Torah Trope Tutor — Support
Help, answers, and how to reach us
Help, answers, and how to reach us
Torah Trope Tutor helps a ba'al koreh (Torah reader) learn and practice a reading. It shows the text as a digital Tikkun, lets you remove the vowels and cantillation marks a step at a time until you can read it the way it appears on the scroll, and lets you mark and practice your assigned verses — and hear how they should be chanted. Full help is also built into the app under the Help tab.
Email us and we'll get back to you. Please include your device model and iOS version, and a short description of what happened.
Email SupportA Sefer Torah is written consonants-only — no nikkud (vowels) and no ta'amei hamikra (cantillation marks). Torah Trope Tutor shows the text as a digital Tikkun, laid out column by column the way it appears on the scroll, at four levels of reading help, from most to least: Full (vowels + cantillation), Vowels (vowels only), Plain (letters only), and Bimah (the scribal scroll script, as on a Sefer Torah). Words stay in the same place at every level, so your eye learns where each word sits on the scroll. Below Full, tap any line to peek at it fully pointed.
On the Read tab, tap Find a reading by date (or any reading under This week), check the date, choose the aliyah or aliyot you've been given, and Save. The verses come straight from the reading calendar, so they are exact. Your readings are kept in My Readings — Upcoming, Marked sections, and Past.
If your section isn't a whole aliyah — for example, several readers are sharing one — open the book and parsha, tap ⋯ → Mark my section, tap the first and last line of your verses, and Save.
Tap Listen to hear your section chanted. The trope phrase being chanted is highlighted — on the levels that show the te'amim, its marks turn blue — and the page turns by itself when the chanting moves on to the next column. Tap Pause to stop, then Resume to carry on from the same word or Restart to hear your section from the beginning. The first play downloads the recording; after that it's cached on your device.
The recordings were made in the traditional seven aliyot, so they carry the closing aliyah melody only where a traditional aliyah ends. If yours ends elsewhere — as most triennial aliyot do — My Readings shows “Ends: …” and the scroll view has an Ending button that plays a real aliyah ending from the recordings with exactly the same te'amim as your last verse.
The calendar comes from Hebcal and runs from 1939 to 2040. It covers Shabbat (including combined parshiot such as Vayakhel-Pekudei), festivals, Rosh Chodesh, Chanukah, Purim and fast days, and Monday and Thursday from 2016. Pick any date to see its reading. This week lists the readings from today through Shabbat — on a festival that is read from two scrolls, you choose your aliyot and the maftir is saved as its own reading.
On the Tools tab, tap Find My Bar/Bat Mitzvah Parsha, turn the wheels to the date of the Bar or Bat Mitzvah itself (not the birthday), choose the aliyot and Save. The reading opens on the Read tab and is kept in My Readings, ready to practice for an anniversary.
Three people read the opening of the coming Shabbat's parsha. Many congregations on the triennial cycle read those same verses; some read the opening of that year's triennial portion instead — check with your rabbi, chazzan or gabbai.
Set Settings → Location: in some years the parsha read in Israel differs from the rest of the world for a few weeks after Pesach or Shavuot. If your congregation reads a third of the parsha each year, choose the triennial cycle under Settings → Aliyot and your system under Triennial calendar; the year of the cycle is worked out from the date.
On the High Holy Days the Torah is chanted to a special melody. The words and te'amim are the same, but every recording in the app uses the regular melody, so Listen is turned off for those readings. You can still use every level of the scroll view to learn the text and the trope. We hope to add High Holy Day recordings in a future version.
Tap an example's reference to see it on the scroll: its words are lit in light blue, and Listen to verse plays the whole verse, lighting each phrase in orange as it's chanted.
Most marks sit over the stressed syllable. A few always sit in a fixed place instead: pashta and zarka on the word's last letter, telisha gedola on its first. When the stress falls elsewhere, the text prints the mark a second time over the stressed syllable. It is still one mark, chanted once. This is also how to tell pashta from kadma, which look the same: pashta is on the last letter, while kadma sits over the stressed syllable and leads straight on to the next word.
The Bimah (scroll) view can render in either of two scribal traditions — Beit Yosef (Ashkenazi) or Vellish (Sephardi). Choose the one that most closely matches your congregation's Sefer Torah in Settings → Amud script.
Not necessarily — treat it as a close practice reference, not an exact copy. Real scrolls vary in line breaks, letter forms, and spacing from scribe to scribe, and communities follow their own customs. Always confirm your specific reading with your tutor, the chazzan, or whoever is guiding your preparation. Their guidance comes first.
Your readings and settings sync across devices signed in to the same iCloud account. The text works offline; you need a connection the first time you play a section's chant, after which it's cached. You can clear cached audio in Settings → Offline audio.
Torah Trope Tutor covers the Torah reading. Haftarah and the megillot are separate readings with their own melodies and are not included.
The chant recordings are from the PocketTorah project, created by Russel Neiss and Charlie Schwartz (not-a-box media lab), and chanted by its . The recordings are used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license; the license covers the recordings, not the app. Reading calendar and aliyah divisions from Hebcal; scroll layout from tikkun.io; text from the Westminster Leningrad Codex; scribal fonts from the Culmus project. Full credits are in the app's About tab.
Torah Trope Tutor keeps your data on your device and — through iCloud — in your own private iCloud account. No ads, no tracking, and we can't see your data. See our Privacy Policy for details.