Bay Shore temple gets Holocaust Torah

Andrew Sass' mother had been keeping a family secret for more than 50 years. When she died, Sass and his wife, Geraldine, were determined the secrecy would end.

The secret? A handwritten Torah that had been buried in Hungary during the Holocaust - and dug up by his maternal grandmother after the danger had passed.

The Torah came to this country with the grandmother, Margit Frey, who immigrated in 1945.

"She buried it for nearly five years while she and my grandfather hid in a cellar with other Jewish families" in Hungary, Sass said.

After Frey's arrival - her husband died shortly after the couple were able to leave the cellar - the Torah was kept in a closet: first in the house where Frey lived with her daughter, Jeanette, and later when Jeanette moved in with Andrew and Geraldine.

Sass said his mother "never talked about the Torah and never explained why they kept it in the closet."

It remained there until after Jeanette's death last year, when Andrew and Geraldine decided to offer it to a synagogue.

A new public life

Now the Torah - along with its finials, decorative breastplate and pointer - has moved into public life. It will be on permanent loan to Sinai Reform Temple in Bay Shore, where Rabbi Emily Losben-Ostrov said it will be one of four Torahs at the temple and the second Holocaust Torah there.

"You can't put a value on a thing like that," said Losben-Ostrov. "The story of the family Torah and how it made it here is so representative of why, as Jews, we are here and what it means to be a people who have survived.

"These stories, these traditions - by reading from a Torah like this you bring our story to life," she said.

"The Torah is called the Tree of Life, and when you read from it you bring our story to life."

One of Losben-Ostrov's uncles is a scribe who hand copies Torahs - all Torahs are handwritten - and she said a new one can cost from $50,000 to $100,000.

"It can take a year to make a new one," she said, adding that this Torah's history, not its replacement cost, is what makes it valuable.

Dug up in perfect shape

The story of the Torah's survival begins in 1939, when Andrew Sass' parents, grandparents and uncles were living in Hungary.

"When they could leave the cellar in 1945," Sass said, "my grandmother dug up the Torah, which was in perfect condition."

In that era, "there were two types of people who had Torahs in their home," said Sass, 73, a retired research engineer who lives in Islip and now teaches physics and robotics at Island Trees High School in Levittown.

His wife, Geraldine, 63, is a nurse for Suffolk County's Department of Social Services' Family and Children's Services Program.

"You were either quite religious, had a rabbi in the family, or were well-to-do," he said, adding that the family was in the last category.

Long journey begins

His father, Alexander Sass, was 32 years old, a businessman who felt it wasn't safe to stay in Hungary or anywhere in Europe. He managed to immigrate to the United States with Jeanette, 22, and Andrew, who was 22 months old.

It was a time when many of their friends in Hungary were insisting they weren't in danger, and Alexander was unable to persuade Jeanette's parents or her brothers to make the trip.

Years later, only Jeanette's mother, Margit Frey, would be alive to make the postwar journey.

"If my father hadn't insisted, I wouldn't be here to tell this story," Sass said. In Hungary, Jeanette's two brothers died in a concentration camp.

The family's journey faced obstacles.

"When they went to apply to immigrate, America's Hungarian quota was filled," Sass said.

"But my father had been born in Italy. His dad was on a job in Italy at the time. So they were approved through the Italian quota. His best friend, who could only apply as a Hungarian, was denied. He later died in a concentration camp."

Sass' mother told him of how the family had to take a train - through Germany - to Rotterdam in the Netherlands to get the boat for the weeklong trip to the United States.

"She said it was like something out of the movies as I began singing a song in Hebrew," Sass said. "One of the German soldiers patrolling the train asked what I was singing. She lied and said it was a Hungarian song. He couldn't speak Hungarian - or Hebrew - so he believed it."

Another narrow escape

They again escaped capture at the train station in Rotterdam while waiting to board the boat.

"A German soldier told them that unless they left the train station, he would arrest them," Sass said. "You couldn't stay on the street, and there were no hotels. They went to the Hungarian Embassy, which gave them shelter overnight. They caught one of the last boats out of Rotterdam the next day."

The weeklong journey took the family to Hoboken, N.J., where a friend was waiting to take them to Manhattan.

The stories his mother told Sass also included an account of Margit Frey's resourcefulness: When the ship captain told her it would be 30 days before she could board, Sass said, "she said she told him that she had 30 days' worth of food and could make it that long if she had to . . . She looked at him and explained that if she was on the boat, she wouldn't need 30 days' worth of all that food."

Frey was on a boat in two days, he said.

A proper home, at last

Sass said he likes to think his mother "would be happy that we're donating the Torah to the temple. It is a religious artifact, and it deserves to be in a proper home, not in a closet in my home . . . It was what was left of a life and a family that she had lost."

In December, he and Geraldine brought out another item that had accompanied his grandmother on the journey from Hungary - a menorah that had been used in the cellar where she and her husband hid.

"My grandmother told me how they used shoelaces to make wicks for the menorah that burns oil," Sass said.

"All the years she was alive, my mother never let us light that menorah."

For Hanukkah, the couple decided they would.