Holocaust survivors Gerda & Norbert Bikales viewing the Torah scroll recovered from Filipów, Poland. Photo: Lest People Forget Project.

The restoration of a historic artifact recently recovered from a small village in Poland will be chronicled at a “virtual museum” website which international supermodel and author Elizabeth Pipko founded to promote awareness of the Holocaust.

In 1939, as Jews in Filipów, Poland, were being rounded up for deportation by the Nazis occupiers, a local rabbi visited the home of the Wróblewski family, his non-Jewish neighbors, carrying a Torah scroll that members of his congregation gave to him before being arrested. Unable to safeguard the scroll himself, he asked his neighbors to conceal it, believing that he would one day return to reclaim it himself.

More than 80 years later, University of Warsaw students Joanna Kopacka and Bartek Krzyżewski, visited Filipów in search of Jewish gravestones that had been repurposed since the War. They were there on behalf of From the Depths, an organization that describes its mission as preserving the memory of the Holocaust. One day, they encountered an elderly couple in Filipów and asked them if they knew of any Jewish gravestones in the area. The husband said he didn’t, but his wife suggested sharing a Jewish an artifact hidden in their couch — the Torah scroll the rabbi had entrusted to his family all those decades ago.

The scroll wasn’t in great condition, having been, according to From the Depths, used as “rags, including insoles for shoes,” but Jonny Daniels, founder and director of the group, had plans for its restoration. Recovering it personally in Filipów, Daniels envisaged the “Survivor Torah Project,” a “letter by letter” restoration undertaken by Holocaust survivors across the world.

He later shared details of the finding with Elizabeth Pipko, founder of Lest People Forget, a Holocaust education project.

“I was blown away when I heard about the Survivor Torah Project,” Pipko said during an interview on Wednesday. “These stories need to be told and preserved, and I’m so grateful to know that I will have a tiny part in making that happen.”

Profiles of Holocausts survivors working on the scroll, as well as short histories of their lives, debuted on Lest People Forget earlier this week. One tells the story of Halina Nadi, a 99 year old who survived the war by assuming the identity of a non-Jewish girl who shared her first name. Another focuses on the life of Peter Katz. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1930, he survived the war in Belgium. Neither his father, who was captured by the Nazis in France, nor his mother, whom the Germans imprisoned in a camp near Lublin, survived.

“The Survivor Torah project gives us a truly remarkable opportunity to bring love and respect to survivors in what may sadly be their final years,” Daniels told The Algemeiner in a statement.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.