A Torah scroll from Salt Lake City

About a year ago, the retired Rutgers University professor Seventy-six-year-old Alvin Segelman went to visit Brent Ashworth, an attorney who, for 46 years, has been collecting rare books, manuscripts and art. While he was poking around Ashworth's store, something caught Segelman's eye.
"I noticed, hanging on his wall, what to me was obviously part of a Torah scroll. It struck my attention because the damn thing was hanging upside-down," Segelman recalled with a laugh. "I said, 'Where the hell did you get this thing?' "
Ashworth, who counts among his collectibles a first edition King James Bible from 1611, had been in the market for old Torah scrolls. He'd purchased a fragment from a 500-year-old Moroccan deerskin scroll from a Jerusalem dealer. And along with the piece framed on the wall, he had bought a larger section that is from Eastern Europe and believed to have predated the Holocaust. That one spoke to Segelman, who says Nazis killed 67 of his relatives.
"I said to Brent, 'I think perhaps someone else should look at this thing.' "
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