How much for your Torahs?
OLDEST JEWISH CONGREGATION IN MARITIMES LOOKING TO SELL TREASURED PARCHMENTS
Mark Chernin needs to make a few phone calls, he says, to the seven or so other surviving members of the Congregation Sons of Israel Synagogue in Glace Bay, N.S., who don’t always agree on everything but agreed on one thing in 2010. They needed to close the doors of their synagogue — founded in 1902, and the oldest in the Maritimes — for good, because there was no point in staying open and paying the bills when there weren’t enough male worshippers left to perform prayer services in the Orthodox tradition during the High Holidays.
Shuttering Sons of Israel marked an end for the congregation — the synagogue has since been demolished — but also the beginning of a new problem for its ever-dwindling (and aging) membership: what to do with the Torah scrolls? Worn, old parchments, weighing as much as 20 kilograms each, that were once the bedrock of their religious ceremonies, but for the past eight years have resided in a box in a spare room at the Temple Sons of Israel Synagogue in nearby Sydney.
“We originally talked about selling all the scrolls,” Chernin says. “And we did sell one to a buyer in Toronto, but it was a lot of work — like a two-year process. I am president of our congregation, because no else wants to be the president, and I am also probably the youngest member left — and I am 61.
“And what we really need to do is get together and talk about the two scrolls we do have left, because selling them is a lot of work, but if we want to give them away there is 10,000 people out there that would want them, and so ...”
And so Mark Chernin has a problem.
Yitzhak Winer is a certified scribe. He apprenticed in Israel, and now lives in New York, where he receives commissions to create new scrolls — scrolls are handwritten — and gets approached to buy used ones in need of repair for a new synagogue to call home.
“It is a very narrow market,” Winer says. “Depending on the size and condition of the scroll — if it is repairable, or not repairable — it could be worth anywhere from $500 to $10,000.”
A new scroll sells for about $30,000. (You can find them on eBay). The scroll the Sons of Israel sold to the Toronto buyer netted $8,000; money earmarked for the upkeep of Glace Bay’s Jewish cemetery. Every scroll, meanwhile, reveals the story of the Old Testament. But the parchment it is written upon also has a yarn to tell, about Jewish community life — and history — in a particular time and place.
It sounds odd, somehow: Cape Breton, that scrappy Canadian island, with deep-sunk Scottish roots, was once a thriving Jewish hub; a destination for refugees fleeing the Russian pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Coal mining companies would advertise in the European papers, offering able-bodied men free passage to Canada in exchange for a job on the Cape Breton coal shelves beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Mining towns, such as Glace Bay, New Waterford, Old Dominion and Sydney, became melting pots. And synagogues sprouted, including the Sons of Israel, the oldest of the bunch. The Russian Jews would save their pennies, and many quit the mines as soon as they could to open a business above ground, selling wares — clothes, cooking utensils, assorted baubles — to community residents.
“The Jews were a one-generation phenomenon,” Irving Abella, a Jewish historian at York University said. “People worked and slaved so their children didn’t need to do what they did, and the kids went off to school and became professionals and never came back.
“It is the professionalization of the Jewish community that doomed the Cape Breton settlements.”
The last underground coal mine in Cape Breton closed in 2001. Nine years later the Sons of Israel followed suit. Packing up its menorahs — switching off an Eternal Light that had burned for 109 years — and boxing and moving its three Torah scrolls into a spare room of the dwindling-but-not-dead synagogue nearby, where two scrolls reside to this day.
They are insured, along with the other artifacts, at a $300 annual rate.
“It is a lot of hassle trying to sell the scrolls, but if we decide to give them away, I want to give them away to people that we know — or have some connection to Glace Bay — not just somebody that sends me an email from Timbuktu and asks us to donate a Torah,” Chernin says. “When they are gone, they are gone. So it would be nice to imagine them being used somewhere by someone with a connection to this place.”
If you are that someone, or you know that someone, Mark Chernin is looking forward to your call.