Torah flies aboard shuttle

[Guest guest]

Torah flies aboard shuttle with Israel's first astronaut, fulfilling

a 59-year-old promise

By Marcia Dunn, Associated Press, 1/21/2003 17:16

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) Israel's first astronaut held up a tiny

Torah scroll aboard space shuttle Columbia on Tuesday, fulfilling a

promise made by a Holocaust survivor 59 years ago.

 

Astronaut Ilan Ramon showed the Torah to Israel's prime minister,

Ariel Sharon, during a televised conference.

 

Watching with emotion from a NASA control center in Greenbelt, Md.,

was the Torah's owner, Joachim Joseph, a 71-year-old atmospheric

physicist at Tel Aviv University who is overseeing an Israeli

experiment aboard the shuttle.

 

The scientist received the Torah from a rabbi while both were

imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1944. Joseph

had just turned 13, and the rabbi secretly arranged a 4 a.m. bar

mitzvah ceremony in the prisoners' barracks.

 

''After the ceremony, he said, `You take this, this scroll that you

just read from, because I will not leave here alive. But you must

promise me that if you get out, you'll tell the story,''' Joseph

recalled.

 

The rabbi was killed two months later.

 

Joseph was freed from the Bergen-Belsen camp in a prisoner exchange

in 1945, one month before it was liberated by the Americans and

British.

 

Ramon, whose mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz death

camp, visited the scientist's home two years ago and saw the

Torah. ''He was deeply affected. He almost cried,'' Joseph said. The

astronaut asked if he could take the Torah with him into space.

 

''This represents more than anything the ability of the Jewish people

to survive despite everything from horrible periods, black days, to

reach periods of hope and belief in the future,'' Ramon told Sharon

and other Israeli government officials in Jerusalem.

 

Joseph said: ''I feel now that I finally was able to fulfill my

promise to Rabbi Dasberg 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago, and

then on a grand scale, and I'm very grateful to Ilan for making it

possible.''

 

On the Net:

 

Tel Aviv University: www.tau.ac.il/geophysics/MEIDEX.home.htm