For the first time ever, members of the public will be able to buy letters, sentences, portions or an entire Torah scroll handwritten by a scribe in the mountain fortress atop Masada, the site where 2,000 years ago, Jews revolted against Roman forces attempting to seize and enslave the last of the Jews rebelling against Roman rule.
As part of the Jewish National Fund-USA's "Be Inscribed" campaign, a scribe is currently writing new Torah scrolls in the very same synagogue that once housed the Torahs of Masada. In 2004, the synagogue was rebuilt and a Torah was placed there. Four years later, in 2008, a room was reconditioned to comfortably house a scribe behind a glass wall, affording visitors the opportunity to watch him at work.
The act of creating a new Torah is strenuous, requiring 304,805 letters be written in Hebrew with a quill on calfskin or parchment by a trained scribe.
Upon each scroll's completion, JNF-USA donates the Torah to a community in either in the southern Negev Desert or the Upper Galilee.
"We're building a safe and vibrant land of Israel by scribing Torah scrolls on top of Masada that once symbolized our destruction but now symbolizes our life," said Ron Werner of Denver, JNF-USA's national assistant secretary and president of the board of directors at Alexander Muss High School in Israel, whose campus, just outside of Tel Aviv, received the first such Torah last July.
"Torah is the soul of the Jewish people and our moral compass," affirmed Werner. "By connecting people to Torah, we elevate the whole equation and will build better bonds between Jewry and Israel."
