We will never hear all the stories that could be told about the doomed space shuttle Columbia, which exploded on Feb. 1, 2003.
But “Mission of Hope†tells one, or two really, that find marvelous inspiration inside the tragedy.
“Mission,†whose executive producers include Tom Hanks, focuses on Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who was killed with his six colleagues in the explosion.
Ramon's own story as an Israeli war hero is fascinating enough. But then the film turns to an item he carried on that final mission: a miniature Torah a rabbi managed to conceal when he was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by the Nazis in World War II.
The rabbi used that Torah to hold a bar mitzvah for a young boy. He then told the boy to keep the Torah and survive the war, so its message would be kept alive.
The boy, Joachim Joseph, did survive, and so did the Torah. Joseph grew up to be a scientist who worked with Ramon on the Columbia mission, which is how the Torah came to be on board.
The Torah was never found after Columbia went down. The message of the rabbi, the boy and the astronaut could not be more enduring.
dhinckley@nydailynews.com
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