Free Republic

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...

Maj. David Rosner, shown here in a C-130 tranport plane, has worked on both the military and post-war operations in Iraq. When Rabbi Mitchell Ackerson blew the shofar this past Rosh Hashanah, it reverberated throughout one of Saddam Hussein´s former palaces. More than 100 Jewish members of the U.S. forces stationed in Iraq attended the High Holiday services at the former Iraqi dictator´s Baghdad compound. They seemed shocked and awed, not least by the echo. "It was a 25-foot ceiling, so it really goes," Ackerson said, describing the shofar´s blast in a telephone interview from Baghdad on Monday. Many of...