School Vandalized
SEATTLE — A Jewish high school in the Seattle area was defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti. The epithets in orange, blue and grey paint on the Northwest Yeshiva High School on Mercer Island included swastikas and references to gas chambers, the Seattle Times reported. The attack occurred late on Sept. 16 and was discovered the next morning, on Erev Yom Kippur. The graffiti covered most of the building’s outer wall, including on the second floor. Area residents helped to clean off the graffiti before Yom Kippur services were held in the school’s sanctuary. Police are examining the school’s security tapes.
Hero Honoured
LONDON — A statue honoring the “British Schindler” was unveiled at a train station in Britain. Sir Nicholas Winton, 101, attended the dedication ceremony Sept. 18 at the Maidenhead railway station. He smuggled 669 mostly Jewish boys and girls out of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The bronze statue shows Winton sitting on a park bench reading a book containing pictures of the children he saved.
Charges Dropped
PHOENIX — Rape and sexual abuse charges against a Phoenix rabbi were dismissed six months after his very public arrest. The case against Rabbi Bryan Bramly was dismissed Sept. 15 in New York County Supreme Court. Rabbi Bramly, 45, has been spiritual leader of Temple Beth Sholom of the East Valley since 2006. He was arrested March 23 in the parking lot of the shul by the U.S. Marshals Child Predator Apprehension Team and New York City police detectives. The married father of two was alleged to have raped a seven-year-old girl in March 2000 when she was spending the night at his family’s home in New York, where he was finishing rabbinical studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The girl, now 17, reported her allegations to authorities in August 2009, but the district attorney in the case said there were inconsistencies in evidence and that the complainant was unable to remember details of the alleged incident.
Dancers Boycotted
NEW YORK — Two New York-based human rights groups have organized a boycott of shows by Israel’s national dance company. Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel and the New York chapter of Artists Against Apartheid announced the move in an open letter to the Batsheva Dance Company, which was slated to perform in New York from Sept. 21 to Oct. 3. They said they called the boycott because of the company’s “collaboration with the Israeli state and its Brand Israel campaign,” a government PR initiative designed to reshape preconceived notions about Israel.
Denier Barred From Leading Camp Tour
WARSAW — The Auschwitz museum won’t allow a British historian who denies the Holocaust to give a tour at the site of the former concentration camp.
David Irving can’t lead a tour group at Auschwitz because he’s not a licensed tour guide, officials of Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum said last week.
Irving, 72, was in Poland to lead a tour of British and U.S. tourists to key Nazi sites, including Hitler’s headquarters and the Treblinka death camp, as well as the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz.
In an interview this month with the British Daily Mail, Irving criticized Polish authorities for turning Auschwitz into a “money-making machine,” and accused them of building fake watchtowers. Irving said other death camps have been neglected because they are not as “marketable.”
He was jailed for Shoah denial in Austria in 2006 for a 1989 speech that said Auschwitz had no gas chambers.