During the Holocaust, more than 200 Jewish communities across Bohemia and Moravia were destroyed. As synagogues were closed and communities deported, the Nazis gathered their ceremonial and cultural objects – including Torah scrolls, silver, textiles, and books – and sent them to the Central Jewish Museum in Prague. The museum’s Jewish curators, forced to work under Nazi supervision, meticulously catalogued and preserved these treasures in the hope that they might survive even if their communities did not.
After the war, the surviving scrolls remained stored in Prague. Many communities they once belonged to no longer existed. In 1964, 1,564 of these Torah scrolls were purchased from the Czech government by the Westminster Synagogue in London. There, the scrolls were restored, recorded, and placed under the care of the Memorial Scrolls Trust. Torah #1139 was shipped to temple Sholom who was president at the time. The torah itself is about 200 years old and comes from Boleslav, a town in the Czech Republic.
