A collection of Jewish scrolls and maps hundreds of years old and worth an estimated $500,000 was donated to San Diego State University, the school announced Wednesday.
The collection from Howard Singer, a member of the Aztec Parents Association, includes more than 70 Torah or Torah fragments, some nearly 800 years old, from locations like Turkey, Morocco, Spain and the Netherlands.
Singer spent more than a decade near the end of his career traveling for IBM. He said he purchased around 100 items in 13 years. Torah is Jewish scripture that also make up the first five books of the Christian Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
"So many of the Torah I bought are beautiful and in some cases, where the scrolls are written on animal hides, the processes used for making these has been lost," Singer said.
"Even today, when you look at them, the artistry and craftsmanship is almost a lost art because they're very old, and yet they look like they were done yesterday, which is just amazing to me."
Risa Levitt Kohn, chairwoman of SDSU's Religious Studies and Classics and Humanities Departments and director of the university's Jewish Studies Program, said the collection is valuable for an understanding of how important the transmission of the Bible, and the tradition with which it is transmitted, is to the Jewish faith.
Also of interest is the artistry displayed by the scribes as they hand- wrote each letter, word and column to certain specifications, she said.
"If a scribe was working on a Torah and made a mistake when forming one of the 340,805 letters contained in a complete scroll, they'd have go back and start over again," Kohn said. "So, the care that was taken to form each letter and each line, how much space could be left between a word or a column, it's part of a very intricate process."
Staff with SDSU Love Library's Special Collections and University Archives are researching and cataloguing the items and determining the best way to preserve them and make them available for viewing, according to the school.
