New Tech Protects Ancient Torahs

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http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,6...tw=wn_tophead_1

BURLINGAME, California -- In an empty chapel at Peninsula Temple Sholom south of San Francisco, James Carlson breathes a heavy sigh and searches his chain for the right key. In front of him is the sanctuary's Holy Ark, a cabinet found in every synagogue that houses and protects Judaism's most revered instruments of worship: the Torah scrolls, by tradition the word of God as received by Moses.

This ark is wood, inlaid with a design of Hebrew letters arranged like a lamp's flame. It looks old, dignified -- except for a shiny deadbolt door lock so new you can almost smell the sawdust where the locksmith bored the hole.

"There was no other way to deal with it," says Carlson, executive director of the temple. Until a week ago, the ark didn't have a lock, and the small chapel -- an annex to the synagogue's main sanctuary -- always remained open and available to worshipers. Then sometime between May 16th and May 21st, a thief entered the chapel and stole one of the two Torahs, leaving behind an empty scroll case and a baffled congregation.

Now Temple Sholom is boosting security, which means more than adding locks. The synagogue is looking at two technologies that manage the tricky task of assigning unique serial numbers to Torahs without running afoul of strict Jewish laws keeping the scrolls ritually pure.

Occupying a central role in Jewish worship, ritual Torahs don't just roll off the printing press like yesterday's newspaper. Under Judaic law, a new Torah must be meticulously copied from an existing scroll by a trained scribe, who pronounces each Hebrew letter aloud -- for accuracy -- before writing it on squares of animal skin. The pieces are later sewn together and reeled onto giant wooden rollers.

The process takes a year, and a single letter broken or out of place renders a Torah unusable. Like many Torah scrolls in active service, the one stolen from Temple Sholom last month is an antique, and is believed to have been crafted in the Middle East several hundred years ago.

The local police suspect an inside job, but they have no clues, and aren't sure where to look -- a scroll isn't a stolen car or a necklace, and it's probably not on its way to the Mexican border or the local pawn shop. "I've never seen an item like this taken in my 30 years here," says Sergeant Peter Tokarski of the Burlingame police department.

For now, the department is checking with antiquities dealers and monitoring eBay. Carlson says he can't even form a theory as to why someone would swipe one of the scrolls. "We can't get the equation to work," he says. "Who's going to buy it? If you start backward from that, it's hard to figure out."

But experts say Torahs are stolen more often than you'd think. Geoffrey Haber, rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, learned the hard way in 1998, when a burglar swiped two scrolls from his synagogue in Englewood, New Jersey. They were recovered by an NYPD Torah-theft task force in a sting operation after the thief, a maintenance man working in the neighborhood, tried to sell the scrolls to a New York rabbi, claiming they were part of an inheritance.

"We were very blessed that our Torah scrolls were recovered," says Haber. "Oftentimes they are not, because there is an underworld, or a black market, in Torah scrolls."

"It's so easy to steal a Torah from the synagogue," says Yitzchak Shteiner, a rabbi at Machon Ot, a Jerusalem-based non-profit Torah preservation center. "Nobody says when you enter a synagogue, 'What are you doing here?' You're praying there."

In 1994, a New York burglar confessed to stealing scrolls from 10 synagogues and fencing them with a Chasidic silversmith in midtown Manhattan. With a fair market value of around $50,000 for a new scroll, $9,000 for a used one, Judaism's sacred text is in some ways a perfect underground commodity. Like precious metals, the scrolls have independent value that can be determined without evidence of their provenance -- an experienced appraiser can establish a Torah's age, learn something of its history and determine that it's kosher for ritual use by visual inspection.

A Torah scroll is also universal: always written in Hebrew, it's accepted everywhere in the world Judaism is practiced. Thieves and their fences have been known to exploit this by shipping hot Torahs between the United States and Israel, or to eastern Europe, where they're sold to unsuspecting congregations of newly built synagogues, says Haber.

But perhaps most attractive to a thief, and vexing to law enforcement, Torah scrolls are inherently anonymous. Jewish law dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text. That means no "property of" stamps, no serial numbers, no visible identifying marks of any kind.

The Burlingame Police Department circulated a bulletin to other law enforcement agencies listing their stolen Torah's vital statistics -- 40 pounds, 175 feet, 600 to 800 years old, "contains the five books of Moses" -- but nothing that would help a cop pick it out of a lineup.

That anonymity spawned a biblical plague of Torah heists in the '70s and early '80s, when by some estimates thieves made off with 200 Torahs a year in the United States and Israel. If you include Long Island and northern New Jersey, the New York City area contains one third of the United States' 3,700 synagogues, and was at the center of the outbreak. "It was virtually an epidemic," says David Pollock, associate executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.

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[Guest Zayit]

:(I was wondering as I was reading why the trees couldn't be marked with an ID number but someone could take the scroll off them easliy enough I guess.

I tell you, there's nothing more sleazy than stealing the word of G-d!