Holocaust survivors
How over 1,500 Czechoslovakian Torah scrolls — including 5 preserved locally — survived both Nazis and communists
By tradition, by habit, the enormity of the Holocaust is expressed by an enormous figure — 6 million, the number of Jews who died under the Nazis — but Jeffrey Ohrenstein, a scholar of those times, uses much smaller ones.
“I try to bring it down to numbers we can understand,” he told a crowd at the Jewish Community Center of the Lehigh Valley in Allentown on Thursday, as he recounted the little-known story of how more than 1,500 Torah scrolls were saved from the Czechoslovakian regions of Bohemia and Moravia during World War II and found their way to synagogues around the world, including five in the Lehigh Valley.
Ohrenstein is chairman of the Memorial Scrolls Trust in London, where the scrolls ended up in good hands after surviving the concentrated destruction of the war and the drawn-out misery of the communist regime that came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948.
He is a lean man with a trim white beard, an accent off a BBC radio drama and a mild,
self-effacing humor directed at his deficiencies as a public speaker.
Those deficiencies exist only in his imagination, of course. As he told the story of the scrolls, which consist of the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures, he evoked the long, tragic arc of Jewish history in Europe and grounded it in the concrete details of ordinary life.
It’s a strange story that began in March 1939, when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia and took over Jewish businesses and properties, including the Jewish Museum in the capital city of Prague.
In 1942, the Nazi government ordered the synagogues of Bohemia and Moravia to send items of historical significance to the museum.
Jewish leaders, seeing an opportunity to preserve Jewish heritage, asked the Nazis to accept other items. They assented, and the synagogues sent virtually everything of significance — scrolls, books, archives, liturgical objects.
“Some of these were communities of only 30 people,” Ohrenstein said, and here is where he recast the abstract and incomprehensible 6 million into something visual and almost tactile — a microcosmic village where every man, woman and child would have had an intimate relationship with the Torah.
More than 200,000 items from these villages found their way to Prague and filled 30 buildings in the center of the city.
By some accounts, the Nazis viewed the collection as the basis of a ghoulish future project: The Museum of an Extinct Race.
Ohrenstein, however, said no written evidence of that plan has emerged, and given that the Nazis kept meticulous records of everything, it is more likely they were interested in the monetary value of the objects.
Whatever the case, the war ended and the artifacts survived, mainly because Prague, though badly damaged, was spared the leveling destruction that robbed Europe of so many other treasures.
For a brief, optimistic time after the war, about 50 Jewish communities were re-established. Then the communists took over and synagogues were closed again.
“In some ways the communists were worse than the Nazis,” Ohrenstein said. “They destroyed over 100 buildings. Others were made into warehouses.”
The scrolls were stored in an old synagogue outside Prague. Here they stayed, decomposing, until 1963, when the Czech government asked a London art dealer who did business in eastern Europe whether he wanted to buy any of them.
The dealer, Eric Estorick, brought the pitch to a client, Ralph Yablon, a founding member of London’s Westminster Synagogue. After confirming the authenticity of the scrolls, Yablon bought them and donated them to the synagogue.
“Exactly 55 years ago today, Feb. 7, 1,564 scrolls arrived on the back of a couple lorries,” Ohrenstein said. “They were in plastic bags, like body bags.”
Soon the trust was created for their care, and the scrolls were allocated to synagogues around the world.
Some were preserved well enough to be usable in services. Others were destined for display cases, like the 204-year-old scroll at Congregation Brith Sholom in Hanover Township, Northampton County.
That scroll came from Boskovice — the hometown of Charles Ticho, father of Jewish Community Center board member Ron Ticho.
The elder Ticho acquired the scroll from the trust about 14 years ago — a moving moment, by all accounts, because Ticho’s ancestors would have used it in worship and ceremonies.
“It would have been the scroll he used for his own bar mitzvah” if the war hadn’t happened, said Brith Sholom’s rabbi, Michael Singer.
The scrolls belong to the trust but are more or less on permanent loan. If two scroll-holding congregations merge, one scroll has to be returned.
The others in the Lehigh Valley are housed at Congregation Keneseth Israel and Congregation Sons of Israel in Allentown, Temple Beth El in South Whitehall and the Jewish Day School in Allentown.
Their value can’t be overstated, Ohrenstein said.
“These scrolls are survivors and silent witnesses of the Shoah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for holocaust. “It’s not just Bohemia and Moravia. They represent all Jews.”