Lawrenceville's Adath Israel commissions a Torah
By Michel Alperin
Nov. 23, 2007
Waving a piece of white parchment at Adath Israel Congregation on Oct. 28, the Torah scribe Zerach Greenfield said to a crowd of about 150, "This is your Torah."
The tale began in March, when a regular Torah reader noticed that a word was missing from the scroll before him.
After encountering this problem, Rabbi Daniel Grossman realized that Adath Israel had not had a major Torah project since 1972. He decided it was time to call in an expert to examine all of Adath Israel's Torahs.
The diagnosis was serious. Two scrolls were fine -- but two looked like they might tear in the next year or so and one had a fungus. Yet a synagogue needs to have three functional Torahs for the times when a special Shabbat also occurs on the first day of the new month -- requiring readings from three different places in the Torah scroll.
That's when the congregation started to think about commissioning a new Torah scroll. And in just seven months, on Oct. 28, the synagogue held its kickoff event for the creation of a new Torah -- the congregation's present to itself on its 85th birthday. Congregants Judy and Arthur Cohen have underwritten the cost of the Torah, which should be finished in 10 to 16 months, so that the sofer can get started immediately while the fundraising continues.
"It is a fabulous project because it brings new life into a congregation," said congregant Evette Katlin who is enthusiastic about the Torah project, "and it gives people the opportunity to grow, learn and experience what it's like to be at the grass roots of a Jewish experience."
"It's wonderful because the 613th mitzvah is that everyone has to write their own Torah," congregant Bill Agress agreed.
Since many people will not have the financial means to finance their own Torahs, this commandment has been understood to include activities that support the writing of a Torah. Even paying for a single letter to be written, which Adath Israel congregants can do for an $18 donation, fulfills this commandment.
The opening event for the Torah fundraiser included a presentation by the children's choir singing Torah-related songs, a question-and-answer session with the rabbi, and a presentation by the sofer.
The afternoon opened with a guided tour of three Torahs unscrolled on parallel tables. Docents trained by Grossman explicated 31 verses scattered through the five books. The goal of the activity was both learning for its own sake and giving congregants a sense of what part of the Torah they might select for their donations.
While people waited for Greenfield, who had gotten stuck in traffic, Grossman answered questions. He explained, for example, that the best Torah parchment, deerskin from Iran and Iraq, would mean a cost of $140,000 for a Torah, but the less expensive parchment to be used in Adath Israel's Torah would come to over $30,000.
The Torahs that the sofer found to be unkosher will be buried, with a full funeral ceremony, in the first or second week in December. With them will be the synagogue's damaged Pentateuchs and prayerbooks that have been in storage for decades.
Adath Israel's Torah project brings together a tradition steeped in Torah and the future of children yet unborn who will read from the new Torah. But the technology-driven present will not be slighted. Along with the new Torah the congregation will receive a CD of the entire Torah, which Torah readers can use to practice the portions they are learning.
The entire Adath Israel community is participating in this Torah-writing project that will also raise money fund education and other congregational programming. This year's bnai mitzvah class is taking responsibility for the project, and Sam Weiner has already created a Torah banner, where children will add a letter with their names as they dedicate a letter for the new Torah.
For Katlin, the power of this project draws from the Torah's centrality in Jewish life.
"To really be able to see how this tree of life that holds us together is created," she said, "gives us a rebirth as a community and a Jewish people."