Roundup

Washington
Adviser
President Obama
named Ann Arbor
native Gene Sperling to
lead the White House
National Economic
Council. Sperling, 52,
Gene Sperling
held the same post dur-
ing President Clinton's second term. He is
the highest-ranking Michigan native in
the Obama administration.
The appointment took effect Jan. 7.
Older brother Rick Sperling founded
and runs Mosaic Youth Theatre in
Detroit. "He's going to stand up for
Michigan," Rick told the Detroit News.
"He knows what I go through. He really
understands the economic challenges of
Detroit."
As the News recounts: Gene Sperling
argued in a White House meeting with
Obama to save Chrysler. He opposed
GM's proposal to move its corporate
headquarters from Detroit. And he
helped bring a deal with Republicans
to extend the Bush tax cuts as well as
unemployment benefits.
"Gene is absolutely first-rate: brilliant,
committed, hard-working, experienced
and understands how to get things
done in Washington in a divided town,"
Michael Barr, a University of Michigan
law professor and former assistant
Treasury secretary under Obama, told
the News.
Sperling earned a bachelor's degree in
political science from the University of
Minnesota and a law degree from Yale.
He is a former intern for U.S. Sen. Carl
Levin, D-Mich., and aide to former New
York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
The News reported that Sperling joined
forces with Michigan Democrats to
prod Congress to approve a $42 million
bill to help small businesses, especially
auto suppliers and other manufactur-
ers, by easing restrictions on credit. The
enabling legislation will help Michigan
businesses access nearly $800 million in
credit.

Sherlock Holmes Reborn
NEW YORK (JTA) -- Anthony Horowitz,
author of the popular series about teen-
age spy Alex Rider, has been commis-
sioned by the estate of Arthur Conan
Doyle to write a full-length Sherlock
Holmes novel.
The book, the fifth Sherlock Holmes
novel ever written, will be published in
Britain in September. Doyle also wrote 56
short stories about the popular detective.
Horowitz, who is Jewish, told the
Guardian Jan. 18 that he set about writ-
ing "a first-rate mystery for a modern
audience while remaining absolutely true
to the spirit of the original."
Horowitz said he fell in love with
Sherlock Holmes stories when he was 16.
His Alex Rider series is geared to young
adults.

Holocaust-Era Mass Graves
BERLIN (JTA) -- A project to save
Holocaust-era mass graves from oblivion
in Eastern Europe has received about
$400,000 from the German Foreign
Ministry.
Thousands of sites of mass shootings
in fields and forests across the region
have been neglected; and the stories of
what happened there nearly forgotten,
said Andrew Baker, director of interna-
tional Jewish affairs for the American
Jewish Committee, on Jan. 21 in Berlin
in marking the first anniversary of the

Pearl's Real
Murderer?
LOS ANGELES (JTA) --
Four men were wrong-
fully convicted of the
murder of Wall Street
Journal reporter Daniel
Pearl nine years ago,
Daniel Pearl
while the actual killer
is the suspected mastermind behind the
9-11 terror attacks, a new investigation
alleges.
The revelations, which include the alle-
gation that a dozen terrorists involved in

project.
The project is coordinated by the
AJC, the Central Council of Jews in
Germany and the German War Graves
Commission.
The stories must be preserved and told
to the next generation, the sites must be
marked and the record must be corrected
where Soviet ideology erased the fact
that victims were Jews, Baker said.
The funds will enable further docu-
mentation of sites and collection of tes-
timonies. Preservation work will require
further funds, he added.
A team coordinated by the AJC's Berlin
office, under the direction of Deidre
Berger, surveyed several sites in 2010.
Among them was Kysylyn, where about
500 Jews were shot to death in a field 68
years ago.
The project was inspired by the work
of the French Catholic Priest Patrick
Desbois, who since 2001 has visited sites
of mass shootings of Jews in Ukraine and
collected eyewitness testimonies.
More than 1 million Jews were mur-
dered by mass killing units during World
War II. In all, about 6 million Jews were
killed by shootings, gassings in death
camps and through slave labor.

the killing are still at large and operating,
are based on a three-year investigation by
the Pearl Project conducted by journal-
ism students and faculty at Georgetown
University and the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Heading the probe was Asra Nomani,
Pearl's colleague, from whose house in
Karachi, Pakistan, the reporter left on the
day of his 2002 disappearance suppos-
edly for an interview with a high-level
terrorist source.
The four men convicted in the slay-
ing remain in jail, but the actual killer is
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the key figure
in the 2001 attack on New York's World
Trade Center, according to the project
analysis.
Mohammed told U.S. investigators
at Guantanamo Bay that he slit Pearl's
throat and severed his head, the report
said, with independent forensic evidence
pointing in a similar direction.
However, Washington officials decided
not to charge Mohammed, fearing it
would complicate their case against him
in the 9-11 prosecution, the report stated.
Judea and Ruth Pearl, the parents of
Daniel Pearl, said they are still "trying to
digest" the report and did not wish to go
into details at this point.
Judea Pearl said, however, that the
authors were "good and honest people
who [conducted the project] with love."
Ruth Pearl added that the project
investigators had phoned frequently and
that she and her husband had provided
valuable contacts.
U.S. and Pakistani officials are accused
of bungling the pursuit of Pearl's killers
and then covering up the actual facts.

Palestinian Peace Concessions
JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Palestinian peace
negotiators were willing to turn over
nearly all of the Jewish neighborhoods
in eastern Jerusalem and accept a shared
authority of the Temple Mount, leaked
Palestinian documents reveal.
More than 1,600 Palestinian docu-
ments about the peace process with
Israel were leaked to the Qatar-based Al
Jazeera network, which shared them with
Britain's The Guardian newspaper. They
began appearing Sunday night in the two
media outlets.
According to the documents,
Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat
told U.S. officials that the Palestinians
were giving Israel "the biggest
Yerushalayim in history," The Guardian
reported.
They show that during negotiations in
2008 and 2009, Palestinian negotiators
offered Israel all of the Jewish neigh-
borhoods in eastern Jerusalem, with

Transition At OU

Orthodox Union Executive Vice

President Rabbi Steven Weil, cen-

ter, welcomes Dr. Simcha Katz as

president of the OU, while express-

ing gratitude to outgoing President

Stephen J. Savitsky for six years
in office. Savitsky now becomes OU

chairman of the board. The transi-

tion took place in January at the

OU Biennial Convention, in Woodcliff
Lake, NJ.

the exception of Har Homa, which now
has 20,000 residents. PLO leaders also
suggested trading parts of the eastern
Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh
Jarrah for land located elsewhere, accord-
ing to The Guardian.
The Palestinian negotiators also pro-
posed a joint committee to take over the
Jewish and Palestinian holy sites on the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The documents show that the
Palestinians agreed that Israel would
take 10,000 Palestinians refugees under
the right of return and that they would
recognize Israel as a Jewish state. In
addition, Israel offered to transfer Israeli
Arabs to the Palestinian state.
They also reveal that Palestinian
Authority leaders in the West Bank,
including President Mahmoud Abbas,
were warned in advance about the Gaza
war, which began in December 2008 and
lasted for one month.
On Monday, Erekat called the report on
the documents "lies and half truths?'

"A Horrifying Scene"
JERUSALEM (JTA) Chabad-Lubavitch
emissaries who responded to the bombing
at Moscow's busiest airport described a
"horrifying scene."
In an e-mail message to JTA, Rabbi
Sheah Deitsch, one of a group of Chabad-
Lubavitch emissaries who are first
responders on behalf of the Moscow
Chief Rabbinate, said "families were
screaming and wailing?'
"They asked to speak to the Jewish
rabbis, and we tried to uplift their spir-
its and told them that we were there
for them for whatever they needed?' he
wrote.

Roundup on page 10

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January 27 • 2011