World Report

Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

SEOUL (JTA) — Under pressure from the South Korean government, a bar in Seoul has removed its Nazi decor.

The move came after the Israeli Embassy in Seoul and the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center demanded that the Third Reich bar be closed. The bar's owner told the Associated Press earlier last week that he had only wanted to attract attention.

Pope's hometown approves plaque

ROME (JTA) — Officials in Pope John Paul II's hometown have approved a plaque commemorating a Holocaust victim who owned the house where the pope lived as a child.

City officials in Wadowice, Poland, said Monday they have accepted an inscription proposed by Ron Balamuth, the grandson of the home's former owner, Chaim Balamuth.

Pope John Paul II, who was born in 1920, lived in the rented house for the first 18 years of his life.

The house was seized by the state in 1940 after Chaim Balamuth was sent to concentration camp, where he later died.

The decision on the plaque came after the grandson was granted a papal audience last Friday.

About 20 Jews from Wadowice are slated to meet the pope during his planned visit to Israel next week. Before World War II, about 2,000 Jews lived in the town, but only a few hundred survived the Holocaust.

German returns Nazi-looted painting

LONDON (JTA) — A German art official has returned a Nazi-looted painting to the British heirs of its original Jewish owner.

The director general of the Bavarian State Collections, who handed back the work Monday, acknowledged that "our behavior in the past was quite wrong."

The painting, currently on loan to London's prestigious Royal Academy, is an 1898 triptych, "The Three Stages of Life," by Count Leopold von Kalckreuth.

Elizabeth Gotthilf, who died in 1983, abandoned the work when she fled to Britain from Vienna with her husband and children in 1938.

Germany won't try last Auschwitz M.D.

BERLIN (JTA) — The last surviving doctor who worked at Auschwitz has been declared unfit to stand trial on murder charges.

German officials confirmed that prosecutors dropped their investigation of Hans Munch, 88, after medical examiners found he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.