Our Russian-built horseless carriage has just returned us from a road trip through Belapolya, Charevka, Putyivil, Shostka, Yampol, Seredina-Buda, Kralivets and Altinivka.
Many interesting things happened, including, but not limited to, a 93 year old man putting tefillin on for the first time in 80 years, meeting a little Gorsky Jew living in a hut in a one-street shtetl, getting our documents thoroughly checked at a police station in the Russian-border town of Seredina-Buda (by no one less than the chief of police), and finding ten Jews living there too.
Near the end of our journey, we stopped off at the home of a woman in Kralivets. We spoke for a while, said a little l'chaim, and ate apples from her garden. She then told us that she had a Torah, and asked if we wanted to see it.
Now you see, whenever anyone in this country tells you that they have a Torah, they most likely mean a book with Hebrew writing in it. But we weren't rushing anywhere so we told her that we would love to see it.
She went into her house, and came back with a wrapped up scroll. We unwrapped it and laid it out on the table. It was a detailed sketch of a deer being attacked by wolves. In the corner was a signature and a date in 1943. We flipped it over. It was an entire section of a Torah scroll, the writing as legible as if it had just been written.
The old woman explained that a young man had found a drawing in a frame amongst the possessions of his grandmother, and had given it to her when he discovered the Jewish writing on the other side.
"Here," she told us, "take it with you."
We looked a little closer at the letters that some scribe had written long ago:
"Remember what Amalek did to you on the road, on your way out of Egypt... you must obliterate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Do not forget."
We wrapped up the scroll, got into the car, and went on to our next stop so that we would be able to put tefillin on with the villagers there before sundown.
