What is Sefaria?

Since 2013, Sefaria has been ushering the world of Jewish texts into the digital age. This expansive goal has taken many forms, and continues to evolve as the world around us shifts as well. Today, we’re proud to offer a suite of products, each dedicated to a specific user experience: The Sefaria Library, Voices on Sefaria, and Developers on Sefaria. Taken together, these interconnected pieces make a formidable whole — a hub for Jewish text study, exploration, and innovation. 

Some quick facts about Sefaria: 

We’re a global resource. Each year, millions of users from dozens of countries around the world explore texts in the Sefaria Library to explore texts, learn how to use our code on Developers on Sefaria, and engage with user-created content on Voices on Sefaria. That’s why you’ll find the sources in the Sefaria Library available in an expanding number of available languages and editions. In addition, texts are fully searchable and interconnected, making it easy for users to move from one source to another, and all of these linguistic options are easily usable for anyone accessing our data and API. 

Sefaria is always free to use. We believe our texts are our collective Jewish inheritance. They belong to everyone, and so we work to ensure the vast majority of texts in the library are available to everyone, in the public domain or with free public licenses. It’s also why our code is all open-source and we maintain a robust API to help developers use it with ease. Whether it’s copying a page of text for your classroom, downloading nearly our entire database for research and new projects, or building a new study tool  — what’s ours is yours.

Sefaria powers (and links) a world of Jewish tech projects. Nearly all of our code is released under an open source license, and we offer services to any project that can make use of them, including a live API and extensive documentation. We invite everyone to reuse our code and data to build apps, conduct research, or make visualizations. We believe the basic infrastructure for Jewish tech is something we should share. In addition, our Linker allows hundreds of sites to provide accurate, linked citations throughout their webpages.

Sefaria loves teachers — and learners. We’re always looking for new ways to empower our users. That means developing the Voices on Sefaria platform, updating our Sheet Editor, and tweaking the Sefaria Google Docs Extension, so they all support those who create and explore original content based in Torah. Plus, of course, adding texts to the Library, expanding translation options, and developing tools to make it easier for you to enjoy the richness of our Jewish textual heritage. 

Sefaria is available on the go. Our Android and iOS apps allow you to access the Jewish library in the palm of your hand — anytime, anywhere. Plus, many works are available for downloading as well, which means you can keep learning even without an internet connection.