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Nov. 22, 2013
Family’s Torah travels
Great-grandfather’s scroll now calls Israel home.
TOBY ROSENSTRAUCH
In the mid-1800s, my great-grandfather lived in a small town in Poland called Yaneveh. He was a learned and religious man who taught cheder and was a Torah scribe. He decided that his family would have a Torah of its own and he somehow managed to acquire the necessary kosher animal skins to make the parchment upon which a Torah must be written.
Writing a Torah is a formidable task, and it takes about a year to do so. There are 304,805 letters in a Torah – and even a single missing or misshapen letter invalidates the entire scroll.
The last commandment in the Torah is to write one’s own Torah. Today, we buy a letter, chapter or portion of a joint Torah but my great-grandfather obviously took this commandment literally.
When he died, the family Torah was passed down to his son, my grandfather Shae. Shae was the overseer of a rich man’s estate but he was unable to make enough money to support his own family of eight children. He decided to go to America. However, he did not yet have the funds to take his family along. It was planned that he would send for them as soon as he could raise the money. He wrapped the Torah in a blanket and hid it in a closet before he left. My mother was two years old in 1913 when her father went to the United States.
Nobody could have predicted that it would take eight years until Shae could send for his family. In the meantime, one of the children died of cholera. In 1921, my grandmother gathered her seven children, took the Torah wrapped in a blanket, and traveled across the ocean by ship to America, bringing several of somebody else’s children with her as well. My mother told me that she felt lost among so many children competing for her mother’s attention on the long voyage. When at last they arrived in New York to meet her father, my mother did not even recognize him.
By that time, Shae had acquired a small used furniture store and a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He stored the precious Torah, still wrapped in a blanket, in a closet. When the sons began to work, too, it became possible to buy a brownstone in Brooklyn. At first, my grandfather prayed at a local yeshivah but, when a magnificent shul with two floors and stained-glass windows was built, he took the Torah there. I went to that shul with him on holidays for many years, until there was a big fire. The shul was destroyed but some brave soul rescued the Torah and returned it to him. He wrapped it in a blanket again and stored it in the closet of his brownstone. By this time, he was old. Both Shae and my grandmother died shortly thereafter. The house and its contents were sold, except for the Torah.
What was the family to do with the Torah? Shae’s children, including my mother, were all married and had children of their own. Family members belonged to temples in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and California. All of them wanted the Torah. They could not share it, nor could they sell it, as it is forbidden to sell a Torah unless the funds are needed for medical expenses. Until a decision could be made, one of my uncles took the Torah, wrapped in a blanket, to his shul in the Bronx in 1966. That small shul was in a bad neighborhood and the family feared theft of the Torah. There was no way to resolve the problem to everyone’s satisfaction.
My uncle had a friend who had just come back from Israel. He suggested that the Torah be donated by the family to a needy Israeli settlement. Inquiries were made and a suitable place was found. My uncle’s friend personally carried the Torah across the ocean again, this time by air, to Israel.
The Torah was given to a community named Peduel, in Modiin. In the thank you letter sent to my family in 1990, Peduel is described as a community of 32 families, consisting of both native-born Sabras and new immigrants from various countries throughout the world, including the United States. Peduel was defined as a “yishuv torani,” a settlement committed to Torah values and lifestyle. At that time, the first 20 homes were being completed as well as a mikvah. They said that the gift of the Torah was fundamental in helping to create a “makom Torah” for them and their children.
The family Torah is now well over a hundred years old and has been repaired. How proud my great-grandfather would be if he could know about his Torah’s final destination after so long a journey!
My entire family has been invited to come and visit Peduel.
Toby J. Rosenstrauch is an award-winning columnist and a resident of Florida. Her first novel, Knifepoint, was recently published.
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