Technology

How much would you pay for a few shards of twisted steel or some quarter-inch-diameter steel balls?
If the metal items are the remnants of Katyusha rockets fired at Israel in recent weeks, the going rate is at least $52 and $24.99, respectively. Those were the high bids offered, as of early this week, by potential customers on the Internet eBay.com auction site.

An empty picture frame at Rodger Kamenetz’s seder table this year is not an empty gesture.
Kamenetz sees Tibet in the frame.

Still reeling from the shocking deaths of their rabbi and his wife in a fierce house fire last Friday night, the congregants of Young Israel of Scarsdale this week were gathering photos and videos of the couple from their own family albums — taken at simchas and other gatherings — to share with the four Rubenstein children.

Passover or tennis? Passover or politics? Passover or crustaceans?
Members of the Jewish community are this year facing — and in increasing numbers, protesting — the need to make such choices at Passover.
Newspaper and Web sites around the country have reported a wide range of conflicts for Jews who wish to observe the holiday, which coincides with events scheduled in apparent disregard for the Jewish calendar. This year, the Jewish community is fighting back.

As far back as the Munich Olympics of 1972, Palestinian terrorists and their supporters have used kidnapping as a political tool, abducting Israeli civilians and soldiers to be used in potential prisoner swaps and to obtain other concessions from Israel. Following is a chronology of prominent Israeli kidnappings and MIA cases:
1972: Members of the Black September terrorist group sneak into the Olympic Village in Munich and take 11 members of the Israeli delegation hostage. All 11 are killed.

A new and more serious indictment — possibly including rape charges — may be filed as early as next week against Israel’s disgraced former president Moshe Katsav after his withdrawal Tuesday from a plea deal that would have kept him out of jail.
“I want to fight for my innocence,” Katsav told a three-judge panel in Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court. “I have been thinking about this for a long time, and it was finalized in my mind today.”

Stuart Wolfer, who grew up in Dix Hills, L.I., surprised his parents on a visit back home during his freshman year in college when he announced he was going to join the ROTC military training program and eventually serve in the U.S. Army.
“We’re not army people. This is not your personality,” his father, Len, told him.
“I only go around once. I want to try everything,” Stuart Wolfer answered.

A speech technology researcher and a pharmacist from nearby New Jersey have devoted the last 15 years to the Haggadah’s Four Questions. But this year they are answering one question.
Why?

A middle-aged school administrator in Los Angeles, Hershey Fellig has been battling kidney failure for five years. Feeling tired each day, he was following a strict diet, taking a regimen of pills, waiting for a kidney donor and praying that someone would call with good news. A year ago someone called. Lauren Finkelstein, a stranger from New York, told Fellig she’d help get him a donor.

A major educational publisher has withdrawn from the market a new book about Israel containing a passage that a prominent Orthodox organization found offensive, and it has agreed to destroy remaining copies of the book.
Scholastic Library Publishing said it took that step after receiving a series of complaints from Agudath Israel of America about “Israel: Enchantment of the World,” a reference book published in 2006.