Where CD-ROMs and Rambam come together

By Michael Handelzalts at Haaretz.com

When former prime minister David Ben-Gurion went to the home of the Hazon Ish (Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz) in Bnei Brak in October 1952, the issue raised was the co-existence of religiously observant Jews and their secular brethren in the young state.

What the meeting mainly left in the collective memory was the parable reportedly related by the Hazon Ish about two wagons that meet on a narrow bridge. His belief was that the empty wagon - the Zionist and secular one - must make way for the full one, that with the belief in the Torah.

Even those who cast doubts about the baggage of the Torah wagon, find it difficult to ignore its scope - starting from the Bible and including the words of the sages in the Talmud, the commentaries in and about them, and the hundreds of years of halakhic (Jewish religious) rulings based on these writings that served as a guide for the lives of the Jewish communities throughout the world.

Since 1992, a compact disc, costing between NIS 1,900 and NIS 2,400, has been available that makes it possible for everyone, not only for those who are rabbis and proficient in the subjects, to get to know Jewish thought over the ages.

The CD-ROM, which took some 300 man-years to create, is updated nearly every year and is also marketed now as a disc-on-key. In its current form, the 17th edition, it comprises of over 1,500 years of texts, from the books of the sages to modern halakhic rulings, as well as more than 100,000 questions and responsa composed by rabbinical experts, religious judges and leaders over hundreds of years. Some 220 million words and more than 450,000 internal links make it possible to find additional relevant material on every subject in the database quickly and easily.

It all started with an idea by the mathematician Prof. Aviezri Fraenkel of the Weizmann Institute, who was among those who built the first computer in Israel, to try to use that new technology to cope with the vast mass of Jewish thought.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Fraenkel set up a group which was known as RESPOR (researchers, programmers, rabbis) who tried to solve the problems by creating a database from which the information could be retrieved. In those days, it was extremely expensive to store information on a computer and it took a great deal of time to process.

In 1975, a while after the project had already migrated to Bar-Ilan University, a senior computer scientist from the United States told Prof. Yaacov Choueka, a philologist and computer expert who replaced Fraenkel, that the initiative was "foolish and absurd and doomed to failure, especially when it comes to an exotic language, a mixture of rabbinic Hebrew and Talmudic Aramaic."

Today the project has some 20,000 users all over the world, who can update their editions for NIS 300. The database is also available on a Web site where institutions can use it with a monthly or annual subscription, or on an hourly basis.

The uniqueness of the project lies in its Boolean search engine, which makes it possible to search for up to four words with all their declensions and forms, to fix the space between the words in the search, and to decide in which of the books on the database to search.