This Day, June 16, In Jewish History by MItchell A. Levin

JUNE 16 In Jewish History

1221: Massacre of the Jews of Erfurt, Germany. At one time this was commemorated as a Fast Day on the 25^th of Sivan.

 1385: Emperor Wenceslaus arrested Jews living in what was known as the Swabian League, (the league of free cities in South Germany) and confiscated their books. A hefty fine had to be paid for their return and the release of the prisoners.

1591: Birthdate of Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, a native of Crete who moved to Italy where he gained fame as a rabbi, physician and author.

1612: Birthdate of Murad IV.  During his reign as Sultan, Murad executed Rabbi Yehuda Kovo over a dispute revolving around the quality of cloth being supplied by the Jews of Salonika for army uniforms and the amount of taxes to be paid.

1660: The debate between Jacob Abendana and Anton Hulsius, which was actually a series of letters written over a ninth month period, over the meaning of a verse in the Book of Haggai, came to an end.

1775: Birthdate of Judah Touro, the native of Newport, Rhode Island who was the son of Isaac Touro who moved to New Orleans where he became a successful businessman.  Touro fought in the Battle of New Orleans under Andrew Jackson and became one of the nation’s leading philanthropists contributing to a wide variety of secular and Jewish causes.

 1825(30^th of Sivan, 5585): Rosh Chodesh Tammuz

1846: The Papal conclave of 1846 concluded. Pope Pius IX was chosen to lead the Catholic Church, beginning the longest reign in the history of the post-apostolic papacy. The papal reign of Pius IX was marked by a variety of reactionary policies as he sought to deal with the loss of the papal temporal power to the emerging united nation of Italy. The Pope returned those Jews under his control to the Ghetto. “Pius IX was the Pope who decided in 1867 to raise to sainthood one of sixteenth-century Spain's notorious grand inquisitors, Don Pedro Arbues de Epilae. He was considered a martyr (witness to the Catholic faith) after some of the family of his Jewish victims managed to assassinate him -- and then suffered grievously themselves.-- It was the conviction of the great liberal theologian of that time, Father Dollinger, that canonizing the inquisitor "served the pope's campaign of riding roughshod over liberal Catholics as well as Jews. The pope was celebrating a man who had sanctioned compulsory baptism of Jews, then inflicted judicial torture to make sure these conversions were sincere.” The most stinging example of the Pope’s anti-Jewish views and behavior is abduction of a Jewish child named Edgardo Mortara. When Pious IX was beatified in 2000, the ADL issued the following statement which summarizes the event. “The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today expressed concern at the Vatican’s beatification of Pope Pius IX, who was responsible for the 1858 abduction of a six-year old Jewish child. Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, issued the following statement: "The beatification of Pius IX is troubling for the Jewish community. Pius was responsible for the case of Edgardo Mortara, who at the age of six was abducted from his family in Bologna and taken to the Vatican by Papal police after it was reported that the Jewish child has been secretly baptized. Many European heads of state protested the 1858 kidnapping, as did Jewish leadership. As a result, Pius blamed Rome’s Jews for what he believed was a widespread Protestant conspiracy to defeat the papacy and levied medieval restrictions on the community. While ADL respects the beatification process as a matter for the Catholic Church alone, we find the selection of Pius IX as inappropriate based on policies he pursued as the head of the Church. It is in the context of the many years of positive progress in Catholic-Jewish relations, including the historic visit of Pope John Paul II to Israel and his asking for the forgiveness of the Jewish people, that the beatification of Pius IX, whose role in denying Edgardo Mortara his family and his right to be who he was, is most unfortunate."

1854: An article entitled "The Position and Power of Prussia" published today includes the information that 200,000 of its inhabitants are Jewish.

1862: Frederick C. Salomon who had served with units from Missouri and Wisconsin was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General in the Union Army.

1865: Having completed its work – a survey of Jerusalem – the team led by Captain Charles W. Wilson left Jaffa for a return trip to England.

1878: The New York Times published a review of “Philochristus: A Memoirs of a Disciple of the Lord” which is a work of historical fiction designed to reconstruct the life and times of Jesus.  Among the book’s many shortcomings is the author’s description of events immediately following the Crucifixion. On the one hand he explains the empty cave of the third day by insisting that the Jews stole the body of Jesus and then “disposed of it in some unknown manner” yet also insisting that the Resurrection was a reality. [Editor’s Note – The book serves a reminder that even in a world where authors were re-examining the stories of the New Testament, the Jew still is depicted as the villain.]

1878: An article published today entitled "Three Golden Spheres" describes the history and current status of pawn-broking in the United States.  "It has long been generally supposed that the money-lending, and especially the pawn-brokering, business is monoplized by the Jews. This is far from being the truth, for in this city the pawnbrokers who belong to the Jewish faith hardly represent one third of the total number."  All religious groups are represented in the business.  Among national groups, the Irish make up the greatest number.”

1879: According to reports published today, Sarah Bernhardt’s current performance at the Gaiety has been well received by audiences in London.  Unfortunately, Mme Bernhardt has not made good on her promise she was learning English and would be able to speak in that language when she appeared in the UK.  Nobody in the cast can speak English.  At the same time, her reputation for eccentric behavior continues to grow.  Photographs already exist proving that she dresses as a man when working on her sculpture and there is proof that she travels with her own coffin.  But now there are new rumors claiming that her next portrait will be in a Napoleonic Pose complete with a hat model after that worn by the Emperor.

1879: The Commencement Ceremony of the Emanu-El Preparatory School of the Hebrew College took place at Temple Emanu-El this evening.  Rabbi Gottheil officiated at the ceremony which included addresses in German, Hebrews and English.

1880: Louis Davis and Moritz Hartman of the Simon Benevolent Association went to the Coroner’s office in New York to tell him the story of how they were mistakenly given the body of a Christian boy over the weekend when they had come to claim the body of a young Jewess named Kate Ungerleider.  The mix-up was an example of official incompetence not anti-Semitism.

1882: It was reported today that “serious obstacles have risen” to thwart Laurence Oliphant’s plan to “re-establish the Jews in Palestine.”  The Turkish government said that Russian Jews are welcome to settle in any part of the empire except in the land of their fathers.  While the Sultan did not give a reason for the ruling it is assumed that the Porte does not consider prudent to give the Jews a national center which might attract others of their faith.

1882: It was reported today that Julius Porgas left two notes behind explaining that he had taken his own life because of financial difficulties that left him to embezzle funds left in his care.  In an example of being worth more dead than alive, he told his wife that he had life insurance policies with three entities including one for a thousand dollars with the Kesher Shel Barzel Society.

1888: Birthdate of Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman, Russian born physicist and mathematician. “He discovered the expanding-universe solution to general relativity field equations in 1922, which was proven by Edwin Hubble’s observations in 1929.” He died of typhoid fever at the age of 37.

1888: The staff of the Hebrew Journal is hosting a fundraiser tonight at the Lyric Hall proceeds of which will go to the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society. The society was established in 1879 to care for destitute children, including, but not limited to, orphans.  At its founding the society had an all-female board and its first president was a woman. In 1940, the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society merged with Hebrew Orphan Asylum, Fellowship House and the Jewish Children’s Clearing Bureau to form the New York Association for Jewish Children which became the Jewish Child Care Association.

 1888: At Temple Beth El in New York Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler “paid an eloquent tribute” to the late Kaiser Wilhelm I who passed away earlier this year. He praised the emperor for having “all the noble ideal qualities of the German without the rather coarse ways of the Prussian soldier.”  The rabbi also praised him for conferring the highest honors upon several Jews and for denouncing anti-Semitism; something his wife continued to do after his death.  Kohler believed that he had “transmitted his liberal ideas to Bismarck and his son and that so long as they are a power there is little fear of anti-Semitism.”

 1889: It was reported today that the Hebrew Benevolent Orphan Asylum was among the organizations awarded a banner as part of the centennial celebration in New York honoring the official start of the United States under its current consitutional system.

1892: Birthdate of Jennie Grossinger, who helped make the Catskills resort Grossinger's into the most famous retreat of its kind.

1895: The New York Times reported on the Louis Down-Town Sabbath and Daily School which “is a magnificent example of what can be accomplished by noble-minded women among the young and old of their sex in the hearts of the slums. From that up-town section where the wealthiest of the community live a few of the philanthropic Jewish women have combined for the highly laudable purpose of elevating the children of the lowliest of the Jewish population in the thickly settled down-town districts.”

1897: Birthdate of Elaine Hammerstein, “an American silent film and stage actress” who was the daughter of opera producer Arthur Hammerstein

1900: Herzl meets Arminius Vámbéry a Hungarian Jewish Orientalist with connections to the Ottoman Empire who will write to the Sultan on Herzl's behalf.

1904: Irish author James Joyce begins a relationship with Nora Barnacle, and subsequently uses the date to set the actions for his novel Ulysses. This date is referred to as “Bloomsay”; a reference to Leopold Bloom. Bloomsday has been celebrated since 1994 in the Hungarian town of Szombathely, the birthplace of Leopold Bloom's father, Virág Rudolf an emigrant Hungarian Jew.

1906: After three days of violence, the Bialystok Pogrom came to an end. The death count varies; from a low of 80 to a high of 100.  Hundreds of Jewish owned shops were destroyed. A major textile manufacturing center and a hot bed or revolutionary activity, approximately three-fourths of the city’s population was Jewish.  This did not protect the Jews from violence instigated by the Russian authorities. “Russian authorities tried to blame the pogrom on the local Polish population in order to stir up the hatred between two ethnic groups (both of which generally opposed the Tsar). However Jewish survivors of the violence reported that the local Polish population had in fact sheltered many Jews during the pogrom and did not participate in it. Apolinary Hartglas, a Polish Jewish leader and later a member of the Polish Sejm, together with Ze'ev Jabotinsky, managed to obtain secret documents issued by Szeremietiev which showed that the pogrom had been organized well in advance by Russian authorities who had actually transported Russian railroad workers from deep within Russia to participate.”

1907: Birthdate of actor Jack Albertson. Albertson appeared in numerous films but he may be rest remembered for his starring role in the television sit-com “Chico and the Man.”

1911: Jews in Sfru (south of Fez) were attacked by rebellious Berbers.

1913: Birthdate of Phillip M. Kaiser who would serve as a diplomat or political appointee under every Democratic President from Harry Truman to Jimmy Carter. He was the ninth of 10 children of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from imperial Russia. He wrote in his 1992 memoir that "whatever political skills I may have, I attribute to the fact that I had to develop them early to cope with sibling rivalries." In his childhood home, his mother rarely spoke English, communicating with her children in Yiddish. But they spoke English to her. At a parochial school, the young Mr. Kaiser learned Hebrew, which, he later wrote, "established my credentials as a Jewish boy and enabled me to feel superior to Yiddish, which I considered a 'greenhorn's' jargon." He graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where he won a Rhodes scholarship. In September 1936 he arrived in England, which was his home base for three subsequent years of study and travel in the European continent as it was lurching toward World War II.

1917: Birthdate of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. Although Katherine Graham came from a distinguished Jewish background she was baptized at the age of ten. The only people who thought she was Jewish were the myriad of anti-Semites who loved to write about the "Jewish Controlled Media in America." Mrs. Graham died in 2001.

1917: Birthdate of Irving Penn “an American photographer known for his portraiture and fashion photography.”

1920: Birthdate of basketball player Henry “Hank” Rosenstein who played forward for the City College of New York.

1922: Birthdate of William Korey the University of Chicago graduate who became Director of the Anti-Defamation League.

1931(1st of Tammuz, 5691): Rosh Chodesh Tammuz

1933: According to a census on this date, the Jewish population of Berlin, Germany's capital city was about 160,000. Berlin's Jewish community was the largest in Germany, comprising more than 32 percent of all Jews in the country.

1933(22nd of Sivan, 5693): Unknown assailants murder Zionist Labor leader Chaim Arlosoroff touching off a scandal that would stain the Zionist movement

1933: President Roosevelt signed into law a series of bills that began the creation of what came to be called The New Deal. For Jews, like so many others, the legislation provided immediate economic assistance. More importantly, the New Deal opened up career opportunities for a whole generation of Jews especially those with degrees in law and accounting. The myriad of government agencies that resulted from the New Deal were a critical ingredient in the growth of the Jewish Middle Class especially for the children and grandchildren of those who had come to the United States from Eastern Europe starting in the 1880's.

1937: Marx Brothers' "A Day At The Races" opens in LA

1937: Birthdate of author Erich Segal.

1938: Birthdate of Joyce Carol Oates. “Joyce Carol Oates’ paternal grandmother was Jewish, but fearing persecution, kept that fact hidden. Her grandmother died in 1970, and it wasn’t until afterwards, that Oates found out the truth about her family’s Jewish heritage. Her book, ‘The Gravedigger’s Daughter’ is dedicated to her paternal grandmother.”

1939: In Oxford, England future famed diplomat Philip Kaiser married Hannah Greeley,

1940: Birthdate of Neil Goldschmidt former Mayor of Portland and Governor of Oregon as well as member of the Cabinet under President Carter

1940: French Premier Reynaud, whose government was in exile, resigned. Henri Petain replaced him. Petain earned a place of dishonor in Jewish and French history as head of the Nazi-collaborating government at Vichy.

1942(1^st of Tammuz, 5702): Rosh Chodesh Tammuz

1942: The American chargé d'affaires in the Vatican, Harold Tittmann, reports to the State Department that Pope Pius XII is adopting "an ostrich-like policy towards atrocities that were obvious to everyone."

1943: SS chief Heinrich Himmler allows a transfer of Jewish prisoners from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp located in Germany for medical experiments involving jaundice.

1943(13th of Sivan, 5703): Dr. Niuta Jurezkaya, a physician who escaped from the Minsk (Belorussia) Ghetto to nearby forests, is recaptured, tortured, and shot.

1943: Two hundred patients from Berlin are sent to Theresienstadt along with the remaining Jews of the Berlin community. The German capital was declared "judenrein" - Free of Jews. Ten years earlier the Berlin Jewish population was estimated around 186,000.

1944: Residents of the Jewish ghetto at Lódz, Poland, are notified of "voluntary registration for labor outside the ghetto." In truth, there is no work but only death at the Chelmno, Poland, extermination camp, where the Germans plan to murder 3000 Jews a week for three weeks.

1944(25th of Sivan, 5704): In France, Jewish historian Marc Bloch, a leader of the resistance group Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, is executed by German troops.

1947(28th of Sivan, 5707): Bronislaw Huberman, famed violinist and founder of the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra, passed away.

1952: Alexander Marx, librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary arrived in New York after  having spent ten weeks in Israel.

1952: Brigadier General Mordechai Makleff, vice chief of staff of the IAF arrived in New York aboard the Cunard Line’s Queen Elizabeth to begin an unofficial tour of U.S. military installations.

1952: "Anne Frank: Diary of Young Girl" is published in the United States

1952: The New York Times reviews “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” translated from the Dutch by B.M. Mooyaart-Doubleday with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt

1956: Dr.Henry Cohen was raised to the peerage as Baron Cohen of Birkenhead, of Birkenhead in the County Palatine of Chester. This meant that the famous physician was now Henry Cohen, 1st Baron Cohen of Birkenhead. The Lord Cohen Medal, the highest award for services to gerontology in the United Kingdom and is named, is named for him.

1961: Birthdate of Adisu Massala, the native of Ethiopia who made Aliyah in  1980 following a clandestine route and eventually became a member of the Knesset. 

1963: David Ben-Gurion resigned for the second and last time as Prime Minister and Defense Minister. Levi Eshkol will be chosen as a compromise candidate to fill both positions. Eshkol, the Israeli politician most Westerners had never heard of will thus be the leader of the Jewish state when it faces it's greatest test in 1967 and enjoys its greatest triumph with the reunification of Jerusalem.

1968:` Governor Nelson Rockefeller designated Jennie Grossinger Day in New York State, the first time this honor was bestowed on a living woman. Jennie Grossinger, who helped make the Catskills resort Grossinger's into the most famous retreat of its kind, was born in Austria on June 16, 1892. At age eight, she immigrated with her family to New York, where she struggled to learn English and succeed in school. At thirteen, she left school to work in a garment factory, providing her family with much-needed income. In 1914, her father bought a piece of land in the Catskills, intending to leave factory work and return to farming. It soon became clear that the rocky soil would never support a prosperous farm, and Jennie suggested that the family take in boarders. The first year, the family charged $9 a week and cleared a net profit of $81. From that modest beginning, Grossinger's was born. Although the initial farmhouse lacked heat, electricity, and indoor plumbing, its other amenities helped to make it a success. Jennie Grossinger's mother, Malka, was a good kosher cook, and Jennie's warm personality was credited with making guests feel at home. In addition, Jennie's husband Harry (a cousin with the same last name), who had stayed in New York, was able to send guests their way. By 1919, the family had made enough money to sell the original farmhouse and buy a nearby hotel. Grossinger's thrived in the 1920s, becoming an opulent resort with tennis courts, a children's camp, crystal chandeliers, and an auditorium that featured world-class entertainers. It was in this decade that Grossinger's became a destination of choice for upwardly mobile East Coast Jews. Although the decade of the Great Depression brought hard times, Grossinger's managed to stay open. One innovative development was the establishment of a training camp for boxers. The boxers provided much-needed income, while Grossinger's provided a Jewish atmosphere and facilities. In the years after the Second World War, Grossinger's fame spread from Jews to non-Jews. While maintaining its kosher kitchen, the resort began to attract a non-Jewish clientele. Part of this was due to the successful national distribution and marketing of "Grossinger's Rye," accompanied by Jennie Grossinger's image and signature. By 1970, non-Jews were estimated to make up one third of the 150,000 annual guests. In the post-war years, such prominent figures as Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Kennedy, and Nelson Rockefeller visited the resort.

1970(12th of Sivan, 5730): Elsa Yur'evna Triolet, a Russian born Jewish French author passed away.

1974: In Rhode Island,  Rabbis William Bradue and Herschel Shacter officiated at the wedding of Elizabeth Fain and Samuel Gerson, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Gerson of Natanya, Israel

1984(16th of Sivan, 5744): Rabbi Bernard Bergman, the nursing home mogul, passed away.

1996(29th of Sivan, 5756): Sportscaster Mel Allen passed away. Yes, the man who was the Voice of the New York Yankees for so many years, the man with the smooth southern drawl, was Jewish. He grew up in rural Alabama as an observant Jew. He reluctantly changed his surname from Israel to further his career. His last name was considered "too Jewish." The Allen in Mel Allen was taken from his father's middle name i.e. Julius Allen Israel. In 1950, Allen served as chairman of Operations Sports for Israel which shipped over three tons of athletic and recreational gear to Israeli children.

2000: Israel complies with UN Security Council Resolution 425 and completely withdraws from Lebanon.

2002: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Fly Swatter by Nicholas Dawidoff and Six Days of War by Michael B. Oren.

2004: Final day of a Birthright trip to Israel - Towards a Sustainable Future for Israel: An Environmental Leadership Seminar for Students and Young Professionals – focused on the environment sponsored as a joint project of COEJL, the Heschel Center for Environmental Leadership and Learning, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and Hillel.

2005: What Sotheby's is calling the only known surviving autographed draft of the Balfour Declaration, the 1917 document that called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what was then Palestine, along with other documents from the archive of the Zionist Leader Leon Simon is to be auctioned in New York today. Besides two original drafts of the Declaration, the auction includes a signed letter from Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist and chemist who relocated from Germany to Britain after the start of World War I, asking his colleagues to review the draft. Sotheby's expects the archive to sell for $500,000 to $800,000.

2006: The Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA) began debating the issue of divesting from companies doing business with Israel because of Israel's policy in the Palestinian territories.

2006: Hebrew Book Week comes to an end.

2007(30th of Sivan, 5767: Rosh Chodesh Tammuz

2007(30th of Sivan, 5767: Eighty-eight year old “Shirlee Mages, whose father owned a thriving Roosevelt Road restaurant in the 1930s and '40s and whose husband put his name on a sporting goods chain” passed away today in Chicago. Mrs. Mages was the widow of Morrie Mages, a 1950s Chicago television staple who was often in the company of the late broadcaster Jack Brickhouse touting his sporting-goods stores through the sponsorship of a late-night movie called "Mages Playhouse."

2008: Time magazine features a profile on Foreign Minister Tzipi Livini who is favored to succeed Ehud Olmert entitled “Mrs. Clean.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812071,00.html

2008: In an article entitled “Grapes on the Golan,” Kevin Peraino profiles the growth Israel’s wine industry which is located on the Golan Heights and the effect peace talks between Damascus and Jerusalem might have on it.
http://www.kosherwinereport.com/2008/06/grapes-on-the-golan---newsweek-june-16th-2008.html

2008: In New York, the Center for Jewish History co-sponsors “’Bloom’ Comes Home.” This is a preview of "Bloom,” which is a documentary film homage to James Joyce's masterpiece, “Ulysses,” with filmmakers Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna. On Bloomsday, 2003, the Center for Jewish History and Jewish Heritage staged an exciting dramatic reading of scenes from Joyce's “Ulysses” featuring Kathleen Chalfant and a host of talented actors playing the Odysseus-like protagonist Leopold Bloom. The acclaimed performance has now become the centerpiece of a film which plays with notions as light as reading Joyce in bed and as serious as what kind of Jew Leopold Bloom really was. The film travels to Ireland to reveal how an anti-Semitic outbreak in Limerick in 1904 inspired Joyce to create Dublin's best known fictional Jew. The preview of this work in progress takes place in the very auditorium where it was first performed. The evening will include conversation with the filmmakers and special additional readings.

2008: Despite intense lobbying by Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, the European Union - in a sign of vastly improved European-Israeli relations over the last few years - agreed to a significant upgrade of relations. The upgrade was announced in Luxembourg during the annual EU-Israel Association Council meeting, headed by foreign ministers, which conducts the bilateral relations between Israel and the EU. The announcement was made at a meeting attended by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and the ministers of the 27 EU states.

2008: After a report in The Sun which exposed Nazi war criminal Milivoj Asner mingling with Euro 2008 football fans in Austria, the British daily interviewed the 95-year-old man at his Austrian home.

The history books describe how Pozega's entire Jewish community was wiped out in World War II, sent to the Jasenovac concentration camp where 700,000 were exterminated.
Asner is suspected to have overseen the deportation from Croatia of hundreds of Jews, Serbs and gypsies to concentration camps. According to The Sun, Asner denied any Jews were deported to death camps from his home town. Laughing again, he said: "I don't know of anyone deported from Pozega. Nobody was murdered. I never heard of one single family murdered in Pozega." Despite Austrian officials ruling out extradition on health grounds, Asner said he was well enough to face trial. He said: "I have a clear conscience, I can appear in front of any court."
"I would welcome the chance to answer these accusations in a Croatian court. I don't have anything to do with it. I did not have enough responsibility to order deportation." According to The Sun, Austrian officials revealed they may order a new medical examination. On Monday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said that Austrian authorities were "exposed as liars" after a "top Nazi war criminal" deemed unfit by the Austrians to stand trial due to his "failing health" was spotted sipping drinks in an Austrian cafe during one of the Euro 2008 soccer championship gatherings.
Asner is number four on the Wiesenthal Center's list of "most wanted Nazis." Three years ago, Austria refused a Croatian extradition request on the grounds that Asner was "unfit" to stand trial or even be questioned for health reasons. "Austria has long had a reputation as a paradise for war criminals and now they've been caught in the act," said Dr. Ephraim Zuroff, the director of the Israel office of the Wiesenthal Center, and the organization's chief Nazi hunter. Zuroff said that the article "exposed the lie" that the Austrian authorities have been peddling for years, noting that the suspected Nazi war criminal is clearly enjoying a life that many hundreds of victims were denied when they were sent off to be murdered. "If this man is well enough to walk around town unaided and drink wine in bars, he's well enough to answer for his past," Zuroff said. Following the publication of the expose, which included video and photos, The Wiesenthal Center demanded that the Austrian Government immediately extradite the top wanted Nazi without further delay. "The photos, and video clips also made available to this office, make it abundantly clear that Asner is in good health, lucid and able to get around on his own, in contradiction to the finding of an Austrian court which ruled that he cannot be extradited to stand trial in Croatia due to ill health," Zuroff wrote in a Monday letter to Austrian Justice Minister Dr. Maria Berger.
"Under these circumstances, there is absolutely no justification for the continued refusal to extradite this wanted Nazi war criminal to the country where he committed his nefarious crimes, so that he can finally be held accountable for the hundreds of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies whom he deported to concentration camps, where the majority were brutally murdered."

2008: In Milwaukee, The Third International Festival of New Jewish Liturgical Music came to a close.

2009: A reception is held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. honoring Ann F. Lewis the recipient of the NJDC Belle Moskowitz Award.

2009: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Laurie Silber, Search Committee Chairperson, announces that Temple Judah has officially hired Rabbi Todd Thalblum. Rabbi Tahlblum will begin on August 1, 2009.

2010: A screening of “Leon Blum: For All Mankind” and lecture by filmmaker, Jean Bodon, are scheduled to be held at noon today at the Library of Congress

2011: “Fiddler on the Roof” is scheduled to be performed at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

2011: Congregation Agudas Achim in Iowa City is scheduled to hold its annual meeting.

2011: At the Historic 6^th & I Synagogue in Washington, DC, Leah Koenig, author of “The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook: Daily Meals for the Contemporary Jewish Kitchen” and former editor-in-chief of the award winning food blog The Jew and the Carrot, is scheduled  to make eco-kosher Portobello mushroom burgers and basil two-bean salad as part of  “Jewish Cooking 101: Farmers' Market Meals”

2011: Today, thousands will retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom, the Jewish protagonist of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses on “Bloomsday,” an annual event celebrating the Irish author’s novel and his Jewish hero. “In Dublin there are lots of events and a few elsewhere in Ireland,” said Terrence Killeen, a research scholar at the James Joyce Center last week. “There’s a breakfast which starts Bloomsday, as it does in the novel. People then follow the events of the book around town as it continues, and recite passages. One happening is at Davy Byre’s Pub and there are lots of musical events. It’s not an academic event but a public one.” Over the years, Ireland’s small but remarkably vibrant Jewish community, population 2,000, has produced many prominent members including the late president of Israel, Chaim Herzog, and two-time Dublin mayor Robert Briscoe, to name a few. Still, the fictitious Bloom might be the country’s most famous Jew – never mind that in the novel he is a convert to Catholicism. “By 1904 he is nominally a Catholic having converted to marry his wife, so he’s a rationalist,” said Killeen, who gave a lecture on the Jewish world of Joyce at the Irish Jewish Museum last Monday. “He seems very much a part of the Jewish race but not of the Jewish faith. At the same time he is very conscious of distinct Jewish thinkers like Baruch Spinoza, Mendelsohn – the composer and philosopher – and Karl Marx.”Throughout the novel, Bloom’s Jewish identity is discussed repeatedly, sometimes despite his best efforts to avoid the subject.

“The most prominent passage is in a pub where Bloom encounters the Citizen, who is strongly nationalist and strongly racist, and that is where he takes on the anti- Semitism of this man,” Killeen said. “In the first chapter he takes on a headmaster who is rather anti-Semitic. He tries to avoid initially an argument about Judaism and he talks about a race that is very much at this time persecuted. He strongly identifies with Jews Christ was a Jew like me, he says. That’s the most emphatically Jewish statement and near the end of the novel he remembers some verses of Jewish songs.” Even Zionism, in its infancy when Joyce wrote the novel between 1914 and 1921, makes a brief appearance. “Zionism does get into the book and there’s an identification between Ireland and the Jews because Ireland was colonized at the time,” Killeen said. “There’s a parallel there.” The origin of Bloom is still a debated topic. Joyce is said to have known several members of Ireland’s small Jewish community growing up in Dublin. Most scholars agree, however, that Joyce’s decision to make Bloom Jewish was intended as a literary device inspired by his encounter with Jews when he lived in Trieste. “Bloom’s Jewishness makes him different than his fellow citizens,” Killeen said. “He’s seen as different and strange. A much more rational person than they are. He is a scientific type. That’s the symbolism, his otherness.” So how does the Jewish community in Ireland feel about having the protagonist of the best known work of one the country’s most famed authors as an honorary member? One rabbi born and bred in Ireland politely declined to comment because he said he only learned about Bloomsday two years ago. Debbie Briscoe of the Irish Jewish Museum said that no discontent with Bloom has been registered by local Jews. “Nobody has ever complained about the fictitious character Leopold Bloom,” she wrote in an e-mail. “In fact everyone enjoys it. Jews everywhere have accepted it as a story. The whole thing is fiction so what is there to complain about?” One Irish Jew, the late painter Gerald Davis, had a special affection for Bloom, Briscoe said. Each year he would don a black bowler hat, dark suit and a mustache and play the role of his co-religionist on Bloomsday. On one occasion he was even invited to Australia to repeat his role there. It may be worth noting that Bloomsday has had at least one unexpected affect on the Jewish community. Each year it brings an unknown number of Jewish celebrants, temporarily boosting the number of Jews in the country significantly. “Many Jews come to Dublin from other countries specially for James Joyce week of festivities,” Briscoe said.

2011: After two months of quiet in the South, a Kassam rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip into the Eshkol Regional Council on tonight. The projectile exploded in an open field and no injuries or property damage was reported. Near to 9:30 p.m., a siren was heard in Eshkol-area communities, followed seconds later by an explosion

2011: Jewish Congressman Anthony Weiner announced his resignation today, following the revelation that he had sent a lewd photograph to young women online. Instead of sending a written letter of resignation, Weiner made a televised public statement, which was met by hecklers shouting out angry remarks

2011: The Korean Embassy in Israel today held a special ceremony to mark the 61st anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. In honor of soldiers who fought to help South Korea stop the communist invasion, a seemingly unlikely group was also recognized: Jewish Korean War veterans living in Israel.

According to an official statement released by the Embassy, some 4,000 Jewish soldiers fought alongside South Koreans and Allied Forces in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. The Embassy has been awarding medals to Jewish soldiers since 2009. This year's ceremony was hosted by Korean Ambassador to Israel Ma Young-Sam at his home in Rishpon.

2012: The Queen Has No Crown is scheduled to be shown at The London Israeli & Film Festival.

2012: Rabbi Jonah Layman and Cantor Wendi Fried are scheduled to lead “A Taste of Shabbat” at Shaare Tefila in Olney, MD.

2012: National Hebrew Book Week is scheduled to come to an end.

Copyright; June, 2012; Mitchell A. Levin  melech3@mchsi.com