This Day, December 1, In Jewish History

December 1 In Jewish History

500: (Kislev 4428): This is the traditional date of the closing of the Talmudic era and the beginning of the Saboraic era. Saboraim is “the title applied to the principals and scholars of the Babylonian academies in the period immediately following that of the Amoraim. The Saboraic Era lasted for approximately 200 years.

1135: Henry I of England passed away. During Henry's reign (1100–1135) a royal charter was granted to Joseph, the chief rabbi of London, and all his followers. Under this charter, Jews were permitted to move about the country without paying tolls, to buy and sell goods and property, to sell their pledges after holding them a year and a day, to be tried by their peers, and to be sworn on the Torah rather than on a Christian Bible. Special weight was attributed to a Jew's oath, which was valid against that of 12 Christians, because they represented the King of England in financial matters. The sixth clause of the charter was especially important: it granted to the Jews the right of movement throughout the kingdom, as if they were the king's own property (sicut res propriæ nostræ). Henry died without a direct male heir. The result was civil strife that was bad for England in general and the Jews in particular. Peace would only come when Henry’s grandson, Henry II, took the throne.

1145: Pope Eugene III sent a papal bull to the French King, Louis VII, proclaiming the Second Crusade. Led by Louis and Emperor Conrad III from 1147 to 1149, the crusade failed to accomplish its goal.

1516: Jerusalem surrendered to Selim I, the Ottoman Sultan

1521: Pope Leo X passed away. Leo was one of those Italian Popes whose pursuit of other interests left him “no time to think of torturing Jews.” Bonet de Lates, a Jew from Provence served as Leo’s physician and unofficial advisor. He was more of an aristocrat than man of the cloth who was more concerned about navigating among the competing temporal powers than matters of religion. His leniency towards the Jews may have stemmed from an attitude summed up by his statement that “It is well known how useful this fable of Christ has been to us and ours!”

1652: Manuel Fernando de Villa-Real, a distinguished Marrano who "conducted the consular affairs of the Portuguese court at Paris" was seized in Lisbon, gagged and executed.

1573(Kislev, 5334): This date marks the death of Solomon Luria who was born in 1510 at Brest-Litovsk. Luria is known as the "Rashal" or the Maharshal. A contemporary of Salomon Shakna, he represented an opposing view in Talmudic study, believing in plain but lucid methods. He was also the author of the Yam Shel Shlomo (Sea of Solomon), a commentary on several volumes of the Talmud, and Chokmat Shlomo (Wisdom of Solomon) in which he corrected many faulty readings in the Talmud, Rashi and the Tosophot.

1626: Ibn Farukh (Governor of Jerusalem) was deposed after harshly persecuting the Jews.
1652(Tevet, 5413): Portuguese Jewish statesman Manuel Fernando de Villarreal was executed by the Inquisition.

1742: The Jews living in “Great Russia” were expelled by order of Empress Elizabeth.

1825: Czar Alexander I passed away. This anti-Semitic Russian monarch’s death coincided with a temporary cessation of the forced re-settlement of Jews in the Pale of Settlement. The cruel re-settlement policy would be quickly reinstituted by his son and successor, Nicholas I. Prayer for the Czar: May the Lord keep the Czar…far away from the Jews.

1843: Birthdate of Leopold Lowenstein a German rabbi born from Gailingen, Baden. The son of a rabbi, he would eventually serve as the Rabbi for three districts located in his native Baden.

1844: In an election for Chief Rabbi of the British Empire Jacob Adler received 121 votes, Hirsch Hirschfeld 12, and Samson Raphael Hirsch 2.

1848: Birthdate of Yosef Chaim Zonnenfeld, or Sonnenfeld, who was the Chief Rabbi and co-founder of the Edah HaChareidis, Haredi Jewish community in Jerusalem, during the years of the British Mandate of Palestine.

1852: A British ship, the Fitzjames under the command of Captain arrived at the Quarantine area in New York tonight. Among the passengers were two Jews – a man named Drestner from Poland and Augustine Behr from Germany. Apparently when the ship was about thirty miles from Sandy Hook (off the coast of New York) the two Jews had a discussion about religion that became so heated that Behr stabbed Drestner with his knife. Drestner was taken to the hospital on Staten Island. While the police are holding Behr in jail, U.S. authorities say they have authority in the case since the attack took place on British vessel in international waters. The British Counsel has been notified and may send Behr back to England for a hearing.

1860: The New York Times correspondent wrote from Jamaica that “an Anti-Jewish feeling is brewing in the community, and I am very much afraid that, politically -- that is, speaking daggers, but using none, for we can never come to that -- a war of races will have to be fought. The colored classes who constitute the education, the planters who represent the wealth, and the blacks who have the force of numbers, are not going to rest satisfied while the Government and the patronage of Government are given up to the Jews, who are clannish enough to employ them to their own use, and to the detriment of all other classes. This is the state of things at present; but the difficulty is far from being settled, and I am afraid the Governor will, at the long run, be forced to retire.”

1861: E. Delafield Smith, the U.S. District Attorney, wrote a letter of introduction to President Lincoln on behalf of Rabbi Fischell “who has been appointed by the Board of Delegates of the Israelites of the U.S. to urge the modification of the laws in relation to chaplains, so far as they affect the practice, though I doubt not unintended exclusion of clergymen of the Jewish faith from acting in that capacity, even in regiments composed of persons of that faith. This class of our citizens has evinced loyalty to the Government, and I need not say is entitled to at least a hearing on this subject. Dr. Fischell is a gentleman of great worth and intelligence.”

1868: Disraeli completed his first term as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and became the leader of the Opposition.

1870: It was reported today that the Hebrew Charity Fair under the chairmanship of E.B. opened to a full house with a program that included a speech by the Governor of New York.

1870: Attendance at the second day of the Hebrew Fair for the benefit of Mount Sinai Hospital and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum was less than on opening night, but was robust enough to raise an additional $7,000. When this total is added to the over $51,000 raised the first night, it means that in only two days the fair has already raise almost $60,000.

1870: Professor Singler’s Orchestra provided the music at tonight’s second annual ball of the Hebrew Young Men’s Literary Association which was held at the Apollo Hall in New York.

1871: The Hebrew Young Men’s Literary and Benevolent Association is scheduled to host an evening of entertainment at the Irving Hall.

1871: It was reported today that children at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum enjoyed a “splendid” Thanksgiving meal filled with “holiday pleasure.”

1871: It was reported today that in Brooklyn all businesses were closed for Thanksgiving except for “saloons and Jew clothing-stores.”

1876: It was reported today that the Hebrew Charity Ball will be held on December 21 at the Academy of Music.

1876: It was reported that Rabbi George Jacobs delivered the invocation at yesterday’s ceremony in Philadelphia, PA during which a monument dedicated to Religious Liberty financed by the B’nai Brith was presented to the Centennial Committee chaired by A.L. Singer.

1877: The Hebrew Free School Association in New York is providing services to 701 students.

1878: The annual meeting of the Hebrew Free School Association was held today at the schoolhouse located at Number 96 Bowery. As of this date, the association operates five schools, employs 17 teachers and serves 1,045 students.

1893: Birthdate of German expressionist playwright Ernst Toller who would be memorialized by W. H. Auden's poem "In Memory of Ernst Toller."

1909: The first Kibbutz, Degania, was established in pre-state Israel. Aaron David Gordon (1856-1922), one of its founders, was considered the "Apostle" of the kibbutz movement. Each colony was independent and democratically governed. Membership was voluntary and all earnings and expenses were shared.

1913: Crete, having obtained self rule from Turkey after the First Balkan War, is annexed by Greece. “The Jews of Crete are first mentioned in 2 Maccabees and appear to have had a community at Gortys.” “Toward the end of the 19th century, Crete was made into an independent republic under a Greek prince regent. A parliament was established, with several Jewish representatives, who managed to claim their constitutionally guaranteed seats with great difficulty. After Crete was formally annexed to Greece in 1913, Jewish emigration continued until, by 1941, there were only 364 Jews in Hania, 1 in Rethymnon, and 7 in Herakleion.”

1915: First night of a “fete” held for the benefit of the Spanish and Portuguese Sisterhood which is chaired by Mrs. Mortimer M. Meken.

1916: Italian government declares an Italian, and not a native, be appointed as rabbinate in Tripoli. Arabs are in charge of local courts of justice and deal unjustly against Jews.

1917: A fund raising campaign led by Jacob Schiff is scheduled to begin today in New York City.

1917: The Bolshevik Armistice Commission, with two Jews, Adolf Jofee and Leo Kamenev (Trotsky’s brother in law) as chief negotiators left Petrograd for peace talks with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk.

1918: Following the incorporation of Bessarabia and Bukovina, Transylvania united with Romania to form what will become known as Greater Romania. Greater Romania gained its legitimacy as a result of the Versailles Peace Conference that end World War I, during which 882 Jewish soldiers died defending Romania (and 825 were decorated). This enlarged state had an increased Jewish population. Based on treaties signed after the war, the government of Romania agreed to change its policy towards the Jews, promising to award them both citizenship and minority rights, the effective emancipation of Jews. The 1923 Constitution of Romania sanctioned these requirements, meeting opposition from Cuza's National-Christian Defense League and rioting by right-wing students.

1918: The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) is proclaimed. The redrawing of the map of Europe by the Allied Powers following WW I was intended to break up the old European imperial system recognizing the aspirations of a variety of nationalities throughout central and eastern Europe. The process may have looked very tidy in the drawing rooms of London and Paris. But it was quite messy for those having to live it out and this very true for the Jews of the Balkans. For a primer on the early days of the Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities in the political invention called Yugoslavia read the following: http://www.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/pdf/02_goldstein.pdf

1918: Iceland becomes a sovereign state, yet remains a part of the Danish kingdom. Jews were not officially allowed to reside in Iceland until 1855 when the parliament complied with the request of the Danish king to allow Jews to enter the little island and trade under the same terms as had been adopted in Denmark. By the end of 19th there were a small number of trading agents which represented firms owned by Danish Jews but there is no record as to how many of them, if any were Jewish. A Jewish Danish merchant named Fritz Heyman Nathan moved to Iceland and pursued a successful business career in Reykjavik in the first two decades of the twentieth century. He moved returned to Copenhagen to pursue his business interest, having found that Iceland was a hard place to follow a Jewish way of life. Today, the Jewish population of Iceland is miniscule.

1921: Following an investigation into Sir Edgar Speyer's wartime conduct held in camera by the Home Office's Certificates of Naturalization (Revocation) Committee, his naturalization was revoked by an order issued today.

1925: Mr. and Mrs. Abraham J. Cahan arrived in New York today aboard the SS Majestic. Mr. Cahan is editor of the Forwards. They were returning from a month long visit to Palestine where Mr. Cahan had spent most of his time investigating the growth and development of the newly created city of Tel Aviv

1925: Birthdate of Martin Rodbell. Dr. Rodbell was an American biochemist who was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery in the 1960s of natural signal transducers called G-proteins that help cells in the body communicate with each other. He shared the prize with Alfred G. Gilman, who later proved Rodbell's hypothesis, by isolating the G-protein, which is so named because it binds to nucleotides called guanosine diphosphate and guanosine triphosphate, or GDP and GTP. Prior to Rodbell's research, scientists believed that only two substances--a hormone receptor and an interior cell enzyme--were responsible for cellular communication. Rodbell, however, discovered that the G-protein acted as an intermediate signal transducer between the two. [Ed. Note: I have note a clue as to what this really means.]

1927: Birthdate of Mordkhe Schaechter, a leading Yiddish linguist who spent a lifetime studying, standardizing and teaching the language.

1927: Birthdate of Abby Mann, American film writer and producer. Born as Abraham Goodman, he grew up in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was best known for his work on controversial subjects and social drama. His most famous work is the drama Judgment at Nuremberg, which was initially a television drama aired in 1959. Stanley Kramer directed the 1961 film adaptation, for which Mann received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. In his acceptance speech, he said: "A writer worth his salt at all has an obligation not only to entertain but to comment on the world in which he lives."Mann later adapted the play for a 2001 production on Broadway, which featured Maximilian Schell from the 1961 film in a different role. Working on television, he most notably created the television series Kojak, starring Telly Savalas. Mann was executive producer, but was credited as a writer also on many episodes. His other writing credits include the screenplays for the television films The Marcus-Nelson Murders, The Atlanta Child Murders Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story, and Indictment: The McMartin Trial, as well as the film War and Love. He passed away in 2008 at the age of 80

1933: Birthdate of Sir James David Wolfensohn the Australian who was the ninth president of the World Bank Group.

1935: Birthdate of Woody Allen

1937: This date marks the seventh anniversary of the Palestine Post, which would later become the Jerusalem Post.

1937: The Palestine Post reported that two members of a police patrol, a British sergeant and an Arab constable were killed by an Arab terrorist gang at Wadi Malak, near Haifa. A Public Works Department store was sabotaged and burnt out at Tulkarm.

1938: Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht travels to London to propose to George Rublee, of the Intergovernmental Committee for Political Refugees, an extortionate scheme: German Jews could emigrate if they put up cash assets that would be transferred to the Reich upon emigration. This Schacht-Rublee plan will be abandoned in January 1939, when Schacht will be dismissed by Hitler after Schacht objects to the high cost of Germany's rearmament.

1938: The British Cabinet allows 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children into Britain in an action called the Kindertransport. (Britain, however, refuses to allow 21,000 more Jewish children into Palestine.) The rescued children come from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia with the help of British, Jewish, and Quaker welfare organizations. Because of the Holocaust, most of the children will never see their parents again, and many of the Jewish children will be converted to Christianity.

1939: This date marked the final deportation of Jews from Poland to the Soviet Union. The Jews had been marched from Chelm to Hrubieszow, Poland. Then 1800 Jews set off marching from Hrubieszow, Poland to the Soviet border. More than 1,400 were killed on December 4 on or near the Russian border.

1939: German Field Marshal Johannes Blaskowitz, commander-in-chief of the German Army Group East, reports that many Jewish children in transport trains are arriving at their destinations frozen to death.

1939: The Lipowa camp at Lipowa Street in Lublin, Poland, is established. It is initially an assembly point for Polish-Jewish POWs, and it will later be a Jewish work camp.

1939: Lódz (Poland) Ghetto administrator Friedrich Übelhör notes that ghettoization of Jews is only temporary. The final goal is to clean Jews out of Lódz, to "utterly destroy this bubonic plague."

1940: Inside the Warsaw (Poland) Ghetto, Polish-Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum begins work on a secret diary of ghetto life.

1941: The German Ministry of Occupied Eastern Territories decrees that the destruction of Jews shall continue irrespective of economic considerations; i.e., the allure of unpaid Jewish labor will be ignored.

1941: During the murder of 5000 Jews at Novogrudok, Belorussia, 200 Jews resist and kill 20 Nazis before being gunned down.

1941: Ten thousand Jews deported from Odessa, Ukraine, are murdered at camps at Acmecetka, Bogdanovka, and Domanevka, Romania.

1941: Mass murders of Jews in the Ukraine and Volhynia region of Poland are slowed when the frozen ground prevents the digging of execution pits.

1941: Fur coats belonging to Jews in eastern Germany are confiscated by the Nazis. They'll be used by German soldiers on the Eastern Front.

1941: The Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica, published in Rome under strict Vatican supervision, reminds Catholics that the Jews are supposedly those primarily responsible for murdering God and that the Jews repeat this crime by means of ritual murder "in every generation."

1941: For the next three days and nights, seven thousand Jews from Novogrudok, Belorussia, are forced to stand all day and night in frigid temperatures outside the municipal courthouse. Five thousand are taken away to their deaths on the 6th; the remaining 2000 are impressed into forced labor at suburban Pereshike

1941: According to an Einsatzkomando Report only 15% of Lithuanian Jews were left alive less than six months after the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union.

1941: The German established a ghetto in Losice forcing all the Jews from surrounding areas to move there.

1942: Ayn Rand, celebrated novelist and creator of Objectivism, delivered the completed manuscript of her novel The Fountainhead to her publisher

1942: Four hundred laborers were killed at Karczew a town near Warsaw

1942: Members of the Siemiatycze (Poland) Group of Jewish resisters kill a Polish peasant and his entire family as retribution for the peasant's capture and betrayal to the Nazis of three Jews.

1942: Nazis lock 1000 Gypsies in a Lithuanian synagogue until the prisoners starve to death.

1942 Ghetto resistance is organized at Czestochowa and Kielce, Poland.

1942: At Brody, Ukraine, Jewish resistance is led by Solomon Halberszstadt, Jakub Linder, and Samuel Weiler.

1942: Jewish resistance at Chortkov, Ukraine, is led by Heniek Nusbaum, Mundek Nusbaum, Reuven Rosenberg, and Meir Wasserman.

1942: Jewish Resistance leader Dr. Yeheskel Atlas, a young Polish physician, is mortally wounded by Nazi troops in a battle at Wielka Wola, Poland.

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

1942: The SS shuts down extermination activities at Belzec.

1942: A Sonderkommando plan to escape from Auschwitz is discovered, and the inmates are gassed.

1942: A forced-labor camp is established at Plaszów, Poland.

1942(22nd of Kislev, 5703): Partisan leader Hirsch Kaplinski, survivor of an August 1942 massacre of Jews at Diatlovo, Belorussia, is killed in combat during a German attack on the Lipiczany Forest.

1942: Roosevelt and Churchill issued a joint public statement revealing the dire facts of the Nazi extermination program aimed at the Jews and issuing a solemn warning that individuals engaged in it would ultimately would be tried as war criminals.

1943: Mussolini ordered the arrest of "all Jews living on the national territory." By now, Italians did not follow Il Duce's bidding and 40,000 Italian Jews survived the war while another 8,000 died.

1943: United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau instructs assistants Randolph Paul and John W. Pehle to investigate the State Department's handling of the Jewish refugee issue.

1944: After three months' work at Lieberose, Germany, Nazis suspend slave labor on a vacation complex for German officers. They instead evacuate the Jewish workers 100 miles on foot northwest to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany. Of the 3,500 who began the march, only 900 arrived at the destination. Several hundred sick inmates who were unable to begin the march were shot in their beds.

1944: American pollster Elmo Roper warns that anti-Semitism has infected the U.S., most strongly in and around cities.

1945: Anti-Semitic Poles murder 11 Jews in the town of Kosow-Lacki, Poland, which is located less than six miles from the site of the Treblinka extermination camp.

1945: Oliver Cox, an American sociologist, concludes that Christians in the United States regard the Jew as "our irreconcilable enemy within the gates, the antithesis of our God, the disturber of our way of life and of our social aspirations."

1945: Birthdate of singer, actress and comedian Bette Midler. Midler was born in Honolulu to Jewish parents from New Jersey. After graduating from the University of Hawaii, she got her start singing in the Continental Baths, a New York City bathhouse. Her piano accompanist at the time was Barry Manilow. Manilow produced Midler first hit album entitled The Divine Miss M.

1947: In response to the partition vote, the Arab High Committee declared that November 29 was henceforth to be “a day of mourning” and that it marked the beginning of the struggle against the Partition.

1947: The Arab League plans to meet and discuss ways to resist the partition of Palestine into two states.

1947:Emanuel Neuman, President of the Zionist Organization of America, sought formal recognition of the Jewish volunteer defense units as being the Jewish militia in Palestine.

1948: The Arab Congress names Abdullah of Trans Jordan, King of Palestine. Abdullah earned this title because the Jordanian Army (known as the Arab Legion) had successfully crossed the Jordan River and seized what is now called the West Bank and the eastern section of Jerusalem. Under the partition plan, the area of the West Bank should have been part of an Arab State. Apparently the Arabs saw things differently since they awarded it to Abdullah as “spoil” for his part in the war against the Jewish state. Since it now held land on both sides of the Jordan, Trans-Jordan would officially change its name to Jordan. Please note, there was no attempt to create an independent Palestinian state on this land for the almost twenty years it was occupied by the Jordanian Army.

1948: Riots break out in Damascus in response to King Abdullah of Transjordan being
proclaimed king of Palestine at a meeting of central Palestinian Arabs in Jericho and Syrian premier Jamil Mardam Bey and his cabinet resign.

1949: The UN General Assembly's Political Subcommittee recommends an international Jerusalem despite objections of Israel and Jordan.

1956: The Dutch Kingdom officially recognized the Jewish community of Aruba.

1966: In response to competition from W & S an automated bagel factory that had begun operating in metropolitan New York, “the bagel bosses” presented baker’s union with a list of “radical demands,” including a 40% pay cut, a decrease in the number of paid holidays and a 50% cut in the number of bakers on each shift.

1968: It was reported today that “Tel Aviv is building a huge five-level bus terminal with local and out-of-town platforms, shops and movie theatres. The terminal will be the world’s largest surpassing even the Port Authority Terminal in New York City.”

1988: As Israeli politicians struggle to form a new government after the elections which were held on November 1, Shimon Peres signed a coalition agree with Agudat Israel even though his Labor Party and this Orthodox political party held different views on attempts to redefine who is Jewish under the Law of Return.

1973(6th of Kislev, 5734): David Ben-Gurion, First Prime Minister of Israel, passed away. There is no way that a short blurb can do justice to one of the greatest Jewish leaders in modern times. Regardless of what one might think of his flaws, and he did have them, without Ben-Gurion there would have not been a modern state of Israel. He was a walking contradiction: an idealist and a pragmatist; a secular Jew who was an expert on the Bible and biblical history; a man whose hands were hardened from manual labor on a kibbutz who taught himself English and classical Greek; a seemingly autocratic political figure who believed in democracy even when the process when against him. No matter how the revisionists work at it, nobody can take away his most monumental achievement – the Jewish homeland. To paraphrase what was said about Maimonides, from David (the king) to David (Ben-Gurion) there was none like David.

1977: Birthdate of guitarist Bard Delson.

1977: Three weeks into the Sadat peace initiative, the Carter administration had offered only the faintest approval for the Egyptian president’s visit to Jerusalem, and had not yet abandoned its support for Geneva in favor of the bilateral Egyptian-Israeli process that Sadat, Begin and Dayan were actively proposing.

1985: In an article entitled “First A State, Then A Nation,” Paul Johnson reviews Israel The Partitioned State: A Political History Since 1900 by Amos Perlmutter.

1988: Birthdate of Zoe Kravitz, daughter of Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz.

1988: Israeli and American women joined together and attempted to pray as a group at the Western Wall for the first time. More than 70 women attended the women’s service, which included a Torah reading, at the remnant of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem often called the Western Wall and sometimes referred to as the Wailing Wall. These women had gathered for the first International Congress for the Empowerment of Jewish Women and decided to go pray as a group at the Wall. Bonna Haberman, one of the women present on that day, suggested that a women’s prayer group meet at the Wall every Rosh Chodesh (the Jewish new moon observance). Local Congress attendees followed through, and the group Women of the Wall was born. Since that first service, Women of the Wall has gathered to pray at the Western Wall every Rosh Chodesh. From the very first gathering, the group has confronted hostile responses including physical assaults and thrown stones, chairs, and dirty diapers. Assertion of their right to pray together as women out loud and to conduct a public Torah service has led not only to physical struggles but also to a protracted legal confrontation. While members of the ultra-orthodox community attempted to pass laws that would entail a seven-year prison sentence for women who conducted Torah services at the Wall, the Israeli Supreme Court mandated in April 2003 that authorities needed to make some provision for women to conduct services in the Wall area. In the summer of 2004, the government opened an alternative prayer space adjacent to the ancient Temple wall uncovered by archaeologists, but far removed from the area called the Wailing Wall. Although Women of the Wall has reluctantly moved its Torah service to this space, the women continue to use the traditional prayer plaza for the rest of their Rosh Chodesh worship.

1991: Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory by Lawrence L. Langer, Maus: A Survivor's Tale II. And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman and Wartime Lies by Louis Begley are among the ten books chosen by the New York Times Book Review as the best books published in the country during the preceding year

1994(28th of Kislev, 5755): An ax-wielding Islamic militant killed an Israeli soldier in a northern Israeli town today, officials said. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, vowing that his peace efforts with the Palestinians would continue despite a surge of guerrilla attacks, said the killer belonged to the Islamic resistance movement Hamas. The Prime Minister said no responsibility for the attack could be attached to Palestinian self-rule authorities because the guerrilla had come from a part of the West Bank still under Israeli control. "He did not have an entry permit into Israel," Rabin said. "We have to investigate how he managed to get to Afula." "We shall continue on our road to peace and to fight those who oppose it," Rabin said. The army identified the soldier as Liat Gabai, 19, an Afula resident. The police identified the attacker as Wahib Abu Alrub, 25, from the occupied West Bank, and said he was in custody. The police commander in Afula, Rami Rahav, said the guerrilla, from a village near the West Bank town of Jenin, attacked the soldier near a police station, striking her on the head with an ax. Speaking at Tel Aviv airport, where he welcomed the two-millionth tourist to visit the Jewish state this year, Mr. Rabin told reporters that Mr. Alrub was a Hamas member who had been detained several times by Israel in the past.

1995: Yigal Amir, the confessed assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, today denied suggestions that he had acted with the approval of a rabbi, and insisted that he had decided on the killing alone after careful deliberation. Mr. Amir, 25, had asserted that he was required to kill Mr. Rabin under religious law because the Prime Minister was betraying Jewish lives and land to the enemy. Suspecting that Mr. Amir may have received a rabbinic authorization, the police interrogated four rabbis this week to determine whether they had declared Mr. Rabin a "pursuer" under Jewish law -- a deadly assailant who can be legally killed. None were held in custody, but the questioning highlighted discussions in some Orthodox circles about whether the Government could be subject to the law of the "pursuer." In court today, Mr. Amir sat hunched and intent as he listened to the proceedings. A police representative said he expected an indictment to be handed down on Sunday against Mr. Amir and his brother, Hagai and a third suspect, Dror Adani, who are being held on conspiracy and other charges. Judge Dan Arbel ordered all three held until next week.

1995: It was reported today that Alfred Lerner, the son Russian-Jewish immigrants and one of America's wealthiest men, with a net worth of $1 billion gained in real estate and banking has donated 25 million dollars to Columbia University in New York City

1996: In an article entitled “Shulberg Tackling Fitzgerald Play Anew” Meryl Spiegel described his interview with Budd Schulberg in this last of “the living links to F. Scott Fitzgerald, talked about ''The Disenchanted,'' his fictional tale of their cataclysmic collaboration on a film script. Having lost favor with the literary world of the 1930's, the ''laureate of the Jazz Age'' was a shadow of his former self, Mr. Schulberg recalled. Deeply in debt, physically ill and desperately trying to stay sober, Fitzgerald grabbed the screenwriting job just to pay his bills and finance a return to his own work. The film, called ''Winter Carnival,'' was written in 1939, two years before the writer died nearly penniless at the age of 44. ''The Disenchanted'' was first written as a novel, published in 1950, and was later transformed into a play that opened on Broadway in 1958. Mr. Schulberg, 82, is probably most famous today for writing the screenplay for ''On The Waterfront,'' starring Marlon Brando, and for his first novel, ''What Makes Sammy Run?'' He has published many other novels, however, several works of nonfiction, and has seen his plays produced on Broadway.”

2001(28th of Kislev, 5755): Two suicide bombers blew themselves up in back-to-back explosions at a downtown Jerusalem pedestrian mall, killing 11 bystanders

2002: The New York Times featured books by Jewish authors and/or about subjects of Jewish interest including One World: The Ethics of Globalization by Peter Singer, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 by Michael Beschloss and Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan. The last two may seem like general history texts but they deal with events that had a unique impact on the Jewish people

2002: Maxine Frank Singer, a leading biochemistry researcher and advocate of science education, stepped down, after 15 years as the president of the Carnegie Institution, a major national scientific research center.

2004(18th of Kislev, 5765): Dr. Jonathan A. Goldstein, former professor at the University of Iowa passed away. Among his scholarly works were his translations and commentaries on the Books of the Maccabees as part of the Anchor Bible. He will be missed by all those who knew him.

2005: A new defense system designed for civilian planes passed it its final test. The new anti-missile protection system is designed to defend passenger jets from shoulder-held missile attacks. El Al will begin installing the systems as early as next week. The development of the systems came as a result of attacks on Israeli civilian airliners flying in Africa by terrorists armed with shoulder held missiles.

2005: The Maryland/Israel Development Center and The Trendlines Group co-sponsored a conference in Tel Aviv on raising money for Israeli homeland security companies One hundred fifty executives and entrepreneurs of Israeli homeland security technology companies came to learn how to raise funds and break into the American homeland security market. MIDC Executive Director spoke about the new Maryland/Israel Development Fund and opportunities for Israeli companies to partner with Maryland firms on new product development and commercialization. Leading Washington, DC based homeland security consultant, Chris Cushing of The Commonwealth Group spoke about segmenting government and commercial markets to identify optimal entry points for new technology.

2006: “The Jews Among Arabs Conference” at Vanderbilt University in Nashville,TN sponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies comes to an end.

2006(10th of Kislev, 5767): Songwriter and journalist Eli Mohar passed away at the age of 58, of cancer. Mohar, considered one of Israel's best songwriters, was best known as the veteran columnist in the Tel Aviv weekly Ha'ir, which published his weekly column "Goings on Around Town."

2006(10th of Kislev, 5767): Character actor Sid Raymond passed away at the age of 97. The NYU dropout was famous for being the face people remembered but did not connect with any given character he portrayed. He was also “known” for being the voice of the cartoon character Baby Huey.

2007(21st of Kislev, 5768): Moses M. Weinstein, a Queens Democrat who served in the State Assembly, with stints as majority leader and acting speaker in the 1960s, and nearly two decades as a trial and appellate judge of the State Supreme Court, died on today at Memorial Hospital in Pembroke Pines, Fla., where he lived. He was 95. Dog-eared official records recite Mr. Weinstein’s accomplishments as a legislator and a jurist, a leader among the 150 all-but-faceless Assembly members in an Albany of long ago, and one of scores of judges who sat on the bench in New York in the 1970s and 80s.But yellowing news clippings and tales of colleagues tell a richer story of a striver who grew up poor, scrambled for an education, fought in World War II, bloomed late in politics but never lost an election, served briefly as acting governor of New York and ruled from the bench on the fates of communities, institutions and people. Once he released a drug pusher because she was dying of cancer.In 1958, when he first ran for the Assembly, Mr. Weinstein — Moe, to his friends — was a versatile, civic-minded lawyer who spent days in court and nights at Queens political meetings. He was already 46 and had never held office, but was well-known for community and clubhouse work, and won handily.Over the next 11 years, he was re-elected five times— compiling an impressive legislative record and forging alliances with party leaders and a name for indefatigable partisan debate — and he became a powerful figure, serving as chairman of the Queens Democratic Party from 1962 to 1969, as Assembly majority leader from 1965 to 1968 and as acting speaker in 1968. He was also majority leader of a 1967 convention that redrafted the state Constitution.In August 1968, Mr. Weinstein, who as speaker was fourth in line for the governorship, became acting head of the state for 10 days when Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, Lt. Gov. Malcolm Wilson and the Senate majority leader, Earl W. Brydges, went to the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. He held the fort as a New York Times headline sported: “G.O.P. Giving Up State/But Wants It Returned.”In the rough-and-tumble Assembly, Mr. Weinstein, a dark-haired man with steady blue eyes and a small Howard Hughes mustache, often took it on the chin, and gave it back in kind. When a Republican called him a political boss, he retorted: “I’ve never been called Boss, not by anybody. I’m not even boss in my own house. My wife makes me take out the garbage.”And when an upstate Republican called him a “city boy” unfamiliar with agriculture, he responded: “I’m well aware of agriculture. To prove it, I listened to you very carefully. All I find you doing is making political hay. All you did was to throw the bull. To sum it up, I think you laid an egg. That’s agriculture!” Mr. Weinstein was an ally of New York’s Mayor Robert F. Wagner in the early 1960s and had a good relationship with Governor Rockefeller, a progressive contemporary. Mr. Weinstein sponsored measures that created the Urban Development Corporation and the Crime Victims’ Compensation Board, reformed divorce and welfare laws, established a consumer bill of rights, increased aid for air-pollution controls and Regents scholarships, and promoted hospital expansion. He supported rent controls, veterans rights, aid to small businesses and antidiscrimination laws. In 1969, Mr. Weinstein won a 14-year term as a State Supreme Court justice in Queens. In a 1973 case, acknowledging he might be violating the law, he vacated the three-year term of a woman convicted of selling drugs, noting that she had terminal cancer and less than a year to live.In the late 1970s he was an administrative judge as well as a trial jurist. In 1980, he was appointed to the Appellate Division, Second Department, with jurisdiction in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and seven suburban counties. He participated in rulings that threw out unjust convictions, invalidated school financing based on property taxes and decided many other controversies. He left the bench in 1989 after reaching a mandatory retirement age. Moses M. Weinstein was born in New York on July 8, 1912. (His first name was Morris and he had no middle initial. A playbill for a production at Brooklyn College gave him the initial, and another mistake inscribing his degree at Brooklyn Law School changed Morris to Moses. He accepted it.) The son of a tailor, he grew up on the Lower East Side in a walk-up where four families shared a bathroom. He graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School at 15, but it took him seven years and a dozen jobs to work his way through college and law school. In World War II, he was an infantry corporal and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. (As reported Robert D. McFadden)


2007: The Ninth Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival opens at the Jerusalem Cinematheque with the showing of Etz O Palestine, The Tribe, The Powder and the Glory, Toots, O Jerusalem and Song of David.

2008: The 92nd Street Y presents "Radical Islam and the Nuclear Bomb: Understanding Contemporary Genocidal Anti-Semitism" - A conversation featuring Dr. Charles Small, founder and director of the Yale University Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, and Bret Stephens, a writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal

2008: Archbishop of Lublin, Josef Zycinski participates in a symposium entitled "Confronting a New Reality: The Polish Catholic Church, the Jews, and Israel." The symposium is being sponsored by The Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI), The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, The Adam Mickiewicz Institute, The Polish Council of Christians and Jews, and Laboratorium Wiez in the framework of Polish Year in Israel 2008-2009. Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland, will also take part

2008 (4 Kislev 5769): Emanuel Rackman, the spiritual leader of the prominent Fifth Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan and an outspoken advocate of a more inclusive, intellectually open Orthodox Judaism passed away at his home in Manhattan at the age of 98. “A lawyer and a Talmudist by training, Rabbi Rackman argued for a more flexible interpretation of Orthodoxy and the relevance of traditional Jewish law to modern life. “Perhaps, like Socrates, I corrupt youth, but I do teach that Judaism encourages doubt, even as it enjoins faith and commitment,” he wrote in Commentary in 1966. “A Jew dare not live with absolute certainty not only because certainty is the hallmark of the fanatic and Judaism abhors fanaticism, but also because doubt is good for the human soul, its humility, and consequently its greater potential ultimately to discover its Creator.” Rabbi Rackman was born in Albany, the son of a businessman and Talmudist who was descended from six generations of rabbis. He studied at the Talmudical Academy in New York, the high school affiliate of Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, where he continued his Talmudic studies while attending Columbia University, which awarded him a law degree in 1933 and a doctorate in public law in 1952. In 1934 he was ordained a rabbi. He practiced law for nine years and was a weekend rabbi on Long Island. In accordance with family tradition, he planned to earn his living as a lawyer rather than as a rabbi, but on entering the Air Force in 1943, he was made a chaplain. While in Germany, where he was military aide to the European Theater commander’s special adviser on Jewish affairs, his encounters with Holocaust victims caused him to reconsider his career. In 1951, he was called up for active duty from the Air Force Reserve, but found that his security clearance had been revoked because of his outspoken opposition to the death penalties handed down in the Rosenberg spying case and his support for the radical singer Paul Robeson. Given the choice between accepting an honorable discharge or facing a military trial, he opted for a trial. He not only won acquittal but earned a promotion from major to lieutenant-colonel. After the war, Rabbi Rackman became spiritual leader of Congregation Shaaray Tefila in Far Rockaway, Queens. He also taught political science at Yeshiva College and helped edit the journal Tradition. In the 1950s, he was president of the New York Board of Rabbis and of the Rabbinical Council of America. He quickly emerged as an important voice for modern Orthodoxy. Shocking traditionalists, he made common cause with Reform and Conservative rabbis, notably on the issue of Jewish family law and the plight of women denied a religious divorce by their husbands. He presented his case for modern Orthodoxy in “One Man’s Judaism” (1970) and “Modern Halakhah for Our Time” (1995). Halakhah is the set of rules and practices governing Jewish life. In 1967, he became the rabbi of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue and soon after was named provost of Yeshiva University. In 1971 he became the head of Jewish Studies at the City University of New York. In 1977, he became the first American president of Bar-Ilan University in Israel.”

2009: Michael Rosen reads from What Else But Home, “a strikingly honest portrait of his unusual (Jewish) identity” at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, IA.

2009: Journalist Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor of Time magazine and currently CEO of the Aspen Institute, discusses and signs his new book, American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane, at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.

2009: At Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, former Israeli Ambassador Asher Naim delivers a speech entitled “Ethiopian Jews then and now-from Operation Solomon-1991 to Israel 2009.”
Asher Naim has been the Israeli ambassador to Japan, Finland and Korea, is multilingual and has been active in working with Arab-Israeli relations.

2009: Knesset Member Ayoub Kara (Likud), who also is Deputy Minister for Development of the Galilee and Negev, is scheduled to tour the Dead Sea area this morning, accompanied by representatives of the Megilot Regional Council. He is promoting the Dead Sea as one of the 28 finalists in the contest for the New Seven Wonders of Nature, sponsored by the New Seven Wonders Fund.

2010: Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, a Professor of Law and History at The George Washington University, and author of a biography of Felix Cohen is scheduled to present a program entitled “Felix Cohen, Father of Federal Indian Law” at the Interior Department in Washington, DC. Felix Solomon Cohen's experiences as a Jewish American deeply influenced his career and legal philosophy, helping shape his reworking of federal Indian law in the 1930s. Come learn about this influential legal scholar in the beautiful New Deal-era auditorium at the Department of the Interior, where Cohen worked in the Solicitor's office.

2010: Editor and writer Robert Gottlieb and New Yorker writer Judith Thurman are scheduled to speak at the 92nd Y in a program entitled “The Life of Sarah Bernhardt”

2010(24th of Kislev, 5771): This evening Jews all over the world will be lighting the first Chanukah candle.

2010: Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin (Likud) is scheduled to light the first Chanukah candle at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron this evening. The event, which is partially sponsored by the Knesset’s Land of Israel Caucus, is part of a plan to bring MKs to various places of historic significance in the West Bank during the holiday, caucus chairman MK Ze’ev Elkin (Likud) said. Hebron Jewish community spokesman David Wilder said Rivlin’s intended visit makes an important statement about the Jewish significance of Hebron, at a time when the international community was trying to deny the city’s Jewish roots.

2010: In a world where the inmates seem to be running the asylum, today is the final day for students at Princeton to cast their ballot on a referendum that would allow brands of hummus other than Sabra to be sold in university stores. Sabra is half-owned by The Strauss Group, which has publicly supported the IDF and provides care packages and sports equipment to Israeli soldiers. The referendum was initiated by Princeton Committee on Palestine, which is led by Yoel Bitran, an American-born Jewish student who moved to Chile and returned to the U.S. to attend Princeton. It is part of larger program supported by the Philly BDS, which calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions against companies that support the Israel Defense Forces.

2010: Today Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu defended his policies against opposition claims that he had not kept his promises in regard to the peace process. Netanyahu's comments came at a special discussion of the Knesset initiated by Kadima, after the opposition party gathered 40 MKs' signatures, therefore obligating the prime minister to listen to their complaints. Opposition leader Tzipi Livni responded to Netanyahu, asking him, "When is the last time you told the truth in public? When was the last time that you told the truth to your ministers?"Livni accused Netanyahu of placing political survival above peace negotiations.

2010: Today, British Prime Minister David Cameron wished "Hanukkah Sameach" to the millions of Jews around the world who prepared to light the first candle of the Jewish festival of lights.

"I want to pass on my very best wishes to the Jewish community here and around the world for a happy and peaceful Hanukkah," Cameron said. "The story of Hanukkah continues to be an inspiring message of the power of hope to sustain people through the toughest of times, and the strength that we can find when we come together and focus on building a brighter future," he added. "I wish you and your families a Hanukkah sameach,” Cameron said. The eight-day Jewish holiday, known as the Festival of Lights due to the ritual of lighting candles, commemorates the re dedication of the Second Temple and marks the narrative of the miracle of the oil lamp, in which oil that should have lasted for one day to light up the temple, lasted for eight days. British Foreign Secretary William Hague also recorded a special Hanukkah greeting saying "it's a great pleasure to send warm good wishes to the Jewish community in Britain and all over the world as you celebrate Hanukkah, the festival of lights." "Hanukkah is about courage," he said. "It is about hope, looking forward of course to the future and we certainly hope for peace and for continuing to strive for peace in a region that so desperately needs it."

2010: Still Hilfe, or Silent Aid, an organization which provides help for Third Reich fugitives of justice, is funding the defense of Klass Faber, a Dutch Nazi living in Germany, the Daily Mirror reported today. According to the report, Gudrun Burwitz, the 81-year-old daughter of Gestapo head Heinrich Heimler is a leading member of the organization, which began operating in 1946.
The organization also funded the court costs of Samuel Kunz, a guard at Belzec who died last week at 89. At a recent meeting of the organization the trial of John Demjanjuk, a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland was also discussed. Stille Hilfe is known for helping Nazi fugitives Klaus Barbie and Erich Priebke evade justice as well as facilitating the escape of Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele to South America. The group is rumored to have some 25 active members, including Himmler's daughter, but receives support and funding from hundreds of other sympathizers. The German Social Democratic party has called for a probe into the organization's charitable status, but thus far, Berlin has taken no action against Stille Hilfe.

2010: At Princeton University, the referendum on whether to ask the university's dining services to provide an alternative brand of hummus came to an end. The referendum is anti-Israel championed by The Princeton Committee on Palestine, which is led by Yoel Bitran, an American-born Jewish student in attempt to dislodge Sabra brand hummus from the campus.

2010: In an article entitled “Small-City Congregations Try to Preserve Rituals of Jewish Life” Jane Levere described the effort of the Jewish Community Legacy Project to help cities like Laredo, Texas; Sumter, SC; and Marion, Indiana deal with “an economic and social decline, shrinking synagogue membership and the eventual end of cemetery oversight.”

2011: After about three months of operation Jerusalem’s light rail is scheduled to begin charging passengers today

2011: The 22nd Washington Jewish Film is scheduled to open with a screening of “Mabul” and a reception at the Avalon Theatre.

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

This Day, November 30, In Jewish History

November 30 In Jewish History

1215: The Fourth Lateran Council which had been led by Innocent III came a close. The Fourth Lateran Council made first official use of the term "transubstantiation," with reference to the Eucharist (Lord's Supper). The adoption of this concept would lead to anti-Semitic outbreaks based on charges that Jews had desecrated the Host i.e. the wafer that was seen as being the body of Christ.

1631(5932): Rabbi Samuel Eliezer ben Judah ha-levi Edels passed away. Born in Cracow in 1555, Edels is known by the acronym Maharsha. He was known as outstanding Talmudist and master of dialectics whose commentaries were of such value that they were included in most editions of the Talmud. Edels was a man of character as well as erudition. “He attacked the misuse of rabbinic authority and the attempt made by wealthy individuals to monopolize communal offices.”

1748(9th of Kislev, 5509): Mordecai ben Jacob Ẓahalon, a doctor and rabbi who was part of a famous Sephardic family, passed away today in Ferrara, Italy. Among his many books were Megillat Naharot," describing the miraculous rescue of the Jewish community of Ferrara from the inundation that occurred in 1707

1782: In Paris, representatives from the United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain sign preliminary peace articles (later formalized as the 1783 Treaty of Paris).

1790: Georgia Governor, Edward Telfair granted to Levy Sheftall, Cushman Pollock, Joseph Abrahams, Mordecai Sheftall, Abraham de Pas, Emanuel de la Motta, and their successors a charter of incorporation wherein they were declared to be "a body incorporate by the name and style of the 'Parnass and Adjuntas of the Mickve Israel at Savannah.'" This charter is still in the hands of the congregation and it is the document under which it operates to this day.

1803: In New Orleans, Louisiana, Spanish representatives officially transfer the Louisiana Territory to a French representative. Just 20 days later, France transfers the same land to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase.

1805: In Chatham, Kent, England, Lazarus Magnus and Sarah Moses gave birth to Jacob Magnus.

1854: Between 300 and 400 people danced to the music of Dodsworth’s Band at the Hebrew Young Men’s Ball held in the New York City’s Chinese Assembly Rooms. Procedes from tonight’s event will be be given to the Ladies’ Hebrew Benevolent Society.

1856(3rd of Kislev, 5617): Marcus Cone, a Jew who had been living in New York, passed away today in Abbersweiler, Germany, the city where he was born.

1856: The Manchester Guardian reported a "Great Fire" had taken place in Constantinople where 600 homes were destroyed, and another devastated Adrianople.

1858: Today’s City Intelligence column reported that the recent stories about the arrest of three Jews for their role in selling lottery tickets were in error. At least one of those arrested was identified as being a rabbi when in fact he made no claim to being a clergyman. Apparently he is the leader of a “Bet Hamidrash” or House of Instruction which is attended by recently arrived poor immigrant Russian Jews who speak little or no English. In Europe, the sale of lottery tickets is legal and apparently the immigrants had no reason to think that this was not the case in the United States. Those preparing the original report were unaware of the fact that the term “Reb” merely implies that one is a “master” or an “instructor” and not a clergyman.

1870: E.B. Hart delivered the opening remarks at the Hebrew Charity Fair. The lavish event was held to raise funds for the Mount Sinai Hospital and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. In his speech Governor Hoffman of New York said praised both institutions saying that the latter was indeed populated primarily by Jewish children but that the former served all members of the community, regardless of their religion.

1873: The Jewish Maternity Association, originally known as Ezrath Nashim (Helping Women) was founded in Philadelphia, PA

1874: Birthdate of Sir Winston Churchill, the British statesman, orator and author who served as prime minister during World War II. Churchill’s official biographer was the famous Jewish historian Martin Gilbert. Churchill often spoke of his support for a Jewish homeland. During the war, his government studiously supported the White Paper which effectively banned Jewish immigration to Palestine. Churchill’s supporters explained this as being a wartime necessity meant to ensure Arab support for the Allied cause. Even if one accepts this argument, it does not explain Churchill’s support for the ban on Jewish immigration after the Nazis had surrendered in May of 1945. For more about Churchill and his relationship with the Jewish people, see Churchill and the Jews by Martin Gilbert. Like all off Gilbert’s work it is well researched and highly readable.

1876: Rabbi Einhorn is scheduled to deliver the sermon at Temple Bethel’s Thanksgiving Services the first of which will be held at 10 AM followed by a second service at 11 AM.

1876: Rabbi Gottheil will deliver the sermon at this afternoon’s Centennial Thanksgiving Service at Temple Emanu-El. The service will include musical program by the congregation’s choir and a reading of the President’s Thanksgiving Proclamation.

1876: In Philadelphia, a ceremony was held today unveiling and dedicating a monument symbolic of Religious Liberty that was built with contribution from member of B’nai Brith from throughout the United States.

1876: It was reported today that the Ladies of the Forty-fourth Street Synagogue’s Hebrew Benevolent Society are seeking donations of goods and money for the fair they are holding during the last two weeks of December.

1878: Solomon A. Levy and Dilah Horner Levy gave birth to Henry Horner, the first Jewish governor of Illionis.

1879: C.J. Fishel of Mellis & Fishel read the opening prayer at the funeral of S.L. Lewis which was the first Jewish funeral to be held in the Sandwich Islands which we know as Hawaii.

1893: Birthdate of author I.J. Singer. Israel Joshua Singer was the older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Born in Poland, Singer gained fame as Yiddish writer. He was the Polish correspondent for The Jewish Daily Forward. He came to the United States in 1934.” Singer’s epic masterpiece Di Bruder Ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenazi) details Jewish industrial development before World War I.”

1895: Birthdate of Samuel Norton "Sam" Gerson, the Ukrainian born Jewish-American wrestler who won a Silver Medal at the 1920 Olympics and helped to organize Philadelphia's Maccabi Sports Club.

1900: Oscar Wilde passed away. The Picture of Dorian Gray, possibly his most famous novel, includes a Jewish character named Isaacs, a theatre manager. The author stresses both his Jewishness and his ugliness describing him as “a hideous Jew,” a “horrid old Jew” who had “greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond … in the centre of a soiled shirt.”

1910: Lucille Selig married Leo Frank. Selig was the member of an “old” Atlanta Jewish family that had founded the city’s first synagogue. Frank would come to a horrible end when he was lynched for a crime that he did not commit.

1913: Jacob H. Schiff, President of the Montefiore Home, presided at the dedication ceremonies of the new buildings at the institution located at Gun Hill Road and 210th Street, near Jerome Avenue. The ceremonies included services at the synagogue located at the Montefiore Home.

1915: A large gathering of Rumanian Jews held a special memorial service at the Manhattan Lyceum in honor of Dr. Solomon Schechter who had passed away on November 20. While recognizing his leadership and scholarly skills, the Rumanians were also honoring one of their own and voted to name soon to be opened Jewish Home for Convalescents the “Professor Solomon Schechter Memorial.

1917: The Australian Light Horse, part of Allenby’s forces, took the offensive against the Turkish forces blocking the way to Jerusalem, The Aussies captured 200 Turks and the rest fell back toward the City of David.

1917: As victorious British Imperial forces approached Jerusalem, the Turkish governor began to make good on the promise that there were would be no Jews in the city to welcome the British. Forty American Jews living in Jerusalem and several Zionists of Ottoman nationality were expelled from the city. A staff member of the German Consulate in Jerusalem said that the Jews were driven out on foot and beaten like criminals as they made their way towards Jericho.

1917: The Germans captured a British brigade headquarters and ammunition dump at Masnieres and Les Rues Vertes, France. Among those taken prisoners was the Captain Robert Gee, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Gee managed to escape and organized a party of the brigade staff with which he attacked the enemy, closely followed by two companies of infantry. He cleared the locality and established a defensive flank, then finding an enemy machine-gun still in action, with a revolver in each hand he went forward and captured the gun, killing eight of the crew. He was wounded, but would not have his wound dressed until the defense was organized. Gee was awarded the Victoria Cross for this action.

1924: Birthdate of songwriter and humorist Allan Sherman author of the famous camp song that began, “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.”

1926: Birthdate of Andrew V. Schally. Schally is a Polish-born American endocrinologist and co-recipient with Roger Guillemin and Rosalyn Yalow, of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Schally fled Poland with his family in 1939. Schally became a U.S. citizen in 1962. He became senior medical investigator with the Veterans Administration in 1973. He was noted for isolating and synthesizing three hormones that are produced by the region of the brain known as the hypothalamus; these hormones control the activities of other hormone- producing glands. These accomplishments were the synthesis of TRH (thyrotropin-releasing hormone), the isolation and synthesis of LH-RH (luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone), and studies of the action of somatostatin.

1930: At a meeting in London today, Dr. Chaim Weizmann “insisted…that he did not and would not accept the MacDonald Government’s White Paper.” While expressing his displeasure with the White Paper, the Zionist leader “cautioned the Zionists…against taking sides in politics, a reminder obviously directed toward the White-chapel by-election in the East End of London, where it is said the preponderant Jewish vote may make trouble for the Labor candidate.”

1933: Rabbi Jerome D. Folkman, of Temple Beth Israel, delivered the Thanksgiving sermon today at a joint service attended by Jews and Gentiles. The services were held in the First Baptist Church of which the Rev. Carl Winters is pastor. (JTA)

1935: Rosa and Avrom Shlavestein gave birth to their daughter Nina. in Berdichev in the Zhitomir District, USSR (today in Ukraine). Before World War II, Nina’s family lived in Moscow. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union Nina was vacationing in Klintsy in the Bryansk District of the Soviet Union, and was unable to return home because of the invasion. Nina perished during the Holocaust. Her mother Rosa survived and immigrated to Israel. Rosa submitted a Page of Testimony in Yiddish to commemorate her daughter Nina, probably in the 1950s. (As chronicled by Yad Vashem)

1936: Birthdate of Abbie Hoffman.

1936: “An American flag, the gift of Mayor a Guardia of New York, was presented today to the municipality of Tel Aviv by the Maccabee soccer team” which had just returned from a tour of the United States. “The Maccabee also presented a flag of New York Harbor to the new Tel Aviv port in ceremonies at the City Ha, where the athletes were officially welcomed after a parade.

1938: According to Michael Hesemann, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli – the future Pius XII – wrote a letter today urging Catholic archbishops throughout the world to apply for visas for "non-Aryan Catholics" and Jewish converts to Christianity who wanted to flee Germany

1938: Germany bans Jews from being lawyers

1940: Anti-Jewish laws are established in Tunisia.

1940: After the “Patria incident,” General Wavell, Britain’s top military officer in the Middle East complains vehemently to Sir Anthony Eden protesting the decision to let any Jewish refugees remain in Palestine. He contends that the decision to let 1,900 Jews remain in Palestine will undermine British relations with the Arabs. The Mufti, who is Berlin with Hitler, will be strengthened. Nazi sympathizers in Syria will be encouraged. And fifth-columnist in Egypt will find it easier to gain support for the Germans. At least Wavell was honest. For him as for so many less honest Englishmen (and others) it was all about keeping the Arabs happy.

1941: At the Riga Ghetto, 27,000 Jews were taken for execution by the Nazis.

1941: Jews began to arrive at Theresienstadt from Prague.

1941: Haj Amin, leader of the Palestinians was “ceremoniously received by Hitler.”

1943(3rd of Kislev, 5704): Esther "Etty" Hillesum a young Jewish woman whose letters and diaries, kept between 1941 and 1943 describe life in Amsterdam during the German occupation died at Auschwitz. They were published posthumously in 1981, before being translated into English in 1983.

1943: All nine Palestinian Hebrew newspapers and the German-language daily issued at Tel Aviv re-appeared today after eleven days' suspension. “The suspension resulted from” the “simultaneous uncensored publication” by these papers “of identical accounts with uniform editorial comment on the search carried” out at a kibbutz named Ramat Hakovesh by British forces looking for arms. The search turned violent resulting in the murder of one of the Jewish settlers. The articles in the newspapers had been part of the Jewish response which, among other things, continues to claim the right for Jews to be able to defend themselves.

1943: Italy's Interior Ministry orders the concentration of all Italian Jews in camps.

1944(14th of Kislev, 5705): Anna Dresden-Polak’s husband, Barend, died today Auschwitz. Anna, a member of the Dutch ladies’ gymnastic team that won the Gold Medal at the 1928 Olympics, had been killed the year before at Sobibor along with Eva, her six-year old daughter.

1944: More than 100,000 persons, more than half the population of the city, greeted Dr. Chaim Weizmann when he visited Tel Aviv today for the first time since arriving in Palestine two weeks ago. The demonstration was the greatest welcome ever given to anyone in Tel Aviv. Weizmann responded by saying, “I never imagined my own people could have received me with such spontaneous joy.” When he went to Te Aviv to review 200 soldiers who where were serving in the new Jewish bridged of the British Army, he was greeted by crowds that were so large that they filled balconies, windows, lamp posts, trees, and telephone poles. Weizmann saw a direct connection between the fate of European Jewry, these troops and the creation of a Jewish commonwealth. He told the crowd that the “remnants of the European Jews” would received the Jewish brigade as “a harbinger of freedom and by the masses of Jewish soldiers serving in the Allied armies as a symbol of national unity.”

1946: Bombs are set off in Jerusalem.

1947: A day after the two-state solution is approved by the United Nations, Arabs begin attacking Jews in Palestine.

1947: Arab rifleman fired shots at an ambulance on its way to Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus.

1947(17th of Kislev, 5708): Arabs armed with machine guns and grenades attacked a bus traveling from the coast to Jerusalem killing four Jews including Jerusalemites Hirsh Stark and Hanna Weiss and twenty year old Shoshana Mizrachi Farhi who had been on her way to Jerusalem to get married.

1947(17th of Kislev, 5708): In another attack on a bus bound for Jerusalem, Arab gunmen killed Hehama Hacohen a pathologist at Hadassah Hospital.

1947(17th of Kislev, 5708): Moshe Goldman, a twenty five year old from Jerusalem was shot dead at the Jaffa-Tel Aviv boundary.

1947(17th of Kislev, 5708): Ernst Lubitsch passed away. Born in 1892, he was a German-born Jewish film director.” His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch".”

1947: On the day after UN decree for Israel, Arabs attacked Jewish settlements. Even though the Jewish state would not officially declare its independence until May, 1948, this day marked the beginning of the Israeli War of Independence as a bus near Lydda (Lod) was attacked by Arabs killing five passengers. The Arabs proclaimed a general strike and attacked the commercial quarter near the Old City of Jerusalem. The Arabs, including those living outside of Palestine, were determined to destroy the Jewish homeland before the mandate officially ended. Their efforts would include attacks on Jewish settlements throughout the Yishuv as well as a siege of the City of Jerusalem. The Arabs were well armed and moved about with impunity. The Jews were limited in their response by an international arms boycott and the presence of the British Army.

1947: Birthdate of David Mamet. Mamet is an American playwright, screenwriter, director and poet born to a Jewish family in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. Mamet first gained acclaim for a trio of off-Broadway plays in The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for Glengarry Glen Ross. In 2006, he wrote The Wicked Son, an examination of self hating and assimilated Jews.

1948: Colonel Moshe Dayan of Israel and Lieutenant Colonel Abdullah el Tell of Transjordan Arab Legion sign cease-fire agreement.

1948: The American Council for Judaism asks Attorney General Tom C. Clark for a federal investigation of Menachem Begin’s U.S. activities.

1952: Birthdate of Semyon Mayevich Bychkov a Russian-American conductor who is the brother of the conductor Yakov Kreizberg, of blessed memory.

1952: Birthdate of Mandy Patinkin. Born Mandel Bruce Patinkin in Chicago, Illinois, Patinkin attended Kenwood High and the University of Kansas before beginning his Broadway career that playing Che Guevara in Evita and a leading role in Stephen Sondheim's Follies.

1953: Edward Mutesa II, the kabaka (king) of Uganda is deposed and exiled to London by Sir Andrew Cohen, Governor of Uganda. “Sir Andrew was from a distinguished Anglo-Jewish family. He was a descendant of Levi Barent Cohen, the founder of the oldest Ashkenazi family in Britain.”

1954: As Churchill celebrated his 80th birthday, Moshe Sharett (formerly Shertok), sent the aging British statesman a telegram praising him for his leadership again the Nazis during World War II and for his steadfast support of Zionism in general and the Balfour Declaration in particular.

1957: Eighty three year old Winston Churchill receives early Christmas presents – a case of Israeli oranges from Vera Weizmann, widow of Israel’s first President and long time friend of Churchill and a Virginia Ham from American Jewish financer Bernard Baruch.

1962: The United Nations General Assembly elects U Thant of Burma as the new UN Secretary-General. U Thant was the Secretary General who caved in to President Nasser’s demand to remove the UN peace keeping force from the Sinai. The men in the Blue Helmets were the guarantee that Egypt would not remilitarize the Sinai. U Thant’s spineless behavior, in violation of the understandings that had caused the Israelis to withdraw after the 1956 Sinai Campaign, set events in motion that would lead to war in June of 1967.

1962: Birthdate of actor Ben Stiller

1966: Barbados becomes independent from the United Kingdom. In 1667 “many Jews moved to Barbados to retain their British citizenship. Jews are believed to have been established in Barbados as early as 1628. In 1661, three Jewish businessmen requested permission to institute trade routes between Barbados and Surinam, which was still part of the British Empire. As will be seen repeatedly, even though the Jews had full legal citizenship and were allowed by the government to trade and conduct business, their success caused the other settlers to try to limit the scope of Jewish trade. British businessmen claimed the Jews traded more with the Dutch than the British, and the government did finally put limits on the Jews' ability to trade. They were not allowed to purchase slaves, and were required to live in a Jewish ghetto. By 1802, the colonial government in Barbados had removed all discriminatory regulations from the Jews living there. A Jewish community remained on Barbados until 1831, when a hurricane destroyed all of the towns on the island.” By the time Barbados gained its independence, there were approximately 80 Jews living in the country. In 1987, the Nidhei Israel Synagogue would be rededicated in a new location and the Old Jewish cemetery in Bridgetown would be restored. “The former Nidhei Israel building, which served as the synagogue, is today used for a library. The Jewish cemetery in Barbados is considered to be the oldest graveyard in the Western Hemisphere. A few of the graves date back to the 1660s and include Samuel Hart, son of Moses Hart, and Moses Nehemiah (the first Jew to live in Virginia). Today, approximately 40 Jews live on Barbados. It was the Jewish community of Barbados that initiated and maintains the Caribbean Jewish Congress.”

1975: WABC-AM is scheduled to broadcast Message of Israel with an address by Dr. Human Judah Schachtel.

1975: WBAI is scheduled to broadcast “A Hanukah Offering – Shtetl on the Hudson with Issac Bashevis Singer, Leonard Michaels and Jerome Charyn, writers who transformed the Jewish experience from the old country to New York

1975: WMCA is scheduled to broadcast a 2 hour program featuring an interview of playwright Dore Schary.

1975: WNBC is scheduled to broadcast the long-running Jewish radio series, Eternal Light, with an appearance by Harry Kemelman, author of “Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red.”

1975: New York Senator Jacob Javits, the state’s most prominent Jewish Republican, is scheduled to appear on a broadcast of Focus on Youth.

1978(30th of Cheshvan, 5739): Rosh Chodesh Kislev

1979(10th of Kislev, 5740): Zeppo Marx, one of the famed Marx Brothers, passed away.

1979: Ted Koppel becomes anchor of nightly news on Iranian Hostages (ABC)

1980: Leonard Bernstein’s "West Side Story" closes at Minskoff Theater New York City after 341 performances

1988: As Israeli political leaders continue try and form a government following the election held on November 1, today the Labor Party decided to end coalition negotiations with Likud. At about the same time, its leader, Shimon Peres, vowed that if a measure redefining who is Jewish under the Law of Return were put to a vote in Parliament, every Labor member would ''vote clearly against it.''

1988: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. buys RJR Nabisco for $25.07 billion. All three of the takeover kings were Jewish.

1994(27th of Kislev, 5755): Lionel Stander, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants whose gravelly voice and beetling brow made him a memorable presence on stage and screen and whose political beliefs in the era of the Hollywood blacklist earned him a long exile from American films, died today at his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. He was 86. Mr. Stander, who began his show business career at the age of 17, was working as recently as two weeks ago, when he appeared once again with Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers as Max, the lovable father figure, confidant and chauffeur, in a two-hour "Hart to Hart" special for broadcast by NBC in February. Often cast as a seriocomic villain, Mr. Stander appeared in such films as Frank Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," William Wellman's 1937 version of "A Star Is Born," Preston Sturges's "Unfaithfully Yours," Tony Richardson's "Loved One," Roman Polanski's "Cul-de-Sac," Martin Scorsese's "New York, New York" and Steven Spielberg's "1941." At one point, he said, he was the most highly paid character actor in the business, "playing the pal of the star." Among those stars were Harold Lloyd, Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Jean Arthur, Rudy Vallee, Rex Harrison, Danny Kaye, Henry Fonda and Robert De Niro. Away from the cameras, Mr. Stander played something of a starring role in the political history of Hollywood. Fiercely liberal, he made a memorable appearance in 1953 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had been investigating Communism in Hollywood for years. While many witnesses saved their careers by informing on others, Mr. Stander lectured the committee on democracy and due process of law and refused to repeat under oath his former frequent denials that he had ever been a Communist. Mr. Stander had helped organize the Screen Actors Guild, raised money for the Spanish Loyalists and campaigned for the release of the Scottsboro Boys. Hollywood executives regarded him as a red. One day in August 1939, his agent, Abe Lastvogel, told him, "Don't worry, Lionel, it'll blow over." Mr. Stander said: "Abe was right. But it took 24 years. Between 1939 and 1963 -- when my friend Tony Richardson put me in 'The Loved One' -- I didn't work for a major studio, except when somebody with courage, like Preston Sturges, decided to use me." Looking back, he said: "I've always been lefter than the Left, and I worked very closely with the Communist Party during the 30's. But I never joined." Ostracized from Hollywood, Mr. Stander found work in the theater, on Wall Street and in comedies and spaghetti westerns in Italy, where, in his 60's, he became an unofficial mayor of the Via Veneto in Rome. In his brocade jackets and frilled shirts, the womanizing actor was derided in Italian newspapers as "the world's oldest hippie." Mr. Stander was born on Jan. 11, 1908, in the Bronx and said he got into show business when he went with an actor friend to a rehearsal and volunteered as an extra for a dice game. Although he said he attended everything from the Little Red Schoolhouse to military and prep schools, he said he never graduated from any. He made his professional stage debut in E. E. Cummings's "Him" and appeared in Provincetown Playhouse productions of O'Neill's "Glencairn Cycle" as well as plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and Chekhov. He said he was signed for movies by RKO as a Russian dialectician in the early 1930's after radio appearances with Fred Allen, Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson. It took a while, he maintained, before producers realized he was an English-speaking actor. During World War II, Mr. Stander served in the Army Air Forces. (As reported by Lawrence Van Gelder)

1997(1st of Kislev, 5758): Rosh Chodesh Kislev

1997(1st of Kislev, 5758): Kathy Acker (née Karen Lehmann) “an American experimental novelist, prose stylist, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer” passed away.

1997: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including The Darkside of Camelot by Seymour Hersh and an essay by Alfred Kazin entitled “Missing Murray Kempton.”

2000(3rd of Kislev, 5761): Ilona Karmel passed away. She was remembered as the author of the novel, An Estate of Memory. It is considered one of the most significant novels in English to address the experiences of Jewish women during World War II. Born in Cracow in 1925, Karmel was interned along with her mother and sister in three different labor camps after the Nazi occupation of Poland. She sustained severe leg injuries during the war and required years of recuperation before immigrating to the United States in 1948. Within four years of arriving in the United States, Karmel graduated from Radcliffe College, won a fiction-writing contest sponsored by Mademoiselle Magazine, and completed her first novel, Stephania. Stephania focused on the physical and spiritual recovery of a young woman who had survived the Nazi concentration camps. In 1969, Karmel published An Estate of Memory, which was reissued by the Feminist Press in 1986. Reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, it was one of the earliest significant literary treatments of Jewish experience in the Nazi camps and remains one of the most significant novels to address Jewish women's experiences during the Holocaust. Karmel taught creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for many years where an annual writing prize that she established has been renamed in her honor.

2002(25th of Kislev, 5763): First Day of Chanukah; light second candle in the evening

2003: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or on topics of special interest to Jewish readers including In An Uncertain World: Tough Choices From Wall Street to Washington by Robert E. Rubin and Jacob Weisberg, Secrets of the City by Anne Roiphe, Primo Levi: A Life by Ian Thomson and Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait by Midge Decter

2005: It is official. Former Labor chairman Shimon Peres announced that he was ending his political activity in the Labor Party and would support Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the upcoming March elections. Peres stated that Sharon was the appropriate person to head a coalition of peace and security. He said he was supporting Sharon as the person who had the best chance of restarting the peace process with the Palestinians. "In my opinion, the appropriate person to head the coalition that will bring peace is Arik Sharon," he said at a special press conference that he convened. "My party activities have concluded," he added. This ended the almost fifty year long relationship between Peres and the Labor Parrty (or its antecdents). In 1959 Peres entered the Knesset as a member of Mapai. He left Mapai to join David Ben-Gurion’s Rafi Party. In 1968, Rafi and Mapai merged to form the Labor Party.

2006: Haaretz reported that a small room in Kibbutz Merhavia which was once home to Israel's first woman prime minister, Golda Meir, has been renovated and refurbished in the style of the 1920s when Golda lived there. It will soon be opened to visitors seeking to learn a little about that period and the severe austerity that prevailed in the Meir household. The reconstructed room is in one of the kibbutz's old stone residential buildings.

2006(9th of Kislev, 5767): Poet, songwriter and journalist Eli Mohar who wrote the “Goings On Around Town” column in the Tel Aviv weekly Ha’ir passed away from cancer at the age of 58.

2006: Sasson Somekh, visiting professor in Jewish Studies, opened the Jews Among Arabs conference at Vanderbilt with a lecture based on his memoir Baghdad Yesterday. Somekh grew up in the Jewish community in Iraq in the 1930s and ‘40s. He pointed out that some 250 Muslim Iraqis died in 1941 while trying to defend their Jewish neighbors being attacked by a pro-Nazi mob. About 150 Jews were killed in the incident, which launched the decline of Jewish community in Iraq, which had thrived there for 26 centuries.

2007: John Strugnell, controversial Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, passed away.

2007: The Wall Street Journal listed Ramaz as one of the top schools for graduates entering the top eight universities in the country, with 10 out of a class of 100 (class of 2007) going to these schools. The Ramaz School is a coeducational, private Modern Orthodox Jewish prep school located on the Upper East Side of the New York City borough of Manhattan.

2007: At The Sydney Jewish Museum an exhibition styled “Butterflies of Hope” comes to an end. “Butterflies of Hope” is a very special exhibition designed to raise awareness of the plight of children trapped in war. Developed for children 10+ and their families, the exhibition introduces the Holocaust from a Child Survivors perspective. The experiences of Sydney based child Holocaust Survivors will be highlighted, along with original objects and photographs. Notably, original children’s drawings and a toy butterfly from the Terezin ghetto have been loaned from the Terezin Memorial Museum for the exhibition. A photographic exhibition of children caught up in recent genocides will also feature in the exhibition. Children are invited to inscribe a message of hope for children affected by such atrocities, and place it within the exhibition in support of the right of every child to live in peace.

2007: The week long launch of "Operation: Last Chance” will continue with a press conference in Chile. The Simon Wiesenthal Center's "Operation: Last Chance" is targeted to find and bring to justice at least some of the thousands of Nazis still hiding in South America 62 years after the end of World War II. It will probably be the final major effort to locate and bring to justice Nazis in hiding scattered around the world.

2007: The New York Times reviewed The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood by Mark Kurzem.

2007(20th of Kislev, 5768): IDF Private Ma’ayan Rotenberg of Kibbutz Beit Haemek passed away as a result of an accident while training with a tank unit. He died a week before his 19th birthday.

2008: The Orthodox Union's National Conference meeting, at the Ramada Hotel in Jerusalem comes to a close. Participants included Rabbi Metzger, Rabbi Lau, Rabbi Menachem Genack and Rabbi Herschel Schachter. The Keynote address was given by British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

2008: The International Conference on Contemporary Issues and Halacha, opens at Yeshurun Synagogue in Jerusalem. The conference which is being held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Israel's first chief Rabbi Isaac Halevi Herzog of Blessed Memory features the theme: "They'll be there, will you?" "They" are 50 well-known personalities, including Chief Rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar, along with their immediate predecessors Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau and Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi Doron, IDF Chief Rabbi Avraham Ronski, Yitzhak Peretz, Chief Rabbi of Raanana, lawyers Dr. Yaacov Weinroth and Prof. Yaakov Neeman, MKs Rabbi Michael Melchior, Rabbi Moshe Gafni and Zevulun Orlev, Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein and retired Judge Zvi Tal.

2008: Four of eight soldiers wounded in terrorist attacks on the Nahal Oz Base Gaza crossing during the Sabbath remained hospitalized. Three of them are being treated for moderate to serious wounds in Soroka Medical center in Be'er Sheva. The fourth victim, Sergeant Noam Nakash, 21, of Beersheba, lost his leg in a mortar attack and is being treated in Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon.

2009: Amy Goodman, host of the radio and television program "Democracy Now!," discusses and signs her new book, Breaking the Sound Barrier, at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C.

2009: AJWS and its President, Ruth Messinger join Congregation Emanu-El, Congregation Emanu-El’s Young Adult Community, Congregation Beth Sholom, Congregation Sherith Israel, Taube Center for Jewish Life at the JCCSF, The Hub of the JCCSF, The SF Bay Area Darfur Coalition and Congregation Sha’ar Zahav to cosponsor an advance screening of Reporter the new documentary featuring Nicholas Kristof, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist. Reporter documents Kristoff’s efforts to write about the gut-wrenching conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

2009: The opening of the John Demjanjuk trial today in Munich had to be delayed by over an hour because of the flood of visitors - including Holocaust survivors - who wished to observe what might be the last prosecution of an alleged Nazi war criminal. Munich's public prosecutor has charged the 89-year-old Demjanjuk with assisting in the murder of 27,900 Jews while serving as a concentration camp guard at Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk entered the court in a wheelchair, his eyes closed. He wore a baseball cap and was covered in a blue blanket. Demjanjuk kept his eyes closed throughout the proceedings and remained mute in response to the judge's questions about his personal details. He repeatedly opened his mouth, apparently wincing in pain. AP reported that a doctor examined him two hours before the trial and found his physical condition to be stable. The trial will be limited to three hours each day in two 90-minute sessions, based on a doctor's evaluation of Demjanjuk's physical condition. Ulrich Busch, Demjanjuk's German criminal defense attorney, compared his client with the survivors of concentrations camps. Demjanjuk was compelled to work in the Sobibor camp, and the Nazis issued orders to him that were "on the same level" as prisoners of extermination camps, said Busch. Demjanjuk, who was born in the Ukraine, fled to the United States after the Holocaust. "How can you say that those who gave the orders were innocent ... and the one who received the orders is guilty?" Busch told the court. "There is a moral and legal double standard being applied today." Dr. Alexander Brenner, the former of head of the Berlin Jewish community, told The Jerusalem Post that the trial could contribute to showing the role of "collaborators in Russia, Latvia, and Ukraine" in carrying out the extermination of European Jewry. Brenner and his family fled Nazi-occupied Poland. The widely read online edition of Der Spiegel termed the case on Monday a "trial of missed opportunities," and raised questions about the passivity of the Nazi research center in Ludwigsburg and its failure to pursue the Demjanjuk investigation. Kurt Schrimm, the director of Ludwigsburg center, confirmed to the Post that the agency was aware "seven or eight years ago" of Demjanjuk's role as a guard at Sobibor. Schrimm said the center gained access to the records in the US and at Yad Vashem in Israel. Asked why the center refused to commence a prosecution, Schrimm said that it "was determined that we could not pursue the accusations in Germany because Demjanjuk was a United States citizen." According to critics in Germany and Israel, the German government systematically ignored cases like Demjanjuk's, as well as Nazis living in post-war Germany who were responsible for the Holocaust. In 2007, the Wiesenthal Center issued a "failing grade" in its annual report to the German authorities for failing to seek indictments and convictions against Nazi war criminals. The Spiegel article suggested that the German authorities - including Ludwigsburg - remained largely passive and non-cooperative about hunting down Nazis. "The Germans could have apprehended Demjanjuk if they wanted to," wrote Spiegel. Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, said in a statement that, "Unquestionably, trials centered on crimes committed during the Holocaust serve as significant forums for raising awareness about the Holocaust. They provide an opportunity to highlight not only events, but to explore society-wide and individual responsibility for the atrocities that were committed during that time." The opening of the trial attracted intense media interest, with 200 accredited journalists attending the first trial session. The trial is expected to run until May

2010: "My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish, and I'm Home for the Holidays!," is scheduled to have its first performance in Charlotte, NC.

2010: The Shin Bet has arrested three Palestinian militants suspected of carrying out a shooting attack against two Israelis in late September, it emerged today The three Palestinians belong to the Abu-Moussa group, a splinter faction of Fatah; the head of the cell received his military training in Syria and Lebanon. The suspects were charged today at the Ofer Military Court. The defense establishment said that they admitted during their interrogation to plotting other terror attacks. Israeli authorities confiscated two M-16 rifles, a handgun, a LAW missile, a homemade explosives charger and mass amounts of ammunition. The incident in question occurred on September 26, just hours before Israel's temporary moratorium on West Bank settlement construction was set to expire. Sharon Zucker and his wife Neta, in the ninth month of pregnancy, were lightly wounded when shots were fired at them as they drove in the southern Hebron hills in the West Bank, near the Omerim Junction. The assailants also fired on another passing Israeli-owned car. One vehicle did not sustain any damage, but the other car, which was driven by Sharon Zucker, was pierced by bullets. Neta Zucker was rushed from the scene of the shooting to Soroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheva, where she gave birth to a son via Cesarean section. The attack coincided with frantic diplomatic efforts to resolve the disagreement over Israel's West Bank settlement freeze, an issue that threatened the recently launched direct negotiations between Jerusalem and Ramallah. In late August, four Israelis were shot dead in their car near the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba less than a day before Israeli and Palestinian leaders met in Washington for a summit to announce the talks. The attack, for which Hamas claimed responsibility, shattered years of relative calm in the West Bank. One day later, two Israelis were wounded, one seriously, in a shooting attack near the Israeli settlement of Kochav Hashachar.

2010: Norman Lebrecht reviews “Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World.”

2011: The Chabad Jewish Center in Metairie, LA, is scheduled to host its monthly Rosh Chodesh event which this month is entitled “Impression & Expression: The Essential Woman.”

2011: In New Orleans, Temple Sinai is scheduled to host its final session of this month’s Adult Education Series, “The Major Message of the Minor Prophet!”

2011: David Schmahmann is scheduled to discuss his new novel “The double Life of Alfred Buber” as the final event of the Jewish Community Center of the North Shore’s Jewish Book Month.

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

This Day, November 29, In Jewish History

November 29 In Jewish History

800: Charlemagne arrives at Rome to investigate the alleged crimes of Pope Leo III. Leo and Charlemagne were allies. Charlemagne would exonerate Leo of the charges and Leo would crown Charlemagne Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. This was “good for the Jews” since Charlemagne was protective of his Jewish subjects at a time when many were using the sword of Constantine to advance the cause of the Cross of Christ.

1394: Massacre of the Jews of Augsburg Germany.

1655: The Brazilian/Dutch Jews of New Amsterdam make an application for a license to enter the fur trade. It was later denied

1777: San Jose, California, is founded as el Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe. Jews began to play an active role in the affairs of San Jose at the time of the Gold Rush in 1849.
http://www.sanjose.com/history/jews/ San Jose History - San Jose's Jewish Community

1806: Napoleon wrote to Minister of the Interior Champagny, “[It is necessary to] reduce, if not destroy, the tendency of Jewish people to practice a very great number of activities that are harmful to civilization and to public order in society in all the countries of the world. It is necessary to stop the harm by preventing it; to prevent it it is necessary to change the Jews. [...] Once part of their youth will take its place in our armies, they will cease to have Jewish interests and sentiments; their interests and sentiments will be French.”

1809(21st of Kislev, 5570): Moses Seixas passed away. Born in New York in 1744, the eldest son of Isaac Mendez Seixas was one of the founders (1795) of the Newport Bank of Rhode Island, of which he was cashier until his death. He addressed a letter of welcome in the name of the congregation to George Washington when the latter visited Newport, and it was to him that Washington's answer was addressed.

1812: Napoleon's Grand Army crossed the Berezina River in its retreat from Russia. The retreat marked the real end of Napoleon. It also marked the end of new found freedom that Jews had begun to experience in most of Germany, Italy and Russia as the French Armies marched across these lands bringing the message of “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality” on the tips of their bayonets.

1820: In New York City, first publication of Israel Vindicated by an anonymous author who styled him or herself as “An Israelite.” “The work was ‘a refutation of the calumnies propagated respecting the Jewish nation; in which the objects and views of the American Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews are investigated.’” The original subtitle also contained the additional words “‘and reasons assigned for rejecting the Christian religion.’” In his monograph entitled “The Freethinker, the Jews and the Missionaries,” Professor Jonathan Sarna contends that the book was the work of a freethinker named George Houston who was assisted by a Jewish printer named Abraham Collins.

1830: The November Uprising also known as the Cadet Uprising begins in Warsaw when a group of Polish non-commissioned officers began an unsuccessful attempt to throw off the yoke of Russian rule. Josef Berkowicz, whose father had commanded a Jewish legion in the 1794 Uprising and who had fought alongside his father in the Battle of Kock, was a leader in what would prove to be another failed attempt to gain Polish independence.

1845: On Shabbat Toldoth, Dr. M. Lilienthal delivered a sermon in German at the Henry Street Synagouge in New York City. Dr. Lilenthal, who had only recently arrived in the United States, had been invited to address the congregation.

1853: Reverend Francis N. Vinton, D. D delivered a lecture enititled "The Merchant, or the Progress and Influence of Commerce" during which he stated that the Jews had invented the first bills of exhange in 1160. This invention was so important that soon it would be impossible to transact business without using them. Furthermore, the Jews created one of the first banks, at Boscoe, but it was used merely as depository for Gold. (Boscoe was probably a city in Italy.)

1855: Most of the Jews of New York City celebrated Thanksgiving today by “eating hearty dinners” and giving thanks “in private.”

1855: During his Thanksgiving Day sermon, Rabbi Morris Raphael rebuked New York’s Governor Clarke for issuing a proclamation inviting “only patriots and Christians to keep Thanksgiving.” At the same time, he commended Mayor Wood for inviting “all the people” to join in observing the holiday.

1855: Rabbi S.M. Isaacs delivered the sermon during Thanksgiving Day services at Shaaray Tefillah, the synagogue on Wooster Street.

1856: A pro-Zionist meeting was held in Great Britain at the Great Assembly Hall of Miles End. There was a "great rush into the building" with most seats taken quickly. The meeting was presided over by Dr. M. Gaster, Chief Rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, and among those present were Sir Francis Montifore.

1858: It was reported from Boston that the Jews of that city have a held a meeting to express their outrage over what has happened in Bologna. “The theft of the child is an outrage of the worst kind and shows there are men in the old Church ready to go as far as did their predecessors of the old days, when the Inquisition was a great fact, and a very disagreeable one, too.” [This refers to the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara which had taken place in Bologna and became known as the Mortara Affair.]

1860: In San Francisco, “The Episcopalians, the Roman Catholics and the Jews, all opened their churches…” for the celebration of Thanksgiving. The Jewish Church is probably a reference to Congregation Sherith Israel and Congregation Emanu-El. Sherith Israel which was founded in 1849 had about 110 members and consecrated its first synagogue which was located on Stockton Street in September of 1852. Emanu-El which followed the Reform minchag had about 260 members and dedicated it sanctuary in 1854.

1862: Phoebe Yates Levy Pember wrote a letter to her sister indicating that she was “to take charge of one of the hospitals at Richmond.” In December 1862, she reported for duty at Chimborazo, a hospital for the care of Confederate soldiers in Richmond, Virginia, reputed to be the largest military hospital in the world up to that time. Pember oversaw nursing services in one of the hospital's five divisions. In this role, she was responsible for the medical and dietary needs of over 15,000 men. Pember had grown up in a prosperous and acculturated family in Charleston, South Carolina. Along with her siblings, she was strongly identified with the Confederate cause and received the invitation to serve as matron of Chimborazo Hospital from the wife of the Confederate secretary of war. In A Southern Woman's Story: Life in Confederate Richmond, published in 1879, Pember described daily life at Chimborazo, detailing the poor state of the Confederate medical facilities. Despite resistance to her authority, Pember's spirit and determination overcame many obstacles. At the end of the war in April 1865, Mrs. Pember stayed at her post so that her patients might be cared for during the transition from Confederate to federal control.

1869(25th of Kislev, 5630): First Day of Chanukah; light the second candle in the evening

1870: It was reported today that Governor Hoffman will deliver an opening address at the upcoming Hebrew Fair designed to raise funds for Mount Sinai Hospital and Hebrew Orphan Asylum

1870: In New York, Henry Hissig, a German-born Hebrew went on trial for violating New York’s new seduction law. He is accused of having seduced his cousin, Ida Schwab.

1873: Major Alfred Mordecai, Jr. begins serving as a member of the U.S. Army's New Cavalry Outfit Board.

1873: It was reported today that members of Adas Jeshrun and Anshi Chesed, two Jewish Temples in Manhattan, have been meeting to discuss the possibility of consolidation. Anshi Chesed has over 100 members while Adas Jeshrun has approximately 300 members. Some of the sticking points revolve around finances with Anshi Chesed being in $110,000 in debt from the construction of a new sanctuary. The other points of contention revolve around ritual. Adas Jeshrun is not in favor of many of the reforms adopted by other Temples. Prayer is in Hebrew and heads are covered during services. Anshi Chesed favors reform. Services are held in German and there is a movement to begin using English. And heads are uncovered during services.

1874: An article published today entitled “Influences of Judaism on Early Christianity” shows that acknowledging the Jewish origins of Christianity becomes a negative in the conflict between Protestants and Catholics. “There is no question that the earliest Christian Church was a Hebrew Church. There is also no question that it was an offshoot from this Hebrew Church which planted itself with exceptional vigor at Rome; and that hence Roman Christianity from that time to this, has been strongly tinctured with Jewish elements, has blazed with Jewish intolerance, delighted in Jewish gorgeousness, and fallen a victim to Jewish realism; while Pauline or Augustinian or Protestant idealism has struggled manfully…to overcome the deep weight of these lower ingredients…and to assert for intelligence and freedom their true place in the Church.”

1879(14th of Kislev, 5640): Mr. S.L. Lewis passed away today in the Sandwich Islands. (This may be the first reported death of a Jew in what is now Hawaii).

1894(1st of Kislev, 5655): Rosh Chodesh Kislev

1894: “To Humanity,” the new Hamilton place wing of the Montifore Home was dedicated today in New York. The Montifore Home had been dedicated ten years earlier as part of the Centennial Celebration honoring Sir Moses Montifore.

1897: Herzl outlines his ideas for the "Jewish Colonial Bank" in a letter to Max Nordau.

1902: Birthdate of Italian painter and novelist Carlo Levi

1926: In responding to publication of the report of Dr. Henry S. Pritchett of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who asserted that the movement to colonize Palestine with Jews is ""unfortunate and visionary," Congressman Emanuel Celler maintained that Dr. Pritchett went to Palestine to find a falure and was surprised to find success. He said that disparage Palestine now was ‘childish,’ that it has been sanctioned and encouraged by the League of Nations. ‘To call the Jews an egotistical nation without capacity of cooperation, with the rest of the world, is akin to insult and belies the history and tradition of the Jews.’ [Editor’s Note: An early version of anti-Zionism meets anti-Semitism.

1926: At tonight’s meeting of the Jewish National Fund at Cooper Union, Bernard A. Rosenblatt responded to “the adverse report of Dr. Henry S. Pritchett on Zionism in Palestine…declared that the fundamentals of economic prosperity exited in Palestine and they would be fully developed.”

1928: Birthdate of Shulamit Aloni an Israeli politician and left-wing activist. She is a prominent member of the Israeli peace camp, founded the Ratz party and was leader of the Meretz party and served as Minister of Education from 1992 to 1993.

1930: This evening “a prominent member of the Revisionists’ Central Committee…said that Jabotinsky’s party would not agree to negotiate with the British Government on the basis of the present white paper. The Revisionists also will not negotiate with the Arabs as long as they continue to demand the abolition of the Balfour Declaration, revocation of the Palestine mandate and the denial of right Jews to repopulate Palestine as a national homeland.

1933: Birthdate of Dr. David Reuben author of Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex

1936: Germany's Minister of Agriculture, Walther Darré, declares that democracy and liberalism were invented by the Jews.

1936: The National Council for Palestine adopted a resolution which was sent today to the British Royal Commission now meeting in Jerusalem ask that it “it embody in its findings the policies of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which pledged Great Britain to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.”

1937(25th of Kislev, 5698): First day of Chanukah; in the evening kindle the second light.

1937: Today’s edition of Time magazine describes the fate of Arnold Bernstein at the hands of his Nazi jailers.

Greying Arnold Bernstein, 47, son of an old-time Saxon shipper, served with distinction as a German artillery officer during the War, was decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class. Back in Germany after the War he evolved the scheme of fitting modern freighters with automobile elevators so that U. S. cars could be exported to Europe uncrated and unscratched. So successful was this that Bernstein "floating garages'' have long carried over 60% of all U. S. automobile exports, made enough money for sole Owner Arnold Bernstein to allow him to buy out the American-Belgian-British Red Star Line and incidentally bring into Nazi Germany thousands of dollars yearly in much needed foreign exchange. Bernstein passenger agents find their boats are "very popular with intellectuals who object to the snobbishness of Cabin Class." Partly because of his personal popularity and War record, Shipper Arnold Bernstein was left in control of his business much longer than most Jewish tycoons. Finally last January, Nazi extremists forced the Government's hand. Arnold Bernstein and four of his managers (three Jewish), were clapped into jail, charged with "economic sabotage" through infringing German foreign exchange regulations. While he sat in jail Bernstein's 21-month-old Palestine Shipping Co. went into receivership "because the Jews deserted me," says Prisoner Bernstein, and Japanese bought for $150,000 its auctioned steamer Tel Aviv. Last week in Hamburg the trial of Arnold Bernstein began. Of all the eight charges in a 88-page indictment against Shipper Bernstein the gravest was that several years ago he set aside in Manhattan banks a fund from the Arnold Bernstein & Red Star Lines' profits to be held for a rainy day of the two lines (whose two chief creditors are the Erie R. R. and Chemical Bank & Trust Co.). This entire sum was returned to Germany some months ago. Hamburg lawyers scoffed at news stories that Bernstein "faces death," expected him to get anything from a five-year jail sentence to pardon. Since the arrest of Arnold Bernstein, Herman Kollmar, the director of his Red Star Line and his executor, has been in amicable contact with Minister President & Economic Director Hermann Goring, seeking a pardon, showing Ford and Studebaker company letters urging clemency. Mr. Kollmar denied rumors that the German Government has taken or plans to take over the Bernstein Line, admitted these rumors have caused many cancellations.

1937: The Habima Hebrew Players open their third week of their season at London’s Savoy Theatre with a performance of “The Wandering Jews."

1937: The Palestine Post reported that a police tender was ambushed and a British constable was killed near Nazareth. A Jewish worker was wounded when a bus was shot at near Nahalal, at the same spot where two Jewish shepherds were murdered and their flocks stolen a year earlier.

1937: The Palestine Post reported that there were very favorable, frequently enthusiastic reports on the series of performances given by the Habimah theater troupe on its visit to London. In the midst of Arab terrorism the Jewish community to develop its artistic, social and political institutions.

1939: Heydrich commented on the first stages of the Final Solution declaring that "The factor determining the pace of the evacuation is the Evacuation Plan." Nothing would slow down the ultimate march to the Death Camps.

1939: SS chief Heinrich Himmler orders the death penalty for German Jews who refuse to report for deportation.

1940: On his own initiative, Dutch Physicist Leonard Ornstein withdrew his membership of the Dutch Physical Society

1941: Kovno Massacre of the Ghetto. Estimated 10,600 people would be killed over the next few days.

1942: The Jewish Fighting Organization of the Warsaw Ghetto assassinated the economic head of the Jewish Council who was an active German collaborator

1942: Friedrich Rehmer, a member of the Red Orchestra, who was in the Brietz military hospital recovering from a severe war wound sustained on the Eastern Front was arrested today and taken from the hospital. Eventually, he would be killed for his role in the resistance.

1946: British Court in Palestine rejects a petition to prevent deportation of Jews to Cyprus

1947: In one of the most historic moments in Jewish history, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to accept the recommendation of the United Nations Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). UNSCOP recommended the partition of Palestine into two states – one Jewish and one Arab with Jerusalem to governed by an international authority. The vote was thirty-three in favor, thirteen against and ten abstentions. In a rare moment of Cold War solidarity, both the United States and the Soviet Union supported the UNSCOP plan which guaranteed the creation of the state of Israel in May of 1948. One other recommendation of the UNSCOP plan was the opening of a port on February 1, 1948 to Jewish immigrants. Almost three years after the ovens of the Holocaust had cooled, boat loads of displaced persons would finally have a final destination. When news of the partition vote reached the public, “there were celebrations in New York, in Palestine, wherever Jews lived. Traffic stopped in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as people danced in the streets until the early hours of the morning.” In the words of Rabbi Isaac Herzog, “After a darkness of two thousand years, the dawn of redemption has broken.” Arabs say they are not bound by decision and charge that U.S. and Soviet Union coerced smaller countries to vote for partition. Starting on the next day, the Arabs responded with violence that would continue until the end of the mandate.

1947: Despite having virtually no Jewish population or tie to the Yishuv, Iceland is among nations voting for the Partition Plan creating a Jewish state.

1947: The annual convention of Junior Hadassah, the young women's Zionist organization of America, at its concluding session today, received from Dr. Chaim Weizmaiin, former president of the World Zionist Organization, a call for young men and women, "who are nurtured in western methods and standards" to "further the building of the (Jewish) state."

1948: Israel applied for admission to the United Nations.

1948: Stanton Griffis was appointed Director of the UNRPR.

1949: Birthdate of comedian Garry Shandling.

1949: Israelis pause to celebrate the first anniversary of the United Nations partition resolution. Zipporah Porath, a nurse working in Haifa, wrote to her parents living in the United States describing the proud parade of Israel’s newly minted soldiers.

1953: As the holiday season begins, which in America means a meshing of Christmas and Chanukah, International Records has released “Holiday Time,” a record combining music from both holidays. The record is designed “to promote better human relations through an understanding of the general cultural significance of Christmas and Chanukah” while avoiding mentioning the theological differences between the two holidays.

1953: It was reported today that Kinor Records has released “Chanukah Music Box” just in time for the holiday season. Designed as a participation record for children, it features music written and sung by Shirley R. Cohen, with narration by Eli Gamliel and musical accompaniment by Helen Schraeter.

1954: Birthdate of Joel Coen. Joel and Ethan Coen, commonly called The Coen Brothers, are Jewish-American film director best known for their quirky comedies such as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, as well as for darker film noir dramas such as Fargo and Blood Simple. The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, alternating top billing for the screenplay. Until recently, Joel received sole credit for directing the films, and Ethan for producing, but the two brothers work so closely together and share such a strong vision of what their films are to be that actors report that they can approach either brother with a question and get the same answer. The brothers are known in the film business as "the two-headed director."

1954: On this cold and rainy night Esther Borenstein was on duty when a "mosquito" plane was hit by lightening and crashed while landing. Esther ran towards the burning plane, rescuing the badly injured navigator. Although ammunition on the plane began to explode, Esther did not hesitate and ran in again to rescue the pilot, Ya'akov Shalmon. When they reached a hiding spot, the entire plane blew up. Esther was awarded a Badge of Courage for this operation by Moshe Dayan, then Highest in Command of the IDF. Esther was born in Bulgaria, and during the Second World War, her family was ousted to Italy. As early as her childhood, Esther always loved the Land of Israel, and at age 11, left her home in an attempt to come to Israel. At 16, she indeed arrived, with her brother, and shortly afterwards, in spite of her early age, joined the Israel Defense Forces. She joined the Air Force, completed a medic's course, and viewed army service as an honor and not a duty. After completing her army service, Esther continued to work as a nurse with the Israeli Red Cross, and was the first female ambulance driver in the country. Later, she looked for a job that would express her love for the country and chose to be a tour guide. At that same time, the 6-Day War broke out, and Esther joined the paratroopers, where under constant fire and shelling, she tended to injured soldiers, receiving the nickname "Angel of the Paratroopers". She volunteered during the Yom Kippur war as well, and in 1973, she received the Medal of Honor for saving the pilot. In February 2003, she passed away during a trip to Italy, and was buried there at her family's request. In February 2005, Bridges of Viewpoint was built in memory of Esther Borenstein on a quiet corner on the banks of the Jordan River, opposite the basalt arches of the 2,000 year old Roman-era bridge.

1956: Birthdate of actor and comedian Howie Mandel

1957(6th of Kislev, 5718): Composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold passed away. Korngold was born in an assimilated Jewish home in Brno, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic), the son of the music critic Julius Korngold, and studied music under Alexander von Zemlinsky and Robert Fuchs. Gustav Mahler, upon meeting the young Erich, called him a "musical genius." He had success in Europe with his opera Die tote Stadt (1920) among other pieces before moving to the United States in 1934, where he wrote a number of highly regarded film scores. He continued to write concert music in a rich, Romantic style, with a violin concerto among his notable later works. In 1943, Korngold became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He died in Hollywood, California.

1957: The three-day dedication program of the nation's largest Orthodox Jewish synagogue, the Baron Hirsch Synagogue of Memphis, starts today.

1959: Birthdate of Rahm Emanuel the son of a former member of the Irgun and civil rights activist who went on to represent the Fifth District of Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives,be named White House Chief of Staff by President Barak Obama and Chicago's first Jewish mayor.

1962(2nd of Kislev, 5723): Rav Aaron Kotler famed Orthodox Talmudic scholar passed away.

1969(19th of Kislev, 5730): Yakov Grigorevich Kreizer, a general in the Soviet Army passed away today at the age of 64. His promotion to the rank of general “apparently made him the highest ranking Jewish military figure in the Soviet Union since Leon Trotsky organized the Red Army after the Bolshevik Revolution.” Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Kreizer took command of the 1st Moscow Motorized Infantry and fought forces under Heinz Guderian to a virtual stand-still giving other Soviet forces a chance to regroup. He was designated a Hero of the Soviet Union for his efforts.

1969: In Massachusetts, the Marblehead School Department has banned all religious reference to Christmas and Hanukah in the town’s public school. The decision prohibits the exchange of gifts and any decorations in connection with either holiday. The policy comes in response to complaints by the American Civil Liberties Union about the religious aspects of the Christmas activity and numerous complaints from Jewish parents protesting their children’s involvement in school holiday activities.

1975(25th of Kislev, 5736): Ze’ev Beret was killed when his F-4E Phantom II Jet spun out of control and crashed.

1975(25th of Kislev, 5736): First Day of Chanukah; light the second candle in the evening

1977: The Jerusalem Post reported that in reply to President Anwar Sadat’s appeal, Israel named Eliahu Ben-Elissar and Meir Rosenne as members of the Israeli negotiating team to the proposed Cairo Conference, which was expected to prepare ground for the reconvened Geneva Peace Conference. Israel joined the fervent Egyptian appeal to Syria, Jordan and Lebanon for their participation, but they uniformly rejected Sadat’s initiative. The US continued to study the Egyptian invitation.

1979(9th of Kislev, 5740): Zeppo Marx, one of the Marx Brothers, passed away.

1981(3rd of Kislev, 5742): Fredric Wertham, German-born, American psychologist passed away. During the 1950’s, in what seems like a laughable episode half a century later, many Americans became convinced that comic books were the cause of juvenile delinquency. “This anti-comic book sentiment led in the spring of 1954 to the publication of The Seduction of the Innocent, based on Jewish psychologist Frederic Wertham's seven-year-long study of the effects of comic books on America's youth. Dr. Wertham condemned most of the genre--especially crime and horror comics--for having contributed to juvenile delinquency. As the outcry following the publication of Seduction of the Innocent grew, so did the call for government intervention. The Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary opened in Manhattan federal court on April 21, 1954.” (Ed. Note: I must confess that my brother and I were eager consumers of comic books during this period.)

1984: Gotthard Günther German born, American philosopher passed away. Günther was not Jewish but he was married to the Jewish psychologist Dr. Marie Günther-Hendel. Together they made their way out Nazi Europe before WWII and finally made their way to U.S.

1989(1st of Kislev, 5750): Rosh Chodesh Kislev

1989(1st of Kislev, 5750): Robert W. Schleck, a former foreign service officer, teacher and research analyst who was second secretary at the United States Embassy in Tel Aviv during the Suez crisis in 1956 passed away today.

1994: The New York Times featured a review of A Chosen Few by Mark Kurlansky.

1998: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including Isaiah Berlin: A Life by Michael Ignatieff, The Crisis of Global Capitalism Open Society Endangered by George Soros and Indivisible by Four: A String Quartet in Pursuit of Harmony by Arnold Steinhardt

2000: At the New York Public Library, a presentation by Marion Kaplan entitled “Friendship on the Margins: Jewish Social Relations in Imperial Germany” that asks the question, “With whom did the German Jews spend their leisure time?” This lecture examines the spectrum of friendships available to Jews in Imperial Germany (1871-1918), looking at extended families, friendships among Jews, and relationships with non-Jews. Those friendships could be intense or distant, intimate, or burdened by social and political anti-Semitism. Marion Kaplan is a social and cultural historian, with an emphasis on women’s history. Dr. Kaplan’s writings include Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, which won the National Jewish Book Award for 1998.

2002(24th of Kislev, 5763): In the evening, Kindle the first Chanukah light

2004: Ilan Shalgi completes his term as Minister of Science and Technology.

2004: Victor Brailovsky became Minister of Science and Technology.

2005: The Seattle Reconstructionist congregation Kadima which, according to its Web site, “welcomes members from all backgrounds, including multicultural, gay, and lesbian households,” now is welcoming Ariel Sharon's adoption of its name. "[We] wish Prime Minister Sharon the very best with his new party name," Kadima Executive Director Susan Davis told The Jerusalem Post via email. "It is a huge responsibility to use a name as progressive as Kadima." Kadima means "forward" in Hebrew. Two other entities using the name Kadima were not nearly as accepting. The city fathers of Kadima, a town in the Sharon section of Israel, expressed their displeasure with the name chosen for Sharon’s new party. Kadima is also the name of a left-wing political party with headquarters in Beersheba. Party leaders are petitioning the government to force Sharon to use a different name since they feel that they own it for purposes of political party nomenclature.

2006: In Jerusalem, The Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies awards the 10th Liebhaber Prize for Religious Tolerance to Deborah Goldman Golan, Director of the Bamidbar Center for Pluralistic Jewish Studies in Yeroham.

2007: A tribute was held in New York City in anticipation of poet Philip Levine's 80th birthday. Among those celebrating Levine's career by reading Levine's work were Yusef Komunyakaa, Galway Kinnell, E. L. Doctorow, Charles Wright, Jean Valentine, and Sharon Olds. Levine himself read several new and interesting poems. He thanked his students and asked them to refrain from asking for any more letters of recommendation.

2007: At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, television star Sarah Silverman, headlines “Comedy without Borders” a fund-raiser for the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, the ecological and coexistence center located at Kibbutz Ketura, near Eilat.

2007(19th of Kislev, 5768): Victor Erlich, a path-breaking scholar of Russian literature, died today He was 93. Erlich was born in Petrograd, Russia, in 1914, the scion of a scholarly Jewish family. His maternal grandfather was renowned Jewish historian Simon Dubnov and his father was Henryk Erlich, a leader of the Jewish labor union known as the Bund. In 2006, Erlich published a memoir of his early years, “Child of a Turbulent Century.” In a review for the Forward, Winston Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert wrote, “Victor Erlich has added magnificently to our sense of what once was, and will never be again.” Erlich was 3 when his family moved to Poland and took refuge from the upheavals of the Russian Revolution. He grew up around the artistic and intellectual luminaries of Eastern Europe, including Marc Chagall and Bundist leader Victor Alter. When the Nazis invaded Poland, the family fled again, this time to Lithuania. Most of Erlich’s relatives were killed, but Erlich made his way to New York in 1942, going through Moscow, Japan and Montreal. He joined the U.S. Army and was sent back to Europe as a soldier. After narrowly surviving the war again, he attended graduate school at Columbia University, studying Slavic languages under Roman Jakobson, an influential Slavic linguist. Erlich became recognized as a major scholar of modern Russian literature with his 1955 study, “Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine,” which remains a classic in the field. His other subjects included Gogol and Russian modernism. In 1961, Erlich became chair of the Russian department at Yale University, where he remained until his retirement. “He encompassed a great deal of culture — Russian, Polish, Jewish, European — so he was like a walking, talking resource for those of us who were younger,” said Greta Slobin, a professor of Slavic literature who studied under Erlich and maintained a friendship with him. “He was a representative of the cosmopolitan Jewish culture that had been destroyed in the Holocaust.” (As reported by Marissa Brostoff)

2007: USCJ International Biennial Convention opens in Orlando, FL.

2007: The Jerusalem Post reported that “Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni failed in attempts to set up meetings in Annapolis or Washington with colleagues from the Arab world, even though the summit was designed to show international support for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations… Israeli officials interpreted this as evidence that the Arab world had not changed its fundamental policy that there would be no warming of relations with Israel until after a deal, and that normalization was one of the Arab world's major bargaining chips.”

2007: Sixty one years after he was buried at a wind hilltop cemetery in southeast Washington, Stephen Theodore Norman, the only grandchild of Theodor Herzl was exhumed as the first step of trip that will lead to his burial in Israel.

2008: On this Shabbat when we recite “Av harachameem,” there will be special poignancy to the words as we mourn the passing Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, the beloved directors of Chabad-Lubavitch of Mumbai. “The Father of mercy who dwells on high in His great mercy will remember with compassion the pious, upright and blameless the holy communities, who laid down their lives for the sanctification of His name. They were loved and pleasant in their lives and in death they were not parted.They were swifter than eagles and stronger than lions to carry out the will of their Maker, and the desire of their steadfast God. May our Lord remember them for good together with the other righteous of the world and may He redress the spilled blood of His servants as it is written in the Torah of Moses the man of God: "O nations, make His people rejoice for He will redress the blood of His servants. He will retaliate against His enemies and appease His land and His people". And through Your servants, the prophets it is written: "Though I forgive, their bloodshed I shall not forgive When God dwells in Zion" And in the Holy Writings it says: "Why should the nations say, 'Where is their God?'"Let it be known among the nations in our sight that You avenge the spilled blood of Your servants. And it says: "For He who exacts retribution for spilled blood remembers them. He does not forget the cry of the humble". And it says: "He will execute judgement among the corpse-filled nations crushing the rulers of the mighty land; from the brook by the wayside he will drink then he will hold his head high".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwom17kFOb0

2008: This afternoon authorities announced that the family of one of Israeli victims of the attack on the Mumbai Chabad House had identified her as being Yocheved Orpaz, aged 60. Another woman was identified as a Jewish resident of Mexico, whose name has not yet been released.
2008: U.N. Israel Partition Day – 61st anniversary of this momentous moment in Jewish history. “Three minutes that changed two thousand years of wandering.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEGUPlhtMWQ

2009: In Jerusalem, the opening of Whiskey Month at the Mia Bar featuring whiskey tastings and special winter dishes which go well with whiskey.

2009: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael J. Sandel and the recently released paperback edition of Friendly Fire: A Duet by A. B. Yehoshua.

2009: The Los Angeles Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta.

2009: Beachwood, Ohio declares today “Hudesa Gora Day” to mark the 100th birth of this holocaust survivor who ran a successful fur business in Cleveland for many years.

2010: Roz Chast, Al Jaffee and Robert Mankoff are scheduled to participate in a program entitled “The Cartoonist Chronicles” at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

2010: Today Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu named Mossad veteran Tamir Pardo as his choice as the new head of Israel's spy agency, to succeed Meir Dagan. Pardo served in senior positions in the Mossad for many years, as well as in various operative units. He left the agency in 2009, before which he served as deputy Mossad chief. Pardo's appointment is still pending the approval of the committee which okays appointments to senior positions in the public service

2010(22nd of Kislev, 5771): Steven N. Posner, who with his father, Victor, was caught up in a major corporate raiding case that led to the convictions of Ivan F. Boesky and Michael R. Milken, died today in a high-speed boat collision on Biscayne Bay, Fla. He was 67 and lived in Miami. Mr. Posner’s 44-foot catamaran was racing with a friend’s boat when they somehow collided, The Miami Herald said. A passenger on Mr. Posner’s boat was also killed, and his cousin Stuart Posner was seriously injured, as was a passenger on the other boat. Mr. Posner (pronounced PAHZ-ner) worked for many years with his father, who became known as a master of the hostile takeover, intentionally mismanaging companies into bankruptcy while enriching himself as they foundered. In 1987, the elder Mr. Posner — who died in 2002 — pleaded no contest to a charge of tax evasion and was ordered to give $3 million to the homeless and perform 5,000 hours of community service. A year later, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Victor and Steven Posner of conspiring with Mr. Boesky and Mr. Milken in 1984 to gain control of the Fischbach Corporation, an electrical contracting company in New York. In its civil complaint, the S.E.C. contended that with Mr. Milken’s help, the Posners had secretly arranged to “park” Fischbach stock, or place it with Mr. Boesky, to conceal their intention to seize control of the company. Mr. Boesky and Mr. Milken pleaded guilty to felony charges stemming from the transaction. The Posners did not face criminal charges in the case, but in December 1993 Judge Milton Pollack of Federal District Court in New York banned them from any further involvement with public companies. The judge also ordered them to give up control of their remaining public companies and to repay about $4 million they had received from Fischbach. Father and son were later involved in their own legal fight. In 1995 Steven sued his father, contending that he had plundered a real estate company by paying himself a “ridiculously excessive” salary, thereby jeopardizing Steven’s 25 percent stake in company. It was one of several lawsuits brought by Steven against his father. A settlement of the suits was reached the year before Victor died; the terms were not made public. Steven Posner eventually became the owner of vast real estate holdings.

2010(22nd of Kislev, 5771): Richard N. Goldman, a San Francisco civic leader and philanthropist best known for co-founding the Goldman Environmental Prize, which is given to six grass-roots environmental activists every year, died today at his home in San Francisco. He was 90. Mr. Goldman and his wife, Rhoda, an heiress to the Levi Strauss fortune, first awarded the prize in 1990 as a way to finance and publicize efforts to protect the environment. Each winner of the prize, which has increased over the years, today receives $150,000. To date, 139 recipients from 79 countries have received a total of $13.2 million. Recipients include Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement to fight African deforestation and meet rural women’s needs in Kenya by planting trees and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004; and Ken Saro-Wiwa, who founded the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People to protest environmental damage by oil companies and government attacks against his tribe in Nigeria. He was executed by the Nigerian government in 1995. Mr. Goldman supported other charities, including ones devoted to Jewish causes, reproductive rights and ecological efforts like reintroducing endangered Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep to Yosemite National Park, through the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund. He and Mrs. Goldman founded the fund in 1951. It has distributed more than $680 million to nonprofit organizations and causes around the world. Richard Nathaniel Goldman was born in San Francisco on April 16, 1920. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1941 and spent a year at the Boalt Hall School of Law before serving in the Army from 1942 to 1946. Mr. Goldman founded Goldman Insurance Services in 1949 and was the company’s chairman until it was sold to Willis Group Holdings in 2001.

2010(22nd of Kislev, 5771): Stephen J. Solarz, a nine-term Democratic congressman whose concerns went beyond traffic lights and beach erosion in his Brooklyn district to nuclear weapons, the Middle East and his revelation that Imelda Marcos owned 3,000 pairs of shoes, died today in Washington. He was 70 and lived in McLean, Va. When he was elected to the House in 1974, Mr. Solarz finagled a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee with the idea that he could appeal to his largely Jewish district by attending to the needs of Israel. He immediately threw himself into foreign policy issues, visiting leaders of Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Syria in his first month on the job. He soon became a leading voice in the House on foreign affairs. Mr. Solarz was defeated in a Democratic primary in 1992 after being caught up in a scandal involving the bank operated for House members and after his district had been redrawn to facilitate the election of a Hispanic candidate. But his arrival in 1975 was a moment of triumph, both for himself and for his party. Mr. Solarz was part of a huge class of 75 freshman Democrats who forced changes in the seniority system, giving newer representatives much more influence. The public’s interest in global affairs had been heightened by the Vietnam War, and the abuses of presidential power in the Watergate affair had given new steam to Congress. “I was elected to Congress at precisely the moment in American history when Congress decided it would no longer abdicate its constitutional authority for foreign policy to an executive branch that had lost its claim to presidential infallibility,” Mr. Solarz wrote in his preface to “Journeys to War and Peace: A Congressional Memoir,” to be published in 2011. Mr. Solarz would go on to be the first congressman to visit North Korea in 30 years; have a nine-hour conversation with Fidel Castro; introduce a nuclear freeze resolution; help alter Reagan administration policies in Central America and Lebanon; and battle many in his own party when he supported the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Mr. Solarz visited more than 100 countries, more than earning his nickname, the Marco Polo of Congress. He once got a standing ovation on the floor of the Indian Parliament. Mr. Solarz was a torrent of activity during his first six months in Congress. According to his office, he made 12 speeches on the House floor, co-sponsored 370 bills, held 11 news conferences, made 24 trips to his district and attended 99 events there, visited 23 subway stations, sent constituents 513,720 pieces of mail and took an 18-day tour of the Middle East. And he became adept at winning the support of House colleagues. “You don’t just win on the merits,” Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts said after Mr. Solarz’s death. “He understood legislating.” Mr. Solarz’s early battles included an unsuccessful effort to stop the Carter administration’s sale of F-15 jets to Saudi Arabia in 1978. The next year, Mr. Solarz was named chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee’s African subcommittee and worked with President Jimmy Carter to thwart the lifting of sanctions against Rhodesia for its racist policies. In 1981, he gave up his post on the African subcommittee to take over the subcommittee on Asian and Pacific affairs. There he developed a peace plan that helped end the genocide in Cambodia. He returned from his 1980 visit to North Korea with the news that the country’s dictator, Kim Il-sung, was interested in improving relations with the United States. In his 1986 hearings on the Philippines, Mr. Solarz provided irrefutable evidence that President Ferdinand Marcos was misusing foreign aid, leading to the uncovering of the vast United States real estate empire he shared with his wife, Imelda — not to mention Mr. Solarz’s blockbuster disclosure about her shoes. In an interview, Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, praised Mr. Solarz’s commitment to building democracy in places like the Philippines, South Korea, Lebanon and Taiwan. “He struck idealistic notes with a lot of his colleagues,” Mr. Dallek said.
But he was also pragmatic, said Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and World Bank president, who worked with Mr. Solarz on Asian issues during the Reagan administration. Mr. Solarz, he said, showed that allying with forces fighting repression could be good policy. “Solarz understood that idealism and realism actually go together,” he said. Stephen Joshua Solarz was born on Sept. 12, 1940, in Manhattan. His parents, Sanford Solarz and the former Ruth Fertig, divorced soon after his birth, and his mother vanished from his life. He was raised first by his father and a stepmother, then by a widowed aunt in Brooklyn after his father divorced again. His political career began when he was elected president of his sixth-grade class; he was later elected president of the student government at Midwood High School in Brooklyn. After graduating from Brandeis University, where he edited the school newspaper, he entered Columbia Law School. But he quickly became bored by the law and switched his studies, earning a master’s degree in public law and government from Columbia. While at Columbia he joined the ranks of reform Democrats in Brooklyn, and at 25 he helped run the primary campaign of Melvin Dubin, an antiwar candidate for Congress. Mr. Dubin lost, but while working for the campaign Mr. Solarz met Nina Koldin, whom he later married. She survives him, as do his mother, Ruth Robin; his brothers, Avrom and Seth Robin; his stepson, Randy Glantz; his stepdaughter, Lisa Prickett; and four grandchildren. Mrs. Solarz had persuaded her husband to run for the State Assembly in 1968 and, using her inheritance, had bankrolled his early campaigns, including his first race for Congress in 1974. She pleaded guilty in 1995 to two criminal charges of writing bad checks against their account at the House bank. Mr. Solarz, despite 743 overdrafts, was not charged. Before running for Congress, Mr. Solarz served three terms in the Assembly. He lost a race for Brooklyn borough president in 1973 but generally won elections by high margins. He lost his district, however, when the state’s Congressional delegation shrunk to 31 from 34 because of population loss. Choosing to run in a district that had been reconfigured to include parts of Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn to help a Hispanic candidate win, he faced five Hispanic opponents in the Democratic primary and lost to Nydia M. Velázquez, who went on to win the general election and remains the district’s representative. After his political career Mr. Solarz worked as a consultant and volunteer for nonprofit international organizations. He was a leader of the International Crisis Group, which works with governments and global organizations to quell deadly conflicts. As a congressman Mr. Solarz was always mindful of local issues, calling himself “Representative Pothole.” In 1990, he introduced a bill denying a sports team that leaves a city the right to sue for trademark infringement. The bill grew out of a suit filed by the Los Angeles Dodgers against the Brooklyn Dodgers Sports Bar and Restaurant in Brooklyn. Mr. Solarz wanted to get in one last lick at the team that had fled to the West Coast and broken his borough’s heart. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

2011: David Kalender, the Senior Rabbi of Olam Tikvah in Fairfax, Virginia, is scheduled to deliver the first in a series of lectures on The Book of Ruth.

2011: In honor of the 10th anniversary of the JCC in Manhattan, the JCC is scheduled to screen the audience’s favorite film.

2011: The Tulane Hillel Board Meeting is scheduled to take place at Goldie & Morris Mintz Center for Jewish Life.

2011: In New Orleans, Rabbi Alexis Berk is scheduled to lead the Touro Synagogue Interfaith Chavurah Group in a discussion of “The December Dilemma.”

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