Sofer stops by Brunswick temple to restore Torahs

Jan. 28—As he reattached the parchment of one of Temple Beth Tefilloh's Torahs from its atzei chaim — or roller — Sofer Neil Yerman couldn't promise he'd be able to focus on an interview with The News on Wednesday, only that he'd try.

"Despite the myth of being good at multitasking, we are actually commanded to give all our attention to the task at hand," Yerman said.

"The Torah commands us to love our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength, with all our being ... If I talk while I do this, I'm not giving all of my being."

A sofer is a Jewish scribe authorized to transcribe holy texts and other religious writings. A Torah is one such text. It has exactly 304,805 letters, Yerman said, and he's had the fortune to write eight of them and restore hundreds in his roughly 40 years of work. He's content with the 2.5 million letters he's put to parchment, saying that it was enough practice.

One of his specialties is Torah restoration. He has a workshop back home in New York that he affectionately called his "little Torah hospital." He'd taken one of the Brunswick temple's Torahs home minus the atzei chaim, and sewed it back onto the rollers Wednesday.

He stayed in town for three days earlier this week to restore another, bringing back a segment that was removed for restoration as well.

There are five primary parts to restoration: mending holes and tears, sewing, reinforcing, lettering and cleaning.

The first step had been done already, he said, but explained the process. Because the Torah is written on parchment rather than paper, tears can be mended together similarly to leather, unless the tear passes through a sacred name. Then the whole segment must be replaced. Otherwise, holes can be patched, and missing words rewritten.

If a segment of the Torah had to be removed for repair, it is then sewn back in using giddin, a Hebrew word for a thread made of the sinew of a kosher animal, either goat, calf, sheep or deer.

"It's very strong," he said, pulling on the thread to demonstrate. "That actually hurt a little bit," he laughed.

Parchment and thread are both made from animal parts, and Yerman uses an animal feather to write by ink and quill. This is due to another Jewish law, that no part of an animal should go to waste, captured in the Hebrew word "avera."

"It's like saying 'Thank you God for giving us this sustenance for our body, soul and mind, but we're going to throw the rest away,'" Yerman said.

Tears that run to the edge of the parchment are reinforced with thicker patches of parchment that look almost like adhesive bandages.

From there, any faded or cracked letter is carefully copied over with a quill — all Torahs must be handwritten, per the laws God gave to Israel.

Finally, the parchment is cleaned.

"It's not dry cleaning, but a method of dry cleaning. I'm not taking it to the one-hour cleaners, you know," Yerman joked.

He has a wide variety of tools for restoration work, from his needle and quills to all manner of hand tools. He pulled out a Tikkun for reference at one point. A Tikkun contains the exact text of the Torah in a portable format. The word itself hints at its purpose, as it translates to something like "repair" he said. He was quite happy with his little copy, which is around 120 years old.

Another nod to his heritage, Yerman also uses specifically turkey and goose feathers for restoring script. He referred to the Tikkun as his "hard drive" and the feathers as his "software."

"I am so 2,500 years old. Not literally," He joked.

Restoration isn't precisely the right word, however, as Yerman isn't restoring them to pristine condition most of the time. It's not desirable to do so, for some Torah. One can learn much from working with an old copy, and one of those in the possession of Temple Beth Tefilloh is easily over 100 years old. In it, he readily identified Ukrainian and Belarusian influences in the script.

From a practical standpoint, the quills actually come in handy. Early in the text, the script was most decidedly of Ukrainian Jewish heritage, while later in the document it exhibited a more Belarusian style. Using a pen might present a challenge, but Yerman was quick with his knife in whittling the end of his quills to match the style of each segment.

The style doesn't necessarily indicate where Beth Tefilloh's particular Torahs came from, but it does indicate by whom the scribes who wrote them were trained.

He's worked with a lot of Torahs from that area of the world. During Germany's conquests of the Nazi era, many Jews in those regions were killed and their possessions and heritage destroyed. From the area which that Torah may have come, he said nearly 90% of the Jews were killed by the Nazis.

So much of what was peculiar to them — local customs, dress, culture — died with them. He'd rather preserve that than impose a standardized style on what is decidedly not a standardized document. The words are the same across every Torah, but how they are presented adds layer upon layer of meaning.

"As with any good restoration, the hand of the restorer should be invisible," Yerman explained. "We're getting something from our ancestors and what they taught their children."

If it wasn't obvious, one of the great pleasures in his job comes from studying and restoring the script, he said.

Much of the Hebrew letters are descendants of those used by ancient Sumerian, Ugaritic and Phoenician cultures. Back then, written works used symbols that maintained some of the aspects of what they were supposed to represent. A symbol for an animal might reflect some physical aspect of that animal, for example.

You layer on the styles of lettering developed in different parts of the world, and you have layers of meaning in each letter that goes back millennia, he said. Studying the text apart from its implicit meaning is a fascination of his.

"It's an amazing area of contemplation and meditation," Yerman said.

In liberal Judaism, the Torah is to be a light to the nations, he said. It's essential to all people of faith to have an understanding of other faiths and to have conversations with one another.

But taking these little trips through time and seeing the extremely wide variety of cultural influences on Jewish tradition is also a reminder. Resting his hand on one of Beth Tefilloh's Torahs, he briefly summed up a chief lesson of the trials of his people's diaspora.

"This is your only permanent home and your story," Yerman said.