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Friday November 30, 2007

Shorts: U.S.

Mohel crosses country for brit

Alon Razla, a Lubavitch businessperson and mohel, flew from Florida to Alaska to perform a brit.

There are no mohels in Alaska, according to Rabbi Yosef Greenberg, co-director of the Lubavitch Jewish Center of Alaska.

Greenberg said there have been about 10 ritual circumcisions in the past 15 years in Alaska, all performed by volunteer mohels sent by Brit Yosef Yitzchak. The organization, founded in 1980 under Lubavitch auspices, does not charge for circumcisions; families only have to pay transportation costs. — jta

Professor guilty of manslaughter

A former Ivy League professor who’s from Israel pleaded guilty this week to voluntary manslaughter for killing his wife as she wrapped Christmas presents last year, telling a judge he “just lost it.”

Rafael Robb, once a tenured economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, faces up to seven years in prison for bludgeoning his wife, Ellen, on Dec. 22, 2006. He apologized to his 13-year-old daughter and family.

“I know she liked her mother … and now she doesn’t have a mother,” he said, stifling tears. — ap

Foundation pledges money to Treblinka

The family foundation of Karen Pritzker and Michael Vlock has pledged $1 million to build a visitor’s center at the site of the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.

The foundation said Treblinka, where some 900,000 people were killed from July 1942 to November 1943, provides no real explanation of what happened there and lacks proper facilities for visitors.

Karen Pritzker’s cousin John is president of the S.F-based Jewish Community Federation.

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