Your comments
We're confused, too. Unless Google changed something, the free/busy status of a subscribed iCalendar should not block the availability of your main calendar. That would be a big departure from how Google Calendar has worked for 10+ years.
You're correct, work is forbidden on every Shabbos, and Hebcal does not use the "out of office" / busy setting for events that occur on Saturdays. Shabbos is always on Shabbos, and it's not part of the workweek in the western world or in Israel, so there's not much need to mark it as a "busy" day.
The major holidays can fall on different days during the week, including the typical western Monday-Friday workweek. We're sorry if this seems inconsistent to you.
Hi, thanks for using Hebcal.
If you're using the default "subscribe" feature for most calendar applications (Apple, Google, or Microsoft Outlook), then your calendar will never be blocked. The Hebcal holidays will be displayed and managed as separate calendar from your main calendar without affecting your main calendar's free/busy time.
If, in fact you imported Hebcal events and merged with your calendar (using our .ics download + import, or the .csv download + import), then yes, holidays that are yom tov such as Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, the beginning days of Sukkot, Simchat Torah, the beginning and ending days of Pesach and Shavuot, will indeed be blocked all day (typically using the "out of office" type, but in some cases "busy"). This is a feature, not a bug, because work is forbidden on those major holidays.
We're sorry, but we don't have the ability to offer customizations for these major holidays. If you choose to download/import/merge, then you'll need to adjust any holidays from busy/oof to "free" on your own.
If you set &yt=H (which it appears you are doing) but you don't want to specify a Hebrew year explicitly, you should consider using &year=now for the current Hebrew year.
If you don't specify year= (or start= and end=), I believe the API will default to the current Hebrew year from 1 Tishrei - 15 Av, and the following Hebrew year starting on the 16th of Av.
Thanks for writing. Hebcal agrees with the conservative Luach, which is published by Rabbi Miles Cohen. See below:
We will investigate further why some books list this as 31:1-19 and others list as 31:2-20.
For example, Mechon Mamre lists chapter 31:1 as Ko amar Adonai matza chein bamidbar
The Hebrew date converter is not designed to be accurate for year 1752 C.E. and earlier.
Hebcal does not take into account a correction of ten days that was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII known as the Gregorian Reformation.
Where do you see י״ד טבת תתק״ס on Hebcal.com for 1/1/2200 ? Here is what we see:
https://www.hebcal.com/converter?gd=1&gm=1&gy=2200&g2h=1
- Wed, 1 January 2200 = 13th of Tevet, 5960
- י״ג בְּטֵבֵת תתק״ס
After you've created your personal yahrzeit + anniversary calendar, you can subscribe to email reminders after saving your calendar.
First, click the grey Save button near the top of the page
Then, fill out your email address and click the blue Save button
A confirmation message will be sent to your email address. Click the link within that message to confirm your subscription.
Thanks for using the Hebcal Yahrzeit + Anniversary calendar. Since the focus of the website is on Hebrew calendar and most regular calendar apps (Apple, Google, Outlook, etc) can already handle repeating/recurring Gregorian events, this hasn't been a very high priority for us. We will take this idea under consideration.
Glad this worked for you. Shabbat shalom & shana tova!
Customer support service by UserEcho
Thank you for the feedback!
It's easy in most calendar applications to set a recurrence rule every Saturday to block off your calendar as busy the entire day. Hebcal.com doesn't have that feature because it's built into standard Gregorian calendars, and our users will have more control and more familiarity if they do so using their native calendar app.
I personally block off Friday afternoons in the winter with a "do not schedule" starting at about 3:30pm so I can get home in time for Shabbos and so my coworkers won't try to schedule anything late.
It would be a handy feature to automatically block Friday afternoons using a user specified number of minutes before candle lighting time (e.g. 90 minutes or 60 minutes or whatever you choose). Alas, we are unlikely to have time to implement it anytime soon.