About Hebcal

Hebcal (pronounced HEEB-kal, as in Hebrew calendar) is a free Jewish calendar and holiday web site.

Our mission is to increase awareness of Jewish holidays and to help Jews to be observant of the mitzvot.

We offer a powerful custom Jewish calendar tool that lets you generate a list of Jewish holidays for any year (past, present or future). Also available are a Hebrew date converter, Shabbat candle lighting times and Torah readings (both full kriyah and triennial system), and a page to look up yahrzeits, birthdays and anniversaries.

Calendars created by Hebcal are easily downloaded and imported into various calendar apps, including iPhone, Google Calendar, Outlook PC, Outlook Web, macOS Calendar, and any app that supports iCalendar (.ics) feeds or subscriptions.

Hebcal doesn’t have a denominational bias. We’re not Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Liberal, or Humanist. We are observant of the mitzvot, and we offer this website because we want to help other Jews with their observance.

Hebcal was created in 1992 by Danny Sadinoff as a Unix/Linux program, derived in large part from the GNU Emacs calendar routines by Edward M. Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz. Michael J. Radwin released a web interface in 1999 to allow Microsoft Outlook and Palm Desktop downloads of Jewish holiday data. Today, Danny and Michael collaborate on the underlying holiday and candle-lighting calculation engine and Michael does most of the web development.

Encyclopædia Britannica has an excellent introduction to the Jewish calendar. Another well written treatment of the Jewish calendar can be found in Understanding the Jewish Calendar by Rabbi Nathan Bushwick. A more complete bibliography on the topic can be found there, as well as in the Encyclopedia Judaica entry on the calendar.

This is a free service. Please donate to help defray the cost of running this website.

Read our privacy policy, news or contact us.