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Torahs in space ‘tell the story of this tragedy to the world’ |
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Written by Shlomo Kapustin
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Tuesday, 27 May 2008 |
TORONTO – When Ilan Ramon made history as Israel’s first astronaut in 2003, he brought a tiny Torah on board the spaceship Columbia.
And now, five years after Ramon and his four-inch Torah disintegrated over Texas while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, they are serving as an inspiration to a Toronto synagogue that is currently writing its own Torah.
Beth Tikvah, in the midst of its Torah L’Tikvah project – which will culminate with the dedication of its Torah to Rabbi Wayne Allen, the congregation’s rabbi of 15-plus years, on Nov. 23 – recently screened a documentary chronicling the four years leading up to Ramon’s historic voyage.
Directed by Neil Weisbrod for Israeli television, the film is part aeronautics overview, part Ramon-family home movie, and part Jewish-pride primer. Called The First Israeli in Space: The Story of Colonel Ilan Ramon, Israel’s First Astronaut, the film begins in Israel and ends four years later with an image of the Columbia in free-fall and a voice-over: “Communications were lost ….”
The screening, co-sponsored by the synagogue and the Israeli consulate, drew about 350 people recently.
Ramon’s Torah was no ordinary one.
It had been brought to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp by Rabbi Shimon Dasberg of Holland, who taught some of the boys their bar-mitzvah portions while in the camp. The Torah changed hands after Joachim Joseph read his portion. Dasberg said, “I am not going to come out of this place alive. Maybe you will…. My condition for giving you this scroll is that you promise to tell the story of this tragedy to the world.”
So the 13-year-old Joseph took the Torah and eventually moved to Israel, where he became a physicist. Not just any physicist, though. Joseph designed the experiments that took place on the Columbia’s fateful trip, and it was his Torah that his friend Ilan Ramon borrowed.
As Ramon says in the film, “By representing the state of Israel, I represent Jews all over the world.” Also, “the Torah represents the ability of the Jewish people to survive.”
As a result, Ramon decided to include it in his spaceship baggage, along with a collection of other symbols of Jewish heritage.
Included, for example, was a painting from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, which was the work of 14-year-old Auschwitz victim Peter Gintz. While at the Terezin concentration camp, Gintz had painted his conception of what the Earth would look like to someone standing on the moon.
But there’s a sequel to Ramon’s journey, and it has a Canadian twist.
Dr. Steve Maclean is a Canadian astronaut who had become close with the Ramon family in the lead-up to Ramon’s mission and stayed with the family during the original mission. At the behest of Rona Ramon, Ilan’s widow, he brought another Holocaust-surviving mini-Torah to space, when he blasted off in Atlantis in 2006.
Maclean’s Torah was loaned by Professor Henry Fenichel – like Joachim Joseph, the owner of the first Torah, a physicist of Dutch origin. His Torah had also survived the Holocaust to arrive in Israel. When Fenichel emigrated to the US in 1953, he took the Torah with him.
Both Fenichel and Maclean addressed the crowd; Fenichel in person and Maclean, due to a last-minute surprise engagement, by prerecorded video.
And both, like Ramon before them, continued to actualize the still-remembered words of a rabbi in Bergen-Belsen from 50-plus years ago: “Tell the story of this tragedy to the world.” |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 03 June 2008 )
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