In what is widely believed to be a forced resignation, the public relations director at the American Friends of Bar-Ilan University has left the organization after its promotional material featured pictures of Yigal Amir, the confessed killer of Yitzhak Rabin.
Bar-Ilan President Moshe Kaveh reportedly met with Leah Rabin, the widow of the slain prime minister, and told her that the executive committee of the American group accepted the resignation of Hedy Shulman, who was responsible for the inclusion of Amir’s pictures in the journal distributed at a fund-raising dinner in New York.
Kaveh also said the inclusion of the Amir’s photo was “an egregious error of oversight, not an act of intent or malice.”
Amir is now on trial in Tel Aviv for the Nov. 4 murder of Rabin.
Shulman, who resigned Feb. 15, refused to comment this week on whether she was forced to leave her job.
In an earlier interview, Shulman said she was “horrified” to learn about the pictures. “It was a total, inadvertent catastrophe,” she said. “We are extremely pained and horrified.”
Kaveh, who took office Feb. 1, said the brochure had been prepared entirely by American Friends and that no administration members had seen it before it was distributed at the dinner. He said that as a result of the incident, the university would demand to review all promotional literature.
Shulman also had said earlier that the material contained photos taken the year before and chosen in October, before the Nov. 4 assassination.
The dinner, originally scheduled for November, was postponed in the wake of the assassination.
Sometimes before the January dinner, she said, the organization was alerted to the fact that some people thought that Amir was pictured in the journal, “but we concluded it wasn’t him,” she said, adding, “It looked like some of the other Yemenite students.”
A new public relations director has not been appointed, Elann Rabinowitz, the assistant director of public relations at American Friends, said this week.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
