Saturday, December 12, 2009

World's Smallest Torah Scroll



Shuki Freiman is one of my favorite judaica artist and his latest project was the development of this alleged smallest Sefer Torah, along with the special Etz Haim and Aron Kodesh.

Shuki's style is traditional, yet he always manages to differentiate himself from everyone else. For those of you visiting Jerusalem, he has a new shop in the popular Mamila mall, featuring many of his most special works, including this revolutionary Seder plate.

According to what I can see in the video, the Sefer Torah's ktav is Ashkenazi, possibly Arizal but I can't see too well (too small..!), and it's quite nice for such small Torah. The gaps in the top and bottom of the Klaf are rather too small, but it was done like that to make the Torah as small as possible, more specifically, 4.3 centimeters in width.

Shuki is today a very expensive artist and I can only begin to imagine what he's asking for the Torah. My guess is U$450,000, but the sky is the limit for these kind of things.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

My Progress #4: Megillat Shir Hashirim

I finally managed to finish my Megillat Shir Hashirim, which took some 4 months to write. I had a very tough time writing this one since the klaf was quite bad, specially in the very first column, and this dragged the process more since I couldn't write as fast as usual.

This highlights how important it is to look for top-quality klaf; if you can't get it, wait until you find a good one. I couldn't erase mistakes properly and I even did the capital sin of a Sofer - I made a small hole while trying to correct something. It doesn't matter so much since I managed to "place it" just in between two words - look in the last line of the forth column.

Additionally, I used a computerized Tikkun (from which I copy the Megilla layout) which was awful - I was forced to stretch and squash words in almost every line. Now I know: only buy copies of hand-written Tikkunim.

But Shir Hashirim is fun to write, since I can use it every week (there's a minhag of reciting it every Shabbat-eve) and it's shorter than Megillat Esther. Now my next project is to write a large Mezuza - stay tuned!


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