when i and a couple of friends decided to start a study/reading group on Jewish texts, we were unable to find a decent platform to read them on. there is, of course, Sefaria, but it lacks some prominent Russian translations (perhaps due to copyright), and it felt kind of mistifying for us to use. several other places on the internet have Russian-language materials (translations of texts and commentary), but none were complete enough. most of them didn’t go beyond the Torah, and as for commentaries, most of them were limited to Rashi and maybe one more commentator. so, as a tech-capable pet-project-loving member of the group, I decided to make our own thing.
from the get-go, I decided that I was not going to worry about copyright. first, I am generally okay with being a pirate. second, this is a very low-scale project, basically for private use, and I am prepared to close it for public use on the first letter from copyright holders. finally, I happen to think that (self-)education of the Jewish community is more valuable than secular copyright law. unfortunately, I was unable to find proper Halachic rulings on this issue, but if you know of them, let me know!
i started by scraping some of the Russian-language materials from a couple of aforementioned websites. i then packed them into a makeshift JSON format and wrote a small CRUD API for them. then, I wrote a simple SPA in Svelte to render them. the basic idea for the reader was that there are two modes of reading:
over time, I added many features such as
overall, this is probably my favorite project to date. not only did it let me intimately interact with complex and religiously significant texts (given the fact that textuality is an integral feature of Judaism), but it serves a small but dense community around me, I love making changes on their request and getting feedback from them.