Something like five people have forwarded me an interesting
article about a Torah scroll dealer from Baltimore who apparently cooks up a delicious story to sell with every old Torah that he sells to Conservative and Reform congregations.
Touting his expertise in dating parchment, Youlus says he has studied with curators "in Europe," but pressed to say with whom he has studied, he won't give names.
Personally I think paleographical expertise might be a little more useful, but maybe I'm wrong about that. Cough
ShapiraCough.
In a 3-hour interview, Youlus is unable to provide a single name, date, place, photograph or document to back up the Auschwitz stories or any of the others. He says that until Save a Torah was founded in 2004, he kept no records. He refers all requests for documentation since then to the foundation's president, investment banker Rick Zitelman of Rockville.
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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.
The irony is that pious Jews do not usually call myth 'midrash.'
