This Day, January 6, In Jewish History

January 6 In Jewish History

548: This was the last year the Church in Jerusalem observed the birth of Jesus on this date. (Celebrating Christmas on December 25th began in the late 300s in the Western Church.)

1481: In Spain, during the Inquisition, the priests inaugurated the fist auto-da-fe.

1497: Jews were expelled from Graz, Syria.

1706: Birthdate of Benjamin Franklin, printer, publisher, scientist, statesmen and a man who was far greater than his parts. “Franklin knew the Hebrew scriptures (what we call the Bible) very well. He had even suggested that the Great Seal of America depict Moses standing on the shore of the Red Sea, while Pharaoh drowns in his chariot in its midst. The motto at the bottom of the seal would have read: ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’ You see Franklin was among those Founding Fathers who saw in the American Revolution a replaying of the story of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt. King George III was the Pharaoh. George Washington was Moses. The Atlantic Ocean was the Red Sea. And, it was as if God were saying to King George: ‘Let my American people go!’ It is also important to point out that when the Jewish community in Philadelphia built their synagogue, which they named “Mikveh Israel,” Franklin contributed to the building fund himself. On July 4, 1788, 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. And when he was carried to his grave two years later, his casket was accompanied by all the clergymen of the city, every one of them, of every faith.”

1785 (24th of Tevet, 5545): Haym Salomon passed away in Philadelphia at the age of 44. Born in Poland in 1740, Salomon came to the United States before the outbreak of the American Revolution. He helped was a friend of financier Robert Morris and several leaders of the American Revolution. Among those whom he lent money to was James Madison, author of the Federalist Papers and President of the United States. Salomon died penniless having bankrupted himself in support of the cause of American independence

1838: Birthdate of German composer, Max Bruch. Bruch was not Jewish. But he is most famous for his composition Kol Nidrei, written for cello and orchestra. It is based on the traditional chant associated with that most holy of Jewish holidays

1840: Sultan Abdul Mejid, under pressure from the Montefiore delegation, issued a Firman against blood libels. He also unconditionally released nine survivors of the Damascus libels. Four Jews had already died.

1896: Birthdate of Nathan Pritzker. The highly successful investor and real estate mogul is best known for his ownership of the Hyatt Hotel chain. At one time or another he has also controlled the Hammond Organ Company and Continental Air Lines. According to one estimate his holdings were valued at 700 million dollars during the 1980’s.

1898: Herzl travels to Berlin and convenes a conference of Berlin Jews. He also has two conversations with Ahmed Tewfik, the Turkish ambassador.

1899: “The Honorable Lionel Walter Rothschild has been elected a member of Parliament for the Aylesburgy Division of Buckinghamshire without opposition, succeeding his uncle, the late Baron Ferdinand James De Rothschild, who died December 17, 1898”

1903: Birthdate of composer and conductor Maurice Abravanel. Abravanel was born in Saloniki Greece when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire. A descendant of Isaac Abravanel, he came from an illustrious Sephardic Jewish family, which was expelled from Spain in 1492. Abravanel's ancestors settled in Saloniki in 1517, and his parents were both born there. In 1909, they moved to Switzerland, where his father Edouard de Abravanel was a very successful pharmacist.
In 1934, anti-German sentiment forced Abravanel to leave Europe. After enjoying a triumph in Austraalia, Abravanel came to the United States to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera. He became the long-time conductor of the Utah Symphony Orchestra (1947-1979, building it from a part-time community orchestra into a well-respected, professional ensemble with recording contracts with Vanguard, Vox, Angel, and CBS. He lobbied for years for a permanent home for the orchestra, which then performed in the Mormon Tabernacle on Temple Square. He saw his dream come true when Symphony Hall was built, but not until the season after he retired. It has now been renamed Abravanel Hall in his honour. Only in America could the a major musical venue in the heart of “Mormon Country” be named for a Sephardic Jew from Salonika.
Abravanel passed away at the age of 90 in Salt Lake City.

1903: Herzl begins a trip that would take him to Paris and London.

1908: Birthdate of composer Menahem Avidom. Born in Galicia, Avidom moved to Eretz Israel after World War I. He studied music and graduated from the American University in Beirut. He gained fame in Israel and throughout the world for his musical accomplishments before he died in 1995.

1911: Birthdate of comedian, actor and columnist, Joey Adams

1912: New Mexico becomes the 47th state to enter the Union. The historical record is too limited to do more than speculate on New Mexico Jewish life prior to 1848. The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia suggests that prior to 1850; there may have been isolated conversos in New Mexico. From then until New Mexico's statehood, Jews played an active role in New Mexico's social, economic and political life. The first religious services were held in 1860 Sante Fe and a B'nai B'rith lodge was formed in 1882 in Albuquerque. New Mexico's first synagogue was built in Las Vegas in 1886. Other Jews were active in municiple and territorial/state politics. The experiences of New Mexico's Jewish pioneers speak clearly to their resilience and dedication.
In 1990, the 6,400 Jews living in New Mexico were found mostly in the Albuquerque area.
Between 1750 and 1850, many German Jews came to America to escape economic hardship and religious persecution. In the 1840s and 1850s, the first Jewish immigrants to New Mexico established themselves as merchants, sending for relatives as soon as they were able. They married local women or traveled to Europe or cities in the United States to find Jewish brides. By 1860, half the Jewish population of the territory was related. During the Civil War, Jews served the Union cause as soldiers and suppliers. After the war, they expanded into new occupations - banking, politics, law, mining, and ranching. The railroad arrived in New Mexico in 1879, and a new wave of Jewish immigrants reflected their conservative Eastern European origins. After New Mexico became the 47th state in 1912, most of these families returned to urban centers to educate and marry off their children, and the pioneer era came to a close.

1914: Birthdate of Heinz Berggruen, collector and gallery owner. One of the world’s most important patrons and collectors of 20th century masters, Heinz Berggruen’s life was something of a work of art in itself. He escaped from the Third Reich, studied in France, emigrated to San Francisco, became the lover of the painter Frida Kahlo, amassed an unparalleled collection of the works of Picasso and other modern artists and finally effected an act of reconciliation with the Germany that had persecuted him and his family, bringing home his collection of “degenerate” art to the former capital of the Third Reich once and for all. Heinz Berggruen was born in the prosperous Berlin borough of Wilmersdorf in 1914. Both his father, Ludwig, and his mother, Antonie, née Zadek, were from West Prussia. They had a stationery shop on the Olivaerplatz, just off the Kurförstendamm and Heinz grew up in the world of assimilated Berlin Jewry. He attended the Goethe-Gymnasium in Wilmersdorf and graduated to the Friedrich-Wilhelms (now Humboldt) University in 1932 where he read literature and art history. After 1933 he continued his studies at the universities of Grenoble and Toulouse, returning briefly to Germany to work as a journalist, even if his articles could not appear under his name, which was seen as being too provocative to the National Socialists. He emigrated to the US in 1936 and studied briefly at Ber-keley before becoming an assistant curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He married three years later while he was working as an art critic on the San Francisco Chronicle. It was at this time that he had a brief but stormy affair with the painter Frida Kahlo. In 1940 he bought his first picture for $100. It was a watercolour by Paul Klee. In 1942 he persuaded his parents to come to New York. They had in May 1939 been on the liner Saint Louisfrom Hamburg, which was not allowed to land its Jewish refugees in America. As their names began with “B” they were allowed to disembark in England, on the ship’s return to Europe. Others were not so lucky and perished in the camps in the East. Berggruen returned to Europe in American uniform in 1945 and worked briefly with the novelist Erich Kästner on an American-sponsored paper in Munich. He moved on to Unesco before starting his art gallery in the rue de l’Univer-sité in Paris in 1947. The gallery brought him into contact with Picasso, who became his friend and the core of his collection.
It was said that as a gallery owner, Berggruen was his own best customer: he did not like to let the best pieces go. He once swapped Van Gogh’s Le Jardin Publiquefor eight Matisses. In 1980 he gave up the gallery to concentrate on his own collection. The main theme was Picasso, but there was more besides: Matisse, Braque, Klee, Giacometti and Cézanne. He was an early champion of Matisse’s late collages. He was generous to a fault. He sold part of his collection to the National Gallery in London, but the sale contained a large bequest. He made similar donations to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In 1991 he met Wolf-Dieter Dube, the director of the Berlin museums. Dube persuaded him to make a visit to Berlin. It was the beginning of the process that would bring Berggruen home, together with 113 canvases from his collection which Dube installed in a classical building by Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s pupil August Stöler opposite the royal palace in Charlottenburg. This was to be the Berggruen Museum. In 2000 the collection of 165 works (including 85 Picassos) was sold to the museum at about a quarter of its value. This was Berggruen’s famous “gesture of reconciliation”: the Nazis had impoverished Germany by their attitude to nonfigurative Modern art. Berggruen had decided to reverse the process. Paris, he said, was already rich enough in such works.
He was granted a flat “above the shop” and said he felt entirely at home. He also encouraged his friends to donate to the museum, adding a further five Cézannes and two Van Goghs. He talked his fellow Berliner Helmut Newton into giving his photographic collection to the city. At the end of his life he was proud that Berlin had finally become a place of pilgrimage for 20th-century art lovers. Berggruen’s ability to forgive the Germans came as a surprise to many. He always said that he felt at home in Berlin, although it did not look much like the city he had left 60 years before. He said he was a European and hoped with time that many more people would feel the same. He had two homes: one near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris and the other above the museum that bore his name in Charlottenburg. He liked to be close to his collection and was happy to show people round. In 2004 he was given the freedom of the city of Berlin.
He married first Lillian Zeller-bach, the daughter of a paper manufacturer in San Francisco, and had a son and a daughter by her. In 1959 he married Betti-na, the daughter of the actor Alexander Moissi and had two further sons. He died in Neuil-ly-sur-Seine in 2007 at the age of 93. At his own wish he is buried in the forest cemetery in Dahlem, in Berlin.

1918: Georg Cantor passed away. Born in 1845, Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor was a mathematician who was born in Russia and lived in Germany for most of his life. He is best known as the creator of modern set theory. He is recognized by mathematicians for having extended set theory to the concept of transfinite numbers, including the cardinal and ordinal number classes. Cantor is also known for his work on the set of uniqueness, a generalization of Fourier series. Cantor’s father was a Jewish Dane. His mother was a Protestant. Under Halachah, Cantor would not be considered Jewish. Under the racial laws that would go into in Germany 15 years after his death, he would have been a candidate for the Final Solution.

1919: Theodore Roosevelt 26th President of the United States passed away. While President, Roosevelt intervened with the governments of Rumania and Russia on behalf of their Jewish populations. This was an unusual event for Jews and earned Roosevelt and the Republicans support among Jewish voters. T.R.’s finest moment, from a Jewish point of view, may have come in 1895 when he was serving as New York City Police Commissioner. Pastor Hermann Ahlwardt, a noted German anti-Semite came to New York to give a speech. In an attempt to gain publicity for himself and his cause, he demanded police protection from what he was sure would be hostile demonstration by New York Jews. Roosevelt gave him his police protection. All of his protectors were Jewish policemen.

1919: As 100,000 German Marxists gathered in Berlin, Rosa Luxemberg urged them not to seize power until they had popular support. They did not listen to her. They began their unsuccessful revolt during which Rosa Luxemberg and Karl Liebknecht, the Jewish Communist leaders were killed.

1923: Birthdate of Argentine born writer and social protestor Jacobo Timerman. After his release from an Argentine prison he moved to Israel. He died in 1999.

1929: The New York Times featured a review of How Propaganda Works by Edward L. Bernays, “father of modern public relations and nephew of Sigmund Freud.

1931: Birthdate of author E. L. Doctorow.

1936: Cartoon character Porky Pig makes his debut. For most of his career the traif animal got his voice from the Jewish Mel Blanc.

1937: The Palestine Post reported that a quarry worker, Haim Katz, 29, and a policeman, Jacob Klinger, 34, were murdered in an ambush at Givat Shaul

1940: Shivering Jews in Warsaw, Poland, are forced to burn Jewish books for fuel.

1941: President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his State of the Union address which became known as the Four Freedoms Speech because FDR listed them as:
Freedom of speech and expression including the right to dissent
Freedom of every person to worship God in his own way
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
The first two are recognizable as being part of the Bill of Rights. Freedom #2 spoke directly to the needs and concerns of the Jewish people and would prove strinkingly ironic considering the events surrounding the Holocaust.

1942: Jacob Moshe Toledano who was born in Tiberias was installed as Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. In 1926 Toledano served as the head of the religious court at Tangiers, and later similar posts in Cairo and Alexandria. Toledano was escorted from Tiberias to Tel Aviv by a grand delegation.

1942: Victor Klemper was arrested and interrogated at the Gestapo headquarters in Dresden.
1943: The Jews of Lubaczow, Poland, are killed at the Belzec death camp

1943: Jews hiding in Opoczno, Poland, are murdered by Germans after being coaxed out of hiding with a promise of rail transport to a neutral country. Five hundred "Jews with relatives in Palestine" came out of hiding to register. All 500 were sent to Treblinka and were gassed.

1944: Birthdate of Bonnie Franklin, American actress. She once said that because of her red hair and freckles, fans have a hard time believing that she is Jewish.

1945: Three women were hanged in front of the entire women's camp at Birkenau. They were women previously tortured in connection with the revolt at Birkenau but gave away no one. Among them was one conspirator, Roza Robota. Her final words were, "that vengeance would come."

1945 (21st of Tevet, 5705): On Shabbat, Roza Robota and three other Jewish women implicated in the smuggling of explosives used in the October 7, 1944, uprising at Auschwitz are hanged in front of the entire women's camp at Birkenau. The three women had been previously tortured in connection with the revolt at Birkenau but gave away no one. Robota’s final words were, "that vengeance would come."

1945: Hungarian authorities accede to Raoul Wallenberg's request that 5000 Jews be transferred to Swiss-sponsored safe homes in Budapest.

1945(21st of Tevet, 5705): Anne Frank's mother, Edith, dies at Auschwitz

1946: In Zanzur, Libya Islamic instigators encouraged the local population to attack the Jewish community. Of the 150 local Jews half were murdered. The rioting spread to a number of small towns near Tripoli leaving a death toll of approximately 180 Jews and 9 synagogues destroyed. The local police and Arab soldiers often joined in the destruction and murder. This outbreak of Arab anti-Semitic violence took place two years before the creation of the state of Israel. This should put an end to claims that only source of friction between Jews and Arabs was the creation of the Jewish state.

1949: The Egyptian government informed the U.N. of its willingness to enter into immediate negotiations for an armistice agreement.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that according to the new and improved rationing schedule each Israeli was now able to purchase four eggs a week. A mere fifty years ago, the Israelis were living barely above the subsistence level. With no natural resources and faced by enemies on all of its borders, the Jews created a modern, vibrant country . A huge forest, named after Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was planted on Mount Carmel. Only five years after the founding of the state of Israel, the Jewish state created a living monument to a Moslem leader who was not afraid to embrace the modern world.

1954: Moshe Sharett succeeded David Ben-Gurion as Prime Minister of Israel. Ben Gurion had been Prime Minister since the creation of the state in 1948. Sharett had been Foreign Minister, a post he kept in the new government. Golda Meir remained as Labor Minister and Pinchas Lavon became Minister of Defense. The change was in leadership; the Labor Zionist still maintained control of the government.

1957: Yeshiva Kol Ya'ackov opened in Moscow Russia

1967: "Milton Berle Show" last aired on ABC-TV

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that Egypt agreed to reduce by one -third its forces in Sinai, once Israel evacuated the whole area. The US Embassy in Tel Aviv asked the Israeli government to clarify its intentions regarding the setting up of new settlements on the West Bank and in Sinai.

1987(5 Tevet 5747): U.S. Federal Court issued a decision in favor of Agudas Chassidei Chabad ("Union of Chabad Chassidim") regarding the ownership of the priceless library of the 6th Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn. The ruling was based on the idea that a Rebbe is not a private individual but a communal figure synonymous with the body of Chassidim. The Lubavitcher Rebbe (Rabbi Yoseph Yitzchak's son-in-law and successor) urged that the occasion be marked with time devoted to study from Torah books ("sefarim") as well as the acquisition of new Torah books

2002: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish author and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including newly released paper back versions of Martyrs' Crossing, by Amy Wilentz. This first novel by a former Israel correspondent for The New Yorker explores the fraught political conflict there through the story of a tragic, accidental encounter at a highway checkpoint, and its effect on the two characters involved: a Palestinian-American mother and a young Israeli soldier. ''Wilentz knows the world she writes about very well, and her descriptions have a solid specificity that lends authority to her fiction,'' Claire Messud said here last year. Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom, by Bob Woodward. (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $14.) Everyone talks in this admiring portrait of the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, and in the process the author ''lucidly explains the axes of intellectual and political disagreement over monetary policy, productivity growth, irrational exuberance and more, shedding new light on major conflicts of the Greenspan era,'' Robert Kuttner wrote in the Book Review in 2000. Greenspan: The Man Behind Money, by Justin Martin (Perseus, $17.50), focuses more on its subject's personal life, including his early career as a musician and his tenure as former President Gerald R. Ford's chief economic adviser. ''Martin helps the reader see the way Greenspan's earlier career made him such an effective Fed chairman,'' Kuttner said.

2005: : Edgar Ray Killen is arrested as a suspect for the 1964 murders of three Civil Rights workers James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi and two Jewish voting rights organizers from New York, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

2005: The First World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace begins in Brussels, Belgium. “The Permanent Committee for Jewish-Muslim Dialogue was created after the First World Congress as an institution which would reflect and act in domains and on problematic issues in which Islam and Judaism are implicated. The committee is composed on nine founder members, four international Jewish personalities, four international Muslim personalities and a neutral president.”

2006: “Fateless” a movie based on the novel by the same name written by Imre Kertesz opens at the Film Forum in New York. Fateless was a biogrpahical novel for which Kertesz won the Nobel Prize in 2002.

2007: As part of its “Jewish Season” The Theater for a New Audience in New York City presents The Merchant of Venice.

2008: An exhibition entitled Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. comes to a close.

2008: The Washington Post book section featured a review of People of the Book a work of historic fiction by Geraldine Brooks. “The Book” in the title is the famous Sarajevo Haggadah, created in medieval Spain. The Haggadah is “a famous rarity because it was a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against illustrations of any kind.”

2008: The Sunday New York Times book section featured a review of, and excerpt from, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 by Matthias Küntzel and translated by Colin Meade, a review of, and an excerpt from, Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy by Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg and a review of Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian and Jewish Coexistence by Zacharcy Karabell.

2008 (28 Tevet 5768): Rabbi Shmuel Berenbaum (the rosh yeshiva of the Mir yeshiva in Brooklyn, New York City which includes an elementary school and a high school, as well as its post-graduate Talmudical Academy passed away. The original Mirrer yeshiva was founded in 1815, in Mir, Belarus, and remained in operation there until 1914. With the outbreak of World War I the yeshiva moved to Poltava, Ukraine, under the leadership of Rabbi Eliezer Yehudah Finkel, son of the legendary Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel (the Alter of Slabodka), and son-in-law of Rabbi Elya Boruch Kamai, his renowned predecessor. In 1921, the yeshiva moved back to its original facilities in Mir, where it remained until Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 marking the beginning of the Holocaust. Although many of the foreign-born students left when the Soviet army invaded from the east, the yeshiva continued to operate, albeit on a reduced scale, until the approaching Nazi armies caused the leaders of the yeshiva to move the entire yeshiva community to Keidan, Lithuania. As the Nazi armies continued to push to the east, the yeshiva as a whole eventually fled across Siberia by train to the Far East, and finally reopened in Kobe, Japan in 1941. Several smaller yeshivos managed to escape alongside the Mir, and, despite the difficulties involved, the overseers of the Mirrer yeshiva undertook full responsibility for their support, distributing funds and securing quarters and food for all the students. A short time later, the yeshiva relocated again, to (Japanese-controlled) Shanghai, China, where they remained until the end of World War II. The heroism of the Japanese consul-general in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, who issued several thousand travel visas to Jews, permitting them to flee to the east, has been the subject of several books. Following the end of the war, the majority of the Jewish refugees from Shanghai ghetto left for Palestine and the United States. Among them were the survivors from the Mir yeshiva, who re-established the yeshiva, this time with two campuses, one in Jerusalem, Israel and this one in Brooklyn, New York.

2009: The National Jewish Democratic Council recognizes the Jewish Democratic Members of the 111th Congress at a reception at Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC

2009: Fast of the 10th of Tevet and Yahrtzeit of Judy Rosentein (nee Levin).

2009: Today, on the Christian observance known as the Feast of the Epiphany, the Ra'anana Symphonette (RS) conducted by Omer Wellber, will play Irena's Song - a Ray of Light through the Darkness by Kobi Oshrat. The composition and the performance were inspired by Irene Sendler, who along with her intrepid band of helpers from Zegota, the Polish underground, rescued 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between 1942 and 1943. “Between these dates grows a story no less wonderful than the life, deeds and soul of a Polish Catholic social worker who risked her life that Jewish children might live. "Every child saved with my help, and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers… is the justification of my existence on earth, and not a title to glory," Sendler said to the Polish Senate when it honored her in 2007. In January 2008, RS general director Orit Fogel saw the portrait of a woman (pictured) in a Poznan home "whose goodness radiated, and when I asked 'who is that?', I was told the story of Irena Sendler. I said 'we have to write a work in her honor.'" Sendler died in Warsaw this past May 12 at the age of 98, so she will never get to hear the song that Oshrat calls "more than a professional challenge. It was a kind of mission, the least that I, as a Jew, could do to honor this woman." The 20-minute work is "a sort of collage of her life, ending with seven-year-old Menashe Shalev, who sings like an angel, and symbolizes a better future." "'I entered the room and saw an angel,' were the first words spoken by ten different people who had met her on ten different occasions," says Fogel. She buckled down to the research on Sendler by enlisting the mayor of Ra'anana to get 2,500 junior high school students to write letters to Irena, after they'd been told her story by some of her "children" who now live in Israel. The Israel Philatelic Authority issued a limited edition of two stamps (designed by renowned Polish artist Rafal Olbinski who volunteered his services when he heard it was "for Irena") for the envelopes. And others including artist Ilana Gur, echoed the sentiment of her angelic nature. "The project was a huge privilege for me," says Fogel. "I threw in a stone called Irena Sendler and the ripples spread and spread. People from all over the world are coming to this concert." Sendler and her helpers smuggled the children out of the ghetto in ambulances, coffins, burlap bags, boxes - any way they could. They settled the children in convents, orphanages, private homes, giving each false papers with a new name. Sendler wrote the child's real name, new name, and that of his parents in code on thin sheets of paper that she buried in jars beneath a neighbor's apple trees so she could reunite the children with their parents after the madness was over. In 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo, horribly tortured and sentenced to death. Zegota bribed a guard, and so rescued her. She resumed her activities under another name until the end of the war. When she was little, her doctor father once said to her "Irena, in this world there is good and evil. Always choose only the good." And so she did.