metro >> Jews in the digital age B Jewish Calendars For The Digital Age esides the often-told joke that the definition of a Jewish holi- day is "they tried to kill us, we prevailed, now let's eat," there are not many jokes about the Jewish calendar. The only one I can ever remember was actually told by a non-Jewish late- night talk show host. In his opening monologue on The Late Show several years ago, David Letterman turned to his Jewish bandleader Paul Shaffer and wished him a "Happy New Year" since it was Rosh Hashanah. Letterman then asked Shaffer what the Jewish year was, to which he explained that it was now 5759. Letterman quickly deadpanned "Well, I'm sure I'll still be writing 5758 on all my checks for a few weeks." The joke struck a chord for so many Jews because we all know we don't use the Jewish year or the Jewish calendar very much in our everyday lives. Even most Israelis write the secular year on their checks and contracts and celebrate the Gregorian date for birthdays and anniversaries. The Jewish calendar, howev- er, does play a significant role in our lives. We need to know when to observe our departed relatives' yahrtzeit dates. We need to schedule our events and travel plans around the Jewish holidays. We need to schedule our children's bar and bat mitzvahs according to their Jewish birthdates. The rhythm of the Jewish calendar affects us emotional- ly. The Jewish calendar, known in Hebrew as luach Hashanah, takes us on a journey. The calendar is made up of days in which we celebrate and days in which we grieve. Some Jews, especially those working in a professional capacity in the Jewish community, have historically carried a small pocket luach to know the Jewish holidays and the Jewish dates. In the past two decades, these print Hebrew calendars have morphed into digital cal- endars and mobile apps. I started using an electronic version of the luach back in 1997 when I got my first Palm Pilot, which was one of the first personal data assistants (PDA) on the market. While there were several luach apps available to install onto the Palm Pilot, the most advanced version 26 June 26 • 2014 Calendar Today • CREATE < > SMTWT F 27 28 29 30 1 2 3 4 8 9 10 6 7 > Sunday, May 18, 2014 (18 lyar 5774) Expand All Collapse All • May 2014 5 < Sun May 18 (18 lyar) S Mon May 19 (19 lyar) 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 8:00am — 9:00am E) Breakfast at Tiffany's tt 6:00pm — 8:00pm ID Bowling at the mall - the mall CT 7:30am — 9:00am ID Danny's Bar Mitzvah CI 8:00pm — 10:00pm Watch the game CI 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 Tue May 20 (20 lyar) was from a company named Penticon Technologies. The app was simply called "Luach," and it integrated flawlessly with the native calendar on the device. What was so great about Luach was that in addition to converting any date on the Gregorian calendar to the Jewish date, the app also kept a record of spe- cial events such as relatives' yahrtzeit dates and it then synced those dates with the device calendar. So rather than depend on the post- card reminders from funeral homes and synagogues about upcoming yahrtzeits, one could simply set an alarm reminder on the PDA. As a new rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in the late 1990s, I found myself being the go-to techie for my fellow students who wanted the mobile luach installed on their pocket data organizer. Penticon's Luach quickly became the killer app for anyone in the Jewish pro- fessional world. The dean of the rabbini- cal school at the time, Rabbi William Lebeau, told the senior class that they could not be ordained as a rabbi from the seminary unless they had a PDA with Luach installed. Newer, High Tech Apps Fast forward more than 15 years and those Palm PDAs now seem archaic by today's technology. Just about every- one now carries a smartphone in their pocket with a fast Internet connection. Determining a Hebrew date or ascer- - 1:00pm — 2:30pm 8 Lunch with work buddies CI 7 taining when a Jewish holiday will occur several years from now is as simple as a Google search. However, those who pre- fer to have a luach app at the ready on their phone have a plethora of good apps to choose from. For Apple devices running iOS, Tebeka Software Solutions' Pocket Luach is one of the most popular apps. For smartphones and tablets running the Android operating system, Simple Luach and AvivoNet's Luach Hebrew Calendar are popular and work pretty well. RustyBrick, one of the most success- ful developers of Jewish mobile apps, released a luach app that is a siddur (prayer book) as well as a Jewish calen- dar with what are known as z'manim, or specific times for Jewish prayer through- out the day, including Shabbat and holi- day candle lighting and Havdallah times. I reconnected with Howie Hirsch of Penticon in December 2012 in Jerusalem. It had been many years since he worked on his company's Luach app because Palm Pilots were out of produc- tion and everyone had shifted to Apple, Android or Windows mobile phones. He told me he was working on an Apple iOS version of Luach and asked if I'd be willing to join his team of beta testers. I told him I'd be happy to. A new beta version of Luach will soon be available for downloading. Hopefully this will be the last beta version. We are now in the process of submitting Luach to the App store and making it available to the gen- eral public. The official release will be within the next few weeks. In mid-April, Howie sent out a beta version of Luach for iOS that has the final fine tuning in order to be ready for an official release, which means it could be available before the High Holidays this year. Like the original versions of Luach, the iOS version will let users enter spe- cial events like yahrtzeit dates, anniver- saries, birthdays and bar/bat mitzvahs. It will also allow users to customize the Shabbat and holiday times based on their location and communal customs (i.e., how long to wait until making Havdallah). It's great to see Howie back in action with Penticon's Luach, and I think it will quickly become the most downloaded luach app in the Apple App Store when it's finally released. All of the luach apps on the market are designed for traditional Jews, mean- ing Orthodox and Conservative Jews who, in the diaspora, observe an extra day of major holidays. Reform Jews, who do not observe the extra day of holidays in the diaspora, have struggled to find a luach app that allows for the customiza- tion they desire. However, Rabbi Leon Morris is hoping to change that with the Reform Luach app he is currently developing (www.reformluach.com ). Rabbi Morris, who is making aliyah with this family, and I began discussing his idea for a Reform version of a luach app in early 2013, and he has made great strides in bringing it to fruition. "Jewish professionals have long relied on the luach in planning community programming and observances," Morris explained. "Reform Jewish professionals had no calendar resource geared specifi- cally toward us; our only option was to consult a luach from another denomina-