A moving torah dedication ceremony was recently held in an unlikely location, aboard the USS Harry S. Truman. The ceremony was held in the mimitz-class carrier’s hangar bay.

The Torah was one of the few scrolls from Lithuania to survive the Holocaust. Technically it is on-loan to the USS Truman by the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater for forty-one years or the life of the ship. It is estimated that less than 5 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish population survived the Holocaust.