When the Federation of Synagogues (recently rebranded as Kehillas Federation) launched its SMS-based Ask the Rabbi ShailaText service in June 2015, it had no idea whether it would take off.

Nearly eight years on, the service has just been accessed by its 10,000th unique user, a landmark following hot on the heels of its 100,000th shaila (halachic question).

At the outset, the goal was to respond to questions within four working hours, with four rabbis engaged in the service, among them Dovid Tugendhaft of the Nishmas Yisroel community in Hendon. It was at Rabbi Tugendhaft’s instigation that the Federation launched the service in memory of Dayan Gershon Lopian, who died in 2014.

“Anyone who knew Dayan Lopian will fondly remember how he would sit at home, studying gemorah throughout the day but always with the telephone by his side, ready to speak to anybody who called him with a shaila,” Rabbi Tugendhaft told the JC.

“After he died, there was a real sense of a gap needing to be filled. People who had shailos didn’t always have a rabbi they knew well enough to turn to.”

Anonymised questions to the service have run the gamut from kashrut and monetary issues to the laws of Shabbat and family purity. There is always a spike in usage before Pesach and in the run-up to the 9th of Av day of mourning, with 250 questions being posed daily during these periods last year.

As use of the service snowballed, more rabbis were added to the group, with the current team of nine holding expertise in different fields of Jewish law. The rabbis are themselves supported by the Federation’s Av Beit Din Rabbi Shraga Feivel Zimmerman and can draw on advice from medical or kashrut specialists when required. The enormous administrative burden is eased by the use of a bespoke case- management app.

ShailaText has also enabled the Federation to get a proper sense of the areas of practical Jewish law the community needs guidance on. For example, regular enquiries on how to properly dispose of damaged prayer books led to the installation of “sheimos banks” at several London synagogues.

Questions on the use of an oven’s Shabbat mode prompted the FedTech service, spearheaded by Rabbi Yisroel Moshe Guttentag, director of certification for the Federation’s kashrut department and another of the rabbis on the ShailaText group. He explained that FedTech advised on the intersection between halachah and technology.

“Buying modern kitchen appliances can be a minefield these days where manufacturers have never considered the needs of the Sabbath-observant market. We realised that these topics needed to be dealt with professionally by a UK religious authority. Very encouragingly, the industry is now starting to understand the importance of catering for this particular demographic.”

In Judaism, it is said that there is no such thing as coincidence — only Divine Providence. So it was considered no accident that ShailaText reached the milestone of its 10,000th user on the date of Dayan Lopian’s ninth Yahrzeit.

“Dayan Lopian had an extremely user-friendly way of answering shailos,” Rabbi Tugendhaft added.

“While we would always prefer that people have a relationship with a rabbi that they can take their shailos to in person, we all feel that the service we set up in his memory is serving a genuine purpose in the community and responding to questions in a similarly user-friendly way.”

Inquiries to ShailaText should be sent by SMS to 07403 939613