Israeli Astronaut Shows Torah Aboard Shuttle
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Israel’s first astronaut held up a tiny Torah scroll aboard space shuttle Columbia, fulfilling a promise by the scroll’s owner to tell the story of the Holocaust.
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.
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