A division of the Museum of the Scroll

קידוש השםAbout

Osiyos Porchos, The Rising Letters, is a division of the Museum of the Scroll, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Passaic, New Jersey, whose mission is preserving Jewish community history through their Torah scrolls. The Museum describes itself as the last address before the closet or the genizah: it takes permanent possession and stewardship of historic scrolls, and the communities that gave them keep their spiritual ownership forever.

The name comes from the Gemara’s account of the death of Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon, burned by the Romans wrapped in a Sefer Torah. Asked by his students what he saw, he answered: גווילין נשרפין ואותיות פורחות, the parchment burns and the letters fly up (עבודה זרה י״ח ע״א). The museum is a Holocaust museum told through the Torah: a thousand years of European Torah life, one restrained chamber for the Churban, the liberators and the return, and a finale in which every visitor writes a letter.

This site complements the parent site. Scroll rescue, the Torah vision checker and Beis HaDefus live at the Museum of the Scroll; here you will find the plan, the blueprints, the film, the campaign, the twelve shuls and the registry.

Kiddush Hashem: what this is

קידוש השםA Holocaust museum told through the Torah

A museum of Kiddush Hashem in three parts: a thousand years of life, the Churban, and the letters that rose from 1945 to today. In every room one station tells how a Jew kept faith: by perseverance, by survival, by living for the Name.

המסע

The Journey

From a dark room in Worms, 1096, through Sepharad and the East, the Chassidus Hall and the Yeshiva Hall with the Grodno beis medrash, the three chambers of the Churban and the three stations of the Rising Path, to the morning light of the Finale Hall.

The twenty-five rooms
שולהויף

The Shulhoyf

Twelve working shuls around one covered court: Worms, the Altneuschul, Remuh, Gwoździec, the Gaon’s Kloiz, Volozhin, Medzhybizh, Pressburg, Frankfurt, the Soviet minyan, Lubavitch and Karlin.

The twelve shuls
ועתה כתבו לכם

The Finale

A sofer writes each man’s letter in a new Sefer Torah as his shaliach; each woman takes on a mitzvah; every visitor leaves with a letter.

Write your letter

The parent

Museum of the Scroll

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Passaic, New Jersey, preserving Jewish community history through their Torah scrolls: historic scrolls and Hebrew manuscript material of every period and provenance, held in permanent stewardship while the communities that gave them keep their spiritual ownership.

museumofthescroll.org

The director

Rabbi Binyomin Terebelo

Founder and director of the Museum of the Scroll, a Torah scroll conservationist, and the author of Clues in the Klaf and Where Is the Menorah.

ben@museumofthescroll.org

From the Print House

Read the scrolls before you see them

Clues in the KlafRabbi Binyomin Terebelo

Clues in the Klaf

The Hidden Stories of the World’s Torah Scrolls

An illustrated history of Torah scroll paleography and scribal tradition: how a scroll is dated, where it was written, and what its letters remember.

Find the book
Where Is the MenorahRabbi Binyomin Terebelo

Where Is the Menorah

The lost vessels of the Temple

A history of the Menorah and the vessels of the Beis HaMikdash after the destruction, and of the searches and the legends that followed them. Published under the Museum of the Scroll Print House.

Find the book