Our Holocaust Scroll

The story of Our Torah begins with the acquisition of 1,564 sacred Scrolls of the Law from Czechoslovakia which arrived at Kent House, the home of Westminster Synagogue, in February 1964, has passed into history as a small but remarkable episode in the tragedy of European Jewry.

In the years after the War, a legend grew that the Nazis had planned to create a ‘museum to an extinct race’. This has little foundation in fact, but we do know that hundreds of artifacts were gathered together for one reason or another. Those who were entrusted with them were a symbol of hope in a time of sorrow, and an intimate link with those synagogues and their congregations destroyed by the Nazis. 
In 1942, a group of members of Prague’s Jewish community devised a way to bring the religious treasures from the deserted communities and destroyed synagogues to the comparative safety of Prague.  The Nazis were persuaded to accept the plan and more than 100,000 artifacts were brought to a Museum, 1,800 of which were Torah scrolls.  
Each was meticulously recorded. labelled and entered on a card index by the Museum’s staff with a description of the Scroll and the place it had come from. It was hoped that these treasures would be protected and might one day return to their original homes.
 
Our Torah, is catalog number 675

All the curators at the Museum were eventually transported to Terezin and Auschwitz. Only 2 survived but their legacy was the catalogue of the vast collection which was eventually sent to what was to become the Jewish Museum of Prague.

After the war, some fifty congregations re-established themselves in the Czech Republic and were provided with religious artifacts, not necessarily from their own communities. They were transferred to the ruined synagogue at Michle outside Prague.  But when the Communists took over the government of the country in 1948, Jewish communal life was again stifled, and most synagogues were closed. Their possessions went to the newly refounded Jewish Museum of Prague.

In 1963, when London art dealer Eric Estorick was offered the opportunity to purchase the remaining 1564 Scrolls being stored by the Museum, a Hebrew scholar was sent to Prague to examine the scrolls and they were subsequently bought and transported to the Westminster Synagogue in London.

Through the vision of Rabbi Reinhart and the meticulous administrative work of Ruth Shaffer and the Memorial Scrolls Trust, a majority of these Torahs have been now sent out to synagogues and organizations across the world to be restored to their proper place in Jewish life. 
If you are interested, the full story of how the scrolls came to London can be found in the book Out of the Midst of the Fire by Philippa Bernard.

Here are a couple pictures of the cataloged Torahs.