By Sharyn Jackson
Inside the Karlsburg synagogue on 53rd Street in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, one light always burns through the evening. Congregants say that Rabbi Yechezkel Roth spends most nights in his shul studying, taking only short naps in his chair while poring over ancient religious texts. But in the early hours of Wednesday, April 28, 2010, the synagogue was dark. Roth and many congregants were in Israel for the holiday Lag BaOmer, which would begin on Saturday evening. The light was out.
One Karlsburg member who did not go to Israel was the rabbi’s grandson, Yitzchok Roth, a youthful man with fair skin, a frizzy brown beard, and shoulder-length payes, or side-curls. At 6 a.m. Wednesday, Yitzchok Roth arrived at the synagogue for his morning prayers. He noticed that the door to the ark, the cabinet containing the synagogue’s Torah scrolls, was ajar. He looked inside at the safe where the scrolls are kept, and found it empty. Sometime during the night, the synagogue’s five Torahs and their silver ornaments had been stolen. Roth called 911.
A Torah scroll, also known as a sefer Torah, contains the five books of Moses, the Hebrew Bible. The text is hand-written on parchment made of animal hide. A Torah scribe can spend one year producing a scroll, and depending on his ability, a new scroll could cost between $40,000 and $50,000. (The Karlsburg Torahs were worth between $30,000 and $50,000 apiece, according to statements made by synagogue members at the time of the theft.) Some Torahs are commissioned in honor of a special event or in memory of a loved one, and are passed down among generations, granting them value that, when added to their religious significance, goes far beyond their cost.
Though Torah theft is a relatively rare crime—New York City has seen only about one theft per year since 2008—each incident reminds local Jews of the 1980s and 1990s, when the crime reached epidemic proportions. From January to May of 1981, between 40 and 50 Torahs were swiped in the city. Then, beginning in 1992, 14 scrolls were taken from synagogues in three boroughs, as well as from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Mount Sinai Medical Center.
The black market for Torahs is far-reaching; in the ‘80s, Jewish leaders believed that stolen Torahs were being re-sold to synagogues worldwide, especially in Israel, that couldn’t afford the cost of commissioning new scrolls. “Eventually, you have to get someone who can get those Torahs back into the kosher system,” said David Pollock, associate executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. “And who uses Torahs? Synagogues, essentially. So what you need are some unscrupulous people who are in the business of selling used Torahs.”
Driving her usual way to work down 53rd Street on the morning of April 28, Sharon Fuchs, an executive aide to State Assembly member Dov Hikind, spotted police tape around Karlsburg’s entrance. Men milled in front of the three-story brick building in two kinds of uniforms, those of the New York Police Department, and the long, black coats and hats of the Hasidic Jews in this area. “There were police there, the Shomrim were there,” said Fuchs, referring to the neighborhood’s Jewish law enforcement. “It was a lebedikes thing. It was a happening thing.”
By 8:30 a.m. that same day, Fox 5’s news copter was hovering above. An impromptu media corps assembled on the sidewalk. Joseph Werzberger, a Karlsburg member who lives half a block from the synagogue, told NBC he believed the thief was someone who knew of the rabbi’s sleeping habits. “This rabbi over here is one of the biggest grand rabbis that we have in our whole community. He learns, I would say, almost 24/7,” said Werzberger. “So if they must have seen some lights that are usually opened are closed to due to he’s not here, they probably took that for a good opportunity to do what they did.”
The police announced Wednesday that there were no signs of forced entry into the synagogue, and they believed that the burglar entered through a window on the first floor. The lock on the ark’s safe was undisturbed, leading police to suspect that it had either been left open, or the thief was one of Karlsburg’s own.
Wednesday afternoon, Hikind and City Council member David Greenfield held a press conference in front of Karlsburg announcing a reward of $10,000 for any information on the theft. “In the community for us, losing a sefer Torah is the equivalent of losing a child,” said Greenfield. “It’s as if five of the children in our community have disappeared.”
“Throughout history, people have sacrificed their lives to protect the Torah, so everyone is touched by it,” said Hikind. “The Torah is the most fundamental, the most basic, the holiest object that we have.”
Samuel Heilman, the chair of Jewish Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of several books on Orthodox Jewry, explained in a recent interview that stolen Torahs are easier for criminals to fence than one might think. “It has become in certain quarters a kind of status symbol for somebody to donate a Torah scroll to a synagogue in honor of a bar mitzvah or in memory of someone,” said Heilman. “With more and more people wanting to purchase these, it increases the pool of the unschooled trying to buy something, and because people are always stunned at how expensive they are, when someone comes along with what looks like a bargain, they will grab it.”
Since there are no identifying markers on a Torah, not even the signature of the scribe, there long had been no way for a purchaser to know where a used Torah came from or how it was procured. That began to change in 1981, when a Brooklyn branch of Vaad Mishmeres Stam, an Israel-based organization dedicated to examining scribal texts for accuracy, started keeping a database of the particularities of each scroll it inspected. Looking at photographs of the scrolls, Vaad Mishmeres Stam’s analysts could determine the thickness of a scribe’s ink strokes and the exact locations the Torah’s 304,805 letters fell on a section of parchment. When a used Torah was put up for sale, buyers could check with the organization to find out if a Torah with the same characteristics had been reported as missing. In the 1990s, Vaad Mishmeres Stam’s registry evolved into ID Scroll, a company that today scans sections of Torahs into a computer system and onto CDs.
At the same time that Vaad Mishmeres Stam began its theft-prevention efforts, David Pollock of the Jewish Community Relations Council established the Universal Torah Registry. Its system of imprinting certain parts of the scroll with patterned pin-pricks invisible to the human eye is in many ways similar to ID Scroll’s scanning, because it creates a “fingerprint” file on a specific Torah. “It’s like if a car has a VIN number on it,” said Pollock about his registry’s unique pin-pricks. “If the VIN number is on a hot list, it makes it very hard to resell it back.”
But the Universal Torah Registry, whose motto is “A Safer Torah is Up to You,” is controversial among more religious segments in the community. “I have many ultra-Orthodox who do not want to make the holes in the sefer Torah. They think it’s wrong to puncture it,” said Rabbi Shmuel Traub, a scribe and Torah seller who joined ID Scroll in 2009. “And as a sofer [scribe], I know it’s very easy to get rid of it. Take powder and rub sandpaper over the holes, and they will get closed up simple.”
Karen Sackville, administrator of the Universal Torah Registry, disagrees. “This technology that we use has been approved by some of the biggest rabbis in the ‘80s,” she said. “Even if they were to take pictures, sometimes people take Torah scrolls apart. Pictures don’t do the real deal.”
Traub, 39, said that there are 15,000 Torahs in ID Scroll’s database, each registry costing several hundred dollars. The Universal Torah Registry charges just $55 per scroll.
Despite the existence of two competing Torah registries in New York, most Torahs are never registered, according to Sackville and Pollock. “Some people don’t believe in that, that God will protect them or the safe will protect them,” said Sackville. “In those cases we cannot identify them.”
Of the Karlsburg Torahs, two were registered with ID Scroll, though Vosizneias.com, a Hasidic news blog, reported on April 29 that ID Scroll had documentation on all five scrolls. Vosizneias.com produced a video with Traub explaining his registry methods, a form of publicity that is characteristic of the company. Traub believes that by leaking information that a stolen Torah is registered, “The thief realizes he won’t be able to do anything with them. There’s no resale value.”
With Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, just a day away, and Lag BaOmer around the corner, spreading the word that the Torahs were registered was vital. When the sun set on Friday, April 30, however, Karlsburg was still Torah-less. Members borrowed a scroll from another congregation nearby and said their weekly Shabbat prayers.
Meanwhile, the police department worked steadily on the case. One of the first people police questioned was Alex Nasimov, a handyman who has worked a few hours per week at the synagogue since 2008. Last year when he didn’t have an apartment for a short period, Nasimov even slept in the shul. Instead of going to work April 28, however, the Uzbekistan native was escorted by two police officers from his home on Ocean Parkway to the 66th Precinct on 59th Street. “The police come in and say, ‘What did you do with the sefer Torahs?’ I say, ‘I eat them.’” recalled Nasimov, 59, who considers himself a jokester. “How many? They say five. I say, ‘I eat five.’” When the commanding officer joined the interrogation, said Nasimov, “Everybody told him, ‘Not this guy.’” The police let him go.
Though Karlsburg is under the jurisdiction of the 66th Precinct, the NYPD assigned to the case additional detectives with background in religious theft—a practice that began in 1993 with the creation of the NYPD’s Torah Task Force. This special unit was set up to combat a string of thefts that began in 1992.
The founding leader of the task force, Detective Mordechai Dzikansky, recalled how he would drop everything when a Torah theft case came in during the ‘90s crime wave. “I’d do everything from Tupac being shot to serial killing,” said Dzikansky, who retired in 2007. But if a Torah theft occurred, he said, “It took priority.” In Dzikansky’s 24 years on the force, he considers catching the most notorious Torah thieves of the ‘90s among his greatest accomplishments.
Richard Stevens was a long-time silver burglar who lurked in synagogues after services to filch Torah ornaments and other fine objects. His Hasidic fence, Markus Fogel, re-sold the finds at his Diamond District shop. Eventually, Fogel convinced Stevens that there was something of even greater value than the silver in the synagogues he burgled. The pair was responsible for 14 Torah thefts over six months. Dzikansky had been looking for Stevens and Fogel for three years, before catching them in 1996.
Like Stevens and Fogel, many Torah thieves Dzikansky caught were Jewish. But, he said, “It’s by no means a Jewish crime. It’s a crime of opportunity. The Jewish angle is, who else knows the value, other than a Jew?” That could simply mean someone who has access to the community, like a custodian. Such was the case in 2008, when a janitor was arrested for stealing eight Torah scrolls from the Kew Gardens Hills synagogue where he worked.
When the perpetrators are Jewish, however, they tend to come from the synagogue that suffers the loss. “Usually it’s an inside job,” said Pollock, who served on the Torah Task Force with Dzikansky as the civilian eyes and ears of the Jewish community. Sometimes it’s over a dispute, something political within the congregation or the neighborhood. Sometimes the thief is in trouble financially and looking for an easy way out. In such inside cases, the Torahs are usually recovered quickly, due to fear of the registries, rewards offered and police expertise. “Torah Task Force gets ya,” said Pollock.
“Like any community, you have a few bad apples,” said Dzikansky. “The only thing that’s unique is their sense of forgiveness of their own.” Ultimately, said Dzikansky, the Hasidic community of Monsey, N.Y., where Fogel lived, supported him despite his criminal acts against his own people. “You saw a community stand up and say ‘We don’t want him to go to jail.’ They look at the family as a whole and don’t want his kids, his wife to suffer. I don’t know why Fogel wasn’t excommunicated, but he should have been.” Fogel served one year in prison.
Last May 1, Kings County District Attorney Charles J. Hynes received an anonymous call. The man on the phone said he knew who had taken Karlsburg’s scrolls and how to get them back. In exchange for complete anonymity, he offered to deliver them to the DA that day.
By sundown Saturday, the scrolls had been inspected by police and were ready to be returned. It was now Lag BaOmer, a joyful and esoteric holiday linked to the Kabbalah. As the holiday continued on Sunday, May 2, Rabbi Yechezkel Roth, who had returned to Brooklyn from Israel upon news of the theft, left the district attorney’s office with Karlsburg’s five Torahs intact.
The man who turned over the scrolls was not suspected of stealing them, said Jonah Bruno, the DA’s public information deputy. Months later, the case remains open and the $10,000 reward still goes unclaimed. Yet there has been no further attempt by the synagogue to publicly solve the mystery. The Torah thief, like Fogel, may have benefited from his community’s power to forgive—a concept that is deep-seated in the religion itself, especially at this time of year.
Starting the evening of Sept. 8, Karlsburg’s members, and Jews around the world, will celebrate the High Holy Days, beginning with Rosh Hashana, the new year. This is followed by the 10 Days of Awe, a time for introspection and a chance both to ask forgiveness from others and to offer it. The High Holy Days culminate on Yom Kippur when Jews confess to God their wrongdoings and repent by fasting and through intense prayer. For all of these hallowed rituals, Karlsburg’s five Torahs will be at the synagogue; parts of them will be read aloud. And that’s what matters most in this community.
“I ask the rabbi, ‘What is the problem? Who steals this? For what? Why bring it back?’” Nasimov recalled. “He say, “Baruch Hashem, we found them, put them back, that’s it.’”
“They don’t talk about this,” explained Pollock. “They like to put it out of their minds. Retire it. It’s an insider ballgame. It got solved, end of story.”
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