U.S. Report

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Members of the U.S. delegation to last week's European conference on anti-Semitism in Vienna confessed to having red faces over a typo in a letter from President Bush that mixed up the names of Nazi death camps.

In his June 17 letter to the conference, Bush noted that he and his wife, Laura, had only recently visited "the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald." There, he wrote, they were "reminded of the inhumanity and brutality that befell Europe only six decades ago."

The Bushes, however, visited the complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in southern Poland. Buchenwald is in Germany.

N.J. survivor suing over camp memorial

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- A Holocaust survivor is suing the American Jewish Committee over a memorial the group is erecting at a Nazi death camp.

On Monday, Norman Salsitz of Springfield, N.J., filed a suit in U.S. District Court in Washington seeking an injunction blocking the AJCommittee from digging a trench through the Belzec death camp in Poland because it allegedly will disturb human remains buried there.

Salsitz, who lost 23 family members in Belzec, where an estimated 600,000 Jews died, said the trench would desecrate the remains of buried bodies.

The AJCommittee denies that any desecration is taking place, and says the memorial has won the approval of Israel's former chief Ashkenazi rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau; leading European rabbis on a Jewish cemetery preservation panel; and other survivors of the camp.