What Shabbat Screen is
Shabbat Screen is a free weather and news display built for one job: to sit on a tablet, monitor, or spare laptop and keep showing accurate, current information all the way through Shabbat and Yom Tov without anyone touching it. Open it before candle lighting, and it carries on refreshing by itself until you come back to it.
Ordinary weather sites assume you will tap, scroll, and reload. That assumption is exactly the problem on Shabbat. Shabbat Screen removes it: every panel refreshes on a timer you set in advance, so the screen stays live and useful with no interaction at all.
What it shows
- Current conditions and a full forecast for your location, including feels-like temperature, humidity, wind, UV index, pressure, and cloud cover.
- An hourly forecast chart plotting temperature against RealFeel, plus a separate hourly chart for odds of precipitation.
- Shabbat and Yom Tov times — candle lighting, havdalah, and the weekly parsha, pulled for your location from the Hebcal API.
- A large clock in your local timezone with a countdown to the next refresh.
- A world news feed from sources you pick in advance.
Who it is for
Anyone who wants to know whether it will rain before the walk to shul, when candle lighting falls this week, or what happened in the world since Friday afternoon — without using a device on Shabbat. It works equally well as a kitchen display, a hallway screen, or a dashboard on a wall-mounted tablet, and it is used the same way on Yom Tov and chol hamoed.
Setting it up before Shabbat
There is no account and nothing to install. Open the site, allow location access or set your city, choose which panels you want and how often the screen should refresh, then leave it. Your settings are saved in your own browser — see the privacy policy for exactly what is stored and where.
For the full walkthrough, including refresh intervals, panel layout, and tips for leaving a device running overnight, read how Shabbat Screen works, or check the frequently asked questions.
Guides and reference
Alongside the screen itself we write longer explanations of the things it displays — the meteorology behind the forecast numbers, the astronomy and custom behind zmanim, and the practical business of keeping a device awake and readable for twenty-five hours.
- Reading a weather forecast — what feels-like temperature, dew point, UV index, barometric pressure, and probability of precipitation each actually measure, and the mistakes people make reading them.
- How candle lighting and havdalah times are calculated — sunset, the eighteen-minute custom, why Jerusalem and Haifa differ, and why two calendars can print different times for the same city.
- Leaving a screen running over Shabbat — sleep, auto-lock, brightness, and kiosk settings for iPad, Android, Windows, macOS, Fire tablets, and Raspberry Pi, plus notes on burn-in and battery health.
- Why Yom Tov moves every year — lunar months against a solar year, the nineteen-year cycle, leap months, and the rules that fix Rosh Hashanah.
The full list lives on the guides index.