Photos: Michael Weichbrod/Jerusafilm, courtesy of STAMP
New efforts are being made to raise oversight of the mezuzah industry. Why?
A terrible accident took place in Manette Mayberg’s home in Silver Spring, Maryland, several years ago. She was hosting an event and a guest leaned on a railing at the top of a staircase—and it gave way. The crowd watched in horror as the woman fell to the floor below.
While waiting in the hospital emergency room for news, Mayberg called her rabbi and asked him to check the mezuzahs in her home. “To this day,” she says, “I don’t know why that was my first thought.”
As it turned out, the mezuzah on the door next to the fallen railing wasn’t kosher. “It had a mistake in the word ‘she’arecha—your gates,’” Mayberg says. She was so shaken by this discovery that when she visited the injured woman in the hospital, she asked the family if they had checked their own mezuzahs recently. With their permission, Mayberg sent her rabbi to check the mezuzahs in their home as well.
A magiah (a certified checker of STa”M) examining a mezuzah written by others.
What he found was almost unbelievable. “He sent me a picture of my mezuzah and theirs side by side,” Mayberg recalls with emotion. “The mezuzah on their bedroom door had the identical mistake as our mezuzah. It was clear to me there was some connection between us that we couldn’t understand.” Mayberg continued to visit the woman throughout her long road to a full recovery.
The mezuzah experience stayed in the back of her mind for many years, until Mayberg came across a published letter written by the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He indicated that women have a special responsibility to make sure there are kosher mezuzahs on the doorways of Jewish homes.
“The light went on in my head,” Mayberg says. “This is my tikkun! I couldn’t have prevented what happened, but it wasn’t an accident that it happened in my house. I want to make sure that every Jewish home in the world has a kosher mezuzah as a tikkun for the accident.”
With that, MyZuzah was born.
Mayberg, who with her husband, Louis Mayberg, serves as a trustee of the Mayberg Foundation, founded MyZuzah in 2018 with the mission to put a kosher mezuzah on the front door of every Jewish home in the world. Since its founding, the nonprofit has distributed more than 20,000 mezuzahs to Jewish homes in seventy-two countries. A well-known entrepreneurial philanthropist and national vice president of the OU, Manette Mayberg, is also the founder of the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge (JEIC) and co-founder of Momentum (formerly Jewish Women’s Renaissance Project). MyZuzah provides kosher mezuzahs at a highly subsidized rate along with educational resources. “Mezuzah is beautiful and unique in that it’s a mitzvah that applies to Jews everywhere and all the time,” explains Alex Shapero, MyZuzah’s program director. “And the majority of people who reach out are not part of an organized Jewish community.”
But the founding of MyZuzah has had a ripple effect, leading to new and important efforts to restore transparency and accountability to the mezuzah industry. In fact, a recent partnership between the OU and The STa”M Project is set to radically change the field of STa”M (an acronym for sifrei Torah, tefillin and mezuzah). “We want to see a revolution,” says Rabbi Avraham Lessin, a Jerusalem-based sofer who is the director of The ST”aM Project, also known as STAMP, which is dedicated to restoring transparency and reliability to the field of STa”M.
The “Wild West”
As MyZuzah got up and running, Mayberg’s team set out to find a large and reliable supply of kosher mezuzahs to distribute. Their efforts brought them up close and personal with the mezuzah industry.
How do you know if the sofer has yiras Shamayim? How do you know what kind of parchment and ink were used? We realized a mechanism needed to be implemented to protect the consumer.
Rabbi Lessin was hired to begin checking mezuzahs for MyZuzah. At the time, he had been working for about ten years as a sofer STa”M. He was also involved in the field as a magiah, a certified checker of STa”M written by others. After a while, the MyZuzah staff began to understand the distressing reality that Rabbi Lessin had been seeing for years. “We had a bigger problem than MyZuzah could address,” Rabbi Lessin says. “Not only were there homes without mezuzahs, but there are also people who have mezuzahs, but they’re simply not kosher.”
Soferim must be well versed in the halachot of writing mezuzahs—and they must write with the intention of fulfilling the mitzvah.
Mayberg and her MyZuzah team found a non-transparent international supply chain rife with problems, including abysmally low wages, substandard products and even outright fraud. “My eyes were opened to a whole world I knew nothing about,” recalls Mayberg. “We thought we had a simple mission, but it turned out it was anything but simple.”
“As I was checking mezuzahs, it was clear that these mezuzahs had issues that had been there all along,” says Rabbi Lessin. “We found problems with the writing itself, such as spelling errors and improperly formed letters. This wasn’t a matter of wear and tear. These items were not good from the outset.”
“It was like the Wild West,” says Shapero. “For starters, there is no way for a consumer to know if a mezuzah is kosher. There are lots of halachot involved, and most people aren’t familiar with them. And to make matters worse, mezuzahs are often already wrapped up when you buy them. There are barriers to even seeing what you’re getting.”
One challenge, Rabbi Lessin explains, is that in North America, most mezuzahs available for sale in Judaica or book stores are written in Israel and purchased by a middleman (or two) who then sells them to store owners. Understandably, the middlemen rarely disclose who wrote the mezuzahs they’re selling, out of concern that buyers could go around them and undercut their business.
“Halachically speaking, we are to believe honest Jews if they tell you something is kosher,” explains Rabbi Ezra Sarna, director of Torah and Halacha Initiatives at the OU. “If the store owner is trustworthy, and they trust the businessman they bought the mezuzah from, then the customer isn’t doing anything wrong at all. And yet that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of mezuzahs are pasul,” he says.
The situation reached a point where there were “simply too many problems to ignore,” Rabbi Sarna adds—even without cases of outright fraud. “The sofer gets paid per mezuzah, not by the hour, so he’s incentivized to write as quickly as possible. That makes him much less likely to even check his own work, let alone pay a magiah to review his mezuzahs. And the middlemen often simply trust the sofer that the mezuzah is kosher.”
Rabbi Sarna underscores that communal leaders have long been concerned about problems within the mezuzah market. “Solutions have been tried multiple times,” he says. He notes that there have been successful efforts to raise the standards for mezuzahs sold in certain stores, or in a specific neighborhood, and there are organizations that vouch for the trustworthiness of certain soferim. “But no one had a wide enough reach to change the system.”
Mezuzah 101
The creation of a mezuzah involves three basic ingredients: the materials, the writing and the sofer himself.
The materials include the klaf (parchment) and the ink. What type of skins are being used? What kind of ink? These are questions few consumers ask. Additionally, the handwriting is critical, says Rabbi Moshe Elefant, chief operating officer at OU Kosher and co-author of The Complete Mezuzah Guide. Does the sofer have the proper knowledge to write the letters accurately? Safrut (the ritual writing penned by a sofer) adheres to a strict set of rules, and seemingly small details can disqualify a mezuzah. Misspelled words or misshapen letters can render a mezuzah pasul, for example. If the sofer does not have the proper halachic knowledge, it doesn’t matter how beautiful the mezuzah looks. [See the sidebar on page 30.]
Finally, there is the sofer himself. A sofer may be a highly skilled expert in the halachot related to STa”M, or he may be an individual who took a crash course in safrut and has nice handwriting. And critically: is he a G-d-fearing person?
A mezuzah has to be written carefully, with every letter formed properly. The halachah states that if one wrote a letter and then the following letter and then realized that there was an error in the previous letter, he cannot go back and fix it. This is because the letters must be written “k’sidran,” in order; if they are written out of order, the mezuzah is not kosher.
“Let’s assume a sofer writes an entire mezuzah, and when he gets to the last letter he realizes there’s a problem with the second-to-the-last letter,” says Rabbi Elefant. “Halachically speaking, he cannot fix it; he must start all over again. You need a sofer with genuine yiras Shamayim, because only Hashem will know if the sofer started over again or chose not to.”
“So when you buy a mezuzah, how do you know if the sofer has yiras Shamayim? How do you know what kind of parchment and ink were used? We realized a mechanism needed to be implemented to protect the consumer,” says Rabbi Elefant.
“Dishonest people will always take advantage,” continues Rabbi Elefant. “They’re motivated to make products at low cost and sell them at high prices. Plus, sophisticated technology that didn’t exist previously has introduced new ways to mimic a real mezuzah.”
Unfortunately, those in the field have no shortage of horror stories to share—of high-end copiers being used to print mezuzahs, or non-Jewish workers hired to handwrite the words on parchment.
There was no transparency in the industry. . . We felt it was time to tackle the problem. We needed to do for STa”M what the OU did for kashrus on food so many years ago.
Rabbi Elefant shares one such story. An Israel-based sofer with a solid reputation called a technician to fix his copy machine. The technician was quite surprised to see that the copy machine was located in the bathroom. He couldn’t understand why anyone would do that. He soon discovered that the sofer was not actually writing the mezuzahs he was selling. He was using one perfect mezuzah and feeding klaf into the machine to produce hundreds of mezuzahs. The technician, who wasn’t religious, realized something was wrong. It was clear that the copy machine was being deliberately kept in the bathroom to hide unethical behavior. “The technician went to the local rabbi of the community, and that’s how the sofer was exposed,” says Rabbi Elefant. “Who knows how many people purchased those mezuzahs?”
Time for Change
The best solution to the problems afflicting the mezuzah market, Rabbi Lessin thought, would be to make a clear delineation between the mitzvah and the money by having a nonprofit organization oversee the production and checking of STa”M.
Through the OU STa”M Pikuach (oversight) Initiative, consumers can now ask for OU mezuzahs. The certification assures that the mezuzah underwent a rigorous quality assurance process.
“There was no transparency in the industry,” says Rabbi Lessin. “We felt it was time to tackle the problem. We needed to do for STa”M what the OU did for kashrus on food so many years ago.”
With support from the Mayberg Foundation, Rabbi Lessin founded the STa”M Project, or STAMP, an Israel-based nonprofit, in 2019. STAMP’s mission: to create a worldwide STa”M market that is transparent and regulated, and to educate the public about the halachic requirements, and importance of the mitzvot, related to STa”M. “Remember the great slogan of the famous men’s clothing store Syms: ‘An educated consumer is our best customer,’” says Rabbi Lessin. “When it comes to STa”M, the idea is the same.”
STAMP’s flagship initiative has been to create an official process to verify and certify that mezuzahs are kosher. Rabbi Lessin envisions a world where everyone looks for certification on a mezuzah before they buy it, just like they check for a hechsher on their food. Three years ago, STAMP partnered with the OU to advance its mission and reach a wider audience. The OU contributions to the project are both internal and outward facing. “OU Kosher is a supervisory agency and we were approached to advise on certain aspects of their supervisory program,” explains Rabbi Elefant. Beyond that, as a result of the OU’s continuous oversight of STAMP’s operations, the OU places its logo on each mezuzah. “The well-known OU logo that has earned the trust and confidence of kosher consumers tells the consumer that this is a mezuzah you can trust,” says Rabbi Sarna.
“Nowadays, no one who keeps kosher would ever consider buying meat without certification,” says Rabbi Elefant. “No one would say, ‘well, this looks kosher to me, I’m sure it’s fine.’ We want to achieve the same standards when it comes to mezuzahs.”
In fact, he says, the halachic issues around mezuzahs are arguably more complicated than for kosher food. “You could have a mezuzah on your door for your whole lifetime—and it’s pasul,” Rabbi Elefant says. “You’d never know, because the issues are not discernible. That’s very serious.”
What Could Be Wrong with Your Mezuzah?
By Rachel Schwartzberg
While nearly all Jewish day school graduates have learned how and where to hang a mezuzah, the many halachot related to the scroll itself are often unfamiliar.
A kosher mezuzah is handwritten on parchment, or klaf, usually between seven and fifteen centimeters high, by a trained sofer. The text consists of the two first paragraphs of the Shema (Devarim 6:4–9 and 11:13–21). The parchment is scored with twenty-two lines, and the letters are written with black ink in Ketav Ashurit—the same font used to write a Torah scroll.
In order for a mezuzah to be kosher, the sofer must be well versed in the halachot and traditions of writing mezuzahs—and he must write it with the intention of fulfilling the mitzvah. The parchment must be made from certain types of animal skins, with the express purpose of being used for the mitzvah. And finally, the halachah requires that the letters of a mezuzah be written “k’sidran,” in order. Practically, that means that if there’s a mistake, the sofer can’t go back and add in or rewrite a letter in the mezuzah—as one could in a Torah scroll.
What makes this so complex is that when a magiah looks at a mezuzah, he cannot discern the process that went into writing it. “None of these factors can be checked by looking at the final product,” explains Rabbi Yisrael Small, a sofer and mohel based in Waterbury, Connecticut. “The only thing I can see is whether the letters were formed properly. I can see if the letters are touching or if the lines that comprise a letter are severed—neither of which is okay. But I can’t know if the klaf was made lishmah (expressly for the mitzvah), or if the sofer was working lishmah and saying out loud that he’s writing l’shem mitzvah (for the sake of the mitzvah).”
What a sofer or magiah can do when checking mezuzahs is to improve the shape of the original letters, explains Rabbi Small. “We can fix the letters if they’re already there,” he says, “for example, to make it look nicer or add crowns to the letters if they were left off.”
Although Rabbi Small writes mezuzahs himself, like many soferim he also buys mezuzahs written in Israel and checks and fixes them to sell in the US. “You can definitely tell from looking at it how much time was spent on the writing,” he says. “One that was done in a rush might be kosher, but it will end up being a cheap mezuzah. The ones that are nicely written with uniform letters and consistent crowns—those are mehudar.”
Halachah generally requires a homeowner to have their mezuzahs checked twice every seven years. Rabbi Avraham Lessin, a Jerusalem-based sofer and the director of STAMP, recalls many “very uncomfortable conversations,” telling people they would need to fix or replace their mezuzahs. “It was like when you take your car to be serviced,” he says, “and the mechanic tells you that you need new brake pads. You feel like you have no choice, because he’s the expert and you don’t know anything about cars. But there’s always a suspicion: Maybe he’s taking advantage of me? Maybe he’s just trying to sell brake pads? That’s how these conversations felt. At the end of the day, the sofer doesn’t want it to seem like he said it was problematic just so he could make money fixing or replacing it.”
But even a mezuzah that was kosher from the outset can develop problems that weren’t there before. “Over time, the blackness of the ink could fade, or the ink might crack if the parchment is bent instead of rolled,” says Rabbi Ezra Sarna, director of Torah and Halacha Initiatives at the OU, who manages the OU’s STa”M Pikuach Initiative. Additionally, exposure to weather can cause the parchment to degrade or even rot. “This is true especially when the sun shines directly on the mezuzah holder, or in places that have weeks of humidity,” he adds. “But even temperature changes with the seasons can affect a mezuzah, because ink expands in heat and contracts in the cold.”
He stresses that it’s impossible to know if a mezuzah is still kosher without having it regularly checked. “I was once checking the mezuzahs of a shul in Texas,” he recalls. “The one on the front door got direct sun exposure, and when I opened the case, the parchment literally disintegrated in my hands and promptly blew away in the breeze. You couldn’t tell at all by looking at it within the case.”
A Stamp of Approval
Under the guidance and supervision of STAMP’s rabbinic board, comprised of leading posekim in the area of safrut, all STAMP soferim must pass a series of tests confirming their halachic knowledge. They must also submit character references and writing samples to compare against the mezuzahs they hand in, in order to ensure that they actually wrote them.
Through the OU STa”M Pikuach (oversight) Initiative, consumers can now ask for OU mezuzahs. “When a consumer buys a mezuzah with an OU/STAMP certification, he can be assured that the mezuzah underwent a rigorous quality assurance process,” says Rabbi Sarna. The certification guarantees that the mezuzah was written by a vetted sofer with the proper materials and that it was checked by two magihim as well as an AI-powered computer scan. Those checks and scans deem the mezuzah to be kosher according to generally accepted halachic standards.
Once a mezuzah is deemed kosher, it is packaged in a tamper-proof sleeve accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, which includes the mezuzah’s basic biography and history and contains a QR code leading to a high-quality image and additional information. The certificate includes STAMP and OU logos.
Yehuda Neuberger, chair of the OU’s board of directors and a board member of STAMP, was involved in the development of the computer program used by STAMP, which took teams of programmers more than two years to build. The technology uses computer vision and machine learning to improve the process of checking mezuzahs and includes several measures for fraud protection as well.
Beyond ensuring that there are reliably kosher mezuzahs available, Rabbi Lessin travels around the world on behalf of STAMP to educate Jewish communities about what goes into making a kosher mezuzah—demonstrating the value proposition of spending a little more when buying one. “We simply can’t expect people to value something they don’t understand,” he explains.
“Consumers often don’t have a frame of reference when it comes to buying mezuzahs,” says Rabbi Sarna. “If the local Jewish bookstore used to sell mezuzahs for $30 and it’s been a while since you bought one, you don’t want to pay $130 now.” All the more so because people tend to need several mezuzahs at once, such as when they’ve recently moved or built a new home, which often coincides with many other expenses. “They start to feel like the higher prices are part of someone’s get-rich-quick scheme,” he says.
Nowadays, no one who keeps kosher would ever consider buying meat without certification. No one would say, ‘well, this looks kosher to me, I’m sure it’s fine.’ We want to achieve the same standards when it comes to mezuzahs.
The fact is, however, that soferim who write mezuzahs are generally remunerated very poorly for their painstaking work. “On average, a qualified and experienced sofer can write twenty mezuzahs per month, and he has to buy his parchment, ink and supplies,” explains Rabbi Sarna. “When you buy a product from Amazon, the retailers and Amazon take 15 percent each. The stores and the middlemen in the STa”M industry rarely take more than that. But by the time the store takes a fair cut, and the middlemen take theirs, how much is the sofer making on a mezuzah that sells for $150? Even if he were to sell every single mezuzah he writes, which is rare, he’s still not earning a decent living—no matter that he is highly skilled in his craft and a talmid chacham.
A mezuzah has to be written carefully, with every letter formed properly and in order.
Neuberger notes that the OU and STAMP recognized that publicizing the issues with mezuzahs required both sensitivity and strategy. “We couldn’t simply tell everyone there’s a problem without having a solution available,” he says. Additionally, adds Rabbi Sarna, the OU leadership was keenly aware that raising alarms could create a rush on kosher mezuzahs and thereby drive up prices.
“One of the things we are seeking to accomplish is to have more people enter the profession of safrus and have more proper mezuzahs written so that we could have a bigger supply,” says Rabbi Elefant.
Both STAMP and MyZuzah are committed to promoting what they call “fair trade standards” to enable soferim and magihim to earn wages that are commensurate with their expertise. Rabbi Lessin believes that this important step will encourage others to enter the profession. “There aren’t enough qualified soferim writing mezuzahs, and there’s a global shortage of magihim as well,” notes Rabbi Lessin. Ideally, his goal would be for every community to have a STa”M professional as part of the region’s Jewish infrastructure. “It would keep the community more connected to the mitzvah of mezuzah, and people would know where to go with questions,” he says.
To make the field of writing STa”M more attractive as a vocation, STAMP has created a professional network and offers training courses. They’ve trained more than 100 new magihim and have more courses planned for the future—including virtual opportunities for people living outside of Israel. “The soferim we work with are independent,” says Rabbi Lessin. “There’s no question that meeting the STAMP requirements is extra work for them, but we believe they will benefit in the long run. And ultimately, they are choosing to be part of something much bigger.”
The organization also offers classes on business practices and one-on-one coaching to help soferim and magihim turn their work into a stable livelihood for their families. Rabbi Lessin is gratified to see these efforts begin to pay off for people. “One sofer came to me about a year ago,” he recalls. “He said STAMP changed his professionalism as a sofer. He took advantage of everything we offered—including feedback from magihim on his work and financial guidance on running a business. He told me, ‘STAMP has helped me make this into a substantial business that can pay my bills.’”
In the coming years, STAMP hopes to begin offering training courses for new soferim, and they’re getting ready to expand their efforts to tefillin as well.
The Economics of Mezuzahs
Neuberger feels that a priority of the OU is to “build and improve the infrastructure of Jewish living—and mezuzah must be a part of that.” What other mitzvah is there, he asks, “where the average person may have the best of intentions, even a willingness to spend money on the mitzvah, and yet they still have no way to really know if they’re doing it properly?”
The systems that may have worked before are no longer serving the community, he says. “In the past, people led simpler lives. There were fewer Jews, and smaller homes. Every town or area had a sofer, and he was known to be honest and reliable. Nowadays, most of the time you don’t know the person writing your mezuzahs. As the market has grown and evolved, there hasn’t been proper oversight or quality control. We’ve been relying too much on ‘trusting the people who trust the people.’”
“The concept of supervising mezuzahs hasn’t existed before,” Rabbi Elefant says. “But there are several factors that have made the kashrus of mezuzahs more of a concern now than in the past.” The primary issue, Rabbi Elefant says, is that there has never been a greater demand. The exponential population growth of the Jewish community and increased engagement in religious life have yielded a significant increase in demand for items of STa”M. “There are more Jews, and homes are bigger,” says Rabbi Elefant. “We simply have more doorways than ever before.”
In addition, adds Rabbi Elefant, we unfortunately lost a significant number of members of our community during Covid, and many people chose to memorialize their loved ones with the writing of a sefer Torah—which is a yearlong project. Writing a sefer Torah is something soferim generally prefer, because they know they are going be paid for a year’s worth of work and therefore they won’t need to be writing mezuzahs and taking on other small jobs. This, however, has resulted in somewhat of a shortage of available soferim.
Finally, since October 7, the number of people interested in having a mezuzah on their doors has increased—even among people who don’t know what a kosher mezuzah means. All these factors have contributed to a lack of supply and an increase in demand. This has led to the supply market being flooded with individuals producing and selling varying levels of mezuzahs, with limited assurance of quality or kashrut for the consumer.
These factors also drive up cost. “Wherever there’s a need, price goes up,” explains Rabbi Elefant.
Rabbi Elefant can’t promise that mezuzahs with an OU/STAMP certification won’t cost a bit more. But he clarifies that the OU’s involvement in this effort stemmed from “a sense of responsibility to the klal” and is simply a service to the community. “The OU is not making any profit from this initiative; there are no OU organizational fees layered into the final price of the mezuzah,” he says.
As an active voice in all three organizations involved in elevating the standards of the mitzvah of mezuzah, Manette Mayberg believes this initiative will have a much broader impact on the Jewish people than anyone can measure. “Mezuzah is one of our oldest mitzvot, going back to marking the doorposts in Egypt,” she notes, “It’s a connective and protective mitzvah—both rational and mystical at the same time.”
She emphasizes that the mezuzah also holds a special place in the heart of the Jewish people. “It’s likely the most universal of all the mitzvot. All Jews relate to it, from the left to the right and in between. Mezuzah is at the core of who we are as a people.” More fundamentally, mezuzah is at the core of a Jewish home.
“It provides a certain shemirah, spiritual protection, and a certain elevated connection to Hakadosh Baruch Hu every time you walk in and out of that home,” says Rabbi Elefant. “The mezuzah is what consecrates the home in the Jewish family.”
Rachel Schwartzberg is a writer and editor who lives with her family in Memphis, Tennessee.