This Day, December 31, In Jewish History

December 31 In Jewish History

1492: One hundred thousand Jews of Sicily were expelled.

1780: The French Consulate in Salonica signs a document stating that Abraham Samuel Covo, Chief Rabbi of Salonica is under his protection.

1791: A decree of issued by Empress Catherine restricted the right of residence of Russian Jews.

1844: The right to collect a tax ("basket tax") on all traditional Jewish clothing, including head coverings as well as a tax on kosher meat and other Jewish necessities was auctioned to the highest bidder in Poland-Lithuania. It was still in force until the 20th century.

1848: Dov Beresh Meisels was elected to the Austrian Parliament. He was also elected to the Municipality of Cracow in the same year. A vociferous supporter of Jewish rights, he aligned himself with radicals because "Juden haben keine rechte" (Jews have no rights)

1862: President Abraham Lincoln signed an act admitting West Virginia to the Union. “The first official Jewish settlement in West Virginia was at Wheeling where a Jewish cemetery and informal congregation was established in 1849. At the time it was still the state of Virginia as West Virginia did not become a state until 1863. Jews lived and traded in West Virginia prior to 1849, and as early as the late 18th century, but the official community did not get its start until Congregation L'Shem Shomayim was established in Wheeling in 1849. An earlier Jewish cemetery was established in Charleston in 1836, but the B'nai Israel Congregation in Charleston was only informally organized in 1856 and legally chartered as the "Hebrew Educational Society" in 1873.” This quote is from the website of West Virginia Jewish History & Genealogy.www.westvirginiajewishhistory.com. Jews- they are every where and darn proud of it.

1881: Birthdate of Jacob Israel de Haan, Dutch poet and writer. Israel de Haan was an “ultra-Orthodox leader who was working to establish the Orthodox community as a separate entity distinct from the Zionists.” He was willing to enlist the support of non-Jews hostile to Zionism in to advance the cause of ultra-Orthodoxy. In one of the most regrettable episodes in modern Jewish history, de Haan was assassinated in 1924 before he could continue his meetings with British authorities.

1882: Birthdate of David Cohen, Dutch historian and Chairman of the Jewish Council.

1894: A French court rejects Dreyfus’ appeal of his conviction.

1900: The New York Times reported that city authorities have decided to locate the Baron and Baroness de Hirsch memorial at the eastern edge of Central Park at the Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street Gate.

1901: The Fifth Zionist Congress ends its meeting at Basil, Switzerland.

1904: Birthdate of Russian-born American violinist Nathan Milstein.

1905: Birthdate of American song writer Jules Styne.

1908: Birthdate of Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

1912: A Russo-U.S. trade treaty, originally ratified in 1832, was abrogated by President Taft because of Russian discrimination against Jews who were American citizens.

1916: In Constantinople, Arthur Ruppin, a German born Zionist wrote in his diary, “Apparently the war is gradually coming to a close. Probably, it will still take some time, but 1917 will bring us peace.”

1917: Colonel Storrs, the newly appointed British Military Governor of Jerusalem “received New Year’s greeting from all the city’s communities – Muslim, Christian and Jewish.” The Jewish community sent two greetings, one from the Ashkenazi Community Council and one from the City Council of Jerusalem Jews.

1922: Birthdate of Marek Edelman, Jewish-Polish political and social activist, cardiologist, and one of the last living leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

1924: Deadline set by Governor General Primo de Rivera of Spain offering all Sephardim the possibility of reacquiring Spanish nationality. Very few Jews took him up on this offer.

1935: The last Jews remaining in Germany's civil service are dismissed by the government.

1938: Five hundred Jews attended a New Year’s Eve dance at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. According to John Martin, the Secretary of the Peel Commission, a female reveler broke into the room of Sir Horace Humboldt, the official who called the Jews of Palestine an “alien race’, blew a small trumpet to awaken him and then proceeded to tell him the ‘he was the ugliest member of the commission and various other home truths while he cowered helpless beneath the counterpane.”

1939: As World War II began 1,210 Jews board the river boat Uranus, looking to be transported to Palestine.

1937: Birthdate of Avram Hershko (אברהם הרשקו) Israeli biologist who won 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.

1937: The Palestine Post reported from London that a number of influential British Cabinet members recommended an entirely new policy in Palestine. They demanded the abandoning of the Lord Peel Partition plan, and the overthrow of the idea of the Jewish National Home as conceived in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and offered an alternative of a permanent Jewish minority in an all-Arab Palestine state; so much for the concept of British honor.

1937: Yehiel Ephroni, 33, was fatally wounded by shots fired by an Arab terrorist gang at an Egged bus at Km. 16 of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road.

1937: The Bucharest Stock Exchange crashed when Romanian Jews started to liquidate their assets, fearing a new government anti-Semitic policy.

1941: Hitler approved Alfred Rosenbeg’s request to plunder the French Jews and distribute their property to Nazi party members and members of the Werhmacht staff. The fact that the Werhmacht profited from this should be an indicator that the German General Staff was aware of what the fate of the Jews from the early days of the war.

1941: In the dark days of the European Night, this was an attempt to strike a match and bring a flicker of hope to the desperate. On this night, Abba Kovner uttered some of the most meaningful lines of the 20th century. On New Year’s Eve, Abba Kovner spoke out at a meeting of Zionist Youth hiding in a convent outside of Vilna. He asserted that Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews and called for armed resistance with his famous words. "Let us not go as sheep to the slaughter." As a result of the meeting and his stirring call to action, the Jews formed the United Partisan Organization. Kovner’s revolt failed and became part of a partisan unit. Later, he was active in smuggling Jews into Palestine. After fighting in the War for Independence, he settled down on a kibbutz with his wife and pursued a career as a poet. He was one of the witnesses against Eichmann when the Nazi butcher was brought to trial in Jerusalem

1942: Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead was delivered to her publisher. Although it was not her first novel, it was the first to win a wide following for the philosophy she called Objectivism. She explained that: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” The Fountainhead illustrated this philosophy for the public through the tale of an architect who sticks to his artistic convictions against massive social opposition. Though critics failed to praise the book, it eventually became a best-seller, and was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper in 1949. Together with Atlas Shrugged (1957), The Fountainhead has become one of the central texts of an Objectivist movement that emphasizes capitalism, individualism, and the pursuit of individual ambition. Although her idea that altruism is bad and selfishness good contradicts traditional Jewish values, Rand's promotion of individual ambition was typical of Russian Jewish emigrants of her generation. Rand herself came from Russia to the United States at age 21, drawn by the conditions depicted in American movies, and eager to leave Stalinist Russia. Jobs as a screenwriter and script reader in Hollywood supported her writing, and also introduced her to husband Frank O'Connor. Literary critics and philosophers have never taken Rand seriously, but her works have garnered popular acclaim. Despite mostly negative reviews, her four novels have together sold over twenty-five million copies, and Objectivist discussion groups and internet sites abound.

1942: By this date, the German Reich has deported more than two million Jews to death camps. Hundreds of thousands more Jews have been murdered by Einsatzgruppen and police battalions.

1942: At a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Churchill asked if would be possible for the RAF to undertake two or three heavy raids on Berlin in January. In addition to dropping bombs on the German capital, the planes would drop leaflets warning them of the fate that awaited them at the end of the war and that the attacks were reprisals for Nazi persecution of Poles and Jews. Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff “warned that any such raids avowedly conducted on account of the Jews would be an asset to enemy propaganda.” The RAF and the USAAF had at least one thing in common. Neither military unit was going to exert any effort to slow down the impact of the Final Solution.

1944: Hungarian Arrow Cross members storm a Swiss-sponsored "safe house" in Budapest and attack residents with machine guns and hand grenades. Three Jews are killed but the rest are saved by a Hungarian military

1944: Josephine Sarah Marcus passed away. Born to German immigrant parents in Brooklyn, NY, in 1861, Marcus grew up in San Francisco. Enchanted by a performance of Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, she ran away from home at age 18 to join the theatre. On tour in Tombstone, Arizona, she met and married Wyatt Earp, then a deputy U.S. Marshall for the Arizona Territory. In 1881, Wyatt Earp won lasting fame when he and his brothers fought a gun battle with their political rivals the Clanton gang at the O.K. Corral. Fleeing indictment for murder in the aftermath of the shootings, Wyatt and Josephine moved to Colorado. Wyatt's and Josephine's marriage lasted another forty-eight years, until his death in 1929. During these years, they moved frequently around the American west, following gold, silver, and copper mining, until they settled in Southern California. There, they invested in real estate and racehorses, wrote Wyatt's autobiography, and drafted a screenplay based on his exploits. After Wyatt's death, Josephine contributed to published and film portrayals of his life, helping to establish an enduring American legend. Josephine Marcus-Earp was buried beside her husband in a Jewish cemetery in Northern California, where their graves are today the primary local tourist attraction.

1945: Birthdate of Leonard Max Adleman a theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California. He is known for being a co-inventor of the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem in 1977, and of DNA computing. RSA is in widespread use in security applications, including digital signatures. He won the ACM Turing Award in 2002.

1945: In Pittsburgh a gang of seven Italian American robbers killed a Jewish restaurant owner. The Pittsburgh Jewish Community Relations council “made a point of laying the role of group antagonism as a motivation for this tragic event in order not to harm Jewish-Italian relations.

1946: Birthdate of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.

1947: Because of constant attacks from Arabs and the siege of Jerusalem, Hebrew Univerty was forced to end all courses and close its doors.

1948: In response to a British ultimatum, Ben-Gurion dispatched the order for Israeli forces to evacuate the Sinai and return to the Negev. The Jewish brigade was on the brink of capturing the Egyptian city of El Arish. Despite pleas from Yigal Allon, who was in command of the forces, Ben-Gurion refused to change his mind. Ever the realist, Ben Gurion knew he need a successful conclusion to fighting with the Arabs; not a widening war with the British.

1948: U.S. President Harry Truman cabled Ben-Gurion demanding Israeli evacuation of the Sinai or face the possible loss of U.S. support. Truman did not know that Ben-Gurion had already issued orders for evacuation. There are those who think Truman was moving to shore up the British whose support he needed in dealing with the threat of Soviet Imperialism.
1949: Birthdate of American author Susan Shwartz.

1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Knesset passed the first reading of the War Invalids Bill, submitted by the Minister of Labor, Mrs. Golda Meyerson (Meir).(This is the same Golda Meir who would become Foreign Minister and Prime Minister in the 1970's in time for the Yom Kippur War.) The bill assured veteran rights, the same as provided to the casualties of the Israel Defense Forces, to the invalids of the World War II Palestinian units of the British Army, and to the invalids of the Haganah. Pensions were also granted to partisans who fought Hitler. The bill was attacked sharply by Herut Knesset members on the grounds that it discriminated against the fighters of the Irgun Zvai Leumi and Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (Lehi). (The Labor Zionists did not the Irgun or the Stern Gang as legitimate parts of the IDF and this was their way of rejecting them and their behavior once and for all.)

1956: Birthdate of Dr. Martin Joseph Fettman. An astronaut, Fettman was a Payload Specialist

1958: Birthdate of actress Bebe Neuwirth.

1959: Isidore Dollinger resigns as a member of the House of Representatives from New York’s 23rd Congressional District.

1963: Israel's first desalination plant opened at the port of Eilat.

1963: Birthdate of Scott Ian. Born Scott Rosenfeld, Ian is known as a guitarist for Anthrax.

1969: Vessels Greeted in Haifa Five unarmed gunboats ended a 3,000-mile journey from Cherbourg, France, here tonight but their arrival did little to unravel the mystery of their departure.

1973: Israeli elections that had been scheduled for October were scheduled to be held on this date.
1975: Isidore Dollinger completes his career as a Justice on the New York Supreme Court.

1980: A Jewish owned hotel in Nairobi Kenya was bombed killing 18.

1987: ''A People in Print: Jewish Journalism in America.'' a major exhibit celebrating the freedoms of speech and religion at the National Museum of Jewish History comes to an end. In the following article entitled History of “Jewish Journalism On Display in Philadelphia” the author provides interesting highlights into this little studied topic.

Since the late 18th century, Jewish journalists have ''hammered out the idea, the identity, of the American Jew,'' said Dr. Kenneth Libo, the curator who organized the exhibition. Jewish newspapers, he said, published in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, German and Ladino, a Spanish-Jewish dialect, have provided a special forum for Jewish concerns and have served as advocates for these concerns in wider society. In the earliest American newspapers, Jews participated in letters, notices and advertisements. A 1790 issue of The Providence Gazette and Country Journal printed letters between George Washington and the Jewish community of Newport, R.I. Washington wrote that the new American Government ''gives to bigotry no sanction.'' As the Jewish population grew in the first half of the 19th century, newspapers were founded to serve Jewish communities. The first, The Jew, published in New York City, lasted only from 1823 until 1825. The most successful of the early papers was The Occident, founded in 1843 in Philadelphia by Isaac Leeser, who championed traditional Judaism at a time of growing interest in Reform Judaism. Through the second half of the 19th century, Jewish papers flourished around the country: The Israelite in Cincinnati, The Jewish Voice in St. Louis, The Jewish Spectator in Memphis, The Occident in Chicago. Most carried local news and editorials, but news concerning Jews from around the world was also included: ''The Judaic Museum has been opened as a separate department of the Louvre,'' reported The Hebrew in 1891. ''The German Antisemitenbund has issued the programme of the anti-Semite party in the form of a flysheet, and invites membership. The only original feature about the programme is that the list of members will be kept secret.'' By the turn of the 20th century, some Jewish publishers were focusing on specialized audiences, with fraternal society papers for men, school publications for children, women's magazines for homemakers and The Jewish Farmer for rural Jews. The exhibition also offers video presentations, including Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger recalling her life as the daughter of Adolph Ochs, who became publisher of The New York Times in 1896 when she was nearly 4 years old, and of Zero Mostel reading letters from the ''Bintel Brief'' column of The Jewish Forward, which is still published in Manhattan weekly in Yiddish.

1990: Garry Kasparov retians holds his title by winning the World Chess Championship.

1991: An Arab women from Bethlehem was preparing an explosive charge in a toilet in the Mahane Yehuda market, the main Jewish market of West Jerusalem, when the charge exploded killing her and no one else.

1993: Entertainer Barbra Streisand performed her first paid concert in 22 years, singing to a sellout crowd at the MGM Grand Garden in Las Vegas.

1994: Leo Fuchs Polish born U.S. Yiddish actor passed away at the age of 83.

1997: Marv Levy retired as coach of Buffalo Bills.

2000: The New York Times book section featured books by Jewish authors and/or about subjects of Jewish interest including Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism by George Soros, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture by Ruth R. Wisse and Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture by Robert Alter.
2002: Maxine Frank Singer, a leading biochemistry researcher and advocate of science education, stepped down after 15 years at the helm of the Carnegie Institution. After earning degrees from Swarthmore (1952) and Yale (1957), Singer joined the National Institutes of Health as a postdoctoral fellow, later becoming a staff member. She was appointed chief of the National Cancer Institute's Biochemistry Lab in 1980, a position she held until 1987. In 1988, she became president of the Carnegie Institution, a major national scientific research center based in Washington, DC. At the Carnegie Institution, Singer created the Carnegie Academy for Science Education, which trains elementary school teachers in science. Reflecting her concern about the lack of women and members of racial minorities in scientific fields, she also created a weekend science school for elementary-age students. Among her other accomplishments at Carnegie was a $50 million capital campaign that financed Carnegie's participation in the building of two giant optical telescopes at the Institution's campus in Chile, as well as other capital improvement projects. Singer's own research interests have ranged widely within biochemistry, but have included significant work on recombinant DNA. Partly as a result of her interest in mammalian DNA, Singer has long taken an active interest in issues of science policy and ethics. Beginning in 1973, she helped to organize a series of conferences that addressed both the promises and the perils of human DNA research. She has also spoken out about U.S. public policy, advocating national investment in the human genome project but cautioning against overspending on biomedical research in space. Singer has served on the boards of the Whitehead Institute, Johnson & Johnson, Yale, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Singer was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1979 and to the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1986. In 1992, she was awarded the National Medal of Science in recognition of her illustrious career in biochemistry. The award citation noted "her outstanding scientific accomplishments and her deep concern for the societal responsibility of the scientist."

2003: German-born American physicist Arthur R. von Hippel passed away. Von Hippel was not Jewish but his wife was. Von Hippel was an opposed to the Nazis. For these two reasons, Von Hippel left Germany and eventually made his as to the United States where he spent the rest of his life.

2004: Israeli Poet and playwright Elisheva Greenbaum passed away. In June of 2003, at the Metulla Festival of Poetry, Elli was awarded the prestigious "Tevah" prize in poetry. Earlier, in 2002, Elisheva was awarded The Prime Minister's prize for poetry.

2005: Premier of “Six Actors in Search of a Plot" a new bilingual Arabic-Hebrew written by the Palestinian playwright Mohammad el-Thaher.

2005: On the secular calendar, Saturday evening means Havdalah. How appropriate that "2005" separates itself from our lives on the evening when the Jew separates the day of rest from the week of work

2005: Neil Diamond appeared on Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve 2006.

2006: Two sad events for the tenth of Tevet – Fast of the Tenth of Tevet and the Yahrzeit of Judith “Judy” Sharon Rosenstein (nee Levin).

2006: The Sunday Washington Post book section and The Sunday New York Times book section both included reviews of The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World by Kati Marton. The Sunday New York Times book section also included reviews of Emma Lazarus by Esther Schor and Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins by Amanda Vaill.

2006: Seymour Martin “Marty” Lipset “the most revered analyst of American society and democracy since Alexis de Tocqueville” passed away at the age of 84.

2006: At the Jewish Museum in New York an exhibition styled “Ours to Fight For: American Jews During the Second World War” comes to an end.

2007: The New Republic magazine featured a review of The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan.

2007: Rabbi, Naftali Tzi Weisz, 59, and the assistant, or gabbai, Moshe E. Zigelman, 60 spent some of the time studying Hebrew books and reciting psalms while waiting to appear in court having been charged in an indictment that alleges a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud U.S. government agencies, to operate a underground money transfer system and to launder money through an Israeli bank.

2007(22 Tevet 5768): Rabbi Arnold G. Kaiman, 74, rabbi at Congregation Kol Ami on the Near North Side for 21 years, died of lung problems, in a West Bloomfield, Mich., hospital. He moved to West Bloomfield after his retirement from Congregation Kol Ami in 1994. Rabbi Kaiman was known for denying and conformity. The longtime Congregation Kol Ami rabbi liked incorporating popular music into his services and conducted many interfaith marriages. Believing that love and commitment trumped religious background, Rabbi Kaiman presided over many interfaith marriages during 36 years as a Reform rabbi. Born in 1933, Rabbi Kaiman grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household in Omaha. He remained Orthodox through his undergraduate years at Yale University and at the University of Cincinnati, where he did his graduate work. It was as a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati that he shifted to Reform Judaism, attracted by the movement's modern ideas and lack of reliance on ancient ritual, his daughter said. Rabbi Kaiman served congregations in Philadelphia, Larchmont, N.Y., and Los Angeles. Rabbi Kaiman came to Chicago in 1973 and maintained a high profile for much of his two decades in the city. He hosted the "Ask the Rabbi" radio show and, in the late 1980s, the TV show "Of Cabbages and Kings.” He volunteered as a chaplain for inmates in Illinois prison and for the Chicago Police Department, and he was a member of the city's Interfaith Council under the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. For Jews seeking a spouse outside the faith, Rabbi Kaiman was the go-to guy. He was one of only a handful of rabbis who would administer interfaith marriages, and he traveled throughout the Midwest to perform such nuptials in addition to the many he conducted in Chicago. "He just felt really strongly it was about love, it wasn't about religion," his daughter said. "He just felt it shouldn't be so limiting. For many Jewish parents, Rabbi Kaiman's actions kept the door open for their children to maintain ties to the faith, said Shom Klaff, executive director of Congregation Kol Ami. "I had so many families come to me and say, 'He saved our kids for Judaism,' " Klaff said. Rabbi Kaiman's services at Kol Ami, held in Water Tower Place since 1976, were spiced with popular music, an attention-getting device he started using while an Air Force chaplain. Selections included everything from "Wind Beneath My Wings" to "Somewhere, Over the Rainbow." In a 1990 Tribune story, Rabbi Kaiman acknowledged his methods were alienating to some. "Let me put it in my bluntest way. You either love me or you hate me," he said. "That's OK. I don't want to be a rabbi who is so conformist that he's accepted."

2008: An exhibition entitled "From Distant Places to Dubuque's Shores: 175 Years of Jewish Life" at the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa comes to a close.

2008: The Maltz Museum offers museum guests an opportunity to toast in the New Year at a 7 p.m. function before moving on to other holiday parties. A brief snapshot of this treasure trove of Judaica provides a valuable reminder that Jewish culture thrives in places outside of New York and Los Angeles. The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, in the eastern Cleveland suburb of Beachwood, opened in late 2005. It is a beautiful, 24,000-square foot building made of Jerusalem limestone that tells the story of the Jewish community in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio -- from the 18th century to the present -- with exhibits, interactive computer displays, and video oral histories. The Maltz Museum is the brain-child of Cleveland media mogul, Milton Maltz and his wife Tamar. They conceived the project after seeing a similar museum in Amsterdam and contributed well over half of the funds as well as the ideas for its creation. The results are spectacular. The 24,000-square foot, elegant building, made from Jerusalem limestone and glass is a stunning tribute to Cleveland's Jewish citizens, past and present -- as well as to the Maltzes. The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage is divided into three sections -- the permanent collection, a large exhibition hall for visiting exhibits, and the Temple-Tifereth Israel Gallery. The permanent collection includes eight galleries, with exhibits such as "They've Arrived" about NE Ohio's Jewish immigrants and "Wonderland" - a tribute to Ohio's Jewish entertainers from Vaudeville to the present, narrated by native NE Ohioan, Joel Grey. Also featured in the permanent exhibits are "To Serve," a look at Jewish Ohioans contributions during wartime and "The World Remade," a look at rebuilding the Jewish trust and community after the fascism and loss of the mid-20th century. The Temple-Tifereth Israel Gallery showcases 170 periodically changing treasures from the University Circle Temple's extensive collection of textiles, paintings, sculpture, and lithographs, dating from the 18th century to the present. Among the objects displayed are a series of Marc Chagall paintings depicting the Exodus and elaborately embroidered Torah coverings.

2008: Haaretz reported that Katyusha rockets fired by Hamas from the Gaza Strip exploded in Be'er Sheva region, 37 kilometers from the coastal territory, which was the furthest point eastward which a Palestinian projectile has managed to reach