I have nothing to do the rest of the year except going to the beach, so I'll try your idea 
Go ahead, rub my face in it.
Since this circuit calls for leaky germs I think that new germ diodes have little leakage for it, most likely it will work with old ones.
BTW, a reversed diode and its leakage current can be considered like a big mega ohm resistor from B to C?
Taking the question first: no, not quite. A reversed diode acts more like a constant current source (or leak) than it does a resistor. The leakage on a reverse biased semiconductor junction rises over a small-ish few volts of reverse bias, then flattens out a LOT. It's not perfectly flat, but the leakage remains reasonably constant, not rising linearly with reverse voltage like a large resistor would. It was this idea that actually kicked off the Millenium Bypass. It's very, very difficult to get resistors that are consistent to any degree, and much larger than 1M, which is what the Millenium circuit needed.
That being the case, going to an external device to supply "appropriate"
leakage is much simpler. You can choose diodes for leakage, using old unsuitable germanium devices for their collector base or base-emitter junction. You can use two (or more) modern germanium diodes with low leakage for germanium, but still 1000x the leakage of silicon til you get the leakage your circuit likes.
This offers a degree of freedom in using transistors that picking among old germaniums does not.
In combination with piggybacking to lower gain, it may well be possible to trim in a generic silicon transistor to sound like an old, low gain and leaky germanium.
Wow. Who'd have ever thought that there would be a use for deliberately making things worse.
