Rabbi Jurovics Uncovers the Story of the Hermanuv Mestec Torah

As many of you know, the tallest of our Torah scrolls lives with us on loan from the Westminster Synagogue in London. After the end of WW II, Westminster established a trust to repair and find homes for Torah scrolls the Nazis had stashed in a warehouse in Prague, scrolls whose Jewish communities had vanished into the merciless fires ofthe Shoah. Our scroll comes from a village in the Czech Republic, Hermanuv-Mestec, a small town about 70 miles from Prague, and I thought the town itself had been destroyed during WW II.

That’s the story I would tell visitors to our Sanctuary, until one day not too long ago, when a young woman, visiting with her classmates from Southeastern Baptist Seminary, spoke up: “No,” she said, “the town was not destroyed. I come from there!” Eliska Donatova, now a Protestant pastor training other pastors in Eastern Europe, provided me with pictures of the town and of the synagogue, a link to the town’s website, and a summary of the history of Jewish life in Hermanuv-Mestec, Jewish life dating back at least to the 15th century. Jews and gentiles had dwelled harmoniously in the town, until the Nazi onslaught ended the lives of all but two of its Jewish residents.

After the war, the town committed itself to preserving its Jewish heritage, caring for the Jewish cemetery and community center, maintaining the ornately decorated synagogue, its pale blue ceiling painted with the golden stars of the firmament. March 30 through April 8, 2008, Rabbi Dinner and I will lead a congregational trip to Prague, Hermanuv-Mestec, and Budapest. We invite you to join us in exploring the rich Jewish heritage of two of Eastern Europe’s most ancient cities, to read from our Holocaust scroll in the synagogue that was its home for close to a century, and to thank the townspeople of Hermanuv-Mestec for their decades of g’milut chasadim, deeds of loving kindness.