In the last few weeks, Zaporizhzhia, a Ukrainian frontline town of more than 800,000 people that still contains thousands of Jews, has been bombarded by Russian rockets and missiles, killing around 70 people. Yet this week a precious Torah scroll from the city was paraded around a London synagogue on Simchat Torah.
That scroll’s presence at Hadley Wood Community synagogue in North London was described by its rabbi, Akiva Rosenblatt, as a signal of Jewish defiance, survival and continuity against the odds.
Hidden in a cellar, it survived the Nazi occupation of the city during which 20,000 Jews were rounded up and shot.
The scroll was brought out of Ukraine by Hadley Wood congregant Ronald Lask.
“My wife Sandra and I were searching all over Europe for a Torah scroll which, like Sandra’s own father and mother, had survived the Holocaust, to dedicate in memory of many other members of her family who perished,” Mr Lask told the JC.
“We felt we should find one with a proven history and which was fully legitimate. It would need our careful restoration and we wanted it cared for and used weekly by Jews here in a synagogue service.”
After a long search, Mr Lask found one. Apparently written in the 1920s, it had been used in private minyanim during World War II.
revamped shul in Zaporyzhzha photographed in 2019 credit Paul Cainer
The revamped shul in Zaporizhzhia
Just after the Germans occupied Zaporizhzhia, in southern Ukraine, in 1942, the scroll was placed in a box and concealed in a cellar by a non-Jewish family, who also hid an 11-year-old Jewish boy, Mihoel Gurevich.
The family saved the boy’s life. The Nazis burned down the city’s main synagogue and massacred 20,000 Jews, including the boy’s parents.
Decades later, Mihoel Gurevich’s son Alexander handed the scroll, still in remarkably good condition, for safekeeping to Rabbi Nochum Ehrentreu, who is currently coordinating Jewish life in the war-battered Ukrainian city.
In 2016, in return for a donation to the Zaporizhzhia synagogue, the Lasks acquired the sefer Torah, and had it repaired and checked in London, where it was given a clean bill of kosher health. It had its first full outing this week at Simchat Torah.
“We felt having and using this Torah scroll here was a wonderful way to keep alive and treasure our memories of so many of our parents and grandparents and families who were killed in the Holocaust and whose synagogues the Nazis destroyed,” said Mr Lask.
“That’s why we made a Torah cover picturing the synagogue in a West German village near Frankfurt, Meudt, where Sandra’s parents and many family members came from. That shul was destroyed during Kristallnacht in 1938.”
Four other Torah scrolls remain unharmed in Zaporizhzhia. The Jewish community there has actually grown in registered numbers since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rabbi Ehrentreu told the JC as he sheltered with his wife Dina is the basement of his home. Nearby explosions from rocket or missile fire could be heard as he spoke.
The rabbi says he has had a few close shaves with death — on one occasion, literally. Early in the war he was bringing supplies from a food bank for his congregation when he was held at gunpoint on the outskirts of the city.
Local soldiers had mistaken him for a militant from Chechnya, whose much-feared mercenary forces all sported beards. Fortunately, one of the soldiers recognised him. He advised Rabbi Ehrentreu to shave off his beard, but he declined.
Before the war there were about 1,000 Jewish families in the city but many more have now registered.
In the modernised new synagogue and purpose-built classrooms, they benefit from supplies of food and shelter, but also, says the rabbi, from a unique sense of camaraderie, and mutual mental and spiritual support. Many found solace in building a huge sukkah, he said.
He estimates that 350 people crowded into the shul during the two days of Rosh Hashanah, though it was at the height of the rocket fire.
Many were men between 18 and 60, who by Ukrainian law are not allowed to leave the country during the war and who may be called up any time to join the armed forces.
Mostly, Rabbi Ehrentreu told the JC, rockets landed between 10pm and dawn, so he adjusted the synagogue timetable to get people home just after dusk. During attacks, community members can shelter in the basement, which is equipped with provisions.
Rabbi Ehrentreu gave out tefillin and sets of lulavs and etrogs to a soldier, Ariel, who was about to head for the frontline last week and would join other Jewish soldiers there.
“Ariel says the previous set of tefillin I gave him was damaged by artillery fragments, but he believes the tefillin saved his life several times because of their spiritual power,” the rabbi said.
He has also handed out 50 mezuzahs for people to nail to their front doors, and cannot meet the community’s demand for them. After one missile attack, a woman was left unscathed and the mezuzah she had just put up was still intact, though windows had been blown out.
Many Jewish families who fled the city when the war began have returned. They found life in west Ukraine or in other European countries difficult and wanted to be in familiar surroundings, said Rabbi Ehrentreu.
Yet he is not optimistic about the course of the war. “Things are not getting better, they are getting even worse.”
