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We Got Some Answers About How That Torah Landed At Goodwill. And A Lot More Questions

JL;DR SUMMARY A Torah scroll, believed to be from a small Ukrainian town, made a remarkable journey from a thrift store in Virginia to multiple collectors including non-Jewish bible enthusiasts. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

HistoryUkraineAuctionJudaicaVirginiaJewish ArtifactsCollectorsGoodwillNon Jewish Collectors

Places mentioned

Williamsburg, Virginia, United States
"So when Hyman, the administrator of Temple Beth El in Williamsburg, Va., got a call a little over two weeks ago about a Torah that was up for auction on ShopGoodwill.com, she felt appalled and profoundly drawn to the scroll."
Berdichev, Zhytomyrshchyna, Ukraine
"Its mantle bore the name of a small town in Ukraine, the country at the center of the current impeachment inquiry. One of Hymans daughters had just celebrated her bat mitzvah; she imagined the last bar mitzvah boy to read from the scroll before the Nazis liquidated the Jews of the town, Berdichev."
Spotsylvania, Virginia, United States
"Now Hyman is grappling with a new, unexpected reality: that the Torah rightfully belongs to a retired real estate agent who lives about a 90-minute drive away in Spotsylvania, Va., who once came close to playing professional football and spent years collecting religious objects."
Richmond, Virginia, United States
"The unknown buyer, however, soon returned it to a Goodwill in Richmond, from where it was posted to the online shop."
Texas, United States
"But we discovered that it was sold in the 1990s by a Judaica store on Manhattans Lower East Side to the owner of a traveling bible museum in Texas, who soon sold it through a middle man to the Virginia real estate agent, a Christian collector who, earlier this year, consigned it to an auction house outside of Washington, D.C."
Washington DC, United States
"But we discovered that it was sold in the 1990s by a Judaica store on Manhattans Lower East Side to the owner of a traveling bible museum in Texas, who soon sold it through a middle man to the Virginia real estate agent, a Christian collector who, earlier this year, consigned it to an auction house outside of Washington, D.C."
New York, United States
"Still, the Torah went up for auction in May alongside the dead rabbis books and Judaica. Meadows had set a sale minimum of $4,000, but there were no qualifying bids."
Florida, United States
"Schiffman, now 64 and living in Florida, back then bought Torahs from shuttered synagogues and via brokers, who collected unused scrolls around Europe and sold them to shops in the United States and Israel."
Czechia
"They set it in an ark, to join their collection of Torahs that includes a tall, thin scroll that survived the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia."

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Cairo Item ID 62012
Cairo Source ID 35
Retrieved 2025-09-20 05:31:27 UTC
Curated 2025-09-20 08:31:45 UTC