Israeli entrepreneur dreams of flying a Torah to the Moon

“The Torah is going to the moon.” It sounds like a phrase straight out of a Jewish fairytale or children’s book, but the real-life Torah on the Moon initiative is not as pie-in-the-sky as one might think. 

French-Israeli entrepreneur Haim Aouizerate is asking the Jewish community to help fund a project that aims to send a Torah scroll to the moon to celebrate the ancient book’s innumerable contributions to morality, justice, education, culture, and more.

The idea was launched about three years ago, when high-tech wiz Aouizerate saw technology ravaging his children. They would come home from school, throw their bags on the floor, and go from screen to screen, he recalls.

“To Aouizerate, it seemed like they were living their lives entirely based on 15-second sound bites and videos, with no depth to them,” says Elie Klein, a spokesperson for Torah on the Moon. “It is not easy for children—or anyone—to connect unless they have the correct foundation and the correct push in the right direction. He knew he needed to do something big, a big stunt, to help people refocus their lives away from technology and more on their culture, heritage, and the legacy they should leave the next generation.”

Inspired by the Google Lunar XPRIZE, a $30 million competition to land a privately funded robot on the moon, Aouizerate determined to catch the Torah a ride on one of these vehicles.

“Modernity has brought the significant blessing of technology to humanity,” Aouizerate tells JNS.org. “However, with this blessing, comes a loss of respect for the written word. Our goal is to reconnect people of all faiths with their identities, values, and roots by allowing the Torah, the world’s oldest code of conduct and law, to take center stage in a way previously thought unimaginable: a one-way, crowdfunded trip to the Moon. To put it in the simplest terms, we are launching a Torah to keep our society grounded.”