On Saturday night, a non-Jewish man was driving near downtown Los Angeles, on Vermont Avenue and Washington Boulevard in Pico-Union, when he spotted something peculiar on the street. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but there was Hebrew writing on it, so he called his friend Adam Schwartz, a lawyer in Tujunga.
“My friend immediately sensed something was wrong,” Schwartz said. “He may not have realized how wrong it was. He reached out to me, at which point I hightailed it to downtown. He rescued it and put it into his car. I met him and confirmed that it was what we now know it is and brought it home.”
What Schwartz’s friend had discovered were Torah scrolls. Schwartz took immediate action, reaching out to the police. They said that there weren’t any reports of a missing Torah scroll filed. Schwartz also contacted his friends in the Jewish community in Los Angeles, trying to find the scroll’s owners, but so far, there have been no leads.
“We don’t have an owner, which means we don’t know if there were victims or the circumstances [of what happened],” he said.
Right now, Schwartz is keeping the Torah scrolls in his home. “It’s a heavy thing to have in the house,” he said. “This is a situation that I was sort of thrust into, and I took the action that any Jewish person would take. I’m merely just a role player.”
If nobody comes forward in a reasonable amount of time, he’ll have to decide what to do.
“My first goal is to return it to the proper owner,” he said. “But if that proves impossible, my next step is to get it into the hands of people who are more qualified to handle it.”
The missing Torah scrolls have been highly publicized on Twitter in an attempt to find the owner, with Jews from all over the world, including Israel advocate Scottish journalist Eve Barlow retweeting a post about it.
Looking at the Torah scrolls, Schwartz said he believes that weren’t any aggressive steps taken by the person who chose to ditch it.
“It seems like they just wanted to get rid of it,” he said. “I really hope that the more we publicize it, that someone comes forward with some information that can lead to its return.”
