1744 Torah finds new home at Portsmouth museum

ON a recent morning, Zelma Rivin gazed at the ruler-straight Hebrew calligraphy of a Torah on display in a former Effingham Street synagogue.

She marvel ed, not over the exquisite penmanship but the 1744 scroll's survival of time's passage, and humankind's capacity for evil.

The Torah is the Jewish scripture containing Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Traditionally, "It's the word of God that God handed down to Moses," Rivin said.

To the Nazis, the Torah and sacred Judaica were, at best, ethnic curiosities, artifacts of a people targeted for extinction. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Yet some Jews survived. So did some Torah scrolls, including the one dedicated last month at the former Chevra T'helim Synagogue that Rivin and a non-profit group are restoring.

Though the scroll escaped destruction, the Jewish community it belonged to in Czechoslovakia was virtually wiped out.

"May its presence in our midst serve as a memorial to the martyrs of our people who perished because of their love for it," Rabbi Arthur Z. Steinberg said of the scroll at the dedication ceremony. The old synagogue is now known as the Jewish Museum and Cultural Center.

Protected in a Plexiglas case, the scroll is rolled on twin, yard-long wooden spindles. The ink is faded from black to brown, but the lettering is clear - not bad for a document older than the Declaration of Independence.

The Torah is the keystone of Jewish congregations everywhere. It teaches monotheism, the early history of the Jews, and God's ethical code for all people, said Steinberg, who leads Temple Sinai, a Portsmouth synagogue.

At worship services, a congregation will read through the entire Torah over the course of a year - and then begin the cycle anew.

"We are never finished with reading the Torah," Steinberg said.

Although the Torah's text is available in printed versions, no synagogue is complete without a Torah scroll.

Torahs are still created the way the Czech scroll was crafted: by a "sofer," a specially-trained scribe who painstakingly hand-letters the text on parchment.

Helen Brewer Glassman, who attended Chevra T'helim as a child, remembers congregants reverently touching their "tallit," or prayer shawls, to the Torah as it passed down the center aisle.

"Everybody would rise; it was a time of great respect in the service as the Torah was taken out," she said.

Years later, Glassman read about the 1960s rescue by Jews in Britain of 1,564 neglected Torah scrolls from Czechoslovakia.

The post-war Czech government sold the Torah scrolls to British preservationists who formed the Memorial Scrolls Trust.

A popular legend held that the scrolls were collected by the Nazis for display in a museum celebrating the extermination of the Jews.

More recent research indicates that Czech Jews, acting with Nazi permission, gathered and stored the scrolls at Prague's existing Jewish museum, said Susan Boyer, U.S. director of the trust.

The trust loans out the scrolls to synagogues. More than 1,000 are in the United States, Boyer said.

Synagogues in Norfolk, Virginia Beach and Hampton are among more than a dozen in Virginia which hold Czech Holocaust scrolls, she said.

Glassman arranged for her family to become a custodian of a scroll that traced to the town of Trebic in what is now the Czech Republic.

"Tradition says there was a Jewish community there dating back to 900 A.D.," said Glassman, a teacher now living in Florida. The scroll was written for a Trebic synagogue built in the 1600s, she said.

During World War II, the town's 1,370 Jews were rounded up on a single day by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps, Glassman said.

"Only 35 of them survived, and nobody came back," said Glassman, who visited the old synagogue in Trebic.

"You go to a town that had a thriving Jewish community for nearly 1,000 years and it's gone - it hits you in your gut," she said. "You just can't believe what you're seeing."

Glassman and her brothers - Herbert Brewer of Norfolk and David Brewer of Reston, Va. - placed the Trebic Torah at Gomley Chesed Synagogue in Churchland in 1990.

But the trio decided to shift the scroll to Chelim T'helim, where it will help tell the story of the Jewish people, Glassman said.

It's a story that mixes the melancholy of the Holocaust with joy.

"Joy and celebration, because in the dedication of this Torah, we have further and incontrovertible evidence that Am Yisrael Chai - 'the people of Israel lives'," Steinberg said.

Steven G. Vegh, (757) 446-2417, steven.vegh@pilotonline.com