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Wednesday November 21, 2007

Shorts: World

Prince Charles rebuffs Israel

Prince Charles’ office rejected an invitation for his top aides to visit Israel because of concerns the trip would be used to bolster the country’s international image, the London-based Jewish Chronicle reported last week

“Acceptance would make it hard to avoid the many ways in which Israel would want (Charles) to help burnish its international image,” the prince’s private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, wrote in an email to Israel’s ambassador to Britain at the time, Zvi Heifetz.

No British royal has ever paid a state visit to Israel, although Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem in 1994. — ap

Vatican-Israel ties deteriorating?

A senior Vatican diplomat who served as papal envoy to Israel has described Vatican-Israeli relations as worsening, blaming the Jewish state for failing to keep promises related to church land, taxes and travel restrictions on Arab clergy.

Archbishop Pietro Sambi lashed out at Israel in an interview posted last week on Terrasanta.net, an online publication about the Holy Land.

“If I must be frank, the relations between the Catholic Church and the state of Israel were better when there were no diplomatic ties,” Sambi said.

The Vatican diplomat also cited a current sore point - the granting of permits for Arab Christian clergy traveling to and around the West Bank. Israel has rescinded some travel privileges for those clergy because of security concerns. — ap

Germany may review treaty on reparations

A German government spokesperson said last week that Berlin would not turn down a request by the Israeli government to reassess a reparations treaty signed in 1952.

The remarks followed a call by Israeli Cabinet minister Rafi Eitan for Germany to examine increasing its payouts. According to Israeli media reports, Eitan’s main argument is that only two-thirds of the reparations sum agreed upon in 1952 was paid.

The other one-third was deferred for the eventual reunification of West and East Germany but was never realized. Eitan has also noted that in the past two decades, Israel took in a large number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, including Holocaust survivors. That influx, he said, could not have been predicted in the 1952 deal. — jta

France denies talk of attack

Reports in Ha’aretz suggesting that France would consider using military force against Iran are wrong, said French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner during a news conference with his Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, last week.

Ha’aretz had cited Kouchner as saying he planned to continue pressuring Iran toward “an agreed solution, the only one that will prevent us from having, one day, to be faced with a dilemma of ‘an Iranian bomb or bombing Iran.’”

In September, Kouchner said on a French TV broadcast, “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.” — jta

Russia honors Jewish spy

Russia President Vladimir Putin posthumously gave George Koval the Hero of Russia medal this month for helping the Soviets develop the atomic bomb.

Koval was born to Jewish parents who emigrated from Czarist Russia

to the United States. In the early 1930s, the family returned to the Soviet Union, lured by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s promise of a Jewish homeland in the Far East.

Koval died in Moscow last year at the of age 93. — ap

Costa Rica soccer team to play Iran

Costa Rica’s national soccer team will play in Tehran, despite pleas from Jewish groups to skip the contest.

Costa Rica and Iran will square off Jan. 30, the Costa Rican Football Federation announced last week. It marks the second time the two will meet in Tehran in less than two years.

Both teams lost in the first round of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, and will use January’s game to prepare for early qualifiers for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. — jta

Breslov grave not for sale

Reb Nachman’s grave in Uman, Ukraine, is a cultural site and cannot be sold, the government said.

The announcement about the grave of Breslov Chasidism’s founder comes after attempts to privatize the site, which thousands of pilgrims visit each year. — jta

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