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A note about advertisements

Hebcal.com displays advertisements on some pages to help cover our operating costs. We don’t like inappropriate advertisements and it’s our policy to suppress them when we discover them.

If you see an inappropriate or offensive advertisement, please accept our sincere apologies for any offense caused.

Also, please let us know about the ad so we can suppress it. Please create a Hebcal Support ticket and describe the offending advertisement to the best of your ability (e.g. the name of the company or the URL).

Please attach a screenshot if you are willing and able to do so.

With a good description or a screenshot, we are typically able to find the offending advertisement, suppress it, and prevent any future advertisements from the same advertiser. Once we suppress an ad, it can take 24-48 hours before it completely disappears from our website.

Hebcal.com is a free service, and Income from displaying advertisements offsets the cost of hosting the website. Donations are always appreciated and never required, and they cover only a small part of the operating costs.

Numerical values of Hebrew letters

Our Hebrew Date Converter displays dates in Hebrew. Each letter of the Hebrew alef-bet (alphabet) has a numerical value, specified in the chart below.

When specifying years of the Hebrew calendar in the present millennium, we omit the thousands (which is presently 5, ה). For example, the Hebrew year 5782 is written as 782 (תשפ״ב) rather than 5782 (ה׳תשפ״ב).

ValueNameLetter
1alephא
2betב
3gimelג
4daletד
5hayה
6vavו
7zayinז
8khetח
9tetט
10yudי
20kafכ
30lamedל
40memמ
50nunנ
60samechס
70ayinע
80payפ
90tzadiצ
100kufק
200reishר
300shinש
400tavת

Note that the numbers 15 and 16 are treated specially, which if rendered as 10+5 or 10+6 would be a name of God, so they are normally written ט״ו (tet-vav, 9+6) and ט״ז (tet-zayin, 9+7).

For more information, see the Judaism 101 article on the Hebrew Alphabet, the Wikipedia article on Gematria, or JewishGen’s Reading Hebrew Tombstones page.

Jewish holiday calendars in Hebrew

It’s easy to create a calendar in Hebrew instead of transliterations.

First, go to our custom calendar page at https://www.hebcal.com/hebcal

Next, change the Event titles option from the default (Sephardic transliterations) to Hebrew – עברית.

Then, set up the rest of your options as you desire, and click Create Calendar.

Hebcal Event titles in Hebrew

After that, you’ll see the calendar of Jewish holidays, and you will presented with an option to print, download, or subscribe to the calendar.

Number of years in Hebcal calendar feed subscriptions

Calendars exported from Hebcal via our subscription feeds (using iCalendar format) are typically “perpetual”. That is, they contain events for the current year (Gregorian or Hebrew) plus some number of years into the future. Most downloads (including Apple, Google Calendar, and Microsoft Outlook) support these perpetual calendar subscription feeds.

Using the default options on the Hebcal Custom Calendar page, our calendars will contain exactly 5 years of events (current year plus 4 years into the future). This is true whether you select the Gregorian year or the Hebrew year.

Size limitations imposed by Google and other calendar clients starting in 2016 require that Hebcal limit the number of events per calendar feed. If the options you select generate many events, the feed may need to be shortened.

OptionFeed duration (years)Number of calendar events per year (approx)
Major holidays only540
Major & minor holidays, Rosh Chodesh, Minor Fasts, Special Shabbatot, Modern Holidays595
Weekly Torah portion on Saturdays550
Candle lighting times4120
Days of the Omer449
Show Hebrew date for dates with some event3variable
Show Hebrew date every day of the year2365
Daf Yomi2365
Daf Yomi and Hebrew date every day of the year1730
Table of Hebcal options and corresponding effect on calendar feed duration

Workaround: multiple subscriptions

Note that if you’d like to include the Hebrew date for every day of the year, you can subscribe to that calendar via a separate calendar feed at our Jewish Holiday downloads page. Look for Hebrew calendar dates (English) or Hebrew calendar dates (Hebrew). Daf Yomi and other large single-purpose iCalendar feeds are also available on that page for Apple, Google, and any iCalendar application.

An added advantage of the multi-subscription approach is that you can choose separate colors in Google Calendar or iOS/iCloud calendar for each calendar event feed.

Advanced users: download and then upload

All that said, if you’d like to download future events to Google Calendar or another program that supports iCalendar (.ics) files such as macOS Calendar or Outlook, you may utilize Hebcal’s alternative download instructions below. This technique requires a laptop/desktop computer and generally does not work well on a smartphone or tablet. Note that once downloaded, these .ics files are no longer managed by Hebcal and will not refresh.

Please note that these instructions are recommended only for advanced users. If you don’t take great care to create a separate calendar and import Hebcal events into that new, separate calendar, you may unintentionally add hundreds of events to your personal calendar.