Parts of lost Torah scroll returned to eastern German synagogue

Dresden, Germany (dpa) – After more than eight decades, parts of a Torah scroll thought lost from the synagogue in the eastern German town of Goerlitz on the Polish border have reappeared.

A Protestant pastor, now retired, kept them safe and the secret around them for more than half a century and has now handed them over to the city, he reported.

“Now they are in good hands, no one will be careless with them,” Uwe Mader told dpa.

Lord Mayor Octavian Ursu promised that the Torah fragments will also be exhibited after they have been inventoried and restored.

The four fragments on parchment paper, presumably 300 years old, were rescued from the burning synagogue at the last minute during the Nazi pogrom on the night of November 9, 1938, Mader said.

“They were hastily but expertly cut from the Torah, the holy scripture of the Jewish religious community.”

Whoever did this must have been proficient in Hebrew, he said. “They are not just descriptions of Jewish history, but meaningful documents, including the Joseph story from Genesis.”

They had been pressed into the hands of his father, a young police trainee at the time.

On the advice of a lawyer, he had given them to a priest so that they would be safe from the Nazis. In 1969, his widow entrusted them to the young Mader, who was a vicar at the time, “under the seal of secrecy,” as the almost 80-year-old reported.

The later police chaplain guarded the handwritten parchment pieces like the apple of his eye. “I was very suspicious.”

Politics in the former East Germany at times had not been very friendly to Jews, he said. “Therefore it was clear that I had to maintain official secrecy.”

First he hid them under rolls of wallpaper in the office, where no one rummaged around, then in an old steel cupboard from the police, a gift after the fall of communism. “I always had the key to it with me.”

The redevelopment of the synagogue and changes in society in Goerlitz now argued for breaking his vow of silence and giving it to the council archives, Mader said. “The time of mistrust is over.”

He had followed the changes in the city closely, he said, and especially that of the synagogue, which had reopened in July as a cultural forum after decades of decay, then renovation.

The house of worship of the Goerlitz Jewish community was the only synagogue in Saxony to survive the pogrom of 1938, also known as the Night of Broken Glass or Kristallnacht.

The Torah scrolls had disappeared. Until now, it had been assumed that they had been completely burnt.