A Wikipedia for Jews
There’s a new craze among religious students in Israel. As regular folk get in on the act of shaping the world’s knowledge by writing, editing and improving articles on Wikipedia, religious students are busily working on their own Jewish Wikipedia-like project.
The Responsa Project, run by Bar Ilan University, is digitizing tens of thousands of rabbinic rulings from throughout Jewish history — essentially the basis on which contemporary Jewish law is built. Traditionally the preserve of scholars who know in which dusty volume to find what, now the responsa are there for everyone. Key words are hyperlinked making it easier than ever to navigate the body of material.
The latest edition of the database has just been released on DVD, containing more than 92,000 responsa and more than 455,000 hypertext links between the databases, totaling 210 million words. As well as responsa, important Jewish texts like Bible and Talmud are also included on the DVD.
The project itself is not new — an early version was available in 1967. But in the past it was scholars who inputted the texts. Now, however, with the rise of netbooks — cheap mini-laptops — within the price range of young yeshiva students and soldiers, many religious Israelis have started volunteering and transcribing documents. Spare moments on trains and buses, or on army bases, have been transformed in to opportunities to help record Jewish history.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Dive In
Most Popular
- 1
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 2
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
- 3
Fast Forward Suspected arsonist intended to beat Gov. Josh Shapiro with a sledgehammer, investigators say
- 4
Politics Meet America’s potential first Jewish second family: Josh Shapiro, Lori, and their 4 kids
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Why can Harvard stand up to Trump? Because it didn’t give in to pro-Palestinian student protests
-
Culture How an Israeli dance company shaped a Catholic school boy’s life
-
Fast Forward Brooklyn event with Itamar Ben-Gvir cancelled days before Israeli far-right minister’s US trip
-
Culture How Abraham Lincoln in a kippah wound up making a $250,000 deal on ‘Shark Tank’
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
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 comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag 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.