Julie Seltzer is one of a small group of women Torah scribes, and became enamored with the Hebrew language when she took her first trip to Israel at the age of 18. She began to further explore the meaning of Hebrew letters and the scribal arts while working at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in northwest Connecticut.

Julie studied scribal arts with Jen Taylor Friedman, the first woman we know of to write a sefer Torah. During a subsequent trip to Israel, Julie studied with Shoshana Guggenheim, the lead scribe of the Women’s Torah Project (a women’s collective Torah scroll), and Shoshana’s teacher Dov Laimon, an Orthodox man who teaches women despite his own adherence to Orthodox Judaism’s prohibition to use a scroll written by a woman.

Upon returning to the United States, Julie apprenticed with Reform scribe Neil Yerman in Westchester. Her first scroll was a Shir Hashirim – a Song of Songs scroll. Julie’s first complete Torah was written while on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, where she worked as a Scribe-in-Residence. 

Julie enjoys the discipline and meditative practice that being a Soferet STa”M, a scribe, provides. She says that, “Writing itself is what interested me most: how a finite number of letters can combine into an infinite number of unique sentences, and function as a means for communication between people across time and space.”