Let me start with a riddle. What do Pacov, Chicago, Milton Keynes, Liverpool, Prague, and Vienna have in common?
The story of the Torah from Pacov begins in 1964 with the acquisition and repair of 1,564 Czech Scrolls by Westminster Synagogue in London and the distribution of the scrolls to Jewish communities around the world. The cataloguing of the Sifrei Torah collected from Jewish communities means that there is a record of the town each Torah came from. As the Memorial Scrolls Trust distributed them, each one was given a small plaque and a number. While many of the Sifrei Torah travelled around the world, MST 970 from Pacov was destined for Milton Keynes.
The calendar day for commemorating the Jewish communities destroyed in the Shoah differs in communities around the world. In the Czech Republic, March 8th is a national day to remember the victims of the Czech Family Camp in Auschwitz. It is also common to mark the dates when Jewish communities were rounded up and transported to ghettos and concentration camps. Milton Keynes honours their Czech Scroll in November in recognition of the date in 1942 when the 97 Jews from Pacov were transported to Theresienstadt.
The correlation of the memorial day with the Gregorian calendar means that reading Lech Lecha this year is a special moment as Lech Lecha will be the Parashah for the commemorative event in Milton Keynes to honour the Jewish community of Pacov.
What can Lech Lecha teach us about how we can remember better?
GOD said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
I will make of you a great nation,
And I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing.
Abram is told to go–
not travel, not voyage, not run away, he does not wander, migrate or make a pilgrimage.
Jewish scholars and rabbis often consider Abram and Sarai’s journey as an archetype of the hero’s journey popularised by Joseph Campbell in his book the Hero with a Thousand Faces. This universal human story entails a transformation from an ordinary person to a hero through a series of stages, and Campbell argued that the journey always begins with a call.
It is tempting to consider the journey of the Czech Scrolls like Abraham’s journey, but there is a midrash which compares Abraham to a flask of balsam oil which I think better captures the painful complexity of the survival and migration of the Czech Torah scrolls.
Bereshit Rabbah 39:2
“The Lord said to Abram” – Rabbi Berekhya began: “By the fragrance of your good oils, your name is like poured oil” (Song of Songs 1:3). Rabbi Berekhya said: To what was Abraham our patriarch comparable? To a flask of balsam oil surrounded with a fastened cover, which was placed in a corner and its fragrance did not diffuse. When it was moved, its fragrance diffused. So, the Holy One blessed be He said to Abraham our patriarch: ‘Move yourself from one place to another place, and your name will be exalted in the world.”
If as a society we are ever able to recover from the hostile environment to migration, new metaphors to think of human migration will be essential, while Jewish history is filled with the stories of exile, wandering, violent ethnic cleansings and genocide, considering the migrating Czech Torah Scrolls as a closed bottle of scented oil, that needs to move to be smelled, is a very helpful way to conceive of our role as the communities who care for them.
Reading Lech Lecha, comparing the scrolls we care for with Abram and a bottle of scented oil, asks us how we can fulfil the promise with the scrolls.
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing.
It is easy to take for granted the presence of this rare sacred heritage in our synagogues, but their sale and distribution was not without dispute. Magda Vaselska a curator at the Jewish Museum of Prague wrote in 2008 about the disagreement between curators such as survivor Hana Volavková who wanted to preserve each individual item as a memorial of a specific community that had been closed down and curators like Otto Muneles’s who as an Orthodox Jew preferred to see Torah scrolls in use.
Lech Lecha and the midrash teach that it is not enough that scrolls are static reminders of their communities. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen paraphrases the S’fat Emet and explains:
“When Torah is static it is an idol: inaccessible, beyond the heavens, and for all intents and purposes, mute. When Torah is studied, and therefore dynamic, it is close at hand and alive. It is the word of God.”
These Sifrei Torah are not idols- they are alive when we read and we chant- and in doing so, we make their name great, make them a blessing, and make the memory of all the people that were part of their life in the land that they came from into a blessing.
Back to my riddle…
On 28 May 1942, on instructions from the SS the Department for the Administration of Provincial Communities at the Prague Jewish Community sent a circular letter to the provincial communities ordering them to send to Prague all ‘historical and historically valuable’ objects. (Pavlat, 2008, p.125).
Among these historical and valuable objects were 1254 files of sheet music and cantorial scores from these provincial communities which are in the archives of the Jewish Museum of Prague. What do Pacov, Chicago, Milton Keynes, Liverpool, Prague, and Vienna have in common?
We know with certainty that in Prague there is a score composed by Salomon Sulzer in Vienna in 1838 that was used in Pacov where the Czech Scroll in Milton Keynes comes from, and it is the same tune that I learned as a child in Chicago, and which is sung during the Torah service in Liverpool.
I imagine on this Shabbat when I will be with the community in Milton Keynes to remember the Jewish community of Pacov the notes of Sulzer’s tune will be like the beautiful fragrance from the bottle of balsam oil diffusing in the world.
Jennifer Verson, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.