Eitan Hilleli isn’t quite certain how old his brother, Yigal, would be today.
“After so many years,” he said with a sigh, “You stop counting.”
In fact, Yigal has been dead longer than he was alive. The 23-year-old Israeli soldier died a hero’s death, cut down fighting the Egyptians in the Sinai in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War. After running out of bullets, Yigal leapt from a ditch and attacked an Egyptian officer with his dagger before dying in a hail of gunfire.
Half a world away and 32 years later, Hilleli was one of 10 men participating in Peninsula Temple Sholom’s Sephardic minyan. Yet when the chazzan (cantor) cracked open the ornate teak box the synagogue’s centuries-old Iraqi Torah is stored in, he found nothing.
Services were disrupted as the minyan searched high and low for the Torah, hoping it had been carelessly misplaced by Sunday school students. But it was gone.
That was in late May. And, when it became apparent the Iraqi Torah wasn’t squirreled away in an old filing cabinet or left under a desk, Hilleli decided it was time to bring Yigal’s Torah to America.
After Yigal’s death, Hilleli’s grieving father, Moishe, bought a Torah and donated it to a small Tel Aviv shul in memory of his son.
That was 32 years ago. And in that time, Yigal’s Torah has been somewhat underutilized, to put it gently.
“I thought, ‘You know what? I have a Torah over there, and they’re not even using it,'” said Hilleli, 46, a Foster City resident and owner of San Francisco’s Sabra Grill kosher restaurant.
“I talked to Effi, our chazzan and Rabbi [Gerald] Raiskin and they said, ‘You know, it’s a good idea.'”
In fact, Effi Sharabi, the minyan’s chazzan and Torah reader, thinks it’s more than a good idea. It’s fate.
“In Israel, my aunt bought a Torah scroll for her shul. Every shul over there has six or seven of them. And if you give a Torah, you want to have the congregation read from your Torah. Over there, they cannot,” he said.
In Burlingame, “it’s going to be used. It’s not just going to be sitting in a closet over here. All the way around, it’s just perfect. I believe things happen for a reason in life. No — I know it.”
Currently, however, Yigal’s Torah is in the shop, so to speak. The scroll had fallen into a state of disrepair, and Hilleli had it sent to a scribe in the Bnei Brak section of Tel Aviv for repairs. The minyan has been passing the hat to come up with the roughly $3,000 price tag.
“When you’re fixing a Torah, it’s like you’re reading the Torah,” noted Hilleli.
“It’s a mitzvah.”
When Hilleli gets the call from the scribe that his Torah is ready to go, he’ll be ready to go to Israel and pick it up. The minyan needs a second Sephardic Torah (Raiskin has loaned them one for the time being), and Hilleli hopes to be able to deliver by the High Holy Days.
“Everything was working fine until this damn thing happened,” said Sharabi of the theft.
Raiskin, meanwhile, said the temple has posted a $5,000 reward for information leading to recovery of the stolen Iraqi Torah. The temple can be reached at (650) 697-2266.