Recovering Torahs from the Nazis

Randolph, NJ, a small town in Morris County, is getting a Torah scroll that survived the Holocaust intact—a rare scroll, indeed.

Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg is completing some unfinished business as he helps World War II’s last emigrants come to the new world.

The 80-year-old Parsippany developer and philanthropist said he has located and bought nine survivor Torahs once hidden from the Nazis in and around his native Poland.

And he and his wife, Cecile, have donated some of the holy scrolls to institutions around New Jersey.

On Tuesday, he will donate the seventh of the Torahs he has acquired, this time to the Mount Freedom Jewish Center in Randolph. Some of Mosberg’s other rescued scrolls are in schools or temples in Livingston, West Orange, Parsippany and Union Township, Union County, where Mosberg resides.

“In a few more years, there will be no more survivors,” he said. “But in Mount Freedom they will be able to say, ‘We have a survivor in the Torah.'”

[…] For a survivor Torah to be preserved in usable condition is “very rare,” said Rabbi Menachem Youlus, owner of the Jewish Bookstore of Greater Washington, located in the nation’s capital.

And once again, European perfidy about things Jewish rears its ugly head:

Youlus, an expert in the area of Holocaust-era Torahs, said many European governments claim the scrolls as “cultural property” and throw up “bureaucratic red tape” as collectors try to recover and save them. He said the governments should be more sympathetic to preservation efforts.

Lovely. They have no more Jews, but they’re still keeping our property. Sorry, “cultural property.”

The donor is a Holocaust survivor—one of those fictional people that Ahmadinejad says don’t exist.

“I will never forget and I will never forgive,” Mosberg said, repeating a mantra that’s also sewn on the cloth. The colorful Torah cover mirrors a stained-glass window mural he also donated to Temple Israel in Union, he said.

A survivor of the Krakow-Plaszow and Mauthausen concentration camps, Mosberg said he was the only member of his family, which lived in Krakow, to survive the Nazis’ invasion of Poland. He said he often goes back to his homeland and the sites of other concentration camps to explore the past and pay his respects.

About 15 years ago, he began collecting shoes, wires, spoons and other memorabilia connected with the concentration camp system that killed 6 million Jews.

[…] “I know that my mother would be very proud of what I do,” he said. His mother, Berta, was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.

Yasher koach for finding, and donating, the Torah scrolls. And for working to undo some of the damage done all those years ago. I agree, your mother would have been very proud.