On my way to the Jerusalem central bus station, I stopped at the Wolfson Museum of Jewish Art.

What struck me the most - what brought tears to my eyes, in fact - was how the museum displays the preservation and perseverance of the written word, and its diversity. There are Torahs and prayerbooks, of course, but there are also letters decorated in colored pencils, etched across eggshells and seashells, embroidered onto fabrics, carved out of leather, and punched through the flat tin of washbasins. There is the handwriting of Miri Amitai, an Israeli killed in a bus bombing, in her annotations to her prayerbook; there is the strip of vellum containing a half-dozen rows of practice strokes by the calligrapher for a tefillin set; there are delicate papercuts and printed songbooks.

And then there are the prayerbooks from a Soviet prison: Simcha Langsam produced them entirely from memory, in secret, using medicine cartons and prescriptions as the paper, fishbones as the quills, and ink clandestinely collected on scraps of cotton wool.