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Torah pointer, Iran, 20th century CE

#jewish #judaism #religious objects #torah pointer #yad #jewish art #iranian jewish #swana jewish #iran #ایران

Just Friends (2018) dir. Annemarie van de Mond

Olive branch yad

New adventures in Jewish crafts: I made yadaim (pointers used for reading Torah) for my parents for their wedding anniversary and my dad's birthday! They're both avid Torah readers, often both leyn on the same day, and when my dad (inevitably) hasn't learned his, my stepmom gives him hand signals (chironomy).

The shafts are made with baked and sealed polymer clay. The hands are also baked polymer clay, but they've been electroformed to encase them in about a millimeter of copper, which I then polished and sealed.

These two are my dad's:

And this is my stepmom's (note how they have a matching set):

I carved a leafy vine twining up the shaft from the hand (the Torah is a tree of life for those who grasp it etc etc), and then electroformed copper onto the vine, and sealed it in with E6000 jewelry glue so it wouldn't flake. Note that this yad is left-handed, just like my stepmother. There are very few left-handed yadaim out there (I checked and it seems halakhically okay), so I felt it would be meaningful to her to have a yad that felt like a true extension of her own hand (I was right).

Close-up of the wood-like texture on my dad's larger maroon yad:

Close-ups of the hand that went into the left-handed yad:

This was super fun and surprisingly not that hard; I churned all 3 out in just under a week—definitely going to make more (and may need to explore a larger electroforming bath lol)

#jumblr #jewish art #torah reading #yad #judaism #electroforming #crafts