Shorts: World

Anti-terror group offers its dogs

london (jta) | An organization that features bomb-sniffing dogs is offering free services to governments to help them fight terrorism.

Pups for Peace said it is making the offer in the wake of last week's bombings in London, which killed at least 50 people. The nonprofit group is active in fighting terrorism in Israel.




French rally against Sharon visit

paris (jta) | Demonstrators in Paris protested Ariel Sharon's July 27 visit to France.

Sources estimated the turnout against the Israeli prime minister to be approximately 2,000 people — considered a low number, though some attributed this to the fact that many Parisians go on vacation during the summer.

According to a statement released by the organizers of the protest, who call themselves the Collective Against the Visit of Sharon to France, inviting "the butcher Sharon" to France "is to insult all those who refuse colonial violence." President Jacques Chirac has invited Sharon to Paris to discuss Israel's retreat from Gaza as well as to solidify the Franco-Israeli relationship.




Arrest made for 1944 murder

sydney (jta) | A Hungarian-born Australian was arrested last week in response to an extradition request to face trial for the 1944 murder of a Jew in Budapest.

Nervous and appearing shaken, Charles Zentai, 83, was taken by Australian federal police to face a specially convened court in Perth. In 1948, a Budapest court issued an arrest warrant for Zentai for his alleged role in the murder of Peter Balazs, 18.

But Zentai was never tried for the crime, having fled to the American-controlled zone in Germany. In 1950 he sailed for Australia, where he claimed refugee status.




Shoah memorial in Slovakia vandalized

moscow (jta) | A Holocaust memorial in Slovakia was vandalized.

Slogans denying the Shoah were recently painted on the new memorial in Rimavska Sobota, and several tombstones were destroyed at a nearby Jewish cemetery, according to media reports.




Belarussian Jews get Torah scroll

moscow (jta) | A New Jersey congregation gave a Torah scroll to a Jewish community in the former Soviet Union.

At a July 2 Shabbat ceremony in Moscow, Temple Sha'arey Shalom in Springfield, N.J., handed the scroll to representatives of the Reform community of Brest-Litovsk, Belarus, during the World Union for Progressive Judaism's convention in Moscow.

Congregant Larry Lerner presented the scroll to the congregation, describing how it was written by a scribe in Lithuania, then rescued 60 years ago by Allied troops from the rubble of postwar Berlin and shipped to Temple Beth El in Elizabeth, N.J. Five years ago Beth El merged with Sha'arey Shalom and the historic Torah scroll sat in the shul's second ark, where it rarely was used.