Rabbi who Sold Phony Holocaust Torahs Gets Four Years in Jail

 Holocaust Torahs Peddlar

Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who was called a Jewish Indiana Jones and provided Torahs through a charity while fraudulently claiming they had been rescued after being hidden or lost during the Holocaust, was sentenced to just over four years in prison on Thursday by a judge who called his scheme sad and incomprehensible.

 “As nearly as I can tell,” Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court in Manhattan said, “the reason is that Mr. Youlus had a screw loose, that Mr. Youlus has this desire to be something he’s not, which is an adventurer, a hero.”

Rabbi Youlus, 51, had pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud; prosecutors said that he had fabricated accounts of finding Torahs at concentration camps like Auschwitz. The Torahs were then provided to others by a charity he had co-founded and which, prosecutors said, he defrauded by seeking reimbursement for doctored or inflated expenses or by diverting donations to himself.

Judge McMahon also ordered that Rabbi Youlus pay victim restitution of $990,000.

The judge had received many letters from victims, describing their humiliation at learning of the fraudulent provenance of the Torahs they had bought in honor of loved ones.

Three victims addressed her in court. One, Robert Kushner, a retired lawyer from Pittsburgh, had paid $14,000 for a Torah and donated it to his synagogue in memory of his deceased father. He said later that Rabbi Youlus had told him falsely that the Torah was found in a mass grave in the town where his father was born in Southern Ukraine.

Mr. Kushner said of his decision to address the court: “I thought in my father’s memory, it was terribly important for me to do so.” He added later that he thought the sentence was “appropriate.”

A prosecutor, Nicole Friedlander, told the judge that Rabbi Youlus’s crime was “egregious” and “sustained.” She added, “He relied on his status as a clergy member to commit it.”

Mr. Youlus looked grim during the hearing. “There is nothing that I can say that will excuse my conduct,” he told the judge. “I know that I have sinned before God, and also violated the laws of a wonderful country that has been good to me and my family.”

His lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, made a strong appeal for leniency. He acknowledged his client had committed “a horrific crime,” but argued that Rabbi Youlus, who has nine children, had spent his life helping people. He also said the money the rabbi had taken was not spent on fancy cars or homes. There were “ no trappings of wealth,” he said.

The sentence was at the bottom of the recommended federal guideline range.

Judge McMahon said she grieved for the pain the victims felt. “I love those five books,” she said. “They’re probably, just in terms of literary merit, among the five best books ever written.

“And I have to believe,” she added, “that what they contain can somehow be divorced from what has happened here.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/nyregion/rabbi-called-jewish-indiana-jones-is-sentenced-in-torah-plot.html?_r=0