Recommended for:

Sefaria is recommended for teachers of Tanach, Talmud, tefilah, Chasidut and other Jewish subjects in grades 3-12 looking for access to open-source free content of a digital library of Jewish texts. Sefaria’s Source Sheet Builder allows users to create a page with source text from Sefaria. Source Sheets can be made public, and available for other users, or can be downloaded as a PDF and printed.

Sefaria is an online open-source free content digital library of Jewish texts. It was founded in 2011 by former Google project manager Brett Lockspeiser and journalist-author Joshua Foer. Calling itself “a living library of Jewish texts”, Sefaria relies on volunteers to add texts and translations. It offers online textual resources with commentary. It has become an indispensable hand to Jewish Day School and Supplementary school teachers to reference texts and prayers. The website is available in Hebrew or English. 

Sefaria has a vast library of Jewish text, including Tanakh, Talmud, and Jewish prayers alongside sources in philosophy, mysticism, Jewish law, and newer works.  Sefaria also produces visualizations of the texts in its corpus, such as illustrating connections between the Tanakh and Talmud.

Translations

Some works, such as Tanakh, some commentaries, and the Talmud, feature English translations. These are either crowdsourced, provided by publishers, or in the public domain. Some translations are written by Sefaria, while others are written by members.  

Links

Many works are linked with their respective commentaries. For example, clicking on a verse in Tanakh will open a window on the side, allowing the user to open commentaries on that verse.

Source Sheets

Sefaria’s Source Sheet Builder allows users to create a page with text from Sefaria. Source Sheets can be made public, and available for other users, or can be downloaded as a PDF and printed. This is extremely useful.