Fill out the form with your preferences and click the Create Calendar button
Click the Download… button
Select the iCalendar option from the Download dialog box
Open your Blackbaud management website.
Go to Core -> Settings -> Manage Calendar – > Add Calendar -> Filters ->Add Filter -> New Category
In the Add New Category modal, a user can toggle the Use iCal URL in order to create an Event Category based on an iCal Feed. Schools will need to type or paste the iCal URL into the text field.
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 7 years of events (current year plus 6 years into the future). This is true whether you select the Gregorian year or the Hebrew year.
Size limitations imposed by Google Calendar and other calendar clients 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.
Holiday and daily learning calendar feeds contain a maximum of 2,400 events. Yahrzeit + Anniversary calendar feeds contain a maximum of 1,200 events.
Recommended workaround: multiple subscriptions
Instead of building a single custom calendar feed that contains dozens of event options, consider subscribing to multiple Hebcal calendar feeds.
For example, you can first subscribe to a custom calendar feed with holidays and candle-lighting times for your city. Then, 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. Separately, you’ll get a 4-year feed for holidays + candle-lighting times, a 3-year feed for Hebrew date events, and a 5-year feed for weekly Torah portion. A combined single feed would be limited to 2 years of events.
Daf Yomi, Mishna Yomi and other daily learning single-purpose iCalendar feeds are also available on that page for Apple, Google, and any iCalendar application. Because each dedicated calendar feed is guaranteed to contain only a single daily learning schedule, we can control the length and often provide multiple years of event lookahead.
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.
Custom calendar event feed length limits
Option
Feed duration (years)
Number of calendar events per year (approx)
Major holidays only
7
40
Major & minor holidays, Rosh Chodesh, Minor Fasts, Special Shabbatot, Modern Holidays
7
95
Weekly Torah portion on Saturdays
5
50
Days of the Omer
5
49
Candle lighting times
4
120
Days of the Omer + Weekly Torah portion
4
101
Show Hebrew date for dates with some event
4
variable
Show Hebrew date every day of the year
2
365
Daf Yomi or other daily learning
2
365
Daily learning and Hebrew date every day of the year
1
730
Table of Hebcal options and corresponding effect on calendar feed duration
Because of the feed limit requirements, perpetual calendar subscription feeds do not contain past year events. Doing so would further reduce the future year lookahead.
Advanced users: download and then upload
All that said, if you’d like to download future or past 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.
To remove a Hebcal calendar from your iPhone or iPad, you’ll need to first determine if you subscribed via iCloud or whether you subscribed directly from your iOS device.
