📖 סידור אבי חי תפילות וברכות לבית ולמשפחה (מנהג הספרדים) | Siddur Avi Ḥai, vol. 1 — for Home and Family (Avi Chai Foundation, 1999)

Contributor(s):

Avigdor Shinan and the Avi Chai Foundation

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19 April 2026 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

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20th century C.E., 58th century A.M., Nusaḥ Sefaradi

סידור אבי חי תפילות וברכות לבית ולמשפחה is a comprehensive nusaḥ Sefaradi birkon containing liturgy for family celebrations (and for domestic use in general), published on behalf of the Avi Chai Foundation in 1999. (A companion volume contains the liturgy for Shabbat.) A lucid commentary by Dr. Avigdor Shinan supplements the liturgy.

Both volumes were contributed to the Open Siddur Project in 2009 following our public launch that year, ostensibly as a crucial resource for seeding our anticipated database of Jewish liturgy. Unfortunately, although digital editions of the siddurim were contributed, they had been rendered into PDF with digital fonts developed prior to the Unicode standard for addressing Hebrew characters, diacritics (niqqud, t’amamim), and punctuation. The result was such that neither edition could be used as a resource of digital text without a means of converting their contents into Unicode Hebrew. As with many non-digital, printed siddurim, the unique contents of this siddurim would need to either be manually transcribed or else wait until some automated method might be devised.

Avigdor Shinan

Professor Avigdor Shinan (אביגדור שנאן; 1946-), born in Prague, is professor emeritus in the departments of Hebrew Literature, Yiddish and Comparative Jewish Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shinan has served as head of the departments of General Studies, and of Hebrew Literature and as Dean of The Hebrew University. He has served as visiting professor at Yale, JTS, and Yeshiva University and has also taught at Ben-Gurion, Tel-Aviv, and at the Schechter Institute.

the Avi Chai Foundation

The Avi Chai Foundation is a private foundation endowed in 1984 by Zalman Bernstein, an investor and founder of Sanford Bernstein. Zalman Bernstein became a Modern Orthodox Baal teshuva (a returnee to Orthodox observance) who wished to further the cause of outreach to alienated and assimilated Jews worldwide. Avi Chai allocates resources in the United States and in Israel. Until 2003, Avi Chai functioned in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries. In 2019, the foundation completed its process of spending-down its remaining endowment which, in 2010, had a value of $600 million. Established by the AVI CHAI Foundation in 2007, Beit Avi Chai is housed, purpose-built facility located at 44 King George Street in Jerusalem, Israel and serves as a hub for the creation, development and expression of Jewish texts and ideas.

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Siddur Avi Hai, vol. 1 (Avi Chai Foundation, 1999) – cover

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Support this work: The Open Siddur Project is a volunteer-driven, non-profit, non-commercial, 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.

ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו׃ (תהלים צ:יז) · "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)