Museum’s Torah more than Display

Brooklyn, NY – A procession of dancing people along Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway behind a float and live music, a “chuppa” canopy with a brand new Torah scroll and children holding torches and flags is unusual on any day. The destination and final home of this particular scroll – the Jewish Children’s Museum – made it that much more notable.

Think “museum” and you imagine ancient relics secured behind bulletproof display cases. A museum would seem unfitting to house a brand new Torah. Then again, the Jewish Children’s Museum is not your average museum. For Mr. Serge Hoyda and his family, “there could be no better place to dedicate a new Torah.”

More pictures in the Extended Article!

In front of 300 friends and family members in the JCM entrance hall, the final letters of the brand new Torah scroll were filled in. The Torah was dedicated by the Hoyda family in memory of Mr. Hoyda’s parents, Leo and Lotte Hoyda and Ari Halberstam, the sixteen-year-old yeshiva student killed in a terrorist shooting on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994.

Rabbi Yerachmiel Benjaminson, executive director of the museum explained “our entire focus is to bring Judaism to life. There are no exhibits that just highlight the past. Everything here is hi-tech and hands-on and shows visitors that Jewish tradition is not ancient history – it’s a way of life that is as relevant today as it was a hundred and a thousand years ago.”

That would explain the Hoydas’ choice of dedication. Mr. Hoyda said he met Devorah Halberstam at a Jewish Children’s Museum dinner a year ago and heard her speak about her son Ari in whose memory the museum is dedicated. “I knew right away that I wanted to do something to continue Jewish education in Ari’s memory” he recalls.

One year later he filled in his own letter in the scroll, guided by Australian scribe Rabbi Eli Gutnick. Rabbi Gutnick is married to Ari’s sister, making the completion of this Torah that much more significant to him than those he has finished in the past.

With the Torah completed, the party danced its way into the streets and around the block, back to its new home at the Jewish Children’s Museum where traditional Hakafot and dancing were held on the Museum’s Eastern Parkway plaza. The Torah was then brought to the Museum’s lower level Discovery Synagogue where it will stay.

Rabbi Yishayahu Yosef Pinto of Kiryat Malachi, Israel shared his thoughts with the packed crowd on the importance of the occasion and the great merit of the Hoyda family for having been the force behind it. Rabbi Pinto spoke about the tremendous value of the Torah in a Jewish person’s day-to-day life. Afterward, the celebration moved upstairs for a buffet dinner.

In keeping with the Jewish Children’s Museum’s theme of hands-on education, this Torah will not be hidden in a display case but used as an educational tool for the thousands of children who visit each month.