This Day, October 23, In Jewish History

OCTOBER 23 In Jewish History

42 BCE: The army of Marcus Junius Brutus was defeated at the Second Battle of Phillipi. Brutus committed sucicide at the end of the day.. Since he was one of those who murdered Julius Caesar, the death of Brutus was probably not mourned by most Jews. Caesar's popularity was such among the Jews of the Roman Empires that when he died, the Roman biographer Suetonious wrote, “Public grief was enhanced by crowds of foreigners, lamenting in their own fashion, especially Jews, who came flocking to the Forum for several nights in succession.” Additionally, the victory paved the way for the eventual rule of Augustus who was a better Emperor than most from the Jewish point of view.

1086: At the Battle of az-Zallaqah, the army of Yusuf ibn Tashfin defeats the forces of Castilian King Alfonso VI. This was part of the ongoing battle between Moors and Christians for control of the Iberian Peninusla. During the centuries long contest, Jewish loyalties varied depending on the nature of the combatants. All of this would come to an end with the Expulsion of 1492.

1868: The Jews of Barbados were denied the right to engage retail trade.

1884: Rabbi Mendes of Shearith Israel wrote to President Chester A. Arthur inviting him to participate in the upcoming events celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Sir Moses Montifore. Arthur’s private secretary replied with a note expressing his high esteem for the great philanthropist and his regrets that he would not be able to attend due to other official demands on his time.

1892 : Birthdate of Gummo Marx. This actor and comedian was one of the famous Marx Brothers. He died in 1977.

1898: The Judeans hosted at the Tuxedo honoring Israel Zangwill. Dr. Danzinger, President of the Association and Judge Sulzberger from Philadelphia flanked Zangwill on the dias. Zangwill spoke to the group of literary, civic and academic leaders about the evolution of the Jew over the centuries including the development of Jewish culture in the United States. Other attendees at the kosher dinner were Isidore Strauss and Adolph Ochs of New York.

1905: Birthdate of Felix Bloch. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1952.

1907: W.R. Wheeler, who is a member of the commission appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to visit foreign countries for the purpose of studying matters bearing on the American immigration problem, sailed for America on the Adriatic. Before he left England he met with Israel Zangwill, the novelist, who is the President of the Jewish Territorial Organization. Among other things, Zangwill expressed his concern that Jews immigrating to the United States quickly assimilated into the general American culture and lost their Jewish identity. Zangwill felt that America was a much better place for Jews to be than other hostile countries such as Russia, but he looked forward to a time when Jews would be united within their own national territory.
1908: Birthdate of Iya Frank. The Russian born physicists won the Nobel Prize in 1958. Like many living in the Soviet Union, Jewish lineage can be a challenge to define. Frank’s father definifely was Jewish.

1927: In Israel, a moshav that would be late known as Netanya is founded by Nathan Strauss.

1929: The city of Netanya named in honor of philanthropist Nathan Strauss. Originally, a coastal Moshav, within a decade it was thriving Mediterranean seaside resort.

1935: Dutch Schultz, Abe Landau, Otto Berman, and Bernard "Lulu" Rosenkrantz are fatally shot in a bar in Newark in what will become known as The Chophouse Massacre. Were there Jewish gangsters? Yes! But contrary to a recent revisionist book on the topic, these thugs were not role models or heroes.

1936: Birthdate of director and screenwriter Philip Kaufman. Kaufman became involved with the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, for which he receives story credit. While the character of Indiana Jones was created by George Lucas, it was Kaufman who came up with the story and the pursuit of the Ark of the Covenant.

1940: The Jewish Hospital in Warsaw was forced to close and move into the Warsaw Ghetto.

1941: Odessa "action" continued as 19,000 more Jews were gathered into the city square, sprayed with gasoline and burned alive.

1941 Thousands of Jews are murdered at Kragujevac, Yugoslavia.

1941: Father Berhard Lichtenberg was arrested for protesting against German deportation of the Jews. He died on his way to Dachau

1941: The Nazis executed 10,000 Jews of the Vilna ghetto

1942: The Battle of El Alamein began with a major attack by British forces on Rommel’s Afrika Corps and their Italian Allies. When the fighting started the Axis were on the verge of sweeping the British out of Egypt, seizing the Suez Canal, cutting the Imperial lifeline to India and destroying the Jewish community in Eretz Israel. The well-supplied Allied forces overcame the usual timidity of their generals and broke the Axis lines, starting the Germans on a long retreat that would end with surrender in Tunisia in 1943.

1942: Algerian-Jewish resistance leader José Aboulker meets with American General Mark Clark in Morocco. Aboulker is given 800 Sten guns, 800 grenades, 400 handguns, and 50 portable radios. This is in preparation for Operation Torch, the November, 1942 landing of American and British forces in North Africa. One of the big unknowns was how the French forces would react. Would they resist since the French Vichy government was allied with Germany, or would they greet the Allies as liberating comrades in arms. The Americans hoped for the latter, but as this action showed, were preparing for the former.

1943: Five days after their deportation train left Rome, its 1,060 Jewish passengers were gassed at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

1943: Eighteen hundred Polish Jews formerly held at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, arrive at Auschwitz, where the women revolt outside the gas chambers, killing one SS guard and wounding two. SS reinforcements use gas grenades and machine-gun fire to subdue and kill the resisters.

1943: In Lithuania, a Jewish partisan unit destroys telegraph and telephone lines along the Vilna-to-Lida railway

1943: One thousand, seven hundred-fifty Polish Jews, believing they were awaiting transport to South America, were sent to Birkenau instead. The women took part in a minor revolt in response to SS Sergeant Josef Schillinger's request for them to strip. He was shot and other SS men were injured. Rudolf Hoess ordered the removal of each of the women into the camp grounds, and had each one shot. According to Jerzy Tabau, who later escaped, "the extermination of the Jews continued relentlessly. . ."

1944: In Budapest, Swedish consul Raoul Wallenberg and Swiss consul Carl Lutz continue to issue protective documents to Jews, partly in response to a decree that Jews in Hungary who are of foreign nationalities or those holding foreign passports will be exempt from forced labor.

1944: Hungarian authorities agreed to send another 25,000 Jews to Germany for purposes of forced labor. Charles Lutz, the Swiss Consul managed to save thousands of others by issuing collective passports and protective documents.

1949: An Israeli government spokesman reports hundreds of Jews in Iraq had been brutally arrested, and all their property confiscated.

1950: Al Jolson pased away. Born Asa Yoelson in Lithuania in 1886, Jolson’s father was a Cantor for a synagogue in downtown Washington D.C. at the turn of the century. Jolson chose to use his singing talents in a different manner. As one of America’s first “superstars he starred on Broadway, radio and film. He is most famous for starring in the first talkie – the first full length film with sound. It was called the Jazz Singer.

1952: The Jerusalem Post reported at length on the research conducted in the Negev wadis by Dr. Nelson Glueck, the president of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Dr. Glueck discovered and described many wadis, situated deep in the Negev wastes, whose sides had been terraced from bottom to top. There were numerous cisterns to catch the run-off rainwater, as well as many dams and irrigation channels, a testimony to the former intense cultivation and human presence in that currently uninhabited territory. Glueck would eventually record all of his findings in a popular tome entitled Rivers In The Desert.

1955: In New York, the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, held a cornerstone ceremony which was designed to serve as fund raiser for erecting a new community center. The inscription on the stone read: "Dedicated to Sephardic Unity and Community Service."

1956: The Hungarian Revolution began as Hungarians sought to remove Soviet forces from their country. The revolt would turn violent as Soviet tanks returned to the streets of Budapest. The Hungarian Revolt came at the same time as the Suez Crisis when the Israelis rolled across the Sinai and an Anglo-French force intervened. In an interesting role reversal the Eisenhower Administration did nothing meaningful to stop the Soviets. At the same, the Eisenhower Administration joined forces with the Soviets to support the Egyptian dictator Gamal Nasser against the English, French and the Israelis.

1958: Russian novelist Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The author of Dr. Zhivago was born to Jewish parents in Moscow. His father was a professor of painting and his mother was a concert pianist.

1973: Rabbi Sally J. Priesand offered the opening prayer in the United States House of Representatives, at the invitation of Congresswoman Bella Abzug. According to Abzug, Priesand was not only the first Jewish woman, but the first woman to be accorded this honor. October 23, 1973 also turned out to be the day on which the first resolution to impeach President Richard Nixon was offered. Priesand became the first woman to be ordained by a rabbinical seminary in June 1972. While Priesand was the American woman rabbi, she was not the first woman to study toward that goal. She was preceded at Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Institute of Religion by other women including Martha Neumark, Helen Levinthal Lyons, Toby Fink, and Norma Kirschner.

1973: The UN Cease Fire Resolution was proving a difficult document to enforce on the ground. There was opposition in Israel to accepting a cease fire. In particular, Menachem Begin, speaking for the coalition of right wing parties, opposed accepting the cease fire as long as Arab forces occupied our territory i.e. any part of the Sinai east of the Suez Canal. Ironically, this would be part of the very land that Begin would trade with Sadat to gain a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

1977: The Jerusalem Post reported that the International Federation of Airline Pilots Association, reacting to the recent passenger aircraft hijacking incidents and the murder of a Lufthansa pilot, had postponed its threatened 48-hour global air-transport strike, after the UN agreed to hold a full meeting of the General Assembly on the subject of air piracy.

1977: The Jerusalem Post reported that Lev Ovsiher, a highly decorated Jewish Red Army veteran, gave his 17 medals back to the Soviet government, to protest the refusal to let him immigrate with his family to Israel. Yes, it was only a quarter of a century ago that the Refusniks were fighting to leave the Soviet Union. Change does happen and some times it is for the better.

1983: A suicide terrorist truck bomb killed 243 US personnel in Beirut. President Reagan responded by withdrawing the Marine peacekeeping force from Lebanon. There are those who feel that this response was viewed as a victory by the terrorists who moved forward with attacks on airports in Europe and the downing of an airliner over Scotland.

1983: Jessica Savitch, American journalist passed away.

1998 (3rd of Cheshvan, 5759): Dr. Barnett Slepian, a doctor who performed abortions, was murdered at his home in suburban Buffalo, N.Y., when a sniper fired a shot through his kitchen window. Slepian was murdered on a Friday night after his family had returned home from Shabbat eve services.

1998: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat signed a land-for-peace agreement at the White House, following nine days of talks at Wye River, Md.

2005: The New York Times reviewed The Life of David by Robert Pinksy. This biography is one of the first books in the “Jewish Encounters” series, which will match prominent Jewish writers with a variety of subjects.

2005: In an article styled “Curacao’s place in the Diaspora,” the Boston Globe reports on the history of this Jewish community including the founding of Mikve Israel-Emanuel which was built in 1732, nearly 100 years after the first Jews arrived. Most of them were Sephardics fleeing persecution in Europe.

2006: The Jerusalem Post reported that Indonesia will purchase four Israeli unmanned planes, or drones, through a Filipino distributor. The deal was a surprise to some because Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, has long supported Palestinian independence efforts and does not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

2006: First of Cheshvan 5767

2007: The Upper Midwest Region of Hadassah hosts its annual Big Gifts Dinner honoring Barbara Melamed with Hadassah’s Myrtle Wreath Award. Babara Sofer, The Israel Director of Public Affairs and Communications for Hadassah and popular columnist for the Jerusalem Post is the featured speaker for the event. Held in Minneapolois, this is one more example of the vitality of the Jewish community of Minnesota, a state where Jewish Republicans and Jewish Democrats run against each for major state offices.

2007: “Avenue Q,” Moshe Kepten’s Israeli version of the Broadway hit musical debuts at Beit Lessin, in Tel Aviv.

2008: “Mother Economy,” the 19-minute film on view at New York’s Jewish Museum since July 1, comes to an end This exhibition, continuously screening in the 300-square-foot Goodkind Media Center marks the American debut of Israeli artist Maya Zack and is a powerfully imaginative meditation on Holocaust remembrance and on the myth of the Jewish mother. The elaborate set and intricately choreographed narrative, in which a mysterious protagonist methodically documents personal artifacts of absent family members before baking a noodle kugel, is saturated with ambiguous details, inviting layers of interpretation.

2008: As part of the Israel@ 60 Celebration, the Resnick Institute for the Study of Modern Jewish presents a screening and discussion of the award-winning Israeli documentary, "No. Seventeen was Anonymous." The event is facilitated by Professor Tova Weitzman of Vassar College.