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New York cannot be used as a haven for stolen artworks, the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court ruled this week in upholding the power of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to seize two Egon Schiele paintings whose ownership was contested.

Gitel D., a college graduate, was living an upper-middle-class life in an apartment on Central Park West. Married to a professional with a doctorate, she did volunteer work for UJA-Federation, joining its Business and Professional Women's Division and sitting on its government relations committee.
"Then my life took a detour," she said.

As she sat down for lunch at a Midtown restaurant, Sandy Cahn set her cell phone on the table. Within minutes, a client was calling. Minutes later, the phone rang regarding an appointment later that day at UJA-Federation.
Cahn, 50, who in July will become the first full-time working woman to head UJA-Federation's Women's Campaign, is already juggling her workload. She is not only vice president of sales for The Weeks, Lerman Co., an office supply and furniture company in Maspeth, Queens, but chair of the Women's Campaign in Manhattan, where she lives.

Former Sen. Warren Rudman expected some opposition to his proposals about reforming Social Security, but not the barrage of criticism he encountered last week at UJA-Federation headquarters in Manhattan.

Saying she wants to make Iranian-sponsorship of terrorism "so expensive that they will think twice about doing it," the mother of a 22-year-old New Jersey student killed in a Hamas bus bombing nearly three years ago is suing Iran over her daughter's death.
Arline Duker, whose daughter Sara was among 24 victims of the Jerusalem attack, said that she and the parents of Matthew Eisenfeld, Saraís longtime boyfriend who also was killed, filed the $600 million suit this summer.

Say this for the bad guys, they had the better names. Old New York had gangs like the Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits, Daybreak Boys, Swamp Angels, Slaughter Housers, the Forty Thieves, and the Hudson Dusters. This is Jewish history, kid. We may be talking about your zeide; in 1921, in New York jails, 20 percent of all prisoners were Jewish. And that’s just who got caught.

For seven years Bertha Laufer, an intelligent, articulate, retired New York City English teacher, lived in a non-Jewish nursing home in the Bronx and would help some of her nurses with their high school equivalency courses. But none of her relatives lived in New York and as the years went by, she became lonelier and lonelier.
"She wanted someone to talk to her about books and ideas," recalled Laufer's niece, Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer of Philadelphia. "She could quote Milton and Shakespeare by heart and there was no one for her to talk to."

Both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna, who will face off in national elections Jan. 28, were sharply reminded this week that within their own parties they are more dovish than their political colleagues.

Faced with a serious scarcity of available land on its heavily populated coastal plain, the government of Israel is quietly moving ahead with plans to develop what critics are calling "fantasy" islands.
The move comes as the country is beset by terrorist attacks inside and outside the country, a desperate need for water and the worst economy since independence 54 years ago.
In the latest move in a project that has been studied for more than a decade, the cabinet last month appointed a six-member committee to explore its financial feasibility.

As Marissa Goldberg, 17, and her four classmates at Baldwin High School finished loading her car with bags of food they were about to take the homebound for Chanukah, she noted that this was her second year delivering the packages as a member of the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization.
"The people last year were so nice and grateful for it," she said. "They invited us in. They wanted us to eat with them, but we had to make other deliveries so we didn't. ... It made me feel good about myself. Seeing the smiles on their faces was reward enough."