Posted on 03/30/2005 5:20:45 PM PST by wagglebee
By Alan Elsner WHEATON, Md. (Reuters) - From a crowded bookstore in an bland strip mall in suburban Washington, D.C., Rabbi Menachem Youlus runs a worldwide effort to rescue sacred Torah scrolls from oblivion.
Over the past 13 years, Youlus has found and rescued 435 of the holy Jewish scrolls, which contain the Hebrew text of the first five books of the Bible.
Youlus has found Torahs hidden in old churches and basements in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has found them in antique stores and hoarded in peoples' homes for the past 60 years -- the last remains of Jewish communities wiped out by the Holocaust.
Once in Ukraine, Youlus found two Torahs in a mass grave along with the remains of 263 men, women and children, some still wrapped in clothes bearing the Star of David, which the Nazis forced all Jews to wear.
"I have Torahs with boot marks on them, with bloodstains and cigarette burns, with bayonet rips. The Nazis made desecration of the Torah a central part of their humiliation of Jews," Youlus said.
Creating a Torah is a long, painstaking process. It is written by hand with a quill pen on carefully prepared parchment using ink made out of powdered gall nuts, copper sulfate crystals, gum arabic and water. Each of the 304,805 letters must be perfect.
Synagogues use the scrolls three times a week, reading a prescribed portion as part of a cycle that repeats itself every year. Orthodox Jews believe the Torah was dictated to Moses by God on Mount Sinai.
For many years, Youlus financed his one-man operation out of proceeds from the bookstore he runs with his father. Now, he is backed by a non-profit organization, Save A Torah (www.saveatorah.org), and has agents looking out for him in most eastern European countries. The group says a Torah costs an average $10,000 and it spends about another $10,000 repairing and shipping the scrolls.
Every day, digital photographs of newly located Torahs arrive by e-mail. Youlus is often able to tell by the font, the parchment or the state of the ink where the Torah came from and how old it is.
Over the years, he has had many narrow escapes. Once in Germany, he bought a Torah from an elderly man who was threatening to burn it live on the Internet.
BEATEN UP
"When I gave him the money, he literally threw the Torah at me. I was driving to the airport when two men forced me off the road and beat me up, trying to steal it back. Fortunately, I had already passed it off to an associate who was in a different car. I lost two teeth and got an concussion," Youlus said. Since then, he usually travels with a bodyguard, a former Soviet commando.
Later, Youlus discovered the man who sold the Torah served at the Auschwitz extermination camp and had confiscated it from a Jew on his way to the gas chambers.
"I estimate there are maybe 2,400 or 2,500 more Torahs out there that I know of that can be fixed if we can only raise the funds to buy them," he said.
He knows of 70 being stored in a single antiques shop in the Ukrainian city of Lviv. The owner had been cutting up the parchment and selling it to artists to paint on the back side.
Recently, Youlus has been expanding his activities. He brought a Torah out of northern Iraq and is negotiating through intermediaries with the Syrian authorities to buy a 300-year-old scroll.
He also found a scroll over 300 years old owned by a group of Christians in South America. Youlus speculates they were Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity centuries ago but had preserved their Torah. They agreed to sell it to him and he repaired it and donated it to a Jewish community in the same area.
When he rescues a Torah, Youlus tries to determine if it can be repaired to be used again by a synagogue. Torahs he has rescued now reside in Jewish communities all over the world. If the Torah is too badly damaged, it can still be put on display as a kind of Holocaust memorial.
Ping
And this is why the Nazis must be accursed forever and removed from the earth!
Ironically, today's liberals seem to think that Hitler and the Nazis yimach shemam vezikhram!) were Bible-thumper types who went around trying to prevent abortions and euthenasia and who erected monuments to the Ten Commandments everywhere!
The world has gone completely insane.
Take that, you "higher critics!"
Over the years, he has had many narrow escapes. Once in Germany, he bought a Torah from an elderly man who was threatening to burn it live on the Internet.
I'm left speechless at the stupidity of some people.
And this is why the Nazis must be accursed forever and removed from the earth!
Works for me.
Good News Ping!
No, it has not. The only insane ones are those who believe in denazification hoax.
After WWII tens of thousands of Nazis got off the hook and never paid for their crimes.
What we are experiencing today is not Nazi revival, this is Nazis comming out in the open after many years of being discrete. They were around us all these years.
...including our Reform congregation in Irvine, California. My sister-in-law's congregation in Long Beach has one, too.
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