Our Czech Torah scroll (MST 1353) is an ‘orphan’, meaning its exact provenance is not known.
York Liberal Jewish Community has very kindly been lent a Torah scroll by the Memorial Scrolls Trust, housed in Westminster Synagogue, which looks after nearly 1600 Czech scrolls rescued from the Holocaust.
In 1942, members of Prague’s Jewish community devised a way to bring the religious treasures from neighbouring communities and synagogues to the comparative safety of the Prague Jewish Museum. The Nazis were persuaded to accept the plan and more than 100,000 artefacts were rescued. Among them were the Torah scrolls. Each was meticulously recorded. labelled and entered on a card index by the Museum’s staff with a description of the scroll and the place it had come from.
After the war, the scrolls were transferred to the ruined synagogue at Michle outside Prague, where they remained until they were transported to London in 1964, in a remarkable act of rescue, paid for by the philanthropist Ralph Yablon, a Jewish lawyer based in Leeds and a founding member of Westminster Synagogue.
The scrolls were repaired and the decision taken to lend them out to Jewish communities around the world in need of a scroll, to foster new Jewish life in the face of the Nazis project to destroy it.
York Liberal Jewish Community is one of the most recent new communities to have benefited from the loan of a scroll by the Trust. Numbered 1353, our scroll is an ‘orphan’, which is to say that its provenance is not recorded, although we know it came from Moravia, in the east of what is now the Czech Republic. Our scroll is unusual in that it has an appendix of 61 lines. We are extremely proud to have been able to provide this orphan with a new home, and we have recently built a special ark for transporting it. Our Torah scroll’s part in the revival of Jewish life in York is, we believe, an appropriate and powerful response to the Nazi genocide.
To read more about the scrolls’ remarkable story, visit the Memorial Scrolls Trust’s website here.