Handling Yahrzeits

The Hebrew calendar is tricky.  Seven years in each nineteen-year cycle, an extra month is added.  Furthermore, months can vary in number of days, from year to year.

Special care is needed for cases where

  • The congregant knows only the Hebrew month and day, but not the year
  • The Hebrew month is one of varying lengths, analogous to February 29th.


yahrzeit_demo from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.

Import and Export

An opinion based on decades of dealing with programs and users (please forgive the virtual yelling):

It’s your data.  Your should be able to extract it into a spreadsheet at any time.

Too often, purveyors of software make you a prisoner of their environment, because your data is locked inside their database.  As a trivial example, I’ve seen this in a lot of to-do apps.   You might have a hundred items in there, and you may wish to extract them for offline analysis.  “No,” say many vendors.

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