Tuesday, January 26th, 2010...4:56 am
Menachem Youlus - “The Indiana Jones of Torah Scribes”
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“Reached for comment about the Auschwitz Torah, Poland’s chief rabbi, American Michael Schudrich, responds in an e-mail: “I cannot confirm anything that Menachem has written. I do not know the people he is referring to.” Youlus’s discovery is also a mystery to Tomasz Kuncewicz, director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center, which cares for the Oswiecim cemetery, and to Dorota Wiewiora, head of the tiny Jewish community still living in the region. She is dismayed at the idea that someone would dig among human remains. And, Wiewiora adds, if such a Torah really was dug up, it would rightfully be the property of her community. “No one would sell it. It’s not ethical.” ” more@WashingtonPost.com
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January 29th, 2010 at 5:07 am
I am the “nephew” referred to in the first paragraph of the Washington Post story.
Like my Uncle Bob, I can’t agree with those who call Youlus’s stories “Midrash,” or say that they serve a greater truth. On the contrary, it seems that he makes them up himself to create a market, and to inflate the prices of the Torahs he acquires who knows how - probably on the Eastern European “gray market” he himself refers to. The story of “corrupt museum curators” rings true to me. I know that curators of archives in Belarus and elsewhere did the same thing with pages of census records that were of value to Western genealogists. No doubt these curators were underpaid - if they were paid at all after the fall of Communism - but that IMO does not excuse their crime: the deliberate erasure of history.
If Youlus’s stories are untrue - and the Post article certainly raises that suspicion - then he himself is guilty of the same crime. How ironic that he claims to be doing just the opposite!
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