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А я и не знал
Jun. 15th, 2005 03:39 pmBuilding a Safer Torah
That anonymity spawned a biblical plague of Torah heists in the '70s and early '80s, when by some estimates thieves made off with 200 Torahs a year in the United States and Israel. If you include Long Island and northern New Jersey, the New York City area contains one third of the United States' 3,700 synagogues, and was at the center of the outbreak. "It was virtually an epidemic," says David Pollock, associate executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.
Pushed by the crime wave, in 1982 the Council responded with the first advance in Torah technology since the invention of parchment: a method of assigning Torahs globally unique identifiers without violating rabbinic law.
Called the Universal Torah Registry, the system works like this: A synagogue mails in a form with their contact information and the number of Torahs they want to place in the system, and the registry sends back a computer-coded template for each scroll. The 3.5- by 8-inch template resembles an IBM punch card, with eight holes arranged so their position relative to one another describes a unique identification number in a proprietary code.
A rabbi uses the template to perforate the coded pattern into the margins of the scroll with a tiny needle. To keep an enterprising thief from swapping the perforated segment with a section from another stolen scroll in some kind of twisted Torah chop shop, the registry recommends applying the code to 10 different segments of the scroll. Pollack says the code contains self-authentication features that keep a thief from invalidating it by just adding an extra hole in an arbitrary location.
Now if a crook tries to sell the Torah, the pattern can be mapped back to the ID number, which is linked to the rightful owner in a database. "It makes it harder to fence," says Pollock. "If your car has a VIN number, it's harder to sell illegally."
That anonymity spawned a biblical plague of Torah heists in the '70s and early '80s, when by some estimates thieves made off with 200 Torahs a year in the United States and Israel. If you include Long Island and northern New Jersey, the New York City area contains one third of the United States' 3,700 synagogues, and was at the center of the outbreak. "It was virtually an epidemic," says David Pollock, associate executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.
Pushed by the crime wave, in 1982 the Council responded with the first advance in Torah technology since the invention of parchment: a method of assigning Torahs globally unique identifiers without violating rabbinic law.
Called the Universal Torah Registry, the system works like this: A synagogue mails in a form with their contact information and the number of Torahs they want to place in the system, and the registry sends back a computer-coded template for each scroll. The 3.5- by 8-inch template resembles an IBM punch card, with eight holes arranged so their position relative to one another describes a unique identification number in a proprietary code.
A rabbi uses the template to perforate the coded pattern into the margins of the scroll with a tiny needle. To keep an enterprising thief from swapping the perforated segment with a section from another stolen scroll in some kind of twisted Torah chop shop, the registry recommends applying the code to 10 different segments of the scroll. Pollack says the code contains self-authentication features that keep a thief from invalidating it by just adding an extra hole in an arbitrary location.
Now if a crook tries to sell the Torah, the pattern can be mapped back to the ID number, which is linked to the rightful owner in a database. "It makes it harder to fence," says Pollock. "If your car has a VIN number, it's harder to sell illegally."
