Shalom, all!

Here are some pictures from today’s writing – there are a few lines left in order to reach today’s quota, but this is the progress thus far.   A friend sent me an interesting question today, asking why the lines of writing, and even some of the constituent strokes of the letters, don’t look perfectly straight in the photos posted.

Under the heat of my drafting lamp and of my arms on the parchment, the parchment wrinkles and warps.  So, in the photos. you are not seeing erratic lines on a flat surface, rather you are seeing straight lines on an erratic surface…

(more…)

From http://www.neighborsgo.com/stories/44627

Levine Academy Students Learn the

Art of Writing Ancient Texts

Rabbi Bloomenstiel shows the Levine Academy Kindergarten students a 500-year-old section of the Torah

In an age when email has replaced posted mail, when desktop publishing has replaced typesetting, when an iPod has replaced a CD, and when a Kindle has replaced the printed book, there is one thing has not been touched by time or technology: the writing of the Sefer Torah – the Five Books of Moses. A scribe of the 21^st Century creates the Torah in exactly the same manner as a scribe from thousands of years ago; both governed by extremely strict rules to ensure that the Torah is kosher or proper/pure.

On Tuesday, October 20, Torah Scribe Rabbi Avraham Bloomenstiel captivated the Levine Academy students by sharing the secrets of this ancient craft. Unlike any other document or book, he told the students, the Torah must be created by following a set of very stringent guidelines…
(more…)

Since this is an Ashkenaz Sefer Torah, it will be attached to rollers, called in Hebrew – Eitzei Chayyim – Trees of Life.

It is customary to decorate the rollers to beautify the Torah scroll.

With great thanks to G-D, I am happy to announce that a donor has generously sponsored the rollers for the CTC Torah.

The proposed design for our rollers attached at the end of this post…

(more…)

Today I finished columns 12 & 13.  That takes me halfway through the 4th yeria (page) which I hope to finish after Shabbos.   That places us at a little over 6% completion, page wise.

Here are some more pics of these columns:

Tops of Columns 12 & 13

Bottoms of Columns 12 & 13

As always, please remember that it is your generous support that makes this project possible.  Please help us take this Sefer Torah to completion by sponsoring a day of writing…
(more…)

Today I got well into the 4th page -

There were some odd problems with the first column and the writing came out below my normal standard of acceptability.  I debated rewriting it for a long time before deciding, in the interests of time, on correcting and rewriting only the parts that bothered me the most…

(more…)