Hawaiian Island Gets First Ever Sefer Torah 

It’s not every day that a new Torah arrives on Kauai. In fact, it is something that has never happened before, at least not until recently, said Gani Kauai Rabbi Michoel Goldman.

So when the time came for Kapaa resident Richard Seigel to give back to the Jewish community in memory of his late father, he could think of no other place to do so but on Kauai.

“My family has a tradition to donate at least 10 percent of whatever we receive to charity, and what better charity to donate to than Gani because we need it,” Seigel said. “We already have two good ones right now, but this will definitely be of benefit to the community.”

On Sunday, about 60 people converged on a secluded Kilauea home to commemorate the new Torah.

“It’s a huge blessing for the island,” said Goldman, who first came to Kauai nearly a decade ago and eventually made it his home about a year and a half ago. “The Torah is a very sacred gift from Heaven so the island got a very big blessing whether people realize it or not.”

The sefer Torah, or written law, is penned in Hebrew, contains a total of 304,805 letters and must be copied precisely by a trained sofer, or expert scribe.

It is a process that, Goldman said, took a full-time scribe in Israel one year to complete.

The event, Goldman explained, was timed to coincide with the first reading of the Torah this Saturday, the birthday of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad, whose writing style was used to pen the donated Torah.

“I think it’s inspiring to know that some place so far from a Jewish establishment on Kauai, we can still have the highest level of godliness,” Goldman said. “People sometimes think that when you come to Kauai that things are really laid back, but the outpouring today is something that you would expect to see in Jerusalem or Europe.”

The written Torah is comprised of the Pentateuch, or first five Books of Moses — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — which begins with God’s creation of the world and ends with the death of Moses.

Wailua Homesteads resident Dale Rosenfeld said her experience of being able to sit next to Torah scribe Rabbi Moshe Klein from New York and write a letter on the delicate parchment was a nostalgic, and somewhat ethereal, experience.

“My mother and my father raised me to be very observant and this is the first time that I have been part of a brand new Torah and writing in a new Torah, so it was in memory of my mother, my father, my sister and my grandparents,” Rosenfeld said. “All of my heritage came together at this event on this wonderful island.”