Cass Friedberg, member of Congregation Bene Shalom: Over a thousand Torahs from various communities in Czechoslovakia were rescued from the Holocaust. The Torahs had been abandoned, and were discovered in a damp basement in Prague, in the early 1960's. Someone from England brought them to the Westminster Synagogue in London. The Torahs were then examined carefully. Some could not be repaired. The few Torahs that were salvageable went on to be identified by their respective communities of origin. The Czech Torahs were then distributed to synagogues all over the world. Our congregation is fortunate to have one of these Torahs, and its origin is known: the small Czech town of Bzenec, about two hundred miles southeast of Prague. Bene Shalom received our Czech Torah in the early 1970's, not long after the founding of our congregation. The Jewish community had been in Bzenec for several hundred years. It was never a large Jewish community, numbering a few hundred individuals at its peak. There were fewer than 150 Jews in Bzenec at the time of the Holocaust. To the best of our knowledge, all died in concentration camps. We have a list of those who perished; we encourage everyone to remember them in our thoughts and prayers.