Have you ever walked past a door and forgotten to touch the mezuzah?
If so, UC Berkeley engineering student Tofic Esses is here to help. He’s designed a “smart” mezuzah that reminds passersby it’s there by lighting up the Hebrew letter “shin” on the case when someone approaches.
The product is still a prototype, but the idea won Esses first place April 29 in the first Craig Exhibition of Jewish Engineering. Esses said people are already telling him they’d like to buy one.
The competition, hosted by Berkeley Hillel, invited students to reimagine a Jewish ritual object through engineering, encouraging creativity in the spirit of “hiddur mitzvah,” or beautifying the commandment. Participants were tasked with designing physical or digital projects that blended Jewish meaning with their “engineering prowess” for a chance to win $1,500. The prize was sponsored by the L.J. Craig and Alice Craig Jewish Engineering Scholarship.
Esses, who is Jewish and originally from Belgium, is pursuing a master’s degree in engineering with a concentration in integrated circuits. He told J. that while the idea for the project came to him rather quickly, developing a working prototype was no simple feat.
“It’s a challenge because I have to think of making it low power so that it can run on a battery and compact so that I could fit all the electronics as well as the scroll,” Esses said. Such scrolls, traditionally made of parchment, contain two Biblical passages, including the Shema.
In addition to design hurdles, Esses said, he faced setbacks during the prototype’s production when the motion sensor in the mezuzah didn’t survive the manufacturing process.
According to Rabbi Adam Naftalin-Kelman, executive director of Berkeley Hillel, a panel of faculty members from multiple departments graded each entry on a rubric, with points for creativity, ties to Jewish tradition and the quality of the engineering.
There were seven contest submissions, which were showcased at Berkeley Hillel on April 29. A web application designed to help people navigate the 49-day ritual of the counting of the Omer won second place.
Other projects included a travel bottle for wine or grape juice that holds eight disposable shot glasses and uses radial channels to split the pour evenly among them for “Shabbat Kiddush on-the-go.” There was also a presentation using fruits associated with Judaism to explain how MRIs use magnetic fields and radiofrequency pulses to generate striking images of internal structures.