Stewart Ain

The worldwide organization that runs an independent school system for more than 90,000 students in Israel has been thrown into chaos amid charges of a lack of financial transparency, slander and turf warfare, The Jewish Week has learned.
Millions of dollars are at stake in the battle that pits World ORT against ORT Israel, which has just broken away from its parent body. Caught in the fray is ORT America, which is charging that ORT Israel is perched to pounce on its American donors.

When a commission investigating Holocaust-era life insurance policies ended its work in March after nine years, it boasted that it had awarded more than $300 million to survivors and their heirs.
Now, a former commission arbitrator is criticizing the group’s work, alleging that a “phantom rule” was used by some of the dozens of arbitrators, accounting in part for the denial of 84 percent of all claims filed. The arbitrator, Albert B. Lewis, who is also a former New York State insurance superintendent, is calling for a reopening of these cases.

In his efforts to co-opt rather than fight terrorist groups, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has sought to get Hamas and Islamic Jihad to join the Palestine Liberation Organization, of which he is the leader. This week, he appeared on the verge of success — but at the expense of Israel.

Two months after apparently squelching an insurrection, the leadership of the World Jewish Congress is facing renewed calls in its ranks for an independent audit and increased accountability.
Isi Leibler, a senior vice president of the organization whose public appeals for improved governance and transparency regarding WJC financial dealings prompted his dismissal in September, has refused to step down, and he seems to have found allies among the leadership of the Swiss branch of the WJC.

Are relations among the leaders of Judaism’s branches as bad as they’ve been portrayed?
A recent, well-publicized report on hundreds of examples of rabbinic cooperation nationwide emphasized that the situation may be improving. But even some of the rabbis involved in cooperative efforts questioned the report’s positive spin.

Charges that the New Israel Fund supports Israeli civil rights groups that played a key role in providing information highly critical of Israel’s role in the Gaza war last year have sparked a spirited, and nasty, debate over the proper role for civil and human rights groups in a democratic state.

Israel’s reported refusal to conduct an independent, thorough probe of its military’s handling of last winter’s 22-day war against Hamas in Gaza as demanded by the United Nations is a “missed opportunity,” according to Moshe Halbertal, co-author of the Israeli military’s code of ethics.

Natan Aviezer is a professor of physics and a former chairman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. The author of “In the Beginning: Biblical Creation and Science” and “Fossils and Faith: Understanding Torah and Science,” he writes about Torah and science, and contends that the first chapter of the Bible is not a mythological tale but rather is in exact agreement with recent findings in cosmology, astronomy, geology and biology. He was recently in New York on a U.S. speaking tour.