| name | shabbat-anchors |
| description | Get candle-lighting, havdalah, sunset and tzeit times plus a day classification (shabbat / yom tov / erev chag / chol hamoed / fast day) for a date range in an Israeli city. Use as the calendar basis for resolving opening hours stated relative to Shabbat, or whenever you need to know what kind of day a given Israeli date is. |
Shabbat and chag anchors
Fetches the boundary times that Shabbat-relative opening hours are measured
from, and classifies each date. Backed by the Hebcal REST API — no API key, no
MCP server, no plugin dependencies.
Command
python3 ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/israel_hours.py anchors \
--city jerusalem --from 2026-09-10 --days 7
Location can be given three ways:
| Flag | Use when |
|---|
--city <name> | One of the recognised cities. English or Hebrew (ירושלים). |
--geonameid <id> | Anywhere else — the preferred fallback. |
--latlon LAT,LON | Last resort only. Loses the local candle-lighting custom. |
Do not reach for --latlon. Hebcal applies a location's candle-lighting
custom only when addressed by city name or geonameid. Jerusalem by geonameid
lights 40 minutes before sunset (18:56 on 2026-07-31); the same coordinates
by lat/lon give 19:16. A silent 20-minute error. Look the place up on
geonames.org and pass --geonameid instead.
israel_hours.py cities lists the 56 bundled places; cities --search <term>
filters them. Lookup is forgiving — English, Hebrew, and romanisation variants
all resolve (kiryat ata, Qiryat Ata, צפת, Tsfat, safed, TLV,
Tel Aviv, Israel).
Anything smaller than roughly 35,000 people is not bundled; use --geonameid.
Output
One record per date:
{
"date": "2026-09-13",
"weekday": "sun",
"day_type": "yom_tov",
"rest_day": true,
"labels": ["Rosh Hashana II"],
"anchors": {
"sunrise": "...", "sunset": "...", "tzeit": "...", "chatzot": "...",
"candle_lighting": "...", "havdalah": "2026-09-13T19:24:00+03:00"
},
"notes": []
}
Day types
weekday, erev_shabbat, shabbat, erev_yom_tov, yom_tov,
shabbat_yom_tov, yom_kippur, tisha_bav, chol_hamoed, fast_day.
rest_day is true for shabbat, yom_tov, shabbat_yom_tov and yom_kippur.
Anchors
sunrise, sunset, chatzot and tzeit exist every day.
candle_lighting and havdalah exist only on the days they occur — a
Tuesday has neither. Code that consumes this must handle their absence.
tzeit defaults to Hebcal's tzeit7083deg (three medium stars). Pass
--tzeit tzeit85deg for the stringent reckoning, which runs ~7 minutes later.
Havdalah as returned in anchors is Hebcal's own nightfall calculation and is
the right anchor for "after Shabbat goes out" phrasing.
Things worth knowing
- Israel schedule is always used (
i=on): one-day yom tov, not two. Rosh
Hashana is still two days, correctly.
- Candle-lighting offset is per-city and Hebcal handles it. Jerusalem uses
40 minutes before sunset; Haifa and Zikhron Ya'aqov 30; everywhere else 20.
Never hardcode an offset, and never address a location by bare lat/lon — a
Jerusalem-vs-Tel-Aviv mix-up is a ~20 minute error in every derived time.
- Yom tov falling on Shabbat is classified
shabbat_yom_tov and has one
continuous rest period with havdalah only at the end.
- The range is padded by a day on each side internally, so erev-chag
detection and past-midnight windows work at the edges of the requested range.
