I L'Shana Tovah! Our wannest wishes to you and your family for a year of joy and peace. Holiday Israel Police Have New Tool: A Voice Identification Lab WENDY ELLIMAN Special to The Jewish News 0 II II $2. 00 off Expires 10/12/97 Dozen Bucket of Bagels 13 Fresh Baked Bagels and 2 tubs of Cream Cheese • one. coputin tt,..1ruvist e ;tgootroonneis noit riepdpeleiztet. wie th s panaidobtlyier corer or sapteacnial .offwerin. 7, orarBo,ductioloncaalltiox.d. Valid 5133 Cash ® 1997 Einstein/ Noah Bagel Corp. Visit the Einstein Bros® Nearest You! onme's PATISSERIE • HOLIDAY DINNERS • DELICIOUS DESSERTS (Order Early) 9/26 1997 357-4540 • n June 8, 1980, 33-year-old artist Zvi Gur cruised slowly past the shopping center of a well-to-do neighborhood near Tel Aviv. He spotted his victim almost at once: Eight-year-old Oren Yarden who was playing with his bike. Things moved fast. Mr. Gur urged the boy into the car and sped to nearby Rishon-le-Zion, from where he placed the first of four fatal phone calls. "I've got the boy!" he told Oren's mother. "It'll •cost you to get him back." The following morning, in. a phone conversation with Oren's father, Gur was more specific: He wanted $70,000 in exchange for Oren. Two further phone calls gave instructions about where and how to leave the ransom. At this point, events took a sudden tragic spiral. Some time between June 8 and 10, Gur strangled Oren ("the Devil made me do it," he later explained) and buried him in a sand dune south of Netanya. A vast man- hunt uncovered the child's body some three weeks later. Oren's death gripped the country. Over 1,500 people came to his funeral and some 6,000 condolence letters poured into his home. Meanwhile, the police were closing in on the murder- er. Marked ransom money, which had showed up in a Rehovot bank, led to four suspects, one of them Gur. He was arrested, but the money itself was insufficient to nail him. It took three days of questioning before Gur broke down and confessed to kidnapping and murder. What clinched his con- - fession, and the 59-year sentence later handed down, was a technique then new to Israel: spectrographic voice identification. "The case of Zvi Gur was among the first major successes of the Israel Police's Voice Laboratory," says American-born Yishai Tobin, a profes- sor of linguistics who created the lab. "The acoustic information we gath- ered from Gur's phone calls to the family allowed us to exclude two of the four suspects immediately, and later the third." Voice identification as a science is some 30 years old. Scotland Yard, Interpol and the FBI all use it, giving it the same validity as the polygraph lie-detector test — a useful and often conclusive tool but not universally admissible in court. Both success and the limitations of technique were borne out in the Gur case, says Professor Tobin. "In the end, we narrowed it down to Gur and one -mg other suspect. The second man was the same height and size as Gur, and, in fact, lived down the street from him." Another major research project at the police lab is an area known as deceptive communication. "This is essentially an attempt to judge • whether people are telling the truth ; based on what they say — either Amo according to the content of what they say or according to parameters related to the voice," explains Professor Tobin. "One theory we're examining is that when people are tense or lie, they use more words or several words for one idea. So, according to this theory, the higher the lexical change, the more likely it is that someone is lying. , Another idea we're examining is that -010 when people are tense, the pitch and fundamental frequency of the voice rise. A basic question in this line of research, however, • is, are people always tense when they lie? Or, conversely, are tense people necessarily lying?" Twenty years ago, as the vast possi- bilities of the microchip were making themselves felt, it seemed that auto- matic voice identification was just 110 around the corner. The human voice, however, turned o' ut to be so complex that no. automatic method of speaker identification has yet been developed -110 — or is likely to be so, according to Professor Tobin. —WZPS Hebrew Studies Come To Kiev In its rapid advancement across Eastern Europe, bringing high-tech education and quality Judaic studies to Jewish communities large and small, ORT recently has established a school in Kiev, Ukraine. Modeled after ORT's highly successful complex in Moscow, ORT Kiev eventually will enroll 1000 students. The ORT school in Kiev was estab- lished at the request of the govern- ment of Ukraine, In addition to the Ukraine national curriculum, students take classes in Hebrew, Jewish studies and modern technology. The school has opened with three classes of 30 children each; enrollment will be aug- mented annually until the target pop- ulation of 1000 is achieved.