Salvaged Torah Rests With the Survivors

When there was peace at last and not a Jew survived, the Nazis planned to open a breathtaking cultural attraction: A museum dedicated to the people they had exterminated.

Children would be ushered through on tours. Docents would lecture on the inferior races that once walked the earth. Viewing the quaint parchment scrolls called Torahs, smirking visitors would gaze upon a faith that lived only beneath a glass case.

Of course, the grand plan never got off the ground. The Jews survived, as did the Torahs seized from the synagogues of Czechoslovakia for the planned museum.

One of them will be dedicated tonight as a Holocaust memorial at Temple Beth Torah in Ventura. A refugee for nearly 60 years, it finally will have a home.

Nobody knows just where this Torah comes from. It may have resided in a synagogue long since burned, in a village now forgotten. The people who would unroll it every Sabbath, who would intone its prayers and parables, who would gently kiss their fingers and then gently touch their Torah--they’re gone, too, and perhaps all their descendants.

In the early 1960s, the Torah that would be destined for Ventura was discovered along with 1,563 others in a dusty warehouse in Prague. Scholars who have examined it believe it dates from the 1760s.

But the details of its origin matter not at all to Vandor Sandor and his wife, Anna.

Born in Hungary, the couple lived through the Holocaust. Anna still bears her tattooed number from Auschwitz. Vandor still recalls not only the day of his liberation from a Nazi labor camp--April 5, 1945, but also his weight at the time--60 pounds. As a teenager, he normally weighed 130.

“We are survivors, and it’s not an easy thing,” said Vandor, a 73-year-old retired mechanical engineer who speaks with the thick accent of his native land. “We survived 54 years and we live every single day with it. Calculate 365 by 54--that’s a lot of days.”

Tonight, Vandor will cradle the Torah in his arms as he, Anna, four other Holocaust survivors, and a slew of relatives march it into the temple’s candle-lit sanctuary.

For them, it is something more than a ritual object freighted with laws and lore.

“Hopefully, it will be a reminder for generations to come that we were slated for extinction and we survived,” he said. “For my grandchildren and their generation, the only reminder will be this physical object that’s here and can be shown and touched--a reminder that something awful happened.”

For Rabbi Lisa Hochberg-Miller, “something awful” is as close as the ceaseless images of anguished Albanian refugees.

“We talk about ‘never again, never again,’ ” she said, “but here it is, again and again. We know the story. We know the next stop--it’s our history.”

In Czechoslovakia, entire communities of Jews were wiped out, but their Torahs--the holiest of Jewish holy books--survived them. After their discovery in the Prague warehouse, they were shipped to the Westminster Synagogue in London for painstaking restoration.

Over the years, they have been “adopted” by temples throughout the world. Congregations in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley are among them.

Today, only about 60 of the scrolls remain at Westminster. A few are torn, stained and burned beyond restoration. The others await efforts like the one mounted last fall by the congregation at Beth Torah.

Temple members raised about $2,000 as a donation to Westminster. In February, after all the necessary permits had been secured, Jerry and Ruthann Feingold picked up the 4-foot-long scrolls, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and gingerly carried them the 6,000 miles back to Ventura.

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“I felt like I was doing something wonderful for it, as if it had a life of its own,” Ruthann Feingold said. “I wouldn’t let anyone else hold it. I felt I would carry this baby with me.”

The Torah is too fragile for use at weekly services, but it’s strong enough to make a powerful point about ethnic cleansing, or the final solution, or whatever the horrifying euphemism of the day may be. It will be displayed in the temple library but also taken to schools for presentations on the Holocaust.

“It can’t be just a museum item, just a relic,” Hochberg-Miller said. “It’s a symbol of hope.”

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.