Hebrew GematriaCalculator · lexicon · dates

Yahrzeit Calculator

Enter the date of death to find the Hebrew date and the Gregorian dates of the coming yahrzeits. Each yahrzeit begins at sunset on the evening before the date shown.

Hebrew date of death
20 Cheshvan 5776 כ׳ חשון ה׳תשע״ו

Monday, 2 November 2015, before sunset.

How the Hebrew calendar works

The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar. Months follow the moon (29 or 30 days), and a thirteenth month, Adar I, is added in 7 years of every 19 so that Pesach stays in spring. Two months, Cheshvan and Kislev, change length from year to year so that Rosh Hashana does not fall on certain weekdays. As a result a Hebrew year has between 353 and 385 days, and a Hebrew date moves around the Gregorian calendar by up to a month.

A Hebrew day runs from nightfall to nightfall. Someone born on a Tuesday evening after sunset was born, by the Hebrew calendar, on Wednesday’s date. Tick the after-sunset box in that case. If the time was close to sunset, check the local sunset time for that date, or ask your rabbi.

Our conversions use the fixed arithmetic of the Hebrew calendar as set out in Reingold and Dershowitz, Calendrical Calculations, and are tested against the open-source Hebcal library for every day from 1800 to 2239.

The rules for a yahrzeit

A yahrzeit is kept on the Hebrew anniversary of the day of death, beginning the evening before. When that date does not exist in a later year, the rules differ from a birthday: a yahrzeit should not be kept later than the day itself, so it moves earlier rather than later.

  • Death on 30 Cheshvan or 30 Kislev. The date depends on the first anniversary. If the month had 30 days in the year after the death, later yahrzeits stay on the 30th when it exists (and move to the 1st of the next month when it does not). If it had only 29 days, the yahrzeit is kept on the last day of the month every year: the 29th or the 30th, depending on the year.
  • Death in Adar of an ordinary year. This calculator follows Calendrical Calculations and places the yahrzeit in Adar I in leap years. Many communities keep it in both Adar I and Adar II, and customs differ between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, so ask your rabbi.
  • Death in Adar II. The yahrzeit is kept in Adar II in leap years and in Adar in ordinary years.
  • Death on 30 Adar I. In ordinary years the yahrzeit is kept on 30 Shevat.

It is customary to light a candle that burns for 24 hours from the evening the yahrzeit begins, and to say Kaddish. For the first year, many communities count the first yahrzeit from the burial, not the death. That custom is not reflected here.