We’re delighted to announce the addition of a modern Russian-language translation of biblical texts to the Sefaria library. First published in 2011, this newly added edition includes all five books of Torah, several books of Prophets, and the scrolls of Ruth and Esther. This release represents a major milestone in our work to make Jewish texts accessible to communities around the world.

In 2023, almost 34,000 people whose primary language is Russian visited Sefaria! We hope the new translation, crafted by Dr. Dmitri Slivniak and edited by Dr. Itzhak Streshinsky, offers these visitors and many more the opportunity for a richer learning experience.

This new addition to our library would not have been possible without the generosity of the Nadav Foundation, an Israel-based organization dedicated to strengthening Jewish identity and peoplehood. Over the past decade, the foundation has assembled an expansive collection of Jewish materials, including the translation now available on Sefaria.

You can access the new translation by clicking on Pусский in the sidebar of our homepage, under the heading ‘Translations.’ Or, you can tap on any passage of text to open the resource panel, then click ‘Translations’ to view all available versions and scroll down to the Russian section.

To mark this exciting addition to the library, join us on March 10 (9am PDT, 12pm EDT, 6pm IST) for a virtual event on the history and importance of Russian biblical translation. We’ll hear from Nadav’s Leonid Rozengauz, biblical scholar Dr. Maria Kaspina, and Dr. Slivniak, translator of the newly added edition on Sefaria.

We’ll also kick off a celebratory week during which we invite members of the Russian-speaking Jewish community to “write” a letter in the Global Community Torah, a worldwide initiative to create a collaborative Torah “scroll.” Together, these letters will form an entire section of Torah contributed by Russian-speaking Jews from around the world.