c. 1998 Religion News Service

Holocaust Museum director ousted

(RNS) The director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has resigned under pressure, some of it stemming from his recent refusal to receive Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat as an honored guest of the museum.

Walter Reich _ a child of Holocaust survivors and a psychiatrist by training with no previous experience in museum administration _ resigned Wednesday (Feb. 18) in a letter to the museum’s board chairman, Miles Lerman.

Museum officials said Reich, a widely regarded Holocaust and Middle East scholar who assumed the post in June 1995, would relinquish his duties March 31. He will be temporarily replaced by associate museum director Sara Bloomfield.

In January, Reich, not knowing that Arafat had already been invited to tour the museum by State Department officials, declined to escort the Palestinian leader, reportedly because he did not want to thrust the museum into a highly charged political situation.

While some within the Jewish community favored Arafat’s visiting the museum, believing that might help sensitize him to Israeli security concerns. Others objected because of Arafat’s history of supporting terrorism against Israel and the presence in his administration of individuals who deny the Holocaust’s historical truth.

Under pressure, the museum later reversed itself and invited Arafat, who then said his schedule did not allow a visit. Lerman, with whom Reich reportedly disagreed on a variety of issues, publicly blamed Reich for the embarrassing incident.

In his resignation letter to Lerman, Reich referred to the incident, saying,”As you know, we have differed on the use of the museum, and of the memory of the Holocaust, in the context of political or diplomatic circumstances or negotiations.” However, the Arafat incident was just the latest in a string of problems that plagued Reich’s tenure.

Journalist James Besser, who covers Washington for a number of American Jewish newspapers, said Reich’s ouster”came after a long-standing staff rebellion that reached a peak with the Arafat incident. But the Arafat incident was not the cause of his ouster.” The Holocaust Museum sits on federal land near the Washington Monument but was privately funded. Enormously popular, it attracts about 2 million visitors annually.

Nude childrens’ photos prompt Alabama to indict Barnes & Noble

(RNS) Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookseller, has been indicted by an Alabama grand jury on child pornography charges stemming from the sale of books containing photographs of nude children.

Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor said Wednesday (Feb. 18) he began the grand jury probe of Barnes & Noble following complaints about two photo books sold by the chain _”The Age of Innocence”by Frenchman David Hamilton and”Radiant Identities”by Jock Sturges of San Francisco.

Barnes & Noble officials have declined immediate comment, saying they had not yet seen the indictment, the Associated Press reported.

The same photo books have gotten Barnes & Noble into trouble in Tennessee as well, where a grand jury in November indicted the bookseller for allegedly distributing obscene materials harmful to minors.

Pryor said the books were pornographic rather than artistic because they contain photos”designed to elicit a sexual response.” Sturges told the Associated Press that his photos”are not done flirtatiously.”

Cross to be removed from former convent site near Auschwitz

(RNS) A wooden cross commemorating a 1979 papal Mass will be removed from a site near the former Nazi death camp in Auschwitz, Poland, following Jewish protests.

The Polish government said it will remove the 16-foot cross from a site where Pope John Paul II celebrated a Mass during his first visit to Poland as head of the Roman Catholic Church.

The cross is about 80 feet from the former death camp. It stands on property currently owned by Catholic nuns, who had a controversial convent at the site until 1993. The land is in the process of being given over to the Polish government.

Jews objected to convent, and now the cross, saying it is inappropriate for Christian symbols to be so close to a camp where more than 1 million Jews died during the Holocaust because of their religious affiliation.

Vatican paper praises, criticizes 7-year-old embryo baby

(RNS) A Vatican newspaper has found”positive aspects”in the birth of a child from an embryo frozen for more than seven years, despite the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to such fertility procedures.

An 8-pound, 15-ounce boy was born in California Monday (Feb. 16) to parents who underwent fertility treatments, had a child in 1990 and then had frozen a second in vitro embryo. The couple then forgot about the embryo until last year, when they decided to have a second child.

L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, lauded the couple for bringing a second child into an apparently loving home, the Associated Press reported. However, the newspaper also noted Pope John Paul II’s opposition to in vitro fertilization and the hormonal treatments of post-menopausal women so they may give birth.”Every human being has the right to be conceived in a human way … and carried in his mother’s womb,”the newspaper said.

Boesak trial postponed for lack of funds to pay attorney costs

(RNS) The trial of Allan Boesak, the former anti-apartheid activist and South African Dutch Reformed Church clergyman charged with fraud and theft, has been postponed because he cannot afford to pay attorney fees.

Boesak has been charged with 20 counts of theft and 12 of fraud in connection with the alleged misappropriation of more than $200,000. The money had been donated to the Foundation for Peace, which Boesak headed.

The foundation’s accountant has been sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to similar charges.

Boesak has maintained his innocence.

Boesak, 51, was in court Monday (Feb. 16), when he had his case postponed until May 18.

His legal fees are expected to cost more than $400,000. Because an unnamed supporter had offered to pay about half of the expected costs, South Africa’s Legal Aid Board has said Boesak is no longer entitled to state funds to cover lawyers’ fees, according to Ecumenical News International, a Geneva-based religious news agency.

Orthodox church leaders: pope not welcome in Moscow

(RNS) Top officials of the Russian Orthodox Church, reacting to the meeting between Pope John Paul II and Russian President Boris Yeltsin last week, say the pontiff is not welcome in Moscow at the moment.”I think the president (Yeltsin) knows that the Russian Orthodox Church has currently a negative attitude to the idea of a papal visit,”said Hilarion Alfeyev, a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church.

John Paul has said he would like to visit Russia and the Holy Land before his pontificate ends.

A spokesman for Yeltsin said the Russian president and the pontiff did not specifically discuss a papal visit to Russia during their 50-minute meeting on Feb. 10, but stressed John Paul has a standing invitation to visit.”But a visit of this sort requires a radical change in relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican,”Sergei Yasztrzhembsky, the Yeltsin spokesman told Ecumenical News International, the Geneva-based religious news agency.

Vatican-Russian Orthodox relations are strained over a number of issues, including Russia’s recently adopted religion law the Vatican feels could harm Catholic religious freedoms and the unbanning of the Greek Catholic, or Uniate, Church in Ukraine.

In the early ’90s, the Moscow (Orthodox) Patriarch had to surrender _ over Orthodox objections _ church properties that had been seized from the Uniate Church during the Stalinist era.”Our position is very clear,”Alfeyev said.”The Russian church is at present against a visit by the pope to Russia. We want to achieve a real improvement of the situation in Ukraine”before a visit would be approved.

Alfeyev also rejected any meeting between John Paul and Partriarch Alexii II, head of the Russian church.

Alfeyev said Cardinal Edward Cassidy, head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, was told in January that any meeting between the pope and the patriarch would be”impossible”until”real progress”is achieved in resolving the tensions in the Ukraine.

British chaplain gets first-hand experience in her mission field

(RNS)”If you want to find out what it’s like being a bus driver you’d better learn to drive a bus,”was what one bus driver told British industrial chaplain Sylvia Wood.

So at age of 57, the Rev. Sylvia Wood, one of three full-time industrial chaplains in the Church of England’s diocese of Chelmsford, learned how to drive a bus. She’s set to take her public service vehicle driver’s test in March.

However, she says,”already I have learned enough to know what a driver’s life is like.” The local bus company _ Eastern National, based in Chelmsford _ is just one of the industries she is concerned with as a chaplain. Another is the local post office sorting office. So she also plans to accompany a postman on his early morning rounds to find out what that’s like as well.

Wood’s”parish”also includes deep-sea divers. But she has no plans to don a suit and experience deep-sea diving.

Quote of the day: Roman Catholic Bishop Luis Reynoso

(RNS)”The severity of the crime of kidnapping and its alarming growth oblige me to impose this punishment of excommunication, which can only be applied in cases of the most serious crimes and with utmost discretion.” _ Bishop Luis Reynoso of the Roman Catholic diocese of Cuernavaca, Mexico, announcing he had excommunicated on Feb. 10 the chief and two agents of a government anti-kidnapping squad who were caught trying to dispose of the body of a kidnapped criminal suspect.

DEA END RNS