Transcription Projects, Prayers for Voting, and Prayers in Dangerous Weather

[Aharon Varady]

Friends,

A short announcement from Open Siddur HQ.

We've moved our transcription and proofreading projects over to Wikisource, the sister site of the Wikimedia Foundations popular Wikipedia. Wikisource provides an online platform for collaboration in transcribing and proofreading texts, which is exactly what our project needs.

Currently, we have six projects across the Hebrew, German, and English Wikisource sites, and we're looking for volunteers to help transcribe and proofread siddurim. In the last year we had success with our pilot transcription being proofread: Fanny Neuda's collection of tkhines (petitionary prayers) in German, Stunden Der Andacht. That project moved forward with the help of Chajm Guska, an project contributor in Germany, and is nearly complete. (If you can read German in Fraktur script, or can pick up misspelings in modern German, please help validate our proofread pages.)

More information on all of our transcription efforts can be found here:
http://opensiddur.org/2012/10/transcription-of-jewish-liturgy-and-liturgy-related-work/


I also wanted to note that here in the United States of America, our election day is coming. A few years ago, Rabbi David Seidenberg <http://neohasid.org> composed a kavanah for voting and he was gracious enough to share it with a free-culture copyright license. You can copy and paste the Hebrew with its English translation from here:
http://opensiddur.org/2010/11/a-prayer-for-voting-by-rabbi-david-seidenberg/

Reb Dovid has also made the prayer available as a PDF suitable for printing. You can download that from his neohasid.org site, here: http://www.neohasid.org/resources/votingprayer/

In the aftermath of Huricane Sandy, I also wanted to share this prayer by Rabbi Shai Held originaly composed in the aftermath of the terrible tsunami of 2004: http://opensiddur.org/2011/03/prayer-in-the-wake-of-the-tsunami/


Here's wishing that everyone is safe tonight.

Aharon


--
Aharon Varady
Founding Director, Hierophant
the Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.org