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Newsletter : 9fax0520.txt
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>Israel Faxx
>JN May 20, 1999 Vol. 7, No. 95
Catering to Christian Pilgrims and other Millennium Visitors
By IsraelWire
The Ministry of Tourism's web site (http://www.goisrael.com ) contains tips on everything from tipping to customs, a calendar of Jewish, Christian and Muslim holidays and links to tour organizers, hotels, cruise lines and rental car companies. Last month, Israel's national airline, El Al, added a free stopover in Rome for Catholics headed to Israel for the Great Jubilee. The airline also offers gourmet kosher meals as well as selections from the Talmud and Chassidic music on its headsets.
Justice Department moves against Demjanjuk
By Michael Kirkland (with permission of UPI)
The Justice Department asked a Cleveland federal court to again
revoke the citizenship of John Demjanjuk, alleging that he was a
guard at Nazi concentration camps during World War 2.
The department filed the action Wednesday even though the Israeli
Supreme Court earlier found there was reasonable doubt the
72-year-old retired Cleveland-area autoworker was the infamous
concentration guard known as "Ivan the Terrible."
Although the complaint does not name Demjanjuk as "Ivan," it
charges that he indeed was a guard at the Sobibor extermination
camp and the Majdanek and Flossenburg concentration camps, and a
member of the SS Trawniki extermination unit.
A federal court in Cleveland previously determined that Demjanjuk,
from Seven Hills, Ohio, was "Ivan the Terrible" in 1981, and he was
extradited to Israel in 1986. In Israel, he was convicted of crimes
against humanity and sentenced to death, before that country's high
court reversed the verdict. But the Israeli Supreme Court also
found that his account of his whereabouts during World War 2 was
not credible.
Given those Israeli proceedings, a federal judge in Cleveland last
year revoked an order stripping Demjanjuk of his citizenship. But
in Wednesday' complaint, the Justice Department asks that
Demjanjuk's citizenship be revoked again.
The complaint says Demjanjuk was born in a village in central Ukraine in 1920. He entered the Soviet Army in 1940, but was captured by "Axis forces no later than May 1942" and interned in a German POW camp. "At the POW camp," the complaint charges, Demjanjuk "was chosen for service by the SS and German police as an SS and police auxiliary."
After his unit was trained at Trawniki in Nazi-occupied Poland, the
complaint says, it participated in "Operation Reinhard" -- the
murder of approximately 1.7 million Jews in Eastern Europe.
The complaint says by January 1943, Demjanjuk was a guard at the
concentration camp near Lublin, Poland, commonly known as Majdanek,
where thousands were forced into labor and killed in the gas
chambers.
.By March 1943, the complaint says, Demjanjuk was a guard at
Sobibor, also near Lublin. Sobibor guards "met arriving transports
of Jews, forcibly unloaded the Jews from the trains, compelled them
to disrobe and drove them into gas chambers where they were
murdered by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide."
.By October 1943, the complaint alleges, Demjanjuk was in the SS
Death's Head Battalion at Flossenburg in eastern Bavaria, where
thousands were forced into labor. About 30,000 died.
The complaint asks a federal judge to rule that Demjanjuk entered
the United States and was naturalized illegally, and to revoke his
citizenship. If the judge revokes Demjanjuk's citizenship, it would
prepare the way for new deportation proceedings against him.
Rabbi Ordained by Yeshiva University Says He is Gay
By IsraelWire
Rabbi Steven Greenberg, a graduate of Yeshiva University and YU's
Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary has become the first
Orthodox rabbi ever to publicly announce his homosexuality. Some
interpret his move as a sign that Orthodox Judaism will soon need
to respond to the conflicts of religion and homosexuality, while
many YU rabbis are disturbed by Greenberg's actions and claim that
his announcement profanes Yeshiva's name.
Greenberg, 42, a teaching fellow at CLAL, has been instrumental in
the establishment of Jerusalem's Open House, the first gay and
lesbian Center to be built in Israel. He is completing a book
exploring homosexuality from the perspective of Jewish theology and
personal experience.
In 1993, Greenberg published an article in Tikkun magazine under
the pseudonym Rabbi Yaakov Lavado. In "Gayness and G-d: Wrestlings
of an Orthodox Rabbi," he called for a "deeper understanding of
homosexuality within the Orthodox world. How can halakhacists
possibly rule on a matter so complex and so foreign, without a
sustained effort at understanding?"
He refers to Leviticus 18:23, the verse in which the Torah
instructs: "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman, it is
an abomination." He says that "for the present, I have no plausible
halakhic method of interpreting this text in a manner that permits
homosexual sex." He does, however, describe various levels of
homosexual activity, and lists some as being less of a violation to
the Torah law.
"Being an Orthodox Rabbi and actively gay is an oxymoron," said
Rabbi Moshe Tendler, Rosh Yeshiva and biology professor. "It is
very sad that an individual who attended our yeshiva sunk to the
depths of what we consider a depraved society."
Tendler said Greenberg's announcement is "the exact same as if he
said, 'I'm an Orthodox rabbi and I eat ham sandwiches on Yom
Kippur.' What you are is a reform rabbi."
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