Project Ben-Yehuda is a volunteer-based initiative that has been working for more than 25 years to preserve, make accessible, and promote Hebrew literature across generations. The project’s volunteers create a digital library that is available to the public free of charge and without advertisements. The library contains tens of thousands of works, from early Hebrew liturgical poetry to contemporary Hebrew literature. For its work, the project received the Yigal Allon Prize for Exemplary Pioneering Activities (2014) and the President’s Volunteer Award in the field of culture (2019).
The website serves approximately 100,000 readers each month, in Israel and around the world, including students, researchers, educators, and lovers of Hebrew literature. Alongside online reading, the site offers advanced tools for searching, citation, downloading, tagging, and text discovery. The website also serves as an important resource for research and development in artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and the digital humanities.
Beyond preserving literary works, we work to bring them back to the center of contemporary Hebrew culture through a variety of initiatives including readings, a writing competition, and a composition competition.
Although the project is volunteer-based, its continued activity depends on public support that helps fund the management of the initiative, website maintenance, and technological development. Every donation helps us preserve these cultural treasures and make them accessible for future generations.