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New AI assistant supports learners of all levels in discovering and exploring 3,000 years of Jewish sources.
[August 10, 2026] — Sefaria, the nonprofit behind the world’s largest free digital library of Jewish texts, announced today full public access to the Sefaria Library Assistant, an AI chatbot for navigating and exploring one of humanity’s oldest and most expansive documented bodies of knowledge.
Built on the latest LLM technology, the Library Assistant draws its data from the Sefaria Library, an unparalleled collection of nearly 390 million words in original languages and translations spanning Tanakh, Talmud, Halakhah, Kabbalah, and more. With this chatbot, Sefaria aims to help users meaningfully engage with the digital stacks by directing them to relevant primary sources and offering opportunities for further exploration.
Unlike general-purpose AI assistants, Sefaria’s Library Assistant is built specifically for Judaism’s sacred texts, with guardrails that reflect Jewish values and a core directive to send users deeper into texts, rather than summarizing them. In an era of AI tools that some people fear may replace human engagement with original sources, the Library Assistant is designed explicitly to do the opposite.
“From oral tradition to handwritten scrolls to print, each new medium has brought more people into the great Jewish conversation,” said Sefaria Chief Learning Officer Sara Wolkenfeld. “The Library Assistant is the latest chapter in that story. It’s a personal librarian, ready to help anyone find their way into our collective textual inheritance. Unlike many other AI assistants, this tool doesn’t provide easy answers. It inspires learners to ask questions, think critically, and seek meaning on their own terms.”
The Library Assistant can be accessed by anyone logged in to a free account at Sefaria.org, where approximately 800,000 users per month already use Sefaria’s free, open-source library. Amplifying the impact of this text collection, the Library Assistant offers a guided entry point for those who might not know where to start and a powerful discovery tool for those who do.
The launch comes after months of rigorous user testing and evaluation, with the primary goal of ensuring the integrity of the primary texts.
“Sefaria is not an archive,” said Michael Kellman, Chief Product Officer at Sefaria. “It’s a space for living, breathing Jewish learning to thrive. The Library Assistant helps people everywhere engage with the canon, making sources more accessible to more learners. In this way, it’s not very different from presenting works in translation or linking source texts to commentators. It’s all there to support the same goal: democratized Jewish learning for all.”
The Library Assistant represents Sefaria’s most significant AI investment to date, following years of experimentation and product development, including AI-assisted translation, learning guides, Topic page curation, and LLM-powered interlinking that highlights millions of connections between library texts.
The launch comes at a moment of intense public debate about the role of AI in religious and cultural life. In keeping with its lifelong commitment to using the best available technologies to advance learning, Sefaria’s values-driven approach offers a model for how faith-based organizations can engage with AI thoughtfully and ambitiously.
The Library Assistant is free to use at Sefaria.org.
About Sefaria
Sefaria is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building the future of Jewish learning. Home to more than 390 million words of Jewish text in over a dozen languages, Sefaria’s free, open-source library serves approximately 8 million users per month worldwide. Learn more at sefaria.org.
