France sentences woman for anti-Semitic hoax

paris (jta) | A French woman who claimed she was the victim of a violent anti-Semitic act but later admitted she had lied received a suspended sentence.

Marie Leblanc, 23, was found guilty July 26 for reporting an imaginary crime and was given a four-month suspended sentence. She also was ordered to pay symbolic damages to the French national railroad company and undergo psychiatric treatment.

On July 9, Leblanc told police she had been attacked on a train in suburban Paris by four men who she claimed scrawled swastikas on her stomach and overturned her baby carriage.

The purported attack shocked the country, with senior politicians and Jewish organizations issuing forceful condemnations. Three days later, however, Leblanc admitted she had lied about the attack and that she had drawn the swastikas on her own body.

Did a New Zealand Jew help the Mossad?

sydney (jta) | A member of New Zealand’s Jewish community was linked to an alleged Israeli spy ring. Police were seeking Tony Resnick, a 35-year-old paramedic and former member of the Auckland Jewish Council, in connection with two Israelis jailed in the city for passport fraud, the New Zealand Herald reported July 23.

According to the leading newspaper, Resnick left the country for Hong Kong after Eli Cara and Uriel Kelman were arrested in April.

He is believed to have gone on to Israel, where his wife and children later joined him. New Zealand accuses Cara, Kelman and a third Israeli still at large of a plot to assume the identity of a wheelchair-bound New Zealander in order to obtain his passport for a Mossad operation.

Czech stamp honors Shoah boy, astronaut

prague (jta) | The Czech Republic will issue a stamp honoring a young Holocaust victim and an Israeli astronaut.

The Czech Post Office agreed to issue a stamp featuring a Czech Jewish boy’s sketch of planet Earth as seen from the moon. The sketch, called “Moon Landscape,” was drawn by Petr Ginz at the Terezin transit camp, where he spent two years before being sent to his death at Auschwitz in 1944 at age 16.

A copy of the drawing was taken into space by Israeli astronaut Col. Ilan Ramon, who died in the Columbia space shuttle explosion in February 2003.