Philadelphia woman traces little Torah to Czech town’s tragedy
Jane Hurwitz felt an obligation to the Jews of Svetlá nad Sázavou who, in the face of death, had prayed with the little Torah.
The sacred scroll, just 14 inches high, had been used by scores of villagers who would be transported in 1942 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, never to return.
Hurwitz’s sense of duty to them deepened as she delved into the Torah’s history, part of a research project at Old York Road Temple-Beth Am, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The Abington synagogue has three scrolls, on permanent loan from a London collection, that survived both the Holocaust and the 1948 Communist takeover of what is now the Czech Republic.
On Monday, after two years of study, Hurwitz concluded her mission with a trip to Svetlá nad Sázavou, where a plaque was to be dedicated “in memory of the Jewish citizens of our city who perished in the Holocaust 1939-1945.”
“We have this link to a place where the Torah survived but [the Jews] didn’t,” said Hurwitz, who pulled together the town-wide ceremony from her home in Huntingdon Valley, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, more than 4,000 miles away. “I said, ‘We need a plaque.’”
The Old York Road Temple-Beth Am contingent, including Hurwitz’s husband, William Patent, and several other members, will join Svetlá nad Sázavou dignitaries and residents, as well as three relatives of a Jewish man who had said a blessing over the Torah before escaping to France. Hurwitz located him – a professor now 100 years old – during her research.
Like many of her fellow congregants, Hurwitz knew little about the synagogue’s three Czech Torahs until 2014, when Rabbi Robert Leib suggested learning more about their provenance.
“As 21st-century American Jews, ... we have the privilege of breathing new life into them,” Leib said.
The sacred texts had been among more than 100,000 items of Judaica from Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic) saved by curators of the Jewish Museum in Prague during World War II. They had persuaded the Nazis to allow them to collect Torahs, books, silver, tapestry and other religious items left behind in synagogues as Jews were transported to concentration camps.
After the war and the subsequent Communist coup d’état, the government needed money, and in 1964 sold 1,564 Torahs to philanthropist Ralph Yablon, of London. He donated them to Westminster Synagogue, which placed them in trust. Since then, the Torahs have been distributed on permanent loan to synagogues around the world.
For the research project on the three at Old York Road Temple-Beth Am, Hurwitz took on the small scroll from the village of about 7,000 residents along the Sázavou River. Deena Schuman, of Jenkintown, focused on a scroll from Tabor, southeast of the capital, Prague. Barry Stein, of Dresher, concentrated on the Torah from Louny, northwest of Prague.
“Mine was the little Torah with no silver ornaments or beautiful covers,” Hurwitz said of her subject.
Its cream parchment bears brown spots of wear. It measures just 29.2 centimeters high – 35.6 including the spindles – but unfurls to a length that can wrap around the synagogue’s 400-seat sanctuary. It likely was used as a travel Torah by a rabbi, said Jeffrey Ohrenstein, of the Memorial Scrolls Trust in London.
The project team scoured books, the Internet, deportation and survivor lists and museum records. Schuman located a Cherry Hill family descended from a survivor who had lived in Tabor, but that town already had memorials honoring the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Stein went to Louny in 2014 after a group from the synagogue had also visited; they inspired local officials to install a plaque.
That left Svetlá nad Sázavou as the only town without a memorial to the Jews who died.
Hurwitz found that Jewish residents had lived in the town since at least the 18th century. Its two synagogues had been destroyed, but two Jewish cemeteries remain.
Also extant is a castle along the river that once was the summer home of a family named Morawetz who escaped the war and settled in North America.
Oskar Morawetz, a famous composer, died in 2007. His brother, Herbert, was still alive, an emeritus professor at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University, Hurwitz discovered. She picked up the phone. “His wife hung up on me,” Hurwitz said. “I think she thought I was a telemarketer.”
Hurwitz then located the couple’s daughter, Nancy Morawetz, a clinical law professor at NYU. They arranged an interview, to which Hurwitz brought the little Torah.
Herbert Morawetz told her he had said a blessing over the Torah at the town synagogue in 1938, on the night the Munich Agreement was signed. The accord allowed Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia.
He asked Hurwitz if he could hold the Torah and say the blessing again.
When he did, everyone wiped away tears, Hurwitz said.
On Monday, his son, John Morawetz, another of his daughters, Pegeen Rubinstein, and her husband, David, were to be at the dedication ceremony for the plaque, to be placed on the town hall.
“Our father, now 100, is haunted by the events of World War II,” Rubinstein wrote in an email as she traveled to Prague. “It is [up to] my generation and the next to keep stories alive, and to learn from that dark hour.” (The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS)