West Hills : Temple’s Torah Gift a ‘Mitzvah Mission’

Not until after the donation of a Torah was arranged did the Shomrei Torah Synagogue in West Hills learn just how close its connection to the Ukrainian village of Vinogradov was.

“There were some members of our congregation who were from Vinogradov,” said Rabbi Eli Schochet, whose temple donated a Torah to the Ukrainian village after a filmmaker launched a nationwide search for one.

In the West Hills synagogue, whose name translates as Guardians of the Torah, there is still the empty niche where the donated scripture was once kept. Schochet said he uses that niche to remind the congregation that the 70-year-old Torah is on a “mitzvah mission,” an act of charity.

David Notowitz, a Santa Monica film producer, was working on a documentary in Ukraine when he found the village of Vinogradov. The village’s Jewish community was decimated by the Nazis during World War II and its synagogue later seized by Soviet authorities.

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the synagogue was returned to the remaining Jewish community. But it lacked a Torah, the parchment scroll bearing the handwritten five books of Moses, which is a central part of Jewish religious life.

Notowitz returned to the United States and began a nationwide search for a temple willing to donate a Torah. The Shomrei Torah Synagogue, which was founded in 1994 with the merger of two San Fernando Valley congregations--Beth Kodesh and Temple Beth Ami--had 16 Torahs.

Notowitz delivered the donated Torah to the Vinogradov temple at the beginning of Passover this year.

One bleary-eyed man kissed the Torah when he realized what it was, Notowitz recalled. “We asked him, ‘How do you feel?’ He just kissed it again.”

The Torah has become a key part of Notowitz’s film about the survival of the Vinogradov Jews. The film, tentatively titled “Carpati 50 Miles . . . 50 Years,” is expected to be shown at New York’s Lincoln Center in the spring.