Apple puts faith at your fingertips
With its new operating system, Apple releases new religion-focused ‘ideograms’
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Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
Freedom of religion is now at your fingertips with a variety of new faith-oriented emojis introduced with Apple’s latest iOS update. Among the images available on the keyboards of Apple devices are several Jewish ones, including a synagogue, a menorah and a Star of David.
Emojis are ideograms, or graphic symbols representing ideas or concepts. Emojis were first used in Japanese electronic messages, but their popularity has grown globally since they were introduced to the operating systems of both Apple and Android products.
The images fall into many categories, including facial expressions, common objects, animals, weather, travel destinations, and others. Rather than writing messages or sentiments out in letters, many people now prefer to express them using emojis, thus saving precious time and effort.
So, how might these new Jewish emojis work? Well, instead of typing out, “Hey, do you want to meet me at shul ?” in a text message to a friend, you could simply press on the synagogue emoji and add a question mark after it. (Just a note of warning, however, to American suburbanites. Don’t look for a picture of a mid-20th century building with a Star of David on it. The emoji shul is decidedly old world, reminiscent of some of the great 19th century European synagogues with Moorish influences.)
Many religions have gotten the emoji treatment. Christianity is represented by a church and Latin and Orthodox crosses. Islam is represented by a mosque, prayer beads (which can double as a Rosary), the star and crescent, and even a mini-Kaaba (the cube-shaped building in Mecca holy to Muslims). For Hinduism there is the Om symbol, for Shinto a temple, and for Buddhism the Wheel of Dharma.
Apple reported that it had originally considered including a Buddha emoji, but decided against it. The company “removed [the Buddha emoji] due to Unicode selection criteria which recommends against adding emojis of people or deities.”
Whether you’ll use them regularly or not, texting will be much easier come this December. Rather than worrying whether the name of the Jewish holiday that month is spelled “Chanukkah,” “Chanuka,” “Hanukkah,” or another 13 variations, you can just use the nine-branched menorah emoji instead.
The person receiving your message will know exactly what doughnut-driven (donut-driven?) holiday you mean.
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