South Beach Chabad to Celebrate New Torah Scroll

There will be dancing in the streets of South Beach — a sacred Jewish artifact has arrived.

A Torah scroll plucked from the remnants of a defunct synagogue in Israel, sold on eBay and then painstakingly restored by scribes in Brooklyn, was shipped this week to Miami Beach.

It will find a permanent home Sunday with the Chabad in South Beach.

“It is a great thing,” said Rabbi Shraga Mann, whose shul will now carry two Torahs, the number required for proper Judaic worship.

The Torah’s arrival has special significance not only for Mann’s Chabad, but also for South Beach: Mann said it marks the return of a legitimate shul to the South of Fifth neighborhood, a community that was once a Jewish ghetto and home to Beth Jacob, Miami Beach’s first temple.

The scroll’s trip to South Beach began in 2007, when Mark Shyman bought it on eBay from Israel Ziegel, a book and manuscript dealer in Israel who said the Torah came from a failed synagogue in Tel Aviv.

Had the scroll not been restored, it would have been buried in a special cemetery, Shyman said.

“Unless somebody fixed it, it was dead,” he said.

So Shyman bought the scroll and sent it to scribes, or “sofers,” in New York, where for months they repaired the scroll so that it would be clean, or kosher. Anything from tearing of the parchment, to ink discoloration and cracking of letters can make the Torah unfit for use during religious ceremonies.

Shyman, who is retired, declined to say what he spent on the purchase and repairs, which were finished last week, save the final letters. Yitzchok Reisman, a New York-based scribe, said repairing a Torah can easily run $5,000 to $10,000, which he said is partly why the dedication of Torahs isn’t common.

“A Torah scroll is a special item,” Reisman said.

For Shyman, the significance is not just religious, but personal: His late-father tried unsuccessfully to acquire a Torah, which he intended to donate to a synagogue.

“It’s dedicated to my father,” he said. “This is not about ego.”

Sunday’s celebration, called Hachnasat Sefer Torah” – which means The bringing in of a Torah — will begin at Cosmopolitan Residences, where Shyman lives. There, a scribe will add the final characters to the Torah, “concluding” it.

A processional with music and dancing will then make its way to Chabad in South Beach’s new home on Fourth Street, with the Torah beneath a marriage canopy. The Chabad’s other Torah, which was donated in 2009 by Naomi Sisselman Wilzig, operator of a South Beach Museum, will be brought out to greet the new scroll before the Torahs are brought back inside the synagogue.

“It’s a beautiful, majestic event,” Mann said.

Mann said he believes the donation and presence of a second Torah marks a resurgence of Judaism in South of Fifth, where Beth Jacob officially closed down in 2005 after clinging for years to space inside what is now the Jewish Museum of Florida.

“The fact that someone is donating the Torah shows the status of the synagogue is growing and thriving,” he said. “People are reconnecting.”