Published: 16 September 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
School leaver Kobi Kahn-Harris spends his spare time making shofarot from unconventional sources.
When synagogues were shut in the first year of the pandemic, some of us might have been grateful for the shofar on the mantelpiece that might have been an heirloom or a souvenir from Israel, which enabled us to make a stab at fulfilling the core mitzvah of Rosh Hashanah.
Even if lockdown might have been a once-in-a-lifetime emergency, a shofar can still be a handy artefact to own — perhaps to blow for an elderly relative who otherwise wouldn’t get to hear it.
Traditionally, the rabbinic preference is for a curved ram’s horn, while the Yemenite Jews took their impressively long and twisting shofars from a kudu.
But if you had an eye for something less common, then Kobi Kahn-Harris might have an alternative to offer. The former JCoSS pupil from North London, who later this month starts a classics degree at Cambridge University, has begun making and selling his own shofarot, fashioned from the horns of springboks, blesboks and pronghorns.
A blesbok horn “has two tones, as opposed to the springbok, which has just one. But the most unusual shofar comes from a pronghorn, a north American animal which unlike the other horn-producers does not belong to the family of bovidae and sheds its horn. “I reclaim them from old taxidermy — mounted horns sitting in an antique shop not being used. They have a distinct grain like wood.”
The student who makes shofars (Jewish Chronicle)
Image: A pronghorn (Wikipedia)
