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Israeli minister quizzed on Holocaust march embezzlement

Israel's finance minister is to be questioned this week by police investigating the funding of an annual march at Auschwitz in memory of Holocaust victims.

The police have already interviewed Abraham Hirchson, one of the most senior members of the cabinet, under caution over allegations in the Israeli press that £662,000 was embezzled from Nili, a nonprofit wing of the National Workers Union that he once headed. They talked to him for seven hours last week.

As the investigation has widened, police have been examining a web of American and Israeli charitable foundations controlled by Hirchson, 66. Some are linked to the March of the Living, an annual event in Poland that he founded in 1987, long before he joined the government.

The March of the Living sees several thousand young Jews and dignitaries from America, Europe and Israel walk a mile from the Auschwitz concentration camp to the Birkenau gas chambers in memory of the estimated 1m Jews killed there by the Germans during the second world war.
Read entire article at Times (of London)