Community Corner

Chabad of Brandon Celebrates, Parades Its New Torah

A parade Feb. 12 welcomed the completion of a newly scribed Torah in the Greater Brandon area, the result of an 18-month campaign to raise funds and commission a Torah for Chabad of Brandon.

 

More than 100 people, including rabbis from throughout the country, were on hand in Greater Brandon on Feb. 12 to witness the culmination of an 18-month campaign to raise funds for and then commission a new Torah for Chabad of Brandon.

Formed in 2004, Chabad of Brandon had been using a loaned Torah for its Saturday services, according to an article written by D'Ann White, editor of the Bloomingdale-Riverview Patch.

Find out what's happening in Brandonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

As reported, members 18 months ago began raising the money needed to purchase a Torah of their own. With the funding in hand, scribes armed with only quill pens and a specially mixed natural ink spent a year re-creating the more than 300,000 handwritten characters that make up Chabad of Brandon's new Torah scroll.

Members agreed to raise the $35,000 needed in memory of Nosson Deitsch, 21, a rabbinical student who was killed in a jet ski accident in May 2009 when he came to Brandon to assist at Chabad of Brandon during the Jewish Lag B'omer celebration.

Find out what's happening in Brandonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

On Feb. 12, scribe Rabbi Yochanan Klein put the finishing touches on the scroll, adding the Hebrew names of Chabad of Brandon members as members looked on. It is customary to leave the new Sefer Torah incomplete to afford people the honor of adding a letter to the Torah.

"By doing this, it is as if they participated in the writing of the whole Sefer Torah, for without their letter, the entire Sefer is incomplete," Chabad of Brandon leader Rabbi Mendel Rubashkin told the Bloomingdale-Riverview Patch.

Klein explained to spectators that the ink used in the Torah is made from a gum arabic, a natural gum taken from the acacia tree, and that he must redip the pen once every two letters.

"The Torah scroll is one of the Jewish people's most sacred objects," said Rubashkin. "The average process takes over a year to produce the beautiful workmanship of a Torah scroll. When a scroll is completed, it calls for great celebration by the city greeting it to its new home, the Holy Ark of the Synagogue."

White reports that on Feb. 12, "a group of rabbis danced throughout the streets, taking turns carrying a newly completed Torah in a celebratory parade that ended at 3005 Waylon Lane in Valrico, the home of the new Torah."

For more on this report, and a gallery of photographs, visit Chabad of Brandon Hosts Completion Ceremony for Torah.


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