Two men stood in the lobby of the Ingeteri Hotel in Havana, Cuba, each with a Torah roller in hand. Slowly they unrolled the parchment from its wooden holders — stepping backward, stretching it across the length of the lobby.
“Everyone watched. It was a kick,” said Rabbi Stuart Kelman, spiritual leader of Conservative Congregation Netivot Shalom.
Kelman, one of the two who removed the Torah from its rollers, was not displaying the text in order to attract an audience. Instead, he was preparing the damaged Torah for travel — and for the mitzvah of repair.
The Torah, and a Purim Megillah belonging to a Cuban congregation, are now in Kelman’s Berkeley office, waiting for his skilled hand to deem them kosher again. Kelman is a sofer, or religious scribe.
Letters are blurred. Ink is cracked.
The Torah “will take hours to fix. I really don’t know how long,” Kelman said. “The Megillah should take about a day.”
Kelman trained as a sofer in Israel in 1967, concurrent with his rabbinic studies. He made it an avocation, rather than a career. Nonetheless, whenever Kelman visits a synagogue, he always asks to see the Sifrei Torah (Torah scrolls) — out of both personal interest and professional concern.
So it was mere habit for Kelman to ask the same during his visit to Congregation Adath Israel in Havana.
Kelman, along with 26 other East Bay residents — most of them Netivot Shalom congregants — traveled to Havana and Santiago de Cuba Dec. 22 through Jan. 3.
It was the congregation’s second organized trip to Cuba. Members brought ritual objects and religious teachings, medical supplies and hard-to-get items like crayons and paper. They also brought a sense of support and spirit to the older, waning Jewish communities struggling to survive within the communist regime.
“We’re helping them to maintain their identity, preserve their traditions and sustain their community,” Kelman said.
Following Shacharit (morning service) at the Orthodox congregation — a mixture of both Ashkenazic and Sephardic traditions — Adath Israel’s president Abraham Breznaik led Kelman to the ark to inspect the Torahs. There were 10. But Breznaik pointed to one in particular.
“This is our only kosher Sefer Torah. The rest are pasul [not kosher],” Breznaik told Kelman, with the help of a translator.
Any mistake, cracking of ink, obliterated letters or touching letters deems a Torah pasul. Most can be fixed by a sofer; those that are beyond repair are buried.
Nine of the 10 Torahs, plus the Megillah, at Adath Israel were damaged by water leaking into the ark, and also by humidity.
Kelman inspected a small Torah. He was confident he could repair it but asked for a larger one to work on.
“I figured most of the people reading from the Torah are older. The larger script of a larger Torah would be easier for them to read,” Kelman said.
But Breznaik implored Kelman to fix the smaller scroll.
“There’s not a lot of young people coming into the congregation,” Breznaik told Kelman. “Those of us who read Torah, we get a little closer to the scroll. But none of us is strong enough to raise the larger Torahs.”
Kelman agreed.
A few days later Kelman and Breznaik unfurled the parchment scrolls and rolled them into a tube. Then Breznaik handed Kelman an envelope . It contained a letter from the Religious Ministry of the Communist Party of Cuba, granting Kelman permission to take the Torah and Megillah back to the United States.
All property in Cuba belongs to the state and a Torah is considered a valuable object.
Now after unrolling, packing and transporting the scrolls, and battling with customs, the real work begins.
Kelman must unroll the scrolls and read them in their entirety — comparing each letter to a tikkun [a book that tells the exact spelling of each word in the Torah]. Mistakes and problematic passages will be scraped off the parchment with a knife and rewritten with a quill dipped in ink made of gallnuts.
Kelman isn’t sure how he will return the Torah to the congregation but insists, “I’ll find a way to get it back.
“We’re helping out the Jews in this community to help them observe mitzvot in the proper fashion.”