A natural worry attaches to any project that gathers a community's sacred manuscripts into a national library: that the objects, once catalogued and photographed by outsiders, effectively leave the community that has always read them. The National Library of Israel's program around Beta Israel sacred texts, of which the Orit Scroll of Kes Abba Yitzhak Aysu is one documented example, was built to avoid exactly that outcome.
The library's own digitization initiative, run in partnership with Tel Aviv University's Department of Biblical Studies and the Koret Center for Jewish Civilization, works from a specific principle: manuscripts get high resolution digital scans made freely available online, while the physical originals mostly stay with the families and Kessim, the community's ordained priests, who have always held them. The Kes Abba Yitzhak manuscript, already donated outright to the library, is something of an exception within the program rather than its model case.
What the broader effort documents is not a single object but a living practice. Seventeen manuscripts recorded in one recent workshop alone ranged from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, evidence that the Orit has been copied, corrected and carried forward by named individuals for half a millennium rather than frozen at some single ancient point. A digitization project can make that history visible without asking anyone to give up the book they still read from.