This Day, December 29, In Jewish History

December 29 In Jewish History

584 BCE (10 Tevet 3175): The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, began his siege of Jerusalem leading to the destruction of the first Temple. This day is commemorated as one of the "minor" fasts, lasting from sunrise to sunset. Of course, the tenth of Tevet floats when it appears on the secular calendar.

1170: Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, is assassinated inside Canterbury Cathedral by followers of King Henry II. While the movie about Becket gives the Archbishop “all of the good lines” the reality was a bit different, especially for the Jews. The reign of Henry II was a good period for the Jews of England. His view that the King and not the Church was the ultimate authority for the realm would have appeared to be the better case for the Jews given the inimical view that the Church held of the Jewish people. Death is always a tragedy, but we should understand the reality of those over whom we weep as opposed to an image created by later day dramatists and film makers.

1485: Joshua Solomon Soncino published Sefer ha-Ikkarim (Book of Principles) at Soncino, Italy. Sefer ha-Ikkarim ("Book of Principles") is a fifteenth century work by Rabbi Joseph Albo, a student of Crescas. It is an eclectic, popular work, whose central task is the exposition of the principles of Judaism. Rabbi Joseph Albo was probably born in Aragon in 1380 and reportedly took part in the religious debate held at Tortosa in 1413 and 1414. His date of death is given variously as 1430 or 1444.

1690: In Italy, “severe earthquakes” struck the town of Ancona. They are memorialized by the town’s Jews with the celebration of a “Purim of Ancona.” A description of the event and the special prayers recited on that day were printed in “Or Boker” was which was published in 1709.

1709: Birthdate of Empress Elizabeth of Russia. The daughter of Peter the Great was an enemy of the Jews. She reiterated and reinforced the decrees already in existence banning Jews from the Russian Empire. Despite requests from some of her advisors that Jewish merchants be allowed to visit the kingdom since it would enrich Russia, Elizabeth held firm. This is yet another example of Religious zeal over-ruling all other considerations. According to one account, at least 35,000 Jews were forced to leave Russia because of her. Her legacy was a Jew Free Russia – something that would not last because of Russian greed for the land of others.

1778: During the American Revolutionary War, 3,500 British soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell capture Savannah, Georgia without firing a shot. Among those taken prisoner by the British as they secured Savannah was the Jewish patriot from Georgia, Morcechai Sheftall. “In 1778,having proven his skill and selflessness as Commissary General of Georgia, Mordechai Sheftall had been appointed to the post of Deputy Commissary General to the federal troops stationed in Georgia and South Carolina by General Robert Howe. Before the Continental Congress could confirm his role, however, he was captured in December 1778, along with his fifteen-year-old son, Sheftall Sheftall, in the battle to prevent Savannah from falling to British troops. Some of the outnumbered patriots escaped by swimming across the Savannah River, but the younger Sheftall could not swim. His father would not abandon him. With 185 other Americans, they were captured and imprisoned. The British interrogated the Sheftalls under great duress, depriving them of food for two days. At one point, they were almost bayoneted by a drunken British soldier. Still refusing to provide information about the American's sources of supplies and refusing to renounce the patriot cause, father and son were transferred to the dank prison ship Nancy where the British deliberately offered Mordecai no meat other than pork, which he refused. After several months, the elder Sheftall was paroled to the town of Sunbury, Georgia, where he was kept under close British surveillance; his son remained on the Nancy. At Mordecai's urging, Mrs. Sheftall took her other children to the relative safety of Charleston. Separation from family weighed heavily on Mordecai. Through the intervention of friends, he was finally able to arrange for his son's parole to Sunbury under the same restrictive conditions on his own freedom of movement. Things looked promising when American military pressure on Savannah forced the British garrison to withdraw from Sunbury, but freedom for the Sheftalls did not follow. Local Tories began to beat and even kill patriots in Sunbury, especially parolees like the Sheftalls. Father and son managed to flee on an American brig headed for Charleston and a hoped for reunion with their family, but were captured by a British frigate and transported to Antigua, where they remained prisoners until the Spring of 1780. In June, both Sheftalls were paroled once more. They headed for Philadelphia, to which Mrs. Sheftall and the children had fled, yet again, for safety. There, despite his own financial hardships, Mordecai helped fund a new synagogue for Congregation Mikve Israel. Mordecai spent the remainder of the war in Philadelphia, seeking to help both the American cause and his own financial condition by financing a privateer to capture and loot British vessels. His investment does not seem to have paid off; on its very first voyage, the ship ran aground. In 1783, when the war ended, Mordecai returned with his wife and children to Savannah, where the family resumed its life for several generations. The state of Georgia granted him several hundred acres of land in recognition of his sacrifices on behalf of independence. When he died in 1797 at the age of 62, his beloved home city of Savannah buried him with full honors in the Jewish cemetery he created.”

1809: Birthdate of William Ewart Gladstone, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Gladstone is known primarily as the political rival of Benjamin Disraeli and this tends to color the view of him held by some Jews. Gladstone was a complicated man. He began his political career who opposed Jews sitting in the House of Commons. At considerable political risk, he modified that position and voted in favor of removing the Christian religious qualification as long as the number of Jews in Parliament would never be so great as to lead Christians from their faith. Although Disraeli was raised as an Anglican, Gladstone was suspicious of what he described as his radical Jewish policies. Considering the level of English anti-Semitism, Gladstone should go into the plus column.

1845: Texas is admitted as the 28th U.S. state. Considering their numbers, Jews played an active role in the affairs of Texas at this time. Moses Albert Levy served as surgeon-general for Sam Houston’s forces at the Battle of San Jacinto – the victory that gave Texas her independence. Isaac Lyons served as the surgeon –general for another Texas leader, Tom Green. At least one Jew, Abraham Wolf, died at the Alamo. David Kaufman fought at the Battle of Neches, served in Republic of Texas legislature and was one of the state’s first Congressmen when she joined the Union. Kaufman County is named for him. With the support of Sam Houston, Henry Castro helped settle 5,000 Germans in Texas between 1843 and 1848. Castro County and Castroville both bear witness to the successful effort of this Sephardic Jew. During the 1850’s Jewish congregations were established in Houston, Galveston and San Antonio. In each case, the building of the cemetery preceded the building of the house of worship.

1857: An article entitled “A Legal Decision” published today told the story of the son of a wealthy London Jewish banker who had fallen in love with a Christian girl whom he was going to marry despite the father’s threat to disinherit him. Taking advantage of a little known law that required Jewish fathers to support their Christian children, the boy told his father he would become a Christian which meant he would be “entitled to one-half of the father’s fortune.” The father sought help from lawyer who said that for a fee of ten guineas he would tell him how to thwart the son’s plan. Once the fee was paid, the lawyer told the father that he could become a Christian would leave him free to disinherit the son. The father left the lawyer without any further comment.

1860: It was reported today that one of the manifestations of excitement shown by the Poles following the Warsaw Conference was “a hatred of Jews and Germans that knew no bounds.”

1864(30th of Kislev, 5625): Rosh Chodesh Tevet

1870: New York City authorities warned Jews about incompetent and unscrupulous mohalim who were causing the deaths of many Jewish infants.

1871: Birthdate of Meyer London, the Brooklyn Congressman who was one only two members of the Socialist Party elected to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.

1874: A review of “The Travels of the Shah of Persia” by J.W. Redhouse which uses the Shah’s diary to recount the monarch’s 1873 tour of Europe by the Shah included a description of his meeting with Lord Rothschild. After praising Rothschild for his wealth, the Shah told Rothschild that “the best thing to do would be that you should” use your money “and buy a territory in which you could collect all the Jews of the whole world, you becoming their chief and leading them on their way in peace, so that you should not longer thus scattered and dispersed.” (Compare this sentiment with the Iranian -modern day Persia- view on the Jewish state.)

1875(1st of Tevet, 5636) Rosh Chodesh Tevet

1893(20th of Tevet, 5654): Adolf Jellinek passed away. Born in 1821, he was an Austrian rabbi and scholar who became a preacher at the Leopoldstädter Tempel in Vienna in 1856.

1895: Birthdate of Werner Scholem, German political leader, member of the Reichstag during the Weimer Republic and the brother of Gershom Scholem. Werner would die in Buchenwald.

1898: Richard J. H. Gottheil, a professor of languages at Columbia University and a leader in the early American Zionist movement gathered together a group of Jewish students from several New York City universities to form a Zionist youth society. The society was called Z.B.T. which most people know as Zeta Beta Tau fraternity.

1901: The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was founded. “The Jewish National Fund is the caretaker of the land of Israel, on behalf of its owners - Jewish People everywhere.” After several false starts, the delegates to the Fifth Zionist Congress passed a motion that a fund to be called Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael) should be established, and that "the fund shall be the property of the Jewish people as a whole". The purpose of the fund would be to be purchase land in the land of Palestine that would belong to the Jewish people. The JNF's first undertaking was the collection of £200,000. One of the delegates immediately pledged £10 in memory of Zvi Hermann Schapira who had been one of the prime mover’s behind the creation of the JNF. Theodore Herzl made the second donation and his aide, the third. And with this, the dream of a national fund--and a Jewish Homeland--became a reality.

1903(10th of Tevet, 5664): Asara B’Tevet

1908: Louis A. Hensheimer, a member of the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company spent his last day “at his desk” prior to undergoing surgery for appendicitis.

1909: Birthdate of Johtje (pronounced YO-tya) Vos, a Dutch woman who along with her husband hid three dozen Jews from the Nazis during World War II. In addition to which they provided assistance to an unknown number of Jews escaping through part of the Netherlands from 1940 through 1945. Mrs. Vos moved to Woodstock, NY in 1951 and passed away at the age of 97 in 2007. She never saw herself as a Righteous Gentile or a particularly brave person.

1911: The Chamber of Commerce of Salonica rendered a decision that Jewish porters do not need to work on Shabbat.

1918: During the Freedom Wars, Lithuania's government called for volunteers to defend the Lithuanian state. Of the 10,000 volunteers who responded more than 500 of them were Jews. Altogether more than 3000 Jews served in the Lithuanian army between 1918 and 1923.

1922(10th of Tevet, 5683): Asara B'Tevet

1922(10th of Tevet, 5683): The Chief Rabbi of Alexandria, Rodolfo Compagnano, passed away.

1924(2nd of Tevet, 5685): 8th and last day of Chanukah

1928: “The fourth national labor convention for Palestine held under the auspices of the national labor committee for the Organized Jewish Workers in Palestine opened tonight in New York. Abraham Shiplacoff, chairman of the national committee gave the welcoming address to the five hundred delegates. Among the visitors was David Bloch, Mayor of Tel Aviv and Israel Merminsky general secretary of the Palestine Federation both of whom have been visiting the United States for the last ten days.

1929: Roger W. Straus ddressed the Chicago Conference of Temple Brotherhoods at their Chanukah Dinner which was being held at the Palmer House Hotel. Mr. Straus, a New Yorker, is the son of the late Oscar S. Straus and President of the National Federal of Temple Brotherhoods which, has 22,000 members. In his speech, Mr. Straus connected the meritorious service of many members in the World War with the valor of the Maccabees in issuing a call to show the same kind of dedication in combating “the corrosive, brutal theory of materialism and thereby to serve again our religion, our country and humanity.”

1929: Lt. Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York, Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson of Pittsburgh, Joshua Kantrowitz, Ben Altenheimer and Jean Wise will address the Third Annual Chanukah Dinner sponsored by the Metropolitan Conference of Temple Brotherhoods which is being held at the Astor Hotel in New York City.

1931: The first Hebrew-language feature-film "Oded Hanoded" - "Oded the Wanderer", directed by Chaim Halahmi, premiered in Tel Aviv.

1937: The Palestine Post reported that the General Council for Palestine Jews (Va'ad Leumi) decreed that in view of certain developments, the council was the sole body authorized to reach an agreement with the Arabs.

1937: The British press reported that the Foreign Office had become increasingly alarmed at the extent of Arab and Moslem opposition to Palestine's partition. It had not yet decided whether to appoint a new Palestine Commission, expected to implement the plan, as agreed upon with the Mandatory Commission of the League of Nations.

1937: Heavy fines and prison sentences were imposed on German Jews, accused of illegal ritual slaughtering practices.

1941(9th of Tevet, 5702): Tullio Levi-Civita passed away. Born in 1873, Levin-Civita was an Italian mathematician who was one of the founders of absolute differential calculus (tensor analysis) which had applications to the theory of relativity. In 1887, he published a famous paper in which he developed the calculus of tensors. In 1900 he published, jointly with Ricci, the theory of tensors Méthodes de calcul differential absolu et leures applications in a form which was used by Einstein 15 years later. Weyl also used Levi-Civita's ideas to produce a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. In addition to the important contributions his work made in the theory of relativity, Levi-Civita produced a series of papers treating elegantly the problem of a static gravitational field. On September 5, 1938 the Racial Laws were passed in Italy which excluded all those of Jewish background from universities, schools, academies and other institutions. Levi-Civita was dismissed from his professorship, forced to leave the editorial board of Zentralblatt für Mathematik, and prevented from attending the Fifth International Congress of Applied Mechanics in the United States. He wrote to a former student in May 1939 “I live as a retired person and I do not move; except in summer, however, if my personal conditions allow me to move. As you maybe know, Jews have been completely expelled from Italian cultural life; in particular, I will not participate in the "Volta Congress" and will not be in Rome in September”. In the last years of his life, in spite of his moral and physical depression, Levi-Civita remained faithful to the ideal of scientific internationalism and helped colleagues and students who were victims of anti-Semitism; thanks to him, many of them found positions in South America or in the United States.

1941(9th of Tevet, 5702): A Jewish physician from Prague, Czechoslovakia, Dr. Karol Boetim dies of spotted typhus while treating patients at a Gypsy camp near the Lódz (Poland) Ghetto.

1945: Just before dawn today British Sixth Airborne Division troops threw a cordon around Ramat Gan a town of 10,000 and searched every part of it, looking for terrorists who blew up police and military installations in near-by Tel Aviv and Jaffa Thursday night. Authorities arrested more than 800 men between the ages of 16 and 40 making this the largest action of its kind in Palestine.

1946: In Palestine, Major Paddy Brett and three non-commissioned officers serving in the British Army were flogged by attackers alleged to have been members of the Irgun.

1947: Five Jewish doctors driving back to Jerusalem from Hadassah Hospital came under attack from Arab gunman. The doctors found sanctuary with a nearby Jewish family while their attackers burned their car.

1947: "The 29th of November", a ship filled with "illegal" Jewish immigrants, was driven off the coast of Eretz Israel by the British. The ship was named in honor of the date when the U.N. approved the partition resolution that effectively created the Jewish state of Israel.

1947: Two ships with 7,000 immigrants are boarded by British forces before they can reach the coast of Palestine. The Jewish Agency wants to avoid confrontation with the British, knowing that immigration will open on 1 February 1948. Ben Gurion gives orders that there has to be no resistance.

1947(16th of Tevet, 5708): Moshe Rembach, a Jew who had been working for Barclays Bank since it opened in 1918, was shot and killed by Arab gunman at the entrance to bank.

1948: It was reported today that Dr. Edwin J. Cohn of the Harvard Medical School has been chosen to deliver the 1949 Julius Stieglitz Memorial Lecture at the University of Chicago.

1948: Israeli troops pushed deep into the Sinai and established a base at Abu Ageila, 20 miles west of the border between Egypt and Israel.

1948: As Israeli forces finally were driving out the Egyptian invaders, the United Nations called for a cease fire between the Jewish state and the Arab aggressor in the Negev.

1948: Israel responded to the UN call for a ceasefire in the Negev by saying it will continue fighting until Egypt agrees to peace talks while the British government, in a move that shows its pro-Arab and anti-Jewish bias, insists that Israel accept the UN call for an immediate ceasefire.

1948: Ralph Bunche urges the Palestine Conciliation Committee to begin its work.

1952(11th of Tevet, 5713): Beryl Rubinstein composer and piano virtuoso passed away at the age of 54. A native of Athens, Georgia, Rubinstein was the son of a rabbi.

1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel protested to the West on its intensified supply of arms to the Arab states. Britain offered to sell jet planes to Israel, and in an equal number to each separate Arab state, and this would obviously give the combined Arab forces great superiority.

1955: Barbra Streisand makes her first recording, "You'll Never Know" at age 13

1955: In a speech to the Supreme Soviet, Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev condemns Israel as a tool of imperialist states used to threaten its Arab neighbors.

1957: Singer Steve Lawrence, born Sydney Liebowitz in Brooklyn, married fellow entertainer Eydie Gorme. He was Jewish. She was not.

1961: Jerry Herman’s off-Broadway musical “Madame Aphrodite” opened at the Orpheum Theatre.

1966: Birthdate of actor Jason Gould, the son of Elliot Gould and Barbra Streisand.

1967: Birthdate of Evan Seinfeld actor, director and heavy metal bassist in the bands Biohazard and Damnocracy

1968: Israeli commandos destroyed 13 Lebanese airplanes

1971: Birthdate of Jay Fiedler, quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles.

1973: Birthdate of baseball executive Theo Epstein

1973: While Prime Minister Golda Meir was not averse to some form of territorial compromise to gain peace with the Arabs, she said today that Israel would not descend from the Golan, will not partition Jerusalem and will not allow the distance from Natanya to the border be a mere 18 kilometers.

1977: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Knesset endorsed the peace plan, as drafted by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and presented to the US and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, by 64 to eight votes with 40 abstentions. More than 1,000 settlers from the administered territories protested against the plan outside the Knesset's gates.

1977: Poland was reported to be seeking to renew relations with Israel that had been severed during the 1967 war.

1982(13th of Tevet, 5743): Movie producer Sol. C. Siegel passed away. His cinematic productions included “High Society,” “No Way to Treat A Lady” and “Alvarez Kelly.”

1992: The Southwestern Bell Corporation and Clal Industries of Israel will jointly bid for control of Israel's national telephone company, Clal said today. Clal and Southwestern Bell International Development will bid for a controlling interest in Bezeq, the Israeli telecommunications concern..The Israeli Finance Minister, Abraham Shohat, recommended this month that the Government sell its 75 percent stake in Bezeq but no deadline was set. The five-month-old Labor Government has vowed to speed privatization but has yet to sell any of the big Government-owned enterprises. The former Likud Government sold 25 percent of Bezeq shares on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in 1990.

1993: Yuval Goldan was stabbed today by a terrorist near Adarim in the Hebron area.

1995(6th of Tevet, 5756): Composer Shlomo Yoffe died in Beit-Alpha.

1995: The family of Yigal Amir, the man who murdered Prime Minister Rabin celebrated the wedding of Vardit Amir and Yithak Cohen in Tel Aviv.

1997(30th of Kislev, 5758) Rosh Chodesh Tevet

1998(10th of Tevet, 5759): Asara B'Tevet

1999: In an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal, Ira Stoll criticized a speech Rabbi Yitz Greenberg gave last November at the United Jewish Communities’ General Assembly in Chicago.

2002: The New York Times featured books reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about subjects of Jewish interest including the paperback edition of Middle Age: A Romance, by Joyce Carol Oates

2004(17th of Tevet, 5765): Chemist Julius Axelrod passed away. Axelrod was a co-winner of the Noble Prize for Chemistry in 1970.

2005: A suicide bomber detonated an explosive device at an IDF checkpoint on the West Bank. An IDF soldier and two Palestinians were killed in addition to the bomber.

2005: Alice Loeb, daughter of Ernst Loeb and wife of John Strugnell passed away today in Grasse, France, two days after celebrating her 85th birthday.

2006: The Jewish Daily Forward, featured a review of Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History by Cormac Ó. Gráda. “Gráda’s new economic chronicle, “traces the history of the Jews in Ireland from 1079, when they first arrived, up until the present day. The book’s main focus is the Jewish community from the 1870s through the 1940s, roughly during the Ulysses author’s lifetime. While much has been written about the Jewishness of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, one of the most famous characters in all of literature, few know anything about the remarkable community in Ireland that inspired Joyce to create him.”

2007: The Chicago Tribune features a review of People of the Book, Geraldine Brook’s new novel that follows the tortuous path of the Sarajevo Haggadah.

2007: It was reported today that the 47,000 square foot property housing Streit’s, the last matzo factory on the New York’s Lower East Side, is going on the market for $25 million in part of the city that is becoming increasingly gentrified. The factory will keep producing matzo until the owners build a new one in about a year, probably in New Jersey.

2008: In “Anatomy of a Scam,” Time magazine offers a pictograph description of a Ponzi scheme as it reports that “…Bernard Madoff was arrested for allegedly bilking investors out of up to $50 billion in a Ponzi scheme described as one of history’s largest swindles.”

2008: The stars of the hit Broadway musical “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas” – Stephen Bogardus, Kerry O’Malley, Jeffry Denman & Meredith Patterson ring The Closing Bell at the NYSE in celebration of the holiday season. “Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas,’” a new musical stage reinvention of the classic film, is now playing a limited engagement on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre.

2008(2nd of Tevet, 5769): Eighth Day of Chanukah

2008: A bottle of flammable liquid was hurled at Temple Sholom one of Chicago's oldest synagogues. The building caught fire but did not suffer “major damage.”

2008 (2 Tevet 5769): Irit Shitrit, a 36 year old mother of four who had sought shelter in a bus station was killed by a rocket in downtown Ashdod. Her sister was one of eight other civilians injured in the attack.

2008 (2 Tevet 5769): First Staff Sgt. Lutfi Nasraldin, 38, from the Israeli Druze village of Daliyat al-Karmel was killed when two mortar shells landed in the brigade headquarters near Nachal Oz.

2008 (2 Tevet 5769) : Hani al Mahdi a 27-year-old construction worker, from the Bedouin village of Aroer was killed when a Palestinian Grad missile exploded near a construction site in the coastal town of Ashkelon. Curious onlookers gathered at the scene despite the Home Front Command's directive to avoid loitering in groups outdoors. At least 50 rockets have been fired into Israel since Monday morning - nine of which hit Ashkelon, five struck Sderot and four others which struck various towns in the western Negev. One home in Sderot sustained a direct hit. Channel 2 reported that the residents of the home have been treated for shock. "I'm standing next to the body," Ashkelon Mayor Benny Vaknin told Israel Radio by telephone, on the third day of an Israeli air offensive in the Gaza Strip. "To my great regret, we have a fatality. He was killed." Sirens wailed intermittently on Monday morning in Ashkelon as television crews captured footage of panicked residents seeking cover from the incoming projectiles. On Sunday, Gaza-based Palestinians launched a barrage of at least 40 rockets at the western Negev on Sunday, as the Israel Air Force continued to bomb targets in the Strip. Two Katyusha rockets, with a diameter of 122 mm, exploded near Ashdod on Sunday. More than 30 kilometers from Gaza, this was the deepest into Israel a Palestinian rocket has yet to strike. The Katyushas, which are the most improved versions of the Palestinian rockets, have a range of up to 40 kilometers. The particular rockets that struck on Sunday traveled 37 and 35 kilometers.
2009: In Jerusalem, Yellow Submarine (Tzolelet Tzehubah) hosts Elan Bar Lavi, the Mexican/Jerusalemite guitarist, back in Israel after an American and Mexican tour.

2009: Opening session of International Conference on Conservative Judaism: Halakhah, Culture and Sociology at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

2009: Israel’s Supreme Court ruled today that a major access highway to Jerusalem running through the occupied West Bank could no longer be closed to most Palestinian traffic. In a 2-1 decision, the court said that the military had overstepped its authority when in 2002, at the height of the second Palestinian uprising, it closed the road to non-Israeli cars. The justices gave the military five months to come up with another means of ensuring the security of Israelis that permitted broad Palestinian use of the road.

2009: “The New Israeli Foundation for Cinema & TV announced today special funding to devlop scripts based on the stories of Shalom Aleichem.”

2009(12th of Tevet, 5770): David Levine, whose macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates were the visual trademark of The New York Review of Books for nearly half a century, died today in Manhattan. He was 83 and lived in Brooklyn.His death, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was caused by prostate cancer and a subsequent combination of illnesses, his wife, Kathy Hayes, said. Mr. Levine’s drawings never seemed whimsical, like those of Al Hirschfeld. They didn’t celebrate neurotic self-consciousness, like Jules Feiffer’s. He wasn’t attracted to the macabre, the way Edward Gorey was. His work didn’t possess the arch social consciousness of Edward Sorel’s. Nor was he interested, as Roz Chast is, in the humorous absurdity of quotidian modern life. But in both style and mood, Mr. Levine was as distinct an artist and commentator as any of his well-known contemporaries. His work was not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one; he was, in fact, beyond his pen and ink drawings, an accomplished painter. Those qualities led many to suggest that he was the heir of the 19th-century masters of the illustration, Honoré Daumier and Thomas Nast. Especially in his political work, his portraits betrayed the mind of an artist concerned, worriedly concerned, about the world in which he lived. Among his most famous images were those of President Lyndon B. Johnson pulling up his shirt to reveal that the scar from his gallbladder operation was in the precise shape of the boundaries of Vietnam, and of Henry Kissinger having sex on the couch with a female body whose head was in the shape of a globe, depicting, Mr. Levine explained later, what Mr. Kissinger had done to the world. He drew Richard M. Nixon, his favorite subject, 66 times, depicting him as the Godfather, as Captain Queeg, as a fetus. With those images and others — Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon in a David-and-Goliath parable; or Alan Greenspan, with scales of justice, balancing people and dollar bills, hanging from his downturned lips; or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. carrying a gavel the size of a sledgehammer — Mr. Levine’s drawings sent out angry distress signals that the world was too much a puppet in the hands of too few puppeteers. “I would say that political satire saved the nation from going to hell,” he said in an interview in 2008, during an exhibit of his work called “American Presidents” at the New York Public Library. Even when he wasn’t out to make a political point, however, his portraits — often densely inked, heavy in shadows cast by outsize noses on enormous, eccentrically shaped heads, and replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o’clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles — tended to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg. “They were extraordinary drawings with extraordinary perception,” Jules Feiffer said in a recent interview about the work of Mr. Levine, who was his friend. He added: “In the second half of the 20th century he was the most important political caricaturist. When he began, there was very little political caricature, very little literary caricature. He revived the art.” David Levine was born on Dec. 20, 1926, in Brooklyn, where his father, Harry, ran a small garment shop and his mother, Lena, a nurse, was a political activist with Communist sympathies. A so-called red diaper baby, Mr. Levine leaned politically far to the left throughout his life. His family lived a few blocks from Ebbetts Field, where young David once shook the hand of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who became a hero, as did his wife, Eleanor. Years later, Mr. Levine’s caricature of Mrs. Roosevelt depicted her as a swan. “I thought of her as beautiful,” he said. “Yet she was very homely.” As a boy he sketched the stuffed animals in the vitrines at the Brooklyn Museum. He served in the Army just after World War II, then graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with a degree in education and another degree from Temple’s Tyler School of Art. He also studied painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and with the Abstract Expressionist painter and renowned teacher Hans Hofmann. Indeed, painting was Mr. Levine’s first love; he was a realist, and in 1958 he and Aaron Shikler (whose portrait of John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House) founded the Painting Group, a regular salon of amateurs and professionals who, for half a century, got together for working sessions with a model. A documentary about the group, “Portraits of a Lady,” focusing on their simultaneous portraits of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, was made in 2007; the portraits themselves were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery. Mr. Levine’s paintings, mostly watercolors, take as their subjects garment workers — a tribute to his father’s employees, who he said never believed that their lives could be seen as connected to beauty — or the bathers at his beloved Coney Island. In a story he liked to tell, he was painting on the boardwalk when he was approached by a homeless man who demanded to know how much he would charge for the painting. Mr. Levine, nonplussed, said $50. “For that?” the man said. The paintings are a sharply surprising contrast to his caricatures: sympathetic portraits of ordinary citizens, fond and respectful renderings of the distinctive seaside architecture, panoramas with people on the beach. “None of Levine’s hard-edged burlesques prepare you for the sensuous satisfactions of his paintwork: the matte charm of his oil handling and the virtuoso refinement of his watercolors,” the critic Maureen Mullarkey wrote in 2004. “Caustic humor gives way to unexpected gentleness in the paintings.” Mr. Levine’s successful career as a caricaturist and illustrator took root in the early 1960s, when he started working for Esquire. He began contributing cover portraits and interior illustrations to The New York Review of Books in 1963, its first year of publication, and within its signature blocky design his cerebral, brooding faces quickly became identifiable as, well, the cerebral, brooding face of the publication. He always worked from photographs, reading the accompanying article first to glean ideas. “I try first to make the face believable, to give another dimension to a flat, linear drawing; then my distortions seem more acceptable,” he said. From 1963 until 2007, after Mr. Levine received a diagnosis of macular degeneration and his vision deteriorated enough to affect his drawing, he contributed more than 3,800 drawings to The New York Review. Over the years he did 1,000 or so more for Esquire; almost 100 for Time, including a number of covers (one of which, for the 1967 Man of the Year issue, depicted President Johnson as a raging and despairing King Lear); and dozens over all for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and other publications. Mr. Levine’s first marriage ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Hayes, his partner for 32 years whom he married in 1996, he is survived by two children, Matthew, of Westport, Conn., and Eve, of Manhattan; two stepchildren, Nancy Rommelmann, of Portland, Ore., and Christopher Rommelmann, of Brooklyn; a grandson, and a stepgranddaughter. “I might want to be critical, but I don’t wish to be destructive,” Mr. Levine once said, explaining his outlook on both art and life. “Caricature that goes too far simply lowers the viewer’s response to a person as a human being.”

2010(22 Tevet): In the yearbook of the Meisel Synagogue in Prague, the 22nd of Tevet is designated as the date on which to commemorate the escape of Yosef Thein from the gallows in the Hebrew year 5383 (1622).

2010: “Judaism and Social Justice: What Can We Contribute to the Discourse in the Age of Globalization?” and “Brotherly Love: Joseph Revisited,” a session that will use close reading techniques to explore the opening of Vayeshev (Genesis 37) and gain a deeper appreciation of the complexity of the text and its surprising insights into the story of Joseph and his brothers, are two of the programs scheduled to be presented at today’s meeting of the Limmud Conference.

2010: Perez Hilton broke the news earlier today that not only is Natalie Portman who starred in “Black Swan” along with three other Jewish actresses all playing ballerinas (Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder and Barbara Hershey), now engaged to marry her choreographer from “Black Swan,” but that she is also pregnant. For those wondering about Millepied's ethnic origins, he is French, but not Jewish.

2010(22nd of Tevet, 5771): Rabbi Menachem Zeev “Wolf” Greenglass, a Chabad kabbalist and educator who exchanged hundreds of letters over the years with the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, died in Montreal today at the age of 94. Greenglass was a founder of the Rabbinical College of Canada in Montreal after escaping Europe during the Holocaust, and taught there for decades. He gave his final lecture on the Chabad philosophical treatise Tanya in 2007. Greenglass was born in Lodz, Poland, to parents who followed the Alexander Chasidic dynasty. In Poland, Greenglass became close to Rabbi Zalman Schneersohn, a descendant of the first Lubavitcher rebbe, and then enrolled in the Otwock Lubavitch yeshiva, where he met Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the son-in-law of the then current Lubavitcher rebbe. When World War II broke out, Greenglass headed for Vilna and was among those who received later transit visas from the Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara, who saved thousands of Jews. Greenglass crossed Russia by rail, went by boat to Japan from Vladivostok and then to Shanghai before reaching Canada. Once there, Chabad tasked him to open schools, including Montreal's Beth Rivkah Girls School, and work with Jewish children in the Montreal public schools. During that time, Greenglass continued a correspondence with Schneersohn, who had become Chabad's rebbe, and who wrote to him in 1954 that "without an intellectual appreciation for the truth … one cannot expect a student to always be in total acceptance." Greenglass also maintained a lengthy correspondence with the Jerusalem mystic Rabbi Yeshaya Asher Zelig Margaliot.

2010: Liverpool marked the death of Avi Cohen with a period of applause before their Premier League match against Wolverhampton Wanderers. Cohen had been declared legally dead the day before after being involved in fatal motorcycle accident

2011: Those viewing tonight’s scheduled screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi creation,
2001: A Space Odyssey at the San Francisco MOMA will find their viewing experience enhanced if they wear the Dreidel Vission Goggles available at the Jewish Museum for a mere $3.00

2011: Rav Gav is scheduled to appear at Greek Themed International night sponsored by HipJLM (Heneni International Programs: Jerusalem).

2011: Mrs. Raize Guttman is scheduled to present “Challah for a Kallah,” an interactive Challah class which will cover everything from the hashkafa to the halacha of baking challah as well as learning how to make new and interesting challah shapes.

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