News in Brief

Lawyers for jailed entertainer Dudu Topaz yesterday demanded Channel 10 compensate their client for infringing on his privacy by publishing a letter he wrote from his cell to presenter Dan Margalit, the father of Reshet executive Shira Margalit, whom Topaz stands accused of assaulting. Topaz wrote, "In spite of it all we forgave the Nazis," and, "I am a father Dan, crazy about my children. If anyone were to hurt them, I would choke them and break every bone in their body." Topaz's lawyers said he had torn up the letters, which were taped together and offered for sale to the media. Only Channel 10 published them. (Ofra Edelman)

An 81-year-old Holocaust survivor from Haifa has received a PhD for a thesis showing how Auschwitz-Birkenau began as a camp for coerced laborers working for a mismanaged Nazi industrial project. Eliezer Schwartz was a project head and urban planner for Solel Boneh, the Israeli construction giant, before retiring and entering the world of academia at his grandchildren's urging. The thesis, written on pen and paper for the University of Haifa, focuses on an ill-managed industrial park built three kilometers from the Polish death camp that may have led to it becoming a slave labor camp first. (Cnaan Liphshiz)

Junior faculty members at Hebrew University announced they will not be submitting students' grades for the 2008-2009 academic year to protest reports that the university will be cutting non-tenured teaching positions. A Hebrew University spokesman responded that the university "is surprised the junior faculty has announced sanctions before the university has made a decision regarding the upcoming [academic] year." These decisions are made in August and depend upon the university budget, which has not yet been finalized, the spokesman said. (Ofri Ilani)

Brazil is now a step closer to extraditing Rabbi Elior Chen to Israel, after its Supreme Court rejected his request for asylum on Monday. Chen, 30, of Betar Illit, is wanted in Israel for alleged child abuse, both physical and emotional. Chen filed the asylum request after a Brazilian court ruled him extraditable. However, his lawyer said, he plans to appeal the extradition ruling as soon as the court issues the reason for its decision. (Tomer Zarchin)

The parents of Ma'ayan Sapir, who was raped and murdered at age 15 in 2005, filed a NIS 2.5 million suit this week against the state and the murderer. The suit, filed in the Petah Tikva District Court, accuses the welfare authorities and the police of negligence in their oversight of the murderer, who was living in a closed youth facility due to a record of violence. He was sent out on furlough with no supervision, despite having tried to escape just two weeks earlier, and during that leave, he murdered Sapir. The murderer, now 20, is serving a life sentence. (Ofra Edelman)

A group fighting proposed legislation to allow the Israel Lands Administration to privatize some land sent letters recently to all 120 Knesset members and ministers asking them to vote against the second and third readings of bill. A small bag of sand was attached to each letter, collected from gardens in Tel Aviv. A Knesset official called the bags "a gimmick, the likes of which we have seen before." (Yuval Azoulay)