During World War II, Jewish inmates of the Yanov labor camp in occupied Poland defied their Nazi guards, secretly conducting religious services inside their darkened barracks.
To observe their ritual, the Jews had cut religious scrolls into sections, bound the parchment pieces around their bodies and walked them through Yanov's front gate. They hid the fragments wherever they could: beneath the floorboards of their barracks, inside hollow bedposts, even in a camp cemetery.
After the camp's liberation in 1945, one survivor collected the scattered pieces. He assembled them into a single ragged scroll, the Yanov Torah.
Three decades later, the Torah -- its parchment warped and water-stained, its patchwork sheets held together by fraying threads -- found its way to Los Angeles and into the hands of a leader of the city's Reform Jewish community, Rabbi Erwin Herman, who devoted the final years of his life to telling its remarkable story.
On Thursday, Herman's dying wish was fulfilled when a new generation of Jews celebrated the rebirth of the Yanov Torah.
Carrying the fragile scroll beneath a chuppah, or wedding canopy, Herman's widow and grandson presented it to the rabbis and rabbinic students at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion near USC. The students, in turn, will carry the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, to their internships at synagogues throughout California.
"The Yanov Torah is a true child of the Holocaust," Agnes Herman, 86, told a gathering at the seminary campus Thursday. "A survivor."
Symbolic ceremony
The hand-over came as Jews this month commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Germans rampaged against their Jewish neighbors, destroying synagogues, businesses and homes, killing dozens and rounding up thousands for deportation to concentration camps.
Though worldwide audiences are marking the occasion in solemn tones, those who gathered Thursday at the seminary struck a joyous chord.
"This Torah is living evidence of people who fought the Nazis in the best way they knew how, which was through faith," Rabbi Richard N. Levy, director of the School of Rabbinic Studies at the seminary's Los Angeles campus, said in an interview. "Every time I read the story, and now talk about it, my eyes well up."
The Yanov Torah might have been lost to history if not for a survivor of the camp, known only as Joseph. After the war, he remained in the nearby city of Lvov.
