World Report

SHANGHAI (JTA) -- The Ohel Rachel Synagogue in Shanghai plans to hold its first Rosh Hashanah service in 47 years.

The synagogue serves about 200 businesspeople, diplomats and journalists who reside in Shanghai. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were among those attending a ceremony marking the restoration of the synagogue in June 1998.

Argentina seeking Hezbollah leader

BUENOS AIRES (JTA) -- Argentina's Supreme Court has issued an arrest warrant for Imad Mughniyah for the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires.

Mughniyah is a leader of the Islamic fundamentalist Hezbollah movement and one of the world's most wanted terrorists.

The warrant was issued after authorities gathered what they called "conclusive evidence" that Hezbollah was behind the bombing, which killed 29 people and injured more than 200 others.

U.S. officials suspect Mughniyah of plotting or participating in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the 1995 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 from Athens to Rome.

Jew may deserve credit for discovering aspirin

BERLIN (JTA) -- The true discoverer of aspirin was not the scientist long credited with the achievement but his German Jewish superior, an expert on the history of drugs said Tuesday.

Bayer AG, which introduced the analgesic 100 years ago, disputes the claim by Walter Sneader, a professor at Glasgow's Strathclyde University.

Sneader, who has written two books on the modern history of drugs, attributes the discovery of aspirin to Arthur Eichengruen, not Felix Hoffmann, long credited with the achievement.

Eichengruen's role was rewritten when the Nazis came to power, Sneader asserts.

Germany's first guest to capital to be Barak

BERLIN (JTA) -- Sixty years after the start of World War II, Germany's chancellor has announced that Israel's prime minister will be the first foreign leader to officially visit the rededicated capital of a reunified Germany.

The visit is planned for Sept. 21, one day after Yom Kippur.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder made the announcement last week as part of a news conference marking the 60th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, which triggered what he called "one of the most awful crimes of German history."

Schroeder, speaking for the first time from his temporary headquarters here, suggested that the invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was linked with a feeling of "responsibility to not forget our history, and also to not repress it."

Schroeder's invitation to Barak -- which has been accepted, sources say -- is a significant step for the administration that claims to represent Germany's postwar era.

Mortar shell found near Jewish school

MOSCOW (JTA) -- A mortar shell that apparently went undetected since World War II was discovered Sept. 2 near a Jewish day school in the Russian capital.

The shell was taken away from the site and defused at a location outside the city. Grigory Lipman, principal of Moscow's Jewish Day School No. 1311, said the incident did not disrupt the school's daily routine.

Russian Jew to visit 13 jailed Iran Jews

MOSCOW (JTA) -- Russian officials are backing the leader of the country's Jewish community in his desire to visit Iran before an expected trial of 13 Iranian Jews on charges of spying for Israel and the United States.

A spokesman for Russia's Foreign Ministry said Russian officials met this week with Iran's ambassador to Moscow, Mehdi Safari, regarding the upcoming visit of Vladimir Goussinsky, the president of the Russian Jewish Congress.

Earlier this year, Goussinsky, a media mogul widely regarded as one of the most influential men in Moscow, called on Russia to intervene on behalf of the 13, who were arrested in March.

Hitler once enthralled film director Bergman

BERLIN (JTA) -- Film director Ingmar Bergman says he was enthralled by Adolf Hitler as a young man but that he underwent a change of heart after seeing photos of concentration camps, according to a forthcoming book.

Bergman, 81, recounts his attraction to Nazism and its leader in a chapter of journalist Maria-Pia Boethius' "Honor and Conscience," which discusses whether Sweden was genuinely neutral in World War II.