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Completion Ceremony this Sunday
Westminster, CO: In 2017 Westminster saw several Nazi graffiti drawings appear around the city. Taken aback by the insensitivity, ignorance and hate, Rabbi Benjy Brackman, director of Chabad of NW Metro Denver, suggested to council person Emma Pinter to build a holocaust memorial in the city. However, when Maureen and Stuart Philips offered to donate a new Torah scroll to the Chabad of NW Metro Denver synagogue, Rabbi Brackman suggested that they dedicate the Torah scroll as a memorial for those who perished in the Holocaust and the Phillips jumped at the idea.
“Both Stuart and I feel strongly that the light of those lives lost should never be forgotten and what better way to remember those lights, than with the writing of a new Torah scroll” says Maureen Stuart. This would be the first such memorial in NW Metro Denver.
Indeed, last September, at a Holocaust event at the Arvada Center, guest speaker and himself a holocaust survivor, Rabbi Nissan Mangel, began inscribing the first letters of the hand-written Torah on a clean sheet of parchment.
Over the past 12 months the 304,805 letters have been meticulously written in ancient Hebrew calligraphy by a skilled scribe in Israel, copying the five books of Moses in their entirety, with only the last few lines remaining to be completed.
On Sunday, September 16th, at 2:00 pm, at Westminster College Hill Library, the final 100 letters of the Holocaust Memorial Torah will be carefully completed by local holocaust survivors and community members who will then join in a joyous community-wide celebration.
Following the writing of the final letters in the Torah, the Torah will be raised for all to see. It will then be dressed in a specially designed velvet cover with embroidered holocaust imagery on the front, adorned with a shiny, brand-new silver crown, and paraded with live music under a special canopy to the Chabad synagogue which is just a short walk from the library.
The community is invited to attend this event which will be open to the general public (RSVP required). Dedication opportunities are also available in the form of sponsoring a letter, verse, chapter or book in the Torah.
Reservations, dedications and additional information may be found at www.HolocaustMemorialTorah.com, or by contacting Rabbi Brackman at (720) 984-5805.
