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SYNAGOGUE GUIDE
Remarkable Restoration
Beth Shalom bringing burned Holocaust Torah back to life
By Cady Schulman
[email protected]
A
round 1,500 Torahs survived the
fires that burned synagogues in
Bohemia and Moravia during
the Holocaust. Congregation Beth Shalom this year is restoring one of those
Holocaust Torahs, an effort Rabbi
Mark Zimmerman said is aimed at ensuring that those Jewish congregations
will not be forgotten.
“Jews right here in Atlanta, Georgia, will keep the flame of their memory alive for future generations,” he said.
When the Torah arrived in Dunwoody from the Czech Memorial Trust,
congregation members were told that
the scroll, which had been unrolled
only to the burned portion, could not
be restored. But when it was unrolled
further while a scribe visited, it proved
to be in better shape than anticipated.
“The Torah must have been opened
to that section when they set the building on fire because the rest of the Torah
is in great shape,” said Vera Newman,
who is leading the project. “We were
amazed as we unrolled it. The dust
was flying everywhere, but we couldn’t
stop. We opened the whole thing, and it
was gorgeous. The edges were smokedamaged but not destroyed.”
The Torah was sent to Miami,
where a sofer (scribe) is re-creating the
burned pages and cleaning the rest of
the scroll at a cost of $25,000, funded
by passage sponsorships and donors.
“For only a few thousand more,
we could have written an entirely new
scroll, but there is something very special about our restoring a scroll from
a synagogue and Jewish community
that was decimated during the Holocaust,” Rabbi Zimmerman said. “Plus,
it is a very elaborate scroll written in
a rare scribal tradition that is no longer taught or used today. In this way
we are preserving something from the
past that the Nazis almost destroyed.”
Although much of the work is being done in Miami, the sofer will travel
to Atlanta several times to give synagogue members the chance to partici-
pate in the restoration.
“Many people have
signed up to write a letter
or word,” Newman said.
“And to think that we’re
actually going to have it
on holidays. We’re going
to use this Torah. It’s very,
very exciting.”
In addition to being saved from the Holocaust, the Torah is unusual because it follows the
Rabbi Mark Zimmerman looks over the !