The rededication ceremony is part of Martins Run's observance of
Yom HaShoah, also known as Holocaust Remembrance Day, a time set
aside to commemorate the Jews who died during the war and those
who resisted the Nazis. Torah No. 586, which has rarely been
used, has been kept in an ark (a special cabinet) at Martins Run
since the early 1980s. The scroll could not be read for
religious services because it was not kosher, as not all the
letters could be deciphered. Martins Run's cofounder, Rabbi
Theodore Gordon, obtained the scroll on long-term loan from the
Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust of London in 1983. The trust
purchased the 1,564 Torahs from Czechoslovakia's Communist
government in 1964. Long before that, Torah No. 586 was used by
the Jewish community in Lipník nad Becvou, a town in the Moravia
section of what is now the Czech Republic. "At least 100 Jews
lived there just before World War II," said Susan Boyer,
director of the U.S. branch of the trust. Starting in 1941, Jews
in Moravia were deported, leaving