SYDNEY (JTA) -- Jewish day schools in Victoria have taken the top five positions in the first-ever official listing of academic achievement in the Australian state.
In a study prepared for the government by Melbourne University that was based on results in high school final examinations in 1996, Bialik College, which has a strong emphasis on the Hebrew language and Israel, topped the list.
It was followed by the Modern Orthodox Mount Scopus Memorial College and Liebler-Yavneh College, and then by Beth Rivkah Ladies College and Yeshiva College.
"The day schools' performance has established that the time devoted to Jewish education has not detracted from the quality of secular education at our schools," Diane Shteinman, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said in an interview.
Neo-Nazi graffiti in town with no Jews
ROME (JTA) -- Vandals on New Year's Eve spray-painted swastikas and racist and anti-Semitic slogans on the walls and shutters of shops and banks in Mentana, a small town near Rome where no Jews live.
The incident came only a few days after vandals last weekend desecrated tombs in the Jewish part of one of Rome's main cemeteries.
Both incidents are believed to be the work of neo-Nazi skinheads or other fringe groups.
"Something like this happens more or less every year, but never to such an extent as this," Mayor Luigi Cignoni told the Rome daily Il Messaggero.
Cignoni said the vandalism was done by a "fringe of disaffected people who are against shopkeepers and banks because, according to them, they are the symbol of the accumulation of money and of capitalism."
`Voluntary' sales of land contested
BONN (JTA) -- A decade may pass before a Potsdam court rules on 19 Jews who seek the restitution of 850 plots of land -- much of the town of Teltow-Seehof, south of Berlin.
A Potsdam administrative court began in December to hear testimony in the case, and expects to hear 2,000 to 3,000 people overall.
Legal experts have said the case is the largest and most complicated of its kind in postwar Germany. The claimants or their family members sold the contested property in the 1930s, but were pressured to do so because they are Jewish.
This case differs from most other European restitution cases because the land, in the former East German state of Brandenburg, was sold "voluntarily" and not confiscated by the Nazis outright.
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