Day 33 - Sunday, November 26 - The Torah that journeyed from the depths to the Heavens

An inside look at the Torah scroll that accompanied Ilan Ramon on the ill-fated Space Shuttle flight.

I read an article in JTA that described a trip that another Torah scroll took into space.

Torah honoring Ramon returns from space journey
By Racelle R. Weiman
December 6, 2006
http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=17360&intcategoryid=5

CINCINNATI, Dec. 7 (JTA) — Rona Ramon, the widow of Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, and Steve MacLean, a Canadian astronaut, helped mark the homecoming of a small Torah scroll from space.

As a tribute to Ilan Ramon, MacLean brought a Torah aboard the Atlantis space shuttle.
It was returned Tuesday to Professor Henry Fenichel at a ceremony at The Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education in Cincinnati. Fenichel is a physics professor in Cincinnati and a child survivor of the Holocaust.

“Ilan Ramon was my best friend,” MacLean said at the ceremony.
A small Torah scroll was brought aboard the 2003 flight of the Columbia space shuttle by Ramon, who was the son of an Auschwitz survivor. It belonged to Professor Joachim Joseph of the University of Tel Aviv, a Holocaust survivor who brought it out of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where as an inmate he secretly held a ceremony for his bar mitzvah.
Joseph, too frail to attend the Tuesday ceremony, sent a videotaped message from Israel.
The Columbia shuttle crashed, killing its crew.

To honor the memory of her husband and the crew of the Columbia, Rona Ramon appealed to a friend, MacLean, to bring another small Torah from Fenichel, a survivor of Bergen Belsen, aboard the 2006 flight of the Atlantis.

She had discovered Fenichel in April on Yom HaShoah as part of a videoconference between Cincinnati and Israeli schoolchildren.

“There was this modest man, a Dutch survivor of the Holocaust, holding a small Torah that was like a sister to the Torah that Ilan took up in space,” she recalled. “I knew that I needed to ask him for a very big favor — to allow his Torah to go up in the next shuttle, and make the return back to Earth — for Ilan’s sake, for his memory, to complete his mission.”

Fenichel expressed the hope that Joseph’s “Torah — the Columbia Torah — and by extension my Torah, — the Atlantis Torah — represents the survival of the Jewish people and the hope for the future, as well as the ability to rise from the anguish of the Holocaust, and to reach for the stars.”

The Atlantis Torah will be the centerpiece of a traveling exhibition in 2007.

(Racelle R. Weiman is founding director of the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education on the Cincinnati campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.)