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Errata: candle-lighting time corrections

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We’ve made changes to candle-lighting times for Shabbat and holidays that corrects an error we introduced a few months ago. Please accept our sincere apologies for this error.

Candle-lighting times have been adjusted 1-2 minutes earlier and now correctly reflect the correct time to light candles (40 minutes before sundown in Jerusalem, 18 minutes before sundown anywhere else).

Users who subscribe to Hebcal.com calendars via iPhone/iPad, Google Calendar, or Outlook.com should get the corrected candle-lighting times automatically when these applications perform their next refresh. The typical refresh cycle is approximately once a week.

If you downloaded or printed a calendar in the past, you may wish to return to the Hebcal.com website to download and/or print an updated calendar.

The error was caused when Hebcal.com moved to a new sunset calculation engine in the summer of 2013. The new sunset engine allows support for thousands of global cities and fixed long-standing issues with our handling of Daylight Saving Time outside of the USA. Sunset times are estimated from latitude and longitude, and generally have an accuracy of +/- 2 minutes except at extreme north or south latitudes.

Unfortunately, an arithmetic error in determining sunset for a given latitude/longitude was inadvertently introduced, which added an additional 1-2 minutes of error. This error was recently discovered and corrected.

Daf Yomi

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We are pleased to announce that Hebcal.com now supports Daf Yomi. Now you can use Hebcal to help follow your daily regimen of learning the Talmud!

For example, today’s Daf Yomi is Yoma 52.

Just check the new “Daf Yomi” checkbox on the “Include Events” section of our Custom Calendar. We’ve also posted a simple iCalendar feed for those of you who want to subscribe in Google Calendar or Apple Calendar and track the events with a separate color.

Many thanks to Aaron Peromsik for doing the work to add this feature.

Historical: Fixing Hebcal after upgrading from iOS 6 to iOS 7

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When you update your Apple device to iOS 7, you may need to adjust your Subscribed Calendar settings in order to see your old Hebcal.com calendars.

Note: these instructions are no longer required. In September 2013, Hebcal.com began supporting SSL. We’re keeping this page here for historical purposes.

When iOS7 was released, calendars upgraded from iOS6 to iOS6 defaulted to SSL on, which did not work with Hebcal.com back in September 2013.

Resetting the calendar to SSL off will cause the calendar to show up correctly again.

  1. Launch the Settings app
  2. Touch “Mail, Contacts, Calendars“
  3. Touch “Subscribed Calendars“
  4. Touch the Hebcal calendar(s)
  5. Under “Subscribed Calendar Information”, set “Use SSL” to “OFF“

If the screen you see next looks like the following, be sure to set the “Use SSL” setting to “OFF”

hebcal ios 7 calendar set SSL to off

 

Update – March 2014: to avoid storing sensitive customer data on our servers, we recently modified our Yahrzeit + Anniversary calendar export to “download” instead of “subscribe” calendars in iOS. Note that this only applies to our Yahrzeit + Anniversary calendar, which often includes names of individuals.

If you successfully downloaded a Yahrzeit calendar from Hebcal.com to your iPhone, then any Yahrzeit or Anniversary reminders are now part of your regular calendar (often called “Home” or “Calendar”) and there is no need to make any changes to your Settings.

Disable holiday alarms on iPhone, iPad

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Here is how to disable alarms for a Hebcal calendar from your iPhone or iPad so you won’t get an event reminder.

First go to the Settings app, then touch Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Scroll down until you see the Subscribed Calendars item:

Touch Subscribed Calendars to see the list:

Then, touch the Hebcal calendar and turn Remove Alarms to On:

ios remove alarms