A Torah from Warsaw, Would it be Too Much Just to Ask before “Adopting” it?

This is an old story from the New York Times (Joseph Berger, 'A Torah in Warsaw Just Asking to Be Adopted', New York Times Mar 4, 2007), but I found it when looking for something else, and it raised a few points, not to mention my blood pressure, so thought I'd write a few words in response.

THERE it was in a shop window, upside down and looking naked without its velvet mantle — the sacred emblem of the Jewish people treated like another heirloom, […] The students who spotted the forlorn Torah were quickly abuzz. They had just spent 10 days touring the infamies of the Holocaust in Poland — places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Maidanek, the Cracow ghetto and several synagogues preserved in amber with no Jews left to worship in them. In a day, they would be leaving for Israel,[…] The students, 38 seniors at the Solomon Schechter School of Westchester [New York], noticed that by some force, which they took as divine playfulness, the scroll had been open to that week’s reading, the portion of Jethro about the giving of the Ten Commandments. “It was like the Torah was supposed to be found by us,” Rebecca Weintraub, 17, said from Israel by cellphone. The students informed their headmaster, Elliot Spiegel, and their Talmud teacher, Rabbi Harry Pell, and the next morning the two men visited the shop in Warsaw’s Old Town Square, American Express card in hand. […] Sure, Dr Spiegel had some qualms about the provenance, but it was certainly an old Torah. The price came to $14,500. The school has many affluent and generous families who will pay not only for the Torah but also for a restoration that could cost more than the purchase price. After all, the lessons to be learned, from the school’s point of view, are priceless.

Not however about the principles of hospitality. Leaving aside the reference to "the infamies of the Holocaust in Poland"...  When you are a guest in somebody’s house surely you ask your hosts before carrying off any of their antiques. If what we read in the New York Times is true, this was not a lesson the 38 students of the Solomon Schechter School of Westchester took home with them it seems.

Leaving the antiques shop, Dr. Spiegel nestled the Torah in his winter coat and carried it on the plane to Israel, where the seniors are spending two more months. On their first Sabbath in a youth hostel, he took it out for an afternoon service…..

And the export licence? When was that obtained? The Polish legislation states quite clearly the procedure for issuing this document after ascertaining that the objects’s loss will not be to the “detriment of the national heritage”. This scroll certainly falls into the categories of items that are specifically noted as needing a licence [For Polish readers: USTAWA z dnia 23 lipca 2003 r. o ochronie zabytków i opiece nad zabytkami, (Dz. U. z dnia 17 września 2003 r.) Chapter 5, articles 51-61, there is an English version somewhere]. The New York Times article makes no mention of the export licence being granted in double-quick time by a helpful ministry (actually just 800 metres along the same road on the other side of the Old Town from the shop where they bought the scroll) so that they could take it away on the plane the next day.

I know this antiques shop well, and I also know the visitors with their American Express card intent on taking away an antique as a souvenir from Poland were severely ripped off (in addition, not everything sold in this shop is indeed what it is stated to be...). I know also that the shop also has a notice prominently by the door telling foreign visitors in English and German that they cannot export old items even within the EU without an export licence and where they need to go to get one. If these US tourists decided not to bother, they would have walked right past it with their new purchase hidden beneath a coat without a thought that their own personal needs and rights are not the only thing which matters.

Do Americans with their American Express cards think they can waltz in, buy up what they want and just cart it off, totally ignoring local laws? Why? Because these ones are Jewish? How long will it be before every single object of Jewish origin not nailed down is going to find its way by legal and illegal export out of the country that for seven centuries was homeland to generations of hundreds of thousands of Jews? Should there be no reminders left of the integral (even crucial) part this people played in the cultural mosaic of these lands? Are they to be wiped off the cultural map by the acquisitive needs of other communities seeking some ersatz roots of its own in imported relics of a foreign past? This is all the more important in that it is in the surviving small items associated with their everyday life that the memory is kept alive since the Nazi occupants of Poland destroyed so much of the built heritage of Jewishness.

Photo: Janet Durrans for The New York Times

I have nothing whatsoever against Jews in general (on the contrary in fact), I have nothing whatsoever against these old Torahs being used in modern worship, what I do however object to is the way that in this case and others like it, we seem to be seeing another manifestation of the “I want it and I’m going to have it, whatever your stupid laws say” attitudes we see among collectors. The people taking these things without even a by-your-leave from the state they are removing it from are inventing their own justifications for this. I bet this one goes like "You are not Jews, we are Jews, these things were made by Jews, so they are our heritage not yours". I think this raises some interesting questions about how complex a question cultural heritage is, and how easy it is for special interest groups to twist it and reduces the notion to some simplistic genetic formula ignoring the wider context. The Jewish heritage of Poland is part of the heritage of Poland which cannot be ignored just because there are so few practicing Jews here. Furthermore, it is the duty (and privilege) of Poland to take care of it by whatever means it can and is able to. It is also the right of the people who live in (and visit) Poland to be able to explore the Jewish heritage of Poland and its lands alongside that of every other group that has lived here (Germans, Tatars, Mennonites, the Bronze Age Lusatian Culture, Late Palaeolithic hunter groups and all the rest). They cannot do that if some other people guided only by self-interest have previously bought up all the spectacular and otherwise collectable bits and carted them all off to a variety of scattered places where it is inacessible from Poland.

Cultural heritage protection laws are established for a purpose, in fact for several. It is only the collectors' fantasy that their purpose is primarily "nationalist" (as James Cuno prompts them to say). The mere fact that Jewish manuscripts as well as German ones and much else besides totally unconnected with "Polishness" come under the Polish one is sufficient demonstration that these simplistic labels are totally misplaced. Their ONLY function is to serve the collectors as a means by which to convince themselves that these are "bad laws" which is their justification for ignoring them. Thus we have statements such as the following which has just now appeared on a collecting forum.

The laws in most of these source countries are irrational and deleterious across the board, hurting source countries themselves, the archeology community, and the collecting community, and throughout history irrational laws have routinely been broken.

There actually is nothing at all "irrational" in a state which values its heritage vetting what others want to take away from it, to selectively remove from the pool of items that can be available for public collections (and not forgetting private collectors) in that state. If the US tourists in Warsaw really did see the notice in the shop and nevertheless carry off their purchase without applying for a licence, they too presumably explained it away as being an "irrational law". Maybe they tried to convince themselves it was some nasty old reminder of Poland's "communist past" (which would be ahistorical, because the current law is from 2003). We notice also that in this case the exporters were trying to convince themselves that God Himself was ("playfully") telling them He wanted them to do this (how many times have we heard this "voices in ma' head made me do it" one?).

One function of these laws here is to prevent the removal from the country of almost every single example of the more commercially desirable types of item. The commission which meets to decide whether or not a licence is granted have in mind the need to retain in the country items which give a balanced picture of its overall heritage and not just the bits that nobody is interested in buying and carting off because they are damaged, excessively ugly and badly-made or whatever. Or fake; there is a lot of silver 'judaica' on sale in Polish antique markets and shops, despite some of it looking convincingly old, almost all of it is of very recent manufacture, the pre-War items have all been snapped up by foreign collectors. What actually is at all "irrational" in that?

From what I know of the workings of the process in Poland, an export licence would probably have been granted in this case and the students and staff of the Solomon Schechter School of Westchester would have had a legally exported Torah scroll to do whatever they want with. They only had to ask before "adopting" (their name for what they seem to have done) this item. As it is - to judge from the New York Times report - it seems they merely have one of the many thousands of illegally exported items of cultural property that is flowing out of some countries to those with greater purchasing power to the detriment of the material cultural resources for study, enrichment and education in the denuded "source countries". If so, I wonder how those “many affluent and generous families” feel about their kids’ school being involved in the illegal movement of cultural property. Is that what they sent them to Europe and Israel with the headmaster and Rabbi Pell to learn?

I'd be interested to hear from anyone involved in this and any of the parents of kids in that group or who paid for this scroll.