When moving, many of us seek to give away items we no longer use. In Kehilat Shalom’s and Rabbi Charles Arian’s case, that item was a Torah scroll estimated to be from the 1950s.

Arian is in the process of moving Gaithersburg’s Kehilat Shalom to a new, smaller location. The Conservative congregation may spend some time in its current building’s chapel for a few months as it waits for the new building.

“We recently sold our building, and we’re not going to have space to properly and honorably store the six Torahs we have once we move,” said Lori Wasserman, Kehilat Shalom’s immediate past president.

The new location won’t have space to house Kehilat Shalom’s two Torah arks.

Though decades old, this particular Torah scroll is “beautiful” and in “very good condition,” the rabbi said: “The writing is clear; I love reading from it because it is so clear.”

The only problem? “It’s very, very heavy.”

“We are a congregation that definitely skews older, and it’s really hard for us to handle that scroll, to carry it around the synagogue, to do hagbah — to lift it up after the reading,” Arian said. “On those rare occasions when it’s been the one that I have set for the reading, I always get yelled at.”

As he and the Kehilat Shalom community have said for years: “If you have a scroll [where] the standing rule is not to use it, then what are we having it for?”

It’s always been in the back of Arian’s mind to donate a scroll to a congregation that doesn’t have one, so the shul’s upcoming relocation presented the perfect opportunity.

Meanwhile, the members of Beth Etz Chaim in Leipzig, Germany, had longed for a Torah scroll of their own for years, according to reporting by journalist Daniela Rusowsky. They approached the Czech Memorial Trust (Memorial Scrolls Trust) with no luck, and tried again unsuccessfully. They had almost given up hope. Then, the kehillah borrowed a Torah for a Jewish youth conference Shabbat service and saw the joy on members’ faces.

Beth Etz Chaim’s Rabbi Esther Jonas-Maertin explained the kehillah’s story in a letter sent through a Rabbinical Assembly affinity group. The first of many positive responses was from none other than Arian.

“I wrote to the congregation in Leipzig and I said when I was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, I would not have guessed that Germany would be one of the few places on Earth where the Jewish community is growing both numerically and spiritually,” Arian recalled.

Then Arian sent another message in early April: his congregation’s board had approved a 99-year loan of a Sefer Torah to Beth Etz Chaim.

“We were looking at logistics to get the Torah from Montgomery Village to Germany, and it was expensive and not really ideal to ship a Torah scroll [overseas] as unaccompanied baggage,” Arian said.

Two members of Kehilat Shalom, Lori and Robert Wasserman, were headed to Europe to visit their son in Ukraine, so the couple offered to deliver the Torah. At a rabbinical school professor’s advice, Arian cut the seam that bound the two sheets — yeriot — of the scroll together to make it nonkosher, thus a lower level of sanctity.

The Wassermans flew into Leipzig on July 30 and brought the bubble-wrapped, boxed Torah to Beth Etz Chaim on July 31: “It was very exciting.”

“To have it brought in person rather than just shipped, I think was very meaningful for them,” Arian said.

A soferet there sewed the scroll back together upon arrival and led an educational presentation on what she was doing and why.

“It hit me a lot harder than I expected it to,” Lori Wasserman said of the delivery of the Torah.

“It is still a miracle to me that this is actually happening,” Jonas-Maertin told Rusowsky. “I am so grateful for everyone being open to this and helping us enrich our lives in so many more aspects.”

The Leipzig rabbi added that the Beth Etz Chaim community can now deepen its Jewish learning by developing regular Shacharit services, learn Torah chanting, celebrate Jewish holidays and create new opportunities for life cycle events, Rusowsky reported.

Their first reading from the Torah is expected to be this Rosh Hashanah.

Lori Wasserman spoke to the significance of the moment at Beth Etz Chaim, citing Arian’s remarks that he sent her via email from Gaithersburg.

Though she lived in Germany from the ages of 9 to 13, Wasserman said she’d never been that far east, to Leipzig.

The Wassermans stayed in town for several days as Jonas-Maertin showed them around her hometown and its historical sites: “It was a really lovely visit,” Lori Wasserman said.

“It all started with somebody asking if anyone had an extra Torah that they might be willing to loan to a young congregation, and it’s been a wonderful, wonderful experience,” she said.

“We’re really happy that we were able to do this,” Arian said. “It was a wonderful way to build bridges with other countries.”

zbell@midatlanticmedia.com