FROM OUR ARCHIVES

15 YEARS AGO

April 18, 2003

The US was weighing whether to try captured Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas or hand him over to Italy to serve prison time for his conviction there in the 1985 Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking, in which disabled American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer was murdered. Abbas was nabbed by US forces in Iraq earlier in the week. The US had known for years that Saddam Hussein was providing safe haven for Abbas in Baghdad. US officials described his capture as evidence of Iraq’s support for terrorism. During the hijacking, Abbas’s followers in the Palestine Liberation Front shot the 69-year-old Klinghoffer, and then dumped his body and wheelchair into the Mediterranean Sea.

Iraqi Muslims spared a small Jewish community center in Baghdad from looting, according to reports. Elsewhere in the Iraqi capital, an armed group was organized to protect a synagogue. According to the report, Iraqis chased a band of would-be looters out of the center. Vandals had previously taken down a sign on the center which labeled the building as belonging to the “Special Committee for the Religious Affairs of Ezra Menahem Daniel.” Then two men tried to force the door open while a guard was on a break, to force their way inside. “We came over right away and asked them what they wanted,” Abdullah Nurredin said. “When they saw the look we were giving them, they left without saying another word.” “The Jews have always lived here, in this house, and it is only normal that we should protect them,” said Ibrahim Muhammad. Although the majority of Jews fled the country in the early 1950s, many of their Muslim tenants came each week to pay their rent to an old woman at the center. In another part of Baghdad, a group was formed to protect a synagogue from bandits. “We are defending the synagogue like all houses on the street,” said Edward Benham.” The young Christian student said that Jews normally attended prayers each Saturday, though none showed up the previous Shabbat.

10 YEARS AGO

April 18, 2008

Iran stepped up its efforts to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip by using floatable devices that it dropped near the waters off the Gaza coast to be picked up by Palestinian fisherman, senior defense officials said.

For the first time ever the rabbinic system in Israel turned to the secular media in an attempt to track down a wanton husband who was refusing to grant his wife a divorce. In the first case to be published in this way, the rabbinic court turned exclusively to The Jerusalem Post to advertise the personal details of one Meir Briskman. Briskman had refused to grant his wife a divorce for five years. The court believed that he might have fled the country, leaving his wife halachically unable to move on with her life.

An Orthodox Jewish passenger who left his seat to pray in the back of a United Airlines plane while it was being boarded and ignored flight attendants’ orders to return to his seat was removed by an airport security guard before the plane took off.

– Daniel Kra