Shofar Cheshvan/Kislev 5771
Jewish Family Congregation www.jewishfamilycongregation.org
November 2010
From the Rabbi’s Desk May NOT be reproduced without written permission from Rabbi Carla Freedman. Anyone who has attended a Bar or Bat Mitzvah here knows that I usually take a few minutes to talk about the origins of our three Torah scrolls. Each of the scrolls has an interesting background, and I think that knowing about this increases our respect for the process of reading from them, which is of course at the centre of every Bar or Bat Mitzvah service. The scroll that we use the most is the Czechoslovakian one. The Sefardic scroll is the hardest to handle, because of its metal container. The “tiny Torah” is the hardest to read because the lettering is, well, tiny. So the Czech scroll is the one we use on a regular basis. It has very beautiful, and I think, very clear calligraphy. In our building, on a Sanctuary wall just outside the Oneg Room, you will see the framed certificate we got along with the scroll, from the Westminster Torah Trust, in 1981. The certificate tells us that our scroll was written in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1838. And while we do indeed think of it as “our” scroll, the paperwork from the Scrolls Trust says that we have it on permanent loan, which can be revoked if we do not take good care of this Torah scroll. They expect us to have it checked periodically by a scribe, and to house it safely and securely when it is not in use. You may be sure that we do everything we can to protect our three sifray Torah. That care involved having the scroll checked by a scribe a few years ago, and many of us got to participate in the cleaning of the surface, under the scribe’s supervision. We learned that it takes about a year for a scribe to write a Torah scroll, that the process is very rigorous, and that the accuracy of the text is assured through all kinds of crosschecking and careful reference to an existing scroll. So we were astonished, in early June, to come upon an error in the scroll. This was discovered when a Bat Mitzvah student was practising from the scroll shortly before From the Rabbi’s Desk Service Schedule Oneg Schedule Early Childhood Center The Religious School JiFTY Social Action Committee JFC Adults
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her big day, and she stumbled over a little word that had not previously troubled her. Her tutor stepped closer to see what the problem was, and saw that what should have been a tav, making the “t” sound, was written as a bet, making the “b” sound. The matter was brought to me, and I confirmed what our teacher and her student had discovered: there was an error in our Czech scroll. How could that be? How is it that no one has noticed this, in a scroll that was supposedly in regular use for about a century in Czechoslovakia? More on this in a few moments. We contacted our scribe friend, and later this summer, our Ritual Committee chairman, Michael Salpeter, took the scroll to him. He checked it, agreed with us that there was a mistake in the scroll, and he corrected it. He actually cut out the mistaken word and replaced it with the correct one, using a scrap from the margin of the scroll’s own parchment. And while he was working, he told Michael that he thinks the scroll is not as old as we have been led to believe. In fact, he said that the calligraphy is not the typical Czech lettering, and that the parchment panels are not sewn together in the usual Czech style. He speculated that the error may have been known, and that, because of this, the scroll was not in active use as we have thought. Perhaps it was sequestered, and that is how it survived the Nazis. Michael reported this to the Ritual Committee, whose members were amazed by it all. Meanwhile, the Ritual Committee has been trying to find out more about the place that it came from, the city of Brno. We are doing this because we have been asked by the Scrolls Trust to mark the 30th anniversary of our acquisition of the scroll, which we plan to do on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day in the spring of 2011. Each of the scrolls loaned out by the Trust has a number on it, and ours is scroll number 1242. The congregation was told at the time that the scroll came to us, that it was one of the last of the usable scrolls in the collection. That would suggest that the scroll was in use, despite the flaw
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