Since the Congregation Bonai Shalom in Boulder, Colorado, was founded in 1981, one of its several Torahs has been taken from the ark each Sabbath, and on other holy days, and read to members of the congregation.

In August, another, particularly special, Torah arrived at the temple, one of some 1,400 scrolls whose survival during the Holocaust has inspired Jewish congregations worldwide. Confiscated by the Nazis as they purged synagogues and communities throughout Bohemia and Moravia, the Torah scrolls were shipped to the Jewish Museum in Prague.

The scrolls were rescued from Prague years after World War II and have become part of a sprawling inventory of faith administered by a London trust that lends the Torahs out to synagogues, universities, hospitals and other institutions in 25 countries.

So one can go to communities in Buenos Aires or Atlanta, Mumbai or Los Angeles, Ontario or Dubai and find a scroll that was once in a Czech synagogue that was closed, emptied or burned by the Nazis.

“The story of our scroll, which had been in a synagogue in Prague, and its survival, is so powerful and connects us to the generations,” said Rabbi Marc Soloway, spiritual leader of Congregation Bonai Shalom, which reads from the scroll often, including during the religious initiations of its young members.

“As each bar or bat mitzvah reads from the actual Torah, they learn its history, which becomes part of their own story and connection of Jewish traditions and community,” the rabbi said.

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On Sunday, the Memorial Scrolls Trust, the London organisation that administers the collection of Torahs, marked the 60th anniversary of their arrival in London with a series of celebratory services and events. Today some 1,000 are on loan to locations in the United States, including the Central Synagogue in Manhattan, whose early-19th-century Torah had been in the town of Lipnik, in the Czech Republic.

“The reason it is important to us – we have 3,000 households with about 9,000 people – is that it gives us a physical connection to that moment in history when our survival as a people was on a precipice,” said Rabbi Sarah Berman, director of the Central Synagogue’s adult education department. “Our Torah was a survivor, and it stands in for that entire story.”

While the Nazis did help to ship the scrolls and other Judaica to the Prague museum, the latest research indicates this effort was not part of a German initiative to preserve the historical record of Jews.

Magda Veselska, former head of the Jewish documentation department of the Jewish Museum in Prague and now a researcher with a Czech agency that studies totalitarianism, said it was Jews who persuaded the Nazis to preserve the Czech scrolls and other artifacts. There is no evidence, she said, that they were collected as part of an effort to create a Nazi research institution or museum about the Jews.

At the same time, she said, Nazi organisations did at times compete for the control of seized Jewish property. In this instance, she said, Jewish leaders were able to persuade the Nazi who led the Central Office of Jewish Emigration in Prague to have the scrolls and other items shipped to the Jewish Museum, a request he granted because it coincided with his own interest in retaining control of Judaica seized in the area. There they joined almost 200,000 other Jewish artefacts that had been seized.

“Many of the scrolls had been burned, waterlogged, torn or scarred when synagogues were destroyed,” said Jeffrey Ohrenstein, chair of the Memorial Scrolls Trust.

After the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Jewish Museum in Prague stayed open, but religious objects were taken off display and the scrolls were shipped to a warehouse on the outskirts of the city.

“The warehouse was damp, the scrolls were uncared for and deteriorating and in control of the communist government, which, in the 1960s, was looking for foreign currency,” Ohrenstein said.

In 1963, Eric Estorick, an art dealer who had a gallery in London and knew officials of Artia, a Czech government agency involved in selling cultural works, helped to arrange a sale of the scrolls. He spoke with Ralph Yablon, a British philanthropist and a founder of the Westminster Synagogue in London, who bought the entire remaining collection of scrolls for US$30,000. “He donated them to the synagogue, which then created the trust, an independent charity,” Ohrenstein said.

One year later, 1,564 scrolls of widely varying size, wrapped individually in plastic bags, were shipped to the Westminster Synagogue. They were stored in three specially constructed rooms, where many of the scrolls were repaired over the next 20 years.

“Most of the scrolls had identity tags attached to them,” Ohrenstein said, “but about 200 came without labels so we refer to them as orphans from unknown towns in Bohemia and Moravia.”

Starting late in 1964, the trust began sending Torahs to synagogues around the world that needed a scroll for worship services.

“Our scrolls are never sold or gifted,” Ohrenstein said, “but allocated on permanent loan defined to mean they remain with the scroll holder as long as they exist but must be returned to the trust if they close or merge with a community that also has a Czech scroll.”

Each Torah scroll is a handwritten copy of the Five Books of Moses, beginning with Genesis and ending with Deuteronomy, that has been wound around wooden shafts.

Institutions that seek a scroll from the trust are asked for a donation, now US$5,000, for the trust, which operates with an all-volunteer staff.

“The trust hopes in a small way that our scrolls are used to remind people of all faiths of what we have in common,” Ohrenstein said, “rather than of what divides them.” NYTimes