Canada’s Holocaust Torahs
Canada’s Holocaust Torahs
Professor Celia Rothenberg is currently carrying out research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council on Canada’s Holocaust Torahs
What is the research about?
Scattered across Jewish communities in Canada today are twenty-six Torah scrolls—scrolls that contain the first five books of the Hebrew Bible handwritten on rolled parchment—that once belonged to Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia (in today’s Czech Republic).
These scrolls are among the 1564 Torah scrolls stolen by the Nazis from the Czech Jewish community in the 1930s and 1940s. Known as “Holocaust Torahs,” many of the surviving scrolls are now dispersed throughout the world. Canada’s Holocaust Torahs can be found in Jewish day schools, community centers, homes for the aged, and synagogues in Alberta, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia.
These scrolls occupy a unique position at the intersections of divine revelation and material object, Nazi destruction and Holocaust survival, and ongoing Jewish vitality and modern persecution
What did the researcher do?
Professor Rothenberg’s research is the first to systematically examine Canada’s Holocaust Torahs, bringing into focus the ways in which Canadian hosts display, store, ritually use, teach about, understand, and feel shaped by their scrolls.
Holocaust Torahs provide a unique and unexplored opportunity to analyze the impact of a material object on Jewish communities’ religious practices and identity, recollections of the Holocaust, and educational work about the Holocaust in relationship to ongoing experiences of antisemitism.
Researcher
Celia Rothenberg
PhD
Associate Professor, Religious Studies
Adjunct & Associate Member, Anthropology
Adjunct & Associate Member, Institute on Globalization & the Human Condition
Chair, Religious Studies
Chair of Undergraduate Affairs, Religious Studies