This Day, December 24, In Jewish History

December 24 In Jewish History

1166: Birthdate of King John of England. King John is known to history as the brother of Richard the Lionhearted whom he followed to the throne in 1199. He is also the monarch who was so rapacious that the English nobles banned together and forced him to sign the Magna Charta, which placed limits on the power of the King. John’s record in dealing with the Jews was uneven, to say the least. Since Jews fell outside of the norms of the feudal world of the Middle Ages, special provisions were needed to deal with them. Two years after coming to power, King John issued a special charter guaranteeing the rights of the Jews while he reigned as long as they conformed to all laws and decrees i.e. provided a steady flow of funds to the royal treasury. In essence, the Jews were “the king’s possession” to do with as he pleased. So this same King John, when he needed more money, imprisoned several wealthy Jews in a castle at Bristol in 1210 and held them until they paid a ransom of 66,000 marks. John’s son followed his father’s pattern of behavior in dealing with the Jews. His grandson would expel the Jews from England after squeezing them of all their financial value.

1294: Pope Boniface VIII is elected Pope. In 1298, four years after Boniface came to power, 628 Jews are killed after a priest Nuremberg, Germany, spreads a story that Jews drove nails through communion hosts, "thereby crucifying Christ again". There are those who hold Boniface accountable for this murderous act, if for no other reason that it took place during his “undistinguished” papal rule.

1491: Birthdate Ignatius of Loyola, Spanish founder of the Jesuit order. Loyola was born one year before the Jewish expulsion from Spain. He lived during a period dominated by the Inquistion and Church sanctioned anti-Semitism. “It is accordingly much to their credit that the Jesuits were firmly opposed (particularly under Ignatius and his first three successors as Superior General of the Jesuits) to ecclesiastical anti-Semitism and to the Inquisition's persecution of suspected Jews. When Ignatius was accused of having partly Jewish ancestry, he replied, ‘If only I did! What could be more glorious than to be of the same blood as the Apostles, the Blessed Virgin, and our Lord Himself?’”

1529: According to various sources date on which Kabbalist, poet and author Shlomo Alkabetz (שלמה אלקבץ) married the daughter of one Yitzchak Cohen, a wealthy householder living in Salonica. His most famous work was 'Lecha Dodi', the hymn that marks the start of the Shabbat.

1610: Spain and the Dutch Republic signed a treaty recognising free commerce between the Netherlands and Morocco, and allowing the sultan to purchase ships, arms and munitions from the Dutch. This was one of the first official treaties between a European country and a non-Christian nation, after the 16th-Century treaties of the Franco-Ottoman alliance. Samuel Pallache, a Jewish-Moroccan merchant, was the lead negotiator during the negotiations. He had been appointed as the Ottoman envoy to the Dutch Republic by sultan Zidan Abu Maali in 1608.

1696: On Christmas Eve, at Evora, Portugal, a group of alleged heretics were led from the palace of the Inquisition (still existing today) to the Roman square, the most visible height of the town, where they were burned. Evora, a provincial capital of Portugal, had been an important center for Marrano Jews.

1789: During the French Revolution, the National Assembly approved a law granting Protestants equal rights with Catholics. The Assembly refused to extend the same rights to the Jews of France.

1798: Birthdate of Adam Bernard Mickiewicz, poet, author and Polish nationalist who sought to organize a military force to fight against the Russians during the Crimean War. To that end, he worked with Armand Levy to organize a military unit made up of Russian and Palestinian Jews called the Hussars of Israel to fight against the forces of the Czar – the same Czar who was the impediment to Polish independence.

1814: The Treaty of Ghent is signed ending the War of 1812 which is also referred to as the Second War for American Independence. As has been the case in all other conflicts, Jews played an active role in the military. The most famous of them was Uriah P. Levy whose naval career would see him rise to the rank of Commodore despite having to deal with anti-Semitism. Captain John Ordronaux gained famed as a privateer. Several grandsons of Mordechai Sheftal, the Georgian who gained fame during the Revolutionary War fought the British as did one of the sons of Haym Solomon. Thirty Jews were part of the force that defended Fort McHenry. Captain Mordecai Myers distinguished himself on the water of Lake Ontario and Major Abraham Massaias helped to “foil British attempts to invade Georgia from the sea.” Last but not least is Judah Touro who would fight with Andrew Jackson’s forces at the Battle of New Orleans. As we all know, this most famous battle of the War of 1812 was fought on January 8, 1815, more than two weeks after the war had officially come to an end.

1834: A letter of this date written from Jerusalem stated “It should be known to you that from other lands, worthy people are actually streaming to the Four Holy Cities (Hebron, Jerusalem, Tiberias and Safed)” which is part of the proof offered by Arei Morgenstern in his book” Hastening Redemption: Messianism and the Resettlement of the Land of Israel” that there a significant number of Haredim had made Aliyah prior to the birth of the modern Zionist movement at the end of the 19th century.

1841: As the conflict between traditionalist and reformers in the Anglo-Jewish community becomes increasingly strident, The Voice of Jacob published an article with a relatively conciliatory tone under the heading ““The attempt to establish a secession synagogue in London.” The article’s author clung to the notion that “that reform group was unlikely to wield any influence.” Considering the names of the people tied to the Reform movement, this seemed like “a vain hope.”

1851: The President of the Hebrew Benevolent Associations attended tonight’s Anniversary Dinner commemorating the first landing of the Pilgrims hosted by the Sons of New England at the Astor House.

1855: Today’s “Parisian Gossip Column” reported a claim by French publicist and editor Taxila Delord that Mlle. Rachel, the famous Jewish actress is planning on returning to France from the United States without completing all of the performances to which she had agreed.

1857: Uriah P. Levy was restored to active duty. Naval officials had tried to end his career prematurely, due in part, to the fact that he was Jewish. Levy played a key role in putting an end to flogging as a punishment for common sea men. He also was responsible for saving the library that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson.

1864(25th of Kislev, 5625): First Day of Chanukah

1865: A group of Confederate veterans met in Tennessee and founded the Ku Klux Klan. The first leader of this violent hate group was Nathan Bedford Forest, the Confederate General who commanded troops at the infamous Fort Pillow Massacre. Klan members have attacked Blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants and just about everybody else who is not just like them. The Klan has fallen several times only to reappear in more virulent forms at a later date. The Klan is not just a Southern phenomenon. During the 1920's one of the largest groups of Klansmen could be found in Indiana. During that same decade, the hooded hate-mongers staged a parade in Washington, D.C. with no objection worth noting. Any attempt to rationalize or romanticize the Klan's behavior smacks of the worst form of revisionism.

1868: Birthdate of Emanuel Lasker. Lasker was a mathematician who gained fame as a chess player. He was “World Champion” from 1894 through 1921. In one of those on-going ironies of the way history is recorded, Lasker is identified as a “German chess champion” even though he was the kind of German who was forced to flee for his life in the 1930’s. Lasker finally found refuge in the United States where he died in 1941.

1870(30th of Kislev, 5631): Rosh Chodesh Kislev

1871(19 Tevet 5631): Abraham Samuel Benjamin (The Ktav Sofer) passed away. Born in 1815, he was a Rabbi, educator and Orthodox leader of Hungarian Jewry. He was the son of Moses Sofer and took his father’s place upon his death in 1839. His Responsa and clarification on the Torah were published under the title Ktav Sofer.

1873: Birthdate of C.G. (Charles Gabriel) Seligman. He was a pioneer in British anthropology who conducted significant field research in Melanesia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and, most importantly, the Nilotic Sudan. After completing his medical education, in 1898 he went with the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits. Subsequently, his interests turned from medical research towards anthropology. In 1904l he revisited New Guinea to distinguish the characteristic racial, cultural, and social traits of the peoples of the region. In the 1920's, he pioneered a psychoanalytic approach: studying cross-cultural similarity of dreams. He concluded that the psychology of the unconscious could provide an approach to some basic anthropological problems. He died in 1940.


1886: Birthdate of Hungarian born film director Michael Curtiz. He directed everybody from Errol Flynn to Elvis Presley. Like so many other Jewish immigrants he helped develop American Middle American culture with films like Yankee Doodle Dandy and White Christmas. But his most famous effort is the all time classic “Casablanca.”

1893: The American Hebrew was founded by F. de Sola Mendes and Philip Cowen, the publisher of the paper.

1906: Birthdate of German-born American composer Franz Waxman. His film scores netted him 12 Oscar nominations and two back to back Academy Awards for “Sunset Place” and “A Place in the Sun.”

1907: Birthdate of I.F. (Isidore Feinstein) Stone. Stone was a left-wing journalistic gadfly who published “IF Stone’s Weekly.”

1910: Birthdate of author Fritz Leiber. The Phi Beta Kappa graduate won three Hugo awards for his science fiction writing including Ship of Shadows.

1912: Marguerite Thompson married William Zorach, the Lithuanian born American Jewish sculptor, painter, printmaker, and writer who won the Logan Medal of the arts.

1913: Birthdate of Bernard Manischewitz, the native of Cincinnati, Ohio who was the last member of his family to preside over the worldwide kosher food empire that began when his grandfather opened a small matzo bakery in Cincinnati. Mr. Manischewitz was president of the B. Manischewitz Company for 26 years, until he supervised its sale to a group led by Kohlberg & Company in 1990. At the time, it had $1.5 billion in annual sales and exported its products, from gefilte fish to borscht, around the world. It then controlled 80 percent of the United States market for matzo, the unleavened bread eaten year-round but especially at Passover. Mr. Manischewitz's father, Jacob, gave him his first job with the company when he assigned him to inspect the production line to make sure the flat, cracker-like matzos did not break. He eventually became one of the three first cousins who ran the company in its third generation, continuing alone after the others died. The cousins followed the five sons of Rabbi Dov Behr Manischewitz, who began the bakery in 1888. In the company's early stages, the rabbi installed certain innovations that were challenged by rabbinical authorities as violating Jewish dietary laws. Rabbi Manischewitz, however, argued strongly that his methods were more sanitary and led to standardized quality. Rabbi Manischewitz also began insisting in advertisements that customers ask for his matzos by the name Manischewitz in order to counter imitators who copied his original name, Cincinnati matzos. In 1932, the company built a second factory, in Jersey City, which quickly became the center of operations. By 1949, Bernard Manischewitz's generation had taken over. He was president, D. Beryl Manischewitz was chairman and William Manischewitz was treasurer. An article in The New York Times in 1951 told how Bernard Manischewitz was leading the company into preparing more than 70 different kosher foods, in addition to matzo, including frozen fish and poultry, canned borscht and chicken soup, and the Tam Tam cracker. Wines with the name Manischewitz were sold throughout the country under a licensing arrangement. In an interview with The Times in 1956, Mr. Manischewitz suggested that those products signified the biggest change in Jewish domestic life since biblical times. He said all but the most strictly Orthodox homemakers had been released from "the compulsory obsession with the problems of cooking." He also noted that American processed kosher foods were selling well in Europe and even in Israel. All this expansion called for snappy — or at least memorable — advertising. One tongue-in-cheek radio ad advised listeners not to eat Manischewitz matzos in bed because they were crispier and so might cause "a crummy night's sleep." Bernard Manischewitz attended Syracuse University for a year and graduated from New York University with a business degree. He later took night courses in factory management. One of the last battles of his career came in 1990, when the company faced charges of conspiring to fix the price of Passover matzos. It ended in 1991 with the company pleading no contest to a single criminal indictment and paying a $1 million fine. Mr. Manischewitz was an intensely private man who avoided using his own name to register in hotels and make restaurant reservations, Dr. Hoffman said. He also believed that not dropping his name made good business sense. When he was in Alaska bargaining over the price of whitefish for making gefilte fish, Dr. Hoffman said, he feared that if people knew he was Mr. Manischewitz, they might expect a higher price. He passed away in 2003 at the age of 89. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

1914; During World War I The "Christmas truce" begins on the Western Front. For more about this amazing tale read Silent Night: The Story of The World War I Christmas Truce by the Jewish author, Stanley Weintraub's and you will see how a Christmas book can be considered a “Jewish Book.”

1916: The New York Times featured a review of Isaac Mayer Wise: The Founder of American Judaism, a biography of the founder of Reform Judaism, written by Max B. May

1918: Birthdate of Anwar El Sadat. Sadat served as President of Egypt from 1970 until his murder in 1981. Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem and subsequent signing of the Camp David Peace Agreement make him a “Profile in Courage.”

1920: Enrico Caruso gave his last public performance, singing in Jacques Halevy's ''La Juive'' (The Jewess) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Halevy was the son of a cantor. In writing “La Juive” he created the role of Eléazar one of the great favorites of tenors including Enrico Caruso. The opera's most famous aria is Eléazar's "Rachel, quand du Seigneur”.

1923: Birthdate of David Frank Friedman a film producer from Birmingham, Alabama, who cheerfully and cheesily exploited an audience’s hunger for bare-breasted women and blood-dripping corpses in lucrative low-budget films like “Blood Feast” and “Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.” (As reported by Bruce Weber)

1924: Albania becomes a republic. Jews had lived in parts of what is now Albania since Roman times. As part of the Ottoman Empire Albania provided a refuge for Jews fleeing from the Inquisition (a role it was to play again during the Shoah). An independent Albania had actually been created just before World War I in one of the on-going dismemberments of the Ottoman Empire. After the war, there were probably 200 Jews living in the country.

1925: In the Bronx, NY, Hetty and Max Schmertz gave birth to Eric Joseph Schmertz “who as one of the nation’s most relied-upon labor peacemakers helped resolve thousands of labor disputes, getting both the Rockettes and New York City cab drivers to end strikes in the 1960s.” (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

1931: Birthdate of Argentinean born composer and director Maricio Kagel.

1932: Birthdate of Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus.

1936(10th of Tevet, 5697): Asara B'Tevet

1937: The Palestine Post reported that 11 Arabs were killed, scores wounded, and one captured, in a battle fought by a strong police and military force against a large Arab band northeast of Nazareth. An Arab gang attack was repulsed at Kibbutz Alonim. Telephone lines were cut in numerous places throughout the country.

1937: In a leading article the Post sadly reflected that at Christmas-time the world picture hardly presented a flattering reflection of a Christian ideal. The situation in Europe was painfully familiar and needed no elaboration, while in Palestine, in which the centuries-old history of Christianity had its roots, peace seemed intractable.

1938: Several members of the American Catholic hierarchy and leading Protestants sign a Christmas resolution expressing "horror and shame" in response to the Kristallnacht pogrom.

1940: In advising the Mandate Government as to how to deal with Jewish immigration to Palestine after the Patria incident Churchill sent a memo urging the government to consider their promises to the Zionists and to guided by general considerations of humanity towards those fleeing from the cruelest forms of persecution. The Permanent Under Secretary of State ignored Churchill’s request and successfully convinced his colleagues not let Churchill know of their decision to suspend Jewish legal immigration until September, 1941.

1942: Following a successful attack on Nazi troops at the Cyganeria, a coffee house in Cracow, Poland, the German authorities launched a massive retaliatory campaign aimed at destroying the Jewish Fighting Organization.

1942: Hundreds of Jews were captured after another German manhunt in the woods of Parczew.
1942: On Christmas Eve before Barney Ross and his Marines were to go to battle the famous Father Frederic Gehring, a war-time chaplain who wrote regular correspondences for Reader's Digest magazine asked Ross to take part in what would become one of the most poignant such events of the war. During his time in Guadalcanal, Ross had begun what would be a life-long friendship with Gehring who considered Ross a national treasure who defied logic when it came to bravery and the defense of principle. Ross was the only one capable of playing a temperamental organ on the tropical island, so Gehring asked him to learn Silent Night and other Christmas songs for the troops. Barney played these songs and sang with the homesick young men, after which Gehring implored Ross to play a Jewish song. Ross played a melancholy song called "My Yiddishe Momma" about a child's love for his self-sacrificing mother. Many of the Marines knew the melody of the song because Ross always had it played when he entered the ring. But when the Marines heard the heart-rending lyrics, newspaper reports say they were all in tears. After Ross's single-handed victory in the battle at Guadalcanal, he was viewed as almost superhuman, particularly based on all he had to overcome in his troubled life.

1942: During his Christmas Eve address, Pope Pius mentioned “the hundreds of thousands who without any fault of their own sometimes only by reasons of their nationality or race are marked for death or gradual extinction.” Despite having been told about the fate of the Jews of Europe, the Pope chooses not to condemn those who are engaged in the slaughter known as “The Final Solution.”

1943: As the Soviet Army began advancing toward Berlin, the Nazis worked furiously to cover up the slaughter of the Jews. At the infamous Fort Number Nine (known as “the Slaughterhouse") in the Kovno Ghetto the Bobel Commando unit composed of 64 Jews dug up and assisted in the burring of 12,000 bodies out of the 70,000 that had been murdered there since the winter of 1941. On this Christmas Eve they attempted their escape while the guards celebrated. Nineteen would survive and tell the horror story of Bobel Commando Unit. In Borki, a similar attempt to escape was undertaken by its Bobel Commando Unit. Of 60 who tried, only 3 escaped to live through the war. One, Josef Sterdyner, testified at the trial of the Borki guards in 1962. Another, Josef Reznik, was a witness at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961.

1943: At Borki, Poland, 60 Jews working on an exhumation squad attempt to escape through a tunnel, but few of them are successful.

1943(27th of Kislev, 5704): New York’s Rabbi Louis Werfel a 27 year old chaplain sweving with the Twelfth Air Force Service Command in North Africa was killed in a plane crash in Algeria as he was flying back from conducting Chanukah services in Casablanca. Rabbi Werfel was the fourth Jewish chaplain to lost his life in the line of duty as of this date. He was known as “the flying rabbi” because of his propensity for using aircraft to travel to distant outposts to serve the unique needs of Jewish servicemen. After graduating from Yeshiva University he served as the rabbi for the Mount Kisco (NY) Hebrew Congregation and Knesseth Israel in Birmingham, Alabama, his last pulpit before joining the Army Air Force. In Birmingham he was on the board of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and the National Jewish Welfare Board’s Army and Navy Committee The wide range of Werfel’s activities could be seen from his request to the Jewish for 10,000 French-Hebrew prayerbooks for the Jews fighting with the Free French forces.

1944: As proof that for many British policy-makers keeping Jews out of Palestine was more important than saving them from the Holocaust, Lord Gort, the High Commissioner for Palestine telegraphed the Foreign Office from Jerusalem asking that the Soviet Government – whose troops had entered the Balkans – be asked to close both the Rumanian and Bulgarian frontiers on the grounds that Jewish immigration from South East Europe to Palestine was getting out of hand.

1945: Twenty-one year old Arnold Weiss who was serving as an officer in the United States Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps, began working on a project that would lead to the discovery of Hitler’s last will and political testament.

1946: Birthdate of Uri Geller, the Israeli who specializes in the para-normal.

1946(1st of Tevet, 5707): Rosh Chodesh Tevet

1946(1st of Tevet, 5707): Israel Levin is murdered in Tel Aviv, Palestine, for betraying Stern Group leader.

1946: The World Zionist Congress ended with the Zionists calling for an end of terrorism. The Congress expressed its opposition to a UN trusteeship and want independence with no partition. The delegates also adopt resolution to boycott conference in London, England.

1947: Heavy sniping amounting almost to guerrilla warfare killed four Arabs and two Jews and wounded at least twenty-six other persons in Haifa during the last twenty-four hours.

1948: The Canadian Minister for External Affairs, Lester Pearson, informed Israel’s Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett that “ the state of Israel, in the opinion of the Canadian governments has given satisfactory proof that it complies with the essential conditions of statehood” including “external independence and effective internal government within a reasonably well-defined territory.” In plain English, the government of Canada recognized the state of Israel.

1948: On Christmas Eve, pilgrims are allowed to enter Bethlehem. But they have to pass through both Jewish and Arab checkpoints.

1948: Egyptian planes attack Nazareth, Haifa and Tel Aviv.

1950(15th of Tevet, 5711): Lev Simonovich Berg passed away. Born in 1876, Berg was the geographer and zoologist who established the foundations of limnology in Russia with his systematic studies on the physical, chemical, and biological conditions of fresh waters, particularly of lakes. Important, too, was his work in ichthyology, which yielded much useful data on the paleontology, anatomy, and embryology of fishes in Russia.

1951: Idris I is proclaimed King as Libya gains its independence from Italy. Jews had lived in what was now Libya since the time of the Greeks and Romans. Jewish fortunes in Libya were already in decline before independence. The anti-Jewish policies of the fascists coupled with outbreaks against Jews following the creation of Israel had begun to take its toll on the Jewish population. The Six Days War in 1967 led to further attacks on the Jews. Idris realized that he could not protect his Jewish subjects and he allowed the Jewish community to leave the country. The Jews went to Rome with some of them moving on to Israel or the United States

1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that the new Mapai-General Zionists-Progressive government coalition won a 63-to-24 vote of confidence. The religious parties still hesitated, but were expected to join the coalition.

1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that 80 dunams of land and a house in the Zeita village in the Little Triangle were detached from Israel and handed over to Jordan by the Mixed Israeli-Jordanian Armistice Commission, according to the demarcation armistice lines, agreed upon at the Rhodes armistice negotiations. Arab residents of this area surrendered their Israeli identity cards and became Jordanians.

1952: As the third Israeli government ends and the fourth Israeli government takes power today, Moshe Sharett retained his position as Minister of Foreign Affiars.

1952: Mordechai Nurock, a member of Mizrachi was ousted from his position as Minister of Postal Services. He was the first person to hold this position is now known as the Communications Minister.

1952: Yosef Burg began serving as Minister of Postal Services, making him the second person to hold this position.

1952: Israel Rokach began serving as Interior Minister in Israel.

1955(9th of Tevet, 5716): Hugo Chaim Adler a Belgian composer, cantor, and choir conductor passed away. “Born in Antwerp to Jewish parents, Adler studied at the Hochschule für Musik Köln from 1912-1915. In 1915 he was drafted into the German Army during the First World War; serving for three years in the infantry until he was wounded at Argonne. In 1918 he was appointed cantor and teacher at St. Wendel in the Saarland. He left there in September 1921 to become second cantor at the synagogue in Mannheim, rising to head cantor there in 1933. While in Mannheim he studied music composition at the Mannheim Conservatory with Ernst Toch. In 1939 he fled Germany for the United States after having been imprisoned due to his Jewish ancestry by the Nazi regime. From September 1939 until his death of cancer in December 1955 he was cantor of Temple Emanuel in Worcester, Massachusetts. He remained active as a choir conductor and composer of sacred music during these years. Several of his works were published by Sacred Music Press and Transcontinental Music Publishers in New York City. He is the father of composer and conductor Samuel Adler.”

1959: The desecration of a new synagogue in Cologne, Germany sparked a wave of anti-Jewish incidents throughout Western Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Africa.

1969: On Christmas eve, five small boats showing almost no lights slipped out of Cherbourg harbor into the teeth of a Force 9 gale which kept even large freighters from venturing out. Built for the Israel Navy, the vessels had been embargoed at the beginning of the year by French president Charles de Gaulle.

1971: Birthdate of Tamir Bloom. A champion fencer, Bloom was a member of the 1996 U.S. Olympic team.

1970: Nine Jews were convicted in Leningrad for hijacking a plane. In the post-Cold War era, some of us may have forgotten about the Refusniks and the battles Jews waged to immigrate to Israel.

1970: The New York Times reports that Jews and Arabs are living harmoniously on the plain near Meggido--believed to be the Biblical Armageddon--where St. John said in Revelations that the forces of good and evil would fight the last great battle at the end of time.

1975(20th of Tevet, 5736): Composer Bernard Herrmann passed away. Born in 1911, Herrmann gained fame for writing musical scores for a wide variety of films including Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Psycho. In fact he died the day after he completed the score for the film Taxi Driver

1984(30th of Kislev, 5745): Rosh Chodesh

1985: A small bomb concealed in a loaf of bread was found at a bus stop near Tel Aviv University today, the police said. A passer-by discovered the suspicious-looking loaf and informed explosives experts, a police spokesman said. The device was safely dismantled. No arrests were reported.

1990: In the run-up to what would be Gulf War I, Saddam said Israel will be Iraq's 1st target. A Spanish television station reported today that during a weekend interview, the Iraqi leader had said that Tel Aviv would be Iraq's first target whether or not Israel joins the war effort against Iraq

1993: Lieut. Col. Meir Mintz, commander of the IDF special forces in the Gaza area, was shot and killed by terrorists in an ambush on his jeep at the T-junction in Gaza. The Hamas Iz a-Din al Kassam squads publicly claimed responsibility for the attack.

1995(1st of Tevet, 5756): Rosh Chodesh Tevet

1995: The night was certainly not silent and it was not always calm as Bethlehem marked its first Christmas under Palestinian control with thunderous fireworks, choirs, bagpipes, dances and laser lights. While the revelry flowed over Manger Square, Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, took his place in the front pew of St. Catherine's Roman Catholic Church, part of the larger complex including the Orthodox Church of the Nativity, for the traditional Midnight Mass in his role as the new leader of Bethlehem and the Palestinians of the West Bank. Sitting impassively in his trademark checkered headdress with his wife, Suha, and Bethlehem's mayor of 23 years, Elias Freij, Mr. Arafat listened as the Latin Patriarch, Michel Sabbah, a Palestinian who is the chief Catholic prelate of the region, praised him and declared that "the beginning of Palestinian freedom is the beginning of reconciliation between Palestinian and Jewish people."

1995: On Christmas Eve, at an Israeli checkpoint on the border of the West Bank, Israeli police stopped busloads of Israeli nationalists who had wanted to hold a protest against the transfer of authority to the Palestinians at Rachel's Tomb. The protesters held up posters and chanted, "Land of Israel, Land of Israel" as the police blocked their way to the West Bank."Why can't we go in?" demanded Judy Pearlman, a Jerusalem resident originally from New York. "The Arabs are having their celebration worshiping their God. Why can't we worship ours? All we want to do is light candles at Rachel's Tomb on the last day of Hanukkah. We're second-class citizens in our own country."

1995(25th of Kislev, 5768): First Day of Chanukah

1997: Edward S. Walker, Jr. presented his credentials as the U.S Ambassador to Israel.

1997: For the first time Chanukah candles were officially lit in Vatican City.

1997: The New York Times published "A Singular Passion for Amassing Art, One Way or Another" — outlined a case involving Portrait of Wally by Egon Schiele, which was in the MoMA exhibition but was obtained by Rudolph Leopold soon after the Nazi era. The Manhattan DA stepped in to help restore the piece to descendants of its original owner, but ownership of the painting is still in contention, nearly 10 years later. Ron Lauder has been accused of a failure to act on the case, despite being MoMA chairman at the time

2000: The New York Times book section featured books by Jewish authors and/or about subjects of Jewish interest including The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth and translated by Michael Hofmann, More Stories From My Father’s Court by Isaac Bashevis Singer; translated by Curt Leviant and a poem entitled Flight to Egypt by Jewish poet Joseph Brodsky.

2004: The Jerusalem Post reported a major archeological discovery. The Israel Antiquities Authority announced that an elaborately paved assembly area and water channel that carried rainwater to the pool of Shiloah (Siloam) during the Second Temple period were uncovered by archeologists digging in Jerusalem's ancient City of David.

2005: The Seventh Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival featured showings of “Dear Enemy,” “Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer” and “The Star Hidden in the Backlands.”

2006: The New York Times book section featured books by Jewish authors and/or about subjects of Jewish interest including Isaac B. Singer: A Life by Florence Noiville; translated by Catherine Temerson and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology by George Prochnik. The book is based on Freud’s only trip to the United States, which took place in 1909.

2006: The Washington Post book section carried a review entitled “Out of Hungary: How an extraordinary group of refugees helped create Casablanca, Darkness at Noon and the bomb” in which Geoffrey Wheatcroft explores The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World by Kati Marton. “In her very readable new book, Kati Marton tells the story of nine Hungarian Jews who left the country between the world wars and prospered.” The nine include filmmakers Alexander Korda and Michael Curtiz, photographers Andre Kertesz and Robert Capa, physicists Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann and the author Arthur Koestler.

2007: The International Conference on Contemporary Reform Judaism opens its two day meeting in Jerusalem. The agenda includes such issues as the concept of homosexuality in Reform Halachah (Jewish law), changes in synagogue ritual and the difficulties of integrating Reform Judaism into Israel. Some 50 Jewish studies scholars from the United States and Israel attend the two-day conference, the first of its kind to be organized by a non-Reform body at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. It is also the first to take place outside of North America, the center for hundreds of Reform congregations and the source of influence of the movement's rabbis.

2008(27th of Kislev, 5769): Seventy-eight year old Harold Pinter, who was widely esteemed as the most important British playwright of the past half-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005, passed away in London today. Mr. Pinter, who wrote more than 30 plays, was known for creating dramatic worlds marked by despair, menace and a sense of psychic helplessness. His groundbreaking plays, including "The Birthday Party," "The Caretaker" and "The Homecoming," typically used just a few characters locked in anxious conversation to convey a sense of mysterious dread, doubt and ambiguity on many levels. Plots were secondary to Mr. Pinter, and his dramas seldom reached a clear resolution. Instead, he built a profound sense of inner tension and psychological terror from hesitant, disjointed lines of dialogue broken by long silences. His plays often had an implied political message, but in later years Mr. Pinter made his views more explicit. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce the U.S. invasion of Iraq and to call then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair "a deluded idiot." "How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?" Mr. Pinter said of the invasion. Many commentators were incensed. Christopher Hitchens lambasted Mr. Pinter's selection as "the almost complete degradation of the Nobel racket," and conservative critic Roger Kimball called it "not only ridiculous but repellent." In the theater, however, Mr. Pinter's stature was beyond dispute. He made his biggest impact in the 1950s and 1960s, when his plays represented a jolting departure from the quaint drawing-room comedies and darkly realistic dramas that had been the opposite poles of British theater. Mr. Pinter's works, which bore the influence of the existential dramatist Samuel Beckett and the modernist poet T.S. Eliot, explored such themes as sexual frustration, jealousy, loneliness and an overriding if indistinct sense of fear. The social or mental balance of his characters -- and, by extension, society as a whole -- was often undercut by a biting, sardonic humor. "Words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other," Peter Hall, who frequently directed Mr. Pinter's plays, once said. In his first full-length play, "The Birthday Party," which debuted in 1958, Mr. Pinter placed a man named Stanley at a seaside rooming house. Two mysterious strangers who had been searching for Stanley show up to throw a birthday party for him, but by the end of the play, they have inflicted psychic wounds on Stanley before seizing him and taking him away to an unknown fate. The initial reviews were scathing -- Mr. Pinter called it "a mammoth flop, a flop d'estime" -- and the play closed in a week. One reviewer said it "will be best enjoyed by those who believe that obscurity is its own reward." Only Harold Hobson, the influential critic of the London Times, saw merit in the play, and his review might have saved Mr. Pinter's fledgling career. "Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work," he wrote, "possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London." By the time of the 1960 premiere of Mr. Pinter's second major play, "The Caretaker," about two brothers who take in a homeless man who exerts a strange control over them, he was universally hailed as the brightest young playwright in Britain. The term "Pinteresque" came to describe the grim, alienated worldview of his plays, even if few critics could agree on their exact meaning. Mr. Pinter resisted all efforts to give his dramas a fixed interpretation, preferring to let his cryptic dialogue speak for itself. "I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it," he said. "I just let it happen." Harold Pinter was born Oct. 10, 1930, in London's East End, where his father was a tailor and dressmaker. Some critics have attributed the sense of terror in Mr. Pinter's later work to the anti-Semitism he faced growing up and to the London Blitz of World War II, which left parts of his neighborhood in rubble. In his youth, Mr. Pinter set school records as a sprinter and was an excellent cricket and squash player. He wrote poetry and studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and registered as a conscientious objector at age 18. He spent the 1950s as an actor touring the British provinces under the stage name David Baron. He continued to act occasionally throughout his life and appeared in several films, including "Mansfield Park" and "The Tailor of Panama." Two years ago in London, he performed Samuel Beckett's one-man play "Krapp's Last Tape." Many top actors vied to appear in Mr. Pinter's plays over the years, and in the production of "No Man's Land" (1975), the roles of a poor poet and his patron were played by stage giants John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. The play closed with lines that could be emblematic of many of Mr. Pinter's bleak, isolating themes: "You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever icy and silent." After a long pause, the other character says, "I'll drink to that." Mr. Pinter used what one critic called his "clinically accurate ear for the absurdity of everyday speech" to make audiences squirm with his unflinching portrayal of disquieting scenes. In "The Homecoming," first produced in 1965, a professor brings a new wife home to meet his father and brothers. By the end of the play, she leaves him to stay behind with the other men in the family. The 1978 play "Betrayal" (later made into a film starring Jeremy Irons) depicted a marriage breaking up under the weight of affairs. It came at a time when Mr. Pinter was caught up in a notorious scandal with Lady Antonia Fraser, a historian and biographer. She left her husband, a member of Parliament, to live with Mr. Pinter, who was not yet divorced from his first wife, actress Vivien Merchant. He and Fraser were married in 1980 and formed a happy household with her six children from her previous marriage. All of them, as well as 17 grandchildren, survive Mr. Pinter. His son from his first marriage, Daniel, changed his last name to Brand and broke off all contact with his father more than 20 years ago. In addition to his work as a playwright, Mr. Pinter often directed his own plays and those of other dramatists. He also wrote more than 20 screenplays, including "The Pumpkin Eater" (1964), with Anne Bancroft; "The Go-Between" (1971), with Julie Christie and Alan Bates; "The Last Tycoon" (1976), an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel about Hollywood; and "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981), based on the John Fowles novel. He also wrote an unproduced screenplay of Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," as well as a 1993 adaptation of "The Trial" by Franz Kafka, who is often cited as one of Mr. Pinter's literary forebears. Mr. Pinter exerted a powerful influence on a generation of playwrights, including Tom Stoppard and David Hare in England and Sam Shepard and David Mamet in the United States. "The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play or film he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected," Hare once said. Mr. Pinter worked quickly -- he wrote his first play in four days -- but admitted that he didn't know where he found his inspiration. "I've never been able to sit down and say, 'Now I'm going to write a play,' " he said in 1976. "I just have no alternative but to wait for the thing to be released within me."

2008: The Maltz Museum, hosts a special Hanukkah candle-lighting service at 5 p.m., followed by a full-buffet Chinese dinner, catered by Pearl of the Orient. Museum

2008: The Moshav Band joins with Soul Farm in an appearance at B.B. King Blues Club in New York City. “The Israeli-born Moshav Band grew up on Moshav Mevo Modiim, a musical village located in the hills between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Their home, founded by the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, was and continues to be the birthplace of many Jewish songs enjoyed by the world over. The members of the Moshav Band were under the spiritual guidance of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, while immersed in his musical world, often performing with him at his concerts. The Moshav Band primarily composed of the Solomon brothers: Yehudah (vocals, percussion), Meir (vocals, guitar, and mandolin), Yosef (bass) as well as friend, David Swirsky (vocals, guitar) comes on like a family of traveling minstrels, court jesters, and the old-age mystics all at once. Their music is rich with fiery rock/folk/reggae songs, spiced with the flavors of the Middle East. The boys draw you into their own struggles, and leave you pondering your own, but not before they provide you with a huge helping of hope. Soul Farm consists of four guys from New York who are forging an exciting new sound by combining the musical roots of their heritage with a shared passion for melodic song writing and modern, progressive arrangements. They create a potent sound that screams originality as it melds a wide range of influences from rock and Latin, to Hebrew and Celtic folk music.

2008: The American Technion Society (ATS), one of the Haifa institution's fund-raising arms, reports that it has lost a total of $72 million invested in funds managed by Madoff. ATS invested $29 million directly with Madoff, and replowed another $43 million of its earnings on the investment back into the fund, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported. A spokesman for the Technion confirmed the report. The Technion was recently reported to have lost NIS 25 million that it invested directly with Madoff. The ATS was founded in 1941, and has raised more than $1.3 billion for the Technion. The society reports revenues of $79.2 million from donations in 2005, with costs of $70 million - $50 million of which went to support the Technion. Following the loss, the society's cash reserves have plummeted to $200 million, from the $300 million reported just a few months ago. The ATS has struggled over the past year, as the Technion saw a substantial drop in donations, due to the global economic crisis. "The American Technion Society is an independent, American organization operating under the U.S. fund-raising laws, with a board of directors and independent investment committee, and the Technion has no influence over its investments.”The society has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the Technion over the past decade - assistance that has supported the Technion's accelerated development. "The Technion is very appreciative of its contribution, and believes that with the help of loyal donors, the organization will manage to extricate itself from its difficulties, and continue to be a strong supporter of the Technion," a spokesman for the Technion said. It is still unclear how the loss will affect the Technion's operations. The educational institution is reviewing the Madoff crisis, and making preparations to seek replacement sources of funding.

2008: The second season of the Hebrew-language edition of “Survivor” begins today.

2009: David Broza, one of Israel's most enduring and energizing artists performs at the Kaufmann Concert Hall in New York City.

2009: Jews in the Greater Washington Metropolitan area can choose between an evening that features the perfect blend of the latest, hottest dances from Israel intermingled with recent hits and oldies from the whole gamut of Israeli choreographers at Tikvat Israel Synagogue in Rockville, MD or "Putting the Ha! in Hanukkah" Jewish music for people who don't like Jewish music at Jammin Java in Vienna, VA.

2009: The gang that ordered the theft of the infamous 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign from the Auschwitz death camp memorial were planning to sell it to fund attacks against the Swedish prime minister and parliament, the Times reported on today. "We are aware of the information about the alleged attack plans," Patrik Peter, a spokesman the Swedish security police was quoted as saying by the British newspaper. "We have taken actions. We view this seriously." Polish police found the sign on Sunday and said they had detained five young men. The purported former leader of a Swedish Nazi group told the Swedish Aftonbladet newspaper that, "We had a person who was ready to pay millions for the sign." The unnamed source told Aftonbladet that the money would pay for an attack on the home of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and on the Swedish Foreign Ministry. A third attack allegedly involved plans to bombard Swedish MPs from the public seats of the parliament. "The sign was to be delivered to Sweden, since it was here the deal should be made," the source said, according to a Times translation. "My role was to find a buyer. We had a person who was willing to pay millions but he had no political agenda. These things have a huge collector value... The biggest collectors are from England, the United States and France."

2009: After months of quiet, a father of seven was shot dead in a drive-by shooting attack near the northern Samaria settlement of Shavei Shomron on Thursday. The victim was identified as Meir Chai, a 45-year-old resident of the settlement and father of seven children ranging in age from two months to 18. Chai was the fourth terror victim in the West Bank in 2009. In March, two policemen were shot dead in the Jordan Valley and in April, 13-year-old Shlomo Nativ was stabbed to death near his home in the Gush Etzion settlement of Bat Ayin. Chai was driving in his minivan on Road 57, between Shavei Shomron and Einav, when a Palestinian car overtook him and opened fire. Chai was hit in the head and drove off the road. Magen David Adom paramedics arrived quickly at the scene and despite their efforts, were forced to pronounce his death. The Al Aksa Martyrs organization announced that its men were responsible for the attack.

2009: The Boston Globe published “Levi Horowitz; guided many as Bostoner Rebbe; at 88,” a comprehensive obituary of the Jewish leader who passed away on December 5.

2010(17th of Tevet, 5771): Roy R. Neuberger, who drew on youthful passions for stock trading and art to build one of Wall Street’s most venerable partnerships and one of the country’s largest private collections of 20th-century masterpieces, died today at his home at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. He was 107 and had lived in New York City for 101 years. Mr. Neuberger had set out to study art, but ended up as a stockbroker, a life path once likened to Gauguin’s in reverse. As a founder of the investment firm Neuberger & Berman, he was one of the few people to experience three of Wall Street’s major market crises, in 1929, 1987 and 2008. Although his artistic ability left no lasting impact, his wealth did. Believing that collectors should acquire art being produced in their own time and then hold on to it, giving the public access but never selling, Mr. Neuberger accumulated hundreds of paintings and sculptures by Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others, becoming one of America’s leading art patrons. Those works are now spread over more than 70 institutions in 24 states, many of them in the permanent collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, which opened in 1974 on the Purchase College campus of the State University of New York. The money to buy the works came from his investments at Neuberger & Berman (now Neuberger Berman), the brokerage and investment firm he founded in 1939 with Robert B. Berman. The firm catered to wealthy individuals but also took on a less affluent clientele with the establishment, in 1950, of the Neuberger Guardian mutual fund, one of the first funds to be sold without the usual 8.5 percent upfront sales commission. His art collecting drew on the lessons he learned in the financial world. Each year he would buy more than he had bought the previous year, often purchasing large lots at a time. In 1948, for example, he bought 46 paintings by Milton Avery, whom Mr. Neuberger counted as a close friend. He eventually owned more than 100 Avery works. “My experience on Wall Street made it possible for me to be comfortable buying a lot of art at once,” he later wrote. “In my investment firm, when we like a security after careful analysis, we buy a modest quantity. Sometimes after the purchase, we will find that we like it very much. If a large quantity of the stock then becomes available, and we are still enthusiastic about its value and its future, we will buy in quantity quickly, even though the day before we had no such plan and no knowledge that the stock would be available.” “The same principle,” he added, “applied to my purchase of the Avery paintings.” Roy Rothschild Neuberger was born on July 21, 1903, in Bridgeport, Conn. His father, Louis, who was 52 when Roy was born, had come to the United States from Germany as a boy. His mother, the former Bertha Rothschild, was a native of Chicago, a lover of music (she played the piano) and a “nervous, troubled woman from a large, well-to-do Jewish family, not related to the famous Rothschilds,” Mr. Neuberger wrote in an autobiography, “So Far, So Good: The First 94 Years” (John Wiley & Sons, 1997). His father was half owner of the Connecticut Web and Buckle Company and had an interest in the stock market, owning thousands of shares in a Montana copper company. The Neuberger family moved to Manhattan in 1909, settling on Claremont Avenue opposite Barnard College on the Upper West Side. Mr. Neuberger attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where in his senior year he was captain of the tennis team that won the Greater New York championship. “Looking back on my youthful addiction to tennis, I find it not much different from my fascination with the market,” Mr. Neuberger wrote in his autobiography. “You have to make fast decisions. You can’t wait to think about it overnight.” A similar impatience led him to leave New York University after a single year. He felt, he wrote, “that I could learn much more out in the world of business.” It was while working for two years as a buyer of upholstery fabrics for the department store B. Altman & Company that he said he developed an eye for painting and sculpture as well as a sense for trading. Both would greatly influence his later life, as would John Galsworthy’s series of novels “The Forsyte Saga,” which described the practice among well-to-do English families of educating their children on the European continent, and “Vincent van Gogh,” a biography by Floret Fels. The first book led Mr. Neuberger to a sojourn in Europe. Using money inherited from his father, he set out in June 1924 for a life of leisure. While living mainly on the Left Bank in Paris, he spent afternoons at a cafe, played in tennis tournaments in Cannes and traveled to Berlin and other European capitals. In Paris, Mr. Neuberger was inspired by the van Gogh biography to collect and support the work of living artists. “Of course, to do so, I had to have capital of considerably more than the inheritance that gave me an annual income of about $2,000,” he later wrote. “In those days you could live very comfortably, almost luxuriously, on $2,000, but you couldn’t buy art in quantity. So I decided to go back to work in earnest.” He arrived on Wall Street in the spring of 1929, as the bull market was roaring toward its peak. Hired for $15 a week as a runner for the brokerage firm Halle & Stieglitz, he soon learned all aspects of the business, at the same time managing his own money. One of the first big trades he executed on his own behalf was designed to hedge his own wealth against the possibility that the stock market might fall from its precarious height. He sold short 100 shares of the Radio Corporation of America, the most popular stock of the era, betting that its price would decline from its lofty level of $500. In October 1929 came the crash that ushered in the Great Depression, and while Mr. Neuberger’s blue-chip stocks fell, his bet against RCA paid off well: the stock’s price eventually fell into the single digits. He said he lost only 15 percent of his money in the crash, while many others lost everything. On June 29, 1932, the Dow Jones industrial average dipped to 42 and Mr. Neuberger married Marie Salant, a graduate in economics from Bryn Mawr who had gone to work in the research department of Halle & Stieglitz two years earlier. “I can report that by June 29, 1996, the Dow Jones industrial average had climbed to 5,704 and Marie and I had had 64 wonderful years together,” Mr. Neuberger later wrote. Mrs. Neuberger died in 1997. Besides Mr. London, Mr. Neuberger is survived by his daughter, Ann Neuberger Aceves; his sons, Roy S. Neuberger of Lawrence, N.Y., and James A. Neuberger of New York City; seven other grandchildren; and 30 great-grandchildren. Emboldened by his management of his own assets, Mr. Neuberger became a stockbroker at Halle & Stieglitz in 1930, leaving nine years later to start his own firm, Neuberger & Berman. The firm was later acquired by Lehman Brothers, but spun off in 2008 as a stand-alone company with Lehman’s bankruptcy. Mr. Neuberger continued to go to his Neuberger Berman office every day until he was 99, Mr. London said. Mr. Neuberger began to build his art collection in the late 1930s, and although he was asked to do so many times, he never sold a painting by a living artist. “I have not collected art as an investor would,” he said. “I collect art because I love it.” He preferred to share his love by donating works to museums and colleges. In May 1965, Mr. Neuberger received an anonymous offer to buy his art collection for $5 million, a sum he considered a fortune at the time. Years later he learned that the offer had come from Nelson A. Rockefeller, then governor of New York. Mr. Rockefeller went on to play a key role in Mr. Neuberger’s art collection. In May 1967, while Mr. Neuberger was visiting Mr. Rockefeller at his Pocantico Hills estate in Westchester County, the governor offered to have New York State build a museum to house the collection at the State University campus at Purchase. Designed by Philip Johnson, the museum opened in May 1974. Mr. Neuberger often said that the true spirit of his collection could be found on the second floor, which held seminal paintings by Pollock, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as many Milton Averys. Mr. Neuberger made an additional gift of $1.3 million to the State University at Purchase in 1984 and other major gifts to the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also served as a president of the New York Society for Ethical Culture and the American Federation of Arts. Mr. Neuberger’s second memoir, “The Passionate Collector,” was published by John Wiley & Sons in 2003. At a White House ceremony in 2007, President Bush presented Mr. Neuberger with a National Medal of Arts. Like any collector, Mr. Neuberger rued the ones that got away. He remembered passing up a Grant Wood painting as well as refusing to pay $300 for a Jasper Johns in the late 1950s. One time a dealer offered him a Picasso sculpture for $1,500, but he declined because he was buying works only by American artists. “I was such a square that I stupidly didn’t buy it,” he told The New York Times in an interview in 2003. Mr. Neuberger bought all his works himself, usually through dealers. And his taste ran toward the bold. “I liked adventuresome work that I often didn’t understand,” he told The Times as he was celebrating his 100th birthday. “For art to be very good it has to be over your head.” But he said he enjoyed the challenge that the work posed to the viewer. “Those who understand the mysteries of art,” he said, “are made happier by doing so.” (As reported by Edward Wyatt)
2010: Hullegeb Fest is scheduled to present “Kudus Kudus ‘The Sacred Songs of Ethiopian Jewry’” at the Confederation House.

2010: Two suspects from Jerusalem and Hadera are set to be indicted today on charges of stealing 30 Torah scrolls from synagogues across the South and the Central region. “Police have been investigating several synagogue breakins in recent months, in which the suspects had covered up any signs of a robbery. As a result, worshipers only discovered that the scrolls were missing when they went to take them out of the holy ark to read from during prayers. Then the duo allegedly struck in the Negev region in November, breaking into synagogues in the villages of Yated, Shuva and Pri Gan, leading Southern District Police chief Cmdr. Yohanan Danino to set up a special investigative team. The detectives obtained clues from the crime scene in Pri Gan that led them to a suspect in Jerusalem, who has past convictions for property offenses. The suspect and another man allegedly gathered intelligence on the synagogues before the break-ins and analyzed levels of security before acting, preferring synagogues in small communities due to laxer security measures.’ Danino said, “These thefts harmed the holy places of Israel and cause enormous economic damage, as well as sorrow.”

2010: A Kassam rocket that was shot into Israeli territory early this evening. The rocket exploded in an open field near Ashkelon. No injuries or damage was reported.

2010: Following a series of attacks from Gaza, IAF planes attacked targets in the northern and southern Gaza Strip late tonight. The IDF Spokesperson Unit said that "a terrorist cell was attacked in the northern Gaza Strip, and a smuggling tunnel in southern Gaza."

2011: The Kinsey Sicks in Oy Vey in a Manger is scheduled to open in Washington, DC.

2011: Israelis from Baton Rouge, Gulfport and other cities nearby are scheduled to join with Israelis from New Orleans and Metairie for a fun Chanukah event of food, music and lots of fun at the Chabad Center in Metairie, LA.

2011: The Godfather of Israeli music, Miki Gavrielov, is scheduled to perform at the 7th Annual Sephardic Music Festival at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC.

2011: Hamshoushalayim is scheduled to come to an end for 2011.

2011(28th of Kislev, 5772): Shabbat Shel Chanukah


Created and Edited by Mitchell Levin Cedar Rapids, IA melech3@mchsi.com
Copyright; December, 2011; Mitchell A. Levin