During the Holocaust, the Nazis determined to murder every Jew in the world.  Yet they sought to preserve artifacts of the “extinct Jewish race.”  In a warehouse in Prague, Czechoslovakia were hundreds of scared Torah scrolls stolen from Synagogues and shipped to this location.  In piles of stacked scrolls, mute testimony of the dead of Europe, were naked scrolls, one held together with a child’s belt, another wrapped in a woman’s dress, many in torn and stained Tallesim.

Nineteen years after the flames of Auschwitz were extinguished, the Torahs were found and brought to London to be tended.  For those not too badly damaged they could be repaired.  For others they would remain silent sentinels of the horrors of the Shoah. 

Each Torah tells a story of a once vibrant Jewish community.  Our Torah, scribed in Lipnik, Czechoslovakia in 1820, was held, venerated, studied and kissed by generations of scholars, hasidim and tzaddikim.  The recorded history of this small community dates back to 1540.  From then until the Holocaust this was an active Jewish community that produced some of the finest minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  In addition, its lustrous scholarly families attracted students and through marriages scions of Hasidic dynasties that are easily recognized names through Jewish history.  One example is the erudite scholar Rabbi Baruch Teomim-Frenkel, whose Talmudic work (Baruch Taam) continues to be consulted to this day.  His first wife was a direct relation of the Satmer Hasidim whose dynasty continues to flourish.  They are also closely connected to the Sazner Hasidic sect.