Ben – Page 6 – Ben's Tallit Shop

How to wear a tallit: Different customs

The blessing blessing recited before donning a tallit is not on the tallit, per se, but on the tzitzit, which are the essence of the mitzvah. The tallit is really just our way of fulfilling the mitzvah of wrapping ourselves in a tzitzit garment. The wording of the Tzitzit Blessing is ...l'hit'atef b'tzitzit, i.e....

Bargain Tefillin: Six questions you should ask before you buy

One should definitely be wary of very inexpensive tefillin. Even if you want to really on many leniencies, it's hard to make tefillin that meet minimal halachic requirements without compromising on the basics. Here's a question we received from a prospective tefillin peshutim buyer. Shalom, I am looking for a Tefillin for my Bar Mitzvah...

Introducing the Meron: Blue-Striped Nonslip Tallit

On several occasions customers have asked me about a blue-striped tallit with a non-slip fabric. When I show them the Tashbetz, typically they reply, "Not light blue striping, dark blue striping. Isn't there a textured tallit with blue stripes?" Nowadays a whole lot of tallit buyers are only interested in non-slip fabrics. Well, I've found...

Tallis & Tzitzis Buyers in Chicago

I've hardly stepped foot in Chicago over the past 40 years, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the city, because I lived there for two years as a child. Not in Evanston, Skokie, Buffalo Grove or Lincolnwood, where most of my Chicago-bound tallis, tzitzis and tefillin orders seem to come...

Kohen Conundrum

My cousin in the U.S. is planning a bar mitzvah. He wants to keep the bar mitzvah very low-key, with an aliyah during the Torah reading on Thursday morning, rather than Shabbos. Sounds simple, right? But he has twin boys, and they are kohanim, so when he started laying out plans with the gabbai...

Lettering on tallit and tallit bags

Although we often add custom letter embroidery to tallit bags, we rarely put letters directly on a tallit. One of the reasons is that there simply is no obvious place where lettering looks right. For those who really want letter embroidery on the tallit itself, we normally put initials or a short name on one...

A genuine Chabad tallis – or something close?

We get a lot of customers who are regulars at their local Chabad shul, but are not necessary Lubavitch themselves. They often follow Chabad customs, but not always down to the fine details. This week we received an inquiry from a prospective ger who seems to be debating whether to go with a bona...

Tefillin in Mauthausen and Gunskirchen

Before entering Mauthausen, Eliyahu hid his precious tefillin by carefully tying them to his leg. At the selection, someone whispered to him to lie about his age and profession. Eliyahu, a 15-year-old yeshiva student, told the camp commandant that he was a 28-year-old tailor. “I was sent to the right, to life, while the...

Warning: Not all undershirt tzitzit are kosher

Are undershirt tzitzit and t-shirt tzitzit kosher? A year or two ago I came upon a batch of t-shirt tzitzit that had a halachic problem. Since then I have learned to be very wary when I buy from wholesalers, because I've discovered that the problem can come up unexpectedly, even with highly reputable manufacturers. For...

On Rav Hershel Schachter’s method of tying with techelet

The majority of our techelet customers opt to have us tie the techelet strings according to the Arizal, Rambam, Sefer HaChinuch, Vilna Gaon or the Raavad. We also get plenty of orders for techelet tied like all-white tzitzit, according to the Ashkenazi or Sephardic customs. We discourage the latter, because those customs were developed...

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