Shorts: World

Lag B'Omer pilgrims flock to Tunisia

djerba, tunisia (jta) | Thousands of people attended the annual Lag B'Omer pilgrimage to the Tunisian island of Djerba.

The two-day celebration at the Ghriba Synagogue, which ended Tuesday, May 16, marks the end of a legendary plague 2,000 years ago.

The synagogue was the site of a 2002 al Qaida terrorist attack that killed 21 people, mostly German tourists. The synagogue is the oldest Jewish house of worship in Africa and serves one of the world's oldest Jewish communities.




Yad Vashem backs renaming Auschwitz

jerusalem (ap) | Yad Vashem supports Poland in its attempt to officially rename Auschwitz to emphasize that German Nazis ran the death camp, but has asked for an additional change, the director of the Israeli Holocaust memorial said last week.

Poland's government requested in March that UNESCO change the official name of Auschwitz on its world heritage registry from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau."

Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem's director general, said his group supports Poland's wish to see Nazi German guilt emphasized in the name, but also wants the word "extermination" added to underline that Hitler sought to wipe out European Jewry.




Pope to honor Holocaust victims

warsaw (ap) | German-born Pope Benedict XVI will honor the victims of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau when he visits later this month, including a Roman Catholic priest made saint by John Paul II for giving up his life for another inmate, a church official said this week.

Benedict will visit the former camp on the last day of his May 25-28 pilgrimage to Poland.

Benedict will deliver a speech in Italian to survivors and members of the Jewish community in Poland. A prayer for peace will be made in Benedict's native German to stress the symbolism of his visit to a place where the language brings ominous associations.




Goering's relative becoming Jewish?

zurich (jta) | A distant relative of Hitler's right hand man, Hermann Goering, is on his way to becoming Jewish, according to reports in Germany's Spiegel online magazine.

Matthias Goering, 49, lives in Zurich and has begun observing some of the practices of Orthodox Judaism, including wearing a kippah and keeping kosher.