the Open Siddur Project
Aharon Varady, M.A. J.Ed., founder
Efraim Feinstein, Ph.D., developer
Rabbi Seth (Avi) Kadish, Ph.D. end-user

Why an Open Siddur?
Compiling a
new siddur
has always
been an
ambitious
project. How
can we
make it
easier?
The Baal Shem Tov’s siddur

Why an Open Siddur?
Most sources for Jewish liturgy
are locked up behind paywalls
and bound by copyright and
restrictive terms of use.

An Open Siddur is
open source at its core
•
Open source is a core value to our project
•
Source code is shared on github, licensed LGPL
•
All © content is adaptable & redistributable
•
Public Domain content stays in the Public Domain
o to enable collaboration, innovation, and to future-proof our efforts
o all supporting software code is open source
o copyright owners license © content with a choice of standard,
non-conflicting, free-culture approved licenses
o licenses maintained by the Creative Commons organization

•
•
•
•
•
An Open Siddur is built upon an
open and standard technical architecture
All text encoded in TEI XML
All text stored native XML database (eXist-db)
Code references open standards, wherever possible
Validatable document format using RelaxNG schema
XML-aware REST-ful APIs for CRUD

An Open Siddur...
•
•
Records levels of semantic structural data in texts
•
Links translations, instructions, notes, and other
annotations to the text at any level
•
Attributes all text to its source
Encodes liturgical variants at the same level as the
liturgical variation

An Open Siddur
records semantic structural data
Paragraph
Sentence?
Phrase (long)
Segment (short phrase)

An Open Siddur
links source text with its translation
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Siddur Tehillat Hashem Y’daber Pi (2008):
‫בּר רוּך שֵׁ ם כְּ בוֹד מַ לְ כוּתוֹ‬
‫לְ עוֹלרם ועעדד‬
‫ר‬
Through time and space,
Your glory shines,
Majestic One.
Rabbi Simeon Singer, Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the British Empire (1895):
‫בּר רוּך שֵׁ ם‬
‫כְּ בוֹד מַ לְ כוּתוֹ לְ עוֹלרם ועעדד‬
‫ר‬
Blessed be His name,
whose glorious kingdom is
forever and ever.

An Open Siddur
displays all variant texts
Kaddish has five basic variants and many minor variants, dependent on nusaḥ,
time of year, location, and some combination of them.
‫יַ תגדַ ל וְ יַ תקַדַ שׁ שׁמֵ ה רבּר א‬
ַ
ְ
ְ
ַ ְ
‫יַ תגדֵ ל וְ יַ תקַ דֵ שׁ שׁמֵ ה רבּר א‬
ַ
ְ
ְ
ַ ְ
‫וְ יַצְ מַ ח פ ְקרקר נֵה וַ יקר רב קֵ ץ משׁיחֵ ה‬
ַ ְ
ֵ
‫לְ עלרא וּלְ עלרא מכּרל בַּ ְרכרתר א‬
ַ
ֵ
ֵ
‫לְ עלרא מן כּרל בַּ ְרכרתר א‬
ַ
ֵ
‫דכרל בֵּ ית יַ שראֵ ל‬
‫ְ ר‬
ְ
‫די בְ אַ תרא קַ דישׁר א הר דֵ ין‬
ַ
‫ְ ר‬
ַ
‫אהבוּהוּן דבַ שׁמַ ירא וְ אַ ְרערא‬
ְ ְ
‫עוֹשה שׁר לוֹם בַּ מרוֹמר יו‬
ְ
‫עש‬
‫עוֹשה הַ שר לוֹם בַּ מרוֹמר יו‬
ְ
‫עש‬
This is not an
exhaustive list of
variants!
The rules for
choosing a
variant may be
complex.

An Open Siddur
attributes all text to its source
•
Transcriptions sourced
from textual witnesses
•
Authoritative history of
edits
•
Word and phrase-level
grammar

Authoring and Adapting Liturgy,
Annotations, Translations, etc.
We are building a web-based user interface to
allow our users to design and edit liturgical
materials
We are not waiting until the tool is built.
Sources are being collected and distributed
now at
http://opensiddur.org

An Open Siddur supports
a diverse community of siddur users:
students, scholars, artist/crafters, and educators
•
•
The depth of teaching, learning, art, and spiritual
practice is enabled by technology rather than being
limited by it
The breadth of sources includes liturgy and liturgy
related work in every language Jews speak or have
ever spoken, historical, contemporary, familiar, and
obscure

The Open Siddur Project is You
90+ contributors
Artists
Musicians
Scholars
Rabbis
Students
Educators
Parents
Store Clerks

the Open Siddur Project
Aharon Varady, M.A. J.Ed., founder
Efraim Feinstein, Ph.D., developer
Rabbi Seth (Avi) Kadish, Ph.D. end-user

Why an Open Siddur?
The Baal Shem Tov’s siddur
Compiling a
new siddur
has always
been an
ambitious
project. How
can we
make it
easier?
Most people who use a siddur would like to improve it, amend it or
expand upon it in some way, but making a siddur today is still a
difficult and ambitious process.
It involves compiling sources together, and choosing among many
possible variant texts. It also may involve additions of unique
personal or communal prayers and commentaries that are asyet unpublished. The siddur, as a personal and communal
prayer book, expresses the voice of the individual or community
to God.

Why an Open Siddur?
Most sources for Jewish liturgy
are locked up behind paywalls
and bound by copyright and
restrictive terms of use.
Modern copyright acts as a barrier to this kind of creative and spiritual activity.
International treaties have solidified that works created today - or even by the last
two generations - will not enter the public domain for generations to come, by
which point their cultural relevance may be limited -- if the works still exist at all.
Creation of a new siddur that does not suffer from legal impediments to its
distribution necessarily involves large expenditure of resources even to gain
access to known public domain editions of texts. When un-redistributable
siddurim are created - say, from photocopies of published works - much creative
effort is put into them, but nobody else will ever be able to benefit from it. The
same basic work is repeated over and over by many people. As a text based
religion, Judaism prides itself on encouragement of advanced learning, but the
copyright system only encourages wasteful duplication of effort.
That is the problem Open Siddur intends to address: to build both a library of texts
and a platform to enable the sharing of Jewish prayer texts, both traditional and
new. To eliminate the unnecessarily hard parts of building a custom siddur,
replacing it with the exercise of Jewish creativity.

An Open Siddur is
open source at its core
•
Open source is a core value to our project
•
Source code is shared on github, licensed LGPL
•
All © content is adaptable & redistributable
•
Public Domain content stays in the Public Domain
o to enable collaboration, innovation, and to future-proof our efforts
o all supporting software code is open source
o copyright owners license © content with a choice of standard,
non-conflicting, free-culture approved licenses
o licenses maintained by the Creative Commons organization
Open source is our core value. Open source is more than open access. It means that
all of the computer code that runs our clients and servers and all of the texts that
we distribute are either in the public domain or conform to copyright terms that
ensure that the works can be copied, distributed, and adapted by anyone who
receives them. We will only redistribute texts under any of 3 licenses maintained
by Creative Commons: Zero - which disclaims the exclusive rights granted by
copyright, Attribution - which claims a right for the author’s name to be associated
with the work; and Attribution-ShareAlike, which, in addition, requires that all
derivative works remain free of onerous copyright restrictions. We work with
authors and content creators to find the best sharing arrangement for them that
also assures that the texts we distribute support a living, vibrant and free Jewish
culture. By using these licenses - and excluding those that limit to “non profit”,
“educational use”, or “non-commercial use”, we simultaneously respect all the
endeavors of our users and contributors, and additionally assure that our users
will never encounter a situation where a copyright restriction prevents them from
creating a fully free and redistributable work on our site.

An Open Siddur is built upon an
open and standard technical architecture
•
•
•
•
•
All text encoded in TEI XML
All text stored native XML database (eXist-db)
Code references open standards, wherever possible
Validatable document format using RelaxNG schema
XML-aware REST-ful APIs for CRUD
In keeping with our open source values, we also are architecting our technical
platform using a fully open source stack, and referencing open standards
whenever possible. Our document formats are based on the XML format
published by the Text Encoding Initiative, the TEI, and extended when necessary
using TEI’s standard extension mechanisms. The format can be validated using
standard XML tools. Our texts are stored in the eXist native XML database and
full-text indexed to make them searchable. The database is also used as a
platform to provide XML-aware RESTful programming interfaces, so our own
client - and any third party applications - can access and edit the data.

An Open Siddur...
•
•
Records levels of semantic structural data in texts
•
Links translations, instructions, notes, and other
annotations to the text at any level
•
Attributes all text to its source
Encodes liturgical variants at the same level as the
liturgical variation
The siddur is a particularly complex text, and we will show a sampling of its
complexities in the next few slides. The Open Siddur XML format does not
encode any particular siddur’s layout. Instead, it encodes the semantic features of
the text: paragraphs, poetic structures, like verses and verse lines, with encoding
possible down to the level of individual words. Liturgical resources are
constructed from combinations of the text and its semantic features. When
repetition occurs, one resource transcludes another.
These features enable linkages between texts and translations, instructional notes,
variants, and annotations at any level - from entire services down to the word,
with minimal repetition of content - and minimal repetition of the effort to create
that content.

An Open Siddur
records semantic structural data
Paragraph
Sentence?
Phrase (long)
Segment (short phrase)
Now for a bit about semantic structural data. The following text is a scan of a 1901
edition of Seligmann Baer’s Seder Avodat Yisrael. The source naturally breaks up
the “Magen Avot” section of Kabbalat Shabbat into a single paragraph. Going one
level down, it also separates it into sentences… and long phrases … A reader
may also wish to break up the texts into segmented units of meaning, that can be
used, for example, to link translations...

An Open Siddur
links source text with its translation
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Siddur Tehillat Hashem Y’daber Pi (2008):
‫בּר רוּך שֵׁ ם כְּ בוֹד מַ לְ כוּתוֹ‬
‫לְ עוֹלרם ועעדד‬
‫ר‬
Through time and space,
Your glory shines,
Majestic One.
Rabbi Simeon Singer, Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the British Empire (1895):
‫בּר רוּך שֵׁ ם‬
‫כְּ בוֹד מַ לְ כוּתוֹ לְ עוֹלרם ועעדד‬
‫ר‬
Blessed be His name,
whose glorious kingdom is
forever and ever.
Here, we see an example of a short text “Baruch shem k’vod malchuto l’olam va’ed”
and two different English texts that are intended to correspond to it. The first, from
Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, is a more figurative associated text, the
second, from Rabbi SImeon Singer, is a more literal translation. In the former
case, the English can only be aligned with the entire Hebrew verse; in the latter
case, the English can be aligned with shorter segments. In Open Siddur’s format,
alignments can be done at any level where encoding exists -- from the smallest
textual units to paragraphs or larger.

An Open Siddur
displays all variant texts
Kaddish has five basic variants and many minor variants, dependent on nusaḥ,
time of year, location, and some combination of them.
‫יַ תגדַ ל וְיַתְקַ דַ שׁ שׁמֵ ה רבּר א‬
ַ
ְ
ַ ְ
‫יַתְגַ דֵ ל וְ יַ תקַ דֵ שׁ שׁמֵ ה רבּר א‬
ַ
ְ
ְ
‫וְ יַצְ מַ ח פ ְקרקר נֵה וַ יקר רב קֵ ץ משׁיחֵ ה‬
ַ ְ
ֵ
‫לְ עלרא וּלְ עלרא מכּרל בַּ ְרכרתר א‬
ַ
ֵ
ֵ
‫לְ עלרא מן כּרל בַּ ְרכרתר א‬
ַ
ֵ
‫דכרל בֵּ ית יַ שראֵ ל‬
‫ְ ר‬
ְ
‫די בְ אַ תרא קַ דישׁר א הר דֵ ין‬
ַ
‫ְ ר‬
ַ
‫אבוּהוּן דבַ שׁמַ ירא וְ אַ ְרעא‬
‫ר‬
ְ ְ
‫ה‬
‫עוֹשה שׁר לוֹם בַּ מרוֹמר יו‬
ְ
‫עש‬
This is not an
exhaustive list of
variants!
The rules for
choosing a
variant may be
complex.
‫עוֹשה הַ שר לוֹם בַּ מרוֹמר יו‬
ְ
‫עש‬
Another frequent problem is that of textual variants. The example here shows a
number of them in the nusach of the Kaddish. In Open Siddur, the encoding of the
variant is the same level as where the variation occurs. Only one copy of a
Kaddish resource is needed to support the order-of-100,000 possible variant
Kaddish texts. The technology supports maximum customization. Note also that
some of the variants are dependent on rite, some are dependent on time of year,
and some dependent on both. The complex conditional rules for when to include a
variant are encodable in Open Siddur’s XML format. The user selects choices of
variant texts, and the XML can then be compiled into a unique custom siddur,
dependent on the user’s choices.

An Open Siddur
attributes all text to its source
•
Transcriptions sourced
from textual witnesses
•
Authoritative history of
edits
•
Word and phrase-level
grammar
Further, we intend to support scholarly pursuits. Open Siddur keeps track of the
bibliographic history of the texts that come in, both to verify compliance with our
copyright policies, and to ensure a text’s provenance to the user. To the maximum
degree possible, we maintain source attributions back to scans of public domain
books, which can then be checked to maintain our texts’ quality and accuracy. As
we compile more variant texts, we will not only have an edit history in the sense of
a wiki, we will also be creating a new critical edition of the siddur.
Our format also supports arbitrary annotations on any of the encoded semantic
objects, including words and phrases. This feature enables grammatical and
syntax tagging, for example.

Authoring and Adapting Liturgy,
Annotations, Translations, etc.
We are building a web-based user interface to
allow our users to design and edit liturgical
materials
We are not waiting until the tool is built.
Sources are being collected and distributed
now at
http://opensiddur.org

An Open Siddur supports
a diverse community of siddur users:
students, scholars, artist/crafters, and educators
•
•
The depth of teaching, learning, art, and spiritual
practice is enabled by technology rather than being
limited by it
The breadth of sources includes liturgy and liturgy
related work in every language Jews speak or have
ever spoken, historical, contemporary, familiar, and
obscure

The Open Siddur Project is You
90+ contributors
Artists
Musicians
Scholars
Rabbis
Students
Educators
Parents
Store Clerks