Detective Mordechai Dzikansky, recalled how he would drop everything when a Torah theft case came in during the ‘90s crime wave. “I’d do everything from Tupac being shot to serial killing,” said Dzikansky, who retired in 2007. But if a Torah theft occurred, he said, “It took priority.”
Inside the Karlsburg synagogue on 53rd Street in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, one light always burns through the evening. Congregants say that Rabbi Yechezkel Roth spends most nights in his shul studying, taking only short naps in his chair while poring over ancient religious texts. But in the early hours of Wednesday, April 28, 2010, the synagogue was dark. Roth and many congregants were in Israel for the holiday Lag BaOmer, which would begin on Saturday evening. The light was out.
One Karlsburg member who did not go to Israel was the rabbi’s grandson, Yitzchok Roth, a youthful man with fair skin, a frizzy brown beard, and shoulder-length payes, or side-curls. At 6 a.m. Wednesday, Yitzchok Roth arrived at the synagogue for his morning prayers. He noticed that the door to the ark, the cabinet containing the synagogue’s Torah scrolls, was ajar.
He looked inside at the safe where the scrolls are kept, and found it empty. Sometime during the night, the synagogue’s five Torahs and their silver ornaments had been stolen. Roth called 911.