CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I would like to use CiviCRM for my synagogue. Many dates need to be tracked according to the Jewish calendar instead of (or in addition to) the Gregorian calendar. For example, people's date of birth, date of death, bar mitzvah date, holidays, etc.  A common weekly task for the office staff is to notify families if there is a death anniversary in the coming week. A common yearly task is to create a list of all families with babies born during the last Jewish year.    Often we need to know both dates, i.e. send a mailing showing both the Jewish date and the Gregorian date for an occasion   

We also need to look ahead. For example, for a 10 year old child we need to be able to look ahead on the calendar and see when their 13th  birthday is on both the Hebrew and Gregorian calendar in order to schedule their bar mitzvah.

How would I do this in CiviCRM? There does not seem to be support for alternative calendars.

Thanks,
Sarah

We have added Japanese Calendar support to our CiviCRM environment which is a complete break from the Gregorian Calendar.

As you may or may not know, we actually still have an Emperor here in the land of the rising sun. Our national calendar is actually based off the era or the reign of the emperor... It looks something like this:

1989 = Heisei Year 1 / Month / Day
1990 = Heisei Year 2 / Month / Day

New Emperor on the thrown, it becomes a NewEra and Year 1 all over again... Yes folks, we are born again and my date of birth is actually based on how long the emperor is on the thrown.

Anyway I am taking a look at הלוח העברי to see if it can be incorporated as a client of ours in Israel (Technion) will probably need it. I will let you know if we have something for you to use in the interim.

I am curious if any more work has been done on this. I have several sites for which this would be very useful.

/carmi

I found a small PHP script that will convert dates. Where should I hook this in to CiviCRM for converting date of birth and date of death?

$gregorianMonth = date(n);
$gregorianDay = date(j);
$gregorianYear = date(Y);

$jdDate = gregoriantojd($gregorianMonth,$gregorianDay,$gregorianYear);

$hebrewMonthName = jdmonthname($jdDate,4);

$hebrewDate = jdtojewish($jdDate);

list($hebrewMonth, $hebrewDay, $hebrewYear) = split('/',$hebrewDate);

echo "$hebrewDay $hebrewMonthName $hebrewYear";

I went through your list of functionality and it seems you have a very complete implementation in mind. How is it going?
One quick question, will you have both English and Hebrew names for the months (Adar and אדר) and holidays? I think that would be important for many people.

I am quite eager to use this for my synagogue as well. Thanks for the great work.

/carmi

This is great. I am looking into using Civicrm for a few synagogues. How are we going to be able to get our hands on this customization, or will it be incorporated into the next version?

Mordy -

I only store the Gregorian date and the "before or after sunset" flag in the database. Then the Hebrew dates are calculated as needed. I have a PHP file that is called every night by a CRON job that handles sending out the yahrzeit reminders by email. wget -O - -q -t 1 "http://myhost.com/civicrm_custom_code/batch/UpcomingYahrzeitsBin.php?wantsBCC=false&name=xxx&pass=xxxkey=xxx&dateStartRange=7&dateEndRange=1"     What this does is send out for any yahrzeits that fall 7 days after today, for a date range of 1 day.  So everybody gets an email exactly 7 days in advance of the yahrzeit.

I am currently making the Hebrew calendar implementation available to try out at: http://demo.shulsuite.com.   It has the Hebrew calendar features I have developed plus other customizations for synagogues such as cemetery tracking.  I would love to get feedback!

I have also been installing it for my synagogue clients.