Source: Huffington Post
Religion News Service | By David Gibson Posted: 01/05/2014 11:15 am EST
BROOKLYN, N.Y. (RNS) The Torah Animal World exhibit can seem a bit like the zombie version of Noah’s Ark — 350 animals crowded into a row house museum in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, at least one of every species mentioned in the first five books of the Bible, and then some.
But they’re all stuffed, and now the museum isn’t looking too good either: Its director, Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, says he needs $1 million to keep the place open or he’ll have to relocate the odd but fascinating — and instructive — menagerie to the Catskills. This is no joke.
“I want to change the way people learn about the Bible,” an animated Deutsch said as he handed out ancient artifacts to a pair of women touring the various displays.
“I believe that if you touch history, history touches you,” he explained as he walked through a series of rooms, their walls painted various shades of bright blue to better show off the biblical bestiary. “Why are museums boring? Because everything is behind glass!”
For Deutsch, 47, it’s all about making the old and beloved stories of the Scriptures come alive for contemporary audiences, especially children.
The bearded rabbi, wearing the distinctive black garments and white shirt favored by strictly Orthodox Jews, has three attached homes in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood; one is his home and another houses the Living Torah Museum and a remarkable collection of artifacts from pre-modern Israel that illustrate the history recounted in the Bible.
For years, Deutsch’s fellow rabbis kept telling him how their students grew excited by the citations of so many different animals in the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and in the Talmud, the ancient compendium of Jewish teaching and wisdom.
And Deutsch himself was “sick and tired” of watching kids sit in class trying to learn only by listening or reading. So he started collecting the Torah taxidermy and opened Torah Animal World in 2008 in the third venue. All of the specimens died of natural causes, he swears, and were not hunted in the wild: “Instead of turning them into a fur coat I use them for education.”
Many of the animals are quickly recognizable from the Bible: serpents and rams, of course, and an ox and a lamb, a lion and an antelope.
But he also has species that may not immediately leap to the mind of even the more attentive Sunday school student — such as the wolf, because of the verse in Genesis that compares Benjamin to “a ravenous wolf.” Or the Arabian oryx, whose long straight horns — and a later mistranslation in the King James Version of the Bible — may have been the source of a scriptural reference to a unicorn.