בִּרְכַּת כֹּהֲנִים: נְשִׂיאַת כַּפַּיִם | Birkat Kohanim: Nesíăt Kăpăyim hand gesture as displayed in Unicode and CSS (WordPress plugin by Aharon Varady)

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady

Shared on:

1 September 2026 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

Categories:

Development

Tags:

21st century C.E., 58th century A.M., Custom Wordpress Plugins

Download: PHP

A WordPress plugin that renders the Unicode character “Vulcan Salute” (U+1F596) together with its mirror image as inline, bidi-safe markup — in order to display, via shortcode, the traditional nesíăt kapayim (“lifting of the hands”) gesture used by Kohanim during the Birkat Kohanim (a/k/a dukhenen) service. The display defaults to showing both hands side by side (right hand before left hand, thumbs facing inward), however, either hand alone is also selectable. Supports full-color emoji vs. line-art (“vs15”) rendering, and fluid display sizing via CSS clamp(), if desired. Skin tone is available from light to medium to dark with ‘medium-light’ and ‘medium-dark’ also available.

Currently, the plugin will display the emoji/line-art using whatever font you’ve defined for your site, else it will default to whatever the rendering browser/Operating System is set to display. (A future feature will provide an option to display the hand gestures according to specific glyphs offered in a set of fonts.)

Examples:

emoji (default):

vs15 (rendering: line-art, size: default):

vs15 (rendering: line-art, size: extra-large):

emoji (size: small, skin tone: medium-light):

emoji (medium, skin tone: medium-dark):

emoji (large, skin tone: dark):

emoji (extra-large, skin tone: medium-light):

emoji (50%, skin tone: medium-dark):

emoji (100%, skin tone: dark):

Aharon N. Varady

Aharon Varady is the founding director of the Open Siddur Project. A community planner (M.C.P, DAAP/University of Cincinnati.) and Jewish educator (M.A.J.Ed., the William Davidson School of Education), his work in open-source Judaism has been written about in the Yiddish Forverts, the Atlantic Magazine, Tablet, and Haaretz. If you find any egregious mistakes in his work, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also transcribes and translates prayers, besides serving as the primary shammes of the Open Siddur Project.)

Stable Link: https://opensiddur.org/?p=68930

Associated Image:

La bendición de los sacerdotes judíos tal como se descifra en un texto del siglo XVII llamado Sefer Shefa’ tal — Rabbi Shabtai Sheftel ben Akiva Horowitz (1565-1619).

(This image is set to automatically show as the "featured image" in shared links on social media.)

Terms of Use: Be a mentsch (a conscientious, considerate person) and adhere to the following guidelines:

Properly attribute the work to Aharon N. Varady.
Clearly indicate the date you accessed the work and in what ways, if any, you modified it. (If you have adapted the work, let us know so that the contributor might consider endorsing your revision.)
Provide the stable link to this resource: <https://opensiddur.org/?p=68930>.
Indicate that the original work was shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license. (To redistribute or remix this work in any format, modified or unmodified, you must refer to the terms of the license under which the work is shared.)

Additional Notes:

The views expressed in this work represent the views of their creator(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Open Siddur Project's developers, its diverse community of volunteer contributors, or its institutional partners.
We strongly advise against printing sacred texts and art containing divine names as these copies must be regarded with reverence, complicating their casual treatment and disposal.
If you must dispose of a printed sacred text (one containing Divine Names), please locate the closest genizah (often established by a synagogue) and contact its custodians for further instructions. We also recommend using Morah Yehudis Fishman's Prayer for Adding a Work to the Genizah.

Support this work: The Open Siddur Project is a volunteer-driven, non-profit, non-commercial, non-denominational, non-prescriptive, gratis & libre Open Access archive of contemplative praxes, liturgical readings, and Jewish prayer literature (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure) composed in every era, region, and language Jews have ever prayed. Our goal is to provide a platform for sharing open-source resources, tools, and content for individuals and communities crafting their own prayerbook (siddur). Through this we hope to empower personal autonomy, preserve customs, and foster creativity in religious culture.

ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו׃ (תהלים צ:יז) · "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." (Psalms 90:17)