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Hebcal 2026 Year in Review

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Hebcal is a volunteer labor of love because our mission is to increase awareness of Jewish holidays and to help Jews to be observant of the mitzvot. We’ve been hard at work this past year making Hebcal faster, more reliable and a more complete resource. Here is a summary of the changes we’ve made (major and minor) during the past 10 months.

1. Hebcal.com website

1.1 Sign in with Google or Apple

In September we added optional Sign in with Google and Sign in with Apple. Hebcal never asks for a password; we rely on Google or Apple to confirm who you are.

You don’t need an account to use Hebcal, and you never will. But signing in makes a few things easier:

  • No more confirmation emails. When you subscribe to weekly Shabbat candle-lighting emails or Yahrzeit reminders using the same email address as your Google or Apple account, your subscription is activated immediately, without the usual “click the link in this message” step.
  • All of your subscriptions in one place. The new Account page lists your Shabbat candle-lighting subscription and each of your Yahrzeit, Hebrew Birthday and Anniversary calendars, with links to edit or unsubscribe.
  • One-click save for Yahrzeit calendars. When you’re signed in, the Email reminders button on the Yahrzeit + Anniversary Calendar page saves your list and turns on reminders in a single step. Your most recently updated calendars are shown at the top of the page.

Existing subscribers don’t need to do anything. Subscriptions are still tied to your email address, so if you sign in with the same address, your existing subscriptions will show up on your Account page automatically.

If you use Apple’s Hide My Email feature, your reminders are sent to your private relay address and Apple forwards them to you.

1.2 Holidays and observance

Swords of Iron War Memorial Day

We added Israel’s new Swords of Iron War Memorial Day, the memorial day for the fallen of the war that began on October 7, 2023. It is observed on 24 Tishrei (postponed to Sunday when that date falls on Shabbat), and it appears on both the Israel and Diaspora calendars when Modern Holidays are enabled.

Candle-lighting in Israel

The default candle-lighting time for cities in Israel is now 20 minutes before sunset, up from 18 minutes, which better matches the common custom in Israel. Jerusalem (40 minutes) and Haifa and Zikhron Ya’akov (30 minutes) keep their local customs.

Havdalah by degrees

You can now choose Havdalah time by degrees below the horizon instead of a fixed number of minutes after sunset. Look for the new field in the Candle-lighting & Fast times section of the custom calendar page and on the Shabbat times page. Use 7.083° for three medium-sized stars, 8.5° for three small stars (our default), or 16.1° for Rabbeinu Tam. Weekly Shabbat email subscriptions remember the setting too. Thanks to the Hebcal user who suggested this on GitHub.

Chametz times for Erev Pesach

Erev Pesach now includes the times for finish eating chametz and Biur Chametz (burning the chametz) when you’ve chosen a location. When Erev Pesach falls on Shabbat, Biur Chametz moves to Friday morning, as it is practiced.

Latest Kiddush Levana

Calendars with candle-lighting times and Rosh Chodesh now include a monthly Latest Kiddush Levana event, calculated for your location. We use the Maharil’s opinion (halfway between moladot). If the deadline falls during the day, we move it back to dawn (alot hashachar) that morning, and if it falls on Shabbat or Yom Tov, we move it back to candle-lighting time. When we move the time, the event description now says so, for example: Latest Kiddush Levana (Maharil): Tue, Nov 24, 2026, 6:28am (adjusted to 5:37am Alot haShachar). The description also lists the earliest times (3 and 7 days after the molad) and the latest time after 15 days, so you can follow whichever opinion your community does.

Our Zmanim iCalendar feed also gained the earliest and latest Kiddush Levana times, plus the moment of the molad, on the days they occur.

To prevent Latest Kiddush Levana events from appearing on your calendar, set your Havdalah preference to 0 minutes past sundown (which disables both Havdalah times and Latest Kiddush Levana) or uncheck the Rosh Chodesh option.

Sefirat HaOmer

The Omer count pages now include the corresponding word of Ana BeKoach and the word and letter of Lamnatzeach (Psalm 67) for each night of the Omer. On larger screens there’s also a new navigation grid to jump to any day of the Omer.

Homepage candle-lighting times

If you’ve looked up Shabbat times for your city before, the Hebcal homepage now shows this week’s candle-lighting and Havdalah times for your location at the top of the page, following your preferred minutes or degrees.

1.3 Torah readings

  • Haftarot of Admonition and Consolation. Parsha pages and calendar event descriptions now label the three Haftarot of Admonition (before Tish’a B’Av) and the seven Haftarot of Consolation (after), for example “Fifth Haftarah of Consolation”. This includes the rare case where Ki Teitzei combines the 3rd and 5th.
  • Chabad custom. When the Chabad custom calls for a different Haftarah, the parsha pages now show it, along with the reason.
  • Yom HaAtzma’ut. We added the Torah reading and Haftarah (Isaiah 10:32-12:6, the same as Pesach VIII) used by communities that read on Yom HaAtzma’ut.
  • Kohelet in Israel. When Sukkot falls on Shabbat, Israeli communities read Ecclesiastes on the first day of Sukkot. We now get this right.
  • Hebrew parsha summaries. Hebrew-language RSS feeds and calendar downloads now carry Hebrew summaries of each parsha (courtesy of Sefaria) and Hebrew holiday descriptions, instead of English.

1.4 Daily Learning calendars

We added four new study cycles to our daily learning calendars this year:

929: Tanakh B’yachad is a synchronized chapter-a-day reading program, named after the 929 chapters of the Hebrew Bible. Participants read one chapter a day, five days a week, completing the entire Tanakh in about three and a half years. Each event links to the chapter on Sefaria.

Amud HaYomi (Dirshu) covers one amud (one side of a page) of the Babylonian Talmud each day, a slower pace than Daf Yomi that completes Shas in about five years.

Daf HaYomi B’Halacha (Dirshu) follows Dirshu’s daily Mishnah Berurah program.

Tanya Yomi is the daily study of the Tanya by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, completing all five parts every year from 19 Kislev through 18 Kislev. It has separate divisions for leap years and regular years. You’ll find it in a new Chasidut section on the Daily Learning page.

Each of these is also available as a ready-made calendar subscription on our Daily Learning page. We also improved Tanakh Yomi so each day shows its verse range, and fixed sedarim that cross from one book to the next.

1.5 Localization

  • We added Dutch translations, following Dutch Wikipedia conventions for transliteration.
  • French translations now cover the Shabbat times page.
  • The Ashkenazi transliterations were reworked with more consistent rules for vowels and consonants (for example, Ta’anis B’choros and Shabbos M’vorchim), and now cover the zmanim.
  • Hebrew spellings and niqqud were corrected for several holidays and readings, including חֹל הַמּוֹעֵד and סֻכּוֹת.
  • When you look up Shabbat times for a city outside the US, the page now uses that country’s preferred language where we have a translation.

1.6 Miscellaneous / UI and usability

Hebcal now remembers whether you prefer a Gregorian or a fully Hebrew calendar.

The Yahrzeit + Anniversary Calendar form is more compact, and subscribing to email reminders is a single click when we already know your address.

Pages load faster. Images use the WebP and AVIF formats, the most important styles are included directly in each page, and we removed about half of the unused CSS. Hebcal also has a new SVG icon that looks sharp in browser tabs and email inboxes.

We updated our privacy policy. Email subscriber logs are now automatically deleted after 18 months.

We refreshed the descriptions of 34 holidays from Wikipedia.

2. Calendar downloads and subscriptions

To keep our servers responsive, we put some limits on very large or very distant calendars:

  • Calendar subscriptions (Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook) are limited to 2,400 events. If a subscription would go over that limit, it now starts 12 weeks in the past and adds a note explaining why. See Number of years in calendar feed subscriptions for details. Yahrzeit + Anniversary subscriptions are limited to 1,200 events and no longer include events older than 13 weeks.
  • Supported years. Torah portion pages, Omer pages and calendar downloads now cover Gregorian years 1752 through 2499 (Hebrew years 5513 through 6260). The Candle-lighting Times Year at a Glance covers the past 4 years and the next 20. The Hebrew Date Converter still works for any year.
  • CSV files now always start with a UTF-8 byte order mark, so Microsoft Excel displays Hebrew and accented characters correctly.

3. User support now by email

We retired the Hebcal Community Support forum on UserEcho. If you have a question, a bug report or a feature request, please email support@hebcal.com. Many common questions are already answered in our Help section. A historical archive of community support messages has been migrated to Google Groups (email addresses and phone numbers redacted for privacy).

4. Hebcal for Apple Watch 2

This fall we released Hebcal for Apple Watch 2, the first major update to the watch app in five years. It’s available now from the Apple App Store.

  • Sunset and candle-lighting times. Turn on Use Location in Settings and the Hebrew date rolls over at sunset instead of 8:00pm. Friday and holiday candle-lighting times, Havdalah and Chanukah candles then appear in the app and on the watch face. Tap a day to see the details on a Zmanim card. Your location stays on the watch and is used only for these calculations.
  • The Omer. During the Omer, tap the day to see the count, the Sefirah, the word and letter of Psalm 67, and the Ana BeKoach words.
  • A calendar you can browse. The app shows the next two weeks day by day, followed by Shabbatot and holidays for a full year, grouped by month.

The new version requires watchOS 10.6 or later. The complications were rebuilt on Apple’s newer WidgetKit, and the ones you already set up should carry over.

5. Developer web APIs

Developers are a small but important part of our audience, and we made a number of improvements this year.

API documentation. All of our REST APIs are now described in a single OpenAPI specification with an interactive Swagger UI page where you can try requests in your browser. The spec documents every parameter, its default value and the specific reasons a request can return 400 Bad Request. See also our Developer APIs overview.

AI agents and MCP. Our Model Context Protocol (MCP) server at https://www.hebcal.com/mcp is now listed in the official MCP Registry as io.github.hebcal/hebcal and has a new shabbat-times tool for candle-lighting and Havdalah times. To help AI agents find the right data instead of scraping HTML pages, we now publish /llms.txt, an RFC 9727 /.well-known/api-catalog, an MCP server card, and Markdown versions of the homepage for clients that send Accept: text/markdown.

New fields and options:

  • The Jewish calendar REST API includes the exact instant of the molad, the Ana BeKoach and Lamnatzeach words for each night of the Omer, the Chabad Haftarah where it differs, and an optional Tachanun field.
  • New parameters customize when fasts begin and end, in degrees or minutes: fsd/fsm for the start of minor fasts, fed/fem for the end of minor fasts, and tbed/tbem for the end of Tish’a B’Av. The td parameter sets Havdalah by degrees below the horizon.
  • The Zmanim API adds zmanim according to the Baal HaTanya, and the molad and Kiddush Levana times.
  • CORS preflight (OPTIONS) requests are now supported, so browser-based apps can call the APIs directly.

Rate limits. API responses now include the IETF draft standard RateLimit-Policy and RateLimit headers, so your code can see the limits instead of discovering them the hard way. The limit is 150 requests per 10 seconds per client (60 requests per 3 seconds for the Hebrew Date Converter). If you go over, you’ll get 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After header. PDF and CSV calendar downloads can also return 429 during busy periods; please wait and try again.

Constraints to be aware of:

  • Date-range requests to the Hebrew Date Converter and Zmanim APIs are limited to 180 days per request.
  • Calendars are limited to 10 years per request.
  • Undocumented FullCalendar output for Yahrzeit calendars was removed.

Several of these APIs (the Hebrew Date Converter, Zmanim, Shabbat JSON, city autocomplete and PDF downloads) moved to a new, much faster backend written in Go. The URLs and output formats didn’t change. If you notice any difference, please let us know.

Latest Kiddush Levana on your Hebcal calendar

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Kiddush Levana (also Kiddush Levanah or Birkat HaLevana, the Sanctification of the Moon) is a blessing said once a month while the moon is growing. It’s usually recited outdoors at night when the moon is visible, and many people wait until Saturday night after Shabbat. Wikipedia has a good overview.

Kiddush Levana can only be said during part of the month. The window opens a few days after the molad (the calculated new moon) and closes around the middle of the month, once the moon starts to shrink. Opinions differ on both ends:

  • Earliest: 3 days after the molad (the common practice) or 7 days after (following the Shulchan Aruch and Kabbalistic sources).
  • Latest: halfway between one molad and the next (the Maharil, brought by the Rema), which is 14 days, 18 hours and 22 minutes after the molad. Others hold a full 15 days after the molad (the Shulchan Aruch).

The OU’s Halacha Yomis covers both questions: the earliest time and the latest time.

The molad happens at the same moment everywhere in the world, so the deadline lands at a different local time in each city. In one month the last night might run until 3am in Tel Aviv, while in San Francisco it already ended the evening before.

How Hebcal calculates it

Hebcal now adds a monthly Latest Kiddush Levana event, calculated for your location:

  • We use the Maharil’s opinion (halfway between moladot). It’s the earlier of the two common opinions, so the event won’t send you past the deadline under either one.
  • If the deadline falls during the day, we move it back to dawn (alot hashachar) that morning. That’s the end of the last night on which you can still say it.
  • If the deadline falls on Shabbat or a Yom Tov, we move it back to candle-lighting time before Shabbat or Yom Tov, so you know to say it on an earlier night.
  • The event description lists all four times: earliest after 3 days and after 7 days, and latest by the Maharil and after 15 days. You can follow whichever opinion your community does.

For example, in New York the last chance for the month of Cheshvan is Sunday, October 25, 2026 until 9:44pm. For Kislev, the Maharil’s time is Tuesday, November 24 at 9:28am, which is during the day. The calendar therefore shows 5:27am, meaning Monday night is the last night.

As always, ask your rabbi about your community’s practice.

How to add it to your calendar

  1. Go to hebcal.com/hebcal and enter your city or ZIP code under Candle-lighting & Fast times. Make sure the Rosh Chodesh box is checked. It’s on by default, but you need both.
  2. Click Create Calendar.

That’s it. Latest Kiddush Levana appears once a month on your calendar. If you download or subscribe to the calendar in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook, each event’s description also includes the earliest times.

Already subscribed to a Hebcal calendar with candle-lighting times and Rosh Chodesh? The new events will appear on their own the next time your calendar app refreshes.

Thanks to the Hebcal user who suggested this feature on our feedback forum!

Hebcal for Apple Watch 2: newer watchOS, sunset times and Omer count

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We’re pleased to announce the release of Hebcal for Apple Watch 2, available immediately at the Apple App Store. It’s been five years since the initial release of the Hebcal Hebrew Calendar for Apple Watch, and we’re back with an important update required to support watchOS 27.

The primary goal of the Apple Watch app is to provide Hebrew date, holidays and Torah portion on the watch face in the form of “complications”. If you used our first version, the complications you already set up should carry over:

  • “Hebcal” (rectangular, inline): Hebrew date + Torah portion and/or holiday
  • Hebrew Date (circular, corner, inline): today’s date in the Hebrew calendar
  • Torah Portion (circular, inline): this week’s parsha, or today’s holiday

We have added a few new features, too:

Sunset and candle-lighting times. Hebrew days begin at sundown, and the app has always rolled over to the next Hebrew date at 8:00pm on the device local timezone. Turn on Use Location in Settings and it rolls over at sunset instead. Friday and holiday candle-lighting times, Havdalah, and Chanukah candles then appear in the app and on the watch face. Tap a day with candle times to see the details on a Zmanim card. You can adjust the candle-lighting minutes and the Havdalah setting. The default follows local custom, such as 40 minutes before sunset in Jerusalem. Your location stays on the watch and is used only for these calculations.

The Omer. During the Omer, tap the day to open the new Omer card. It shows the evening the count is said, the count itself, the Sefirah, the word and letter of Psalm 67, and the Ana BeKoach words, with Hebrew set in the SBL Hebrew typeface.

A calendar you can browse. The list used to show the next 60 days. It now shows the next two weeks day by day, followed by Shabbatot and holidays for a full year, grouped by month. Each month shows its Hebrew months and the emoji for its events. Tap a month to see its days.

You’ll also notice some minor improvements on the complications themselves. The corner Hebrew-date complication now shows the day number in the center with the month curving along the bezel. The Torah Portion circular picks the best layout for each week: two lines for long names, a single large word for holidays, and tuned hyphenation for names like Ha’azinu. On a holiday such as Yom Kippur it shows the holiday, not the next Shabbat’s reading. The rectangular complication shows the Torah icon next to the parsha, and the inline ones fall back to shorter text when space is tight.

As always: no frills, no gimmicks, no notifications, just an easy way to glance at the date and parsha. Sephardic, Ashkenazi and Hebrew, the Israel schedule and Daf Yomi are all still in Settings.

Other minor improvements

  • Requires watchOS 10.6 or later (1.16.4 supported watchOS 7)
  • Chanukah is shown with emoji on the complications, and the day of Chanukah is a plain number instead of a keycap emoji
  • The Hebrew Date complication text is now white, and the Hebrew parsha complication drops the vowel points so it’s easier to read at small sizes
  • The Israel schedule now turns on automatically when you install in an Israel time zone, or when your first location fix is in Israel. Your own choice is never overridden.
  • Complications refresh right away when you change the language, Israel or Daf Yomi settings, and when you travel across time zones
  • Long holiday names now shrink to fit on one line instead of wrapping
  • The Hebcal inline complication no longer shows the year
  • Month names are abbreviated when they don’t fit
  • Spelling fixes, including Ha’azinu capitalization and Tazria/Sazria
  • Updated holiday and parsha data, including Purim Meshulash

If you install Hebcal for your Apple Watch and then delete it, it may be difficult to reinstall. This problem occurs because the Hebcal watch app does not have a companion iPhone app. See our article Reinstalling Hebcal for Apple Watch for step-by-step instructions.

We welcome your feedback and other questions! Please post a comment to the Hebcal Community Support page.

How do I change my email address?

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If you’ve moved to a new email address and want to keep receiving your Hebcal reminders, you don’t need to sign up from scratch. Hebcal lets you update the address on file for each subscription directly from a link in your existing emails.

The steps are slightly different depending on which type of subscription you have, so this article covers both:

  1. Weekly Shabbat candle-lighting time emails
  2. Yahrzeit, Hebrew Birthday & Anniversary reminder emails

Weekly Shabbat candle-lighting emails

If you receive a weekly email with Shabbat candle-lighting and Havdalah times for your city, here’s how to switch it to a new address:

  1. Open your favorite email program (Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, or whichever app you use).
  2. Find a recent weekly email from Hebcal with your candle-lighting times (sent to your old email address).
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the message and look for the Update Settings link.
  4. Click that link. It will take you to hebcal.com.
  5. On the Hebcal site, enter your new email address and submit the form.
  6. Hebcal will send a confirmation message to your new email address.
  7. Open that confirmation message and click the activation link inside it.
  8. Once you click the link, your weekly candle-lighting subscription is officially updated to the new address, and the old address will stop receiving emails.

Yahrzeit, Hebrew Birthday & Anniversary emails

If you receive annual reminder emails for yahrzeits, Hebrew birthdays, or anniversaries, the process starts the same way but changes a bit:

  1. Open your email program and find a message from Hebcal about one of your yahrzeit, birthday, or anniversary reminders.
  2. Scroll to the bottom of the email and look for the Edit Yahrzeit, Edit Hebrew Birthday, or Edit Hebrew Anniversary link.
  3. Click that link to go to hebcal.com.
  4. Scroll up a bit and push the grey Email reminders button.
  5. Enter your new email address in the dialog box and push the blue Subscribe button to submit the form.
  6. Check your new email address for a confirmation message from Hebcal.
  7. Click the activation link inside that confirmation email.
  8. Your anniversary calendar reminders are now updated to send to the new address.
  9. To stop receiving reminder emails to your old address, back to your reminder email message and click the Unsubscribe button at the bottom of that message.
  10. You will see a web page that asks Do you wish to stop receiving annual email reminders of Person1’s Yahrzeit sent from Hebcal to recipient@example.com? push the blue Unsubscribe all (#) Yahrzeit Reminders button.

A few things to keep in mind

  • The confirmation step matters: your subscription won’t move to the new address until you click the activation link in the confirmation email.
  • If you have both a weekly Shabbat candle-lighting subscription and a yahrzeit/anniversary subscription, you’ll need to repeat this process separately for each one, since they’re managed independently.
  • If you no longer see the confirmation email, check your spam or junk folder before trying again.

Related articles

Updated Privacy Policy

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We’ve updated our Privacy Policy for the first time since February 2022. The previous policy was generated using a GDPR-compliant template and, while legally sound, read like it was written for a large corporation, not a free community resource run by one person.

The new policy is rewritten in plain language and reflects how Hebcal actually works. A few highlights:

  • Data retention schedules are now specific. We describe exactly what we keep and for how long. We’ve also implemented an automated purge of old email tracking and bounce data for inactive subscriptions after 2 years.
  • Hebcal apps beyond the website. The policy now covers the Hebcal Apple Watch app (which collects no data at all) and the Alexa skill.
  • Analytics transparency. We describe our self-hosted, cookieless Matomo analytics setup, including how we anonymize IP addresses before they are stored.

You can read the full policy here. If you have questions, please contact us.