Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 7 January 2004 — Page 7

January 1. 2004 NAT 3 5 sent to prison as draft dodgers

Israel lifts work ban for 29,000 Palestinians

JERUSALEM—Israel has reauthorized work permits for 29,000 Palestinian laborers just weeks after revoking their work permits in reaction to a suicide bombing. The decision allows 19,000 Gaza residents and 10,000 Palestinians from the West Bank to work in Israel. That still leaves the total of Palestinian workers far fewer

than the estimated 150,000 who used to work in Israel before the outbreak of violence in September 2000. The United States and other countries have increasingly pressured Israel to ease the economic restrictions on Palestinians, whose economy has been hit hard by unemployment and poverty during the current intifada.

JAFFA, Israel—A military court has sentenced five teenaged conscientious objectors to a year each in prison for their refusal to join the Israel Defense Forces. Their confinement time since their arrests will not be deducted from their sentences. They could have faced up to three years in prison. The

judges' ruling said the sentence was meant as a warning to others. On leaving the court, the five said that their sentence will not deter the refusenik movement. They said soldiers who commit "war crimes" get lenient sentences while they are sent to prison for matters of conscience. The court ruled that their freedom to follow their con-

science was outweighed by values such as national security, which could be gravely impaired if conscripts were exempted from service. Furthermore, the court said, by acting as a group opposing Israeli policy, they had strayed from the norms of classic individual conscientious objection into the realm of civil disobedience.

Israeli population numbers sluggish

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Switzerland pardons refugees’ rescuers

BERN, Switzerland—A new Swiss law pardons the people the country criminalized for helping Jewish refugees enter Switzerland during World War II. The law that took effect on Jan. 1 annuls all sentences issued during the war to those who smuggled or sheltered refugees, but without granting a right of compensation to those jailed or fined for the wartime crime.

Switzerland began the border controls in 1938 and had closed its borders entirely to the refugees by 1942. Even though helping them was a crime, Switzerland sheltered around 300,000 people between 1938 and 1945. Relatively few of those who entered illegally were forcibly expelled. Switzerland previously made a formal apology to Jews for its World War II policies.

Survivors group may sue Mormons

NEW YORK—The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors is considering suing the Mormon church for posthumous baptisms of people who died in the Nazi death camps. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) said it ceased that practice in 1995. However, an independent researcher, Helen Radkey, says she found about 20,000 Jews on Mormon lists, including Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Jewish philosopher Theodor Herzl. She says she found many baptisms occurring after 1995. A Mormon official insisted the church has told members not to conduct such ceremonies without written consent of immediate family members. Church officials insist they have kept to the 1995 agree-

ment. The agreement came about after Ernest Michel, a former executive vice president of the UJA-Federation of New York and chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, learned in 1994 that the Mormons had baptized posthumously his parents and various aunts and uncles whom the Nazis killed in a camp in southern France. Radkey said she checks the church's online lists on a daily basis and has found that whenever news reports reveal famous Jews in the index, their names are removed quickly. But she says notable Jews still in the Mormon records as having been baptized include Hasidism founder the Ba'al Shem Tov, Nobel Prize winning author S.Y. Agnon, and Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann.

JERUSALEM—Immigration to Israel in 2003 was the lowest in 15 years, the government reported. The Central Bureau of Statistics blamed the ailing economy and more than three years of Palestinian-Israeli violence as apparently having discouraged immigration.

The 23,000 immigrants represented a 32 percent drop from the 2002 figure of 34,000, the bureau said. The country's population grew by 1.7 percent, to 6.75 million, the lowest natural growth rate since 1990. The populace includes 5,160,000 Jews and 1.3 million Arabs,

roughly a 5 to 1 ratio. The slow growth was due mainly to the decline in immigration, the report said. Immigration to Israel boomed in the 1990s, but the flow from that area slowed in 2000, and immigration has steadily decreased since then.

Lieberman, Dean spar over war on terror

JOHNSTON, Iowa—Democratic presidential candidates debated Sunday, with Sen. Joe Lieberman leading the attacks on front-runner Howard Dean here.

Lieberman targeted Dean's assertion that America is no safer with Saddam Hussein in captivity. Dean dted the deaths of nearly two dozen American troops since

Saddam's capture and insisted the Bush administration would have done better to attack alQaida than to occupy Iraq. They were here preparing for the Iowa caucuses.

NEW MEXICO SUPPORTS ISRAEL—New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson presents New Mexico Israel Bonds chairman Harold Albert of Albuquerque with a presentation check to mark the State's $10 million bond purchase. Israel Bonds President & CEO Joshua Matza said that the purchase "demonstrates New Mexico's commitment to strengthen Israel's economy at this critical

moment in its history."