Law

Faced with the prospect of an investigation by New York Attorney General Elliott Spitzer’s office into its financial dealings, the World Jewish Congress is close to working out an agreement with its chief inside critic that would include holding the full and independent audit he has been demanding, The Jewish Week has learned.Sources close to the issue say that Stephen Herbits, transition director of the WJC, met this week in Israel with Isi Leibler, a former leader of the Australian Jewish community living in Israel who WJC officials sought to remove as senior vice president this fal

About a year ago, amid allegations of financial improprieties on his part, Bernard Moshe Kahn of Brooklyn quietly resigned as the top executive of HASC, the Hebrew Academy for Special Children, which operates a highly praised Catskills summer camp and other services.Sources close to the institution say that a special audit of the charity’s records found that over the past few years Kahn used well over $1 million in funds from the government-supported charitable organization for personal and other improper expenses, including lavish spending, like a sheva brachot wedding party for his

On the eve of the first World Jewish Congress Assembly in three years, the group’s chief spokesman said he welcomes the prospect of an investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s office into its financial dealings but regrets the failure to resolve internally a conflict over past governance.The WJC Assembly will meet in Brussels for three days starting Sunday, with an expected 500 participants representing 88 Jewish communities from around the world.

Both sides in the increasingly nasty World Jewish Congress feud got what they wanted from the organization’s assembly in Brussels this week. The leadership put on a display of solidarity, with the 540 delegates from around the world not only showing their support for Edgar Bronfman and Israel Singer by re-electing them unanimously as president and chairman, respectively, but by fully embracing their version of the internal dispute about alleged financial mismanagement and lack of governance as baseless and harmful.

Even as a worldwide search was launched to locate and pay insurance policies of Jewish Holocaust victims and their heirs, a major Israeli group rejected offers by the new rightist Austrian government to resolve its outstanding Holocaust-era claims.
"It is imperative that we not fall into Haider's trap and let him use the back of the Jewish people to gain recognition and legitimacy from the world," Salai Meridor, chairman of The Jewish Agency, told The Jewish Week.

At the age of 26, Amy Strong of Forest Hills, seeking to get a better sense of her career goals, sat down at a computer, called up a site on the Internet and answered about 300 questions designed to evaluate her skills, personality and career interests.
Billed as more comprehensive and user friendly than any other career-related program on the Net, the program, called Careervectors.com, was developed three years ago by Barry Lustig, a career counselor at FEGS, the Federation of Employment and Guidance Service.

The pluralism wars that have proved so polarizing in Israel are being played out in another arena locally: a Brooklyn federal courtroom. Attorneys for the state of New York and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver are seeking to defend the constitutionality of the state's 117-year-old kosher laws, which are being challenged by a Long Island butcher.

When he first proudly donned a badge as a Suffolk County cop three decades ago, Howard Mandell walked a beat in Huntington, L.I. He made headlines a few years later when he and his partner foiled a bank robbery in Northport, shooting and killing the gunman.

When Natan Sharansky, the ex-Soviet refusenik turned hard-line Israeli cabinet minister, visited several local universities here last month, he brought a pointed message: Yasir Arafat, he told students at Columbia University and New York University, is an unrepentant ìdictatorî who is an ominous presence dooming peace and must be removed.

Ari Sonesh came up with the idea for his 3-year-old company in the mid-1980s while he was overseeing the computer support system at Comverse Technologies in Woodbury.
"I saw the potential to improve customer support services," he explained. "So I put things together and came up with an idea. I discussed it with Steve [Kowarsky at Comverse] and others, and decided it was an idea I had to commit myself to. So I left Comverse."
Sonesh's idea: Allow customers to speak directly with representatives of a company through its web site.