During services at the Roth Center for Jewish Life last Friday, Rabbi Edward Boraz dedicated a Torah scroll from Czechoslovakia that is over 130 years old and survived the Holocaust.
Carol Cram, whose daughter Amy is currently a senior at the College and son Jeremy graduated from Dartmouth in 1993, decided to loan the Torah scroll to the Roth Center, soon after hearing of the construction of the new center for Jewish Life.
"Being able to have this scroll here is a wonderful gift," Boraz said.
According to Boraz, the scroll was commissioned in 1860 in Tabor, Czechoslovakia.
Tabor, which had an expanding Jewish population of about 300 people at the time, has a long historical relationship with Jews. The town's first synagogue was constructed in 1655.
Unfortunately, in November 1942, the town also served as a holding area for over 1,000 Jews who were later transported to concentration camps, Boraz said.
It is not clear what happened to the scroll in the intervening years. However, after the war the scroll was rediscovered by Joseph Pick, Cram's grandfather.
Pick, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, was the husband of Ida Stern, whose great-grandfather had originally commissioned the Torah Scroll.
Pick was working with the London-based Westminster Synagogue Memorial project, an organization that aimed to rescue, preserve and restore scrolls that survived the Holocaust.
Recovered scrolls are then loaned out to congregations and communities around the world.
Due to his family connection to the scroll, Pick was able to permanently borrow the scroll for display at his local synagogue in Rye, New York.
The scroll is on indefinite loan to the Roth Center and the Upper Valley Jewish community.
