Developer APIs

Our mission at Hebcal.com is to increase awareness of Jewish holidays and to help Jews to be observant of the mitzvot. You can embed Hebcal.com content directly onto your synagogue website with our JavaScript, JSON and RSS APIs.

Content generated by the Hebcal.com web APIs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This means that you can use you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format as long as you give appropriate credit to Hebcal.com.

Technical notes:

• Hebcal web APIs do not require registration or API keys
• Rate-limiting is used to throttle clients who are sending too many API queries. You may receive a 429 “Too Many Requests” error if your client makes more than 90 requests in a 10-second window. Remember, this is a free service; please be polite and send batch API requests slowly over a longer period of time
• If you’re building a JavaScript application, consider using @hebcal/core instead of web APIs for a faster user experience

Easy integrations

Our easy integrations require just a few HTML script tags and offer some simple customization.

• Shabbat Times – embed weekly Shabbat candle-lighting times and Torah portion directly on your synagogue’s website
• Today’s Hebrew Date – a simple script to display only today’s date in Hebrew or in English transliteration
• Customizing Yahrzeit, Birthday and Anniversary Calendar for your website.

Intermediate

Some integrations require editing JavaScript or use specialized file formats such as RSS and iCalendar.

• Jewish Calendar – display a monthly Jewish calendar on your synagogue’s website using JavaScript
• Shabbat Times WordPress widget – add Torah portion, candle lighting and havdalah times to your WordPress-powered site.
• RSS feeds – integrate Hebrew date, Parsahat ha-Shavua, or candle lighting times into any content management system supporting RSS.
• iCalendar feeds – calendar event feeds for many consumer calendar applications such as Google Calendar, Outlook.com, etc.

Advanced REST APIs

Hebcal’s REST APIs offer flexible access to date, calendar, holiday, Torah Reading and zmanim calculations. They are designed to make getting up and running with a new web or mobile app as simple as possible

• Hebrew Date Converter REST API – for converting between Gregorian and Hebrew dates (XML + JSON).
• Jewish calendar REST API – a JSON interface for fetching Jewish calendar data (holidays, Torah readings, candle lighting times, etc).
• Leyning (Torah Reading) API – full kriyah leyning on Shabbat and holidays, Triennial (optionally) for Shabbat, and weekday readings on Mondays & Thursdays.
• Shabbat Times REST API – a JSON version of our easy-to-use Shabbat Times HTML widget.
• Yahrzeit + Anniversary API – Generate a list of Yahrzeit (memorial) and Yizkor dates, Hebrew Birthdays and Anniversaries for the next 20 years.
• Zmanim API – for calculating halachic times (Alot HaShachar, misheyakir, sof zman Shma, etc).

Source Code

In addition to web APIs, Hebcal code is available in many programming languages, all freely available on GitHub

• @hebcal/core – JavaScript (ECMAScript 2015) implementation of Hebcal engine, released under GPL License. See also hebcal/hebcal-es6 on GitHub
• hebcal command-line interface (CLI)
• hebcal-go – Go Language (Golang) port
• hebcal-swift – Swift port

Open Source Judaism

Learn more about the Open Source Judaism movement.