Thanks for using Hebcal! We're sorry to hear you're having difficulty downloading and importing the correct year for your calendar.

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.

Please follow those links above to find specific instructions for your calendar program. After you've done so, feel free to contact us with any additional questions.

Shana Tova!

A perpetual calendar subscription shows only the current year + future years.

Because of the feed limit requirements, perpetual calendar subscription feeds do not contain past year events. Doing so would further reduce the number of future years included in the feed.

There is no way to subscribe to (not download) to previous years. You may download previous year events.

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.

The size limitation is imposed by Google Calendar and other 3rd party calendar apps. We cannot change it because we are not Google. This is described in detail on the page

 https://www.hebcal.com/home/1398/number-of-years-in-calendar-feed-subscriptions

This page also suggests a recommended workaround: multiple subscriptions

Note that 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. Look for Hebrew calendar dates (English) or Hebrew calendar dates (Hebrew).

Daf Yomi and other daily learning single-purpose iCalendar feeds are also available on that page for Apple, Google, and any iCalendar application.

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.

again, please read the article we suggested before if you have further questions. 

https://www.hebcal.com/home/1398/number-of-years-in-calendar-feed-subscriptions

That sounds like a good strategy!

We document the exact list of exception cities on this page and don't intend to change them very frequently, but you're right that making your own list is more durable and insulates you from any future changes.

https://www.hebcal.com/home/4463/candle-lighting-havdalah-fast-times

Hebcal defaults to 18 minutes before sundown for most all locations. The only exceptions are 40 minutes before sundown for Jerusalem, 30 minutes for Haifa and Zikhron Yaakov. 

So if you don’t specify b, it will be 18 unless it’s one of those 3 cities. 

Note also b=on may be harmless now but isn’t recommended according to the documentation. If that parameter is specified it should be a positive integer only. 

Thank you for this suggestion!

If your application is fetching RSS data from Hebcal, perhaps you could consider post-processing our RSS feed and modifying the title field yourself? For example, if the RSS contains this:

<title>Candle lighting: 7:22pm</title>

You could modify it to say

<title>Candle lighting: 7:22pm (20 min)</title>

This would give you the most flexibility to display the candle lighting minutes before sunset in whatever format you prefer...

Hi, thanks for using Hebcal.

Candle-lighting and Havdalah times are derived from sunset times, which are approximated from a location (latitude, longitude) and day of year. As of August 2020, Hebcal.com calculates zmanim (halachic times) using an algorithm published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The NOAA solar calculator is based on equations from Astronomical Algorithms by Jean Meeus.

Since 2013, Hebcal.com has been using lat/long definitions from GeoNames.org, which is available under a Creative Commons license. For the USA, we purchase a commercial ZIP code database from zip-codes.com that provides latitude and longitude for the “center” of each zipcode.

For more details, see this page:

https://www.hebcal.com/home/94/how-accurate-are-candle-lighting-times

did you subscribe to our Hebrew calendar dates feed from https://www.hebcal.com/ical/ or somewhere else?

please post a screenshot so we can understand better what happened?

No updates yet. We haven’t found time to work on this as it’s a bigger feature. Hebcal is a volunteer job so it’s mostly evenings or Sundays when we can work on improvements and bug fixes. We hope to find time in December. 

After making a modification to an existing Hebcal Yahrzeit + anniversary calendar, it takes 24-48 hours for these changes to show up on your mobile phone. This delay is caused by the calendar app which only checks for updates to the Hebcal personal calendar feed at most once per day.