Torah scroll
Our synagogue is home to Torah Scroll No. 1052 from the prestigious collection of the London-based Memorial Scrolls Trust. Scroll No. 1052 was written in 1890 in Brno, where it served the local Jewish community until 1942, when the Nazi occupation authorities ordered all remaining Jewish communities in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to send all their liturgical objects and books to Prague, where they were to be stored and cataloged by the Central Jewish Museum.
Thus, more than 212,000 artifacts made their way to Prague, including 1,800 Jewish scrolls. Unlike many of the people who read from them, the scrolls managed to survive the war and storage in the poor conditions of a ruined synagogue in Prague’s Michle district during the communist regime.
In the 1960s, the communist authorities decided to sell most of the scrolls abroad. Thanks to the generosity of philanthropist Ralph Yablon, 1,564 Torah scrolls were transferred in 1964 to the Westminster Synagogue in London, where the Memorial Scrolls Trust was established to manage them. The scrolls were restored and began to be loaned to Jewish communities and organizations around the world. The scrolls are never sold but are provided for use for as long as their holders live.
In 1974, as a result of efforts by local rabbis, Scroll No. 1052 was brought to Kutz Camp, an American summer camp for young Jewish leaders, where it served for nearly 50 years and accompanied several generations of American Jewish youth. In this regard, it is noteworthy that in the summer of 2013, Rabbi David Maxa taught Torah at Kutz Camp using this very scroll. In 2019, the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) decided to close the camp, and its leadership considered where the scroll might continue its work. It was agreed that, after returning to the MST headquarters in London for necessary repairs, the Ec chajim would be loaned to us on a permanent basis. The costly repairs were made possible thanks to the generous support of the Union for Reform Judaism—the umbrella organization for more than 850 Reform Jewish congregations in the U.S. and Canada—and members of the Kutz Camp Alumni Network. The arrival of the scroll in our community symbolizes the revival of Czech progressive Judaism, which was the predominant form of Judaism in the Czech lands until World War II.
You can learn more about the Memorial Scroll Trust’s activities on its website: https://memorialscrollstrust.org/.