Jewish Organizations

The suspicious package discovered Thursday at B'nai B'rith--sparking an hours-long chemical-hazard alert that closed several downtown streets--was sent by someone claiming to be associated with a group called the Counter Holocaust Lobbyists of Hillel, according to the FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force.

This nation's strained ties with Jewish organizations worsened Sunday with publication of a leaked document in which Bern's envoy to Washington called for "waging war" against Jewish groups and other vocal critics. Swiss Jewish leaders assailed the comments, which the Sonntags Zeitung weekly said came from a confidential strategy paper that Ambassador Carlo Jagmetti sent to Bern last month on how to handle a controversy over dormant accounts in Swiss banks of World War II Holocaust victims.

The United Jewish Appeal/Federation of Ventura County is organizing an informational fair next month to promote Jewish community organizations. The fair will showcase organizations offering activities for seniors, adults and youths. Organizers are encouraging families to attend. More than two dozen organizations will present opportunities for travel, education and entertainment, both in the area and beyond. "This is an educational fair," said Susan Abrams, administrator of the federation.

Leaders of major Protestant, Catholic and Jewish organizations condemned Republican welfare and Medicaid reform proposals Wednesday as "unholy" and beseeched President Clinton to veto the legislation. "Unholy legislation that destroys the safety net must not be signed into law by President Clinton," the organizations said in a joint statement. "The very soul of our nation is at risk."

Among the grisly reminders of Nazi Germany, none is more horrific than the complex of concentration camps in this southwestern Polish town, known under German occupation as Auschwitz. Historians estimate at least 1.1 million people from across Europe, the vast majority Jews, were put to death here, most of them in gas chambers disguised as showers, while others were starved, tortured, executed or worked to death.

The 70-page Jewish quarterly that arrived in mailboxes this week was typically thoughtful. Articles declared, among other things, that spousal abuse is a larger-than-acknowledged Jewish problem, that too many rabbis suffer burnout over conflicting expectations and that two decades of women rabbis has not led to a "feminization" of the synagogue as predicted. But there was also a surprise in the fall issue of Jewish Spectator, edited and published in Calabasas.

A swastika found spray-painted under the sign of the Jewish Family Service office on Monday is the fifth reported anti-Semitic incident in Orange County this year, and follows a record number of such crimes in 1993. According to a report released Monday by the Orange County Anti-Defamation League, 41 anti-Semitic acts were reported last year, up from 17 the previous year. That 141% increase compares to a national increase of 8%, the ADL's Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents found.

Administrators at Cal State Northridge will take no disciplinary action against the campus' black student group for a letter that accused a Jewish student group of using "Hitlerian tactics" to reduce attendance at a scheduled speech by Minister Louis Farrakhan, controversial head of the Nation of Islam. University officials have decried the letter, and it has inflamed tensions between black and Jewish students on the eve of Farrakhan's speech Thursday.

Joseph Spivack, 91, one of the founders of the American chapters of ORT, the Jewish Organization for Rehabilitation and Training. Inspired by a visit to ORT schools in Rome and Israel more than 30 years ago, Spivack founded a chapter in Cleveland, which was the forerunner of the more than 50 American ORT chapters today. Worldwide, there are 250,000 students in 50 countries receiving vocational-technical training and Jewish education.

One group of women arrives by car, secure, a lifetime behind them. The other takes a bus, maybe two or three, lugging a child, and a future in doubt. Each Wednesday, the two worlds come together in a cluttered room in Pacoima--middle-aged Jewish women offering hope to teen-age girls who dropped out of adolescence--and high school--to become mothers. The women teach them fundamental English and math skills, but, more importantly, to believe in themselves.