On December 17, 2012, Youlus began serving a 51-month prison sentence at the federal correctional institution in Otisville, New York.
[2] The co-owner of the Jewish Bookstore of Greater Washington in Wheaton, Maryland,[6] Youlus claimed he had personally traveled to Eastern Europe and beyond to recover Torah scrolls lost or hidden during the Holocaust, including some from the sites of concentration camps at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
[11][12] In January 2010, the Washington Post reported that many Torahs purportedly rescued from Holocaust sites in Eastern Europe appeared to be old Torah scrolls mostly acquired when American congregations closed, and resold at high prices because of Youlus's unsubstantiated assertion that they were rescued from Holocaust-related sites.
[15] Youlus was arrested in Manhattan on fraud charges on August 24, 2011, for claiming to have toured Europe in search of lost or hidden Torah scrolls – the holy Jewish texts containing Hebrew scripture.
He distributed the scrolls among American synagogues and communities, sometimes at inflated rates, and diverted almost one third of $1.2 million into his accounts for personal use.
He had that money transferred to a Jewish bookstore he co-owned in Wheaton, on a pretext of payment for restoring old and damaged scrolls.
He was charged for writing $344,000 in checks to himself from the bookstore account, $200,000 in personal expenses, and for using $90,000 to pay private school tuition fee for his kith and kin.
[20] Youlus offered this confession on February 2, 2012, to Manhattan Federal District Court judge Colleen McMahon:[4][5] Between 2004 and 2010, I falsely represented that I had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls — in particular ways, in particular locations — in Europe and Israel.