A former resident of Gwelo, Zimbabwe had made a life’s goal to find the whereabouts of the Torah his father read from. Thanks to The Jerusalem Post Magazine, he succeeded.
It goes to show that you never know where it is going to go.
A while ago, I heard a moving story about a Torah scroll that belonged to the small Jewish community in Gweru (previously Gwelo), Zimbabwe, which closed its doors in the early 1980s.
At the request of Jerusalem’s Menora Organization, the scroll had been smuggled out of the country in 1986 by Gilad and Micky Stern and their four children. It was brought to Israel by South African oleh Roy Scher, and installed in the synagogue in the town of Beit Yatir in the Hebron Hills, where it is in use to this day.
An article I wrote describing the Torah’s trek was printed in the Magazine (May 19) and did the rounds among Jewish Zimbabwean expats. Then a few weeks later, my phone rang. “Hi Richard. You don’t know me. My name is Brian Brom, calling from Johannesburg.”
Source: Jerusalem Post
