|
 |
 advertisement
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Israel's First Astronaut Helps Fulfill Half-Century-Old Promise
By Marcia Dunn
AP Aerospace Writer
posted: 03:30 pm ET
22 January 2003
|
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- A Holocaust survivor who sent a tiny Torah scroll into space with Israel's first astronaut says the flight has allowed him to fulfill a promise he made 59 years ago. Astronaut Ilan Ramon held up the Torah _ the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures _ aboard space shuttle Columbia during a televised conference Tuesday with Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon. 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.''
|
|
|
|
|
