Dei'ah veDibur - Information & Insight
  

A Window into the Chareidi World

24 Shevat 5762 - February 6, 2002 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
NEWS

OPINION
& COMMENT

OBSERVATIONS

HOME
& FAMILY

IN-DEPTH
FEATURES

VAAD HORABBONIM HAOLAMI LEINYONEI GIYUR

TOPICS IN THE NEWS

HOMEPAGE

 

Produced and housed by
Shema Yisrael Torah Network
Shema Yisrael Torah Network

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NEWS
Lithuania Hands Over 31 Sifrei Torah through Efforts of the CER
by Yated Ne'eman Staff

Lithuania handed over 309 sifrei Torah and megillot to Israel in a ceremony that closed the book on a sad chapter. The collection of scrolls -- some more than 200 years old and all in various states of disrepair -- were part of German loot confiscated from the Jewish community of Lithuania during the Holocaust, which lay in a church in Vilna for over 50 years.

Rabbi Abba Dunner, secretary of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), worked hard for three years behind the scenes in order to bring the documents back to the Jewish people. He traveled to inspect the documents, spending at one point three straight days going through all of them carefully.

The scrolls, none of which is kosher, include 31 complete scrolls, 70 partial scrolls, and the rest megillot of Bible and parchment fragments. They will be inspected, and those deemed salvageable will be restored.

Rabbi Dunner said that the scrolls are in "terrible, terrible shape, and I don't think in the end we will be able to salvage more than 18 kosher scrolls from the entire collection. However, there will still be many megillot and haftarah scrolls which can be used."

Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior, together with Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisroel Lau, accepted the scrolls on behalf of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.

The party left Israel early Wednesday morning, and visited the grave of the Vilan Gaon as well as those of other gedolim who are buried in the Vilna area.

President Moshe Katsav met the plane at the airport to receive the scrolls.

The multiple ceremonies, which included the president, foreign minister, and chairman of the parliament of Lithuania, concluded six years of protracted discussions and external pressure on the Lithuanian government that involved the Israeli government, numerous Israeli, European, and US organizations, and even US President George W. Bush.

"When the Lithuanian president visited Washington earlier this month, the issue of returning scrolls was raised at every one of his meetings, including those with the National Security Council and at his meeting with Bush," said Andrew Baker, director of International Jewish Affairs at the American Jewish Committee.

"The president told [Lithuanian] President Valdas Adamkus that he must `deal with the issue of Jewish heritage,' " he said.

The saga of the scrolls began six years ago, when the large collection was discovered in the church.

"The Torah scrolls were lying there naked, with mice droppings and dust and dirt, lying there piled on each other," said Rabbi Shalom Krinsky, a rabbi in Vilna.

The entire worldwide Jewish community attempted to claim rightful ownership of the collection, and the internal bickering led to the long delay in obtaining the scrolls.

The government moved the collection to the National Library, declared them part of the country's national heritage and embarked on a plan to catalogue and restore the scrolls, including removing fungi, treating the parchment, and safekeeping them in state-of-the-art temperature-controlled conditions in the library's basement.

Three years ago, the Conference of European Rabbis was invited by the government of Lithuania to examine the scrolls and suggest an acceptable solution.

"Lithuania felt that we were the most acceptable towards resolving this issue," said Dunner. "We visited Vilna and examined, catalogued, and negotiated with the director of the National Library, Mr. Vladas Bulavas, in an attempt to reach an agreeable solution for the distribution of the scrolls."

As claims came in from Jewish communities and institutions worldwide who were eager to get the scrolls, it became clear to the major umbrella organizations involved in the restoration of Jewish life in Europe that unless a consensus could be found in which all parties could agree on criteria for distribution, they would never be released, especially since the Lithuanians were keen on holding on to them forever, and this gave them a valid excuse.

While Bulavas was reluctant to lose such a valuable collection, Dunner said, he nevertheless understood that the scrolls "did not belong in a library, and they could not be compared to other books, and therefore they had to be returned for daily use in synagogues."

A law was passed a year ago that separated the sifrei Torah from all other items considered valuable artifacts of Lithuanian heritage, thereby releasing them for distribution. But the internal fighting among Jewish groups prevented them from being turned over.

Then in July, an ad-hoc committee was formed among various representatives of world Jewry, including the Israeli government, the Conference of European Rabbis, the American Jewish Committee, B'nai B'rith, Menorah, and Hechal Shlomo, which agreed to deal collectively with the question of world distribution of the scrolls.

When Arie Zuckerman, an aid to Melchior on issues of Holocaust restitution, went to Lithuania in October to explain the formation of the committee, "that was when Lithuania said OK," said Dunner.

The ceremony also included the unveiling of a plaque to Antanas Ulpys, a librarian who "gathered from Lithuanian towns and villages the Jewish books and manuscripts and Torah scrolls that were scattered by Nazi violence, and preserved them in defiance of Stalin-era orders throughout the period of the Soviet occupation."

 

All material on this site is copyrighted and its use is restricted.
Click here for conditions of use.