'It's not just saving a law book'

It’s a mitzvah: LA fires activate Jewish law of saving Torah scrolls from calamity

While saving human lives is top priority according to Jewish tradition, the mandate to save Torahs is a close second, propelling congregants into still-raging fires before evacuation

Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel

Composite image showing the approaching fires in Los Angeles' Topanga Canyon neighborhood, with rabbis Dovid Weiss (left) and Mendy Piekarski (right) of Chabad of Topanga with rescued Torah scrolls. (images courtesy Chabad of Topanga)
Composite image showing the approaching fires in Los Angeles' Topanga Canyon neighborhood, with rabbis Dovid Weiss (left) and Mendy Piekarski (right) of Chabad of Topanga with rescued Torah scrolls. (images courtesy Chabad of Topanga)

When the fast-spreading Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles broke out on January 7, the staff at the Chabad House in neighboring Topanga Canyon knew immediately that the flames, driven by high winds and dry vegetation, would likely reach their hilly and green neighborhood.

“Right away we started getting ready… The first priority was the safety of the kids” who attend the center’s popular preschool, said Rabbi Mendy Piekarski, one of the Chabad of Topanga directors.

After ensuring that the students were sent home safely, the next priority was the protection of the center’s two Torah scrolls, one of which had been brought over from Europe by a family after World War II.

“My father-in-law, the head rabbi, took the two Sifrei Torah, wrapped them in a prayer shawl and put them in a car. We took valuables with us, we contacted families to evacuate… Just a few hours later the entire Topanga Canyon was under mandatory evacuation. Our entire community had to leave,” Piekarski said, speaking to The Times of Israel on Sunday via video call.

Traditional Torah scrolls are fairly large items that are expensive and time-consuming to produce. They contain the Five Books of Moses written in Hebrew by a trained scribe on specially treated parchment made from a kosher animal. The ritualized, singsong reading from Torah scrolls called cantillation, learned by Jewish boys (and girls) when they come of age, is a part of services on Shabbat and holidays, with truncated versions on Mondays and Thursday mornings.

Chabad of Topanga has served a neighborhood with hardly any Orthodox Jews for over 20 years. Chabad Lubavich, the Hasidic-oriented Jewish outreach umbrella organization, has over 5,000 emissaries around the world, some in far-flung locations.

In prioritizing the safety of the preschoolers and community members, the Chabad of Topanga rabbis were adhering to Jewish law, which gives precedence to saving human life over nearly anything.

The fire in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles, in an undated photo released on January 12, 2025. (courtesy Chabad of Topanga)

The saving of Torah scrolls is a close second, however, and the Jewish communities that have been evacuated as a result of the Los Angeles fires have made it a point to bring their Torahs to safety, something that has a long tradition in times of calamity and disaster.

Los Angeles in flames

By Sunday, the multiple large, wind-driven Los Angeles fires that broke out last week had consumed more than 62 square miles (160 square kilometers), an area larger than San Francisco. At the time of writing the flames were minimally contained and forecasters predicted continuing dangerous weather and the return of strong winds this week, which are likely to further spread the blazes.

Authorities on Sunday said that thousands of homes and structures have been destroyed, 24 people have been killed and more than a dozen people were missing, with numbers expected to rise. About 150,000 people in Los Angeles County remained under evacuation orders.

With the fires largely breaking out in hilly areas around Los Angeles, the main Jewish neighborhoods – the Pico-Robertson neighborhood in West LA, Sherman Oaks in the Valley and the old Fairfax district downtown – have been spared the flames and evacuations.

Nevertheless, multiple synagogues and communities have been affected. The building of Kehillat Israel, a large Reconstructionist synagogue in the Pacific Palisades, survived the flames. The homes of the community’s clergy and emeritus rabbi, along with those of hundreds of community members, however, were destroyed.

Evacuated Torah scrolls from the Kehillat Israel synagogue. (via Instagram, courtesy Kehillat Israel/used in accordance with clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

Their multiple Torah scrolls, evacuated along with the residents, were pictured in an Instagram post resting on beds and couches of several community members, “safe and in the best of hands.”

Across town at the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, the Torahs were removed before the building was destroyed by the flames from the Eaton fire.

“We want to assure you that last night, we were able to rescue all our Torah scrolls from the sanctuary, chapel, and classrooms. They are safely in the home of one of our congregants,” the synagogue said in a statement last week.

According to a report in The Forward, “four temple members and staff ran into the synagogue as flames closed in and ashes rained down.” While “choking on smoke,” the members were able to rescue the congregation’s Torah scrolls, including the Nehdar Torah, which was written in 1930s Iran.

The Pasadena Jewish Temple & Center burns during the Eaton fire in Pasadena, California, on January 7, 2025 (JOSH EDELSON / AFP)

The Nehdar Torah survived the Islamic Revolution and disappeared during the Iran-Iraq war, only to be mysteriously sent to a family member in Los Angeles a few years later, allegedly by Khomeini himself, according to the report.

These instances aren’t the first time Torah scrolls have had to be saved from the flames in fire-prone Southern California. In 2018, during a blaze in Thousand Oaks during a fire season that destroyed over 6,000 structures around the state, four scrolls were rescued from Temple Adat Elohim, a Reform synagogue.

The spiritual aspect

Jewish law surrounding the importance of guarding a Torah scroll is very clear.

“Saving a Sefer Torah is a big thing. We can violate Shabbat to save a Sefer Torah, but we aren’t supposed to risk human lives,” said Rabbi Tuvia Aronson, a veteran Jewish educator and community rabbi based in Pardes Hanna, Israel.

Jewish people through the generations have made great efforts to save Torah scrolls, especially during the turmoil in the Middle Ages and during the Holocaust, he noted. Even if only 85 letters remain in a damaged Torah scroll (out of over 300,000 it takes to write a complete Torah), the sages said, a Torah is still to be saved and, even if damaged beyond repair, can still be “buried like a loved one,” he said.

Eighteenth century Hasidic master the Baal Shem Tov taught that a Torah scroll represents “channels of divine blessing flowing into the world through the letters like a ladder, a bridge between heaven and earth, between spirituality and the material world,” Aronson said.

Rabbi Mendy Piekarski of Chabad of Topanga taking a Torah scroll to safety, on Tuesday, January 7, 2025. (courtesy Chabad of Topanga)

In the Zohar, the main text of Kabbalah or mystical Judaism, the Jewish people and the Torah “are united, are one. We’re all a letter in the scroll that represents all of the Jewish people, all of our missions. It’s not a simple thing… So when we try to save a Sefer Torah, it’s not just saving a law book,” he said.

The Los Angeles fires are “certainly a big tragedy,” said Aronson, whose wife hails from Los Angeles. Her parents are currently evacuated from the Brentwood Hills neighborhood, on the other side of the Pacific Palisades fire from Topanga, with the flames just “a couple of ridges away” from their home, he noted.

“The human pain” that’s happening right now in Los Angeles is immense, he said. “The biggest tragedy is the human lives that have been lost, and for the people of Israel, the loss of houses of worship,” Aronson said.

Community effort

In Topanga Canyon, a hip, village-like neighborhood of some 25,000 nestled above Malibu in a terrain of canyons, trees and shrubbery, on Sunday the flames were still approaching the Chabad House, located along Old Topanga Canyon Road, the main artery, Chabad Rabbi Piekarski said.

During the first two days of the fires, there were no airdrops of water or fire retardants and because of the mountain roads, some of which aren’t on Google Maps, stretched-thin fire services had difficulty reaching some locations.

“Around one hundred people stayed behind in order to protect their homes. It’s everything they have… I know someone who, with a hose, was able to save his house while the rest around him burned,” Piekarski said.

Chabad of Topanga as the flames approach, in an undated photo. (courtesy)

Chabad of Topanga has been able to organize food and supply deliveries for all the residents who remained, since as “the only Jewish organization in Topanga, we took responsibility for the whole town,” he said. Additionally, the Topanga rabbis, like much of the Los Angeles community, have organized fundraisers, food banks and other services for the evacuees.

The help even extended to the lending out of one of the two evacuated Torah scrolls. Members of the Chabad community in Malibu, an upscale seaside town down the mountain from Topanga that has been heavily damaged by the fires, found themselves needing to hold a bar mitzvah ceremony over Shabbat while evacuated in the Valley, but they didn’t have a Torah scroll in their location.

One of the rescued Topanga scrolls was sent to Malibu on Friday to allow the 13-year-old boy’s celebration to still go on, Piekarski said.

AP and JTA contributed to this report.

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