About six or seven times-per-year, I get contracted to do major repair or restoration work on antique Torah scrolls.   Restoring antique scrolls is tricky and really, really time consuming.    Because of the time commitment, I decided to avoid doing restorations while writing the CTC Torah Scroll, with the exception of some historic Torahs owned by the Dallas Holocaust Museum.

However,  just before starting the CTC Torah, I received a call from an elderly couple living in Athens, Texas who, surprisingly, had a Sefer Torah to be restored.   While I may still be new to Texas, I don’t think “Athens, TX” and immediately thereafter think: “Oh, Athens? Well, Jews, naturally….”

Out of curiosity,  I drove to Athens to take a look.  The story was that the wife of this nonagenarian couple came to the US with her family from Algiers around WWII.   Among their possessions was a Sefer Torah.  Upon the death of this woman’s father, she inherited this Torah, which sat in a trunk for almost 50 years.

She and her husband decided to have the scroll restored and to donate it to a conservative synagogue in Austin, TX.

After 50 years in a trunk, the Torah was in very good condition and didn’t need much work to bring it back to usable condition.  So, I took the job.

I noticed three immediate things about this scroll:

1 ) It was very, very heavy.  In fact, it may be the heaviest Torah that I have ever lifted.

2) It was on wooden rollers.  Sephardi Torah Scrolls are traditionally housed in boxes such as this:

Sephardi Torah Scroll in its Distinctive Case

This scroll, which is Sephardi, was probably in a box at some point and only later removed to rollers.    The problem with having a scroll like this, meaning this incredibly heavy,  on rollers is that it makes hagbah (the traditional raising of the Torah Scroll before or after having been read) very difficult.

Hagbah - The Raising of the Torah Scroll Either Before or After the Public Torah Reading

3) It was mashuach.   A long time ago it was fashionable to whitewash the writing surface of the parchment with a plaster-like substance called log that made the parchment very white and very smooth to write upon.  The plaster fills any gaps and pores, smoothing the surface, and just soaks the ink right in, drying quickly.   Klaf treated like this is called mashuach, coated parchment.
This particular Torah is mashuach.  And mashuach is bad news.

The Surface of Mashuach (Coated) Parchment. Note the white surface and brushstrokes in the plaster.

The coating of mashuach klaf eventually powders, crumbles, then flakes off. If you take a black cloth and rub it across the surface, you can see the powdering of the coating.

The first problem with Torahs written on mashuach parchment has to do with general kashrus.  According to many poskim (decisors of Jewish law)  it is ossur (prohibited)  to coat the parchment for two reasons:

1 – According to the Teshuvos Mahari Mintz, the layer of log on the surface is a barrier between the ink and the parchment.  In a kosher Sefer Torah, the ink must cling directly to the parchment,

2 – According to the Benei Yonah, the problem is that the log eventually crumbles away, destroying the text and leading to transgressing the prohibition against erasing the Divine Name of G-d.

A few poskim have allowed coated parchment under the logic that the coating is a fulfillment of Exodus 15:2 – Zeh Keli ve-anveyhu, “This is my G-d and I will beautify Him,” which exhorts the Jews to execute the mitzvos in a way that is beautiful.

The Rabbinic consensus, however, is that coated parchment is prohibited for the two aforementioned reasons.

Nowadays, nobody writes Torahs on coated parchment and, if one did, almost no shul (synagogue) would use it. However, using antique mashuach scrolls in synagogues nowadays require consultation with an expert on Jewish law.

Repairing mashuach scrolls is exceedingly difficult because of the reason of the Benei Yonah: that the log coating slowly comes off as powder, then crumbs, then whole flakes, taking the writing with it.

Another issue not mentioned in the Benei Yonah is that the coating is moisture sensitive and can severely oxidize the ink, turning it red and smearing bir red blotches.

Example of smearing and oxidization

Oxidization on the back of the mashuach parchment.

Restoring a mashuach sefer is a little like nailing jello to a tree or trying to herd a bunch of cats.  Each time that a letter is corrected or the parchment cleaned, it only takes rolling the parchment back on the rollers to crumble off more log and undo the repairs.

I had to take this Sefer Torah outside and airgun it page-by-page to remove the powder.  I then used a special cloth to remove remaining residue.   Where the coating was exceptionally rough and deteriorated,  the writing had to be scraped clean and the place sanded smooth.   Each letter that had crumbled away or badly oxidized had to be re-written.

Note how the letters of the word in the center have mostly crumbled away.

The crumbled letters after correction.

Badly crumbled and oxidized letters - note that the first letter of the line is supposed to be a "beis," however it is missing its heel. Also, the leg of the "gimmel" is detached from it's body

The same section after correction

The whole project is complicated by the fact that this Torah’s parchment was not just coated with log on the front, but on the back as well.  This double coating is the reason why the scroll weighs so much.  It also accelerated the oxidization by sandwiching the ink between two layers of plaster.

Aside from the issue of the coating, this sefer has numerous scribal problems.  While the writing is beautifully spaced, the actual forms of the letters are incorrect in many instances.   The most common problem is that the sofer consistently drops the heel  back of he letter “beis” when writing it  in a tight spot.   As we’ll see in our next videos on the forms of the Hebrew letters, this heel MUST be part of any “beis.”    This means that every beis, in particular, must be carefully checked and corrected.

In short -

• Don’t buy Torah Scrolls written on mashuach (coated) parchment.
• If a synagogue has a mashuach scroll, it must have the scroll checked more often than plain-parchment scrolls.  About every 3 or 3.5 years is a good schedule for checking.
• Old or antique mashuach scrolls are not usually worth having restored, because even average usage will wear them out much faster than plain-parchment scrolls.

4 Comments »

1. 

   This web site is great.

   Comment by pat torrey — August 8, 2009 @ 12:43 pm

2. 

   While it’s true that many Oriental communities (”Eidut Hamizrach”) house Torah scrolls in a box, there are some, such as Iraqi and North African, which do use wooden rollers siliar to those used by Ashkenazi communities. As Algiers is in North Africa, this is not so unusual.

   Comment by Yoni — August 13, 2009 @ 5:51 am

3. 

   Hi Yoni –

   What you write was generally correct many hundreds of years ago. Back then, you would find some Sephardi communities using rollers – there was no hard and fast minhag established yet. There are Torah scrolls extant from over 500 years ago in various museums and nearly all of them, whether sephardi or Ashkenazi, are on rollers.

   Since the 1800’s, though, almost all Sephardi communities have used the boxes.

   In the main synagogue in Algiers, according to the Algerian owner of this sefer, almost all of the sifrei Torah were in boxes. She acknowledged that many were unsewn from the boxes for transportation over-seas. I am certain that this scroll was once in a box because the rollers are clearly newer in make, and I can see the holes in the klaf where it was originally tied onto different mountings. Additionally, given the incredible weight of this sefer (50 lbs) it is extremely unlikely that it was originally intended to go onto rollers.

   As far as Iraq goes- I don’t think Iraqi Torahs have been on rollers any time in recent history. I have the antiquities catalogs for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and several other Jewish museums. They list and provide photos of Iraqi Torah scrolls going back to the first part of the 19th century and they are all in boxes. Incidentally, the Algerian Torahs in the catalogs are a mixed bag – most are in boxes, but a few re on rollers.

   Comment by Rabbi Avraham Chaim Bloomenstiel, Sofer — August 13, 2009 @ 9:31 am

4. 

   Thanks! We have a GREAT webmaster and designer as well – they get most of the credit.

   Comment by Rabbi Avraham Chaim Bloomenstiel, Sofer — October 29, 2009 @ 11:11 pm

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