Lviv, Ukraine – The Central State Historical Archive in the Ukrainian city of Lviv have returned 14 Torah fragments to a local Jewish congregation.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Mordehai Shlomo Bold, the chief rabbi of Lviv, said that the Torah fragments he received from the archive will be buried, in accordance with Jewish customs. Bold said Jewish tradition requires them to bury the holy book pieces in the same way a human is buried because it is considered “dead,” or impossible to restore.
Four other Ukrainian cities are planning to give very old copies or portions of a Torah to Jewish communities based on a presidential decree signed in 2007.
Ukraine is home to the third-largest Jewish community in Europe and the fifth-largest Jewish community in the world. Most Ukrainian Jews live in Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Odesa.
One of the butai midrushim here just had a hachnusas sefer toireh for an old sefer from russia that was redone & restored to a beutiful state.
Why not keep it for its historical value?
its ossur al pi halacha to keep sifrei torah that can’t be restored
They are ganovim. They are only giving back the fragments that are impossible to be restored. They are still holding hundreds of sifrei torah that were stolen from Jewish communities before and after WW2.
Unique Jewish religious objects taken from synagogues during the Soviet regime are in two Lvov museums: the Museum of the History of Religion, and the Museum of Ethnography and Crafts. There are about 1,000 Jewish religious objects in each museum, including over 420 Torah scrolls and fragments from the 15th through 20th centuries.
This theme is simply matchless :), very much it is pleasant to me)))