Personalized Jewish Children's Books: How to Choose One
A personalized children's book puts your child's name - and sometimes their face - inside the story. For a frum family the question is narrower than the general market makes it look: most personalized books are secular stories with a name dropped in, and most Jewish children's books are beautiful but not personalized. This is what to check before you buy either.
What actually gets personalized
There are three levels, and they are not priced very differently, so it is worth knowing which one you are buying. The first is a name swap: a printed template with your child's name typeset into it. The second adds a chosen character - hair colour, skin tone, glasses - picked from a set of options. The third draws the child from a photograph, so the character in the illustrations is recognisably your child.
A Torah Tale book is the third kind. One clear front-facing photo becomes a character sheet, and every page is drawn from that sheet, so the same child appears on the cover and on every page rather than a fresh interpretation each time.
Torah accuracy is not automatic
A general personalized-book company will happily generate a 'Noah's ark' story, and it will contain things that did not happen. Ask who checks the content. Torah Tale's stories are written under rabbinical guidance and follow the Torah account - who was there, what they were holding, how the story ends - and each one is reviewed before it prints.
Tznius in the pictures, not only in the words
This is where most options fall down, because the illustration is generated or licensed without anyone frum looking at it. Check the pictures, not the blurb: sleeve and hemline length on women and girls, hair covering on married women, who appears in a shul scene, whether boys wear a yarmulke. Torah Tale enforces these in the illustration itself and re-draws a page that breaks them.
Language
Most personalized books are English only. If you want Hebrew or Yiddish, ask whether the whole book is in that language or only the child's name - and whether the name is spelled the way you spell it. Torah Tale writes the whole book in English, Hebrew or Yiddish, with the child's name spelled correctly in each.
Format and age
A board book survives a two-year-old; a hardcover is the one that gets kept. For a child under three, board is usually the right answer even though it costs more. From about four, softcover is the everyday choice and hardcover is the gift.
Stories to start with
- Parshas Bereishis - Hashem creates the world in six days - light and darkness, sky and sea, every creature that swims and flies and walks - and rests on the seventh. Adam and Chava are placed in Gan Eden, and a child watches the whole world come into being one word at a time.
- Parshas Noach - The world has gone crooked, and one man is asked to build a teivah and fill it with pairs of every living thing. Forty days of rain, a dove sent out over the water, and a rainbow that promises it will never happen again.
- Purim - Megillah read twice with the graggers ready, mishloach manos carried to neighbours, matanos la'evyonim, and a seudah where a story that could have ended terribly ended upside down instead.
- Chanukah - One small jug of oil that should have lasted a day and lasted eight. Lighting by the window, latkes and sufganiyos, dreidels, and the light growing by one flame every night.
Questions
- Are personalized Jewish books just a name swap?
- Some are. The difference worth paying for is whether the child is drawn from a photograph, so the character in the pictures is recognisably them, rather than a stock character with a name typeset underneath.
- How can I tell if the content is reliable?
- Ask who reviews it. A story generated without rabbinical review will get details of the Torah account wrong in ways a child will repeat.
- Can I get one in Hebrew or Yiddish?
- Yes - a Torah Tale book can be written entirely in English, Hebrew or Yiddish, with the child's name spelled correctly in that language.