Casting A Wide Jewish “Net”

New Web site is filled with Jewish knowledge.

January 2, 2009

Richard Greenberg
Washington Jewish Week

Item: Gaza was embroiled in fighting.

Item: Jews had won more than 300 Olympic medals by the 1990s.

Item: One of the better-known bullfighters of the 20th century was a Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Jew named Sidney Franklin.

Item: The state of North Dakota has two Reform congregations.

So said (as of publication date) JudaismWiki.com, a free, interactive and highly eclectic Web site that was launched in 2008 by semi-retired Rockville, Md., publisher Mordecai (Morry) Schreiber.

He was seeking to provide ready access to information on virtually anything Jewish—from trivia to current events to community resources throughout North America.

In addition, JudaismWiki.com is a forum for discussions on an unlimited range of Jewish topics, although perhaps due to the newness of the site, the back-and-forth was not yet evident.

“It’s a little quixotic,” reported Mr. Schreiber, 68, an Israeli-born Potomac, Md., resident, who is an ordained Reform rabbi.

“It’s a very big undertaking, it’s nonprofit and it’s a little idealistic. Anything that can bring Jews of different views and ideologies together is a very positive thing.”

JudaismWiki—which includes an online version of the 50th anniversary edition of “The Shengold Jewish Encyclopedia,” by Schreiber Publishing—is modeled on Wikipedia, the cyber-encyclopedia that has revolutionized information gathering, in part because it is produced by countless contributors who freely edit or delete content on the ever-evolving site. (Wiki means quick in Hawaiian.)

Sure enough, JudaismWiki warns would-be contributors that any submission “may be edited, altered or removed by other contributors. If you don’t want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then don’t submit it here.”

Mr. Schreiber, who believes that his site may be the only wiki-style Jewish entity around, said he and a part-time staffer (currently the site’s only paid employee) monitor incoming content each day for errors and other unacceptable material.

Thus far, he said, the only material they’ve had to delete is pornographic spam.

“But I’m already worrying that when things get out of hand how much support we might need,” he added.

Site visitors can tap into an exhaustive list of community resources by clicking the appropriate spot on a map of North America found on the site’s home page. Each state’s page lists a community-by-community compendium of congregations, Jewish newspapers, Jewish day schools, and Jewish museums (as well as links to each of them.)

The site also features a selection of current Jewish-related news stories and analysis.

Mr. Schreiber, who came to the United States from his native Israel in the late 1950s to attend college, said the idea for the Web site was born when his company, Schreiber Publishing, put out the 2007 (hard-copy) edition of “The Shengold Jewish Encyclopedia,” which his firm had acquired from a New York Judaica publisher in 1998.

(Mr. Schreiber operates two divisions—SchreiberLanguage, which provides language reference books, and SchreiberJudaica, which offers books that “enrich Jewish life and bring Jews, Christians, Muslims and others closer together,” according to a company blurb.)

The current edition of the hard-copy encyclopedia, whose sales have been declining for several years, was distributed for the first time with a CD and a Web site version, which triggered visions of all-Jewish-all-the-time platform that would reach a wide audience and “open the door for participation,” said Mr. Schreiber.

“Jews love to write,” he added, describing the new Web site as “another venue for them to get their word out to the world. We want to hear from everybody. We want everyone to participate. We tend to be sectarian. But I’d like to see this as a place where everybody checks in.”

The initial reaction to the site? Mr. Schreiber has received e-mails from several rabbis, including some old friends, who praised the project—and also offered advice.

For example, Rabbi (and published author) Niles Goldstein of The New Shul in Manhattan “very strongly encouraged” Schreiber to include in his listings unaffiliated synagogues, “such as my own,” and to provide space for information on Jewish books.

“If you should add that feature to the site,” he added, “I’d love to have my own books added.”

Rabbi Stephen Weiss (location unknown) called JudaismWiki “a wonderful project,” but cautioned Mr. Schreiber to “be very careful to avoid the serious pitfalls of Wikipedia—namely, that anyone can edit articles, and therefore you never know someone’s agenda; who wrote/changed something and why.”