A precious new arrival

Jayne Josem

closed down and their synagogues destroyed or deserted. In 1930 there were 117,551 Jews in Bohemia and Moravia. By 1943 some 26,000 had managed to emigrate. Around 81,000 Jews were deported to Terezin and other camps, of whom about 10,500 survived. In total, around 80,000 Jews from Bohemia and Moravia died during the Holocaust. Prior to the war, 60 of the 350 synagogues were destroyed (mostly in the Sudetenland). Those remaining were abandoned and left to decay, and when the Communists came to power 80 were demolished.

In 1942, a group of members of Prague’s Jewish community devised a way to rescue the religious treasures from the deserted communities and destroyed synagogues, and bring them to the comparative safety of the Jewish Museum in Prague. The Nazis were persuaded to accept the plan, and more than 100,000 artefacts were brought to the capital. Among them were about 1,800 Torah scrolls. Each was meticulously recorded, labelled and entered on a card index by the museum’s staff with a description of the scroll and the place it had come from. In his speech, Dr Toltz referred to the speculation that the Nazis were hoarding this material for a future ‘Museum of an Extinct Race’, but added that ‘there is no documentary evidence from the Nazis to state this as a specific motive’.

After the war, the scrolls were transferred to the ruined synagogue at Michle, outside Prague, where they remained until they came to London. Some 50 congregations re-established themselves in the Czech Republic after 1945, and were provided with religious artefacts. When the Communists took over in 1948, Jewish communal life was again stifled, and most synagogues were closed. The initiative to keep the remaining 1,564 Torah scrolls safe was taken by London Jews, who purchased them from the Communist government and brought them back to Westminster Synagogue. The full story of how the scrolls came to London can be found in the book Out of the Midst of the Fire by Philippa Bernard. It is also detailed on the Memorial Scrolls Trust website: memorialscrollstrust.org.

This particular scroll had been used in the 1970s in a synagogue in Brisbane until it was declared posul (unkosher), making it unusable for religious purposes. The synagogue then handed it to the Brisbane Museum, where it was stored safely for many years. The mission of the Memorial Scrolls Trust is for these scrolls to be visible to a wider public, hence the transfer to the JHC in Melbourne, where over 22,000 school students and many adult visitors come each year to learn about the Holocaust and its wider implications.