The International STa"M Forum

I was asked to check all the seams in a sefer Torah, and to fix any tsuras ha'os issues that I saw in passing, for a Torah with a number of damaged seams.  If anyone in the New York area could give me an idea of the going hourly rate for this in our area, either by commenting here or by e-mail to sofrus AT dovberger.com, I'd be most appreciative. A zisn Pesach!

A friend has asked me to do some basic repair work on his shul's megillah - it appears to be approximately 75-100 years old, and the lettering is virtually pristine, so in terms of reinking, it shouldn't be much work.  The larger problem is that the edges of the klaf are weak, and there are places where the klaf is almost torn/very heavily creased.  (In at least one place, the klaf has been reinforced with scotch tape, which I will obviously remove, and have told my friend that this is, to say the least, sub-optimal.) My plan is to use thin matleisim around the border of the megillah to reinforce as necessary, but there is one problem - the back of the klaf is mashuach and very, very crumbly.  (The front, luckily, seems to not be.)  My feeling is that if I glued a matlis to the klaf, it wouldn't adhere, and, to the extent that it did, the matlis would come off with the coating quite quickly. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to deal with this?  I...

Sefarim that are only ever used for one reading tend to wear out in that area. On Shabbos Chol Hamoed, we noticed some faded letters in the maftir sefer (not our maftir, but the one for Shavuos a little earlier on the amud.) While repairing them on Sunday,  I found many other letters beginning to peel. I also found out that the last yeriah in Pinchas and the first one in Mattos had already been replaced once due to this problem and I was fixing the new yerios. Constantly rolling over the same portion for decades takes its toll. Gabbaim can easily prevent that from happening by rotating their shul's Sifrei Torah. This is a cross post from my own blog where I wrote about it at greater length.