It all started with a box of papers – and a local woman named Shana Kramer.

“She used to go and travel from city-to-city,” recalled Donna Zeffren. “Teachers would just look through them and copy them.”

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That’s exactly what teachers still do today, except without the travel – or the box – or the papers.

We have over 40,000 users in 95 countries,” marvels Aliza Shapiro. “We get submissions from Cancun to Australia. It’s really unbelievable.”

Zeffren and Shapiro are a part of Chinuch.org, a website that has spent the last decade on a mission to spread Jewish learning by allowing educators in day schools, synagogues and other institutions to share the lessons they’ve created. Started in 2000 by Kramer, who now lives out of town, the site has racked up some impressive statistics. In an average month, more than 150,000 downloads of more than 12,000 different items are logged, everything from workbooks and PowerPoints to curricula and smartboard programs.

With hundreds of new submissions every year, the list keeps growing.

“We’re at the point where 100 percent of things are editable now,” said Zeffren, director of the site since its inception. “Everything we’ve gotten in the past few years has been editable. We’re slowly weeding out the older stuff and retyping it.”

The customizable nature of the materials is what makes them so valuable. Zeffren said that the site is designed to address the fact that teachers so often must reinvent the wheel, coming up with lesson plans on their own that may resemble those being created by others elsewhere. Even when sharing does occur, it still doesn’t match the exact needs of the educator.

Not so with materials from Chinuch.org.

“You can make the lines a little bigger for kids who can’t write clearly,” she said. “You put in a few more English words for kids who don’t know so much Hebrew. You can even put in the class’s names as the examples.”

The St. Louis-based site, run out of a small office building at 8630 Delmar Boulevard, is supported by the National Society of Hebrew Day Schools, also known as Torah Umesorah, and has developed a worldwide following.

Its fan base doesn’t just include teachers either. Jewish homeschoolers have taken to it as well. Even parents whose children are in public school use it as a resource to supplement their child’s Judaic education.

“It’s basically teachers helping teachers,” Zeffren said. “But every Jew is a teacher to some extent.”

And every teacher can see where his or her efforts are going. Individual accounts on the site allow those who upload a creation to find out what happens to it.

“Not only can you track whether it’s been downloaded but teachers can come back a month later and say, ‘Wow, this has been downloaded 75 times in the last week,'” she said. “They can even go into their profile and see in what cities it’s been downloaded.”

It’s a feature Zeffren said is appreciated by users who can watch the site update live.

“Someone told me in the Chicago teacher’s center they sometimes leave the computer running and keep refreshing it watching things be downloaded all day long,” she said.

The site’s materials are presently all in English. However, Zeffren notes that the future could include translation into other languages, a request she’s heard from France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland and Russia. Everything on the site, from project ideas to entire curricular units are converted to PDF form and searchably cross-referenced.

The site also includes a clipart library with Judaic themes and a forum that allows teachers to communicate directly.

The support doesn’t end there.

“We write a lesson plan for every single thing that’s donated that says how to use it, what materials you need, variations for learning disabled or other circumstances that might come up,” Zeffren said.

Not that Chinuch.org is in the business of educating. Its job is to support educators.

“These are tools for teachers, not crutches,” said Zeffren. “The teacher is meant to take it, look through it and make sure it’s suitable for her class. We’re providing the raw materials. Teachers take these and build their own curriculums.”

Shapiro, who does public relations and development for the site, said that for many trying to pass on Judaic connections to the next generation, Chinuch.org is a lifeline.

“It’s a very exciting thing for the site and for many teachers that don’t necessarily live in a concentrated Jewish community,” she said. “They will be able to work on their professional development as Jewish educators wherever they are.”