By B.J. Davis
North Carolina has been home to many Holocaust survivors. Some of their stories and memories can be heard on websites such as Jewish Heritage North Carolina or from the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust, a program under the auspices of the State’s Department of Public Instruction.
Yet, there are a handful of survivors with whom most North Carolinians—both in the Jewish community and beyond—are not familiar. These survivors are not people but rather sacred Torah scrolls.
One of the main sources of these surviving Torah scrolls is the Memorial Scrolls Trust in London, which collected and preserved Torah scrolls from Prague. Today the capital of Czechia (formerly known as the Czech Republic), Prague had been home to a Jewish community for about 800 years. In 1906, the Jewish Museum of Prague opened to document the history and culture of a thriving community. Little did Jewish residents know that in 20 years, the future of Jewish communities throughout Europe would be changed forever.
In September 1941, the Nazis banned the holding of Jewish services in Prague, and in December 1941 the museum became a storehouse for items taken from the empty Prague synagogues. In 1942, the Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia were instructed to send their “historically valuable” items to the Jewish Museum in Prague. Eventually the museum’s collection grew to include 212,000 artifacts, which included 1,800 Torah scrolls.
The Torah scrolls were discovered following the Prague offensive in May 1945, when the city was liberated by Soviet forces. After the war, the scrolls continued to be held by Communist forces, and later by Czechoslovakia’s communist government.
In 1963, a company owned by the Czech communist government approached Ralph Yablon, a British art dealer and philanthropist, about purchasing a collection of Torah scrolls. Yablon decided to purchase the entire collection, and in February 1964, 1,564 scrolls from the repository in Prague arrived in London. After a series of negotiations, the entire collection was donated to Westminster Synagogue, Kent, London.
The Westminster Synagogue oversaw the creation of what is now the Memorial Scrolls Trust and Museum. Part of the mission of the Trust is to make these invaluable repositories of Jewish life and culture available to Jewish and faith-based organizations. Today, 1,400 scrolls survive in communities on nearly every continent.
These scrolls are significant because they retain unique characteristics of their place of origin and the sofers, or scribes, who wrote them. Some of these scrolls may contain different styles of script which may indicate the country or region where they were written. Some scrolls have another indicator of a scroll’s age or origin reflected by unique decorative embellishments just above the Hebrew letters. These marks are known as “ketarim” (crowns) in Hebrew or “tagin” in Aramaic. They are occasionally referred to as “tittles” in English.
Caption: Examples of differences in the script and styles of the letter crowns or “tittles.” The top photo is from the Czech scroll at Temple Beth Or in Raleigh. Notice the heavier letters and the less ornate and shorter crowns compared to a different scroll owned by Temple Beth Or pictured below. Photos by B.J. Davis.
Prior to 1938, there were approximately 357,000 Jews living in Czechoslovakia. During the Holocaust, the Germans and their collaborators killed approximately 263,000 of the Jews who had resided in the territory of the Czechoslovak Republic. By 1945, some 14,000 Protectorate Jews remained alive in the Czech lands.
North Carolina is fortunate to have these unique Holocaust survivors in the Torah scrolls that continue to enhance and inspire our communities. In addition to the fourteen Czech scrolls currently housed throughout the state, North Carolina is also home to a fifteenth scroll, which was smuggled out of Hungary, and a sixteenth scroll constructed from the panels of three separate scrolls that survived the Holocaust.
Jewish Heritage North Carolina is currently working directly with a Trustee of the Memorial Scrolls Trust, the holders of these scrolls, and several Holocaust education organizations within the state to organize a future event to bring the scrolls together for a special program. We look forward to sharing more information as details become available.
