News Brief

An Israeli civilian was killed and a policeman wounded after a young Palestinian was stopped for a security check in Jerusalem.

The Palestinian terrorist pulled out a knife and stabbed one of two police officers who detained him on the street in Jerusaelm’s Gilo neighborhood Thursday morning. The assailant escaped the policemen, though he was shot and injured as he fled the scene, and then stabbed a 60-year-old Israeli civilian before being tackled and held by another civilian.

The civilian died of his wounds on the scene. The policeman and the terrorist are both being treated at Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital.

Egypt is not to blame for failed negotiations to release kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, Hosni Mubarak told Shimon Peres.

The Israeli president met Thursday with his Egyptian counterpart in Sharm el-Sheikh. Mubarak invited Peres for the visit during a pre-holiday phone call on the eve of Rosh Hashana and Eid al-Fitr.

Mubarak also criticized Israel for continuing to build in the settlements during a press conference following their meeting.

Though the president of Israel is largely a ceremonial position, Peres made the trip without opposition because Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has already resigned pending a new government coalition and Prime Minister-designate Tzipi Livni is in the process of putting together a new government. Livni’s office said she and Peres coordinated strategy in advance of the meeting.

The two leaders were scheduled to discuss “advancing the peace process between Israel and its neighbors, strengthening ties between Israel and Egypt, the matter of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, and a variety of other state and security issues” as well as ” the global financial crisis and its possible ramifications in the Middle East,” according to a statement from Peres’ spokesperson’s office. But speculation in Israeli media indicated that the two would likely discuss the Arab League regional peace plan.

On Wednesday, Egypt denied that it had invited Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to visit the country, after a report to that effect surfaced in the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar. Nasrallah has rarely been seen in public since he went into hiding during the Second Lebanon War.

The German town of Goerlitz is refusing to allow its Jewish community to hold its own ceremony marking Kristallnacht.

Instead, the only ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom will be held by the local Protestant church, which has traditionally focused on all victims of the Third Reich. The small Jewish community had planned to bring a Torah scroll from Dresden into a newly renovated synagogue, which dates from 1909. It is the only synagogue to have survived Kristallnacht in the state of Saxony. But the city insists that ceremonies must be secular and inclusive. The former synagogue was deconsecrated after the 1938 pogrom. Following its six-year renovation, the structure now has room for 230 guests. “The city has cancelled the entire event planned by the Jewish community and the Society for the Promotion of the Synagogue,” which was to include several performances and speeches, Alex Jacobowitz, cantor and chairman of the town’s tiny Jewish community, told JTA. He insisted that the Jewish community’s program would be inclusive. The Society for the Promotion of the Synagogue is a secular group authorized to hold ecumenical events in the building. It cooperates with the Jewish community. Now, only the ceremony run by the local Protestant church is still scheduled to take place in the building. The city bought the synagogue from the remnant Dresden Jewish community in 1963, and then formally purchased it again from the Claims Conference after German unification, according to Jacobowitz, a musician who came from New York to Germany in 1991. The approximately 30-member Jewish community has held services in a small sanctuary within the building for about a year, Jacobowitz said.