Nicaragua's Jews hadn't had a Torah scroll of their own for nearly 30 years. This fall, they received a scroll in honor of the birthday of Channah Sorhagen of Morristown.

Sorhagen's children, Dennis and Roger Sorhagen and Barbara Grosslight, helped her with the purchase of a 100-year-old restored scroll, which will find a place in the Managua home of plastics maker Max Najman.

Asked what she wanted for her birthday, Sorhagen said she wanted to help a community that didn't have a Torah scroll. A friend visited Nicaragua and made the connection with Najman, a follower of Chabad-Lubavitch who hosts about two dozen people each week for Sabbath dinner.

"They had everything except a Torah," said Sorhagen, a member of Congregation Levi Yitzchok, a Chabad-Lubavitch shul in Morristown. "It was divine intervention."

The casual meetings that take place at the Najman house every Friday night represent a renaissance of Judaism in Nicaragua, whose entire Jewish population fled the country in the early 1980s after the Sandinistas took power. The former synagogue is now a funeral home, and its Torah scroll was given to the Jewish community in neighboring Costa Rica.

When the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990, some Nicaraguan Jews began returning. The community peaked in 1972 at about 250 people; today its members number just 15 families, about 60 people. They often travel to Miami or Costa Rica for holiday services. Najman's son Jimmy trucks in kosher food from Costa Rica.

In August, the younger Najman made the trip to the United States to pick up the scroll from the shop in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where it was purchased. He brought it to Morristown for a celebration with a few area Chabad rabbis, Sorhagen, her three children, and her six grandchildren, before returning with it to Nicaragua in time for the High Holy Days.

Of his journey from Brooklyn to Nicaragua via Miami, Najman said, "Even the trip from Crown Heights to the airport was unbelievable. The car service driver brought his mother along just to be with the sefer Torah. Then the trip from Miami to Managua was full of emotions, knowing you are bringing a Torah into a country where there is none."

Sorhagen said she remembers when she told Najman about the donation of the scroll. "He was silent, choked with emotion. All I could think was, ‘Thank you God for showing me the way. What a big mitzva that is!'"