About the Mezuzah

The Hebrew word mezuzah means doorpost – in other words, the part of the door that doesn’t move when you open it. Most of the time, when people say "mezuzah", they are talking about this:

a case with a scroll inside of it, that many Jewish people hang on their doorposts.

A mezuzah case can be made out of many different materials, and decorated in many different ways. See?

 Click on each mezuzah to visit the artist's website

Unlike the case, the scroll inside the mezuzah is always pretty much the same. It’s written on parchment, which looks like paper, but is actually made from the skin of a kosher animal.  Here’s an example of a scroll, known in Hebrew as a klaf.

 
As you can see, the klaf is written in Hebrew. The words come from the Torah (the Hebrew word for the Bible) and teach about the custom of hanging a mezuzah. This is what one of the verses means in English: "You should write these words on the doorposts of your houses. "

The klaf is written by hand. A person who is trained to write a mezuzah scroll is called a sofer. Here's a picture of a sofer hard at work.

If you would like to know more about the mezuzah, click here for a great presentation from www.myjewishlearning.com: