Questions people actually ask

Because both parts of the answer vary: when sunset is, and how long before sunset candles are lit.

The interval is a custom. Eighteen minutes before sunset is the most widespread practice, but twenty, thirty, and forty minutes are all kept by different communities, and some cities have a long-standing local custom. For example, Jerusalem’s widely observed custom is forty minutes before sunset; Haifa’s is thirty. None of these is a mistake — they are different practices.

Sunset itself varies too. The moment of sunset depends on the exact coordinates used, and a city is not a point. A synagogue calculating for a specific address, at a specific elevation, will get a time slightly different from one calculated for the city centre.

Shalom Table prints the method underneath every time it shows — something like “18 min before sunset · General Diaspora setting” — so you can always see which practice is being applied. If it does not match your community, change your timing profile in Settings → Practice profile, choose a recognized city custom, or enter your synagogue’s published time directly.

If you think the app has an actual error rather than a different custom, please report it.

Shabbat begins at sunset. It is customary not to begin at the exact moment, but to add a little time to the start of Shabbat — so candles are lit a set interval before sunset, and that lighting marks the beginning of Shabbat for the household.

The interval most commonly used in Diaspora communities is eighteen minutes. So a listed candle-lighting time of 6:58 PM means sunset that evening is calculated at 7:16 PM, and the community custom is to light eighteen minutes earlier.

It is worth being clear about which part is which:

• Sunset is calculated. It is astronomy, and it depends on your coordinates and the date.
• The eighteen minutes is a custom. It is a practice layered on top of the calculation, and it is the part that differs between communities.

Shalom Table keeps these visibly separate, which is why every time is shown with its method attached.

Shabbat ends at nightfall, and nightfall is harder to pin down than sunset. Sunset is a single observable event. Nightfall — the point at which enough stars are visible — is defined differently by different authorities, and the practical calculations differ correspondingly.

Common approaches include a fixed number of minutes after sunset (42, 50, and 72 minutes are all in use), or the moment the sun reaches a set angle below the horizon, often 8.5 degrees. Shalom Table lets you choose which your household follows, and shows the choice alongside the time.

Where a community publishes its own Havdalah time, that time is the one to follow.

Outside the Land of Israel, several festivals are observed for an additional day — יוֹם טוֹב שֵׁנִי שֶׁל גָּלֻיּוֹת, the second festival day of the Diaspora. It is a practice that dates to the era when the start of a new month was declared by witnesses in Jerusalem and communicated outward, and communities far away could not be certain which day was correct.

Two things follow from it:

• Holiday dates and lengths differ. Passover is seven days in Israel and eight in the Diaspora; Shavuot is one day in Israel and two outside it; Sukkot’s concluding days are arranged differently.
• The weekly Torah reading can diverge. When a festival falls on Shabbat, Israel reads the regular weekly portion while the Diaspora reads the festival reading. Israel is then one portion ahead — sometimes for several weeks — until the two cycles realign, usually at a week where the Diaspora reads two portions together.

This is why your weekly portion may differ from a relative’s in another country for part of the year, with neither being wrong.

Shalom Table asks which calendar you keep during setup, suggests one based on your location, and then applies it consistently to holidays, readings, and times. You can change it at any time in Settings → Practice profile, and you can keep separate saved locations — a home city and a Jerusalem entry, for instance — each with its own settings.

Shalom Table shows no time at all, and says why.

Above roughly the Arctic and Antarctic circles the sun does not set for a stretch of the summer and does not rise for a stretch of the winter. At somewhat lower latitudes — much of northern Scandinavia, parts of Alaska and northern Canada — the sun sets, but true nightfall does not arrive before it begins to grow light again.

In those conditions a sunset-based calculation has nothing to work from. What a household should do is a question of halachic ruling, and different authorities answer it differently. It is not something arithmetic can settle, and an app that produced a plausible-looking number would be misleading.

So the app refuses. It displays a clear statement that a standard time could not be calculated, explains that the sun does not set at this latitude at this time of year, and offers three routes:

• Use a schedule published by a synagogue or community in the area.
• Enter the week’s time manually — it will be shown with a visible “manually entered” label, never styled as a calculated time.
• Read a plain-language explanation of polar day and night.

Everything else in the app — blessings, readings, discussion material, the checklist — works normally at those locations.

You can save a temporary travel location alongside your home city, and the app will use it for the period you specify before switching back.

Changing your location, your time zone, or your timing profile cancels every pending reminder and reschedules them all against the new times. This is deliberate: a reminder computed for the city you left is worse than no reminder at all.

Because it is, and we would rather tell you than not.

Every liturgical and textual item in Shalom Table carries a record of where it came from, what licence it is used under, which edition it is, and whether a human advisor has reviewed it. Items that have not yet been reviewed are displayed with a visible banner marking them as pending.

The banner is not a warning that the text is wrong. It is an accurate statement about how far our editorial process has got with that item. An app dealing in religious text should not present unreviewed material as though it had been checked.

Review status is stored as data, not built into the app, so when an advisor approves an item the banner disappears for everyone without waiting for an App Store release.

Hebrew liturgical text is drawn from public-domain sources. English scripture is the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, which is in the public domain. Calendar and zmanim data come from the Hebcal API under the CC BY 4.0 licence.

Each item shows its own source and edition in the app, so you are never looking at an unattributed text.

No. No Hebrew text, no transliteration, and no halachic instruction in Shalom Table is generated by an artificial-intelligence model. This is a fixed rule of the project, not a current preference.

Where content is missing, the app shows that it is missing rather than filling the gap with something plausible.

No, and it is built not to. Practice options are presented as customs and descriptions, never as rulings about which practice is correct. Communities differ legitimately, and an app is not the right instrument for settling that.

For any question of Jewish law or practice, ask your rabbi or your community. Shalom Table is there to organise, remind, and explain — not to decide.

The one you choose: Modern Israeli / Sephardi, Ashkenazi, or Chabad. You are asked during setup and can change it at any time, and the choice is reflected in the transliteration shown throughout the app.

Transliteration is written separately for each interface language rather than reusing one Latin spelling everywhere, because a transliteration designed for English readers does not help a Spanish or Russian reader pronounce the same word.

The first release ships in English and Hebrew, with full right-to-left layout support and correct handling of mixed-direction text.

The app is built to support Russian and Spanish as well; those are a content addition rather than an engineering change, and will follow.

No to both. Shalom Table is free — no in-app purchases, no subscription, no advertising of any kind.

And it has no account. No sign-in, no email address, no password, no user profile. Setup asks eight questions about your household’s practice, takes about two minutes, and stores the answers on your device.

You cannot yet. Shalom Table is in development for iPhone and is not currently available on the App Store. This site will be updated when it is released.

We are not running a waiting list or collecting email addresses, which would be inconsistent with an app that asks for no personal information.

The first release is an iPhone app. It adapts to larger screens, but there is no separate iPad, Apple Watch, Android, or web version at launch.

Yes. Core Shabbat content — times for the period you have downloaded, blessings, readings, and your checklist — is stored on the device and works with the network off. Losing signal on a Friday afternoon should not cost you the information you were relying on.

Short version: no account, no advertising, no data sale, no location history, and no personal data about children. Anonymous reliability telemetry only, with coordinates stripped before anything is recorded.

The one thing that regularly leaves your device is your latitude and longitude, sent to our timing service each time times are calculated so that it can compute them for where you are. Those coordinates are not stored.

The full detail is in the privacy policy — particularly section 4 on location.

No. No engagement notification is sent during Shabbat or a holiday. Reminders are scheduled locally on your device, are computed from the times you have already seen, and are yours to turn off at any time. There are no marketing or promotional notifications at all.

Tell us — you do not need to be certain. The app has a “report a correction” action on individual items, and you can also write to us from the support page, where there are pre-filled templates for timing errors and text errors.

Content is delivered from a service we control, so a confirmed correction reaches every device without waiting for an App Store review. That is precisely why the correction path exists.