Two towns, 6,000 miles, and one aging Torah scroll: Holocaust document connects two Jewish communities

As Holocaust survivor Sidney Schenk entered the sanctuary of the newly established Beth Am synagogue, he carried in his arms a fellow Holocaust survivor: the Torah scroll of Roudnice nad Labem, a relic of a bygone Jewish community 6,000 miles away.

That was 1983. This year, in celebration of the Torah’s 40th anniversary as part of the Beth Am community in Carmel Valley, several congregants, including two more Holocaust survivors and Schenk’s son and daughter-in-law, brought the scroll back to its Czech hometown. Led by senior Rabbi David Kornberg, the 34 congregants of Beth Am traveled first from San Diego to Prague, and then to the quiet village of Roudnice nad Labem on the River Elbe.

Rabbi David Kornberg with Holocaust survivors Mike and Manya Wallenfels.

(Shari Schenk)

“Our Holocaust Torah has always been a central part of our identity,” Kornberg said. “We wanted to honor the 40 years that the Torah has been a part of our community by reading from it in Roudnice, and create an even stronger and more indelible connection between our two communities.”

In Roudnice, Kornberg led a Shacharit morning service just outside of the ruins of an old Jewish chapel, where the bodies of the deceased were ritually prepared for burial. The ruined chapel and its adjacent cemetery are all that remains of the once-thriving Jewish community in Roudnice nad Labem. The arrival of the Nazis in the 1940s brought the decimation of its Jewish population, most of whom were put to death by those forces in the Holocaust. Although the town once enjoyed its own synagogue, the Nazis destroyed that structure as well, leaving the ruins of the chapel on the outskirts as its only remaining Jewish edifice.

Fred Schenk lifting the Roudnice Torah scroll during the service.

(Shari Schenk)

Approaching the remains of the chapel, the San Diego travelers felt a sense of deja vu.

“At Beth Am, there’s a façade replica from the synagogue in Roudnice,” Shari Schenk, the daughter-in-law of Sidney Schenk, explained. The replica was added to the San Diego synagogue in 1989, to further tie the congregation to the Czech town where their Torah scroll originated. “So when you’re walking toward the [remains of the] synagogue in Roudnice you see the façade that is the same as Beth Am,” she added.

During the service, Kornberg invited the travelers to read parts of the Torah aloud. Fred Schenk, the son of Sidney Schenk and husband of Shari, had the honor of Hagbah –– lifting up the scroll and showing the words to the congregation. It was an honor he had 40 years ago, when the Torah first arrived at Beth Am in Carmel Valley.

Rabbi David Kornberg standing outside the facade of the old chapel in Roudnice during the service.

(Shari Schenk)

While the Roudnice Torah scroll had a relatively straightforward journey home from San Diego to the Czech Republic, its initial arrival to the U.S. was several decades in the making. While the Nazis destroyed the synagogue in Roudnice nad Labem and displaced the Jewish population, they saved the town’s Torah scroll and housed it at the Jewish Museum in Prague during the war. There, it sat rolled up and unused with several other Jewish sacred objects from other occupied towns in the Czech Republic, ostensibly to become part of a planned Nazi “Museum of Extinct Peoples.”

The scroll and the other items from the collection gathered dust in Prague for 20 years as Czechoslovakia struggled to rebuild. In 1963, a prominent British art dealer, concerned about the care of the items, arranged for the scrolls to be transferred to Westminster Synagogue in London, where preservation and restoration efforts could be made. The collection of 1,564 Torah scrolls arrived in February 1964, a highly publicized entrance that drew tourists and visitors from all over the world.

The chapel wall seen from the back.

(Shari Schenk)

Soon, requests for scrolls from the collection poured into the committee in London, which instituted a permanent loan program to congregations around the world. The Roudnice scroll is one such item.

The founding rabbi at Beth Am, Wayne Dosick, caught wind of the permanent loan program shortly after establishing the congregation in 1982. He enlisted the help of founding member Lynn Schenk, who would go on to represent California’s 49th district in Congress and whose father was a Holocaust survivor, and her husband Hugh Friedman. With the Schenks’ support in financing its passage from London, the Roudnice Torah scroll arrived at Beth Am on Yom Kippur, 1983, carried in by Lynn Schenk’s father, Sidney. For the past 40 years, it has been used in weekly services, and read by generations of bar and bat mitzvah students.

After their Czech journey, Kornberg and a few of his congregants brought the Roudnice Torah to Jerusalem before returning it to Carmel Valley. There, the memory projects continue.

“Before the trip, I’d never seen a picture of the [Roudnice] synagogue or any artifacts from the community at all,” Kornberg said. “When we visited one of the Jewish museums in Prague, I saw pictures from the inside of the [Roudnice] synagogue that I had never seen before. And it made me realize that there was more information out there than we think.”

“We’ve got a number of people now that are already in the process of trying to locate, dig up, and sort of collect these images so that we can have that here as part of our community,” he added.

Kornberg sees Beth Am as the heir to Roudnice’s legacy; with no more Jews in Roudnice, it falls to his San Diego congregation to preserve their memory. Kornberg intends to build more of Roudnice’s history into the curriculum at Beth Am and provide resources for anyone who wants to visit the Czech Republic. He hopes for an exhibit or physical space within the synagogue where congregants can interact with Roudnice in a way that goes beyond the physical Torah scroll.

“The reality is, this Torah is more than 100 years old, probably closer to 150,” he said. “It’s gonna get to a point where we’re not gonna be able to use it. And we have to think about what we’re going to do once we have to retire the Torah.”

For the community of Beth Am, archival projects are the answer. Kornberg aims to link Beth Am’s future to Roudnice’s past; he believes it is now Beth Am’s responsibility to honor the memory of that bygone Czech community.

“I feel like that connection to Roudnice and the history of the Jewish people there now rests on our shoulders,” Kornberg said. “We have to make sure that that story is told.”