Imagine a cutting-edge, innovative new app that allows its users to access one of the largest libraries of Jewish texts available. That’s exactly what Josh Herzberg and Noah Santacruz, seniors majoring in electrical engineering at The Cooper Union, did.
While working on a final project for one of their classes, they realized that they could use this as an opportunity to create something beneficial that other people could gain something from. Thus the idea for their app, “BetaMidrash,” was born.
BetaMidrash contains millions of Jewish texts, many of which are paired with complete English translations. Tanach, Tosefta, Talmud, Midrash, Halacha, Kabbalah, tefillah; and commentaries such as Rashi, Ramban and Radak are just some of the sources one can access through the app. Sefaria.org, a website with extensive Jewish resources and texts, provided the texts featured on BetaMidrash.
Herzberg and Santacruz made every effort to ensure that BetaMidrash would be convenient and user friendly. BetaMidrash allows users to jump from text to text, so if one is reading a verse and wants to see the commentary on it, her or she is able to do so easily and painlessly.
This took many hours of work, far more time than they had initially intended to spend working on an app for a mere class project.
Josh described how he and Noah worked hard on making BetaMidrash really powerful. “We spent lots of time tweaking the app to make sure the user interface was intuitive and powerful, and making sure it was fast and responsive,” Josh said.
One issue that came up while creating the app was how to make the search engine of BetaMidrash as fast and accurate as possible. “We saw that in many similar types of apps the search engine wasn’t that powerful,” said Josh. “It’s actually very hard to make a fast search on a mobile device without taking up lots of valuable extra storage space on the phone. We saw this as a problem that needed to be solved, so we spent some time thinking about it, and developed a specially designed algorithm which allows a powerful search which is fast and has advanced options.”
BetaMidrash is a free app. This, Josh explains, was to “make a better Torah experience.” Though their website has links to donate money to the cause, they would rather people learn and use the app without feeling any pressure to donate.
Working on a Torah-related computer project is not a first for either Josh or Noah. They have created a program which can take a picture of a page of Talmud and then convert it into a digitized version of the page. Josh also created Torahsummary.com, which contains summaries of the Torah according to the breakdown of both the chapter and verse, as well as page-by-page summaries of Gemara.
Josh and Noah now work for Sefaria.org, a relationship that was formalized through their use of its texts for BetaMidrash. “Ultimately we see BetaMidrash as an important point in both of our careers which will hopefully help us to work on more Torah projects in the future,” said Josh. “This is not the first Torah project the two of us worked on and it won’t be the last.”