Looking for a computer program that can translate Hebrew into English and back again? How about a screen saver featuring scenes from Jewish holidays, or fluttering Israeli flags? Or educational software for kids, such as programs on the geography of Israel or stories from the Bible?
All those and about 100 more items are available through the Jewish Software Center, a Silicon Valley-based clearinghouse for Jewish-themed computer programs.
The business was founded last December by Anna and Jeffry Young out of their home in Monte Sereno, between Saratoga and Los Gatos.
The idea occurred to the Youngs after they bought an educational program on beginning Hebrew for sons Eli, 7-1/2, and Abe, 6, and had a difficult time finding other Jewish software.
“Here we were in Silicon Valley, the software capital of the world,” Anna Young said. “Why wasn’t Jewish software readily available?”
So the couple widened their search.
They found a lot. The Youngs’ Jewish Software Center now stocks programs on the Torah and Talmud, Hebrew fonts and word-processing programs in Hebrew, Russian and English. Among the children’s programs available, many of which come on both disk and CD-ROM, are simple courses of aleph-bet study and more advanced Hebrew-language instruction.
On disk format they found a game called Jewish IQ Baseball. “You answer questions on Jewish subjects, like biblical questions or current events, and when you get a right answer you advance around the baseball diamond,” Anna Young said.
Questions are worth singles, doubles, triples, and home runs according to their difficulty. A relatively simple question, such as, “Maccabee means a) hammer, b) fighter, or c) teacher,” is worth only one base, since most Jews would know the correct answer is hammer.
But for this question — “Which king gave the Jews permission to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem? a) Cyrus, b) Julius Caeser, or c) Herod” — you would score a home run if you chose Cyrus.
“I got a double on a question about what the ‘bat’ means in bat mitzvah,” Young said. “The choices were woman, adult, or daughter, and I guessed daughter. It was right.”
The Youngs also stock Jewish clip art for desktop publishers, and mouse pads featuring the aleph-bet in block and script lettering.
Young said she and husband Jeffry (who jokes that his mother didn’t know how to spell, hence the missing second “e” in his name) always envisioned starting a Jewish business — though their background is actually in medicine.
He is chief of nephrology (kidney medicine) at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, a teaching hospital in San Jose. She is a nurse who used to manage an operating room at San Jose’s O’Connor Hospital but left to have children.
She works on the computer about six hours a day, but insists that otherwise, she and her husband are not extraordinary computer users.
“Jeff researches the latest medical journal articles; we use [the computer] to do our finances and manage our personal portfolio; and the kids play on it.”
The Jewish Software Center was officially launched at the Children’s Educational Software Fair in Palo Alto last December: The Youngs had a booth and collected names for their mailing list.
“We’re sending out our catalogs now,” Anna said. “We want to educate people that there is a wealth of Jewish software programs available.”