May 31, 1996

District attorneys from around the state condemned Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani yesterday for continuing to challenge the Bronx District Attorney over his prosecution of a man charged in the death of a police officer last week. Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn District Attorney and the president of the New York State District Attorneys Association, said: "It's gotten to the point where enough is enough. No one quarrels with Rudy Giuliani's right to criticize a public official, but when it's a daily occurrence, it goes beyond the bounds of what's appropriate."

CERTAIN ideas are so obvious that they really should be shot down as soon as they come to mind. Directors with a penchant for French classics are unlikely to leave the Circle in the Square's clunky production of "Tartuffe: Born Again," which turns Moliere's religious mountebank into a televangelist, murmuring, "Now why didn't I think of that?" The odds are they already had, and wisely resisted the temptation. Any recent revival of this dark 17th-century comedy has automatically drawn reflections on its abiding pertinence in the era of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. To set "Tartuffe," as Freyda Thomas's adaptation does, in a contemporary Southern television studio is to belabor the blatant.

When he was 4 years old, Seyi Fayanju's family bought an atlas. From that moment on, his mother said yesterday, he was captivated by geography. Seyi, now 12, returned home to Verona yesterday after winning the National Geography Bee in Washington on Wednesday by correctly identifying Andorra, a tiny country between France and Spain.

Although it was not a Jewish holiday, the streets of this ardently Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv had an uncommonly festive air today, with the talk at the bustling shops and restaurants all about the new power the Orthodox have snatched in Israel. In Steisel's Restaurant, Hasidic men, seated in front of plates heaped with stuffed green peppers and potato pudding, took deep puffs of filtered cigarettes and chuckled as they passed their time with predictions of an Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu and a Parliament with a record 25 deputies from religious parties.

Evidence of an increasingly strong economy mounted today as the Government reported that sales of new homes surged in April, especially in the Northeast. The labor market is also strengthening, as indicated by an eighth consecutive decline last week in first-time benefits for unemployment insurance.