Jewish tradition tells us that the Torah is Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life; and so it seems fitting that the eight Torah scrolls that lived in Haverhill’s Temple Emanu-El, which closed in June, should find new homes where they can nurture the growth of other Jewish communities.

Four of the scrolls are crossing the pond to foster small Jewish communities in Ireland. Over Labor Day weekend, Wendy Kruger and Sophia Siegel flew into Boston to take delivery of the Sifreh Torah and shepherd them back to Ireland. Morry Korinow, a congregant of Emanu-El and the son of that shul’s former longstanding rabbi, Ira Korinow, drove the scrolls down from Haverhill.

They all met at the Cambridge residence of Rabbi David Kudan, formerly of Peabody’s Tiferet Shalom and most recently of Gloucester’s Ahavat Achim, and his wife, Suffolk University professor Barbara Abrams. Abrams’s parents have long owned a home in Ireland, and Kudan has known Siegel and the County Cork Jewish community for many years.

In fact, when Malden’s Congregation Agudas Achim-Ezrath Israel started downsizing in 2023, Kudan, who once served as rabbi there, arranged for them to give Siegel’s community a scroll. At that time, Siegel mentioned Cork would be interested in acquiring a second Torah. “Because there are times when it’s so useful to have another scroll,” Kudan said.

So when Rabbi Korinow made it known Emanu-El was seeking homes for its Sifreh Torah, Kudan thought of Siegel. Excitedly, she mentioned there might be other Irish Jewish communities looking for scrolls. “There are several new, kind of liberal Jewish communities that have popped up in the last few years in the south of Ireland, and in other parts of Ireland, as well,” Kudan said. “Especially since the closure of the synagogue in Cork City, which was nominally Orthodox.”

Siegel spoke with the leaders of other Jewish communities, and they were all very eager to have their own scrolls. So, in addition to the 200-member Cork community getting its second Torah, each of the 50-member communities of Belfast, Galway and Limerick will have a scroll, as well.

As Siegel explains it, the main influx of Jews to Ireland were Orthodox Lithuanian refugees in the late 1800s and early 1900s. “They weren’t a very large group,” she said. “At the height, it was something like 4,500 people, and they have mostly emigrated [out of Ireland] at this point.”

The Jews who live in Ireland today are relative newcomers with a Progressive – what we would call Reform – orientation. Rather than descending from the original Lithuanian immigrants, Siegel said they come from all walks of life, including some who have married Irish people and others who moved there for jobs. In all of Ireland, there is only one Orthodox and one Progressive synagogue, both in Dublin.

“But there’s people who live in other areas in Ireland, and they have become more active over the last few years,” she said. “I think the pandemic was a big driver for people in general to look at where they were coming from and where their spirituality and community was. So there’s a real need for more Progressive and Reform communities.”

Siegel described the Jews of Ireland as ecstatic over the arrival of the Sifreh Torah. A GoFundMe page to cover transportation costs exceeded its goal within five hours. “For every community, it feels like a real milestone. Communities don’t feel like they’re like an official community until they have a Torah scroll,” she said.

“I know that from our experience in Cork here, when we got our first Torah scroll two years ago, it really made the community feel like they were taking themselves more seriously,” she said. “People started to invest more time and energy in the community because they felt like they had the official stamp of approval. You know, it’s really important for us, and for Progressive Judaism or Reform Judaism in Ireland.”

Many of the holy objects from Temple Emanu-El – including two Sifreh Torah and the yahrzeit plaques – are now home at Temple Emanuel of Andover. Rabbi David Wilfond is thrilled to read from them in rotation with the synagogue’s existing scrolls. “All scrolls must be used, so that they all stay supple and youthful and well-used,” he said. “If you don’t use a scroll a couple times a year, it dies. It’s like a baseball mitt: If you use it, it stays soft and supple. You can catch a ball. If you don’t use it often, then it just cracks and breaks.”

Also now at home at Emanuel of Andover are 70 families who were congregants of Emanu-El in Haverhill. Wilfond said his congregation is delighted to have them. “It’s kind of like a marriage,” he said. “We recreated a wedding ceremony for a holy marriage between the two congregations.”

At the ceremony, members of Emanu-El of Haverhill escorted their Torah scrolls – their “children” – to the bimah and stood under a chuppah held by members of Emanuel of Andover. “The ark is kind of like a house, and so we’ve welcomed two new children or two new members into the home,” Wilfond said. “May the children of both communities continue to be inspired by the lessons and messages of Torah.”

Wilfond also reflected on how, as Etz Chaim, the Torah is alive. “They like to say, ‘We look at and we read the Torah.’ But there’s another expression: ‘The Torah looks at us and reads us.’ And so the Torahs will continue to see the members of the Haverhill congregation reading them and using them, and we will, with them, be using them and reading them. So the life goes on.”

The lives of the Haverhill Sifreh Torah are indeed long. When Rabbi Korinow, who served at Temple Emanu-El from 1981 until 2017, had the scrolls examined by a sofer, he learned they were around a century old. Most of the scrolls came to Emanu-El from three local congregations founded by Eastern European immigrants around the turn of the 20th century: the Russishe shul, whose congregants came from pre-Soviet Russia; the Galitzianer shul, whose congregants came from Poland and Ukraine; and the Litvashe shul, whose members came from the Balkans, including Latvia and Lithuania.

Another Torah, from Plzeň in what was Czechoslovakia, is on permanent loan from the Westminster Synagogue in London. The Memorial Scrolls Trust Museum there cares for over 1,500 Torah scrolls rescued from Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia after the Holocaust, restores them, and distributes them to Jewish communities throughout the world.

Emanu-El received one of these “Czech Scrolls” in 1983. Since it was too damaged to be read in public, the congregation chose to display it in the temple’s lobby, in a specially-built cabinet adorned with a sculpture with six lights, to commemorate the 6 million Jews who perished. That Torah, and its case, went to the Jewish Community Day School in Watertown.

The museum gave its blessing to the relocation, noting it was very appropriate to help perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust for Jewish schoolchildren. Korinow noted JCDS was an especially meaningful location because his late wife, Gail, taught there for seven years after the day school at Temple Emanu-El closed. “She was very much a beloved teacher there, so it was very appropriate and always possible,” he said.

The final scroll went to Rabbi Jeffrey J. Sirkman of Larchmont Temple in New York. Sirkman grew up next door to Emanu-El in Haverhill, when its spiritual leader was Korinow’s predecessor, Rabbi Abraham Jacobson. “The temple literally raised me and made me the Jew I am. Not just the Jew, but the rabbi I am,” Sirkman said.

When his lifelong friend Carol Goldberg, head of Emanu-El’s Archives Committee, asked if he wanted one of the Torahs, Sirkman chose the scroll he had read from at his bar mitzvah. “When I opened it up, I teared up because it was open to my bar mitzvah portion, ‘Lech Lecha,’” Sirkman said. “It sort of underscores – oh, my God – this is a journey that’s come full circle. I can only be who I am because of where I came from.”

Sirkman anticipates his 900 families will read from the Emanu-El Torah as often as they do from Larchmont Temple’s eight other scrolls. But this one is special. “The Torah is timeless. It transcends,” he said. “Standing alongside me on the bimah is my rabbi of youth, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Jacobson, and the educators who taught me, and the Young Judea leaders who gave me a sense of love for Israel and the people of Israel.

“We’re all together again somehow, and even though I can’t go home again, home is coming with me.” Θ