St. Louis ? St. Louis dentist Ethan Schuman could hardly contain his excitement as he watched the elderly Polish man return from his attic carrying a large, heavy bag.

Standing in the doorway of the old house, Schuman opened the bag and then he saw the scroll, which was probably at least two centuries old.

“It took my breath away,” Schuman said. “My heart was pounding to actually find a Torah. … It was an unbelievable and rare find.”

Schuman was in the village of Ishbitz, Poland, two years ago, a world removed from his wife, Debby, and their daughters in University City. For more than 60 years, the sacred scroll had been hidden in the attic of a non-Jew, in a modest block and stucco house in Ishbitz.

A Jewish family probably had hidden it there in hopes that it would survive the Nazis. Perhaps, like most other Jews in the town, the family members perished in a death camp or were killed in the town cemetery during a massacre there in 1942.

But the Torah survived.

“I told the translator to tell the man ‘it’s a great thing you have done to preserve the Torah all these years until the Jews could reclaim it’ and that there was a place in heaven for him,” Schuman said.

When the man requested compensation, Schuman and his friend Dr. Ari Greenspan of Efrat, Israel, paid him $200. They never learned the man’s name.

Museum takes possession

Schuman now has found the Holocaust Torah a safe home, at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center. The museum, a department of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis, is in the federation building off Schuetz Road in the Creve Coeur area.

Dan Reich, museum curator and director of education, called the Torah an “important discovery” and said the museum was honored to receive it.

“When a proper place is found for this Torah scroll within our permanent exhibit, it will be seen by our thousands of annual visitors who will recognize yet more evidence of the richness of Jewish life before the catastrophe of the Holocaust,” Reich said.

A Torah scroll contains the Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. A scribe uses a quill and ink to apply the Hebrew letters on parchment. It is the source of Jewish law and at the heart of the Jewish religious service on the Sabbath and other special times.

The scroll that Schuman brought back includes Genesis and part of Exodus. The rest of the Torah scroll is in Israel, where it is on exhibit at an important factory where a rare blue dye is made for dyeing the fringe of prayer shawls.

Several Jewish congregations in St. Louis display honored Torahs that survived the Holocaust and were found after the war.

Schuman believes this Torah dates back to the late 18th or early 19th century. The calligraphy is brown from copper sulfate, which was used for ink during that time, he said. The handles are the work of a skilled carver rather than the product of a lathe, he said.

Hidden treasures

The Torah’s discovery was sobering, he said, “knowing what happened and that there’s virtually nothing else left.” He had visited a concentration camp on the trip.

“The people still in Ishbitz live in a virtual ghost town,” he said. “They know that millions of people went up chimneys, that they were incinerated.”

Ishbitz was once a great center of Jewish learning and of Hassidic life. Before the Nazis, it was at least 90 percent Jewish and was a center of trade and crafts.

Today, “If you blink you miss it,” Schuman said. Only a few Jewish artifacts survive, mostly in homes of Poles who have taken over the Jewish homes.

At one home in Ishbitz, Schuman found a Sukkah, a wooden booth used in the Sukkot festival. The annual festival celebrates the harvest and commemorates the 40-year period during which the children of Israel wandered in the desert, living in temporary shelters.

An elderly woman who lived at the house with the Sukkah led Schuman to her neighbor’s house, where the Torah was hidden. Schuman said the family may have kept the Torah and not discarded it out of superstition and fear – a belief that it contained magical powers.