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.