July 4 In Jewish History
1187: Guy de Lusignan (King of Jerusalem) force-marched his troops through the dry, hot Galilee against the advice of Raymond III of Tripoli and others. At a site known as the Horns of Hittim near Lake Tiberius, the Moslems defeated him and his Crusader army. The Moslems were led by the legendary Saladin. This defeat lead to a string of Crusader defeats that culminated in the loss of Jerusalem in October. These losses would result in the Third Crusade, led by Richard the Lionhearted, which would fail to restore the gains of the Christians. There would be several more Crusades, none of which would prove any more successful. In the end, the Christians would be forced into retreat as Moslem rulers would extend their rule into the across a large swath of Europe. Those who contend that the today’s clashes between the West and certain groups of Moslems and Arabs are rooted in the creation of the state of Israel would do well to read some history. Obviously, today’s conflicts pre-date modern Zionism. Lest we lose track of the events of the eleventh and twelfth century, the Crusades were not a good period for the Jews
1453: Forty-one Jews were burned at the stake in Brelau, Germany. The remainder of the Jewish population was expelled
1632: Several secret Jews in Spain were sentenced at an auto-de-fe for holding Jewish services. They practiced in a house on a street known as Calle de las Infantas. The house was later destroyed. The non-Jewish owner of a building used as a shul was burned at the stake
1776(17th of Tammuz): Celebration of Independence Day. The Declaration of Independence in the United States of America provided the basis for religious tolerance in most other countries. During the Revolutionary war there were fewer than 2,500 Jews in total within the colonies. More than six hundred fought in the war including the great grandfather of Supreme Court Justice Cardozo. One company in South Carolina had so many Jews that it was called the Jews’ company. In 1776, July 4 corresponded to the 17th of Tammuz, which is a fast day on the Jewish calendar tied to the events leading up to the destruction of the Temple.
1788: The Jews of Philadelphia celebrate in a Federal Parade after hearing that the Constitution was adopted by a majority of the states. The newspaper read, "The rabbi of the Jews, locked in arms of two ministers of the gospel, was a most delightful sight."
1788: Benjamin Franklin was too sick and weak to get out of bed, but the Independence Day parade in Philadelphia marched right under his window. And, as Franklin himself had directed, ‘the clergy of different Christian denominations, with the rabbi of the Jews, walked arm in arm.’
1794: Catherine II of Russia restricted the area where Jews were permitted to trade.
1802: The U.S. Military Academy opens its doors at West Point, N.Y. According to Daniel Isaac Helmer, Cadet Sergeant, United States Military Academy--West Point and the Hillel president at the United States Military Academy the Jewish people have been associated with the Academy since its opening. The first graduating class consisted of two cadets one of whom was a Jew named Simon Levy. In the 1980s, the West Point Jewish Chapel, a beautiful $10 million facility, was opened. In 2002, in honor of 200 years of Jewish history at the Military Academy, the Jewish Chapel began building a commemorative wall to record and recognize all of the Jewish graduates of West Point. At that time there were about 70 Jews at the Military Academy out of a student population of approximately 4,000. An increasingly active Jewish population has begun to sponsor numerous Jewish activities. Jewish students from other schools have visited West Point for events including "Weekend of the Jewish Warrior" and a Hanukkah party. The Military Academy also has a West Point Jewish Chapel Choir, which has performed all over the East Coast.
1807: Birthdate of Giuseppe Garibaldi one of a triumvirate of Italian patriots who freed the peninsula from foreign rule and created the modern nation of Italy. Garibaldi was a revolutionary and a guerilla fighter in the true sense of the terms. His belief in equality extended to religion where he made no distinction between the rights of Christians and the rights of Jews. Numerous Jews served in his military unit known as “the Thousands” which liberated southern Italy and Sicily.
1845: The Egyptian Revival Hobart Synagogue was consecrated in Hobart a city on the Australian island state of Tasmania.
1873: Birthdate of dietician Frances Stern. The Frances Stern Nutrition Center a part of Tufts-New England Medical Center was named in her honor.
1883: Birthdate of Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg. Goldberg entertained several generations with his drawings of simple activities that were turned into multi-step complex functions. His name became synonymous with improvised temporary solutions to problems of major and minor magnitude.
1885: Birthdate of Louis B. Mayer. Born in Minsk, Russia, Mayer was one of a generation of early movie moguls. In his case, he was the motion-picture executive MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
1902: Herzl had his first meeting with Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild in London.
1902: The Sultan asks Herzl top come to Constantinople immediately.
1902: Birthdate of mobster Meyer Lansky.
1905: Birthdate of author and literary critic Lionel Trilling.
1911: Birthdate of Mitch Miller. Born in Rochester NY, Miller’s greatest claims to fame are "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and his television show, "Sing Along With Mitch."
1913: Abe Attell the boxer known as “the Little Hebrew” accidentally hit the referee on the face during a win against Willie Beecher.
1918: At the Battle of Hamel on John Monash applied his doctrine of "peaceful penetration", and led Australian Divisions, along with a small detachment of US troops, to win a decisive victory for the Allies. A native of Australia, Monash was the son of Prussian born Jews and had risen to the rank of Major General in 1917.
1918: Birthdate of advice columnist Abigail Van Buren.
1918: Birthdate of advice columnist Ann Landers.
1918: Ottoman sultan Mehmed VI ascends to the throne. Mehmed had the unenviable challenge of salvaging what he could of Ottoman glory as World War I came to the end and the Allies were poised to turn most of the Ottoman Empire into European Colonies. Jews continued to play an active part in the governing of the Empire and the emerging Republic. These included the minister of telegraph Yusuf Franko Pasa and Professor Avram Galante who served as “translator of the foreign press news for the Ankara government.”
1926: Birthdate of Amos Elon.
1927: Birthdate of playwright Neil Simon. Some of his hits include Odd Couple, Plaza Suite and Biloxi Blues.
1929: When the “Ah-Say-Fah Ha’Nivcharim” (Assembly of the Chosen) resumes its meeting Jaobtinsky loses the vote to ignore the organization’s’ agenda and leads the eleven revisionist delegates out of the meeting after reading a speech attacking the Jewish Agency.
1931: According to a report by the Labor Department of the Jewish Agency made public today by the American Palestine Campaign, “few countries in the world afford women such equality of opportunity as is enjoyed by Jewish women in Palestine.” Out of work force of 23,830 most of which is located in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Petach Tikvah 18,067 are men and 5,754 are women. While the largest number of women works in agricultural endeavors, they are also represented in manufacturing, the professions and government work.
1934: An Inspectorate of Concentration Camps is established, headed by Theodor Eicke.
1934(21st of Tammuz, 5694): Zionist poet Chaim Nachman Bialik passed away. Born in Russia in 1873, Bialik had a traditional Talmudic education. However, at an early age he was attracted to Zionism and became a member of the Lovers of Zion. He fell under the influence of the author Achad Ha’am. His Hebrew poetry reflected the idea that Zionism was as much a cultural as it was a political movement. One of his famous early poems was "City of Slaughter" written in response to the pogrom at Kishnev. Bialik made Aliyah in 1924. Such was his influence that during his lifetime, he was called the "national poet," a title that has remained to this day. For those interested in reading his works in translation, consider looking at a copy of “Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of Hayim Nachman Bialik.”
1934: Leo Szilard, the Hungarian born Jew who would take refuge in the United States and become part of the Manhattan Project, patents the chain-reaction design for the atomic bomb.
1941: The Nazis murdered scientists and writers in the captured city of Lvov.
1941: Lithuanian militiamen murdered 416 Jewish men, 47 Jewish women in Kovno.
1941: Two thousand Jews from Lutsk, Ukraine, are transported to the Lubard Fortress and killed.
1941: Fifty-four Jews are killed at Vilna, Lithuania.
1941: Germans order Lithuanian militiamen to murder 416 Jewish men and 47 Jewish women at the Seventh Fort
1941: Between July 4 and July 11 five thousand Jews are killed in Ternopol, Ukraine.
1944(13th of Tammuz, 5704): Corporal David H. Rubenstein was killed in action in France. He was the 19th Milford, Massachusetts man to lose his life in World War II. “Milford’s Fallen Family” of that war would come to total 55.
1944: One thousand Jewish women are sent from Auschwitz to Hamburg, Germany, to pull down the remains of structures damaged during Allied bombing raids.
1944: 250 inmates, most of them French Jews, from the Alderney camp on the Occupied Channel Islands are killed by fire from British warships while being transported to the mainland.
1944: Between July 4 and July 5 2565 Jews from Pápa, Hungary, are sent to Auschwitz just as the Hungarian government is poised to defy Germany and halt the deportation. Only 30 of Pápa's 2800 Jews will survive the war
1945: In Tripoli, Libya and in other Libyan towns, Muslims began anti- Jewish riots.
1946: A Pogrom took place in Kielce, Poland. The date is correct –1946. One year after the end of the World War II and the Holocaust and a Polish mob attacked a house in Kielce in Poland where almost all of the town's surviving Jews were living (200 of the original 25,000). Forty-two Jews were brutally murdered, another 50 injured. This was followed by a chaotic mass exodus of around 150,000 Jews from across Poland to DP camps in Germany
1946: Birthdate of financier Michael Milken. A wizard of Wall Street, Milken’s name became synonymous with greed and the Junk Bond Scandal. He eventually ended up going to prison for his part in the financial fraud that was rampant in the 1980’s.
1947: David Ben-Gurion appeared before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). During his testimony which covered the history of the Jewish people and the reasons for creating a Jewish state in Palestine Ben Gurion tells the UN officials that “What happened to our people in this war is merely a climax to the uninterrupted persecution to which we have been subjected for centuries by almost all the Christian and Moslem peoples in the world.’
1948: Pitcher Marv Rotblatt made his major league debut with the Chicago White Sox.
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that an accidental blast in a quarry of Even V’Sid Company on Castel Hill killed eight workers and injured six others. The holiday-with-pay principle was legally established in Israel following the final reading of the Annual Leave Bill in the Knesset. Employees were entitled to a minimum of 14 days' paid vacation as of October 1, 1951. The employee must have worked 200 days out of year's contract, or must have worked 240 single days for the same employer in any one 12-month period to be entitled to such paid leave.
1959: Alaska becomes the 49th state to join the Union. Jewish involvement with Alaska dates back to January, 1868 when the Alaska Commercial Company was formed in by a group of Jewish businessman in San Francisco including Louis Sloss (President), Lewis Gerstle (Vice President), Simon Greenwald, William Kohl and A. Wasserman. Jews were included in those went “North to Alaska” during the Gold Rush of the 1890’s. There was actually an attempt made before World War II to turn the Alaska Territory into a refuge for Jews fleeing Hitler. The plan failed. Ernest Gruening, a Jew from New York, was one of Alaska’s most prominent early political leaders. A supporter of statehood, he served as territorial governor and then was elected as one of the state’s first two United States Senators. Gruening joined Wayne Morris as one of only two Senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The vote cost him his seat. But it made him one of the first to see the folly of the Viet Nam War.
1967: In the General Assembly of the UN Chile gave its full support to the resolution of the Latin American Bloc in the aftermath of the Six-Day War.
1970: American painter Barnett Newman passed away.
1975: In Jerusalem’s Zion Square, members of the PLO detonate a bomb hidden in a refrigerator which killed fourteen and wounded seventy. Victims included Arabs as well as Jews.
1976: The Jerusalem Post reported that there was extensive violence in the West Bank towns in protest against the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old Arab youth during clashes with security forces during the weekend. The giant American Bicentennial National Park in the Jerusalem hills was officially opened to the public.
1976: Antoni Słonimski, Polish poet and author, passed away. Slonimski spent the war years in exile in Britain. He returned to Poland in 1951 where he was a staunch anti-Stalinist.
1976: The Entebbe Rescue – 256 hostages from an Air France plane were held prisoners by Palestinian terrorists and Ugandan soldiers. After 8 days they were rescued by Israeli commandos in a brilliant ruse under the command of Yonatan Netanyahu who was shot in the back during the rescue. Netanyahu was the one of four Israeli soldier killed in the rescue mission. His brother parlayed the death into a political career that took him to the top of the Israeli political ladder. The United Nations condemned Israel for violating Ugandan Sovereignty.
1986: Russian born, American mathematician Oscar Zariski passed away.
1987: Nazi Klaus Barbie, "Butcher of Lyon" is convicted by a French court.
1999: The New York Times reviews books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Story Begins: Essays on Literature” y Amos Oz and “The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity” by Daniel Mendelsohn.
2002: Jewish National Fund officials announced that retired Tel Aviv District Court Judge Arye Segelson will head the organization's investigation into allegations of misconduct in JNF's 'Plant a Tree With Your Own Hands' program for tourists. The announcement is the latest in a series of JNF efforts to address an article last week in Ma'ariv claiming that saplings planted by tourists at a JNF site near Hadassah-University Hospital, Ein Kerem, had been uprooted to allow other tourists to plant in the same spot the next day."
2002 (24th of Tammuz, 5762): A gunman opened fire at Israel's El Al airline ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport; three people were killed, including the gunman
2004: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Conspirators” by Michael André Bernstein and ‘Politics: Observations & Arguments'' by Hendrik Hertzberg
2004: Victor Kreiderman, 49, was killed by terrorists in Israel.
2007: In an interview broadcast on Channel 10 Abu Mutfana - a leader in the Army of Islam – said that the kidnappers of Cpl. Gilad Schalit have transferred him to the custody of Hamas
2008: Rosh Chodesh Tammuz (Second Day); First day of Tammuz, 5768
2008: As part of its 4th of July cookout themed advertising, Wal Mart touts the availability of “100% all kosher Hebrew National Hot Dogs.” The Red, White and Blue meets OU!
2008: Following two days each punctuated by a rocket attack on Israel, Hamas today announced that it was suspending all negotiations with Israel over the release of captured IDF soldier Gilad Schalit. The deputy head of Hamas's political bureau, Mussa Abu Marzuk, said that the talks were being frozen because Israel was not displaying commitment to the truce agreement with his organization in Gaza.
2008: Despite the seemingly endless rounds of adversity that would break the spirits of lesser people, the Jews of Tel Aviv showed their true mettle by hosing the fourth annual mass water fight in Rabin Square which drew hundreds of children, teens and adults. Participants sprayed each other with water from various water guns, buckets, bottles and bags. The "weapons" were filled up with water from the main fountain in the square, near the municipality building. Friday's water fight was the fourth such annual event organized by a group of youths called "Farsh." According to the group, "the aim of the event is for people to have fun. We want to make people smile and feel happy, and get wet at the same time."
2008: The Washington Post features a review of “Undiscovered” by Jewish actress, Debra Winger
2009: In Alexandria, VA, Jews of the Old Dominion celebrate Independence Day with a "Red, White & Blue Tot Shabbat" in the chapel at Beth El Hebrew Congregation.
2009: There is no Independence Day Celebration at the U.S. Embassy in Israel on July 4 because the official celebration took place on July 1. The celebration included remarks by the Ambassador on the 233rd anniversary of U.S. Independence, Shiri Maimon singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hatikva” and fireworks lighting up the night sky above the cliffs of the Mediterranean.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Thursday, July 2, 2009
This Day, July 3, In Jewish History
July 3 In Jewish History
323: Constantine the Great defeated Licinius at the Battle of Adrianople. Constantine ruled the western half of the Roman Empire. Licinius ruled the eastern half. In 313 the two rulers had issued the Edict of Milan which opened the Roman Empire to Christianity. In 320, Licinius reject the edict. These led to a clash of political and religious power that was settled at the Battle of Adrianople. When the war ended, Constantine and Christianity were secure in their respective positions of power and the history of the Jews of Europe would take a turn for the worse.
987: Hugh Capet is crowned King of France, the first of the Capetian dynasty. “The Capetian dynasty lasted for more than 300 years. Capetian rule was weak, especially during the first hundred years. Thus each duchy decided for itself how to treat its Jews. The Church gained enormous influence over local affairs and promoted the idea that the Jews were in league with the Devil - declaring them the antichrist".
1608: Quebec City was founded by French explorer Samuel Champlain. Prior to 1760, when the British took Canada from France, officially there were no Jews living in Quebec or any other part of the French colony. The King of France had decreed that only Roman Catholics could settle in the colony. This declaration was aimed at potential Protestant colonists, but it hit Jews as well. The first known Jew settled in Quebec in 1767.
1844: Birthdate of Dankmar Adler, American architect and engineer. Adler was born in Germany, the son of a Rabbi. His name is first name is a combination of the German word for thanks –‘dank’- and the Hebrew word for bitter – ‘mar’. Adler’s father created the name since Adler’s mother died in childbirth. The Adler family moved to Chicago where young Adler learned his trade as a draftsman. He enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War fighting his way across Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. After the war, Adler designed or helped build a variety of buildings including The Stock Exchange in Chicago and Carnegie Hall in New York. He also built Temples and Synagogues in Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of America’s most famous architects trained in Adler’s offices. Adler passed away in 1900 after having just completed Temple Isaiah in Chicago
1849: The French entered Rome in order to restore Pope Pius IX to power. After his return to power Pius re-instituted the Ghetto for the Jews of Rome 1850. In 1858, he would gain greater fame (or infamy) during the Mortara Affair during which Pius refused to return young Edgardo to his Jewish family.
1863: Third and climactic day of the Battle of Gettysburg. During Picket’s Charge, an attack on the Union center at place called Cemetery Ridge. The Rebels reached what was called High Water Mark. The Union line held. The war would last for almost two years, but the tide had been turned. The “last best hope of man” would survive. The United States, with all of its freedom, would become home to one of the largest and most dynamic Jewish communities in the four thousand year history of the Chosen People.
1866: Prussia defeats Austria at the Battle of Königgratz. The victory seals the victory of the Prussians over the Austrians during Austro-Prussian War which lasted as scant six weeks. This little known battle is one of the most decisive in modern history because of all the major events that flowed from it. The victory removed Austria as a power among Germanic states. This opened the way for German unification under Prussian dominance which lead to the Franco-Prussian War, which led to World War I which led to the Shoah. The defeat of Austria led the Austrians to turn to the rest of the empire and create the Austro-Hungarian Empire which gave empowered the Hungarian nationalist which led to granting of full rights to the Jews of the empire who gave the world everybody from Freud to Herzl and a whole lot more. And this only scratches the surface of the impact of this one brief battle.
1869: In Germany (Prussia), all restrictions against Jews were lifted. After the war of 1866 Prussia increased its territory to include Hanover, Hesse-Kassel Saxony, and other territory that became part of the North German Confederation. Under the initiative of the Liberal party, full rights were extended to Jews including serving in public positions. By April 16, 1871 it became Imperial Law and was extended to the entire empire. Although later reaction revoked most of this freedom, the discrimination never returned to the level existing in the "Middle Ages" - until the rise of Hitler.
1879: In London, a formal announcement was made that the three sons of the recently deceased Baron Lionel de Rothschild will carry on their father’s business activities.
1883: Birthdate of author Franz Kafka. The famous Czech born author gained his real fame after his death. After many false starts Kafka earned a Doctorate of Laws and then took a mind-numbing job with an insurance company. Ill health finally enabled him to work shorter hours, which gave him time to pursue his writings. Three of his best known works are the Trial, The Castle and America. Kafka became famous in spite of himself. He had left word that at the time of his death all of his manuscripts were to be destroyed. Fortunately his friend Max Brod disobeyed him and had the works published. Kafka had planned to immigrate to Palestine before his untimely death in 1924 hastened by the effects of tuberculosis. On being Jewish Kafka wrote, "Not one calm second is granted to the Western Jew. Everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future but also the past…"
1890: Idaho joins the Union becoming the 43rd star on the Star Spangled Banner. Despite a comparatively small Jewish population, Idaho was the first state to elect a Jew as Governor. On his second try for the top spot Moses Alexander was elected in 1914. He served from 1915 until 1919. A German immigrant, Alexander had previously been elected Mayor of Boise. Alexander was not casual about his Jewish identity. His wife was a Jew by choice, having converted when she married Alexander.
1903: Pogrom began in Bialystok.
1904: Theodor Herzl away at the age of 44. One person can make a difference. “If you will it, it is no dream!”
1923: Mayer Dizengoff, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, sails from New York City aboard the Aquitania.
1925: Birthdate of Tony Curtis. Born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, Curtis was some times referred to as "a poor man's Cary Grant." One of his biggest hits came when he played opposite Grant in the film "The Pink Submarine." Other famous roles were in "Some Like It Hot" with costars Jack Lemmon and that famous Jewess, Marilyn Monroe and as the wisecracking New York born orderly in "Dr. Newman, M.D."
1929: At the opening meeting of the Assembly of the Elected, “the national body which elects the National Council of Palestine Jews, a dispute broke out between Dr. Ton, the presiding officer and revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky. The dispute revolved around revisionist claims that several of their delegates were attacked by Labor delegates and was so intense the meeting was adjourned.
1933: In Chicago, the convention of the ZOA comes to a close.
1935: Sir Francis Montefiore, grandnephew of the noted philanthropist, Sir Moses Montefiore, passed away today at the age of 75
1936: German Jew Stefan Lux kills himself in the assembly room of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. The suicide is in protest of Germany's persecution of Jews.
1936: The Palestine Post reported from London that the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Ormsby Gore, told the House of Commons that "there were no provisions in the Covenant or Peace Treaties or the Mandate regarding the withdrawal of the Mandate from the Power entrusted with it." Hebron was fined a collective fine of £2,000 for ambushing an army patrol. Two British soldiers were hurt in this encounter. Ten suspected Jewish communists were rounded up by police in Tel Aviv and interned at the army's Sarafand detention camp. Questioned about a news item which appeared in an Arab newspaper, the management of the Jerusalem YMCA declared that it offered a platform on which young men, irrespective of their race, creed and religion could cooperate and meet in an atmosphere of congeniality and goodwill.
1937: Twenty-nine year old Brooklynite Moe Schultz returned today on the President Roosevelt from Palestine, where he said he had driven a truck for three years between the towns of Haifa and Tel-Aviv, a distance of ninety miles, and had many thrilling escapes from Arab snipers.
1941: At Nowogrodek, the Nazis sought fifty "volunteers" to be members of the Jewish council there. They are taken away and never seen again. Fifty more were shot in the town square.
1941: In Vilna, all the Jews were required to wear identity badges.
1941: One hundred Jews are murdered at Bialystok, Poland.
1941: In the Ukraine, 3500 Jews are killed at Zloczow and hundreds die at Drohobycz.
1941: Fifty Jews in Novogroduk, Belorussia, who volunteer for a German-organized Jewish council, "disappear." Another 50, selected at random, are shot in the town square to the accompaniment of music played by a German band.
1941: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin orders the establishment of partisan units to harass German troops in occupied Soviet territory. Jews would play an active role in these units. There were also units made up exclusively of Jewish partisans.
1943: Birthdate of self-promoting television news personality Geraldo Rivera. Rivera’s father was from Puerto Rico. After moving to New York he married a Jewish woman named Lily Friedman. Contrary to popular urban legend, Rivera’s original name was not Gerry Rivers. And he did not change his name to appeal to Hispanic audiences.
1944: Minsk was liberated from Nazi control by Soviet troops during Operation Bagration
1944: The British War Cabinet agrees to examine Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann's request for the formation of a Jewish Brigade to fight in the British Army, with the white and blue Star of David as its standard.
1946: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis met for the first time in Atlantic City. They would become one of the leading comedy teams of their time. The Italian Crooner played straight man to the Jewish clown.
1947: Birthdate of brilliant attorney, Renaissance man and all-around great guy, David Robert Levin- a real Mensh. He is also one heck of a great brother!
1948: Rumors abound in besieged Jerusalem that a new road was being built that would bring supplies to the embattled city.
1949: Birthdate of world traveling computer whiz and pillar of the Cedar Rapids Jewish community, Bill Hurwitz
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that the first reading of the Women's Equal Rights Bill was passed by the Knesset. The Knesset had also passed a bill empowering the government to float loans up to IL5m. from financial institutions to be applied to the defense budget. 128,223 new immigrants entered the country during the first six months of 1951. Since the state was established in 1948, 638,597 immigrants arrived.
1962: The Algerian War for Independence ends with Algeria gaining its independence from France. The end of the war with the Algerians marked a shift in French attitudes and policies in the Middle East. Under De Gaulle’s leadership, the French government sought to develop a power base among the Moslem nations of North Africa and the Near East. This meant a growing policy of hostility towards Israel that would ultimately lead the French government to attempt to block the delivery of patrol boats to Israel later in the decade. The naval craft had already been paid for when the French refused to deliver them so Israeli agents seized them and brought them to Haifa.
1964: President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Jewish political leaders played a major role in passing this piece of landmark legislation. Congressman Cellar, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was the driving force in getting the bill through the House of Representative. Today we take the provisions of this anti-discrimination law for granted. It is difficult to believe how controversial it was forty years ago and what an act of political courage it took to support this law. Although thought of as a law to end racial discrimination, the law banned discrimination based on several criteria including religion.
1979: Thirty-four years after the end of World War II, the West German government voted to continue prosecution of Nazi war criminals by removing the statute of limitations on murder.
1982: Uri Avnery, the Israeli writer and knesset member who has traveled from the Irgun to the leftist peace movement met Yasser Arafat on during the "Battle of Beirut" — said to have been the first time an Israeli met personally with Arafat.
1997: Poet Adrienne Rich made headlines on by refusing to accept the National Medal for the Arts. “Ms Rich informed Jane Alexander, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, that she would not accept the National Medal for the Arts. To accept the award, she felt, would be hypocritical in view of the country's widening socio-economic gap. In her typical hard-hitting style, Rich wrote that, "art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage." Both the national recognition and Rich's principled refusal were emblematic of the place this poet has come to occupy in American culture.”
2001: Mordecai Richler passed away. Born in 1931, Richler was a prolific prize winning author. One of his most famous books was the “Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” which was later made into a movie starring Richard Dreyfus.
2005: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including the recently released paperback editions of “The Missing Peace: The Inside Store of the Fight for Middle East Peace” by Dennis Ross and “Codex” by Lev Grossman
2006: In the following review of “Up, Up and Oy Vey!” by Simcha Weinstein, Louis Parks describes “the obvious parallels” between the origins of Superman and Biblical depiction of Moses.
A loving parent tries to save the life of a child by placing him in a basket—or space capsule—and sending him floating/blasting to safety. Found and adopted into a new family in his new world, Moses/Superman is still guided by the wisdom and counsel of his parent. He lives a double life with a secret identity. Moses eventually leads people from abuse to freedom. Superman rescues people from disasters and crime. Superman's creators, Jewish immigrant sons Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster, invented the superhero in 1938 Cleveland, Ohio. They never declared Superman was Jewish and their ambiguity was probably intentional. Though they didn't give their hero a specific ethnicity or religion, there are hints at his Jewishness. In some of his earliest stories, Superman sometimes foiled the plans of thinly disguised German Nazis, whose persecution of Jews already was infamous. Americans may not have noticed, but apparently the Nazis snapped to the implications, quickly blasting the new comic. Weinstein writes that in 1940, Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels denounced Superman as Jewish. Weinstein also "recounts the Jewish influence on superheroes such as Batman, Captain America, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and X-Men, most of whom were created by Jewish artists."
2007: “Friendship: An Expose” by Joseph Epstein goes on sale to the general public.
2007: Much to the delight of all who know him, David Levin, a mensch in the truest sense of that word, celebrates his sixtieth birthday.
2007: In Jerusalem, The Israeli Ballet, featuring Yevegenia Oberzatsuba and Vladimir Shaklerov, will perform the famous, romantic ballet, "Giselle," in the Sherover Theater at the Jerusalem Theater.
2008: Rosh Chodesh Tammuz (First Day)
2008: Birthday celebration of David Levin, a grand gabbai and, like his Biblical namesake, a sweet singer of song.
2008: A foundation created by Steven Spielberg is giving $1 million to the National Museum of American Jewish History. The money from the Righteous Persons Foundation will go toward a new, five-story museum building being built in Philadelphia. With the donation, officials say the museum's capital campaign has raised $111 million toward its $150 million goal. The new museum is set to open in 2010. Spielberg helped establish the Righteous Persons Foundation in 1994 after directing his Oscar-winning Holocaust film "Schindler's List."The museum was established in 1976 and is dedicated to telling the story of the American Jewish experience. It is constructing the new building in hopes of raising its profile and increasing the number of visitors
2008: Today, Saudi Arabia invited an Israeli rabbi to attend an interfaith conference to be held in Madrid. Rabbi David Rosen, president of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, is the only rabbi who lives in Israel who was invited by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the World Muslim League to the conference that is slated for July 16 to 18. Other rabbis representing Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism have also been invited. Rosen said that the conference was the Saudis' first initiative to reach out to other religions in this way.
2008: During the ceasefire with Hamas a Kassam rocket fired from Gaza struck near a kibbutz in the Sha'ar Hanegev Regional Council. No casualties or damage was reported.
2009: Bill Hurwitz, world traveling computer whiz pillar of the Cedar Rapids Jewish community, and a Zeda twice over celebrates the BIG Six-O.
2009: The family and friends celebrate the another natal day anniversary of David Levin whose accomplishments are so numerous that we would have to start a separate blog just to cover them. יום הולדת שמח
323: Constantine the Great defeated Licinius at the Battle of Adrianople. Constantine ruled the western half of the Roman Empire. Licinius ruled the eastern half. In 313 the two rulers had issued the Edict of Milan which opened the Roman Empire to Christianity. In 320, Licinius reject the edict. These led to a clash of political and religious power that was settled at the Battle of Adrianople. When the war ended, Constantine and Christianity were secure in their respective positions of power and the history of the Jews of Europe would take a turn for the worse.
987: Hugh Capet is crowned King of France, the first of the Capetian dynasty. “The Capetian dynasty lasted for more than 300 years. Capetian rule was weak, especially during the first hundred years. Thus each duchy decided for itself how to treat its Jews. The Church gained enormous influence over local affairs and promoted the idea that the Jews were in league with the Devil - declaring them the antichrist".
1608: Quebec City was founded by French explorer Samuel Champlain. Prior to 1760, when the British took Canada from France, officially there were no Jews living in Quebec or any other part of the French colony. The King of France had decreed that only Roman Catholics could settle in the colony. This declaration was aimed at potential Protestant colonists, but it hit Jews as well. The first known Jew settled in Quebec in 1767.
1844: Birthdate of Dankmar Adler, American architect and engineer. Adler was born in Germany, the son of a Rabbi. His name is first name is a combination of the German word for thanks –‘dank’- and the Hebrew word for bitter – ‘mar’. Adler’s father created the name since Adler’s mother died in childbirth. The Adler family moved to Chicago where young Adler learned his trade as a draftsman. He enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War fighting his way across Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. After the war, Adler designed or helped build a variety of buildings including The Stock Exchange in Chicago and Carnegie Hall in New York. He also built Temples and Synagogues in Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of America’s most famous architects trained in Adler’s offices. Adler passed away in 1900 after having just completed Temple Isaiah in Chicago
1849: The French entered Rome in order to restore Pope Pius IX to power. After his return to power Pius re-instituted the Ghetto for the Jews of Rome 1850. In 1858, he would gain greater fame (or infamy) during the Mortara Affair during which Pius refused to return young Edgardo to his Jewish family.
1863: Third and climactic day of the Battle of Gettysburg. During Picket’s Charge, an attack on the Union center at place called Cemetery Ridge. The Rebels reached what was called High Water Mark. The Union line held. The war would last for almost two years, but the tide had been turned. The “last best hope of man” would survive. The United States, with all of its freedom, would become home to one of the largest and most dynamic Jewish communities in the four thousand year history of the Chosen People.
1866: Prussia defeats Austria at the Battle of Königgratz. The victory seals the victory of the Prussians over the Austrians during Austro-Prussian War which lasted as scant six weeks. This little known battle is one of the most decisive in modern history because of all the major events that flowed from it. The victory removed Austria as a power among Germanic states. This opened the way for German unification under Prussian dominance which lead to the Franco-Prussian War, which led to World War I which led to the Shoah. The defeat of Austria led the Austrians to turn to the rest of the empire and create the Austro-Hungarian Empire which gave empowered the Hungarian nationalist which led to granting of full rights to the Jews of the empire who gave the world everybody from Freud to Herzl and a whole lot more. And this only scratches the surface of the impact of this one brief battle.
1869: In Germany (Prussia), all restrictions against Jews were lifted. After the war of 1866 Prussia increased its territory to include Hanover, Hesse-Kassel Saxony, and other territory that became part of the North German Confederation. Under the initiative of the Liberal party, full rights were extended to Jews including serving in public positions. By April 16, 1871 it became Imperial Law and was extended to the entire empire. Although later reaction revoked most of this freedom, the discrimination never returned to the level existing in the "Middle Ages" - until the rise of Hitler.
1879: In London, a formal announcement was made that the three sons of the recently deceased Baron Lionel de Rothschild will carry on their father’s business activities.
1883: Birthdate of author Franz Kafka. The famous Czech born author gained his real fame after his death. After many false starts Kafka earned a Doctorate of Laws and then took a mind-numbing job with an insurance company. Ill health finally enabled him to work shorter hours, which gave him time to pursue his writings. Three of his best known works are the Trial, The Castle and America. Kafka became famous in spite of himself. He had left word that at the time of his death all of his manuscripts were to be destroyed. Fortunately his friend Max Brod disobeyed him and had the works published. Kafka had planned to immigrate to Palestine before his untimely death in 1924 hastened by the effects of tuberculosis. On being Jewish Kafka wrote, "Not one calm second is granted to the Western Jew. Everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future but also the past…"
1890: Idaho joins the Union becoming the 43rd star on the Star Spangled Banner. Despite a comparatively small Jewish population, Idaho was the first state to elect a Jew as Governor. On his second try for the top spot Moses Alexander was elected in 1914. He served from 1915 until 1919. A German immigrant, Alexander had previously been elected Mayor of Boise. Alexander was not casual about his Jewish identity. His wife was a Jew by choice, having converted when she married Alexander.
1903: Pogrom began in Bialystok.
1904: Theodor Herzl away at the age of 44. One person can make a difference. “If you will it, it is no dream!”
1923: Mayer Dizengoff, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, sails from New York City aboard the Aquitania.
1925: Birthdate of Tony Curtis. Born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, Curtis was some times referred to as "a poor man's Cary Grant." One of his biggest hits came when he played opposite Grant in the film "The Pink Submarine." Other famous roles were in "Some Like It Hot" with costars Jack Lemmon and that famous Jewess, Marilyn Monroe and as the wisecracking New York born orderly in "Dr. Newman, M.D."
1929: At the opening meeting of the Assembly of the Elected, “the national body which elects the National Council of Palestine Jews, a dispute broke out between Dr. Ton, the presiding officer and revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky. The dispute revolved around revisionist claims that several of their delegates were attacked by Labor delegates and was so intense the meeting was adjourned.
1933: In Chicago, the convention of the ZOA comes to a close.
1935: Sir Francis Montefiore, grandnephew of the noted philanthropist, Sir Moses Montefiore, passed away today at the age of 75
1936: German Jew Stefan Lux kills himself in the assembly room of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. The suicide is in protest of Germany's persecution of Jews.
1936: The Palestine Post reported from London that the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Ormsby Gore, told the House of Commons that "there were no provisions in the Covenant or Peace Treaties or the Mandate regarding the withdrawal of the Mandate from the Power entrusted with it." Hebron was fined a collective fine of £2,000 for ambushing an army patrol. Two British soldiers were hurt in this encounter. Ten suspected Jewish communists were rounded up by police in Tel Aviv and interned at the army's Sarafand detention camp. Questioned about a news item which appeared in an Arab newspaper, the management of the Jerusalem YMCA declared that it offered a platform on which young men, irrespective of their race, creed and religion could cooperate and meet in an atmosphere of congeniality and goodwill.
1937: Twenty-nine year old Brooklynite Moe Schultz returned today on the President Roosevelt from Palestine, where he said he had driven a truck for three years between the towns of Haifa and Tel-Aviv, a distance of ninety miles, and had many thrilling escapes from Arab snipers.
1941: At Nowogrodek, the Nazis sought fifty "volunteers" to be members of the Jewish council there. They are taken away and never seen again. Fifty more were shot in the town square.
1941: In Vilna, all the Jews were required to wear identity badges.
1941: One hundred Jews are murdered at Bialystok, Poland.
1941: In the Ukraine, 3500 Jews are killed at Zloczow and hundreds die at Drohobycz.
1941: Fifty Jews in Novogroduk, Belorussia, who volunteer for a German-organized Jewish council, "disappear." Another 50, selected at random, are shot in the town square to the accompaniment of music played by a German band.
1941: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin orders the establishment of partisan units to harass German troops in occupied Soviet territory. Jews would play an active role in these units. There were also units made up exclusively of Jewish partisans.
1943: Birthdate of self-promoting television news personality Geraldo Rivera. Rivera’s father was from Puerto Rico. After moving to New York he married a Jewish woman named Lily Friedman. Contrary to popular urban legend, Rivera’s original name was not Gerry Rivers. And he did not change his name to appeal to Hispanic audiences.
1944: Minsk was liberated from Nazi control by Soviet troops during Operation Bagration
1944: The British War Cabinet agrees to examine Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann's request for the formation of a Jewish Brigade to fight in the British Army, with the white and blue Star of David as its standard.
1946: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis met for the first time in Atlantic City. They would become one of the leading comedy teams of their time. The Italian Crooner played straight man to the Jewish clown.
1947: Birthdate of brilliant attorney, Renaissance man and all-around great guy, David Robert Levin- a real Mensh. He is also one heck of a great brother!
1948: Rumors abound in besieged Jerusalem that a new road was being built that would bring supplies to the embattled city.
1949: Birthdate of world traveling computer whiz and pillar of the Cedar Rapids Jewish community, Bill Hurwitz
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that the first reading of the Women's Equal Rights Bill was passed by the Knesset. The Knesset had also passed a bill empowering the government to float loans up to IL5m. from financial institutions to be applied to the defense budget. 128,223 new immigrants entered the country during the first six months of 1951. Since the state was established in 1948, 638,597 immigrants arrived.
1962: The Algerian War for Independence ends with Algeria gaining its independence from France. The end of the war with the Algerians marked a shift in French attitudes and policies in the Middle East. Under De Gaulle’s leadership, the French government sought to develop a power base among the Moslem nations of North Africa and the Near East. This meant a growing policy of hostility towards Israel that would ultimately lead the French government to attempt to block the delivery of patrol boats to Israel later in the decade. The naval craft had already been paid for when the French refused to deliver them so Israeli agents seized them and brought them to Haifa.
1964: President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Jewish political leaders played a major role in passing this piece of landmark legislation. Congressman Cellar, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was the driving force in getting the bill through the House of Representative. Today we take the provisions of this anti-discrimination law for granted. It is difficult to believe how controversial it was forty years ago and what an act of political courage it took to support this law. Although thought of as a law to end racial discrimination, the law banned discrimination based on several criteria including religion.
1979: Thirty-four years after the end of World War II, the West German government voted to continue prosecution of Nazi war criminals by removing the statute of limitations on murder.
1982: Uri Avnery, the Israeli writer and knesset member who has traveled from the Irgun to the leftist peace movement met Yasser Arafat on during the "Battle of Beirut" — said to have been the first time an Israeli met personally with Arafat.
1997: Poet Adrienne Rich made headlines on by refusing to accept the National Medal for the Arts. “Ms Rich informed Jane Alexander, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, that she would not accept the National Medal for the Arts. To accept the award, she felt, would be hypocritical in view of the country's widening socio-economic gap. In her typical hard-hitting style, Rich wrote that, "art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage." Both the national recognition and Rich's principled refusal were emblematic of the place this poet has come to occupy in American culture.”
2001: Mordecai Richler passed away. Born in 1931, Richler was a prolific prize winning author. One of his most famous books was the “Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” which was later made into a movie starring Richard Dreyfus.
2005: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including the recently released paperback editions of “The Missing Peace: The Inside Store of the Fight for Middle East Peace” by Dennis Ross and “Codex” by Lev Grossman
2006: In the following review of “Up, Up and Oy Vey!” by Simcha Weinstein, Louis Parks describes “the obvious parallels” between the origins of Superman and Biblical depiction of Moses.
A loving parent tries to save the life of a child by placing him in a basket—or space capsule—and sending him floating/blasting to safety. Found and adopted into a new family in his new world, Moses/Superman is still guided by the wisdom and counsel of his parent. He lives a double life with a secret identity. Moses eventually leads people from abuse to freedom. Superman rescues people from disasters and crime. Superman's creators, Jewish immigrant sons Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster, invented the superhero in 1938 Cleveland, Ohio. They never declared Superman was Jewish and their ambiguity was probably intentional. Though they didn't give their hero a specific ethnicity or religion, there are hints at his Jewishness. In some of his earliest stories, Superman sometimes foiled the plans of thinly disguised German Nazis, whose persecution of Jews already was infamous. Americans may not have noticed, but apparently the Nazis snapped to the implications, quickly blasting the new comic. Weinstein writes that in 1940, Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels denounced Superman as Jewish. Weinstein also "recounts the Jewish influence on superheroes such as Batman, Captain America, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and X-Men, most of whom were created by Jewish artists."
2007: “Friendship: An Expose” by Joseph Epstein goes on sale to the general public.
2007: Much to the delight of all who know him, David Levin, a mensch in the truest sense of that word, celebrates his sixtieth birthday.
2007: In Jerusalem, The Israeli Ballet, featuring Yevegenia Oberzatsuba and Vladimir Shaklerov, will perform the famous, romantic ballet, "Giselle," in the Sherover Theater at the Jerusalem Theater.
2008: Rosh Chodesh Tammuz (First Day)
2008: Birthday celebration of David Levin, a grand gabbai and, like his Biblical namesake, a sweet singer of song.
2008: A foundation created by Steven Spielberg is giving $1 million to the National Museum of American Jewish History. The money from the Righteous Persons Foundation will go toward a new, five-story museum building being built in Philadelphia. With the donation, officials say the museum's capital campaign has raised $111 million toward its $150 million goal. The new museum is set to open in 2010. Spielberg helped establish the Righteous Persons Foundation in 1994 after directing his Oscar-winning Holocaust film "Schindler's List."The museum was established in 1976 and is dedicated to telling the story of the American Jewish experience. It is constructing the new building in hopes of raising its profile and increasing the number of visitors
2008: Today, Saudi Arabia invited an Israeli rabbi to attend an interfaith conference to be held in Madrid. Rabbi David Rosen, president of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, is the only rabbi who lives in Israel who was invited by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the World Muslim League to the conference that is slated for July 16 to 18. Other rabbis representing Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism have also been invited. Rosen said that the conference was the Saudis' first initiative to reach out to other religions in this way.
2008: During the ceasefire with Hamas a Kassam rocket fired from Gaza struck near a kibbutz in the Sha'ar Hanegev Regional Council. No casualties or damage was reported.
2009: Bill Hurwitz, world traveling computer whiz pillar of the Cedar Rapids Jewish community, and a Zeda twice over celebrates the BIG Six-O.
2009: The family and friends celebrate the another natal day anniversary of David Levin whose accomplishments are so numerous that we would have to start a separate blog just to cover them. יום הולדת שמח
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
This Day, July 2, In Jewish History
July 2 In Jewish History
1298: Albert I of Habsburg defeated Adolf of Nassau-Weilburg at the The Battle of Göllheim serving to cement the dominant position of the Habsburgs in the Germanic states of central Europe. As is the case with so many Christian monarchs, Albert’s treatment of his Jewish subjects was a mixed bag. In 1298 he 1 endeavored to suppress riots based on the blood libel that were sweeping the Rhineland and imposed a fine on the town of St. Poelten. But in1306, “he punished the Jews in *Korneuburg on a charge of desecration of the Host.”
1389: The Pope issued a bull condemning the attacks on the Jews of Bohemia that had begun on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1389. The mobs ignored the Pope and Emperor Wensceslaus refused to protect his Jewish subjects claiming that they deserved to suffer since they should not have been out of their houses on Easter Sunday.
1490: A Chumash with commentary by the Ramban was published for the first time. The Ramban is Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman also known as Nachmanides. He was a Spanish physician and noted Torah scholar who lived during the 13th century. He is not to be confused with the Rambam, Moses Maimonides who was also born in Spain and who was an even greater Torah scholar. The Ramban was born after the Rambam had already passed away.
1776: The Continental Congress resolved "these United Colonies are & of right ought to be Free & Independent States." This marked the actual declaration of independence by the thirteen colonies. While there were some Jews who were Loyalist, most favored the cause of Independence and supported it with the lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.
1853: The Russian Army invades Turkey, beginning the Crimean War. The British and the French both sided with the Turks, assisting them in the defeat of the Russians. The Paris Treaty of 1858, concluding the war, granted Jews and Christians the right to settle in Palestine, forced upon the Ottoman Turks by the British for their assistance in the war effort. This decision opened the doors for Jewish immigration to Palestine.
1854: Jews living in Los Angeles, having recognized the necessity of organizing in order to provide for religious services, a Jewish cemetery and Jewish welfare needs, met today and formed the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles, the first charitable group to be founded in the city. Samuel K. Labatt was elected president, not only because he had the language facility of a native-born American, but also because he had similar experience in New Orleans. The following year, the Hebrew Benevolent society established a Jewish cemetery in Chavez Ravine. This society still exists, now over 145 years old under the name of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles having been active longer than any other such group in Southern California. As the first president, Samuel K. Labatt was responsible for local efforts in defending the fair name of Jewry against the 1855 anti-Semitic attack by William Stow in the California State Assembly.
1871: The Anglo-Jewish Association was established in London based on the principles of the French Alliance Israelite. It was soon imitated in Germany in the form of the Lifaverein der Dutchen Juden.
1896: Theodor Herzl began a trip to England that would last until July 20.
1901: Jacob Saphirstein begins printing The Jewish Morning Journal the first Yiddish daily morning newspaper established in New York. “Its staff of writers includes Jacob Magidoff (city editor), Ḥayyim Malitz, A. M. Sharkansky, M. Seifert, I. Friedman, and Peter Wiernik. While professedly Orthodox and Zionistic, it is the most secular of the Yiddish papers in America, and is an ardent advocate of the Americanization of the Russian immigrants who form the bulk of its readers.”
1906: Delegates at today’s session of the Federation of American Zionist meeting responded enthusiastically to a letter from Max Nordau that contained “a strong appeal for support of the Jewish institutions in Palestine.”
1909: At the end of a successful seven week strike, “triumphant bakers marched though the Lower East of Manhattan carrying a loaf of bread five wide and fifteen feet long” which was emblematic of their hard won victory.
1918: Pitcher Ed Corey made his major league debut with the Chicago White Sox.
1923: “The first coupons to fall due on the bonds” issued by the municipality of Tel Aviv “are paid at the offices of the Guaranty Trust Company.” Although the bonds were issued in pounds, they will be redeemed in dollars for the convenience of the American bondholders. Meyer Dizengoff, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, is present for the redemption ceremony.
1927: The Rothschild Hospital in Jerusalem is partially destroyed as an earthquake hits Palestine.
1931: Tempers flared at today’s meeting of the World Zionist Congress as New Yorker Berl Locker, leader of the Paole Tzion likened the Revisionists led by Valdmir Jabotinsky to the “Hitlerites.” Locker relented and apologized for his remarks. Jabotinsky responded with an impassioned speech demanding a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan and assailing the leadership of Chaim Weizmann. Ben Gurion responded in defense of Weizmann and his efforts to negotiate with the British. He ridiculed the Revisionists as “easy Zionist” who ignored the reality of the situation in Palestine. American Zionist leaders expressed their support for Weizmann. The conflict between the two wings of the Zionist movement is driven by the restrictions of the Passfield White Paper and the obvious fact that the British government is reneging on the Balfour Declaration.
1933: In Chicago, Mayor Kelly addresses the ZOA at the formal opening of its convention.
1933: Chaim Weismann is the guest of honor at Jewish Day at A Century of Progress Exposition aka, The Chicago World’s Fair.
1935: Birthdate of pianist and educator Gilbert Kalish. Kalish has been the pianist for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players since 1969. He is the Leading Professor and Head of Performance Activities at SUNY, Stony Brook. He was also on the faculty at Tangelwood Music Center for 30 years.
1936: The Palestine Post reported that Yitzhak Glazer, a local watchman, was shot dead by Arab terrorists in Hadera. Another guard, Jacob Bahar, was severely injured by Arab fire at Motza. Arab terrorists, interned at the detention camp at Sarafand, went on a hunger strike, as a protest against the camp's conditions. Arab "tree-killers" cut down about 40 old, fruit-bearing olive trees in Zichron Ya'acov. Dr. Paul Zubek from Vienna was to be deported after police found a large quantity of Nazi literature in his flat in Tel Aviv.
1941: Nazi-instigated pogrom claimed many Jewish lives in Lvov.
1941 (7th of Tammuz, 5701): A German cavalry unit on patrol in Lubieszow, Volhynia, Ukraine, murders Jewish resisters.
1942 (17th of Tammuz, 5702): The Jewish community from Ropczyce, Poland, is murdered at the Belzec death camp.
1942: The New York Times reports the "slaughter of 700,000 Jews" in German-occupied Poland.
1944: As the Red Army closed in on the Lithuanian city of Vilna, the Germans seized 1800 Jews from their work in the factories and took them to Ponar where they were shot.
1944: Responding to Allied threats that he would be held personally responsible for war crimes, Regent Miklos Horthy order “a halt to all further deporations of Jews and Eichwas was advised to return to Germany.”
1946: Birthdate of Ron Silver, Tony-award winning actor and poltical activist.
1947: Birthdate of Larry David. This actor, writer and producer is best known for his work on Seinfeld" and his own HBO show.
1948: Birthdate of German born (his parents were really Poles) Canadian cinema actor Saul Rubinek.
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that China accepted the US bid for peace in Korea. The first issue of Omer, the vowelized daily newspaper for new immigrants in simple Hebrew, appeared on newsstands. It included a glossary in Spanish, French, Arabic and Yiddish. A young man was killed by an Arab Legion sniper in the Musrara quarter of Jerusalem.
1961: American author Ernest Hemingway took his own life. Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, featured a Jewish character, Robert Cohn. Cohn was a friend of the novel’s protagonist, Jake Barnes. Cohn is not only insecure, he is an insecure Jew. While attending Princeton, his sense of insecurity is heightened by his brushes with anti-Semitism. In the best of tradition of Hemingway, Cohn compensates for his Jewishness and insecurity by becoming a boxer. The Jewish jock, especially the Jew as a boxer may have resonated well with readers of the time, since Jews held a number of boxing titles during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Although Hemingway was not Jewish, his books were featured at Nazi book burnings where the works of Einstein, Freud, et al were consumed by the flames.
1969: As hostilities heated up along the Suez, Israeli paratroops conducted their second deep penetration of Egyptian territory in less than a week, killing thirteen, taking 3 prisoners and gathering additional intelligence for the IDF.
1976: The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel began proceedings, through the French government, for the release of 98 Israelis held by hijackers in Entebbe, Uganda. The hijackers extended their deadline for three days and released 101 hostages. The remaining hostages included 98 Israelis and other Jews of dual nationality, as well as a crew of 12.
1977: Russian born writer Vladimir Nabokov passed away. Nabokov was not Jewish but his wife’s family was. More importantly, his father had a champion of Jewish rights in the days of Czarist Russia. Nabokov was living in France in 1940. Because of these aforementioned “Jewish connections” a Jewish welfare organization helped get him out of the country when the Nazis marched into Paris.
1984: Small arms fire directed at an Israeli car in Jerusalem wounded several children.
2000: The New York Times features reviews books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero” by Stanley Weintraub and “The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America” by Jeffrey Rosen.
2001: Doctors at Jewish Hospital in Louisville implanted the first AbioCor heart replacement in a seven hour long operation. Unlike earlier artificial hearts such as the Jarvik-7 the AbioCor has no wires or tubes that stick out of the chest and connect to a big compressor. The battery-powered, plastic-and-titanium device is the size of a softball.
2005: Cinema screenwriter Ernest Lehman passed away. Born in 1915 Lehman was nominated for six Oscars. He was responsible for the scripts for such hits as “The Sweet Smell of Success,” “The Sound of Music,” and “North by Northwest.” He gained additional fame as the director of “Portnoy’s Complaint.”
2006. Rabbis Stephanie Alexander and Aaron Sherman celebrate their wedding anniversary
2006: Rabbi Stephanie Alexander celebrates her birthday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
2006: West Magazine published “How Hollywood Really Operates” by Leonard Mlodinow.
2006: Israel continued its military efforts to gain the release of abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit. An Israel Air Force attack helicopter launched a missile before dawn striking the office of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza City. Also before dawn, the IAF struck the headquarters of a Palestinian Authority security organization founded by Hamas in Gaza, killing one of the group's operatives and injuring another, Israel Radio reported.
2007: The Verbatim section of Time Magazine quotes the words of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as he withdraws from the Republican Party. “Real results are more important than partisan battles, [and] good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology.” According to some, Bloomberg’s switch to Independent presages a run for the Presidency in 2008 which would make him the first viable Jewish candidate to ever seek the top job in America.
2007: In Jerusalem, "Life in Film," a series focusing on the Jewish communities around the world as captured in film, features "Judaism in Iran - Past and Present." The event includes a meeting with Orly Rachmian from Ben Gurion University and Machon Ben-Zvi and selections from a documentary about the lives of Jews in Iran.
2007: President George Bush commuted the sentence of convicted government official “Scooter” Libby. Mr. Libby was an aide to Vice President Cheney and one of the Jews serving in the Bush administration.
2007: Famed soprano Beverly Sills passed away at the age of 78.
2007: Hy Zaret, one of the last of the Tin Pan Alley lyricists, whose most indelible work was the oft-recorded 1955 hit “Unchained Melody” but whose oeuvre ranged from jingles to songs about science to ballads of love and war passed away at the age of 99.
2008: “Leisure Time in Israel” featuring the works of Israeli photographer Orit Siman-Tov opens at the JCC in Manhattan.
2008(29th of Sivan, 5768): Three Israelis were killed and dozens more wounded when a Palestinian construction worker driving a bulldozer plowed deliberately into a crowded bus and a string of cars in downtown Jerusalem. Jerusalem residents Bat Sheva Unterman, 33, Elizabeth Goren-Friedman, 54, and Jean Raloy, were named as the fatalities in the attack. Unterman was a resident of Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood, and worked as a nanny in a religious kindergarten in the city's Har Homa quarter. She was killed when the car she was driving was crushed by the oncoming bulldozer. Unterman's 6-month-old daughter, Efrat, was evacuated from the car just before the vehicle was hit.Her husband, Ido, was notified only hours after the attack that his wife had been killed.Unterman was the daughter of Rifka and James Lubenstein, immigrants from Holland. Her husband, Ido, is the grandson of Rabbi Isser Yehuda Unterman, who served as chief rabbi of Liverpool and of Tel Aviv, and also as chief rabbi of Israel from 1964-1973.The Unterman couple had tried for years to have children, but managed only with the birth of Efrat last year. Bat-Sheva had extended her maternity leave by a few months, returning to work last week with her daughter to celebrate the end of the year party. Unterman's friend, Meira Schwartz, described her as a person filled with faith, who never gave up her dream of having children, even after having to go through countless procedures. "Until Efrat was born, the children in the kindergarten were like her own, and she was a nanny of the highest excellence, with exemplary patience for each and ever child," said Schwartz. Unterman will be laid to rest at 11:30 P.M. in the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem. Elizabeth Goren-Friedman, originally from Austria, was a resident of Katamon who worked as a teacher in a school for the blind. She was laid to rest at 10:30 P.M. in Givat Shaul. Goren-Friedman was divorced and the mother of three children: Yael, 16, Issachar, 19, and Zvi, 23. Both of her sons were students at the Horev hesder yeshiva in Jerusalem. Her friends described her as a "wonderful person," who volunteered regularly at the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. Rachel Sakrovish, who worked with Goren-Friedman, said her colleague was an excellent teachers. "It's hard to speak about her in the last tense. Lili was a wonderful person. There was not a student that she did not help progress on a personal, educational, and rehabilitative level. We knew that if a student was retreated or having difficulties, Luly was the teacher who would do the fundamental work to help him advance.""When I think of her, I remember the phrase, 'a woman of valor, who can find,'" she said. Jean Raloy, an air-conditioner technician who lived in the Gilo neighborhood, was the third person killed in the terrorist's murder spree. His nephew said "the first thing with Jean was his family." Raloy, who was born in Iran, was married to Hanna and the father of two daughters and a son, and was to become a grandfather in about a month.
2008: The Jerusalem Post reported that a London university made history this week when it appointed the country's first professor of Israeli studies. The University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) named Dr. Colin Shindler, reader in Israeli and Modern Jewish Studies and chair of the Center for Jewish Studies, as the first professor of Israeli studies in the UK. "This is a real advance for Israeli Studies in this country," Shindler said. "SOAS is the natural and appropriate institution for this chair. This is a great honor for me personally." SOAS is one of the UK's top schools and notorious for having an anti-Israel atmosphere on campus. The university's Palestinian Society annually hosts controversial events such as "Israel Apartheid Week" and this year's two-day conference on the "one-state" solution. Last year, posters on campus advertising the launch of a book written by Shindler, entitled What Do Zionists Believe?, were daubed with swastikas. Shindler joined the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East at SOAS in 1998. He convenes both the BA and MA programs in Hebrew and Israeli studies, and lectures on an array of subjects such as Zionist ideology, and "Israel and the Arab World and the Palestinians." His professorship comes as a direct result of his efforts and commitment to developing the Israeli Studies Department at SOAS, the university said. Each year, his classes are filled to capacity with students from an array of backgrounds and ethnic origins. A number of his students now provide young, dynamic leadership for several Jewish communal organizations such as the Zionist Federation, BICOM, World Jewish Relief and the Israeli Embassy. "This is a welcomed and well-deserved appointment for Dr. Shindler, who is very popular on campus with a wide range of students," said Gavin Gross, a former Middle Eastern studies MA student and currently director of public affairs at the Zionist Federation. "He covers Israeli and Zionist history in a very intellectual, thoughtful and level-headed manner, which is sadly not always the case with other academics and certainly not in the SOAS Student Union. I enjoyed my academic work there and would encourage others to consider studying Israel and the Middle East at SOAS." Shindler is the author of seven books and an authority on the Revisionist Zionist movement and the origins and emergence of the Israeli Right. Cambridge University Press recently published his book The History of Modern Israel to mark Israel's 60th anniversary. Active in Jewish affairs since the 1960s, Shindler was one of the originators of the campaign for Soviet Jewry in the UK, and in the 1970s served as political secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students. In 1982, he helped found the British Friends of Peace Now, of which he continues to be a patron. He served as editor of Jewish Quarterly and Judaism Today and has written for an array of think tanks, journals and publications, including The Jerusalem Post. Shindler remains at the forefront of higher education issues related to Israel, speaking out against the proposed boycott of Israeli academia and facilitating Israeli and Palestinian students in the Olive Tree program at London's City University.
2009: Today the fourth annual week devoted to the cooperation of the IDF and the Israel Antiquities Authority in preserving the country's environment and antiquities comes to an end with this last day focusing primarily on current archeological issues.
2009: The Randi & Bruce Pergament Jewish Film Festival features a screening of “Goyband,” a campy comedy that’s a cross between “Dirty Dancing” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” in which a fading teen idol is booked to perform at a kosher Catskills hotel-casino and a romance ensues between the hotel owner’s already engaged daughter and the boy band icon.
1298: Albert I of Habsburg defeated Adolf of Nassau-Weilburg at the The Battle of Göllheim serving to cement the dominant position of the Habsburgs in the Germanic states of central Europe. As is the case with so many Christian monarchs, Albert’s treatment of his Jewish subjects was a mixed bag. In 1298 he 1 endeavored to suppress riots based on the blood libel that were sweeping the Rhineland and imposed a fine on the town of St. Poelten. But in1306, “he punished the Jews in *Korneuburg on a charge of desecration of the Host.”
1389: The Pope issued a bull condemning the attacks on the Jews of Bohemia that had begun on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1389. The mobs ignored the Pope and Emperor Wensceslaus refused to protect his Jewish subjects claiming that they deserved to suffer since they should not have been out of their houses on Easter Sunday.
1490: A Chumash with commentary by the Ramban was published for the first time. The Ramban is Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman also known as Nachmanides. He was a Spanish physician and noted Torah scholar who lived during the 13th century. He is not to be confused with the Rambam, Moses Maimonides who was also born in Spain and who was an even greater Torah scholar. The Ramban was born after the Rambam had already passed away.
1776: The Continental Congress resolved "these United Colonies are & of right ought to be Free & Independent States." This marked the actual declaration of independence by the thirteen colonies. While there were some Jews who were Loyalist, most favored the cause of Independence and supported it with the lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.
1853: The Russian Army invades Turkey, beginning the Crimean War. The British and the French both sided with the Turks, assisting them in the defeat of the Russians. The Paris Treaty of 1858, concluding the war, granted Jews and Christians the right to settle in Palestine, forced upon the Ottoman Turks by the British for their assistance in the war effort. This decision opened the doors for Jewish immigration to Palestine.
1854: Jews living in Los Angeles, having recognized the necessity of organizing in order to provide for religious services, a Jewish cemetery and Jewish welfare needs, met today and formed the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles, the first charitable group to be founded in the city. Samuel K. Labatt was elected president, not only because he had the language facility of a native-born American, but also because he had similar experience in New Orleans. The following year, the Hebrew Benevolent society established a Jewish cemetery in Chavez Ravine. This society still exists, now over 145 years old under the name of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles having been active longer than any other such group in Southern California. As the first president, Samuel K. Labatt was responsible for local efforts in defending the fair name of Jewry against the 1855 anti-Semitic attack by William Stow in the California State Assembly.
1871: The Anglo-Jewish Association was established in London based on the principles of the French Alliance Israelite. It was soon imitated in Germany in the form of the Lifaverein der Dutchen Juden.
1896: Theodor Herzl began a trip to England that would last until July 20.
1901: Jacob Saphirstein begins printing The Jewish Morning Journal the first Yiddish daily morning newspaper established in New York. “Its staff of writers includes Jacob Magidoff (city editor), Ḥayyim Malitz, A. M. Sharkansky, M. Seifert, I. Friedman, and Peter Wiernik. While professedly Orthodox and Zionistic, it is the most secular of the Yiddish papers in America, and is an ardent advocate of the Americanization of the Russian immigrants who form the bulk of its readers.”
1906: Delegates at today’s session of the Federation of American Zionist meeting responded enthusiastically to a letter from Max Nordau that contained “a strong appeal for support of the Jewish institutions in Palestine.”
1909: At the end of a successful seven week strike, “triumphant bakers marched though the Lower East of Manhattan carrying a loaf of bread five wide and fifteen feet long” which was emblematic of their hard won victory.
1918: Pitcher Ed Corey made his major league debut with the Chicago White Sox.
1923: “The first coupons to fall due on the bonds” issued by the municipality of Tel Aviv “are paid at the offices of the Guaranty Trust Company.” Although the bonds were issued in pounds, they will be redeemed in dollars for the convenience of the American bondholders. Meyer Dizengoff, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, is present for the redemption ceremony.
1927: The Rothschild Hospital in Jerusalem is partially destroyed as an earthquake hits Palestine.
1931: Tempers flared at today’s meeting of the World Zionist Congress as New Yorker Berl Locker, leader of the Paole Tzion likened the Revisionists led by Valdmir Jabotinsky to the “Hitlerites.” Locker relented and apologized for his remarks. Jabotinsky responded with an impassioned speech demanding a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan and assailing the leadership of Chaim Weizmann. Ben Gurion responded in defense of Weizmann and his efforts to negotiate with the British. He ridiculed the Revisionists as “easy Zionist” who ignored the reality of the situation in Palestine. American Zionist leaders expressed their support for Weizmann. The conflict between the two wings of the Zionist movement is driven by the restrictions of the Passfield White Paper and the obvious fact that the British government is reneging on the Balfour Declaration.
1933: In Chicago, Mayor Kelly addresses the ZOA at the formal opening of its convention.
1933: Chaim Weismann is the guest of honor at Jewish Day at A Century of Progress Exposition aka, The Chicago World’s Fair.
1935: Birthdate of pianist and educator Gilbert Kalish. Kalish has been the pianist for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players since 1969. He is the Leading Professor and Head of Performance Activities at SUNY, Stony Brook. He was also on the faculty at Tangelwood Music Center for 30 years.
1936: The Palestine Post reported that Yitzhak Glazer, a local watchman, was shot dead by Arab terrorists in Hadera. Another guard, Jacob Bahar, was severely injured by Arab fire at Motza. Arab terrorists, interned at the detention camp at Sarafand, went on a hunger strike, as a protest against the camp's conditions. Arab "tree-killers" cut down about 40 old, fruit-bearing olive trees in Zichron Ya'acov. Dr. Paul Zubek from Vienna was to be deported after police found a large quantity of Nazi literature in his flat in Tel Aviv.
1941: Nazi-instigated pogrom claimed many Jewish lives in Lvov.
1941 (7th of Tammuz, 5701): A German cavalry unit on patrol in Lubieszow, Volhynia, Ukraine, murders Jewish resisters.
1942 (17th of Tammuz, 5702): The Jewish community from Ropczyce, Poland, is murdered at the Belzec death camp.
1942: The New York Times reports the "slaughter of 700,000 Jews" in German-occupied Poland.
1944: As the Red Army closed in on the Lithuanian city of Vilna, the Germans seized 1800 Jews from their work in the factories and took them to Ponar where they were shot.
1944: Responding to Allied threats that he would be held personally responsible for war crimes, Regent Miklos Horthy order “a halt to all further deporations of Jews and Eichwas was advised to return to Germany.”
1946: Birthdate of Ron Silver, Tony-award winning actor and poltical activist.
1947: Birthdate of Larry David. This actor, writer and producer is best known for his work on Seinfeld" and his own HBO show.
1948: Birthdate of German born (his parents were really Poles) Canadian cinema actor Saul Rubinek.
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that China accepted the US bid for peace in Korea. The first issue of Omer, the vowelized daily newspaper for new immigrants in simple Hebrew, appeared on newsstands. It included a glossary in Spanish, French, Arabic and Yiddish. A young man was killed by an Arab Legion sniper in the Musrara quarter of Jerusalem.
1961: American author Ernest Hemingway took his own life. Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, featured a Jewish character, Robert Cohn. Cohn was a friend of the novel’s protagonist, Jake Barnes. Cohn is not only insecure, he is an insecure Jew. While attending Princeton, his sense of insecurity is heightened by his brushes with anti-Semitism. In the best of tradition of Hemingway, Cohn compensates for his Jewishness and insecurity by becoming a boxer. The Jewish jock, especially the Jew as a boxer may have resonated well with readers of the time, since Jews held a number of boxing titles during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Although Hemingway was not Jewish, his books were featured at Nazi book burnings where the works of Einstein, Freud, et al were consumed by the flames.
1969: As hostilities heated up along the Suez, Israeli paratroops conducted their second deep penetration of Egyptian territory in less than a week, killing thirteen, taking 3 prisoners and gathering additional intelligence for the IDF.
1976: The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel began proceedings, through the French government, for the release of 98 Israelis held by hijackers in Entebbe, Uganda. The hijackers extended their deadline for three days and released 101 hostages. The remaining hostages included 98 Israelis and other Jews of dual nationality, as well as a crew of 12.
1977: Russian born writer Vladimir Nabokov passed away. Nabokov was not Jewish but his wife’s family was. More importantly, his father had a champion of Jewish rights in the days of Czarist Russia. Nabokov was living in France in 1940. Because of these aforementioned “Jewish connections” a Jewish welfare organization helped get him out of the country when the Nazis marched into Paris.
1984: Small arms fire directed at an Israeli car in Jerusalem wounded several children.
2000: The New York Times features reviews books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero” by Stanley Weintraub and “The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America” by Jeffrey Rosen.
2001: Doctors at Jewish Hospital in Louisville implanted the first AbioCor heart replacement in a seven hour long operation. Unlike earlier artificial hearts such as the Jarvik-7 the AbioCor has no wires or tubes that stick out of the chest and connect to a big compressor. The battery-powered, plastic-and-titanium device is the size of a softball.
2005: Cinema screenwriter Ernest Lehman passed away. Born in 1915 Lehman was nominated for six Oscars. He was responsible for the scripts for such hits as “The Sweet Smell of Success,” “The Sound of Music,” and “North by Northwest.” He gained additional fame as the director of “Portnoy’s Complaint.”
2006. Rabbis Stephanie Alexander and Aaron Sherman celebrate their wedding anniversary
2006: Rabbi Stephanie Alexander celebrates her birthday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
2006: West Magazine published “How Hollywood Really Operates” by Leonard Mlodinow.
2006: Israel continued its military efforts to gain the release of abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit. An Israel Air Force attack helicopter launched a missile before dawn striking the office of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza City. Also before dawn, the IAF struck the headquarters of a Palestinian Authority security organization founded by Hamas in Gaza, killing one of the group's operatives and injuring another, Israel Radio reported.
2007: The Verbatim section of Time Magazine quotes the words of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as he withdraws from the Republican Party. “Real results are more important than partisan battles, [and] good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology.” According to some, Bloomberg’s switch to Independent presages a run for the Presidency in 2008 which would make him the first viable Jewish candidate to ever seek the top job in America.
2007: In Jerusalem, "Life in Film," a series focusing on the Jewish communities around the world as captured in film, features "Judaism in Iran - Past and Present." The event includes a meeting with Orly Rachmian from Ben Gurion University and Machon Ben-Zvi and selections from a documentary about the lives of Jews in Iran.
2007: President George Bush commuted the sentence of convicted government official “Scooter” Libby. Mr. Libby was an aide to Vice President Cheney and one of the Jews serving in the Bush administration.
2007: Famed soprano Beverly Sills passed away at the age of 78.
2007: Hy Zaret, one of the last of the Tin Pan Alley lyricists, whose most indelible work was the oft-recorded 1955 hit “Unchained Melody” but whose oeuvre ranged from jingles to songs about science to ballads of love and war passed away at the age of 99.
2008: “Leisure Time in Israel” featuring the works of Israeli photographer Orit Siman-Tov opens at the JCC in Manhattan.
2008(29th of Sivan, 5768): Three Israelis were killed and dozens more wounded when a Palestinian construction worker driving a bulldozer plowed deliberately into a crowded bus and a string of cars in downtown Jerusalem. Jerusalem residents Bat Sheva Unterman, 33, Elizabeth Goren-Friedman, 54, and Jean Raloy, were named as the fatalities in the attack. Unterman was a resident of Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood, and worked as a nanny in a religious kindergarten in the city's Har Homa quarter. She was killed when the car she was driving was crushed by the oncoming bulldozer. Unterman's 6-month-old daughter, Efrat, was evacuated from the car just before the vehicle was hit.Her husband, Ido, was notified only hours after the attack that his wife had been killed.Unterman was the daughter of Rifka and James Lubenstein, immigrants from Holland. Her husband, Ido, is the grandson of Rabbi Isser Yehuda Unterman, who served as chief rabbi of Liverpool and of Tel Aviv, and also as chief rabbi of Israel from 1964-1973.The Unterman couple had tried for years to have children, but managed only with the birth of Efrat last year. Bat-Sheva had extended her maternity leave by a few months, returning to work last week with her daughter to celebrate the end of the year party. Unterman's friend, Meira Schwartz, described her as a person filled with faith, who never gave up her dream of having children, even after having to go through countless procedures. "Until Efrat was born, the children in the kindergarten were like her own, and she was a nanny of the highest excellence, with exemplary patience for each and ever child," said Schwartz. Unterman will be laid to rest at 11:30 P.M. in the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem. Elizabeth Goren-Friedman, originally from Austria, was a resident of Katamon who worked as a teacher in a school for the blind. She was laid to rest at 10:30 P.M. in Givat Shaul. Goren-Friedman was divorced and the mother of three children: Yael, 16, Issachar, 19, and Zvi, 23. Both of her sons were students at the Horev hesder yeshiva in Jerusalem. Her friends described her as a "wonderful person," who volunteered regularly at the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. Rachel Sakrovish, who worked with Goren-Friedman, said her colleague was an excellent teachers. "It's hard to speak about her in the last tense. Lili was a wonderful person. There was not a student that she did not help progress on a personal, educational, and rehabilitative level. We knew that if a student was retreated or having difficulties, Luly was the teacher who would do the fundamental work to help him advance.""When I think of her, I remember the phrase, 'a woman of valor, who can find,'" she said. Jean Raloy, an air-conditioner technician who lived in the Gilo neighborhood, was the third person killed in the terrorist's murder spree. His nephew said "the first thing with Jean was his family." Raloy, who was born in Iran, was married to Hanna and the father of two daughters and a son, and was to become a grandfather in about a month.
2008: The Jerusalem Post reported that a London university made history this week when it appointed the country's first professor of Israeli studies. The University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) named Dr. Colin Shindler, reader in Israeli and Modern Jewish Studies and chair of the Center for Jewish Studies, as the first professor of Israeli studies in the UK. "This is a real advance for Israeli Studies in this country," Shindler said. "SOAS is the natural and appropriate institution for this chair. This is a great honor for me personally." SOAS is one of the UK's top schools and notorious for having an anti-Israel atmosphere on campus. The university's Palestinian Society annually hosts controversial events such as "Israel Apartheid Week" and this year's two-day conference on the "one-state" solution. Last year, posters on campus advertising the launch of a book written by Shindler, entitled What Do Zionists Believe?, were daubed with swastikas. Shindler joined the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East at SOAS in 1998. He convenes both the BA and MA programs in Hebrew and Israeli studies, and lectures on an array of subjects such as Zionist ideology, and "Israel and the Arab World and the Palestinians." His professorship comes as a direct result of his efforts and commitment to developing the Israeli Studies Department at SOAS, the university said. Each year, his classes are filled to capacity with students from an array of backgrounds and ethnic origins. A number of his students now provide young, dynamic leadership for several Jewish communal organizations such as the Zionist Federation, BICOM, World Jewish Relief and the Israeli Embassy. "This is a welcomed and well-deserved appointment for Dr. Shindler, who is very popular on campus with a wide range of students," said Gavin Gross, a former Middle Eastern studies MA student and currently director of public affairs at the Zionist Federation. "He covers Israeli and Zionist history in a very intellectual, thoughtful and level-headed manner, which is sadly not always the case with other academics and certainly not in the SOAS Student Union. I enjoyed my academic work there and would encourage others to consider studying Israel and the Middle East at SOAS." Shindler is the author of seven books and an authority on the Revisionist Zionist movement and the origins and emergence of the Israeli Right. Cambridge University Press recently published his book The History of Modern Israel to mark Israel's 60th anniversary. Active in Jewish affairs since the 1960s, Shindler was one of the originators of the campaign for Soviet Jewry in the UK, and in the 1970s served as political secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students. In 1982, he helped found the British Friends of Peace Now, of which he continues to be a patron. He served as editor of Jewish Quarterly and Judaism Today and has written for an array of think tanks, journals and publications, including The Jerusalem Post. Shindler remains at the forefront of higher education issues related to Israel, speaking out against the proposed boycott of Israeli academia and facilitating Israeli and Palestinian students in the Olive Tree program at London's City University.
2009: Today the fourth annual week devoted to the cooperation of the IDF and the Israel Antiquities Authority in preserving the country's environment and antiquities comes to an end with this last day focusing primarily on current archeological issues.
2009: The Randi & Bruce Pergament Jewish Film Festival features a screening of “Goyband,” a campy comedy that’s a cross between “Dirty Dancing” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” in which a fading teen idol is booked to perform at a kosher Catskills hotel-casino and a romance ensues between the hotel owner’s already engaged daughter and the boy band icon.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
This Day, July 1, In Jewish History
July 1 In Jewish History
70 C.E.: Titus set up battering rams to assault the walls of Jerusalem.
1388: Jews of Lithuania received a Charter of Privilege.
1569: The Union of Lublin joins The Kingdom of Poland and the Great Duchy of Lithuania into a united country called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Republic of Both Nations. This had to be an improvement in the situation for the Jews of Lithuania who were governed by statutes that read in part, "The Jews shall not wear costly clothing, nor gold chains, nor shall their wives wear gold or silver ornaments. The Jews shall not have silver mountings on their sabers and daggers; they shall be distinguished by characteristic clothes; they shall wear yellow caps, and their wives kerchiefs of yellow linen, in order that all may be enabled to distinguish Jews from Christians." During the 15th and 16th centuries the Jews of Poland enjoyed an increasing amount of political autonomy and economic well being which would come to a crashing end with the Ukrainian uprisings in the 17th centuries.
1651: Poland was victorious over the Cossacks. The Jews were allowed to return to their lands.
1776: First Jew lost his life in the American Revolution.
1798: In Switzerland, special taxes on the Jews were finally abolished.
1862: Russian Jews were granted permission to print Jewish books
1863: First day of the Battle of Gettysburg. For more information about Jews in the Civil War see http://www.jewish-history.com/civilwar.htm.
1867: With the passage of the British North America Act, Great Britain officially recognizes the Dominion of Canada as an independent country. Jews had been living in Canada since the British took it from France in the 17th century. There were enough Jews living in Montreal to allow for the creation of a synagogue called Shearith Israel. While most members of the small Jewish community lived in various towns in the eastern part of the country enough Jews arrived in British Columbia during the Gold Rush that a synagogue was constructed in Victoria in 1862. At the time that Britain recognized the independence of Canada there were about 1,000 Jews living in “our neighbor to the North.” This number would explode shortly thereafter with the beginning of the immigration of Russian Jews.
1873: Prince Edward Island joins the Canadian Confederation. Apparently, Jews did not start settling in Prince Edward Island until the first decade of the 20th century with the arrival of Louis, Israel and Abie Block. The three brothers were from Riga and may have been the Jews who were described in 1908 newspaper article as having celebrated Passover in this part of Canada.
1878: At the insistence of Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck the Congress of Berlin incorporated into the Treaty of Berlin an article intended to provide the Jews of Romania with the opportunity for full citizenship. Unfortunately, the Romanians evaded the article and only a hand full of Jews would gain citizenship.
1880: (12th of Tammuz): Birthdate of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok who would become the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe would overcome a terrifying imprisonment at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen in the 1920’s. Later, he would escape the clutches of the Nazis and settle in Brooklyn where he revived the cause of Chabad-Lubavitch. The Rebbe would launch, what would become under his son-in-law who was the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, one of history’s most successful Jewish outreach programs.
1898: In the Spanish-American War Teddy Roosevelt & his Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill in Cuba. The Rough Riders was a cavalry unit recruited by Roosevelt that drew on every strata of American life from Western cowboys to Yankee Bluebloods. Several Jews served with the united including Jacob Wilbusky, the first Roughrider killed in action. The Roughriders were forced to leave their horses back the United States so the famous charge was made on foot.
1899: The Conference of the English Zionist Federation comes to an end.
1900: Herzl turns to Prime Minister Koerber and asks him to use his influence with the Sultan to permit the Rumanian Jews to immigrate into Turkey and to receive him, in order to discuss the question of colonization and settlement.
1902: Birthdate of Oscar winning director Billy Wyler. Wyler directed many classics including the World War II tear-jerker Mrs. Miniver. Ironically, his greatest hit was The Best Years of Our Lives, a film that described the return of four veterans to civilian life after World War II. Once again, the Jews played a major role in crafting the cultural myths of Middle American Culture.
1907: Birthdate of famed sportscaster Bill Stern.
1907: The SS Cassel entered the port of Galveston, Texas with 87 Russian Jews aboard, heralding the start of the Galveston Movement - an organized attempt to bring Jews to less populated parts of the US.
1908: Birthdate of Estee Lauder. Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. She married Joseph Lauter who changed the family named to Lauder in the late 1930’s. Mrs. Lauder was CEO of Estee Lauder’s Cosmetics. . She was one of several Jewish women who found fame and fortune in the cosmetics business. She was the only woman on Time magazine's 1998 list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the 20th century. She passed away in 2004 at the age of 97.
1920: Sir Herbert Samuel, a British statesman was appointed High Commissioner of Eretz-Israel. His first official act was to grant amnesty to political prisoners including Jabotinsky. He governed the British Mandate for five years. Sir Herbert governed as a British official, not as a Jew and there were clashes between him and some Zionist leaders.
1921: Dr. Thomas G. Allen, Secretary of the Oriental Institute announced today that the thanks to a $60,000 grant by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. the University of Chicago will excavate the site of Armageddon or Megiddo.
1923: Fast of the 17th of Tammuz
1927: (12th of Tammuz): Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok is liberated from his death sentence and imprisonment in the Soviet Union. With the outbreak of World War II, the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe would make his way to New York where he would establish the headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch in Crown Heights. From there, he would launch what would become a highly successful world-wide outreach program designed to educate Jews and heighten their awareness of their heritage.
1930: At the morning session of the International Wailing Wall Commission, Rabbi Ben Zion Meyer Uziel, Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, described Jewish prayer rituals conducted at the Wall declaring that the High Commissioner’s recent ban on the use of the Torah Scroll, Lulav, tefillin and tallit was unacceptable. While questioning Rabbi Uziel, Arab leader Abdul Auni implied that the Zionists were using bogus claims of the right to worship at the Wall as a form of propaganda to recruit Jews to settle in Palestine. At this afternoon's meeting of the International Wailing Wall Commission, the three commissioners watched a movie filmed in 1911 showing Jewish men and women praying at the wall, Jewish worshippers sitting on benches and Jewish women kissing the stones of the Wall. The commissioners pronounced the film as authentic and thus it became further evidence of the long standing connection of the Jewish people to the Wall. The International Wailing Wall Commission was established by the League of Nations after Arab rioters violently denied Jews access to the Western Wall
1930: Birthdate of Carol Doris Schatz, the Philadelphia native who would marry Noam Chomsky in 1949 and gain fame in her own right as a linguist and educator. Mrs. Chomsky passed away at the age of 78 in December of 2008.
1932: Over the next 11 months (June 1, 1933), the ZOA will clear the cases of 1,622 people wishing to settle in Palestine.
1933: With a message of "cordial greetings and best wishes" from President Roosevelt and a declaration that "the calamity that has overtaken the 600.000 Jews in Germany has cast a shadow over everything else in Jewish life," the Zionist Organization of America opened its convention today in Chicago. With five thousand delegates and observers in attendance, this meeting is described as being the largest in the history of the ZOA. At this evening’s opening session at the Palmer House, Moriss Rothenberg, President of the ZOA reported that 20,000 Jews had entered the National Home in the last 18 months and that during 1932 12 million dollars in new investments had been made in Palestine. While Rothenberg had words of praise for the British High Commissioner, Sir Arthur Grenfeel Wauchope, he was highly critical of the Mandatory Government (the British) for not increasing the allotment of immigration certificates in light of the events in Germany.
1933 The German government states that "Reich Chancellor Hitler still belongs to the Catholic Church and has no intention of leaving it."
1934: Birthdate of director Sydney Pollack. His hits have included Tootsie and Presumed Innocent.
1934: Erich Gans was murdered in Dachau. It was the last such murder for ten months. The Jewish population at Dachau was almost non-existent at the time since most had been killed or released by end of 1933.
1934: The New York Times reviews “From Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler” by Danish author Peter Hemmer Gudme. In this sympathetic study of the Zionist movement which the reviewer is sure will be translated in English, the non-Jewish Gudme traces the ancient connection of the Jewish people with their homeland before describing modern efforts beginning with Pinsker, Hess and Herzl to create a modern Jewish home in Palestine. Gudme will die at the hands of the Nazis in Copenhagen in 1945.
1935: In London, Sir Francis Abraham Montefiore passed away. Montefiore was the head of the London Portuguese community and was a great philanthropist
1936: The Palestine Post reported from London that the House of Commons discussed the question of the composition of the proposed Royal Commission for Palestine. The Colonial Secretary, Mr. Ormsby-Gore, explained that the appointment of women members to the commission was undesirable, due to the Moslem and Orthodox Jews' susceptibilities. The Christian communities of Beit Jala and Kafr Kana were warned by Arab terrorists that they must deliver 60 young men as volunteers for their ranks, or face the consequences. There were sporadic shootings, bombs thrown and trees uprooted throughout the country. Two British soldiers were hurt by flying debris during the demolition of houses in the old quarter of Jaffa.
1937: The Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of "unacceptable" artwork by Jews and others opens in Munich. A concurrent event of "approved" art held nearby attracts far fewer people than the Entartete Kunst
1937: Pastor Martin Niemöller's anti-Semitism does not prevent the Nazis from arresting him because of his opposition to Hitler
1938: Under a proposal called the Sosua Project, the Dominican Republic offers to accept 100,000 European Jewish refugees, to be settled in an area near Santo Domingo, in return for payment of millions of dollars from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). (Under the plan the Dominican Republic actually admitted on only about 500 Jews by 1940 when immigration was halted)
1940: The America First Committee is formed. It is the most significant American isolationist group, and it is also infiltrated by Nazis, who are working to prevent American intervention in Europe. Several prominent Americans speak in support of the committee. Many in Congress attack the Jews of Hollywood as attempting to involve America in opposition to Hitler.
1940: Bloody anti-Jewish riots erupt in cities throughout Romania
1940: In a letter to German Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, Bishop Theophil Wurm, head of the provincial Lutheran Church at Württemberg, Germany, objects to "euthanasia" killings at the nearby Grafaneck crippled-children's institution; See September 5, 1940.
1940: In Holland, a collaborationist propaganda group, Nederlandse Unie (Netherlands Union), is established.
1940: A Jewish ghetto is established at Bedzin, Poland.
1941 (6th of Tammuz, 5701): The first day of a three day killing spree in Drohobych, during which Ukrainians, assisted by Whermacht soldiers killed three hundred Jews.
1941: A Pogrom in Jassy, the cradle of Rumanian anti-Semitism claimed 5000 Jewish lives.
1941: Birthdate of Dr. Alfred G. Gilman recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1941: British code breakers monitoring radio traffic coming from German troops in the Soviet Union become aware of Nazi massacres of Soviet Jews.
1941: Two thousand members of Minsk, Belorussia's intelligentsia are executed by German troops in a nearby forest.
1941: More than 2500 Jews are slaughtered at Zhitomir, Ukraine.
1941 (6th of Tammuz, 5701): During an Einsatzkommando Aktion (murder operation) at Mielnica, Ukraine, a Jew named Abraham Weintraub hurls himself on a German officer and shatters the officer's teeth. Weintraub is immediately shot.
1941: In the Bialystok region of Poland, Nazis murder 300 members of the Jewish intelligentsia.
1941: German killing squads begin to murder Jews remaining in Kishinev, Romania.
1941: The Hungarian government undertakes a mass roundup of almost 18,000 Jewish refugees for deportation to Kamenets-Podolski, Ukraine.
1941: Twenty-two-year-old Jew Haya Dzienciolski finds a pistol, leaves Novogrudok, Ukraine, and helps to organize a group of young partisans in nearby forests.
1941 (6th of Tammuz, 5701): One hundred Jews are murdered at Lyakhovichi, Belorussia.
1941 (6th of Tammuz, 5701): Hundreds of Jews are killed at Plunge, Lithuania.
1941 In the Ukrainian town of Koritz, Nazi troops begin what would become a three day murder spree. The Jews are forced to prepare three burial pits, one each for men, women, and children. For sport, a man's corpse is propped atop one of the pits, in which some Jews have been buried alive.
1941: Members of the Einsatzgruppen, the Wehrmacht, and Esalon Special, a Romanian unit, begin murdering the Jews of Bessarabia in eastern Romania. By August 31st, they will have killed more than 150,000 Jews.
1942: Hundreds of German Jews are deported to the ghetto/camp at Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. In Paderborn, Germany, all Jewish orphans are deported to Theresienstadt.
1942: Seven trains of Jewish deportees leave Westerbork, Holland, for the Auschwitz death camp
1942: At Kleck, Belorussia, a few dozen Jews break out and join partisans.
1942 (16th of Tammuz, 5702): The Jewish community at Gorodenka, Ukraine, is wiped out.
1942: Extermination activities at the Sobibór death camp are temporarily halted for railway construction and enlargement of the camp's gas chambers.
1943: In an American radio broadcast, U.S. Congressman Emanuel Celler excoriates the U.S. government for its continuing silence on Nazi treatment of European Jews. This is the same Congressman Celler whom Senator Bilbo of Mississippi will refer to as a “kike” while giving a speech in the Upper Chamber; a reference that brings no response from those who hear it and who will guide the 1964 Civil Rights Act to a successful in the House of Representatives.
1943: The American Women's International League for Peace and Freedom estimates that millions of Jews have already been murdered by the Germans in Poland, and that the American government and people share in the guilt for these atrocities because they are complacent cowards covered "with a thick layer of prejudice."
1944: During the month of July, Jewish-Soviet partisans from Poland and Lithuania are active behind the lines at Lublin, Poland, and Kovno, Vilna, and Siauliai, Lithuania, as Soviet troops approach from the east.
1944: The Red Army liberates Lvov, Ukraine.
1944: The SS completes the evacuation of the death camp at Majdanek
1944: The SS evacuates the concentration camp at Kovno, Lithuania
1944: Neutral Switzerland ends long-standing, restrictive Jewish-immigration standards and admits all Jewish refugees who wish and are able to enter.
1944: Jewish-American Lieutenant Colonel Murray C. Bernays is assigned by the U.S. Army Civil Affairs Division to collect evidence of war crimes committed against American servicemen. Bernays begins to formulate his concept of Nazism as a criminal conspiracy, which will be central to the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46.
1944: As the war put additional strains on the German labor force, 1,000 Jews were taken from Birkenau and put to work within Germany.
1948: On the night of July 1 - 2, the first shipment of arms to be used by the Jewish forces arrived from Czechoslovakia by air. The arms were landed in a single DC-4 trans-port. The twin engine plane delivered 200 rifles, 40 machine guns and 150,000 rounds of ammunition. In an act of daring, the plane landed at an abandoned British air field which was illuminated by intermittent flashes of light so that the British forces would find out what was happening. The Jewish state was still six weeks way from reality and at this point in time, the British were doing all they could to disarm the Jews even as the Arab attacks grew bolder and more deadly. The weapons would be used in Operation Nachshon, the desperate attempt on the part of the Yishuv to open the road from the coast to Jerusalem, thus ending the Arab siege of Jerusalem.
1951: Six Arab terrorists were killed in two engagements with security forces in Emek Hefer, Israel. A number of other infiltrators fled into the Jordanian-occupied territory across the border.
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that six Arab terrorists were killed in two engagements with security forces in Emek Hefer. A number of other infiltrators fled into the Jordanian-occupied territory across the border. Israel presented to the US State Department a detailed aide-memoire urging the settlement of Israel's $1.5 billion restitution claim against Germany. The police had so far examined 150 war-crimes cases since the Knesset passed the War Crimes Law, directed at persons who cooperated with the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. The experience of the first few cases had raised some doubts as to the possibility of obtaining convincing evidence against the accused.
1971: In one of those ironies of “progress,” while bagel production and consumption soared to new heights, Local 338, the fabled bagel bakers local, ceased to exist and Local 3 acquired a Bagel Division.
1976: Terrorists in Entebbe, Uganda, still held 200 hostages from the Air France jet, hijacked four days earlier on a flight from Tel Aviv to Paris. They threatened to kill all remaining hostages and blow up the plane if their ransom demands were not met by two o'clock. A special Air France plane carrying 47 hostages, released earlier, arrived in Paris.
1984(1st of Tammuz, 5744): Moshe Feldenkrais passed away. Born in the Ukraine in 1901, Feldenkrais moved to Palestine in 1918 where he continued his education. After living in France before World War II and serving with the British Navy in World War II he returned to Israel. He was a renowned physicist and judo expert, who developed a method of education and self-awareness training called The Feldenkrais method.
1991(19th of Tammuz, 5751): Michael Landon, born Eugene Horowitz, passed away at the age of 54. Landon gained fame for his portrayal of Little Joe on the television western, Bonanza. He gained additional fame for his work in front and behind the camera in another television hit, Little House on the Prairie.
1993: Anne Lapidus Lerner became Vice Chancellor of the Seminary, the first woman to hold that post. As Vice Chancellor, Lerner was one of the highest-ranking women in all of American Jewish institutional life. In that role, she devoted her energy to adult education, working to bring Jewish education to the lay community. After earning bachelor’s, master's, and doctoral degrees from Harvard, Anne Lapidus Lerner joined the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) in 1969, becoming the first American-born woman to hold a full-time position there. JTS trains rabbis and cantors for the Conservative movement and offers a range of masters and doctoral degree programs. Today, Lerner is an assistant professor in the Department of Jewish Literature at JTS, where she teaches courses in Hebrew and American Jewish poetry, modern Jewish literature, and the portrayal of women in Jewish literature. In addition, she is the director of the JTS Jewish Women's Studies Program, which she also founded, and Director of the Jewish Feminist Research Group. In 2001-02, she was a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Divinity School. Lerner has published two books and is at work on a third. In Passing the Love of Women: A Study of Gide's "Saül" and Its Biblical Roots Lerner examines how the Biblical book of Samuel inspired a novel by French author André Gide. In Who Has Not Made Me a Man: The Movement for Equal Rights for Women in American Judaism Lerner discusses the interaction between Judaism and the modern American feminist movement. A new book on the image of Eve in Jewish literature is due to be completed soon. In addition, Lerner has published a range of articles, and sits on the editorial boards of the journals Women's League Outlook, Hadassah, Judaism, Nashim, and Lilith.
1993 (12th of Tammuz, 5753): Olga Khaikov a Jewish immigrant from Russia and the mother of an 11 year old daughter was killed when terrorists tried to seize a bus near French Hill in Jerusalem.
1994: PLO chairman Yasser Arafat drove from Egypt into Gaza, returning to Palestinian land after 27 years in exile.
1998: First Lady Hillary Clinton, her daughter Chelsea and Secretary of State Madeline Albright visited the Ohel Rachel Synagogue in Shanghai, China, accompanied by Rabbi Schneier. In a speech on this date the First Lady commented, "So, for [the Ohel Rachel Synagogue] to be restored, I think, is a very good example of respect for religious differences and an appreciation for the importance of faith in one's life."
2000: Actor Walter Mattheau passes away. Born Walter Matthow in 1920, Mattheau began work at the age of 11 selling candy and playing bit parts in a Yiddish theatre on the Lower East Side. Years later he claimed that his birth name was Matasschanskayasky. According to his son, his father did this as a prank. However, the myth has become accepted as fact by many sources. Mattheau had a long, successful career playing in films some of the best of which paired him with Jack Lemmon. These included, "The Fortune Cookie," a re-make of "Front Page," and that greatest of hits, "The Odd Couple."
2000: Publication of Haviva Ner-David's book, "Life on the Fringes: A Feminist Journey Toward Traditional Rabbinic Ordination." The book, which is part memoir and part halakhic commentary, tells the story of Ner-David's integration of feminism and Orthodox Judaism over a lifetime and argues for the ordination of women as Orthodox rabbis. Haviva Ner-David was born and raised in a modern Orthodox family in the New York City suburbs, attending traditional day schools where girls and boys sat separately for daily prayer and boys were taught to recite the traditional blessing thanking God "for not having made me a woman." Though raised with a love of Jewish tradition, she also struggled to accept traditional teachings about women's limitations. Study at New York's Drisha Institute and a subsequent move to Jerusalem left Ner-David with a thorough education in Jewish law and the conviction that new roles and opportunities for women could be found within tradition. Her book explores both her personal journey and many of the specific halakhic issues that have been taken on by feminist Jews. Throughout the book, Ner-David also reflects on what she will teach her sons and daughters about Judaism, feminism, and the roles of men and women. In Jerusalem, Ner-David found a teacher who was receptive to her desire for ordination. Like his student, Rabbi Aryeh Strikovsky believes there are precedents in Jewish history for Orthodox women rabbis. On the eve of Passover 2006, Ner-David was ordained as a rabbi in Jerusalem. Rabbi Strikovsky signed her ordination, but did not give Ner-David the title of Rabbi, noting that it is the role of the community to determine her official title. Two other Orthodox women, Mimi Feigelson and Eveline Goodman-Thau, claim to have been privately ordained, but their ordinations are not recognized by any Orthodox seminary, synagogue, or official body.
2000: The judge in the Revolutionary Court in Shiraz announced the verdicts on the 13 Jews on trial for spying for Israel. The harsh verdicts against 10 of the defendants range from 4 to 13 years. The three defendants, who had been out on bail since February, were acquitted. The international community, Jewish groups around the world and human rights groups vocally condemned this verdict and expressed outrage at the lack of due process throughout the trial.
2004: Actor Marlon Brando passed away. No, Brando was not Jewish. But he did have this to say about Jews. “Marlon Brando…once told an interviewer that, per capita ‘Jews have contributed more to American…culture than any other single group.’ Without them, the actor claimed, ‘we wouldn’t have music,’ ‘we wouldn’t have much theater,’ and we wouldn’t have “all the songs that you love to sing.’”
2005: The New York Times reported that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had moved decisively to deal with killing of a African-American man by two white males in Howard Beach. The Times favorably compared Bloomberg’s swift action with the city’s reaction to a racially inspired killing in the same neighborhood in 1986.
2005: The New York Times reported that Time’s editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine made the decision to follow a court order and turn over a reporter’s documents to a grand jury investigating a leak of a CIA operative’s identity. Pearlstine wrestled with the compelling issues – freedom of the press versus the need to submit to the rule of law – and he came down on the side of the latter. The decision was not an easy one for a man who was a lawyer as well as the head of one of America’s flagship communication corporations.
2005: The New York Times reported that Bank of America had agreed to buy MBNA. MBNA was founded by Alfred Lerner who passed away in 2002. Learner supported numerous philanthropies including the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. The JFR seeks out to fulfill the age old injunction to seek out and recognize righteousness. In particular, the JFR works to help aged and indigent righteous gentiles who helped save Jews during the Shoah.
2006: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Din In the Head: Essays” by Cynthia Ozick.
2006: Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs, who founded the British branch of the Conservative Movement and was voted the greatest Jew in the history of Britain's Jewish community last year, passed away at the age of 86.
2006: Arnie Eisen office as Chancellor-elect of the Jewish Theological Seminary
2007: Arnie Eisen, who took office as Chancellor-elect of the Jewish Theological Seminary on July 1, 2006, assumes the position full time.
2007: The Opening Day game of the Israel Baseball League is broadcast on a delayed basis on PBS in major US markets.
2007: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including the recently released paperback edition of “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of TocquevillyBernard-Henri Lévy and “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope by Jonathan Alter.
2007: The Sunday Washington Post book section featured a review of a collection of here-to-for unpublished stories by Primo Levi entitled A Tranquil Star. According to the review, those who think of Levi only in terms of being a “Holocaust writer” will be pleasantly surprised by the wide ranging topics and unique style displayed in this posthumously published tome.
2008: Lauren Weisberger, author of the bestselling novel The Devil Wears Prada, reads from and signs her new book, Chasing Harry Winston, at a Borders Books in suburban Virginia.
2009: In Cedar Rapids, IA, meeting of the Hadassah book club discusses “Courtesan,” a novel by Dora Levy Mossanen.
2009: After 29 years of serving as supporting character alongside Marvel greats like the Incredible Hulk and the X-Men, Sabra, the alias of Ruth-Bat Seprah, mutant superhero and former agent, makes her first headlining print appearance in the Marvel anthology Astonishing Tales #6. Sabra's first solo appearance is the work of Matt Yocum, who by day serves as the US Air Force's representative to the Israeli government and by night writes comic books. Yocum, who is not Jewish, has long been involved with the State of Israel. His first visit to the country was in 1992 with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and he spent four weeks living on Kibbutz Beit Ha'emek, close to the coastal city of Nahariya. In 2002 he found himself in Israel again, this time as an exchange officer doing engineering for the Israeli government. Based on his previous experience in the country, Yocum was selected to come for a third time in 2006 to work in the attaché office for the US Air Force. Using three elements unique to his life in Israel, Yocum created a story about a member of the Air Force at a diplomatic reception in Israel, which sums up his existence here. "I wanted to take the experience I had in Israel and bring it to the people who don't live here," he explains. "The vast majority of the people who read the story will not have been to the country, and they will not realize that there are things we take for granted here - one being that everyone has to serve in the army. In the US, less than one percent of the population serves, and here it's part of a natural dialogue with a high-schooler." "At the end of the day, I don't think it's going to change any ideas about Israel," he says. "It shows a piece of what it's like to live in the country and what it's like to serve here."
2009: President Shimon Peres completes his trip to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan
70 C.E.: Titus set up battering rams to assault the walls of Jerusalem.
1388: Jews of Lithuania received a Charter of Privilege.
1569: The Union of Lublin joins The Kingdom of Poland and the Great Duchy of Lithuania into a united country called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Republic of Both Nations. This had to be an improvement in the situation for the Jews of Lithuania who were governed by statutes that read in part, "The Jews shall not wear costly clothing, nor gold chains, nor shall their wives wear gold or silver ornaments. The Jews shall not have silver mountings on their sabers and daggers; they shall be distinguished by characteristic clothes; they shall wear yellow caps, and their wives kerchiefs of yellow linen, in order that all may be enabled to distinguish Jews from Christians." During the 15th and 16th centuries the Jews of Poland enjoyed an increasing amount of political autonomy and economic well being which would come to a crashing end with the Ukrainian uprisings in the 17th centuries.
1651: Poland was victorious over the Cossacks. The Jews were allowed to return to their lands.
1776: First Jew lost his life in the American Revolution.
1798: In Switzerland, special taxes on the Jews were finally abolished.
1862: Russian Jews were granted permission to print Jewish books
1863: First day of the Battle of Gettysburg. For more information about Jews in the Civil War see http://www.jewish-history.com/civilwar.htm.
1867: With the passage of the British North America Act, Great Britain officially recognizes the Dominion of Canada as an independent country. Jews had been living in Canada since the British took it from France in the 17th century. There were enough Jews living in Montreal to allow for the creation of a synagogue called Shearith Israel. While most members of the small Jewish community lived in various towns in the eastern part of the country enough Jews arrived in British Columbia during the Gold Rush that a synagogue was constructed in Victoria in 1862. At the time that Britain recognized the independence of Canada there were about 1,000 Jews living in “our neighbor to the North.” This number would explode shortly thereafter with the beginning of the immigration of Russian Jews.
1873: Prince Edward Island joins the Canadian Confederation. Apparently, Jews did not start settling in Prince Edward Island until the first decade of the 20th century with the arrival of Louis, Israel and Abie Block. The three brothers were from Riga and may have been the Jews who were described in 1908 newspaper article as having celebrated Passover in this part of Canada.
1878: At the insistence of Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck the Congress of Berlin incorporated into the Treaty of Berlin an article intended to provide the Jews of Romania with the opportunity for full citizenship. Unfortunately, the Romanians evaded the article and only a hand full of Jews would gain citizenship.
1880: (12th of Tammuz): Birthdate of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok who would become the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe would overcome a terrifying imprisonment at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen in the 1920’s. Later, he would escape the clutches of the Nazis and settle in Brooklyn where he revived the cause of Chabad-Lubavitch. The Rebbe would launch, what would become under his son-in-law who was the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, one of history’s most successful Jewish outreach programs.
1898: In the Spanish-American War Teddy Roosevelt & his Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill in Cuba. The Rough Riders was a cavalry unit recruited by Roosevelt that drew on every strata of American life from Western cowboys to Yankee Bluebloods. Several Jews served with the united including Jacob Wilbusky, the first Roughrider killed in action. The Roughriders were forced to leave their horses back the United States so the famous charge was made on foot.
1899: The Conference of the English Zionist Federation comes to an end.
1900: Herzl turns to Prime Minister Koerber and asks him to use his influence with the Sultan to permit the Rumanian Jews to immigrate into Turkey and to receive him, in order to discuss the question of colonization and settlement.
1902: Birthdate of Oscar winning director Billy Wyler. Wyler directed many classics including the World War II tear-jerker Mrs. Miniver. Ironically, his greatest hit was The Best Years of Our Lives, a film that described the return of four veterans to civilian life after World War II. Once again, the Jews played a major role in crafting the cultural myths of Middle American Culture.
1907: Birthdate of famed sportscaster Bill Stern.
1907: The SS Cassel entered the port of Galveston, Texas with 87 Russian Jews aboard, heralding the start of the Galveston Movement - an organized attempt to bring Jews to less populated parts of the US.
1908: Birthdate of Estee Lauder. Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. She married Joseph Lauter who changed the family named to Lauder in the late 1930’s. Mrs. Lauder was CEO of Estee Lauder’s Cosmetics. . She was one of several Jewish women who found fame and fortune in the cosmetics business. She was the only woman on Time magazine's 1998 list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the 20th century. She passed away in 2004 at the age of 97.
1920: Sir Herbert Samuel, a British statesman was appointed High Commissioner of Eretz-Israel. His first official act was to grant amnesty to political prisoners including Jabotinsky. He governed the British Mandate for five years. Sir Herbert governed as a British official, not as a Jew and there were clashes between him and some Zionist leaders.
1921: Dr. Thomas G. Allen, Secretary of the Oriental Institute announced today that the thanks to a $60,000 grant by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. the University of Chicago will excavate the site of Armageddon or Megiddo.
1923: Fast of the 17th of Tammuz
1927: (12th of Tammuz): Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok is liberated from his death sentence and imprisonment in the Soviet Union. With the outbreak of World War II, the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe would make his way to New York where he would establish the headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch in Crown Heights. From there, he would launch what would become a highly successful world-wide outreach program designed to educate Jews and heighten their awareness of their heritage.
1930: At the morning session of the International Wailing Wall Commission, Rabbi Ben Zion Meyer Uziel, Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, described Jewish prayer rituals conducted at the Wall declaring that the High Commissioner’s recent ban on the use of the Torah Scroll, Lulav, tefillin and tallit was unacceptable. While questioning Rabbi Uziel, Arab leader Abdul Auni implied that the Zionists were using bogus claims of the right to worship at the Wall as a form of propaganda to recruit Jews to settle in Palestine. At this afternoon's meeting of the International Wailing Wall Commission, the three commissioners watched a movie filmed in 1911 showing Jewish men and women praying at the wall, Jewish worshippers sitting on benches and Jewish women kissing the stones of the Wall. The commissioners pronounced the film as authentic and thus it became further evidence of the long standing connection of the Jewish people to the Wall. The International Wailing Wall Commission was established by the League of Nations after Arab rioters violently denied Jews access to the Western Wall
1930: Birthdate of Carol Doris Schatz, the Philadelphia native who would marry Noam Chomsky in 1949 and gain fame in her own right as a linguist and educator. Mrs. Chomsky passed away at the age of 78 in December of 2008.
1932: Over the next 11 months (June 1, 1933), the ZOA will clear the cases of 1,622 people wishing to settle in Palestine.
1933: With a message of "cordial greetings and best wishes" from President Roosevelt and a declaration that "the calamity that has overtaken the 600.000 Jews in Germany has cast a shadow over everything else in Jewish life," the Zionist Organization of America opened its convention today in Chicago. With five thousand delegates and observers in attendance, this meeting is described as being the largest in the history of the ZOA. At this evening’s opening session at the Palmer House, Moriss Rothenberg, President of the ZOA reported that 20,000 Jews had entered the National Home in the last 18 months and that during 1932 12 million dollars in new investments had been made in Palestine. While Rothenberg had words of praise for the British High Commissioner, Sir Arthur Grenfeel Wauchope, he was highly critical of the Mandatory Government (the British) for not increasing the allotment of immigration certificates in light of the events in Germany.
1933 The German government states that "Reich Chancellor Hitler still belongs to the Catholic Church and has no intention of leaving it."
1934: Birthdate of director Sydney Pollack. His hits have included Tootsie and Presumed Innocent.
1934: Erich Gans was murdered in Dachau. It was the last such murder for ten months. The Jewish population at Dachau was almost non-existent at the time since most had been killed or released by end of 1933.
1934: The New York Times reviews “From Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler” by Danish author Peter Hemmer Gudme. In this sympathetic study of the Zionist movement which the reviewer is sure will be translated in English, the non-Jewish Gudme traces the ancient connection of the Jewish people with their homeland before describing modern efforts beginning with Pinsker, Hess and Herzl to create a modern Jewish home in Palestine. Gudme will die at the hands of the Nazis in Copenhagen in 1945.
1935: In London, Sir Francis Abraham Montefiore passed away. Montefiore was the head of the London Portuguese community and was a great philanthropist
1936: The Palestine Post reported from London that the House of Commons discussed the question of the composition of the proposed Royal Commission for Palestine. The Colonial Secretary, Mr. Ormsby-Gore, explained that the appointment of women members to the commission was undesirable, due to the Moslem and Orthodox Jews' susceptibilities. The Christian communities of Beit Jala and Kafr Kana were warned by Arab terrorists that they must deliver 60 young men as volunteers for their ranks, or face the consequences. There were sporadic shootings, bombs thrown and trees uprooted throughout the country. Two British soldiers were hurt by flying debris during the demolition of houses in the old quarter of Jaffa.
1937: The Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of "unacceptable" artwork by Jews and others opens in Munich. A concurrent event of "approved" art held nearby attracts far fewer people than the Entartete Kunst
1937: Pastor Martin Niemöller's anti-Semitism does not prevent the Nazis from arresting him because of his opposition to Hitler
1938: Under a proposal called the Sosua Project, the Dominican Republic offers to accept 100,000 European Jewish refugees, to be settled in an area near Santo Domingo, in return for payment of millions of dollars from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). (Under the plan the Dominican Republic actually admitted on only about 500 Jews by 1940 when immigration was halted)
1940: The America First Committee is formed. It is the most significant American isolationist group, and it is also infiltrated by Nazis, who are working to prevent American intervention in Europe. Several prominent Americans speak in support of the committee. Many in Congress attack the Jews of Hollywood as attempting to involve America in opposition to Hitler.
1940: Bloody anti-Jewish riots erupt in cities throughout Romania
1940: In a letter to German Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, Bishop Theophil Wurm, head of the provincial Lutheran Church at Württemberg, Germany, objects to "euthanasia" killings at the nearby Grafaneck crippled-children's institution; See September 5, 1940.
1940: In Holland, a collaborationist propaganda group, Nederlandse Unie (Netherlands Union), is established.
1940: A Jewish ghetto is established at Bedzin, Poland.
1941 (6th of Tammuz, 5701): The first day of a three day killing spree in Drohobych, during which Ukrainians, assisted by Whermacht soldiers killed three hundred Jews.
1941: A Pogrom in Jassy, the cradle of Rumanian anti-Semitism claimed 5000 Jewish lives.
1941: Birthdate of Dr. Alfred G. Gilman recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1941: British code breakers monitoring radio traffic coming from German troops in the Soviet Union become aware of Nazi massacres of Soviet Jews.
1941: Two thousand members of Minsk, Belorussia's intelligentsia are executed by German troops in a nearby forest.
1941: More than 2500 Jews are slaughtered at Zhitomir, Ukraine.
1941 (6th of Tammuz, 5701): During an Einsatzkommando Aktion (murder operation) at Mielnica, Ukraine, a Jew named Abraham Weintraub hurls himself on a German officer and shatters the officer's teeth. Weintraub is immediately shot.
1941: In the Bialystok region of Poland, Nazis murder 300 members of the Jewish intelligentsia.
1941: German killing squads begin to murder Jews remaining in Kishinev, Romania.
1941: The Hungarian government undertakes a mass roundup of almost 18,000 Jewish refugees for deportation to Kamenets-Podolski, Ukraine.
1941: Twenty-two-year-old Jew Haya Dzienciolski finds a pistol, leaves Novogrudok, Ukraine, and helps to organize a group of young partisans in nearby forests.
1941 (6th of Tammuz, 5701): One hundred Jews are murdered at Lyakhovichi, Belorussia.
1941 (6th of Tammuz, 5701): Hundreds of Jews are killed at Plunge, Lithuania.
1941 In the Ukrainian town of Koritz, Nazi troops begin what would become a three day murder spree. The Jews are forced to prepare three burial pits, one each for men, women, and children. For sport, a man's corpse is propped atop one of the pits, in which some Jews have been buried alive.
1941: Members of the Einsatzgruppen, the Wehrmacht, and Esalon Special, a Romanian unit, begin murdering the Jews of Bessarabia in eastern Romania. By August 31st, they will have killed more than 150,000 Jews.
1942: Hundreds of German Jews are deported to the ghetto/camp at Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. In Paderborn, Germany, all Jewish orphans are deported to Theresienstadt.
1942: Seven trains of Jewish deportees leave Westerbork, Holland, for the Auschwitz death camp
1942: At Kleck, Belorussia, a few dozen Jews break out and join partisans.
1942 (16th of Tammuz, 5702): The Jewish community at Gorodenka, Ukraine, is wiped out.
1942: Extermination activities at the Sobibór death camp are temporarily halted for railway construction and enlargement of the camp's gas chambers.
1943: In an American radio broadcast, U.S. Congressman Emanuel Celler excoriates the U.S. government for its continuing silence on Nazi treatment of European Jews. This is the same Congressman Celler whom Senator Bilbo of Mississippi will refer to as a “kike” while giving a speech in the Upper Chamber; a reference that brings no response from those who hear it and who will guide the 1964 Civil Rights Act to a successful in the House of Representatives.
1943: The American Women's International League for Peace and Freedom estimates that millions of Jews have already been murdered by the Germans in Poland, and that the American government and people share in the guilt for these atrocities because they are complacent cowards covered "with a thick layer of prejudice."
1944: During the month of July, Jewish-Soviet partisans from Poland and Lithuania are active behind the lines at Lublin, Poland, and Kovno, Vilna, and Siauliai, Lithuania, as Soviet troops approach from the east.
1944: The Red Army liberates Lvov, Ukraine.
1944: The SS completes the evacuation of the death camp at Majdanek
1944: The SS evacuates the concentration camp at Kovno, Lithuania
1944: Neutral Switzerland ends long-standing, restrictive Jewish-immigration standards and admits all Jewish refugees who wish and are able to enter.
1944: Jewish-American Lieutenant Colonel Murray C. Bernays is assigned by the U.S. Army Civil Affairs Division to collect evidence of war crimes committed against American servicemen. Bernays begins to formulate his concept of Nazism as a criminal conspiracy, which will be central to the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46.
1944: As the war put additional strains on the German labor force, 1,000 Jews were taken from Birkenau and put to work within Germany.
1948: On the night of July 1 - 2, the first shipment of arms to be used by the Jewish forces arrived from Czechoslovakia by air. The arms were landed in a single DC-4 trans-port. The twin engine plane delivered 200 rifles, 40 machine guns and 150,000 rounds of ammunition. In an act of daring, the plane landed at an abandoned British air field which was illuminated by intermittent flashes of light so that the British forces would find out what was happening. The Jewish state was still six weeks way from reality and at this point in time, the British were doing all they could to disarm the Jews even as the Arab attacks grew bolder and more deadly. The weapons would be used in Operation Nachshon, the desperate attempt on the part of the Yishuv to open the road from the coast to Jerusalem, thus ending the Arab siege of Jerusalem.
1951: Six Arab terrorists were killed in two engagements with security forces in Emek Hefer, Israel. A number of other infiltrators fled into the Jordanian-occupied territory across the border.
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that six Arab terrorists were killed in two engagements with security forces in Emek Hefer. A number of other infiltrators fled into the Jordanian-occupied territory across the border. Israel presented to the US State Department a detailed aide-memoire urging the settlement of Israel's $1.5 billion restitution claim against Germany. The police had so far examined 150 war-crimes cases since the Knesset passed the War Crimes Law, directed at persons who cooperated with the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. The experience of the first few cases had raised some doubts as to the possibility of obtaining convincing evidence against the accused.
1971: In one of those ironies of “progress,” while bagel production and consumption soared to new heights, Local 338, the fabled bagel bakers local, ceased to exist and Local 3 acquired a Bagel Division.
1976: Terrorists in Entebbe, Uganda, still held 200 hostages from the Air France jet, hijacked four days earlier on a flight from Tel Aviv to Paris. They threatened to kill all remaining hostages and blow up the plane if their ransom demands were not met by two o'clock. A special Air France plane carrying 47 hostages, released earlier, arrived in Paris.
1984(1st of Tammuz, 5744): Moshe Feldenkrais passed away. Born in the Ukraine in 1901, Feldenkrais moved to Palestine in 1918 where he continued his education. After living in France before World War II and serving with the British Navy in World War II he returned to Israel. He was a renowned physicist and judo expert, who developed a method of education and self-awareness training called The Feldenkrais method.
1991(19th of Tammuz, 5751): Michael Landon, born Eugene Horowitz, passed away at the age of 54. Landon gained fame for his portrayal of Little Joe on the television western, Bonanza. He gained additional fame for his work in front and behind the camera in another television hit, Little House on the Prairie.
1993: Anne Lapidus Lerner became Vice Chancellor of the Seminary, the first woman to hold that post. As Vice Chancellor, Lerner was one of the highest-ranking women in all of American Jewish institutional life. In that role, she devoted her energy to adult education, working to bring Jewish education to the lay community. After earning bachelor’s, master's, and doctoral degrees from Harvard, Anne Lapidus Lerner joined the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) in 1969, becoming the first American-born woman to hold a full-time position there. JTS trains rabbis and cantors for the Conservative movement and offers a range of masters and doctoral degree programs. Today, Lerner is an assistant professor in the Department of Jewish Literature at JTS, where she teaches courses in Hebrew and American Jewish poetry, modern Jewish literature, and the portrayal of women in Jewish literature. In addition, she is the director of the JTS Jewish Women's Studies Program, which she also founded, and Director of the Jewish Feminist Research Group. In 2001-02, she was a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Divinity School. Lerner has published two books and is at work on a third. In Passing the Love of Women: A Study of Gide's "Saül" and Its Biblical Roots Lerner examines how the Biblical book of Samuel inspired a novel by French author André Gide. In Who Has Not Made Me a Man: The Movement for Equal Rights for Women in American Judaism Lerner discusses the interaction between Judaism and the modern American feminist movement. A new book on the image of Eve in Jewish literature is due to be completed soon. In addition, Lerner has published a range of articles, and sits on the editorial boards of the journals Women's League Outlook, Hadassah, Judaism, Nashim, and Lilith.
1993 (12th of Tammuz, 5753): Olga Khaikov a Jewish immigrant from Russia and the mother of an 11 year old daughter was killed when terrorists tried to seize a bus near French Hill in Jerusalem.
1994: PLO chairman Yasser Arafat drove from Egypt into Gaza, returning to Palestinian land after 27 years in exile.
1998: First Lady Hillary Clinton, her daughter Chelsea and Secretary of State Madeline Albright visited the Ohel Rachel Synagogue in Shanghai, China, accompanied by Rabbi Schneier. In a speech on this date the First Lady commented, "So, for [the Ohel Rachel Synagogue] to be restored, I think, is a very good example of respect for religious differences and an appreciation for the importance of faith in one's life."
2000: Actor Walter Mattheau passes away. Born Walter Matthow in 1920, Mattheau began work at the age of 11 selling candy and playing bit parts in a Yiddish theatre on the Lower East Side. Years later he claimed that his birth name was Matasschanskayasky. According to his son, his father did this as a prank. However, the myth has become accepted as fact by many sources. Mattheau had a long, successful career playing in films some of the best of which paired him with Jack Lemmon. These included, "The Fortune Cookie," a re-make of "Front Page," and that greatest of hits, "The Odd Couple."
2000: Publication of Haviva Ner-David's book, "Life on the Fringes: A Feminist Journey Toward Traditional Rabbinic Ordination." The book, which is part memoir and part halakhic commentary, tells the story of Ner-David's integration of feminism and Orthodox Judaism over a lifetime and argues for the ordination of women as Orthodox rabbis. Haviva Ner-David was born and raised in a modern Orthodox family in the New York City suburbs, attending traditional day schools where girls and boys sat separately for daily prayer and boys were taught to recite the traditional blessing thanking God "for not having made me a woman." Though raised with a love of Jewish tradition, she also struggled to accept traditional teachings about women's limitations. Study at New York's Drisha Institute and a subsequent move to Jerusalem left Ner-David with a thorough education in Jewish law and the conviction that new roles and opportunities for women could be found within tradition. Her book explores both her personal journey and many of the specific halakhic issues that have been taken on by feminist Jews. Throughout the book, Ner-David also reflects on what she will teach her sons and daughters about Judaism, feminism, and the roles of men and women. In Jerusalem, Ner-David found a teacher who was receptive to her desire for ordination. Like his student, Rabbi Aryeh Strikovsky believes there are precedents in Jewish history for Orthodox women rabbis. On the eve of Passover 2006, Ner-David was ordained as a rabbi in Jerusalem. Rabbi Strikovsky signed her ordination, but did not give Ner-David the title of Rabbi, noting that it is the role of the community to determine her official title. Two other Orthodox women, Mimi Feigelson and Eveline Goodman-Thau, claim to have been privately ordained, but their ordinations are not recognized by any Orthodox seminary, synagogue, or official body.
2000: The judge in the Revolutionary Court in Shiraz announced the verdicts on the 13 Jews on trial for spying for Israel. The harsh verdicts against 10 of the defendants range from 4 to 13 years. The three defendants, who had been out on bail since February, were acquitted. The international community, Jewish groups around the world and human rights groups vocally condemned this verdict and expressed outrage at the lack of due process throughout the trial.
2004: Actor Marlon Brando passed away. No, Brando was not Jewish. But he did have this to say about Jews. “Marlon Brando…once told an interviewer that, per capita ‘Jews have contributed more to American…culture than any other single group.’ Without them, the actor claimed, ‘we wouldn’t have music,’ ‘we wouldn’t have much theater,’ and we wouldn’t have “all the songs that you love to sing.’”
2005: The New York Times reported that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had moved decisively to deal with killing of a African-American man by two white males in Howard Beach. The Times favorably compared Bloomberg’s swift action with the city’s reaction to a racially inspired killing in the same neighborhood in 1986.
2005: The New York Times reported that Time’s editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine made the decision to follow a court order and turn over a reporter’s documents to a grand jury investigating a leak of a CIA operative’s identity. Pearlstine wrestled with the compelling issues – freedom of the press versus the need to submit to the rule of law – and he came down on the side of the latter. The decision was not an easy one for a man who was a lawyer as well as the head of one of America’s flagship communication corporations.
2005: The New York Times reported that Bank of America had agreed to buy MBNA. MBNA was founded by Alfred Lerner who passed away in 2002. Learner supported numerous philanthropies including the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. The JFR seeks out to fulfill the age old injunction to seek out and recognize righteousness. In particular, the JFR works to help aged and indigent righteous gentiles who helped save Jews during the Shoah.
2006: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Din In the Head: Essays” by Cynthia Ozick.
2006: Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs, who founded the British branch of the Conservative Movement and was voted the greatest Jew in the history of Britain's Jewish community last year, passed away at the age of 86.
2006: Arnie Eisen office as Chancellor-elect of the Jewish Theological Seminary
2007: Arnie Eisen, who took office as Chancellor-elect of the Jewish Theological Seminary on July 1, 2006, assumes the position full time.
2007: The Opening Day game of the Israel Baseball League is broadcast on a delayed basis on PBS in major US markets.
2007: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including the recently released paperback edition of “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of TocquevillyBernard-Henri Lévy and “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope by Jonathan Alter.
2007: The Sunday Washington Post book section featured a review of a collection of here-to-for unpublished stories by Primo Levi entitled A Tranquil Star. According to the review, those who think of Levi only in terms of being a “Holocaust writer” will be pleasantly surprised by the wide ranging topics and unique style displayed in this posthumously published tome.
2008: Lauren Weisberger, author of the bestselling novel The Devil Wears Prada, reads from and signs her new book, Chasing Harry Winston, at a Borders Books in suburban Virginia.
2009: In Cedar Rapids, IA, meeting of the Hadassah book club discusses “Courtesan,” a novel by Dora Levy Mossanen.
2009: After 29 years of serving as supporting character alongside Marvel greats like the Incredible Hulk and the X-Men, Sabra, the alias of Ruth-Bat Seprah, mutant superhero and former agent, makes her first headlining print appearance in the Marvel anthology Astonishing Tales #6. Sabra's first solo appearance is the work of Matt Yocum, who by day serves as the US Air Force's representative to the Israeli government and by night writes comic books. Yocum, who is not Jewish, has long been involved with the State of Israel. His first visit to the country was in 1992 with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and he spent four weeks living on Kibbutz Beit Ha'emek, close to the coastal city of Nahariya. In 2002 he found himself in Israel again, this time as an exchange officer doing engineering for the Israeli government. Based on his previous experience in the country, Yocum was selected to come for a third time in 2006 to work in the attaché office for the US Air Force. Using three elements unique to his life in Israel, Yocum created a story about a member of the Air Force at a diplomatic reception in Israel, which sums up his existence here. "I wanted to take the experience I had in Israel and bring it to the people who don't live here," he explains. "The vast majority of the people who read the story will not have been to the country, and they will not realize that there are things we take for granted here - one being that everyone has to serve in the army. In the US, less than one percent of the population serves, and here it's part of a natural dialogue with a high-schooler." "At the end of the day, I don't think it's going to change any ideas about Israel," he says. "It shows a piece of what it's like to live in the country and what it's like to serve here."
2009: President Shimon Peres completes his trip to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan
Monday, June 29, 2009
This Day, June 30, In Jewish History
JUNE 30 In Jewish History
713 CE: In Spain, Visigoth nobility which had held out against the invading Moslem forces, throughout the winter of 712 finally surrendered to the Arabs. A majority of the remaining Goths and Hispano-Roman people who lived in the newly acquired areas eventually converted to Islam. The Jews, who had been persecuted by the ruling Goths, proved to be the exception. They kept their religious identity and flourished under the new rulers.
1294: The Jewish community of Berne, Switzerland forfeited all financial claims against non-Jews, and then was expelled from the country.
1298: The Jewish community of Morgentheim, Austria was massacred.
1470: Birthdate of Charles VIII, King of France. In 1494, Charles invaded Italy leading to the occupation of the Kingdom of Naples in 1495. Charles conquest led to increased persecutions of the Jewish population which lead to their expulsion in 1510, two years after his death.
1680: In Madrid, an Auto de Fe was held in honor of the marriage of Carlos II to Louis Marie d’Orleans. It took place in the Plaza Mayor and lasted 14 hours. Over 50,000 spectators came to see 118 accused sentenced to prison or burned. It marked the last time that a "royal" auto was held since Carlos’ successor, Philip V, refused the "honor." took place in the Plaza Mayor
1838: The Swedish government abolished discrimination against Jews. Unfortunately due to public objections it was repealed. Another 30 years were to pass before Jews were given the right to vote.
1866: Today the Bucharest Synagogue was desecrated and demolished (it was rebuilt in the same year, then restored in 1932 and 1945). Many Jews were beaten, maimed, and robbed. As a result, Article 6 was withdrawn and Article 7 was added to the 1866 Constitution; it read that "only such aliens as are of the Christian faith may obtain citizenship". When Charles von Hohenzollern succeeded Cuza in 1866 as Carol I of Romania, the first event that confronted him in the capital was a riot against the Jews. A draft of a constitution was then submitted by the government, Article 6 of which declared that "religion is no obstacle to citizenship"; but, "with regard to the Jews, a special law will have to be framed in order to regulate their admission to naturalization and also to civil rights".
1902: Herzl began a journey to London seeking support for his plans for a Jewish homeland. The journey lasted until July 17.
1904: Herzl suffers a severe bronchial catarrh, which turns into pneumonia. Oskar Marmorek proceeds to Edlac with two doctors.
1905: Albert Einstein publishes the article "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" where he introduces special relativity.
1911: A Jew, Abraham Benrubi, former President of the Tribunal of Commerce at Cavalla (Turkey) was appointed Judge of the Court of Appeal in Jerusalem.
1911: Two Ottoman deputies of Jerusalem, Ruhi Bey and Said Bey, receive numerous letters and telegrams complaining of their anti-Jewish speeches in the Turkish.
1915: After electing officers for the national organization, the Federation of American Zionists closed tonight what is on all sides is “acclaimed as the most beneficial convention of Jews ever held.” Dr. Harry Friedenwald of Baltimore was elected President. Other officers chosen were Chairman of Executive Committee, Louis Lipsky of New York; Honorary Secretary, Bernard A. Rosenblatt of New York, and Treasurer, Louis Robison of New York. The delegates to the convention received a pleasant surprise at this closing session when it was announced that Nathan Starus, the famed philanthropist had turned over his private yacht, valued at between $35,000 and $50,000, to the Zionists to help them deal with the looming financial shortfall.
1917: Birthdate of Bernard “Buddy” Rich. Born in Brooklyn, Rich is best remembered as one of the greatest drummers of all times. Later in his career he was the leader of his own group – The Buddy Rich Band. According to one legend, when on his deathbed a nurse asked him if anything was bothering him, Rich replied, “Yes, country music."
1922: The Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the Reform movement's professional organization, meeting in Cape May, N.J., voted 56 to 11 to affirm in principle the right of women to become rabbis.
1920: Sir Herbert Samuel the first high commissioner for Palestine arrives in Jaffa and is received with a military ceremony. Samuel served in the position for five years. He was the son of Edwin Louis Samuel, a successful Anglo-Jewish banker. Samuel had been raised as an Orthodox Jew and although according to at least one source, he ceased to be a practicing Jew but remained active in Jewish affairs..
1924: Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael De Haan, a Dutch born Jew who was a leader of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community opposed to Zionism was shot outside of the synagogue moments after finishing his evening prayers. De Haan was scheduled to lead a delegation of ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews to London where he planned to make their case to the British government. His killer was rumored to be a fellow Jew. The Jewish community of Jerusalem, regardless of political affiliation was shocked by the killing and 20,000 people turned out for his funeral. Forty years after the crime took place a 1970 broadcast on Israeli radio revealed that the killer had been a member of Haganah who had killed De Haan because he was viewed as a traitor.
1926: Birthdate of Paul Berg, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1980.
1927: Henry Ford retracted and apologized for the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
1934: Night of the Long Knives: Hitler ordered the execution of some of the SA (Sturm Abteilungen) leaders of whose absolute loyalty he questioned including Ernst Roehm. Until then the SS under Himmler was subordinate to the SA. The SS now became independent and was given charge of the concentration camps.
1936: Polish Jews strike to protest anti-Semitism
1937: “A tower and stockade kibbutz was established at Tirat Zevi (Zevi’s Castle) 6 miles south-east of Beisan and less than a mile from the Jordan border.”
1937: Under the auspices of the Bialiki Association, Chiam Nachman Bialik’s house was opened to the public. The public display included: the archives of Bialik’s manuscripts and that of other writers, Bialik’s private library and a museum with the poet’s personal possessions.
1941: Ninety Jews are murdered at Dobromil, Ukraine.
1941: German troops enter Lvov, Ukraine, and beat hundreds of Jews to death after running them ragged at gunpoint.
1941 Three hundred young Jews are deported from Amsterdam, Holland, to stone quarries at the Mauthausen, Austria, concentration camp. All will eventually perish.
1941: American radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin celebrates Hitler's invasion of Russia as "the first strike in the holy war on communism" and attacks "the British-Jewish-Roosevelt war on Germany and Italy."
1941: The Germans entered Lvov, Soviet Union, cite of the third largest Jewish Community after Warsaw and Lodz.
Thousands of Jews would be tortured and slaughtered at the hands of rampaging mobs.
1941: In Amsterdam, 300 Jews were deported to work camps.
1941: In Denmark, a collaborationist SS organization, Freikorps Danmark (Danish Free Corps), is established.
1941: In Belorussia, a guerrilla collaborationist organization, Belaruskaya Narodnaya Partizanka (Belorussian National Guerrillas), is established.
1941: In Latvia, Viktor Arajs establishes the Perkonkrusts (Thunder Cross), a collaborationist paramilitary unit.
1941: Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, tells Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, that Hitler has ordered that the "Jewish question" be solved once and for all and that the SS is to implement that order. Auschwitz is the death camp that is to carry out the greater part of the Jewish extermination. Mass gassings, not shootings, are determined to be the most effective means to exterminate the large numbers of Jews.
1942: A headline in the London Daily Telegraph reads: "MORE THAN 1,000,000 JEWS KILLED IN EUROPE."
1942: Three-year-old Jewish twins in Sosnowiec, Poland, Ida and Adam Paluch, are spirited away from Gestapo agents by their aunt and sent to live with separate Catholic families
1944: By now, more than 500 Jews are being secretly protected by industrialist Oskar Schindler.
1944: Joel Brand and Rudolf Kasztner working together with the Jewish Agency and the War Refugee board concluded a deal with and Adolph Eichmann. It became known as “Blut fuer Ware” ("Blood for Goods"). This date marked the first of three transports from Hungary to Switzerland. A total of 3344 Jews were sent on a special transport at a price of $1,000 per head. The deal was the subject of a great amount of controversy and later even resulted in a defamation trial, which reached the Israeli Supreme Court in June of 1955.
1944: One thousand, seven hundred, ninety-five Jews arrived from Corfu arrived at Birkenau.
1944 The crematoria at Auschwitz are working at full capacity when 2044 Jews from Corfu and Athens, Greece, arrive. At day's end, lightning rods on crematoria chimneys are warped from the heat generated by the furnaces.
1945: "Lest We Forget," an exhibition of death-camp photography organized by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Washington Evening Star began a tour in Boston, Massachusetts, and then on into Midwest. By tours end nearly 90,000 Americans will have viewed this testament of the Holocaust.
1948: The last British armed forces left Israel.
1948: An Israeli convoy led by commandos arrives at the isolated settlement of Kfar Darom, south of Gaza. The convoy brought food for the Jews and was supposed to evacuate the wounded and the women. The Egyptians were able to prevent the convoy from departing which meant that the commandos and the defenders would now be forced to share the meager supplies as they wait for relief from the outside.
1952: Guiding Light, a soap opera created by Irna Phillips, debuted on television on. It is one of the longest-running daily television programs.
1953: Between May 15, 1948 and June 30, 1953, the Jewish population of Israel doubled from 640,000 to 1.3 million.
1956: Between May 15, 1948 and June 30, 1956, the Jewish population of Israel tripled from 640,000 to 2.1 million.
1959: American composer Lazare Saminsky passed away at Port Chester, NY. Born in Russian in 1882 he was a pupil of Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov at the St Petersburg and Moscow conservatories from 1906 until 1910. He moved in 1920 to New York, where in 1923 he was a founder of the League of Composers. He was musical director of Temple Emanu-El from 1924 until 1956 and author of several books. Saminsky wrote Jewish liturgical music and drew on Jewish sources for his five symphonies, choral music and songs.
1962: LA Dodger Sandy Koufax pitches another no-hitter. This time he beat the Mets 5-0.
1966: The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded at a meeting in Betty Friedan's hotel room.
1971: Herbert Biberman, screenwriter, director and part of the Hollywood Ten, passed away
1976: Catcher Jeff Newman made his major league debut with the Oakland Athletics.
1984: Playwright Lillian Hellman passed away.
1985: In an article entitled “Yuppies with Fetlocks” Jean Franco reviews “The Centaur in the Garden by Moacyr Scliar.; translated by Margaret A. Neves. “This novel…is reminiscent of the Chagall paintings in which the scenes of everyday Jewish life are tenderly and oddly transmuted into fantasy. ''The Centaur in the Garden'' is set..on a farm in southern Brazil, in one of the colonies of Jewish immigrants established there at the beginning of this century by the German-Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch…One Jewish family's struggle to make a living in these unfamiliar and lonely surroundings is thwarted by the birth of the youngest child, Guedali, who is a centaur.
1992: Prosecution of East European Nazi collaborators who had gained entry to the country posing as innocent refugees from Communism by Australia's "Special Investigations Unit" met with failure and the prosecution effort for all practical purposes was shut down on this date.
1994: Catcher Mike Lieberthal made his major league debut with the Philadelphia Phillies.
1996: An article entitled “New Museum Traces 2 Paths Into Jewish History in Atlanta” appears in the New York Times
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEFDD1339F933A05755C0A960958260
Visitors standing in the high-ceilinged foyer of the new William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum here have a choice. They can begin their journey through time and history by entering a portal on the left marked "The Holocaust" or one on the right labeled "Creating Community: The Jews of Atlanta from 1845 to the Present." Once inside, the two sections of the 50,000-square-foot museum flow into one another, but the choice at the beginning, said the museum's director, Jane Leavey, is the real point. The only place in the school curriculums here where they talk about Jews is with regard to the Holocaust, and that is Jews as victims," said Ms. Leavey in a preview tour this week of the museum that is to open on Sunday. "Here we have an opportunity to say there was a Jewish community here long before Hitler and one long after Hitler." The design and rationale of the Atlanta museum is part of what James Young, a professor of Judaic studies and English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, sees as part of an increasingly common but still controversial effort to "contextualize and expand Jewish history" memorials in the United States. American Jews, especially in communities with significant numbers of survivors of the death camps, Professor Young said, have been moving very gingerly over the years to broaden the Jewish identity in the memorials and museums while not losing sight of the significance of the Holocaust. In some cases, he said, the "muted debate" over the pivotal role of the Holocaust has led to bifurcation of museums and memorials. That is the case, he said, in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the Holocaust is memorialized at one site and Jewish heritage is celebrated at another across town. But increasingly, the idea is to combine the two, Professor Young said. "This is an altogether healthier approach to Jewish history," he said, noting that it embraced the tensions of assimilation, achievement and community that are part of the immigrant experience generally, along with events that had contributed to immigration. "With vicariously remembered catastrophes such as the massacre of native Americans, the enslaving of African-Americans and the Holocaust," Professor Young said, "history can be reduced to competing catastrophes, and that reduces its richness. Three thousand years should not be collapsed into 12 calamitous years." Indeed, said Miles Lerman, chairman of the board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the juxtaposition and coexistence of the darkness that was the Holocaust and the relative light that was the evolution of Atlanta's Jewish community serve to "make clearer the contrast between evil and goodness" in Jewish history. With this idea in mind the new museum here, 13 years in the making, was created by the Atlanta Jewish Federation. The museum, named for a local philanthropist, has exhibits dating to 1733, when Jews first settled in Georgia as part of the largely Methodist settlement of James Oglethorpe in Savannah. It is presumed that the first Jews to arrive in Atlanta came from that settlement. In 1845, two peddlers, Jacob Haas and Henry Levi, moved to Atlanta where they opened a dry goods store. Census data show that after 10 years there were 26 Jews among Atlanta's 2,572 residents and by 1870, when the first synagogue was opened, barely 300. According to projections from population surveys, Ms. Leavey said that there are now about 75,000 Jews among the Atlanta metropolitan area's 2.4 million people. The Jewish heritage exhibit presents a primer on Jewish religion and culture and then a glimpse at the religion's key rituals before going on to document the role of Jews in the city's development through artifacts, photographs, newspaper clippings and official records. A significant portion of the exhibit focuses on the 1917 lynching of Leo Frank by an anti-Semitic mob in nearby Marietta, where he was held after being wrongly accused of the rape and murder of a young woman, and the 1958 bombing that damaged the city's main synagogue and shattered some of the community's illusions of comfortable assimilation. The Holocaust portion of the museum draws on the memories and videotaped histories, photographs and artifacts of Atlantans who were survivors of Nazi death camps or who, as children, were spirited out of Germany by family members who did not survive. Designed by one of those children, Benjamin Hirsch, a local architect, the space uses floor and wall treatments to suggest changes in time and circumstances -- from the quaint cobblestones of an old European city to the stark concrete of Nazi Germany. There is a reproduction of the 11-foot wall of the Warsaw ghetto and the weathered wooden slats of box cars, suggesting the span from Hitler's rise to power in 1933 to the horrors of the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps. In one hallway, leading to a wall-size color photograph of a stretch of railroad tracks going into Birkenau, the walls are covered with the wooden siding of the box cars. Bolted to the ceiling are rail tracks, seeming to reflect the tracks running up to the Birkenau gate. They are the actual rails and wooden ties from the Treblinka death camp, said Ms. Leavey, who recalled being puzzled by this part of the exhibit and observing to Mr. Hirsch that it did not make any sense. "His response was that neither did the Holocaust," Ms. Leavey said.
1996: In an article entitled “A Question of Conscience” appearing in the New York Times, Eugen Weber reviewed "The Statement" by Brian Moore.
The German occupation of France and its factious fallout provide the raw material of Brian Moore's powerful new novel. Between 1940 and 1944, more than one in four of the 330,000 Jews living on French territory were deported. The majority were identified, arrested and shipped off by French administrators and the French police, without whose zealous cooperation German forces in France would have been unable to carry out the job. In a time of want, fear and national humiliation, few of the French cared about what happened to the Jews. While many individuals helped them (otherwise three in four would not have survived), many also denounced, pursued and robbed them. The drumbeat of official Vichy propaganda presented Jews as noxious parasites, and the church went along, fearing godless Communists more than godless Nazis. Some bishops -- and, in their wake, some priests -- denounced such injustice, but most Roman Catholics had other priorities. Objectively, the church, like its Vichy allies, shared in the vicious anti-Semitic policies of those dark years. After 1944, when liberation brushed Vichy aside, a significant portion of the ecclesiastical establishment discovered treasures of Christian charity that had lain dormant in the preceding years. For them and many others, Communism was a greater crime than collaboration, and a lot of bloodstained thugs were sheltered and hidden, or smuggled out of the country. The moral quagmire that resulted provides tantalizing material not only for the historian but for the novelist -- particularly a novelist like Mr. Moore, who has spent his career exploring the complex and contradictory nature of religious and political devotion. Mr. Moore's attention has been caught by the real-life situation of a man named Paul Touvier. While still in his 20's, Mr. Touvier had headed the murderous militia's intelligence and operations unit for the Savoy and Rhone departments, fighting the Resistance and tormenting Jews. After the war, although convicted of treason and sentenced to death in absentia, he received priestly protection that enabled him to have a family and earn a living. In 1971, he was pardoned by President Georges Pompidou in the name of national reconciliation. But the pardon raised a national outcry that affected not only "the torturer of Lyons" but more important figures: high officials who served the Fourth and Fifth Republics as they had served Vichy. One of these was Rene Bousquet, who as Secretary General for Police presided over Vichy's Jewish policy. Another was Maurice Papon, who had done well under Vichy and worked efficiently as General Secretary of the Gironde department to intern and deport Jews. Bousquet prospered as a banker, industrialist and supporter of Francois Mitterrand. Papon, inducted into the Legion of Honor in 1948 "for 18 years of public service," became the police prefect of Paris. Compared with such men, Mr. Touvier was in the minor leagues. While they grew respectable, rich and powerful, he lived on faked papers, passed counterfeit bills, traded on the black market, informed for the police -- and became a groupie of Jacques Brel. But in June of 1944 Mr. Touvier had selected seven Jews to be shot as hostages, and this qualified as a crime against humanity, something that could not be wiped out by a presidential pardon. After dilatory court procedures and further years in hiding, Mr. Touvier was rearrested in 1989, tried, retried, convicted and finally sentenced to life in prison. This is the background of the fascinating story told by Mr. Moore in "The Statement," a roman a clef that can be read with equal suspense by those who know the context and those who don't.
2002: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including 'Masters of Death': Himmler's Willing Executioners” by Richard Rhodes and ''Trains of Thought,'' by Victor Brombert
2003: Comedian Buddy Hacket passes away at the age of 68
2006: In the evening, Jonathan Michael Kerbis participates in Friday Night services as part of becoming a Bar Mitzvah.
2006: Ismar Schorsch, the sixth Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, retired. For more information about the life of this famed Jewish scholar and author see the following JTS sponsored website. http://www.jtsa.edu/progs/his/isschorsch/index.shtml
2007: Paul Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank, officially resigns his position.
2008: In New York, the 92nd Street Y presents “Debra Winger in Conversation with Arliss Howard” during which Arliss Howard interviews his actress wife who was raised as an Orthodox Jew in Cleveland Heights, spent time on a Kibbutz in Israel and was called to the Torah during her son’s Bar Mitzvah in 2000.
2009: In New York, Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of Presidents Major American Jewish Organizations delivers the Fourth Annual Gershon Jacobson Memorial Lecture, with an address entitled “The Media and Silencing the Support for Israel.”
2009: In the Czech Republic the Holocaust Era Assets Conference comes to an end.
2009: Phoebus Energy is scheduled to unveil its first hybrid water heating system at the Gilo community center in Jerusalem today.
2009: Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak is scheduled to meet with George Mitchell, the special envoy to the Middle East, in Washington, D.C. today.
2009: A concert featuring 100 cantors from the world is scheduled to take place in Warsaw at The Grand Opera which is less than a kilometer from Tlomackie Synagogue which the Nazi blew up during World War II.
713 CE: In Spain, Visigoth nobility which had held out against the invading Moslem forces, throughout the winter of 712 finally surrendered to the Arabs. A majority of the remaining Goths and Hispano-Roman people who lived in the newly acquired areas eventually converted to Islam. The Jews, who had been persecuted by the ruling Goths, proved to be the exception. They kept their religious identity and flourished under the new rulers.
1294: The Jewish community of Berne, Switzerland forfeited all financial claims against non-Jews, and then was expelled from the country.
1298: The Jewish community of Morgentheim, Austria was massacred.
1470: Birthdate of Charles VIII, King of France. In 1494, Charles invaded Italy leading to the occupation of the Kingdom of Naples in 1495. Charles conquest led to increased persecutions of the Jewish population which lead to their expulsion in 1510, two years after his death.
1680: In Madrid, an Auto de Fe was held in honor of the marriage of Carlos II to Louis Marie d’Orleans. It took place in the Plaza Mayor and lasted 14 hours. Over 50,000 spectators came to see 118 accused sentenced to prison or burned. It marked the last time that a "royal" auto was held since Carlos’ successor, Philip V, refused the "honor." took place in the Plaza Mayor
1838: The Swedish government abolished discrimination against Jews. Unfortunately due to public objections it was repealed. Another 30 years were to pass before Jews were given the right to vote.
1866: Today the Bucharest Synagogue was desecrated and demolished (it was rebuilt in the same year, then restored in 1932 and 1945). Many Jews were beaten, maimed, and robbed. As a result, Article 6 was withdrawn and Article 7 was added to the 1866 Constitution; it read that "only such aliens as are of the Christian faith may obtain citizenship". When Charles von Hohenzollern succeeded Cuza in 1866 as Carol I of Romania, the first event that confronted him in the capital was a riot against the Jews. A draft of a constitution was then submitted by the government, Article 6 of which declared that "religion is no obstacle to citizenship"; but, "with regard to the Jews, a special law will have to be framed in order to regulate their admission to naturalization and also to civil rights".
1902: Herzl began a journey to London seeking support for his plans for a Jewish homeland. The journey lasted until July 17.
1904: Herzl suffers a severe bronchial catarrh, which turns into pneumonia. Oskar Marmorek proceeds to Edlac with two doctors.
1905: Albert Einstein publishes the article "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" where he introduces special relativity.
1911: A Jew, Abraham Benrubi, former President of the Tribunal of Commerce at Cavalla (Turkey) was appointed Judge of the Court of Appeal in Jerusalem.
1911: Two Ottoman deputies of Jerusalem, Ruhi Bey and Said Bey, receive numerous letters and telegrams complaining of their anti-Jewish speeches in the Turkish.
1915: After electing officers for the national organization, the Federation of American Zionists closed tonight what is on all sides is “acclaimed as the most beneficial convention of Jews ever held.” Dr. Harry Friedenwald of Baltimore was elected President. Other officers chosen were Chairman of Executive Committee, Louis Lipsky of New York; Honorary Secretary, Bernard A. Rosenblatt of New York, and Treasurer, Louis Robison of New York. The delegates to the convention received a pleasant surprise at this closing session when it was announced that Nathan Starus, the famed philanthropist had turned over his private yacht, valued at between $35,000 and $50,000, to the Zionists to help them deal with the looming financial shortfall.
1917: Birthdate of Bernard “Buddy” Rich. Born in Brooklyn, Rich is best remembered as one of the greatest drummers of all times. Later in his career he was the leader of his own group – The Buddy Rich Band. According to one legend, when on his deathbed a nurse asked him if anything was bothering him, Rich replied, “Yes, country music."
1922: The Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the Reform movement's professional organization, meeting in Cape May, N.J., voted 56 to 11 to affirm in principle the right of women to become rabbis.
1920: Sir Herbert Samuel the first high commissioner for Palestine arrives in Jaffa and is received with a military ceremony. Samuel served in the position for five years. He was the son of Edwin Louis Samuel, a successful Anglo-Jewish banker. Samuel had been raised as an Orthodox Jew and although according to at least one source, he ceased to be a practicing Jew but remained active in Jewish affairs..
1924: Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael De Haan, a Dutch born Jew who was a leader of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community opposed to Zionism was shot outside of the synagogue moments after finishing his evening prayers. De Haan was scheduled to lead a delegation of ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews to London where he planned to make their case to the British government. His killer was rumored to be a fellow Jew. The Jewish community of Jerusalem, regardless of political affiliation was shocked by the killing and 20,000 people turned out for his funeral. Forty years after the crime took place a 1970 broadcast on Israeli radio revealed that the killer had been a member of Haganah who had killed De Haan because he was viewed as a traitor.
1926: Birthdate of Paul Berg, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1980.
1927: Henry Ford retracted and apologized for the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
1934: Night of the Long Knives: Hitler ordered the execution of some of the SA (Sturm Abteilungen) leaders of whose absolute loyalty he questioned including Ernst Roehm. Until then the SS under Himmler was subordinate to the SA. The SS now became independent and was given charge of the concentration camps.
1936: Polish Jews strike to protest anti-Semitism
1937: “A tower and stockade kibbutz was established at Tirat Zevi (Zevi’s Castle) 6 miles south-east of Beisan and less than a mile from the Jordan border.”
1937: Under the auspices of the Bialiki Association, Chiam Nachman Bialik’s house was opened to the public. The public display included: the archives of Bialik’s manuscripts and that of other writers, Bialik’s private library and a museum with the poet’s personal possessions.
1941: Ninety Jews are murdered at Dobromil, Ukraine.
1941: German troops enter Lvov, Ukraine, and beat hundreds of Jews to death after running them ragged at gunpoint.
1941 Three hundred young Jews are deported from Amsterdam, Holland, to stone quarries at the Mauthausen, Austria, concentration camp. All will eventually perish.
1941: American radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin celebrates Hitler's invasion of Russia as "the first strike in the holy war on communism" and attacks "the British-Jewish-Roosevelt war on Germany and Italy."
1941: The Germans entered Lvov, Soviet Union, cite of the third largest Jewish Community after Warsaw and Lodz.
Thousands of Jews would be tortured and slaughtered at the hands of rampaging mobs.
1941: In Amsterdam, 300 Jews were deported to work camps.
1941: In Denmark, a collaborationist SS organization, Freikorps Danmark (Danish Free Corps), is established.
1941: In Belorussia, a guerrilla collaborationist organization, Belaruskaya Narodnaya Partizanka (Belorussian National Guerrillas), is established.
1941: In Latvia, Viktor Arajs establishes the Perkonkrusts (Thunder Cross), a collaborationist paramilitary unit.
1941: Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, tells Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, that Hitler has ordered that the "Jewish question" be solved once and for all and that the SS is to implement that order. Auschwitz is the death camp that is to carry out the greater part of the Jewish extermination. Mass gassings, not shootings, are determined to be the most effective means to exterminate the large numbers of Jews.
1942: A headline in the London Daily Telegraph reads: "MORE THAN 1,000,000 JEWS KILLED IN EUROPE."
1942: Three-year-old Jewish twins in Sosnowiec, Poland, Ida and Adam Paluch, are spirited away from Gestapo agents by their aunt and sent to live with separate Catholic families
1944: By now, more than 500 Jews are being secretly protected by industrialist Oskar Schindler.
1944: Joel Brand and Rudolf Kasztner working together with the Jewish Agency and the War Refugee board concluded a deal with and Adolph Eichmann. It became known as “Blut fuer Ware” ("Blood for Goods"). This date marked the first of three transports from Hungary to Switzerland. A total of 3344 Jews were sent on a special transport at a price of $1,000 per head. The deal was the subject of a great amount of controversy and later even resulted in a defamation trial, which reached the Israeli Supreme Court in June of 1955.
1944: One thousand, seven hundred, ninety-five Jews arrived from Corfu arrived at Birkenau.
1944 The crematoria at Auschwitz are working at full capacity when 2044 Jews from Corfu and Athens, Greece, arrive. At day's end, lightning rods on crematoria chimneys are warped from the heat generated by the furnaces.
1945: "Lest We Forget," an exhibition of death-camp photography organized by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Washington Evening Star began a tour in Boston, Massachusetts, and then on into Midwest. By tours end nearly 90,000 Americans will have viewed this testament of the Holocaust.
1948: The last British armed forces left Israel.
1948: An Israeli convoy led by commandos arrives at the isolated settlement of Kfar Darom, south of Gaza. The convoy brought food for the Jews and was supposed to evacuate the wounded and the women. The Egyptians were able to prevent the convoy from departing which meant that the commandos and the defenders would now be forced to share the meager supplies as they wait for relief from the outside.
1952: Guiding Light, a soap opera created by Irna Phillips, debuted on television on. It is one of the longest-running daily television programs.
1953: Between May 15, 1948 and June 30, 1953, the Jewish population of Israel doubled from 640,000 to 1.3 million.
1956: Between May 15, 1948 and June 30, 1956, the Jewish population of Israel tripled from 640,000 to 2.1 million.
1959: American composer Lazare Saminsky passed away at Port Chester, NY. Born in Russian in 1882 he was a pupil of Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov at the St Petersburg and Moscow conservatories from 1906 until 1910. He moved in 1920 to New York, where in 1923 he was a founder of the League of Composers. He was musical director of Temple Emanu-El from 1924 until 1956 and author of several books. Saminsky wrote Jewish liturgical music and drew on Jewish sources for his five symphonies, choral music and songs.
1962: LA Dodger Sandy Koufax pitches another no-hitter. This time he beat the Mets 5-0.
1966: The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded at a meeting in Betty Friedan's hotel room.
1971: Herbert Biberman, screenwriter, director and part of the Hollywood Ten, passed away
1976: Catcher Jeff Newman made his major league debut with the Oakland Athletics.
1984: Playwright Lillian Hellman passed away.
1985: In an article entitled “Yuppies with Fetlocks” Jean Franco reviews “The Centaur in the Garden by Moacyr Scliar.; translated by Margaret A. Neves. “This novel…is reminiscent of the Chagall paintings in which the scenes of everyday Jewish life are tenderly and oddly transmuted into fantasy. ''The Centaur in the Garden'' is set..on a farm in southern Brazil, in one of the colonies of Jewish immigrants established there at the beginning of this century by the German-Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch…One Jewish family's struggle to make a living in these unfamiliar and lonely surroundings is thwarted by the birth of the youngest child, Guedali, who is a centaur.
1992: Prosecution of East European Nazi collaborators who had gained entry to the country posing as innocent refugees from Communism by Australia's "Special Investigations Unit" met with failure and the prosecution effort for all practical purposes was shut down on this date.
1994: Catcher Mike Lieberthal made his major league debut with the Philadelphia Phillies.
1996: An article entitled “New Museum Traces 2 Paths Into Jewish History in Atlanta” appears in the New York Times
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEFDD1339F933A05755C0A960958260
Visitors standing in the high-ceilinged foyer of the new William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum here have a choice. They can begin their journey through time and history by entering a portal on the left marked "The Holocaust" or one on the right labeled "Creating Community: The Jews of Atlanta from 1845 to the Present." Once inside, the two sections of the 50,000-square-foot museum flow into one another, but the choice at the beginning, said the museum's director, Jane Leavey, is the real point. The only place in the school curriculums here where they talk about Jews is with regard to the Holocaust, and that is Jews as victims," said Ms. Leavey in a preview tour this week of the museum that is to open on Sunday. "Here we have an opportunity to say there was a Jewish community here long before Hitler and one long after Hitler." The design and rationale of the Atlanta museum is part of what James Young, a professor of Judaic studies and English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, sees as part of an increasingly common but still controversial effort to "contextualize and expand Jewish history" memorials in the United States. American Jews, especially in communities with significant numbers of survivors of the death camps, Professor Young said, have been moving very gingerly over the years to broaden the Jewish identity in the memorials and museums while not losing sight of the significance of the Holocaust. In some cases, he said, the "muted debate" over the pivotal role of the Holocaust has led to bifurcation of museums and memorials. That is the case, he said, in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the Holocaust is memorialized at one site and Jewish heritage is celebrated at another across town. But increasingly, the idea is to combine the two, Professor Young said. "This is an altogether healthier approach to Jewish history," he said, noting that it embraced the tensions of assimilation, achievement and community that are part of the immigrant experience generally, along with events that had contributed to immigration. "With vicariously remembered catastrophes such as the massacre of native Americans, the enslaving of African-Americans and the Holocaust," Professor Young said, "history can be reduced to competing catastrophes, and that reduces its richness. Three thousand years should not be collapsed into 12 calamitous years." Indeed, said Miles Lerman, chairman of the board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the juxtaposition and coexistence of the darkness that was the Holocaust and the relative light that was the evolution of Atlanta's Jewish community serve to "make clearer the contrast between evil and goodness" in Jewish history. With this idea in mind the new museum here, 13 years in the making, was created by the Atlanta Jewish Federation. The museum, named for a local philanthropist, has exhibits dating to 1733, when Jews first settled in Georgia as part of the largely Methodist settlement of James Oglethorpe in Savannah. It is presumed that the first Jews to arrive in Atlanta came from that settlement. In 1845, two peddlers, Jacob Haas and Henry Levi, moved to Atlanta where they opened a dry goods store. Census data show that after 10 years there were 26 Jews among Atlanta's 2,572 residents and by 1870, when the first synagogue was opened, barely 300. According to projections from population surveys, Ms. Leavey said that there are now about 75,000 Jews among the Atlanta metropolitan area's 2.4 million people. The Jewish heritage exhibit presents a primer on Jewish religion and culture and then a glimpse at the religion's key rituals before going on to document the role of Jews in the city's development through artifacts, photographs, newspaper clippings and official records. A significant portion of the exhibit focuses on the 1917 lynching of Leo Frank by an anti-Semitic mob in nearby Marietta, where he was held after being wrongly accused of the rape and murder of a young woman, and the 1958 bombing that damaged the city's main synagogue and shattered some of the community's illusions of comfortable assimilation. The Holocaust portion of the museum draws on the memories and videotaped histories, photographs and artifacts of Atlantans who were survivors of Nazi death camps or who, as children, were spirited out of Germany by family members who did not survive. Designed by one of those children, Benjamin Hirsch, a local architect, the space uses floor and wall treatments to suggest changes in time and circumstances -- from the quaint cobblestones of an old European city to the stark concrete of Nazi Germany. There is a reproduction of the 11-foot wall of the Warsaw ghetto and the weathered wooden slats of box cars, suggesting the span from Hitler's rise to power in 1933 to the horrors of the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps. In one hallway, leading to a wall-size color photograph of a stretch of railroad tracks going into Birkenau, the walls are covered with the wooden siding of the box cars. Bolted to the ceiling are rail tracks, seeming to reflect the tracks running up to the Birkenau gate. They are the actual rails and wooden ties from the Treblinka death camp, said Ms. Leavey, who recalled being puzzled by this part of the exhibit and observing to Mr. Hirsch that it did not make any sense. "His response was that neither did the Holocaust," Ms. Leavey said.
1996: In an article entitled “A Question of Conscience” appearing in the New York Times, Eugen Weber reviewed "The Statement" by Brian Moore.
The German occupation of France and its factious fallout provide the raw material of Brian Moore's powerful new novel. Between 1940 and 1944, more than one in four of the 330,000 Jews living on French territory were deported. The majority were identified, arrested and shipped off by French administrators and the French police, without whose zealous cooperation German forces in France would have been unable to carry out the job. In a time of want, fear and national humiliation, few of the French cared about what happened to the Jews. While many individuals helped them (otherwise three in four would not have survived), many also denounced, pursued and robbed them. The drumbeat of official Vichy propaganda presented Jews as noxious parasites, and the church went along, fearing godless Communists more than godless Nazis. Some bishops -- and, in their wake, some priests -- denounced such injustice, but most Roman Catholics had other priorities. Objectively, the church, like its Vichy allies, shared in the vicious anti-Semitic policies of those dark years. After 1944, when liberation brushed Vichy aside, a significant portion of the ecclesiastical establishment discovered treasures of Christian charity that had lain dormant in the preceding years. For them and many others, Communism was a greater crime than collaboration, and a lot of bloodstained thugs were sheltered and hidden, or smuggled out of the country. The moral quagmire that resulted provides tantalizing material not only for the historian but for the novelist -- particularly a novelist like Mr. Moore, who has spent his career exploring the complex and contradictory nature of religious and political devotion. Mr. Moore's attention has been caught by the real-life situation of a man named Paul Touvier. While still in his 20's, Mr. Touvier had headed the murderous militia's intelligence and operations unit for the Savoy and Rhone departments, fighting the Resistance and tormenting Jews. After the war, although convicted of treason and sentenced to death in absentia, he received priestly protection that enabled him to have a family and earn a living. In 1971, he was pardoned by President Georges Pompidou in the name of national reconciliation. But the pardon raised a national outcry that affected not only "the torturer of Lyons" but more important figures: high officials who served the Fourth and Fifth Republics as they had served Vichy. One of these was Rene Bousquet, who as Secretary General for Police presided over Vichy's Jewish policy. Another was Maurice Papon, who had done well under Vichy and worked efficiently as General Secretary of the Gironde department to intern and deport Jews. Bousquet prospered as a banker, industrialist and supporter of Francois Mitterrand. Papon, inducted into the Legion of Honor in 1948 "for 18 years of public service," became the police prefect of Paris. Compared with such men, Mr. Touvier was in the minor leagues. While they grew respectable, rich and powerful, he lived on faked papers, passed counterfeit bills, traded on the black market, informed for the police -- and became a groupie of Jacques Brel. But in June of 1944 Mr. Touvier had selected seven Jews to be shot as hostages, and this qualified as a crime against humanity, something that could not be wiped out by a presidential pardon. After dilatory court procedures and further years in hiding, Mr. Touvier was rearrested in 1989, tried, retried, convicted and finally sentenced to life in prison. This is the background of the fascinating story told by Mr. Moore in "The Statement," a roman a clef that can be read with equal suspense by those who know the context and those who don't.
2002: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including 'Masters of Death': Himmler's Willing Executioners” by Richard Rhodes and ''Trains of Thought,'' by Victor Brombert
2003: Comedian Buddy Hacket passes away at the age of 68
2006: In the evening, Jonathan Michael Kerbis participates in Friday Night services as part of becoming a Bar Mitzvah.
2006: Ismar Schorsch, the sixth Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, retired. For more information about the life of this famed Jewish scholar and author see the following JTS sponsored website. http://www.jtsa.edu/progs/his/isschorsch/index.shtml
2007: Paul Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank, officially resigns his position.
2008: In New York, the 92nd Street Y presents “Debra Winger in Conversation with Arliss Howard” during which Arliss Howard interviews his actress wife who was raised as an Orthodox Jew in Cleveland Heights, spent time on a Kibbutz in Israel and was called to the Torah during her son’s Bar Mitzvah in 2000.
2009: In New York, Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of Presidents Major American Jewish Organizations delivers the Fourth Annual Gershon Jacobson Memorial Lecture, with an address entitled “The Media and Silencing the Support for Israel.”
2009: In the Czech Republic the Holocaust Era Assets Conference comes to an end.
2009: Phoebus Energy is scheduled to unveil its first hybrid water heating system at the Gilo community center in Jerusalem today.
2009: Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak is scheduled to meet with George Mitchell, the special envoy to the Middle East, in Washington, D.C. today.
2009: A concert featuring 100 cantors from the world is scheduled to take place in Warsaw at The Grand Opera which is less than a kilometer from Tlomackie Synagogue which the Nazi blew up during World War II.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
This Day, June 29, In Jewish History
JUNE 29 In Jewish History
1096: Crusaders massacred the Jews of Mehr.
1397: Birthdate of John II of Aragon who reigned from 1456 until his death in 1479. During John’s reign Conversos and Jews held positions of power and influence. John even employed a Jew as his personal physician. Within 13 years of his death, the Jews would be expelled from the Iberian Peninsula.
1494: A fire broke out destroying part of Warsaw. The Jews were accused of setting the fire and attacked. King John I ordered them to leave the city and move to the "suburb" of Kazimierz, which became the first Polish ghetto. Jews were confined to the ghetto until 1868.
1654: In Cuenca, Spain, 57 Marranos were taken to the auto-da-fe. Ten were burnt to death. One of them, Balthasar Lopez, announced as he was taken to the stake "I don't believe in Christ even if you bind me." He had returned recently from Bayonne in order to persuade his nephew to return to Judaism when he was captured by the Inquisition.
1654: A large auto-de-fe took place in Cuenca where many were burned to death. One man about to be burned threw the crucifix away from him. A priest scrambled to retrieve it and managed to talk the man into holding it again. As the executioner began to do his job, the priest asked if the man was truly repent, the dying man looked at him and said, "Father…do you think that this is a time to joke?"
1756: Schoeneche Moses, A.M. Rothschild’s mother, dies from smallpox.
1891: In Xanten, Prussia, the libelous charges of ritual murder were uttered publicly. The rise of anti-Semitism culminating in this libel resulted in an exodus of Jews from Germany to the United States and other countries.
1896: Herzl leaves Turkey in possession of the "Commander's Cross of the Order of the Medjidje" as visible evidence of the seriousness of the negotiations. On the way back to Vienna, Herzl spends a few hours in Sofia. He his conducted to the Zionist Society and the synagogue. Hundreds of people cheer him.
1903: Birthdate of Alan Blumlein, English engineer, who played a key role in developing electronic equipment for the RAF that was critical in holding the Germans at bay in the years following the fall of France in 1940.
1908: Birthdate of Dr. Cyrus H. Gordon, American Jewish archaeological scholar. Dr. Cyrus H. Gordon was a scholar of Near East culture and a leading expert on ancient languages. Dr. Gordon was professor of Near Eastern studies at Brandeis University from 1956 to 1973 and chairman of its department of Mediterranean studies from 1958 to 1973. He was a professor of Hebrew studies at New York University from 1973 to 1989, when he retired. In part, his claim to fame came from his writings on Ugaritic, an ancient language spoken in part of what is today is modern Syria. Based on his linguistic and other studies, Dr. Gordon believed that the Greeks and the Israelites had a common cultural origin. Dr. Gordon passed away in 2001.
1910: Birthdate of composer Frank Loesser. Loesser wrote such Broadway hits as “Guys and Dolls” and “How To Succeed in Business Without Trying.” He won an Oscar for "Baby It's Cold Outside." He passed away in 1969.
1911: Birthdate of composer Bernard Herrmann. This son of Jewish immigrants from Russia created the theme music of a whole host of films. He created the music for the Orson Wells’ classics, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Amberson. He was a favorite of Alfred Hitchcock for whom provided the theme muic for Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho. He passed away in 1975. Herrmann is another example of the Jewish role in creating modern American culture.
1923: Meyer Dizengoff, Mayor of Tel Aviv, addresses a letter to the New York Times thanking everybody from the Mayor on down for the hospitality shown to him during his recent trip to New York. He expressed his hope that the “first Jewish city” would benefit from the things shown him including the city’s public utility system.
1924: Birthdate of composer Ezra Laderman. Laderman is a leading 20th century classical composer. He has won the Rome Prize and several Guggenheim Fellowships. He has taught at several leading institutions including Sarah Laurence and has been the visiting composer at Yale
.
1926: Arthur Meighen returns to office as Prime Minister of Canada. In 1925, while serving as leader of the “loyal opposition” he spoke during ceremonies dedicating the new Hebrew University. Echoing traditional English-Canadian views on the Holy Land and Jewish restoration., Meighen said, “Of all the results” of World War “none is more important and more fertile in human history than the re-conquest of Palestine and the rededication of that country to the Jewish people.” Meighen went on to express the hope that “Jews in Canada [would] take a proper pride in this great event and that the sons of generations to come may go back to the land of their destiny.”
1929: Birthdate of Edgar Bronfman, Sr. CEO of Seagram’s until 1994
1930: Birthdate of producer Robert Evans
1936: The Palestine Post reported that a government school was set on fire in Jaffa. Sniping continued on convoys of buses traveling on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv and Jerusalem-Hebron roads. The long-awaited reply of the Arab Higher Committee addressed to the High Commissioner and the Colonial Office stated that the British government continued to ignore all its undertakings given to the Arab people.
1938 (30th of Sivan, 5698): Chanting the song of the Revisionist party and dressed in its uniform, 19-year-old Solomon ben Yosef steadily walked to the gallows in the troop-surrounded prison at Acre at 8 A. M. He was sentenced to be hanged by the British for alleged terrorist activities, which in fact consisted of being part of a group that scared away Arabs by firing a shot in the air. His last words were "Yechi Jabotinsky (Long live Jabotinsky); Lamut o Lichbosh et Hahar (To die or take the mountain)" after which he sang “Hatikvah.” No Rabbi was present since today was Rosh ChodeshTammuz. In fact, some Jews had hoped that the British might use this as an excuse for commuting his death sentence. British airplanes, policemen and troops
tonight patrolled a Palestine which had been made tense by the hanging of the Jewish youth.
1939: Thirteen Arabs were killed and four wounded in shooting outrages in the early hours of this morning in Southern Palestine. Two of the victims were shot dead on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. In general, Jewish opinion condemns the attacks on innocent Arab civilians. “This evening’s edition of the daily Davar headlines all its news with this bold type query: ‘Who will put an end to the outrages that sully our struggle and ruin our population.’” The attacks are seen as a reaction to the new British land law that “is regarded even by moderates as flagrant breach of faith on the part of Great Britain to the Jews.”
1939: “Early this morning a boat carrying 742 Jewish immigrants trying to land clandestinely without visas was apprehended by the Coast Guard near Gaza”. The passengers were taken by train to Haifa. If they are released, their number will be deducted from small quota of “legal Jews” who will be allowed to enter Palestine.
1941 (4th of Tammuz, 5701): In Jassy, Rumania; soldiers and police, under the watch of the SS, kill over 260 Jews. 5,000 other Jews are stripped of all belongings and then placed into cattle cars, (over 100 in each), and sent to Mirteshet. On the way over 600 Jews would die. Once there another 327 would die. Within an eight-day period, over 2,500 people would die during the train ride.
1941: Nazis murdered the male Jews of Drobian, Lithuania.
1942: One-year anniversary of the founding of the Judenrat in Bialystok. A quote from Ephraim Barash's diary captured the feelings of the time, "It is lucky that we cannot foresee the future, for if we could, we would not have lived and reached the present stage. There is no place for optimism in the ghetto."
1942(14th of Tammuz, 5702): Armed Jewish resistance takes place at Slonim, Belorussia. The Germans burn Jews to death, killing nearly 15,000.
1942: A 13-year-old girl in Amsterdam who would gain fame as Anne Frank wrote in the diary which she had received as a birthday present only eight days before: "I want to write, but, more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart."
1942: A second gas chamber begins functioning at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
1943 (26th of Sivan, 5703): South of Warsaw, five Poles are shot for hiding four Jews. The latter also are shot.
1943 (26th of Sivan, 5703): At the Biala-Waka labor camp near Vilna, Lithuania, 67 inmates are shot as reprisal for the escape of six Jews to a nearby forest.
1945: Churchill writes to Weizmann justifying his decision to continue the White Paper of 1939 by reminding the Jewish leaders that many Conservative MP’s were opposed to the Zionist cause and that many members of the Labor Party were adopting the view as well. He urged Weizmann to stop looking to the British and seek support from the United States to gain the opening of Palestine to Jewish immigration.
1946: This day was the Black Sabbath in Pre-state Israel. In the largest operation to date, thousands of British soldiers and policemen raid kibbutzim looking for hidden weapons. The British arrested 2,700 Jews living legally in Palestine in an attempt to destroy the Yishuv. The British dubbed this action “Operation Agatha” and Kibbutz Yagur, an important center for the Haganah, was a major focal point for their raids. The British claimed their actions were part of a plan to stamp out terrorism. Apparently, there were no Arab terrorists since no Arabs we arrested.
1946: A scheduled luncheon meeting between Abba Eban and Moshe Sharett is cancelled amid reports that the British are arresting large numbers of Zionist leaders.
1947: Birthdate of comedian Richard Lewis.
1949: Birthdate of Micky Arison an Israeli-American businessman and the Chief Executive Officer of Carnival Corporation, the world's largest cruise operator, and owner of the NBA's Miami Heat. At one time, Forbes magazine places Arison's wealth at $6.1 billion, making him the 94th wealthiest person in the world as of 2006. He is the son of the late Ted Arison, Carnival Corporation's founder and the brother of Shari Arison reputed to be the wealthiest woman in Israel. While Arison is a resident of Miami, he maintains a home in Israel.
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that the zone limits scheme, imposed on the public by the Ministry of Transportation in order to save foreign currency, will continue. M.S. Tamar, Zim's newest fruit-carrier vessel, was launched in Holland.
1952: Travel writer Diana Rice describes the progress being made on constructing the Nordeau Plaza Hotel in Tel Aviv. The hotel is scheduled to open in September. The four million dollar seaside structure boasts luxury suites, a variety of shops inteneded to attract tourists and a banquet hall that will seat 1,000.
1955: Israel Rokach completes his term as Interior Minister.
1955: Haim-Moshe Shapira begins his term as Minister of Internal Affairs.
1967: The official reunification of Jerusalem begins as 8,570 acres of west Jerusalem are united with 18,750 acres of east Jerusalem. It was not only Jews who hailed this event. Nabil Khoury wrote in the Beirut weekly al-Hawadith, ‘On June 29, in Jaffa Road, the main street of Jerusalem, the Hebrew tongue disappeared. On that day, along the entire length of the street, Palestinian Arabic, in all its different dialects, was heard.’
1967: In Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion told his supporters that “the re-building of Jerusalem must be at the center of the national effort.” These words followed naturally for the man who had fought to keep the road to Jerusalem open during the dark days of 1947-1948 when so many told him that it could not be done.
1976: The Jerusalem Post reported from Entebbe, Uganda, that hijackers held there more than 250 Air France Airbus passengers and threatened to blow them all up if Uganda's security forces intervened. Uganda's President Idi Amin paid a visit to the hijackers. The Israeli Embassy in Paris was assured that France would do everything it could to secure the release of all hijacked passengers
1990: Author Irving Wallace passed away.
1997: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Handsome Is Adventures With Saul Bellow: A Memoir”by Harriet Wasserman, “The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich”by Michael H. Kater and “A Tale of Two Continents: A Physicist's Life in a Turbulent World," the autobiography of Dutch born Jewish physicist Abraham Pais
2007: At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem an exhibit entitled “Yemima Ergas: Hidden Cities” opens. “A new series of drawings by artist Yemima Ergas depicts fantastical cityscapes reminiscent of the majestic Modernist architecture of the early twentieth century. In the delicate pencil and charcoal drawings we see bridges, public buildings, factories, and stadiums, but a longer look reveals that it is all a fiction – we are in fact looking at discarded computer motherboards.”
2007: In Jerusalem, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra performs Berg`s Concerto for Violin and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Sherover Theater at The Jerusalem Theater
2007: As part of his plea bargain President Moshe Katsav resigned as President of Israel. Katsav is schedule to be indicted on Sunday July 1. At the time he is expected to plead guilty to to three charges, and will receive a suspended sentence and be ordered to pay compensation to the complainants. While one of the charges will be for a serious sex related crime, under the terms of the plea bargain he will not be charged with rape.
2007: Acting President Dalia Itzik replaces Moshe Katsav and will serve as President of Israel until July 15 when President-elect Shimon Peres takes office. Ms. Itzik is a 54 year old native of Jerusalem who has enjoyed a long poltical career.
2007: Joel Siegel, Emmy Award-winning film critic for ABC’s “Good Morning American” passed away at the age of 63.
2008: In Chicago, the Spertus features “Private Lives of Public Figures: How Moral Do Our Leaders Need To Be?” From King David to contemporary politicians, leaders who engage in immoral or unethical behavior inevitably face questions regarding their suitability to govern. What do Jewish sources say about these issues? Should moral turpitude exclude someone from public office? Are all transgressions the same? Exactly how moral do our leaders need to be? In this text-based study session and discussion, facilitated by Jewish leadership scholar Dr. Hal M. Lewis, participants look at several classical Jewish sources that address these and related matters. Hal M. Lewis is Dean of Public Programming and Continuing Education at Spertus, where he also serves as Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies. A recognized authority on Jewish leadership, he is author of Models and Meanings in the History of Jewish Leadership and From Sanctuary to Boardroom: A Jewish Approach to Leadership.
2008: Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois holds it annual meeting and presents “Ask the Experts at Temple Beth Israel in Skokie, Il. www.jewishgen.org/jgsi
2008: The Sunday New York Times book section features reviews of "The Spies of Warsaw," a novel by Jewish mystery writer Alan Furst, "The Hebrew Republic:How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last" by Bernard Avishai and "Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands," Michael Chabon’s first collection of nonfiction as well as an essay entitled “Cultural Crossroads of the Levant” which describes Ibis Editions “a boutique Jerusalem Press owned by the husband and wife team of Peter Cole, a MacArthur award-winning poet and translator, and Adina Hoffman, a biographer and critic that has published English translations of works in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, German and Judeo-Spanish — all relating to the Levant.
2008: The Washington Post book section features reviews of "The Dream" by Harry Bernstein and "America America" by Ethan Canin
2008: At Congregation Ansche Chesed on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, One World Symphony presents a performance of the opera “Adriadne Auf Naxos” by composer Richard Strauss who was appointed President of the German State Music Bureau by Joseph Gobbels. In fairness to Strauss he later resigned the position and is credit with saving “several Jewish lives later in the war, specifically those of his daughter-in-law and her son.” On the other hand, the true measure of the man may be found in his 1945 declaration “that the Allied bombing of the Hoftheater, his favorite opera house in Munich, was ‘the greatest catastrophe that has ever disturbed my life.
2008: Israel’s government voted to trade one of the most notorious convicts in its prisons, a Lebanese murderer, for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers whose cross-border capture led to and partly motivated its month long war with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah in summer 2006. After a wrenching national debate that drove hesitant officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, to accept the deal, the cabinet voted 22 to 3 to trade the prisoner, Samir Kuntar, along with four other Lebanese, for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two Israeli soldiers. Mr. Kuntar was part of a cell that in 1979 raided the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, fatally shooting a civilian, Danny Haran, while his daughter Einat, 4, watched, then smashing the girl’s head, killing her as well. Mr. Haran’s wife, Smadar, hid with their 2-year-old daughter, accidentally suffocating her in an effort to stop her from crying out.
2008: Veteran Civil Rights leader John Lewis was honored at a luncheon on Sunday by New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind and the black-Jewish Alliance, which was inaugurated in January to address the 25 percent surge in anti-Semitic and racist incidents in the black and Jewish communities. The luncheon, hosted by Joe Lazar, who is running for City Council in September 2009, included 40 black and Jewish elected officials and community leaders. "As blacks and Jews, the wind may blow, the rain may beat down on an old house, be it a house in Brooklyn, Atlanta, America, Israel or Africa, but we all live in the same house," Rep. John Lewis, a leader of the civil rights movement who stood behind Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, told a group of Jewish and black leaders in Brooklyn this week. "We are one people, one family and we must stay together and build a society at peace with itself," he added.
2009: Starting today, Cantor Jack Chomsky of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Columbus, helps to lead “Poland to Israel: A Journey Through Time,” in which 100 cantors connect 1,000 years of Jewish History in Poland with 4,000 years of history in the homeland of the Jewish people.
1096: Crusaders massacred the Jews of Mehr.
1397: Birthdate of John II of Aragon who reigned from 1456 until his death in 1479. During John’s reign Conversos and Jews held positions of power and influence. John even employed a Jew as his personal physician. Within 13 years of his death, the Jews would be expelled from the Iberian Peninsula.
1494: A fire broke out destroying part of Warsaw. The Jews were accused of setting the fire and attacked. King John I ordered them to leave the city and move to the "suburb" of Kazimierz, which became the first Polish ghetto. Jews were confined to the ghetto until 1868.
1654: In Cuenca, Spain, 57 Marranos were taken to the auto-da-fe. Ten were burnt to death. One of them, Balthasar Lopez, announced as he was taken to the stake "I don't believe in Christ even if you bind me." He had returned recently from Bayonne in order to persuade his nephew to return to Judaism when he was captured by the Inquisition.
1654: A large auto-de-fe took place in Cuenca where many were burned to death. One man about to be burned threw the crucifix away from him. A priest scrambled to retrieve it and managed to talk the man into holding it again. As the executioner began to do his job, the priest asked if the man was truly repent, the dying man looked at him and said, "Father…do you think that this is a time to joke?"
1756: Schoeneche Moses, A.M. Rothschild’s mother, dies from smallpox.
1891: In Xanten, Prussia, the libelous charges of ritual murder were uttered publicly. The rise of anti-Semitism culminating in this libel resulted in an exodus of Jews from Germany to the United States and other countries.
1896: Herzl leaves Turkey in possession of the "Commander's Cross of the Order of the Medjidje" as visible evidence of the seriousness of the negotiations. On the way back to Vienna, Herzl spends a few hours in Sofia. He his conducted to the Zionist Society and the synagogue. Hundreds of people cheer him.
1903: Birthdate of Alan Blumlein, English engineer, who played a key role in developing electronic equipment for the RAF that was critical in holding the Germans at bay in the years following the fall of France in 1940.
1908: Birthdate of Dr. Cyrus H. Gordon, American Jewish archaeological scholar. Dr. Cyrus H. Gordon was a scholar of Near East culture and a leading expert on ancient languages. Dr. Gordon was professor of Near Eastern studies at Brandeis University from 1956 to 1973 and chairman of its department of Mediterranean studies from 1958 to 1973. He was a professor of Hebrew studies at New York University from 1973 to 1989, when he retired. In part, his claim to fame came from his writings on Ugaritic, an ancient language spoken in part of what is today is modern Syria. Based on his linguistic and other studies, Dr. Gordon believed that the Greeks and the Israelites had a common cultural origin. Dr. Gordon passed away in 2001.
1910: Birthdate of composer Frank Loesser. Loesser wrote such Broadway hits as “Guys and Dolls” and “How To Succeed in Business Without Trying.” He won an Oscar for "Baby It's Cold Outside." He passed away in 1969.
1911: Birthdate of composer Bernard Herrmann. This son of Jewish immigrants from Russia created the theme music of a whole host of films. He created the music for the Orson Wells’ classics, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Amberson. He was a favorite of Alfred Hitchcock for whom provided the theme muic for Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho. He passed away in 1975. Herrmann is another example of the Jewish role in creating modern American culture.
1923: Meyer Dizengoff, Mayor of Tel Aviv, addresses a letter to the New York Times thanking everybody from the Mayor on down for the hospitality shown to him during his recent trip to New York. He expressed his hope that the “first Jewish city” would benefit from the things shown him including the city’s public utility system.
1924: Birthdate of composer Ezra Laderman. Laderman is a leading 20th century classical composer. He has won the Rome Prize and several Guggenheim Fellowships. He has taught at several leading institutions including Sarah Laurence and has been the visiting composer at Yale
.
1926: Arthur Meighen returns to office as Prime Minister of Canada. In 1925, while serving as leader of the “loyal opposition” he spoke during ceremonies dedicating the new Hebrew University. Echoing traditional English-Canadian views on the Holy Land and Jewish restoration., Meighen said, “Of all the results” of World War “none is more important and more fertile in human history than the re-conquest of Palestine and the rededication of that country to the Jewish people.” Meighen went on to express the hope that “Jews in Canada [would] take a proper pride in this great event and that the sons of generations to come may go back to the land of their destiny.”
1929: Birthdate of Edgar Bronfman, Sr. CEO of Seagram’s until 1994
1930: Birthdate of producer Robert Evans
1936: The Palestine Post reported that a government school was set on fire in Jaffa. Sniping continued on convoys of buses traveling on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv and Jerusalem-Hebron roads. The long-awaited reply of the Arab Higher Committee addressed to the High Commissioner and the Colonial Office stated that the British government continued to ignore all its undertakings given to the Arab people.
1938 (30th of Sivan, 5698): Chanting the song of the Revisionist party and dressed in its uniform, 19-year-old Solomon ben Yosef steadily walked to the gallows in the troop-surrounded prison at Acre at 8 A. M. He was sentenced to be hanged by the British for alleged terrorist activities, which in fact consisted of being part of a group that scared away Arabs by firing a shot in the air. His last words were "Yechi Jabotinsky (Long live Jabotinsky); Lamut o Lichbosh et Hahar (To die or take the mountain)" after which he sang “Hatikvah.” No Rabbi was present since today was Rosh ChodeshTammuz. In fact, some Jews had hoped that the British might use this as an excuse for commuting his death sentence. British airplanes, policemen and troops
tonight patrolled a Palestine which had been made tense by the hanging of the Jewish youth.
1939: Thirteen Arabs were killed and four wounded in shooting outrages in the early hours of this morning in Southern Palestine. Two of the victims were shot dead on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. In general, Jewish opinion condemns the attacks on innocent Arab civilians. “This evening’s edition of the daily Davar headlines all its news with this bold type query: ‘Who will put an end to the outrages that sully our struggle and ruin our population.’” The attacks are seen as a reaction to the new British land law that “is regarded even by moderates as flagrant breach of faith on the part of Great Britain to the Jews.”
1939: “Early this morning a boat carrying 742 Jewish immigrants trying to land clandestinely without visas was apprehended by the Coast Guard near Gaza”. The passengers were taken by train to Haifa. If they are released, their number will be deducted from small quota of “legal Jews” who will be allowed to enter Palestine.
1941 (4th of Tammuz, 5701): In Jassy, Rumania; soldiers and police, under the watch of the SS, kill over 260 Jews. 5,000 other Jews are stripped of all belongings and then placed into cattle cars, (over 100 in each), and sent to Mirteshet. On the way over 600 Jews would die. Once there another 327 would die. Within an eight-day period, over 2,500 people would die during the train ride.
1941: Nazis murdered the male Jews of Drobian, Lithuania.
1942: One-year anniversary of the founding of the Judenrat in Bialystok. A quote from Ephraim Barash's diary captured the feelings of the time, "It is lucky that we cannot foresee the future, for if we could, we would not have lived and reached the present stage. There is no place for optimism in the ghetto."
1942(14th of Tammuz, 5702): Armed Jewish resistance takes place at Slonim, Belorussia. The Germans burn Jews to death, killing nearly 15,000.
1942: A 13-year-old girl in Amsterdam who would gain fame as Anne Frank wrote in the diary which she had received as a birthday present only eight days before: "I want to write, but, more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart."
1942: A second gas chamber begins functioning at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
1943 (26th of Sivan, 5703): South of Warsaw, five Poles are shot for hiding four Jews. The latter also are shot.
1943 (26th of Sivan, 5703): At the Biala-Waka labor camp near Vilna, Lithuania, 67 inmates are shot as reprisal for the escape of six Jews to a nearby forest.
1945: Churchill writes to Weizmann justifying his decision to continue the White Paper of 1939 by reminding the Jewish leaders that many Conservative MP’s were opposed to the Zionist cause and that many members of the Labor Party were adopting the view as well. He urged Weizmann to stop looking to the British and seek support from the United States to gain the opening of Palestine to Jewish immigration.
1946: This day was the Black Sabbath in Pre-state Israel. In the largest operation to date, thousands of British soldiers and policemen raid kibbutzim looking for hidden weapons. The British arrested 2,700 Jews living legally in Palestine in an attempt to destroy the Yishuv. The British dubbed this action “Operation Agatha” and Kibbutz Yagur, an important center for the Haganah, was a major focal point for their raids. The British claimed their actions were part of a plan to stamp out terrorism. Apparently, there were no Arab terrorists since no Arabs we arrested.
1946: A scheduled luncheon meeting between Abba Eban and Moshe Sharett is cancelled amid reports that the British are arresting large numbers of Zionist leaders.
1947: Birthdate of comedian Richard Lewis.
1949: Birthdate of Micky Arison an Israeli-American businessman and the Chief Executive Officer of Carnival Corporation, the world's largest cruise operator, and owner of the NBA's Miami Heat. At one time, Forbes magazine places Arison's wealth at $6.1 billion, making him the 94th wealthiest person in the world as of 2006. He is the son of the late Ted Arison, Carnival Corporation's founder and the brother of Shari Arison reputed to be the wealthiest woman in Israel. While Arison is a resident of Miami, he maintains a home in Israel.
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that the zone limits scheme, imposed on the public by the Ministry of Transportation in order to save foreign currency, will continue. M.S. Tamar, Zim's newest fruit-carrier vessel, was launched in Holland.
1952: Travel writer Diana Rice describes the progress being made on constructing the Nordeau Plaza Hotel in Tel Aviv. The hotel is scheduled to open in September. The four million dollar seaside structure boasts luxury suites, a variety of shops inteneded to attract tourists and a banquet hall that will seat 1,000.
1955: Israel Rokach completes his term as Interior Minister.
1955: Haim-Moshe Shapira begins his term as Minister of Internal Affairs.
1967: The official reunification of Jerusalem begins as 8,570 acres of west Jerusalem are united with 18,750 acres of east Jerusalem. It was not only Jews who hailed this event. Nabil Khoury wrote in the Beirut weekly al-Hawadith, ‘On June 29, in Jaffa Road, the main street of Jerusalem, the Hebrew tongue disappeared. On that day, along the entire length of the street, Palestinian Arabic, in all its different dialects, was heard.’
1967: In Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion told his supporters that “the re-building of Jerusalem must be at the center of the national effort.” These words followed naturally for the man who had fought to keep the road to Jerusalem open during the dark days of 1947-1948 when so many told him that it could not be done.
1976: The Jerusalem Post reported from Entebbe, Uganda, that hijackers held there more than 250 Air France Airbus passengers and threatened to blow them all up if Uganda's security forces intervened. Uganda's President Idi Amin paid a visit to the hijackers. The Israeli Embassy in Paris was assured that France would do everything it could to secure the release of all hijacked passengers
1990: Author Irving Wallace passed away.
1997: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Handsome Is Adventures With Saul Bellow: A Memoir”by Harriet Wasserman, “The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich”by Michael H. Kater and “A Tale of Two Continents: A Physicist's Life in a Turbulent World," the autobiography of Dutch born Jewish physicist Abraham Pais
2007: At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem an exhibit entitled “Yemima Ergas: Hidden Cities” opens. “A new series of drawings by artist Yemima Ergas depicts fantastical cityscapes reminiscent of the majestic Modernist architecture of the early twentieth century. In the delicate pencil and charcoal drawings we see bridges, public buildings, factories, and stadiums, but a longer look reveals that it is all a fiction – we are in fact looking at discarded computer motherboards.”
2007: In Jerusalem, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra performs Berg`s Concerto for Violin and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Sherover Theater at The Jerusalem Theater
2007: As part of his plea bargain President Moshe Katsav resigned as President of Israel. Katsav is schedule to be indicted on Sunday July 1. At the time he is expected to plead guilty to to three charges, and will receive a suspended sentence and be ordered to pay compensation to the complainants. While one of the charges will be for a serious sex related crime, under the terms of the plea bargain he will not be charged with rape.
2007: Acting President Dalia Itzik replaces Moshe Katsav and will serve as President of Israel until July 15 when President-elect Shimon Peres takes office. Ms. Itzik is a 54 year old native of Jerusalem who has enjoyed a long poltical career.
2007: Joel Siegel, Emmy Award-winning film critic for ABC’s “Good Morning American” passed away at the age of 63.
2008: In Chicago, the Spertus features “Private Lives of Public Figures: How Moral Do Our Leaders Need To Be?” From King David to contemporary politicians, leaders who engage in immoral or unethical behavior inevitably face questions regarding their suitability to govern. What do Jewish sources say about these issues? Should moral turpitude exclude someone from public office? Are all transgressions the same? Exactly how moral do our leaders need to be? In this text-based study session and discussion, facilitated by Jewish leadership scholar Dr. Hal M. Lewis, participants look at several classical Jewish sources that address these and related matters. Hal M. Lewis is Dean of Public Programming and Continuing Education at Spertus, where he also serves as Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies. A recognized authority on Jewish leadership, he is author of Models and Meanings in the History of Jewish Leadership and From Sanctuary to Boardroom: A Jewish Approach to Leadership.
2008: Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois holds it annual meeting and presents “Ask the Experts at Temple Beth Israel in Skokie, Il. www.jewishgen.org/jgsi
2008: The Sunday New York Times book section features reviews of "The Spies of Warsaw," a novel by Jewish mystery writer Alan Furst, "The Hebrew Republic:How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last" by Bernard Avishai and "Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands," Michael Chabon’s first collection of nonfiction as well as an essay entitled “Cultural Crossroads of the Levant” which describes Ibis Editions “a boutique Jerusalem Press owned by the husband and wife team of Peter Cole, a MacArthur award-winning poet and translator, and Adina Hoffman, a biographer and critic that has published English translations of works in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, German and Judeo-Spanish — all relating to the Levant.
2008: The Washington Post book section features reviews of "The Dream" by Harry Bernstein and "America America" by Ethan Canin
2008: At Congregation Ansche Chesed on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, One World Symphony presents a performance of the opera “Adriadne Auf Naxos” by composer Richard Strauss who was appointed President of the German State Music Bureau by Joseph Gobbels. In fairness to Strauss he later resigned the position and is credit with saving “several Jewish lives later in the war, specifically those of his daughter-in-law and her son.” On the other hand, the true measure of the man may be found in his 1945 declaration “that the Allied bombing of the Hoftheater, his favorite opera house in Munich, was ‘the greatest catastrophe that has ever disturbed my life.
2008: Israel’s government voted to trade one of the most notorious convicts in its prisons, a Lebanese murderer, for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers whose cross-border capture led to and partly motivated its month long war with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah in summer 2006. After a wrenching national debate that drove hesitant officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, to accept the deal, the cabinet voted 22 to 3 to trade the prisoner, Samir Kuntar, along with four other Lebanese, for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two Israeli soldiers. Mr. Kuntar was part of a cell that in 1979 raided the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, fatally shooting a civilian, Danny Haran, while his daughter Einat, 4, watched, then smashing the girl’s head, killing her as well. Mr. Haran’s wife, Smadar, hid with their 2-year-old daughter, accidentally suffocating her in an effort to stop her from crying out.
2008: Veteran Civil Rights leader John Lewis was honored at a luncheon on Sunday by New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind and the black-Jewish Alliance, which was inaugurated in January to address the 25 percent surge in anti-Semitic and racist incidents in the black and Jewish communities. The luncheon, hosted by Joe Lazar, who is running for City Council in September 2009, included 40 black and Jewish elected officials and community leaders. "As blacks and Jews, the wind may blow, the rain may beat down on an old house, be it a house in Brooklyn, Atlanta, America, Israel or Africa, but we all live in the same house," Rep. John Lewis, a leader of the civil rights movement who stood behind Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, told a group of Jewish and black leaders in Brooklyn this week. "We are one people, one family and we must stay together and build a society at peace with itself," he added.
2009: Starting today, Cantor Jack Chomsky of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Columbus, helps to lead “Poland to Israel: A Journey Through Time,” in which 100 cantors connect 1,000 years of Jewish History in Poland with 4,000 years of history in the homeland of the Jewish people.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
This Day, June 28, In Jewish History
JUNE 28 In Jewish History
1389: Ottoman forces crush the armies of Christian Europe in Kosovo, opening the way for the Ottoman conquest of Southeastern Europe. This event is known as the Battle of Kosovo. The memory of this battle lingers to this day and has provided fuel for hostility between the different religious and ethnic groups in the Balkans. This victory of the forces of Islam over the Christians made their position in Europe just that much more precarious. And Christian insecurity was never a good thing for the Jewish population.
1491: Birthdate of King Henry VIII of England. Isabella of Aragon, the daughter of the Spanish King and Queen was Henry’s first wife. Before allowing the marriage to go forward, Henry had to promise that he would never allow Jews to settle in England. For the most part, Henry was true to his word although a small community of crypto-Jews may have settled in London. Henry’s other contact with Jews also surrounded his marriage to Isabella, only this time it revolved around his attempts to shed his wife. Henry sought to use the texts of what he called the Old Testament to prove that the marriage was invalid and that it was cursed by God. He attempted to get Rabbis in Italy to support his claims made to the Pope in Rome. The Rabbis decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Regardless of what the Bible said, they felt no need to risk their safety in Italy for the sake of capricious monarch living so far away.
1519: Charles V elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Charles was the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella. Charles had already been on the Spanish throne for three years when he became Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. As king of Spain, Charles was a worthy heir to his grandparents. He continued the Inquisition and enforced their philosophy regarding Jews and Marranos. But in the Germanic and central European lands that came under his role, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Emperor showed a more benign, tolerant (for his time) attitude towards his Jewish subjects. “He made no attempt to institute the inquisition or even tamper with privileges extended by past emperors. At the Diet of 1544 held at Speyer, “Charles reaffirmed Jewish privileges” to such an extent that “the Speyer document was considered the most liberal and generous letter of protection ever granted to the Jews.” Charles defended the Jews against the anti-Semitic attacks of Martin Luther. “When Spanish troops entered Germany in 1546 during the Emperor’s campaign against rebellious Protestant princes…Charles issued an order to his army not to molest the Jews.” [Editor’s note: If you can find an explanation for this seemingly schizophrenic behavior, please let me know.]
1712: Birthdate of Swiss philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Unlike some other Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau did not dabble in anti-Semitism. He may not have been Philo-Semitic but in his limited references to the Jewish people he wrote with unusual understanding and compassion. “We shall never know the inner motives of the Jews until the day they have their own free state, schools and universities where they can speak and argue without fear. Then, and only then, shall we know what they really have to say.”
1762: Catherine II (whom the Boyars called “the Great”) ascends the throne of Russia. The German born Czarina followed her husband Peter III who died under mysterious circumstances in which she might have had a hand. The Jewish historian Salo Baron described her as possessing a rational attitude. Under the partition of Poland, Catherine became the ruler of Lithuanian with its large Jewish population. At first, Catherine tried to “thread the needle” of not offending the Russian Orthodox by granting her Jewish subjects too much freedom while taking advantage of their professional and business skills. In the end, she succumbed to pressure from Russian merchants who hid behind religion and limited the activities of her Jewish subjects to an area that would become known as “The Pale of Settlement.”
1809: A.M. Rothschild writes from Frankfurt to his son Nathan in London telling him that writing in Hebrew was fine for discussing family matters but not for conveying business information.
1831: Birthdate of Hungarian/German violinist and composer, Joseph Joachim.
1836: Former President James Madison passed away. Madison worked with his mentor Thomas Jefferson to ensure freedom of religion in the state of Virginia in the years between the Revolution and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Madison played in a key role in the ratification of the first ten amendments of the Constitution known as the Bill of Rights. The first of those amendments guaranteed the separation of church and state. Madison was the first President to appoint a Jew to a U.S. diplomatic post.
1836: Baron Nathan Maeyer de Rothschild who founded the London branch in 1808 passed away leaving his title and position as head of the house to his son Lionel who was the grandson of Meyer Anselm Rothschild the original founder of the House at Frankfort-on-the-Main.
1838: The coronation of Victoria of the United Kingdom. Victoria was on the throne until 1901. Her long tenure gave an era its name. But under the British system of government she regined but did not rule which means she had only a limited impact on growing role of Jews in her realm. Early in reign, she sided with Moses Motifore as he sought to protect the Jews of Syria during the Damascus Blood Libel lending him her royal yacht for his trip to France. On the other hand,in 1869 she exercised her royal prerogative when it came to creating new peerages by blocking the appointment of Lionel Rothschild to the House of Lords. According to Frederick Morton, one of her biographers, “it was not until Suez became British though Jewish money” and she came under the spell of Benjamin Disraeli that she relented and allowed Lionel’s son to enter the Lords. As she aged, Victoria would visit “the French estate of Baron Rothschild.” Despite her lack of political clout, she did attempt to intervene on behalf of the Russian Jews as Tsar Alexander III worked to make their lives increasingly unbearable. On the other hand, she was not pleased with the growing number of Jews who made up the social circle of her son, the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII.
1868: Disraeli appointed Prime Minister
1883: Birthdate of right wing French political leader Pierre Laval who eventually became Prime Minister of the Vichy Government where he aggressively followed pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic policies that would lead to his execution in 1945.
1902: Birthdate of Richard Rodgers. Rodgers would team with Lorenz Hart and then Oscar Hammerstein in writing numerous Broadway musicals including Oklahoma and Carousel. In reading Mr. Rodgers' obituary in the New York Times one would have no idea that he was Jewish. In fact the only hint comes in a comment that during the early 1920's when he could not get anything on Broadway he "put on amateur productions for schools and synagogues."
1906: Birthdate of Israeli archaeologist Binyamin Mazar.
1906: Birthdate of Maria Goeppert Mayer, German born US atomic physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1963. Mayer was not Jewish. She did come to the United States during the 1930’s where she remained for the rest of her life. Aside from her scientific work, she supported Jewish female colleagues who had immigrated to the USA. This latter selfless act certainly should rate her at least honorable mention as a righteous gentile.
1912: After four months of conflict, the entire Council of Jewish Community at Constantinople, resigns.
1914: Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife were assassinated at Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists. According to at least one source, he was going to view the Sarajevo Haggadah when he was killed. This assassination set in motion the events that started World War One. World War was not inevitable. It actually took more than a month for the war to actually break out. Three Austro-Hungarian Field Marshals and eight generals were Jewish. “One of them, Field Marshal Johann Georg Franz Hugo Friedlander, was deported by the Germans in 1943 from Vienna to the Theresienstadt Ghetto and from there in 1944, to Auschwitz, where he died.” While there are no exact figures the best estimates indicate that a million and half Jews served as soldiers in the armies on both sides of the conflict. The horrors of war fell hardest on the Jews of Eastern Europe and American Jews made Herculean efforts to provide aid for their suffering brethren.
1914: Birthdate of Aribert Heim a former Austrian doctor, also known as "Dr. Death". As an SS doctor in a Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen, he is accused of killing and torturing many inmates through various methods, such as direct injections of toxic compounds into the hearts of his victims. Along with Alois Brunner, Heim — who would now be (as of 2008) in his early nineties — is one of the last major Nazi fugitives still at large. However, according to a 2007 publication by former Israeli Air Force Colonel Danny Baz Heim was kidnapped from Canada and taken to Santa Catalina off the Californian coast, where he was killed by a Nazi hunting team code named “The Owl” in 1982. Baz himself claims to have been part of this group. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, as well as the French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld say this is not true.
1914: Miss Henrietta Szold, Nathan Straus, Dr. J. L. Magnes, and Dr. Stephen Wise of New York arrive in Rochester, New York early this morning, when the convention of Zionists is formally opened by Louis Lipsky of New York, Chairman, who will introduce Dr. Schmarya Levin of Berlin. He will address the delegates in behalf of the International Executive Committee, whose headquarters are in Berlin. Dr Levin will speak in Hebrew and German. Max Lowenthal will welcome the delegates in behalf of the Jews of Rochester.
1915: During a meeting of the Zionist Federation in Boston, a dinner was held in Mechanics’ Hall where 1,400 attendees listened to speeches by Louis D. Brandeis, Nathan Straus and Rabbi Stephen Wise, among others. Brandeis was hailed as the leader of the movement to create a Jewish home in Palestine. Rabbi Wise’s call for additional funds brought the following response. During the evening it was announced that Mr. and Mrs. Julius Rosenwald of Chicago would donate $1,000 per month to the Zionist cause for the duration of the World War and would continue making their donations for a full year after a peace treaty was signed. an anonymous donor from New York gave $6,000 while Samuel Untermyer and Eugene Meyer each gave $3,000.
1919: The Treaty of Versailles was signed in France, ending World War I. The United States Senate would fail to ratify the treaty, which meant the U.S. would not join the League of Nations. Many Germans resented the terms of the treaty. This resentment helped to undermine the Weimar Republic and helped the Nazis in their rise to power. In other words, from the Jewish point of view, the treaty contained the seeds of destruction.
1921; Birthdate of Dorothea Herz who as Dorothea Rabkin she joined forces with her husband Leon to build a collection of American folk art noted for the whirligigs and other sculptures made by anonymous carvers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Starting not long after their marriage in 1958, the Rabkins spent decades scouring flea markets and secondhand shops. They acquired some traditional pieces like quilts and baskets, but they also bought objects few people wanted then — the works by unschooled artisans that are known today as outsider art. Their collection grew to more than 1,200 items, including paintings by self-taught black artists like Sam Doyle and Mose Tolliver. But the Rabkins were best known for figural folk sculpture, amassing one of the finest collections in private hands. Most often carved in wood, sometimes made of metal, the sculptures are typically human in form, depicting men and women at work and at play. Besides whirligigs, articulated pieces designed to move or spin in a breeze, they include tradesmen’s mannequins, ventriloquists’ dummies and dolls. Artwork from the Rabkins’ collection has been reproduced widely in books and exhibited around the country. More than 200 of the couple’s pieces are now in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in New York. One of the most instantly recognizable is the whirligig “Uncle Sam Riding a Bicycle,” among the most emblematic works of American folk art of any kind. Nearly five feet long and carved of wood, it was made between 1880 and 1920. When a propeller at the front is turned, Uncle Sam, in top hat and tails, pedals his little bike. Behind him, a richly carved American flag (the reverse side is Canadian) seems to ripple in the breeze. Among other notable objects the Rabkins gave the museum is an elaborate sheet-metal farm scene from the early 20th century that, set in motion, is almost Rube Goldbergian in its symphony of contingencies: a man pumps water, and a horse drinks it; a fisherman pulls on his rod as a chicken steals a worm from his bait can. As associates said in interviews this week, Ms. Rabkin had a keen eye for unheralded talent. (She was an early advocate, for instance, of the Pennsylvania folk painter Justin McCarthy.) From the mid-1980s till her retirement in 2007, she served on the collections committee of the folk art museum, advising it on acquisitions. Rabkin was born in Berlin. Her father was Jewish. Her mother was not. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the mother left the family and repudiated her children. In the years that followed, Dorothea and her twin sister, Rose, were shuttled among sympathetic Christian neighbors, sometimes together, sometimes apart, often hidden in closets. They dared not go to school, and their formal education ended. After the war began, the twins, now young adults, found themselves adrift in Berlin. Living separately and furtively, they and an older sister, Elizabeth, passed as Gentiles. (Dorothea dyed her hair platinum blond, her husband said.) During this period, their father, pursued by the Gestapo, killed himself. Their mother survived the war. Rose made her way to New York in 1948. Dorothea arrived the next year, carrying, as she later said, “an empty suitcase.” She found work as a cook in a Schrafft’s restaurant and was later an assistant to a rare-book dealer. In January 1958, Dorothea met Leo Rabkin on a blind date; they married that May. A native of Cincinnati, Mr. Rabkin is an abstract artist whose work is in the collections of major museums; for many years he was also a teacher of troubled adolescents at the Livingston School for Girls on King Street in Manhattan. She passed away at the age of 87, a victim of Parkinson disease cared for by her husband Leo, her sole immediate survivor.
1926: Birthdate of comedian/actor/director Mel Brooks
1934: Birthdate of Carl Milton Levin a Democratic United States Senator from Michigan and the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. He has been in the Senate since 1979 and Michigan's senior senator since 1995. He is the longest-serving US Senator ever to represent Michigan.
1936: The Palestine Post reported that after a train was derailed near Lydda, and one British soldier and an Arab railway man were killed, the town was ordered by the authorities to pay a 5,000 pound collective fine. The mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini again alleged in his statement, mailed to the high commissioner, that Jews planned to restore their ancient holy places on the site of al-Aksa mosque. He had also complained that British Army soldiers disregarded the sanctity of Muslim holy places and searched for arms hidden inside mosques. Two British soldiers were wounded while protecting linesmen repairing sabotaged telephone lines.
1938: The British authorities refused to commute the sentence Solomon ben Yosef, a Jewish youth, who is to be hanged tomorrow for having fired at an Arab-owned bus although he caused no casualties.
1939: “Delegates to the forty second annual convention of the Zionist Organization of America heald an outdoor meeting at the Jewish Pavilion at the World’s Fair” after having concluded its regular business sessions. This occasion coincided with the 30th anniversary of the founding of Tel Aviv, the all-Jewish city that has grown from a sand dune to a modern metropolis with 150,000 inhabitants.
1940: In a letter to Lord Lloyd lamenting the Colonial Sectary’s opposition to arming the Jews of Palestine, Churchill that because of this policy “twenty thousand sorely needed British and Australian troops were tied up in Palestine. This is the price we have to pay for the anti-Jewish policy which has been persisted in for some years…I is little less than a scandal at a time when we are fighting for our lives that these very large forces should be immobilized in support of a policy which only commends itself to a section of the Conservative Party.”
1941: German forces entered the Polish city of Drohobych which had been in the Soviet Zone. This marked the start of the destruction of the Jewish community of Drohobych.
1941: Chief of Gestapo, Henirich Muller, sent Adolph Eichmann to review the destruction in Bialystok and Minsk.
1941: For two days, in the German-occupied town of Kovno, Lithuania, Lithuanian police and released convicts use iron bars to beat hundreds of Jews to death in the city's streets. Thousands more Jews are murdered at Kovno, Lithuania, and another 5000 are killed at Brest-Litovsk, Belorussia.
1942: Following the end of fighting at Minsk 40,000 Jews are now trapped in the Nazi killing machine.
1942: All Jews living in France over the age of 6 are required to wear an armband with a yellow Star of David
1943: Samuel Levy, former Borough President of Manhattan and chairman of the Board of Directors of Yeshiva and Yeshiva College announced today that Dr. Samuel Belkin, Talmudic scholar and dean of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (Yeshiva) since 1941, has been elected president of Yeshiva and Yeshiva College
1944: At Minsk, The Red Army made gains into German occupied territory. However, they bomb the labor camp of Maly Trostenets. The Germans locked all the Jews in their housing and torch them, reducing the structures to ashes.
1944: As the Red Army approaches the concentration camp at Maly Trostinets, Belorussia, near Minsk, regular SS troops replace the non-German SS-auxiliary guards. All surviving prisoners--Jews and non-Jewish Russian civilians--are herded into a barracks that is set ablaze. Any prisoners who manage to exit the burning building are shot. About 20 Jews who had come to Maly Trostinets from the camp/ghetto at Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, escape to the woods
1945: Birthdate of Representative Jane Harman representing California’s 36th district
1946: Birthdate of Gilda Radner, the Detroit born, comedienne who gained famed for weekly appearances on the television show, Saturday Night Live.
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that a modified scheme for national insurance was finally approved by the government and was to be brought before the Knesset. Registration continued for the Four-Year People's Housing Scheme. Twelve thousand housing units were expected to be allocated to needy citizens yearly.
1952: On Shabbat, in Tel Aviv, taxicab drivers pull their vehicles off the road in protest over the government’s new restriction on use of gasoline and restrictions on driving of personal vehicles.
1967: Several thousand Jews returned to the Hebrew University amphitheatre on Mount Scopus, the scene of the inauguration of the university in 1925, cut off from the rest of Jerusalem since 1948.
1967: Israel removed the barriers that separated occupied east Jerusalem from the rest of the city. This marked the first time that Jerusalem was one city since the illegal occupation by the Jordanians in 1948.
1975: Rod Serling passed away. He gained fame as the creator and opening line presenter of Twilight Zone television series. Serling was born and raised as a Reform Jew. He became a Unitarian while in college in an attempt to mollify his wife's family who were upset at the prospect of having a Jewish son-in-law.
1976: The Jerusalem Post reported that an Air France jumbo jet was hijacked over Greece with some 216 passengers, including about 70 Israelis, aboard. This was the first instance of the hijacking of an Air France plane. Distraught relatives of Israeli passengers waited all night at Ben-Gurion Airport and the Air France offices in Tel Aviv. (This would prove to be the first act in an adventure that became known as The Raid on Entebbe.
1980: Molly Picon received a Creative Achievement Award from the Performing Arts Unit of B'nai B'rith.
1987: A children’s memorial designed by Moshe Safdie and financed by an American Jew named Abraham Spiegel who had lost his two year old son at Auschwitz, opened at Yad Vashem
1998: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth” by Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn.
2001: American philosopher Mortimer Adler passed away. Adler was born into a non-observant Jewish home. He began his philosophic quest in his teens. Before his death, Adler converted to Roman Catholicism.
2007: Screening of “From Philadelphia to the Front” at the Vilna Shul / Boston Center for Jewish Heritage in Boston, MA. For more about this film see www.fromphiladelphiatothefront.com
2007: Israel’s President Moshe Katsav signed a plea agreement under which the rape charges against him will be dropped and he will serve no active jail time.
2007: Tel Aviv held its three White Night festival. Following the tradition of the French, the cultural institutions of Israel’s largest metropolis keep their doors open until “the wee hours of the night.”
2008: Birkat Hachodesh - On Shabbat, Jews around the world prepare for the saddest month of the year, by announcing that month of Av will arrive on the seventh day of the upcoming week.
2009: "The Java Jews, an energetic and talented group from Des Moines, IA, with guest artist John Manning, University of Iowa Professor of Tuba perform at the Hillel House at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
2009: The Washington Post featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone” by D.D. Guttenplan
2009: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish reader including “Arthur Miller: 1915-1962” by Christopher Bigsby and the recently released paperback edition of “For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago” by Simon Baatz
1389: Ottoman forces crush the armies of Christian Europe in Kosovo, opening the way for the Ottoman conquest of Southeastern Europe. This event is known as the Battle of Kosovo. The memory of this battle lingers to this day and has provided fuel for hostility between the different religious and ethnic groups in the Balkans. This victory of the forces of Islam over the Christians made their position in Europe just that much more precarious. And Christian insecurity was never a good thing for the Jewish population.
1491: Birthdate of King Henry VIII of England. Isabella of Aragon, the daughter of the Spanish King and Queen was Henry’s first wife. Before allowing the marriage to go forward, Henry had to promise that he would never allow Jews to settle in England. For the most part, Henry was true to his word although a small community of crypto-Jews may have settled in London. Henry’s other contact with Jews also surrounded his marriage to Isabella, only this time it revolved around his attempts to shed his wife. Henry sought to use the texts of what he called the Old Testament to prove that the marriage was invalid and that it was cursed by God. He attempted to get Rabbis in Italy to support his claims made to the Pope in Rome. The Rabbis decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Regardless of what the Bible said, they felt no need to risk their safety in Italy for the sake of capricious monarch living so far away.
1519: Charles V elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Charles was the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella. Charles had already been on the Spanish throne for three years when he became Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. As king of Spain, Charles was a worthy heir to his grandparents. He continued the Inquisition and enforced their philosophy regarding Jews and Marranos. But in the Germanic and central European lands that came under his role, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Emperor showed a more benign, tolerant (for his time) attitude towards his Jewish subjects. “He made no attempt to institute the inquisition or even tamper with privileges extended by past emperors. At the Diet of 1544 held at Speyer, “Charles reaffirmed Jewish privileges” to such an extent that “the Speyer document was considered the most liberal and generous letter of protection ever granted to the Jews.” Charles defended the Jews against the anti-Semitic attacks of Martin Luther. “When Spanish troops entered Germany in 1546 during the Emperor’s campaign against rebellious Protestant princes…Charles issued an order to his army not to molest the Jews.” [Editor’s note: If you can find an explanation for this seemingly schizophrenic behavior, please let me know.]
1712: Birthdate of Swiss philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Unlike some other Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau did not dabble in anti-Semitism. He may not have been Philo-Semitic but in his limited references to the Jewish people he wrote with unusual understanding and compassion. “We shall never know the inner motives of the Jews until the day they have their own free state, schools and universities where they can speak and argue without fear. Then, and only then, shall we know what they really have to say.”
1762: Catherine II (whom the Boyars called “the Great”) ascends the throne of Russia. The German born Czarina followed her husband Peter III who died under mysterious circumstances in which she might have had a hand. The Jewish historian Salo Baron described her as possessing a rational attitude. Under the partition of Poland, Catherine became the ruler of Lithuanian with its large Jewish population. At first, Catherine tried to “thread the needle” of not offending the Russian Orthodox by granting her Jewish subjects too much freedom while taking advantage of their professional and business skills. In the end, she succumbed to pressure from Russian merchants who hid behind religion and limited the activities of her Jewish subjects to an area that would become known as “The Pale of Settlement.”
1809: A.M. Rothschild writes from Frankfurt to his son Nathan in London telling him that writing in Hebrew was fine for discussing family matters but not for conveying business information.
1831: Birthdate of Hungarian/German violinist and composer, Joseph Joachim.
1836: Former President James Madison passed away. Madison worked with his mentor Thomas Jefferson to ensure freedom of religion in the state of Virginia in the years between the Revolution and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Madison played in a key role in the ratification of the first ten amendments of the Constitution known as the Bill of Rights. The first of those amendments guaranteed the separation of church and state. Madison was the first President to appoint a Jew to a U.S. diplomatic post.
1836: Baron Nathan Maeyer de Rothschild who founded the London branch in 1808 passed away leaving his title and position as head of the house to his son Lionel who was the grandson of Meyer Anselm Rothschild the original founder of the House at Frankfort-on-the-Main.
1838: The coronation of Victoria of the United Kingdom. Victoria was on the throne until 1901. Her long tenure gave an era its name. But under the British system of government she regined but did not rule which means she had only a limited impact on growing role of Jews in her realm. Early in reign, she sided with Moses Motifore as he sought to protect the Jews of Syria during the Damascus Blood Libel lending him her royal yacht for his trip to France. On the other hand,in 1869 she exercised her royal prerogative when it came to creating new peerages by blocking the appointment of Lionel Rothschild to the House of Lords. According to Frederick Morton, one of her biographers, “it was not until Suez became British though Jewish money” and she came under the spell of Benjamin Disraeli that she relented and allowed Lionel’s son to enter the Lords. As she aged, Victoria would visit “the French estate of Baron Rothschild.” Despite her lack of political clout, she did attempt to intervene on behalf of the Russian Jews as Tsar Alexander III worked to make their lives increasingly unbearable. On the other hand, she was not pleased with the growing number of Jews who made up the social circle of her son, the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII.
1868: Disraeli appointed Prime Minister
1883: Birthdate of right wing French political leader Pierre Laval who eventually became Prime Minister of the Vichy Government where he aggressively followed pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic policies that would lead to his execution in 1945.
1902: Birthdate of Richard Rodgers. Rodgers would team with Lorenz Hart and then Oscar Hammerstein in writing numerous Broadway musicals including Oklahoma and Carousel. In reading Mr. Rodgers' obituary in the New York Times one would have no idea that he was Jewish. In fact the only hint comes in a comment that during the early 1920's when he could not get anything on Broadway he "put on amateur productions for schools and synagogues."
1906: Birthdate of Israeli archaeologist Binyamin Mazar.
1906: Birthdate of Maria Goeppert Mayer, German born US atomic physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1963. Mayer was not Jewish. She did come to the United States during the 1930’s where she remained for the rest of her life. Aside from her scientific work, she supported Jewish female colleagues who had immigrated to the USA. This latter selfless act certainly should rate her at least honorable mention as a righteous gentile.
1912: After four months of conflict, the entire Council of Jewish Community at Constantinople, resigns.
1914: Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife were assassinated at Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists. According to at least one source, he was going to view the Sarajevo Haggadah when he was killed. This assassination set in motion the events that started World War One. World War was not inevitable. It actually took more than a month for the war to actually break out. Three Austro-Hungarian Field Marshals and eight generals were Jewish. “One of them, Field Marshal Johann Georg Franz Hugo Friedlander, was deported by the Germans in 1943 from Vienna to the Theresienstadt Ghetto and from there in 1944, to Auschwitz, where he died.” While there are no exact figures the best estimates indicate that a million and half Jews served as soldiers in the armies on both sides of the conflict. The horrors of war fell hardest on the Jews of Eastern Europe and American Jews made Herculean efforts to provide aid for their suffering brethren.
1914: Birthdate of Aribert Heim a former Austrian doctor, also known as "Dr. Death". As an SS doctor in a Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen, he is accused of killing and torturing many inmates through various methods, such as direct injections of toxic compounds into the hearts of his victims. Along with Alois Brunner, Heim — who would now be (as of 2008) in his early nineties — is one of the last major Nazi fugitives still at large. However, according to a 2007 publication by former Israeli Air Force Colonel Danny Baz Heim was kidnapped from Canada and taken to Santa Catalina off the Californian coast, where he was killed by a Nazi hunting team code named “The Owl” in 1982. Baz himself claims to have been part of this group. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, as well as the French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld say this is not true.
1914: Miss Henrietta Szold, Nathan Straus, Dr. J. L. Magnes, and Dr. Stephen Wise of New York arrive in Rochester, New York early this morning, when the convention of Zionists is formally opened by Louis Lipsky of New York, Chairman, who will introduce Dr. Schmarya Levin of Berlin. He will address the delegates in behalf of the International Executive Committee, whose headquarters are in Berlin. Dr Levin will speak in Hebrew and German. Max Lowenthal will welcome the delegates in behalf of the Jews of Rochester.
1915: During a meeting of the Zionist Federation in Boston, a dinner was held in Mechanics’ Hall where 1,400 attendees listened to speeches by Louis D. Brandeis, Nathan Straus and Rabbi Stephen Wise, among others. Brandeis was hailed as the leader of the movement to create a Jewish home in Palestine. Rabbi Wise’s call for additional funds brought the following response. During the evening it was announced that Mr. and Mrs. Julius Rosenwald of Chicago would donate $1,000 per month to the Zionist cause for the duration of the World War and would continue making their donations for a full year after a peace treaty was signed. an anonymous donor from New York gave $6,000 while Samuel Untermyer and Eugene Meyer each gave $3,000.
1919: The Treaty of Versailles was signed in France, ending World War I. The United States Senate would fail to ratify the treaty, which meant the U.S. would not join the League of Nations. Many Germans resented the terms of the treaty. This resentment helped to undermine the Weimar Republic and helped the Nazis in their rise to power. In other words, from the Jewish point of view, the treaty contained the seeds of destruction.
1921; Birthdate of Dorothea Herz who as Dorothea Rabkin she joined forces with her husband Leon to build a collection of American folk art noted for the whirligigs and other sculptures made by anonymous carvers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Starting not long after their marriage in 1958, the Rabkins spent decades scouring flea markets and secondhand shops. They acquired some traditional pieces like quilts and baskets, but they also bought objects few people wanted then — the works by unschooled artisans that are known today as outsider art. Their collection grew to more than 1,200 items, including paintings by self-taught black artists like Sam Doyle and Mose Tolliver. But the Rabkins were best known for figural folk sculpture, amassing one of the finest collections in private hands. Most often carved in wood, sometimes made of metal, the sculptures are typically human in form, depicting men and women at work and at play. Besides whirligigs, articulated pieces designed to move or spin in a breeze, they include tradesmen’s mannequins, ventriloquists’ dummies and dolls. Artwork from the Rabkins’ collection has been reproduced widely in books and exhibited around the country. More than 200 of the couple’s pieces are now in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in New York. One of the most instantly recognizable is the whirligig “Uncle Sam Riding a Bicycle,” among the most emblematic works of American folk art of any kind. Nearly five feet long and carved of wood, it was made between 1880 and 1920. When a propeller at the front is turned, Uncle Sam, in top hat and tails, pedals his little bike. Behind him, a richly carved American flag (the reverse side is Canadian) seems to ripple in the breeze. Among other notable objects the Rabkins gave the museum is an elaborate sheet-metal farm scene from the early 20th century that, set in motion, is almost Rube Goldbergian in its symphony of contingencies: a man pumps water, and a horse drinks it; a fisherman pulls on his rod as a chicken steals a worm from his bait can. As associates said in interviews this week, Ms. Rabkin had a keen eye for unheralded talent. (She was an early advocate, for instance, of the Pennsylvania folk painter Justin McCarthy.) From the mid-1980s till her retirement in 2007, she served on the collections committee of the folk art museum, advising it on acquisitions. Rabkin was born in Berlin. Her father was Jewish. Her mother was not. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the mother left the family and repudiated her children. In the years that followed, Dorothea and her twin sister, Rose, were shuttled among sympathetic Christian neighbors, sometimes together, sometimes apart, often hidden in closets. They dared not go to school, and their formal education ended. After the war began, the twins, now young adults, found themselves adrift in Berlin. Living separately and furtively, they and an older sister, Elizabeth, passed as Gentiles. (Dorothea dyed her hair platinum blond, her husband said.) During this period, their father, pursued by the Gestapo, killed himself. Their mother survived the war. Rose made her way to New York in 1948. Dorothea arrived the next year, carrying, as she later said, “an empty suitcase.” She found work as a cook in a Schrafft’s restaurant and was later an assistant to a rare-book dealer. In January 1958, Dorothea met Leo Rabkin on a blind date; they married that May. A native of Cincinnati, Mr. Rabkin is an abstract artist whose work is in the collections of major museums; for many years he was also a teacher of troubled adolescents at the Livingston School for Girls on King Street in Manhattan. She passed away at the age of 87, a victim of Parkinson disease cared for by her husband Leo, her sole immediate survivor.
1926: Birthdate of comedian/actor/director Mel Brooks
1934: Birthdate of Carl Milton Levin a Democratic United States Senator from Michigan and the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. He has been in the Senate since 1979 and Michigan's senior senator since 1995. He is the longest-serving US Senator ever to represent Michigan.
1936: The Palestine Post reported that after a train was derailed near Lydda, and one British soldier and an Arab railway man were killed, the town was ordered by the authorities to pay a 5,000 pound collective fine. The mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini again alleged in his statement, mailed to the high commissioner, that Jews planned to restore their ancient holy places on the site of al-Aksa mosque. He had also complained that British Army soldiers disregarded the sanctity of Muslim holy places and searched for arms hidden inside mosques. Two British soldiers were wounded while protecting linesmen repairing sabotaged telephone lines.
1938: The British authorities refused to commute the sentence Solomon ben Yosef, a Jewish youth, who is to be hanged tomorrow for having fired at an Arab-owned bus although he caused no casualties.
1939: “Delegates to the forty second annual convention of the Zionist Organization of America heald an outdoor meeting at the Jewish Pavilion at the World’s Fair” after having concluded its regular business sessions. This occasion coincided with the 30th anniversary of the founding of Tel Aviv, the all-Jewish city that has grown from a sand dune to a modern metropolis with 150,000 inhabitants.
1940: In a letter to Lord Lloyd lamenting the Colonial Sectary’s opposition to arming the Jews of Palestine, Churchill that because of this policy “twenty thousand sorely needed British and Australian troops were tied up in Palestine. This is the price we have to pay for the anti-Jewish policy which has been persisted in for some years…I is little less than a scandal at a time when we are fighting for our lives that these very large forces should be immobilized in support of a policy which only commends itself to a section of the Conservative Party.”
1941: German forces entered the Polish city of Drohobych which had been in the Soviet Zone. This marked the start of the destruction of the Jewish community of Drohobych.
1941: Chief of Gestapo, Henirich Muller, sent Adolph Eichmann to review the destruction in Bialystok and Minsk.
1941: For two days, in the German-occupied town of Kovno, Lithuania, Lithuanian police and released convicts use iron bars to beat hundreds of Jews to death in the city's streets. Thousands more Jews are murdered at Kovno, Lithuania, and another 5000 are killed at Brest-Litovsk, Belorussia.
1942: Following the end of fighting at Minsk 40,000 Jews are now trapped in the Nazi killing machine.
1942: All Jews living in France over the age of 6 are required to wear an armband with a yellow Star of David
1943: Samuel Levy, former Borough President of Manhattan and chairman of the Board of Directors of Yeshiva and Yeshiva College announced today that Dr. Samuel Belkin, Talmudic scholar and dean of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (Yeshiva) since 1941, has been elected president of Yeshiva and Yeshiva College
1944: At Minsk, The Red Army made gains into German occupied territory. However, they bomb the labor camp of Maly Trostenets. The Germans locked all the Jews in their housing and torch them, reducing the structures to ashes.
1944: As the Red Army approaches the concentration camp at Maly Trostinets, Belorussia, near Minsk, regular SS troops replace the non-German SS-auxiliary guards. All surviving prisoners--Jews and non-Jewish Russian civilians--are herded into a barracks that is set ablaze. Any prisoners who manage to exit the burning building are shot. About 20 Jews who had come to Maly Trostinets from the camp/ghetto at Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, escape to the woods
1945: Birthdate of Representative Jane Harman representing California’s 36th district
1946: Birthdate of Gilda Radner, the Detroit born, comedienne who gained famed for weekly appearances on the television show, Saturday Night Live.
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that a modified scheme for national insurance was finally approved by the government and was to be brought before the Knesset. Registration continued for the Four-Year People's Housing Scheme. Twelve thousand housing units were expected to be allocated to needy citizens yearly.
1952: On Shabbat, in Tel Aviv, taxicab drivers pull their vehicles off the road in protest over the government’s new restriction on use of gasoline and restrictions on driving of personal vehicles.
1967: Several thousand Jews returned to the Hebrew University amphitheatre on Mount Scopus, the scene of the inauguration of the university in 1925, cut off from the rest of Jerusalem since 1948.
1967: Israel removed the barriers that separated occupied east Jerusalem from the rest of the city. This marked the first time that Jerusalem was one city since the illegal occupation by the Jordanians in 1948.
1975: Rod Serling passed away. He gained fame as the creator and opening line presenter of Twilight Zone television series. Serling was born and raised as a Reform Jew. He became a Unitarian while in college in an attempt to mollify his wife's family who were upset at the prospect of having a Jewish son-in-law.
1976: The Jerusalem Post reported that an Air France jumbo jet was hijacked over Greece with some 216 passengers, including about 70 Israelis, aboard. This was the first instance of the hijacking of an Air France plane. Distraught relatives of Israeli passengers waited all night at Ben-Gurion Airport and the Air France offices in Tel Aviv. (This would prove to be the first act in an adventure that became known as The Raid on Entebbe.
1980: Molly Picon received a Creative Achievement Award from the Performing Arts Unit of B'nai B'rith.
1987: A children’s memorial designed by Moshe Safdie and financed by an American Jew named Abraham Spiegel who had lost his two year old son at Auschwitz, opened at Yad Vashem
1998: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth” by Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn.
2001: American philosopher Mortimer Adler passed away. Adler was born into a non-observant Jewish home. He began his philosophic quest in his teens. Before his death, Adler converted to Roman Catholicism.
2007: Screening of “From Philadelphia to the Front” at the Vilna Shul / Boston Center for Jewish Heritage in Boston, MA. For more about this film see www.fromphiladelphiatothefront.com
2007: Israel’s President Moshe Katsav signed a plea agreement under which the rape charges against him will be dropped and he will serve no active jail time.
2007: Tel Aviv held its three White Night festival. Following the tradition of the French, the cultural institutions of Israel’s largest metropolis keep their doors open until “the wee hours of the night.”
2008: Birkat Hachodesh - On Shabbat, Jews around the world prepare for the saddest month of the year, by announcing that month of Av will arrive on the seventh day of the upcoming week.
2009: "The Java Jews, an energetic and talented group from Des Moines, IA, with guest artist John Manning, University of Iowa Professor of Tuba perform at the Hillel House at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
2009: The Washington Post featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone” by D.D. Guttenplan
2009: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish reader including “Arthur Miller: 1915-1962” by Christopher Bigsby and the recently released paperback edition of “For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago” by Simon Baatz
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