About this site...
Welcome to the Hazzan Menes Jewish Information Site
This site is designed to provide information for Torah study and cantillation, Jewish music, and prayer. The simple exterior houses a very large data treasury of approximately 8 Gb of sound files and text in English and Hebrew. Although the information is "pluralistic, egalitarian Jewish", some may reveal a mainstream Conservative North American bias.
There are 2 parts to this site:
- Ritual Information for congregants and b'nei mitzvah
- Synagogue Management for clergy and staff
The management information is password-protected.
The Ritual Information includes virtually everything one needs to be a knowledgeable participant in Jewish synagogue services. However, the site does assume that you know what you are looking for. While there is some help for the site, it is succinct rather than user-friendly.
Site Design
Most of the site is accessible to the public, but some sections are password protected. It is possible to register for a password; approval comes from the Administrator and is not automatic.
All resources, web design and programs were designed and compiled by Hazzan Menes. In most cases, programs were modified from existing, readily available programs on the web and attribution has been maintained. Scripts have generally been written in Perl, with only minor use of Javascript in the simple html interfaces. All databases are flat-file text files.
There are 4 essential elements to this site:
- calendar: based on webcal
- bulletin boards: based on wordpress
- news posting: based on Coranto
- flat-file databases: based on csvscript
- file-system organized data files: my own organization
The flat-file databases, accessible only via the password-protected links, hold the following information:
- Care management, including mi shebeirach and hospital info
- Yahrzeit info
- Honors info, including Shabbat aliyot
- B'nei Mitzvah info, including daily status info for each student
- Event management, time and place for weddings, brit, etc.
The heart of the site, and the initial reason for its existence, is the series of files for the parashiyyot. Each parasha has both text and sound files, divided into aliyot for the triennial system.
The site also contains the complete sound files for the daily, Shabbat, and festival nusach.
Hazzan Rob Menes
Information about Hazzan Rob Menes, the creator and administrator of this site, can be found here: