Valuable scrolls returned to Jewish owners

Over 309 sacred documents kept safe by Lithuanians during the tumultuous Nazi and Soviet periods have been returned to Jewish religious and cultural representatives.

The valuable Torah scrolls, which can be used for religious worship, are being handed over to the Jerusalem-based association Hechal Shlomo, a center for Jewish religious and spiritual heritage, by the Martynas Mazvydas National Library.

Hechal Shlomo is to carefully analyze and conserve the parchments, and later form an expert commission to decide to whom to distribute the holy writings from among the many Jewish congregations worldwide that have expressed a desire to house the Lithuanian Torahs.

Traditionally, if a Torah scroll becomes unfit for ritual use, it is buried in the earth. Hechal Shlomo will decide which of the documents are damaged too severely for restoration.

The occasion is another reminder of Lithuania's troubled history but also of the heroism that resulted from wartime terror.

"Lithuania is really transferring, not returning the Torahs, because independent Lithuania never seized Torahs from the Jewish community. We're demonstrating our good will," Parliament Chairman Arturas Paulauskas said at a ceremony with religious and political representatives from Israel held at the national library on Jan. 30.

It was a tragedy some Lithuanians collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation, he said. "But there were also Lithuanians who were hiding the Torah, the soul of Jews," Paulauskas said.

Nazi occupants destroyed whatever Torahs they found during the Holocaust. They were even known to use some as wallpaper.

The Torah is the law of God as revealed to Moses and recorded in the Pentateuch - the first five books of the Old Testament - traditionally handwritten on parchment.

Rabbi Michael Melchior, Israel's deputy foreign minister, expressed gratitude for the possibility to take the scrolls from Vilnius, in past centuries a thriving center of Jewish culture, to Jerusalem.

"This act shows quality of morals here," said Meir Lau, Israel's chief rabbi.Emanuelis Zingeris is the most well-known member of Lithuania's now considerably smaller Jewish community.

As director of the Lithuanian State Jewish Museum, chairman of an international commission set up to evaluate the crimes of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, and a former MP, he started to take an interest in the fate of the Lithuanian Torahs when a student at Vilnius University in the 1980s.

During the Stalinist terror, the Lithuanian Torahs were secretly saved along with other religious items by Antanas Ulpis, director of the Lithuanian Chamber of Books, a Vilnius-based store that kept one copy of every book and manuscript issued in the country, said Zingeris.

A Jewish museum had been founded in Vilnius in 1945 and was engaged in gathering together what few cultural valuables remained after the Nazi occupation.

However, in 1948 the young Israeli state chose a pro-American direction and Stalin started his anti-Semitic campaign. The Jewish museum was closed down.

Ulpis took the Torahs from the museum and hid them. "I know that all the Torahs in Minsk were set on fire by the Soviet authorities in 1948," Zingeris said.

Ulpis died at the age of 75 in 1981. Zingeris wrote a study about Ulpis in 1987.

A special Ulpis Room exists in the Center for Tolerance, a branch of the Jewish museum founded in 2000 on Naugarduko Street in Vilnius.

Most of the 309 Lithuanian Torahs will be given to Jewish religious communities in the United States, Israel and South Africa, where large numbers of "Litvaks," Lithuanian Jews, live.

Some will be handed to U.S.-based yeshivas - Orthodox Jewish schools - which have the names Panevezys, Telsiai and other Lithuanian towns. However, 57 Torahs will remain in the Lithuanian National Library, kept as part of Lithuania's cultural heritage. These may be kept in the library or passed on to Jewish communities throughout Lithuania.