Holocaust-era Torah Scroll Gets New Home in Utah

After a year of restoration, a Torah scroll that survived the Holocaust will be welcomed to its new home this week by Chabad-Lubavitch of Utah.

According to Rabbi Benny Zippel, co-director of the Salt Lake City-based Chabad House, the scroll was discovered by Mormon antique dealer Brent Ashworth who then called a Jewish friend to come take a look at the find.

Upon his arrival at the Provo, Utah, store, Dr. Alvin Segelman first noticed that a section of the Torah had been cut out and inadvertently framed upside down.

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"We Jewish people don't like seeing things like this displayed in public," Segelman said he told Ashworth. "After all, it's a holy document."

Zippel later found that all of books of Genesis and Deuteronomy, as well as parts of the books of Exodus and Numbers were missing. Only the book of Leviticus survived intact. The rabbi bought the Torah scroll and the framed section, and sent the items to Rabbi Moshe Klein, a scribe in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, N.Y.

It took Klein, who ascertained some of the scroll's Holocaust history based on markings on its back, nine months to repair the extant letters and arrange for the completion of the new sections.

A few of the scroll's final letters will be completed by the local Jewish community during a dedication ceremony Thursday, which marks the day in 1951 that the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory, assumed the worldwide leadership of Chabad-Lubavitch.

For his part, Segelman, 77, a retired professor of pharmacognosy at Rutgers University College of Pharmacy in New Brunswick, N.J., who now lives in Orem, Utah, said he was grateful to be in the right place at the right time.

"I was happy to save the Torah, so to speak," he said.

Segelman added that Ashworth just called him last week, this time to show him a Torah scroll he purchased from Morocco.