By Carl Zebrowski
Editor 

The Lehigh Valley’s commemoration of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, on Monday, April 13, will feature a unique story of survival—the survival of Torah scrolls in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Lois Roman of the Memorial Scrolls Trust will tell the story of those scrolls in the presentation “History, Journeys, and Now” at the JCC. Several of the 1,564 scrolls currently reside in the Lehigh Valley, and they will be Roman’s focus.

“As the survivors of the Shoah are passing on, how are we going to continue to make Holocaust relevant to future generations without eyewitness accounts?” Roman told Hakol. “Pivoting to the use of silent witnesses, items of Judaica saved by the Jewish community during the war under the noses of the Nazi officers, can bring to life the gut-wrenching story of collection, storage, and—for these objects, unlike the people—survival.”

The scrolls were brought together at the Jewish Museum in Prague in 1942 by order of the Nazi Jewish Central Office. Museum staff catalogued them and put them in storage on site. Soon afterward, Nazis took those workers to concentration camps. The scrolls remained in place. The museum escaped significant damage during the war, and the scrolls survived intact.

The Soviet Union took control of Czechoslovakia in 1945 and had no interest in religious objects. One of the Jewish Museum’s curators returned home from a concentration camp and convinced Communist officials to let the scrolls be moved to an abandoned synagogue outside Prague.

There the scrolls sat for two decades until a wealthy collector in London bought the collection in its entirety and had it sent to Westminster Synagogue. Soon the Memorial Scrolls Trust was set up to restore and preserve the scrolls in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. 

Over time, the trust has sent 1,400 of the scrolls on permanent loan to caring Jewish communities all over the world, including the Lehigh Valley. They serve as powerful symbols of the Holocaust and its horrors, but also, as Roman will highlight during her talk, of the hope that remains strong among the Jewish people. 

Roman got involved with the Memorial Scrolls Trust several years ago, after a long career on Wall Street. Now, while working toward a master’s degree on Holocaust and genocide studies at Yeshiva University, she serves as the trust’s U.S. representative based on the East Coast, traveling around to Jewish communities and other locations to make presentations on the surviving scrolls.  

To register to attend this Yom HaShoah commemoration, organized by Shari Spark, coordinator of the Jewish Federation of the Leigh Valley’s Holocaust Resource Center, visit jewishlehighvalley.regfox.com/yom-hashoah-2026. The reading of the names of locally connected Holocaust victims will begin at 6 p.m. The Torah scrolls program will begin at 7.