CANTON -- The 2016 Rabbi Seymour Siegel Memorial Lecture at St. Lawrence University will be delivered by Rabbi Linda Motzkin of Temple Sinai in Saratoga Springs, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 13, in the Sykes Common Room.

The event is free and open to the public; desserts will follow.

Rabbi Motzkin has served as co-rabbi of Temple Sinai with her husband, Rabbi Jonathan Rubenstein, since 1986, and she serves as the High Holy Day Chaplain part-time at Skidmore College. She is one of only a handful of women in the world trained as a soferet, a Hebrew scribe, and is currently writing a Torah scroll as a long-term educational endeavor that she began in 2007, titled “The Community Torah Project.” The project also helped to inform her lecture, “Women and the Making of Torah: A Soferet’s Story.”

The Torah scroll is the most sacred ritual object in the Jewish tradition, yet many people know little about where Torah scrolls come from, how they are made, the methods and materials involved in their production and the work of the individuals who perform this sacred task. Women have traditionally been excluded from being Hebrew scribes under Jewish law, known as the halacha. Rabbi Motzkin is one of only eleven women who have written all or part of a Torah scroll. Her lecture will illuminate the process by which Torah scrolls are made and reflect on the experiences of women in relation to the Torah making process.

Rabbi Motzkin received her bachelor’s degree in Hebrew at the University of California at Berkeley and her master’s degree and rabbinical ordination at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, where she also received her doctor of divinity in 2011.

Siegel was a noted Conservative Jewish author and scholar. His family donated his papers to St. Lawrence University’s Owen D. Young Library and created an endowment for an annual lecture on campus in his memory. Info: 229-5454.