THE student in the picture is a model of scholarly concentration. His head is lowered intently over the book on the desk in front of him. A finger of his left hand strokes his lower lip, while his right hand marks his place.
What image could better represent an institute of higher education, anxious to solicit funds from potential donors? Or so, at least, thought the editors of a fund raising booklet prepared for Israel's Bar Ilan University.
The booklet, with the same photograph of that model student appearing no less than 12 times con its heavy quality pages, was supposed to have been distributed at a fund raising dinner on November 12th last. But the event was cancelled because it fell just a week after the assassination of Mr Yitzhak Rabin a killing carried out by Yigal Amir, a student at Bar Ilan University.
So the fund raiser was rescheduled for late January, and the booklet was updated and dedicated to Mr Rabin's memory featuring letters of tribute from US Vice President Al Gore among others, and a photograph of Mr Rabin receiving an honorary doctorate at the university.
Apparently no one, however, thought to check the original material, or to look too closely at that picture of the hardworking student.
And so it was, extraordinarily, that a fund raising booklet, dedicated to Mr Rabin and prepared for distribution late last month at a $600 a head New York City dinner, came to feature a photograph of the prime minister's assassin, repeated 12 times through its pages. The "model student" was none other than Yigal Amir.
From its campus in Tel Aviv, where it has been trying somewhat unsuccessfully for three months to shrug off the stigma of having nurtured Amir in its law faculty, Bar Ilan this weekend issued near hysterical apologies and cries of "human error".
The head of the university's American fund raising network, Mr Yehuda Levy, responsible for the booklet, was summoned from New York to a crisis meeting. The university's former president, Dr Shlomo Eckstein, called the inclusion of Amir's picture "an act of" Satan that has shocked us all". The current President, Dr Moshe Kaveh, said he was "embarrassed and angry," and that the university had been trying to expunge all memories of Amir from its consciousness.
But while Bar Ilan officials repeated insistently that it had all been a tragic mistake, Mrs Leah Rabin, the prime minister's widow, retorted that it was "very hard for me to believe that this just happened through lack of attention of laziness". And some Knesset members called for a suspension of all government funding to the university.