Hebrew Dash: a productivity dashboard with Hebrew calendar integration

Living in Israel means constantly juggling two calendrical systems — and it's more complicated than people outside the Jewish world might realise. Secular dates for work meetings and deadlines, Hebrew dates for holidays and religious observance, zmanim (prayer times that shift daily with sunrise and sunset), Shabbat candle lighting times that vary by location and week, the weekly Torah portion, and a rolling calendar of Israeli national holidays that don't align with the secular calendar. Most productivity dashboards don't even know Hebrew dates exist, let alone integrate them meaningfully. So I built Hebrew Dash: a local dashboard that brings all of this into one clean interface alongside the standard productivity feeds I rely on daily.

Everything you need for the day in one screen

The headline feature is full Hebrew calendar integration powered by the HebCal API: the current Hebrew date in both English transliteration and Hebrew characters, daily zmanim for Jerusalem (configurable to any location), Shabbat times including candle lighting and havdalah, the weekly Torah portion, and upcoming Israeli holidays. But a dashboard that only shows calendar data isn't worth building — the value comes from combining it with everything else I check throughout the day. Hebrew Dash also integrates Google Gmail and Calendar (via OAuth, supporting multiple accounts), weather and air quality data from Open-Meteo, Israeli news headlines from Google News RSS, and even the Israeli emergency Red Alert system, which is unfortunately relevant enough to warrant a dashboard widget when you live in Jerusalem. The whole thing runs locally as a Flask app, uses free APIs wherever possible, and refreshes on sensible intervals.

The morning glance that replaced five apps

What I wanted was a single screen I could glance at in the morning that would tell me everything I needed to know for the day: what time is mincha, when does Shabbat start this week, what's the weather looking like, do I have any urgent emails, what's on my calendar, and what's in the news. Before building this I was checking five different apps and websites for that information. The dashboard runs on Python/Flask and supports installation as a standalone executable or development mode. Google OAuth handles the Gmail and Calendar integration. The location defaults to Jerusalem but is configurable. It's responsive enough to work on mobile, though it really shines on a desktop display or a dedicated screen. I later built a more minimal sibling called Day Planner Dashboard for smaller screens, but Hebrew Dash remains my primary morning dashboard. The project is on GitHub.