JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995, Page 113

Bulletin Board

Compiled by Janet McMahon

Convenings

The Atlanta High Schools Model Arab League will be held Jan. 26 and 27 at Atlanta's Marist School. For additional information on this and other model leagues nationwide, contact the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, 1140 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 1210, Washington, DC 20036, phone (202) 293-0801, fax (202) 293-0903.

Human Concern International, an Ottawa-based international relief group, will be holding a fund-raising dinner at Toronto's TARIC mosque on Jan. 28. The event's theme is "Never Again: War Crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina," and the keynote address will be delivered by Prof. M. Cherif Bassiouni, former chief investigator of the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. For additional information and tickets contact HCI, 131 Mammoth Hall Trail, Scarborough, Ontario M1B 1P8, (416) 293-8065.

Opportunities

The University of Virginia-Yarmouk University Summer Arabic Program, held at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan and taught in Arabic, is an intensive eight-week program in Modern Standard Arabic, and includes a course in the Jordanian dialect. For complete information and application forms, contact the program at the University of Virginia, B027 Cabel Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22903, phone (804) 982-2304. Application deadline is Feb. 10.

The American Research Institute in Turkey expects to offer 10 fellowships for this year's intensive eight-week summer program of advanced spoken Turkish at Istanbul's Bosphorus University. Applicants must be U.S. citizens, and either enrolled as graduates or upper-level undergraduates in a degree program or instructors of Turkish or related language and area studies. Complete information is available from Sheila Andrew, ARIT Summer Fellowship Program Center, Washington University, Campus Box 1230, One Brookings Dr., St. Louis, MO 63130-4899, phone (314) 935-5166, fax (314) 935-7462. Deadline is Feb. 15.

People

General Joseph P. Hoar, USMC (Ret.) has been named co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations' Middle East Forum in Washington, DC. He retired in August 1994 as commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command based in Florida, where he served as Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's chief of staff from 1988 to 1990. He succeeds Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., who is now U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Charles W. Freeman, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm, and most recently assistant secretary for regional security affairs at the Pentagon, is leaving the foreign service to become a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where he will be working on a book on the resolution of international disputes.

Deaths

Mohammad Ali Araki, Shi'ism's grand ayatollah and marja-e taqlid ("source of emulation"), died in a Tehran hospital. His age was variously estimated between 100 and 106. Ayatollah Araki, whose base was in the holy city of Qom, succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had been his student.

Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani, a dissident Iranian author arrested in March for criticizing his country's theocratic government and its censorship policies, died of a reported heart attack at the age of 63. At least one opposition group, the nationalist Iranian Nation Party, accused the government of having tortured him.

Erwin Knoll, editor of The Progressive magazine, died Nov. 2 of a heart attack at the age of 63. Born in Vienna, he fled the Nazis to the U.S., where he worked as a journalist with The Washington Post and Newhouse News Service before joining The Progressive . A human rights and civil liberties advocate, he had a nationally syndicated radio talk show and was an outspoken critic of U.S. Middle East policy.

Rabbi Shlomo Goren, former chief rabbi of Israel who advocated the assassination of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and urged Israeli soldiers to disobey any government orders to evacuate Jewish settlements, died in Tel Aviv of a heart attack at the age of 77. Born in Poland, his family moved in 1925 to Palestine, where he joined Haganah and was a sniper and machine gunner during the 1948 fighting. As IDF chief military chaplain, he became the first rabbi to lead a prayer service at the Western Wall after its capture in 1967.

Sheikh Suleiman Jabari, the mufti of Jerusalem, died Oct. 11 in Jerusalem at the age of 82. Born in Hebron, he studied at Al-Azhar University in Cairo before returning to Palestine, where he worked in the religious courts and as an educator. Following the end of the British Mandate, he was appointed deputy mufti of Jerusalem by Sheikh Hussam Addin Jarallah, and was named chief magistrate and mufti of the Jordanian army. He was a counselor in the department of education until his retirement in 1975, and was named mufti of Jerusalem in March 1993.

Khaled Al-Hassan (Abu As-Said), a founder of the PLO's Fatah movement and close associate of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, died Oct. 8 in Morocco after a long illness, at the age of 66. Born in Haifa, he left Palestine in 1948 and lived in Lebanon and Syria. A member of the PLO's executive committee and head of its political department from 1968 to 1974, he served on Fatah's central committee and as president of the Palestine National Council's committee on external relations.

Kamil Nasser, general secretary of the YMCA in Jerusalem since 1980, died Sept. 27 in Jerusalem at the age of 46. A graduate of the American University in Beirut and a founder of the Center for the Rehabilitation of Intifada Disabled, he was a member of many international religious and social organizations and institutions, including the YMCA's General Committee for Refugees and the Middle East Council of Churches' Department on Service to Palestine Refugees.

Makram Copty, acting director of the Galilee Center for Social Research, died in his sleep of an apparent heart attack Sept. 12 in Nazareth at the age of 46. Before his return to Palestine in 1992, he spent 20 years in Austin, TX, where he earned four degrees—a B.A. and M.A. in political science, an M.A. in Middle Eastern studies, and a Ph.D. in education—at the University of Texas. He taught Arabic language and literature and political science at the university and was a popular lecturer at schools, churches and community groups in Austin.