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בני תורה
B'nai Torah
Holocaust Torah
In The News
St. Peters Congregation Values Holocaust Torah
Survival and God's Word
By Steve Pokin - spokin@yourjournal.com
Posted: Friday, December 17, 2010 12:00 am
Jack Cohen tells the three teenagers from St. Dominic High School to, go ahead, lift the Torah, feel the heft of 18 pounds of God's holy word.
The girls also get to spread the rollers and open the parchment. They follow the tip of Cohen's pointer, or yad, directed at the Hebrew letters — all consonants, no vowels.
Torahs like this, used in worship, are painstakingly compiled by scribes, who use a special brew for ink. The parchment is from the skin of a kosher animal, usually a cow.
Cohen, president of B'nai Torah in St. Peters, tells the girls that this Torah was recently restored, making it kosher, or "fit for use," once again.
Reprinted with Permission
The restoration occurred from November 2009 to June 2010 and cost $15,000. On Dec. 12 the small congregation celebrated the completion of the task.
The Torah, Cohen explains, is the word of God as given to Moses in the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Cohen, 76, who helped found B'nai Torah in 1984, has been giving talks like this on Judaism for years. His guests Tuesday were Danielle Wilson, 17, of Dardenne Prairie; Jessica May, 16, of O'Fallon; and Kat Lammering,17, of O'Fallon. Their task was to write a paper for their world religions class.
This Torah has an unusual history. It is one of 1,564 Torahs that survived the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia.
Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, in World War II. In 1941 the Nazis commenced the systematic deportation of Czech Jews to work and death camps. In all, 77,297 men, women and children were murdered.
More than 1,000 of the Holocaust Torahs are in the United States. One is in the White House. One is in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Thirteen are in Missouri.
What Cohen knows about his temple's Holocaust Torah is that it came from the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague and is about 200 years old.
For this column, I tried to learn more. There are multiple Holocaust Torahs designated as coming from the Pinkas Synagogue. The reason there are so many likely is two-fold. The temple was built in 1535. Excavations in the 1950s revealed that parts of a wall are believed to be from an 11th century synagogue once on the site, according to the book "The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe."So, it's likely the Pinkas Temple had multiple Torahs.
Secondly, during Nazi occupation thousands of items of Jewish cultural and religious life were confiscated, catalogued and warehoused, including Torahs. Pinkas was a location where these items were stored. It's likely that many Holocaust Torahs designated as coming from the Pinkas temple probably were used in worship elsewhere in Czechoslovakia.
In 1956 the Torah scrolls were moved to a single location — a synagogue in the suburbs of Prague, where they were warehoused and neglected by the country's Communist government.
Ralph Yablon was an American lawyer and businessman and a member of the Westminster Synagogue in London. He bought all 1,564 Torah scrolls in 1964 from the Czech government for about $40,000. Yablon donated them to his temple, which established the Memorial Scrolls Trust, whose goal is to loan the scrolls, without charge, to temples around the world in need of a Torah. Michal Frankl, who heads the Shoah (Holocaust) history department at the Jewish Museum in Prague, says it has never sat well with Czech Jews that the Communist government sold the Torahs.
"There is a bitter aftertaste from the point of view of Jews in Czechoslovakia that the socialist state sold them to British Jews," Frankl says. "On the other hand, I think it is very positive the Torahs are being used around the world and that they're not being stored in museums, but are used in village life," he says.
In many cases, he says, the Memorial Scrolls Trust has helped U.S. congregations research the history of their Holocaust Torah and in some cases has helped them connect to the existing Czech congregation — if there is one — that once possessed the Torah.
That's not always possible because the Jewish population of Europe was decimated in the Holocaust. Prague had a Jewish population of 54,000 in 1940. Seven years later it was less than 8,000.
"We are running out of survivors," says Susan Boyer, U.S. director of the Memorial Scrolls Trust. She lives near Los Angeles. As a result, she says, some Holocaust Torahs are the sole survivors of temples and congregations wiped off the face of the Earth.
And what about the Pinkas Synagogue? Does it still exist? Yes. But it has not been a place of worship since World War II. Instead, it stands as a memorial to the Czech Jews murdered.
On the temple's walls are the names of the dead, as well as their hometowns, dates of birth and dates of deportation. The Nazis were far more meticulous in recording dates of deportation than dates of death. The Pinkas Holocaust Memorial was created decades before the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is similar in theme.
The evil of the Holocaust is not lost on the members of B'nai Torah. "Everyone in the congregation, including the children, understand the origin of that Torah," Cohen says. "When I think about the Jews that were killed and that 1.5 million of them were children, it still makes me cry."
Cohen understands why some view the Holocaust as proof that God cannot possibly exist. But it is not his view. "I feel that whenever I open the ark and we look at that Torah it shows that we did survive, despite the horrors that took place."
Gedaliah Druin is the rabbi who restored B'nai Torah's scroll. He works for Sofer on Site in North Miami Beach. He says that many of the Czech Holocaust Torahs are distinct in that certain letters have a style dating to writings from the time of Joshua, who led the Israelite tribes after Moses died. "It is like you had all Cezanne's paintings in one room," Druin says of the Holocaust Torahs. "There will be no more. That's it. "And when you lift one of these Torahs up it's like you're lifting up a victory flag," he says. "Hitler lost. We won."
