We were engaged with terrific stories about remote Israelis from different states around the US, that without our service, had no access what so ever to Hebrew literature, and funny enough (or sad, depends how you look at it), had to read their same books again and again – we say NO MORE to Hebrew dryness!! Let the Hebrew language flourish in every Jewish house that can read the language or that would like to maintain it for themselves or for their young ones!The excitement didn't end there – we had a wonderful Israeli author coming to visit, and she met the Israeli audience in an exciting "Ivrit Be'Kef" event, right here in Manhattan. We are happy to say that we are now engaged with dozen of Israeli authors that are just waiting to meet with the Israeli & the American audience here in the US, demonstrating their love to Hebrew and showing their great books written in Hebrew & translated into English. We are creating a dedicated author shop for each one of them for no operating costs, just for them to be able to reach you guys!
One of our basic rules is that they need to give you the possible price for their book, as we want to create a direct channel with minimum overhead – all for the benefit of the consumers!
Some of these authors have also shown interest to come and demonstrate their children & adults books right here in the states, and we can't wait to meet them all here with you guys.Besides that we have started a very special project of mapping the libraries around the US that hold Hebrew Books, and the Jewish community centers, so you will be able to easily locate which ones are around your area by simply entering your zip code – we call each and every one of you to send us that data so we can update it in out site for everyone to enjoy. Did we mention community yet? So that's why we are here for!
We also had some exciting meetings with many big organizations that everyone knows and even with major Israeli representatives talking about ways of making our services more widely approachable to everyone in local libraries, expanding our books variety, enhancing the "Ivrit Be'Kef – Hebrew with Fun" events and so much more.
But above all that we got a wonderful welcome by the community, and of course great exposure in "Yediot Ahronot" news paper – we can't count how many wishes we got saying how important this venture is (Actually maybe we can, with over 1700 likes to our Facebook page in just 2 months), and people keep on asking us how come such a venture didn't exist till now, and how many people feel "saved" by it as they have no access to Hebrew books. We see people register to our mailing list on a daily basis, and to all of our services on the site: exchanging books for free locally or with friends around the US, renting the books and get them home to read, and opening stores to sell or swap their current books – all of you make it worth it!
We can't wait for 2016, but currently we operate this entire community venture with no external support what so ever! Unfortunately, no organization yet offered to help us or donated to support our costs, and as you can imagine, we paid tens of thousands to build the infrastructure of our operation. Every single dollar donated will go straight into making this amazing project even more wonderful, and the donor, even if they will donate $20 or $20000 will be recognized on a special section of our site because we like to honor every one that help us help the community:
- The first $2000 will be used to purchase the newest books for you to enjoy
- The next $2000 will be used for us to rent a warehouse to store the books (We wish to have it in a library but we need way more for that)
- The next $2000 will be used to pay for our hosting for 4 months (Yes, hosting is expansive)
- The next $2000 will be paid to hire some help so we can finish indexing 4500 books that are waiting to be indexed – currently we do that every night by ourselves and it takes a while
- The next $2000 will be used to develop a feature of your choice to be used for free by the community – buy & sell marketplace, dating for Israelis, books crowdfunding, sublet board or any other feature – you name it.
- The next $2000 will be used to organize another great "Ivrit Be'Kef" event so we will actually be able to rent real audio equipment for our wonderful Broadway singer Merav Eitan to sing clearly and beautifully as she knows, and a place to host it, because we couldn’t find any place except lovely Aroma that accepted to host this wonderful Free event for Free
- Any money on top of that will be a starting point to rent a real space to open a real library in the city, and everyone that donates to this cause will get free access and would be able to be proud of themselves of being part of something wonderful.If you read all the way down here, it means that you most likely liked what we do, so just click here and donate any amount – no amount is too little or to large
We wish you all happy holidays and of course a wonderful year to come!
Lior & Nirit