When Henry Fuchs acquired a Torah scroll from the Hungarian synagogue he belonged to as a child, it came with two conditions — that the scroll, painstakingly written in ink on parchment, be used regularly in services at Fuchs’ synagogue in North Carolina, where he now lives; and that his congregation recite the Mourners’ Kaddish once a year in memory of the 1,000 Hungarian Jews of Tokaj. In May 1944, the town’s Jews were marched into cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz. Fewer than 100 survived.

Fuchs, a professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has honored those two conditions. Since the scroll came into his possession 18 years ago, it has been housed inside the Ark at his place of worship, the Kehillah Synagogue in Chapel Hill, where it is part of a rotation of the congregation’s four Torah scrolls. But since the coronavirus pandemic began, the scroll has taken on a starring role on Zoom.

Every Saturday, when Kehillah members gather online for services, one of the Zoom video screens shows the Tokaj Torah, which resides for the duration of the lockdown in Fuchs’ home office. When it comes time to read the weekly Torah portion, Fuchs lays it out on a table and unfurls it to the allotted chapter and verse, as the rabbi or one of the congregants reads from it on the screen, and everyone else watches from their own homes and listens to the reading.

The history of the scroll is a testament to the resilience of the Jewish people. The Jewish residents of Tokaj could not keep the Nazis from destroying their synagogue, but they had hidden the scrolls, which were unearthed after the war. Several of them were sent to an Orthodox synagogue in the southern Israeli town of Beer Sheva, where they were repaired and refurbished. Fuchs, who had followed their migration, convinced the Israeli synagogue that as one of the few remaining Jews of Tokaj, he should have one. It arrived in North Carolina in 2002, just in time for Fuchs’ son’s bar mitzvah.

In March 2020, when the coronavirus began to spread, and houses of worship canceled in-person services, Fuchs took home the Tokaj Torah, which is read every Shabbat morning via Zoom — linking his American congregation even more closely to the Hungarian one that no longer exists. At a time when Jews can no longer gather in person for services, this artifact of another time is uniting them.

(Pictured, Henry Fuchs, third from left, holds the Tokaj Torah decorated with a wreath of flowers for the holiday of Shavuot in keeping with Hungarian Jewish tradition. The story was excerpted from original publication by Religion News Service. Rabbi Jen Feldman photo)