Imagine an open database of Jewish prayers showing historical variations and changes across Jewish traditions, manuscripts, and facsimile editions.
Imagine the siddur as a record of your family’s and community’s minhagim and nusaḥ tweaked exactly to your needs — a siddur, custom designed by you, that integrates your practice with your learning — from your own experience, your teachers, friends, family, and the complete corpus of Jewish tradition.
Our collaborative, open-source project is working to create a libre open access database of Jewish prayer — historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure — in every language Jews pray or have ever prayed. We are building a complete end-to-end system for producing high-quality Jewish prayer books, for paper publication or for sharing online. We envision a system robust enough for use by academic researchers, Jewish educators, and DIY crafters. Join our project.
If you can write a simple script, join our development team. Obtain the source code and start building, here! Source code for alpha-ready Open Siddur application is available from our github repositories.
Contribute new prayers or translations of historic prayers.
Can you transcribe or proofread? We have a number of works awaiting transcription and proofreading. Some works are in Hebrew, but we’re also working on transcribing work in Arabic, German, French, Marathi, English, and Yiddish.
Take a look at the prayers, translations, exercises, art, and recordings that folk are already sharing with open content licenses that permit their creative reuse. That means that you can use these works right now in the creation of new siddurim (alas, offline) while we continue developing the Open Siddur web application.
Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest, or contact us directly if you like. Get to work with us right now by sharing your own work, and introduce yourself in our Facebook or email discussion groups (or join the technical one), and begin to imagine the siddur you’ve always wanted. If you’d like to get an email when new posts appear on the site, please subscribe to our feedburner.
