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Coincidentally just minutes ago I came out of a “parents learning session” at my synagogue about the Czech Torah scrolls, ehich I didn’t know about previously.
by jeffwass 8y ago
Coincidentally just minutes ago I came out of a “parents learning session” at my synagogue about the Czech Torah scrolls, ehich I didn’t know about previously.
During he Holocaust, thousands of Czech scrolls taken from scattered synagogues, to a main synagogue in Prague. An old rumour, though now thought to be inaccurate, was that Hitler wanted to document the culture of the race he eliminated.
Many of these scrolls have deterioated, some have been restored, and they are now distributed on-loan to many Jewish communities around the world, not just as working Torah’s but as part of the living story of persecution and perseverance.
- jeffwass 8y agoReally confused why someone felt the need to downvote that comment.
- sctb 8y agoThe voting software can be very noisy early on, which is unfortunate in cases like these. But this comment is upvoted by a massive ratio—there's no question at all about how the community feels.
- matt4077 8y agoJudging by the other early comments, this article seems to be triggering the dark underbelly of the HN community to make an appearance.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoI feel the same (sorry dang about "you are not allowed to discuss downvoting here" policy). The only explanation is that there is still some anti-Jewish sentiment and somehow it's present also among the HN folks, hopefully in a fraction of a promille.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- josefx 8y agoI feel a bit irritated by the fact that it gives us explicitly outdated information ("an old rumor now thought to be inacurrate") without mentioning the current thoughts behind it.
- jeffwass 8y agoThe latest idea to replace the “old rumour”, according the rabbi, is that some of the initial collecting of Torah scrolls came from Jews hoping to preserve the scrolls from their synagogues that were vandalised or destroyed by the nazis. But after a collection of Jewish artefacts and treasures was started (which includes things like silver scroll crowns and plates and Yad pointers), the nazis themselves became interested in gathering the relics hoping to extract precious metals. So much of the silver is gone today, but amazingly the collection of scrolls themselves remained relatively intact. My synagogue has one of the scrolls, very badly damaged, which the rabbi showed us this morning. There is something very powerful about seeing and feeling a religious artifact hundreds of years old, originally from a Czech Jewish community now destroyed and practically forgotten. Yet this Torah lives on a living and breathing Jewish community today, where some of the Bar and Bat Mitzvah students actually read from it.