They Danced With This Torah Before the Nazis. We're Dancing With It After

By Yisrael Eliashiv / Chabad.org

The dancing at Chabad-Lubavitch at the Shore in Ventnor, N.J., was already underway on Simchat Torah 2023 when the horrific news from Israel of the Oct. 7 massacre began to spread through the room. It came in fragments, each update worse than the last. Congregants turned to Rabbi Avrohom Rapoport, the center's director, and asked whether they could still dance.

“Now we have to dance for ourselves and for all those who can't dance anymore,” Rapoport told them.

So they kept going. Rapoport remembers dancing and crying simultaneously, the joy of the holiday pressing against what they were hearing from the Holy Land.

“It was as if the Torahs were dancing for us,” Rapoport said. “We were just holding on.”

With the congregation watching him, he pointed to one of the scrolls. “You see this Torah? They danced with this Torah before the Nazis, and we're dancing with this Torah after the Nazis.”

THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR

The Hammerschlag Torah's story begins in Lauenau, Germany, where the family had deep roots. Lennard Hammerschlag, whose grandfather Adolf Hammerschlag brought it out of Germany, says the family believes the scroll is about 200 years old.

When the family fled to Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, they were forced to give up nearly everything they owned. Adolf made certain the Torah was not among the losses. It remained in the family for nearly 80 years.

In 2018, Lennard, his brother Marc, and a group from Stockton University brought the scroll back to Lauenau, into the room on the old Hammerschlag property that had once served as the town's Jewish prayer space. The Torah had once been spirited away under terrible circumstances. This time it came and went in peace.

“It was significant that I didn't have to bring it in through the back door,” Hammerschlag said. “I brought it in through the front door.”

In Ventnor, the scroll served for years as the centerpiece of the Chabad center's Holocaust exhibit. Hammerschlag wanted more for it than a display, and he and Rapoport had spoken about restoring it for years. When a sofer, a ritual scribe, finally gave them an estimate, the figure exceeded the cost of a new Torah.

“Value-wise, you could buy a Torah for less than it costs to fix this one,” Rapoport said. “For us it wasn't a money thing. This Torah has a story.”

The two were discussing the cost at a Shabbat dinner hosted by Rapoport when a guest, Craig Beresin, moved from the far end of the table and found himself within earshot.

“I'm meant to hear this,” he recalls thinking, “and I'm not meant just to hear it and do nothing.”

His parents were elderly and in poor health, and he had been looking for meaningful ways to honor them. He pledged toward the restoration and began bringing others into the project.

When the scribe, Gad Sebbag, examined the scroll, he found fine parchment and lettering. The text on the entire Torah, however, was red. Jewish law requires the letters of a Torah to be black, and over the decades the ink had faded through shades of brown to a reddish hue, a condition known as chaludah. All 304,805 letters needed attention.

Restoring them meant tracing the hand of the original scribe, whose strokes, spacing and layout remained visible in the faded ink.

On August 30, 2026, the community gathered to complete the restoration. They screened the documentary “Saved from the Shoah: The Hammerschlag Family Torah Returns,” Hammerschlag filled in the final letter, and the congregation sang, danced and raised the scroll high in the Jewish tradition of hagbah. Its first formal reading came on Rosh Hashanah, when Hammerschlag was called for the third aliyah.

TORAH RESCUED AFTER 80 YEARS

In May 2015, Dr. George Leventon and his wife, Marge, traveled to Russia to help recover and restore Torah scrolls that had been kept out of Jewish communal ownership since the early years of Soviet persecution. In their Moscow hotel, Marge unrolled the one that would eventually reach the Jewish community of Bellaire, Texas.

An initial restoration followed in 2016, with further work in 2024 to prepare it for regular synagogue use. George restored the badly dried wooden rollers himself, Marge designed its mantle, and friends contributed two crowns and a yad.

On Oct. 27, 2024, as the community marked a year since Oct. 7, the congregation formally dedicated it as the Am Yisrael Chai Torah. Rabbi Yossi Zaklikofsky, co-director of the Chabad center, recalled the prophet Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones.

“This Torah, like the dry bones in Ezekiel's vision, seemed lifeless for decades,” he said, before being restored “word by word, letter by letter.”

Esty Zaklikofsky, who co-directs the center with her husband, said the name reflected what the community was living through.

“At the time, everybody was very focused on the hostages,” she said. “It really felt like this Torah had itself been held hostage for approximately 80 years. It wasn't being used as a Torah is meant to be used, and here we were, decades later, with the Torah restored and everybody celebrating.”