Green Bay man has made about 200 shofars
Bob Dick has only blown the shofar in a synagogue on the High Holidays once. But it wasn’t one of the 200 shofars he estimates he has created over the past 10 years.
According to Dick, who lives in Green Bay with his wife, Rabbi Shaina Bacharach, spiritual leader of Congregation Cnesses Israel, there were “a variety of factors that made me start” creating shofars.
He has taught about a dozen classes to show others how to make shofars since he first had the idea while teaching 8th grade Sunday school.
Dick was looking for a project for his students and thought of making original shofars. Plus, he recalled, during a recent interview, he had felt “a real frustration with the teeny tiny mouth pieces” found on most shofars.
Dick had a friend who owned an osteological supply store, who was able to provide him with the kudu horns he used for his first shofars.
Dick planned to teach a class to Cnesses Israel congregants before Rosh HaShanah but had trouble receiving the horns. As of press time, the group was still waiting for delivery of the horns from Africa. Participants could choose from using either a nyala or kudu horn, and Bacharach was to explain the shofar’s significance for Jewish people.
There are different processes that Dick uses to start the shofar, based on how much time he has. Depending on the state of the horn, the first step is usually to clean it out. Dick describes this as a “very smelly” process.
If he has a week, Dick says he fills the horn with vinegar, to eat away at the organic material in the horn. If he has only one night, Dick says he “fills them with Coca-Cola,” which gets the job done faster.
Next, he cuts off one end of the horn. On each horn there is a small dot that indicates the soft center area. Dick carefully drills into that point, taking extra care to not drill through the other side.
“Once that’s accomplished,” said Dick, “I use a tool with a stone tip to create a mouthpiece similar to that on a trumpet.”
“Then you sand the end down, and you have a shofar,” he continued.
To get to the “clear, pretty underhorn,” Dick said that he uses a sander to remove the coarse outside of the horn. Then the shofar is polished, and some like to use polyurethane to give it a glossier finish.
Dick modifies sounds of the shofars by making the holes larger, which makes them easier to blow.
So easy in fact, as he recalled of one of the first shofars he made, that once when a there was a trumpet player at the shul, “I handed it to her and she played ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ on it.”
Dick says the general process is simple: “Making a shofar takes 10 minutes.” But finishing it “can take the rest of your life.”
He added, “Knowing that my horns are being sounded in dozens and dozens of synagogues around the world every Rosh HaShanah leaves me with a very special sense of connection to all our people wherever they may be celebrating.
“Building these horns further serves as a reminder to me that while Judaism and Jews do circle the globe, we do so as one people.”
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