Two Torah scrolls now housed in Winnipeg share a common message

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This article was published 15/04/2023 (910 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Originating from different centuries and cities in what is now Czechia, two Torah scrolls now housed in Winnipeg share a common message: remember how we got here, says a cantor studying one of them.

“I’m hoping to raise broader awareness of this because so many lives were erased. This represents a connection to real people and a real time and place,” says Congregation Shaarey Zedek’s Leslie Emery of their 19th-century Torah scroll once belonging to a synagogue in Slaný, near Prague.

The heavily repaired scroll, acquired on permanent loan in 1981 from the London-based Memorial Scrolls Trust, is one of two scrolls in the city once used by Jews in the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia before the Second World War.

Temple Shalom houses the other one, now 100 years old, from Moraska Ostrava, brought to Winnipeg in 1969 for the newly established Reform synagogue.

Winnipeggers can learn more about both scrolls — and see them in a person — at a hybrid event at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 20 at Temple Shalom, 1077 Grant Ave., featuring Lois Roman of Memorial Scrolls Trust, who delivers a presentation by Zoom.

About 1,800 Torah scrolls and tens of thousands of pieces of Judaica were collected from Jewish communities in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, explains Roman, a former Wall Street money manager who holds a master’s degree in the Holocaust and genocide. With the majority of the Czech Jewish population murdered during the war, most Judaica items were not repatriated.

In 1964, the Czech government sold a collection of 1,564 scrolls to a London art dealer, who brought them to England where the Jewish community set up the non-profit Memorial Scrolls Trust to repair them and then lend them out to Jewish communities worldwide.

Twenty-seven scrolls landed up in Canada, including the two in Winnipeg, and about a thousand more went to the United States, says Roman, who fears the institutional memory of how the scrolls got there and the people behind them may have faded since then, she says.

“I’m guessing maybe 10 per cent of the people who have (a scroll), have used it or cherished it and (the rest) don’t know what they have,” says the New Jersey-based trustee.

Currently both scrolls share the ark at Temple Shalom, which is renting space to Congregation Shaarey Zedek while their Wellington Crescent building undergoes renovation.

“It was one of the advantages of the two synagogues under one roof,” says Rabbi Allan Finkel of Temple Shalom.

“We’re learning more about our own cultures and shared histories.”

Scribed in 1923, the Temple Shalom scroll is warped from water damage, but still intact and used several times a year, says Finkel.

“Any survivors coming to Winnipeg carried their personal stories and these Torahs do too, and they represent every person who ever read from it and saw it process” past them, he says.

The older scroll was damaged beyond repair and is no longer considered kosher, says Emery, since some of the letters are unreadable. To be kosher, a Torah scroll must be complete.

“There are panels written by other people and sewn in, in an attempt to make it a whole scroll,” explains Emery of the repairs.

“It’s had a hard life.”

Because the scroll is so fragile, unrolling it for further study could cause more damage, so Emery arranged for photographer Keith Levit to make a digital record of each parchment. She plans to post the images online so others from the congregation and beyond can study this Torah scroll, which features flourishes and embellishments unique to its age and place of origin. Most striking is how the letter pey is often doubled or wrapped, says Emery.

“Letters in this tradition were used to highlight a hidden meaning in the text,” says Emery, who has 27 years of experience of reading the Torah at services.

That embellishment speaks to the life and beliefs of Czech Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries, says Roman. By 1850, most of the Jews in the Czech lands had adopted Reform Judaism, adapted culturally, and one-third married outside the faith, says Roman.

“The scribes were pretty progressive as well and they started adding in embellishments in the writing of letters to hearken back to kabbalistic thinking,” she says, referring to the Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism.

Because most of the 1,564 scrolls were distributed well before the advent of digital photography and the internet, Romans says the photographs of Shaarey Zedek’s scroll, numbered MST 1483, adds to story of the Jewish community in the Czech lands, where Jews lived for ten centuries.

“Our collection of scrolls is an example of a moment in time in Jewish history,” says Roman.

Brenda.suderman@freepress.mb.ca

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