This Week
News Digest
Scandalized Weizman
Resigns Presidency
Jerusalem/JTA
H
aunted by a scandal that overshadowed his
decades of service to the Jewish state, President
Ezer Weizman has submitted his resignation.
His resignation letter was delivered Monday, July
10, to the speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, who
will fill the largely ceremonial post until legislators vote
for a new president on July 31.
Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres is the candi-
date of the governing One Israel Party. The Likud can-
didate is Moshe Katsav, a former tourism minister and
longtime legislator.
Weizman, 75, who stepped down three years before
his second five-year term was to end, resigned three
Israel Kills
Sale To China
Tel Aviv/JTA — Israel canceled its
planned sale of an advanced airborne
warning system to China.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
informed President Bill Clinton of the
decision during the Camp David sum-
mit, according to Barak's spokesman.
The plan was opposed by the United
States and prompted threats from some
U.S. legislators to cut aid to Israel.
The documents are now available
to researchers at the National
Archives in College Park, Md.
Eli Rosenbaum, director of the
U.S. Justice Department's Office of
Special Investigations, which hunts
Nazis, said, "If there is anyone left
on this planet who harbors a suspi-
cion that perhaps Holocaust sur-
vivors have exaggerated the grotes-
queries inflicted by the Nazis on
their victims, that suspicion will be
put to rest by reading this tran-
script."
Allies Knew Of
Nazi Death Plans
Pope Pius IX
Called No Saint
New York/JTA — Newly released
World War II documents indicate
Britain and the United States knew
ahead of time that Germany planned to
exterminate Rome's Jews. They also
reveal candid conversations among
Germanprisoners of war, including
`graphic descriptions of how Jews were
executed during the war.
According to records, British intelli-
gence knew in late 1943 of German
plans to deport Roman Jews to the
Auschwitz death camp in Poland, and
shared this information with the United
States. Neither country took steps to
deter the Germans or inform the
Italians.
The Nazi War Criminal Records
Interagency Working Group released
400,000 pages of documents to comply
with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure
Act of 1998. The documents, culled
from records of the Office of Strategic
Services, a forerunner to the Central
Intelligence Agency, constitute the
largest document release by the working
group so far.
7/14
2000
32
months after police probing his finan-
cial affairs recommended that he not
be charged — but gave him a less-
than-blemish-free verdict.
A veteran public figure who held
key posts in the military and politics
before becoming president, Weizman
served as president during a period
that spanned both left- and right-
Ezer Weizman wing governments.
The outspoken Weizman has fre-
quently been a counterbalance to government policy,
pushing for progress when the peace process faltered
and urging a slowdown during waves of terrorist
attacks.
Most recently, he gave his unequivocal support to an
Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in order to
reach peace with Syria.
Police launched their investigation of Weizman after
a free-lance journalist, Yoav Yitzhak, published allega-
tions that he had received a regular stipend for years,
starting in the late 1980s, from a French millionaire
friend, Edouard Saroussi Police confirmed more than
$300,000 was involved.
Weizman received the gifts when he served as a leg-
islator, a minister and even as president, police found.
Weizman, Israel's seventh president, acknowledged
accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts
from Saroussi. But he insisted they were personal gifts
that he was not required to declare.
The police report, released April 6, found insuffi-
cient evidence to sustain a charge of bribery, even
though the police documented instances in which
Saroussi sought Weizman's help to promote Saroussi's
business interests in Israel. The police did find evidence
of fraud and of breach of trust. They recommended
that no charges be brought — but only because the
statute of limitations had expired. ❑
Vandalism Hits
Reform Campus
Jerusalem/JTA — Vandals
struck the Reform movement's
Hebrew Union College in
Israel, smashing glass windows
and doors and spray-painting
the word "Satan" in black let-
ters on the ground.
The July 6 attack on the
institute was the second on the
HUC after a door was smashed
there a few weeks ago. It was
also the fifth recent attack on a
A worker sweeps up broken glass caused van-
non-Orthodox institution, the
&Lis who smashed windows at the Hebrew Union
most serious being the torching College July 6 in Jerusalem.
of a Conservative synagogue in
Jerusalem, two weeks ago.
Reform officials told police that night workers said men dressed in haredi, or fer-
vently Orthodox, garb were seen nearby before the attack. There were no arrests.
Rabbi David Rosen, the modern Orthodox director of the Anti-Defamation League's
Israel office, said the perpetrators of recent attacks and those who agree with them must
be taught "in schools and synagogues, through the media and from political and reli-
gious leaders," that differences of opinions must be accepted in a democracy.
"These acts, which seek to curtail freedom of religious expression, undermine
democratic rule," he said. (Related editorial: page 37)
Rome/JTA — Jewish protests are
mounting against Vatican plans to
beatify the 19th-century pope infa-
mous for sanctioning the forced
baptism and kidnap of a 7-year-old
Jewish boy.
Pope Pius IX, who knocked
down the walls of Rome's ghetto but
pursued virulently antisemitic poli-
cies, is set to be beatified Sept. 3.
Beatification is the last step before
sainthood. Jewish leaders have warned
that the decision could have serious
repercussions for Catholic-Jewish rela-
tions.
The boy, Edgardo Mortara, was
seized from his home in Bologna in
1858 by papal guards acting on the
pope's orders, after a servant told a priest
that she secretly baptized the boy when
he was a baby. Bologna at that time was •
under papal jurisdiction. Edgardo was
brought to Rome, where he was virtual-
ly adopted by Pius IX and brought up as
a Catholic. Mortara eventually became a
priest and died in 1940.
In a letter earlier this year to
Archbishop Jose Saraiva Martins, chair-
man of the church's Congregation for
the Causes of Saints, B'nai B'rith
International President Richard
Heideman, a former Detroiter, said the
Mortara case "demonstrated a funda-
mental disrespect and disdain for Jews,
for Jewish feelings, and indeed for basic,
God-given human rights."
Reform Leader
Resigns As Scout
New York/JTA — The top profes-
sional of the Reform movement's rab-
binic arm resigned his rank as Eagle
Scout to protest the Boy Scouts of
Arrierica's policy of not allowing
openly homosexual men to be scout
leaders.
Rabbi Paul Menitoff, whose
Central Conference of American
Rabbis recently affirmed the right of
rabbis to officiate at same-sex unions,
said in a letter to the Boy Scouts'
president that he cannot be "associat-
ed with any organization that engages
in discrimination against homosexu-
als."
The U.S. Supreme Court recently
upheld the Scouts' policy.