In 1971, Congregation Har Shalom received one of the 1,564 Torah scrolls that were confiscated from Czechoslovakian synagogues by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The Potomac shul’s three clergy leaders dedicated that Torah on July 23 and it’s now on display in a hallway at Har Shalom.

For decades, the Holocaust-era Sefer Torah was kept in storage.

“I knew that this was here, and it always kind of pained me that we didn’t have it displayed as it was meant to be,” said Har Shalom’s Rabbi Adam Raskin.

The Sefer Torah was stolen by the Nazis when they invaded Czechoslovakia, plundered synagogues and killed 80% of the Jews of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia, according to Raskin.

Many of the 1,564 scrolls that were kosher or able to be restored were donated to synagogues that didn’t have a Sefer Torah. The Memorial Scrolls Trust distributed the 200 or so that couldn’t be restored to synagogues, Holocaust memorials, museums and libraries around the world.

Today, the Sefer Torah is safely displayed inside a glass case thanks to late donors Elaine and Stanford Steppa of Har Shalom.

“On Tisha B’Av afternoon, we will dedicate this beautiful new display case … so this Sefer Torah will be a testimony to the legacy of Jews who read and studied from this sacred text, and the illustrious community that existed for over a thousand years,” Raskin wrote in an Instagram post.

Har Shalom’s Cantor Max Silverstone led attendees of the dedication in song and prayer in front of the Sefer Torah on July 23.

“[We are] tremendously fortunate to have this sacred remembrance,” Raskin told Washington Jewish Week. “I look at the open scroll and I think about the wise people who read from the scroll, who celebrated Shabbat always with the scroll, who danced with it on Simchat Torah, who held it close.”

He spoke to the value of the congregation’s children passing by the historic Torah and seeing the Shema in the Torah, a core prayer they’re taught in Hebrew school. “It’s going to be very impactful,” Raskin said.

The dedication intentionally fell on Tisha B’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, a day of mourning and remembrance.

“There are many people who associate Tisha B’Av with not just the destruction of the Temples that both were destroyed on this day, but also various other calamities that befell people, and it’s often tied back to dates during the Holocaust,” said Rabbi Shira Rosenblum. “There were certain moments in the Holocaust that also occurred on Tisha B’Av, so it’s very common to do programming around the Holocaust.”

It’s also more important than ever to remember this particular tragedy, according to Raskin.

“With the resurgence of antisemitism and Holocaust denial in the world, what better time than the present to have a living memorial?” Raskin asked.

After the dedication ceremony, attendees viewed a Holocaust documentary that combined hand-drawn animation with historical record.

“It’s not something you usually see in documentaries,” said Jennifer Mino-Mirowitz, Har Shalom’s marketing and communications coordinator, of the animated style.

“Among Neighbors” (2024) takes place in a rural Polish town, where Jews and their Polish neighbors attended school together and were generally friendly with one another.

Directed by Yoav Potash, the film intertwined two narratives: an elderly Polish woman who witnessed her neighbor’s family get gunned down by local Poles, and a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust as a child.

“Among Neighbors” delved into the secrecy around Poland’s treatment of its Jewish residents. While it’s well known that Nazi Germany rounded up Jews into concentration camps and gas chambers, systematically wiping out generations, the filmmakers pushed Polish residents to confront their uncomfortable past: they too killed Jews six months after the end of World War II.

“It should have been a time of peace, but it wasn’t,” Yaacov Goldstein, the Holocaust survivor, said in the film.

Anyone who spoke up faced threats by the Polish government.

“The documentary is very gripping,” Mino-Mirowitz said. “It’s a love story, it’s suspense, it’s drama, but it’s also documenting a part of history that really has not been documented before. It touches on our communities and what it means to be a community and care for one another.”

“Since we show[ed] a film about the Holocaust, we figured this was an appropriate time to dedicate the Torah as well,” Rosenblum said.

zbell@midatlanticmedia.com