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Do you like your siddur Open or Closed?

The Open Siddur Project is a volunteer-driven, non-denominational, non-prescriptive, gratis and libre Open Access archive of Jewish prayer, liturgy, and related works (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure), composed in every era, region, and language Jews have ever prayed. Have a favorite prayer, piyyut, or praxis? If it’s not yet in the archive, please share it and make it available to others studying Jewish prayer or crafting their own prayerbooks. (If you’d like to improve this website or help build our next-generation siddur building application, please contact us and join us on github.)

We call our Siddur Project “open” because we adhere to the definition of open content and open data as maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the definition of open-source as maintained by the Open Source Initiative. We adhere to the values of “free culture” as defined by the Free Culture Foundation and we aspire to be a resource as open and free as the Torah of Kindness (תּוֹרָת חֶסֶד) described in the Babylonian Talmud (Sukkah 49b). In addition to text that we carefully transcribe and proofread from works in the Public Domain, our community of contributors make their own copyrighted work available for your adaptive reuse under their choice of Open Content license.

☞ Read more about our mission, vision, and project history. If your question isn’t answered there or in our FAQ, please contact us. (A technical summary of this project is available in a slide presentation given before the EVA/Minerva Digital Humanities conference in Jerusalem.)

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Support this work:
The Open Siddur Project is a volunteer-driven, non-profit, non-denominational, non-prescriptive, gratis & libre Open Access archive of contemplative praxes, liturgical readings, and Jewish prayer literature (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure) composed in every era, region, and language Jews have ever prayed. Our goal is to provide a platform for sharing open-source resources, tools, and content for individuals and communities crafting their own prayerbook (siddur). Through this we hope to empower personal autonomy, preserve customs, and foster creativity in religious culture. If you like what you've found here, please help keep our project alive and online with your financial contribution.

ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established."–Psalms 90:17

Imagine a library of Jewish prayer shared by everyone in the world designing and crafting their own siddur.

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.


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