A Year After Devastating Fire, N.J. Congregation Welcomes Two New Scrolls
by Faygie Levy Holt – chabad.org
Under a chuppah, the traditional wedding canopy, members of a New Jersey congregation carried two new Torah scrolls through the streets of Rutherford on Sept. 6. The procession passed the site where their synagogue stood for a century until a fire tore through it in August 2025, destroying the congregation’s Torahs with it. This year, when the community dances on Simchat Torah, the holiday marking the completion of the annual Torah-reading cycle that begins on Oct. 2, they will be holding scrolls that belong to them.
“It will be very special,” said Beth El congregant Fred Weinstein. “It’s our first time a new Torah was written just for our shul.”
On Aug. 8, 2025, a fast-moving blaze ripped through the building that housed Congregation Beth El. Rabbi Yitzchok and Bina Lerman, who also direct Chabad of South Bergen County and The Meadowlands, escaped the flames with their family, including four of their six children who were home at the time, but the building and the congregation’s Torah scrolls were lost in the blaze. A larger building on the property, which once housed the Beth El congregation, survived the fire but needs repairs and can’t be used.
The scroll written for the congregation was underwritten by the Kohn family of Brooklyn, N.Y., and completed just before Rosh Hashanah. The other—a much-loved scroll read at countless prayer services—was a gift from Howard and Gerry Kessel, Ira and Joan Kastrinsky, Amy Golden, and Stuart and Esther Rubinstein, members of Congregation B’nai Sholom-Fair Lawn Jewish Center.
“It brings me and my community a deep sense of joy, pride and delight to know that we played even a small role in helping Chabad of the Meadowlands observe Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah with a Sefer Torah that they can call their own,” Rabbi Eitan Bloostein of B’nai Sholom-Fair Lawn Jewish Center told Chabad.org.
‘A Rebirth of the Torahs We Lost’
At the celebration welcoming the Torah scrolls, The scribe who wrote the new Torah came to Rutherford, and congregants, along with Rabbi Lerman, assisted him in writing the final letters.
Once the new scroll was finished, the community carried both through town to the temporary synagogue space they are using. There they were placed in the ark beside a third Torah, given to the congregation last year by the Van Cortlandt Jewish Center in New York.
“It’s tremendous having three Torahs. Now we just need a permanent place to put them,” said Adam Wolf, who grew up attending Beth El and has helped lead fundraising to rebuild the destroyed synagogue. “I think that’s very important. I think it’s a huge step forward in the rebuild. It’s really important to me as a member for 60 years, and to my mother, who is 95, and runs all the kiddushes and is there every Shabbat.”
The fire was not the first hardship the congregation has weathered. Over the years, membership has declined, and about 10 years ago, Wolf said, someone threw a Molotov cocktail through a window. Miraculously, the attacker bungled his attempt at building a firebomb, and the device never went off.
“For me, getting the new Sefer Torah is closure,” says Lerman. “From the moment I saw the building burned to the ground with the Torahs burned inside, I felt a hole in my heart and guilt that I couldn’t save the Torahs. When we take out the new Torah from the aron kodesh, the holy ark, on Simchat Torah, there will be tremendous joy.”
