Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.
A siddur (pl. Siddurim) is a Jewish prayer book containing the order of daily, Shabbat (the Sabbath), and holiday services. The word siddur means ‘arrangement,’ or ‘putting things in order’ in Hebrew, and the siddur provides a structured liturgy that includes prayers, blessings, and scriptural verses. These books are used in both synagogues and private homes and vary among different Jewish communities and denominations. They are often available both in Hebrew and in translation to the language of the local community where they are being used.
The Open Siddur Project is a “volunteer-driven, non-profit, non-commercial, non-denominational, non-prescriptive, gratis (without cost) and libré (without restriction) 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.”[1] It provides a platform for sharing open-source resources, tools, and content for individuals and communities crafting their own prayerbook with content that pertains to their own life cycle.
Aharon Varady, a community planner and Jewish educator who founded the project in 2002 and directs it to this day, is a key figure in open-source Judaism, an initiative that uses open-source principles to create and share Jewish cultural and liturgical works. He believes that “the commodification of prayer texts, historical or contemporary, is anathema to Jewish spiritual practice.” Asserting that “the underlying unformatted text of a liturgical reading or prayer … must remain accessible for redistribution and adaptive reuse,” the project’s values are aligned with the definition of open content and open data maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation, the definition of open-source maintained by the Open Source Initiative, and the four values of libre/free culture.[2]
Image 1: view of main categories and upcoming festivals, feast & fasts
The Open Siddur Project’s main page includes six sections, through which various prayers and related content could be discovered. The Project’s activity ‘heatmap’ displays a calendrical grid of resources published by the project over the course of each year since inauguration, alongside a display of recent contributors. The next section includes recently added prayers and related content (e.g., “Thanksgiving to the Almighty for the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty the Empress Victoria, by Joseph Ezekiel Rajpurkar at Gates of Mercy Synagogue, Bombay (20 June 1897)). Additional sections on the main page present selected sub-categories and calendars.
The database itself is organized around four main categories: Prayers & Praxes; Liturgical Readings, Sources, and Cantillation; Compiled Prayer Books; and Miscellanea — each of which has its own sub-categories. For example, under Prayers & Praxes, one can find prayers for after “Earthquakes & Tsunamis,” or prayers “composed for, or relevant to, conflicts over sovereignty and dispossession.” Additional sub-categories include “Commemorative Festivals & Fasts” (e.g., Hannukah), as well as “civil days on civil calendars;” e.g., Transgender Day of Remembrance (November 20th), Human Rights Day (December 10th), and even one prayer for May the Fourth, “marking the success of the Rebel Alliance in defeating the Galactic Empire.”
Image 2: The Jewish Prayer of the Dead, adapted for commemorating victims of lethal hate-crimes against Transgender people. This version was originally written for Queer Jews at Brandeis’s Transgender Day of Remembrance Services on 20 November 2024.
Additional points of discovery and access are available by clicking on the top right search button. There are indices of languages & scripts, and authors & contributors, as well as categories index and various how-to guides.
The whole project is backed up and downloadable on GitHub. Unsurprisingly for an open access project, the default license under which all content is shared online is the Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International license. A such, content could be shared through email and a few social media platforms.
The Open Siddur Project is used by students studying private and communal Jewish prayer in its literary and historical context, educators preparing curricular resources, authors of new prayers and liturgies, translators of prayers new and old, transcribers of digital text from printed and handwritten works, and ultimately, living practitioners actively producing new prayerbooks for their communities.
Let us end this post with a Prayer for Librarians!
Siddurim and Jewish liturgy in UTL collections:
Non-UT resources:
[2] The four values are: the freedom to use the work, the freedom to study the work and apply knowledge acquired from it, the freedom to make and redistribute copies of the information or expression, and the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works. See https://freedomdefined.org/Definition.
