A late 19th-century Torah scroll that survived the Holocaust and spent more than 40 years behind the Iron Curtain completed a long journey back to a synagogue when Jewish residents in Cutler Bay, Fla., celebrated its donation to the local Chabad-Lubavitch center.
According to a report in The Miami Herald, the Dec. 19 celebration at Chabad of Cutler Bay and Homestead saw a parade down Old Cutler Road as dancing congregants circled around the holy scroll. The scroll, written in 1899, survived the Holocaust in Romania and after the war, spent time in museums. In 1991, the country’s chief rabbi gave it and another scroll to Haim Wiener of the American Society for the Advancement of the Cantorial Arts.
Wiener, who kept the two scrolls in his Miami Beach home, eventually gave one of them to the regional Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Miami. He recently decided to give the other to the Cutler Bay Chabad House.
“This is incredible,” Rabbi Yossi Wolff said of the donation. “It makes the synagogue more beautiful.”
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