B Nai B Rith

MOSCOW -- The men running the Soviet Union did everything they could to make sure everyone got the story right. They filled television with old movies, they jammed radio programs and they shut down any newspaper that didn't get it right:Mikhail S. Gorbachev was sick and would be back to work eventually. The conscientious vice president was taking over to carry on the ailing president's philosophy. The motherland was being saved from anarchy and chaos.Within hours, most of Moscow was ridiculing this version of events as the truth swept the city.

WASHINGTON -- The NAACP, whose unwillingness to break relations with black Muslim leader Louis T. Farrakhan has upset some Jewish groups, moved yesterday to rebuild bridges by calling for a meeting next week with Jewish leaders."

Maurice R. Shochatt, 80, a journalist and public relations man with a voice in many Baltimore causes, died yesterday at Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital of complications from cerebral palsy and diabetes.Funeral services will be at 10 a.m. tomorrow at the Levinson funeral establishment, 6010 Reisterstown Road. Burial will be in Petach Tickvah Congregation Cemetery in Rosedale.Born in Ukraine, Mr. Shochatt came to America as a child and settled in Baltimore with his parents, the late Sholom and Shiffa Shochatt.

Early in the evening, the participants split up -- parents went upstairs in the Randallstown split-level, teens and young adults stayed down.Then the serious game began. The subject was hate.Each group was asked to study a list of eight narratives, all examples of anti-Semitism. Would they select the same three as the most offensive or the most dangerous? If so, would everyone agree on which was the most abhorrent example?What happened was a surprise to Ofra Fisher, director of the B'nai B'rith Department of Jewish Family Life.

Six clergymen -- representing five Protestant traditions -- and a Roman Catholic sister will preach tomorrow during a three-hour Good Friday service at Trinity Episcopal Church in Towson.The public is invited to participate in all or any part of the ecumenical Holy Week worship, beginning at noon at the church at 120 Allegheny Ave.The time will be divided into seven segments, each based on a portion of the Passion narrative of St. Luke. In addition to seven brief sermons, there will be hymns, prayers, silent meditations and anthems by the Trinity Choir, directed by Sally Tarr.

When Joe Cohen waxes nostalgic about his teen years in the early 1970s, he thinks of the basketball tournaments and pizza parties with a local Jewish boys club. As a president of the local chapter, he formed lifelong bonds with his peers and developed pride in his religion and culture. Now the Millersville resident is ushering in a new era for the long-dormant club known as Aleph, Zadik, Aleph, letters that start the Hebrew words for fraternal love, benevolence and harmony. Cohen is reviving the Anne Arundel County Colonial AZA chapter in the name of a Jewish teen who died in August 2005 in a highly publicized car accident.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, refusing to concede the traditionally Democratic and potentially embittered Jewish vote, argued yesterday that he's been a better friend to Israel than his opponent Bill Clinton could ever be.With his re-election campaign now a daily struggle for every possible vote, Mr. Bush could not resist making what he considers a good case for a significant share of support from the nation's 5.5 million Jews, many of whom are concentrated in...

Several national Jewish leaders said yesterday that a clarifying letter from Cardinal William H. Keeler has defused a controversy over a recent ecumenical statement on Christian rights in Jerusalem.A draft of the letter was being circulated among leaders of Jewry in New York, Chicago, Washington and Baltimore. The draft was prepared by the cardinal and his advisers after a hastily called meeting with the Jewish leaders Monday at his Baltimore residence.The American Jewish Committee had attacked the March 6 statement, which sought a greater Christian role in determining the future of Jerusalem, as "seriously flawed and incomplete."

Cardinal William H. Keeler demonstrated his diplomatic skills as well as his concern for amicable interfaith discussion in his March 13 meeting with a group of American Jews, invited to his Baltimore home after their explosive reaction to a statement he had signed the week before.The climate for discussion was improved, but core disagreements remain unresolved.The criticized statement was issued March 6 by the cardinal and seven other Christian leaders as a public appeal to President Clinton.

EMMY A. KOLODNY remembers her aunts leaving their Amsterdam home in 1942, knapsacks on their backs, "without any protest." The Germans had occupied Holland since 1940, but the slaughter had not begun. At first, Dutch Jews went meekly to their deaths. In her mind's eye, "I see these two really healthy women, going off like they were going to summer camp," Kolodny says.Her aunts never returned. Called up by the Nazis to labor in eastern Holland, they were eventually transferred to an extermination camp and murdered.