CTJC Chanukah bulletin 2020

Chanukah 1942 Jane Liddell-King The first candle lighting of Chanukah 1942 should have taken place on 4th December. Instead of gathering in their homes to share latkes, the 606 members of the Jewish community of the Czech town of Pardubice were packing. Parents encouraged children and children were unusually quiet. On 9th December, the entire community was deported to the garrison town of Terezín, which had been turned into a concentration camp. The train stopped at Bohusivice and the passengers had to drag the permitted 50kg of luggage the last icy 3 kilometres. An 82 year old woman slipped and died.

Of those 606 deportees, just 24 survived and returned to Pardubice.

Why should we remember them?

In 1942, the Nazi authority in charge of “the Jewish Question”, the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (the Central Office for Jewish Emigration), ordered the communities in Bohemia and Moravia to send all of their liturgical items to a newly established Jüdisches Zentralmuseum in Prague. This museum had been founded by members of the Prague Jewish community anxious to protect the belongings of those who had been deported to concentration camps.

Some 1,800 scrolls joined the collection, including scrolls from Pardubice. In the 1950s, the remarkable director of the museum, Hana Volavkova, arranged for the scrolls to be housed in the dilapidated Michle Synagogue outside Prague. But Hana was forced to leave the museum and the scrolls became a source of ready cash for the country’s Soviet authorities.

Consequently, in 1965, three British Jews concluded a deal and brought 1,564 deteriorating scrolls to the Westminster Synagogue in London.

There, over the next 25 years, Sofer (scribe) David Brand painstakingly set about their restoration. All those that could be used have been distributed across the world, and number 689 came to Cambridge.

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