On holiday’s last night, a new life for a Torah
Students from Temple Rodeph Torah in Marlboro watch scribe Neil Yerman refurbish a Torah scroll, which was rededicated during Shabbat services on the last night of Hanukka.
Photo courtesy of Temple Rodeph Torah
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January 4, 2010
On the last night of Hanukka, a holiday marking the rededication of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, members of a Temple Rodeph Torah in Marlboro held their own ceremony of rededication, welcoming back a refurbished Torah scroll.
The century-old scroll, one of two used by the Reform congregation, was donated about 20 years ago. It was cleaned of grime and restored under the supervision of sofer, or scribe, Neil Yerman.
Rabbi Shira Stern, the synagogue’s primary school educator, noted “the synchronicity” of completing both the scroll and holiday during the Dec. 18 family Shabbat service.
“Just as the Maccabees rekindled the ner tamid, the eternal light, in 165 BCE, after cleaning the Temple of all unkosher and inappropriate Roman symbols, we will light the nine candles and celebrate with our beautifully restored Torah,” said Stern, in an interview conducted before the service.
Religious-school students, who participated in the restoration every step of the way, were called up to explain the significance of the rededication and the holiday’s miracles.
The final touches were put on the scroll on Dec. 17 by Yerman with help from fifth- and sixth-graders. He guided their hands as they inked the final “crowns” on the letters.
The Torah scroll got “the Jewish spa treatment,” quipped Stern.
The history of the scroll — which was donated through a member’s relative whose synagogue had closed — was unknown until now, said Rabbi Donald Weber.
“Neil Yerman told us our scroll is of Persian ancestry, from either Iraq or Iran, and is between 100 to 110 years old,” Weber said. It had never been cleaned and was “really dirty.”
At one point, fourth- and seventh-graders were put to work by Yerman scrubbing the parchment with erasers to remove years of residue and grime.
“Normally we use a yad and touch the Torah so gingerly,” said Stern. “The sofer kept shouting at them to put more elbow grease into it and rub harder. I was so scared when they went over the letters because you don’t want to hurt the Torah.”
To her astonishment, decades of copper residue came off — enough for Stern to fill an entire cup — as a clean scroll appeared underneath.
Stern added that the scribe explained that “those who had lovingly written it over a century ago, as well as those who had chanted from its pages, were in the sanctuary now. He encouraged our students to feel the presence of everyone who had loved that scroll since its birth and told us we were now part of that chain of Jewish tradition.”
Fourth-grader Sydney Schoenholtz of Morganville said becoming a shomrei Torah, or guardian of the Torah, was “definitely the highlight of 2009.”
Seventh-grader Jack Langner of Marlboro said, “Now I feel I have a closer connection to God because I got to keep Judaism alive a little longer.”
A scroll’s ‘founding’ journey
During a recent trip to Paris, Rabbis Donald Weber and Shira Stern of Temple Rodeph Torah — who are married to each other — learned that a Torah scroll that helped their synagogue get started continues on an inspiring journey across Europe.
The Reform movement gave the scroll to the Marlboro synagogue at its founding in about 1980. When Rodeph Torah acquired another scroll, the first one was given to a new synagogue in Paris — with the proviso that it eventually be donated to another new congregation.
The French congregation kept its promise, as Weber and Stern discovered when they visited Paris last month. “Our scroll is now at a new liberal congregation in Copenhagen,” he said. “That congregation also understands its obligation — that we decided this scroll would be used to start a new congregations.”
— DEBRA RUBIN
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