diary of a sofer - part 29

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Tikkun for Megillat Hashoah

Being a sofer has meant that I have presented and appeared in all sorts of places. However some of my favourites weren’t in the normal Jewish environment of the cheder, synagogue or educational day. And, finally free from the shackles of my old website’s 15Mb I can now share these with you.

In what I often refer to as my ‘other life’, I am involved in Direct Marketing for Government trying to get people to do or not so things - like give up smoking, not take drugs, get a pension, become a nurse etc and many of these activities are very worthwhile. however these are very much team efforts and we often employ the services of creative agencies. One such agency is known as WWAV and are very famous in the direct marketing industry.

They very much believe in being passionate about things and particularly creative things, and when they heard about what I did in what little spare time I have, they asked me to come a speak to their creatives and

agency team. This was very interesting and a very different audience for me.  By all accounts even though 99.9% of them were not Jewish they enjoyed it and found it fascinating.  They even shot a little video - which I have slightly edited down - it was a little long - and you can see this by clicking here or on the graphic right.

The other slightly odd presentation was to an audience of only one - a lady, Julie Herman, armed with a very good microphone who was doing a slot for a BBC World Service programme.  The only draw back for this - as I pointed out of the time was that sofrut is rather visual and other than the very small sound that a quill makes scraping across the parchment or the rustling of parchment when you roll it up - an audio treat is isn’t! Nonetheless she spent well over an hour trying to make my studio make some noise and interviewing me about sofrut. An hour of material condensed into a few minutes. My bit is in the middle but the whole article is interesting.