About our Historic Czech Torah Scroll

In 1980, on behalf of CBB, the Abrahams Family sponsored the acquisition of a Torah from Pribram, Czechoslovakia. This Torah (MST#35) is one of over 1,500 scrolls gathered in Prague during the Nazi occupation, and later rescued with the help of Ralph Yablon and brought to the Westminster Synagogue in London who set up the Memorial Scrolls Trust to care for them.

Much of the Jewish community of Czechoslovakia perished during the Holocaust, and so the memorial Scroll trust took on the task of finding homes for these orphaned Torah scrolls. Ours is Sefer Torah Number 35, and is over 200 years old and contains a unique combination of Ashkenazi and Sephardi characters as well as some Kabbalistic symbols.

In 2011, with the help of a generous gift from the Stein family and donations in memory of Alex Stein, we engaged Sofer Neil Yerman to extensively restore this scroll during our “Year of Living Torah.” The scroll is now housed in the main ark at CBB, where for the past several years it has been brought out and read from on Yom Kippur afternoon.

Visit the Memorial Scrolls Trust website to learn more about this program: www.memorialscrollstrust.org

History of Pribram Jews

  • First mentioned in 1238, one of the oldest Jewish settlements in the Czech lands.
  • In 1568… (read more)

How the Scrolls Were Saved

After the defeat of Germany, a free and independent Czechoslovakia emerged, but it was a country largely without Jews. Most of the surviving Jews… (read more)

Our Year of Living Torah: My Journey

By Judy Mannaberg-Goldman

In the summer of 2011, I became involved… (read more)