TLV Minyanim
Where can I daven in the next 40 minutes?
Nobody in Tel Aviv can currently answer that. There are synagogue directories —
they list buildings, addresses, phone numbers. What they cannot do is sort
today's prayer times into a timeline, because most of those times are not clock
times at all. They are rules: twenty minutes before sunset, ten minutes before
candle lighting, at dawn.
This is a bilingual (Hebrew/English) site for the person who is not where they
usually pray — a visitor, a business traveller, someone saying kaddish in an
unfamiliar city.
Read that Mincha row: 20 דק' לפני שקיעה = 18:47. The rule is stored; the
clock time is computed for today. Tomorrow it will say something else, and it
will still be right — because sunset moved, not because anyone edited a row.
The one idea
A minyan time is a structured value, never a display string.
type MinyanTime =
| { kind: 'fixed'; time: string } // "13:30"
| { kind: 'relative'; anchor: Zman; offsetMinutes: number } // shkia − 20
| { kind: 'unknown'; rawText: string } // "בזמן"
LA Jewish Times — the closest comparable — stores relative times as the literal
text "~25 Min before Netz". Those minyanim are therefore invisible to its own
next-minyan feature: a string cannot be sorted into a timeline. That single
decision breaks the only feature that matters.
The invariant is enforced in Postgres, not just TypeScript:
CONSTRAINT minyan_time_shape CHECK (
CASE kind
WHEN 'fixed' THEN fixed_time IS NOT NULL AND anchor IS NULL AND …
WHEN 'relative' THEN anchor IS NOT NULL AND offset_minutes IS NOT NULL AND …
WHEN 'unknown' THEN raw_text IS NOT NULL AND fixed_time IS NULL AND …
END
)
An import script cannot write in SQL what the types forbid in the app. All three
malformed shapes were tried against a live database and rejected.
The third kind matters most
About 60% of the source data says only בזמן — "at the proper time" — with no
offset. That is kind: 'unknown', and it is never guessed.
A hallucinated Mincha sends someone across a neighbourhood to an empty room, and
it does so with a confident-looking number on the page. A blank is honest. The
parser has a test asserting that two shuls with identical field shapes — one
stating shkia − 20, one saying בזמן — do not let the second inherit the
first.
The site says so out loud rather than hiding it:
טעון בדיקה — לא מאושר
המקור לא ברור, והשעות האלה לא אושרו. אל תסתמכו עליהן.
Where it stands
| |
|---|
| Parser | Hebrew free text → structured values. All 26 raw fields parse, zero leftovers |
| Data | 16 synagogues, 65 minyanim — 42 fixed, 19 unknown, 4 relative. 1 verified against its own notice board |
| Zmanim | @hebcal/core, GRA, resolved at read time and never stored |
| Tests | 284, including edge cases asserted against published luachot |
| Contrast | AA in both modes — 130 elements, 0 failures, worst 5.05 light / 5.73 dark |
Not built: geo/radius search, the nightly refresh job, and any deployment —
the site currently runs locally only.
The real gap is not code. Shacharit is known for every shul. Mincha is 69%
unknown, and exactly one synagogue in the neighbourhood publishes a real
offset. No feature closes that; twelve conversations with gabbaim would.
A few decisions worth the detour
Candle lighting in Tel Aviv is shkia − 22, not 20. @hebcal/core ships 20
for the Tel Aviv geoname and Hebcal's own pages print 20 — but the Tel Aviv-Yafo
Religious Council, the authority for exactly these synagogues, publishes 22, and
MyZmanim labels it 22 דקות קודם השקיעה. Checked against all 34 published
Fridays of 5786 falling in 2026: no date fits 20, 21 or 23. Where published
authorities disagree, take the earlier — two minutes early costs nothing, two
minutes late is chillul Shabbat.
tzeit names two different times, so no tzeit minyan is published. On a
luach, יציאת שבת is the stringent 8.5° value. A synagogue writing צאת הכוכבים on
its Arvit line means the nightfall it actually davens at — up to 26 minutes
earlier. Resolving one against the other listed a real minyan 26 minutes late,
so the anchor is kept and the record held back until a gabbai settles it.
מנחה 1:30 means 13:30, and that is reading rather than guessing. Mincha at
01:30 does not exist, so the time is stated and only the clock convention is
open. Every such shift is recorded in clockNormalisation and stays queryable.
Where neither reading is possible, the record is flagged and withheld.
Hebrew sorts with COLLATE "C". The cluster default is en_US.UTF-8, which
orders Hebrew into nonsense — it put המרכזי before אוהל. Invisible to anyone
not reading Hebrew.
Contrast is measured by painting a pixel, never by reading a colour string.
color-mix() computes in oklab, and a regex reads oklab(0.72 0.13 0.11) as
near-black — 81 elements on the homepage are affected. See
scripts/contrast-audit.js.
Tests never assert that a library returns what the library returns. Expected
zmanim come from published luachot, sourced independently of this code
(docs/zmanim-ground-truth.md). Reverting candle lighting to 20 fails six tests;
switching tzeit to the 7.083° opinion fails ten.
Stack
Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript, server-rendered — every synagogue page must be
crawlable. Postgres + PostGIS for real geo queries. @hebcal/core for zmanim,
never hand-rolled. Zero runtime dependencies in the parser, which is a standalone
module with its own tests.
Bilingual routing (/he, /en) from the first commit, because retrofitting it
means losing every ranking. CSS logical properties only; Asia/Jerusalem
throughout, where the Hebrew date rolls at sunset.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
