Showing the sefer haftara in their care for the week were Temple Beth-El Mekor Chayim men’s club members, from left, Stuart Kaback, Michael Scher, David Salomon, Lance Kandl, Phil Stein, Leonard Farber, and club president Chuck Leavitt.
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February 12, 2009
For members of the men’s club of Temple Beth-El Mekor Chayim, this past weekend — designated as the club’s weekend — had two highlights, one familiar and one entirely new to them.
The Conservative Cranford congregation took part in the World Wide Wrap, an annual event shared for the ninth year by men’s clubs around the world, celebrating the tradition of putting on and reciting the blessings for tefillin, or phylacteries.
Chuck Leavitt, president of the temple’s men’s club, said the members celebrated the event with their rabbi, Akiba Lubow, and students from the Beth-El Mekor Chayim religious school. They showed the youngsters how to make tefillin — the little leather boxes containing small pieces of parchment inscribed with liturgical verses — and how to use the leather bindings to attach them to their foreheads and hands.
This year, the weekend had a second, special element: the presence of a special sefer haftara, a handwritten scroll containing the passages from the books of the Prophets read on Shabbat and holidays through the year.
The Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs commissioned an Israeli sofer to inscribe the haftara scroll in 2003. Since then, it has been traveling around North America from one men’s club to another. Each congregation has it for about a week. Where the distances are great, it is sent by a commercial service; within a region, members hand-deliver it themselves.
Over the past few weeks, the scroll has been with various New Jersey communities and will be going on to more.
Unlike Torah scrolls, which are written with tightly defined constraints, the text of the haftara scroll is written with vowels and cantillation marks, which provide guides to chanting. Leavitt said the Beth-El Mekor Chayim men’s club members got to read from the scroll at a midweek gathering, and again when they led the Shabbat service on Friday night. “It has large lettering, so it’s easier to read than the books,” he said.
At some temples, the scroll is used by youngsters for their bar or bat mitzva ceremonies. That wasn’t the case at Beth-El Mekor Chayim this weekend. But — as with other congregations — Leavitt said its presence also had a fund-raising aspect: Parents or grandparents can commission a “mini-scroll,” written the same way as the large one, bearing just the haftara passage to be read by the youngster at the bar or bat mitzva service as a special memento of the day.
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