(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)February 10, 2023

“Czech Scrolls of the Holocaust and the Brno Torah” with Dr. Jacob Ari Labendz

March 21, 2023 / 7:00 – 8:30 pm / Temple Beth Tikvah (TBT), Wayne, NJ
Co-Organized with the Rabbi Israel S. Dresner Library and Lecture Series at TBT
You may watch the discussion on Zoom with this link.

A reception with refreshments will follow the discussion.

In 1964, the State Jewish Museum in Prague, Czechoslovakia sold 1,564 Torah scrolls to the Westminster Synagogue in London for only $30,000. They came from a collection of at least 1,800 scrolls that had survived the Holocaust due to the intrepid efforts of Jewish scholars and curators, as well as the Nazi government which approved the former’s request to collect and catalogue Jewish religious artifacts from communities the Nazis deported to Terezín. Through the Memorial Scrolls Trust, the Czech Torahs’ new owners distribute scrolls to synagogues and other organizations around the world. Over one-thousand currently reside in the United States of America. Temple Beth Tikvah cares for a Torah from Brno, the capital of Moravia.

Dr. Jacob Ari Labendz will introduce this history, which will serve as a jumping off point for a deeper discussion of what our Czech scrolls can mean for us today in twenty-first-century New Jersey. He will pay particular attention to Brno’s Jewish history and to contemporary Jewish life in that city. Jacob hopes for this talk to be the beginning of a longer process of learning about our Czech scrolls that will culminate in a multisite exhibit, which will include the Torah from Kolín, which the Gross Center has recently obtained from the Memorial Scrolls Trust.

Dr. Jacob Ari Labendz directs the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He researches and writes about the history of Jews in and from Czechoslovakia in the twentieth century, and contributes to scholarly discussions around nationalism, the Cold War, antisemitism, Holocaust memory, and Jewish food cultures. In addition to his articles and reviews, Jacob has published two edited volumes, Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism: Studies and New Directions with Shmuly Yanklowitz (SUNY, 2019) and Jewish Property after 1945: Cultures and Economies of Ownership, Loss, Recovery, and Transfer (Routledge, 2017). Jacob earned his Ph.D. in history from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014. He has taught and researched in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Berlin, and Prague.

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