us report

NEW YORK (JTA) -- A North Carolina museum is at the center of a dispute over a 16th-century painting that may have been looted by the Nazis.

Two elderly Austrian sisters say the painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder was stolen from their family. Estimated to be worth $750,000, "Madonna and Child in a Landscape" is now held by the North Carolina Museum of Art after changing hands at least three times since the end of World War II.

Player's Judaism hits a home run

NEW YORK (JTA) -- A Jewish outfielder is making his religion a central factor in his baseball career.

Shawn Green "told us he wanted to play in a major U.S. city with a large Jewish population," said Gord Ash, the general manager for Green's former team, the Toronto Blue Jays.

Green, who was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers this week, was quoted earlier this year as saying he wanted to have a bar mitzvah.

Green made the American League All-Star team this past season.

Witness prevents Conn. firebombing

NEW YORK (JTA) -- A witness prevented the firebombing of a Connecticut synagogue by honking his car horn. Two men outside Congregation Beth El in Norwalk were apparently frightened by the sound of the horn, dropped the Molotov cocktails they were holding and fled the scene in a car, the witness told police.

People were inside the synagogue at the time of last week's incident. In August, two containers of medical waste marked with swastikas were found outside Congregation Beth El and another synagogue in Stamford, Conn. Police said they did not yet know if the two incidents are connected.

Rabbinical leaders decry Baptist tactics

NEW YORK (JTA) -- The heads of four rabbinical seminaries in the United States sent a joint letter to the president of the Southern Baptist Convention condemning his group's strategy of targeting Jews for conversion.

"The Jewish community is deeply offended that the SBC has formally embraced a strategy that attempts to deceive Jews into believing that one can be both a Jew and Christian," said the letter, which was organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and sent to the Rev. Paige Patterson.

The presidents of the rabbinical schools connected with Yeshiva University, which is modern Orthodox, and the Conservative, Reconstructionist and Reform movements signed the letter. The convention has also recently intensified its conversion attempts against members of other religions.