This Day, January 5, In Jewish History

January 5 In Jewish History

1589: Catherine de Medici, Queen of France as the wife of King Henry II passed away. Along with several other French rulers and power brokers including Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV, she had a penchant for collecting Hebrew Manuscripts. Richelieu, Louis XIV, Henry IV and Catherine de Medici

1826: Maryland put into effect the "Jew Bill", 1826, which allowed Jews to hold public office if they believed in Reward and Punishment in the Hereafter. Maryland had an interesting history when it came to questions of religious toleration. Unlike other colonies, it was founded by Catholics and the Act of Toleration was one of its landmark pieces of colonial legislation.

1876: Birthdate of Konrad Adenauer. Adenauer was the first post-war Chancellor of West Germany. He took office in 1949. Having been imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II, Adenauer sought to return Germany to the world community. He sought to make amends with the Jewish community by offering war reparations to the government of Israel. Under Adenauer, Germany recognized Israel and provided arms for her defense despite threats from the Arab governments.

1895: Alfred Dreyfus was publicly degraded and sent to Devil's Island. Later, evidence was produced which proved that Major Esterhazy and Colonel Henry, Dreyfus' chief accusers, had forged the evidence. Yet, a new trial was not begun until 1899. The Dreyfus Affair brought on a torrent of anti-Semitism that spawned the modern Zionist movement. It tore at the fabric of French society and for decades later, there was still a political divide between those who supported Dreyfus and those who wanted to believe that he was a traitor.

1898: Herzl’s "The New Ghetto" is finally produced in the Carl-Theater in Vienna. The play is performed in Berlin and Prague too.

1912: State organization formed in Boston, Mass. to encourage naturalization of Jews living in the Bay State.

1912: The Philadelphia Jewish community requests leniency in enforcement the Sunday Closing Law of 1794.

1912: Boston Section withdraws from Council of Jewish Women.

1914: Birthdate of Heinz Berggruen a German art dealer and collector who founded the Berggruen Museum in Berlin Germany. Born in Berlin, he immigrated to the United States in 1936 and studied at Berkeley University. In 1939 he became an "Assistant director" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In preparing an exhibition about the Mexican painter Diego Rivera he met Frida Kahlo, too, and had a short love affair with her. After the Second World War he got acquainted with Pablo Picasso in Paris, who spontaneously had confidence in Berggruen and so he became Picasso's art dealer. In 1996, after 60 years in exile, he returned to Germany and opened an art museum in front of the Charlottenburg Palace. Berggruen left his precious art collection in a generous gesture of a low price to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. For this he was awarded the honorary citizenship of Berlin and the Federal Cross of Merit (Grand Cross 2nd Class) of Germany (Bundesverdienstkreuz, Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern und Schulterband). He died in Paris on February 23, 2007.

1923: Birthdate of Robert L Bernstein, chief executive of Random House.

1923: Birthdate of Israel Prize-winning author and translator Aharon Amir. Amir, who was born in Lithuania, grew up in Tel Aviv and was a member of both the Irgun and the Lehi. He was one of the founders of the Canaanite movement, which saw geographical location rather than religious affiliation as the defining element of Hebrew or Israeli culture. He studied Arabic language and literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but translated works of literature mainly from English and French. Authors whose work he rendered into Hebrew include Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll, Albert Camus, and Charles de Gaulle. Amir won the Tchernichovsky Prize for translation in 1951 and the Israel Prize for translation in 2003. He passed away on February 28, 2008 at the age of 85,


1919: The National Socialist Party (Nazi) formed as German Farmers Party. Hitler was not one of the party founders.

1936: Birthdate of Steven Cojocaru, Canadian born American television personality and fashion critic.

1938: The Palestine Post reported that the British government was about to send to Palestine a new, largely technical commission, essentially a fact-finding body, which would plan how to implement Partition, according to the terms of the agreement reached with the Mandatory Commission of the League of Nations. The government, however, indicated that it was in no way committed to the actual execution of such a plan. Three Arabs out of a band of 40, apparently arms smugglers, were killed close to the Syrian border. Haskiel Joseph and Nathan Yairoff were shot and badly wounded by an Arab terrorist inside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem.

1939: Sir Horace Rumbold, a member of the Peel Commission, attempts to explain away his description of the Jews of Palestine as an “alien race” by saying that he merely meant that the Jews were a race with different characteristics from the Arab race.

1939: Germany declares Karaite Jews exempt from enforcement of the Nuremberg Laws.

1940: Jews were forbidden by the General Gouvernment be in the streets between 9:00PM and 5:00AM.

1942: Birthdate of Elzbieta Ficowska, nee Koppel, one of the 2,500 children smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto by Irena Sendler and her associate Stanislawa, a widowed Catholic mid-wife. (Shades of the story of the brave mid-wives found in the Book of Exodus.)

1942: The Jewish ghetto at Kharkov, Ukraine, is liquidated.

1943: The Vught, Holland, concentration camp is established

1943: In an orgy of killing that would last for the next two days the Nazis murdered thousands of Jews at Lvov, Ukraine.

1944: Birthdate of Ed Rendell, Democratic Mayor of Philadelphia in the 1990’s before being elected Governor of the State of Pennsylvania in 2002.

1946: "Show Boat" opened at Ziegfeld Theater in New York City for 417 performances.

1947: Haganah, the Jewish defense organization, in a broadcast from its secret transmitter today denounced Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern band as extremist organizations and blamed them for the latest outburst of violence in Eretz Israel.

1948: Benjamin Rabin begins serving on the New York Supreme Court.

1948: Warner Brothers offered the first color newsreel, covering the Tournament of Roses Parade and the Rose Bowl Game. At that time, the company was still the property of the four brothers name Warner – Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack L. – Polish Jews who came to the United States via Canada

1948: As the seige of Jerusalem continues, the Haganah launches an attack against Katamon, a suburb from which Arab gunmen have been firing non-stop into adjacent Jewish neighborhoods.

1949: As the War of Independence winds down, Israeli forces struggle to dislodge the Egyptians from Gaza. A sandstorm hinders and IDF column attacking the town of Rafa. At the same time the storm provides cover for an Egyptian armored column that launched a counter-attack aimed at keeping the Israelis from Rafa.

1950: Birthdate of guitarist Chris Stein, co-founder of “Blondie.”

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that East Germany had launched a Zionist witch-hunt, accusing two Jewish Communist leaders of being Zionists, American agents, Titoists and Trotskyists.

1959: In his his introduction to A Matter of Taste: The Albert D. Lasker Collection: Renoir to Matisse that includes commentaries by Wallace Brockway Alfred Frankfurter asks, “What was it that made an American business man * * * train his eye and his energies so spectacularly as to produce this extraordinary array of art ?"

1964: Pope Paul VI and President Zalman Shazar of Israel met today at Meggido, the scene of ancient battles, and both voiced hope for a moral revival and for peace among men

1970: Max Born passed away at the age of 87. A native of Germany, the famous physicist was forced to take refuge in Britain in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. Max Born won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954.

1970: Nine Egyptians soldiers crossed the Suez Canal and under covering fire from the west bank attacked Israeli positions. All nine are killed.

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that at Aswan US President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat declared jointly that any Middle East peace settlement required the recognition of the "legitimate rights of the Palestinians and their participation in deciding their own future." In Jerusalem Premier Menachem Begin declared his firm opposition to this self-determination principle. The Jewish National Fund started ground-breaking operations for eight new settlements in Sinai, between Yamit and El Arish.

1985: Israel temporarily suspended the airlift Ethopian Jews, leaving one group stranded in the Sudan. With help from the CIA, Israel would organize Operation Sheba, the last of the airlifts which had secretly brought over 14,000 Jews from Ethopia from 1972 through 1985.

1988: Richard Mathew Stallman starts developing GNU. GNU is a free software operating system.

1996: Yahya Ayyash, chief bomb maker for Hamas, is killed by an Israeli-planted booby-trapped cell phone.

1997: "Show Boat" closed at Gershwin Theater New York City. These were obviously two different runs of the famed musical that owes its music, lyrics and book to three American Jews.

1997: The Sunday New York Times book section featured review of books by Jewish authors or of special interest to Jewish readers including My Teacher’s Secret Life by Stephen Krensky, A Journalist's Search for the Heart of His Country by Henry Grunwald which tells the story of how a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s German editor in chief of all publications in the vast Time Inc. empire, before retiring at the end of 1987 and Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America by Ruth Gay which “is essentially a memoir of Jewish life in the West Bronx in the 1920's and 30's, including the author's discomfort with her Eastern European immigrant family and her ''ordeal of civility,'' to use John Murray Cuddihy's phrase, in moving from ghetto culture to gentility.”

1998: To commemorate her 30 years on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Muriel Siebert rang the closing bell to mark the end of the trading day. She was the first woman to own a seat on the NYSE “Known as the "First Woman of Finance," Muriel "Mickie" Siebert was a dentist's daughter from Cleveland, OH, Siebert never graduated from college. Still, by lying about her education, she was able to get a low-level job at a prominent Wall Street firm where she eventually became partner before striking out on her own. In 1967, after being rejected by nine of the first ten men she asked to sponsor her application, Siebert became the first woman to purchase a seat on the NYSE. A decade later, New York Governor Hugh Carey appointed Siebert the first woman New York State Superintendent of Banking, a post she held for five years. After an unsuccessful 1982 bid for a United States Senate seat, Siebert returned to Wall Street, where she became an outspoken critic of business and financial practices. Throughout her career, Siebert worked on behalf of women in business and politics, donating millions of dollars from her brokerage and securities underwriting business to help other women break into the world of business and high finance. She is a founding member and former president of the Women's Forum, an international women's leadership network, and a member of the Committee of 200, a group of over 445 leading American businesswomen. Siebert was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1994.”

2003: Twenty three people were killed in a suicide bombing in the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood of Tel Aviv.

2004: The Center Art Gallery at Calvin College presents “Talmud: in the Art of Ben-Zion and Marc Chagall,” an exhibit that brings together the Biblical work of two of the most important Jewish artists of the 20th Century. It features 18 intaglio prints by Ben-Zion and 25 color lithographs by Marc Chagall. The title, Talmud, is appropriate for this exhibit of images that help illustrate the collection of Biblical writings that constitute the Jewish civil and religious law (Talmud, n. {Heb. Talmud, instruction, from lamed, to learn}). Although Talmud traditionally deals with text and not image, these works act as aesthetic and insightful commentaries on the text of Scripture in the best of the Talmudic tradition. Viewed together, Zion’s blunt, powerful expressions of Biblical subjects and Chagall’s vibrant and dreamlike interpretations of religious narrative create an artistic dialogue that furthers understanding and enjoyment of their work and the Scripture they interpret.

2005: The 10th Pan American Maccabi Games came to an end in Santiago, Chile.

2007: Haaretz reported that The Amsterdam house where Anne Frank wrote her diaries in hiding before dying in a Nazi concentration camp drew almost a million visitors during 2006. The total of 982,000 was 16,000 higher than in 2005. Most of the visitors were young tourists, primarily from the United States and Britain, the Anne Frank House said.

2008: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, The traditional Shabbat Morning minyan at Temple Judah enters into its seventh year.

2008: The Israeli Army wound up a large-scale, three-day operation in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Nineteen Palestinians had been detained during the operation that uncovered a major arms cache including rockets similar to the hundreds of projectiles that have been fired from Gaza into Israel.

2009: For Women Only, drama, song and dance showcasing Jewish women and girls of Baltimore, presented at Goucher College.

2009: Lawmakers are scheduled to take their first close look at financier Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion fraud and why the Securities and Exchange Commission failed to discover the scandal. Critics say the SEC missed warning signs and failed to uncover the scandal until Madoff's sons went to the authorities and told them he confessed to the fraud.