Death tag taken off auction block in L.A.

los angeles (ap) | A body marker from a Nazi concentration camp was removed from a public auction after complaints from leaders at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The 2-inch limestone tag from Dachau was among memorabilia from the unclaimed estate of a Los Angeles man who died last fall. It was to have gone on the block at a recent county auction.

new york (jta) | New York City police defended their conduct during the arrest of an elderly Orthodox Jewish man and a subsequent protest in the Chassidic community.

In response to the incident in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood, police chief Raymond Kelly said officers had been neither too aggressive nor too lenient.

Police on April 4 arrested Joseph Schick, 75, for being uncooperative when he was stopped for a traffic offense, police said. Two other members of the community were arrested in subsequent protests.

pittsburgh (jps) | Weekly attendance at religious services can add up to three years to your life, a new U.S. medical study has found.

Dr. Daniel Hall of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the author of the study, compared the impact of regular exercise, statin therapy and religious attendance on life expectancy, and found that each accounted for an additional two to five years of life.

Hall found that regular physical exercise provides the greatest boost to longevity, adding 3.0 to 5.1 years. Use of statin medications accounted for 2.1 to 3.7 additional years, while regular religious attendance added 1.8 to 3.1 years.

denver (jta) | The Jewish Funders Network last week announced $12 million in grant initiatives.

At the group’s annual conference, a new $6 million matching grant program for congregational schools was initiated by philanthropists Carol Auerbach, Diane Troderman and Ricky Shechtel, the network’s new chairwoman.

The group also said that the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation had pledged $2 million in matching funds for a new initiative to assist elderly poor. The French Sacta-Rashi Foundation will make a $1 million grant to the network’s Matching Grants for Israel Initiative.