The year was 1974. I was just a baby, and my father left his job working for a GM dealership because commissions were too low and his boss was giving up the place.  

As he looked for other work, his friend Jerry Bechhofer hired him as a messenger at his computer processing business. (To explain to a younger audience: Before every business had a computer, they would send their bookkeeping files to be entered into a computer, and they would receive large printouts on computer paper ( many pages attached with a perforation between each page and holes on both sides to move it through the printer). It often had green and white stripes in the background. See picture) 

Anyhoooow, he was often in the “apartment”, the home of Jerry and his FIL, the Rav, picking up or dropping off, and if he saw something interesting, he might take a picture of it. One such picture is of the Shul at Friedberg Anlage, with the verse “M’mizrach Shemesh Ad Mevo’o” above it.  

This week, the Jewish Museum in Berlin added a picture of the Hirsch Realschule to its website, which was a print issued by the school to mark its 75th anniversary. The photo has a verse from Tehillim atop the Shul. 

I have likewise seen, among family papers, a card my aunt wrote as an adolescent to her brother, with a verse from Mishlei and a picture of herself.  

I have seen similar cards on the Leo Baeck Institute website, where students at a German Jewish school created a farewell booklet for a beloved teacher upon his retirement. Many of these cards included a favorite verse, written clearly and sometimes translated. 

So, there is a lost art that seems to have once been something we aspired to. The ability to quote scripture. Appropriately, artfully.