As they lay torn, battered and forgotten in the deteriorating, abandoned Michle Synagogue on the outskirts of Prague, nearly 2000 Torah Scrolls, stacked floor to ceiling had somehow escaped destruction. The years of darkness and silence since the War’s end confirmed that those who once held, prayed and read from these Scrolls had no such fortune.

They came from the small towns and villages of Moravia and Bohemia, as well as the larger cities such as Klatovy, Pilsen and Tabor. The Scrolls were summoned along with hundreds of thousands of other pieces of Jewish life and worship. The orders stated that they were to be received, catalogued and stored in the rapidly overflowing makeshift warehouses of Prague.

The question we ask today, is why? What series of events caused this frantic, desperate act of preservation of these precious items that represented Jewish life of an entire nation?

In 1964, when they emerged from cold storage into the light, loaded onto transports, andarrived at the doorstep of London’s Westminster Synagogue, they began a new life.Brought through the doors, one by one and given numbers that they carry today. Their narrative of their survival would begin to emerge. It would be obscured at the same time. What arrived at the door of the Westminster Synagogue on February 4th, 1964… were 1564 Stories.

Today,in nearly 900 synagogues around the world, a Czech Memorial Torah Scroll resides. They are read from by young people at their Bar or Bat Mitzvahs.They are carried and lifted during the holidays. Some reside behind glass, too battered and damaged to be used in religious service, but to serve as a memorial to Jewish community from where it came.

If you were to ask many of congregants of the Synagogues in which a Czech Scroll resides how the Scrolls were saved, they would most likely tell you some version of “They were collected by the Nazis during the war to be used in a “Museum to an Extinct Race”.

It is a story that has become entrenched over the years.We can trace its origins. We can make a rational argument that it sounds entirely plausible.We can find many kernels of parallel fact to use as proof. But what we can’t find is any specific reference or evidence that the Nazis had any such plan.

What we do know is a small group of Jews working in the horrific conditions of Nazi occupied Prague, coming together to formulate an action that would lead to the saving of the Scrolls.This story is always eclipsed by the “Museum” narrative.

Our narrative will examine the time from the Munich Agreement in 1938. Chamberlain cedes the Sudetenland to Hitler in the Munich agreement.In less than a year, the Nazis occupied the Czech lands, and the country of Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.The Protectorate of Moravia and Bohemia, as much of Europe, was now under Nazi control.

The war years play out in the way that we all know. But in Prague, a small group of Jews, community leaders and the staff of the Jewish Museum, take on the inconceivable task of summoning and collecting all the Judaica that could be shipped to Prague.As the transports began sending Jews to Terezin,Jews carried out their mission of cataloguing and storing over 200,000 religious items; all from communities around the Czech Lands.These items included over 2000 Torah Scrolls.

The war ends, and of those who worked to save the Scrolls, only 2 survived. In the dark years of communism that hovered over Czechoslovakia, the Scrolls lay abandoned and forgotten. In the early 1960’s the Communists government sought Western currency, so they began to sell what they could.

After failed negotiations with Israel, the government Arts Bureau approached an art dealer inLondon and asked if he would be interested in purchasing “some Jewish Scrolls”. He traveled to Prague and was brought to the abandoned Michle Synagogue. He realized these represented an entire Czech Jewish population, now gone. Negotiations ensued, and in February of 1964, the 1564 of those Scrolls arrived at the Westminster Synagogue in London to begin their new life.

In London, a trust was formed with the intention of sharing the Scrolls with communities around the world.They would be given on “permanent loan” to any Synagoguewishing to welcome one of these surviving Scrolls into their congregation.By the mid-eighties, most of the Scrolls were dispatched. Approximately 200 remained in London as part of their permanent collection.

To Be Lost Again

After all that these Scrolls have witnessed, perhaps the greatest tragedy is that they are being lost all over again… to time. It has been nearly 5 decades since the Scrolls began to find new congregations.In that time, Synagogues have closed and merged.Clergy move on to other cities. Those who originally receive the Scrolls have passed.All of this leads to the Scrolls being lost again.

As we struggle to ensure that each and every congregation that has possession of a Czech Scroll knows the unique story of its survival and about the community from which it came, this message also comes at a crucial time in the world of Holocaust Studies;a time that will soon come when there is no living Holocaust survivors.

The tragedy of the “Myth of the Museum” is that it hides a much greater truth.Through a series of actions by a small group in the Jewish Community during the war, these Scrolls were saved. It was their diligent work, in the face of unspeakable circumstances, that allows us to hold and read from these Torah Scrolls today.

It is this notion, that we are telling one collective story.Yet we know that each of these Scrolls represents its own.

We end where we began; in a congregation celebrating their ties to a community lost.Their one Scroll, one of 1564 Stories.