News

Like Lucy holding out her football for Charlie Brown to kick again, President Clinton, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat once more raised the world’s expectations Monday for a breakthrough on their long-stalled peace agreement.

But when the three faced an expectant White House press corps after their meeting, Clinton again voiced the phrases heard so often before.

The surprise second-place finish of French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in Sunday's presidential vote has at least one Israeli official calling on French Jews to make aliyah.
Interior Minister Eli Yishai spoke with French community leaders, his spokesman was quoted as saying, and "implored them to start packing their bags and come to Israel."

Embassy Issue Surfaces Again

The issue of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which the administration claims is a time bomb in the middle of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, is ticking again thanks to a petition being circulated by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
The petition originated with an “ad hoc interfaith group of people concerned about Jerusalem,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chair of the umbrella group.

Hate groups have been out of the news in recent months, but that doesn’t mean they are not exploiting recent events — including the stock market plunge and the Monica Lewinsky scandal — to expand their base. That was the message in a new  Anti-Defamation League report on the National Alliance, which the Jewish watchdog group called “the single most dangerous organized hate group in America today.”

With Secretary of State Colin Powell's Mideast mission widely seen as a failure, the focus of international diplomacy now shifts to a possible regional conference using the Saudi peace initiative as a basis for talks.

With Israel considering increasing taxes and cutting social service programs to fund its ballooning defense budget, the Jewish federation system in the United States and Canada has launched a multimillion-dollar Israel Emergency Fund.
"Israel is in a crisis and it's incumbent on American Jews to do whatever they can to help," said James Tisch, chairman of the United Jewish Communities, which represents 189 Jewish federations in North America.

Jewish leaders for weeks have quietly urged European leaders, businessmen, humanitarian groups and United Nations diplomats to press Iran to release 13 Jews arrested 10 weeks ago. Perhaps in response, Iran publicly announced their arrests Monday and said they had been charged with spying for Israel and the United States.

One man spent two years as a slave laborer in Nazi Germany, working for a company whose profits were deposited in a Swiss bank.
A woman died of starvation in another factory but her son, who now lives in New York, does not know if Swiss banks profited from her work.
The Nazis seized another man's home, but he managed to escape to the United States with just the shirt on his back. He does not know if any of his assets found their way to a Swiss bank.

"The children are terrified when they see a person in uniform because they saw what the Serb police did," said Renate Brand of the Kosovar refugees being resettled with relatives here with the help of the Jewish community.
The refugees (39 have arrived in the last two weeks) are coming with horrific tales of Serbian atrocities they either witnessed or heard about, according to Brand, supervisor of the Kosovar resettlement program for NYANA, the New York Association for New Americans.

First it was parents who were asked to give money. Now, their kids are getting involved. Tens of thousands of toiletry kits are being assembled by families throughout the metropolitan area as part of the Kits for Kosovo drive launched here by UJA-Federation to help ethnic Albanian refugees forced by Serbs from their homes in Kosovo.