But after a collection of Jewish artefacts and treasures was started (which includes things like silver scroll crowns and plates and Yad pointers), the nazis themselves became interested in gathering the relics hoping to extract precious metals. So much of the silver is gone today, but amazingly the collection of scrolls themselves remained relatively intact.
My synagogue has one of the scrolls, very badly damaged, which the rabbi showed us this morning. There is something very powerful about seeing and feeling a religious artifact hundreds of years old, originally from a Czech Jewish community now destroyed and practically forgotten. Yet this Torah lives on a living and breathing Jewish community today, where some of the Bar and Bat Mitzvah students actually read from it.
The only explanation is that there is still some anti-Jewish sentiment and somehow it's present also among the HN folks, hopefully in a fraction of a promille.
During he Holocaust, thousands of Czech scrolls taken from scattered synagogues, to a main synagogue in Prague. An old rumour, though now thought to be inaccurate, was that Hitler wanted to document the culture of the race he eliminated.
Many of these scrolls have deterioated, some have been restored, and they are now distributed on-loan to many Jewish communities around the world, not just as working Torah’s but as part of the living story of persecution and perseverance.