Dear ORT Friends and Leaders,
This week, while I was in our London office, I noticed something hanging on the wall.
It is large. It is old. It is badly damaged. And it appears to be a fragment of a Sefer Torah.
Here’s what we know: it’s a section of a Torah scroll, last section of Dvarim (Deuteronomy). The text is handwritten on parchment, in the distinctive format of a Sefer Torah. It’s been badly damaged. The edges are torn. The parchment is darkened and cracked. Parts are missing.
And that’s more or less where our knowledge ends. We don’t know how old it is. We don’t know where it came from. We don’t know how it came to World ORT. We don’t know whether it was damaged in a fire, or whether the damage came from age, water, or something else.
And, perhaps most importantly, we don’t know whether it has a connection to the Shoah. That was, of course, my first thought. Maybe this was a Torah rescued from a destroyed Jewish community in Europe. Maybe it survived a fire. Maybe it was given to ORT decades ago for a reason now forgotten.
We’ve asked around. I asked Jen, our archivist. We looked for any obvious information in the office, examined the photograph carefully. And we’re reaching out to experts who may be able to help us identify the scroll, its age, its origins, and more.
There’s something appropriate about this mystery as we approach Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah is often described as the beginning of the year. But it’s also a moment when we look backward.
Where have we come from?
What has brought us here?
What do we remember?
And what have we forgotten?
World ORT has been part of Jewish history for 146 years. We’ve worked in communities that no longer exist. We’ve educated generations of students whose names we may never know. We’ve survived wars, revolutions, migrations, the destruction of European Jewry, and extraordinary changes in the Jewish world. We have a remarkable history.
But history isn’t just the stories we remember. Sometimes it’s also the stories we rediscover.
That damaged Torah fragment is now hanging on a wall in our office in London. Somebody put it there. Somebody knew where it came from. Somebody believed that its story mattered. Now it’s our turn to find out why.
And I find myself thinking that this is, in some ways, also the work of World ORT: we inherit something. We don’t always know everything about where it has been. We may not have all the answers. But we have a responsibility to understand what we’ve been given, to preserve what matters, and then to carry it forward.
As we enter a new year, that feels like a good challenge for all of us: to remember, to rediscover, to ask questions. And to make sure that what we’ve inherited is stronger when we pass it on to the next generation. And who knows? Maybe somewhere among the thousands of people who receive this email, someone will look at the photograph and recognize something. Let me know.
Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova,
Dov
Dov Ben-Shimon,
Chief Executive Officer, World ORT