The recovery of forgotten mesorah and lost minhagim that once flourished in the pre-modern world of safrus

Photos: Elchonon Kotler

When Avraham Strauss received his first calligraphy set as a young boy, he had no idea that his new hobby would one day develop into restoring the ancient scripts from as far back as the Rishonim, a mission that could have a ripple effect on the entire STaM industry. His is a quiet revolution: the recovery of forgotten mesorah and lost minhagim that once flourished in the pre-modern world of safrus

IN a small room adjoining his home in Ramat Beit Shemesh, ink pools in a tiny dish and the sound of a feather quill scratching parchment faintly echoes, as Rabbi Avraham Strauss puts the final letters on the last folio of a nearly complete sefer Torah. But this is no ordinary Torah scroll — it’s a hands-on, living mesorah of how sacred texts were once written.

Rabbi Strauss is at the forefront of a small cadre of sofrim whose mission is to bring back ancient writing traditions that might have otherwise been relegated to the dustbin of history. His is a quiet revolution: the recovery of forgotten mesorah and lost scripts that once flourished in the premodern Jewish world. It’s a complex tapestry of mesorah, halachic debate, historical shifts, and practical questions surrounding ksav, sofrim, and our relationship with earlier generations.

The sefer Torah — the 12th one he’s written, this one a self-commission in fulfillment of the mitzvah of writing a personal Torah scroll — is a testimony to his research. It’s written primarily according to the custom of the Rema, the great 16th-century Ashkenazi posek, with certain stylistic nuances that today have virtually disappeared.

Still, there is no copy of the Rema’s sefer Torah in existence today, so how does he know what was different than the modern standard?

“It’s true that no one has a copy of the Rema’s sefer Torah,” Rabbi Strauss explains, “but what we do have are some very old scrolls that we know are pretty much identical, that followed the Rema’s traditions. In the manuscripts department at Hebrew University, you can find entire sifrei Torah from up to 700 years ago, so we see the differences between then and now.”

Rabbi Strauss says that World War II was an inevitable cause of a rupture in European scribal tradition because so much was lost, both in terms of documentation and in sofrim themselves, who passed on certain traditions that vanished after the war. That’s also when the Rema’s Torah scroll — which endured for close to 400 years — disappeared.

“We have accurate documentation that at the beginning of the war, the Rema’s sefer Torah was hidden with a Christian family,” Rabbi Strauss relates. “But they were too frightened to keep it,  so they sent it back to the Jews, who hid it along with other scrolls at the gate to the entrance to the old Krakow cemetery, which the Germans later destroyed.”

After the war, three different sifrei Torah turned up by dealers, each one claiming to be the Rema’s scroll. But it turns out they had been “corrected” to make them correspond with the opinions of the Rema, and they were fakes.

“You didn’t need to be a big expert to see that those scrolls were tampered with,” Rabbi Strauss says.

In the ensuing years, there became a dire need for standardization in the STaM [an acronym for sifrei Torah, tefillin, and mezuzos] industry, which had become a free-for-all market; in 1976, Vaad Mishmeres Stam was established by Rabbi Dovid Leib Greenfield with the backing of Rav Shmuel HaLevi Wosner, in order to get rid of the charlatans, create an umbrella of supervision across the industry, and make sure every sofer complies with all halachic requirements.

But with the blessing of quality control came some collateral damage as well, according to Rabbi Strauss. Accreditation and accountability meant a huge and long-awaited clean-up and elevation of industry standards, but at the same time, the modern halachic rulings and highly regulated supervision meant that a lot of the old traditions were either lost, ignored, or considered bedi’eved. Some kosher, even mehudar prewar STaM items might even be considered passul today.