World’s Only Jewish Presidents Zelensky and Herzog Finish Wartime Torah

Israeli President Isaac Herzog has added the final letters to the wartime Torah for Ukrainian Jews, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky launched in early 2022, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reports. The finished Torah scroll will be brought to Ukraine in the coming months and placed in one of the capital's synagogues.

A Torah scroll contains the entire text of the Five Books of Moses, hand-written in the original Hebrew. It is rolled up around two ornate wooden shafts, attached to either end of the scroll. Kept in an Ark or Chest in each synagogue, the Torah scroll is routinely read aloud during temple services, and in its presence, Jews offer prayers and blessings for all those in need.

The writing of this Torah, dedicated to peace in both countries, began in Ukraine shortly after the outbreak of a full-scale war in 2022 and was completed this week in Israel, which is also currently at war in Gaza.

“When we began writing the Sefer Torah, we did not think we would reach a situation where our brothers, the people of Israel in the Holy Land, would also be under the threat of a cruel war,” Kyiv’s Chief Rabbi Yonatan Markowitz, who had helped initiate the Torah, said.

According to JTA, Jews serving in Ukraine's armed forces, members of the Jewish community in Kyiv, families of fallen Israeli soldiers, and relatives of Israelis kidnapped in Gaza, among others, were involved in the writing of the characters on the scroll on its way to completion.

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Ukrainian President Zelensky wrote the first letters of the Torah “in his office in the presidential bunker in Kyiv,” while Israeli President Herzog completed the final letters at a ceremony held in his official residence in Jerusalem.

“Both Jewish presidents wrote a letter in the Sefer Torah, dedicated for the sake of peace and achdut (unity) in Am Yisrael, which will be placed in Kyiv’s Great Synagogue JCC, Beit Menachem,”Rabbi Chabad said, referring to Zelensky and Herzog, who are currently the world’s only Jewish heads of state.

According to the newspaper, the ceremony was attended by relatives of Zina Beilin, a 60-year-old Israeli woman of Ukrainian descent who was murdered by attacks by Hamas on Oct 7 in Sderot along with a dozen other elderly people during a bus tour to the Dead Sea which she had organized. The images of the pensioners’ bodies were some of the first that showed the bloody events of that day.