Israeli Police Question Rabbis on Assassination : Investigation: One religious figure was reportedly attached to a seminary attended by the confessed killer of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Police Sunday widened their investigation into the killing of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a religious Jew, calling in rabbis for questioning for the first time.

“God forbid,” said Rabbi Shmuel Dvir, 27, one of two rabbis questioned for more than six hours, when reporters asked if he had issued a ritual ruling condemning Rabin to death for handing over land to Palestinians.

White-bearded Rabbi David Kav sidestepped reporters’ questions about whether he knew confessed assassin Yigal Amir. “Don’t say a word,” his wife said in Yiddish as they entered the police station in Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv.

Army radio said Kav was a rabbi at a religious seminary that the killer attended.

Rabbi Yehuda Amital, a member of the Israeli Cabinet, told the radio that he knew Dvir, a settler from the Gush Etzion bloc in the West Bank.

“He was known for being strange, a little weird and radical in his opinions,” said Amital, a rabbi with the religious, dovish Meimad movement.

It was not immediately clear why police called Dvir and Kav first. Israel’s Channel 2 television said more rabbis had received summonses to appear before investigators this week.

Police spokesman Eric Bar-Chen declined comment on the inquiry. Amir shot Rabin at close range after a peace rally in Tel Aviv on Nov. 4. His brother and seven others are being held in connection with the assassination.

A rabbi in the West Bank, Yoel Ben-Nun, has charged that right-wing rabbis had issued a death edict against Rabin for endangering Jewish lives by giving away West Bank land to the Palestine Liberation Organization that God promised the Jews in the Bible.

In a Petah Tikva magistrate court Sunday, police said Yigal Amir had tried to enlist the help of a 20-year-old religious woman to monitor the movements of Rabin and current Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Law student Margalit Har-Shefi, a Jewish settler in the West Bank, was ordered held for another six days while police prepare an indictment against her. She was arrested two weeks ago.

“The suspect told her to prepare secular clothes so she could get near Rabin and Peres and monitor their movements without arousing suspicion,” a police officer told the court.

But defense attorney Yair Golan said: “The only thing she is guilty of is being close to Yigal Amir and hearing about his crazy plans, which she never took seriously.”