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Nov. 22, 2013
Restoring sacred treasures
Scribe duo brings two sifrei Torah home to Victoria’s Emanu-El.
JAN LEE
Life often has a way of coming full circle. For Congregation Emanu-El, that moment occurred last month when it welcomed its two oldest Torah scrolls back home from the United Kingdom in a joyous hachnasat Torah (an “ushering in” of the Torah). The two sifrei Torah had been sent to husband and wife scribes Avielah Barclay and Marc Michaels in London, England, to be restored in honor of the congregation’s 150-year anniversary. The scrolls were transported to London in June 2012, where they remained until their return to Victoria this October.
The decision to have the scrolls restored made practical sense for the Vancouver Island congregation, said Rabbi Harry Brechner. “We are restoring the building” and “these are the original Torah scrolls that were brought to Victoria,” he explained. Emanu-El’s members “felt we should ensure that they maintain their kashrut,” he added, so that the scrolls could continue to be used for future generations. It was a decision that also helped answer questions about the age of the scrolls and try to confirm their provenance.
“We knew that they came up from San Francisco. How they got to San Francisco, though, is not clear,” Brechner said. From records and research conducted by one of the congregants, Adele Vernon, they knew that the scrolls would have arrived around the time the congregation started, in the 1860s. But various details in the scrolls – particularly the larger of the two – suggested that the scrolls were actually much older.
Michaels and Barclay’s work confirmed that the sifrei Torah were actually at least 300 years old, and more rare than had originally been thought. Michaels, who goes under the name Mordechai Pinchas for his professional work as a sofer, said that he and Barclay were able to identify letters whose shape and distinctive scroll suggested its scribe had been trained in a particular kabbalistic style of writing, and had probably lived in an area now described as central Germany.
“The ones that learned the mystical tradition would have all put in these features when they wrote a Torah,” said Barclay. She said this makes the scrolls all the more exceptional. The art that was associated with this type of writing in Europe was almost completely erased by the Holocaust. “Nobody writes these kinds of things in Torahs any more except the Yemenite community,” she said, and “a few mystics who are Sephardi or Mizrahi.”
According to Michaels, the two scrolls presented some interesting challenges. Not all scribes that reviewed the kabbalistic script appear to have agreed with its presentation. Michaels said he found evidence of the letter “pey” that had its ornate detail written over by a later sofer.
“A scribe, at some point in history, had started overwriting the letter pey, where it was a kabbalistic, spiral pey. And he had just gone over the spiral with a big blob because he obviously didn’t agree with that old-fashioned tradition. So we put them back, because that is what it was supposed to be – that’s what the original scribe intended. We are trying to keep it true; looking at it as an esthetic restoration job, as much as making it kosher job.”
He also arranged to have the rollers replaced on the smaller Torah, which were in need of tender-loving care. For that job, he contracted the help of a local English woodworker, a Holocaust survivor who was familiar with turning wood for such delicate projects.
“[We] commissioned him to do a pair of atzei chaim that would sort of fit the old style ... and he weathered them just a bit as well,” said Michaels. The handles were sewn onto the scroll after it safely arrived at the synagogue last month.
For Barclay, who hails from the Victoria, B.C., area, the return of the sifrei Torah to Congregation Emanu-El on Oct. 20 signified a sense of personal completion, as well. Victoria was not only her home for a time, but the place from where she embarked on her decision to become a soferet (female scribe). Barclay said that the return of the scrolls, and her ability to be able to take part in their restoration made this a uniquely special event for her.
“I am lucky enough that I get to do this sort of work for a lot of different communities but, of course, this being my home community and the original community that supported me in my interest in the field, it’s extra special for me to have helped them back,” she said, noting that she has a special understanding of how precious the scrolls were since she had attended synagogue there when she lived in Victoria.
“I mean, every scroll has a history and every community has a relationship with their scrolls,” she added, “but this is one that I understood intimately on a personal level. So it was really like a big family reunion on some level.”
The return of the Torahs also marked a special transition in her growth as a soferet. It was almost exactly a decade ago that she embarked on her career as an Orthodox-certified soferet. In 2003, after several years of tutelage and self-study both in Vancouver and Israel, she left Victoria for Jerusalem to complete the final leg of her studies, which were accomplished with the help of two tutors trained in the meticulous halachah of sofrut.
Becoming the first soferet in at least 200 years, and the first such scribe in Canada’s history, can be a heady experience. But, for Barclay, what keeps her dedicated to her work is a love of the trade.
“As far as making a name for myself, I like just enough attention in PR or media, or whatever it is, that I keep working. Whatever I think of myself, I would like to think it is my reputation for work” that matters most, Barclay said.
There has, indeed, been a lot of press. After her certification was announced, news spread, with many mistakenly calling her the first soferet in history. Barclay said it was important to her to make sure the record was straight.
“I felt really uncomfortable about that,” she said, especially because she didn’t know if it was true.
“You have to be so careful,” she continued. ”[If] it turned out it was not true, then how do you back out on that? You would never want people to be misled, especially in matters that are spiritual or matters that have to do with money.”
That question set her on a path of exploration that spanned the history of sofrut, an exhaustive search for Jewish female scribes that eventually yielded some surprising discoveries.
“There were 12 of them that I was able to unearth,” Barclay said, “in lots of different parts of the Jewish world: in Germany and in Iraq and in Yemen, Rome, you know.” Every 100 to 200 years, she continued, “there’s another woman [scribe]. Their work has been left behind, or someone wrote about them but didn’t mention their names. So women were certainly doing [sofrut].”
While some may think that it would be disappointing to find they aren’t the first, Barclay said for her it was “a relief.” She was pleased to see that other women had dedicated themselves to the trade, as well.
“There’s quite a lot of women doing it now,” she said of developments in the field over the last decade or so. She added, laughing, “I’m pleased that I am not as special as I used to be. I think that’s a really important goal for Jews and Jewish women and Judaism – for it to become more commonplace, for women to be available to do this work.”
Just the same, she said she is grateful to the female scribes that preceded her. “I see them as being like my foremothers in a way,” Barclay said.
Both Barclay and Michaels are dedicated to furthering knowledge of sofrut. In London, they give lectures, teach Hebrew classes and tutor would-be Jewish scribes. They even run a publishing company that focuses on the art of sofrut. For both of them, their teachings reflect a belief in the need to pass on the knowledge of the art to those who are willing and interested in learning.
“Personally, I think Jews should have access to [the knowledge]…. They should be able to learn how to write their own mezuzahs, for example, since that is a responsibility of each Jew,” Barclay said. “It’s a different matter to write your own sefer Torah,” which is also an obligation in Jewish tradition.
“But I just think, like I said, anyone who has the physical and mental ability to do it properly should have access to [the information],” she continued. “The more fully functioning Jews can be, the more we can spread our wings [and] I think the better for all of us.”
Jan Lee’s articles have been published in B’nai B’rith Magazine, DailyRabbi.com and cjvoices.org (Voices of Conservative and Masorti Judaism). She is also a regular contributor to the business and ecology publication TriplePundit.com, where she writes on sustainable business practices throughout the world. Her blogs can be found at MulticulturalJew.blogspot.ca, and blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/jan-lee.
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