Our Torah Scrolls

Our Czech Scroll – Holocaust Memorial Torah #720. In our founding year, we received in trust one of the 1,564 Czech Torah scrolls that survived the Holocaust. The scrolls were originally collected by the curators of the Jewish Museum in Prague under the Nazis.

In 2009 we began researching the history of TBSPR’s Holocaust scroll. Each of the Czech Torah scrolls has a plaque identifying the town and, when known, the exact synagogue, from which it was taken. We found out from the Memorial Scrolls Trust that 216 of the 1,564 scrolls were “orphan” scrolls, their towns of origin unknown, and that our scroll was an orphan scroll. The Trust recommended that we “adopt” a destroyed congregation for our scroll. TBS chose Jihlava, a large town in Moravia, whose most famous citizen was Gustav Mahler.

In 2010, we rededicated the scroll, adopting as our own the destroyed Jewish community of Jihlava. Every Shabbat we include six names of Jihlava Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, and all of their names appear in our Book of Memory.

You can read the entire story in the monograph entitled We Adopt As Our Own The Destroyed Jewish Community of Jihlava, written by Naomi Patz.

More information about the Memorial Scrolls Trust is available on their website.

The Klau Torah. Our second Torah was brought to us by Jimmy Klau’s mother, Sadie, at the behest of Sue and Jim, for the occasion of Jimmy’s 40th birthday. They had been advised that we should have two Torahs so that there would always be one Torah on the bimah on Simchat Torah.