Smuggled Jewels
Feld Carr saw there were two records of purchase appended to the manuscript. One showed it had changed hands in Spain before Jews were expelled from the country in 1492, and the second recounted another sale in the Ottoman Empire, where many Jews from Spain found refuge.
A volume of the Damascus Keter
The Associated Press clarifies yesterday's nearly incomprehensible Ynet report about the secret rescues of ancient Hebrew codices, known collectively as the Damascus Keter (Crown of Damascus) and written as early as 1300 CE, from Damascus, Syria:
…Another of the books displayed Wednesday, a 700-year-old Bible that scholars believe was written in Italy, had a riskier journey to Jerusalem.
Beginning in the late 1970s, a Canadian Jewish woman, Judy Feld Carr, undertook an effort to smuggle Jews out of Syria, raising money from North American synagogues, bribing Syrian officials, dispatching envoys and running an independent immigration operation for more than 20 years from her living room in Toronto. All told, Feld Carr's endeavor facilitated the emigration of more than 3,000 Syrian Jews.
Feld Carr learned of the manuscript, she said, from Jews who had already fled, and dispatched a contact to Damascus in 1993. She would identify the man only as a Western Christian who died last year.
Feld Carr orchestrated a meeting in Damascus between her envoy and the community's rabbi, she recounted. The rabbi slipped him the book, and the man then smuggled it out of the country hidden under his raincoat in a black shopping bag. The book reached Feld Carr in Canada and came to Israel the next year.
While the book was in her possession, Feld Carr saw there were two records of purchase appended to the manuscript. One showed it had changed hands in Spain before Jews were expelled from the country in 1492, and the second recounted another sale in the Ottoman Empire, where many Jews found refuge.
"It went from Italy to Castille, to Constantinople, to Damascus, and then to Toronto, this book was the story of the Jewish people," she said.
The eight books that were not put on display at the library Wednesday arrived in Israel in the 1990s in murkier circumstances, smuggled out of Syria via the West in an operation conducted by Israel's intelligence services. Few details of that smuggling operation have been disclosed. Aviad Stollman, the library curator in charge of the collection, said the eight books were not displayed to avoid putting a spotlight on a story that remains largely classified.…
Hey Shmarya, why are you ignoring the Lakewood BMG story reported on matzav. They banned cell phones that have text and internet. If a bochur is caught he's out.
Posted by: ultra haredi lite | October 06, 2011 at 05:59 PM
What a trip for these scrolls !
It is fun looking at an old book and think about who would have read, held and looked at it throughout all the years.
Posted by: Adam Neira | October 06, 2011 at 08:56 PM