Your comments
To make a change to a Yahrzeit + Anniversary calendar calendar, delete or unsubscribe from the calendar. Return to Hebcal.com and re-enter in all of the event details, then download again. Hebcal does not yet support editing event dates.
https://www.hebcal.com/home/632/how-to-make-changes-to-a-yahrzeit-anniversary-calendar
Thank you for the bug report. The error has been corrected and now Jerusalem candle lighting times are correctly listed as 40 minutes before sundown. Shabbat shalom!
Thanks for using Hebcal and thanks for the bug report!
We have fixed the inadvertent omission of Hebrew text when you select "Sephardic translit + Hebrew" or "Ashkenazi translit + Hebrew". Now the website is behaving as it claims to do.
https://www.hebcal.com/home/632/how-to-make-changes-to-a-yahrzeit-anniversary-calendar
To make a change to a Yahrzeit + Anniversary calendar calendar, delete or unsubscribe from the calendar. Return to Hebcal.com and re-enter in all of the event details, then download again. Hebcal does not yet support editing event dates.
Thanks for using Hebcal. We have recently begun upgrading our website and we've introduced a new, more accurate candle-lighting times engine. We're working hard to complete the upgrade, which will remove any remaining inconsistencies between what's displayed on the website and the PDF/downloads.
In the meantime, please note that differences of 1 or 2 minutes are fully expected. Candle-lighting and Havdalah times can only be approximated and are never 100% precise. To determine candle-lighting times, Hebcal uses latitude and longitude, which is in derived from the city's geographic and time-zone information.
If you ever have any doubts about Hebcal's times, consult your local halachic authority.
Thanks for using Hebcal, and our sincere apologies for the inconvenience. We recently upgraded some servers on our website and regret if we've caused any inconvenience.
If the problem persists might try deleting your Hebcal calendar subscription and then re-subscribing.
Hebcal events are supported on Android via Google Calendar. If you'd like to remove Hebcal events from your Android device, remove them first from Google Calendar, and then let your Android device sync your Google account.
Thanks for the bug report. We recently upgraded our servers and this feature was inadvertently disabled. Our apologies for the oversight.
A change has been deployed and your calendar will be updated in approximately 7 days, or whenever your iPhone next refreshes subscribed calendars.
Although the Tenth of Tevet is an annual observance on the Jewish calendar, its placement around the end of the Gregorian calendar year means that in some Gregorian years, there is no observance of the fast, while in other years, the fast is observed twice. Thus, the Tenth of Tevet does not occur at all in 2019. Instead, the "2019" observance of the fast will take place in January 2020, while the subsequent observance will occur in December 2020
Customer support service by UserEcho
Hi, thanks for using Hebcal.
One of the features of the new website is that it offers a radio button for Havdalah with two choices - tzeit or fixed minutes. The new default is Tzeit HaKochavim (solar depression of 8.5 degrees) vs. a fixed number of minutes (e.g. 72) after sunset, because it works more consistently across the globe.
Tzeit doesn't apply here, because it looks like in this case you're specifically choosing 72 minutes.
There are 3 things that could account for 1-2 minute differences in candle lighting and Havdalah times:
1. slightly different NOAA sunset calculators - the one we're using on the website now is implemented in JS. It was previously implemented in C. Both use double-precision floating point arithmetic, but there are so many constants and opportunities to round/truncate that there could be slight differences in the resulting number.
2. In JS, we truncate candle-lighting (Friday) times down to the nearest minute, and round Havdalah times up to the nearest minute. The idea here is that it's better to list candle-lighting time as 30 seconds earlier than strictly necessary, and for Havdalah it's better to wait an additional 30 seconds to end Shabbat/yontiff. So if the exact candle lighting time from the sunset engine (including seconds) was at 20:02:31 or even 20:02:59, we have always returned candle-lighting at 20:02 in both C and JavaScript. However, in JS we're operating a little differently for Havdalah times only. If the Havdalah calculation comes back as 21:17:29, JS will display 21:17, but if it were 21:17:30 through 21:17:59 we display 21:18. In the C version, we would display 21:17 for Havdalah even if the engine returned 21:17:59. Should we consider this a bug in the C version and backport the rounding feature to C? It's a 1- or 2-line code change.
3. Lastly, when comparing Hebcal to other sources like OU and Chabbad, most of the differences are explained by slightly different latitude/longitude definitions for a given city. 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.
In this particular case, it's likely that 1 minute of the 2-minute difference is accounted for reason #1, and the other minute is accounted for by reason #2.