Privacy

Last updated October 20, 2026

Shavua is a Jewish calendar, learning, and community-events app. You do not need an account, name, or email address to use the app.

Location and preferences

If you allow location access, Shavua requests your location while you use the app to find a place for local calendar times and nearby shuls. You can instead choose a city manually, and you can change location permission in iOS Settings.

Apple location and Maps services help find and identify places. The selected place’s coordinates are sent to Hebcal to calculate calendar results and daily times (zmanim). This can include coordinates obtained from your device. Shavua does not continuously track your location.

Your selected place, shul, calculation preferences, and cached calendar, reading, and event content are stored on your device. The app shares preferences and a calendar snapshot with its widget through private on-device storage.

Services and external links

Shavua requests calendar data from Hebcal, reading and learning content from Sefaria, and published community events from Shavua’s service hosted by Cloudflare. These requests include the information needed for the feature, such as a date, text reference, or selected community. Internet requests also expose your IP address to the service receiving them. Operational logs may retain request information beyond the time needed to respond. Hebcal’s policy says it keeps technical server logs for about two weeks. See the Hebcal privacy policy and Sefaria privacy policy for their practices.

Opening a registration, study, or maps link takes you to the selected external service and shares the link’s information, including the event location for maps. Those services handle information under their own privacy policies.

When you share an event, the link opens a public page on myshavua.com that shows that event’s published details. Shavua doesn’t record who shared it or who opened it.

The current app does not include advertising or third-party analytics SDKs, and does not use your information for cross-app advertising tracking.

Anonymous usage counts

Once a day, the app sends Shavua’s service a short anonymous summary of the previous day: the shul you have picked, how many times you opened the app, which parts of the app you visited, and whether it is your first day of the week or month using it. It contains no name, account, location, or device identifier. We only keep daily totals across everyone, which tell us which shuls and features people use.

Community events

We process community newsletters and calendars to prepare event listings. Newsletters reach us through a Gmail address (Google), Cloudflare hosts the service, and AI services help extract event details from community sources. Source messages, extraction records, and event information are kept privately to operate and correct the listings. Only published event details are displayed in the app.

Requests to add a shul

If you use the app to request a shul, we receive the shul name and website you submit. We store these details and send them to our support inbox so we can review the request and connect the community. The form does not ask for your name or email address. Please submit public organization information rather than private personal information.

To limit spam, the service uses a temporary hashed version of your network IP address. This rate-limit value changes daily, expires at the start of the next UTC day, and is removed during scheduled cleanup. The rate-limit table does not store the original IP address or attach this value to the shul request record. Hosting services may separately retain technical request information in operational logs as described above.

Feedback and ratings

If you send feedback from Settings, we receive your message, the city selected in the app, and the app and iOS version. After a thumbs down you can choose a topic and, only if you'd like a reply, add your email address. We use that address only to reply to you, and we delete it from our service once your message reaches our inbox. We store the message, email it to our support inbox, and use an AI service (Anthropic’s Claude) to sort it and suggest a fix. A message that reports a problem may also be copied into a private issue tracker (GitHub) so we can fix it. Please don’t include sensitive personal information.

Tapping thumbs up or thumbs down adds one to an anonymous daily count. To limit spam, feedback and ratings use the same temporary daily hash of your network address described above.

Support and retention

If you contact support, we receive the contact details, message, and attachments you choose to send. We use them to respond and investigate your request. Please avoid sending sensitive personal information.

We retain community source records and support correspondence as needed to operate the service, resolve requests, and correct listings. There is currently no fixed deletion schedule. On-device caches and preferences can be removed by deleting Shavua and its widgets; this does not delete correspondence or community records held by the service.

Contact

For privacy questions or a request concerning information you have sent us, email myshavua+support@gmail.com or use our support page. We will review your request and explain any information we need or records we must retain.