They showed their joy by joining hands and dancing in the streets as they escorted the new scroll along under a white canopy. A keyboard filled the air with Jewish folk music as onlookers clapped, sang and marched along behind  the heavy scroll, covered, in velvet and crowned in silver. The men took turns carrying it.

 The ceremony marked a major milestone Sunday in the life of Young Israel of Lawrenceville, an Orthodox Jewish congregation on the Princeton Pike. With a pomp that was part wedding, part parade, the community celebrated the dedication of the brand new Torah scroll it had commissioned almost two years ago.

The event is a rarity some Jewish people never experience. Even then, many of the Torahs bought by congregations are used and have often been repaired. Commissioning a new Torah from a scribe is even rarer.

Bill Agress, a Lawrence resident who was master of ceremonies for the event, said, according to rabbis in town, all the other Torahs came from other synagogues, making the new scroll at Young Israel the first new Torah ever written for a congregation in Lawrence.

Rabbi Yitzchak Goldenberg, leader of Young Israel since 2001, said when God gave Jewish peo­ple the Torah, God and the peo­ple became one, like a marriage, which is why the wedding can­opy is used in the dedication cer­emony.

The Torah contains the first five books of the Hebrew scrip­tures, also known as the Books of Moses. It contains the complete body of Jewish religious law and learning, including sacred literature and oral tradition.

As Goldenberg described it, the Torah is the bedrock of the Jewish people, connecting them to each other and the eternal God. In times of trial, tribulation and persecution, they found their hope and strength in God's word. "When our grandparents were forced to flee their homes in the past, the Torah was always one of the first objects they would take along with them to their un­known destinations," Goldenberg said. "Where we kept the Torah, the Torah kept us."

The Young Israel community in Lawrenceville decided to com­mission its own Torah about two years ago. The synagogue already had three scrolls, but they were from other synagogues, such as the former Congregation Workers of Truth on West State Street, scrolls that dated back about 40 years with each one having some damage. It was eventually decided that the con­gregation needed a Torah scroll of its own.

Commissioning a new Torah was a major undertaking for the community of about  30 families founded in 1971 that met for its first 20 years in the homes of various members before finding a permanent home in 1991.

The creation of a new scroll is time-consuming and costly. The scroll is handwritten in Hebrew by a trained scribe who writes each letter of the Torah on parchment using a quill.

Every scroll is copied letter for letter, column for column, from another scroll. Under Jewish law, each letter must be perfect, and must never touch another letter. Every word must be spelled correctly; a missing, transposed or extra letter invali­dates the entire scroll. "If one letter is missing, it cannot be used," Goldenberg said.

A brand new scroll can cost between $20,000 and $60,000 and takes more than a year to com­plete. The restoration of an older scroll costs between $10,000 and $16,000. Scrolls can often be bought second-hand, even on e-Bay.

Young Israel members wanted to commission a scribe in Israel to support the struggling economy there. They hired Rabbi Eliezer Alperowitz of Rechovot. The scroll cost about $30,000 and took about a year and a half to complete.

"It unified our community," Goldenberg said. "Everybody did what they could to make it happen." People made contributions large and small, he said.

On Sunday, supporters were able to take part in the comple­tion of the scroll. The Rabbi Do­vid Steigman, a scribe from New York, filled in the last few para­graphs of the scroll during the ceremony before the parade. One by one, families approached and Steigman inscribed a letter in the Torah representing each person's name.

Synagogue members were looking forward to reading from the new Torah yesterday for the holiday of Shavuot, which cele­brates the day the Jewish people were given the Torah at Sinai. It seemed a fitting holiday to read the Ten Commandments from a new Torah.

Authored by: Krystal Knapp of the Trenton Times. Contact her at kknapp@njtimes.com or at (609) 989-5707.