NEW YORK, Aug 6, 2007 (AFP) - American historian Raul Hilberg, one of the world's leading Holocaust scholars and author of 'The Destruction of the European Jews,' has died at the age of 81, his former university said Monday.

Hilberg died in the northeastern US state of Vermont of lung cancer on Saturday, according to a statement from the University of Vermont, where he taught from 1956 until 1991.

It was while at the university in 1961 that Hilberg first published his masterwork, widely seen as the seminal study of the Nazis' extermination of Jews during World War II.

PARIS, Aug 6, 2007 (AFP) - The American historian Raul Hilberg, one of the world's foremost scholars of the Holocaust, has died aged 81, his French publisher announced on Monday.

Hilberg was the author of 'The Destruction of the European Jews,' widely seen as the seminal study of the Nazis' extermination of Jews during World War II, to which he continued to add throughout his life.

He died on Saturday in Burlington, in the US state of Vermont, according to his publisher Gallimard.

PARIS, Aug 2, 2007 (AFP) - France's second woman rabbi, a 29-year-old who was ordained in London last month, took up her duties Thursday at a Progressive synagogue in eastern Paris, according to a French Jewish group.

Celia Surger was trained and ordained at the Leo Baeck rabbinical college in London, according to a spokesman for the Progressive Jewish Movement of France (MJLF), which represents some 1,400 families.

France's only other woman rabbi, Pauline Bebe, also officiates in Paris.

JERUSALEM, July 23, 2007 (AFP) - Religious Jews in Israel and around the world began traditional prayers and fasting on Monday to commemorate the destruction of the First and Second holy temples in Jerusalem.

Commemorated under the Hebrew calendar as the Ninth of Av, worshippers will gather on Tuesday before the Wailing Wall, the last remaining vestige of the Second Temple, in occupied and annexed east Jerusalem which Israel captured in 1967.