Lithuanian Megillot - 02.06.2003

 

Lithuanian Megillot Find Home in D.C.

Ron Sachs/CNP

(l.-r.) NCSJ Executive Director Mark Levin; Rabbi Andrew Baker, Director of International Jewish Affairs, American Jewish Committee; Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas; Daniel Mariaschin, Executive Vice President, B'nai Brith International

Washington Post coverage
American Jewish Committee coverage
Washington Jewish Week coverage

Link to Prime Minister Brazauskas
Link to Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania
Link to American Jewish Committee

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Ceremony in Lithuania (January 2002)
JTA coverage

Lithuanian Government Announcement (January 2002)
JTA coverage
B'nai B'rith coverage
Announcement by Israeli Foreign Ministry

Lithuanian Parliament Votes to Return Scrolls (October 2000)

Ron Sachs/CNP

Mark Levin greeting  Prime Minister Brazauskas

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The Washington Post
February 8, 2003

Century-Old Scrolls Given Home in D.C.

Three Synagogues Are First to Receive Jewish Texts Found Hidden in Lithuania 

By Bill Broadway

Six years after the discovery of hundreds of religious scrolls in a library basement in Lithuania, three Washington synagogues have become the first recipients of historic Jewish texts allowed to leave a country of the former Soviet Union.

The hand-lettered parchments, presented Thursday in a ceremony at Adas Israel Congregation in Northwest Washington, are the first of dozens of Lithuanian scrolls and scroll fragments that will be donated for use in synagogues around the world.

"It's an unprecedented step," Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee, said of Lithuania's decision last year to send 308 scrolls and fragments to Jerusalem for analysis, repair and distribution. "Most countries do not willingly part with items in their libraries and archives."

Baker, who helped negotiate the release of the century-old texts, is part of an international committee that will decide which synagogues will receive the scrolls. The committee decided to present the first scrolls to congregations in Washington, in part because of U.S. government efforts to persuade Lithuania to allow the sacred texts to leave the country, he said.

In a symbolic gesture, the committee chose congregations representing the three major streams of Judaism: Kesher Israel, an Orthodox synagogue in Georgetown; Adas Israel, Conservative, in Cleveland Park; and Temple Sinai, Reform, in Chevy Chase D.C.

The three scrolls are called megillot -- individual books of the Bible not included in the Torah -- and are inscribed with the Book of Esther, the text for the celebratory holiday of Purim, which this year begins the evening of March 17. 

Baker said that scribes in Jerusalem have restored about a dozen Torah scrolls from Lithuania but that their destinations have not been determined. An additional 30 megillot need little or no repair and will be distributed to congregations that have applied for them. Some scroll fragments can be repaired for liturgical use, but most are beyond repair and, in accordance with Jewish tradition, will be buried in cemeteries, he said.

In Thursday's ceremony, Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas said his government wanted the texts "to live on so that they inspire future generations [of Jews] and teach them well."

"Jews have lived in Lithuania 650 years," said Brazauskas, a Roman Catholic. "It breaks our hearts to realize that before the war they made up almost 10 percent of the country's population [of more than 2 million]. Now there are only several thousand of them."

Brazauskas noted with pride that Vilnius, Lithuania's capital, was long called the "Jerusalem of the North" because it was a renowned center of rabbinical studies. And he recalled that many Litvaks, as Lithuanian Jews are called, have made major contributions to Western culture, among them violinist Jascha Heifetz, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz and painter Chaim Soutine.

When the prime minister said his government would help revive the Jewish community by restoring historically Jewish neighborhoods and returning cemeteries and other communal properties, the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

"We are thrilled to hear your talk about the revival of Judaism in Lithuania," said Rabbi Barry Freundel, of Kesher Israel. "There was a horror" in the country, he said. "Now there is a future."

Also accepting scrolls were Rabbi Fred Reiner of Temple Sinai and Rabbi Jeffrey Wohlberg of Adas Israel. 

Just 24 hours earlier, about 350 people had gathered at Adas Israel to celebrate the life of Columbia crew member Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli to go into space. He had carried with him a small Torah scroll given to him by a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. 

The two events attest to the strength and resilience of Jewry worldwide and underscore the importance of passing sacred texts from generation to generation, Wohlberg said in an interview. 

"The word as it has been revealed and interpreted has been the source and inspiration to Jewish life century after century, no matter where we were," he said. "It has inspired continuity and helped maintain a connection across time and space."

Baker said he first heard about the Lithuanian scrolls six years ago while in Vilnius to discuss the dispensation of thousands of Jewish books and Yiddish newspapers that had been hidden from the Nazis and, later, the Soviets. He and a colleague were touring the collection at the national library when the head librarian said, "Let me show you something else we have stored in the basement."

Excited about the discovery, Baker said he and representatives of other Jewish organizations began a lengthy, often difficult process of persuading Lithuanian officials to return the scrolls to active use. Several of the best-kept scrolls were given to Lithuania's half-dozen or so active synagogues, but most were donated to the chief rabbinate in Jerusalem for international distribution. 

Unlike untold numbers of scrolls and religious materials the Nazis confiscated -- to be placed in a German "museum to an extinct race," Baker said -- the scrolls and fragments had been secreted away in attics, basements and elsewhere before or during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania from 1941 to 1944.

"These are true Holocaust survivors," said Baker, whose maternal grandfather was born in Vilnius and immigrated to the United States with his family at age 8. "They were not collected under Nazi supervision."

In his office a day before the ceremony, Baker pulled the three sheepskin megillot from their protective linen pouches and pointed to the worn edges and nicks and repairs that gave character to each.

"There's great symbolic importance to these scrolls, but you also feel something when you look at them," he said. "It's possible that my grandfather, as a boy in Vilnius celebrating Purim, could have heard the story of Esther read from one these."