At no point in his life did 12.5-year-old Amitai Weizmann think he would get to touch history.
He just passed by the genizah tin of the settlement of Elazar and saw old books thrown away carelessly, and decided to take one of them home.
But it was the worn-out book he chose to take from the pile that turned out to be a real treasure - a gemara that survived the Nazi days and passed from hand to hand, until it was finally thrown away.
"Amitai returned from Bnei Akiva at the end of Shabbat with a thick and crumbling book in his hand," said his father, Rabbi Shai Weizmann. "And to write everything, and his book must not get wet in the rain, but it turned out that the book is a volume of the Sanhedrin Tractate in the Gemara. I do not know who decided to shelve it, but on its first page it says
Rabbi Weizmann planned to keep the Gemara in the family bookcase, but the next day the Yad Vashem archives contacted him.
The director of the archive told him that the gemara he found in us had archival value, and that she would soon find her way to the Holocaust memorial archive thanks to the help of Danny Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, who took care of the composition.
"The chills refuse to leave me"
It turns out that in the early years of the state, the Ministry of Religions launched an operation to preserve holy books that survived the war, some of which became real diaries documenting the events from the ghettos and camps while the scholars wrote their experiences in these books. The old gemara that the young Amitai found is further evidence of the devotion of Jews to Torah study - even in the most difficult times of the Jewish people when despite all the difficulties, Jews kept mitzvos and studied Torah under Nazi occupation, risking their lives.
"After a long conversation," said Rabbi Weizmann, "the director of the archive sent me a photo of another page of Gemara from the Holocaust, and the shudder I felt when I saw him refuse to leave me. This is a photo of page K. An unnamed Jewish scholar wrote in pencil the following words: 'And every day I studied one page with all the relevant commentators.
And while I was hungry I learned a little more so that I would swear off eating.
And even today, on the eve of the month of Elul, Parshas will come, I have run out of money and I have nothing to eat ... '.
"This gemara was handed over to the archives of Rabbi Aharon Feyer, who immigrated from Romania after the war. This is the kind of thing that simply must be taught in every educational institution, in order to fulfill all the words of the 'Talmud Torah in love,'" Rabbi Weizmann concluded.
