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Monday, June 25, 2018

A female Torah-scribe in Hamilton, Ontario

SOFERET WATCH: An ancient text message. Hamiltonian Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli, a rabbi and scribe, spent two years handwriting a Torah scroll (Emma Reilly, The Hamilton Spectator).
Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli is a modern-day woman with an ancient calling.

Lavery-Yisraeli, 33, is a Hamiltonian, a rabbi, and a scribe. Her work involves writing documents in Hebrew in tiny, uniform script — labour that is both painstaking and prayerful.

In the past several years, Lavery-Yisraeli has written dozens of mezuzah scrolls (called klafs), which are placed in decorative and protective cases and hung on the doorposts in Jewish homes, as well as her biggest accomplishment: a Torah scroll.

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Female scribes are still a rarity, as they have been back to antiquity. But there have always been some. For more on modern sofrot, see here and links. Jen Taylor Friedman, mentioned in the article above, also appears there. And that post also collects past posts on female scribes from antiquity to the present.

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