About SiddurAudio.com

Unfamiliarity with the Hebrew liturgy is an obstacle which keeps many from experiencing the joy and ruach of participating fully in their synagogue services. This website's aim is to help people acquire the skills to overcome that hurdle.

The idea for this project first started when our shul decided to update our siddurim to the new "Siddur Sim Shalom" published jointly by the Rabbinical Assembly and United Synagogue (©1998).

I knew that we needed to update our instructional audio tapes to reflect our current siddur's new page numbers, etc., but soon realized that this would present an opportunity to teach our congregants and students some alternative melodies to many of the prayers we daven during services. Since most of our kids no longer have "antiquated" cassette recorders these days, I researched how to produce digital recordings of our service liturgy. And one thing led to another...

Once we went "digital", I realized that I could make the clips available for download via our synagogue web site. This would make the material accessible to many more people, as well as avoid the expense and effort of media duplication. The result of those efforts, was an audio web page that was posted to the Congregation Beth Shalom website. It wasn't until much later that I understood what a powerful teaching tool this would become.

Shortly afterwards, the site became so widely used that excessive data transfer was becoming an issue - since audio files are fairly large, even in compressed format. At the same time, the tremendous response to this site was quite gratifying, particularly the knowledge that we were reaching out and teaching siddur skills to such an eager community of learners. Nonetheless, I had to look for another solution, which ultimately led to the creation of this new website hosted by a provider that offered significantly more bandwidth at an affordable cost.

My goal was to get most of the liturgy uploaded, including the home rituals, Torah trop, zemirot, etc. So far, most of these objectives have been achieved. Recently, audio CD's of the siddur clips were made available for those who wanted to have easier access to the sound tracks and avoid the cumbersome process of downloading and saving all the individual tracks.

It is my hope that many of you will benefit from this new learning tool that will in turn create a more siddur-proficient and knowledgeable Jewish community. And by mastering the liturgy, hopefully you will be able to heighten your sense of Jewish spirituality and enhance your kavanah (inner devotion) during your own prayers.

B'Shalom,
Rabbi Mark Zimmerman