We receive several inquiries per day. Most of them are for very basic information that customers probably didn’t notice is available in the various online resources provided on our webstore. But we also receive specific questions not addressed already. Today we received the following inquiry:

I noticed you offer variations for the tzitzit tying; do you do that at your shop?  or does Mishkan Hatchelet do this?

At the Mishkan Hatchelet manufacturing center in Be’er Sheva they tie thin, machine-spun tzitzit on all of their modern and basic tallits, but high-end tallits like the Beit Yosef, Hamefoar, Malchut, Chabad, Yemenite, Turkish and others are packaged without tzitzit, because the type of people who buy high-end traditional tallits often have specific tzitzit in mind — e.g. thin or thick tzitzit strings; hand-spun, lashonot hatzemer or niputz lishmah; all-white or techelet; Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Yemenite or Chabad tying.

Mishkan Hatchelet has tzitzit tie-ers at their manufacturing center in Be’er Sheva, but it takes too long to use their services and we offer several tying customs which they are not set up to handle. Our tzitzit tie-er is a kollel student and a second-generation tzitzit professional from Bnei Brak.

When manufacturers set out to get 20,000 or 30,000 or 50,000 sets of tzitzit tied, they look for a very inexpensive way to do it, and different companies adhere to different standards. Sometimes they recruit in places you might not have thought of, such as jails. Once a colleague asked how I would feel about putting tzitzit tied by a jailbird on my son. I wasn’t sure how to answer the question, considering that there are many bona fide baalei tshuva stuck in jail cells.

What I wonder more is what is the halachic qualification (geder) for being able to tie tzitzit leshem mitzvas tzitzis. I once asked a moreh tzedek, and he suggested that someone who regularly wears tzitzit himself would be qualified.