The Torah That Would Not Die

In March 1944, as the Nazis overran Hungary, an enraged Nazi soldier, finding nobody home at the Lisker Synagogue, threw the Torah he found into the waters of the Bodrog River, which flowed through the synagogue’s backyard. Hidden from view, a 17-year-old Christian boy, Istvan Fenye, watched in disgust, and as the Nazis departed, the boy stole down to the river and rescued the Torah.

On Sunday, March 16, 42 years to the day the Torah was desecrated, it was rededicated in a profoundly moving ceremony at the new Lisker Synagogue in Manhattan. Before an unanticipatedly large crowd, the 400-year-old Torah was brought out in a new white velvet cover and marched into the street under a chuppah, the canopy under which Jewish weddings are performed.

Livened by music and dance, the procession then returned into the sanctuary to inscribe the names of victims of the Holocaust who left no progeny, and of loved ones of those present at the ceremony. A special parchment addition was provided at the end of the Torah scroll upon which a scribe penned the names given.

THE FULL CYCLE OF AN EPISODE

Thus came full cycle an episode of death and rebirth in a Jewish community, a small yet greatly significant gesture in the ongoing tale of broken and demolished Jewish congregations that refuse to let the memory die. More than that, the act of dedication signaled yet one more effort of those who suffered the Nazi scourge to let the world know “We are here.”

The Fenye boy, an orphan who was taken into the Lisker rebbe’s household years before the incident and who retained his Christian beliefs, also found his way into permanent remembrance as his name, too, was inscribed in the Torah scroll.

But this wasn’t the only righteous Gentile who saved the Torah and the rebbe’s family. This is also a “Wallenberg story,” for the family of the rebbe, Solomon Friedlander, who had been hiding in Budapest with Christian papers, were left to fate once more as Budapest was bombed. And the tall Swede named Raoul Wallenberg provided them with papers and gave them and the valise they carried with the Torah inside — just as Fenye had brought it to them under great peril himself — shelter in the Swedish Embassy, where they remained for the 10 days till liberation.

‘WE ARE HERE TO STAY’

In a ceremony of remembrance and testimony preceding the taking out of the Torah, tribute was paid to those who perished and to the power of the Torah itself, whose importance to the Jewish people did not die in the Holocaust’s flames.

Rabbi Samuel Ashkenazie of Kew Gardens, Queens, and brother-in-law of the Lisker rebbe, reminded those gathered that “when these monstrous people, the beasts of humanity, the Germans, came into Hungary, and they were sure that they’d be able to extinguish the Jewish nation, they were sure the Torah would not exist any more… today we can come together and proclaim to the world ‘We are here to stay.’ The Torah is our life and the Torah is with us … There is no greater joy, no greater privilege than to tell the world, ‘We saved the Torah, and we are here with it’.”

Keynote speaker Jack Eisner, founder of the Holocaust Survivors Memorial Foundation and cofounder of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization, remembered that he was only one of 30 grandchildren who survived. In a deeply felt testimony, he recalled his grandmother’s near-survival, and his presence, in hiding, as she was thrown down the stairs by the Nazis.

And he remembered the question often asked, as the Jews tried in vain somehow to escape the round-ups. “Why save the Torah?” He spoke of the Torahs burned, and of “the letters (that) will float in Heaven to come back to us to teach our grandchildren what Judaism is all about.”

The ceremony was sweetened by the voice of Cantor Chaskele Ritter, who sang in Yiddish as well as Hebrew, and was enhanced by a candle-lighting ceremony by survivors.

A TESTIMONY TO SURVIVAL

The Lisker shul itself is a testimony to survival. It is a beautiful melange of artifacts brought to the East Side sanctuary, the only Hasidic shtiebel on the Upper East Side, from emptied and vandalized synagogues in The Bronx where the Lisker shul stood from 1949 to 1977. Mismatched chandeliers, menorahs, clocks and even the doors to the Ark where the Torahs are kept were all brought to the new Manhattan location nine years ago as The Bronx emptied of its once heavily concentrated Jewish population.

Rebbetzin Judith Friedlander, a gracious woman, eagerly talked about the synagogue and the 275-year-old dynasty of Lisker, from the Hungarian city which goes by the name of Olaszliszka and in which the synagogue still stands, unused, surrounded by the old Jewish cemetery.

Her father, the rebbe who brought the Torah to America with them in 1949, was interested in Bikor Holim, the visiting of the sick. It was this interest, she said, that brought them to the Upper East Side, the locale for so many of New York’s hospitals. It is to this seemingly unusual location for a Hassidic shtiebel that the memories of Hungary and, more recently, of The Bronx, have come.