This Day, September 23, In Jewish History

September 23 In Jewish History

484 BCE: Birthdate of the very influential Greek playwright Euripides. Wherever Greek culture spread, writers attempted to create drama in the manner of Euripides. During the time of Hellenization of the Jews, a Jewish playwright by the name of Ezekiel re-wrote Exodus as a Greek tragedy. Written in Greek, it was in the style of Euripides and presents the story of Exodus slightly differently. Here Moses not only was educated in the Jewish traditions, but had a wide range of knowledge of Egyptian spiritualist wisdom. A central part of the Pagan Mysteries was a Pagan god-man, mortal yet immortal, god yet man. One who died yet was resurrected, a figure who often came to save mankind and offered spiritual teachings. If the Jews could Hellenize Exodus into a Greek tragedy, might a Hebrew version of Euripides' The Bacchae be far off?

63 BCE: Birthdate of Octavian who would reign as Caesar Augustus from 27 BCE to 14 CE. Augustus continued to follow the comparatively benign policies of his great-uncle Julius Caesar in dealing with the Jews. He allowed Herod to rule a Kingdom of Judea. Augustus was not blind to Herod’s moral shortcomings. Combining his knowledge of Jewish dietary laws with Herod’s murderous treatment of his family, Augustus was reported to say that he would rather have been Herod’s pig than Herod’s son. When Herod died, Augustus turned Judea into a province but he instructed the governors not to do anything that would be offensive to the Jewish population such as parading the Roman Eagle through the streets of Jerusalem. He also sought to protect the rights of Jews living throughout the Empire including offering imperial protection for synagogues and exempting Jews from court appearance on Shabbat. Considering the track record of his successors, Augustus would be looked upon as a “good Roman Emperor.”

1529: Siege of Vienna begins as Suleiman II begins his attack on the city. The Siege of Vienna of 1529, as distinct from the Battle of Vienna in 1683, represented the farthest Westward advance into Central Europe of the Ottoman Empire, and of all the clashes between the armies of Christianity and Islam might be signaled as the battle that finally stemmed the previously-unstoppable Turkish forces (though they continued their conquest of the Austrian-controlled parts of Hungary afterwards).

1672: The Cossacks captured Satanow, Poland, one of the few Polish towns to have escaped harm until this date. The Jewish populations would suffer accordingly.

1776: Yom Kippur – American Jews fast for the first time as citizens of the newly independent United States

1837 (13 Tishrei 5598): On the secular calendar Rabbi Akiva Eiger of Posen passed away. Born in 1761, he was a renowned scholar and leading Talmudist. He was also a leading opponent of the Reform movement sweeping across German, one of the leading Talmudists in the first half of the nineteenth century. His devotion to the sick during a cholera epidemic earned him the recognition of Frederick William III Rabbi Akiva Eiger not only taught Torah, he lived it as well. It was his custom to invite poor people to his Seder and treat them as honored guests and not mendicants. According to one story, a guest once accidentally spilled a cup of wine on the new white Pesach tablecloth. Seeing how embarrassed the poor man was, the Rabbi quickly knocked over his own cup and then announced, "It seems that the table is not very steady. He interpreted many parts of the liturgy and the Torah as warnings against false leaders - a topic of great importance to him given what was happening in Germany during his life time.

1889: Birthdate of Walter Lippmann. Born in New York City, Lippmann was raised in comfortable circumstances by German-Jewish parents. A graduate of Harvard, Lippman began his career as a journalist. During World War I he was both a captain in the Army (military intelligence) and Assistant Secretary of War. Although his name is meaningless to many today, from the days of Woodrow Wilson through Lyndon Johnson, Lippmann was one America's leading journalists and political columnists. During his the various stages of his career, Lippmann's writings were variously described as socialist, liberal and finally neo-conservative. They were never characterized as being pro-Jewish. He passed away in 1974.

1896: Clara, Baroness von Hirsch, widow of Baron Moritz von Hirsch, signs the first copy of her last will and testament.

1899: Birthdate of Louise Nevelson, one of the most important American sculptors of the twentieth century

1904: Birthdate of art historian and critic Meyer Schapiro.

1911: Arabs attack Jewish worshipers in Jerusalem at the Western Wall on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. About 60 worshipers were injured.

1912: Anti-Jewish demonstrations took place in Sophia, Bulgaria in response to statements by the Chief Rabbi. Police were instructed to repress further disorders.

1918: Five hundred British cavalrymen captured Haifa and then moved north and captured Acre, much to the joy of the Jews who must have sensed that each British victory brought the Balfour Declaration that much closer to implementation.

1934: Outfielder Fred Sington made his major league debut with the Washington Senators.

1936: A concentration camp opens at Sachsenhausen, Germany.

1937: The Palestine Post reported that Palestinian Arabs indicated that they would refuse to Commission on Palestine.

1939: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, died at the age of 83.

1939: On this Jewish Day of Atonement, Jews across Poland are publicly humiliated by SS troops: forced labor, coerced shavings of beards, destruction of property, beatings, and forced dancing. At Piotrków, Poland, Jews are compelled to relieve themselves in the local synagogue school, then use prayer shawls and holy books to clean up the mess.

1939: As the Nazis completed their conquest of Poland, Jews began to feel the persecution that would eventually become the Final Solution.

1940: SS chief Heinrich Himmler authorizes a special SS Reichsbank account to hold gold (including gold extracted from teeth), silver, jewelry, and foreign currency stolen from interned Jews. The account is held by the fictitious "Max Heiliger."

1941: Gassing tests are conducted at Auschwitz.

1941: 3500 Jews unable to escape from Ejszyszki, Lithuania, are locked in a synagogue and then moved to a cattle market, where they are denied food and water;

1942: Over 2,000 Jews were deported from the "show ghetto" at Theresienstadt to the extermination camp of Maly Trostenents in the Soviet Union. Approximately 200,000 to 500,000 were murdered at the camp. There were no known survivors.

1942: Hundreds of Jews from Slovakia and 641 from France are gassed at Auschwitz.

1942: At the Treblinka death camp, 10,000 Jews from Szydlowiec, Poland, are killed.

1942: British Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security Herbert Morrison opposed any further admission of Jewish immigrants into Britain. He fears this would encourage the French Vichy government to "dump" Jewish children into Britain.

1943: The Nazis liquidated the Vilna Ghetto. Eight thousand of the remaining 10,000 Jews were beaten, robbed and gathered in Rosa square. One thousand, six hundred were selected to go to the labor camps in Estonia. Another 5,000 were sent to Majdanek and its new gas chambers. Hundreds of the old and sick were sent to Ponar and shot.

1943: Birthdate of Henk Brink son of Henk Drogt, a Dutch policeman who joined the resistance movement after being ordered to round up Jews. Drogt, who was executed by the Nazis in 1944, was already recognized as a hero by former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, Britain and the Netherlands for his role in rescuing Allied pilots who ejected over occupied Holland. In 2008, Brink attended ceremonies at Yad Vashem where his fathers was recognized as A Righteous Among the Nations.

1951: Shortstop Al Richter made his major league debut with the Boston Red Sox.

1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that two Israeli soldiers were wounded by Jordanians. Infiltrators from Jordan stole animals and irrigation pipes in the Jerusalem Corridor during Yom Kippur.

1956: Shimon Peres met with French Defense Minister Bourges-Manouy to discuss increased shipment of French arms to Israel to offset the increase of modern arms being sent to Egypt and Syria by the Soviets. The French also were seeking to involve the Israelis in Operation Musketeer,, a joint Franco-British plan to land in Egypt and seize the Suez Canal which had been nationalized by Egyptian President Nasser.

1956: A Jordanian soldier at a border post north of Bethlehem opend fired on a goup of a hundred Israeli archaeologists who were examining the ancient ruins excavated at Rmat Rahal, the southernmost point of Jewish Jerusalem. Four of the archaeologists were killed. One of the four was the daughter in law of Golda Meir.

1964: The Paris Opéra unveils a stunning new ceiling painted as a gift by artist Marc Chagall, who spent much of his life in France. The ceiling was typical of Chagall's masterpieces--childlike in its apparent simplicity yet luminous with color and evocative of the world of dreams and the subconscious. Marc Chagall was born in the town of Vitebsk in the Russian empire in 1887. His parents were Jewish merchants, and the society he grew up in was in many ways a survival from the medieval era. The Jewish and Russian folkloric themes to which he was exposed in his youth would inform his artwork throughout his career. He took up drawing as a child and in 1906 went to St. Petersburg to study art with the help of a rich Jewish patron. In 1908, he was invited to the Zvantseva School to study under the prestigious theater designer Leon Bakst and that year produced one of his great works, The Dead Man, a nightmarish painting inspired by a brush with death. In 1910, another Jewish patron sent Chagall to Paris, rescuing him from what might have been a career confined to folk art. In Paris--the center of the Western art world--he was embraced by avant-garde artists who encouraged him to exploit the seemingly irrational tendencies of his art. Imaginative works like I and the Village (1911) generated widespread enthusiasm, and Chagall entered the artistic phase that many viewed as his best. His pictures, wrought in a variety of artistic mediums, showed a fantastical world in which people, animals, and other figurative elements were cast in bright and unusual colors and seemed to dance and float across the canvas. He had his first one-man show in Berlin in 1914 and with the outbreak of World War I was stranded in Russia during a visit to Vitebsk. He welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1917, which provided full citizenship for Russian Jews and brought official recognition of Chagall and his art. He was made a commissar for art in the Vitebsk region and helped establish a local museum and art academy. However, he was soon frustrated by aesthetic and political quarrels and in 1922 left Soviet Russia for the West. He was welcomed as an idol by the Surrealists, who saw in Chagall paintings like Paris Through the Window (1913) an important precursor to their own irrational and dream-like art. He took up engraving and produced hundreds of illustrations for special editions of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, Jean de La Fontaine's Fables, and the Bible. In 1941, he fled with his wife from Nazi-occupied Paris to the United States, where he lived in and around New York City for seven years. War-induced pessimism and sadness over the death of his wife infused much of his art from this period, as seen in the Yellow Crucifixion (1943) and Around Her (1945). In 1945, he designed the sets and costumes for the New York production of Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird, and in 1946 Chagall was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1948, he returned to France, and eventually settled in the French Riviera village of St. Paul de Vence, his home for the rest of his life. In 1958, he designed the sets and costumes for a production of Maurice Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé at the Paris Opéra. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he produced stained-glass windows, first for a cathedral in Metz, France, and then for a synagogue in Jerusalem. In 1964, Chagall completed a stained-glass window for the United Nations building in New York that was dedicated to the late Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Meanwhile, André Malraux, the French minister of culture, commissioned him to design a new ceiling for the Paris Opéra after seeing Chagall's work in Daphnis et Chloé. Working with a surface of 560 square meters, Chagall divided the ceiling into color zones that he filled with landscapes and figures representing the luminaries of opera and ballet. The ceiling was unveiled on September 23, 1964, during a performance of the same Daphnis et Chloé. As usual, a few detractors condemned Chagall's work as overly primitive, but this criticism was drowned out in the general acclaim for the work. In 1966, as a gift to the city that had sheltered him during World War II, he painted two vast murals for New York's Metropolitan Opera House (1966). In 1977, France honored Chagall with a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. He continued to work vigorously until his death in 1985 at the age of 97.

1990: Saddam announced that he would destroy Israel.

2001: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism by David I. Kertzer, Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and Media by Renata Adler and Total Recall by Sara Paretsky

2005: The Jerusalem Post reported that the price of lulavs may triple this year after Egypt, in an attempt to prevent damage to its date trees, prohibited the export of palm branches, causing a severe shortage. Since 1967, after Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula, Israelis have been importing palm branches from El-Arish, on the Egyptian Mediterranean coast just south of Rafah.
However, after last Succoth the Egyptian Agriculture Ministry decided to prohibit export of the branches. According to Israeli traders, harvesting of the branches caused damage to date trees.
"Over the past few years the lulav market, both in Israel and in the United States, has exploded to the point where El-Arish was exporting a million lulavs a year," one trader said.
"I know traders who signed big contracts to supply sets to a large group at a prearranged price," said Asayag. "They will be forced to supply the merchandise at that price despite the situation."
One trader told the Post he and his colleagues would not take advantage of the lulav shortage.
"You are doing God's will when you take a lulav on Succoth. So we want to help people do His will," he said. However, another trader said he would pass on the full price rise to consumers.
"The harder a Jew endeavors to fulfill a commandment, the greater the reward," he said.r

2006: Tishrei I, 5767 – Rosh Hashanah

2006: Louisa.Schoenbuam, granddaughter of Dr. David and Tamara Schoenbaum makes her first appearance in the world. This is a real reason to sound the Shofar!

2007: The Sunday New York Times book section featured the following reviews of books with Jewish authors or Jewish subject matter: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam, The Israel Lobby and U.S Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt and and a study of the lives Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas entitled Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm.

2007: The Sunday Washington Post book section section featured the following reviews of books with Jewish authors or Jewish subject matter: A Drive in the County by Michael J. Rosen, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan and The Coldest Winter America and the Korean War by David Halberstam.

2008: In Washington, D.C., the Chaim Kempner Author Series hosts a discussion with journalist Ariel Sabar for his new memoir My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq.

2008: Thomas Friedman discusses and signs his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--And How It Can Renew America, at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, which is the original site of Adas Israel, the only Conservative Congregation in the Washington, D.C. city limits.

2008: Tuesday, a voting body of 150 rabbis and public servants convenes to vote for the Chief Rabbinate's governing council (moetzet harabanut harashit), the final authority on issues such as criteria for kosher supervision, deciding who is a Jew for the purpose of marriage and the appointment of new rabbis and marriage registrars.

2008: Russian archaeologists said they had found the long-lost capital of the Khazar kingdom in southern Russia, a breakthrough for research on the ancient Jewish state. "This is a hugely important discovery," expedition organiser Dmitry Vasilyev told AFP by telephone from Astrakhan State University after returning from excavations near the village of Samosdelka, just north of the Caspian Sea. "We can now shed light on one of the most intriguing mysteries of that period -- how the Khazars actually lived. We know very little about the Khazars -- about their traditions, their funerary rites, their culture," he said. The city was the capital of the Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic peoples who adopted Judaism as a state religion, from between the 8th and the 10th centuries, when it was captured and sacked by the rulers of ancient Russia. At its height, the Khazar state and its tributaries controlled much of what is now southern Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan and large parts of Russia's North Caucasus region. The capital is referred to as Itil in Arab chronicles but Vasilyev said the word may actually have been used to refer to the Volga River on which the city was founded or to the surrounding river delta region. Itil was said to be a multi-ethnic place with houses of worship and judges for Christians, Jews, Muslims and pagans. Its remains have until now never been identified and were said to have been washed away by the Caspian Sea. Archaeologists have been excavating in the area if Samosdelka for the past nine years but have only now collected enough material evidence to back their thesis, including the remains of an ancient brick fortress, he added. "Within the fortress, we have found huts similar to yurts, which are characteristics of Khazar cities.... The fortress had a triangular shape and was made with bricks. It's another argument that this was no ordinary city." Around 10 university archaeologists and some 50 students took part in excavations in the region this summer, which are partly financed by the Jewish University in Moscow and the Russian Jewish Congress.