One of Israel's favorite winners, soccer legend Avi Cohen, lost the battle for his life last week, after 
  a critical injury in a motorcycle spill.

The 54-year-old athlete was a childhood hero of many, after making local history in 1979 as the first Israeli soccer player to sign with a big international team as defender for Liverpool and later with the Glasgow Rangers.

His son Tamir -- himself a promising footballer now playing in England -- had rushed home to be at his father's bedside.

Pray for him, he and the family asked supporters waiting for good news at the hospital and at home. They sought higher help too, meeting with rabbis who came to the hospital to give their blessings.

A week later, Cohen was pronounced brain dead. His heart stopped the following morning.

Fans observed a minute of applause on soccer fields on both sides of the ocean. Liverpoolers wished him a final farewell with their trademark 'YWNA' -- "you'll never walk alone."

Cohen's death united fans but also divided people in a debate about a sensitive issue: organ donation.

Brain death is the point at which relatives are approached for their consent to organ donation. The medical window of opportunity isn't always wide, around 12 hours in this case. Cohen had an organ donor card but his family couldn't bring themselves to act on it. 

Initially, they agreed. Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar reportedly called the family, personally urging them to approve; other rabbis discouraged them. Finally,the family decided against it.

Many left in silence, hastily packing their belongings. From one day to the next, the Jews of Lebanon were gone.

"We sat down and cried on the doorstep of the house," said one elderly Lebanese woman in a new film about Lebanon's now-destroyed Jewish community.

The 45-minute Arabic-language documentary, "The Jews of Lebanon: Loyalty to Whom?" by BBC journalist Nada Abdelsamad, tracks the lives of Lebanese Jews before, during and after their departure. 

It is based on accounts from Lebanese Jews, who fled or migrated to other countries, and memories from their old neighbors and friends and the residents of former Jewish neighborhoods in Beirut and Sidon.

The 1948 establishment of Israel, the subsequent Arab-Israeli conflict and warfare between Israel and Lebanon triggered exoduses of Lebanese Jews to Israel and other countries around the world. It is estimated that only a few hundred or so Lebanese Jews are left in the country, compared with well over 20,000 in 1948.

President Obama's call Thursday in an address before the U.N. General Assembly for Israel to extend its West Bank construction moratorium got little reaction from the Israeli delegation. That's because they weren't there.

As Obama spoke about the importance of supporting U.S.-brokered peace talks, television cameras panned to empty chairs at Israel's U.N. desk.

Speculation immediately spread across Internet sites and among arm-chair analysts about whether Israel was snubbing Obama and boycotting his speech. Israel has been resisting mounting international pressure to extend the partial moratorium, which is set to expire Sunday. Palestinians have threatened to quit peace talks if construction resumes, though they've also hinted in recent days that they are open to a compromise.

Israeli officials have denied their absence was an intentional slight, saying they were observing the Jewish holiday of Sukkot and had informed the U.S. in advance that they would not be present.

Nevertheless, American officials expressed some disappointment that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to skip the U.N. meeting, sending other Israeli leaders to represent the country. Obama had hoped to use the forum to continue efforts to prevent peace talks from collapsing.

And some of Netanyahu's right-wing colleagues condemned Obama's speech, accusing the U.S. president of "inappropriate interference."

-- Edmund Sanders in Jerusalem

Can Israel be a democratic and Jewish state at the same time? It's a divisive, long-running debate that has now found its way into the classroom -- or rather, it's about to get kicked out of school.

Israeli Education Ministry officials have moved to slash funding for high-school civics classes, where students learn about democracy, equal rights and government, and shift the money to religious teachings about the Bible, the Talmud and Zionism.

"We have nothing against Jewish studies,'' one teacher told Haaretz newspaper,"but bolstering them should not come at the expense of civics." 

One night before the Arab League met in Cairo on Thursday, where Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said he could not return to direct negotiations with Israel because of continuing Jewish settlement activities in Jerusalem, Jewish settlers seized a building in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City.

While most of the 40 Palestinian residents of the building were attending a wedding celebration, a group of settlers guarded by Israeli police broke down doors inside the two-floor building and moved into the fully furnished rooms.

Only one member of the Qirrish family, longtime inhabitants of the site, was in his room and was not evicted. The elderly man telephoned the rest of his family and told them what had occurred. The family rushed back to find the police blocking the entrance. Family members spent the night sitting on chairs outside the building, waiting to seek legal help in the morning.

The building had been purchased by the Jewish settler group Ateret Cohanim, a religious organization whose agenda is settling Jews inside the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, from its original Palestinian owners, who moved to the U.S. in the late 1970s. The new owners soon attempted to evict the Qirrish family, who contested the eviction in court and won an order allowing them to remain while paying rent to Ateret Cohanim.

The settler group attempted a second time, in 2000, to get a court eviction order after older members of the Qirrish family had died.

The Qirrish descendants who continued to live in the same building again contested the eviction; the court ruled in their favor. Since then, the family had been residing in the house, said Munnawar Qirrish. “I have been living in this house for 42 years,” she said while waiting for the police to allow her to reenter the building.

The day after the home was seized, a magistrate court ordered that residents be allowed to return to the building. But that did not occur immediately, and family members continued to wait outside the building Thursday.

“My husband is 67 years old, and he needs his medicine, which is inside the house," Munnawar Qirrish said. "I cannot even enter the house to get the medicine. All my personal belongings are inside and I do not know what the settlers are doing to them. I do not know if they are sleeping in my bed or what they are doing inside.”

-- Maher Abukhater in Jerusalem

In a ruling that could strike fear in the hearts of cads everywhere, a Jerusalem court has ruled that lying to a woman to get her into bed is a form of rape.

Sabbar Kashur, 30, an Arab resident of Jerusalem, pretended to be a Jewish bachelor looking for a relationship. He met a Jewish woman and they went to a nearby building to have consensual sex, according the account in the Haaretz newspaper. He split before she'd finished putting her clothes back on.

She filed a criminal complaint for rape and indecent assault, which authorities took seriously.

Sure, it wasn't "classic rape by force," reasoned Jerusalem District Court Judge Tzvi Segal, but if the woman "hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor ... she would not have cooperated."

The court rejected a plea bargain to serve community service and sentenced Kashur to 18 months in prison.

-- Los Angeles Times

A bill proposing (among other things) that control of conversions to Judaism be given to the country’s chief rabbinate, an orthodox body, is causing political controversy in Israel and threatening a big family feud outside it.

The question of "who is a Jew" has been asked -- and avoided -- since Israel’s inception. The interesting religious issue has practical civic repercussions in Israel, which passed the "Law of Return" in 1950. In a nutshell, it determined that anyone entering Israel as a Jew would be entitled to immediate citizenship.

 A later amendment clarified that for this purpose, a Jew "means a person born of a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion." The state law reflects religious law. The main gate into Judaism is biology, by way of maternal heredity. The second way is by conversion. At the time, religious Judaism in Israel was synonymous with Orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy welcomes new Jews, as long as they come in through the main door of orthodox conversion. Reform and Conservative streams are very nice religions, they say, but these won’t serve as a back door in. We’re not looking to recruit, said Ultra-Orthodox legislator Moshe Gafni in a heated debate in Parliament on Monday, saying even “membership in a beer-drinkers’ club is based on specific criteria.” 

Abraham Zahry loves his home country but says he finds it hard to keeping living there. He is now considering what many of his fellow Jews have done in the last year: Leave and settle elsewhere. 

“I might go to America, Canada, or even Israel," the 26-year-old told Babylon & Beyond. "I think America would be good. Education, business, everything is easier for Jews there."

Last year, assaults against the country’s Jewish community increased to such a level that American and Jewish organizations flew more than 100 Jews out. In one attack, a Jewish man was murdered outside his home. Many others have reportedly been threatened.

Most recently, Britain's Independent newspaper reported in mid-April that the British government is about to sign a secret deal which would allow some Yemeni Jews who have been subject to severe persecution to move to the United Kingdom.

Zahry, who stands out with his long locks of hair hanging from the side of his head, says he is sometimes verbally harassed on the streets.

“They call me things like Jew and dog,” he said.