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22
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T
he
W
einberg
T
orah
T
he Weinberg Torah is both a witness
to the destruction of European Jewry
during the Holocaust and a testament
to the survival of the Jewish People.
This Torah was commissioned by
Isaak Stern and his wife Leah in
Rheda, Germany, and given to
the Rheda Synagogue in 1845 by
their children, Leffman and Rosa (Stern) Weinberg. It was
miraculously saved from being torched on Kristallnacht,
ninety-three years later, because it happened to be safely out
of the synagogue while it was undergoing repair. The repaired
Torah was then shipped to Holland where the grandson of
Leffman and Rosa, Werner Weinberg, was living, having fled
Germany. When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, they
agreed to grant monument status to three old synagogues in
Amsterdam, and the Weinberg Torah and other ceremonial
objects were secreted in one of them for safekeeping.
In 1945 Werner Weinberg and his wife Lisl were liberated
from concentration camps and reunited. They returned
to Holland to reclaim the Torah only to learn that it had,
in fact, been confiscated by the Nazis. Shortly thereafter,
however, the American Military Government notified
the Weinbergs that their Torah had been recovered. They
reclaimed it and brought it with them to the United States in
1948,
keeping it in their home. In 1975 Werner Weinberg,
then Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at HUC-
JIR/Cincinnati, presented “his precious
Sefer Torah
”
to
HUC-JIR on the occasion of its Centennial. The Weinberg
Torah is dressed today with the
rimmonim, yad,
and Torah
mantle given by the faculty at that time. It is permanently
displayed at the Skirball Museum at HUC-JIR/Cincinnati.