News

The Jewish Theological Seminary is facing a new financial crisis and plans to dip into what its new chancellor calls a “rainy day fund” to cover a $2.2 million budget shortfall, The Jewish Week has learned.

By staving off early elections this week through a last-minute deal with the Labor Party, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has given himself more time to try to negotiate peace deals with both the Palestinian Authority and Syria. But opposition leaders warn that any such deal would surely bring down the government.

Picking A FightWith Clinton?

The drill used to be simple. In times of tension between the United States and Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee would lobby lawmakers to sign statements and letters to the administration backing Jerusalem. And the members would sign on, to pretty much universal applause from organized Jewry.

After her husband’s death in 1988, Florence Mormor of the City Line section of Brooklyn contacted her husband’s family burial society and bought him a grave and another for herself.

After a few weeks, she called the cemetery, Mount Hebron in Flushing, Queens, and learned that the grave next to her husband’s had not been reserved for her. She then called but failed to speak with the officer of the society, Trembowler True Sisters, who had deposited her check but never acknowledged it in writing or sent her a deed for the plot.

Monthly German reparation to 65,800 victims of the Holocaust worldwide were increased by 8 percent June 1, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

New Restitution PanelGets Bipartisan Support

Hungarian authorities ousted a police official this week for issuing a permit allowing an anti-Semitic protest by more than 100 skinheads in a downtown Budapest square that prevented members of Chabad from lighting a Chanukah menorah there, according to the World Jewish Congress.
There was no physical altercation but the skinheads blocked the square. Only after the skinheads left an hour later did the lighting take place on the sixth night of Chanukah.

Poland has introduced legislation that would cut compensation to former Jewish property owners and heirs whose homes and businesses were seized by the Nazis. The legislation would cover fewer claims than previous versions of similar bills and would also pay only 8 to 10 percent of the property's value. The Polish government had previously agreed to discuss such legislation with Jewish leaders before submitting it to parliament for approval.

In convicting five leaders of the Holy Land Foundation Monday for financing the Hamas terrorist organization under the cover of a charity, a federal jury disregarded defense claims that the case was contrived by Israel.

“All of these folks had charged that this was a politically motivated trial and that Jews and Israel were behind it,” said Mark Briskman, regional director of the North Texas office of the Anti-Defamation League.

The controversy over a proposed eruv for observant Jews in Westhampton Beach, L.I., heated up this week when eruv opponents sent a letter to residents that the American Jewish Congress labeled “racist.”

“It’s pretty close to sheer bigotry,” said Marc Stern, the AJC’s acting co-executive director.

The opponents, members of a group calling itself the Jewish People Opposed to the Eruv (JPOE), said in their letter that they were seeking to “preserve and protect this secular community.”