Lithuania handed over 309 sifrei Torah and megillot
to Israel in a ceremony that closed the book on a sad
chapter. The collection of scrolls -- some more than 200
years old and all in various states of disrepair -- were part
of German loot confiscated from the Jewish community of
Lithuania during the Holocaust, which lay in a church in
Vilna for over 50 years.
Rabbi Abba Dunner, secretary of the Conference of European
Rabbis (CER), worked hard for three years behind the scenes
in order to bring the documents back to the Jewish people. He
traveled to inspect the documents, spending at one point
three straight days going through all of them carefully.
The scrolls, none of which is kosher, include 31 complete
scrolls, 70 partial scrolls, and the rest megillot of
Bible and parchment fragments. They will be inspected, and
those deemed salvageable will be restored.
Rabbi Dunner said that the scrolls are in "terrible, terrible
shape, and I don't think in the end we will be able to
salvage more than 18 kosher scrolls from the entire
collection. However, there will still be many megillot
and haftarah scrolls which can be used."
Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior, together with
Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisroel Lau, accepted the scrolls on
behalf of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.
The party left Israel early Wednesday morning, and visited
the grave of the Vilan Gaon as well as those of other
gedolim who are buried in the Vilna area.
President Moshe Katsav met the plane at the airport to
receive the scrolls.
The multiple ceremonies, which included the president,
foreign minister, and chairman of the parliament of
Lithuania, concluded six years of protracted discussions and
external pressure on the Lithuanian government that involved
the Israeli government, numerous Israeli, European, and US
organizations, and even US President George W. Bush.
"When the Lithuanian president visited Washington earlier
this month, the issue of returning scrolls was raised at
every one of his meetings, including those with the National
Security Council and at his meeting with Bush," said Andrew
Baker, director of International Jewish Affairs at the
American Jewish Committee.
"The president told [Lithuanian] President Valdas Adamkus
that he must `deal with the issue of Jewish heritage,' " he
said.
The saga of the scrolls began six years ago, when the large
collection was discovered in the church.
"The Torah scrolls were lying there naked, with mice
droppings and dust and dirt, lying there piled on each
other," said Rabbi Shalom Krinsky, a rabbi in Vilna.
The entire worldwide Jewish community attempted to claim
rightful ownership of the collection, and the internal
bickering led to the long delay in obtaining the scrolls.
The government moved the collection to the National Library,
declared them part of the country's national heritage and
embarked on a plan to catalogue and restore the scrolls,
including removing fungi, treating the parchment, and
safekeeping them in state-of-the-art temperature-controlled
conditions in the library's basement.
Three years ago, the Conference of European Rabbis was
invited by the government of Lithuania to examine the scrolls
and suggest an acceptable solution.
"Lithuania felt that we were the most acceptable towards
resolving this issue," said Dunner. "We visited Vilna and
examined, catalogued, and negotiated with the director of the
National Library, Mr. Vladas Bulavas, in an attempt to reach
an agreeable solution for the distribution of the
scrolls."
As claims came in from Jewish communities and institutions
worldwide who were eager to get the scrolls, it became clear
to the major umbrella organizations involved in the
restoration of Jewish life in Europe that unless a consensus
could be found in which all parties could agree on criteria
for distribution, they would never be released, especially
since the Lithuanians were keen on holding on to them
forever, and this gave them a valid excuse.
While Bulavas was reluctant to lose such a valuable
collection, Dunner said, he nevertheless understood that the
scrolls "did not belong in a library, and they could not be
compared to other books, and therefore they had to be
returned for daily use in synagogues."
A law was passed a year ago that separated the sifrei
Torah from all other items considered valuable artifacts
of Lithuanian heritage, thereby releasing them for
distribution. But the internal fighting among Jewish groups
prevented them from being turned over.
Then in July, an ad-hoc committee was formed among various
representatives of world Jewry, including the Israeli
government, the Conference of European Rabbis, the American
Jewish Committee, B'nai B'rith, Menorah, and Hechal Shlomo,
which agreed to deal collectively with the question of world
distribution of the scrolls.
When Arie Zuckerman, an aid to Melchior on issues of
Holocaust restitution, went to Lithuania in October to
explain the formation of the committee, "that was when
Lithuania said OK," said Dunner.
The ceremony also included the unveiling of a plaque to
Antanas Ulpys, a librarian who "gathered from Lithuanian
towns and villages the Jewish books and manuscripts and Torah
scrolls that were scattered by Nazi violence, and preserved
them in defiance of Stalin-era orders throughout the period
of the Soviet occupation."
