Robert Kirschner

Four years after he resigned amid a sex scandal, the former rabbi of one of Northern California's largest Jewish temples--who is now program director at a Jewish cultural center in Los Angeles--has publicly apologized to the women affected by his advances. Robert Kirschner, former rabbi at San Francisco's Temple Emanu-El, offered the apologies in an article published in the Jewish Bulletin. The incidents took place during his 10 years with the congregation, beginning in 1982.

Robert H. Kirschner, 61, an internationally recognized forensic pathologist and human rights activist, died Sunday of complications from kidney cancer at University of Chicago Hospitals. Kirschner participated in human rights missions for the United Nations, Physicians for Human Rights and other groups. His travels took him to Argentina, Kenya, South Korea and many other countries.

Robert H. Kirschner, 61, an internationally recognized forensic pathologist and human rights activist, died Sunday of complications from kidney cancer at University of Chicago Hospitals. Kirschner participated in human rights missions for the United Nations, Physicians for Human Rights and other groups. His travels took him to Argentina, Kenya, South Korea and many other countries.

Four years after he resigned amid a sex scandal, the former rabbi of one of Northern California's largest Jewish temples--who is now program director at a Jewish cultural center in Los Angeles--has publicly apologized to the women affected by his advances. Robert Kirschner, former rabbi at San Francisco's Temple Emanu-El, offered the apologies in an article published in the Jewish Bulletin. The incidents took place during his 10 years with the congregation, beginning in 1982.

The State Department said an autopsy conducted by two American pathologists showed that human rights activist Pavel Wonka, 35, who died in a Czechoslovak prison April 26, was not tortured but that harsh treatment may have contributed to his death. Drs. Robert Lawrence of Harvard University and Robert Kirschner of the University of Chicago, both members of Physicians for Human Rights, were permitted by Czechoslovak authorities to conduct the autopsy.

The rabbi of the largest Jewish congregation in Northern California resigned after being confronted with anonymous allegations of sexual harassment, a temple official confirmed Wednesday. Rabbi Robert Kirschner, 41, resigned from Temple Emanu-El last month after allegations by four women were presented to him, according to Gary Cohn, the synagogue's executive director. The resignation was first reported in Wednesday's San Francisco Examiner, which said Kirschner had denied the allegations.

Since April, 1983, at least 130 Southeast Asian refugees have left this world in essentially the same way. They cried out in their sleep. And then they died. Medical authorities call this Asian Death Syndrome. The refugees have various names for it, one of them being Night Terror. "In the Philippines, it's called bangungut, in Japan pokkuri, in Thailand something else," says Dr. Robert Kirschner. "But it all roughly translates as the same thing: nightmare death."

Guatemalan police Thursday arrested a 24-year-old man with a police record as a suspect in the killing of Roman Catholic Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, provoking more doubts than praise. Two witnesses, examining photographs in police files, picked out Carlos Enrique Vielman Viani as the cleric's killer, government Minister Rodolfo Adrian Mendoza Rosales told a packed news conference in Guatemala City. This was the first indication that police knew of a second witness.

Nearly 500 bodies, mostly women and children who were hacked or bludgeoned to death, have been found in a mass grave near a Rwandan church where thousands were believed massacred in 1994, a U.S. forensic expert said Friday. Dr. Robert H. Kirschner said the wounds on the victims indicated that few offered resistance. "Almost all were killed by blunt trauma blows to the head or by machete blows," he said in a telephone interview from Chicago.