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•
`Model Student'
Yigal Amir's alma mater thought it had distanced
itself from the confessed assassin — until he
showed up on the university's fund-raising brochure.
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ar-Ilan University, the
alma mater of Yigal Amir,
has gone to inordinate
lengths to distance itself
from Yitzhak Rabin's self-con-
fessed assassin, but its most no-
torious student keeps coming
back to haunt the campus on the
eastern edge of Tel-Aviv.
On Feb. 2 Israel Television's
Friday-night news magazine,
Woman Hashavua, featured a
fund-raising brochure for Is-
rael's only religious university,
which included 12 uncaptioned
photographs of the 25-year-old
law major, with his now-famil-
iar sly smile, as a symbol of the
student body. Another 12
showed an unnamed woman
student in the same role.
The 100-page glossy was dis-
tributed by the American
Friends of Bar-Ilan to 600
guests at a $500 a plate dinner
in the New York Hilton on Jan.
21. The event had originally
been set for Nov. 12, but was
postponed after the Rabin as-
sassination eight days earlier.
The front of the brochure was
revamped to pay tribute to the
dead prime minister. Among the
new material was a letter with
a January date from Vice-Pres-
ident Al Gore.
The revelation provoked out-
rage in the government and the
Rabin family. The education
minister, Amnon Rubinstein, re-
ferred the episode to the Coun-
cil on Higher Education. Dalia
Itzik, the Labor chairwoman of
the Knesset education commit-
tee, demanded that all public
funding to Bar-Ilan be sus-
pended until it was cleared up.
Leah Rabin, the prime min-
ister's widow, said she was
"chilled" by the publication. "I
thought," she said, "that Bar-
Ilan had turned over a new
page. It's very hard for me to be-
lieve that this happened only be-
cause of lack of attention and
carelessness."
For Bar-Ilan, the damage was
compounded by the fact that the
university's Orthodox president,
Shlomo Eckstein, had to wait 24
hours, till the end of Shabbat, to
deliver his embarrassed reply
on prime-time TV news.
"The shock is first of all ours,"
he said, "because we at the uni-
versity denounced Amir and
wiped him off all our books. I am
extremely sorry that such a
technical error has again led to
a stigma against the universi-
ty." He made an impassioned
plea to the public not to add an-
other stigma.
University spokeswoman
liana Oberlander laid the blame
squarely on Bar-Ilan's Manhat-
tan-based American Friends,
whom she accused of "very poor
oversight" in preparing the of-
fending brochure.
Her explanation was so sur-
real that it rang true.
The photographs, she said,
were taken 1 1/2 years ago by a
photographer sent by the Ameri-
can Friends, who wanted pictures
of typical students. Yigal Amir, it
seems, fit the bill. His portrait was
used on page after page of greet-
ings to major donors in the
brochure's original version, edit-
ed during September and Octo-
ber.
K
Yigal Amir: Poor oversight.
"A la of material, including
these photos, had gone to the print-
er before the assassination," Ms.
Oberlander explained. "Once the
dinner was postponed, all the ma-
terial was left with the printer.
Later material was added af-
terwards, but nobody checked
the material that had been sent
before. The printer was told to go
ahead. We didn't know anything
about it in Israel."
The blunder was discovered
only after the brochures had been
issued to guests at the dinner,
Which was addressed among oth-
ers by Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi
Yisrael Meir Lau and the Israel's
consul-general in New York, Co-
lette Avital. A guest drew it to
Professor Eckstein's attention,
and the university president im-
mediately ordered remaining
copies, which would have gone to
other potential supporters,
trashed.
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