For over a decade, Sefaria has been working to make Jewish texts freely available to everyone, everywhere. While many associate this work with our free digital library, there’s another side of Sefaria that’s equally crucial to opening the doors to the digital study hall: converting Jewish texts into machine-readable data, and maintaining that data, so it can be freely used by tech builders.

As of June 2026, we’re celebrating an exciting milestone on the collective journey to democratizing Torah: Sefaria’s data now powers more than 100 independent digital projects. (And that’s just the ones we know about! The actual number of projects utilizing our data is estimated to be even higher.)

Looking for an app that lets you read Torah on an e-reader? How about a chatbot that simulates a conversation with the 12th-century scholar Maimonides? They both exist, built on the same data that powers the Sefaria Library: thousands of Jewish texts converted into computer code.

These Powered by Sefaria tools and apps are as varied as the people who dreamed them up — from trained software developers to tech-curious learners with no formal coding background. But what they all have in common is a desire to harness technology for the sake of Torah.

Sefaria’s work is grounded in the belief that Torah is the collective inheritance of the Jewish people; it should belong to all of us, not just publishers, institutions, or specific individuals. That’s why the texts in the Sefaria Library are freely available to read — and why our data has been freely available to download and use since our inception.

Over the years, we’ve experimented with different ways of supporting independent tech innovation using our data: hosting Powered by Sefaria contests, hosting knowledge-sharing sessions, and even collaborating with major companies like Microsoft on hackathons.

In 2024, we made major headway in supporting free innovation by launching Developers on Sefaria: a central hub for building Torah tech using our data and API (application programming interface, or the pathways that deliver data to applications and websites).

Developers on Sefaria is where we provide expansive technical documentation (behind-the-scenes descriptions of how the Library is built and structured), guides to using our API Reference (a collection of pathways for obtaining data), and even tutorials, all written to guide anyone using Sefaria’s massive data collection.

These resources have helped people around the world craft their own Torah tech. They’ve also enabled people to build bespoke Torah-learning tools tailored to very specific needs: an AI-powered translation tool, for instance, built to help a retired developer fill his gaps in Hebrew. Or a site that helps young learners in Israel access and read Psalms during times of strife. Neither of these would have been within Sefaria’s purview, but they both exist — and are freely available — because of open-source data and AI-powered coding capabilities.

“Having this data at your fingertips is a huge deal,” says Lev Israel, Chief Technology Officer at Sefaria. “Just think: If you want to build anything — anything! — that includes Jewish texts, you don’t have to digitize a single word, because Sefaria has both done that legwork and is working every day to maintain top-notch data accuracy. That means technologists can do the creative work of Torah innovation without engaging in the time-consuming labor of making texts digitally accessible. And they can count on high-quality data to build on.”

This increase is, in part, due to the spread of AI coding assistants such as Codex and Claude Code, along with the growth of so-called "vibe-coding," which lets people build functional tools with little or no formal programming experience. Whereas Sefaria's open data once made Torah innovation accessible to anyone who could code, now that data can be used by anyone with a device, an internet connection, and a vision.

“AI coding agents amplify everyone's ability to create, whether they are vibe-coding or not,” says Sarah Kreitman, Software Engineer with Sefaria. Indeed, whether users are building an AI-powered Talmud study buddy or a database of mystical stories from the Zohar, Sefaria operates behind the scenes, ensuring that the texts being used are accurate, the data is correct and maintained, and the pathways for calling that data are robust, clear, and ready to use.

“Our focus on responsible data stewardship and data pathways is what’s allowing an entire new generation of Torah technology to develop,” Kreitman says. “In an era where code or text generation is cheap, the quality of the response from an AI agent depends largely on the quality of the data we put in. We’re ensuring that the current digital revolution is grounded in accurate, authentic Jewish texts as it begins impacting the Jewish community.”

Of course, we’re not the first Jews to understand the value of a group effort. In Pirkei Avot, a third-century compilation of rabbinic teachings, Rabbi Tarfon says, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it” (Pirkei Avot 2:16). This principle of a shared, ongoing objective was on Sefaria’s co-founders' minds when they started painstakingly digitizing the Jewish canon back in 2013. And it’s guided our ongoing efforts to support developers as technology advances.

“When we started building the Sefaria Library, the work was about digging and filling a reservoir, adding all the texts into the collective pool,” says Michael Kellman, Chief Product Officer at Sefaria. “Then, when we added technical documentation and API guides, the work was about building a path, so developers could fill their buckets with our collective water. Now it’s a different task. These new technologies pipe the water right into your home. Our job is to do ongoing maintenance and make sure the reservoir of Torah texts is ready to consume.”

Sefaria does not expect the pace of new projects to slow. With more advanced and accessible tech tools — and ever-growing resources for understanding and utilizing our data and API — anyone with an idea can make some version of it a reality.

The dream of shared, open-source Torah for all was never going to be realized by a single organization or individual. It was always meant to multiply, one developer, one app, one wild idea at a time. Rabbi Tarfon didn't say the work would look the same from generation to generation — he just said to keep going.

That’s exactly what Sefaria intends to do: keep the data open, maintain an accurate and authentic collection of Jewish texts, and make sure developers everywhere have the tools they need to build things we never could have dreamed up ourselves. Torah for all, it turns out, looks like a hundred different apps… and counting.