Website and new community calendar can be found at BCBM.org.

Today, nobody thinks twice about going online to find the shiurim of their favorite rabbanim or lecturers. All it takes is typing in the name or topic into a search engine, and, instantly, the vast number of resources are at their fingertips. But it wasn’t always so easy, and as Beis Midrash of Bergen County unveils a newly-updated website, it seems appropriate to look back at how they got to where they are.

Over 25 years ago, the Beis Midrash of Bergen County was incorporated into Congregation Bnai Yeshurun (CBY). Back then, a few local individuals took it upon themselves to ensure that the Beis Midrash would be a magnet to community members for learning and shiurim. The Beis Midrash of Bergen County—which has become a center for communal shiurim—hosts daily shiurim and a morning kollel given at CBY by Rav Zvi Sobolofsky, at 6:20 a.m. Before the internet was available for shiurim, people either attended shiurim in person or listened to tapes or CDs of them.

In the early years of the Beis Midrash of Bergen County, over a number of years, they gave out over 120,000 CDs. More than 10,000 CDs were distributed a year—free of charge—to anyone who wanted to listen to shiurim. All you had to do was go to the CBY Beis Midrash and take a CD. The idea was to connect the entire Bergen County area through Torah. As tapes and CDs started to become out of style, www.BCBM.org was created by the Beis Midrash of Bergen County to be a digital source for recordings of all the local shiurim, allowing the shiurim to be listened to on one’s smartphone on the go, at home, at work, during lunch or wherever the learner had the opportunity.

The BCBM.org founders’ feeling was that Bergen County, probably, has the largest number of RIETS scholars and rabbeim and other rabbis and scholars living within the county. The “superstars” of Jewish life are right here in Bergen County, as well as up-and-coming leaders and sought-after lecturers. The idea was to have the local shiurim available to the community—community rabbi’s shiurim, visiting lectures and more and for the website to be a resource to elevate the learning in the community—allowing residents to take advantage of what’s been here for decades. The hope was to galvanize the community locally to be engaged in their own communal scholars. While YUTorah.org contains a wide array of shiurim given at Yeshiva University and at other venues, BCBM.org is focused primarily on the local shiurim given in Bergen County by our rabbis, roshei yeshiva and other speakers who spread Torah in our community.

According to Chaim Shulman—a longtime volunteer for the BCBM website—aside from collecting current shiurim, BCBM.org became a magnet for collecting older shiurim. In fact, close to 600 of Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik’s recorded shiurim were digitized for the first time as a BCBM project (working with Rabbi Milton Nordlicht and a few others) and were made available in digital format on a wide-scale for the first-time ever! It is certainly fitting that BCBM should be the catalyst for this project, as so many of the rav’s talmidim live in or near Bergen County.

Another project near and dear to the Beis Midrash of Bergen County was organizing and disseminating Rav Asher Weiss’s shiurim, which were collected from over three decades and digitized and posted. The large trove of Zoom shiurim that was made necessary by COVID, greatly boosted the number and scope of community shiurim that were collected and uploaded to BCBM.org, and there has continued to be many more Bergen County shiurim being made available at BCBM.org than ever before.

Working with the very talented Ben Sommer at sommertechs.com, BCBM.org has now been relaunched with a more streamlined and user-friendly interface (and making use of “Elementor,” a very popular and user-friendly website tool). In addition to an updated and more comprehensive website at BCBM.org, the updated website now features a community calendar, with information on local upcoming and recurring shiurim. Anyone can submit information about shiurim which will be added to the calendar, where you can list and find many of the shiurim/lectures in the community.

BCBM.org was founded and dedicated to the memory of Menachem Yitzchak ben Yaakov Yisrael Orlinsky, zt”l—whose story is like that of so many survivors of the Holocaust—who sacrificed for the continuity of our mesorah, with yirat Shamayim and ahavat Yisrael.

The calendar can be found at www.bcbm.org/calendar. To advertise your shul’s scheduled shiurim and events on BCBM.org, go to https://bcbm.org/calendar/bcbmcommunity/bcbmadd/.

The website can be found at www.BCBM.org. For help in loading your rabbi’s shiurim onto BCBM.org and to make sure that your rabbi is featured on BCBM.org, email [email protected] or [email protected] or fill out a query form at https://bcbm.org/contact/.

Sara Kosowsky Gross is a staff writer for The Jewish Link.