Mikveh Yisrael
Mesianic Jewish Synagogue. Erie, PA.
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Times of Services
10:00 AM – 3:30 PM Shabbat (Saturday Mornings)
Our Torah
Mikveh Yisrael’s Sefer Torah was brought to us from the Holy Land of Yisrael and had previously been the possession of a congregation from Eastern Europe whose initials were carved into the Etz Chaim many, many years before we took possession of it. Our Sefer Torah is over 200 years old and survived the years of the Holocaust. The way to be able to tell the age of a Sefer Torah is by the way the Hebrew script is written on each column. If the Hebrew script begins each column with the Hebrew letter “vav” the scroll has been written within the last 100 years, but if the Hebrew script at the beginning of each column begins with different Hebrew letter, the scroll is 200 years old or older. It has only been in the last 100 years that the Sefer Torah Scrolls have begun to be written with a “vav”. A Hebrew word beginning with the letter vav indicates the prefix “and”, giving the Torah the idea of continuing thought, from one column to the other. Before this tradition each column began with different letters.