On 12 May 2002, members of the Jewish community in eastern Ukrainian Dnipropetrovsk participated in a procession with the Torah, a ceremony transferring the Torah scroll to the synagogue.
According to ancient ritual, the writing of the Torah scroll should be finished by the community that will keep it. “The Golden Rose,” a synagogue in Dnipropetrovsk, hosted the ceremony of completing the writing of the Torah scroll. The writing of the scroll began in Israel, then continued in Brooklyn (USA) and finished in Dnipropetrovsk. “The Torah scroll is written on a specially prepared parchment by a sofer, a very religious person who follows all the commandments. It is not written in a year or two. It might even take ten years to get the Torah written,” says Oleksandr Fridriks, head of the Jewish community in Dnipropetrovsk. “Everything has a deep mystical sense: spaces, marks and letters. [For example:] sixty thousand letters symbolize the 60,000 Jews who were at Mount Sinai,” says Oleh Rostovtsev, head of the community’s press service. Followers of Judaism believe that the Torah is the eternal document of the unity of the Jewish people with God. Source: http://i-news.org