The Daily Page Portal, which offers Gemara study in various languages, among them Yiddish has received a maximum and rare rating • The ancient Talmud has become a particularly large innovative enterprise

• The meetings are closed? You can learn from the cellphone (illustration, the photographers have no connection to the article) // Photo: Netti Shochat

Wise? WhatsApp? Instagram? All are large, well-known and useful widgets, but none even come close to the rankings of one small and not well-known widget: The Daily Page Portal widget, which managed to achieve an unprecedented 5-star maximum rating, after being downloaded over 100,000 times and rated by 5,000 Android users Various.

"The combination of both things is very rare," says Harel Shapira, 45, a Gemara teacher from Jerusalem and the person behind the widget. "Tens of thousands of users and the highest ranking, I don't know if there is another widget in the world with such a rare statistic. This is because the applet was developed at a high level, but also because people who study a daily page are full of gratitude and want to pervade us. "

Shapiro began offering online tools to Gemara learners 15 years ago: "When the Internet era began, I uploaded some textbook site that I made to my students and suggested that others upload their materials. I wanted to set up a site that concentrated the materials, I thought it would be a small project, and I couldn't guess where it was going. Since then, it has just taken my entire life, in terms of time and money, and today there are huge amounts of materials from all shades and styles that reach all peoples in Israel and around the world - religious and ultra-Orthodox, but also secularists who use the site - and the Android and iPhone widget by Liron Portangag And Benjamin Trachtman. " 

The widget offers everyone who learns Gemara, and especially for daily page learners, a wide variety of content, tools and services, for example: the Gemara itself in two versions: the conventional page shape and text of the page, audio and video lessons in different styles in languages: Hebrew, English, Yiddish, French, Spanish and Portuguese, Hebrew Aramaic Dictionary, Monthly Calendar for daily page learning with options for markup learned and commenting, forum for questions and answers, and even online map of daily page lessons that are close to the learner and possibility to search for real-time study companions. The applet interface has already been translated into English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German, and this week (Sunday) a Yiddish version has also been uploaded.

"There is a demand for Yiddish," surprising Shapiro, "and people from Jewish communities in Israel and abroad contact us and request that we add more lessons and content in the language. Lately we have been translating the interface into Yiddish, so that I myself have become a language expert myself. It turns out that there is an Israeli Yiddish and there is an American Yiddish. "

The Corona crisis, which caused a decline in institutionalized learning, actually led to an increase in learning through the app and on the site. "In the last month and a half, the app has downloaded 5,500 more users," says Shapiro, "and there has been a significant increase in site sign-ups, almost twice as much as usual. Everyone is now forced to study from home, and not necessarily available for textbooks. The Jewish world. A number of people from the US who were in isolation called me and said that thanks to the app, they could continue learning and feel connected. I did a site survey among the learners and a lot of them said that their learning had actually improved because of the Corona, so you can say that this epidemic brought a blessing with her. "