Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 10, 1995                   TAG: 9507100135
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TEL AVIV, ISRAEL                                 LENGTH: Short

OLDEST TORAH SMUGGLED INTO ISRAEL

The Aleppo Codex was written in Tiberias some 1,000 years ago. It was the first known Old Testament produced in book form rather than on scrolls, said Bible scholar Menachem Cohen of Tel Aviv's Bar-Ilan University.

It is considered the most authoritative and grammatically perfect Old Testament in existence, Cohen said.

The book is believed to have been seized in Jerusalem by Crusaders in the 12th century and sold to Jews in Alexandria, Egypt. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides studied it while composing some of his most important religious works, Cohen said.

It then ended up with the Jews of Aleppo in northern Syria. They guarded the book jealously, rarely allowing outsiders to see it.

The Aleppo Jews told Syrian authorities the book was lost when their synagogue burned down in anti-Jewish riots after the United Nations voted to establish the state of Israel in 1947.

But about two-thirds of it - 295 pages - were smuggled to Israel in the 1950s.

Syrian Jewish immigrants have now brought the missing pages to Israel, the Yediot Ahronot daily said in an unattributed report Sunday. The paper did not give further details.

Cohen said the missing parchments could be ``a very great asset'' for researchers trying to reconstruct the original text of the Jewish Bible. He said currently published editions still contain dozens of imperfections.