Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Israel News

Forgot the Prayer? Check Your iPod

‘Blessings often come in disguise. This one comes on your iPhone.”

HOLY HIGH-TECH: The new iPhone/iPod application plays blessings in Hebrew and English.

So says the description of the new iPhone/iPod touch application, the iBlessing, a product developed by The Jewish Learning Group and now available on iTunes. When a user clicks on any one of the food groups displayed on the screen — including fruit, meat, bread and wine — the appropriate blessings appear and the prayers are played aloud in Hebrew and English. Added bonuses include the Modeh Ani, the prayer recited upon waking, and the Shema, a blessing declaring one’s faith in God.

The Jewish Learning Group also launched the ParveOMeter, which is perfect for those inclined to lose track of time: The application counts down the minutes between meat meals and dairy meals. The timer is automatically set to go off six hours after the meat button is pressed, but it can be customized, based on levels of observance, to zero, 30 or 60 minutes following a dairy meal.

According to Zalman Goldstein, head of The Jewish Learning Group, the applications have already received 14,000 downloads combined since August 16, when they were introduced on iTunes. Best of all, both applications are free of charge.

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.

In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.

At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.

Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we need 500 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.

Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly. 

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Our Goal: 500 gifts during our Passover Pledge Drive!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.