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October 1, 2008
Vatican Invites Rabbi to Speak
Rome
JTA Wire Service
The Vatican for the first time invited a rabbi to speak at its World Synod of Bishops. The Oct. 6 address by Shear-Yashuv Cohen, the chief rabbi of Haifa and the co-chair of the Israeli-Vatican Dialogue Commission, marks the first time that such an invitation was extended to a non-Christian. Cohen will lead a one-day discussion of the Scriptures. The three-week synod ends Oct. 26. Cohen told the Catholic News Service that the invitation “brings with it a message of love, coexistence and peace for generations.” He added, “We see in [the] invitation a kind of declaration that [the Church] intends to continue with the policy and doctrine established by Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II, and we appreciate very deeply this declaration.”
Lithuania Drops Probe of Ex-partisan
Lithuania’s prosecutor general dropped a war crimes inquiry of a World War II partisan. A spokeswoman for the prosecutor general said the 2-year-old investigation of Dr. Yitzhak Arad, the chairman emeritus of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, was dropped because of insufficient data. The probe interviewed 83 people. The inquiry stemmed from the publication of memoirs recalling partisan activities against Nazis and their collaborators in wartime Lithuania—activities that Lithuanian law interpreted as tantamount to genocide. It is unknown whether the inquiry of two other elderly former partisans, Rachel Margolis and Fania Brantsovsky, also will be dropped. The incident in question was a Soviet-led ambush of Lithuanian collaborators in which 38 villagers were killed, including children and a pregnant woman. Lithuania’s consul general in New York, Jonas Paslauskas, had acknowledged previously to JTA that negative publicity abroad had generated second thoughts on the inquiry by Lithuania’s highest officials, including President Valdas Adamkus. Last month, Adamkus came out with a statement indicating that he would push to have the inquiry dropped.
Serbians Open Probe of Alleged Nazi Killer
Serbian prosecutors launched a war crimes investigation of a 94-year-old alleged mass murderer. Sandor Kepiro is accused of participating in the killing of Jews and Serbs during World War II. The investigation opened Wednesday. Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, and Serbian prosecutors want Kepiro extradited from Hungary. The prosecutor’s office accuses Kepiro of participating “in full conscience and of free will” in the killings of some 2,000 Jews and Serbs. Kepiro is thought to have participated in the Great Raid of 1942, when approximately 800 Jews and 400 Serbs were robbed of their possessions, forced to strip naked, shot and drowned in the freezing Danube River, which runs in the northern city of Novi Sad. Kepiro returned to Hungary in 1996 after immigrating to Argentina after World War II. Hungarian prosecutors had launched an investigation of Kepiro at the behest of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, but he was not punished for participating in the killings in Serbia. The Simon Wiesenthal Center was credited in a statement with aiding the Serbian prosecutor’s office with the probe.
This story reprinted courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.