La vie soferet - Rodeph Sholom

[hatam_soferet]

A very Rodeph-Sholom couple of weeks.

Rodeph Sholom, for those not intimately familiar with Manhattan’s Upper West Side Jewish Scene, is a Reform synagogue of epic proportions, with after-school religious school program, and eponymous Reform day school a few blocks away. I have the good fortune to visit them relatively often.

Week before last I was

Comments

Torah fixing and suchlike

[agw0]

Your comment about the pencil markings reminds me of an incident reported R' Hillel Yisraeli (whom I know through the Conservative Yeshiva).

He mentioned that he was supposed to lein at some minyan. When he opened up the scroll, he found that some "helpful" person had penciled in the niqqud and the ta'amim. Since it was Shabbat, he wasn't able to erase same. As I recall, he simply couldn't do the leining.

Re: Torah fixing and suchlike

[hatam_soferet]

Yup. Nikud makes a scroll pasul, and you mayn't remove it on shabbat.

Some people even put the nikud in pen. Blue ballpoint's popular, for some perverted reason.