| name | check-opening-hours |
| description | Answer "is this Israeli business open" / "what time does it open" / "will it be open before Shabbat" for a named business. Gathers stated hours from Google Business and easy.co.il, then resolves any Shabbat- or chag-relative phrasing into concrete clock times for the requested date using Hebcal candle-lighting and havdalah times. Use for any opening-hours question about a business in Israel. |
Check Israeli opening hours
Answer opening-hours questions about a business in Israel, including the common
case where the stated hours are expressed relative to Shabbat or a chag rather
than as clock times.
Why this needs its own workflow
Google stores hours only as fixed clock times. Israeli merchants set Friday and
Saturday once and rarely revisit them, but candle lighting moves by about an
hour and forty minutes between midwinter and midsummer. So a Google entry saying
"Friday 08:00–16:00" is often simply wrong for the week being asked about, and
"Saturday: Closed" tells you nothing about the motzei-shabbat reopening that the
user probably cares about.
The job is therefore: collect what the sources state, work out what rule is
behind it, then evaluate that rule against the real calendar for the target date.
Workflow
1. Pin down the business and the date
Get the business name and its city — the city matters, because candle
lighting in Jerusalem is 40 minutes before sunset, Haifa and Zikhron Ya'aqov
use 30, and everywhere else 20. That is a 20-minute difference in every derived
time, so a Jerusalem/Tel Aviv mix-up is a real error. Ask if unclear.
Default the date to today. "Before Shabbat" means the coming Friday.
2. Get the calendar picture first
python3 ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/israel_hours.py anchors \
--city jerusalem --from 2026-08-01 --days 7
This tells you the day_type of each date (weekday, erev_shabbat,
shabbat, erev_yom_tov, yom_tov, shabbat_yom_tov, yom_kippur,
chol_hamoed, fast_day, tisha_bav) and its anchor times. Do this early —
if the target date is Yom Kippur you can answer immediately and skip the lookups.
See the shabbat-anchors skill for the details of this command.
3. Collect stated hours
Use the google-business-hours skill first — highest coverage.
Use the easy-co-il-lookup skill when Google has no entry, the entry looks
stale, or the business is small/local (easy.co.il often carries Hebrew-language
hours text with the Shabbat phrasing intact, which Google strips).
Where the two disagree, prefer whichever gives an explicit Hebrew hours string —
that is the merchant's own wording, and it is what you can actually model.
4. Turn the stated hours into a rules file
Use the hours-rules-authoring skill. It covers the schema and the phrase
translations ("שעה אחרי צאת השבת" → {"anchor": "havdalah", "offset_min": 60}).
Save it under businesses/<slug>.json in the working repo if the user is likely
to ask again; otherwise a temp file is fine.
5. Resolve and answer
python3 ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/israel_hours.py resolve \
--rules businesses/<slug>.json --from 2026-08-01 --days 7
or for a single instant:
python3 ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/israel_hours.py open-at \
--rules businesses/<slug>.json --at "2026-08-01T21:30"
Answering well
- Lead with the concrete time, then the reasoning. "Closes 14:37 this Friday —
that's 90 minutes before candle lighting, which is 16:07 in Jerusalem in January."
- State your confidence and its source. Sunday–Thursday hours from Google are
usually right. A Friday closing time you derived from a rule is an estimate;
say so.
- Flag the reopening. For a Saturday question, the useful answer is almost
always the motzei-shabbat time, not "closed".
- Never present a derived time as authoritative. If the user is making a trip,
say that a phone call is the only way to be certain, and give the number if you
have it from Google.
Israeli context that changes the answer
- Not every business closes for Shabbat. Much of Tel Aviv, most of Haifa,
and Arab- and Christian-owned businesses countrywide trade normally on
Saturday. Do not apply a Shabbat rule because the business is in Israel —
apply it because the source says so or the business type strongly implies it.
- Yom Kippur closes essentially everything nationwide, including Ben Gurion
airport. No reopening until after havdalah.
- Erev chag behaves like erev shabbat. The script already classifies it.
- Chol HaMoed hours are reduced and vary wildly between branches. Treat any
chol hamoed answer as low confidence and say so.
- Ramadan materially shifts hours for businesses in Arab-majority areas, and
Hebcal does not cover it. This plugin has no Islamic calendar source — if the
business is in e.g. Nazareth, Umm al-Fahm, or East Jerusalem, say the estimate
does not account for Ramadan.
- Fast days other than Yom Kippur mostly affect restaurants and cafés, not
retail.
Dependencies
requests. Available in the default Python environment.
