300 year-old Torah scroll being restored by Southern California synagogue

Oct. 2, 2010 - PRLog -- The Ongoing Story of the Kolin Torah Scroll:
Restoration and Renewal in Northridge

Northridge, California
September 2010

In the last years of the 17th century in Eastern Europe, a man named Samuel Oppenheim commissioned the building of an aron kodesh—a holy ark—to house the community of Kolin’s recently-written Torah. More than 300 years later that Torah has found its way into the hands of Oppenheim’s distant cousin at Temple Ahavat Shalom in Northridge, where it is being restored with the help of an official Torah scribe.

This summer, when the restoration is completed, the congregation will take the renewed Torah on a round-trip journey to Kolin. “We will stand in front of Samuel Oppenheim’s ark with this Torah,” announced Temple Ahavat Shalom Rabbi Barry Lutz at Rosh Hashanah worship in mid-September. “We will bear witness for the people of Kolin that the Germans didn’t win, that we still exist, and that this Torah will be a living part of our community for many more generations to come.” It’s no wonder Rabbi Lutz is excited; it turns out his wife, Debbie, is Oppenheim’s cousin.

This Torah scroll has a colorful past. At the time it was written, the Jewish community of Kolin was already over 250 years old. The Kolin Torah was in use for more than 300 years before being hidden away in Prague during the Holocaust, where it remained until being discovered in the 1960s. That Torah was eventually adopted by Temple Ahavat Shalom, but it was only this year that Rabbi Lutz discovered the connection to his family.

In 1942 the Kolin Torah—along with almost 1800 other Czech scrolls from 122 communities— was sent to Prague, where it became part of the collections of the Jewish Museum there. The museum was intended by German authorities to hold the remnants of a people they intended to wipe from the face of the earth. More than 30 years later those scrolls were discovered in a small, damp, deserted synagogue in a dingy suburb of Prague, where the scrolls had been moved after the Soviet occupation. A description of their condition noted that they were kept in rows of high rough wooden racks along a damp wall—more than 1500 Torah scrolls, laid two or three rows deep. “There was something strangely familiar about the look of the rows of Sifre Torah lying on those racks,” reads the official report, “like the rough wooden bunks in the barracks at Terezin [concentration camp]. Only, instead of the bodies of ... suffering Jews, there were the Scrolls that come from the communities of those … Jews. Now the people … were gone, but the scrolls remained.”

A deal was struck between the Czech government and a British philanthropist to bring the entire collection of Torahs to London’s Westminster synagogue. Westminster decided that the scrolls should be offered, on permanent loan, to Jewish communities around the world. The Torah scrolls would serve as testimony and memorial to a great Jewish community that had been lost.

In 1978, Temple Ahavat Shalom’s Rabbi Solomon Kleinman and Esther and the late Harvey Saritzky decided that their congregation should have one of the Czech memorial scrolls. Esther went to London to retrieve a scroll with one instruction: “Bring back a scroll that our children can carry.” When Saritzky returned to LAX she was met with great fanfare and celebration, as members of the congregation sang and danced their way down the concourse and north up the 405 toward the Torah’s new home.

Since that day, all of the synagogue’s b’nai mitzvah children have carried that little Torah around their sanctuary. Rabbi Lutz says they carry it not because it is the smallest, “but for the last children of Kolin, who never had the opportunity to celebrate their own b’nai mitzvah, or to hold and hug this little Torah.”

On the congregation’s regular trips to Israel, they always visit the Valley of the Communities at Yad v’Shem, where they stand under the name of Kolin and hold a memorial service. They call out the names of that last, lost generation, remembering them and the horrible sacrifice they were forced to make simply because they were Jewish.

“This little Torah is not ours, it is theirs—the people of Kolin,” said Rabbi Lutz in his Rosh Hashanah sermon. “We carry it for them. We carry the hopes and dream of a Jewish community that is no more. This is their precious legacy to us. And this is the promise we made to them: to care for their scroll and do all we can to make sure that they are never forgotten.”

Over the years the Torah had fallen into a state of disrepair—faded letters and frayed seams. It has become fragile and unusable. And so this year Rabbi Lutz and the congregation are restoring the Torah. “We owe it to the people of Kolin,” he says, “to 300 years of men and women, boys and girls, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers who cherished this Torah.”

“We are going to make this Torah, once more, as it was intended to be,” said Rabbi Lutz. “A living, vibrant part of a Jewish community.” Temple Ahavat Shalom is engaging in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: each and every member of the community has the chance to take quill in hand and write a letter in the Torah, aided by a Torah scribe working with the same tools and dedication as the one who wrote their Torah more than three centuries ago. Opportunities exist for dedications of words, verses, weekly portions or even an entire book of the Torah to support the project.

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Join us at the Torah Restoration Opening Celebration
October 10, 2010 — 5:00 p.m.
Temple Ahavat Shalom in Northridge, California
Meet the scribe, hear from Rabbi Lutz, and see the first letters restored in the Kolin Torah

www.tasnorthridge.org/torah