Seattle-Jerusalem latest trip for family Torah

By TIM KLASS

updated 12:32 a.m. ET Jan. 14, 2009

SEATTLE - EDITOR'S NOTE — Through more than a century of Jewish holy days and sacred occasions, the Torah in the family of AP Writer Tim Klass has been a constant, its travels reflecting five generations' journey from Russia to the United States, and more recently to Israel. Klass offers a biography of this uniquely well-traveled scroll.

The story, exquisitely hand-printed on old parchment, has been a staple of sermons for centuries. Jacob, having tricked his twin brother Esau out of the birthright, flees to his trickster uncle Laban, begets many children, grows wealthy and sneaks away for home.

This recitation of the story, though, could not have been more quintessentially characteristic of my family and the continuing vitality of Jewish life in the 21st century.

Reciting it was Yonatan Gralnek, the 13-year-old son of my cousin. Even before his reading, my heart nearly burst as I held aloft our family's Torah at the Western wall in Jerusalem last month.

It was the latest journey for a uniquely well-traveled Torah, a sacred treasure that has traced my family's travels from czarist Russia to the United States and beyond for more than a century.

Longest of its many trips
I'd brought the scroll from Seattle, where I live, and I will never forget the glow on Yoni's face as he carried it from the reading table a few yards to the ancient stone wall in his coming-of-age ceremony. When I brought the Torah back home, it completed the longest of its many trips.

Torahs as small as ours, at 14 inches (35.6 centimeters) about half the size of a standard Torah, are uncommon, nor do many of any size remain within a non-rabbinic family for so long. Hardly any have covered as many miles (kilometers) as ours, made in the middle or late 19th century and brought by my grandmother, Yoni's great-great grandmother, Tuba Kastelman Gralnek, from what is now Ukraine to the U.S.

Owned by my brother, Kalman Klass, and kept on indefinite loan at Temple B'nai Torah, the synagogue we attend in suburban Bellevue, it has been read by me, my brother and our three sisters, our children and various cousins and in-laws at bar and bat mitzvahs from Minnetonka, Minnesota, to Bethesda, Maryland, and Santa Cruz, California. A rabbi and cantor have borrowed it for bat mitzvahs in unrelated families in Sitka and Valdez, Alaska.

It takes about a year to make a Torah, Judaism's most sacred object, the Five Books of Moses written by hand in an ornate Hebrew calligraphy with special ink on parchment sewn together in sections. A sofer, or certified scribe, copies each of the 304,805 letters in the approximately 79,000 words from a Torah previously checked for errors, any of which renders a scroll ritually unfit for use in Jewish services.

Over time, frayed bindings, deteriorating parchment and fading or flaking letters must be replaced.

When a synagogue closes, each Torah is usually sent to another where it will remain for decades or centuries.

Famous Torah travels on display
Once in a while a famous Torah travels on display, like an 800-year-old scroll from Portugal that is held by the Centro Comunitario Chalom in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Muslims on the Isle of Rhodes preserved it after the Jewish community was deported by the Nazis to the death camp at Auschwitz during World War II, then returned it to the few survivors.

The number of kosher Torahs is a mystery. E-mail inquiries to Hebrew University and the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem drew a blank.

Yitzchok Reisman, a sofer in New York and collector of rare Torahs, estimated that 40,000 to 130,000 kosher scrolls exist worldwide, likely more than 80,000.

The precise origins of our Torah remain unclear.

We believe it was written in or near Nikolayev Podolski, a town on the Bug River between Kiev and Lvov in what was then czarist Russia, by a sofer who was related to my mother's family.

Like one of similar size from Warsaw, Poland, that was owned by Rabbi Jacob Singer, the late founder of Temple B'nai Torah, ours may have been made for use in bar mitzvah training.

In 1904, fleeing from conscription before the Russo-Japanese War, my grandfather, Kolman Gralnek, and his brother, Morris, known in the family as Moishe, left their wives and children in the dead of winter, made their way to Le Havre, France, and emigrated to the United States. Five years later they had settled in central Iowa, Kolman in Marshalltown and Moishe in Newton, and sent for their families.

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