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Torah scroll portion
Torah scroll portion

Torah scroll portion

Not on view
Dimensionsoverall: 16 in x 20 in x 4 in
ClassificationsJudaica
Credit LineGift of Irving Finkel
Object number2000.A.706
Object DescriptionPortion of a Torah scroll from Jósefów, Poland, a small town which was predominantly Jewish before the Holocaust. It was rescued from the street by local resident Josef Sawiarski after the destruction of the synagogue by the Germans in 1942. Mr. Sawiarski kept it for some 50 years, and gave it to the donor and his wife in 2000. It had been kept by Mr. Sawiarski in his workshop. The fragment is filthy, crumpled, speckled with paint, carrying a few dead spiders and bits of plant life. It includes the end of Vayikrah. Note this Jósefów is in south east Poland, on the road that runs due south of Opole. There is another Jósefów, south of Lublin, which is the Jósefów that Browning and Goldhagen wrote about.
Collections
  • Judaica
Keywords
  • Torah scrolls
  • Desecration
  • Josefow
NotesDr. Irving Finkel is a British philologist, Assyriologist and the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures within the British Museum's department of the Middle East. Finkel was born in 1951 in London and raised in an Orthodox Jewish household. He travelled to Jósefów every summer with his wife, and after reading Browing and Goldhagen's books detailing the murder in Jósefów, went searching for more traces on the ground at Jósefów, only to later learn there were two different Jósefóws. There they met local Jósefów resident Mr. Sawiarski, who had been a child during the war. Mr. Sawiarski showed Finkel and his wife the Torah scroll he had stored for so many years. After seeing the Finkel's moving reactions, Mr. Sawiarski gave the Torah scroll portion to them. See article in donor file that Finkel wrote for The Jewish Quarterly in 2000 about his experience finding the Torah scroll portion. He also wrote a poem about the scroll, titled "The Spider Scroll."

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