c. 2004 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ By all accounts, the moment arrived with a real emotional wallop _ completely unexpected yet completely genuine, according to those who were there.

The place: Temple Sinai in New Orleans, at the morning service on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. The congregation’s choir is singing “S’eu shorim” _ “Lift up your heads, O ye gates.” The rear doors open, and several past officers of the temple slowly accompany up the aisle 87-year-old Shep Zitler, a native Pole who survived the World War II labor camps, but whose family perished in the Holocaust.

And Zitler is walking forward, cradling in his arms a Torah recovered from Germany shortly after the war. A surviving Holocaust Torah.

“I don’t cry easily _ but I’ll tell you, I was crying,” said Buddy Kullman, whose family helped make the gift of the restored Torah possible.

“There wasn’t a dry eye anywhere,” said Betty Zivitz, the temple’s executive director. Those who knew the moment was coming thought it might be poignantly sweet, she said. Instead, it was deeply powerful in ways nobody expected.

Now restored after nearly a year’s work by a “sofer,” a Jewish scribe, the Torah will go into regular circulation, available for use for the first time in Temple Sinai’s regular services, Rabbi Ed Cohn said.

The oddest thing about the story is that, for years, the Torah had been hiding in plain sight _ damaged, little used, shunted off to the side, while others were pulled out of the ark to be used in regular services.

In fact, Temple Sinai has had the Torah since 1945 or 1946, Cohn said.

The local oral tradition about the Torah is that shortly after the close of the war, a rabbi in London called the congregation’s then-rabbi, Julian Feibelman, and said he had come into possession of a damaged Torah recovered “off the streets” in Germany, Cohn said.

Did he want it? Feibelman said yes.

That’s all anyone knows about its provenance, Cohn said.

A big, substantial scroll dating from the early 19th century, it presumably belonged to a congregation. Also presumably, that congregation was extinguished by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The scroll seemed to be in bad shape, Cohn said. The wooden handles were broken or missing. It was wired closed and never used. It appeared not to hold much promise, Cohn said.

Feibelman put it away. Kullman said he has boyhood memories of Feibelman handling the scroll during long-ago services, but does not remember him ever trying to read from it or alerting the congregation to its special significance.

That reflects a reality about Holocaust awareness that many scholars have noted: In the first years after World War II, the immensity of the Holocaust wound was not yet apparent.

Indeed, “right after the war, people didn’t talk about the Holocaust,” Cohn said.

It would take a few decades for the world to come to grips with the scale of the Nazi genocide _ beginning with early works such as “The Diary of Anne Frank,” rendered on Broadway in 1955, and Leon Uris’ 1958 novel, “Exodus.”

As the years passed and coming to grips with the Holocaust became more a part of Jewish life, Cohn thought it might be appropriate to bring the damaged scroll out and make it the center of a permanent Holocaust memorial in the temple.

Perhaps he could unroll it, expose a not-too-damaged place, and display it that way in a glass case, he thought.

So last fall he removed the wire binding and began to unroll the old parchment that had been in the temple’s custody for almost 60 years.

He was astonished. “My goodness, it was beautiful,” he said.

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True, the handles were wrecked and the hand-inked letters were faded _ “more gray than black” _ and there were holes here and there. But overall, it was in much better shape than he had anticipated, Cohn said.

About the same time, Kullman, an investment adviser and chairman of Universal Furniture Co., was looking with his wife, Lynne, and sons, Marc and Billy, for a way to honor his parents, Wilfred and Elsie Kullman.

Cohn mentioned the idea of restoring the scroll and bringing it into use, and the way for this to happen was suddenly clear.

Such a restoration is not a small job.

The Torah, the first five books of the Bible, constitutes the law, the center of Jewish life and ritual.

Even highly liberal Reform congregations such as Temple Sinai treat the Torah with great reverence, holding fast to many Torah-related traditions even after shedding old customs related to other areas of Jewish life, Cohn said.

Each Torah is hand-lettered, on parchment, by a licensed “sofer,” or scribe. The ink is special. Only a quill is employed in the lettering. To be employed in temple readings, a Torah must be letter-perfect _ no omissions, no dropped letters, no deletions, said Rick Zitelman of Save a Torah, a nonprofit enterprise that tries to locate deteriorating Holocaust Torahs remaining in Europe.

Save a Torah scours Europe in search of Holocaust Torahs. Some may be tucked away in attics or held as souvenirs by people who do not appreciate their value to the Jewish community, Zitelman said.

Every Torah, no matter its size, is identical. Each line of text, each column, breaks in the same place _ testimony to the belief that each Torah is an exact replica of the law as it was first given to Moses, he said.

“No matter whether a congregation is Reform, Conservative or Orthodox, the Torah is the one symbol that unites the community,” Zitelman said. “You show any of them a Torah, and it’s total reverence.”

MO/JL END RNS

(Bruce Nolan is a staff writer for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. He can be contacted at bnolan(at)timespicayune.com.)