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Last update - 04:56 02/05/2008 Insulted ex-mayor demands revision of school booklet By Roni Singer-Heruti, Haaretz Correspondent Tags: Or Yehuda, Education, Israel Three pages of a booklet about Or Yehuda, distributed to the town's schoolchildren, have been removed at the instruction of the Central Elections Committee, (CEE) following a request from Or Yehuda's former mayor, Yitzhak Bokovza, who claimed the booklet damaged his reputation and slandered him. For the past three weeks, Or Yehuda's children have been swotting for a quiz on their town's heritage due next week, to mark Independence Day. But at the end of the Passover vacation they were told to return the booklets to school, where school secretaries tore out pages 4, 5 and 6 at the CEE's instructions. A few weeks ago, a relative of Bokovza's came home from school with the elegant 54-page booklet, narrating Or Yehuda's history from its days as a maabarah (transit camp for new immigrants). The boy told his family that the municipality was organizing a general knowledge quiz about the town. Advertisement After reading it, former mayor Bokovza complained to the CEE that the booklet, which devoted the first three pages to the town's mayors, had only eight lines of text about him, although his two mayoral terms lasted almost 30 years. To make matters worse, Bokovza found that six of those eight lines were about his harshly criticized refusal to accept Ethiopian immigrants at Or Yehuda schools some three years ago. "The public saw his conduct as racist," the booklet says. It describes Bokovza's retirement in 2007 as "sudden and unexplained." Bokovza found an entire page in the booklet devoted to incumbent mayor David Yosef, who is described as a former paratrooper and Shin Bet man and as the author of five books. "Anyone who reads it thinks that I never served in the army or studied at university. All they wrote was about the Ethiopians," Bokovza complained on Thursday. "I am a model figure. I was nominated for the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement this year after four people recommended me. I read what they wrote about Yosef and can't believe it. Wrote five books? They were photo albums he collected. And the booklet author's thanking him at the opening for the use of the history books he wrote is simply a joke." He petitioned CEE chairman, retired justice Eliezer Rivlin, complaining that the booklet's distortion of history was a "cynical exploitation of schools for election propaganda rather than history study." The municipality responded that it would try to repair the injustice Bokovza felt had been done to him. The CEE ruled in a compromise agreement that all Or Yehuda's children would return the booklets to their schools, where the secretaries would tear out the three pages about the town's six mayors. The mayors are not mentioned in any of the remaining pages. "All the pages were torn out at the beginning of the week and every school was asked to keep them for me so that I could make sure they had indeed been torn out," Bokovza said. Or Yehuda Mayor David Yosef said: "The booklet was written by a man we hired from the outside and I didn't intervene in his work. He apparently understood by himself who the bad guys and who the good guys were. I suggested the compromise to the CEE so the quiz wouldn't be held up. I didn't prepare the booklet for my personal publicity. The books I wrote about Or Yehuda exist for that." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Hamas on the Holocaust Al-Aqsa TV claims Jews concocted the Holocaust. Grasping genocide How a non-Jew in Israel came to understand the Holocaust.

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