The rabbi dived into a corner of his office Sunday and, with effort, hoisted up a shoebox that felt as if it held 100 cannonballs.
Inside was a grimy, coppery sea of pennies, about 10,000 of them. Under the guise of a kid's hobby are the kernels of Rabbi Yisroel Engel's Six Million Penny Project.
"This is just the beginning," said Engel, director of the Chabad House, an educational center for Hasidic Judaism at 400 S. Holly St. "You're seeing something in action!"
The plan is to gather 6 million pennies to honor all the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Since launching his idea six months ago, Engel figures contributors have helped him squirrel away about 1 million pennies.
One Colorado prison inmate sent a check to cover 1,018 pennies. When twins Ari and Esther Shapiro threw a party for their 11th birthday, they told their friends, "Don't bring presents, bring pennies!"
Details of the penny project (for the practical minded, that's 18 tons worth, or $60,000) is spelled out at www.sixmillionpennies.com. Engel hopes to plunk down the 6,000,000th penny in time for Holocaust Awareness month next April.
So once you have them, what do you do with them? The answer to that drew more than 100 people Sunday to Chabad House. It's one of 15 in the state founded in the 200- year-old Orthodox/Hasidic movement. Its mission is to educate Jews about their heritage.
The pennies will pay for the commissioning of a Torah scroll, the rendering in Hebrew of the first five books of the Bible. Torahs, which hold the sacred place of honor in a synagogue, cost between $45,000 and $60,000 each. This Torah will be ensconced at Chabad House as a living memorial to Holocaust victims.
"This is a legacy that lives on," said Rabbi Mendel Duchman, a Beverly Hills friend of Engels who flew into town to help celebrate the project. "This Torah will keep alive the flame of those who have departed."
Each Torah scroll is meticulously written out in Hebrew script, by a certified scribe, on special parchment paper.
"Whether a Jew lives in Athens or Brussels or Denver, the Torah unites us," said Rabbi Moshe Liberow, a certified scribe from Colorado Springs who launched the opening words of the scroll Sunday. It will be finished by a scribe in Israel and take about a year.
In a ceremonial touch, benefactors, one by one, sat next to Liberow and lightly touched his hand as the scribe wrote out each Hebrew letter.
The honor of tracing out the first word of the Torah went to Jack Grynberg, founder and president of Grynberg Petroleum Co.
A standout in a sea of men wearing Hasidic black hats and yamulkas, Grynberg wore his favorite, well-seasoned Stetson smudged with the patina of the Wyoming oil fields. Like Engel and others, Grynberg's family, in Poland, was decimated by the Nazi genocide.
With his wife, Celeste, "We gave 500,000 pennies," Grynberg explained later. "Well, not pennies - in a check."
A Denver bank is arranging to set aside a display room where Engel envisions "busloads" of kids coming to witness the shocking, incomprehensible magnitude of "6 million."
"I wanted to do something that wasn't a museum piece, but larger than life, something living," Engel said. "A living declaration that pays tribute to the 6 million who died."
torkelsonj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5055
No comments:
Post a Comment