New ‘Rav Legacy Project’ Uses AI to Make Rabbi Soloveitchik Shiurim Accessible
YU’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) has released The Rav zt”l Legacy Project, a website that gives users access to recorded lectures from Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, former rosh yeshiva at YU and a leader in the American Orthodox Jewish community.
The Rav Legacy, led by Coby Melkin (RIETS ‘27) and overseen by YU Community Dean for Values and Leadership Rabbi Ari Rockoff, features many of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s lectures with summaries, transcripts, subtitles, short clips and an AI “shiur assistant” tool that allows users to search for ideas within Rabbi Soloveitchik’s available shiurim (lectures). The website is largely run by students.
President Rabbi Ari Berman informed students of The Rav Legacy during a March 24 lecture in the Glueck Beit Midrash. He noted that the lectures delivered by Rabbi Soloveitchik in Yiddish will be added to the project — it currently only includes English lectures — and said that it will enable people “to hear directly the words of the Rav.”
Rockoff told The Commentator that the project started when Leeor Cohen (SSSB ‘11) wanted to learn from Rabbi Soloveitchik but could not effectively do so because of his unfamiliarity with Yiddish and the low audio quality of available English lectures. Cohen provided a grant to YU to support a project making Rabbi Soloveitchik’s lectures more accessible, and Melkin, a software engineer, was brought on to help lead it.
“This is a story about students coming together to solve a really important mission,” Rockoff said. “This is a story of an alum who wanted to invest in this institution of YU to make the Torah of Rav Soloveitchik more accessible for himself and for your generation and beyond.”
AI technology is an important tool for the project.
“We leverage AI to make the transcription process much more efficient and scalable,” Melkin told The Commentator. “Using AI-based audio enhancement software,” the team removes poor sound quality, after which it uses Sofer.Ai — a creation of fellow YU alum Zachary Fish (YC ‘23) — to transcribe the audio before manual editing and summarizing, he said.
Melkin also mentioned the AI “shiur assistant” feature and showed The Commentator a demo of the tool, asking the chatbot to explain what Rabbi Soloveitchik said about antisemitism. Using retrieval-augmented generation, it showed where in particular lectures the Rav discusses the topic. The tool was mainly an initiative of AI engineer Dothan Bardichev (YC ‘26).
“It was an absolute pleasure working on the RAG system for The Rav Legacy Project,” Bardichev told The Commentator. “As a student, I found it especially rewarding to contribute to a real-world, nontrivial application, applying the theory I’ve learned in school to build and deploy something meaningful and impactful.”
The Rav Legacy Project comes months after the launch of The Lamm Legacy, a similar project cataloging archives of material from former YU President and Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Norman Lamm. Rockoff explained that The Rav Legacy is not so much an outgrowth of the latter as it is part of a shared story with the “same roots.”
“We see our project as becoming the mechanism through which we'll be able to perpetuate all the legacy of all of the teachers of YU and beyond for the next generation,” he told The Commentator.
The project is expected to grow further. Rockoff told The Commentator that “we’ve developed what we call in business an MVP, a minimum viable product. We’ve created sort of the first round of what will become, we hope, a whole new phase for how we disseminate Torah at Yeshiva University.” The website is still in its beta form after it was launched in February, according to Melkin.
Two developments now in the works are adding source sheets to the lectures and incorporating Yiddish lectures, Melkin said.
Rockoff emphasized that YU computer science students are leading the project.
“This is a story of student leadership,” he said. “As much as it sounds funny, it’s not the story of Rav Soloveitchik’s Torah, it’s the story of students.”
“YU is the perfect place to be at the forefront of properly, effectively integrating tools at our disposal to perpetuate the mesorah,” Melkin told The Commentator. “God-willing, initiatives like this, driven by incredibly talented students in the computer science department, working together with semikha students in the beis medrash, will be able to bring about a number of projects, a number of initiatives that will make Torah more accessible and engaging for an AI age.”
Photo Caption: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
Photo Credit: Yeshiva University
