But there are doubts about his thrilling tales ( 4 )

But there are doubts about his thrilling tales ( 4 ). What's also hard to ascertain is how the two Torahs Youlus says he found in a mass grave in Ukraine wound up in the hands of five different buyers.

The first was Martin Ingall, 50, of Potomac, who reported Youlus's discovery to the Jewish genealogical newsletter. Its August, 2001, issue states that Ingall, president of Technology Information in Rockville, bought one of the two Torahs and suggested that someone else might want the second. After reading this, Kushner then purchased what Youlus told him was the second scroll.

Rabbi Menachem Youlus regales believers with dramatic stories of Holocaust-era scrolls he says he has rescued and restored. But are his tales true?

But another Pennsylvania couple, Phyllis and David Malinov, also read the notice and felt a tug on their heartstrings. Phyllis, 71, knew her mother had immigrated from Kamenets-Podolsk. So the couple, a teacher and a physician, headed off to the Wheaton bookstore. After they told Youlus about their family connection to the town, David Malinov, 72, recalls, the scribe "was in favor of our receiving the Torah."

They paid about $10,000, they say, for what Youlus told them was one of two Torahs, and took it back to their Jewish fellowship group in Pike County, Pa. Around the same time, the Pearlstone Conference and Retreat Center outside Baltimore, which caters to Jewish organizations, was looking for a Torah.

The center's executive director, Carol Pristoop, wrote down the incredible story that Youlus told the Pearlstone donors, who paid $10,000 for the scroll. She saved her notes, which state the Pearlstone Torah is one of two found in a mass grave.

Hantman also remembers Youlus telling her that her Westchester County congregation was receiving one of two Torahs from the mass grave. Youlus declines to explain how five parties believed they had one of these two Torahs. But Zitelman says: "There's a total of eight Torahs -- two that were in the mass grave and six that were from the general community. I don't know what Rabbi Youlus said specifically to anybody."

When Hantman hears about the mystically multiplying Torahs, she pauses and says she has to gather her thoughts: "I hope you've read 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' At the end, a truth is concealed for the better good of the community. ... If there is any deception going on ... also think about what he's done that's good." She wrestles with what she has heard. "Destroying this man, if he is guilty of what you suspect, may very well be in service of the truth but in disservice of a greater truth," Hantman says. What, for Hantman, is the greater truth? "The Jewish reverence for the past, for heritage and for those who suffered and died because of the Nazis."

Clark University professor Deborah Dwork, co-author of a history of Auschwitz, says she has an "allergic reaction" to the notion of a greater truth, because, she says, such tales can play into the hands of Holocaust deniers. For her, the historical record must be "absolutely crystal clear. Anything that deviates from that one whit does the memory of the Holocaust a huge disservice," she says.

So why have so many of Youlus's customers accepted his dramatic rescue stories without evidence? Is it because he carries the title "Rabbi"? Or is it because so many unimaginable things did happen during the Holocaust? Perhaps, as sociologist Samuel Heilman says: "There's a sensitivity because of Holocaust denial. If you say some stories aren't true, you may have to say that all stories are not true.

So best not to touch on a sensitive topic." Heilman -- who has written numerous books about Jewish communities and is a professor at City University of New York -- suggests that some American Jews feel guilty: "They didn't manage to rescue the people, so they rescue the Torahs." Dwork has her own theory: "The loss was so devastating that we crave tales of survival."

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David Rubenstein does not want any lingering doubts about provenance to taint the Torah he donated to New York's Central Synagogue, or another scroll he donated to the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in downtown Washington. Youlus said that Torah was read by inmates at the Dachau concentration camp.

But the archivist at Dachau, Albert Knoll, says he has no record of a Torah being smuggled into the camp. After Rubenstein was told that experts questioned the stories about the Torahs, he hired noted Holocaust historian Michael Berenbaum, 64, to investigate. Berenbaum, a former director of the research institute at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, spent an hour and a half with Youlus, spoke with people in Poland and searched through archives and oral histories. "Based on Dr. Berenbaum's investigation," Rubenstein wrote in a September e-mail, "we cannot fully and unquestionably establish that the Torahs are what I had been led to believe." Rubenstein asked Berenbaum to find Torahs "whose Holocaust provenance is not in question.

When such Torahs are located and secured, I will donate them to the synagogues -- to ensure they will have what I originally intended them to have." Since then, Berenbaum says, he has secured a replacement Torah for Central Synagogue from a Romanian collection recently transferred to Israel. Sixth & I will receive a scroll from Poland. The Carlyle Group reports that Rubenstein is also paying for the restoration of a historic building for Jewish youth in Poland "as a sign of goodwill and appreciation."

As for Youlus's Torah rescue stories, Berenbaum came to his own conclusion. "A psychiatrist might say they are delusional. A historian might say they are counter-factual. A pious Jew might call them midrash -- the stories we tell to underscore the deepest truths we live," he says. Midrash, in this context, refers to the ancient tradition of rabbis telling anecdotes and fables to convey a moral lesson. "Myth underscores the deepest truth we live," Berenbaum says.

But for Kushner, who to honor his father bought a Torah he believed was from a mass grave, "It's better that I should know the truth than I should go on the rest of my life believing in a myth."

Rabbi to the Rescue: Menachem Youlus is called the Indiana Jones of Torah recovery and restoration. But there are doubts about his thrilling tales.

( washingtonpost.com )