Fast facts:
- In March 2020, Sefaria saw a 30% increase in traffic, as many of us stayed home as much as possible
- Topical search, launched shortly before the pandemic began, helped create pages like this one:
Sefaria's community thought about how to help people feel uplifted and connected during this time, as you can see from the third source when you search "COVID" on Sefaria. Sefaria's team considered this as well, and created resources like Seder on Sefaria and Shavuot on Sefaria.
Of course, the best way to learn Torah is do so with a study partner, so our engineers decided to act on an idea they had been playing with for a while, and built our new Chavruta feature, as well as Chavruta Roulette, which you can explore with us tonight.
As the new school year approached and it was clear that even schools that were fully in-person would have challenges and limitations, and that a lot of students would be learning from home a lot, we thought more about encouraging independent learning, and leaned into creating resources that students can use with minimal teacher oversight. We want to encourage teachers to build on these and create their own.
Growing and diversifying Sefaria's library remains important and our team continues to work on expanding our offerings. Here are some of the titles and tools we added:
- Moses, by Dr. Avivah Zornberg
- Rereading the Rabbis, by Judith Hauptman
- Chavel translation of Ramban on the Torah
- Translation of Rashi on all of Tanakh
- Rabbi's biographies
..and here are a few coming attractions for our library and beyond:
- Jerusalem Talmud in English
- Breslov texts in English
- Powered by Sefaria Contest....with a youth competition category
We continue to think about how to make Sefaria more social and more accessible and welcoming, so we are redesigning the homepage with these ideals in mind. Your feedback is welcome (but don't tell anyone else yet)!
Fun fact: This source sheet, which allows you to show students a source (like the story of the spies in this past week's parsha), and then a reference to that story later on, and then a retelling of that story in Devarim, all without leaving the page, represents a new direction for our sheets. What do you think?
What new texts or features would you most like to see on Sefaria?