A 19th century Czechoslovakian Torah scroll, which was stolen by the Nazis and later sold by Communist rulers, will be used for the first time in a Miami, Florida synagogue on the first day of Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, which falls on the Sabbath and Sunday this year.
One of the wooden handles of the scroll bears the date 1878, when the scroll apparently was completed. Also inscribed is the name of the couple who contributed the holy scroll in a synagogue that now is part of the Czech Republic.
After the Allied forces defeated Hitler, a Nazi warehouse of Judaica, including Torah scrolls was discovered. Communist rulers sold more than 1,500 scrolls from the warehouse to a London synagogue 46 years ago, when a Memorial Scrolls Trust began sending them all over the world. “They have come back to life,” Trust curator Evelyn Friedlander told the Associated Press.
The Torah scroll is now safely guarded at Miami’s Ahavat Olam (Love of the World) congregation, which prays in rented space in a Methodist church. One of the synagogue members is Bianca Lerner, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor who escaped the Nazis by hiding in a Catholic orphanage after she and her parents were forced from their home.
The Nazis murdered her father, and her mother died at the Treblinka death camp. She told AP that she once thought material possessions do not mean much after experiencing her leaving the family’s beautifully furnished Polish home and its antiques and Oriental rugs. Lerner explained that the Torah scroll, although physical, is different because it is a central part of the Jewish faith and is used in prayer.
Ahavat Olam Rabbi Danny Marmorstein said that years ago he placed the community’s name on the waiting list for a Torah scroll from the London-based trust. He explained he wanted to pay tribute to the six million Jews whom the Nazis killed, butchered and gassed, including nine of the rabbi’s great aunts and uncles, grandfather and great-grandparents. His father and uncle survived the Auschwitz death camp.