FROM OUR ARCHIVES
50 YEARS AGO
November 29, 1967
It was announced that sewage from the greater Tel Aviv area would be purified and used for drinking by June 1968. This would be the first national sewage recycling program in Israel. Many sewage recovery schemes were already in operation in Australia and California. The first stage of the program would recycle eight million cubic meters of sewage a year. [In 2015, Israel produced 500 million cubic meters of wastewater with more than 85% being reused – a worldwide high.]
The IDF announced that Arab workers employed by the military would enjoy shorter working hours during the month of Ramadan.
IDF liaison officer Maj. Shmuel Liran received a silver medal from the International Red Cross in recognition of his “good work with refugees and Egyptian repatriates in the Gaza Strip and North Sinai.
Convicted Nazi war criminal Eric Rajakovich began defamation proceedings against Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal and his publishers. He demanded an injunction prohibiting the further sale of Wiesenthal’s book But the Murderers Live On, until they deleted a quote alleging that he worked as a Soviet agent in Italy after the war.
25 YEARS AGO
November 29, 1992
The Health Ministry forbade government hospitals from treating patients for free or without a referral from a patient’s health fund, as a reminder aimed at nipping in the bud the planned four-day protest campaign by state hospital doctors against Kupat Holim Clalit. The State Hospital Doctors’ Union had declared that free medical diagnostic services would be available at state hospital outpatient clinics for Kupat Holim members for four days the following week. The doctors’ union claimed that Kupat Holim was refusing to send most of its members to government hospitals closest to their place of residence, and instead referred them to more distant Kupat Holim hospital outpatient and community clinics.
The State’s Attorney’s Office agreed to allow visiting spouses and children of Palestinian residents to remain in the territories. The agreement meant that spouses and children who had already been deported or who left the country voluntarily would be permitted to return and apply for renewable six-month residence visas, while those still here could apply for such visas from here. Previously, non-resident spouses and children had to leave the territories regularly and re-apply for visas from abroad. The agreement basically extended a similar one reached in 1990, but it was more liberal in that it included husbands as well as wives of residents, allowed visa holders to work, and included the Gaza Strip in the arrangement.
10 YEARS AGO
November 29, 2007
Immigrant absorption minister Ya’acov Edri said that the punishments handed out to violent men in Israel were a joke, and the judicial system needed to get tougher with Ethiopian men found guilty of violence against their partners. Three more Ethiopian women were murdered by their husbands or boyfriends since a meeting five months earlier which focused on the rise in domestic abuse within the Ethiopian community. “It is shocking that a man can hit his wife and just get away with it, without being properly punished,” Edri said, highlighting that sentences handed out by the courts to violent men could be as short as two months.
– Daniel Kra