From two-year-olds to 12^th graders, a full range of young people were on hand from two area day schools Monday to mark the dedication of a new Torah, which aims to meet the needs of St. Louis’s Jewish youth.

“You are our living Sifrei Torah,” Rabbi Mike Rovinsky, director of the Jewish Student Union, told dozens of children, teens and well-wishers gathered in a common room at Epstein Hebrew Academy. “The future of the Jewish people depends on you.”

Known as the Torah of Unity, the holy scroll took a year from conception to completion with the final letters being put in place by attendees at Sunday’s JSU gala dinner. The scroll will be housed at Epstein, which shares its campus with Yeshivat Kadimah, a local Jewish high school.

Underwritten by Gloria Feldman to honor her two brothers and the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust, the Torah project was also supported by a group of benefactors that included Drs. Gregory Storch and Lisa Ring, Harvey and Esther Lyss Greenstein, Paul and Diane Gallant, Milton and Galia Movitz and a donation in memory of Bobbie and Simon Kohn. 

The scroll is intended to be moved from place to place for various groups and gatherings.

“Whenever there is a need, whenever there is a teen convention, a Shabbaton or an event or a bar or bat mitzvah, this Torah should travel and be at that simcha,” Galia Movitz told the group.

Monday’s event provided a brief respite from morning classes with music, dancing and a Torah procession that included not just the new scroll but several others housed at Epstein. Head of School Rabbi Yaakov Green said those scrolls were no longer fit to be used because of damage or disrepair.

He said it was a great blessing for the institution to have a new Torah for daily use.

“We know that learning Torah is powerful and special but most important, it is supposed to be very sweet,” he announced to the students before handing out candy tightly wrapped in the shape of a scroll. After the younger children were dismissed, the older students stayed behind to hear remarks from Green, Rovinsky and Galia Movitz.

Despite the overall festive mood of the occasion, the rabbis’ comments made reference to both the Holocaust and the responsibility of new generations to carry on Jewish tradition. Green spoke of a European rebbe who visited America shortly after World War II and made a point of going to a Judaic youth camp.

“He said ‘I had to come and see this for myself because after the Shoah, I didn’t believe there was such a thing as Jewish children anymore,’” Green said.

Rovinsky told the youngsters that there were only a few thousand Jewish children in the St. Louis area, noting that the few hundred in Jewish day schools have a special charge.

“Some have a connection but only 300 or 350 learn Torah every single day,” he said. “It is up to you guys. You’re the future. That Torah that we just dedicated…it is not supposed to live in an ark. Yes, we keep it there for safekeeping but really we should be learning every day.”

Jacob “J.J.” Adler, a 17-year-old from University City, said the feeling of celebrating the Torah’s arrival with the rest of the school was unique.

“To be able to know that even though it is my last year, I can be learning from something as special as that and to be also hoping to pass along that message to younger students, it is really an amazing thing to be able to participate in,” said the senior who attends at Young Israel.

Fellow Young Israel congregant Galit Shulman agreed noting the Torah’s ability to unite everyone. She was particularly moved by the story about the rebbe.

“It will be something I will always remember,” the 11-year-old said of the day’s event.

Ariela Grad, a 13-year-old Creve Coeur girl, said the dedication of the scroll reminded her of a program that allowed her to use her bat mitzvah to remember a child who died in the Holocaust. 

The seventh grader said the Torah helped connect all Jewish people by promoting knowledge, discussion and learning.

“It is like a giant tree,” said the B’nai Amoona congregant. “The Torah is the stem and all the conversations from the people who read it are so different. They are like the roots going in all the different directions of the world.”

Movitz said after the event that she felt education was the key to the future of Judaism.

“I grew up in Israel where I took being Jewish for granted,” she said, “but raising my kids, my family, here, I know that that is what it takes to raise a generation of Jewish kids who are educated, who operate with a heart full of knowledge so that wherever they go, that is what leads them, those values, in pride of who they are.”