Haifa

A year ago, Haifa Street was a name that inspired dread. Automobile carcasses littered the sidewalks -- charred remnants of car bomb attacks on U.S. and Iraqi security patrols. Gouges in the roadway from American rockets and insurgents' rocket-propelled grenades had turned the asphalt into a slalom course.

Violent death has struck this tight-knit community many times over the decades, men and women lost in wars and other hostilities. But none of that prepared resident Hillel Leviatan for the tragedy now before him: members of three generations of a single family cut down by a suicide bomber.

To his Leisure World neighbors, Simon Lechtuz seemed the penniless eccentric--a disheveled lifelong bachelor who seldom changed clothes and sought treasure in trash containers around Laguna Hills. Little did they know Lechtuz was a millionaire who, in the final years of his life, had agreed to leave his $5-million fortune to the government of Israel in exchange for his burial there with full religious observance.

Tucked into the hillside of this ancient port city is a sight few Israelis ever imagined they'd see in the Jewish state. It's a simple, small housing shelter, converted from an old office building and not unlike ones for the homeless, drug addicts or battered women. This facility, however, has a different clientele: Holocaust survivors. The dozen or so residents are among those who more than six decades ago survived concentration camps or spent years as refugees fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II. In Israel, many built prosperous, productive lives.

Israeli police Monday said they have arrested a second man--a friend of one already in custody--on suspicion of desecrating 250 Jewish graves near the city of Haifa. A Haifa police spokesman described the suspect as a "mentally confused" 32-year-old Jew. He said he was a friend of a man, also described as mentally deranged and Jewish, who was arrested Sunday after reportedly being seen loitering near the two desecrated graveyards.

Drop by the Israeli restaurant Haifa on a Sunday for hamin to take home. This Sephardic Sabbath dish cooks slowly over the weekend starting Friday and is available only on Sundays. Haifa makes it with beef roast, white beans, potatoes and hard-boiled eggs. The eggs are colored brown with onion skins. Orders of hamin come with pita bread and three salads: marinated beets, cabbage and carrot, and a Turkish salad that is more like a spicy tomato salsa.

Four Israeli parachutists were killed and six seriously injured when their plane crashed Saturday after takeoff, a Civil Aviation spokesman said. One of the plane's engines failed minutes after it left the ground from an airfield in Haifa, north of Tel Aviv, aviation spokesman Nir Yarkoni said. The pilot tried to make an emergency landing but crashed into a mountainside, Yarkoni said. Rescue workers evacuated the injured by helicopter to two hospitals in Haifa, according to Israel's Army Radio.

Israeli supporters of extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane set fire to the office of a socialist newspaper in Haifa, police said. Two young activists in Kahane's Kach party were arrested shortly after setting the blaze, police spokesman Dov Lutzki said. "There is little doubt that their motives were political," Lutzki said. The U.S.-born Kahane has accused the media of being leftist and has threatened "to take care of all the journalists" if he ever attains power.

Four Israeli Arabs from the Haifa area in northern Israel were given life sentences Friday for the 1982 rape and murder of a Jewish woman soldier. Kamel Sbechi and his brother Mohammed, their cousin Attaf Sbechi and Ahmed Kuzli had pleaded not guilty. A panel of three judges convicted them of the gang rape and murder of Dafna Carmon, 21, seized near her home on Haifa's Mount Carmel on June 11, 1982, five days after Israel's invasion of Lebanon.