This Day, November 18, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L
1095: Pope
Urban II opened the Council of Clermont. Summoned to plan the First Crusade, it
was attended by over 200 bishops. Among its official policies, the Council
decreed that a pilgrimage to Jerusalem made every other penance superfluous. And so began one of the darkest periods in
Jewish history.
1297: Today
during the Papacy of Boniface VIII, “the inquisition issued a bull according to
which an accuser or witness could remain unrevealed to the accused when the
latter was a person of influence” and since “the Jews were classed among the
powerful persons, a simple denunciation sufficed to condemn them.”
1302: Pope
Boniface VIII issued the Papal bull Unam sanctam that proclaimed, "outside of the Church there is neither
salvation nor the remission of sins” which was part of an on-going effort to
isolate the Jews from the general community and make anti-Semitism a permanent
part of European society. It’s declaration that those who resist the Roman
Pontiff are resisting God's ordination was one more plank in a platform that
would sour Jewish-Christian relations for centuries to come. This is the same Pope
Boniface VIII who issued the bull Exhibita Nobis, ordaining that Jews
could be denounced to the Inquisition without the name of the accuser being
revealed, so as to protect Christians against Jewish reprisals.
1489: Joseph
Günzenhäuser, Yom-Tov ben Perez and Solomon ben Perez published “Hobot
ha-Lebabot” (Duties of the Heart) by Bayha ibn Pakuda in Italy. Bahya ben
Joseph ibn Paquda was a Jewish philosopher and rabbi who lived at Zaragoza,
Spain, in the first half of the eleventh century. The same trio had printed
“Eben Bohan” by Kalonymus ben Meir ben Kalonymus in August of 1489. Kalonymus
was an author and translator who lived in Provence “Eben Bohan” (The
Touchstone) was a seminal work on morality for the Jews living in southern
France.
1554: Philip “was
invested with the Kingdom of Sicily and Jerusalem today by Pope Julius III.
1570:
In Ferra, Italy, the town where Azarya ben Moses dei Rossi is living was struck
by an earthquake, which “miraculously” spared the Jewish Community. In
the aftermath of the earthquake, Dei Rossi became aware of whole body of Jewish
literature from the time of the Second Temple which was known to Christians but
had been lost to the Jews because it was written in Greek. In
twenty days he translated "The Letter of Aristas," from Greek into
Hebrew. "The Letter of Aristas," "is supposed to be the discourse
a Greek king gave about the wisdom of the Jews [Some sources give 1571 as the
date for the earthquake.]
1576:
Birthdate of Philipp Ludwig II of Hanau-Münzenberg who in 1603 “invited many
wealthy Jewish” to live in Hanuah and provided them with “a definite legal
status” as well as permitting them to build a synagogue.
1663:
The Ascamoth (regulations and ordinances) the Sephardi Congregation of London
were compiled today.
1648: Bogdan Chemielniki and his Cossacks began their attacks.
Kamenets, in the western Ukraine is one of the first cities to be attacked,
with thousands killed in the first few days. Chemielniki was leading a Ukrainian national uprising against
their Roman Catholic Polish masters. The Russian Orthodox Ukrainians were
bitter over the forced conversions to Catholicism led by the Jesuits and the
unscrupulous taxes collected by some Jews for the nobles. The Jews managed the Ukrainian estates of the
absentee Polish landlords. This volatile mixture of nationalism, religion and
economic exploitation set the stage for the Cossack uprising. During the reign
of Vladislav IV, the Zaporozhin Cossacks lived in a semi-autonomous kingdom
called Sitch. Led by their leader - or Hetman - Chemielniki, they decided to
avenge the people's rights. Their victories over the Polish army encouraged the
serfs to join them. The Jews were even more hated than the Poles and were
massacred in almost every town. In the ten tumultuous years that followed, over
seven hundred Jewish communities were destroyed and between one hundred and
five hundred thousand Jews lost their lives.
1738: Abraham De Leon and his wife
gave birth to Isaac De Leon
1740: New York native Isaac Lev, “a
merchant and trader” was naturalized in New York City today after which he “went
to England in 1756 but returned to Philadelphia I 1756.
1759: Following a mass baptism of
Sabbatians at Lvov, today Jacob Frank and his wife were baptized “under the
patronage of the King of Poland” in the cathedral at Warsaw following which the
Catholic Church rejected “the request of the Frankists that they be allowed to continue to live
separately from other Christians and that they be permitted to wear Jewish
clothing, to keep their sidelocks, avoid pork, to rest on Saturday as well as
Sunday to retain use of the Zohar and other works of the Kabbalah.
1766: In Philadelphia, Elizabeth
Whitlock and Moses Mordecai gave birth to Joseph Mordecai, the husband of
Esther Marache with whom he had seven children.
1777: Richea Hart and New York City
native Abraham Mendes Seixas, the parents of Moses Mendes Seixas were married
today in Charleston, SC.
1783: In Amsterdam, “Marianne
Witzenhausen-Italianer” and Marcus Koster gave birth to Eva Marchu Koster the
wife of Daniel Levie Woudhuijsen with whom she had three children.
1792(3rd of Kislev,
5553): Zipporah Phillips Noah, the daughter of Jonas and Rebecca Mendes
“Machado” Phillips, and the wife of Manuel Noah with whom she had two children
– Mordecai Manuel Noah and Judith Noah – passed away today after which she was
buried Coming Street Cemetery in Charleston, SC.
1795; David Nathan married Sarah
Isaacs at the Great Synagogue today.
1804(15th of Kislev,
5565): First observance Purim of Abraham Danzig which is also called
Pulverpurim or Powder Purim. Memorial Day established for himself and his
family by Abraham Danzig, to be annually observed by fasting on the 15th of
Kislew and by feasting on the evening of the same day in commemoration of the
explosion of a powder-magazine at Wilna in 1804. By this accident thirty-one
lives were lost and many houses destroyed, among them the home of Abraham
Danzig, whose family and Abraham himself were all severely wounded, but escaped
death (see Danzig, Abraham ben Jehiel). Danzig decreed that on the evening
following the 15th of Kislew a meal should be prepared by his family to which
Talmudic scholars were to be invited, and alms should be given to the poor.
During the feast certain psalms were to be read, and hymns were to be sung to
the Almighty for the miraculous escape from death.
1808(28th of Cheshvan,
5569): Five-year-old Jacob Henriques, the Kingston Jamica born of Abraham
Quixano Henriques, Esq and Leah Rachel Henriques passed away today.
1817: Copper manufacturer Harmon
Hendricks, the son of Uriah Henricks, one of the founders of Congregation
Shearith Israel and his Frances Isaacs, the daughter of Joshua and Brandy
Isaacs gave birth to Hannah Henricks.
1821(23rd of Cheshvan,
5582): Abram Myer, the co-owner of a ship’s chandlery who had returned to
Norfolk after having spent the summer in Baltimore where he had gone to escape
the Yellow Fever Epidemic, passed away after which “he was buried across the
Eastern Branch of the Elizabeth River on land recently set aside for a Jewish
cemetery.”
1823: Two days after he had passed
away, “Issacher bar Yehuda” was buried today at the “Brady Street Jewish
Cemetery.”
1829: In Liverpool, Harriet and
Moses Samuel gave birth to Walter Samuel, the husband of Harriet Samuel and father
of Evelyn White; Arthur Harrington Samuel; Florence Raife; Samuel Edgar and
Lucille Samuel.
1829: In London, Benjamin Barent
Cohen, the son of Levi Barent Cohen and Lydia Barent-Cohen, and his wife
Justina Sebag Cohen, gave birth to the Right Honorable Arthur Joseph Cohen.
1835: Alexander Davis married Anne Solomons
at the Western Synagogue today.
1838: In Mainz, Lazarus and Eleonore
Hallgarten gave birth to Charles Hallgarten, the husband of Elise Mainzer who
followed in his father’s footsteps as an American banker at Hallgarten &
Company.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1908/04/21/105004782.pdf
1842: In Cincinnati, Ohio, Lamle
‘Lewis’ and Judith Einstein gave birth to Edwin Einstein who was the
Congressman from New York’s 7th district from 1879 until 1881.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/EEinstein.html
1843: Joseph Jonas, the Exeter, UK
born son of Annie and Benjamin Jonas and his wife Martha Jonas gave birth to
Michael Benjamin Jonas.
1844: Birthdate of Sir Benjamin
Louis Cohen, Baronet, British businessman and Conservative politician.
1845: Sir George Grey, who hired
Samuel Joseph, an Anglo-Jew from London as his interpreter” began serving today
as the third Governor of New Zealand.
1846: In Exeter, Devon, Eliza and
Isaac Lazarus gave birth to Julia Lazarus the wife of Louis Abelson.
1847: In South Carolina, Adolf and
Adeline Moses Brady gave birth to Isaiah Abram Brady, the resident of Atlanta,
GA and husband of Isabella Abrams Brady.
1847: “After passing the exams of
the U.S. Navy’s Medical Department,” 25-year-old Phineas Jonathan Horowtiz, a
graduate of the University of Maryland and the Jefferson Medical College in
Philadelphia, was appointed Assistant Surgeon today after which he was posted
to the Gulf Squardron.
1849: Birthdate of Ukrainian native Maximilian
Bern, the son of a German physician and husband of Austrian actress Olga
Wolbruck who starved to death in post-war Berlin because his novels and other
writings did not provide enough money to support himself. (Some sources show
November 11)
1849: Birthdate of French banker and
horse breeder Maurice Ephrussi, the native of Odessa who was part of the
“Euphrussi family” and the husband of Beatrice de Rothschild, the daughter of
Alphonse de Rothschild
1851: Birthdate of Austrian critic
and journalist Anton Bettelheim.
1851: Reverend Henry
Giles delivered a lecture before the Mercantile Library Association entitled
"The Greek Man: or the Man of Culture" in which he compared the
ancient Greeks to the Jews. Among other things he said that "Among men of
the higher races, the Hebrew man and the Greek man stand, perhaps, the most in
contrast. The spirit of the Hebrew man went upward; the faculties of the Greek
man went outward. In one was the idea of the divine: in the other, the
idea of the Human. The Hebrew man abhorred all image of God; the Greek
man had no Got but in an image...The worship of the Hebrew ascended to a single
and supreme object; the worship of the Greek went diffusively abroad...The mere
form of the Hebrew ritual was eminently ceremonial...the appeal was with a
sublime and sacramental meaning of which that of the Greek had nothing...the
Hebrew life was developed through faith
and governed by authority. The Greek life was developed
through imagination and was governed by art.
1852: At the Paris Observatory, Hermann
Goldschmidt confirmed his observations of November 15 that had led to the
discovery of Asteroid 21 Lutetia.
1853: “Alsey Harris” and Abraham Ellis gave birth to Jane Ellis.
1854(27th of Cheshvan, 5615): Chayei Sarah
1856: German born, Cincinnati, OH, businessman and civic leader Julius
Frieberg and his wife Duffie Frieberg gave birth to their first child, Minnie
Frieberg who became Minnie Ranshoff when she married Dr. Joseph Ransofhoff.
1856: In Lancaster, PA, Congregation
Shaarai Shomayim was incorporated today with Jacob Herzog serving aas the first
president.
1857(1st of Kislev,
5618): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
1858: At New York’s Congregation
B’nai Jeshurun, popularly known as the Greene Street Synagogue, Rabbi Morris
Raphall preached a Thanksgiving Day Sermon following the afternoon service
based on the words of the Psalmist, “Thank ye the Lord, for He is good; His
mercy endureth forever.” In his sermon,
the Rabbi noted that the Governor’s Thanksgiving Proclamation had been written
in such a manner that it did not offend the Jews making this a day that
fulfilled the words of the Psalm, “How good, how beautiful it is for brethren
to dwell together in unity.
1858: A Thanksgiving Day service was
held today at Congregation Shearith Israel on Crosby Street. The service began at 11 a.m. and featured a
sermon by Dr. Fischel based on the words of the Psalmist, “Except the Lord
build the house, they labor in vain who build it; except the Lord keep the
city, the watchman walketh but in vain.”
1859: Today, the Jewish Chronicle
published an advertisement “for a German Lady to teach in her own language and
to give instruction in Hebrew” from a
“Ladies’ school” in Dover “where the number of pupils is small and where there
are resident French and English Governesses.
1862: During the Civil War, James
Goldsmith who go from Corporal to Sergeant during his three year hitch, began
his service to with Company H of the 163rd Regiment which was part
of the Eighteenth Cavalry
1863: King Christian IX of Denmark decided to sign
the November constitution, which declared Schleswig as part of Denmark, what
was seen by the German Confederation as a violation of the London Protocol and
lead to the German–Danish war of 1864. If you look at history in the long haul,
The Prussian war with the Danes was the first of a series of conflicts
ultimately led to the creation of Modern Germany. In other words, there is a line from war with
the Danes, to war with the Austrians, to war with France in 1870, to World War
I to World War II and the Holocaust.
1864(19th of Cheshvan,
5625): Jacob Weil the German educator and author from Frankfort-on-the-Main who
was the father Professor Henri Weil passed away today.
1865(1st of Kislev, 5626):
Rosh Chodesh Kislev observed for the first time in a united United States.
1867(20th of Cheshvan,
5628): Leopold Dukas, the twelve-day old son of Leopold and Magdalena Madel
Dukas passed away today.
1869: In New York City, Rabbi James
K. Gutheim delivered a Thanksgiving Day sermon at Temple Emanu-El based on
Isaiah, XXXV, 17.
1869: A group of dissident members
of “Congregations Beaith Israel and Beth Elhoim” in Brooklyn including Jacob
Wechsler, S.L. Moses, Simon Sondheim and Abraham L. Bass, all of whom were
“sympathetic to the Reform movement” met today and formed Temple Israel which
initially held services in rooms rented from the YMCA on the corner of Gallatin
Place and Fulton Street.
1870(24th of Cheshvan,
5631): Seventy-seven-year-old Rachel Jacobs, the Savanah born daughter of
Abraham Jacobs and the wife of Samuel Barnet whom she married in 1822 passed
away today in New York City.
1871: The British Medical Journal
reported today that Henry Behrend was the first Chairman of the Jews’ Deaf and
Dumb Home “founded in 1863 by Baroness Mayer de Rothschild as a schoolor where
resident Jewish children could learn to speak” and William Van Praggh, “the
grandfather of chemist Gordon Van Praggh” was the Director,
1872: Two days after his demise, 87-year-old
Emanuel Levie Goldsmith, the Dutch born son of Levie Emanuel Goudsmit and
Magdalena Hartog Goudsmit and the husband of Alijda Joseph Joel Goldsmith was
buried at Beth Olam Cemetery in Queens County, NY.
1873(28th of Cheshvan,
5634): Sixty-four-year-old Adeline Lyon Moses, the Charleston, SC daughter of Rachel
and Joseph Moses, the wife of Levi Isaiah Moses and “mother of Emily Touro Nathan; Sarah A. Moses; Alfred
Huger Moses; Joseph Winthrop Moses; Rosanna Cecilia Moses; Mordecai Lyon Moses;
Judah Touro Moses; Grace Aguilar Moses and Henry Clay Moses” passed away today
in Montgomery, AL.
1873: “Give a Dog a Bad Name” by
Anglo-English playwright Leopold Davis Lewis was published today.
1874: Rabbi De Sola Mendes delivered
the first in a series of six lectures on Hebrew poetry at the Lyric Hall in
Manhattan.
1875: The Cleveland (Ohio) Herald
reported that an unnamed young woman living on the city’s west side has
canceled her wedding. The bride assumed
that her future husband, a local doctor, was a Roman Catholic. In fact he is a Jew who regularly attends
services at his synagogue. The young
woman sent word that she would not marry him unless he renounced his Judaism;
something that he does not appear to be willing to do.
1876: In New York City, Fanny
Shevelson and Harris Rogers gave birth to NYU trained attorney Gustavus A.
Roders, the husband of Elinor Tauszig, a partner in the law firm of Rogers and
Rogers, a lecturer on law at CCNY and a president of the Jewish Center as well
as a trustee of congregations B’nai Israel and Shearith Israel
1878(22nd of Cheshvan,
5639): William Moultrie Moses, the son of Columbia S.C. native Jacob Moses, the
husband of Penina S. Moses whom he married in 1865 and was the father of
Albert, William, Montefiore, Stanford and Lionel Moses passed away today.
1878: It was reported today that
during the recent Congressional elections in Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan
delivered a speech opposing the candidacy of Colonel William Lowe in which he
described Charles E. Mayer, the United States District Attorney and a Lowe
supporter as being a “Jew dog.” The attack on Mayer resulted in many Jews who
had opposed Lowe to support him in his bid for election. Lowe, who was opposed by the Bourbon Machine,
won the election. Morgan was a bigot who sought to pass legislation legalizing
lynching an repealing the 15th Amendment. Mayer served as U.S.
District Attorney from 1876 through 1870.
1879(3rd Kislev, 5640): Thirty-six-year-old
William Moultrie Moses, the Georgia born son of Jacob Isaiah Moses and Rinah J.
Ottolengui Moses and the husband of Penina Septima Moses Robison with whom he
had three children – Albert William and Stanford – passed away today.
1879: Bernard Williams, a Jew born
in Poland now living in New Orleans, was one of the witnesses who testified
before the Senate Sub-Committee looking into allegations of irregularities
regarding the elections held in the Crescent City’s Seventh War in 1876. Allegations concerning voter fraud were a
major issue in the South following the Civil War as the “Bourbons” sought to
return to power by disenfranchising newly freed slaves and poor whites who
would not support them.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9804E3DF163EE63BBC4152DFB7678382669FDE
1880(15th of Kislev, 5641): Arthur
Lieberman, a Jew who had fled Russia to avoid arrest by the authorities took
his own life today in Syracuse, NY.
https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Lieberman_Aharon_Shemuel
1881: Philologist Phineas Mordell,
the son Kovno born son of Malka Garber and Bezalel Mordell and husband of Annie
Feller arrived in the United States where he “began research work in Hebrew Grammar
and under the encouragement of Rabbi Marcus Jastrow and Mayber Sulzberger
published articles written in Hebrew, on Hebrew Grammer in Hashiloah.
1882(7th of Kislev,
5643): Parashat Vayetzei
1883: It was reported today that the
Lord Mayor of London has received telegrams from Jews in the United States and
Germany congratulating him on his decision to not let Herr Stoeckel, the
anti-Semitic German religious leader speak at Mansion House.
1883: It was reported today that
Herr Stoeckel, the anti-Semitic German minister, has had numerous offers to
speak before sympathetic audiences in London.
1883: “Morris Ranger’s Career”
published today traces the rise and fall of this native of Hesse-Cassel who
joined the Liverpool Exchange and became the “Napoleon of the Cotton
Speculators” before suffering financial reverses in the amount of £10,000,000.
1883: “Gossip of the Theatres”
published today contained a clarification issued by Daniel Frohman, the Jewish
American theatrical producer, expects “The Strangler” to run for another seven
or eight weeks at the New Park Theatre.
This play is a collaborative effort of all three Frohman brothers -
Daniel, Charles and Gustave.
1883: Birthdate of Chicago native
Milton S. Yondorf “the president of the S. Yondorf and Company, real estate and
mortgage bankers.
1883(18th of Cheshvan,
5644): Sixty-four-year-old James Abraham Theodore Cohen Stuart, the Dutch born
son of James Abraham Cohen-Stuart and Petronella Wilhelmina Stuart and the
husband of Cornelia Beijerinck passed away today.
1884(30th of Cheshvan,
5645): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
1884: It was reported today that the
Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society for Children is providing lodging for
“nearly 400 children who are homeless waifs.”
1884: The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian
Society for Children sponsored a fund raiser featuring theatrical and dramatic
performances by the Thalia Theatre Company
1885: “A New Jewish Platform”
published today lists the 8 points of what will become known as the Pittsburgh
Platform of Reform Judaism – that group’s controlling document for decades to
come.
1885: The Hebrew Asylum Ball was
held tonight at the Academy of Music in Brooklyn, NY.
1886: Chester A. Arthur, 21st
President of the United States passed away.
Elected as Vice President, Arthur became President after James Garfield
was assassinated by a disappointed office seeker. Arthur was one of the least distinguished
personages to occupy the White House. In
1882, when the United States finally ratified the Red Cross treaty, President
Arthur appointed Adolphus Simeon Solomons as one of three delegates to
represent the country at the Geneva Congress, where he was elected
vice-president. Solomons was a successful Washington businessman who played an
active role in the secular and Jewish communities
1888: “Searching For Her Husband” published today tells the story of Mrs.
Hirschbeck, a Jew from Warsaw who has arrived in Buffalo, NY, her latest stop
on a five year quest to find her husband, who is now known as Nathan Cohen. According to her, he was a dissipated man who
deserted her and their five children.
1890: A conference of Protestant clergymen met today at the University of
the City of New York where attendees spoke in favor of keeping religion out of
the public schools because Roman Catholics and Jews “were partners in the
public schools” and “their children were entitled to the benefit of
them…without the liability of having” to change “their faith in the religion of
their fathers.” The ministers felt it
was the responsibility of churches and homes to provide moral and religious
training.
1890: Birthdate of architect Maurice
Courland who was responsible for designing several Jewish buildings including
Temple Beth El in Rockaway Park and the Flatbush Jewish Center and who was the
husband of Rebecca Graff Courland and the father of Raphael and Nehama Courland
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1957/11/18/90854339.html?pageNumber=31
1891: Tonight, in New York, Carnegie Hall will be transformed into an
Oriental Bazaar such as those found in Palestine where items will be sold in
various “stalls” to raise funds for the Louis Down-Town Sabbath and Daily
School.
1891(17th of Cheshvan, 5652): Eighty-three-year-old Amalia
Bamberger passed away today after which she interred at the Indianapolis Hebrew
Congregation Cemetery.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/11/18/118441826.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
1892 (28th of Cheshvan, 5653)): Seventy-six year old Hebrew scholar
Senior Sachs passed away in Paris. Born
in Russia he was trained in Talmud by his father Rabbi Tzemach Sachs. After studying in Berlin during the 1840’s he
arrived in the French capital in 1856 where he worked as a private librarian
and produced several works including Kanfe Yonah
1893: As two more Spanish regiments arrive Mellila to deal with the Rif
Berbers “numbers of Jews continue to leave” the Spanish city on the coast of
Morocco.
1893: In Morocco, 12 Spanish Jews were each “sentenced to six years’
penal servitude” after a court martial found them guilty of keeping rifles
intended for the Riffians in their houses.
(The Riffians were a group of Berbers who were rebelling against their
European masters)
1894: In New York, Rabbi Joseph Silverman delivered a talk on “What Is
The Attitude of Judaism to Christianity and Other Religions” which is “the
first of a series of lectures on ‘Answers to Jewish and Christian Inquirers.”
1894: The Glasgow Herald published a theory propounded by one of its
readers “that the Japanese are…descendants of the ten lost tribes” basing “his
arguments on linguistic considerations point out that ‘Hiroshima’ has a very
strong resemble to the Hebrew word for Jerusalem and that ‘Tokyo’ may be a
corruption of ‘Tekoa.’”
1895: Birthdate of Galicia native Jacob Kalich, “the Yiddish theatrical
producer, playwright and actor” who was the husband of Molly Picon.
1895: It was announced today that “Dr. Ahlwardt, the anti-Semitic leader
of Berlin, Germany, is making arrangements to sail for the United States next
month to deliver lectures” at the
invitation of “a committee of German Americans in Milwaukee.” Given his nickname “Jew-baiter” there is
little doubt as to the subject matter of the talks.
1896: Fannie and Irving Dittenhoefer married today in New York City.
1896: In Cleveland, Ohio, Micahelis Machol, the Rabbi at the Reform
Temple on Scoville Avenue protested “against that portion of President
Cleveland’s Thanksgiving proclamation of Christ as the mediator between man and
God.”
1896: Following today discussion of the Report of the Committee on Motto
and Badge and a report of the Committee on the New Constitution, the delegates
at the National Council of Jewish Women changed the name of their organization
to the Council of Jewish Woman after Mrs. Mendola de Sola of Canada protested
“the use of the word national” following which the delegates then adopted
“Faith and Humanity” as their motto.
1897: Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, “who has forced the government to reopen
the Dreyfus case did not attend today’s meeting of the Senate so that he could
meet with President Faure who told him that “I give you my word of honor that”
the documents in the Dreyfus case that have been brought to my notice “contain
irrefutable proofs of guilty” and “I beg you to cease this campaign by you are
comprising the republic and yourself to no purpose.”
1897: In Little Rock, AR, “Emanuel V. Benjamin and Rachel Goldsmith” gave
birth to the New Orleans educated (Isidore Newman School) Harvard graduate
Edward Bernard Benjamin, WWI Army officer and husband of Blanche Sternberger,
who was a successful businessman and generous philanthropist.
1897: In Albany, Chief Examiner Fowler of the State Civil Commission
announced that candidates for the upcoming examination of interpreter for the
First Judicial District must be able to interpret several languages including
“Hebrew jargon.” (This may be a reference to Yiddish)
1897: The Relief Committee of the Board of Guardians is scheduled to meet
this afternoon in London.
1898: William Sparger conducted the Sabbath eve service at Temple
Emanu-El which was a prelude to a Thanksgiving Service and a celebration of Dr.
Guastav Gottheil’s silver anniversary as the Rabbi of New York’s leading Reform
congregation.
1898: It was reported today that in New Orleans, “Felix J. Dreyfous and
several others were to draw up an ordinance calling for an election in the near
future which would give the people an opportunity to vote on the two and
one-half mill tax for sewerage and drainage” which led to the upgrade of the
sewerage and water systems which was the crowning victory during his tenure as
a New Orleans City Councilman.
1898: Following the meeting of Herzl and Kaiser Wilhelm II outside of
Jerusalem, the London Daily Mail wrote today that: “An Eastern Surprise
Important Result of the Kaiser’s Tour Sultan and Emperor Agreed in Palestine
Benevolent Sanction Given to the Zionist Movement One of the most important
results, if not the most important, of the Kaiser’s visit to Palestine is the
immense impetus it has given to Zionism, the movement for the return of the
Jews to Palestine. The gain to this cause is the greater since it is immediate,
but perhaps more important still is the wide political influence which this
Imperial action is like to have. It has not been generally reported that when
the Kaiser visited Constantinople Dr. Herzl, the head of the Zionist movement,
was there; again when the Kaiser entered Jerusalem he found Dr. Herzl there.
These were no mere coincidences, but the visible signs of accomplished facts.”
Reverend William Henry Hechler, an Anglican clergyman who supported the Jewish
return to Palestine, was instrumental in arranging the meeting between the
Zionist leader and the German monarch.
1899: Birthdate of Conductor Eugene Ormandy. Born in Budapest,
Hungary, Ormandy was a child prodigy. He
began playing the violin at the age of 4 and entered the Royal Academy at the
age of 5. Ormandy’s father dreamed of
his son becoming a great violinist. So
he was disappointed when Ormandy pursued a career that would lead him to become
one of the world’s greatest conductors.
For most of his career, Ormandy was the conductor of the Philadelphia
Orchestra. This was no small
accomplishment since he was following in the footsteps of the world-renowned
Arturo Toscanini. He passed away in
1985.
1899: “Notes and News” published
today described the decision of Harper & Brothers to published a second
edition of The Jewish Question and the Mission of the Jews which include “much additional material”
including an article on Captain Dreyfus. Originally published anonymously, the
second edition will include the name of the author, Dr. Charles Waldstein,
Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge, an American born Jew who graduated
from Columbia.
1900: It was reported today that “M.
Warley Platzek,” who “was one of the first Directors of the Eductional Alliance
and is a director of both the Montefiore Home and Director of the Mount Sinai
Training School for Nurses” has been appointed to the Tammany Hall Anti-Vice
Committee
1901: Approximately three hundred
young, most of whom were members of the Hebrew Education Alliance attended a
dinner tonight in Seminole Hall “in honor of Samuel Greenbaum, Judge-elect of
the state Supreme Court.”
1901: In New York City, Kate Weiss
and Philip Fuchs gave birth to violinist and composer Lillian Fuchs a member of
the Marianne Kneisel String Quartet and the Helen Teschner Tas String Quartet
who made her New York debut in 1925 and who often performed with brothers,
violinist Joseph Fuchs and cellist Harry Fuchs.
https://jwa.org/thisweek/oct/05/1995/death-of-lillian-fuchs-one-of-best-string-players-in-america
1902: Birthdate of Manhattan native
Abraham J. Gellinoff, Justice of New York Supreme Court and husband of Jeanne
Lepler Gellinoff whom he married in 1927.
1903: Today, “the correspondent of The Times (of London) at Moscow says
that such information as has been allowed to appear in the newspapers in regard
to the Kishineff trial has been scanned by both the Jewish and Christian
sections of the population” and that “since April nearly 200 officials have
been uninterruptedly engaged in preparatory work in connection with the trial
of the persons charged with participation in the massacre of Jews.”
1904: Birthdate of Varsovie native
Abraham Narvara who was shipped on June 28, 1942 on a convoy bound for Auschwitz.
1904: According to the will which
was filed for probate today, “Solomon Rothfeld, who was a member of the firm of
Rothfeld, Stern & Co., left an estate valued at almost one million dollars
and that his bequests included a $5,000 bequest to Mt. Sinai Hospital.
1905: “A tract of eighteen acres”
was purchased for new buildings at the Hebrew Union College.
1905: Cyrus L. Sulzberger, Secretary
of the fund being raised by the National Relief Committee said this afternoon
that “if the subscriptions now in the mail equal in volume those of the last
few days we out by tomorrow night have $500,000 to apply to the relief of the
sufferers from the massacres in Russia.”
1905: A letter published in Paris
from a Frenchwoman in Odessa gave “a graphic description of the Jewish
massacres” in which she estimated the dead at 8,000 and the wounded at 12,000.
1905: “Arnold Kohn, Vice President
of the State Bank on Grand Street, near Norfolk Street announced” today” that
the total amount of money received at the bank for the last six days for the
aid of the sufferers from the Russian massacres was $13, 359.38.”
1905: Nineteen-year-old Isaac
Gillman and his twenty-year-old sister Rebecca who came to the United States
two years ago gave their bankbook which showed a balance of one hundred dollars
to Arnold Kohn and “asked him to see that their mother and father who are in
Odessa received the money so that they might come to America.
1905: As of today, a grand total of
$369, 870.04 has been raised to for the relief of the Jews suffering from the
massacres in Russia.
1905: “The Russian Jews” published
today provides a review of The Russian Jew In The United States edited by Dr.
Charles S. Bernheimer which “is a compilation by many hand that undertakes to
show what the Russian Jews have been doing and are doing in America…”
1905: “25,000 Jew Murdered”
published today described “a cablegram that Clarence I. De Sola, President of
the Zionist movement in Canada has received from General President Wolssohn of
Odessa” stating “that 25,000 Jews have been murdered and 100,000 wounded in the
recent outrages in Russia.”
1906: Birthdate of German novelist
Klaus Mann. Klaus Mann was the son of
Thomas Mann and Katia Pringsheimz.
Pringshmeimz was Jewish which according to Halachah means Kalus Mann was
Jewish as well. He was also part of the unit known as “Ritchie Boys.”
1906: Birthdate of biologist George
Wald, American biochemist who received (with Haldan K. Hartline of the U.S. and
Ragnar Granit of Sweden) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1967 for
his work on the chemistry of vision
1906: In Brooklyn, Leopold Wintner,
the Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Beth Elohim and Canto Leon Kourick
officiated at the funeral of Raphael Benjamin the Rabbi of Beth Elhoim who was
the subject of the eulogy delivered by Rabbi Joseph Silverman of Temple Beth
Emmanuel in Manhattan.
1907: Birthdate of Martin John
Gilman, a relative of the Jewish pioneer who founded his native Gilman, CT and
who played basketball for the University of Connecticut Huskies in the
mid-1920’s.
1907: In Baltimore, at the Lloyd
Street Synagouge, Rabbi Levinson is scheduled to officiate at funeral services
for Aba Ascher Levin the father of eight sons and six
daughters, after which he was buried at B’nai Israel Congregation Cemetery.
1907: In Memphis, The Tennessee
Volunteers coached by Izzy Levene defeated the football team from the
University of Arkansas.
1908: In Warsaw, Hebrew education
and Zionist Yechiel Heilperin and his wife gave birth to Uriel Heilprin who
went to Palestine in 1921 where he changed his last name to Shelah but was
better known by his nom de plume Yonatan Ratosh under which name he was awarded
the Prime Minister’s Prize for his literary accomplishments.
1908: Birthdate of Newark, NJ born NYU
graduate Rabbi Bertram Klausner, the
husband of Helen Rose Berger Klausner who “served B'nai El Congregation, St.
Louis, Missouri for over 18 years (1953-1974).”
1909: “Bequests to five Hebrew
institutions in New York, amounting in all to $40,000 were made in the will of
retired banker Emanuel Einstein, which “was filed today in Surrogates Court.”
1910: It was reported today that
Rabbi Stephen S. Wise had delivered a speech at the annual dinner of the
Twilight Club where he was the guest honor during which “he predicted that New
York would see a law passed for equal suffrage within a few years and that when
it comes it will be followed immediately by great strides toward social justice
for women which is now denied.”
1911(27th of Cheshvan,
5672): Parashat Chayei Sara
1911: “A dispatch to the Reich from
Kiev sys that the Governor of the province has notified the police authorities
that when ‘termless” passports are present by Jews they are to be taken from
them” and the Jews are to be given “annual passports” which means “Jews will be
treated as foreigners have no right to ‘termless’ passports.”
1912: In Baltimore, MD, Rabbi
Charles A. Rubenstein officiated at the funeral of Felix Graetz, who had been a
patient at the Jewish Home for the Consumptive and was “the son of the late
Professor Heinrich Graetz,” the author of the multi-volume History of the
Jews and the brother of Professor Leo Graetz.
1913: It was reported today that a
mass meeting will be held on November 19 “in the auditorium of the Educational
Alliance under the auspices of the Young Israel” which will mark the start of
year in which 25 lectures are to be given by “prominent Jewish citizens.”
1914: In Far Rockaway, NY Rabbi
Stephen S. Wise addressed a group of orthodox and reform Jews at meeting at
Temple Israel where $3,000 was raised to provide “relief for the Jews of
Palestine.”
1914: The Central Committee for the
Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War announced today that as of today it
had raised $19,463.
1915: “Turkey Is Offering Advantages
To Jews” published today quotes the offer being extended to Jews which will
give them “the advantages and exemptions” that “during the last century the
Ottoman Government has accorded to Mohammedan immigrants come to Turkey from
Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Bosnia including “the acquisition of
Ottoman nationality” as well as “immunity for a certain period of time, from
payment of taxes and military.”
1915: Forty-four-year-old Abraham
Ber Goldenson, the Lithuanian born St. Louis Rabbi “became a naturalized United
States citizen” today.
1915: In his address about the World
War entitled “Democracy vs. Sovereignty” Darwin P. Kingsley note that in this
war nationalism has overridden all other considerations so that “Christians are
fights Christians; Jews are killing Jews; Moslems are against Moslems; whites
are murdering whites; men of color are fighting their own kind.”
1916: The Battle of the Somme, an
exercise in futility and stupidity that was a hallmark of the British General
Staff which is brilliantly described in The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the
First World War by Sir Martin Gilbert, came to an end today.
1916: Today, Jewish leaders in New
York City took a great deal of interest in “a dispatch to the New York Times from its Berlin
correspondent describing the promise of freedom in religion and in civil life
to the Jews of Poland and telling of the enthusiasm with which Polish Jews had
received this news.”
1916: Dr. S.M. Melamed, the editor
of The American Jewish Chronicle
announced today plans for a national loan for the Jews of Europe that differed
from that proposed by Rabbi Judah L. Magnes because among other things it would
charge interest – a fact that Melamed said “would create a sense of
self-interest and responsibility that would be an uplift in the work of
reconstruction in Russia and Poland.”
1917: At a time when Reform Judaism
is trying to observe Shabbat on Sunday, Dr. Emil G. Hirsch is scheduled to
deliver a sermon on “Philanthropy and Religion” at Sinai Temple in Chicago.
1917: In Cincinnati, OH, twenty-four-year-old
Dr. John Reis Stark, the son of Sigmar and Lily (Reis) Stark and member of the
Plum Street Temple married Louise Johnson while serving as an instructor of
gynecology at the University of Cincinnati.
1917: Rabbi Joseph Stolz is
scheduled to conduct services this morning “with the co-operation of the Isaiah
Junior Congregation and Religious School where he will deliver a sermon on “And
the Elder Shall Serve the Younger.”
1917: In Chicago the “Zion
Congregation and the Woman’s Society” are scheduled to “give a reception and
entertainment in honor of their new members” this evening that will feature a
performance of “The Burden” by the Sinai Center Players.
1917: In the hope of ensuring that
the Ottoman army had little time to regroup or construct defenses which, given
more time, might prove impregnable, while Allenby was at the British XXI
Corps headquarters at El Kastine, the decision was made to closely follow
the Ottoman Seventh Army into the Judean Hills.
1917: Saul J. Cohn is scheduled to speak on “What the recent British
Declaration Means to the Jews” before the Harlem Forum at Wadleigh High School
this morning.
1917: “Denouncing a false report in
the European and American newspapers that Jews were leading and support the
Bolshevik movement in Russia, Herman Bernstein, in an address before the
Institutional Synagogue…declared” today “that the attempt to associate the Jews
with the Bolsheviki was merely another expression of anti-Semitic propaganda.”
1917: Yale University Professor William Lyon Phelps is scheduled to speak
on “The Drama of Today” at this morning’s service at the Free Synagogue in
Carnegie Hall.
1917: This evening, Henri La Fotanine is scheduled to speak on “The Case
for Belgium” at the Sunday Evening Forum of the Free Synagogue.
1917: This evening, “three orphan boys who are wards of the Hebrew National
Orphan House” are scheduled to the guests of honor “at a dinner arranged by the
Ladies’ Auxiliary of the House at Beethoven Hall.”
1917: The 75th Division with the Australian and Yeomanry Mounted Divisions
began their entry into the Judean Hills with the objective of capturing and
securing the heights on either side of the main Jaffa to Jerusalem Road at
Amwas, so the 75th Division could advance up the road and into the Judean Hills
1917: The American Jewish Congress”
which is to work “for the attainment of full rights for the Jewish people in
all lands where such rights are denied them and which is to work for the
economic reconstruction of the Jewish communities in the war zones after the
war is over” which was originally supposed to meet on September 2 is scheduled
to open today in Washington, D.C.
1917: Eleven young men in West
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded Sigma
Alpha Rho(ΣAP) the oldest, continuously run, independent
Jewish High School Fraternity.
1918: It was reported today that
Charles Urban, the English photography pioneer, who has just arrived in New
York aboard the White Star liner Magnetic said that his films of the World War
included “some fine pictures of “General Allenby’s advance across the plains of
Esdraelon and by the Sea of Galilee to Damascus.”
1918: It was reported today that
Major Solomon Lowenstein described the need for “large reconstructing work in
Palestine” where “large sections of Jews in the Holy Land were utterly
helpless.”
1918: “British Work in Holy Land”
published today described the how the “troops were cleaning up Jerusalem” and
bringing water “to the Holy City from the springs fifteen miles away, whence
the Romans under Governor Pontius Pilate conveyed it in stone aqueducts nearly
2,000 years ago to Jerusalem.”
1918: It was reported that the
appeal of Dr. Nathan Krass of Central Synagogue has collected over $7,000 for
the United War Work Campaign.
1919(25th of Cheshvan, 5680): Sixty-year-old
German mathematician Adolf Hurwitz, the husband of Ida Samuel who helped
develop the Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion (which I do not pretend to
understand) passed away today in Zurich
1919: Birthdate of Polish born
dental student Bronek Jakubowicz, better known as Benjamin Jacobs, who survived
Auschwitz thanks to his skill with dental tools that he carried in “a bright
red box” which he called “his passport to survival and who described his
experiences during the Holocaust including the bombing by the British of his
prison ship in 1995 memoir The Dentist of Auschwitz
https://www.doullbooks.com/product/122307
1919: In Chicago, Henrietta Levy and
Harry Walter Jarrow gave birth to MIT graduate Stanley L. Jarrow, the President
of Jarrow Products, the president of Chicago Sinai Congregation and the husband
of Elinor Ruth Feiwell with whom he had one child, Ellen.
1920: In Louisville, KY, The Young
Men’s Hebrew three-day fund-raising driving which has a goal of $50,000 is
scheduled to come to an end today.
1921: “President Warren Harding gave
Rabbi Simon Glazer of Kansas City, Kansas, executive permission to adopt five
children who are now in Romania.” Glazer already has five children of his
own. The orphans lost their mother in
one of the Ukrainian massacres last year and their father died in the United
States. If it had not been for President
Harding’s intervention, current immigration restrictions would have kept the
rabbi from bringing the youngsters to the United States.
1921(17th of Cheshvan): Fifty-six-year-old
journalist and author Micha Josef Berdyczewski passed away in Berlin. Born in Russia, the son of a Rabbi, he wrote
in Hebrew, Yiddish and German. Sdot Micha, the moshav founded in 1955, was
named in his honor
1921: Today there was staged in the
Liberty Theatre through Bernard Young with Clara Young in a main role,
"Hearts of Stone, a melodrama by Israel Rosenberg, lyrics by Tanzman,
music by Sholom Secunda," later put on through Clara Young across the
province under the name, "Natur libe," adapted (without the knowledge
of the author) by Sh. Steinberg.
1922: Fifty-one-year-old Marcel Proust passed away.
“Marcel Proust was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother. He
himself was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin)
and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never practiced that faith and as an
adult could best be described as a mystical atheist, someone imbued with
spirituality who nonetheless did not believe in a personal God, much less in a
savior. Although Jews trace their religion through their mothers, Proust never
considered himself Jewish and even became vexed when a newspaper article listed
him as a Jewish author. His father once warned him not to stay in a certain
hotel since there were "too many" Jewish guests there, and, to be
sure, in Remembrance of Things Past there are unflattering caricatures of the
members of one Jewish family, the Blochs. Jews were still considered exotic,
even "oriental," in France; in 1872 there were only eighty-six
thousand Jews in the whole country. In a typically offensive passage Proust
writes that in a French drawing room "a Jew making his entry as though he
were emerging from the desert, his body crouching like a hyena's, his neck
thrust forward, offering profound `salaams,' completely satisfies a certain
taste for the oriental." Proust never refers to his Jewish origins in his
fiction, although in the youthful novel he abandoned, Jean Santeuil (first
published only in 1952, thirty years after his death), there is a very
striking, if buried, reference to Judaism. The autobiographical hero has
quarreled with his parents and in his rage deliberately smashed a piece of
delicate Venetian glass his mother had given him. When he and his mother are
reconciled, he tells her what he has done: "He expected that she would
scold him, and so revive in his mind the memory of their quarrel. But there was
no cloud upon her tenderness. She gave him a kiss, and whispered in his ear:
`It shall be, as in the Temple, the symbol of an indestructible union.'"
This reference to the rite of smashing a glass during the Orthodox Jewish
wedding ceremony, in this case sealing the marriage of mother to son, is not
only spontaneous but chilling. In an essay about his mother he referred, with
characteristic ambiguity, to "the beautiful lines of her Jewish face,
completely marked with Christian sweetness and Jansenist resignation, turning
her into Esther herself"--a reference, significantly, to the heroine of
the Old Testament (and of Racine's play), who concealed her Jewish identity
until she had become the wife of King Ahasuerus and was in a position to save
her people. The apparently gentile Proust, who had campaigned for Dreyfus and
had been baptized Catholic, was a sort of modern Esther. Despite Proust's
silences and lapses on the subject of his mother's religion, it would be
unfair, especially in light of the rampant anti-Semitism of turn-of-the-century
France, to say that he was unique or even extreme in his prejudice against
Jews. And yet his anti-Semitism is more than curious, given his love for his
mother and given, after her death, something very much like a religious cult
that he developed around her. His mother, out of respect for her parents, had
remained faithful to their religion, and Proust revered her and her relatives;
after her death he regretted that he was too ill to visit her grave and the
graves of her parents and uncle in the Jewish cemetery and to mark each visit
with a stone. More important, although he had many friends among the
aristocracy whom he had assiduously cultivated, nevertheless when he was forced
to take sides during the Dreyfus Affair, which had begun in 1894 and erupted in
1898, he chose to sign a petition prominently printed in a newspaper calling
for a retrial. The Dreyfus Affair is worth a short detour, since it split
French society for many years and it became a major topic in proust's life--and
in Remembrance of Things Past. Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was a Jew and a
captain in the French army. In December 1894 he was condemned by a military
court for having sold military secrets to the Germans and was sent for life to
Devil's Island. The accusation was based on the evidence of a memorandum stolen
from the German embassy in Paris (despite the fact that the writing did not
resemble Dreyfus's) and of a dossier (which was kept classified and secret)
handed over to the military court by the minister of war. In 1896 another
French soldier, Major Georges Picquart, proved that the memorandum had been
written not by Dreyfus but by a certain Major Marie Charles Esterhazy. Yet
Esterhazy was acquitted and Picquart was imprisoned. Instantly a large part of
the population called for a retrial of Dreyfus. On January 13, 1898, the writer
Emile Zola published an open letter, "J'accuse," directed against the
army's general staff; Zola was tried and found guilty of besmirching the
reputation of the army. He was forced to flee to England. Then in September
1898 it was proved that the only piece of evidence against Dreyfus in the
secret military dossier had been faked by Joseph Henry, who confessed his
misdeed and committed suicide. At last the government ordered a retrial of
Dreyfus. Public opinion was bitterly divided between the leftist Dreyfusards,
who demanded "justice and truth," and the anti-Dreyfusards, who led
an anti-Semitic campaign, defended the honor of the army, and rejected the call
for a retrial. The conflict led to a virtual civil war. In 1899 Dreyfus was
found guilty again, although this time under extenuating circumstances--and the
president pardoned him. Only in 1906 was Dreyfus fully rehabilitated, named an
officer once again, and decorated with the Legion of Honor. Interestingly,
Theodor Herzl, the Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper, was so
overwhelmed by the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair that he was
inspired by the prophetic idea of a Jewish state. In defending Dreyfus, Proust
not only angered conservative, Catholic, pro-army aristocrats, but he also
alienated his own father. In writing about the 1890s in Remembrance of Things
Past, Proust remarks that "the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the
Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder." Typically, the
ultraconservative Gustave Schlumberger, a great Byzantine scholar, could give
in his posthumous memoirs as offensive a description of his old friend Charles
Haas (a model for Proust's character Swann) as this: "The delightful
Charles Haas, the most likeable and glittering socialite, the best of friends,
had nothing Jewish about him except his origins and was not afflicted, as far
as I know, with any of the faults of his race, which makes him an exception
virtually unique." It would be misleading to suggest that Proust took his
controversial, pro-Dreyfus stand simply because he was half-Jewish. No, he was
only obeying the dictates of his conscience, even though he lost many highborn
Catholic friends by doing so and exposed himself to the snide anti-Semitic
accusation of merely automatically siding with his co-religionists.”
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Pe-Pu/Proust-Marcel.html
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/white-proust.html
1922: Die Zaubernacht (The Magic Night), a children’s pantomime by Kurt
Weil premiered at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm;
1923: The immigration problem and
anti-Jewish agitation abroad were discussed this “afternoon by members of the
American Jewish Committee at a meeting in the Hotel Astor and by the American
Jewish Congress at the Hotel Pennsylvania” where “the committee took a stand
against any further attempts to restrict immigration, and the congress voted to
send a delegation to Washington to urge the admission of 900 Russian immigrants
in excess of the quota who are awaiting deportation.”
1924: This evening at the Broadway
Central Hotel, Barnard College graduate
Regina M. Bublick, “the daughter of Gedaliah Bublick, the editor of
Jewish Daily News and Mrs. Bublick married Harvard Law School graduate Edward
S. Silver, the son of Mrs. Sarah Silver.
1924: Today “a picture of the life
of the Jew in Eastern Europe was painted
by Louis Marshall of the Emergency Committee on Jewish Refugees, in a radio
talk broadcast tonight from Station WGBS during which Mr. Marshall told of the suffering endured by
50,000 refugees stranded in European seaports and Cuba.
1925: There is consternation in
Budapest today “caused by the decision the decision of the Court of Appeals
reversing the death sentences of Marfy and Marosi who were convicted of
throwing bombs into a Jewish dance hall two years ago, killing nine and wounding
23 others.
1926: In Cleveland, Barnett
Brickner, the Rabbi at Anshe Chesed and Rebecca Ena Aaronson gave birth to
Arthur James Balfour Brickner who gained fame as Rabbi Balfour Brickner the
founder of Washington, D.C. Temple Sinai, one of the city’s leading Reform congregation
whose members included Dr. Jack and Ada Levine and their three children – Judy,
Dale and Nancy.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/31/AR2005083102485.html
1926: In Manchester, UK, Nelly Ades
and Abraham Sciama, both of whose families “traced their roots back to the
ancient Jewish community of Aleppo, gave girth to physicist Dennis William
Siahous Sciama
http://www.sissa.it/ap/activity/sciama.php
1927: Birthdate of Chicagoan Paul
Silverberg, the son of teacher and writer Viola Spolin who gained fame as Paul
Sills the “founding director of The Second City. (As reported by Campbell
Robertson_
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/theater/04sills.html
1927: In Breslau, Germany, Hans
Hubert Pinkus, the son of Max and Hedwig Pinkus and Charlotte Pinkus gave birth
to Freda Maria (Freddie) Pinkus and Johanna Hedwig (Jonnie) Pinkus
1927: Humphrey Bogart divorced his
first wife, the Jewish actress Helen Menken.
(Bogart’s fourth and final wife would also be Jewish)
1928: At Temple Emanu-El Rabbi H.G.
Enlow and Dr. Solomon Lowenstein are scheduled to officiate at the funeral of seventy-two-year-old
Henry Aaron Guinzburg, the Baltimore born son of Caroline and Rabbi Aaron
Guinzburg and the Colonel of Cavalry, aide-de-camp and chief of staff of
Governor Stone of Missouri and the husband of Leonie B. Guinzburg with whom he
had three children – Leonore, Harold and Herminia.
1928: WABC is scheduled to broadcast
the thirty minute “Jewish Program” at 9:30 p.m.
1928: In his sermon this morning at
the Motefiore Congregation in the Bronx, Rabbi Jacob Katz declared that
“America is the first country to give the Jews an opportunity to change their
religion for the better” which stood in stark contrast to past times when
“persecution led the Jew to submit to death rather than to transgress his
faith.”
1929: Featherweight Harry Blitman
fought his 51st bout today, suffering only his third loss at the
Arena in Philadelphia, PA.
1929: According to the report of the
Palestine Committee presented at today’s meeting of Hadassah held in Atlantic
City, NJ, “the outstanding event in Palestine heal work this year has been the
completion an formal opening of the Nathan and Lina Straus health center in
Jerusalem.”
1930: “The admission of Jews into
the Hungarian Order of Heroes was opposed by Minister of Goemboes in an address
at Kechkskemet at the dedication of the banners of this order found by Regent,
Admiral Horthy, in which are enrolled Hungarians selected for the honor by
reason of their distinguish war service.”
1930: “In a cablegram sent yesterday
to David Lloyd George, former Prime Minister of Great Britain and head of the
Liberal party, Rabbi Stephen Wise and Nathan Straus…expressed approval of his
attack on the White Paper in the House of Commons…”
1931: In Amsterdam, a capacity crowd
filled a concert hall where Zionist leader Dr. Chaim Weizmann gave a lecture on
Palestine’s problems.
1931: The first tea this season of
the West End Group of the New York Chapter of Hadassah, the women's Zionist
organization of America, which was attended by 200 women was held this
afternoon in the Crystal Ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
1932: “A tea and reception in honor
of the Yiddish Art Theatre company, of which Maurice Schwartz is director” is
scheduled to “be given this afternoon at the Fifth Avenue Hotel…”
1933(29th of Cheshvan,
5694): Parashat Tolodot
1933: Led by team captain Sid
Gillman Ohio State defeated the University of Wisconsin today.
1933: “Roberta,” a musical with a
score by Jerome Kern opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre for the first of 295
performances.
1933: This evening, “a week before
Thanksgiving, the SPHAS, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association basketball
team took the floor at their home court, the Broadwood Hotel at the corner of
Broad and Wood Streets in Philadelphia” in what “was the first game for the
1933-34 season of the American Basketball League, the premier professional
league of that era.”
1934: In one of those steps that
would eventually lead to the Shoah, the Nazis won the elections in what was
then the “Free City of Danzig.”
1935: In what would turn out to be
one of the many steps that led to WW II and the Shoah, “the League of Nations
sanctions against Italy,” which would have no effect on fascist aggression went
into effect today.
1935: Val Rosing and his Swing Stars
recorded Al Jolson’s “Avalon.”
1936: It was reported today that the
police did not intervene when Jewish students were attacked by anti-Semitic and
fascist mobs after they refused to leave their classes at the University of
Budapest.
1936: Two weeks after meeting with
Hitler, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich, “met with
leading members of the German hierarchy of cardinals to ask them to warn their
parishioners against the errors of communism.”
1937: Establishment of military
courts in Palestine to try civilians.
1937: The Palestine Post
reported that a Jewish farmer, Yehuda Shpanov, was shot in Afula and died four
hours later in the local hospital, where his wife was awaiting the birth of
their child. An official amendment held that "no judgment over the
proceedings of the Military Court shall be called in question or challenged in
any manner whatever by or before any other Court."
1937: The
Palestine Post reported that in Hamburg a baptized Jew, Dr. Theodor
Wohlfahrt, was sentenced to 10 years penal servitude for having married a
gentile and claiming in a German court that it was his right to do so.
1938: Hitler recalls Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, German
ambassador to the United States, after President Franklin Roosevelt recalled
the U.S. ambassador to Germany as part of America’s protest against
Kristallnacht.
1938: The American Virgin Islands Assembly offers the islands
as a haven for Jewish refugees. The American government does not explore this
possibility.
1939: Hans Frank, the governor-general of Occupied Poland,
reiterates Reinhard Heydrich's order of September 21 regarding the
establishment of Judenräte in Jewish ghettos.
1939: The Nazis ordered the Jews of
Cracow to wear a Star of David.
1939: In Lodz, German-occupied
Poland today, the German administrator issued a decree stating that “any Jew
leaving his home without a special permit between 5 P.M. and 8 A.M. may be
punished by death” and “also made punishable by death the failure of any Jew,
irrespective of age or sex to wear a yellow armband. In case of extenuating
circumstance, a money fine of unlimited sixe or imprisonment or both may be
adjudged.”
1939:
At Michie Stadium at West Point, NY Penn State led by their Team Captain Spike
Alter defeated the team of the United States Military Academy.
1939(6th of Kislev,
5700): Sixty-seven-year-old Dr. Jacob Itzhak Niemirower a supporter of Zionism
and the first Chief Rabbi of Romanian Jewry passed away today in Bucharest.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1939/11/19/113371145.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
1940; In Jerusalem Knesset member Yizhar Harari and Dina Neumann
gave birth to Hebrew University-trained theoretical physicist who “was the
President of the Weizmann Institute of Science from 1988 to 2001.’
1940: Samuel Field, the President of
the Hebrew National Orphan Home In Yonkers announced that “twenty-five refugee
children will become wards of the home and that “arrangements for their
‘adoption’ had been completed with the United States Committee for the Care of
European Children.”
1941: “The Forgotten Village,”
directed, edited and co-produced by
Herbert Kline, with music by Hanns Eisler, “the son of a father who “was an atheist
of Jewish descent” was distributed in the United States by Arthur Mayer and
Joseph Burstyn.
1941: J.D. Salinger “wrote to a
young woman in Toronto,” Marjorie Sheard, “to look for a new piece of his in a
coming issue of The New Yorker” which he described as “the first Holden story.”
(As reported by Dave Itzkoff
1941: Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS
General who developed the 8-point Jecklin System for murdering Jews was
searching for the right place to slaughter of the Jews of Riga when he saw
Rumbula for the first time.
1942: Birthdate of pianist Jeffrey
Siegel.
1942: “The Skin of Our Teeth”
directed by Stanley Prager opened on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre.
1942(9th of Kislev,
5703): Seventy-six-year-old Milton Kraus, a native of Kokomo, Indiana who
organized a company of volunteers for the Spanish-American War and served in
the 65th, 66th and 67th Congresses passed away today in Wabash, Indiana after
which he was buried in Peru, Indiana.
1942: As part of the Holocaust
German SS carry out a selection of Jewish ghetto in Lviv in the western Ukraine
arresting 5.000 "unproductive Jews". All get deported to Belzec death
camp.
1943: In an attempt to hide the
Holocaust from the westward moving Soviet Army, 300 Jews at Borki were told
that they were to dig up the trenches of 30,000 dead humans in Borki and then
burn them all. One thousand bodies were placed on each pyre. The bones were
ground to dust and taken away. The graves were emptied, disinfected, filled
with earth and grass was planted over them.
1943: During the Holocaust, as part
of Aktion Emtefest, the Nazis liquidate Janowska concentration camp in Lviv,
western Ukraine, murdering at least 6.000 surviving Jews. The German SS leader
Fritz Katzman declares Lviv (Lemberg) to be Judenfrei (free from the
Jews).
1944(2nd of Kislev, 5705): Thirty-nine-year-old Enzo Serini, Havivah Reik, Raffi Reiss and
Zvi Ben Ya'acov who were all Jews from Palestine who had parachuted behind
German lines were murdered today at Dachau.
1944(2nd of Kislev, 5705): Alfred B. Nietzel died valiantly
today during the Battle of Hurtgen Forest providing covering fire for his
comrades “during an enemy advance threatening to overrun his position” – an
action that would earn him the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of
Honor.
http://www.army.mil/medalofhonor/valor24/recipients/nietzel/?f=recipients&l=name
1945: “The premiere performance of Nathaniel Shilkret’s “Genesis Suite”
took place today at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles.
1945: At Zionist
Organization of America meeting, Dr. Abba Hillel Silver is elected to succeed
Dr. Israel Goldstein as president. A proposal is made to allow the Jewish
National Fund of America to buy 500,000 acres of land in Palestine in defiance
of British land transfer regulations. A budget is approved for immigration and
settlement.
1945: In the wake of the latest British statements about Palestine it was
reported today that “It was apparent that some sort of compromise will have to
be forthcoming from outside Palestine as there is little possibility of the
Arabs and Jews getting together on anything so far proposed.” (Editor’s Note –
what was written in 1945 sounds as if it could have been written in 2012)
1945: Twenty-eight-year-old basketball player Jule Rivlin, the future
coach of Marshall University, married Esther Komesar, a union that lasted until
his death in 2002 and produced “5 children, 1 son, Jerry and 4 daughters,
Randy, Sherryl, Susan and Felicia.”
1945: Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of Jewish Agency and World Zionist
Organization, says British foreign minister Ernest Bevin cannot divide Zionists
and other Jewish People.
1946: Police and Jewish citizens clashed in Tel Aviv.
1946: In Jerusalem, Zina and London born Israeli diplomate Avraham Harman
and London born MK Zina Harman gave birth to Columbia and Hebrew University
trained academic and MK Naomi Chazan.
1946(24th of Cheshvan, 5707): Lithuanian born Harry Lazarus,
the son of Basheva Pearlman Lazarus and the husband of Maggie Oppert Lazarus
passed away today in Valdosta, GA after which he was buried in the Sunset Hill
Cemetery in Valdosta.
1946: “A Flag is Born” opened at the Broadway Theatre.
1947: Today, Hitler’s closest confidante Albert Speer wrote down the
following recollection in his Spandau prison diary which today sounds so eerily
prophetic: I recall how [Hitler] would have films shown in the Reich
Chancellory about London burning, about the sea of fire over Warsaw, about
exploding convoys, and the kind of ravenous joy that would then seize him every
time. But I never saw him so beside himself as when, in a delirium, he pictured
New York going down in flames. He described how the skyscrapers would be
transformed into gigantic burning torches, how they would collapse in
confusion, how the bursting city’s reflection would stand against the dark sky...
1947: “Stern Gang Hints at Truce” published today examined the
possibility of “a respite from violence in Palestine” should among other things
Lehi make good on its announcement to the press that it was “ready to resume
its truce pledge.”
1947: Birthdate of Peter Shurman, the native of Ontario who went from
being a radio talk show host to a career in politics as member of the
Progressive Conservative Party.
1947: Birthdate of Michel-Jean Hamburger, a very successful French singer
and songwriter of Jewish origin.
1947: “Lewis Neikrug, the director general for Europe of the Hebrew
Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society” who “was among the 400 passengers who
sailed from Pier 88, North River, for Europe on the French liner De Grasse”
said that “the projected partitioning of Palestine can ease considerably the
problem of displaced persons of Europe.”
1947: British editor James Caunt was reported today to have expressed his
belief that the accusations of seditious libel that had been filed after his
assertions that anti-British propaganda “was financed by American Jews and
“that if British Jews were really concerned by the shooting of British boys in
Palestine they should ‘disgorge their ill-gotten wealth in try to dissuade
their brothers in the United States from pour out dollars to facilitate the
entrance into Palestine of European Jewish scum’” were politically motivated by
those who believe that “anyone who criticizes the Jews must be a Fascist.”
1948: “Light Up the Sky,” satire and farce written and directed by Moss
Hart premiered on Broadway at the Royal Theater.
1948: British state
minister Hector McNeil offers the Political Committee a resolution calling for
permanent settlement based on Bernadotte plan. Israel proposes compromise: it
will withdraw all troops who arrived in Israel after October 14; troops who
arrived before October 14 will stay to ensure that area does not fall to Egypt.
Israel announces it is ready to begin armistice with Arabs.
1949: “Adams Rib,” a comedy directed by George Cukor, produced by
Lawrence Weingarten and featuring Judy Holliday was released in the United
States today.
1949: UN Economic Survey
Mission for the Middle East proposes after a three-month study that the General
Assembly set up program of relief and public works in various Arab countries
for 652,000 Arab refugees from Palestine. No comparable fund would be suggested
for providing aid to Israel when Jewish populations of Arab and Moslem
countries were forced to flee from their homes.
1950(9th of Kislev, 5711): Parashat Vayetzei
1950: The CCNY football team played its last game today at Lewisohn
Stadium name for “financier and philanthropist Adolph Lewisohn” who “donated
the money for the combination athletic facility and amphitheater which opened
in 1915 and fell victim to the wrecking ball in 1973.
1950: After 742 performances at the Morosco Theater, the curtain came
down on the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a
Salesman.”
1951: In Tel Aviv, second generation architect Yaakov Rechter and his
first wife, Sara Safir gave birth to Israeli musical artist Yoni Rechtet, the
stepson of Israeli actress Hanna Meron.
1951: Birthdate of David “Dudu” Fisher, the native of Petah Tivka who pursued
a decade’s long career as a cantor before appearing as “Jean Valjean in the
musical Les Miserables.”
1952: Dr. Franz Josef Kallman, a Columbia University psychiatrist and “one of the founders of the American
Society of Human Genetics, is scheduled to third lecture in 19th
series of the Thomas William Salmon memorial lectures.
1952: The Jerusalem Post
reported that observers noted Arab protests over the German-Israeli Reparation
Agreement were meant only to extort more trade and imports from their countries
to Germany.
1952(30th of Cheshvan,
5713): Seventy-seven-year-old John Parker an English Jew who was the “editor of
reference works” passed away today.
1953: As his eight years as New York
City comptroller were coming to an end, Lazarus Joseph was quoted by the New
York Times as warning the citizenry “"that it is easy to borrow, but the
reckoning always must be met in the expense budget, and by the taxpayer” –
words that seemed to be prophetic when the city went bankrupt in the 1970’s.
1953: Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Pincus of
Brooklyn announced the engagement of their daughter Merrel Ruth Pincus to Yale
under graduate Richard Margolin.
1954: Terence William Leighton
MacDermot began serving as Canada’s Ambassador to Israel.
1954: “The Last Time I Saw Paris” a
romantic company directed by Richard Brooks who wrote the screenplay along with
Julius and Philip Epstein, filmed by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg with a
theme song by composer Jerome Kern and
lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II was released in the United States today by MGM,
1955(3rd of Kislev, 5716): Sixty-five-year-old
chess master Solomon Rosenthal passed away today.
1956: After finally winning their
second game of the season last Sunday, Sid Gillman’s Los Angeles Rams returned
to their losing ways by dropping a game to the Chicago Bears.
1956: In case of “Jew on Jew,”
Alfred Kazin reviews Saul Bellow’s most recent book, Seize the Day.
1958: The Assistant United States
Attorney that the $4,790.44 that Charles A. Levine still owed the government as
part of a $5,000 fine levied after he was convicted of smuggling in 1937 was
not collectible.
1958: “I Want to Live!” a dark film
that raises questions about capital punishment co-starring Theodore Bikel and
with a theme-song by Johnny Mandel was released today in the United States.
1958: Jerusalem's new reservoir was
opened ending a long history of water problems that made Jerusalem more
vulnerable to siege. Water for Jerusalem
had been a challenge going all the way back to Biblical times. Remember the story of how David took the city
in the first place. Fear of siege was
not paranoia for the Israelis. The Jews
had nearly lost the city ten years earlier when the Jordanian Army (the Arab
Legion) laid siege to it during the War for Independence.
1959(17th of Cheshvan,
5720): Sixty-one-year-old Arkady Shaiket, who like Robert Capa and Joe
Rosenthal was another Jewish photojournalist who provided iconic WW II
photographs
http://www.nailyaalexandergallery.com/russian-photography/arkady-shaikhet
1959: “A Summer Place” a movie
version of the novel with the same name contains “a memorable instrumental
theme composed by Max Steiner, which spent nine weeks at #1 on the Billboard
Hot 100 singles chart in 1960” was released the United States today.
1959: William Wyler’s film Ben-Hur
premieres at Loew's Theater in New York City. William Wyler was Jewish. Judah Ben Hur was also Jewish.
1959: Opening of the Sephardic
Bibliographical Exhibition in Madrid, Spain. The Exhibition was in
conjunction with the World Sephardi Federation, Arias Montano Institute, the
faculty of Philosophy of the Madrid University as well as the Royal Academy of
Spanish Language. The Exhibition demonstrated rare Sephardic documents,
books, maps and material showing the life of Jews in Spain up to 1492.
1961: “The Gay Life,” a musical
based on the plays of Arthur Schnitzler “with a book by Fay and Michael Kanin,”
“music by Arthur Schwartz,” directed by Gerald Freeman and featuring Jules
Munshin opened today on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre.
1961: In New York City, Irving and
Marcia Dawn (Papier) Stolberg gave birth to University of Virginia graduate and
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sheryl Stolberg, the Congressional
Correspondent for the New York Times who is kind enough and patient enough to
respond to an inquiry from one of her many readers.
1962: Funeral services are scheduled
to held to at the Central Synagogue in Manhattan for CCNY graduate and NYU trained accountant Morris Carlton Troper, the
Brooklyn born son of Rose Schaeffer and Abraham, the husband of Ethel Dorothy
Gartner with whom he had two children –
Betty Elsie and John – and “who as European Chairman of the Joint Distribution
Committee from 1938 to 1942 save the lives of many Jewish refugees” and who
rose from the rank of Colonel to Brigadier General while serving in the Office
of the Fiscal Director and Chief of Finance for the U.S. Army on what would
have been his 70th birthday.
1962: Niels Henrik David Bohr passed
away. “Bohr was a Danish physicist, born in Copenhagen, who was the first to
apply the quantum theory, which restricts the energy of a system to certain
discrete values, to the problem of atomic and molecular structure. For this
work he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. He developed the
so-called Bohr Theory of the atom and liquid model of the nucleus. Bohr was of
Jewish origin and when the Nazis occupied Denmark he escaped in 1943 to Sweden
on a fishing boat. From there he was flown to England where he began to work on
the project to make a nuclear fission bomb. After a few months he went with the
British research team to Los Alamos in the USA where they continued work on the
project.”
1962: “Some 1, 000 persons attended
a special service at Temple Emanuel here today, marking the 30th year in the
rabbinate of Dr. Nathan A. Perilman, rabbi of the temple, the largest house of
Jewish worship in the world. The service observed the 30th year of Dr.
Perilman’s affiliation with the Temple.”
1963(2nd of Kislev,
5724): Sixty-two-year-old Lean Zion Alper, the wife of Abraham Joseph Alper and
the mother of Ben and Frances Alper passed away today after which she was
buried in the B’nai Zion Cemetery in Chattanooga, TN.
1963(2nd of Kislev,
5724): Seventy-seven-year-old New York
City native and Columbia graduated Edward H. Green, the Harvard educated
attorney and member of Sullivan and Cromwell who specialized in tax cases who
was the husband of the former Margaret Morgenstern passed away today.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/11/19/89976247.html?pageNumber=41
1964: In London, UK, Neil Simon’s
“Little Me” opened at the Cambridge Theatre.
1964: NBC broadcast “The Hanged Man”
directed by Don Siegel, co-starring Norman Fell and featuring Stan Getz who
also wrote the music for the first time.
1965(23rd of Cheshvan,
5726): Sixty-one-year-old Idella S. Sittler Farberg, the Ohio born daughter of
Joseph and Henrietta Pollak Sittler, the wife Joseph J. Farberg with whom she
had two children – Donald and Nancee – passed away today after which she was
buried at the Zion Gardens in Chicago, IL.
1966: Sandy Koufax announces his
retirement, due to an arthritic left elbow
1968(27th of Cheshvan,
5729): Seventy-four-year-old movie producer Walter Wagner who was responsible
for the 1963 big screen epic “Cleopatra” based away today.
http://www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/walter-wanger_intro.htm
https://spartacus-educational.com/SPYwanger.htm
1968(27th of Cheshvan,
5729): Eighty-six year old Vienna native Arnold Gottlieb who at the age of 19
came to the United States, went into the construction business, forming in 1912
Gotham Construction Corporation which built such “edifices as Montefiore
Hospital in the Bronx, the Federal Courthouse and the General Post office in
Bronx and married “the former Beatrice M. Schiff,” with whom he had a daughter,
Hilda, passed away today.
1969: “The Ballad of Andy Cocker”
produced by Aaron Spelling with a script written by Stuart Margolin, the Davenport,
IA born son of Morris and Gertrude and Kalina Margolina.
1969: “The Arrangement” the movie
version of the novel with the same name starring Kirk Douglas and featuring
Harold Gould with a score by David Amram was released in the United States
today by Warner Bros.
1971(30th of Cheshvan, 5732): Rosh
Chodesh Kislev
1971: ITV broadcast the “The Best Laid Plans, the last
episode of “The Lovers” a British sitcom created by Jack Rosenthal who also
served as the writer and director.
1973: “David Ben-Gurion suffered a
cerebral hemorrhage, and was taken to Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer,
Ramat Gan.”
1973: Sixty-year-old Sir Gerald
David Nunes Nabarro, the scion of a prominent of Sephardi family who converted
to Christianity passed away today.
1973(23rd of Cheshvan,
5734: Eighty-year-old Phillip A. Vogelman, the Polish born “president and
chairman of the Onondaga Silk Company and active member of the ADL, UJA and
Federation of Jewish Philanthropies passed away today.
1973: Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis
delivered a speech today at Madison Square Garden that led to the formation of
“Hineni,” “one of the first Ba’al Teshuva movements.
1974: An analytical report compiled
by refuseniks M. Agursky, A. Luntz, V.
Davidov, V. Rubin, D. Beilin, A. Voronel, A. Sharansky, V. Slepak, A. Lerner
was transferred to the West. The report was submitted to the administration of
President Ford on the eve of the summit between Ford and Brezhnev in
Vladivostok.
1975: “Alexander Silnitsky, a 23
year old student from Krasnodar, was sentenced to three years imprisonment on
charges of draft evasion.”
1976(25th of Cheshvan,
5737): Sixty-six-year-old “Louis G. Cowan the former President of CBS” and his
wife 63 year old Pauline Cowan were killed today when “a fire swept through
their apartment in the Westbury Hotel.”
1976(25th of Cheshvan, 5737): Eighty-six-year-old
American born artist Man Ray passed away in Paris.
1976: Refuseniks held a sit-in
demonstration at the Supreme Court demanding an answer to a letter filed by
them a month earlier. In the evening, participants were detained, taken into
the woods and released.
1977: Seventy-nine-year-old Kurt
Schuschnigg the Austrian chancellor who opposed Hitler’s annexation of his
country and spent the war in two different concentration camps passed away
today.
1977: Longtime feminist activist and
U.S. Representative Bella Abzug presided over the first federally funded
National Women's Conference.
1977: The Jerusalem
Post reported that 60 Egyptians and 2,000 journalists arrived in order to
prepare the historic visit of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Israel.
Chaim Herzog, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, suggested that the General
Assembly suspend the "acrimonious and counterproductive" debate on
Palestine in order to be able to consider this historic event. It was also
reported that Sadat¹s visit was partly prompted by a question that the Post¹s
US correspondent, Wolf Blitzer, had asked Sadat in Washington last April.
1978(18th of Cheshvan, 5739): Judge
Leo Frederick Rayfiel passed away. Born
in 1888 to immigrant parents in Brooklyn, he was a graduate of New York
University Law School. He was a member
of the New York State Assembly and served two terms as a member of the U.S.
House of Representatives before being appointed to the federal bench by
President Harry S. Truman in 1947. Rayfiel was a voracious reader and die-hard
Dodgers fan until the team left Brooklyn.
1979(28th of Cheshvan, 5740):
Eighty-three-year-old Dr. Henry Boruchoff, the son of Rabbi Dov Ber Boruchoff
and Bessie (Pessa Golde) Boruchoff and husband of Frances Boruchoff passed away
today after which he was buried at the Congregation Beth Israel of Malden
Cemetery in North Reading, Massachusetts.
1981: A funeral service will be held
this morning at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel for 91-year-old “retailer
and civic leader” Charles Jay Oppenheim, Jr. the WW I veteran and husband of the
former Marjorie Burgunder of Wilkes Barre, PA with whom he had two sons,
William and Charles who worked in “his father's business, Oppenheim and
Collins, the former Manhattan department store, before founding “the Jay
Thorpe specialty stores in 1920.
1981(21st of Cheshvan,
5742): Seventy-eight-year-old Oklahoma native Eleanor (Klein) Lapowski, the wife of Errold Baum Lapowski and the
mother of Jean and Louise Lapowski passed away today in El Paso, TX.
1983(12th of Kislev,
5744): Eight-three actor Marcel Dalio passed away today.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/23/obituaries/marcel-dalio-83-film-actor-dead.html
1983(12th of Kislev,
5744): Ninety-one-year-old publisher, George B. Eisler passed away today.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/09/obituaries/george-b-eisler.html
1985(5th of Kislev,
5746): Seventy-four-year-old Chicago native and University of Illinois and
University of Chicago trained biochemist whose research on hormones and
metabolism contributed to the development of oral contraceptives and who was “a
retired president of Syntex Research passed away today. (Wiki says November 19
but the NYT says November 18)
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/11/18/118441826.html?pageNumber=87
1986: “An extended version of” Billy
Joel’s “Big Man on Mulberry Street was used today on an episode of
Moonlighting.”
1987(26th of Cheshvan,
5784): Eighty-year-old Polish born and CCNY and Columbia University graduate
Abraham Gordon Ducker who rosed to become
a professor and president of the College of Jewish Studies and a
professor and director of libraries at Yeshiva University passed away today.
1988: In Tel Aviv, Orly Silbersatz
and Yuval Banay gave birth to singer and guitarist Elisha Banai, older brother
of Amalia and Sophie Banai and the grandson of another Israeli performer Yossi
Banai.
1988: In New York City, Wendy
Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles” premiered at the Playwrights Horizon.
1989(20th of Cheshvan,
5750): Parashat Vayera
1989(20th of Cheshvan,
5750): Ninety-one-year-old Princeton University graduate and veteran of WWI and
WWII Clinton O. Mayer, Jr., “a former president of the Jewish Home and
Hospital for the Aged who was a broker with Drexel Burnham Lamber and “who was
believed to be the oldest member of the New York Stock Exchange” passed away
today.
https://paw.princeton.edu/memorial/clinton-orth-mayer-jr-19
1990(1st of Kislev, 5751): Rosh
Chodesh Kislev
1990: The third Broadway revival of
Fiddler on the Roof opened today at the Gershwin Theater. It ran for 241
performances at the George Gershwin Theatre. Topol starred as Tevye, and Marcia
Lewis was Golde. Robbins' production was reproduced by Ruth Mitchell and
choreographer Sammy Dallas Bayes. The production won the Tony Award for Best
Revival.
1991(11th of Kislev,
5752): Eighty-three-year-old French Marxist Claude Cahen who has been described
as “the doyen of Islamic social history
and one of the most influential Islamic historians of [his] century” and who
“neither self-identified as Jewish nor supported the State of Israel” passed
away today.
1992: Birthdate of Israeli Olympic
sailor and Gan Hashomoron native Dan Froyliche.
1993(4th of Kislev,
5754): Ninety-three-year-old German born American character Fritz Feld passed
away today.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/23/obituaries/fritz-feld-actor-93.html
1999: The 1999 Trophée Lalique, a figure
skating competition held in Paris, in which Galit Chait and Sergei Sakhnovski
represented Israel in the ice dancing competition opened today.
2000(3rd of Kislev,
5672): Eighty-eight-year-old NYU grad and Columbia University trained attorney
Eli Katz, a former Mayor of Thomaston and active member of B’nai B’rith who
with his wife Beulah raised two children, Lorna and Charles, passed away today.
2000(3rd of Kislev, 5762):St.-Sgt.
Baruch (Snir) Flum, 21, of Tel-Aviv was shot and killed by a senior Palestinian
Preventive Security Service officer who infiltrated the Kfar Darom greenhouses
in the Gaza Strip.
St.-Sgt. Sharon Shitoubi, 21, of
Ramle, wounded in the Palestinan shooting attack in Kfar Darom, died of his
wounds on Nov 20.
2001: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors
and/or about topics of Jewish interest including The Complete Works of Isaac Babel: Edited by Nathalie Babel,
Translated by Peter Constantine. Introduction by Cynthia Ozick, Somewhere
For Me:
A Biography of Richard Rodgers by Meryle Secrest, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions by
Martha C. Nussbaum, Interrogations: The
Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 by Richard Overy and I’m Not Bobby by Jules Feiffer.
2002(13th of Kislev, 5763) Esther
Galia, 48, of Kochav Hashahar, was killed in a shooting attack near Rimonim, on
the Allon Road, some 15 kilometers northeast of Ramallah
2002: During the investigation of
Jack Abramoff’s business activities in Guam a grand jury issued a subpoena
demanding that the administrator of the Guam Superior Court release all records
relating to the contract.
2002: “U.S. District Judge Myron
Thompson of Montgomery, Alabama, orders the removal of Roy Moore's Ten
Commandments monument, finding that it violated the constitution's ban on
government establishment of religion.”
2003(23rd of Cheshvan, 5764: Fifty-five-year-old
Grammy award winning musician Michael Kamen passes away. While studying the
oboe, he formed a rock classical fusion band called New York Rock & Roll
Ensemble, which was on the first of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts
with the New York Philharmonic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/20/arts/michael-kamen-55-award-winning-composer.html
2003(23rd of Cheshvan, 5764): Two
IDF soldiers, Sgt.-Maj. Shlomi Belsky, 23, of Haifa, and St.-Sgt. Shaul Lahav,
20, of Kibbutz Shomrat, were killed by a Palestinian terrorist who opened fire
with an AK-47 assault rifle, hidden in a prayer rug, at a checkpoint on the
tunnel bypass road, linking Jerusalem and the Gush Etzion bloc. The Fatah
al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack.
2004(5th of Kislev, 5765): Cy Coleman, American composer,
songwriter, and jazz pianist passed away.
Born Seymour Kaufman, to Jewish
immigrant parents, Coleman won or was nominated for 15 Tony Awards, 3 Emmy
Awards and 2 Grammy Awards. (As reported by Robert Berkvist)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/19/theater/19cnd-coleman.html
2005(15th of Cheshvan, 5766): Harold J. Stone passed away. Born
Harold Hochstein to a Jewish acting family in 1913, Stone practiced his craft
on Broadway, in film and finally in television where he gained respect and a
form of fame as “a character actor.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/nov/19/local/me-stone19
2005: The Jerusalem Post reported that Pope Benedict XVI responded
positively to an invitation extended to him by President Moshe Katsav when the
two met at the Vatican.
2006: Some eight thousand people
gathered near Germany's biggest World War II soldiers’ cemetery to protest
against far-right extremism.
2006(27th of Cheshvan, 5767: Jack
Werber passed away at the age of 92. He
was a Holocaust survivor who helped save more than 700 children at Buchenwald
slave labor camp. He gained economic
success in the mid-fifties by manufacturing coonskin caps during the Davey
Crockett craze.
2007: The Sunday Washington Post
book section featured a review of The Conscience of a Liberal by Jewish
economist Paul Krugman
2007: The Sunday New York Times book section featured reviews of three
books about or by comedian Woody Allen including, Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking by
Eric Lax, Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen and The Insanity Defense: The
Complete Prose by Woody Allen.
2007: The Chicago Tribune business section reported on the growth of
Chicago based Levy Restaurants. Since its founding in 1978 by brothers Larry
and Mark Levy, Levy Restaurants has grown from a single delicatessen in Chicago
to a specialized, industry-leading food organization with a network of
internationally acclaimed restaurants; the leading market share of premium
foodservice operations at sports and entertainment facilities; as well as a
full-service consulting and advisory services group. The keeper of the
Company’s precious culture is Eadie Levy, mother of Larry and Mark, and
resident Mom to almost 15,000 team members. Her story is simple, but it’s one
filled with a passion for great food and a love for making people happy. When
her two sons opened a delicatessen called D.B. Kaplan’s in Chicago’s Water
Tower Place in 1978, they thought they had everything under control. That is,
until their ambitious investment started to struggle a bit. Their rescue
strategy? They called their mother, Eadie. At the time, she was living in St.
Louis and her cooking skills were considered a work-in-progress, being that she
didn’t even learn to cook until she was married. But as any mother would do,
she came to the rescue of her two sons. Eadie moved to Chicago and immediately
became involved in the deli operations, starting in the kitchen. Many of the
recipes in the Levy Restaurants repertoire are Eadie’s or her grandmothers,
passed down from generation to generation. Eadie herself trained the staff on
the preparation of the traditional Jewish menu items. Her work with D.B.
Kaplan’s eventually lead to the creation of her namesake restaurant, Mrs.
Levy’s Delicatessen, located in Chicago’s Sears Tower. Since 1986, Mrs. Levy’s
Deli has been one of the city’s greatest delis, treating guests to authentic,
New York-style sandwiches, homemade soups and old-fashioned soda fountain
creations. After a few years behind the scenes, Eadie’s desire to have more
interaction with her guests grew, and she moved to the front of the house, where
she remains today, meeting and greeting guests, most of whom she knows by name.
This personal touch has made Eadie a celebrity in her own right. Photos of her
posing with her favorite celebrities – everyone from local hero, Michael
Jordan, to Hollywood stars Goldie Hawn and Steven Spielberg – adorn the walls
of the deli. And in true Midwestern style, Eadie graciously obliges every
request to have her picture taken and added to the growing "Wall of
Fame." These days, Eadie Levy, a grandmother and great-grandmother, still
believes that despite her own success, her proudest accomplishment remains her
sons’ entrepreneurialism and creativity in making Levy Restaurants a successful
company, full of genuinely nice people.
2008: In Israel, members of the
National Religious Party “voted to disband the party in order to join the new
Jewish Home Party
2008: French and Israeli police
discovered 43 of timepieces that had been stolen from the L.A. Mayer Institute
for Islamic art in two French bank safes.
2008: Ethan Berkowitz himself
conceded defeat in the race to fill the seat of U.S. Representative for
Alaska's At-large congressional district, after counting of absentee and
provisional ballots had mostly been completed and his Republican opponent Don Young
had a clearly insurmountable lead.
2008: At Tifereth Israel Synagogue
in Des Moines, Iowa AIPAC Midwest Political Director Jonathan Greenberg speaks on
“Changes in the White House and on Capitol Hill: How It Impacts The Pro-Israel Agenda.” Of course, the presentation is based on the
premise that AIPAC’s agenda and the “Pro-Israel Agenda” are one and the same.
2008: The Ninth Annual Rutgers New Jersey Jewish Film Festival
presents: “The Counterfeiters” “One Day
You’ll Understand,” adaptation of Jerome Clement’s autobiographical novel, Plus
Tard, Tu Comprendras and “Two Ladies” a hopeful drama that offers a
sensitive portrayal of the unlikely friendship two French women – Esther, who
is Jewish, and Halima, who is Muslim – which defies the prejudice and hostility
that surround them.
2008: As part of the
"Jewish Encounters" series at the D.C. Jewish Community Center,
writer and poet Adam Kirsch discusses
and signs Benjamin Disraeli, his new biography of the British prime
minister in which takes an in-depth look at the first—and only—Jewish Prime
Minister of England.
2008: Michael Rosen was presented with the Chevalier de l'Ordre des
Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature) by the
Government of France at the French Ambassador's residence in London
2009 (1st of Kislev, 5770): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
2009: Moshe Holtzberg, son of Barvriel and Rivka Holztberg of blessed
memory who were murdered by the terrorists in Mumbain in 2008, celebrated his
third birthday according to the Jewish calendar. A party was held at Kfar
Chabad which was attended by 2,000 people who stayed for a memorial dinner for
his parents.
2009: In Fairfax, VA, Congregation Olam Tikvah hosts “Sacred Scripture:
How do you understand your own? Can I try?” as part of its interfaith program.
2009: At the UK Jewish Film Festival, a screening of an episode from
the groundbreaking TV drama "Good Intentions", which centers around
two female chefs, one Palestinian and one Israeli, co-hosting a cookery show
despite intense opposition from their respective communities.
2009(1st of Kislev, 5770): Seventy-five-year-old “Ari
Kiev, a psychiatrist whose early work on depression and suicide prevention led
to a career helping athletes and Wall Street traders achieve peak performance,
passed away today in Manhattan. (As reported by William Grimes)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/business/30kiev.html
2009(1st of Kislev, 5770): James F. Berg, who as the chief
negotiator for most of the major landlords in New York City was given large
credit for an era of labor peace in their buildings because of the trust he
inspired on both sides of the bargaining table, died today in Manhattan. He was
65 (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)
2010: “Precious Life” is scheduled
to be shown at the Other Israel Film Festival today at the JCC in Manhattan.
2010: In New York, YIVO Institute
for Jewish Research is scheduled to present The Fall Concert which is part of
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series at YIVO:
2010: In response to a call by Chief
Ashkenazi RabbiYona Metzger and Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo for the public to
pray for rain during this draught-like period, today is scheduled to be a
special day of fasting and prayer to atone for the sins that are likely
preventing the direly missing rainfall.
2010: "Army of Islam," a group linked to Al Qaida,
released today for the first time a statement in Hebrew threatening to avenge
the killing of two senior members of the organization in the Gaza Strip
yesterday
2010: Jacob
Lew began serving as Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
2011:
“Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” is scheduled to be shown this evening at Jewish
Eye World Jewish Film Festival.
2011: An
opening reception is scheduled to take place at the Derek Eller Gallery marking
the opening of “Rona Yefman: Marath a Bouke, project #4” in which Rona Yefman
will present an installation about Martha Bouke, an 80-year-old grandfather and
Holocaust survivor living in Tel Aviv who assumes a feminine persona…”
2011: It
was reported today that Henry Kissinger in 1972 called Jews
"self-serving" because of pleas from the community for the Nixon
administration to increase the pressure on the Soviet Union to allow its Jews
to leave. "Is there a more self-serving group of people than the Jewish
community?" Kissinger, who is Jewish, asks Leonard Garment, also Jewish,
in transcripts of a 1972 exchange released this week by the State Department
and reported by The Associated Press. Garment, a special counsel to President Nixon,
replied: "None in the world." Kissinger, who at the time was the
national security adviser, added: "What the hell do they think they are
accomplishing? You can’t even tell bastards anything in confidence because
they’ll leak it.”Nonetheless, Kissinger tells Garment he will raise the issue
with the Soviet ambassador. Kissinger resented the Jewish community's emphasis
on releasing Jews, saying it detracted from the overall White House strategy of
achieving detente with the Soviet Union -- a strategy he to this day maintains
would have brought greater success for Soviet Jewry, although veterans of the
movement adamantly disagree. Kissinger's office said he was traveling and not
immediately available for comment. A request to Garment for comment, emailed to
a law firm where he is last known to have had offices, went unanswered.
Revelations of Kissinger's disparagement of Jews during his Nixon years have at
times led to him apologizing; most recently, last December, he said he was
"sorry" for telling Nixon in 1973 that it would not be an American
concern if the Soviets were to consign Jews to death camps.
2011: Israel sent housing assistance
for up to 1,000 people in Turkey affected by two earthquakes that hit the
country in October. The mobile homes, which were requested by the government in
Ankara, were delivered by the Defense Ministry this morning. In October, a 7.2
magnitude quake killed 600 people in Turkey’s eastern region, leaving thousands
homeless. Less than three weeks later, another 5.7 earthquake hit the same
region, killing five and burying scores under rubble. After the first quake,
Israel sent a civilian aircraft to Turkey carrying prefabricated homes, warm
blankets and mattresses.
2012: The New York Times features reviews of
books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Marvel
Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe which “begins with Marvel’s
best-known employees:” – Stan Lee (Stanley Martin Lieber) and Jack Kirby (Jacob
Kurtzburg) and the recently released paperback edition of A Train In Winter:
An Extraordinary Story of Women Friendship and Resistance in Occupied France
by Caroline Moorehead which traces the fate of 230 women shipped to Auschwitz
in January, 1943.
2012: The
UK Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end.
2012: The
American Society for Jewish Music and American Jewish Historical Society are
scheduled to present The Hugo Weisgall Centennial Concert
2012(4th
of Kislev, 5773): Eighty-six-year-old academic and diplomat Helmut Sonnenfeldt
passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)
2012: Adas
Israel Cantor Arianne Brown and the Charm City Klezmer are among those
scheduled to perform at the Jewish Folk Arts Festival hosted at B’nai Israel in
Rockville, MD.
2012:
Global Day of Jewish Learning
http://www.theglobalday.com/community/curriculum2012/
2012: As published today in the Cedar Rapids Gazette
For weeks Arabs have
been firing rockets into southern Israel. Israeli schools have been
closed for days at a time. Citizens of several towns including Beersheba
have had to stay within seconds of a “safe room” because that is all the
warning that exists between the launching from Gaza and landing in
Israel. In one sense, there is nothing new about this. The Arabs in
Gaza did this in November of 2011, 2010, etc. The reason for the attacks is
simple. Hamas is committed to the destruction of the state of
Israel. When Israel left Gaza without any pre-conditions, the Arabs had a
choice. They could start working on building a state or they could
enhance their war of destruction aimed at Israel. Unfortunately, they
chose the latter. Today, the Israelis had enough. They responded to these
incessant attacks by killing one of the leaders responsible for these
rocket terror attacks and unleashed a series of limited attacks on launch sites
and the logistics net that supported it. Unfortunately, the American media
chose not to cover the attacks of the last three weeks so all we have in the
news tonight is the mean old Israelis attacking the poor Palestinians. http://thegazette.com/2012/11/17/weeks-of-arab-attacks-preceded-israeli-attack/
2012: After a few hours of relative quiet, a rocket fired from Gaza this evening
hit a house near Kiryat Malachi. (As reported by the Jerusalem Post)
2013: The Center For Jewish History and the YIVO Institute For Jewish
Research are scheduled to present a concert and lecture “Charles-Valentin
Alkan: His Life and Music” as part of the Circles of Justice Program.
2013: “The Lesson” and “Mom, Dad, I’m A Muslim” are scheduled to be shown
at The Other Israel Film Festival.
2013: The Embassy of the Czech Republic, Embassy of Israel and
LCPA-Hebrew Language Table are scheduled to present “The Story of the
Shipwrecked from the Patria.”
2013: French President Francois Hollande continued his official visit
today, touring the Old City in Jerusalem, meeting with senior Palestinian
Authority officials in Ramallah and then visiting the Knesset, where he
listened to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly call on PA President
Mahmoud Abbas to break the diplomatic freeze and come address the Israeli
parliament. (As reported by Moran Azulay)
2013: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-mmon walked through the “Arbeit Macht
Frei” gate as he began his to Auschwitz where he paid tribute to those murdered
by the Nazis and their allies.
2013: “Former chief
rabbi Yona Metzger was arrested today at the culmination of a long
investigation into a litany of financial crimes involving millions of shekels.”
(As reported by Stuart Winer)
2014:
The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present “Stravinsky, Ravel,
Prokofiev: Composing in War Time.”
2014:
In Melbourne “Theodore Bikel: In the Shoes of Sholom Aleichem” and “King of the
Jews” are scheduled to be shown at the Jewish International Film Festival.
2014:
“Swim Little Fish” and “This Is Where I Leave You” are scheduled to be shown at
the 18th annual UK Jewish Film Festival.
2014(25th of Cheshvan): Rabbi Moshe Twersky, 59;
Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, 68, a British-born father of six; Rabbi Aryeh
Kopinsky, 43; and Rabbi Kalman Levine, 55 were murdered by Arab terrorists this
morning and “at least 8 others were injured” while praying at a synagogue in
Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood.
2014: Chaim Rothman, the husband of a friend of Renee Ghert-Zand, was
attacked by “Palestinian assailants” who “axed him in the head as he prayed in
a Jerusalem synagogue this morning.” (As reported by Renee Ghert-Zand)
2014: Thousands attend funerals of Aryeh Kupinsky, Rabbi Avraham Shmuel
Goldberg, Rabbi Kalman Levine, and Rabbi Moshe Twersky, killed at prayer in
Jerusalem this morning.
2014: New York City increased its police presence at synagogues and other
locations in the wake of an attack on a Jerusalem synagogue that left four dead
2014: In the United Kingdom, the Community Security Trust issued the
warning today in a security bulletin that contained nine instructions to Jewish
institutions, including a call to “ensure visible external security patrols
take place to deter and detect hostile activity” and immediate reporting to
police of any suspicious behavior.
2014: Zidan Saif, a police
officer who was seriously injured in the Tuesday-morning terror attack at a
synagogue in Jerusalem, succumbed to his wounds.Saif, 30, was shot in the head
during a gunfight with the two terrorists. According to eyewitnesses, he was hit
by a bullet when attempting to protect a fellow police officer.He is the fifth
victim of the attack.Druze community leaders and residents of Saif’s village of
Yanuh-Jat in the Galilee describe him as a hero, NRG reports. (As reported by
Lazar Berman and Adiv Sterman)
2015: “A Jewish teacher in the French city of Marseille was stabbed by a
man wearing an Islamic State T-shirt who shouted anti-Semitic profanities at
him with two other men.”
2015: “The Unpublished Creative Works of Walter Blumenthal” which
describes the writing of University of Pennsylvania graduate Walter Hart
Blumenthal, the Clinton, IA born son of Ida Rawitch and Hart Blumenthal and the
wife of Claudine Brown who served as chief librarian at Camp Greene during WWI,
associate editor of The American Hebrew while writing Rachel:
Tragedienne and Pageant of Moods was published today.
2015: At Oxford, Hindy Najman, the
new Oriel and Laing professor for the interpretation of holy scripture who is
the first Jew and the first woman to have the role is scheduled to talk about
new perspectives on how prophecy continues in ancient Judaism from her paper
titled: "The Beginning of Judaism: New Perspectives.”
2015, the Friedrichstadt-Palast in Berlin inaugurated a memorial at
Friedrichstraße 107 dedicated to the theatre's founders, Max Reinhardt, Hans
Poelzig and Erik Charell, two of whom were Jewish.
2015: “The Physician” and “The Voice of Peace” are scheduled to be shown
at Melbourne at the Jewish International Film Festival.
2015: Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman on the National Book
Award for Young People’s Literature today.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-fathers-book-on-mental-illness-wins-national-book-award/
2015: “The Kozalchik Affair,” a documentary about Yakov Kozalchik a
Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz known as “The Warden of the Death Block” is scheduled
to be shown in Los Angeles as the 29th Israel Film Festival.
2016: In “Amos Oz on His Novel ‘Judas,’ Which Challenges Views of a
Traitor” published today Gal Beckerman examined the Israeli author’s latest
work.
2016: “Two Nazi symbols and the words ‘Go Trump’” were discovered today
“on a piece of playground equipment” at “a New York park dedicated to the
memory of the late Beastie Boy member Adam Yauch” during a year in which “anti-Semitic imagery has proliferated on
social media, Jewish journalist” have been targeted “and longstanding
anti-Jewish conspiracy theories” have gotten “a fresh airing.”
2016: “Dark Diamond” and “Aida’s Secrets” are scheduled to be shown in
Australia as part of the Jewish International Film Festival.
2016: “Women: New Portraits of Annie Leibovitz” is scheduled to open in
New York.
2017(29th of Cheshvan, 5778): Parashat Toldot
2017(29th of Cheshvan, 5778): Ninety-eight-year-old Benjamin
Scheinkopf, who survived the Holocaust along with his brother Josef, because of
his hair-cutting skill and who went to a life time of barbering in Chicago
passed away today.
2017: Seventy-five-year-old Ken Shapero, “the former child actor and
creator of ‘The Groove Tube,’” passed away today. (As reported by Richard
Sandomir)
2017: “The Cakemaker”
and “The Heir” are scheduled to be shown in London at the 21st UK
International Jewish Film Festival.
2017: Jewish Book
Month, an annual event that provides us with a chance to contemplate Jewish
books and the lives of authors such as Joseph Telushkin whose wide variety of
works included Jewish Literacy, Jewish Humor and A Code of
Jewish Ethics continues today
2018: “Parallel Lines,”
a week-long jewelry exhibition “featuring the work of Israeli artists Naama
Bergman, Tamar Navama, Ruta Reifen, Dana Hakim, Noga Harel, Vered Kaminski, and
Einat Leader” is scheduled to come an end today.
2018: The YIVO
Institute is scheduled to present David Biale delivering a lecture on “The
Afterlives of Shabbati Zvi.”
2018: The Gershman
Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end today.
2018: “The Cleveland
Jewish News” is scheduled to present the 4th annual “18 Difference
Awards Ceremony” at Landerhaven in Mayfield Heights, OH.
2018 AJEX (The Jewish
Military Association”) is scheduled to sponsors its “84th Annual
Remembrance Ceremony and Parade” where attendees can show their support and
honor “the Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women who have served the United Kingdom in
the Armed Forces since the 1750s as well as all the victims of the Holocaust.”
https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/ajex-parade-2018/
2018: As part of Inter
Faith Week, the Jewish Museum is scheduled to host a free open house where
attendees can take part in such activities as making challah for a local
homeless shelter and decorating a Tzedakah box.
2018: The American
Society for Jewish Music is scheduled to present “Soundscapes of Modernity:
Jews and Music in Polish Cities,” a concert presenting “choral pieces from
19th-century progressive congregations, compositions associated with Jewish
music societies, and avant-garde works by Jewish composers.”
2018: The New York Times featured reviews of
books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including
the audiobooks The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris and read by Richard
Armitage, Parker: Selected Stories by Dorothy Parker and read by Elaine
Stritch, The Feral Detective, a novel by Jonathan Lethem, A New
Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism by Jeffrey D. Sachs, The
Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World by Robert Kagan, the son of
Donald Kagan and in “American Jews Face a Choice: Create Meaning or Fade Away,”
brief looks at The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion
by Steven R. Weisman, The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice Their
Religion Today by Jack Wertheimer, The Jewish American Paradox:
Embracing Choice in a Changing World by Robert Mnookin, God is in the
Crowd: Twenty-First Century Judaism by Tal Keinan and Dear Zealots:
Letters From a Divided Land by Amos Oz.
2019: As the day begins
in Israel, it would seem that the two biggest issues facing the country are the
on-going rocket attacks from Gaza and the need to avoid a third round of
elections by forming a new government.
2019: “The Israel
Defense Forces’ Arabic-language spokesman,” Avichai Adraee “said today that
posts he make last week alleging that an Israeli airstrike on a home in the
Gaza Strip, which killed a Palestinian family of eight, had targeted a
terrorist may have been ‘imprecise.’” (As reported by Adam Rasgon)
2019: The American
Sephardi Federation and the Embassy of Kosvo are scheduled to present two
screenings of “The Righteous Gypgsy” which “tells the story of Hajrija Imeri-Mihaljić,
the only Gypsy woman honored by Yad VaShem as a Righteous Among the Nations.”
2019: “A Skirball
Academy Special Class,” “Jewish Mysticism: The Spark of the Soul” with Rabbi
David Wolpe is scheduled to meet for the first time.
2020: Via ZOOM, The
Jewish Heritage Museum of Monmouth County is scheduled to present historian
Marty Schneit lecturing on “Ethel Merman, an American Icon.”
2019: In London, the UK
Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to host screenings of “Echo,” “Ms Stern” and
“Henri Dauman: Looking Up.”
2019: In Berkley, CA,
the Aquarian Minyan is scheduled to host “The Grateful and Speaking Dead,” a
“lecture examining the Jewish tradition of communicating with the dead through
Jewish text and ritual.”
2020: The Israeli
Office of Cultural Affairs in New York is scheduled to host a discussion of
“Making The Garden Left Behind.”
2020: The ASF Institute
of Jewish Experience is scheduled to present Professor Jane S. Gerber as she discusses
her new book Cities of
Splendour in the Shaping of Sephardi History, part of The Littman Library of Jewish
Civilization
2020: The Gershman
Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to host streaming screenings of
“Thou Shalt Not Hate” and “Jewish International Shorts.”
2020: Live on Zoom, The
American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to host “New Works Wednesdays –
Cities of Splendor in the Shaping of Sephardi History.”
2020: Live on Zoom, the
YIVO Institute is scheduled to host “Fermenting and Foraging: Resourcefulness
in the Historical and Contemporary Kitchen.”
2020: The Maine Jewish
Film Festival is scheduled to host the final screeing of “Last Stop Coney
Island” and the first screening of “Good Thoughts, Good Words.”
2020: Live on Zoom, the
Leo Baeck Institute and Straus Historical Society are scheduled to host “The
Great Families and Their Temple: The Strauses, the Lehmans and Temple
Emanu-El.”
2021: The American
Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to present “At Lunch with Jean Hanff
Korelitz” live on Zoom during which Julie Salamon (Wall Street Journal and NY Times) will
sit down with New York
Times bestselling novelist, playwright, and founder of
BOOKTHEWRITER, Jean Hanff Korelitz.
2021: The Boston Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to
come to a close with a screening of “Persian Lessons.”
2021: In Rohnert Park, CA “Voice majors from Sonoma
State University are scheduled to perform music of the late Leonard (“West Side
Story”) Bernstein, art songs in French, religious songs in Hebrew and more.”
2021: “Brazilian
musician and singer Carla Sitton Berg’s first Ladino song, “NES (Miracle),” was
released today just in time for Hanukkah.”
2021: The Illinois Holocaust Museum is scheduled to
host James McAuley, author of The House of Fragile
Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France for an in-depth
conversation about antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries in the art
world, the French-Jewish experience, the rise of a social class where trade
(rather than land) determined wealth, and the history of consumerism.
2022:
In California, as part of the Jewish Music Series at Sonoma State SSU students
majoring in voice are scheduled to perform vocal music by Kurt Weill, the late
German-born composer whose operas were steeped in social satire and became
synonymous with radical politics and cultural innovation of the Weimar
Republic.
2022:
The final performance of The Tales of Hoffman by the Israeli Opera is scheduled
to take place this afternoon, “barely ending before the Sabbath commences.
https://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/ryd11gnyus
2022:
Due to Shabbat, UK Jewish Film is dark until tomorrow.
2022:
In Newton Centre, MA, Temple Emanuel is scheduled host Shabbat Alive services
followed by dinner and drinks where Yisod looks forward to the 2022 FIFA World
Cup that kicks off on November 20.
2022:
Jewish Book Month is scheduled to begin
2022:
In San Rafael, CA, the Osher Marin JCC and Not in Our Town is scheduled to host
a screening of “Repairing the World: Stories from the Tree of Life”, the 2022
film about Pittsburgh’s powerful community response to hate in the aftermath of
2018 synagogue shooting that killed 11.
2022:
Lockdown University is scheduled to host a webinar with Rabbi Shippel lecturing
on this week’s Torah Portion.
2022:
The 35th Annual Ann Arbor Jewish Book Festival is scheduled to come
to an end.
2023(5th
of Kislev, 5784): Parashat Toldot (Generations)
2023:
The Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to host a screening of “The
Other Widow.”
2023:
The Eden Tamir Center is scheduled to host “Between Vienna and Prague”
featuring violinists Vika Gelman and Omer Herz, violist Leikie Glick and
cellists Gali Knaani and May Endy.
2023:
At Temple Judea, Chase Miller is scheduled to be called to the Torah as a Bar
Mitzvah.
2023:
In Waterloo, Rabbi Kushner is scheduled to lead this month’s Shabbat service at
Sons of Jacob Synagogue.
2023:
As November 18, volunteers from the Israel Antiquities Authorities are “sifting
through the rubble in Be’eri, in Kfar Aza, in the cars that were torched
fleeing the Supernova rave” to identify the remains of the dead using
techniques that are usually reserved for identifying the remains of those who
died thousands of years ago, Israeli civilians still face the threat of death
and destruction as can be seen by the rockets fired yesterday from Gaza aimed
at Tel Aviv and the Hezbollah rockets fired toward the town of Manara and the Hamas held hostages begin day 43 in captivity.
(Editor’s
note: this situation is too fluid for this blog to cover so we are just
providing a snapshot as of the posting at midnight Israeli time)
2024:
Zibby Media is scheduled to present “Pride, Laughter and Terror Under the
Six-Pointed Star: Jewish Writers Speak Out with Talia Carner, Annabelle
Gurwitch, Nicola Kraus and Lihi Lapid in conversation with Zibby Owens”
2024;
Central Synagogue is scheduled to host “Beit Midrash and Nosh with Rabbinic
Intern Rebecca Thau
2024:
Matthew Mugmon — a professor of music at the University of Arizona with
specialized knowledge of 20th-century Jewish composers- is scheduled to deliver
the third lecture on “Jewish Composers Who Changed Classical Music.”
2024:
“ADL’s In Concert Against Hate is scheduled to take place at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.
2024:
Sara Jo Ben Zvi is scheduled to the second lecture on Lesson of 1948, part of
the Segula Lecture Series.”
2024:
Today “Tikvah's Jonathan Silver is scheduled to sit down with renowned social
psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt and Jewish scholar Dr. Mijal Bitton for a
conversation on "Building Our Children's Moral Foundation.”
2024:
The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host “a performance of Joel
Engel’s A krants yidishe folksnigunim (1924): a collection of Jewish folksongs,
dances, Hasidic nigunim, and religious melodies in arrangements for piano and
four hand piano.”
2024:
The JBC Writers Conference is scheduled to a conference panel on “Writing
While Israeli: Hebrew Literature Home and Abroad, after October 7th”
with authors Maya Arad, Ruby Namdar, and Noa Yedlin, moderated by Sandee
Brawarsky
2024:
As November 18th begins in Israel, an unprecedented wave of
anti-Semitism that has included Hamas supporters calling for Zionist passengers
on a New York subway to raise their hands, demonstrations at a high school
production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and the beating of a college student in
Chicago sweeps the United States and the Hamas held hostages begin day 409 in
captivity while Israelis brace for more rocket attacks by Hezbollah, Iran and
terrorists based in Iraq (Editor’s note: this situation is too fluid
for this blog to cover so we are just providing a snapshot as of the posting at
midnight Israeli time)
