by Marilyn Silverstein
NJJN Bureau Chief/PMB

January 08, 2008

In a moment of consecration and dedication, members of Adath Israel Congregation in Lawrenceville came together recently to bury an irreparable sefer Torah and other unusable sacred objects and books.

As the morning wept with a steady rain, congregants gathered on Dec. 16 with Rabbi Daniel Grossman and Cantor Arthur Katlin to consecrate a patch of synagogue land along Lawrenceville Road in a ceremony sanctifying a geniza, a repository for holy items. Nearby were the sacred objects that would soon be lowered into a 300-cubic-foot grave there — the Torah scroll, encased in a clay pot; hundreds of books shrouded in pillowcases; and prayer shawls and tefillin, or phylacteries.

“Today, we gather on this sacred ground to lay to rest holy objects that have conveyed a deep sense of holiness and meaning in our lives,” Grossman said. “Here, they will rest for all eternity. This is now and forever a sacred cemetery of our people.

“Now we place it in the ground in a place of rest, and we place beside it prayer books, tallesim, and tefillin. They are forever a part of this community and this land,” Grossman said as tears rolled down his cheeks.

The practice of burying sacred books and objects that can no longer be used goes back as far as the Talmud, Grossman said in an interview before the ceremony.

“The whole idea is that the name of God in a book not only made it sacred, it made it an etz chaim” — a tree of life. “It is a living thing, and, as a living thing, we must treat it with respect,” he said.

The Torah scroll being buried there was written in Germany in the time of Napoleon, the rabbi said. It had traveled across the ocean to a synagogue in Paterson, and then, when that synagogue closed, to Adath Israel.

The geniza ceremony at Adath Israel was the last link in a chain of events that began during the Torah reading at a Purim service last March, according to Grossman. A congregant chanting from the Torah discovered that a word was missing from the scroll. That prompted Grossman to hire a sofer, or scribe, to check all of Adath Israel’s Torah scrolls. And that led to the discovery that one of the congregation’s seven scrolls was irreparable.

“Once I knew we had to bury one of them, I said, let’s make it a project. Let’s involve people,” Grossman said. He decided that the project would also involve burying the hundreds and hundreds of old Hebrew schoolbooks and prayer books that had been accumulating in temporary storage at the synagogue for more than 80 years. “I said, let’s get them in the ground in a geniza, and let’s make it a learning process.”

Along the way, the project became a learning process for Grossman, too. Much of that learning came from researching how congregations whose synagogues had been battered by Hurricane Katrina had buried their damaged Torah scrolls and prayer books.

As he addressed about 60 students in the Adath Israel sanctuary before the geniza ceremony, Grossman explained that one thing he learned was to shroud the books in pillowcases. Another was to cut the Torah parchment from the spindles that anchor it.

“I have to tell you kids, even though I knew this was the right thing to be done, while I was doing it, I felt really sad,” he said. “I’ve got to tell you, to cut the Torah in pieces was a very hard feeling. It was a very, very sad and strange feeling. It really did feel like a funeral.”

The geniza ceremony he was about to perform, Grossman told NJ Jewish News, was both rare and remarkable.

“I see it as an amazing moment that people are not going to see again in a lifetime,” he said as he stood among the shrouded books and sacred objects.

“You see something as sacred,” he said. “You treat the Torah like a living person. You give it the respect to return it to the earth. The clay pot will dissolve. The books will dissolve. The parchment will dissolve. All of this will go back to nature, as it should.”