Restoring sacred texts

BASYA LAYE

As Congregation Emanu-El celebrates its last 150 years, the community is also looking to the future, with various community-building projects and plans to reinforce the physical space of the synagogue. Ensuring that the community’s sacred ritual objects can withstand the test of time is part of this ongoing endeavor.

Emanu-El’s Rabbi Harry Brechner spoke with the Jewish Independent about the pioneer spirit of the Emanu-El community and the ongoing restoration of two of the congregation’s sifrei Torah, a project that he hopes will be completed by the High Holidays after approximately eight months of meticulous work by sofrim, ritual scribes.

JI: What makes Congregation Emanu-El special?

HB: It’s truly a very heimish community, there’s a lot of care that congregants really give one another, and I think a real attachment to the synagogue as well as to the congregation. It’s very eclectic.... We have a lot of people who are craftspeople, poets and a couple of organic farmers, academics and people who work for government, as well as numbers of different types of professionals, like doctors and naturopaths, psychologists.... If you were to try to get as far away from the established Jewish world as you could and stay in North America, this is probably it. And, if you want to choose to come back, or to re-engage, I’d say that’s what a lot of the congregants who are really involved [here] are doing....

JI: Can you offer some background on the sifrei Torah being restored?

HB: The two Torahs are small, they’re almost like sisters, although one is very embellished and one is very straightforward in terms of the scribal arts. Based on the ink, because the [letters are] almost turning reddish-brown – and how we kind of have a sense of the date of it – there was a time that they would put iron filings into the ink. They stopped doing that about 250 years ago. These are the first Torahs brought to Victoria from Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, when the synagogue opened in 1863. And probably they were 100 to 150 years old when they first came to Victoria.

Based on the kind of stitching and the kind of ink, the two sofrim, who are a husband and wife team [based in London, England], they are estimating them to be about 300 years old [and] based on the kind of embellishment and style, they look like they were probably written by a central European kabbalist. The embellishments on the letters, crowns and different kinds of markings are no longer done.

What they are doing, instead of just ... repair, they’re trying to restore them using appropriate materials, from the way that the wooden handles, the atzei chayim, are being repaired, to the kinds of ways that they’re re-inking.... One of the scribes, Avielah Barclay, and her husband, Marc Michaels, both of them have said that the script is so small and precise, they had to find the tiniest of quills, they had to cut their quills down as small as they can, it’s almost like they’re working on writing a mezuzah....

JI: The two Torahs were to be welcomed back at the High Holidays. Is the restoration on schedule?

HB: That’s what we’re hoping for. They’re pretty close. We’re just trying to figure out when to have a siyum, a [celebration of the] completion of the writing. There’s so much rewriting that it’s almost as if we’re writing the Torah again. So, the restoring of it, we’re really seeing as the mitzvah of writing a new Torah. We’re looking at when to do that celebration and we’re not sure yet.

JI: How many sifrei Torah does the congregation have? What does it mean to have these older scrolls?

HB: We have two that are here now, and we have another one that a congregant has donated to us – it’s being written in Jerusalem.... There’s something special about the fact that these were the first scrolls to be brought here – and being able to know that we’re holding them and caring for them and bringing them into the future. They weren’t in a state of being unkosher when we began restoring them. This is really about saying let’s ensure that they stay ritually fit and that they’re going to be able to be used into the future. There’s something really special about them.

JI: What kinds of sacred objects will be on view at the open house on June 2?

HB: There are some really exquisite historical items that we have. From a chuppah that we brought around the Cape Horn in [the mid-1860s] to get here – it was the first chuppah – and, actually, a number of artists in the community have created another chuppah for the 150th [anniversary] because this one is no longer useable. It’s one of the really special things about the synagogue, is that almost all of the art and almost everything that you see in the sanctuary was created by congregants.

JI: What does this anniversary mean to the community at large?

HB: I think that the myth ... the grounding story about who the synagogue is and how it came into being, is pretty special, because I think it lasts until now. In the 1860s, the [British] colonial government ... was giving land grants to faith communities, and the Jewish community wasn’t considered by the government at the time to be a faith community, so we didn’t receive a land grant. I think there were about 70 [Jews] in Victoria at that point ... those 70 people were highly involved in the beginnings of civic organizing in Victoria. They were connected with the Masons, they were connected with a number of different cultural groups. People from outside the Jewish community said, this isn’t reasonable and fair, and they donated money and time to the building of the synagogue. I think that sense of collaboration and friendship, as well as the synagogue’s involvement in civic organizing, has always been a focal point of the community. My sense is that when things were really dwindling in Victoria, after World War Two until probably the mid-70s, when the last person at Congregation Emanu-El shut the light, the building had been stuccoed over and a false ceiling [put in], there was a sense of just trying to preserve what little there was left.... But, I think we’ve returned to being very, very involved in social action in the downtown core.

The synagogue is situated in almost what is as close as Victoria comes to [Vancouver’s] Downtown Eastside, and to have a synagogue with a school and a day care in that environment has been an anchor for the city. It’s also meant that we have a responsibility to our neighborhood. We serve as a youth shelter [and] we’ve done an enormous amount of outreach to the marginal and the street community. It’s been a real part of the synagogue and synagogue life. I think that connects in with that sense of really feeling like we’re part of the fabric of Victoria.

I think that the help that we’ve received, because we’ve been working on pretty serious structural repairs, and the support from the greater community, as well as the civic and local government, and I think that the province is going to help us in the future, it’s been really uplifting. Even individual contributions from folks who are outside of the community to say, “We really want to support you.”

To give you a really quick vignette, [Victoria] Cool Aid [Society] is an organization here on the island that runs a number of shelters, and does a huge amount of work with the hard-to-house as well as the general homeless community. When we were looking to gain different kinds of grants, it was becoming clear that we needed to show the government and other granting agencies that we’re not a parochial, insular faith community. I had asked numbers of people, that we do all kinds of collaborative work with, to write us a letter of reference about who we are.... So, when Cool Aid wrote their letter, one of the directors of the agency said, “I’d like to go out for coffee and give you the letter personally.” I thought, “That’s interesting. Fine, we’ll do that.” It was very nice. He passed me [the letter] and he said, “Here’s your letter, but you’ve supported us so much over the years, this is a token of our thanks,” and handed me a $1,200 cheque. It’s been a typical story.

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