Twenty-six survivors of the Holocaust were reunited recently at Temple Beth El in Hollywood, Fla. — Torah scrolls from Czechoslovakia, the Sun Sentinel reported.
The scrolls were among some of 1,500 that were stored in Prague as part of a Nazi project during World War II and distributed on permanent loan during the last century by the London-based Memorial Scroll Trust.
“This is a reunion like no other,” Rabbi Allen Tuffs, the synagogue’s spiritual leader, told the Sun-Sentinel.
The congregations where the sifrei Torah had once resided no longer exist; now they belong to synagogues in Florida, California, New York, Canada and England.
More than 100 men and women from South Florida who had lived through the Shoah were in attendance at the event.
“Our Torah scroll (number 1,372) came from a small shtetl in Czechoslovakia called Kutna Hora,” Ronda Bellsey of Temple Beth Kodesh in Boynton Beach told the Sun Sentinel. “None of the Jews from Kutna Hora survived the Holocaust.”
At the reunion ceremony, a Torah scribe completed repairs on of the scrolls.
“These Torahs, like human survivors of the Holocaust, share a common story and carry with them the souls of our martyred brothers and sisters," Tuffs told the Sun-Sentinel.
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