There is a Torah scroll being written for the Jewish children of the world, and one letter in it can belong to your child. Tell us their Hebrew name, we buy the letter for them, and we hand them the certificate that says which letter it is.
The Rebbe taught that the letters of the Torah correspond to the souls of Israel — six hundred thousand of them. A scroll missing a single letter is not a Torah scroll at all, and the Jewish people is not whole while a single child is missing from it.
So in the spring of 1981 he called for a Sefer Torah written for children: one letter for each child, for every Jewish child under bar or bat mitzvah, anywhere in the world. The first scroll was written in the Old City of Jerusalem, in the Tzemach Tzedek synagogue, the one shul there that has stood intact since the day it was built. Close to three million letters have been bought for children since.
“A missing or unreadable letter in a Sefer Torah invalidates the entire Sefer Torah.”
The child's Hebrew first and middle name, and their mother's Hebrew name — that is how a letter is recorded. If your child has not been named yet, write “no name” and email us the moment a name is given.
We place the purchase in the Children's Sefer Torah on your child's behalf. Nobody has to work out a checkout page in Hebrew, and nothing arrives from abroad in your name.
You will hear from us which letter your child received and which portion of the Torah it sits in, and we give them the certificate here at Chabad — with the letter read out loud.
Worth watching with your child beside you — it is their letter, in their scroll, and this is the clearest explanation of it there is.
One dollar a letter. Not a suggested minimum — the price, set so that it would be uniformly affordable for every child.
The real cost of a letter — the scribe, the certificate, the mailing across the world — is closer to three dollars, so the form leaves room to add something toward that if you would like to. Nobody has to.
If you can, take the dollar out of your child's own tzedakah box and tell them what it bought. The Rebbe asked that it be the child's money, not a gift handed to them.
Past bar or bat mitzvah and sorry to have missed it? Buy the letters for the younger children in the family, and come and ask us about the other ways an adult can have a share in a Sefer Torah.
We would rather do this face to face than by post. When your child's certificate reaches us we find the right moment — a Sunday at Hebrew School of the Arts, a morning at Camp Gan Israel, a Shabbat in shul — and hand it over by name.
More than one child? Fill it in for the first — the thank-you page brings you straight back for the next.
Write “no name” on the form and email us as soon as a name is given — we will have the certificate written correctly. Any other question, however small, is welcome.
