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jewish-grantaire:

hermione-walked-out-of-a-yeshiva:

euryale-dreams:

sadfunnytrue:

jewishhenna:

wetwareproblem:

So… Anyone remember when the Hobby Lobby people were busted for smuggling artifacts, and we were all shocked and confused and then forgot about it?

Well, the artifacts they were actually busted for are Mesopotamian clay tablets. But… those aren’t the only artifacts they’ve been dealing in.

I just found out that they have thousands – thousands! – of Torah scrolls, which they then donate to other Evangelicals for financial reasons and political leverage. (In one case, they donated a 16th-century scroll to Liberty University. It was completely unfurled and directly handled in an auditorium. By untrained students.) Almost two thousand of them are sitting in an explicitly Evangelical museum full of supercessionist bullshit, and the text of the largest display talks about how they were “saved” from burial or the genizah.

Saved.

From proper Jewish ritual handling.

By Evangelical Xians.

Who then donate these things to other Evangelicals who mishandle them.

For money.

I… I think I’m going to cry.

I was just about to post this! I even got a little shout-out in the article. 🙂

The notion of “build[ing] a Christian museum on the backs of Jewish items” is, as I’ve come to understand in my research of the history of Judaica collecting, goes back several centuries to the origins of the modern museum itself. But it is particularly disturbing to see how this classically-supersessionist and fossilizing language (“God gave those people [Jews] a job, and they did that job well,” Steven Green explains, referring to the “job” of preserving the Torah text in identical copies so that evangelical Christians could prove the Bible’s unerring nature) is intertwined with corporate capitalism and greedy tax evasion. If only there was something in all those Torah scrolls on the subject…

Not okay. Not even a little.

It gets even more disgusting when you realize that the reason why they’re desecrating our most holy artifacts is because they’ve figured out how to use them to perpetrate tax fraud. This is how the scam works:

• A congregation owns a Sefer Torah. It is worth many thousands of dollars.
• A rabbi examines the Sefer Torah and discovers that it contains one or more flaws which render it no longer kosher and it must be retired from use. However, because a damaged Sefer Torah likely contains individual panels that are still in good condition it can be dismantled and combined with other damaged sifrei in order to produce a new kosher scroll. Those panels make the entire scroll worth a couple of thousand dollars.
• The congregation offers the damaged sefer up for sale with the expectation that the buyer will use it to produce a new Sefer Torah with the undamaged panels while properly laying to rest any panels that can no longer be used. Somehow one of these assholes buys it.
• Said asshole donates it to one of these museums.
• The museum then ‘appraises’ the scroll as if it were a kosher Sefer Torah worth tens of thousands of dollars. After all, who’s to say it isn’t, amirite?!
• Said asshole deducts tens of thousands of dollars off of their taxes when they only paid one or two thousand dollars to buy the scroll.

So there you have it. Not only is the Sefer Torah deprived a respectful burial but a low-income congregation somewhere is deprived a Sefer Torah that they are able to afford. All so that some rich Christian asshole can scam the federal government out of a few thousand dollars.

Reading this raised my blood pressure.

I’m BEYOND furious.

I live in spitting distance of liberty university, that evil community. We only have one synagogue, and a chavurah. Also only one Islamic Center. In a SEA of evangelical churches who hate us. Another nearby town only has one synagogue as well. My heart feels like it’s being torn to shreds. Any of these small congregations would gladly have bought or raised money for that non kosher Sefer Torah LU mistreated.

How could we possibly get it back?

Nonprofits have to file a federal tax return called a 990, and have to make them publicly avaialble. Get a copy of Liberty’s returns and any lists of scheduled assets they’re using to offset for-profit revenues. Then report them for tax fraud.