On Sunday evening, thousands will fill La Rural, the sprawling exhibition center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to watch and celebrate as the final letters are inked into the 12th Unity Torah Scroll, the Torah that belongs, quite literally, to hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world.
The event takes place on Oct. 25 (14 Cheshvan) at 5:30 p.m. local time (4:30 p.m. Eastern). It will be broadcast live on Chabad.org, so Jews everywhere can share in the celebration as it happens. Distinguished guests include Rabbi Kalman Ber, Chief Rabbi of Israel and President of the Chief Rabbinate Council; and Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt, regional director and chairman of Chabad-Lubavitch institutions in Argentina.
The completion will be followed immediately by begining the writing of the first letters of the 13th Unity Torah.
The Story of the Unity Sefer Torah
The first Unity Torah scroll had been initiated in 1981 by the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—and overseen by Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Oirechman of Chabad of the Krayot, a cluster of towns north of Haifa, Israel.
Speaking on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, called for a Torah to be written to unite all of Israel, in which every Jew could acquire a letter, and urged that it be done as soon as possible. Jews differ from one another, the Rebbe explained, each with a unique mission in life. What unites them all is the one eternal Torah, shared equally by every Jew.
The Rebbe specified that there be no set price per letter, and letters could be acquired on behalf of both the living and the departed.
Quickly, the first scroll was begun in Jerusalem by the venerable scribe Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Henig. By the time it was finished the following spring, 304,805 people had been included—one for each letter in the Torah.
Since then, scroll after scroll has been written for the Jewish people.
In 2015, the seventh scroll became the first to leave the Holy Land. It was completed amid thousands of emissaries at the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries in Brooklyn, N.Y., and placed in the synagogue adjacent to the Ohel, the Rebbe’s resting place in Queens, N.Y. The eighth Torah, completed in 2021 in Toronto, was dedicated in memory of Avremele Lieberman, the young son of Chabad emissaries Rabbi Mendy and Itty Lieberman.
With the 12th scroll’s completion, the Unity Torah project will span more than 3.6 million letters. Each one stands for a Jewish soul, bound together in a single scroll.
Watch the completion live on Chabad.org, Sunday, Oct. 25, at 4:30 p.m. ET. and click here get your letter in The 12th Unity Torah.
