Torah scroll

The presented Torah scroll has been donated to the museum by Jerzy Grzelachowski. NRThe Donor's father found this scroll in the Warsaw ghetto, probably at the beginning of 1943, before the ghetto uprising. Burn marks are visible on the parchment with 42 verses of the Torah. The object is dated at the first half of the 20th century.The scroll, according to the family account, was hanging on the gate of a burning house, the parchment had already started to ignite. The scroll most likely had no rollers then, and it is possible that it was torn. After the war, at the end of the 1950s, a friend of Józef Grzelachowski's wife, Barbara née Filipowicz, a Jew who most probably left for Israel later, received from her the largest, unburned part of the scroll.

We do not know how Józef Grzelachowski got into the ghetto, but we do know – the information also being based on his family account – that he would enter the ghetto to contact Jewish traders there. Before the war, he worked at the Pionier machine tool factory. During the occupation, when the factory was closed, joblessness forced him to trade, together with his brother Jan, in wooden booths at Ogrodowa St., and later at the 'Kercelak' (the common name of the square and the famous marketplace located in Wola, operating until World War II). This is how he met the Jews who traded such goods as collars for fur coats. When they were transferred to the ghetto, Józef and Jan Grzelachowski would sell goods for them on the so-called Aryan side.

Józef's son Jerzy Grzelachowski remembers that, as a small child, he left food in the drainage openings of the ghetto wall, at the behest of his father, two or three times.The scroll survived the 1944 uprising, because the Grzelachowski family lived in the houses of the Workers' Housing Estate Society (at 68 Obozowa St.), which were not burned down. Valuable items, including former Jewish property delivered to the Grzelachowski brothers for sale, were of course lost from the apartment, stolen by looters, but the scroll has been preserved among such relics as family albums (one of them shot through). The family even found a plate that Grzelachowski once received from his fellow traders from the ghetto together with fish in jelly (unfortunately, the plate was later lost).Józef Grzelachowski, who fought in the uprising, died of pneumonia in a German POW camp near Stuttgart, two days before the liberation of the camp by the French.

Natalia Różańska