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Friday January 29, 1999

World Report

TORONTO (JTA) -- Members of Canada's Polish community are criticizing Prime Minister Jean Chretien for not inviting any of their representatives to join him this week in a visit to Auschwitz.

Chretien was accompanied to the former death camp by representatives of the Canadian Jewish Congress, including its national president, Moshe Ronen, and by Ronen's 67-year-old father, Mordecai, an Auschwitz survivor.

Chretien's office described his trip to Auschwitz as a personal visit, made at the start of a weeklong trip to Europe.

"This is an insult to the Canadian Polish community," said Ala Gettlich, general secretary of the Canadian Polish Congress, whose grandparents died at Auschwitz during World War II.

This was the first visit by a sitting Canadian prime minister to Poland.

Old Jewish cemetery to be commemorated

WARSAW (JTA) -- A 16th-century Jewish cemetery in southeastern Poland will be commemorated with a fence and symbolic gravestones, according to Polish officials.

Nothing remains of the original cemetery in Przemysl, located near the Ukrainian border, after the Nazis uprooted all the tombstones and used them to build roads. Like the rest of Polish Jewry, most of Przemysl's 20,000 Jews were killed in Nazi death camps.

Gypsies reject charge of bilking survivors

WARSAW (JTA) -- A Polish Gypsy association rejected accusations it skimmed money from payments to Holocaust survivors.

The denial came after a Gypsy group in Germany filed embezzlement complaints in Poland and Switzerland, alleging that $1.2 million had been skimmed from payments from a Swiss humanitarian fund intended for victims of the Nazis.

Accused collaborator ruled too ill for trial

VILNIUS (JTA) -- A man accused of handing Jews over to the Nazis during World War II is too ill to stand trial, court-appointed doctors in Lithuania ruled this week.

The panel of physicians was appointed after Kazys Gimzauskas, 91, failed to appear in court earlier this month. The court will now decide whether to accept the medical panel's ruling.

Norway may drop case against Israeli

OSLO (JTA)-- A Norwegian state attorney is recommending that the state drop its case against an Israeli suspected of killing a Moroccan waiter in 1973 in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

The move by the attorney comes after his office conducted an informal investigation of the suspect, retired Mossad agent Michael Harari. In 1996, Israel agreed to pay compensation for the killing of the Moroccan, who was mistaken for the Palestinian mastermind behind the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.

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