Jeanette Friedman

Tale of a traveling Torah

Sep 27

Jeanette Friedmanhistory, local stories/community No Comments

By Jeanette Friedman | Published 09/21/2006 Jewish Standard

Film records quest and journey

The Partziver rebbitzen, Yita Rabinowich, who was trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, collected Torah scrolls, and kept them on the table in her dining room.
They were piled high, and when asked what would happen to them, said that whatever would happen to her, would happen to them. She did not survive the war, and no one knows what happened to the scrolls.

Torah
Fast forward to summer 2005. Marie and Harley Lippman are planning their daughter’s bat mitzvah. Her name is Juliet and she and her family wanted to add special meaning to her lifecycle event and were casting around for ideas. They read an article about Israeli teenage girls who were in Poland and discovered a street peddler selling paper dolls, dolls he called “Jew dolls.” When the girls looked closely, they saw the dolls were made from scraps taken from a Torah. They asked the peddler where he got them, and he directed them to his uncle, who had found a scroll in the house of a Jew who “disappeared in the war.” The girls bought what was left of the Torah, managed to get it to Israel, restored it, and presented it to a synagogue in Jerusalem.
“That,” said Harley recently, “is the story that inspired us.”
The Lippmans, who live in New York City, found Rabbi Adina Lewittes, a Bergen County rabbi, who helped them locate a reparable Torah scroll through a broker on the Lower East Side. The scroll they chose had been written sometime in the 1870s in Strasbourg, France, and was sponsored by a wealthy Polish family. Juliet’s grandparents had come to the states from Poland at the turn of the 20th century, Her father had been a Fulbright scholar in Poland for two years in the late ’70s, and her mother is French, so there were links between the past and present. The family hired Ellen Friedland and Curt Fissel of Jem/Glo Productions, which is based in Bergen County, to look into the Torah’s provenance and film the entire experience of repairing and donating the Torah in Poland for them.
“When we planned the Hachnosat Sefer Torah [the welcoming of a Torah to a congregation, a festival that resembles a wedding in many ways], we expected a small crowd to celebrate our simcha with singing and dancing in the streets of Warsaw. Instead there was a miracle, because more than 170 Israel Defense Forces officers who happened to be in Warsaw joined us in our jubilation. We danced through the city’s main park, an area that had been off limits to Jews during the Holocaust, and our event took place on the anniversary of the day that Jorgen Stroop told Hitler Warsaw was Judenrein and that the ghetto was destroyed. The irony of our celebration was not lost on anyone!”
The Jem/Glo film, which began as a 17-minute film for the family, was increased to 28 minutes and aired last week on national PBS as “A Torah Returns to Poland.” Jem/Glo director Ellen Friedland said in an interview, “It grew legs. The film was received enthusiastically by the people with whom the Lippmans shared it, and earned a Summit Award and a silver Telly Award. We all realized the subject had an impact on those beyond immediate family and friends, so we expanded it and went looking for additional information.”
Here’s what Friedland and Fissel discovered on their hunt: “We knew from the spindles that the Torah was written in 1876 in Strasbourg by a scribe named Avraham Schwab and commissioned by a couple named Avraham Zev and Beila Schwab and their six children; we also knew from the scribe on the Lower East Side that it had been found in Poland and brought to New York.
Schwab was buried in the main Jewish cemetery in Strasbourg 13 years after the Torah was written. By studying the history of Alsace, we discovered that the Schwabs’ descendants had disappeared, though they would almost certainly have lived in the vicinity of the scribe and that the Torah would have served the local community.
“All the rabbis and scholars in Strasbourg and Poland agreed that the only imaginable way the Torah would have landed in Poland was by accompanying its community on a deportation to Auschwitz during the Holocaust. The fact that this Torah had survived when its community members had not seemed to us to multiply in spiritual value the initial tzedakah of Harley and Marie Lippman in donating it to a living and needy Jewish community.”
Friedland and Fissel, who have recorded many family journeys to Europe to trace roots, say this story is different from most of the stories they’ve covered.
Fissel told the Standard: “It is significant that the Lippmans purchased the Torah. But unlike other folks who purchase and donate Torahs, they did not send it alone on a plane to Poland; they accompanied it as if it were a family member. They spent several days meeting Jewish community members in Poland and visiting community institutions, and they were center stage, surrounded by 170 members of the IDF visiting the country at that time as well. In addition, many members of the Jewish community from around all of Poland came to join them as they marched and danced through the streets of Warsaw to dedicate the Torah and give it back to a European Jewish community.”
Said Friedland, “What touched us so deeply about this one was the unique bridge the Lippman family built to connect the Jewish past with the Jewish present and future to the redeveloping Jewish community of Poland, the American Jewish community, and the Israeli community. Imagine all the potential for creating good will around the world if others take their lead!”
The documentary is being distributed by the National Educational Telecommunications Association to PBS stations around the United States. While stations often need several months of advance notice of a program for scheduling purposes, within six weeks it was aired on 32 percent of PBS markets, and it is likely to be broadcast around Chanukah.
“The film will be shown in Israel in February 2007 with Hebrew subtitles,” Friedland said, “and the family will have a reunion with many of the soldiers who had joined us in Warsaw.”
Said Juliet, the bat mitzvah girl, “I felt good about being able to give something so important back to the community. My friends thought it was a good idea and was more meaningful than just a party because it related to my Jewish heritage.”