Bringing Home the Bride
Millman, Joan
Bringing Home the Bride Joan Millman The journeys of brides are tales oft told, woven into lore. But where is the weaver to tell of the bride, raped and raped once more, in a Holocaust so...
...Mistakes in the Torah scroll can be erased with a knife and pumice stone...
...They quote The Last of the Just and Beggar in Jerusalem and The Chosen and Diary of Anne Frank...
...Prague, the Goldena City, City of Gold...
...The lights that glitter off its shimmery strange brick, that give to it its name of splendor, are matched by the richness of its culture, one of the oldest in Europe, no small part of it the gift of its illustrious Jews...
...Sinai that the mountain shall be for them as a chupah...
...An ad is placed in Boston's Jewish Advocate, which plays it into a feature...
...Shoes...
...Such was the scientific bent that conceived not only the annihilation of a people, but also a plan to memorialize its "ethnographic artifacts...
...Ah," he observes, "a bit faded, but it can be read...
...Midrash) "Not to forget not to ever forget so long as you live so long as you love so long as you breathe eat wash walk think see feel read touch laugh, not to forget not to ever forget so long as you know the meaning of freedom____" The 1,564 Sifre Torah which came to Westminster Synagogue on February 7, 1964, had been gathered together in Prague from the desolated synagogues of Bohemia and Moravia by the Nazi official in charge of the Czech "Protectorate...
...Rabbi Waldorf has been there and said Kaddish before them himself...
...It is the first stop in a quest, to trace the path of more than a thousand rescued scrolls, Holocaust survivors themselves, whose tales have been little told...
...Thirty years later...
...Footnote to history: that museum did indeed come to be in Prague, one of the oldest centers of Jewish cultures in Europe, but only after the Third Reich itself was destroyed...
...It is the end of our quest and we are sitting in the home of Dr...
...For Rabbi Thomas Liebschutz of Temple Tifereth Israel, Maiden, its coming is a second privilege...
...When a mistake is found, a wimple is tied around the outside of its mantle until it has been repaired...
...Gathered round him on the eve of their permanent departure were his sons, aged nine and twelve, his wife, and her parents...
...However, a mistake in the writing of any of the names of God may not be erased and such faulty parchments must be discarded...
...No, it is merely the customs officer bidding him off with a final word, "Remember, not all of us are bad...
...There are numerous small details which render the Torah fit, "Kosher," or unfit, "Pasul," and all of these are the expertise of the scribe...
...No better gift for the young doctor, that gift of life...
...Such was the efficiency that marked the Third Reich...
...Shocking white sideburns frame the heavy black brows, the deepset eyes looking inward to a night of flames...
...The first task of the Westminster Memorial Scroll Committee was the careful unpacking and numbering of the scrolls and the construction of three rooms of numbered racks designed for that purpose...
...In the Spanish Synagogue, which had its origin twelve hundred years ago in its present location, there is a collection of 2,800 parochot (curtains), many of which had been donated in joyous tribute to a marriage or a circumcision...
...He longs to give more than he has already given to his congregation, a life of service...
...When Grubel alerted the police, they hung up...
...With the cooperation of the Czech government, a London art connoisseur, Eric Es-torick, was able to arrange with Artis, the authority responsible for such treasure, for their acquisition...
...For poets Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel and all the scholars and philosophers who preceded them, it thrived in an atmosphere of intellectual ferment...
...Had there been survivors of that shul, that very village outside of Prague where Napoleon first liberated the Jews...
...A prominent, philanthropic Maiden businessman hears the story of the 1,564 abandoned Torahs, piled in Prague for more than two decades...
...Another, in the voice of an announcer: "Women and children are to take their shoes off at the entrance to the barracks...
...Kurt Maier, research librarian at Leo Baeck Institute in New York, recalls those final ties...
...Dressed, caressed, and then, beneath the chupah, embraced and placed at last among the sisters of her faith...
...It tells as well of the music of a thousand silver chains on which pointers hung and the bells of crowns and tabernacles...
...Draped in widow's clothes, the scroll is carried to the bimah by two children, the youngest of the family...
...Spread out in a dining room redolent with old-world charm are pictures, albums, and memorabilia that have particular meaning for the Seligsbergers, themselves refugees of Dresden...
...Two years later, Rabbi Waldorf is again involved with a Czech Torah...
...The Leo Baeck Institute is a quietly grand bit of German Jewry, a dark-paneled, soft-carpeted refuge set in a row of town-houses cum foundations off Park Avenue...
...Shoes...
...Shipped with the family treasures to Switzerland where she rested for the next eight years...
...The wheels hurry onward, onward, what do they carry...
...Inscribed with the words, "That the faith and people of Israel shall live," she links the lives of all the Jews who ever paid her homage...
...What condition is it in...
...later, much, much later, to America...
...Encouraged by others who hooted and cheered, the village idiot hurled paving stones into the upper windows...
...No, no survivors...
...In Hamburg on Krystallnacht, nineteen-year-old Paul Langer leaps into the burning synagogue because he knows himself to be the only responsible male left in a family already deported to a camp in Poland...
...From the pulpit, the rabbi announces this to be his final year of service...
...Not to forget, not ever to forget...
...Piled neatly, symbols of the crematoria...
...Irving paces while the package passes security...
...Later, at Buchenwald, Herr Grubel received a bill "for services of a locksmith...
...Arrested time and again, always released, aided by a school friend who was, ironically, the nephew of Rudolph Hess, Paul stands at last in the airport in Hamburg, a breath away from safe departure...
...The scrolls were cleaned and refurbished and each one's history researched...
...And I hear that music...
...With what pride had Miro-slav's family celebrated his degree from Czechoslovakia's oldest university and with what joy sent him off to Paris for his graduation present...
...Standing shoulder to shoulder, the congregation rises for the Hakafa, the circuit of the Torah, passing it from hand to hand, two hundred fifty pairs of hands, in solemn and loving tribute to its old/new symbolic life presence...
...Jews jumped into the flames to rescue the holy artifacts and many were severely burned...
...I hand it now to you, from Moses down to our day...
...At Beth El, a reader entones, "But who emptied your shoes of sand, when you had to get up to die...
...A small community north of Boston...
...In terror the boy saw his father taken, later to return to prepare the family for its exile...
...From Czechoslovakia in 1936 to London and then to New Zealand and to Australia to help resettle displaced Jews, and finally now to New York where he has been spiritual leader of Temple Beth Hillel in Washington Heights for the past twenty years...
...It is tornado country, Wichita, Kansas, and all day warnings spur flurries of prepara^ tion...
...Come with me, son...
...They returned, of course, this time with a locksmith who made a key to permit a proper entry...
...Rescued scroll of Zion, welcome home...
...Tomorrow you will be dust in the shoes of those to come...
...All Jews carried off to death camps...
...That is so you will never forget," she tells me...
...Now again he welcomes the patchworked scroll, the clear outlines of a bootmark a shout from its violated past...
...According to tradition, before a sofer can begin his work, he must perform the mikvah, ritual cleansing bath...
...From Kippen-heim to Switzerland to New York and now, draped in a white sheet, riding with me in a taxi to the Israel Consulate...
...The knowledge of parchments, inks, and type of letters are his as is the judgment of the sheets of the scroll itself...
...Home now: The Bronx, New York, sending to Switzerland for the family belongings...
...No one waited Miroslav's return...
...Crated like rifles, its arrival at Logan Airport receives the scrutiny of a threat...
...One energetic young man climbed the outside synagogue wall and with a sledge hammer knocked off the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments...
...the shoes, clustered like people in a dance...
...On Yom Hashoah, the Hum-polec Torah's rebirth is set in an aura of unforgettable theater, piety, and prose...
...Each was named and numbered and noted for its town of origin...
...In Munich, the Institute for Jewish History painstakingly cataloged its data, leaving behind the world's most extensive bibliography of Judaica...
...The Maiers presented their Torah to the Sharei Tefillah, their new synagogue, and later, when the congregation was dissolved, looked about to give the scroll another home...
...As Scroll Number 699 lies in its crude coffin-like box at Beth El Congregation, a community synagogue of merely forty families in Winchester, Virginia, Rabbi Frank Waldorf calls it a "naked stranger," and wraps it in a tal-lis...
...When the synagogue of the Israeli congregation in Na-chod, Bohemia, was permanently destroyed by the Nazis, the scroll had been taken from Munich to Prague to London and, finally, this Sunday, to Temple Israel in Staten Island...
...He spins out his retirement now in one more land, Eretz Yisrael...
...His quest: to rescue the Torah which his grandfather had brought from Poland during World War I. The young man wraps it in a prayer shawl and carries it safely through the streets to his home...
...bringing six million Jewish lives as burnt offerings on the mount of oblivion...
...Thirty-eight years, yet the memory endures...
...It bears a brass tablet and a number corresponding to one on the certificate describing its origin and history...
...For Rabbi Hugo Stransky, who had served his people nearly half a century, lesser miracles do not surprise...
...Torah, daughter of God, bride of Israel, given in marriage by Moses himself on the holy mount...
...Here's that Wandering Jew," a voice announces as Irving whirls...
...Her reply, a simple one, "I am here...
...A mob formed in front of our house and threw stones through the windows...
...The act brings the cycle to a close...
...Langer, now a fifty-seven-year-old pharmaceutical executive in Engle-wood, New Jersey, is a trustee...
...Another recites from the Vilna Ghetto poem...
...To him, young director of the synagogue council in Leipzig, came the early morning call, "The synagogue is burning...
...laid it in a wooden box, shaped by a Jewish carpenter into a simple shrine...
...He removes his glasses to wipe the tears from his eyes...
...As Rabbi Liebschutz leads the groom, his congregation, in the renewal of marriage vows, the bare parchments are draped in white...
...Is human survival enough...
...The middle grades have been diligently worked upon and thus the majority of them are slowly becoming fit, with much effort and expense, for rededica-tion...
...Shoes...
...Sharing with Rabbi Milton Rosenfeld the rededication of a Holocaust scroll becomes for him a moment of exquisite sanctity...
...I imagine the scholars reaping from all the occupied lands the relics of their heritage...
...When God came to Sinai, He came to Sinai as a groom goes forth toward his bride...
...To protect ourselves, my mother, brother, and I crawled under an overturned corrugated tub...
...At Temple Sinai in Brookline, Massachusetts, re-dedication has an even greater meaning, for the Torah has come from Prague itself, from the Pin-kas Synagogue, which has become a memorial to the Jews who perished at Terezein, and on whose eight walls 77,000 names are hand-etched...
...A system of cataloging was devised and each scroll scrutinized by an expert to determine its physical condition, and, most important, the state of writing and defects therein...
...Drawing on all the annals of martyrdom, the readers cry out from the writings of the prophets, the scholars, the kabbalists...
...One speaks with the voice of a Jewish nurse, "Suddenly as if by electric current, the real situation became clear...
...The elder turns to Murray Gott who had sponsored the Torah in honor of his son's bar mitzvah...
...At last the scroll of Ho-donim rolls in on a blackcreped cart...
...Flashed now before me are scenes of bare, wooden bunks of Terezein, occupied once by Greta's parents, and now another flash, their names etched with their landsmen on the Pinkas walls...
...And I know that because these scrolls are ours, so also is their story, the story of where they have been and of how they came to us, the story inscribed on their parchment...
...Be neat...
...The next morning the synagogue was on fire, the Torah scrolls flung into the street...
...The wagon like a canopy in the evening light...
...The sand which Israel gathered, its Nomad sand...
...To justify the Nazis' diabolical plan, scholars were ordered to assemble, research, record...
...The S.S...
...At age nineteen, Shel Bassel is likely the youngest sofer, Torah scribe, in the world...
...His white beard trembles as he keeps his voice from cracking...
...But where is the weaver to tell of the bride, raped and raped once more, in a Holocaust so terrible no tapestry can contain it...
...Are the strips cracked, burnt, or worm-eaten...
...It began the night of November 9, 1938, when the Polizei rounded up the Jewish men of Kippen-heim, our Black Forest village, and shipped them to Dachau...
...Of the few valuables left to make that trip, one was a small crate...
...And it is said the Ke-tubah, the wedding contract, which Moses presented to his people, shall be the Ten Commandments...
...With these criteria, the scrolls were classified into five grades, from "best" to "unusable...
...Such is she who was taken in with tender hands, healed with love, and sent, restored, to the groom across the sea...
...Shoes, tell me the truth, where are they, the feet, the feet from those boots with buttons like dew, where is the body and where is the bride and where is the child to fill those shoes...
...Beneath a red velvet chupah, Langer carries it in a procession from one school building on East 10th Street to another on East 17th, evoking memories of such street parades in the ancestral shtetls of Poland...
...In an upstairs study as eloquent as its owner, executive secretary Fred Grubel sorts memories from the ashes...
...Now the Maiers made a journey of their own...
...They packed for storage the china and the jewelry and then Herr Maier, a pious man, took the Torah he had lifted from the streets and Joan Millman is a freelance writer who lives in the Greater Boston area...
...Once before, in Wichita, he had gathered his congregation for such an honor...
...What did the occasion mean to her...
...From Rotterdam to New York, Paul travels, still carrying the Torah, and when his parents and sisters are released from the concentration camp, they are able to join him there...
...Mehil-tah, Jethro 19) The rabbi's memories that Sabbath morning carry him back to a distant eve...
...Bending to the craft he perfected in Israel, his work on the calligraphy is so taxing it may not be undertaken more than a few hours at a time...
...Of the remainder, some have already come to rest, at Westminster Abbey and at universities and synagogues worldwide, as sacred memorials...
...Now in Winchester, Virginia, a town so like Humpolec, Moravia, in many ways, a basket of shoes is carried in and there in the isle of the sanctuary the shoes are dumped, a heavy reminder upon the floor...
...Women began to tear their hair from their heads, to rip off their clothes — to no avail...
...Again a unique device is used to dramatize the occasion...
...arrived, pounded on his door...
...What better center for the proposed keeping of Jewish treasures, gold and silver ornaments, vestments, pictures, books, and manuscripts, as well as every manner of ritual artifact intrinsic to Hebrew practice...
...Ludwig and Greta Seligsberger in Newton, Massachusetts...
...As Schoenberg's "Survivor from the Warsaw Ghetto" splutters through the failed P.A., the wind deals out the electricity...
...Holding the candles, confirmands and congregants chant the Shavuot prayers...
...Eli, Eli," the cantor chants as she is stripped and adorned in gold...
...Well-traveled also is Scroll Number 66, now two hundred years old...
...But it is merely an attendant with a plant that bears that ironic label...
...Recently the Langer Torah is rededicated at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, where Mr...
...It conducted us throughout the ages, from city to city, from country to country, from hand to hand...
...Austerlitz-Slavkov" it reads, and upon its wooden handles a name and date, "1890...
...Have the letters rusted to reddish-brown...
...A monstrous machine of death was assembled...
...The packing and shipping were no small undertaking, executed with meticulous care, after the parties agreed that only a noncommercial agent would supervise their eventual distribution...
...No, no survivors...
...The children's socks are to be placed in the sandals, in the litde shoes and slippers...
...As he writes, the sofer repeats, "I am writing the name of God for the holiness of His name...
...The stockings are to be put into the shoes...
...They carry a cartload of shivering shoes...
...The work of the Munich scholars had eased that of the Westminster scribes...
...Before him, the very Torah he had used in his first congregation, Nachod, from 1930-1936...
...It details the range of textiles used for altar cloths, pillows, wrappers or wimples, and parochot...
...It is the young rabbi's first Confirmation service, his first encounter with a rescued scroll...
...Aiming to establish a museum to commemorate an "exterminated race," scrolls, altar curtains, pointers, and cloths gathered in heaps, looted in every land that felt boot or bayonet...
...Sephardi embroidery next to Romanian peasant craft, the rich interpretations of the sophisticated next to the rustic examples of the shtetl...
...From behind it he ordered them away...
...Despite the threat, that night more than 150 people overflow Temple Emmanu-El...
...Miroslav Kerner takes his place with the Brudnicks, the rabbi, and the congregation...
...God placed the Jews beneath Mt...
...The chandeliers and windows were shattered (as in the synagogues and Jewish homes and shops throughout the Germany of the Third Reich) in revenge for the assassination in Paris of a German diplomat by a Polish Jew...
...In Irving Brudnick breathes hope for a restored bride...
...And coming forth to bear that witness is, in Boston, their only "messenger unto the world...
...Shoes...
...On the dining room table is one of the loveliest art books I have ever seen, The Story of the Jewish Museum in Prague, created by art historian Hana Volav-kova...
...Who blasphemes...
...Vera Feld-man, Vera Bundy then, and later a number in the concentration camp where her husband and children perished...
...Seated in the sanctuary is another member of that Nachod shul which had survived for five hundred years...
...It keeps the memoirs and relics of what is now an extinct people, a heritage too broad to be contained even within these archives...
...The service is lit only by the ner tamid and menorah, and, in a moment, by shabbat candles...
...Months later a note acknowledged its sanctuary on a kibbutz...
...On display are objects for all the observances and occasions during the year designed by hands from all parts of Bohemia and Moravia...
...When the "thousand year Reich" came to an end, after a period significantly less than a thousand years, the doors of the Prague Museums, housed in several no-longer-used synagogues, opened to the most extensive collection of Jewish ceremonial objects ever assembled in one area...
...Here in the shadow of its thirteenth-century renowned synagogue, the Alta-Neu Starnova, with its unique clock tolling the Hebrew letters backwards, the task of arranging and cataloging was assigned to talented and knowledgeable Jews, reprieved for their labor from immediate extermination...
...Not to forget, not ever to forget.''' Kurt Maier remembers, how he remembers, Krystall-nacht, Night of Glass, when began the destruction of the German Jews...
...A black computer tickertape, punched with six million holes, hangs from the balcony and its paper punches, representing the lost lives of Jewry, fill a lobby punchbowl...
...But first, I am beckoned to the basement where a slide projector and screen have been set up for my visit...
...The old rabbi, midst the uplifted faces of the throng, a dozen of whom are themselves exiles from Bohemia, studies the scroll in its new white cover...
...Together their final sacrament was to seal away the bride...
...Since a Torah may never be sold, the Brudnicks appropriate a donation for a permanent loan to the Westminster Synagogue in London, to which the Czech scrolls have passed in trust...
...The Prague Jewish Museum, now administered by the State and seen only by those tourists and families of survivors who are drawn to it by legend, has been described as a halfway house on the way to the gas chambers, "a memorial to the dead by the dead...
...First to a concentration camp in France...
Vol. 2 • April 1977 • No. 6
