Shabbat Screen is a weather and news display designed to be set up once, before Shabbat begins, and then left alone. Everything on the screen refreshes on its own schedule, so the information stays current for the whole of Shabbat and Yom Tov without anyone touching the device.
The idea behind it
Every normal weather site expects you to interact with it — tap to reload, scroll to see the next few hours, click through to a forecast. That makes them unusable on Shabbat. A Shabbat screen inverts the design: the page assumes nobody will touch it, so it does the reloading itself, shows everything at once instead of hiding it behind taps, and keeps the layout readable from across a room.
Setting it up before Shabbat
- Open the site on the device you want to leave running. There is no account, no install, and nothing to download. A tablet, an old laptop, a spare monitor, or a wall-mounted screen all work.
- Set your location. Allow the browser location prompt and the screen detects your city automatically. If you would rather not share location, or the prompt fails, search for your city by name instead. Your last working location is saved in the browser, so on later visits it loads straight away.
- Choose your refresh interval. Pick 1, 5, or 15 minutes from the header. The screen counts down to the next update so you can see at a glance that it is still live. There is also a Manual setting if you want to freeze the display.
- Pick your panels. Use the Panels button to turn individual sections on or off — main weather summary, the weather details grid, the large clock, Shabbat and Yom Tov times, the hourly forecast chart, odds of precipitation, and the news feed. Close what you do not need so the rest gets more room.
- Choose your news sources. The news panel lets you select which outlets appear, including Times of Israel, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC News, CNN, Associated Press, Axios, and Financial Times.
- Set units, theme, and language. Celsius or Fahrenheit, light or dark or system theme, and thirteen languages including Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Ukrainian. Right-to-left languages get a proper right-to-left layout.
- Leave it running. Set the device not to sleep, plug it in, and walk away.
What keeps updating on its own
Weather
Current conditions, feels-like temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, UV index, barometric pressure, and cloud cover, all refreshed on your chosen interval. The background of the screen changes to match the actual conditions and the time of day, so a glance from across the room tells you roughly what is happening outside.
Hourly charts
One chart plots temperature against RealFeel across the coming hours. A second shows the odds of precipitation hour by hour — the practical one for deciding whether to bring a coat to shul.
Shabbat and Yom Tov times
Candle lighting, havdalah, the weekly parsha, and upcoming holidays for your specific location, fetched from the Hebcal API. Because the times are tied to the location you set, they follow you if you are away from home for Shabbat.
Clock and countdown
A large clock in the local timezone of your chosen location, with a visible countdown to the next refresh.
News
Headlines from the sources you selected, refreshed alongside everything else, so you can see what happened in the world since Friday afternoon without opening anything.
Practical notes for leaving a screen on
- Turn off screen sleep and auto-lock on the device, and keep it plugged in — a tablet running a live display overnight will not survive on battery.
- A 5 or 15 minute refresh interval is usually the right choice for an unattended screen. One minute is more than the data actually changes and burns through more battery and bandwidth.
- If the display will run somewhere dark, the dark theme is easier on the eyes and dimmer at night.
- Open the screen well before candle lighting and give it a minute to load every panel, so you know it is working before Shabbat starts.
Where the data comes from
Weather and forecast data comes from the Open-Meteo API. Shabbat and Yom Tov times come from the Hebcal API. News headlines come from the public RSS feeds of the outlets you choose. Your location, panel layout, units, theme, and language preferences are stored in your own browser and are not held on a server — the privacy policy spells out the details.
More
Still have questions? The frequently asked questions cover the most common ones. Otherwise, head back to the screen and set it up.