Shabbat Blocker

Shabbat Blocker automatically prevents access to your WordPress site during Shabbat and Jewish holidays, based on accurate times from Hebcal.

Features:

• Manual city selection (Jerusalem, New York, London, Los Angeles, etc.).
• Displays candle lighting and havdalah times, adjusted to the selected timezone.
• Multilingual display: Hebrew when the selected city is in Israel, English otherwise.
• Simple settings page – choose your city once and it just works.
• Lightweight and fast – no unnecessary options.

This plugin is ideal for businesses, organizations, and personal sites that want to respect Shabbat observance and Jewish holiday closures.

External Services

This plugin connects to the public Hebcal.com API to obtain Shabbat and Jewish holiday times.

• What it’s used for
The plugin fetches candle-lighting and havdalah times for the selected city in order to display the block page during Shabbat/holidays.

• What data is sent and when
On the front end, when the block page needs to show times, the plugin sends:
– The selected city identifier (geonameid) and the current Gregorian date (gy, gm, gd) as query parameters to Hebcal’s /shabbat endpoint.
No personal data is sent. No persistent identifiers are collected.

• Provider
Hebcal – a public Jewish calendar service.
Privacy Policy: https://www.hebcal.com/home/privacy-policy
Licensing / API information: https://www.hebcal.com/home/help

1. Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/shabbat-blocker directory, or install via the WordPress Plugins screen directly.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress.
3. Go to Settings → Shabbat Blocker to configure:
   • Select a city (geonameid).
   • Save settings.

1. 

   Example of the block page in Hebrew (Jerusalem).

2. 

   Example of the block page in English (New York).

3. 

   Settings page inside WordPress admin.