150-year-old Torah scroll ends its odyssey in Brooklyn synagogue

A 150-year-old Torah, hidden for a half-century in the former Soviet Union, was paraded through New York on Sunday on its way to its new home at a Brooklyn synagogue. The scroll had been kept in a closet behind clothes during the Soviet era, when Jewish life was restricted. Senya Dovidov, 68, a one-time shoe factory worker in Latvia who gave the Torah to the synagogue, said his father, Abraham, was a leader of the Jewish community in the Latvian capital of Riga during the 1930s, and fled to Russia with the scroll when the Nazis invaded during World War II. He returned to live under a Soviet regime. Dovidov brought the scroll with him when he came to the United States in 1995.