This Day, July 5, In Jewish History

July 5 In Jewish History



1247: Pope Innocent IV, semi-retired by Emperor Frederick II, issued a Bull refuting blood libels and sent it throughout Germany and France.



1345: Pope Clement VI banned forced baptism of Jews. Subsequent Popes overturned this decree in 1597 and 1747.



1764: Birthdate of Daniel Mendoza ((often known as Dan Mendoza) an English prizefighter, who was boxing champion of England 1792-95. He is sometimes called the father of scientific boxing. Mendoza's style consisted of more than simply battering opponents into submission, his "scientific style" included much movement. His ability to overcome much heavier adversaries was a consequence of this. In 1789 he published The Art of Boxing. Mendoza was so popular that the London press reported news of one of his bouts ahead of the storming of the Bastille which marked the start of the French Revolution. He transformed the English stereotype of a Jew from a weak, indefensible person into someone deserving of respect. He is said to have been the first Jew to talk to the King, George III. . In 1954 Mendoza was elected to the Boxing Hall of Fame. In 1990 he was inducted into the inaugural class of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Mendoza was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1981. The actor Peter Sellers was a descendant of Dan Mendoza. Prints of the boxer can be seen on Inspector Clouseau’s wall in the Pink Panther films.



1687: Sir Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Newton was also a millenarian and a theologian who thought the world would end in 2060. A treatises he wrote contains a diagram is of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. The Jewish National and University Library at Hebrew University has an exhibit of these more unusual aspects of Newton's career, and Ha'aretz has a story on the exhibit (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/871575.html). For more about Newton and the Jewish religion see Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton by Matt Goldish.



1811: Venezuela declares its independence from Spain. According to the “Virtual Jewish History Tour,” Simon Bolivar, considered Venezuela's liberator, found refuge and material support for his army in the homes of Jews from Curaçao. Jews such as Mordejai Ricardo, Ricardo Meza and his brother Abraham Meza offered hospitality to Bolivar as he fought against the Spanish, thus establishing brotherly relations between Jews and the newly independent Venezuelan republic. Several Jews even fought in the ranks of Bolivar's army during the war.”



1838: The Jews of the city of Safed came under attack from the Druze, who also had sacked an Ottoman caravan capturing 300 fully loaded camels of the Sultan. "While it was still night, the entire city was suddenly and terrified because unknown men were seen walking around the streets, and there were signs of malice on their faces." The attack on the Jews was by a group men armed with rifles, knives, axes and clubs.



1877: Birthdate of Rabbi Judah Leib Magnes. Born in San Francisco and educated at Hebrew Union College, Magnes was a life-long maverick. He was an early and ardent Zionist, which was unusual among the Reform movement since it was largely anti-Zionist at the time. He was named Rabbi at New York’s prestigious Temple Emanu-el in 1906 but left four years later because he found it "too assimilationist", another unusual stance for a Reform Rabbi. He was an outspoken pacifist during World War I. (He would change his views during World War II.) In 1925, he became the first Chancellor of the brand new Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He held the post for ten years. He was ousted as Chancellor as a result of an academic squabble and "kicked upstairs to the Presidency. . Although he was a Zionist, Magnes believed in a binational Arab-Jewish state. While there were other Jews including the famous philosopher Martin Buber who supported Magnes, none of the "Moderate" Arabs would join his efforts. This did not stop Magnes from pursuing what became his Quixotic Quest. He passed away in 1948



1896: Herzl met with Claude Montefiore and Frederic Mocotta of the Anglo-Jewish Association who are anti-Zionist.



1897: Birthdate of Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim. Born Paul Frankenburger in Munich, “he trained at the Munich Academy of Arts from 1915 to 1920. He was assistant conductor in Walter and Knappersbusch, 1920 to 1924, and then conductor at Augsburg from 1924 until 1931. He then abandoned conducting and devoted himself to teaching and composition. In 1933, he emigrated to Tel Aviv and changed his name to Paul Ben-Haim. Some of his works include the Concerto Grosso (1931), Symphony No. 1 (1940) and Symphony No. 2 (1945). In 1953, he won the Israeli State Prize for the composition Sweet Psalmist of Israel, scored for harp, harpsichord and orchestra. According to the critics, Ben-Haim’s music can best be described as late romantic with an Oriental/Mediterranean overtone. He embodies the general tendencies of this group of composers who were trained in the classic late romanticism of the late 19th and early 20th century. Ben-Haim died in 1984.”



1923: Third baseman Joe Bennett made his major league debut with the Philadelphia Phillies.



1934: In Vienna, The body of Chaim Nachman Biliak, the great Hebrew poet who died last night of a heart attack lies in state in the ceremonial hall of the Central Jewish Cemetery surrounded by an honor guard of Jewish students from the University of Vienna.



1934: In announcing plans for U.S. memorial services honoring the late Chaim Nachman Bialik, Morris Rothenberg, President of the ZOA, described him “the foremost Hebrew Poet of the last 500 years.



1935: The Bialik Institute invited authors throughout the world to compete for eight prizes with a total value of 900 pounds which will be awarded in January, 1936. The winners will be determined based on their contributions to Hebrew literature. Submission may include original Hebrew works as well as efforts translated from the original into Hebrew.



1936: A Czechoslovak press photographer, Stephan Lux, shot himself in Geneva, during the League of Nations Assembly meeting, in protest against the treatment of Jews in Germany. He died in hospital the following night.



1936: The Palestine Post reported that in spite of the six-week-long general Arab strike, work was still going on the Jaffa Port improvement. A Czechoslovak press photographer, Stephan Lux, shot himself in Geneva, during the League of Nations Assembly meeting, in protest against the treatment of Jews in Germany. He died in hospital the following night. Four cars belonging to Jews were set on fire in Jerusalem. The shooting, bomb throwing and tree uprooting by Arab terrorists continued throughout the country.



1937: During the Spanish Civil, New Yorker Moe Fishman, a volunteer with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, was wounded while fighting in a battle west of Madrid.



1938: Herb Caen's first column appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen’s father was Jewish, but his mother was not.



1941: After 54 Jews were shot the prior day, 93 more were killed in Vilna by members of the Einsatzkommando unit. The Einsatzkommando were the SS killing squads that followed the Nazi Army into eastern Poland, the Baltic States and the Soviet Union. They were to round up the Jews and other undesirables and kill them. But special emphasis was placed on the Jews in this next phase of the Final Solution.



1941: In Lvov, the local Ukrainians continued to take Jews from their homes and murder them. Among the victims were a 49-year-old ophthalmologist, Kornelia Graf-Weisenberg, and her daughter.



1941: The Nuremberg Race Law was extended to include Czech citizens.



1941: In the Ukraine, 3000 Jews are murdered at Chernovtsy; 600 are killed at Skalat.



1943: Heinrich Himmler orders that Sobibór, a death camp, be made a concentration camp.



1945: Great Britain holds its first general election since 1935. The election pits Churchill and his Conservative Party against Atlee and the Laborites. Churchill and the Conservatives will go down to defeat. Unfortunately for the Jews, the new Laborite government will enforce the White Paper and support the Arab cause with even more tenacity than the Churchill government had.



1950: The Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, passed a law granting every Jew the absolute right to settle in Israel. This is the famous Law of Return.



1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that registration began of all the Israeli-occupied houses in Jerusalem's no-man's-land by the joint subcommittee of the Israel-Jordan Mixed Armistice Commission. It was hoped that the registration would eliminate the neutral areas and all the trouble spots in which many lives were lost during the past three years. Israeli seamen demanded a large share in their foreign currency earnings.



1960: The then 50-year old Jewish community of the Belgian Congo, consisting of 2500 Jews fled in the wake of riots that followed independence of that former Belgian colony.



1975: In Jerusalem, a refrigerator that had five kilograms of explosives packed into its sides exploded on Zion Square, a main square leading to Ben Yehuda Street and to Jaffa Street. Fifteen people were killed and 77 were injured. After the attack, Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister, said: "The murder serves as a warning not to get caught up in illusions about the intentions of the terror organizations ... Therefore we must follow a strict policy of not negotiating with them. We must speak to them only in the language they understand, the language of the sword." Ahmad El-Sukar, the terrorist responsible for placing the bomb, was released from Israeli prison in 2003 as a gesture to Arafat.



1976: The Jerusalem Post reported on the successful completion of the Entebbe rescue operation, the joy at the freeing of hostages who arrived home to a jubilant Israel. Four Israelis - the commander of the rescue team, Yonatan Netanyahu, and three other soldiers - were killed during the operation. A number of wounded Israelis were still under treatment in Nairobi hospital. Idi Amin, Uganda's ruler was working together with Palestinian gunmen, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Knesset.



1989: An exhibition entitled ''Robert Capa: Photographs From Israel, 1948-1950,'' appearing at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan comes to a close. The following review entitled “Slices of Time, Preserved in Deft Images” describes the exhibition and its importance.



A photograph, whether intended to or not, speaks of the time in which it was made. This is obvious in the case of images taken years ago -pictures from the first days of Israel's independence, for example, or from the tumultuous decade of the 1960's. But it is also true of contemporary art photographs of the sort one finds displayed in SoHo galleries. This weekend affords an unusually rich opportunity to look at photographs of the past and present, and to assess how much the world has changed in the last 40 years. Robert Capa's photographs of the first years of the State of Israel were taken at a time - 1948 to 1950 - when photojournalism was in full flower. Not only was this genre the most visible and provocative manifestation of photography, but it was also the primary means by which the events of the world were conveyed. Capa, considered by many the quintessential photojournalist, made a considerable reputation by photographing the Spanish Civil War and World War II. His images of those conflicts have become so well known that they could be considered among the lasting monuments of war. With relatively few exceptions, however, Capa's pictures of Israel did not achieve wide currency during his lifetime (he died, the victim of a land mine in Vietnam, in 1954). Curiously, given the potential interest in their subject matter, they have rarely been published or seen in exhibitions. Thus the show ''Robert Capa: Photographs From Israel, 1948-1950,'' which has opened this week at the Jewish Museum has an unusual fascination. The 107 black-and-white images in the exhibition, which was organized by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from the archives of the Capa estate, depict an Israel in the throes of self-definition. There are pictures of immigrants in transient camps, of politicians electioneering, of soldiers mobilizing. We see the first meeting of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) as well as the unloading of mattresses beside rows of tents pitched in the desert. There are pictures of combat as well, but they do not seem as vivid or vital as Capa's earlier war work. Perhaps that is because Capa, a Jew born in Hungary, had his heart elsewhere. The most affecting images in the show are filled with human interest, not action. For a picture called ''Funeral,'' 1949, Capa framed a grieving elderly woman in the foreground, but the camera focuses behind her, on the beautiful and stoic face of a young girl. In his pictures of the transient camps, Capa concentrated on faces that bespeak optimism and pride. Children, especially, seemed to catch his eye. In addition to depicting farmers, construction workers, soldiers and shopkeepers, he photographed a couple dancing to the music of an accordion, a painter, several musicians - with the apparent aim of bearing witness to the perseverance of the nobler aspects of the human spirit. In appreciating these images as historical artifacts, however, one might also wonder why it is that they have lain in such desuetude all these years. Is it that once their news value had faded, they became no more than relics? That doesn't seem likely, since none of Capa's other work has remained unseen for so long. A more reasonable speculation would be that Capa's attempt to put a good face on what was happening in Israel was not sufficiently convincing to the editorial tastes of his day, and that consequently the pictures never acquired the aura of news. One could also wonder whether the photographs' focus on human interest, rather than on combat or other action, made them seem dispensable. But human interest is one of photojournalism's perennial staples, as can be gleaned from ''Life: Through the 60's,'' an exhibition at the International Center of Photography (1130 Fifth Avenue, at 94th Street, through May 21). The show consists of more than 100 photographers' pictures taken between 1956 and 1972 and culled from the archive of Life magazine. ''Life: Through the 60's'' has its fair share of bedrock photojournalism, including such ''hard news'' specimens as a view of James Meredith being shot during a civil-rights march, a frame from the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, and a score of examples of first-rate war photography from Vietnam. But Life's editors, and Doris C. O'Neil, who selected the images in the exhibition, were savvy enough to know that the 60's could not be encapsulated solely by cataclysmic events. So the show also includes pictures of women in mini-skirts, communal-living hippies, sports figures and, of course, movie, television and rock stars like the Beatles. Compared with Capa's view of Israel at the end of the 40's, Life's retrospective of the 60's seems well balanced to a point close to blandness. But the period itself gives the show a flavor that is even more pronounced than the magazine's two previous forays into the past, ''Life: The First Decade'' and ''Life: The Second Decade.'' Any review of the 60's comes complete with a hearty helping of nostalgia to enrich its already complex, confounding texture, and the images here are no exception.



1989: The sitcom “Seinfeld” aired its first episode. Much to everybody’s surprise, this sitcom built around the life of a New York Jewish comedian becomes a smash hit.



1998: Football great Sid Luckman passed away. Luckman gained fame as quarterback with Columbia and then with the Chicago Bear. His success earned him a spot in the NFL Hall of Fame.



1998: The New York Times featured books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Nineteen to the Dozens: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things” by Sholem Aleichem.



2007: The 24th Jerusalem International Film Festival opens. This is one of the world’s premier film festivals, featuring dozens of films from Israel and around the world. The 2007 festival will inaugurate the renovated Jerusalem Cinematheque.



2007: Sylvan R. Shemitz, whose lighting designs warmed the facade of Grand Central Terminal and flooded the Jefferson Memorial, passed away at the age of 82.



2008: At the Joyce Theatre in New York City, the Pilobolus Dance Theater, in collaboration with Inbal Pinto Dance Theater, performs “Rushes.” The Inbal Pinto Dance Company was founded by Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak in 1992. “Together, they have been involved in a variety of artistic endeavors - mainly the creation, direction, choreography and design of unique and award winning, dance performances for their Company. The Israeli company consists of 12 dancer/actors working together and motivated by the collective wish to make connections among various artistic disciplines to convey new stage creations informed by memories, longings, ideas and imagination.”



2009: The Sixth Australian Israel Film Festival, sponsored by AICE, the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange comes to an end today.

2009: The New York Times featured books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “American Radical: The Life and Times” of I. F. Stone by D. D. Guttenplan.

2009: The Washington Post featured books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Sweet Science and Other Writings: The Sweet Science, The Earl of Louisiana, The Jollity Building, Between Meals, The Press” by A.J. Liebling and “The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works” by Henry Waxman and Joshua Green.