Sefaria

Sefaria is building and maintaining a digital platform that lowers the barriers of engagement with Jewish texts, creates interactive opportunities for teaching and learning, and provides educators, scholars, and technologists with an open source database of texts to make new educational applications simpler and more viable to develop.

Sefaria is permeating Jewish learning in schools, synagogues and homes, allowing those who have never studied texts before to learn alongside teachers and scholars. Since the beginning, we've forged meaningful relationships with users of all backgrounds to inform product design and content acquisition. In 2016, after extensive prototyping, Sefaria launched a redesigned website and native mobile apps for iOS and Android. Today, more than 425,000 people access Sefaria for learning and teaching each month.

Product Development — We will work to make Sefaria’s resources more accessible and easy to navigate. We will add dictionaries, explanatory tools, and continuously work to ensure the our library is of the highest quality.

Content Acquisition — We will focus on acquiring more key translations and texts by women and Sephardic authors, as well as supporting texts to make learning Talmud easier.

Education — Our education department will create a critical platform for lesson plans and materials that highlight the best of what technology can do for Jewish education. To showcase this innovative pedagogy, which brings Judaic studies into the 21st century, we conduct hundreds of trainings for educators and students worldwide.

Marketing — Our marketing and engagement team seeks to bring new and diverse audiences into conversation with Jewish texts through robust communications with users, SEO/SEM, and other tactics.

Sefaria is an cutting-edge non-profit, comprised of creative engineers, educators, and non-profit professionals. The team is spread from California to Jerusalem, and our geographic diversity better equips us to engage and serve various communities. Operationally, we are similar to a tech start-up. We invest heavily in R&D, release product developments early, iterate often, and have attracted donors who are passionate about the intersection of technology and education. While we are a new organization, we have secured major funding from established foundations and individual donors.

Since we launched in 2013, we have continued to innovate and develop our library and other resources. Our strong emphasis on research and metrics, engagement with our users, and organizational sustainability makes us capable of optimizing the possibilities of Jewish texts in the digital era.

Sefaria's library is vast and it is visited each month, on average, by more than 425,000 people around the world. The library contains more than 250 million words in Hebrew and English translation. It is easy to navigate and shareable, and has truly revolutionized Jewish learning and accessibility to texts. Through our Source Sheet Builder, users have created more than 280,000 source sheets on topics that range from Shabbat rituals to the theories of justice (www.sefaria.org/topics).

Our project is ongoing and there is still much to be done. Over the next few years, we will focus on increasing and diversifying the audience for Jewish texts. We plan to add more dictionaries and explanatory tools to make the texts more accessible to people without a background in text study. We also are also developing our product to make text study more social and customizable, encouraging deeper and more lively conversation on our platform.