A Jewish charity co-founder who claimed he crisscrossed the globe rescuing Torahs as a "Jewish Indiana Jones" surrendered Wednesday to face mail and wire fraud charges after authorities said he duped benefactors by fabricating dramatic stories about sometimes dangerous trips, including to concentration camp sites in Poland and Germany.

Menachem Youlus, who owns the Jewish Bookstore in Wheaton, Maryland, was charged in a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan.

Open gallery view Illustration: Torah scrolls from youth village, Israel. Credit: Hagai Fried

The court papers said the 50-year-old Youlus carried out the fraud from at least 2004 through last year, pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars through the "Save a Torah" charity he co-founded in 2004 as a nonprofit organization.

It said he passed off Torahs he bought from U.S. Torah dealers to synagogues and congregations nationwide, sometimes at inflated rates.

It said he received nearly a third of $1.2 million collected by the group, spending some of it on private school tuition for his children and on personal expenses, including meals and health care. The publicly stated mission of the charity was to locate and acquire Torahs that survived the Holocaust or had been taken from Jewish communities worldwide and repair them so they could be used in communities that need them.

According to a criminal complaint prepared by U.S. Postal Inspector Greg Ghiozzi, an application by "Save a Torah" to become a charity listed on the federal government's campaign to encourage donations by federal employees boasted that Youlus had been "dubbed as the present day Jewish 'Indiana Jones.' He has been beaten up, thrown in jail, and gone $175,000 into debt, to bring these holy scrolls out of less-than-friendly places, back to safety and a new life."

At a 2004 Torah dedication, Youlus wrote: "I guess you could call me the Jewish Indiana Jones," the complaint said, referencing the action-adventure hero played by Harrison Ford in the 1981 Stephen Spielberg classic "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

But Ghiozzi wrote that his investigation of Youlus' globe-trotting found no facts to support claims that Youlus rescued the "Auschwitz Torah" in Poland from inside a metal box that he located and unearthed in 2004 using a metal detector.

There was also no evidence that he discovered a Torah in 2002 that had been hidden during World War II under the floor of a barracks at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, Ghiozzi wrote.

The postal inspector wrote that a review of travel records showed that Youlus never traveled to Poland in 2004, making only a two-week trip to Israel, and that he didn't travel internationally from early 2001 to August 2004, when he claimed to have made the trip to Germany.

Ghiozzi said a historian at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial Museum told him Youlus' claims were impossible because the barracks was completely destroyed by the British Army several weeks after the camp was liberated at the end of World War II.

"Youlus told fabricated, untrue accounts of having 'rescued' Torahs that had been lost or hidden during the Holocaust and other times of Jewish persecution around the world, and then used those fabricated accounts as a platform for soliciting contributions to 'Save a Torah,"' Ghiozzi said.

It wasn't immediately clear who would represent Youlus when he appeared Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan.