A charity founder who claimed he travelled the world as a "Jewish Indiana Jones" to rescue Torahs admitted to fraud in a Manhattan court last week.
Rabbi Menachem Youlus, 50, co-founded the Save a Torah charity in 2004 with the aim of retrieving and restoring holy scrolls that had survived the Holocaust or had been forcibly taken from Jewish communities. The charity promised to place these Torahs in active Jewish communities.
Youlus has admitted to lying about daring trips to locations across Europe and Israel, including the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. During his plea, he admitted to fabricating elaborate and detailed accounts of Torah rescue-missions and retracted claims of having personally used a metal detector to unearth a metal box with Torah scrolls in Auschwitz.
A buyer paid around $32,000 for the "Auschwitz" Torah and donated it to a prominent Manhattan synagogue which staged a large ceremony on its reception.
