Hebrew date converter
People bring me photos of a great-grandmother’s stone or a letter from before the war, and the date is usually the first thing they want read. It is written in letters, with the thousands left off and an abbreviation or two around it. Type it here the way it is written and you get the civil date, the weekday, and how the letters add up, so you can check my reading against the stone.
Read a Hebrew date
Copy the date line from the stone or the letter as it is written, abbreviations and all.
- Weekday
- יום ה׳ = Thursday
- Day
- ז = 7
- Month
- טבת = Tevet
- Year
- ת 400 + ר 200 + צ 90 + ט 9 = 699 → 5699
Thursday, 29 December 1938
ז׳ טבת תרצ״ט · 7 Tevet 5699 · יום ה׳
- The text says יום ה׳ (Thursday), and that matches.
A Hebrew day starts at nightfall, not at midnight. Someone who died on a Tuesday evening after dark has Wednesday’s Hebrew date on the stone.
From a civil date to the Hebrew date
For a stone you are ordering, a yahrzeit, or checking that a stone agrees with a certificate.
How a written date is put together
Each letter is a number: א to ט are 1 to 9, י to צ are the tens, ק ר ש ת are 100 to 400. Final letters count the same as the ordinary ones. 15 and 16 are written ט"ו and ט"ז, never with י, because those spellings would begin God’s name. The marks ׳ and ״ only say “this is a number”.
The year normally leaves out the thousands, which is what לפ"ק (“by the short count”) means: תרצ"ט is 699, so 5699. Some stones put the thousands in front as ה׳. The Jewish year begins in September or October, so one Hebrew year covers the end of one civil year and most of the next.
In a leap year there are two months of Adar, written אדר א׳ and אדר ב׳. When a date in a leap year says only אדר, both are shown above. Weekdays on a stone are written יום א׳ (Sunday) to יום ו׳ (Friday), and שבת or ש"ק for Saturday; when the stone gives one, the page checks it against the date.
Dates are converted from 1583 on, in the calendar used today. Documents from the Russian Empire before 1918 used the old Julian calendar, ten to thirteen days behind, so that date is shown too.