Paris

For Israel, the pressure has lifted — for now. After weeks of escalating criticism, the Clinton administration has suddenly taken a more benign tack in its dealings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s meetings with Netanyahu and with Palestinian Authority chief Yasir Arafat last week reset the clock for the two leaders to make some fateful decisions — decisions that so far they have studiously avoided.

Scathed but far from destroyed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now has the same secret weapon that has long served Palestinian chief Yasir Arafat so well when dealing with Washington: his weakness.

Columbia University history professor Simon Schama stood at the podium in the Center for Jewish History's auditorium Sunday night relating how the desecration of hundreds of Jewish graves in England last week had affected him personally.
"The headstones of my uncle and great-aunt were turned over," when 386 Jewish graves were damaged in East London, he said.
Thus began a three-day international conference in New York on the rise of global anti-Semitism.

The "Jewish" cardinal from Paris arrived here Monday to help launch an innovative weeklong program to teach French priests about Jewish life, New York style.
Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Jewish-born Roman Catholic archbishop of Paris, delivered a 40-minute address about the future of Catholic-Jewish relations during a dinner sponsored by the World Jewish Congress attended by about 50 interfaith observers.

The New York Police Department is planning to put its officers through a new police tolerance training center being launched in Manhattan next year by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, The Jewish Week has learned.
Police Commissioner Howard Safir has held several discussions with Wiesenthal Center founder Rabbi Marvin Hier about using its Tools for Tolerance program to sensitize the nation's largest police force, which has been rocked by a series of tragic incidents involving ethnic minorities.

His given name is Aaron, the same as the first High Priest of the Children of Israel. He wears garments similar to those worn more than 2,000 years ago by the kohanim (Jewish priests) in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
But this Aaron, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland whose mother died in Auschwitz, is a priest of a different kind. Having converted to Catholicism at the age of 15, he has risen to become Archbishop of Paris.

In Hebrew and Aramaic he was known as Jacob or Yakov. He was a son of a late Second Temple period carpenter named Joseph.

And like Robert from the hit sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” he was the forgotten brother of a much more popular sibling.

But Jacob, better known to the world as James the Just, was actually no slouch. In Jerusalem, he led a religious congregation of observant Jews devoted to his brother’s memory and teachings until he was also put to death, in the year 63 CE.

Philanthropists partnering up to match new donations to Jewish day schools in the United States, and social service and educational causes in Israel, are producing millions of new dollars in contributions for both areas.

Paris — Nestled among Parisian gefilte fish proprietors, pickled herring vendors and boulangeries stocked with chocolate rugelach, an Israeli restaurateur yanks otherwise oblivious customers into his teeming falafel palace while Chabad boys sell palm fronds for Sukkot across the cobblestone Rue des Rosiers.

In the Marais, the traditional Jewish quarter of the French capital, neon leaflets advertise Hebrew classes and nearly every shop window has a stamp of approval from the Beth Din of Paris.

The publisher wanted a suggestion for the cover of a forthcoming book with a religious theme. The publisher turned to the book's author, Rabbi Dennis Shulman.
Think of Rodin's "Hand of God," said Rabbi Shulman.
iUniverse, the publisher, liked the suggestion.