Czech Memorial Scrolls Conference and Service

On Sunday, 31st October, a conference followed by a service was held to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the arrival in London in 1964 of 1,564 sifrei torah that were rescued from Prague. One of these, originally owned by the Jewish community of the town of Kolin in what is now the Czech Republic and who perished in the Holocaust, is on permanent loan to SLLS and is used regularly in our services. Over 1,000 of the scrolls have been similarly loaned to congregations around the world and thus perpetuate the memory of the hundreds of lost congregations and the tens of thousands of their members principally from Bohemia and Moravia.

The event took place at the Westminster Synagogue, the home of the Memorial Scrolls Trust and was attended by some two hundred people; two had come from the U.S.A. especially to mark the occasion. Sixteen UK congregations, both Orthodox and Progressive and including SLLS,  brought their scrolls with them and these were processed at the opening and closing of the service during which they took their place as silent witnesses in remembrance of all those lost communities whose lives they once illumined.