On Sunday, April 29, at 8 p.m., the Adult Education Committee of Cong. Rinat Yisrael presents Lev Israel, chief data officer, Sefaria, speaking on: “Old Wine in New Vessels—Torah, Sefaria and New Media.”

Sefaria is a nonprofit organization creating a massive, interconnected, living library of Jewish texts, with a beautiful interface and parallel translations, all for free. Lev Israel will describe the ongoing project to digitize the whole of Torah literature, and make it available for free to teachers, students and the general public. He will also describe the current technological moment in the light of history and Jewish sources—looking at the many technological changes Torah has weathered, from the writing down of the Oral Torah and onwards through time. What kind of change results from the move of Torah online? Which kinds of interactions does it encourage, and which does it make more difficult?

Lev Israel has led Sefaria’s engineering team from the early days, and is in charge of the data pipeline—getting texts into the system and making them most useful for students, teachers and technologists. He is a veteran of Israeli startups, now living in New York. He studied computer science and philosophy at Boston University and learned Torah at Darchei Noam, Bat Ayin Yeshiva, Sulaam Yaakov and Har-El Yeshiva.