A solution to Cyprus' bailout crisis within the framework set down by the European Union may be possible within "the next few hours," the deputy leader of the island's ruling Democratic Rally party said on Friday.

"There is cautious optimism that in the next few hours we may be able to reach an agreed platform so parliament can approve these specific measures which will be consistent with the approach, the framework and the targets agreed at the last Eurogroup," Averof Neophytou told reporters. 

The news came hours after the Cypriot finance minister left Moscow empty-handed when Russia turned down appeals for aid, leaving the island to strike a bailout deal with the EU before Tuesday or face the collapse of its financial system.

The rebuff left Cyprus looking increasingly isolated, with the deadline looming to find billions of euros demanded by the EU in return for a 10 billion euro ($12.93 billion) bailout.

Without it, the European Central Bank said on Wednesday it would cut off emergency funds to the country's teetering banks, potentially pushing Cyprus out of Europe's single currency.

"The talks have ended as far as the Russian side is concerned," Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told reporters after two days of crisis talks with his Cypriot counterpart, Michael Sarris.

Having angrily rejected a proposed levy on tax deposits in exchange for the EU bailout, Nicosia had turned to the Kremlin to renegotiate a loan deal, win more financing and lure Russian investors to cut-price Cypriot banks and gas reserves.

Wealthy Russians have billions of euros at stake in Cyprus's outsized and now crippled banking sector.

But Siluanov said Russian investors were not interested in Cypriot gas and that the talks had ended without result.

Sarris was due to fly home, where lawmakers were preparing to debate measures proposed by the government to raise at least some of the 5.8 billion euros ($7.48 billion) required to clinch the EU bailout.

They included a "solidarity fund" bundling state assets, including future gas revenues and nationalized pension funds, as the basis for an emergency bond issue and likened by JP Morgan to "a national fire sale".

They were also considering a bank restructuring bill that officials said would see the country's second largest lender, Cyprus Popular Bank, split into good and bad assets, and a government call for the power to impose capital controls to stem a flood of funds leaving the island when banks reopen on Tuesday after a week-long shutdown.

'Playing with fire'
There was no silver bullet, however, and Cyprus's partners in the 17-nation currency bloc were growing increasingly unimpressed.

"I still believe we will get a settlement, but Cyprus is playing with fire," Volker Kauder, a leading conservative ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told public television ARD.

There were long lines at ATMs on Thursday and angry scenes outside parliament, where hundreds of demonstrators gathered after rumors spread that Popular Bank would be closed down and its staff laid off.

"We have children studying abroad, and next month we need to send them money," protester Stalou Christodoulido said through tears. "We'll lose what money we had and saved for so many years if the bank goes down."

Cypriots have been stunned by the pace of the unfolding drama, having elected conservative President Nicos Anastasiades barely a month ago on a mandate to secure a bailout. News that the deal would involve a levy on bank deposits, even for smaller savers, outraged Cypriots, who raided cash machines last weekend.

Related:

EU to Cypriots: Let us raid your savings or no bailout

Cyprus bailout backlash poses little wider risk - for now

Full business coverage from NBC News

This story was originally published on Fri Mar 22, 2013 6:02 AM EDT

Charly Triballeau / AFP - Getty Images

A woman walks on a snowy road in Caen, northwestern France, during a heavy snowstorm on March 12, 2013. Overnight Monday nearly 500 cars were blocked near Cherbourg, where snowdrifts piled up almost two feet as winds reached more than 60 miles an hour.

Pascal Rossignol / Reuters

A man shovels snow off his car in Cambrai, northern France, on March 12, 2013.

Nicolas Armer / EPA

A snowplow removes snow at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, on March 12, 2013. Over 200 flights were cancelled as bad weather hampered efforts by snow sweepers to clear runways and prevented airline crews from reaching work on time.

Reuters reports — An overnight snowstorm in northwestern Europe forced the closure of Frankfurt Airport, caused record traffic jams in Belgium, and left British and French drivers sleeping in their cars. 

Take-offs and landings at Europe's third-busiest airport were halted at around noon on Tuesday to clear snow from the runways. It was set to reopen at around 8.30 a.m. ET.

The high-speed Eurostar train service connecting London with the French and Belgian capitals and the Thalys line linking Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Cologne in Germany were both suspended. Read the full story.

Charly Triballeau / AFP - Getty Images

Firefighters rescue a driver who slid from a roadside during a heavy snowstorm in Caen, northwestern France, on March 12, 2013.

Pascal Rossignol / Reuters

Firefighters evacuate a man in Cambrai, northern France, on March 12, 2013 as winter weather with snow and freezing temperatures returns to the region.

Ian Langsdon / EPA

A pedestrian braves heavy snowfall on the snow-covered Champs de Mars near the Eiffel Tower in Paris on March 12, 2013.

Sean Gallup / Getty Images

With chants of "Fill the gap!" protesters attempt to bring forward a styrofoam replica of a piece of the Berlin Wall in order to fill a gap created by construction workers in the East Side Gallery, which is the longest still-standing portion of the former Berlin Wall, as police try to block the protesters on March 1, 2013 in Berlin, Germany.

Markus Schreiber / AP

Protestors are gathering in front of a part of the former Berlin Wall in Berlin, Germany, on March 1, 2013.

David Rising, The Associated Press

Thomas Peter / Reuters

People protest against the removal of a segment of the former Berlin Wall, now known as East Side Gallery, in Berlin on March 1, 2013.

Hundreds of angry protesters on Friday prevented construction workers from removing a section of one of the few remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall, part of a plan to build a road to a new luxury condominium being built on the banks of the reunited city's Spree river.

Crews only managed to remove one section from the famous East Side Gallery before about 300 protesters pressed too close for work to continue. Demonstrators then wheeled in a mock wall section they had set up in front of the gap.

The East Side Gallery is the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall and is one of the German capital's most popular tourist attractions. It was recently restored at a cost of more than €2 million ($3 million) to the city.

Continue reading.

Thomas Peter / Reuters

Police keep watch as workers remove a piece of the former Berlin Wall, now known as East Side Gallery, in Berlin on March 1, 2013.

Thomas Peter / Reuters

Police carry away a protester's styrofoam copy of a segment of the Berlin Wall at a demonstration against the removal of several segments of the original former Berlin Wall, now known as East Side Gallery, in Berlin on March 1, 2013.

Sean Gallup / Getty Images

A visitor photographs a model of Knut the polar bear, that features Knut's original fur, at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, Germany.

Adorable in life, still attracting admirers in death: Knut the polar bear's hide has been mounted on a polyurethane body and is going on display in a Berlin museum.

The Natural History Museum on Friday unveiled the statue prepared by taxidermists featuring the famous Berlin Zoo bear's fur and claws, with the synthetic body and glass eyes.

The display runs through March 15. Knut will then be added to the museum's scientific collections.

Knut was hand-raised after his mother rejected him. He rose to stardom in 2007 as a cuddly cub, appearing on magazine covers, in a film and on mountains of merchandise. He died in 2011 after suffering from encephalitis.

The museum dismissed criticism of the decision to display Knut, saying it gives everyone an opportunity to see him.

The Associated Press

Alex Grimm / Bongarts via Getty Images

Fans of the German soccer team Kaiserslautern hold up Israeli flags to protest against anti-Semitism prior to the Bundesliga match between FC Kaiserslautern and VfL Wolfsburg in March last year.

Nearly seven decades after the Holocaust, young soccer fans in Germany have become targets of neo-Nazis who preach the hatred of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

“Again and again we see neo-Nazi presence in [sports] fan clubs and my office asks that action be taken against them,” said Winfriede Schreiber, head of the Brandenburg branch of the German government’s intelligence service. “For example, we see the fan club in [the German city] Cottbus consisting of a lot of neo-Nazis. We asked the football club to do something about this.”

At her office in Brandenburg, a state in eastern Germany, Schreiber monitors extremism and reports evidence of hate crimes to prosecutors.

“The neo-Nazis now look like everyone else,” Schreiber said. “Gone are the jackboots and black leather jackets that used to make it easy to expose them. Now they blend into the local population.”

According to Schreiber, the neo-Nazis subscribe to Hitler’s views and extol his one-time deputy, Rudolf Hess.

“The danger the neo-Nazis pose is that they are against democracy and they work to alienate young people from democracy,” she said. “They have made ‘Juden’ [Jews] a curse word even if there are no Jews playing on the soccer field.”

Jens Teschke, a spokesman for Germany's interior ministry, which is responsible for domestic security, said neo-Nazi activities are visible throughout Germany, but strongest in the country's east.

“Neo-Nazis take young soccer fans to homes built in the Nazi times as holiday retreats for elite members of Hitler’s party,” Teschke said. “They laud the Nazi era and the legacy of this era.”

According to Teschke, the German government launched programs in January 2011 to make soccer coaches more aware of neo-Nazi tactics.

The problem is not limited to Germany. 

In England, fans of London-based Tottenham Hotspur -- which boasts a strong Jewish following -- have been subjected to anti-Semitic abuse for many years. In November, supporters of West Ham United "hissed on several occasions, mocking the mass execution of Jews during the Second World War," the U.K.'s Telegraph newspaper reported. "While the hissing, shamefully, is nothing new, Tottenham fans were also subjected to a chant of 'Adolf Hitler, he's coming for you.'"

Only days earlier, an American college student suffered a foot-long stab wound and a punctured lung when a mob of up to 50 masked men armed with knives and baseball bats attacked Tottenham Hotspur fans before a Europa League match in Rome.

Witnesses told local media that the attackers shouted "Jews, Jews" as they laid siege to the bar. 

"The coordinated attack ... appears to have been motivated at least in part by anti-Semitism," the Telegraph reported.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center also recently highlighted the issue's growth. "The problem of anti-Semitic abuse at soccer matches which until recently has been limited to Eastern Europe, has been revived in Western Europe," it said in a report.

Prime targets of anti-Semitism on the soccer field are the Makkabi teams, Jewish athletic clubs located in 15 German cities.

“Every Makkabi team in Germany is confronted with anti-Semitism, as are teams with Jewish roots,” said Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in Berlin, an advocacy group.

Soccer coach Claudio Oppenberg, who is Jewish, said his team also faced anti-Semitism from Muslim immigrants.

According to Oppenberg, who’s coached Tus Makkabi Berlin for seven years, only two members of the current team are Jewish. The rest are from North Africa and Turkey.

During a game last March, Oppenberg said members of a Turkish team shouted at fellow Turks on the Makkabi team: “How can you play for these damned Jews?”

The Turkish team beat the Makkabis 1-0. Oppenberg said the Turkish coach confronted him after the game and said: “We f---d you Jews.” 

Oppenberg filed charges with the German Football Federation and the Turkish coach was suspended for a year.

“If you have racism and anti-Semitism in society, then you will have it in football too,” said Alex Feuerherdt, a soccer referee and freelance writer.

Donald Snyder, a veteran NBC News producer for more than 25 years, is a special correspondent for NBCNews.com. 

Related:

Hatred boils over in Israeli soccer

Holocaust archive rescues lost identities, reunites family after decades

A retired teacher's courageous crusade: Tackling neo-Nazi hate

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Peter Breiter, CEO of Raiffeisen Gammesfeld eG bank, serves a customer at the counter of the bank in Gammesfeld, Baden-Wuerttemberg. Things do not seem to have changed much since the bank was founded in 1890.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Peter Breiter works with an old adding machine. The bank is not connected to a database system, there are no cash machines and its customer base consists only of residents of the town of Gammesfeld, which has a population of around 510.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Fritz Vogt, 82, who used to run the bank and still helps out with paperwork, writes into a savings book. During his time at the bank he rejected the idea of IT, preferring his trusty fountain pen, and now eyes the 'new' computer with its floppy disks warily.

By Victoria Bryan, Reuters

Peter Breiter, 41, is an unusual banker. Not for him the big bonuses, complicated financial instruments and multi-million deals of Wall Street lore.

He is happy instead writing transaction slips out by hand for the 500 inhabitants of the tiny southern German village of Gammesfeld.

The Raiffeisen Gammesfeld eG cooperative bank is one of the country's 10 smallest banks by deposits and is the only one to be run by just one member of staff.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Peter Breiter rolls euro coins in paper.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Peter Breiter mops the floor in the waiting room of the bank.

A typical day's work for Breiter involves providing villagers with cash for their day-to-day needs and arranging small loans for local businesses. Not to mention cleaning the one-story building that houses the bank, which is 200 meters from his own front door.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Peter Breiter holds the floppy disks he uses now that the bank has a computer.

Moving from a bigger bank, where it was all "sell, sell, sell," Gammesfeld-born Breiter says taking up this job in 2008 was the best decision he ever made.

The advertisement required someone to work by hand, without computers. The typewriter and the adding machine bear the signs of constant use, although Breiter, in his standard work outfit of jeans and a sweater, does now have a computer.

"It's so much fun," Breiter, a keen mathematician, says as he deals with a steady stream of lunchtime customers. He knows his customers by name and regularly offers advice on jobs, relationship and money woes.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Peter Breiter, right, welcomes customer Mandes Rueger, 30, at the counter of the bank. Rueger, an insurance salesman, comes in around twice a week to use the bank.

Raiffeisen Gammesfeld restricts its business to traditional retail banking --  no credit cards, shares, funds or even online banking. Annual profits are stable at around 40,000 euros ($54,000) and the biggest loan it ever made was for 650,000 euros ($875,000).

Breiter said the financial crisis prompted interest in his bank from all over Germany: "One person rang up five times asking for a 4 million euro loan, but I had to refuse because he wasn't from Gammesfeld!" Read the full story.

Photographer's blog: Lisi Niesner describes her visit to Germany's one-man bank

EDITOR'S NOTE: Images taken on Jan. 29, 2013 and made available to NBC News today.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

A Raiffeisen Gammesfeld eG bank stamp.

Courtesy Auschwitz Jewish Center

The Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot synagogue (c. 1939-1941).

REGENSBURG, Germany -- A synagogue near the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz is on the verge of collapse, officials warned on Wednesday.

The head of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, which maintains the historic building in the southern Polish city of Oswiecim, said in a phone interview that the synagogue is on unstable ground and if it is not reinforced soon, it may crumble.

"There are already small cracks visible," Tomasz Kuncewicz said. "A thorough examination found that the ground is unstable and with heavy rain or something similar, anything can happen."

If the Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot Synagogue were to collapse, the only surviving Jewish house of prayer in the city would be ruined.

Oswiecim, once an ordinary town home to a large Jewish community, became an international symbol of the Holocaust when Nazi Germany ran its largest and deadliest concentration camp just two miles from the city center during World War II. Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps.

"Several synagogues were located in the area, and this was the only one not destroyed by the Nazis," Kuncewicz said.

Jacek Bednarczyk / EPA

Students visit the Chewra Lomdei Mishnayot Synagogue in Auschwitz, Poland, on Wednesday.

The synagogue itself seems to trace the tragic path of the Jewish community in the area.

Built around 1913, it thrived until the Nazi occupation. During World War II, the interior was gutted and it was used to store ammunition.

After the war and the liberation of the concentration camp, a group of Jewish survivors restored the building provisionally, but it stopped operating when the small group emigrated from Poland shortly thereafter. In the 1970s, the country's communist government nationalized the building and turned it into a carpet warehouse.

It wasn't until 1998 that the synagogue was turned back over to the Jewish community, a historic first in Poland after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. It was rededicated in 2000 in an effort to rekindle the Jewish community that had been so vibrant in the city decades before.

Today, it is not only a place of prayer, but also a historical site and educational center that draws 25,000 visitors each year.

Organizers are seeking $300,000 for the renovation effort, the majority from donations, but they also are asking for help from government agencies.

Kuncewicz said he hoped to start the repairs this spring: "We are working very hard to raise money for this project, to make sure the synagogue will stand."

Pope Benedict XVI was troubled by "some great challenges" during his time in office -- including allegations of corruption within the church that were illegally exposed by his former butler and his relationship with a controversial Catholic brotherhood -- the pontiff’s brother said Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters in Germany, Georg Ratzinger said the pope was “doing relatively well” and his announcement Monday that he was going to stand down had not had an effect on his health.

Slideshow: The life of Pope Benedict XVI

Javier Barbancho / AFP - Getty Images

Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. Look back at his life from childhood through his papacy.

Launch slideshow

On Monday, Benedict, 85, explained his resignation, saying that the papacy required “strength of mind and body” and his had deteriorated in recent months. On Tuesday, the Vatican acknowledged for the first time that the pope has had a pacemaker for years and that its battery was replaced a few months ago in secret, Reuters reported.

“But you notice that the aging process impacts body and soul, and especially on his strength," Ratzinger said Tuesday. "And he thinks that with a reduced workload he couldn't carry on this great responsibility, that a younger person is needed to capture the problems of today's time and who has the power to do what has to be done.” 

'Indiscretions'
Ratzinger said the pope’s time in office had “created great challenges for him,” highlighting two particular issues that concerned his brother.

 "Within the church a lot of things happened, which brought up troubles, for example the relationship to the Pius Brotherhood or the irregularities within the Vatican, where the butler had let known indiscretions,” he said.

“These were emotional years, but with God's help and his own commitment, I think he mastered it rather well,” he added.

Ratzinger did not specify the pope’s issues with the Pius Brotherhood, or Society of St. Pius X as the group is formally known.

But in late December, Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the group, described Jews as “the enemies of the church” to widespread condemnation from within and outside the Catholic Church. Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, reportedly said it was “absolutely unacceptable, impossible to define Jews as enemies of the church.”

In October, the pope’s former butler Paolo Gabriele was given an 18-month prison sentence in the so-called “Vatileaks” case, after he was found guilty of stealing thousands of Vatican documents -- including some of Benedict’s private papers and letters alleging corruption within the church -- while working for the pontiff.

Some of papers were leaked to the media and, in court, Gabriele said he acted out of concern for the church and the pope. The pope pardoned Gabriele just before Christmas.

On a brighter note, Ratzinger said foreign trips had also been “important” to the pope, enabling him “to have a pastoral impact, to find friends and to create understanding for the message of the Gospel.”

Reuters contributed to this report.

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New pope doesn't mean new doctrine, experts say