When Brigitte Milo looks at the Torah scroll dedicated to the memory of her son, Nadav, who fell nearly 30 years ago in Lebanon, she still recalls its journey from rural Maine to Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in amazement.
“The story of how this Torah scroll came to Sde Eliyahu astonishes me even to this day,” she told me in a recent interview. “We never expected that the Torah scroll would come from the hometown of Eliyahu Hanavi,” she added.
Eliyahu Hanavi, or Elijah the Prophet, was the nickname that the kibbutzniks of Sde Eliyahu gave my late father, Harold L. Silverman, because his visits to the religious kibbutz usually coincided with Passover. To this day, if you ask an elderly member of Sde Eliyahu about Eliyahu Hanavi, they will smile and tell you about this unusual American.
“The kibbutz helped your father find religion, and he brought us a sefer Torah [Torah scroll] in return. This was the most appropriate gift your father could have given the kibbutz,” Milo said.
In Maine, where my father was born and raised, he was known by titles other than Eliyahu Hanavi. Many knew my father as the former Maine state senator, Harold L. Silverman. He served in the Maine legislature for more than a decade as a representative, an independent senator, and an adviser to Maine governor James Longley. He also sponsored legislation to help Maine’s elderly and handicapped, and helped bring a community college to Calais.
My father was a fourth-generation Mainer who ran his father’s hardware store, selling fishing equipment and hunting rifles in his hometown of Calais for many years. He also worked as a blueberry inspector in the area’s blueberry fields.
While my father wasn’t raised with religion, he did have a bar mitzvah at the Chaim Josef Synagogue in Calais in 1947, when the border town had a Jewish community and a rabbi, and where he attended services with his parents on the High Holy Days throughout his childhood.
A bridge to Judaism
But my father always wanted to know more about his faith beyond what his secular parents could provide. When he visited Israel in 1968, he discovered Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, which became the bridge to Judaism he had always searched for. Thanks to his adoptive kibbutz family, the late organic farming pioneer Mario Levy and his wife, Priva, my father immediately felt at home with the religious agricultural community.
Mario, who had made aliyah from Trieste, Italy, took my father under his wing and taught him the basics of Judaism. My father credited Mario with reconnecting him to his Hebrew name, Aryeh Leib, and getting him to purchase his first set of tefillin. Mario worked the fields with the same fervor as he prayed in the synagogue, and that impressed my father.
Following his first Passover visit in 1968, when my father volunteered in the carrot fields and participated for the first time in the evening “Mincha” prayers still in his work clothes, he would continue to make an annual visit to the kibbutz, even during his political career.
In the Maine State Legislature, my father would occasionally reference Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in his addresses to the House. During my father’s recent shloshim (month after death mourning) ceremony in Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, I shared part of a transcript I had found in the online archives of the Maine State Legislature from a speech he delivered in 1976.
It read: “I hope you realize how fortunate you are in the State of Maine that you do not have to bring weapons when you go to the church to pray. Next Wednesday, I will be in the Beit She’an Valley in the State of Israel. There, I see the Gilboa Mountain Range and the Transjordanian Mountain Range, a military area.
“There you can also see a 3,000-year-old tradition still alive in this world: all these farming communities entering their houses of worship and chanting the same prayers that we sang in the Exodus from Egypt.”
One Maine legislator, Louis Jalbert, a Christian man from Lewiston, responded:
“This man has been visiting Israel for quite a few years, spending two weeks there every year. He doesn’t go just for sightseeing; he is a believer. I have always respected and admired him. He puts on work clothes and works in the mud and prays. I think the House ought to give this man a real vote of their feelings, what I consider a young Jewish man who believes in his faith, and I am so proud of him that I envy him.”
Settling down in Israel
In 1980, my father ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket and lost against incumbent Olympia Snowe. He reassessed his political career, and instead of going to Washington to work with George Mitchell (a future majority leader of the US Senate), who offered him a position, he decided the time was right to settle down and marry in Israel.
Friends from Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu and nearby Tirat Zvi matched him with Rachel Winograd, a librarian at the National Library in Jerusalem. They met for their first date in downtown Jerusalem. My father was 48 and my mother 36 when they married in her hometown of Kfar Haroeh, a religious moshav in the Hefer Valley.
Mario and Priva Levy were at his side, and a bus packed with kibbutzniks from Sde Eliyahu attended their joyous wedding, officiated by Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Neriah, the founder of the Bnei Akiva movement.
My father was fond of telling us about the white kippah with the Jerusalem walls that my mother knitted for him for their wedding day. “It was the most beautiful kippah you could ever find,” he said.
From that point on, my father became religiously observant like my mother. After five years of living in Jerusalem, my father decided that Calais, Maine, would be the place he and my mom would raise their family. While my mother had visited the empty Calais synagogue on a previous visit, by the time my parents moved there in 1988, the synagogue had been torn down.
There were only four remaining members left of the former Jewish community that had fallen apart after many had moved away to more urban areas: my father, Burton and Jessie Baig of Calais, Nathan and Miriam Cohen of Eastport, and Howard and Janet Urdang of New Brunswick, Canada. In addition, two of the three Torah scrolls of the Calais synagogue had found new homes in a Boston nursing home and a Montreal congregation, but one still remained.
The last Torah scroll was placed in a bank vault in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, with the hope that it would someday serve a revived Jewish community of Calais. When the remaining families concluded that this unfortunately would never happen, the fate of the last Torah scroll could not be agreed upon, and it remained in the vault for at least 25 years.
Finding a home for the Torah scroll
Among the many accomplishments of my father, finding a new home for the Torah scroll was probably the one that he was most proud of.
“I was part of a plan that I didn’t realize,” he told reporter Stewart Ain for an article he wrote about the Torah’s journey for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 1999.
“It was as if this Torah’s destiny was written above,” my father once said.
In 1998, the Canadian bank where the Torah scroll was kept in St. Stephen had shut down, and my parents took in the Torah scroll, placing it in the guest room with no idea what they would do with it. I remember my mother telling us to be very careful with the Torah because if it fell accidentally to the floor, we would have to fast the entire day.
“A Torah scroll at home provides a layer of holiness to the household,” my mother said. “It was very special to house this Torah scroll for that period of time. We never had that opportunity again.”
“It was also a wonderful opportunity for my three young daughters to see a sefer Torah up close.”
But a solution soon presented itself. A good friend in Israel, Shamai Keinan, told my father about the Menora Authority, an organization headed by Moshe “Moshko” Moshkowitz, which collected unused Torah scrolls from around the world and brought them to Israel to be matched with a synagogue or community in need of a Torah scroll.
After the remaining members of the old Calais Jewish community unanimously consented that the Torah scroll be sent to Israel, a representative of the Menora Authority flew in to Bangor, Maine, to take the Torah, which was found to be in excellent condition.
Around this time, a member of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, Dani Tamari, called Moshkowitz and said that a family from the kibbutz whose son fell in Lebanon was looking to dedicate a Torah scroll in his memory.
Moshkowitz told Tamari that a Torah scroll from the US was on its way to Israel and could be transferred to the kibbutz. Tamari, who had visited my family in Calais several years earlier, asked where in the States the Torah scroll was from.
“Maine,” Moshkowitz replied.
“This was the shocking part,” Milo told the Magazine. “I remember telling Moshko that Maine was where Eliyahu Hanavi was from, and he said that he didn’t know who Eliyahu Hanavi was.
“I just couldn’t believe that this Torah scroll that was to be placed in the synagogue of the kibbutz high school came from Calais, Maine,” said Milo, who immigrated from France in her early twenties and married Avraham Milo, a second-generation member of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu.
“This was more than a coincidence; it was the hand of God,” she said.
“It was very moving when your father and family came to the Torah dedication ceremony,” Milo continued. “It was there that I learned your father’s real name was actually Aryeh Leib and not Eliyahu Hanavi,” she said with a smile.
The Calais Torah was dedicated in memory of Nadav Milo and his cousin Amit Alexander of Ein Hanatziv. Milo, 78, who was principal of the Shaked high school in Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, where the Torah scroll resides and where Nadav and Amit studied, felt there was an important educational message in bringing the scroll to the school.
“I also immigrated to Israel from a small town in France, and I wanted a sefer Torah from abroad to show our high school students the connection that exists between the Jewish communities of the Diaspora and the State of Israel,” said Milo, who studied English and French literature at Hebrew University.
“All my children were born on the kibbutz. Sometimes Israeli children forget that they are part of a bigger Jewish community throughout the world. It takes great effort to make aliyah. They could see how this Torah was taken care of before and hear the story of Aryeh, which is a very beautiful story.”
As Brigitte and I, along with my children, Carmel, Meron, and Golan, and my husband, Elyakim, gathered around the Calais Torah on a recent visit to Sde Eliyahu, I could not help but feel that my father, who passed away in June, was there with us.
We peered at the open Torah scroll, looking at the verses once recited in the Chaim Joseph Synagogue of Calais and is now read in his beloved kibbutz.
“This is beautiful,” I could hear my father saying.
The writer made aliyah from Calais, Maine, in 2004 and lives with her family in Midreshet Ben-Gurion, where she teaches English.