We have added Baghdad to the list of hebcal cities.

Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 08:48:38 +0400
From: Daniel.Lostotter@...
To: webmaster@hebcal.com
Subject: candle lighting time for Baghdad
Sir,
We are Jewish soldiers stationed in Baghdad, Iraq and were wondering if you
would consider adding Baghdad to your list of cities for candle lighting
times.  It is a wondrous event to be Jews in Baghdad observing our faith and
to be recognized on your website would be an honor.
Thank you on behalf of the Victory Base Jewish Community.
B'Shalom
Daniel Lostotter

We’ve added two cities in Australia (Melbourne and Sydney) and Ottawa, Canada to the list of hebcal cities. We also added support for the AUNZ daylight saving time scheme which is the inverse of the European Union (their summer time begins the last Sunday in October and ends the last Sunday in March).

Israel ruled Feb. 1 to move the Day of Remembrance (Yom Hazikaron) and Israel Independence Day (Yom Ha’atzmaut) to Monday, April 26 and Tuesday, April 27 to avoid possible Shabbat violations in the country.

Following the Feb. 1 ruling, Rabbi Gedaliah Dov Schwartz of the Rabbinical Council of America issued a ruling saying American Jews should observe the holidays without adjusting to Israel’s schedule. [IJN]

Hebcal.com is using the Israeli rules this year.

We have added links to OU Torah Insights, URJ Torat Hayim, and Torah.org commentaries on the parashah pages. For example:

https://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/vaera.html#drash

This fixes feature request #629967.

Thanks to Alan Ziv, an error in the Vayigash full kriyah aliyot list has been fixed.

The corrected list looks like this:

1: 44:18-30 (13 p’sukim)
2: 44:31-45:7 (11 p’sukim)
3: 45:8-18 (11 p’sukim)
4: 45:19-27 (9 p’sukim)
5: 45:28-46:27 (28 p’sukim)
6: 46:28-47:10 (17 p’sukim)
7: 47:11-27 (17 p’sukim)
maf: 47:25-27 (3 p’sukim)

Previously the website had incorrectly listed the third, fourth and fifth aliyot as:

3: 45:8-27 (20 p’sukim)
4: 45:28-46:7 (8 p’sukim)
5: 46:8-27 (20 p’sukim)