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THIS WEEK IN ISRAEL President Moshe Katsav decided to commute the sentence of Margalit Har-Shefi, who was convicted of failing to prevent the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin z"l and sentenced in September 1998 to 9 months imprisonment. Har-Shefi was jailed in March this year and will be released on August 10th, after completing two thirds of her term. The decision reads as follows: "The President is convinced that the prisoner has paid her debt to society and has been punished". The President noted the Court's decision that Har-Shefi was in no way involved in planning or assisting in the assassination in any way". As expected, the decision received a mixed response in the Knesset. Right-wing MKs welcomed it, while left-wing MKs sharply attacked it. MK Shaul Yahalom (NRP) said: "The President has taken a brave and sensible step in the face of pressure from the left, which made Har-Shefi a scapegoat". Dalia Rabin-Pelosoff, Deputy Minister of Defense and daughter of slain PM Yitzhak Rabin, said: "The decision causes us all much pain. All the judicial processes which discussed the matter unanimously declared her guilty of not preventing this terrible murder". Gush Dan water scare - end of story: Th contamination of the water supply in the Dan area seems finally to have been caused by a fault in ammonia system of Israel's Mekorot water company. The meter in an ammonia tank filling truck at one of the company's sites malfunctioned, and four times the normal quantity of ammonia flowed into the potable water system. Company employees at the site did not notice, and the company only discovered the incident an hour later. The Ministry of Health said that Mekorot should have discovered the source of the fault at a much earlier stage. Jerusalem couple Mark & Slava Shufrin, 64 and 59 years of age respectively, were detained on suspicion of abusing children under their care, olim from the former Soviet Union, at a dormitory which they ran in the city. The Council for the Welfare of the Child discovered the state of affairs at the institution, revealing a horrific picture: boys and girls were being fed rotten food, their rooms were filthy and moldy, the bathrooms stank, and garbage was dispersed throughout the apartment. An investigator defined the situation as "sanitary conditions almost endangering life". In addition, the couple allegedly confiscated the youngsters' passports as a guarantee that they would not run away, and forbade them from speaking with their parents. The police suspect that the couple fraudulently took money from the youths, such as funds from the basket of absorption assistance provided by the government. The miserable story of the Zefunot dormitory was revealed after one of the girls there managed to escape and called the Council for the Welfare of the Child for help. Intellectuals from the former Soviet Union, including writer Maya Kagensky and a group of well-known former refuseniks, among them Ida Nudel, Eduard Kuznetzov and Silva Zalmanson, are demanding that Housing Minister Natan Sharansky (Yisrael Ba'aliyah) publish the KGB documents concerning him. Sharansky received the documents following an application to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, former head of the KGB. In their letter to Sharansky, the group wrote: "Retaining the documents and keeping them from public scrutiny raises concern that you may be a target for pressure, brought to bear by the secret services of a foreign country. The high ranking position that you hold requires that you reveal the documents pertaining to your past, in order to dispel any doubts." The letter was sent to Sharansky prior to his having filed a libel suit against Yuli Nudelman who published the book "Sharansky Unmasked", in which he claims: "Some people claim that ...... was a KGB agent, or an agent of the CIA or the Mossad." Nudelman also wrote that during his period of incarceration in Russia, Sharansky served as a hut leader, a position usually reserved for a senior informer, according to Nudelman. At the hearing in the case against Nudelman, Sharansky discounted the claims against him, and told the court that he had been sentenced to 13 years imprisonment - three years in jail and 10 at a labor camp considered to have been more comfortable than jail. In practice however, he served 8 years in jail and less than a year at the camp, and was also held in solitary confinement for 405 days. When transferred to the camp, he was appointed "hut leader", making him responsible for cleaning, and that during this period he managed to prevent prisoners from collaborating with the KGB. Following questions asked him by the defendants' attorneys, Sharansky said: "The questions I am being asked here are just like the questions I was asked at KGB interrogations 23 years ago. It's a great pity." Ajoint committee of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Legislative committees acceded to a request by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, tby deciding that the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act do not apply to the Nativ organization, engaged in bringing Jews from the former Soviet Union to Israel, as its operations are generally covert. Zvi Magen, who heads Nativ, appeared before the joint committee, persuading its members not to apply the provisions of the law to Nativ.
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