Tefillin emerge intact from Sea Point fire

When Harel Iluz returned to an apartment destroyed by the recent Sea Point fire, he expected to find nothing intact. The roof had collapsed, the heat had destroyed most of the contents, and his belongings had been reduced to burned and damaged fragments. 

Then he found his tefillin. Left inside a bag on his bed, the parchment scrolls had survived the blaze unscathed. Although the outer covering was badly damaged, the parchment scrolls inside were intact. 

A rabbi subsequently confirmed that they remained kosher. “It was crazy,” Iluz said. “Everything is burned from the outside, but the packet itself and the words, the tefillin, survived.” 

Iluz, an Israeli educator spending a year working in Cape Town’s Jewish community, was one of the residents of the Dorchester on High Level Road when the building caught fire on 30 July. The blaze destroyed several apartments and displaced many residents. Iluz and his fellow educators lost almost all their belongings. 

They were initially unable to return to their apartment because of the extent of the damage. “When we tried to go back, they wouldn’t let us in,” Iluz said. “So only a week later we went back to the apartment to see if anything had survived.” 

The scene he encountered was sobering. “The place is severely damaged. Nothing really survived. The heat was so strong. The roof collapsed.” 

While searching through the remains, Iluz remembered that he’d left his tefillin in a bag on his bed. He found the bag in the centre of the room, surrounded by the remains of his possessions, including his computer, which was a badly damaged mass. 

He managed to remove the tefillin, the outside badly burned. However, the scrolls inside appeared to have survived. 

Iluz didn’t initially know whether the tefillin could still be used. A few days later, he returned to them and carefully opened the damaged outer covering. “The cover itself got damaged a lot,” he said. “I broke it down, but the base itself and the shape of it still looked like it stayed.” 

The tefillin were partly burned, but there was enough of the structure remaining for Iluz to wonder whether they could be salvaged. He subsequently took them to a rabbi for examination. 

The result surprised him. “All the scrolls inside perfectly survived. Nothing was affected, and the ink didn’t go at all.” The rabbi confirmed that the scrolls could still be used. “After getting checked, it’s kosher for everything,” Iluz said. 

The discovery was particularly striking because of what had happened in the room. When Iluz arrived at the apartment, he’d found a satellite antenna on his bed. “I don’t remember putting it there,” he joked. 

Most of his other belongings were destroyed. A few items that did survive were subsequently stolen, including important possessions from a drawer. A book was found intact among the remains. Its title also struck Iluz as significant. The book’s Hebrew title translates to The Power of This Moment. 

For Iluz, however, the tefillin were the most significant item to emerge from the destruction. “They shouldn’t have survived,” he said. 

The discovery comes several weeks after Iluz and other residents fled the fire, in which 93-year-old Sam Strime died from smoke inhalation, and several families lost their homes and possessions. 

During the blaze, Iluz returned to the burning building to help rescue a nanny and two young children trapped inside. The fire left him and his fellow bochurim temporarily without a home. They have since found somewhere to stay and are preparing to return to Israel in September. 

Despite the destruction, Iluz said the discovery of the tefillin had given him something important to hold on to. The objects may be damaged on the outside, but the handwritten Torah passages inside remain intact and kosher for use. 

For Iluz, that makes them more than one of the few possessions to survive the fire. They are the part of his Jewish practice that emerged from an apartment where almost everything else was destroyed.