NEW ORLEANS — Two New Orleanians who survived the Holocaust helped to preserve a significant part of Jewish history by taking part in a project to restore a historic Torah.
Anne Levy and Lila Millen, sisters who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and survived by being hidden by non-Jewish families, took part in that restoration project on Sunday, by each writing a letter in that Torah at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in downtown New Orleans.
The sisters and their parents survived the Holocaust by paying Christian families to hide them. They came to New Orleans in 1949, when Levy was 14 and Millen was 12. Levy later rose to prominence by confronting former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke about his Holocaust denial when Duke was elected as a Republican state representative in Metairie in 1989 and when he unsuccessfully ran for Louisiana governor in 1991.
A Torah is the handwritten scroll containing the Five Books of Moses in Hebrew, which is read at every synagogue. The Survivor Torah is an international restoration project which has the scroll travel the world to Holocaust survivors who then share in the restoration by inking in the outlined letters of the Torah restored by a scribe.
The Survivor Torah
In 1939, as Jews in the village of Filipow, Poland were rounded up by Nazis and deported to the Treblinka concentration camp, the village Rabbi asked his neighbor, a Polish shepherd, to hide the community Torah scroll in his home.
It remained hidden there for 70 years until 2015 when nonprofit leader Jonny Daniels recovered it from the shepherd’s family and started the Survivor Torah Project.
Only about half the Torah scroll survived before Daniels and volunteers with From The Depths, an organization working to preserve Jewish history, recovered it. Now the scroll travels the world as it is being rewritten, letter by letter by Holocaust survivors on its journey of restoration.
Once the restoration is complete the scroll will find a new home in Israel's Presidential Palace.
► Get breaking news from your neighborhood delivered directly to you by downloading the new FREE WWL-TV News app now in the IOS App Store or Google Play.