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This Day, February 20, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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February 20



390: Emperors Valentinian II., Theodosius, and Arcadius issued a decree that thwarted the attempt of the association of "navicularii" (ship-and cargo-owners) of Constantinople to force the Jews and the Samaritans to join them and to share in the burdens of the society. They “decided that the communities of the Jews and the Samaritans could not legally be forced to join the navicularii, and that at most their wealthy members only could be taxed ("Codex Theodosianus," xiii. 5, 18). This decree was most important to the Jews, for many of them were ship-owners, and more than one-half of the shipping in Alexandria was controlled by Jews.” (As reported by the Jewish Encyclopedia)



1194: King Tancred of Sicily died effectively ending the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and bring it under the German Hohenstaufens. This would prove beneficial to the Jews because 15 years later, Emperor Frederick II would intervene on behalf of his Sicilian Jewish subjects to temporarily put an end to their persecutions by the Crusaders.



1422:  Pope Martin V (1417-31) issued a Bull reminding Christians that Christianity was derived from Judaism and warned the Friars not to incite against the Jews. The Bull was withdrawn the following year amidst allegations that the Jews of Rome attained the Bull by fraud.



1431: Pope Martin V, the author of Sicut Judaeis ("and thus to the Jews," passed away today.



1495: “The Jew Mekl, son of Jontoffa, gave a mortgage of 60 schock of Meissen thalers on his Jewish house at number 263, on the corner of what are today Solní Road and Sedláčková Road in Pilsen, to his stepmother Lea, giving her the right to live there before gentiles and Jews.


1547:  Edward VI of England crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey. Edward was the male heir sought by his father Henry VIII. Edward’s reign was short since he died at the age of 15.  Reportedly small numbers of Conversos made their way to the kingdom during his reign as they had during Henry VIII’s time and worshipped secretly in London and Bristol.



1662(1stof Adar, 5422): Shabbatai ben Meir HaKoehn, the Lithuanian-born Moravian rabbi whose works included Siftei Kohn or the Shakh, a commentary on the Shulchan Aruch Yoreh De'ah passed away today.



1667(26thof Shevat, 5427): Rabbi David ben Samuel Halevi passed away. Born in Cracow in 1586, he was known as TA"Z an acronym for his response Turei Zahav – Rows (or Rock) of Gold. During the Chmelnitsky Uprisings which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Jews he found refuge in the castle of Prince Radziwill in a narrow room at the top, near the clock – the symbol of the Polish eagle that could be seen for miles. A folktale says that when Chmelnitsky and his hooligans approached the town Olyka, the rabbi and a large number of Olyka Jews took refuge in the Prince's castle and prayed to God. They fought alongside the Prince's men against the cruel enemy. Two ancient huge cannons that were not even usable suddenly shot out by themselves and killed off many of the enemy. In any event, the fear of God befell the hooligans and the quickly retreated and ran away. In memory of this miracle, Rabbi David composed special penitential prayers for the 20th of Nisan, the day the miracle occurred. The descendants of Rabbi Ha-Levi were the Russian rabbinical family Paltrowitch. This family produced 33 rabbis over several generations. One of these rabbis, Simcha Paltrowitch (1843-1926) served the Pine street “shul” in Buffalo from 1890 to 1914.  His brother’s descendant is the producer-director Bruce Paltrow (Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere), the father of the actress Gwyneth Paltrow.



1751: Benedict XIV issued Elapso proxime Anno, a papal bull dealing with the issue of what the



Church called “Jewish heretics.”



1790:  Austrian Emperor Joseph II passed away at the age of 49.  Joseph II actually reigned over the Holy Roman Empire which was "neither holy nor Roman."  For his time he was a benign despot who sought to reform his empire.  Jews viewed him with mixed feelings.  On the one hand he abolished many of the archaic restrictions on Jewish social and commercial life.  He abolished laws pertaining to wearing the yellow badge and prohibiting Jews from practicing law and medicine.  At the same time, he called for an end to writing public documents and contracts in Yiddish or Hebrew and the abolition of certain aspects of self-governance in the Jewish community.  On the one hand even a reformer like Moses Mendelssohn was concerned about the impact of Joseph's plans on Jewish identity.  On the other hand, a century and a quarter later, Adolph Hitler expressed his disdain for this Austrian monarch.  I guess you will have to be the judge after you have had a chance to the history of Jews in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries.



1790: At Strasbourg, The Society of the Friends of the Constitution admitted its first Jewish member.



1792: “Jews who lived in the vicinity of Strasbourg were granted permission to enter the city to take an oath of allegiance.



1793(8thof Adar, 5553): Prudence Hays, the wife of Baruch Hays and the mother of John Jacob Hays passed away today in New York City.



1798(4thof Adar): Following Napoleon’s conquest of Italy, the ghetto at Rome was abolished.  When the Pope regained power the ghetto was re-established.  It would finally be abolished after the re-unification of Italy in 1870.



1804: At Hobart, Australia a penal colony was established which included 8 Jews among its prisoners.



1808: In Canada, the assembly resolved by a vote of 35 to 5 that "Ezekiel Hart, Esquire, professing the Jewish religion cannot take a seat, nor sit, nor vote, in this House.”



1812(7thof Adar I, 5572): Seventy-two year old Rabbi Moses Ben Abraham Frankel, the father of David Frankel passed away at Dessau.



1816(21stof Shevat, 5576): Polly Israel (Perla bat Kalonymous) the mother of Henrietta Israel passed away today.



1817: Abraham Quixano Henriques married Rebecca Aguillar at Bevis Marks Synagogue in London today.



1821: Asher ben Israel married Breina bat Uri Feivel at the Western Synagogue today.



1827: Sir Moses Montefiore and Lady Judith Montefiore began their first trip to Palestine (As reported by Jennifer Breger)



1829: In Florence, Italy, British Major-General Lord George Russell and Elizabeth Rawdon gave birth to Odo William Leopold Russell, the British diplomat who worked with Sir Moses Montefiore in an unsuccessful attempt to get the Pope to return Edgardo Mortara to his Jewish parents.



1832: A version of Robert le diable (Robert the Devil) an opera in five acts composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer was presented in London today at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane under the title “The Fiend-Finder.



1838: Ashe Davis married Frances Wolfe today at the Great Synagogue.



1839: In Charleston, SC, Rabbi Poznanski officiated at the wedding of Lew Hertz and Esther Peixotto, the eldest daughter of the late Solomon C. Peixotto.



1845(13thof Adar I, 5606): Seventy-two year old Polish born author and poet Shalom Ben Jacob Cohen who was educated in Berlin and whose works in “Light of David,” an epic poem about the Israelite king and He Who Calls The Generations, “a history of the Jews from Maccabean times to the present.”



1852(30th of Shevat, 5612): Rosh Chodesh Adar



1855: “The inauguration of the Touro Literary Institute took place this evening, at the rooms of the Institute at Number 448 Broome-street in New York City.”  Most of those attending the meeting were described as “intelligent” and of “Hebraic descent.”  Benjamin H. Myers, the president of the Association presided over the meeting.  Jonas B. Phillips and Rabbi R.J.M. Raphall addressed the meeting. In their speeches, the speakers traced the history of Jewish literature and literary societies from ancient Jerusalem, through Spain and London to modern times.



1857: It was reported  today that the boot manufactures of Hopkinton, MA, have discovered, much to their consternation, that some of their workmen have been selling some of their footwear to "certain Jew peddlers and others" at a fraction of their cost.  The plan was to purchase the goods in one town and sell them in another, thus avoiding detection. [Please note, only the Jews are identified by their religion.  This was often in the case in newspapers and journals of the day including the New York Times.]



1858: Lord Derby formed a government in which Benjamin Disraeli would play an “outsized” role because he was a member of the House of Commons while Derby and most of his other cabinet members sat in the House of Lords.



1862: Philadelphian Jacob Jacobs began serving with Company K of the Eleventh Regiment



1863: Ha-Levanon, the first Hebrew language periodical in Palestine, was published today



1863: In Paris, impressionist painter Camille Pissarro and his wife Julie (née Vellay) gave birth to landscape painter, printmaker, wood engraver and designer and printer of fine books Lucien Pissarro who was fortunate to have settled in London and thus avoided the Holocaust which engulfed his native France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Pissarro#/media/File:Manson-Lucien-Pissaro-Reading.jpg



1864: Ellen Terry, the British actress who gained fame for her portrayal of Portia in The Merchant of Venice marred George F. Watts, the artist who painted her portrait.



1865: Having reached the rank of Corporal, Jacob Jacobs completed his three year enlistment with the Union Army as a member of Company K of the Eleventh Regiment.



1871: Baron Jozsef Eotvos, Hungarian statesman and who supported the emancipation of the Jews passed away today while serving as Minister of Religion and Education of Hungary.



1871(29thof Shevat, 5631): Selig Newman, the native Posen who became a rabbi in Plymouth, taught Hebrew at Oxford and founded the Society for the Cultivation of the Hebrew Language and Literature passed away today in New York where he had been living and teaching for approximately the last twenty years.



1872: According to reports published today, a dispute has arisen in New York over the ritual purity of wine being supplied to the Jewish community.  According to Rabbi Aronson, the wine being supplied to the local synagogues has not been prepared in accordance with Jewish law.  But the wine dealers say that their wine bears the seal and signature of Rabbi A.J. Ash of the Grand Beth Hamedrash of New York City proving that the wine is Kosher.  Rabbi Isaacs has also certified the wine as ritually fit.



1873: In Buffalo, NY, William D. Ellis and Bertha Strass gave birth David A. Ellis the Phi Beta Graduate of Harvard and Editor of the Harvard Law Review and husband of Amy Friedman who was a director of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, the Boston Branch of Alliance Israelite Universelle and several other Jewish and secular educational and charitable organizations in Boston.



1874: Birthdate of Samuel Earl “Ike” Samuels the native of Quincy, Illinois who played third base before the turn of the century.



1874: Benjamin Disraeli began serving his second and final term as Prime Minister of Great Britain. Disraeli was a leader of the Conservative Party.  But as can be seen by the reform legislation passed by his government these Conservatives have more in common with the liberal Democrats of the 21st century than they do with those on the American right who call themselves Conseratives.  “Disraeli's government introduced various reforms, including the Artisan's and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act 1875, the Public Health Act 1875, the Sale of Food and Drugs Act (1875), and the Education Act (1876). His government also introduced a new Factory Act meant to protect workers, the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875 to allow peaceful picketing, and the Employers and Workmen Act (1875) to enable workers to sue employers in the civil courts if they broke legal contracts. As a result of these social reforms the Liberal-Labour MP Alexander Macdonald told his constituents in 1879, ‘The Conservative party have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty.’”  When it came to foreign policy, Disraeli’s government supported the concept of Empire.  He engineered the first British acquisition of financial interest in the Suez Canal.  He understood the great issue of the time as being the management of the decline of the Ottoman Empire and showed his mastery of the diplomacy at the Congress of Berlin.



1875: Birthdate of Hyman Phillips, the native of Russia who moved to Massachusetts who served as officer for the Home for Jewish Children in Dorchester and as a board member of the Federation of Jewish Charities.



1876: Birthdate of Richard Beuthner who would die in Berlin at the age of 66.



1876: It was reported today that The Alliance Israélite Universelle, which is headquartered in Paris, is providing a variety of services to Jews throughout the world.  Among other things, the Alliance is providing care for a large number of Russian Jewish orphan, supporting an Agricultural School in Jaffa and operating a normal school for Jewish women from Asia Minor in Paris.  The Alliance is supporting numerous other schools throughout North Africa and western Asia, including ones at Aleppo, Baghdad and Constantinople.



1878: Leo XIII is elected Pope. “In reaction to the painful loss of the papacy’s temporal power…Leo XIII lashed out against modernity.”  “The Vatican increasingly viewed the Jews who were beneficiaries of the demise of the church’s temporal rule as part of the array of dangerous forced against it.  In 1880, apparently with the approval of Leo XIII, “Civilta Cattolica kicked off a decades-long campaign against the Jews accusing them of all the old sins and then many new ones such as being responsible for both capitalism and communism and of being disloyal to the countries in which they lived.’ (As reported in Antisemitismby Richard S. Levy)



1879: “The Jews Oath” was “abrogated” today in Dresden, Germany.



1880: In Prescott, AZ, the Pauline Markham troupe that included Josephine Sarah Marcus, the eccentric Jewess who became the lover and wife of Wyatt Earp completed their performances of HMS Penifore.



1880: “Oil in the World,” an article published today that describes the conditions of oil fields throughout Asia, Europe and the United States, the some of the fields in Eastern Galicia are controlled by Polish Jews. The Jews of Boryslaw are more interested in gaining the wax found in their fields because it is part of the highly profitable candle business.  Therefore, they have resisted spending the money necessary to develop the oil production in the area.



1880: Birthdate of Maurice Zackheim, the native of Raczki, Poland, who came to the United States in 1904, became a pharmacist in Detroit where he served as an officer of the Talmud Torah.



1882: Birthdate of Polish -born “American sculptor, draughtsman and collector” Elie Nadelma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Classical_Head_by_Nadelman.jpg



1882: This morning, Philadelphia’s Mayor King received a telegram from J.M. Brown of Galveston Texas offering to provide one hundred acres of land in Motely County, Texas to any of the 50 Jewish families who are on their way to Philadelphia from Russia who are willing to settle in the Lone Star State. Motely County is one of those under populated expanses in the northwest part of the state.



1882: The Grand Lodge of the order Kesher Shel Barzel, District No. 1 continued with its annual convention at the Pythagoras Hall.



1886: “Undesirable Immigrants” published today described the condition of 300 Romanian Jews who were expelled from their native land and are now being held at Castle Garden.  While few of them had any money, most of them had tickets that would take them to American cities where they say that have friends who will assist them.



1886:  Birthdate of Béla Kun head of Hungarian Soviet Republic formed in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I.  Neither the Soviet nor Kun survived for very long.



1888: Henry de Worms, the Lord Pirbright, began serving as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in the government of Marquess of Salisburgy.



1888: Rabbi Joseph Silverman finished his service with Congregation B'nai Israel in Galveston, Texas, where he had been serving since July, 1885.  The Ohio born rabbi was on his way to a pulpit in New York City. 



1890(30thof Shevat, 5650): Rosh Chodesh Adar



1890; It was reported today that Mrs. Phillip J. Joachimsen is President of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society of New York and C.W. Meyer is serving as Secretary.



1892: The Cunard Line Etruria was being held in quarantine because of the need to take extra precautions because there are Jews from Russia among the steerage passengers.



1893: Birthdate of playwright and librettist Russel Crouse whose interaction with Jews included collaborating with Rodgers and Hammerstein on the “Sound of Music” and making “a casual remark” which resulted in Arthur Laurents having to go before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee “to account for his political views.”



1893: “Some New Publications” published today includes a review of Studies by a Recluse in Cloister, Town and Country in which Augustus Jesopp describes the history the Abbey at Bury St. Eduunds including a period in the Middle Ages during which Abbott Sampson drove out the Jews who had legitimately acquired much of the property following a period of gross mismanagement.



1893: The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian and Orphan Asylum will give a concert at the Lenox Lyceum this evening under the sponsorship of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Society.



1894: It was reported today that Jesse Seligman, Nathan Straus and Perry Belmont were among those who attended the meeting of the Distribution Committee established by the Citizens’ Relief Committee.  The committee had been set up to deal with the suffering caused by the Depression that began in 1893.  Belmont was the son of August Belmont, Jr. the Jewish born financier.  Perry’s mother was not Jewish.



1895: Ferdinand Forzinetti, the commandant of the Cherche-Midi military prison, and one of the first to be convinced of Dreyfus's innocence was granted his retirement today while his most famous prisoner sailed to Guyana. Later, Alfred Dreyfus paid homage to his jailer who had dissuaded him from taking his own life and "who knew how to combine the strict duty of a soldier with the highest feelings of humanity."



1896: It was reported today that the last year’s charity ball sponsored by the Young Ladies and Gentlemen’s League of the Montefiore Home raised $10,088.12.



1896: It was reported today that among those who included on the lists as patrons for the upcoming charity ball sponsored by the Young Ladies and Gentlemen’s League of the Montefiore Home are Governor 



1897: In Leipzig, Marie Edith Fischer, a Lutheran and Rudolf Eisler a Jewish professor of philosophy gave birth to Gerhart Eisler.
http://spartacus-educational.com/Gerhart_Eisler.htm



1897: Rolla Hewitt, a woman of questionable sanity who felt it her duty to convert Jews to Christianity was assumed to be dead after having wandered off twenty-four hours ago.



1897: According to some sources, birthdate of boxer Danny Frush, the husband of Binnie Cohen Frush.



1897: “Insane on Religion” published today described the disappearance of Mrs. Rolla Hewitt who “a demented woman” who “wandered away from her home”  “several days” after “a converted Jew preached” at her Church having declared that “she had a mission to perform and her objective” was to convert every Jew at the Baron Hirsch settlement in Woodbine, NJ.



1898: As the Dreyfus Case continued to embroil France a mob of three thousand Parisians “marched toward the Pantheon yelling ‘Down with Zola!’ and “Death to the Jews.’”



1898: Ludovic Trarieux, Emile Duclaux, Edouard Grimaux and Francis de Pressensé are among those who founded “The Ligue des Droits de l'Homme et du citoyen” [League for Human and Civic Rights] which was founded to defend Alfred Dreyfus who had been wrongly convicted of treason Ludovic Trarieux served as its first President,



1898: A mass meeting was held in New Jersey synagogue tonight to protest the statements by William J. Corssley, the Prosecutor in Mercer County, who while trying a case against a peddler, said “The god of the Jew is gold.  They are not fit to be citizens, as they only come here to hoard wealth, that they may go back to Jerusalem and spend it.



1898: In Port Huron, MN, founding of the Mount Sinai Society which “maintains a cemetery and dispenses charity” and whose members included Jacob Jacobi, Jacob Cohn, Leon Cohen, Benjamin Cohn, Adolph Kanter and Louis Levine.



1899: “Christ and His Religion” published today provides Rabbi Gustav Gottheil’s views on Jesus whom he does not believe would be comfortable with the practices and the preachings of today’s Christian churches.



1900: “The 37thConvention of District No. 4 of the Independent Order of B’Nai B’rith came to an end today in San Francisco.



1900: In Mulhouse, France, Constance Kenendel Lang and Baruch Kahn gave birth to Raphael Kahn



1901: Birthdate of famed architect Louis I. Kahn



             1902: The state of New York approved a charter for the Jewish Theological Seminary of America


1905: Miss Annie Russell appeared to-night in the leading role of "Jinny, the Carrier," a four-act comedy by Israel Zangwill, which was presented for the first time before a packed house at the Park Theatre in Boston, MA.



1906: According to a summary of the forecast prepared by Broughton Brandenburg, the President of the National Institute of Immigration “there will be a heavy fall off in the” immigration of Gallician, Russian and Polish Jews because, among other things, he believes “that the bloody events in Russia have served to promote a new solidarity among the Jews and they will remain where they are, for a time at least, hoping for better things at home or the inauguration of a movement to found a new Hebrew nation in Palestine or som other land.”



1907(6th of Adar, 5667): French Chemist Henri Moissan passed away. Moissan isolated fluorine and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1906
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/moissan.html



1912(2ndof Adar I, 5672): Eighty-three year old Jewish communal worker William Cobe passed away in Boston, MA.



1915: “Louis Marshall of New York, counsel for Leo M. Frank, now under sentence of death by State court in Georgia for the murder of a factory girl in Atlanta in 1913 today filed a brief in the Supreme court of the United States Support their appeal from the judgment of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Georgia denying to Frank a writ of habeas corpus.”



1916(16thof Adar I, 5676): Eighty-five year old Rabbi Simon Bernstein passed away in Winthrop, Massachusetts.



1916: “A profile of Theda Bara (born Theodosia Burr Goodman) that appeared in the New York Times, reported that 500,000 fans followed Bara everywhere she went. She was said to have received over a thousand marriage proposals from adoring fans. Others named children after her. One critic called her "a clever actress with...a marvelously mobile and expressive face."’



1916: The first session of the 24th annual meeting of the Jewish Historical Society was held at Dropsie College today where several papers were presented including “Some Pedagogical Aspects of American Jewish History” by Mabel Lyon and “The Question of the Kosher Meat Supply in New York City in 1813.”



1916: Today, Rabbi Joseph Karuskop, the founder and President of the National Farm School said "He who does not voluntarily do more than he is obliged to do will in time do less than he ought, and in the end will find himself unable to do what he must."



1916: “Hope For Jews In Russia” published today includes the prediction of Victor Bash, a professor at the University of Paris now teaching at Columbia that since “anti-Semitism was born in Germany and came from Germany to Russia” “a bill of complete Jewish emancipation, social as well as legal, is possible in Russia, more possible than in Germany, and more possible today than ever before.”



1917: The musical “Oh Boy” with the score composed by Jerome Kern, premiered in New York City.



1917: Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, is appointed Apostolic Nuncio to Germany. This will make him the eyes and ears and representative of the Vatican during the rise of Hitler.



1917: It was reported today now that the Germans are in control of Warsaw, “There is also a very strong propaganda in full swing again the Jews and measure of an outrageously unlawful kind have been put in for again them.” No passes are granted to the Jews and “no Jew is allowed to build a house and this in spite of the fact that there 350,000 Jews” among the one million inhabitants of Warsaw.



1918: In New York, Clara and Maxwell Cohn gave birth to Lenore Cohn. A niece of movie mogul Harry Cohn, she gained fame as Lee Annenberg, the wife of Walter Annenberg



1919: Victor Berger was convicted of having violated the Espionage Act of 1917 and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. “The trial was presided over by Judge Kenesaw Landis, who later became the first commissioner of Major League Baseball. His conviction was appealed, and ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court which found that Judge Landis had improperly presided over the case after the filing of an affidavit of prejudice.” Berge was Jewish and was the first member of the Socialist Party elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.  In the eyes of many, these were his real crimes.



1920(1st of Adar, 5680): Rosh Chodesh Adar



1920(1st of Adar, 5680): Pauline Einstein, the mother of the physicist Albert Einstein, passed away. Born in Cannstatt, Württemberg, in 1858, she “had an older sister, Fanny, and two older brothers, Jacob and Caesar. Her parents were Julius Doerzbacher, who had accepted the family name Koch in 1842, and Jette Bernheimer.”



1920: Birthdate of Tidor Rudas, the Budapest born impresario who spent 6 months in a concentration camp because his father was Jewish. (As reported by Douglas Martin)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/arts/music/tibor-rudas-classical-music-impresario-dies-at-94.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=1



1921: Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Congressman Isaac M. Siegel and Leon Sanders are scheduled to speak this afternoon at “the twelfth annual meeting of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America” in New York City.



1924: Birthdate of Mordechai Ofer, the Krakow native who made Aliyah a year later and served in the Knesset from 1965 until his untimely death in 1971 at the age of 47.



1924: Birthdate of Columbus, Ohio, native Eugene Borowitz, the Ohio State University graduate who became one of the leading Rabbis and philosophers in the Reform movement and the founder of “Sh’ma, a Journal of Jewish Responsibility.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/us/rabbi-eugene-b-borowitz-reform-leader-dies-at-91.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
https://forward.com/shma-now/



1924: Birthdate of Gerson Goldhaber, the German born “American particle physicist and astrophysicist who was one of the discoverers of the J/ψ meson which confirmed the existence of the charm quark.”



1926: Chief Justice Walter I. McCoy in Equity Court ruled today that Mrs. Beta Isenberg, 80 years old, widow of Paul Isenberg, a citizen of Bremen and also of the Hawaiian Islands, is an American citizen because of the Hawaiian citizenship and is entitled to the return of $2,500,000 worth of property despite the protest of Howard Sutherland, Alien Property Custodian



1926: Plans for an upcoming goodwill dinner sponsored by the Greater New York Federation of Churches which will be attended by Jews and Christians were announced today including the fact that the meal be “strictly kosher.”



1926: In Marshalltown, Iowa, Louis Bucksbaum and the former Ida Gervich gave birth to Matthew Bucksbaum the co-founder of “a family shopping mall empire that helped transform the landscape of suburbia and the habits of American consumers.” (As reported by Bruce Weber)



1927: Birthdate of Roy Cohn the lawyer, who gained fame or infamy as the council for the (Joseph) McCarthy Committee.  McCarthy and Cohen took advantage of American fears of Communism to conduct a witch hunt that ruined reputations and lives without saving us from any Communist spies.  Publicly homophobic, Cohn's death from AIDs was the subject of an HBO movie.



1929: “The Night Belongs to Us” starring Otto Wallburg as “Vater Bang” was released in Germany today


1931: U.S. premiere of “The Night Belongs to US” a German film co-starring Otto Wahlberg who would be murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.



1932(13thof Adar I, 5692): Parashat Tetzveh



1932: While delivering a sermon today at Congregation Emanu-El dedicated to honoring George Washington, Rabbi Samuel Schulman “referred to a statement made in a treaty between the United States and Tripoli in 1796 and signed by Washington that stated ‘the Government of the United States in not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.’”



1932: “Freaks,” a horror film co-produced by Harry Rapf and Irving Thalberg was released in the United States today.



1932: Plans were announced today for the upcoming bicentennial exercises to be held at Albany which including a speech by “Chief Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo of the Court of Appeals whom President Hoot has nominated for the United States Supreme Court.
 
1932: “Tribute to the memory of George Washington and especially to the first President’s work in establishing freedom in this country was paid” today “in synagogues throughout” New York City where “special Washington bicentennial services were held in addition to the regular” Shabbat services.



1932: In “Judge Cardozo’s Philosophy of the Law” published today, R. L. Duffus provides a snapshot of the Supreme Court nominee’s view of the world of jurisprudence.



1932: In the Bronx, Mae and Nathan Ader gave birth to Doctor Robert Ader, the Tulane University graduate and experimental psychologist who was among the first scientists to show how mental processes influence the body’s immune system; a finding that changed modern medicine. (As reported by Paul Vitello)



1933: Industrialists met at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace to show support of Hitler. Hitler promised to rid the world of Marxists and restore the Wehrmact (the Germany Army).  Hitler and his anti-Semitic policies enjoyed support from Germany’s business community from the outset.



1936: “Things to Come” a sci-fi film produced by Alexander Korda was released today in the United Kingdom.



1936: Dr. Arnold Netter, “a noted physician” was elected President of the Alliance Israelite Universelle succeeding Professor Sylvain Levy who had passed away on October 31, 1935.



1936: The Rabbis Association of Poland sent a radiogram to the more important Jewish religious communities of the world request that they join the Jews in offering prayers for the preservation of Jewish ritual slaughter which is being outlawed by the government.



1936: Bronislaw Huberman, the Polish violinist and founder of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, announced today that “the first concert of the newly organized Palestine Symphony Orchestra will be broadcast to the United States from Tel Aviv late in October over the facilities of the National Broadcasting Company.”  He also said that “negotiations have been started for regular visits of the orchestra to Egypt and Greece” as well as a world tour that would include a visit to the United States.



1937(9thof Adar, 5697): Parashat Tetzaveh and Shabbat Zachor



1937: Tiberias, one of the towns of Palestine known for its friendly relations between Arabs and Jews, was the scene of disorder today. Thirty Jews, thirty Arabs and two British policemen were slightly injured and two Jews were seriously hurt before order was restored.



1937: Ten days after receiving his passport, 24 year old Edward Isaac Lending sailed for Europe aboard the Ile de France on his was to fight as a member of the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.



1937: “Polish Jews Face Dismal Future published today provides a snapshot of the anti-Semitism faced by Jews in inter-war Poland. (It is also worth the read to see how much misinformation the Literary Digest, the magazine that predicted FDR would lost to Alf Landon could provide about the origins of the Jews of Europe)
http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/Jews_in_Poland_Before_WW2_pdf



1938: Louis Lipsky, chairman of the administrative committee of the United Palestine Appeal presided over a meeting of Jewish leaders held under the auspices of the Zionist Organization of America at the Hotel Pennsylvania.  The Jewish leaders, including Dr. Bernard Joseph, legal adviser of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, expressed a desire for a peaceful solution to the problems separating Jews and Arabs in Palestine.



1938: Hitler addressed the Reichstag and served notice that the future of Austria and the Sudeten Germans were in the direct interest of Nazi Germany. The annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland would be two of the landmarks on the road to World War II and the Final Solution.



1938: Franz Josef Rarkowski is consecrated as espiscopus castrensis, bishop of the military chaplains in the German Army, by Papal Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo.



1938: The Palestine Post reported that one British officer was shot dead and two others wounded when their car was shot at in the vicinity of Haifa. British troops and police cordoned off the whole area and one Arab was shot dead when he tried to break through. A number of Arab suspects were arrested. There were many other cases of sniping at traffic and sabotage throughout the country.



1939: Twenty thousand Nazi supporters gather in New York City’s Madison Square Garden.  While there were only a limited number of such displays, the power of the isolationists led by Lindbergh and the America First movement provided a socially acceptable cover for anti-Semites and fascists.  FDR’s decisions about European Jewry were made against this hostile background.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/when-a-jewish-laborer-took-on-20000-us-nazis-in-madison-square-garden/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=8ca7427a19-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-8ca7427a19-53921877



1939: In an apparent attempt to strengthen the Axis Alliance, Mussolini shifts policy by banning Jews from his Fascist Party.  According to some, as many as 10,000 Jews had been members of the party.  Years later, Mussolini’s mistress would claim that Il Duce had claimed that he always had been an anti-Semite.



1941: The Nazis ordered Polish Jews barred from using public transportation



1941: Birthdate of New York City novelist Alan Furst whose one work of non-fiction was a biography of the creator of Mrs. Fields Cookies company
1941: The first transport of Jews from Plotsk, Poland to be sent to a concentration departed. "We remember so that nobody will forget.  We remember lest anybody try and forget."



1942: In France, Jacques Bielinky described the responses of his non-Jewish fellow citizens to anti-Jewish policies, expressing contempt for their lack of making any attempt to prevent the dismissal of their Jewish colleague.  “They did not make the move; cowardice has become a civic virtue.”



1942:  Under the Vichy government, Leon Blum went on trial today.



1943(15thof Adar I, 5703): Parsashat Tetzaveh



1943(15thof Adar I, 5703): While serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force, Flying Officer William Kadison Komaiko, one of the two sons of Solomon Baruch (S.B.) Komaiko, was died today when he was shot down over Europe.



1943: Birthdate of English movie director Mike Leigh.



1943: “The Hard Way” a musical drama version of a story by Irwin Shaw, directed by Vincent Sherman, produced by Jerry Wald and with a screenplay by Daniel Fuchs and Peter Viertel was released today in the United States.



1943: Birthdate of Moshe Cotel, the Baltimore native who would become an acclaimed pianist and composer whose works were often infused with themes emanating from his deep Jewish roots. Cotel’s “Jewish reconnection” would lead him to the rabbinate. He would be ordained five years before his death in 2008 while he was serving as spiritual leader of Temple Beth El of Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn.



1944: Birthdate of Lewis “Lew” Michael Soloff, the native of Brooklyn who gained fame as an American jazz musician.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/arts/music/lew-soloff-trumpeter-for-blood-sweat-and-tears-dies-at-71.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well



1945: At Dovrat, “a kibbutz near Afula,” two refugees from Nazi Germany gave birth to decorated war hero Amram Mitzna, the MK who served as Mayor of Haifa and Yerhuam.



1945: Birthdate of Queen’s native Andrew Bergman who gained fame as a “screenwriter, movie director and novelist”
http://www.hollywood.com/celebrities/andrew-bergman-57284947/



1947: Birthdate of actor Peter Lawrence Strauss, the native of Croton-on-Hudson who won an Emmy for The Jericho Mile and was best known for the popular mini-series “Rich Man, Poor Man.”



1947: A female member of The Irgun Zvai Leumi telephoned newspapers correspondents stating the Irgun was responsible for cutting an oil pipeline in two places and attacking a Royal Air Force installation near Hadera.



1947: The British government announced that it would withdraw from India.  This decision signaled a change in the U.K.’s foreign policy.  Its willingness to give up the Palestine Mandate would be triggered in part by the realization that protecting the Suez Canal as the lifeline to an imperial possession was no longer a critical need.



1950: King Features Syndicate “launched” the daily version of the comic strip “Big Ben Bolt” co-created by Elliot Caplin.



1951: Rostam Bastuni, the first Israeli Arab to represent a Zionist party in the Knesset left Mapam and “set up the Left Faction with Adolf Berman and Moshe Sneh.



1951: Birthdate of Dr. Robert “Bob” Silber, a fine physician, a devoted husband and father, an ardent Hawkeye fan, a pillar of the Cedar Rapids Jewish Community and a real mensch, who is smart enough to have more questions than answers.



1951: In Los Angles, Bernice Pearl Wolfe and her husband gave birth to Randy Craig Wolfe who gained famed as Randy California, one of the original members of “Spirit.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-randy-california-1283572.html
http://randycaliforniaandspirit.com/biography/



1952: The film The African Queen opened at the Capitol Theatre in New York City.  The African Queen marked the film debut of Theodore Bikel.



1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that Washington Senator William Langer, a Republican, introduced a resolution asking Congress to investigate the plight of Arab refugees, a roadblock to the "stability and security" of the Middle East. (The Republican Party was not always friendly territory for supporters of the State of Israel.)



1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that The Jewish Agency opened a hostel in Tel Aviv for skilled Western immigrants. 



1953: Birthdate of Philadelphia-born meteorologist Dave Schwartz, an early and long-time “host” on the Weather Channel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/business/media/dave-schwartz-63-dies-was-weather-channel-meteorologist.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=1



1958: A UK production of “Where's Charley?” a musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser “opened in the West End at the Palace Theatre where it ran for 404 performances.



1958(30thof Shevat, 5718): Rosh Chodesh Adar



1958(30thof Shevat, 5718): Sixty-nine year old Al Lichtman, who produced “The Young Lions” and whose career was such that he earned a “Star” on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
http://projects.latimes.com/hollywood/star-walk/al-lichtman/



1958: “Doctor Crippen Lives” featuring Inge Meyself “who was banned from performing 1935 until 1945 because her father, Julius Meysel, was Jewish” was released in Germany today.



1959(12thof Adar I, 5719): Israeli poet Zalman Shneur, the native of Belarus who wpm the Bialik Pririze in 1951 and the Israel Prize in 1955 passed away today in New York City.http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=883&dat=19590306&id=VfBOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=W0wDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3543,5060391



1960: Eighty year old “Monuments Man (a member of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section of the Allie Armies) Sir Charles Leonard Woolley the non-Jewish British archaeologist remembered for having excavated Ur of the Chaldees, and for discovering the ancient Sumerian civilization passed away today.  Yes, these are the actual places which produced Abraham, Lot and Sarah.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leonard-Woolley\



1960: In Bloomington, on Shabbat, the dedication of the new Moses Montefiore Temple continued.



1962:  Birthdate of Galveston, TX native Adam Schreiber who played Center for the University of Texas before spending 15 years in the National Football League.



1963: Opening performance of Rolf Hochhuth’s “The Deputy” which provides a controversial view of Pious XII’s behavior during the Holocaust.



1965(18thof Adar I, 5725): Director and producer Michał Waszyński passed away.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/jewrnalism/item/he_managed_to_fool_the_world_micha_waszyski/



1971: “Follies” a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim began its pre-Broadway tryout at the Colonial Theatre in Boston.



1972(5th of Adar, 5732): Walter Winchell passed away at the age of 74.  According to some, Winchell was the creator of the modern newspaper gossip column.  Starting out with the New York Graphic and then the Daily Mirror in the nineteen twenties, Winchell's column was eventually syndicated in papers across the country.  At one time he had 30 million readers.  The column coupled with his radio show gave Winchell an amazing amount of power - sort of cross between Rush Limbaugh and Entertainment Tonight.  The right mention in a Winchell column could make you; the wrong mention or the lack of a mention could break you. How Jewish were Kun, Cohn and Winchell? Who really is a Jew in Jewish History? 



1972(5thof Adar, 5732): Seventy-three year old Harold W. Carmely, the native of Poland who came to the United States where he became a Zionist leader, Superintendent of the Daughters of the Israel Home and the husband of  Esther T. Carmely passed away today.



1973(18th of Adar I, 5733): Joseph Szigeti Hungarian born US violinist, passed away at the age of 80.



1973: Seventy-eight year old of Dimitar Peshev, the Bulgarian leader who helped to prevent the deportation of Bulgaria's 48,000 Jews “for which he was named one of the "Righteous Among the Nations" passed away today.


1975(9thof Adar, 5735): Sixty-one year old Robert Strauss the actor who created the memorable character of “Animal” in “Stalag 17” as well as playing “second banana” to Sgt. Bilko in the Phil Silvers Show.
http://cscottrollins.blogspot.com/2013/11/robert-strauss-popular-1950s-character.html#!/2013/11/robert-strauss-popular-1950s-character.html



1976(19th of Adar I, 5736): French born human rights activist, Renee Cassin, passed away.  Jurist, combat veteran of  World War I, member of the Resistance in WW II and leader of the French Jewish community, Cassin received the Nobel Prize Winner for Peace,
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1968/cassin-facts.html
http://www.renecassin.org/



1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that in a chaotic gun battle at Larnaca, Cyprus, 38 Egyptian commandoes freed the 11 Egyptian hostages held aboard a Cypriot Airways DC-8 airliner and apprehended the two Arab terrorists who held them.



1978(13thof Adar I, 5738): Eighty-five year old “Indian civil servant and banker” Sir Abraham Jeremy Raisman passed away today.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0017_0_16374.html



1981(16thof Adar I, 5741): Seventy-six year old “Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, a former senior fashion editor at Vogue magazine whose panache and sense of quality earned him the reputation of one of the fashion industry's great men of style” passed away today.  (As reported by Sheila Rule)
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/21/obituaries/nicolas-de-gunzburg-76-aformer-editor-of-vogue.html



1987: “Square Dance” a movie version of the film by the same name starring Winona Ryder (Winona Laura Horowtiz) was released in the United States today.



1989: Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl” was released to the public today.



1992: The clashes between Israelis and Iranian backed guerrillas in Lebanon culminated with an Israeli armored push today into the villages of Kafra and Yater, about a mile north of what Israel calls its security zone in southern Lebanon.



1992:  German premiere of the Israeli film “Cup Final.”



1995(20thof Adar I, 5755): Eighty-four year old Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, the Rosh Yeshiva of the Kol Torah Yeshiva in Jerusalem passed away today. Over a quarter of a million people attended his funeral.



1996(30th of Shevat, 5756):  Dr. Solomon Asch, leading Gestalt Psychologist and pioneer social psychologist passed away.



1998: St. Peter’s Church, Chapel and Cemetery Complex which was built in 1853 using the designs of architect Leopold Eidlitz “was add to the National Register of Historic Places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter%27s_Church,_Chapel_and_Cemetery_Complex#/media/File:Buildingside.JPG



1999(4th of Adar, 5759): Film critic Gene Siskel passed away.  As the article below indicates, he was not just a successful critic he was also, a committed Jew, a real `mensch'



People the world over have eulogized him as a master movie critic, a dedicated family man and a modest person whose fame didn't detract from his friendliness.A lesser-known but equally important side to Siskel reflected his Jewish upbringing and his continued dedication to Judaism and his community. Siskel, who died of cancer at age 53, was an active supporter of Israel and Jewish educational initiatives. He spent his early childhood in a historically Jewish neighborhood on Chicago's North Side. After his parents died when Siskel was very young, he and his siblings were raised by their mother's sister and her family in a north Chicago suburb. His aunt and uncle were founding members of Conservative Synagogue Beth El, where he celebrated his bar mitzvah and later became a member with his wife, Marlene. Their daughter celebrated her bat mitzvah at Beth El in January, the last time he was out in public. More than 1,200 people attended his funeral there on Monday, among them his film-critic partner and longtime friend Roger Ebert. Just days before he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, Siskel emceed at Chicago's community celebration of Israel's 50th anniversary. At the time he was suffering from migraine headaches due to his illness. “Gene was a revolutionary at his craft, known the world over, yet he never forgot where he came from," said Steven Nasatirof the Chicago area Jewish federation." In an era when public figures often have little to do with their community, Gene was a mensch, whose Judaism was paramount in his life and who was a very willing and active member of his community." Siskel's dedication to Israel was strongly influenced by a family trip there two years ago when his oldest daughter, Kate, was in eighth grade. Siskel's children attended Moadon Kol Chadash, a small, family-run Hebrew school whose first graduating class was taken to Israel. Believing that such a trip should be offered to a greater number of local Hebrew-school students, Siskel took the project under his wing. As a result a group of eighth-graders went to Israel last February, and a second, much larger group, went earlier this month. Siskel compiled a video chronicling Jewish stereotypes and anti-Semitism in Hollywood, which he used as an educational tool. Friends say Siskel expressed Judaism with modesty and little fanfare. "He was very low-key and never took himself too seriously," said his longtime friend Howard Caroll, a retired Illinois state senator, "but he was fervent about his Jewish beliefs." Beth El Rabbi Vernon Kurtz said in his eulogy Monday that just weeks ago, prior to their second daughter's bat mitzvah, Siskel and his wife told her that the two most important values in life were family and Judaism. "Judaism," Siskel said, "has taught me right from wrong,"



2000: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans by Eric A. Johnson and The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin; edited by Rolf Tiedemann; translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.



2000(14thof Adar I, 5760): Purim Katan



2000(14thof Adar I, 5760): Eighty-six year old Elliot Caplin the comic strip writer who “co-created The Heart of Juliet Jones, Big Ben Bolt and Dr. Bobs” and who was the younger brother of Al Capp, the creator of Li’s Abner, passed away today.



2000: Bruce Lee Fleisher won the GTE Classic.



2002: The Israeli Defense Ministry awarded Elbit Systems, the Haifa based electronics manufacturer founded in 1967, a ground-breaking tender to purchase new trainers for the air force



2003(18th of Adar I, 5763): Daniel Aaron, a refugee from Nazi Germany and an orphan who went on to become a founder of Comcast, the largest cable company in the country, died today in Philadelphia, where he lived. He was 77. The cause was Parkinson's disease, according to the company. In 1990, speaking at a dinner for his retirement as vice chairman of Comcast in Philadelphia, Mr. Aaron described himself as something like the conscience of the operation. He pictured the young company as a car, with Mr. Roberts, the chairman, behind the wheel, Julian A. Brodsky, the principal fund-raiser, stepping on the gas, and Mr. Aaron himself with a foot on the brake. In 1963, Mr. Aaron persuaded Ralph J. Roberts, a Philadelphia entrepreneur who had recently sold a men's wear business, to buy a small cable television system in Tupelo, Miss. As part of the deal, Mr. Aaron agreed to help run it, and over the next 30 years they built or acquired dozens of other cable systems around the country. Last fall, the company they started, Comcast, acquired AT&T Broadband to become the largest cable television service provider in the country



2005: At the DCJCC, the final performance of Joyce Carol Oates’ The Tattooed Girl.



2005: The Jew of Iowa Jima published today.
http://www.jewsingreen.com/2005/02/the-jews-of-iwo-jima/



2006: Right-wing British historian David Irving was convicted in Austria on Monday of denying the Holocaust - a crime in this country once run by the Nazis - and was sentenced to three years in prison.  Irving, 67, who had pleaded guilty and insisted during his one-day trial that he had a change of heart and now acknowledged the Nazis' World War II slaughter of 6 million Jews, had faced up to 10 years behind bars for the offense. "The court did not consider the defendant to have genuinely changed his mind," presiding judge Peter Liebetreu told the court after pronouncing the sentence. "The regret he showed was considered to be mere lip service to the law."



2005:  The New York Times included reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitzan, the recently released paperback edition of Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. by Debra Weinstein and
 essay by the recently deceased Susan Sontag entitled “Report on the Journey.”



2006(22ndof Shevat, 5766): Sixty-three year old Brandeis gradate Eli J. Segal the attorney and political activist who tasted defeat with George McGovern and victory with Bill Clinton while married to his college sweetheart Phyllis passed away today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/us/eli-j-segal-63-clinton-aide-who-led-major-initiatives-dies.html



2007: Former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak speaks at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.



2007(2ndof Adar I, 5767):  Eighty-five year old symphony conduct Siegfried Landau passed away today.(As reported by Dennis Hevesi)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E7D9123EF932A15751C0A9619C8B63



2007: Jon Scheyer of the Duke Blue Devils “grabbed a career-high 12 rebounds against Pittsburgh.”



2007: “The Farnsworth Invention” a play by Aaron Sorkin that examines how David Sarnoff’s relationship to the “invention of television signal transmission” opened today at the La Jolla Playhouse.



2008: Jon Scheyer “scored 27 points at Miami, matching the most points by a player off the bench in Duke history.”



2008: Chelsea Football Club announced that Avraham Grant had received anti-Semitic death threats from unknown sources



2008: At the Jerusalem Cinematheque a showing of “Le Viel Homme et L’Enfant” ( הזקן והילד). Set in WW II France, the story revolves around the relationship between a young Jewish boy sent to hide with a rural family and the older man who is a WW I hero, a supporter of Petain and a vocal anti-Semite.



2008: The Washington Post reported on the results of a cancer study conducted by Itai Kloog, of the University of Haifa.  According to the study, “women who live in neighborhoods with large amounts of nighttime illumination are more likely to get breast cancer than those who live in areas where nocturnal darkness prevails, according to an unusual study that overlaid satellite images of Earth onto cancer registries



2008: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met in Jerusalem in an attempt to further latest round of peace talks which appear to be faltering.  These talks are an outgrowth of the negotiations held in Annapolis, MD in November of 2007.



 2009: The 24th Annual Jerusalem International Book Fair comes to an end.



2009: A barrage of 10 mortar shells was fired at Gaza Belt communities, in what military sources said might have been the first stage of an attempted two-part combined terrorist attack. The attack, which was preceded by a Grad missile attack on the Negev town of Netivot, was repulsed by IDF forces operating near the Kissufim Crossing, who returned fire.



2009: Posin's Made Its Name on Its Authentic Kosher, Crunchy Pickles and Sweet Treats published today described a landmark institution of the Washington, DC Jewish Community where I spent innumerable hours in my childhood waiting for the best tasting egg bagels and meat knishes in the world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/19/AR2009021903131.html



2010: Singer, actress and playwright Rebecca Joy Fletcher is scheduled to perform her acclaimed one-woman show “Cities of Light” at Congregation Beth Emeth in Herndon, VA.



2010: “A Matter of Size” is scheduled to be shown on the opening night of The 12th Annual Northern New Jersey Israel Film Festival.



2010:  Birthday celebration of Dr. Bob Silber, a pillar of the Jewish community and a mensch in the truest sense of the word.



2011(16thof Adar I, 5771): Jay Landesman, a writer and editor whose journal Neurotica analyzed the anxieties of postwar America and whose Broadway musical, “The Nervous Set,” has been called the first (and only) Beat musical passed away today in London at the age of 91.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/arts/27landesman.html



2011: The 21stAnnual San Diego Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end.



2011: Amos Oz: The Nature of Dreams, a documentary based on the memoirs of Amos Oz, that “delves into the persona of one of Israel's greatest and most controversial authors and political commentators” is scheduled to be shown at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.



2011: English author Ian McEwan is scheduled to be awarded the Jerusalem Prize, Israel's highest literary honor for foreign writers at the opening of the Jerusalem International Book Fair.



2011: The family and myriad friends of Dr. Bob Silber celebrate the 60thnatal day of this die-hard Hawkeye fan, ardent Zionist and all-around good-guy.



2011: The New York Times featured a profile of author Walter Isaacson who has been the chairman and chief executive of CNN and the editor of Timemagazine and the recently released paperback edition of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, a “philosophical novel about love, Jewish cultural identity and academic infighting.”



2011:The Environment Ministry reported that the recent appearance of an extensive bout of haze has brought the concentration of dust in central Israel to a level four to 10 times more than the average rate as of today



2012:US National Security Adviser Tom Donilon's three day trip to Israel brought on by rising tensions over the creation of an Iranian nuclear capability is scheduled to come to an end today.



2012: MesorahDC is scheduled to sponsor Café Nite at the Historic 6th& amp; I Synagogue in Washington, DC.



2012: As the United States celebrates Presidents’ Day,  the Jewish community may reflect on the unique interaction between it and various Chief Executives including: Washington’s letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island; Franklin Pierce’s appointment of the first Jew to serve as the U.S. Minister to a foreign country; Abraham Lincoln’s role in making it possible for Rabbis to serve as Chaplains in the U.S. Army and revoking Order #11; U.S. Grant’s attempt to appoint the first Jew to the Cabinet and his attendance at the dedication of Adas Israel; Teddy Roosevelt’s appointment of the first Jew serve in the Cabinet; William H. Taft’s at the first seder ever to be graced by a U.S. President; Woodrow Wilson’s appointment of the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court; President Herbert Hoover’s appointment of the second Jew to serve on the Supreme Court; President Harry Truman’s role in the creation of the state of Israel; Lyndon Johnson’s role in saving Jews from the Holocaust, passing legislation that outlawed discrimination based on religion and support Israel during the 1967 War. (And this is a short list)



2012: If Cairo unilaterally decides to alter the peace treaty with Jerusalem, Israel will ask why sign agreements with other neighbors if these accords are not kept, Intelligence Agencies Minister Dan Meridor said today..



2012: US President Barack Obama will meet with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on March 5, the White House said today. Netanyahu will be in Washington to address the annual policy conference of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which will be held on March 4-6.



2012: Ammunition Hill will not close after an emergency meeting this evening with representatives from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Defense Ministry, and the Finance Ministry,



2012: “Iran Raid Seen as a Huge Task for Israeli Jets” published today describes the great challenge that the IAF would face if it had to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/world/middleeast/iran-raid-seen-as-complex-task-for-israeli-military.html?hp



2013: My German Children,” which premiered at Jerusalem’s Jewish Film Festival in December, is scheduled to air for the first time on Israeli TV today as part of a Yes Doco series on children. (As reported by Renee Ghert-Zand)



2013: Happy Birthday Dr. Bob



2013: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present a ”discussion on the groundbreaking anthology Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, “featuring editors Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, Hannah S. Pressman, editors, along with Gennady Estraikh (NYU), Eddy Portnoy (Rutgers), Jennifer Young (NYU/YIVO), and many others.”



2013: Nigerian security forces this evening arrested three people belonging to an Iranian-linked terror cell that was reportedly planning to launch an attack against Israeli and American targets, Army Radio reported.



2013: Jonathan-Simon Sellem “officially declared his candidacy to become member of the Assembly of French Citizens Abroad, in the 8th district (including Israel, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, San Marino and the Vatican.



2013: It was reported today that “Supreme Court Deputy-President Rivlin joined the Hebrew University Faculty of Law.”
http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge136136371405872560



2014: Friends and family of Dr. Bob Silber, pillar of the Jewish committee, President of the Thaler Holocaust Memorial Committee and diehard Hawkeye celebrate his natal day.



2014: Hemi Rudner, “one of the finest musicians in the Israeli rock scent” who is the leader of “Eifo Hayeled” at CAFÉ WHA?



2014” The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present “The Power of the Geniza.



2014: “Bethlehem.” winner of 6 Ophir Awards, is scheduled to be shown at the DPJCC's 14th Annual Jewish Film Festival



2014: “Bulgaria announced today that it has confirmed the existence of a third suspect in the 2012 bombing that killed five Israeli tourists and their tour bus driver in the city of Burgas.” (As reported by Spencer Ho)



2014: German police arrested three Auschwitz guards; names take from a list of thirty that had been turned over to authorities by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. (As reported by JTA)



2014: “The Israeli government and Jerusalem Municipality finalized plans for an initiative to invest NIS 22 million ($6.25 million) in movies and television series that film in the capital, Jerusalem City Hall announced today.” (As reported by Spencer Ho)



2014: “Finance Minister Yair Lapid praised a Knesset committee’s approval of a bill pushing for the enlistment of ultra-Orthodox men to the military, saying it was a resurgence of Zionism that fixed a major flaw in Israeli society.”(As reported by Israel Hayom and Times of Israel)



2015(1stof Adar, 5775): Rosh Chodesh Adar



2015: Jewish filmmaker Aviva Kempner, is scheduled to screen a clip of her work in progress focusing on the Rosenwald schools funded by Julius Rosenwald, Sears-Roebuck magnate as part of the Visionaries of Black Education program in Washington, DC.



2015: “Love, Marilyn” is scheduled to be shown in the last of the Women On Top film series at the 92nd Street Y.



2016(11thof Adar I, 5776): Shabbat Tetzaveh



2016: The University of Iowa Hillel is scheduled to host its annual fundraising concert this evening.



2016: An exhibition “WOMEN: New Portraits Annie Leibovitz” is scheduled to continue its ten city tour with an opening in Tokyo.



2016: The Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia is scheduled to present “the winter program of its Jews and Jazz Series” that will include a lecture by Tamar Barzel, author of New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene. 



2017(24thof Shevat, 5777): Eighty-six year old award winning professor of physics and electrical engineering Mildred Dresselhuas passed away today.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/mildred-dresselhaus-physicist-dubbed-queen-of-carbon-dies-at-86/2017/02/22/3355d3a2-f8a7-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html?utm_term=.a0ad22262b6c
http://news.mit.edu/2017/institute-professor-emerita-mildred-dresselhaus-dies-86-0221



2017: At least ten Jewish community centers” including those in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin; St. Paul; Houston; Buffalo, New York; Albuquerque, and Birmingham, Alabama “were targeted with bomb threats today – the fourth time in five weeks that JCCs across the United States have been targeted.” (JTA)



2017: “A bas-relief showing a menorah was displayed at a news conference” to where an announcement was made about “a joint exhibition by the Vatican Museums and Rome’s Jewish Museum”



2017: Two days after an Israeli done strike killed five ISIS terrorists who had been preparing to fire a rocket into Israel, “two rockets were fired into Israel from the Egyptian controlled Sinai Peninsula” this morning “outside of the city of Rafiah.”



2017: Ben Greenberg, the Director of Adult Engagement at Central Synagogue is scheduled to lecture on “Mourners Kaddish: The Untold Story” at Limmud, NY



2017: JW3, the Jewish Community Centre in London is scheduled to host a screening of “Aida’s Secrets.”



2017: Friends and family of Dr. Bob Silber, the chair of The Thaler Holocaust Memorial which “was established in 1995 by Dr. David and Joan Thaler to provide support for education about the Holocaust to residents and students at the local colleges in Linn County” are scheduled to celebrate his birthday today- just days after he took part in an amateur musical that raised thousands of dollars to fight the scourge of colon cancer.



2017: In the United States, observance of President’s Day, a federal holiday that celebrates the lives of President Washington who set the tone of acceptance of Jews in American as equal citizens and President Lincoln who furthered the cause of Jews in American as could be seen by his rescission of General Order No.11 in 1862 and his signing legislation that made it possible for Jews to serve as Chaplains in the Union Army.



2018: In New York, “The Mineola Historical Museum and the Wood County Historical Commission are scheduled to celebrate Black History Month” today by hosting “a showing of an Aviva Kempner film "RosenWald" the remarkable story of a Jewish partnership with African American communities.”


2018: In Coralville, IA, Agudas Achim is scheduled to hosing a screening of “Bajel: The Hidden Jews of Ethiopia” by Irene Orleansky,


2018: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host a lecture by Jan Gross on “Europe, the Holocaust, and the rise of the right.”


2018: In St. Louis, MO, the United Hebrew Congregation is scheduled to host “An Evening of Song and Spirit” with Abbie Strauss and Joe Buchanan.


2018: “Rabbi Mordechai Zeller, the Chaplain in Cambridge and former Rabbi in Maaleh Gilboa Yehisva is scheduled to lead a discussion on “Sacred Purim Theatre: Reclaiming the myth of Ishtar and Esther” at Oxford.


2018: Quintessential Hawkeye Hebrew Dr. Bob Silber is scheduled to celebrate his birthday as a Memphis transplant.


2018:  Friends and family of are scheduled to celebrate the natal day of Lance Anderson, an avid student and all-around good guy.


 


 


 


This Day, February 21, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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 February 21



362: Athanasius returns to Alexandria so he can lead the fight against various Christian heretics such as the Arians.  His negative views about the Jews were really part of his fight against Christian heretics. His “anti-Jewish rhetoric served to stigmatize Christians who resisted” the efforts of Athanasius “to reform the Alexandrian (local) practices of Lent and Easter along more international (catholic) lines.” For more on this view of his works and writings one should read “Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria” by David Burke, Journal of Early Christian Studies - Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2001, pp. 453-481



1513: The papacy of Julius II came to an end.  His greatest claim to fame was that he gave Michelangelo the paint brush for the Sistine Chapel.  Samuel Sarfatti, a Jewish physician, took care of the Pope’s health needs.  His papacy was a period of benign neglect for the Jews.  Julius was more interested in temporal pleasure than doctrine so he pretty much left the Jews alone; not a bad deal considering what other Popes did to the Jews.



1519: Upon the death of Maximillian, the Jewish community at Regensburg numbering approximately 800 souls, (one of the oldest in Germany,) was expelled. The synagogue was destroyed and a chapel, built in its place. About 5,000 gravestones were taken from the Jewish cemetery and used for building the Christian house of worship.



1520: Birthdate of Moses Isserles, the Ashkenazic rabbi from Cracow best known for writing HaMapah (The Table Cloth) a “gloss” on The Shulchan Aruch (Set Table) of Joseph Karo.  Karo relied primarily on Sephardic sources. Isserles used Ashkenazic sources to create a table cloth that would cover the set table thus making Caro’s work viable for the large number of Jews living in Northern and Eastern Europe.



1619(7th of Adar): Rabbi Ephraim Solomon ben Aaron of Luntshits, author of Keli Yakar passed away



1665: Emperor Maximilian II granted permission to Christophe Plantin, whose work included the Plantin Polyglot Bible the first four volumes of which were the “Old Testament” which contained two columns with the Hebrew original and the Latin translation, to print Hebrew books in Antwerp



1677(19thAdar I, 5437): Philosopher Baruch de Spinoza passed away. His philosophy and his life are too complex for this simple summary page. I did not understand why he was banned from the Jewish community when I first read about him as a Religious School student.  His philosophy baffled me when I first read it at Tulane.  Since I do not fake it, I suggest you begin your quest at


  http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Spinoza.html. and go from there. Good luck.



1683: Birthdate of Johann Christoph Wolf, the “German Christian Hebraist” who created the 4 volume Biblotecha Hebrae published between 1715 and 1733 which among other things provided many Christians with their knowledge of the Talmud for more than 150 years.



1730: The papacy of Benedict XII came to an end. In 1727, he had issued Emanavit Numerthat laid down the conditions under which Jews could be forcibly baptized. Two years later, he issued Alias Emanarunt that “forbade the selling of goods by Jews.”  (For more see The Inquisition: A History by Michael C. Thomsett)



1743: George Frederic Handel's oratorio, "Samson" premiered in London.  The musical was based on the figure depicted in the Book of Judges and is another example of how Jewish culture enriched the culture of the Western World.



1810: David Davis married Elizabeth Benjamin at the Great Synagogue today.



1821: Birthdate of Elisabeth "Eliza, or Élisa" Rachel Félix better known only as Mademoiselle Rachel. She gained fame as an actress and as the mistress of the rich and famous including Napoleon III.



1838(26thof Shevat, 5598): Fifty-nine year old French linguist Atntoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, the son of Abraham Silvestre, a Jewish notary, and the father of journalist  Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy passed away today in Paris.



1843: A committee of representatives, including eight from the Great Synagogue, met for the second time in two days under the chairmanship of Isaac Cohen in the Vestry room in Duke's Place



1848: Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto.  Marx was not Jewish but his father was.  This fact has not stopped a myriad of anti-Semites including Adolph Hitler from equating Judaism with Communism.



1849: Due to the civil rights granted under the Frankfurt Constitution which into effect today in Hamburg, forty-two year old lawyer Gabriel Riesser, the grandson of Rabbi Jakob Pinchas Katzenellenbogen and Rabbi Raphael Cohen was able to become a citizen of Hamburg where he was elected to the city’s parliament in 1859.



1851: In Aldgate, London, Isaac and Leah Isaacs gave birth to Barnet Isaacs who gained fame as diamond and gold mining entrepreneur Barney Barnato who claimed that his birthdate was July 5, the same as contemporary Cecil Rhodes.



1852: 1st of Adar, 5612): Rosh Chodesh Adar



1852: Pope Pius IX wrote to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, “insisting that he revoke the right of the Jews to live outside of the Ghetto.”



1852:Austen Henry Layard, the archeologist who excavated Nimrud and Niniveh as described in Discoveries at Nineveh completed his service as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.



1856: A blood libel case occurred in Constantinople, with Jews being targeted with violence from Greeks, Armenians, and Turks. This occurred only three days after the Ottoman "reforms" which were to bring equality.



1860: In Esztergom, Hungary, Rosalie Wiess and Phillip Schwartz, a captain in the Hungarian Army gave birth to Julius Schwartz, the husband of Annette Hirschman, who served as a Lt. of Artillery in the Hungarian Army until 1880, and came to the United States where he served as Richmond County (NY_ Park Commission, worked as manager for the Equitable Life Insurance Society for Staten Island and President of the Staten Island Hebrew Benevolent Society and Free Loan Fund.



1860: An Imperial decree issued today granted the Jews of Lower Austria, Moravia, Silesia, Hungary, Voywodina, and the Banat, Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, and the Littoral Districts, the right of possessing real property. They cannot, however, exercise the rights of patronage, jurisdiction, or scholastic representation, attached to such possession.



1860: Uriah P. Levy was appointed Commodore and given command of the U.S. Navy’s Eastern Mediterranean fleet. A Jewish officer in the Navy at this time was rather unusual.  Levy dealt with his share of anti-Semitism during his career including a court-martial at the end of which he was fully exonerated. Levy waged a successful fight to end flogging as a form of punishment in the Navy.  He was an ardent admirer of Thomas Jefferson.  After Jefferson’s death, Levy bought Monticello and restored it to its former luster.  The restoration included reclaiming Jefferson’s library which numbered about 2500 volumes.  When Levy passed away in 1862, he left the estate to the people of the United States.  Levy was proud of his Jewish heritage.  He served as the first president of Washington Hebrew Congregation which is still one of the dominant Reform congregations in Washington, D.C. Forty-three years after President Monroe had made Levy a lieutenant, President Buchanan gave him command of the Mediterranean Squadron. With command came the Navy's highest rank: Commodore. The American fleet and frigates from Russia and Sardinia boomed out a thirteen-gun salute in the harbor at La Spezia as the pennant bearing a single star ran up the main mast of his flagship, USS Macedonian.



1861(111thof Adar I, 5621): Hayyim Nissim Abulafia, a descendant of Hayyim Abulafia who “had come to Tiberias in the middle of the 18th century” who had served as chief rabbi of Jerusalem since the fall of 1854 following the death of Isaac Kobo, passed away today.



1863: The Illustrated London News published an article new Bayswater Synagogue for which the foundation stone had been laid in July of 1862 and which would be dedicated in July of 1863.



1863: Seventy-one year old Enrico Marconi, the non-Jewish Italian architect who designed the Great Synagogue in Lomza, Poland which “was built on the initiative of Rabbi Eliezer-Simcha Rabinowicz “and destroyed by the Nazis passed away today.



1864: In London Esther (nee Davis) and businessman William Miller gave birth to Leonard Miller, the solicitor turned author who legally changed his name to Leonard Merrick and whose works included Violet Moses“about a Jewish Financier and his troubled wife” which was a “satire of middle class London Jewry.”



 1865: Cécile Anspach and Baron Gustave de Rothschild gave birth to Aline Caroline de Rothschild who became Lady Sassoon when he married Edward Sassoon in 1887. She passed away in 1909 having given birth to two children – Philip Albert Gustave David and Sybil Rachel Bettie Cecile.



1866: At Rotterdam Johanna Hijmans became Johanna Kann when she married 26 year old Maurice Kann.



1867: Ion Ghica who “was a valuable ally for Yiddish theater in Bucharest” and “on several occasions expressed his favorable view of the quality of acting, and even more of the technical aspects of the Yiddish theater” completed his second tour as Prime Minister of Romania today.



1867: Birthdate of banker and patron of the arts Otto Hermann Kahn. While his name is unknown today, in his time Otto Kahn was a major financial and cultural figure in the United States and Europe.   Kahn began his banking career in Germany.  But he reached greatness after moving to the United States in 1893 where he became a partner in the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company.  Described as Wall Street Wizard, he helped “reorganize the U.S. railroad system, finance the Allied effort in World War I and encourage banking reform after the 1929 stock market crash.”   He organized and bankrolled the Metropolitan Opera Company.  He also supported a whole slew of artists many of whom were unknown and struggling at the time. Among the many recipients of his support were Hart Crane, George Gershwin, Arturo Toscanni, Eugene O’ Neil, Paul Robeson, Isadora Duncan and Ezra Pound.  The eclectic Kahn was also a favorite of the inventor Thomas A. Edison who kept a picture of the banker-philanthropist on the wall of his New Jersey Home.  Kahn accomplished this and a lot more despite anti-Semitism and anti-German feelings in the United States.  He passed away in 1934. Here is something to think about.  If a man with a resume like Kahn can be so quickly forgotten, how many of today’s “important people” will be remembered fifty years from now?



1874:  Benjamin Disraeli replaced William Gladstone as Prime Minister.  Disraeli was born Jewish, but his father had him baptized.  The conversion came over a dispute that the elder Disraeli had with the local synagogue.  Since he was not Jewish, Disraeli was not limited by English law in pursuing his political career.  At the same time, he was the target of anti-Semitic barbs and he was quite proud of his Jewish heritage.



1875: According to “Poland Today” described conditions in the present day Russian province which has shrunk from 282,000 square miles to 48,863 square miles under the rule of the Czars.  While the majority of the population is Roman Catholic, “the money in Poland is chiefly in the hands of the Jews.”



1877: The 200thanniversary of the death of the great Dutch Jewish philosopher on the secular calendar was marked by the publishing of “Baruch Spinoza.”



1879: "The Reformer and Jewish Times; A Journal of Progress in Religion, Literature, Science, and Art" published its final edition today.  It first appeared in 1869 as “The Jewish Times: A Journal of Reform and Progress.”



1880: According to “The Elder Disraeli’s Tomb” published today, the tomb of Benjamin Disraeli, the grandfather of the Prime Minister which is located at the Spanish and Portuguese Cemetery in the Mile-end-road has been repaired.  The need to recut and repaint the tombstone should come as no surprise since the elder Disraeli was buried in 1816. No repairs have been made on the tombstone of the Prime Minister’s grandmother who was buried in the same cemetery.



1880: It was reported today the Jewish leaders in New York City have an issued an appeal to their co-religionists throughout the United States to make generous contributions to the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the Paris based charity that provides financial support and educational opportunities for Jews living under the Czar and the Ottoman Sultan.  It is suggested that leaders take advantage of the upcoming Purim festivities and address their congregations on the Sabbath of Remembrances on the need for providing financial support.



1881: Birthdate of Marc Boegner, the President of the Council of the Protestant Federation who risked his life by writing to Marshal Petain “protesting again the deportation of Jews and the inhuman manner in which orders for these deportations were being carried out.



1881: Birthdate of Rabbi Jonah Bondi Wise “an American Rabbi and leader of the Reform Judaism movement, who served for over thirty years as rabbi of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan and was a founder of the United Jewish Appeal, serving as its chairman from its creation in 1939 until 1958.”



1882: It was reported today that the reports of British Consular officials have “to a certain extent” exaggerated “the seriousness of the anti-Jewish riots in Russia” especially when it comes to “the reports of loss of life” and attacks on Jewish women.  Only about “100 Jews were shamefully” mistreated in Warsaw of whom only 10 or 12 have died because of their injuries. However, the reports of property destruction were not exaggerated.



1883(14th of Adar I, 5643): Purim Katan



1886: In Massachusetts, founding of the Lynn Hebrew Benevolent Society which meets the first Sunday of each month and is supported by an auxiliary society – the Ladies’ Hebrew Circle.



1889: Birthdate of Otto Wasserzug, the son of Berlin banker who gained fame as actor Otto Wallburg who would win an Iron Cross while serving on the Eastern Front in WW I which did save him from being murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.



1889: Birthdate of Moritz Neumann, one of the many Jewish men from Leinsteinach who served in the German Army during WW I.



1892: As New York City continued to deal with an outbreak of Typhus, the SS Etruriawhich had been “detained at Quarantine” because she had a large “number of Russian Jews among her steerage passengers” was allowed to dock today.  The Health Officer order the seventy Russian Jews to remained on board until “their baggage” had been “thoroughly fumigated.”



1890(1stof Adar, 5650): Rosh Chodesh Adar



1892: “Non-Success of Russian Jews” published today which relied on information first published in the Pall Mall Gazette reported that Voskhod has examined the conditions “of Jews who left Russia during the persecutions of the last 18 months.”  According to this monthly Jewish publication, those who went to Palestine want to return to Russia because the agricultural settlements “have been failures.”  And things are so bad for those who went to United States, “that were a society formed…to pay” their expenses “two thirds would gladly avail themselves of its funds and return.” (This report may reflect the philosophic stance of Voshkod as much as it does the conditions of the people it described.



1891: In Pittsburgh, PA on Shabbat, the rabbi at Poale Zedeck Congregation on Grant Street was prevented from preaching his announced sermon by Rueben Miller, the Vice President of the synagogue who was to be the topic of the talk.



1892: “A Great Hebrew Hospital” published today provided a lengthy history of Mount Sinai Hospital which began as the Jewish Hospital.  In addition to all of its other accomplishments, it “was the first hospital in the city to admit women to membership on its house staff.”



1893: Mr. Weinstock wrote from Sacramento, CA to Pierre Botkine of Century Magazine asking  about the status of Jews in Russia “who enter the Greek Catholic Church.”  Specifically, he wanted to know if conversion brings “full civil and political rights.”



1895: Birthdate of Szmul Zygielbojm (Zygelbojm or Zigelboim) “a Jewish-Polish socialist politician, leader of the Bund, and a member of the National Council of the Polish government in exile” who in 1943  “committed suicide to protest the indifference of the Allied governments in the face of the Holocaust.”



1895: Alfred Dreyfus was “removed from his prison and transferred to an icy cell in a naval cruiser” which would carry him imprisonment on Devil’s Island.



1896: Students' party at "Kadimah". The students give Herzl a great ovation.



1897: Birthdate of Meir Ya’ari, the native of Galicia who made Aliyah in 1920 where he help to found Kibbutz Artzi before serving in as a member of Israel’s first Knesset.



1897: In correspondence bearing today's date, “leading members of the Jewish community in Tripoli sent a letter to the President of the Alliance that gave a grim picture of Jewish life in rural Tripolitania."  The Jews reported that they were living as “dhimmi.” An Arab mob had destroyed the synagogue in the village of Zliten and in another village the authorities refused to find those who had murdered one Jew and injured his companion.



1897: The Board of Trustees of the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum is scheduled to meet today where they will take up Emanuel Lehman’s offer to provide $100,000 “for the endowment of an industrial and provident fund for the benefit of graduates of the asylum.”



1898: As the trial of Emile Zola, the publisher of the Aurore enters its final days it was reported today that “public feeling against the Jews is so overwhelming that” his conviction is a foregone conclusion.



1898: It was reported today that Jews in Trenton, NJ are are still upset with the anti-Semitic remarks of William J. Cossley, the Prosecutor in Mercer County. 



1899: It was reported today that “Max Regis, the former Mayor of Algiers” and “notorious Jew-baiter…has been sentenced…to three years’ imprisonment” and ordered “to pay a fine of 1,000 francs” for press offenses and glorify murder and pillage at meetings in Algiers and Paris.”  (These meetings were part of the anti-Dreyfus violence that swept France.)



1899: In Brooklyn,” Morris and Anna Krystal Gottschalk, Jewish immigrants from Poland” gave birth to their sixth child, historian Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk.
http://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/25/archives/louis-gottschalk-historian-76-french-revolution-expert-dies.html?_r=0



1900: Birthdate of Henry Cohen, the British physician and lecture who was honored as the 1st Baron Cohen of Birkenhead for his contributions in the field of medicine.



1902(14thof Adar I, 5662): Purim Katan



1902(14thof Adar I, 5661): Louis Brenner, the daughter of Brooklyn real estate developer Levi Blumenau and the wife of “Brooklyn magistrate and Kings County Commissioner of Jurors” with whom she had six children – Arthur, Mortimer, Rose, Rica, Selma, and Caroline – passed away today.



1905: During the Russian Revolution of 1905 the Chief of Police for the district that included Bialystok was killed.  Attacks like this would become an excuse for the attacks against the Jews known as the Bialystok Pogrom that would take place in June of the following year.



1910: Samuel D. Warren, a former law partner of Louis D. Brandeis passed away today in Boston, MA



1912: Birthdate of Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, the British rabbi who saved thousands during the Holocausthttp://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/british_hero_of_holocaust_government_honours_highgate_rabbi_dr_solomon_schonfeld_for_saving_3_500_lives_in_holocaust_1_2013751
http://www.jta.org/1984/02/10/archive/solomon-schonfeld-dead-at-72
http://www.ajr.org.uk/index.cfm/section.journal/issue.Dec07/article=971



1913(14thof Adar I, 5673): Purim Katan



1914: Dr. John Tatlock and Marjorie Tatlock gave birth to Dr. Jean Frances Tatlock whom some contend was the mistress of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Tatlock was a Communist and this relationship would be used against him when his security clearance was lifted after World War II.



1915: Dr. Cyrus Adler, President of Dropsie College, presided over the opening session of the 23rd annual meeting of the American Jewish Historical Society which is being held at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City.



1915: “At a meeting of the Jewish Community, or Kehillah, held today at the Educational Alliance a report was approved calling upon the American Jewish Committee to take the leadership in plans for meeting ‘the greatest crisis that has overtaken the Jews in centuries’” – a crisis that “has been brought about by the war” and the problems of which “must be solved by the 3,000,000 American Jews.”



1915: “Life and Times of the Famous Jewish Historian” published today provides a review of Josephusby Norman Bentwich published by the Jewish Publication Society.



1915: Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey and Attorney General Warren Grice left Atlanta for Washington today where they will file a brief with the Supreme Court in the case of Leo Frank, “asserting the right of every state of the union to make and enforce its own criminal laws, from interference or supervision by the Federal courts.



1915: William Vincent Byars of St. Louis read a paper on the part played by the Gratz brothers in the development of trade in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys at the morning session of the annual meeting of the American Jewish Historical Society.



1915: Leon Huchner presented a paper on the life of Daniel Gomez a merchant in colonial New York at the afternoon session of the annual meeting of the American Jewish Historical Society.



1915: Another 600 or 700 refugees, most of whom are Jewish, arrived in Egypt today “reporting that the situation in Syria is going from bad to worse.”



1916: C.H. Rubenstein wrote to Simon Wolf, the “Chairman of the Board of Delegates on Civil Rights of the Union American Hebrew Congregations describing the action he took with Rabbi Rosenau in opposing “a bill now before the General Assembly making the reading of the King James version of the Bible compulsory in the public schools of Maryland.



1916: During World War I, 1,400 German guns fired the opening salvo in the Battle of Verdun. The bloodletting would last for ten months at a cost over half a million French casualties and four hundred thousand German casualties.  For the French, this pointless bloodletting would lead to a pacifism when facing the threat of Hitler.  Life in the trenches would lead to the creation of the Maginot Line which also helped to pave the way for France’s early collapse in World War II.  In other words, a fairly straight line can be drawn from a battle in 1916 and the rise of Vichy and French collaboration with the Nazis that led to the death of so many Jews. Additionally, the “hero” of Verdun was Marshall Petain, the same Marshall Petain who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, shipping Jews to Drancy, the first stop on the way to Auschwitz.



1917: According to the Overseas News Agency, the $250,000 that the U.S. Ambassador has given to the Vienna Jewish Association which was collected by the American Jewish community “is destined for the relief of Galician Jews and Jewish refugees from the occupied territory of Galicia.”



1918(9thof Adar, 5678): Fifty-two year old author and linguist Hedwig Lachmann passed away. (As reported by Hanna Delf von Wolzogen)



1918:  During the fight to free Palestine from Turkish control, Australian units under the overall command of General Allenby drove the Turks from Jericho and reached the northern end of the Dead Sea. As a result of these victories, the British would become the mandatory power after the war and the Balfour Declaration would be worth the paper it was written on, for a little while at least.



1919:  As the right wing reasserts its authority in Germany, a German aristocrat named Count Anton Arco-Valley shot Jewish born Bavarian political leader Kurt Eisner in the back and killed him as he on his way to the Munich Parliament.



1919: In Hungary, “the prime minister ordered the arrest of over one hundred prominent Communists including Bela Kun.”



1921: The Daughters of Zion Hebrew Day Nursery are scheduled to hold a ball tonight which is a fund raiser of the school at 211 Varet Street that provides care about fifty children of working mothers.



1921 Dr. Maurice I Harris of Temple Israel delivered one in a series of four lectures on Modern Jewish History at the Teachers’ Institute of the Free Synagogue on West 68th Street this evening.



1922: Birthdate of DJ Murray “the K,” referred to as the Fifth Beatle.



1922: Birthdate of Zivi Zeitlin, the native of Dubrovna who was raised in Palestine and became “an internationally renowned violinist known for interpreting the work of contemporary composers.” Zeitlin was 11 years old when he won a scholarship to Julliard making him the youngest person to win such an honor from the famed music school.  In 1967, he became a professor at the Eastman School of Music.(As reported by Margalit Fox)



1922: “The Loves of Pharaoh” a “million dollar epic” silent film directed by Ernst Lubitsch premiered in New York today.



1925: In York, PA, Lewis and Nettie Wolfson Leibowitz gave birth to Herschel Weldon Leibowitz, “a Penn State University psychologist who was among the first scientists to explore how the mind can misinterpret what the eye sees at night, a phenomenon that contributes to traffic accidents.” (As reported by Benedict Carey)



1926: In London, “Israel Zangwill, speaking at a meeting of the Jewish Drama League” tonight “said that George Bernard Shaw had make the Jews his debtors because all his translators and agents were Jews.”



1926: “A contribution of $3,000 was announced” today “from national headquarters of the United Jewish Campaign which is endeavoring to raise $15,000,000 from American Jewry for their suffering corelitionist in foreign lands.”



1926: “Speakers at the third annual meeting of the National Council of the Palestine Foundation Fund at the Hotel Astor” today “declared that wealthy Jews have not done their share in the last year toward the support of the fund for the welfare of Jews in Palestine.”



1929: Sir Julien Cahn XI, a cricket team Sir Julien Cahn founded and captained for made its “first-class debut” in Jamaica.



1929: Sixty-nine year old Sir John Grenfell Maxwell, the British General who when putting together the forces for the Gallipoli landings selected Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson “to raise and command a Jewish military unit to fight against the Turks in the Middle East” passed away today.



1932(14th of Adar I, 5692): Purim Katan



1932(14th of Adar I 5692): Boris Schatz, founder of the Bezalel Art School passed away.



1932: The new home for Sephardi Temple Tifereth Israel located on Santa Barbara Avenue was dedicated today in Los Angeles.



1932: “According to announcement sent out by the Jewish National Fund of America” today, “an evergreen memorial of 500,000 pin and eucalyptus trees will be planted in Palestine as a living tribute of the Jews of America” to George Washington.



1932: It was reported today that “Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo of the Court of Appeals…who has been named a member of the United States Supreme Court” attended services at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the only Jewish congregation active in New York during the Colonial and Revolutionary Period that celebrated the bicentennial of the birth of George Washington.



1932: The New York Times featured a review of The Tragedies of Progress by Italian Jewess Gina Lombroso who is described as a severe critic "of the trend in our technical civilization"



1933: In Tyron, NC, Mary Kate Waymon and John Divine Waymon gave birth to Eunice Kathleen Waymon who gained fame as singer-songwriter Kathleen Waymon whose repertoire included “Eretz Zavat Halav and who recorded “Strange Fruit,” a song written by Abel Meeropol which was inspired after he saw “a photograph of two young men being lynched.”



1933: Birthdate of New York native Robert “Bob” Rafelson, “the son of hat ribbon manufacturer” and nephew of screenwriter Samuel Raphaeslon, “the author of ‘The Jazz’” whose most famous work may have “Five Easy Pieces which directed, produced and also co-authored the script.



1934: The Los Angeles Times reported that “Samuel Untermyer, head of the New York-based Anti-Nazi League came” to the southern California metropolis “to speak about the dangers of Nazi Germany.]



1935: “When the Jewish-owned steamer Tel Aviv” docked today in Palestine for the first time, the first passenger to land was” Georg Martini the correspondent for The Völkischer Beobachter the official newspaper of the Nazi Party.



1936: In Warsaw, the Polish Senate debated a proposal for “a mass emigration of Jews from Poland” during which Senator Jausz Radzweill said that he felt “bound to say that Germany’s example may encourage anti-Semitic troubles everywhere.”



1936: “The National Democratic Party of Upper Silesia was ordered disbanded today on charges of conducting anti-Semitic agitation.”



1937: Today’s listing “Forthcoming Books” included The Dreyfus Case and Major Noah: American Jewish Pioneer.



1937: In Poland, citizens were informed by loud speakers, posters and leaflets of the “creation of the new government party Colonel Adam Koc, commander of the Pilsudski Legionnaires who said “we can never approve of violence and brutal anti-Semitic outrages which degrade our national dignity and honor… but we understand the instinct of legitimate defense of our people in their” move “toward economic independence.”



1938: Semyon Dimanstein who had at one time been head of Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist party, was arrested by Stalin.  Within short order he would be condemned to death and executed.



 1938: The Palestine Post reported that British troops, assisted by police, inflicted heavy casualties on a gang of armed Arabs halfway between Rosh Pina and Safed and that there were about 500 suspected Arab terrorists interned at El Mizra camp.



1938: The Palestine Post reported that R.E. Alderson, R.A.F. Squadron Leader murdered by Arab terrorists near Atlit was buried with honors at Ramle.



1938: The Palestine Post reported that The Jewish Agency, The Marine Trust Ltd. and other Jewish organizations asked the government to speed up the development of the Tel Aviv port in order to stop congestion and allow normal passenger traffic. The basin had to be deepened, the quay space doubled and another lighter basin added to the existing facilities.



1939: In a further move to impoverish the Jews, the German government order them “to surrender all objects made from gold, silver, precious stones and pearls.” (Like Haman, Hitler knew that anti-Semitism was a profitable “business.”



1939: The Italian government continued its “campaign against the United States as a whole and Mr. Roosevelt in particular” by calling the President “an alarmist who is …yielding to pressure from Jews bent on crush the totalitarian States to avenge the persecution of their brethren in Germany and Italy…”



1939(2ndof Adar, 5699): Eighty-seven year old Jewish philanthropist Jacques Teitel who “for forty years filled an office” similar to that of a district attorney in the United States and who after being forced to leave Russia “went to Germany where he became president of the Union of Russian Jews in Germany” passed away today in Nice, France.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1939/02/22/96020335.pdf



1940: Oberfuerher Richard Gluecks informed Himmler that he had found a "suitable site" for a new "quarantine Camp" at Auschwitz.



1940: Czech architect Otto Eisler arrived in Norway after fleeing his homeland which had been taken over by the Nazis who had imprisoned and tortured him.



1941: “The Strawberry Blonde” featuring George Tobias with a script by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein was released in the United States today.



1943: The Battle of Guadalcanal ended.  Former champion boxer, Barney Ross won a Silver Star the second highest medal given for battlefield gallantry for his heroics during this grinding eight month long battle.  Ross had enlisted at the age of 32 and fought in the first of the island hopping battles that would lead to victory over Japan in 1945.



1943: In Paterson, NJ. stationary store owner Morris Roses and his wife, the former Ceil Schwartz, both of whom escaped the Holocaust, gave birth to Dr. Allen Roses “a maverick researcher whose team of scientists identified two genes that put healthy people over 65 at higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/science/allen-roses-who-upset-common-wisdom-on-cause-of-alzheimers-dies-at-73.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well



1943: Dutch Roman Catholic bishops protested against persecution of Jews. This came as part of the response to Nazi recent roundups of Jews in Amsterdam. The "Righteous Gentiles" did make their attempts to help, but there were just too few of them.



1943:In Borough Park, Brooklyn, Abraham Geffen and Batya Volovskaya, the owner of “a clothing store called Chic Corsets by Geffen gave birth to David Lawrence Gefen, who founded “Asylum Records in 1970, Geffen Records in 1980, DGC Records in 1990, and DreamWorks SKG in 1994.”



1943: Sir Harold MacMichael, High Commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine, broadcast a speech tonight on the eve of Red Army Day in which he “warmly praised the achievements of the Red Army.”



1944(27thof Shevat, 5704): Dov Lopatyn was killed by a landmine today.  While serving as the head of the Judenrat in Lachwa  he “refused the demand of the Einsatzgruppen that the Lakhva Ghetto inhabitants line up for deportation and led one of the first ghetto uprisings after which an untold number of the Jews escaped to the Pripet Marshes.  It was there the Lopatyn joined the partisans with whom he fought until his death.



1944: Birthdate of Dr. Sander L. Gilmnan, the New York native and Tulane University alum whose accomplishments include the founding of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
http://ila.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/gilman.html



1946: British soldiers and policeman are searching for those who attacked the police headquarters tonight in Haifa and Tel Aviv.  The attackers in Tel Aviv were armed with machine guns and grenades and set-off at least 6 separate explosions.  The attacks followed searches of Jewish settlements by the police that resulted in the seizure of rifles and “a clandestine radio.”



1946: Congressman Augustus Bennett, a New York Republican, with the support of Congressman Thomas J. Lane, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a resolution today in the House of Representative calling for a “Congressional investigation of the Palestine situation…The measure calls for a joint House-Senate committee to be sent to the Holy Land to investigate conditions there and report its findings to Congress.”



1946: Birthdate of Monice Lenore Belson, the sister of Jerry Beslon, who gained fame as screenwriter Monica Johnson.



1947: “Nora Prentis” a film noir directed by Vincent Sherman, with music by Franz Waxman and a screenplay by N. Richard Nash was released today in the United States.



1947: Edwin H. Land demonstrated the first instant developing camera in New York City. It took only sixty seconds to develop a black and white photograph.  Most of us know that such famous scientists as Einstein, Salk and Sabine were Jewish.  But how many knew that this famous college dropout was Jewish as well?  He is also given credit for creating improved lenses and sunglasses as well as providing research on new theories related to color perception.



1948(11thof Adar I, 5708): Parashat Tetzaveh



1948(11thof Adar I, 5708): Seventy-six German born journalist and university professor Gustav Mayer who moved to the Netherlands when the Nazis came to power before making his way to England in 1936 where he began working on a “history of the English Worker’s Movement” passed away today.



1948: Twenty-eight year old Alf James won the South African Welterweight Title.



1948: The Arab League voted to deny American oil companies pipeline rights in the Middle East until Washington altered its Palestine policy reinforcing efforts by Secretary of State George Marshall and others at the State Department to get President Truman to reconsider his support for the creation of a Jewish state.



1951(15thof Adar I, 5711): Sixty-nine year old Sara Samuel who served as “Headmistress of the girl’s department of the JFS” from 1938 “until her retirement in 1945” and was the Secretary of the Stamford Hill Ladies’ Guild at the New Synagogue for 15 years passed away today.



1955: David Ben-Gurion succeeded Pinhas Lavon as Defense Minister.



1955(29thof Shevat, 5715): Seventy-six year old Dr. Alwin M. (Max) Pappenheimer the Columbia trained pathologist who was on the faculty at Columbia and who was the father of Dr. Anne P. Forbes, Dr. John R. Pappenheimer and Dr. Alwin M. Pappenheimer, Jr. of NYU who followed in his father’s footsteps, passed away today.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1955/02/22/96627378.pdf



1956(9thof Adar I, 5716): Sixty-nine year old mobster and confederate of Al Capone Jake Guzik passed away on the South Side of Chicago.



 1958: Birthdate of exercise expert Jake Steinfeld (Body by Jake).



 1958: Egypt and Syria having formed the United Arab Republic (UAL) elected the Egyptian dictator Gamiel Nasser as its new President.  Nasser was a Pan Arabist - yes they show up year in and year out - who was determined to destroy the state of Israel as his means of uniting the Arab World.  He failed on both counts.



1956(9th of Adar, 5716): Edwin Franko Goldman the founder of Goldman Band of New York City and the American Bandmasters Association passed away at the Montefiore Hospital in New York



1958: In Cambridge, MA, Elaine Salovey, a registered nurse, and Ronald Salovey, a physical chemist gave birth to their oldest child Peter Salovey, a descendant of the Soloveichik rabbinic family who became the 23 President of Yale University.



1960: In Bloomington, the weekend long ceremonies marking the dedication of the Moses Montefiore Temple came to a close.



1962: “Walk on the Wild Side” a movie version of a novel by the same name with “opening and closing sequences directed by Saul Bass” starring Laurence Harvey and with music by Elmer Bernstein was released in the United States today.



1962: In Brooklyn, Norma and Al Lerner gave birth to Randy Lerner the billionaire businessman who took over ownership of the Cleveland Browns when his father passed away.



1962: Birthdate of Eliezer Sandberg, the Haifa native who has served as a member of the Knesset and held at least two cabinet posts.



1966: Jan Peerce appeared in “Don Giovanni” today in what would be his “last complete stage performance at the Metropolitan Opera.”



1968: Birthdate of Daniel Jacob “Dan” Calichman the native of Huntington Station, NY who “played college soccer at Williams” before going on to a career as professional player and coach.



1968: “Bye Bye Braverman” an American comedy directed and produced by Sidney Lumet, starring George Segal and Joseph Wiseman, with music by Peter Matz and filmed cinematographer Boris Kaufman was released in the United States today.



1969(3rdof Adar, 5729): Two were killed and twenty more wounded in a terrorist bombing attack at Jerusalem supermarket.



1969(3rd of Adar, 5729): Itzik Manger (איציק מאַנגער) passed away. Born in what is now the Ukraine in 1901, Manger lived in various European cities as he wrote plays and poems in Yiddish. Towards the end of his life, he made Aliyah and lived in Tel Aviv. Itzik's Midrash and Songs of the Megillahwere two of his more famous works, both of which drew upon Biblical themes.
http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Manger_Itsik



1970: A Swissair plane bound from Zurich to Tel Aviv explodes and crashes shortly after takeoff; all 47 people aboard are killed.



1970: An Austrian airliner carrying mail for Israel from Frankfurt, West Germany, to Vienna is damaged by an explosion in flight; no one is hurt.



1971(26thof Shevat, 5731): Eighty-five year old Madison, SD native Calre Stephen Jacobs who won the Bronze Medal for Pole Vaulting in the 1908 Summer Olympics passed away today.



1971: In “Seeing the Sinai” Douglas Greener described his tour of the Wilderness 4 years after the Six Day War.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=FA0813F73B5F127A93C3AB1789D85F458785F9



1972: Today, “Mel Brooks appeared as the 2000 Year Old Man to help celebrated the 2000thepisode of the original quiz show Jeopardy!”



1973: Israeli fighter planes shot down a Libyan Airlines jet over the Sinai Desert, killing more than 100 people.



1974: Refusniks “Vitaly Rubin, Vladimir Galatzky and David Azbel completed a hunger strike” today.



1974: Israeli forces left the territory on the western side of the Suez Canal.  While the Yom Kippur War (October, 1973) began as a disaster for the Israelis, the military outcome was a triumph.  Troops under Sharon crossed the Suez Canal and put a stranglehold on the Egyptian Army.  The disengagement of 1974 led to the historic visit of Sadat and the peace treaty that followed.



1977: Birthdate of Birthdate of Jonathan Safran Foer an American author whose works include Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Eating Animals.



1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that there were at least 2,000 guests at the colorful opening of the 29th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem.



1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that Finance Minister Simha Ehrlich had set up a special police task force to study how to implement the Shimron Committee's recommendations on fighting the organized crime in Israel.



1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that Egypt withdrew its diplomatic mission from Cyprus after its 15 commandos were killed and some 50 injured in fighting Cypriot soldiers and PLO terrorists in an attempt to free a plane at the Larnaca airport, in which two Arab terrorists were holding Arab and Egyptian hostages.



1982: A revival of “Little Me,” a musical written by Neil Simon, with music by Cy Coleman and lyrics by Carolyn Leigh the cast of which included Bebe Neuwirth closed at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre.



1982(28th of Shevat, 5742): Gershom Scholem passed away.  Born on December 5, 1897, Scholem, was a Jewish philosopher and historian who was raised in Germany. He is widely regarded as the modern founder of the scholarly study of Kabbalah, becoming the first Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Scholem is best known for his collection of lectures, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and for his biography Sabbatai Zevi, the Mystical Messiah (1973). His collected speeches and essays, published as On Kabbalah and its Symbolism (1965), helped to spread knowledge of Jewish mysticism among non-Jews. He was awarded the Israel Prize in 1958 and was elected president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1968.

1983(8thof Adar, 5743): Eighty-nine year old Columbia University graduate  Louis Bernstein who was a teacher and principal in New York City for more than 50 years passed away today.

1983(8th of Adar, 5743): Murray Seasongood, who served as Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio from 1926 through 1930 passed away today at the age of 104.

1986: Leonard “Cohen appeared as villain Francois Zolan in the "French Twist" episode of the American television series Miami Vice originally broadcast today.”



1987: The Syrian army marched into Beirut.  This was part of Syria’s plan to rule “Greater Syria” a territory that would include Lebanon, Israel and Jordan.  At the behest of the United States, Israel blocked Syria’s plans to seize part of Jordan in the 1970’s.  As the bombing in Beirut this week reminds us, the Syrians still dominate the Lebanese political scene.



1988: In “Russia and the Jews: Photos of a Turbulent Past,” published today Chaim Potok used his critique of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum to provide a semi-sentimental journey through the world of Russian Jewry in the closing decades of the 19th century and the opening decades of the twentieth century.



1991: Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers" premiered at Richard Rodgers Theater in New York City for the first of 780 performances.



1991: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher delivers the key note address at the retirement dinner honoring Sir Immanuel Jakobovits, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth,



1992: Israeli forces withdrew from two villages in southern Lebanon today, ending a 24-hour thrust against Shiite Muslim guerrillas who had fired salvos of rockets into northern Israel. Hours after the withdrawal, the villages were again filled with gunmen from the pro-Iranian Party of God, and fresh barrages of rockets were fired at Israeli border villages.



1992(17th of Adar I, 5752): In Granot Haglil, five-year old Avia Elizad was killed by a Katyusha fired by Arabs in Lebanon as she ran to meet her father who was returning from work.  Her last words were “Daddy, Daddy!”



1992: A Palestinian fatally stabbed Russian émigré today in Kfar Sava, northeast of Tel Aviv. The assailant, from neighboring Kalkilya on the West Bank, stabbed the woman in the neck with a kitchen knife and wounded three other émigrés before being shot and subdued. Leaflets distributed in Gaza and signed by the Islamic Holy War movement took responsibility for the stabbing.



1992: Opening of “Lou Bernstein: Five Decades of Photographs” an exhibition of his works that covers 20 years of wandering New York from the 1940s to the 1960s.



1993: After a campaign sullied by charges of mischief and wrongdoing, Israeli rabbinical elders and political leaders chose Chief Rabbis today for the Ashkenazic and Sephardic branches of Judaism. Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, 56, Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, won the closely watched race to represent Ashkenazic JewsNS Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi-Doron, 52, of Haifa, won the Sephardic contest



1993(30thof Shevat, 5753): Sixty-eight year old cartoon pioneer Harvey Kurtzman passed away today. (As reported by Richard D. Lyons)
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/22/nyregion/harvey-kurtzman-68-cartoonist-who-helped-start-mad-magazine.html
http://www.harveykurtzman.com/



1994(10thof Adar, 5754): Ninety-three year old Mary Woodard Lasker, the widow of Albert Davis Lasker with whom she established the Lasker Foundation passed away today. (As reported by Eric Pace)
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/23/obituaries/mary-w-lasker-philanthropist-for-medical-research-dies-at-93.html



1995(21stof Adar I, 5755): Eighty-six year old pathologist Alwin M. (Max) Pappenheimer passed away today.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/24/obituaries/alwin-m-pappenheimer-jr-86-shed-light-on-bacterial-toxins.html



1995:Leonard Hoffmann, Baron Hoffmann began serving “as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary” today.



1996(1st of Adar, 5756): Science fiction writer Horace Leonard Gold passed away at the age of 81.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1760058/Horace-L-Gold



19961st of Adar, 5756): Composer and former President of ASCAP Morton Gould passed away at the age of 82. (As reported by Bernard Holland)
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/22/nyregion/morton-gould-composer-and-conductor-dies-at-82.html



1997: Bob Rafelson turned sixty-four today, on the same day which Blood & Wine, the thriller he had directed was released in the United States.



1999: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Kissinger Transcripts:The Top Secret Talks With Beijing and Moscow,Edited by William Burr and Ex-FriendsFalling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailerby Norman Podhoretz



1999(5th of Adar, 5759): Gertrude Elion, winner of The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988,passed away.For more about this fascinating woman in her own words see
 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1988/elion-autobio.html.



1999: At the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Family Heritage Week, with special activities, including creating family trees and special tours, goes on through Sunday. Exhibitions include ''Jewish Life a Century Ago,'' with memorabilia from Jewish rituals and celebrations in Europe in the early 1900's; ''War Against the Jews,'' detailing events from 1933 to 1945, and ''Jewish Renewal,'' focusing on life after the Holocaust comes to an end.



2000: Ninety-two year old General Kenneth D. Nichols who played a key role in the development of the Atomic Bomb during WW II and who was one of the driving forces behind removing J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance passed away.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/25/us/k-d-nichols-92-leader-in-early-atomic-age.html



 2002: The State Department declared that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was dead, a month after he'd been abducted by Islamic extremists in Pakistan.



2002(9thof Adar I, 5762): A Palestinian terrorist shot 22 year old Minhal Dragma during the killing spree known as the Second Intifada. (Don’t you just love how the terrorists come up with this jazzy names for murder?)



2002: A videotape was released titled “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.” The video shows Pearl's mutilated body, and lasts 3 minutes and 36 seconds.



2004: Bassam al-Asker, one of the murdering terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro was erroneously reported to have died today.  (As of 2007, he was supposedly living in Lebanon having spent 14 years training terrorists in Iraq.)



2004(29thof Shevat, 5764): Eighty-four year old Milton “Milt” Rubenfeld who flew for the RAF and the USAAF in WW II before ‘becoming one of the five founding pilots of the IAF during Israel’s War of Independence” whose service was vital to the success of the Zionist cause passed away today in Florida.
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~sklausne/NWin04.pdf



2006: The Jewish author E. L. Doctorow was named the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. The winning work was The March (Random House), his best-selling novel about Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating march through the Confederate South, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Doctorow, who also won the 1990 Pen/Faulkner Award for "Billy Bathgate," will receive a prize of $15,000 from the Washington-based organization, which is "committed to building audiences for exceptional literature and bringing writers together with their readers."



2006: Wafa Sultan, an American author and critic of Muslim society and Islam who trained as a psychiatrist in Syria took part in Al Jazeera's weekly 45-minute discussion program The Opposite Direction. She criticized Muslims for treating non-Muslims differently, and for not recognizing the accomplishments of Jewish and other members of non-Muslim society while using their wealth and technology. The video was the most discussed video of all time with over 260,000 comments on the video-sharing website YouTube. Sultan describes her thesis as witnessing "a battle between modernity and barbarism which Islam will lose". It has brought her telephone threats, but also praise from reformers. Her comments, especially a pointed criticism that "no Jew has blown himself up in a German restaurant", brought her invitation to Jerusalem by the American Jewish Congress.



2006(23rd of Shevat, 5766):  Abraham Lopez Cardozo passed away at the age of 91.  The New York cantor was known for his efforts to preserve the music of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews (As reported by Ari L. Goldman)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/arts/music/23cardozo.html



2007: Haaretz reported that only 19,264 people immigrated to Israel in 2006, down nine percent from 2005. It is the lowest number of immigrants recorded since 1988. Nearly 3 million people have immigrated to Israel since the country's founding in 1948, roughly one third of which immigrated during the 1990s. Some 300 people emigrated from India in 2006 - a fivefold increase from 2005. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, since 2002 - the year in which the major wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union came to an end - there has been a consistent downward trend in immigration. In 2006, immigration was down to 1980s levels, during which time 9,000-24,000 people immigrated annually.  In 2006, only 2.7 people immigrated for every 1,000 veteran residents. In 1990-91, at the height of immigration from the former Soviet Union, that figure stood at an average of 35 per 1,000, and from 1990-2001, it averaged 17 per 1,000. Starting in 2003, that figure fell to below 3.8 per 1,000 - also the rate during 1980-89, the period of lowest immigration in Israel's history.



2007: Today,in an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times,” on his 64th birthday, movie mogul David “Geffen described Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton in unflattering terms saying, ‘Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it's troubling’ and that Hillary Clinton was "incredibly polarizing" while Bill Clinton was "reckless” thus casting doubt on those who say he has become a different person since leaving office



2008: In New York, Susannah Heschel presents a lecture entitled “Biblical Scholarship and the Rise of Racism.”



2009: Shabbat Shekalim – Sabbath of the Shekel (5769)



2009: Two and a half weeks after United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon discovered five rockets ready to be launched toward Israel, a Katyusha rocket slammed into the western Galilee near the town of Ma'alot this morning, lightly wounding three people.



2009: The 92ndStreet Y presents “It Started With a Dream: David Zippel—Lyrics He Wrote, Lyrics He Wishes He Wrote”during which the Jewish Tony Award-winner and multiple Oscar, Emmy and Grammy award nominee  presents highlights from his own scores and shares his inspirations and personal favorites from the iconic Songbook canon.  



2009: The Cedar Rapids Gazette reports that Rabbi Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus, who leads a small congregation in suburban Chicago, will become the second woman to head the rabbinical assembly of Judaism’s liberal Reform movement.



2010: Family, students and friends, including American historians Jonathan Sarna and Kimmy Caplan will gather at 7 p.m. at Jerusalem’s Yedidiya Synagogue for a memorial symposium marking the 40th anniversary of the death of Rabbi Geffen, who for 60 years was considered the dean of the Southern Orthodox rabbinate in the US.



2010: The Jewish Agency for Israel is scheduled to open its three-day long meeting today in Jerusalem.  The meeting had originally been scheduled to be held in St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida.)



2010: The Israeli Ballet is scheduled to perform Don Quixote, at the Walt Whitman Theatre in Brooklyn, NY.



2010: A man hurled a suitcase containing a makeshift bomb at Cairo's main downtown synagogue in the early hours this morning, causing no injuries or damage, police said.



2010: The Washington Post featured a review of Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power by James McGrath Morris, a biography about the Hungarian born Jewish immigrant who changed the face of American journalism.



2011: The movies scheduled to be shown today at the Atlanta Jewish Film touch a wide range of Jewish emotions and themes since they include Diary of Anne Frank and American Tail, an animated film about “the immigrant adventure of Russian-Jewish mice that flee persecution in pursuit of the American dream.”



2011: Israeli pianist Idith Meshulam is scheduled to perform the second annual Music Of Now Marathon in New York City.



2011: Suez Canal officials said today that two Iranian naval vessels were expected to start their passage through the strategic waterway early tomorrow.If the ships make the passage, it would mark the first time in three decades that Iranian military ships have travelled the canal that links the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.



2012: Sue Eckstein is scheduled to discuss her latest novel “Interpreters” in London as part of Jewish Book Week.



2012: Pam Fox is scheduled to discuss “A Place to Call My Jewish Home: Memories of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue 1911-2011” in London as part of Jewish Book Week.



2012: Joshua Cohen, Ruth Franklin and Adam Kirsch are scheduled to participate in “In the Beginning Were Words: The Greatest Jewish Books” at the 92nd St Y in Manhattan



2012: IDF and Israel Police forces conducting anti-smuggling operations foiled a potential terrorist attack when they discovered a powerful explosive device being brought into the country.The authorities believe the intended target was IDF forces that patrol the southern border. (As reported by the Jerusalem Post Staff) 



2012: As tensions in Israel continue to rise due to threat of a nuclear Iran, the deputy head of the Islamic Republic's armed forces was quoted by a semi-official news agency as saying today that Iran would take preemptive action against its enemies if it felt its national interests were endangered "Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran's national interests, and want to decide to do that, we will act without waiting for their actions," Mohammad Hejazi told Fars news agency.



2013: In London, The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide is scheduled to mark LGBT history month with a “screening two of the earliest sympathetic depictions of same-sex attraction in the history of cinema” which “were created in the German Weimar Republic.”



2013: The Center for Jewish History and Leo Baeck Institute is scheduled to present a concert, “The Best of the Classics.”



2013: In New York, Temple Shaaray Tefila is scheduled to host a Klezmer Jam.



2013(11thof Adar, 2013): Fast of Esther



2013: Three men were found guilty today of planning a “spectacular bombing campaign” in the UK, including an attack on a synagogue.


2013: Today President Shimon Peres exhorted the European Union and its member states to place Hezbollah on their terror lists, and warned Lebanon against initiating violence against Israel.


2014: Congregation Har Tzeon-Agudath Achim in Silver Spring, MD is scheduled to host “Rockin’ Moroccan Shabbat Dinner” this evening.


2014: “Hundreds of copies of The Diary of Anne Frank and related books were vandalized in libraries in Tokyo, news reports said today. Library officials notified police after some pages of at least 265 copies of the diary and books about Anne Frank were found to have been ripped out at 31 libraries since January.”


2014: When attempts to disperse Palestinians who were throwing stones at soldiers beyond the border fence, IDF soldiers opened live fire at "the lower extremities of the main instigators" in an attempt to disperse them.


2014: In Iowa City, Avremel and Chaya Blesofsky invite the community to attend the brit of their son.


2015: Yevgenia Pikovsky, Elyakum Salzman – violin; Dmitri Ratush, Vladislav Krasnov – viola; Felix Nemirovsky, Yaacov Kashin – cello; Uri Arbel - double bass and Marianna Sorkin – piano are scheduled to perform a program of Russian music at the Eden-Tamir Music Center.


2015: Lewis Black is scheduled to perform at the State Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio.


2015(2ndof Adar, 5775): Fifty-eight year old filmmaker Bruce Sinofsky passed away today.

2015: In Oslo, “hundreds of non-Jews including many Muslims” are scheduled “to encircle the synagogue as a gesture of outrage at the shooting at the Danish synagogue by a Muslim fanatic” who murdered 37 year old Dan Uzin who was providing security during a bat mitzvah celebration. (JTA)



2016(12thof Adar I, 5776): Eighty-three year old attorney and conservationist Henry Diamond passed away today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/science/allen-roses-who-upset-common-wisdom-on-cause-of-alzheimers-dies-at-73.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well



2016(12thof Adar I, 5776): Ninety-four year old Rabbi Yohanan Sofer passed away early this morning in Jerusalem.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/venerated-leader-of-the-erlau-hasidic-sect-dies-at-93/



2016: “Court Vacancy” published today described the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo.
http://www.thegazette.com/subject/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/letter-follow-hoovers-lead-to-fill-court-vacancy-20160221



2016: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Yid by Paul Goldberg and West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein.



 2016: As part of the Breman Museum’s “Bearing Witness” series, Mariella Crea is scheduled to the story of her family who “rescued French Jews being transported to the concentration camps by train” and smuggling them “to safety in Switzerland.”



2016: The Jewish Genealogical Society of New York and the American Sephardi Federation are scheduled to sponsor Gene Milgrom’s discussion of her work “documenting an unbroken maternal lineage back to 1480 in Pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal.”



2017: “Families waited in silent clusters in a century-old Jewish cemetery” in University City, MO where “they came with a single question: Was the grave ofa loved one among the nearly 200 that had been vandalized here over the weekend?” (As reported by Monica Davey and Alan Blinder)



2017: “President Trump called anti-Semitic violence “horrible” and vowed today to take steps to counter extremism in comments that followed criticism that the White House had not clearly denounced vandalism and threats targeting Jewish institutions. (As reported by Fred Barbash, Ben Guarino and Brian Murphy)



2017: As part of its celebration of Black History Month, in Atlanta, the Breman Museum is scheduled to host its “second annual Historic Jewish Atlanta Tour” devoted to the Civil Rights movement.


2017: ‘Der Golem” is scheduled to be shown at JW3, the Jewish Community Centre in London.


2017: Rabbi David Wolpe is scheduled to “present an in-depth profile” of the story of “King David” as part of the “The Bible: The Greatest Stories Ever Told” at the Streicker Center.



2017: Rachel Joselson and Rene Lecuona are scheduled to present “Songs from the Holocaust” at the Voxman Music Building in Iowa City.

2018: The Steicker Center is scheduled to host “Einstein’s Brain: A (Gray) Matter of Dispute where a panel including Dr. Amir Amedia, a brain scientist at Hebrew University “will explore questions such as How should we treat Einstein’s legacy in the 21st century? And How do we explain his genius and understand his enormous contributions?”


2018: In honor of Black History Month, The Literary Guild of St. Simons Island, Inc, The Coastal Georgia Historical Society,Temple Beth Tefilloh and the College of Coastal Georgia are scheduled to host  a screening of “Rosenwald, a documentary of how two men, Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, in the early decades of the twentieth century, together helped finance and build 5,357 elementary schools for African American children throughout the segregated South.”


2018: At the University of Virginia, the Brody Center is scheduled to host “Bagels on the Lawn” followed in the evening by the “4th Year Seminar: Judaism and Post College Life.”

 


 

This Day, February 22, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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February 22


1290 BCE:  The coronation of Ramses II, who, according to some, is the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Since the Bible does not mention the Pharaoh by name, Ramses is not the only candidate.  In addition to which, there is some debate among Egyptologist as to when Ramses actually came to power.  According to some, his reign began in 1297 BCE. 


1040: On the secular calendar birthdate of Rashi ישר, an acronym for Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac or Shlomo Yitzchaki.  Rashi was one of the greatest commentators on the TaNaCh and the Talmud. Rashi was born at Troyes, Champagne, northern France, in 1040 and died there in 1104 or 1105. He was reputedly descended from the Davidic line with lineage to the royal house of King David. He studied at Worms under Yaakov ben Yakar, and at Mainz under Isaac ben Judah. He returned to Troyes at age 25, probably serving as Rabbi and “religious judge.”  According to the Dictionary of Jewish Biography, as a judge and a rabbi, “he was unpaid…and he earned his living from the vineyards that he is reported to have owned.” [Editor’s note: Like Maimonides, Rashi followed the admonitions that he who makes a spade of the Torah shall perish and calling upon people to work for a living as well as studying Torah.]  About 1070 he founded a Yeshiva which attracted many disciples. According to tradition Rashi earned his living as a vintner and/or as a wine merchant. Although there are many legends about his travels, Rashi likely never went farther than from the Seine to the Rhine - the utmost limit of his travels was the Yeshivot of Lorraine. Rashi had no sons, only three daughters, Yocheved, Miriam and Rachel, all of whom married scholars. Yocheved married Meir ben Samuel, Miriam married Judah ben Nathan (see above), and Rachel married (and divorced) Eliezer ben Shemiah. Yocheved and Meir's four sons were the tosafists Shmuel (Rashbam), Yaakov (Rabbeinu Tam), Yitzchak (Ribbam), and the grammarian Shlomo; one of their daughters, Channah, wrote a responsum explaining the ritual and blessing for the Shabbat lights. Besides minor works, such as an edition of the Siddur (Prayer-Book), Rashi wrote two great commentaries on which his fame rests. These were the commentaries on the whole of the TaNaCh (Hebrew Bible) and on about thirty tractates of the Talmud. Rashi's works are so well respected that he is often cited simply as "the Commentator." His commentaries are of interest to secular scholars because he tended to translate unfamilar words into the spoken French of his day. As such, his commentaries offer an interesting insight into the vocabulary and pronunciation of Old French. The authors of the Dictionary of Jewish Biography and The New Encyclopedia of Judaism agree that “although Troyes (Rashi’s city of residence) was untouched by the First Crusade of 1096…the last years of his life were saddened by the devastation that the Crusaders brought to bear on “defenseless Jewish communities of the Rhineland” in general and “the disasters which had befallen his own colleagues.


 Commentary on the TaNaCh


Rashi's commentary on the TaNaCh is very thorough, and is used to understand both the plain meaning of the TaNaCh and the interpretation of the medieval rabbis. His commentary is often used in basic, intermediate, and advanced studies of the TaNaCh. There are a small number of commentaries that bear his name that were not authored by him, but by his students. Rashi's commentary on the Torah has become an indispensable part of the framework of Orthodox Judaism - tens of thousands, men and women alike, daily study "Chumash with Rashi" (Chumash = Pentateuch + corresponding portions from the Prophets) in reviewing the Parsha to be read on the next Shabbat. Rashi's explanation of Chumash, clarifies the "simple" meaning of the text so that a bright child of five could understand it. At the same time, it is the crucial foundation of some of the most profound legal analysis and mystical discourses that came after it. Since its publication, this commentary has been included as a standard in almost all Chumashim produced within the Orthodox community. Supercommentaries on this work include Gur Aryeh by Rabbi Judah Loew (Maharal), Sefer ha-Mizrachi by Rabbi Elijah Mizrachi (Re'em) and Yeri'ot Shlomo by Rabbi Solomon Luria (Maharshal). Almost all later commentaries will discuss Rashi either bringing His view as a support or debating it


Commentary of the Talmud


Rashi also wrote the first comprehensive commentary of the Talmud. His commentary attempts to provide a full explanation of the words, and of the logical structure of each Talmudic passage. Unlike other commentators, Rashi does not paraphrase or exclude any part of the text, but carefully elucidates the whole of the text. He also exerted a decisive influence on establishing the correct text of the Talmud. He compared different manuscripts and determined which readings should be preferred. His work became such a standard that it is included in all printed versions of the Talmud.


Rashi's Talmud commentary is always situated towards the middle of the opened book display; i.e. on the side of the page closest to the binding. The semi-cursive font in which the commentaries are printed is often referred to as "Rashi script." This does not mean that Rashi himself used such a script, only that the printers standardly employ it for commentaries. Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer from Venice, introduced "Rashi script" in his publication of Rashi's commentary on the Tanakh in 1517. Rashi's commentary, which covers almost all of the Babylonian Talmud, has been printed in every version of the Talmud since the first Italian printings. Rashi did not compose commentaries for every tractate of the Babylonian Talmud. Some of the printed commentaries which are attributed to him were composed by others, primarily his students. In some commentaries, the text indicates that Rashi died before completing the tractate, and that it was completed by a student. This is true of the tractate Makkot, the concluding portions of which were composed by his son-in-law Rabbi Judah ben Nathan and of Bava Batra finished (in a more detailed style) by his grandson, Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (also known as the Rashbam), one of the prominent contributors to the Tosafot.



“Rashi’s responsa (replies to inquiries on matters of Jewish law) …are characterized by liberality and humility…He ruled that it is permissible to interrupt the grace after meals to fee ones animals, basing the decision other scriptural injunction for a man to feed his animals before himself.  On one occasion he told his questioner, ‘I was asked this question before but I realize that my answer then was wrong and I welcome the opportunity to correct my mistake.’”  There are places in his commentaries where admits that he does not understand the meaning.  “Of this I do not know.” 


Rashi in his own words:


“Any plan formulated in a hurry is foolish.”


“Be sure to ask your teacher his reasons and his sources.”


“Teachers learn from their student’s discussions.”


“A student of laws who does not understand their meaning or cannot explain their contradictions is just a basket full of books.”


“Do not rebuke your fellow man so as to shame him in public.”


“To obey out of love is better than to obey out of fear.”


“”All the 613 commandments are included in the Decalogue.”


1217(6th of Adar, 4977): Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg passed away. Born in 1140 in Speyer, he was also called He-Hasid or 'the Pious' in Hebrew and was the initiator of the Chassidei Ashkenaz, a movement of Jewish mysticism in Germany. “This movement is considered different from kabbalistic mysticism because it emphasizes specific prayer and moral conduct. Judah settled in Regensburg in 1195. He wrote Sefer Hasidim (Book of the Pious) and Sefer Hakavod(Book of Glory). The latter has been lost and is only known by quotations that other authors have made from it. His most prominent students were Elazar Rokeach and Moses ben Jacob of Coucy.


1288: Papacy of Nicholas IV began. Like many medieval popes, Nicholas IV displayed a mixed attitude toward the Jews. On the one hand, he issued various instructions (1288) to the inquisitors to proceed against *Conversos and he renewed earlier legislation concerning the Jews in Portugal, compelling them to wear a *badge. On the other hand, he specifically protected the Jews of Rome from being molested by Christians (January 1291). He wrote to Emperor Rudolph requesting the release of *Meir b. Baruch of Rothenburg from prison. There is a belief that he enlisted the services of the Jewish physician and scholar Isaac b. Mordecai Maestro Gaio, who also attended Boniface VIII and who was the first of the Italian Jewish papal physicians. (As described in the Jewish Virtual Library)


1349: In Zurich, Switzerland, the town council tried to protect the Jews of the town, they were forced to give in to the mob, resulting in the murder of many of the Jewish inhabitants. The Jews were then forced to leave.


1455: Birthdate of Johann Von Reuchlin the German linguist who came to the defense of the Jews when Dominican Friars led by Johann Pfefferkorn sought imperial support to destroy a vast array of Jewish books.


1475: The first known Hebrew book, a copy of the TaNaCh, was printed in Italy.


1495: King Charles VIII of France enters Naples to claim the city's throne.  Following the expulsion from Spain, Jews had found refuge in Naples thanks to King Ferdinand of Naples.  When Ferdinand died his son Alfonso replaced him on the throne.  Charles deposed Alfonso.  During his short lived reign over the Italian city, the situation of the Jews worsened.  Fortunately, a mixed bag of political and religious leaders drove Charles back to France.  Unfortunately, the Jews of Naples would be expelled from their Italian haven in 1510.


1501: On this day and the following day, two tremendous auto-de-fe's took place in Toledo. A woman prophet and over 100 of her followers were burned. The woman envisioned those Jews who had previously died as martyrs were taken to heaven, and the Jewish Messiah was speedily going to return the Jews to the Promised Land.


1520: Birthdate of Moses Isserles, the Ashkenazic rabbi from Cracow best known for writing HaMapah (The Table Cloth) a “gloss” on The Shulchan Aruch (Set Table) of Joseph Karo.  Karo relied primarily on Sephardic sources. Isserles used Ashkenazic sources to create a table cloth that would cover the set table thus making Caro’s work viable for the large number of Jews living in Northern and Eastern Europe.


1590:  Archduke Maximilian granted the Jews of Mergentheim, Markelsheim, Igersheim and Unterbalbach the right to continue to bury their dead above the village of Unterbalbach for an annual payment of 16 Gulden to the Monastery of Mergentheim


1618(27th of Shevat): Rabbi Tanhum Ha-Kohen of Cracow passed away today.


1656: The Jews in New Amsterdam are granted, "A little hook of land situate [sic] outside of this city for a burial place." This cemetery land was located by the Bowery, near Oliver Street in what is now lower Manhattan. It would be another month before Jews were granted the right to own real estate.  Public Jewish worship would not be an accepted matter of fact until the turn of the century.  The establishment of a burial society and cemetery is a matter of major importance for any Jewish community.   It was sign of permanence and belonging.  Following the defeat of the Dutch by the English in 1664, New Amsterdam would become New York. 


1732:  Birthdate of George Washington. Several Jew’s served with Washington during the Revolutionary War.  When Washington was elected President he sent amicable letters to different Jewish communities assuring them that Jews were welcome in the United States.  The tone set by Washington helped to make the American experience different for the Jews than anything they had known in their history. As he said in his famous letter written to the Jews of Newport, “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants--while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”



1755: Benedict XIV issued Beatus Andreas a Papal Bull that confirmed the blood libel as factual. ”The Bull reviewed the cases of ritual murder by Jews, which it explicitly upholds as a fact, and establishes the beatification but not the canonization of Andreas of Rinn and Simon of Trent”


1775: The Jews were expelled from outskirts of Warsaw, Poland.


1781: During the American Revolution Isaac Franks, who had been serving as “forage-master” at West Point, was commissioned as an ensign in the 7th Massachusetts Regiment.  He served in that capacity until 1782 when he resigned due to health problems. 


1788:  Birthdate of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who has nothing to positive to say about human existence.  For him, life is harsh and cruel.  If this is so obvious, Schopenhauer asks why there are any optimists in the world. Schopenhauer argues that ‘the aggressively optimistic philosophers of the Western World have fallen victim to a vulgar buoyancy which is rooted in the Jewish Tradition!”  In his most famous work The World as Will and Ideathe philosopher says Jewish traditional optimism reflects "a self-congratulatory human egoism, which is blind to all except our (own) all too frail human goals and aspirations."


1793: Birthdate of Isaak Markus Jost, the native of Bernburg who overcame poverty and the loss of his father while still a child to become one of the early creators of modern Jewish historical writing.


1812: Birthdate of Moses (Moyses) Baruch Auerbach who gained fame as poet and author Berthold Auerbach whose early efforts included a biography about Spinoza and a text entitled Judaism and Recent Literature.


1816: In St. Thomas, French native Jacob Baiz and Leah Baiz gave birth to Hannah Nanette Henriquez Moron, the wife of Jacob Henriquez Moron today.


1819: The United States of America and Spain signed the Florida Purchase Treaty which gave the United States complete control over what is now the Sunshine State.  Within 2 years, records show that 30 to 40 Jews lived in northern Florida including Moses Levy a Moroccan born lumber dealer who built a Jewish colony in an area that is now home to the University of Florida.  Abraham Myers, a West Pointer who served during the Seminole Wars was one of the first Jews to live in south Florida.


1820: Birthdate of Elizabeth D. A. Cohen, who would become the first practicing female physician in Louisiana. Born in New York City and educated at the Philadelphia College of Medicine, Cohen practiced medicine in New Orleans, LA.  She passed away on May 28, 1921 and was buried in the Gates of Prayer Cemetery on Canal Street.


1821: In Hamburg, Germany Dr. David Assing and Rosa Maria Assing gave birth to authoress Ludmilla Assing.


1828: The final letter of correspondence between Lazarus Jacob Riesser and his son Gabriel was written today.


1828: In Vilnius, Abraham Bar Lebensohn and his wife gave birth to the Hebrew poet Micah Joseph Lebensohn. His brother-in-law Joshua Steinberg who was an author in his own right and functionary in the Russian government translated some of his Hebrew works into German.


1837: Nathan Lewis married Harriette Moses at the Great Synagogue today.


1839: In Hamburg, Kalmar Calman and Betty Friedburg gave birth Adolf Calman who served as a rabbi at several New York congregations including Beth Israel Bikur Cholim and Etz Chaim of Yorkville.


1840:  Birthdate of August Bebel, a German social democrat and founder of the Social Democrat Party of Germany.  The non-Jewish Bebel was committed to the concept of the brotherhood of man and one of his famous statements was, "Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools."


1847: In Germany, M.A. and Sophia Stern gave birth to Louis Stern.  After the family moved to Albany, Louis was sent to Petersburg, W. Va. “to learn the rudiments of merchandizing in the small store of any uncle after which he moved to New York where he and his brothers – Isaac, Bernard and Benjamin - opened the dry goods store that became known as Stern Brothers, that classier than Wanamakers and B. Altman’s but never quite reached the level of Lord and Taylor or Bonwit Teller.


1848: Beginning of the “The Third French Revolution” which replaced Citizen King Louis Philippe with the Second Republic.


1850: Birthdate of Isaac L Rice.  The German born Rice taught at Columbia University and is the namesake for its Rice Stadium.  As a businessman he played a key role in the development of submarines.  He was a famous chess player and the inventor of the Rice Gambit.


1852: Martin Beir, the secretary and treasurer of the Milton Clark Company, an insurance agency in Rochester, NY married 17 year old Clara Hirsch, the daughter of Wolf and Eva Hirsch. (Clara passed away at the age of 39 and Beir never remarried.  In 1898, he was chosen to head B’nai B’rith for the state of New York.


1852: Solomon Isaacs married Esther Hart today at the Great Synagouge.


1853: Founding of Eliot Seminary in St. Louis which would become Washington University. According to recently published figures Wash U has 2,000 Jewish undergraduates who are 33% of the student population. This helps to rank it as number 11 on a list of the 30 private schools Jews choose.


1854(24 Shevat, 5614): Austria Rabbi Abraham Neuda, the native of Moravia who was the son of Rabbi Aaron Neuda of Loštice, and the nephew of Rabbi Jacob Neuda of Lomnitz (Lomnice), Moravia and the husband of author Fanny Schmiedl passed away today


1855: The New York Times reported that a concert designed to raise funds for the Hebrew Benevolent Society is scheduled to be held at the Dodsworth Academy.


1855:  Pennsylvania State University is founded.  Today Penn State has approximately 4,000 Jewish undergraduate and graduate students out of a total student population of over 40,000.  The university offers approximately 45 Jewish Studies courses.  Penn State offers both a major and a minor in Jewish studies.


1856: The Republican Party holds its first national meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Early Jewish Republican supporters included Sabato Morais, Rabbi of Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel Congregation; Moritz Pinner, a German born editor of an abolitionist paper who would fight in the Union Army during the Civil War; Louis Naphtali Dembitz, a Louisville lawyer whose nephew would become the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice.  Jews were drawn to the Republican Party because of its anti-Slavery stance.  Ironically, another group drawn to the Republican Party were members of the short-lived American Party, also called “The Know-Nothing” Party.  The Know-Nothings were natavist who were opposed to the swelling tide of immigration, a belief that included more than just a whiff of anti-Semitism.


1857: Birthdate German born physicist Heinrich Hertz. He was the first one to broadcast and receive radio waves.  The unit of measure “hertz” is named for him.  Hertz was born into a Jewish family that converted to Christianity.  The German Jewish community was devastated two times: first by conversions in the 19thcentury and then by the Final Solution in the 20th century.  One wonders how many of those who perished in the latter were from families who had participated in the former.


1859: Ephraim Alex, the Overseer of the Great Synagogue secured the adoption of the following resolutions designed to help “the strange and foreign poor”:


(1) That it is highly expedient that the relief of the strange poor be managed by a Board of Guardians constituted of delegates from the three City Uniting Congregations.


 (2) That the following gentlemen be appointed the delegates of this Board with power to meet the delegates appointed by the other two congregations and make such arrangements with them for one year as shall seem most desirable to effect the desired object, viz., Messrs. E. Alex, Samuel Moses, Lewis Jacobs, S. A. Jonas, Joseph Lazarus, Jacob Waley, M.A., and Lionel L. Cohen.


(3) That £220 be placed at the disposal of such Board of Guardians for one year to be paid in monthly instalments.


(4) That the Secretary of the Synagogue do attend the meetings of the Board of Guardians when requested and finish all information, books or documents bearing on the relief of the strange poor.


1860: The New York Times reported that “The community of Kingston, which is composed chiefly of Jews, have been making contributions for the relief of their suffering brethren of Morocco. They have managed to collect large sums in spite of the prevailing poverty.”


1861: Bell and Daly announced the upcoming publication of The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, by Isaac Taylor


1861: According to reports sent from Paris today, the arrest of Jules Mires has threatened the stability of the Credit Mobilier.  It is expected that when word of his arrest reaches Constantinople, ruinous panic will set in since investors there hold a glut of paper tied to his financial activities.


1865: The Richmond Examiner described the condition of Charleston, SC when it fell to Union forces under the command of General Sherman. According to the Examiner, all that the Yankees found was “the abandoned hull of Charleston” inhabited by “a few Jews” and “some telegraph operators.”


1868: In Amsterdam, Marianne Smit and diamond cutter Mozes Polake gave birth to Henri Polak the founder of the Dutch Social Democratic Workers’ Party and longtime President of the General Diamond Workers’ Union of the Netherlands who died of pneumonia before the Nazis could ship him to a concentration camp in 1943.


1868: Birthdate of Charles Pearce Coady, a Democrat who served as a Congressman from Maryland’s Third District and was one of the opening speakers at the 13th annual convention of the Order of Brith Shalom in Baltimore.


1869: In Kaiserslautern, thirsy five year Abraham Weil, the German born son of Salomon Weil and Helena Lea Meyer married Berta Seligmann, a native of France


1871: Dr. Henry W. Schneeberger received his formal rabbinical ordination from Dr. Hildesheimer. In the document of ordination Dr. Hildesheimer testified to Henry’s high moral character and to his devotion to Judaism. He also wrote, “He is worthy to be crowned with the crown of Morenu Horav [Our Teacher, the Rabbi].” “Thus equipped with the rabbinic title and with the university degree, he lost no time and hurried home to try out for a rabbinical post. Only three weeks after his ordination in Berlin, he preached at the synagogue where he had delivered his very first sermon, at the Rodeph Shalom Synagogue on Clinton Street in New York City.” Rabbi Dr. Henry W) Schneeberger was the First American Born, University- Educated, Orthodox Ordained Rabbi in America (As reported by Dr. Yitzchok Levine).


1872: “Galicia’s Demands” published today described conditions in this portion of Austria that became part of the empire as a result of the partition of Poland.  According to the article, the Poles are in the majority.  However, the Germans and the Jews, who are in the minority “are far ahead of the Poles” “in money and intelligence.” Due to the electoral system, the Poles are the dominate force and the Germans and the Jews are underrepresented in the Diet.


1873: “Joseph Litten, the president of the Jewish community in Konigsberg” and his wife gave birth to professor and jurist Friedrich Julius Litten who became a Lutheran “in order to further his career” but who was also the father of Hans Litten, the lawyer who defended opponents  of the Nazis and died at Dachau.


1876: In New York City, a Polish Jew was arraigned on charges of cruelty to animals.  According to the arresting officer, Siwaski roasted a rat after he had caught in a wire cage trap. 


1876:  Johns Hopkins University was founded in Baltimore, Maryland.  Today, the elite school has approximately 750 Jewish students out of a student population of 6,500.  The university offers 45 courses in Jewish Studies and a major in Jewish Studies.


1878: It was reported today that Rabbi Maruice Treichenberg, who had served as the spiritual leader for the Greene-Street Synagogue, has passed away in Denver, Colorado.


1880: In New York, a meeting is scheduled to be held this afternoon at the Sons of Israel Synagogue to evaluate charges by Jewish butchers that they are being forced to violate Halachah by the wholesalers who employ them.  According to the butchers, the wholesalers are having them keep meat for a period longer than that allowed by law and they are not allowed to warn their customers about this.  The wholesalers deny the allegations.


1880: Professor Felix Adler delivered a lecture today on the subject of “Catholicism and Liberty” in which he took issue with the view of Cardinal Manning. Speaking on behalf of the Church, Manning has taken issue with the concept of the equality of man and the theory that government’s authority is derived from the will of the people.


1881(23rd of Adar I, 5641): In Jersey, eighty-eight year old Mary Asher, the widow of Benjamin Asher and the mother of Asher Asher passed away today.


1882: The SS Illinois a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Russia is expected to arrive in Philadelphia, PA today.  The 50 Jewish families are escaping the violent attacks now going on the Czar’s domain.  A committee of prominent Christians including the Mayor and leading Jews has developed plans to care for the refugees including lodging, food and job placement.


1882: Philadelphia’s May King received an offer today from Calvin Jones of Charlotte, NC, offering 40 acres to each of the 50 Jewish refugee families. The land is located in Alexander and Wilkes counties and is described as well watered and suited for growing wheat, corn and tobacco.


1882: In London, Sir Alexander T. Galt, the Resident Minister in Great Britain of the Dominion of Canada, recommended that Russian Jews immigrate to Manitoba while he was attending a meeting of the Lord Mayor’s Jewish Fund Committee.


1884:  Birthdate of boxing Hall of Famer Abraham “Abe” Attell.  Known as “The Little Hebrew,” Attell was Featherweight Champion from 1901 until 1912.  He gained additional notoriety and ignominy as one of the figures alleged to have fixed the 1919 World Series.  Supposedly Attell was the one who actually passed the ten thousand dollars to several White Sox players to guarantee that they would throw the Fall Classic.


1885: In Munkacs which at the time part of the kingdom of Hungary Mendel Gottesman and Sarah Fishgrund gave birth to American businessman and philanthropist, the husband of Jeanne Regina Gottesman and father of patron of the arts Celeste Ruth Gottesman.


1887: The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society opened a new facility “for infants and boys over six years old” at 11th Avenue between 150th and 151stStreet in New York.


1887: Birthdate of Ksawery Tartakower, the native of Rostov-on-Don who gained famed as Polish and French chess grandmaster Savielly Tartakower.


1887: Henry M. Stanley who had been designated as the leader of the expedition charged with rescuing the apostate Jew Emin Pasha arrived at Zanzibar.


1890: Tonight’s celebration of Washington’s Birthday sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association which will take place at the Hebrew Free School Building will include a speech by Rabbi Rudolph Grossman.


1890:  Birthdate of Ukrainian born British pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch.


1890: Menachem Ussishkin one of the originators of BILU, founded the Odessa Committee. The Committee was dedicated to the practical exponent of the Hovevei Zion movement, in establishing agricultural settlements in Eretz-Israel. Ussishkin later served as President of the Jewish National Fund. He was one of the few early Zionist leaders who actually settled in Eretz-Israel.


1891(14th of Adar I, 5651): Purim Katan


1891: Birthdate of "Chico" Marx one of the Marx Brothers.  A couple of his more famous films included “Animal Crackers” and “A Night at the Opera.”


1892: As New York City dealt with an outbreak of Tyhus that had been traced to recent arriving immigrants thirty-two year old Solomon Zabalzki and forty-two yeard old Rachel Hesselberg were among those who taken to North Brother Island where those thought to be infected were kept under quarantine.


1892: Sixty year old Esther Goodman, Robert Goodman and Sarah Goodman were rescued by firemen when a fire broke out this morning at their apartment in Brooklyn, NY,


1892: It was reported today that “the Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort and Konigsberg Jewish Relief Committees” will be meeting “to consider the refusal of America to receive Russian Jewish immigrants brought by North German Lloyd steamers.”


1892: Birthdate of David Dubinsky one of a veritable army of American Jews who became leaders in the American labor movement.  Born in Russia, Dubinsky began working the United States in 1911 as a cloak cutter.  Two decades later he had risen to the presidency of the International Ladies Garment Union.  The ILGU was a force for social and labor progress that helped end sweatshops and improve the lot of American workers.  Dubinksy was honored with an American Medal for Freedom.  He died in 1982 at the age of 90.


1893: Birthdate of “Polish born circus performer and vaudeville strongman” Siegmund Breitbart who was billed as “The Superman of the Ages” when he toured the United States in 1923.

1894: The 14thannual reception sponsored by the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society was held at the asylum’s facility on 151st Street.


1895: Captain Dreyfus began the journey that would take him to prison in French Guyana


1897: Amos J. Cummings will deliver a lecture today on “Horace Greeley” as part of the free lecture course offered at the Hebrew Institute.


1897: The Young Ladies and Gentlemen’s League will host a reception today in honor of George Washington’s Birthday at the Montefiore Home.


1897: The Jewish Alliance will host a reception today at Temple Emanu-El on 5thAvenue in honor George Washington’ Birthday.


1897: “Lehman Gift Accepted” published today provided details of the decision of the Board of Trustees of the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society to accept the gift of $100,000 from Emanuel Lehmnan that will serve as an endowment for a fund that will benefit those who had been under the care of the society and were now out on their own.


1898: Seventy-seven year old Heungseon Daewongun, the Regent of Korea whom German Jewish businessman Ernst Jakob Oppert attempted to blackmail in an attempt to remove “Korean trading barriers” passed away today.


1898: The managers of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society will host their annual reception in honor of George Washington’s Birthday between 3 and 5 this afternoon.


1898: The Young Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s League of the Montefiore Home will host their fourth annual reception this afternoon in honor of George Washington’s Birthday.


 1901: On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Leah (née Goldstein) and Mordecai Marcus gave birth to David Daniel “Mickey” Marcus the West Point graduate and attorney who was the first “Aluf” of the IDF and built the “secret” road to Jerusalem that meant that the ancient city of David would be part of the modern state of Israel.

1901: Over the next three days, Herzl writes letters to Zionists in France, Italy, England and America for parliamentary intervention against immigration restrictions in Palestine. He considers transferring the center of his action to London but drops the plan because he does not want to separate from his parents.


1902: Herzl travels to Munich and meets the banker Reitlinger. Herzl proposes the Turkish suggestion of Jewish immigration to Asia Minor and Mesopotamia and the exploitation of mines. Reitlinger considers the matter too costly, risky and unsafe.


1902: Birthdate of Jacob Sack, the Pittsburgh native who played lineman for the Pitt Panthers before going to play professional ball for the nascent NFL.


1903: Boutros Ghali writes the conditions for the Jewish settlement in Sinai.


1907: Birthdate of actor, director and producer Sheldon Leonard.


1907: In Omaha, Nebraska, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Maisal gave birth to Zena Maisel who married Sidney E. Pollack and as Zena Maisel Pollack served as the administrative director of the Jewish Guild for the Blind.


1909(1st of Adar I, 5669): Rosh Chodesh Adar I


1909(1st of Adar 1, 5669): Sixty-seven year old chess champion Eugene Delmar passed away today.


1910: Birthdate of Sophie Melvin, the native of the Ukraine who gained fame as social activist Sophie Gerson (As reported by Deborah Gerson and Tim Wheeler)

1912(4th of Adar, 5672): Seventy-four old Bertha Eppstein, the wife of Max Eppstein and the mother of Seraphine Eppstein Pisko, the secretary of National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives, passed away today in Denver, CO.


1913(8th of Adar I, 5673): Parashat Tetzaveh


1913: Dr. Gerson B. Levi is scheduled to officiate at Saturday morning services at B’nai Sholom-Temple Israel in Chicago.


1913: Rabbi Joseph Stoltz is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “Washington and the Jews” this mornings at Isaiah Temple.


1913: Rabbi Abraham Hirshberg is scheduled to deliver a talk at this afternoon’s children service at the Chicago Hebrew Institute.


1913: Judge Huge Pam is scheduled to deliver a lecture this evening on “Municipal Government to the Welfare of the Nation and People” at the Chicago Hebrew Institute.


1913: It was reported today that “Samuel Littman, a sergeant of Company B, 47th Regiment of the New York National Guard has resigned” because he claimed that he was not promoted to lieutenant because he was Jewish – a charge that Governor Sulzer has asked to be thoroughly investigated.


1914: Birthdate of Dr. Renato Dulbecco, the Italian born virologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1975 for his role in drawing a link between genetic mutations and cancer. During World War II, Dulbecco served as a medical officer in the Italian Army. When the train taking him to the Russian front “stopped in Warsaw, he saw railway laborers wearing yellow stars. When he asked about them, he was told that the workers were Jews who would be killed when their work was done. He was horrified.” According to him seeing this was a life changing moment which may account for the fact that he deserted from the Italian Army and spent the rest of the war providing medical assistance to the resistance fighters in and around Torino.(As reported by Denise Gellene)

1915: The second day of the 23rd annual meeting of the American Jewish Historical Society will include another series of literary presentations and a business meeting that will include the election of officers.


1915: Birthdate of New York native, “the song and dance man” whose credits including “Easter Parade” and “On the Town.”

 1915: Georgia Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorse and State Attorney General Warren Grice are scheduled to file their brief in the U.S. Supreme that will deny a writ of Habeas Corpus in the case of Leo Frank who is scheduled to be hung after a trial held in the midst of an orgy of anti-Semitism.


1915: Eighteen year old Charles Pores won a weather-shortened version of the Brooklyn-to-Sea Gate Marathon.


1915: Following the failure of the Ottoman attack on Allied forces in Egypt, the Arabs have expressed their bitterness and “their determination not to fight in the future” on the side of the Turks.


1915: It was reported today that Djemal Pasha, the Ottoman Minister of Marine “clearly see the utter futility of further military operations against Egypt” and has gone north to Damascus” where he plans on resigning. (Reading this, one would not suspect that it will take the British another two years to finally get to Jerusalem and more than three years to finally complete their conquest of Palestine and Syria)


1916: Elinor “Ellie” Fatman the daughter of Morris and Settie Fatman who had been teaching at the Henry Street Settlement House since 1913 proposed to Henry Morgenthau, Jr. in Central Park.(As reported by Edna S. Friedberg)


1916: In Amsterdam, Levie Van Praag and Sabiena Cohen, both of whom were killed in Sobibor, gave birth Jacques Van Praag who was murdered at Birkenau

1916: In Washington, D.C., at today’s meeting of the Executive Committee of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers is scheduled to raise “the question of Jewish rights in the belligerent countries.


1916: Dr. Nathan Syrkin and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise addressed a convention chaired by Judge Sanders of the Jewish organizations of Manhattan held at Arlington Hall where plans were discussed for the upcoming Jewish conference to be held in Philadelphia in March.


1916:  After two years and four month serving in Constantinople, American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau arrived in New York aboard the steamship Frederick VIII to start a 60 day vacation.


1917(30th of Shevat, 5677): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1917: As of today, Frederic C. Penfield, the United States Ambassador to Austria-Hungary “has turned over $25,000 to the Vienna Jewish Association to be used for the relief of Jews in the occupied districts of Rumania and Serbia.


1918: A report today from Zurich stated that Jewish deputies succeed in persuading the Austrian Government to abolish the prohibition against Yiddish correspondence.


1918: Colonel John Henry Patterson led the Jewish Legion, the unit he commanded on parade down Whitechapel Road.


1919(22nd of Adar I, 5679): Seventy-eight year old French neurologist Hippolyte Bernheim passed away today in Paris.


1920: The New Orleans Times-Picayune published an interview with Elizabeth D.A. Cohen, the first practicing female physician in Louisiana, her 100th birthday.


1921(14th of Adar I, 5681): Purim Katan observed for the first time under President Warren G. Harding.


1921: The Tikvath Israel Society hosted “junior activities” at the center on Sumner Avenue at the corner of Van Buren Street.


1922: In the South Bronx, Solomon and Lillian Baumol, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe gave birth to economist William J. Baumol. (As reported by Patricia Cohen)

1922: Birthdate of Sammy Hershkovitz, the Romanian born Jew who made Aliyah at the age of 2 and gained fame as Sammy Ofer, the Israeli international shipping magnate, philanthropist and art collector who headed a family ranked as the richest in Israel. (As reported by Isabel Kershner)

1922 (24th of Shevat, 5682): Aaron David (A.D.) Gordon passed away. Gordon, a Hebrew writer and philosopher of the “religion of Labor,” was considered the ideological pillar of the kibbutz movement. Born in 1856 in Russia he only came to Eretz Israel at the age of 48. Neither his age nor health impeded his drive to work in agriculture .He helped found Kibbutz Degania in 1909. Gordon's philosophy included a call to a return to “Nature.” He believed that the self-improvement of each individual rather than external changes such as espoused by Marxism was the way to change Jewish destiny.

1923: “Earth Spirit” a silent film produced by Richard Oswald and written by Carl Mayer was released in Germany today.


1923: In Chicago, Max and Bertha Goldsmith gave birth real estate developer Bram Goldsmith who “served as the chief executive of National City Bank from 1975 to 1995.”

1925: In Pittsburgh, PA, Harry and Ida Barch Stern, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, gave birth to American poet Gerald Stern whose works have been published The Pineys, Leaving Another Kingdom, and Odd Mercy and who while married to Patricia Miller gave birth to a daughter Rachel, “a nutrition therapist” and David, “an architect.”

1925(28th of Shevat): Poet and author Mrs. Radcliffe N. Salomon (Nina David) passed away


1926: Birthdate of Alan David Yorkin, the native of Washington, PA who gained fame as director, producer and write Bud York who teamed up with Norm Lear to form Tandem Productions which gave us many cutting edge sit-coms including All in the Family, Maude and Sanford and Son.

1926: In Great Britain, a “well-known play producer” was reported to have “said he judged his play not by first-night receptions, but by the attitude of Saturday night audiences, which he estimated were nearly 75 per cent Jewish” and that “the Jewish population of London were keen dramatic critics” who “had been of tremendous service to the modern British drama.”


1926: Ross Sterling, the owner and publisher of the Houston Post Dispatch, who is not Jewish was reported today to have been donor of an unsolicited give of $5,000 gift to the United Jewish Campaign which is trying to raise fifteen million dollars to alleviate the suffering of Jews living “in foreign lands.”


1926: As of today the new officers of the National Council of the Palestine Foundation Fund were Samuel Untermyer, President; Morris Rothenberg, Chairman of the directors and Rabbi Aaron M. Ashinsky of Pittsburgh, Vice Chairman of the board.


1926: “The United Jewish Campaign received word” today at its headquarter in the Pershing Square building that a $50,000 quota for the $15,000,000 overseas chest had been accepted a committee of Jews from North Dakota. (That’s right – Jews in North Dakota!)


1926: Pledges totaling $300,000 for the relief of Jews in Poland were made” today “at a conference in the HIAS Building called by the Federation of Polish Jews in America” whose President, Benjamin Winter “blamed the policy of the Polish Government for the present distress among the Polish Jews.”


1927: Birthdate of Franz Reheinberger who would be executed at the age of 17 for his part in anti-Nazi activities.


1929: In New York City, “Rachel Gutman and real estate attorney Judah Wattenberg” gave birth to Rebecca Ann Wattenberg, the sister of Ben J. Wattenberg “aunt of journalist Daniel Wattenberg” who gained famed as actress Rebecca Schull, the wife of Gene Schull.


1930: U.S. premiere of “Slightly Scarlet,” a comedy direct by Edwin H. Knopf with a script co-authored by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.


1931(5th of Adar): Poet and novelist Menahem Mendel Dolitzky passed away today.


1932: The United States marked the bicentennial of the birth of George Washington who Rabbi de Sola Pool of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue had “praised” as “a great liberator” and whom Rabbi Samuel Schulman while addressing his congregation had “referred to a statement made in a treaty between the United States and Tripoli in 1796 and signed by Washington that ‘the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”


1932: “With Chief Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo of the Court of Appeals assured of confirmation as an associate jus of the United States” the Governor of New York “indicated tonight that he would promptly fill the vacancy on the State bench.”


1932: As America celebrates the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Washington members of the Jewish National Fund of American are scheduled to meet tonight at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York “to hear speakers pay tribute to Washington and to hear speakers discuss” plans for creating “an evergreen memorial of 500,000 pine and eucalyptus trees” which “will be planted in Palestine as a living tribute” by “the Jews of America to the first President.”


1932: In New York, Chief Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo is scheduled to speak on “Washington, the Constitution Builder” during the Bicentennial celebration at Chancellor’s Hall.


1933: Birthdate of Gideon Patt, a Sabra who served in the Nahal Brigade, earned a BA from NYU before pursuing a career in politics that included service in the Knesset and several cabinet posts.


1933: Adolf Hitler made his private para-military units, the SS and the SS, part of Germany’s police force.


1934: U.S premiere of “It Happened One Night” an all-time classic comedy written by Robert Riskin for which he won the Oscar and co-produced Harry Cohn


1934: During his eulogy today at the funeral of Rabbi Hyman Gerson Enelow in Chicago, David Philipson said, “If there was one trait that characterized Hymen G. Enelow above all other, it was his love of learning for its own sake.

1934: “The Jewish newspaper IF” published a photograph by Herbert Sonnenfeld of “a model portraying two different periods in Eretz Israel: a typical home in Tel Aviv in 1934, and ten years earlier.”

1934: Bishop Hermann Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück ordered all churches in his diocese to display the Nazi’s swastika flag on patriotic occasions alongside standard church flags.


1935: “The Whole Town’s Talk” a crime comedy  written by Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin and starring Edward G. Robinson was released in the United States today.


1935: “After Office Hours” directed by Robert Z. Leonard who co-produced the film with Bernard H. Hyman which was written by Herman J. Mankiewicz was released today in the United States.


1936(29th of Shevat, 5695): Parashat Mishpatim and Shabbat Shekalim


1936: “The third annual observance of Brotherhood Day” sponsored by the Conference of Jews and Christians began today.


1936: It was reported today that in Poland Senators “suggested that the government should communicate with international Zionist organizations and arrange an immigration quota for Poland” which would be a way of ridding the country of one million of its three and one half million Jews.


1936: This morning Arturo Toscanini accepted an invitation to conduct the opening concert of the newly organized Palestine Symphony Orchestra on next October 24 at Tel-Aviv.


1937(11th of Adar, 5697): Sixty-seven year old Astronomer J. Ernest G. Yalden who spent 25 years directing a “trade school funded by the Trustees of the Baron de Hirsch Fund passed away

1938: “After warning that he would be ‘tactless’ in his remarks, Stanley M. Isaacs, Borough President of Manhattan, told 1,750 teachers attending the 11thanniversary of the Jewish Teachers Association at the Hotel Commodore” today “that he could see no reason for the existence of their organization”


1939: As part of the annual observance of Brotherhood Week, “ceremonies honoring the memory of Roger Williams the founder of Rhode Island” and one of “the first to preach the gospel of tolerance in the New World” were held in front of his bust in the Hall of Fame on the campus of NYU by members of Zeta Beta Tau, which included an address by B. Leo Schwartz, a benediction by Rabbi Augustus Loeb and wreath laying by James R. Katzman.


1941: In Paris, Theodore Dannecker, the SS officer in charge of bringing the Final Solution to France reported approvingly that “The French inspectors formed and instructed in collaboration with our section for Jewish affairs today constitute an elite body as well as training cadres for Frenchmen to be drafted in the future to the anti-Jewish police.”  The “French inspectors” worked for the agency that “transferred” the over 20,000 Jewish businesses into the hands of Frenchmen sympathetic to the Third Reich.  “The anti-Jewish police” referred to the Frenchmen who would round up French Jews and ship them off to the death camps. 


1941: The Nazi SS began rounding up Jews of Amsterdam.


1941: Today’s New Yorker magazine called stockbroker and New York Stock Exchange Member James B. “Jimmie” Seligman “one of the wittiest men on the Floor.”


1942(5th of Adar, 5702): In Brazil, author Stefan Zwieg and his second wife Lotte (néeCharlotte Elisabeth Altmann) committed suicide together in Petrópolis using the barbiturate Verol. Filled with a sense of despair at the future of Europe and its culture, he wrote, "I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labor meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on earth."

1942:Wanda Landowska performed Bach's Goldberg Variations at New York City's Town Hall. It was the first 20th-century performance of this work on the harpsichord. The Polish born Jewess who sought refuge from the Nazis first in France and then the United States is credited with reviving harpsichord music in the 20th century,


1942: U.S. premiere of “The Adventures of Martin Eden,” the cinema version of the novel Martin Edenproduced by Samuel Bronston and B.P. Schulberg.


1942: Lord Moyne completed his service as Secretary State for the Colonies. Moyne was a close personal friend of Churchill, who as Deputy Resident Minister of State in Cairo took part in the interrogation of Joel Brand when a response was being crafted to Eichmann’s “Blood for Truck” proposal.  Moyne would be murdered by Lehi in 1944.


1943(17th of Adar 1, 5703): At Auschwitz, the Nazis murdered Communist Party member and anti-Fascist fighter Dagobert Biermann, the father of singer-song writer Karl Wolf Bierman.


1943: For the next six days, 10,000 more Jews were deported to Chelmno. All were gassed to death.


1943: “An agreement was signed between the special Nazi envoy sent to facilitate the deportations, Theodor Dannecker and the Bulgarian Commissar for Jewish Affairs, Alexander Belev for the deportation of 20,000 Jews (12,000 from Macedonia and Thrace and 8,000 – from the old territory of Bulgaria).”


1943: Bulgaria agreed to allow the Germans to deport 11,000 Jews. Horrible overcrowding conditions existed in the 20 trains that would transport them. Each day the trains stopped to dump the bodies of those who died during the journey.


1943: Italians countermanded German orders to deport French Jews. Three days later Ribbentrop complained to Mussolini that "Italian military circles. . . lacked a proper understanding of the Jewish question."


1943: “Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and condemned to death by head judge of the court Roland Freisler. They were beheaded by executioner Johann Reichhart in the Munich-Stadelheim prison only a few hours later at 17:00. The execution was supervised by Dr. Walter Roemer who was the enforcement chief of the Munich district court. Prison officials emphasized the courage with which she walked to her execution.” This trio was part of a small number of genuine anti-Nazi Germans who had worked to bring down the regime.


1943: “Allied military forces marched through the crowded streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa today as part of the celebrations of Red Army Day.” [The Red Army referred to is the Soviet Army which was doing the brunt of the fighting against the Germans.]


1943: Birthdate of Elliot Rabinowitz who gained fame as music manager and businessman Elliot Roberts who partnered with David Geffen to “create Asylum Records.”


1944: Dr. Leonardo De Benedetti, Physician and Surgeon and Dr. Primo Levi, Chemist “left the concentration camp at Fossoli di Carpi with a convoy of 650 Jews of both sexes and all ages. They did not know that the trip would end four days later in Auschwitz.


1945(9th of Adar, 5705): Osip Maksimovich Brik “a Russian avant garde writer and literary critic, who was one of the most important members of the Russian formalist school, though he also identified himself as one of the Futurists,” passed away.


1945: In Boston, businessman Samuel Tannenbaum and the former Gertrude Leaman gave birth to Rena Meryl Tannenbaum who gained game as publisher Rena Wolner.

1946: The Palmach attacked the Police Tegart fort at Shefa 'Amr with a 200-pound bomb; in the firefight that followed, the Palmach suffered casualties


1946: The British said today that three members of armed Jewish bands had been killed during the series of night attacks on Palestine mobile police camps in which dynamite charges damaged several buildings, vehicles and other facilities last night.


1947: Birthdate of Israeli man of letters Yehonatan Geffen, the native of Nhalal who is the nephew of Moshe Dayan and the father of Aviv, Shira and Natasha Geffen.


1948 As the conflict over the coming partition of Palestine grew, three car bombs arranged by Arab irregulars exploded on Ben Yehudah Street killing 52 Jewish civilians and leaving 123 injured. This was part of the war waged by the Arabs between the partition vote in November, 1947 and the end of the Mandate in 1948.  In the meantime the international community did nothing then or later to enforce its decision to make Jerusalem a city to be governed by an international body.


1948: The Golani Brigade, one of Israeli’s most elite infantry brigades was formed. 


1951: Birthdate of Ellen Greene, the Brooklyn born daughter of a guidance counselor and dentist who has enjoyed a multi-dimensional career performing in nightclubs, on Broadway, in films and television programs including Law and Order, The X Files and Miami Vice.


1952: “The Belle of New York” produced by Arthur Freed was released in the United States today.


1958: Egypt and Syria announced that they were joining together in a new nation, The United Arab Republic.  The UAR was supposed to be the first step in the creation of giant Pan Arab Nation.  The Israelis were concerned because the two enemies now were going to have a one military command which made coordinated military actions against the Jewish state a potentially destructive reality.  The UAR would collapse three years later as the Syrians grew disgusted with the Egyptian attempts to dominate the relationship.  This would not be the first or last time that charismatic leader would try to form a Super Arab and/or Super Moslem state. 


1958: In East Meadow, New York, Leon Greenberg, “an executive for New York’s Century Theatres movie chain” and his wife Shirley gave birth to playwright Richard Greenberg who won the Tony Award in 2003 for “Take Me Out.”


1960: David Susskind produced “A Very Special Baby” this week’s “Play of the Week” co-starring Marion Winters as “Anna” and Larry Blyden as “Joey.”


1961: “Come Blow Your Horn” Neil Simon’s first play opened “on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.


1964: Final performance of “The Passion of Josef D.” written by Paddy Chayefsky at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.


1964(9th of Adar I, 5724): Ninety year old Samuel Earl “Ike” Samuels who played briefly for the St. Louis Browns before pursuing a career in dentistry and insurance sales passed away today in New York City.


1965(20th of Adar I, 5725): Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice passed away.  Born in 1882, Frankfurter was involved in various liberal and unpopular causes including the defense of Sacco and Venzeti.  He was a professor at Harvard Law School.  Many of his students went to work in FDR’s new deal and they were known as “Frankfurters” (for their teacher not the hot dog).  When FDR appointed him to the bench, Frankfurter was the third Jew to serve on the High Court.

1966: “Promise Her Anything” directed by Arthur Hiller with a title song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David which had been released in the previous November in the United Kingdom was released today in the United States.


1971(27th of Shevat, 5731): Fifty-six year old New York native David “Dynamite Dave” Smulker the all-star Temple University fullback who as a member of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles played in the first televised professional game in 1939 passed away today.


1971: Birthdate of Arnon Grunberg, the Dutch born author of Blue Mondays which won the Dutch prize “for the best debut novel” and whose mother survived Auschwitz

 1972: Paul Grüninger, the Swiss police official who save thousands of Jews following the Anschluss died in poverty today.

1973: In New York, premiere of “Charlotte’s Web” an animated feature film version of a children’s novel by the same time with music by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman and sons by Irwin Kostal.


1973: “Walking Tall,” a biopic with music by Walter Scharft and directed by Phil Karlson whose father was Jewish was released in the United States today.


1974: Today “Jewish activists Mark Abramovich and Yakov Schwartzman (Kishinev), Leonid Bendersky (Tiraspol) and Sender Levinson (Bendery) were arrested in Kishinev after staging a hunger strike near the Central Post Office.”


1975(11th of Adar I, 5735): Fifty-six year old Samuel Bihari, one of the four brothers who founded Modern Records and helped to create a “sanitized” form of rock and roll for the mass market of the 1950’s passed away today.


1981(18th of Adar I, 5741): Eighty-one year old Curtis Bernhardt who worked as movie director in Germany under the name of Kurt Bernhardt before fleeing Nazi Germany and pursuing his career in France, England and finally the United States, passed away today.


1981(18th of Adar I, 5741): Seventy-five year old Austrian born American historian Saul K. Padover whose works include biographies on Karl Marx, Joseph II of Austria, Louis XVI, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson passed away today.

1982: New York City Mayor Ed Koch announced his plans to run for governor of New York.  The campaign would be a failure. 


1982(29th of Shevat): Legendary DJ Murray "the K" Kaufman, called the 5thBeatle by some, passed away at the age of 60.


1984(19th of Adar I, 5744): Eighty-seven year old mathematician and WW II codebreaker Maxwell Herman Alexander “Max” Newman passed away today in Cambridge.

1985(1st of Adar, 5745): Rosh Chodesh


1985 (1st of Adar, 5745): Violinist Efrem A Zimbalist passed away at the age of 95..  Born in Russia, Zimbalist was one of long line of violin virtuosos that included Jascha Heifitz, Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern. Many of you may recognize this name with the word "Junior" after it.  Zimbalist’s son was a minor matinee idol in television and movies who was not Jewish.(As reported by Tim Page)

1986(13th of Adar I, 5746): Soviet Poet Boris Slutsky passed away.

1987(23rd of Shevat): David Susskind passed away at the age of 66. Susskind is best remembered for his pioneering role in late night television.  Susskind hosted a show called Open End, where guests from a variety of walks of life actually discussed issues of the day without a script and with civility. (As reported by Robert D. McFadden)

1989: At a benefit for the Dance Library of Israel, an international dance library and archive in Tel Aviv, Marge Champion presented an award to Agnes de Mille. The presentation took place at a dinner that preceded a benefit performance of “Jerome Robbin’s Broadway.”


1989:Different Trains,” a three-movement piece for string quartet and tape written by Steve Reich in 1988 won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.


1991: "Underground," a new work by the Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol, directed by Adrian Hall, has its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater today, co-directed by Adrian Hall.


1991: “He Said, She Said,” a comedy directed by Marisa Silver was released in the United States today,


1992(18th of Adar I 5752): Avot Yeshurun, an Israeli poet who wove Arabic and Yiddish idiom into a unique and influential form of Hebrew verse, passed away today at the age of 88. No cause of death was given by his family, which announced his death. Born in Ukraine as Yehiel Perlmutter, Mr. Yeshurun made aliyah in 1925, worked as a laborer and began publishing poetry. His family perished in the Holocaust. After Israel was established in 1948, Mr. Yeshurun was one of its first literary figures to acknowledge the plight of the uprooted Palestinians. He saw the Palestinians and the Jews of Europe as having endured a common tragedy, and sought to fuse their experience in the language of his poetry. Although long ignored by the establishment, Mr. Yeshurun was highly regarded by younger poets. His stature was formally recognized a month ago when he was awarded the Israel Prize.


1992:  Barry Diller resigns as CEO of FOX Television Network.


1992: American diplomat Josiah W. Bennett who as a member of the Foreign Service headed the United States Information Service in Tel Aviv passed away.  (Bennett was not Jewish)


1993: New York Judge Judith Kaye is nominated by then-governor Mario Cuomo to become the first female Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals.


1998: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including the recently released paperback editions of Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom and Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist by Philip Furia.


1998(26th of Shevat, 5758): Distinguished Democratic politician and government official, Abraham Ribicoff passed away.  Ribicoff was Governor of Connecticut, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under John Kennedy and U.S. Senator from 1963 until 1981.

1999(6th of Adar, 5759): Nobel Prize winner Gertrude Elion passed away.

2002(20th of Adar I, 5762): A Fatah terrorist murdered 45 year old Valery Ahmir “in a drive-by shooting.”


2003(20th of Adar I, 5763): Ninety-year old Oscar winning screenwriter Daniel Taradash passed away today.

2003: An International Conference hosted by the Dubnow Institute on “Transforming Religious and Ethnic Emblematics of Judaism and Jewishness” began today.


2004(30th of Shevat, 5764): Rosh Chodesh Adar


2004(30th of Shevat, 5764): Israel Ilan Avisidris, 41, of Jerusalem; Lior Azulai, 18, of Jerusalem; Yaffa Ben-Shimol, 57, of Jerusalem; Rahamim Doga, 38, of Mevasseret Zion; Yehuda Haim, 48, of Givat Ze'ev;


Netanel Havshush, 20, of Jerusalem; Yuval Ozana, 32, of Jerusalem and Benaya Yehonatan Zuckerman, 18, of Jerusalem were murdered today and 60 other people were injured when an Arab terrorist blew up Egged bus #14 in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada.


2004: A suicide bomber attacked a bus in the center of Jerusalem, killing 8 people and wounding 70. The Palestinian terrorist group Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility.


2005(13th of Adar I, 5765): Ninety-six year old Trude Rittman, the German-Jewish American arranger of Broadway hits including Carousel and Sound of Music passed away today. (As reported by Wolfgang Saxon)

2005(13thAdar I, 5765): Ninety-four year old French film actress Simone Simon who was “the daughter of Henri Louis Firmin Champmoynat, a French Jewish engineer and airplane pilot in World War II, who died in a concentration camp” passed away today.


2006: The Liberal Party appointed Irwin Cotler Critic for Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness in the opposition shadow cabinet for the 39th Canadian Parliament. “Cotler's wife, Ariela, is a native of Jerusalem and worked as a legislative assistant to the Likud members of the Israeli Knesset from 1967 to 1979.”


2006: French President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister attended a synagogue memorial ceremony for a Jewish man who was kidnapped, tortured and killed.


2006(24th of Shevat, 5766): Hilde Palm (née Löwenstein) the daughter of German Jewish lawyer Eugene Lowenstein, who wrote under the pseudonym Hilde Domin creating such works as the poetry anthology “The Tree Blossoms Nevertheless” passed away today.


2006(24th of Shevat, 5766):Bernie Weisberg, former national director of Young Judea and the Labor Zionist Alliance, passed away at the age of 82 (As reported by Anthony Weiss)



2008: The Jerusalem Post reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has established an unprecedented high-level government task force charged with fundamentally altering the Israel-Diaspora relationship.


2008: Israeli officials rejected Arab complaints that they are not committed to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.  Furthermore, these officials stated that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had responded positively to the Arab League initiative as a basis for negotiations. 


2009: In a move intended to improve its relationship with the new wave of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the Hebrew Free Burial Association hosted a Russian-Jewish Community event. Established in 1888, HFBA is one of the oldest and largest free burial associations serving the New York Jewish Community.


2008: Sarah Chayes, the daughter of Abram Chayes and award winning reported for National Public Radio “was a guest on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal” today.


2009:Music of the Sephardic Diaspora is the focus of a concert in the new Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center when celebrated viola da gambist Jordi Savall and early music ensemble Hespèrion XXI present Diáspora Sefardí: From Medieval Spain to the Eastern Mediterranean.
2009:Agudas Achim conducts the first ever Early Passover Pallet Salein eastern Iowa making it possible for those living in the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids Corridor to buy unique “Kosher for Passover “items including Chocolate Seder Plates, at “discount prices.”


2009: The New York Times features a review of A Hidden Life:A Memoir of August 1969by Johanna Reiss who had won a Newberry Award a quarter of a century ago for The Upstairs Room, her story of survival as a ten year old hiding from the Nazis in occupied Holland.


2009: The now-daily rocket attacks by Gaza terrorists against southern Israel resumed today with the launch of a Kassam rocket at the Sha'ar HaNegev region and a mortar attack fired at IDF troops near the Kissufim Crossing


2009: Duke Blue Devil guard Jon Scheyer scored a then-career-high 30 points against Wake Forest


2009(28th of Shevat, 5769): Howard Zieff, the commercial director and ad photographer who stuffed an actor with spicy meatballs in a memorable Alka-Seltzer spot and used an American Indian in print ads to convince people “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye,” then went on to direct movie comedies, passed away today at the age of 81. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

2010: The Knesset "approved a law instructing the Israeli Government to protect the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab counties in all forthcoming peace negotiations; the first Israeli law to recognize Jews as coming to Israel not only to fulfill Zionist aspirations, but as refugees


2010:The Jewish Studies Program at Tulane University under the leadership of Dr. Brian Horowitz and the Center for Cultural Judaism are scheduled to present a program entitled “The Jewish Question as the Arab Question: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz” at Tulane’s Uptown Campus in New Orleans, LA.


2010:National police headquarters issued an order today to cease the delivery of mail throughout Israel following the discovery of what is believed to be a package bomb at a post office in Migdal Haemek


2010:Army Radio reported today that The Palestinian Authority handed a Kassam rocket made in a West Bank village to Israeli authorities last week. According to the report, PA security forces found the rocket ready to be launched towards central Israel.


2010:Israel's ice dancing team at the Winter Olympics finished in 10th place. Roman and Alexandra Zaretsky performed to music from "Schindler's List" in the free dance tonight at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, Canada. The brother-and-sister duo earned a score of 90.64 in the free dance, and a score of 180.26 over-all. The music was chosen in part as a tribute to 27 family members that died in Minsk, Belarus during the Holocaust, the Jewish Chronicle reported.


2010:Israeli archaeologists said today that they've discovered an unusually shaped 1,400-year-old wine press that was exceptionally large and advanced for its time. The octagonal press measures 21 feet by 54 feet (6.5 by 16.5 meters) and was discovered in southern Israel, about 40 kilometers south of both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.


2010(8th of Adar, 5770):Rabbi Menachem Porush, a long-serving Knesset member and father of current Deputy Education Minister Meir Porush, died in Jerusalem today at the age of 94. Porush, a seventh generation descendent of Lithuanian immigrants, sat in the Knesset for 35 years until 1994 and remained politically active until his death. The son of a deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Porush entered politics through journalism, working as a writer and editor for religious newspapers for two decades until his election to the Knesset in 1959. "He was a great Jew. He was like one of the stone of the Wailing Wall in the Holy City, Jerusalem," President Shimon Peres said. "Menachem my friend, you were full of vision and hope for the future of the Jewish nation. You loved the nation and worked to unify it. You stood as a bridge between its parts.


2010(8th of Adar, 5770):Steffi Sidney-Splaver, who began a career as an actress and then gave up acting to become a Hollywood writer, publicist and producer, passed away today at the age of 74.


2011:Member of Knesset Danny Danon. The Deputy Knesset Speaker, Chairman of the Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Committee and of World Likud is scheduled to give an address at The OU Israel Center in Jerusalem.


2011: The Round Up,a “drama that tackles the controversial subject of French collusion in the atrocities of the Holocaust” is scheduled to be shown at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.


2011: At the Jerusalem International Book Fair, Galaade Editions and ITHl are scheduled to present: “Sisters, not enemies: Telling the story of Jews and Arabs in Israel in another voice.”


2011: Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is scheduled to perform at Carnegie Hall.


2011:Israel conducted a successful test of the Arrow 2 ballistic missile defense system off the coast of California early this morning, when it destroyed a target simulating an Iranian ballistic missile


2011: Rham Emanuel was elected Mayor of Chicago today, making him the first Jew to hold this position.


2011:Montreal's city council has condemned the boycott campaign against a local shoe store that sells footwear made in Israel. A council motion deploring the campaign, proposed and supported by Mayor Gerard Tremblay, passed today by a vote of 38 to 16.  (As reported by JTA)


2011(18thof Adar, 5771):George Einstein, a cousin, contemporary and occasional companion of Albert Einstein who was a successful inventor and businessman in his own right passed away at the age of 91.

2011: Sue Fishkoff described the role of the Jewish community in the conflict between Wisconsin’s Governor Walker and public sector employees.

2011:Nearly 100 orthodox North American rabbis signed a letter demanding of Interior Minister Eli Yishai to “rectify the injustice being done to our converts, ourselves and the Jewish people” and “insure that those individuals whom we convert will automatically be eligible for aliyah as they have been in the past.”


2011:In an effort to curb the trend of Orthodox converts from abroad not being recognized by Israel for citizenship, the Jewish Agency today appealed the Interior Ministry for a more dominant role in identifying established Diaspora communities as such.


2012: “Ahead of Time: The Extraordinary Journey of Ruth Gruber” is scheduled to be shown at Temple Beth Sholom Idelson Library in Sarasota, FL.


2012: In London, Chochana Boukhobza is scheduled to discuss “The Third Day” a novel about two cellists who travel to Jerusalem for a concert, as part of Jewish Book Week.


2012: In London, Rod Arad is scheduled to talk about his passion for marrying unconventional forms with unexpected functions and the sources of his unbridled creativity during Jewish Book Week.


2012: Publication of “The Jewish Community of Harbin, China”

2012:Iran may develop inter-continental missiles that can reach the east coast of the United States in two to three years, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said in a CNBC interview today


2012: Israel Beiteinu will propose an alternative to the Tal Law by which "everyone will serve the state," Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said today.


2012(29thof Shevat, 5772): Eighty-six year old Mark Shulman the husband of Margaret Shulman


2013: The Israeli Opera’s Meitar Opera Studio is scheduled to present The Operas of Donizetti at the Eden Tamir Music Center


2013: In Springfield, VA, Congregation Adat Reyim is scheduled to host a wine and cheese reception along with a Shabbat Folk Service “celebrating the anniversary of Debbie Friedman’s birth.”


2013: Palestinian protests in Jerusalem and the West Bank turned violent today, with demonstrators throwing stones at Israeli security forces at several locations.


2013: After nine seasons and 197 original episodes CBS broadcast the last episode of CSI:NY, a cerebral crime fighting program created by Carol Mendelsohn and  for which Jerry Bruckheimer served as executive producer.


2014: In Iowa City, Hillel under the leadership of Director Jerry Sorkin, is scheduled to host its annual fundraising concert featuring University of Iowa School of Music faculty members, Kenneth Tse (saxophone), Alan Huckleberry (piano), and Scott Conklin (violin), along with a quartet of School of Music graduate students.


2014: The DPJCC's 14th Annual Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to close with the showing of “Orchestra of Exiles”


2014: Friends and family of Cyndie Birchansky, whose accomplishments include three really neat children, look forward to celebrating her natal day.


2014: The Red Door is scheduled to host “Waiting Room” an evening curated by Leah Wolff and Guy Ben-Ari.


2014: The Jewish Agency will extend immediate emergency assistance to the Jewish community of Ukraine and will help secure Jewish institutions in the country, the Chairman of the Executive of The Jewish Agency for Israel Natan Sharansky announced today.


2015: The New York Times features books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Lies, First Person by Gail Hareven, Khirbet Khizehby S. Yizhar, Lucky Alan and Other Stories by Jonathan Lethem, Mark Twain’s America by Harry L. Katz and Huck Finn’s America by Andrew Levy.


2015: In New Orleans, Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn is scheduled to officiate at the graveside services Martha Blackman who was the widow of Murray Blackman, of blessed memory, the longtime Rabbi at Temple Sinai.


2015: “Laureen Nussbaum, Anne Frank scholar and Holocaust survivor, is scheduled to speak on Holocaust history and the legacy of Anne Frank's work during this afternoon’s lecture at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.


2015: “Mexican-Jewish cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki accepted the Academy Award for “Birdman,” repeating his victory last year for “Gravity.”


2015: An exhibition “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War and the Holocaust” is scheduled to open at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center.

2015: “Ida,” a “Polish moved that traces the evolution of a young novitiate in Catholic convent, who, about to take her vows, learns that she is the daughter of Jewish parents killed in the Holocaust” won the Oscar for best foreign-language film. (As reported by JTA and Times of Israel)


2015: “The evening’s “In Memoriam” segment of the Oscars devoted to film industry notables who have passed away over the past year, included, among others, Israeli filmmaker Menachem Golan, director Mike Nichols, and legendary film actress Lauren Bacall.”


2015:Israel’s losing streak at the Oscars continued, as the short film “Aya,” cowritten and codirected by Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnun and starring Sarah Adler, failed to win for Best Short Film.


2015: As the world is scheduled to watch the Academy Award ceremonies tonight there are those who remember that Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky “claimed to have been the first to call the Academy Award Statuette ‘Oscar.’”


2015: Lewis Black is scheduled to appear at the Vonnegut Fundraiser in Indianapolis, Indiana


2015: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to host a “1-hour workshop that will include a series of activities designed to get” people “thinking, taking and sharing ideas to help in planning for a new regional museum projected to open in 2020.


2015: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Barnes & Noble is scheduled to host a book reading and signing featuring Boris Fishman, author of A Replacement Life.


2015: “Fragile” an exhibition by Tel Aviv native Tal Eshed is scheduled to open at the Klemens & Tanja Grunert Gallery.


 2016: The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to host “a new class exploring the Baqashot (‘Songs of Seeking’ in Edwin Seroussi’s wonderful translation), a musical tradition whose roots are in Andalusian Spain.”


2016: 284thanniversary of the birth of George Washington whose welcoming tone expressed to the Jews of the United States helped to make the American Jewish experience unique from its inception down to the 21st century. 


2017: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was warmly welcomed at Sydney today by his Australian counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull, with the Israeli leader promoting the two countries’ growing ties as Israel faces rising international criticism over its settlement policy in the West Bank.” (As reported by Jacqueline Williams and Gerry Mullany)


2017: Meir Weinstein, “founder and leader of the Jewish Defence League of Canada” filed a hate crime complaint “with Toronto police against a downtown mosque whose imam allegedly called for killing Jews.” (As reported by Ron Csillag)


2017: The Jewish Museum celebrated its annual Purim Ball today at the cavernous Park Avenue Armory, which was decorated with a ceiling-to-floor installation of multicolored streamers and shapes, eliciting oohs and ahhs from the more than 700 festive guests who included former Mayor Michael Bloomberg as they mingled with dancing giant anthropomorphic Purim Puppets on stilts. (As reported by Masha Leon)


2017: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to host a focus group opened to the public to receive an exclusive sneak peek and provide feedback on stories and historic artifacts for the new Jewish museum being built in the Washington Metropolitan Area.


2017: As “the climate conversation heats up,” The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to present “An Evening With Al Gore.”


2017: The JDC Archives and The Center For Jewish History are scheduled to host “Town Fools, Beggars and Other Outcasts: Bringing the Margins to the Center in East European Jewish History” during Nata Meir will examine “Jewish social outcasts in prewar Eastern European history and offer insights into the changing mentalities of Jewish society.”


2018: The Steicker Center is scheduled to host “Love and Death in Italian Ghettos in the Time of the Plague” during which a panel of experts “using original documents from Italian archives…will explore the everyday lives of Roman, Mantuan, Venetian and Florentine Jews during exceptionally trying times, addressing how Europe’s Jewish communities coped with plagues and pestilence.


2018: JW3 is scheduled to host the final screening of “Scaffolding” in London.


2018: JW3 is scheduled to host the first screening of “Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema.”


2018: The New Orleans JCC is scheduled to host a screening of “The 90 Minutes War” as part of the Cathy and Morris Bart Jewish Cultural Arts Series.


2018: MusicTalks and Yeshiva University’s Center for Israel Studies are scheduled to present a celebration of “the music and life of Arik Einstein, “the voice of Israel” and a pioneer of Israeli rock music, through a live performance by Elad Kabilio and an ensemble of musicians from MusicTalks.”


2018: Two hundred eighty-sixth anniversary of the birth of George Washington who signed a treaty between the United States and Tripoli in 1796 that said “the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” which meant that “Washington did not intend to disparage the Christian religion” but “he did mean to say that no claim in the future would justified that Christianity was …the foundation of the Government of the United States.”


 


 


 

This Day, February 23, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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February 23


42(16th of Adar, 3892): King Agrippa I began the construction of a gate for the of Jerusalem (pg 128)


68(4th of Adar, 3828): During the Great Revolt, Vespasian occupied the city of Gadara as the legions made their slow, inexorable march to Jerusalem.


1422:  During the conflict between the Hussites and the Dominicans, Pope Martin V issued a Bull favorable to the Jews reminding Christians that their religion had been inherited from the Jews.  “The pope forbade the monks to preach against intercourse between Jews and Christians.”


1443: Birthdate of Matthias Corvinus who as King Matthias I “created the office of Jewish prefect in Hungary.


1447 Pope Eugenius IV passed away. In speaking about the Jews, Eugenius declared “We decree and order that from now on, and for all time, Christians shall not eat or drink with the Jews, nor admit them to feasts, nor cohabit with them, nor bathe with them. […]  They cannot live among Christians, but in a certain street, separated and segregated from Christians, and outside which they cannot under any pretext have houses.”


1455:  Traditional date for the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.  This revolution in publishing was one of the most liberating events in Western history.  Some say that it really marked the beginning of the Modern Intellectual Era of Western Civilization.  Soon books would be printed Hebrew giving the People of the Book greater access to books thus further democratizing the concept of learning which is a cornerstone of Jewish civilization.  The chapter and verse system finally took hold in copies of the Torah (books not the Scroll itself) as a result of the printing revolution.


1484: Over this day and the next, 30 men and women were burned alive, as well as the bones of 40 others at the Inquisitional Tribunal of Ciudad Real.


1592: Emperor Rudolph II invited Rabbi Judah ben Bezalel Lowe, known as the Maharal of Prague to his castle.  The two men met for an hour and a half during with they “developed a mutual respect for each other. Rabbi Judah Lowe made use of his excellent connections with the Emperor, often intervening on behalf of his community when it was threatened by anti-Semitic attacks or oppression. (As reported by Chabad Knowledge Base)


1658: Jacob (John) Lumbrozo, the first doctor in Maryland was tried for having, "Denied Jesus of Nazareth…." Lumbrozo was convicted, sentenced to death, and was to have all his property confiscated by the government. He was later freed from these penalties. Lumbrozo was born in Portugal. He then moved to Holland and finally settled in Maryland in 1656.


1665: Emperor Maximilian II granted permission to Chrisophe Plantin to print Hebrew books in Antwerp


1685: Birthdate of composer George Frideric Handel.  In 1718, he wrote the oratorio “Esther” which was based on Racine’s 1689 tragic drama of the same name. Two of his other oratorios were “Deborah” based on the life of the Biblical Judge and “Athalia,” an operatic treatment of the life of the murderous Jewish Queen.


1744: In the ghetto of Frankfurt am Main, “Amschel Moses Rothschild and his wife Schönche Rothschild (née Lechnich) gave birth to Meyer Amschel Rothschild.


1723: Birthdate of Richard Price, the non-conformist minster who held the lectureship at Old Jewry, the Presbyterian meeting house built on the site of London’s original Jewish neighborhood.


1777: Birthdate of Leopold Bettelheim, the Hungarian physician who “was the recipient of a gold medal of honor from the emperor Franz I. for distinguished services to the royal family and to the nobility.”


1807: The British Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of abolition of the slave trade. This victory was due in large measure to the decades’ long efforts of William Wilberforce. This is the same William Wilberforce who helped found Christ Church Ministries Jerusalem (CMJ) in England in 1809. Wilberforce and other leading evangelicals such as Lord Shaftesbury believed that the Jewish people had to be restored to their ancient land in order to pave the way for the return of Jesus. From the 1840s on the Society built in Jerusalem a School of Industry for training Jewish believers in basic trades; an Enquirers House, a Hebrew College, and a modern hospital for Jewish people as well as Christ Church.


1812: Birthdate of Fischel Arnheim the Baireuth lawyer and politician who “was elected by the cities of Hof and Münchberg to the Bavarian legislature.”


1813: In Leipzig, Susanna Rosina and Johann Gottfried Delitzsch, “a peddler, craftsman and day laborer” gave birth to Lutheran theologian Franz Delitzsch who “wrote many commentaries on books of the Bible, Jewish antiquities, Biblical psychology, a history of Jewish poetry, and Christian apologetics.”


1815(13th of Adar): Patriot and founder of Aaronsburg, PA, Aaron Levy passed away


1823: In Piotrkow, Poland, Phineas Mendel Heilprin and his wife gave birth to Michael Heilprin the American author, philanthropist and champion of social justice.


1825: In Baltimore, MD, Joseph Osterman married Rosanna Dyer whose older brother Major Leon Dyer would escort Santa Anna to Washington in 1836 and who as Rosanna Dyer Osterman would become “one of Texas’ earliest and most generous benefactors.”


1831: Lewis Cohen married Sophia Andrade at the Hambro Synagogue.


1831: Elias Simmons married Matilda Jones at the Great Synagogue.


1832(22ndof Adar I. 5592):Wolf Heidenheim, who was born at Heidenheim in 1757 and whose works included several editions of the Pentateuch, a Pesach Haggadah, and several siddurim passed away today at Rödelheim


1832: In Cracow, Isaac Halberstram, a wealthy merchant and his wife gave birth to Solomon Joachim Chayim Halberstam known as ShaZHaH.


1832: Birthdate of Hirsch Rabinowitz, the native of Kovno who founded a technical school for Jewish boys at Dvinsk and who became a leader of the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia after he moved to St. Petersburg.


1832: Yitzchak Alter and Feigele Lipschitz gave birth to their seventh child Ester Alter.


1834: Birthdate of Abraham Greenwalt, who won the Medal of Honor for his “bravery at the Battle of Frankilin (TN)’ during the Civil War


1835: La Juive (The Jewess) a grand opera in five acts composed by Fromental Halévy premiered today at the Opéra, Paris


1836: The Siege of the Alamo began at San Antonio, Texas.  Dr. Mark Levy, a Jewish physician was reportedly one of those manning the walls of the Texas mission facing the forces of Santa Anna.


1839: In New York City “Michael and Sophia (nee Hart) Asher gave birth to Morris Asher, the resident of Philadelphia and member of Company of B of the 71st Regiment of Infantry, Pennsylvania Volunteers who fought with the Army of the Potomac in every battle until Gettysburg where his wounds were so severe that he was mustered out of service in 1864.


1846: In Poland, the National Government issued a proclamation “calling for the Jewish population to join the uprising and ensuring their full equality.”


1848: David Jacobs married Matilda Rebecca Jacobs today in the United Kingdom.


1848: John Quincy Adams, Sixth President of the United States passed away.  In what seems like a strange turn of events, President Adams expressed his support for a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel.  In a letter to Mordecai Manuel Noah, one of the most prominent Jews in pre-Civil War America, Adams wrote that he believed in the “rebuilding of Judea as an independent nation.”


1848: During the third French Revolution François Guizot, the reactionary Prime Minister opposed by Adolphe Cremieux was forced to resign and flee the country.


1848: In Cincinnati, Ohio, Jacob Levinson and Fannie D. Hirsch gave birth to their daughter Hannah who married Julius Newman and who as Hannah Newman was a “member of the Board for Jewish Friendless” and was a member of the committee that originated the first free kindergarten in Chicago.”


1852: Birthdate of Nathan Frank, the native of Peoria, Illinois and leader of the Republican party who founded the St. Louis Star and served in the 51stCongress.


1853: In Philadelphia, a dinner was held at the Samson Street Hall to raise funds for Jewish charities.


1855: It was today reported that the concert designed to raise funds for the Hebrew Benevolent Societies scheduled for February 27 has been moved from Dodworth's Rooms to Niblo's Saloon because of the unusually high demand for tickets.


1858: David Defries married Esther Moses today at the Great Synagogue.


1860(30th of Shevat, 5620): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1861: Birthdate of Emrich Ullmann the Austrian surgeon who was a pioneer in renal transplantation research.


1864: The United States Senate voted to confirm President Lincolns’ appointment of Rabbi Jacob Frankel to serve “as a Chaplain of United States Hospitals during the Civil War.”


1865: Birthdate of pioneer baseball executive, Barney Dreyfuss, the owner of the Pittsburg Pirates and the “father” of the World Series.


1867: Birthdate of Isaac David Broydé, the native of Grodno, in what was then part of the Russian Empire who after being educated at the Sorbonne worked in France and the UK before coming to New York in 1900 where he “joined the editorial staff of the Jewish Encyclopedia.”


1868(30th of Shevat, 5628): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1870: Professor George Bartchelor delivered a talk on education reform to the New York Liberal Club.  Batchelor contended that when it came to language, Hebrew, along with Greek and Latin, were the foundation of liberal education.  But the public schools were teaching German, French and Spanish. [Considering who belong to the Liberal Club, one wonders what would have happened if a Hebrew teacher from the Lower East Side had shown up at its meeting.]


1871: The official position of the Jewish community in Ghent was regulated by two decrees one of which was issued today.


1872: Mortiz Ellinger ended his term as publisher of the Jewish Times today.


1873: “The State of the Jews in Persia” published today described the conditions of those living under the rule of the “sovereign in Tehran” who “treats the Moslems” with “greater forbearance than the Jews” because the latter “are not always ready to pay when the tax gatherer calls on them which leads to the Jew being beaten until he discharges his arrears – a fate they could escape “if they offered to embrace Mohammedanism.”


1874: It was reported today that there are only ten bakers in New York who manufacture the Passover Bread” (Matzos) and that they fill orders not only for those living in New York but for those “from Brooklyn Philadelphia and many cities outside of “New York State and that matzos are sold for “eleven cents a pound.”


1874: It was reported that “some time ago” the Atlantic Monthly published an article “Our Israelitish Brethren” “which treats in a very pleasant way the religious observances of this wonderful people.


1878: “Celebrated Jews In Power” published today claims that the rise of Jewry in Europe has turned the fiction of “Coningsby” and the predictions of Sidonia into reality.  One of the proof points is the leading role that Benjamin Disraeli, the author of Coningsby, plays in British politics.


1879(30th of Shevat, 5639): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1879: Birthdate of Colonel Ernest Albert Rose who married Julia Eda Lewis at the Synagogue Princes Road in Liverpool in 1907.


1879: It was reported today that unnamed Jew had scored a coup during the sale of old military stores at Edinburgh Castle. He bought 600 rusty old helmets for 6 pence a pound.  After he cleaned them up, he discovered that they were made of “fine steel…adorned with Arabic inscriptions” showing that they were very old pieces of equipment. After selling a few of the helmets, an Armenian purchased the lot of them for 18 shillings per helmet. Realizing their error, the government bought the helmets from him for 2 of 3 English pounds per helmet.


1880: It was reported that in Germany, associations have been formed for the purpose of excluding Jews from serving in Parliament. In Breslau, one such group has announced that it will not support a Jew under any circumstances. [The rise of anti-Semitism paralleled the moves to emancipate German Jewry.]


1881: “At Oegeklooster, near Hartwerd, in the Province of Friesland, Netherlands, Titus Brandsma who died in 1920 and Tjitsje Postma who died in 1933 gave birth to Anno Sjoerd Brandsma, who gained famed as Titus Brandsma, a Carmelite priest arrested by German occupiers in Holland for speaking out against Nazism as a "lie" and "pagan."  Brandsma had been speaking out against the Nazis since the mid 1930’s.  After his arrest, he was shipped to Dachau in where he was the subject of medical experiments.  He died of a lethal injection in July, 1942. Brandsma was declared “Blessed” by Pope John Paul, II in 1985.  Since then, the promotion of his cause for sainthood has been in progress.


1882: The SS Illinois arrived at Philadelphia, PA at 3:20 pm carrying 325 men, women and children who were refugees from the anti-Semitic violence that had been taking place in the Russian Empire including Poland, Kiev and Odessa.  The refugees were greeted by members of the committee that has been preparing for their arrival. After being examined by Dr. T. J. Elleinger and his medical staff, the refugees were taken to the old Pennsylvania Railroad station which has been remodeled to meet their needs.  The refugees had harrowing tales of deprivation and violence to tell their American benefactors who included Jews and Christians.


1882: It was reported today that the Toronto Globe has received a cable from London describing a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Mansion House Fund for the Relief of Russo-Jewish Refugees presided over by Cardinal Manning.  With the support of Sir A.T. Galt a sub-committee was established to select sites for the establishment of agriculture settlements in Palestine the Canadian Northwest that could provide a viable new home for the persecuted Jews. The subcommittee has a budget of ten thousand pounds. [This outpouring of support for the Jews who were the victims of a series of Pogroms following the assassination of Alexander II is laudable.  Sensing that England could and New York City could inundated by a wave of refugees, plans were made to try and settle the Jews in the under-populated areas of Canada, the United States and Argentina]


1886: Lena Lillienthal married Meyer Goldberg. By August of the following year, the two would embroiled in nasty divorce case in which she sought to end the marriage.


1890: The President and Managers of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society of New York will hold a reception today between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. in honor of George Washington’s birthday.  (Washington was born on February 22 which in 1890 fell on Shabbat which accounts for the delay)


1890: English dramatist Leopold Davis Lewis passed away.  Born in 1828 and trained as a solicitor he began his dramatic career by translating Erckmann-Chatrian's “Le Juif Polonais,” (the Polish Jew) which he then produced as “The Bells.”


1890: It was reported today that among those charities received property tax exemptions were the Ladies’ Deborah Nursery and Child’s Protectory ($12,000) and the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews ($30,000).


1890: “Gladstone At Oxford” published today included comments by the English Prime Minister about the status of the Jews.  When asked if he thought “that there is any likelihood of an anti-Semitic agitation in England” Gladstone replied “I have not the least fear of an agitation in England against the Jews.  You might as well expect one against the law of gravity.”


1890: “Sir A Sassoon” published today relying on information that first appeared in The Spectatorbriefly described “this rise of this Jewish family in England” which “were till quite recently strictly Indian Jews” who were “almost natives in their manner of life.” (Sir A. Sassoon probably referred to Sir Albert Abdulah David Sassoon, the First Baronet)


1890: It was reported today that in the summer of 1875 a group of visitors from Massachusetts came to Lincoln’s Inn, London looking for Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate leader turned British Barrister..  They were surprised that Benjamin, who was Jewish “was engaged to appear against an influential firm of Jewish money lenders.”


1891: “A Row in the Synagogue” published today described the outbreak of fight at the Grant Street synagogue in Pittsburg, PA.  Ruben Miller bloodied the nose of Harris Bartniski during a meeting at which congregants were discussing a sermon by Rabbi Feinich in which he denounced Miller for renting his building “to a company of atheists.”


1893: New York State Jacob A. Cantor met with party leaders at the “Tammany Wigwam” to discuss pending legislation in Albany.


1894: In Tétouan, MoroccoRabbi Shlomo Aburbeh and Yocheved Khalfon gave birth to Amram Aburbeh the Chief Rabbi of the Sephardic congregation in Petah Tikva, Israel


1894: It was reported that among those who attended the 14th annual reception of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society included Mr. and Mrs. Selig Steinhardt, Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Seligman, Mr. and Mrs. Lyman Bloomingdale and the Honorable and Mrs. Joseph Blumenthal.


1895: It was reported today that English actor John Hare, who has played the lead in “The Old Jew” will be coming to New York City to perform in December.  Among the productions in which he is expected to appear is “The Old Jew.”


1896: It was reported today that the sale of tickets and boxes for the upcoming Purim Ball are “exceeding all expectations.”


1896: “Nordau Replied To” published today contained a detailed reviews of Regeneration: A Reply to Max Nordau with an Introduction by Nicholas Murray Butler.


1896: The Tootsie Roll is introduced by Leo Hirshfield. The soft chewy candy took its name from the nickname of Hirshfield’s daughter.  Hirshfield was from Austria.  However, the question as to whether he was or was not Jewish is still up for grabs.  Like the mystery of the Red Heifer, this one may not be answered until the coming of the Moshiach.


1896:Mihail Grigore Sturza, the voivode, (count or military governor) signed a document recognizing the Jewish community of Galatz, Romania.


1897: In Hampstead, London, American opera singer Francesca Halle and Joseph Gluckstein whose family founded J. Lyons and Co. gave birth to lawyer and Conservative politician Colonel Sir Louis Halle Gluckstein.


1898: In France Émile Zola was convicted following his trial for libel.  He received the maximum sentence – one year in jail and a fine of 3000 Frances. He had written “J'accuse” which was a letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism and wrongfully placing Alfred Dreyfus in jail.


1898: As the Dreyfus Affair reached one of its climaxes, Paul Deroulede attempted to get the troops at Neuilly to take part in a coup d’état.


1899: In France, during President Félix Faure’s state funeral Paul Déroulède, Jules Guérin and the Ligue des Patriotes attempt a coup which resulted in their arrest.


1899: The Nineteenth Century Club heard Israel Zangwill and Hamlin Garland discuss "The Novel" in Delmonico's large ballroom tonight, and both authors agreed so well upon the functions of art in fiction that the men and women present had to forego the usual argumentative entertainment which they plan for these meetings by bringing together speakers of supposedly differing views


1899: In Chicago, Anita "Annie" Taurog (née Goldsmith) and Arthur Jack Taurog gave birth director and screen writer Norman Rae Taurog who won the Academy Award for directing “Skippy” which premiered in 1931.


1902(16th of Adar I, 5662): Max Budinger, the native of Cassel German and the son of Moses Mordecai Budinger, who occupied the chair of history at the University of Vienna” starting in 1872 and who “was elected a member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences” in 1887 passed away today.


1902: The ninth meeting of the Union of Judaeo-German Congregations opened today in Berlin.


1903: Leopold Greenberg an English newspaper editor, Zionist and friend of Theodore Herzl leaves Egypt.


1904: While sailing from the Mediterranean to China, the USS Chauncey commanded by Lt. Stanford E. Moses which was part of the “First Torpedo Flotilla” was caught in a storm today.


1904: Birthdate of William L Shirer.  Shirer was one of "Murrow's Boys" a group of correspondents hired by Edward R. Murrow who covered the events prior to and including World War II.  Shirer's post was Berlin where he broadcast stories about the rise of the Nazis.  He actually provided live coverage of the French surrendering to Hitler in 1940.  His greatest claim to fame was as author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a classic on Hitler and his followers, based, in part, on Shirer's first hand observations


1904: Birthdate of Leopold Trepper, a Jewish James Bond.  Born in Poland, during  World War II he organized and ran one of the most famous espionage rings in history - The Red Orchestra.  Operating in France in 1940, the ring penetrated German intelligence and was able to provide the Soviets with detailed information about the impending invasion of Russia by Germany.  Unfortunately, Stalin refused to believe the warnings. Members of the Red Orchestra were captured in 1942.  Trepper escaped and hid until the liberation of Paris in 1944.  When he returned to Moscow, he was arrested along with thousands of others who had bravely fought the Nazis and spent ten years in prison.  Eventually he moved to Israel where he died in 1982.


1904(7th of Adar I, 5664): Sixty-seven year old German-Jewish poet, playwright and social reformer Friederike Kempner passed away today.


1906: “The East Side Dry Goods Merchants’ Association…decided today to close all of its stores from Friday at 6 P.M. until Saturday at 6 P.M. in order to the employees a day off” since Saturday is chosen for a holiday because most patrons of these stores are Jews.”


1907: In Potsdam, Count Has von Blumenthal and his gave birth to Hans-Jürgen Graf von Blumenthal, a German officer who was part of the anti-Hitler resistance and was hung for his part in the plot to kill Hitler in July of 1944.


1910: Birthdate of Albert Philipson, the native of Ossining, NY and graduate of Columbia Law School work for the Farm Credit Administration and was active in Democratic politics.


1910: The Hahambashi proposes to convene, in summer, a conference of delegates of all Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire to consider reform of the rabbinate and to plan a new reorganization of the community. Included in this would be the elimination of life appointments in favor of elections.


1912: A New York Ladino language newspaper called La Aguila hit the presses, but failed due to lack of support and finished running on March 22 of the same year.


1912: Jews in Kustendil, Bulgaria were attacked by a mob and nine people were injured.


1912: A bill introduced in the Portuguese Congress provides for cession of land to Jewish emigrants who move to Angola, Portuguese West Africa.


1913: In Rozwadow, Poland, Abraham Chaim Springer, the son Mamci Springer and Sara Birnbaum was circumcised by Simon Katz.


1913: Dedication of the Sabbath School Building in Erie, PA.


1913: Dr. Stephen S. Wise, the rabbi at New York’s Free Synagogue, is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “What Ails the Jew” at Sinai Temple in Chicago.


1913: Nellie Woolf and Reuben Davis are scheduled to be the soloists at the Chicago Hebrew Institute’s Sunday Afternoon Concert directed by Alexander Zukovsky.


1913: An Auxiliary of the Marks Nathan Orphan Home is scheduled to host a fund-raising ball at the First Regiment Armory in Chicago.


1913: Solomon Schechter, President of the Jewish Theological Seminary, founded the United Synagogue of America, the association of Conservative synagogues in the United States and Canada. In 1957, it organized the World Council of Synagogues with membership in 22 countries


1915: The Supreme Court of the United States is scheduled to hold a hearing today in which the state of Georgia will oppose attempts to get a writ of habeas corpus granted in the case of Leo Frank.


1916(19thof Adar I, 5676): Twenty-one year old Max Neuman, a citizen of Kleinsteinach, was killed today while serving in the German Army.


1916: Delegates from Jewish organizations in Manhattan met today “to consider plans for the proposed Jewish Congress and to elect delegates to the preliminary conference” to be held next month in Philadelphia.


1917: The Wort, a Yiddish newspaper published in Warsaw said the Overseas News Agency announced “that the Jewish administration in that city granted loans without interest, made gifts in money or distributed free food, milk and medicines” in 1916 to 148,000 people from 25,000 families.


1917(O.S.): The February Revolution began in Russia.  This is the revolution that brought down the Czars and brought the Social Democrats to power.  Unfortunately, they failed and the next revolution brought the Communists to power with disastrous effects for the world in general and the Jews in particular.


1917(1st of Adar, 5677): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1918: “Felix M. Warburg, Chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee for the various Jewish war relief funds announced” tonight that plans had been finalized “for the transmission and distribution of American relief money to the Jews in that part of Palestine now under occupation through cooperation with the Zionist Special Committee for the Relief of Jews in Palestine, at Cairo” which has been recognized by the British military authorities.


1919: Benito Mussolini forms the Fascist Party in Italy. According to author Alexander Stille "What distinguished the story of Italian Jews from that of Jews elsewhere in Europe was the long coexistence between Jews and Fascists in Mussolini's Italy. Italian Fascism was in power for 16 years before it turned anti-Semitic in 1938. Until then, Jews were as likely to be members of the Fascist Party as were other conservative-minded Italians. This singular fact altered the entire moral and existential equation for Italy's Jews. In other countries, Fascism was the undisguised enemy. But the experience of Italian Jews was far more complex: a strange mixture of benevolence and betrayal, persecution and rescue."


1919(23rd of Adar I, 5679): Just weeks before his 84th birthday New York lawyer, jurist and author Abraham Jesse Dittenhoefer passed away. Ironically, this native of Charleston, SC, the cradle of Southern Secession, was the last surviving elector from the election of 1864 during which he cast his vote for Abraham Lincoln.


1921(15th of Adar I, 5681): Dermatologist Phineas Simon Abraham the native of Kingston, Jamaica, who was elected Medical Secretary of Britain’s National Leprosy Fund and President of the West London Chirurgical Society passed away today.


1921: Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Rabbi Ya'akov Meir were elected as the first two chief Rabbis of pre-state Israel.  Kook was the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi and Rabbi Ya'akov Meir was the Chief Sephardic Rabbi.


1921: As head of the Colonial Office, Winston Churchill reviews Pinchas Rutenberg’s request for a concession to harness the waters of the Jordan and Yarkon fivers for electrical power; a concession that would employ 800 Jews and Arabs.


1922(25th of Shevat, 5682): Fifty-five year old Leon Khan passed away today after which he was in the Jewish Cemetery in Morgan City, LA.


1922: “A Vanished World” a silent adventure film directed by Alexander Korda and co-starring his wife Maria Corda was released today in Austria.


1925: U.S. premiere of “Le Miracle des Loups” (The Miracle of the Wolves) “a French historical drama directed by Raymond Bernard


1925(29th of Shevat, 5685): Eighty-six year old Yitzhak Yeruham Diskin the son of Rabbi Juda Leib Diskin and Hinda Rachel Diskin passed away today.


1926: Irving Lehman and Mrs. Rebecca Kohut are scheduled to address this evening’s good-will dinner (which will be Kosher) for Jews and Christians being sponsored by the Greater New Yorker Federation of Churches


1926: David A. Brown, chairman of the United Jewish Campaign trying to raise fifteen million dollars to aid the suffering Jews of Europe, is continuing his tour of “the west”  after addressing a conference of Jews in Fargo, ND that was held to set a fund-raising target to help with the national campaign.


1929(13th of Adar I, 5689): Thirty-nine year old Mercédès Jellinek, the granddaughter of Adolf Jellinek, the former chief rabbi of Vienna whose name is the Mercedes in the Mercedes-Benz automobile succumbed to bone cancer today.


1929: A recording was made today of "Wedding Bells (Are Breaking Up That Old Gang Of Mine)” a popular barbershop song composed by Sammy Fain with lyrics by Irving Kahal and Willie Raskin which number 8 on the pop charts.


1930: “Chasing Rainbows” a romantic comedy with a script co-authored by Al Boasberg with music by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen and co-starring Jack Benny was released today in the United States.


1932: “The nomination of Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo to an associate just of the Supreme Court was unanimously reported favorably by the Senate Judiciary Committee which is chaired by Republican Senator Norris of Nebraska.


1932: Premiere of “Mamsell Nitouche” a 1932 French-German operetta film directed by Carl Lamac and filmed by cinematographer Otto Heller.


1932: In the Netherlands, the Jewish Historical Museum was officially opened. It was located in a single room on the top floor of the Amsterdam Historical Museum, which was housed in the Weigh House.


1933: “Louis Marshall Memorial Hall, the second building erected at the New York State College of Forestry, was dedicated” today in honor of the Jewish jurist who “was also a conservationist, and the force behind re-establishing the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, which evolved into today's State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.”


1936(30th of Shevat, 5696): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1936: A conference to choose national officers and assign quotas for the 1936 campaign of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is scheduled to be held today in Cincinnati, Ohio, under the leadership of Felix Warburg.


1936: Birthdate of Harrison Jay Goldin the Bronx born lawyer and former New York politician who served as an attorney in the United States Department of Justice Office of Civil Rights during the Kennedy Administration and ran in the 1989 Democratic Primary election for Mayor of New York.


1936: Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope the High Commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine was booed by a crowd as he left a museum in Tel Aviv where he had just given a dedicatory address.  The demonstration was prompted by reports that the mandatory government is about to implement new regulations designed to limit Jewish immigration and land purchases by Jews. The High Commissioner ordered the crowd to disperse but did not order any arrests.


1937: It was reported today that author Marvin Lowenthal described the Jews Poland to be “in the same condition as those in Germany with one million absolutely dependent upon charity” and another 2,400,000 needing outside to subsist” in a country that has not passed “public legislation on the Jewish question” but has “numerous other ways to destroy the Jews.”


1938: “Assailing Hitlerism as ‘fundamentally anti-German and anti-Christian’ and picturing the Nazi regime as ‘the Antichrist’ and the enemy of Western civilization, Dr. Ernst Wilhelm Meyer” a sixteen year veteran of the German diplomatic service announced his resignation “as the first secretary of the German Embassy in Washington” where he has served for the last six years.


1938: Today is the planned date on which passengers will begin debarking at the newly refurbished port of Tel Aviv.  The event is viewed as “a milestone in the rebuilding of the Jewish National Home.”


1939: Birthdate of Lester Glassner, an artist who graduated from Pratt Institute who created a “museum-size collection that included dolls and wind-up toys, plastic fruit sculptures and costume jewelry, sunglasses and makeup kits, greeting cards and matchbooks, salt and pepper shakers and Christmas ornaments, not to mention movie stills, posters, cardboard cutouts, books, magazines, records, and 8- and 16-millimeter films.”


1939: “The chief architect and designer of the Palestine Pavilion” at the New York World’s Fair, Arieh El-Hanani arrived today “on the Queen Mary to supervise “the setting up of the Palestine exhibits, which will arrive next week on the liner Excalibur.


1939: “Under a decree that Field Marshall Goering announced today, all German or Stateless Jews must surrender with a fortnight all jewels,” “knives, forks, tableware” “and other objects of gold, silver or platinum as well as all diamonds, pearls and other precious stones”


1939: At a time when “the present wave of anti-Semitism is aimed at the destruction of as a whole as well as the Jewish religion,” “ministers of a dozen Protestant denominations and non-denominational groups” met at Temple Israel to study Jewish religious forms and discuss common Jewish and Christian problems in a meeting “arranged by the Central Synagogue, Temple Israel and the Greater New York Federation of Churches.


1940(14th of Adar I, 5700): Purim Katan


1940: Al “Bummy’ Davis lost a unanimous decision at the lightweight level.


1941 Romanian born painter Marcel and Medi Janco and their two daughters who had survived the Iron Guard’s Bucharest Pogrom, arrived in Tel Aviv


1941: David Zacharin, Russian born cellist and director of the Tel Aviv Academy, gave his first New York recital tonight at the Town Hall. His program was devoted Jewish music.  Of the seventeen works played 14 were his own while the remaining three were Bloch’s “Schelomo” (Hebrew for Rhapsody, Gnessin’s “Song of the Wandering Knight” and Bruch’s “Kol Nidre.”  Zacharin “achieved real eloquence” when he played “If I Forget Thee Jerusalem,” a piece of his own creation.  Whatever the evening lacked in artistic perfection was overcome by the fact that it gave “insight into the longings and religious aspirations of an ancient people.”


1941: A large scale pogrom in Amsterdam continued for a second day.


1942: Edward M.M. Warburg, son of the late Felix Warburg and Chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee, joined the army last week as a private, despite the fact that he is married and has a 6-months-old son, it was learned here today. A member of Company B, 518th Military Police Battalion, Private Warburg is in training at Governors Island, home station of the unit. Army headquarters, in disclosing Mr. Warburg's enlistment, emphasized that the battalion was a field unit subject to call to active service. Warburg himself declined to comment on his enlistment.


1942: Author Stefan Zweig and his wife Elizabeth who had died yesterday “were found dead of a barbiturate overdoes in their house in the city of Petropolis, Brazil.”


1942: Struma, a ship chartered to carry Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to British-controlled Palestine during World War II, with its engine inoperable, was towed from Istanbul through the Bosporus out to the Black Sea by Turkish authorities with its refugee passengers aboard, where it was left adrift.


1943: A division of the Red Army attacked the Germans at Alexseyevka, in the Ukraine. Many of the attacking soldiers were Jews.


1943: Lydia Litvyak “was awarded the Order of the Red Star, made a junior lieutenant and selected to take part in the elite air tactic called okhotniki, or "free hunter", where pairs of experienced pilots searched for targets on their own initiative.”


1944: At Zwadka, Poland, a Polish man and his daughter were killed by Germans, along with the two Jewish women whom they had helped.


1945(10th of Adar, 5705): As the Soviet Army approached Schwarzheide, in the Dresden (Germany) area 300 Jews who had been moved from Berkenau to the Schwarzheide factories were shot. The German camps of Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen and Ravnebruck became the destination of thousands of evacuated Jews from all the other camps


1945: Father Stefan Wincenty Frelichowski who had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 died today at Dachau.


1945: Joe Rosenthal takes the most famous picture of World War II, "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima." 


1946: In a report issued by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, medical authorities said that there were no reports of Plague in Europe with the exception of the Mediterranean ports including Jaffa with two cases, and Haifa and Tel Aviv with one case each.


1947: General Eisenhower opened a drive to raise $170 million in aid for European Jews


1948: In Tel Aviv, Ruth and Gad Paz gave birth to their son Amnon Paz who perished aboard the Israeli Submarine Dakar on January 25, 1968.


1949(24th of Shevat, 5709): Fifty-nine year old print-maker Todros Geller who a leading Chicago artist passed away today leaving behind a treasure trove of work part of which can be seen at the Spertus Institute.

1950: Birthdate of Rebecca Newberger, the native of White Plains, NY, gained fame as author Rebebbac Goldstein.


1952: “Love is Better than Ever” a romantic comedy directed by Stanley Donen and starring Larry Parks and Elizabeth Taylor was released in the United States today.


1952: Three years after being released in the United Kingdom, “The Small Room” which Emeric Pressburger co-directed, co-produced and co-wrote was released in the United States today.


1952: In Philadelphia, Frieda (née Schreiber) and Alexander Herskovitz gave birth to Marshall Schreiber Herskowitz, the director, producer and writer who won several Emmys for “Thirtysomething” the television series he created.



1954: The first mass inoculation using the Salk Polio Vaccine began.  In one of the irony of history the first polio vaccine was created by a Jewish Doctor, Jonas Salk.  But the second polio vaccine was also created by a Jewish Doctor, Albert Sabin. 



1955: In France, the second government led by Pierre Mendès France ended today.



1955: Marianne Winters began playing the role of “Gelda” in a production of “The Dark Is Light Enough” which opened today.



1957: “The Diary of Anne Frank” which had opened at the Cort Theatre in 1955 was performed for the last time prior to moving to the Ambassador Theatre where it would open three days later



1960(25thof Shevat, 5720): Seventy-eight year old gold medal winning Olympic fencer Alexandre Lippmann passed away.



1962: Churchill’s friend Montague Brown wrote a letter expressing his concerns about the retired Prime Minister’s plan to visit Israel on an upcoming cruise to the eastern Mediterranean.  He was fearful of the effect such a visit would have on Britain’s Arab friends in the Middle East. Ultimately, Churchill’s yacht would pass the coast of Israel at night and would not make landfall.



1965: Sixty-four year old Herberts Cukurs, a member of the Arajs Kommando which slaughter thousands of Jews in Latvia died today in Uruguay.



1965: In Houston Lorraine Charlotte (née Langfan), a stockbroker and Alexander Dell, an orthodontist, gave birth to Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers.



1965: American classic’s scholar Charles A. Robinson, the husband of Celia Sachs and son-in-law of art historian Paul J. Sachs who played a key role in saving European art from the Nazis, passed away today.



1968(24th of Shevat, 5728): Fannie Hurst passed away at the age of 78.  Born in 1889 in Ohio, she graduated from Washington University (St. Louis) and then furthered her studies at Columbia in NYC. (This educational activity was unusual in and of itself for a woman of her times.  Hurst was a successful author, friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and supporter of the New Deal and aid to refugees from Nazi Europe.  By the time she passed away she had written seventeen novels, nine volumes of short stories, three plays, many articles, speaking engagements, a television talk show and collaborated on a number of films. One of the most amusing stories about her, which shows that she was way ahead of her times, involved her marriage. “In 1915, she had secretly married pianist Jacques Danielson and they each had their own residence. When their marriage was revealed in 1920, a New York Times editorial took them to task for having separate residences when there was a housing shortage. Hurst retaliated by stating that a married woman had the right to retain her own name, her own special life and her own personal liberty. They remained happily married until his death in 1952.” When Justice Arthur Goldberg declared in 1962, "that it is time that we evaluated Women on merit and fitness for a job," she snapped back, "Time sir! You are a half century too late.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/hurst.html



1970: One American was killed and two more injured when terrorists opened fire on a bus at Halhoul.



1971: The First World Conference on Soviet Jewry which had opened in Brussels on February 23 came to a close today.



1973(21st of Adar I, 5733): Tehilla Lichtenstein passed away.  She served as leader of the Society for Jewish Science from 1938 until her death.



1974(1st of Adar, 5734): Songwriter Harry Ruby passed away.
http://www.songwritershalloffame.org/exhibits/C308



1977: Leonard Steinberg, Baron Steinberg of Belfast in the County of Antrim was shot by the Provisional Irish Republican Army after he refused to give in to a demand to pay “protection money.”



1979: Release date in Italy for “Christ Stopped at Eboli” (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli) a film adaptation of the book of the same name by Carlo Levi.



1981: Birthdate of actor, comedian and singer Joshua Ilan “Josh” Gad whose father “was a Jewish immigrants from Afghanistan.”



1982: Today, “Tanya Gulyaeva-Gurevich, the daughter of Minsk refusenik, Lieutenant-Colonel Lev Ovsischer, who emigrated to Israel in 1979, was allowed by the Soviet authorities to pay a month’s visit to her sick mother in Minsk.”



1983: Moshe Arens replaced Menachem Begin as Defense Minister.



1986: In “The Museums of Israel,” published today, Nitza Rosovsky, the curator of exhibits at the Harvard Semitic Museum and the author of Jerusalem Walks describes “Israel, as a crossroads of ancient civilizations in which the countryside itself is like a museum filled with the remains of those who were here before, from Canaanites to Philistines, from Romans to Crusaders. Even the present-day inhabitants -Jews from some 80 lands, Arabs from all over the Middle East, Christians of different denominations - create a living museum.”  In describing the rich variety of museums to be found in Israel, she captures both the history and the efforts to capture the history of the land and cultures that are now part of the Jewish homeland.



1987: The Russian Writers Union accepts Boris Pasternak as a as member posthumously



1987: Aulcie Perry Jr., a former basketball player who became an Israeli citizen and was hailed as a sports champion there, was convicted in Brooklyn Federal Court tonight of smuggling heroin with a street value of $1.8 million into the United States



1987: “Former Soviet Prisoner of Conscience Iosif Begun” who “was pardoned last week after serving three years for ‘anti-Soviet activities’ as a result of his teaching Hebrew” arrived in Moscow this morning after his released from Chistopol Prison.



1988: Elections for the President of Israel were held today in the Knesset with Chaim Herzog, who was unopposed winning re-election.



1989: At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Soviet émigré pianist Vladimir Feltsman is scheduled to play the music of Schubert and Mussorgsky at a benefit performance designed to raise funds for the Maimonides Research and Development Foundation.



1990(28th of Shevat, 5750): David Samuilovich Kaufman who wrote under the name of David Samoylov passed away. Born in 1920, he was a “notable poet of War generation of Russian poets, and considered one of the most important Russian poets of the post-World War II era.” 



1992: In Philadelphia, Israeli tennis player Amos Mansdorf lost in the finals to American Pete Sampras.



1995: The Washington Post reported today that “Steven T. Katz, who is to become director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here next month, was reprimanded in the early 1990's for misrepresenting his scholarly achievements and violating leave policies while on the faculty at Cornell University.”



1997: Sixty five million viewers watch the completely uncensored version of “Schindler’s List” on NBC television.



1997(16th of Adar I, 5757):  Oscar Lewenstein, British producer and director, passed away at the age of 80.



1997: Palestinian Ali Abu Kamal opens fire on tourists on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, killing one and wounding another six before committing suicide.



1997: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedlander and Conflicting Accounts: The Creation and Crash of the Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Empire by Kevin Goldman



1998: Osama bin Laden publishes a fatwa declaring jihad against all Jews and Crusaders. Considering what the Crusaders did to the Jews during the Middle Ages, this is a strange declaration indeed.



1999: In another example of personalization and splintering of Israeli politics, Yitzhak Mordechai quit Likud and formed the Israel in the Centre Party. Other members included David Magen and Dan Meridor from Likud, Hagai Meirom and Nissim Zvili of Labour, and Eliezer Sandberg of Tzomet.



1999: Michael Nudelman and Yuri Stern left Yisrael BaAliyahto form Aliyah, which later entered into an alliance with another Russian-immigrant party, Yisrael Beiteinu.



2000(17th of Adar I, 5760): Ofrz Haza, popular Yeminite Israeli singer, passed away. Born in 1957, she made her international debut at the Eurovision Song Contest 1983, which she very narrowly failed to win for Israel with the song "Hi". Ofra Haza had a world-wide hit in 1988 with "Im Nina'lu" from the album Fifty Gates of Wisdom. Her international hits also included "Temple of Love (Touched by the Hand of Ofra Haza)" with the Leeds-based post-punk band, The Sisters of Mercy in 1992 and "My Love is for Real" with Paula Abdul in 1995. She also sang in the animated film The Prince of Egypt in 1998. Her Israeli hits include "Shir ha-Frekha" ("The Bimbo Song", theme from the movie Shlager, in which she also acted) and "le-Orekh ha-Yam" ("Along the Shore"). Haza, who came from the poor Hatikvah neighborhood of Tel-Aviv, at one time almost a slum, was a success story and the subject of pride on behalf of many Israelis of Yemenite origin. She died of AIDS.



2001(30thof Shevat, 5761): Rosh Chodesh Adar



2003(21st of Adar I, 5763): Meyer R. Schkolnick, who became the famed sociologist Robert K. Merton, passed away at the age of 93. According to one source he is the man who coined such as phrases as “unintended consequences,” “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy.”



2003(21stof Adar I, 5763): Seventy-three year old Jerusalem native Shlomo Argov the confidant of David Ben Gurion and Israeli Ambassador to several countries including the United Kingdom who with his wife Hava had three children – Gideon, Yehudit and Edna – passed away today.



2003: Bruce Fleisher won the Verizon Classic.



2003: An International Conference hosted by the Dubnow Institute on “Transforming Religious and Ethnic Emblematics of Judaism and Jewishness” continued for a second day.



2005(14thof Adar I, 5765): Purim Katan



2005: The French Law on Colonialism passed to by the Union for a Popular Movement was opposed by Jewish French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet



2005: Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz announced that Dan Halutz would be the next IDF Chief of Staff.



2005: Effi Eitam and Yitzhak Levi announced that they had officially split from the NRP to form a new party, the Renewed Religious National Zionist Party



2005: “Serenada Schizophrana,” “a series of compositions written by American film composer Danny Elfman in 2004 premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York City by the American Composers Orchestra today.



2005: Chief Nazi hunter Eli Rosenbaum was the guest speaker for "Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals". Over 150 students, staff and community members crammed into the UMKC School of Law Courtroom for the lecture. Eli Rosenbaum has directed the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) for over 10 years.



2006: As reported in The Washington Post, Frederick Busch, 64, a writer whose novels and short stories were esteemed by critics but who never quite found a large following with the general public, died of a heart attack at a New York City hospital. Since 1971, Mr. Busch had written 27 books and came to be known, perhaps in sympathy with his middling sales, as the quintessential "writer's writer." Novelist Scott Spencer called him "a first-rate American storyteller," and Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley praised him as "a serious and gifted novelist" whose stories and novels "tend to be quiet, reflective and subtle."



2006: The Roundabout Theatre Company revival of “The Pajama Game,” a musical created by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross opened today.



2006: “'Maternal ambivalence' is Ayelet Waldman's baby” published today.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2006-02-23-waldman_x.htm



2007: Ben Stiller received the Hasty Pudding Man of the Year award from Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals. According to the organization, the award is given to performers who give a lasting and impressive contribution to the world of entertainment



2007: In Amsterdam, the Jewish Historical Museum opens Retrospectives of the works of photographers Robert Capra and Eva Besnyö.  



2007: In Jerusalemthe 23rd International Book Fair which is being held at the Binyanei Haooma Convention Center comes to an end.



2007(5th of Adar, 5767): Heinz Berggruen, collector and gallery owner passed away at the age of 93. (As reported by Alan Riding)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/arts/design/27berggruen.html



 2008: In Washington, D.C. Susan Jacoby author of Half Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past discusses and signs her newest work, The Age of American Unreason.



2008:Joseph Cedar, director of the Oscar-nominated Israeli film Beaufort, and an Orthodox Jew, will attend a symposium sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the five finalists vying for the best foreign-language film Oscar today. Since the symposium is being held on Shabbat attending presented a unique challenge for Cedar.  Cedar’s rabbi told him he could attend as long as he walked to the event and did not use a microphone. Observing Shabbat would require a two mile long walk to the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre which Cedar, New York born whose parents made Aliyah when he was five, figured he could cover in about two hours.



2008: Simon Garfield described the story of Anne Frank’s lost love.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/feb/24/news.features



2009: Manhattanville College sponsors a lecture and Q and A session with Ambassador Danny Carmon, Deputy Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations entitled "Israel and Europe: An Insider's Perspective."



2009: After undergoing surgery to remove a tumor on her pancreas, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returned to the court in time for three days of oral arguments.



2009: Sport Illustrated“remembers the life” the late Joe Goldstein, the “old-school sports public relation man” who recently passed away at the age of 81.  He was known for his upbeat manner as well as his persistency which cause an NBC executive to describe him as “the Jewish equivalent of the Chinese water drip.”  His clients included “Joe Frazier, Bob Hope, the New York City Marathon, Evel Knivel and the Palisades Parkway.”



2009: In Washington, D.C.,Sara Houghteling reads from and signs her new novel, Pictures at an Exhibition, at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue (formerly the home of Adas Israel, the only Conservative Synagogue still located in the District of Columbia.)



2009:The Israel Antiquities Authority announced today that a routine archeological excavation that was conducted before the scheduled start of a private construction project in an Arab neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem has uncovered a series of seal impressions from the reign of the biblical King Hezekiah 2,700 years ago.



2009:IDF soldiers foiled a large-scale attack at the Kissufim border crossing against troops or a southern Israeli community.



2009: Gaza terrorists fired two Kassam rockets at southern Israeli civilian areas on Monday. One hit an open area in the Sha'ar Hanegev region, while the other landed in a field near Sderot. No one was wounded and no damage was reported.



2010: The three-day long meeting of the Jewish Agency for Israel being held in Jerusalem is scheduled to end.



2010: The Jewish Studies Program at Tulane University under the leadership of Dr. Brian Horowitz and the Center for Cultural Judaism are scheduled to present a program about Satmar Chasidism featuring Dr. David N. Myers, Professor and Director, UCLA Center for Jewish Studies.



2010: Israel said today that Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon will lead a high-level delegation next week to China, the most prominent holdout against tough sanctions on Iran. Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer will also travel with the delegation, expected to discuss issues shared by both nations.



2010: Delaware's first Jewish governor hung a mezuzah at the governor's mansion in Dover today. Among those joining Jack Markel in today’s ceremony in the capital were Rabbi Peter Grumbacher of the governor’s synagogue, Congregation Beth Emeth in Wilmington; Rabbi Steven Saks of the Rabbinical Association of Delaware; and Glenn Engelmann, president of the Jewish Federation of Delaware, according to the Sussex Countian. Markel received the mezuzah as an inauguration gift, according to the report.



2011: “Vidal Sassoon: The Movie” and “The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground” are two of the documentaries scheduled to be shown tonight at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.



2011: The 25thJerusalem International Book Fair is scheduled to present a program entitled ''The Changing Jewish Kitchen - Is Jewish food still Jewish food and what is it?''



2011: David McKenzie is scheduled to present a program entitled “Isachar Zacharie: Lincoln’s Chiropodist—and Peace Envoy” at Adas Israel in Washington, DC.



2011: Eleven Palestinians were injured today when Israeli Defense Forces fired at a group of militants on the border with Gaza, Palestinian news agencies reported. The IDF responded by saying that an explosive device was detonated toward soldiers who were performing routine activity in the area, on the northern part of the border. The IDF noted that in the past two months, "over 12 devices were laid along the security fence and exploded at IDF forces."



2011(19thof Adar I, 5771): Eighty-seven year old Joseph H. Flom, a pioneering corporate lawyer who helped build Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom into one of the nation’s leading law firms, passed away today.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/joseph-h-flom-pioneering-deal-lawyer-dead-at-87/



2011(19thof Adar I, 5771):Jack Gottlieb, a composer who brought synagogue melodies to concert halls and who worked closely with the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein passed away today at the age of 80.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/lohud/obituary.aspx?n=jack-gottlieb&pid=149164072



2012(30thof Shevat, 5772): Rosh Chodesh Adar



2012: Dina Zvi-Riklis’s 2006 film “Three Mothers” that explores Israel’s history through the lives of three Egyptian-born sisters Triplets Rose, Flora and Yasmin who were born into “high society” over 60 years ago in Alexandria, Egypt and now live in Israel, is scheduled to be shown at The Yeshiva University Ring Family Israel Film Festival. 



2012: “Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray” is scheduled to shown at the Columbus Jewish Film Festival in Columbus, GA



2012: In London, “Mordechai Richler: The Last of the Wild Jews” a film about the Canadian-Jewish author is scheduled to be shown as part of Jewish Book Week.



2012: In London, Simon Goldhill is scheduled to discuss “Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Bronte's Grave” as part of Jewish Book Week.



2012: Iran submitted a letter of protest to the United Nations Security Council today, charging Israel of attacking its nuclear scientists and coloring recent accusations of Tehran's links to attempted attacks against Israeli officials worldwide as being part of a "war game" against the Islamic Republic.



2012: Interior Minister Eli Yishai said today that "The government will have to extend Tal Law until alternative legislation regulating yeshiva students' military service is drafted, with the collaboration of the Defense, Justice and Finance ministries



2013: The Northernmost Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to open in Fairbanks, Alaska.



2013: In Iowa City, Hillel is scheduled to host its annual fundraising event in which Benjamin Coelho will join with colleagues from the University Of Iowa School Of Music to perform a program entitled “Songs without Words.”


2013: Purim in Ein Karem “More than Carnival: with the Ensemble Millennium is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. today.


2013: The Maccabeats are scheduled to perform at Temple Moses in Miami Beach, FL.


2013(13th of Adar, 5773): Shabbat Zachor Erev Purim


2013: In the evening, reading of the Megillah Esther


2013: Today’s announcement by the Pentagon it was grounding all F-35 fighter jets due to a crack found in one of the engine blades” could have an unforeseen impact on Israel’s military capabilities since the IAF has ordered 20 of the planes in a bid to maintain a qualitative edge over its vast array of actual and potential adversaries


2014: Adam Liptak, Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times is scheduled to Hadassah Attorneys Council dinner in Washington, DC


2014: “Handle With Care,” a hilarious and heartwarming romantic comedy about an inept package deliverer who loses an Israeli grandmother’s corpse in a Virginia parking lot on a snowy Christmas Eve is scheduled to have its final performance at Westside Theatre Downstairs


2014: “Threshold to the Sacred: The Ark Door of Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue” is scheduled to close today at Yeshiva University Museum.


2014: Ruth Grumber is scheduled to appear via Skype at the event officially opening “Ahead of Time: The Extraordinary Journey of Ruth Gruber.”


2014: The annual Seforim Sale – the largest sale of Jewish books in North America – is scheduled to come to a close.


2014: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Forgiving The Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka by Jay Cantor


2014(23rd of Adar I, 5774): Alice Herz-Sommer, believed to be the oldest-known survivor of the Holocaust, died this morning in London at age 110, a family member said. Herz-Sommer’s devotion to the piano and to her son sustained her through two years in a Nazi prison camp, and a film about her has been nominated for best short documentary at next week’s Academy Awards.


2014: Following the death today Alice Herz-Sommer, Yisrael “Kristal became recognized as the wolrd’s oldest known Holocaust survivor.


2014(23rd of Adar I, 5774): Eighty-seven year old  Rabbi Joseph Ehrenkranz who was the Executive Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut and was the Synagogue Council of America's representative to the United Nations passed away today.

2014(23rd of Adar I, 5774): Samuel Sheinbein, an American-Israeli convicted murderer serving his sentence in Israel was shot and killed today at Rimonim Prison today after he shot three people today, all of whom were apparently prison guards.

2015: Cecile Kuntz is scheduled to “explore how Jews asserted their presence in cities by looking at buildings constructed by Yiddish-speaking communities in Poland and America” in a lecture styled “Towards a Yiddish Architecture


2015: The Winter Semester is scheduled start at the Skirball Center offering such courses as the “Golden Age of Yiddish Cinema” with Dr. Eric Goldman and “Man, Miracle and Menace – The Truth About Elijah” with Dr. Diane M. Sharon which comes just in time with Pesach only weeks away to enliven the part of the Seder when we open the proverbial door.


2015: In London, “Jewish Book Week, a unique nine day literary festival” is scheduled to open today.


2016: The Center for Jewish History and the Leo Baeck Institute hosted the opening “Burning Words: The Battle of the Books” that examines the 16th century debate among Christians as to whether or not Jews should be allowed to publish books on Jewish theology.


2016: The Jewish Book Council is scheduled to host an evening with Shulem Deen, Christopher Noxon and Sigal Samuel -- 3 authors who will “share their unorthodox perspectives on what it means to keep the faith with respect to their writing, personal lives, and the Jewish people at large.


2016: Under the terms of a settlement announced today by the University of Oklahoma,the ownership of impressionist Camille Pissarro's 1886 "Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep" will be transferred to Léone Meyer, a French Holocaust survivor whose father owned the painting when it was stolen and the painting “will split its time being displayed at the university's Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman and a museum in France.” (As reported by Daniel C. Houston)


2017(27th of Shevat, 5777): Sixty-six year old Alan Colmes, “the liberal foil” that FOX used to make it “fair and balanced” and husband of Professor Jocelyn Elise Crowley passed away today. (As reported by Sam Roberts)

2017: “The Jewish Community Center in New Orleans was evacuated” for two hours today “after a receiving a bomb threat this morning – the latest in a series of such threats made against centers across the United States.


2017: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to co-host “a deli supper reception and docent-led tour of the Museum’s newest special exhibition, Operation Finale: The Capture & Trial of Adolf Eichmann, followed by a screening of Faceless, a story about a teenager on trial for terrorism, pitted against a female Muslim who is brought on to prosecute.


2017: In San Francisco, Lynn Downey is scheduled to “speak about her book, Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World “at the Jewish Community Library


2017: In London, JW3 is scheduled to present past judges of the JQ Wingate Literary Prize discus “What Makes a Book Jewish?”


2017: “An Israeli Air Force fighter jet shot down” an Hamas drone today “before it managed to infiltrate Israel.” (As reported by Yoav Zitun)


2017: In Davie, FL, Nova Southeastern University is scheduled to host Holocaust survivor Alfred Munzer and Syrian immigrant Mouaz Moustafa, the Executive Director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force as they share their experiences dealing with “persecution and displacement.” (Editor’s note: One wonders how Moustafa will deal with the fate of the Syrian Jewish community and/or Syria’s decades long attempt to destroy the state of Israel – home to the largest population of Holocaust survivors.)


2017: At Coe College, Professor Steve Feller is scheduled to lead the final session of “The Conflicted World Of Chaim Potok” in which he uses the author’s novel to explore the “conflicts within Judaism.”


2018: In Coralville, Iowa, Agudas Achim is scheduled to host a Hebrew School Dinner followed by a Kabbalat Shabbat Song Fest.


2018: Following the Friday night Shabbat meal, the Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to hold Committee Elections for Trinity.


2018: The Jackson Hole Jewish Community Center is scheduled to host services with an Oneg to follow.


 


 

This Day, February 24, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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 February 24



303: The first official Roman edict for the persecution of Christians was issued by Roman Emperor Galerius Valerius Maximianus.  This was part a contest between Pagans and Christians for control of the Roman Empire.  The Jews were not involved.  But they would be the ultimate losers when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire and the Church unleashed the power of the state on all religious groups that opposed it, including the Jews.



1147: In Wurzburg, Germany, a rumor began that a Christian corpse was found in the river which could perform miracles. The Jews were accused to killing the person. In the ensuring riots, twenty two Jews were murdered including the rabbi, Isaac ben Elyukem. After the riot the survivors fled to a local Castle



1221: Alice de Montmorency, wife of Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester passed away.  In 1217, Alice ordered the arrest of all of the Jews living in Toulouse.  They could either convert or be killed.  Children under the age of six were taken from their parents, baptized and raised Christians.  Her actions violated the promise her husband had made to the Jews of Toulouse guaranteeing them their freedom and right to practice their religion.   



1463:At Mirandola, near Modena, Gianfrancesco I Pico, Lord of Mirandola and Count of Concordia, by his wife Giulia, daughter of Feltrino Boiardo, Count of Scandiano gave birth to Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola who studied Kabbalah with Johanan Aleman and was one of the first Italian nobles to collect Hebrew manuscripts and who “was convinced that the literature of Kabbalah was the true transcript of what Moses heard at Sinai , that Christianity and Judaism were one with Kabbalah as the point of connection and that the differences between Judaism and Christianity were superficial”



1479: After four years of conflict and intrigue, Queen Isabella of Castile secured her throne.  Isabella’s machinations to gain control of the kingdom show her as every bit as other female monarchs as Elizabeth of England or Catherine the Great of Russia.  Later in the year, she would marry Ferdinand of Aragon, a move that would lead to the creation of the modern Spanish state.  Contrary to popular misconception, she was the abler of the two monarchs.  In fact, it was only because Ferdinand was a man in a male-dominated society that saved his reputation.  Isabella’s accession to the throne was the first in a series of events that would end with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.



1500: In Ghent, Philip the Handsome and Joanna Castile gave birth to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor who provided Josel of Rosheim with “a charter or letter of protection from for the whole of German Jewry but who alos  “issued a proclamation again the Jews who had not been baptized” which may have applied to the Jews he ruled as King of Spain.



1510:  Pope Julius II excommunicated the Republic of Venice. Many remember Julius II as the Pope who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel.  Julius II, like at least one of his predecessors, had a Jewish physician; in this case Samuel Sarfatti.  From the Jewish point of view, Julius clashes such as the one that brought on the above mentioned excommunication and aesthetic projects meant that he did not have time to waste on persecuting his Jews.  Out of sight out of mind or benign neglect placed Julius on the list of one of the “better Popes.” 



 1582:  Pope Gregory XIII announced the Gregorian calendar.  This replaced the Julian Calendar which explains why there is some confusion about various dates in history.  Of course the Jews use their own calendar, but as a people who “live in time” it is useful to know when other parts of the Western world began changing the way they keep track of the years.



1590: An entire family of Marranos named de Carabaja “was forced to confess and abjure at a public auto-da-fé, celebrated” today. “Luis de Carabajal the younger, with his mother and four sisters, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and his brother, Baltasar, who had fled upon the first warning of danger, was, along with his deceased father, Francisco Rodriguez de Matos, burnt in effigy.” (According to some accounts this happened in 1599)



1688(23rd of Adar): Portuguese poet and grammarian Moses Gideon Abudiente passed away.



1739: The army of Iranian ruler Nadir Shah defeats the forces of the Mughal emperor of India, Muhammad Shah at the Battle of Karnal.  Nadir Shah’s rise to power marked an improvement in the lives of the Persian Jewish community.  The last half of the 17th century had been a period of persecution for the Jews when many of them actually outwardly converted to Islam. Under Nadir, the Jews were once again free to practice their religion in public.



1765: David Tevele Schiff was named as the Rabbi to lead the Great Synagogue in London succeeding Hart Lyon in that position.  Hart had actually been the rabbi for the Great Synagogue and the Hambro Synagogue. The two congregations were supposed to continue this practice.  But they could not agree on a successor.  Once the Great Synagogue had made its decision, the Hambro Synagogue chose Israel Meshullam Solomon to serve as their rabbi.



1831: Birthdate of Leo von Caprivi, who as Chancellor of Germany earned the enmity of the anti-Semites, who were a growing force, when he attacked their leaders in a speech before the Reichstag in 1893.



1835: Birthdate of Sir Julius Vogel, the eighth Premier of New Zealand and the first Jew to hold this position.



1836: Louis Goodman married Julia Salamon today at the Western Synagogue.



1841: David ben Jacob married Rachel bat Aaron HaLevi today at the Western Synagogue.



1842: Birthdate of German Egyptologist Émile Brugsch who in 1881 “discovered the tomb at Deir el Bahir” which included the mummy of Ramses II, the Pharaoh of the Exodus.  



1847: Moss Ansell married Mary Cantor today at the Great Synagogue.



1847: Asher Solomon married Anna Russel today at the Great Synagogue.



1848: Louis-Philippe, “King of the French,” abdicates the throne. Louis’s reign began with a revolution in 1830 and ended with a revolution in 1848.  This monarch from the house of Orleans was a rather dull character when compared to the glory of the Bourbons and Bonaparte but it was his very dullness that got him to the throne.  As is so often the case, Louis’ record in dealing with the Jews is a mixed bag.  As Elliot Rosenberg points, by the time Louis came to the throne French Jews were well on their way to full emancipation.  Under Louis, “rabbis joined other clerics paid from the state exchequer.”  While English Jews were still denied entry to Oxford and Cambridge, the doors “opened widely” at French universities.  “Jewish communities joined in praising” him as the monarch who “’had enlarged our liberties.’” In 1835, Louis defended the rights of French Jews in a diplomatic conflict with the Swiss.  James de Rothschild, head of the French branch of the House of Rothschild was “a royal intimate” who according to his brother Salomon “goes to the palace whenever he wishes.  James was not only a pillar of the French government, he was also the man who handled the “personal investment accounts” of the French monarch.  All this good will was tainted by the Damascus Affair in which the French sided with those who supported the claim of the Blood Libel against Jews living in Syria.  The French were trying to establish their sphere of influence in the Middle East and North Africa and if the price was that of a few Jews, so be it.  Regardless, by the time of the abdication, Jewish emancipation in France was so ingrained that nothing would stem that tide.  Of course, the Dreyfus Affair, fifty years later would demonstrate the illusory nature of that emancipation.  Louis’s successor, Napoleon III would prove to be “bad for the French people” and therefore “bad for the Jews.”



1848: As the revolutionary forces took power, the Republicans named Adolphe Cremieux, a prominent lawyer, statesman and leader of the French Jewish community, to serve as the minister of justice. During his time in office, he “secured the decrees abolishing the death penalty for political offenses, and making the office of judge immovable.”  “He was instrumental in declaring an end to slavery in all French Colonies, for which some have called him the French Abraham Lincoln.”



1860(1st of Adar, 5620): Rosh Chodesh Adar



1862: Sergeant Elias Reubenthal began a three year enlistment with Company I of the 113thregiment of the 12th Cavalry.



1863: In Vienna, Austria, Rabbi Ignatz and Nettie (Rosenbaum) Grossman gave birth to Louis Grossman who graduated from Hebrew Union College and served as the rabbi at Detroit’s Temple Bethel and Congregation B’nai Yeshurun in Cincinnati, Ohio.



1864: During the Civil War, Joseph B. Greenhut, who had been fighting as a member of the Union Army since April of 1861, resigned his commission and returned to civilian life. Greenhut had fought at a series of famous battles including Fort Donelson, Gettysburg and Lookout Mountain.



1868(1st of Adar, 5628): Rosh Chodesh Adar



1868: Alphonse, Baron de Rothschild and his wife Leonora, the daughter of Baron Lionel de Rothschild of London gave birth to their only son Edouard who fought a duel during the Dreyfus case.



1874: Birthdate of Moshe Smilansky, the native of Telepino and brother of Meir and Anna Smilansky who first came to Palestine in 1890 as part of the First Aliyah, became an author who wrote in Hebrew and was a proponent of a bi-national state in the 1930’s.



1877: An agreement was reached today between the Ottoman rulers and the Serbian envoys led by Prince Milan. The Serbians agreed to all of the conditions set by the Turks except two, one of which was the requirement that the Jews of Serbia be granted the same rights as all other Serbs.



1878: “Is Disraeli A Jew” was published today.



1878: The Young Men’s Hebrew Association met tonight in New York to discuss the proposal made by Thomas Grady to abolish the Free College.



1879(1stof Adar, 5639) Rosh Chodesh Adar



1881: Seventeen year old Marion Calish, the Hebrew teacher at Professor Felix Adler’s kindergarten who has been missing since the 19th, was found just before midnight tonight by a traveling salesman who took her to the local police precinct.



1882: A man who claimed to be named Rothschild and is thought to be Jewish attempted to use a bogus check to pay for purchases at A & C Myer in New York City.



1882: Two of the Jewish refugees from Russia who arrived in Philadelphia, PA on the SS Illinois are the only ones who have been identified as being sick – that is two out over three hundred men, women and children.



1882: A cable sent to the Toronto Globe from London stated that at a meeting of the Committee on the Fund for the Relief of Russo-Jewish Refugees, Sir A.T. Galt suggested that two or three of the Jewish refugees should be allowed to go to Canada’s Northwest Territories to make arrangements for the arrival of their co-religionists. 



1885: Birthdate of Joseph Sprinzak, first Speaker of Israeli Knesset. “Born in Moscow, Sprinzak's father was active in the Hovevei Zion. When Jews were expelled from Moscow in 1891, the family moved to Kishinev and then Warsaw. The home was a center for young Hebrew writers and Zionists. In the early 1900s, he was one of the organizers of HaTehiyah, a Zionist group led by Yitzhak Gruenbaum. During this period he worked in a Hebrew publishing house as well as on Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw. In 1905 he returned to Kishinev where he was active in Zionist affairs. In 1908 he spent several months in Constantinople where he was in contact with Zionist leaders, and then went to Beirut to study medicine. His studies were cut very short when, after just a few months, he was asked to become secretary of HaPoel HaZair. During World War I he was in Eretz Yisrael and after the war, was instrumental in founding Hitahdut, a world movement which joined HaPoel HaZair and Zeirei Zion. A delegate to the 11th and 12th Zionist Congresses, Sprinzak became the first representative of the yishuv's labor movement to be elected to the Zionist Executive. When independence was declared in 1948, he was elected to the Provisional State Council as well as the first three Knessets, serving as speaker for 10 years.   Joseph Sprinzak was known as a Zionist leader who strongly identified with the rank-and-file, both in Israel and abroad. His conception of Zionism was based on socialism and the process of national rebirth. During his tenure as secretary of HaPoel HaZair, he was involved in the absorption of Jews from Yemen. During World War I, he helped organize the yishuv's Jewish workers. In the 1920s, as a member of the Zionist executive, he was head of the Labor and then the Aliyah Departments. He also helped found the Histadrut labor federation and was a member of the Tel Aviv municipality. In the 1930s, as a member of the Histadrut executive, Sprinzak was instrumental in the formation of Ben-Gurion's Mapai political party. In the 1940s he became a leading member of the Zionist General Council and eventually was general secretary of the Histadrut. As Knesset speaker during the body's first 10 years, Sprinzak had a major influence on the country's emerging democracy. He died in 1959.”



1889: Birthdate of Aleksei Denisovich Dikiy, the native of the Ukraine and brother of actress Maria Sukhodolska – Dikova who was a Soviet actor and director during the Stalin era.



1889: Birthdate of Jacques (Jacob) Presser “a Dutch historian, writer and poet best known for his book Ashes in the Wind: The destruction of the Dutch Jewswhich descried “the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands during World War II.”.



1890: It was reported today that Sarah Bernhardt will be returning to the United States in October to perform at the Broadway Theatre in New York City. 



1890: It was reported today that at the request of Elsie Leslie, 500 hundred children from the Industrial Schools of the Associated Hebrew Charities will attend one of her final matinee performances of “The Prince and the Pauper at the Broadway Theatre. (Elsie Leslie was a noted child actress of her time.  Born in 1881, she passed away in 1966.  I cannot find any reason why she singled out a school for Jewish students for this treat.)



1890: It was reported today that the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society is caring for nearly 600 children, 200 of whom were girls and 400 were boys.



1891: “Elevated Funeral Trains” published today described the decision of the Directors of the Union Elevated Railroad in Brooklyn to extend service to Cypress Cemetery and the “numerous Jewish cemeteries in the neighborhood and to establish funeral trains consisting of a car for the coffin and two or three cars for the funeral party.  Most of the directors are Jewish and Edward Lauterbach who is counsel for the company is attempting to establish contracts with various synagogues to convey the funeral parties from the ferries or bridge to the cemetery.



1893: The American University, a private Methodist university in Washigton, D.C. is chartered by an act of the Congress of the United States of America. A.U. has over one thousand Jewish undergraduate students out of a total of almost 6,000.  Out of an estimated 4,700 grad students, 1,000 are Jewish.  The school offers a minor in Jewish Studies, a university program in Israel and the services of an authorized Hillel House.



1893(8th of Adar): Benjamin Henry Ascher, Hebrew scholar and author passed away



1893: “At the second session of the 52nd Congress…a bill was presented to the House ordering that a gold medal be struck off in recognition of the services rendered by Haym Solomon during the Revoluionary War, in consider of which the Salomon heirs waived their claims upon the United States for indemnity.” The full House never took action on the resolution.



1894: It was reported that Kuhn, Loeb & Co is among the contributors to the Citizens’ Relief Committee which has raised $94, 065.50 for those suffering from the effects of the economic depression.



1894: It was reported today that Jacob H. Schiff, Solomon Loeb and Abraham Wolff are among the prominent citizens who have joined a movement led by Cornelius Vanderbilt “to establish a pawn broking establishment” in New York modeled on “public pawn broking establishing that have been of great help to the poor in several large European cities.



1895: “A Most Noble Charity” published today described the work of the Montefiore Home for Incurables which “was originally intended as home where incurable patients should be received and made comfortable during their lives” has not taken on the additional role of providing treatment for chronic invalids” many of whom “were hopelessly stricken by disease” but have left the facility “in the full possession of health.



1896: “Religion In Large Cities” published today described the conditions of religious institutions in New York City including the fact that there “51 Hebrew organizations” in the city.



1896: According to Emily Crawford of the Associated Press, Prince Henry of Orleans is hoping to capitalize on the anti-Dreyfus spirit as a way of bringing about the downfall of the Republic which he no doubt hopes will be replaced with a Monarchy.



1898: Birthdate of Romanian born American political scientist and Fabian Socialist Herman Finer the University of Chicago professor and author who is the brother of Samuel Finer.



1898: “Prison and Fine For Zola” published today described the scene in the courtroom when Emile Zola was convicted. The verdict was handed down at seven in the evening but the jury had agreed on its decision days ago in response, in part to threats from the mob that surrounded the court during the trial. In response to the sentence which stemmed from his defense of Captain Dreyfus the defamed Jewish officer Zola compared himself to Christ saying that he too was “a victim of mob violence office cowardice and a grand miscarriage of justice.”  (Considering that the Catholic Churc were one of the groups arrayed against him, this was a bold, fitting, comparison.)



1899(14thof Adar, 5659): Last Purim celebration of the 19th century.



1902: In Berlin, the ninth meeting of the Union of Judæo-German Congregations came to end.



1904:  Herzl writes, "Yesterday I had a most curious visitor: Ali Nuri Bey ... His proposal ... comes to this: Sail into the Bosporus with two cruisers, bombard Yildiz, let the Sultan flee or capture him, put in another Sultan (Murad or Reshad), but first form a provisional government - which is to give us the Charter for Palestine...."



1906:Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky and his second wife Natalia Sedova gave birth to Lev Lvoich Sedov.
http://spartacus-educational.com/Lev_Sedov.htm



1906: Birthdate of Yosef Serline, the native of Bialystok who served as personal secretary Nahum Sokolow before making Aliyah in 1930 following he which he served as an MK in the first seven Knessets.



1906: Birthdate of Yosef Serlin, the native of Bialystok who made Aliyah in 1933 and worked as lawyer in Tel Aviv while pursuing a political career that included serving as member of the First Knesset.



1906: “Their Stores to Close Saturdays” published today described the decision of the East Side Dry Goods Merchants’ Association to give their employees the day off on Saturday because they did little or no business because the vast majority of customers were Jews.



1907(10th of Adar, 5667): Composer Otto Goldschmidt passed away at the age of 87.



1908: Muller v. Oregon in which Louis Brandeis “as additional counsel for the state of Oregon” filed the first of its kind of brief now known as the “Brandeis Brief” which relied “more on a compilation of scientific information and social science than on legal citations” was decided today by the Supreme Court in favor of the state of Oregon



1908(22nd of Adar): Rabbi Jehiel Michal Epstein of Novogrdok, Russia author of Arukh ha-Shulhan passed away



1909: Birthdate of Max Black.  Born in Azerbaijan, raised and educated in England, Black became a U.S. citizen in 1948.  It is hard to classify him because his interests were so varied. “Black was famed for his contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, the philosophy of art, conceptual analysis, and his studies of the work of several major philosophers. Black was a prolific author and lists of his publications contain over 200 items. He passed away in 1988.



1910: Birthdate of Fred Sington, the native of Birmingham, Alabama, who as an all-America tackle at the University of Alabama, led the Crimson Tide to the national championship in 1930 before going on to a major league baseball career with the Washington Senators and Brooklyn Dodgers.



1912: “The Sunshine Girl” a musical comedy “with a book by Paul A. Rubens” opened at the Gaiety Theatre in London.



1912: “At a meeting at Temple Emanu-El in New York City today, Henrietta Szold together with other Zionist women, proposed to the Daughters of Zion study circle that they expand their purpose and embrace proactive work to help meet the health needs of Palestine's people” which resulted in the birth of Hadassah, the largest women's organization in America.
http://jwa.org/thisweek/feb/24/1912/hadassah



1913: Dr. Stephen Wise of New York is scheduled to deliver an address on “Moral and Religious Aspects of the Woman’s Movement” at a joint meeting of the Chicago Association of Jewish Women and the Chicago Woman’s Aide this afternoon at Sinai Temple



1914: Birthdate of Esta Saltzman the native of Boston, MA who gained fame as Yiddish actress Esta Saltzman Lubin



1915: It was reported today that Jews were among the hundreds of thousands who were suffering and has lost everything because they lived along the borders of between Russia and Germany where much of the fighting was taking place on the Eastern Front and were now fleeing to avoid the advancing and retreating armies.



1916: Representatives from the National Jewish Workmen’s Committee on Jewish Rights are scheduled to attend “a public hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the House of Representatives called for the purposed of considering a resolution…urging that all legal disabilities of the Jews be removed in the countries now at war.”



1916: In Congress, “the Committee on Foreign Relations” is scheduled to hold a public hearing on a joint resolution offered by Representative London and Senator Lane supporting the cause of peace and “the removal of discriminations against Jews wherever they exist.”



1916: The Zionist Council of New York held a mass meeting at Cooper Union tonight.  Louis Lipsky, who presided over the meeting, attacked the critics of the Zionist movement, including fellow Jews who had called it a “partisan issue.”  He said that “Zionism is the essential ingredient of any policy the Jewish people may adopt at this time time for the protection of Jewish interests.”  Wolf Gluskin, who has only arrived in the United States from Palestine where he had helped to establish one of first Zionist settlements, told the assembly about the suffering being experienced by 35,000 Palestinian Jews as a result of the World War.  The wine industry, which the Jewish settlers had worked so hard to develop, was on the verge of destruction.  The New York Zionists also heard from Dr. Ben Zion Mossinsohn, a teacher living in Jaffa and Dr. Schmaraya Levin of the International Zionist Committee. 



1917: H. Pereira Mendes celebrates his 40th anniversary as rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel of New York City.



1917: Dr. Samuel Schulman is scheduled to leader Saturday morning services at Temple Beth-El in Manhattan.



1917: Dr. Enelow is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “How Can We Gain the Benefits of Religion” at Temple Emanu-El.



1917: At Temple Israel of Harlem, Dr. M.H. Harris is scheduled to deliver a Sabbath sermon on “The Temple and Israel.”



1917: The Judeo-Spanish newspaper El Emigrante was established in New Jersey.



1917: The Russian Revolution begins in earnest when troops of the Czar fire on the citizens of St. Petersburg.  This is the first, non-Bolshevik Russian Revolution. Jews played an active role in the various upheavals that would bring an end to the reign of the Czars.  The Jews did not realize that anti-Semitism was such an integral part of the Russian psyche that it would survive and flourish under the next wave of autocrats – the Communists who replaced the Czars.



1917: The German plan to bring Mexico into World War on the German side is exposed.  The incident is referred to as the “Zimmerman telegram.”  Zimmerman was the German foreign minister.  This bit of arrogance and ignorance was one of the causes of the United States entering the war in April of 1917.  The Jewish author Barbara Tuchman wrote a very readable and informative book on this subject.



1918:  Einstein wrote “to an academic correspondent who had rebuked him for his dislike of war, ‘Your ostentatious Teutonic muscle-flexing runs rather against my grain.  I prefer to string along with my compatriot Jesus Christ, whose doctrines you and your kind consider to be obsolete.  Suffering is indeed more acceptable to me than resort to violence.’”



1918: It was reported today that the Joint Distribution Committee has appropriated an additional $100,000 to help pay for “the medical unit being formed by Hadassah” which is to be sent to Palestine.



1918: It was reported today that Joint Distribution Committee has allocated $500,000 “for the general relief” of Jews living “in the occupied parts of Russia, including Poland, Lithuania and Lublin” and $800,000 to help “the wives and children of American Jews stranded in Harbin to join their husbands” in the United States.



1920: The Nazi party held it first major meeting in Munich, Germany.



1921: In New York City, two Jewish immigrants from Russia – Samuel Vigoda and the former Lena Moses gave birth to actor Abraham “Abe” Charles Vigoda known to many as “Tessio” the mobster who betrayed Michael Corleone in the “The Godfather” and Detective Fish in the comedy cop show “Barney Miller.”https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/arts/television/abe-vigoda-actor-of-godfather-fame-dies-at-94.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0



1921: In Cincinnati, Ohio, the Board of Governors announced that Dr. Kaufman Kohler, President of the Hebrew Union College, will retire at the end of the current academic year.  Dr. Kohler has been serving as President since February, 1903.



1921: As head of the Colonial Office, Winston Churchill makes his first commitment to practical Zionist enterprise by approving Pinchas Rutenberg’s plan to harness the waters of the Jordan and Yarkon rivers for electrical power enabling the Jews to begin to make further plans for substantial urban and rural development.1922:  Birthdate of actor Steven Hill.  Born Solomon Krakovsky in Seattle Washington, he is best known for his role as Adam Schiff on the television series “Law and Order.



1922: Birthdate of Seattle, Washington, native Solomon Krkovsky, who gained fame as actor Steven Hill who was the “original team leader” on “Mission: Impossible” and the long-serving New York District Attorney Adam Schiff on “Law and Order.”
http://www.biography.com/people/steven-hill-9542271



1922(26thof Shevat, 5682): Sir Ellis Kadoorie passed away today and was buried in keeping with Jewish ritual was buried on the same day at the Jewish Cemetery in Hong Kong. Born in 1865, he was part of prominent Jewish family from Baghdad that moved to Bombay and eventually made their fortune in a variety of enterprises many of which were located in China and Hong Kong.



1923: In New York Hungarian born composer George Steiner and his wife gave birth Frederick
“Fred” Steiner whose most famous musical accomplishments may be creating the theme song for the ironic cartoon comedy show featuring Rocky and Bullwinkle and CBS’s popular series “Perry Mason.”

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-fred-steiner-20110625-story.html



1925(30th of Shevat): Rabbi Isaac Jeroham Diskin passed away



1926: In Washington, DC, President Calvin Coolidge received a delegation from “Agudath Israel, the world organization of Orthodox Jewry, who extended the felicitations of the organization.”



1928: Birthdate of Ezat Delijani, a 1979 refugee from Iran’s Islamic Revolution who became a prominent Los Angeles businessman (As reported by Dennis McLellan)



1929(14thof Adar I, 5689): Purim Katan



1929(14thof Adar I) 5689): Twenty-nine year old Sophie Josephine Franks, the daughter of Louis and Emma Sachs and the wife of Siegfried Frank passed away today in Winschoten.



1932: Senator George Norris, the Republican from Nebraska who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee was reported today to have said that he did not know of any plans for speeches being given in the Senate expressing opposition to the confirmation of Benjamin Cardozo as a Supreme Court Justice.



1932: Benjamin N. Cardozo was confirmed by a unanimous voice vote in the Senate to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Compare the ease with which Cardozo’s name sailed through the approval process with the contentious combat that surrounded the confirmation of Justice Brandeis.  



1932: The Maccabee Association of the United States hosts a benefits concert at Carnegie Hall to raise funds for an athletic stadium in Tel Aviv.



1933: “Perfect Understanding” a comedy directed by Cyril Gardner was released in the United Kingdom today.



1934: Litzi Friedman, the daughter of Viennese Jews Israel and Gisella Kohlman, married Kim Philby the British communist spy.
http://spartacus-educational.com/Litzi_Friedmann.htm



1936(1stof Adar, 5696): Rosh Chodesh Adar



1936: “Henrietta Szold…replied today to Palestine Jewry’s greetings on her seventy-fifth birthday, stating that without their assistance she could have achieved nothing.”



1936: In Jaffa, Arabs picketing construction sites where schools were being built “stoned Jewish laborers and policemen, dangerously wounding one British constable and seriously damaging” at least one building.



1937(13thof Adar, 5697): Ta’anit Esther and Erev Purim



1937: Thy Neighbour by Lord Melchett which provided “a survey of the history of the persecution of Jews, a description of the rise and progress of Zionism and he position of Jews in the world today” was included on the “Books Published Today” listing.



1937: It was reported today that funeral services have been held in Prague for Dr. Maxmillian Reiner “a founder of the Czech-Jewish movement and active member of Sokol, the Czech national gymnastic organization.



1937: The anti-Semitic student demonstrations that took place today in Hungary included driving Jews from classrooms, interrupting professors’ lectures, smash windows in Budapest’s main synagogue, and the rector of the University of Budapest forcing threes Jewish students to “absent themselves from graduation ceremonies in order to prevent disturbances.



1938: Three speakers – Reverend Edward Lodge Curran, head of the International Catholic Truth Society; Rev. Dr. Mark Depp of Christ Methodist Church in Pittsburgh; Rabbi Philip D. Bookstaber of Ohev Sholom Temple in Harrisburg --- representing Catholics, Protestants and Jews “today addressed Dickinson College’s Forum on Interreligious Cooperation which is designed to opposed attempts by dictatorships to get a foothold in America.”



1939: An informal meeting that lasted less than half an hour “between Jewish delegates to the Palestine conference and representatives of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq was held today in St. James’s Palace on the same day that Dr. Stephen S. Wise and Louis Lipsky met with United States Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy.



1939: Europe’s Conscience in Decline by Charles E. Shulman which provided “a survey of the vicissitudes of the Jews in Europe” was included on the “Books Published Today” listing



1940: “Stop Me If You've Heard This One,” a comedy radio series hosted by Milton Berle and featuring Harry Hershfield (the Jewish Will Rogers) as a panelist was broadcast for the last time today.



1940:  Winston Churchill shared a telegram with the War Cabinet in which Chaim Weizmann described the “deplorable” effect that adoption of the Land Transfer Regulations would have.  The War Cabinet was unmoved by the plea.



1940: In Elizabethtown, NJ, Gregor Piatigorsky and Jacqueline de Rothschild gave birth molecular biologist Joram Pitaigorsky, the author of Jellyfish Have Eyes.
https://www.amazon.com/Jellyfish-Have-Eyes-Joram-Piatigorsky/dp/0989562263



1941: Following a two-long pogrom in Amsterdam, “an open air meeting was held on the Noordermarkt to organize a strike to protest against the pogrom as well as the forced labor in Germany.



1942: The Struma was torpedoed and sunk by the Soviet submarine SC 213.  Approximately 769 illegal Jewish immigrants aboard the Strumaperished on their way to Palestine.  The Struma was one of a series of ships filled with Jews that attempted to run the British blockade.  The blockade was part of the British commitment to the Arabs to keep Jews out of Palestine in violation of the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the Mandate.  The British slavishly enforced the blockade during and after World War II.  The Struma traversed the Black Sea and attempted to stop at Istanbul.  But the British told the Turks that the Jews would not be allowed to land in Palestine so they turned the ship back in the Black Sea.  It was there that the ship was sunk, reportedly torpedoed by a Nazi submarine.  Exodus by Leon Uris is based on another blockade running episode that took place in 1947.



1942:  In Stamford, CT, liquor store owner Henry Lieberman and Marcia (nee Manger) Lieberman gave birth to Joseph Isadore “Joe” Lieberman the U.S. Senator from Connecticut and the first Jew to run for Vice President of the United States on the ticket of a major political party. 



1943: Hitler sent Nazi members a message on the anniversary of the establishment of the Nazi Party, "The struggle will end . . . with the liquidation of Jewry in Europe."



1944: At Birkenau, 200 of the 800 prisoners in the Sonderkommando were sent to Majdanek where they were shot.



1944: Birthdate of Bucharest native Dan Manor (Menes) who perished when the Dakar was lost in 1968/



1944: Max Jacob a French artist, who was born Jewish but converted to Catholicism, was arrested by the Gestapo and put into Orléans prison. He was then transferred to a holding camp in Drancy for transport to a concentration camp in Germany.



1946: In Tel Aviv, a throng of more than 50,000 Jews attended the funeral of four men killed during an attack on several RAF airfields. For more than six hours, this “all-Jewish” city was truly in control of the Jewish people as there were no signs of any British police or soldiers.  Jewish newspapers published black-bordered obituaries for each of the deceased.  During the funeral, the Haganah distributed leaflets, giving further proof that the airfield attacks were not the work of the Irgun, but were the work of a broader-based Jewish resistance movement.  The attack and the public outpouring of grief seemed to indicate a change in mood among the Jewish population who were now apparently willing to support more aggressive tactics designed to secure their national home in light of what they have come to view of as the British betrayal of the Zionist cause and their support for the Arabs.



1946: Birthdate of Michael Radford the New Delhi born son of an Austrian Jewish mother who became a successful director and screenwriter who directed the 2004 film version of the Merchant of Venice starring Al Pacino as Shylock.



1947: Birthdate of Lawrence Bailey Bogdanow an architect whose love for natural materials and fine craftsmanship brought a sense of warmth and ease to the interiors of dozens of Manhattan’s most popular restaurants, including Union Square Café, Savoy and the Cub Room (As reported by William Grimes)



1947: Birthdate of Juval Aviv, the native of kibbutz Kfar Menachem who is known as an Israeli-American security consultant and writer.



1949: "Under the auspices of the United Nations Mediator Dr. Ralph Bunche, an armistice was signed between Egypt and Israel."  This marked, more or less, the end of Israel's War for Independence.  "It was the first such agreement between Israel and any of its warring neighbors.  The aim of the armistice was not merely to end the fighting but, as its terms stated to 'facilitate the transition...to permanent peace'.  The phrase was taken from the United Nations Security Council resolution of November 16."  Unfortunately, the Egyptians and the other Arab nations only viewed this as a cease fire.  Over the next several decades they would violate the spirit and the agreement as they sought to destroy the state of Israel.  For the Israelis the armistice was a great victory won against seemingly impossible odds.  When asked to explain the reason for this victory which sealed the creation of the Jewish state, Yigal Yadin replied, "If we are to condense all the various factors, and they are many, which brought about victory, I would not hesitate to credit the extraordinary qualities of Israel's youth, during the War of Independence, with that victory."  In other words, it was the spirit of the people that provided the will to hold out in the early dark days and then to take advantage of later breakthroughs to turn toward victory.  As we study Jewish History, it will be interesting to see the similarity between the causes of Jewish victories in ancient and modern times.



1949: President Weizmann entrusted David Ben-Gurion with the task of forming Israel’s first government.



1950: Ada Maimon, a member of the Knesset, is spearheading the drive to tighten Israel’s marriage laws.  She is seeking to raise the minimum age of consent from 15 to 18 and tighten up on rules concerning the exceptions.  Current law, which is left over from the British mandate allows girls to marry at the age of 15 but allows for marriage at a younger age with parental consent. Miss Maimon would limit exceptions to girls at the age of 17.  Miss Maimon, who is a member of the Knessett, is most concerned about ending what she considers the abuse of this “loophole” that has girls as young as 12 getting married.  Primary opposition is coming from Jews of Oriental orign who are offended by Miss Maimon’s characterization of Oriental mothers as “breeding delinquents.”  The fifty-seven year old Miss Maimon is the sister of Rabbi Judah L. Maimon Israel’s Minister for Religious Affairs and is in charge of the agricultural training farm at Ayanot that was founded in 1930.



1952:  Birthdate of Simon Weinstock, British businessman and racehorse owner.



1953: Birthdate of March Feinstein the native of Mitchell, South Dakota who has served as the Representative from the 14th District in the South Dakota House of Repesentatives.



1954: Birthdate of Dutch author Leon de Winter whose works include the novels Kaplanand Hoffman’s Hunger.



1956: “Churchill received the Israeli Ambassador, Eliahu Elath, who presented him with a portfolio of woodcuts depicting ancient Jerusalem as an eightieth birthday gift from the Prime Minister and Government of Israel.



1956:  Birthdate of television journalist, Paula Zahn.



1958: In London, Katherine Margaret McAdam and Lucian Freud gave birth Jane McAdam the “winner of the 2014 European Trebbia Award” who is the great-grand daughter of Sigmund Freud.



1959: Twenty-one year old “Roughhouse Rudy” LaRusso scored 29 points as Dartmouth defeated Holy Cross.



1967(13th of Adar I, 5727): German born, American composer Franz Waxman passed away.  Waxman was nominated for 12 Oscars.  In back to back victories he won for “Sunset Boulevard” and “A Place in the Sun.”  These two films give us a sense of the breadth of Waxman’s skills since the first film was classic cinema noir and the second was a Western.



1972(9thof Adar, 5732): Ninety-year old Sidney Hollander, a 1902 graduate of the University of Maryland, President of the Maryland Pharmaceutical Company and the national president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds from 1939 to 1956 passed away today in Baltimore.



1973: First screening today of “A Brand New Life” starring Martin Balsam with music by Billy Goldenberg.



1976: Jules Feiffer's "Knock Knock" premiered in New York City.



1976: Birthdate of Kiryat Ata native Yuval Noah Harari, a professor of History at Hebrew University and the history of two major works: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/24/homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review



1977(6thof Adar, 5737): Fifty-five year old Milton “Milt” Kaimen who was a successful French horn player and occupied a French horn chair at the Metropolitan Opera” before pursuing his career as a comedic actor and standup comedian passed away today.
http://cscottrollins.blogspot.com/2013/03/milt-kamen-stand-up-guy.html



1978(17thof Adar I, 5738): Lionel Jacobson, the son of Lithuanian immigrant Moses Jacobson and the brother of Sydney Jacobson with whom he created a major European textile business when he combing Jackson the Tailor with the Burton Tailoring Group and who was President of the Newcastle Jewish Representative Council passed away today.



1981(20thof Adar I, 5741): Eighty-two year old Moshe Nathanson, the Jerusalem born son of Rabbi Nahum Nathanson, who moved to Canada in 1922 before settling in New York where “ he became the cantor for the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (Mordecai Kaplan's Synagogue in New York) passed away today,
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/25/obituaries/moshe-nathanson.html



1981: Jean Harris as convicted of murdering Dr. Herman Tarnower, the Jewish author of the bestselling The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. From “eat, eat my children eat” to a mania for weight watching; such is the Jewish experience in the last hundred years. 



1981: Two bronze doors, weighing about 200 pounds, were stolen from a mausoleum at the Baron Hirsch Cemetery on Staten Island cemetery today. The police estimated the value of the doors at $600.



1983(11thof Adar, 5743): Ta’anit Esther



1987(24th of Shevat, 5747): Marian Gerber Greenberg, who worked closely with Henrietta Szold, the founder of the Hadassah, the Woman's Zionist Organization of America, and its Youth Aliyah to help rescue thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Germany, died of congestive heart failure at the Cooley-Dickenson Hospital, Northampton, Mass. She was 89 years old and lived in Amherst, Mass. Mrs. Greenberg was the first national chairman of Youth Aliyah, serving in the post from 1936 to 1941. A national board member of Hadassah since 1927, she was a national vice president and a Hadassah delegate to five world Zionist Congresses between 1931 and 1952. She was also national chairman of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Building Fund. She edited the Hadassah newsletter (now a magazine) and, from 1943 to 1946 was editor of the monthly bulletin of the Citizens' Housing and Planning Council of New York. A former resident of Manhattan, she retired to Amherst in 1976, where she taught courses in the Bible and modern Jewish thought, sponsored by the Judaic Studies department of the University of Massachusetts. She was born in Philadelphia and graduated from Cornell University in 1919. She was the widow of David Greenberg, a writer on wildlife and conservation, who died in 1968.



1988(6thof Adar, 5748): Sixty-one year old Seymour Siegel, the Rabbi who has been a major force in Conservative Judaism for the last four decades passed away today. (As reported by Ari L.Goldman)
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/25/obituaries/rabbi-seymour-siegel-61-leader-in-conservative-judaism-is-dead.html



1989(19thof Adar I): Sergeant Binyamin Meisner, an Israeli paratrooper, was killed today when he was struck in the head by a concrete block thrown from a building in Nablus, in the West Bank, the army said. Meisner, a 24-year-old reserve sergeant, is the sixth Israeli soldier to die in the current Arab wave of violence.



1989: Premiere of “My Left Foot” starring Daniel Day-Lewis with music by Elmer Bernstein.



1991: The New York Times reviews To Know A Woman by Amos Oz.



1991: Allied forces began their ground offensive in Gulf War – a war which was unique for the Israelis because they had trust the United States to protect them from the Iraqi Scud attacks that were cheered by Palestinians.



1994(12th of Adar, 5754): Dinah Shore passed away. Born Francis Rose Shore in 1916, the Tennessee native gained fame as a singer and star of her own television variety show. (As reported by Stephen Holden)
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/25/obituaries/dinah-shore-homey-singer-and-star-of-tv-dies-at-76.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm



1995: “New Director of Museum Was Censured by Cornell” published today described the reaction of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s to allegation that Steven Katz, the director-designate has falsified his record of academic achievement.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/24/arts/new-director-of-museum-was-censured-by-cornell.html



1996:  Andrew Beckerman-Rodau a Jewish professor at Suffolk University Law School flew from Detroit to Kiev. His visit to Kiev was at the invitation of the Ukrainian Supreme Court in cooperation with USAID, an agency of the United States government. USAID's mission is to assist this newly independent country in developing a democratic government.



1996: For the first time, HBO televised “The Late Shift” featuring Bab Balaban and Sandra Bernhard for the first time.



1997: Time published “Echoes of the Holocaust” that describes attempt for victims regain some of the wealth stolen from them be bankers during the Nazi domination of Europe.
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,985946,00.html



1998(27th of Shevat, 5758): Comedian Henny Youngman passed away at the age of 92.  Youngman was famous for his tagline “Take my wife please.”  Youngman did not have a Bar Mitzvah as a child.  When he was in his seventies, he finally had one much to his joy and delight. (As reported by Mervyn Rothstein)
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/25/arts/henny-youngman-king-of-the-one-liners-is-dead-at-91-after-6-decades-of-laughter.html



1999(7th of Adar, 5759): David Daube, a world renowned Biblical law scholar who charmed generations of students while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley's law school passed away at the age of 90.
http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/10358/noted-bible-scholar-david-daube-dies/



2001(18thof Adar I, 5760): Eight-four year old Bronx born Bernard Opper, the All SEC Guard for the pre-WWII University of Kentucky Wildcats who went on to play for nine years in the pros passed away today.
http://www.bigbluehistory.net/bb/Statistics/Players/Opper_Bernard.html



2001(1st of Adar, 5761): Rosh Chodesh Adar



2002: Bruce Fleisher won the RJR (Golf) Championship



2002(11th of Adar, 5762):  Leo Orenstein, Russian born American composer and pianist passed away at the age of 89.



2002: “An exhibition of the work of colonial silversmith Mike Myers, one of the most accomplished craftsman working in pre-industrial America” is scheduled to open today at the Skirball Cultural Center.



2002: In Salt Lake City, the Winter Olympics where Sarah Hughes won a Gold Medal for Ladies’ Figure Skating came to a close today.



2002: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski by Blake Eskin and Kindred Souls: The Friendship of Eleanor Roosevelt and David Gurewitsch by Edna P. Gurewitsch. (Gurewitsch, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia was “Eleanor Roosevelt's friend, confidant, personal physician, housemate, and traveling companion during her post-White House years.”)



2003(22nd of Adar I, 5736): Ninety-two year old 10-time Oscar nominated composer Walter Scharf passed away today.
http://articles.latimes.com/2003/feb/28/local/me-scharf28



2003: An International Conference hosted by the Dubnow Institute on “Transforming Religious and Ethnic Emblematics of Judaism and Jewishness” ended today.



2004(1stof Adar, 5764): Rosh Chodesh Adar



2004(1stof Adar, 5764): Eighty-three year old Albert “Albie” Axelrod the leading American fencer during the middle of the 20th century who won the Bronze at the 1960 Summer Olympics passed away today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/05/sports/albert-axelrod-83-a-champion-in-fencing.html



2005: Roger Ebert’s review of “Paper Clips” was published today.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/paper-clips-2005



2006: London Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended from office for four weeks after being found guilty of bringing his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard.



2006: “After the Wedding” directed by Susanne Bier was released today in Denmark.



2006: "Growing Up Jewish In Nogales: Memories Of a Bygone Era," by Renee Claire and "Tucson Was a Wonderful Place to Grow Up In the '40s and '50s," by Lori Olshansky Sobel err published today in the Arizona Jewish Post.



2007: Israel Non-Stop  “seven days of cutting edge Israeli music, theatre, film, art, food and more” began in New York with the appearance of Israeli music phenomenon Mosh Ben-Ari. According to the playbill, “Mosh Ben-Ari combines ecstatic middle eastern rhythms, spirituality, and scents of reggae and African beats. Mosh Ben-Ari's joyous concerts around the world turn into high spirited celebrations for peace. His recently released album, Go Giving, has been praised by music critics and fans alike.”



2007: “West Bank Story” won the Academy Award for Short Film-Live Action. The 21 minute musical has a “West Side Story” motif. “In this case the confrontation is between competing West Bank Falafel stands, the Israeli Kosher King and the Palestinian Hummus Hut.



2008: Rabbi Avrohom Yitzchok Ulman was one of the main speakers at a major protest rally against the growing influence of nationalistic (Zionist) thought and philosophies in the Haredi world” Born in Hungary, Ulman is an expert on Jewish law pertaining to fiancé and property and he is a member of the Dushinksy Hasidic Movement founded by Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky



2008:  “Burnt Diary Yields Horror of Warsaw Ghetto” published today described the recovery of the writings of person known only as “Debora” who chronicled life in one of the most infamous places of Jewish captivity.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/25/secondworldwar.usa



2008: In Australia at Parliament House, Rabbis Reisenberg, Rubinfeld and Gutnik are scheduled to officiate at the marriage of Federal Labor MP Michael Darby and Amanda Mendes Da Costa “in the first Jewish wedding to be held in the big house” with the bedecken taking place in the Marble Hall followed by the trip to the chuppah which was erected at the Queens Terrace. (As reported by Jehane Sharah)



2008: The Sunday New York Times book section featured a review of a biography about Jewish author and playwright David Mamet entitled David Mamet: A Life In The Theatre by Ira Nadel.



2008: An exhibition styled “CHIM: The Photography of David Seymour (1911 – 1956)” came to an end at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco.



2008: The Washington Post book section featured a review of Alfred Kazin: A Biography by Richard M. Cook and Staring At The Sun Overcoming the Terror of Death by Irvin D. Yalom, the award winning Jewish born psychiatrist and author.



2008: Israelis (and many others) wonder if Beaufort directed by Joseph Cedar will win the Oscar for best Foreign Language Film.  This is the seventh time an Israeli film has been nominated in this category. Beaufort is set “in the days leading up to Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. The soldiers stationed at the mountaintop outpost of Beaufort live under a barrage of constant attacks. Frustrated by the knowledge that they are risking--and often losing--their lives in defense of a fortress that will soon be abandoned, the men struggle to do their duty while grieving for their dead comrades and preparing for the evacuation.”The movie is based on the novelIm Yesh Gan Eden (If There is a Paradise) by Ron Leshem, who co-wrote the screenplay with Cedar.



2009: Dalia Itzik completed her term as Speaker of the Knesset



2009: Paul Finkelman, a professor of law and public policy who had reviewed Eli Faber’s Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straightand is the author of Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, presents a lecture on abolitionist John Brown as part of the "Great Lives Lecture Series" at the University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA.



2009: More than 300 rabbis gather at the 120th annual Central Conference American Rabbis convention opens in Jerusalem, Israel.



2009(1stof Adar, 5769): Rosh Chodesh Adar



2009(1stof Adar, 5769): Eighty-seven year old choreographer Pearl Lang, the founder of the Pearl Lang Dance Theatre passed away today. (As reported by Jack Anderson)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/arts/dance/27lang.html



2009:More than three months after the 17th Knesset was dispersed, the 18th Knesset was sworn in this afternoon, in a ceremony that began with a moving speech by President Shimon Peres, during which he paid tribute to the IDF for the recent Gaza operation, hailed US President Barack Obama's election and called for a peace deal with the Palestinians during the next Knesset's term.



2009: The Jerusalem Post reported that an archive of over 10,000 works of modern Yiddish literature has gone on-line. The collection of full texts, comprising the National Yiddish Book Center's Steven Spielberg Digital Library, can be read, downloaded and printed free at
www.archive.org/details/nationalyiddishbookcenter.



The project of putting 3 million pages on-line was undertaken by the Yiddish Book Center and the Internet Archive of San Francisco. "It's an historic moment for Yiddish culture," said Aaron Lansky, founder and president of the nonprofit Yiddish Book Center. "The magnificent record of a civilization the Nazis sought to destroy has been brought fully into the 21st century." The collection includes original novels, stories, poetry, drama and nonfiction titles published in Yiddish over the past 150 years. Most out-of-print Yiddish works are already in the public domain. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said, "This is the first time a full literature of a people has been available on-line. We hope others follow the Yiddish Book Center's pioneering example."



2010:The Israel Ballet, Israel's foremost classical ballet company which was founded in 1967 by Berta Yampolsky and Hillel Markman is scheduled to perform "Don Quixote" in Elmira, NY.



2010:Ted Leonsis, the AOL entrepreneur and the owner of the Washington Capitals as well as a partner in the Washington Wizards franchise, is scheduled to discuss his new book, "The Business of Happiness: 6 Secrets to Extraordinary Success in Life and Work," at the Sixth & Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C.



2010:A bill that allows civil marriage in Israel to couples who could not be married by the rabbinate failed by a large margin in its initial reading.



2010:Today, the Israel Flower Growers Association reported a 30-percent drop in exports for Valentine’s Day compared to last year.



2010: Forty year old Dawn Brancheau who was “pulled into a tank and killed by a six-ton orca” at Seaworld – a death which Stephen A. Schwarzman blamed on her because he claimed “that the veteran animal trainer” had broken “multiple safety rules,” a claim which the company later disclaimed.



2011: Gainsbourg,the boldly imaginative and wildly entertaining biopic of Jewish French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, one of the most iconic and diversely talented music artists of the 20th Century” and Chariots of Fire are scheduled to be shown at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival



2011: Ruth David, Professor Peter Davies (Edinburgh) and Dr Andrea Hammel (Aberystwyth) are scheduled to present a program entitled “Holocaust Texts and Translation” at The Wiener Library in London, UK.



2011: The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to continue its year round programming in Berkeley with an encore presentation of 2010 Festival sleeper hit Father’s Footsteps– a gripping coming of age drama about a Tunisian-Israeli family threatened by violence and crime.



2011: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present: "Integrale Yidishkeyt": Modern Yiddish Culture's Turn Inward in Response to the Holocaust.



2011: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present a discussion of Joseph Roth's Job



2011: IAF aircraft struck against a number of terrorists in the southern Gaza Strip today in a joint IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) operation following a rocket being fired into Beersheba.



2011: With Israeli Apartheid Week a week away, Israel seems to have found an unexpected champion in Michael Lucas, a popular gay columnist and porno producer with dual US-Israeli citizenship who told The Jerusalem Post by phone from New York today that “I defeated a group of anti- Semites” who sought to equate Israel with the former South African apartheid regime at an event slated to be held at the city’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) Center.



2011(20thof Adar I, 5771): Jerrold (Yoram) Kessel passed away today.
http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=209791



2011: Judy Gross, the wife of Alan Gross “pleaded with the Cuban government to release her husband on humanitarian grounds. Gross' daughter, 26, has breast cancer, and his mother has been diagnosed with lung cancer.” (As reported by JTA)



2012(1stof Adar, 5772): Rosh Chodesh Adar



2012(1stof Adar, 5772): Ninety-two year old mathematician Benedict Freeman who co-authored the novel Mrs. Mike with his wife Nancy passed away today.
http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-benedict-freedman-20120305-story.html



2012: In London, Claudia Roden is scheduled to talk about discoveries she made while researching her new book “The Food of Spain” as part of Jewish Book Week.



2012: As many as 100 college students who are part of the Kol HaOlam competition are scheduled to attend the Ruach Minyan at Adas Israel in Washington, DC.



2012: In New York City, Temple Emanu-El is scheduled to host a Friday night service that will include a commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the founding of Hadassah attended by Marcie Natan, National President of Hadassah.



2012: Tensions continued to escalate in the South early this morning with the Israel Air Force making two separate forays into the Gaza Strip to bomb terror targets in response to the firing of Kassam rockets into Israeli communities.



2012: Security forces used force to disperse hundreds of Muslim worshipers at the Temple Mount today who rioted and threw stones following a tense week in the Old City. 2013: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel, City of Angels Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf and the recently released paperback edition of God’s Jury; The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy



2013: Center for Jewish History, YIVO Institute and the International Center of Photography are scheduled to sponsor a screen of Eleanor Antin’s “Man Without a World.”



2013: Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa is scheduled to celebrate Purim complete with a megillah reading and separate costume contests for children and adults.



2013: Dedication of the Jacobs Family Education Center is scheduled to take place at Agudas Achim in Iowa City, Iowa.



2013: The Maccaebeats are scheduled to perform at The Moriah School Purim Chagiga in Englewood, NJ



2013(14th of Adar, 5773): Purim



2013: Purim’s carnival atmosphere spread out across Israel today, with revelers of all types and ages soaking up the holiday cheer, many bedecked in bright, loud and extravagant costumes.   2014: German Chancellor Angela Merkel is scheduled to begin a two day visit to Israel.



2014: At the Center for Jewish History, Henry L. Feingold is scheduled to speak on “American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion.”



2014: “Dancing Alfonso” is scheduled to be shown at the UK Jewish Film Festival



2014: Israel Apartheid Week, a week-long orgy of anti-Semitism hidden under the guise of anti-Israel lectures and workshops is scheduled to begin today.



2014(24thof Adar I, 5774): Sixty-nine year old comedy screenwriter Harold Remis passed away.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/movies/harold-ramis-who-helped-redefine-what-makes-us-laugh-on-screen-dies-at-69.html?_r=0

2014: Ian Heath Gershengorn, Principal Deputy Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice, is scheduled to address the Hadassah Attorneys Council in Washington, DC.


2014: In New Orleans, the Jewish Studies Department of Tulane University is scheduled to present a lecture by Tome Beller entitled “J.D. Salinger’s Late Barmitzva.”


2014: According to a report today on the news site timenews.in.ua, the Giymat Rosa Synagogue in Zaporizhia located 250 miles southeast of Kiev was firebombed overnight.


2014: Israel is facing the driest winter since 1927, Ma'ariv reported today, leaving experts concerned. The Kinneret (Sea of Galilee)'s water level has dropped by four centimeters since the rainy season began, compared to a 1.97 meter rise over the same five-month period in 2013. (As reported by Tova Dvorin)


2015: The Tulane University Jewish Studies Department chaired by Professor Brian Horowitz is scheduled to host a lecture by Antony Polonsky entitled “Writing the History of the Jews of Poland and Russia.”


2015: Robin Renwick, former British Ambassador to South Africa is scheduled to discuss Helen Suzman’s extraordinary life and achievements with her daughter, art historian Frances Suzman Jowell and niece, actress and director Janet Suzman at the Jewish Museum in London during Jewish Book Week.


2015: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present “Roads Taken:  The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way.”


2015(5thof Adar, 5775): One hundred and nine year old Wall Street investor Irving Kahn passed away today.

2016: Itzik Barak the executive chef from Jerusalem’s Waldorf Astoria is scheduled to prepare 150 plated dishes of the Seven Species for the panel of judges at the annual Tastes of Waldorf Astoria competition.


2016: “The Breman Museum is scheduled to sponsor "Fitting In: A Short History of Jewish Film in America" at The Temple in Atlanta, GA.


2016: “Baba Joon” “Israel’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award” is scheduled to be shown on the opening night of the 26th Annual Washington Jewish Film Festival.



2017: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a pre-Shabbat celebration combining singing and challah baking.



2017: “Major roads and key thoroughfares were blocked to traffic in Tel Aviv today for the city’s marathon, with an estimated record number of 40,000 runners from across the country and abroad taking part in the annual event” which was won by Ethiopian runner Balata Mekonnen.



2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host both Orthodox and Egalitarian Kabbalat Services, followed by Shabbat dinner and voting for next term’s president and vice president.



2017: At Agudas Achim, Professor Robert Cargill is scheduled to deliver a lecture in which he “unfolds biblical verses talking about the kind of life one ought to live and about the origin of the z’’l tradition.”



2018(9thof Adar, 5778): Shabbat Zachor; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/



2018: Agudas Achim is scheduled to host the Hillel Adult B’nai Mitzvah Service.



2018: Twenty-one year old Miss Internet Tamar Morali is scheduled to take part in “the final stage of the Miss Germany Contest today in Germany’s Europa Park.”



2018: “Israeli company Roy Assaf Dance is scheduled to perform at the Norman Rothstein Theatre.



 


 

This Day, Feburary 25, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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February 25



161 BCE: Jewish soldiers led by Judah Maccabee defeated Nicanor, the Syrian general who had boasted that he would destroy the Temple and mount Judah’s head on the gates of Jerusalem.



138: The Emperor Hadrian adopts Antoninus Pius, effectively making him his successor. For Jews Hadrian stands out as one of the cruelest of the Roman emperors.  He is the one who defeated Bar Kochba.  It is said that Hadrain was more evil than Titus because he did not just make war against the Jewish people.  He made war against Judaism by banning its practice.  In one of those many ironic twists of fates, Antionious Pious, his hand-picked successor reversed the decrees of Hadrain. He allowed the Torah to be studied and is laws obeyed.  He reinstituted the ban on imperial statues in synagogues and he allowed the Jews to practice the rite of circumcision.



628: The reign Persian Shah Khosrau II who “conquered Jerusalem after a brief siege in 614 during the Byzantine – Sasanian War” came to an end today.



1308: Coronation of King Edward II.  One of this uniquely incompetent monarch’s claim to fame is that he was the first King of England to reign over a realm without any Jews since the Norman Conquest in 1066.  Edward’s father, Edward I, had expelled the Jews in 1290.



1304: Birthdate of Ibn Battuta, the Moslem Moroccan explorer who visit large segments of Asia and Africa where he chronicled meetings with various groups including Jews in India and China.



1333: Ibn Batuta, the Arab traveler, visited Jewish communities in India



1336: Alfonso X of Castile was persuaded by the apostate Alfonso of Valladolid to ban the prayer Aleinu. Alfonso alleged that the prayer was anti-Christian. As a result, many Jewish communities excised a sentence from the prayer which has only been printed in recent years in only some prayer books.  The offending line which was taken out comes just before the time when everybody bows and recites “Va-ananchnu Kor’im – But we bend our knees…” The line that was taken out reads “For they bow to vanity and emptiness and pray to a god which helps not.”  If you read the entire prayer and insert this line, the following line makes a lot more sense.  According to several commentators the offending line had nothing to do with the Christians but had been placed there to refer to all heretics and that its origins were found in Isaiah (30:7 and 45:20). Further evidence refuting the claim that it was anti-Christian can be found in the fact that it was composed in the third century by Rav Abba Arucha head of the Academy of Sura (Persia) which was not a Christian country.  Ashkenazi prayer books dropped the line but Sephardic prayer books i.e. those in the land of Islam, retained the line.  Today it can be found in some Ashkenazi prayer books including those in the Artscroll Series.



 1451: Nicholas V issued a papal bull banning all social intercourse between Christians and Jews probably caused by a fear of Christians being attracted to Judaism. A Christian who converted to Judaism and the Jews who helped him were usually subject to the death penalty in most Catholic and Eastern Orthodox countries.  It is amazing that with the Church's attitude towards Judaism, and with the contempt that Jews in which Jews were held, that there should be such a fear of "Jewish missionizing".



1570:  Pope Pious V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I.  This was one of the steps on the road to loosening the stranglehold that doctrinal Christianity had on Western Europe.  As the Church’s grip on Europe weakened it opened up the way to a religious toleration that was highly beneficial to the Jewish people.



1593: Pope Clement VIII issued “Caeca et Obdurata Hebraeorum perfidia” (the blind and obdurate perfidy of the Hebrews) a papal bull which expelled the Jews from the Papal States, effectively revoking the bull Christiana pietas issued in 1586 by his predecessor Pope Sixtus V.The bull was a culmination of Clement VII's tightening of the anti-Jewish measures of his predecessors which began with his elevation to the papacy in 1592. The bull gave Jews three months to leave the Papal States (with the exception of Rome, Ancona, and the Comtat Venaissin of Avignon). The main effect of the bull was to evict Jews who had returned to areas of the Papal States (mainly Umbria) after 1586 (following their expulsion in 1569) and to expel Jewish communities from cities like Bologna (which had been incorporated under papal dominion since 1569). For the Jews remaining within Rome, Ancona, or the Comtat Venaissin, the bull re-established mandatory weekly sermons. The bull also resulted in the relocation of Jewish cemeteries to Ferrara and Mantua. The bull alleged that Jews in the Papal States had engaged in usury and exploited the hospitality of Clement VIII's predecessors "who, in order to lead them from their darkness to knowledge of the true faith, deemed it opportune to use the clemency of Christian piety towards them" (alluding to Christiana pietas).



1713: The reign of Frederick I, who in 1709 appointed Aaron ben Benjamin Wolf “to the office of chief rabbi of Berlin with jurisdicition over all the Jews living in the mark” came to an end today.



1795: First New York City performance of “Sheva, The Benevolent” by English playwright Richard Cumberland which features, Sheva, “the Jewish moneylender as the benevolent hero.”



1799: Napoleon defeat the army led by Al Jazzar as he made his way from Khan Younis to Gaza.



1799: Napoleon captured Gaza. (Yes, the same place in the news today). This was his first encounter with "Palestinian" Jews.” It is said that he offered “the reestablishment of ancient Jerusalem” as a Jewish homeland in return for Jewish loyalty.



1806: Birthdate of Rabbi Salomon Ulmann the French rabbi who among other things organized the Central Conference of the Chief Rabbis of France



1806: Baptism of German theologian Johann August Wilhelm Neander who had been born David Mendel, the son of a Jewish peddler Emmanuel Mendel.



1824: Moritz Bertram married Sophia Boss at the Hambro Synagogue.



1825(7thof Adar I, 5585): Thirty-one year old Hannah Aarons (Hannah bat Aharon be Jacob ZL) passed away today.



1840: Birthdate of German philosopher, the Kantian, Otto Liebmann
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0012_0_12511.html



1841: Birthdate of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the French artist who painted “Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers” (most commonly referred to as Pink and Blue).The painting portrayed the 2 daughters of the banker Louis Raphael Cahen d'Anvers, the blonde, Elisabeth, born in December 1874, and the younger, Alice, in February 1876, when they were respectively six and five years old. The artist produced many portraits for the families of the Parisian Jewish community at the time. Renoir was commissioned to paint many portraits for this family, which he had met through the collector Charles Ephrussi, proprietor of the "Gazette des Beaux-Arts."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_and_Blue_(Renoir)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Renoir_Mlles_Cahen_d_Anvers.jpg



1844: Birthdate of Leó Frankel, the Hungarian born revolution who active in the First International and a member of the Paris Commune that was formed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War.



1846: Henry Hyman Defries married Dinah Samson in Liverpool today.



1847: State University of Iowa was approved.  What is now called the University of Iowa has certainly provided employment and educational opportunities for a fair number of Jews from the land of the Hawks as well a number of other places. The 28,000 student body includes approximately 600 Jewish undergrads and 200 Jewish grad students.  The school offers ten Jewish studies courses and the campus offers students a choice of Hillel or Chabad.  They also have access to Agudas Achim and its Rabbi, Jeff Portman, a mensch in the truest sense of the word. Several distinguished Jewish scholars have taught at the university including the late Dr. Jonathan A. Goldstein who provided the introduction and commentary for The Anchor Bible's Book of Maccabees and Dr. David Schoenbaum who has authored numerous works about German history as well as The United States and the State of Israel, a diplomatic history of relations between the United States and Israel from 1948 to 1993.



1848: Birthdate of Eugène-Melchior, vicomte de Vogüé the French diplomat and archaeologist who provided “much of the earliest documentation about the Temple Mount. Because his work was done with the “full consent of the Muslim Counsel” he “work included the most complete and detailed mongraphs on how the mosques looked and their relationships to ancient Temple of Jerusalem.”  De Vogue “was also known for his architectural studies of Jerusalem and its surroundings.” (For more on this Digging Through the Bible by Richard A. Freund



1855: The Jewish residents of Lancaster PA organized Congregation Shaarai Shomayim which then took possession of the old Jewish cemetery.



1856: Professor O.M. Mitchell is scheduled deliver a lecture tonight entitled "Critical Examination of the Astronomical Allusions and Illustrations Employed by the Writers of the Sacred Books of the Hebrews" at the Brooklyn Athenaeum. 



1858: Sir Anthony de Rothschild, Louis Nathan, Ephraim Alex and Marcus Samuel, the father of the first Lord Bearsted were among those who attended a conference designed to deal with the problems of “the strange and foreign poor” held in the chambers of the Great Synagogue in London.



1859: The first formal meeting was held at 31 New Bridge Street of the Board of Guardians which consisted of delegates from the London’s three leading congregations.



1860: Birthdate of Professor H.L. Sabsovich, the native Berdiansk, Russia who came to the United States in 1888 to serve as an agricultural chemist at Colorado State Agricultural College before becoming the “General Agent of the Baron De Hirsch Fund and the first mayor of the Jewish Agricultural Colony at Woodbine, NJ.



1861: Judah P. Benjamin began serving as Attorney General in the cabinet of Jefferson Davis.



1862(25thof Adar I, 5622): German educator Emanuel Hecht passed away.
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7469-hecht-emanuel



1862: Birthdate of Stanisław Głąbiński Polish attorney and political leader who shared a cell in Lubyanka Prison with Rabbi Moses Schorr with whom he formed a close friendship before the Jew and Gentile met the same fate – murder by the NKVD in 1941.



1862: A fire broke at 6 o'clock this morning in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, on Lamartine-place.  Damages which are valued at three hundred dollars, should be fully covered by insurance.



1862: During the American Civil War commissioning of the USS Monitor, the U.S. Navy ironclad with the revolving turret that revolutionized naval war and whose crew included William Durst, the Austrian born “coal heaver” who was the last surviving member of the ship’s crew.



1865(29th of Shevat, 5625): Shabbat Shekalim



1867: Ralph Disraeli and his wife gave birth to British political leader Coningsby Disraeli, the nephew of Benjamin Disraeli.



1868: In Portsmouth, Isaac Phillips, the rabbi of the Portsmouth Hebrew Congregation and his wife gave birth to Jacob Phillips, the author of A Peep Into the Talmud andJewish Rites and Ceremonies who served as the rabbi of congregations at Tredegar, Swansea, Sunderland and Port Elizabeth, Cape Colony and was “Justice of the Peace for the Division of Port Elizabeth’



1870(24thof Adar I, 5630): Seventy-two year old Danish poet Henrik Hertz passed away today.



1870: As a reminder that the battle over the separation of church and state which has been a cornerstone of Jewish success in the United States is on-going, a meeting was held at the Reformed Presbyterian Church in New York in which the attendees called for a national convention that would promote “constitutional recognition of Almighty God and the Christian religion in the United States.”



1871(4thof Adar, 5631): Parashat Terumah



1871(4thof Adar, 5631): Seventy-two year old Maurice Schlesinger (born Moritz Adolf Slesinger)
“a German music editor” who followed in the footsteps of his father Adolf Martin Schlesinger and founding a music publishing house passed away today in Baden-Baden.



1871: Rabbi Stephen Wise of Cincinnati delivered a lecture on the Apostle Paul, the third and final in a series of addresses on the Origin of Christianity. The well attended event took place at Steinway Hall in New York City.



1874: Jonas Hart married Amelia Cohen in Dublin today.



1875: Today eleven year old pianist Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler made her debut “at a concert of the Wolfsohn’s Beethoven Society.”



1876(30thof Shevat, 5636): Rosh Chodesh Adar



1877: It was reported that the Purim Association will host a masked ball at Delmonico’s on March 1st in celebration of this minor Jewish festival.



1877: A reception celebrating Purim was held today at the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews.  The event was hosted by the lady managers of the well-maintained facility located at 87th Street and Avenue A in New York City.



1877: Professor Felix Adler delivered a detailed laudatory address to a mostly Jewish audience at Standard Hall on the life and teachings of Baruch Spinoza.  The 200th anniversary of the death of the famous Jewish Dutch philosopher provided the impetus for the “panegyric.”



1879” Birthdate of German silent film actor and director Julius Falkenstein who passed away the same year the Nazis came to power.



1880(13th of Adar, 5640) Ta'anit Esther



1881: It was reported today that the will of Louis Strauss of San Francisco includes bequests to the Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum and Home Society of San Francisco ($10,000), and the Jewish Orphan Asylum of New York ($5,000) as well as three other non-Jewish institutions.



1881: It was reported today that Marion Calisch, young Jewess kindergarten teacher who disappeared mysteriously, has been re-united with her parents and taken home.  The police are still investigating the matter since they do not find Ms Calisch’s explanation of events creditable.



1882: A mass meeting is scheduled to be held at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia during which the attendees will express their outrage at the treatment of Russian Jews by the Czarist government.  The multi-denominational array of speakers will be expressing their sympathy with the plight of the refugees, some of whom have just arrived in the City of Brotherly Love.



1882: It was reported today that John W. Foster will be deliver a lecture on “The Czar and His People” before the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in Chickering Hall.  The New York event will be a benefit for Jewish refugees who have fled persecution in Russia.



1882: A Purim celebration for the Temple Beth-El Sunday School students was held at the Terrace Garden this afternoon in New York City.



1882: The Young Men’s Association of Temple Beth-El sponsored a grand ball in Terrace Garden.  This Purim celebration was organized by Nathan Ullman, Louis Lowenfels and Samuel Eiseman.



1884: Birthdate of Else Feldman, the native of Leopoldstadt (Austria) who overcame poverty to become a leading socialist author and writer which did not keep the Nazis from murdering her Sobibor.



1885: Birthdate of Princess Alice of Battenberg, the mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II, who personally saved Rachel Cohen and two of her children from the Nazi death camps.



1887: Relief expedition to rescue the apostate Jew turned Ottoman official Emin Pasha, under the command of Henry M. Stanley, left Zanzibar for its next stop, Banana at the mouth of the Congo River.



1888: Birthdate of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State from 1953 through 1959.  No, Dulles was not Jewish. But this patrician Cold Warrior did play a major role in American Israeli relations and his effect was less than positive.  He sided with the Soviets in their support of Nasser during the Suez crisis of 1956.  He led the forces that put pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Sinai and Gaza leaving the terrorist bases in tact while propping up the Egyptian dictator.  Dulles and Eisenhower’s misguided action led to the development of the independent French nuclear capability and to the Six Day War in 1967.



1890: Birthdate of Kilburn, London, native Julia Myra Hess the accomplished concert pianist remembered by many as the artist who “gave almost 2,000 lunchtime concert” during the six years of WW II – a performance time brought about by the wartime blackout and the need for moral building activities.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/history/myra-hess-concerts/myra-remembered



1891: Charles W. Foster began serving as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, a position which gave him considerable control over the increasing influx of Jews from Russia and Poland; a fact that would be duly noted later in appeals made to him by leaders of the American Jewish Committee.



1892: “No Mercy For the Jews” published today provided a detailed account of the report prepared by Colonel John B. Weber who had represented the 33rdDistrict of New York in the 49th and 50th Congresses and Dr. Walter Kempster on the “conditions and treatment of the Jewish subjects of the Czar.  The report which was prepared for the House Committee on Immigration, “sets forth calmly, dispassionately and with a careful regard to accuracy...a state of things unheard of in modern times.” 



1893: In Newark, NJ, “Max Bornestien, a Polish Jews…has retained counsel in a suit for damages alleging that the defendants, three constables “brought pork sausage into his house and ate them therein” defiling his property in such a manner “that he can no longer make use of it.”



1894: In Philadelphia, PA, a non-sectarian memorial service in memory of the late George W. Childs was held at Keneseth Israel.



1894: It was reported today that a member of the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore has contributed a paper on the “The Booth” the famous family of 19thcentury thespians.  According to the paper, they were originally a Jewish family from Spain named “Cabana.”  When one of the ancestors settled in England he translated the family name into English and that back the family name – Booth



1895: “Once Famous, Now Forgotten” published today described the life of Bernard Bauer, the Hungarian Jew who converted to Catholicism, where, as Father Maria Berhnard he became a popular preacher in France and the confessor of Empress.  This meant that he was following in the footsteps of Hermann Cohen, the Jewish pianist who converted and gained fame as Father Hermann.



1897(23rdof Adar I, 5657): Sixty-two year old author and historian Michael Bernays passed away today.
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3120-bernays-michael



1898: A social event is scheduled to be held today to raise funds for Jewish hospital to be built in Brooklyn.  Currently there are no Jewish hospitals in Brooklyn and Robert Strahl, Sigmund Wechsler and Charles Levy are among those leading the drive to remedy this deficiency.



1898(3rdof Adar, 5658): Before reaching his second birthday, Albert Weil, the son of Abraham and Berta Weil pass away today in Oppau.



1899: It was reported today that the Junior Association of the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews had participated in the annual Purim reception that had been held at the home on 106th Street.



1899: Paul Julius von Reuter founder of the news agency Reuters passed away.  Reuter was born in 1816 and his name was Israel Beer Josaphat.  He left his uncle's bank in the German town of Gottingeng and established what would become the world's greatest wire service in 1848. No Kaddish was said since he had converted and became a Lutheran in 1845 after having moved to London.



1901: Birthdate of Zeppo Marx, one of the famous Marx Brothers



1902: In South Carolina Rabbi B.A. Elzas officiated at the marriage of James Dundas and Rebecca Bowman



1903: Dr. Kaufmann Kohler, the senior Rabbi at New York’s Temple Beth-El has been asked to serve as President of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the first and until recently, when a conservative seminary was established in New York, the only college in America designed for the education of Rabbis.



1903: “Zionist committees set out today to investigate the feasibility of a British proposal to have Jews colonize El-Arish” which is located on the Mediterranean coast of the Sinai Peninsula.  



1903: Herzl receives a telegram from the commission in El Arish: "Vicinity has made a favorable impression."



1906: In New York, today’s annual meeting of the Independent Order of Free Sons Israel included a business meeting followed by a dinner at the Harlem Casino where School Commissioner M.S. Stern and Coroner Julius Harburger were the principal speakers.



1906: In “Why France Sought Separation of Church and State” published today Yvest Guyot traced attempts by the Catholic Church to gain unique total power from the Napoleonic era, including the importation “of anti-Semitism from Austria” which was intend to purge Army of non-Catholics starting with the Jews, followed by Protestants and Freemasons.”



1907: Birthdate of actor Shimen Rushkin.  Born in Poland, he gained famed in America in televisions and a variety of films including Fiddler on the Roofand the original version of The Producers.  He passed away in 1967.



1908: Continued massacres in Setatt drive Jews to Casablanca for safety. During this period the Jewish population of all Morocco is somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000.



1912(7thof Adar I, 5672): Eighty-one year old Rabbi Nachum Paltiel Bromson passed away today in Baltimore, MD.



1913: “Reciprocity Day” Echoes of the Bicentennial Meeting of the Union of America is scheduled to be the topic at today’s  regular meeting of the K.A.M. Auxiliary  in Chicago.



1913: Birthdate of Herman L. “Reds” Bassman, the native of Philadelphia who ran track, wrestled and played football for Ursinus before playing professionally for the Philadelphia Eagles.
http://www.profootballarchives.com/bass02000.html



https://web.archive.org/web/20150430215549/http://articles.philly.com/2010-08-05/sports/24971315_1_ursinus-virginia-75th-anniversary



1913(18thof Adar I, 5673): Forty-nine year old Boston merchant Maurice Newman passed away today.



1914: BirthdateMuriel Kallis Steinberg Newman, whose donation of artworks by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Alexander Calder greatly bolstered the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s standing as an exhibitor of modern art. Muriel Kallis was on the only child of Maurice and Ada Nudelman Kallis. Her father was an engineer. As a child she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; she later took art courses at the University of Chicago. Mrs. Newman did not turn her back on her hometown; according to The Chicago Tribune, she donated more than 170 works to the School of the Art Institute. As an aspiring artist in her early years, Mrs. Newman became a denizen of New York’s artistic haunts, befriending noted Abstract Expressionists like de Kooning, Pollock, Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline. By the late 1940s, while married to a successful businessman, Jay Z. Steinberg, she began acquiring works by those rising stars, paying, for example, $2,700 for a de Kooning canvas and $3,000 for a Pollock. Mr. Steinberg died in 1954, and a year later Mrs. Newman married Albert Hardy Newman, another successful businessman. The walls of their Chicago apartment were resplendent with her growing collection. In 1980, to the consternation of art institutions in her native Chicago, Mrs. Newman bequeathed her collection to the Metropolitan in New York.



Asked why, she said at the time: “I’m so involved with New York, and besides, the artists I knew loved the Met, particularly Franz Kline, who used to go there and study Ingres by the hour. I find the idea that their work should hang there now rather touching.” Eventually Mrs. Newman decided not to complete the gift before her death. In 2004 Gary Tinterow, the Met’s curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, received a surprise call from Mrs. Newman, asking that he start planning the transfer. “I’m about to turn 93,” she told The New York Times last year, “and I think now is a great time to do it.” Mr. Tinterow said that Mrs. Newman’s donation “created, with one fell swoop, an extraordinary representation of postwar American Abstract Expressionism.”



The collection of more than 70 works includes the 5-foot-by-9-foot “Number 28,” one of the great canvases of Pollock’s classic period; de Kooning’s “Attic”; Motherwell’s “Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 35”; a Calder mobile, “Four Directions”; “Mecca,” a painting by Hans Hofmann; and an abstract version of Kline’s portrait of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. It also includes 30 examples of primitive art from Oceania, the Americas and Africa, among them a phallic house post from the Dogon people of Mali. Estimated to be worth $12 million to $15 million when first bequeathed in 1980, the collection is now valued in the hundreds of millions. “Mrs. Newman’s collection remains paramount in its quality, having been acquired by her soon after most of the works were made,” Mr. Tinterow said. “She had this extraordinary insight into the importance of this radical new style of art, and she acted upon it, seeking out the best examples of the best artists.” Mrs. Newman’s second husband died in 1988. Her son from her first marriage, Glenn Steinberg, died in 2004. Besides her grandson Peter, of Manhattan, she is survived by four other grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. Speaking of her kinship with the great Abstract Expressionists, she told The Times in 1980, “I knew them well and loved their work.” She added: “At first I began to hang my own things next to them, but I soon realized I wasn’t making much of a statement. I really am not at heart a collector. I’m a failed artist — there’s no other way to describe it.” She died in Chicago, her hometown at the age of 94.



1915: “The Supreme Court of the United States today heard” Louis Marshall “head counsel for Leo Frank…on his appeal from the denial by the Federal District Court of Georgia of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus.”



1916: “Tales of Hoffman” a silent film directed by Richard Oswald was released in Germany today.



1916: Simon Wolf wrote to Rabb C.H. Rubenstein of Baltimore, MD, expressing his appreciation for the role he has played in opposing measures to allow the reading of the Bible in Maryland public schools and and asking to be kept informed of the next steps he plans on taking.



1916: Based on reports published today, that 35,000 Jews living in Palestine including those at settlement started by Wolf Gluskin, are “in dire straits” because, among other things, “the wine industry which” had been developed “before Turkey entered” the World War “had been destroyed.”



1917: A list of the accomplishments of Rabbi Henry Pereira Menes published today included helping to found The American Hebrew, initiating the movement to found the Montefiore Home for Chronic Invalids and the School for Crippled Jewish Children and helping to found the Jewish Theological Seminary.



1917: Among the contributions acknowledged today by the American Jewish Relief Committee included $200 from the Jewish Women of East Chicago, $100 from the United Hebrew Organization of South Bend, Indiana and $500 from the Committee in Council Bluffs, Iowa.



1917: Dr. Samuel Schulman is scheduled to deliver an address on “The Jew’s Service to the World” at Temple Beth-El.



1917: At Temple Emanu-El, Dr. Silverman is scheduled to speak on “What the Hew Jews Should Know about Jews and Judaism: the Patriotism of the Jews.”



1917: At Carnegie Hall, Dr. Wise is scheduled to deliver a sermon to the Free Synagogue entitled “Marriage Ideals, True and False.”



1918: Today “a dispatch appeared in the daily newspapers to the effect that the Italian Government had notified its Ambassadors that it approved of the stand on Palestine taken by the Allies” making this “the first authorized announcement by the Italian Government to the Zionist organization.”



1919: The funeral for the Abraham Jesse Dittenhoefer, the native South Carolinian who was the last living elector to have voted for Lincoln in 1864, will be held at his home this morning at ten o’clock.



1919: Birthdate of Brooklyn born cellist Fred Katz.



1920: In Germany, the Nazi party endorsed its own platform consisting of twenty-five points. Seven of these points concerned the Jews.



1920: Twenty-one year old Parisian native Benny Valgar “won the Featherweight Boxing Championship of the World today.



1921: Greek authorities expropriate the old Jewish cemetery in Smyrna.



1923: Birthdate of Viennese native Jacob Taubes who taught Jewish studies at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and the Free University of Berlin who was the husband of author Susan Tabes with whom he had two children -  Ethan and Tania.
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2672/i-am-impossible-an-exchange-between-jacob-taubes-and-arthur-a-cohen/



1923: The price of bread rose to 2,000 marks in Berlin.  This hyper-inflation wiped people’s life savings and destroyed the basic faith of the middle class in many of the existing political and social institutions.  It laid the groundwork for the rise of political extremism that would make the Communists and the Nazis the dominant political forces in the 1930’s.



1923: In “Palestine Relief Work Extended,” published todayDoctor Isaac M. Rubinow, the director of the Hadassah Medical Organization describes the positive changes that the work of the Hadassah doctors and nurses has had on the citizens of Palestine including Jews, Arabs, Moslems and Christians.  When Dr. Rubinow went to Israel in 1919 the unit consisted of 43 nurses and doctors.  Today four hundred medical personnel sponsored by Hadassah support five major hospitals and several field hospitals.  As a sign as of its commitment to “heal the wounds of prejudice” all Hadassah hospitals and clinics are open to Moslems and Christians as well as Jews.  To ensure equality of treatment, the staff members do not maintain a private practice and there are no private rooms in the medical facilities.  Everybody is treated in a democratic fashion on modern hospital wards.  The Hadassah Medical Organization has established a modern infant welfare plan under the management of pediatricians at Rothschild Hospital in Jerusalem and a department of school hygiene “which has saved thousands of children from blindness and other ailments by regular examination for and treatment of trachoma and various forms of skin diseases.”



1925: In Camden, NJ, Congregation Beth-El and the Council of Jewish Women hosted its Fourth Annual Ball.



1926: New York Mayor James J. Walker received the advance delegates of Europe’s champion soccer team whose creation “was the direct result of the formation of the Hakoah organization in Austria fourteen years ago and that Hakoah had been created because of a realization of the need for building up the physical health of the Jews in Europe.”



1926: The Student’s Union gave as the reason for its strike which began today as being “the authorities’ refusal to meet its repeated demand for limiting the number of Jewish students admitted to the university.



1926: Three hundred guests attended “the Hundred-Dollar-Dinner of the Washington Heights United Palestine Appeal held tonight at the Hotel Astor” in New York City.



1926: “The country home of Milton F. Untermeyer, a member of the brokerage firm of Henry Henck and Company situated on the top of a mountain about five miles from Butler, NJ, was struck by lightning tonight and destroyed by fire.”



1926: Henry Hurwitz, the editor of The Menorah Journal was the principal speaker at “the third of a series of ‘plain-talk’ dinners tonight at the Aldine Club.



1926: Among those reported today to have recently met with President Coolidge are Jacob Rosenheim, the President of Agudath Israel, Dr. Leo Jung, the rabbi of the Jewish Centre in New York and New York state legislator Samuel H. Hofstadter.



1927: “Maccabi Tel Aviv defeated Hapoel-Allenby in the first Soccer Derby in Tel Aviv” today. (As reported by Al Wechsler)



1928: In New York City, Dr and Mrs. Henry Stern gave birth to Richard Gustave Stern, the best American author of whom you have never heard…” (As reported by Bruce Weber)



1928: Birthdate of Larry Gelbart, television producer responsible for the hit show “MASH.”



1928: Birthdate of Shlomo Kalo, a native of Bulgaria who survived the Holocaust and made Aliyah in 1949.  He gained fame as a microbiologist as well as a poet and an author of works of fictions and non-fiction.



1932: Adolf Hitler who had been born in Austria and whose Germanic connection was ethnic rather than political until he joined the Kaiser’s army in 1914 officially became a German citizen.



1932: Premiere of “Behind the Mask” produced by Harry Cohn.



1932: In Brooklyn, Harold Spitzer and the former Gertrude Schwartz gave birth to Lincoln High graduate and Army veteran Elton Leopold Spitzer who created the “broadcasting phenomenon at WLIR.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/business/media/elton-spitzer-84-who-helped-turnwlir-into-a-radiodestinationdies.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0



1933: The Literary Digest, the magazine that would go out of business after picking Alf Landon to win the election in 1936, published “Israel’s Alarm at Hitler’s Rise.”
http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/Jewish_reaction_to_the_rise_of_ADOLF_HITLER_pdf



1934: Birthdate of Meir Har-Zion a sabra who “was an Israeli military commando” and “a key member of Unit 101.”



1934: In London, two second-generation Jewish immigrants from Poland gave birth to 6’7” British actor Bernard Bresslaw.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-bernard-bresslaw-1491593.html
http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/bernard_bresslaw.htm



1935:  Birthdate of Sally Lowenthal, better known to most Americans as talk show hostess Sally Jesse Raphael.



1936: In Brooklyn, Max and Marion (Smith) Reinsdorf gave birth tax attorney turned sports mogul (Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox) Jerry M. Reinsdorf.



1936: Messages from David Lloyd George, the former British Prime Minister, English philanthropist Simon Marks and Leopold Amery, the former British Secretary of State for the Colonies, “congratulating the Palestine Foundation Fund on its fifteenth anniversary were made public” in New York today.



1936: In Magdeburg, Germany, “three Jewish employees of the Barasch Department Store were sentenced to four years, one year and give months imprisonment, respectively, on charges of immorality” that had been brought salesgirls or members of their families.



1936: Rose Pesotta joined the Goodyear Rubber workers' sit-in as an organizer of the strike which temporarily closed the largest tire factory in the world.
http://jwa.org/thisweek/feb/25/1936/rose-pesotta



1937(14thof Adar, 5697): Purim



1937: Children in Herrlingen, Germany dressed in Bedouin costumes as part of the Purim celebration.
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/march/02.asp



1937: In London, Winston Churchill met Emery Reves for the first time. Reeves was a Hungarian born Jew whose birth name was Imre Rvesz who had become a leading literary agent for European democratic leaders, a role he would soon assume for Churchill.



 1938: The Palestine Post reported that The Times of London criticized, in its leading article, the delay shown by the Colonial Office in appointing a new technical commission which would advise how to implement the proposed by the Royal (Peel) Commission and the League of Nations partition of Palestine. 



1939(6thof Adar, 5699): Parashat Terumah



1939: Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “Is There Anything Sacred to the Modern Mind” today at Temple Emanuel.



1939: Rabbi Jonah B. Wise is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “The Gift of Faith” at the Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue.



1939: Rabbi Louis I. Newman is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “We Are All Semites Spiritually” this morning at Temple Rodeph Sholom.



1939: Rabbi William F Rosenblum is scheduled to deliver a sermon on American Jews Have a Right to Be Proud” this morning at Temple Israel.



1939: Rabbi Nathan Stern is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “Facing Life’s Sanctuaries” at West End Synagogue today.



1939: Rabbi Alexander Segel is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “The Treasures in the Sanctuary” at Fort Washington Synagogue today.



1939: Rabbi Harold Mashioff is scheduled to deliver a sermon “If This Be Freedom of Speech” at the Temple of the Covenant.



1939: Heinrich Himmler reportedly issued a secret decree designed to get of Germany’s Jews by encouraging emigration. This report would seem to lack credibility given the impediments that the German government placed in the way of Jews leaving Nazi control.



1939: U.S. premiere of “Wife, Husband and Friend’ a comedy directed by Gregory Ratoff, co-starring Binnie Barnes with music by Alfred Newman.



1939: In Britain, the Picture Post published the first of two photo-journalist presentations that supported the call for Winston Churchill’s return to an active role in the Government.  Stefan Lorant was the editor and designer for the Picture Post was the moving force behind the article.  Lorant was a Hungarian born Jew who had worked in Germany before being imprisoned at Dachau in 1933.



1941(28thof Shevat, 5701): Fifty seven year old New York Eton educated real estate manager and insurance agent Theodore Badman, the son of Herman and Rosa Frandenfelder Badman, the husband of Hortense Goldsmith and mother of Carl and Adolph Badman who had been a member of the Washington Lodge of B’nai B’rith and Free Sons of Israel passed away today.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1941/02/27/85453413.pdf



1941: The 1941 February Strike (aka The Strike of February 1941) which was organized in the Netherlands as protest following pogroms that had taken place in Amsterdam’s Jewish neighborhoods began today



1941: One thousand, six hundred Jews were deported from Gora Kalwaria to the Warsaw Ghetto.



1942: For the second time this month, Reverend Chait of the Army Chaplaincy visited Isidore Newman who was in the hospital after having broken his leg while going through parachute training for SOE agents



1945: Birthdate of Amram Mitzna “an Israeli politician and former general. He is the acting mayor of Yeruham, the former mayor of Haifa (1993–2003) and lead the Labour Party from 2002 to 2003.”



1946: Three RAF installations were attacked in Palestine tonight resulting in damage valued at $2,000,000,000.  Fourteen planes were destroyed outright and another 8 planes were damaged so badly that they were beyond repair.



1947: Birthdate of Gary Rosenblatt who has served as editor for the Baltimore Jewish Times, The Jewish News of Detroit, The Atlanta Jewish Times and The Jewish Week of New York



1947: British Foreign Minister Bevin continues his anti-Semitic rhetoric attacking Zionism and defending theArabs who have been in Palestine “for 2,000 years.”



1947: Birthdate of Buffalo native Anne Beatts, the comedy writer who converted to Judaism while a McGill University and “was the first female editor of National Lampoon magazine.



1947: The SS President Warfield set sail from Baltimore, MD on a voyage which would sail her into the history books as The Exodus.



1948: The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia takes control of government in Czechoslovakia and the period of the Third Republic ends.  The Communist seizure of power was a major step in the hardening of positions during the early days of the Cold War.  It galvanized pro-western forces in Europe to participate in what would become NATO.  It also helped internationalists (many of whom were Jewish) in the United States to overcome isolationist opposition America taking the lead in opposing Soviet imperialism.  For the Jews of Palestine who were already facing Arab attacks prior to the pending departure of the British, this turn of events was beneficial.  With the approval of their Soviet masters, the new Czech government would allow the shipment of surplus ME-109 aircraft that was stored in Czechoslovakia to Israel at the moment of the creation of the Jewish state.  In one of the great ironies of history, the first combat aircraft flown by Israeli pilots were former German fighter planes shipped from Communist Czechoslovakia.



1949(26thof Shevat, 5709): Noted portrait painter Alfred Joseph Praga, a native of Liverpool born in 1861 and the husband of journalist Teresa Prager, “who revitalized the art of miniature painting in Britain” and “was one of the founders in 1895 of the Society of Miniaturists” passed away today.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Alfred+Praga&biw=974&bih=590&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjGtrO_wI_LAhXJsIMKHZDWALIQsAQIJQ#imgrc=32_z3AbTQJRr9M%3A



1950: "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca premiered on NBC. Writers included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and Woody Allen. This was an early hour long variety - primarily comedy - show that dominated the airwaves in its weekend time slot.  And it was live when live meant live.  Yes, three of those mentioned above were Jewish.  But by now you have come to expect a connection between Jewish and Humor.



1951: Pan American Games, during which Byron “Krieger won gold medals in team foil and team sabre and the team silver in épée” opened today in Buenos Aires.”



 1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that after Jordan asked Britain to intervene against what he called Israeli "aggression" and invoked the Jordanian-British pact of mutual assistance, the British government officially disclosed that it considered the possibility of stationing its armed forces on Jordanian territory.



1953:The Jerusalem Post reported that Hevrat Ovdim (the Histadrut's General Cooperative Society), together with the Histadrut's pension funds and other organizations, mobilized funds for the construction of the first huge hotel and rest house in Eilat. Eilat is Israel's southern port.  Early on, the Israelis sought to make it a tourist haven as well as a port that would be a gateway to Africa and Asia.  The blockade of Eilat by the Egyptians in 1967 was the official act of war that provided the justification under international law for what would become the Six Days War.



1954: Nasser became Egyptian premier. The “man behind the throne” who had masterminded the downfall of the Egyptian monarchy now took center stage and took his country down a road to repeated war with Israel as well as doom and disgrace.



1955(3rdof Adar I, 5715): Sixty year old  Cornell and Brooklyn Law School alum Solomon Abelow who served as state commander of the Jewish War Veterans passed away today after which he was buried at Mt. Hebron Cemetery in Queens.



1955(3rdof Adar I, 5715): Arab terrorists, one of whom “was found to be in possession of documents linking him to Egyptian military intelligence” murdered an Israeli civilian in Rehovot.



1956: Nikita Khrushchev delivered a “secret speech” at the Twentieth Communist Party in which he denounced Stalin and his “cult of personality” – a denunciation that would lead to the posthumous rehabilitation of the victims of past purges many of whom were Jewish.



1957(24th of Adar I, 5717): Mark Aldanov, aka Mark A Landau, Russian born author and chemist passed away at the age of 70.



1957(24th of Adar I, 5717): B. P. Schulberg passed away. Born Percival Schulberg in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1892, he took the name Benjamin from the boy in front of him when registering for school to avoid mockery for his British name. He worked in the fledgling film industry in New York City until 1919 when he moved to Hollywood, California where he operated "Preferred Pictures" and was responsible for making Clara Bow a star. He joined Louis B. Mayer to form "Mayer-Schulberg Studio" but after Mayer became part of MGM, Schulberg would join with Adolph Zukor and became the head of Paramount Pictures. In an era when the film industry was filled with conservative studio executives, B.P. Schulberg was a "New Deal" liberal, described by Moving Pictures magazine as "a political liberal in the reactionary world of Mayer and Hearst." His wife Adeline Jaffe-Schulberg founded a talent agency taken over by her brother, producer/talent agent Sam Jaffe. She spent little time with Hollywood society women, instead working for charities that aided the poor and promoting socialism. She subsequently had a literary agency in New York. They were the parents of renowned novelist and screenwriter, Budd Schulberg, producer Stuart Schulberg, and writer Sonya Schulberg O'Sullivan.In a power struggle at Paramount, Schulberg left the studio in 1937 and remained out of the business until 1940 when he began producing for Columbia Pictures. He produced six films for Columbia in three years until he retired in 1943.



1960: Lillian Hellman's "Toys in the Attic" premiered in New York City.



1963: “The Barbra Streisand Album,” “the debut album by Barbra Streisand was released today on Columbia Recoreds.



1963(1st of Adar, 5723): Melville J. Heskovits passed away. The American born anthropologist established African and African American studies in American academia. Herskovits's controversial classic The Myth of the Negro Past is about African cultural influences on American blacks. He also helped forge the concept of cultural relativism, particularly in his book Man and His Works.



1965:  On New York’s Upper East Side, Jane and Gerald Finerman gave birth to Karen Lisa Finerman, the sister of Wendy, Leslie, Stacey and Mark Finerman and the wife of private equity manager Lawrence Golub, who was the “co-founder and President of Metropolitan Capital Advisors, INC as well as a panelist on “Fast Money.”



1967: Birthdate of Jonathan Saul Freedland “a British journalist, who writes a weekly column for The Guardian and a monthly piece for the Jewish Chronicle. Freedland has previously written for The Daily Mirror and as of September 2005, he writes each Thursday for the London Evening Standard. He is the son of Michael Freedland, the biographer and journalist.



1965(23rdof Adar I, 5725): Eighty-year old Russian born pianist Leo Sirota who settled in Japan in 1929 where he lived for 15 years before moving to the United States where he taught and performed passed away today.



1967: “Enter Laughing” a comedy directed and co-produced by Carl Reiner “based on his autobiographical novel and the stage play of the same name” with a screenplay by Carl Reiner and Joseph Stein and co-starring Shelley Winter, Elaine May, Jack Gilford, Janet Margolin, David Opatoshu and Don Rickles was released in the United States today.



1969: One person was injured during a bombing at the British consulate in East Jerusalem.



1969: “Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?” produced by Philip Rose opened at the Belasco Theatre.



1970(19th of Adar I, 5730): Latvian born American painter and print maker Mark Rothko born Marcus Rothkowitz passed away whose unusual work. includes the 1961 painting “Blue, Orange, Red.”



1971: Part One of a two part production of Clifford Odette’s “Paradise Lost,” co-starring Eli Wallach was broadcast for the first time on American Public Television.



1972: Birthdate of Argentine attorney and activist Myriam Bregam who was elected as a national deputy in 2015 as a member of the Workers’ Left Front.



1973: Steven Sondheim's musical "Little Night Music" premiered at the Shubert Theater in New York NY for the first of its 601 performances.



1974(3rdof Adar, 5734): Seventy-nine year old Lothar Mendes “the German born screenwriter and film director who moved to the Hollywood in 1926 and is best known as the director of Jew Süss, the British film adaptation of the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger which is not to be confused with the viciously anti-Semitic film made by the Nazis.



1975(14thof Purim, 5735): Purim



1976: BBC2 broadcast the last episode of “The Glittering Prizes” a drama series written by Frederic Raphael.



1977(7thof Adar, 5737): Eighty year old producer Joseph Hyman, who collaborated with Moss Hart to create several successful Broadway plays passed away today.
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/27/archives/joseph-hyman-80-producer-is-dead-worked-with-bernard-and-moss-hart.html



1980: The first episode of the British sitcom “Yes Minister” created by Jonathan Lynn was broadcast today.



1982: Today “Labor Party chairman Shimon Peres today rejected Premier Menachem Begin’s latest offer to form a national unity government.”



1983: Birthdate of “French-Israeli journalist” Jonathan-Simon Sellem.



1986:  Birthdate of actor Justin Berfeld who plays Reese on “Malcolm in the Middle.”



1988(7thof Adar, 5748): Eighty year old William G. Braude who has served as a rabbi for 40 years at Congregation Sons of Israel and David, Temple Beth-El in Providence, R.I., passed away today. A native of Lithuania, he came to the United States in 1920 where he earned degrees from the University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College. He also taught at Yale, Brown, Hebrew University and Leo Baeck College in London.
http://www.fold3.com/page/3884072_william_g_braude/



1988: Eighty-four year old Kurt Mahler, the German Mathematician who met Kurt Hirsch while in a British internment camp for “enemy aliens” (a strange appellation for somebody who had fled the Nazis) and eventually settled in Australia where he passed away today.



1988: Secretary of State George Schultz arrived in Israel today on the first of four day mission to the Middle East designed to explore reaction to recent American peace proposal. Shultz called on Israel to make ''decisions of historic proportions'' to help change the status quo in the Middle East when greeted by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres who responded by saying that this is ''a most demanding period of our life, facing probably the most complicated issue of the day.''



1990: In “Cafritz v. Cafritz” published today, Marjorie Williams described the attempt of two sons of the late Gwendolyn Cafritz to have her will overturned.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1990/02/25/cafritz-v-cafritz/9f486a14-9672-4802-802e-0e470a9f1507/?utm_term=.edf7eee05775



1991: The barrage of Iraqi scud attacks that began on January 18th came to an end today.  During that period 39 missiles were fired into Israel.



1994(14thof Adar, 5754): Purim



1994 (14th of Adar, 5754): Eighty- year old Sam Eisenstadt was assaulted with an axe while walking in the center of Kfar Saba. Sam died of his wounds shortly afterwards.



1994: In one of the most shameful acts committed by a Jew, American-born Baruch Goldstein opened fire inside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the West Bank, killing 29 Muslims before he was beaten to death by worshippers. 



1996(5thof Adar I, 5756): One person died in the bombing of the Ashkelon bus station for which Hamas claimed responsibility.



1996(5thof Adar I, 5756): Seventeen civilians and nine soldiers were murdered and forty-eight people were injured when a Palestinian terrorist set off a bomb “on a No.18 bus traveling down Jaffa Road near the Jerusalem Central Bus Station.”



1999: The Reuters News Agency commemorated the 100th anniversary of the death of its founder, Paul Julius Reuter, by launching a university award in Germany.



1999: Eighty-eight year old Margaret Meagher, who when was appointed to be Canada’s ambassador to Israel in 1958 became the first Canadian woman to reach that diplomatic rank.



1999: Disney named Bob Iger president of Walt Disney International, the business unit that oversees Disney's international operations, as well as chairman of the ABC Group. Disney called the change a promotion for Iger. But the company's insistence was initially viewed with skepticism, as some thought Iger was merely being removed from day-to-day authority at ABC since ABC had been struggling.



2000: The European Indoor Championships during which Aleksandr Averbukh placed first in the Pole vault opened today in Ghent, Belgium.



2000: Hilary Koprowski, a Polish Jew, was honored with a reception at Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first administration of his oral polio vaccine. At the reception, he received commendations from the United States Senate, the Pennsylvania Senate and Governor Tom Ridge.



2001(2ndof Adar, 5761): Ninety-five year old Lithuanian born and education American philanthropist Jacob “Jack” Hiatt , the son of Joshua and Leah Hiatt who died in the Holocuast, the husband of Francis Hiatt with whom he had two children Myra and Janice and the father-in-law of Patriot’s owner Robert Kraft passed away today.
https://www.holycross.edu/departments/publicaffairs/hcm/spring01/in_memoriam/mem-spr01-hiatt.html



2002(13thof Adar I, 5762): Sixty-five year old Avraham Fish and forty-six year old Aharon Gorov were murdered by members of Fatah outside of Tekoa.



2005(16thof Adar I, 5765):Yael Orbach, 28, of Rehovot, Yitzhak (Itzik) Buzaglo, 40, of Mishmar HaYarden, Aryeh (Arik) Nagar, 37, of Kfar Saba,Ronen Reuvenov, 30, of Tel Aviv and Odelia Hubara, 26, of Jerusalem were murdered today and fifty more people were injured when a Palestinian terrorist detonated a bomb “at the entrance to "Stage", a popular Tel Aviv nightclub, on the corner of Herbert Samuel and Yonah Hanavi streets, opposite the Israeli beachfront.”



2006(27thof Shevat, 5766): Parashat Mishaptim and Shabbat Shekalim



2006(27thof Shevat, 5766): Graphic artist Sally Fox passed away today.
https://jwa.org/thisweek/feb/26/2006/this-week-in-history-death-of-artist-and-photograph-editor-sally-fox
http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~sch01175



2006: Tens of thousands of people marched through Paris in memory of Ilan Halimi, who was kidnapped, tortured and killed two weeks ago in an attack that authorities say was partly motivated by anti-Semitism.



2006: American cellist Yo-Yo Ma, a group of four journalists and a pair of U.S. cancer researchers have each won $1 million Dan David awards



2007: In Amsterdam, an exhibition styled “Looted, But from Whom?,” an exhibition about art objects which were either acquired by forced sale or stolen from their Jewish owners by the Nazis during the Second World War, closed.



2007: Yaakov Edri “was appointed be responsible for Israel’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations.



 2007: Yaakov Edri “was questioned under caution on suspicion of having tried to receive personal benefits in return for promoting a police commander, Ya'akov Zigdon, whilst he was Deputy Minister of Internal Security” and denied the charges.



2007: The Sunday New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Bambi vs. GodzillaOn the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business by David Mamet, George Gershwin His Life and Work by Howard Pollack and Overture by Yael Goldstein.



2007: Corresponds to the 7th day of Adar which “traditionally marks the birth and the death of Moses.  This is a minor fast date “observed by members of Jewish burial societies to atone for any acts of disrespect which they may unwittingly have committed toward the dead.”



2008: In New York City, the 92nd Street Y presents “Life is a Cabaret: A Tribute to Fred Ebb” highlighting the decades long collaboration between Jewish lyricist Fred Ebb and composer John Kander that produced such works as Cabaret, Zorba, Chicago, Woman of the Year, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Curtains



2008: Newsweekreported on the financial loss suffered by the New England Patriots owner, Jewish businessman Robert Kraft, as a result of the Pats failure to have a perfect 19-0 season.  Anticipating a Super Bowl victory, Kraft had applied for trademarks to use phrases such as “19-0” and Perfect Season” on a litany of gear including greeting cards, jigsaw puzzles, kites and temporary tattoos.  The trademarks are worthless and sale of the merchandize never materialized.



2008: Timereported on the recent death of 14 term California Congressman Tom Lantos the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the U.S. Congress.  Lantos was sixteen when the Nazis occupied his native Hungary where he escaped the death camps and fought against the Nazis.



2009: In New York, famed Italian performer Moni Ovadiahis presents a performance “Kavanah” (intention and participation through a chant), a reflection on the Hebraic liturgical tradition and its complex maze of meanings and sources.



2009: Another stage of “Le Bœuf sur le toit, Op. 58 (English title, The Ox on the Roof: The Nothing-Doing Bar) a surrealist ballet made on a score composed by Darius Milhaud” took place today “as part of the Montreal Highlights Festival.



2009: A fresh exhibition in New York that has put a spotlight on postcards used during and after the turn of the 20th century meant to depict important aspects of Jewish life comes to a close



2009: Rosh Chodesh Adar 5769



2009: Two Kassam rockets were fired across the Gaza border into Israel today. One of the rockets fired from Gaza hit an agricultural area near a kibbutz in the Sha'ar Hanegev region, and rescue services were yet to find the second rocket.



2009: A British bishop whose denial of the Holocaust led Argentina to order him out of that country returned to England today. Richard Williamson, a bishop with the conservative Society of St. Pius X, was told to leave Argentina or face expulsion amid criticism over a television interview in which he said no Jews were gassed during the Holocaust. The controversial bishop had been excommunicated 20 years ago, but Pope Benedict XVI last month lifted the excommunication decree on Williamson and three other bishops.



2010: During a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee held today, Illinois Rep. Don Manzullo, a Republican, asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to intervene on behalf of a gefilte fish factory in his district. The factory, Schafer Fishery is located in Thomson, Illinois. Manzullo is concerned about several hundred jobs at the fishery in his district and he said Israel had imposed a 120-percent tax on nine containers of Asian carp that had been made into gefilte fish patties. Drawing laughs, Clinton said she was up to a job that “sounds to me like one of those issues that should rise to the highest levels of our government.” “If not, we’re going to have to figure out what to do with nine containers of it,” she said, prompting Rep. Howard Berman, chairman of the House committee, to quip that perhaps the fish would end up at the next state dinner. Fresh and processed foods are subject to tariffs under the trade agreement between the US and Israel. “Carp is not exempt from customs in the framework of the free trade agreement between Israel and the United States,” said Jonathan Peled, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington. “Having said that, we are obviously looking into the request by Congressman Manzullo and are trying to see whether something can be done.” Peled said two containers of gefilte had already arrived at the port in Haifa.“I don’t think there’s a lack of gefilte fish either in Israel or in the United States regarding Pessah,” Peled said. Nonetheless, he said, “we’re seriously looking at this request by a member of Congress.”



2010: As he arrived at Jerusalem District Court for the opening of his trial today Ehud Olmert became the first former prime minister in Israel's history to stand trial for alleged corruption.



2010(11th of Adar, 5770): Fast of Esther



 2010(11thof Adar, 5770): “David Bankier, Professor of Holocaust History at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, head of  the International Institute for Holocaust Research and holder of the John Najmann Chair at Yad Vashem passed away” today.
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/institute/studies/issues/38-1/michman.pdf



2010(11thof Adar, 5770): Eighty one Irish jurist Henry Barron who served as a justice on the Irish Supreme Court from 1997 until 2000 passed away today.
http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/respected-judge-who-led-bomb-inquiries-1.633921
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/former-supreme-court-judge-dies-1.853881



2010: “Andy Warhol's Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century: In Retrospect” is scheduled to open at the Washington DCJCC.



2010: Novelist, critic and broadcaster Howard Jacobson is scheduled to appear at the Washington DCJCC.



2010(11th of Adar, 5770): Ninety-two year old Eugene L. Moore, a past commander of the Department of Florida Jewish War Veterans, passed in Boynton Beach, Florida.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/palmbeachpost/obituary.aspx?n=eugene-l-moore&pid=148892651&fhid=5124



2010(11th of Adar, 5770): Herta Herzog-Massing, “Austrian-American social scientist specializing in communication studies,” passed away



2011(21stof Adar I, 5771): Ninety-two year old Eugene Moore, a past commander of the Department of Florida Jewish War Veterans passed away in Boynton Beach, FL.



2011: Ahead of Time, “graceful portrait of the extraordinary life of 99-year-old American journalist and humanitarian Ruth Gruber whose efforts led to the rescue of 1,000 Jewish Holocaust refugees” and The Judge, a documentary featuring the former Chief Justice of Israel's Supreme Court, are scheduled to shown at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.



2011: Today, the IDF instructed teachers to keep children from going outside to play in kindergartens located in towns near Gaza after two Grad rockets landed in Beersheba



2012: “The Death of Klinghoffer” an American opera, that critics including the two daughters of the late Leon Klinghoffer have described as anti-Semitic and as glorifying terrorism was performed in London for the first time.



2012: In London, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jeffery Goldberg and Maureen Kendler are scheduled to a new Haggadah edited by Foer and translated by Englander as part of Jewish Book Week.



2012; “Jewish solders in Blue and Gray” is scheduled to be shown at Young Israel of Woodmere in Woodmere, NY.



2012: “Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women” is scheduled to be shown at B'nai Sholom Reform Congregation in Albany, NY.



2012: HaOlam II, at the end of which the second official National Collegiate Jewish A Cappella will named, is scheduled to take place at Adas Israel in Washington, DC.



2012: Indian intelligence services have considerable evidence that Iran was behind this month's New Delhi terrorist attack, but are not releasing it in a bid to avoid public confrontation with the Islamic republic, an Israeli security source says.



2012: Hundreds gathered in front of Ministry of Interior offices in Tel Aviv today to protest the deportation of families whose petitions for residency permits were rejected.



2013: The Leo Baeck Institute is scheduled to co-host “Arnold Bernstein and Gerd Bucerius,” a lecture and discussion on the relationship between shipping pioneer Arnold Bernstein and Gerd Bucerius, the lawyer and published who defended him against the Nazis.



2013: Burglars broke into the home of an employee at the Prime Minister's Office today. Initial reports indicate a computer was taken from the house, which is located in Moshav Beit Yitzhak in the Sharon.. (As reported by Yaniv Kubovich)



2013: Israel carried out a successful test of its upgraded Arrow III missile interceptor today. Defense sources said it was the first flight test of the advanced interceptor. (As reported by Gil Cohen)



2014: Graham Spanier who was president of Penn St. during the “child sex scandal” “was granted a stay in his defamation lawsuit until his criminal case is resolved.”



2014: Dr. Daniel Rynhold is scheduled to deliver a lecture “Rav Kook and the Heroism of the Holy” at the Skirball Center.



2014: German Chancellor Angela Merkel is scheduled to complete her two day trip to Israel.



 2014: Kay Menchel is scheduled to lecture on “The Short Stories of Bernard Malmud” at the JCC of Northern Virginia.



2014: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would neither confirm nor deny reports that the IAF had destroyed a shipment of weapons being sent from Syria to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.



2014: “Participants in programs that bring young Diaspora Jews to visit Israel should be allowed to extend their stay without proving they are Jewish enough to make aliyah, a Knesset committee recommended. (As reported by JTA)



2014: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host “YIVO, Freud, and American Jewry: Discourse on Eastern Europe as a Talking Cure” for American Jewish Ambivalence” in which Marcus Krah explores how American Jews in the 1940s-50s used competing narratives of aspects of the East European Jewish past - from the shtetl, to pogroms, to Hasidism and Socialism - to find meaning in their American present.



2015: On the heels of the terrorist attacks in Paris, The UK Jewish Film festival is scheduled to host a showing of “Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy.”



2015: Rosenwald is a 2015 documentary film directed by Aviva Kempner about the career of American businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald debuted today at the Washington Jewish Film Festival



2015: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host “Argentina and the Nisman Case: Why is it so Hard to Understand What Really Happened?”



2015: Jewish Disability Advocacy Day
http://blogs.rj.org/rac/2015/01/13/join-us-in-washington-for-jewish-disability-advocacy-day/



2016: The Temple Emanu-El Skirball Center is scheduled to host a screening of “Footnote” followed by a discussion with director/screenwriter Joseph Cedar moderated by historian Eric Goldman.



2016(16thof Adar I, 5776): Seventy-five year old “radical lawyer” William H. Schaap and the brother of sports broadcaster Dick Schaap passed away today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/03/nyregion/william-h-schaap-radical-lawyer-author-and-publisher-dies-at-75.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well



2016(16thof Adar I, 5776): Ninety year old U.C.L.A. grad and developer of medical devices Alfred E. Mann passed away today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/business/alfred-e-mann-pioneer-in-medical-devices-dies-at-90.html



2016: “Yona” and “On the Banks of the Tigris: The Hidden Story of Iraqi Music” are scheduled to be shown at the Washington Jewish Film Festival.



2017(29thof Shevat, 5777): Parashat Mishpatim; Shabbat Shekalim

2017: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to present a “Survivor Talk” featuring Frankfurt native Frank Stern who survived Kristallnacht at the age of ten, following which lived in Switzerland and England before leaving from Southampton aboard an armed merchant bound for the United States in 1940.



2017:Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat are some of the speakers scheduled to speak at the annual meeting of J Street opening today at the Washington Convention Center.



2018: The Exhbition: Semi(te) Sweet: On Jews and Chocolate is scheduled to come to a close today.



2018: A final closing reception celebrating Yiddish New York’s 2017 Visual Arts Exhibition is scheduled to take place today.



2018: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host a production of “We Are the White Rose” written and directed by “local teens” that tells the story of the German resistance movement.



2018: In New Orleans, the JCC is scheduled to the community’s annual Purim Carnival.



2018: In Iowa, Congregation Agudas Achim is scheduled to host its annual Purim Carnival



2018: In Memphis, TN, Ti Chai and MEFTY are scheduled to present the Purim Carnival at Temple Israel.



 


 


 

This Day, February 26, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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February 26


11 BCE: According to some sources, the day on which Herod dedicates the renovated Holy Temple in Jerusalem. According to Heinrich Graetz, the building project began in 20 BCE, the 18th year of Herod’s reign. A year and half later, (18 BCE) the inner part of the Temple was finished. It took another eight years to build the outer walls, courts and galleries. The dedicatory celebration took place on “the very anniversary of the day when twenty years previously, Herod, with blood stained hands, had made himself master of Jerusalem.”  Herod reportedly built this modernized version of the Second Temple because he loved to build things and because he was trying to show his Roman masters that he was the beloved ruler of his people.  Regardless, in one sense, Herod sealed the doom of the Temple and the Jewish people because he placed it under the protection of Rome.  What Rome protected Rome could destroy.


364:  Valentinian I is proclaimed Roman Emperor. He was the last Emperor to rule the Empire alone.  A month later, he would appoint his brother Valens Emperor in the East, while he would rule over the Western portion of the Empire. Valentinian belonged to a minority sect called the Arians.  In an attempt to keep peace in the Empire, in 371 he issued a proclamation allowing Christians and Arians to practice their religious belief without incurring any “political disadvantage. This toleration was extended to the Jews.”


1147: The Crusaders massacred the Jews of Wurtzburg; so much for all of those tales of knights and chivalry.


1361: Birthdate of Wenceslaus IV who as Emperor failed to continue the Imperial protection of the Jews of Luxembourg led to their expulsion in 1391.


1418: Emperor Sigsmund “issued commands to all the German princes and magistrates, cities and subjects, to allow” the Jews the full enjoyment of the privileges and immunities given them by the Pope who had denounced attacks on the persons and property of the Jews and the practice of forced conversion.


1498: Isaac Abravanel completed "Mashmia' Yeshu'ah" (Proclaiming Salvation), one of three works “devoted to the exposition of the Jewish belief concerning the Messiah and the Messianic age.”


1569: Pius V issued Hebraeorum gens, a papal bull that accused the Jews of a variety of evil deeds including the practice of magic.


1569:  Pope Pius V ordered the eviction of all Jews from the Papal States (excluding Rome and Verona) who refuse to convert. Most of the approximately 1000 Jewish families decided to emigrate.


1592: First performance of “The Jew Malta” by Lord Strange’s Men, an English theatrical group.


1802 Birthdate of French man of letters Victor Hugo the “preeminent biblical poet among the French Romantics.” He eulogized Isaiah and Ezekiel in William Shakespeare (1864) and injected some basic knowledge of the Kabbalah (probably gained from his Jewish admirer, Alexandre Weill) into Les Contemplations (1856).


1809: Birthdate of Rosanna Dyer Osterman, the native of Germany who married Joseph Osterman who worked in his business in Galveston until passed away at the age of 57 when a steamboat exploded near Vicksburg, MS.

1814: In Holland, a law was enacted officially ending the French rule that had been overseen by Napoleon’s.  The Jews supported the new government under William I and the Netherlands proved to be a welcoming home for the Jewish population which thrived there throughout the rest of the 19th century.


1825: Maryland removed the requirement of a Christian oath for public office, and substituted a declaration of belief in reward and punishment and the World to Come. This obviously made life in Maryland easier on its Jewish citizens. On the very last day of the session of the legislature an act "for the relief of the Jews in Maryland," which had already been passed by the Senate, was passed by the House of Delegates by a vote of twenty-six to twenty-five.  Only fifty-one out of eighty members were present for the vote.  The bill provided that "every citizen of this state professing the Jewish religion" who shall be appointed to any office of profit or trust shall, in addition to the required oaths, make and subscribe a declaration of his belief in a future state of rewards and punishments instead of the declaration now required by the government of the state.


1825: Thirty-one year old Hannah Aarons who passed away yesterday was laid to rest today at the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery in London.


1827: “Lady Georgiana Mary Walpole, a descendant of Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of Great Britain” married Joseph Wolff, the son of Rabbi David Wolff, who was baptized in 1812 and whose missionary travels and archaeological studies took him took him to the Sinai, Jerusalem and Aleppo as well a large part of Central Asia when began searching for the Ten Lost Tribes.


1829:  In Bttenheim, Germany, “Hirsch Strauss and his second wife Rbecca” gave birth to Loeb Strauss who as Levi Strauss made the riveted blue denim trouser an icon of American fashion called “Levi’s”

1830: Birthdate of Philip Bondi, the Bohemian born Rabbi who “in 1857 received his doctor's degree from the University of Prague and his rabbinical diploma from Aaron Kornfeld and Daniel Frank” and whose works included “a Bohemian translation of the Pentateuch.”
1848: In the wake of revolutions that swept Europe, the Second French Republic comes into being.  The Republic last a mere four years when it was swept aside when Louis Napoleon (Bonaparte’s nephew) proclaimed the second empire.  Just prior to the birth of the Republic, the Jew’s Oath had been declared unconstitutional by the French courts.  This opened the way to further participation of the Jews in the general world of French business, society and culture.


1851: In Charleston, SC, Samuel Samson married Abigail Goldsmith, the second daughter of Morris Goldsmith.


1851: Philadelphian Washington H. Nones was promoted from Third Assistant Engineer to Second Assistant Engineer today.


1853: The New York Times published a portion of a paper present by Dr. A.K. Gardner on "the meats of New York" that was delivered before the Academy of Medicine and was published in the New York Journal of Medicine. According to Dr. Garnder unlike the other butchers, the Jewish butchers "do not prostrate the animal with the ax but first suspend it and then cut this throat.  This must be performed in a peculiar manner.  It is necessary to have along knife, which must be from rust, nic, or any imperfection of the cutting edge."  Only one cut is allowed.  If more cuts are required, “the animal is deemed unfit for food for the Hebrews.  After the animal is dead, he is upon the fore-quarters.  From the difficulty of removing the blood vessels, as required by their law, from the hind quarters, this portion is rarely eaten by the Hebrews, but the mark is placed upon them for the benefit of many Christians, who prefer the meat thus examined.  The butcher paid by the Society in which he worships an annual salary and in addition he receives a small sum per animal from the keeper of the slaughter house for his services."


1854: Henry Cohen, a native of London who came to the United States in 1844 and Matilda Cohen gave birth to “social economist” Mary M. Cohen


1858: Disraeli began serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer in a government led by Lord Derby and most of whose members sat in the Lords which gave him an unusual amount of power since he led the Tory Party in the House of Commons.


1860(3rdof Adar, 5620): Seventy-seven year old educator and author Michael Hess the brother of Mendel Hess and the son of Rabbi Isaac Hess Kugelmann who among other accomplishments tutored “young Baron James Rothschild”  passed away at Frankfort-on-Main.


1861: “The Fundamental Law of February 26, 1861” was promulgated in Austria today after which Raphael Basch, he served as the official spokesman government of Anton Ritter von Schmerling. Born in Bohemia, Basch alternated between being a journalist and political activist who actually became part of successive Austrian governments.  This latter element was unusual for a Jew living in the Austrian Empire at this time.


1862: In Wilna, Joel Kopelovitz and Zine Danishevsky gave birth to Victor Harries, founder and editor of the B’nai B’rith Messenger, the secretary of Congregation Beth Israel and a court interpreter in Los Angeles, CA.


1865(30thof Shevat, 5625): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1870: A “scheme of amalgamation” involving The Great Synagogue, the Habmro Synagogue and the New Synagogue as well as their branches on Portland Street and the Bayswater was incorporated in the Seventeenth Report of the Charity Commissioners of England and Wales so it could be presented by them to Parliament.


1872: Birthdate of New York City native Moses Henry Cohen, the Tampa, FL, lawyer, Spanish-American War veteran and secretary for 28 years of Schaarai Tzedek who married Julia Wolf, “whose family owned Wolf Brothers.


1873: It was reported today that the recent Hebrew Charity Ball in Philadelphia raised $7,920 after expenses.  The money has already been distributed to several of the city’s Jewish institutions.


1876(1stof Adar, 5636): Rosh Chodesh Adar and the Sabbath of Shekel.


1877(13thof Adar, 5637): Fast of Esther


1877: “The Home for Aged Hebrews” published today described it as “one of the most delightful” institutions of its kind in New York City.  The building which was originally a country home of the Astor family, offers views of the East River and Long Island Sound. The facility currently is home to 70 older men and women who live in “air well-furnished rooms,” are well clothed and enjoy excellent food on a daily basis which is complimented by wine if so desired.


1880(14th of Adar, 5640): Purim


1880: The Young Men’s Hebrew Association is scheduled to host a Purim entertainment and reception this evening at the Harlem Music Hall.


1880: In New York, the Purim Association sponsored a ball in the Academy. A tableaux featuring Queen Esther surrounded by the Muses, preceded the evening’s dancing.


1880: Sixty-year old Dr. Simon Rosenberger, a distinguished Philadelphia, PA Jewish physician and Ida Smith, a servant girl working in his house, were the victims of a mysterious malady. Miss Smith passed away after suffering convulsions brought on possibly by coal gas that had seeped into the house from the cellar.  Rosenberger who is unconscious and near death is thought to be a victim of the case or possibly an ingestion of poison.


1882: “The Hebrew Charity Ball” published today described plans for the upcoming Purim Association’s upcoming fancy dress ball.  This ball, which has been a part of the New York Social Scene for two decades, will be held at the Academy of Music under the leadership of M.H. Moses, the association’s President.


1882: A review of “Divorce and Divorce Legislation” by Theodore D. Woolsey notes that the volume includes a chapter devoted to the history of divorce among the Jewish people.


1882(7th of Adar, 5642): German painter Moritz Daniel Oppenheim passed away. He is often regarded as the first Jewish painter of the modern era. His work was shaped by his cultural and religious roots at a time when many of his German Jewish contemporaries chose to convert to Christianity. Oppenheim is considered to be in sympathy with the ideals of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) movement, because he remained "fair to the present" without denying his past.

1888(14thof Adar, 5648): Purim


1888: Birthdate of Alfons Klauber who was deported from Prague in 1942 to Ujazdow where he was murdered.


1888: The grant of citizenship for businessman, banker and philanthropist Jacob Noisotz was approved by the upper house of the Romanian legislature today but would fail to gain his goal when the lower house rejected the request in December.


1889: In Baltimore, founding of the Hebrew Free School Society whose members included Joseph Eisner and Abraham S. Shochet and which sponsored a Talmud Torah that offers daily instruction for three hours from 4 until 7 and that “maintains a school for girls” as well


1890: In New York City, Jake and Hulda Pilzer gave birth to conductor and composer Maximilian Pilzer.

1890: In honor of a request made to Charles Frohman by child acting star Elsie Leslie, 500 children from the Industrial Schools of the Associated Hebrew Charities attended today’s matinee performance of the “Prince and the Pauper (Frohman was one of three Jewish brothers from Ohio who were involved with the Broadway theatre before World War I)


1891: The Purim Association hosted its 30th annual charity ball at the Metropolitan Opera House tonight in New York City.


1892: The New York Times“has received $20 for Russian Hebrew immigrants from ‘A.Y.E.’”


1893: “New Things in Lawsuits” published today described a lawsuit brought by Max Bronestein against three New Jersey constables for desecrating his home “by cooking and eating meals which had not been prepared according to the Hebraic usages and principles” including the use of “pork sausage.”


1894: “Zangwill’s New Jewish Stories” published today provided a review The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies by Israel Zangwill.


1894: It was reported today that Rabbi Henry Berkowitz offered the opening prayer and then presided over the non-denominational memorial service held in Philadelphia at Keneseth Israel in memory of George W. Childs who was a newspaper and public benefactor in Philadelphia, PA. Dr. Joseph Krauskopf the rabbi at Keneseth Israel delivered an address that highlight Mr. Child’s philanthropic work.


1896: More than 3,000 people are expected to attend tonight’s charity ball sponsored by the Young Ladies and Gentlemen’s League of the Montefiore Home.  This ball is the successor to Purim balls which were a popular social and fundraising event in New York City for many years.  Among the expected attendees are Mayor Strong and Governor Morton.


1898: “London Literary Letter” published today described Israel Zangwill’s new novel as being “a Jewish story” similar to the one that was his “first great success.”  Zangwill’s attendance at the “congress called to consider” “the project of colonizing Palestine with Jews” means “that he intends to do more than write stories of the Ghetto.”


1898: It was reported today that David Christie Murray, the English author, “is emulating Zola in taking up the defense of Dreyfus. 


1898: Emile Zola appeals his conviction.


1899(16th of Adar, 5659) Shushan Purim – the 15th of Adar fell on Shabbat


1899: The children attending the religious school at Congregation B’nai Jershurun on the corner of 65th Street and Madison Avenue celebrated Purim today.


1898: Picquart is dismissed from the Army.


1900: Birthdate of college football star and Medal of Freedom winner Harry Herbert.

1901: Birthdate of Aharon Zisling, the native of Minks who helped to found Youth Aliyah, the Palmach and Ahdut HaAovoda and was Israel’s first Minister of Agriculture.


1902: In Vienna, Ida Wolf and Siegfried Reginald Wolf gave birth to Irma Wolf.


1903: Rabbi Kaummann Kohler was elected to the presidency of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio.


1903: Leopold Greenberg arrives in Brindisi and sends a short telegram whose obscurity of wording strikes dismays Herzl.


1903: A paper by Victor Rosewater was read at The National Convention on Municipal Ownership and Public Franchises which is meeting at the Reform Club in New York City.  Rosewater was arguing for the ownership of electric lighting plants by municipalities. Rosewater was the editor of the Omaha (Nebraska) Daily Bee, an important Republican political leader and an active member of the Jewish community.


1905(21st of Adar I, 5665):Abraham Adolphe Sée the attorney who “president of the Jewish consistory of Colmar and was “the brother of Marc Sée and Gustave Sée” passed away today in Paris.


1906: The New York Times reported that the Motor Yacht Club of Great Britain has received two challenges from E.J. Schroeder of New York, owner of the Dixie, to compete in races for the Hamsworth Cup and the International Cup which was won last year by Napier II, a vessel owned by Lord Montague and Lionel Rothschild.


1906: “The Jewish congress for the attainment of full civil and political rights of Jews which met” secretly in St. Petersburg “decided to participate in the elections for members of the National Assembly and to for a party to defend the interests of the Jewish masses.”


1907: Birthdate of Cyrus Sol “Cy” Malis the native of Philadelphia who pitched in one game for the hometown Phillies.


1909: Birthdate of Claude Cahen a native of Parish who was “a specialist in the studies of the Islamic Middle Ages, Muslim sources about the crusades and the social history of the medieval Islamic Society.”


1912(8th of Adar, 5672): Sixty-one year old New York banker Ernst Thalmann passed away today.


1913(19th of Adar I, 5673): “Communal worker” William Sicher passed away today in St. Louis, MO.


1913: Dr. Nathaniel I. Rubinkam is scheduled to deliver a lecture on “Faust” this evening at the Chicago Hebrew Institute.


1915: For a second day, the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments concerning the granting of a writ of habeas corpus in the case of Leo M. Frank who was found guilty of murdering a factory girl in 1913 in a courtroom “pervaded by mob spirit.”


1915: Arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States on the appeal of Leo M. Frank from the denial of a writ of habeas corpus by a Federal District Came to an end this afternoon” when Louis Marshall concluded his speech for the defense and Attorney General Grice and Solicitor General Dorsey argued for the State of Georgia


1916: Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, who has just returned from Constantinople, is to be honored today by the public at the Great Hall of the College of the City of New York.  Cleveland H. Dodge, acting on behalf of the Mayor, is chairman of the committee sponsoring the event.  Among the speaks will be Mayor Mitchell, Bishop Greer, Oscar S. Straus, Rabbi Wise John H. Finley, President Sidney E. Mezes and Ambassador Morgenthau himself.


1916: Birthdate of award winning composer Mordecai Seter.  Born in Russia, he moved to Palestine in 1923 where he spent the rest of his life.  Among his earliest work was The Sabbath Cantata, patterned after Renaissance music.  Several of his most important works included Biblical themes.  These included music for the ballet Judith commissioned by Martha Graham Jephthah’s Daughter commissioned for the Bat Sheva Dance Company and a symphony simply entitled Jerusalem


1917: A. M. Sharp is scheduled to lead the daily service at Temple Emanu-El where Dr. Enelow will speak on “The Jewish Characteristics of Jesus.”


1917: As the Romanoff dynasty hurtled towards its final days, with all that that meant for the Jewish people, Tsar Nicholas “order the Duma to close down” today


1918(14th of Adar, 5678): As World War I enters its final year, Jews celebrate Purim


1918: “A memorial meeting in honor of the late Dr. Henry M. Leipziger” the long time “Supervisor of Lectures in the public schools was held” tonight “at Temple Emanu-El under the auspices of the Judeans, an organization which he had been President for many years.


1919: Birthdate of Brooklyn native Mason Adams the multi-talented actor who most famous role was as the anonymous voice of Smucker jams and jellies which ended with his tagline - "With a name like Smucker's, it has to be good"

1920: “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “a silent horror film…written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer” was released in Germany today.


1920: Major General Louis Bols, the Officer Administering the Government of Palestine, issued an official proclamation that the British government intended to carry out the terms of the Balfour Declaration


 1920: Birthdate of Tony Randall.  Born Leonard Rosenberg in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Randall is best remembered for his role as Felix Unger in the television version of The Odd Couple.  Randall often played light comedic roles in the movies but in reality he was an accomplished actor and very urbane, cultured individual.  During the 1950’s, Randall lived near the Met.  In the evening he would take around the neighborhood often stopping in to catch the last two or three acts of that evening’s opera.  As Ed Murrow said when visiting Randall’s apartment during “Person to Person,” Randall’s apartment was not only filled with books, but Randall had actually read the books.


1924: The trial against Hitler began in Munich.  Hitler was on trial for his part in attempted coup that began in a Munich Beer Hall.  The coup failed.  Hitler was found guilty and sent to jail.  While in jail, he wrote Mien Kampf.  He was treated like a celebrity while in jail and came out stronger politically than when he went in.


1925: Seventy-four year old James Edgar who as U.S. Senator from New Jersey succeeded in getting the Senate to adopt a resolution in 1916 “asking the President to set aside a day as Jewish relief day for Jewish war sufferers” passed away today.


1925: As a sign of the growing power of the Nazi Party, The Völkischer Beobachter the party’s official newspaper begins publishing again.


1926: In London, David and Rose Pollack gave birth to Dr. William Pollack, who in 1980 along with his colleagues won the Lasker Award “for excellence in biomedical research.”

1926: In New York City, Isaac and Bertha Belack, Jewish immigrants from Russia, gave birth to Doris Belack, the veteran actress known for her roles on “Law & Order” and the hit comedy “Tootsie” who was also the wife of Philip Rose, the producer of “A Raisin in the Sun.” (As reported by Paul Vitello)


1926: Fearing trouble now that students at Bucharest University have gone on strike because the school has not acted to limit the number of Jewish student, the government is having the streets of the city “patrolled by military policy” who have orders to “prohibit” “all authorized gatherings.”


1926: According to Menorah Journal Editor Henry Hurwitz, while in “the last century many of the finest minds and spirits in Europe and America turned their backs on Judaism, today, the intelligent Jew is seeking not avenues of but the road to return to Judaism.”


1926: According to reports published today, that according to H.J. Reit Chairman of the Washington Heights section of the United Palestine Appeal, the organization has reached its goal of $125,000 after raising $90,000 at its recent one hundred dollar a plate dinner.


1926: According to the official figures of the British Colonial Office published in the United States today, “during 1925 a total of 33,801 Jewish immigrants entered Palestine, 2,141 Jews emigrated from Palestine” for a “net increase in the Jewish population for the year of 31,660.”


1927: Ten year-old Yeudi Menuhin made is his European debut as a soloist with the Lamoureux Orchestra under the baton of Paul Paray in Paris


1928: In Kfar Malal, Shmuel Scheinerman of Brest-Litovsk and Vera (née Schneirov) Scheinerman of Mogilev gave birth to Ariel Scheinermann who would gain as soldier-statesman Ariel Sharon.


1930:  Birthdate of pianist Lazar Berman.  Born in Leningrad to Jewish parents, he placed third in the piano competition at Budapest in 1956.


1930: Birthdate of Bronx native and DeWitt Clinton High graduate Donald R. Siegel who gained fame as actor Don Devlin.


1930: Moe Berg received his LL.B. today.


1931(9th of Adar, 5691): Otto Wallach passed away at the age of 93.  The German born chemist was a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1910.


1932(19th of Adar I, 5692): Yosef Chaim Zonnenfeld, or Sonnenfeld, passed away.  Born in 1848. He “was the Chief Rabbi and co-founder of the Edah HaChareidis, Haredi Jewish community in Jerusalem, during the years of the British Mandate of Palestine. He was originally given the name "Chaim", however, the name "Yosef" was added to him while he experienced an illness. Sonnenfeld was born in Verbó, Hungary (today: Vrbové, Slovakia). His father, Rabbi Avraham Shlomo Zonnenfeld, died when Chaim was five years old. He was a student of Rabbi Samuel Benjamin Sofer (the Ksav Sofer), the son of Rabbi Moses Sofer (the Chasam Sofer). He was also a student of Rabbi Avraham Schag in Kobersdorf (who was himself a disciple of the Chasam Sofer); Sonnenfeld moved from the latter city to Jerusalem in 1873. He became an important figure in Jerusalem's Old City, serving as the right-hand man of Rabbi Yehoshua Leib Diskin and assisting the latter in communal activities, such as the founding of schools and the Diskin Orphanage, and the fight against secularism. He refused to meet with Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany who visited the Old City because he believed that the Emperor was a descendant of the nation of Amalek. Sonnenfeld sent a delegate, a former Dutch diplomat and writer who had become a baal teshuva, Dr. Jacob Israël de Haan, to Jordan with a peace proposal for King Abdullah.” Contrary to what some might have claimed, “he had a warm relationship with and mutual respect for Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, although the two were vigorous opponents in many areas. Indeed, in 1913 the two traveled together to Northern Israel to try to return lapsed Jews to Torah Judaism.”


1933: Birthdate of Anglo-French financier Sir James Michael "Jimmy" Goldsmith.


1933: A program marking the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Chaim Nachman Bialik, national Hebrew poet, was held this evening in the auditorium of the College of the City of New York. Bialik’s birthdate was actually January 9, 1873.


1933(30th of Shevat, 5693): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1933(30th of Shevat, 5693): Therese Loeb Schiff, the daughter of Solomon Loeb and the wife of Jacob Schiff, who “organized a literary series for wealthy German Jewish women, donated ten thousand dollars to the National Council of Jewish Women to help cope with Jewish prostitution among young immigrant women, and lectured for the Consumers League in support of protective legislation to end child labor and the exploitation of women” passed away today.


1934: The New York Times featured a review of “’The Dream of My People, a film described as “a screen trip though Palestine with Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt” produced by the Palestine-American Film Company now showing at the Acme Theatre which  is also showing “Lot in Sodom.”


1935: In violation of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler orders the rebuilding of the Luftwaffe.  This is one of the many times the West missed a chance to stop Hitler’s march that would lead to the Holocaust.


1935: The Jerusalem Shopkeepers Association announced today that it will be conducting a one day work stoppage next week in a “a protest against rising rents and the refusal of the Municipal Council to pass a rent restriction law.”


1936: Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, the Iowa native and longtime leader for the emancipation of women, delivered an address today “before the women’s division of the American Jewish Congress” said that Jews and Christians “together must uphold the standard of individual rights” and “singled out Germany for condemnation” because of “Nazi persecution of Jews, Catholics and Protestants.”


1937: Mrs. Herbert H. Lehman was among those who addressed the Women’s Committee of the National Women’s Conference of Jews and Christians at the Hotel McAlpin where the theme was “Woman’s Contribution to Better Human Relations.


1938(25th of Adar I, 5698): Parashat Vayakhel and Shabbat Shekalim


1938: In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a meeting of the pro-Nazi German-American Volksbund ends in a riot. (A meeting like this in America’s heartland provides part of the background around which FDR made his decisions about the Jews of Europe This is not an excuse. It is an explanation.)


1939: Jews held protest demonstrations in Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, and several of the large kibbutzim this evening. The demonstrations were sparked by credible reports from London that the British government intends to create an independent Arab State in Palestine which will be structured in such a way to ensure that Jewish people will be permanently relegated to “minority status.” 


1939: Israel Rokach, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, sent a telegram to Colonial Secretary of Malcolm MacDonald expressing the displeasure of the 150,000 citizens of his city over what is reported to be the British decision to turn Palestine into an Arab State in which Jews will permanently be a minority.   He wrote that “establishment of a Jewish National Home in the historic land of our ancestors was accepted by fifty-two nations as a sacred trust” and the Jewish people would never agree to accept this newly created permanent minority status.


1939: Professor Max Lerner of Williams College is scheduled to deliver an address today on “Is It Later Than You Think” at Temple B’nai Jeshurun


1939: Tehilla Lichtenstein is scheduled to deliver a lecture on “The Uses of Adversity” today at the Jewish Science Society


1939: The sixth annual observance of Brotherhood Week which is sponsored by the National Conference of Jews and Christians and which has been endorsed by President Roosevelt came to an end today.


1941: On the second day of deportations, 1,349 Jews were shipped from Gora Klilwaria, Poland today to Warsaw where they either perished or stayed alive long enough to be sent to Treblinka. (As reported by Yad Vasehm)


1941: In the Netherlands, the citizens of Utrecht and Zaandam staged strikes protesting Nazi raids on the Jews.


1942: Isidore Newman and Edward Zeff, two Jewish wireless operators with the SOE began the trip that would end with them landing in Occupied France by take a train to Bristol and then flying to Gibraltar.


1942: For twelve hours today, between midday and midnight, the Jewish population of Palestine observed a voluntary stoppage of all commercial and business. During this period all persons remained indoors in a self-imposed curfew, as a sign of mourning for the loss of the more than 700 Jews who died when the Struma, sank in the Black Sea north of the Bosporus. The Jewish passengers were trying to escape from Nazi dominated Europe and settle in Palestine, something opposed by the British and the Arabs.


1944: Birthdate of Ronald Steven Lauder “an American businessman, civic leader, philanthropist, and art collector. Forbes lists Lauder among the richest people of the world with an estimated net worth of $3.0 billion in 2007.”


1944: Primo Levy and Dr. Leonardo de Benedetti arrive at Auschwitz after a four day trip from a detention camp at Fossoli in central Italy.


1944: Shooting begins of the Nazi propaganda film, "The Fuhrer Gives a Village to the Jews" in Theresienstadt.


1945: Birthdate of Ohio native Stephen Allan “Steve” Hertz who played five games for the National League Houston Colt .45s in 1964 and managed the Tel Aviv Lightning in the Israel Baseball League.


1946: As they searched for those responsible for last night’s attacks on three RAF airfields that destroyed and/or severely damaged 22 aircraft, British troops “seized 5,000 Jews today and imposed a paralyzing night traffic ban throughout Palestine.” The British have already found the body of a dead Jew near one of the airfield.  The deceased is assumed to have been one of the attackers.


1946: Birthdate of Ephraim Sidon the Jerusalem born author of satirical and children books now living in Tel Aviv who in 2004 “was a co-recipient along with David Grossman and Haya Shenhav of the Bialik Prize for literature.

1946: “Inveterate Los Angeles Gambler, publicist and nightclub owner W.R. ‘Billy Wilkerson’” who had “bought a thirty-three acre site between the El Rancho Vegas and the airport” “signed a contract with (Meyer) Lansky’s agent, Harry Rothberg, for a syndicate of investors to buy 60 percent of Wilkerson’s property for one million dollars. (The Mob meaning Lansky and Bugys Siegel, would completely buy-out Wilkerson)


1946: A resolution is scheduled to be introduced today in the United States Senate that would call for a “Congressional investigation of the Palestine situation…The measure calls for a joint House-Senate committee to be sent to the Holy Land to investigate conditions there and report its findings to Congress.”


1947: Jacob and Niza Gabbai arrived in New York from Palestine today.  The couple is here to continue their education.  The Gabbais were married in Tel Aviv in 1944 while Mr. Gabbai, who was serving with the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, was home one leave.  After the war, Mr. Gabbai became co-editor of the Maavak(Struggle), “a publication of the Young Palestinian League in Tel Aviv, which seeks to integrate the country’s cultural resources.


1949: “I Shot Jesse James” a low budget western directed by Samuel Fuller and featuring J. Edward Bromberg as “Harry Kane” was released in the United States today.


1950: Leonard Bernstein's "Age of Anxiety" premiered in New York City.


1951: Monnett B. Davis presented his credentials as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that an agreement on the future status of the Haifa Refineries was initialed by the representatives of the government, the Consolidated Refineries Ltd. and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. Ltd.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that the fourth anniversary of the liberation of Eilat was celebrated by a military parade attended by President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and "a show of local achievements."


1954: In New Haven, CT, Helen (née Gubin) and George Bolotin gave birth to Michael Bolotin the younger brother of Orrin and Sandra Bolotin who gained fame as singer and actor Michael Bolton and who won the Grammy in 1990 and again in 1992 as the Male, Best Pop Vocal Performance


1954: Birthdate of Yuli Tamir the veteran of “Aman” who has served as an MK and held various ministerial posts.


1955: Final performance of “Peter Pan” a musical version the 1904 play “Peter Pan: with music by Mark Charlap and Jule Styne with lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, Betty Comden and Adolph Green.


1957: The Diary of Anne Frank which had been running on Broadway at the Cort Theatre since October, 1955, re-opened at the Ambassador Theatre after it had left the Cort four days ago.


1957: In Jerusalem, Geula Cohen, a prominent member of the 1940s underground group Lehi and later MK for Likud and Tehiya and Immanuel Hanegbi, was the Operations Officer for the Lehi gave birth to MK, cabinet member and security expert Yitzhak “Tzachi” Hanegbi


1958(6th of Adar I, 5718): Eighty-seven year old “magazine cover artist” Modest Stein who was “best known for his painted covers for several Street and Smith magazines, such as The Shadow Magazine” passed away today.

1959(18th of Adar I, 5719): Selig Suskin, a native of the Crimea who was one of the founder of Be’er Tuvia, a delegate


1961: Fifty-one year old Mohammed V, the Sultan of Morocco, who according to Meredith Hindley, found Vichy’s laws pertaining to Jews “appalling” and did what he could given his limited power, to ameliorate their affect, passed away today.


1961(10th of Adar, 5721): Sixty-five year old Uberto De Morpurgo, the son of Julius Baron von Morpurgo and Mary Catherine and husband of Claire Clara Maria de Morpurgo who was Italy’s leading male tennis player during the 1920’s passed away today.


1964: “He Rides Tall” a western with a musical score by Irving Getz was released today in the United States.


1969(8th of Adar, 5729): Seventy year old orthopedic surgeon and World War II veteran Philip Palew, the husband of Dr. Stephanie Shick Palow passed away today.

1969(8th of Adar, 5729): Levi Eshkol passed away.  Eshkol is one of the ironic characters in Jewish History.  He was the Prime Minister sandwiched in between such giants as David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir.  Yet this comparative political non-entity was the Prime Minister in 1967.  He was the one who made the decisions that saved the state in those fateful days of May and June.  And he was the Prime Minister who reunited Jerusalem and reclaimed the City of David.

1970: “Beverly Hills developer Louis Lesser filed suit in San Diego Superior Court today claiming half interest in the estimated $100 million Rancho Los Penasquitos Inc. development company.”


1970: “Georgy”  “a musical with a book by Tom Mankiewicz, lyrics by Carole Bayer” opened today at the Winter Garden Theatre.


1974: At its founding convention The American Sephardi Federation announced its goals: First to revitalize Sephardi heritage, and second to provide for aid the underprivileged population in Israel.


1978: “Deathtrap” written by Ira Levin debuted on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre with Marian Winters in the role of “Helga ten Dorp,” a part that she would stop playing in October when she was diagnosed with Cancer that would claim her life.


1980: Egypt and Israel exchanged ambassadors for the first time.  This was one of the tangible outcomes of the historic Sadat - Begin Peace Accords.  While the peace may have turned out to be a cold one, the peace has held.


1980: An Off-Broadway production of “Biography” written by S.N. Behrman opened at Stage 73.


1982: It was reported today that Labor Party chairman Shimon Peres had “told the party’s Central Committee that he had responded negatively to a letter from Begin because he believed that before there could be any talk of a national unity government there had to be a debate on a joint policy.


1984: Reverend Jesse Jackson acknowledged that he called New York City, "Hymietown".  What can I say? Twenty years later we get Mel Gibson and his dad.


1984: ABC broadcast the first half of “Lace” a two part min-series featuring June Brown as “Mrs. Trelowney.”


1986: Seventy-four year old Czech jazz musician Karel Vlach who had “a day job as a traveling salesman for Jewish notions firm until the German occupation made it untenable” and who played with several Jewish musicians including Fritz Weiss before the war when Weiss was ultimately shipped to his death at Auschwitz passed away today.


1987: Israeli officials contended tonight that the Tower Commission had played down the Israeli role in the Iranian arms deal as secondary to that of the United States. ''At first glance, it doesn't seem to stress especially the role of Israel; we are not being blamed,'' said Avi Pazner, spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. ''But that's at first glance, and we have to study it in depth.'' Unofficially, Government members appeared generally relieved that the report did not disclose any involvement deeper than that already attributed to Israeli officials and middlemen.


1987(27th of Shevat): Eighty-three year old Fredric R. Mann, an industrialist and patron of the arts who helped finance music centers in Philadelphia and Tel Aviv, died of cancer this morning in Miami. (As reported by Tim Page)

1988: Secretary George Shultz is scheduled to meet with Israeli leaders today in an attempt to promote the Bush Administration’s latest peace proposals for the Middle East.


1988: “Alien From L.A.” a sci-fi thriller produced by Yoram Globus was released in the United States today.


1988: “Frantic” a fast paced mystery directed by Roman Polanski was released in France and the United States today.


1988: Settlers from the West Bank demonstrated in Jerusalem today outside the office where Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was meeting with Secretary of State George P. Shultz at the start of a new Middle East peace drive. The demonstrations stood in stark contrast to the expression of other Israelis, notably Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who are willing to consider trading occupied land for peace. 1988: Naum Meiman a 77-year-old Soviet Jew who battled for 13 years to leave the Soviet Union embraced his daughter when he arrived in Israel today. Mr. Meiman hugged his daughter, Olga Plam, 50, of Boulder, Colo., who left the Soviet Union 14 years ago and had not seen her father since then.  Meiman who is a mathematician said, “Some of us managed to get out. Many are still left behind.'' Soviet authorities said they delayed Mr. Meiman's emigration request because of his ''access to state secrets.'' Mr. Meiman had worked on classified calculations in 1955.


1989: In an article entitled “Design: Imagine This,” Carol Vogel describes architect Ron Arad's gallery and office including the small back room in which the architect is drafting his design for the new opera house in Tel Aviv.


1991: The Bank of Israel said today that it would permit foreign companies to issue stocks and bonds on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. But the amount of money a foreign concern could take out of the country would be limited to 20 percent of any new issue. Previously the central bank had turned down applications by foreign firms to issue shares on the stock market. The change of policy "will make the Israeli stock market more international," said Gideon Schurr, speaking for the Bank of Israel."Now we need local investments, not Israeli investments abroad."


1993: In New York City, a truck bomb parked below the North Tower of the World Trade Center explodes, killing 6 and injuring over a thousand. One of the bombers claimed the attack was in retaliation for American support of Israel.  The bombers were later found to be connected with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda.


1993(5th of Adar, 5753): Sixty-four year old Carol Solomon author of Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient, “an account of the shock-therapy treatment used to treat patients in asylums, drawn directly from personal experience.”


1994: Eight-six year old Sofka Skipwith, the Russian émigré and Communist who was honored by Yad Vashem for saving Jews during the Shoah passed away today.

1994: The Peace Now supporters rallied tonight in central Jerusalem, demanding an independent inquiry into the Friday massacre and an evacuation of the 400 Jewish settlers living in overwhelmingly Arab Hebron.


1994: Palestinians rioted and fought with Israeli soldiers across the occupied territories and in predominantly Arab towns in Israel today to protest the massacre here on Friday of at least 40 Arab worshipers by a Jewish settler.


1996(6th of Adar, 5756): Mieczysław Weinberg passed away. Born in Warsaw in 1919, he moved to Moscow in 1943.  He lived and composed in the Soviet Union for the rest of his life. His musical virtuosity did not keep him from being arrested during the period Stalin’s “Doctor Plot.” (He left a large body of work that included twenty-two symphonies and seventeen string quartets; according to one reviewer he ranked as, "the third great Soviet composer, along with Prokofiev and Shostakovich".[1


1999: Jewish American cultural historian Maurice Berger when writing in the Los Angeles Times about “the flap at Inglewood High School over Black History Month and Cinco de Mayo observances” reminder readers that “that history can be a valuable force for social change.”


2002(14th of Adar, 5762): Purim


2004: A fourth Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” today and ran for 36 previews and 781 performances at the Minskoff Theatre in NYC.


2005(17th of Adar I, 5765): Henry Anatole Grunwald an Austrian-born journalist and diplomat perhaps best known for his position as managing editor of TIME magazine and editor in chief of Time, Inc passed away today. (As reported by Richard Severo)

2005(17th of Adar I, 5765): Sixty-one year old Jeff Raskin an America human-computer interface expert best-known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple Computer in the late 1970s passed away tody


2005: In “The Morning After the Tel Aviv Bombing” Joseph M. Hochstein provided a portrait of the indomitable will of the citizens of Tel Aviv in the face of senseless slaughter.

2006(28thof Shevat, 5766): Sixty-six year old artist and photograph editor Sally C. Fox passed away.

2006(28th of Shevat, 5766): Sir Hans Singer, a refugee from Nazi Germany and a well-known British development economist, passed away.


2006: In “Betty Friedan's Enduring 'Mystique'”, published todayRachel Donadio describes the importance of the writings and career of the recently deceased author and feminist.


2006:  The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel's two chief rabbis, Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger have “questions” for the Archbishop of Canterbury, but will not cancel plans to meet the leader of Britain's state church this May in light of the vote by the General Synod of the Church of England to divest its shares in companies whose products are used by the Israeli government in the territories.


2007: Members of Histadrut remained on the job giving authorities more time to affect an immediate solution to the problem of salary debts in 40 local authorities.


2007: Starting today Diane Ravitch “participated in a ‘blog debate’ called ‘Bridging Difference’ with Deborah Meier on the website of Education Week.”


2007: Knesset members yesterday urged the legal authorities to explore ways of indicting Professor Ariel Toaff over his book Pasque di Sangue, which alleges a factual basis to a 15th-century blood libel.”


2008: In New York, The Center for Jewish History and the American Jewish Historical Society presents distinguished writer and journalist Janet Malcolm reading from her stunningly perceptive work Two Lives, in which she pursues the charmed life of famed literary couple Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas while living in a Vichy, France village and pursues the larger question of biographical truth.


2008: The New York Times reports on the results of  a survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.http://religions.pewforum.org/.  The report indicates that the behavior of American Jews in terms of religious affiliation may be more a function of their behavior as Americans as opposed to their behavior as Jews.  The report supports the bi-modal nature of religious behavior in America – a quest for spirituality which is not necessarily tied to usual patterns of denominational affiliation – which is also apparent in the Jewish community.


2008(20th of Adar I, 5768):Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, a former chief of Israel’s general staff and the paratroop commander who planned and led the storied 1976 raid in which Israeli troops freed 103 hijacked hostages at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, in Israel. He was 70. He was the 13th Chief of Staff for the IDF.


2008:Rabbi Charles A. Klein, a Conservative rabbi and for the last 30 years the spiritual leader of the Merrick Jewish Center-Congregation Ohr Torah,will be installed today as the 59th president of the New York Board of Rabbis, the world’s oldest and largest interdenominational rabbinical board.


2009:Comedian and actor Eugene Mirman discusses and signs his new book, The Will to


 Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life, at Barnes & Noble in Georgetown.


2009: The Nineteenth Annual KOACH Kallah, sponsored by KOACH, the college program of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism opens at the Brandeis-Bardin Campus of the American Jewish University in Simi Valley, CA.


2009: In Venezuela, assailants threw an explosive at a Jewish community center today, but nobody was hurt which was the second assault against Venezuela's Jewish community this year.


2009: Today Sergio Widder of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center criticized Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for failing to take steps aimed at curbing anti-Semitism.


2010: U.S. premiere of “The Yellow Handkerchief” produced by Arthur Cohen with music by Eef Barzelay.


2010: Harry Baron, the first Jewish justice to serve on the Irish Supreme court whose wife Harriet had passed away 13 years ago, was laid to rest today at “Dolphin’s Barn’s Jewish Cemetery.


2010:Rabbi Barry Baron, co-Director of Jewish Welfare Board is scheduled to lead Purim festivities and services at Fort Belvoir.


2010:Today's issue of Haaretz Magazine is scheduled to publish the exclusive story of Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a Hamas founder and one of its leaders in the West Bank, who served for over a decade as the Shin Bet security service's most valuable source in the militant organization's leadership.


2010(12thof Adar, 5770): Eighty-eight year Daniel Kapilow, the “retired President of Teamster Local 966” and advocate for providing aid to retired boxers who was predeceased by his wife Natalie with whom he had two children – Susan and Gloria – passed away today.


2010:ABC News President David Westin confirmed in an interview today that the network's ranks of bureau correspondents, which currently number several dozen, would be cut in half and be replaced with "digital" journalists who would be expected to shoot and edit their own stories. As part of the deep cuts announced this week at ABC News, the network plans to close all of its physical bureaus around the country except Washington and halve the number of its domestic correspondents.


2010(12 Adar, 5770):Prof. David Bankier, one of the world's most renowned Holocaust scholars who also served as the head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, died at the age of 63 today after a four-year battle with cancer. 

2011:Five Brothers, a film about a brotherhood of Algerian Jews living in France who rally to defend themselves while avenging the memory of their murdered father, is scheduled to be shown at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.


2011: In Iowa City, Benjamin Coelho and other local musicians are scheduled to perform at Hillel’s Champagne & Classical Evening, which is a fundraiser for this vital part of the University Of Iowa and Iowa City Jewish communities.


2011: In Fairfax, VA, the Olam Tikvah Mens Club is scheduled to host its Judaism is for Lover’s Party.


2011: Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan is scheduled to perform as part of the People’s Symphony Concerts in NYC.


2011:Palestinians in Gaza reported today that IDF planes hit targets in Gaza belonging to Islamic Jihad west of Khan Younis but the IDF did not confirm the Palestinian reports.


2011:Iran and Syria have agreed to cooperate on naval training, Reuters reported Iran’s official news agency saying today.


2011(22ndAdar I, 5771): Eighty-nine year old “Judith Coplon, a former Justice Department employee who became a sensation in 1949 when she was accused of being a Soviet spy” passed away today.(As reported by Sam Roberts)

2011(22ndAdar I, 5771):Arnost Lustig, an acclaimed Czech author who drew on his own harrowing experiences as a teenager in World War II to produce novels and short stories laced with tales of young people who survive the Holocaust, passed away today the age of 84. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

2011(22ndAdar I, 5771):Ora Eyal, one of Israel’s most successful children’s book illustrators, whose work included the Israeli classic “A Tale of Five Balloons,” passed away today at the age of 64. “Eyal was born in Jerusalem in 1946 and studied at the Bezalel Academy in the city. She also worked as a translator from Italian. Eyal won the 1994 Ben Isaac Prize for Illustration from the Israel Museum. She was awaiting delivery of the final book she illustrated, “Everyone Went for a Trip,” just before she died.” (As reported by the Eulogizer)


2011(22ndAdar I, 5771):Howard R. Johnston, 86, a retired lieutenant colonel, passed away today. A native of Bruce Lake, Indiana, he spent 23 years on active duty, and was a combat veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He was a senior aviator, qualified in fixed and rotary wing aircraft, and a certified flight examiner. (As reported by the Eulogizer)


2012: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Technologist” by Matthew Pear and the recently released paperback edition of “Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall — From America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness” by Frank Brady.


2012: Today, the IDF is expected to open the southwest segment of a highway that leads to Eilat for the first time since a terror attack near the border with Egypt left 8 Israelis dead after having made major security improvements including the erection of 23 foot high fence. (As reported by Yoav Zitun)


2012: “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” is scheduled to be shown at Temple Beth-El in Poughkeepsie, NY


2012: “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is scheduled to be shown at the Greater Phoenix Jewish Film Festival in Scottsdale, AZ


2012: In London, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of J Street and the author of “A New Voice for Israel” and Jonathan Freedland who writes a weekly column for The Guardian are scheduled to take part in a panel discussion entitled “A New Voice for Israel” as part of Jewish Book Week.


2012: The new edition of “IBM and the Holocaust” by Edwin Black will be released today at a special Live Global Streaming Event at Yeshiva University’s Furst Hall in New York. The Event can be seen at http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

2012(3rd of Adar):  Anniversary of the completion of the Second Temple.  [Editor's Note – This ushers in one of the best periods in Jewish History; we got to be Jewish and nobody tried to kill us!  It is puzzling that we celebrate the tragedy of the destruction of the Temple but do not celebrate the joy of it completion.  It is also puzzling that we celebrate an invented moment in our history (Purim) and do nothing to celebrate a real moment of joy.]


2012: One-hundred-one year old Canadian violinist Ethel Stark founder of the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra passed away.

2012(3rd of Adar, 5772): Ninety-four year old Sol Schiff who so dominated his sport that he was known as “Mr. Table Tennis” passed away today. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

2012: Workers at Haifa, Ashdod and Eilat ports called a general strike starting at 6 A.M. this morning, after overnight talks between representatives of the finance and transportation ministries, leaders of the Histadrut labor federation and workers’ committees failed to reach an agreement to prevent the strike. 2012: Israeli aircraft bombed two targets in the southern Gaza Strip overnight, the military said today. 2013: “MAKERS: Women Who Make America,” which is follow up to “Gloria Steinem: In Her Own Words” is scheduled to be shown on PBS this evening


2013((16th of Adar, 5773): Ninety-five year old Stéphane Hessel, the hero of the Resistance, concentration camp survivor and French diplomat passed away.

2013: The 92nd Street Y is scheduled to host “Political Earthquake In The Middle East: Are There Any Good Options For The U.S. and Israel” with Walter Russell Mead and Warren Kozak


2013:A rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip at Ashkelon early this morning, breaking months of quiet between Israel and the Palestinian enclave.


2013: US President Barack Obama will not present a new peace initiative when he visits Israel and the Palestinian territories next month, and instead is coming “to listen,” Secretary of State John Kerry said today


2014: The Thaler Holocaust Committee under the leadership of Dr. Bob Silber is scheduled to meet at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.


2014: Author and newswoman Hoda Kotb is scheduled to talk about her memoir with Jonathan Tisch at the 92nd Street Y.


2014: Jordan warned today that it might review a 1994 peace treaty with Israel after Israeli MPs began a debate on allowing Jewish prayers at Jerusalem’s sensitive Temple Mount.


2014: Yad Vashem recognized Sebastián Romero Radigales as Righteous Among the Nations.

2014: “It was announced today that actress Jessica Lange would be the new face of Marc Jacobs Beauty (He is Jewish – she isn’t)


2014: Israeli troops along the border with Lebanon were on high alert tonight after Hezbollah threatened action over what it said was an Israeli air raid


2014: Pulitzer-prize winning author Philip Schultz is scheduled to discuss The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse about a young man translating his mother mother’s diaries that “concern the Jedwabne massacre.”


2015: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center For Holocaust Education is scheduled to host “The Hiding Place: A Queer Storytelling Tribute to the Diary of Anne Frank.”


2016: In New York, the Jewish Museum is scheduled to host 45 minute tours of the exhibition “Unorthodox” led by the Museum’s docents.


2016: “Ten terrorist attack victims who won financial claims against Iran can seize a $2.8 million judgment owed to that country’s Defense Ministry, a federal appeals court said today.”


2016: “Feeling are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer” and “Cremator” are scheduled to be shown at the 26th Washington Jewish Film Festival.


2017(30th of Shevat, 5777): Rosh Chodesh Adar

2017: The New York Times published books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Almost Complete Poems by Stanley Moss, When Police Kill by Franklin E. Zimring, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Older by Richard Haass and the recently released paperback edition of Not In God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.


2017: “Cloudy Sunday,” a film that tells “of a war-time romance in Thessaloniki between a Jewish girls and a young resistance fighter” is scheduled to be shown for the last time at JW3 in London.


2017:Soprano Rachel Joselson and pianist Rene Lecuona are scheduled to perform selections by composers who were prisoners of Nazi Germany in Theresienstadt during the Holocaust, including Viktor Ullmann, Adolf Strauss, Ilse Weber and Gideon Klein at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.


2017: Among those waiting to see if they will win an Oscar tonight are actress Natalie Portman, actor Andrew Garfield and the creator of “Joe’s Violin”



2017: “The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936” – an exhibition that “explores whether a controversial proposed boycott might have strengthened international resistance to Nazi tyranny and how the Nazis used the games as propaganda to further their agenda” is scheduled to come a close at California African American Museum.


2017: Efraim Halevy, the ninth director of the Mossad is scheduled to be interviewed by David Horovitz tonight at the Hirsch Theatre in Jerusalem.


2017: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host “An Evening with Wolf Blitzer.”


2018: The Center for Jewish History and YIVO Institute are scheduled to host the opening of the exhibition of “Jews in Space: Members of the Tribe in Orbit.”


2018: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host “An Evening with Israeli Master-Mentalist Lior Suchard.”


2018: “Prayer” is scheduled to be the topic for the interdenominational scripture discussion group co-sponsored by the Oxford University Jewish Society.


2018: The Jewish Women’s Group is scheduled to celebrate Purim at the Brody Center at the University of Virginia.


 


 


 

This Day, February 27, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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February 27


272:  Birthdate of Constantine the Great, Roman Emperor from 306 to 337.  Constantine adopted Christianity as the state religion for the Roman Empire which marked a turning point (negative) for the Jews of Europe.[ There is plenty of agreement that Constantine was born on February 27 but there is not agreement on the year.  It ranges from 272 to 289]


380: Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II jointly issued The Edict of Thessalonica which made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.


1514: King Sigismund I appointed Michael Yosefovich “senior” of all Lithuanian Jews


1562: Pius IV issued Dudum e felicis recordationis, a papal bull that confirmed the papal bulls of Paul IV including those that put restrictions on where Jews could live and how they could earn a living.


 1670: Leopold I ordered the Jews expelled from Austria.


1680: Seventy-nine year old Puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin the author of Moses and Aaron: Civil and Ecclesiastical Rites, Used by the Ancient Hebrews passed away today.

https://archive.org/details/mosesandaaronci00goodgoog



1717: Birthdate of German bible scholar Johann David Michaelis one of whose “dissertations was a defense of the antiquity and divine authority of the vowel points in Hebrew.”


1719: In London, Moses Raphael Levy, a native of Germany and Grace Mears, a native of Jamaica gave birth to Rachel Franks Levy, the wife of Isaac Mendes Seixas.


1755: Birthdate of Shalom Ullman, the Hungarian born rabbi and Talmudist whose son and grandson followed in his footsteps by serving as rabbis at Lackenbach.


1771: “Mr. Isaac De Peza presented the Synagogue in Barbados with 6 Silver Purim Cups.


1790: Birthdate of Sara Ballin who was buried at the Hosens Jewish Cemetery in Denmark when she passed away in 1876.


1799: Birthdate of Frederick Catherwood the English artist architect.  In 1833, he made a detailed survey of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.  He probably was the first westerner since the days of the crusades to have access to this shrine which is located on the Temple Mount.  Catherwood was one of a veritable army of English visitors to “the holy land” who helped to excavate and map the area in the 19th century.


1801: Pursuant to the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801, Washington, D.C. is placed under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress. “The first recorded Jewish resident of the city was Isaac Polock. He arrived in 1795. Polock, a grandson of a founder of the Newport, Rhode Island synagogue, was a small time real estate developer. He built a number of fine homes along present day Pennsylvania Ave. An early renter of one of Polock's houses and his neighbor was James Madison, a later President.”  Major Alfred Mordecai was another of D.C.’s first Jewish residents. The North Carolina native entered West Point at the age of 15 and was in the first graduating class when he completed his studies in 1823.  Mordecai came to Washington in 1828 where he served as the commander of the Washington Arsenal. Washington Hebrew Congregation founded in 1852 was the city’s first Jewish Congregation.  Adas Israel, which was originally founded as an Orthodox synagogue in 1869 received a donation from President Grant for its building fund. The congregation later switched to the Conservative movement.  Today the downtown location of Adas Israel is remembered as the Historic 6th& amp; I Synagogue.  For me, the synagogue at 6th& I was the place in the late 1940’s and 1950’s where I went for my first Simchat Torah Services, my first Megillah readings and a whole lot more.  The synagogue at 5th& amp; I was famous because Al Jolson’s father had been its cantor and Jolson sang their as a little boy.  Adas Israel moved to its Connecticut and Porter where it remains today. During the 1950’s Ambassador Eban spoke from its pulpit on more than one occasion much to the congregation’s joy and delight.  For more about the history of the Jewish community in Washington you might want to look at the website of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington.


1805(28th of Adar I, 5565): Naphtali Herz (Hartwig) Wessely passed away. Born in Hamburg in 1725, he “was a 18th-century German Jewish Hebraist and educationist born at Hamburg.”


1807: In Portland, Maine Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow and Stephen Longfellow gave birth to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow the poet famed for such famous poetic works as “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Evangeline” as well as “Judas Maccabaeus”  an 1872 five-act verse tragedy a Hebrew version of which  was published in 1900.

1811: In Charleston, SC, Mr. Solomon Hyams officiated at the wedding of Montague Jackson to Hannah Hyams.


1821: Birthdate of Selig Cassel, the brother of Jewish historian and author David Cassel, who converted and became Paulus Stephanus Cassel who was then able to further his academic career as well as taking on the role of being a missionary trying to convert other Jews.


1827(30th of Shevat, 5587): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1827(30th of Shevat, 5587): Samuel Marx, the chief rabbi of Trier and an uncle of Karl Marx passed away today.


1831(14th of Adar, 5591): Purim


1831(14th of Adar, 5591): “Austrian historian and educator” Adolf Beer passed away today.


1841: In the Netherlands Eliezer Eduard Hirschel Kann and Hyacintha Kann gave birth to Livia Amalia Kann.


1844: The Dominican Republic (then known as Santa Domingo) on the island of Hispaniola gained its independence from Haiti.  During the 16th and 17thcentury Sephardic merchants settled on the island, many of them coming from Curaco. “The oldest Jewish grave (on the island) is dated 1826.”  Jews of this period assimilated into the general population and lost their identity.  In the 1930’s the Dominican Republic became a haven for Jews escaping Hitler’s Europe and most of today’s vibrant Jewish community traces its origins to this period.


1844: Birthdate of Moses Ha-Levi Horowitz, the Romanian born Yiddish actor and playwright who came to the United States in 1882 where he was known as the famous Morris Horowitz.

1845: A “Reise-Pass” was issued to Bernhard Behrend today which he was required to carry with him at all times as he traveled “from his native Rodenberg to Frankfurt

1846; “In Darmstadt-Eberstadt, Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany, Emanuel Bamberger and the former Helen Fleisch gave birth to  Simon Bamberger, “the fourth Governor of the state of Utah who was the first non-Mormon, the first Democrat and the first (and so far only) Jew to hold this post.

1847: Birthdate of English actress Ellen Terry, whose portrayal of Portia in the Merchant of Venice was one of her signature role.  She performed with Sir Henry Irving whose greatest dramatic success came with his performances in “The Bells.”


1852: Benjamin Disraeli began serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer for  the first of three times which also meant that he was the leader of the Tories in the House of Commons


1853(19th of Adar I, 5613): Sixty-eight year old Jacob Aaron passed away in London.


1855: A concert designed to raise funds for the Hebrew Benevolent Society is scheduled to be held today.


1856: Estra (Therese) Wiesner and Rabbi Jonas Wiesner gave birth to Emilie Wiesner.


1856: Adolphe Salomon married Esther Russell today in the United Kingdom.


1859: Birthdate of Bertha Pappenheim “the founder of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women).”


1861(17th of Adar): Rabbi David Tevele ben Moses of Minks author of Bet David passed away today


1861: In Frankfurt, Selig Meir Goldschmidt and Clementine Fuld, the daughter of Herz Salomon Fuld and Caroline Schuster gave birth to Hedwig Goldschmidt who after her marriage was known as Hedwig Cramer.


1864(20th of Adar I, 5624): Chaia Basia, the daughter of Rabbi Yehoshua Usher Rabinowicz of Parysow passed away.


1865(1st of Adar, 5625): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1865: Birthdate of Jacques Mieses, the native of Leipzig who became a journalist and world-class chess champion.


1865: Birthdate of Armand Bloch, the native of Strasbourg who was the grandson of Rabbi Moses Bloch known as of 'Hokhom (the Wise) of Uttenheim, who served in a variety of rabbinic and communal roles in France and Algeria. In 1931, the French government named him as Chevialier of the Legion of Honor in recognition of his service to his co-religionists and his country.


1868: Benjamin Disraeli begins serving as Prime Minister for the first time.


1870: In New York City, James (Jacob) Seligman, the son of Fanny and David Seligman, and Rosa Seligman gave birth to Fleurette Guggenheim, the future wife of Wife of Benjamin Guggenheim


1870: The Chicago Tribune reported that the Constitutional Convention will not be amending the Illinois State Convention mandating a day of the week for observing the Sabbath.  The Jews and the Seventh Day Adventists had petitioned the convention include a provision making the 7th day of the week the Sabbath.  Since this would be based on the 4th commandment of the Decalogue, the biblical source would make it more likely that the populace would enjoy a day of rest. Other groups wanted to disregard the literal biblical reading and follow the first day of rest practice.  Rather than offend any group, the committee hearing the matter decided the convention should take no action.


1871: In Newark, NJ, the Ladies’ Temple Association opened a grand fair at Turn Hall.  The fair is scheduled to be open for the next four nights and is a fund-raiser for the Temple on Washington Street.


1873: A national convention of those who want to amend the U.S. Constitution so that it will state that the United States is a Christian nation met today in Pittsburgh, PA.  There were 500 people at the opening session and more than a thousand attending the evening session.  Attendees claim that their move is part of a fight against atheism, something that Catholics and Jews of the time might have found difficult to believe.


1873: In New York, Isaac and Adeline Phillips gave birth to portrait painter J. Campbell Phillips whose last work was a portrait of his cousin Bernard Baruch completed just two months before his death in 1948.

1874: It was reported today that the annual Purim reception at the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews in New York will be held on March 1st and 2nd.


1874: Birthdate of Dr. David Nunes Nabarro, the son of London merchant who became President of the Medical Society for the Study of Venereal Diseases, President of the Association of Clinical Pathologists and President of the London Jewish Hospital Medical Society.

1877(14th of Adar, 5637): Purim


1877: The Young Men’s Hebrew Association hosted a Purim Ball this evening at Cooper Hall in Jersey City, New Jersey.


1877: Birthdate of Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski “the head of the Council of Eldgers in the Lodz Ghetto who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.


1878: The parents of Lucy Shereck, a young Jewess, “wept bitterly” as they watched the baptism of their daughter at the Marcey Avenue Baptist Church.


1879: Constantine Fahlberg discovered the artificial sweetener saccharine which Ellen Glotz described in The Accidental Epicure.


1880(15th of Adar, 5640): Shushan Purim


1880: Over 4,000 people attended the fancy dress ball given by the Purim Association at the Academy of Music. This year’s annual event raised an estimated $18,000 for Mount Sinai Hospital.


1880: It was reported today that “the war which has for some time raged in Germany between the natives and the Jews, seems to increase rather than to diminish…The crime of the Jews appears to be…their financial prosperity.” “If the Jews in Germany were poor, they would not be attacked.”  But many of them are very rich “and this is their offense.” [Editor’s note – this is fifty years before Hitler came to power]


1881: It was reported today that the second edition of the “History of Egypt Under the Pharaohs” by Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey is now available.  The description of the Exodus presented in this edition is one of the many improvements made in this edition. In a special preface to the new volume, Brugsh-Gey claims that he bases his description of the change in direction taken by the Jews on “contemporary records and the evidence of the Egyptian monuments” to establish “the veracity of the scriptural record.”  He also co-authored “The True Story of the Exodus of Israel: Together with a Brief Review of the History of Monumental Egypt” with Francis Henry Underwood.


1882: In Hudson, Mass., Mary Elizabeth Rice (née Tyler) and Asa Leonard Wheeler, gave birth to Burton K. Wheeler, the U.S. Senator from Montana who in 1936 “said that anti-Semitism has not only gained a foothold in European countries like Germany, Poland, Rumania, Austria and Hungary, but has been imported in the Western Hemisphere by Mexico, Brazil and Ecuador” and that the “capacity for persecution” as embodied in anti-Semitism is not “foreign to American soil.”


1882: A review of “The Electorate and the Legislature” by Spencer Walpole, one of a series of books on the rights and responsibilities of an English Citizen, published today notes that “The House of commons kept one of the members elected for the city of London out of his seat for 11 years because he was a Jew.” This was based on the “historic intolerance and prejudice” of the Commons and its members which has not been fully overcome.


1883:Oscar Hammerstein patented the 1st cigar-rolling machine


1883(20th of Adar I, 5643): Sixty-two year old Julius Stern co-founder of the Stern Conservatory and conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra from 1869 to 1871 passed away today.


1885: In Dublin “Maurice Solomons, an optician who practice is mentioned in Ulysses and his wife gave birth to Dr. Bethel Solomons who played rugby for Ireland was a “supporter of the 1916 Rising.” 

1888: In Xenia, Ohio, Bernhard Schlesinger, a Prussian Jew and Kate Feurle, an Austrian Catholic gave birth to historian Arthur Meir Schlesinger, the Harvard professor who was the father of historian and Kennedy aficionado Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

1888: Birthdate of Lotte Lehman German opera star who eventually moved to the United States and became known for the foundation in her name.  Lehman was not Jewish.  But her stepchildren (on their mother’s side) were Jewish.  When Hitler marched into Austria, Lehman got the children out, moved them to Paris and eventually brought all of them to the United States. 


1889: In Soroki, Bessarabia, Mindel and Yechiel Bronfman gave birth to Samuel Bonfaman founder of Distillers Corporation Limited which was renamed Seagram Co., Ltd whose products included Dewars scotch and a leader of the Canadian Jewish committee.


1891: Birthdate of David Sarnoff.  Born in Russia, Sarnoff became the head of R.C.A. and N.B.C.


1891: It was reported today that the Purim Association raised $15,000 at its annual ball which it will donate to the United Hebrew Charities.


1892(30th of Shevat, 5652): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1892(30th of Shevat, 5652): Seventy-three year old Chazan Moritz German passed away in Bresalua


1893: “Coming Exodus of Russian Jews” published today compared the doubling of the Jewish population in the United Kingdom over the last twenty years to the projected redoubling of that number in only another five years because of the mass migration of Jews from the lands of the Czar due to their cruel treatment.


1895: “Elsie Leslie’s Little Guests” published today described an afternoon at the theatre enjoyed by several hundred Jewish children who saw “The Prince and the Pauper” who were there as guest of the famous child actress.  As a sign of their appreciation they gave her an a bag which was elegantly embroidered with her initials – “E.L.L.”


1895: A debate opened in the Reichstag today over a motion to restrict the immigration of Jews from Russia and Austria.


1895: A large number of prominent Jewish citizens attended “the third reception for the season of the Young Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s League of the Montefiore Home took place this evening at Carnegie Hall.


1895: Rabbi Joseph Silverman of Temple Emanu-El delivered a speech tonight entitled “Charity” in which he said that charity was “the language of the heart…the very poetry religion.”  “The Jewish sages of old had said that the world existed on three pillars – education, religion and charity.  Some might be willing to strike of education, others would be willing to strike of religion and even some would go so far as to strike off both religion and education, but where is the man who would be willing to strike off the pillar of charity?”


1897: A visit to “the Hebrew theatres” was included in the tour of the Lower East Side slums by a group of Yale University divinity students which was followed by a symposium on the methods of organized charities that included Nathaniel S. Rosenthal of the United Hebrew Charities.


1898: “Jews Defended In Reichstag” described the debate during which “deprecated the promotion of Jews to the rank of officers and surgeons, on the ground of their ‘un-soldier like spirit.’” Herr Eugene “Richter vigorously repudiate this” He said that during the war with France in 1870,83 Jewish soldiers received the Iron Cross and 36 of the 70 Jewish surgeons received the same decoration.  General Heinrich von Gossler, the Minister of War, defended the Jews against the false accusation that they had sold defective rifles to the government.


1899: “A Bible Story Up To Date” published today described Abraham Gruber’s updated version of the Purim story which equated the behavior of Haman with anti-Dreyfus forces in France and the European bigots who falsely claim that Jews have their own laws which makes them disloyal of whatever country they are living in.


1899: In his on-going attempt to create a Jewish homeland, Herzl meets with Grossherzog Friedrich of Baden in Karlsruhe. He offers the Grossherzog the protectorate over the land company and requests another audience with the Kaiser. Herzl receives a recommendation to the Deutsche Bank in Berlin to act as a subscription agency for the Jewish Colonial Bank.


1902: In London, a group of Zionists formed the Anglo Palestine Company which became the Bank Leumi.


1903: In Pruzhany, Rabbi Moshe Soloveichik and Pesya Feinstein, the daughter of Rabbi Elihyahu Feinstein gave birth to Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik.





1906: As the Russian rulers issued an “imperial ukase” calling for the first meeting a Russian Parliament, some Jewish leaders have decided to form a political party and participate in the elections for members of this National Assembly.


1907: Jockey Walter Miller, the native of Brooklyn born in 1890 who rode his first race at the age of 14 and passed away in 1959 after having rode 1,094 winners, today road “winners in all vie races at Oakland Race Course.”


1908: Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin delivered an address to the Jewish Colonization of Vienna.


 1911: Twenty-four year old Matt Wells fought a twenty round bout at the National Sporting Club in London “to win the lightweight championship of Great Britain and take home the Lonsdale Belt.”


1913: In Brooklyn, “hat-trimming salesman” William Shamforoff and his wife Rose gave birth to Irwin Gilbert Shamorfoff who gained fame as author Irwin Shaw two of whose most  famous works were The Young Lions, a novel about World War II that became a popular movie and Rich Man, Poor Man, a saga about department store tycoon that provided the basis for a television mini-series of the same name.

1916: “Dr. Stephen S. Wise spoke at the Free Synagogue” this morning on ‘Marriage and After,’ the fourth of his series of addresses on the deeper things of life”


1916: “The twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Temple Israel Sisterhood of Personal Service was formally observed” this evening.


1916: Prior to Mark “Sykes’s departure to meet the Russian Foreign Minister in Petrograd today, Sir Herbert Samuel approached Sykes with “a plan in the form of a memorandum” concerning Palestine which later led Sykes to write to Samuel “suggesting that if Belgium should assume the administration of Palestine it might be more acceptable to France as an alternative to the international administration which France wanted and the Zionists did not.


1916: “E.M. Newman of Chicago delivered he first of his illustrated lectures for the current season at Carnegie Hall” tonight.


1916: The Morris Loeb Memorial Building and the Joseph B. Bloomingdale Memorial Auditorium were formally dedicated today during “the annual meeting of the Hebrew Technical Institute.


1916:  During his speech this afternoon at the annual meeting of the Young Women’s Hebrew Association, Dr. Cyrus Adler “said he did not altogether approve of young women soliciting for the relief funds on the street in the manner exhibited” during “tag day.”


1916: At today’s annual meeting of The Widowed Mothers’ Fund Association, Mrs. William Einstein, the President “made a plea against ‘machine ready’ charity.”


1916: “The new Hebrew Technical Institute” was dedicated today in New York


1916: This afternoon, “at the annual meeting of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society…President Sanders announced that Jacob H. Schiff had donated $25,000 to the organization as the nucleus of a fund with which to erect a new building” to help the society meet its increased needs.


1917: The Russian Revolution broke out in Petrograd. After three years of ruinous war the old regime collapsed. By March a provisional government under Kerensky was set up. During the ensuing revolution, the Jews were caught in the middle. Much of the conflict centered around the south and west where over 3 million Jews lived. It is estimated that over 2000 pogroms took place, especially in the Ukraine, leading to the death of 100,000-200,000 Jews within the next 3 years.


1917: Three days after defeating the Ottomans at Kut, the British forces under Frederick Stanley Maude arrived at Aziziyah on their way to Baghdad with all that this will mean to creation of what we have come to call the modern “Middle East.”


1917: Assemblyman Nathan D. Pearlman sponsored a bill today in the New York State legislature to allow New York City “to buy and sell food” “as an emergency measure” to relieve shortages,


1918: “A dinner,” attended by “officers of the British Recruiting Mission and many rabbis” “for the 150 Jewish soldiers in the battalion recruited for service in Palestine was given at the Hotel Imperial tonight by the Zionist Lunch Club.”


1918: Morris Weinberg, the publisher of the Day announced that in the future, the Day and the Warheit would appear as one publication, Day-Warheit.


1919: During the Versailles Peace Conference, today the Dr. Weizmann, Nahum Sokolow, Professor Sylvain Levi of the College of France, Andre Spire of the French Zionist organization and Mr. Syzsyahkin representing the Jews of Russia presented their case before the Supreme Council which at a “minimum” called for the “establishment of communities Palestine and guarantee of special rights and sovereignty for these communities” and which at a “maximum” called :for the creation of a Jewish state in order that the Jews may have a national home where they can live in peace.”


1921: “On a farm in Calgary, Alberta, Samuel and Zelda Cohen gave birth to “Morton Cohen, a scholar of Victorian literature.” (As reported by Richard Sandomir)

1922: Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones and his wife gave birth to Mervyn Jones the British author whose works included Joseph, a fictional tale based on the life of Stalin.


1925:  Birthdate of Sam Dash.  The Georgetown Law Professor would gain fame as the Chief Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate Scandal.


1926(13th of Adar, 5686): Parashat Tetzaveh; Shabbat Zachor; Erev Purim


1926: Young Judea Clubs throughout the United States presented Purim plays.


1926: “The Einstein Theory of Relativity is not valid under a strict mathematical analysis according to a statement made” today by Charles Lane Poor, the Professor of Celestial Mechanics at Columbia University who attacked the mathematics of theory and “criticized Einstein for his errors in logic saying that he would prove the laws of logic false in order to make his theory hold.”


1927: In Detroit, MI, Abraham and Ruth Jaroff gave birth to Leon Morton Jaroff, “a science writer and editor who persuaded Time Inc. to start Discover magazine in 1980, became its top editor and for many years wrote the popular Skeptical Eye column challenging pseudo-sciences…” (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)


1927: Birthdate of Ariel Sharon, Israeli soldier and political leader.


1927: “Nearly 271 years after Baruch Spinoza…was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam, the ban was revoked when Dr. Joseph Klausner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem uttered the formula of release at” today’s meeting of the university faculty.


1928: Abie Bain, the St. Petersburg born Jewish-American middleweight Abie Bain was knocked out in the fifth round by “KO” Phil Kapla.


1930: In Los Angeles, silent film writer and producer John Stone and the former Hilda Ness gave birth to Peter Hess Stone, the writer who won an Oscar, and Emmy and a Tony

1932: Today, “Chef Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo summoned the Court of Appeals to meet in special session in Albany” on March 3rd which has led many to believe that a decision has been reached in a case regarding the investigation of the government of New York City by a joint state legislative committee.


1932: In Hampstead Garden Suburb, London “art dealer Francis Lenn Taylor” and retired actress Sara Sothern gave birth to American actress Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor who converted to Judaism in 1959, had two Jewish husbands (producer Mike Todd and crooner Eddie Fisher) and was such an ardent supporter of Israel and Jewish causes such as the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, that her films were “were banned by Muslim countries throughout the Middle East and Africa.”

 
1933: Germany’s parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, was set on fire.  The Reichstag Fire was started by the Nazis who used the fire as an excuse to begin their subversion of the German legal and political system.



1933: As a result of the Reichstag Fire which he saw as the confirmation of the Nazis rise to power, Walter Benjamin left Germany.


1933: Along with all the Jewish and leftist actors, Wolfgag Heinz (David Hirsch) was dismissed from his work mark the start of an exile that would lead him from Holland to Britain and finally to Switzerland.


1935: Lazar Kaganovich began serving his first term as People’s Commissar for Transport.


1935: In the Bronx, Jeanette Efron and Sol Fineman gave birth to Eleanor Fineman, an “American photographer, author, and artist” whose works included “Vilna Nights” with dealt with lost Jewish culture.


1935: Harry Hoffman, who works at the Curb Exchange, is scheduled to compete in the 400-meter run at tryouts for the American Maccabi Team being held at the 102ndEngineers Armory today.  The “Jewish Olympics” are scheduled to be held in Tel Aviv starting on April 2 and finishing on April 7.


1935: Birthdate of Uri Shulevitz American author and illustrator. Born in Poland, he survived the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 and moved with his family first to Paris and finally to Israel, in 1949. During the Sinai War in 1956, Mr. Shulevitz joined the Israeli Army. Later, he joined the Ein Gedi kibbutz. He moved to New York City in 1959, studying painting at Brooklyn Museum Art School and working as an illustrator for a Hebrew children's book publisher. In 1962, an editor at Harper & Row saw his freelance portfolio and suggested he write children's book. He won the Caldecott Medal in 1969 for his illustration of The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship. He created his first picture book, The Moon in My Room, in 1963.


 1936: U.S. premiere of Liebelei a German film directed by Max Ophüls which was based on a play of the same name (Liebelei (de)) by Arthur Schnitzler, the Austrian playwright was the son of laryngologist Johann Schnitzler.


1936: “The Goes ‘Round” a musical comedy with a script co-authored Jo Swerling and starring Harry Richman was released in the United States today.


1936: Mathematician Issai Schur returned from Switzerland via Karlsruhe, where his sister lived, to Berlin.


1936: “The plight of the Christian men and women who fled from Germany because of Nazi persecution and terrorism was described this afternoon and evening at a conference and dinner under the auspices of the American Christian Committee for German Refugees at the Hotel Astor.”


1936: “A street fight broke out today in front of a Warsaw synagogue when a group of Jews tried to prevent a number of Jewish tradesmen, who they alleged were continuing to import German goods, from entering the synagogue.”


1936: During a press conference today Count Henri de Baillet-Latour of Belgium, president of the International Olympic Committee sportswriters asked if Germany had lived up to all her promises and agreements to which he answered, “In every respect, the International Olympic Committee had not fault to find.  There Jews on the teams, among the officials and among the spectators.  There were no signs of discrimination.”


1937: New York Timescolumnist Arthur Krock had an award winning “exclusive interview with the President of the United States.


1937: In Rumania, thirty people were hospitalized after having been injured today “when members of an anti-Semitic Nazi party sought to prevent Jews from voting in municipal elections” while another thirty-five people suffered injuries that were not serious enough to require hospitalization.


1938: The Palestine Post reported that during his last day in Palestine, the departing High Commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, laid the foundation stone of the Andrews Memorial Hospital in Netanya, and visited Pardess Hana, Hadera and Haifa.


1938: The Palestine Post reported that In New York the Joint Distribution Committee announced that the Soviet government's firm opposition to the immigration of Jews from outside of the Soviet Union to Birobidjan ended the practical prospect of the development, if not of the entire existence, of what was expected to become an autonomous Soviet Jewish republic. The report mentioned that out of some 27,000 foreign Jews who immigrated to Birobijan, 20,000 had later left the area. 


1939: Birthdate American Formula One driver Peter Revson, who won the 1973 British and Canadian Grand Prix events and was runner-up at the 1971 Indianapolis 500. He was killed during a practice run in 1974.


1939: As the multi-year Arab wave of violence continues, 32 people were killed today and another fifty persons were wounded in a series of explosions and shootings throughout Palestine today.


1940: Jewish scientists Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben discovered carbon-14, the critical material for the method known as “carbon dating.”


1940: The Land Transfer Regulations aimed at ending Jewish property acquisition in Palestine were put into effect by the British government.


1941: “So Ends Our Night” the movie version of the novel by the same name featuring Erich von Stroheim, Alexander Granach and Ernst Deutsch with music by Louis Gruenberg was released in the United States today.


1941: The Nazis completed the suppression of “the February Strike,” the first even if unsuccessful direct action taken against the “treatment of Jews in Europe.”


1941: In retaliation for an innocent incident in Amsterdam, the Germans arrested 425 Jewish men, beat them and deported 389 of them to Buchenwald concentration camp. Two months later 364 of them were transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp. Ten of them committed suicide. By autumn, none of the men were alive.


1942: In Kovno, the German issued an order stipulating “that the Jews were to submit all books in their possession” – which resulted in the confiscation of over 100,000 books. (Yad VaShem_


1942: The first transport of French Jews was sent to Nazi-Germany 


1942: A group of Aryan women staged a protest in Berlin against the arrest of their Jewish husbands whom the government was planning to ship off to concentration camps. 


1943: Birthdate of Jonathan Rosenbuam, the native of Florence, Alabama whose “childhood home was the Rosenbaum House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright” who “was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008.”

1943: Work orders were increased in the Lodz Ghetto increased, easing tensions within the ghetto since more Jews would be needed to work and less would be exposed to deportation.


1943 (22nd of Adar I, 5703): On Shabbat, Rabbi Avraham Duber Shapiro, Chief Rabbi of Kovno, died in the Kovno Ghetto.  Shapiro was a famous Talmudic scholar.  He had been Chief Rabbi of Kovno since before World War I.  At the outbreak of World War II he was in Switzerland under a doctor’s care.  He insisted on returning to Kovno in Lithuania and revisited one of his son’s efforts to join in him in the United States.  Shapiro stayed with his fellow Jews.  When he died, the Nazis forbade any public demonstrations.  Thousands of Jews defied the decree and showed their affection by attending his funeral on the next day.


1943: U.S. premiere of “The Hard Way” “a musical drama directed by Vincent Sherman,” produced by Jerry Wald with a screenplay by Daniel Fuchs and Peter Viertel.


1944: This morning, there were reports of explosions at the income tax office in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa.  There were no reports of casualties.  The Irgun Zvai Leumi is thought to have set off the devices that caused the explosions.


1945: During “The Hunting Season,” “Yaakov Tavi who was in charge of Irgun’s intelligence service was kidnapped at 11 a.m. at the corner of Dizengoff and Yirimiyahu streets.”


1945(14th of Adar, 5705): Final Purim celebrated during World War II.


1947: Louis B. “Mayer auctioned of his horses” today after having thrown Mendel Silberberg and “a gaggle of Jewish Leaders” when they “suggested that Mayer give up his involvement in horse racing because it was bad for the image of the Hollywood Jew.”


1948: The International Agriculture Institute which had been co-founded by David Lubin in 1908 “to help farmers share knowledge, produce systematically, establish a cooperative system of rural credit, and have control over the marketing of their products” was dissolved today.


1950: In the UK, Walter and Liesel (Alice) Schwab gave birth to Julia Schwab, the wife of Professor Anthony Neuberger, who gained fame as Rabbi Julia Babette Sarah Neuberger, Baroness Neuberger, the first female rabbi to have her own congregation (South London Liberal Synagogue) and the “full-time Senior Rabb at the West London Synagogue.”


1951: Three years after having been released in Sweden.“The Little Ballerina” a British drama featuring Anthony Newley was released in the United States today.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that an Israeli soldier was killed when Jordanians opened fire on an Israeli patrol in the frequently infiltrated Beit Guvrin area.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that A Nahal group established a settlement at Ein Gedi, on the shores of the Dead Sea.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that A festive meeting celebrated the establishment of the first local council of Ashkelon, the Afridar housing suburb near Migdal Ashkelon. 


1956: Final broadcast on NBC of “The Tony Martin Show,” a 15 minute musical variety hosted by Tony Martin and produced by Bud Yorkin.


1957: Lazar Kaganovich completed his final term as a “Full Member” of the Politburo.


1958(6th of Adar, 5718):  Harry Cohn, CEO of Columbia Pictures passed away after suffering a heart attack.  Con was one of several Jewish movie moguls who shaped Hollywood and the entertainment business.

1964, Steve Lawrence opened at the 54th Street Theatre in a Broadway musical version of “What Makes Sammy Run?” which ran for 540 performances


1970:  Birthdate of science fiction writer Michael A. Burstein.  According to some, Burstein is not unique because he is a Jewish science fiction writer.  He is unique because he is a practicing Jew who writes science fiction. “Burstein appears at a number of science fiction conventions throughout the year, which can be a problem because they are inevitably held on weekends. “It can be difficult, but it is manageable," he said. He and his wife Nomi either bring kosher meals or arrange to have them delivered to the hotel. Other issues are more complicated. "One of the biggest problems is that a lot of hotels use electronic key cards," he explained. Burstein arranges with a non-Jewish friend to handle unlocking his room during Shabbat, when such usage might not be deemed appropriate. There are a number of Shabbat-observant fans at local science fiction conventions, and they often congregate in Burstein's room for a festive Friday night meal, complete with wine and challah. As for his science fiction, Burstein said there's been nothing particularly Jewish about it... so far. Although there are many Jews who have made it big in science fiction, including Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, and Asimov himself, Burstein is one of the few who has succeeded in the genre who takes his religious obligations as seriously as his scientific ones.”


1971(2nd of Adar, 5731): Parashat Terumah


1971(2nd of Adar, 5731): Seventy year old Russian born American producer Oscar Serlin whose most famous play was “Life With Father” pass away today.

1975(16th of Adar, 5735): One day before his 86th birthday, Hyman Levy passed away in Wimbeldon.

1976: The World Sephardi Federation headed by Nessim Gaon met with King Juan Carlos of Spain. The WSF goal of helping to normalize relations with Israel and Spain did not come to fruition immediately, but over time a relationship developed and eventually the two countries recognized each other.


1978: After premiering at The São Paulo International Film in 1977, Lucio Flaviom a Brazilian film directed by Héctor Babenco was released in Brazil today.


1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that the cabinet had agreed on a new settlement policy which apparently implied a virtual moratorium on new settlements in the administered territories. The cabinet, however, actually failed to make this statement official. At the same time the cabinet rejected any phrasing of the Palestine question in the declaration of principles, now being discussed with Egypt, which would go significantly further than the West Bank and Gaza autonomy scheme, already proposed to Egypt and the US by Israel.


1980: Egypt and Israel exchanged ambassadors for the first time.


1980(9th of Adar, 5740):  Seventy-eight year old character actor George Tobias passed away. Despite a long career that included performing in such hit movies as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Sergeant York” most Americans will remember him as Abner Kravitz, the husband of the busybody neighbor Alice Kravitz on the television sitcom “Bewitched.”


1980: Birthdate of Israeli MK Bazalel Yoel Smotrich, the conservative attorney who opposed the disengagement from Gaza and organized anti-LGBT events.


1981 (22nd of Adar I, 5741): Former New York Congressman Jacob Gilbert passed away at the age of 60.  Gilbert served in Congress from 1960 to 1971.


1983(14th of Adar, 5743): Purim


1984: ABC broadcast the second and final episode of “Lace” featuring June Brown as “Mrs. Trelowney.”


1987: The Israeli Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, announced today that he had agreed with Egyptian officials that there should be an international conference on Middle East peace this year. The agreement, reached after two meetings here with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, reaffirmed in writing a call the two men made in Alexandria last fall, when Mr. Peres was the Israeli Prime Minister. Mr. Peres's commitment, announced at the end of a three-day visit here, was expected to provoke strong reaction from the current Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who vehemently opposes such a conference.


1988(9th of Adar, 5748): Shabbat Zachor


1988(9th of Adar, 5748): Seventy-six year old economist Moe Frankel who earned his doctorate from Rutgers University passed away today.

1988: Today, “TV presenter Esther Rantzen announced live on air that the people in the audience sitting around Nicky Winton were some of the children he had saved” which “was an overwhelming, unexpected and emotional moment and became the catalyst for an outpouring of written material tributes and accolades, including a knighthood in 2003…”


1989: U.S. premiere of “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” with a script by Bruce Wagner.


1990(1st of Adar, 5750: Rosh Chodesh Adar


1990(1st of Adar, 5750): Eighty-two year old Brooklyn born NYU Law School graduate Samuel Perlman, the husband of the former Lucille Rabinowitz and “chief executive of L.M. Rabinowitz and Company” passed away today.


1990 (1st of Adar, 5750): Nahum N. Glatzer passed away. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and educated in Germany, Glatzer moved to the United States in 1938 where he furthered his reputation as a literary scholar, theologian, and editor. A list of his works includes The Schocken Passover Haggadah, The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka and Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought


1991(13th of Adar, 5751): Ta’anit Esther; Erev Purim


1991(13th of Adar, 5751): Eighty-five year old Nathan Perilman who served as the rabbi at Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El passed away today.
 
1991: President George H.W. Bush announced the end of the first Gulf War. During the war, the Israelis agreed not to join the coalition and not to retaliate against the Iraqi’s when they began firing Scuds into their country.  It was the first time that the Israelis had entrusted their security to another country.



1995: Uzi Baram replaced Yithak Rabin as Minister of the Interior


1995(27th of Adar I, 5756): Sixty-seven year old financier Bernard “Bernie” Cornfeld passed away today.

1997: Funeral services were held in Manhattan today for 97 year old May W. Hartman, the widow of Judge Gustave Hartman and mother of Kenneth Hartman and Alicia Ashe who was “founder of the Gustave Hartman YM-YWHA and for 25 years she was President of the Gustave Hartman Home for Children.


1997: Eighty-one year old Scottish painter William Gear who worked for the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section, making him one of the Monuments Men who play a major role in returning looted art, much of it taken by the Nazis from the Jews, to the rightful owners or their heirs.


1998: U.S. premiere of “Dark City” a sci-fi cinema with a script co-authored by David S. Goyer.


1998: The 25th European Athletics Indoor Championships in which Aleksandr Averbukh placed sixth in the Heptathlon opened today at Valencia.


2000:The opening ceremony of the temporary exhibition of photographs and artifacts, “The Jewish Community of Volos” took place, at the Jewish Museum of Greece.


2000: The European Indoor Championships during which Aleksandr Averbukh placed first in the Pole vault came to an end today in Ghent, Belgium.



2000: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Stroheim by Arthur Lennig.

2002: Thirty-four year old Gad Rejwan was shot by a Fatah terrorist north of Jeruslaem.


2003(25th of Adar I, 5763):  Eighty-nine year old Rabbi Noah Golinkin, the former spiritual leader of a Columbia synagogue who earned a national reputation for programs that taught Hebrew literacy to more than 150,000 Jewish adults, passed away  today at Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center & Hospital of complications after surgery. .His one-day Hebrew Reading Marathon and its forerunner, the Hebrew Literacy Campaign, is credited with quickly giving adults enough knowledge of the language to follow the Hebrew prayer book. He wrote textbooks widely used to teach adults because he could not find any suitable for his programs. He is best known for his crash course, an eight-hour program that uses familiar Hebrew words, repetition, exercise, humor and encouragement to bring Hebrew reading familiarity to those who did not learn it as children.

2004: Today, in a case of a Jew honoring a Jew, actress Lauren Bacall, spoke at the posthumous induction of screenwriter Peter Stone into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.


2005:  The New York Times included reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss


2006: The Harlem Globetrotters, the creation of Abe Saperstein, extended their overall record to 22,000 wins.


2006:  The Jerusalem Post reported that a new Israeli tourism campaign will take center stage at Emirates Stadium, the London home of English soccer giants Arsenal, starting in August.


2007: Holocaust survivors from around the world gather in Warsaw to urge the Polish government to compensate them for property confiscated by the former communist regime.


2007: Ninety-three year old Hitler aide Baron Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven passed away today.

2007: Israel got its first Arab President.  Acting President Dalia Itzik left for a weeklong trip to the United States.  During that time, Jajallie Whbee, a Druse who had attained the rank of Lt. Colonel before retiring from the IDF, served in the largely ceremonial post.


2007: Commander Mark Polansky visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to meet Sophie Turner-Zaretsky.  He presented the replica of the bear called Refugee that had comforted Sophie during the Holocaust and a photo of an orphan from war-torn Dafur -- along with NASA space travel certificates -- to U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum chief of staff Bill Parsons, who said the Museum wanted to provide something that would be a timely reminder of history’s relevance. "Although we can send people into space, we still can’t seem to stop them from hating and killing one another. A child’s stuffed toy from the Holocaust and a photograph of a refugee from the genocide today in Darfur remind us the lessons of the Holocaust have yet to be learned."


2007: David Bromberg released “Try Me One More Time,” the first new studio album he had recorded since 1990.


2007: Teapacks performed four songs in a TV special, and the song "Push The Button" was chosen as the Israeli entry for the 2007 Eurovision Contest by popular vote


2008: The Finalist Grand Prize portion of The Second Annual Simply Manischewitz Cook-Off takes place in New York City.


2008 (21 Adar I 5768): Anthony Bernard Blond passed away.  The British publisher and author’s mother was a Sephardic Jew from Manchester and he was the cousin of Harold Laski, the noted British socialist and Laborite.

2008(21 Adar I): Myron Cope, "the voice of the Pittsburgh Steelers" passed away.

2008 (21 Adar I 5768): Approximately 50 Palestinian rockets hit the western Negev today, with one of them slamming into Sapir College near Sderot, killing a 47-year-old student. Another exploded on the helipad of Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, while the hospital was treating casualties from Sderot. The deceased, Roni Yechiah from the town of Btecha in the western Negev, was inside his car in Sapir's parking lot. He died of shrapnel wounds to the chest. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. Yechiah is survived by his wife, Esther, and four children: Niv, who is currently serving in the Israel Defense Forces, Lital, a 17-year-old high school pupil, her 14-year-old sister Coral and 8-year-old brother Idan.


2009:Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip continued their attacks on Israeli civilian areas early this morning when they fired a Kassam that hit an open area in the Sdot Negev region.


2009: Rick Recht returns to Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for another incomparable Musical Shabbat.  Rick is joined by the talented Abbe Silber, daughter of Dr. Bob & Laurie Silber, pillars of the Jewish community.


2009:Robert M. Morgenthau, the long-serving Manhattan district attorney and an institution in New York City politics, will not run for re-election this year. Outside New York, Mr. Morgenthau is most well-known as the model for the original district attorney, Adam Schiff, on the television show “Law & Order.” Mr. Morgenthau had a cameo on the show, portraying a judge.


2009: Former Iowa State University quarterback Sage “Rosenfels was acquired from the Texans by the Minnesota Vikings.”


2010: An Egyptian court overturned a lower court ruling today that called for a halt to natural gas exports to Israel, saying the deliveries should continue unhindered.


2010:An Israeli Arab rights committee sent a petition to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) today opposing the addition of Israel to the organization. After two years of official talks, the OECD will vote in May on whether to admit Israel.


2010: Shabbat Zachor!


2010:  In the evening, Purim and the reading of the Megillah.


2010:Glass falling from the atrium roof of the Sony Building in New York interrupted a Purim party. Ice reportedly broke through the glass roof of the midtown Manhattan building after 11 p.m. Saturday, injuring at least 10 of the 300 guests, according to reports.The party, reportedly given by Aish Hatorah, was attended by "Sex and the City" actor Chris Noth, as well as reality show "Jersey Shore" cast members Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi and Vinny Guadagnino. "Omg roof just collapsed!" Polizzi Tweeted from the party."I think me and @sn00ki felt the wrath for not being Jewish," Guadagnino Tweeted.The actors were not injured. 


2010(Adar 13, 5770):Eighty-nine year old Hank Rosenstein, who played in what is considered the National Basketball Association’s first game, in 1946, as an original member of the New York Knicks, died  today in Boca Raton, FL. (As reported by Vincent M. Mallozzi)

2010: Opening of Jewish Book Week in London, UK.


2011(27thof Adar I, 5771): Eighty-nine year old Philip Burgher, a World War II Army veteran passed away in Buffalo Grove, Illinois.


2011(27thof Adar I, 5771):Brazilian born author Moacyr Scliar, whose “The Centaur in the Garden,” was included among the 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature by The National Yiddish Book Center, passed away today. (As reported by William Grimes)

2011: The Prince of Kosher Gospel, Joshua Nelson, is scheduled to perform at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, IA.


2011: Closing night of the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.


2011: Closing night of The “Voices From a Changing Middle East” festival.


2011: The Los Angeles Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Modigliani: A Life by Meryle Secrest and Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall — From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady


2011: Among the Jewish winners are tonight’s Oscar ceremonies were:


Israel-born Natalie Portman for her portrayal of a tortured ballerina in “Black Swan”


Emile Sherman one of the co-producers of “The King’s Speech” which was named best picture


David Seidler of “King’s Speech” winning for original screenplay


Aaron Sorkin of “The Social Network” for adapted screenplay


Danish director-writer Susanne Bier, took the best foreign-language film statuette for “In a Better World,”


American filmmakers Kirk Simon and Karen Goodman won in the short documentary category for “Strangers No More”  - a film based on the work of the Bialik-Rogozin School in south Tel


Director-writer Lee Unkrich accepted the award for his animated feature “Toy Story 3,”


Randy Newman won for his song “We Belong Together.”


Lora Hirschberg was one of the co-winners for the work of sound-mixing for “Inception.”


(As reported by JTA)


2012: Anna Kantar is scheduled to give a reading of poems by Leah Goldberg at the Stern College for Women in New York City.


2012: Open Women’s Mic Night featuring Poetry, Music, Comedy, whatever you do to entertain the ladies at David Lilimnick’s Off the Wall Comedy Club in Jerusalem


2012: The Tal Law cannot be extended by even one hour, and any attempt to ignore the issue is a mistake, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said at a press conference in the Knesset today (As reported by Lahav Harkov)


2012: Workers at the Haifa, Ashdod and Eilat ports who had held a one-day strike over pension-related demands yesterday will return to work today after a truce was reached at a late-night National Labor Court meeting.


2012: Nurses across Israel went on a 24-hour strike this morning, after overnight negotiations between the Finance Ministry and the chairman of the national nurses’ union failed to reach an agreement to prevent the strike.


2013: L'Chaim Kosher Vodka is scheduled to sponsor the reception that follows The SHUFFLE Concert that will feature performances by Eliran Avni, piano, Moran Katz, clarinet, Linor Katz, cello, Hassan Anderson, oboe, Francisco Fullana, violin, and soprano Ariadne Greif


2013: “The Mexican Suitcase” Rediscovered Spanish Civil War Negatives by Capa, Taro and Chim is scheduled to open at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme


2013: The Weiner Library is scheduled to sponsor a lecture by Mary Fulbrook, author of A Small Town Near Auschwitz


2013: In Portland, the Oregon Jewish Museum is scheduled to host a reception marking the opening of “Pictures of Resistance: The Wartime Photographs of Jewish Partisan Faye Schulman.”


2013: A panel of judges at the International Convention Center Haifa awarded the title of Miss Israel to 21 year old Yityish Aynaw  “the young and gorgeous model, who came to Israel only about a decade ago from Ethiopia.” (As reported by Yori Yanover)


2014: The Consulate General of Israel in New York, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and the Jewish National Fund are scheduled to honor Dr. Clarence B. Jones, co-author of the “I Have A Dream Speech” at the annual commemoration of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.


2014: Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen are scheduled to discuss their bestseller The New Digital Ageat the Historic 6th& I Synagogue.


2014: “In the wake of an alleged attack by Israel on a Hezbollah arms convoy, the organization’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, warned key military personnel of the possibility of war with the Jewish state, a Lebanese journalist with close ties to the organization said today. (As reported by Spencer Ho and Elhanan Miller)


2014: Soldiers are searching for the two Palestinian Arab men who robbed and stabbed an Israeli cab driver this evening near Ariel junction. (As reported by Maayana Miskin)


2015: In London, Jewish Book Week at the Jewish Museum is scheduled to come to an end.


2015: “A Happy End” by Iddo Netanayahu, the younger brother of Benjamin and Yonatan Netanyahu  is scheduled to be performed at Abingdon Theatre.


2015: “Deli Man” “Erik Greenberg Anjou’s forthcoming documentary about the dying (but perhaps reviving) culture of Jewish delicatessens is a meal with many courses” is scheduled to being “its theatrical run in Florida and Arizona” today.

2015(17th of Shevat, 5775): Eighty-three year old Leonard Nimoy passed away today. (As reported Virginia Heffernan)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/arts/television/leonard-nimoy-spock-of-star-trek-dies-at-83.html?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad&_r=0

2016: Shabbat Ki Tissa; for more see
http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/


2016: “Einstein in the Holy Land” and “One in a Lifetime” are scheduled to be shown at the Washington Jewish Film Festival.


2016: In North Carolina, “Apples from the Desert” is scheduled to be shown at the Charlotte Jewish Film Festival.  (A reminder that there are thriving Jewish communities all over the United States)


2017(1st of Adar, 5777): Rosh Chodesh Adar


2017: “Through the Wall” a melodrama starring Noa Koller is scheduled to be shown at JW3 in London.


2017: “More than 200 Israelis attended the funeral of a complete stranger,” Holocaust survivor Hilde Nathan “from the Canary Islands who fulfilled a final wish to be buried in Israel alongside her mother.”


2017: The Temple Emanu-El is scheduled to host “Nuclear Weapons in the Trump Era.”


2017: The J Street annual convention is scheduled to continue for a third day at the Washington Convention Center.


2017: In Paris, “The State of Deception,” an exhibition that examines the Nazis use of “propaganda to win broad voter support, implement radical programs, and justify war and mass murder” is scheduled to come to an end today.


2017: Yiddish folk singer Cindy Paley is scheduled to lead a sing-along of Yiddish love songs at the Beverly Hills House Concert.


2018:The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host a presentation by Rabbi Joy Levitt and Rabbi Michael Strassfeld on “Wife and Husband: Ruth and Boaz”


2018: In Washington, D.C., the Tabard Inn is scheduled to host a screening of “Rosenwald” followed by “further readings and discussion with poet E. Ethelbert Miller and director, producer and writer Aviva Kempner.


2018: In Des Moines, Temple B’nai Jeshusrun is scheduled to host Shayna Steinger speaking “about her professional experiences with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas.”


2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host a Hamantashen Bake-Off followed by a sale of the pastries for the benefit of the Oxford Food Bank.


2018: 2018: JW3 is scheduled to host the penultimate screening of “Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema.”


2018: The Hillel Jewish Leadership Council at the University of Virginia is scheduled to host an evening of “Hamantaschen Making: Bake Action Against Gun Violence.”

 


 


 


This Day, February 28, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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 February 28



628: Persian Shah Khosrau II who “conquered Jerusalem after a brief siege in 614 during the Byzantine – Sasanian War” came passed away today.



1255: Bishop Richard of Worms transferred to the chapter of the local cathedral, among other revenues from the city, the sum of 40 pounds heller which the Jewish community was obliged to pay annually on St. Martin's Day which falls on November 11.



1261: Henry III, the Duke of Brabant and Margrave who provided the first evidence Jews living in Antwerp when he “expressed his wish that the Jews of Brabant should be expelled and destroyed because they were all considered ‘usurers’’ passed away today.



1276(12th of Adar): Bishop Pierre III Rostaing guaranteed protection to the Jews of Carpentras, France in return for a tax of one-thirteenth of the total seat rents of the synagogue



1348: At the Cortes of Alcala de Hebares King Alfonso XI issued a "startling" decree which forbad Jews and Moors from lending money “at interet.”



1488: Joshua Solomon Soncino began printing copies of the Bible at Soncino, Italy.



1533:  Birthdate of French writer and philosopher Michael de Montaigne.  His mother, Antoinette de Louppes, came from a rich Spanish Jewish family, but was herself raised as a Protestant.  Should Montaigne be considered Jewish?  It depends upon whose list you look at, so I will leave it up to others to investigate more fully and decide.



1574: The first official Auto da Fe in the New World was held in Mexico after the establishment of the Inquisition 5 years earlier. The first unofficial Auto da Fe was actually held in 1528 when the conquistador Hernando Alonso was executed.



1575(18th of Adar II): Rabbi Elijah ben Moses de Vidas completed Reishit Hakhmah



1592: Clement VIII issued Cum saepe accidere, a Papal Bull that forbade the Jews of Avignon from selling new goods.



1593: Clement VIII issued Cum Haebraeorum militia, a Papal Bull decreeing that the Talmud should be burnt along with cabalistic works and commentaries, which gave the owners of such works 10 days to turn them over to the Universal Inquisition in Rome and subsequently two months to hand them over to local inquisitors.



1648:Frederick III, who said of the Jews, they “have stolen into Denmark contrary to long-standing custom, [since the days of the Reformation, the Lutheran creed had, according to the laws of Denmark, been compulsory throughout the kingdom], and have dared to traffic with jewels and the like” which led him “to order that no Jew should enter Denmark without a special passport ("Geleitsbrief"), and that those who were already in the country should be heavily fined if they did not leave within fourteen days” began his reign today. [Editors’ note: A few years later, however, the tables were turned. Frederick III., being in need of funds for his wars, borrowed money from the Jew Abraham (or Diego) Teixeira de Mattos of Hamburg (known through his relations with the Swedish queen Christina), and gave as security crownlands in Jutland. Teixeira thereupon made such good use of his influence with the Danish king that, as early as Jan. 19, 1657, "the Portuguese professing the Hebrew religion" were permitted to travel everywhere within the kingdom, and to trade and traffic within the limit of the law. Teixeira himself gained little by his transaction with the Danish monarch. As his loan was not returned, he took instead the estates he held as security, selling them later at a great loss. The king acted similarly in his dealings with the De Lima family, who were in possession of the Hald estate from 1660 to 1703.”]



1659: Birthdate of Father Jean Morin, a French biblical scholar who was the first to edit the “Samaritan Pentateuch and Targum.



1660(16thof Adar I, 5420): Jacob Katzenellenbogen the son and successor of Abraham (Joseph Jacob) Katzenellenbogen of Lemberg who served as President of the bet din and head of the yeshibah of Lemberg  passed away today.



1675: An agreement was ratified today that would allow 250 Jewish families to return Vienna and occupy 50 places of business.  In return for this privilege, the Jews agreed to make a payment of 300,000 florins and the payment of an annual tax of 10,000 florins.  The government agreed to the return of the Jews because the treasury was empty.



1677: In Newport, RI, Jewish community purchased land to be used as a cemetery



1715: Judah Monis “was admitted a freeman by the Mayor and Common Council of New York City today.



1720: Judah Monis, an Algerian born Jew who would become the first American author of a Hebrew grammar book arrived in New York.



Page 182 Green book for more.



1721: In New York City, Moses Raphael Levy and Grace Mears who had been married in London in 1718 gave birth to “Esther (Hetty) Levy.”



1747: Benedict XIV issued Postremomens, a Papal Bull that deals with the baptism of Jews.



1784: Ralph de Pass, a “vendue master” (auctioneer) arrived in Savannah today from Jamaica before moving on to Charleston, SC where he passed away in 1812.



1784: Jacob de Pass, the son of Ralph de Pass arrived in Savannah today from Jamaica the place to which he would return in 1788.



1784: Esther de Pass, the future wife of Samuel da Costa, arrived in Savannah today.



1787: The state legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania granted Hugh Henry Breckenridge a charter for a school that is now known as the University of Pittsburgh. Today, there are approximately 1,800 Jewish students among the total undergrad population of 16,000 and 500 Jewish students among the 7,000 graduate students. The university offers a major in Jewish studies.  Jewish students can avail themselves of programs offered by Hillel and Chabad as well as find kosher meals at the “Kosher Korner” at the University Center.



1799: Birthdate of Father Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger author of “The Jews In Europe.”
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_21/June_1882/The_Jews_in_Europe_I



1799: Napoleon, the first European leader to meet with Jewish leaders in Palestine, led his army out of Gaza and headed for Ramallah.



1805(29thof Adar I, 5565): Naphtali Hirz Wessely, the Jewish man of letters born at Hamburg in 1725 and educated at Copenhagen passed away today in his native city.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0021_0_20854.html



1811(4th of Adar, 5571): Eighty-six year old Jakob Faibel, the husband of Ewa Duschenes passed away in Prague.



1812: Birthdate of German-Jewish author Berthold Auerbach.  Born Moses (Moyses) Baruch, Auerbach published a novel entitled Spinoza: Ein Historischer Romanin 1837.  He passed away in 1882 at the age of 70.



1823: Birthdate of Ernest Renan a French author who specialized in studies of the ancient languages and civilizations of the Middle East. Late in life, Renan wrote a three volume “History of Israel.”  The first volume appeared in 1887 and the final volume appeared in 1897. Some claimed that he was an anti-Semite (anti-Jewish) because of comments about the limitations of the Semitic mind.  But Renan contended that the Jewish people were not a race in the biological and he was an opponent of the nationalism that took hold in Germany in the latter of the 19th century because of its anti-Semitic component.



1827(1st of Adar): Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Shklov passed away



1829(25th of Adar): Wolf Breidenbach passed away   p137



1831: In Philadelphia, John A. Forepaugh and Susannah Heimer gave birth to Adam John Forepaugh, the circus owner who included Leopold S. Kahn, “the dwarf performer” known as Admiral Dot among his acts in the 1890’s



1832: Birthdate of Moritz Wahrmann, the native of Budapest and the grandson of Israel Wahrman and brother of Alexander Wahrmann who was a leader of the Jewish community, a member of the Hungarian Parliament and President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Budapest.



1837: In Bavaria, Jakob Neumond and his wife gave birth to Isidore Newman the husband of Rebecca Kiefer and “head of the banking firm of Isidore Newman and Sons, the “owner of street railway systems” in several cities and the President of the New Orleans Stock Exchange whose philanthropies included chairing the Board of Trustees of the Endowment Fund for the Jewish Widows’ and Orphans’ Home, chairing the Endowment Fund of the Touro Infirmary Board, Commissioner of Audubon Park and the founding of the Isidore Newman Manuel Training School.



1838: Birthdate of French engineer Maurice Levy.



1838: In New York City, Myer David Cohen and Judith Simha Solis gave birth to Jacob Da Silva Solis Cohen, the husband of Miriam Binswanger with whom he had eleven children who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and Jefferson Medical College and who served with both the U.S. Army and Navy during the Civil War before pursuing a career as a leading laryngologist and who



1842: B'ne Yeshurun, a congregation organized by the German Jews living in Cincinnati, Ohio was incorporated under the laws of the state of Ohio.



1842: In Cleveland, Ohio, Anshe Chesed (now Anshe Chesed - Fairmount Temple) which had been founded as a German Orthodox congregation in 1841 was chartered today.  The congregation had 30 members and Asher Lehman served as the Rabbi.



1843: In Bishop-Purnitz, Austria, Mina and Benedict Greenhut gave birth to Joseph B. Greenhut, a decorated Civil War veteran and a successful Chicago, Illinois, businessman



1850: The General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret established the University Desert which was the forerunner of the University of Utah located at Salt Lake City, Utah. Today the university has approximately 350 Jewish students out of a student population of 15,000.  The school has ten courses in Jewish studies and offers a major degree in Jewish Studies.  Not bad for a school founded deep the heart of the land of Brigham Young.



1853: Jacob Aaron, a London hosier and haberdasher, was buried today at the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.



1854: The Republican Party of the United States is organized in Ripon, Wisconsin. The party was formed in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska act and was designed to stop the Democrats’ pro-slavery agenda.  Some of the Jews who were active in the early days of the party were Sabato Morais, rabbi of the Mikveh Israel Congregation, Moritz Pinner who edited a German language abolitionist paper in Kansas, Kentuckian Lewis Naphtali Dembitz, uncle of the Louis Brandeis and New Yorker Sigsmund Kaufman who was an a member of the electoral college that chose Abraham Lincoln to serve as President in 1860.



1855: In a demonstration of the extent to which Jewish concepts have penetrated the general cultural milieu, while giving a speech in New York on the habits of North American Indians, General Sam Houston tells the audience that until “the spirit of revenge had been conquered by civilization” the law of the Cherokee Nation “was the same as that practiced under the old dispensation by the Jews of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and blood for blood.”



1858(14thof Adar, 5618): Purim



1858(14thof Adar, 5618): Joseph Reuben Romm, the third generation of printers of Hebrew books, who moved the family business from Grodno to Vilna, passed away today.



1858: At Frankfurt Am Main, Selig Meier Goldschmidt and Clementine Goldschmidt gave birth Helene Goldschmidt, the future wife of Leon Yehudah Tedesco making her Helen Tedesco.



1860: Birthdate of Victor L. Berger who would become the first member of the Socialist Party to hold a seat in the U.S. House of Representative.



1862: A column entitled “Affairs In Utah” published today described the drive of those living in that territory to become a state in the Union. “As things go, it does seem apparent that Jews and Gentiles here are, more or less, under the conviction that the particular time ‘in the course of human events’ is at hand when a change is inevitable in the fashion of Government among "this people." Some may be surprised to hear of Jews connected with Utah which is almost synonymous with the Mormon Religion. The first Jews who settled in Utah were probably “dropouts” from the wagon trains heading to California during the California Gold Rush. By 1853, two Jews had established a millenary store in Salt Lake City. The first non-Mormon governor of Utah would be a Jew named Simon Bamberger.  As to the issue of statehood, it would be another 34 years before that goal was reached.  The price of admission would be a formal rejection by the Mormons of the practice of polygamy.  To date, this is the only time that the federal government has “interfered” with the doctrines of a religious organization.



1862(28thof Adar I, 5622): Meyer Schoenfeld, who is buried in the New Mount Sinai Cemetery & Mausoleum in St. Louis County, passed away today.



1863: The will of the late Commodore Uriah P. Levy, U.S. Navy, which has been admitted to probate, is now before the Supreme Court, at Special Term. Proceedings have been “instituted to break it, in respect to its bequests to the people of the United States, or the State of Virginia, and then to certain Hebrew congregations in New-York, Philadelphia and Richmond, for the purpose of founding an agricultural school at Monticello, in the State of Virginia.”



1865: In Geneva, Kate, née Levison and Michel Bergson gave birth to Mina Begson, the sister of Henri Bergson who gained fame as “artist and occultist” Moina Mathers.



1866(13thof Adar, 5626): Ta’anit Esther; Erev Purim



1868(5th of Adar): Rabbi Israel Muschkat, author of Harei Besamim, passed away.



1877(15thof Adar, 5637): Shushan Purim



1878: Birthdate of Warsaw native Zdzisław Birnbaum, the Polish violinist and conductor who served two terms as Music Director of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra.



1882 In Hungary, Judah and Marjem Grunwald gave birth William Vilmus Grunwald, the borther of Samuel, Hani, Emanuel and Ida Ethel Grunwald.



1882(9thof Adar, 5642): Eighty-four year old Almeria Levy, the daughter of Jacob and Hannah de Leon and wife of Hayman Levy passed away today in Philadelphia.



1882: It was reported today that the Russian government offered an explanation to the British government for the expulsion of Mr. Lewisohn from the Czar’s empire.  While the British saw Lewisohn as an English citizen, the Russians saw him as being a Jew.  And in Russia, Jews, regardless of the country in which they live, are considered to be Jews which make them a thing without legal standing.



1882: John w. Foster will deliver a lecture on “The Czar and His People” a tonight’s meeting of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association at Chickering Hall in New York City.



1883: In the U.K. British Zionist and barrister Herbert Bentwich and Susannah Bentwich gave birth to Norman De Mattos Bentwich who “was the British-appointed attorney-general of Mandatory Palestine.



1886(23rdof Adar I, 5646): Pawnbroker Aaron Simon, a native of Prussia, passed away today after which he was buried at the Wolverhampton Old Jewish Burial Ground.



1887: Rumania excluded Jews from public service and the tobacco trade.



1887: Birthdate of William Zorach, “a Lithuanian-American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and writer” who won the Logan Medal of the arts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Zorach#mediaviewer/File:William_Zorach,_Moses,_1952.JPG
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/11/20/107181369.pdf
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/11/17/82157813.pdf



1889(27th of Adar I, 5649): In Edinburgh, Marcus Levy, a picture frame maker and Minna Levy, a draper, gave birth to Hyman Levy.
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Levy_Hyman.html
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Obits/Levy_Hyman.html



1891: Birthdate of Yaakov Kamenetsky, the Lithuanian born Rosh Yeshiva and Talmudist, who moved to North America in 1937 where he served as a Rabbi in several U.S. and Canadian cities.



1892: Birthdate of Buffalo, NY native Howard Aaron, the alum of the University of Buffalo Law School who was an active leader in Jewish communal affairs.



1893: Decrees ordering the expulsion of the Jews from Poland today which were even more far-reaching than those that had been issued expelling Jews from their homes in Russia.



1894: In New York City, Joseph Seligman and Babette Seligman gave birth to Walter Joseph Seligman



1894: Birthdate of playwright and novelist Ben Hecht. His most famous work was “The Front Page” which he co-authored with Charles MacArthur. Hecht also won two Oscars for two of his screen plays.  This comic drama about the newspaper business was a Broadway hit as well as a successful movie in the original and remakes.  Hecht was also an ardent Zionist.



1895: It was reported today that the officers of the Young Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s League of the Montefiore Home are: Lucien Bonheur, President; Miss Gertrude Hess, Vice President; James Loeb, Treasurer; Amelia Simon, Secretary.



1895: “Great Hebrew Charity” published today included Jacob Schiff’s acknowledgement of the receipt $10,063.19 for the Montefiore Home that was raised by the recent charity ball as well as an additional $2,000 that came from payment of dues.



1895: “German Hebrew Immigration” published today described the debate in the Reichstag on restricting the immigration of Jews from Russia and Austria which one deputy described as being “so great as to amount to a national plague.” Deputies from the Social Democrats and National Liberty Party voiced their opposition to any restrictive measures which led to an end to the debate.



1897(26thof Adar I, 5657): Fifty-eight year old the Cracow born Austrian physician Blumenstock von Halban who was raised to nobility in 1891 in recognition of his service as chairman of the forensic medicine department passed away today.



1898: In New York City, Polish Jewish immigrants “Clara (née Ostrow), a wardrobe mistress, and Louis Opiekun, a shirtmaker” gave birth Malka Opiekun who gained fame as actress Molly Picon.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/molly-picon
http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Mi-So/Picon-Molly.html



1898: In Lisrobin, Kiskeam, County Cork James and Margaret O’Flaherty gave birth to Hugh O’Flaherty, the priest and Roman Curia official who risked his life to save Allied P.O.W.’s and Italian Jews
http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-unbelievable-heroic-story-of-irelands-overlooked-oscar-schindler/



1898(6thof Adar, 5658): Eighty-two year old Joseph Baron von Morpurgo passed away today at Trieste.



1898: “The Get-Together Clubs” of New York and Brooklyn met this evening where the general discussion of “The Problem of the Unemployed” including a presentation by N.S. Rosenau, the Director of the United Hebrew Charities.



1900: During the Second Boer War the 118 day siege of Ladysmith came to an end. 1899: Major Karri Davies was one of the Jewish soldiers who fought in defense of the British position at Ladysmith. There were at least 2,800 Jews fighting for the British and an untold number fighting for the Boers.



1903: Max Nordau meets Leopold Greenberg in Paris and sends a wire to Herzl: "Greenberg had obtained everything that can possibly be conceded in an official agreement."



1904: The first entry was made on the marriage register of the Artillery Lane Synagogue.



1905: In New York, the initial meeting of a “Choral Society for Ancient Hebrew Meolodies” was held at the rooms Young Men’s Hebrew Association under the direction of Mr. Rosenblatt.



1906:  Birthdate of mobster Bugsy Siegel



1907(14thof Adar, 5667): Purim



1907(14thof Adar, 5667): Eighty year old Wilhelm Rapp passed away.  Born in Germany in 1827, he moved to the United States in 1852 after having participated in the failed Revolutions of 1848. Rapp edited newspapers in several cities before the Civil War.  An outspoken abolitionist and Unionist he was forced to flee from Baltimore to Washington, DC in 1861. Rapp turned down President Lincoln’s offer to make him postmaster general and moved to Chicago, Illinois where worked as a newspaper editor until his death.



1909: In Kensington (UK) Edward Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster who was consider “half Jewish” because her father’s family had been German Jews before converting gave birth to Poet Laureate Sir Stephen Spender whose identification with the Jewish people was strengthened by the fact that his second wife was English Pianist and author Natasha Spender.



1911: Akron, Ohio businessman Bert A. Polsky and the former Hazel Steiner gave birth to their daughter Peggy who was the wife of H.C. Dodge.



1911: Birthdate of Judah Leon Bernstein who gained fame as photographer Lou Bernstein.
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/lou-bernstein?all/all/all/all/0



1913(21stof Adar I, 5673): Fifty-seven year old Phil Phillips passed away in Cardiff, Wales.



1915(14thof Adar, 5675): Purim



1915: “One thousand members of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association attended” services at Temple Beth-El in New York this “morning to celebrate the festival of Purim.”



1915: Tonight “The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Congregation, the oldest in the United States” presented “a series of tableaux representing the influence of Jews on the early history of America.”



1915: The Church Peace Union founded by Andrew Carnegie whose trustees are 29 prominent clergymen including those from Jewish organizations made public an address cautioning the clergy “against partisanship in discussing the European War and protesting against the agitation for increased armaments.”



 1915: In Brooklyn, NY, Israel Mostel and Cina "Celia" Druchs gave birth Samuel Joel "Zero" Mostel an actor known for his roles in the original version of “The Producers” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”



1915: “Aid For Polish Jews” published today described efforts that have been organized in the United States and Petrograd to provide aide for the approximately 500,000 Jews of Galicia who have been “ruined” by the war.



1915: It was reported today that “the large number of Jewish refugees arriving in Moscow from various parts of” war torn Poland are given “a sympathetic reception” while “the situation is quite different for Jewish refugees…who arrive in Petrograd” who now “are all being sent back to the pale of settlement.”



1916(24th of Adar I, 5676): Morris Lasker, aged 76, millionaire miller, pioneer, Indian fighter and philanthropist died in Galveston, Texas, this afternoon.  Mr. Lasker won wide fame when he led the Jews of the South in a fight for the life and vindication of Leo Frank, who was convicted in Atlanta for the murder of Mary Phagan.  Mr. Lasker came to America from Germany at the age of 16.  He “was in the mercantile business in George for three years, and then came to Texas, settling at Weatherford, where he engaged in many expeditions against the Indians.”  He settled in Galveston in 1867 and married Miss Nettie Davis of Albany, NY, the widow who survives him, along with six children including Albert Lasker of Chicago.



1916: The Board of Trustees of Congregation Orachim held a special meeting today where they adopted resolutions expressing their sorrow at the death of Henry Glass, the President of Henry Glass and Company.



1916: On the same day that it was reported that the Czar has granted freedom of travel to Jews from the United States, Judge Leon Sanders said that as a result of the work of New York lawyer Isidore Hershfield “sums of money are now being sent to Russia by Jewish immigrants in” in the United States “which will far surpass the amounts thus far collected for relief purposes.



1916: Henry James, one of the literary giants of the 19th century, passed away.  For more about how James viewed Jews including his review of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda see Milton Kerker’s Henry James on the Jewish scene/
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-112354673.html



1917: “The 5,000 members of the Federation of Hebrew Grocers’ Association have been advised by their executive committee” “which met last night” “to close the 8,000 retail grocery stores which they operate unless the housewives, now boy boycotting certain foodstuffs, are force to change their tactics.”
1918: “The 150 recruits for the Jewish units in the British Army who have enlisted” in the United States “were mustered into the service at the British and Canadian Recruiting Mission” in New York City “and led by mounted policemen, a band and British and Canadian officers down Fifth Avenue to the Fall River line pier from which point they embarked on their way to The Front.
1919: Birthdate of Leo Cantor who “played halfback at the University of California-Los Angeles from 1938-1941. He then played defensive back, halfback, and fullback in the NFL with the New York Giants in 1942 and for the Chicago Cardinals in 1945.”

1919: Following the decision to combine two Yiddish newspapers whose readers were “the younger and more progressive Orthodox Jews, the Day-Warheit appeared for the first time today


1919: In Paris, Dr. Sikolow, the head of the Zionist delegation to the Peace Conference who summed up the aspirations of the Jews as comprising the recognition of the historic title of the Jews people to Palestine and the right to re-establish national home” “said today that the Supreme Council gave an attentive hearing to the Zionist case.”



1921: Fire destroys 120 homes and a large amount of shops in the Jewish quarter of Kouskoundjouk, Constantinople. Most of these belonged to poor Jews.



1921: Conference of rabbis in Jerusalem elects a court of Justice and chooses four Ashkenazi and four Sephardi rabbis with Rabbi Kook (Ashkenazi) & Jacob Meir (Sephardic).



1921: In Passaic, NJ, “Morris and Goldie Zaentz, Jewish refugees from a shtetl in eastern Poland” gave birth to Oscar award winning movie producer Saul Zaentz whose work included “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Next” and “Amadeus” (As reported by Robert McFadden



1926(14thof Adar, 5686): Purim



1926 Programs celebrating Purim are scheduled to take place at all of the 91 institutions affiliated with the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies.



1926: “Young Judaea Clubs throughout” the United States presented plays as part of their Purim celebrations.



1926: In New York, the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews held an open house on Purim.



1928:  The Soviets decided to set up a Jewish district in Biro-bijanin Eastern Siberia. Most of its 14,200 square miles were uninhabitable due to floods. It was to be used as a buffer zone against China.



1929:  In Toronto, Thelma (née Kaplanski/Caplan) and Irving Goldberg gave birth to architect Frank Gehry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Gehry#/media/File:Dr_Chau_Chak_Wing_Building_from_The_Goods_Line_(27438092220).jpg



1932: It was reported today that Eugene Meyer, Jr., chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation would be one of the witnesses to be called by the Senate Banking and Currency Committee which is holding hearings on the behavior the stock markets flowing the passage of “the Glass-Steagall credit stimulus.”



1934(13thof Adar, 5694): In the depths of the Great Depression, for some Jews, the fast of Esther was just one more day without food.



1935(25th of Adar I, 5695): Jeannette Miriam Goldberg, who organized Texas chapters of the National Council of Jewish Women and the Jewish Chautauqua Society, passed away.



1936:Otto David Tolischus, the Prussian born Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent today wrote a description of the Nazi regime that began with the withering words: “Like every successful revolution that wants to be more than successful in ousting the ins by the outs the National Socialist revolution is eagerly seeking to creates its own style of living which shall visibly demonstrate its totalitarian character and wean the populace from any longing to return to ‘the good old day,’ thereby helping to assure the permanence of the new regime.



1937: It was reported today that Rabbi Sidney E. Goldstein of the Free Synagogue will chair “a community program on ‘Marriage and the Home’”



1937: “More than 100 Jews of German origin attended a service held in memory of the Jews who have died as a result of Nazi persecution sponsored by the German Jewish Congregation and led by Rabbi Max Malina.



1937: In “Jewish Literature” published today John Cournos provided a review of Volume III of A History of Jewish Literature from the Close of the Bible to Our Own Days by Meyer Waxman.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1937/02/28/118958393.pdf



1938: As the latest wave of Arab violence continued, The Palestine Post reported that the "representatives" of armed bands were regularly visiting Arab towns and villages, demanding money for their "activities" and issuing "receipts." A bridge on the Jenin-Afula road was damaged by an explosion and there were numerous shooting incidents throughout the country. A curfew was imposed on a number of villages after armed Arab terrorists stormed isolated police posts and stole arms and ammunition, intimidating the local Arab constables.



1938: The Palestine Post reported that The Union of Romanian Journalists expelled all Jews who became members after December 1919.



1939: The curfew that had been imposed on all of the Arab quarters starting on February 26 following the murder of 3 Jews by Arabs was scheduled to come to an end today at 6 A.M.



1940: The British adopted the MacDonald White Paper that included restriction of sale of Arab land to Jews in Eretz Yisrael. This document nearly voided the Balfour Declaration



1940: Ben “Auberbach and his NYU squad played against in Georgetown University in a doubleheader at Madison Square Garden in one of the first two college basketball games to ever appear on television.”



1942: In Tel Aviv, Aharon Werba, a civil servant who made Aliyah in 1933 and his wife Chava gave birth to Dorit Werba who as Dorit Beinish was the first woman to serve as president of the Supreme Court of Israel.
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/Madam-Chief-Justice



1943: George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" opened on Broadway with Anne Brown and Todd Duncan.  The musical originally premiered in 1935 and survived for a mere 124 performances.  The musical was revised after Gershwin's death and slowly gained popular and critical acclaim.



1943: Brotherhood Week came to an end today.



1943: In Kovono Ghetto, thousands of Jews attend the funeral of Rabbi Avraham Duber Shapiro, Chief Rabbi of Kovno despite an order from the Nazis forbidding them to do so.



1944(4thof Adar, 5704): Sixty-three year old Kishinev native Semion Portugeiz who camed to the United States in 1941 after the Nazis conquered France and “who for many years wrote in the Jewish Daily Forward under the name of S. Ivanovitch” passed away today, (JTA)



1945(15thof Adar, 5705): Shushan Purim



1945(15thof Adar, 5705): Siegried Adler, one of the last Jews surviving in Berlin, died today.



1945: Author Heinrich Eduard Jacob “gained American citizenship” today.



1945(15thof Adar, 5705): Walter Süskind, the German born Dutch Jew who saved over six hundred Jewish children died either at Auschwitz or one of the death marches inflicted on Jews by their Nazi captors as the war came to a close.
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/suskind.html
http://www.morsephotography.com/suskindfilm/home_welcome.htm
http://www.castelfilm.ro/node/202



1946: Fifty-four year old “Bela Imredy, the father of the anti-Jewish bill intended to exclude Jews and those Christians with Jewish parentage from the Hungarian civil service and liberal professional while radically curtailing their position in trade and industry who resigned as Premier in 1939 because “he was compelled to admit…that he was of Jewish descent” since “his mother’s grandfather was born a Jew” passed away today.



1947: The group of 600 Jewish passengers who were going to sail on the Abril, a ship intending to run the British Blockade arrived at Port de Bouc from Grenoble.



1947: Jacob and Niza Gabbai, a husband and wife couple who have just arrived in New York City from Palestine enrolled at Fordham University.  The Gabbais are part of the Young Palestinian League which is working to develop a new cultural environment in their homeland.  They chose Fordham “because it is a complete university and not just a drama or radio school, and also because it located in the world capital of the theatre.”



1948: The famed Golani Brigade was formed today  during the Israeli War for Independence when the Levanoni Brigade in the Galilee split into the 1st Golani Brigade and the 2nd Carmeli Brigade



1950: Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett presented the cabinet with the draft of five year non-aggression pact between Israel and Jordan.  The pact is the product of several months of secret negotiations.  It includes most of the terms of the armistice agreement without setting final boundaries.  Some additional points include the opening of the Israeli held road to Bethlehem to Arab traffic, the opening of the road to Mt. Scopus to Israelis and an Israeli promise to supply electricity to the Arab held sections of Jerusalem.  Israeli opposition to the agreement will be limited to a handful of leftists who oppose King Abdullah because they think he is a puppet of the British imperialists and the rightwing nationalists who believe that all of the land west of the Jordan should be part of a Jewish state.  Jordanian approval is much more problematic since it will face serious opposition from numerous sources including those who want a second war with the Jews so that they can destroy the Zionist entity. [Abdullah would be assassinated in the following year for conducting these negotiations and it would take another four decades before Israel and Jordan finally concluded a peace agreement.]



1952:  Birthdate of William Alan Finn the Boston born musician whose “musical Falsettos received the 1992 Tony Awards for Best Music and Lyrics and for Best Book.”



1953: Birthdate of Paul Krugman, leading U.S. economist, New York Timescolumnist and Nobel Prize Winner.



1953(13th of Adar, 5713): Israeli archeologist and Hebrew University professor,Eleazar Lipa Sukenik passed away. His life reads like an early history of the Zionist movement. Born in Bialystok in 1889, Sukenik made Aliyah in 1911. He served in the British army in World War I in the 40th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers which became known as the Jewish Legion. He played a central role in the establishment of the Department of Archaeology of the Hebrew University. He recognized the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls to Israel and worked for the Israeli state to buy them. In 1948, he published an article tentatively linking the scrolls and their content to a community of Essenes, which became the standard interpretation of the origin of the scrolls, a theory that is still probably the consensus among scholars, but has also been widely questioned. He was the father of soldier, politician and archeologist Yigael Yadin, the actor Yossi Yadin, and Mati Yadin, who was killed in action during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.



1954: Birthdate of Tulane graduate and Renaissance man Alan Smason whose interests have led to serve as everything from a theatre reviewer to the founder of the Crescent City Jewish News, the source for everything Jewish along the bayou.
http://www.crescentcityjewishnews.com
http://koshercomputing.blogspot.com/



1955: Three days after Arab terrorists had murdered an Israeli civilian at Rehovot, paratroopers from a brigade under the command of Ariel Sharon implemented Operation Black Arrow that included an attack on an Egyptian base in Gaza and the ambushing of the relief column – an action in which the Israelis lost eight men while he enemy lost 37 men with “many more wounded.”



1959: In Atlantic City, NJ, “Jane (née Divac) and Franklin Abramoff, who was president of the Franchises unit of Diners Club Credit Card Company” gave birth to crooked lobbyist Jack Allan Ambramoff.



1960: The Second Annual Concert of Jewish Music was held this evening at Congregation Beth-El in Camden, NJ, for the benefit of the Cantors Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary.



1961: Recently elected President Kennedy named Henry Kissinger as special advisor.  Before being the first Jew to be named Secretary of State, Kissinger followed a path that took him from Kennedy, to Rockefeller, to Nixon.



1961: Twelve days after premiering in London, “Jungle Fighters” produced by Michael Balcon, with a screenplay by Wolf Mankowitz, music by Stanley Black and starring Laurence Harvey was released today in the UK.



1963: “Hot Spot,” a musical with “lyrics by Martin Charnin, music by Mary Rodgers, and additional lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim” opened at the Shubert Theatre in Philadelphia, PA.



1956: The New York City debut of The Guarneri Quartet whose members included 1stViolinist Arnold Steinhardt, Violist Michael Tree and Violoncellist David Soyer took place today at the New School for Social Research a



1972(13th of Adar, 5732): Fast of Esther



1974: Nigel Lawson began serving as a Member of Parliament for Blaby



1974: The United States and Egypt renew diplomatic relations.  This was one of the steps from the Yom Kippur War to the Camp David Peace Accords.



1974: Greville Ewan Janner began serving as an MP for Leicester on the same day he completed his services MP for Leicester North West.



1977: The family and friends of Joseph M. Hyman, the producer and co-producer with the late Bernard Hart of nearly a score of Broadway plays who passed away last week are scheduled to gather this morning at Frank E. Campbell’s in Manhattan.



1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that the majority of the plenum of the 29th Zionist Congress, held in Jerusalem, approved a resolution calling for a Jewish education program in the Diaspora, based on the principle of equality for all trends in Judaism, and specifically including the Conservative and Reform movements.



1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Liberal Faction of the Likud in the Knesset described the recent action taken by Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon in the settlement of the Yamit (Rafiah) area as injurious to the national interest, "idiotic" and "crazy."



1978: David Mamet’s “The Water Engine” “transferred to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway as a double-bill with a short Mamet play entitled Mr. Happiness, and ran for 24 performances”



1979: Six people were injured in a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem.



1983(15th of Adar, 5743): Shushan Purim



1983: Ninety-year old Dutch born, Englisn“writer and translator” Joseph Leftwich one of “The Whitechapel Boys” whose career included stints with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Palestine Post, passed away today.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/leftwich-joseph
http://www.jta.org/1983/03/07/archive/joseph-leftwich-dead-at-90



1986: John Demjanjuk was deported to Israel today



1986: Laura Z. Hobson who wrote Gentlemen’s Agreement, the novel about anti-Semitism that was turned into a 1947 film classic starring Gregory Peck, passed away.



1987(29thof Shevat, 5747): Sixty-seven year ballerina Nora Kay, born Nora Koreff, passed away. (As reported by Jennifer Dunning)
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/01/obituaries/nora-kay-is-dead-leading-ballerina.html



1991: A twenty-five year old Jewish religious student, Elhanan Atali, was found in an abandoned storeroom in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.  His throat had been slit and he had been stabbed in the back.



1993: At the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, “The Sisters Rosensweig…a play by Wendy Wasserstein” that “focuses on the lives of three Jewish-American sisters” closes after 149 performances.



1993: Actor Tony Curtis, born Bernard Schwartz, wed Lisa Deutsch. 



1994: Jeffrey Dinowitz began serving as a member of the New York State Assembly from the 81stDistrict.



1994(17thof Adar, 5754): Seventy-eight year old geographer Jean Gottman passed away today. (As reported by Richard D. Lyons)
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/02/obituaries/jean-gottman-78-a-geographer-who-saw-a-northeast-megalopolis.html



1997:“The Portrait of a Lady,” the cinematic version of the novel of the same name starring Nicole Kidman, Barbara Hershey and Shelley Winters which had premiered at the Venice Film Festival was released in the United Kingdom today.



1999: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters by Wendy Lesser and Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economyby Edward Luttwak



2000(22nd of Adar I, 5760): Kariel Gardosh, the prominent Israeli political cartoonist known by the pen-name "Dosh," died in his home in Tel Aviv from a cardiac arrest. He was 79 years old. “Gardosh was best known for cartoons featuring his character Srulik. Srulik was a small boy in short, sandals and a traditional Tembel hat. Gardosh's character, always intended by the caricaturist to act a symbol for Israel, was a blank slate upon which to reflect the changing national mood and a perfect emblem for the emerging nation's view of itself in the 1960s and 1970s as a small nation surrounded by hostile aggressors. The small boy facing down representative from a hostile Arab world left an indelible impression upon several generations of Israelis allowing the character to remain popular through several changes in the political climate. The character is still a presence in various licensed formats such as posters and stickers.”



2002: Hungarian premiere of “An American Rhapsody” starring Brandeis graduate Tony Goldwyn, the grandson of Samuel Goldwyn and featuring Emmy Rossum as “Eva.”



2003(26th of Adar I, 5763): “Alfred Bernstein, a New Deal lawyer who led the movement to unionize government workers and later helped desegregate the lunch counters, restaurants, public swimming pools and playgrounds of Jim Crow-era Washington, died today at his home in Washington. He was 92.Mr. Bernstein attended public schools in Manhattan and graduated from Columbia College and Columbia Law School. Inspired by the social ferment of the New Deal, he moved to the capital in 1937 to work as an investigator for the Senate Commerce Committee's inquiry into the monopolistic railroad industry. ''What all of us were interested in was the transformation of the political process -- drafting regulations, establishing Social Security, making regulatory agencies work,'' he once told an interviewer. ''There was a lot of idealism at the time.'' After serving in the Army Air Transport Command in the South Pacific in World War II, Mr. Bernstein returned to Washington where he helped lead the successful effort against Jim Crow laws in the capital.”



2003: Ariel Sharon begins serving as Communications Minister.



2003: Eliezer Sandberg began serving as Science and Technology Minister



2003. Reuven Rivlin completed serving as Communications Minister.



2003: Benjamin Netanyahu completed his service as Minister of Foreign Affairs.



2003: Silvan Shalom begins serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs.



2003: Natan Sharansky completed his service as Minister of Housing and Construction.



2003: Eli Suissa completed his service Jerusalem Affairs Minister



2003: Tzachi Hanegbi succeeded Uzi Landau as Minister of Public Safety.



2003: Yosef Paritzky replaced Effi Eitam as National Infrastructure Minister



2003: Avraham Poraz replaced Eli Yishai as Minister of Internal Affairs.



2003: David Azulai competed his service as Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs.



2004(6th of Adar, 5764): Daniel Boorstin passed away at the age of 89. He was one of America's most renowned historians and, between 1975 and 1987, the Librarian of Congress in the world's largest library in Washington. The son of Russian-Jewish im­migrants, Daniel Joseph Boorstin was born on October 1, 1914, in Atlanta. He was educated at Tulsa Central High School and Harvard, from where he graduated with honors in Law. Boorstin wrote more than 20 books, including a trilogy on the American experience and one on world intellectual history. The Americans: The Democratic Experience, the final book in the first trilogy, received the 1973 Pulitzer Prize in history.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/mar/01/guardianobituaries.obituaries



2004(6thof Adar, 5763): Forty-seven year old “poet and published of avant-garde magazines” Elzabeth Perl Nasaw, he sister of historian and author David Nasaw passed away today



.2006(30thof Elul, 5766): Rosh Chodesh Adar (first of a two day Rosh Chodesh).



2006: Johanna van Schagen, a woman who helped Jews escape from the Nazis during the Holocaust and later was honored by Israel died at the age of 91. Johanna van Schagen, who had suffered a series of strokes, died at Friendship Village in nearby Trotwood, where she lived. Van Schagen and her husband, Cornelius, moved to the United States from the Netherlands in 1956. She told the Dayton Daily Newsin 1994 that she and her husband sheltered Jews out of anger toward Germans who were taking over their native Netherlands. "We were afraid many times ... there were lots of raids and if they had found them in your home, you would be taken to concentration camps, too," she said. Israel honored the couple in 1987 and a tree along the Avenue of the Righteous in Jerusalem is named for Johanna van Schagen, the newspaper said. Her funeral was scheduled for Friday at Polk Grove United Church of Christ in Dayton, which sponsored the van Schagens when they moved to the United States, said Jacob van Schagen, a son. She is survived by four sons and a daughter.



2007: The second International Eilat Chamber Music Festival opens.



2008: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Rabbi Lane Steinger, Regional Director of the Union for Reform Judaism,teaches an adult education class at Temple Judah on the Reform Movement's New Prayer book, Mishkan Tifillah.



2008: In New York City, the 92nd Street Y presents “Witness to Nuremberg” featuring Richard W. Sonnenfeldt the chief interpreter for the American prosecution at the Nuremberg trials who discusses startling new information about the Nazi war criminals and the origins and development of the Holocaust.



2008:The Diary of Anne Frank: A Song To Life”  a musical that tells the story of Anne Frank's life in German-occupied Holland and her death in a concentration camp, using songs that sound like a combination of Fiddler On the Roof and Spanish tunes (complete with flamenco guitar) opens in Spain.



2008(22 Adar 1, 5768): Israel Prize-winning author and translator Aharon Amir passed away at age 85. Amir, who was born in Lithuania, grew up in Tel Aviv and was a member of both the Irgun and the Lehi. He was one of the founders of the Canaanite movement, which saw geographical location rather than religious affiliation as the defining element of Hebrew or Israeli culture. He studied Arabic language and literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but translated works of literature mainly from English and French. Authors whose work he rendered into Hebrew include Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll, Albert Camus, and Charles de Gaulle. Amir won the Tchernichovsky Prize for translation in 1951 and the Israel Prize for translation in 2003.



2008:Eyes Wide Open,” a documentary film that chronicles the preconceptions and revelations of American Jews as they visit Israel, is held at the Jerusalem Cinematheque.The film was directed by veteran filmmaker Paula Weiman-Kelman and written by award-winning journalist Stuart Schoffman



2008(22 Adar 1, 5768):Esra Shereshevsky, 92, noted Hebrew-language scholar and educator, died in Jerusalem. As founder and former chairman of the Department of Hebrew and Near Eastern Languages and Literature at Temple University, Shereshevsky was one of the first professors to establish Hebrew as a full course of study at an American university. His classes were exciting events. Whether discussing Bible, medieval manuscripts or 20th-century poets, his teaching was seasoned by his love of the Hebrew language.



2009:According to Reform Judaism magazine, Brandeis University, Harvard University and RadcliffeCollege, Tufts University, Boston University, and Northeastern University are among the "Top 60Schools Jews Choose."



2009: In Barbados, Terry Schwarzfeld, who had just started her term as president of Canadian Hadassah WIZO and was executive director of Ottawa's largest synagogue, Agudath Israel, was mortally by an ex-con when he tried to rob her and her daughter-in-law, Lauana Cotsman.



2009: In Chicago, the Harris Theatre presents “Pinchas Zukerman in Recital” along “with his long time collaborator, pianist Mark Neikruug.”



2009:Rabbi Ellen Weomberg Dreyfus is installed in Jerusalem during the CCAR's 120th Annual Convention. She is the second female Rabbi to be elected to this position and the first female leader of a major rabbinic organization to begin her tenure in Israel. She succeeds Rabbi Peter S. Knobel, 66, Rabbi of Beth Emet in Evanston, IL, who will complete his two-year term as CCAR President.



2009:From January 1 through today, there were 64 terrorist attacks that took place in the West Bank or were carried out by terrorists from the West Bank



2009: In “His Story Told, Koch Makes His Peace and Dares to Look Ahead,” published todayformer New York May Ed Koch ruminates on his concerns as he reaches the twilight years and describes his plans for a funeral that will leave no question as to his profound attachment to his Jewish faith. He’s already installed and inscribed his tombstone. He’s recruited a rabbi to preside over his funeral. He’s been saying some goodbyes. He insists he no longer carries any grudges; well, maybe just a few. He’s issued an apology or two and even confesses to a few regrets as mayor. But the former mayor — still looming though stooped from stenosis, a spinal degeneration — is philosophically confronting his own mortality. His is a life that has played out mostly in the public eye, and now, perhaps appropriately, so are many of his preparations for the beyond.



“We all die,” he said over lunch in Midtown the other day, his words unequivocal but his voice raspy. “Whenever he or she wants me, I go.” Not surprisingly, though, Edward I. Koch, New York’s 105th mayor, proposed several conditions for whenever the time comes. Having survived a stroke in 1987 and a heart attack in 1999, he said he has no desire to linger: “I had a conversation with God: ‘Take me totally or don’t take me. No salami tactics.’ He’s been very good about it.” “I want to die at my desk,” Mr. Koch added. The former mayor is at his desk daily (he is a partner at the Manhattan offices of Bryan Cave, a law firm). He begrudgingly exercises at a gym several days a week and goes for rehabilitation for the spinal condition. He lunches every Saturday with a regular group of about 10 alumni of his administration. He doesn’t march in parades any more, except for St. Patrick’s Day, and says he is through writing books.  “After eight autobiographies and two children’s books,” he said, “I don’t think I have anything left in me.”



Mr. Koch also insists that while the fight hasn’t gone out of him — he is particularly concerned about anti-Semitism and wants to bring Jews and Catholics closer together — he picks his fights more carefully. He says he is sorry for having started some and has unilaterally declared a cease-fire for others.  “I’m not settling any scores,” he said. “I absolutely have no grudges. That’s over with. It’s not that I love those people. I don’t, but it takes too much energy if you think about who injured you.” Of all the grudges he has held, the one that people who know Mr. Koch figured he would carry to his grave was with Mario M. Cuomo, whom he defeated for mayor in 1977 and who was later elected governor. But there is evidence of rapprochement. Yes, it’s true, the former mayor said, he did pointedly refer to Mr. Cuomo by a very disparaging epithet several years ago in a recorded interview with The New York Times that is not to be made public until after Mr. Koch’s death. Reminded of the remark, he laughed heartily, and did not take it back.  “I told the truth as I felt it then,” he said. “But it all worked out.” Mr. Koch’s anger was originally triggered by placards that sprouted in the 1977 mayoral campaign that said “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.” The Koch camp blamed Cuomo operatives. Mr. Cuomo has always disclaimed any responsibility.



“If anything, I thought it was done by someone who wanted to see me lose,” Mr. Cuomo recalled last week. “I never did anything like that and it was a wrong thing to do, whoever did it; it was ugly and unfair. If he believed I did it and forgave me for it, that was kind of him. I always liked him and respected him however he felt about me.” In December, Mr. Cuomo invited himself to a birthday party for the mayor at Gracie Mansion and offered a gracious tribue. Mr. Koch was moved. He recalled: “Mario always told people, ‘I like Ed a lot more than he likes me.’ The first time he said that, I replied, ‘You’re right, Mario.’ But that’s over with. He said he was sorry.” (For the record, Mr. Koch, a lifelong bachelor, declines to say whether he is gay. “I do not want to add to the acceptability of asking every candidate, ‘Are you straight or gay or lesbian?’ and make it a legitimate question, so I don’t submit to that question. I don’t care if people think I’m gay because I don’t answer it. I’m flattered that at 84 people are interested in my sex life — and, it’s quite limited.”) Mr. Koch said he also no longer holds a grudge against Bernard Rome, a former campaign treasurer, whom he fired as head of the Off-Track Betting Corporation for publicly opposing casino gambling.  “Bernie Rome called me years later and wanted to meet,” Mr. Koch recalled. “I said to my secretary, ‘Tell him I have no desire to.’ I don’t hold a grudge, but I don’t have to become his buddy.” Mr. Koch is certain of his legacy — restoring New Yorkers’ self-confidence after the city’s fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, balancing the budget, rebuilding the Bronx and instituting a merit selection for the appointment of judges. (He was feted last year by some of the 140 he appointed: “They wanted to say goodbye,” Mr. Koch said.)  Mr. Koch does not typically second-guess himself, but feels guilty over one nagging regret: his decision to shutter Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, both to save money and because of complaints about the quality of health care there.  “I fought,” he said. “We closed it. We did the right thing. But, in retrospect, it was the wrong thing to do. The total amount saved was $9 million, but there was such a psychological attachment to Sydenham because black doctors couldn’t get into other hospitals. It was the psychological attachment that I violated. That was uncaring of me. They helped elect me and then in my zeal to do the right thing I did something now that I regret.” Mr. Koch says he has few other major misgivings. “I’m sure there are things we could have done better, but in terms of waking up in the middle of the night and thinking of mistakes, no,” he said. “I’ve had a wonderful ride. I’ve done what I wanted to do.” “I’m not morbid,” he added. “How many 84-year-olds do you know who are as active as I am? Not many. And how many 84-year-olds do you see in obituaries? A lot. But I believe I have another five years.” Whenever the ride is over, his funeral service will be held at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan. He has given his sister the names of several potential speakers, but has not made any other arrangements, including the music (“I love the Catholic hymns,” he said, “but they can’t be sung even in Temple Emanu-El”). He will be buried in the nondenominational Trinity Church Cemetery in Upper Manhattan under a tombstone that quotes the last words of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded in 2002 by Islamic terrorists (“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish”) and includes the most familiar Jewish prayer, in English and Hebrew, (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”) and the epitaph the former mayor wrote after his stroke: “He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York, and he fiercely loved its people. Above all, he loved his country, the United States of America, in whose armed forces he served in World War II”  “That’s it,” Mr. Koch said. “It takes up the whole stone.”  He recalled the funeral for a much-loved mayor of Madrid: “Eight hundred thousand people turned out. That won’t happen with me,” he predicted, “but I hope a lot of people do go to the cemetery — which, by the way, is conveniently located at 155th and Broadway on the subway.” New York has not lavished monuments on former mayors. The most famous memorial is La Guardia Airport. Mr. Koch, who was raised for 10 years in Newark, would not mind one of his own. “I have said — and it won’t happen — that I would like Newark Airport changed to E.I.K.,” he said. [It] “Kind of rhymes with J.F.K.”



2010(14thof Adar, 5770): Purim



2010(14thof Adar, 5770): Ninety-five year old Chicago born child-welfare advocate Natalie Goldstein Heineman passed away today.
http://www.examiner.com/article/natalie-goldstein-heineman-died-just-18-days-after-her-96th-birthday
http://jwa.org/weremember/heineman-natalie



2010: An exhibition at the Center for Jewish History in New York entitled “In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis” is scheduled to come to a close.



2010: Final performance of Rinne Groff’s “Compulsion” is scheduled to take place at the Yale Repertory Theatre.



2010: The Los Angeles Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Ask, a novel by Sam Lipsyte



2010: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Devotion: A Memoir by Dani Shapir.



2010(14thof Adar, 5710): Jose Mindlin, a Jewish bibliophile who owned the largest private library in Latin America has died today in Brazil. He was 95. Born to Ukrainian parents, Jose Mindlin owned over 38,000 books and was a member of the prestigious Brazilian Academy of Letters. In 2006, he donated about half of his collection to the University of Sao Paulo, mostly on topics related to Brazilian studies. A building will be built in the university's campus specifically to maintain this massive library, and will be named after the Guita and Jose Mindlin Foundation. After retiring from the business world, Mindlin was able to dedicate his time to a passion he had since he was 13 years old: collecting and preserving rare books. The first rare edition in his collection was "Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle," by Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, published in 1740. Mindlin had occupied several public positions in the cultural field in Sao Paulo, including that of secretary of culture. "He was a giant of the Brazilian culture. His legacy is the library he left, the result of a life dedicated to the books. Today it's an asset of all Brazilians," said Sao Paulo Mayor Gilbero Kassab. Henry Sobel, emeritus rabbi of Latin America's largest Jewish congregation, the 2,000-family Congregacao Israelita Paulista, declared that Mindlin's life was book itself. "He was a righteous man who could see ethics in politics and culture. I felt so little when I was in his library. His greatest book was called Jose Mindlin," Sobel said.



2010:Israeli police entered the Temple Mount compound today after Palestinians began throwing stones during rioting in Jerusalem's Old City



2010: Two Jewish athletes took home medals at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver which ended today. Steve Meisler won a gold medal for the United States in the four-man bobsled, pushing his team to a combined time of 3:24:46 in the four-heat race.  Jewish ice dancer Charlie White claimed a silver medal in ice dancing along with partner Meryl Davis.  White's victory edged a fellow ice dancer and American Jew, Ben Agosto, off the medal podium. Agosto and his partner, Tanith Belbin, finished fourth. The pair won a silver medal at the 2006 games. Other Jewish competitors in ice dancing, the Israeli brother-sister duo Roman and Alexandra Zaretsky, finished 10th. Their routines included music from "Schindler's List" and "Hava Nagila," and in one performance, Roman wore a yarmulke. Israel's third Olympic athlete, skier Mikail Renzhin, finished 35th in the slalom and 55th in the giant slalom. Laura Spector, a Jewish biathlete from Massachusetts, finished 65th and 77th in the two races in which she competed.



2010: Ethan Bronner wrote the following obituary describing the life of Holocaust scholar David Bankier. “David Bankier, who helped expand the contours of Holocaust research by examining the participation of ordinary Europeans in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors, died over the weekend after a long illness, Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust center, announced. He was 63.  Mr. Bankier, who was head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, focused his scholarly work on anti-Semitism, especially its use by the Nazis to promote and sustain a broader ideology. He was the author of “Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism” as well as a collection of essays, “Hitler, the Holocaust and German Society: Cooperation and Awareness.”  Born in Germany just before the state of Israel was created, Mr. Bankier grew up and was educated here, earning his doctorate in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He held a professorship at Hebrew University and had served as a visiting professor in Britain, the United States, South Africa and South America. He spoke excellent English and Spanish, in addition to German and Hebrew. A rumpled, somber man who sought to understand the most bewildering aspects of genocide — how someone could play soccer with an acquaintance one day and assist in his murder the next — Mr. Bankier insisted both on the uniqueness of the Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews and on its applicability to other cases of mass murder. For anti-Semites, ‘Jews represent mysterious, mythic and evil forces,” he said at a recent lecture, “an omnipotence playing a sinister role in world history.’ At another lecture he noted that for Hitler, “Nazism was a doctrine of world salvation to redeem humanity from the Jewish-Christian-Marxist doctrine. The acquisition and maintenance of total suppression of the German race, Hitler believed, must be through total war of Germans against the Jews.” At the same time, Mr. Bankier said last year in an interview with The New York Times that the work he was overseeing at Yad Vashem on the role of bystanders and neighbors in numerous smaller mass killings across the former Soviet Union in the early 1940s had important implications for contemporary genocide in Africa and other places. He argued that the world was a different place as a result of what the Nazis had done, that if genocide in far-off places shocked average people today it was partly because of their knowledge of the details of the Holocaust. In other words, Holocaust deniers aside, Holocaust awareness was central to contemporary sensibility. Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, said that with Mr. Bankier’s death, the world had lost one of its most important scholars in the field. He noted that Mr. Bankier, who had fought his illness over a long period, kept a regular schedule until his last day.”



2011:“Korach: The Biblical Anarchist” is scheduled to have its final performance tonight at the Living Theater on New York’s Lower East Side.



2011: Theodore Bikel and Jim Brochu are scheduled to do a concert reading of The Sunshine Boys by Neil Simon at a fundraiser for Theatre J in Washington, DC.



2011:A host of charities and social action organizations from across the Jewish world” are scheduled to meet at the Nalaga’at Theater in Jaffa ttoday “to discuss the future of their field and hear from a wide range of professionals who will guide them on improving their services



2011: The New York Times featured a review of “Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan” by Jewish author and political pundit Jeff Greenfield.



2011(24th of Adar I, 5771): Eighty two year old “prolific writer, editor and popular radio broadcaster Netiva Ben Yehuda passed away in the early hours of this morning.



2011:The prosecuting attorney in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, retired Supreme Court justice Gabriel Bach, said today that a psychiatric evaluation conducted on the Nazi leader following his capture in 1960 suggested that the man responsible for the deaths of millions during the Holocaust had ambivalent sexual tendencies. (As reported by the Jerusalem Post).



2011(24thof Adar I, 5771): Ninety-two year old Louis Sachwald, the former resident of Pikesville, MD who survived the Bataan Death March  and 42 months as a POW passed away today.  He was a member of Baltimore’s Beth-El Congregation
http://philippine-defenders.lib.wv.us/html/sachwald_louis_bio.html



 2011(24th of Adar I, 5771): Seventy-five year old Harvey Dorfman who worked with many Major League Baseball stars and wrote books on sports psychology, including “The Mental Game of Baseball: A Guide to Peak Performance,” passed away today. (As reported by the Eulogizer)



2011: Actress Natalie Portman condemned Christian Dior chief designer John Galliano for anti-Semitic comments made at a bar in Paris, France which appeared on an online. “I am deeply shocked and disgusted by the video of John Galliano’s comments that surfaced today," Portman said in a statement. "In light of this video, and as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr. Galliano in any way." The Oscar winning actress is currently under an endorsement contract with Dior for its "Dior Cherie" fragrance.



2011: The United States Senate confirmed the nomination of Amy Totenberg to serve as Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia



2012: Ballet de Genève's stunning artists are scheduled to perform a work by Israeli born choreographer Emanuel Gat at the Joyce Theatre in New York City.



2012: Israeli trained clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein is scheduled to perform at Lincoln Center tonight. The program will include a work by American Jewish composer Aaron Copland.



2012: Megillat Ha-Manginot (The Scroll of Melodies) a musical celebrating Israel and its songs is scheduled to be performed at the Jerusalem Theatre on Rechov Marcus.



2012: Publication of “Faye Schulman – the Jewish Girl Who Fought the Nazis”
http://www.blogwrath.com/jewish-issues/faye-schulman-the-jewish-girl-who-fought-the-nazis/2585/



2012: Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch put down her gavel this morning, ending a 45-year legal career, and urged in her farewell remarks that it is crucial to maintain the independence of court. 



2012: The IDF said today that soldiers patrolling the border overnight spotted a group of people who had breached the frontier.



2013: Jack Lew, an observant Orthodox Jew, was sworn as Secretary of the Treasury.



2013: It was announced today that Idina Menzel would make her return to the Broadway stage, starring as Elizabeth in the new musical “If/Then.”



2013: Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot “performed with violinist Itzhak Perlman at a Jewish Music concert at the Barclay's Center in Brooklyn.”



2014: The exhibition, “Passages through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War,” comes to a close at the Jewish Museum of Maryland.



2014: In Bethesda, MD, Congregation Adat Shalom is scheduled to start a hosting a weekend devoted to exploring “The Enduring Legacy of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.”



2014: Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor are scheduled to perform at Abrons Arts Center Playhouse.



2014: In Denver, CO, “45 Israeli and North American Jewish Artists are scheduled to show and sell their creations: under the auspices “Jewishcolorado.”



2014: The IDF has reportedly issued a stern warning to the Lebanese government, clarifying that the government will be held response and be a target for response should Hezbollah carry out its threats to attack Israel. (As reported by Ari Yashar)



2014: The Israeli Air Force attacked an underground rocket launcher in the northern Gaza Strip tonight in an effort to eliminate “an imminent threat” of rocket fire towards Israel.  (As reported by Yoav Zitun)



2014: The Islamist Basij militia force in Tehran ran a special military exercise yesterday and today preparing for an Iranian takeover of Jerusalem. (As reported by Dalit Halevy and Tov Dvorin)



2015: In Rockville, MD, Magen David Sephardic Congregation is scheduled to host “Bling Bling Like A Persian King…..A 21+Purim Extravaganza.”



2015: In a bit of homecoming, Lewis Black is scheduled to perform at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C.



2015: This evening in Iowa City, Hillel is scheduled to host its Annual Fundraising Concert.



2015: “Stitching History” “a remarkable exhibit about the late Hedy Strnad, a Jewish-Czech dressmaker who with her husband, Paul, attempted to immigrate to the United States on the eve of the Holocaust” is scheduled to come to a close at the Jewish Museum in Milwaukee.
http://www.jta.org/2014/10/05/arts-entertainment/the-jewish-dressmaker-fdr-turned-away



2015: The Igael Shemtov Exhibition which has been on display for the last three weeks at Baxter St at CCNY is scheduled to come to an end
http://www.baxterst.org/exhibitions-3/igaelshemtov/



 2016: The Andalusian Orchestra is scheduled perform with Berry Sakharov and Raymonde Abecassis on tonight at 10 p.m. at Zappa Herzliya.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/a-little-bit-oud-country-a-little-bit-rock-n-roll/



2016: “The first major documentary about legendary director about Claude Lanzman who has never won an Oscar entitled ‘Claude Lanzmann: Specters of the Shoah’ is among the nominees for this year’s Academy Awards” which are scheduled to be announced at tonight ceremony in Los Angeles.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/will-lanzmann-finally-win-an-academy-award/



 2016: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Right Wrong Man:John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial by Lawrence Douglas



2016(19thof Adar I, 5776): Ninety-three year old Chicago born real estate developer and “banker to the stars” Bram Goldsmith whose philanthropies included Jewish Federal Council of Greater Los Angeles and the National Conference of Christians and Jews passed away today.
http://www.jta.org/2016/03/02/news-opinion/united-states/arts-jewish-causes-philanthropist-bram-goldsmith-dies-at-82



2017: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host “No Shushing Allowed” an event designed to introduce the general public to the institutions librarians and archivists in an informal atmosphere.



2017(2ndof Adar, 5777): Ninety-two year old Marion Javits, the widow of Senator Jacob K. Javits passed away today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/nyregion/marian-javits-dead.html?ribbon-ad-idx=3&rref=obituaries&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Obituaries&pgtype=article
https://nypost.com/2017/03/01/marion-javits-found-dead-in-her-apartment/



2017: “Israel’s state comptroller took military and political leaders to task for their failure to prepare adequately for the threat of attack tunnels ahead of the 2014 war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, in a pair of long-awaited, highly critical reports published” today. (As reported by Judah Ari Gross)



2017: The headstone of Staff Sgt. Jack Weinger, a navigator for the 345thBombardment Group killed during an air raid over Japan in 1945 was replaced today “with one bearing a Star of David” “at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.” (JTA/TOI)



2017: Dr. Robert Silber, a pillar of the Jewish community and chair of the Thaler Holocaust Committee is scheduled to begin his career as a professor at the University of Iowa Medical School.



2017: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host Rabbi Norman Cohen’s lecture “Cain and Abel.”



2017: J Street’s annual convention is scheduled to come to an end today.



2017: The Leo Baeck Institute is scheduled to host a screening of the iconic film “Casablanca” followed by a discussion of We’ll Always Have Casabalanca by Noah Isenberg.
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Well-Always-Have-Casablanca/
https://www.noahisenberg.com/



2018(13th of Adar, 5778): Fast of Esther; Megillah reading in the evening; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/


2018: Hillel of Iowa and Augdas Achim are scheduled to join forces to observe Purim complete with Megillah reading, face painting, hamentaschen baking and carnival games.


2018: Following a community breaking of the fast and the reading of the Megillah, the Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host a Purim Party.


 

This Day, February 29, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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 February 29

 1236: In Narbonne (France), an attack on the Jewish quarter occurred after a Jew accidentally killed a Gentile during an argument. The Governor of the city, Don Amyeric, forcibly reestablished order. The house and library of Rabbi Meir ben Isaac were pillaged, but no one was killed.



1644: Dutch explorer Abel Tasman began his second Pacific voyage which proved to be a disappointment to his backer – the Dutch East India Company in which Jews owned approximately a quarter of the shares.


1704: During Queen Anne’s War, French forces and their native allies staged a raid on Deerfield, MA which today is home to Schoen Books and the Jewish History Society of Western Massachusetts.


1720: Queen Ulrika Eleonora of Sweden, in whose presence “two Jews of Stockholm, Israel Mandel and Moses Jacobs together with their families were baptized in 1681” abdicated in favor of her husband, who became King Frederick I


1820(14th of Adar, 5580): Purim


1832(28th of Adar I, 5582): Emanuel Baruh Lousada, the uncle and namesake of West Indies merchant Emanuel Baruch Lousada and the uncle of Abigail Lousada, who lived at Sidmouth and was a member of the Mahamad (Council of Elders) of the London Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue passed away today.


1836: Les Huguenots an opera composed by Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer premiered at the Paris Opéra


1856: Sir Saul Samuel completed his first term as a member of the Legislative Council of New South Wales.


1860: Samuel Levy, alias "Old Levy"; Morris M. Goldstein, alias Goldever; L. Truebart; Michael Roberts, alias "Big Roberts," and Henry Wcyman, “five Polish and Prussian Jews known to the authorities of New York as expert pickpockets and daring burglars left town this evening on what was described as a “Western Tour” meaning they were heading for Albany, Buffalo and parts unknown.


1868: Benjamin Disraeli completed his third and final term as Chancellor of the Exchequer


1868: Birthdate of Heinrich Class, the anti-Semitic German politician who supported the Putsch of 1923 and was a member of the Nazi Party who avoided punishment for his evil and passed away in 1953.


1872: Birthdate of bantamweight boxer Sigmund “Sig” Hart who managed three Heavyweight Champions including Jack Johnson.


1880: It was reported that the Young Men’s Hebrew Association will hold a Purim celebration at the Lexington Avenue Opera House featuring performance by the Torriano Opera Troupe.


1888: Birthdate of Lucille Selig, the Atlanta native who married Leo Frank in 191


1892: Sir Edgar Speyer, the American born chairman of Speyer Brothers, the British branch of his family’s financial empire, became a naturalized British citizen.


1892: Among the charities that were named at today’s meeting of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment to receive contributions from the city’s theatrical  and concert license fund were the United Hebrew Charities of the City of New York, $1,500; the Montefiore Home, $1,000; Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews, $350; and Beth Israel Hospital, $100.


1892: Incorporation of St. Petersburg, Florida which has become the site for the Florida Holocaust Museum.


1892: Thirteen new cases of typhus were discovered today by sanitary authorities in New York City.  Seven of the new cases were Russian Jews who had arrived aboard the SS Massiliaand had been quarantined at a facility provided by the United Hebrew Charities.  The other six were people who had come in contact with one of these seven.


1892: “Renan on the Prophets” published today provides an in depth review of History Of The People of Israel From the Time of Hezekiah Till The Return From Babylon by French author Ernest Renan


1904(13th of Adar, 5664): Ta’anit Esther; Erev Purim


1912(11th of Adar, 5672) Ta’anit Esther is observed on Thursday to avoid conflict with Shabbat.


1916: In Winchester, Tennessee, “Russian-Jewish immigrant shopkeepers, Anna (née Stein) and Solomon Shore gave birth to Frances Rose Shore who gained fame as singer, actress and television variety show hostess, Dinah Shore.  She overcame a childhood bout of polio to become a successful dancer.  After graduating from Vanderbilt University, she found early fame and fortune as a singer with bandleader Xavier Cougat (Charo’s husband).  She took the name Dinah from the title of a popular song.  During the 1950’s she hosted a Sunday Night variety show which she always ended by giving America a big sweeping kiss before singing the theme “See the USA in your Chevrolet.”  Most Americans did not know that this all-American blond girl-next door was Jewish.



(Please note, NYT shows her birthdate as March 1 while all other sources show February 29.  I realize I disagree with the Times at my peril)


1916: Funeral Services are scheduled to be held this morning at the Uptown Talmud Torah for Henry Glass the husband of Fannie Glass and head of Henry Glass and Company where the mourners will include members of the Young Women’s Hebrew Association, the Jewish Centre and the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War.


1920: In New York, Gertrude and David Nemerov gave birth to Howard Nemerov the Pulitzer Prize winning poet who was the older brother of famed photographer Diane Arbus. 



1920: Czechoslovakia’s National Assembly passed a constitution establishing a democratic republic.  At the time there were approximately 350,000 Jews living in the country making them about 2 to 3% of the total population. Jews of the newly created republic would flourish until the shameful Munich Agreement of 1938.


1920: In Hungary Admiral Miklos Horthy overthrew the government and becomes Regent, a position he will hold until 1944. Horthy was an avowed anti-Semite who promulgated a series of declarations and laws aimed limiting the participation of Jews in all facets of Hungarian society.  This played well with the populace since at this time, the Jews who were 5% of the population were 60% of the doctors, 51% of the lawyers, 25% of the university students, etc.  [Anti-Semitism goes hand in hand with Jewish success.  Yet, anti-Semites also attack Jews as a pariah when they are poor.]


 1924: Birthdate of Cleveland third basemen Al Rosen. Rosen elected MVP of the American League in 1953.  He was the first player to be elected unanimously.  He led the Indians to the American League Pennant in 1954.  He left baseball after 1956, his all-star career shortened by injuries.



1928: Birthday of Laszlo Berkowits “a Hungarian-born American Reform rabbi. From 1944-1945, he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. After his release in 1945, he studied briefly in Sweden before he moved to the United States, where he began studying to be a rabbi. He was ordained in 1962.” In 1963, he was hired by Temple Rodef Shalom as its first senior rabbi. He held this title for 35 years, prior to his retirement in July, 1998. In 1988, he received his Doctor of Divinity from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He is currently the Rabbi Emeritus at Temple Rodef Shalom.


1932: A portrait of Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo was among those on display at an exhibition of American portraits by contemporary American artists that was held this afternoon at the American Art – Anderson Galleries for the purposed of raising funds to support the Free Milk Coffee Stations for the unemployed.


1932: “Benjamin Cardozo, the newly appointed Justice of the Supreme Court” had lunch with President Hoover today at the White House during which they “discussed legal affairs and his new duties on the highest tribunal.


1932: Twenty-four year old Jackie Fields (born Jacob Finkelstein) won a non-title bout with a 9th round knockout in Pittsburgh, PA.


1936: Twenty-two year old track star Milton Green who would boycott the Berlin Olympics, won the 45 high hurdles, the 50 yard spring and the broad jump in a competition today between Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Dartmouth.


1936(6th of Adar, 5696): Parashat Terumah


1936: Rabbi Israel Goldstein is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “What Is Success: How Much Is Worth?” at B’nai Jeshurun.


1936(6th of Adar I, 5696): Seventy-one year old Abraham “Abe” Ruef, who began as a reformer but became a political boss and Mayor of San Francisco who went to prison after being convicted of corruption related to the rebuilding of the city after the earthquake.



1936: Paul Baerwald, Chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee announced today that “New York City’s quota in the 1936 national $3,500,000 fund of the Joint Distribution Committee has been set at $1,500,000.


1936: Dr. Chaim Weizmann, is reported scheduled to meet with those Jews who “are sponsors of a scheme to accelerate the evacuation of Jews from Germany “told the New York Times ‘I do not know the extent of the funds of the nature of the scheme contemplated by Herman Samuel’s mission, but I am ready to cooperate in the execution of any project promising to increase Jewish immigration to Palestine.’”


1936: In Berlin court today, when sentencing five communists to death and “five more to penal servitude for fourteen years each and six others to penal servitude ranging from three to twelve years” the presiding Judge said that in passing judgement he had “considered all the circumstances that had led to the incitement of the masses by Jewish-Marxist wirepullers.”


1936: In Lwow, Poland, “two Jewish students were seriously injured and other were slightly hurt in a clash” tonight “between Jewish and non-Jewish students at the Lwow University of Polytechnic and Commerce.


1936: Birthdate of Gene Golub, the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and co-author of “Matrix Computations.”


1936: Baby Snooks, played by Jewish comedic actress Fanny Brice, debuts on the radio program The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air.


1936: During a concert at the Carnegie Hall, Bronislaw Huberman, switched the Stradivarius "Gibson" he owned for over 40 years with his newly acquired Guarnerius violin in his dressing room during the intermission and went on to the second half of the concert. When he was playing Cesar Franck's Violin Sonata in A Major, his secretary, Miss Ida Ibbiken, noticed that the "Gibson" disappeared from the dressing room. It was snatched by a young New York nightclub musician, Julian Altman, who kept the violin for the next half century. After being convicted of child molestation in 1985, Altman made a deathbed confession to his wife, Marcelle Hall, that he had stolen the violin. The insurance company, Lloyd's of London, paid Huberman $30,000 for the loss in 1936. Ironically, Julian Altman went on to become a violinist with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. and performed for Presidents and politicians with the stolen Stradivarius for many years. After Altman's death in 1985, Ms. Hall consulted experts who confirmed that the violin was indeed the Gibson Stradivarius. Two years later, she returned it to Lloyd's and collected a finder's fee of $263,000. The instrument underwent a 9-month restoration by J&A Beare Ltd., in London. In 1988, Lloyd's sold it for $US1.2 million to British violinist Norbert Brainin. In October 2001, the American violinist, Joshua Bell, purchased it for $4,000,000. "Normally someone in my situation with my income could not afford to own a Strad like this, but I was very lucky in my purchases of violins", Bell said. "I kind of worked my way up and managed."


 1936: “Not The Only Victims” published today



1940: "Gone with the Wind" won eight Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, including Best Picture of 1939. This American classic certainly had a Jewish touch.  It had a Jewish producer, theme music written by a Jew and of course a Jew, Leslie Howard, played one of the leading characters – the soulful Ashley Wilkes


1940: The screen version The House of the Seven Gables with a script by Lester Cole and directed by Joe May premiered in Chicago today.


1940: In response to the adoption of the Land Transfer Regulations, David Ben Gurion declared that “The effect of these regulations is that no Jew may acquire in Palestine a plot of land, a building or a triee, or ay right in water, except in town and a very small part of the country.  The regulations not only violate the terms of the Mandate but completely nullify its primary purpose.’


1940: “Jewish women and children marched through the streets of Tel Aviv today carrying banners with biblical quotations prophesying Jewish ownership of Palesine.


1948(19th of Adar I, 5708): Two Jews were killed and five other persons were wounded in a bomb explosion in Haifa today on the third floor of Barclays Bank building near the railway station in the harbor zone.


 1948: The Stern Gang bombed the Cairo-Haifa train killing 27 British soldiers.


1952: Lawrence Demmy and his partner won “the ice dancing title at the World Figure Skating Championship in Paris.” (As reported by Bob Wechsler.


1956: President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower announced that he would seek a second term.  He would win in a landslide in November.  In the last weeks of the campaign (October, 1956) the Suez Crisis would flair up and Ike would have to deal with a major foreign policy challenge which would have special meaning for Jewish voters as they went to the polls.  


1960: The first Playboy Club opened in Chicago, Illinois. One of the most famous Playboy Bunnies was feminist activist Gloria Steinem.


1960: “The Play of the Week” broadcast the Moss Hart adaption of “The Climate of Eden” produced by David Susskind


1960: An earthquake in Agadir, Morocco killed 5000 people, including hundreds of Jews.


1972(14th of Adar, 5732): Purim


1976: Birthdate of Lior Mor, the native of Haifa who was Israel’s 2000 Davis cup team and coached Israeli players at the 2008 Summer Olympics.


1976: “Operation Daybreak” a “film based on the true story of Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of SS General Reinhard Heydrich in Prague” with a screenplay by Ronald Harwood was released in the United Kingdom, 3 months after having first been seen in the United States.


1980 (12th of Adar, 5740): Yigal Allon (יגאל אלון) passed away.  Born on a kibbutz in 1918, this sabra played an active role in the creation of the Kibbutz movement and the IDF.  He was a member of the Haganah and leader of the Palmach.  After the War for Independence he became a leading general in the IDF.  After leaving the army, Allon became active in politics and held several responsible government positions including acting prime minister between the death of Levi Eshkol and the installation of Golda Meir as head of the government.





1988: Nazi documents implicated former UN Secretary-General and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim in WWII deportations. Waldheim's claims that he was just an Austrian serving as an officer in the Nazi Army, proved to be false.  His war time behavior would make him persona non grata in many countries and he did not run for re-election as President of Austria. 


1996: Novelist Joan Collins, the daughter of a South African Jew, was awarded US $1 million from Random House for breach of contract.


1996: Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger named today as “Henry Roth Day” in New York City.


2000: In “Its Children; Cultural Ties and Low Costs Lure Orthodox Couples to Lower East Side” published today, Tina Kelly described the phenomena of young Jews returning en masse to an area from which their immigrant forbearers sought to escape.



2004: Thirty-four year old “defenseman Mathieu Schneider” whose love of the game may have come his French-Canadian mother Aline, led the Detroit Red Wings to victory over the Philadelphia Flyers.


2004: "Ten Years of Hope," a play by Elizabeth Swados about the experiences of women who fled El Salvador for new lives in New York City, opened.


2004: The New York Times features books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Five Men Who Broke My Heart by Susan Shapiro and the recently published paperback edition of Michael Pye’s novel World War II art theft The Pieces From Berlin. A woman in wartime Berlin accepts objets d'art for safekeeping from cultivated Jews, most of whom are sent to their deaths in Nazi camps. Sixty years later a Holocaust survivor recognizes a table in the window of her shop in Switzerland, forcing both characters to confront their long-submerged pasts.


2004(7th of Adar, 5764): Playwright Jerome Lawrence passed away.  Born Jerome Schwartz in Cleveland, Ohio, Lawrence is best known for the hits “Auntie Mame” and “Inherit the Wind” both of which became hit films.



2004: In “A Frenchman Or a Jew?” published today Fernanda Eberstadt uses a sketch of the life of a French Jewess named Brigitte Stora as a vehicle for describing the changing status of the Jews of France especially in light of the growing Moslem population in metropolitan France. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07EEDE173CF93AA15751C0A9629C8B63


2008: At Temple Judah, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the second in a series of special Musical Shabbats.


2008: The original motion picture soundtrack of “The First Basket,” a “documentary film on professional basketball’s influence on Jewish culture was released today.


2008: Two weeks after its premiere at the Berlin International Festival, “The Other Boleyn Girl” starring Natalie Portman and featuring Andrew Garfield was released today in the United States.


2008: A Belgian writer has admitted that she made up her bestselling "memoir" depicting how, as a Jewish child, she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust, her lawyers said. Misha Defonseca's 1997 book, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France, according the Associated Press.Her two Brussels-based lawyers, siblings Nathalie and Marc Uyttendaele, said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during World War II, the AP reported. Nor is she Jewish.


2008: Israel began Operation Hot Winter, also called Operation Warm Winter a “military campaign in the Gaza Strip, launched in response to Qassam rockets fired from the Strip by Hamas. Two days prior to the IDF mission, “Hamas, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad carried out a rocket barrage, in which they fired for the first time 6 Grad missiles at the industrial city of Ashkelon.” 2012: “New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza” is scheduled to open at Theatre J in Washington, DC.


2012: A petition that had been presented to Parliament by Isabel Ferreira Lopes, granddaughter of Barros Basto and Vice President of the Jewish Community of Porto that stated Barros Basto’s dismissal from the army was a matter of political and religious segregation on account of being Jewish, the name of Artur Carlos de Barros Basto was officially “rehabilitated” today.


2012: The annual Latke-Hamentasch Debate is scheduled to take place at Adas Israel in Washington, DC.


2012: Violinist Yehonatan Berick and cellist Rachel Mercer are scheduled to perform a series of duets at the Jerusalem Music Center.


2012: A number of people were injured, traffic was disrupted and electricity was cut today due to winds that reached up to 110 kilometers per hour as a late-February winter storm swept across the country. In Tel Aviv, a large tree was toppled on the city's central King George Street, taking down an electricity line with it. The street was closed to traffic as crews worked to clear the tree and restore electricity. A number of other trees were uprooted in Tel Aviv, causing damage to cars. In Herzliya, Netanya, Ramat Hasharon, municipal crews were working to clear fallen trees from city streets. In Netanya, a driver was trapped when a tree fell on his car. Emergency crews freed the uninjured driver from his vehicle. In Netanya, a 70-year-old man was lightly injured by flying glass from a shattered store door. Magen David Adom crews treated the man on the scene and evacuated him to a hospital. In the North, a major road in Hatzor Haglilit was closed to traffic due to a number of uprooted trees strewn across the road. Police were allowing traffic accessing the city from the direction of Safed. The Israel Electric Company said its crews were working to restore electricity in a number of locations. It asked the public to stay away from downed power lines and to report such dangerous instances to its hotline, *103. In the North, snow fell this morning on the Hermon Mountain in the Golan Heights, leading police to close access to the area. Schools in the Golan Heights closed early Wednesday and sent children home due to the snow. By the afternoon snow flurries spread to the south over the Golan, prompting authorities to close Route 91 between the Hasharyon and Wasat junctions leading to the Golan settlement Ein Zivan.  Snow was expected to reach other mountain areas in the North later tonight and it was possible snow would reach mountains in the Center of the country later tonight. (As reported by the JPost)



2012: Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints posthumously baptized slain Jewish reporter Daniel Pearl last year, the Boston Globe reported today.



2012(6thof Adar, 5772): Ninety-one year old “Sheldon Moldoff, who drew some of the most recognizable superheroes of comic books’ golden age without receiving recognition in his own right until decades later” passed away today.  (As reported by Daniel Slotnik)



http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/books/sheldon-moldoff-batman-comic-book-artist-dies-at-91.html?_r=1&hpw



2016: Shulem Deen, the author of All Who Go Do Not Return, his story of growing up among the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US is scheduled to lecture on “Telling Your Story: The Art and Craft of Memoir Writing” at the Skirball Center.


2016: Mike Brown who had placed on waivers by the Sharks was claimed today by the Montreal Canadiens.


2016: “Sands and Seasons” and “Carvalho’s Journey” are scheduled to be shown at the 26th annual Washington Jewish Film Festival

This Day, March 1, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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March 1

 
286: Roman Emperor Diocletian raises Maximian to the rank of Caesar. Diocletian was determined to restore greatness and stability to the Roman Empire.  He was far more concerned about the Christians whom he saw “as the sole cause of the dissolution of the Empire, on account of their persistent struggle against the Roman state religion and their zeal for conversion” than he was about the Jews.  When he attempted to unify the empire by ordering all of those under his reign to accept his divinity and “bring sacrifices to his cult,” Diocletian exempted the Jews.  The only negative note of import surrounding Diocletian and his Jewish subjects had to do with accusation that they had mocked him because of his early origins as a swineherd.  Judah III, the Patriarch, actually had to appear before the Emperor while he was in Tiberias to answer the charge.  Judah assured him that while some may of spoken disrespectfully of Diocletian the swineherd nobody had uttered any words of criticism against Diocletian, the emperor.  The explanation assuaged Diocletian but it has been used an example of the dangers of speaking L’shon Hara.



293: Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian appoint Constantius Chlorus and Galerius as Caesares, thus beginning the Tetrarchy.  This move on the part of Diocletian was part of an attempt to ensure a smooth transition of power after Diocletian resigned as Emperor.  The plan would fail and would result in 19 years of turmoil that would end only when Constantine took the throne. For the Jews, this would mean an end to great Yeshiva at Tiberias.  Those who could would flee to Caesarea where they would a haven at the yeshiva begun by Abbahu.


317: Crispus and Constantine II, sons of Roman Emperor Constantine I, and Licinius Iunior, son of Emperor Licinius, are made Caesares. Lucinius and Crispus would be killed, the latter by his father Emperor Constantine I.  Constantine II would continue the anti-Jewish policies of his father.  Among other things, he decreed that any Christians who converted to Judaism would forfeit their property to the state.


1105: Birthdate of Alfonso VII who in 1130, started a school in Toledo which begins to spread Hebrew and Arabic learning as well as ancient Greek knowledge through Western Europe


1274: Gregory X issued Turbato Code, a Papal Bull that forbade Christians from “embracing Judaism.”


1349 (Adar 10): Riots broke out in Worms (Germany). Many Jews fled to Heidelberg.  Others in desperation set fire to their homes or were murdered. An estimated 420 people died that day. Their property was seized by the town.


1565: Portuguese settlers founded the city of Rio de Janeiro. For the first two centuries of its existence, Jewish life in the city was hindered by the reality of the Portuguese laws against Judaism and the Inquisition.  “New Christians” played an active role in the city’s commercial and social life but records show that at least 300 of these New Christians were found guilty by the Inquisition of secretly practicing Judaism.  After Brazil gained its independence in 1822 and adopted a constitution in 1824 that allowed for religious toleration, more Jews began arriving in the city and played a more active role in its growth and prosperity.  Today, Rio has the second largest Jewish community in Brazil.


1655: The Magistrate of New Amsterdam wrote a ruling making an attempt to expel the Jews. It read, in part, "Resolved that the Jews, who came last year from the West Indies and now from the Fatherland, must prepare to depart forthwith." (“The Patroons of the West India Company decided, however, that the Jews owned most of the stock in that organization they would have to be left alone.”


1655: The Sheriff of New Amsterdam as plaintiff filed suit against the defendant Abram de la Sina, a Jew, for the crime of keeping his store open during the hour the church gave a sermon.


1670:  “A solemn proclamation was made in all public places that ‘for the glory of God’ all Jews should, on penalty of imprisonment and death, leave Vienna and Upper and Lower Austria before Corpus Christi Day, never to return. Hirz Koma and a physician named Leo Winkler, “made a last attempt to propitiate the emperor by offering him 100,000 florins and, in addition, 10,000 florins a year.”


1779(13th of Adar, 5539): Ta’anit Esther; erev Purim


1790: The Pennsylvania Packet featured an advertisement offering the skills of Abraham Cohen as Hebrew tutor


1792: Francis II, who relied on Bernhard Eskeles for “financial advice” became King of Hungary and Croatia.


1803: Birthdate of editor Salomon Frensdorff


1803: Ohio is admitted as the 17th U.S. state. Under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance there was not to be any religious qualification for states formed in the region including Ohio. The first record of Jewish settlement in Ohio relates to the city of Cincinnati.  By 1824, there were enough Jews living in the “Queen City,” that the Jews formed a congregation called the Sons of Israel.  The twenty-four members of the congregation were not able to raise enough funds for a building until 1836.  Max Lilienthal and Isaac Mayer were the first two rabbis in the state.  By the time of the Civil War, the Jewish population was large enough that it sent almost 1,200 of its sons to fight in the Union cause.


1806(11th of Adar, 5566): Chaim Yosef David Azulai ben Isaac Zerachia passed away.  Born in Jerusalem in 1724, he was the great-great grandson of Abraham Azulai who was a noted student of the Talmud and Kabbalah, community leader and prolific author.



1810:Georgetown College was chartered in Washington, D.C., making it the first Roman Catholic institution of higher learning established in the United States.  Today Georgetown has approximately 1,600 Jewish students out of a student boy of 13,000 students.  The school offers approximately 35 Jewish Studies Courses.


1810: John Jonas, the son of Jacob Jonas and Sarah Reuben was circumcised today in the UK.


1811: Birthdate of Wolf Landau, the native of Dresden and grandson of Rabbi David Landau who “in 1854, when Zacharias Frankel became director of the Jewish Theological Seminary at Breslau,  was unanimously elected as his successor in the Dresden chief rabbinate.”


1822: In Brno, Joshua Philipp Feibelman Gomperz and Henriette Auspitz gave birth to Max von Gomperz the sugar merchant who was Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Creditanstalt


1827: In Karlsruhe, Germany, Fanny and David Ellstaetter gave birth to Mortiz Ellstaetter whose quarter of a century as Minister of Finance made him “the first and only Jew since the days of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer to be a Cabinet Minister in Germany.”


1823: In New York, Solomon Henry Jackson published “The Jew,” an anti-missionary journal. This is thought to be the first Jewish publication to be published in the United States. Jackson is also known for translating and publishing the first Sephardic Siddur in America. He published an English-Hebrew version in 1826.


1837: Birthdate of Egyptologist Georg Moritz Ebers, the Berlin native who “discovered the Ebers Papyrus at Luxor” which dates from 1550 BCE.


1841: Dr. Marcus Mosse and Ulrike Mosse gave birth to Deborah Leonore Mosse who became Leonore Cohn When she married Emil Cohn


1843: David Belasco married Mary Davis at Bevis Marks in London.


1843: The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of New York passed a resolution prohibiting the performing of ceremonies at funerals of persons intermarried with Christians.


1843: Isaac Michael Emanuel married Jane Jacobs today at the Great Synaogue.


1848: In Shirwint, Russia Hirsch Tannenbaum and his wife gave birth to Abner Tannenbaum who came to New York in 1887 and “opened a small candy and cigar store” and then starting in 1889 began writing for Jewish publications including Der Morgenstern as well as translating “all the work of Jules Verne into Yiddish.”


1851: Noting the appearance of Jews in Utah, Lorenzo Brown wrote in his diary today that he had seen “some Hungarian Jews living in the ward--emigrants bound for the [California] mines...forced to leave their native land because of the revolution.”


1852: The New York Times reported that a funding raising ball has raised $1,034 which will be donated to "The Hebrew Hospital" in New York City.


1857: The Hebrew Indigent Sick and Burial Society was organized today.


1858: The New York Times reported that in February of this year, Lord John Russell's bill that would modify the oath of office so that Jews could serve in Parliament had been "debated and read for a second time" in the House of Commons. [This was in the days before the transatlantic cable.  Gaps between events and published reports are responsible for some of the inconsistencies in providing specific dates for events]


1858: Birthdate of German born philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel. Simmel’s family was Jewish, but when his father died, Simmel’s Catholic guardian converted him to the Church of Rome. 


1860: “Gang of Rogues Started on a Traveling Tour,” published today, reported that “Five Polish and Prussian Jews, who have long been known to the police authorities of” New York City “as expert pickpockets and daring burglars… started on a Western traveling tour” yesterday evening.  Information of their departure was given by two members of the gang, who have lately sundered relationship with their old associates.” According to these two, “the gang has for a long time gone by the name of the ‘Order of Vatabeds,’ a name till now kept private among the members.” Since it was impossible for the police to detain them in New York, “telegrams were sent to Albany, Buffalo and Dunkirk, stating the fact of their departure, and putting the public and Police on guard against their arrival. The names of the traveling troupe are Samuel Levy, alias "Old Levy"; Morris M. Goldstein, alias Goldever; L. Truebart; Michael Roberts, alias "Big Roberts," and Henry Wcyman. Most of them have served terms in foreign state prisons.” 


 1860: London Town Talk published today provides a gossipy and negative view of William Ward’s elevation from Baron of Ward to Earl of Dudley. His elevation was attributed not to his virtue but to his wealth. According to the unnamed author the role of money should come as no surprise since it was “Baron Rothschild’s millions” that made Lord John Russell an advocate of the bill to remove “Jewish disabilities” when it came to taking the oath to serve in Parliament. 


1861: The first train of the Florida Railroad arrived in Cedar Key providing the first link between Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico’s ports.  The railroad was the creation of David Levy Yulee, the first Jew to be elected to the United States Senate. Unfortunately for Yulee, the business success was short-lived due to the Civil War which began a month later.  Yulee supported secession and served in the Confederate Congress so you might say he was the architect of his own doom


1861: Birthdate of American author Henry Harland. A lawyer by trade he began his literary career by using the pen name Sidney Luska under which he wrote his first three novel’s  As It Was Written, Mrs. Peixada and The Yoke of the Torah which were known as his “Jewish Trilogy.”



1861: The New York Times reported that The Knoxville (Tenn.) Whig gave “a first rate” description of a “Jew” named Mordecai who distinguished himself a few weeks” ago since by presenting $10,000 to the Governor of South Carolina. The Whig stated that “Mordecai who is a druggist, visited New-York, Philadelphia and Boston, just before he did this act, and represented to his creditors that he was insolvent, and settled with them by paying 50 cents on the dollar.”  [By this time, South Carolina had seceded from the Union so the money was going to support the Rebel government.]


1865: The Medal of Honor was issued to Private Benjamin Levy for bravery displaced during fighting at Glendale, VA in 1862.


1866(14th of Adar, 5626): Purim


1866: The Purim Ball, the last of the three great events of New York’s Winter Social Season was held this evening.


1867: Nebraska becomes the 37th state to join the Union. The Jewish community in Nebraska pre-dates statehood. Services were conducted in Omaha in the 1860’s. The oldest congregation in the state, Temple Israel, was founded in 1871 along with a burial society.  The town of Lancaster was renamed Lincoln at this time and Lincoln became the state capital. Lincoln, Nebraska’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, also known as the South Street Temple was Lincoln’s first Jewish congregation. The Temple was founded in 1884, principally by German immigrants. The year 1884 must have been an auspicious one for Cornhusker Jews, since that is the same year in which the first synagogue building in the state was dedicated at Omaha.  It was the home of Congregation Israel now known as Temple Israel.


1870: J.K. Buchner published Di Yiddshe Zeitunge, the first Yiddish weekly to be published in the United States. The language itself was more of a German Yiddish than the eastern European variant of the patois.   The politics were conservative rather than socialist in direction.


1871: Birthdate of Baltimore native Bertha van Leer.


1872(22nd of Adar II, 5632): Forty-four year old Hannah Moses, the widow of Zvi Moes passed away today after which she was buried at the Lauriston Road Jewish Cemetery.


1872: “In the Galitzian town of Lemberg, or Lviv, then under Austrian administration, Nahum Niemirower, a Jewish trader and his wife gave birth to Dr. Jacob Itzhak Neimirower, “a modern reform rabbi” who served as the first Chief Rabbi of Romania as well as a member of the Romanian Senate.


1874: The first day of the annual Purim Reception at the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews in New York is scheduled to begin at eleven o’clock this morning.


1874: Birthdate of General Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope who was appointed High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief for Palestine and Trans-Jordan in 1931” and whose firs four years in office were described as “the heyday of Zionist history in Palestine” with an increase in immigration, land holdings and “Jewish business and commerce.”1875: It was reported today that a Jewish furniture dealer named Beyfus has brought suit against a weekly London newspaper claiming that he and his son have been defamed as money-lenders by the publication.


1876: In Savannah, GA, the cornerstone is laid for the new home of Mikveh Israel.  The new structure was required because the congregation had outgrown the old building. 


1877: The Purim Association is sponsoring a Purim calico masked reception at Delmonico’s in New York City.  The association had originally planned on sponsoring a fancy dress ball but changed its plans because of the current economic problems.


1878: It was reported that George H. Hepworth is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “Our American Homes” at a meeting of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association at Lyric Hall later this week.


1879: In a modern case that is harkens back to the fifth commandment, in the Court of General Sessions, Judge Gildersleeve heard charges from seventy year old Fanny Salomon that she had been abandoned and refused support by her three sons – Alfred, Leopold and Felix.  The sons responded by contending that their mother was financially secure and was merely to parsimonious to pay for her own upkeep.


1880: It was reported today that Lee & Shepard is about to published “The Exodus of the Children of Israel” by Francis Underwood and Brugsch Bey that uses the latter’s research to provide that the Red Sea has been mistaken for the Sea of Reeds in the Exodus narrative.


1880: It was reported today that Ernest Renan, the French scholar who is an expert on ancient eastern civilizations and Semitic languages is scheduled to deliver a series of lectures in London.  Renan’s knowledge of Hebrew is such that he was the chair of Hebrew at the College de France, a position from which he was ousted because he challenged the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church.[Renan would eventually write a three volume history of Israel.]


1881: Ida (Kuhn) Cohen and Eduard Cohen gave birth to Sophie Cohen


1881: Twenty-three citizens of Salt Lake City met to form B’nai Israel. Under the direction of President Henry Siegel $2,600 was spent on a lot which would be the site of Utah’s first synagogue. (As reported by Jack Goodman)


1885(14th of Adar, 5645): Purim


1886: First organized Arab attack on a Jewish settlement in what would become Eretz Yisrael.  The attack was waged against Petak Tikvah, the first all Jewish village to be built in Palestine during modern times.  The early settlers had a difficult time of it facing not only Arab marauders but malaria as well.  The land on which the village was built was purchased by English Jew named Hayyim Amzalak who had moved to Palestine in 1830.  Money for draining the malarial swamps in the area was given by Baron Edmond de Rothschild.  Much of the labor was supplied by Russian Jewish immigrants.


1888: Rabbi Joseph Silverman begins serving as spiritual leader for Temple Emanu-El replacing the legendary Gustav Gottheil. Silverman is the first American born rabbi to serve a congregation in New York City.


1890: Birthdate of Theresa Ferber Bernstein the Krakow born American artist who settled in Manhattan in 1912 whose husband William Meyerowitz was a well-known artist in his own right.




1891(21st of Adar I, 5651): Sixty-seven year old Bernhard Sondheim passed away today in New York.  Born in Hesse Homburg, he and his family moved to Georgia when Sondheim was nine years old.  Eventually he settled in New York where he established a successful import business. He was a member of the 10thRegiment of the state militia and served as Vice President of the Hebrew Mutual Benefit Society, a position he held at the time of his death.



1891: With less than two months until the start of Passover, The Passover Relief Association, which provides matzoth and items to New York’s less fortunate Jews, finds itself with only $173.45 in its treasury.  Considering the fact that the association spent $675.24 and the fact that the population of needy Jews has greatly increased, the association is in need of donations which can be sent to its members including the chairman, Benjamin Saidel.


1891: Today the United States trustees of the fund created by the late Baron de Hirsch to provide for the needs of immigrants coming to America will draw the $2,400,000 set aside for this purpose from the banks in Paris.


1891: In New York city Harriet "Hattie" (nee Lehman) and Philip Julius Goodhart gave birth to their third and youngest child Arthur Lehman Goodhart, the brother of Howard Goodhard and Helen Goodhart Altschul and grandson of Mayer Lehman (co-founder of Lehman brothers who became a Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford and “was the first American to the Master of an Oxford College.”



1891: “Good Things From Foreign Tongues” published today provided a review of A Literary Manual of Foreign Quotations, Ancient and Modern by John Devoe Belton which includes an explanation of the Latin phrase “Credat Judaeus Appella” which Horace saw as a reference to Appella “the most superstitious of his race” who “believed that the incense placed on the threshold of his temple melted without fire” but whom Renan “thought referred to a Hellenized Jew who, was orthodox, ill-informed and consequently very superstitious.” (As the worse Latin student in the history of Alice Deal and Woodrow Wilson, I can claim no credit for the following.  According to some experts this phrase, which by the way Doc Holliday used in the movie “Tombstone”, can loosely be translated as “Let the Jew believe it; not I” or in colloquial English, “tell it to someone else, not me.”)


1892: It was reported today that the next meeting of the Hebrew Technical Institute will take place at Temple Emanu-El


1892: Carl Wiser played the role of Shylock in the German version of “The Merchant of Venice” at New York’s


Thalia Theatre


1892:  As of this afternoon, 21 year old Joseph Seigler who worked in his father’s dry good store is the only new case of typhus reported today. 


1892: As New York City continued to deal with the latest outbreak of typhus fever, public health officials ordered all synagogues on the Lower East to be fumigated.


1893: “Jewish Women’s Achievements” published today outlined the plans for the presentation of papers to delivered at the upcoming Parliament of Religions “which is to be a feature” of the upcoming World’s Fair. The papers which will be prepared by some of New York’s leading Jewish ladies will highlight the unique contributions of such groups as the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum.


1894(23rd of Adar I, 5654): Twenty-seven year old Hyman Freedman, the husband of Sarah Freedman passed away today after which he was buried at the Edmonton Western Jewish Cemetery.


1894: According to the testimony of Benny Weiss, Charles Krumm gave two ten dollar bills to Ward Man Jeremiah Levy of the Eleventh Police Precinct “in pursuance of an arrangement with the policeman.” (Arrangement is a euphemism for bribe)


1894: Over the last six months (10/1/93 – 3/1/94), the United Hebrew Charities spent $103,102.40 providing aid to the needy as opposed to $46,498.22 “for the corresponding period of the preceding year.”


1895: The National Council of Women, an organization whose members included Jewish, Protestant and Catholic women, opened the penultimate session of its annual triennial meeting in Washington D.C.


1895: “Russians Arrested on Suspicion” published today relied on telegraphs from the Vienna correspondent of the Central News to described arrests made in Kiev and Odessa of those thought to be “engaged in revolutionary plots’ many of whom were Jews.


1896(16th of Adar, 5656): Forty-three year old Jacob Bueno De Mesquita, the son of David and Jessy Bueno De Mesquita passed away after which he was buried in the Nuevo Jewish Cemetery in London.


1896:  Theodor Herzl and Nathan Birnbaum meet for the first time. Nathan Birnbaum was born in Vienna, and lived there from.1864-1908, and again from 1914-21. In 1882, together with two other students in the University of Vienna, he founded “Kadimah,” the first organization of Jewish nationalist students in the West. In 1884, he published his first pamphlet, Die Assimilationsucht(“The Assimilation Disease/Mania”). He founded, published and edited Selbst-Emancipation!(“Self-Emancipation!”)  The periodical promoted “the idea of a Jewish renaissance and the resettlement of Palestine.” It incorporated and developed the ideas of Leon Pinsker. In 1890, Birnbaum coined the terms “Zionist” and “Zionism,” and, in 1892, “Political Zionism.” In 1893, he published a brochure entitled Die Nationale Wiedergeburtdes Juedischen Volkes in seinem Lande als Mittel zur Loesung der Judenfrage(“The National Rebirth of the Jewish People in its Homeland as a Means of Solving the Jewish Question”), in which he expounded ideas similar to those that Herzl was to promote subsequently. Birnbaum played a prominent part in the First Zionist Congress (1897) and was elected Secretary General of the Zionist Organization. However, he and Herzl developed ideological differences. Birnbaum had begun to question the political aims of Zionism and to attach increasing importance to the national-cultural content of Judaism. Birnbaum eventually left the Zionist movement and later became a leading spokesman for Jewish cultural autonomy in the Diaspora. He stressed the Yiddish language as the basis of Ashkenazi Jewish culture and was chief convenor of the Conference on Yiddish held in Czernowitz, Bukovina, in 1908. This was attended by leading Yiddish writers, and proclaimed Yiddish as a national Jewish language. Birnbaum propagated his ideas in writing and by lecturing in many Jewish communities. In the years preceding World War I he gradually abandoned his materialistic and secular outlook, eventually embracing full traditional Judaism. He may be seen as the forerunner of the modern Baal Teshuvah movement. His most famous book of this period was Gottesvolk (“God’s People”) first published in German and Yiddish in 1917 (translated into English in a shortened form by J. Elias in 1947 titled "Confession"). In 1919, he became the first Secretary General of the new Agudath Yisrael Organization. Dissatisfied with the spiritual complacency of the religious masses, he initiated a movement, the Order of the Olim (“[Spiritual] Ascenders”), to consist of small groups of people dedicated by their way of living to raising spiritual awareness within the larger Jewish society, thus leading toward a Jewish spiritual renaissance. Disturbed by the urbanized focus of Jewish life, he promoted the establishment of agricultural communities and other groups living a style of Jewish life more in conformity with nature. Settlement in Eretz Israel was to be for the prime purpose of fulfilling the spiritual role of the Jewish people. He lived in Berlin from 1912-1914, and again from 1921-1933. After the rise of Nazism, he left Germany for Scheveningen, Netherlands, where he edited Der Ruf("The Call"), a platform for his ideas. He died there in 1937.


1896: “Gifts on Purim” published today based on information that first appeared in The American Hebrew described the near disappearance of “the custom of sending gifts on Purim to friends” a custom, “that can easily be restored.”


1896: “The Mexican Inquisition” published today described the publication of two papers by the American Jewish Historical Society – “Trials of  Jorge de Alemdia by the Inquisition in Mexico” by Dr. Cyrus Adler and Jewish Martyrs of the Inquisition in South America” by George Alexander Kohut – which provide a hitherto untold story of the  early Jews living in Latin America.


1897(27th of Adar I, 5657): Seventy one year old Mosbach native and editor of Jewish texts Seligman (Isaac) Baer whose most famous work was Seder Avodat Yisrael, “a monumental edition of the Jewish prayer book according to the Ashkenazic rite” passed away today.


1897:”Old Bibles In A New Home” published today “rich and curious library of the American Bible Society” which includes “an ancient Hebrew roll found in a synagogue in the interior of China” that “is supposed to date back to the year 900 and is supposed to have been used for centuries.”


1897: It was reported today that the Yale Divinity Students who visited New York last week learned about “the magnitude of the problems confronting charitable organizations” including the United Hebrew Charities whose director N.S. Rosenau told them “We have been faced since with an unprecedented rush of immigration” since 1890 because the Russian have driven 400,000 people to the United States.


1898: In Bucharest, Tulius Revici and Ecaterina Gaster Revici, the daughter of Phina Judith Gaster and Abraham Emanuel Gaster, gave birth to Fina Friedman


1898: “Get-Together Clubs Meet” published today included a summary of a speech, “The United Hebrew Charities and the Unemployed” by N.S. Rosenau in which the director described “the problem of Jewish labor in New York saying that their natural limits of ability had kept them out of the work of the day laborer” and had “sent them into the garment trades” where “the Italians were already displacing them.”


1898: “Hope For Zionist Union” published today described efforts two unify the religious and secular supporters of the Zionist which, if successful will strengthen the movement designed to buy land for Jewish settlement in the Ottoman Empire.  Representative of 26 different Jewish organizations including Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Adam Rosenberg, E.D. Eisenstein and Dr. Moses Mintz are working on the effort led by Columbia Professor Richard Gottheil.


1899: Sixty-one year old Farrer Herschell, the 1st Baron Herschell whose father Rabbi Ridley Haim Herschell who had converted to Christianity and founded the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews passed away today.


1899(19th of Adar, 5659): Miriam Joel, the wife of Lewis Leapman passed away today in her 66th year after which she was buried at the Plashet Jewish Cemetery in London.


1900: In France, a bill calling for amnesty of all matters related with the Dreyfus Affair is introduced by   the Senate


1902: In New York City, Goodman Richard Davis and Benvenida Solis Davis, the daughter of David and Sarah Brickner, gave birth to Walter Alan Davis


1903:  “Light on the Jewish Question in Romania,” published  today summarizes an article that first appeared in The Romanian Bulletinthat defends King Charles (a.k.a. Carlos I) against accusations that he is the prime mover in the persecution of his Hebrew subjects.  The article depicts him as being sympathetic to their plight, but as constitutional monarch, all but powerless to defend the Jews against “unscrupulous ministers” who do not share his enlightened views of Romanian Hebrews.  


1904(14th of Adar, 5665): Purim


1904: In London, Redcliffe Nathan Salman, the son of Myer and Sarah Salaman and Nina Ruth Salaman gave birth to Arthur Gabriel Salaman


1904: Israel Schochat, founder of Ha-shomer arrived in Palestine.


1905: Birthdate of New York native research chemist Saul Caspe who was educated at Columbia and Brooklyn Poly Technique.


1906: In Hamburg, “Austrian actor Fritz Spira who died in the Ruma concentration camp in 1943” and actress Lotte Spira gave birth to German actress Camilla Spira.


1911: Birthdate of chess grandmaster Harry Golombek


1913(22ndof Adar I, 5673): Parshat Vayakhel


1913(22ndof Adar I, 5673): Seventy-two year old Rabbi Judas Leopold Friedman passed away today in Cleveland, Ohio.


1913: Rabbi Weil is scheduled to preach his sermon in German this morning at Temple B’Nai Jehoshua in Chicago.


1913: Rabbi Abram Hirschberg delivered the sermon this morning at Temple Sholom.


1913: Birthdate of boxer Nathan “Nat” Bor, the native of Fall River, MA, “who won a bronze medal at the 1932 Summer Olympics.


1913: Effective today, Congregation Anshai Emeth released Dr. Charles S. Levi from his contract as of today.


1914: Birthdate of Aaron Ruben the Chicago native who gain fame as a producer, writer and director for some of the most popular television comedies of the 1960s and ’70s, notably “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” and “Sanford and Son


1915: Mrs. Piza Weyl was reported today to have been in charge of the tableaux “representing the influence of Jews on the early history of America” which were shown at the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue at 70tth Street and Central Park West.


1915: Rabbi Emil Hirsch was reported today to be among the 29 clergymen who are trustees of the Church Peace Union founded by Andrew Carnegie designed to promote “a new moral leadership to prevent armed conflict” – specifically to limit and/or end the World War that had begun in 1914


1915: “Dr. (Samuel) Schulman Tells Why He Opposes Return To Palestine Movement” published today quotes the President of the Metropolitan League as saying that “In America we are Americans, and if there are those who wish to perpetuate Jewish customs and narrow nationalism, let it be done in Palestine, not here in America. The highest work of the Jews is not to teach customs but how different races and peoples may live together in accord and harmony.”


1915: The American Jewish Relief Committee received a cablegram from the Jewish Colonization Association of Petrograd describing the desperate condition of the “tens of thousands” of refugees from Poland” and the granting of official permission to organize assistance for the Jews of Galicia.


1916: The funeral of Rose Fridstein, the wife of Joseph Fridstein and the mother of Myer, Sam and Harry Fridstein is scheduled to take place today followed by burial at Bickur Cholim Cemetery.


1917: As the Russian Revolution gained momentum, with all that that would mean to the Jewish people, the Czar abdicated today “leaving the Provisional Government in control of” the Russian Empire.


1917: The U.S. government released the plaintext of the Zimmermann Telegram to the public.  Barbara Tuchman, the noted Jewish historian, wrote The Zimmerman Telegram a fascinating volume covering this little known event which had a major impact on America’s decision to enter World War I on the side of the Allies.


1918: In Vienna, the “Press states that Count Czernin, Minister of Foreign Affairs, will in the course of peace negotiations with Romania, bring up thequestion of granting full rights to the Jews.”


1918: The new Zionist publication, Ungarische Wochenschrift reported that Galician Jewish regfugees are the victims of frequent artiocities.


1919: Emir Feisal, the son of Emir Hussein, Grand Sharif of Mecca and the leader of the Arabs of Hejaz sent a letter to Felix Frankfurter.  According to Martin Gilbert he wrote, “We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.  We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.”  “I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness.  We are working together for a reformed and derived Near East, and our two movements complete one another.  The Jewish movement is notional and not imperialist: our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for both.  Indeed I think that neither can be a real success with the other.  I look forward, and the people with me look forward to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once against take their place in the comity of the civilized peoples of the world.” 


1919(29th of Adar I, 5679): Parashat Vayakhel and Sabbat Shekalim


1919(29th of Adar I, 5679): Seventy-three year old Moshe Dov ben Mordecai Zev passed away today after which he was buried at the Blackley Jewish Cemetery.


1920: “Several hundred Shiite Arabs from the village of Jabal Amil in southern Lebanon marched to the gates of Tel Hai together with Bedouin from Halasa and their Mukhtar, Kamal Affendi” demanding to search Tel Hai for French soldiers


1920(11th of Adar, 5680): Tel Hai, a Jewish village in the Galilee is attacked by Arabs. Joseph Trumpeldor, the one-armed Jewish military leader and one of the Zionist movement’s first military heroes was killed in the ensuing battled along with five men under his command. “Trumpeldor was born in 1880 in Russia. Originally in training as a dentist, he volunteered for the Russian army in 1902. During the Russo-Japanese War he participated in the siege of Port Arthur, where he lost his left arm and was captured. Subsequently, he received four decorations for bravery, which made him the most decorated Jewish soldier in Russia. In 1906 he became the first Jew in the army to receive an officer's commission. In 1911 he emigrated to Palestine then under the Ottoman Turks, living for a time at kibbutz Deganya. When World War I broke out, he went to Egypt, where together with Vladimir Jabotinsky he developed the idea of the Jewish legion to fight with the British against common enemies and as a result, the Zion Mule Corps was formed in 1917, considered to be the first all-Jewish military unit organized in close to two thousand years, and the ideological beginning of the Israel Defense Forces. He saw action in Gallipoli, where he was wounded in the shoulder. Upon his return to Russia in 1918, he established the He-Halutz, a youth organization that prepared immigrants for Aliyah (moving to Palestine), and returned to Palestine himself, then under the British Mandate. He was one of the founders of the Zionist Socialist movement in pre-state Israel.. After his death Trumpeldor became the symbol of Jewish "self-defense", and his memorial day on the 11th day of Adar is officially noted in Israel every year. Supposedly, his last words were, "Never mind, it is good to die for our country". There is no proof whether this is true.”


1921: The Political committee of the Zionist Organization met in London to discuss Churchill’s forthcoming visit to Palestine.


1921: Margery Merlyn Baillieu and Sidney Myer, the founder of Myer (Australia’s largest department store chain) gave birth to the first child, Ken.  But since Myer had converted a year earlier and Baillieu was not Jewish, Ken would not be carrying on the “faith of his fathers.”


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1391841/Sir-Michael-Kerr.htm


1921: In Berlin, “Alfred Kerr, the well-known socialist author and theatre critic for Berliner Tageblatt and Frankfurter Zeitung” and his non-Jewish wife gave birth to Sir Michael Kerr, the Lord Justice of Appeal who was believed to be “England's first foreign-born judge since the reign of Henry II.”


1922: John Schuburgh a member of the Middle East Department (of the British Government) sent a visiting Arab delegation a letter reiterating British support for the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. 


1922:  Birthdate of Yitzhak Rabin(יצחק רבין). A Sabra, Rabin was a soldier-statesman who served as Prime Minister from 1974 until 1977.  The scandal which drove him from office would open the way for the Right-Wing Likud to take power for the first time since the founding of the Jewish State.  Rabin would return as Prime Minister in 1992.  He would win the Nobel Peace Prize for his groundbreaking attempts to end the violence in the Middle East.  Sadly, the man who had avoided death at the hands of Israel’s Arab enemies, met death at the hands of a Jewish fanatic bent on derailing the Peace Process.  Would events been different had Rabin lived?  We will never know.  Just as a killer at Dallas had thwarted the American electoral process, so a killer thwarted the democratic process in Israel in 1995.


1924: Dr. Max Pinner, the recipient of the American Thoracic Society’s Trudeau Medal, married Berna Rudovic, four years before he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.


1926(15th of Adar, 5686): Shushan Purim


1926: It was reported today that the Purim Ball at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel sponsored by the Old Timers of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association had “served a reunion for all former Y.H.M.H.A. members since 1874.”


1926: At a testimonial dinner honoring Joseph Barondess’ forty years of service to American Jewrtygiven tonight in the ballroom of the Manhattan Opera House, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise said “that no Jew in America had given more to Jewish life.”


1926: Mlle. Maxa Nordau, the daughter of the late Zionist author Max Nordau is scheduled to begin holding an exhibition of art in New York staring today.


1926: Birthdate of Robert Clary.  The French born actor gained fame playing the part of LeBeau on “Hogan’s Heroes.”  The irony is that Clary was the only one of his immediate family members to survive imprisonment by the Nazis during World War II.


1928: Joseph Levy, writing in the New York Times described the ceremonies that marked “the recent inauguration of the plantation of the Balfour Forest at Ginegar, in the Valley of Jezreel, Palestine.” As part of the ceremony, Sir Alfred Mond delivered an address in which he “paid high tribute to Lord Plumer, the High Commissioner, for the devotion he has shown during his tenure in office and to the Jewish national fund. The entire cost of the Balfour Forest is being borne by the Jews of Great Britain.  The project is part of the Zionist led reforestation project that is vital to the renewal of Palestine.


1930: “Puttin’ On the Ritz” produced by Joseph M. Schenck starring Harry Richman in his movie debut who also wrote the music for the film along with Fred E. Ahlert and Irving Berlin was released in the United States today.


1931: The White House released President Herbert Hoover’s congratulatory message expressing his congratulations to Baith Israel Anshei Emes on the celebration of the 75th anniversary of its founding.


1932: On a radio broadcast Clarence C. Dill, Democratic Senator for Washington, called Hoover's appointment of Justice Cardozo "the finest act of his career as President"


1932: It was reported today that Daniel Frohman is the honorary president of “Theatre in Art” exhibition which will open later this month as a fundraiser for the Actors’ Fund of America.


1932: It was reported today that Judge Cardozo has met with Chief Justice Hughes and “made tentative arrangements for his induction as a member of the Supreme Court.”


1932: “The confirmation of the appointment of Judge Benjamin Cardozo as associated just of the Supreme Court was transmitted to the White House by this Senate this evening.”


1932: Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. the infant son of “the Lone Eagle” was kidnapped today which would lead to the trial of his kidnapper where David Theodore Wilentz, the Attorney General of New Jersey would serve as the lead prosecutor.


1932: The Maccabee Association of the United States announced the members of the swimming and track and field teams that will be sent to compete in the Jewish Olympic Games that will take place at the end of March.  The selection committee was chaired by Sol Goodstein.


1932: Benjamin N. Cardozo was elected an honorary member at today’s meeting of the governing committee of the Lawyers’ Club in New York City.


1933: During the movement to boycott Jewish businesses in Germany, Nazi troops sang in front of the Berlin Woolworth Company store” because they believed that the Methodist Woolworth brothers were Jewish.


1933: Today, Billy Wilder arrived in Paris from Berlin and settled in the Hotel Asonia which was “a haven for members of the German film industry who had fled from their homeland to escape the encroaching threat of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party including actor Peter Lorre, composers Franz Waxman and Friedrich Hollaender, and screenwriters H.G. Lustig and Max Kolpé, who agreed to help Wilder develop a plot he had conceived in Berlin” which became the French film “Mauvaise Graine.”


1934(14th of Adar, 5694): Purim


1934: As of this date, according to a report prepared by Morris Rothenberg, President of the ZOA, there are a quarter of a million Jews living in Palestine which marks a significant increase from the total of 85,000 Jews living there in 1921.


1934: Birthdate of gymnast Abie Grossfeld.



1934: Billy Wilder arrived in Paris from Berlin today and “settled in the Hotel Ansonia where he joined Peter Lore, Franz Waxman, Friedrich Hollaender and others who fled from Hitler and the Nazis and directed “Mauvaise Graine” which premiered later in 1934.


1935: Sandor Harmati served as the conductor today when “Serenade” had its “official premiere” today with “the American Ballet at the Adelphia Theatre in New York.”


1936(7th of Adar I, 5696): Eighty-one year old “Dr. Arnold Netter, noted physician and newly elected President of the Alliance Israelite Universelle died today while addressing a meeting of the French Medical Association” in Paris.


1936: Dr. Chaim Weizmann, is scheduled to leave Palestine today for London where he will meet with those Jews who “are sponsors of a scheme to accelerate the evacuation of Jews from Germany “told the New York Times‘I do not know the extent of the funds of the nature of the scheme contemplated by Herman Samuel’s mission, but I am ready to cooperate in the execution of any project promising to increase Jewish immigration to Palestine.’”


1936: Birthdate of Richmond, VA native Shirley Bernice Politzer who would gain fame as “Dr. Shirley P. Glass, a psychologist who strove to redefine the nature of infidelity” and the mother of Ira Glass, producer of “This American Life.”


1936: “Creation of an ‘Albert Einstein Fund for Palestine’ to be applied to the nation-wide campaign of the United Palestine Appeal to raise $3,500,000 for the settlement in Palestine of Jews from Germany, Poland and other countries was announced” today “after a meeting of the Council of Jewish Organizations at the Hotel Pennyslvania


1936: “A new anti-Semitic wave was ushered in today in Germany following of weeks of quiet because of the Winter Olympics” during which the “Nazis attempted not to offend foreign visitors.”


1936: “Two thousand people attending the fifty-first annual meeting of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aids Society” today “at the Hotel Astor urged Congress to ‘humanize’ sections of the immigration law affecting resident aliens by enacting the Kerr-Coolidge Bill” which according HIAS President Abraham Herman “would tend to remove ‘some hardships affecting innocent resident aliens.’”


1936: “In view of the recent Nuremberg decrees” it was reported today that the “efforts” of the Joint Distribution Committee “will be intensified including the continuation of aid to Jewish and non-Jewish German refugees in France, Czechoslovakia, Holland, etc., providing money for German Jews going to Palestine as well as the “education of about 60,000 German Jewish children in Germany.”


1936: “Travels in Palestine” published today provided a review of Footprints in Palestine: Where the East Begins by Madeline Sweeney Miller with an introduction by Field Marshal Viscount Allenby, the liberator of Palestine during WW I.



1936: It was reported today that the “three hundred chapters of Hadassah throughout the country will merge the celebration of Purim with founders’ day programs” that will mark the 24thanniversary of the organization which was established by Henriette Szold in 1912.”


1936: Taking advantage of earlier meetings held by Eliezer Kaplan, treasurer of the Jewish Agency in Palestine and the General Manager of the Anglo Palestine Bank, Dr. Chaim Weizmann is scheduled to leave today for London “to confer with Sir Herbert Samuel, Viscount Bearsted and Simon Marks, sponsors of a scheme to accelerate the evacuation of Jews from Germany”


1936: According to sources in Heidelberg, “Nazi Government will…now undertake a counter-campaign against the refusals of the English universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Birmingham to accept an invitation to send representatives to the ceremony celebrating the 550thanniversary of the found of Heidelberg University.”


1936: Columbia University’s acceptance of “an invitation to send a representative to the 550th anniversary celebration of Heidelberg University evoked a protest” today “from Roger E. Chase, editor of Spectator, an undergraduate publication.”


1936: It was reported that the Nazi “program, which fundamentally has only one aim, namely, racial, as a substitute for national, unification through restoration of German military strength” will require it t”o make compromises with all existing classes except the Jews.”


1936: The Cornell University Daily Sun will say editorially today: If Cornell has already accepted the German invitation as reported, it can only save its academic face by publicly reversing its stand and by joining British and American universities in a boycott of this Nazi travesty.”


1936: “Germany recovered full sovereignty over the Saar today when the last League of Nations bonds were cut” which meant an end to “the validity of assurances given by the German government to the League that ‘no discrimination on account of language, race or religion’ would be made during the one year period.”


1936: “Details of an agreement under which 1,000 non-Russian Jewish families will be settled in the Jewish autonomous territory of Birobidjan, Soviet Russia have been made public by William W. Cohen, chairman of the American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Birobidjan.”


1937: Winston Churchill retains Hungarian born Jew Emery Reves as his literary agent which would prove a boon to Churchill’s literary career and pocketbook.


1938: Today, “the American ORT Federation opened a national campaign to raise $450,000 to provide technical and agricultural training for Jewish victims of social and economic decimation in Poland, Germany, Rumania and other European countries and to assist them in achieving economic independence and stability.


1940: In Brooklyn, “Maurice Schaap, a salesman, and the former Leah Lerner, a French teacher” gave birth to controversial attorney William H. Schaap, the older brother of sportscaster Dick Schaap.



1941: In South Miami Beach, FL, Max and Mae Greenberg gave birth to “anthologist” Martin Harry Greenberg.



1941: Prime Minister Winston Churchill writes to Colonial Secretary Lord Moyne expressing his displeasure with General Wavell who, “like most British officers is pro-Arab” and opposed to the Jews.  This attitude extends to an unwillingness on the part of the British military to form additional Jewish military units to fight in the Imperial Army.


1941:  Himmler inspected the Auschwitz concentration camp


1941: Bulgaria officially joins the Axis Powers - Germany, Italy and Japan.


1942: Three years after premiering in the United Kingdom, “The Silent Battle” with a script co-authored by Emeric Pressburger and music by Francis Chagrin was released in the United States today.


1942: On Purim Eve, the Germans ordered 5,000 Jews deported from Minsk.


1942: “Hitler order the Einsatzstab to establishment a library of Jewish books and works to art to be use in the in the ideological war against the Jews”  “600,000 of which volumes fell intact in the hands of the United States Army” at the end of the war.


1942: In Boston, Ruth Ashen and Sam Gruber, the owner of a junk business, gave birth to Howard Peter Gruber, best-selling author, CEO of Mandalay Entertainment and the owner of several pro teams.


1943: In Jerusalem, Aliza and Menachem Begin gave birth to Benny Begin who earned a doctorate in Geology from Colorado State University before following his father into the world of Israeli politics.


1943: In Amsterdam, a Jewish old age home for the disabled was raided.


1943: Fourteen examples of the work of William Zorach including “Hound” and “Cat” were part of his one-man show that opened today in New York at the Downtown Gallery.


1943:  In a speech given before a crowd of 70,000 people at Madison Square Garden, Chaim Weizmann states, “Two million Jews have already been exterminated.  The world can no longer plead that the ghastly facts are unknown or unconfirmed. This rally had been planned by the American Jewish Congress in an attempt to mobilize American public opinion in support of efforts to rescue Jews trapped in Hitler’s Europe.


1945: “Pope Spoke In Hebrew” published today described the visit of Pvt. Lou Herman who in civilian life was a cantor and other Canadian Jewish soldiers who were singled out by Pope Pius XII and speaking in Hebrew were blessed by the Pontiff who “raised his arms in the manner of the priests of the Hebrew faith” while giving the benediction.


1945: During the “Hunting Season” the British expressed their concerns that the Jewish Agency was interested in more than just going after terrorists when the High Commissioner to the Minster of Colonies wrote today that Unfortunately, the Jewish Agency's lists of so-called terrorists continues to include numerous people who have no terror connections, but politically speaking are undesirable to the Jewish Agency. This adds to the difficulties the police has in separating the sheep from the goats…”


1947: Jews responded violently to British Foreign Minister Bevin’s latest pronouncements about Palestine by conducting multiple attacks that resulted in the death of at least sixteen British military personnel.


1947: The Abril, filled with 600 Jewish refugees, set sail from Port du Bouc today only after have been pulled free by tugboats after she ran aground.


1947: David Remez, Chairman of The Jewish National Council, announced tonight that the “Jewish population of Palestine will observe a self-imposed curfew for four hours” tomorrow night to express their concern for the refugees from Europe recently seized by the British.


1948: This month Henry and Phoebe Ephron gave birth to author Hallie Ephron one of four sisters all of whom are talented authors.


1948: A dramatization of Robert Nathan’s The Bishop Wife“was dramatized as half-hour radio play on today’s broadcast of The Screen Guild Theatre.


1950: It was revealed today that in the non-aggression pact being considered by Israel and Jordan included a promise that Haifa would become a free-port for Jordan thus giving the Arab state access to the Mediterranean.


1955: The Lux Radio Theatre broadcast an hour long adaptation of “The Bishop’s Wife” based on the novel of the same name by Robert Nathan.


1960(2nd of Adar): Hundreds of Jews, including some students of the local Chabad Yeshivah, were among the thousands of victims to perish in a devastating earthquake that struck Agadir, Morocco today


1961(13th of Adar, 5721): For the first time during the Presidency of John Kenney, Jews observe Ta’anit Esther.


1964: Fifty-four year old composer and pianist, whose father was “a Lithuanian Jews” passed away today.


1967: In a sketch tonight on “At Last the 1948 Show” Marty “Feldman’s character harassed a patient shop assistant for a series of fictitious books, achieving success with Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying.


1969: Joseph Vogel the MGM executive who served as its President from 1956 to 1963 during which the studio produced the classic “North by Northwest” passed away.


1970: Birthdate of best-selling author Darin Strauss author of “Half a Life, which won the 2011 NBCC Award for memoir/autobiography.”


1972: Naomi Bronheim Levine was appointed Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress (A. J. Cong.), becoming the first woman to take the helm of a major American Jewish organization that included both men and women as members. Born in New York on April 15, 1923, Levine was educated at Hunter College and Columbia University and worked as a lawyer before joining the A. J. Cong.),  in 1951. She would remain there for more than two decades. Levine began her work at the Congress as a lawyer for its Commission on Law and Social Action; from that position, Levine went on to become director of the A. J. Cong.),  Women's Division. These positions foreshadowed her involvement with civil rights and women's issues as executive director of the organization. Although she was considered a pioneer for women, Levine saw herself as caught somewhere between an older ideal of domesticity and a newer feminism. She told the New York Times that "women's lib is probably correct, but it's not my style." Although a Timesprofile published when Levine was appointed to the top post at the A. J. Cong.),  focused on her devotion to the traditional roles of wife and mother even as she built a path-breaking career, Levine had long been committed to progressive women's issues. From 1955 to 1971, she had owned and operated Camp Greylock, an all-girls summer camp that was later credited with contributing to the professional success of many of its alumnae. Levine stepped down from her post at the American Jewish Congress in 1978, when she was appointed head of public relations, government relations, and fundraising at New York University. She stayed at NYU for over two decades, eventually becoming senior vice president for external affairs and raising over $2 billion. Her fundraising success allowed the University to transform itself from a local commuter school to a strong university with a national presence. During her tenure at NYU, Levine created the Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising and the Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life. After retiring in 2000, Levine continued to chair the boards of both of these organizations. Upon her retirement, NYU President L. Jay Oliva called Levine "quite simply a spectacular human being."


1972(15th of Adar, 5732): Shushan Purim


1972(15th of Adar, 5732): Sixty- three year old Moshe Sneh passed away



1973: U.S. premiere of “The Thief Who Came To Dinner co-produced by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin who also directed the film featuring Alan Oppenheimer as “Insurance Man.”


1973: A week after premiering in New York “Charlotte’s Web” with music by Richard and Robert Sherman is released today across the United States.


1973: Eight Palestinians were arrested after the Saudi Arabian Embassy at Khartoum was seized and the U.S. Ambassador and Deputy Head of Mission and the Belgian Charge d’ Affaires were murdered.


1974: “Soviet police detained about 70 Jews from Moscow and other Soviet cities to prevent the transmission of a petition to the Central Committee of the CPSU with 200 signatures.


1974: “Radio Moscow reported demonstrations by Zionist elements during the wreath laying ceremony at the monument to the heroes of Plevna in Moscow.”


1978:  Charlie Chaplin's coffin was stolen from a Swiss cemetery.


1979: Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” opened on Broadway at the Uris Theater.


 


1982: Wadi Aranki of the POL was killed in Madrid


1983(16th of Adar, 5743): Author Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia took their own lives this evening.



1983:”Soviet dissident, mathematician, teacher and human rights advocate” Valery Senderov went on trial in the USSR today.


1985: Milwaukee businessman Herb Kohl Kohl would go on to become one of Wisconsin’s two Jewish senators purchased the Milwaukee Bucks. 


1985: “The Sure Thing” a comedy directed by Rob Reiner and co-produced by Henry Winkler and Roger Birnbaum was released in the United States today


1987:  In “An Israeli Lawyer Dares Defend an Accused Nazi,”published today Francis X. Clines describes the challenges and criticism facing  Yoram Sheftel, the Tel Aviv criminal lawyer serving as co-counsel in the defense of  John Demjanjuk, the retired auto worker from the United States who is accused of being the infamous executioner of the Treblinka death camp.


1988(12th of Adar, 5748):  Joe Besser one of the Three Stooges passed away.


1991(15th of Adar, 5751): Edwin H Landinventor of the Polaroid Camera passed away at the age of 81.




1991: Following the end of the Iraq War, Lufthansa plans to resume service to Tel Aviv today.


1991: “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” a rodeo drama directed by Stuart Rosenberg was released in the United States today.



1991: Months after its premiere in the United States “Avalon” the saga of a Jewish immigrant family in Baltimore, MD, directed, produced and written by Barry Levinson, with music by Randy Newman, starring Leo Fuchs, Leo Jacobi and Kevin Pollak was released today in the United Kingdom.



1993: In “Doubts Mar PBS Film of Black Army Unit,” Richard Bernstein describes the controversy surrounding a movie that is supposed to be a documentary about the 761st Tank Battalion’s role in the liberation of Jews held in concentration camps at the end of World War II.  The tank battalion was an all-black unit and the film was supposed to be a tool to rejuvenate the alliance between Jews and African-American.



1993: Publication of E. M. Broner's The Telling: The Story of a Group of Jewish Women Who Journey to Spirituality Through Community and Ceremony



1993(8th of Adar, 5753): “Two civilians in their twenties, Natan Azaria and Gregory Avramov, were stabbed to death in Tel Aviv by Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.


1994: Ari Halberstam, a 16-year-old yeshiva student, was returning from a vigil for Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. While pulling onto the exit ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge, Halberstam’s vehicle was shot at by Rashid Baz, a Lebanese immigrant. He died five days later. (As reported by Seth Berkman)


1994: Publication of Gun, with Occasional Music, a novel by Jonathan Lethem.


1994: U.S. Air Force Captain Jack Weinstein, the future Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration, was promoted to Major today.


1995: Publication of the paperback edition of Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem.


1998: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or special interest to Jewish readers including recently released paperback editions of Unto the Soulby Aharon Appelfeld in which “Gadand Amalia, brother and sister, have been given the sacred duty of tending an ancient cemetery of Jewish martyrs near their village in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe and Isaiah Berlin John Gray’s study of the 20th century's premier Renaissance man that focuses on his liberalism, which was complex in that it acknowledged no one right path for human society.


1998: Today, “Titanic” produced by Jon Landau and featuring Victor Garber and David Warner became the first film to earn more than $1 billion worldwide


1999: Dan Seligman provide a detailed review of The Times of My Life by Max Frankel today.



2001(6thof Adar, 5761): Hamas claimed credit for the Mei Ami junction bombing which took place at Vadi Ara where one person was murdered.


2005(20th of Adar I, 5765): Seventy-seven year old Peter “Zvi” Malkin, the Mossad agent who led the team that captured Adolf Eichmann passed away today.




2005: Completion of the Eleventh Daf Yomi Cycle begun in September, 1997.  The next cycle begins on Wednesday, March 2, 2005.


2005: Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel was deported from Canada to Germany today where he “was arrested and detained in Mannheim prison” where he would await “trial for inciting racial hatred.”


2005: Penultimate broadcast of “Boston Public” co-starring Fyvush Finkel as “Harvey Lipschultz.”


2005: “Boris Lurie: Uneasy visions, uncomfortable truths” published today highlights the views of artist Boris Lurie the native of Leningrad who survived imprisonment in a string of concentration camps including Buchenwald.



2006:  On the secular calendar Rosh Chodesh Adar, first day of the month of Adar.


2006: London Mayor Ken Livingstone began serving his four week suspension from office after being found guilty of bringing his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard.


2007: Fast of Esther observed on 11th of Adar since the 13th of Adar falls on Shabbat.


2007(11th of Adar, 5767): Meyer “Mike” Feldman, a White House advisor for President Kennedy, passed away at the age of 92.


2007: Celebration of the birthday of Muriel Rogers, doyen of the Cedar Rapids Jewish Community


2008: The Jerusalem Cinematheque presents The Path Of Our Fathers \ בדרכי אבות This is “an extraordinary and at times surrealistic road movie about a charismatic man named Menahem Goldberg. On the eve of Passover, Menahem took his donkey and two sons, one 12 years old and the second 8 years old, and set out to fulfill the mitzvah of going up to Jerusalem. The 170 km, 9-day trip by foot from their home in the north to the Western Wall, took them through the biblical landscapes of Judea and Samaria and brought them into contact with the present-day Israeli and Palestinian realities there.”


2008: Beth Hillel Congregation in Wilmette, Illinois, presents a screening of the Argentinean film Legado a documentary about the arrival of the first Russian Jews in 19th century Argentina. “In August 1889, the steamship Wesser docked in Argentina with the first group of Jewish escapees from the pogroms of Czarist Russia. After first finding work in order to survive first and to progress later, they grouped themselves in colonies, distributed in different provinces - Entre Ríos, Santa Fe, La Pampa, Santiago del Estero and Buenos Aires -, most of them thanks to the initiative of baron Mauricio de Hirsch who facilitated around one hundred hectares to each group.This, the first Jewish agricultural colonization gave birth to a new way of life that, beyond the questions related to the traditions and faith (or indeed by them), would leave a remarkable imprint on the country of Argentina. The film's Yiddish narrator is Esther, one of the many women who arrived in those very small boats and participated in the foundation of Moisésville, known as "the mother of all the colonies". Her account spans eighty years.”


2008(24th of Adar I, 5768): St. Sgt. Doron Asulin, 20 of Beersheba and St. Sgt. Eran Dan-Gur, 20, of Jerusalem, were killed early Saturday as their Givati Brigade units operated against terrorists.  Asulin served in the brigade’s anti-tank company and Dan-Gur served in the Shaked Battalion.


2008:On the second day of Operation Hot Winter which was aimed at disrupting terrorist infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces “carried out airstrikes at ammo warehouses, rocket factories, rocket warehouses and launching cells, combined with small incursions close to the border. Despite the IAF presence in the whole Gaza Strip and the IDF presence in the border areas, the Palestinian militants managed to fire more than 200 rockets during the operation, most of them at Sderot, but at least 20 at Ashkelon and 1 at Netivot.”


2009: Jonathan Schanzer, director of policy at the Jewish Policy Center discusses and signs copies of Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle For Palestine at Politics and Prose Bookstore in


Washington, D.C.


2009: The 120th annual Central Conference American Rabbis being held in Jerusalem comes to an end.


2009: The annual Koach Kallah comes to an end.


2009: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War by Alexander Waugh, A Mad Desire to Dance by Elie Wiesel and recently released paperback editions of The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal,by Lily Koppel and Swimming in a Sea of Death:A Son’s Memoir, by David Rieff.


2009: The Washington Post featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Future of Liberalism by Alan Wolfe


2009:Effective today the Glendale Uptown Home will become a nonkosher facility, leaving Philadelphia proper without a certified glatt-kosher nursing home.


2009: A revival of Rogers and Hart’s Pal Joey presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company .had its last performance 


2010 (15thof Adar, 5770): Shushan Purim


2010:In a talk at Harvard University on "Identity, Diversity, and Human Rights," Canada Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella shared her family's Holocaust story and explained how it informs her view of human rights. (As reported by Jewish Women’s Archives)


2010: “The 48 Ways to Wisdom,” a program cosponsored by The Jewish Renaissance is scheduled for this evening at Keter Torah Synagogue this evening in West Bloomfield, Michigan.


2010:In Jerusalem, The Kingdom of Alrov Mamilla Avenue is scheduled to celebrate Shushan Purim at its annual Purim carnival which will include a colorful parade with characters from the Megilla, clowns and jugglers, circus performances, circus workshops, magnet games, and whole lot more. 


2010:Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel was released from a German prison today after serving a five-year sentence..


2011: Israel LTD, film that records “a group of young Americans on their intensive bus journey across a strong and righteous Israel” is scheduled to be shown at the JCC in Manhattan.


2011:Today Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh accused Israel of financing and plotting the protests in his country and other Arab states.


2011:In reaction to clashes that took place a day earlier in the Gilad Farm outpost in Samaria, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said today that "We cannot let citizens take the law into their hands."


2011: Amy Totenberg assumed office as the Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia which includes Atlanta, GA.


2011: In an “Anti-Semtism Double Header”Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan said Jews and Zionists are "trying to push the US into war" and are a cover for Satan, at the group's annual meeting near Chicago today while a report published by a British magazine today said the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, suggested that British journalists, including the editor of The Guardian, were engaged in a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization.


2011(25th of Adar I, 5771):Marilyn Henry, a journalist and lecturer, died of cancer today four days short of her 58th birthday. She lived in Teaneck, NJ with her husband, Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer



2011(25th of Adar): On the Yahrzeit of those who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire (March 25), Rabbi Shmuel Plafker led a memorial survey at the Hebrew Free Burial Association cemetery on Staten Island where 22 of the victims are buried (As reported by Joseph Berger)



2011:The postal services of Liberia, Gambia and Sierra Leone will simultaneously issue a set of three commemorative postal sheets today in memory of 12 Jews – men and women – who fought Apartheid and racism in Africa.


2011: On the 70th anniversary of the signing of the pact uniting Bulgaria with Germany as Axis partners The Sephardic Temple in Cedarhurst, New York is hosting a public meeting as part of a campaign to convince “the government of Bulgaria to reveal the truth over its interaction with the Jews during the Holocaust.”


2011: A Merkava MK IV stationed near the Gaza border, equipped with the Trophy active protection system, successfully foiled a missile attack aimed towards it and became the first operational success of the system


2011: It was announced today that Frank Rich would be leaving the New York Times for New York magazine.


2012(7th of Adar, 5772): Forty three year old Tulane alum Andrew Breitbart the creator of Brietbart.com passed away today.



2012: “Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray” is scheduled to be shown at the Charleston Film Festival in Charleston, SC


2012: “Tijuana Jews” is scheduled to be shown at Congregation Etz Chaim in Toledo, Ohio.


2012: Miriam Gilbert is scheduled to deliver a lecture Shakespeare and ‘the likeness of a Jew’ Shylock, Fagin and Disraeli” will take place at the Iowa City Public Library


2012: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present: “Anti-Jewish Violence in Eastern Europe” an evening based on a book of the same name that “and Israel that investigates the phenomenon of anti-Jewish violence, the local and transnational responses to pogroms, and instances where violence was averted.”


2012: Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein today ordered the police to open a criminal investigation into illegal building in the West Bank Shiloh settlement. Notification of the investigation was given to the High Court of Justice, which in November asked the state to decide if it planned to hold such an investigation.


2012: Former Shas Minister Shlomo Benizri, who was released from the Maasiyahu Prison this morning, said Israel was the most anti-Semitic country in the world due to what he referred to as its "incitement campaign against the haredi community."


2013: In Ashburn, VA Beth Chaverim is scheduled to join hundreds of congregations throughout the United States in “Shabbat Across America!” that will include a screening and discussion of “Advice and Dissent” starring Eli Wallach.


2013:Release date for Put it in the Book, Howie Rose’s “autobiography and memoir of 50 years of Mets history”


2013: As sequestration goes into effect today, Israeli defense planners are bracing for a potentially dramatic cut in US assistance that may slash as much as $300 million in aid over the next seven months. (As reported by Haviv Rettig Gur)


2013(19thof Adar, 5773): Sixty-nine year old actress Bonnie Franklin passed away. (As reported by Douglas Martin



2013: Some 20,000 runners took part this morning in the Jerusalem marathon, which was won by Abraham Kabeto Katale of Ethiopia. His final time of 2:16:29 was a record for the course.


2013: Secretary of State John Kerry said today that Turkey’s prime minister had made “objectionable” remarks when he cast Zionism as a crime against humanity in comments earlier this week.


2014: In London, JW3 in partnership with the UK Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to present “Oscars Warm-Up Night” including a screening of “Searching For Sugar Man.”


2014: “A Prayer for Aliyah” and “The Jewish Cardinal” are scheduled to be shown at the 24th Washington Jewish Film Festival.”


2014: Observance of Tel Hai Day in honor of the memory of Joseph Trumpeldor


2014: Professor David Shneer is scheduled to host a seminar on “Post Holocaust American Judaism” in Boulder, CO.


2014(29thof Adar I, 5774: Shabbat Shekalim


2014: Two rockets landed near an IDF post in Mount Hermon early this morning. According to the IDF, the rockets “were most likely the spillover from the clashes in neighboring Syria, not a deliberate attack.” (As reported by Tova Dvorin)


2014: Renowned Religious Zionist leader Rabbi Haim Druckman has called on the Religious Zionist community to stay far away from tomorrow’s "million-man march" against the hareidi draft. "I totally reject [the march]," Rabbi Druckman declared tonight. "If this demonstration is being held to say that Israel is fighting against the rule of the Kingdom of Heaven, I am so shocked and outraged by it," said the rabbi. (As reported by Tova Dvorin)


2014: Twentieth anniversary of the mortal wounding of 16 year old yeshiva student Ari Halberstram who was shot by Rashid Baz, an immigrant from Lebanon.



2014: At Tiftereth Israel in Columbus, Ohio, Rachel Levin will join her classmates in the First Grade Consecration Service.


2015(10thof Adar, 5775): Ninety-one year old record executive Orrin Keepnews passed away today.



2015: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education by Morris Dickstein, We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler and Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947 by Bruce Hoffman


2015: The 25th Washington Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end.


2015: F.I.U. is scheduled to host the 30th Anniversary Screening of “Shoah”


2015: The curtain is scheduled to come down on “The King of Second Avenue” which has been playing at Boston’s Charles Mosesian Theatre.


2015: “The exhibition Light & Noir: Exiles and Émigrés in Hollywood, 1933–1950 which explores how the experiences of German-speaking exiles and émigrés who fled Nazi Europe—many of them Jews—influenced the classic films of Hollywood’s Golden Age” is scheduled to come to an end at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles.


2015: ““’Twas the Night Before Hanukkah” an “exhibition, which highlights the music of Hanukkah and Christmas, and the people behind some of the holidays’ songs” at the National Museum of American Jewish History is scheduled to come to a close today.


2015: “California Senator Dianne Feinstein” who is a supporter of Israel, “lashed out at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his “arrogant” claim to speak for all Jews today, two days before he is scheduled to deliver a controversial speech to the US Congress. (As reported by Joshua Davidovich)


2015: Commanders for Israel’s Security, “a nonpartisan body of more than 200 retired officers held a press conference in Tel Aviv this morning” where Prime Minister Netanyahu was “slammed” for what were described as his “destructive diplomatic policies.” (As reported by Stuart Winer)


2015: “Activists pitched tenets in Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard to protest inequality and the cost of living.”(Lazar Berman)


2015: Today “ is the anniversary of the execution by beheading of Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and their school friend Christopher Probst who farmed the short-lived anti-Nazi ‘White Rose’ conspiracy in Munich” during World War II.


2016: The Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to co-present a screening Raise the Roof “as part of the 26th annual Washington Jewish Film Festival.”


2016: “The Indiana Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill banning state dealings with entities that boycott Israel or its settlements.”


2016: “According to the 30th annual Forbes billionaires list released today, “five Jews are in the top 15 spots and seven are in the top 25 spots” with Mark Zuckerberg being ranked as the “sixth richest person in the world and the richest Jew” in the world.


2017(3rdof Adar, 5777): Ninety-two year old Israeli photographer David Rubinger whose many iconic photos of the early days of the Jewish state included the pictures of soldiers at the Wall during the Six Day War passed away today.




2017(3rdof Adar, 5777): Ninety year old “artist and political radical” Gustav Metzger passed away today.



2017: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host the Phoenix Chamber Ensemble playing an evening of “Mostly Schubert.”


2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host “Jewbilation!” featuring “music from the Yoelling Stones, food, Jewish dancing and regular music.”


2017: Rabbi Michael Rosenfeld-Schuler is scheduled to lean an interfaith discussion on “Scriptural Reasoning” in the Harold Wilson Room of Jesus College, Oxford.


2017: In Pikesville, MD, Chizuk Amuno is scheduled to host “Auschwitz through the Lens of the SS.”



2018(14thof Adar, 5778): Purim; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/


2018: MIT Assistant Dean Ray Feller is scheduled to speak on “Hard Times in Hard Sciences: Mental Health in Stem” at Coe College in Cedar Rapids.


2018: In Little Rock, Chabad under the leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Ciment is scheduled to host a “Royal Purim Fest and Masquerade Party” completed with a multimedia Megilla reading


2018: In Iowa City, Rabbi Avremel Belsofky is scheduled to host a “multi-cultural” Purim celebration featuring Sushi and Hamantashen.


2018: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host two screening of “Remember Baghdad,” “fascinating exploration of the rich Jewish life and culture that had flourished in Iraq before the events of the 20th and early 21st centuries dramatically changed the course of the country – and the fate of its Jews.


2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host a Gemara shiur which will be on mesechet Megillah.”


2018: In London, the Phoenix Cinema is scheduled to host a screening “The Cakemaker” directed by Ofir Raul Graizer.


 


 


 


 


 

This Day, March 2, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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March 2


117(12th of Adar, 3877):  As the rebellion by Disapora Jews against the Roman Empire of Trajan came to an unsuccessful close, two Jewish brothers who had been leaders in the revolt, Pappus and Julianus were executed at Laodicea in Syria.  Trajan did not get to savor his victory since he died in 117.  Unfortunately for the Jews he was followed by Hadrian who was even crueler than his predecessor.  


986: Louis V becomes King of the Franks. Louis was the last of the Carolingian, a dynasty under whom the Jews had done rather well, all things considered.  Charlemagne was the most famous of the Carolingian rulers and he supported his Jewish subjects despite opposition from church leaders. Louis le Débonnaire who reigned from 814 to 833 was another of the Carolingians who gave special protection to his Jewish subjects. During the reign of Carolingians the Jews were active in commerce, medicine and agriculture, especially in the field of viticulture a fact of which we are reminded when we study about Rashi.  The change in dynasties would not have an immediate effect on the Jews living in France.  Life for them would not really change until the first crusade in 1096.


1127: Charles, the Good, Count of Flanders was murdered while praying in the church of St. Donat at Bruges. This came two years after Charles had expelled the Jews from Ghent because he blamed them for the famine that consumed his realm in 1125.


1336(10th of Adar I, 5096): Physician and astronomer Joseph Sason, a member of a prominent Iberian Jewish family passed away today in Toledo


1349: In Erfurt, the capital of the German state of Thuringia, 1,000 Jews were killed in a single day of violence in a pogrom brought on by hysteria surrounding The Black Death which struck Europe in 1340.  During this outbreak of what was probably bubonic plagues millions died in Europe removing approximately one third of the continent’s population. “Modern research has revealed that the plague was probably carried by boat from an Asian source, but at the time the affected communities had no idea why and how such a terrible affliction had come upon them so suddenly. In seeking an explanation, they needed a scapegoat and lighted upon the Jews living in their midst. In many villages, towns and cities, Jews were accused of causing the sickness by poisoning drinking water in wells and fountains.”  [Editor’s note: for those tracking sweeping patterns of history, note that blaming Jews is not different or rational today than it was in what was supposedly the unenlightened Dark Ages.


1382: The Mailotin Riots began in Paris. These riots were similar to the tax riots held two years previously. Both times the Jews were considered accomplices in over-oppressive taxes. Sixteen Jews fell victim to this outbreak violence.


1640(20th of Adar): Rabbi Joel Sirkes, author of Bayit Hadash passed away today.


1727: Abraham Pinto and his wife gave birth to Samuel Pinto.  (Editor’s note – There are several men who bear the name of Samuel Pinto)


1743: In Wolfenbütteler, “court factor Samson Gumpel” and his wife gave birth to “court banker” Philipp Samson.


1753(26th of Adar I, 5513): Issachar Berush Eskeles the native of Poland who was the son of Gabriel Eskeles and son-in-law of Samson Wertheimer, who was named rabbi of Kremsir in 1710, when he was only eighteen years old and eventually served as "Landesrabbiner" of Moravia passed away today in Vienna.


1779(14th of Adar, 5539): Purim


1794: Benjamin Farmer who had changed his last name from Solomons married Phoebe Moses at the Great Synagogue today.


1796: Rabbi Mordecai of Niesvizh, issued a proclamation, which was approved by other rabbis in Poland, addressed to all Jews of Poland, imploring every male and female, adult and minor, whether living in cities or villages, to subscribe a fixed sum every week for the support of their countrymen, who had settled in the Holy Land with the amount to be paid quarterly, in addition to special donations at weddings, circumcisions, and other religious rejoicings all of which resulted in a substantial increase in the halukkah (the fund to support Jews living in the Holy Land.


1798(14th of Adar, 5558): Purim


1803: Isaac Joseph married Judith Myers today at the Great Synagogue.


1822: In Bavaria, Solomon Blumauer and Helen Binswanger gave birth to Simon Blumauer the Portland businessman, the builder of the second brick building in Portland, Oregon, and charter member of Congregation Beth Israel who was the husband of Malie Rodelsheimer.


1824: Founding of The Boston Courier which had become a weekly newspaper by the time Benjamin Cohen began serving as its Business Manager.


1831: Frederick Samuel married Sarah Mocatta today at the Great Synagogue.


1835: Francis, who as Francis II was the last Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and who as Francis I was the first Emperor of the Austrian Empire passed away.


1836: Texans signed the Texas Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos, effectively creating the Republic of Texas. Adolphus Sterne was one of the many Jews who supported the cause of Texas Independence both on and off of the battlefield.  Sterne was “an East Texas merchant who became a principal source of financial backing for the Texas Revolution. Born in the Rhineland in 1801, he arrived in Texas in time to fight in the ill-fated 1826-27 Fredonia Rebellion at Nacogdoches. He was sentenced to be shot but was released on the promise never to bear arms against the government again. He kept to the vow in the 1836 struggle for independence but supplied funds, coordinated with his old friend Sam Houston, who he had known in Tennessee before coming to Texas.”


1839: French political leader Benoit Fould was re-elected for a third time.


1847(14thof Adar, 5607): Purim


1847(14thof Adar, 5607): Forty-seven year old Immanuel Wohlwill taught at the Israelite Free School in Hamburg and then became the Director of the Jacobson School in Seesen.


1848: Ibrahim Pasha who issued a decree “forbidding the Jews to pave the passage in front of the Wall. It also cautioned them against “raising their voices and displaying their books there.” They were however allowed “to pay visits to it as of old” began his reign over Egypt without the approval of the Porte.


1854: Temple Israel which was established as the Orthodox Congregation B'nai Israel in 1853 by 36 heads of families, was granted a charter by the Tennessee state legislature today.


1855: Czar Nicholas I, a narrow-minded, reactionary, whose anti-Semitism included but was not limited to expulsion from a variety of cities including Kiev; the drafting of under-age Jewish boys for twenty-five years of military service; the banning of beards and a sidelocks for men and banning of women shaving their heads at the time of marriage; the banning of Yiddish; censorship and destruction of Jewish books passed away today.


1855: Alexander II becomes Czar of Russia. Alexander gets high marks from many historians for two reasons.  First, he is the Czar who freed the serfs.  Second he was a lot better than his two successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II.  Alexander earned the goodwill of the Jewish people because “he called a half to the cantonist system that separated Jewish youths from their families, a staple of the previous Czars anti-Semitic program.”  From then on, “only Jews of draft age would serve, and under the same rules as well as other Russians.”  Under his reign, universities liberalized their admission policies for Jews and Jews were allowed to enter the legal profession.  Jewish businessman and craftsmen were allowed to work outside of the Pale and enter into the commercial life of many major urban areas.  The Czar was no liberal.  His changes in policies were caused, in part, by a desire to attract investment from Jewish European financiers.  The Czar’s reforms were proving to be too little too late.  When the Czar saw Jewish names among opponents, his anti-Semitism rose to the surface as can be seen by the closing of Yeshivot and his opposition to legal equality for Jews when the issue came up at the 1878 Congress of Berlin.


1857: In New York Solomon and Jael Belais gave birth to Henry Belais Belais


1859: Birthdate of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich whom we know as Sholom Aleichem, the most famous Jewish author of his times. As with many Russians of his periods, Sholom Aleichim has two birthdates on the secular calendar – one on the Julian calendar and one on the Gregorian calendar.


1861: In Warsaw, despite the fact that is was Shabbat, three Rabbis including Morris Jastrow joined the funeral procession for five Polish nationalists who had been shot by the military.


1861: Morris Jastrow preached his first sermon in Polish at the Shabbat service during which the five victims of the Polish military were memorialized.


1864(O.S.) Birthdate of Sergei Zubatov. “the head of the Czarist Secret Police in Moscow” who “convinced” the imprisoned Manya Shochat to form “tame” workers “organizations that would work for reform rather than the overthrow of the government” which would supposedly “help achieve rights for Jews” – a supposition which the policeman knew was false and which the Jewish leader came to see as a “pipe dream.”


1868: “The Alleged Illegal Action of the American Consul at Jerusalem” published today described a dispute that took place recently in Jerusalem involving a Prussian Rabbi, named Markus, a Prussian Jewess named Steinberg, her sister who had converted to Christianity and Victor Beaubouchier, the American Counsel in Jerusalem


1870(29thof Adar I, 5630): Abraham Jacob Jones, the native of Whitechapel and husband of Sophia Goldsmid passed away today


1870: In New York, Judge Brady began hearing a suit brought by Benjamin Abrahams, the executor for the estate of his late brother Dr. Simeon Abrahams.  The total value of the bequest exceeds the value of the estate and the executor is seeking to obtain a decree that will establish “which if any legacies have preference” or, if there be no such preference, what pro rata share each of the legacies should receive. The late Dr. Abrahams was a prominent member of the Jewish community and he left several large bequests to Jewish charities including the Hebrew Benevolent Society, Mt. Sinai Hospital as well as numerous bequests to secular charities most of which provide aid to orphans, juveniles and those in need of medical aide.


1871: The Purim Association hosted its second reception of this social season at Delmonico’s under the management of Emanuel B. Hart, Samuel A. Lewis and Gustave D. Cardozo.


1871: Adolph Marx Oppenheimer, the son of Marx and Sarah Oppenheimer, and Julie Oppenheimer gave birth to Alfred Oppenheimer



1874(13thof Adar): Fast of Esther


1874: In Vicksburg, Mississippi, Nicholas Scharff and the former Carrie Bernheimer gave birth to their second child Sidney N. Scharff.


1874: Today marked the second and final day of the Purim reception at the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews in Manhattan.


1877: The Hayes-Tilden election is finally settled by the specially created electoral commission that resolved the disputed election returns of four states in favor Hayes making him the 19th President of the United States. Hayes appointed the first Jew to effectively serve as a U.S. Ambassador - Benjamin Peixotto – and assured a government employee that she would not lose her job if she did not work on Saturday.


1879: At the Clinton Street Synagogue in New York City, Rabbi H.P. Mendes of the Nineteenth Street Synagogue delivered a lecture on “A Dark Chapter of Spanish-Jewish History” one the opening of the tenth season of lectures sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Union.


1876: In Rome, Filippo Pacelli and  Virginia (née Graziosi) Pacelli gave birth to Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli who gained fame as Pope Pius XII, the Holocaust Pope.


1877: Rutherford B. Hayes declared winner of the 1876 Presidential Election.  Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but Hayes won a majority of the disputed in the Electoral College giving him and the Republicans the White House by one vote.  As President, Hayes worked to protect the well-being of Jewish communities in Europe.  In 1879, his Secretary of State, William Evarts said that “this government has ever felt a deep interest in the welfare of the Hebrew race in foreign countries.”  Hayes backed up these noble sentiments in negotiations with the government of Romania where he worked to try and improve the condition of Jews living under that anti-Semitic regime.


1880: It was reported today that Mrs. W. T. Brothington of Newark, NJ has finally received the $10,000 from the estate of deceased English family. 


1882: The twentieth annual Hebrew charity dress ball sponsored by the Purim Association will begin at the in the Academy of Music at nine o’clock with the grand march starting at ten.


1884: Birthdate of Albert Samuel, the native of Vesoul who was the father of Raymond Samuel better known as French Resistance leader Raymond Aubrac.


1884: Seventy-four year old anti-Semitic author Theodor Griesinger passed away.


1886: This afternoon Rabbi Gustav Gottheil of Temple Emanu-El officiated at the wedding of Julia Wormser, “the only daughter of Isidor Wormser” and Jefferson Seligman, the “youngest son of James Seligman, the head of the well-known bank house.”


1888: The Convention of Constantinople is signed, guaranteeing free maritime passage through the Suez Canal during war and peace.  The one major exception to this would be the state of Israel.  For years, the government of Egypt denied ships flying the flag of Israel from using the canal.  The Egyptians also denied access to ships that had visited Israeli ports from using the canal. 


1891: At today’s meeting of the Louisville (KY) Ministerial Association a debate was held over the question of admitting priests, rabbis and Unitarian Ministers.


1891: At a meeting of the New York Siberian Exile Petition Association was held at the Church of Ascension in New York City, “Isaac Aronavitch Hourvitch, a Russian Jew who had suffered exile in Russia related his terrible experiences as a political prisoner.”  Following discussion of this and other matter, “copies of the petition which is to be forwarded to the Czar in April protesting against the present treatment of the Jews were circulated” and signed by many attendees.


1892: A theatrical review published today described Carl Weiser’s portrayal of Shylock, “the vengeful Jew” as being “picturesque, if not strikingly dignified.”  “The Merchant of Venice” reportedly first performed in America in the 16thcentury making it possibly the first Shakespearean drama performed in what would become the United States.


1892: It was reported today that the sixty Russian Jewish immigrants who are in quarantine on North Brother Island due to the outbreak of typhus are housed in their own heated pavilion where they have their own cooks who prepare their food according to Orthodox Jewish law.


1892: Fifty-year old Otto Glagau the anti-Semitic author whose hatred of Jews may be traced to losses he suffered while speculating in stocks passed away today.


1892: Forty two Russian Jewish immigrants who may be infected with typhus and are under the care of the United Hebrew Charities will be taken to North Brother Island today if the storm sweeping the area abates.


1892: Birthdate of Felix Bressart, a native of what was then East Prussia the German-American character actor whose best known for his appearance in the Jimmy Stewart comedy “The Shop Around the Corner.”


1893(14th of Adar, 5653): Purim


1893: A fire broke out in a building in Fall River, MA, that was used as meeting place by the Hebrew Literary Club. (Who would have thought that Fall River would have been home to such an organization in the 19th century?)


1893: Birthdate of Eliyahu Golomb the native of Russia who made Aliyah in 1909 and organized the Haganah during the Mandate.



1894: Birthdate of Hélène Falk, the native of Crest who was the mother of of Raymond Samuel better known as French Resistance leader Raymond Aubrac.


1895(6th of Adar I, 5655): Thirty-eight year old Charlotte Myers, the wife of Godfrey Harris passed away today after which she was buried at the Edmonton, Western Jewish Cemetery.


1895: The National Council of Women, an organization that was unique for its time because it included Jewish, Catholic and Protestant members, held the final session of its triennial meeting in Washington, DC.


1896: “Mathias Bells for Bicycles” published today described the debate in Parliament where lawmakers are trying to force cyclists to use “the continuous bell of the kind brought into vogue by Sir Henry Irving’s “Polish Jew.”


1897: Birthdate of Budapest native Jacob Weiss who gained fame as producer, director and writer Jack White.


1898(8th of Adar I, 5658): Forty-two year old Marylebone native Isaac Botibol, the son of Moses Botibol and Jessie Myers, passed away to today.


1898: In Albany, the Senate Cities Committee will report out a bill sponsored by Senator Cantor “exempting the real estate of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association from taxation, assessment and water rates.”


1899: The annual Purim reception at the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews will be held today starting at 11 a.m. and lasting until 5 p.m.


1900: In Dessau Emma Weill (née Ackermann) and Albert Weil gave birth to German-American composer Kurt Weill whose “best-known work is The Threepenny Opera.”



1901: Birthdate of Breman native, mathematician Grete Hermann.



1901(11th of Adar, 5661): Sixty-six year old Joseph Blumenthal passed away in New York City.  Born in Munich in 1834, he came to the United States in 1839, settled in California with his family before moving to New York.  He was part of the Committee of Seventy that helped to overthrow the infamous Tweed Ring and spend the last 15 years of his life working to create and build the Jewish Theological Seminary.


1902: In Harlem, Bernard Berg, a pharmacist, and Rose Tashker, a homemaker” gave birth to their third and last child baseball catcher Morris “Moe” Berg.  In a day when most baseball players were barely literate Berg stood out as a Princeton graduate who was multi-lingual. His major league career lasted from 1923 to 1939. He was a journey-man catcher, described as “good field, no hit.” The stories about his eccentricities are too numerous for this brief entry.  Suffice it to say, he makes the television character “Monk” look normal.  His real claim to fame was his espionage work.  During barnstorming trips to Japan in the 1930’s, the Japanese speaking Berg would leave the group to do his own “explorations.”  Among other things, he took a series of pictures in Tokyo which later were used to help plan the famous Doolittle Raid during World War II. 



1903:  Herzl receives Leopold Greenberg's report. Greenberg was the owner of a successful advertising agency, publisher of the Jewish Yearbook and an ardent Zionist.


1904(15th of Adar, 5664): Fifty-seven year old professor of statistics Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt passed away today in Halberstadt, Germany.


1904(15th of Adar, 5664): Sixty-six year old Moritz Framing, the German rabbi who edited two Jewish magazines and whose writings included On the Introduction to Maimonides and Jerome’s Commentary on the Twelve Minor Prophets, passed away today in Magdeburg.


1905: Birthdate of Pincus “Pinky” Sober the half-miler who became an executive with the Amateur Athletic Union.


1905: Birthdate of Philadelphia native and noted composer Marcus Samuel Blitzstein.



1906: “The Rabbinical Conference of Bohemia decided that a Rabbi may officiate at the funeral of a cremated body” which led “Chief Rabbi Ehrenfield of Prague” to resign his membership.


1907:Ein Walzertraum (A Waltz Dream), “an operetta by Oscar Straus premiered today at the Carltheater in Vienna.


1909(9thof Adar, 5669): Seventy-six year old Baron Horace Günzburg, the son Joseph Günzburg, wealthy merchant and army contractor, and  the father of David Günzburg who was a major philanthropist and leader of the Jewish community passed away.



1909: Birthdate of composer Hanoch Jacoby


1910: Birthdate of Natie W. Brown, the Washington, D.C. native, brother of Morris Brown and wife of Ann McKinley Brown, who “fought Joe Louis two times in the heavyweight division.”


1911: Sophie Tucker recorded “Some of these Days” on a four inch cylinder.  “Some of these Days” was written by African American composer Shelton Brooks in 1910.  “Some of these Days” was Tucker’s signature song and the title of her autobiography.


1912(13th of Adar, 5672): Parashat Tetzaveh; Shabbat Zachor; Erev Purim


1913: The New York Times reported that Dr. Joseph H. Hertz, Rabbi of the Congregation Orach Chayim of New York was recently appointed replace the late Dr. Hermann Adler, who was serving as Chief Rabbi of the British Empire when he passed away in July of 1911.


1913: “Mr. Aaron Aronsohn, chief of the Experimental Station at Haifa is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Sinai Temple in Chicago.


1913: Today, “The Hebrew Sunday School Society which maintains fifteen schools in various parts of Philadelphia with an enrollment of more than 4,000 pupils celebrated its 75th anniversary at the Horticultural Hall in Philadelphia.


1913: I.D. Levy and Frederick M. Gottlieb are scheduled to perform a ventriloquist act as part of a congregational social at Temple Emanuel.


1914:  Birthdate of Martin Ritt director of The Long Hot Summer.


1915:  Vladmir Jabotinsky formed a Jewish military force to fight in Palestine against the Turks in World War I.


1915: The Red Cross Fund of which Jacob H. Schiff is the treasurer received an additional $1,670.07 in contributions bringing the total collected so far to $464,796.11.


1915: An “official communication” concerning the condition of the Jews was sent from Constantinople stating that “All the recent publications to the contrary are unfounded.  The natural inconveniences they may have experienced during the mobilization have been shared by the rest of the population.”


1916: The funeral of Bertha Hirsch, the wife of Adolphe Hirsch and the sister of Mrs. William Hirsch is scheduled to take place at her residence today in Chicago.


1916: After funeral services are held at the home of George Levitt, his father Jacob Levi is scheduled to be buried at Waldheim Cemetery where mourners will include his other son Henry Levi.


1916: On the Gregorian calendar, birthdate of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovitch, whose birthdate was February 18, 1859 (OS) and who was better known by his penname Sholem Aliechem



1917: Birthdate of American fiction writer David Loeb Goodis


1918: Today, “the House Immigration Committee recommended the adoption of a resolution by Representative Slayden of Texas” which be beneficial to Jewish immigrants “authorizing readmission to the United States of aliens who were conscripted or have volunteered for service with the United States or the Allies.”


1918: An announcement was made today at the headquarters of the Palestine Restoration Fund, “that contributions for the fund were close to the $950,000 mark nearly $150,000 having been raised in the last ten days.


1919(29thof Adar I, 5679): For the first time since the end of The World War, observance of Parashat Vayakhel and Shabbat Shekalim.


1919: “Approval of the plans of Zionist leaders for the creation of a national Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine was given tonight by President to a delegation of representatives who spent an hour at the White House in conference with the President over the international stats of Jews around the world.”


1920: An appeal signed by several prominent Polish academics supporting historian Szymon Askenazy joining the faculty of Warsaw University was published today in Robotnik,“a newspaper published by the Polish Socialist Party.” (He did not get the position, probably because he was Jewish)


1920: The U.S. Supreme Court hear arguments in Missouri v. Holland in which Louis Marshall, submitted an amicus curae brief on behalf of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks


1921: In Harrisburg, PA, Jules Solomon, “a scrap-metal dealer” and homemaker Lena Solomon gave birth to Birdie Solomon who gained fame as “operatic soprano” Brenda Lewis.




1922: On the Lower East Side, Barnet and Tessie Greenglass gave birth to “Atomic Spy” David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg and the brother-in-law of Julius Rosenberg.



1923(14th of Adar, 5683): Purim


1923(14th of Adar, 5683): Sixty-seven year old Max Meyerhard a native of Krojanka, Germany who practiced law in Rome, Georgia for nearly forty years passed away today.



1923: In the Bronx, social worker Louis Keepnews and his wife, the former Naomi Perlman gave birth to “Orrin Keepnews, who as a record company executive and producer helped create some of the most celebrated recordings in jazz over a half-century.” (As reported by Nate Chinen)



1924: Birthdate of Calvin “Cal” Abrams, the native of Philadelphia the left-handed hitting outfield who played for several major league teams from 1949 to 1956.


1925(6th of Adar, 5685): Zionist leader Shneur Abel passed away today in NYC/


1926: It was reported that Jean Barondes, the daughter of Joseph Barondess, had joined with the Herzliah Hebrew Academy Choir and Cantor Adolphe J. Weisgal had provided the music at the gala dinner honoring her father’s “forty years of work in behalf of American Jewry.


1926: In the Bronx, chemist David Rothbard and his wife Rae gave birth to American economist Murray Rothbard.



1928(10th of Adar, 5688): Sixty-two year old Max Pine the native of Smolensk who came to the United States in 1889 who became the Secretary of the United Hebrew Trades passed away today.





1928: In Antwerp, Belgium, Morris Golinski, a tailor and his wife Caroline gave birth to Marie Golinski who gained fame as Mary Adelman, whose Osner Business Machines was the most famous of that dying breed – a typewriter repair shop.



1930: Twenty-two year old Solomon “Happy” Furth, who would compete in the 1932 Olympics, won “the 70 yard hurdles at the IC4A indoor meet” today.


1931: Birthdate of Lionel I. Pincus “an American finance executive, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur” who “ran the private equity firm Warburg Pincus from 1966 to 2002.”


1932: Birthdate of Jacob “Jack” Austin, the native of Calgary who went from being an attorney to a political leader whose career included serving the Canadian Senate.


1932: Reports published today explained that the delay between the Senate confirmation of Judge Cardozo and its transmittal to the President was due to “a Senate rule that all confirmations must be held through three executive sessions in the event that the Senate should wish to reconsider its action.


1932: The New York Times reported on speech by Senator Dill of Washington praising the appointment of Benjamin Cardozo to the U.S. Supreme Court.


1933: Despite the fact that he was gay, on his 28th birthday composer Marc Blitzstein married novelist Eva Goldbeck whose mother was soprano Lina Abarbanell, whose “father was the descendant of prominent Sephardic family.


1935: In Toronto, Aaron Waxman and his wife who together owned and operated Melinda Lunch gave birth to actor and director Albert Samuel “Al” Waxman the husband of Sara Waxman.


1935 (27th of Adar I, 5695):Eighty-three year old Samuel Sachs, an American investment banker passed away. He was born in Maryland in 1851 to Jewish immigrants from Bavaria, Germany. Sachs along with his longtime friend Philip Lehman of Lehman Brothers pioneered the issuing of stock as a way for new companies to raise funds. He married Louisa Goldman, the youngest daughter of close friends and fellow Bavarian immigrants, who had already seen their older child wed as well. Sachs then joined his father-in-law Marcus Goldman's firm which prompted the name change to Goldman Sachs in 1904. Together they underwrote securities offerings for such large firms as Sears, Roebuck and Company. During this time Goldman Sachs also diversified to become involved in other major securities markets, like the over-the-counter, bond, and convertibles markets which are still a big part of the company's revenue today. Sachs retired in 1928 and died in 1935.


1936(8thof Adar I, 5695): Seventy-six year old, Shalom Binder, the retired cantor and father of composer Abraham W. Binder, who had come to the United States from Poland forty-five years ago and was the “founder of the Federation of Galician and Bukowinian Jews” as well “as the first president of the Home of the Sons and Daughters of Israel” passed away at Bronx Hospital today.


1936(8thof Adar I, 5696): Sixty-one year old Isaac Brill, the leader and rabbi of Congregation Agudath Achim, native of Mainz and son the Jewish scholar Jechiel Bril, who came to the United States from London in 1904 where spent 25 years as the editor of the English department of The Jewish Daily News and was the first editor “of The Hebrew Standard which later merged with the Jewish Tribune” passed away today.



1936: When the “first crown session of Parliament” opened today in Athens, deputies swore their oath to their respective deities which meant “the Spanish Jews from Salonika swore by Jehova.”


1936: It was reported today that the Nazi Governor of the Saar has already warned that now that Germany has assumed full sovereignty over the region it “will become the most Jewless part of Germany.”


1936: “The official organ German Justice announced 763 notaries had been ousted through the recent Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws.”


1936: The newly formed Physician Committee of the United Palestine Appeal is scheduled to hold its first meeting this evening at the Harmonie Club under the leadership of co-chairmen Dr. Emanuel Libman and Dr. Bernard Sachs.


1937: “According to a statement issued” today “by the American Delegation to Palestine, Great Britain has not discharged her duties or fulfilled her pledges with respect to Palestine but instead has place artificial barriers to immigration there and obstructed the purchase of land by Jws and failed to give adequate assistance in reconstruction work.


1937: In Pittsburgh, the Convention of the Women’s League of the United Synagogue adopted resolutions “urging prompt ratification of the child labor amendment, passage of neutrality legislation to prohibit the use of American armed forces outside continental and territorial United States and endorsing President Roosevelt’s ‘good neighbor’ policy in Pan-American relations” at its final sessions. (Editor’s Note – For those critical of FDR’s response to the plight of the Jews of Germany, please note that this leading Jewish women’s organization favored the very kind of isolationist legislation that helped to tie the President’s hands.)


1937: “Lost Horizon,” the cinema version of the novel with the same name with a screenplay by Robert Riskin, co- starring Sam Jaffe and with music by Dimitri Tiomkin was released today in the United States.


1937: Rabbi Goodman “George” Lipkind wrote “Here’s Hoping” a three act farce.


1938: The Palestine Post (the progenitor of today’s Jerusalem Post) published the farewell message of the retiring High Commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, addressed to the people of Palestine. In a separate letter to the Post, Sir Arthur wrote that “though rather busy during most of my leave in England, I always found time to read The Palestine Post... I hope to read your paper in future years.”


1938: The Palestine Post reported that Sir John Woodhead, Sir Allison Russel and Mr. A.P. Waterfield were appointed by the British Government to serve as members of the Technical Commission which will proceed to Palestine to investigate conditions for the country’s eventual partition. 


1938: The Palestine Post reported that An Emek settler, Abraham Goldschlager, 38, was murdered by Arab terrorists near Mishmar Ha¹emek. Tirat Zvi came under heavy Arab fire.


1938: According to a report published today, The Jewish Agricultural Society, Inc. led by General Manager Dr. Gabriel Davidson, which aids Jews in settling on farms and then helps them with an educational and extension programs, has granted 12,313 farm loans totaling $7,513,857 since its founding in 1900.


1939: Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli is elected Pope and takes the name Pius XII. As Secretary of State for the Vatican he had negotiated a concordat with Hitler.  As Pope, he would remain silent about the Nazis and the Holocaust even when a Roman Catholic nun who converted to Judaism years ago was taken to the death camp because, under Hitler’s Race Laws, she was really a Jew.  Based on this alone, one wonders what this Pope thought about the meaning of baptism.


1940: “The police imposed curfew regulations at Tel Aviv tonight after breaking up widespread demonstrations protesting against British restrictions on the sale of Arab lands to Jews.


1942: Birthdate of Brooklyn born American musician Lewis Allan “Lou” Reed


1942(13thof Adar):As Purim began, Jews from Minsk refused to cooperate in latest deportation. Germans and Ukrainians retaliated by searching houses, dragging children to sand pits and throwing them in alive, throwing candies in after them as they died. By the end of Purim 5,000 Jews were murdered in Minsk. Jews all over Europe were tortured, murdered or deported that day included those from Krosniewice, Baranowicze, Lvov and Zdunska Wola


1942: At Janowska, eight laborers were ordered to stand in a barrel of water by Gestapo chief Dibauer, because "they didn't look too clean." They all froze to death by the next day as the ice hardened around their feet.


1943: Over 2,500 Jews in Salonica are crammed into 593 rooms in the Baron de Hirsh Ghetto. The ghetto was surrounded with high wooden fences, topped with barbed wire. Signs in German, Greek and Ladino warned Jews not to leave, under penalty of death.


1943: The daily transports to Treblinka continued. Included are New York Born Yetta Flater and London born Helene Rosenberg. Three hundred of the deportees that day were over 70 years old.


1943: In explaining the Nazi commitment to the Final Solution, Goebbels writes in his diary, “We are so entangled in the Jewish question that henceforth it is impossible to retreat.”


1944: Eighty-five year old Lucius Nathan Littauer, the first Harvard football coach, businessman and Congressman passed away today.



1944: Denise Bloch and a fellow SOE agent “were dropped back into central France” on what would, tragically prove to be her last mission since she would be captured in June and executed at Ravensbruck.


1945: Haaretz published the following description of kidnapping Yaakov Tavin during the “Hunting Season.” “Passersby in Dizengoff and Yirmiyahu streets were greatly struck…by the kidnapping of a young man in the street. The kidnapping occurred at 11 a.m, and was witnessed by a large number of people. A large taxi halted at the corner of Dizengoff and Yirmiyahu streets, and several men emerged, one of them dressed in police uniform. They approached the young man, who was standing on the pavement holding a package. Shouting 'Thief!', they attacked him and began to hit him. The crowd thought that he was in fact a thief, and several of them joined the attackers and helped them to push the young man into the taxi. He struggled with them and shouted in Yiddish and in Hebrew: 'Jews, help me! Why do you let them hit a Jew?' He was thrown into the car, which swiftly drove away.


1945: In Afula, Yemima and Adam Rubin gave birth to Michal Breslavy who gained fame Michal Bat-Adam who among other things was “the first Israeli woman to direct a feature film.”


1947: In Tel Aviv a radio announcement by the Irgun was heard in which the Jewish organization took responsibility for yesterday’s attack on a British officers’ club in Jerusalem yesterday.  The Irgun said the attack was in retaliation for British attacks in Haifa on Friday, February 28.


1947: In response to the latest wave of violence, the British imposed martial law throughout Palestine.  At 4 A.M. British troops occupied Petah Tikav Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv as well as other coastal communities while the government in Jerusalem imposed additional restrictions on Mea Sharim.


1947(10th of Adar, 5707): Four year old Ketti Shalom died tonight after having been shot by British forces as she stood on the balcony of her home in Jerusalem, which is under martial law.  Her mother was wounded but survived the shooting.


1947: Composer Morton Gould and his second wife Shirley Blank gave birth to their second child David.


1949(1st of Adar, 5709): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1949(1st of Adar, 5709): Fifty-four year old Henry J. Berkowitz, the Rabbi at Temple Israel “the largest Jewish Congregation in the Pacific Northwest passed away today.  Born in Philadelphia, a veteran of WW I, and a graduate of HUC, he wrote several books including Book Camp which “described his experiences as a Navy chaplain.” (As reported by JTA)


1949: “Two Blind Mice,” a comedy by Samuel and Bella Spewack opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre.


1950(13th of Adar, 5710): Ta'anit Esther


1950: Israel Railways began regular passenger service today from Tel Aviv North Railway Station, via the Eastern Railway and Rosh HaAyin, to Jerusalem.


1950: “Salih Jabr, the Iraqi interior minister in a draft bill to parliament – Supplement to Decree 62 of 1933 --  that became law a week later which said the Jews were “free to go” as long as they give up their citizenship, agree never to return and basically left them impoverished at the time of their departure


1950: A bill was introduced in the Iraqi parliament allowing the Jews of Iraq to immigrate to Israel.  Introduction of the bill required a large cash payment by the Israeli representatives.  The “Jews could leave provided they left behind all gold, jewelry and valuables and provided that they also gave up their Iraqi citizenship.”


1950: In Iraq, Parliament passed the Revocation of Citizenship which had been introduced earlier on that same day by Saleh Jabr, the Minister of the Interior. 


1950: A horse named Tel Aviv is entered in the second race at Hialeah Park in Miami.


1951(24th of Adar I, 5711): Yakov Gilyarievich Etinger, “one of the physicians accused in the ‘Doctor’s Plot’” died today in prisons as result of the brutal interrogations he was forced to endure.


1952: Birthdate of comedian and early star of SNL Laraine Newman and the sister of Emmy winning television writer Tracy Newman.


1952: It was reported today that 74 year old Dr. Alexander Marx, director of libraries and Jacob H. Schiff Professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America will be taking his first trip to Israel this month.


1953:  Birthdate of Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported from Washington that the Eisenhower administration decided to pay more attention to Arab countries and less to Israel. The first concrete step in this direction was granting Egypt an $11m. credit so it could purchase American arms.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that twenty Jewish families from Poland arrived in Austria on their way to Israel. They reported that the Polish Jews were in a state of panic and more families were expected to follow.


1956: Seventy-four year old Israel Zolli, the former chief rabbi of Rome who converted to Catholicism in 1945 passed away today.


1956: Morocco gains its independence from France; date celebrated as Independence Day in Morocco. Jews are known to have settled in what is no Morocco during Roman times.  In 1948, the ancient Jewish community had over a quarter of a million members.  Following violent attacks, large numbers of Jews began leaving for Israel.  At the time of independence, Jews served in the parliament and held at least one ministerial post.  The new government banned immigration to Israel.  The ban was lifted in 1963 and Jews began moving en masse to Israel.  The ancient community has now dwindled to a couple of thousand members.


1958: In “Israel’s Anniversary Year” Mary Qualley King described plans being made by Israelis to celebrate the country’s tenth anniversary.



1959: “Sleep Warm,” an album including songs by Alan Bergman and Harold Arlen was released today.


1961(14th of Adar, 5721): Purim is observed for the first time during the Presidency of John Kennedy.


1964: Pre-Broadway tryouts for “Anyone Can Whistle” “with a book by Arthur Laurents and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim” opened in Philadelphia.


1965: U.S. premiere “The Sound of Music” the movie version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical with a score by Irwin Kostal and a screenplay by Ernest Lehman.


1966: In Moscow, Mikhail Sheferovsky and Rachel Sheferovskaya gave birth to Felix Mikhailovich Sheferovsky who gained fame as real estate developer and business associate of Donald Trump Felix Henry Sater.



1970: “The white minority Rhodesian Front government, led by Ian Smith, severed ties with the British crown; Smith declared Rhodesia an independent republic.” The majority black population resisted the Smith government. A civil war broke between the Smith government and the black population which was represented by ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) and ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union).  Because of the civil war, most of the Jewish population (approximately 7,000 in number as of 1961) left the country.  Eventually the minority white government was defeated and the Republic of Zimbabwe was formed.



1972: “Journey Through Rosebud” co-starring Kristoffer Tabori was released in the United States today.


1975: Birthdate of Rishon LeZion native Danny Niv, the “Israeli singer and rapper” known as “Muki.”


1978:The Jerusalem Post reported that Egypt was counting on US President Jimmy Carter to put forward an American peace package to put pressure on Israel and to break the apparent deadlock over the Israeli-Egyptian “declaration of principles.” In Israel government sources declared that the positions of the two sides remained far apart on major issues, especially on the problem of the future of the “administered areas.”


1978: “Fingers,” an aptly named drama about a pianist directed and written by James Tobac and starring Harvey Keitel was released in the United States today.


1978:The Jerusalem Post reported that Venezuela had announced that there were no obstacles in selling oil to Israel and welcomed cooperation on other aspects of energy.


1979: U.S. premriere of “Norma Rae” directed by Martin Ritt, with music by David Shire, a screenplay by Irving Ravetch and his wife Harriet Frank Jr. co-starring Ron Liebman.


1980(14th of Adar, 5740): Purim


 


1980: Yigal Allon’s funeral took place today at Kibbutz Ginosar on the shore of Lake Kinneret which had been his home for almost fifty years.



1981: Rockets from Lebanese territory struck several homes in the Galilee town of Qiryat Shemona today, wounding three people.


1981: Discovery of 5020 Asimov, an asteroid named after science fiction author Isaac Asimov.


1982: Rabbi Haim Meir Drukman lost his post as Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs.


1982(7th of Adar, 5742): Seventy-one year old Yoel Zussman the fourth President of the Supreme Court of Israel, passed away today.


1982: The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously adopted a resolution calling on the Soviet Union to end the persecution, arrests and trials of Jewish activists; to remove obstacles to emigration; and to respect the rights of its citizens to practice their religion


1982: The Dearborn Station, “a Romanesque Revival structure designed by Cyrus W. Eidlitz” was designated as an official Chicago Landmark.


1983: Shulamit Ran's Verticals“was premiered by pianist Alan Feinberg at New York's Merkin Concert Hall. The New York Times described the work by the Tel Aviv native as “rhapsodic and intriguing.”


1984: U.S. premiere of “This Is Spinal Tap” “an American 1984 rock music mockumentary written and scored by Rob Reiner who also co-starred along with Harry Shearer.


1984: U.S. premiere of “Harry and Son” directed, produced and written by Paul Newman, who co-starred in the feature along with Ellen Barkin.


1984: “Against All Odds” a romantic thriller featuring Saul Rubinek was released today in the United States.


1986(21st of Adar I, 5746): Marcel Liebman, Belgian historian and Holocaust survivor, passed away at the age of 56. 


1986: A revival of “Jubilee” a musical with a book by Moss Hart opened today at The Town Hall.


1987:Law-enforcement officials said today that federal prosecutors are on the verge of seeking the indictment of Aviem Sella, a prominent Israeli Air Force officer who the Justice Department alleges played a key role in directing the espionage activities of Jonathan Jay Pollard,


1988:Dr. Inamullah Khan, secretary general of the Pakistan-based World Moslem Congress has been named as the winner of the $369,000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion even though there are reports that the prize winner has been associated with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel causes.


1989: The Broadway production “Lend Me A Tenor” directed by Tony Award winner Jerry Sake opened at the Royale Theatre.


1991(16th of Adar, 5751):  French musician Serge Gainsbourg passed away at the age of 62. Born Lucien Ginzburg, Gainsbourg survived the Nazi occupation of France to become a leading poet, songwriter, singer and director.


1992(27th of Adar I, 5752): The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, suffered a disabling stroke while praying at the gravesite of the previous Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak of Lubavitch.


1993(9th of Adar, 5753): Yehoshua Weissbrod was stoned and then shot dead by Palesinian terrorists in the town of Rafa.


1993: ABC broadcast the episode of “Civil Wars” created by Steven Bocho who served with Executive Produces along with William M. Finkelstein and co-starring Debi Mazar and Alan Rosenberg.


1997: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Rubber Bullets:Power and Conscience in Modern Israel
by Yaron Ezrahi, the children’s book, When Chickens Grow Teeth: A Story From the French of Guy de Maupassant retold and illustrated by Wendy Anderson Halperin and Too Much Is Never Enough by Russian born architect Morris Lapidus, the man who “created Miami Beach in the 1950’s


1998: After almost three months of negotiations, Ronald Perelman and Al Dunlap reach an agreement involving the sale of Sunbeam and Coleman.


1999(14thof Adar, 5759): Purim


2000: Thomas Buergenthal began serving as a Judge of the International Court of Justice.


2001(7thof Adar I, 5761): Forty-seven year old British journalist and broadcaster John Diamond lost his battle with throat cancer and passed away today.




2001: “Inherit the Wind,” the controversial play co-authored Jerome Lawrence “that used Darwin vs. Genesis as a way to speak out against McCarthyism” opened at the Sheffel Theatre of the Topeka Civic Theatre & Academy


2001:Eleanor Antin: Real Time Streaming” opened at the Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK.


2001: The Times of London reviewed The Jewish State: The struggle for Israel's Soul by Yoram Hazony


2002(18th of Adar, 5762): Eleven Israelis were killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox neighborhood.



2003: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of interest to Jewish readers including 'The Pieces From Berlin': Swindling Holocaust Victims by John


Sutherland and Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent by Gerald Sorin.
 2005: Start of the 12th Daf Yomi Cycle.  Daf Yomi is translated as "Daily Page."  Daf refers to the double-sided page of the Talmud.  Daf is also the word for Plank.  Tjere are those who say that the double meaning of the term Daf comes from a story about Rabbi Akiva who was saved by from drowning when he grabbed hold of a plank of a daf.  By holding on a daf - a page of the Talmud, the Jew stays a float in the worldly sea.  The program called Daf Yomi is "a systematic approach to the daily study of the Talmud formulated by Reb Meir Shapira of Lublin in 1923.   The program enables Jews throughout the world to study the same daf or double-sided page of the Talmud simultaneously.  Using this method, one can study the Talmud in a little over seven years.  This system has become popular and there is plethora of sites that provide both text and audio explanations.  There are also weekly summaries.  The success of Daf Yomi has led to the creation of other cyclical study programs.  These programs can be found on the web.  Also, many congregations - Orthodox, Conservative and Reform - now have spontaneously formed lay study groups that cover this material.  It is one more example of the burgeoning interest in Adult Jewish Education.


2005: Final performance of television series “Boston Public” co-starring Fyvush Frinkel, the veteran of the Yiddish theatre who portrayed “history teach Harvey Lipshultz.”


2006:  The Jerusalem Post reported on deteriorating condition for Jewish communities in parts of the former Soviet Union.  In Uzbekistan authorities are probing the murder of one of Tashkent's rabbis.  And despite pleas from the Jewish community and international organizations, the Tajikistan government has started to destroy the country's only synagogue.


2006(2nd of Adar, 5766): Marty Stein, who helped start Stein drugstores and Stein Optical, has died of cancer. He was 68. Mr. Stein was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 1994. He passed away in Milwaukee. A former pharmacist, Mr. Stein co-founded the first Stein drugstore in Menomonee Falls in 1961. He later expanded the chain into 19 stores, which he sold to the Walgreen Co. in 1979.  He then started Stein Health Services Inc., which ran three companies in home health care, eye care and related fields. The Eye Care One division ran Wisconsin stores as Stein Optical and Chicago stores as EyeQ. Those were sold in the late 1990s.Mr. Stein also was involved in efforts to help Israel and Jewish immigrants, including serving as national chairman of a worldwide effort to airlift thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. By 1988, he had met President Ronald Reagan, the pope and Israeli leaders. Despite his international focus, Mr. Stein remained committed to helping those in his local communities.” There are two Americas in America," he once said. "There's the one where I live and there's the other one in places such as the inner city. I want to help other people who live in the other America to know the America I know. "Mr. Stein was active in groups such as the Hunger Task Force of Milwaukee. Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson called the news of Mr. Stein's death "devastating."


2006: This evening poet Rachel Tzvia Back gave a lecture entitled "Placing the Voice: The Personal and Political, Israel 2006" at Williams College. Though born in Buffalo, NY, she "is the seventh generation of her family in Palestine," according to this bio at The Drunken Boat. Her grandfather left there in the 1920s, seeking his fortune in America; in the 1980s she returned to Israel, completing the cycle, and lives there still.



2007: Ethiopian born singer Aiiala Ingdsht released her first album in Tel Aviv.


2007: The Secretary of State appointed Eliot Asher Cohen, the Harvard Ph.D. and graduate of the Army ROTC program at MIT “serve as Counselor of the State Department.


2007(12th of Adar, 5767): Former American Jewish Congress leader William Maslow died in his Manhattan home at the age of 99. Born in Kiev in 1907, Maslow moved to the United States with his family in 1911. He served as general counsel to the American Jewish Congress from 1945 to 1960, and as executive director from 1960 to 1972, guiding the organization’s fight against discrimination to the court system. Under Maslow’s direction, the American Jewish Congress fought housing restrictions on Jews in many communities, as well as discriminatory hiring and admissions policies at U.S. companies and universities. He filed the group’s amicus brief in Brown v. Board of Education and helping organize the 1963 March on Washington that featured the “I Have a Dream Speech.” He also founded the Commission on Law and Social Action, modeled after the ACLU and NAACP. A nephew of Paula Ben-Gurion, wife of Israel’s first Prime Minister, Maslow was a dedicated Zionist and helped lead Israel’s fight against the Arab economic boycott in the 1970s.


2007: 153 years to the day after the congregation now known as Temple Israel received its charter from the State of Tennessee, a historical marker was erected by the Shelby County Historical Commission, the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, and Temple Israel, on the corner where the synagogue had once stood describing the building as the "First Permanent Jewish House of Worship in Tennessee".


2007: After almost thirty two years, Jacob “Jack” Austin completed his service as a Senator from British Columbia.


2008: The Washington Post featured a review of Richard M. Cohen's Strong at the Broken Places.


2008: The Sunday New York Times features a review of Dreams and Shadows:The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright and The Bush Tragedyby Jacob Wiesberg.


2008: In New York City, the 92nd Street Y  presents what might be called“Jewish night the press” in a program styled “In the News With Jeff Greenfield—On the Election with Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein and Rich Lowry.” 


2008: During Operation Hot Winter the “IDF decided to change its strategy today and sent a whole regiment (about 2000 men) into the Northern Strip to occupy Jabalya and Sajiyah but met stiff resistance from the Palestinians. In the bloodiest day for Gaza since 2002, close to 70 civilians were killed. Military deaths totaled 4 Palestinian fighters and 2 Israeli soldiers.”


2009: Jonathan David Leibowitz assuming the Chairmanship of the Federal Trade Commission.


2009: Sports Illustrated reports that Andy Roddic will “not be showing up at the Dubai Open” this week.  “He’s ticked that Israel’s Shahar Peer was denied entry to the United Arab Emirates to ply in the women’s tournament.”


2009: At the 92ndStreet Y, playwright, author and actress Anna Deavere delivers the Annual State of Anti-Semitism lecture entitled “Hatred Knows No Boundaries, a unique address on the issues of hatred, racial conflict and genocide


2009: In Washington, D.C. Jewish author Adam Gopnikdiscusses and signs his new book, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life,


2009: Israel's UN envoy filed a letter of complaint about the continued rocket attacks from Gaza to the Secretary-General and the president of the Security Council, whose rotating chair is currently held by Libya. Ambassador Gabriela Shalev warned that the Hamas attacks would hinder efforts to reach a "stable and durable cease-fire" - a deliberate echo of language adopted by the Security Council in its January resolution calling for an end to Israel's Operation Cast Lead offensive in Gaza.


2009: In an article entitled “The Good, the Bad, the Bible,” Lisa Miller examines The Good Book by David Plotz, “a naïf wandering in a strange land full of eccentric people and incomprehensible rules.” 


2010: Today is the day the New Israeli Foundation for Cinema & TV has set as the deadline for submitting scripts based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem that could be used for television productions.  The selected scripts will be eligible for special funding supplied by the foundation.


2010: A direct-to-DVD sequel to the animated film Curious George titled Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey!” based on the character created by Hans Augusto Rey and Margret Rey was released today.


2010:At noon today a demonstration that will include members of the Union of Israel Journalists who are demanding the safeguarding of public broadcasting in Israel is scheduled to take place at Beit Sokolov in Tel Aviv. The demonstration is being initiated by a group of organizations concerned that the sharp deterioration in employer/employee relations at the Israel Broadcasting Authority, coupled with the souring of relations between the IBA and the Finance Ministry and other government bodies, may result in a decision that the IBA is no longer necessary.


2010: The Tulane University Jewish Studies Program under the direction of Dr. Brian Horowitz is scheduled to present to present a program entitled “Obama and Israel,” featuring Mitchell Bard of the American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise


 


2010:Late today reports started to emerge that, contrary to initial reports, the Masorti synagogue in Concepcion was destroyed in the earthquake that had rocked Chile this past weekend.The head of the international Masorti organization, Rabbi Tzvi Graetz had been to Concepcion which was close to the epicenter of the earthquake.  He said that ‘it was like the 'hurban habayit' [destruction of the Temple], the walls were all cracked and the roof had fallen down. I couldn't stay there, so I got the sifrei Torah and left,’”


2010: Amos Oz said today that the Khoury family of East Jerusalem had funded the translation of A Tale of Love and Darkness, his best-selling autobiography to promote coexistence. The translation which was done by Israeli Arab Jamal Gnaim, was done in memory of Khoury’s son George who was a promising Hebrew University law student when he was killed in a 2004 shooting attack while jogging on the university's Mt. Scopus campus.


2011: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to present a program entitled “Jewish Confederates” at Adas Israel Congregation.JHSGW Board Member Les Bergen’s presentation will include information about “a female spy living just doors from the White House and her sister, who ran a military hospital in Richmond and became known as the ‘Confederate Clara Barton.’”


2011:Pope Benedict XVI reiterated that the Jewish people are not responsible for Jesus' death in a new book released today. The Pope also denies the Gospel writers' claim that Jews working in the Temple collaborated with the Roman authorities, leading to Jesus' execution."Many readers will find this section of the book particularly interesting as the Pope reviews the historical positions taken about this," said Father Joseph Fessio, founder and publisher of Ignatius Press, the primary publisher of the Pope's books in the US. "He discusses some very controversial claims that have been made, and draws on some contemporary scholarly resources to reach a conclusion that I am certain will generate a lot of discussion."The book, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week - From the Entrance Into Jerusalem to the Resurrection,a sequel to a previous book on Jesus' life, the Pope describes "the final week of Jesus' earthly life."


2011:There were signs today of a new effort to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process after months of stagnation, but chances of a resumption of talks looked slim and Israel appeared to be stepping back from the stated goal of reaching a framework agreement resolving the core issues of the conflict by September. 2011(26thof Adar I, 5771):Eighty-seven year old Walter Zacharius, a publisher and iconoclast who released an unauthorized version of the erotic classic "Candy" and had the savvy and sales talk to help romance novels make the transition from drugstores to superstores to the Internet passed away today (As reported by Hillel Italie)



2012: Final day to make reservations for the 2012 Humanitarian Awards Dinner sponsored by the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.


2012:Joseph Cedar’s “Footnote,” a tragicomic tale of rival father-and-son Jewish scholars in the Talmud department of Hebrew University in Jerusalem is scheduled to open in New York today.



2012: Emanuel Berman, author of “City within a City” is scheduled to participate in a lecture and book signing sponsored by   the YIVO Institute of Research.


2012:In his first public comments on a North American visit that will include talks with U.S. President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said today Israel reserved the right to defend itself against Iran.


2012:Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said today that Israel is ready to help treat Syrians wounded in the uprising against President Bashar Assad.


2013(20thof Adar, 5773): In Cedar Rapids, the traditional minyan at Temple Judah gathers for Shabbat Parah which, the weekly portion includes the story of the Golden Calf, might be called “The Tale of Two Bovines.


2013: The Minneapolis Jewish Film Festival is scheduled the Minnesota Premiere of “Life In Stills.”


2013: The Israel String Quartet – Yigal Tuneh and Avital Steiner (violins), Robert Moses (viola), and Tzvi Moskovsky (cello) – is sechduedl to perform to pieces by Beethoven at the Eden-Tamir Music Center


2013: “After failing to assemble a coalition within the legally allotted month, Prime Minister Netanyahu went back to President Shimon Peres tonight to ask for an extension. Peres granted Netanyahu a two week extension, which is the maximum allowed by the law. If he fails to put together a coalition within two weeks, Peres can assign the job of assembling the coalition to someone else, and if that attempt fails, Israel will be required to hold new elections.” (As reported by Jewish Press News Briefs)


2013: Three Syrian mortars landed near moshav Ramat Magshimim in the southern Golan Heights this afternoon, causing no injuries or damage (As reported by Yoel Goldman and Gavriel Fiske)


2014(30th of Adar I, 5774): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


2014(30th of Adar I, 5774): Eighty-eight year old Justin Kaplan who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain passed away today. (As reported by Margalit Fox)



2014: The Center for Jewish History and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research are scheduled to present a symposium, “Tevye’s Daughters: How Jewish Women Confronted Modernity.”


2014: Yuval Adler’s “Bethlehem” a move that “explores the relationship between a Shin Bet agent and a Palestinian teenager is among the films competing tonight for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. (As reported by Debra Kamin)


2014: Niv Adiri who was “part of the team” nominated for the Academy Award for Best Sound for “Gravity” is the only Israeli nominated for one of tonight’s Oscars.


2014: Opening session of the AIPAC Policy Conference is scheduled to take place today in Washington


2014: “The Sturgeon Queens,” a documentary featuring Russ & Daughters is scheduled to be shown at the Washington, DC Jewish Film Festival.


2014: Eight people have been arrested as suspects in a stabbing that took place in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, this evening. The background for the attack is suspected to be nationalistic.


2014: A Jewish man is beaten on the Paris Metro by assailants who reportedly told him “Jew, we are going to lay into you, you have no country.”


2014: Jerusalem is the site of the so-called million man march where haredim protest having to serve in the IDF.


2014: Michael Kapustin, the rabbi at Ner Tamid, the reform congregation in Simferpolo, the capital of Ukraine’s republic “said there is an atmosphere of fear in the city, with few cars and fewer pedestrians on the streets” and that his congregants should “stay indoors.”  Ner Tamid has already been vandalized with “anti-Semitic graffiti including swastikas” (As reported by Amanda Borschel-Dan)


2014: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or Jewish readers including Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen and Not I: Memoir of a German Childhood by Joachim Fest.


2015: Dr. Hana Barouk is scheduled to deliver a lecture on”Chassidic Feminism? Rabbi Menachem Schneersohn's Approach to the Role of Women in Chabad Chassidism” at the Jewish Museum of Florida.


2015: Rabbi Robert Loewy is scheduled to officiate at the graveside services at Hebrew Rest Cemetery in New Orleans for Elma Bloch Rosenfeld, the mother of Becky Ripps.


2015:  Evan Rapport is scheduled to deliver a lecture “Greeted with Smiles: Bukharin Jewish Music and Musicians in New York” at the Center for Jewish History.


2015: In an interview to be broadcast on Channel 2 today, “Israel’s recently retired Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz hinted that he helped prevent a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program


2015: Three thousand reservists will have to report for duty today as part of an exercise to prepare of “possible destabilization of the security situation in the West Bank.” (As reported by Justin Jalil)


2015: US Secretary of State John Kerry today delivered a vigorous defense of Israel before the UN Human Rights Council, urging its members to end what the United States says is its unfair and biased focus on the Jewish State that could undermine its credibility.


2015: Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed AIPAC today.


2016: “Black Jews: The Roots of the Olive Tree” and “Chaos Within” are scheduled to be shown today at the 26th annual Washington Jewish Film Festival.


2016: As part of the Books on Broadway seriesAuthor Barbara Isenberg is scheduled to chronicle the rich tale of how Sholem Aleichem's 19th-century Yiddish stories of Tevye the milkman and his family were re-imagined, set to music and popularized onstage and onscreen and scholar Diane Cole is scheduled to set the context with a background discussion on Yiddish author Sholom Aleichem, whose stories were the basis for Fiddler on the Roof.


2016:Dario Disegni, the president of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Italy, told a meeting of the foundation board in Rome today that Carbon 14 dating carried out by the Geochronology Laboratory of the University of Illinois has established that “a Torah scroll from the synagogue in the northern Italian town of Biella has been identified as probably the oldest in the world still owned and used by a Jewish community.” (As reported by JTA)


2016: In Tel Aviv, the Estonian Israeli Music Festival is scheduled to come to an end today.


2016: “Mr. Kaplan” a movie made in Uruguay about a Jewish refugee is scheduled to be shown at the Charlotte Jewish Film Festival.


2016: “A bipartisan slate of House lawmakers introduced a bill that would ensure that claims of Jews from Iran and Arab lands are addressed in any Arab-Israeli peace talks in which the United States is involved and also requires that any administration report to Congress each year what it has done to address the issue of those Jews.”


2017: The family of photojournalist David Rubinger made public the news today that he had passed away yesterday at the age of 92.



2017: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host “Growing Up Bielski” during which Michael “Mickey” Bielski, the son of Tuvia Bielski describes the his families fight for survival which was depicted in the film “Defiance.”


2017: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to host the final focus group to provide input for a new Jewish Museum.


2018: The 92nd Street Y is scheduled to host a concert by the Woman to Woman All-Start Band featuring clarinetist Anat Cohen.


2018: In Des Moines, I, Temple B’nai Jershurun is scheduled to host a special “Megillah reading for kids” this evening.


2018: The Jackson Hold Jewish Community Center is scheduled to host “Megillah Madness: Purim Shabbat and Improv Comedy Night.”


 


 

This Day, March 3, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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March 3


321: Roman Emperor Constantine named Sunday which had been a Roman pagan day for honoring the sun as a day of rest.  This was an attempt by Constantine to close the gap between pagans and Christianity and to isolate the Jews.  Constantine’s day of rest should not be confused with the Jewish Sabbath which was a universal day of rest.


505: Rav Ahai ben Ray Huna, a member of the Saboraim, passed away


561: The Papacy of Pelagius I came to an end.  He owed his election to Justinian I, the emperor whose religious program included placing restrictions on Jews and interfering with their practices by trying to force them to substitute the Greek Septuagint for the TaNaCh.


1186: Saladin takes control of the city of Mosul which at that time had a Jewish population of approximately 7,000 souls which had been led by Zakkai ha-Nais “who claimed to be a descendant of King David.” (As reported by the Jewish Encyclopedia)


1240: Seizure of all copies of the Talmud in France


1337: Levi ben Gershon, better known by his Latinised name as Gersonides or the abbreviation of first letters as RaLBaG Levi observed a solar eclipse today.


1431: Eugene IV began his papacy today. This was a less than positive move for Jews since the new pope would “decree and order that from now on, and for all time, Christians shall not eat or drink with the Jews, nor admit them to feasts, nor cohabit with them, nor bathe with them. […]  They cannot live among Christians, but in a certain street, separated and segregated from Christians, and outside which they cannot under any pretext have houses.”


1455: Birthdate of John II, the King of Portugal whom Abraham Zacuto served as Royal Astronomer.


1554: Fifty year old John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony, whose issuance of “a mandate that prohibited Jews from inhabiting, engaging in business in or passing through his realm” sparked an episode in which Luther showed that he had become an anti-Semite passed away today.


1605: VIII, during whose Papacy Jews were forced to attend “conversionist sermons,” prohibited from “dealing in new articles of clothing” and forced to allow copies of the Talmud to be burned in 1601, passed away today at the age of 69.


1619(17thof Adar, 5379): Shlomo Ephraim ben Aaron Luntschitz passed away.  Born at Lenczyk in 1550 he was “a rabbi, poet and Torah commentator, best known for his Torah commentary Keli Yakar.” (For more see Seeing with Both Eyes: Ephraim Luntshitz and the Polish-Jewish Renaissance by Leonard S. Levin)


1658: Dr. Jacob Lumbrozo, the first Jew to settle in Maryland was given amnesty by Oliver Cromwell. Lumbrozo had been indicted on charges of blasphemy which was a capital offense.


1732(6thof Adar, 5492): Isaiah Azulai, father of Isaac Zerahiah Azulai and the grandfather Hayyim Joseph David Azulai passed away in Jerusalem.


1779(15thof Adar, 5539): Shushan Purim


1799: The French army under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte reached the outskirts of Jaffa. The army had left for Palestine on the first of February in an attempt to forestall a Turco-British invasion through the Palestinian land-bridge. A division under the command of General Kleber deployed along the shores of the river Yarkon, 10 kms north of the town and was responsible for shielding the besieging forces from hostile interference. This military action had nothing to do with the Jewish people. It was another example of the land of the Jews being a battleground because it was the land bridge between Africa, Asia and indirectly, Europe.


1801: David Emanuel took office as the Governor of Georgia. Emanuel was the first Jewish person to serve as a governor in the United States. Emanuel was appointed to serve the last eight months of the term of his predecessor who had assumed a seat in the U.S. Senate. Born in Pennsylvania in 1743, he passed away in 1808.


1805(2ndof Adar II, 5565): Eighty-year old author Naphtali Hartwig Wessley passed away in Hamburg following which he was buried “in the cemetery of the Portuguese Israelites, whose rituals he had professed all his life.”


1808: In the Kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by Jerome Bonaparte, Israel Jacobson “was appointed president of the Jewish consistory which was established today.


1810: In Frankfurt am Main, Jacob Hirsch Kann, the son of Miriam and Isaac Jacob Kann, and Jetta Kahn gave birth to Fanny Sichel


1811: Birthdate of Bernhard Wolff, the German journalist and editor who founded Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau which was the German version of Rueters (British) and Havas (French).


1813: Henry Moses married Esther Nathan today at the Great Synagogue.


1814: Birthdate of Charles Kensington Salaman, the native of London who gained fame as pianist and composer.


1819: Benjamin Cohen married Jestina Montefiore today at the Great Synagogue.


1822: In Baltimore, “Dr. Jonas Horwitz and his wife Debby Andrews” gave birth to Phineas J. Horwitz, the 1845 graduate of the University of Maryland who would become Surgeon General and Chief of the Navy Bureau of Medicine.


1824: Daniel Levy married Amelia Jacobs today at the New Synagogue.


1824: Isaac Vallentine married Sarah Green today at the Hambro Synagogue.


1833: Birthdate of Mendel Hirsch, the German born Bible commentator and poet who was the son of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.


1844: Birthdate of “Dreyfeusard” Clement Moras.

1845: Florida becomes the 27th state to join the Union.” In 1763, the first recorded Jews in Florida came to Pensacola, in the northwest corner of the territory. More Jews moved to north Florida in the next few decades, but the Jewish population remained small during this time, numbering no more than a dozen individuals. When Florida became a state, there were less than 100 Jews in a population of 66,500. The first U.S. Senator from Florida was a Jew, David Levy Yulee.” For more about the history of the Jews of Florida see

1846: The French Supreme Court declared the “Jewish Oath” unconstitutional in response to a case involving Rabbi Lazard Isidor of Pflazburg who was defended by Isaac Adolphe Crémieux, the Jewish lawyer and political leader.


1846: In Franklin, PA, Julius Marx Rieser and Clara Kahn gave birth to Hernai Rieser, the CCNY grad and husband of Carrie Rosenfeld who served as the Manager of the Clara de Hirsch Home and Superintendent of Beth Israel Hospital.


1849: The United States Department of the Interior is established. Joel D. Wolfsohn who served as Assistant Secretary of the Department from in the final months of the Truman Administration appears to be the highest ranking Jew to have served at the Department of the Interior. He served from July 10, 1952 through February 20, 1953.


1849: Israel’s Herold was published for the first time in the United States


1850: Aaron Lyons married Fanny Nathan at the Great Synagogue today.


1851: David Levy Yulee completed his first terms as a United States Senator from Florida. He was the first Jew to sit in the Upper Chamber of the U.S. Congress. Yulee was also the last Jew in his family line since he married a gentile and raised the children in the faith of their mother. Yulee would not only turn his back on his religion, he would turn his back on his country and join the Confederacy during the Civil War.


1852: Birthdate of Sir Ernest Joseph Cassel British merchant banker and capitalist. Born in Cologne, Germany, the son of Jacob Cassel, who owned a small bank, Cassel arrived penniless in Liverpool, England in 1869 and found employment with a firm of grain merchants. With an enormous capacity for hard work and a natural business sense, Cassel was soon in Paris working for a bank. The Franco-Prussian War forced him to move to a position in a London bank, as he was born in Prussia. He prospered and was soon putting together his own financial deals. His areas of interest were in mining, infrastructure and heavy industry. Turkey was an early area of business ventures, but he soon had large interests in Sweden, the United States, South America, South Africa, and Egypt. One of the wealthiest men of his day, Cassel was a good friend of King Edward VII as well as of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and the young Winston Churchill. In 1878, he married Annette Mary M. Maxwell at Westminster He became a Roman Catholic at the behest of his wife, Annette, but was always thought of as a Jew. The establishment was shocked to find out on his death that he had converted many years before. A few months after his death in 1921, Cassel's estate was probated at £6,000,000


1852: Lionel Alman Myers married Julia Collins in the UK today.


1854: Birthdate of Moisei Yakelovich Ostrogorski, the native of Grodno who lived in France during the Dreyfus scandal and whose visits to the U.S. and the U.K. led to the publishing of his most famous work Democracy and the Organization of Political which did not keep him from returning to his native Russia where he dies “in 1919 during the chaos that followed the Bolshevik Revolution.”


1855: Philip Phillips, the son of a prominent Charleston, SC Jewish family completed a term representing Alabama’s First Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.


1859: Henry Myer Phillips completed his terms as member of the House of Representatives in the 35th Congress.


1860: In France, “Babette Kahn (née Bloch), an uneducated homebound mother: and cattle dealer Louis Kahn gave birth to Abraham Kahn who gained fame as Albert Kahn was a millionaire Parisian banker and philanthropist whose plan to use his fortune to document the world in photographs was thwarted by the Great Depression.

1861: Marcus Jastrow repeated the sermon he had delivered yesterday on Shabbat so that those who had heard and impressed by the sentiments expressed could write it down.


1861: Alexander II of Russia signs the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing serfs.


1862: At a meeting of the Jewish community in Davenport, Iowa, Rabbi Lowenthal was “elected to serve Congregation B’nai Israel” whose President was Isaac Bernist, “as Chazan, Schoket and M’lamed” for which he was paid an annual salary of $350.


1862: During the American Civil War, David Yulee, barely avoided capture by Union troops who were attacking Fernandina FL. Yulee was the first Jew to be elected to the United States. When Florida left the Union and joined the Confederacy, Yulee resigned from the U.S. Senate and took a seat in the southern Congress.


1863: During the American Civil War, Alfred Mordecai, Jr. was promoted to the rank of Captain in the Union Army.


1869: In Widz, Russia Isaac Ginsburg and his wife gave birth to David Ginsburg the “Rabbi of Congregations Beth Israel and Beth Hakneses Hachodesh, Rochester, N. Y.”


1870: Arguments resumed this morning in the matter revolving around the will of the late Simeon Abraham, the New York physician and Jewish civic leader whose bequests exceeded the value of his estate. The executor is seeking a court order in how to resolve the shortfall while several of the beneficiaries are seeking to protect their interests.


1871: On his 49th birthday, while serving with the United States Navy, Dr. Phineas J. Horowitz was appointed medical inspector.


1871: Abraham Hoffnung married Esther Levey in Manchester, UK.


1871: In New York, the remodeled sanctuary of Shaarey Tzedek was dedicated today. The building, which is located on Henry Street, was bought by the Jewish congregation from Quakers in 1840. The remodeling was necessitated by the growth of the congregation.


1874(14th of Adar, 5634): Purim


1874: Theodore Minis Etting, the son of Philadelphia merchant Edward Etting was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant in the United States Navy.


1874: As a group of temperance crusaders marched through Columbus, Ohio looking for support it was rebuffed by various merchants and other locals including a group of German Jews who taughtened them with offers of free beer. [Could the beer drinking Jews have been Purim revelers?]


1875: William Sprague completed his 12 year career as a United States Senator from Rhode Island.  During a debate in the United States Senate on the massacre of Jews of Romania, Sprague said “the facts would show that the Jews of Romania had possessed themselves of nearly all the land and of all of the trade of the that principality while a vast population of Christians there were deprived of their means of support..”  He said that this “would be found to be the cause of the recent outbreak” and that that this experience should provide “food for profound reflection…in regard to conditions…in our own country.


1877: It was reported today that a Reuter’s dispatch from Constantinople the Greeks are upset with the outcome of the election held in that city to choose delegates for the Ottoman Parliament because the of the five non-Muslims chosen the Greeks got the same number as the Jews – one – with the other three going to Armenians


1877: It was reported that a dispatch from the Daily News that one Jew was among the 10 delegates elected to serve in the Ottoman Parliament. Of the remaining delegates, 5 were Turks and 4 were Christians – a result that the Daily News said “caused no excitement.” [Editor’s Note – no matter which version you prefer, for the Jews the important item was that they were an accepted part of the electoral process as the Porte lurched toward a more open form of government.]


1878: Following the Russo-Turkish War, Bulgaria regained its independence from Ottoman Empire. The rights of the Jews of Bulgaria, along with other religious minorities, were guaranteed by the Treaty of Berlin. The treaty guarantee did not protect from outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence, blamed in part on the erroneous notion that the Jews had supported the Ottomans. Bulgaria was never very hospitable to its Jewish population. On the other hand, Bulgaria managed to avoid shipping most of its Jewish population to concentration camps.


1878: In New York City, Meyer S. Isaacs presided over a meeting of prominent Jewish leaders including rabbis, synagogue presidents and representatives of Jewish benevolent societies. Those attending the meeting which was held at the 34th Street Synagogue discussed ways of raising funds to aid the suffering Jews of Turkey and the East during the current hostilities. A proposal to by the Ball Committee to hold a masked ball at the end of March as a fundraiser was rejected and a more direct approach for appealing for funds was adopted.


1878: Rabbi D.C. Lewin delivered a well-received lecture on “The Life and Character of Moses Mendelssohn” at the Young Men’s Hebrew Union in New York City this evening.


1878: Birthdate of German-born expressionist theatrical producer and director Leopold Jessner. Jessner left Germany in 1933. His life was saved but his career was over. He passed away in 1945.


1878: “Macklin in the Merchant of Venice” published today described the decision of great 18th century thespian Charles Macklin to play the role of Shylock in the manner of a serious character. Despite the doubts of others, Macklin was so successful that he reprised it hundreds of times. No other actor even came close to his portrayal of this Jewish figure until Edmund Kean took up the role in the 19th century. Of Macklin’s portrayal, Alexander Pope, the great English poet wrote, “This is the Jew, That Shakespeare Drew.”


1878: In Philadelphia, PA, “Hebrew School No. 2 opened today in a synagogue building” at “fifth and Catherine Streets. The school would later move to Wheatley Hall before finding its final home at Touro Hall. (As reported by Cyrus Adler and David Sulzberger)


1878: Charles Wessolowsky wrote to Rabbi Edward B.M. Browne today describing “the B’nai B’rith organization in Uniontown, Alabama and the value of B’nai B’rith to the survival of American Judaism”  while praising “a Mrs. Ungar of Uniontown not only for her resistance to attempted conversions, but also for the raising of her family in Jewish lore.”


1879: Jewish financier and businessman Joseph Seligman was among the major stockholders of the St. Louis and San Francisco who arrived in St. Louis this morning prior to tomorrow’s meeting during which a new Board of Directors will be elected


1880: It was reported today that the first edition of the “Oriental and Biblical Journal” edited by Stephen D. Peet has been issued in Chicago, Illinois. [Peet served as a pastor to several Congregational and Presbyterian Churches in the Middle West. He had a passion for archeology which he used in his Biblical studies. He was one of a series of English and American clergyman who tied the study of Archeology with Biblical Scholarship; a connection that late would become a national pastime of the Zionists.]


1881: Edward Einstein completed his term as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 7th Congressional District


1882(12thof Adar I, 5642): Sxity-seven Ludwig Kalishch, the German born author whose participation in the Revolutions of 1848 and 1849 forced him to move to France passed away today in Paris.


1883: Leopold Morse completed his service as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts’s 4th district.


1884: On his 62nd birthday, Phineas Jonathan Horwitz retired from the U.S. Navy after 38 years of service.


1885: Leopold Morse completed his service as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts’s 5th district.


1885: Fifty-year old Benjamin Franklin Jonas, a native of Williamstown, KY and 1855 graduate of the University of Louisiana (the future Tulane University) who served in several governmental and political positions after the Civil War completed his services a U.S. Senator from Louisiana today.


1886: It was reported today that banker Isidore Wormser had given his daughter, the former Miss Julia Wromser “$100,000 in Lake Shore 7 per cent sinking bond funds” as a wedding gift, while James Seligman had given Jefferson Seligman, his son and her new husband “a check for $50,000” which was supplemented by a check for $20,000 from the firm of J & W Seligman.


1887: Birthdate of Chasidic Rabbi Yehuda Meir Shapiro “a descendant of Rabbi PInchas Shapiro of Korets, on the students of the Baal Shem Tov” and French tosafist Rabbi Joseph ben Isaac Bekhor Shor, who was “known as the Lubliner Rav”


1888: Birthdate of František Langer Czech military physician and author who survived the Shoah because he was serving “as a member of the Czechoslovakian Army abroad (England) with the rank of brigadier general.



1889: Leopold Morse completed his service as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts’s 3rd district.


1889: Twenty-six year old Moses G. Zalinski who had joined the U.S. Army as a private, completed his service with the First Artillery with the rank of Sergeant.


1889: The Temple Emanu-El Sisterhood was incorporated today by several leading Jewesses including Mrs. Theodora G. Levy, Mrs. Cordeilia Schnitzer and Mrs. Theresa Sidenberg.


1890: The Trustees of Columbia College met today and “acknowledged and accepted “ several gifts including “a valuable collection of Hebrew manuscripts from” Oscar S. Straus, the former American minister to Turkey.


1890(11th of Adar, 5650): Seventy year old Rabbi Julius Landsberger who helped found “the Liberal Synagogue at Darmstadt” passed away today in Berlin.


1891: It was reported today that the New York Siberian Exile Petition Association will be forwarding a petition to the Czar in April “protesting against the present treatment of the Jews.”


1891: “Priests and Rabbis Barred” published today described an attempted Dr. T.T. Eaton, “a liberal Baptist preacher” to have the Louisville Ministerial Association admit Catholic and Jewish clergy as members.  His motion failed in 14 to 12 vote.


1891: Prominent St. Louis Jewish leader Nathan Frank completed his service as U.S Congressman.


1891: Charles Baker completed his service in the House of Representatives during which he had protested the treatment of the Jews by the government of Russia.


1892: President James H. Hoffman presided over tonight’s meeting of The Hebrew Technical Institute which was held at Temple Emanu-El in New York City.


1892(4th of Adar, 5652): Joseph Ratner, a Russian Jewish immigrant who has been married for two months shot himself this afternoon.  He was believed to have been despondent over health problems.


1893: Birthdate of Salvator Cicurel “an Egyptian Olympic fencer, who competed in the individual and team épée and team foil events at the 1928 Summer Olympics.”


1893: Forty-two year old Sigmund Hyman was taken from Mount Sinai Hospital and sent to North Brother Island because he was suffering from typhus fever.


1893: The New York Auxiliary to the Jewish Section of the Woman’s Branch of the Parliament of Religions is scheduled to resume its meeting today at the home of Mrs. Scholle where they will continue making plans for the papers they will be presenting at the upcoming World’s Fair. The members include Mrs. Oscar Straus, Mrs. Jacob Schiff, Mrs. Simon Borg, Mrs. Isidor Wormser, Mrs. Jesse Selgiman and Mrs. Alexander Kohut, the wife of Rabbi Alexander Kohut.


1894: Policemen Fay and Schultz came to Shearith Israel to investigate reports that “there was a crazy man in the synagogue.”


1895: “A Wedding Reception, 1471” published today described the wedding of the Duke Ferrara who hosted so many guests that he was ‘obliged to hire” “the mattresses and bolsters…from the Jews who kept a bank in Ferrara.


1895: “The Fate of a Financier” published today provided one version of the life and death of Joseph Suess Oppenheimer which is at odds with the facts as they are known today.



1895: Birthdate of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Born in Uzda, Belorussia "Reb Moshe" was the leading authority on Orthodox Jewish religious law (Halacha) during the last century. He served as a Rabbi of Luban, near Minsk starting in 1921 before coming to the United States in 1937. In 1938, he was named Rosh Yeshiva (Dean) of Mesivta Tiferes Yerushalayim, a New York yeshiva a position he held until 1986, the year he passed away. As his reputation grew, his rulings on religious law came to be accepted worldwide. A multi-volume collection of his letters, Igros Moshe, is considered authoritative among Orthodox Jews with regard to moral and ethical issues. He served President of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, 1968-1986, Chairman, American Branch, Mo'ezet Gedolei ha-Torah of Agudat Yisrael, the Council of Torah Sages, and was acknowledged as the Gadol Ha-Dor, or preeminent individual of his generation of Jewish scholars.


1895: “Early Bible Printing in This Country” published today described the role of the city of Philadelphia has played “in this branch of bookmaking” including the fact that the first Hebrew Bible published in the United States was printed by Philadelphian William Fry in 1814. This was done five years after a Hebrew language copy of the Book of Psalms had been printed at Harvard.


1895: “B’nai B’rith Pioneers” published today traces the fifty year history of “the pioneer of all the existing Hebrew secret societies.”


1895: Isidor Straus completed his service as U.S. Congressman from New York’s 15thCongressional District.


1896: Professor Felix Adler will deliver a lecture entitled “Moral Aspects of the Question” at the opening session of a conference on Improved Housing being held at the United Charities Building.


1896: It was reported today the resolution Congress had adopted “which virtually denounced the attitude of the Russians toward the Jews” had caused “embarrassment” for the U.S. Minister to St Petersburg because he had to “present such expression from his own government to the nation to which he is sent.”


1897: Four lodges of B’nai B’rith hosted a party in honor of the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln at the Tuxedo on Madison and 59thStreet.


1898: “The Jews For Arbitrators” published today described  Rabbi Pereira Mendes wish that the United States would consider submitting its claims against Spain following the blowing up of the battleship USS Maine to a court of international arbitration instead of resorting to war.


1899: Stanford Moses who had been serving aboard the USS Oregon, was promoted to the rank of Lt. Jr. Grade and transferred to serve on the U.S.S. Celtic, a “stores ship” that provided support for U.S. forces during the Philippine-American War.


1901: Jefferson Monroe Levy completed his services a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 13th district.


1901: New York Democrat Mitchell May completed his service as a member of the 56thUnited States Congress.


1902(24THof Adar, 5662): Isaac Conquy Abecassis, a native of the Azores born in 1840 passed away today at Var, France



1903: Congress passed legislation aimed at curbing immigration to the United States. The bill required immigrants to pay a two dollar head tax (a considerable sum in those days for poor immigrants). It also gave immigration officers the right to exclude those whom they deem anarchists or as people who believe in or advocate the overthrow of the United States government. The legislation was obviously aimed at immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, including the large Jewish populations in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.


1903: Senator Joseph Simon, Oregon Republican, finishes his term in the U.S. Senate. Simon returned to Portland, Oregon where he resumed his law practice and would serve as may from 1909 to 1911.


1903:Lucius Nathan Littauer completed his service as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 22nd district which began in 1897.


1903: Despite “all the pressure that has been brought to bear to induce him to reconsider,” the leaders of Temple Beth-El reluctantly accepted the resignation of Dr. Kaufmann Kohler from his position as Rabbi of New York’s leading Reform congregation.


1904: Birthdate of award winning sportswriter Jesse Abramson, “who was noted for his coverage of track and boxing.”



1904: In South Carolina, Rabbi J.J. Simenhoff officiated at the wedding of Jake l. Karesh and Minnie A. Ellison.


1905: In the wake of the defeat by Japan and the Russian Revolution, Czar Nicholas II agreed to create an elected assembly, the Duma.


1906: M.S. Snow delivered a lecture on “The Habit of Reading” before the Jewish Educational alliance.


1907: Charles Grosvenor completed his 14 year career as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio’s 11th district.  He was an opponent of immigration bills that specifically barred Russian Jews from coming to the United States.


1907: Birthdate of London native Joyce Black, who as Joy Finzi gave birth to Christopher and Nigel Finzi and founded the Finzi Trust “a foundation named for deceased husband composer Gerald Finzi


 


1907: After 4 years, Lucius Nathan Littauer completed his service as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 25th district


1910: Dorothy Levitt “was booked to give a talk at the Criterion Restaurant today about her experiences learning to fly.


1910: Birthdate of Eddie “Kid” Wolfe, the welterweight from Memphis, TN, who fought his first bout in 1927.


1911(3rd of Adar, 5671): Rabbi Jacob de Botton leader of the Jewish community in Salonica passed away at the age 68.


1911: William S. Bennett, who would publicly support aid for the Jews Europe after the World War broke, completed his service as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 17th District.


1912(14thof Adar, 5672): Purim


1912(14thof Adar, 5672): Eighty-six year old philanthropist William Wolf passed away today in San Francisco.


1912: The New York Times publishes a review of Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews in Economic Life) recently published in Germany by Prof. Werner Sombart, Professor of Political Economy at the Commercial High School of Berlin that includes the insights of Dr. Solomon Shechter.


1913: Victor L. Berger completed his term representing the 5thCongressional District of Wisconsin


1913: Simon Guggenheim completed his term as U.S. Senator from Colorado.


1913: Jefferson Monroe Levy completed his services a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 13th district.


1913: Birthdate of Harold Hochstein who gained fame as Harold J. Stone, the American actor who traveled from Broadway, to Hollywood to Television.


1915: As the 63rd session of the United States Congress came to an end, Jacob Cantor completed his term as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He had been elected on November 4, 1913 to fill the vacancy of Francis Harrison (who was not Jewish). He lost to Issac Siegel who was Jewish and returned to his New York law practice. Siegel in turn would be replaced by that most famous of all New Yorkers, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, the son of a Jewish mother who was raised as a Yiddish speaking Italian Catholic.


1915: “Needs of Jews in Russia” published today described the request for aid from the Jewish Colonization Association of Petrograd to aid the “tens of thousands:” of “new refugees from Poland” that have arrived in the Russian capital.


1915: As the 63rd session of the United States Congress came to an end, Henry Mayer Goldfogle completed his term as a member of the U.S. House of Representative which had begun with the 57th session of Congress.


1915: Jefferson Monroe Levy completed his services a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 14th district.


1916: In Vienna, rabbis and communal leaders from Galicia met and formed a committee designed to find a “solution for the eastern Jewish problem.”


1916: Today, C.H. Rubenstein wrote to Simon Wolf, the Chairman of the Board of Delegates in Washington, DC, “I am glad to inform you that the bill before the Maryland Legislature, making the reading of the Bible compulsory in the public schools of the State…has been defeated” by a “constitutional majority.”


1916: After winning 15 straight bouts Benny Leonard (born Benjamin Leiner) fought today for the lightweight championship but lost when he failed to knockout the champ.


1917: Birthdate of Lou Labovitch, the native of Winnipeg who played right wing in six different hockey leagues from 1938 to 1948, none of which were the NHL.


1917: William H. King, who in 1927 “declared…that he favored the United States severing diplomatic relations with any country which failed because of anti-Semitism to protect its Jewish nationals” and “expressed the belief that eventually Palestine would be able to support a population of a million Jews” began serving as a U.S. Senator from Utah.


1917: William Stiles Bennet who in 1916 told 3,000 people attending a meeting at the McKinley Casino that it was “now necessary for the American Jew to assist his brethren in Europe” and “said that large sums of money would be needed in order to accomplish the desired relief” completed his services as a Member of the US. House of Representatives from New York’s 27th District today.


 


1917: Djemal Pasha offers to give the Jews free access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem to pray if they provide the sum of 80,000-100,000 Francs


1918: Birthdate of photographer Arnold Abner Newman.




1918: Germany and the new Communist government of Russia signed The Brest-Litovsk Treaty. This treat dismembered the Russian Empire and took Russia out of the war. This freed the German Army to shift all of its forces to the Western Front where the Kaiser’s forces tried for a knock-out blow that failed. The treaty helped bring on the Russian Civil War between the Whites and the Reds during which Jews were slaughtered by both sides. Also, the treaty resulted in western forces (U.S., English, etc.) sending troops to Russia. Once again, Jews were caught in the middle and suffered economic ruin and death.


1918: In New York City, Joseph and Lena Kornberg who had married in 1904 and emigrated to New York from Austrian Galicia gave birth to Arthur Kornberg US biochemist who synthesized artificial DNA. He received the Nobel Prize in 1959. He died in 2007 at the age of 89.


1919: Emir Faisel writes a letter to Felix Frankfurter expressing his support for the Zionist cause. ”We Arabs...look with deepest sympathy on the Zionist Movement....We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome… The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper." The boundaries of Palestine shall follow the general lines set out below: Starting on the North at a point on the Mediterranean Sea in the vicinity South of Sidon and following the watersheds of the foothills of the Lebanon as far as Jisr el Karaon, thence to El Bire following the dividing line between the two basins of the Wadi El Korn and the Wadi Et Teim thence in a southerly direction following the dividing line between the Eastern and Western slopes of the Hermon, to the vicinity West of Beit Jenn, thence Eastward following the northern watersheds of the Nahr Mughaniye close to and west of the Hedjaz Railway. In the East a line close to and West of the Hedjaz Railway terminating in the Gulf of Akaba [will serve as the boundary]; in the South a frontier to be agreed upon with the Egyptian Government; in the West the Mediterranean Sea. The details of the delimitations, or any necessary adjustments of detail, shall be settled by a Special Commission on which there shall be Jewish representation. Emir Faisel fought against the Turks alongside T.E. Lawrence. Faisal was expecting to be able to control a Caliphate based in Damascus. As we can see here he had even worked out a plan with Chaim Weizmann that would have allowed for the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine. Unfortunately, the French, who controlled Syria after the war, drove Faisal from Damascus, ending his power and the dream of peace in the Middle East.


1919(1st of Adar II, 5679): Abraham (Albert) Antebi, head of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Constantinople passed away. He was born at Damascus in 1899.


1919: Meyer London, one of only two members of the Socialist Party to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives completed his term representing the 12th District of New York. He had defeated Henry M. Goldfogle, a Jew, for the seat and Goldfogle returned the favor.


1920: Arabs attacked Kfar Giladi forcing the settlers to abandon their land and take refuge in “the Shia village of Taibe” before finding ultimate sanctuary at Ayelet Hashahar, a kibbutz settled in 1915 during the Second Aliyah.


1921: In Galveston, TX, “Russian Jewish immigrants Louis and Rose Paskowitz” gave birth to Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz the graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine who gave up his medical career to become “a professional surfer.


1921: Birthdate of Allen Ginsberg beat generation poet. In 1969 he received the Arts & Letters Award.


1922: An Arab delegation “held a meeting…at the Hyde Park Hotel in London to denounce Britain’s ‘Zionist policy.’” The Secretary of the delegation was reported to have declared “the necessity of killing Jews if the Arabs did not get their way.”


1922: The schedules in the estate of Jacob H. Schiff, banker and philanthropist, who died Sept. 25, 1920, prepared for submission to the State Tax Commission in the inheritance tax proceeding to begin shortly, fix the value of the property to be taxed in New York State at $35,257,008. The net estate on which the executors estimate a tax will be fixed is $34,426,282.


 


1923: Meyer London completed his second, non-successive term as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives representing New York’s 12th District. He was followed in office by another Jewish politician, Samuel Dickstein.


1923: TIME magazine was published for the first time by Henry Luce. Jews connected with America’s leading weekly news magazine have included managing editors Henry Grunwald (1968–1977) and Walter Isaacson (1996–2000) and contributors Lev Grossman, Joe Klein and Joel Stein.


1924:”Why Men Leave Home” a silent film directed by John M. Stahl and produced by Louis B. Mayer was released today in the United States.


1923: Fifty-six year old Republican Milton Kraus completed his service as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana’s 11th congressional district.


1925: “Salome of the Tenements” a silent film adapted to the screen by Sonya Levien from the Anzia Yezierska novel produced by Jesse L. Lasky and Adolph Zukor and co-starring Jetta Goudal was released in the United States today.


1926(17thof Adar, 5686): Sixty-six year old Sir Sidney Lee, the author who specialized in the Elizabethian period and was the brother of Elizabeth Lee passed away today.




1926: The Lenox Quartette performed “String Quartette” by Leopold Mannes at the New York Public Library.


1926: Theatrical producer E. Ray Goetz returned to New York today on the line France and said that his brother-in-law Irving Berlin and his bride the former Ellin Mackay “are planning to make their home in London” at least until next fall.


1926: “Important Jewish manuscripts, relics, early printed books, antiquities, ceremonial objects and other items of Judaica” totaling 6,174 pieces “have been purchased in Germany for the Hebrew Union College at Cincinnati and are now on their way to “the United States” according to an announcement made today by Dr. Adolph S. Oko, who has been in Europe for ten weeks working on the project.


1926: Dr. William Filderman of Bucharest, the President of the Union of Rumanian Jews was met at the pier when his ship docked in New York by “a large delegation from the American Branch Branch of the Union of Rumanian Jews headed by Leo Wolf who heard the visitor say that while the “King depalored any anti-Semitic feeling in Rumania…the situation of the Jews…was very bad” and that economic help might be a remedy for their troubles.


1927: After ten years, Senator William King who “declared…that he favored the United States severing diplomatic relations with any country which failed because of anti-Semitism to protect its Jewish nationals” and “expressed the belief that eventually Palestine would be able to support a population of a million Jews” completed his service as Secretary of the Senate Democratic Caucus today.


1927: Nathan David Perlman completed his service as a member of the U.S. House Representatives from New York’s 14th District.


1928: A statement published today marking the passing of Max issued by Joseph C. Hyman, Secretary of the Joint Distribution Committee closed by say “The annals of the Joint Distribution Committee, as well as the record of American Jewry, united in this great humanitarian effort to save rebuilt the lives of our people across the sea, will for all time carry the name of his modest, simple, devoted leader who gave of his very best to the causes which he served”


1929: In the Old City of Jerusalem, Rabbi Salman Eliyahu, a Jerusalem Kabbalist from an Iraqi Jewish family and his wife Mazal gave birth to Rabbi Mordechai Tzemach Eliyahu


1930: U.S. premiere of “Madame Satan,” a “musical romantic comedy” co-starry Lillian Roth (b. Lillian Rutstein)


1931: A special screening of “1914” directed and produced by Richard Oswald, co-starring Reinhold Schunzel and filmed by cinematographer Mutz Greenbaum was held today at the Reichstag.


1932: Judge Cutherbert W. Pound addressed Benjamin Cardozo on his last as Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals saying of the man who was about to become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, “We shall miss not only the great Chief Judge whose wisdom and understanding have added glory to the judicial office but all the true man who has blessed us with the light of his friendship, the sunshine of his smile.”


1932: “In a unanimous opinion written by Chief Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo as his final judicial act before taking his place on the United States Court bench, the court held” today “that the issuance of a subpoena to Senator Hastings was legal but that the efforts to penalize him were improperly conducted.”


 


1933: Birthdate of Harry Oscar Triguboff, the native of Dalian whose parents had fled from Russia to northeastern China after the Russian Revolution who became  an Australian billionaire residential property developer known as “high-rise Harry.”


1933: About a month after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and about a week after the burring of the Reichstag 100 prisoners were taken to a school in the small town of Norha near the city of Weimar. They were interrogated and sent into three large rooms where they guarded by policemen and students from the school. This was the start of Germany's first Concentration camp.


1934: “Heat Ligthning,” the film version of the Broadway play by the same name, directed by Mervyn LeRoy and produced by Samuel Bischoff was released today in the United States.


1934: At the 102nd Engineers Armory, the undefeated City College of New York basketball team led by Abe Weissbrodt lost to the undefeated NYU team led Willie Rubenstein.


1935: Birthdate of New York native, Brandeis Alum and Harvard Ph.D Michael Walzer, the Professor Emeritus for Advanced Study in Princeton who is the husband of Judith Borodovko Walzer with whom he had two daughters – Saran Esther and Rebecca Leah – and “older brother of historian Judith Walzer Leavitt.


1936: Birthdate of Eva Kleinova who was transported from Prague in 1942 to Ujazdow where she was murdered.


1936: Paul Bekker, the former director of the Wiesbaden opera whom “officials said ‘favored Jews and showed Bolshevik opposition” was among those deprived of their citizenship today by the German government.


1936: Funeral services are scheduled to take place at the family residence for Rabbi Isaac Brill which will be attended by his four children – Jacques, Ray, Nellie and Jessie Brill.


1936: Eighty-five Jewish refugees from Germany arrived in New York aboard the Cunard White Star Line Berenaria.


1936: “Twenty-five more German intellectuals, led by Arnold Zweig” who “was denounced as Jewish author” “were denationalized today by order of Dr. Frick in agreement with…the Foreign Minister on the ground that they had violated their duty of loyalty to the Reich…”


1936: It was announced today that “the United Palestine Appeal will be opened in New York City” on March 4” with a tea at the Hotel Astor.”


1936: A dispatch from Berlin “today reported that an agreement has been reached between the German and Netherlands Governments enabling Netherlands citizens of Jewish descent living in Germany to be repatriated with part of their capital in order to be in a position to start anew in the Netherlands.”


1937: Benjamin Winter announced today that “Professor Albert Einstein has accepted the honorary chairmanship of the American Appeal for the Jews in Poland” which is trying to raise one million dollars in the United States to provide relief for destitute Polish Jews. (Editor’s Note – Due to the Shoah we often lose sight of the fact that during the 1930’s many countries in Europe, including Poland, were in the grip of a virulent anti-Semitism that had nothing to do with Hitler)


1937: In an address at the annual luncheon of the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress, Fiorello La Guardia suggested that Hitler’s effigy be placed in a chamber of horrors at the World’s Fair.


1938: Oil is discovered in Saudi Arabia. The connection with Jewish history should be self-evident.


1938(30th of Adar I, 5698): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1938: Sholem (Samuel) Schwarzbard a Bessarabian-born Jewish poet and anarchist, known primarily for the assassination of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura who wrote poetry in Yiddish under the pen name of Baal-Khaloymes (English: The Dreamer) passed away today in Cape Town, South Africa.



1938: The Palestine Post reported from London that the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Ormsby Gore, assured the House of Commons that Palestinian police, assisted by British troops, were doing everything possible to contain the deeply seated and widespread Arab terror.


1938: The Palestine Post reported that Yacoub Marata, an Arab police corporal, and Alfred Koblenz, a Jewish constable, were shot and badly wounded by Arab terrorists at a Haifa market.


1938: The Palestine Post reported that the Haifa Port inaugurated a new, extensive cargo jetty.


1939: Cardinal Pace III, a long time semi-supporter of the German government, became Pope Pius XII. He was later greatly criticized for his passive acceptance of the Final Solution.


 


1939: Thirty-three year old Jenny Marx who was caring for ailing parents wrote to her younger brother Max who had taken refuge in Palestine today that, “It makes little sense to you about the same subject over and over, yet there is nothing else to write about.  I am so sired of life that I have often wished it would end.  In your case it is quie different.  You are held in esteem and you have a fantastic position, for which I congratulate you.  You enjoy life.  In my case all is finished. The tragedy with our parents, the long separation from you, everybody loaded down with sorrows, so interest in life is not great.” (Editor’s Note – In a decision that we might not understand, men were thought to be a greater risk in the 3rdReich so women stayed behind when family matters forced them to make such a decision. Jenny’s engagement in April to Sigmund Mayer, “a plain workman, baker and confection” brought her renewed hope.”


1939: “The first contingent of about 500 Jews who had been expelled from Danzig left early this morning for an unknown destination. In a departure marked by “distressing farewell scenes” the contingent of men, women and children were taken to a German railway station by a convoy of buses and trucks. There are unconfirmed rumors that these homeless Jews will pass through Hungary to Constanta, Romania where a ship is waiting to take them to Tel Aviv. The Jews face the double whammy of the Nazis and the Arab inspired limits on Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel since no valid visas are available for this wretched contingent.


1940: When hundreds of Jewish women took to the streets of Tel Aviv today chanting “anti-land law slogans,” the British military commander issued an order imposing a total curfew that was scheduled to last for three days until.


1941: Ice cream parlor owner Ernst Cahn was executed by a Nazi firing squad today in the Netherlands.


1941(4th of Adar, 5701): Adolph Schwartz died from a heart attack today at the age of 74.



1943(26thof Adar, 5703): Betty Diana Aarons passed away today after which she was interred in the Rainham Jewish Cemetery.


1943(26th of Adar I, 5703): Judikje Simons, later Judikje Themans- Simons, died today at Sobibor, together with her husband, Bernard, their five-year-old daughter Sonja, and their three-year-old son Leon. Simons was one of six Jewish members of the Dutch Ladies’ Gymnastic Team that won the Olympic title at Amsterdam in 1928, Simons, who ran an orphanage with her husband in the city of Utrecht that housed 83 children, had apparently been warned that the Nazis were heading her way, and was offered a hiding place by Dutch friends. However, Simons had no intention of forsaking her orphans, sealing her fate, and that of almost all of the children.


1944: “The Iraqi Government today announced through the Arab News Agency that its protest to Washington with regard to the Palestine resolution “has had satisfactory results.” (As reported by JTA)


1944: Birthdate of Yoram Jerrold Kessel, the South African born Israeli journalist and correspondent who gain fame with American audiences as the CNN correspondent reporting on the Middle East from Jerusalem.


1944: “The Jewish Agency for Palestine today announced that David Ben-Gurion, chairman of its executive, has withdrawn his resignation and resumed work in the Agency’s headquarters.” (As reported by JTA)


1944: Birthdate of Fred Goldsmith “the 1992 Sports Illustrated National NCAA Football Coach of the Year and the 1994 Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year Award.”


1944: Emir Abdullah Ibn Husseein, ruler of Transjordan…cabled a bitter protest to President Roosevelt against the pending Senate resolution reaffirming United States approval of Palestine as Jewish national homeland.”


1944: Jermie Adler, a Jewish father of three who was hiding in village outside of Liege, Belgium became so ill that he checked himself into a hospital today. “While he was in the hospital, the Gestapo arrested his wife, two daughters, and a nephew.” Only his oldest daughter survived the war.


1945: The Jewish Infantry Brigade was activated as part of the British Army. Jewish military groups fought with distinction during World War II. These soldiers were drawn from the Yishuv - the Jewish community in what was then called Palestine. At the end of the war, some of these soldiers participated in daring rescue activities that brought survivors of the Holocaust from central Europe, through Italy and eventually to ships bound for Palestine. Military training gained by the Jewish troops proved useful when the Israelis converted from the small military unit tactics of the pre-Independence period to the larger operations necessary to defeat the invading armies they faced in 1948 and 1949.


 


1945: Eri Jabotinsky, son of the late Zionist Revisionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, was released after two days in custody for interrogation concerning his “activities.”


1945: Over two thousand Jews from Ebensee, a sub-camp of Mauthausen were sent from Gross Rosen. Of them 49 died in the trains on the way and 182 more died upon arrival.


1946: The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, parent body of Reform Judaism in the United States, was urged today by Dr. Maurice N. Eisendrath, executive director, "to disassociate itself from dogmatic anti-Zionism."


1946: In an article about the appropriate ways to rehabilitate disabled WW II GI’s Dr. Howard Rusk reported that the number of “working-age males, who are either unemployable or marginally employable because of handicaps exceed, numerically, the Jewish population.” Such a comparison would indicate that the average American knows how many Jews live in the United States.


1947: Having left Poland for Paris in 1946 and Paris for the United States in February 1947, future novelis Louis Begley and his family arrived in New York City.



1947: The four hundred ton “motor ship Susanna” left Italy carrying 800 Jewish refugees who hope to avoid the British blockade and find a home in Palestine.


1947: The Irgun gave proof to its announcement that open warfare exists between its forces and the British by attacking British military installations in Haifa with a barrage of 500 hand grenades.


1947: The Haganah accused the British of “deliberately destroying the Jewish economy” by imposing martial law on “thousands of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with terror or crime.”


1947: Lieutenant General G.H.A. MacMillan announced that the word “terrorist” would no longer be used to describe those Jews attacking the British in Palestine. The term had acquired a sense of “glamour” which should not be ascribed to people he said were no better than the gangsters from Al Capone’s Chicago.


1947: Lazar Kagnovich began serving as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine.


1948: “Black Bart,” a cowboy biopic filmed by cinematographer Irving Glassberg was released in the United States today.


1948: The executive board of the Parent-Teacher Association at DeWitt Clinton High School registered their protest “again the banning of Gentleman’s Agreement and Focus.


1948: “Pleading for a supreme for effort at conciliation, Canada today called on the five permanent members of the Security Council” – US, UK, USSR, France and China – “to make a last-minute attempt to find an agreed solution to the Palestine problem.”


1949: “At the Theatre” published down provided review of “Two Blind Mice” starring Melvyn Douglas.



1949: In Brooklyn, discount store owner and stock broker Israel Chernow and Ruth Chernow, a bookkeeper gave birth to Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer Ronald “Ron” Chernow whose subjects have included George Washington, J.P. Morgan and Warburg family.


1950(14th of Adar, 5710): Purim


1950: In the San Fernando Valley, California, Elaine Edelman, and Jay Ziskin gave birth to Laura Ziskin, the producer of “Spider Man” and “Pretty Woman.”


1950: In Jordan the cabinet has reportedly resigned because it was opposed to the non-aggression pact which has been secretly negotiated with Israel. King Abdullah is said to be the major supporter of the agreement.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that seven infiltrators from Jordan were killed in two separate incidents on Israeli territory. The Soviet ambassador to Egypt, Semyon Kozirev, invited the former mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, to visit Moscow. The increased food rations for Pesach included an extra 100 grams of meat, a welcome addition to the monthly rate of 200 grams, and 290 grams of olive oil to every consumer. (As you can see from this entry, even without the attacks from Arab terrorists and the threat of attack from the surrounding Arab nations, the early settlers of Israel had a rough time of it.)


1954: “Rose Marie” an adaptation of the 1924 operetta with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II with a script by George Froeschel and directed by Mervyn LeRoy premiered in Chicago, Illinois today.


1956: Morocco gained its independence from France. "One of the first actions of the government was to order the Jewish agency to halt its emigration activities."


1956: After 461 performances, the curtain came on the original Broadway production of “Plain and Fancy” with a book co-authored by Joseph Stein and music by Albert Hague in which Bea Arthur understudied for the role of “Ruth.”


 


1957(30th of Adar I, 5717): Controversial Holocaust survivor Rudolf (Israel) Kastner, the man who negotiated with Eichmann to save Hungarian Jews was shot by by Zeev Eckstein, 24, a Holocaust survivor, and died of his injuries nine days later.


1959: Birthdate of Ira Glass, host of public radio’s “This American Life.”


1960: U.S. premiere of Home From the Hill with a screenplay by Irving Ravetch, the son of a rabbi and his wife Harriet Frank, Jr.


1961(15thof Adar, 5721): Shushan Purim


1961: Hassan II becomes King of Morocco. When he came to the throne, Hassan II had a reputation as a playboy. Nobody would have predicted the positive role he would play in relations with Israel. The following story written when the King died in 1999 describes the impact of the Moroccan Monarch. “Tens of thousands of Israelis are mourning the death of Morocco's King Hassan II, a man they considered "their" king, leaving them homesick for the land their families left. Young Israelis of Moroccan origin placed the Moroccan flag on top of their cars, while others displayed huge posters in their homes of the king, who died last Friday of a heart attack at the age of 70. The Moroccan Jewish community in Israel declared a seven-day period of mourning for the king. A delegation led by Israeli President Ezer Weizman, Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres joined 30 other world leaders, including President Clinton and Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat, in remembering a man who played a vital role in bridging the gap between the Jewish state and the Arab world. In a condolence message, Weizman called Hassan a "true partner in the peace process.” Attending the funeral, Barak called Hassan a "great leader" and a "farsighted man, a friend to the governments of Israel in their voyage toward peace with the Arab people." In Israel, Moroccan Jews have traditionally supported parties, such as Likud or Shas that espouse hard-line policies toward the Arab countries. That is partly to compensate for the fact that they felt "Ashkenazi Jews regarded them as Jewish Arabs," according to Haim Shiran, director of Inbal, an ethnic center in Tel Aviv. He said anti-Arab political views were a kind of self-defense mechanism, a way to distinguish themselves from the Arabs. But when it came to the king's death, the reaction of Israel's estimated 300,000 Moroccan Jews appeared similar to Morocco's Arab residents, many of whom consider the king to be a direct descendent of the Muslim prophet Mohammad. "I know that it may sound ridiculous," said Shiran, "but when on Friday, I saw the Moroccan announcer on television announcing the death of the king, I broke out in tears." Hassan took power in 1961 after the death of his father, Mohammed V. When Hassan ascended to the throne, he was an unknown quantity with a reputation as a playboy. But ruling with a deft mixture of pro-Western democracy and traditional autocracy, he earned the respect of his people. He also survived several coup attempts. Mohammed V was widely credited with having saved Morocco's Jews from deportation during World War II, and Hassan continued the philo-Semitic policies of his father. Although there was an outbreak of anti-Jewish incidents following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Jewish community was generally safe under the protection of both Mohammed and Hassan. When tens of thousands of Jews left Morocco in a massive aliyah that began after Morocco gained its independence in 1956 -- and accelerated after Hassan II gained power -- it was due as much to Zionism and a desire for economic opportunity as it was to a fear of anti-Semitism. Along with the recently deceased King Hussein of Jordan, Hassan was considered a moderate in the Middle East. During his 38-year reign, he discreetly, and later openly, promoted ties with Israel at a time when most of the Arab world rejected such contact. In the 1967 and 1973 Middle East wars, he contributed only a nominal number of troops to support Arab forces. His mediation efforts, including secret meetings with Israeli intelligence officials and political leaders, helped pave the way for the 1978 Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt. Hassan also played a role in preparing for the 1991 Madrid peace conference and welcomed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in September 1993, making Morocco the first Arab nation outside of Egypt to officially host an Israeli leader. In 1994, Hassan hosted the first Middle East regional economic conference, which included Israel, in Casablanca. After the euphoria of the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel was allowed to establish a consular office in Rabat, and an estimated 40,000 Israeli tourists visited Morocco in 1995 and 1996. Even in death Hassan provided an opportunity for Israeli and Arab officials to meet -- in this case, an unprecedented exchange among Barak, Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Speaking in French, Bouteflika asked Levy whether Israel was serious about peace, to which the Moroccan-born minister responded, "Yes." Levy added that it was in Israel's interest to do so and was ready to work hard to achieve it. Turning to Barak, Bouteflika said his country was willing to help in any way it could.


 


1962: Art Heyman led Duke to victory over South Carolina in the ACC tournament semi-finals. (As reported by Bob Wechsler)


1966: “The Lion in Winter” a play depicting the lives of Henry II and his wife Eleanor written by James Goldman opened on Broadway at the Ambassador Theatre.


1967: Stan Lee was a special guest on WBAI’s broadcast of “Will Success Spoil Spirderman?”


1968: Birthdate of  Scott David Radinsky, the native of Glendale, CA who spent eleven years in the majors as a pitcher and pursued a career as a “punk rocker.”


1968: Iraqi Prime Minister, Tahir Yahya, instituted a law that impoverished the Jews. "Jews couldn't sell their cars or furniture. All licenses given to Jewish pharmacists were canceled" and their pharmacies were ordered to close. "All commercial officers in Baghdad had to dismiss their Jewish employees. Muslim owned businesses were warned not to engage in commerce with Jews.


1969: In a Los Angeles, California court, Sirhan Sirhan admits that he killed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. According to his diaries, he killed Kennedy because he was a supporter of Israel.


1970: Thirty-two “local, independent groups in the U.S. join together to create the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews…”


1970: Gabriel Oliver Koppell “was elected an Independent to the New York State Assembly.”


1971: After opening on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre, today “Man of La Mancha” a musical adaptation of Dale Wasserman’s “non-musical 1959 teleplay I, Don Quixote” with music by Mitch Leigh moved to the Eden Theatre.


1972(17thof Adar, 5732): Seventy-seven year old Rabbi Morris Silverman, best known for the creation of the black book affectionately known as the “Silverman Prayer Book” passed away today.



1973: Senator Guy Gillette passed away. While serving in the Senate during World War II, Gillette spoke out in favor of caring for the Jewish refugees in Europe and in favor of Jewish aspirations in Palestine. After he lost his bid for re-election he served as “president of the American League for a Free Palestine, serving until the Committee's work ended with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.” [Why a senator from Iowa, a state with a miniscule Jewish population, would adopt such views is a mystery awaiting further study.]


1974(9thof Adar, 5734): Fifty-eight year old Bernard Phillips, the native of Minneapolis who earned PhD at Yale and became a Professor of Philosophy and Religion passed away today.


1978: The Jerusalem Post reported from Washington that US President Jimmy Carter warned that “the abandonment” of UN Resolution 242 by any of the parties in the Middle East “would put us back many months or years.” Observers, however, noted that on the eve of the expected Carter-Begin summit meetings, the American position on many issues was seen to be much more supportive of Egypt than of Israel. In Jerusalem, the 91-year-old Notre Dame Hospice, uninhabited for years, had quietly begun a new life as a modern hostel for pilgrims.


1978(24thof Adar I, 5738): Seventy-two year old “American industrial psychologist, executive, civil rights leader, and philanthropist” Alfred J. Marrow passed away.



1980: In “Tens of Thousands of People Attend Funeral of Yigal Allon” Yitzhak Shargil described the final ceremony honoring the fallen Israeli leader.



1981: Israeli planes raided Palestinian positions northeast of Tyre today, according to the Lebanese radio. The raid came a day after rockets from Lebanese territory struck several homes in the Galilee town of Qiryat Shemona today, wounding three people.


1981(27thof Adar I, 5741): Eighty-three year old Hugh Harris the educator and journalist who was the brother of Leslie Julius Harris and the son Rabb John Solomon Harris passed away today.


1983(18th of Adar, 5743): Hungarian born author Arthur Koestler passed away. Two of his more famous works were Darkness at Noon and Thirteenth Tribe, which highlighted his view of the role the Khazars played in the life of European Jewry.


1985(10thof Adar I, 5745): Seventy-one year old Sándor Scheiber who served as director of the Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest from 1950 until his death passed away today.


1985: After “767 performances and 37 previews” the curtain came down on the original Broadway production of “My One and Only” a George and Ira Gershwin musical.


1986: The final performance of a revival of “Jubilee” a musical with a book by Moss Hart is scheduled take place at the Town Hall in New York.


1987(2nd of Adar, 5747): Multi-talented performer Danny Kaye passed away. Born David Kominsky in 1913, the red-headed comedian and vocalist enjoyed success in a variety of entertainment formats. His hit movies included The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Hans Christian Andersen. He also starred in his own television variety show. He used his fame for the betterment of mankind serving as a champion for UNICEF when that organization was dedicated to welfare of the world's children without consideration to politics. (As reported by Eric Pace)



1987: Israeli Air Force Colonel Aviem Sella was indicted today for his alleged role in the Pollard spy operation.


1988(14thof Adar, 5748): Purim


1988(14thof Adar, 5748): Sixty-nine year old Polish-born Mexican violinist Henryk Szeryng who donated his Stradivarius “King David” violin to Jerusalem in 1972 in honor of 25 years of Israeli independence passed away today.


1988: Today the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Committee protested the designation of Dr. Inamullah Khan, secretary general of the Pakistan-based World Moslem Congress, as the winner of the $369,000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion because he has been associated with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel causes. The league said Dr. Khan and the congress were linked to anti-Semitic groups, including those that deny the Holocaust occurred, and that Dr. Khan had rejected Israel's right to exist. Dr. V. A. Hamdani, the congress's representative at the United Nations, where the Islamic group has observer status, called the league's complaint a ''rehash'' of old charges. He said his organization had not supported denials of the Holocaust. ''To my knowledge,'' he added, ''we have never denied Israel's right to exist.''


1991(17th of Adar, 5751): Arthur Murray passed away at the age of 95. Born Arthur Teichman, Murray became "America's dance instructor" through a string of dance studios and a hit television show featuring his wife and partner, Catherine. (As reported by Eric Pace)



1991: As the war with Iraq came to an end Air France is scheduled to resume service to Tel Aviv today.


1991: “THEATER; Music? Lyrics? He Can Get Them for You” published today described the career of Harold Rome



1993(10th of Adar, 5753): Albert Sabin passed away at the age of 86. Born in 1903, Sabin developed an oral polio vaccine which supplanted the earlier Salk Vaccine. Sabin was 86 at the time of his death.


1995: “Roommates” a comedy based on a story by Max Apple who co-wrote the screenplay, with music by Elmer Bernstein and starring Peter Falk was released today in the United States.


1995: Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb's She Who Dwells Within, which she describes as "a practical guide to nonsexist Judaism," was published. In 2004, Gottlieb left the pulpit to become director of a California organization dedicated to interfaith work.


1995: Steven T. Katz, “the man chosen to lead the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum resigned today “citing recent news reports over his misrepresentation of his scholarly accomplishments and a violation of leave policy while a faculty member at Cornell University.”


1996(12thof Adar, 5756): In Jerusalem a Palestinian terrorist boarded a No. 18 bus, detonated an explosive belt murdering 19 people and wounding another seven.


1996 (12th of Adar, 5756): Ninety-one year old Dr. Meyer Schapiro, university professor emeritus at Columbia University, multi-disciplinary critic and historian, galvanic teacher, lifelong radical and for more than 50 years a pre-eminent figure in the intellectual life of New York, died at the Greenwich Village house that had been his home for more than 60 years.


1998(5thof Adar, 5758): Eighty-two year old Fred Friendly, the CBS broadcast executive who teamed with Edward R. Morrow to make television news a meaningful part of the 20th century passed away today.



2001(8thof Adar, 5761): Parashat Terumah and Shabbat Zachor


2001(8thof Adar, 5761): Ninety-one year old Deborah (Pessin) Margolis, the widow of Dr. Benjamin D. Margolis passed away today.


2002: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin; translated by Roger Keys and Angela Keys and Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire by Michael T. Kaufman


2002(19thof Adar, 5762:Capt. Ariel Hovav (25), Lt.(res.) David Damelin (29), 1st Sgt.(res.) Rafael Levy (42), Sgt.-Maj.(res.) Avraham Ezra (38), Sgt.-Maj.(res.) Eran Gad (24), Sgt.-Maj.(res.) Yochai Porat (26), Sgt.-Maj.(res.) Kfir Weiss (24), Sergei Birmov (33), Vadim Balagula (32) and  Didi Yithak (66) were murdered by Fatah terrorists at an IDF roadblock.


2003: Natan Sharansky began serving as Jerusalem Affairs Minister.


2005(22nd of Adar I, 5765): Max M. Fisher, the Detroit oil and real estate magnate known for his philanthropy and for the advice he gave Republican presidents on the Middle East and Jewish issues, passed away at his home in Franklin, a Detroit suburb at the age of 96. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/national/04fisher.html


2006(3rd of Adar, 5766): William Herskovic who was a Holocaust survivor and humanitarian passed away at the age of 91. His escape from Auschwitz in 1942 and early eyewitness testimony inspired Belgium's opposition to Nazi Germany during World War II, and alerted the Resistance to the atrocities that were taking place in the concentration camps. Because of Herskovic's escape and testimony, hundreds of lives were saved. Herskovic is also the founder of Bel Air Camera, a veritable landmark in Los Angeles, which he established in 1957, and has received numerable awards for his philanthropy.


2006(3rdof Adar, 5766): Eighty-three year old “Scottish poet, songwriter and humorist Ivor Cutler (born Isadore Cutler) passed away today.





2007: Shabbat Zachor


2007: In the evening, Jews fulfill the mitzvah of hearing the Megillah as Purim begins


.2008: This evening, Israel pulled its troops out of the Gaza Strip marking the end of operation Hot Winter.


2008: Agudas Achim, the Shulman Hillel and Chabad Lubavitch of Iowa City sponsor “An Evening in Tribute to Michael Balch” (devoted member of the Iowa City Jewish Community and Professor Emirtus of Economics at Iowa University) featuring an address by Rabbi Dov Greenberg from Stanford University entitled “Death and Afterlife in Judaism.”


2008(26thof Adar I, 5768): Eighty-six year old artist William Brice the son of Fannie Brice and Nick Arnstein passed away today in California.



2009: David Polonsky discusses “Waltz With Bashir” at the Society of Illustrators. David Polonsky is the art director and chief illustrator for Waltz With Bashir, written, produced and directed by Ari Folman.


2009: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research presents a lecture by Dr. David Berger, author of The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference, entitled “The Lubavitcher Rebbe as Messiah: Turning Point in Judaism?” in which he will examine whether the Lubavitch messianic movement represents a fundamental transformation of Judaism or is merely a passing development of little moment.


2009: The Believers, Zoë Heller’s latest novel appears in American bookstores.


2009: Hillary Clinton makes her first visit to Israel as Secretary of State meeting with a variety of Israeli leaders.


2009: A press release issued today confirmed that Julius Genachowski was President Obama’s choice to serve as Chairman of the Federal Communication Commission.


2010: The Jewish Women's Archive’s tour of Santa Fe is scheduled to begin today.


2010: Israeli musicians Asaf Avidan &cellist Hadas Kleinman of Asaf Avidan and the Mojos leading rock/folk band are scheduled to perform at the City Winery in New York City.


2010: In Columbus, Ohio, Congregation Tifereth Israel is scheduled to host “Interfaith Study of Genesis” in conjunction with First Congregational Church and Noor Islamic Center.


2010: After years of drought-like conditions that saw the water level of the Dead Sea plummet by 15 meters, this winter the water level rose by 8 centimeters, the Water Authority said today.


2010: Canadian businessman and Brandeis graduate Leonard Asper stepped down as Canwest CEO today.


 


2010: A documentary entitled “Harlan – In the Shadow of ‘Jew Suss’” opened today in Manhattan



2011: The Wiener Library, “the world’s oldest Holocaust memorial institution,” is scheduled to sponsor an exclusive gala fund raising event that will feature a recital by Andras Schiff and a talk by Misha Aster about the Berlin Philharmonic under the Third Reich.


2011: Amit Peled and Dina Vainshtein are scheduled to perform at Symphony Space in New York City.


2011: Today Prime Minister Netanyahu met with White House senior advisor Dennis Ross, who is in the country with a team of Middle East experts – including Fred Hoff and Mara Rudman from US envoy George Mitchell's team – for talks.


2011: Today, Canadian Historian Catherine Chatterley, who has said that “the accusation that Zionism is racist and imperialist by nature is as old as Israel” wrote an editorial for the National Post outlining the history of Israel Apartheid Week and its relationship to the BDS movement


2011: The 7th Annual Charlotte, NC Jewish Film Festival opened today.


2011(28th of Adar I, 5771): Holocaust survivor Gina Borchardt Nencel passed away today in Israel at the age of 100.


2011: In “Yankees remember late baseball author Harvey Dorfman” Marc Carig described the impact that the Jewish sports psychologist had on the National Pastime.



2012: A conference entitled "One State Conference: Israel/Palestine and the One-State Solution” hosted by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government is scheduled to open in Cambridge Mass.



2012: “Mahler on the Couch” is scheduled to be shown at the Denver Jewish Film Festival sponsored by the Mizel Arts and Culture Center


2012: “Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women” at Florida Atlantic University’s Jewish Kultur Festival in Boca Raton, Fl


.2012: “Camera Obsucra” is schedule to be shown at Temple Beth Israel’s Fresno Jewish Film Festival in Fresno, CA


2012: “Ahead of Time” is scheduled to be shown at Congregation Beth Israel Judea in San Francisco, CA.


2012: “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is scheduled to be shown at Congregation Kerem Shalom in Concord, MA.


2013: “My Name is Asher Lev,” Aaron Posner’s dramatic adaptation of Chaim Potok’s novel of the same name is scheduled to have its final performance tonight at the Westside Theatre.


2013: The Maccabeats are scheduled to perform at West Side Institutional Synagogue


2013: An evening concert is scheduled tonight as part of the Preliminary Program for Jewish Music in New Orleans hosted by Tulane University.


2013: The AIPAC Policy Conference is scheduled to open in Washington, DC


2013: Rebekka Helford and Bruce Bierman are scheduled to lead the Klezmer Jam Session and Dance at The Talking Stick in Venice, CA.


2013:A young couple expecting their first child was on their way to a hospital early Sunday when the car they were riding in was hit, killing them both, but their baby boy was born prematurely and survived, authorities said.


2013: Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, opened the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference with an appeal for pro-Israel outreach to African Americans, Latinos and Muslims, and others.


2013: In “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking.” Eric Lichtblau lets us know that the worst event in Jewish history was even worse than we had thought it was.


2013: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Hearing Builtby Mark Russ Federman the grandson of the founder who made each trip to his store a most memorable occasion for two Jews from Iowa.


2013: In New York City, the City Winery is scheduled to host a Kosher Wine Tasting


2013(21stof Adar, 5773): Ninety-one year old Abe Baum the leader of ill-fated Task Force Baum in WW II passed away today.



 


2014(1stof Adar II, 5774): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


2014(1stof Adar II, 5774): Eighty-three year old physician and author Sherwin B Nuland passed away today. (As reported by Denise Gellene)



2014: “Women of the Wall founder Bonna Devora Haberman attended a Women of the Wall prayer service today.


2014: The HEA All-Judaic & Israeli Art and Jewelry Festival is scheduled to take place in Denver, CO.


2014: David Broza is scheduled to appear in concert at the AIPAC Policy Conference.


2014: “Master of a Good Name” and “Nothing Old About This Testament” are scheduled to be shown at the 24th Jewish Film Festival.


2014: Shelter Studious is scheduled to host a reading of “Suddenly a Knock at the Door” by Robin Goldin based on stories by Etgar Keret


2014: In London, JW3 is scheduled to co-sponsor a showing of “Flash Faith.”


2014: Senator John McCain, US Secretary Jack Lew and Senator Chuck Shumer addressed the AIPAC Policy Confernece with each of them using the “Jewish issues” to promote their American domestic political agenda – a point that apparently was lost to the attendees who mistake pandering for policy.


2014: “Israeli aircraft fired at Gaza terrorists (mortally wounding one) as they were preparing to launch rockets at southern Israel.


2014: “France’s Jews demand the election of new chief rabbi (the post had been filled by two interim chief rabbis since April 2013), in a letter that cites the need of a leader “to express the voice of Judaism during the difficult period we are experiencing.”


2014: Some 20 Israelis who were making their way to India today found themselves for a short time in Tehran


2015: For two hours this morning, students at Oxford (UK) are scheduled to have a chance to make hamantaschen while raising money for The Gatehouse and Camp Simcha.


2015: In a display of cultural diversity the Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia is scheduled to offer programs on “Jews in Sports” and “The Evolution of the Passover Seder.”


2015: Marc Caplan, 2014-15 Cahnman Senior Scholar at CJH, is scheduled to present his groundbreaking research on Jewish modernity in conjunction with a screening of Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron at the Center for Jewish History.


2015: Having created crisis atmosphere in relations between Israel and the United States Prime Minister delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress where he “argued that the proposed nuclear deal being negotiated with Iran will lead inexorably to a nuclear-armed Iran and war in the Middle East.” (JTA) 


2016: “Remember” directed by Atom Egoyan is scheduled to be shown for the last time at the UK Jewish Film Festival.


2016: JCC Manhattan is scheduled to host “Shulamit,a new opera with music and libretto by Dina Pruzhansky”


2016: “Strong ties between Israel and US will be needed to confront the “instability in the region,” according to Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., who met in Tel Aviv” today. (As reported by Judah Ari Gross)


2016: Screening of Three Episodes of the Israeli TV Show Fauda is scheduled to take place at the Ninth Annual Ring Family Wesleyan University Israeli Film Festival.


2017: Fifty-one year old author Amy Krouse Rosenthal “announced that she was terminally ill with ovarian cancer, by way of a New York Times"Modern Love" essay” which “was in the form of a dating profile for her husband Jason, to help him remarry after her death.”


2017: Today thirty-one year old Juan Thompson of St. Louis, “a reporter for a news website was charged on Friday with making more than a half-dozen bomb threats against Jewish community centers, schools and a Jewish history museum, federal authorities said.”


 2017: “Hautey: Memory of Fire” “a new Yiddish opera composed by iconic Klexmatics trumpeter Frank London” “based on an epic poem written in 1931…by Oscar Pinis” is scheduled to have its inaugural performance in Havana, Cuba.


2017: Penultimate day for New Yorkers and out of town visitors to view “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda” on view at the United Nations headquarters.


2017:  The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host Shabbat evening dinner.


2018(16 of Adar, 5778): Parashat Ki Tissa; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/


2018: Jack and Jennifer Benjamin, Jr.,John Haspel and Amy Gainsburgh-Haspel and Rob and Pamela Steeg are scheduled to be honored this evening in New Orleans at Temple Sinai’s Spring Gala.


2018: Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan is scheduled to perform this evening at the 92nd Street Y.


 


 


 


 


 

This Day, March 4, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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March 4


457BCE(1st of Nisan, 3303): According to chapter 7, verse 9 of the Book of Ezra, Ezra and his followers left Babylonia for Jerusalem


1193: Saladin, the great Moslem leader, passed away.  Among Saladin’s many accomplishments was the re-taking of Jerusalem from the Crusaders and his subsequent defeat of Richard the Lionhearted.  Saladin had begun his leadership career in Egypt where Maimonides served as physician to his court.  There is some question as to whether Maimonides provided medical services to Saladin or to his brother-in-law and his entourage. 


1152: Frederick Barbarossa was elected Roman-German king.  Born in 1123, Barbarossa or Frederick I was Holy Roman Emperor for forty years.  He was slated to lead the Third Crusade along with Phillip of France and Richard the Lion-Hearted.  Unfortunately, Barbarossa drowned before he could help lead the Crusade.  From the Jewish point of view, unfortunately is the correct word to use in describing his death.  Unlike other Crusaders, Barbarossa sought to protect the Jews. He warned local priests and monks not to preach against the Jews.  He told the Diet (Parliament) that anybody who killed a Jew would forfeit his own life.  Thanks to Frederick's efforts, German bishops threatened those who attacked Jews with excommunication.  As a Jewish commentator of that time wrote, "Frederick defended us with all his might and enabled us to live among our enemies, so that no one harmed the Jews."


1215: King John of England makes an oath to the Pope as a crusader to gain the support of Innocent III.  While they may have been odds over many issues, the two leaders both held firm to the concept of allowing the Jews to exist, but in a state of humiliation.  In 1210, John imprisoned the Jews of Bristol and demanded 66,000 in ransom as the price of their freedom.  To move the process along, John reportedly had the teeth of the prisoners extracted one at a time until they agreed to the payment. Such was his treatment of the Jews, that Barons included special language about the treatment of the Jews in the Magna Carta. The Fourth Lateran Council over which Innocent actively presided adopted several cannons attacking Jews including the denying them the right to hold office and the requirement to wear distinctive dress. 


1277: “Emperor Rudolph of Hapsburg granted a charter of rights to the Jews of Prussia.” P 140


1349:  Birthdate of Prince Henry the Navigator.  The Portuguese prince earned his sobriquet and place in history for supporting ever more ambitious efforts to explore the uncharted waters of the Atlantic Ocean and beyond.  His efforts were financed and encouraged by the family of Don Judah Abarbanel a wealthy refugee from Spanish persecution who served as financer and confident to two generations of Portuguese monarchs.


1386: Władysław II Jagiełło (Jogaila) is crowned King of Poland. The situation of the Jews in Poland had already begun to deteriorate prior to his kingship.  In the middle of the century, the Jews were blamed for the Black Plague and attacked by the countrymen.  Under Wladislaus II and his successors the first extensive persecutions of the Jews in Poland commenced, persecutions which the monarch did not act to stop.


1493: According to some records, today Columbus arrived in Lisbon from which he sent the letter that described the results of his first voyage. The letter was addressed to Luis de Santangel, the converso who, as finance minister, had convinced the Spanish monarchs to finance the voyage.


1524: In Cairo, Mohamed Bey freed the Jews who had been imprisoned by the viceroy Ahmed Schaitan on the day on which he planned to kill them.  Ahmed had rebelled against the Sultan and when a Jewish leader, Abraham de Castro, exposed the plot, Ahmed responded by demanding a ransom from the Jews of Cairo and then imprisoning them once they had brought him the money.  This day of deliverance is celebrated as the Purim of Cairo.


1648(8th of Adar): Rabbi Issachar Baer, author Arba’ah Hadashim passed away


1699: Jews of Lubeck, Germany, were expelled.


1743: Birthdate of Tuscan poet Solomon Fiorentino who wrote “Elegie” after the death of his wife Laura Gallico and was the father of Hebrew teacher Angiolo Fiortentino.


1791: Vermont is the 14th state to join the Union.  It is the first state to join the original 13 states.  Today Vermont boasts a vibrant, if small, Jewish community.  This includes houses of worship in at least half a dozen cities, a Chabad in Burlington and Hillel chapters at two of the state’s universities. 


1791: A Christian in Alsace was punished by the Church for lighting a fire for a Jew on Shabbat.


1791: Israel Jacobs of Pennsylvania took his seat as the first Jewish member of the United States House of Representatives.


1797: John Adams is sworn in as second President of the United States, succeeding George Washington.  This orderly transfer of power, including the acceptance of the outcome of elections, is a uniquely American gift to the world of political science.  At the national level, the U.S. failed to abide by this and the result was four violent years of Civil War.  There are those who would say that the Jewish people have been able to thrive in America because of the stability of the society and because of its respect for the rule of law as epitomized by this seemingly simple event.  Adams, like so many of his New England contemporaries was greatly influenced by his reading of what he called “the Old Testament.”  The images of George III as Pharaoh and the colonists as the modern day Israelites fighting tyranny provide a couple cover for what others might have called treason.  Adams was an early Zionist, writing to the Jewish leader Mordechai Manuel Noah, “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.”  For more about the views of our Second President on the Jewish people see http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/adams.html


1798: Catholic women were forced to do penance for kindling fire for Jews on Shabbat.
Either this is the same episode reported at two different times or being a "Shabbos Goy" was a big no-no among the Catholic hierarchy.


1799:Under cover of night, between the 3rd and the 4th of March, work commenced- the erecting of five batteries, four against the southern wall and one in support of the northern sector.13 The artillery park at Napoleon¹s command consisted only of field pieces, mostly of 12, 8, 6 and 3 "pouces" (=inches of 2.7 cm), of howitzers of 6 pouces and of 6-pouce mortars,14 since the heavy artillery had all been loaded for transfer to Acre bay onto the ships of the flotilla commanded by captain Standelet, and onto the freighters that had been collected for that purpose in the Egyptian harbors. Those ships were only just then commencing their journey north, without the means of contact with the land forces, and Napoleon was compelled to make do with the lighter ordnance at his command. However, he did not seem to have been unduly worried. Most probably, the outward appearance of these antiquated walls revived his confidence in the description of M. de Volney, who, in 1784, had called the ramparts of Jaffa "mere garden walls."


1820: Alexander I of Russia prohibited the employment of Christian servants by Jews.


1822(11th of Adar): Isaac Franks the American patriot from Philadelphia who served in the Continental Army passed away.


1826: In St. Thomas, Jacob and Leah Biaz gave birth to Sarah Henriquez Morón


1837(27th of Adar I, 5597): Parashat Vayakhel and Shabbat Shekalim


1837: Chicago receives its official charter by the state of Illinois. Jews first came to Chicago from Prussia, Austria, Bohemia and sections of modern-day Poland, fleeing oppression to settle in the Chicago area as early as 1832. Kehilat Anshe Mayriv (Congregation of the People of the West), Chicago's first Jewish congregation, was founded in 1847; in 1851 KAM built the city's first synagogue at Clark and Jackson streets, a site now occupied by the Kluczynski Federal Building. It was followed by B'nai Shalom, in 1852, and Chicago Sinai, the city's first Reform congregation, in 1861. The expansion of the Jewish community was slow but steady. In 1871, the Great Fire destroyed many residences near the downtown business district, forcing thousands of people to relocate. The more prosperous German Jews, who made up the majority, moved south along Michigan, Wabash and Indiana avenues, eventually settling in Washington Park, Kenwood, Hyde Park and South Shore; the Eastern European Jews moved west of the central business district in the vicinity of Maxwell Street. Between 1880 and 1900, a new wave of 55,000 Russian and Polish Jews crowded into the Maxwell Street market neighborhood. Yiddish was the language of choice. Dozens of Hebrew schools and Yiddish theaters were organized, and 40 Orthodox shuls were built within walking distance of Halsted and Maxwell streets. As successive waves of Jewish immigrants became settled and successful, the Jewish community began expanding. In addition to continued growth on the South Side, neighborhoods such as Lawndale and Douglas Park on the West Side and Albany Park, Humboldt Park, Lake View, Uptown and Edgewater on the North Side became vibrant Jewish communities. Many Chicago Jews today trace their roots in this city to one or more of these areas. 


1838: The first Sunday School for Jewish students, under the direction of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, opened today in Philadelphia, PA.


1839: In Württemberg, Germany, Bernhard Frankfurter, the son of Moses Levi Frankfurter and Mirjam Landauer, and his wife Esther Frank gave birth to Henriette Emma Frankfurter


1849: Austrian Jews were granted equal civil and political rights under the new constitution. The imperial government would renege on its promise and full rights would not be finally granted until 1867.


1853: Philip Phillips began serving as a U.S. Congressman representing Alabama’s 1stDistrict.


1855: After having been out of office for four years, David Yulee, the first Jew elected to the United States, began his second term in office today.


1857: Philadelphia Democrat Henry Myer Phillips began service as a member of the U.S. House Representatives


1857: In Charleston, SC, Rabbi Solomon Jacobs officiated at the wedding of Mr. Magnus of Rome, GA and Rebecca Alexander the youngest daughter of the late Abraham Alexander.


1858: Edmund Myer Tobias married Adeline Miriam Alexander today at “Bristol, (Avon), Somerset.”


1859(28thof Adar I, 5619): Sixty-six year old Frances Cohen, the daughter Hymen Cohen and the former Zipporah Isaacs passed away today in London.


1861: Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as the 16th President of the United States.  Lincoln sensitivity to Jewish can be seen in the way he handled the law that allowed Jews to serve as Chaplains and the aftermath of General Grant’s infamous order banning Jews from the area under his command.  But Lincoln’s greatest contribution to the welfare of the Jewish people was his successful effort to save “the last best hope of man” which has provided Jews with unprecedented opportunity.


1862: “From the African Coast” published today described the travels of the USS Saratoga through the waters of the South Atlantic including a stop at the island of St. Helena where the ship took on provisions. According to the author, the Jews on the island exploited the plight of the American naval vessel, selling spoiled and overpriced supplies and even exchanging money at rate that exploited the Americans. “The Jews of St. Helena took money out of us and tucked sour flour and bad rice into us, sold us Spanish dollars at 4s. 2d., and took them at 3s. 9d., was a caution, never to come again if we can help it. Even the common necessaries of life were in price luxuries -- for instance, beef, 60c. per pound; mutton, do.; butter, 55c. per pound; eggs, 5c. each, &c., &c.” [It is difficult to know who these Jews were.  During the 1820’s, Nathanial Isaacs uncle served on St. Helena as the counsel for France and Holland.Saul Solomon who converted to Christianity was born in St. Helena in 1817 but left to find fame and fortune in South Africa. “The few other St. Helena Jews who settled” on St. Helena “during Napoleon's banishment, the Gideon, the Moss, and the Isaacs families, were all related to” Solomon, and, like him “most of them drifted from Judaism.”1863(13th of Adar, 5623): Ta’anit Esther; Erev Purim


1863: A rumor from Jackson, Miss., says that a Jew has been arrested on the charge of offering to spike the guns at Port Hudson for $60,000.


1863: William Sprague completed his term as governor of Rhode Island and took his seat in the United States Senate representing his home state.  While in the Senate Sprague would explain away the suffering of the Jews of Romania as being the result of their taking away the lands and livelihood of the Christian, a pattern that he implied could be repeated in the United States.  Sprague’s words take on additional weight because he was not just an ordinary political hack. He was a successful businessman who supported Abraham Lincoln and was the son-in-law of Salmon Chase, the powerful Republican politician who served as Secretary of the Treasury and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.. 


1865: Birthdate of Lieutenant General Sir George Mark Watson Macdonogh, that rarity among British officers, “a Zionist sympathizer” who was a close enough friend of Chaim Weizmann, that Jewish leader discussed the possibility of having Herbert Samuel removed as British High Commissioner following the issuance of the report issued by the Haycroft Commission of Inquiry.


1866: An article published today entitled  “The Purim Ball: The Wonders or a Persian Temple-A Glimpse of the Glories of Babylon Fun, Frolic and Phantasmagoria” described the celebration of the Purim Ball in New York City which was “duly celebrated…with all the pomp, display an out-rivaling effectiveness which was promised for it by its promoters.


1869: William Seward who had served as Secretary of State under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson completed his service in this office following which he took a tour around the world which included a stop in Jerusalem and Palestine which he had first visited in 1859. Seward described in the Jews as “the builders and the founders of “ Jeruslaem.


1870: President U.S. Grant appointed Civil War hero Edward Selig Salomon governor of Washington Territory (the future state of Washington, not D.C.) 


1871: In France, Israël-Vita Lattès and Marie ép. Lattès gave birth to Eveline Bethsabée Lattès ép. Mayrargue the wife of Henri Daniel Mayrargue.


1871: Robert C. De Large, the son of black woman and Jewish man, began serving in the U.S. Representatives as a member from South Carolina’s 2nd district.  A Republican, he had served in the state legislature and as state land commissioner before being elected to Congress.


1872: In Tilsit, East Prussia, Abraham Weil, the son of Salomon Weil, and the former Berta Seligman gave birth to their son Karl Fischel.


1874(15th of Adar, 5634): Shushan Purim


1874: In Cincinnati, Ohio, Solomon and Caroline Fox gave birth to Lydia Mack


1874: “The Jews In Italy” published today contains a synopsys of an article by Dr. Berliner published in the Judische Presse. According to Dr. Berliner there are approximately 4,500 Jews living in Rome “most of who are destitute.”  There are 5 synagouges in Rome two of which follow the Sephardic (Spanish) rite and three of which follow the Italian rite. One of the synagogues dates backs to the time of Titus, the Roman who destroyed the Second Temple. 


1875: It was reported today that over 2,000 tickets have already been sold to the upcoming Hebrew Charity Ball sponsored by the Purim Association.


1875: William Sharon began serving as U.S. Senator from Nevada.  When he passed away ten years later, his recipients of his bequests included several California charities including those established by the Jewish community


1875(27th of Adar I, 5635): Rabbi Joseph Saul Nathanson of Lemberg, author of Ner Ma’aravi, a novaellae on the Jerusalem Talmud passed away



1876: Birthdate of Ferencz Dezso Weisz, the native of Budapest, who “went by the name of Theodore Weiss when the family was living in Appleton, Wisconsin” and who in 1893 as Theodore Hardeen Hardeen performed with Houdini at Coney Island as "The Brothers Houdini:


1877: “The Russian Army of the South” published today provides a detailed description of Kishinev, the city that is the headquarters of the major Russian unit under the Grand Duke that has been mobilized in the war against the Turks.  Kishinev has a population of 100,000, more than half of whom are Jews. [This is the same Kishinev that will be the site of future horrible Pogroms.]


1877:  Emile Berliner invented the microphone.  He would also invent the flat disc that replaced Edison’s cylinder and became the prototype for the record which would become the standard for the recording industry for the better part of a hundred years.


1877: Leopold Morse began serving as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts’s 4th district.


1878: The Great Synagogue at 187a Elizabeth Street in Sydney, Australia was consecrated today.


1879: It was reported today that the Purim Association will be sponsoring a fancy dress charity ball to be held later this week at the Academy of Music in New York City.


1879(9th of Adar, 5639): Leon Hyneman passed away. Born in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in 1808, he “was the author of "The Fundamental Principles of Science" and of several works on masonic subjects, the chief among them being "The Origin of Freemasonry" and "Freemasonry in England from 1567 to 1813." Hyneman was one of the members of the Jewish Publication Society of America. Among his eight children were Leona Hyneman who “under the stage name of "Leona Moss," became a talented actress. Another daughter was Alice Hyneman, authoress; born in Philadelphia Jan. 31, 1840; contributor to "The North American Review"; "The Forum"; "The Popular Science Monthly"; and the author of "Woman in Industry," a treatise on the work of woman in America, and of "Niagara," a descriptive record of the great cataract and its vicinity.


1879: Edwin Jonas took his seat as a United States Senator from Louisiana making him the third Jew to serve in “the upper chamber.”


1879: Edwin Einstein, a native of Cincinnati, began to serve as a member of the U.S. House Representatives from New York’s 7thCongressional District.


1881: William Sharon, who would bestow a bequest of $5,000 on the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of San Francisco, completed his term as service as a U.S. Senator from Nevada.


1881: James G. Fair who would bestow a bequest of $25,000 on the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of San Francisco, began his term as service as a U.S. Senator from Nevada.


1883: Leopold Morse began serving as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts’s 5th district.


1883: Julius Houseman began serving as a member of the U.S. House Representatives from Michigan’s 5th district.


1884: Arthur Sebag-Montefiore and Harriett Beddington gave birth to Charles to English stock-broker Charles Edward Sebag-Montefiore, the husband of Muriel Alice Ruth de Pass.


1885: Grover Cleveland who relied on Isidor Strauss the co-owner of R.H. Macy and member of Congress as a trusted advisor and whom he appointed as Ambassador to Turkey was inaugurated as 22ndPresident of the United States.


1885: Julius Houseman completed his service a member of the House of Representatives from Michigan’s 5th district.


1885: Charles Henry Grosvenor is elected to the House of Representatives from Ohio for the first time.  His career will last until 1907, but he will represent 3 different congressional districts.  During his career he will take part in several debates on immigration bills during which he said “he said he would not vote for a measure framed specially to restrict the entrance of the Russian Jews, for such a would be charged up to him as a vote against a  man on account of his religion.”


1885: Californian William W. Morrow, who would champion the cause of Adolph Kutner, formerly of Wierbchow, Russia who was afraid to return to his native land on business because of the Czar’s policies, began serving a member of the House of Representatives today.


1885: Joseph Kemp Toole, who would lay the cornerstone when construction was begun on Temple Emanu-El in Helena, Montana began serving as the Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives from Montana Territory’s At-large district today;


1885: Edwin Jonas, who failed to win re-election, competed his term as a United States Senator following which he was appointed Collector of the Port of New Orleans.


1887: James G. Fair who would bestow a bequest of $25,000 on the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of San Francisco, completed his term as service as a U.S. Senator from Nevada.


1887: William Stewart, who will defend the Jews of Romania against persecution, begins serving as the U.S. Senator from Nevada.


1887: Leopold Morse began serving as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts’s 3rd district.


1887: Isidor Rayner began serving as a Congressman from Maryland in the 50th U.S. House of Representatives.


1889:St. Louis newspaperman Nathan Frank began serving as a member of the House of Representatives in the 51stCongress. 


1889: Benjamin Harrison who appointed Solomon Hirsch of Portland, Oregon as Minister to Turkey was inaugurated as 23rd President of the United States.


1890: Seventy-seven year old Franz Delitzsch, the “Lutheran theologian and Hebraist” who “wrote many commentaries on the books of the Bible and Jewish antiquities” and who “defended the Jewish community against anti-Judaic attacks” passed away today.


1890: Isidor Gunsburg was among the spectators of the chess match played between Delmar and Lipschutz at the Manhattan Chess Club.


1890: The 29th annual ball sponsored by the Purim Association took place this evening at the Metropolitan Opera House. Money raised this year will go to the aid of the United Hebrew Charities.


1890: Thieves attempted to rob Solomon Barnett, a Jewish tailor, while he was working at this shop on Lexington Avenue, near 83rdStreet in New York City.1891(24th of Adar I, 5651: Two students at the Hebrew Union College, Isador H. Frauenthal and Ernst Sallinger, passed away today in Cincinnati, Ohio.


1891: James B. Eustis completed his last term as a United States Senator following which he would become U.S. Ambassador to France, a position from which he would study the Dreyfus Affair but die before he could deliver his report to the government in Washington.


1892: It was reported today that Abraham Herrman, Simon Borg and Solomon B. Solomon have been unanimously elected to serve three year terms as Directors of the Hebrew Technical Institute.


1892: Max Marcus Zerner and Julie Zerner gave birth to Alice Zerner who became Alice Eister when she married Otto Eisler.


1893: Grover Cleveland who would lend his support to those who objecting to the treatment of the Jews of Russia and opposed legislation that would have kept Jews from immigrating to the United States was inaugurated as 24th President of the United States.


1893: It was reported today that the proceeds from the upcoming ball sponsored by the Purim Association will be donated to the United Hebrew Charities.


1893: “Scenes in the Azores” published today provides a picture of life on these Atlantic Islands including the fact that “native Azorean Jews” have gradually come to dominate the banking business, the importation of coal and the ownership of the mail boats to Lisbon.  The Jews now own homes in Tangiers and Lisbon.


1893: “Manifesto of Jewish Rabbis” published today described a document issued by 210 German Rabbis designed to counteract the increasing power of the country’s anti-Jewish movement.


1894: The Superintendent of the Bureau of Immigration, a section of the Treasury Department, “has received an official denial from the Russian Government that” it is aiding Russian Jews in their efforts to come to the United States.


1894(26th of Adar I, 5654):Fifty-eight year old Rabbi Joseph Perles passed away. Born in Baja, Hungary in 1835, he received his early instruction in the Talmud from his father, Baruch Asher Perles, he was educated successively at the gymnasium of his native city, was one of the first rabbis trained at the new type of rabbinical seminary at Breslau, and the university of that city (Oriental philology and philosophy; Ph.D. 1859, presenting as his dissertation Meletemata Peschitthoniana). Perles was awarded his rabbinical diploma in 1862. He had already received a call, in the autumn of the previous year, as preacher to the community of Posen; and in that city he founded a religious school. In 1863 he married Rosalie, the eldest daughter of Simon Baruch Schefftel. In the same year he declined a call to Budapest; but in 1871 he accepted the rabbinate of Münich, being the first rabbi of modern training to fill that office. As the registration law which had restricted the expansion of the communities had not been abrogated until 1861, Perles found an undeveloped community; but under his management it soon began to flourish, and in 1887 he dedicated the new synagogue. He declined not only a call to succeed Abraham Geiger as rabbi in Berlin, but also a chair at the newly founded seminary in Budapest. Perles' most important essays were on folklore and custom. There is much that is striking and original in his history of marriage (Die Judische Hochzeit in nachbiblischer Zeit, 1860), and of mourning customs (Die Leichenfeierlichkeitcn ins nachbiblischen Judenthum, 1861), his contributions to the sources of the Arabian Nights (Zur rabbinischen Sprach-und Sagenkunde, 1873), and his notes on rabbinic antiquities (Beitrage zur rabbiniscizen Sprachund Altertumskunde, 1893). Perles' essays are rich in suggestiveness, and have been the starting-point of much fruitful research. He also wrote an essay on Nachmanides, and a biography and critical appreciation of Rashba (1863).


1894: As the United States grapples with the problem of unemployment brought by economic depression, the United Hebrew Charities is one of the organizations making daily requests to aid the needy.


1894: Among the donations made to the fund to help New York’s unemployed are R.H. Macy & Co ($100), Simon Borg ($100) and Emanuel Lehman ($100).


1895: “The Pope May Interfere” published today described the Pope’s plans to issue an “encyclical letter denouncing the anti-Semitic agitation in Europe.  The Pope is reacting to the reports brought to him several weeks ago by Cardinal Schoenborn “concerning Jew-baiting in Austria.”


1895: A case was “called against the Adelphi Club” “among whose members are the wealthiest and most influential Jews of Albany, NY” which resulted in the Judge decreeing that private clubs were under the jurisdiction of the Excise Board and must be licensed accordingly.


1895: The 3 year old “waif” found wandering the streets and known only as “John Doe, No.19” moved to the Hebrew Sheltering Society’s Home where  Philip Goodhart, the President of the home gave him the name of Judah Touro.


1895: “Mrs. Ida Lieberman, the convicted fire-bug was taken to Auburn Prison” today to begin serving “her sentence of six years and eight months.


1895: The six year old daughter and eight year old son of prisoner Ida Lieberman, for whom no provision had been made, were provided with a home today at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum.


1896: Among the facilities being visited by those attending the conference on “Improved Housing” is the Hebrew Institute on East Broadway, where they will be greeted Inspector


Isaac Spectorsky


1897: Joseph Simon, a native of Germany who settled in Portland, Oregon where he became a member of the bar and played an active role in Republican Party politics began serving in the U.S. Senate 


1897: Lucius Nathan Littauer, the first football coach at Harvard, began serving as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 22nd District.


1897: “Two Heroes Remembered” published today summarized a speech given by Hugo Hirsh in honor of the 1st and 16thpresidents of the United States in which he said that the “Hebrew race was typified by the institutions of the county in that the Hebrew was the most cosmopolitan among peoples and the United States the most cosmopolitan of nations.”  Furthermore, “the principles of educational, religious and political freedom fostered by these two leaders had been of incalculable benefit to the Hebrew race.”


1897: William McKinley was inaugurated as 25thPresident of the United States.


1897: William H. King, who in 1927 “declared…that he favored the United States severing diplomatic relations with any country which failed because of anti-Semitism to protect its Jewish nationals” and “expressed the belief that eventually Palestine would be able to support a population of a million Jews” began serving in the House of Representatives today


1899: Jefferson Monroe Levy, the nephew of naval hero Uriah P. Levy, began serving as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 13th district.


1899: Mitchell May who was elected as a Democrat to the 56th United States Congress began serving as a member of the House of Representatives today.


1899: A group of “prominent” Jews met in Cincinnati to plan for the reception and entertainment of the rabbis who will be attending the upcoming annual Central Conference of American Rabbis.


1899: It was reported today that among the three new novels in Houghton, Mifflin & Co.’s spring list is A Tent of Grace, a story of a Jew and a gentile in Germany by Adelina C. Lust.


 1900: In Philadelphia, PA Joseph and Eva Biberman gave birth to screenwriter and director Herbert J. Biberman who was one of the Hollywood Ten.

1901: Birthdate of Genevieve Brown the wife of Ralph Horween, the All-American Harvard and NFL football player and lawyer who founded the Horween Leather Company with his brother.”


1901: Birthdate of master bridge player, Charles Goren, the Philadelphia born lawyer who probably did more to popularize the game bridge than did any other single American.

1901: Henry Mayer Goldfogle began serving as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 9thCongressional District.


1903: Having spent six years serving as a member of the U.S. House of Representative from New York’s 22nddistrict Lucius Littauer began serving as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 25th district.


1903: Henry Thomas Rainey who in 1906 attended a mass meeting held to protest the “atrocities in Russia” and told the audience that the Romanoffs “are inflaming the populace against the helpless Jews – and already the blood of 100,000 Jews cries out for vengeance” began servings as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois’s 20th district today.


1903: Senator Joseph Simon, Oregon Republican, finishes his term in the U.S. Senate. Simon returned to Portland, Oregon where he resumed his law practice and would serve as mayor from 1909 to 1911.


1904: In Richmond, VA, Beth Ahabah, a Reform congregation that could trace its roots back to 1789, laid the cornerstone for a new house of worship popularly referred to as the Franklin Street Synagogue because of its address 1111 West Franklin Street.


1905 Isidor Rayner began serving as U.S. Senator from Maryland.


1905: Frank Putnam Flint, who would be one of those supporting a new trial for Leo Frank, began serving as a U.S. Senator from California.


1905: William S. Bennett, who would publicly support aid for the Jews Europe after the World War broke, began his service as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 17thDistrict.


1905: William M. Stewart completed his services as U.S. Senator from Nevada.  During one debate on anti-Semitism in Romania, Stewart defended the Jews of charges from Senator Sprague that the Jews were the author of their own suffering because they had been so successful.


1906: Abraham E. Lubarsky, a wealthy tea merchant from Odessa arrived in New York today on the American liner St. Louis and in describing the desperate conditions of his coreligionists said that “A Jew’s Life in Russia is not worth as much as a bad cigarette.


1906: Only days after Martial Law had come to an end a police officer name Kulchitsky was killed in Bialystok.  This killing was one of the many acts of violence that would lead to the pogrom that took place in June of that year.


1907: John Simon Guggenheim, the son of Meyer and Barbara Guggenheim began serving as U.S. Senator from Colorado.


1907: Adolph Joachim Sabath began serving as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois’ 5thdistrict today.


1909: Birthdate of Millionaire Real Estate Mogul Harry B. Helmsley.


1909: Ed “Cotton” Smith who as a member of the House of Representatives had opposed legislation that would have exempted Jewish immigrants from Russia from a literacy test began serving in the United States Senate.


1910: The first issue of Der Yiddisher Record, a Yiddish weekly, appeared in Chicago today.


1910: Birthdate of Mt. Pleasant, PA, native Henry Weinberg, the guard for the Duquense Dukes when they played Miami in the first game of what would become the Orange Bowl before going on to play as a lineman for the Pittsburgh (Football) Pirates who would become the Pittsburgh Steelers.


1910(23rd of Adar I, 5670): Romanian born Yiddish dramatist Moses Horowitz passed away in the Montefiore Home at the age of 76.  The Bucharest native came to the United States in 1882 and was hailed at his passing as being “the Pioneer Yiddish playwright in New York.”  Five years before his death he lost all of his money while trying to produce a unique Yiddish opera at the Windsor Theatre.


1911: Victor Berger of Wisconsin became the first member of the Socialist Party to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.


1911: Frank Flint, who in 1915 would offer Governor Slaton who had commuted Leo Frank’s sentence a place of refuge, completed his service as a U.S. Senator from California.


1911: James Edgar Martine, a member of the Democratic Party who would support Jewish fund raising efforts on behalf of their co-religionists in war torn Europe began serving as a U.S. Senator from New Jersey.


1911: Jefferson Monroe Levy, the nephew of Uriah P. Levy began serving as the U.S. Congressman from New York’s 13thDistrict.


1912(15th of Adar, 5672): Shushan Purim


1912:  Birthdate of the actor John Garfield in New York. Born Julius Garfinkle, Garfield rose to stardom in the 1930's and 1940's playing a variety of wisecracking, “lover boy” type roles.  One of his most famous roles was in the film hit, “The Postman Rings Twice.”  Garfield was caught up in the Anti-Communist Witch Hunts of the 1950's.


1913: In Mainz, Germany Maier and Selma (Hirschberger) Trepp gave birth to Leo Trepp, the German born American Rabbi who was freed from “Sachsenhausen Concentration on the condition that “he and his wife leave the countries within two weeks – a requirement that led him to England and then to California where he served as the “rabbi for Beth Ami in Santa Rosa and Beth El in Berkley

1913: Dr. Joseph Hertz sailed from New York on the SS Mauritania bound for the British Isles where he will become Chief Rabbi of England which will make him not only the leader of British Jewry but one of the most influential Jewish clerics in the world.


1913: “On Rivington Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, Russian Jewish immigrants David and Hannah Garfinkle gave birth to Jacob Julius Garfinkle who gained fame as actor John Garfield whose marvelous talent did not keep him from being crushed by the Red Hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities.



1913: Jefferson Monroe Levy, the nephew of Uriah P. Levy began serving as the U.S. Congressman from New York’s 14th District.


1913: Maude Kohn is scheduled to play a piano solo this afternoon during the meeting of the Ladies’ society of B’nai Sholom Temple.


1914: The General Orders issued on this date provided the official citation awarding Louis C. Hoseher the Congressional Medal of Honor. “The President of the United States of America, in the name of Congress, takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor to Second Lieutenant Louis C. Mosher, United States Army, for most distinguished gallantry on 11 June 1913, while serving with the Philippine Scouts, in action at Gagsak Mountain, Jolo, Philippine Islands. Second Lieutenant Mosher voluntarily entered a cleared space within about 20 yards of the Moro trenches under a furious fire from them and carried a wounded soldier of his company to safety at the risk of his own life.”


1914: “Arthur Ruppin wrote in his diary, ‘Today I succeeded in buying from Sir John Gray Hill his large and magnificently situated property on Mount Scopus, thus acquiring the first piece of ground for the Jewish University in Jerusalem.’”


1915: The United States naval collier Vulcanis scheduled to set sail from the League Island Navy Yard at Philadelphia today carrying supplies paid for by the Jewish Relief Society for “distribution to the starving residents” of Palestine.


1915: William Stiles Bennet who in 1916 would tell 3,000 people attending a meeting at the McKinley Casino that it was “now necessary for the American Jew to assist his brethren in Europe” and “said that large sums of money would be needed in order to accomplish the desired relief” began his services as a Member of the US. House of Representatives from New York’s 27thDistrict today.


1915: Dr. Robert Tuttle Morris, ex-President of the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists delivered a talk tonight at the Cornell Club on “Warfare as Natural History” in which he “advanced the theory that the Jewish people would be the next to dominate” the world because, among other thing, “they are gathering in the citing, thriving under urban life” and “increasing more rapidly than any others.”


1915: Jefferson Monroe Levy completed his second and final term as a U.S. Congressman.


1915: Meyer London, the Jewish Socialist, began serving his first term in the U.S House representing New York’s 12th Congressional District.


1915: Among those whose contributions to the Fund of the American Jewish Relief Committee were received today included L.M. Jacobs of Tucson, AZ and the Dallas, TX, YMHA,


1915: “Assurance that the Jewish people of Palestine ‘enjoy perfect safety’ was given in an official communication” that arrived in Washington, DC today from Constantinople.


1916(29thof Adar I, 5676): Parashat Pekudi and Shabbat Shekalim


1916: In King Williams Town, South Africa, Morris and Ethel Aronowitz gave birth to Cecil Aronowitz.


1916: At 8:00 p.m. in Chicago, the Sinai Swimming Team is scheduled to take part in a meet at the Hyde Park Y.M.C.A.


1916: It was reported today 30,000 shirtmakers are on strike with their union demanding “higher wages and more sanitary working conditions.”


1916: In Berlin, film start Helga Molander, a Lutheran, and nightclub entertainer Eduard Anton Eysenck, a Catholic, gave birth to psychologist Hans Jürgen Eysenck who was raised by his Lutheran maternal grandmother who died in a concentration camp where she had been interred because she came from a Jewish family.


1916: In Bologna, Dora Bassani and Dr. Enrico Bassani gave birth to the author of ''The Garden of the Finzi-Continis whose early career was stifled by Italian race laws and who was imprisoned for anti-fascist activates



1917: Among the contributions listed today by The Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War were $1,167 from the Jewish Morning Newsand $1,097 from the Jewish Daily News.


1917: James Edgar Martine who in 1916 introduced a resolution in the Senate “asking the President to set aside a day as Jewish relief day for Jewish war sufferers” which led to Jewish Relief Day completed his terms as a U.S. Senator from New Jersey.


1917: Republican Milton Kraus began serving the first of three terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana’s 11th Congressional District.


1917: William H. King, who in 1927 “declared…that he favored the United States severing diplomatic relations with any country which failed because of anti-Semitism to protect its Jewish nationals” and “expressed the belief that eventually Palestine would be able to support a population of a million Jews” began serving as the U.S. Senator from Utah today.


1918: It was reported today that Mrs. Rose Pastor Stokes told a gathering at the Masonic Temple “that she had just returned to the Socialist Party and that while she was not anti-Zionist, she feared a Jewsih State in Palestine could not be made socialistic at once” and she feared that Great Britain was playing a game designed to dampen “the fervor of the Jewish working people all over the world.


1919: After four years out of office, Henry Mayer Goldfogle began serving as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 12th Congressional District.


1919: In Washington “acting on behalf of a committee of thirty-one prominent men, Congressman Kahn of California presented a petition to President Wilson on behalf of the Zionist organization for consideration at the Peace Conference” and in turn, President Wilson said that he would “have the matter put before the conference after his arrival in Paris.”


1920: Birthdate of Leo Greenland, the Bronx born adman whose accounts included Tanqueray Gin, Johnnie Walker (Red & Black) Scotch and Olvatine. Do you think he ever confused his liquids? (As reported by Margalit Fox)


1920: In Harlem, Robert and Mary Habib Yohai, Jewish immigrants from Turkey, gave birth to Morrie Robert Yohai, the man who invented Cheez Doodles one of America’s most popular junk snack foods. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)


1921: Having been out of office for two years, Meyer London again begins representing New York’s 12th Congressional District.


1921(24th of Adar I, 5681); Eighty-two year old Leopold Loeb passed away today after which he was buried at Morgan City, LA.


1921: “The Raft of the Dead” a silent drama filmed by cinematographer Mutz Greenbaum was released in Germany today.


1922: Birthdate of British cardiologist David Mendel.


1922: Release date of German silent horror film “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” co-starring Wolfgang Heinz, the stage name of David Hrisch.


1923(16thof Adar, 5683): Shushan Purim, since the 15th of Adar fell on Shabbat


1923(16thof Adar, 5683): Edward Lauterbach, prominent New York attorney and leader of the Republican Party who devoted four decades of his life to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum passed away today.



1923: Birthdate of Kurt Schubert, the founder of Austria's first Jewish museum after World War II and the founder of the Jewish Institute at the University of Vienna.


1923: Burton K. Wheeler, who in 1936 “said that anti-Semitism has not only gained a foothold in European countries like Germany, Poland, Rumania, Austria and Hungary, but has been imported in the Western Hemisphere by Mexico, Brazil and Ecuador” and that the “capacity for persecution” as embodied in anti-Semitism is not “foreign to American soil” began serving as a U.S. Senator from Montana.


1923: Emmanuel “Manny” Celler began serving as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 10th Congressional District.1923: Sol Bloom began as serving as a member of the U.S. House Representatives from New York’s 20th District.


1923: Royal Samuel Copeland begins serving as a U.S. Senator from New York. In June of 1933, when several Senators rose on the floor to condemn the treatment of the Jews of Germany, Copeland “paid tribute to the Jews as whole mentioning Nathan Straus as an example of Jews whose work set an example for the world.” He went on to say that the condemnation of Germany’s treatment of the Jews by Senator Pat Robinson of Arkansas, the Senate majority leader, “will bring hoe and cheer into the hearts of many persons…”


1924: In Manhattan, Isidor and Gussie Stein gave birth to their only son “Robert Stein who helped expand the scope of women’s magazines as editor in chief of McCall’s and Redbook in the early stages of the modern women’s movement, publishing articles about race and politics and introducing readers to the nascent writings of feminist leaders like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.” (As reported by Paul Vitello)

1924: Iris Margaret Origo, an Anglo-Irish writer who helped to save Jewish children through the kindertransport including the painter Frank Helmut Auerbach “married Antonio Origo, the illegitimate son of Marchese Clemente Origo.”


1925(8th of Adar, 5685): Polish born composer Moritz Moszkowskipassed away at the age of 70 while living in Paris.


1926: Plans are under way to raise five million dollars to build a new library at the Hebrew Union College to house the new collection of 6,174 items brought back from Europe by Dr. Adolph S. Oko.


1927(30th of Adar I, 5687): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1927: Birthdate of Richard “Dick” Savitt the Bayonne, NJ, who started out playing basketball for Cornell University and then switched to tennis – a sport at which he became so adept that he became the first Jewish player to “win both Wimbledon and the Australian Open.”



1927(30th of Adar I, 5687): Solomon Cicurel, 46, was fatally stabbed - eight times - shortly after midnight today. The only witness to the crime was Cicurel’s wife Elvire Toriel. She had little to say except that she had been chloroformed by her husband’s assailants. Four suspects were eventually tried. They had either murdered Cicurel during a robbery or as part of an act of revenge or both. The four were all tried, but due to the legal system under which existed, they were tried in the courts of their native countries. This reality caused as much anger among many Egyptians as did the murder of the Jewish merchant.  The murdered victim was the eldest of three brothers. Solomon, Salvator and Joseph were the sons of Moreno Cicurel, a Sephardic Jew who came to Egypt during the previous century from Smyrna (Izmir), then a thriving cosmopolitan trading port in Turkey. A self-made man, Moreno, started his career as an employee with a coreligionist who owned a textile shop in the Mousky district, Cairo’s main commercial hub. Moreno Cicurel was the founder of one of the largest department stores in the Middle East.


1928: Funeral services are scheduled to be held today for Max Pine, the Secretary of the United Trades, at The Jewish Daily Forward building at 175 East Broadway.


1928:  In Mannheim, Germany, cantor and composer Hugo Chaim Adler and Selma Adler gave birth to composer Samuel Adler who came to the United States in 1939 where he earned a B.M. from Boston University, and an M.A. from Harvard University. He has also received several honorary doctorates in recognition for his artistic accomplishments. During his tenure in the U.S. Army, he founded and conducted the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra, and because of the orchestra's great psychological and musical impact on the European cultural scene, he was awarded the Army's Medal of Honor.

1929: In New York, screenwriter Jo Swerling and Florence (née Manson) Swerling gave birth to mathematician Peter Swerling.

1930: ‘Masks” a crime film direct by Rudolf Meinert was released in the Weimar Republic today.


1931(15thof Adar, 5691): Shushan Purim


1931: William Henry Dieterich, the anti-Semitic and somewhat pro-German Republican began serving as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois’s at-large district.


1931: “Two world records,” in the 500 yard back stroke and the half mile back stroke “were broken today by Joe Wohl, the captain of the Syracuse University swim team.


1932: “President Hoover signed he commission of Benjamin Cardozo as Justice of the Supreme Court” today.


1933: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as 32nd President of the United States.  Regardless of what one may think of Roosevelt's record during the Holocaust, there is no denying the positive things he did for Jews during the days of the New Deal.  He had numerous Jewish advisors and appointed them to a variety of positions of power including Supreme Court Justice to Secretary of the Treasury.  A hitherto untapped cohort of well-educated first or second generation American Jews gained access to positions through the newly emerging federal agencies that were part of Roosevelt's program to reform American government, business and labor practices.


1933: Theodore Albert Peyeser began serving as a member of the United States House of Representatives from New York’s 17th congressional district.


1933: Cordell Hull began serving as U.S. Secretary of State a post he would hold until 1944. Hull would win the Nobel Peace Prize but he earned low marks from the Jewish community for his moves to thwart attempts to aid Jewish refugees and his failure to curb the genteel anti-Semitism found in his department.


1933: Sixty year old Theodore Albert Peyser, a native of Charleston, West Virginia, began representing New York’s 17th congressional district today.


1933: Seventy more people are imprisoned at Nohra on the second day of the operation of Germany's first Concentration Camp.  This brings the total of prisoners to 170.


1934: As the Philadelphia SPHAS(South Philadelphia Hebrew Association) basketball team dressed into their uniforms prior to playing the Brooklyn Jews, “Coach Eddie Gottlieb introduced the team to its newest member, Moe Goldman, a Brooklyn native, who had just completed his senior year of basketball at the City College of New York (CCNY) where he had excelled as a center for the CCNY team, under the tutelage of coach Nat Holman, arguably the best Jewish basketball player in the 1920s.”


1935: The Jerusalem Shopkeepers Association plans to shutter its shops today in an attmpet to “force the Municipal Council to adopt a rent regulation ordinance” similar to the ones in force in Tel Aviv and Haifa.


1936: In Poland, “Warsaw University, scene of anti-Semitic riots, was closed today for an indefinite period.”


1936: Among those reported today to have been “denationalized” by the German government were ‘nine designated as Jews” including “Herbert Stahl who writes under the name of Steel who is denounced as ‘a Jewish editor who directed lying press attacks against American newspapers against Germany and in connection with the Jewish boycott movements surpassed all other machinations of that kind in meanness.’” (Editor’s Note:  What is worse than being a Jew in Germany?  Not being Jewish but being labeled as one.  Johannes Steel was an author who left Germany before WW II and was allegedly involved in wartime espionage for the Soveits.)


1936: Under the terms reported today, “Netherlands citizens of Jewish descent living in Germany” may be repatriated to Holland but every family can take no more than 20,000 marks (less than $10,000) with them regardless of how much wealth they may have accumulated or the size of the family.  (Editor’s note: Anti-Semitism almost always include theft making it a profitable business throughout the centuries)


1936: “Nearly 1,000 women representing various” philanthropic organizations attended a meeting today at the Hotel Astor where “Christians and Jewish leaders joined with officials of the women’s division of the United Palestine Appeal in the campaign for $1,500,000 to be raised for the benefit of Jewish settlements in Palestine.


1936: Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, a national co-chairman of the United Palestine Appeal which is seeking to raise $3,500,000 to help settle German Jews in Palestine and Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt are the featured speakers at a tea in the Hotel Astor which is the opening event of the campaign in New York City. (Editor’s note: Abba Hillel Silver was a Reform Rabbi and ardent Zionist who was instrumental in seeing to it that support for a Jewish state in Palestine was supported by both American political parties.  One can only wonder how he would have reacted to the state of Israel’s treatment of Reform Judaism including denying that Jews who were converted by Reform rabbis are not really Jewish.)


1937: The 9th Annual Academy Awards, hosted by Jewish actor and Hollywood fixture, George Jessel, are held at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.


1937: In Warsaw, the Polish Government and the Jewish Emigration Agency signed an agreement designed “to facilitate the emigration of wealthy Polish Jews to Palestine.


1937(21stof Adar, 5697): Four year old Miriam Ruhama Pacifici the daughter of Rabbi Riccardo Reuven Pacifici passed away at Genoa.


1938(1st of Adar II, 5698): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1938: The Palestine Post reported that Sir Harold MacMichael had arrived in Palestine and described the ceremony in which he was sworn as the fifth High Commissioner.


1938: The Palestine Post reported that The Lydda-Jerusalem train was sabotaged when the railway line was damaged by an explosion. Another bomb was found on the railway tracks near Khan Yunis. Curfew was imposed on Arab villages situated close to the railway tracks.


1938: The Palestine Post reported that there were 5,734,917 Palestine pounds in circulation and 15,641 registered vehicles in the country in 1937. There were also 95 credit cooperatives with 79,750 members.


1939: Twenty-three year old Bernard “Bernie” Opper, the Bronx native whose Kentucky Wildcats were upset by the Tulane Green Wave in the 1938 SEC Tournament redeemed himself today by leading his team to victory over the Tennessee Vols in the 1939 SEC Championship finals.


1938: Birthdate of Allan Nathaniel Kornblum, the Brooklyn native who would help steer the F.B.I. into the post-J. Edgar Hoover era by drafting guidelines for its surveillance operations in the 1970s, and whose testimony would help convict the murderer of a black man in a celebrated civil rights case revived nearly 40 years after the event.


1941: A group of tailors who worked in shop supplying uniforms to the German Army were photographed in Nazi occupied Bendzin, Poland.

1941: "I. Segaloff" wrote “My best regards to my friend Tatsuo Osako," on the back of a photo. Segaloff was probably a Jewish refugee who had been helped by Osako who was a young employee of the Japan Tourist Bureau at the start of World War II. Osako probably worked with “Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat stationed in Lithuania who granted transit visas to several thousand Jews in the early days of the war. In doing so, he defied strict stipulations from Tokyo that such recipients have proper funds and a clear final destination after Japan. He was one of a handful of diplomats such as Sweden's Raoul Wallenberg and Hiram Bingham IV of the U.S. who used their bureaucratic machinery, often without their government's knowledge, to issue the paperwork that would get Jews to safety. Dubbed the "Japanese Schindler," Sugihara was honored in 1985 by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a high honor reserved for non-Jews who saved Jews at their own personal risk from the Holocaust, Hitler's destruction of 6 million Jews. A short movie about him, "Visas and Virtue," won an Academy Award in 1997. Museums at his home town and in Lithuania are dedicated to his memory.”


1942: Algiers radio announced that all firms, property and legal titles owned in part or full by Jews have been put under "Aryan" administration. This came after the dismissal of 3,000 Jews from the French civil service just a couple months prior.


1942: Birthdate of Peabody award winner and “feminist” Lynn Sherr.

1942: Eichmann met with all his territorial representatives to discuss the organizational problems of the deportations to come. Actual plans commenced months earlier.


1943: Most of the Jews living in Cuomotini, Greece were arrested and transported in 20 open train cars to the notorious Dupnitsa transit camp, and then dispatched from Lom by boat via the Danube. The Jews from Cuomotini and Kavala on the Karageorge were shot by the Bulgarians and the Germans; while three other boats, of which one held Cuomotini Jews, arrived in Vienna and from there the Thracian Jews were sent to Treblinka; where they were gassed upon arrival. The Bulgarians confiscated all of the Jewish properties and possessions.

1943: The Jews of Drama, a town in Macedonia, were arrested by the Bulgarian police and army, held in tobacco warehouses in the Agia Barbara quarter for three days, and then sent to the Gorna Djumaya camp in Bulgaria, where they were kept in extremely harsh conditions. From there, young men in their teens and early twenties were sent to forced labor in Bulgaria and 113 families (589 people) were dispatched by train to Lom and from there put on a boat to Vienna, where they were reloaded on trains to Treblinka and gassed upon their arrival.


1943: Jews continued to be sent from Paris to Chelmno, Sobibor, and Majdanek.


1943: At the 15th Annual Oscar award ceremony, “Mrs. Miniver” directed by William Wyler wins for Best Picture of 1942.  Wyler, a refugee from Hitler’s Europe wins for Best Director.


1944(9th of Adar, 5704): In Warsaw, four Jewish women were shot in the ghetto along with 80 non Jews. All their bodies, dead and wounded alike, were thrown into a building that was then lit on fire.


1944(9th of Adar, 5704):  In Ossining, New York, Louis Buchalter, the leader of 1930s crime syndicate Murder, Inc. was executed at Sing Sing.


1946(1st of Adar II, 5706): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1946: In New York City doctors Ruth (Silboiwtz) Achs and Samuel Achs gave birth Naomi Achs, who gained fame as screenwriter and director Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal.


1946: Birthdate of English impresario Harvey Goldsmith


1946: Felix Frankfurter was one of the Associate Justices who heard Girouard v. United States, a landmark citizenship case, when it was argued today before the Supreme Court.


1947: Birthdate of Douglas Peter “Doug” Beal, the Cleveland Ohio native who played volleyball at Ohio State and then continued his involvement with the sport as a college and  serving as USA Volleyball CEO

1947: As much of Palestine’s Jewish community endured the third day of martial law, Joseph Saphir, the mayor of Petach Tikva reported that 4,000 men were out of work due to the clampdown and the number was growing.  In Tel Aviv, the banks were closed due to a lack of coin and currency while the population worried about getting the necessities of life including fresh milk.


1948(23rd of Adar I, 5708): This morning “Arabs ambushed and killed seventeen Jewish members of the Haganah…seven miles northwest of Jerusalem.”


1948: U.S. premiere of “The Naked City,” a gritty, black and white film directed by Jules Dassin, produced by Mark Hellinger with a screenplay by Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald.


1949: The Security Council of the United Nations recommended Israel for membership in the international body.


1950: “The Baron of Arizona” a western movie directed and written by Samuel Fuller and featuring Vladimir Sokoloff was released in the United States today.


1950: “Israel and Jordan Working for Peace,” an article about the proposed Israel-Jordan non-aggression pact entitled Gene Currivan declares that “Israel decided long ago that while external advice is always welcome, she must rely principally – as the Jews have over the centuries – on her own resourcefulness where the future is concerned.”


 1950: The Revocation of Citizenship Bill, which made it possible for Iraq's Jews to flee the country, went into effect.   "By the end of May of 1950, at least ten thousand Iraqi Jews" many of whom were impoverished before leaving, "had crossed the border into Iran” as they made their way to Israel.


1953:The Jerusalem Post reported that the new, official US Middle Eastern policy was to “equalize the support for Israel and other countries in the area.” According to the explanation given to the Post by US Embassy officials in Tel Aviv, this new policy did not mean that the support hitherto given to Israel was to be lessened, but that the assistance offered to the Arab states was to be increased. [This new policy was a product of the newly elected Republican Administration of Dwight Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.  Eisenhower and Dulles would show their true feelings about Israel when they took the side of the Egyptians over the Israelis during the Suez Crisis of 1956.]


1953:The Jerusalem Post reported that following the recent Israeli offer, the Barclay and Ottoman banks in Cyprus started accepting claims from Arab Palestine refugees for the release of their frozen accounts held in Israeli banks.


1953:The Jerusalem Post reported that a new draft for the Punishment of Crimes against the State was tabled in the Knesset. It provided for a death sentence for the high treason in time of war.


1954: As attempts were being to remove his security clearance, J. Robert Openheimer, the “father of the Atomic Bomb,” sent a letter to Major General Kenneth D. Nicholas describing his relationship with Jean Tatlock.


1955:Following the rape and murder of his sister Shoshana and the murder of her boyfriend Oded Wegmeister by Bedouin Tribesmen, Meir Har-Zion  “and three ex-members of the 890 Battalion drove to the Armistice Line with Jordan where they captured six Bedouins.


1956(21st of Adar, 5716): Sixty-nine year old NYU alum, attorney and unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress Max Perlman passed away today leaving behind his wife, Mrs. Gertrude Hyams Pearlman and his son Franklin Perlman.


1957:  Israel, in compliance with the United Nations resolution, withdrew from the Gaza Strip and other territories.  These territories had been seized in the Sinai Campaign of 1956, sometimes referred to as “the One Hundred Hour War” because of its short duration.  The fighting in 1956 was an Israeli response to years of attacks by terrorists as well as the arming of the Egyptians by the Soviets with an arsenal of modern weapons.  The history of the war is too complicated to summarize here.  Suffice it to say that the Israelis withdrew with guarantees from the United Nations and the United States that the Sinai Peninsula would be a demilitarized zone and that Israel would enjoy unfettered access from Eilat, its southern port through the Straits of Tiran.  In 1967, Egypt would completely break the agreements of 1957 and the U.N. would fail to honor its commitments which brought about the Six Days War.


1957: The Importance of Overweight by childhood obesity researcher Hilda Bruch was published today.


1957: “Ill Met by Moonlight” on which Emeric Pressburger served as co-writer, co-director and co-producer was released today in the United Kingdom.


1959(24th of Adar I, 5719): Ninety-nine year old Adolphe Danziger de Castro the native of Poland and scholar, journalist, lawyer, author of poems, novels and short stories who was the first president of the La Comunidad Sefardi of Los Angeles passed away today.

1964: Birthdate of New York native and former New York City Council Member Eva Sarah Moskowitz whose mother “fled Europe during the Holocaust” avoiding the fate of other family members who died in the concentration camps.


1966: “The Group” directed by Sidney Lumet, produced and written by Sidney Buchman and filmed by cinematographer Boris Kaufman was released in the United States today.


1967: Birthdate of Manchester native Ivan Lewis, the Chief Executive of Jewish Social Services of Greater Manchester who was elected as the Labour MP for Bury South in 1997.


1969(14TH of Adar, 5729): The first Purim during the Nixon Presidency


1969(14th of Adar, 5729): Seventy-one year old “Romanian-born British political scientist and Fabian socialist who was professor at the University of Chicago passed away today.


1969(14th of Adar, 5729): Pioneering movie mogul, Nicholas M. Schenck passed away.

1970: “Loving” a comedy directed by Irvin Kershner, produced and written by Don Devlin and starring George Segal and with music by Bernardo Segall was released in the United States today.


1971: The second of two part television production Clifford Odets’ Paradise Lost co-starring Eli Wallach was broadcast on American Public Television.


1973: Marcel Marceau appears at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City, IA.


1974(10th of Adar, 5734): Adolph Gottlieb, prominent Abstract Expressionist painter passed away at the age of 71.

1974: After having been beaten by police outside the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Alexander Tsatskis and Saul Raslin were taken to Kiev where they were “arrested and interrogated.”


1974: "Five months after Israel's defeat of the Syrian forces on the Golan Heights, four young Syrian Jewish women were found raped, robbed and murdered in a cave on the Syrian side of the Syrian-Lebanese borders...The bodies were returned to their parents in sacks."


1975: Charlie Chaplin was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of England.


1975: Tonight, “at 11:00 p.m. eight Palestinians in two teams landed by boat on the Tel Aviv beach at the foot of Allenby Street.”


1980(16th of Adar, 5740): Sixty-three year old Charles Pannet, the Brooklyn native and Executive Director of Hillcrest Jewish Community Center who was an officer of the National Association of Synagogue Administrators passed away today in New York City.


1982: The “U.S. Senate adopted a resolution calling for the Soviet Union to stop the persecution, arrests, and trials of Jewish activists; to remove obstacles to emigration; and to respect the religious rights of its citizens.”


1984: The life of journalist and author Sidney Zion “was transformed” tonight “when his 18-year-old daughter, Libby, a Bennington College freshman with a history of depression and cocaine use, was admitted to New York Hospital with fever, chills and agitation. Her condition was not diagnosed, but two interns gave her a painkiller and sedative, a plan approved by phone by a senior clinician who had treated members of the family, and Ms. Zion was tied down to prevent injury. She died eight hours after admission.”  This tragedy resulted in Zion leading a crusade that resulted in national reforms in the training, workload and supervision of young doctors.


1986: Today, “The New York Times reported on Kurt Waldheim’s wartime service in the Balkans and his prewar Nazi associations.”


1987: Jonathan Pollard was sentenced today by a Washington, D.C. court to life imprisonment for spying for Israel.


1988: Sir John Templeton, sponsor of the $369,000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, has expressed surprise at charges that this year's prize winner was associated with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel causes.


Gal Mekel. Who played for Wichita State University before turning professional.


1992(29th of Adar I, 5752): Eighty-four year old Hollywood animator and Walt Disney collaborator Arthur Babbitt passed away today.

1993(11th of Adar, 5753): Ta'anit Esther observed since the 13th of Adar falls on Shabbat


1993(11th of Adar, 5753): Izaak Maurits (Piet) Kolthoff “a highly influential chemist, widely considered the Father of Analytical Chemistry” passed away. https://www2.chemistry.msu.edu/portraits/PortraitsHH_Detail.asp?HH_LName=Kolthoff


1994: The INS Hanit a corvette built by Northrop Gruman was launched today.


1994: “Greedy” produced by Brian Grazer, a screenplay co-authored by Lowell Ganz, with music by Randy Edelman and starring Kirk Douglas was released in the United States today.


1995: President Clinton appoint Martin S. Indyk as U.S. Ambassador to Israel.


1996(13th of Adar, 5756): A suicide bomber killed at least 10 people and and wounded at least 35 others. The Arab bomber, with explosives strapped to his body, blew himself up in the street near the indoor mall known as Dizengoff Center. 


1996(13th of Adar, 5756): This morning, owner Abe Lebewohl the 2nd Avenue Deli was in his delivery truck, going to make his habitual deposit at a nearby bank when he was shot and killed, a victim of a robbery that remains unsolved to this day. His baby brother, Jack Lebewohl, who, unlike Abe, realized their parents’ American dream by becoming a “professional,” a real estate lawyer, gave up his practice and took over the deli. He made a go of it for almost 10 years, despite the fact that delis in New York have been disappearing for almost 40 years.


1998: “The Fourteenth Knesset re-elected Ezer Weizman for a second term. For the first time, an acting president was faced by an opponent, (MK Shaul Amor of the Likud), in the re-election. 119 members participated in the election: 63 votes were in favor of Weizman, 49 were in favor of Amor, and 7 were empty ballots.


2001: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal


2001(9thof Adar, 5761):Naftali Dean, 85, of Tel Mond; Yevgenya Malchin, 70, of Netanya and Shlomit Ziv, 58, of Netanya were murdered today by a Palestinian suicide bomber “in the center of the business district of Netanya.


2001: Graveside services were held at Temple Emeth Memorial Park, Baker St., West Roxbury, MA for Deborah (Pessin) Margolis, the widow of Dr. Benjamin D. Margolis.


2005: A German court ruled that the heirs of a once prominent Jewish-owned department store chain were entitled to compensation for what has in recent years become one of Berlin's most valuable pieces of real estate. Deciding one of the biggest and most bitterly disputed claims for restitution of property seized by the Nazis, the German Administrative Court awarded $17 million to Barbara Principe and her nephew, Martin Wortham. They are the main surviving heirs of the family of German Jews that, until the war, owned and operated the Wertheim department store chain, which even today is to Berlin what Macy's or Bloomingdale's is to New York.  The Wertheim Company, founded in the 19th century, owned seven large stores in Berlin before the war, all of them appropriated by the Nazis in 1937 as part of the process by which Jews were squeezed out of German economic life and their holdings turned over to "Aryans." The Wertheim brothers arrived in the United States penniless in the 1940's. Gunther Wertheim, Mrs. Principe's father, ran a chicken farm in southern New Jersey.


2005:  The New York Times reviewed The Great Morality by John Kelly.  This book provided “an intimate history of the Black Death.  Included in this acclaimed volume are references to the treatment of the Jews including reports of “survivors pointing accusatory fingers at Jews and Muslims and outsiders” and the “pogroms instituted against the Jews, who were scapegoated for spreading the plague; the abdication of responsibility on the part of many officials and community leaders; and the exploitation of the needy and grief-stricken by con men and opportunists.”


2005: An exhibition styled “The Power of Conversation of Jewish Women and Their Salons” opens at the Jewish Museum.


2006: Dalia Itizk a native of Jerusalem born into a family of Iraqi Jews, began serving Speaker of the Knesset, making her the first women to hold this post.


2006:  In Cedar Rapids, celebration of the birthday of Ivy Hurwitz.  In the short time that Ivy has been in Cedar Rapids, she has demonstrated her culinary wizardry and made herself an integral part of the Jewish community


2007: The Sunday New York Times book section featured a review of The Art of Aging:A Doctor’s Prescription for Well-Beingby Jewish author Sherwin B. Nuland and a review of  Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artistby Gail Levin. “Judy Chicago, born Judith Sylvia Cohen in Chicago in 1939, is descended from a long line of rabbis, going back to the Vilna Gaon in eighteenth century Lithuania.” 


2007(14th of Adar, 5767): Purim.


2008: As part of “Hadassah on Tour,” Dr. Michael Wilschanski, the Director of the Pediatric Gastroenterology Unit of the Division of Pediatrics at Hadassah Medical Center, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, speaks in Duluth, MN


2008: In New York, the 92nd Street Y presents “Breaking News from Israel: Reports from the Front Lines” featuring NBC journalist Martin Fletcher and moderated by New York Times editor and author Joseph Berger.


2008:James L. Kugel and Rabbi Harold Kushner are among the 20 writers honored tonight at the 57th annual Jewish Book Awards, to be held at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. In January, the Jewish Book Council, which administers the awards, named Mr. Kugel's How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Nowthe Jewish Book of the Year for 2007, and chose Rabbi Kushner, the author of the 1981 best seller When Bad Things Happen to Good People, the recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award. The Jewish Book Council, founded in 1943, is the only organization in America devoted exclusively to promoting books reflecting the Jewish experience. The annual awards honor achievement in biography and memoir, children's and young adult literature, fiction, poetry, and history.


2008: According to Palestinian sources, the Arabs suffered 110 casualties during Operation Hot Winter.  The Israelis launched Operation Hot Winter following a series of rocket attacks launched from Gaza that targeted Israeli towns, including Sderot. 


2008(27th of Adar I, 5768): Eighty-three year old Oscar winning composer Leonard Rosenman passed away today.



2009: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Hadassah Book Club meets at the home of community leader Amy Barnum discuss a novel by Anita Dimant entitled Good Harbor


2009: In New York, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Chinese Community Relations Council sponsor a presentation by Avrum Ehrlich, Professor at the University of Shandong, China, entitled China-Israel Relations: Geopolitical and Social Dimensions.


2009:  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Ramallah before flying out of Israel as she completes her first official peace mission to the Middle East.


2009: Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander in chief of the Iran’s Revolutionary Gurad announced that Iran now has missiles that can reach Israeli nuclear sites.  Iran’s Shahab-3 missles have a range of up to 1,250 miles, putting Israel within striking distance.


2009: According to the Proivdence Journal,the last two paid staff member of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I., were let go and public tours were canceled because of financial difficulties.


2009(8th of Adar, 5769: Joseph Bloch, who was a professor of piano literature at the Juilliard School in New York passed away today at the age of 91. at his home in Larchmont, N.Y. For the better part of the past five decades, every Juilliard pianist passed through Mr. Bloch’s classroom. There was a brief interruption to this process in the 1980s when Mr. Bloch tried to retire but proved indispensable and was persuaded to return. His pupils included many of the best-known performers of the second half of the 20th century, among them Van Cliburn, Emanuel Ax, Garrick Ohlsson, Misha Dichter, Jeffrey Siegel, Jeffrey Swann and Yoheved Kaplinsky, the current chairwoman of Julliard’s piano department. A pianist trained as a musicologist, Mr. Bloch did not teach his students prowess at the keyboard; that was done by the conservatory’s studio teachers, eminent pianists like Rosina Lhévinne and Adele Marcus. What he taught was not so much the how-to of pianism but, the why and the what-if. Mr. Bloch also leaves behind a world of pianists, each of them,. Emmanuel Ax said, “a cultured musician, someone who retains curiosity throughout one’s life of music.” “Maybe all of us would have found another road that would have led us to the same end,” Mr. Ax added. “But we were lucky enough not to have had to look beyond him.”


2010: YIVO is scheduled to present a program entitled Goebbels in Arabia during which Jeffrey Herf, eminent historian and a professor at the University of Maryland, discusses his new book, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press), a detailed account of how Hitler's Germany planted the seeds of its own brand of virulent anti-Semitism in the Middle East.


2010: The Twentieth Annual KOACH Kallah is scheduled to begin today at the Pearlston Conference and Retreat Center in Reisterstown, MD.  KOACH is the college program Conservative Movement.


2010: In Washington, D.C., Norman Shore is scheduled to lead a “learn over lunch” that examines the reign of Solomon as described in Book of I Kings.


2010: Rabbi Joshua Maroof, the spiritual leader of the Magen David Sephardic Congregation in Rockville, Maryland is scheduled to conduct another class designed to discover the fascinating world of Sephardic Jewish thought in which attendees delve into the legacy of great philosophers such as Maimonides and Joseph Caro (author of the Shulchan Aruch) and discuss monotheism, free will and other ever-contemporary themes.


2010: The High Court today refused to throw out a lawsuit by Peace Now against construction in Kiryat Netafim, even though the government says it has evidence that shows that construction was approved before the lawsuit was undertaken, contradicting the contention of the suit that the building was illegal. The court, however, rejected a demand by Peace Now that the town and the Samaria Regional Council be held in contempt of court for allowing construction to continue, even though the court had ordered building frozen until the lawsuit was heard.


2010: Michigan Congressman Sandy Levin took over as chairman of the committee today when Charles B. Rangel of New York stepped aside in due to a number of ethics violations. (Levin is Jewish; Rangel is not.)


2011: Agudas Achim in Iowa City is scheduled to celebrate Shabbat Across America.


2011: In Rockville, MD, Tikvat Israel is scheduled to explore the world the Jews of Ethiopia in a program styled: “From Tesfa to Tikva: A Lens on Ethiopian Israelis.”


2011: Congregation Adat Reyim is scheduled to celebrate a Shabbat Service Honoring Military Families.


2011: Several hundred people gathered in central Tel Aviv today to protest government plans to deport hundreds of children of foreign workers and illegal residents of Israel


2011: Twenty year old Jessica Feibler, a U.C. student has brought a federal civil rights lawsuit against the University of California, Berkeley, saying the university did not protect her from being attacked because she is Jewish. The case, filed in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif., today against the university, the regents of the University of California and their ranking officials, is the first of its kind.


2011(29thof Adar I, 5771): Vivienne Harris, 89, who worked with her husband to found the Jewish Telegraph, now a regional publishing powerhouse in northern England with editions in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow, passed away. Harris received an Order of the British Empire -- MBE -- for her professional and charitable works, and was still active as the company's financial director until days before her death. Her son, Paul, the Telegraph's editor, said that "I always said that she had three children -- myself, my brother and the Jewish Telegraph. The paper was very much her baby, and she nurtured it like a child for 60 years. Even in her 90th year, she was devoted to the company." Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdon, Ron Prosor, said that Harris "embodied what we should all be proud of: Jewish values, Zionistic determination and motivation of someone who established the Jewish Telegraph with her late husband with just the 10 fingers that she had, against all the odds. A remarkable woman who I had the privilege of meeting and talking to. It's a great loss (As reported by the Eulogizer)


2012: The AIPAC Policy Conference is scheduled to begin in Washington, DC


2012: Jeremy Skidmore (director) and the Designers of “New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch De Spinoza” are scheduled to take part in a “Talk Back” which is part of “a month-long national conversation about Spinoza’s impact and legacy.”


2012: Rabbi Jeffery Saks is scheduled to lead the first in a three part mini-series, “Aganon’s Eretz Yisrael” that examines the work of Nobel Prize Winner, S.Y. Agnon.


2012: Virginia’s Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader and the only Jewish Republican serving in the U.S. House of Representatives endorsed Mitt Romney for president and said that he is not interested in the vice-presidency.


2012(10thof Adar): Ninety seven year old Shmuel Tankus, who commanded Israel’s navy from 1954 until 1960 passed away today.





2012: President Barak Obama addressed the AIPAC Policy Conference.


2013: Josh Sussman is scheduled to host a Montreal Aliyah Fair this evening.


2013: Dr. Brian Horowitz is scheduled to be the first speaker at today’s session of the a day-long conference at Tulane University - “Jewish Music in New Orleans”


2013(22ndof Adar, 5773): Sixty-eight year old Rabbi Menachem Froman died tonight at his home in Tekoa in Gush Etzion, where 200 of his students and followers sang and prayed instead of learning with him a weekly lesson in the mystical Zohar.



2013: Pawel Frenkel, who fought alongside Mordecai Anielewicz is to be commemorated today at an event marking anniversary of the Jewish rebellion



2014: Sandy, Larry and Michael Levin, from suburban Chicago, are among those scheduled to attend the final day of the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC.


2014: Emily Casden, Coordinating Curator for “Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix: A Retrospective” is scheduled to participate in a Q & A following a screening of “The Art of Spiegelman.”


2014: “Dancing in Jaffa” and “An Evening of Yiddish Song” are scheduled to be shown at the 24th Washington Jewish Film Festival.


2014: The Historic 6th& I Synagogue is scheduled to host “Judaism on Trial: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263”


2014: The Library of Congress is scheduled to host a screening of Regina, Diana Goo’s documentary about Regina Jonas the first female Rabbi ordained in Germany who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.


2014: Arab terrorists hurled a firebomb today at the community of Beit El, in the Binyamin region, north of Jerusalem. No one was hurt and no damage was caused. A similar attack took place on yesterday, too.


2014(2ndof Adar II, 5774): Fifty-nine Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, the Chicago native who “has led Chabad in Illinois since 1977” died suddenly today.


2014(2ndof Adar II, 5774): Nine-two year old Frances Calisch Rothenberg, “the granddaughter of Edward N. Calisch of Temple Beth Ahabah passed away today.



2014: GW’s Rabin Chair Forum and Middle East Forum and the Middle East Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars are scheduled to host a program about the making of “JERUSALEM” a “film that tells the…story of Jerusalem through the viewpoints of…Christianity, Islam and Judaism.


2014: YIVO is scheduled to host “Jacob Glatstein: A Yiddish Genius in Anglicizing America.”


2015: Britain’s advertising watchdog banned an Israeli government tourism advertisement for suggesting that the Old City of Jerusalem is part of Israel today.


2015: The Daily Mail reported today that “A hillside house dating back to the early first century CE in northern Israel may have been the Nazareth home where Jesus was raised, according to researchers.


2015(13thof Adar, 5775): Fast of Esther


2015: In the evening, Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids has a “Pizza” Purim complete with costumes and the traditional Megillah Reading


2016: Rabbi Kushner is scheduled to speaking about “Learning Life from Painting” as an exhibition of his paintings opens at Congregation Emanuel-El of San Francisco.


2016: Agudas Achim, in Coralville, IA, is scheduled to host the 20thAnnual Shabbat Across North America.


2017(6thof Adar, 5777): Parashat Terumah; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/


2017: “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda” is scheduled to come to an end today in New York City.


2017: Assemblyman Dov Hikins tweeted photos tonight showing “headstones toppled in a Brooklyn Jewish cemetery.”


2017: National Day of Unplugging

2018: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress by Steven Pinker, Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoirby Irvin D. Yalom and The Narrow Space: A Pediatric Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Patients, and a Hospital in Jerusalem by Elisha Waldman


2018: The American Sepahrdi Federation is scheduled to present “Queen Esther’s Dilemma,” “a musical by Samuel J. Bernstein inspired by the” Megillah Esther.


2018: In Ames, IA, home of the ISU Cyclones, the Ames Jewish Congregation is scheduled to host a Megiallah reading “and other fun activities” this morning.


2018: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Center for Jewish History, American Jewish Historical Society, Leo Baeck Institute & Yeshiva University Museum are scheduled to present “March Mash-Up” a family festival featuring The Gefilteria’s Liz Alpern and Jeffrey Yoskowitz, singer Eléonore Biezunski, storyteller Shane Baker, and the Yiddish puppet theater troupe Great Small Works.


2018: “Filmmaker and writer Aviva Kempner, who is responsible for The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” and “Rosenwald” is scheduled to wear a red, white and blue button at the Oscar ceremony reading “Let’s Love Our Kids More Than Our Guns!”


2018: The final performance of “A Walk With Mr. Heifetz” which is based on performance by the violinist Jashcah Heifitz at Ein Harold Kibbutz in 1926, is scheduled to take place at the Cherry Lane Theatre.


 

This Day, March 5, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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March 5

 
363: Roman Emperor Julian moves from Antioch with an army of 90,000 to attack the Sassanid Empire, in a campaign which will bring to his own death. Julian followed Constantine to the throne and turned back his predecessor’s pro-Christian promulgations.  Effectively, his decrees gave validity to other religions previously practiced in the Empire.  On his was to fight the Sassanids, Julian gave orders that the Temple in Jerusalem should be rebuilt.  His untimely death prevented this from happening.  The Sassanids were the Persians of their day.



1133: Birth of King Henry II of England during whose reign Jews would prosper as reported by visitors including Abraham ibn Ezra and Isaac of Chernigov as well as the money that flowed to his coffers through the estate of Aaron of Lincoln and “the Saladin tithe.”


1179:  The Third Lateran Council opens at Rome.  At the end of the meeting the council would adopt the following as matters of canon law: "Jews should be slaves to Christians and at the same time treated kindly due of humanitarian considerations."”The testimony of Christians against Jews is to be preferred in all causes where they use their own witnesses against Christians."


1245: As the Mongols continued their sweep across Christian Europe, Innocent IV issued “Dei patris immense,” a Papal bull urging them to be baptized.  These are the same Mongols who had destroyed the kingdom of the Khazars in 1239.  Apparently the Mongols were no more impressed with Christianity than the Khazars had been since the latter, in a legendary contest, had chosen Judaism over Islam and Christianity.


1291(3rd of Nisan): Sa’ad al-Da’ulah, Jewish grand vizier under the Mongol ruler of Persia Argun Kahn was assassinated today.


1328(15th of Adar, 5088): After the death of Charles the Fair, Pedro Olligoyen, a Franciscan friar, used the Jews as a scapegoat against French rule. Starting today, Shabbat, all the Jewish houses were pillaged and then destroyed. Approximately 6000 Jews were murdered with 20 survivors. Among the dead were parents and four younger brothers of Menachem ben Zerach, “then barely twenty years old who became a scholar of commanding influence.”  He was saved by “a compassionate knight” who was a friend of the young Jew’s father.


1563: Havazzelet ha-Shaon, a commentary on the Book of Daniel by Rabbi Moses Alshekh was published for the first time today.


1616: The Roman Catholic Church decreed that the Copernican theory was “false and erroneous” and that teaching or believing in the earth orbiting the sun was prohibited.  For one view of Copernicus and the Jews see



1696: Birthdate of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.  His fresco, “The Sacrifice of Isaac” is an example of how European artists used the Hebrew Bible as an inspiration and resource. It also is an example of how deeply entrenched Judaism is in the fabric of Western Civilization  


1737: The Dragon, a fifteen ton sloop built in Lewes, Delaware was registered today by three individuals including Daniel Nunez who in 1743 registered the sloop Sally and the twenty ton sloop Molly of which he was part owner and Master. (Editor’s note- some show the date as 1738)


1767: In Boulay-Moselle, Jacob Bernard Fould, “a small-time wine dealer” and his wife gave birth to Beer Léon Fould, “the founder of the Fould banking dynasty.”


1783: King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski granted rights to Jews of Kovno. 


1792(11th of Adar, 5552): Moses Alexander (Moshe ben Abraham) passed away today in London.


1798: Today French troops completely overran Switzerland, leading to the collapse of the Old Swiss Confederation where Jewish settlement had been limited to a couple of communities and creation a month later of the Helvetic Republic.


1814(13th of Adar, 5574): Seventy-four year old Solomon Pappenheim, the son of Rabbi Seligmann Pappenheim of Zulz, who was the associate rabbi at Breslau and the author of a three volume work on Hebrew synonyms passed away today.


1815: Birthdate of Austrian banker Friedrich Freiherr Schey von Koromla, the father of Charlotte Przibram and the maternal grandfather of biologist Hans Leo Przibram


1817: Birthdate of Sir Austen Henry Layard whose excavations at Ninveh helped to provided historical context for the events described in the Bible and whose discovery of the library of Ashurbanipal provided a copy of the “Epic of Gilgamesh” a flood story that in some respects parallels that of Noah and helped to establish the historicity of the event.


1820: Dutch city of Leeuwarden forbade Jews to go to synagogues on Sundays.


1828: Jacob ben Eliezer HaCohen married Keila bat Benjamin Zeev Wolf HaLevi today at the New Synagogue.


1832: In Frankfurt am Main, Charlotte and Anselm von Rothschild, a chief of the Vienna House of Rothschild gave birth their second oldest daughter Hannah Mathilde Rothschild who was known for her musical skills and who married the banker Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild, a cousin of her father with whom she had two daughters, Adelheid and Minna Caroline Rothschild.


1851: In Beisegola, Russia, David Atlas and his wife gave birth Elazar Atlas, the bookkeeper turned literary critic.


1856: In New York, Esther (Nathan) Lazarus and Moses Lazarus gave birth to Agnes Marx.


1856: Michael Heymanson married Adelaide Jewell today at the Great Synagogue.


1858: In Vienna, Simon and Marie Spitzer gave birth to Dr. Franz Spitzer


1861: Dr. Fischer delivered a paper at tonight’s meeting of the New York Historical Society entitled “The History of the Inquisition in America” that included a description of the life and death by fire of the dramatist Antonio José da Silva.  Da Silva wrote most of his plays while imprisoned in a dudgeon and faced the auto de fe rather than betray the faith of his fathers.


1861: William H. Seward began serving as Secretary of State under President Abraham Lincoln. Seward had visited Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine in 1859 and it is thought that his talk about that visit may have been the factor that prompted Lincoln’s comment that when his term was over he wanted to visit the “Holy Land” during his travels aboard with Mrs. Lincoln.


1863(14th of Adar, 5623) Purim


1863: In New York, more than three thousand Jews and their friends gathered tonight at the Academy of Music to for the second annual grand ball of the Purim Association. The first grand ball took place last year and it was great success. Many of the guest came in costumes including “one lady who was dressed … in garments made entirely of Frank Leslie's paper, and was decidedly a feature of the night, as were "Joan of Arc,""Old Aunt Dinah,""Mehitabel Ann,""Old Mother Goose,""Pocahontas,""Anne Boleyn" and the "Dame aux Camelias.” One lady was dressed in the height of fashion, in garments made entirely of Frank Leslie's paper, and was decidedly a feature of the night, as were "Joan of Arc,""Old Aunt Dinah,""Mehitabel Ann,""Old Mother Goose,""Pocahontas,""Anne Boleyn" and the "Dame aux Camelias.” Myer S. Isaacs and his committee are to be congratulated for putting on such a successful event which was orderly and entertaining.


1869: Birthdate of Michael von Faulhaber who was Archbishop of Munich from 1917 until 1952 who opposed the Nazis on certain issues but demonstrated the anti-Semitism compatible with European Christianity as manifested by his work with Amici Israel among other things.


1869: The first edition of the Jewish Times appeared in New York City.  Mortiz Ellinger was the publisher.


1870: In Cambridge City, Indiana, Michael H. and Rachel Levy Franklin gave birth to Leo Morris Franklin who served as Rabbi of Detroit’s Temple Beth El for over four decades.


1871: In Zamość, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, timber trader Eliasz Luxemburg and Line Löwenstein gave birth to German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.



1871: The clause of the Constitution of the Independent Order of the Free Sons of Israel “establishing an endowment fund for widows and orphans” “went into effect” today which meant that “the widow and orphans of a deceased member became entitled to receive $1,000 besides monthly benefits.”


1873: In Kovno, Lithuania (part of the Russian Empire), Fanny Sapira Morris and Jacob Samuel Samuels Morris gave birth to Hyman Morris who was the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Leeds.


1874: “A Gang of Swindlers” published today J. Moritz Ehrenberg, a college educated middle class Hungarian born Jew as the leader of a group of con man who have preyed on members of the American financial community in many cities. Michael Mandel, an Austrian born Jew and Henry Hertz, a Russian born Jew are two of his comrades in these larcenous schemes for which they have been imprisoned in New York and Missouri.


1876: It was reported today that a Purim reception will be held at Delmonico’s 4 days after the actual celebration of the holiday on the Jewish calendar.


1876: Birthdate of Francis Deak Pollak, the native of NYC and Columbia Law School Graduate who was a partner in the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell and served as a trustee of the Jewish Agricultural and


Industrial Aid Society.


1876: Karl Goldmark’s “Rustic Wedding Symphony premiered in Vienna today.


1878(30th of Adar I, 5638): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1879: In Charleston, SC, Rabbi David Levy officiated at the wedding of Isaac Levy of Thomasville, GA and “Rachel Elias, the daughter of the late Levy Elias.”


1879: In New York, Judge Gildersleve is scheduled to rule on an application compelling the 3 Salomon brothers to pay six dollars a week in support of Mrs. Fanny Solomon, their 70 year old mother.  She had petitioned the court for a payment of support.  The sons had contested the matter claiming that their mother was financially capable of taking of herself.


1880:  The would-be assassin of General Melilkoff, a leading figure in Russia, who was to be hanged today, said while be interrogated that he had converted from Judaism because it was impossible for a Jew to live in St. Petersburg.


1880:  Publication of “Was Shylock A Jew”



1882(14th of Adar, 5642): Purim


1882: In Vienna, Albert Salomon von Rothschild and Bettina Caroline de Rothschild gave birth to Louis Nathaniel de Rothschild who had to pay the Nazi twenty-one million dollars to gain his freedom.



1884: Gustav Jacob Born and his first wife Gretchen Kauffmann gave birth to their daughter Kathe.


1884: In the wake of an order expelling all Jews holding foreign passports from Odessa and other Russian cities, The Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Department of Internal Relations, St. Petersburg said that it could not provide Jewish citizens of America with Russian permits of residence.


1885: Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen completed his terms U.S. Secretary of State under President Chester A. Arthur during which he dealt with problems related to the persecution of Jews in Russia and Russian discrimination against American Jews trying to do business in the Czar’s empire.


1885: In Vienna, Dr. Alois Klemperer and Eugenie Jenny Klemperer gave birth to Gustav Klemperer


1887: In Great Britain Jewish novelist Benjamin Leopold Farjeon and Margaret Jefferson gave birth to Herbert Farjeon, a major force in “the British theatre from 1910 until 1945.”


1890: “Dancing For Charity” published today described the charity ball given by the Purim Association has raised between ten and twelve thousand dollars for the United Hebrew Charities.


1890: In Baltimore, MD, Benjamin and Rose Nathan Perlman gave birth to Philip B. Perlman who was appointed as U.S. Solicitor General by President Truman in 1947, making him the first Jew to hold that post.


1890: As Mr. and Mrs. Lazar Anezes and their four children are detained by the Commissioners of Emigration as paupers and the United Hebrew Charities work for their admission by offering “to go surety for them” Judge O’Brien granted a writ of habeas corpus.


1890: “Lipschutz Won Another Game” published today descried the third game of the  match between Jewish chess champions Eugene Delmar and Samuel Lipshcutz at the Manhattan Chess Club which Lipschutz  when Delmar “resigned” after the 49th move.


1891 In one of the earliest manifestation of popular non-Jewish support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Blackstone Memorial was sent to President Benjamin Harrison.  The petition was the creation of Reverend William Eugene Blackstone and called for U.S. government support in the endeavor. It was signed by 431 prominent Americans including John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and future President William McKinley and was supported by a myriad of newspapers including the New York Times,Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post.  Harrison’s lack of response may have been another sign of the ineptitude that would lead voters to deny him a second term a year later. 


1892: Kansas Congressman Funston was brought to tears during his visit to Ellis Island today when he saw the conditions under which the immigrants were living.  A member of the House Committee on Immigration, Funston was so moved by what he saw that he took money from his own billfold and gave it to some of those whom he encountered.


1892(6th of Adar, 5652): James Solomon Moore who had suffered a stroke two years ago passed away this evening in New York City.  Born at Konigsberg, Germany in 1821, he moved to England at the age of 17 where he pursued his studies while living with his uncle, P.B. Moore.  He came to the United States during the 1840’s and in 1849 joined the California Gold Rush. After a successful business career, he became interested in economic theory and his advocacy of removing tarries earned him the title of “The Father of Free Trade.” He married Amelia Moore in 1854 and was a member of B’nai Jeshrun at Madison and 65th Street.


1892:In New York Rabbi Henry Pereira Mendes was shot in the abdomen at his home by a beggar named Jose Mizrachee. Born in England, he had been the rabbi at Congregation Shearith Israel of New York and an active member of the Jewish community, who, among other things, established the Jewish Theological Seminary and The American Hebrew. Misrachee followed the rabbi home from the synagogue and forced his way into the house and shot him during a botched robbery attempt.  The rabbi’s wife and baby were in the house at the town.  Emergency surgery spared Mendes and permanent harm.  Mizrachee is described as an “Arabian Jew” who came to the United States in 1890.  He was well known to the victim and other members of his congregation for his aggressive begging habits and his failure to be content with any “alms” that were given to him.


1893: R.H. Mcay & Co. was advertising the sale of “Passover Goods for the Holiday” including “Matzoths, Matzoth Flour and Potato Flour” for nine cents a pound on the fifth floor of its new building.


1893: It was reported today that tickets for the upcoming Purim Ball will cost ten dollars and they may be purchased from M.H. Moses as well as several other Jewish businessmen.  Those wanting a box for the event must contact S.B. Solomon or Simon Schafter.


1893: At today’s meeting of The Central Labor Federation, “the Hebrew printers said they had conferred with Typographical Union, No.6”


1894: “Russian Hebrew Immigrants published today described some of the controversy surrounding the admission Jews to the United States.  According to the Bureau of Immigration many of the Russian Jews are actually coming from South America where they have been living in agricultural communities financed by the Baron Hirsh Funds.  The colonies in Argentina have failed and the Jews have come to the United States where they have been allowed to settle as long as they meet the legal requirements regarding health and financial responsibility.  Despite criticism, the Bureau cannot turn people away because of their religion.


1894: In the New York, Assemblyman Danforth E Ainsworth, a Republican from Oswego County made use of the term “Jew pawnbrokers” while addressing the legislature.


1895: “Fortunate Hebrew Foundling” published today described the work of Henry S. Allen who has secured a place for a homeless waif at the orphanage run by the Hebrew Guardian Sheltering society.


1896: In New Haven, Pennsylvania, Aaron and Jennie Marcus gave birth to Jacob Rader Marcus, the Reform Rabbi who founded the American Jewish Archives at the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, Ohio. He passed away in 1995 at the age of 99.



1898: “Notes of Forthcoming and Recent Publications” published today described an article by Israel Zangwill written by Israel Zangwill “for the Sunday School Times on the second Moses – Moses Maimonides – without a knowledge of whom the old Hebrew prover ‘From Moses to Moses there was non like Moses,’ is meaningless.”


1898: “Bargain Books” published today listed The Jew at Home by Joseph Pennell as costing $.10


1898: “Colonel Picquart, who was disciplined for giving testimony favorable to the case of Emile Zola,” the defender of Dreyfus, “at the recent trial of the author, fought a duel with swords today in the riding school of the Military School with Colonel Henry who testified against Zola.”


1898: “New Jewish Synagogue” published today described plans for the construction of a new synagogue being built by Congregation Hand-in-Hand, the first such building to take place in the Borough of the Bronx. The congregation, which received a gift of $1,000 from Baroness Hirsch for its building fund, has been meeting at the North Side Republican Club Hall


1899: “Rabbis Will Meet in Cincinnati” published today described the decision of reform movement to hold its Annual Central in March instead of July because March  marks the birthday of Dr. I. M. Wise and the rabbis wish to honor the man who mentored so many of them.


1900:Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan,” “a play in one act by David Belasco premiered today at the Herald Square Theatre in New York.”


1900: Today Otto Jaffe, the German born Irish businessman who helped turn The Jaffe Brothers into the “largest linen exporter in Ireland before becoming Lord Mayor of Belfast was “knighted at Dublin Castle by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.


1900: Birthdate of Lilli Schlüchterer who gained famed as the German Jewish doctor Lilli Jahn “who gained international fame posthumously following the publication of her letters to her five children which she wrote during her imprisonment in the labor camp Breitenau before being deported to the concentration camp Auschwitz where she was murdered.



1901(14th of Adar, 5661): Purim


1901: Birthdate of Yocheved Ba-Miriam the Russian born Israeli poet who made Aliyah in 1928 who “never wrote another poem” after her son Nahum (Zuzik) Haaz “died in the Israeli War of Independence.”


1901(NS): Birthdate of Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky who gained fame as Philadelphia architect Louis Isadore Kahn.



1902: Mizrachi (literally: "Eastern", but actually derived from the Hebrew acronym for "Spiritual Centre") was established by Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines as a religious Zionist organization based on the Basel Program and commitment to the Torah. Their slogan is "Eretz Israel for the people of Israel according to the Torah of Israel." Mizrachi is a worldwide religious Zionist movement. Its main ideal is that Torah should be the spiritual center of Zionism. In Israel, it initiated the Ministry of Religion and helped pass laws for "Kashrut" and Sabbath observance in public life and in the Israel Army. During WWII, it participated in the American Zionist Emergency Council.


1902: Leopold Greenberg, one of Herzl's most devoted followers and representative in London suggests that Herzl should appear before the Royal Commission in London.


1902:26th of Adar I, 5662: Fifty-four year old New York businessman Leonard Lewisohn passed awa at the London home of his son-in-law Charles S. Henry. A native of Hamburg, Mr. Lewisohn came to the United States when he was 16 years old. He was President of the United Metals Selling Company and a philanthropist who had mad generous contributions to numerous Jewish charities.


1902: Reports of the death of Leonard Lewisohn “caused some weakness in the stock market where Amalgamated Copper declined 1 and 3/8 points.


1902: In response to the death of Leonard Lewishon who was trying “make a bull market in coffee” the coffee market opened 10 to 20 points lower than the day before but regained its losses by the close of business


1902: Louis Seligisberg, who represented the business interests of Leonard Lewisohn announced that his death would not affect the coffee business of the firm


1903: Birthdate of Irving Kahal, the native of Houtzdale, PA, the songwriter who collaborated with composer Sammy Fain (Samuel E. Feinberg)>



1903: A committee was appointed to secure a site for a new building at Hebrew Union College.


1904: The Criminal Chamber of Cassation grants Dreyfus a re-investigation of his case.


1905: Birthdate of László Benedek the native of Budapest who “worked as a writer and editor in Hungarian cinema until World War II when Louis B. Mayer helped him escape and brought him to Hollywood where he directed his first film for MGM in 1944 as a stand-in.”


1906: A description of the Pogrom in Russia provided by Abraham E. Lubarsky, a wealthy tea merchant from Odessa who has escaped to safety in New York included praise for the “Soma Borona (Self Defense)” which “is composed of armed young Jews” that Cossacks “have learned to fear.”


1909: Alianza Hispano-Israelita formed in Spain to bring about the return of Spanish Jews.


1909: Oscar Solomon Straus completed his terms as the third U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Straus had been appointed by Theodore Roosevelt and left when William Howard Taft took office.  A year later Straus would return to a post he had held before, U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire.



1913(26th of Adar I, 5673): One hundred five year old Abraham Isaac Trager, a rabbi from NYC, passed away today at Columbia, SC.


1913: Dr. Joseph H. Hertz, “the newly chosen English Chief Rabbi” is scheduled to set sail for London today aboard the Mauretania today, when it is rumored that Dr. Moses Hyamson, “his principal competitor for the position” is sailing from England to New York where he is expected to become the rabbi of Orach Chaim, replacing Rabbi Hertz who had held that position.


1913: Mrs. Philip Stein is scheduled to lecture on “To and From Jerusalem” at today’s meeting of the Isaiah Woman’s Club at the Isaiah Temple in Chicago.


1915: Birthdate of French mathematician, Laurent Schwartz.  His considerable mathematical work, including the theory of distributions, won him the Fields Medal in 1950.  During World War II the Schwartz hid his Jewish identity by using numerous aliases including that of Laurent Sélimartin.  He passed away in 2002.




1915: It was reported today that Dr. Robert Tuttle Morris the former President of the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists believes that “Zangwill’s melting pot theory…is absurd biologically” because “the Jews are not going to cross with the Aryans” which means “they are not melting away” and they have “a sort of racial feeling that they must come again to rule the earth” which “keeps them together.” 


1915: As of today, the Fund of the American Jewish Relief Committee has collected $532,937.14.


1916: Pianist Lois Adler is scheduled to perform during ‘the 18th regular Sunday afternoon concert” at the Chicago Hebrew Institute today.


1916: Thanks to the efforts of Isidore Hershfield of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society who was sent to Poland by HIAS, the German authorities have granted the Jews of the Governmental District of Warsaw postal privileges which will enable them to send letters asking friends and relatives for financial assistance and informing of them of lifestyle events such as births and deaths.


1916: “The sixteenth concert of the fourth season of the Sinai Orchestra” conducted by Arthur Dunham is scheduled to take place this evening at Sinai Temple in Chicago.


1917: As of today there are 200,000 Jews living in the province of Kalisch, “of whom 100,000 are destitute” and 500,000 Jews in the district of Warsaw “of whom half are in want…”


1918: Constantin C. Arion, who said that his “Government would grant rights to the Jews in accordance with the peace treat” and that the Government “would completely abolish Article 7 of the Rumanian Constitution” which states that “Jews in Rumania are aliens and that naturalization is only possible for them individually” began his service as the Rumanian Minister of Foreign Affairs today.


1918: President Wilson ordered the removal of the sentence “The foreign born and especially Jews, are more apt to malinger than the native born” which had inadvertently been included in the manual sent to medical advisory boards in February.


1919: Rabbi Hyman Gerson Enelow who served “as a member of the Overseas Commission of the Jewish Welfare Board, which went to France in July, 1918” wrote today that “I am in Paris for several days and busier than ever.  My last trip covered...a vast area all the way from Marseilles to Brest” where I opened up a number of centers for the Jewish War Board and delivered “a great many addresses.”


1919:  In a letter published in the New York Times Emir Feisal wished “the Jews a hearty welcome home” and asserted “our two movements complete one another.” “There is room in Syria for both of us” he concluded.


1919: Birthdate of Albert J. Rosenthal, who as dean of Columbia Law School in the late 1970s and early 1980s helped increase the number of women on the school's faculty.” (As reported by Margalit Fox)


1921: Birthdate of Milton “Milt” Kaiman the native of Hurleyville, NY, who was a standup comedian appearing on numerous variety and talk shows as well as a frequent actor on television shows and movies whose sole Broadway credit in “The Passion of Josef D” – one of those “Jewish culture things” since it was written by Paddy Chayefsky and starred Luther Adler and Peter Falk.


 1923: In Brooklyn, Russian immigrants Sadye Tisch and Al Tisch a “former All-American basketball player at the City University of New York who owned a garment factory as well as two summer camps” gave birth to businessman Laurence Tisch, CEO of CBS from 1986 through 1995.



1924: In Seattle, WA, Moe and Rose Minnie (Cohn) Bernhard gave birth to producer, writer and real estate executive Harvey Bernhard, the husband of Lillian Vera Kramer.


1925: Birthdate of Menahem Stern, the native of Bialystok and son of a mitnaged father and Chasidic mother (talk about mixed marriages) who made Aliyah in 1938 and who began his climb up the academic ladder as “Lecturer of the History of the Jewish people in the Second Temple period.”


1926: “The Bohemian Dancer” a silent film based on a 1907 operetta directed and produced by Frederic Zelnik was released today in Germany.


1926: William Fox, the chairman of the United Jewish Campaign in New York City announced today that national campaign which will begin in April will be trying to raise fifteen million dollars of which six million dollars will be raised locally.


1927: In response to a call by Bishop Manning “for a joint effort by Protestant, Catholic and Jewish churches to preserve marriage and the home”  Rabbi David de Sola Pool said “he believed that such cooperation between these three religious groups was feasible and that headway could not be made against the divorce evil without it.”


1927(1st of Adar II, 5687): Rosh Chodesh Adar II and Shabbat Shekalim


1927: David Louis Podell and Sara (Cissie) Podell gave birth to Margaret A. Shulman the wife of Mark Shulman.


1928(13th of Adar, 5688): Ta’anit Esther and Erev Purim


1928: Herbert Samuel’s successor as High Commissioner, Field Marshal Viscount Plumer, a distinguished WW I commander, opened Jerusalem’s first Arts and Crafts Exhibition which was held in the Citadel at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem.


1929:John D. Rockefeller Jr. spent the day viewing ancient and historic sites in Jerusalem, including the Mosque of Omar and the Holy Sepulcher.


1929: In the Bronx, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Halpern gave birth to Howard Marvin Halpern, “psychotherapist who wrote popular self-help books about severing or realigning burdensome relationships.” (As reported by Bruce Weber)


1930: In New York, Dr. Bernard Goodman and the former Alice Matz, the heir to a fortune created by “Ex-Lax” gave birth to Roy M. Goodman who was powerhouse among liberal Republicans when there really were such people.” (As reported by Richard Perez-Pena)



1930: Birthdate of David Lawrence Goldberg, the native of Crown Heights who gained fame as political consultant David Garth, the political guru behind the elections of Mayors John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.  (As reported by Sam Roberts)




1932: Three members of the team of athletes assembled by the Maccabee Association of the United States to participate in the Jewish Olympic Games in Palestine sailed on the SS Aquitania.  The three athletes included co-captains David White and Lesslie Flaskman representing the Maccabee Association of Boston and Harold Ginsburg representing the 92nd Stree Y.M.H.A. The other ten members of the team are to sail next week on the Majestic or the Conte Grande.


1932(27th of Adar I, 5692): Parashat Vayakhel and Shabbat Shekalim


1932(27th of Adar I, 5692): A week before her 85th birthday, rebbetzin Rosa Sonneschein passed away today.



1933: Last democratic election during Hitler's lifetime. Nationalists gain 52 seats, but not enough to establish a dictatorship by consent of Parliament. The Third Reich is born.


1933:When Jeanette Wolff, an outspoken critic of the Nazis, returned home from an election campaign today and was arrested by SA men.


1934: In Tel Aviv, while visiting relatives in Tel Aviv, Ruth Kahneman gave birth to Israeli economist and Nobel Laurette Daniel Kahneman, whose father “Efrayim “was picked up in the first major round-up of French Jews. He was a key pioneer and theorist of behavioral finance, which integrates economics and cognitive science to explain seemingly irrational risk management behavior in human beings. He is famous for collaboration with Amos Tversky and others in establishing a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and in developing prospect theory. Kahneman spent his childhood years in Paris, France and moved to Palestine in 1946. He received his B.Sc. in mathematics and psychology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1954, after which he served in the Israeli Defense Forces principally in its psychology department. In 1958 he came to the United States and earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. Currently a faculty member at Princeton University and a fellow at Hebrew University, he is the winner of the 2002 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his work in prospect theory, despite being a research psychologist and not an economist. In fact, Kahneman claims to have never taken a single economics course — he claims that what he knows of the subject he and Tversky learned from collaborators Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch. In explaining why he entered the field of psychology, Kahneman once wrote: “It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others - the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.”


1935: A brothel run by Polly Adler was raided resulting in the only conviction for which the famed madam served jail time (24 days of a 30 day sentence). 


1936(11th of Adar, 5696): Observance of the Fast of Esther since the 13th of Adar fell on Shabbat


1936: The men’s division of the New York campaign of the United Palestine Appeal is scheduled to “hold a luncheon rally at the Hotel Astor” today.


1936: It was reported today that “in the House of Lords, the government’s intentions” “to establish a legislative council for Palestine” “were assailed by peers of all parties, notably by the Marquees Lothian who predicted that the proposed council ‘would exaggerate racial difficulties, not heal them’” and would lead to Chaim Weizmann using “all of his powers of persuasion at the Colonial Office…to postpone or scrap this project.”


1936: “Responding to the appeal from Dr. Chaim Weizmann, President of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, for funds to aide Jewish refugees in various parts of Europe, leaders of the United Palestine Appeal opened a campaign here today” with a luncheon at the Hotel Astor presided over by Nathan Straus, chairman of the campaign.


1936: Jewish leaders estimated that at least thirty people had been injured during the attacks by nationalist students in Warsaw who threw “firecrackers and stench bombs in several classrooms.”


1936: “The largest single group of Jewish refugees to reach” the United States “from Germany, 200 men, women and children arrived” today “on the United States liner Washing as quota immigrants” which meant “they were admitted as permanent residents on the basis, in most case, of avowals given by relatives here that none would become public charges.”


1936: “Sir John Simon, Minister of Home Affairs, admitted today in the House of Commons there was Jewish persecution going on in the East End of London which he a attributed to the Fascist movement” – a movement led by Sir Oswald Mosely – but “denied that police had shown any political bias in the matter” i.e. supporting the Fascists.


1936(11th of Adar, 5696):Rabbi Yosef Rosen, known as the Rogatchover Gaon (Prodigy/Genius), passed away in Vienna today. Born in 1858, and raised in the Belarusian city of Rogatchov, he served for decades as a rabbi in the Latvian city of Dvinsk (Daugavpils). He was an unparalleled genius, whose in- depth understanding of all Talmudic literature left the greatest of scholars awestruck. He habitually demonstrated that many of the famous debates between the Talmudic sages have a singular thread and theme. Rabbi Rosen authored tens of thousands of responsa on the Talmud and Jewish law. Many of them have been compiled in the set of volumes Tzafnat Paneach.



1936: The Spitfire went through its first test-flights.  The famed fighter plane would play a key role in the defeat of the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain.  Thanks to the Spitfire and the spirited pilots of the Royal Air Force (RAF), Hitler’s seemingly invincible legions were stopped for the first time; the British Isles remained free and would become the launching point for the Allied invasion of Europe which would save a remnant of European Jewry. Robert Roland Stanford Tuck, known as “Lucky Tuck” was one of the Jewish pilots in the RAF who flew the Spitfire.  In his case he flew it at the Battle of Dunkirk where he earned a DSO. The Spitfire was the favorite plane of Ezer Weizmann the father of Israel’s Air Force and later President of the Jewish state.  He had his own Spitfire which was featured in flyovers by IDF planes during various Israeli celebratory activities.


1937: U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull offered a public apology for New York Mayor LaGuardia’s suggestion that the “1939 New York World’s Fair would include a ‘chamber of horrors’ displaying that ‘brown-shirted fanatics who is menacing the peace of the world.’” (Hull’s comments came during the hey-day of Isolationism in the United States.  His apology came in the same year that the United States ignored a Japanese attack on an American gunboat in China.)


1937: Despite an apology issued by the State Department, Mayor La Guardia said he stood by his declaration that Hitler is a “brown-shirted fanatic who is menacing the peace of Europe.”


1937: British author Mary Frances Butts who had been the wife of Jewish poet and published John Rodker whose career she had worked to further and with whom she had one child passed away today.


 


 


1937: The wave of Arab terror spread into southern Palestine when an Arab entered a Jewish orange grove near the colony of Less Tzionah and shot Vladislav Louga, a non-Jewish worker from Poland, in the stomach.  Louga was rushed to a hospital in Tel Aviv where he is in critical condition.


1938(2nd of Adar II, 5698): Parashat Pekudi


1938: During his sermon at the Mount Zion Congregation, Rabbi B.A. Tinter said “the non-sectarian Temple of Religion to be erected at the New York World’s Fair of 1939 was ‘one of the greatest contributions the fair will offer to posterity.”


1938: In his sermon at Mount Neboh Temple Abraham L. Feinberg warned that “dictatorship in the style of Hitler and Mussolini has become so alluring to many, even in America.”


1938: During his sermon at the West Side Institutional Synagogue, Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein said, “the present trial in Moscow is the greatest indictment against liberalism” because “liberalism brought about the breakdown of the autocracy of the Czar and ushered in through Communism the slavery of the body, mind and soul.”


1938: During a sermon at Temple Ansche Chesed, Rabbi Joseph Zeitlin said he “saw in the darkness of the California floods a ray of  light in the thought that so many have rallied to the aid of those who have been so unfortunate as to have lived in communities swept away by rushing waters.”  (Editor’s note – Eighty years later, we are still dealing with these same California floods.)


1939: The New York Times reported that Palestine Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Eugen Szenkar has just completed four subscription concerts in a tour that included stops in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem where the symphony played before audiences totaling 30,000 music lovers.


1939(14th of Adar, 5699): Purim


1939(14th of Adar, 5699): Moses Gaster, the Romanian born Jewish scholar who served as Hakam of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation in London passed away today at the age of 82. In addition to all of his other accomplishments he was the father of the renowned scholar, Thedore Herzl Gaster.



1940: The Jewish Labor Committee, representing about 500,000 members of Jewish labor unions in the United States, sent a cable to the Labor Party in England requesting the Laborites oppose the recent British restriction of Jewish land purchases in Palestine.


1940: A delegation consisting of Henrietta Szold, Mrs. Isaac Herzog, wife of the Chief Rabbi of Palestine and “others representing the Council of Jewish Women of Palestine” met with the British High Commissioner and gave him a memorandum protesting the recent change in the land laws that was intended to be forwarded to his superiors in London.


1941: Birthdate of Alain Boublil a Tunisian musical theatre lyricist and librettist, best known for his collaborations with the composer and co-religionist Claude-Michel Schönberg for musicals on Broadway and London's West End including: La Révolution Française (1973), Les Misérables (1980), Miss Saigon (1989), Martin Guerre (1996), The Pirate Queen (2006), and Marguerite (2008).


1942: At the “Selection” of Jews at Baranowicze, Poland those sent to the left were beaten and placed in trucks where they sent away to their death in a pit just outside of town. Those on the right looked on. Of the 12,000 Jews living in the town at the start of the war, 3,500 were killed that Purim.


1942: “49th Parallel,” a British war movie based on an original story by Emeric Pressburger who wrote the screenplay and starring Leslie Howard premiered in New York as “The Invaders.”


1943: In the Ukraine, over 1,000 Jews were murdered outside the Khmeilnik ghetto.


1943: Office of Strategic Services interviews Dr. Eduard Bloch, a Jewish Austrian physician who had been doctor and confidant to Adolf Hitler and his family while the future Fuehrer was growing up, and who ministered to Hitler's mother Klara during her losing battle with breast cancer.


1944(10th of Adar, 5704): Max JacobFrench writer and painter, died at the Drancy, the French concentration camp at the age of 68.  Born in Brittany in 1876, Jacob converted to Roman Catholicism in 1914. He spent most of the war hiding from the Nazis and their French fascist allies. He died while awaiting transport from France to a concentration camp in Germany Apparently his conversion was not enough to get the Roman Catholic Church to intervene on his behalf. His friends, who included the renowned Pablo Picasso, saw to it that he had a fine burial after the war, but were unable to do anything so save him from the fate common to most of the Jews of Europe, great and small alike.


1944(10th of Adar, 5704):Ernst Julius Cohen, “a Dutch chemist known for his work on the allotropy of metals,” was murdered today in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. Born in 1869, “Cohen studied chemistry under Svante Arrhenius in Stockholm, Henri Moissan at Paris, and Jacobus van't Hoff at Amsterdam. In 1893 he became Van't Hoff's assistant and in 1902 he became professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Utrecht, a position which he held until his retirement in 1939. Throughout his life, Cohen studied the allotropy of tin. Cohen’s areas of research included polymorphism of elements and compounds, photographic chemistry, electrochemistry, pizeochemistry, and the history of science. He published more than 400 papers and numerous books. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1926.


1945: While excavating the site near Crematorium II at Auschwitz, Soviet soldiers found a German canteen which contained the diaries of Salmen Gradowski.One of the entries read,“At almost each block, beside the men standing in line, bodies of three, four persons are lying. These are the victims of the night that have not lived to see the day. Even yesterday they were standing members of the roll-call and today they lie, lifeless, motionless. Life is not important at the roll-call. Numbers are important. Numbers tally…” Gradowski’s diary was published in a book entitled Amidst a Nightmare of Crime: Manuscripts of the Sonderkommandowhich describes life in the death camp through the eyewitness accounts of four Sonderommandos. For more about this work, Gardowski and the others who supplied the material see



1946: Birthdate of Martin Levi van Creveld “an Israeli military historian and theorist. Van Creveld was born in the Netherlands in the city of Rotterdam, and has lived in Israel since shortly after his birth. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has been on the faculty since 1971. He is the author of seventeen books on military history and strategy, of which Command in War (1985), Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (1977, 2nd edition 2004), The Transformation of War (1991), The Sword and the Olive (1998) and The Rise and Decline of the State (1999) are among the best known. Van Creveld has lectured or taught at many strategic institutes in the Western world, including the U.S. Naval War College.”


1947: Birthdate of Dr. John Kitzhaber the Oregon physician who served as governor from 1995 to 2003.


1947: As the Jews of Palestine endure their fourth day of living under martial law, banks in Tel Aviv are scheduled to reopen thanks to a shipment of coins and currency in an amount equal to thirty-two million American dollars having arrived from Jeruslaem.  In an attempt to exercise greater control, the British suspended the press passes of correspondents which had enabled the journalists to enter and leave zones of military occupation.


1948: Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver warned the U.N. Security Council today “that the Jews of Palestine would fight for survival even without the United Nations if the world organization is unable to carry out its own decisions” i.e. the Partition vote that created an Arab State, a Jewish state and a Jerusalem governed by an international body.


1948: Actor Eli Wallach married actress Anne Jackson in what marked the start of 66 year marriage that only ended with his death.


1948: Publication of a review of Mark Hellinger’s final film, “The Naked City.”



1949: Operation Uvda, the final Israeli campaign of the War of Independence which is intended to secure portions of the Negev began oday.


1949:Negev Brigade forces set out from Beersheba to the Ramon Crater, through Bir 'Asluj. Golani forces simultaneously set out from Mamshit to Ein Husub on the first day of Operation Uvda, one of the final campaigns of the War for Independence.


1950: Jordanian political leader Samir Rifai Pasha has rejected King Abdullah’s request that he form a new government.  Pasha’s refusal is tied to opposition to the non-aggression pact with Israel which was first made public on February 28, 1950.  Despite Abdullah’s support, the pact seems doomed since Jordan’s political leaders do not.


1950: Iraq’s announcement that effectively, the Jewish population must leave the country within the next twelve months represents a reversal of its policy of not allowing Jews to move to Israel while completely dislocating “Israel’s immigration program for 1950.” The Jewish agency had budgeted for the absorption of 150,000 immigrants, including 50,000 from Arab countries and 50,000 from eastern Europe.  Since there are approximately 150,000 Jews living in Iraq, the Israelis will have to find some way to raise additional funds allowing for the in-gathering of twice as many as Jews as had been originally planned.


1950: Daniel Frisch, the President of the Zionist Organization of America, underwent surgery today at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center today after having named Benjamin G. Bowdy, on the ZOA’s vice president, as acting president.


1952(8th of Adar, 5712): Sixty-six year old Rachael “Rae” Landy the Cleveland born nurse who helped create the health system in pre-World War I Palestine and rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army passed away today.



1953: Birthdate of Michael J. Sandel, the Minneapolis born Harvard Professor “best known for his course ‘Justice.’”


1953: Stalin died disrupting plans for mass deportations of Russian Jews.  The Soviet dictator was an anti-Semite.  Unlike Hitler, he could curb his anti-Semitism when it suited his purposes.  For example, he allowed the government of Czechoslovakia to sell modern arms to Israel at the moment of its birth.  He later switched his views and followed an anti-Zionist as well as anti-Semitic policy.


1953: Lazar Kaganovich began serving as the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers in the Soviet Union.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Lower House of the Bonn Parliament passed the first reading of the West German agreement to pay reparations to Israel and World Jewry for the Nazi persecution.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that in the Knesset, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion defined the role of the army in national life. The Knesset extended for a year the provisional military law currently in force, providing for prison terms for any form of propaganda intended to undermine the authority of the state.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Abill to legalize the requisition of land or property for the development, security or settlement, from the establishment of the State in May 1948, to the end of April 1, 1952, was presented for the second and third reading.


1954(30th of Adar I, 5714): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1954(30th of Adar I, 5714): Forty-year old Donald Bloomingdale the son of Rosalie and Irving Bloomingdale and the onetime husband of Bethsabée de Rothschild passed away today.


1954: “The Girl in Pink Tights, a musical comedy with music by Sigmund Romberg; lyrics by Leo Robin; and a musical book by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields” opened on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theatre.


1955: In the United Kingdom, Phyllis April Jaffé, child Lithuanian Jewish refugees and Stephen Eric Seabag-Montefiore, the descendant of “a line of wealthy Sephardic that included “his great-great uncle Sir Moses Montefiore” and veterans of both World Wars,gave birth to Nicholas Hugh Sebag-Montefiore the barrister turned author who wrote Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man, the ultimate “big book” about this moment in British history and who is the brother of historian Simon Sebag Montefiore who authored “the big book” on the history of Jerusalem. (Editor’s note – can you imagine what the dinner conversation was like in their home. Wow)


1955: Birthdate of Julien Dray, the native Oran which was then part of French Algeria, who became a leader of the French Socialist party.


1956:Erich Itor Kahn composer, pianist and Holocaust survivor passed away at the age of 50.


1957: Jewish comedian Phil Silvers in the role of “Sergeant Ernie Bilko” satirizes rock star Elvis Presley.


1962: “Rome Adventure,” a romantic comedy co-starring Suzanne Pleshette with music by Max Steiner was released in the United States today.


1962: In Washington, DC, “law professor and Kennedy administration member Abram Chayes and lawyer and former Undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force Antonia Handler Chayes” gave birth to Sarah Chayes “a former award winning reporter for NPR” and “a senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.”


1967(23rd of Adar I, 5727): Sixty-one year old Mischa Auer the native of Russia who transitioned from the Yiddish theatre to movies, which included a 1936 Oscar nomination passed away today.


1967: Last minute replacement Rodney Dangerfeld was the surprise hit of tonight’s Ed Sullivan Show on CBS.


1970: U.S. premiere of blockbuster “Airport” directed by George Seaton who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and called himself a “Shabbos Goy” produced by Ross Hunter with music by Alfred Newman.


1973: Baritone Robert Merrill (Moshe Millstein) “celebrated his 500th performance” at the Metropolitan today.


1973: Marcel Marceau appears at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City, IA.

 
1974: In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur Israeli forces withdrew from the west bank of the Suez Canal as step towards ending hostilities brought on by the Arab sneak attack.  Ariel Sharon was responsible for the audacious attack across the Suez Canal which gave the strategic advantage to the Jewish forces.



1974(11th of Adar, 5734): Solomon I "Sol" Hurok US impresario, passed away at the age of 85. Hurok was responsible for bringing a troupe of Yemenite Jews who had moved to Israel to perform in the United States.  Thanks to these efforts Yemenite culture was introduced to Americans (Jews and non-Jews alike).  Not only did this help to preserve an ancient part of the Jewish heritage, it helped create a positive image of Israel as a homeland for persecuted Jewry no matter where they lived.


1975(22nd of Adar, 5735): Thirty-eight year old Colonel Uzi Yairi who had become head of the Sayeret Matkal at the age of 31 was killed when rescuing hostages being held by Palestinian terrorists at the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv.


1975 After hearing gunfire from Tel Aviv’s Savoy Hotel, Private Moshe Deutschmann, a soldier from the Israeli army's Golani Brigade who was on home leave, grabbed his weapon, ran to the hotel after hearing gunfire and was mortally wounded during a firefight with terrorists who were trying to escape from the Saoy. Deutschmann was posthumously awarded the Medal of Distinguished Service.


1978: A revival of David Merrick’s “Hello Dolly” that would run for 147 performances began at the Lunt-Fontaine Theatre.


1978:The Jerusalem Post reported that the US State Department was upset and angered that between the time that Prime Minister Menachem Begin presented his peace plan to US President Jimmy Carter in early December, and when the same plan was submitted at the end of the month to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, significant changes were made in the text. The draft added Israel’s right to maintain security and “public order” in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and stipulated that only those Palestinians who accepted Israeli citizenship could buy land in Israel, while any Israeli could purchase land in the administered areas. The Americans demanded complete reciprocity.


1979: Twelve people were injured in Jerusalem when a terrorist bomb exploded on a bus at the Plaza Hotel.


1979: In Tel Aviv, a bomb exploded on a bus but nobody was injured.


1981(29th of Adar I, 5741): Seventy-five year old “Bernard Postal, associate editor of The Jewish Week, passed away today.

1982: Gail Winston and journalist Frank Rich gave birth to novelist Nathaniel Rich, the brother of screenwriter Simon Rich.


1982: “I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can” produced by Scott Rudin and featuring David Margulies as “Walter Kress” and Ellen Greene as “Karen Mulligan” was released today in the United States.


1982: U.S. premiere of “Diner” with a script by Barry Levinson who also directed what would the first of four films set in post-war Baltimore, produced by Jerry Weintraub co-starring Steve Guttenberg and Ellen Barkin and featuring Paul Reiser.


1986: CBS broadcast the first episode of “Fast Time” produced by Amy Heckerling who directed the 1982 film on which the television series was based.


1987: Today, in Tel Aviv, Defense Minister Yithak Rabin, read a statement in English apologizing to the American government and the American people for the Pollard sypinng operation, an operation that Foreign minister Shimon Peres had characterized as a mistake.


1987: Yossi Sarad, a member of the Knesett, called for the dismissal of Rafael Etian from his job as chairman of the state-owned Israel Chemicals since he was the Defense Ministry official who organized the Pollard spying operation.


1993: In the United Kingdom premiere of “Toys” a comedy directed and co-produced by Barry Levinson who also co-authered the script and filmed by cinematographer Adam Greenberg.


1995: The New York Times features a review of The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition


 by Anne Frank; edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler; translated by Susan Massotty


1996(14th of Adar, 5756): Purim


1997(26th of Adar I, 5757): Eighty-eighty year old Zalman Abramov the Israeli politician who had been born in Minsk, made Aliyah in 1920 and served as an MK from 1959 to 1977 passed away today.


1997: U.S. premier of “The Watermelon Woman” with music by Paul Shapiro whose specialties include Klezmer music.

 
1999: U.S. premiere of  “Analyze This” directed by Harold Ramis, produced by Paula Weinstein and Jane Rosenthal with music by Howard Shore and co-starring Billy Crystal and Lisa Kudrow.



1999: The Times of London featured a review of Brother Against Brother: Violence and


 Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination by Ehud Sprinzak.


2000: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or special interest to Jewish readers including The Unruly Life of Woody Allen: A Biography by Marion Meade, Law of Return: Short Stories by Maxine Rodburg and Essential Judaism: A Complete Guide to Beliefs, Customs, and Rituals by George Robinson.


2002(21stof Adar, 5762):Police officer FSM Salim Barakat (33), Yosef Habi (52), and Eli Dahan (53) were murdered today in Tel Aviv when a Fatah terrorist opened fire on diners at two restaurants.


2002: “The Vagina Monologues” with Idina Menzel opened at the West Side Theatre.


2003: Victor Brailovsky began serving as Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs.


2003 (1 Adar II, 5763): Seventeen people were killed and 53 wounded in a suicide bombing of an Egged bus No. 37 in the Carmel section of Haifa, en route to Haifa University. The blast, which took place on the city's main Moriah Boulevard near the Carmel Center, turned the bus into a charred wreck and scattered bodies along the road. The bus driver, a Christian Arab from Shfaram, was moderately injured. Police said the bomb was laden with metal shrapnel in order to maximize the number of injuries and strapped to the bomber's body. This was the first suicide bombing in two months, following the bombing in the Neve Sha'anan neighborhood in Tel-Aviv on January 5, in which 23 people were killed. The Hamas spokesman praised the attack. The suicide bomber has been identified as a member of Hamas. A letter found on his body praised the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers.  The victims included the following all but two of whom died on the day of the attack:


·         Kmer Abu Khamed, 12, from Daliyat al Karmel


·         Yuval Mendelevitch, 13, from Haifa


·         Smadar Firstatter, 17, from Haifa


·         Avigail Lietel, 14, from Haifa


·         Asaf Tzur, 16, from Haifa


·         Daniel Harush, 16 , from Safed


·         Tom Hershko, 16, from Haifa, and his father-


·         Motti Hershko, 41, from Haifa


·         Tal Kehrmann, 17, from Haifa


·         Elizabeth (Liz) Katzman, 17, from Haifa


·         Meital Katav, 20, from Haifa


·         Moran Shushan, 20, from Haifa


·         Anatoly Biryakov, 20, from Haifa


·         Be'eri Ovad, 21 , from Rosh Pina


·         Eliyahu Laham, 22, from Haifa


·         Miriam Atar, 27, from Haifa


·         Mark Takash, 54, from Haifa


2003: Victor Brailovsky begins servicing as Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs.


2005: "Dear Esther," an Arizona Jewish Theatre Company production had its last performance in Phoenix, Arizona.  The play is based on the life of Esther Rabb and her experiences as recorded in “Escape from Sobibor” about the 1943 uprising.


2006(5th of Adar, 5766): Eighty-four year old Haifa native Yael Alingham, the daughter of Yehiel Weitzman, wife of Conal Wolsey Allingham and the sister of Israeli pilot, politician and president Ezer Weizman passed away today.


2006:  A restoration of a 1942 freight car, the type used to carry Jews to death camps went on display at the Holocaust Museum in Houston, Texas. The freight car is intended to symbolize the penultimate step in the industrialized mass murder of the Jews of Europe.

 
2006:  The Jerusalem Post reported that American Jewish leaders welcomed the decision by British architect Richard Rogers to resign his membership in a professional organization that has called for the boycott of Israel's construction industry. However New York politicians had questions for Lord Richard Rogers, in light of the state contract awarded him on September 29 to design a $1.7 billion project that would almost double the size of Manhattan's Jacob Javits Convention Center. The boycott by an association of British engineers and architects follows on the heels of an anti-Israel weekend at Oxford and a plan by the Anglican Church to divest itself of investments of companies doing business with the Jewish state.  It would appear that the genteel, and not so genteel, anti-Semitism is still alive and well among the British.  The people who spent the inter-war years catering to the Arabs and who closed Eretz Israel to the Jews during the Holocaust are still at it.



2006: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Absolute Convictions, a biography of Dr. Shalom Press by his son Eyal Press, The Case for Goliath:How America Acts as the World's Government in the Twenty-First Century by Michael Mandelbaum and Intuition by Allegra Goodman.


2007: CBS broadcast the final episode of “The Class” a sitcom created and produced by David Crane and starring Lizzy Caplan and Jon Bernthal.


2007: Opening of an exhibition styled “Studio Man Ray: Photographs by Ira Nowinski” at the


 Judah L Magnes Museum.


2008: Sheldon Adelson ranked #12 on the list of The World’s Billionaires published today.


2008(28th of Adar I, 5768): Joseph Weizenbaum “a German-American author and professor emeritus of computer science at MIT” passed away.


2008: As part of “Hadassah on Tour,” Dr. Michael Wilschanski, the Director of the Pediatric Gastroenterology Unit of the Division of Pediatrics at Hadassah Medical Center, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, speaks in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.


2008: A Yarhtzeit on the civil calendar - Five Year Anniversary of the bombing of Egged Bus 53 carried out by a Hamas suicide bomber who killed 17 innocent civilians.


2008: Following the completion of Operation Hot Winter, today “Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office announced that Israel would maintain its pressure on Hamas.


2008: In “A City That Was and Is No Longer” published today, Aharon Appelfeld examines the history of Czernowitz

2009: Israeli model Bar “Refaeli received the World Style Award presented by the Women's World Awards for her "natural elegance, sense of style and compassion/.”


2009:Sherman Oaks-based mortgage banker Bruce Friedman, whose Friedman Charitable Foundation committed $10 million to the Children’s Museum of Los Angeles and $1 million to Brandon’s Village, a special-needs park in Calabasas, was indicted on securities fraud charges today by the Securities and Exchange Commission.


2009:Professor Anat Helman of Hebrew University delivers a talk and visual presentation exporing the deeper meanings of Israeli styles of the 1950s at Rutgers University entitled "Fashion and Identity in Israel in the 1950s."


2009:An exhibition of paintings by Simon Black who was raised in a close knit Jewish family in Prestwich and attended Stand Grammar in Whitefield came to an end. 


 2009:An Arab terrorist attacked police officers and civilians in Jerusalem with his bulldozer today


2010: The Washington DCJCC is scheduled to host Interfaith Couples Shabbat Dinner with Rabbi Tamara Miller explaining the rituals while attendees enjoy a traditional Shabbat Dinner.


2010: A major security exercise is scheduled to take place today at the Sha'ar Ha'ir building in Ramat Gan, next to the Diamond Center. The exercise will begin at 7 AM, and will entail movement of soldiers, police, rescue workers, and firefighters, who will practice life-saving and evacuation techniques in preparation for the possibility of a terror or gas attack in the area.


2010:Clashes broke out between Israeli police officers and Muslim rock throwers at the end of Friday prayers on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem following a sermon on a recent Israeli decision to include two West Bank shrines on a list of national heritage sites.


2010: Vandals have defaced a former Nazi concentration camp with anti-Jewish and anti-Turkish graffiti, Austrian authorities said today. The spray-painted graffiti extends about 10 meters (33 feet) along the wall of the former Mauthausen concentration camp, which is now a memorial site, according to police in Upper Austria province. The vandalism was discovered this morning and is being investigated, police said. Local politician Josef Ackerl, a Social Democrat, said the incident showed the urgent need to monitor the extreme right better. A similar incident happened in February 2009. The Nazis murdered or worked to death about half of the 200,000 inmates in Mauthausen's main camp and its affiliates. The camp got its name from the nearby town of Mauthausen, about 155 kilometers (96 miles) west of Vienna. 


2010: Marc Trestman of the Montreal Alouettes Marc “won the Coach of the year award.”


2011:Ravid Kahalani, a veteran of Israel’s renowned Idan Raichel Project who uses his music to showcase his Yemenite-Jewish heritage is scheduled to appear in Berkeley, CA at opening night of the Jewish Music Festival.


2011: Israeli sculptor Ohad Meromi is scheduled to host a series of events as the culmination of his evolving New Commission project in New York City.


2011: Leonard I. Weinglass, filed brief on behalf Mumia Abu-Jamal that was part of “a post-conviction motion to vacate the conviction of his client,” (Weinglass was Jewish; Abul-Jamal was not)


2011(29 Adar I): Shabbat Shekalim


2011:A computer glitch which had been preventing the flow of natural gas at the Mari-B natural gas field operated by the Yam Tethys conglomerate off of Ashdod was fixed after several hours today.  


2012: “A Child of the Ghetto” is scheduled to be shown at Prague in the Czech Republic.


2012: The second of the annual AIPAC Policy Conference capped off by an gala evening event is scheduled to take place in Washington, DC


2012:Yeshiva University Museum with Fantagraphics Books is scheduled to present: “Diane Noomin’s Graphic Details: Glitz-2-Go Book Launch.”2012: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with President Barak Obama at the White House.


2012: President Shimon Peres today praised US President Barack Obama's speech to the AIPAC annual policy conference, saying he had offered the maximum support for Israel that an American president could possibly offer.


2013: The field of candidates in today’s Mayoral election in Los Angeles includes Wendy Gurel a synagogue attending Christian married to a Jew whose 10-year-old son studies Hebrew and is being raised in the Jewish tradition, City Councilman Eric Garcetti whose mother is Jewish and City Councilwoman Jan Perry, an African-American who converted to Judaism while in college. (As reported by Bill Boyarsky)


2013: Iranian born Israel singer Rita Yahan-Faourz, known simply as Rita, sang in Persian, Hebrew and English at performance in the UN General Assembly Hall tonight.


2013: The London Sinfonietta, conducted by Brad Lubman, at the Royal Festival Hall in London gave the world premiere of Radio Rewrite for ensemble with 11 players, inspired by the music of Radiohead.


2013: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to sponsor a lecture by Zalmen Mlotek entitled “100 Years of Yiddish Theater Music.”


2013: Defense Minister Ehud Barak is scheduled to meet with newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel today.  This will be Hagel’s first meeting with a foreign defense chief since his confirmation by the U.S. Senate.


2013: The AIPAC conference is scheduled to come to an end in Washington, DC


2013(23rd of Adar, 5773): Eighty-seven year old actor and director Arthur Storch passed away today.
(As reported by Paul Vitello)

2013:The daughters of a Yiddish writer persecuted under communism reclaimed copies of his works today, following a prolonged legal fight to establish their ownership.


2013: The first Hebrew language edition of Playboy magazine was launched in Tel Aviv.

2013: Thousands attended the funeral of Menachem Froman in the Judean Desert settlement of Tekoa today, remembering the mystic rabbi and activist as a unique figure in Israel’s religious and political landscape.

2014: The Library of Congress is scheduled to host “Dancing in Jaffa,” Diane Nabatoff’s documentary about ballroom dance Pierre Dulaine.


2014: “The Women Pioneers” and “Shtisel” are scheduled to be shown at the 24thWashington Jewish Film Festival.


2014: The Jewish Study Center is scheduled to present “Two 20th-Century Theologians:  Herberg and Soloveitchik”


2014: “If/Then” a musical featuring Idina Menzel is scheduled to open at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.


2014: Today, IDF Special Forces intercepted a ship in the Red Sea carrying an Iranian arms shipment headed for the Gaza Strip


2014: The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the United States-Israel Strategic Alliance and Security Act, which is aimed at further enhancing the two countries’ already strong defense relationship


2015(14thof Adar, 5774): Purim


2015(14thof Adar, 5774): Eighty-eight year “award winning documentarian” Albert Maysles passed away today. (As reported by Anita Gates)

2015: The funeral for Chabad Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, the husband of Esther Rochel Moscowitz and the father of nine children is scheduled to take placed today in Chicago.


2015: This evening the Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host a “Purim Spiel.”


2015: “The elections for the 20th Knesset have officially begun for thousands of Israeli diplomats across the globe” today. (As reported by Raphael Ahren


2015: “Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan lambasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a Channel 2 interview previewed today, calling his speech before Congress “bullshit,” and charging that his policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians endangered the Zionist dream. (As reported by Avi Lewis)


2016(25thof Adar I, 5776): Shabbat Shekalim


2016: The board of trustees of Oberlin College in Ohio “has denounced as ‘anti-Semitic and abhorrent’ social media post” by Joy Karega, a professor in the rhetoric and composition department that referred to ISIS as a “C.I.A. and Mossad organization.”


2016: The Jewish Children’s Regional Service (JCRS) which has been serving families since 1855 is scheduled to host its annual fund-raiser “The Jewish Roots of Celebration!”


2016: “Wedding Doll,” starring Moran Rosenblatt and Asi Levi is scheduled to be shown at the Charlotte Jewish Film Festival.


2017: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including A Horse Walks Into A Bar by David Grossman, The Fortunate Ones by Ellen Umansky, Well Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie by Noah Isenberg and Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953 by Simon Ings.


2017: The Jewish Historical Society and Congregation B’nai Israel are scheduled to host “The Release of Natan Sharansky: The Back Story” during which “John Martin - former FBI agent and Director of the Department of Justice Internal Security Section - will discuss the behind-the-scenes negotiations leading to the release of former Soviet refusenik Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky, and share never-before-seen film footage of Sharansky's 1986 historic crossing of the snow-covered Glienecke Bridge to freedom.”


2017: In Atlanta, The Breman Museum is scheduled to continue it “Bearing Witness” program during which Hungarian native Murray Lynn will share his story of survival.


2017: WLIW is scheduled to broadcast the television concert “Dudu Fisher in Jerusalem.”


2017: In London, Sarah Kaminsky spoke about Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life, the biography she wrote about her father.

2017: “An NYPD spokesman said” today “that the department’s hate crimes division had been notified of the “headstones toppled in a Brooklyn Jewish cemetery” yesterday.


2017: The American Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to sponsor an “all-day festival to launch the special issue of the journal East European Jewish Affairs featuring “opening remarks by guest editor Anna Katsnelson” and including “panels on current issues in the field of Russian Jewish American cultural production, writers and visual arts.”


2018: The annual AIPAC Conference is scheduled to continue for a second day.


2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to co-sponsor a talk by Liliane Umubyeyi, a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda who “has been named Ultimate Campaigner of the Year for her work with Survivors Fund, of which she is a trustee.”


2018: President Trump is scheduled to meet in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with hopes of soon reaching a long-sought Mideast peace agreement, as both world leaders try to make international progress amid the strains of domestic investigations into each of their governments. (As reported by Joseph Weber)


2018: The New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to begin today.


 


 


 


This Day, March 6, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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March 6


19 BCE (12th of Adar II, 3741): The Temple “built” by King Herod was dedicated.  Technically, Herod had refurbished the Second Temple and not built a ‘third ‘Sanctuary


1239: With the Edict of Valencia, Spanish King James I validated privileges of the Jews of Aragon. The Jewish courts (Bet din) were authorized to try all cases except capital offenses.


1405: In Toro, Zamora, King Henry III and Catherine of Lancaster gave birth to John II, who as King of Castile and Leon overturned the Valladolid laws that restricted Jewish activities and adopted “a more tolerant attitude toward the already battered Jewish population of Castile following the mass wave of conversions” that had taken place from 1391 to 1415.


1447: The papacy of Nicholas V began today. According to Shlomo Simonsohn he “changed course several times in his policy the Jews just as his predecessors had done.” (For more on Nicholas V and the Jewish people see The Apostolic See and the Jews)


1475: Birthdate of famed Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti.  Say Michelangelo to most people and they respond, Sistine Chapel ceiling.  Say his name to Jews and the response is “Moses.”  Moses” is a marble sculpture which depicts the greater Jewish leader. Originally intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II in St. Peter's Basilica it was placed in the minor church of San Pietro in Vincoli on the Esquiline in Rome after the pope's death. The statue depicts Moses with horns on his head. This is believed to be because of the mistranslation of Exodus 34:29-35 by St Jerome. Moses is actually described as having "rays of light" coming from his head, which Jerome in the Vulgate had translated as "horns." This horned Moses provided further proof that the Jews were, as the Gospel says, “the Devil’s spawn.”


1754: British statesman Henry Pelham who while serving as Prime Minister introduced the Jew Bill of 1753 “which allowed Jews to become naturalized citizens by application to Parliament” passed away today.


1758: Abraham de Mesquito was one of those witnessing the changes of the will made by Abraham Menedes Seixas also known as Miguel Pancheco Da Silva.


1766(25th of Adar): “The Sefardim congregation of London passed a resolution that a Sefardi marrying an Ashkenazi has forfeited his claim on congressional charities.


1781: James Wright, the British Colonial Governor ordered the Jews of the Georgia to leave; accusing them of disloyalty to his majesty by supporting the revolution. The order was never carried out. For the most part, Wright had it right.  Most Jews did support the American Revolution.


1789(8th of Adar): Rabbi Aryeh Leib ben Jacob Joshua Falk, author of Penei Aryeh,passed away


1791: Birthdate of David Paul Drach the native of Strasbourg who converted to Catholicism after moving to Paris and eventually became the librarian of the College of Propaganda in Rome


1792: Moses Alexander (Moshe ben Abraham) was buried today at the Alderney Road Jewish Cemetery.


1815: With the defeat of Napoleon, new restrictions were imposed on the Jews all over Europe.


1816: The Jews were expelled from the Free City of Lubeck, Germany at the instance of the local guilds. This was part of the reactionary backlash that followed the defeat of Napoleon a year earlier. Many of these Jews finally found refuge in the German of city of Moisling.  After “a period of adjustment” where the citizens of Moisling determined how many Jews would live in their city and under what conditions, the government provided a house for a rabbi and constructed a building that the Jews were allowed to use as a synagogue if they paid “a moderate annual rent.”


1819: Birthdate of Fanny Neuda author of Studen de Anacht (Hours of Devotion) a prayer book for women.




1821: Start of the Greek War for independence. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Jewish populations in the Peloponnese had become in disfavor with the Greeks by apparently supporting the Ottomans, and during the Greek War of Independence thousands of Jews were massacred alongside the Ottoman Turks by the Greek rebels, with the Jewish communities of Mistras, Tripolis, Kalamata and Patras completely destroyed. At the same time, Jews throughout other parts of Europe, including the Rothschilds supported the revolt, which captured the popular imagination with its imagery of Greece the cradle of Democracy versus the Ottoman Sultan.


1821: In Paris Elie Furtado and Rose Fould gave birth to Cécile Charlotte Julie Fould-Furtado who was the wife of Charles Heine who unlike his cousin Heinrich did not convert to Christianity.


1825(16th of Adar, 5585): Hungarian Talmudist Shalom Charif Ullman passed away at Lackenbach where he, his son and grandson all served as Rabbis.


1834: In Canada, York was incorporated as the city of Toronto. It was not until the 1840s that small numbers of Jewish immigrants from Western and Central Europe began to arrive in Ontario and settle in the cities of Hamilton, Kingston, and Toronto. In 1849, Abraham Nordheimer moved from Kingston to Toronto and purchased a plot of land for a cemetery on behalf of the Toronto Hebrew Congregation. The congregation was originally an Orthodox synagogue, made up of members from Germany, including Bavaria, Bohemia, and Alsace, Great Britain, the United States, Russia, Galicia, and Lithuania. It became known as the Daytshishe Shul because of its modernized services. In 1856, Lewis Samuel of York, England, immigrated to Toronto and helped organize the Sons of Israel Congregation. In 1858, the two congregations combined to form the Toronto Hebrew Congregation-Holy Blossom Temple. Holy Blossom was Orthodox, but in the 1920s joined the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and became Reform. It was the only Reform temple in Toronto until the 1950s, when it was joined by Temple Sinai and Temple Emanu-El. Today Holy Blossom is the largest Reform Congregation in Canada. In the 1880s, the arrival of large numbers of Eastern European Jews escaping the pogroms of czarist Russia, led to the creation of three new synagogues. Goel Tzedec and Beth Hamidrash Hagadol Chevra T'Hillim were founded in 1883, and were made up of mostly Russian members. They merged in the early 1950s to form Beth Tzedec, a Conservative congregation. The third synagogue, Shomrei Shabbos, was started in 1889 by Orthodox Galician Jews. Also in 1889, Beth Jacob, known as the Poylishe Shul and Rumanian Synagogue or Adath Israel came into existence. By the 1940s, Toronto had about 60 synagogues. These were mainly small Landsmannschaften, which were immigrant synagogues that represented the different hometowns of settlers from Russian Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belorussia. In the 1950s and 60s, the smaller shtiblekh merged into larger synagogues. Therefore, the number of synagogues decreased, but in their place were larger and more stable congregations. The Jewish population of Toronto started out small in the 18th and 19th centuries and grew slowly but steadily into the early 20th century. In 1871, 157 Jews lived in Toronto, in 1891, the number rose to 1,425, and, by 1901, the Jewish population had increased to 3,090. The size of the community always depended on waves of immigration from Europe, based on pogroms and persecution in various countries. In 1911, the Jewish population of Toronto had expanded to 18,237 and, by 1921, had almost doubled to 34,619. In 1931, 45,000 Jewish immigrants, made up of mostly Poles, settled in Canada after the United States tightened its immigration quota in 1924. Because of restrictions imposed by the Canadian government during the Depression, Immigration preceding and during World War II declined significantly. This was a huge blow to Eastern European Jews trying to escape persecution, and only small groups of Austrian and German Jews fleeing Hitler were able to immigrate to Toronto during this period. In 1941, the number of Jews in Toronto had only risen slightly to 49,046, despite the thousands who desperately sought refuge in Canada. After World War II, the Canadian government established anti-discrimination laws and eased immigration regulations. The Canadian Jewish Congress and needle traders helped refugees come to Toronto from displaced persons camps. In addition, an important development in the Toronto community was the growth of the Jewish day school system in the post-World War II era. Previously, the Montreal and Winnipeg Jewish communities had larger networks of congregational and day schools. The 1950s and 60s saw a tremendous growth of population and community life. In 1951, the Jewish population of greater Toronto reached 66,773. It was augmented further after the 1956 Hungarian uprising brought a new influx of Jewish refugees to the city. In the 1960s, the first Sephardic Jews came to Toronto from Morocco, and established the first Sephardic synagogues and organizations in the city. Toronto's economic developments of the 1960s, combined with the rise of Quebec's separatist movement in the 1970s, led to a mass migration from Montreal to Toronto in the late 70s and early 80s. In 1971, the Jewish population stood at 105,000, by 1981, it reached 128,650 and, by 1991, increased to 162,605. When the Parti Quebecois won the provincial election in 1976, 20,000 to 30,000 Jews fled to Toronto, fearing an independent Quebec would divide and weaken the national Jewish community. Toronto assumed Montreal's position as the center of Jewish activity. However, the economic recession of the 1990s had a deleterious impact on the Jewish community's finances and its ability to subsidize Jewish day schools. Despite this setback, Toronto maintains the largest Jewish population of any Canadian city. In recent years, Toronto has received Jewish immigrants from South Africa, the former Soviet Union, the United States, and Israel. Today, the Jewish community stands at approximately 150,000 out of Toronto's 3.5 million inhabitants. Most Jews living in Toronto have only been there for one or two generations. With such close ties to their homelands, Torontonian Jews are typically more traditional than those in the rest of Canada and the United States. Of the 50 percent or so of the Jewish population that associate themselves with the community, 20 percent are Orthodox, 40 percent Conservative, 35 percent Reform, and the remainder nondenominational. Toronto maintains around 50 synagogues, a growing network of Jewish day schools, and a number of Jewish organizations.


1836: The Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, fell to Mexican forces after a 13-day siege. Antony Wolfe, a young Englishman, was reportedly the only Jew who fought and died at the Alamo.


1844: In Amsterdam, Ahasuerus Salomon van Nierop and Lady Rachel Salvador gave birth to Frederick Salomon van Nierop the Dutch lawyer who became a director of the Amsterdam Bank in 1871 and also served on the City Council


1851(2nd of Adar II, 5611): Benjamin Wolf Löw passed away today.  Born at Loslau in 1775, this Polish-Hungarian rabbi was the son of Eleazar Low, the father of Eleazar Low and the grandfather of Abraham and Benjamin Singer.


1856: The University of Maryland, College Park is chartered as the Maryland Agricultural College. According to recent figures approximately 5,000 of the school’s 25,000 undergraduate students are Jewish while 1,500 of the 10,000 grad students are Jewish.  These figures do not include the other U of Md. Campuses.  The school offers 35 Jewish studies courses with a major and minor in Jewish Students. In 1949, Evelyn Levow Greenberg, the wife of the Hillel Rabbi at the University of Maryland published The Little Tractor who Traveled to Israel one of the first children’s books to celebrate the Kibbutz movement and the creation of the state of Israel.


1857(10th of Adar, 5617): Leopold Reiss, the husband of Caroline, the father of Emily and the Manchester woolen merchant who with his brother James owned Reiss Bros. passed away today in France “leaving £180,000 in England.”


1858: Isadore Untermyer and Therese Laudauer, two Jews from Bavaria, gave birth to Samuel Untermeyer in Lynchburg, VA.  Untermeyer would move to New York as a child and become a prominent lawyer, civic leader, successful businessman and pillar of the Jewish Community


1863(15th of Adar, 5623): Shushan Purim


1863: Mr. Max Maretzek resumption of his old position at the Academy of Music this evening was greeted with the full approval of “all classes of the music-loving community in New York.


1870:  Birthdate of Austrian-born composer Oscar Straus whose most famous work is an operetta called “Der tapfere Soldat” or “The Chocolate Soldier.”



1870: In Rochester, NY, founding of the Hebrew Ladies’ Aid Society whose members included Mrs. Levi Adler, and Mrs. Simon Guggenheimer.


1871(13thof Adar, 5631): Fast of Esther


1872(26th of Adar I, 5632): Fifty-one year old Theodor Goldstücker, the German born Sanskri school who was appointed professor of Sanskrit at University College London in 1852 passed away today in his adopted homeland.


1875: In Kensington, London Leopold (Lippmann) Seligmann, the son of Fanny and David Isaac Seligmann and Julia Levi gave birth to Clara Schloss


1876: Birthdate of Chaim Aaron ben David the native of Berlin who gained fame as artist Hermann Struck an ardent Zionist who “helped establish the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.


1876: “Ben Israel or Under the Curse” opened at the Grand Opera House in New York City this evening.  Described as “a Jewish drama” in five acts, the drama had previously been performed in Troy, New York.


1876: It was reported today that the Purim Association will host a full dress reception at Delmonico’s that will mark the end of five days of festivities celebrated the Jewish people who hold private masquerade parties as is their “usual custom.”


1877(21st of Adar, 5637): Seventy-one year old Johann Jacoby, the physician turned political activist passed away today in his native Konigsberg.



1877(21st of Adar, 5637): Franklin J. Moses, Sr. an attorney, planter, politician and judge in South Carolina who both opposed secession, then supported the Confederacy and then was accused of being a scalawag during Reconstruction, passed away. His maternal grandfather was Jonas Phillips a founder of Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, PA and the paternal grandfather Commodore Uriah P. Levy, the highest ranking Jewish officer to serve in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War.  Yes, you got it right.  These two Jewish grandees were on opposite sides during the Civil War, a fight that pitted brother against brother, father against son and in this case, grandson against grandson. For a contemporary view of Moses, written by a Northern newspaper see


1877: It was reported today that humorist Raphael J. de Cordova is scheduled to deliver a lecture at an upcoming fundraiser to be held at Steinway Hall sponsored by the Hebrew Lodge for those who suffered during the recent fire in Brooklyn.


1878: “Beaconsfield on the Jews” published today described Disraeli’s view of the Jews as described in Coningsby, a novel he wrote before he entered political life including the fanciful sentiment that “the Jews hold in their hands the destinies of Europe.”


1879 (11th of Adar, 5639): Fast of Esther observed because the 13th of Adar is Shabbat


1879: The Purim Association is sponsoring this evening’s fancy dress charity ball which is taking placed at the Academy of Music.


1880(23rd of Adar, 5640): Parasaht Vayakhel-Pekudi ending the reading of Exodus and Shabbat Parah.


1883(27th of Adar): Jacob Barit (Yankele Kovner) passed away


1886 Nine thousand members of the Knights of Labor struck Jay Gould’s Southwestern Railroad System. The Knights were one of the earliest attempts at forming a national labor union in the United States.  The Cloak and Suit Maker’s Union which was made up largely of “westernized Jews from Austria, Galicia and Germany” was part of the Knights which made it one of the successful joining of Jewish laborers with this umbrella labor organization. Cultural and linguistic differences as well as plain old fashioned anti-Semitism trumped the supposed solidarity of labor.


1886: Birthdate of Shmuel “Samuel” Eisner, the native of Kolomyia, Austria-Hungary and father of “American cartoonist, writer and entrepreneur” William Erwin “Will” Eisner.


1890(14thof Adar, 5650) Purim


1890: It was reported today that the United Hebrew Charities have offered to post a bond on behalf of Lazar Anezes, his wife and four children who have been detained by the Commissioners of Emigrations because they are “paupers.”


1890: It was reported today that the next event sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association will be held at the Vienna Hall on Lexington Avenue at 58thStreet.


1890: Solomon Barnett, a Jewish tailor who had thwarted an attempt to rob him “is lying at his home in a badly demoralized condition” as a result of the injuries he received at the hand of the thieves.


1891: I.S. Isaacs of the United Hebrew Charities was among those who a attended a conference in the office of the President of the Sanitary Aid Soceity where plans were made to promote a municipal lodging house law in New York City.


1891: It was rumored today that United States Collector of Internal Revenue Ernst Nathan had retired.


1891: “They Ask For Palestine” published today described the efforts of William E. Blackstone, Chairman of the Conference of Christians and Jews to present “a memorial to President Harrison concerning the Russian Government’s treatment of the Jews.”


1892: In New Jersey, two Jewish grocers operated their business today for which they would be arrested because they were open on Sunday.


1892: The Superintendent of the orphan asylum operated by the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society said that only of the youngsters was suffering from measles and that the twelve other youngsters who had been diagnosed with the disease have been sent to the Willard Parker Hospital.


1892: Henry Pereira Mendes, the rabbi at Shearith Israel is recovering from the gunshot wound he suffered at the hands of Jose Mizrachee who some describe as a “professional beggar”


1892: “To Establish ‘Special Alcoves’” published today described the efforts of the directors of the Aguilar Free Circulating Library to establish special alcoves at the various branches of the library” including the one in the Hebrew Institute at East Broadway and Jefferson Street “for the reception of works on particular lines of reading.”


1893: Charles W. Foster completed his service as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury who during his term in dealt with issues surrounding the massive influx of Russian Jews as can be seen by his response to the letters of 1891 from Simon Wolf and Lewis Abraham of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in which he expressed his appreciation for their “expressions of confidence” that the department would act humanely “while executing the immigration laws efficiently.”


1893: “The Answers to Correspondence Column” published today included the information that “a ellow badge, round or square, was the mark of degradation a Jew was obliged to wear in certain parts of medieval Europe.”


1895: In Germany, by a vote of 167 to 51, the Reichstag rejected the bill to restrict Jewish emigration.


1896(21stof Adar, 5565): Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor a leading Russian rabbi and Talmudist passed away. Born in 1817, Rav Spektor engaged in a wide variety of activities including visiting St. Petersburg to ameliorate the suffering that followed the Pogroms of 1881, the establishment of yeshivas and involvement with the Hovevei Zion movement.  His impact was so great that the Yeshiva University named it theologic seminary after him - Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), or Yeshivat Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan, 


1896: Rabbi M.H. Harris delivered the first in a series of lectures on the Inquisition tonight at Temple Israel in New York City.


1896: Thirty-four year old Behrendt Pick, who would eventually hang himself as a result of Nazi persecution began teaching “as an adjunct professor of ancient numismatics at the University of Jena” today.


1897: In City Court today, Justice McCarthy signed an order for the release of Oscar Altman from the Ludlow Street Jail where he has been held on a charge of “breach of promise of marriage.”


1897: It was reported today that Mrs. Esther Herrmann whose late husband was a partner in H. Herrmann, Sternbach & Co has given $10,000 to the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. According Percival Menken, the President of the association, the money will make it possible to improve the facility at 861 Lexington Avenue which Jacob Schiff had donated to YMHA last January.


1897: Seymour Mork and Philip Harrison won the prizes at the debate hosted this evening by the Young Men’s Literary Society of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association which was held at Temple Ahawath Chesed.


1897(2ndof Adar II, 5657): Parashat Pekudi


1897: Cantor David Kahn led “the regular Sabbath” at Temple Rodloph Shalom at Lexington and 63rd.


1897: Rabbi Kaufman Kohler delivered the “charge” to Dr. Rudolph Grossman at services marking his installation as the new rabbi at Temple Roloph Sholom.


1897: A two day conference begins in Vienna with members of the Zionist circles of Vienna, Berlin, Breslau and Galicia. Herzl's proposal of a general Zionist Congress is adopted with the reservation that the cooperation of the Russian Zionists will be obtained. München is chosen as the city for the congress.


1898: Congregants from Beth Elohim with a membership of 150 and Congregants from Temple Israel with a membership of 140 met in Brooklyn and voted unanimously to consolidate the two congregations and build a new building to serve as their synagogue.


1898: More than a thousand people attended the annual Purim reception at the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews hosted by the President Simon Borg and the Board of Trustees.


1898: It was reported today that the “heads of the army” refused to allow Commandant Esterhazy who played a key role in framing Dreyfus with Colonel Picquart because they were afraid of “the effect on popular sentiment if Esterhazy were defeated.”


1899: According to the Court Circular, today "The Emperor of Austria has given the title of Baron De Forest to M. Arnold [De] Forest and to his brother M. Raymond De Forest, both the adopted sons of Baroness de Hirsch de Gereuth, widow of the late Baron de Hirsch."


1899: Bayer registers aspirin as a trademark. According to Diarmuid Jeffreys, the author of Aspirin: The Story of a Wonder Drug, a Jew named Arthur Eichengrün, was “the Bayer chemist who first found an aspirin formulation which was tolerable in the human stomach and did not have the unpleasant side effects of nausea and gastric pain. Eichengrün also invented the name aspirin and was the first person to use the new formulation to test its safety and efficacy. However, Eichengrün was excluded from the official version of Bayer's history in 1934 because of his Jewish origin. Instead, it was claimed by Bayer that aspirin was ‘discovered" by an Aryan scientist, Felix Hoffman, to alleviate the sufferings of his rheumatic father.”  Fritz ter Meer who “became chairman of Bayer's supervisory board” in 1956 had been “convicted at the Nuremberg trials for his part in carrying out experiments on human subjects at Auschwitz and was imprisoned for five years.”


1900: Birthdate of Avraham Shlonsky, a Russian born Israeli poet.


1900: Birthdate of Viennese native Ludwig Donath whose European acting career was cut short by the Anschluss which led him to the United States where his film career included the portrayal of Al Jolson in two biopics about the Jewish performer.


1903: On this date it is announced that the King has been pleased to give and grant unto the Right Honorable Sir Ernest Joseph Cassel, E.C.M.G., K.C.V.O., his Majesty's Royal license and authority that he may accept and wear the Grand Cordon of the Imperial Ottoman Order of the Osmanieh, conferred upon him by his Highness the Khedive of Egypt, authorized by his Imperial Majesty the Sultan of Turkey, in recognition of valuable services rendered by him to his Highness.


1901: Birthdate of Russian born film director Mark Donskoy


1902: Herzl informs the Sultan that on March 15th three million francs will be deposited to his account in banks in Paris, Berlin and London.


1910(25th of Adar I, 5670): Sixty-three year old Zygmunt Wartski, the husband of Eugenie Wartski passed away today in Vienna.


1910: Fifteen hundred members of The Hebrew Actor’s Union honor the memory of Morris Horowitz with “an elaborate funeral” that remembered his contributions to the Yiddish Theatre yet belied the impoverished state to which he had fallen in his declining years.


1910: Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading, began serving as Solicitor General for England.


1915: As of today, “the Palestine Relief Ship Fund, which is being raised by the American Jewish Relief Committee and will used purchase supplies to be shipped on the naval collier Vulcan has reached a total of $34,413.86.


1915: The list of contribution to the Palestine Relief Ship Fund published today includes the Lawrence, MA Jewish Relief Committee,, the Zadek Lodge, International Order of B’nai Brith of Selma, Alabama and the Minneapolis American Jewish Relief Committee.


1916: Felix A. Levy is scheduled to present a paper on Egyptian Obelisks at this morning’s meeting of the Chicago Rabbinical Association at the Stratford Hotel.


1916: It was reported today from New York that Jacob H. Schiff has issued another statement expressing his continued opposition to “the negotiation of any loan by Russia in” the United States.


1916: It was reported today from New York that the custom tailors, many of whom are Jewish “are now on strike for higher wages.


1916: It was reported today from New York that Ambassador Henry Morgenthau has met with “two delegation of Oriental Jews” and after having discussed their problems with them “agreed to send them a Ladino-speaking chief rabbi to care for their spiritual needs” when he returns to his post in the Ottoman Empire.


1917: Birthdate of Haifa native Ruth Schwartz who gained fame as Ruth Dyan, the first wife of Moshe Dyan, the mother of Yael, Ehud and Assi Dyan and the sister of Reuma Schwartz, the wife of Ezer Weizman


1917: In Brooklyn, the former Fannie Ingber and Shmuel “Samuel” Eisner gave birth to cartoonist Will Eisner who was a mentor for Jules Feiffer.




1917: Albert Lucas, the Secretary of the Joint Distribution Committee on Jewish War Relief traveled from Washington to New York today where he announced that the committee had made new arrangements making it possible to send money from the United States to people living “in the territory occupied by Germany and her allies.”


1917: Birthdate of Irving Torgoff, the Brooklyn born basketball player who led Long Island University to “an undefeated record and National Invitation Tournament” in 1939 before going on to a career as a pro.



1918(22nd of Adar, 5678): Ludwig Dreyfus whose estate was valued at $1, 305, 318, passed away today.


1918: During a patriotic gathering at Congregation Ohab Zedek attended by an array of dignitaries including Dr. Isaac Alcalsy, the Grand Rabbi of Serbia, Rabbi Bernard Drachman and Rabbi Pereira Mendes a “service flag bearing eighty-seven stars was presented to the congregation and Albert Lucas, he Secretary of the Union of Orthodox Congregations of American expressed the loyalty of American Jews saying “We shall continue to support the Government even to the sacrifice of our lives where this sacrifice is ask asked of us and as this flag expresses.”


1919: It was learned today that “the resignation of Henry Morgenthau, the former Ambassador to Turkey, as President of the Free Synagogue was due to his unwillingness to continue as lay leader of the congregation while its rabbi, Dr. Stephen S. Wise, champions the cause of Zionism.”


1919: Today, at the New York home of Henry Morgenthau Jacob Billikopf, the executive director of the American Jewish Relief Committee who was described as the “Marshal Foch of the army of solicitors of the Jewish Relief Committee” received “a check for $50,000 in recognition of his services as head of the Relief Committee since January, 1915.”


1921: In Vienna, Max Bretholtz, a Polish born tailor and Yiddish actor and Dora Fischmann Bretholtz, a seamstress gave birth to Leo Bretholz a Holocaust survivor who played a key role in the class action lawsuit against the French railway system - the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, or S.N.C.F.


1921: Birthdate of Austrian born conductor Julius Rudel who fled to the United States at the age of 17after the Anschluss.



1921: As the lockout aimed of members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers enters its 14th week, Joseph Schlossberg told a meeting at New York’s Town Hall, that employers were trying to the old sweatshop environment.  Schlossberg was a Russian born Jewish was one of the founders the Amalgamated and served as its Secretary General.


1924(30thof Adar I, 5684): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1924(30thof Adar I, 5684): Seventy-one year old Thomas Jefferson Levy, the three-term Congressman from New York who followed in the footsteps of his uncle Uriah P. Levy by spending a great deal of his time and fortune on the preservation and restoration on Monticello, the home of President Thomas Jefferson.



1924: The Jewish Transcript of the Pacific Northwest now known as JTNews was published for the first time today. (JTA and Times of Israel)


1926: “Miss Henrietta Szold, President of Hadassah…sailed” today for Palestine “take charge of the construction of the Nathan and Lina Straus Health Center in Jerusalem made possible by a recent gift of $100,000 by Mr. Straus.”


1926: In Washington Heights (NYC) stockbroker and market analyst Herbert Greenspan and Rose Goldsmith gave birth to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.



1927: In Jersey City, NJ, “Herman Firstenberg, a plumber and the former Elizabeth Loeb gave birth to  Elaine Firstenberg who gained fame as graphic designer Elaine Lustig Cohen.



1927: Fritz Lang's silent film epic “Metropolis” is released.  Lang’s murky ethnic heritage is typical of many Germans of his era.  Lang’s parents were practicing Roman Catholics.  But Lang’s mother was born Jewish and she did not convert until Fritz was ten.  Sort of makes hash of those easy answers about “who is a Jew” although by Nazi standards Fritz and his brother would have been fodder for the Holocaust.


1928(14thof Adar, 5688): Purim


1928(14thof Adar, 5688): Mrs. Lewis M. Nelson who was a member of the Directors of the Beth El Sisterhood and Hadassah, passed away today in Camden, NJ.


1930: In Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, Marion "Marie" Shulman Maazel, the founder of the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orcestra and mult-talented actor and musician Lincoln Maazel gave birth to conductor and composer Lorin Maazel(As reported by Allan Kozinn)



1930: In the Bronx, David and Dora Rubin gave birth to “Ira Rubin, a champion bridge player and an innovative theorist who was nicknamed the Beast because of the emotional intensity of his play…”  (As reported by Paul Vitello)


1932(26th of Adar I, 5692): Seventy-two year old German author Alfred Bock from Giessen, the father of author Werner Beck passed away today.


1932: As the confirmation process comes to a close, it was reported today that “Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo who has been appointed to succeed Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on the Supreme Court bench is the author of two books, The Growth of the Law and The Nature of the Judicial Process by published by the Yale University.


1932: It was reported today that the Song of Songs Publishing Company in Jerusalem has recently issued a new edition of the Solomon’s Song of Songs with the text printed in Hebrew and English and with illustrations by Zeeb Raban, one of the leading artists of the Bezalel Arts and Crafts School” which “is on sale in a number of bookshops and department stores in New York.”


1933: Premiere of “The Merry Heirs” a German comedy directed by Max Ophüls.


1936: As Jews prepared to observe Shabbat this evening and Purim tomorrow evening, Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson of Temple Emanu-El sent a letter to all of his colleagues reminding them and their congregants of “the campaign of the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee to raise $1,500,000 in” the New York metropolitan area “as a part of the nationwide effort to raise $3,500,000 for the benefit of Jews in Germany and in other European countries.”


1936: In Amsterdam, “Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic Stuermer was burned during a mass meeting” tonight “organized by the Liberal State party as a protest against the distribution of this paper in the Netherlands by an Amsterdam news store circulating propaganda for the Netherlands National Socialist movement.”


1936: “In a sharp message to the Legislature delivered today, New York Governor Herbert Lehman demanded that that the Republicans restore to the budget an item of $11,160,010 for the debt service” which he said was a clear violation of the state constitution.


1936 In Warsaw, “prohibition of Hebrew ritual slaughtering would unconstitutional, Monseigneur von Golowicz, State Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Education and former Professor of Canon Law at Vilna University declared today at a meeting of the Sejm committee appointed to deal with the bill for the abolition of ritual killing of cattle.”


1936: In Berlin, “it was confirmed today that the first mutually satisfactory agreement for the exodus of foreign Jews from Germany had been concluded between the Reich and the Netherlands” (Editor’s note – the term mutually satisfactory cannot have been applied to the Jews since the price of being effectively deported was that they had to give up most of their wealth.)


1936: While “official records on the number of German Jewish refugees received visas for the United States were not available in Washington, DC, as of today it is know that “the annual quote for Germany is theoretically 25,957 but nothing near that number of German immigrants has been admitted” to the United States “in any recent year.


1936: “The Home Office has received a series of complaints from Jews in Jewish districts of London who have been subjected to abuse and in some cases assault” and “there can be no doubt…people have been molested because they are Jews in pursuance or as an outcome of a campaign that is being carried on to some extent by Fascist speakers at Fascist meetings” in Britain.


1937: And on the other side of the financial ledger, birthdate of Ivan Boesky the stockbroker convicted of insider trading.


1937: “Despite the official statement of regret made by the State Department yesterday for Mayor La Guardia’s attack on Adolf Hitler, the Mayor said he would stand by what he had said.”


1937: In the Old City section of Jerusalem, an Arab shot and wounded M. Schneerson as he walked to daven at the Western Wall. 


1938: Author Ludwig Lewisohn “declared in an address before the congregation of the Free Synagogue in Carnegie Hall” this morning that “the Greeks had their Homer and the Jewish people have their Torah which is their great historical novel” that “is the eternal expression of our character and our faith.”


1938: The Palestine Post reported that an armed Arab gang was routed by troops in the Umm el-Fahm area. One British soldier was killed and three wounded in this operation, while numerous Arabs were killed, wounded or arrested. There was also unrest in the Acre northern district.


1938: The Palestine Post reported that the new High Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, had outlined his immediate policy in a radio broadcast. He asked the rival parties in the area to reconcile their claims “upon an amended basis.”


1938: Today “Communist activity and propaganda were denounced at the closing session of the first national convention of the Jewish Labor Committee at the Capitol Hotel” where “delegates…representing more than 500,000 organized Jewish workers in this country, rejected suggested participation and cooperation with Communist groups” in the labor committee’s “fight against anti-Semitism and fascism.” (Editor’s Note - It may seem meaningless now, but this entry is a reminder of how hard various leftist and liberal organization fought against being taken over by the Communists.  At times, this fight became physical.  The irony was that the Right Wing Red Hunters attacked these groups who were on the front line against internal subversion as being Communists and fellow travelers.)


1938: The Palestine Post reported that the first Palestinian “Who’s Who” was published by Masada in Tel Aviv.


1939(15th of Adar, 5699): Purim


1939: “Representative Sol Bloom of New York” is scheduled to “read President Roosevelt’s greeting from Washington today in a Purim festival program” being “broadcast by the National Broadcast Company that will include speeches by “Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein and Mrs. Moses L. Isaacs, the chariman of the women’s division of the Orthodox Union for the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington.”


1939: “Plans for a ‘Jewish College of Exile’ at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and a program for a ten-year campaign of spiritual education by the college and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations were outlined” tonight “at a dinner at the Hotel Ambassador by Ralph W. Mack, hairman of the board of the college and Robert P. Goldman, president of the Union.”


1940: The Nazis barred Jewish physicians from treating Aryans and vice-versa.


1940: Vladimir Jabotinsky, president of the New Zionist Organization of the World lectures on "The Fate of, Jewry" at Manhattan Center.


1940: “Three leaders of the Jewish Labor party were sentenced to three months in prison today on charges of organizing recent demonstrations against the British government that took place in Tel Aviv.


1940: Laborite M.P. Philip J. Noel introduced a motion to censure the British government in response to the newly enacted laws restricting the purchase of land in Palestine by Jews.   In defending the government’s action, Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary, said, in effect, that the restrictions were put in place to placate the Arabs and avoid more Arab-led violence.  Baker contended that the enactment of the new laws was in violation of the rules of the League of Nations.  Furthermore he said that “if the Jews were not a weak and hunted race today, the British government would have repudiated the moral contract which we made with them while the last great was going on.”  Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Liberal leader and Leopold S. Amery, the former Colonial Secretary spoke out against the government’s action, with Mr. Amery reminding the House that Winston Churchill also opposed the new rules.  All of the talk was useless since the Chamberlain government had the votes to thwart any vote of censure.


1942: Adolph Eichmann talked of deportation of 50,000 Jews from the Old Reich. He emphasized the importance of secrecy.


1943: In Swieciany, Ukraine, 20 youths armed with two revolvers escaped the ghetto and hid in the forest.


1943: The Bulgarian army started to liquidate Jewish property. All confiscated gold and silver was deposited it in sealed packages in the Bulgarian National Bank. Many Bulgarian officials became rich by stealing from the Jews.


1944: An internal memo from the United States Government War Refugee Board states that the United States was negotiating the purchase of a ship for $400,000. The S.S. Necat would be donated to the Turkish Red Crescent after evacuating 5,000 Jewish refugee children from Romania to Palestine.  


1947: Birthdate of John Stossel, the Chicago born journalist who was born to two Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who raised him as a Protestant.


1947: In the Bronx, “Estelle Reiner (née Lebost), an actress, and Carl Reiner, a renowned comedian, actor, writer, producer, and director” gave birth to actor and director Rob Reiner best known for his role of “Meathead.” Archie Bunker’s son-in-law in the comedy hit “All in the Family.”


1947: In his second visit to Tel Aviv in two days, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the former President of the Zionist organization and world-class chemist, told a group of civic leaders that he is setting aside his research to do whatever he can to help the people on the coastal plain who are living under strict martial law.  


1947: “The Guilt of Janet Ames” a post-WWII movie directed by Henry Levin, produced by Helen Deutsch, with a screenplay co-authored by Devery Freeman and Allen Rifkin and co-starring Melvyn Douglas was released in the United States today.


1947: In a demonstration of how successful their campaign has been, British authorities announced today that “25 known terrorists have been captured in Palestine in recent days.”  Authorities said that many of them are members of Irgun or the Stern Gang.


1948: It was announced today that the Joint Distribution Committee “has appropriated $50,400 for emergency aid and relief” for Jews in the British protectorate of Aden where “Arab violence…has totally paralyzed Jewish business” and led to “four synagogues and two schools” being “looted and ruined.”


1949: Birthdate of Norman Spector, the native of Montreal who after a career as a civil servant became publisher of the Jerusalem Post in 1997.


1949: In Los Angeles, novelist Blossom Elfman (aka “Clare Elfman”) and elementary school teacher Milton Elfaman gave birth to actor, director and author Richard “Rick” Elfman.


1949: On the second day of Operation Uvda “the Negev Brigade travelled to Sde Avraham and began to clear land for an airfield there” and that night the “7th Brigade reinforcements from the Gahal platoon arrived by air in the newly cleared airfield” carrying “supplies and fuel vital to continue the operation.”


1950(17th of Adar, 5710):Fifty-your year old Lew Lehr, the comedian, writer and editor who authored Lew Lehr's Cookbook for Men and Stop Me If You've Heard This One passed away today



1951: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg go on trial charged with espionage for providing secret information concerning the Atomic Bomb to the Soviet Union.  In this case the defendants, the prosecutor and the Judge will all be Jews.  But right wing America fixated on the ethnicity of the defendants and used it to equate beings Jewish with being anti-American.


1953: U.S. premiere of “Battle Circus” a Korean War movie directed by Richard Brooks (b. Ruben Sax) and produced by Pandro S. Berman.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that Stalin¹s condition was very grave.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that The World Jewish Conference, scheduled to open in Zurich was postponed.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill had promised that the British sales of jet aircraft to Arab States would take care to preserve the balance of power in the area.


1954: “New Faces” a film adaptation of 1952 musical revue directed by Harry Horner and written by Mel Brooks was released today in the United States.


1956: CBS Television broadcast the last episode of “Meet Millie,” a sitcom that had featured Marvin Kaplan as Alfred Prinzmetal


1957: United Kingdom colonies Gold Coast and British Togoland become the independent Republic of Ghana.  Israel and Ghana formed several joint ventures including a shipping company.  The leaders of Ghana and other emerging African countries saw Israel as a non-threatening source of Western technology and training.  The African leaders were afraid that accepting similar assistance from the major Western powers would lead to re-colonization, something they did fear from the tiny nation of Israel.  The Israelis provided aid to Ghana and other newly independent countries as a way of breaking out of the diplomatic and economic isolation that the Arabs and their allies were trying to use to destabilize and destroy the Jewish state.


1957: Israel withdrew its troops from the Sinai Peninsula.  The withdrawal followed the October, 1956 war with Egypt.  The Americans and the Soviets joined forces to make the Israelis leave.  They saved President Nasser of Egypt.  The Soviets quickly re-armed Nassar.  The American action had the effect of giving Nasser a free hand to follow his Pan-Arab dream which included the destruction of the state of Israel. 


1958: U.S. Premiere of “Star Struck” directed by Sidney Lumet and co-starring Susan Strasberg.


1959:  Birthdate of actor Tom Arnold.


1964: Allan Sherman sang “The Dropouts March” on tonight’s edition of “That Was The Week That Was.


1964: Jewish movie star Liz Taylor divorced Jewish “crooner” Eddie Fisher so that she could marry Richard Burton. Fisher and Taylor were Jewish – he by birth, she by choice.


1966(14th of Adar, 5726): Purim


1967: Today, “the architect, Saul Berkoiwtiz, gave an elaborate description” of the Chapel planned for Congregation Shaar Hashomayim of Montreal which “will seat approximately 289 people, cover an area 50 feet by 70 feet” with “windows that will be fitted with solar bronze glass.”


1967: In New York City, Arlene and Daniel Greenwald gave birth to “lawyer, journalist and author” Glenn Greenwald.



1969: Twenty-nine people, most of whom were students were injured when a terrorist detonated a bomb in the cafeteria at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.


1969: One person was injured when a terrorist exploded a grenade at a bank in Al Bireh


1969: Yonatan Netanyahu wrote to his parents, "In another week I'll be 23. On me, on us, the young men of Israel, rests the duty of keeping our country safe. This is a heavy responsibility, which matures us early... I do not regret what I have done and what I'm about to do. I'm convinced that what I am doing is right. I believe in myself, in my country and in my future"


1971: Publication of “Diplomacy in the Living Room.”



1972: Birthdate of Israeli Olympic swimmer Yoav Bruck


1973: Marcel Marceau appears at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA.


1975(21st of Adar, 5735): Eleven people were killed and twelve more were injured during a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv.


1975: “On the ABC late-night television show Good Night America (hosted by Geraldo Rivera), two assassination researchers presented the first-ever network television showing of the Zapruder home movie.


1976(4th of Adar II, 5736): "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom light-heavyweight box champion from 1932 to 1934 passed away at the age of 71.  Rosenbloom boxed during a period when Jews dominated the ring.  In 1933, during Maxie's reign as light-heavyweight champion, Jewish boxers were the champions in four out of the eight weight classes.


1977(16th of Adar, 5737): Shushan Purim


1977(16th of Adar, 5737): Seventy-six year old Richard Jacob Mack, the son of Bertha and Jacob William Mack and the husband of Elizabeth Mack passed away today in his home town of Cincinnati.


1978: Birthdate of Sage Rosenfels, the native of Maqkoketa, Iowa, who as quarterback, led Iowa State University to its victory in a bowl game before going to a career in the NFL.


1978:The Jerusalem Post reported that Premier Menachem Begin, on the eve of his departure to the US, was adamant that Resolution 242 did not specify the withdrawal of the “territories occupied in the recent conflict” and that the war of 1967 was a war of national self-defense, while the West Bank was never under Jordanian sovereignty. Begin did not rule out any West Bank territorial compromise, but argued that 242 was unspecific, and Israel reserved its position until there was a practical prospect of negotiating the issue.


1981: Canadian attorney Samuel “Sam” Berger sold the Montreal Alouettes football team to a Vancouver businessman.


1981: The Mannes Orchestra performed under the baton of Yakov Kreizberg as part of his graduation ceremony from the Mannes College The New School for Music.


1981: U.S. premiere of “On the Right Track” featuring Herb Edelman and Norman Fell.


1982(11th of Adar, 5742): Russian born Ayn Rand, author and social commentator, passed away.




1984: Ninety-two year old “German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller passed away today. He is best known for his statement


“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Socialist.


 


Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Trade Unionist.


 


Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Jew.


 


Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me



 


1985(13th of Adar, 5745): Ta’anit Esther and Erev Purim


1986: “The West End production” of “Lend Me a Tenor” for which Jerry Zaks won a Tony Award as Best Director opened today at the Globe Theatre.


1986: In Santa Monica, CA, Penny Marienthal and Joseph Cross gave birth to actor Eli Marienthal whose two siblings Harley Cross and Flora Cross are also thespians.


1986: It was reported  today that those who gathered at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City to celebrate the wisdom of Maimonides whose work they have been studying for the past year  “were centuries removed from the life” of the sage “who was born 851 years ago in Cordoba, Spain.


1987: U.S. premiere of “Tin Men,” the second of Barry Levinson’s four “Baltimore films co-starring Richard Drefyus and Barbara Hershey, whose father was Jewish.


1989(29th of Adar I, 5749): Eighty-three year old Erwin Charles Ginsburg who earned All-Far Western Conference honors while playing for Fresno State College from 1925 thought 1929 passed away today.


1990: In Tel Aviv, architect Arik Ginzburg and his wife gave birth to fashion model Esti Ginzburg.


1991: Harry Heinz Schwarz began serving as the Ambassador of South Africa to the United States.


1991: “CBS Newsman Bob Smon Tells of Ordeal as Captured Jew” published today



1992: U.S. premiere of “Once Upon A Crime” a comedy directed by Eugene Levy with a script co-authored by Nancy Meyers and co-starring Richard Lewis as “Julian Peters.”


1994: It was reported today that “The Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel in Los Angeles has installed stained-glass "Sephardic Heritage Windows" designed by Israeli artist Raphael Abecassis.”


1994: Twenty-six year old Rabbi David Keehn, who is legally blind, is one of 144 rabbis who is honored with formal ordination at the quadrennial Chag HaSemikhah (rabbinic convocation) of Yeshiva University's affiliated Rabbis Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) in the Nathan Lamport Auditorium, Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Hall, New York City.


1997: Janet Rosenberg Jagan, the daughter of middle class Jewish parents from Chicago moved from being the first lady of Guyana to the role of Prime Minister.


1998: The Times of London featured a review of The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism and the Making of the Jewish State by Zeev Sternhell; translated by David Maisel.


2000: First showing of ''The Life of the Jews in Palestine'' at the Museum of Modern Art. The classic documentary was produced in 1913 by the Odessa-based Mizrakh Company and presumed to be lost for some 80 years -- has resurfaced in New York. This excellent new print with English inter-titles of Noah Sokolovsky's 78-minute silent film is quite likely the rarest of the rarities featured in the museum's 10-program tribute to France's national film archives, the Centre Nationale de la Cinematographie.


2002(22nd of Adar, 5762): Seventy-four year old “Walter Goodman, a former reporter and critic at The New York Times and the author of a widely read history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities” passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)



2002(22nd of Adar, 5762): Eighty-five year old Scottish economist and psychologist Ralph Glasser passed away today.



2005: After 138 years, Rich's (as Rich's-Macy's) disappeared and became part of Macy’s-Central. Rich’s began as a dry goods store run by Morris Rich in 1876.


2005: The Washington Post book section features a review of Michael Medved’s autobiography, The Faith of a Critic.


2005: The Chicago Tribune reported that despite an anti-Semitic backlash, the renaissance of Jewish culture and religion continued its growth in Russia.  This “quiet cultural revolution” has been fueled, in part, by Jews who moved to Israel during starting in the 1970’s and have returned at the start of the 21st century. 


2005:  The New York Times reported that Robert K. Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots made his thirtieth visit to Israel since 1963.  On this most recent visit he took the Lombardi Trophy which was proof of his teams’ Super Bowl Victory and showed it Prime Minister Sharon.  While Sharon is not known as a football fan, he posed for the obligatory photo with a major Jewish philanthropist.


2005: The New York Times reviewed Ester and Ruzya by Masha Gessen.  The title characters are Gessen’s grandmothers.  The biography tells how these two women maintained their Jewish identities while living through Stalin, Hitler and the Cold War.


2005: The cover story of The New York Times Magazine was “A Memory Loop” by Joseph Lelyveld featuring an account of life with his father Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld.


2006(6th of Adar, 5766): Ninety-seven year old Ruth F. Weiss, also known as Wèi Lùshī, an Austrian born Chinese “educator, journalist and lecturer” passed away today.



2007: The Colorado Jewish Artist’s Guild of the Mizel Museum hosts a workshop styled “Catapulting Your Visions to Achievements: Do You Want to Be A Working Artist or An Artist Who Works?”


2007: Former White House aide I. Lewis Libby, Jr. was found guilty on four of five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice trial. The one person convicted in the whole Plame Affair was a practicing Reform Jew. 


2008: As part of its Israel at 60 celebration, the 92nd Street Y presents “Lee Saar The Company & Netta Yerushalmy: Out of Israel” as two innovate Israeli dance companies join forces to present a compelling evening of duets.


2008(29th of Adar, 5768): Ninety year old screenwriter who was nominated for Best Story Oscar for “Naked City” passed away today.


2008(29th of Adar, 5768): Eight people were killed and nine others were wounded this evening when a terrorist infiltrated a Jerusalem yeshiva and opened fire. Three of the wounded in the attack at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood were serious condition and taken to Hadassah Medical Center in Ein Karem. The other six were lightly hurt and taken to Sha'arei Tzedek Medical Center. One of the wounded is 15 years old. Magen David Adom emergency medical service declared the incident a "multiple casualty event."


2009: Agudas Achim hosts Shabbat Across Iowa City with an early Friday evening service followed by a Shabbat Dinner.


2009:Composer Samuel Adler lights up the marquee at Temple Emanuel’s Synaplex Shabbat service on Friday night. The German-born son of a cantor showcases a sampling of his music, performed by the Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale.  In addition to putting his musical talents on display, Adler also exhibits his strong faith in a musical sermon.


2009: At the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, Kirk Douglas appears in “Before I Forget” a scripted one-Douglas show all about the 92-year-old Hollywood icon. . In this rare theatrical appearance, Douglas shares stories about his life and acting career — the stroke he suffered in 1996 that left him unable to speak, his numerous starring roles and  his return to Judaism.


2009:  Today was a double-header for Jews and the criminal justice system.  The lawyers for Bernard Madoff, the goniff who ran the biggest Ponzi Scheme in history, has taken steps that could lead to him pleading guilty as early as next Tuesday. In Des Moines, a federal judge rejected a motion to dismiss illegal immigration and bank fraud charges against Agriprocessors Inc. and its former owner/manager, Sholom Rubashkin.  Rubashkin’s attorneys asked that the charges be dismissed claiming the grand jury proceedings were tainted by improper comments about religion, race and anti-Semitism.  In her rule, Chief Judge Linda Reade rejected the claims pointing out that the statements under discussion were made by witnesses by the members of the Grand Jury.  Additionally, she was highly critical of the defense’s expert witness saying that reasoning was “flawed” and that she had a “deep unfamiliarity with the federal grand jury process.”


2009: The Foreign Ministry said today it had closed its embassy after the government of Mauritania, an overwhelmingly Muslim West African nation asked the Israeli ambassador and his staff to leave.


2009: In Davis Cup competition, Thomas Johansson put Sweden ahead of Israel with a five-set win over Harel Levy Israel’s Duda Sela even the series with a five-set victory against Andreas Vinciquerra.


2010 (5770): Shabbat Parah


2010: The 40th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches” opened in Philadelphia, PA.


2010: Theater J in association with Jonathan Reinis Productions is scheduled to present the World Premiere of Andy Warhol - Good for the Jews?


2010: In London, UK, Jewish Book Week came to an end.


2010: U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell met with Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Tel Aviv today as he began a round of meetings aimed at relaunching peace negotiations.


2011: Today, Professor Geoffrey Alderman was named the recipient of the Chaim Bermant Prize for Journalism.



2011: Veretski Pass is scheduled to perform their new composition “Klezmer Shul” as well as their standard repertoire and some special surprises at the Freight and Salvage Coffee House in Berkeley, CA as part of the Jewish Music Festival.



2011: Mlle. God” by playwright Nick Kazan is scheduled to have is final performance at the Atwater Village Theatre in Los Angeles.


2011: “Down Home,” a multi-media project that “celebrates Jewish contributions to North Carolina social, civic and commercial life” that has been appearing at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh is scheduled to come to a close today. The project also aimed “to capture a nearly vanished way of life for Jews in the state’s mill and market towns, according to Leonard Rogoff, an organizer of the project and historian at the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina, which is producing “Down Home.” According to Eli Evans, a speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson whose parents lived in Durham where his mother served Hadassah for 40 years, “The story of the Jews is the untold story of the South.” The Jewish experience in North Carolina was unique in the South, Evans said, because North Carolina was unique in the South. “We didn’t have a strong Klan in our state. We had a commitment to public education, a more moderate political atmosphere, and enlightened political leaders,” he said. “I’m not saying no antisemitism existed. But there was a philo-Semitism that manifested itself in many ways.” While the exhibit’s was partly intended to educate North Carolinians about their own history, it was also intended to provide Jews from outside of the South a look at Jewish culture and customs as practiced below the Mason-Dixon Line.


2011: The Los Angeles Times featured reviews by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Eisenhower 1956: The President's Year of Crisis — Suez and the Brink of War by David A. Nichols


2011: Most of the Israel’s welfare services will be suspended indefinitely starting today morning after negotiations between representatives of social workers and the Finance Ministry broke down two days ago.


2011: A sanitation worker of the Jerusalem Municipality was moderately injured today by an explosion apparently set off when he picked up a garbage bag in Jerusalem.


2011(30th of Adar I, 5771): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


2011(30th of Adar I, 5771) Ninety-two year old Dr. Sholom Omi Waife a noted writer and medical researcher who was the grandson of Sholom Aleichem passed away today.



2012: The annual AIPAC Policy Conference is scheduled to come to an end.


2012: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host its annual Humanitiarian Awards Dinner.


2012: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to sponsor a noontime screening of “Jewish Women in American Sport: Settlement Houses to the Olympics,”


2012: Jewish Women's Morning at the Capitol (JWMC) is scheduled to take place in St. Paul, MN.


2012: Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt is scheduled to deliver the annual Charles Grossman Lecture In Jewish Intellectual History entitled “History Written, History Re-Written: On American, The Holocaust and Playing the Blame Game” at The Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-El


2012: The organization Peace Now filed a complaint with police this morning after a death threat was made against director Yariv Oppenheimer the night before. (As reported by Ben Hartman)


2012: Following the death of Robert Sherman, the founder of Music World, “his son Robert J. Sherman succeeded him as CEO and President.”


2012(12thof Adar, 5772): Ninety-four year old “Albert Abramson, who became a principal force in the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington by using the same pragmatic approach that had made him a successful developer of apartments, offices and malls” passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)



2012: Israel Military Industries will be barred from submitting bids for Indian defense contracts for the next ten years, along with five other firms, The Times of India reported today. The decision followed an investigation in 2009 by India's Central Bureau of Investigation (the Indian equivalent of the American FBI), which found that the companies had allegedly won past contracts through improper means, including bribing senior officials.


2013: The Humanitarian Awards Dinner co-sponsored by the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is scheduled to take place this evening in Chicago, Illinois.


2013: To mark its acquisition of the defense archive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, The Wiener Library is scheduled to host a public panel discussion on the subject of Anglo-Jewish responses to domestic fascism in the 1930s.


2013: “The Last White Knight: Is Reconciliation Possible?” is scheduled to have its Minnesota Premier tonight at the Minneapolis Jewish Film Festival.


2013: The Hebrew language edition of Playboy will be available on newsstands today in Israel.


2013: “Agriculture Ministry workers armed with pesticides went into action at first light today morning, distributing both aerial and ground sprays in the area where millions of locusts descended upon southern Israel from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula the day before.” (As reported by Sharon Udasin)


2013: New York police today said they arrested a suspected hit-and-run driver following a weekend accident that killed a young Orthodox Jewish couple whose baby was later delivered by C-section but then died.


2013: A global Shi’ite terrorism network made up of Iranian Quds Force operatives and Hezbollah continues to target Israelis overseas, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism bureau warned today, ahead of the Passover vacation season.


2013: The Los Angeles mayoral runoff opened today with Democrats Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greue, each of whom have Jewish connections


2014: Shaul Magid, professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies at Indiana University Bloomington is scheduled to deliver a lecture “After Multiculturalism: Postethnicity and Judaism in America” at the University of Colorado Boulder.


2014: Leslie Maitland is scheduled to discuss “Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile and Love Reclaimed.”


2014: “Dove’s Cry and “Sukkah City” are scheduled to be shown at the Washington Jewish Film Festival.


2014(4th of Adar II, 5774): Eighty year old theatre critic and author Martin Gottfried passed away today. (As reported by Daniel E. Slotnik)




2014: Dr. Rose Cohen is scheduled speak on “Facets of Holocaust Research: Victims and Survivors, Possessions and Plunder Search strategies and Integrating Resources” at the Center for Jewish History.


2014: A source at the Foreign Ministry confirmed today that the trip of Pope Francis scheduled for this May has been cancelled because Foreign Ministry workers “are currently on strike and are unable to make the necessary arrangements for the visit.”


2014: In Columbus, Ohio, Abbie and Feivel Straus have a new daughter; Joseph Straus has a new sister and Dr. Bob & Laurie Silber have a new granddaughter.


2014: Today’s decision “in Crimea’s parliament to hold a referendum on March 16 asking whether the semi-autonomous region should become part of Russia took some members of the peninsula’s 17,000-strong Jewish community by surprise.”



 2015: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host the “penultimate Friday night dinner.”


2015: Agudas Achim is scheduled to host “Shabbat Across Iowa City.”


2015: Lewis Black is scheduled to perform at the Club Regent Event Center in Winnipeg, Canada.


2015: “In U.C.L.A. Debate Over Jewish Student, Echoes on Campus of Old Biases” published today Adam Nagrourney described the assault that Rachel Beyda endured from members of the Undergraduate Students Association because, as they said, she “a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community.”



2015: “Police in the northern town of Dokkum said in a statement today that they are investigating the attempted sale of the soap online dating back to WW II  that purportedly contains remains of Jews murdered in the Holocaust,


2015: “Five people were injured Friday morning in a car-ramming terror attack near a Jerusalem Light Rail station in the north of the city.”


2015: “Deli-Man” a documentary by Erik Greenberg Anjou opened in New York City.


2016: “A tribute to Ephraim Kishon’s work that includes


2016: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Master of Ceremonies: A Memoirby Joel Grey with Rebecca Paley and Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan


2016: Hunter College is scheduled to host the Sixth Annual Diaspora-Israeli Russian Film Festival.


2016: In Iowa City Rabbi Avremel and Chaya Blesofsky are scheduled to celebrate the Bar Mitzvah of their son Yehoshua.


2016: In Atlanta, GA, the Breman Museum is scheduled to host “a very special one-time-only performance of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow: The Music of Harold Arlen."


2016: Evelyn “Evie” Banko, a native of Vienna whose family fled after the Anschluss, is scheduled to speak at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.


2016: “A Torah scroll from the synagogue in the northern Italian town of Biella has been identified as probably the oldest in the world still owned and used by a Jewish community” is scheduled to “returned to the Biella synagogue at a ceremony” today.


2016: Temple Beth Ami is scheduled to Dr. Ramon Tasat speaking on the “Music of the Jews In Italy” – a lecture that includes musical selections.


2017: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host Hershey Felder in “George Gershwin Alone.”


2007: The Yeshiva University Museum is scheduled to host “Out of the Whirlwind: Hugh Mesibov and the Legacy of the Book of Job” during which Mordechai Cohen will “explore the character of the Book of Job and its legacy within the Jewish imagination.”


2017: The Times of Israel is scheduled to host a screening of “Norman” at Cinema City In Jerusalem

2018: In Washington, DC, the annual AIPAC Conference is scheduled to come to an end today.  (Editor’s note – you have to wonder how many of the attendees feel about the fact the state of Israel does not recognize them as Jews and/or does not regard their religious practices as being Jewish)


2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host a Hummus Off where teams compete to create the best form of this Oriental treat.


2018: The screening of “The Jews of Syria” is scheduled to be shown at the 21stNY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival “followed by an After Party! Featuring Music by Maury and Josh Blanco, Mazza and a special performance by crooner Steven Chera and his quartet.”


 

This Day, March 7, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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March 7


322 BCE:  Aristotle passed away. “Aristotle was almost universally held in esteem by the Jews; at one time for his intelligence and mental power, at another as a penitent sinner. The following is Maimonides' verdict concerning him: "The words of Plato, Aristotle's teacher, are obscure and figurative: they are superfluous to the man of intelligence, inasmuch as Aristotle supplanted all his predecessors. The thorough understanding of Aristotle is the highest achievement to which man can attain, with the sole exception of the understanding of the Prophets." Shem-Ṭob ben Isaac of Tortosa (1261) styles Aristotle "the master of all philosophers." Elijah b. Eliezer of Candia, who edited the "Logic" about the end of the fourteenth century, calls Aristotle "the divine," because, having been endowed by nature with a sacredly superior intellect, he could understand of himself what others could receive only from the instruction of their teachers.”


161: Roman emperor Antoninus Pius passed away.  He was the handpicked successor of Hadrian.  Antonious undid the anti-Jewish decrees of his predecessor and when he died the Jewish people lost one of the few friends they ever had sitting on the throne in Rome.


161: Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus are named co-Emperors of the Roman Empire following the death of Antonious Pius.  Marcus Aurilius had little understanding or appreciation of the Jewish people.  He described them as “stinking and tumultuous” when he traveled through Judea. He reportedly said that he preferred the company of Germanic barbarians to that of Jews.


321: Constantine I, the first Christian Roman Emperor decreed that the dies Solis Invicti (sun-day) is the day of rest in the Empire.  Thus would begin the conflict between the Christian Sunday and the Jewish Saturday.  Of course the commandment says to hallow the 7th day and Sunday is the first day of the week.


1190(20th of Adar, 4950): During the Lenten Fair, Crusaders filled “with passion for crusade” and jealousy over the supposed wealth of the Jews, slaughtered them at Stamford, England.


1236(21st of Adar, 4996): The Jews of Narbonne began celebrating the Purim of Narbonne after Don Aymeric, the governor, intervened to protect the Jews from marauding Christian  who had already carried off the library of Reb Meir ben Isaac as they made their riotous way through the Jewish quarter.


1274: Catholic theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas passed away.  While no friend of the Jews, Aquinas’ view of Jews was a little better than the average one held by ecclesiastical and temporal leaders of his time.  He opposed conversions at the point of the sword.  He opposed the murder of Jews.  He felt they should be allowed to live so they could serve as eternal witnesses to “the truth of Christianity.”  The views of this influential Catholic theologian are best summed up in a letter to a widow who had inherited a duchy that included what is now Belgium and the Netherlands.  “It is true, as the laws declare, that in consequence of their sin (rejecting Jesus) Jews were destined to perpetual servitude, so that sovereigns of state may treat Jewish goods as their own property, save for the sole proviso that they do not deprive them of that is necessary to sustain life.”  In other words, Jews could live, but they could only live a miserable life.  Aquinas also made it respectable for Catholic nobles to borrow from Jews and then not repay their debts.


1291: Arghun Khan aka Argon, a devote Buddhist and “the fourth ruler of Mongol empire’s Ilkhanate” who “was friendly with Jews and Christians” in this predominately Moslem part of the world and whose “chief counselor was a Jew, Sa'ad al-Daulah, a physician of Baghdad” passed away today touching off a violent attack by Moslems on the Jews of Baghdad.


1361(30th of Adar): Rabbi Simeon ben Zemah Duran, author of Sefer ha-Rashbaz passed away


1612(3rd of Adar II, 5372): Mordecai ben Avraham Yoffe, the son of Abraham ben Joseph passed away at Prague.  Born in 1530, he was the Rosh Yeshiva in Prague and author of “Levush Malkhut, a ten-volume codification of Jewish law that particularly stressed the customs of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

1693: Birthdate of Carlo della Torre di Rezzonico, who as Pope Clement XIII would rule that there was no substance to the claim that Jews used blood in the preparation of their unleavened bread. Among other things he intervened with the Polish church and nobles and ordered the protection of Jacob Zelig, the Jewish spokesperson that the Polish Jews had sent to Rome to plead their case.


1738: Seckel and Levi Moses Ulf, the owner of a ribbon factory that in 1720 “was required by the Crown Prince Frederick to supply all the royal regiments with the necessary braid” were married today


1748: Birthdate of William V, Prince of Orange-Nassau who “donated a considerable sum for a new menorah” when he stayed with Benjamin Cohen in Amersfort and whose wife gave the same community a curtain for the congregation’s Holy Ark.


1754(13th of Adar, 5514): Ta’anit Esther and erev Purim


1788: The Jews of the Netherlands celebrated the birthday of William V as holiday as a sign of the support for the Prince of Orange.


1789: Birthdate of Michel Martin Drolling the French painter who counted among his student the Alsatian Jew, Benjamin Ulmann whose works include “Sylla and Manus” which hangs in the Luxembourg Palace.


1792(13th of Adar, 5551): Ta’anit Esther and erev Purim


1799: (30th of Adar I, 5559): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1799: As Napoleon Bonaparte fought his way across Palestine, his army defeated “a 12,000-strong mixed force of Al Jazzar and the Mamluks” and captured the port city of Jaffa. In one of the first examples of what would become a recurring theme, westerners used modern technology to defeat a Muslim army.  In this case, Napoleon use of bombardments from his heavy artillery was the key to victory.  Following the victory, the French commander “set out to try and gain political advantages from his military achievements. Letters and proclamations were directed at the Sultan, the various communities of Palestine and Syria and their leaders, Akhmad Jasar, the pasha of Acre and commander-in-chief (seraskir) of the Ottoman forces at that time.  All these aimed at paving the way for the complete occupation of the Holy Land by negotiation or by making alliances and contacts to ease further military conquest. Among these was the contact with the Jewish communities in Palestine and Syria, the first de facto attention to the Jews as a potential factor in international policy in modern times.”


1799: The Royal Institution an organization devoted to scientific education and research is founded in London.  The Royal Institution today is led by director Baroness Susan Greenfield, renowned scientist and the daughter of Jewish parents.


1802(3rd of Adar II): Rabbi Noah Chaim Zevi Berlin, author of Azei Arazim, passed away.


1807: On the day before “the Great Sanhedrin presented its responses and formally ended its proceedings, Rabbi Sinzheim delivered a short summary of its conclusions and proclaimed them as nothing less than a ‘social pact’ between ‘the People of God and the People of France.’”


1809: Birthdate of Meïr Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Weiser the Russian rabbi known by the acronym Malbim the opponent of Reform whose literary works included a commentary on “Esther” published in 1845.


1815: Just south of Grenoble, Marshall Ney turned his back on King Louis XVIII and embraced Napoleon which was a major step on his attempt to return to power which might have nullified those reactionary forces that would re- impose the restrictions of the ancient on the Jews of Europe.


1818: Birthdate of German born historian, author and Rabbi David Cassel, the brother of Selig Cassel.


1818: In Kassel, Germany Mayer Japhet and Deborah Weinberg gave birth to Israel Meyer Japhet who “was choir director at the Realschule (Adass Jeschurun) in Frankfurt am Main under Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.”


1822(14th of Adar, 5582): Purim


1822: Turkish soldiers killed 60 Jews in Bucharest.


1824: Il crociato in Egitto (The Crusade in Egypt), an opera in two acts by Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, premiered at La Fenice theatre in Venice, Italy.


1825:  Birthdate of Alfred Edersheim, English biblical scholar. Edersheim converted to Christianity before the age of 20. He was the author of The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiahwhich is considered by many Christians to be a classic study on this topic.


1828(21stof Adar, 5588): Noted Talmudist Jacob Lazarus Riesser, the father of Gabriel Riesser and “the son-in-law by Raphael b. Jekuthiel Süsskind ha-Kohen, the incumbent of the rabbinate of Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbeck” passed away today in Hamburg.


1830: The body of Mordecai Benet, the Moravian rabbi who had passed away in 1829 while “taking a cure in Carlsbad,” was exhumed from “the cemetery in Lichtenstadt, near Carlsbad and reburied in the Nikolsburg Cemetery” today.


1833(16thof Adar I, 5593): Sixty-one year old Rahel Antonie Friederike (née Levin) the German author and hostess to the leading intellectuals of her time who had an asteroid named in her honor and who was the subject of Hannah Arendt’s 1958 biography Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess passed away today.


1839: In Kassel, Meyer Bär (Moritz) Mond and Henrietta Levinsohn gave birth Dr. Ludwig Mond a German-born British chemist and industrialist.


1841(14thof Adar, 5601): Purim


1844: Birthdate of French historian Gabriel Monod who in 1897 stated in a letter published by Le Temps“his conviction that Dreyfus was innocent and demanded that his case be reviewed, denying that it would be an insult to the army: ‘There is no shame in an error that is consciously committed and consciously rectified.’”


1847: In Stuttgart, Germany, “Moriz Eichberg, Oberantor of Wurtemberg and Lenore Seligsberg gave birth to Julie Rosewald the wife of Jacob Rosewald who for “ten years was the solo soprano at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco” where she sang and recited “the parts of the service usually sung and recited by the Cantor and served as the Professor of Vocal Music at Mills College


1849: The Emperor Franz Joseph “promulgated his own constitution which granted equal civic and political rights to all citizens, regardless of religious confession” as a result of which “the Jews were emancipated by imperial fiat and not by the popularly elected Reichstag.”


1851: A poll tax levied on Russo-Polish Jews entering Austrian Galicia was discontinued.


1854: Michael Nathan married Sarah Mitchel today at the Great Synagogue.


1856: A letter from the Hahambashi discusses "reforms" to institute in the Jewish community. The Judeo-Spanish language is discussed, "As the language taught by the Jews of the Levant is not, properly speaking, a language, and cannot be useful to the youth, we order the creation of free schools for the poor where Turkish, Greek, French, and Italian will be taught."


1857: Birthdate of Julius Wagner-Jauregg, the Austrian born physician and Nobel Prize Winner.  Apparently he saw no conflict between the fact that he had been a student of Salomon Stircker, the Jewish pathologist and his support of the Nazis.



1860: Birthdate of Austrian physicist Adler Gottlier who earned a doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1882 and developed an expertise in the fields of “electricity and magnetism.”



1860(13th of Adar, 5620): Ta’anit Esther



1860(13th of Adar, 5620): Fifty-eight year old Italian poet and book collector Joseph Almanzi passed away today in Trieste.



1863: “The Purim Ball. A Jewish Festival – A Great Success” published today reported that “No one of the ancient Hebraic celebrities holds a more absolute sway in the affections of the Jews of this day than Esther, the beautiful and pious spouse of Ahasuerus. In commemoration of the signal service rendered by that estimable lady to her nation, on the occasion of the timely elevation of Haman, the envious enemy of her uncle Mordecai, whose daily place of rest was in the neighborhood of the King's gate, the Jewish people yearly observe the Feast of Purim. In this City, the first grand ball of the Purim Association was given last year, with marked success, and the second was given on Thursday night, at the Academy of Music. The building was very elegantly and tastefully decorated and most brilliantly illuminated, the floor was laid for dancing, and the usual magnificence of the Academy incredibly enhanced.” [Please note, this article which showed a certain comprehension and approval for this minor Jewish holiday appeared in a United States newspaper at a time when Jews comprised approximately 1% of the Jewish population.]



1866(20th of Adar, 5626): Birthdate of Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein who was Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva Knesseth Yisrael in Slabodka, Lithuania and is recognized as having been one of the leading Talmudists of the twentieth century.


1869: Birthdate of Ernst Julius Cohen “a Dutch chemist known for his work on the allotropy of metals” who was gassed by the Nazis at Auschwitz.


1871(14th of Adar, 5631): Purim


1871: Receptions celebrating Purim were held at numerous New York Jewish institutions including the Asylum for the Aged and Infirm, the Orphans Home and the Industrial Home on west 17thStreet.


1871: Henry Cardoza and Mary Levi were married this morning by Justice Buckley in Brooklyn’s Second District Police Court.  Cardoza opted for a civil ceremony because he could not afford a rabbi.


1872(27th of Adar I, 5632): Jekuthiel Süsskind (Süssel) Rapoport, a leader of the Russian Jewish community passed away today.  Born in 1802, he was the son of Rabbi Chaim ha-Koen and the great-grandson of Rabbi Chaim ha-Koen Rapoport. He and his brother Jacob, rabbi of Ostrog, published their father's work "Mayim Ḥayyim"


1875(30th of Adar I, 5635): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1876: Attendance at tonight’s fancy dress ball sponsored by the Purim Association is expected to be greater than at such past events.  The Association has increased its membership which should me more revelers will be dining and dancing at Delmonico’s.


1876: “Ben Israel or Under the Curse,” a 4 hour long drama about the travails of a Jewish patriarch named Ben Israel, his granddaughter Rachel and her suitors was described in a review published today as being “destitute of originality, coherence and interest.”


1878: Joseph Seligman was elected as one of the vice presidents of the newly formed American Pig Lead Association at a meeting of the leading lead miners and dealers held at St. Louis, MO.


1878: Reverend George H. Hepworth, a Unitarian Minister will deliver a lecture entitled “Our American Homes” to the Young Men’s Hebrew Association who are meeting at Lyric Hall in New York City.


 1879: In New York’s Court of General Session, Judge Henry A. Gildersleeve heard evidence before rendering a decision on the application of the Commissioners of Charities and Correction to force Leopold, Felix and Alfred Salomon to pay six dollars a week in support of their 70 year old widowed mother, Fanny Salomon.  The brother’s contested the request saying that she had rejected their offers to live with them and that she had been able to pay for a trip to France which would indicate she was not destitute.


1879: Birthdate movie director and muralist Hugo Ballin.

1880: Nineteen year old Hedwig Goldschmidt married Herman Hirsch Cramer, the son of Jacob Cramer and Caroline Furth today.


1880: A service was held to this afternoon at Temple Emanu-El to honor the memory of the late Isaac Adophe Creimieux, the Frenchman who had served as President of the Universal Israelite Alliance. When word reached New York that the 84 year old philanthropist and statesman had passed away, the Board of Delegates on Civil and Religious Rights of the Union of American Hebrew congregations recommended a city-wide service.  This afternoon’s service was a collaborative effort of 11 congregations under the leadership of Louis May.


1880: Former U.S. Secretary of State Elihu B. Washburne was the featured speaker at today’s memorial service in Chicago held at Temple Sinai to honor the memory of the late Adolphe Cremieux.


1883: Herzl withdraws from the Akademische Burschenschaft Albia. ("Ich sagte den edlen jungen Leuten Lebewohl und fing nun an, mich ernstlich an die Arbeit zu setzen." - "I said farewell to my noble young colleagues and sat down seriously to my work.")


1884: Birthdate of Shlomo Kaplansky, the native of Bialystok who was a leader of the World Union of Poalei Zion and an advocate of a bi-national state for the Jewish homeland.


1887: North Carolina State University is founded by the North Carolina General Assembly. According to recent figures there are approximately 250 Jewish students among an undergrad population of 20,000.  The campus is home to a Hillel Chapter. The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh contains a Judaic Art Collection that includes an array of historic and contemporary pulpit, life cycle and holiday objects.


1889: At a meeting of the Board of Trade, Jacob Schloss “agreed to support a scheme to drive an exploratory mining shaft to demonstrate the continuing viability of the mining district.


1890: Abraham Sudyham, a criminal defense attorney was sentenced to five years in New York State prison after having been convicted of grand larceny when he tried to sell the house belonging to his aunt.


1891: Birthdate of Marcel Barger.  Born Meyer Streliskie the famed European cabaret performer died at Auschwitz in 1942.


1891: Professor Charles A.L. Totten “the well-known military instructor” at Yale University made a statement today in which he described his approval of the memorial presented to President Harrison by William E. Blackstone advocating a project for “restoring Palestine to the Jews.”


1891: “Collector Nathan To Retire” published today described Ernst Nathan’s repudiation of unfounded reports that he was retiring from his position or that he would seek the office of Mayor of Brooklyn.


1892: It was reported today that the 600 children living at the orphan asylum operated by the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society will be returning to school next week.  They have been confined to the orphanage since January 1stdue to an outbreak of measles – a medical challenged that has been successfully dealt with.  (In an era of vaccinations, we do not appreciate the deadly challenges of childhood illnesses)


1892: The Hebrew Orphan Asylum Bazar, sponsored by the Ladies’ Aid Society is scheduled to take place in Baltimore, MD.  Mrs. Benjamin Harrison, the wife of the President is scheduled to be one of the guests.  Mrs. Harrison had told Mrs. Edward Pels and Mrs. J.B. Eiseman that she will be sending a donation of flowers from the White House for the event.


1893: It was reported today that Russian Jews who had formed at a colony in Chesterfield, Connecticut are returning to New York after a suffering through a winter of hardships.


1894: Assemblyman Ainsworth apologized to the Jews for using the term “Jew pawnbrokers” during the debate on a bill to incorporate the “Provident Loan Society.”  The bill passed by a vote of 86 to 6 with the Jewish members all voting no.


1894(29th of Adar): Fifty-nine Abraham Baer the German born cantor who was author Ba’al Tifillah, passed away today in Sweden.


1895: The Beth Israel Hospital on East Broadway received a substantial benefit this evening from the proceeds of the Purim charity ball an concert sponsored by the Young Ladies and Gentlemen’s League, the purpose of which is to support the hospital.


1895: The last “open meeting” of the Monte Relief, “one of the best known Hebrew charitable organizations in” New York City, “will take the form of a “Cake Walk and Colored Jubilee.”


1896: The New York Times reports on the preparations for the upcoming celebration of the 45th anniversary of Dr. Sabato Morais beginning his service as the Rabbi for Congregation Mikvah Israel in Philadelphia, PA.


1897: Professor Felix Adler delivered a lecture “Religion of To-day” at Carnegie Music Hall this morning.


1897: Rabbi Gustav Gottheil spoke on “The Present Bible Controversy” today at Temple Emanu-El.


1897: It was reported today that August Belmont was one of the principal financial backers of plan to unite the manufacturers of bourbon whiskey into a national syndicate.


1897: It was reported that Seymour Mork and Phillip Harrison won the prizes at a debate sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.


1898(13th of Adar, 5658): Ta’anit Esther


1898: In the evening, the Purim “festival proper began” this evening, when the first star was visible, for in celebrating their holidays the Jews till adhere to the old Oriental custom of counting the day from evening to evening.”


1898: “Tatza Jews Killed by Arabs” published today describe the pillaging of the Moroccan city by Ghiatz Arabs who abducted the women after murdering the men.


1898: Senator Cantor introduced a bill today that would exempt the real estate of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association from taxation, assessment and water rates.


1898: “Congregations to Unite” published today traces the decision of members Temple Beth-Elhoim to consolidate with Temple Israel.  Both of the congregations are located in Brooklyn with Beth-Elhoim having 150 members and Temple Israel having 140 members.  The enlarged congregation will have to build a new sanctuary as neither of the currently occupied edifices are big enough to accommodate the increase in attendance.


1898: It was reported today that the oldest resident of the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews is a 99 year old man “whose only physical ailment is deafness.”


1900: Birthdate of Gerald Burton Windrod, the Kansas native whose virulent anti-Semitic views earned him the title of "the JayHawk Nazi.”


1900: Birthdate of Benn Wolfe Levy the British Playwright and Labour Party MP who clashed with his party’s Foreign Minister over the government’s pro-Arab and anti-Jewish policies in Palestine after WW II.


1902(28th of Adar I, 5662): Isidore Cahen, French scholar and journalist born at Paris in 1826 passed aay today.

1903: In Athens, Ohio, newspaper editor and publisher Charles Harvey Bryson, who owned the Athens Morning Journal and his wife gave birth to Bernarda Bryson who married Ben Shan and gained fame in her own rights as Bernarda Bryson Shan (As reported by Margalit Fox)

1904: In Paris, Baron Louis de Koenigswarter and his wife gave birth to Lt.-Col. Baron Jules de Koenigswarter who married Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild in 1935 and fought with the Free French during WW II.


1908: In Des Moines Iowa, “community activist” and suffragette Rose Frankel Rosenfield and Meyer Rosenfield the owner of Younkers department store gave birth to Louise Frankel Rosenfield who became Louise Noun when she married dermatologist Maurice “Maurie” Noun.

1909(14th of Adar, 5669): Purim


1909: On Purim, in Paris, France Leopold and Lena Pilichowski gave birth to Thade Pilley


1910:  It was reported today that the widow of the recently deceased actor-playwright Moses Horowitz is now living at the Home of the Daughters of Jacobs on East Broadway.


1912: Hadassah was founded by Henrietta Szold.  “At a meeting at Temple Emanu-El in New York City, Henrietta Szold, a noted scholar, teacher, journalist, editor, social worker and pioneer Zionist, convinced the Daughters of Zion study circle to expand its purpose and embrace “practical Zionism,” proactive work to help meet the health needs of Palestine’s people. Because the meeting was held around the time of Purim, the women called themselves “The Hadassah chapter of the Daughters of Zion,” adopting the Hebrew name of Queen Esther. Hadassah also means “myrtle,” a hardy Levantine plant with agricultural and biblical significance. Henrietta Szold became the first president.


1912(18th of Adar, 5672): In St. Louis, Marcus Bernheimer, the native of Liberty, Mississippi and the son of Samuel and Henrietta Bernheimer passed away today.


1912(18th of Adar, 5672): Seventy-two year old St. Louis merchant Eugene Sterne passed away today.


1913(28th of Adar I, 5673): In Chicago, Samuel Weil, the brother of Carrie, Josephine and Esther Weil, passed away today.


1913(28th of Adar I, 5673): Seventy-five year old Rabbi Adolf Ehrlich passed away today at Tilsit.


1913(28th of Adar I, 5673): Forty year old theatre manager Maurice Baumfeld passed away today in New York.


1914: For the second time in five years, Jewish welterweight Joe Hirst fought Jack Britton to a draw, a year before Britton on the Welterweight title.


1914: Mrs. Simon Baruch had a surprise party for twenty-one Italian children from the Bronx at her home as part of her program to teach patriotism and American values to the children of immigrants newly arrived in the United States.


1914: Eighty-two year old “Polish born British Bible scholar and student of the Masoretic tradition of Judaism Christian David Ginsburg who had converted to Christianity at the age of 15 passed away today in Middlesex.


1914: Having exhausted all of his appeals at the state court level, today, the state set Leo Frank’s execution date for April 17, 1914.


1915: “Miss Jane Addams spoke of ‘War and Social Service’ at the Free Synagogue at Carnegie Hall” this “morning following the service conducted by Rabbi Stephen Wise.


1916: Mrs. Edward Goldbeck is scheduled to speak on “America at the Crossways” this after afternoon during the regular meeting of the Chicago Woman’s Aid at the Sinai Social Center.


1916: “Habits and preferences of members of the Yale senior class were disclosed today” including that of the 325 members of the senior class, 12 of them were Jewish.


1916: Mrs. Edward A Aaron and Mrs. Jules E. Furth arranged the program for the sixth regular meeting of the B’nai Sholom Temple Sisterhood on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.


1917(13th of Adar, 5677): Ta’anit Esther and Erev Purim


1917: “The trial of a $50.000 libel suit brought by Maschulem F. Seidman, war correspondent for the Warheit and other Jewish news against The Day, another Jewish publication” which centered on whether or not it was in fact part of “German propaganda effort to win the sympathies of Jews in America for the Teuton cause” began today in New York.


1917: Birthdate of Herman Fishman, the Detroit native who letter in basketball, baseball and football and went on to play professional baseball until his career was cut short by WW II where he served in a U.S. Navy intelligence unit.


1917: The decision rendered in People ex rel. Mulderig v. Kaplan which held that “a theatrical performance give in the Neighborhood Playhouse by the Henry Street Settlement” on a Sunday “did not interrupt the repose and religious liberty of the community in any way” which means that “a prosecution of the treasurer of the settlement house for Sabbath-breaking should be dismissed” was reported in today issue of the New York Law Journal.


1917:  During World War I, on the Dialah River in Mesopotamia, Private Jack White, a signaler, during an attempt to cross the river, saw the two pontoons ahead of him come under very heavy fire with disastrous results. When his own pontoon had reached mid-stream, with every man except himself either dead or wounded, and not being able, by himself, to control the boat the private tied a telephone wire to the pontoon, jumped overboard and towed it to the shore, thereby saving an officer's life and bringing to land the wounded and also the rifles and equipment of all the men in the boat.


1918: The Palestine Fund Restoration Commission announced to today that “plans have been completed for the establishment of a great Jewish university in Jerusalem” and “that one of the first duties of the commission, which is going to Palestine under the auspices of the fund, would be the founding of this university” on the site which has already been chosen and acquired.


1918: In London, King George expressed his gratitude to Dr. Wiezmann for Zionists “useful work during the word” today.


1919: The Jewish Press Bureau in Stockholm said that the Yiddishe Morgenpost of Vienna reported “400 families have been killed at Proskuroff in the Ukraine, east of Lemberg” where “Jews were being massacred in large numbers.”


1920: Birthdate of Harry Kuniansky, the native of Atlanta who played guard for the U. of Georgia football team from 1940 through 1942 when the Bulldogs were “declared national champion in six polls recognized by the NCAA.”


1921: Red Army under Trotsky attacked sailors of Kronstadt in a move to put down “a counter-revolutionary” plot.  Soviet leaders were always putting down “counter-revolutionary plots” both real and imagined.  Stalin would later brand Trotsky as a counter-revolutionary and drive him from the party and the Soviet Union.


1922: Birthdate of Hans Eduard Ephraimson-Abt, the Berlin born Jew who became an internationally known advocate for families of air-crash victims after the death of his daughter on Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shot down by Soviet fighter planes in 1983 (As reported by Margalit Fox)


1924(1st of Adar II, 5684): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1924: “Dr. William Armhold, Rabbi Emeritus of Keneseth Israel, Philadelphia, who passed away in Atlantic City at the age of 96 is scheduled to be interred today at Mt. Sinai Cemetery in Philadelphia, PA.


1925: Dr. Chaim Weizmann is scheduled to sail for England today aboard the SS Olympic so that he can accompany Lord Blafour to Palestine where they will take part in the dedication of the new Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus.


1926: Herbert H. Lehman sent a letter to William Fox, the chairman of the United Jewish Campaign of New York which will officially be launched in April that $300,000 has already been pledged by the American Joint Reconstruction Foundation which should help in meeting the goal of raising six million dollars.


1928(15th of Adar, 5688): Shushan Purim observed for the last time during the presidency of Calvin Coolidge.


1929: Today in Iraq, "Jewish journalist, Anwar Shaul, published an open letter in weekly magazine al-Hasid, addressed to the British High Commissioner and commander-in-chief, Brigadier-General Sir Gilbert Clayton, demanding full independence for Iraq from Britain


1930: Birthdate of Alfred Gottschalk, the native of Germany who “as head of Reform Judaism’s major institution of higher learning ordained the first women as rabbis in the United States and Israel.”


1930: Chief Justice MacDonnell and Justices Baker and Kermak heard the appeal of Simcha Hinkis, a 22-year-old Jewish policeman accused of participating in the murder of an Arab family at Jaffa in the August riots. Hinkis had been “found guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced to death.”  “Mordecai Eliash, counsel for the defense, declared the conviction was based on insufficient evidence.”  The court is expected to render its judgment next week.  [It is ironic that a Jewish policeman is the one who was convicted of murder following the murderous Arab rampage of 1929.]


1930: The blue liveried state luxury saloon carriage of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, which entered service today would gain an extra measure of fame when it became part of the 2009 Winton Train – “a private passenger train which travelled from the Czech Republic to England in September 2009, in tribute to the wartime efforts of Sir Nicholas Winton, described as the 'British Schindler' for his part in the saving refugee children from Czechoslovakia.”


1931(18th of Adar, 5691): Parashat Ki Tisa; Shabbat Parah


1931(18th of Adar, 5691): Fifty year old Romanian born German “actor director, producer and screenwriter Lupu Pick” passed away today in Berline.


1932:  Benjamin Cardozo, the Chief Judge of the Court of appeals sent his formal resignation today to the Secretary of State as part of the process by which he assumed the position of the Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.


1936: In Poland, those supporting a bill introduced by Mrs. Blazej Pyster, the wife of the former Prime minister, that would prohibit kosher slaughtering practices on grounds that it is not humane and makes meat more expensive are faced with charges of violating the Constitution since it guarantees “to all of Poland’s citizens freedom of faith the free execution of religious rites” and this new law “would violate the rights of the Jewish population.”


1936: Today’s meeting of the Reichstag “will be the first since” that body “was convoked hurriedly in Nuremberg last September to sanction the new restrictions on the Jews and the ordinance establishing the Nazi flag as the Reich’s official emblem.”


1936: According to the current issue of the American Hebrew, “the 1935 American Hebrew Medal for outstanding service in promoting better understanding between Christians and Jews has been awarded to Roger Williams Straus…the son of the late Oscar Straus, United States Ambassador to Turkey” who is also co-chairman of the National Conference of Jews and Christians, a member of the executive committee of the American Jewish Committee and a vice president of the National Republican Club.


1936(13th of Adar, 5695): Parashat Tetzaveh; Shabbat Zachor; Erev Purim


1936(13th of Adar, 5696): As the celebration of Purim begins tonight, the Jews are in the words of Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson, painfully aware that “in Germany half a million Jews are groaning under the yoke of the Nuremberg laws and are threatened with economic and even physical annihilation.”


1936:  Hitler violated Treaty of Versailles by sending troops to the Rhineland. This was one of the early steps leading to World Word II and the Final Solution. Hitler was running a bluff.  He really lacked sufficient military force to have made the remilitarization stick.  If France and Great Britain had acted decisively, Hitler would have been forced to back down and he might even have been forced from power.


1937: Fifty-four year old Paul Bekker, “the former director of the Wiesbaden opera” who had been stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazis in 1936 because “favored Jews” passed away today in New York City.


1938: The Palestine Post reported that members of the Russian Zionist Center in Tel Aviv were worried by a new wave of purges and arrests in the Soviet Union. They reported that in Moscow, Odessa and many other Russian towns, charges of counter-revolutionary activities were trumped up against Jews and the youth was particularly affected. Although there were hardly any Jews in Japan, the Tokyo government launched Japan¹s first anti-Semitic campaign announcing a “worldwide Jewish plot.” The Japanese press presented a long list of the country’s Jewish enemies who included, among others, various international peace leagues, socialists and even Rotary International. The charges against Rotary were later withdrawn.


1938: In New York City Getrude Lipschitz and Richard Baltimore gave birth to David Baltimore, American biologist, recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.



1939: “Two Czech Fascists named Stund and Kovarik were in Pilsen today by the explosion of an infernal machine that they were concealing in a ceremonial hall of a Jewish cemetery where a big funeral service was scheduled for tomorrow.”


1939(16thof Adar, 5699): Seventy-four year old Ludwig Anton Salomon Fulda the poet and playwright who was the first President of PEN of Germany and whose career effectively came to an end when the Nazis came to power committed suicide in Berlin today when he was denied entry into the United States. (Editor’s Note – Germany wanted to put an end to him because he was a Jew and the United States had no room for him for the same reason.  Also there seems to be some confusion about the date of his death)

1940: As Jews continued to protest against the newly enacted British laws limiting purchase of land in Palestine by Jews, the Chief Rabbis and leaders of the Vaad Leumi led a protest demonstration through the streets of Jerusalem while other Jews took part in a work stoppage in Haifa.  In reaction to the protest in Jerusalem, the British imposed an over-night curfew on the Jewish quarter of the City of David.


1940: Birthdate of Arlene Hannah Butter, the New York born daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who gained fame as artist Hannah Wilke.

1942: Birthdate of Michael Eisner President of The Walt Disney Company.


1942: Lucy Parsons the labor organizer and anarchist who addressed the striking members of the Chicago Tailors Union most of whose members were Jewish and who clashed with Emma Goldman passed away.


1943(30th of Adar I, 5703): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1943: “The third American enlisted men’s club in the Middle East” is scheduled to be open in Tel Aviv today.  The club has “sleeping quarters for 150 men and lounge, game reading and music rooms.  It is 300 yards from the beach.” In addition, hospitality committees of the Jewish Agency arrange sightseeing trips in the Holy Land and the Tel Aviv Hospital committee is operating three clubs for solidiers and nurses of the Allied armies serving in Palestine.


1944: In Kansas City, MO, “Hilde and Alfred Rosbash, Jewish refugees from pre-war Nazi Germany” gave birth to Nobel Prize winning “geneticist and chronobiologist” Michael Rosbash

1944: The poet David Vogel was deported from Drancy the French concentration camp and sent to Birkenau along with another 1,500 Jews.


1944(12thof Adar): At Birkenau, 3,860 Jews who had been living in "family quarters", were sent to the gas chambers. Five days earlier, in their special "family quarters", they were shown off to Red Cross representatives (who were not allowed to see the rest of the camp.) The Jews were told to write postcards to their Czech relatives, but postdate them March 25, 26, and 27. The Jews would never live to see those days. Of this group, only 37 were spared, including eleven sets of twins. They would be sent to Dr. Mengele for medical experiments.


1944(12th of Adar): Today, the Nazis discovered “the hideout of Emanuel Ringelblum the historian of the Warsaw ghetto and one of the leaders of the Jewish underground” which would lead to the execution of him and his family a few days later.(For more see Who Will Write Our History)


1945: Brigadier General Ernest Frank Benjamin began serving with the British Eighth Army in the Faenza Area, Italy; a posting that would last until the end of World War II in Europe. Born in 1900, Benjamin “was a British officer from Canada of Jewish birth who commanded the Jewish Infantry Brigade during the Second World War. Benjamin was commissioned into the Royal Engineers and served with that service during 1941-42 before being transferred as a General Staff Officer 1 to the Middle East Command in 1943. He served as Assistant Quartermaster-General there until 1944 when he was appointed Deputy Director of Military Training Middle East Command and in the autumn of the same year as the Commanding Officer, Jewish Brigade Group. His last post with the Brigade group was in north-west Europe as part of the VIII Corps of the British Army of the Rhine. He passed away in 1969.


1945: The US 9th Armored Division seized the bridge at Remagen Germany, enabling them to cross the Rhine and enter the German heartland.  This is an amazing story of luck and unbelievable courage on the part of American soldiers which shortened the war and help end the nightmare for European Jewry. 


1946: Birthdate of Ronald Reider, the New Jersey native who settled in Cedar Rapids, after earning his M.D. at the University of Iowa. 


1947: In Brooklyn, “voice actor Allen Swift” (Ira Stadlen) and his wife gave birth to Lewis J. Stadlen who “made his Broadway debut as Grouch Marx in the 1970 musical comedy ‘Minnie’s Boys’”


1947: Major Beneral R.N. Gale, the British commander of “Operation Elephant” expressed satisfaction with the results of having imposed martial law over a large area of Palestine and that it will be able to “cut out this canker of underground violence.”


1947: As the British continued their efforts to pacify Palestine, 5,000 troops and policemen surrounded Rehoveth, Nathanya and Hadera and began searching the communities for “terrorists” and weapons.  The raid netted thirty-two detainees and a small cache of arms.  Dr. Chaim Weizmann is a resident of Rehovoth. “After the searches ended” armed masked men attacked the police station at Rishon le Zion.  As the British looked for the attackers, they let be known that they were looking for members of the Irgun and the Stern gang and not members of Haganah.


1948: At a speech given tonight in Reading, MP Ian Mikardo said “Lt. Gen. G.H.A. MacMillian, commander of the British forces in Palestine ‘forgot’ to get evidence regarding Arabs who entered Palestine to fight Jews” which he described as “appeasing the Arabs.”


1948: While speaking at Temple Rodeph Sholom, Rabbi Louis I. Newman said that “relations between Christians and Jews” in the United States “will steadily deteriorate if both do not maintain stability and common sense in attitudes toward the great social issues of our time.”


1948: At the opening of the annual conference of the Poale Zion of Great Britain, Ian Mikardo revealed that a vote of "no-confidence" would be sought against the government by some members of the British Labour Party when the bill to terminate the Palestine Mandate had its second reading in the House of Commons.


1948: This afternoon speakers at a meeting of 2,000 delegates at the annual conference of the Council of Organizations, United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York said that “world peace and international security are dependent largely on United Nations support of the Palestine partition plan


1949: During Operation Uvda, “Golani forces conquered the village Ein Harouf.


1949(6thof Adar, 5709): Two days before his 79th birthday Sol Bloom the music publisher turned politician passed while serving his 14th term as a Member of the House of Representatives representing the 19thand then 20th Congressional District from New York.

1949: During Operation Uvda, “the Alexandroni Brigade moved from Beersheba through Mamshit towards Sodom and then made an amphibious landing near Ein Gedi through the Dead Sea.”


1949: The IDF established a based Ayn Husb at the junction of the Beersheba-Sodom and Sodom-Eilat tracks


1950(18th of Adar, 5710): Daniel Frisch, the President of the Zionist Organization of America, passed away today at the age of 52 following a surgical procedure that had been performed yesterday.  Born in Palestine, Frisch was the son of Rabbi Eliezer and Haia Landau Frisch.  His family moved to Roumania when Frisch was one year old.  Frisch came to the United States in 1921 and settled in Indianapolis where he operated a successful salvage yard.  Frisch who had been active in the Zionist movement since childhood, founded the Indianapolis Zionist District, served as President of the Ohio Valley Zionist Region and was elected to the ZOA Administrative Council in 1934.  He retired from business five years ago and moved to New York so he could devote himself to the Zionist cause.  Frisch reportedly made at least 14 trips to Israel and worked tirelessly to raise funding for a projects for the infant Jewish state.


1950: In what has to be one of the all-time great whoppers of history, the Soviet Union issues a statement denying that Klaus Fuchs served as a Soviet spy days after he had been found guilty by a British court.  Fuchs testified that Harry Gold was his courier for getting information to the Soviets.  Harry Gold led to David Greenglass that led to the Rosenbergs.


1950: “The Communist newspaper Kol Ha’am charged today that Israel has instituted an anti-Communist campaign and inquirty to similar to those that it said had been launched by President Truman in all countries under American protection.”  The paper charged that America was pulling the strings of anti-Communism in Israel just as it was in England. [This charge came at the same time when many right-wing Americans were warning of the Jewish Communist conspiracy.]


1951: Lillian Hellman's "Autumn Garden" premiered in New York City.


1951: In one of those incidents that undermine stability in the Middle East and thus prove worrisome to Israel, the Prime Minister of Iran was shot and killed by an Islamic fundamentalist.


1952: Dr. Alexander Marx, director of libraries and the Jacob H. Schiff Professor at JTS is will leave for Israel today.  This is his first trip to the new Jewish state during which he plans to establish closer working relationships between JTS and libraries in Israel.


1953(20th of Adar, 5713): Maksymilian Apolinary Hartglas passed away in Tel Aviv.  Born in 1883, he was a lawyer, Zionist and a politician in pre-war Poland who courageously escaped from Warsaw and finally settled in Jerusalem.


1955: NBC presented “Peter Pan,” a musical version of the 1904 play of the same time with music by Mark Charlap and Jule Styne, and lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, Betty Comden and Adolph Green as part of its Producers Showcase anthology series.


1956(24th of Adar, 5716): Seventy-eight year old Cecile Meyer Pilpel (Mrs Emanuel Pilpel) a native of Wissembourg, France, “a leader in parent education for more than thirty years an executive of the Child Study Association of America” passed away today in Hartford, CT.


1960: “Volpone” co-starring Lou Jacobi as “Corvino” was broadcast today at the Play of the Week.


1964: Seventy year old Sir Alexander Knox Helm, the United Kingdom’s first ambassador to Israel passed away today.


1965: On Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, group of 600 civil rights marchers are violently prevented from marching to the state capital in Montgomery.  Two weeks later a group of marchers would successfully begin the march from Selma to Montgomery.  Included among them would be Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who said he was “voting with his feet.”

 
1965: Release date for “The Train” a film based on Le front de l'art by Rose Valland, which tells the story of a successful attempt to keep a train filled with looted French art from reaching Germany.  In reality, the boxcar doors were opened by Free French forces under the command of Lt. Alexandre Rosenberg who had no trouble identifying the masterpieces since man of have them had been hanging in the Paris home of his father Paul Rosenberg



1967: “You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown” premiered off-Broadway today with Bob Balaban as Linus.


1967: Alice B. Tolkas passed away. Born Jewish in 1877, the San Francisco she gained fame as confidante, lover, cook, secretary, muse, editor, critic, and general organizer for another famous Jewess, Gertrude Stein.  Before her death, Tolkas converted to Roman Catholicism. 


1969: The Central committee of the Labor Party voted to nominate Golda Meir as Prime Minister.


1970: In Westminster, London, George Weisz, an inventor from Hungary and Edith Ruth (née Teich), a teacher-turned-psychotherapist from Vienna, Austria Rachel Hannah Craig (née Weisz) who gained fame as British actress Rachel Weisz.


1971(10th of Adar, 5731): Eight-three year old movie mogul Barney Balaban, the long serving head of Paramount pictures passed away today.

1971: Birthdate of British-born Academy Award winning actress Rachel Weisz.  Her father was a Hungarian Jewish inventor who fled to England to escape the Nazis.  Her mother is described as Catholic with Jewish ancestry. Weisz has appeared in films with Keanu Reeves and Hugh Grant.


1971:  Egypt refused to renew the Suez ceasefire during an outbreak violence that presaged the Yom Kippur War of 1973.


1972(21st of Adar, 5732): Sixty-eight year old Aubrey Louis Goodman the tackle who led Baylor University and the University of Chicago to conference championships before turning professional and play for the Chicago Bulls and for the NFL Chicago Cardinals passed away today.


1973: “Slither” a crime move directed by Howard Zieff and starring James Caan, Louise Lasser and Allen Garfield was released today in the United States.


1973: U.S. premiere of “The Long Goodbye” starring Elliot Gould and featuring Mark Rydell and Warren Berlinger.


1974(13th of Adar, 5734): Ta’anit Esther and erev Purim


1974(13th of Adar, 5734): Eighty-three year old Irma Shloss Mannheimer, the daughter of Max and Rose Shloss and the wife of Eugene Mannheimer passed away today after which she was interred at the Emanuel Cemetery in Des Moines, IA.


1974: “Jewish activists Miron Dorfman, Mark Abramovich, Yacov Schwartzman (Kishinev), Leonid Bendersky (Tiraspol) and Sender Levinson (Bendery),” who were “serving 15 day sentences for staging a hunger strike outside the Central Post office in Kishinev, celebrated Purim by declaring a 48 hour hunger strike” today.


1974: “Yankel Kantas was released from prison today” a month before he would leave for Israel.


1974: “David Rockefeller, the Chairman of the Manhattan Bank criticized the Jackson Amendment” because, “concern for Jewish emigration and human rights must not jeopardize US – Soviet trade relations.” (Editor’s Note – really learned a lot from the Holocaust experience)


1975(24th of Adar, 5735): Canadian born comedian Ben Blue passed away at the age of 73.  Blue never achieved the fame of some his contemporaries like George Burns or Milton Berle.  But he was good enough to have his own life variety show in the early days of television.


1977:  Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin met President Carter.  Most people remember Rabin as the Prime Minister of Peace from the 1990's.  But Rabin was first Prime Minister back in the 1970's.  It was at this time that he and the Labor Party were rocked by a scandal dating from Rabin's days as Israel's Ambassador to the United States.  The scandal drove him from power.   It resulted in the rise to power of Likud and the election of Menachem Begin as Prime Minister.  In other words, Rabin's financial indiscretions ended Labor's control of the Israeli government which dated back to the founding of the state in 1948 and changed the political landscape of Israel.


 1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that the representatives of the Ministry of Finance and the Histadrut met to discuss the current wave of strikes which for more than seven weeks paralyzed the merchant marine, disrupted El Al flights and TV, radio and other communications.

 
1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that In Iran the shah warned that he might impose an oil embargo on Israel to make it more flexible in negotiations with Egypt.



1979: Twelve people were injured when a bus was detonated on a bus at the Plaza hotel, while nobody was injured when a second bomb was detonated on another bus in Tel Aviv.


1981: As Soviet authorities “put pressure on Hebrew teacher, “Yuli Kosharovsky and Pavel Abramovich were threatened with arrest.”


1982(12thof Adar, 5742): Fifty-six year old the movie director Konrad Wolf, the younger brother of Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf passed away in the German Democratic Republic (Communist East Germany) today.

1985(14thof Purim, 5745): Purim


1986: Divers from the USS Preserver locate the crew cabin of Challenger on the ocean floor. The crew included Judith Resnik, the first Jewish American astronaut and the first Jewish woman to go into space.


 1986(26th of Adar I, 5746): Former Senator from New York, Jacob K Javits passed away in Palm Beach FL at the age of 81.  Javits was a political anomaly for his time.  At a time when most Jews were Democrats, he was a Republican.  True, he was part of the liberal wing of the Republican Party, but he was a Republican nonetheless.  Javits was a champion of Civil Rights and stood against the right wing tide that swept his party in the 1960's.  A lot of Jews were critical of Javits for supporting President Eisenhower in 1956.  Ike and his Republican Administration sided with Egypt during the Suez Crisis and threatened Israel with crippling economic sanctions unless she bowed to the will of the Americans.


1987: In his “Jerusalem Journal,’ Francis X. Clines described the newly Ophel Garden which is “a magnificent ascending honeycomb of history at the southern foot of the Temple Mount that allows passing mortals to meander across 3,000 years of history, from the First Temple time of Solomon in the 10th century B.C. to the Ottoman extravagances of the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, 2,500 years later.”

1993(14thof Adar, 5753): Purim observed for the first time under President Bill Clinton.


1996: The Third Way was formed today “towards the end of the thirteenth Knesset's term when two MKs, Avigdor Kahalani and Emanuel Zisman, broke away from the Labour Party.”


1996: MK Efraim Gur left Likud.


1997: “Jungle 2 Jungle” a comedy featuring Leelee Sobieski was released today in the United States.


1997(28th of Adar I, 5757):  Rabbi Emanuel H. Bronner passed away.  Born in 1908, Emanuel H. Bronnerwas the eccentric maker of Dr. Bronner's castile soap, a concentrated liquid notable for the vast amount of lather produced from a few drops and the vast amount of tiny text on its packaging. Although his parents were killed in the Holocaust, Rabbi Bronner believed in the goodness and unity of humanity. He was born in Heilbronn, Germany to the Heilbronner family of soap makers. He emigrated to the United States in 1929, dropping "Heil" from his name to protest the rise of Hitler. He pleaded with his parents to emigrate with him for fear of the Nazis, but they refused. His last contact with his parents was in the form of a postcard saying, "You were right. —Your loving father." He started his business making products by hand in his home. The product labels were crowded with statements of Bronner's philosophy, which he called "All-One-God-Faith" and the "Moral ABCs". Many of Bronner's references came from Jewish and Christian sources, such as the Shema and the Beatitudes; others from poets such as Rudyard Kipling. Sometimes they contained unusual product statements, for example suggesting a contraceptive use for the soap. They became famous for their idiosyncratic style, including hyphens to join long strings of words and the liberal use of exclamation marks. In 1947, while promoting his "Moral ABC's" at the University of Chicago, Bronner was arrested and committed to a mental hospital from which he escaped. Eventually his operation grew into a small factory in Escondido, California. At his death in 1997, it produced over a million bottles of soap and other products a year but was still not mechanized. The firm did no advertising but has been the subject of many published articles. It supported many charitable causes. After Bronner's death, his family continued the business. They have said the labels he wrote will not change except when required by government regulations.


1999(19th of Adar, 5759):  Sidney Gottlieb passed away.Born in 1918, Sidney Gottlieb was an American chemist probably best-known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency mind control program (MKULTRA). Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Schneider. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. Despite the fact that he was a stutterer since childhood, Sidney got a master's degree in speech therapy. He also had a club foot, but this did not stop him from practicing folk dancing, a lifelong passion. In 1951, Sidney Gottlieb joined the Central Intelligence Agency. As a poison expert, he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Sidney became known as the "Black Sorcerer" and the "Dirty Trickster". He supervised preparations of lethal poisons and experiments in mind control.


1999(19th of Adar, 5759): Movie director Stanley Kubrick passed away at the age of 70.  Some of his more memorable films included “Spartacus,” “2001-A Space Odyssey” and “Dr. Strangelove.”


1999: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or special interest to Jewish readers including The Times of My Life: And My Life With The Times by Max Frankel


A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue by Wendy Shalit, Hirschfeld On Line by Al Hirschfeld and P.S.: The Autobiography of Paul Simon by Paul Simon


2000: Second showing of ‘The Life of the Jews in Palestine'' at the Museum of Modern Art. The classic documentary was produced in 1913 by the Odessa-based Mizrakh Company and presumed to be lost for some 80 years -- has resurfaced in New York. This excellent new print with English inter-titles of Noah Sokolovsky's 78-minute silent film is quite likely the rarest of the rarities featured in the museum’s 10-program tribute to France's national film archives, the Centre Nationale de la Cinematographie.


2001: Gesher pulled out of the coalition as a result of Ehud Barak’s participation in the Camp David Smmit.


2001: Ehud Barak completed his services as Israel’s tenth Prime Minister.


2001: Shlomo Ben Ami completed his service as Israel’s Foreign Minister.


2001: Binyamin Be-Eliezer replaced Ehud Barak as Defense Minister.


2001: Dalia Rabin-Pelossof replaced Efraim Sneah as Deputy Minister of Defense.


2001: Shimon Peres begins serving as Israel’s Foreign Minister.


2001:  Reuven Rivlin replaced Binyamin Ben-Eliezer as Communications Minister.


2001: Asher Ohana replaced Yossi Beilin as Minister of Religion


2001: Avigdor Lieberman replaced Avraham Shochat as the National Infrastructure Minister


2001: Natan Sharansky began serving as Minister of Housing and Construction.


2001: Uzi Landau replaced Shlomo Ben-Ami as Minister of Public Security.


2001: Gideon Ezra began serving as Deputy Minister of Public Security


2001: President Bush met with 25 leaders from the Jewish community in the White House Roosevelt Room.


2002: Fifteen people were injured in the hotel lobby bombing at Ariel for which the PFLP terrorists took credit.


2003(3rd of Adar II, 5763): Two Israelis were killed and five were wounded when armed terrorists infiltrated the community of Kiryat Arba and attacked during Shabbat. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.


2003: “In an advertisement placed in” today’s edition of The Jewish Press, The Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada declared that ...Agudas Horabonim cannot approve of a call to attend a Reform or Conservative temple on Friday night, or any time. As important as Kiruv - bringing Jews closer to the synagogue - is, it must be carried out in accordance with the Halacha. Since the "Shabbat Across America/Canada" does not state that the synagogue must be Orthodox, clearly implying that it can also be a Reform and Conservative temple, the Agudas Harabonim strongly disapproves, and warns all Jews not to take part in the "Shabbat Across America/Canada" program.”  (While this group sees itself as the true keeper of the flame, so to speak, there are those who find them “too lax”)


2003: A celebration of actress Ruth Kobart’s life is scheduled to be held this evening at the Geary Theatre in San Francisco.

2004: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of interest to Jewish readers including The Prisoner of Vandam Street by Kinky Friedman and the recently released paperback edition of Trains of Thought: From Paris to Omaha Beach: Memories of a Wartime Youth, by Victor Brombert in which the renowned literary scholar recalls his bourgeois Jewish childhood in Europe and his stateless youth: his parents escaped from France to the United States in 1941, and after joining the Army he returned to Europe to fight in the Normandy campaign and the Battle of the Bulge.


2004(14th of Adar, 5764): Purim


2005: After considering Hiram Bingham's deeds during the war years in Marseille for a number years, Israel's memorial Yad Vashem ("Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority") issued the Bingham family a letter of appreciation


2006: The Jerusalem Post reported that Saudi Arabia has continued to participate in the boycott against Israeli goods in violation of promises the Saudis had made to the United States and the international economic community. Despite a promise made to Washington last November to drop its economic boycott of Israel, Saudi Arabia plans to host a major international conference next week aimed at promoting a continued trade embargo on the Jewish state. The kingdom continues to prohibit entry to products made in Israel or to foreign-made goods containing Israeli components, in violation of pledges made by senior Saudi officials to the Bush administration last year. On November 11, the WTO's ruling general council had voted to grant Saudi Arabia entry into the prestigious group, which aims to promote international free trade, after it agreed to scrap restrictions on doing business with Israel.


2006: The Cedar Rapids Gazette announced that it would no longer carry the column by Mitch Albom because he was not reliable.  Apparently the Gazette could tolerate his fictional columns, just not the fact that he could not be trusted to get his work to the paper once a week as promised.


2007: The Ministry for the Development of the Negev and Galilee decided  to move the national archive of Israel from Jerusalem to Arad,


2007: At the Skirball Cultural Center, a screening of Black Book.  In the film “a beautiful chanteuse (Carice van Houten) joins the Dutch resistance in 1944 to track down the Nazis who killed her family and becomes embroiled in a web of seduction, betrayal, and revenge. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, Black Book premiered at the Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals to rave reviews.


2007: The Israel Air Force began incorporating the new "Shoval" drone, which according to the Israel Defense Forces has an improved ability to identify the launch of projectile rockets such as Katyushas and Qassams.The army said the drones will also be able to provide better assistance to troops on the ground. Shoval is the IAF nickname for the "Mahatz" drone manufactured by the Israel Aircraft Industries.


2007: An exhibition entitled “Superheroes and Schlemiels: Jewish Memory in Comic Strip Art” opens at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. “Superman, Maus, The Rabbi’s Cat and many other heroes and anti-heroes from the art of comics feature in this exhibition of comics and graphic novels by Jewish artists. Leading comic artists present their vision of a Jewish past in original drawings, printed matter and film material. The artists include Will Eisner, Joe Kubert, Ben Katchor and Rutu Modan. The exhibition, with comics from 1910 to the present day, is a co-production by the JHM and the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris.”


2007(17thof Adar, 5767): Eighty-year old journalist and novelist Charles Einstein, the author of The Bloody Spur passed away today in Michigan City, Indiana.

2008(30 Adar I, 5768: Rosh Chodesh Adar II


2008 (30 Adar I, 5768): The eight victims of the attack on Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem were buried this afternoon, each with Torah scrolls stained with their blood, in accordance with the Halakhic decision ruled by former Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu. The victims included American student Avraham David Moses, aged 16, Doron Maharata, 26 the oldest of those killed whose family immigrated to Israel as part of Operation Moses when he was eight years old, Yochai Lipschitz, 18, of Jerusalem; Yonatan Yitzchak Eldar, 16, of Shiloh; Yonadav Chaim Hirschfeld, 19, of Kochav Hashahar; Neriah Cohen, 15, of Jerusalem; Roey Roth, 18, of Elkana; and Segev Pniel Avihayil, 15, of Neveh Daniel


2008: Roland E. Arnall completed his term as U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands.


2008: “The Other Boleyn Girl” starring Natalie Portman premiered in the United Kingdom


2008: Today a state historical marker was erected by the Georgia Historical Society, the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, and Temple Kol Emeth, near the building at 1200 Roswell Road, Marietta where Leo Frank was lynched.  The memorial reads:

 
Near this location on August 17, 1915, Leo M. Frank, the Jewish superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, was lynched for the murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, a factory employee. A highly controversial trial fueled by societal tensions and anti-Semitism resulted in a guilty verdict in 1913. After Governor John M. Slaton commuted his sentence from death to life in prison, Frank was kidnapped from the state prison in Milledgeville and taken to Phagan's hometown of Marietta where he was hanged before a local crowd. Without addressing guilt or innocence, and in recognition of the state's failure to either protect Frank or bring his killers to justice, he was granted a posthumous pardon in 1986.


 
2009: In “The Perfect Hamantaschen” published today Deborah Gardner attempts to settle the dispute between those who prefer prune and those who munch on “mun.”

2009: Journalist David Plotz, the editor of Slate, discusses and signs Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible at Politics and Prose Bookstore, 202-364-1919.


2009: Israeli illustrator and artist David Polonsky discusses and signs his new graphic novel, Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story (created with Ari Folman, whose animated film of the same name inspired the book), at Busboys and Poets (D.C.)


2009: Shabbat Zachor 5769


2009: With demonstrators clashing with the police outside a near-empty stadium, Sweden won a doubles match to take a 2-1 lead against Israel in the Davis Cup series in Malmo, Sweden


2009: In case involving Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, The Chicago Tribune reported that New York City authorities this week charged the son of University of Chicago professor Norman Golb with identity theft, criminal impersonation and harassment in connection with a campaign to smear opponents of his father's scholarly theories. The academic subject at the center of the controversy is the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls, religiously significant documents that have provoked controversy since they were discovered six decades ago. The Manhattan District Attorney contends that Raphael Golb, 49, used dozens of Internet aliases during a six-month period last year to sway debate about the scrolls. In one instance, the 49-year-old attorney allegedly opened an e-mail account in the name of Lawrence Schiffman, a New York University professor and one of his father's chief critics. Then, using NYU computers, Golb allegedly posed as Schiffman and sent e-mails to Schiffman's colleagues admitting plagiarism.Schiffman said he contacted the district attorney's office, and the investigation began. The younger Golb "obviously went way overboard to protect the intellectual views of his father," Schiffman told the Tribune on Friday. "I can't believe this would happen," he said. "We are supposed to be doing scholarly interchange." New York authorities say Raphael Golb, using various aliases, also created Internet blogs that he used to accuse Schiffman of plagiarism, as well as creating e-mail accounts in the names of other Dead Sea Scrolls scholars. Norman Golb, a professor of Jewish history and civilization at the U. of C., on Friday described his son's arrest as another twist in the ongoing, often heated debate about the ancient scrolls. "The fact of the matter is that if I understand it, Raphael was responding to the attacks on me," Golb said from his university office. "I suppose my son felt it was important to get things straight."He added, "This has everything to do with the politics of the scrolls."Indeed, since their discovery six decades ago, the Dead Sea Scrolls have not only shed light on the ancient world but also ignited contemporary conflicts. Scholars view the ancient manuscripts, which include texts from the Hebrew Bible, as a missing link between Judaism and Christianity. Norman Golb, the author of "Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search for the Secret of Qumran," has played a leading role in the squabbles and is known for criticizing museum exhibits about the scrolls that do not include his views. Golb holds a minority view that the scrolls, hidden during the time of Jesus, were a sort of library of writings by several Jewish sects that were moved to one site to protect them from Roman invaders. Most scholars believe the scrolls are the work of a single Jewish sect, the Essenes, who wrote the documents in a monastery, where they were found in the 1940s and 1950s.Raphael Golb's attorney, Irena Milos, declined to comment Friday. In criminal court for his arraignment Friday, Golb did not enter a plea. He was released on his own recognizance. A spokeswoman for the district attorney's office said the investigation is ongoing and would not comment on whether Norman Golb is under investigation.


2010: The Jewish Women's Archive’s tour of Santa Fe is scheduled to come to an end today.


2010: “The Splendor of the House of Camondo: From Constatinople to Paris, 1806-1845” which opened at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris on November 6, 2009 is scheduled to close today.


2010: The 121st annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis opened in San Francisco.


2010: The Twentieth Annual KOACH Kallah is scheduled to come to an end. KOACH is the college program of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.


2010: After a year-and-a-half of careful restoration work by the Egyptian authorities, the Maimonides Synagogue in Cairo is scheduled to be rededicated today. The 19th-century synagogue and adjacent yeshiva, which stand on the site where Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, the Rambam, worked and worshiped more than 800 years ago, was restored by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA).


2010: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readings including The Ask by Michael Lipstye


2010(21 Adar, 5770):Arnold Forster, an American Jewish leader, lawyer and writer who was a longtime executive of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, passed away today in the Bronx at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale.  He was 97. Associated with the Anti-Defamation League for nearly six decades, Mr. Forster was its general counsel from 1946 to 2003. In that capacity he helped document, publicize and combat myriad forms of anti-Semitism in the United States and overseas. He was widely quoted in the news media over the years on a range of Jewish issues, including Zionism, a cause he defended ardently and about which he wrote frequently. His books, many of which began life as league reports, include “The Trouble-Makers” (Doubleday, 1952), “ ‘Some of My Best Friends ...’ ” (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962) and “The New Anti-Semitism” (McGraw-Hill, 1974), all written with Benjamin R. Epstein. Mr. Forster was also the author of a memoir, “Square One” (D. I. Fine, 1988), which has a foreword by Elie Wiesel. Mr. Forster began his work with the Anti-Defamation League in the 1930s. In 1938, he convened a group of lawyers to serve pro bono as the league’s legal arm. He formally joined the league in 1940 and later became its associate national director, presiding over an expansion of its law department and civil rights programs. In 1965 Mr. Forster hired a young law school graduate named Abraham H. Foxman as an assistant to the director of the league’s law department. Mr. Foxman is now the league’s national director.  After retiring from the league in 1979, Mr. Forster was associated with two New York law firms, Shea & Gould and Baer Marks & Upham. Besides writing books, Mr. Forster wrote the screenplays of several documentary films. Among them are “The Avenue of the Just” (1978), about Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust, and “Zubin and the I.P.O.” (1983), about Zubin Mehta, the music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Broadcast on NBC, “Zubin and the I.P.O.” won Daytime Emmy Awards for its director, Samuel Elfert, and for Mr. Mehta. In “Square One,” Mr. Forster recounted his decades-long campaign against bigotry. Reviewing the memoir in The New York Times Book Review, Marlene Sanders called it “an earnest chronicle of the useful life of a dedicated man.” Ms. Sanders continued: “The work of Mr. Forster and the league over the years has contributed to eliminating many institutionalized forms of prejudice.” She added, “We may not be back to ‘Square One’ in solving the problem, but this book is a reminder that there is still work to be done.”


2011: Israeli choreographer Michal Samama is scheduled to perform ‘Still Life with Seven Stones’ in New York City.


2011:Israeli violinist Misha Keylin, Seymour Lipkin and the Jupiter musicians are scheduled to perform at the Good Shepherd Church in New York City.


2011: On the day before Mardi Gras, Jews in the Crescent City have the opportunity to participate in Breakfast with Maimonides during which Rabbi Zelig Rivkin is scheduled to lead a study of the writings of the Rambam


2011: (1 Adar II 5771): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


2011: (1 Adar II 5771) Yahrzeit for the passengers killed on Egged Bus #53 8 years ago in Tel Aviv:


·         Kmer Abu Khamed, 12, from Daliyat al Karmel


·         Yuval Mendelevitch, 13, from Haifa


·         Smadar Firstatter, 17, from Haifa


·         Avigail Lietel, 14, from Haifa


·         Asaf Tzur, 16, from Haifa


·         Daniel Harush, 16 , from Safed


·         Tom Hershko, 16, from Haifa, and his father-


·         Motti Hershko, 41, from Haifa


·         Tal Kehrmann, 17, from Haifa


·         Elizabeth (Liz) Katzman, 17, from Haifa


·         Meital Katav, 20, from Haifa


·         Moran Shushan, 20, from Haifa


·         Anatoly Biryakov, 20, from Haifa


·         Be'eri Ovad, 21 , from Rosh Pina


·         Eliyahu Laham, 22, from Haifa


·         Miriam Atar, 27, from Haifa


·         Mark Takash, 54, from Haifa


2011:Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has ordered the state to demolish all illegal West Bank outposts built on private Palestinian land by the end of 2011, Cabinet Secretary Zvi Hauser announced today.

2011: Publication of “Jewish Texts Lost in War Are Surfacing in New York”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/nyregion/08books.html?_r=2&hpwm



2012:Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good” is scheduled to be shown at the Pittsburgh Jewish Film Festival in Pittsburgh, PA.



2012: The junior faculty at the University of Haifa is scheduled to go on strike as part of “an ongoing dispute with the Committee of University Presidents over work conditions”


2012: Friends and family of Dr. Ron Reider join together to celebrate his natal day.  Besides being a crack physician, Reider is an avid wrestling fan, a pillar of the Jewish community and a loyal supporter of the Traditional Minyan. In addition to which, he is one of only two people in Cedar Rapids who wraps his tefillin around his right arm.


2012(13th of Adar, 5772): Fast of Esther


2012: As part of their Fast of Esther observance, the 9thgraders at Temple Judah have agreed to take part in “Say No To Lashon Hara Day.”  Purim is a holiday that reminds of the evil consequences of the Evil Tongue..  Traditionally, on the day before Purim, we give up food and drink to show our solidarity with Esther. They are going to avoid Lashon Hara, both in its literal and figurative meaning, on the day before Purim to show that modern world would be better off without it just as the Jews of Shushan would have benefited from its absence. 


2012: Education Minister Gideon Saar announced today that Rabbi Chaim Druckman will receive the Israel Price for his contributions to society and education.

2012: Thirteen Israelis made this year’s list of billionaires which totaled 1,226 people. Idan Ofer, director of Ofer Group, leads the list of Israeli billionaires in the 161st spot, with an estimated fortune of $6.2 billion. Beny Steinmetz of Steinmetz Business Group ranked eight spots bellow Ofer, with a net worth of $5.9 billion. Another Ofer brother, Eyal, came in 173rd on the list, with $5.8 billion.  Iscar founder Stef Wertheimer and his family ranked 255th with some $4.2 billion, while Bank Hapoalim's Shari Arison was placed in the 288th spot with $3.9 billion. Other Israelis included on the list were film producer Arnon Milchan (290th, $3.8 billion); Kazakh-Israeli tycoon Alexander Machkevich (418th, $2.8 billion); Check Point founder Gil Shwed (683, $1.9 billion); Delek Group owner Yitzhak Tshuva (683, $1.9 billion);Lev Leviev (764, $1.7 billion); Marius Nacht (1015, $1.2 billion); Teddy Sagi (1015, $1.2 billion) and Moris Kahn (1153, $1 billion). (As reported by Y Net)


2013: Center for Jewish History and American Jewish Historical Society are scheduled to present a discussion of the soon-to-be published book FDR and the Jews.


2013: Helaine and Isaac Heller donated one million dollars as an unrestricted gift to Cooper Union’s Annual Fund.


2013: In Cedar Rapids, the family and friends of Dr. Ronald Reider, a pillar of the Jewish community and an ardent supporter of the Shabbat Minyan, celebrate his natal day.  Dr. Reider is one of two men in Cedar Rapids who uses “left-handed’ tefillin.


2013(25thof Adar, 5773): Ninety-eight year old Jacques Torczyner, the Belgian born former president of the ZOA passed away today.

2013:” British Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Jewish Defence,” a one day conference co-sponsored by the Board of Deputies of British Jewish is scheduled to take place at the Wiener Library. 


2014: JW3 is scheduled to host a “100% Shabbat friendly” Friday Night Supper Club in London.


2014: Following funeral services this afternoon, Francis Calisch Rothenberg, the granddaughter of Edward N. Calisch the rabbi at Richmond’s Temple Beth Ahabah, is scheduled to be interred at the Hebrew Cemetery in Richmond.

2014: The Library of Congress is scheduled to screen “Sukkah City,” Jason Hutt’s documentary that “explores the artistic process of architects and documents how an ancient building was reinvented for the 21st century.”


2014: In Coralville, Iowa, Agudas Achim is scheduled to host Shabbat Across America.


2014: Following a congregation spaghetti dinner, the 9th grade class is scheduled to lead Friday night services at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.


2014: The third bi-annual LimmudFest New Orleans is scheduled to open this evening with registration at Temple Sinai on St. Charles Avenue.


2014: Nine Ukrainian Jews injured by gunfire during fighting in Kiev were flown to Israel today afternoon to receive crucial medical treatment. (As reported by Yoel Goldman)


2014: “Israeli jets scrambled to its Northern border with Syria today after Syrian aircraft were spotted in the area.  The Syrians, who were apparently attacking rebel positions, pulled back from the border when they spotted the IAF. (As reported by Times of Israel)


2014: “Closer to the Moon” a movie based on the Ioanid Gang (a group of Jewish Romanians who allegedly stole a huge amount of money from an armored car) was released in Romania today.


 2015: As Jews in Cedar Rapids come together for the Traditional Shabbat minyan they are bathed in a veritable Upper Mid-West Heat Wave as temperatures go above freezing for the second day in a row.


2015: The Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia is scheduled to host a Paint Your Own Passover Pottery party this evening.


2015(16thof Adar, 5775): Eighty-eight year old businessman and philanthropist Isaac Heller passed away today.

2015: Tom Morton-Smith’s “Oppenheimer” which takes him “from a left-wing academic in Berkeley, California, to a military scientist in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he headed the top-secret Manhattan Project” is scheduled to be performed for the last time at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon


2015: At the New Orleans Hyatt Hotel, the Jewish Children’s Regional Service (JCRS), the first and oldest Jewish children’s agency in the United States, will host a 160th anniversary, featuring some of New Orleans finest musical talent, and honoring families who have made programs on behalf of Jewish children a centerpiece of their philanthropy. (Editor’s Note – speaking from personal experience, this is an organization worthy of financial support)


2015: “Yoav Galant, a former IDF general running for Knesset with the centrist Kulanu party, charged today that the government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu largely ignored the tunnel threat posed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip until Operation Protective Edge last summer.


2015: “An estimated 40,000 demonstrators filled Rabin Square this evening “to take part in a rally calling for a change in government” where they herard former Mossa chief Meir Dagan say that Netanyahu “is dragging us down to a bi-national state and to the end of the Zionist dream.”


2016: “Phoenix” and “Apples from the Desert” are scheduled to shown at the Houston (TX) Jewish Film Festival.


2017: “War Paint,” a musical based on the rivalry between Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, the Jewish cosmetics entrepreneur, premiered on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre today.

2017: It was announced today that “beginning in 2017, the National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust studies and narratives will be named to honor the memory and legacy of the late Ernest W. Michel” who was “deported from his hometown of Manheim, Germany by the Gestapo at 16 years old, “Ernie” Michel escaped seven years later after the death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald and dedicated the rest of his life to Jewish life and Holocaust remembrance.


2017: In Memphis, TN, Temple Israel is scheduled to host its annual Purimspiel, “an original production…inspired by a collection of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock tunes.”


2017: In France, the court is scheduled to render a verdict after hearing evidence in a case where “French Jewish scholar Georges Bensoussan is being sued by Muslim anti-racism groups for saying in a radio debate: ‘In French Arab families, babies suckle antisemitism with their mothers’ milk.’”


2017: The YIVO Institute is scheduled to sponsor a lecture by Jack Jacobs on the “Political Thinkers Of East European Jewry” where he “will focus on the ideas of Dubnow, Zhitlowsky, Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am, Syrkin, Borochov, Scherer, and Jabotinsky.”


2017: “As of midday today, threats had been reported at Jewish institutions in Wisconsin, Maryland, Oregon, Florida, Alabama and at least two community centers in New York, according to Secure Community Network, the security arm of the Jewish Federations of North America” while “two threats were directed toward Canadian JCCs, in Toronto and London, Ontario.”


2018: “Why Do They Hate Us?” a documentary that examines anti-Semitism in France is scheduled to be shown at the 21st NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival.


2018: Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center’s 2018 Humanitarian Awards Dinner.


2018: Dr. Mark W. Weisstuch is scheduled to lead two sessions on “The Ten Commandments: Ambiguities and Misconceptions” at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center.


2018: The National Jewish Book Award is scheduled to take place at the Lander College for Women – The Anna Ruth and Mark Hasten School in Manhattan.


2018: Rabbi Lawrence of the Kinloss United Synagogue and an Oxford alumnus, is scheduled to discuss issues of confidentiality and cover-ups in Halacha at the Old Law Library at the Magdalen College.


 

This Day, March 8, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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March 8


1126: Alfonso VII is proclaimed king of Castile and Leon, after the death of his mother Urraca. Under the reign of Alfonso Christian Spain “became a refuge for the persecuted Andalusian Jews.  The capital city of Toledo became a new center for Jewish learning.  The major reason for this positive turn of fortune for the Jews was the king’s positive relationship with Yehuda Ibn-Ezra.  After taking the fortress of Calatrava, the king appointed Ibn-Ezra as its commander as a reward for his bravery.  Ibn-Ezra used his influence to create a refuge for the Jews who were fleeing Almohades, a religiously fervent Berber Moslem dynasty that had crossed into Spain after successful conquests in parts of North Africa. Those who equate the Golden Age of Spain with Moslem rule would do well to remember that life for the Jews was much more varied than that.


1255: King Przemysl Ottocar II of Austria renewed the charter granting favorable rights to his Jewish subjects.


1607: A complaint was filed today by the Inquisition “against Jorge de Almeida, a Portuguese domiciled in the City of Mexico, husband of Dona Lenor de Andrada” who had been convicted of observing Mosaic law” which makes her a Jewess.


1688: On this night a large group of secret Jews planned to escape from the island of Majorca by booking passage on an English ship. They were looking for religious freedom. A storm delayed their departure, and their plan was betrayed. All those planning to leave were put in prison. In the spring of 1691 these prisoners were sentenced at an auto-de-fe, where 37 were burned at the stake.


1702: King William II of England passed away today. Antonio Lopez Suasso, later Baron Avernes de Gras had provided financing for William who had been Prince of Orange to take the English throne. In 1700 William knighted Solomon de Medina who had served as an army contractor making him the first Jew to be so honored.


1731: In Mladá Boleslav, David Brandeis a Jewish shopkeeper who had been accused of poising a local Christian printer with plum jam was released today after the accusation was proven to be untrue.



1754(14thof Adar, 5514): Purim


1757: Jacob Pinto and Thankful Pinto gave birth to Abraham Pinto today,


1766: In the Netherlands, on the day when Prince William V reached his majority, Jews held services of Thanksgiving as sign of their on-going support for the monarch who was not universally popular.


1768:In the Netherlands, synagogues held services of thanks-giving on the day that “King William V entered the legislature on the day of his majority.” “Under the government of William V the country was troubled by internal dissensions; the Jews, however, remained loyal to him” and William did not forget the loyalty of his Jewish subjects.


1773(13thof Adar, 5533): Ta’anit Esther


1773: In the evening, Rabbi Raphael Hayyim Isaac Caregal attended Purim services at the synagogue in Newport, RI, with Ezra Stiles, the future President of Yale who described him as being "dressed in a red garment with the usual Phylacteries and habiliments, the white silk Surplice; he wore a high fur cap, had a long beard. He has the appearance of an ingenious and sensible man"


1792(14thof Adar, 5551): Purim


1799(1st of Adar II, 5559): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1807: In France, the Great Sanhedrin presented its conclusions at its final session.


1817:  In New York, the Stockbrokers Guild formerly incorporates itself and becomes the New York Stock Exchange.  Among the founders were several prominent Jewish financiers including Benjamin Seixas, Isaac Gomez, Alexander Zuntz and Ephraim Hart.  Ephraim Hart’s son’ Bernhard, became Secretary of the NYSE.  Bernhard was also the grandfather of writer Bret Harte.


1817:Joseph Jonas the first Jew to settle in Cincinnati, Ohio arrived in the Queen City today.  He was an English-born peddler who had come from Philadelphia, PA. “He became a successful watchmaker and silversmith and lived on Broadway between Fifth Street and Harrison. Jonas, like most early Jews, settled in downtown Cincinnati. Jonas wrote letters describing the opportunities that existed in the Ohio River valley. This convinced other Jews to join him including two younger brothers. In 1821, when Benjamin Lieb was dying, he begged to be buried as a Jew. He was the first Jew to die in Cincinnati. In response to his request, Joseph Jonas and Morris Moses, two of Cincinnati's six Jews, purchased the lot for Cincinnati's first Jewish cemetery from Nicholas Longworth for $75.00, and then buried Lieb there. This cemetery known as the Old Jewish Community or the Chestnut Street Cemetery is the oldest Jewish cemetery west of the Alleghenies. By 1824 there were enough Jewish residents to fulfill the requirement of ten adult males so that regular religious services could be held, and the first Jewish congregation beyond the Allegheny Mountains was established. This congregation became the Rockdale Temple. Most of the early Jews were British.”


1825: Birthdate of Salomon Kohn, the son of Prague merchant who traded in his business career in 1873 for the world of literature.


1826: This evening, in Charleston, SC, Isaac Soria of New York married Hetty Cohen, “the daughter of Moses Cohen.


1830: Birthdate of German Jewish jurist Hermann Makower who was also a leader of the Berlin Jewish community.


1831: Birthdate of French photographer Félix Bonfils who created one of the first modern photographic records of the Middle East including Palestine including the Wall of the Second Temple.



1832: Nathan Solomons married Deborah Abrahams today in the UK.


1857:Today one of the first real organized actions of women's solidarity took place in New York City when hundreds of women staged a strike against the garment and textile factories in New York City, protesting low wages, long working hours and inhumane working conditions.  This strike, which undoubtedly included Jewish workers took place 54 years before the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire.


1857: Reverend Charles Harris, "a Christian Jew" is scheduled to preach twice today at the John Street First M.E. Church in New York City. [The Jews for Jesus concept obviously was not a 20th century phenomenon.]


1860(14thof Adar): As war clouds loom in the United States, celebration of Purim


1860: Sir Saul Samuel completed his term as 6th Treasurer of New South Wales


1863: In London “Julius L. Sterner, a German-born American citizen” pursuing business opportunities in the UK and Sarah Steiner gave birth to Albert Edward Sterner, a student at Julien’s Academy and Ecole des Beuaz Arts who came to the United States in 1881 where he pursued a career as an “artist, scene painter and lithographer.”


1871(15thof Adar, 5631): Shushan Purim


1871: A review of The Recovery of Jerusalem: A Narrative of Exploration in the City and the Holy Land” by two legendary British officers, Captains Wilson and Warren, who, among other accomplishments, conducted the first modern mapping of the ancient Jewish capital was published today.


1871: “The Purim Festival” published today described the history of the holiday as well as local observances including the celebrations at the Asylum for the Aged and Infirm, the Orphans’ Home and the Industrial Home on West 17th Street.


1872: Four years after Abraham Oppenheim had been ennobled, German-Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder and his family were made Prussian nobles; making them the second Jewish family to have been so honored.


1874: In Münstereifel, Germany, Rabbi Joseph Kahn and his wife Rosalie who would raise their family in Detroit, gave birth to Julius Kahn, the University of Michigan trained engineer who invent “the Kahn System, a reinforced concrete engineering technique for building constrctuion.


1874: “The Prince of Printers” published today traces the history of printing in Italy including the rise of the printers of Soncino who were the first to print texts using Hebrew letters. Although they would set up presses at other locations, they always used the name of their home town which they adopted as their family name.


1875(1stof Adar II, 5635): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1875: It was reported that next week’s Hebrew Charity Ball will include music supplied by two bands and a supper catered by Delmonico’s served at the Academy of Music.


1877: The Hebrew Lodge, Number 5 of the International order of B’nai Brit is sponsoring a fundraiser at the Steinway Hall tonight to aid those who suffered loss in the recent fire in Brooklyn.  Entertainment will included vocalists and violinists.


1877: In Eichstetten, Leopold Bloch, the son of Samuel and Jeanette Bloch and Babette Bloch gave birth to Jakob Bloch


1879: Birthdate of Otto Hahn.In 1944, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the fission of heavy nuclei, which made the atomic bomb possible.


1879: It was reported today that the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Harlem are sponsoring a Purim Calico Ball which will be held on the day that coincides with Shushan Purim.


1879: The Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Manhattan will host its fourth annual Purim celebration at the Lexington Avenue Opera House.


1881: The town of Seligman, MO, which was named for Joseph Seligman, was incorporated today.


1882: Abraham Aarons married Miriam Solomons today in London.


1887: “In the history of the religious life of the Israelites of” the United States “there was never expressed in the midst of the Jewish people such deep-felt grief and sorrow over the death of a public man as over the death of Henry Ward Beecher” the 73 year old social reformer and abolitionist clergyman who passed away today and was eulogized by Rabbi David Phillipson of Cincinnati.


1890: “The charity ball of the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Long Island City took place tonight at Ahler’s Astoria Assembly Rooms.


1891: “Palestine for the Jews” published today described the plan “advocated by prominent men of the leading cities” including such philo-Semites as Yale Professor Charles Toten “to obtain in a peaceable way” the “old homes in Palestine for Jews through… an international conference.”


1891: “Electric Light In The Holy Land” published today relied on information that first appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette to described the introduction of electric light at a new flour mill located near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem.


1891(28th of Adar I, 5651: Seventy year old Benjamin Feuerstein, a clothing cutter, passed away while riding the elevated on his way to a meeting of a Jewish charitable society.


1891: Birthdate of American film and television actor Sam Jaffee.  His film career included the role of Gunga Din in the movie of the same name and “Doc”, the criminal mastermind in the film noire classic “The Asphalt Jungle.”  His film career came to a halt as a result of the infamous blacklist.  He returned to acting as the wise old Dr.Zorba in the television medical melodrama “Ben Casey.”


1892: As public health workers in New York cope with the latest outbreak of typhus, 20 year old Sarah Koslofsky who was living in a tenement occupied by 18 Jewish families was taken to the hospital after she was found to suffering with the fever.  Thirteen year old Baruch Stelson who was also found to be suffering from the disease was taken the facility at North Brother Island.


1894: “Benny” Weiss” saw  Wardman Jeremiah Levy and Charles Krumm shake hands but do not exchange any money.


1894: “Brooklyn Bridge Trustees” published today described Senator Cantor’s objection “to removing men from office upon charges of dishonesty unless the charges were shown to be true.”


1894: “Mr. Ainsworth Makes an Apology to the Hebrews” published today described New York Assemblyman Ainsworth’s public recantation of his use of the term “Jew pawnbrokers’ claiming that he spoke hastily during the debate on reforming pawn-brokering “and did not think of my Hebrew brethren on the floor of the house.”


1895: “Unparalleled” published today, relying on information first appearing in the Cincinnati Tribune described the United as “perfect in a religious way” because it is the only country on earth where “a Hebrew Mayor” could “call for the troops to keep the Catholics and Protestants from getting into a riot.”


1896: “Rabbi Morais’s Anniversary” published today described plans for the upcoming celebration of Dr. Sabato Morais’s 45thanniversary as the Rabbi of Philadelphia’s Congregation Mikve Israel.


1896: Birthdate of Otto Heller, the Prague born English cinematographer Otto Heller.


1896: Birthdate of Joseph Bernbaum, the native of Stopnica, Poland native who came to Canada in 1918, joined the Jewish Legion in 1918 and who “left Toronto with first group of volunteers and served in Palestine with the 39th Royal Fusiliers.


1897(4th of Adar II, 5657):Frederick C. Salomon passed away.  A native of Prussia where he trained as a surveyor, Salomon moved to Wisconsin where he worked as a surveyor, registrar of deed and chief engineer on a local railroad.  At the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined the Union Army where he served with such distinction that he rose to the rank of Major General (Brevet) by the time he mustered out in 1865.  After the war he served as the Surveyor General of Utah Territory and settled in Salt Lake City where he passed away.


1897: Maurico Jacobs, a native of Peru who has been living in Cuba for the last 12 years has applied to the United Hebrew Charities for assistance for himself and his family.


1897: “Welcomes the Controversy” published todat described Temple Emanu-El’s Rabbi Gottheil response to Reverend Lyman Abbot’s claims about the Bible including the charge that the Book of Psalms was not theological because it was written in poetry.


1898(14th of Adar, 5658): Purim


1898(14th of Adar, 5658): Sixty-eight year old Moses Bruckheimer, a pawnbroker living in Brooklyn passed away today. He was active in the Jewish community serving as trustee of Temple Beth Elohim and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum.


1899: At the annual diplomatic dinner given by the Emperor of Germany Today, the Kaiser looked “robust,” having “fully recovered from the effects of his Palestine” trip where he sought to strengthen the German role in the Ottoman Empire.


1899: In Albany, State Senator Elsberg introduced a bill “authorizing the consolidation of the Education Alliance and the Hebrew Free School Association of New York City.


1899: At the Bloomingdale Church in Manhattan Dr. Madison C. Peters will deliver a lecture on “Justice to the Jew,” “which is intended to refute popular fallacies and prove that the movements of civilization have hung upon the Jew.”  “Dr. Peters claims that he will show that the Jew is in the front rank as patriot, lawyer, statesman, scientist, philosopher, artist, dramatist, poet, physician, musician, mathematician, astronomer, actor, discoverer, philologist, physiologist – in every department of human activity.”


1900: Ray Emanuel, the daughter of David and Amelia Emanuel married Joseph Jewell at the Central Synagogue.


1902: Birthdate of Bernard Irvin “B.I,” Greenhut who served as Mayor of Pensacola, FL from 1965 through 1967.


1905: In New York, Rebecca (née Green) and Dr. Isidore L. Marrow gave birth to psychologist Dr. Alfred J. Marrow, the husband of Monette Marrow and father of Paul Bennett Marrow and Marjorie Samberg.



1906: In New York City, Rebecca (née Green) and Dr. Isidore L. Marrow gave birth to Alfred J. Marrow “American industrial psychologist, executive, civil rights leader, and philanthropist.”


1906: Po’alei Zion was organized underground in Poltava, Russia


1908: The Federation of Rumanian Jews in America was founded


1908(5th of Adar II, 5668): Adolph Meyer, a native of Natchez, Mississippi, who served as a member of the House of Representatives from Louisiana, passed away today.


1908: Miss Dora Brachman married Louis Ginsberg in Marietta, Ohio where they will make their home.


1910: Two days after he passed away, 63 year old Zygmnunt Wartski, the native of Kalisch, Russia, was buried today in Vienna.


1910: Birthdate of Louis “Lulu” Bender, “an all-American basketball player at Columbia whose stellar play during the Depression helped popularize the game and make Madison Square Garden a magnet for college basketball…” (As reported by Vincent M. Mallozzi)



1911: International Women's Day is launched in Copenhagen, Denmark, by Clara Zetkin, leader of the Women's Office for the Social Democratic Party. Born Clara Eissner, she married a Russian Jewish socialist leader named Ossip Zetkin.


1912(19th of Adar, 5672): Seventy-six year old Colonel Isaac Hirsch, he former Mayor of Chillicothe, MO, passed away today.


1912:  Birthdate of Seymour Louis Stark, the Brooklyn native who played college football at Syracuse before turning pro and playing for the Boston Redskins in 1935.


1912:  The Greek town of Zante was devastated by an earthquake. The Jewish quarter was destroyed, and more than 100 Jewish families are homeless


1912: Marco Besso of Trieste and Errea Cavalieri of Ferrara were both elected as Senators in Italy.


1913(29th of Adar I, 5673): Parashat Pekudi and Shabbat Shekalim


1913: Seventy-three year old Leon Israel, “the manager of the first Italian grand opera company to appear in Chicago passed away today at his home on Calumet Avenue.


1914: Birthdate of Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich who played a key role in the development of nuclear weapons for the Soviet Union


1914: Mrs. Simon Baruch hosted a party at her home today for twenty-one Italian children from the Bronx as part of an attempt to combat anarchist propaganda and to the immigrant a children a sense of American history and patriotism.  Mrs. Baruch is the wife of Dr. Simon Baruch.  They are the parents of Bernard Baruch.


1915: In Washington, DC, “Count von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador, issued a statement today declaring that tolerance toward all religious beliefs had been displayed by the Turkish Government and that the disturbances of which he Jews in Palestine were victims were caused by the overzealousness of local Turkish authorities.


1916: It was reported today that of the 325 seniors at Yale, twelve of them are Jewish.


1917: “The trial of a $50,000 libel suit brought by Maschulem F. Seidman, war correspondent for the Warheit and other Jewish news against The Day, another Jewish publication” which centered around whether or not was in fact part of “German propaganda effort to win the sympathies of Jews in America for the Teuton cause” continued for a second day in New York.


1918: The first issue of Di varhayt (The Truth), the first Yiddish communist paper in the world, was published today. Di varhayt was published in Petrograd, Russia by the People's Commissariat for Jewish Affairs. It was closed down after a brief existence, as the People's Commissariat was shifted to the new capital Moscow and the lack of Yiddish journalists in Petrograd. The paper was later re-started as Der Emes.


1918: A meeting of the Fatherland Union, the Elberfeld German People’s Party resolved “to request that in the future all professors and teachers of German, theatre managers and contributors to the press in all German states be of pure German lineage.”  (Editor’s note:  For all of the Holocaust apologists, please note that the war is still going on, there is no Versailles treaty and Hitler was a corporal in the Kaiser’s Army)


1918: Ukrainian mobs massacred the Jews of Seredino Buda


1918: In Salonica, the government decided to exempt Jewish Ottoman subjects living in Greece from the regulation prohibiting commercial transactions with subjects of enemy states.”


1918: Jews of Gloucher were massacred by Ukrainians.  At this point in Russian history, the empire was in chaos.  The Czar had been deposed.  Kerensky and his Social Democrats were trying to rule the country.  The Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky were plotting to replace the Provisional Government.  In the meantime, the Ukrainians continued their tradition of anti-Semitism and killing Jews whenever they had the chance.


1918: The Government of Greece decides to exempt Jewish Ottoman subjects living in Greece from regulations prohibiting commercial transactions with subjects of enemy states.


1918: “As a result of steps taken by pro-Jewish labor leaders, the ban against using Jewish employees in the factories” was lifted in Bobruisk.


1919: Representative Julius Kahn, Republican congressman from California expressed his opposition to Zionism. He said “that the Zionist Congress which was recently held in Philadelphia had asserted that it represented 150,000 out of approximately 3,000,000 American Jews. These figures would seem to indicate that the so-called Zionist number only a small minority” of American Jewry. “The reason I am opposed to a Jewish state is that experience has shown that the Jew becomes a good patriotic citizen of any country giving him full citizenship and civil and religious liberty….I am afraid that many avowed Zionists are also internationalists.  I am not.  I believe that we in America should stand for this country and its institutions against all the world.  In fact, I believe that as nationalist we make of our religion a secondary matter.  Our country comes first.  Our Judaism is simply our religious faith.”   


1920: Faisal I bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi who fought with Lawrence of Arabia and who signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann that was blueprint for cooperation between Arabs and Jews began his short lived reign as Faisal I, King of Syria.


1920: During a series of Arab protest demonstrations “led to several Arab attacks on Jewish passers-by and shop owners.  The British authorities were alarmed at the violent tone of the Arab protests, in which calls to kill the Jews were heard alongside the popular slogan ‘Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs.’”


1921: In Paris, Marguerite and Paul Rosenberg, “a key figure in the Parisian art world in the first half of the century” gave birth to “Alexandre P. Rosenberg, founding president of the Art Dealers Association of America and for many years a prominent art dealer in New York.” (As reported by John Russell)


1921:Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1st Marquees of Reading, completed his service as Lord Chief Justice of England.


1924: Ninety-two year old Hannah Mathilde von Rothschild, the daughter and wife of members of the famous members of this banking dynasty who was unique in her musical activities which included studying with Chopin, writing songs for popular vocalist of the day and publishing “a volume of 30 melodies” passed away today.



1926: “Denies Break in Jews’ Life” published today included a denial by Rabbi Nathan Krass of Temple Emanu-El “that the blank page in the” Christian “Bible separating the Old and New Testaments was meant to mark a barren period in the history of Israel.”


1926: In Philadelphia, PA, “prominent basketball referee and baseball umpire Harry Rudolph” and his wife gave birth to Marvin “Mendy” Rudolph who was an NBA referee for 22 years from 1953 to 1957




1927: Birthdate of Dick Hyman, composer and conductor.


1927: Birthdate of Joel Kaufman who played forward and center for New York University before choosing to play professional with the American Basketball League after having been drafted by the Warriors of the NBA.


1928: Bantamweight Herman “Kid” Silvers (born Herman Silverberg) was defeated in his 32 bout.


1929: “Fräulein Else” the movie version of a novella by Arthur Schnitzler and directed by Paul Czinnner was released in Germany today.


1929: Financier Paul Warburg warned that the wild speculation gripping the stock market could lead to disaster. [Bernard Baruch was another Jewish financier who expressed the same concern.]


1932: Judge Pound, “another ‘liberal’” is scheduled to succeed “Benjamin N. Cardozo as chief judge of New York’s State Court of Appeals.”


1935: U.S. premiere of “Roberta” produced by Pandro S. Bermon with music by Jerome Kern and conducted by Max Steiner.


1936(14thof Adar, 5696): Purim


1936: “A festival of Purim play was given” this “afternoon at Temple Emanu-El on 5thAvenue.


1936: At Temple Ansche Chesed, “Rabbi Joseph Zeitlin said Purim offered consolation to all oppressed people” because “it teaches us that force will inevitable fail” and that “the more a people is persecuted for devotion to ideals the more attached and loyal they become.”


1936: “At Temple B’nai Jershurun, Rabbi Israel Goldstein reviewed historical instances of persecution” saying that “the problem that confronted the Jews of Persia and Rome now confront the Jews of the twentieth century” who must “yield to the forces and lose their identity” or “resist those forces” and risk isolation.


1936: In the Bronx, “Dr. Jacob Katz rabbi of the Montefiore Congregation said the celebration of PUrimes was not to commemorate the defeat of the Persians, but to revive the spirit of endurance, patience and fortitude of the Jews ‘until the time comes when neither nations nor creeds shall ask conquest but shall rely for their survival and progress on the true human value and divine inspiration.’”


1936: “Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, preaching at the Institutional Synagogue, said anti-Semitism arose not only from the desire to abolish Judaism but also from political and economic jealousies.”


1936: “Three hundred chapters throughout the” United States are scheduled to “merge the celebration…with founders’ day programs” today on a “date that marks the 24thanniversary of the organization which was established by Miss Henriette Szold in 1912.”


1936: Dr. Chaim Weizmann is scheduled to arrive today in London where he will engage in “a series of consultations on the increasingly serious position of Jewish communities’ including Germany, Poland – where “anti-Semitism on the Nazi model” is growing and Rumania as well as actions being taken by the British government in Palestine which are inimical to Jewish interests and violate the Balfour Declaration.


1936: “Rabbi Joseph Rosen, an authority on Talmudic law…known to Jews as the Rogachever Gaon (sage of Rogachev, Russia)…was eulogized at services” in Vienna today where were attended by “a great number of his co-religionists.”


1936: The three winners of the Einstein Medals which are presented by the Jewish Forum “for distinguished services in the fields of peace, literature and philanthropy” tonight were awarded to “Mrs. Estelle M. Sternberger, executive director of World Peace ‘for outstanding service to the cause of world peace and goodwill; author Franz Werfel for distinction as a novelist and playwright and James G. McDonald, former high commissioner for German refugees for his services to the humanitarian cause.”


1937: Helmut Hirsch, a Jewish architectural student originally from Stuttgart was sentenced to death today for his role in the attempted murder of Julius Streicher.


1937: The New York Times reported on acts of human kindness and brotherhood during the ongoing wave of terrorism in Palestine.  “During recent disturbances a Jewish chauffeur took the son of an Arab who was killed to a hospital and an Arab driver rescued on the Jews hurt by stone-throwing.”


1938: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America observed the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dr. Joseph H. Hertz as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire in a broadcast from Radio Station WHN. Dr. Hertz was the first graduate of the seminary.


1938: “The Girl of the Golden West” a musical based on a play by David Belasco and directed and produced by Robert Z. Leonard was released in the United States today.


1939: “The British Government decided today to suspend all formal and informal meetings with the Jewish and Arab delegates to the Palestine Conference and to proceed with the formulation of its own plan, which will be submitted to both sides early next week. (As reported by Robert P. Post)


1939: Sixty-three year old Isaïe Schwartz, the Grand Rabbi of Strasbourg who during the World War had served as a stretcher bearer and as a chaplain at the American Army based at Bordeaux, was elected Grand Rabbi France, “replacing Israel Levy who had retired on account of his health.”


1941: In a prelude to her famous diary, Esther "Etty" Hillesum wrote a letter addressed to Julius Spier in an exercise book. These would provide a picture of life in Amsterdam under Nazi occupation.


1943(1stof Adar, 5703): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1943: Greek Jews of Salonika were transported to Nazi extermination camps.


1943: The Sokolovo Czech battalion battled the Germans for three days. Of the 1,000 Czech soldiers, 600 are Jews.


1944: In the Warsaw Ghetto 37 Jews are given away in their hiding places.  Emanuel Ringelblum, noted historian and author of a detailed chronicle of the plight of the Warsaw Jews is one of the group that is captured.  Ringelblum was tortured for three days during which he revealed nothing about his fellow Jews in hiding. A few days later Ringelblum aged 43, his wife, and 13 year old son Uri were executed. (Some sites show this as having happened on March 7.  The fog of war and change of time zones can play havoc with precision dating sometimes)


1944: In France, "in the morning there is a knock on the door at the apartment of Hélène Berr's family." Her parents Raymond and Antoinette will die later that year in Auschwitz.  Helene will survive until 1945 when she will die at Bergen Belsen where she was beaten to death five days before the camp was liberated by the British.


1945(23rd of Adar, 5705): Katherine Garfield the only daughter of actor John Garfield and Roberta Seiman who had been born in 1938 passed away today after contracting a case of strep throat while on a USO tour with her father.


1945: The Big Red One, whose members included Samuel Fuller captured Bonn today.


1947: The Committee organizing the second International Music Festival to be held in Prague has invited Leonard Bernstein to conduct the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra when it performs in May of this year.


1947: After having been sighted by RAF plane the refugee-filled SS Ben Hecht also called the Abril was intercepted by British ships- HMS Chieftain, HMS Chevron and HMS Chivalrous and HMS St. Bride’s Bay off the coast of Palestine and were boarded by two waves of British soldiers wearing red berets which earned them the sobriquet “red devils”


1947: Dr. Ludwig Fischer was executed for his role in the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto


1947: Jewish terrorists defy British Martial law by launching a series of attacks in Tel Aviv tonight that injure 17 people, including 15 Jews, one British constable and one Arab constable.


1948: Birthdate of Yaakov Zvi, the London native we know as Jonathan Henry Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and one of the most influential Jewish leaders of his time.


1948: “It was learned tonight after the first meeting of the Great Powers” that “the Soviet Union is pressing for a prompt decision on steps to carry out the partition of Palestine while the United Sttes still hopes that a settlement satisfactory to both Jews and Arabs can be worked out.” (As reported by Thomas J. Hamilton)


1948: Milton Sperling and Betty Warner gave birth to their third child, Cass Warner.


1948:The U.S.Supreme Court ruled that religious instruction in public schools was unconstitutional.


1949: During Operation Uvda, as the defending Jordanian forces withdrew, the Golani forces took Ein Ghamr.


1949: During the day the IDF moved towards Umm Rashrash through the Valley of the Fingers which in the evening the Alexandroni Brigade set sail from Sodom on the Dead Sea with the intent of seizing Ein Gedi.


1949: Following elections, David Ben-Gurion formed the first government of Israel.  In what would prove to be the curse of the Israeli political system, it was a coalition government led by Mapai but including two other smaller parties.  Ben-Gurion served both as Prime Minister and Defense Minister. Future Prime Minister Golda Meir served as the Minister of Labor and Social Security.


1949: "In a Knesset session in Tel Aviv...Eliahu Eliashar, a parliamentary representative of the Sephardi Jews, spoke on behalf of the Jews from Muslim lands."


1950(19th of Adar, 5710): Sixty-seven year old Hans Müller-Einigen, the son of Dr. Josef Müller and Johanna Müller, who is best “known for his screenplay for ‘The White Horse’” passed away today in Germany.


1950: An overflow crowd of one thousand mourners filled New York’s Park West Memorial Chapel and spilled out into the street at the funeral services for Daniel Frisch, the president of the Zionist Organization of America.  Rabbi Bernard Bergman officiated at the service and he was assisted by Cantor Robert Segal.  Numerous tributes were paid to Frisch for his support of Jewish causes and Zionism by several famous dignitaries include Eliahu Elath, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Louis Lips, chairman of the American Zionist council and Dr. Nahum Goldmann, chairman of the American section of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.  Following the service, Mr. Frisch’s body will be taken to Indianapolis for burial.


1950: Judge Morris Rothenberg, National Chairman of the United Palestine Appeal, issued a report today that funds raised by American Jews “had made possible” the establishment” of 3,000 small businesses for the rehabilitation and resettlement of invalid immigrants in Israel at a cost of five million dollars.”


1951: The International Table Tennis Federation banned Egypt for refusing to play Israel.  You have to give some points to the ping pong players.  They were one of the few international organizations that has not knuckled under to the Arabs and their supporters.


1951: In London, the original West End production of “Kiss Me, Kate” a musical with the book by Samuel and Bella Spewack opened today.


1951: Release date for “Royal Wedding” the Alan Jay Lerner musical comedy directed by Stanley Donen.


1951: Release date for “Lemon Drop Kid,” a comedy directed by Sidney Lanfield, featuring Sid Melton as “Little Louie” and Ben Welden as “Singing Solly.”


1952: Birthdate of former U.S. Senator George Allen.  According to Jewish law, Allen is Jewish since his mother was Jewish. This information surfaced during Allen’s campaign for re-election in 2006. He did not find out that his mother was Jewish until sometime after he became an adult.  His mother had lived in Tunisiaduring World War II and seen her father hauled off by the authorities.  She did not want her children to know about their Jewish heritage because she saw being Jewish as threat to their physical well-being.  If it could happen in Tunisia, she reasoned, it could happen again, even in the United States,


1955(14th of Adar, 5715): Purim


1957:  Egypt reopened the Suez Canal to minor shipping after the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula. This was the last chapter in the Suez Crisis of 1956.  Unfortunately the United Nations did not honor its guarantees to Israel and the result was the Six Days War of 1967


1957(5th of Adar II, 5717):A shepherd from kibbutz Beit Guvrin was killed by terrorists in a field near the kibbutz.


1959: “Too Many Crooks” a comedy co-starring Bernard Bresslaw and music by Stanley Black (Solomon Schwartz) was released in the United Kingdom today.


1959: George Lincoln Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party


1961(20th of Adar, 5721): Seventy-three year old Artur Carlos de Barros Basto (Abraham Israel Ben-Rosh)  the Portuguese army office the crypto-Jew who affirmed his Judaism through conversion, helped hundreds escape the Shoah and worked to rebuild the Jewish community on the Iberian peninsula passed away today




1961:  Birthdate of actress Camryn Manheim.  She has appeared in such movies as “Bonfire of the Vanities” and television programs as “The Practice.”  In 1999 she published her autobiography entitled Wake Up, I'm Fat!


1963: A five-man syndicate led by Sonny Werblin bought the New York Titans which they would rebrand as the New York Jets, the first AFL team to win the Superbowl. (As reported by Bob Wechsler)


1965:The Knesset passed the “Broadcasting Authority Law” which is the basis for the Israeli Broadcasting Authority’s operations. The Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was formed as an independent corporation responsible for all broadcasts in Israel and to the Diaspora. Until 1965, Kol Israel operated under the Office of the Prime Minister.


1969:During “The War of Attrition” a massive artillery barrage marked the start of the Egyptian campaign to destroy the Bar Lev Line.  The plan was under the direct supervision of General Abdul Munim Riad, the chief of Staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces.


1970: “Thirty-nine Soviet Jews from different cities protested against the” U.S.S.R’s’ “continuing anti-Israel and anti-Zionist Campaign.”


1970: Attorney Robert Shapiro, part of the O.J. Simpson “dream team” and a co-founder of LegalZoom married Linell Thomas today.


1971: Birthdate of David Aaron Greenberg, the native of New Haven, CT whose poetry was inspired by a meeting with Allen Ginsberg.


1971: William Davidon, a Jewish physics professor at Haverford College led “a group of anti-war activists” who “broke into a small FBI satellite office in the town of Media,” Pennsylvania.



1971: Dorothy Fields was inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame. She was the only woman in the first class of inductees. Two of her songs that are still played today are"I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby" and "On the Sunny Side of the Street."The song "The Way You Look Tonight" an Academy Award for "Best Song" in 1936.


1973: CBS broadcast the “Marcus-Nelson Murders” with a script by Abby Mann in what would prove to be the pilot for the police drama “Kojak” created by Mann.


1974: “Henry Kissinger warned Congress of a presidential veto if the trade bill” was linked to the issue of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union.


1977: “Cross of Iron” a WW II move set on the Eastern Front with music by Ernest Gold was released in the UK today.


1977: First International Women’s Day as proclaimed by the United Nations.


1985(15thof Adar, 5745): Shushan Purim


1985:Two hundred and fifty Congressmen addressed a letter to President Reagan requesting the administration to set up talks with the Soviet Union, aimed solely at allowing freer emigration of Soviet Jews, in accordance with the Helsinki Accords.”


1988: Refuseniks meet today with U.S. Senators Sam Nunn, Alan Cranston and Carl Levin all of whom were Democrats.


1989: “Will You Marry Me?” a one act opera by composer Hugo David Weisgall was performed for the first time today by the Opera Ensemble of New York.


1993(15th of Adar, 5753): Uri Magidish was stabbed to death by two Palestinians while working in a hothouse at Gan Or.


1998: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or special interest to Jewish readers including The Picasso Papers by Rosalind Krauss, Mahler by Jonathan Carr and Conversations With Joseph Brodsky: A Poet's Journey Through the Twentieth Century
by Solomon Volkov.


1998(10thof Adar, 5758): Forty-four year old Broadway musical star Laurie Hope Beechman passed away today.



2001(13thof Adar, 5761): Ta’anit Esther; Erev Purim


2001(13thof Adar, 5761): Sixty-seven year old Plymouth, PA native Abraham ‘Abe Cohen who played college football at the University of Tennessee, Chattagnooga before turning pro with the CFL Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the NFL Boston Patriots (the forerunner of the New England Patriots) passed away today.


2004(15thof Adar, 5764): Shushan Purim


2004(15thof Adar, 5674): Ninety-two year old painter Elise Asher, the wife of poet Stanley Kunitz, passed away today.



2006: French born, American-Jewish businessman Roland Arnall begins serving as United States Ambassador to the Netherlands.


2006: Zubin Mehta, conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, is honored as a Dan David Laureate the annual awards ceremony at the Opera Garnier in Paris.  The Dan David Prize annually awards 3 prizes of US$ 1 million each for achievements having an outstanding scientific, technological, cultural or social impact on our world.


2006(8th of Adar, 5766): Sixty-nine year old George Sassoon, the multi-talented son of poet Siegfried Sassoon passed away today.



2007: Haaretzreports the 2006 war in Lebanon triggered a baby boom. According to health maintenance organization statistics show that the number of women now in their fifth, sixth or seventh month of pregnancy was 35 percent higher than the figure a year ago.


2008: A scaled down London revival Jerry Herman’s and Harvey Fierstein’s “La Cage aux Folles” came to a close at the Menier Chocolate Factory


2008: Rosh Chodesh Adar II, 5768, First Day of Adar II


2008: Shabbat Shekalim, 5768


2008: (1 Adar II 5763) Yahrzeit for the passengers killed on Egged Bus #53 five years ago in Tel Aviv:


·         Kmer Abu Khamed, 12, from Daliyat al Karmel


·         Yuval Mendelevitch, 13, from Haifa


·         Smadar Firstatter, 17, from Haifa


·         Avigail Lietel, 14, from Haifa


·         Asaf Tzur, 16, from Haifa


·         Daniel Harush, 16 , from Safed


·         Tom Hershko, 16, from Haifa, and his father-


·         Motti Hershko, 41, from Haifa


·         Tal Kehrmann, 17, from Haifa


·         Elizabeth (Liz) Katzman, 17, from Haifa


·         Meital Katav, 20, from Haifa


·         Moran Shushan, 20, from Haifa


·         Anatoly Biryakov, 20, from Haifa


·         Be'eri Ovad, 21 , from Rosh Pina


·         Eliyahu Laham, 22, from Haifa


·         Miriam Atar, 27, from Haifa


·         Mark Takash, 54, from Haifa


2009: In Chicago final performances of two plays by Lillian Hellman – “The Little Foxes” and “Scoundrel Time.”



2009: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling, The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, The Believers by Zoe Heller and the recently published paperback edition of The Forger by Cioma Schönhaus.



2009: In its on-line edition The Washington Postfeatured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Believers by Zoe Heller and Hunting Eichmann:How a Band of Survivors And a Young Spy Agency Chased Down The World's Most Notorious Nazi by Neal Bascomb.



2009:Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin said today at the weekly cabinet meeting that "Iran has crossed the technological threshold" in its quest for nuclear arms.



2009: In “They Lived in our midst: Area was haven for Nazi-era figures,” published today, Ron Grossman reports on Nazis who moved to Chicago after World War II.http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-chicago-nazis-08-mar08,0,758025,print.story


2009:Israel advanced to the Davis Cup quarterfinals for the first time since 1987 after rallying to beat seven-time champion Sweden 3-2 today in a close series overshadowed by political protests.


2009: In  “Even Among Venerable Texts, a Torah Like No Other,” published today Sophia Hollander described the discovery of an 800 year-old Torah and the unique career of Yitzchok Reisman who is both a rabbi and a sofer.


The weathered brown parchment with its frayed edges and inked Hebrew letters seemed beautiful but unremarkable. Itzhak Winer, a 34-year-old Torah scribe turned Judaica seller, considered the item a nice find, but just one of the 30 or more Torahs he buys and sells in a year. From his Jerusalem dealer, he learned that the Torah had been owned by a family in Morocco and was in excellent condition. “He knew that it’s old, but he didn’t really know — and neither did I — how special it was,” said Mr. Winer, who works out of his home in Willowbrook, Staten Island.  Curious about the item’s origins, Mr. Winer took it to a Lower East Side rabbi named Yitzchok Reisman, an expert in identifying antique Torahs, the scrolls containing the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. Rabbi Reisman, born in 1938 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, found himself drawn as a teenager to the scribes who congregated on the Lower East Side. They shared their craft with him, passing down stories and lore of ancient scrolls. Rabbi Reisman also became attracted to the buying and selling of Torahs. “There were 400 congregations that were declining, closing up and selling off the Torahs and the assets,” he said. As Torahs from the Lower East Side migrated to the suburbs and across the continent, the sellers, he saw, “helped transfer the Torah scrolls on to the rest of America.” Today, Rabbi Reisman restores Torahs using handmade ink and carved turkey feathers at his workshop on Grand Street. Heaps of wooden rollers and antique furniture obscure treasures like the gleaming copper case of a 300-year-old Yemenite Torah and an elaborately woven Torah cover from Iraq. Rabbi Reisman quickly realized that Mr. Winer’s Torah was unique. The materials and calligraphic style identified it as Spanish, which meant that it was written before 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain. In addition, the strong swirls on the top of certain letters matched the style favored in Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical movement.  “There are very, very few manuscripts and pieces of manuscripts that are older than the 1400s,” Rabbi Reisman said on a recent day in his ramshackle office as Mr. Winer looked on. And the kabbalistic flourishes, the rabbi added, make it “the only Spanish Torah known done in that way.”


These special markings are “like thorns that appear in certain letters that only show up in a small window of time,” Rabbi Reisman said. “No!” Mr. Winer interrupted. “A few hundred years.” “That’s a small window,” Rabbi Reisman retorted. As they bickered gently over nearly every detail, the two men also said that their research suggested that the Torah was created between 1272 and 1302, and that it could be connected to a famous Spanish scribe, Shem-Tob ben Abraham ibn Gaon. But they did seem to agree on who should get the Torah. “We’re hoping to get somebody or some community or some organization that wants to preserve the Spanish kabalistic tradition,” Mr. Winer said, “and it’s important to them to give it the


2010:CJH, LBI and YIVO are scheduled to present “Czernowitz in Jewish Memory” during which a panel of historians and writers, including Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, the authors of a new volume entitled Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, will discuss and debate the reconciliation of the two different memories Czernowtiz within the broader history of Jewish emancipation, assimilation and resistance in Eastern Europe. Czernowitz-"Vienna of the East"-is the site of two different powerful memories. To some, it was home to an assimilationist Austro-German Jewish culture; to others, it was a hub for the creation of modern Yiddish language and culture.


2010(22ndof Adar, 5770):  Ninety-two year old microbiologist Benjamin Rubin, “the investor of the bifurcated vaccination needle” passed away today.


2010(22ndof Adar, 5770: David Kimche, reputed Israeli spymaster and diplomat passed away.  A native of London who made Aliyah in 1936 he fought in the War of Independence before attending  the Sorbonne and Hebrew University.



2010: “The Addams Family” a musical comedy with a book co-authored by Marshall Brickman and lyrics by Andrew Lippa with Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia began previews on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre


2010: Ronald Florence is scheduled to discuss Emissary Of The Doomed: Bargaining For Lives In The Holocaust his new book on the fate of Hungary’s Jews during World War II at noon today in the James Madison Building of the Library of Congress.


2010:Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. began a five-day visit to the Middle East today, part of a concerted American effort to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and keep Israel focused on relying on sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program rather than on unilateral military action.


2010: George J. Mitchell, the administration’s Middle East envoy, announced today in Jerusalem that Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to start indirect negotiations and that he would be back next week to continue structuring those talks.


2010:The Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) hosted a ceremony at the Tel Aviv Opera Housed it presented mock awards for what the nonprofit organization has termed the “most sexist advertisements” of the year. The five “winners,” including a mix of television commercials and billboard ads from some of the country’s most well-known local and international manufacturers, show women in either an inappropriate sexual capacity or in a degrading conjugal role, said those judging the contest. Listed as the top five Most Sexist Advertisements for 2009 are ads from Fairy dish liquid, AXE deodorant, Goldstar Beer, the morning-after contraceptive pill by Postinor, and DO IT Kitchen’s print campaign. This is the second year WIZO has run such a campaign. The Fairy ad had been awarded first prize in the competition because it depicted a family situation in which the woman or mother was left to wash up all the dishes alone while her husband and the male relatives watched her.


2010: Today “it was announced that Rob Morrow has signed on to star in Jerry Bruckheimer's new series, The Whole Truth, on ABC


2011:At the Crowden Music Center, in Berkley, CA, violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley is scheduled to perform the “rarely heard works from the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, a turn-of-the-century movement that brought Jewish folk music into European classical form” during the Jewish Music Festival.


2011:The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host a panel discussion entitled “The Rebbe, Charismatic Leadership and the American Spiritual Landscape.”


2011: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Moonwalking With Einstein:The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer


2011:A recent blast of cold air from Scandinavia coupled with warm Mediterranean Sea influence created torrential rain and thunderstorms today. Snow fell in the Hermon and other areas in the north. The morning hours saw between 10-30 mm of rainfall in the country's center, and between 5-15 mm in the North, with the Israeli Meteorological Service reporting up to 32 mm in the Tel Aviv area. Showers are expected to dissipate in the afternoon hours. Authorities closed the Hermon to visitors as snow began to fall.The stormy weather wreaked havoc on motorways as well, causing heavy traffic in the Center and even worse traffic jams in the North. In the Kirya junction in Tel Aviv, a traffic disturbance developed when traffic lights malfunctioned and jammed the roads until a police officer arrived to help direct traffic.


2011:A film festival on women and religion is launching today at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. The two-day event, the sixth of its kind, is organized by the Mavoi Satum organization, which works for the rights of women who have been refused divorces by their husbands. It marks International Women’s Day and the upcoming Yom Ha’aguna, a day devoted to women “chained” to a marriage by recalcitrant husbands. As in past years, the films, accompanied by lectures and discussions, will deal with the complex relationship between women, religion and state. Wednesday’s panel debating whether private rabbinic courts have a place in today’s reality comes in the wake of the growing problem of rabbinic courts’ inaction toward recalcitrant husbands. The head of Mavoi Satum attorney Batya Kahana-Dror will be on the panel. Also participating in that discussion will be MKs Otniel Schneller (Kadima) and Rabbi Haim Amsalem (Shas), and attorney Dr. Aviad Hacohen. Bar-Ilan University’s Rackman Center for the Advancement of Women’s Status is presenting a day at the movies on today, also to mark International Women’s Day.


2011:The Hurva Synagogue, which was officially rededicated a year ago, celebrated a milestone today. For the first time since its destruction by the Jordanian Arab Legion in May 1948, the Ashkenazi synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter hosted a wedding ceremony as an operational house of worship. Avraham Pashnov and Rachel-Orli Journo were married in the Hurva’s courtyard. During the ceremony, Pashnov said he and his wife are “only a tiny chain link that brings together the past and the future.”


2011: In an interviewed published today by the Wall Street Journal, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel was considering asking the United States for an additional $20 billion in aid due to the increased volatility in the Middle East.


2012(14thof Adar, 5772): Purim


2012: Under the leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Ciment, Chabad Lubavitch of Arkansas is scheduled to sponsor the Royal Purim Feast With The Stars in Little Rock, AR.


2012: “Grace Paley: Collected Shorts” is scheduled to be shown at the Farthest North Jewish Film Festival in Fairbanks, Alaska.


2012: Professors Jerome Copulsky and Alison Peterman are scheduled to lead “Scripture and Spinoza,” a backstage discussion following tonight’s performance of “New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch De Spinoza.


2012:A Palestinian stabbed an IDF soldier in the village of Yata in the southern Hebron Hills today. The soldier returned fire, injuring the attacker and killing another Palestinian with him. The two Palestinians that were shot were both teenagers. The soldier was moderately wounded and evacuated to Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital in Jerusalem.


2012: Maj.-Gen. Nitzan Alon was appointed head of the Central Command in place of Maj.-Gen. Avi Mizrahi. Alon, who in the past served as commander of the Judea and Samaria Division will officially take up his post on the first day of next week at a ceremony at Central Command headquarters in Jerusalem. During the ceremony today, Mizrahi said that the position was the most "complicated and difficult" that he had performed throughout his career.


2012: As Israel struggles with how to keep Iran from going nuclear “Six world powers called on Iran today to let international inspectors visit a military site where the UN nuclear watchdog says development work relevant to nuclear weapons may have taken place.”  U.S. Sec. of State Clinton described the sanctions imposed on Iran as the strongest ever and expressed the hope that they would be given time to have their desired impact – keeping Iran from a nuclear weapon without war.


2013:  Soloists and Ensembles of the Jerusalem Conservatory of Music and Dance are scheduled to perform at the Eden-Tamir Music Center.


2013:Eva Erben who as a young girl “ was forced by the Nazis to leave her home in Prague and join one of the transports to the Theresienstadt Ghetto” is scheduled to speak at the Wiener Library on “Escape Story: Surviving the Holocaust as a Young Girl.”
2013: The Maccabeats are scheduled to perform at Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills, CA.


2014: Nir Areli’s, “Inframan” in which he created a series of portraits using an infrared technique is scheduled to have its final showing at the Daniel Cooney Gallery.


2014: In London the Girls in Trouble duo (poet and multi-instrumentalist Alicia Jo Rabins, accompanied by bassist Aaron Hartman) are scheduled to perform songs from their two albums; Girls in Trouble and Half You Half Me.


2014: “Natan” and “When Jews Were Funny” are scheduled to be shown at the Washington Jewish Film Festival.


2014: “The Jewish Cardinal” is scheduled to be shown at the Northern Virginia Jewish Film Festival.


2014: “The Klos-C, which was captured with what the IDF says is a cargo of Iranian arms in its hold” and “its Israeli Navy escort entered the port of Eilat this afternoon after a voyage of three-and-a-half days following Israel’s interception of the ship off the coast of Sudan earlier this week.” (As reported by Ilan Ben Zion)


2014: “A Little String Music” featuring performances of Israeli and klezmer music by Ruth Navarre is scheduled to take place this evening at “LIMMUD” New Orleans.\


2014(6th of Adar II, 5774): Ninety-three year old Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz passed away today.(As reported by Paul Vitello)



2015(17th of Adar, 5775): Fifty-nine year old Sam Simon, the creative of “The Simpsons” passed away today.



2015: The New York Times features reviews of books by and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg.


2015: The Jewish Museum of Florida is scheduled to mark the 30th anniversary of the screening of Shoah by showing Part 3 of the famed documentary.


2015: The Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia is scheduled to host “Have We Overcome?” which will include a screening of a film depicting the famous 1960 Woolworth’s sit-in.


2015: In Iowa City, Rabbi Avremel and Chaya Blesofsky are scheduled to host the Upsherin of their son Berel.


2015: IPTV presents “The Jewish Journey: America.”


2015: “Residents of the Bat Ayin settlement in the Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem accused the IDF and police of “provoking” a violent altercation with local youth today that ended with a soldier firing in the air to ward off the demonstrators” after police entered the settlement “to arrest two residents suspected of ‘nationalist crimes.’”


2015: “A composition from Estonian-born composer Jonas Tarm entitled ‘March to Oblivion’ which was set be performed today at Carnegie Hall was pulled at the last minute because it “contained a 45-second musical quotation from ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ – the Nazi anthem. (As reported by Lazar Berman)


2016: The Jewish Genealogical Society of Broward County is scheduled to host a “presentation from Jewish Records Indexing-Poland” that “will deal with Jewish records and research for two major areas of Poland.”


2016: The Pew Research published “Israel’s Religiously Divided Society” today.



2016: “A Nazi Legacy” is scheduled to be shown at the Houston Jewish Film Festival in Houston, TX.


2016: Dr. Donneil Hartman, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute is scheduled to lead the final lecture of six session series at the Skirball Center that “focuses on the personal and social mores behind the passionate opinions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.


2016: In London, the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism is scheduled to host a lecture by Professor Sander Gilman of University on “Circumcision: An Index of Difference and/or the Health Exception?”


2017: Rabbi Yigal Levinstein “who works together with Rabbi Eli Sadan at the Bnei David pre-army program told sever hundred graduates of another pre-army that IDF service had ‘driven our girls crazy’” because they are recruited into “the army where they enter as Jews but” are not “Jews by the time they leave.”


2017: In Chicago, Dr. Richard A. Chaifetz and E. Scott Santi are scheduled to be honored at tonight’s 2017 Humanitarian Awards Dinner sponsored by the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.


2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host “Pizza and Movie Night”


2017: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host “Streit’s Matzo Mania” - an evening with Streit scion, cookbook author Michele Heilbrun and chef/cookbook author David Kirschner who will provide a crash course on matzo history, complete with clips from a fascinating Streit’s documentary.


2018: “Nora’s Will” is scheduled to be shown at the 21st NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival today.


2018: In honor of International Women’s Day, the National Library of Israel is scheduled to host special “Women’s Day tours” today.


2018: Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host the “Jewniversity Challenge.”


2018: “Itzhak” by Alison Chernick is scheduled to open in New York.


 


 


 


 


 


 

This Day, March 9, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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March 9


590: Bahram Chobin is crowned as King Barham VI of Persia. The newly crowned king enjoyed support among Persian Jews since opposing forces under a general named Mahbad “killed the Jewish followers of the pretender to the throne, Bahram Chobin.”



1230: Bulgarian tsar Ivan Asen II defeats Theodore of Epirus in the Battle of Klokotnitsa. According to information in the Virtual Jewish Library Jacob b. Elijah wrote a letter in which he reported that two Jews were thrown from a mountaintop for refusing to obey the order of the Czar to put out the eyes of the defeated Greek ruler.


1244: The Pope ordered the burning of the Talmud.  Those who hate the Jews understand how critical studying and learning are to our survival.  Hence they have always burned our books and outlawed study.


1276: Augsburg becomes an Imperial Free City in the Holy Roman Empire. The Jewish presence in Augsburg began during the days of the Romans. Existing records show that a Jewish cemetery and synagogue existed by 1276. The Augsburg Municipal Charter of 1276, determining the political and economic status of the Jewish residents, was adopted by several cities in South Germany. “Regulation of the legal status of Augsburg Jewry was complicated by the rivalry between the religious and municipal powers. Both contended with the emperor for jurisdiction over the Jews and enjoyment of the concomitant revenues.”  For more about this ancient Jewish community see


http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/5960/history.html .


1316: “Louis the Bavarian granted the city of Worms the privilege of levying on the Jewish community a yearly tax of 100 pounds heller in addition to the 300 pounds it had thitherto paid.”


1490: In Florence, Berahiel ben Hezekiah Trabot completed “a small machzor” today.


 1496:  The Jews of Carinthia, Austria were expelled (and not readmitted until 1848).


1513: Start of the papacy of Leo X who employed Immanuel ben Jacob “as a physician and translator.


1666: Birthdate of George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne, the English poet, playwright and political leader.  In 1701 Lord Lansdowne produced “a spurious version” the “Merchant of Venice” entitled “The Jew of Venice.”  In Lansdowne’s version the part of “Shylock was degraded to a kind of low comedy.”  The play would not be performed again for 40 years when Macklin would revive it and begin the hundreds of his sensitive portrayals of Shakespeare’s most famous Jewish character.


1739: Birthdate of Boston, MA merchant Moses Michael Hays, the son of Judah and Rebecca Hays.  He was one of the founding members of the famous Touro Synagogue.


1773(14th of Adar, 5533): Purim


1773: On Purim at the Newport synagogue, the future President of Yale University at Ezra Stiles described Rabbi Raphael Chiam Isaac Carregal as being "dressed in a red garment with the usual Phylacteries and habiliments, the white silk Surplice; he wore a high fur cap, had a long beard. He has the appearance of an ingenious and sensible man"


1774: Birthdate of sugar merchant Louis-August Say the brother of Léon Say, who worked on the on the Northern Railway Company which was owned by his friend Alphonse de Rothschild and who had supported Rothschild’s fight to maintain bimetallism while serving as Minister of Finance.


1789: In Coswig, David Salomon Unger, the first Jew to settle in Erfurt with full “civil rights” and his wife gave birth to mathematician Ephraim Salomon Unger.


1792(15th of Adar, 5552): Shushan Purim


1799: Napoleon comes to power as a result of a coup d’etat.


1808: Seligman Löb (Siegmund Leopold) Beyfus married Babette Rothschild


1815: Friedrich von Gentz, the Secretary of the Congress of Vienna “had a conference” today “with Simon Elder von Lamel of Prague, the distinguished Jewish patriot and accepted a commission from him to urge Jewish emancipation” when the Congress met.


1820: The revolutionary military leader and de facto Spanish leader, Riego of Spain issued a decree ending the Inquisition. This decree was apparently not accepted by everybody since people continue to suffer under the Inquisition until 1826. The Spanish Inquisition was actually only brought to an end on July 15, 1834.


1821: In Philadelphia, Aaron Moses Dropsie and Angenette Dropsie gave birth to Moses Aaron Dropsie, the Jewish attorney, scholar and philanthropist best known for bequeathing the funds that created Dropsie College.


1825: In Charleston, SC, Rabbi Peixotto officiated at the wedding of Noah J. Ellis and Esther Levin.


 
1828: At Posen, Rabbi Levi Aron Pinner and Wilhelmine Goldbarth Pinner gave birth to Moritz Pinner who moving to the United States became active in the anti-Slavery movement and the creation of the Republican Party.



1836: Charles Millingen married Sarah Barnet at the Hambro Synagogue.


1839: In Bingen, German, Louis Loeb and his wife gave birth to Adolph Loeb and husband of Lucille Hart who lived in Memphis before moving to Chicago in 1873 where he served as a director and/or agent for several insurance companies while serving as a President of Sinai Congregation and the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith.


1843: Bavarian born Judah Abraham and Sara Sussman whom he married en route to the United States in 1837, gave birth to Abraham Abraham “the founder of Brooklyn department store Abraham and Straus.


1846: Birthdate of Emil Gabriel Warbug a leading German Jewish physicist was part of the famous Warbug Family


1849: “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” an opera with a libretto by Hermann Salomon Mosenthal was performed for the first time in Berlin


1849: Today, just “a few weeks before his death” Hananeel de Castro “secured the repeal of the herem that had been promulgated against the Reform synagogue in London in 1841.


1851(5th of Adar II, 5611): Eighty one year old Ruben Samuel Gumperz an advocate of Jewish emancipation passed away today in Berlin.


1852: The New York Times reported that “France has addressed three demands to the government of Switzerland” one of which concerned the treatment of the Jews of Basle Champagne.


1853: Ellis Harfield married Catherine Marks today at the Great Synagogue


1855: “Response to the Call for a Rabbinical Conference” published today.

1860(15th of Adar, 5620: Shushan Purim


1860(15th of Adar, 5620): David Romm, who became head of the family printing business in Wilna after the death of his father Joseph Reuben Romm, passed away today “while on his way to St. Petersburg.”


1862: During the Civil War, the Union ironclad “Monitor” whose crew included William Durst, arrived at Hampton Roads and engaged the CSS Virginia (the Merrimack) in what would be the revolutionary battle where for the first time the clash was between two ironclads. 


1864: President Lincoln appointed General Grant to command all of the armies of the United States while General William Tecumseh Sherman succeeded Grant as commander of the Union forces in the west.


1865(11th of Adar, 5625): Ta’anit Eshter is observed for the last time during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.


1868(15th of Adar, 5628): Shushan Purim.


1868: The annual Purim Ball was held tonight at Pike’s Opera House in New York City. The ball marked the end of city’s “season of Carnival.”


1869: Joseph Aron married Maria Samuel today in Paris.


1870: Birthdate of Sol Bloom, the native of Pekin, Illinois, who went from “entertainment impresario and sheet music publisher in Chicago to a legislative powerhouse while serving in the House of Representatives from two different New York congressional districts  for more than two decades.


1872: A reporter for The New York Times visited Temple Emanu El in this morning where he “at once noticed the extraordinary resemblance” that this Jewish house of worship had “to the Christian cathedral form.”


1876(13th of Adar, 5636): Fast of Esther.


1877: Birthdate of Russian born American businessman and musical impresario Max Rabinoff who also attended the Versailles Peace Conference.

1879(14th of Adar, 5639): Purim


1879: It was reported today that there of the 849,870 people living in Australia’s Victoria Colony, 4,237 are Jews.


1879: Thomas Grady is scheduled to speak at meeting of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association tonight where he will defend his proposal to abolish the Free College.


1880: Birthdate of Bernard “Barney” Samuel a leader of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania who served as May of Philadelphia from 1941 to 1952.  He passed away two years later.


 
1881: Birthdate of English labor leader and politician Ernest Bevin. Bevin was Foreign Minister in the Labor Government after World War II. He helped to enforce the White Paper and hewed to a pro-Arab line.  In responding to request for consideration for Jews after the Holocaust, Bevin
commented that Jews were always trying to push to the head of the line. Bevin died in 1951 at the age of 70.



1883: Thirty year old historian Arnold Toynbee, the uncle of historian Arnold J. Toynbee who despairingly referred to “the Jewish people as a “fossil of Syriac civilization” passed away today.


1884(12th of Adar, 5644): Moses Wilhelm Shapira “shot himself in the Hotel Bloemendaal in Rotterdam. Born in the Russian Empire in 1830 he followed his father to Palestine in 1856. He converted to Christianity and began a career selling artifacts.  Unfortunately, many of these were reported to be fakes. According to some reports he took his own life as the result of his involvement in the forging of supposedly biblical texts.

1885(22nd of Adar, 5645): Seventy-one year old Breslau born merchant who after his retirement “prepared a large Hebrew commentary on the Targum Onḳelos, which was published posthumously by his son-in-law Joseph Perles” passed away today.


1889(6th of Adar II, 5649): Fifty six year old Giacomo Alatri, the Italian banker whose warnings about the impending bankruptcy of Banca Romana and helped raise funds to support kindergartens for poor Jewish children passed away today, two months before his father Samuel Altari passed away.


1890: Several “Sabbath Schools of Jewish congregations” in New York City hosted special Purim celebrations. One congregation hosted a Purim Operetta performed by the female faculty for the benefit of the young children.


1890: In Paramaribo, Suriname, Salomon David Levy Hartogh and Rachel Fernandes gave birth to Daniel Joseph Hartogh the husband of Estelle Celine Abrahams.


1890: Almost 2,000 people attended the Purim celebration hosted by the Temple Beth El Sabbath School which was held at the Lexington Avenue Opera House.


1890: It was reported today that the money raised by the Hebrew Benevolent Society’s charity ball at Long Island City will go “to the erection of a house of worship, a school for children, the purchase of a burial plot” and for a fund to provide relief for widows and orphans.


1890: Rabbi Kohut recounted the Purim story to 350 children, their parents and friends at Temple Ahawath Chesed at 55thand Lexington Avenue.


1890: It was announced today that Dr. Charles Elliot who has been teaching Hebrew at Lafayette College for the past four years will not be teaching after this year.


1891: Today during the strike by Polish cloakmakers “ a group of Polish Jews” broke into the tenement occupied by two cloak contractors – Hermann Greenbaum and Sam Billet – where they were reportedly having non-union workers make cloaks and broke up the work stations.


1891: Benjamin Fernstein, a seventy year old clothing cutter who died yesterday while riding the Second Avenue El was the victim of a heart attack according to his family.


1891:Birthdate of Georg “George” Froeschel,  “the son of banker in Vienna” and lawyer turned author who came to the United States where he wrote several successful screenplays the most famous of which was the all-time classic “Mrs. Miniver.”


1892: Following the death of two more Jewish immigrants and two more Irish immigrants, it was reported that there have been 14 deaths since the outbreak of typhus with 70 known or suspected cases quarantined on North Brother Island.


1892: Mason Hirsh, a senior member of the umbrella manufacturing firm of Hirsh Brothers located in Philadelphia was knocked down by a car in front of 435 Broadway in New York City today.


1892(10th of Adar, 5652): The four year old “minor son” of Isaac and Esther Jacob passed away today after which he was interred in the Jewish Cemetery at Natchitoches, LA.


1892: A. J. Rosenthal, a Jewish banker from Fayette County served as Chairman of the Credentials Committee when the Republican State Convention opened today in Austin, Texas.


1892: The New York State Senate passed the “so-called Freedom of Worship bill” this afternoon


1892: Birthdate of Mátyás Rosenfeld, the Hungarian communist leader who repudiated Judaism and changed his name to Mátyás Rákosi as he climbed the ladder of “party success.”


 
1893: A charity ball sponsored by the Purim Association will take place tonight at Madison Square Garden with the United Hebrew Charities serving as the beneficiaries of the event where the admission ticket costs $10 per attendee regardless of their sex.



1893: “Gift to the Aguilar Library published today described an anonymous gift given to this non-sectarian institution founded by several prominent Jews that is “open to any resident of New York over twelve years of age.  (In a day of “tablets” and “i-pads” it is hard to envision what the availability of this trove of free books meant to generations of immigrants and their families)


1893: Today, Lord Lyon Playfair explained to the House of Lords that “Messrs. Burnett and Schloss” had been sent to the United States “as part of a general inquiry in the subject of pauper alients to the United Kingdom” especially as it pertained to Russian and Polish Jews.


1895: On New York’s City Lower East Side, “Hannah Pepper, an Austrian native who had emigrated to the United States via Russia” and her husband gave birth to Bertha "Beatrice" Alexander Behrman who gained fame as dollmaker “Madame Alexander.”

1895: Fifty-nine year old Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch “who faithfully described the manners of Polish Jews but feared that his affection for them might give the impression that he was” Jewish passed away today. He was the author Jews and Russians and the editor of At the Pinnacle, “a progressive magazine” that championed “tolerance and integration for the Jews of Saxony.”


1895: Birthdate of Albert Günther Göring, the older brother of Hermann Göring, who worked to save Jews while his brothers was killing them.

1895: Purim will be celebrated this evening with an invitation only fancy-dress reception at Delmonico’ sponsored by the Purim Association.


1896: Judge Julian Mack married Jessie Fox.


1897: Maurico Jacobs and his family are scheduled to set sail from New York to Panama today aboard the SS Allianca thanks to funds provided by the United Hebrew Charities.  Jacobs is a native of Peru who owned a sugar plantation in Cuba with his brother.  He claims that they were forced to leave the island after his brother was killed and the plantation was seized.


1898(15th of Adar, 5658): Shushan Purim


1898(15th of Adar, 5658): Seventy-seven year old  “a Warsaw-born Polish composer and pianist, promoter of Chopin, son of Gabriel Bereksohn, grandson of Berek and Temerl Bergson,  great-grandson of Samuel Zbytkower,” husband of Katherine Levison and father of “influential French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson and Moina Mathers, wife of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers” passed away today in London.


1898: Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein has obtained a lease Olympia which was arranged by Andrew Freeman.


1898: It was reported today that the name of Esterhazy, one of the French officers responsible for the false imprisonment of Captain Dreyfus, was added to the name of villains who were booed during the reading of the Megillah during Purim Services.


1899: “Peters Praises The Jews” published today provides a summary of Reverend Madison C. Peters lecture on “Justice to the Jew” – a unique highly positive view of the Jewish people.


1900: Herzl had another meeting with Austrian Prime Minister Ernest von Koerber. The subscribers the Colonial Bank were permitted to complete their payments and receive their shares.


1900(8th of Adar II): Sixty-three year old Hebrew poet and Yiddish author Isaac Rabinowitz (Ish Kovno) passed away


1902: Birthdate of Paterson, NJ, native Judah Harry Barth, the Hackensack lawyer and leader of the YMHA.
1902: Composer Gustav Mahler married Alma Schindler in Vienna.


1902: Louis and Clara Asia Parnes gave birth to Rose Parnes who became Rose Parnes Petchesky when she married Joseph Petchesky in 1932


1902: Birthdate of Elisabeth Pelletier de Chambure, the member of a wealthy Catholic aristocratic family who became Élisabeth de Rothschild when she married famed vintner Baron Philippe de Rothschild.


1902: Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines founded the Mizrachi Movement.


1904: Birthdate of Gerald Ernest Heal Abraham, the native of the Isle of Wright who forsook a career in the Royal Navy to become one of Britain’s leading musicologists.


1906: The Wadsworth District Sunday bill (H.R 16483) which would make it effectively to operate a grocery store on Sunday in the District of Columbia – a bill that be at odds with the needs of Jewish businessman – was introduced in the House of Representatives.


1906: In Russia, “founding of the Jewish Socialist Workers Party” an offshoot of the Paole Zion that followed the teachings of Chaim Zhitlowsky.  


1908: It was reported today that in Camden, NJ, “because of the excellent work she has done in behalf of the Jewish Ladies’ Aid Society, Mrs. Jacob Silver has been presented with a gold medal.”


1908: In Camden, NJ, “tonight Jacob Wietzman” is scheduled to “give a reception and dinner to his fellow members of the Seventh Ward Republican Club.


1911: After having been baptized as Roman Catholic in 1905 and having “taken” his doctorate in laws in 1906, Hans Kelsen took “his habilitation today.”


1912(20th of Adar, 5672): Shabbat Parah


1912(20th of Adar, 5672): Fifty-seven year old Hiram Ullman, the Pennsylvania businessman who served on the Williamsport Common Council passed away today.


1913: The Independent Anshe Bessarabia Talmud Torah was founded in Philadelphia, Pa.


1913: The funeral for Pauline Phillips, wife of Herman Phillips and the mother of Arthur Phillips is scheduled to take place today followed by interment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.


1913: In Bangor, Maine, founding of Beth Israel Synagogue.


1916: Birthdate of Hyman H. “Bookie” Bookbinder a Washington lobbyist for Jewish causes who spent many years working for a variety of liberal causes including civil rights and the rights of labor.

1916: Kitty Kelly of the Chicago Tribune staff is among those scheduled to address the meeting this afternoon of The Deborah and Deborah at their meeting in the Sinai Social Center on Chicago’s south side.


1917(15th of Adar, 5677): Shushan Purim


1917: The Jewish Publication Society announced “that it has published the first edition of the news translation of the Bible, the first volume of The History of the Jews in Russia and Poland by Simon Dubnow and that it will be holding its annual meeting later this month at Dropsie College in Philadelphia, PA.


1917: Dr. M.H. Harris is scheduled to lead services today, Shabbat, at Temple Israel of Harlem.


1917: Dr. Enlow is scheduled to deliver a sermon on Apostasy and Judaism” this morning at Temple Emanu-El.


1917: Dr. Samuel Schulman is scheduled to deliver the Sabbath morning sermon at Temple Beth-El.


1918:Ukrainian mobs massacre Jews of Seredino Buda


1918: The Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs made public the suggestions by the British Palestine Committee, “a non-Jewish organization” which spoke approvingly of the creation of a Hebrew university in Jerusalem which was being built “while military operations were still in progress.”


1918: In Bloomington, Illinois, vaudevillians Claire and George Rockwell gave birth to George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party.


1919: In Manhattan, “Israel Edwin Goldwasser and the former Edith Goldstein,” gave birth to physicist Edwin Leo “Ned” Goldwassser

1919: Jacob H. Schiff told 3,500 members of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America meeting in Carnegie Hall tonight he hoped “that the portals of America would never be entirely closed to the Jews” but he also “declared that the one aim of all Jews at the present time should be the restoration of Palestine.


1920: The tombstone for Emanuel Jacobs of Covent Garden is scheduled to be consecrated at Jersey today.


1921: Winston and Clementine Churchill arrive in Cairo in preparation for a conference to examine the workings of the mandates for Palestine and Iraq.


1922: Twenty-two year old Alexander Neufeld, the native of Budapest who in 1918 played his first game as a member of the Hungarian national team which defeated Switzerland today led his team Hakoah Vienna’s soccer team to victory. (As reported by Bob Wechsler)


 
1922: Winston Churchill delivered a speech in Parliament support the Balfour Declaration against its opponents.  He reiterated support for the establishment of the Jewish Homeland in Palestine while cautioning against letting Jews who were Bolsheviks settle in Palestine.



1922: The Shearith Israel League of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York City is scheduled to present a performance of “The Mikado” today in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Plaza.


1923: In Vienna, “Salomon Kohn, who ran a business selling artistic postcards, and the former Gittel Rappaport, whom her son described in an autobiographical sketch for the Nobel committee as “a highly educated woman with a good knowledge of German, Latin, Polish and French and some acquaintance with Greek, Hebrew and English” gave birth to Walter Kohn winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1998.

1924(2nd of Adar II, 5684): Abraham Caraco, who was named rabbi of the Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel after 39 Turkish elders of the Sephardi community formed the Sephardic Community of Los Angeles ("La Communidad") in 1920 passed away today.


1926: William Fox, the Chairman of the $6,000,000 United Jewish Campaign of New York announced the appointment “”Albert Goldman , Commissioner of Plant and Structures of New York City, as Chairman of the Bronx Division of the drive, which is part of the $15,000,000 ‘Overseas Chest of the United Jewish Campaign.”


1927: In London, Dr. Alex Tudor Hart and Dr. Alison Macbeth gave birth to Dr. Julian Tudor Hart the husband of British photographer and Soviet sympathizer Edith Suschitzky the daughter of Viennese Jewish social democrat Wilhelm Shuschitzky.


1927: Birthdate of Erfut, Germany native Leo Alexander Inselsbacher who gained famed as Hebrew musician Aryeh “Arik” Lavie,

1928: In Vienna, Franzi Grossman and her husband, a chief bank accountant gave birth to Lore Groszmann, who gained fame as Lore Segal, the author of Shakespeare’s Kitchen, one of the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.


1928: New York State Supreme Court Justice Alfred Frankenthal was injured this morning when the taxicab in which he was riding skidded out of control and hit an elevated pillar. Israel Mora was the cab driver.


1928: In Manhattan, Maxwell Walzer, a furrier and the former Ruth Rosenthal, gave birth to Peggy Sandelle Walzer gave birth to Peggy Charren who gained fame as an advocate for improved children television programming. (As reported by Bruce Weber)

1929(27th of Adar I, 5689): Shabbat Shekalim


1929(27th of Adar I, 5689): Thirty-four “English composer, arranger, music teach and pupil of Gustav Holst passed Jane Joseph away today.

1929: The Zionist Organization of America announced plans for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the founding of Tel Aviv.  The planned activities include a Jewish ‘world Congress for Propagation of Interest in Palestine Products and a Palestine and Newar East Exhibition and Fair.


1931: Dr. Victor Rosewater, the former editor and publisher of The Omaha Bee and a leader of the Jewish community and Republican Party in Nebraska spoke at the school of politics of the Women’s National Republican Club.  He told the gathering that “the influence of the press in forming political opinion is no longer as directed as it once was…”


1932: The new turbines at the hydroelectric project created by Pinhas Rutenberg began to turn today.


1932: “Night Over Taos” a three-act play “staged by Lee Strasberg with a cast that included Luther Adler, Stella Adler, J. Edward Bromberg, Morris Carnovsky, Sanford Meisner and Clifford Odets opened at the 48th Street Theatre today.


1933: The first of thousands of “critics” of The Third Reich were sent to Dachau.


1933: Henry Thomas Rainey who in 1906 attended a mass meeting held to protest the “atrocities in Russia” and told the audience that the Romanoffs “are inflaming the populace against the helpless Jews – and already the blood of 100,000 Jews cries out for vengeance” began servings today as 40th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.


1934: “Coming Out Party” a comedy produced by Jesse L. Lasky and a script co-authored by Jesse L. Lasky, Jr. was released in the United States today.


1935: “New German Plea” published today described Dr. Julius Lippert’s call for American businessman to put an end to the Jewish Boycott of German goods.


1936: The cover of Time magazine features the beaten, bandaged visage of Leon Blum who had been beaten Royalist (right wing) youths.

1936: “Abominable Triumph” published today as the cover story for Time described the causes of the life threatening beating given to Leon Blum by those who oppose him because he is a socialist, anti-fascist and Jewish. (The road from Drancy to Auschwitz began on the streets and chambers of Paris in the 1930’s)

 1936 :( 15th of Adar, 5696): Shushan Purim


1936 Birthdate of Martin Ingerman who gained fame as comic actor Marty Ingles. (A comedian born on Purim – talk about bashert)

1936(15th of Adar, 5696): “Two Jews were killed and four seriously injured today in rioting in the town of Prystytyk in the District of Radom, Poland while “scores” more “were beaten or wounded  and 700 Jewish families were thrown into panic.”


1936: “A government statement issued by the official news service” at Berlin which says “Jews do not enjoy the privilege of voting – that is to say, such persons as are descendants of at least three fully Jewish grandparents. Furthermore, persons are not privileged to vote who are descendants of two fully Jewish grandparents and who were members of Jewish religious bodies… or who joined a Jewish religious body after September 30, 1935 or who married a Jew after that date.”


1936: Birthdate of Juda Bar-Norwegian, Dutch born Israeli actor.


1936: The Przytyk, Pogrom, the worst of a series of pogroms that took place in Poland during the interwar decades, claimed the lives of three people.


1937: The American Labor Delegation to Palestine, whose members include Max Zaristk, Josephy Schossberg, Isidore Nagel, Samuel Perlmutter, Reuben Guskin, Jacob Breslaw and Jacob Blum is scheduled to deliver their report at the Hippodrome today.


1938: The Chancellor of Austria, Schuschnigg, announces a plebiscite on the question of Austrian independence. His policy was to try and keep Austria semi-independent and to limit the more overt anti-Semitic activities. Hitler furiously demanded his resignation, which arrived two days later. His resignation opened the way to the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Germany on March 13


1938: The Palestine Post reported that Arab terrorists sniped at various quarters of Jewish Jerusalem. The Sanhedria Quarter came under a direct Arab fire from Lifta.


1939: In what might be seen as double-header for the Jews, today President Roosevelt “discussed tax legislation with Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau” and received “a report on the progress made in arranging for emigration of Jews from Germany” presented by George Rublee, the director of the Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees.  


1941: Esther "Etty" Hillesum began writing in her diary which would provide a description of life Amsterdam under the Nazis.


1941: After 8 months in office Petain and his Vichy Government adopted an ordinance requiring Jews to get “authorization to sell or rent property.”


1942: The Jews of the small Polish community of Mielec were driven out of their homes and rounded up in the marketplace; the old and feeble were shot on the equivalent of a death march. The survivors waited in a hangar in the aircraft factory without food or water and were herded into cattle cars a few days later.


1943: U.S. Army Colonel F.B. Yancy, Chief of the Special Services spoke at the opening club designed for the use of U.S. military personnel. The club is housed in former Tel Aviv luxury hotel.


1943: Today Rokhl Auerbakh, one of the few surviving members of Emanuel Ringelblum’s “Oyneg Shabes group” “escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and began working as Polish secretary which enabled her to continue her work of recording the fate of the Jews of Warsaw.


1943: The Nazis continued the transport of Greek Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz. Salonika was an ancient Jewish community.  It became a haven for Sephardic Jews when they fled Spain at the end of the fifteenth century.  It was renowned center for kabalistic studies.  In 1943, Elie Veissi, a journalist, formed an all Jewish resistance group at Salonika.  Veissi supplied valuable information to the British about Nazi activities in Greece.  But he and his group failed in their main mission - saving the Jews of Salonika.  A few thousand escaped to Athens, but most of the rest perished in the camps. Some of you know about the Jews of Salonika because of their unique music. Some of it was captured in a recording called Kol Salonika.  You may have heard their haunting melody for verses five and six of the 118th Psalm – Min hameitzar karati Ya, anani vemerchav, Out of my distress I called upon the Lord and He set me free.  .  The other famous song is entitled Kol Ha-Olam Kulo - "The entire world is a narrow bridge; the main thing is not to fear." (I realize this has been a little lengthy, but one of the lessons of Jewish History is that Holocaust Memorial Day should be plural, not singular, event.)


1943: In a rare case of open police resistance to the arrest and murder of Jews of Europe during WWII, 12 Dutch military policemen including 23 year old Henk Drogt refused orders to round up the remaining local Jews in Grootegast, Holland. The policemen were pressured and threatened by their commanders with incarceration at a concentration camp themselves, but steadfastly refused to carry out the orders. The group was subsequently arrested and taken to the Vught concentration camp in the Southern Netherlands.  Drogt would evade capture until his arrest in August of 1943.  He was executed in April of 1944.  In 2010, he received the State of Israel's highest honor for non-Jews on Monday at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.


1943: An audience of 40,000 gathered in New York’s Madison Square Garden to watch “We Will Never Die”  “a dramatic pageant” designed “to raise public awareness of the ongoing mass murder of Europe's Jews. It was organized and written by screenwriter and author Ben Hecht and produced by Billy Rose and Ernst Lubitsch. The musical score was composed by Kurt Weill and staged by Moss Hart. The pageant starred Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni and subsequently traveled to other cities nationwide.”


1944(14thof Adar, 5704): Purim


1947: In Tunis, Hnuna and Shimon gave birth to Yedhuda Galili who made Aliyah in 1956 and died aboard the Dakar, a submarine lost with all hands on board in 1968.


1947: The first unauthorized immigrant ship known to have been sent to Palestine by the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation was taken into government custody today. The ship which was known variously as the SS Ben Hecht and/or the SS Abril was filled with 599 Jewish refugees including 385 men, 194 women and 20 children.  All of the refugees were placed on two ferries by the British and sent immediately to displaced persons camps in Cyprus. 


1947: According to Jack Bernstein, who served as a Seaman aboard the SS Abril (Ben Hecht) “at 05:33 A.M. the HMS Octavia came along side, secured a line and towed the Ben Hecht to Haifa” where “the British took the American crew members to Akko Prison” and shipped the “passengers  to Detention Camp Number 66.”


1947: “Troops fired over the heads of a number of Jews in the marital-law area of Jerusalem” because officials said they were “’too slow in returning to their homes when the daily curfew was re-imposed at 5 P.M.’”


1947: British policed reported that 25 “suspected terrorists” have been arrested in Tel Aviv in the last 24 hours.


1948: In Los Angeles, Henry and Phoebe Ephron gave birth author to Hallie Ephron, the sister of Nora, Amy and Delia Ephron.

1948: Jacob Joseph Kohn, the American-born clothing salesman” is still being held by the Paris police having been charged with complicity in the illegal collection of arms seized recently in Paris that were “allegedly collected for use by the Jews in Palestine.”  (Editor’s Note – this is an example of the double standard of the time. The arms embargo was enforced against the Jews but the Arabs, because they were part of nation states had unlimited access to modern military equipment.)


1948: Birthdate of American artist Eric Fischl.

1949: During Operation Uvda, one unit from Alexandroni Brigade captured Ein Gedi while another unit captured Masada.


1949: During Operation Uvda,“Golani forces captured Gharandal and proceeded to Ein Ghadyan (now Yotvata).”


1949: During the War for Independence, two IDF units set off to take Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba.


1950: A special meeting of the board of directors at the Astor Hotel is held to announce the formation of the Amun-Israeli House Corporation that “will finance $20,000,000 worth of housing construction” in Israel.  The lack of adequate housing is one of the Jewish state’s most pressing problems and this effort which enjoys support from a diverse group that includes Nelson Rockefeller and the leaders of the I.L.G.W.U. represents a major effort to provide both immediate and long term relief.


1950:  It was officially announced tonight that Turkey “has accorded full diplomatic recognition” to the state of Israel.


1950: The Swedish government issued a report today accusing the Israeli police of demonstrating grave negligence in investigating the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte which had taken place in September of 1948.


1950: AT&T announced today that it has created a new direct circuit between New York and Tel Aviv which will improve phone service between the major cities.  Calls can only be made between 7 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon at a cost of $12 for the first three minutes.


1951: Birthdate of Michael Kinsley, journalist and founder of Slate.


1951: The Pan American Games, during which Byron “Krieger won gold medals in team foil and team sabre and the team silver in épée” came to an end today in Buenos Aires.”



1951: Almost thirty thousand Iraqi Jews had signed up for immigration for Israel as of today.  Today was the deadline the Iraqi government had set for this registration.  Registration meant giving up their Iraqi citizenship which meant that as of this date these people were "stateless."


1952: Birthdate of Amir Petertz, the native of Morocco whose family made Aliyah in 1956. A Labor Party MK, he has served as Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that in Moscow following the death of Stalin,Georgi Malenkov, 51, was appointed the head of the Soviet Union while Molotov, Beria, Bulganin and Kaganovitch had been named as his deputies. Israel was one of the few countries which were not invited to Stalin’s funeral.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel had been divided into six administrative districts: three urban: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, and three rural: the Northern, Central and South.


1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that fifteen marauders were killed and 11 captured during the past week.


1954: CBS television broadcasts the See It Now episode, "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy," that featured Ed Murrow at his finest. Fred Friendly, a Jewish television producer born in New York, joined forces with Murrow to produce all of the See It Now episodes. CBS was owned by William Paley who was also Jewish.  Their ethnic origins had nothing to do with this choice of programming.  In fact, Paley, like so many other Jews in the print and electronic media, bent over backwards to avoid any connection between being Jewish and the product they offered.


1956: In Finland, premiere of “The Rose Tatoo” directed by Daniel Mann, produced by Hal B. Wallis with a script co-authored by Hal Kanter.


1959: Barbie, the popular girls' doll, debuted, Over 800 million have been sold marking another Jewish business success brought to us, in this case, by Ruth Mosko Handler.

1959: “Juno, a musical with music and lyrics by Marc Blitzstein and book by Joseph Stein” “premiered on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre” today.


1959: In New York City, “Edie L. (Greene), a merchandise manager, and Murray A. Price, a car leasing company owner” gave birth to theatric actor, writer and director Lonny Price.


1960(10th of Adar, 5720): Forty-seven year old Richard L. Neuberger, the junior Senator from Oregon passed away unexpectedly today as the result of a cerebral hemorrhage.

1962: “Knife in the Water” a film nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film directed by Roman Polanski who co-authored the script along with Jakub Goldberg was released in Poland team.


1962: Egyptian President Nasser declared that Gaza belonged to Palestinians. Of course Gaza was occupied by Egypt from 1948 until 1967.  No attempt was made to turn the government over to the Palestinians at the time of this declaration.  In fact, the Palestinians were trapped in Gaza without meaningful economic assistance from their Arab brethren.


 
1963: The 1963 NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament which would provide a showcase for the talents of Duke’s Art Heyman opened today.



1963: Allan Sherman’s “My Son The Celebrity” reached #1 on Billboard’s Top 150 Best Sell LP’s Chart.


1968: Today, while serving with the U.S. Army in Viet Nam Jack S. Jacobs performed so heroically that earned the Medal of Honor for Valor. “Although seriously wounded and bleeding profusely, he assumed command and ordered a withdrawal. He then repeatedly returned through heavy fire, to rescue other wounded including the company commander and treated their wounds. On three occasions he repelled Viet Cong squads who were also searching for wounded American soldiers in the same area, killing three and wounding several others.”


1968: CBS broadcast the final episode of “Good Morning, World” a sitcom created by Sam Denoff, Carl Reiner and Sheldon and co-starring Goldie Hawn.


1968: Birthdate of Adam Carl Adamowicz, “concept artist whose paintings of exotic landscapes, monsters and elaborately costumed heroes and villains formed the visual foundation for two of the most popular single-player role-playing video games of all time” – Fallout3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. (As reported by Daniel E. Slotnik)


1969: The chief of staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces was killed today during the War of Attrition. Today marked the second day of Egypt’s attempt to destroy the Bar Lev using massive artillery bombardments.  While General Abdul Munim Riad was at the front to personally viewing the product of his handiwork, he was mortally wounded by Israeli artillery that had been fired in response to the Egyptian assault.


1970: A meeting of over 100 investors interested in financing tourist development projects in Israel will meet today in Jerusalem today.  The government will unveil its plans to provide support for these efforts.


1971: “When Eight Bells Toll” the film version of the novel of the same name produced by Elliot Kastner and Jerry Gershwin was released in the United Kingdom.


1972(23rd of Adar, 5732): Fifty year old Israeli diplomat and former intelligence officer Yaakov Herzog, the son of Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog and the brother of Chaim Herzog who was trained as a rabbi and a lawyer passed away today.

1977: About a dozen armed Hanafi Muslims invaded three buildings in Washington D.C., killing one person and taking more than 130 hostages. The siege ended two days later. The three buildings were the District Building (city hall), the Islamic Center and, surprise, surprise the national headquarters of B’nai B’rith. And you thought terrorism like this only started with Osama and company.


1978:The Jerusalem Post reported that the US refused to consider any new sale of arms to Israel, despite Defense Minister Ezer Weizmann’s pressing requests, until the conclusion of the current Carter-Begin summit meetings and negotiations.


1978:The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel has started the commercial exploitation of oil from the Alma II and III wells, situated near a-Tur in the Gulf of Suez.


1982(14th of Adar, 5742): Purim


1982: Pola Nirenska, a Polish-born dancer and choreographer who first came to the United States with Mary Wigman's company from Germany in 1932, presented ''An Evening of Choreography'' to night in George Washington University's Marvin Theater.


1984(5th of Adar II, 5744): Seventy-two year old movie producer Hannah Weinstein passed away today.

1984: “Splash” a romantic comedy produced by Brian Grazer, with a script by Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel and Bruce Jay Friedman with a cast that included Eugene Levy and Howie Morris was released in the United States today.


1985: As part of its pre-Broadway run the curtain came down on a month long performance of Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues” at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco which was its last stop before opening in New York


1989: “The Heidi Chronicles” by Wendy Wasserstein opened on Broadway today.


1990: “Coup de Ville” a “comedy-drama” directed by Joe Roth and co-starring Alan Arkin was released in the United States today.


1992(4th of Adar II, 5752): Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin died in Tel Aviv at age 78. Regardless of your view of his politics, Begin was one of the central characters in the Zionist movement whom we will study in depth. Begin was the heir to Jabotinsky and the founder of what today is the Likud Party.  In other words, he was the leader of the Jewish opposition to the Labor Zionists personified by Ben Gurion.  Begin was the founder and leader of the Irgun.  He was the first right wing Prime Minister of Israel.  Most important of all, he negotiated the peace treaty with Sadat that ended the state of war that had existed with Egypt since 1948.

1994(26th of Adar, 5754):  Lawrence E. Spivak, creator of Meet the Press passed away at the age of 93.  On radio and then on television, Meet the Press was billed as the live press conference of the air.  With Spivak sometimes serving as the moderator and sometimes as a member of the four person panel, American and foreign government officials took part in a thirty minute unrehearsed question and answer session.  While the programs were marked by an air of civility, the members of the print and electronic media asked real questions and the guests were expected to provide real answers.


1996(18th of Adar, 5756): Comedian George Burns passed away at the age 100.

1996(18th of Adar, 5756): Fifty-one year old Imar Ambrose of Romania succumbed to the wounds he had suffered during the Jaffa Road bus bombing on March 3rd.


1997:The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Blood and Water:Sabotaging Hitler's Bombby Dan Kurzman, Southernmost And Other Storiesby Michael Brodsky and The Stories of David Bergelson:Yiddish Short Fiction From Russiaby David Bergelson.


1999(21stof Adar, 5759): Hermann Merkin, the native of Leipzig who fled Nazi German and in 1940 arrived in the United States where, in turn, he served in the Army, founded the investment firm of Merkin and Company and became a philanthropist whose good works including the founding of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue.

2001(14th of Adar, 5761): Purim observed for the first time under President George W. Bush


2002(25thof Adar, 5762): Shabbat HaChodesh


2002(25thof Adar, 5762):Limor Ben-Shoham, 27, of Jerusalem; Nir Rahamim Borochov, 22, of Givat Ze'ev; Danit Dagan, 25, of Tel Aviv; Livnat Dvash, 28, of Jerusalem; Tali Eliyahu, 26, of Jerusalem;Uri Felix, 25, of Givat Ze'ev; Dan Imani, 23, of Jerusalem; Natanel Kochavi, 31, of Kiryat Ata; Baruch Lerner-Naor, 28, of Eli;Orit Ozarov, 28, of Jerusalem and Avraham Haim Rahamim, 29, of Jerusalem were murdered by an Arab terrorist and 54 more people were murdered  at the Café Moment in Jerusalem “about 100 meters from the home of the Prime Minister.


2003: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of interest to Jewish readers including Regions of the Great Heresay: Bruno Schulz: A Biographical Portrait by Jerzy Ficowski, Down and Out in the Magic by Cory Doctorow and the recently released paperback edition of Me Times Three, by Alex Witchel.


2006:There was a palpable air of excitement at the Kraft Family Stadium, as two-time Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady of the New England Patriots made a special visit to see what American Football in Israel was all about. Fans of all ages surrounded Brady as he signed autographs and threw passes to some of the AFI athletes.


Commenting on Brady's visit, AFI President Steve Leibowitz said, "It is an honor to have one of the best players in Super Bowl history visiting Israel. It is truly commendable that such a sports superstar would take the time out of his busy schedule to show his support for the people of Israel."


2006: “After the Wedding” a Danish movie nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film directed by Susanne Bier who co-authored the script was released in the United Kingdom today.


2007: As the college basketball world is seized with “March Madness,” The Jewish Weekfeatures an article styled “Carolina on his Mind” in which “Lennie Rosenbluth looks back a half century later on the historic victory that put the UNC Tar Heels on the basketball map.” Rosenbluth led UNC to a perfect 32-0 season including Carolina’s first NCAA championship.  Along the way, Rosenbluth averaged 27.9 points and 8.6 rebounds per game during the regular season and defeated a team led by the legendary Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain. This is further evidence of the pervasive impact that Jews have had on many facets of American culture.


2007: Robert Alan “Bob” Levinson “was taken hostage” today “when visiting Iran’s Kish Island


2007: John Zorn’s Masada Quartet is scheduled to perform on of its last concert at Lincoln Center.


2008: Novelist and former Roman Catholic priest James Carroll discusses his 2001 book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.


2008: The Sunday New York Times featured reviews of Beaufort, a novel by Israeli author Ron Lehsem, translated by Evan Fallenberg, The Life of the Skiesby Jonathan Rosen and a collection of  four short works of fiction by French novelist and Holocaust victim by by Irène Némirovsky including David Golder, The Ball, Snow In Autumn and The Courilof Affair.


2008: In “A Family Tree of Literary Fakers,” published today Motoko Rich traces famous literary frauds including Clifford Irving’s “biography of Howard Hughes,” Binjamin Wilkomirski’s 1996 phony memoir, Fragments describing how he survived as a Latvian Jewish orphan in a Nazi concentration camp and Misha Defonseca’s book, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years about a childhood spent running from the Nazis and searching for her deported parents; a childhood that did not happen.


2008: The Washington Post book section featured a review of Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America by Steven Waldman.  Founding Faith takes up two central questions about religion in early America. First, what did such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison usually believe? And second, how did it come about that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"? The answers to these questions carry implications for Jewish Americans since the role of religion and religious freedom has allowed the American Jewish community to think of itself as a unique element that will transcend past Jewish experiences in other societies and countries.


2008(2 Adar II, 5768):Twenty-year-old Sergeant Liran Banay, who was critically wounded last Thursday when a bomb was detonated near an IDF vehicle patrolling the Gaza security fence, died of his wounds on Sunday morning. The Givati Brigade soldier, who lost both legs as a result of Thursday’s explosion, died in Soroka Hospital in Ashkelon.


2009: WebYeshiva started the WebYeshiva Blog today. “The WebYeshiva Blog presents a variety of posts daily in audio, video, and text format, and features regular columns such as the weekly Parsha, Haftora, Nach, Business Ethics, Aggada, and Jewish Philosophy. Both WebYeshiva students and teachers also make regular contributions, and WebYeshiva's Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Chaim Brovender, posts a video Halacha Yomit every day.” “WebYeshiva, founded in 2007 by Rabbi Chaim Brovender, was the first online yeshiva and midrasha.


2009 (13 Adar 5769): Fast of Esther


2009: In the evening, Megillah Reading


2009: Economist Nouriel Roubini, the Turkish born son of Iranian Jews who spent part of his youth living in Israel and who was the “man who predicted the current financial crisis said the US recession could drag on for years without drastic action…Roubini sees ‘no hope for the recession ending in 2009 and will more than likely last into 2010.’”


2009:Police arrested two Arab youths carrying a commando blade in the Pisgat Ze'ev neighborhood of Jerusalem today foiling a stabbing attack. During a preliminary investigation, the pair said they had planned on carrying out a terror attack.


2009: In an article entitled “Bad Guy Inspires Goodies,’ published in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, columnist Cecilia Hanley provides a brief account about Purim, the history of Hamantaschen and a recipe for a pastry that she likened to the Kolache, a pastry popular with the Czech population that settled Cedar Rapids and is still a unique local delicacy.


2009: In “The Perfect Hamantaschen” published today Deborah Gardner attempts to settle the dispute between those who prefer prune and those who munch on “mun.”

2010: The winners of the National Jewish Book Award are scheduled to be honored today in New York City. The names of the winners had been made public in January. Toronto author Joseph Kertes won the 59th annual National Jewish Book Award for Fiction for his novel, "Gratitude." Other National Jewish Book Award winners include Hasia Diner, author of "We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962" (New York University Press), the American Jewish Studies' Celebrate 350 Award; Melvin Urofsky, the Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award for "Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (Pantheon Books); Daniel Gordis, for "Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End" (John Wiley & Sons), the Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice Award. Ellen Frankel and Avi Katz of the Jewish Publication Society won the Louis Posner Memorial Award in Illustrated Children’s Books for the JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible. Sir Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of England, won the Dorot Foundation Award in memory of Joy Ungerleider Mayerson in Modern Jewish Thought & Experience for his "Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, Genesis: The Beginnings" (Koren Publishers).


2010: David Nemeth is scheduled to be the instructor at this evening’s session of How to Give A D’var Torah at Adas Israel in Washington, D.C.


2011: Alan Joseph Shatter, Irish political leader, began serving as Minister for Justice and Equality


2011(3rd of Adar II, 5771): Seventy-two year old “Owen Laster, one of the most powerful literary agents of his generation, who ran William Morris’s worldwide literary operations and had a long list of best-selling writers that included James A. Michener and Gore Vidal”, passed away today (As reported by William Grimes)



2011: Calvin Goldscheider (Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies, Brown University), Max Ticktin (Professor of Judaic Studies, George Washington University), Susan K. Finston (CEO and Managing Director, Amrita Therapeutics Ltd.), Steve Rabinowitz (future emeritus president and CEO of Rabinowitz-something Communications), and a special mystery guest speaker are scheduled to appear at Washington DC's 20th Annual Latke-Hamantash Symposium at Adas Israel.


2011: The Lillian & Albert Small Jewish Museum is scheduled to host “From Shtetl to City: Travel in the Old Jewish Heartland” featuring author Ruth Ellen Gruber.


2011:As Jerusalem prepared for the possibility of a snowstorm, Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat asked the public “to be responsible” “during an inspection of the city’s emergency snow plans at the Givat Shaul maintenance center.


2011: Today the Knesset approved the initial reading of a bill which proposes an end to allowing companies to discriminate against customers based on where they live, a law which could potentially benefit West bank cities and residents. "


2011: UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks was honored by Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba today for his exceptional work as “a widely published theologian and philosopher, whose aspirations for truth and mutual respect of all peoples guide his actions.”


2011: According to an article entitled “50 Famous Travel Spots Every Literary Geek Should See” published today by the website “Online Courses must see spots include the following four spots of special interest to followers of Jewish history.


  1. The Secret Annex: Amsterdam has converted The Secret Annex into the Anne Frank Museum, preserving the memory of lives lost and destroyed when Nazis discovered their hiding place.


2.     Auschwitz-Birkenau: Holocaust literature frequently relates horrific tales of the Auschwitz concentration camp, most notably Night and Maus, and today it stands as a somber reminder of humanity’s capacity for senseless cruelty. Buchenwald also appears in many memoirs as well.


3.     Algonquin Hotel: This lush Midtown Manhattan locale used to host the Algonquin Round Table, consisting of New York’s finest wits. Their meetings resulted in a plethora of fictitious and non-fictitious works alike, most famously the bulk of Dorothy Parker’s oeuvre. Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild, the daughter of German-Jew who was not related to the famous banking house.


4.     Dublin, Ireland: Visit the Irish capital on June 16th for Bloomsday, a festival honoring James Joyce’s modernist magnum opus Ulysses. Readings and walks bring the brick of a novel to life, allowing celebrants to follow in the footsteps of iconic protagonist Leopold Bloom. Although fictious, Bloom may be Ireland’s most famous Jews.


2011(3rd of Adar II): Anniversary of the dedication of the Second Temple which took placed on the 3rdof Adar, 3412 (349 BCE)


2011(3rd of Adar II, 5771): Seventy-two year old Owen Laster, a literary agent for William Morris passed away.

 
2012: In Washington, DC,  at Tifereth Israel,  Artist in Residence Alison Westermann is scheduled to kick off a weekend of “Translating Text Into Song” with a Carlebach Kabbalat Shabbat Service.



 2012: “Footnote” – the Oscar nominated tale of a rivalry between two Talmudic scholars who are father and son – is scheduled to pen Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema.


2012: Two senior terrorists were killed in Gaza today after IDF aircraft targeted a vehicle in the Strip, the army confirmed.


2012: More than 30 rockets were fired from Gaza into southern Israel tonight, leaving at least eight people injured, one of them seriously.


2013: “No Place On Earth” is scheduled to have its Minnesota Premiere this evening at the Minneapolis Jewish Film Festival.


2013: AMIT is scheduled to host “A Night of Israeli Cinema” at Tribeca Cinemas.


2013: The Eden-Tamir Music is scheduled to host a concert “Loving Brahms” today in Jerusalem.


2014: In Coralville, Iowa, Agudas Achim is scheduled to host its annual Purim Carnival under the leadership of Rabbi Jeff Portman.


2014: “The Sturgeon Queens,” a documentary about Russ & Daughters is scheduled to be shown in Boulder, CO.


2014: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host “The Whole Megillah: A Family Purim Program featuring a Puppet Show and Art Project”


2014: The Washington DC JCC is scheduled to host the 4th Annual Community Day of Education on Israeli Arab Issues.


2014: The JCC of Northern Virginia is scheduled to host a Pre-Purim Pajama Party.


2014: The 24th annual Washington Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end.


2014: David Brooks is scheduled to lecture on “Genius, God and Morality” at the 92ndStreet Y.


2014: The third bi-annual LimmudFest New Orleans is scheduled to come to an end.


2014: The New York Times published reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Genesis: Truman, American Jews and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict by John Judis and The Double Life of Paul De Man by Evelyn Barish


2014: In “Eulogy for a Source” published today, Helen Epstein remembers Jiri Fiedler, who along with his wife was murdered at the end of January.

2014: In Eilat, this morning, Israeli troops unloaded some 150 containers, suspected of holding illicit Iranian arms, from a ship seized several days earlier in the Red Sea


2014:Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews filled the streets in lower Manhattan today to protest Israel’s proposal to draft strictly religious citizens into its army.


2015: The Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia is scheduled to host a field trip to The National Museum of American Jewish History which is featuring a an exhibited “that examines the role that Jews have played in the American Military from 1654 to present.”


2015: The 92nd Street Y is scheduled to host an evening with the Meitar Ensemble which was “founded in 2004 in Tel Aviv by artistic director Amit Dolberg.


2015: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host a screening of “Above and Beyond,” “the first major feature length-documentary about the foreign airman” who served in the War of Independence in 1948 produced by Nancy Spielberg.


2015: “A state attorney announced today that the Israel Prize for Literary Scholarship will not be awarded this year, after a month-long controversy over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intervention in the composition of the judges’ panel.” (As reported by Tamar Pileggi)


2016: Today, Mitchell “Schwartz signed a 5-year, $33 million contract with the Kansas City Chiefs, making him one of the highest-paid right tackles in the NFL.”


2016: Steven Gimbel, a Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College and author Einstein: The Man is scheduled to speak at Stevens Tech in Hoboken, NJ.


2016(29th of Adar I, 5776): Eighty six year old investment mogul John Gutfreund passed away today.

2016: “Everything Is Illuminated” a favorite of festival chairman John Dreyfus is scheduled to be shown at the Houston Jewish Film Festival.


2016: Today, “Dos Equis Beer announced that it would replace Jonathan Goldsmith in the role as the "Most Interesting Man in the World",


2016: “The Midnight Orchestra” is scheduled to be shown at the Charlotte, NC Jewish Film Festival.


2017(11th of Adar, 5777): Ta’anit Esther


2017: Michael D. Cohen, the son of a Holocaust survivor the lawyer and confidant of Donald Trump who personally paid off “porn start Stormy Daniels” registered as a Republican today.

2017:  The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to co-host an evening with Tuvia Temebom” the author of The Lies They Tell Us who will talk about “What American Really Think About Jews And Israel.”


2018: “Israeli dance master Roy Assaf’s ‘Girls and Boys’” is scheduled to pend for a month-long run at the Suzanne Dellal Centre in Tel Aviv today. (As reported by Stacey Menchel Kussell)


2018: Rabbi Eli Glaser is scheduled to run “the Jerusalem Marathon in memory of, and motivated by Rafael Shachar Weissberg” who succumbed to “a debilitating neurological illness” last year at the age of 37.


2018: In New York, the Sephardic Jewish Film Festival is “dark” this evening because of Shabbat but is scheduled to continue on March 10.


2018: In New York, the Landmark Theatre is scheduled to host a screening of “Itzhak,” a film that “explores Perlman’s remarkable biography as an immigrant of humble origins and a childhood victim of polio who went from young violin prodigy (debuting at 13 on “The Ed Sullivan Show”) to established international star, balancing a demanding performance schedule with a robust family life.”


2018: “The Diary of Anne Frank,” featuring Serena Collins as “Margot Frank” is scheduled to premiere at Theatre Cedar Rapids in Cedar Rapids, IA.


 


 


 


 

This Day, March 10, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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March 10


515 BCE (Adar 5): According to Ezra VI, 15, in the sixth year of the reign of Darius, the Second Temple was completed today. (15 And this house was finished on the third day of the month Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king.)


0037: Roman Emperor Tiberius passed away at age 78.  He followed Augustus to the throne and reigned from 14 through 37.  His record in dealing with the Jews was a mixed one.  On the one hand he over-ruled anti-Jewish edicts of Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea.  At the same, he temporarily expelled all of the Jews from Rome when a Jew was falsely accused of defrauding a Roman matron.


0298:The Roman Emperor Maximian concluded his campaign in North Africa against the Berbers, and made a triumphal entry into Carthage.The city of Carthage appears repeatedly throughout Roman history.  According to some historians, when Carthage fell to the Romans after the Punic Wars, “many Carthaginians and Phoenicians converted to Judaism, because Jerusalem was the only remaining centre of West Semitic civilization.” They attribute the original Jewish settlements in Spain to the fact that Spain had been a Carthaginian colony and that these settlers were part of a group of these converts.  The Berbers would also figure in Jewish history. In the 7th century, they would convert to Islam.  In the 8th century, the Berbers were a major part of the Muslim force that drove the Christians out of Spain and created a comparatively hospitable for the Jewish people.


0418: Jews were excluded from holding public office in the Roman Empire


1126: Following the death of his mother Alfonso VII, the monarch who started a school in Toledo which begins to spread Hebrew and Arabic learning as well as ancient Greek knowledge through Western Europe was crowned King of Leon and Castille.


1452:  Birthdate of Ferdinand II the Catholic, King of Aragon/Sicily who expelled the Jews from his realm.


1616: Vincent Fettmilch was hanged.  Fettmilch lived at Frankfort on the Main (Germany).  During a period of economic downturn (1612-1616), the ruling class blamed the problems on the Jews.  They allowed anti-Semitic demagogues to attack the Jews.  Fettmilch was the ring leader of the action that resulted in the destruction of the Jewish property in the ghetto.  Jews fled for their lives.  Without the Jews to blame, the powers that be feared the mobs would turn on them.  So they hanged Fettmilch as a way of re-establishing law and order.


1743: Today, Nathan Ley and David Franks of Philadelphia are listed as two of the owners of the Philadelphia built schooner Drake two years before they “appear…as the owners of the sloop Sea Flower built in Connecticut” and five years before they appear as the owner of Myrtilla.


1754(16thof Adar, 5514): Shushan Purim


1771: In New York, Uriah Hendricks and his first wife Eva Esther Henricks gave birth to Harmon Hendricks


1791(4th of Adar II): Rabbi Aryeh Leib Sarah, a disciple of Rabbi Dov Baer passed away.


1802: Victor Abraham married Rebecca Levy at the Great Synagogue today.


1822(17thof Adar, 5582): The mother of Moses Sofer, Reizel the daughter of Elchanan passed away.


1823: In Prague, Abraham and Judith Eidlitz gave birth to New York architect whose commissions included the former Temple Emanu-El sanctuary built in New York between1866 and 1868 and which was destroyed in 1927


1831: The French Foreign Legion was established by King Louis-Philippe to support his war in Algeria. A large number of Jews who fled Eastern Europe during the 1930’s found “a home” in the French Foreign Legion.  For more about the Legion and the Jewish people see Jews and the French Foreign Legion by Zosa Szajkowski


1845: Birthdate of Czar Alexander III. Alexander III was the second to the last of the Romanov Czars.  In a line of rulers who made life hell on earth for the Jewish people, Alexander stands out as one of the worst, if not the worst of the lot. His policies were intended to give meaning to the one third, one third, one third rule. One third of the Jews would leave Russia, one third would convert. One third would perish.


1845: The Jewish Reform movement in Germany was publicly announced


1845: In Kovno, Rabbi Aaron Silberstein and Zibhya Sander gave birth to Rabbi Solomon (Sholem) Joseph Silberstein, the grandson of Kabbalist Naphtali and the author of numerous works including General Law of Nature and The Jewish Problem and Theology in General.


1847: Birthdate of “French deputy jurist Camille Sée, the native of Colmar, Alsace, who was the nephew of French physician Germain Sée and founder of “the École normale supérieure in Sèvres in 1881.


1855(20thof Adar, 5615): Parashat Ki Tisa and Shabbat Parah


1855(20thof Adar, 5615): Sixty-six year old Carol Mayer von Rothschild the Frankfurt am Main born son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and Gulte Schnapper and husband of Adelheid Herz with whom he had four children who was “the founder of the Rothschild banking family of Naples” passed away today.


1856: The News of the World reported that in Constantinople a Turkish woman who could not locate her child for several hours started to scream after local Greeks told her Jews had dragged her child by force into the house to drain its blood for use on Passover. A crowd gathered and started to smash the windows of the home, and was only held back by the French soldiers. The child later was found by the mother.


1857(14thof Adar, 5617): Purim


1859: In Budapest, Jeanette and Jacob Herzl gave birth to Pauline Herzl, the sister of Theodor Herzl


1860: Mortiz Pinner, the German-Jewish immigrant abolitionist who was a publishing a newspaper in Kansas City served as a delegate at the Republican State Convention in Missouri.  Pinner would be chosen as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago where Abraham Lincoln was nominated as President of the United States.


1861: Birthdate of Meier Dizengoff.  A native of Bessarabia, he would make Aliyah in 1905, help found Tel Aviv in 1909 and then became its first mayor.


1862: During the Civil War, William Durst was on board the U.S.S. Monitor as it held its position waiting in vain for the CSS Virginia to return to the fray – a failure to engage which meant the Union blockade of the Confederacy, a key to Union victory would hold and grow.


1863: Guests at today’s wedding Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) and Alexandra of Denmark heard a wedding march composed by Sir Julius Benedict the son of a German Jewish banker.


1864: During the American Civil War, beginning of the Red River Campaign which would claim the life of Colonel Newbold of the Fourteenth Iowa.


1866 (23 Adar 5626): Yitzchak Meir Alter passed away. Born in 1798, he is the first Rebbe of the Ger Chasidic dynasty. Some of his followers referred to him as Reb Itche Meir as the Chidushei HaRim.  


1867: Birthdate of Lillian Wald. Born into a successful merchant family in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised in Rochester, New York, Lillian Wald is remembered today as the founder of public health nursing and an influential pioneer in the settlement house movement of the early twentieth century.




1868: An article entitled “The Purim Ball” published today reported that last night’s Purim Ball was so lavish that it was a fitting way to end New York’s gala winter social season. “The truly brilliant affair” reinforced the reputation of the Purim Society for providing a ball that “was unique in character” and “meriting the praise” that it has continued to receive. The ball not only is the epitome of refinement, it raises money for the disadvantaged – Jew and non-Jew alike.


1868(16thof Adar, 5628):Naphtali Hirsch Katzenellenbogen, theson of Simḥah Katzenellenbogen, “who was the editor of the baraita of thirty-two middot” and who delivered a funeral oration in memory of Saul Katzenellenbogen, passed away today.


1869: Abraham Belasco married Maria Davis at Bevis Marks Synagogue.


1870: Birthdate of Odessa native David Borisovich Goldendakh, “the son of Jewish father and a Russian mother who gained fame Marxist revolutionary David Riazanov.



1870(7th of Adar, II 5630): Czech born composer Isaak-Ignaz Moscheles composer passed away at the age of 75.


1871: Seventy-eight year old German author August Lewald, the cousin of novelist Fanny Lewald, the Jewess who converted to Christianity, passed away today.


1872(30thof Adar I, 5632): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1875: It was reported today that E.B. Hart, Joseph Seligman and Joseph Koch are among the prominent Jews heading the committee of the Purim Association that will be responsible for the upcoming Hebrew Charity Ball.


1873: Birthdate of Jakob Wassermann author of My Life As a German and a Jew.  Wasserman was a novelist who dealt with challenges of being both a German and a Jew.  His writings urged Jews to assimilate and "and thus destroy themselves as a group.  By the end of his life, he recognized that Jewish survival was inevitable and desirable."


1875:Die Königin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba), an opera in four acts by Karl Goldmark was first performed today at the Hofoper (now the State Opera) in Vienna,


1876(14thof Adar, 5638) Purim


1876: The Anshe Bikur Cholim Society held a reception this evening at Irving Hall.  It was very well attended because it was the Purim celebration of its kind in New York held today.


1877: In what was then Galicia, Esther Verner and dairy farmer Jacob Taffel gave birth to Frank Taffel who founded the Fulton Auto Exchange in Atlanta, GA in 1924.


1878: Birthdate of Lamed Lev Shapiro, the Ukrainian born Yiddish author known as Lamed Shapiro.


1879(15thof Adar, 5639): Shushan Purim


1879: Ernest Falck married Matilda Samuel today.


1884(13thof Adar, 5644): Fast of Esther


1886: At the Hasell Street Synagogue, Rabbi David Levy officiated at the wedding of Belle Elias to Isadore Blank.


1887(14thof Adar, 5647): Purim


1887: “Three Hebrew clergymen” – Dr. L. Wintner, William Sparger, Leon Harrison – wrote a condolence letter to the widow of Henry Ward Beecher expressing their sorrow over his passing.


1887: In Galicia, Esther Verner and dairy farmer Jacob Taffel gave birth to Shrage Fyvel Taffe who as Frank Taffel became a pillar of the Georgia (USA) Jewish community.


1888(27th of Adar): Ferdinand Eberstadt, the first Jewish Mayor of Worms, passed away


1888(27th of Adar): Scholar and philanthropist Issachar Dov Ber Bampi passed away


1890: The Young Men’s Hebrew Association will host its fifth “informal entertainment of the season this evening at Vienna Hall.


1890: The body of an unidentified Jews was found in a cellar at a house on Eldridge Street in New York City.


1890: The Downtown Religious and Sewing Schools and the Young Men’s Society will hold their Purim celebration tonight at Pythagoras Hall.


1891: Birthdate of Sam Jaffe who starred in movies and television.  He gained early fame playing an Indian water boy in the film “Gunga Din.”  Television viewers of the 1950's and 1960's saw him as wise old Dr. Zorba in the popular medical series called “Ben Casey.”


1892(11thof Adar, 5652): Ta’anit Esther


1892: Friedman Silverstein, a Jewish immigrant from Russia who has been living in the United States for 2 years was diagnosed as having typhus fever today.


1892: Ruben Lodge No. 3 of the Independent Order of the Free Sons of Israel will host a masquerade ball this evening at the Lexington Opera House.


1893: Lillian Wald opened the Lower East Side settlement house that would become the Henry Street Settlement on her 26th birthday. The Nurses' Settlement opened on Jefferson Street. Two years later, in 1895, she moved her enterprise to Henry Street. In both locations, the settlement was dedicated to public health nursing, a term Wald coined to describe an organic relationship between health care and broader community needs. In the first year, the settlement cared for 4,500 patients. Recognizing the interconnectedness of illness and poverty, Wald expanded the activities of the settlement over time. The renamed Henry Street Settlement House offered boys' and girls' clubs; classes in arts, crafts, homemaking and English; and vocational training. Health care remained important, with over 26,000 patients cared for by 100 Henry Street nurses in 1915.


1893: In Philadelphia, Rabbi Dr. Henry Berkowitz delivers a speech to his congregation, Rodelph Shalom in which he suggests that a society be formed in the United States for "the dissemination of knowledge of the Jewish religion by fostering the study of its history and literature, giving popular courses of instruction, issuing publications, establishing reading-circles, holding general assemblies, and by such other means as may from time to time be found necessary and proper." In response to his suggestion, the Jewish literary societies of Philadelphia appointed a "committee on organization," which formulated plans. An agreement was entered into with the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle for the use of the general methods of the popular education process known as the "Chautauqua System." A Jewish society, national in its scope, was then organized, with Dr. Berkowitz as chancellor. In the winter of 1893 the society began the publication of a series of "course books" or syllabi for general readers and members of reading-circles or study classes. These guide-books give syllabi of courses in Biblical and post-Biblical history and literature, in the Hebrew language (correspondence method), and on Jewish characters in fiction.


1893: “To Study Our Immigration” published today described the debate in the House of Lords led by Lord Lyon Playfair over the impact of Russian and Polish (Jewish) immigration in the United Kingdom and the treatment of these immigrants in the United States


1895(14th of Adar, 5655): Purim


1895: It was reported today that it will cost $80,000 to build a new facility for Beth Israel Hospital which now using a building on East Broadway owned by the Hebrew Free School


1895: Birthdate of Samuel Caplan, the native of Russia, who became and an American author and editor for the Congress Bi-Weekly


1895: In “Emanu-El’s Fifty Years,” published today described plans for the celebration of Temple Emanu-El’s fiftieth anniversary which will be held on April 12, 13 and 14th.  The article also provides a brief history of the Reform Movement and the milestones in the history of New York’s leading Reform congregation.


1896:Dr. Reuben Bierer, chief rabbi of Sofia, announces that he considers Herzl to be the Messiah. The newspaper "Ha-am" in Kolomea places itself at Herzl's disposal.


1896: In London, 2 years before he was murdered by a blackmailer, Woolf Joel and his wife gave birth to their only son, Geoffrey Joel.


1896: Theodore Herzl described his first meeting with Reverend William Hechler in today’s diary entry.  Herzl described Hechler as an enthusiastic Zionist who wants introduce him to the various German leaders who are friends of the Anglican minister.


1896: The world trade mark for State Express 555 cigarettes, a creating of Sir Albert Levy, “was first registered” today “in Ireland


1896: In Pittsburgh, PA, Anselm and Sophie Irene Loeb, the noted child welfare worker, were married today.


1897: The will of the late Simon Goldenberg, who left an estate valued at $200,000 in real property and $1,000,000 in personal property was filed for probate today.


1897: The Charity Ball for the benefit of the Montefiore Home which is being sponsored by the Young Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s League will take place this evening at Carnegie Hall, under the leadership of Leon Hirsch, who is the group’s President. 


1898: Funeral services for Moses Bruckheimer will be held today at Beth Elohim in Brooklyn


 


1898: At today’s meeting of the House of Commons Committee “inquiring into the evils of money lending”


Sir George Lewis “condemned the business in the strongest terms saying it frequently cost the victims


2000 percent” and speaking as a Jew he could say that the Jewish community “loathed and despised those who engage in such activity.


1898: Fifteen thousand people are expected to attend tonight’s annual Fête and Bal Champêtre at


Carnegie Hall sponsored by the Young Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s League of the Montefiore Home for


Consumptives


1902(1st of Adar II, 5662): Rosh Chodesh Adar II


1902(1stof Adar II, 5662): Seventy-two year old author and social reformer Jenny Hirsch died today in Berlin.



1905(3rdof Adar, 5665): Fifty-nine year old Elijah David Rabinowitz-Teomim (ADeReT), a Lithuanian born Rabbi who made Aliyah at the turn of the century passed away today and was buried on the Mount of Olives.


1905: Ernst Gräfenberg earned his doctorate after studying medicine in Göttingen and Munich. Another intellectual casualty of the Nazis, this doctor who had served in the German Army in World War and who developed the IUD, would flee to the United States in the 1930’s.


1906(13thof Adar, 5666): Parashat Tetzaveh; Shabbat Zachor; Erev Purim


1906: Purim services were held this evening at the West End Synagogue at the end of which every worshipper made “his contribution to charity.”


1906: Sixty-seven year old Eugene Richter, a German political leader who defended the Jews during the growing waves of German anti-Semitism that marked the last decades of the 19th century passed away.


1908: Birthdate of Fevel Greenberg, the native of “the Russian occupied region of Galicia” who gained fame as Philip Rahv “the editor, author, reviewer for Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books and Brandeis University English Professor.




1910: Karl Lueger, the sixty-five year old anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna passed away.


1911: Birthdate of New York native Harold “Hy” Lefft the NYU basketball player who was the older borther of NYU basketball player Joe Lefft.


1911: Birthdate of Odessa native Charles Robert “Buckets” Goldenberg the University of Wisconsin star who went on to play for 12 years with the Green Bay Packers. (Editor’s Note – according to some records he was born in April.)



1911: Jerome Kern’s “La Belle Paree” starring Al Jolson, opened at the Winter Garden Theatre.


1913(1stof Adar II, 5673): Rosh Chodesh Adar


1913(1stof Adar II, 5673): Forty-two year old Chicagoan Victor B Strelitz, a member of the firm of Strelitz Brothers and the husband of Sarah Strelitz passed away “suddenly in New York City” today.


1913: Birthdate of Canadian composer John Jacob Weinzweig. The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he received his first formal study of music in mandolin at the Workmen's Circle Peretz School.


1913: The funeral of Pauline Phillips, the wife of Herman Philips is scheduled to take place today followed by burial at Waldheim Cemetery.


1915: The American Jewish Relief Committee for Suffers from the War” made its first detailed report public today sowing that it has collected approximately $550,000 of which $472,000 has been sent to various countries in Europe.


1915: The Frankfurter Zeitung published a letter that had first appeared in the Hambruger Israelitische Familienblatt written by a Jewish soldier, who with his brother had joined the German Army even though they had been denied German citizenship. According to the letter, one brother had been killed in battle and the surviving brother wanted his family to know that it was not a piece of paper that made them Germans. It was their “sentiments that made them Germans.”  Feeling this way, they could not let others fight while they remained spectators.  “The hero’s death is better than shame.”


1916: With the passing of the Military Service Act in 1916 the period of voluntary enlistment came to an end as did the publication of the list entitled “Our Honour Record of All Jews who are serving” the last one of which was published.


1916: In Rochford, Essex, Isidore and Helen Ostrer gave birth to Pamela Helen Ostrer, the English actress known as Pamela Mason after she married actor James Mason.


1916: “According to the ninth annual report of the American Jewish Committee issued” today “by President Louis Marshall” “nearly $4,000,000 was spent for charity last year by Jewish organizations in New York State”


1917: “The Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies issued…an appeal” which was supported by President Felix Warburg and Executive Director Edwin Golwaser “to Jews to do away with the long-established practice of sending elaborate floral tributes to the dead on the grounds that the money so spent could be used to greater advantage in caring for the poor.”


1918: Birthdate of Isaac Rosenfeld, the Chicago born author who wrote Passage from Home in 1946.


https://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/april29/zipperstein-steven-042909.html1918 At today’s meeting of the Jewish Ministers’ Association of America being held at the Girls’ Hebrew Technical School Moses Hyamson called for “unified action on the part of the Orthodox congregation  to provide for the welfare of Jewish soldiers” at camps in the United States and at the Front and the rabbis demonstrated their support for the war effort by pledging “their support for a campaign which the Independ Order of B’rith Abraham is conducting to raise one million dollars in thrift and war savings stamps.”


1918:  Warner Brothers released its first major film “My Four Years in Germany." The corporate name honors the four founding Warner brothers, Jewish brothers who emigrated from Poland to London, Ontario, Canada, Harry Warner (1881–1958), Albert Warner (1883–1967), Sam Warner (1887–1927) and Jack L. Warner (1892–1978).


1919:  At the Strand Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island, Archibald Silverman presided over the memorial service honoring the memory of Colonel Harry Cutler who passed away last year in London which was attended by hundreds of Jewish and Gentile residents of the state including Rabbi Samuel Gup of Temple Beth-El who characterized Cutler as “a God intoxicated man.”


1919: Tonight at the Harmonie Club in Manhattan, “the Executive Committee of the Isaac M. Wise Centenary launched a campaign to raise $300,000 for the support of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati” in response “to the appeals of Henry Morgenthau and Jacob Schiff for a united effort to spread the ideals of Judaism.”


1920: In the wake of Arab attacks on Jewish citizens, Major-General Louis Bols, the Officer Administering the Government of Palestine, issued an order prohibiting further demonstrations in Jerusalem.


1920: In the House of Commons, when Major W. Ormsby-Gore asked he Prime Minister if “any special instructions had been sent to the commander-in-chief in Palestine in the wake of anti-Jewish “excesses+ in Metulah and the Galilee, “Secretary Williamson of the War Office” replied he had “no information of such excesses.


1924: In New York City, attorney Charles Bailey “and the former Phyllis Hedley gave birth to Judith Bailey who gained fame as Judith Jones, the literary editor whose accomplishments included rescuing “Anne Frank’s diary from a US publisher’s rejection pile.”



1925(14thof Adar, 5685): Purim


1925: In New York Charles and Elizabeth Kabrin Limmer gave birth to Abraham Louis Limmer who gained fame as Lou “Boomie” Limmer the major league first baseman who overcame the effects of having broken his neck and suffered temporary blindness “while sliding into third base in the Western League” to play for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1951 and 1954.


1925: “Wood Love” a silent comedy written by Hans Neumann was released today in Germany


1926: Today, at the Astor Hotel, during her address at the sixth annual convention of the Jewish Women’s Organizations, “Mrs. Leory S. Blatner, Field Secretary, New York State Federation of Temple Sisterhood, launched a spirited attack on the modern Jewish mother who prepared her daughter for a wedding and not for marriage…”


1927: The Committee on Civics and Communal Affairs of the Council of Jewish Women arranged for today’s visit to City Hall in Philadelphia which is part of “a series of trips through various places of interest in and hear Philadelphia with the idea of acquainting” members “with the many places of importance in” this historic city.


1927: Mrs. W.T. Andress presided over the opening meeting of the Dallas Section in Max J. Rosenfield Hall.


1929(28thof Adar I, 5689): Seventy-seven year old German Jurist Victor Gabriel Ehrenberg passed away.


1929: “Shakedown” directed by William Wyler and produced by Samuel Goldwyn “was released in parallel silent and sound versions.”


1929: In New York, Lewis Steiger, the proprietor of men’s clothing business and his wife Rebecca gave birth to Samuel Steiger “a New Yorker who transformed himself into a Western rancher, served five terms in the House as a Republican from Arizona…” (As reported by William Yardley)


1929: Reports published today described the upcoming opening of “the Warner Brothers' ambitious Vitaphone production which will open at the Winter Garden, featuring Dolores Costello and George O'Brien” which is a cinematic treatment of the Biblical story.


1929: Birthdate of “Stephen Myron Schwebel is an American jurist and expert on international law.”


1932: In Great Britain, David and Eleanor Montague gave birth to businessman and Laborite Michael Montague, Baron Montague of Oxford



1932: It was reported today that when Benjamin Cardozo is sworn in next week as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, there will finally be enough Justices to constitute a quorum so that the Court can hear the government’s appeal of a consent decree by the lower court in an anti-trust case involving the nation’s meatpackers.  The death of Justice Holmes and the recusal of Justices Hughes, Stone and Sutherland had meant that there were not enough Justices to hear the case.


 1933: Michael Siegel, a Jewish lawyer who complained about the police “is forced to walk through Munich barefoot while carrying a sign reading ‘I will never complain to the police again.’”


1933: Victor Klemperer writes in his diary “Hitler elected as Chancellor. What I had called terror was only a mild prelude. . . . It is amazing how everything collapses . . . prohibitions and acts of violence. And with it, on streets and radio, unrestrained propaganda. On Saturday I heard a piece of Hitler's speech in Konsigsberg. I understood only a few words. But the tone! The unctuous roaring bark, the bark, really, of a clergyman. . . . How long will I be able to retain my professorship?”


1933: In Germany, premiere of Liebelei directed by Max Ophüls, based on a play of the same name by Arthur Schnitzler.


1934: “Jail Birds of Paradise” a Three Stooges comedy and directed by Al Boasberg was released in the United States today.


1936: “Two Jewish students, one them cast as Shylock, withdrew from a classroom production of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” at Hackensack (NJ) High School today as Rabbi Irving Silman of Hackensack Hebrew Institute continued a campaign to have the play stricken from the sophomore English course at the school because the character of Shylock ‘is the foulest slander ever penned by the hand of genius.’”


1936: A delegation from the Federation of Polish Jews in America met with Secretary of State Cordell Hall an asked him “to use the influence of the United States to stop the Polish Parliament from adopting a law “to prohibit Jewish ritual slaughter in” that country.


1936: In New York, the motion introduced by “Aldermen Morton Moses and Saul Frassler to grant holidays to Jewish employees during Passover” was sent to committee for consideration.


1937: “Chicken Heart” written by Arch Oboler was broadcast for the first time on the radio suspense show,


1937: Despite attempts by the Polish foreign minister to have Jews leave for Palestine, “the Council of Polish Organizations in the United States of America denied” today “that Poland as forcing Jews to emigrate” and “it declared the present emigration of about 80,000 Polish Jews annually wa normal.


1937: The Palestine Post reported from London that Viscount Cranborne, MP, the Foreign Under-Secretary told Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, MP, that the population of Transjordan was about 300,000 and that the Palestine Mandate still applied there, except for the provisions which included the establishment of the Jewish National Home. The policy in regard to the prospects of the Jewish settlement in Transjordan "remained unchanged". Thomas Williams, MP, asked the Colonial Secretary why the recent British military expenditures were charged to the Palestine government, while they might have been caused by the necessities of the international situation.


1937: “Franklin Forgery Exposed by Beard” published today described Professor Charles A. Beards’ conclusion that “the anti-Semitic ‘Prophecy’ attributed to Benjamin Franklin and distributed in Germany within the last few days by the government news service” was “a barefaced forgery.”


1937: The Palestine Post reported that Jerusalem Arabs welcomed Moslem pilgrims returning by train from the pilgrimage to Mecca.


1938: The day after the Germans marched into Austira, Fritz Grünbaum and Karl Farkas acted for the last time in Simplicissimus before trying to flee to Czechoslovakia.


1938: “Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels” visited Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.
1938: Birthdate of Ron Mix.  Mix was an oddity - a Jewish professional football player.  He was all-star offensive tackle with the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders.  He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1979. Just to be on the safe side, Mix went to law school at night.


1939: “The Ice Follies of 1939,” a musical comedy directed by Reinhold Schünzel and produced by Harry Rapf was released in the United States today.


1939: “Striking a ‘Nazi persecution of Catholics as well as Jews in Germany,’ William Cardinal O’Connel, dean of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in” the United States “today set March 19 as ‘Catholic refugee Sunday’”


1943: Emanuel Zisman, his mother and his sister, along with the rest of the Jews living in Plovdiv, Bulgaria were rounded up for a planned deportation to the death camps.


1943: Bulgaria refused to release 48,000 of its Jews to the Germans. This became known to the Bulgarians as a "miracle of the Jewish people."


1943: More than 1,000 Jews in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, Emanuel Zisman, the future Israeli ambassador to Bulgaria, his mother and his sister “were taken from their homes concentrated in the Jewish quarter, near to the school. But during the day the public pressure was so strong that the tsar of Bulgaria, Boris III, decided to cancel the deportation. It was a long day but a very, very happy night.”


1943: Last of two performances of “We Will Never Die” took place at Madison Square Garden in New York City


1944: Adolf Eichmann and his staff met at Mauthausen concentration camp to work out the deportation of over 750,000 Jews from Hungary.


1945: Major Ronald Edmond Balfour, “the son of Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Robert Balfour and May Eleanor Balfour (née Broadwood) of Marlow, Buckinghamshire, England” a British officer serving with the “Monuments Men” died in a shell-burst, while operating beyond the Allied front line at Kleve (Cleves), seeking out artworks to be protected from war damage” after which he was buried in Reichswald Forest War Cemetery.



1945(25th of Tevet, 5705): Thirty year old Czech journalist Joseph Taussig, the son of Otto and Frederike (Federer) Tausig and younger brother of journalist František (Franta) Taussig died today at Flossenburg just five weeks before the camp was liberated by the United States Army.


1947: In what seems to be a public change in policy by Jewish leaders, 5 mayors in the martial law zone, including the Mayor of Tel Aviv issued a strongly worded statement warning against any new outbreak of terrorism.  “Acts of desperation do nothing but harm to the community and are calculated to bring about the disruption of our organized life.  We urgently warn the perpetrators and those who bear responsibility for them to cease all acts of terrorism, murder and violence against Jews and Britons.  Do not destroy the last possibility of maintain the wholeness of our organization.”


1947: “Twenty-one American citizens, including a woman named Hanna Herschkowitz, as well as two Norwegians with American…papers and two French nationals, all of whom arrived aboard the unauthorized immigrant ship Abril, were remanded by a magistrate in Haifa today. They will be held for a fortnight pending investigations into charges arising from the ship’s arrival in Palestine waters.”  Two American newspapermen – Wallace Litwin and Albert L. Hrschkoff are among those being detained.  Joseph Kaserman, an attorney from Haifa has been retained to defend the crew and protect the rights of the ship’s registered owner, the Tyre Shipping Company of New York City. The Abrilis also known as the SS Ben Hecht, a ship under Irgun control that had been carrying 599 Jewish refugees trying to land in Palestine.


1947: Daniel Frisch a leading member of the ZOA and the Zionist General Council said tonight, “I am persuaded by consultations and assurances obtained back by overwhelming Jewish as well as non-Jewish sentiment, that the United States Government will never give its consent to a solution of the Palestine problem which would tend to rob the Jewish people of its only path leading to rehabilitation and life.”


1948: Birthdate of retired government agent and private investigator Robert Levinson who has been held by the Iranians since 2007.


1948: A “company of the 1st Battalion commanded by Assaf Simchoni acted against an Arab gang which had settled in Kafr Kanna, on the Tiberias-Nazareth road. Information had been received that the village had become a center for gangs headed by a certain ‘Ibrahim’ that had carried out many attacks in the Lower Galilee and the Zevulun Valley. Among these was a gang that had previously been active in Shefaram, but had moved to Kafr Kanna. Born in 1922, Simchoni would rose to the rank of Major-General in the IDF. In 1956, he “commanded the Sinai Campaign and was killed in an airplane accident at the end of the war.”


1949: During Operation Uvda “an aerial photographer discovered that the police station guarding Ras al-Naqb was abandoned and the Negev Brigade set out towards Umm Rashrash through Ras al-Naqb


1949: At 15:00 the Negev Brigade reached the abandoned policed station at Umm Rashrash (the future site of Eilat) followed two hours later by the Golani Brigade.


1949: The conquest of the southern Negev and Um Rashrash (Eilat) in March 1949 ended the War of Independence.


1949: In Israel, the Provisional Government gave way to the first Cabinet of the new State.


1949: Moshe Sharett completed his term as Foreign Minister for the Provisional Government which had been in power since the creation of the state in May of 1948,


1949: Moshe Sharett begins serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Israel’s first elected government.


1949: Haim-Moshe Shapira replaced Yitzhak Gruenbaum as Internal Affairs Minister.


1949: Aharon Zisling completed his service as Israel’s first Minister of Agriculture.


1950: In Tel Aviv Dov Fruchtman, a teacher of literature and his wife gave birth to Nita Ben-Dov (nee Fruchtman a Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa


1950: “The Vicious Year” written by N. Richard Nash was released in the United States today.


1951: An estimated 200 million dollars’ worth of Jewish property was then taken over by the state.  "At a secret session of the Iraqi Parliament passed Law No. 5 of 1951 under which "the assets of all Jews who were leaving and had denounced Iraqi citizenship - 103,866 by that time - were frozen and put under Iraqi Government control."  This law actually was applied to the more than 123,000 Jews who had been forced to flee during the years 1948-1951. The Jews still trapped in Iran were not only stateless, they were now totally impoverished. 


1951: In Los Angeles, Albert and Ruth (Feldman) Zugsmith gave birth to real estate executive Michael Albert Zugsmith who was also a “member of real estate and construction cabinet Jewish Federation” amd a “guardian of the Jewish Home for the Aging.”


1951: After 48 performances, the curtain came down a second Broadway production of Frank Loesser’s “Where’s Charley?”


1952(13th of Adar, 5712): Fast of Esther


1952: Fulgencio Batista leads a successful coup in Cuba and appoints himself as the "provisional president". This was Batista’s second time to serve as president.  It was during this second presidency that Meyer Lanksy negotiated the deal with Batista that gave “the mob” monopoly control over the island’s gambling operations in return for a down payment of 3 million dollars and a fifty percent cut of the profits.  (In those days, a million dollars was really worth a million dollars.)


1952: The Jerusalem Post reported the cabinet’s decision that wages earned by Arabs in the employ of the state, municipalities and other public institutions, and the prices paid for Arab produce would be equal to those paid to the Jews. Mr. Palmon, the prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs, stated that among Israeli Arabs the collection of income tax was practically nonexistent. They paid only a negligible property tax. The cabinet had also approved the Pensions and Rehabilitation of the Victims of the War of Independence bill.


1957(7thof Adar II, 5717): Sixty-six year old screenwriter and author Samuel Ornitz who was blacklisted as a member of the “Hollywood Ten” passed away today.



1959: Birthdate of Aital Selinger, the native of Haifa volleyball player who twice represented the Netherlands in the Summer Olympics.


1959: The original Broadway production of “Sweet Bird of Youth” starring Paul Newman opened today at the Martin Beck Theatre.


1960(11thof Adar, 5720): Ta’anit Esther observed for the last time during the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower.


1961: “God Naked in the World” produced by Aaron Rosenberg was released in the United States today.


1963: Birthdate of Frederick Jay Rubin, known as Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin is one of the two guys behind legendary hip-hop label Def Jam.


1965: Neil Simon's play ''The Odd Couple'' opened on Broadway.


1966: Birthdate of actor Stephen Mailer, son of author Norman Mailer.


1970: Barbra Streisand recorded "The Singer"& "I Can Do It"


1970: The Knesset passed the "Who is a Jew?" bill which defined a Jew as one born to a Jewish mother or a convert to the Jewish religion.


1971: “Get Carter” a slick British crime film produced by Michael Klinger and photographed by Wolfgang Suschitzky.


1972: “Silent Running,” a sci-fi thriller featuring Ron Rifkin, produced by Michael Gruskoff


1973(6th of Adar II, 5733): Seventy-two year old movie director Robert Siodmak, another of those whose career in Europe was cut short by the Nazis but who managed to escape to the United States before the war, passed away today.




1974: Golda Meir formed a new government that included Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres.  The government was formed in response to a new threat from Syria and would prove to be the shortest lived government in the history of Israel.


1974: Abba Eban completed his term as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Israel’s 15thgovernment and began serving as the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Israel’s 16thgovernment.


1974: Aharon Uzan replaced Shimon Peres as Communications Ministers


1974: Yitzhak Rafael replaced Zerach Warhaftig as the head of the Ministry of Religious Services.


1974: Yehoshua Rabinovitz replaced Ze’ev Sherf as Minster of Housing and Construction.


 1974: Birthdate Keren Ann Zeidel the famous singer-song writer born at Caearea.



1977: This evening, the ambassadors of Egypt, Pakistan and Iran “along with a few D.C. officials, including the police commander Joseph O’Brien” met with the Hanifis who had seized the District Building, the headquarters of B’nai B’rith and the Islamic Center of Washington.


1977: The Jerusalem Post reported that US President Jimmy Carter suggested that the final Israeli borders should include only "some minor adjustments in the 1967 borders." He added, however, that it was important to recognize the difference between the "legal borders" and "defense lines" which would enable Israel to defend itself.


1978: “The Fury” a film version of the novel by the same name starring Kirk Douglas and Amy Irving was released in the United States today.


1979: Four terrorists were killed in Tel Aviv today.


1980: Yitzhak Shamir began serving as Foreign Minister.


1980: Jean Harris murdered Doctor Herman Tarnower, the Scarsdale diet doctor.


1986(29th of Adar I, 5746): Eighty-three year old Myron Cohen, the comedian noted for his use of dialect in his humor passed away today.



1986(29th of Adar I, 5746): Ninety-five year old Rosh Yeshiva Yaako Kamenetsky, author of Emes leYaakov al HaShas ("Truth to Jacob") passed away.


1987: The New York Timesfeatured reviews of Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story by Dan Vittorio Serge and The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, Survival by Susan Zucotti.


1987:Five authors of books with Jewish themes, published in 1986, were honored today at the Eighth Annual Present Tense/Joel H. Cavior Book Awards luncheon, sponsored by Present Tense magazine and the American Jewish Committee, and held at the committee's headquarters.  The winners were: Biography/Autobiography: Victor Perera, ''Rites: A Guatemalan Boyhood'' (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Fiction: Art Spiegelman, ''Maus: A Survivor's Tale'' (Pantheon Books). History: Bernard Lewis, ''Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice'' (W. W. Norton & Company). Jewish Religious Thought: David Weiss Halivni, ''Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara: The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law'' (Harvard University Press). General Nonfiction: Lesley Hazleton, ''Jerusalem, Jerusalem'' (Atlantic Monthly Press).  Elie Wiesel was honored with a special lifetime achievement citation for his ''extraordinary efforts to rescue the Holocaust from historical and literary oblivion and to dramatize the plight of Soviet Jews and other oppressed people.


1989: “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” a fantasy comedy with music by Michael Kamen was released in the United States today.


1991:  Susanne J. Schwartz and Colin M. Davidson were married this evening.  The bride’s father is Richard A. Jacobs, the president of the Joseph Jacobs Organization, an advertising agency that was founded by his father the late Joseph Jacobs.


1992: In “Menachem Begin, Guerrilla Leader Who Became Peacemaker,” published the day after he passed away James Feron described Menachem Begin as “the Israeli Prime Minister who made peace with Egypt” after  living much of his life in the opposition. A Jewish underground leader before Israel gained independence in 1948; he openly fought the established Zionist leadership of the struggle against British rule. Then for nearly three decades, he headed Israel's major opposition party. Ultimately and to many Israelis, surprisingly, his minority bloc ousted the Labor Party, which had governed continuously in the three decades since statehood, and Mr. Begin, as party leader, became Prime Minister. He was to govern an ever more divided and troubled nation. Mr. Begin, who led Israel from May 1977 until he resigned as Prime Minister in 1983, stretched the national mood from great pride to deep dismay. He guided the nation to a peace treaty with Egypt, the first such pact with an Arab country. But he also presided over a bitterly divisive war against Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon.” The treaty with Egypt, which brought Mr. Begin a shared 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with President Anwar el-Sadat, represented a high point in his political leadership while the war in Lebanon in 1982 and the stalemate that followed, with its steady toll of dead and wounded, were its low point.


1996: New York City Mayor Giuliani visited Israel.


1996(19thof Adar, 5656): Oscar nominated movie and television producer Ross Hunter passed away today.



1996: Helène Aylon's “The Liberation of G-d” was shown for the first time in the New York Jewish Museum's exhibit “Too Jewish?: Challenging Traditional Identities.”  The work, which took six years to create, was made by covering every page of the five books of the Torah with transparent parchment, on which Aylon marked problematic passages with a pink pen. The marked passages were mostly those considered degrading to women, but also included negative references to homosexuality. This work was accompanied by commentary on the marked passages from a spectrum of Jewish scholars and rabbis. “Liberation” was typical of Aylon's work in combining Jewish and social justice themes.


1997: The New York Times reported that the ownership of The Chattanooga Times is being transferred from the four grandchildren of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought the paper in 1878 and remained its publisher until 1935, to his 13 great-grandchildren. The family said it did not anticipate any shift in the Tennessee newspaper's management or direction as a result of the change in ownership. ''It is part of an orderly transfer of responsibility to our children, and we make it with the utmost faith that they will sustain and enrich'' the family's commitment to the paper, said Ruth S. Holmberg, who remains the chairman of The Chattanooga Times and is one of the four current owners. In addition to Mrs. Holmberg, the other three owners are Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Marian S. Heiskell and Dr. Judith P. Sulzberger. All are in their 70's, while their children range in age from 32 to 53. The four grandchildren of Mr. Ochs are also the trustees of four trusts that own a controlling stake in The New York Times Company. Mr. Sulzberger is also the chairman of the Times Company. Although Mr. Ochs bought The New York Times in 1896, The Chattanooga Times remained separate from the Times Company.


1998(12thof Adar, 5758): Seventy-four year Hayim David HaLevi, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi for Tel Aviv and Jaffa passed way today. A native of Jerusalem, he served in the IDF during the War for Independence before following a rabbinical career to which this blog cannot do justice.


1998: The new building of the Jewish Museum of Greece was inaugurated today.


1999: The first Australian production of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” opened at the Sydney Theatre Company today.


2002: Israeli helicopters destroyed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's office in Gaza City, hours after 11 Israelis were killed in a suicide bombing in a cafe across the street from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's residence in Jerusalem.


2003: Yaakov Edri begins serving as Deputy Minister of Public Security.


2004: “A conference titled ‘Jacques Faitlovitch and the Jews of Ethiopia’” which was organized by the Centre de recherche français de Jérusalem in collaboration with Ben-Zvi Institute and Tel-Aviv University “to mark the centennial day of Jacques Faitlovitch’s first trip to discover the Falashas” opened today.


2006: The Conservative movement decided to postpone until December 2006 making a final decision on recognizing gay marriage and allowing homosexuals to be ordained as rabbis, a move that is threatening to split the movement. The movement's Halakhic (Jewish law) committee discussed the initiative today but it was decided to delay making a final decision. One of the Conservative movement's leading rabbis in New York, who requested to remain anonymous, told Haaretz on Monday that the initiative's approval would cause broad resistance among the movement's rabbis and congregation members, and that many would leave the movement.


2007: Shabbat Parah


2007: The Tel Aviv Museum hosts a gala concert in honor of American composer Steve Reich.


2007: “John Zorn’s Masada Quartet performed one of their last concerts at Lincoln Center today.


2007: “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged Al Qaeda operative reported to be third in command under Osama bin Laden, claimed responsibility, before his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, for the murder of Daniel Pearl” whom he claimed to have beheaded.


2008: An exhibition styled “Lucien Freud: The Painter’s Etchings” at the Museum of Modern of Art comes to an end.


2008: A screening of a film based on Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History takes place at The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.


2009: “Irena’s Vow,” starring Tovah Feldshuh opens at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City.


2009 (14 Adar, 5769): Purim


2009: Sherwin B. Nuland, a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University and the author of The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine and the forthcoming The Soul of Medicine: Tales from the Bedside, presents the inaugural Stephen E. Straus Distinguished Lecture in the Science of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, "Chinese Medicine, Western Science and Acupuncture," at the National Institutes of Health.


2009:Charles Zentai, an 87-year-old man accused of killing a Jewish teenager in Hungary during World War II asked an Australian court today to prevent his extradition to Hungary, and claimed the results of a lie detector test prove he had nothing to do with the death.
Zentai, an Australian citizen, is listed by the U.S.-based Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center among its 10 most wanted Nazis as having participated in manhunts, persecution, and murder of Jews in Budapest in 1944.


2010:The CJH, YUM, Program in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies at Cardozo Law School is scheduled to present “Genocide and Responsibility to Protect" during which a panel of scholars and practitioners will discuss The Responsibility to Protect ("RtoP" or "R2P"), a new international security and human rights norm designed to address the international community's failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.


2010(24thof Adar): Thirty-eight year old Actor Corey Haim passed away.



2010: The 121stannual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis came to a close today.


2010: “The Game Change” based on the book of the same name co-authored by Mark Halperin and featuring John Rothman had its public debut today on HBO.


2010: French premiere of “La Rafle” or “The Round Up a moved “based on the true story of a young Jewish boy living through “the mass arrest Jews by French (not German) police in Paris in 1942.


2011:The NJDC is scheduled to host a reception honoring Kenneth R. Feinberg an American attorney specializing in mediation who is currently overseeing the U.S. government’s response to claims arising from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.


2011:The Israeli Opera is scheduled to host the premiere “of the tumultuous Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Katerina Izmaylova), by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, directed by Yulia Pevzner, based on a version staged by Irina Molostova, a Ukrainian stage director who first directed it in a joint production of the Israeli Opera and the Kirov Opera House in 1997.”


2011: Ruth Ellen Gruber is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “From Persona Non Grata to the Present: An American Jewish Journalist's View of Poland's Transformation” in Washington, DC.


2011: Opening night of the 15th New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival.


2011:The faces of four of Israel’s most celebrated poets and playwrights have been selected to appear on a new series of banknotes slated for release in the next three years, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer announced today. Natan Alterman, Leah Goldberg, Shaul Tchernichovsky and Rachel Sela – better known as Rachel the Poetess – were selected for the list, which was finalized following more than a year of heated debate and which will now be submitted to the government for approval. The faces will appear on new NIS 20, 50, 100 and 200 banknotes. The Bank of Israel said in a press release that the poets were chosen in the hope that “featuring these personalities on the banknotes will help to instill in the younger generation of Israelis an appreciation of their contribution to Israeli society and to the state.” Fischer made the announcement a day after meeting with the Committee for the Planning of Banknotes, Coins and Commemorative Coins, chaired by retired Judge Yaacov Turkel, to confirm the four selections. The committee was tasked in December 2009 with finding a new set of personalities for the banknotes after the central bank shelved its original list – which included Rachel the Poetess, writer Shai Agnon and former prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin - following strong opposition from, amongst others, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and MK Benny Begin, son of Menachem. The New Israeli Shekel was introduced in place of the old shekel in 1985, with banknotes featuring the same personalities that can still be found today: former prime minister Moshe Sharett on the NIS 20 note, Shay Agnon on the NIS 50 note, and former presidents Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and Zalman Shazar on the NIS 100 and 200 notes. According to the Bank of Israel, the new series will incorporate state-of the-art security and identification features to aid anti-counterfeiting measures.


2011: In an agreement signed today, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate sold most of its leasing rights to large swaths of Jerusalem to a group of Jewish investors last week. The NIS 80 million agreement puts an end to the long draw-out land affair - at least for the next 140 years


2011: “Today, Skopje, the capital of Macedonia — home to more than a quarter of the country’s population of 2 million — gained a new cultural artifact: the Holocaust Memorial Center of the Jews from Macedonia. A landmark in the middle of the city, the center remembers Jews lost in the Holocaust from Macedonia and from neighboring Southeast European nations.” (As reported by Katherine Clarke)



2011: Opening of the 15th New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival


2012: “Camera Obscura” is scheduled to be shown at Congregation Beth-El Jewish Film Festival in Fort Worth, TX.


2012: Alison Westermann is scheduled to make her Washington, DC debut with a perforamcne at Tifereth Israel


2012(16thof Adar, 5772): On the Hebrew calendar, anniversary of the commencement of the rebuilding of the Walls of Jerusalem by Agrippa I in 41 of the CE.


2012” HBO broadcast the film version of Game Change co-authored by Mark Halperin.


2012: United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the barrage of rockets fired towards Israel from the Gaza Strip. Clinton said in a meeting with Opposition leader Tzipi Livni in New York that Israel has the right to defend itself. Livni in turn urged the international community to speak out against terrorism directed at Israel's southern communities.


2012: Due to the escalation in violence, the IDF Home Front command along with the heads of a number of local authorities in Israel’s south decided tonight to cancel school in all towns and cities located between 7km to 40km from the Gaza Strip.


2013:Bel Kaufman, author of Up the Down Staircase; Rachel Cohen Gerrol, co-founder of the Nexus Global Youth Summit; and Rachel Sklar, founder of Change the Ratio are scheduled to be honored at JWA's Third Annual Making Trouble/Making History awards luncheon


2013: The Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital is scheduled to host a Purim Ball and Auction honoring Marsha Gentner and Joe Berman, Jacqueline Eyl and Leonard Chanin Mindy and Jeffrey Sosland featuring comedian Joel Chasnoff


2013: As part of Temple Judah’s 90th anniversary observance, Barb Feller will lead a trolley tour of historic Jewish cites in Cedar Rapids with Mark Hunter serving as “subject matter expert.” 


2013: “Passages through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War” – an exhibition presented by Yeshiva University Museum and the American Jewish Historical Society opened today.


2013: In a ceremony joining together two of the nicest people in the world, Harvard grad Anna Michelle Resnick married Harvard grad Ilan Caplan who for years brought joy to the Cedar Rapids Jewish community as the High Holiday Chazan.



2014: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present “Exploring Esther: The Origins, Values and Power of Purim.”


2014: Jennifer George, Al Jaffee, Adam Gopnik and Brian Walker are scheduled to discuss “The Genius of Rube Goldberg” at the 92nd Street Y.


2014: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present “Lost Souls: Retrieving Jewish War Orphans after the Holocaust.”


2014: An Israeli man was attacked with a stun gun in the Marais district” of Paris.


2014: Authorities in Stockholm reported today that The Vasa Real School which offers classes in Jewish studies and Hebrew was emblazoned with pink and blue swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans, including “disgusting Jews” and the white supremacist insignia “1488” (As reported by Times of Israel)


2014: Muhammad Mafarji a Palestinain who was convicted last year of planting a bomb on a bus in Tel Aviv during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense was sentenced to 25 years in prison today.


2014(8thof Adar II, 5774): Eighty three year old career diplomat Samuel Lewis who served as U.S. Ambassador to Israel for eight years passed away today.



2014(8thof Adar II, 5774): At the age of 111, Gisela Kohn Dollinger passed away today.



2014: “Dozens of rockets, boxes of hundreds thousands of bullets and nearly 200 mortar rounds will be opened for the world to see today as Israel puts weapons on show from a recently intercepted ship smuggling arms that it says exposes the “true face of Iran” which allegedly dispatched it (As reported by Mitch Ginsburg)


2015: The Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia caters to diverse Jewish interest as it offers workshops on “Jews in Sports” and “the evolution of the Passover Seder over the last two thousand years.”


2015: Take a musical journey through Modeling the Synagogue – from Dura to Touro. Guests will listen – within the gallery, in the company of historic scale synagogue models -- to diverse musical selections inspired by the synagogues and their communities. Hosted by cellist Elad Kabilio of MusicTalks, and accompanied by clarinet and singerTake a musical journey through Modeling the Synagogue – from Dura to Touro. Guests will listen – within the gallery, in the company of historic scale synagogue models -- to diverse musical selections inspired by the synagogues and their communities. Hosted by cellist Elad Kabilio of MusicTalks, and accompanied by clarinet and singerEliad Kabilio is scheduled to take attendees on “A Musical Journey through Jewish Space” at the Center for Jewish History.


2015: Today the defense ministry released new photos from the IDF archives of the raising of the Ink Flag, a historic moment in which IDF soldiers raised a handmade Israeli flag painted with ink over the Umm Al-Rashrash police station in 1949 to mark the capture of Eilat.


2015: “An IDF officer was lightly wounded on the Golan Heights today by gunfire emanating from Syria.” (As reported by Yoav Zitun)


2015: “Herzog Emerging as Credible Challenge to Netanyahu in Israeli Race” published today provides a status report on the Israeli elections to be held in just one week.



2016:The19th New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to start in New York City this evening.


2016: “Rosenwald” and “Fire Birds” are scheduled to be shown at the Houston Jewish Film Festival.


2016(30thof Adar I, 5776): Rosh Chodesh I, Adar II


2016(30thof Adar, I 5776): Eighty-seven year old Booker Prize winning author Anita Brookner passed away today.



2017: Today “twenty one people were lightly injured in Tel Aviv during the city’s annual festival for the Jewish holiday of Purim.”


2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host a Friday night dinner during which all of those participating in “mystery matanot” reveal their identities.


2017: “A day after the Jewish Children’s Museum” in Brooklyn was evacuated due to a bomb threat, “the Jasa Senior Citizen Center on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn received the threat in the form of a text message at 8:45 a.m. local time.


2017: In Paris, the symposium on “The Holocaust in Ukraine. New Perspectives on the Evils of the 20th Century” is scheduled to continue for a second day.


2018(23rdof Adar, 5778): Finish the book of Exodus with Vayakhel and Pekuday; Shabbat Parah; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/


2018: “Bar Bahar” is scheduled to be shown this afternoon at Jackson Hole Jewish Community Center in the Centennial Building.


2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host its last Shabbat observance of the term.


2018: The 21st NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to host “Classic Move Night: Greek Sephardim in the Holocaust.”


 


 


 


 


 

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