Twelve-year-old Amitai Weizman was walking in the Gush Etzion community of Elazar when he stumbled across a pile of old books and decided to take one of them home.
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Upon closer inspection, the book turned out to be a copy of the Gemara that survived the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
A component of the primary source of religious law known as the Talmud, the Gemara is comprised of rabbinical analysis of what was once oral law.
According to Amitai's father, Rabbi Shai Weizman, the book was in fact a copy of the book of Sanhedrin.
"On the first page, it says it is a Gemara that was salvaged from the Nazi horror, and the names of its owners over the years are written in it," he said.
Rabbi Weizman planned to keep the text in the family library, but he was contacted by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum the very next day. The director of archives there informed him the text was of archival value and that it would soon make its way to the museum's archive thanks to the assistance of Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan.
In the years following the State of Israel's founding, the Religious Services Ministry embarked on a mission to preserve religious texts salvaged from the war, some of which served as veritable journals documenting events inside the ghettos and the camps.
The Gemara found by Amitai is further evidence of the Jewish devotion to Torah study, even in the most difficult of times and while risking their lives.
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