Chabad Jewish Center Celebrates New Torah

Naperville, IL — The completion of a new Torah scroll for the recently established Chabad Jewish Center of Naperville was celebrated Sunday at the Alfred J. Rubin Riverwalk Community Center in downtown Naperville.

Attendees sang, clapped and danced in a procession that began inside the center, spilled outside and wound through the surrounding streets. At the front of the line was the new Torah, protected from the elements by a wedding canopy.

“What a happy and joyous occasion,” Naperville Mayor George Pradel said. “Have a good time today and welcome to the community.”

The Chabad Jewish Center of Naperville, a religious center currently based in the home of Rabbi Mendy Goldstein, offers prayer services and both formal and informal religious instruction but does not require membership or charge membership fees, he said. There are 30 Chabad centers in Illinois and about 3,000 centers worldwide, he said.

“We’re more of an outreach organization,” he said. “We help people get in touch with their Jewish roots.”

Often, Goldstein said, Torah scrolls are passed from one congregation to another. Every synagogue has a Torah, but not every synagogue receives a newly made Torah scroll, crafted expressly for that congregation, he said.

“We’re getting our own Torah. It’s especially for us,” he said.

Before the Torah was dedicated, guests listened to music, sampled food and mingled.

“This is the third new Torah (ceremony) of my life,” said Ken Abrams of Naperville, at the event with his wife, Elaine. The first, he said, was at a synagogue in New York when he was 13 or 14 years old.

“I still remember it,” he said.

Several clergy members addressed the group before Hebrew prayers were read.

Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, regional director of Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois, told the crowd of about 160 that dedicating a new Torah is a highly significant event.

“To write a Torah is not an everyday event,” he said. “It takes time, it takes effort, it takes money to create a Torah scroll.”

The Torah, which contains the first five books of the Bible’s Old Testament, beginning with Genesis and ending with Deuteronomy, is created over the course of about a year, Moscowitz said.

The text, about 600,000 letters long, is painstakingly hand-written on parchment by a scribe. The parchment is sewn together and wrapped around wooden sticks to form a scroll, which is used in prayer services on the Sabbath, on holidays and during special events, such as bar and bat mitzvahs, he said.

“You have to be ordained to be a qualified scribe,” Moscowitz said. “If even one of the letters is faulty, the Torah scroll can’t be used until it is repaired. It’s much more than a book. It’s something that has tremendous holiness to it.”

Moscowitz said the scroll was carried under a wedding canopy as a symbol.

“This is the wedding contract between God and his people,” he said. “This underscores the celebration part of it. It’s a real celebration.”