Happy Hanukkah to all (3) of our readers! Here is a link to a page about How to Light the Menorah.
Mezuzah Blog
Aaron Shaffier – Certified Torah Scribe
http://mezuzahstore.com/blog/index.php/2008/12/22/how-to-light-the-menorah/
Here is a question that I got recently in the email:
My first floor ceiling now has a horizontal opening say .8 metres by .8
metres with a hatch bordered by a frame. When the hatch is opened you can
grab the loft ladder and access the loft. Does the hatch need a mezuzzah.
Can you place a mezuzah on the horizontal.
Here’s my answer:
Dear Sir,
Any door that is horizontal is exempt from a Mezuzah. In fact I have the same kind of hatch in my home here in Israel.
Be well,
Aaron Shaffier
MezuzahStore.com
http://mezuzahstore.com/blog/index.php/2008/12/22/mezuzah-on-a-horizontal-door/
http://mezuzahstore.com/blog/index.php/2008/12/21/funny-mezuzah-video/
We just got in some great Menorahs and Hanukkah Candles and put them up on the site. Can you believe Hanukkah is already around the corner? Here are a few of them:
http://mezuzahstore.com/blog/index.php/2008/11/23/new-menorahs-for-hanukkah/
http://mezuzahstore.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/04/mezuzah-at-google-tel-aviv/
Some of you may have tried to visit our site in the last 12 hours or so and found that the site was down. We had a really horrible experience with our web hosting company. When we realized that the site was down, we contacted customer support right away. It took them almost 7 hours to get the site back up. Also during that time, none of our company email addresses worked.
Please except our apologies if anyone was inconvenienced by the down time. We pay a lot of money to host with a company that has a reputation for high quality hosting. We didn’t expect this kind of thing with them.
In any case, keep your eyes on MezuzahStore.com. In the near future we are going to be upgrading the entire site. It is going to be very nice when it is done.
http://mezuzahstore.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/07/were-back/
You will be happy to hear that the Israeli athletes at the Olympic village will have Mezuzahs on their door. Rabbi Freundlach of Chabad-Beijing affixed them this week. The Rabbi also is making sure that there will be kosher food available at all times at Dini’s Kosher Restaurant, situated near the American Embassy.
You can read the full story here.
I am gonna go ahead now and take the liberty of posting it on Mezuzah Planet. (But it won’t qualify for the $108 gift certificate.)
I wonder how the sweet and sour chicken is at Dini’s?
http://mezuzahstore.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/06/mezuzahs-at-the-olympics/
On Sunday I posted about my little project to take over the Google search results for terms like “Printable Mezuzah”. My goal was that people who are searching for a printable Mezuzah scroll would end up on a page on my site that explains why it is so important to have a real, Kosher Mezuzah scroll.
Well now it is Tuesday and it seems to be working quite well. If I do a Google search for “Printable Mezuzah” here is what I get:
You can see in the image above that the top result is a site that links my blog post. The second link is to the page I created. The third link is to the blog post. Of course at the time that you are reading this the results on Google may have changed. But at least for now I feel I have succeeded in my goal.
http://mezuzahstore.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/05/printable-mezuzah-scroll-update/
Its coming up on a year since we moved here to Tekoa, Israel. The longer I am here the more I realize how amazing Tekoa is. I have really been wanting to build a website dedicated to Tekoa. I have been very busy this year and haven’t had the time to get to it. In the mean time this little Tekoa Page on Squidoo will have to do.
The only other sites out there that I can find about Tekoa are:
Those sites really don’t give you much of a feeling of what Tekoa is about. I will work on my new page some more this week and try to make it into a starting point for people who want to learn about Tekoa.
http://mezuzahstore.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/04/tekoa/
Could this too be a product of the tough economy? Lately I have noticed that a lot of people reach our website searching for terms like “free printable mezuzah” or “printable mezuzah scroll“. Of course, we don’t have any such item to offer because we very much believe that every Jewish home needs to have Kosher Mezuzahs.
I think that what is happening is that people are finding the picture of our Kosher Mezuzah Scroll, printing it out, and using it in place of a real Mezuzah. I am a bit disturbed by this and its not for the reason you think.
I actually would love to offer a free printable Mezuzah scroll! As it is, we hardly make anything off of the Kosher ones. The dollar is really low now and the scrolls are getting more and more expensive. We have to put a whole lot of effort into obtaining scrolls that are truly Kosher at a price that is somewhat affordable (the really good quality scrolls cost around $70). Then we have to put more work into checking each scroll in our workshop to make sure that it is 100% Kosher. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to personally stand behind the product.
If we could offer a free downloadable Mezuzah scroll, we could focus our energy on selling the Mezuzah covers which have a much higher profit margin and don’t require nearly as much effort on our part to obtain. But then we would be defeating the primary goal of our website which I started originally as an effort to get Kosher Mezuzahs into the hands of Jewish people all over the world. So you can imagine that I am disturbed to see that people are printing the picture of our Kosher Mezuzah and using it as a Mezuzah scroll.
So today I made a new page that I think will eventually rank quite high in the search engine results when someone searches for things like “printable mezuzah”. The page explains briefly why we can’t offer such a product and refers the visitor to our Kosher Mezuzah scrolls. It will be interesting to see what happens.
http://mezuzahstore.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/03/free-printable-mezuzah/