Rabbi Tzali Wilschanski and his congregation at the B’nei Tzedek Chabad thought they would never see their two Torah scrolls again, but this weekend the sacred documents were returned.
Just as an air of mystery surrounded the case of the missing Torahs, their return is equally as baffling. However, Wilschanski isn’t focused on the mystery as much as they are in awe of the documents being returned.
“This is phenomenal. It’s a miracle,” Wilschanski said.
Ron Sanders, a member of the synagogue, received a phone call months ago from someone calling on a pay phone in Brooklyn. The person told Sanders he dropped off the Torahs at an address listed on their website and then the man hung-up. The address was the home of man who did some work for Sanders. However, the man didn’t live at the south Chicago address anymore.
“I asked him if he would go to his old address to pick them up, but the people that lived there weren’t home,” Sanders said. “He left a little note months ago and they (the people currently living at the house) just called Saturday night.”
The new residents at the home said the package had been dropped off in the middle of the night at the Chicago residence. They didn’t realize what the package contained until they found the phone number on the note and called Sander’s friend, who wished not to be named. Now, the Torahs and a Hebrew book are in a safe place under lock and key in Wilschanski’s home after being stolen just days before the start of Passover in 2008.
The congregation had owned the two Torah scrolls since the 1950s and they were considered the heart of the Synagogue.
“The Torah is the tenet of our religion. It’s a sacred article of our religion and was used continuously,” Wilschanski said.
For over two years, Wilschanski had been borrowing a Torah from Milwaukee. Meanwhile the congregation worried if the person who took the Torahs was taking care of it properly.
“We keep it in a special cover, we held it in a special closet and we treated it with respect,” Wilschanski said. “To get it back is a sense of relief. Now we have what we need, but also in a spiritual sense we have our Torah back in the congregation and we feel this way because we feel a responsibility for it. With that said, someone went to a great deal of trouble stealing it, but they also went to a great deal of trouble returning it.”
Torahs, which cost tens of thousands of dollars, are handwritten and take close to a year to write. When theirs was stolen, people from the community — Jews and non-Jews— donated money for the temple to get a new one and they had commissioned a scribe to write one for them, which is now almost complete.
“We didn’t expect to get it back, but the new one is practically done and when we get it we had planned to make a celebration out of it,” Wilschanski said. “There was such an outpouring of support when they were stolen — morally and financially. This is coming full circle now… and we are more than thrilled.”
While the congregation is thrilled to get the Torahs back, 20 new Torah books and a laptop are still missing.