By Tim Klass, JTNews Correspondent
Pirkei Avot, a section of the Talmud traditionally studied between Pesach and Shavuot, begins with the passing of the Torah to Moses, then to Joshua, the elders, the prophets and, finally, the rabbis.
This may be read as a kind of franchise. Seven weeks after their exodus from Egypt, the defining foundation of Judaism is given to the 12 tribes and their leaders are charged with passing its wisdom down through the generations.
Similar, in a sense, is the experience of a Torah with columns about 14 inches high, about half the standard size, that was made by a young sofer about 120 to 150 years ago in a part of czarist Russia that is now Ukraine.
Today, the product of this unknown scribe’s precise, painstakingly delicate lettering is one of the world’s most widely traveled Torahs, a treasured keepsake of my far-flung family through five generations.
Some of the most moving moments of my life have been hearing it read at the Kotel, the western retaining wall of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, for the B’nai Mitzvah of two cousins, Yonatan Gralnek in December 2009 and Ariel Gralnek, his younger brother, in the week before the first seder this spring.
It was my grandmother and their great-great grandmother, Tuva Kastelman Gralnek, who made it possible. Largely to honor her, I use Ashkenazi, the Hebrew she knew, in the transliteration for this article.
The story begins in Nikolayev, a shtetl between Kiev and Lvov. Facing conscription into the Russian army, my grandfather, Kolman Gralnek, and his older brother, Morris (“Moishe”) Gralnek, fled one winter night on foot, eventually reaching Le Havre, France, and boarding a ship to the United States.
Five years later, with help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, they resettled in central Iowa and sent for their wives and children.
Before leaving, my grandmother went to a synagogue the family had endowed and took from it the Torah, which according to family lore had been written by a cousin or other relative of hers. Knowing little about Iowa except that the state had few Jews, she wanted her children to have at least that source of instruction in their ancestral heritage.
The two families arrived at Ellis Island on the Fourth of July, 1909, cleared immigration the next day and began their long train journey: Tuva, her five children and the Torah to Marshalltown and Moishe’s wife and their four children to Newton, about 30 bumpy miles away.
My mother, Merry, the youngest of nine, was born in 1917. The two families celebrated Jewish holidays together in Marshalltown, and the Torah remained in the household until Sons of Israel Congregation was organized in 1939.
Growing up in Sioux City, Iowa, I attended services a few times in Marshalltown and must have seen the little Torah, but never was I told it was from our family. Nor were any of my siblings or, to my knowledge, any of our cousins in either the Newton or Marshalltown branches of the family.
When Sons of Israel was disbanded in 1985, my aunts Esther and Tillie Gralnek took the scroll to my mother for safekeeping in Sioux City, again without a word to any of us.
In January 1989, four days before her death, my brother Kalman found the Torah in my mother’s dresser drawer, alongside the documents that established its provenance.
At the seudas havra’ah, the traditional meal following the funeral, we asked Rabbi Sol Bolotnikov, a Lithuanian-trained Orthodox rabbi in Sioux City, whether it was ritually acceptable.
He examined the fragile parchment and the text, especiallly the feathery ornamentation over the letters shin, ayin, tet, nun, zayin, gimel and tzadi.
“Ah, the crowns,” he marveled. “The sofer who wrote this Torah was a young man. An older sofer could not have been so steady with the hand.”
Yes, he said, with repairs to replace missing and flaking letters, rebind a few sections of parchment and patch some holes, it would be a kosher Torah.
Twice the Torah has undergone these repairs, a staple of Torah maintenance. Any flaw in the 304,805 letters that comprise the 79,847 words of the text renders a scroll unusable for formal services.
Torahs this small are uncommon, and rarely does one of any size remain in a non-rabbinic family for so long. There may be none that have traveled as many miles as ours — Ukraine to Iowa to Seattle, coast to coast for family events in the U.S. and twice from Seattle to Israel and back. Rabbis and cantors have borrowed it for B’nai Mitzvah in unrelated families in remote parts of Alaska and Colorado.
Kal, who now owns the Torah, has put it on indefinite loan at Temple B’nai Torah in Bellevue. It has been read by both of us, our three sisters, my two daughters, their eight first cousins and other cousins and in-laws from both the Marshalltown and Newton branches of the family.
It was some time after the Torah was read at a family reunion in Minneapolis that Ian Gralnek, a first cousin once removed, asked if I would bring it to Israel for Yoni’s bar mitzvah in 2008. How could I say no? Before I left to return home, Ariel asked if I’d bring it again for his.
On a bright spring day, amid the exuberant cacophony of prayers and candy-throwing at reading tables lined up for B’nai Mitzvah all along the mechitzah, the fence that separates men and women at the Kotel, the Torah quickly gained near-celebrity status.
Some waiting their turn and others preparing to leave after the completion of B’nai Mitzvah stopped to ask if it was indeed a kosher Torah. The story traveled through the crowd. A young Chasid asked if he could have it to keep at home for his family. I couldn’t tell if he were joking. He went away looking sad.
The shaliach, a layman who led the service for Ariel, sighed with relief as he opened the scroll to find I had already rolled it to the start of the reading.
Small, wiry and intense, Arieli chanted with assurance in a high, powerful voice that must have carried to the reading tables at least two away from ours on either side.
As with his brother a year and a half earlier, I felt the stirring of am Yisroel chai, the nation of Israel lives, the tradition that all Jews of every age should see the exodus from Egypt as their own liberation from slavery and that all stood together to receive the Torah at Sinai.
I recalled how, in 1917, the Jewish essayist Asher Zvi Hirsh Ginsburg, better known by his pen name Ahad Ha’am, famously wrote, “More than Israel has kept Shabbos, Shabbos has kept Israel.”
In the same vein, it seemed to me, more than I took our Torah to Israel, our Torah took me to Israel — to a sense of peoplehood as well as nationhood.