Diaspora Jews are stepping up pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to intervene in a dispute in Israel over conversions to Judaism.

Leaders of the United Jewish Communities federation umbrella organization sent a sharply worded letter to Olmert on July 9 urging him to assign his cabinet secretary "to oversee conversion."

At issue in this case is a dispute over who can perform conversions and which conversions should be considered valid by Israeli religious authorities.

NEW YORK – Amos Avgar won’t talk about the signs of death he saw in Myanmar in the days immediately following Cyclone Nargis.

"The death is apparent," the bespectacled and graying Avgar told JTA in the offices of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee last week, a couple of days after returning from a weeklong fact-finding mission to the country. "There is evidence of bodies, but I am not going to talk about it."

Avgar, the executive director of the JDC’s nonsectarian arm, the International Development Program, was one of the first aid workers employed by an American nongovernmental organization to be allowed into Myanmar after the cyclone wreaked its hell May 3.

Tens of thousands have died and 1.5 million Burmese are without food and shelter.

NEW YORK – The philanthropic trend toward investing in people rather than projects is getting a boost from one of America’s largest Jewish foundations.

The Avi Chai Foundation, which has nearly $700 million in assets, according to its last available tax filing, awarded $1.15 million last week to six Jewish social entrepreneurs whom the foundation sees as emerging Jewish leaders.

Foundations typically fund specific programs and tend to keep a fairly close eye on how their money is used. But Avi Chai gave four individuals and one team of two $75,000 per year over the next three years simply to create.

NEW YORK – The Starbucks on 50th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan is a world away from the gruesome mayhem that is the aftermath of the cyclone that hit Myanmar last week.

But as Sammy Samuels sips on a $4 coffee, his thoughts are with his home and family in the ravaged country’s capital. His is one of only eight Jewish families in Yangon.

Samuels is heading there this week to deliver suitcases of water purification tablets and medicine.

When he arrives, the fourth-generation Burmese will become one of the few Westerners to bring aid into Myanmar, where an estimated 1.5 million people have been devastated by the cyclone that ripped through the country May 3.

Scandal highlights perilous ties to U.S. Jewish money

The finance industry is still roiling from last month’s stunning collapse of Bear Stearns, Wall Street’s fifth largest investment bank. The dollar continues to fall against the other world currencies.

And the philanthropic world is becoming increasingly fearful about what seems to be a perfect storm brewing against the financial world.

While most philanthropy professionals feel some anxiety now, they are bracing for what could be a calamity in the world of charitable giving.

Flying in the face of two decades of research that indicates that American Jews are falling out of love with Israel, a new report says that American Jews love Israel as much as they always have — and that in the future, that sentiment may grow more intense.

Conventional wisdom, based largely on the work of sociologist Steven Cohen, is that American Jews are becoming less attached to Israel by the generation, as younger Jews typically feel less close to Israel and Israelis than older Jews.

NEW YORK – In the wake of last week’s assassination of a top Hezbollah official and this week’s firebomb attack at a Jewish community center in suburban Los Angeles, American Jewish groups should be vigilant, according to the head of a Jewish security consultant group.

Although Israel has denied any involvement in Imad Mughniyeh’s death in a car bomb in Damascus last week, radical Muslim leaders, including Hezbollah chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Mohammed Ali Jafari, have threatened to strike back against Israel and Jews abroad.

NEW YORK – Hillary Clinton could be America’s next president, but her picture will never appear in the country’s only Jewish daily newspaper.

The English-language version of Hamodia, which touts itself as "The Newspaper of Torah Jewry," does not publish photographs of women because its editorial board believes that pictures of the female form are immodest and displaying them, even in the context of news coverage, would be out of line with Jewish law.

NEW YORK – The growing ideological gap between the Orthodox and non-Orthodox threatens the long-term unity of the Jewish people, several communal leaders said at a forum to address the matter.

At issue were the results of a survey conducted in November by the American Jewish Committee, which found widening differences between the Orthodox and non-Orthodox on a range of issues.

The Jan. 31 forum convened by the AJC and the Orthodox Union also included leaders of the Reform movement.