Liberty Torah Dedicated in Oxnard Handwritten Scroll Honors US Military

OXNARD, CA — A Jewish scribe, using a feather quill, wrote the final words in a torah Sunday, fulfilling a mother’s dream.

The Liberty Torah, handwritten in tiny letters on a scroll, honors members of the U.S. military, present and past.

About 200 people, including veterans and Holocaust survivors, attended the ceremony where the torah was dedicated at Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard.

“This is the least that we feel we could do in the beautiful tradition that we’re in the current of,” said Rabbi Dov Muchnik, director of the Chabad of Oxnard, who led the ceremony. “This is a moment of togetherness we hope we have embodied here.”

The torah was inspired by Edi Boxstein, whose son, Cpl. Jonathan Boxstein, served in Iraq and is scheduled to return in about two months.

Boxstein and her husband, who have homes in Oxnard and North Hollywood, wanted to do something connected to their faith to protect their son and his Army platoon.

So they decided to commit the last of the mitzvahs, or good deeds, that Jews are expected to do in their lifetimes — writing a torah.

The $30,000 cost was covered by donations from people who paid to honor loved ones with letters, words or chapters.

On Sunday, Dr. David Boxstein, Jonathan’s father, helped write the final letters in the torah, following others who had helped write letters.

“It was (my wife’s) prayer that through this dedication to soldiers … that the end should be near for the need for them to lay down their lives,” Boxstein told the crowd.

Mary Aguirre came from Texas for the ceremony. Her son, Nathaniel, became friends with Jonathan Boxstein when they both were in Iraq. Nathaniel, an airborne combat medic, was killed in October 2006 by a sniper. He was 21.

“He died doing what he wanted to do,” Aguirre said. “I have no regrets.”

After the final letters were written, the torah was carried under a chuppah — a canopy used in Jewish weddings — by singing and dancing celebrants along Victoria Avenue to the nearby Chabad of Oxnard Jewish Center, which will be its home.

“I’m so excited I have goose bumps,” said Fleurette Le Bow, who lives in Oxnard. “We have our own torah.”

The Liberty Torah was inaugurated last year at a ceremony on the eve of Sept. 11, then sent to Israel.

There another scribe took a year to write by hand the five books of the Old Testament, creating “an exact copy of Moses’ Torah,” Muchnik said. The Torah is considered the word of God as told to Moses on Mount Sinai.