hebrew_date

HebrewDate

hebrew_date is a library designed to provide information about the Jewish calendar. This includes dates, holidays, and parsha of the week.

Usage

Full documentation can be found here.

To initialize a Hebrew date, you can use either the English date:

HebrewDate.new(2009, 12, 25)

or the Hebrew one:

HebrewDate.new_from_hebrew(5775, 4, 29)

HebrewDates respond to all the methods dates do:

HebrewDate.new.saturday?
HebrewDate.new.beginning_of_week # Rails
HebrewDate.new + 3 # go 3 days forward

Printing

HebrewDate also responds to strftime, but provides a number of additional flags for printing Hebrew dates. These are identical to the normal flags except that they start with * instead of %:

• *Y - Hebrew year
• *m - Hebrew month, zero-padded
• *_m - Hebrew month, blank-padded
• *-m - Hebrew month, no-padded
• *B - Hebrew month, full name
• *^B - Hebrew month, full name uppercase
• *b - Hebrew month, 3 letters
• *^b - Hebrew month, 3 letters uppercase
• *h - same as %*b
• *d - Hebrew day of month, zero-padded
• *-d - Hebrew day of month, no-padded
• *e - Hebrew day of month, blank-padded

There is an additional flag added which is of simple utility:

• %.b - Gregorian day of month, followed by a period (.), except for May, which doesn't need one and is incorrect.

Parsha

You can get the parsha of the current day by calling the parsha method. This will only return a value if it is on Shabbat. By default the parsha will have "special" values appended to it (e.g. the special Parshiyot, Shekalim, Zachor, Parah and Hachodesh), which can optionally be suppressed.

By default HebrewDate will use the "chutz la'aretz" parsha scheme (i.e. assuming two-day Yom Tov). You can use the Israeli scheme by calling

HebrewDate.israeli = true

before creating your first instance of HebrewDate.

Holiday

If the current date is a Jewish holiday (including Erev Yom Tov and the "modern" holidays of Yom Ha'atzmaut, Yom Hazikaron and Yom Yerushalayim) you can retrieve those as strings via the holiday method.

Month names, holidays and parshiyot all will be in Sephardic / Mizrachi accents by default. You can change this to Ashkenazi pronunciation by calling

HebrewDate.ashkenazi = true

You can also retrieve a date from the holiday name:

HebrewDate.from_holiday(:PURIM, 5774)