The Open Siddur is a volunteer driven project to create a free resource for folks crafting their own siddur (Jewish prayer book). We intend to collaboratively build an archive of material that makes up the siddur — texts, translations, instructional material, commentaries, essays, and other associated media. Along with the archive, we are building the software that can be used to put together the building blocks to customize and personalize the siddur. Ultimately, siddurim prepared from this content will be printed with either an on-demand printer or else in cooperation with a book artist.
By “open,” we mean that our code and our texts are free to take under permissive copyright licenses. We are creating a community of folks passionate about the siddur and who express their passion by contributing material that can be used by others in the preparation of their own siddurim. This material could be historic or new, familiar or obscure. We seek to design a tool that will provide a resource to help those who take Jewish spirituality seriously engage in their own spiritual practice.
If you’d like to help us, take a look at the following opportunities to contribute (below), fill out our questionnaire, or just straight out contact us.
| If you … | then … |
|---|---|
| can type in Hebrew with vowels… | try transcribing a line or a page from a historic siddur. |
| have already written (or transcribed) prayers, meditations, commentaries, or other siddur-related material… | submit them so that they can easily be shared and adapted into new siddurim. |
| have access to public domain books and a high speed book scanner… | try scanning from our list of wanted books. |
| code or document XML… | proofread, debug, and/or provide examples for the JLPTEI XML specification, improve validators using TEI ODD or Schematron. |
| code in any language… | help us write one-time transformations to convert contributed material into JLPTEI. |
| code in CSS … | help us write rendering instructions for web browsers. |
| code in Javascript… | help us build our web application. |
| code in Java… | help us build the compiler application and/or choose and improve existing rendering engines. |
| code in XSLT 2.0… | help us write transforms. |
| code in XQuery… | help us write the toolkit API. |
Donations, if you like, can be made via our fiscal sponsor the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity, a registered non-profit that shares our passion for creative engagement with Jewish spirituality. To donate, please click on the button below and provide however much you wish. Currently, our project is simply trying to cover the operational cost of keeping our servers and websites online. The speed by which the project moves forward ultimately depends on to what degree we can convince others to provide either in-kind donations of content or labor, or else funds for contract jobs. If you believe in our mission, want to see this project succeed, but cannot volunteer any labor or siddur-related content, then please donate some funds. Thank you!
For more details on our development and to get status updates, fill out our questionnaire and you’ll be added to our mailing list. If you’d like to receive announcements from the project, please join our announcement list. To follow our developments closely and participate, then please join our general or technical discussion lists, friend us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and check out our development wiki (our current storehouse for documentation and texts).
