Community Happenings

Have an event to share?

If you have a Jewishly connected event, workshop, or other community happening that you'd like featured on this page, please email the details to the front office at admin@shaloha.com for review. Be sure to include a brief explanation of how the event relates to Jewish life, culture, or values.

All submissions will be reviewed by our team, and inclusion is not guaranteed. Thank you for understanding that we are selective in order to maintain the purpose and integrity of this space.

Forgot something at Temple?

Check out our Lost and Found page for items we've found and are looking to reunite with their owners! 

Or....looking to snag some cool items? Visit our Free to a Good Home page for goodies we are giving away for free. What a steal! 

Jewy Hui is a community of Oahu Jews in their 20s and 30s. If you're interested in joining, please fill out this form.

Make art and friends with the Glass Fusion Collective (GFC), who share our home on the Pali:

Join O'ahu PFLAG for their monthly potluck meeting. Please note that the location of the meetings has been intentionally omitted due to concerns regarding safety and security. Interested in attending? Send them an email requesting the location of their meetings. They'll happily respond to your request.

Transforming an Archival Object into an Educational Tool: the Czech Torah Scroll

Sophia Lambert, a History PhD student, has been working as an Assistant on the Learning from Yorkshire’s Holocaust Torah Scrolls Project at the University of Leeds. In this post Sophia explores the MST#68 Czech Torah scroll, also known as the Brno scroll, held by Leeds University Library Cultural Collections.

We have been using the MST#68 Czech Torah scroll as an educational tool as part of a co-learning and co-creation project called Learning from Yorkshire’s Holocaust Torah Scrolls. The project involves several project partners, including Cultural Collections, five of Yorkshire’s Jewish communities and the Memorial Scrolls Trust (MST). The project aimed to work with the five Jewish communities, facilitating knowledge exchange about the history, religious value, archival handling, and storage, as well as community use of the scrolls.

Each of these Jewish communities and Cultural Collections holds a Torah scroll that originates from Bohemia and Moravia. One of the things that makes the MST#68 Czech Torah scroll incredibly special is that it is among the 1,564 that survived the Holocaust and were brought from Prague to Britain by Leeds University Alumnus Ralph Yablon in the early 1960s. MST gave these scrolls on long-term loan to Jewish communities and organizations worldwide.

A Torah scroll is composed of sheets of parchment, containing the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, handwritten in Hebrew with black ink. The parchment sheets of the MST#68 Czech Torah scroll are sewn together with thread made from animal sinews. The scroll has two wooden handles, which are used to unroll the scroll. Torah scrolls are covered with a mantle. Sadly, MST#68’s original mantle has not survived, but the one that is used today is made of purple velvet with a Torah crown and wreath embroidered in gold thread. The crown is inscribed CT, which is an abbreviation for ‘Crown of Torah’. The wreath is inscribed ‘Burial Society of the HC (Holy Congregation) of Ettingen (or Oettingen) 1905’. It is not clear whether this is Ettingen in Switzerland or Oettingen in Bavaria. The latter had a fairly prominent Jewish community and seems more likely.

We aimed to transform MST#68 Czech Torah scroll from an archival object into an educational tool by incorporating it into the workshops during the project’s main event, a study and discussion day held in May at the Cultural Collections. During one of the day’s sessions, Dr Marc Michaels, a scribe, gave a fascinating talk on the art of writing a Torah scroll. Marc showed us the tools a scribe uses to write a scroll and used MST#68 Czech Torah scroll to explain how to determine when the scroll was produced. We learned that one way to date a Torah scroll is by examining the stitching between each piece of parchment.

One of our workshops focused on learning the basics of reading from a Torah scroll with Rabbi Elisheva Salamo, the Rabbi of York Liberal Synagogue. Participants were invited to practice reading from a scroll together.

Seeing MST#68 Czech Torah scroll alongside the other scrolls in Cultural Collections, I realized the power of these objects. I found it very emotional seeing the scrolls together, knowing what they had been through to end up in Yorkshire. These scrolls symbolize resilience because they survived while the communities to which they originally belonged did not. They are responsible for preserving the memories of these communities. Integrating these scrolls into Jewish communities today, storing them in synagogues, and using them in Shabbat services keeps the Jewish communities alive that were tragically lost during the Holocaust. Projects such as Learning from Yorkshire’s Holocaust Torah Scrolls are also invaluable for ensuring that the Czech Torah scrolls are not just seen as archival objects, but also as educational tools. We can learn a lot about other religions, the history of lost Jewish communities, and art history.

Courtesy: Leeds Univesity Library Blog.  Author Karen Sayers

Click here to learn more about the The Prestice Torah at Temple Emanu-El Honolulu. Temple Emanu-El Honolulu is honored by the presence of a Torah rescued from the “new” synagogue (1910) of Prestice, Bohemia during WWII.