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p>Sikhs from New Orleans used equipment popular with Navy SEALs to rescue their copy of the Guru Granth Sahib from a gurdwara under nine feet of water (via Amardeep):

… the United Sikhs sought the help of one of its volunteer Ranbir Kaur, a US Army National Guard [soldier], to hire the rescue services of SRT, a private helicopter special response… firm… [The] operation… lasted over a period of 22 hours…

Zodiac boats equipped with underwater cameras and rescue equipment were used to reach the flooded gurdwara, which was completely damaged inside, but [the] Guru Granth Sahib was on the ‘palki’ (palanquin) and floating on water. “I was amazed, looking at the Guru Sahib’s ‘sukhasan’ on the palki, floating on 5 feet of water and untouched by the flood waters,” Hardayal Singh was quoted as saying. [Link]

The immense value the Sikhs place on this religious artifact reminds me of synagogues’ ingenious solution to the theft of Torah scrolls. To protect priceless ancient work, they’re using digital watermarking:

Like many Torah scrolls in active service, the one stolen from Temple Sholom last month is an antique, and is believed to have been crafted in the Middle East several hundred years ago… With a fair market value of around $50,000 for a new scroll, $9,000 for a used one, Judaism’s sacred text is in some ways a perfect underground commodity… Torah scrolls are inherently anonymous. Jewish law dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah’s text. That means no “property of” stamps, no serial numbers, no visible identifying marks of any kind…

A rabbi uses the template to perforate the coded pattern into the margins of the scroll with a tiny needle. To keep an enterprising thief from swapping the perforated segment with a section from another stolen scroll in some kind of twisted Torah chop shop, the registry recommends applying the code to 10 different segments of the scroll. Pollack says the code contains self-authentication features that keep a thief from invalidating it by just adding an extra hole in an arbitrary location… [Link]

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p>Here’s another solution, bibliometrics:

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… the International Torah Registry takes advantage of the handcrafted nature of the Torahs. Though the content is always the same, the position of the lettering varies from scroll to scroll, making each Torah as individual as a halachic snowflake. By measuring the distances between letters at certain standardized points, and entering them into a computer program, Machon Ot generates a 20-digit number that uniquely identifies each Torah. [Link]

Here’s more on soldier Ranbir Kaur and the press release about the rescue.