One Torah, said to have been in Auschwitz, has been in the ark at one of New York’s most prominent synagogues since 2008. A second Torah joined it on Monday night, as the synagogue, Central Synagogue in Manhattan, observed Holocaust Remembrance Week.

It has a back story — one that the rabbi, Peter J. Rubinstein, hopes will prove less problematic than the first one’s, which, it turns out, may not be entirely believable.

The Law and Order plot (Season 16, “Bible Story”) involves “the murder of a man found desecrating a Torah outside of a synagogue is tied to the feud between a devout Jewish business owner and his more secular cousin”. There’s a further discussion of the plot and Judaism here.

Under oath,  Rabbi Geller (Allan Miller) admitted that he and Speicher’s father actually purchased the Chumash  in a used book store after failing to locate the hidden one during their trip to Poland  Astonished, prosecutor Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) demanded to know why they would fabricate the story that it was the real hidden Chumash?

“How do I explain this to you, Mr. McCoy?,” Rabbi Geller responded. “The Bible is full of stories that may be apocryphal.  Do we believe that Methuselah lived 900 years or that Moses parted the Red Sea?  Their truth is in the inspiration that we gather from them.  And this particular book inspired a lot of people.  Even if it isn’t the same book, it is a symbol of our survival.  I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”

Oy.

When the Gestapo raided the hiding place in the annex to Otto Frank’s business office on Aug. 4, 1944, and arrested its eight occupants, it left behind his daughter Anne’s diary and her writings on loose sheets of papers. The journals recounted life in those rooms behind a movable bookcase and the hopes of a girl on the brink of womanhood. Mrs. Gies gathered up those writings and hid them, unread, hoping that Anne would someday return to claim them.

But when Anne’s father, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam at the end of World War II, having been liberated from Auschwitz, he was the lone survivor of the family. Anne Frank had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three months before her 16th birthday. Her sister, Margot, died there at age 19 and their mother, Edith Frank, died at Auschwitz.

Mrs. Gies gave Anne’s writings to Mr. Frank, and they were first published in the Netherlands in 1947 in an abridged version. “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” has since been translated into dozens of languages in several editions, read by millions and adapted for the stage and screen, a voice representing the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

… the internal wrestling never ends. The search for truth must always be first; and religion is nothing if it is not true. Which is why doubt can never be a danger. Banishing doubt is the danger.