Remember Eisenbach's?

All throught the 50s, the Lower East Side was where we returned to before Pesach and Rosh Hashana. Food shopping, clothes, shoes, all sorts of sundries.

And the pickles.

And to stop by Eisenbach's for a good book or so.

Well, Eisenbach's is in the NYTimes.

Letter by Letter, Sacred Documents Are Reborn

Rabbi Zacharia Eisenbach dips his quill into a jar of black ink, then painstakingly restores each faded calligraphic letter. The quill makes a soft scratching sound as it travels slowly across the parchment. The work, intensely physical, straining the eyes and nerves, is precise and time-consuming.

Rabbi Eisenbach is a practitioner of one of the world’s oldest, rarest and most revered professions. He is a trained sofer, the Hebrew word for the scribe who, adhering to ancient Jewish law, writes and restores the Torah, Judaism’s holiest document, entirely by hand.

It is a pressure-filled task. Any error made during the inscription of a Torah’s 304,805 letters, an effort that takes more than a year, could render part of it invalid.

Rabbi Eisenbach is one of an estimated 200 sofers in New York, according to Rabbi David L. Greenfield, the founder of Vaad Mishmeret STaM, a religious organization in Borough Park, Brooklyn, that certifies sofers.

...Pausing from his work under the glare of the fluorescent lights in his crowded Judaica store at 41 Essex Street on the Lower East Side, Rabbi Eisenbach pointed to a framed black and white photograph hanging on the wall, showing a man with a flowing white beard and skullcap bent over a Torah.

“That’s a picture of my father,” Rabbi Eisenbach, 65, said. He looks very much like his father, Rabbi Moses Eisenbach, who worked in the same store after emigrating from Jerusalem in the late 1930s, until he died 15 years ago.

The Eisenbachs still maintain their presence in Jerusalem as a prominent family of sofers. The elder Rabbi Eisenbach began teaching his son, who was born there, the sofer’s craft when he was 17. Rabbi Eisenbach has written and repaired many Torahs since then. “I don’t count,” he said.

He rarely writes entire Torahs any more, he explained, because in Israel, where labor is less expensive, a handwritten Torah costs about $25,000, half the price of one made here.

The Torah must be written on parchment made from the hide of a kosher animal that has been stretched and treated with lime to remove hairs. That process alone costs more than $5,000.

..“It’s nice when somebody writing Torah writes in the spirit of Torah,” said Rabbi Robert N. Levine, who leads Congregation Rodeph Shalom, a Reform synagogue on West 83rd Street in Manhattan, which has commissioned three Torahs from Rabbi Eisenbach over the years. “He’s a real mensch.”

...There are 245 columns on about 60 parchment pages that are sewn together and wrapped around two rollers to make a Torah. “I’m only a human being and I’m making mistakes, making mistakes” said Rabbi Eisenbach, describing how, if he accidentally makes a minor scratch, he can repair it by cutting it out and creating a patch.

But there are certain mistakes that are irreversible and would require redoing a page, though not an entire Torah. “If ink, God forbid, fell on God’s name and you could no longer see God’s name,” Rabbi Eisenbach said, giving an example.

Is that last example true?