“Giving someone tefillin isn’t just handing them an object,” she told JNS. “It helps open up a whole world to them.”
On a bitter-cold day in early January, Mary Jarada, a Syrian Jewish woman from Brooklyn, N.Y., stood beaming at Machon Stam, a small scribal workshop in the Crown Heights neighborhood of the New York City borough that specializes in writing tefillin, mezuzot and Torah scrolls. Jarada, 23, was there to pick up the 200th pair of tefillin that she had sponsored through her foundation, Ein Od Milvado (“There is no other besides Him”), which has raised some $135,000.
To Jarada’s surprise, the staff at the shop had bought a cake and had placed large black balloons, which displayed the number “200” to mark the milestone.
“This is a special pair,” she told JNS. “This man I am sending them to has a family member in jail who was recently denied parole. When he got the news, he was so devastated and felt like he needed to do something to strengthen himself spiritually.”