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A recovered parochet (Torah ark curtain) stolen by the Nazis is brought back to the Berlin Jewish community, in an undated photo. (Nicolai Froundjian via JTA)

JTA — What could one purchase with boxes of Crisco, bags of coffee, and cartons of cigarettes in chaotic postwar Germany?

For Moishe Saksenhaus, a young Holocaust survivor from Belarus, the answer was: two Jewish ritual textiles, hundreds of years old.

The seller said he’d stolen them himself from a burning Berlin synagogue on November 9, 1938 — the November Pogrom, commonly called Kristallnacht.

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Promoted: Jewish Crossroads, Avi Issacharoff

Moishe brought those two items — a Torah wimple, or sash, and a parochet, or Torah ark curtain — with him to America, taking them out of their suitcase only on special occasions. After Moishe’s death in 1993, his family donated them to his synagogue, Temple Chai in Phoenix, Arizona. They remained on display there until the building was deconsecrated in 2026.…