In November, members of Congregation Emanu-el B’ne Jeshurun and local Holocaust survivors gathered for a special homecoming celebration to dedicate Westminster Holocaust Scroll #942, and fill in the last seven of its 304,805 letters.
The Torah is one of 1,564 gathered from destroyed synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia between 1939 and 1942. Czech museum workers convinced the Nazis that Torahs and other synagogue artifacts should be preserved and catalogued. In 1963, the Torahs were purchased and brought to London. From there, those that were usable were sent to synagogues and organizations around the world.
Along with the religious school students, teachers, congregants and survivors were three generations of the family responsible for first bringing #942 to Milwaukee in 1967. Congregant Eve Joan Zucker shared the story of her mother-in-law, Sarah, who belonged to Emanu-el until her death in 1985.
“Sarah grew up in a small Hungarian town that was almost around the corner from Czechoslovakia,” Zucker said. “She remembered that there was a sofer (scribe) living with her family for a whole year so he could write a Torah for her mother Rivka.”
From then on, Zucker said, Sarah had wanted to fulfill the mitzvah of writing her own Torah or having one written for her. When she found out about the Westminster Scrolls, she paid to have one of them restored and brought to Milwaukee.
Sarah’s grandchildren, Laurie Shapiro and Bill Zucker, read from it at their b’nai mitzvahs not long after its arrival. Years later, Eve Joan and her late husband Jim went to London and reconnected with a camp friend who had become the rabbi at Westminster Synagogue. He gave them a tour of the room where the scrolls were stored.
“When he showed us a book telling where many of the Torahs had been sent, we knew that Sarah Zucker’s Torah was one of them,” she said, adding that it had come from the Pinkus Synagogue in Prague and was written in 1880.
Its latest repair was sparked by a recent bar mitzvah. Sarah’s great-grandson Jacob Zucker wanted to read his parsha from the family Torah. Arrangements were made, and Rabbi Kevin Hale, a sofer from Leeds, Massachusetts, performed a variety of repairs.
Hale, who presided over the dedication ceremony, said the Torah was significantly older than its recorded age.
“I would say it was written in 1780. And for being well over 200 years old, it is in remarkable condition,” he said.
Hale was able to date the Torah because of the parchment on which it was written. Pre-19th-century Torahs, he said, were written on thin, almost onion-skin-like parchment compared to their newer counterparts, which were written on thicker parchment with a treated backing.
The thinness, he said, made the Torah harder to roll, and prone to creases. Along with flattening creases, Hale sewed panels, patched, rewrote letters and cleaned the Torah. He also completely replaced one panel. Cleaning, he said, presented a particular challenge.
“My plan had been to thoroughly clean the front,” he said, “but to do the vigorous cleaning might have endangered the text itself. What I ended up doing was to lightly clean the text itself with an eraser. By wiping between the columns and above and below, I sanded with emery paper. So the cleaning was a little bit complicated.”
Sewing panels, Hale was able to identify those that had been sewn by the original sofer, those repaired – and in one case, created and sewn in – by subsequent scribes.
“Pre-1880, there was a way of sewing where the two panels are folded back and there are loops every few inches,” he said. “The newer way is more like seismic plates, where one is behind the other and then the top one is folded. So the old style is a bunch of loops and the new style is back-and-forth, back-and-forth.”
Many of the panels on #942, sewn originally in one style, had been repaired in the other, newer one. Faced with the need to repair both types, Hale did his best to preserve the integrity of the scribes before him.
“Where the seam was still in the old style, I sewed in the old style,” he said, “and where it was in the new style, I sewed in the new style.”
With the newer panel, however, Hale recommended that it be completely rewritten, for two reasons. One had to do with appearance and honor.
“(It) didn’t match the original script at all. It was a different kind of parchment and different script,” he said.
The original scribe, based on his lettering style, had been experienced and meticulous, Hale said. His letters were unadorned, very upright and even where they curved naturally, seemed almost written in little segments to make them stand as straight as possible.
It would honor the original scribe, Hale said, to create a new panel that more closely matched the style in which the rest of the Torah was written.
It also opened up a path for Sarah’s descendants and her community to fulfill the 613th mitzvah. Writing a new panel provided the opportunity to create the Torah as a new Torah, Hale said.
“If all but one of the letters are written, it’s not a complete Torah scroll, it’s a Chumash. So, by writing this new piece, it was an opportunity to complete the Torah anew.”
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At a glance
· Local synagogue’s Holocaust Torah is repaired.
· It is believed to be 200 years old.
· The original scribe had been experienced and meticulous.
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