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For thousands of years, recording the Hebrew language has been the work of scribes. Now it is the focus of artists.

"Art of the Alef-Bet: Works Inspired by the Hebrew Letters" runs through March 19 at the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco. Filling the library's walls and floor space, the exhibit displays the work of more than 25 Jewish artists, with about 60 pieces.

Selections run the gamut from paintings to sculptures, mosaics to prints. A few incorporate high-tech computerized graphics. A number of the pieces focus on single letters. Others incorporate the entire alphabet. Some include prayers or parts of Jewish text.

Curated by Elayne Grossbard, the free exhibit is funded by the Friends of the Jewish Community Library. It is part of the S.F.-based Bureau of Jewish Education's sixth annual Feast of Jewish Learning.

Jews have "always had scribal arts such as ketubot and the Torah," head librarian Jonathan Schwartz said. "What we have here is modern art playing with the mystical meaning of the letters."

For some of the artists, creating a piece for the show was more than just an exercise in their craft. It became a spiritual journey and a transformative experience.

Barbara Winer of San Francisco saw the process as a part of the grieving and healing process.

One of her pieces, created specifically for her sister's boyfriend, includes the Mishebeirach, or healing prayer.

"I was working on it when I got the call about the show," Winer said.

Her sister's friend had contracted yellow fever during a trek in Venezuela and was gravely ill at the time. He later died. "Sometimes I had to take a break [from my work] when things got too heavy," she said.

Although Winer taught at San Francisco's Congregation Sherith Israel for 17 years and has been an exhibitor at past art shows at the Feast of Jewish Learning, most of her professional artwork doesn't deal with Jewish themes.

"Jewish themes are too personal," she says. Most of her corporate clients want art that everyone can relate.

In this show, however, she focuses on both the spiritual and the personal.

Winer works in monotype, a process in which paint is applied to a zinc plate and then pressed onto paper. To describe the process she uses words like "magical" and "ghost images."

Rather than using a different plate for each piece, Winer builds on the remnants or ghost image of the previous print to create the next one.

"There's a see-through quality so you can tell their lineage or the generation before. Each picture has a history of all the pictures that proceeded it, just like us."

Carla Brooke also used her artwork as part of a grieving and renewal process.

A mosaic fountain she created contains the words "spirit," "eternity" and "remembering the water of Egypt." Made primarily of glass, it includes part of a car window that Brooke salvaged after last year's floods in La Honda, the San Mateo coast town where she lives. As she was completing the project, her father had a massive heart attack and died.

"It was a very emotional piece for me," Brooke said. "Very meaningful at this time of grieving. [It made me] think about a wellspring within yourself as a source of renewal, an internal fountain that we can tap into for spiritual strength."

It also was an experience that brought her back to Jewish fundamentals. To do the project, she borrowed alef-bet primers from the library.

"I knew no Hebrew," said Brooke who had little Jewish education. "I never would have come up with this on my own. I really want to study Hebrew more. Through this piece I personalized what Hebrew is."

Tasha Robbins of San Francisco explores the mystical aspects of the alef-bet in her painting.

"Jewish themes have been re-emerging in my work for the last 10 to 12 years," Robbins said. "It's the 'choose life' proposition, which is why we do art. That's the main theme of Judaism."

Her depiction of the letter chet is the signature piece of the show and was used in its publicity. Although only the chet is on display, Robbins has done a series that includes all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, a project she began in the late 1980s.

"I wanted it to be a process of learning the letters again, making friends with the letters again in a meditative process through painting," she said. Like Brooke, Robbins said the project has taken her back to the study of Hebrew. "Each Hebrew letter means something. I've reinterpreted the letters in my own way."

She uses what she calls "angelic script" or ketav einayim (eye writing); the letters are always composed of lines and small circles. She describes the finished product as akin to surrealistic art.

"Once you get into the letters and let your imagination go, it will always bring you home," Robbins said. Of all the letters, mem is the one that speaks to her the most. "It's one of the mother letters. I painted it as memory, time, the way things work."