Around the Jewish World

By JTA

article created on: 2009-03-01T00:00:00

NATIONAL

‘Classification czar’ can testify in AIPAC staffers’ case

WASHINGTON (JTA)—The Bush administration’s former “classification czar” can testify for the defense in the case against two former AIPAC staffers.

Federal Judge T.S. Ellis III Feb. 18 allowed the testimony of William Leonard, who headed the Information Security Oversight Office, in the classified information leak case.

Leonard could be the most damaging witness to the prosecution when Keith Weissman, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s former Iran analyst, and Steve Rosen, its former foreign policy chief, go to trial for allegedly relaying classified information to colleagues, journalists and Israeli diplomats.

Lawyers for Rosen and Weissman sought the testimony of Leonard, who oversaw classification procedures from 2002 to 2008, and his predecessor, Steven Garfinkel, because both men have argued in retirement that the government overclassifies. Their expertise could undermine arguments that the information allegedly handled by Rosen and Weissman met the standards of “national defense information,” which Ellis has said the government must prove.

Proving that information was classified is not by itself enough to show wrongdoing. Prosecutors must show it meets national defense information standards of being “closely held” by the United States and that its release could potentially damage the nation. Prosecutors sought to bar Leonard from the witness stand, saying that his testimony would violate a law banning government officials who have been substantially involved in an investigation from testifying on behalf of any party contesting the United States in court cases arising out of the investigation.

In his order, Ellis summarily dismissed prosecution claims that an hour-long conversation prosecutors had with Leonard in 2006 qualified as “substantial involvement” in the investigation as defined by the law. In a footnote, the judge suggests that the true reason prosecutors sought to keep Leonard off the stand was that he made clear in the meeting that his views on over-classification would undermine rather than reinforce their case.

“That Leonard might disagree with the government is no reason to allow the government to invoke” the relevant statute “to prevent Leonard from serving as a defense expert,” Ellis wrote.

FBI agents raided AIPAC offices in August 2004; Rosen and Weissman were indicted a year later. Their case has yet to come to trial, mostly because of disagreements over what information may be presented at trial.

Yiddish literature online

JERUSALEM (JTA)—An archive of more than 10,000 works of modern Yiddish literature has gone on-line.

The collection of full texts, comprising the National Yiddish Book Center’s Steven Spielberg Digital Library, can be read, downloaded and printed free.

The project of putting 3 million pages online was undertaken by the Yiddish Book Center and the Internet Archive of San Francisco.

“It’s an historic moment for Yiddish culture,” said Aaron Lansky, founder and president of the nonprofit Yiddish Book Center. “The magnificent record of a civilization the Nazis sought to destroy has been brought fully into the 21st century.”

The collection includes original novels, stories, poetry, drama and nonfiction titles published in Yiddish over the past 150 years. Most out-of-print Yiddish works are already in the public domain.

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said, “This is the first time a full literature of a people has been available online. We hope others follow the Yiddish Book Center’s pioneering example.”

Oscars for Holocaust films, but Israeli movie loses

LOS ANGELES (JTA)—A Holocaust-related short and Kate Winslet playing a former Nazi won Academy Awards, but an Israeli film again came up short.

“Toyland,” a 14-minute German film that was four years in the making, won the Oscar for best live-action short in ceremonies held here Feb. 22. Set in a small German town in the winter of 1942, the film follows the friendship between two 6-year-old boys, the Aryan Heinrich and the Jewish David Silberstein.

When the Silberstein family is about to be deported, Heinrich asks his mother where his friend is going. She tells him that David is taking a trip to Toyland. An intrigued Heinrich sneaks along for the ride when the town’s Jews are packed onto a train.

“Well, it was a drama, but it was a story I really wanted to tell—a film about ignorance, truth and the history of my country,” director and producer Jochen Alexander Freydank told Moving Pictures magazine. “Shooting this film was one of the most rewarding experiences in my film life.

“Growing up behind the Berlin Wall, I always dreamt about making films. But I never, ever thought that a film of mine might be nominated for an Oscar one day. It still feels a bit unreal, I must say. But makes me very, very happy.”

Winslet won for her role in “The Reader,” in which she plays an illiterate former SS concentration camp guard whose teenage lover is unaware of her Nazi past. Some observers have panned the film for trivializing the Holocaust.

“Waltz With Bashir,” Israel’s hopes for its first Oscar, failed to win for best foreign film. It was the eighth time that an Israeli film was nominated for an Academy Award but did not win.

Ari Folman’s animated masterpiece, a psycho-historical investigation into one man’s inability to remember what he did during the 1982 Lebanon War, won this year’s Golden Globe for best foreign film, and critics and audiences in Israel and around the world have embraced the film.

Sean Penn, the son of Jewish director Leo Penn, whose own parents arrived as immigrants from Lithuania and Russia, won the Oscar as best actor portraying a gay Jewish politician in “Milk.” Veteran comedian Jerry Lewis received the Jean Hershholt Humanitarian Award, recognizing his philanthropic efforts to aid muscular dystrophy victims.

U.S. pledging $900 million to rebuild Gaza

WASHINGTON (JTA)—The Obama administration has pledged to provide $900 million in aid for rebuilding Gaza.

The New York Times reported that administration officials said the aid would not be given to Hamas, which controls Gaza, but would go through nongovernmental organziations. Congress would have to approve the aid package.

Survey: Few synagogues actively welcome gays

NEW YORK (JTA)—Few synagogues actively welcome gay and lesbian Jews, a new survey finds.

The new transdenominational synagogue survey on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual inclusion and diversity, which questioned 1,221 North American rabbis, synagogue directors and board presidents, found that 73 percent of respondents believe their congregations do a good or excellent job of welcoming gay and lesbian Jews. Nearly a quarter, mostly Orthodox, said they were minimally welcoming.

By contrast, only 33 percent of rabbis said their congregations held programs or events related to gay people. The most popular “program” was marriage equality, eclipsing events like gay pride Shabbat and gay and lesbian havurah groups.

“There’s a lot of goodwill in the American Jewish community, but there’s not a lot of action,” said Caryn Aviv, a Jewish studies scholar at the University of Denver and co-author of the study with Dr. Steven Cohen, a research professor of Jewish social policy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

MIDDLE EAST

Israel files rocket complaint

JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israel filed an official complaint with the United Nations over the firing of Katyusha rockets from Lebanon.

The complaint, submitted Feb. 24 to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Security Council President Yukio Takasu by Israel’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, demands that the Lebanese government and UNIFIL live up to their commitments in Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 second Lebanon war, and work harder to stop the flow of weapons into southern Lebanon.

The letter said that Israel holds the Lebanese government responsible for rockets fired into northern Israel, and that Israel reserves the right to self-defense.

A Katyusha rocket fired from Lebanon landed next to a house Feb. 21 in northern Israel, injuring three. A second rocket accidentally detonated in Lebanon.

Gaza evacuees topic for panel

JERUSALEM (JTA)—A committee was appointed to investigate the handling of the resettlement of Gush Katif evacuees.

The committee, headed by retired Supreme Court Justice Eliyahu Matza, also will make recommendations for their resettlement, as well as look at the state of the evacuees’ employment and welfare situation.

A recent report of Israel’s state comptroller criticized the authorities charged with resettling and assisting the evacuees, who were evicted from their homes in August 2005 when Israel unilaterally left the Gaza Strip.

According to the report, some 95 percent of evacuated families who wished to be resettled with their neighbors remain in temporary housing.

Nazi camp visits said taboo

JERUSALEM (JTA)—A prominent Zionist rabbi says it is forbidden to visit Nazi death camps.

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter, urged Israeli schools to cancel their annual trips to the camps, saying they are forbidden since there is a halachic ban on leaving Israel and because they “provide livelihood to murderers.” Aviner made the statement in a religious journal in answer to a reader’s question.

Law of Return due scrutiny

JERUSALEM (JTA)—A special committee was appointed to discuss revising Israel’s Law of Return.

The committee, appointed by Interior Minister Meir Steetrit, was charged Feb. 22 with finding a way to stop granting citizenship to those with no connection to Judaism, Ynet reported.

The Law of Return grants automatic Israeli citizenship to all children and grandchildren of Jews.

Professor Yaakov Ne’eman, a former justice and finance minister, will head the committee. Ne’eman in the late 1990s headed a commission on Jewish conversions named for him.

“The Law of Return is an anachronistic law through which people that have nothing to do with Judaism receive citizenship,” Sheetrit said Feb. 22, according to Ynet.

WORLD

Holtzberg kin going to Mumbai

JERUSALEM (JTA)—The sister and brother-in-law of a Chabad emissary killed in Mumbai will run the Chabad House there temporarily.

Rabbi Yakov Dovid and Sara Leiter of Safed, Israel, will serve as emissaries in Mumbai for three months, Lubavitch.com reported. Sara Leiter is Rivkah Holtzberg’s younger sister.

Rivkah Holtzberg and her husband, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, were among the nearly 200 people killed in last November’s siege of the Indian city. The Holtzbergs were slain in the Chabad House with four others; their 2-year-old son, Moshe, escaped with his caregiver.

Report: Russia freezing anti-missile sales to Iran

WASHINGTON (JTA)—Russia reportedly froze its pending sale to Iran of anti-missile defense systems.

Kommersant, a Russian newspaper, reported Feb. 18 that Anatoly Sedyukov, the Russian defense minister, informed his Iranian counterpart, Mostafa Mohammed Najjar, that the sale of the S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems would not go through at least until Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and U.S. President Barack Obama meet April 2 at a summit in London.

Israel has been pressing Russia not to make the sale, saying such a system could remove any inhibitions Iran might have about the possibilities of an Israeli strike aimed at disabling the Islamic Republic’s suspected nuclear weapons program.

Russia reportedly has signed but not ratified an $800 million deal for five of the systems.

Russia is known to be seeking guarantees from the new Obama administration that it will roll back the Bush administration’s efforts to raise NATO’s profile in Eastern Europe.

According to the Jerusalem Post, the S-300 missiles have a range of about 200 kilometers, about 125 miles, and can hit targets at altitudes of 27,000 meters, about 89,000 feet.