Torah Scribing: A Recipe for a Living Tradition

Torah scribe, Julie Seltzer, compares the experience of finding her belated mother’s hand-written banana bread recipe on a worn index card and the writing of a Torah scroll. How can the handwriting of each of these items speak to us, convey care, and transmit tradition?

Julie Seltzer is a Torah scribe and educator with a BA in theatre arts from Brown University. She has been writing new Torah scrolls since 2009, when she was Scribe-in-Residence at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA. A video of Julie and this project can be found here. Julie also offers Torah repair, and runs interactive educational workshops, offering a hands-on glimpse into the world of Torah scrolls. Julie resides in the Hudson Valley, NY with her Israeli mutt Shusha. Her hand is featured on Sefaria’s homepage.

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