Several of today's poskim recomend the „DUK” program, made by the Tor company in B'nei Brak. Although the program also finds mistakes that the sofer should find on his own: ie two letters touching, a letter split in two, smudged letters or letters that have lost there shape, its main advantage is finding leteers that are missing, extra letters or exchanged letters. A scroll which at a glance has been written with beautifull script may still be pasul. It may be that a scroll has been used for a hundred years, and was never kosher.

In order for a Megia to find such mistakes without the help of a computer program, he must know the entire Torah by heart, or he must compare each letter with a scroll that has already been checked. Of course, we are not saying that before the invention of computers there were no kosher sifre Torah written, chas v'shalom, then the checking was much more complicated. There were places which checked sifrei Torah in the following manner: Two sofrim sat together, each with a Torah scroll. One with a previously checked scroll, and one with the new scroll. One would read out each letter and the other would check the scroll in front of him. When they finished, they would switch. They repeated this 2 more times. This was a very fail safe method. In short, one can get by without the computer, but it is exhausting. Our lazy and tired generation needs this. As with other inventions, there was life before electricity and computers and other modern inventions, but today, who would open a bank, for example, without the use of computers. According to the statistics, in about three quarters of our Torah scrolls spelling errors are found, in addition to other mistakes, meaning they are not kosher. Although it is important to know that a scroll is considered kosher unless proven otherwise.

Let us see an example of the mistakes found by the program. The mistakes on this list were all found in the same Torah scroll, and this list is far from final.

It is important to stress that the computer program is only a tool to help the sofer, and cannot stant instead of the manual checking of the Torah scroll.

contact: sofer@sofer.hu