MUSEUM OF TORAH ANIMALS:
The Torah’s Animals Inhabit a Borough Park Museum
Sun, Jul 25, 2010
By Sharyn Jackson (The Brooklyn Link)
Holding up the stuffed leg of a giraffe, Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch commanded the unwavering attention of nine sixth-grade boys on a June afternoon. The class from Yeshiva K’Tana in Waterbury, Conn., had come to Deutsch’s museum, Torah Animal World, to see the difference between kosher and non-kosher animals, an issue of Jewish dietary law discussed at length in two passages of the Torah they were studying in school. Deutsch showed the group the clean split down the center of the animal’s hoof, one sure sign that a giraffe is indeed kosher. He later pointed out on a two-humped camel upstairs that its hoof is not fully split, its meat therefore forbidden to enter Jewish mouths.
“It’s amazing to actually see the animals that we learn about,” said Rabbi Elisha Freedman, the students’ teacher and chaperone. While buying keychains of scorpions encased in plastic, Freedman’s students echoed his sentiment as only 11-year-olds can: “Really cool!”
In two years, Torah Animal World, a taxidermy museum claiming to display every animal mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, has become the final resting place for approximately 350 specimens gathered from taxidermists, zoos and private collectors around the world. The museum, in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, will be complete once Deutsch builds an annex for the sacrificial animals listed in the Torah—oxen, sheep and goats, mostly. But the rooms of this row house-turned-museum are already brimful with $3.5 million worth of wildlife that once traipsed about the ancient Middle East, assembled by one man determined to make Torah-learning a hands-on experience.
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There's even a room devoted to "creeping things." Deutsch has more such projects:
Besides Torah Animal World, Deutsch also runs the Living Torah Museum, a collection of biblical artifacts two doors down, and an animal exhibit in the Catskills featuring the creatures mentioned in the Talmud, the collection of writings on Jewish law. On the horizon is a plan to open a botany museum, with freeze-dried examples of every plant in the Torah. Deutsch also hopes to one day build a full-size model of the Tabernacle, the ancient shrine believed to be the dwelling place of God. His plans are part of a pursuit, he said, to make Jewish scripture both visible and tangible to those as curious as he was. “The things I struggled through,” said Deutsch, “I want to make that available to everybody.”
Finally, some Talmudic exegesis based on an exhibit:
Deutsch then pointed to a massive white snake. Once at a zoo, the zookeeper put a 13-foot boa constrictor around the rabbi’s legs, pulling the snake off only when it reached his chest. The journey took the boa constrictor 11 minutes. “Now, why would I do something like that?” Deutsch asked the group. “Because the Talmud tells us that if you’re standing and praying, even if a snake is around your legs, don’t stop. You have time to finish. It takes him a while till he gets up there.”