News at a Glance

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Dunkin' Donuts yielded to pressure from critics and has pulled an ad featuring a keffiyeh.

The online ad featured Rachael Ray, the celebrity cook, posing against a background of cherry blossoms, wearing a black-and-white keffiyeh scarf, and holding up iced coffee.

Conservative bloggers led by Michelle Malkin complained about the ad, saying that it endorsed Arab radicalism because of the keffiyeh's identification with Yasser Arafat, the former Palestinian leader.

Palestinian nationalists adopted the checkered keffiyeh as a symbol in the 1960s, but its use predates that period and persists in the Middle East.

Dunkin' Donuts pulled the ad, saying that "the possibility of misperception detracted from its original intention to promote our iced coffee."

But the Interfaith Alliance, a religious-freedom advocacy group, blasted the decision. "Enough already," Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, the alliance's president, said in a statement. "Have we really reached the point where we are associating wearing a scarf of Middle Eastern origin with terrorist sympathies?"

The alliance's chairman is Rabbi Jack Moline of Agudas Achim congregation in Alexandria, Va.

Portman Promoting Rwanda Youth Village

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Actress Natalie Portman will promote a youth village in Rwanda financed by American Jewish donors.

The youth village, built by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, will house 500 children whose parents were killed during the 1994 genocide.

Ethiopian immigrants to Israel will staff the program.

Portman is filming a public-service announcement about the youth village that is scheduled to be aired on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," according to Ha'aretz.

Portman's recent visit to Africa, including two days in Addis Ababa on the way to Rwanda, has been shrouded in secrecy, reported the newspaper.

Novelist Appelfeld Wins Italian Prize

ROME (JTA) -- Aharon Appelfeld became the latest Israeli author to win an Italian literary prize.

Appelfeld was awarded the Grinzane Cavour's 2008 special prize for his novel Badenheim 1939.

Other Israeli authors to receive a Grinzane Cavour Award include A.B. Yehoshua; David Grossman, who won for foreign literature in 1994 and 1997; Amos Oz, for Mediterranean culture in 2007; and Sayed Kashua, an Israeli Arab who writes in Hebrew, for new authors in 2004.

Put It on Your List: Fix Up His Grave!

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Yad Vashem is lobbying for better care to be taken of Oskar Schindler's grave in Jerusalem.

Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of some 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, died in 1974 and was buried in a Christian cemetery on Jerusalem's Mount Zion.

Yaacov Bruder, a son of one of the "Schindler Jews," in paying his respects at the grave site this week said that he was shocked to find the plot unkempt and overgrown with foliage.

"I think a man who saved so many Jews deserves more respect, and the grave should be better tended to," Bruder told Army Radio.

Contacted by the station, Yad Vashem said that it was speaking with the Greek Patriarchate, which is responsible for the cemetery, in hope of addressing the issue.