Category Archives: General

Hebcal.com authored using hand-coded JavaScript/TypeScript in VSCode. Pre-2020, the website was built in PHP and Perl in Sublime Text 3 and Aquamacs.

Our minimalist, responsive front-end design is provided by the Bootstrap framework.

The website runs on Ubuntu Linux. We use the Vinyl Cache (née Varnish) HTTP accelerator. We primarily use DigitalOcean for hosting, with occasional use of Amazon Web Services (primarily SES for weekly emails and S3 for backups).

Our Help pages and news archives are powered by WordPress.

We use MySQL to store our email subscriber database, and SQLite for latitude/longitude location databases (GeoNames and USA ZIP codes).

Typefaces

Hebcal.com primarily uses Helvetica Neue for body and Merriweather for headers. Helvetica Neue is the default font for Bootstrap

Hebrew body and headline text is Adobe Hebrew.

The Hebcal logo uses SBL Hebrew and Merriweather.

Occasionally people ask us about automating appliances or smart home using Hebcal.

For your reference, here are two 3rd-party apps that offer some automation based on the Jewish calendar. Both are designed to run on Rasbperry Pi

Home Assistant – Jewish Calendar

Homebridge Jewish Calendar

Also:

Hubitat Elevation – Shabbat and Holiday Scheduler

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.

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).

Value	Name	Letter
1	aleph	א
2	bet	ב
3	gimel	ג
4	dalet	ד
5	hay	ה
6	vav	ו
7	zayin	ז
8	khet	ח
9	tet	ט
10	yud	י
20	kaf	כ
30	lamed	ל
40	mem	מ
50	nun	נ
60	samech	ס
70	ayin	ע
80	pay	פ
90	tzadi	צ
100	kuf	ק
200	reish	ר
300	shin	ש
400	tav	ת

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.

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.

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.