In early 2013, we highlighted a new site called: Sefaria. You can read that original blogpost here. Since our post went live, we continue to get great feedback from our readership telling us how much they enjoy using the site.
Recently, Sefaria announced that their database of texts in Hebrew and English has grown tremendously and that they have added new features to the “Source Sheet Builder”, which allows people to create source sheets without copying and pasting. If you haven’t tried Sefaria before — you should give it a look!
In addition, Sefaria has also announced that they are looking for a few skilled educators who want to partner with them to optimize the site for their own educational goals. These educators will benefit from on-demand tech support.
If you would consider filling this role, keep in mind that Sefaria also announced that they are open to building features to support the specific needs of your educational institution or organization. For more informaiton on this initiative, you can contact Sara Wolkenfeld, Sefaria’s director of education and community engagement at: sara at sefaria dot org.
Another new feature added to the site by Lev Israel, the senior engineer of Sefaria, is one that will help rabbis and educators when it comes to showing people how all of our Jewish sources are connected.
Lev Israel recently wrote a new script that scanned Sefaria’s entire library of Hebrew texts looking for links between texts. In doing so, he added 32,000 new links to the database. From here on out, any new links to the Tanach, Mishnah or Talmud that are added to their Hebrew library will be linked automatically. This new aspect of Sefaria is sure to come in handy when you want to show your student or congregant how our Jewish texts are interconnected.
To see for yourself this interactive map of commentary connections between books of Tanach and Talmud, click here.
