As Rabbi Kraus explained in his 5783 Yom Kippur morning sermon, the 613th commandment in the Torah, the final commandment, is understood to be the instruction for each of us to write a Sefer Torah, and the act of writing even a single Hebrew letter in the Sefer Torah is sufficient to fulfill that commandment. Within our own congregation, there had long been a desire to have another scroll small enough for our B’nai Mitzvah students to hold comfortably, but big enough to read easily. The idea of bringing a new Torah to our congregation surfaced roughly a decade ago and was explored by a small group of BETC members led by Todd Shuster (z”l). That original group developed a proposal for BETC to scribe a Torah, but funds were not available to proceed.
