In Truth, Shamir’s Lie Gave Him Entry to New Home

It was a case, argued Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, where the end justified the means, as the Jewish leader confessed that he lied extensively to gain entrance to Palestine from Poland as a young man of 20. In 1935, restrictions for living in Palestine, which the British ruled under a League of Nations mandate, were such that Shamir judged the only way he could get in would be to apply to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the application, Shamir fibbed that he had studied law for a year at Warsaw University to please his parents but that Hebrew literature was his true love. The letter “wasn’t too accurate a description of my feelings,” Shamir conceded in a speech to 600 Israelis who were able to escape the Nazi Holocaust by gaining acceptance to the university. Once there, “I wanted to study,” Shamir said, but “I got involved in other things.” In 1940, he became a founder and leader of the Stern Gang, which carried out a campaign of political assassinations and bombings to force an end to British rule in Palestine.

--Working full time is no excuse not to get involved, declared the new national director of the PTA, who becomes the first woman to head the organization while also maintaining a full-time career. Ann Lynch, 64, the public relations director at Humana Hospital Sunrise in Las Vegas, vowed to overhaul the image of the 6.6-million-member group. “The PTA is not an organization for homemakers,” she said. “It is for parents and others who care about young people. . . . You can work full time and be involved. Just because you work is no excuse.”

--An infant boy with severe burns was the first beneficiary of an Illinois man’s decision to donate four square feet of his excess skin to a hospital burn unit. Through dieting, Dennis Genz had shed 170 pounds but was left with a large flap of skin on his abdomen, which was removed surgically Monday. Some of the 19 1/2 pounds of skin and adjoining tissue went to Dexter Moore, a 3-month-old Indiana fire victim. “There have been rare cases where parents have donated skin for their children,” said Betty Perls, education director for the Regional Organ Bank of Illinois. “But none of us have ever heard of a case like this.”