having beautiful handwriting. He graduated with a degree in psychology from Bar-Ilan University and, having obtained a chemistry teaching license from New York State, taught the subject at grade school level in New York and Israel."} 62:T4a9,“My first contact with formal Hebrew letters was a warning poster – that in a sefer Torah, if one letter, or even the serif (an oketz) of a letter, was damaged, or badly drawn, it made the whole scroll unfit. What secrets were in that little oketz? That fascinated me. That people could be so concerned with letters as to ban a whole, huge scroll because one letter was damaged!” “I was 25 and living in Tel Aviv when I decided to change my career. I went to Bnei Brak to learn the skills. The first time I held the quill in my hand, I knew there was no looking back. It was 1980. I had long hair. In Israel no one seemed to mind. But when I went back to America and wanted to study more seriously, I was looked at with suspicion. The message I received there was that to be a scribe, a sofer, you had to cut your hair!” Somewhat disappointed with this first exposure to Hebrew calligraphy, he went to Jerusalem and found a very good sofer in Mea Shearim. “He didn’t look at my hair. He was interested only in the work.61:{"position":4,"content":"$62"} 63:{"position":5,"content":"I worked at it, and I’m not going to say that it was easy. It was enough to get me started as a sofer, which I worked at for many years.”"} 64:{"position":6,"content":"Parallel with learning his skills as a calligrapher, Pludwinski was concerned with his own religious development."} 65:{"position":7,"content":"Although he had a traditional Jewish education in New York’s Yeshiva University’s high school, he was drawn to various disciplines in order to develop his spirituality. But while in Jerusal

The art of calligraphy

Master calligrapher Izzy Pludwinski battles to stem the decline in the art