“I just want to thank you once again for making possible such a moving and memorable day with the Lithuanian Jewish community,” Judah Passow said in the note.

“It was an honour and a privilege to be with all of you. I’m especially grateful to you for the time and effort you put into making what began as an idea a year ago into a reality,” he wrote.

Judah Passow’s father, professor David Passow at Philadelphia University, received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to commemorate Jewish life behind the iron curtain in 1960. When he went to Vilnius that same year, local Jewish leaders asked him to take away with him one of two Torah scrolls which were used in the Vilnius ghetto and survived the Holocaust intact, saying they were unsure what the future held for Jews in the Soviet Union. The Passows protected the Torah ever since then, for 56 years, and used it for three bar mitzvahs in the family. When he came to Vilnius last year for a showing of his photography work, Judah Passow met Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky and the idea was fleshed out of returning the scroll to Vilnius. Just last week Passow returned the Torah dating from the time of Vilna Gaon, with a silver decoration his mother Aviva Passow made for the scroll.