Torah hidden in Poland during Holocaust restored in Canada

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Eight Holocaust survivors gathered in Toronto on Monday afternoon to restore a Torah scroll that was hidden in a Polish village in 1939.

“I made the decision that the only people who would be rewriting the letters in this Torah — this Torah that survived the Holocaust — would be survivors themselves,” Jonny Daniels told the National Post.

Daniels is the founder of From the Depths, an organization dedicated to Holocaust memory and memorial. The Torah was entrusted to Daniels in 2016 after it was rediscovered in the home of a Polish couple. A Torah, a holy Jewish text, consists of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Deuteronomy. Torah scrolls are made of parchment sheets from the hides of kosher animals and written by hand by a scribe, or a sofer.

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The story of the scroll goes back to 1939, more than 4,000 miles from Toronto, in the village of Filipów, in northern Poland. Students from the University of Warsaw working with Daniels’ foundation were going door to door in an attempt to rediscover hidden Jewish heritage and history.

Poland was home to around 3.3 million Jews prior to the Second World War. In the late 1850s, the population of Filipów consisted of 2,500 residents, and around 850 of them were Jews, according to the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. By 1927, the number of Jews had dwindled to 263. Roughly 90 per cent of the country’s Jewish population were killed in the Holocaust.

The two students approached an unassuming wooden home with a thatched roof. It belonged to an elderly retired shepherd, Kazimierz Wróblewski, who invited them inside. He was happy to host, until the students explained they were seeking items that may have been left behind by Jewish families after the war.

Wróblewski refused to speak when the students pressed the matter. Finally, his wife urged him to explain what happened in 1939, when he was five years old.

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At the time, the antisemitic Nazi Party had taken over Germany with leader Adolf Hitler at its helm. Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. That year, the Jews of Filipów were rounded up by Nazi soldiers.

Wróblewski, then a young boy part of a non-Jewish family, remembered the soldiers coming to “take the Jews,” said Daniels. His neighbour was the rabbi, who he described as an old man with a long white beard.

“He sat and watched as the rabbi was being taken,” said Daniels.

After about 15 minutes, there came a knock on his door. Wróblewski’s father answered — “petrified,” said Daniels — expecting German soldiers. Instead, it was the rabbi, who handed over an item to Wróblewski’s father. The rabbi asked his father to look after it until he came home. But if he never returned, the rabbi said to give it to a Jewish person because they would “know what to do with it.”

The students asked Wróblewski if they could see what the item was, but he would not show them because they weren’t Jewish.

As I entered the house, the shepherd looked at me and burst out crying

Jonny Daniels

So they called Daniels. When he arrived, he said it was  a “very, very moving experience.”

“As I entered the house, the shepherd looked at me and burst out crying. He said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you for 75 years,’” said Daniels.

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The retired shepherd lifted up the couch in his living room to reveal a Torah scroll on the ground. It shocked Daniels to see a holy book laying on the floor. Half of the scroll was missing.

When Daniels asked what happened, Wróblewski told him that he and his wife had used it to make various items, like a bag or shoe insoles, when they fell upon hard times.

“Torah is made out from the hide of a kosher animal … so they used the skin,” said Daniels, adding that it was not done out of malice.

Usually, when a Torah has been desecrated and can no longer be used, it is buried in a Jewish cemetery. But Daniels couldn’t bring himself to do that. After all, it was the last survivor from the village, he said. Records showed that the Jews from Filipów were eventually taken to Treblinka, a forced-labour camp that turned into a death camp. More than 700,000 people were murdered there — including the rabbi.

“I felt a connection to this rabbi who risked his life to save (the Torah). I decided that rather than burying this Torah, or maybe putting it in a museum, it deserves to be brought back to life,” said Daniels.

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Holocaust survivors around the world, from Sao Paulo, Brazil to London, England, have taken part in restoring the scroll. They have added letters to it with the help of Daniels, who is also a sofer.

Most recently, survivors in Toronto met to do just that.

Ben Carniol, Judy Cohen, John Freund, Pinchas Gutter, Renate Krakauer, Andy Réti, Kitty Salsberg and Agnes Tomasov made their contributions on Monday with Daniels at their side. They have all shared their stories with the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program, run by the Azrieli Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to philanthropy and Holocaust education.

Although Daniels had not met the survivors before Monday, he had previously met others from Toronto and Montreal. He said that Canada played an important role for Jews after the Holocaust, calling the country “a safe haven.”

“Toronto’s Jewish community was effectively built in a large part by survivors, who after going through the horrendous ordeals of the Holocaust, came to Canada and rebuilt their lives, and built communities,” he said.

“Canada for me is a really crucial and important place to do this.”

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After his Toronto visit, Daniels is taking the Torah to Puerto Rico and then back to North America, where more Holocaust survivors will add to it. The plan is to use the Torah for Jewish celebrations when the restoration is finally complete.

“I think that’s the most beautiful thing that we can do, this continuation of Jewish life,” he said.

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