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This Day, August 27, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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August 27

410: The sacking of Rome by the Visigoths ends after three days. Some view the Visigoths as just one more group of barbarians that helped to bring an end to the Roman Empire.  But that is only part of the story. The Visigoths were Arians and they supplanted the anti-Jewish Catholic hierarchy, when they took control of parts of what is now Spain later in the 5th Century. For the Visigoths, the Catholics were synonymous with their Roman enemy but they had no animosity for the Jews.  They took advantage of their unique skills and the Jews repaid them by taking a leading role in defending the passes of the Pyrenees against invasion from the Catholic Franks and Burundians.   All this would come to an end in the last half of the sixth century when the Visigoth kings converted to Catholicism and adopted the anti-Jewish policies espoused by the Church.


1097(16th of Elul): Samuel ben Shealtiel ha-Nasi passed away.


1255: The day on which Hugh of Lincoln reportedly died. Discovery of his body two days later touched off one of the first, if not the first, Blood Libel.



1490: The Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada issued an indictment ordering the transfer of the prisoners from Segovia to Ávila to await trial on charges of having murdered an alleged victim of Jewish ritual murder who came to be known as The Holy Child of La Guardia.


1523: Cardinal Domenico Grimani who when asked by the German scholar Johann Reuchlin for a tutor on Hebrew Literature, recommended Rabbi Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno, passed away today.


1556: The reign of Charles, the King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor who dealt with the rise of the Protestant faith in the Netherlands in several ways including issue edicts “against Jews who had not been baptized” on several different occasions came to end when he had to abdicate due to declining health.


1590: Papacy of Sixtus V came to end. There seem to be competing view on how he treated the Jews.  According to one source “the condition of the Jews was somewhat improved. He repealed many of the regulations established by his predecessors, permitted Jews to reside in all parts of his realm, and gave Jewish physicians freedom to practice their profession.” While another contends that “he revoked Pope Gregory’s policies allowing Jews to reside in the Papal States and to print the Talmud.”



 1698:(18 Elul): Birthdate of Rabbi Yisroel (Israel) ben Eliezer (רבי ישראל בן אליעזר often called Baal Shem Tov or Besht.  There is no way to even begin writing about his effect on Judaism. 




1770:  Birthdate of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In his article “Sublimity and Resentment: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews,” Yirmiyahu Yovel offers the following comment about Hegel and the Jews.  ‘According to the Hegelian dialectic, every cultural form makes some true, genuine contribution to world history (and the world Spirit), after which it is sublated (aufgehoben) and disappears from the historical scene. Yet the Jews continued to survive long after their raison d'tre had disappeared--indeed, after they no longer had a genuine history in Hegel's sense but merely existed as the dead corpse of their extinguished essence. With the French Revolution, the Jews were entering the modern world and claiming their rights and place within it. Hegel, despite his anti-Jewish bias, was perfectly disposed to grant these rights, but he did not know what to do with the Jews in modernity as Jews, nor could he explain their survival in terms of his system.”


1743: Henry Pelham, the Prime Minister who would pass the Jew of Act of 1753 assumed office today.


1776: The British defeated American forces under the command of George Washington at the Battle of Brooklyn Heights in the first of a series of military actions that will lead to the British taking control of the city of New York for the duration of the war.  While most of New York’s Jewish population favored independence, the community was split between Rebels and Tories; a splitt which was even felt at Shearith Israel.


1779: In Charleston, SC, Gershon Cohen married Rebecca Sazrzedas, the daughter of the late Abraham Sarzedas from Georgia.


1782: While in Philadelphia, James Madison wrote to Edmund Randolph, I cannot in any way make you more sensible of the importance of your kind attention to pecuniary remittances for me than by informing you that I have for some time been a pensioner on the favor of Haym Salomon, a Jew Broker.”


1793(19th of Elul, 5553): Abraham Aaron (Abraham ben Uri HaCohen of Hichburg) passed away today in London.


1794:Simon Magruder Levy distinguished himself at the Battle of Fallen Timbers while serving as an Orderly Sergeant under General "Mad Anthony" Wayne.


1801: Birthdate of Ludwig Hirzel who taught Hebrew at the Carolinum in Zurich and whose included a Commentary on the Book of Job that was so popular it went through three editions after having first appeared in 1839.


1813: Birthdate of Moses Polydore Millaud, a native of Bordeaux who gained fame as the found of Le Petit Journal


1816: Birthdate of Polish born Jewish journalist Aleksander Zederbaum who in 1860 founded Ha-Meliz, the first Hebrew language periodical published in Russia.


1825(13th of Elul, 5585) Parashat Ki Teitzei


1825(13th of Elul, 5585): Seventy-three year old Flora Aarons (Bluma bat Eleazer), the widow of Aaron Aarons passed away today in England.


1828: Jacob Montefiore married Justina Lydia Gompertz today.


1834: In New Orleans, LA Clarice Allain and George Eustis gave birth to James B. Eustis who was the U.S. Ambassador to France during the Dreyfus Affair.


1840: Sixty-year old Herman Wedel Jarlsberg, the Norwegian count who opposed the ban Jews settling in his country passed away today.


1845: Isaac ben Eliezer HaLevi married Rebekah bat Moshe at the Great Synagogue today.


1846: Charles V. Lewis married Eliza Isaacs today.


1854: Birthdate of Marx Warley Platzek, a native of North Carolina, member of the 1894 New York Constitutional Convention tand he New York Supreme Court Judge who was President of the YMHA and a “benefactor of the American Jewish Historical Society.”



1857: Birthdate of Max Szabolcsi, author and newspaper editor who wrote numerous articles about the blood libel known as the Tisza-Eszlár affair


1858: Sixteen year old Nathan Cohen arrived in Tamworth, Australia so he could go to work in his Uncle William Cohen’s store on Ebsworth Street


1861: Birthdate of Edward Aaron who was buried in The Jewish Cemetery in Natchitoches, LA when he passed away in 1913 at the age of 51.


 


1861: Philadelphian Samuel Alexander enlisted in the 44thRegiment where he served as an Assistant Surgeon until he was killed during the fighting at Dranesville, VA in November.


1862: Henry Berg began serving as a Private in Company E of the 107th Regiment – service which would lead to his being wounded in fighting near Richmond in October of 1863?


1863: Two days after he had passed away, 63 year old businessman and author Israel Albu, the husband of the former Johana Cohen with whom he had five children was buried today at the Lauriston Road Jewish Cemetery.




1864: The New York Times published a letter in which the author complained about the difficulty in getting a naval substitute.  He ties his complaints about the process to involvement of the Jews.  He claimed that all of the locations where one goes to complete the forms are “all located either above or alongside of Jew clothing stores,” that the naval substitutes are coerced into buying their outfits at these Jewish clothing stores and that Jews attempt to extort cash from the participants that they then split with government officials.  [Ed. Note – The author is a draft dodger.  Under the law, a draftee could buy a substitute to serve in his place.  This reinforced the concept that it was rich man’s war and poor man’s fight.  The system was amazingly corrupt and led to the infamous Draft Riots of 1863 in New York City.


1867: In Tamworth, Australia, Esther and Nathan Cohen gave birth to Ida Cohen who married her first cousin Victor Cohen in 1901 with whom she had three sons: George, Nathan and Alan


1867: In Memphis, TN, Netherlands native Jacob Joseph Peres and Eve Chute Peres gave birth to Yale trained lawyer Israel Hyman Perex who served on the School Board and was a member of the YMHA.


1867: Following his trip to Romania, Sir Moses Montifore wrote a letter to Prince Charles concerning the treatment of the Jews of Romania.  Prince Charles will eventually be crowned as King Carlos I.


1868: Six days after he had passed away, Hamburg native Joseph Baum, “the son of Peter Frederick Baum” and the former “Hannah Behrens” was buried today at the West Ham Jewish Cemetery.


1869(20th of Elul, 5629); Rebecca Gratz passed away.  Born in 1781 to a prominent Jewish family in Pennsylvania, Gratz spent most of her adult life in Philadelphia where she was the patron of many philanthropic and social organization aimed at benefiting the Jewish community. She is best known as the founder of the Jewish Sunday School.  “In 1838 Gratz and the women of the congregation of Mikveh Israel established the first Hebrew Sunday School in the United States, which served as the model for all others that followed.”  Gratz, who was quite lovely and never married, was reputed to be the model for Rebecca, the heroine in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe. [Ed. Note – a Jewish connection: When Hollywood turned Ivanhoe into a big screen delight during the 1950’s, Elizabeth Taylor played the part of the Jewess Rebecca.  Taylor would convert to Judaism when she married Mike Todd.]


1871: It was reported today that the editor of the Jewish Times supports “American Jewish Seminary” for the training of rabbis in America. The editor contends that the Hebrew Orphan Asylum would provide a platform for creating such an institution since it would have a ready-made group of candidates and the additional training could be added on to the courses already offered by the Asylum.


1875: Birthdate of Albert M. Hyamson who was honored with the OBE for his work as the immigration officer in Palestine and who was the husband of Marie Rose Lavey with whom he had two sons Captain Theodore Hyamson and Corporal Philipp Hyamson both of whom were killed during WW II.


1877: Outfielder Jay Pike made his major league debut with the Hartford Dark Blues


                                                            Or


1877: Jacob Emanuel “Jay” Pike played in his first and last major league baseball game today when he took the field for the Brooklyn Hartfords of the National League.  Pike went 1 for 4 giving him a batting average of .250. He was charged with 1 error but there is no record of his fielding average. Pike may have been part of the first Jewish Family entry in major league baseball.  His brother was Lipman Emanuel Pike whose career spanned sixteen seasons.  Pike “batted and threw left-handed. He is credited as the first ballplayer named Jay to appear in a major league game…Pike also played the outfield for the Lowell, Massachusetts team that won the 1875 state championship and claimed the New England title. That same year, he also served as an umpire in the National Association.”


1878: In Vladislavov, Duvvid Schubart and Katrina Helwitz gave birth to their second son and fifth child theatrical producer Samuel S. “Sam” Schubert who along with his brothers built one of the most powerful “theatre empires” of the early twentieth century.


1880: In Leadville, Colorado, Eva Schloss and Lottie Beaumont performed with the Pinafore Company at the Windsor Hotel.


1882:  According to some, birthdate of movie mogul Sam Goldwyn. The confusion about his natal day was created by Sam himself.  He is the ‘G’ in MGM. As has been noted in previous items, Goldwyn was one of many Jewish immigrants who created Hollywood and the American Entertainment Industry. He passed away in 1974.


1882: “The Jews of York” published today described the conditions under which “the persecuted race” lived in this English city during the 12th century.  During the reign of Henry II and his son Richard the Lionhearted, they enjoyed royal protection and prospered as could be seen by the “splendid houses” on Jubbergate.  All of that change when Richard left for the crusades and the citizens of York massacred the Jews.  While Richard expressed his displeasure, “no serous punishment was inflicted on the murderous people of York for their fiendish cruelty.”  Ironically, the city’s long term punishment came in the loss of commerce and prosperity.  Without the Jews to lend money, business went elsewhere.


1882: It was reported that Professor Robertson Smith has written the article on “Lamentations” the new published edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica.  According to Smith, Jeremiah is traditionally viewed as the author of the text.  He sees a shift in the stance of the author as the book unfolds going from “an isolated figure among unsympathetic countrymen” to “a representative of Israel among the heathen.”


1882: It was reported today that little Jacob Greenhaldt a Hungarian Jewish immigrant “who was badly injured by a street car about a month ago” is out of the hospital and back at work on the streets of Cleveland.  The boys are said to be “imbued with the spirit of trade” so characteristic of his race.  They may make hard bargains but they are never beggars.


1882: “Facts About Street Gamins” published today described changing conditions on the streets of Cleveland, Ohio.  Immigrant Jewish boys from Hungary have replaced the Irish.  The Hungarians begin as shoe shine boys.  But as soon as they learn enough English, they begin work selling newspapers.


1883: It was reported today that Nathan Gottgetren, a 35 year old Jew who uses the alias Nicholas Gilbert, will be appearing before the District Attorney in New York to faces multiple charges of forgery.


1884(6th of Elul, 5644): Schaje Tripock an octogenarian Polish Jew living with his son in an apartment on Essex Street apparently took his own life today.  He was reported to “suffering from senile insanity.”


1885: Birthdate of Natchez, Mississippi native and American architect Samuel Abraham Marx, the husband of Florence May and the son-in-law of David May, the founder of May Department Stores.


1886: The Pope approved of the Hungarian Diet’s vote to reject a bill that would legalize marriages between Jews and Gentiles.


1887: It was reported today that The Board of Managers of the Sanitarium for Hebrew Children has received a total of $3,238.95 in contributions.


1887: Birthdate of  Pittsburgh native Rachel Vixman, the wife of Avrom H. Vixman and “a certified parliamentarian and authority on parliamentary procedure, who founded the Pittsburgh Chapter of Hadassah, served as national vice president of the organization in the United States and as associate director of the Canadian Chapter.”



1889(30th of Av, 5649): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1890: Birthdate of Emmanuel Radnitzky, the native of Philadelphia who gained fame as “American modernist artist” Man Ray.



1890: The 10thfree excursion sponsored by the Sanitarium for Hebrew Children will set sail on the East River at 9 a.m. this morning.


1891: “In Putzig, West Prussia, Germany, Herman and Jenny (Eisack) Eisenstadt”gave birth Dr. Joseph Herman Isenstead, a holder of the Iron Cross for his four years of service in the Medical Corps of the German Army in WW II who, along with his wife the former Elly Neuman, in 1936 came to the United States where he practiced “medicine specializing in the treatment of liver disease.”


1891: In today’s editorial, the New York Times expresses its sympathy with the plight of the Russian Jews on board the SS Marsala who were barred from entering the United States but insists that under the law Superintendent O’Beirne had no choice in the matter. “The whole subject matter is a complicated one and it is like that the law will have to be amended in some particulars….”  (Sounds as if this could have been written in 2014 just as easily as 1891)


1892: As cholera threatens to spread across Europe, “Hamburg is plague stricken today because it humanely too on itself the brunt of the burn of the” exodus of Jews from Russia.


1892: A representative of “the Hebrew branch of the Federation of Labor” investigated conditions at Ziontown, NJ, where Jewish settlers who have been on strike for six weeks face “actual starvation.”


1892: Four year old Ida Samyan the daughter of Russian Jews arrived today in London on a ship that came from Hamburg, Germany.


1892: In New York, the Board of Health said that it does not know anything about a group of Jews from Odessa who were supposed to come to this city but instead went to Havre where they were to go to Boston.  (These reports are all given against the background of a cholera epidemic that is breaking out in Europe)


1892: It was reported today that near Mariapol, Russia a mob ten thousand “terrorized the village killing several Jews” as they expressed their resentment over governmental measures to control cholera.1892: The first passenger train belonging to the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway arrived in Jerusalem today. Reactions were mixed, with some local inhabitants declaring it to be the work of the devil. However, the Jewish Chronicle wrote: "The year 5653, which is about to burst upon us, will witness one of the grandest sights that have been known in many centuries. May it prove an unmixed blessing."  The Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway was the first modern railway line to open in the Middle East. The railway was built in response to the increasing demand of all the pilgrims who began visiting the Holy Land and specifically Jerusalem starting in the middle of the 19thcentury. In writing about the history of the railroad Anthony S. Travis notes that “building the railway was a tremendously ambitious undertaking, considering the local conditions. Hundreds of tons of rails were brought from Belgium, coal from Britain and rolling stock from France. The unloading of all this in Jaffa's primitive harbor presented an immense challenge. A report in Railway Magazine said it was "a wonder that all the materials for the railway were safely and without loss conveyed to their destination... Bulky but light articles, such as boiler barrels or water tanks, were thrown into the sea and tugged ashore..." The weather also presented difficulties, as heavy rains washed away the jetty, and in some places along the track bridges were destroyed. Despite other problems related to construction crews leaving to tend their crops, and outbreaks of disease in the work camps, work progressed fairly rapidly, and by December 4, 1891, the line had reached Deir Aban (today's Beit Shemesh). From there, construction was much more difficult, owing to the mountainous terrain. While the first train did reach Jerusalem in August, the official opening would not take place until September of 1892. Theodor Herzl, who took the train in 1898 on his way to meet Kaiser Wilhelm II, was not very impressed, calling the line a "miserable little railway." It was in stark contrast to the earlier part of his journey, in the luxurious Orient Express, with dining cars and sleeping accommodation. The Jaffa-Jerusalem railway coaches did not have ashtrays or toilet facilities, and according to Herzl, not even drinking water. He said the heat was "frightful... sitting in the cramped, crowded, scorching compartment was torture." As if that were not enough, when Herzl and his party arrived at the hotel for which they had reservations, it turned out there were no rooms available, as they had been appropriated by Turkish officials and members of the Kaiser's entourage.” As an avid fan of science and technology, Herzl expressed his belief in the future of rail travel when in Altneuland he predicted that by the 1920s there would be high-speed electric railways throughout the country. Unfortunately even now, more than a century later, Israel has not yet reached that stage, although railway development has certainly come a long way in the last 20 years.         


1893: “B’nai B’rith’s Jubilee” published today described the plans that are being for the celebration of “the well-known Hebrew benevolent organization’s” golden anniversary which will take place this October.


1893: “The Correspondence of 3,500 Years Ago” published today described new information that described the role of clay tablets in ancient Palestine. In the past such evident has been ignored “by those who regard the early Hebrews a savages and who think that, though place in the very center of the ancient civilized world between the the Egyptians and Assyrians they were unacquainted with arts” or culture. This evidence shows that “the art of writing was known in the time of Moses” and that the inhabitants of Palestine wrote on thin clay tablets in the same way we write on a sheet of notepaper.



1893: Among the dead bodies taken to Henry Skelton’s undertaking establishment in Newton, LI following the collision in Berlin 38 year old Max Stein who was employed by Abram Stein & Co, Mrs. Bertha Weinstein and her young son Sidney Weinstein who was identified by a medal of merit given to him Temple Rudolph Sholom.



1893: In Camden, NJ the Jewish shopkeepers and merchants are scheduled to meet tonight to organize themselves to provide protection from the thieves and marauders who have been attacking them.



1894: Rabbi Bernhardt Hailperin was chosen chief rabbi by the Orthodox Jews of Newark.



1894: In Rixdorf, Germany, the police broke up a meeting of anarchist because the chairman “urged those present to use guns and dynamite to exterminate the Jews.”



1895: A coroner’s jury exonerated Solomon Pulka of charges that he had caused the death of nine year old Benjamin Pincus by kicking him in such a manner that it caused peritonitis.



1895:  “Over on the East Side” published today described the changes in the district bounded by Catharine  Street, the Bowery, Houston Street and the East River where can now be found “the children of Israel in their new exodus out of the Russian Egypt and house of bondage into the Canaan of the West.”  More for 2015



1896: Abraham Gruver, Myer S. Isaacs, Julius Lowenthal and Edward Lauterbach were among those who listened to Benjamin Harrison’s speech last night at Carnegie Hall.



1897(29th of Av, 5657) Forty-eight year old David J. Seligman, the husband of Addie Walter Seligman, the eldest son of Babette and the late Joseph Seligman passed away today at Hollywood, NJ.



1897: The funeral of the late Albert Tobias who had been a member of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and Chevra B’nai Israel will take place at his home this morning.



1897: A list of the bequests by the late David Blumenthal published today included two hundred dollars each to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, the Montefiore Home and the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society.  Mt. Sinai Hospital will receive either two hundred or five hundred dollars.



1898: Based on information that first appeared in The Jewish Messenger, it was reported that Colonel Teddy Roosevelt intends to recommend four men in his command be promoted for gallantry including one Catholic, one Jew, one Protestant and one whose religion is not known.  The Messenger sees this an example of American brotherhood and unique cooperation of those of all creeds.



1898: “Zangwill’s Visit” published today described the anticipation with which New Yorkers are filled now that that Israel Zangwill, the author of Without Prejudice and The Children of the Ghetto is about to arrive in the Big Apple.



1898: A review of Alexander Harkavy’s Yiddish Dictionary was published today.



1898: “Books and Authors” published today described “an extensive collection of 2,500 Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts that has recently been acquired by the British Museum.”  The collection which “includes a number of Arabic deed, written both in Hebrew and Arabic characters” has items that date fro the 9th through the 14thcenturies.



1899: In Chicago, trade unionist and newspaper man Benjamin "Ben" Schlesinger married Rae Schenhause with whom he had three children – two sons and one daughter.



1899: “Answers To Correspondents” published includes a reply to J.F. which tells him that there are between 350,000 and 400,000 Jews living in New York



1899: “Meyerbeer’s Posthumous Works” described yet another delay in the posthumous publication of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s compositions which according to his will should have been published in 1894.   One of his daughters Cornelie Meyerbeer who was married to Gustav Richter refuses to allow the publication to take place.



1898: In Sheboygan, Wisconsin Congregation Adath Israel dedicated its new synaoguge.



1899: Fernand-Gustave-Gaston Labori the French attorney who defended Zola and Drefyus was featured on the cover of “Le Petit Journal.”



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Petit_journal_8_27_1899_Fernand_Labori.jpg



1901: In Newark, NJ, haberdasher Max Joachim and his wife Pauline gave birth to Albert Joachim who gained fame as Al Ritz, one of the Ritz Brothers.



1902: Herzl wrote to the Polish writer Pauline Korvin-Piatrovska asking her to obtain an audience with the Czar.



1903: After today’s session of the Zionist Congress where delegates “remodeled the National Fund” delegates continued to talk about establishing a Jewish colony in East Africa even after the meetings came to an end.



1904: Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer described upcoming plans for the re-dedication of a synagogue in Camden, NJ.



1904: Rogers Adolphe Pinner, a senior partner of the Mutual Electric Company, was shot by his `former girlfriend', one Mrs. Augustina Hermann, a pretty hat-maker/designer of French extraction, who was a two-time widow.”



1908: Birthdate of Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president of the United States. Unbeknownst to most people, Johnson played an active role in rescuing Jews from Hitler’s Europe.  According to Ladybird LBJ wept when he visited Auschwitz in 1945. . Lyndon Johnson was a staunch supporter of Israel.  He helped the Israelis exhaust all diplomatic possibilities to avoid the Six Day War in June, 1967.  The real test for Johnson came on June 10 when the Soviets threatened Israel unless the Jewish state would immediately surrender the gains it had made against the Syrians and Egyptians, which were their client-states.  Unlike President Eisenhower in 1956, Johnson responded firmly by sending the Sixth Fleet towards Syria to thwart any Soviet moves.  He also began supplying arms to Israel since DeGaulle had betrayed Israel by cutting if its supply of weapons.  As Israel’s Ambassador to the United States wrote, “When it came to the crunch of 1967, the United States (thanks to Johnson) was firmly on Israel’s side, logistically and politically.” He passed away in 1973. 



1908: Samuel Gompers to-day announced that he would take to the stump in a personal effort to drive Speaker Cannon from the House. The President of the American Federation of Labor will open the campaign, which he intends to make a general fight for the Democratic ticket, at the Labor Day exercises at Danville, Ill., the home of "Uncle Joe."



1911: In Cleveland, Ohio found of Anshe S’fard.



1911: “The sale of seats to those not members of K.A.M. for the upcoming High Holiday is scheduled to take place for two hours this morning “at the Vestry Rooms of the Temple.



1915: “Meir Steinbrink, one of the Republican delegates” to the Constitutional Convention “from Brooklyn” explained his vote in favor of “requiring a literacy test as a voting qualification” saying that Louis Marshall had exaggerated the negative reaction that the state’s Jewish population would have to adding this provision to the New York State Constitution.



1915: “Councilors For Warsaw” published today described the new system of government set up for the Polish city by its German conquerors which includes the appointment of councilors based on proportion of population which means there are twelve Germans, twelve Poles and six Jews holding these posts.



1915: As of today, it is reported that there are more than 50,000 black Jews or Falsha “inhabiting the mountains of Abyssinia” for whom the American Jewish Committee has raised $5,000.



1916: It was reported today that The Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War has received a $25,000 contribution from its Chicago Committee.



1916: Birthdate of Oregon State University “forestry professor,” Alan Berg, the husband of Helen Berg who became “the first woman to serve as mayor of Corvallis, Oregon.”



1916: The Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society announced today it has received more than 100,000 letters in the past two weeks “from families in the provinces occupied by the German Army in Russia and Poland” “in accordance with arrangements made with the German Government by Isidore Hershfiled who had recently visited Germany.



1916: Clarence Butler and William Hoffman, two instructors at the American College who returned to New York today after making a circuitous trip home that included a stop in Jerusalem said “There were no pilgrims in Jerusalem and no Jews…as the majority had been driven out Palestine shortly after Turkey entered the war “and those who remained were forced to convert to Islam so they could retain their lands and other property.”



1917: “Municipal Court Justice Leonard A. Snitkin today the District Attorney “to investigate the remarks alleged to have been made by Russell Dunne at an open-air meeting in Madison Square Park” in which he “had assailed the Jews as slackers and had called Joseph Friedlander, a Jewish soldier in uniform, vile names when the latter resented the defamation of his race.



1917: Simon Frank, the President of Temple Emanu-El in Brooklyn wrote a letter today inviting members of the United States Army and Navy to attend High Holiday services at the Temple without being charged for their seats.



1918: During WWI, today while serving with Company E of the 306th Infantry, USA, Isaac Hirsch “showed great heroism, determination, determination and courage” when while serving voluntarily as a stretcher bearer, carried wounded “in an area which was being swept by” fire from artillery, machine guns and rifles.



1918: “At Chateau Diable, near Fismes,” Sergeant Julius Goldstein, a Philadelphian” serving with Company E of the 307th Infantry “displayed unusual coolness and great bravery in the face of terrific enemy machine gun fire” when “he took out a patrol of four men and led it through the enemy’s lines” and rescued a group of soldiers from Company E who “had become lost in the woods.”



1919(1st of Elul, 5679): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1919: During the Russian Civil War, forces of the White Army occupied Boguslav a Ukrainian city, “pillaged all the houses” and “massacred” approximately forty Jews.  [This was the war between the Reds (Bolsheviks) and the Whites (supporters of the former Czarist regime).  The Jews were often caught in the middle and slaughtered by both sides]



1920: On Friday night, “Dr. William Rosenau of Baltimore, MD, conducted the last in a series of seven services sponsored by Department of Synagogue and School Extension of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations at Oden, Michigan.



1920: “The American Bible Society” announced “the immediate publication of the Revised Mandarin Bible,” “a translation of the Bible into Chinese…which Chinese and foreign scholars have been” working “for more than a quarter of a century.



1920: It was reported today that “the I.L. Peretz Writers’ Organization has donated the first $1,000” to a Jewish Writers’ Fund that is being created by the Jewish Writers of America to help fledgling authors.



1920: Mr. Albert Rosenblatt announced that the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America has received a contribution of $10000 to the Building Fund from the Arbeiter Ring or Workmen’s Circle.



1921: The New York Times published a letter from Samuel Gompers in which he corrects the Times report of his speech to the Kiwanis Club of Atlantic City.  Gompers contends that the “misquote” of his remarks changes them so that they read like support for business instead of support for the workers of America.



1921: In Lawrence, MA, Jewish immigrants Elizabeth (née Melincoff) and Maurice Daniel Penn gave birth to WW II veteran, actor and director Leo Z. Penn, the father of Michael, Sean and Chris Penn.



1922: "The League of Nations is a Jewish idea, and Jerusalem someday will become the capital of the world's peace," declared Dr. Nahum Sokolow, Chairman of the Zionist Executive Committee, at a special meeting of the Zionist Conference today. Dr. Sokolow “said the Jews of the world will back the League and that Jerusalem will be the International Peace Capital.”



1923: Birthdate of Danzig native Yitzhak "Ike" Aronowicz the captain of the famous SS Exodus.



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/world/middleeast/24ahronovitch.html



1925: Birthdate of Herman Cohen, the producer of horror film who helped launch the career of Michael Landon when he featured him in “cult classic, ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf.’”



http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-06-12/news/0206120136_1_evil-adult-teenage-werewolf-mr-cohen



1926: Featherweight Harry Blitman fought and won his second bout today.



1926: In Vlagtwedde, Vlagtwedde, Groningen, The Netherlands, Sophie Josephine Franks, the daughter of Louis and Emma Sachs and Siegfried Frank gave birth to Emma Frank



1926: “The White Horse Inn,” a film version of the play by Oskar Blumentahl and Gustaf Kadelburg directed and produced by Richard Oswald was released in Germany today.



1927: Birthdate of Harlem native Morris “Mo” Levy, “owner of Roulette Records and the Birdland jazz club who passed away  before he could begin serving a prison sentence after having been convicted of “conspiring to extort” in connection with an investigation into mob involvement in the record industry.



https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/23/obituaries/morris-levy-is-dead-power-in-recording-and-club-owner-62.html



1927: Samuel Greenwald declined to accept the Republican nomination for the Judgeship in the Second District Court of the Municipal Court in New York.



1927: Two years after opening on Broadway, George S. Kaufman’s “The Butter and Egg Man” opented today at the Garrick Theatre in London.



1928: The Kellogg-Briand Pact, which failed in its anti-war making goal but provided part of the legal justification for the Nuremberg War Crime trials was signed today by “Germany, France and the United States.”



1929:  Birthdate of Ira Levin, author of many popular novels including Rosemary's Baby



1929: While Moslem leaders in Jerusalem have issued an appeal to Arab raiders to return to work and cease their attacks, widespread disorders occurred in Palestine. Marauding band of Arabs have left hundreds of victims, dead and wounded, from Dan to Beersheba while British troops have been unable to stop the violence.



1929: “Black Magic” a silent film featuring Fritz Feld as “James Fraser” was released in the United States today.



1930: “Monte Carlo” a musical directed and produced by Ernst Lubitsch was released today in the United States.



1931: Birthdate of “actress, singer and AIDS activist” Marilyn Lovell Matz, the wife of composer Peter Matz



http://richardskipper.blogspot.com/2012/04/marilyn-lovell-matz-remembrance.html



1932: In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, attorney Morris Fromkin “and the former Selma Strelsin, the sister of Albert A. Strelsin, the industrialist and arts patron” gave birth to historian David Fromkin, the author of A Peace to End All Peace, a must read book by anybody who wants to talk intelligently about events in the Middle East and beyond. (As reported by Sam Roberts)



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/world/middleeast/obituary-david-fromkin-dead-middle-east-author.html



1933:  Birthdate of magazine editor, author and Presidential speech writer, Ben Wattenberg.



1933: Birthdate of Leonard Irving Weinglass  who was according to some “the nation’s pre-eminent progressive defense lawyer, who represented political renegades, government opponents and notorious criminal defendants in a half century of controversial cases, including the Chicago Seven, the Pentagon Papers and the Hearst kidnapping.” (As reported by Bruce Weber)



1933: In Prague, The economic development of Palestine is outlined in a report of the Zionist Executive to the Congress, which reveals the following: During the past two years £3,252,000 has been invested in Palestine, of which £1,350,000 or 42% went into agriculture, mainly citrus planting, £1,400,000 or 43% went into building, and the remainder into industry and handicraft. A survey of 213 immigrants of the capitalist class shows that 54% of their total capital of £697,000 was invested in agriculture. During this period 21,767 immigrants came into the country; 11,384 workers on labor schedule, 3,122 capitalists, 2,697 certificates went to relatives of residents and 4,168 people came under unspecified classifications.



1933: Testimony given in the magistrate's court at Jaffa, on August 25th,alleging that Revisionist extremists had contemplated recourse to murder over shadowed all other issues here as the eighteenth World Zionist Congress entered its second week of deliberations today.



1934(16thof Elul, 5694): Four days before his 41st birthday, Yale educated engineer Alexander Cahn passed away today in Branford, CT.



1934: “The original Broadway production of ‘Life Begins at 8:40’ a musical revue with music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and E.Y. Harburg and sketches by David Freedman opened at the Winter Garden Theatre.”



1934: In Iraq many Jews were dismissed from public service and quotas were set up in colleges and universities



1935: In Switzerland, Rabbi Dov Yehuda and Sarach Schochet gave birth to Rabbi Dov Yehuda Schochet.



http://www.jewoftheweek.net/



1935: In Chicago, “Sam Patinkin, a scrap dealer and the form Eva Brezinsky” gave birth to Sheldon Patinkin, a writer, director and teacher who helped shape the theatrical life of Chicago over half a century.” (As reported by Bruce Weber)



http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/chi-sheldon-patinkin-dies-20140921-column.html



1935: The Federal Theatre Project is established. Elmer Rice, the Manhattan born son of Jacob and Fanny Lion Reizenstein, was the first director of the New York office of the Federal Theatre Project, but resigned in 1936 to protest government censorship of the FTP's "Living Newspaper" Ethiopia, about Mussolini's invasion of that country. The FTP included a Yiddish Unit.



1935: In New York, Morris Yablans, a cab driver and his wife Annette gave birth to producer and studio executive Frank Yablans, the younger brother of producer Irwin Yablans.



https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/29/business/media/frank-yablans-film-executive-dies-at-79.html



1936: In Brooklyn, “Rose (Farber) Kovel” and Louis Kovel, “an accountant and the namesake of the Kovel Rule, a legal doctrine that extended the lawyer-client confidentiality privilege to other professionals and experts” gave birth to psychiatrist and “eco-socialist” Joel Kovel.



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/obituaries/dr-joel-kovel-a-founder-of-ecosocialism-is-dead-at-81.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well



https://louisproyect.org/2018/05/02/joel-kovel-1936-2018-an-appreciation/



1936: “Leaders of the Arab Youth party began collecting signatures for a memorandum demanding an Arab boycott of the Royal Commission” coming to Palestine to investigate the causes of the violence begun by the Arabs in April, 1936.  The Arabs are demanding that Jewish immigration and land sales must be stopped before there will be any negotiations.



1936: It was reported today that Senator William H. King cabled Max Rhoade, the Washington representative of the Zionist Organization of America from San Juan that “As president of the American Palestine Committee, I have followed with much anxiety and concern the serious disorders for the last few months in Palestine” and have refrained from any public expression with regard to Great Britain’s policy in Palestine because he thinks we can rely “on the good faith of the British to carry out their pledge to Jews and to the League of Nations for the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.



1936: “Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of the Zionist Organization of America said today on his return from Europe that the great task facing the Zionist movement in this country and of all Jews throughout the world who are concerned with the rebuilding of the Jewish national homeland in Palestine was firm resistance to the threatened suspension of Jewish immigration in Palestine.”



1937(22nd of Elul, 5697): Lionel Walter Rothschild passed away. The 2nd Baron Rothschild was a British zoologist who became a great collector and founded the Rothschild Natural History Museum in London. The museum was opened to the public in 1892. As the eldest son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild, he was somewhat of a disappointment to his father as his life was devoted to natural history and not banking. His interest in natural history began when he was a child, collecting butterflies. Numerous species and sub-species of animals were named after him. He issued Novitates Zoologicae from Tring, his country estate and published scores of scientific papers. He received his titles on the death of his father in 1915. The Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum became part of the Natural History Museum.



1937: Birthdate of Philip Arthur Shulman, the native of Glasgow, Scotland who gained game as Phil Shulman, “a member of the progressive rock group Gentle Giant.”



1938(30th of Av, 5698): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1938: As British forces sought to bring an end to the latest wave of Arab terror two Arab youths were wounded, one fatally, when troops today opened fire on a group that refused to disperse when caught setting fire to a closed wine shop at Jaffa. Meanwhile “armed Arab completed the evacuation of the Jewish settlement of Jamam in the Beersheba district and set fire to every building there.”


1939: In France, “the Communist deputies” were excluded from the Assembly “after the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed.”


1939: “After two days of packing, truck convoys” filled with art from the Louvre including the collection of engravings, drawings and illustrated books that had belonged to Baron Edmond de Rothschild which had been donated in 1935 “began to leave Paris” as it became obvious that war was about to break out in Europe.


1940(23rd of Av, 5700): One of first to reprisals against the Germans, Israel Karp was shot by Germany military authority in France.


1940(23rd of Av, 5700): Sixty-seven year Alice Lillie Seligsberg “a social worker and Zionist who helped to found Hadassah:” passed away today. (As reported by Marilyn J. Sladowsky)



1940: The Vichy French government rescinded the law forbidding racial hatred.  This made hating Jews legal.


1941(4th of Elul, 5701): First group of 11,000 Jews from Kamenets are taken out of town to a pit and gunned down in bomb craters.


1941: Isidore Newman who was being trained as a Wireless Oifficer with SOE “went for a long walk today saying he was suffering from nostalgia.


1941(4th of Elul, 5701): The Nazis massacred the Jewish community of Posvol, Lithuania


1941(4th of Elul, 5701): “Detachments of the Einsatzgruppen in Kamenets-Podolsk and troops under the command of the Higher SS and Police Leader for the southern region, SS General Friedrich Jeckeln, began to carry out mass killings of the Jewish deportees as well as the local Jewish population.


1942: Thirty-six year old Mohammad Essad Bey, who was Lev Nussimbaum before converting to Islam passed away today.



1942(14th of Elul, 5702):  Eight thousand Jews from Wieliczka, Poland, are killed at the Belzec death camp.


1942(14th of Elul, 5702):  When a transport train carrying 6000 Jews from Miedzyrzec, Poland, arrives at the Treblinka extermination camp, guards discover that all 6000 have died of suffocation during the 75-mile journey.


1942(14th of Elul, 5702):  Several thousand Jews from Chortkov, Poland, are assembled in the town square and forced to witness the murders of the community's children


1943(26th of Av, 5703): All the Jews working at a cement factory at Drogobych, Ukraine, near the Janówska labor camp, are murdered. One of the victims is Dr. Mojzesz Bay, a 36-year-old graduate of the Sorbonne.


1943: “Hitler’s Madman,” a “film about the assassination of Nazi Reinhard Heydrich and the Lidice massacre revenge taken by the Germans” based on a story by Albrecht Joseph and Emil Ludwig with a screenplay by Peretz Hirschbein, Melvin Levy and Edgar G. Ulmer was released in the United States today.


1944: Bruce Sundlin the U.S. bomber pilot who had been working the Marquis (French Resistance) and serving with OSS was among those who took part in the battle at Marseilles today during which most of the city was liberated from German control.


1944: As of today Victor Cavendish Bentinck, assistant under-secretary in the British Foreign Office still doubted the existence of gas chambers when he said, 'I think we weaken our case against the Germans by publicly giving credence to atrocity stories for which we have no evidence.'These mass executions in gas chambers remind me of the story of the employment of human corpses during the last (1914-18) war for the manufacture of fat, which was a grotesque lie and led to the true stories of German enormities being brushed aside as being mere propaganda.'


1945: Premiere of “True Glory”  -- “a  documentary account of the allied invasion of Europe during World War II compiled from the footage shot by nearly 1400 cameramen” – directed by Garson Kanin with a script created by Paddy Chayefsky and Eric Maschwitz among others.


1945: Today Hermann Göring became the first Nuremberg defendant to be interrogated intensively by the Allies.


1946(30th of Av, 5706): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1947: “Golden Earrings” a spy film with a script by Helen Deutsch and Abraham Polonsky and music by Victor Young was released in the United States today by Paramount Pictures.


1947: In Queens, NY, Jewish police officer Howard I. Golbach and his wife Marjorie who was not Jewish gave birth to Barbara Goldbach who gained fame as actress Barbara Bach the future wife of Beatle Ringo Starr.


1948: Birthdate of Los Angeles native Elliot Miles Goodman the Antioch graduate and composer who was the cousin of Johnny Mandel.



1951: Rabbi Israel Goldstein was re-elected today president of the World Confederation of General Zionists, and Mrs. Rose Halprin and Dr. Emanuel Neumann vice presidents. They are all from New York.


1952: In Peekskill, NY, Judy and Milton Rubenfeld gave birth to Paul Reubenfeld who gained games as Pee-Wee Herman.


 1952: The Knesset endorsed by an overwhelming vote the agreement with the US for the purchase of arms and for the negotiations in Washington for military aid, within the framework of the Mutual Security Act. The vote came in the form of a vote of no confidence in the government, introduced by Mapam and supported by the Communists, which was defeated by 69 votes to 13.


1952: Reparation negotiations between West Germany and Israel end in Luxembourg; West Germany to pay 3 billion Deutschmarks.


1953: Birthdate of Jonathan David Simons, the native of Glasgow whose “first novel The Credit Draper…is set primarily with the Glasgow Jewish community in the early part of the 20th century.”



1954: “Shield for Murder” directed by Howard W. Koch was released today in the United States by United Artists.


1955(9th of Elul, 5715): Parashat Ki Teitzei


1955: Sandy “Koufax threw a two-hit, 7–0 complete game shutout against the Cincinnati Reds for his first major league win.”


1955(9th of Elul, 5715): Sophie Ratner, the wife of Benjamin Ratner and the mother of director, producer and actor Gregory Ratoff known for playing suave, sophisticates, passed away today.


1957(30th of Av, 5717): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1960: In Cleveland, Ohio, Victor and Ellen Cohn gave birth to Goldman Sachs millionaire Donald Cohn the husband of Lisa A. Pevaroff who was named Director of the National Economic Council by President Donald Trump whom he continued to serve despite publicly expressing his displeasure with the President’s response to Nazi Torchlight Marchers in Charlottesville, VA.


1964: The Democratic National Convention comes to an end having nominated two pro-Israel candidates – Lyndon Johnson for President and Hubert Humphrey for Vice President. Johnson had helped Jewish refugees enter the United States through Mexico in the 1930’s, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and would stand up to Russians on behalf of Israel in 1967 in stark contrast to the craven behavior of the Eisenhower administration during the Suez Crisis of 1956)


1964: “Mary Poppins” with an Oscar winning score by Richard and Robert Sherman and featuring Ed Wynn as “Uncle Albert” premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles.


1964: Sixty-two year old comedian Gracie Allen, the wife and partner of George Burns, passed away today.
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=22




1967: Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles, passed away.  Yes, the lads from Liverpool were managed by an English Jew.


1968(21st of Av, 5727): Movie Director Robert Z. Leonard passed away



1969(13th of Elul, 5729): Sixty-three year old Erika Mann, the actress and writer who was the “eldest daughter of Thomas Mann and Katia Mann and who had been baptized as a Protestant passed away today.


1969: “Medium Cool” a directed, written and filmed by Harold Wexler and starring Verna Bloom was released in the United States today.


1971(6th of Elul, 5731):  Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House and panel member on the television hit What’s My Line, passed away at the age of 73


1971: Sixty-seven year old Margaret Bourke-White, one of the great photographers of the 20thcentury, if not of all times whose father was from an Orthodox Jewish family and whose mother was Irish passed away today. (For those who grew up in a world of hand-held video cams, satellite communications and cable network news, it is hard to appreciate the important role played photographers and photo-journalists like Bourke-White.  Her photos filled the pages of such publications as Life Magazine, which brought the world of natural disasters, war and high fashion to Middle America. If you know anything about Jews and photography you will see why this was a must post item and a reason for supporting Patrilinealism)   





1973: “The Recipes of Chairman Mao" by Marshall Brickman's appeared in The New Yorker. (Brickman was Jewish; Mao was not)



1976: It was reported today that the “release of Briton Robert G. Clegg” who had been charged with spying for the Israelis during the raid on Entebbe by Idi Amin came as a surprise since the Uganda government had previously said “it had no record of him ever being in the country.”


1977: The US State Department confirmed that a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization had applied for a visa to the US in order to be allowed to open a PLO Information Center there. But the PLO¹s rejection, at a special meeting held in Damascus, of both UN Resolution 242 and Israel¹s right to exist was seen here as a serious setback to President Carter¹s Middle East peace efforts. He was reported to be in a rather pessimistic mood.


1977: In Bucharest Prime Minister Menachem Begin described his Sabbath visit to the Bucharest synagogue as the most moving day in my life since the day Israel announced its independence. Begin sought to comfort Romanian Jews and praised President Ceausescu for his policy of tolerance toward religious practice. Ceausescu would lose much of his luster and ultimately be killed during a anti-Communist revolt.


1979: Funeral services for Joseph H. Blass, a member of Young Israel of Flatbush and the husband of Edythe Blass, the “Honorary Sisterhood President” are scheduled to take place this morning in Brooklyn


1979: After Lord Mountbatten was murdered by a terrorist bomb he was buried in Romsey Abbey which
was celebrated for its collection of Hebrew books.


1980(15th of Elul, 5740): Sam Levenson passed away at the age of 68. Levenson was a Brooklyn school teacher who became a television star in the 1950’s. The Sam Levenson Show was quite popular in its day.  This was quite since surprising considering the source of Levenson’s humor.  He was the son of Jewish immigrants who had worked as a school teacher in Brooklyn. These experiences were the basic material for his witty stories and quips.




1983: Barry Manilow (Barry Alan Pincus) “performed a landmark open-air concert at Blenheim Palace in Britain, an event that he told the audience was "one of the most exciting nights" in his life being the first such event ever held at that venue and was attended by a conservative estimate of 40,000 people.”


1986: ''We Were So Beloved,'' Manfred Kirchheimer's documentary about Jews who escaped Germany before the Holocaust opened today Film Forum 1 in New York City. (As reported by Vincent Canby)



1988: “A Friendship in Vienna,” a film set in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss starring Stephen Mach and Edward Asner premiered today on the Disney Channel.


1988(14th of Elul, 5748): Seventy-nine year old Dr. Max Black passed way today in Ithaca, NY.



1988: A single was recorded today with Carole Bayer Sager’s “A Groovy Kind of Love” on the “A-side.”


1989(26th of Av, 5749): Fifty-eight year old Melvin “Mel” Seeman , the Lincoln High graduate and star forward and center for NYU passed away.


1992: FOX broadcast the first episode of “The Heights” produced by Aaron Spelling.


1993: “Estate Fee To Wachtler Is $800,000” published today



1994: After 320 performances the curtain came down on the original Broadway production of Neil Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor”


1995(1st of Elul, 5755): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1996(12th of Elul, 5756): Fifty tow year old Tel Aviv native Yair Rosenblum the composer who was musical director of the IDF passed away today.



1997(24th of Av, 5757):  Forty-eight year old television whiz-kid executive Brandon Tartikoff passed away.




1998: Eric Edelman began serving as U.S. Ambassador to Finland.


1999: “The Muse” a comedy directed, written by and starring Albert Brooks and featuring Mark Feuerstein was released in the United States today by October Films


2000: The New York Times book section featured reviews of Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms by Jewish born education reformer Diane Ravitch.The Secret Parts of Fortune
Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms
by Ron Rosenbaum andThe Presidential Difference: Leadership Style From FDR to Clintonby Fred Irwin Greenstein


2000(26th of Av, 5760): Sixty-five year old Gilbert de Botton, the financial manager who was a descendant of the rabbinical scholar Abraham de Botton passed away. (As reported by Paul Lewis)



2002: Thirty-eight year old Meir Lixenberg was shot today by terrorists.


2001: Israeli helicopters fired a pair of rockets through office windows and killed Mustafa Zibri, Secretary General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He was also known as Abu Ali Mustafa. “The PFLP is designated a terrorist organization by Israel and many western states. Israel held Mustafa personally responsible for 10 different car-bomb attacks undertaken by the PFLP during his time as general secretary.”  He had been allowed to return to the West Bank in a deal worked out between Arafat and Barak.  But apparently killing Israelis was more attractive than following the path of peace.


2002: Moshe "Bogie" Ya'alon told Haaretz; "The Palestinian threat harbors cancer-like attributes that have to be severed. There are all kinds of solutions to cancer. Some say it's necessary to amputate organs but at the moment I am applying chemotherapy."


2003(29th of Av, 5763): Ninety-one year old Austrian born American architect and designer Henry P. Glass who survived Dachau and Buchenwald passed away today.



2004(10th of Elul, 5764): Sixty-four year old actress Susan Peretz passed away today from Breast Cancer.



2004: “Adam & Paul” a movie about drug addicts directed by Lenny Abrahamson was released in Ireland today by Element Pictures.


2004: “The Brothers” a Danish film directed by Susan Bier was released today by Nordisk Film.


2005: Under the leadership of President Scott Cowen, “Tulane began to publicly respond to the arrival of Hurricane Katrina today with an initial plan to close the university until September 1.”


2005:  The Jerusalem Post reported on the Red Sea Jazz Festival at Eilat, Israel’s southern seaport.  This marked the 19thyear for this annual event and the response of the crowd indicated that Jazz is a live, well and thriving in Israel.  Apparently the rocket attack in Jordan which resulted in an errant warhead hitting Eilat by mistake did not dampen the spirit of the attendees who ranged in age from teens to grandmothers swaying in the aisles.


2006: In “Green's Chase Revives Greenberg's Name and Fame,” published today, Murray Chass notes that “Shawn Green, with 314 career home runs, is only 17 from matching Hank Greenberg's standard as the career leader among Jewish players?   '’I would say the chances are outstanding; he'll probably do it as a New York Met next year,'’ said Steve Greenberg, Hank's son and the former deputy baseball commissioner. Green's passing his father would not bother him, Greenberg added. ''Why would it bother me?'' he said. ''Ed Kranepool broke my dad's record at James Monroe High School.''''I'm fine with it,'' he added. ''I think it's great. I'm fine with anything that keeps my dad's name in the news. The last 10 years have been incredible. I think my dad is better known among sports fans who never saw him play than he was 20 years ago with a generation that never saw him play.'' Hank Greenberg, who played from 1933 through 1947, missing nearly four seasons during World War II, nearly matched Babe Ruth's single-season record in 1938 when he hit 58 home runs. But, his son said, Hank didn't care much about home runs. ''Runs batted in is what he lived for,'' Greenberg said. ''If you had asked him what accomplishments he was proudest of, it would be R.B.I. for a single season and career. That's why I grew up not thinking about home runs as his legacy.'' Hank Greenberg led the American League in runs batted in four times, driving in 170 and 183 sandwiched around a season in which injuries limited him to 12 games. In 1935, he had 103 R.B.I. by the All-Star Game. Greenberg, an investment banker, is engaged in selling naming rights for the Mets' new park. He said his father was once asked about being known as the greatest Jewish slugger ever. '''I don't think of myself that way,''' he quoted his father as saying. '''I think of myself in terms of Gehrig, DiMaggio and Williams.''' If Green does pass Greenberg for career home runs, the name of the standard-bearer won't change all that much. In fact, Green's grandfather shortened the family name from Greenberg.


2006: The Sunday New York Times book section included a review of Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn(St. Louis born Jewish novelist, travel writer and journalist), edited by Caroline Moorehead.


2006: “New Torah scroll presented to the Beth Israel Synagogue in New Orleans”



2006: As those who study history know, history is determined, in no small part, by the person writing the history.  With that in mind, please excuse  this shameless orgy of self-adulation in publishing the following letter as it appeared in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.


Letters


A Man in Cedar Rapids


To the Editor:


After a lifetime of reading about Jewish lawyers, doctors, brilliant writers and Nobel Prize winners, I cannot tell you how excited I was to read about A Woman In Jerusalem by A. B. Yehoshua (Aug. 13). I am totally blown away — a novel where the leading character is a Jewish human resources manager. I am a longtime Jewish human resources director and I never thought I would make it as a character in a novel, let alone the main character. Of course, I do this in Cedar Rapids, which is not exactly Jerusalem. But if you ever want to know what it is like to be Jewish in the heartland, hey, that’s a book I could write.


Mitchell A. Levin


Cedar Rapids, Iowa


2007: An article published today entitled “The Kibbutz Sheds Socialism and Gains Popularity,” described the changing face of kibbutz movement in Israel.


2007: As Phil Spector stood trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson, Bruce Clarkson, his second defense lawyer withdrew and was replaced with Linda Kenney Baden.


2007:  In Cedar Rapids, Harold Becker, a pillar of the Jewish community and Guaranty Bank & Trust was honored for donating $75,000 to The Arc of East Central Rapids.  This is just one more example of Mr. Becker’s philanthropic efforts on behalf of both the Jewish Community and the people of Cedar Rapids and its environs.


2007: The New Republic featured a review of Davide Ferrairo’s film, “Primo Levi’s Journey,” which follow, figuratively, Levi’s footsteps as made his way from Auschwitz back to his home in Turin.


2007(13th of Elul, 5767): Seventy-two year old, Gad Yaacobi passed away. A native of Kfar Vitkin he was an MK and held several ministerial positions.



2008(26th of Av, 5768): Eighty one year old Abie Nathan the Israeli air force trained pilot and self-declared peace activist who flew a plan from Israel to Egypt a decade before Sadat flew to Jerusalem passed away today.




2008: Yale University announced that Peter Salovey will succeed Andrew Hamilton as Provost, making him the fourth provost appointed by President Richard Levin


2008: Second night of the inaugural Gilboa Coexistence Festival taking place throughout the Gilboa region featuring David Broza with Yair Dalal and Ibrahim Eid.


2008 Florida Congressman Robert Wexler addressed the Democratic National Convention for the first time on the subject of national security and foreign policy.  Wexler represents Florida’s 19thdistrict, one of the most heavily Jewish congressional districts in the United States and I considered a strong advocate for Israel in Washington.


2008: The Washington Postfeatured a review of The End of the Jews, the new novel by Adam Mansbach.


2009: Opening of the Ceremonies commemorating the 65thAnniversary of the Liquidation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto in Lodz by German authorities.


2009: Six days after he passed away, funerals services are scheduled to be held for 93 year old Robert Bendheim, the “former president and chairman of M. Lowenstein Corporation, member of the Board of Trustees of Mt. Sinai Hospital who had graduated from Princeton and served in the Navy during WW II.



2009:The Israeli unemployment rate rose to 8 percent in the second quarter despite encouraging economic indicators pointing to a recovery, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported today.


2009:Sketched on yellowing parchment, the 29 blueprints presented to Israel’s prime minister today lay out the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in chilling detail, with gas chambers, crematoria, delousing facilities and watch towers drawn to scale. 


2009: Eighty-two year old Alex Grass the creator of Rite Aid Corporation passed away today. (As reported by Charles Duhigg)



2009:The publicly funded Multicultural Center's (Werkstatt der Kulturen) decision to remove educational panels of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, who was an ally of Adolf Hitler, from a planned exhibit, sparked outrage today among a district mayor, the curator of the exhibit, and the Berlin Jewish community.


2010: In Cedar Rapids, IA, Temple Judah celebrates the start of the fourth season of “Musical Shabbat.”


2010: In “Black and Jewish, and Seeing No Contradiction,” published today Trymaine Lee describes the life of African-Americans who are Orthodox Jews.



2011:Hutzot Hayotzer, the popular international arts and crafts fair that has become a Jerusalemite ritual, is scheduled to come to a close today.


2011: In the United Kingdom the curtain comes down on “Nine Suitcase” “a solo piece performed by British actor David Prince” of a this theatrical adaptation of Béla Zsolt’s novel of the same name which recounts the experiences of the author during the Holocaust.



2011:Tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets tonight to participate in demonstrations protesting the high cost of living in Israel.


2011:Saeb Erekat repeated his claim that meeting thatConsul-General Daniel Rubenstein had threatened that the US would cut off aid to the Palestinians if they insisted on going to the UN adding that the Americans have threatened to veto the PA statehood bid and cut off financial aid to the Palestinians.


2011: Norfolk’s Beth El Synagogue did not hold service today as Hurricane Irene barreled its way up the East Coast. 


2011(27th of Av, 5771): Eighty-three year Ezat Delijani, Iran born businessman and philanthropist passed away today. (As reported by Dennis McLellan)



2012: Christian Dawid is scheduled to appear tonight at The Montreal Jewish Music Festival.


2012: “Hutzot Hayotzer, the popular international arts and crafts fair that has become a Jerusalemite ritual” is scheduled to come to an end.


2012(9th of Elul, 5772): Seventy-one year old Duke Basketball start Art Heyman passed away today. (As reported by William Yardley)



2012(9th of Elul, 5772): Ninety-five year old WW II Australian RAAF war hero Sir Richard Kingsland who had changed his name from Julius Cohen “to avoid anti-Semitism” passed  away today.



2012:President Shimon Peres said today that he could not understand the stupidity of the ongoing rocket campaign being waged by Palestinian terrorists, which has escalated in the lead in to Israel's 2012-2013 school year.   


2012:An IDF soldier was critically injured during a joint exercise involving infantry units and armored corps in the Golan Heights this morning, according to the IDF Spokesman's Office. The soldier, from the IDF's Golani Brigade, received first aid treatment on the scene before being evacuated to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa.


2013: Tango Apassionata in Yiddish – A Night with Sharon Brauner is scheduled to take place at the Budapest Music Center.


2013: The Muzsikás Ensemble is scheduled to perform tonight as part of the Jewish Summer Festival in Budapest.


2013: With the US poised for military action in Syria and amid uncertainty as to how Damascus will react, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon made clear today that while Israel will not get involved, it will respond severely if attacked. (As reported by Herb Keinon)


2013: “The 5774 (2013-2014) school year formally opened today with over 2.13 million schoolchildren arriving in more than 4,500 schools nationwide for their first day of classes.” (As reported by Haviv Rettig Gur)



2014(1st of Elul, 5774): Rosh Chodesh Elul – the shofar is blown for the first time


2014: Dr. Eric Goldman is scheduled to present the final session of “Hollywood Zion: Israel Through the Lens of American Film Makers.”


2014: Noa Meir, Director of Israel Action Center & International Affairs for Jewish Community Relations is scheduled to speak at Shaare Tefila in Olney, MD on “Current Events and How to Advocate for Israel.”


2014: “An Israeli officer in the Golan Heights was moderately injured by apparent stray fire from fighting in Syria this morning, as an al-Qaeda linked rebel group took control of the only crossing between Israel and Syria.” (As reported by Spencer Ho)


2014: While Prime Minister Netanyahu’s supporters praised the most recent ceasefire, others including the Foreign Minister and residents of southern Israel questioned its value or condemned it as a failure because Hamas remained in power.


2014: Aaron Sofer, a New Jersey yeshiva student who disappeared while hiking in the Jerusalem Forest has not been found despite the offer of 100,000 shekel reward by his parents.


2015: “Prosecutors in Kansas rested their case today “in the murder trial of white supremacist” 74 year old Klu Klux Klan member Frazier Glenn Cross” “after playing a recorded call in which he expressed surprise the three people fatally shot outside two Jewish centers in suburban Kansas City, MO,last year were not Jewish.” (As reported by Kevin Murphy)


2015:  Miri Ben-Ari, a Grammy Award-Winning sabra violinist/producer/humanitarian, “UN Goodwill Ambassador of Music to the United Nations Associations of Brazil”, and Global Brand Ambassador for Harman Kardon is scheduled to perform at the Highline Ballroom


2015: The historic Georgia Railroad Freight Depot is scheduled to host “Kosher Food & Wine Atlanta” during which Sandra Bank of A Kosher Touch Catering will be honored for her twenty years of service to the community.


2015: Friends and family of Murray Wolfe, led by his loving wife Charlene, prepare to say one last good bye as he his laid to rest in California.


2016: The International Al Jolson Society is scheduled to host “The 20thAnnual Long Island Jolson Festival” featuring a “A Tribute to Al Jolson.”


2016: At Temple Israel in Memphis, TN Michael Hirsch, son of Marci and Geoffrey Hirsch, will become bar mitzvah.,


2016: Agudas Achim Congregation which is now located in Coralville, IA, is scheduled to host its Centennial Celebration Dinner in Iowa City.


2016(23rdof Av, 5776): Shabbat Ekev;


2016(23rdof Av, 5776): Seventy-nine year old Jamie Davidovich who “helped create the Artists’ Television Network, which broadcast “The Live! Show” passed away today. (As reported by William Grimes)



2017(5thof Elul, 5777): Eighty-five year old Syd Silverman who had followed in the footsteps of Sime Silverman to become the editor of Variety passed away today.



2017: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Campus Confidential: How College Works, or Doesn’t for Professors, Parents and Students by Jacques Berlinerblau ,Galaxy Love: Poems by Gerald Stern, This Is Just A Test by Madelyn Rosenberg and Wendy Wan-Long Shang and Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Case of R.B.G. vs. Inequalityby Jonah Winter.


2017(5thof Elul, 5777): One hundred and four year old  ”Maj. Gen. (res.) Yitzhak Pundak, a career military officer, civil servant and diplomat” passed away today



2017: As Hurricane Harvey ravaged Houston this weekend, The JCC of Houston which collected relief supplies would remain closed today and based on reports from the Texas Jewish Herald-Voice homes in heavily Jewish populated Houston subdivisions, including Meyerland, were reporting flooding this morning, for the third time in as many years.


2017: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education a “special presentation with Romani Scholar Dr. Ian Hancock” styled “Romani Life: Then and Now.”


2017: The Federation of Greater Washington is scheduled to host “Grand Slam Sunday – Jewish Community Day Nationals Park.”


2017: “Our Great Tchaikovsky,” Hershey Felder’s latest one man show which challenged the actor’s ability to deal with the composer’s alleged anti-Semitism is scheduled to come to an end a the Hartford State in Hartford, CT


2017: The Red Sea Jazz Festival is scheduled to open at Eilat.


2017: The Kansas City Jewish Community is scheduled to host “Day of Discovery – Explore the Joy of Jewish Learning” in Overland Park, Kansas.


2017: As part of its centenary celebration Montreal’s Federation CJA to host “a big birthday party…that promises family fun.”



2017: “An exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum called ‘Noah’s Beasts: Sculpted Animals from Ancient Mesopotamia” is scheduled to come to a close today.



2018: In Jerusalem, Mercaz Hatarbuyot is scheduled to host a “Tribute to Chopin” featuring award winning concert pianist Eliah Zabaly this evening.


2018: The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to host a series of concerts starting at 3 p.m. featuring Sara Aroeste, Gerard Edery, Nashaz, Adam Maalouf and the Future of the Tribe and Steven Cehera at the Center for Jewish History.


 


This Day, August 28, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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August 28

388: Magnus Maximus, an Hispanic usurper to the throne of the western Roman Empire passed away. During his disputed reign Maximus issued an edict of which censured Christians at Rome for burning down a Jewish synagogue which was condemned by Bishop Ambrose who said people exclaimed: ‘the emperor has become a Jew’.



430: St. Augustine of Hippo passed away. Augustine believed that Jews should be allowed to survive in a Christian world to provide credence to roots of Christianity. But Jews should live at best as “second class” citizens in that Christian world to serve as a reminder of their fall from God’s favor for rejecting Jesus as the Son of God and as proof that God had made the Christians the new Chosen People.



1189: The Crusaders begin the Siege of Acre under Guy of Lusignan. This two year long siege was part of the Third Crusade which is known as a confrontation between England’s King Richard I and Saladin. The siege followed the Crusader defeat at the Battle of the Horns of Hittin but was followed by Crusader victories near Jaffa. In the end, the Moslems kept Jerusalem, the Jews of England suffered under the rule of Prince John in the absence of the Crusading Richard and the Jewish population of Eretz Israel suffered further depredations and despoliation.



1349: Six thousand Jews are killed in Mainz after having been accused of being the cause of the plague.



1378: Having been promised the payment of 20,000 gulden in “voluntary taxes” in 1377 by the Jewish community, the city of Worms “was granted the right of extending protection to the Jews.”



1453: Zbigniev Olesnicki, Bishiop of Cracow and a heretic hunter named Capistrano, began a six month long campaign turn Poland’s King Casimir against the Hussite heretics and the Jews of Cracow.



1481: John II of Portugal who chose Abraham Zacuto to serve as Royal Astronomer, began his reign as King of Portugal.



1511: The Portuguese conquer Malacca. “Malacca, Malaysia was in the 16th century a Jewish hub not only for Portuguese Jews but also for Jews from around the Red Sea and the Malabar. With its synagogues and rabbis, Jewish Culture in Malacca was alive and well. Visible Jewish presence existed in Malacca right up to the 18th century. Due to the Portuguese inquisition a lot of the Jews of Malacca assimilated into the Malacca Portuguese (Eurasian) community. They are a creole community often referred to as Kristang; and their Portuguese dialect Papia Kristang.”



1521: The Ottoman Turks occupy Belgrade. “The first written records of the presence of Jews in Belgrade date back to the 16th century when the city came under Ottoman control. “At that time Belgrade boasted a strong Jewish Ladino-speaking Sephardic community mostly settled in the central Belgrade neighborhood called Dorćol. The city's Ashkenazi Jews, many of them from Central Europe and nearby Austria-Hungary, mostly lived near the Sava River in the area where the current active synagogue stands.” Even with the official “second class” status accorded to Jews under the laws of Islam, the Ottoman Empire offered a haven for Jews who had been expelled from Spain and/or were fleeing the clutches of the Inquisition.



1565: St. Augustine, the oldest European settlement in what is now the United States, is established on the coast of Florida. According to Marcia Zerivitz, Founding Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Jewish Museum of Florida, "It is possible that Jews were living in St. Augustine as conversos or secret Jews when Ponce de Leon first discovered Florida. There are Sephardic names among those who lived there in the 1500s. This is nearly 100 years prior to the first settlement of Jews in New York in 1654. Documented Jewish history in Florida began in 1763 when the Treaty of Paris was signed at the conclusion of the French and Indian War. In that treaty, Florida was taken from the Spanish and given to the British. Until that time, Jews had been prohibited from living in Florida."



1619: Ferdinand II is elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The Jesuit trained monarch was an arch foe of the Protestants who ruled during the first 18 years of the Thirty Years War. His treatment of the Jews was uneven to say the least. It was influenced by his hatred of the Protestants, the needs to finance the war and his Jesuit training. He protected the right of Jews to live in Worms and Frankfort because the Protestants had tried to drive them out of the city. He warned his generals not treat the Jews harshly since they were a source of funds for their fight. This protection came at a high price as can be seen by the 40,000 florins that the Jews of Bohemia were forced to contribute annually to support the war effort. He did play a role in the unfortunate affair surrounding Lipmann Heller, but the original cause of the affair was one of jealousy in the Prague Jewish community. Once the emperor was involved no good could come of the matter. He did order the Rabbi brought to court in chains and even though he was found innocent of the charges, his Jewish opponents would not stop their attacks which resulted in the Emperor removing him as the Chief Rabbi in the Bohemian city. Now that the Jews had brought themselves to the Catholic monarch’s attention, he issued a decree in February, 1630, compelling the Jews to listen to conversation sermons every Saturday morning between eight and nine. Two hundred Jews of both sexes had to be in attendance and at least forty of them had to be between 15 and twenty years of age. The Jesuit trained monarch hoped these measures would lead to mass conversion of Jews. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for the Jews, the Jesuits to whom he entrusted this task were more concerned with fighting Protestants than converting Jews.



1655: Peter Stuyvesant barred Jews from military service. Asher Levy led the fight for Jews to able to serve as part of the local guard force. He rejected the notion of paying a special tax in lieu of military service. Service in the militia was the sign of first class citizenship. In a resolution of the New Amsterdam Council, Stuyvesant writes, "Whether the Jewish people who reside in this city, should also train and mount guard with the citizen's bands, this was taken into consideration, and deliberated upon…" The result was that the Dutch members of the citizen guard had a "disinclination" and "unwillingness" to be on guard with Jews in the same guardhouse. They also pointed out that Jews were "not counted among the citizens…"



1703 The Aleinu prayer was prohibited in Brandenberg, Germany. Aleinu,( עָלֵינוּ) composed by Rav (one of the great Talmudist (d. 247)) had been part of the ritual prayer for almost 1500 years. It served as a focal point for anti-Jewish attacks. Although the wording "For they bow down to emptiness and vanity and to a God that cannot save" which was taken from Isaiah (45:20) referred to idol-worshipers, some Christian leaders claimed it was an attack on Christianity. The part of the prayer was eventually eradicated from the Ashkenazic siddur (prayerbook) entirely and only reprinted recently.



1730: King Frederick William I, gave permission to Moses ben Aaron to serve as the rabbi of Frankfort-on-the Oder.



1766: Birthdate of Simon Edler von Lamel the native of Bohemia who became a leading Austrian merchant while working to improve the conditions of his fellow Jews as could be seen by his efforts to reduce their taxes. (Something that was not intended to benefit him)



1765: Benjamin Ze’ev ben Menachem Mendel married Sarah bat Eliezer today.



1782: After the death of Philadelphia merchant Moses Mordecai, a signatory of the 1765 Non-Importation Resolutions, in 1781, his twenty-one year old widow Elizabeth also known as Esther today married Jacob I Cohen who helped to found the “Virginia’s first synagogue – Kahal Kadosh Beth Shalom in Richard.”



1789: In France, adoption of the declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.



1793: Abraham Aaron who had passed away yesterday was buried today at the Alderney Road (Globe Road) Jewish Cemetery where his tombstone contains a Hebrew inscription saying “Here lies an upright and proper man, Abraham ben Uri HaCohen of Hichburg.”



1793: Jonas and Sarah Levy were wed today at the Great Synagogue.



1797: Four months after the entry of the French army into Padua Italy, the provisional government decreed that "Jews are able to live in every part of the city." Jews enlisted in the National Guard and the main street in the ghetto was changed to Via Libera. Unfortunately as in most parts of Italy, the newly won freedom only lasted until the arrival of Austrian troops 8 months later.



1799: Birthdate of Immanuel Wolf who gained fame as German Jewish educator Immanuel Wohlwill the director of the Jacobson School in Seesen.



1819: As conditions for the Jews of Hamburg continued to deteriorate Martin Steinthal today told how he had been forced to leave the Schweitzer Pavillion where he was told that “as a Jews there was no place for him this coffeehouse or in the larger society.”



1827: Two days after he had passed away, “Moses Isaacs of Cox’s Square, Bell Lane” was buried today at the Lauriston Road Jewish Cemetery.”



1828: Birthdate of Count Leo Tolstoy. As one commentator has said, Tolstoy did not like Jews, but he did not hate them which made him a cut above other Russian authors such as Dostoyevsky. In 1881 he reluctantly signed a private letter to the Czar protesting a pogrom and publicly protested the infamous pogrom at Kishinev. On the other hand, he held Jews responsible, in part, for loss of the war with Japan. In the twilight of his career he expressed a desire to write how the teachings of Jesus, “who was not a Jew” were replaced by the teachings of Paul, who was a Jew.



1833: One day after he had passed away, “58 year old Meir bar Yehuda” was buried today at the “Brady Jewish Cemetery” today.



1833: The British enact the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 which put abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. One of the driving forces behind this was William Wilberforce who also was a leader of London’s Jews Society, a missionary Christian group who advocated the return of the Jewish people to Palestine.



1839: Birthdate of Hungarian-born “Austrian actor and theatre manager” Maximilian Steiner, the father of theatre managers Franz and Gabor Steiner and the grandfather of composer Max Steiner.



1840: During the Damascus Affair, Mehemet Ali’s personal physician, who was Jewish, removed a boil from the royal buttock. During the procedure, the doctor is reported to have told the Khedive that he would soon need all of his strength including the support of six million Jewish voices raised in his support.



1840: In attempt to avoid appearing to be caving into pressure from the European powers, Mehmet Ali dispatched an order to Damascus order that the Jewish prisoners should be set free much to the joy of Montefiore, Cremiuex and the Jews of Egypt, where he three synagogues in Alexandria “resounded with prayers of thanksgiving and blessing for Mehment Al…” The joy of the Jewish leaders would be dampened when they read the text of the document which “implied that the Jews were guilty” and that they were being released as an act of mercy.



1845: French banker Jules Isaac Mires sued his brother Alphonse, a wine merchants and his brother Edward in the Court of Assizes.



1846: In Natchez, Mississippi, Jessie and James Newlands gave birth to Francis Newlands, the Senator from Nevada who was the only Democrat to vote against the confirmation of Louis Brandeis as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.



1848: Birthdate of Lautenburg, Germany native David Davidson, the Breslau educated Rabbi who came to the United States in 1880 where he served on the “faculty of Hebrew Union College” and led several congregations including Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Des Moines from 1881 to 1885.



1849: One day after he had passed away, “47 year old Benjamin Levy” the wife of Eve Levy with whom he had four children – “Jane, Henry, Edward and Hannah” – was buried today at “Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.



1853: Henry David Thoreau’s journal entry described what would become “the ancestral vine to all of Lower East Side sugary sweet kosher wine.”  “I detect my neighbor’s ripening grapes by the scent twenty rods off, though they are concealed behind his house. Every passer knows of them. Perhaps he takes me to his back door a week afterward and shows me with an air of mystery his clusters concealed under the leaves, which he thinks will be ripe in a day or two—as if it were a secret. He little thinks that I smelled them before he did.” (As reported by Laurie Gwen Shapiro)



1855: “In Ponevezh, Kovno region of Lithuania,” “a prominent mashkil” and his wife gave birth David Apotheker the Yiddish poet who came to United States in 1888 where he combined the role of “insurance broker” with “membership in the nihilistic movement.



http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/yt/lex/A/apotheker-david.htm



1858: In New York City, Semel Sobel and the former Cecilia King gave birth to Isador Sobel to Erie, PA attorney and Republican political leader who served as President of Anshei Chesed and was the husband of Emma Auerhaim



1860: A column entitled General City News published today reported that “a new Jewish Congregation has been organized in this City, which for now is worshiping in Cooper Institute, Room No. 24 in the Cooper Institute, under the guidance of Rabbi Bondi, “whose learning and popularity will no doubt tend to advance this organization to the foremost rank among the Israelitish Congregations in this City.”



1861: Sergeant-Major Washington Cromelien completed his 3 month enlistment in the 27thRegiment which made it possible for him “accept a commission as a Lieutenant in the 65th Regiment



1862: Alfred A. Rinehard who would rise in rank from Sergeant to Captain began his service with Company D of the 148th Regiment.



1864: Ferdinand Johann Gottlieb Lassalle was mortally wounded when he fought duel with Count von Racowitza, the brother of Helene von Dönniges. The two had fallen in love, but her family opposed the marriage. 



1867: In Vilna, Israel David Lascoff and Anna R. Lascoff gave birth to Russian trained pharmacist Dr. J. Leon Lascoff , the husband of Clara Joacimson Lascoff who in 1882 came to Newy Ork where founded J. Leon Lascoff and Son, served as “president of the American Pharmaceutical Association and earned the Remington Honor Medal.



1869: Twelve year old Gottlieb Schumacher, the son of Jacob Schumach, arrived in Haifa from Buffalo today.



1870: In San Francisco, “at a meeting held in the synagogue,” members of Congregation Sherith Israel “subscribed the sum of $48,500 towards expunging the indebtedness of the synagogue and received in return ownership of the selected seats in the synagogue.”



1871: In New York, the B’nai Brith held their annual meeting at the Masonic Hall during which they elected officers for the coming year and heard the Treasurer reported that the balance on hand was $46,378.29.



1872:  Isaac Levitt, the son of Solomon Levitt and the former Ann Isaacs, was buried today at the “West Ham Jewish Cemtery.”



1873: A man named Irving who was in a San Francisco jail confessed to being the killer of New York businessman and Jewish community leader, Benjamin Nathan.



1874: Based on information that first appeared in the London Echo, that Edgardo Mortara is now Father Pius Mortara, an Augustine friary in the Monastery of Notre Dame de Beacuhene. At the age of six, Mortara was secretly baptized by a servant girl and then “kidnapped: by agents of the Papacy who raised him as a Catholic.



1874: In New York Fabian and Theresa Saxe gave birth to Martin Saxe, the New York State Senator who introduced a bill that would have banned public announcements such as were used by numerous establishments stating that "Jewish patronage is not solicited." The bill was inspired by an episode involving Bertha Rayner Frank in which she was refused a room at a hotel in Atlantic City.



1878: As Louisiana continued to grapple with the latest Yellow Fever Epidemic, it was reported today that Messrs. Levy, Loeb, Scheuer and Co. of New York has received and forwarded to Turo Infirmary and the Hebrew Benevolent Association of New Orleans the sum of $65.00



1878: The Hebrew Ladies’ Benevolent Society of Montgomery, Alabama, sent $100 to those suffering during the Yellow Fever Epidemic.



1880: At Frankfurt am Main Rabbi Isaac Seckel Bamberger and Julie Judith Bamberger (Klein)  gave birth to their daughter Rachel  who married Mortiz Hellmann making her Rachel Hellman the name under which she would meet death at Sobibor in 1943.



1880: Leopold de Rothschild was present at the cricket match played at Ascot House which lead to the family taking a leading role “in the formation of the Buckinghamshire County Cricket Club.”



1880: “Jews in Germany” published today cites information from the Pall Mall Gazette that “the silly season in Germany promises again to be enlivened by a crusade again the Jews.”



1881: It was reported today that Richard Andree, a German ethnographist who has been studying the world’s Jewish population for the last 11 years says there are 6,080,000 Jews in the world.  This includes 403,000 in Africa, 183,000 in Asia, 308,000 in American and 20,000 Australia.  His figures do include the Falashas or “pseudo-Jews.”



1882: The New York Times reviewed The Prophets of Israel and Their Place in History by W. Robertson Smith.



1882: It was reported that there 2,525 students enrolled in the various Sunday Schools hosted by New York’s Temples and Synagogues.  (This is a misleading number for anybody who knows how Jews educate their children)



1883: “Affairs In Foreign Lands” published today described riots against the Jews in Hungary and Russia where recent attacks on the Jews at Ekaterinoslav destroyed 346 houses and caused damage valued at 611,000 rubles and attacks on the Jews of Berchadi destroyed 80 houses leaving the inhabitants “without shelter and suffering great privations.



1883(25thof Av, 5643): Eighty-six year old Solomon Plessner whose controversial views forced him to leave Berlin and settle at Posen in 1843 where he served as a rabbi until he passed away today.



1883: As violence aimed at Jews worsened it was reported today that “the Russian government has made a serious effort “to suppress the outbreaks against the Jews” while “there are many indications that the authorities at Vienna and Budapest are not seriously trying to protect the Jews.”  (In other words, for once the Czar is trying to do something to protect his Jews, while Emperor Franz Josef is not)



1883: Following their meeting last month at the British Museum where they discussed the antiquity of a scroll of Deuteronomy recently discovered by Moses Shapira, Shapira wrote to Edward A. Bond from Amsterdam asking him to reconsider his evaluation of the scroll contending that “the sin of believing in a false document is much greater than disbelieving the truth.  The tendency of showing great scholarship by detecting forgery is rather great in our age.”



1884: It was reported today that Adolph Meyer, a wealthy Jewish cotton merchants, is challenging Representative Carlton Hunt for the 1st Congressional District in Louisiana.  Meyer is a Democrat while Hunt is a Republican supported by the sugar cane and rice planters.  (Meyer would have to wait until 1901 before he would win a seat in Congress)



1884: Three days after she had passed away, “Louisa Isaac, the daughter of Alexander Isaac” and the former “Sophie Levy” was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”



1884(7thof Elul, 5644): Seventy-three year old Philadelphia native Henry Myer Phillips, the first Jewish member of the House of Representative from Pennsylvania passed away today after which he was interred in Mount Sinai Cemetery.



http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=P000308



1885: Four days after she had passed away, Caroline Samuel, the daughter of “Philip Moses Samuel” and the former “Julia Goldsmid” was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”



1887: Lizzie Kauffman, the young German-Jewess whose body had been found floating in the river at Philadelphia is scheduled to be buried today by the Hebrew Association.



1888: The body of Jacob Noisotz, the Moldavian born banker and businessman who had passed away two days ago was taken to “Temple Beth Jacob” where after a service he was buried at the Jewish Cemetery in a service conducted by Rabbi Samuel David Tauber.



1888: It was reported today that Dr. John T. Nagle, the Deputy Register of Records at the Sanitary Headquarters has complained to Commissioner John Griffin that a Polish Jew was buried at Cypress Hills surrounded by “a few boards” rather than in a coffin.  He considered this burial, which is common among Polish Jews to be “unsanitary.”



1889(1stof Elul, 5649): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1890: As of today, it was reported that the Sanitarium for Hebrew Children has received donations totaling $8,000.17 including $309.70 from Isaac Stern, $306 from Benjamin Stern and $5 from Herman Mendel.



1890: In New York, “Harris and Jennie (Yarzumbek) Nowak gave birth Abraham Nowak, the holder of degrees from CCNY, Columbia University and JTS and WW I Army Chaplain who organized two congregations in Cleveland before moving to Beth El in New Rochelle and was the husband of Ann Segal with whom he had two sons – Wellville and Peter.



1890: Adolph Eisner who has been Superintendent of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn for the last six years left the asylum today “telling his wife that he was going to Coney Island.”



1891: Jewish immigrants from Russia, most of whom are penniless and do not speak English have begun arriving in Detroit, Michigan.



1891: American chemist Julius Stieglitz, the twin brother of Leopold Stieglitz and the younger brother of photographer Alfred Stieglitz married Anna Stieffel today.



1891: A Jewish agricultural colony was established in New Jersey. This was one of several attempts at Jewish settlement in the Americas. The failure of most of these projects confirmed the view that Jews needed a historical and religious link to the soil upon which they would work in order for them to succeed.



1892: Today is the last day for the accused murders of Jake Marks to appeal for a writ of habeas corpus and avoid extradition from Canada to the United States.  The victim and the accused (Blank and Rosenweig) are all Jewish.



1892: Four year old Ida Samyan, the daughter of Russian Jewish couple who had just arrived in London from Hamburg was admitted to the London “suffering with the symptoms of Asiatic Cholera.



1892: “The Prophets of Israel” published today provides a detailed review of Prophètes d'Israel par James Darmesteter published by Calmann-Levy.



1892: In Deadwood, South Dakota, the Hebrew Cemetery Association purchased a section in the new cemetery for Jewish burials for the sum of $200. Hebrew Hill, as the Jewish area was called locally, is located at the top right-hand side of the cemetery and is accessible via a pathway marked "Jerusalem," which is most likely a Masonic, rather than a Jewish, reference. While there are more than 80 Jews buried up on Hebrew Hill, or Mount Zion as it was known among the community, Deadwood's most famous Jewish citizen, Sol Star, is not among them. In accordance with the wishes of his family, Star lies in the Mount Sinai Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri. Two hundred and fifty meters up from the Jewish section lies the grave of Deadwood's first sheriff and Star's long-time friend and business partner, Seth Bullock. Among the Jews who are interred on Hebrew Hill is Harris Franklin, né Finkelstein. Franklin was said to have been Deadwood's wealthiest man, having made his fortune - estimated at $5 million - from the liquor business and the mining industry. Given his status and wealth, it is unsurprising that the Franklin headstone is the largest in the cemetery. His name is perpetuated in Deadwood through the Franklin Hotel in which he was the largest investor. The Franklin name is also prominent in the city's annals owing to Harris's son, Nathan, who became the second Jewish mayor of Deadwood in 1914, running on an anti-Prohibition platform. Also buried in the cemetery is the Colman family, who arrived in Deadwood from Germany in the spring of 1877. In 1878, Nathan Colman (born Kugelmann) was appointed justice of the peace, an office he held until his death in 1906. Colman was also the lay religious leader for the Jewish community and officiated at the first Jewish wedding in the Black Hills, when Rebecca Reubens married David Holzman



1894: It was reported today that there are 5,000 Orthodox Jews in Newark, NJ who worship at seven different synagogues.



1894: As the leaders of the Central Labor Federation and the Central Labor Union compete for power and membership, Abraham Cahan, the leader of the Jewish Socialists has expressed his dissatisfaction with the leadership of the Central Labor Federation and wants his supporters to join the Central Labor Union.



1895: The Board of Health has been told to improve the safety of the bathhouse at 26 Ridge Street following the accidental drowning of 4 year old Sarah Rubin who had fallen into the tank that had no railing around it.



1897: At two o’clock this morning nephew of Charles Fleischmann” went to Bellevue Hospital and asked that a doctor come out to his yacht, the Hiawatha and examine his uncle who seemed to be quite ill.  After examining him, the doctor “intimated that his condition was serious.”



1898: In New Jersey, found of the Paterson Hebrew Ladies’ Relief Society which meets every two weeks and whose members included Ida Kushner, Ester Limskey, Fannie With, Freda Finkelstein and Emma Urdanz.



1898: “Many Themes Stir Paris” published today described the happenings in the French capital including Jules Guerin’s decision to start a new anti-Semitic paper L’Antijuif



1898: The Second Zionist Congress convenes in Basel and hears an address from Dr. Max Nordeau. Herzl's father is among the delegates.



1898: Private Henry Behren, Company E, 31st Michigan Volunteer Infantry was discharged today due to a “physical disability.”



1898: Private M.A. Hahn of Mobile, Alabama transferred from Company I of the 1stLouisiana Volunteer Infantry to the Hospital Corps of the United States Army.



1898: Abram Herschberger “installed as the rabbi at the North Side Temple on Goethe Street in Chicago, Illinois.



1899: “Light From A Russian General On The Dreyfus Case” published today provided information about the soon to be published memoirs of the late General Annenkoff which “include certain evidence tending to prove that Henry and Esterhazy delivered War Office documents to the agents of several foreign powers.”



1900: Birthdate of Alexander Zeitlin who was a leading figure in the Air Force’s Heavy Press Program which “enhanced the US defense industry's capacity to forge large complex components out of light alloys such as magnesium and aluminum.”



1902: Birthdate of Leo Hollander, the native of Hungary who married Goldie Gertrude Finegold Hollander and eventually settled in Indianapolis, Indiana.



1903: Birthdate of famed psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim. Born in Austria in 1903, Bettelheim survived the death camps. He is “best known for his pioneering work with emotionally disturbed and autistic children. Bettelheim’s views on the Jewish response to the Holocaust were controversial to say the least. On one point he does seem to track with “Man’s Search for Meaning” when he writes that those who survived the death camps were able to do so because they believed in some cultural or religious ideal that helped them transcend themselves. He passed away under tragic circumstances in 1990.



1903: An abridged version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion begins to appear in a St. Petersburg daily newspaper. (As reported by Austin Cline)



1903: The Sixth Zionist Congress came to a close after five days during which Herzl proposed using territory offered by Britain, specifically Uganda, as a temporary shelter for Jews fleeing Eastern Europe and Russia. The Russian delegates, after a riotous debate, walked out and refused to return for the next congress unless the plan was stopped. Herzl had been concerned about the immediate physical well-being of Russian Jews who were faced with a series of Pogroms. The Russian Jews were telling Herzl and the world, that there was only one place for a Jewish homeland and that was Eretz Israel.



 


1904: “Woman Shoots Merchant” published on the front page of the New York Times described the shooting of prominent New Jersey businessman Rogers Pinner. (The Times misspelled his name as Piner.)



1904: “Several prominent rabbis from Philadelphia and Camden, NJ, Mayor Joseph E. Nowrey are among those scheduled to speak at ceremonies this afternoon marking “the reopening of the synagogue of the Congregation of the Sons of Israel” which will be attending by the “Knights of Joseph, the Young Hebrew Zionists and the Hebrew Educational Society.”



1905: Birthdate of Kiev native Semyon Fridlyand, the photographer who lived his adult life in Moscow.



https://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/artists/24450.html



1905: Birthdate of Russian born actor Sholom Levene who gained fame as stage and film actor Sam Levene who created the role of “Nathan Detroit” in the musical hit “Guys and Dolls.”



https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1755&dat=19801230&id=c54cAAAAIBAJ&sjid=42cEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4805,7505194&hl=en



1905: “The Catch of the Season” a musical produced by Charles Frohman opened today at Daly’s Theatre in New York City.



1906: Birthdate of Ukrainian born American composer David Tamkin who along with his brother Alex created an operatic version of The Dybbuk by S. Anksy (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport)



1908(1stof Elul, 5668): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1908(1stof Elul, 5668): Twenty seven year old Jack Annenberg who had “served for the last 10 years in the London Rifle Brigade before transferring to the New Territorial Force  drowned today while swimming at Plemont Jersey.



1908: In Vienna, “left-wing bookshop owner” Wilhelm Suschitzky and the former Adele Bauer gave birth to Edith Suschitzky who gained fame as photographer and communist sympathizer Edith Tudor-Hart



http://spartacus-educational.com/Edith_Tudor_Hart.htm



1909: After visiting ailing financial giant Edward Harriman, Jacob H. Schiff, the Jewish New York financier said that Harriman would “avoid the knife” and rely on medical as opposed to surgical solutions. Schiff’s statement had a calming effect on the markets and the world of high finance. (Schiff was Jewish; Harriman was not)



1912: In Toronto, “Samuel and Rebecca Rosen,” two Russian Jewish immigrants from Minks gave birth to Goodwin George “Goody” Rosen who played centerfield for two National League Teams that no longer exist – the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants.



http://jewishbaseballmuseum.com/player/goody-rosen/



1913: Birthdate of American cantor and operatic tenor Richard Tucker. Born Reuben Ticker, gained fame as a Chazzan in Brooklyn before pursuing his operatic career. He debuted at the Met in 1945. He made his European debut in 1947 where he joined Maria Callas in La Gioconda. Tucker’s operatic career was such that when passed away unexpectedly in 1975 he enjoyed the singular honor of being the only person to have his funeral take place on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. Tucker never lost his love of Jewish music or serving as a chazzan. He was the brother-in-law of another famous American tenor and cantor, Jan Peerce. Can you imagine a Seder at their house?



1914: As the conflict in Europe turns into a Great War that will effect Jews serving as combatants in forces on both sides of the fight, The Royal Navy defeated the Kaiser’s fleet at the First Battle of Heligoland Bight on the same day that Austro-Hungary declared war on Belgium.



1915: In today’s Jewish Chronicle, Israel Zangwill described Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, DSO, the commander of the Zion Mule Corps “as the soul of chivalry and gentleness.”



1915: Dr. Jacques Faitlovitch, an Ashekanzi Jew from Lodz “who studied Ethiopian languages at the Sorbonne and traveled to Ethiopia for the first time in 1904” set sail for Italy today having “completed a successful mission in the United States to raise fund for the education of the black Jews in Abyssinia who are known as Falashas.”



https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0006_0_06241.html



1916: Italy declares war on Germany and Germany declares war on Romania. By the time Italy joined in the fighting, the Jews of the country were so will integrated into the national fabric that a Jew had served as prime minister and another Jew had served as Mayor of Rome for six years. Prior to World War I, Romania was notorious for its mistreatment of its Jewish population – the nation was a haven for anti-Semitism and one of its major exports was Jews fleeing the country. Ironically, during the war, hundreds of Jews served in the Romanian Army and were decorated for valor. The additions of these two combatants did nothing to shorten the war but it did add to the misery suffered by the peoples of Romania and Italy.



1916: In Chicago, the center of the grain trading market  “The abrupt widening of the European war zone sent wheat values tumbling as if the market had no bottom” while the value of the ruble which tumbled from 51 cents to 30 cents actually moved up in value by two cents.



1916: Today, “The plan for an American Jewish Congress, agreed to by representatives of the Jewish Congress Organization and the Conference of National Jewish Organizations in the movement to demand equal rights for Jews in lands discriminating against them was submitted to a referendum of the delegates who had given shape to the congress campaign at a preliminary conference held at Philadelphia more than a year ago.”



1917: Russell Dunne who “has been for some time making inflammatory speeches in which he has tried to stir up religious prejudice” was sentenced to one month in the workhouse in Men’s Night Court for a speech he made in Madison Square where he disparaged Jews and called them slackers – statements that brought a an angry response from Joseph Friedlander a Jewish soldier in uniform who was in the park at the time.



1917: Justice Leonard A. Snitkin was beaten up by two supporters of Russell Dunne as he left the courthouse today.



1917: Birthdate of Benjamin Saget, the supermarket executive who was the father of comedian Robert Lane “Bob” Saget.



1917: Birthdate of Jacob Kurtzberg, the son of Austrian immigrants who gained famed as Jack Kirby, one of the most influential, recognizable, and prolific artists in American comic books, and the co-creator of such enduring characters and popular culture icons such as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Hulk, Captain America, and hundreds of others stretching back to the earliest days of the medium. He was also a comic book writer and editor. His most common nickname is "The King."



http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/08/obituaries/jack-kirby-76-created-comic-book-superheroes.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm



1918: American diplomats Henry King and Charles Crane presented their report to the Paris Peace Conference. They recommended the joining of Palestine to Syria, an end to the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine and an international and interdenominational committee to supervise the Holy Places. Their report proved to be meaningless when the U.S. Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty. What may come as a surprise to some is that this betrayal of Zionist principles was prepared on the initiative of Woodrow Wilson.



1918: Samuel Gompers arrived in London as the head of a labor delegation. He expressed the delegation’s solidarity with workers in Europe and declared its support for all measures designed to win the war against the Germans.



1918: Samuel S. Koenig, Chairman of the New York Republican Committee was sent a letter tonight “tell him that forgeries had been committed by workers in the Sixth Assembly District” of which he is the leader.



1919: Birthdate of German born Rabbi Walter H. Plaut, the graduate of Franklin and Marshall College and Hebrew Union College who served as the spiritual leader of Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.



http://www.nytimes.com/1964/01/04/rabbi-walter-plaut-44-dead.html



1919: The recommendations of the King-Crane Commission with regard to Syria-Palestine and Iraq were presented today.



1920(14thof Elul, 5680): Parashat Ki Teitzei



1920: Rabbi I. Mortimer Bloom is scheduled to deliver a sermon this morning on “The Seats of the Lowly” at the Hebrew Tabernacle on Broadway.



1920(14thof Elul, 5680): Forty-six year old Colonel Harry Cutler, the chairman Jewish Welfare Board of United States, passed away today in London.



https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/cutler-harry



http://unitedwarwork.com/groups/jewish-welfare-board/



1920: “Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Leipziger of Philadelphia” who have been entertaining Mrs. Nathan Sommer and Evelyn Sommer from Memphis, are scheduled to set sail for England today where they will meet Nathaniel Leipziger’s sister Pauline.



1920: Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent published another in a series of “major” anti-Semitic articles.



1920: At the insistence of advertising maven turned campaign manager Albert Lasker, Warren Harding, the Republican candidate for President delivered an address opposing entrance into the League of Nations where he said, (in Lasker’s words) there would be “no more wiggling and wobbling” on foreign policy as there had been under President Wilson.



1923: Three Jewish mobsters -Samuel “Sammy” Weiss, Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen and Samuel Gipson - were arrested by police outside of the Essex Market Courthouse. When the police found that they were each carrying pistols, they were charged with violation of New York’s Sullivan Law.



1923(16th of Elul, 5683): "Kid Dropper" Nathan Kaplan was gunned down today by Louis Cohen, a member of Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen’s gaing.. Born in 1891, he was “also known as Jack the Dropper. Kaplan was an American gangster controlling labor racketeering and extortion in New York City during the post-World War I period into the early years of Prohibition in the early 1920s.”



1924: In Georgia, opponents of the Communist regime staged the August Uprising against the Soviet Union. Following the fall of the Czar’s Empire, Georgia declared its independence in 1917. Following their seizure of power, the Communists sought to re-constitute the Russian Empire as the Soviet Union. When the Soviets invaded Georgia, approximately 2,000 Jews left the country. Following the August Uprrising, the Soviets cracked down on the remaining Jews, enacting laws that bankrupted their businesses and putting an end to all Zionist activities. Charges of blood libels would increase during the rest of the decade and things would get even worse in the 1930’s



1924: Birthdate of Rabbi Zalman Meshullam Schachter-Shalomi, the native of Zhovkva who survived the detention camps of Vichy to settle in the United States where he eventually became a leader in what is called the “Jewish Renewal Movement.”



http://www.rzlp.org/Yesod-RZLP/Home.html



http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_26084358/zalman-schachter-shalomi-dies-jewish-renewal



1924: Birthdate of American sculptor Stanley Bleifeld.



http://stanleybleifeld.com/



1925: “The Elegant Bunch” a silent film written by Adolf Lantz and featuring Hermann Picha was released today in Germany.



1926: Birthdate of Ursula Stern who the Sobibor surivior who fought with the Parczew Partisans.



1927: In New York City, the Secretary of the Socialist Party confirmed reports that Jacob Panken, the Socialist candidate for Municipal Court Justice, who described himself as “a Socialist” who “can only be a candidate of the party which represents the workers” has rejected the endorsement of the Republican Party.



1928: George Engles, the manager of Jascha Heifetz, announced that his employer had married film star Florence Vidor, the ex-wife of King Vidor. He was Jewish.  She was not. (The marriage would end in divorce in 1945)



1929: Birthdate of Hungarian conductor Istvan Kertesz.



1929: As Arab violence engulfs Palestine French troops are patrolling the Jewish quarter of Beirut in case there are further attacks by Arabs in this Lebanese city. So far, Arab militants have contented themselves with demonstrations and clashes with local police, but the French authorities are alarmed enough to have taken these extra measures.



1930: Premiere of “A Student’s Song of Heidelberg” a German musical written by Billy Wilder along with Hans Wilhelm and Ernst Neubach, the latter two who were fled from the Nazis even though they were not Jewish.



1933: It was reported today that Herman Bernstein, the United States Minister to Albania has announced his resignation and said that he plans to return to New York the end of September. Bernstein had served in the post for 3 years during which he enjoyed a positive relationship with the ruler, King Zog.



1933: Laurence Adolph Steinhardt began serving as United States Ambassador to Sweden.



1933: In Johannesburg, South Africans, Jews and non-Jews, led by Tielman Roos, a leading statesman, express resentment against the attitude of Premier Hertzog towards boycott of German goods.



1933: The Deutsche Landhandelsbund, the Nazi department for agrarian trade and industry, informs the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that an agreement has practically been concluded between Germany and the Palestine Government whereby the Reich will import oranges to the value of eight million to ten million marks for which it will pay with exports of its goods to Palestine valued at twice that amount plus transportation in German ships. The Palestine Government, the British Colonial Office and the World Zionist Organization issue denials of the German report.



1933: In Warsaw, The Central Organization for the German Boycott wires protest to Zionist Congress against the reported trade agreement between Germany and Palestine.



1933: In Davenport, IA, “Richard Emanuel and Bernice (Klemperer) Petersburg gave birth to Harvard educated Washington lawyer and U.S. Air Force veteran, the husband of the former Helen Blackham with whom he had two children – Clare and Wilfrid



1934: Funeral services are scheduled to be held today for Marcus W. Marks, the former President of the Borough of Manhattan who passed away two days and who is survived by his widow Esther Friedman Marks; two sons, Erich H. and Warren L. Marks and two daughters, Mrs. Bernice M. Stearns and Mrs. Doris M. Dreyfus. (As reported by JTA)



1934(17thof Elul, 5694): Fifty-three year old Elias Harry Pofcher, the native of Odessa who earned an MD from Tufts and an LLB from Boston University and was a Zionist passed away today.



1934(17thof Elul, 5694): After having “suffered a collapse while working near Asheville, NC, 52 year old photographer Doris Ulmann passed away today in New York.



http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/1568/doris-ulmann-american-1882-1934/



http://blog.nyhistory.org/doris-ullman/



1935: In Lucerne, Black flags flew at half-staff today on buildings housing the nineteenth World Zionist Congress, a symbol of Jewry's protest against Nazi "persecution" of their race.



1935: Most baseball writers are reported to believe that Detroit’s slugging first baseman Hank Greenberg will win this year’s MVP award for the American League.



1936(10th of Elul, 5696): David Nishri, a19 year old student was killed today “when Arabs ambushed a bus traveling between Kiriat Anavim and Jerusalem” making him the seventy-eighth Jew to be killed during the 18 months of Arab riots and violence.



1936: In response to the violence in Palestine and the pressure being brought on the British government to stop Jewish immigration, the Association of Chief Rabbis of Holland has ordered a special evening prayer to be recited in all of the country’s synagogues.



1936: Four “children were injured when three bombs exploded in Tiberius” and two more people were injured when Arabs attacked on bus traveling to Jerusalem.



1936: “The authorities’ determination to stamp out ‘Jew-baiting’ in Great Britain was emphasized in the Old Street Police today when the Magistrate ordered John Penfold to pay a fine and “to be on good behavior for 12 months” after being found guilty of using “insulting words” in an open-air meeting in the East End which included his statement that “he would turn all Jews out Britain headed by Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Minister of Transport, Sir Philip Sassoon, the Under-Secretary for Air” and the sculptor Jacob Epstein who “would be there with is grotesque monstrosities to keep the birds away from the Wailing Wall.”



1936: “A denial that Father Coughlin was prompted by anti-Semitic motives in his attacks on ‘money changer’ coupled with a statement he will continue to assail Jewish international bankers” is scheduled to be carried today “in his publication Social Justice.”



1937(21stof Elul, 5697): Parashat Ki Tavo; Leil Selichot



1937(21stof Elul, 5697): Eighty year old  comic strip pioneer Frederick Burr Opper who created the Happy Hooligan comic strip passed away today.



https://cartoons.osu.edu/digital_albums/newspaperartists/opper/Opper_bio.html



http://www.sil.si.edu/ondisplay/caricatures/bio_opper.htm



1937: In London, it was announced that Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, the English Jew to whom the late Lord Balfour addressed the famous Declaration promising Jews a National Home in Palestine had passed away on August 27. The Balfour Declaration was actually a letter dated November 2, 1917 written by the Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, which began “Dear Lord Rothschild” and was delivered to Rothschild’s home. This should give one an excellent idea of how well-connected the English branch of the House of Rothschild. Lord Lionel was well known for his philanthropies, but like all of the Rothschilds, power and money never separated them from the House of Israel.



1937: In Berlin, Henrietta Szold addressed a meeting of parents of 100 Youth Aliya children leaving for Palestine. She told them how during her recent visit to Eretz Israel she was impressed by the Jewish German youth working on the land, unhindered and conscious of their task. Youth Aliyah, the Hadassah sponsored program to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis, saved the lives of approximately 22,000 Jewish-German youngsters.



1938(1st of Elul, 5698): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1939: Fifteen year old Heinz Bernard’s mother sent him from Germany to England as part of a plan for the two to eventually join family members in the United States.



1940: Chiune Sugihara, the Vice Counsul for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania continued to defy his government and issued visas on his own initiative to thousands of Jews fleeing from certain death in Poland and Lithuania.



1940:The National Encampment of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States is scheduled to begin today in Boston.



1940: After seven weeks of traveling by train across Eastern Europe and Asia, and then by ship across the Pacific Ocean to escape the terror of Nazi Germany, Eva Schott Berek and her parents arrived at the Angel Island Immigration Station one week before Eva’s 19th birthday



1941: Chicago Bears’ quarterback Sid Luckman led the Monsters of the Midway to a 37 to 13 victory over the College All-Stars in what had become an annual event at Soldier Field



1941: Second day of two day Aktion under the command of Obergruppenfuehrer Friedrich Jeckeln at to Kolomija near Kamenets-Podolsk during which a total of 23,600 Jews were murdered. Of the total between 14,000 and 18,000 of them were Hungarian Jews. The Germans were assisted by the Hungarians during the two days of slaughter. A complete description of the event can be found in Jeckeln’s report (Operational Report USSR No. 80).



1941: The Gestapo murdered more than 23,000 Hungarian Jews in the occupied Ukraine.



1941: Isidore Newman, who was training to serve as a Wireless Officer with SOE was described by one of his trainers as seeming to be “depressed” while adding that his “colloquial French” is not good even though his French vocabulary is improving but that his proficiency in Morse Code is such that “he does excellent work in instructing other students.



1941(5th of Elul, 5701): A Jewish butcher, one of 2000 Jews forced into a ditch at Kédainiai, Lithuania, resists by inflicting a fatal bite upon the throat of one of the Einsatzkommando soldiers. The butcher and the other Jews are immediately shot.



1941(5th of Elul, 5701): Lithuanian Nazi collaborators murdered Rochel Leah and sons Hillel, Shimon and Avraham in Panevezys.



1941: Thousands of Jews are murdered at Czyzewo-Szlachecki, Poland.



1942: Joseph C. Hyman executive chairman of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee announced tonight that it was sending   $25,000 to the OSE to provide for 1,200 Jewish children trapped in occupied France.



1942: It was revealed today that President Rafael L. Trujillo has offered to allow 3,500 Jewish children between the ages of 3 and 14 living in Vichy France to settle in the Dominican Republic.



1942: Forty-one year old Bension Gotlob and 43 year old Regina Gotlop were among those who left Drancy today in Convoy 25 which was headed for Auschwitz.  Among the 285 children heading for the death camp were seven year old Salomon Gottlob and his two year old sister Tama,



1942: Fourteen thousand Jews are killed at Sarny, Ukraine.



1942: Fleischer Studios, Inc which was found in 1921 as Inkwell Studies by Max and Dave Fleisher and had been acquired by Paramount Studios went “defunct” today



1942: Seventy-seven General Antoine Louis Targe (Retired) who played a key role in proving the innocent of Captain Dreyfus passed away today.



1942: World Jewish Congress (WJC) President Stephen S. Wise receives a cable from Swiss WJC representative Gerhart Riegner regarding the "Final Solution." Wise elects to suppress the information until it can be verified;



1942: Ten thousand Jews are murdered at Miedzyrzec, Poland.



1942: Jews of Chortkov, Ukraine, are put into freight cars and transported to the death camp at Belzec.



1942: German authorities order the arrests of Parisian priests who have sheltered Jews.



1942: The Antwerp police roundup 1,243 Belgian Jews and ship them to the death camps.



1943(27thof Av, 5703): Parashat Re’eh



1943(27thof Av, 5703): Sixty-two year old Ukrainian born historian Elias Tcherikower who eventually came to the United States to work with the U.S branch of YIVO with his wife, the former “Riva or Rebecca Teplisky” in 1940 passed away today.



http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Tsherikover_Elye



http://www.mydearchildrendoc.com/the-treasure-of-the-tcherikower-archive/



https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Tcherikower-Archive-and-why-is-it-important-to-Jewish-history



http://www.yivoarchives.org/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=32545



1943: The Danes began a general strike against the Nazi occupation.



1943: Two days after returning from Berlin, King Boris dies under mysterious circumstances in Sofia, Bulgaria. According to some sources, the Nazis had poisoned the king as punishment for protecting the Jews of his kingdom. Thanks in part to the monarch who was a “reluctant hero,: most of Bulgaria’s fifty thousand Jews avoid the deadly consequences of the final solution.



1944(9th of Elul, 5704): Jewish Sonderkommando Auschwitz inmates beat to death sixty-seven year old Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski



http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html



http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/rumkowski-chaim.htm



1945: Final entry in the third of the three marriage registers the Artillery Lane Synagogue which was “incorporated into the Ezras Chaim Synagogue.



1945: Birthdate of producer Robert Greenwald.



1945: Birthdate of Benny Lévy the native of Cairo, Egypt who served as personal secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre from 1974 to 1980.



http://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/oct/21/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries



http://www.haaretz.com/life/arts-leisure/obituary-jean-paul-sartre-s-secretary-benny-levy-1945-2003-1.103190



1945: The British Mandate Government published the Fitzgerald Plan for governing Jerusalem. The system of dividing the city into boroughs had some merit, but it was predicated on the notion that the British Mandate would continue. The plan, like so many before and after it, was “dead on arrival.”



1946(1stof Elul, 5706): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1947: “The Song of the Thin Man” the last of the “Thin Man films” produced by Nat Perrin who also co-authored the screenplay was released in the United States today by MGM.



1948: In Egypt, “Jews were forbidden to engage in banking or foreign currency transactions. (In the following month Egyptian Jews would be ”dismissed from the railways, the post office, the telegraph department and the Finance Ministry on the” unfounded  “ground that they were suspected of ‘sabotage and treason’”]



1952: The reparations talks between Israelis and West Germans ended in The Hague. West Germany was to pay Israel 3 billion marks (about $714m.) in the form of goods. She was also bound to deliver to Israel goods worth 450m Marks (about $106m.), to cover the claims of world Jewry. This was part of very painful process especially for those Israelis who had survived the Holocaust or who had lost family and friends at the hands of the Germans. Many, including Menachem Begin, did not want to accept anything from the Germans. For some acceptance of the money was part of a forgiveness process in which they were unwilling to participate. [The East Germans - the Communist half of Germany did not take part in the talk. Unlike West Germany, East Germany never conducted any de-Nazification program or made any attempt to make amends for Germany's slaughter of the Jewish people.]



1952: The first, undated letter written by Mordechai Oren, the Mapam leader imprisoned in Czechoslovakia, was received by his family.



1952: In an address to the Knesset, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion reported that Arab infiltrators killed 62 Israelis, injured 110 and abducted 29 during 1951. These on-going attacks would have several impacts on Israeli society. One was that the military developed an aggressive stance in fighting these terrorists. Another was the Suez War of 1956. Part of the Israeli goal was to destroy the bases of Egyptian sponsored terrorists in Gaza.



1953: In the evening, Unit 101, under the command of Ariel Sharon, conducted its first mission.



1954: Mortimer May, president of the Zionist Organization of America, said tonight that the State Department's proposed policy of arming the Arab states would not thwart the advance of communism.



1955: Funeral services are scheduled to held today in Far Rockaway, Long Island, for Rebecca Cohen, the widow of Michael Cohen and mother of Harry and Charles Cohen.



1957(1stof Elul, 5717): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1957: “Perri,” the Walt Disney filme based on Perri: The Youth of A Squirrel by Felix Salten, the Hungarian born grandson of an Orthodox Rabbi, was released in the United States today.



1957: Birthdate of actor Daniel Stern a graduate of Bethesda-Chevy Chase in suburban Washington who made his debut as the off-beat “Cyril” in “Breaking Away” but who may be best known for his appearance in the comedy “City Slickers” and whose brother is television writer David M. Stern.



1959: The Pan American Games in which Eugene Selznick would coach the United States Volleyball Team opened today in Chicago.



1959(24th of Av, 5719): Fifty nine year old Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish attorney who created the word “genocide” passed away today.



http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v02/v02p-19_Martin.html



1961: Milk and Honey, the musical featuring the music and lyrics of Jerry Herman, began its pre-Broadway tryout run at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven. “The story centers on a busload of lonely American widows hoping to catch husbands while touring Israel and is set against the background of the



country's fight for recognition as an independent nation. It was Herman's first Broadway book musical.”



1964: Al Aronowitz brought Bob Dylan to the Delmonico Hotel in New York City where he introduced them to the Beatles.



1963: Isaac Franck, executive director of the Jewish Community Council, Hyman Bookbinder and the Washington Board of Rabbis were among the 250,000 people who attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. (As reported by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington)



1969: In Washington, DC, Adele and Joel Sandberg gave birth to Sheryl Kara Sandberg the Harvard grad who became COO of Facebook.



1969: In Santa Monica, CA, Judith and Thomas Black gave birth to actor Joe Black



1970: Birthdate of Richard Samuel “Rick” Recht, the Jewish troubadour known, among other things for his Shabbat Alive programs.



1972: Mark Spitz wins the first of his seven gold medals at the Summer Olympics in Munich. He earned the medal by setting a new world’s record for the 200 meter butterfly.



1973: “Gone with the Wind” a musical adaption of the novel by the same name with lyrics and music by Harold Rome opened today at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles.



1973: Former U.S. Senator Kenneth B. Keating presented his credentials as U.S. Ambassador to Israel.



1977: Amos Horev, president of the Haifa Technion, announced that Israel was on the threshold of a major breakthrough in water desalination. He claimed that Prof. Abraham Kogan had completed work on a revolutionary invention on desalination, ready for industrial exploitation. Negotiations were advancing for a full-scale million-cubic-meter a year desalination plant. Water has always been a major issue in Israel and continues to be to this day. Desalination projects such as this were critical for those seeking to irrigate the Negev, among other things.



1979: Funeral services are scheduled to be held this morning in New York City for Hylve Blomberg, the widow of Philip Blomberg and the mother of Norman and Richard Blomberg.



1981: “Body Heat” a thriller directed by Lawrence Kasdan who also wrote the script was released in the United States by Warner Bros.



1981(28thof Av, 5741): Eighty-two year old “Hungarian footballer and coach” Bela Guttman passed away in Vienna.



https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/may/18/bela-guttmann-benfica-european-cup-eusebio



https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-coach-who-rose-from-the-holocausts-ashes-to-dominate-european-soccer/



1982: Jack Weinstein was promoted to the rank of 2nd Lt. in the U.S. Air Force.



1983(27thof Av, 5703): Parashat Re’eh



1983(27thof Av, 5703): Seventy-seven year old Texas native Marguerite Wallenstein “Peggy” Feldheym, the wife of Norman Frank Feldheym, the longtime Rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in San Bernardino who served as an Army chaplain in WW II and Korea, passed away today, marking the end of thei 49 year marriage.



1983: Israeli PM Menachem Begin announced his resignation.



1984(30thof Av, 5744): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1984: Second Lt. Jack Weinstein was promoted to the rank of 1st Lt. in the U.S.A.F.



1986: First Lt. Jack Weinstein was promoted to the rank of Captain in the U.S.A.F.



1986: Birthdate of Galid Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June, 2006



1986: Premiere of “A King and His Movie” an Argentine comedy written by Jorge Goldenberg the native of Buenos Aires whose other works include “Los Gauchos judíos,” a 1975 film about Russian Jews settling in Argentina in an effort to escape from the Pogroms in their native land.



1986: “Danny Arnold sold his production company Four D Productions, Inc. to Coca-Cola's Columbia Pictures Television Group for $50 million after Arnold dropped the federal and state lawsuits against Columbia Pictures Television accusing them of antitrust violations, fraud, and breach of fiduciary duty.”



1987: “Matawan” a cinematic treatment of the 1920 coal strike for which Haskell Wexler was nominated for an Oscar for Best Cinematography and featuring Josh Mostel, the son of Zero Mostel, was released in the United States today.



1988: Leonard Bernstein’s three day long 70th birthday celebration comes to an end.



1991: Ukraine declares its independence from the Soviet Union. Approximately 80% of Ukraine's half million Jews left the country. At the dawn of the 21st century there was a rejuvenation of Jewish life in Ukraine. Unfortunately, the anti-Semitism that has been endemic to Ukraine continues to rear its ugly head.



1996: “The Portrait of a Lady,” the cinematic version of the novel of the same name starring Nicole Kidman, Barbara Hershey and Shelley Winters premiered at the Venice Film Festival.



1997 Boston's Jewish Advocate ran a story entitled "Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) set for launch into cyberspace," which outlined JWA's origin, mission, and work, and announced a new chapter in the organization's history. JWA was a young organization, just two years old, when the launch of its "virtual archive" was announced in the Advocate article. The goal of the virtual archive is to identify and link existing materials and archives around the country. JWA's founding director Gail Twersky Reimer explained that although Jewish women's letters, diaries, personal papers, and more exist, "most material is not readily identifiable and needs to be resurfaced." She envisioned the virtual archive as a gateway for scholars and the public to gain access to otherwise-hidden resources. As Reimer told the Advocate, documenting existing collections is only part of JWA's mission. JWA was also working to create new materials, primarily by conducting oral history interviews with elderly women from the congregation of Temple Israel in Boston. This project, called "Women Whose Lives Span the Century," led to an art exhibit of works based on the interviews; the exhibit took place at the Jewish Community Center in Newton, MA. Reimer also told the Advocate that JWA was engaged in long-term planning to assemble the resources to fulfill its mission. The article reported that that mission had been recently refined to focus on archival and educational work. In the eleven years since the launch of the Virtual Archive, JWA has been at the forefront of collecting and disseminating that information. Through Women of Valor web exhibits and posters; curriculum materials; oral history projects in Baltimore and Seattle; Women Who Dared events honoring local Jewish activists; an exhibit on Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution; Katrina's Jewish Voices; the Jewesses with Attitude blog; and the This Week in History feature which you are reading now, JWA has led the way in putting Jewish



1997: “"Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) set for launch into cyberspace"



http://jwa.org/thisweek/aug/28/1997/jewish-womens-archive



1998: Congregation member Daniel Z. Nelson was celebrating his 43rd wedding anniversary with his family at his home in Amagansett, New York, when he learned that Manhattan's Central Synagogue was in flames.



1998: “Indiscreet” a made for television “thriller” starring Gloria Reuben whose father was Jewish and featuring Lisa Edelstein as “Beth Sussman” was broadcast for the first time today.



1998: Central Synagogue in Manhattan burned today. The Central Synagogue, believed to be the oldest continuously used Jewish house of worship in New York, was built between 1870 and 1872. Its cornerstone was laid by the founder of Reform Judaism in the United States, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. Built as a fifth synagogue for the Ahawath Chesed congregation, which was formed in 1846 by Bohemian Jews, the building was designed by Henry Fernbach, one of the first Jews to make a name for himself in American architecture. According to Cissy Grossman, a member of the congregation and the author of a 1989 book about the synagogue called The Jewish Family's Book of Days, at the time it was built, American Jews were casting about for a style that could represent both their sense of modernism and their desire to root themselves in a rich past. The search expressed itself in a revival of Spanish, Moorish and Egyptian style and, in the Central Synagogue, in a profusion of arches and lacy arabesque designs carved into the woodwork. Ms. Grossman continued, ''It was the whole idea of finding a stylistic thing that has the feeling of being Jewish and also refers to the fact that Jews lived in the Islamic world for so long and had a peaceful existence.'' Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president emeritus of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the umbrella organization of Reform temples, said: ''I come from Nazi Germany, so I don't tie myself to a building. But this one hit me that way. The architecture was awe-inspiring. It's a place that made the spirit soar.'' Over the years, the congregation undertook several major renovations. Yet another repair project was under way to restore the original painted designs on the interior walls, some of which had been painted over. That dedication to maintaining the glory of the synagogue and uncovering its original splendors apparently has saved many of its treasures. Ms. Goldman, who oversees the synagogue's extensive collection of Judaica, said most of the precious historical objects, many Torah scrolls and even the original architectural plans from the 19th century had already been moved to warehouses over the last few months. So had much of the congregation's archive of wedding and birth records, letters, cemetery maps and other documents. Despite the fire, records of what the synagogue looked like and how it was built survive. ''There are many restorers in New York who know that building very well,'' Ms. Goldman said. ''Every aspect of it has been photographed and many people have worked on it.'' The fate of two of the synagogue's most beloved treasures, vestiges of the lost Jewry of Eastern Europe, was still unknown. One is a grand bronze Hanukkah lamp from the 18th century that was donated by some of the original members of the congregation. The other is a recovered and restored fragment of a Torah scroll that had been confiscated by the Nazis from one of the countless synagogues destroyed, along with their members, in World War II. ''If they are not able to rescue it,'' Rabbi Schindler said, ''it will burn twice.'' In 1970, at a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Central Synagogue, Rabbi Schindler recalled the simple people -- the shopkeepers and tailors of the lower East Side -- who pooled their money to buy the land at 55th Street and Lexington Avenue where they would eventually build their temple. ''We can imagine the trepidation that filled their hearts as they stood here that morning,'' Rabbi Schindler said then. ''We can imagine the doubts they knew and the fears they had. But they conquered these fears and doubts and gave strength to their children and their children's children and to us.'' But as the Central Synagogue burned today, Ronald Goldberger recalled the small personal moments he had shared there with his family: the naming of his children, their bar mitzvahs, the service when his wife blew the shofar, or ram's horn, to signal the arrival of the Jewish New Year. And then Mr. Goldberger, who said he has been a member for more than 20 years, wept. ''That's my synagogue that's burning up,'' he said hoarsely, as a friend embraced him in the pall of smoke.



2001: An editorial in today’s Washington Post urged Secretary of State Colin Powell to support the proposal to support the proposal for a postage stamp honoring U.S. diplomat Hiram Bingham IV who risked his career to save thousands from the Nazis.



2003(30th of Av, 5763): Rosh Chodesh Elul



2005: the IDF began dismantling Gush Katif's 48-grave cemetery. All of the bodies were removed by special teams of soldiers supervised by the Military Rabbinate and reburied in locations of their families' choosing. In accordance with Jewish law, all soil touching the remains was also transferred, and the dead were given second funerals, with the families observing a one-day mourning period. All coffins were draped in the Israeli flag on the way to reburial. The



2005: Rabbi David M. Gordis and Rabbi Barry Freundel officiated at the wedding of Fern Schad and Alfred Moses a senior partner with Covington & Burling who served as U.S. Ambassador to Romania.



2005: The University of California published Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, Norman Finkelstein’s attack on Alan Dershowitz and his latest work, The Case for Israel



2005: Matan Vilnai began serving as Minister of Science and Technology.



2005: “Israeli author Amos Oz received the German city of Frankfurt's Goethe Prize for 2005 at the city's St Paul's Church. The prize, which is awarded every three years, went to the 66- year-old Oz for his "thematic diversity" and "stylistic virtuosity", the awards judges said. "Through his literary works Amos Oz transmits to readers in all parts of the world a deep profound all-surpassing feeling of humanity, moral values and cooperation," the judges said. The highest honor bestowed by the central German city of Frankfurt, the Goethe Prize has been in existence since 1927.Previous recipients included Sigmund Freund (1930), Ingmar Bergman (1976) and Siegfried Lenz (1999).”



2005: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel, The Amorous Busboy of Decatur: A Child of the Fifties Looks Back by Robert Klein and 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America(And Al Franken Is #37) by Bernard Goldberg.



2006: Sportscaster Max Kellerman lost out in the competition to serve as host on the 7 pm timeslot at WEPN also known as 1050 ESPN Radio in New York City.



2006: Family and friends of Corporal Gilad Shalit came to Kerem Shalom, where he was abducted, to mark his 20th birthday.



2006(4th of Elul, 5766): Melvin Schwartz, who shared in the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988, passed away.



http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1988/schwartz-bio.html



2006: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appointed Nahum Admoni “to be chairman of an investigation committee, charged with investigating the actions of the government during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.”



2006: Today Jackie Mason who described himself as Jewish as a Matzah ball or kosher salami “filed a lawsuit against the group Jews for Jesus for using his likeness in a pamphlet in which his image was used next to the tag line "Jackie Mason...a Jew for Jesus!?" 



2008: Zehava Ben along with Sarit Hadad and Israeli Arab singers Lubna Salame and Riham Hamadi join forces at the third and final night of the inaugural Gilboa Coexistence Festival taking place throughout the Gilboa region. The singers will be accompanied at the Ein Harod Amphitheater on the 28th by the Ra'anana Symphonette Orchestra and the Nazareth Orchestra.



2008: Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, will be making history today as he opens the Democratic convention’s last day, in front of an expected crowd of 70,000 in the audience and millions more watching from afar.



2008: The Democratic National Convention which Ayelet Waldman, a law school classmate and supporter of Barak Obama attended as a delegate came to an end.



2009(8th of Elul, 5769: Thirty-eight year old DJ AM (Adam Michael Goldstein was found dead in his apartment today.



http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=132025382



2009: Premiere of “Taking Woodstock,” a comedy co-starring Henry Goodman, Liev Schreiber, Eugene Levy and Emile Hirsch.



2009: Today “the Vancouver Canucks signed Mathieu Schneider to a one-year, $1.55 million contract.”



2009: At Temple Judah Friday night services are a ‘family affair in the best sense of the word. Dr. Bob and Laurie Silber, pillars of the Jewish community, lead the Tefillah, while their daughter Abby leads the singing bringing her own special brand of musical excitement and joy to the celebration of Shabbat.



2010: The Gilead Barkin Trio is scheduled to perform at the Indium Jazz Club in New York City.



2010: Palestinian Authority Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat rejected Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's calls for fortnightly face-to-face meetings with PA President Mahmoud Abbas during upcoming peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel Radio reported today, citing an interview Erekat conducted with the BBC in Arabic. In the interview, Erekat added that it is too soon to establish who exactly will meet for negotiations, how often they will do so, and where the meetings will take place.



2011: Kol Shira is scheduled to perform at the Agudas Achim end of summer picnic in Iowa City.



2011: The British Jewish community is marking Gilad Schalit’s 25th birthday today by launching a new awareness campaign and calling on the government and Red Cross to press for his release.



2011: Israeli jazz clarinetist, saxophonist and bandleader Anat Cohen is scheduled to perform at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in New York City.



2011(28thof Av, 5771): “David Reichenberg, a 50-year-old Orthodox Jewish father of four from Spring Valley, N.Y. died saving a father and his 6-year-old son from a downed power line when Reichenberg came into contact with the live wire and was electrocuted.” (As reported by JTA)



2011: The body of eighty-two year old Rozalia Gluck, one of two Jews reported to have died during Hurricane Irene was recovered this evening. (As reported by JTA)



2011: Today, “as part of its 75th anniversary, the CBC is showing an hour of old Wayne and Shuster comedy material.”



https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2011/08/25/salutin_wayne_and_shusters_comedy_of_gratitude.html



2011(28thof Av, 5771): Eighty-one year old CBS culture critic Leonard Harris passed away today.  (As reported by Daniel Slotnik)



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/arts/television/leonard-harris-tv-critic-with-star-turn-dies-at-81.html?pagewanted=print



 2012: “Two of the Upper West Side of Manhattan’s most renowned Cantors – Rebecca Garfein, Senior Cantor of Congregation Rodeph Sholom, and Dan Singer, Cantor at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue – are scheduled to perform at the Enrico Caruso Room at Grotta Azzurra Ristorante in Little Italy” this evening. 2012: Magillah, Montreal’s Yiddish/Klezmer Band directed by Henri Oppenheim is scheduled to perform at the Montreal Jewish Music Festival.



2012: Congregation Shir Hadash is scheduled to offer “Taste of Judaism,” an interactive class designed to provide an introduction to Jewish perspectives on ethics and values, study, community, holidays, and spirituality



2012: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to host a tour of the special exhibition To Bigotry No Sanction: George Washington & Religious Freedom at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia 


2012(10th of Elul, 5772): Sixty-seven year old Shulamith Fireston, author of The Dialectic of Sex passed away today (As reported by Margalit Fox)




2012: “Two of the Upper West Side of Manhattan's most renowned Cantors – Rebecca Garfein, Senior Cantor of Congregation Rodeph Sholom, and Dan Singer, Cantor at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue – performed at the Enrico Caruso Room at Grotta Azzurra Ristorante in Little Italy.”


2012(10th of Elul, 5772): Eighty year old Eva Figes, a leading feminist, author and refugee from the Holocaust passed away today. (As reported by Leslie Kaufman)



2012: Police indicted the nine suspects connected with the near-deadly beating of an Arab teenager two weeks ago in downtown Jerusalem today in the Jerusalem District Court. The suspects were indicted on charges of assault and battery, racial incitement and inciting violence.



2012: An Israeli judge ruled today that the state bore no responsibility for the death of Rachel Corrie, the young American woman who was run over by a military bulldozer in 2003 as she protested the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip.



2012: Two rockets and a mortar were fired from Gaza into the Eshkol Region in the Western Negev this evening.http://www.timesofisrael.com/two-rockets-fired-at-southern-israel-no-injuries-reported/


2013: Tel Aviv Woodwind Quintet - Roi Amotz , Danny Erdman, Yigal Kaminka , Nadav Cohen , Itamar Leshem – is scheduled to perform Kleine Kammermusik, op. 24/2 by Hindemith in Jerusalem.


2013: Stúdió11 Band is scheduled to perform “Evergreen – selection from Barbra Streisand’s songs” at the Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest


2013(22nd of Elul): Yarhrzeit Joseph B. Levin, husband of Deborah Levin z”tzl, father of Judy z”tzl, Mitchell and David without whom literally, this blog would never exist.


2013(22nd of Elul, 5773): Ninety-one year old Murray Gershenz who ran a used record store in Los Angeles for fifty years passed away today. (As reported by William Yardley)



2013: “The Security Cabinet approved a limited call-up of reserve soldiers as preparations for a possible US strike on Syria and retaliation against Israel intensified this afternoon. The call-up, already under way today, was mainly for personnel from Home Front Command and the IAF’s Active Defense wing, charged with defending the country from rocket-fire and aerial incursions.” (As reported by Gavriel Fiske and Mitch Ginsburg)


2013: “Thousands of Israelis failed in their attempts to obtain gas masks today as growing numbers of citizens flooded post offices and IDF Home Front Command distribution centers ahead of an expected US strike on Syria.” (As reported by Haviv Gettig Gur)


2013: Ethiopian-Israelis are planning a protest outside of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office at the same time that a plane representing the official end of Ethiopian aliya is scheduled to land at Ben-Gurion Airport today. (As reported by Sam Sokol)


2014: Roey Gilad, the Consul General of the State of Israel is scheduled to speak at the ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto and Hazan Alberto Mizrahi of Anshe Emet Congregation is scheduled to provide the cantorial music for the event at Chicago’s Union Club.


2014: “The body of missing US student Aaron Sofer, 23, of Lakewood, New Jersey, was found near the capital’s Ein Kerem neighborhood, Hatzalah said in a statement today” (As reported by Marissa Newman and Adiv Sterman)


2014: As tensions rose on the border with Syria, rebels who have taken control of the area and fired into Israel abducted 40 members of the UN Peacekeeping force.


2015: Dor Zweigenbom’s “Why I Killed My Mother” is scheduled to be performed at Under St. Marks in New York City.


2015: A Study Mission to New Orleans sponsored by the American Jewish Archives as part of its Travels in American Jewish History is scheduled to continue for a third day.


2015: “Adam J. Szubin, the top Treasury Department official who helped negotiate the accord between Iran and six world powers” is scheduled to arrive in Israel today to defend the nuclear containment deal with Iran and try to reassure a government and public deeply opposed to the accord that the United States is still prepared to inflict severe financial penalties on Tehran for its sponsorship of terrorism and support for military proxies.”


2015: “Avid Life Media, the parent company of Ashley Madison, announced that its chief executive, Noel Biderman, stepped down today, more than a month after hackers broke into the company’s computer systems and released data and emails that suggested it engaged in questionable business practices.”


2016: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children by Marjorie Ingall  ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic by Alan Schwarz,  The Gardner and the Carpenter What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik,  The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla, Against Everything: Essay by Mark Greif andThe Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner.


2016: “Weiner” the winner of the 2016 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary that examines the behavior Anthony Weiner, the husband of one of Hillary Clinton’s closest advisors is scheduled to open at JW3 Cinema.


2016: The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington is scheduled to pay tribute to “the national pastime” by sponsoring Grand Slam Sunday Jewish Community at the home of the Washington Nationals baseball team.


2016: Congregation Mikveh Israel of Philadelphia and the American Sephardi Federation are scheduled to host a screening of “Disobedience: The Sousa Mendes Story” a film that describes the exploits of “Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul-General in Bordeaux, France, who courageously rescued thousands of refugees, many of them Jews, in the spring of 1940 by issuing visas contrary to the strict orders of his government.”


2016: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to host “Nusakh Vilne Memorial” – a commemoration of the Jewish community in Vilna” featuring a presentation by Executive Director Jonathan Brent.


2016: In Los Angeles YIDDISHKAYT is scheduled to commemorate the start of Stalin’s Great Terror “which led to the devastation of Yiddish culture” in the Soviet Union “at the Southern California Arbeter Ring | Workmen's Circle”


2016: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host the U.S. premiere of “Heaven in Auschwitz” “a documentary film that tells the incredible story of 13 Jewish children during World War II, whose lives were changed forever by the legendary Fredy Hirsch, a German-Jew who worked to provide arts, culture and sports to improve the lives of children in the Terezin Ghetto.”


2016(24thof Av, 5776): Eight year old Iraqi born Israeli leader Binyamin Ben-Eliezer passed away today.



2016: UKJF is scheduled to sponsor a screening of “Mr. Gaga” directed by Tomer Heymann


2017: The Catherine Russell Quartet and the Josh Evans Quintet are scheduled to perform at the Red Sea Jazz Festival.


2017: Gilad Katz, “Israel’s consul general in Houston said today that people were living like “cavemen” in the city as a result of the flooding brought on by the heavy rains from Harvey, saying many residents of America’s fourth-largest city were stuck without food, water and electricity.”


2017: For a second day, “the Foreign Ministry” is scheduled to open “its doors to the diplomatic compound” so the public can see “just how diplomacy is done.”


2017: The City Contemporary Dance Company of Hong Kong is scheduled to perform at the dance festival in Tel Aviv.


2017(6thof Elul, 5777): Seventy-six year old mechanical engineer and son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Maurice Bluestein, the “maven of the wind chill index” pass away today. (As reported by Amisha Padnani)



2017: Maj. Gen. (res.) Yitzhak Pundak, whose contributions to the birth of Israel included creation of 53rd battalion of the Givati Brigade during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, founding of the IDF’s Nahal unit while serving as its first commander, and leading the IDF Armored Corps in the 1950s.who passed away yesterday is scheduled to be buried this afternoon at Kibbutz Nitzanim next to his wife.



2018: The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to host concerts featuring Itamar Borochow and David Serero this evening at the Center for Jewish History.


2018: “The new Tree House musical show…together with an original screen art work which incorporates still photography and animation, created by Daniel Zini and Yair Moss are scheduled to be shown in Jerusalem as part of the “End of Summer Festival..”


2018: “Hebrew folk country band Jane Bordeaux which is considered one of the most intriguing and surprising musical phenomena of recent times” is scheduled to perform tonight in Jerusalem.


2018: Following yesterday’s outbreak of fire in Be’eri and Shokeda forests and in Sa’ad Junction which were started by incendiary balloon, it appears that those elusive peace talks have not put an end to the violence from Gaza.


 


 


 

This Day, August 29, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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August 29

1255: The body of little boy who had disappeared was found in a well at Lincoln.  The boy would become known as Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (England) was the subject of an infamous ritual murder libel. It was alleged that Jews enticed the boy and while starving him, invited Jews of Lincoln to murder him ritually. (Jews did come to Lincoln at that time to attend a wedding.) His body was cast into a well and a month later, "miracles" followed the discovery of his corpse. On the basis of the alleged "confession" by Jopin (Jacob), the secular authorities (for the first time) and the Church sent 91 Jews to the Tower of London. Eighteen were executed before Richard and the friars stopped the killings. This incident provided Chaucer with the idea for his Prioress Tale and the hero of the popular ballad, "Little Sir Hugh."


1261: Urban IV, who reaffirmed Sicut Judaeis the papal bull first issued by Calixtus II which “was intended to protect the Jews” during the Crusade, began his papacy today.


1263: King Jaime of Spain gave the Jews three weeks to remove all blasphemy from their books (Talmud).


1288: Pope Nicholas IV “wrote to Emperor Rudolph “requesting the release of Meir b. Baruch of Rothenburg from prison.


1338: Pope Clement VI directed “that an investigation be made into the miracles connected “with a host in Pulka” the desecration of which was used as “as a pretext” for attacking and robbing the Jews.


1435: Paul of Burgos the Spanish Jew who converted to Christianity, and became an archbishop, Lord Chancellor, and exegete passed away today. He was also known as Pablo de Santa Maria or Paul de Santa Maria. His original name was Solomon ha-Levi. Like many converts of his time he took a leading role in the persecution of his former co-religionists.


1477: T'hilimwith Kimchi's commentary was published for the first time in Bologna, Italy by Hayyim Mordecai and Hezekiah de Ventura.  T’hilim is the Book of Psalms.  Kimchi is David Kimchi also known as RaDAK.  He was the third in a line of grammarians, lexicographers and Biblical commentators.  RaDAK’s more accurate renderings of the ancient texts helped to fuel the Protestant Reformation.


1484:  Pope Innocent VIII, a staunch supporter of the Spanish Inquisition, was elected Pope.  The significance to Jewish history of this event is self-evident.


1526: An Ottoman army defeated the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohács following which the Turks pillaged the city. The Christians nobles and the handful of wealthy Jews fled in fear of the Ottomans.  While Jews had lived in Hungary since the third century C.E., many of them had fallen on hard times during the 15th and 16th centuries as they dealt with accusations’ of Blood Libels and decrees designed to avoid repayment of just debts.  The Ottomans left but returned to stay in 1541 when much of central Hungary became part of the Ottoman Empire and a refuge for Sephardic Jews moving eastward to avoid the clutches of the Inquisition.


1541: The Ottoman Turks capture Buda, the capital of the Hungarian Kingdom. On the anniversary of the battle of Mohács, Sultan Suleiman I again took Buda by a ruse. This event marks the beginning of Turkish rule in many parts of Hungary, which lasted down to the end of the 17th century. The Jews living in these parts were treated far better than those living under the Habsburgs. During this period, beginning with the second half of the sixteenth century, the community of Ofen (Buda) flourished more than at any time before or after. While the Turks held sway in Hungary, the Jews of Transylvania (at that time an independent principality) also fared well. At the instance of Abraham Sassa, a Jewish physician of Constantinople, Prince Gabriel Bethlen of Transylvania granted a letter of privileges (June 18, 1623) to the Spanish Jews from Turkey.


1596: Coronation of Christian IV, the King of Denmark and Norway who lifted the restrictions that had been placed on Sephardic Jews when he took control of the town of Altona.


1632: Birthdate of English philosopher John Locke. Locke influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States.  In 1689 he wrote his “Letter Concerning Toleration” in which he stated “Neither Pagan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.”  Locke was asked to right a constitution for the new colony of South Carolina.  At the time, Christian merchants were complaining about the active involvement of Jews in the trade between South Carolina and the English Colony of Barbados.  Locke saw the problem as bigotry, not “swarming Jewish merchants.”  He inserted a line in the colonial charter that called for the protection of “Jews, heathens and other dissenters.”


1643: The oldest existing ketubbah written in the Western Hemisphere was executed in Surinam at the marriage of Yehudit to Hakaham Yizhak Meatob. The Jewish community in Surinam began with the arrival of a party Sephardic Jews in 1630. By the second half of the 17th century, there were at least Sephardic Jewish communities in the colony, numbering several hundred families.  As you can see from the attached, this item has been challenged



1655: Warsaw falls without resistance to a small force under the command of Charles X Gustav of Sweden during The Deluge. The Deluge is a general expression for a series of misfortunes that befell the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth starting with the uprising of the Cossacks and including an invasion by the Swedes. When it was all over, Poland was a much diminished entity and much less tolerant of its Jewish population.  This defeat was part of the long road that would lead to the partition of Poland in the late 18thcentury, which, among other things, would give Russia its large and unwanted Jewish population. 


1703: Following the death of Samuel Oppenheimer Emperor Leopold I named Samson Wertheimer to serve as his successor as “court factor” while extending “for twenty years his privileges of free religious worship, denizenship, and immunity from taxation


1756: Frederick the Great attacks Saxony, beginning the Seven Years' War. The Seven Years War was one of what seems to be a long list of interminable wars in Europe.  Americans know the Seven Years War as the French-Indian War; a fight that led directly to the American Revolution and the creation of the United States, and all that that means for the Jews of the world.  Frederick’s mistreatment of his Jewish subjects is too big a subject for this brief entry.  After visiting Frederick’s Berlin, the French statesman Mirabeau described the Prussian monarch’s decrees concerning Jews as “worthy of a cannibal.” Frederick characterized Jews “usurious vermin;”  “wretches who “multiply infamously.”  Saxony was the site of Martin Luther’s famous fight with the Roman Catholic Church.  He had the Jews expelled from Saxony in 1537. It would be centuries before they were readmitted and they would not gain full rights of citizenship until the second half of the 19th century.


1766: “An enlarged building, designed by George Dance the Elder” which served as the home of The Great Synagogue was consecrated today in London.


1770: At the age of 25, A.M. Rothschild married Guttle Schanpper, age 17.


1776(14thof Elul, 5536): Jose Pereira supplied a flotilla which General Washington used to move his army across the East River and escape destruction at the hand of the British.  Unfortunately the young Sephard lost his life as helped to provide covering fire for the army as it crossed to temporary safety.


1799: Papacy of Pius VI, who issued the anti-Semitic “Editto sopra gli ebrei” came to an end today.


1813: Samuel Abrahams married Rachel Joseph at the Great Synagogue today.


1822: In London Morocco native Solomon Ben Masud Ben Abraham Sebag (Solomon Sebag and his wife Sarah, “the eldest sister of Sir Moses Montefiore gave birth to Sir Joseph Sebag-Montefiore, the stock broker who held several positions including Justice of the Peace of Kent and President of the Board of Deputies.


1825: Seventy-three year old Flora Aarons, the widow of Aaron Aarons, who passed away two days ago was buried today at the Brady Street in Jewish Cemetery in London.


1826: Birthdate of French portrait painter Emile Levy who passed away in 1890.



1827: Jacob Lyons married Pessa Elizabeth at the New Synagogue today.


1829(30thof Av, 5589): Parashat Re’eh and Rosh Chodesh Elul


1832: Samuel Moses married Elizabeth Davis today.


1834: In Bavaria, Jacob and Jeanette Bettmann gave birth to Bernhard Bettman who would become a successful businessman and leader of the Cincinnati, Ohio, Jewish community.


1842: Jews began arriving in Hong Kong after it was ceded to Great Britain by China today. The first synagogue would not come into use until 1870 when a house on Hollywood Street was rented for that purpose.


1843(3rdof Elul, 5603): Sixty year old Ludwig Lewin Jacobson the Danish surgeon who developed several surgical instruments including “the lithoclast for the crushing of stones in the bladder.”


1843: Birthdate of David B. Hill, the Governor of New York who was supported by Samuel Gompers and opposed the American Protective Association (A.P.A.) the anti-immigrant organization that was hostile to Jews.


1848: Birthdate of Henry Schneeberger, the "first American-born, ordained rabbi who was the spiritual leader of Chizuk Amuno in Baltimore, MD.


1851: The U.S.S. Mississippi, under the command of Captain Uriah P. Levy, the highest ranking Jewish officer in the U.S. Navy, arrived today in Constantinople.  The American warship had been sent to the Ottoman capital for the purpose of providing Louis Kossuth, the exiled Hungarian political leader, with safe passage to France. 


1853: Two days after having fallen victim to cholera, Major Meno Berg, the fist Jewish Prussian staff officer was buried with full military honors in the Jewish cemetery in the Schönhauser Allee in a ceremony that police estimated was attended 60,000 people.


1853:  Birthdate of Solomon Bibo. Born in Prussia, Bibo would come to the United States where, in the 1880’s he became the first non-Indian governor of the pueblo of Acamo in New Mexico Territory.


1854: Birthdate of Joseph Jacobs an Australian literary and Jewish historian, who was a writer for the Jewish Encyclopedia.




1855(15th of Elul, 5615):Isaac Samuel Reggio passed away at the age of 71. Born in 1784 at Goriza, he was an Austro-Italian scholar and rabbi born at Gorizia. Reggio studied Hebrew and Talmud with his father, Abraham Vita, the Rabbi at Gorizia. At the same time he attended the gymnasium where he acquired knowledge of secular science and languages. Reggio's father, one of the liberal rabbis who supported Hartwig Wessely, paid special attention to the religious instruction of his son, who displayed unusual aptitude in Hebrew, and at the age of fourteen wrote a metrical dirge on the death of Moses Ḥefeẓ, who has served as the Rabbi of Gorizia.


1855:The New York Timesreported that  "a child of Mr. Louis Levinson of Providence, and of scriptural age, 'eight days old' was circumcised according to the ancient Jewish method at the house of his father...The ceremony was performed by Mr. Wolf of this city."


1858: Birthdate of French archaeologist Salomon Reinach whose “first published work was a translation of Arthur Schopenhauer’s “Essay on Free Will.”


1858:Dr. Joseph Bondi was installed as Rabbi of Anshi Chesed, the synagogue on Norfolk Street between Stanton and Houston Streets.


1859: The Tory (NY) Times reported that there was a quarrel taking place in the Jewish community over the ownership of a Bible. The Hebrew Bible which mysteriously disappeared, and was found only after a search warrant had been issued by a member of the local judiciary.


1862: During the reign of Napoleon III modifications were made today in the decree promulgated by Napoleon I in the method of choosing delegates to the Jewish Consistory.


1863:The five deserters in the Fifth corps, reprieved on Wednesday, will positively be shot to-day, at 3 o'clock, in presence of the corps. Two of them are Catholics, two Protestants, and one a Jew. Spiritual advisers have been with them to-day, a Jewish Rabbi having come expressly at the request of the one of that persuasion. The unfortunate men have finally made up their minds that they must die, though they have made several efforts to have their sentences commuted to hard labor for life. But the President, to his credit be it said, telegraphed yesterday that he could not interfere with the sentence, and the men will die. Their death is necessary to save hundreds of other lives, and to put a stop to the desertion of this class of men. Thirty more are on trial for the same offence in the first corps, and they will probably meet with a like fate.


1864: Democrats nominated Union General George B. McClellan to run against Abraham Lincoln who enjoyed a significant amount of support among the Jewish community in the upcoming Presidential campaign.


1865: Corporal Isaac Myers completed his service with Company G, 74thRegiment of the Union Army.


1865: Philadelphian Samuel Rothschild who rose from the rank of private to Commanding Sergeant of Company I of the 74th Regiment completed his term of service in the Union Army.


1865: In Pomerania, Hedwig and Isaak Lachmann gave birth to poet and translator Hedwig Lachmann. (As reported by Hanna Delf von Wolzogen)


1865:The New York Timesreported from Washington D.C. that the court-martial an Army Paymaster named Webb has come to an end.  Webb was accused of playing a key role in swindling hundreds of soldiers out a total $400,000.  According to the report “a Jew who was dismissed the service for defrauding the government at the beginning of the war” played a key role in the swindle.  This unnamed Jew testified against Webb during the trial confessing his own role in the scheme. [Editor’ note – the religion of no other person involved in the scheme was mentioned in the article.]


1865(7th of Elul, 5625): Dr. Robert Remak, Polish born German physician, neurologist and embryologist passed away at the age of fifty. While in medical practice, he researched unpaid at university. As a Jew, he was barred from teaching. In 1847 he became the first Jew to officially teach a university and was later promoted to the position of assistant professor. He discovered the fibers of Remak, nonmedullated nerve fibers and named the three germ layers he discovered of the early embryo: the ectoderm, the mesoderm, and the endoderm. In 1844 he discovered the nerve cells in the heart now called Remak's ganglia and provided the first illustration of the 6-layered cortex. He was a pioneer in the use of electrotherapy for the treatment of nervous diseases.


1867: One day after she had passed, 56 year old Brina (Joseph) Morris, “the wife of Henry Morris” with whom she had four children – “Cordelia, George, Deborah and Roas” – was buried today at the “Plymouth Hoe Burial Ground.”


1870(2ndof Elu, 5630): Forty-one year old Lazarus Geiger, the brother of Rabbi Abraham Geiger and the nephew of Rabbi Abraham Geiger, who was “intrigued” by the psychology of color passed away today.



1871: “Sketch of the Prison Rosenzweig, Alias Archer” published today described the activities of a German or Russian Jew named Rosenzweig who has been jailed for posing as medical doctor named Archer – a position for which he lacks both training and credentials.


1872: Among the 400 passengers arriving in New York on board the Packet-ship Charles H. Marshall was a German Jew named Meyer Velt


1873: This morning’s New York newspapers published a copy of a telegram from San Francisco that contains the confession of John T. Irving who claims to have murdered wealthy businessman Benjamin Nathan.


1873: “The Nathan Murder” published today described the confession of John T. Irving to the murder of Benjamin Nathan which included a claim that his son Washington Nathan was the mastermind of the crime.


1875: As the Shooting Season opens in France, Baron Hirsch entertains several of the “leading shots” on the land he leases in the forests around Saint-Germaine.


1878: After being attacked by a political opponent because of his religion, Raphael J. Moses, a prominent resident of Columbus, GA, responded in the local newspaper by asserting his Jewish pride in an article that was reprinted around the country: “I feel it an honor to be of a race whom persecution cannot crush, whom prejudice has in vain endeavored to subdue.” When he ran for congress, Moses explained, “I wanted to go to congress as a Jew and because I would have liked in a public position to confront and do my part towards breaking down the prejudice.”


1878(30th of Av, 5638): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1878: It was reported today that there are four Jews serving on the newly created 18 man Communal Council at Sarajevo.


1878: It was reported today that a Communal Council has been formed in Sarajevo. The Council, which represents a cross section of Sarajevo’s religious communities, includes four Jews, five Muslims, three Catholics and six Orthodox (Greek or Russian, not Jewish).


1882: Seventy two year old Friedrich Adolf Philippi the son a Jewish bank and family friend of the Mendelssohn who converted to Christianity in 1829 and became a Lutheran minister passed away today.


1882: Eliot Arthur De Pass married Beatrice “Trixie” De Mercado in Jamaica today.


1886: A party of forty Russian Jews landed at Castle Garden today and was detained by authorities.


1886(28thof Av, 5646): Gretchen Kauffmann Born, the first wife of Gustav Jacob Born and the mother of Nobel Prize winner Max Born, passed away.


1887: Birthdate of Clarence Yale Palitz, the native of Lavia who came to the United States in 1900 where he became a lawyer, alderman and active member of the Jewish community holding leadership positions with the Jewish Ladies Day Nursery and the Jewish Social Service Association while raising three children – Lillian, Bernard and Clarence, Jr. – with his wife Ruth Krumnas Palitz.



1888: Today marks the tenth free excursion of this season sponsored by the Sanitarium for Hebrew Children. As of this date, the Sanitarium for Hebrew Children the ten excursions have provided relief from the summer heat for 6,127 babies, 3,812 children and 3,678 mothers.


1888: “Bloody Days In Morocco” published today described the violence in the North African country that has included Arab leaders calling for a Holy War. This has prompted at least one newspaper in Tangiers to call for the European powers to send ships to protect the Christians and the Jews.


1889(2ndof Elul, 5649): Eighty-one year old Gustav Weil who switched from studying to be a rabbi to become a leading Orientalist and whose Mohammed der Prophet served as resource for Washington Irving when he wrote the Life of Mohammed passed away today.


1891: “Russian Jewish Refugees” published today described the “considerable complaints” being made by people in Detroit because “the Canadian authorities send all the penniless Jews who get into that country” here to be taken care of.


1891: Recorder Albert Hessberg of Albany was among those who greeted Senator Jacob A. Cantor of the Tenth Senatorial District and his wife when they returned from Europe today aboard the Hamburg steamer Columbia today.


1891: Birthdate of Cincinnati native Raphael Isaacs the University of Cincinnati educated physician and Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan who served as the Assistant Director of the Simpson Memorial Institute and the “Editor of the section of ‘Pathology of the Blood’ in Biological Abstracts while also being “a member of the Editorial Board of the medical journal Harefuah Haivri.


1892: “No Way To Stop Immigration” published today discussed the challenges of protecting the United States from the European cholera outbreak including the comment that once the danger from cholera is out of the way, “it is plain that the United States would be better off if ignorant Russian Jews…were denied a refuge here.”


1892: Birthdate of Alexandre Koyré, the Russian born French philosopher who served with the French Foreign Legion in WW I and spent WW II teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City.



1892: Birthdate of Chicago native Alvin Robert Cahn, the holder of a “BS from Cornell” and “PhD from the University of Illinois where he served  on the faculty  who was stationed at Dutch Harbor for three years during WW II.


1897: The First Zionist Congress (Basle, Switzerland) was convened by Theodore Herzl. It was represented by one hundred and ninety-seven delegates. This was one of the most important yet unexpected convocation in modern Jewish History.  Against all odds, Herzl had Jews from twenty-four different states as varied Palestine, the United States and an array from across Europe.  The Congress adopted a document known as the Basile Program that declared, "The task of Zionism is to secure for the Jewish people in a Palestine in a publicly recognized legally secure homeland."  The Congress also announced that it would dedicate itself to strengthening Jewish consciousness and national feeling."  Writing in his diary on September 3 of the same year Herzl stated,” At Basle I founded the Jewish state.  If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter.  Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it."  In 1947, just a few months beyond those fifty years, the UN approved the partition of Palestine that gave birth to the Jewish state.



1897: In Jersey City, NJ, Rabbi Jacob Boer led members of the Society of Teferith Israel in the ceremonies which converted a structure that had housed the German Evangelical Church into a synagogue. Rabbi Moses Wechsler, Rabbi Jacob Goodman and the Mayor of Jersey City were among the dignitaries who addressed the congregation.


1897: “The Snake in the Bible” published today described two appearances of the serpent in the Torah – the first in the Garden of Eden and the second when God calls on Moses to go before Pharaoh – each of which shows a different aspect of Biblical philosophy.



1898: The Zionist Conference chaired by Dr. Herzl continues for a second day in Basel, Switzerland.


1898: It was reported today that at age 22, Abram Herschberger is youngest Rabbi to lead a congregation in Chicago, Illinois and he may be the youngest clergy of any denomination serving in the Windy City.


1899: When the court martial of Captain Dreyfus resumed today Colonel Cordier, the Deputy Chief of the Intelligence Department was the first witness to take the stand and he testified based on his examination of the documents in question “he was now convinced Dreyfus was innocent.”


1899: Nouri Bey receives 10,000 Francs to arrange an audience for Herzl with the Sultan.


1900(4th of Elul, 5660): Seventy-nine year old Sir Saul Samuel, 1st Baronet, the Australian merchant, government official and leader of the Jewish community passed away today.



 


1903: Die Welt publishes the declaration of the British Government on the allocation of a "Jewish territory" in East Africa. Die Welt was the name of publication started by Herzl in 1897 to further the Zionist cause.  It should not be confused with the modern German publication of the same name.


1904: Joseph E. Nowrey, the Mayor of Camden, NJ, was reported today to have compared the conditions of Jews in the United States and in Russia when he said, “What a great sensation it would be if a Russian official, presiding over a city, should appear on a platform and speak words of encouragement at the dedication of a Jewish synagogue.  But thing are different in the broad land of ours.”


1910(24th of Av, 5670): Sixty-eight year old San Francisco attorney and Democratic politician Joseph Naphthaly, the Prussian born son of Samuel and Julia Naphthaly who married the former Sarah Schmitt, the daughter of Blaize L. and Pauline Schmitt with whom he had two children, Samuel and Leon, passed away today.


1911: In Great Britain the Tredegar District Council adopted a resolution protesting against “disgraceful rioting and looting” attacks against Jews in New South Wales.  The riots, which had begun on August 19 following the end of strike, were the worst outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in the British Isles in modern times.


1912: Birthdate of Wolfgang Suschitzky, the “the photographer and cinematographer” who was the brother of Edith Tudor-Hart.



1912(16th of Elul, 5672): Eighty year old Brno born philosopher and author Theodor Gomperz passed away today.



1913(26th of Av, 5673): David Shubert, the Lithuanian born husband of Gittel Helvich Shubert whose children – Lee, Fannie, Samuel, Sarah, Jacob and Dora – the male members of which were the famous producers and theatrical entrepreneurs passed away today in Manhattan.


1913: Birthdate of Sylvia Fine, the Brooklyn native who was an “American lyricist, composer, producer and the wife of the comedian Danny Kaye.”


1914: Solomon Standwood Menken, a Memphis born New York lawyer who had converted to Christianity “returned to the United States today” from Great Britain where “he helped form the National Security League, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to higher military budgets, universal conscription and tight regulation of the economy” after having seen how poorly prepared the United Kingdom had been prepared to go to war against the Central Powers.


1914: Much to the delight of the Jews serving with the Kaiser and to the disappointment of Jews serving under the Tricolor, the Germans thwarted an attack at Guise which would lead to further retreat by the French.


1915: In Atlantic City, NJ, 500 people attended a meeting at the Garden Pier sponsored by the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews suffering through the war where arrangements were completed “for raising a fund throughout the country for the relief of Jews in Poland and Palestine.”


1915: “The dedication of the home for the convalescents established by the Federation of Rumanian Jews of America did not take place this afternoon as planned due to inclement weather.”


1915: According to reports published today, Dr. Jacques Faitlovich is planning on starting “a school for the Abyssinian black Jews in the Italian colony of Eretria” with the help of two young men he had brought to Italy for an education and which is supported “by Jewish organizations in America.”


1915: James Huneker provides an insight into the works of Russian author Mikhail Artsybashev including “The Doctor” which provides “a view of pogrom in a tiny Russian province town” that provides details “of the wretched Jews shot down ripped open, maltreated and driven into the wilderness” which makes the reader “shudder.


1915: In Richmond, VA, founding of Beth Israel Synagouge.


1915: In Baltimore founding of Ahavas Sholom.


1915: In Newark, NJ, founding of Aahavath Zion Synagogue.


1915: In Los Angeles dedication of the Home for the Aged.


1916: During World War I, Paul von Hindenburg became Chief of the German General Staff. Hindenburg’s supposed brilliance was really the work of his loyal lieutenant Erich Ludendorff. Among other things, Hindenburg helped provide ammunition for the myth that that German Army was stabbed in the back (by the Jews) and actually brought Hitler to power as Chancellor.


1916: Jacob de Hass, the Secretary of the Provisional Committee for General Zionists wrote a letter today in which he took exception to a report by three teachers from American colleges in Turkey who said “that on their visit to Palestine they learned that all the Jews had been deported from Jerusalem with the exception of a few who had accepted the Moslem faith.”


1916: “Austrian Threats to Jews” published today described two orders by the military commander of the Chelm District which The Day, a Jewish newspaper published in New York described as “an open provocation, the purpose of which is to make the Jews of invaded Poland the scapegoat for all Austrian misfortunes.”


1917: Today, in Moscow, at the closing session the third sitting of the national conference, “the representative of the Jews said that they loved their country, notwithstanding their unprecedented persecution under the old regime and had contributed greatly to the emancipation of the people and the defense against the enemy.”


1918: In Manhattan Thomas Rockwell Shepard Sr. and the former Marie Maze Dickinson gave birth to Thomas Rockwell Shepard Jr. the last publisher of Look magazine “which helped to launch the photography career of Stanley Kurbrick” and which published Thomas Morgan’s ““The Vanishing American Jew: Leaders fear threat to Jewish survival in today’s ‘crisis of freedom.'”


1918: Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, who arrived in Great Britain yesterday from the United States at the head of a labor delegation, visited his birthplace in Spitalfields.


1918: “Bennett Charges Forgery” published described complaints of voting irregularities that had been lodged by Ex-Senator William Bennett who was seeking the Republican nomination for Lt. Gov. of New York with Samuel S. Koenig, the chairman of the county Republican Committee – charges which the Jewish political leader dismissed as being groundless.


1919: Sendel and Riva Grynszpan gave birth to Mordechai Grynszpan, the brother of Herschel Grynszpan the man who assassinated Ernst vom Rath which was the excuse for Kristallnacht


1920: At Surprise Lake Camp, Cold Spring on the Hudson, Herman Lehman presided over the dedication of the Marx Building where the 75 attendees heard a speech by Judge Samuel Greenbaum and “a talk by Eddie Cantor who traced the beginning of his theatrical career to the summer, 18 years ago, when he was first sent to Surprise Lake Camp by the Education Alliance” and found himself providing entertainment for his 450 fellow campers.


1920: “The first issue of Di Tsayt,” a Yiddish daily newspaper that would survive for two year “was published today in New York.


1921: In Budapest, the United States and Hungary signed a peace treaty because the Senate had rejected the Versailles Treaty – a rejection that many believe was a step on the road to WW II and all that that came to mean.


1922: Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin was arrested today in Glasgow, “ostensibly for breaking immigration regulations” but more likely because the authorities in the UK knew about his role as a spy and agent for the Soviet government.


1923: Jewish gangsters Samuel "Sammy" Weiss, Jacob "Little Augie" Orgen and Samuel Gepson were arraigned at Essex Market Courthouse today on charges of having violated New York’s Sullivan Law.


1924: Birthdate of Warsaw born filmmaker and actor Jakub Goldberg whose most famous collaboration with Roman Polanski.


1924: Birthdate Victor Parsonnet, the WW II Navy veteran and NYU Med School graduate “who became a thoracic and cardiac surgeon in Newark, New Jersey and is affiliated with Newark Beth Israel Medical Center” and served as Chairman of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.


1927: In Worms, birthdate of furniture designer Vladimir Kagan who was brought to the United States in 1937 by his mother Hildegard to escape the Nazis.



1928: Birthdate of Perry K. Peskin, the Western Reserve University educated high school and U.S. Army veteran who was best known for his hobby as a “Bird Watcher”



1929: The day began with an Arab attempt to massacre the Jewish population of Safed, one of the sacred cities of Palestine and the center of study of the Kaballah. Initially nine Jews were killed and thirty wounded. As day turned into night the attack continued with the Arabs killing twenty-two Jews, wounding scores more and burning the whole town except the government buildings. Fighting proceeded for eight hours before British troops arrived from Tiberias.  At least one American was found among the wounded.  According to reports circulating in the ancient Jewish settlement 3,000 have been left homeless and some of the wounded were tortured by the Arab raiders.


1929: After six days of Arab attacks, 133 Jews had been killed throughout Palestine.  The casualties would have been higher if had not been for the work of the Haganah.  Established nine years earlier, members of the Haganah worked to defend settlements through Palestine.  At Hulda, twenty-three Haganah members held off more than 1,000 Arab attackers.  The success came at a cost - Ephraim Chizik, commander of the unit and one of the earliest members of the Jewish defense force was killed during the action.


1929: After a week of Arab riots that started on August 23, as of today, 113 Jews had been killed and 339 wounded. As a result of the riots, Sir Walter Shaw headed a commission which urged the banning of Jewish immigration and absolved the Arabs and the Mufti of guilt. Another commission led by Sir John Simpson declared that the entire Zionist operation was unsound and undesirable. Both of these commissions were under the auspices of Lord Passfield, the British Colonial Secretary.


1929: In a letter to The Times of London, British Zionist Harry Sacher refuted Arab claims that the Wailing Wall was part of the Mosque of Omar and that the Jews had no right to be there.  The Mufti had claimed that the Arab Riots were provoked by Jews marching to the Wailing Wall and violating the law by hosting a Zionist flag. (Please note the similarity of this claim to the one that would be made at the end of the century to justify the violence known as the Second Intifada.)


1931: Robert Szold said in a statement issued on behalf of the administration of the Zionist Organization of America that the great majority of the American delegation to the recent World Zionist Congress at Basle applied itself to averting continued internal dissension in the organization and accomplished that goal.


1933(7th of Elul, 5693): Ninety- year old Sir Philip Magnus, the rabbi who gave up the pulpit to pursue a career furthering technical education and the husband of Katie Magnus with whom he had two children biographer Philip Magnus and published Laurie Magnus.




1933: In the Bronx, the former Rachel Gutman, a nutritionist and Judah Wattenberg, a real estate lawyer who gave birth to Joseph Ben Zion Wattenberg who gained famed as Democratic Party activist, author and social commentator Ben Wattenberg.



1933: “Dinner at Eight” the film version of the play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, directed by George Cukor, produced by David O. Selznick with a script by Herman Mankiewicz was released in the United States by MGM.


1933: “The New York Times runs a story about the existence of 65 concentration camps in Germany where at least 45,000 people are being held in inhuman conditions. Most of the prisoners in these camps are political: communists, socialists, and liberals of various sorts.”(As reported by Austin Cline)


1933: In Canada, A spokesman of the Immigration Department publicly announces that the Government does not intend to amend the present restrictive immigration policy, thus responding to the objections of anti-Jewish groups and a section of the press to the proposed admission of German-Jewish refugees.


1933: The conflict within the World Zionist Congress, caused by the presentation during the week-end of charges that the Palestine labor leader, Dr. Chaim Arlosoroff, had been murdered by Zionist Revisionists, overshadowed today’s discussions when the congress met today.


1933:  Dr. Chaim Weizmann definitely declines to accept the presidency of the World Zionist Organization, though he agrees to head the campaign for funds to settle German Jews in Palestine.


1935: The delegates to the World Zionist Congress were saddened by the death of Queen Astrid of the Belgians. This was reflected by the decision of the delegates to limit their activities today the holding a series of quiet sectional conferences.


1935: The Los Angeles Times reported that “a Los Angeles based anti-Nazi League” had been operating in that city at least since February of 1934.


1935: In Chicago, Louis Friedkin, “a semi-professional softball player, merchant seaman, and men's clothing salesman” and Rachael (née Green) Friedkin, “an operating room registered nurse gave birth to Oscar winning director whose works included the “French Connection” and “The Exorcist.”


1935: New York premiere of “Top Hat” a musical produced by Pandro S. Berman with a score by Irving Berlin and Max Steiner.


1936: Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Union, “warns that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party are planning a massive war that will lead to slaughter across Europe.”


1936: It was announced today that “The American Committee Appeal for the Relief of Jews in Poland” which is seeking to raise one million dollars “has asked Jewish congregations throughout the United States to raise funds during the coming Jewish holidays for the relief of destitute co-religionists in Poland.”


1936: Two British soldiers were killed tonight and three more were wounded when Arabs attacked a patrol near Mount Tabors.


1936: Arabs attacked Jewish settlement in the Sharon Valley in southern Judea and in the Jordan Valley tonight.


1936: In light of the violence in Palestine and the pressure being brought on the British government to stop Jewish immigration, a special evening prayer is scheduled to be recited in all Dutch synagogues in response to an order from the Association of Chief Rabbis of Holland.



 



1936: “Unless unforeseen circumstances arise between tonight and tomorrow morning, an Arab High Committee meeting then will accept the intervention of General Nuri Pasha as-Said, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, for a settlement of the present deadlock between the Palestine Arabs and the Palestine (British Mandate) Government.



1937(22nd of Elul, 5697): In the ongoing violent uprising against the Jews and in an attempt to silence Arab opposition, Abraham Berkowsky, aged 45, a Tel Aviv tailor, was killed on an Egged bus by a terrorist firing from an ambush just above Motza.


1937: At Oxford, Prof. Dr. Herbert Danby, who translated the Mishna into English, severely criticized Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi scholar and the head of the German Foreign Affairs section, who had just published his book The Immorality of the Talmud. Danby said that the book, published by Friends of Europe, was full of malice and misquotations


1937: New York’s WNEW radio station broadcast a memorial show honoring cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper who had passed away on August 28.


1938: In New York City, Sylvia (née Seiderman) and Alexander Rubin gave birth to Robert Rubin, the United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton.


1938: In Brooklyn, the former Lucille Raver and Bernard Goldstein gave birth to Elliott Goldstein who gained fame as Elliot Gould one of the most prominent American film actors in the early '70s, best known for playing Trapper John in the satirical 1970 film M*A*S*H. Time magazine put him on its cover in 1970, when he was at the brief height of his long career, calling him a "star for an uptight age


1938: According to the London Daily Mail, a group of Arabs attacked Jerusalem tonight.  The same report included a description of an attack on Mothea, a kibbutz known for its dairy, during which the barns were burned and “a number of the pedigreed cattle” were deliberately burned alive.


1939: On the eve of World War II, Chaim Weizmann informed the prime minister of England that the Jews of Eretz Israel would stand by Great Britain and fight on the side of the democracies.


1939:  Birthdate of director William Friedkin.  He is best known for his work with The Exorcist and the French Connection for which he won an Oscar.


1939:  Birthdate of movie director Joel Schumacher the son of Marian (née Kantor) Schumacher, whose “mother was a Swedish Jew.”


1940: The National Encampment of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States continued to a second day in Boston.


1941: The remainder of 11,000 displaced Hungarian Jews (forced laborers), now living in Kamenets Podolsk and whom Hungary did not want to take back were taken out of town to a pit and machine gunned down.


194(16th of Elul, 5702): Rabbi Simcha Oberbaum, Aleksanderer Chassid; a central figure in the Lodz Jewish community; born in Warsaw in 1852, died in the Lodz ghetto.


1942: As can be seen from the attached photograph, more Jews were deported today from Wiesbaden Germany to Auschwitz.



1942: It was reported today that Dominican President Rafael L. Trujillo’s offer to provide a haven for 3,500 Jewish refugee children living in Vichy was been forward, Marshal Petain, the head of the French government. A few years earlier, Trujillo had provided land at Sousa for a Jewish refugee colony.


1942: Twelve Jewish American women were included among the first graduating class of WAAC officers at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. They were Ruth Ginns, Beatrice Berg, Carolyne Casper and Jean Korn from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Kathryne Goldfluss, Rose Ross and Joan Strongin from New York, New York; Bee Rosenberg and Ruth Spivak from Chicago, Illinois; Rita Fink and Isabel Bayley of Buffalo, New York; and Elizabeth Morgenstern of Seattle, Washington.a


1942: The Jewish community from Olesko, Ukraine, is deported to the Belzec death camp


1942: Occupation officials in the East inform Berlin that the "Jewish problem" has been "totally solved" in Serbia. Since German occupation, 14,500 of Serbia's 16,000 Jews have been murdered.


1943: The American Jewish Conference “opened at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City.  More than five hundred delegates were present representing sixty-five different national organizations.”  Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver gave an “electrifying speech” in which he “convinced his audience to support the Biltmore Declaration.”


1943: After almost 8 years, the New Deal agency known as The Federal Art Project (FAP) whose artists included Leon Bibel, Adolph Gottlieb, Harry Gottlieb, Isaac Soyer, Moses Soyer. Raphael Soyer and Lee Krasner came to an end


1943: Six hundred prisoners were sent from Larissa to Athens so they could be held Haidari, a concentration camp that was really a stopping point for the ultimate trip to Auschwitz. 


1943: In Denmark, the official chief rabbi, Dr. Max Friediger is detained as a "hostage" of along with some 100 prominent Danes, including a dozen Jews, in a camp near Copenhagen.


1944: More than 800 Jews earmarked for forced labor are transported from Auschwitz to the labor camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, for assignment to nearby factories. Elsewhere in Germany, about 72 ill or pregnant Jews are taken from a labor camp near Leipzig and transported to gas chambers at Auschwitz.


1944: The last transport left the Lodz Ghetto after two months of final liquidation of the Jewish population. Only 600 Jews remained from 76,000 who were still alive there on June 15, 1944.


1944: Father Giuseppe Girotti was arrested today when he was “caught in the middle of transferring a wounded Jewish partisan” to a safe house –a deed that earned him a one-way ticket to Dachau where he was murdered on Easter Day. (As reported by JTA)


1945: Lt. Colonel Judah Nadich entered the Feldafing D.P. camp.  Nadich was a rabbi serving as the senior Jewish chaplain in Europe.  Nadich was repelled by the barbaric conditions under which the Jews were living; especially by the fact that they were confined behind barbed wire just as had been the case in the Concentration Camps while “The conquered Germans had complete freedom.”


1945: Lt. Col. Louis Geffen, who had served as a judge advocate in the US Army since January 1941, set sail from Oakland, CA for Japan.


1951: In Chicago, Edward H. Levi the former President of the University of Chicago and Attorney General and his wife gave birth to David F. Levi who served a federal judge before becoming Dean of the Duke University School of Law.


1952: Birthdate of Baltimore native Karen S. Hesse winner of the Newbery Medal for Out of the Dust and  the Koret Jewish Book Award in 2005 for The Cats in Krasinski Square.


1954: WNBC is scheduled to broadcast “first radio performance of Maria del Carmen (Granados) and Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra by Nathaniel Shilkret.”


1955: Birthdate of Jacob “Jack” Lew, whom President Obama chose to serve as the 25thWhite House Chief of Staff.


1957: Premiere of The Pajama Game featuring a score by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, two more of the Jews who created and nurtured the “Broadway Musical,” one of America’s unique contributions to the world of entertainment.


1958: United States Air Force Academy opens in Colorado Springs, Colorado. According to the latest figures available, there are approximately fifty Jewish cadets attending the Academy. 


1959(25th of Av, 5719): Parashat Re’eh


1958(25th of Av, 5719): Sixty-two year old Denver born Zionist leader David Tannenbaum passed away today in Tel Aviv.



1960(6th of Elul, 5720): Fifty-two year old Hedwig “Vicki” Baum whose 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel would be made into the Academy Award winning “Grand Hotel” passed away today.



1961: “Bear Meat,” a short story by Primo Levi, was published for the first time in Il Mondo.


1964(21st of Elul, 5724): Leil Sleichot


1964: After 964 performances, the curtain came down on the original Broadway production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” the Stephen Sondheim Tony award winning musical comedy starring Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford (both of whom had been blacklisted) featuring Karen Black


1968: In Chicago, the National Democratic Convention which has been held against a backdrop of demonstrations led in part by Lee Weiner, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, comes to an end.


1963: At the New York Shakespeare Festival, final performance of “Electra” featuring David Hurst in the role of “Paedagogus”


1969: A deranged Australian tourist who was a Christian fundamentalist set fire to the Al Aksa Mosque claiming that it was “Satan’s Temple.”


1969: Two Palestinians hijacked a TWA plane after it had left Los Angeles and forced it to land at Damascus where 6 Israeli passengers were detained.


1970: Plans for Israel's forthcoming appeal to the world's Jews for $1-billion next year for nondefense needs of the country were outlined at a meeting of the newly reorganized Jewish Agency


1972(19th of Elul, 5732):René Leibowitz, Polish born French composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher passed away.


1974: Just days before his 65th birthday, Biblical scholar and archeologist George Ernest Wright who directed the Drew-McCormick Archaeological Expedition to Shechem and the Hebrew Union College Biblical and Archaeological School Expedition at Tell Gezer passed away today.


1975: Colonels Lev Ovsischer and Yefim Davidovich and other Zionist activists protested the imminent screening in Minsk of new anti-Zionist documentary film, “The Secret and the Obvious”.


1976: John Darnton described the volatile conditions in sub-Saharan African including “the recent dispute between Kenya and Uganda stemming from President Idi Amin’s charge of Kenyan complicity in the Entebbe raid.”


1976:  The first Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education began at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. http://jwa.org/thisweek/aug/29/1976/caje


1977(15th of Elul, 5737): Seventy-nine year old Aharon Menachem Shapira, the son of Avraham and Liba Rochel Shapira passed away today at Petah Tikva.


1977: Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu cruised peacefully on Lake Snagov, discussing peace prospects and bilateral relations. They reaffirmed Israeli-Rumanian friendship, but haggled over the wording of the final joint announcement.


1977: In Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek asked whether the ³equalized services² promised for the West Bank and Gaza by the new Likud government would be extended to east Jerusalem, as well as to the new Jewish neighborhoods, deprived so far of adequate religious, educational and communal facilities.


1979(6th of Elul, 5739): Eighty-four year old newspaper mogul Samuel I. Newhouse passed away today.



1979: Birthdate of Ehud “Udi” Tenenbaum the native of Ramat HaSharon who was arrested for hacking into a wide variety of computer systems including those at NASA, MIT and the Knesset.


1982: Dr. Sari Lynn Kramer, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Julian S. Kramer of South Orange, N.J., was married to Samuel L. Margulies, son of Mrs. Emmanuel Margulies of New York and the late Mr. Margulies. Rabbi Barry Greene of Livingston, N.J., performed the ceremony at the home of the bride's parents. The bride, who will retain her name, is a psychologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in East Orange, N.J. She was graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received a master's degree in education from Harvard University and a master's degree and a doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University. Her father is chief executive officer of the Suburban Foods Corporation in Clifton, N.J. Mr. Margulies, a lawyer in Montclair, N.J., is chairman of the New Jersey Council on Divorce Mediation in Upper Montclair, N.J. He was graduated from New York University, where he also received a master's degree in international relations. He has a doctorate in political science from the University of Oregon and a law degree from the Rutgers University Law School. His previous marriage ended in divorce. His father was president of the Community Bank in Linden, N.J.


1982(10th of Elul, 5742): Eight-seven year old Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann, the founder of the World Jewish Congress passed away today.




1983: “Strange Brew” directed and written by Rick Moranis who also starred in the comedy was released in Canada today by MGM.


1984(1st of Elul, 5744): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1985: One person was injured during a stabbing attack by a terrorist in Jerusalem.


1986: “In an essay entitled "Encumbered Remembrance: The Controversy about the Incomparability of National-Socialist Mass Crimes" first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung today, Joachim Clemens Fest claimed that Ernst Nolte's argument that Nazi crimes were not "singular" was correct.”


1986: Birthdate of Canadian actress, Lauren Collins.


1994: Solomon “Sol” Wachtler, the Republican Chief Judge of the New York of Appeals who had been convicted and sentenced to prison for “acts stemming from threats he made against a former lover and her daughter” was scheduled to be released to a half-way house today.


1994(22nd of Elul, 5754): Ninety-five year old Walter Gilbert Peiser, the Brooklyn born son of William and Jennie Peiser and the husband of Frances Henrietta Peiser who was a graduate of the University of Cincinnati and the Hebrew Union College and who served as a rabbi in Cleveland, OH, Austin, TX and Baton Rouge, LA where he also served on the faculty of LSU passed away today.



1996: The Democratic National Convention comes to an end having nominated Bill Clinton for President comes to an end.  His second administration will include Monica Lewinsky, a failed attempt to force a peace agreement at Camp David and the pardon of Marc Rich.


1997(26th of Av, 5757): Seventy-three year old Ilya Gazarkh, a resident of Pisgat Ze’ev who had survived the combat of WW II, died of the wounds he sustained during a terrorist bombing at the Mahane Yehuda Market in July.


1999: David Berger completed his service as Canada’s Ambassador to Israel.


1999: “The Chicago Jewish Historical Society – in cooperation with the Dawn Schuman Institute – is scheduled to lead a tour of southwest Michigan led by Leah Axelrod where participants will “learn about early Jewish farmers” and the development of the resorts at South Haven and Benton Harbor.


1999: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayedby Gerald Gamm, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese Historyby Joanna Waley-Cohen daughter of Sir Bernard Nathaniel Waley-Cohen, the Jewish businessman who became Lord Mayor of London, Kosovo Crossing by David Fromkin and The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostelby Arnold Wesker.


1999: The 7th World Championships in Athletics in which Aleksandr Valeryevich Averbukh placed third in the Pole Vault representing Israel came to a close today in Seville, Spain.


2000(28th of Av, 5760): Ninety-seven year old Gertrude H. Schaefler, the widow of the late Leon Schaefler passed away today.


2001(10th of Elul, 5761): Thirty-five year old Oleg Sotnikov was shot by terrorists today.


2003(1st of Elul, 5763): Rosh Chodesh Elul


2003(1st of Elul, 5763): The Fatah al-Aqsa Brigades “claimed responsibility for the murder of 25 year old Shalom Har-Melekh and the wounding of his “wife Limor who was seven months pregnant” and subsequently “gave birth to a baby girl by Caesarean section.” (Jewish Virtual Library)


2003: Eric Edelman began serving as United States Ambassador to Turkey.


2003: Pulitzer-Prize Winning Poet Louise Glück (pronounced “Glick”) was named poet laureate of the United States. http://jwa.org/thisweek/aug/29/2003/louise-gluck


2004: In “In New York Try and Find A Genuine New York Bagel,” published today Molly O’Neill decried the downward spiral of the genuine bagel while providing a list of places where the aficionado can find this unique hunk of boiled dough.


Beware the billowy bagel. It bears no resemblance to its small, gnarly forebears. The traditional bagel was as tough as New Yorkers imagine themselves to be. It was a workout: the carb count of a handmade bagel was net zero once the chewing was done. This bagel was one of the reasons that the typical New Yorker found it difficult to wake up elsewhere and one reason people came here. Today the typical New York City bagel is no different from the ones served in malls nationwide. The traditional bagel, born of Eastern European shtetls, was made of yeast, malt, flour, water and salt. It was rolled by hand, first boiled and then baked. Today's version is made from yeast and sugar, flour, water and salt, extruded through machines and baked. The result is a big, fat, soft pillow suitable only for naps. Had we not been focused on other issues in recent years, New Yorkers would have taken swift and certain action against the airy and flaccid interlopers that dare to call themselves bagels. Rather than a daily entitlement, the authentic bagel has become a special event. We generally find them behind well-steamed windows -- the secret is in the malt, the baker and the boiling -- in places like these:


BAGEL HOLE -- 400 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn, (718) 646-2210


BAGEL OASIS -- 183-12 Horace Harding Expressway, Queens, (718) 359-9245


BAGELWORKS INC. -- 1229 First Avenue, (212) 744-6444.


ESS-A-BAGEL -- 359 First Avenue, (212) 260-2252; 831 Third Avenue, (212) 980-1010.


MURRAY'S BAGELS -- 242 Eighth Avenue at 23rd Street; (646) 638-1335


 NEPTUNE BAGELS -- 371 Neptune Avenue, Brooklyn; (718) 462-2830


ROCCO'S PASTRY SHOP AND ESPRESSO CAFE -- 243 Bleecker Street between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue, (212) 242-6031


2004: The Sunday New York Times book section includes a review of Blackbird House by Jewish novelist Alice Hoffman.


2004: The New York Mets held their annual “Jewish Heritage Day” game by playing the Los Angeles Dodgers who roster includes Shawn Green, the 21st century version of Sandy Koufax.


2005(24th of Av, 5765): Seventy-eight year old Rabbi Balfour Brickner whose accomplishments included the founding to Temple Sinai in Washington, DC passed away today.




2005: Hurricane Katrina strikes New Orleans causing untold suffering among the Jewish community as well as the secular community. In the coming days, the world will be treated to Tzizth wearing rabbis rescuing Torah Scrolls from flooded buildings as the Crescent City suffers one of the worst disasters in American history.


2005: The issue of Sports Illustrated Magazine of this date contained an article entitled “Stars Of David” about the two Arab Israelis named Abbas Suan and Walid Badir.  They are stars on Israel’s World Cup soccer team.  They each scored a critical goal in two games that have left Israel undefeated in seven qualifying games and on the verge of reaching its first World Cup in 36 years.


2005: In Little Rock, AR, Rabbi Pinchas Ciment and his wife Estie Ciment announce the arrival of their new son.


2006: In San Francisco a SUV struck two people in front of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on California Street, a few blocks from where the hit and run rampage ended. Blood covered the sidewalk in front of the center’s gift store entrance, and 50 feet farther down the sidewalk lay a mangled bicycle. Security cameras in front of the center captured images of the incident, which happened at 1:12 p.m., according to Aaron Rosenthal, spokesman for the community center


2007: In Eilat, second night of the Red Sea Jazz Festival.


2007:In response to the Larry Craig scandal Al Goldstein declared in his blog that he was bisexual, and said he'll be "the first presidential candidate to admit to sucking cock and the first to turn fully gay mid-campaign."


2007: Boaz Mauda won Kochav Nolad 2007 with 50% of the votes.


2008:  “Lifetimes To Go in Old Mexico” published today provides a of “My Mexican Shiva” based on  "Morirse está en hebreo," a short story by Ilan Stavans “about Jewish life in Mexico at the time of the 2000 presidential election.”



2008: The Red Sea Jazz Festival comes to an end.


2008: TheAvishai Cohen Trio performs at the Blue Note in New York City.Acclaimed bassist Avishai Cohen, whose most recent recording, “Gently Disturbed,” continues to earn rave reviews, visits NYC for three days of performances where he is joined by the same trio – Shai Maestro on piano and Mark Guiliana on drums – who perform with him on Gently Disturbed, which Jazz Timesrecently lauded as “scintillating”, Downbeatpraised as “simultaneously delicate and fierce,” and which the Washington City Paper called “unpredictable” and “deeply compelling.”


2009: Ceremonies commemorating the 65th Anniversary of the Liquidation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto by German authorities comes to an end.


2009:Palestinian militants fired a Qassam rocket into the western Negev early Saturday. The rocket fired by Palestinian militants hit an open area in the Sdot Negev regional council. The Qassam, fired at around 6 A.M., was one of several military incidents along Israel's boarder with Gaza, coming after months of relative calm.


2009:In the evening, The Cedar Rapids Jewish community gathers for the first Shiva minyan honoring Peggy McHugh beloved mother of Sabrina Thalblum and the mother-in-law of Rabbi Todd Thalblum.


2010:Annual dinner to support Magan David Adom in Israel is scheduled to take place at Adat Shalom Synagogue in Farmington Hills, Michigan 


2010: The Stern Senior Art Show is scheduled to come to an end at Yeshiva University Museum.


2010: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Freedomby Jonathan Franzen


2010: With Mideast peace talks due to restart in Washington this week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak met with Jordan' King Abdallah today to offer assurances that Israel is committed to a lasting peace with the Palestinians. "Peace is a strategic objective for Israel," Barak told the king. "We expect the Palestinians to come to the peace talks with openness."


2010: It was reported from Jerusalem today that “recent discoveries of large natural gas reserves off Israel's coast have set in motion a battle between investors and the government over how to divide up the profits.


2011: “Ushpizin” is scheduled to be the movie shown at Movies Under the Stars at the Chabad Community Campus in Fairfax, VA.


2011:Seven people were injured in south Tel Aviv early this morning, when a terrorist from the West Bank carjacked a taxi and rammed it into a police road block protecting a Tel Aviv nightclub, before going on a stabbing spree.


2011:Top Israeli singer and TV personality Margalit "Margol" Tzan'ani and convicted criminal Michael Hazan were indicted this morning on charges of extortion, and conspiracy to commit a crime.


2012: “Advanced Kashrut Seminar for Women” is scheduled to take place at the OU Headquarters in New York City.


2012: In “Boys Own Adventures in Wartime and Sterling Public Service” published today John Farquharson described the exemplary life of Sir Richard Kingsland who had been born Julius Cohen, but changed his name “to avoid anti-Semitism.”


2012: A 25 person Israeli team is set to compete at the Paralympic Games which are scheduled to open today in London (As reported by Aaron Kalman)



2012: One hundred fifteenth anniversary of the opening of the First Zionist Congress in Basle.


2012:A New York City hardware store clerk who pleaded guilty to kidnapping, killing and dismembering a lost little boy was sentenced today to 40 years to life in prison



2012:The office of Rabbi Yitshak Ehrenberg, who has been serving the Berlin Jewish community since 1997, confirmed today in an email that criminal charges had been filed against him. Ehrenberg has received a letter from the prosecutor’s office because of comments he made on a nationwide broadcast television show, an aide confirmed. At this point it is not known who filed the complaint and what exactly the letter states.



2012: In “Peeking through the highrises: famed Jerusalem street's old architectural glories” published today Moshe Gilad provides cultural history of the Jewish state disguised as a tour of Jerusalem's Hanevi'im (Prophets) Street



2013: The Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival presents “In Conversation with Laurent Binet” whose award winning first novel HHhh “recounts the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.”


2013: Denis Kozhutkin is scheduled to play Hindemith’s Piano Sonata no.3 in B flat major at The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.


2013: Nicholas and Jacobina, the children of Judith (Perlman) Martin “began sharing the credit for the Miss Manners columns today.


2013: Félix Lajkó and his band are scheduled to perform at the Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest.


2013: "Praying for peace is not enough when God’s children are being gassed,” a leading British rabbi, Dr Jonathan Romain, said in an expression of support for military intervention in Syria, British media reported today.”



 2013: “Thousands of Israelis lined up outside gas mask distribution centers today, despite efforts by authorities to calm fears of being on the receiving end of a threatened Syrian retaliation should the US take military action against the Assad regime.” (As reported by Rettig Gurg and Stuart Winer)



2014: Valerie Sassyfras is scheduled to perform “a vocal set of original songs” at the Banks Street Bar in New Orleans.


2014: The Tel Aviv International Synagogue is scheduled to host a Carelbach Kabbalat Shabbat Service followed by a Champagne Kiddush.


2014: At Friday night services in Cedar Rapids, IA, Temple Judah celebrates the 10thanniversary of Kathe Goldstein’s serving as Cantorial Soloist.


2014: Twenty-three year olf Aaron Sofer, a US yeishiva student from Lakewood, NH whose body had been found in Ein Kerem, “was laid to rest in Beit Shemesh.” (As reported by Marissa Newman and Advi Sterman)


2014( 3rd of Elul, 5774); Twenty-two year old Sgt. Natanel Maman  died this morning at the Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva  as a result of shrapnel wounds suffered last week when a rocket  exploded next to Gan Yavneh in the Ashdod region. (“In life he was loved and admired; he was swifter than eagles and stronger than lions.”)


2015: As the Israel Museum celebrates its 50thanniversary “6 Artists / 6 Projects” an exhibition featuring contemporary Israeli artists is scheduled to come to a close today.



2015: This year’s Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival which has featured the work of Israeli choreographers:  Hofesh Shechter, Saar Harari, Roy Assaf,Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar is scheduled to have its finale tonight.


2016(25th of Av, 5776): Eighty-three year old comedic actor Gene Wilder passed away today. (As reported by Daniel Lewis)



2016: Only months after having signed him a one year contract, the Detroit Lions released thirty year old Offensive Guard Geoff Schwartz today.


2016: “The Kind Words,” a comedy about three Jewish Israeli siblings at The Hampton Synagogue Film Series which is now in its 14thyear.


2016: Classes are scheduled to begin at Missouri State University the academic home of Marc Cooper, a professor emeritus of history who was stabbed to death last week. (As reported by Ari Feldman)


2016: “A free public reception is scheduled to take place at 402 College Street, the home of Makom, a space dedicated to ‘creative downtown Judaism’ which is also the location for Mandel’s Dreamery, an art installation at the Fenster Gallery in Toronto.


2016: In Chicago, the Institute of Cervantes is schedule to host a screening of “Heaven in Auschwitz,”  “a documentary film that tells the incredible story of 13 Jewish children during World War II, whose lives were changed forever by the legendary Fredy Hirsch, a German-Jew who worked to provide arts, culture and sports to improve the lives of children in the Terezin Ghetto.”


2017: In Israel, the Foreign Ministry is scheduled to host the third and final of its two-hour tours of its Jerusalem offices complete with short lectures designed to provide families with a sense of “what it is like to be a diplomat.”


2017: The Rothbard Trio featuring Wayne Escoffery is scheduled to appear at the Red Sea Jazz Festival today.


2017: “The Invisible Museum: History and Memory of Morocco” is scheduled to open today.



2017: “Sketching "Fiddler": Set Designs by Mentor Huebner” is scheduled to open today.



2017: “The Power of Attention: Magic & Meditation in Hebrew "shiviti" Manuscript Art” is scheduled to re-open today.



2018: “Operation Finale,” a cinema depiction of the capture of Adolf Eichmann is scheduled to open today in the United States.



2018: In Jerusalem, Hashaa Theatre is scheduled to host a performance of “The Dolphin,” “musical fantasy for children.”


2018: “Map Story – an experiential activity for children who like stories and for those willing to set out on adventures and discoveries between the words” is scheduled to come to an end today at the National Library of Israel.


2018: At part of the “Home: Lens on Israel” series, the Temple Emanuel Streicker Center is scheduled to open the photographic exhibition “The Storied Druze Village of Yanuh-Jat.”

2018: In Sandy Springs, GA, Israeli pianist Asrtith Baltsan is scheduled to perform at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center.



 


 


 


 


 

This Day, August 30, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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August 30


70: According to Josephus, the day one which the Second Temple was set aflame


500: Having conquered Italy, Ostrogoth King Theodoric gave the Jews freedom to worship.


526 Death of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths (the eastern Goths) who controlled the Italian Peninsula and area adjacent to it. Theodoric had a reputation for religious toleration which he extended to the Jewish people.  He encouraged them to settle in his kingdom reportedly because he saw them as a source of economic benefit.  


1179: As the Crusaders and the Moslems jockey for control over Palestine, soldiers under the command of Saladin had sacked the castle at Jacob’s Ford, the critical passage way across the Jordan River.  The crossing takes its name from the Biblical patriarch and would be a seen of fighting in 1948 and 1967.


1181: The papacy of Alexander III comes to an end. He was “the author of the oldest extant version of the bull “Sicut Judaeis” (As the Jews) first promulgated in 1120 by Calixtus II.


1334: Birthdate of King Peter who reigned over Castile and Leon from 1350 to 1369. “Peter's rival Henry of Trastámara continuously depicted Peter as "King of the Jews", and had some success in taking advantage of popular Castilian resentment towards the Jews. Henry of Trastámara instigated pogroms beginning a period of anti-Jewish riots and forced conversions in Castile that lasted approximately from 1370 to 1390. Peter took forceful measures against this, including the execution of at least five anti-Jewish leaders of a riot.”


1465: Johannes Hinderbach, who blamed the Jews for the death of Simon of Trent which was his justification for murdering “several of them” and working to canonize the boy in what was one of many of the blood libels, was elected Prince-Bishop of Trent today.


1563: The Jewish community of Neutitschlin, Moravia was expelled.


1793(22nd of Elul, 5553): In his 37th year, Judah Levy passed away erev Shabbat after which he was buried in the Alderney Road Jewish Cemetery.


1803: Twenty-two year old Leo Wolf and Johanna Wolf gave birth to Dr. Moritz (Morris) Wolf


1808: The Magistrate of Frankfurt (a puppet of the French Government) summoned Rothschild to give an account of his business dealings with the Landgrave.


1809: Benjamin Lewin married Sarah Elkin at the Great Synagogue today.


1810: Philip Wilks married Hannah Levy at the Great Synagogue today.


1812: Phillip Solomon married Jane Aaron at the Great Synagogue today


1813: Following today’s attack “on white settlers and allied Creeks at Fort Mims” Abraham “Mordecai aided the federal troops in tracking down the members of the Red Stick faction” responsible for this action that took place during the Creek War.


1815: This evening Henry Nathans of London married Hester Levy in Charleston, SC.


1818: Lewis Barnett married Elizabeth Levi at the Great Synagogue today.


1821:Mr. Myer Ellis of Charleston, SC married Francis Polack the daughter of New Yorker Jacob Abrahams.


1824: Simon Drukker married Mary Emanuel at the Great Synagogue today.


1826: In Paris, Moise Mayer Fichel and Lili Abigail Sasias gave birth to French painter Benjamin Eugène Fichel.



1829(1st of Elul, 5589): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1829:1829: Two days after he had passed away, 22 year old Samuel Solomon, son of “Michael and Hannah Solomon” was buried today at the “Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery


1835: Founding of Melbourne, Australia.  The first synagogue opened in Melbourne in 1847. Melbourne provided the first native born Australian to serve as Governor-General – a lawyer named Isaac Isaacs. King George V was reportedly reluctant to appoint Isaacs to the post because he was Jewish. Prime Minister James Scullin assured the reluctant monarch that Australians took a more liberal view than most Englishmen did in such matters.  They were not bothered by the matter of religion and therefore, the appointment was made without further complications


1836: The city of Houston is founded by Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen. Within twenty years after the founding of the city there were enough Jews living in Houston to form a burial society. In 1859, Congregation Beth Israel, the first chartered Jewish congregation in Texas was founded as an Orthodox Synagogue but switched to the Reform movement fifteen years later. In 1906, Houston saw the publication of The Jewish Herald Voice, the first journal of its kind to appear in the state. A list of early Houston Hebrew businessmen would include Joseph Weingarten, Simon Sakowitz and Tobias Sakowitz. Houston established its Jewish Community Council in 1936 under the presidency of Max Nathan and enhanced its Jewish Family Service under Ruth Fred.


1836: Hart Levy married Julia Woolf at the Great Synagogue today.


1843: Mary and Philip William Flower gave birth to Cyril Flower, the 1st Baron of Battersea who married Sir Anthony de Rothschild’s daughter Constance in 1877.  The couple were the last of their line since they had not children.


1843: Lewis Levy married Catherine Elias at the Great Synagogue today.


1848(1st of Elul, 5608): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1851: Birthdate of Abram S. Isaacs, the New York native who served as the Rabbi for Barnett Memorial Temple in Paterson, NJ and served as the first Professor of Hebrew at New York University.


1855: James Finn, the British Counsel in Jerusalem reported to the British Ambassador in Constantinople that Sir Moses Montefiore had been given permission by the Ottoman government to purchase land in Jerusalem on which he would be allowed to build a hospital and where he could employ poor Jews in gardening.  Montefiore was only the second European who had been allowed to purchase land.  Finn had been the first.


1860: Birthdate of Isaac Levitan, famed Russian landscape painter.whose works included Autumn day. Sokolniki and Issac Levitan. Selfportrait.




1862(4th of Elul, 5622): As the Union Army suffers a crushing blow thanks to the stupidity of General Pope, thirty-three year old Captain Jacob A. Cohen, Company A, 10thLouisiana, was killed today fighting for the Confederacy.


1863: Birthdate of Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who provided a photographic record, in color of Jews living in far-flung parts of the empire.



1865: On Broadway, Mr. Edmund Kean is scheduled to play "the Jew" in tonight's performance of the Merchant of Venice.


1865: Judah P. Benjamin arrived at Southampton, Britain marking the final stop on his flight from America when the Confederacy was finally defeated.


1867: The Washington Avenue Synagogue, also known as Temple Beth El, was dedicated today in Detroit, Michigan.


1867: Prince Charles, the future King Charles (a.k.a. King Carlos I) wrote a letter to Sir Moses Montifore, expressing his pleasure at the Anglo-Jewish leader’s recent visit to Romania and his support for better treatment of the Jews living in Romania.


1868: Three days after he had passed away, 72 year old Ralph Isaacs, the father of nine children – Caroline, Julia, Isabella, Esther, Rosina, Frances, Emma, Ameilia and Ralph – was buried to at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1871: Birthdate of Vilna native Nathan Weinstein, the “officer of the Zionist Organization of America” who settled in Portland, Oregon.


1872: In Philadelphia, Abraham and Barbara Wilder Salus gave birth to University of Pennsylvania trained lawyer Samuel W. Salus, the member of both houses of the state legislature and Republican Party leader who was the husband of Ada R. Salus, the father of Arthurs S. Salus and the grandfather of Samuel W. Salus II.


1872: It was reported today that Sir Moses Montefiore has completed his trip to St. Petersburg, Russia and returned to his home at Ramsgate.  Sir Moses had gone to Russia at the behest of the Board of Deputies to intercede with the Czar’s government on behalf of the Jews of Russia.


1869(23rd of Elul, 5629): Jacob Romm, one of the three sons of printer and published Joseph Reuben Romm, passed away today in Vilna.


1873(7TH of Elul, 5633): Parashat Shoftim


1873(7th of Elul, 5633): Eighty-seven year old “economist and journalist Jacob Newton Cardozo” the Savannah born son of Sephardic merchant David N. Cardozo passed away today.


1873: In the United Kingdom, Sir George Jessel begins serving as the Keeper or Master of the Rolls and Records of the Chancery of England, known as the Master of the Rolls. For the two years prior to accepting this position, he had served as Solicitor General.


1875: The New York Times published an account of Sir Moses Montefiore’s trip to Palestine including his visit to Jerusalem.


1875: It was reported today that Abraham H. Guedalla has provided The Jewish World with some of the correspondence between him and Sir Moses Montefiore that provided details of his visit to Palestine during July of 1875.


1876: Henry Schneeberger was sent a letter inviting him to become the first rabbi of Chizuk Amuno in Baltimore, MD.


1877: While “on special service at the European Station, U.S. Navy Lt. and future Rear Admiral Edward D. Taussig and his wife Ellen Kneffler gave birth to Joseph K. Taussig, the U.S. Naval Academy quarterback who served in every conflict from the Spanish American War to WW II and rose to the rank of Vice Admiral.


1878(1st of Elul, 5638): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1878: In New York, Judge Van Rant, granted a writ of habeas corpus directing Thomas F. Fallon to bring Caroline Cohen to court.  Caroline was the 15 year old daughter of Loewenthal Cohen, a Jewish clothing dealer.  Fallon was a Roman Catholic who allegedly had eloped with young Caroline. The judge had granted the write in response to Cohen’s petition claiming that his daughter was being held against her will having been enticed away from her home “under the pretext that he wanted to marry her.”


1879: In New York, 12 year old Henry O’Brien decided to find out if it was true that Jews did not eat pork. He thrust a piece of pork down the throat of Harris Goldstein, a Polish Jew.  Goldstein chased after O’Brien who hit Goldstein with a shovel when the Jewish boy caught up to him. O’Brien hit him in the face and broke his nose.  At the end of the melee, both of the boys were arrested by Officer McCarthy of the Tenth Precinct.


1880: David Belasco’s version the drama “True to the Core” was performed today at the Baldwin Theatre.


1880: Kaspar von Preysing and his wife, Hedwig von Walterskirchen gave birth to anti-Nazi Cardinal Konrad von Preysing who as Bishop of Berlin “had vainly appealed to the Pope to protest specific Nazi actions, including those directed at the Jews.”


1881: It was reported today that authorities have denied “Jew-baiter” Ernst Henrici the right to address a public meeting in Hamburg, Germany. [His speeches had been connected to riots in Berlin and the burning of the synagogue in Neustettin.]


1882: In Williamsburg, VA, “William and Lena (Engelberger) Teiser” give birth to University of Virginia trained attorney Sidney Teister who lived and worked, for a time, in Portland, Oregon and who was the husband of the former Betty Kline with whom he had two children – William and Ruth.



1883: It was reported today that martial law has been declared at Eglerszeg, Hungary after an outbreak of anti-Jewish riots.  All of the shops remain closed and many of the Jewish families have fled from the city.


1885: Rabbis Mendes and Morais are scheduled to speak at the service being held at the 19thStreet Synagogue in memory of the late Sir Moses Montefiore.


1885: “New Antiquities” published today described the career of Moses Shapira, “the converted Jew” whose discovery of a “so-called Moabitish manuscript of Deuteronomy…and a Moabitish dictionary” which he offered to sell to the British Museum for $5,000,000 has been declared to be “a clumsy forgergy” by experts from Germany.  This, and other forgeries tied to Mr. Shapira, is attributed to the fact that he left the faith of his birth.


1886: Thirty-one of the forty Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. yesterday left Castle Garden with friends who had promised to provide support for them. 


1890: The boy’s band from the Hebrew Orphan Asylum will perform at the Summernight’s festival sponsored by District No. 1 of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith which is being held at Sulzer’s Harlem River Park.


1891: The tenth free excursion sponsored by the Sanitarium for Hebrew Children will begin with a boat ride up the East River starting at 9 a.m.


1891: “Famine Face in Russia” published today described how the government’s anti-Jewish laws have exacerbated the situation since, in the past, Jewish money lenders have provided funds for the peasants when their crops have failed.  Such is not the case which makes the agricultural crisis all the worst and the government refuses to alter the laws.


1891: State Senator Jacob A. Cantor is preparing for the upcoming election following his return from Europe yesterday.


1892(7th of Elul, 5652): Four year old Ida Samyan, the daughter of a Russian Jewish couple who had just arrived from Hamburg passed away today.  Much to the relief of authorities “a post-mortem examination showed that her death was not due to cholera.”


1892: Max Strassburger, a representative of the United Hebrew Society arrived at Ziontown, NJ to investigate the claims that the Jewish settlers had been brought their under false pretenses and were now facing the prospect of starvation. 


1892: In Elizabeth, NJ, the city Board of Health met this evening and adopted measures to deal with the threat of cholera including measures to improve the sanitary conditions in the First War which is home to “a large number of Russian and Polish Jews.”


1895(10th of Elul, 5655): Mrs. Rebecca Kastor who left legacies of $100 each to several Jewish institutions including Mount Sinai Hospital and the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society, passed away today.


1896: Herzl received a "Shana Tova" from Jerusalem signed by Ephraim Cohn, director of the Lämel School, David Yellin, Eliezer ben Yehuda and Wilhelm Gross.


1897: The funeral for David J. Seligman who passed away in his 48th year and was the son of the late Joseph Seligman is scheduled to take place at his home on East 55thStreet in Manhattan.


1897: In Michigan, the Montefiore Pleasure Club which meets every Thursday evening and “aids the Hebrew Charities of Detroit” was founded today.


1897 In Amsterdam, art dealer Eduard Goudstikker and his wife gave birth to Jacques Goudstikker whose “extensive and significant art collection” was stolen by the Nazis” and then became the subject of decade’s long litigation in the post-War years.



1897: At today’s session of the Zionist Congress being held in Basel, Switzerland, “the delegates…unanimously adopted, with great enthusiasm, the program for re-establishing” the Jews “in Palestine, with publicly recognized rights.”  “A dispatch was sent to the Sultan of Turkey thanking his Majesty for the privileges enjoyed by “the Jews “in his empire.”


1898: Godefroy Cavaignac, the Minister of War, stated that the document “which definitely incriminated Captain Alfred Dreyfus” “had been discovered to be a forgery by Hubert-Joseph Henry” “but he refused to concur with his colleagues in a revision of the Dreyfus prosecution” opting instead to resign and join with the nationalists and anti-Semites in the Chamber of Deputies.


1898: During the Dreyfus Affair, Major Henry, one of those who had helped to frame the French officer, was arrested. Following his arrest, Henry confessed to his role in the matter.


1898(12th of Elul, 5658): In Chicago Sixty-four year old Rabbi Louis Rosenbloom was kicked to death by seventeen year old John Schlechta when he tried to the teenager from attacking various members of the Levi family.


1898: The second annual Zionist Congress at Basel Switzerland, where the American delegation was led by Dr. Richard J.H. Gottheil, Professor of Rabbinical Literature and Semitic Languages at Columbia University was scheduled to come to and today.


1899: On this date Herzl wrote in his diary “While riding out to Währing today on a jolting bus the title for my Zion novel occurred to me: Alt-Neuland [Old-Newland].”


1899: Three handwriting experts, including Paul Meyer, Director of the of the School of Ancient Manuscripts all testified today at the court martial of Captain Dreyfus that Estherhazy and not Dreyfus had written the bordereau that was at the heart of the claim that Dreyfus had betrayed France to the Germans.


1900: Four days after he had passed away, 74 year old Charles Cleve, the husband of the former Adeline Stiebel, was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”


1902: Birthdate of Paul Massing the German sociologist who wrote “Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study Of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany.”


1902: Birthdate of Gisela Kohn Dollinger the native of Baden-be-Wien, a Vienna suburb, who survived the Holocaust and lived to be 111. (As resulted by Julie Wiener)



1903: In Scranton, PA, a meeting is scheduled to be held today at Keneseth Israel Synagogue on Linden Street “for the purposed of organizing a council” made up “of the following societies – Chovevi Zion, Daughters of Zions, Sons of Zion all in Scranton; Chovevi Zion of Wilkes-Barre; Machsi Zion of Pittson and Tifereth Zion of Olyphant, PA.


1904: Birthdate of Saul Pollock, the Newark native who earned a PhD in Mathematics and was a consultant for the Hall of Science at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago.


1904(19th of Elul, 5664): Sixty-three year old Baden native, Lippmann Mayer the German trained Reform Rabbi who led Congregation Rodef Shalom in Allegheny City, PA and served as the Chaplain for the petitionary and “as a director of home for the aged in Pittsburgh” passed away today.


1906: Native Muslim soldiers attack the Hara (Jewish Quarter) of Tunis.  


1906(9th of Elul, 5666): Edward Rosewater passed away. Born in Bohemia in 1841, he came to the United States in 1854. He became the publisher and editor of the Omaha (Neb) Bee. “Rosewater had a reputation for always being ‘aggressive and controversial’, and was influential in Nebraska politics as one of the leaders of the state Republican Party.”


1908: First Conference for the Yiddish Language opened in Czernowitz


1909 (13th of Elul, 5669 ):Yosef Chaim (a leading Hakham (Sephardic Rabbi), authority on Jewish law (Halakha) and Master Kabbalist passed away two days before his 71stbirthday. He is best known as author of the work on Halakha Ben Ish Chai ("Son of Man (who) Lives"), by which title he is also known.


1909(13th of Elul, 5669): Chaim Jossel Eidelsohn passed away today.


1909(13th of Elul, 5669): A young girl named Scheitel Lewin passed away today.


1912: Founding of Temple Israel in Gary, Indiana.


1912: In Wellington, NZ, Ella Wake (née Rosieur) and Charles August Wake gave birth to SOE agent Nancy Wake known as the White Mouse.




1913: The Manchester Guardian and the New York Times, report that Max Nordeau will not be giving the opening address at the upcoming Eleventh Zionist Congress.  This is first time Nordeau will not have given the opening address since the Zionists began their meetings.  It is further evidence of a shift to the program of the practical Zionists as opposed to those Zionists who had looked to a combination of European nations acting in concert to create a Jewish Homeland.


1914: During World War I, the Battle of Tannenberg came to an end with the Germans defeating the Russians.. At the urging of the French, the Russian Army had begun advancing before it was fully mobilized and ready for battle.  The Russian Army advanced into East Prussia which caused panic in Berlin.  The Germans transferred troops from the Western Front to meet the Russian advance.  This shift of troops weakened the German forcing attacking the French, undermined the German grand strategic design and enabled the French to finally halt the advance. This would lead to the four year stalemate known as World War I.  The strengthened German forces in Prussia blocked the Russians and hurled them back.  The fighting in the East would be a see-saw affair that would bleed Russia until the Revolutions of 1917 and 1918.  The Jews living in the Pale of Settlement which was in the path of this clash between the Kaiser and the Czar suffered great privations.  The irony was that the Germans could probably have won the battle without the additional troops and World War I might have been a rather brief affair where the troops were home by Christmas and Europe (including the Jews) would not have experienced the upheavals that led to World War II and the Holocaust.


1915: “Storm Delays Dedication of Home” published today described plans for the dedication of the home for convalescents established by the Federation of Rumanian Jews of America” which will take place next week because inclement weather had forced a postponement of the ceremony.


1915: Birthdate of composer Robert Strassburg whose works would span both the secular and religious worlds as can be seen by his work on such Broadway shows as “The Rose Tattoo” and such compositions as “Torah Sonata” and the opera “Chelm.”


1915: Birthdate of Shifra Lerer, “who was discovered at age 5 in Argentina by the great Yiddish actor Boris Thomashefsky and went on to become a winsome and wide-ranging trouper of the Yiddish theater for the next 90 years.”


1915: It was reported today that Rabbi Henry M. Fisher of New York “will conduct a campaign among” visitors to, and permanent residents of, New York City to raise money “for the relief of the Jews in Poland and Palestine” who are suffering from the effects of the World War.


1915: It was reported today that the supporters of Eleftherios Venizelos “have cast suspicions of treason and sedition upon the Jews because they voted for candidates” supporting Dimitrios Gounaris in the recent Greek parliamentary elections.


1916: In “America and Russia” published today Louis Marshall refuted the arguments of Montgomery Schulyer that the economic interests of the United States were being subverted by the Jews who were blocking trade agreements with the Russians by insisting that U.S. citizens who were Jewish would be treated in the same ways as all other Americans and not subject to the anti-Jewish laws of the Czar. (Editor’s note – While serving as an officer with the U.S. Army in Russia during WW I, Schulyer would create a volume of correspondence equating Bolshevism with Judaism)


1917: “Says Turks Pay The Jews” published today provided the description of Djemal Pasha, Commander of the Turkish forces in Syria of the treatment of the 5,000 Jews living in Jaffa which he described as a “small Jewish settlement about which so much fuss is made which is administered by a self-elected commission and maintained by the Ottoman Government which spends 7,000 pounds Turkish (about $30,000) on it monthly.”


1917: Crystal Eastman, the sister of Max Eastman and Jacob Panken were among the delegation of 150 pacifists gather at the Weehawken Station of the West Short Railroad this afternoon but absent from the group were Morris Hillquit and Rabbi J.L. Magnes


1918: Samuel Gompers and the American Labor Mission were entertained by the British Government today at a luncheon, where the visitors were welcomed by Lloyd George, G.H. Roberts and Lord Reading. The British Prime Minister lauded Gompers saying that “no man has done more to convince civilization must fight to victory.


1918: It was reported today that “the Irving Place Theater” which was “abandoned by the Germans” has been taken over by a Yiddish theatrical company head by the well-known actor, Morris Schwartz.”


1918: It is reported today that the Jewish Welfare Board has established headquarters at 41 Boulevard Haussman in Paris to enable it to work with members of the American Expeditionary Force


1918: “An East End Tailors’ Strike” published today described a strike by 3,000 London tailors most of whom are Jewish where the participants are not asking for more money but better working conditions.


1918: The Jews of Salonica who were originally Ottoman subjects are exempted from alien restrictions, under which they had previously lived. 


1918: Fanya Kaplan a disillusioned revolutionary shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. This, along with the assassination of Bolshevik senior official Moisei Uritsky days earlier, prompts the decree for what is known as the Red Terror.


1918: This evening, “Australians of the Second Division” under the command of Sir John Monash, “crossed to the north bank of the Somme River” in the first move of what would become the Battle of Mont Saint-Quentin.


1919: The Emergency National Convention of Socialist America at which New York State Secretary Julius Gerber and Jacob Panken played crucial roles opened today in Chicago.


1919: Samuel Gompers announces support for the Versailles Treaty and denounces Republican leaders for opposing a document, which among other things, contains provisions beneficial to labor and workers.


1919: The Jewish Commissariat Yevsektsiya of Russia proclaimed Hebrew a "reactionary language." As such the teaching of Hebrew was prohibited in all educational institutions and books in Hebrew removed from libraries.


1920: “The Devil’s Pass Key” a “silent film directed by Erich von Stroheim was released in the United States today by the Universal Film Manufacturing Company.


1920: The reign of Mohammed Alim Kahn, the last Emir of Bukhara whom Levi Babakhan served as court vocalist came to an end. Babakhanov was part of dynasty of Jewish musicians that included his son Moshe and grandson Ari.


1922: Birthdate of famed mezzo-soprano Regina Resnik.


1923:Today the United Jewish People's Bank, Ltd., was registered in London by the cirectorium of the United Jewish Emigration Committee. The bank which, according to its articles of incorporation, will seek to promote the development of handicraft industries and agriculture among Jews starts with a capital of £500,000. It will aim to foster in particular all kinds of cooperative undertakings and assist in the emigration and immigration of Jews throughout the world. While its ultimate objects are of a social nature the institution is authorized to conduct a regular banking business. Among the subscribers are Latzki-Bertholdi, Advocate Sliosberg, Leo Motzkin, Dr. L. Branson, Vladimir Tiomkin, Rabbi Jochelman, and Dr. Brutzkus. The directors of the bank have not yet been appointed. (As reported by JTA)


1924(30thof Av, 5684): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1927:The Fifteenth Zionist Congress, the legislative body of the International Zionist movement, went into session at Basel, Switzerland, today with 280 delegates representing Zionist societies from all parts of the world present. Forty of the delegates are from the United States and chooses Sokolow at President 1927: According to reports published today, the Palestine Economic Corporation which had been organized in February, 1925, has increased its investments in Palestine by $575,000 during its first year of operation.  The corporation was organized by the Non-Partisan Palestine Conference under the Chairmanship of Louis Marshall, with investments of $620,000. Substantial funding has gone to support the citrus growing industry.



1928: Birthdate of Barbara Zimmerman who became Barbara Epstein after marrying Jason Epstein and gained fame as “the editor at Doubleday of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl.”



1929: “A telegram from Reuter’s news agency was sent to all its subscribers: ‘Jerusalem has now been a city of death for eight days during which work has ceased and people are starving.  Hundreds are receiving bread rations.  Everywhere it is deadly quiet, and everyone is very nervous.’”



1929:With relative quiet restored to central Palestine today, people and officials looked anxiously to the north, where a force of Syrian Arabs has crossed the border to march on Jerusalem. British planes are searching for them. The incursion of large forces of Arabs over the Syrian frontier is causing considerable uneasiness in London tonight.



1930: Leila (née Stahl) and Congressman Howard Buffett gave birth to their only son, Warren Buffet the investor who became close friends with Dorothy and Myer S. Kripke, the Omaha rabbi whose investment of $70,000 turned into $25 million which they donated to a variety of philanthropic causes.



1931: In Hamburg, Temple Israel dedicated its third house of worship which had been built as a result of the relocation of many congregants from “the old city center.”



1933(8th of Elul, 5693): Seventy year old British author Ada Esther Leverson, the daughter of Zillah and Samuel Henry Beddington and wife of Ernest Leverson who was a close friend with her contemporary, the better known Oscar Wilde.



https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/leverson-ada



1933: “Sensation Hunters” directed by Charles Vidor and with music by Bernie Grossman was released today in the United States by Monogram Pictures.



1933: In a bid for the support of the Laborite faction in the forthcoming election of the administration of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Sokolow, 72-year-old president of the organization, addressing the World Zionist Congress tonight, defined his views on the position of labor in the building of a Jewish national home in Palestine.



1933: William Dodd began serving as U.S. Ambassador to Germany.  He was the first Roosevelt appointee to deal with the Hitler government.  Unfortunately, the professionals in the State Department would not listen to the warnings offered by this American college professor.



1933: The Hessische Volkswacht publishes a list of 30 concerns in Hessen that have been represented by Jews in court actions.



1933: In a published declaration the Union of German National Jews protests against the resolution adopted by the Zionist Congress against Nazi Germany, and blames Zionism for the present situation of German Jewry.



1933: In Worms, the police announce that "a large number of Jews" have been arrested and taken to a concentration camp because of their provocative attitude and degrading remarks against the Nazi regime.



1934(19th of Elul, 5694): Sixty-two year old anthropologist Dr. Maurice Fishberg passed away today.



http://www.jta.org/1934/08/31/archive/dr-m-fishberg-dies-of-heart-attack-at-home




1935: “Catherine the Last,” “a romantic comedy directed by Henry Koster, produced by Jose Pasternak and starring Otto Walberg who was murdered at Auschwitz was released in Austria today by Universal Pictures.


1935: Sixty-two year old French anti-fascist author and friend of Albert Einstein and Egon Kisch passed away today in Moscow.



1936: “Catherine the Last” a comedy directed by Henry Koster, produced by Joe Pasternak and starring Otto Walberg was released today in Austria.


1936: Charles Edward Russell, the President of the Pro-Palestine Federation of America announced plans to “launch a nationwide effort to mobilize and encourage Christian interest in the right of the Jews to establish a national home in Palestine.


1936: Morris Rothenberg announced today “a gift of $20,000 to the meet the emergency situation in Palestine has been made to the United Palestine Appeal of which he is the co-chairman by Mr. and Mrs. Felix M. Warburg.


1937: In what was described as “a new political murder against Jews in Palestine” heats up.  “A bomb was thrown in a Tel Aviv thoroughfare severely wounding at least one Jew while two Jewish workers – Daniel Swanitsky and Isar Pankus – were murdered early this morning. 


1937: The Arab Higher Committee decided that the Arab General Strike, begun on April 19, would continue. The problem of Jewish refugees from Jaffa and the surrounding area had been finally solved after every family was furnished with a home, comprising a large room with a balcony, kitchen, lavatory and a shower at the cost of 90 pounds, paid back in form of rent at the rate of half a pound a month over a period of 15 years. One British soldier was severely wounded at Lydda and more British troops arrived from Malta


1938: Several cases of Arab arson attacks are reported to authorities throughout Palestine and Haifa police shot and killed a fleeing Arab terrorist.


1938: “As part of the tower and stockade settlement campaign” “immigrants from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany” established Ma’ayan Tzvi a kibbutz “named after Henry Zvi Frank, a Zionist activist and head of the Jewish Colonization Association, which had acquired the land on which the kibbutz was built.” Boy Meets Girl a 1982 Israeli drama directed by Michal Bat-Adam was filmed on location at Kibbutz Ma'ayan Tzvi.


1938: Birthdate of Owen Jacob Laster, the son of immigrants from the Ukraine and Russia, who became one of the most powerful literary agents of his generation, running William Morris’s worldwide literary operations that had a long list of best-selling writers including James A. Michener and Gore Vidal (As reported by William Grimes)


1938(3rd of Elul, 5698):  Max Factor, Sr. passed away. Born Max Firestein, this Russian Jewish immigrant had reportedly been a makeup artist for Russian nobility.  He made his debut as Max Factor, Sr. at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair to launch what would become a cosmetics empire with a special relationship with the stars of the Hollywood film industry.


1940: Registration of all Jewish property became mandatory in Slovakia.


1940: Much to the initial pleasure of the Jews, the Nazis returned Kolozsvar to Hungarian control. The Jews did not realize how much influence the Nazis had over the Hungarians or the depth of anti-Semitism that existed among some of their non-Jewish neighbors. Kolozsvar was the home of Rudolf Kastner who at this time was thirty-six years old and writing for the Jewish newspaper Új Kelet


1941: The SS at Chelmo work camp ordered fifty Jewish workers to dig trenches. Five were shot at a time, as five would dig a new trench, until all but the last five were killed.


1941: A second round of daily shootings which last until December began today at the Latvian city of Liepāja


1942(17th of Elul, 5702): Fifty-two year old Nissim Joseph Ovadia, the Turkish born chief rabbi of Vienna and Paris who came to the United States after the French surrendered to the Nazis passed away today.



1942: Members of the Jewish community at Rabka, Poland, were murdered today.


1942: French Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas reminds his parishes that all human beings are created by the same God, Christians and Jews alike, and that "all men regardless of race or religion deserve respect from individuals and governments."


1943: The Army Show, starring Jewish comedians Frank Shuster and Johnny Wayne opened at the Forum in Halifax, Canada.


1943: A statement by the American Council for Judaism stating its opposition to “the creation of a Jewish national state” was made public today in Philadelphia.


1943: The American Council for Judaism, Inc “appealed to the United Nations for the earliest possible repatriation or resettlement under the best possible conditions of all peoples uprooted from their homes by the Axis Powers” while expressing its “hope for the ultimate establishment of a democratic autonomous government in Palestine where Jews, Moslems and Christians shall be justly represented.”


1943: The Jews of Denmark began their first day of living without the protection of the Danish government which had resigned meaning the country was now under the direct control of the Nazis.


1944: In Warsaw, Władysław Szpilman, whose story of survival was chronicled in The Pianistmoved back into his old building, which by this time had entirely burnt out but where the larders and bathtubs provided the bread and rainwater, which kept him alive.


1944: The SS St. Louis, which had been the centerpiece of the famous 1939 voyage “was heavily damaged” today during an Allied bombing attack at Kiel.


1944: As of today, “about 70,000 Jews from Lodz had been sent to Auschwitz.”



1944:  After visiting Majdanek and seeing firsthand what the Germans had done, W.H. Lawrence wrote in the New York Times, “I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.”


1944: Sir Harold Alfred MacMichael completes his term as British High Commissioner of Palestine.


1945: Major Ronald Edmond Balfour, the lecturer at King’s College, Cambridge who had been serving with the British Army since 1940 and had joined the Monuments Men (the unit that was so helpful in rescuing Jewish owned art and valuables stolen by the Nazis and their collaborators) in 1944 was unable to take up his position today ,as scheduled, “as Monuments Officer for the First Canadian Army due to crowded roads, poor transport  and destroyed bridges” all products of the Allied drive across France.


1946: “The Killers” a cinema treatment of Hemingway’s short story directed by Robert Siodmak, produced by Mark Hellinger and co-starring Sam Levene was released in the United States by Universal Pictures.


1948:  In Silver Spring, MD, Jeannette and Sam Black gave birth to comedian and social commentator Lewis Black. http://lewisblack.com/


1948(25th of Av, 5708):  “A Jewish worker was shot dead by sniper fire from the Old City walls while crossing a street on the Israeli side of the city.”  This threat of death would only finally end when the Israelis reunited the city in 1967.


1948: Alice Salomon passed away in New York City.  She was a pioneer German social worker who fled the Nazis after being arrested and interrogated.  She was not Jewish, but her Jewish origins put her at risk given the Nazi racial laws.


1951: The twenty-third World Zionist Congress, which closed early this morning, unanimously adopted a resolution asking the Israeli Government to give the world Zionist organization legal status.


1954: This evening, start of Operation Binyamin 2 under the command of Ariel Sharon.


1954: Birthdate of Shlomi Shabat, the native of Yehud who has become a popular singer and musician.


1955(12th of Elul, 5715): Seventy-two year old NYU trained labor lawyer David Drechsler, the former “president and chairman of the board of Sons of Israel in Brooklyn and the husband of Fannie Drechsler with whom he had one child – Selma – passed away today.



1956: In Israel, the eight day nation-wide bus strike ended today.  The strikers were from the Egged Bus Company which serves Haifa and provided interurban services and the Dan Company that serves the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.  These companies are owner-operator co-ops.


1968: Birthdate of Scottish author and broadcaster Muriel Gray who creating a documentary entitle “The Wandering Jew” in 1996 which traced the Jewish roots of her mother’s which stretched back to Moldova.


1962(30th of Av, 5722): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1963: Today, in Rockville, MD, Washington, DC, native William Peyser “Bill” Jacobson, the son of Aaron Jacobson and Victoria Peyser married Barbara Johnson with whom he had two children Michael and Stay Ann Jacobson.


1964: Five hundred Orthodox rabbis issued a proclamation calling on religious Jews to join the Religious Zionists of America


1965: The album ''Highway 61 Revisited'' by Bob Dylan was released.


1966: The first Knesset building was dedicated in Jerusalem. This was one of several artistic ventures that marked 1966.  Two others were the opening of the America-Culture House in New York which displayed Israeli arts and crafts while providing scholarships for Israeli artists to study in the United States and the naming of Israeli author Shai Agnon as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature


1970: Sarah Jacobs the Polish born daughter of Abraham Simcha (Simon) Flashtiq and Rebekah Flashtiq and the wife of Abraham Goodman Jacobs passed away today in London.


1976: An Israeli patrol killed two terrorists who infiltrated through a security fence from Lebanon.


1976: London's Spectator weekly claimed that the PLO was making millions out of terror and had some £50 million invested in Britain. For those of you who think terror began on September 11, think again.  .


1976: Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party's major newspaper, described the US proposal to send American monitoring personnel to Sinai as a "questionable development." This should serve as a reminder that the conflict in the Middle East was fueled, in part, by the needs of Soviet imperialism.


1976(4th of Elul, 5736): Dr. Paul Lazarsfeld, a Columbia University sociologist whose studies of American voting patterns and the influences of the printed and electronic press on society are classics in his field, died of cancer at New York Hospital today at the age of 75.



1981(30th of Av, 5741): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1981: Terrorist bombing at a market in Nablus.


1981: At Temple Emunah in Lexington, Massachusetts, “Rabbi Moses Mescheloff of Chicago” officiated at the wedding of his nephew Dr. Jonathan Furth Schoneld, “a theoretical physicist” and grandson of Rabbi Lazar Schonfeld, the former chief rabbi of Nagy Karoly, Hungary to “Jonina Tessa Gorenstein, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Gorenstein, of Medford.”


1983: “A tired and depressed Prime Minister Meachem Begin turned to his colleagues and said with a sigh, ‘I cannot go on any longer.’”  [Begin would leave office a few days and return to his Jerusalem apartment at 1 Semach Street where he would lead a life of almost total isolation.]


1983: In what would prove to be the first act in what some describe as a tragedy and others describe as murder, “23-year-old Alice Ephraimson-Abt, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, boarded KAL Flight 007 at John F. Kennedy International Airport.”


1984(2nd of Elul, 5744): Sixty eight year old Oscar nominated composer Emil Newman who was the brother of two other composers – Alfred and Lionel Newman – the father of composers Maria, David and Thomas Newman and the uncle of songwriter Randy Newman passed away today.



1984(2nd of Elul, 5744): Forty-nine year old “poet, critic and chairman of the department of comparative literature at Queen College, Paul Zweig, and the author of Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet passed away today.



1984: Judith Resnik began her first space flight aboard the Discov ery which was making its maiden voyage.



1985: After premiering at the Seattle International Film Festival, “Flesh and Blood” co-starring Jason Leigh was released in the United States today by Orion Pictures.


1987: Author Jean Hanff Korelitz got married today.


1987(5th of Elul, 5747): Ninety-four year old Abraham Bernard “Abe” Levy, the native of Hull who moved to the United States to “pursue a career in design” after having served in World War I and then returned to England in the 1930’s where he wrote “articles on what remained of Jewish life in the East End and on the occupation patterns of Anglo-Jewry” which formed the basis for East End Storypassed away today.



1989: A federal jury in New York found ''hotel queen'' Leona Helmsley guilty of income tax evasion but acquitted her of extortion.


1989(29th of Av, 5749): Dorothy Schiff owner and publisher of the New York Postfor nearly 40 years passed away. She was a granddaughter of German born Jewish financier Jacob H. Schiff and the daughter of Mortimer Schiff and Adele Neustadt Schiff.



1989(29th of Av, 5749): Author, essayist and editor Seymour Krim passed away. According to at least one critic, “some of the Jewish themes that obsessed him were post-Holocaust anger, the lack of a nourishing Jewish culture, assimilation and emasculation, and the ugliness of self-hatred.”


1992(1st of Elul, 5752): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1998: The New York Times book section features reviews of two works by Jewish authors: Theatre on the Edge by Mel Gussow and Capital Dilemma by Michael Z. Wise.


1998: In “First, the People Moved East. Now, So Are the Cemeteries,” published today John Rather describes the changes in the New York cemetery scene including four Jewish cemeteries on Cemetery Row including Mount Ararat, New Montefiore, Beth Moses and Wellwood .  The Jewish community faces its own unique set of challenges.''Very often what Jews do is arrange for family plots, which means there may be people who pass away in Florida who want to return to New York to be buried,'' said Rabbi Bruce Ginsburg, president of the Long Island Board of Rabbis. Some Long Island funeral homes have affiliates in Florida to speed the return home.


2000(29th of Av, 5670): Ninety-three year old movie and television director Joseph H. Lewis passed away today. (As reported by Lawrence Van Gelder)



2001(11th of Elul, 5761): Sixty year old Amos Tanjouri was “shot at point blank range” by Palestinian terrorists.


2005(25th of Av, 5765): Eighty-five year old James H. Scheuer who served 13 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives passed away today. (As reported by Jennifer Lee)



2005: “A Scrappy Congressman, Ready for His Next Risk” published today examined the career of Congressman Anthony D. Weiner and his chances to become Mayor of New York City. (The more things change, the more they stay the same)



2005: Today, Tulane University which was being led by President Scott Cowan reported that due to Hurricane Katrina “physical damage to Tulane’s campuses was extensive” with several feet of standing water on the campus north of Feret Street which included most of the dorms and eating facilities but fortunately “no serious flooding on the portion of the campus between Feret Street and St. Charles Avenue which encompassed the original academic quad of the school.


2005:  The Bedouin guard who subdued a suicide bomber in Beersheba was hailed as a hero of the state of Israel in headlines of the Jerusalem Post.


2006:America gets ready for new Jewish-themed cable network. “First there was the Kinky Friedman documentary Shalom Y'All,and now there's Rabbi Mark S. Golub's Shalom TV. Golub is launching America's first national television channel dedicated to celebrating Jewish life and culture. The channel will initially be available as an on-demand network costing subscribers $7.99 monthly and will present 50 hours of programming weekly only to those living in southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware. The aim, however, is eventually to expand to the entire continental US, Golub says.


2006: The Bank Leumi announced that leak concerning the stock transactions of Lt. Gen. Dan Haulutz that took place before fighting broke out Hezbollah did not come from anybody working that institution. 2007: An exhibit at the Land of Israel Museum in Tel Aviv featuring hundreds of works by cartoonist Kariel Gardosh, who became famous under his pen name “Dosh” comes to an end. Dosh was the first Israeli cartoonist to have his work published in a daily newspaper.


2007: “Faith and Civic Pride Clash Over Parade on Yom Kippur” published today describes the conflict between Yom Kippur and a civic celebration in Herkimer, NY.



 2007: Ant-Zionists Max Blumenthal and Norton Mezvinksy, were joined by Tehran Professor Kaveh Afrasiabi on WBEZ”s “Worldview” which features discussions on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.



2007: A national tour of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeny Todd” which would last until November, 2007 began today.



2007: The Red Sea Jazz Festival comes to an end at Eilat.



2008: The Eleventh Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival opens today.



2008: Today, Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler of Florida lashed out at John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, accusing her of supporting "Nazi sympathizer" Pat Buchanan, and branding the move an "affront to all Jewish Americans.""John McCain's decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans," said a statement by Wexler. "Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel, even going as far as to denounce bringing former Nazi soldiers to justice and praising Adolf Hitler for his 'great courage'".Wexler went on to accuse McCain of having "failed his first test of leadership."
"At a time when standing up for Israel's right to self-defense has never been more critical, John McCain has failed his first test of leadership and judgment by selecting a running mate who has aligned herself with a leading anti-Israel voice in American politics. It is frightening that John McCain would select someone one heartbeat away from the presidency who supported a man who embodies vitriolic anti-Israel sentiments." The National Jewish Democratic Council also issued a statement saying that McCain's judgment appears "lacking" in choosing Palin. "Prior to today's selection, Palin apparently has never spoken publicly about Israel," said a statement by the group's Executive Director Ira N. Forman. "Moreover, on a broad range of issues - most strikingly on the issue of women's reproductive freedom - she is totally out of step with Jewish public opinion. The Republican Jewish Coalition, however, welcomed Palin's nomination. "As governor of Alaska, Palin has enjoyed a strong working relationship with Alaska's Jewish community. She has demonstrated sensitivity to the concerns of the community and has been accessible and responsive," said coalition Executive Director Matt Brooks.



2009: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including A Village Life by Louise Glück and I’m So Happy For You by Lucinda Rosenfeld.



2009: Today’s announcement by Africa Israel Investments which is owned by Lev Leviev “that it could not repay billions of dollars in debt…caused shares to drop 25.5 percent on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.” (As reported by JTA)



2009: The Washington Post features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Too Good To Be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff by Erin Arvedlund, Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff by Andrew Kirtzman, Madoff With The Money by Jerry Oppenheimer, Israel is Real by Rich Cohen and The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe by J. Randy Taraborrelli



2009: The Los Angeles Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow and A Village Life: Poems by Louise Gluck



2009:Israel Air Force planes struck a tunnel in the northern Gaza Strip early today in response to a Qassam rocket fired by Palestinian militants into the western Negev early yesterday, which was Shabbat.. 2009: In Little Rock, the Jewish community gathers at the Chabad House to celebrate the completion of the first sefer torah to ever be written for the Jewish community of Arkansas. The project is one more example of the great works done by Rabbi Pinchas Ciment, a mensch in the truest sense of the word who is the epitome of the Rebbe’s concept of “the Lamplighter.



2009:Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was indicted today in three corruption affairs, concluding months of investigations into cases allegedly conducted during his tenure as Jerusalem mayor and trade minister.



2009 Israeli singer Roni Dalumi was the final of Kochav Nolad 7.



2010: Seth Rudetsky co-starred “in a one-night-only concert performance of “They’re Playing Our Song,” “a musical with a book by Neil Simon, lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager, and music by Marvin Hamlisch.”



2010: Release of “Box of Secrets,” featuring “Let Me Back,” “Box of Secrets” and “Over which was the debut album of Zarif Davidson, better known as Zarif the daughter of an Iranian Jewish mother.



2010:Bernice K. Weiss, author of Converting to Judaism - Choosing to be Chosen: Personal Stories  is scheduled to lead a course entitled “Basic Judaism for Jews and Non-Jews Alike” that provides an overview of the Bible, Shabbat ritual and observances, how to observe kashrut and the Jewish laws of death and mourning.



2010(20 Elul): Yahrzeit of Dr. Jacob  Levin, of blessed memory, beloved husband of Betty, loving father of Michael (Gigi Cohen) Levin, Stephen (Dian Garton) Levin, Sharon (Philip) Wein and Lawrence (Sandra Morrison) Levin and proud Zaide to a whole tribe of grandchildren.   To his brother Joe, he was the incomparable “Yaenkel” and to me his was my wonderful Uncle Jack – living proof that good guys finish first.



2010:Israeli archeologists unveiled a 2,000 year old semi-precious cameo bearing the image of Cupid today, which the Israel Antiquities Authorities (IAA) said was among several items located in the City of David archeological area in Jerusalem's Old City in the last 12 months. The cameo, which will be displayed at the 11th Annual City of David Archaeology Conference scheduled to take place later this week, is 1 cm in length and 0.7 mm in width, and was discovered in the Givati Parking Lot Excavation, a part of the Jerusalem Walls National Park. The excavation, according to an IAA statement, has been conducted by the organization under the direction of Dr. Doron Ben Ami and Yana Tchekhanovets and funded by the Ir David Foundation.Dr. Doron Ben Ami, of the IAA, said that the cameo was "made from two layers of semi-precious onyx stone. The upper layer, into which the image of cupid is engraved is a striking blue color which contrasts with the dark brown background color of the lower layer.""The brown layer is the side of the cameo which would have been inserted into the round metal setting of a piece of jewelry, apparently an earring," Ben Ami said, adding that the "cupid’s left hand is resting on an upside-down torch which symbolizes the cessation of life." According to Dr. Ben Ami, the "discovery, together with other important finds that we uncovered from this unusual large Roman structure at the City of David, contribute significantly to our understanding of the nature of Jerusalem’s Roman Period.”" The IAA statement added that the inlaid stone was of the "Eros in mourning" type, one of a group of visual motifs linked with the imagery of mourning practices.



2011: An exhibition of charcoal drawings by artist Jean Barry that interpret the Book of Job is scheduled to come to a close at the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives in Washington, DC.



2011(30thof Av, 5771): Rosh Chodesh Elul



2011:Israel has been warned that a terrorist cell linked to the Islamic Jihad and based in the Sinai Peninsula may try to carry out a series of attacks over the coming days, Home Front Minister Matan Vilnai said today.



2011:  Iran is planning to send its 15th fleet, comprised of a submarine and a warship, to the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, semi-official news agency Press TV quoted Iranian naval commander Admiral Habibollah Sayyari as saying today The announcement came after the IDF modified the operational doctrine of the Navy Command Center in Eilat which is responsible for protecting southern Israel from threats originating in the Red Sea. Yesterday, two large Navy corvettes were seen docked in Eilat, likely for anti-terror and smuggling operations in the Red Sea



2011:Labor Party leadership candidate Erel Margalit demanded today that the upcoming primary be delayed, because the list of party members eligible to vote has yet to be published. If the Labor Party’s administration does


2011(29th of Av, 5771): Ninety-nine year old Ayala Zacks Abramov, the Israeli-born art collectior passed away today.



2012: Yemen Blues is scheduled to appear at The Montreal Jewish Music Festival


2012: In Berkeley, Urban Adamah and Wilderness are scheduled to sponsor “Mother-Daughter Full Moon of Elul Circle,” an event that will “include harvesting wheat, grinding it into flour with a new grain mill and then baking it into pita over an open fire.”


2012:Without naming Iran, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon denounced his hosts in Tehran today for threatening to destroy Israel and for denying the Holocaust.


2012: The Egyptian army began withdrawing tanks from the Sinai Peninsula today, pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported. The report comes just a day after Egypt's army said it would broaden its offensive against militants in the Sinai Peninsula, a campaign that has raised concerns in Israel about the movement of heavy armor into the area near its border.


2013: “Fill The Void” is scheduled to open at the Ridgeway Quarter in Memphis, TN


2013: Rabbi Shira Stutman is scheduled to lead Shabbat eve services which will be a celebration of “Labor on the Bimah,” an initiative of Jews United for Justice that “weaves together labor issues, social justice and Judaism, in an effort to bring meaning and reflection back into Labor Day.”


2013: Michael Barenboim and Alexander Melnikov are scheduled to perform Mozart’s Sonata for Piano and Violin in D Major at the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.


2013: “IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz visited Artillery Corps units stationed on the Golan Heights this morning, and received a briefing by commanders on the state of readiness of the military forces on the northern border.”  (As reported by Yaakov Lappin)


2013: “US President Barack Obama said today the chemical weapons attack in Syria threatened US allies Israel and Jordan and said his preference would have been for the international community to move forward on a response.” (As reported by Michael Wilner)


2013: As his legal woes mounted, San Diego Mayor Bob Filner “signed a letter of resignation that became effective at 5 pm PDT.”


2014: Chani Nachmias and Friends are scheduled to sing in Tel Aviv as part of the Performing Arts Center August Concert Series.


2014: Ashkelon’s annual pop music festival Briza is scheduled to come to an end today. (As reported by Simone Somekh)


2014: Turkey’s president-elect Recep Tayip Edrogan who had served as Prime Minister for the past 11 years shook hands with Yosef Levi Sfari, the charge d’affaires of Israel’s embassy in Ankara marking the first time the Turkish leader had done this in six years.


2014: Seventy-five UN peacekeepers stationed on the Golan Heights “fled Syrian territory for Israel today “after their positions were attacked by rebels who are affiliated with al-Qaida. (As reported by Times of Israel)


2014: Eighty-four year old Joseph E. Perisco author of Nuremberg: Infamy on Trialwhich “tells the story of the Nuremberg Trials” passed away today.



2014: As fighting raged between rebels and government forces in Syria, two mortar shells, thought to be strays, exploded inside Israel near the Golan Heights border.


2015: The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington is scheduled to host Grand Slam Sunday Jewish Community at Nationals Park.


2015(15thof Elul, 5775): Ninety-five year old Maryland political leader and former governor Marvin Mandel passed away today.




2015: In Coralville, Iowa the House of David Softball Team is scheduled to sponsor its annual car wash while Agudas Achim is scheduled to host its End of the Summer Picnic.


2015: Slovakia native Tomas Kovar is scheduled to describe surviving the Holocaust at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.


2015: A Study Mission to New Orleans sponsored by the American Jewish Archives as part of its Travels in American Jewish History is scheduled to come to an end.


2015(15thof Elul, 5775): Seventy-nine year old novelist Rhoda Lerman passed away today. (As reported by Bruce Weber)




2015(15thof Elul, 5775): Eighty-two year old neurologist and author Oliver Sacks passed away today.





2015: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb, Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman and The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution by Dominic Lieven which given the large number of Jews who lived in Russia or left it for the West and Palestine qualifies it for this list.


2016: “Hundreds of people turned out in Holon today for the funeral of former MK, minister and IDF general Binyamin (Fuad) Ben-Eliezer, who died Sunday at the age of 80.”



2016: “Roseanne Barr, the Jewish actress with an outsized Twitter personality who called Hillary Clinton an anti-Semite and her aide Huma Abedin a “filthy nazi whore,” lectured tonight in a prominent San Francisco synagogue about Judaism, Israel and the critics who have been calling her a racist.”



2016: In “Israel Quietly Legalizes Outposts in the West Bank” published today Isabel Kershner provided one view of the “unauthorized settlements.”



2016: “Israeli society is heading for civil war and the country must take steps to counter it, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo warned today in his first public remarks since stepping down as the spy agency director in January.


2016: “Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz will keep her seat in the US House after defeating Tim Canova today in a bruising primary that featured traded barbs over Israel.”


2016: “Three Balconies and a Door,” a new exhibition of the works of Jerusalem born artist Michal Nachmnay is scheduled to open at the Manny Cantor Center.


2017: JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “Dough,” the “film adaptation of Hans Fallada’s bestselling novel.”


2017: Despite bomb threats earlier in the week, classes are scheduled to begin for the fall term today at Brandeis University.


2017: The City Contemporary Dance Company of Hong Kong is scheduled to perform at the Tel Aviv Dance Festival for the last time this evening.


2017: In Australia, the Sydney Jewish Museum is scheduled to host “Harvesting hidden treasures in the community: Advancing the science of proactive collecting” with Roslyn Sugarman.


2017: The Noam David Trio is scheduled to perform on the final night of the Red Sea Jazz Festival.


2018: The National Geographic Channel is scheduled to broadcast “Titanic: 20 Years Later” in which James Cameron, to whom the Straus Historical Society provided “information and photographs” about Isidor and Ida Straus asks and hopefully answers the question “Did we get it right?”



2018: The Jerusalem Centre for the Performing Arts is scheduled to host “From Folk to Flamenco - An Intimate Journey through Landscapes, Boundaries, Stories and Cultures” featuring Haifa born guitarist David Broza.


2018: In the wake of yesterday’s recommendation by the CDC that “consumers avoid kosher chicken and the Empire Kosher brand for now” following an outbreak of salmonella that has killed one and sickened at least 17” Jews who pay a premium for fowl with a Hechsher may be wondering if the companies cannot maintain basic cleanliness, how do they know they are really observing the ritual laws concerning the slaughtering of animals.


 


 


 


 

This Day, August 31, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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August 31



12 CE: Birthdate of Gaius Caligula, Roman Emperor.  Caligula was crowned in 37 and murdered in 41.  Life for Jews during his reign was part of the downward spiral that would result in three rebellions by the Jews over the next one hundred years.  Caligula was crazy.  Unfortunately his insanity had additional negative impact on the Jews.  Caligula thought he was divine and insisted on his statue being placed in the Temple at Jerusalem.  His efforts were twice thwarted and his untimely death prevented him from taking vengeance against his Jewish subjects.


38 CE: Riots broke out in Alexandria, Egypt after the Jews spurned an order by the Roman Prefect Flaccus to place a statue of Emperor Caligula in the local synagogue. This was an outgrowth of antagonism between the Jews of Alexandria and some of their pagan neighbors.  The pagans were angered by the Jews celebrating Caligula’s decision to restore Agrippa, a descendant of the Hasmoneans to the Jewish kingship in Palestine.  They knew that the Jews could not worship a statue so by forcing a statue of Caligula into the synagogue, Apion, the pagan leader knew he was asking for trouble. The violence ended and Flaccus was recalled to Rome.  But this was not the end of the trouble much of which was rooted in the fact that some pagans begrudged the Jews their commercial success and wished to do away with them as competitors.  This would not be the last time that those who sought to oust the Jews from commercial ventures did so under the guise of religion.


161; Birthdate of Commodus, the Roman Emperor who reigned while Judah ha-Nasi was compiling and editing the Mishna


1056: Byzantine Empress Theodora becomes ill, dying suddenly a few days later, without children to succeed the throne ending the Macedonian dynasty. This was a period of relative calm for the Jews of the Byzantine Empire.  The last official persecution had taken place at the end of the 10th century.  Conditions would not seriously deteriorate until the arrival of the waves of Crusaders that began at the end of the 11th century.


1481: Coronation of John II, the Portuguese monarch who employed Abraham Zacuto whose accomplishment included the development of a new type of astrolabe as Royal Astronomer and Historian.


1506: The first printed edition of Lashon Limudim, a Hebrew grammar by David ben Yahya was published today in Constantinople.


1694:A difference between the Jewish and Christian relations with the slave population in the Antilles is evidenced in an act passed today by the Dutch Leeward Council and Assembly. “The act was specifically directed at the Jews and states that it is: 'An Act against Jews ingrossing Commodities imported in the Leeward Islands, and trading with the slaves belonging to the inhabitants of the same.’”


1774: “Austrian general, Gabriel Freiherr von Spleny entered Czernowitz at the head of his troops” following which he administered the city in such a way that “the situation of the Jews basically remained unchanged.”


1793(23rd of Elul, 5553): Parshat Nitzavim-Vayeilech and Leil Selichot


1801: Birthdate of Pierre Soulé, a United States politician and diplomat from Louisiana during the mid-19th century. He is best known for his role in writing the Ostend Manifesto, which was written in 1854 as part of an attempt to annex Cuba to the United States. The Manifesto was roundly denounced, especially by anti-slavery elements, and Soulé himself came under severe attack.  According to an article published in the New York Times, Soule was Jewish.


1834: Birthdate of Simon Kayserling, a German educator and writer; who was the principal teacher and inspector of the M. M. David'sche Freischule from 1861, and taught for several years in the Jewish teachers' seminary in Hanover.


1836: Isaac Kalischer married Rose Marks at the Great Synagogue today.


1836: Henry Worms married Rebecca Nathan at the Great Synagogue today.


1837: In Amsterdam, Salomon Bernard Sichel and Fanny Sichel gave birth to their daughter Henrietta who became Henrietta Montefiore when she married Joseph Mayer Montefiore.


1839: Birthdate of Julien Sée the Paris born librarian who made the first translation in French of Joseph ha-Kohen's "'Emeḳ ha-Baka," a history of the sufferings of the Jewish people from the time of their dispersion to the present day.”


1842: Birthdate of Adolf Pinner, the German chemist who began his schooling at the Jewish Theological Seminary at Breslau before attending the University of Berlin where he earned a doctorate in Chemistry in 1867.


1842: In London, George Palmer Putnam and Victorine Haven Palmer gave birth to Mary Corinna who became Mary Corinna Jacobi when, in 1873, she married Dr. Abraham Jacobi, the Jewish physician known as the “father of American pediatrics”


1852: One day after he passed away, “Simcha bar Meir” (Simon Marks) was buried today at the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.


1853: Birthdate of Aleksei Brusilov, the Russian General who as Chief of Staff in 1917 approved the appointment of Jewish Chaplains to serve alongside Orthodox Priests.


1857: In New York, James and Rosa Seligman gave birth to Eugene Seligman.


1857: In Safed Yaakov Mordechai Hirsch who had come to Palestine from Pinsk in 1848 and his wife gave birth to Chaim Hirsch the future “Chief Rabbi of Hoboken, NJ.”


1861: Philadelphian, Corporal Jacob Ullman began serving a four year hit with Company E of the 75th Regiment.


1862:This afternoon the Congregation Baith Israel dedicated their new synagogue to public worship. The synagogue, which is a very handsome brick structure, stands upon the lot at the corner of State and Boerum streets, Brooklyn, and cost in the neighborhood of $10,000. Rabbis Raphael and Isaacs entered the sanctuary which was packed with congregants leading a procession that carried the synagogues “sacred scrolls.”  They were greeted by Baith Israel’s spritiual leader, Rabbi Joel Alexander who said or rather intoned the sacred welcome "Boruch habo" -- when the choir, which was composed of several beautiful black-eyed Hebrew maidens led by Felix Sanger, and accompanied by Sanger's brass band, sang with strange effect one of their quaint and sacred songs. The procession then marched around the room seven times, the Rabbis successively chanting an appropriate song to which the choir responded with the proper chorus. The eternal fire was lighted, the sacred rolls were deposited behind the altar, the Synagogue was irrevocably dedicated to the worship of God, the Father; and after other songs were given, Rabbi Raphael delivered the consecration sermon. [Editor’s Note - Baith Israel was also known as Baith Israel Anshei Emes and is now known as the Kane Street Synagogue,, the oldest continually running synagogue in Brooklyn. Among the congregations Bar Mitzvah “boys” was Aaron Copland.]


1864:The New York Times reviews a new translation of the Book of Job by J.M. Rodwell, “an eminent Oriental scholar who has lately published the first readable English version of The Koran, in which the chapters are chronologically arranged, and the poetical portions rendered metrically.” His translation of the Book of Job, “the most sublime of the Hebrews scriptures” follows the same pattern. Instead of following the normal pattern of chapters and verses, Rodwell’s translation “divides the book according to the stages of the narrative, arranging the text in couplets of measured prose that represent the simple energy of the original.”


1864(29th of Av, 5624): Thirty nine year old Ferdinand Lassalle died of wounds he sustained while fighting a duel two days ago that had been precipitated by a star-crossed love affair.



1864: The Union Army under General William T. Sherman began the final assault on Atlanta. Among those leading the way was Frederick Knefler, an immigrant from Hungary who rose to the rank of Major General in the Army of the Cumberland.


1865: In San Francisco, Leopold Seligmann, the son of Fanny and David Isaac Seligman and his wife Julia Levi gave birth to Florence Meyer, the wife of Albert H. Mayer..


1865: A writer who simply signs his letter to the editor of the New York Times“A Subscriber” took issue with Max Maretzee’s description of his dispute with the New York Herald. In defending The Tribune, the unnamed letter writer accuses Max of using “all the cunning of his Jewish origin.”  Max Maretzee probably refers to the German born composer and impresario Max Maretzek


1867: The Detroit Free Presspublished a description Temple Beth El at Washington Avenue and Clifford Street.


1868: In Pilsen, Elise Herz, neé Edle von Lämmel, contributed 40,000 florins to establish a foundation that would help “respectable craftsman” to set up their own business regardless of their religious affiliation – a caveat that should not come as a surprise since the benefactor came from a prominent Jewish family.


1875: The New York Timespublished a detailed description of Sir Moses Montefiore’s visit to Jerusalem in the last weeks of July, 1875.


1875: Birthdate of New Haven, CT native Alexander Cahn, the Yale educated engineer who served as “member of the Board of Education in New Haven.”


1876:After only three months on the throne, Ottoman sultan Murat V is deposed and succeeded by his brother Abd-ul-Hamid II. During his reign, the Jews celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of their arrival from Spain.  Abd-ul-Hamid II is the first Sultan to meet with Herzl. Unfortunately, this meeting does not result in approval for Herzl’s plan to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine as part of the Ottoman Empire.


1877: Birthdate of St. Louis, MO, native and Washington University  and Cornell University educated engineer Alexander S Langsdorf, the Dean of the School of Engineering and Architecture “who worked tirelessly for the advancement of new curricula, expansion of scholarship and loan funds and the development of engineering graduate programs” at his alma mater for thirty years..


1877: The recently re-built synagogue of Washington Hebrew Congregation was dedicated this evening.  President Rutherford B. Hayes who was supposed to attend the service sent a message expressing his regret that official business kept him from fulfilling his obligation.  Rabbi Benjamin Szold of Baltimore’s Temple Oheb Shalom preached the sermon at the service. [Rabbi Szold was the father of Henrietta Szold.]


1877: “The Life of Midhat Pasha” published today described the rise to power of the leader of “Young Turkey,” the party of reform in the Ottoman Empire.  Pasha, who was born in 1822, is the son of a Bulgarian Jew “who embraced Islam in order to make his fortune.” (Sounds almost like a Turkish Disraeli)


1878: In New York, Judge Van Brunt rejected Lowenthal Cohen’s attempt to use a writ of Habeas Corpus to regain “possession” of his daughter Rebecca who had married Thomas F. Fallon.  The young couple had eloped and the Judge found the marriage to be perfectly legal.  Cohen’s real objection to the marriage may have stemmed from the fact that Fallon was not Jewish.


1878: As the Yellow Fever Epidemic continues in the Deep South, The Young Men’s Hebrew Association of New York City has received an appeal for aid from those living in New Orleans   Contributions can be sent to the offices on West 42nd Street.


1878:  It was reported today that the world’s population includes 8 million Jews.  Other reports have placed this number anywhere from 3,500,000 to 15,000,000.  The claim that there are only 73,000 Jews living in the United is thought to be low since it commonly assumed that the U.S. Jewish population is approximately 150,000.  The European portion of the Russian Empire has the largest Jewish population (2,610,179) followed by Austria with 1,600,000.  Surprisingly, Asia, not counting Turkey is reported to have a total Jewish population in excess of 2,000,000 while Canada has one of the smallest number of Jews ranging anywhere between 1,500 and 7,000.  Spain and Scotland are reported to have the fewest number of Jews of all the places surveyed.


1878: Albert Chapsky who died of Yellow Fever in St. Bernard Parish was buried today in the Hebrew Cemetery in New Orleans, LA. [In Louisiana, the term Parish as used here refers to a county and is not a religious designation.]


1879:  Birthdate of Alma Mahler. She passed away in 1969.


1879: William Price died in a freak accident while driving a wagon filled with the bodies of three children who were to be interred in the Hebrew Cemetery at Cypress Hills.


1879: It was reported today that Mme. Caroline Bertrand, the daughter of Samson Bertrand has written a placed called “Le Noveau Juif Errant” or in English, “The New Wandering Jew.”


1879: In New York, Judge Van Brunt was satisfied that Rebecca Cohen, a 15 year Jewish girl, was legally married to Thomas Fallon, a Roman Catholic and vacated the writ of habeas corpus that he had previously issued.  The writ had been granted when the girl’s father, Lowenthal Cohen, came before the court and claimed that his daughter had been taken against her will or had been deceived into going off with Fallon.


1879: At the Essex Market Police Court, Justice Smith decided that Henry O’Brien was justified in hitting Harris Goldstein in the face with a shovel and breaking his nose. O’Brien had tricked Goldstein into eating a piece of pork and then tried to escape from him by taking refuge in his apartment.  The judge felt Goldstein had earned his punishment for letting his temper get the better of him and for breaking into O’Brien’s apartment.  The judge sent both of the boys on their way.


1882: Three days after she had passed away, “Evelina Mocatta the widow of Abraham Mocatta” was buried at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1883: In a letter to the Times, Herman Strack, a Christian theologian who was an expert on rabbinic literature and a supporter of the Jews against the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany, provided his evaluation of the recently discovered scroll of the book of Deuteronomy which he feels is a forgery.


1883: Jacobi Bornstein, the son of Aron and Sara Bornstein and Thelka Bornstein gave birth to Alexander Bornstein


1884(10th of Elul, 5644): Daniel Weinberger, a German Jewish peddler was found dead in his room on South Halsted Street in Chicago, Illinois.


1885: A fight took place today in Montreal, Canada during the annual meeting at the German and Polish Synagogue.


1885: Today, the U.S. Secretary of State wrote to the U.S. charge d’affairs in Vienna expressing his disgust with the government of Austria-Hungary’s refusal to accept Anthony M Keiley as the American minister “on the ground of his wife being a Jewess.”


1886(30th of Av, 5646): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1886: It was reported today that the 9 Russian Jews who arrived in the United States two days ago and have not found sponsors will probably be sent back to Europe.


1886: An earthquake kills 100 in Charleston, South Carolina. The earthquake occurred in the same year that members of Sheartih Israel reunited with members of Congregation Beth Elohim, Charleston’s (and the nations) oldest continually functioning Reform Temple.


1887: The expenses for today’s excursion under the auspices of the Board of Managers of the Sanitarium for Hebrew Children will be defrayed by the widow and children of the late Edward J. King are doing this to honor his memory.


1887: In Vienna physiologist Joseph Paneth and his wife, both of whom were Jewish, gave birth to British scientist Friedrich Adolf Paneth who life his three brothers was raised as a Protestant. Knowing what he did of Hitler’s racial rules and being opposed to his politics, Paneth did not return from a speaking tour during the 1930’s and remained in Britain where he studied and worked.


1888(24th of Elul, 5648): In New Jersey, two Jewish men from New York were killed when they were struck by Pennsylvania Railroad express train.  Louis Greenburg suffered internal injuries and Israel Cohen was killed instantly.


1883: It was reported today anti-Jewish riots are continuing at Egerszeg, Hungary despite the declaration of martial law.  After having burned the homes of Jews and destroyed their crops, the peasants are now threatening to attack their gentile landlords.


1890: Rabbi Taubenhaus is scheduled to deliver his inaugural sermon at Mount Sinai Temple on East 72nd Street.


1892: It was reported from The Hague today that the man who was identified as a cholera victim last night was a Jew from Vilna who had arrived here from Hamburg.


1893: Birthdate of Lily Aimée Laskine, the Parisian who became one of the leading harpist of the twentieth century



1894(29th of Av, 5654): In his 62nd year, Jacob F. Bamburger the husband of Pauline Bamburger passed away today at his home on West 56th Street.


1895: During a meeting at the Hebrew Institute, the Street Cleaning League adopted a resolution dealing with the “pushcart nuisance.


1896: Birthdate of Ukraine native, Sophie Udin, the feminist and Zionist who married Pinhas Ginguld with whom she had two children – Yehuda and Marcia.




1897(3rd of Elul, 5657): Eight-two year old Bavarian native Lazarus Morgenthau the son of Moses and Brunhilda Morgenthau and the husband of Seline Babette Morgethau who was a major cigar manufacturer and the founder of the Orphan Dowry Fund passed away in New York City.



1897: Three days after he had passed away, 43 year old Solomon Rosenthal was buried at the Plashet Jewish Cemetery in London.


1897: A meeting of the Old Fifth Street School Association will take place today in the office of Maurice B. Blumenthal who is the secretary of the organization.


1897: In Basel, “Dr. Theodor Herzl…presided at the morning” session of The Zionist Congress. The delegates discussed” a plan “to centralize the Zionist Movement” with the formation of Central Committee that would be headquartered in Vienna.”  The committee would “consist of twenty-three members representing” all of the major Jewish “natural groups” who would be expected to contribute to a central operating fund.


1898: Major Hubert- Joseph Henry, one of those who was arrested yesterday on charges of having forged the evidence used against Alfred Dreyfus was found dead in his cell.  The assumption was that he had committed suicide.


1898:”Boy Kills A Rabbi” published today described the murder of Rabbi Rosenbloom who was kicked to death by a mob of a half a dozen “young men” led by seventeen year old John Schlechta  who had been terrorizing the Levi family.


1899: “It was learned” today “that as soon as the State Board of Charities” approves “the plans of incorporation for the Emanuel Hospital and Dispensary of New York, Dr. Maurice J. Burstein will select a site” and begin erect a building.


1899: As a result of his role in creating forgeries during the Dreyfus Case, the Minister of War struck Major Esterhazy from the army lists.


1899: “The Degenerates” which premiered in London tonight includes a series of “well drawn characters” including “the rich Jew who sneers at his own race.”


1899: Today’s session of the court martial of Captain Dreyfus “opened behind closed doors” so that General Deloye and Majors Hartmann and Ducros could testify about the secret artillery information contained in the documents that had been given to the Germans.


1900(6th of Elul, 5660): Eighty-year old Ferdinand Falkson, the German physician and doctor possibly best known for his three battle to have his marriage recognized passed away today.


1903: Herzl's last meeting with German nobleman Grossherzog Friedrich of Baden on the island of Mainau. Herzl presents his difficult dilemma between East Africa and Palestine. "We would be glad to renounce the good land of East Africa for the poor land of Palestine. I in particular would see an honorable rescue for our poor Jews if this exchange could be made."


1902: Mrs. Adoph Landenburg introduces the split skirt for riding horseback.


1905(30th of Av, 5665): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1905:  Birthdate of Dore Schary, American screenwriter, playwright, producer and director. The son of immigrant Russian parents, Schary’s first name came from shortening the original which was Isadore.  Shary provided the Oscar winning script for the film “Boys Town.”  He also produced another all-American film, “Lassie come Home.”  Shary was part of that gaggle of first generation American Jews who created the cinematic version of the American Myth.   Shary’s greatest success came late in his career when he wrote the script for “Sunrise At Campobello” the popular play and film that focused on FDR’s fight with polio.  Shary was active in numerous Jewish organization including the Anti- Defamation League.  He passed away in 1980.


1905: In Brooklyn, the former Bertha Knoepfler and furrier Hermann Meisner gave birth to Sanford Meisner, American actor, teacher and creator of the Meisner Technique.



1906(10th of Elul, 5666): Edward Rosewater, the founder of the Omaha Bee and unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate from Nebraska passed away.  His son Victor took over leadership of the paper


1907: In Chicago, Illinois, Benjamin T. and Anna (née Bransky) Chon gave birth to William Shawn the editor of The New Yorker magazine.




1909(14th of Elul, 5669): Joseph Goldberg passed away.


1909: Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich began the first chemotherapy when with his assistant Sahachiro Hato, a rabbit infected with syphilis was injected with "Preparation 606." This number marked the 606th chemical devised and tested by Ehrlich's team at his Frankfort laboratory. The compound was so successful that the sores on the rabbit promptly healed. The term "chemotherapy" was coined by Erhlich.


1912(18th of Elul, 5672): Parashat Ki Tavo


1912(18th of Elul, 5672): Sixty-eight year old “communal worker” Samuel Hirsch passed away at Niagara Falls, NY.


1913: Birthdate of Helen Levitt, the Brooklyn native “noted for her street photography around New York City.




1914: In Berlin, Kurt W. Rosenthal, a flour merchant, and Elsa Rosenthal (née Kirschstein) gave birth to their second son Franz Rosenthal who the Louis M. Rabinowitz professor of Semitic Language at Yale and then the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic at the same institution.



1914: In response to an appeal by the Yishuv’s leaders and his own knowledge of the desperate condition of the thousands of Jews living in Palestine Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire sent a cable to Jacob Schiff that read, in part, “PALESTINIAN JEWS FACING TERRIBLE CRISIS … BELLIGERENT COUNTRIES STOPPING THEIR ASSISTANCE … SERIOUS DESTRUCTION THREATENS THRIVING COLONIES … FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS NEEDED.” Within a month the appeal produced $50, 000 (the equivalent of 1 million dollars in the 21stcentury)


1915: “The Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America of which ex-Judge Leon Sanders is President announced today that it had established at its offices, 229 East Broadway, a bureau through which dependent Jews in the war zones may be more readily located by their immigrant relatives in this country seeking to render them assistance.”


1915: At Beth Hamidrash Hagadol a synagogue on Norfolk Street, “Rabbi Israel Rosenberg of Paterson presided over a service attended by 25 rabbis and 1,000” congregants which he opened the ark and the attendees began singing Avienu Malkenu.


1915: “Resolutions calling for an American-Jewish congress to formulate plans for the unification of the 3,000,000 Jews in the United States were adopted at a meeting” in Chicago, “tonight of the Lawyers’ Jewish Congress Committee.”


1915: George Breitman, a native of the Ukraine who was working as a laborer in Australia enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).


1916: In the Bronx, “Russian Jewish immigrants, Tillie Godiner and Gedaliah Tchornemoretz gave birth to broadcast journalist Daniel Schorr.  To the current generation, Schorr is the wild old political voice on NPR.  To an earlier generation, he is one of the journalists who made Richard Nixon’s infamous “Enemies List.”  To an even older generation, Schorr was the voice of CBS news from Moscow during the coldest days of the Cold War in the 1950’s.  The Soviets finally go disgusted with Schorr that they expelled.  This gave Schorr the singular distinction of antagonizing the Communist Russians and the ant-Communist Nixon.




1917: Birthdate of communist politician György Aczél/


1917: In Berlin, premiere of “Hilde Warren Und der Tod” directed and produced by Joseph Otto Mandel who would be known as Joe May with a screenplay by Fritz Lange and featuring Hermann Picha.


1917: “A deputation of prominent English Jews head by Lord Swaything visited the Secretary of War…and urged the abandonment of the title ‘Jewish Regiment’ which had been adopted for the new regiment recently organized” because “the 40,000 Jews now serving in the army were fighting not as Jews but as British subjects…”


1917: “It was announced tonight that Rabbi Samuel Greenfield and Reverend Einer Larsen had reached an agreement that would allow the Jews of the Isaiah Temple to temporarily use the quarters of the Swedish Baptist Church for worship services until they can build a sanctuary of their own.


1917: “An Invitation to Soldiers” published today described an announcement by Simon Franks that Temple Emanu-El in Brooklyn will have “free seats” for any members of the United States Army and Navy who attend Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur Services at this congregation.


1918: Following petition of leading Jews, the Polish Council of State abolished existing restrictions respecting the purchase of land by Jews.


1918: For the past 7 months, ending today, Lt. Hugo Gutman, a Jewish officer serving with Kaiser’s army commanded Adolph Hitler who received the Iron Cross First Class thanks to Gutman’s efforts.


1918: The Polish Council of State adopted a resolution giving authorities power to open in existing schools separate classes for Jewish children which shall be closed on Saturday if a sufficient number of parents apply for such a privilege and recognizing as private schools all Talmud Torahs and hedarim in which the teaching of Polish is to be obligatory and in which instruction in all elementary secular subjects is to be given in Polish.


1918: In Nizhni-Novgorod, authorities arrested seven ringleaders for their role in “anti-Jewish riots.”


1918: In Chovol, a Council of Workmen and Soldiers put an end to efforts to start a Pogrom.


1918:The Australian Corps under the command of Sir John Monash broke the German lines at the Battle of Mont St. Quentin and the Battle of Péronne.


1918: Birthdate of Alan Jay Lerner, American librettist and lyricist for stage and screen.  Lerner was yet another of a myriad of Jews who created and refined that most original American art form – the Broadway musical.  One of his most famous contributions was “My Fair Lady.” He passed away in 1986


1919: Thirty five members of the Jewish Defense Organization were disarmed and shot after the Ukrainian National Army recaptured Kiev from the Bolsheviks. As an organized unit, the Jews had played an important role in the defense of Kiev. This was part of massacre of the Jews at Kiev.


1919(5th of Elul, 5679): Sixty-year old Austrian born Dr. Joseph Zeisler, the son of Anna and Isaac Leonard Ziesler and husband of “Theresa Freuchtmean”  who was recognized as an expert in the fields “of skin and venereal diseases passed away today



1920: In Boston, three thousand children are scheduled “to gather in Franklin Field” today “for a grand outing and pageant” sponsored by the Recreational Bureau of the Federated Jewish Charities with the assistance of the Associated Boston Hebrew Schools,  the Bureau of Jewish Religious Schools, the Council of Jewish Juniors, the Home for Jewish Children and the Jewish Welfare Centers.”


1921: Birthdate of Madeline Rochelle Barotz who as Madeline Rochelle Amgott was a pioneer in the early days of broadcast television news – a role made all the more difficult because was the first and only member of her sex to do this in the 50’s and early 60’s.


1921: “Ilona” a silent film produced by Joe May, with a script co-authored by Adolf Lantz was released today in Germany.


1924(1st of Elul, 5684): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1924:  Birthdate of actor and comedian Buddy Hackett.



1926: Robert and Lillian Mulwitz gave birth to their daughter Ruth at Port Chester New York.  The family changed their name to Roberts and it was as Ruth Roberts that she gained fame as the “songwriter best known for her cheerful and durable baseball anthem ‘Meet the Mets.’”


1927:Dr. Leon Motzkin presided over today's session of the Fifteenth Zionist Congress in Basel.


1928:The Threepenny Opera” with music by Kurt Weill was first performed at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin today.


1929: Bedouins attacked nearly a dozen Jewish settlements in the northern Galilee pillaging the houses and burning the crops.”  According to at least one report, at least 22 Jews were wounded in the attacks.  “In Jerusalem, houses of Georgian Jews located near the Damascus Gat which were reportedly left open by police during their unsuccessful search for weapons were looted by Arab marauders.


1929:A party of thirty-seven Jewish settlers left for Palestine today on the steamer Carnaro bound for Jaffa. Dr. A. Kligler of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, Professor Roth, the Palestine labor leader Ben Gurion, Dr. Benzion Mossensohn, director of the Hebrew High School at Tel Aviv, and other Palestinian Jewish leaders sailed on the same steamer


1932(29th of Av, 5692): Seventy-two year old Sir Sassoon Eskell, the first Finance Minister of Iraq passed away today.




1932(29th of Av, 5692):Moyshe-Leyb Halperndied of a heart attack in New York City.  Born in 1886, he was a Yiddish-language modernist poet raised in a traditional Jewish household in Zlotshev, Galicia and brought to Vienna at the age of 12 in 1898 to study commercial art. Halpern began writing modernist poetry n German while living in Vienna. Upon returning to his hometown in 1907, he switched to writing in Yiddish. In 1908, Halpern emigrated to New York City in order to avoid the military draft. There he became associated with a group of Yiddish poets called Di Yunge (The Young Ones). He published his first book of poetry in 1919, In nyu york (In New York). That same year, he married. He had a son in 1923. His second book, Di goldene pave (The GoldenPeacock), was published in 1924. Halpern also wrote for satirical magazines and Frayhayt (Freedom), a communist Yiddish newspaper.



1933: Rabbi Joseph Zvi Dushinsky becomes the Chief Rabbi of the Agudath Israel in Jerusalem.



1933:  The Jiidische Rundschau is permitted to reappear.  The popular Jewish weekly, which had been published since 1902, had been forced to suspend publication for producing editorials that had challenged Nazi charges against the Zionists. The magazine would be forced to close in 1938



1933: The eighteenth World Zionist Congress adopted a resolution providing for sending a commission to Palestine to investigate charges of terrorism in connection with the murder of Dr. Chaim Arlosoroff, the Zionist leader who had been killed in Tel Aviv.



1933: Professor Selig Brodetsky told members of the World Zionist Congress that Zionist organization has inaugurated conversations with Arab leaders of Syria and other neighboring lands for the extension of Jewish colonization.



1933: The Council of the Warsaw Jewish Community sends a protest to the Zionist Congress against agreements for exchange of goods between Nazi Germany and Palestine.



1933(9th of Elul, 5693): Nazi agents murdered Theodore Lessing in Marienbad, Czechoslovakia. Lessing was an anti-Nazi Jewish philosopher and Zionist who had taught at Hanover Technical High School.  He had moved to Czechoslovakia because he feared for his safety. 1935(2nd of Elul, 5695): Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook known as Rav Kook passed away. Rabbi Kook was the first Chief Rabbi Ashkenazic of Palestine, serving from 1921 until his death in 1935.  Born in Russia in 1865, Kook was a child prodigy and star student at the famed yeshiva in Volozhin He served as a Rabbi in several communities in Europe before moving to Eretz Israel in 1904 where he served as a rabbi in Jaffa as well as for the new Zionist settlements.  "Kook was the outstanding leader and thinker of the religious Zionist movement at a time when the great majority opposed of Orthodox Jewry Zionism. He endeared himself to the nonreligious elements in Israel by sympathy and support for the secular sector, particularly in the agricultural settlements."  He regarded all who made Alyiah, "regardless of their beliefs to be inspired by holy sparks "since they were laying the foundation for the ultimate messianic redemption."



1935(2nd of Elul, 5695):Herman Bernstein an American journalist, writer, translator, and diplomat, passed away. Herman Bernstein was born in 1876, at Vladislavov which was on the Russo-German border to David and Marie Bernstein. In 1893, he emigrated to the United States, where he completed his education and married Sophie Friedman on December 31, 1901. “His first stories were published in 1900. He contributed to the New York Evening Post, The Nation, The Independent, and Ainslee's Magazine. He was the founder and editor of The New London Day and an editor of the Jewish Tribuneand of the Jewish Daily Bulletin. As a correspondent of the New York Times, Bernstein regularly travelled to Europe. In 1915, he went to Europe to document the situation of Jews in the war zones. He documented the Russian Revolution in 1917 for the New York Herald, which led him to both Siberia and Japan with the American Expeditionary Forces. He also covered the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 for the same newspaper. In 1921 Bernstein published a book History of a Lie, an account of the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. According to GPU agent Pavlovsky (Yakshin), arrested in Germany in 1929, Bernstein worked for both GPU and Comintern, arranging pro-Soviet coverage in American press. One of his main goals was to describe White army and White emigres as anti-Semitic instigators of pogroms and suppress coverage of pogroms by units of the Red Army and other forces allied to Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war. GPU supplied Bernstein with forged documents for publication. In 1921 Bernstein received 17 000 gold rubles for his services.



1936: “Fear that the future of Jews in Palestine was imperiled by British ‘inaction’ was voiced today in a declaration issued at the close of an extraordinary session of the general council of the World Zionist Organization” that was held in Zurich.



1936: “The problem of uniting the religions of the United States, not under one banner of dogma or doctrine, but a united front to deal with civic, social and welfare problems of the nation was discussed” at a meeting in Appleton, Wisconsin, tonight by three clergymen of the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faiths” the latter of which was Rabbi L.L. Mann of Sinai Temple in Chicago.



1936: Dr. Alexander Rosenfeld, vice president of the Tel Aviv Sports Organization received a cable today saying that the Maccabees Palestine Soccer team is scheduled to arrive in New York on September 14.



1937: In Brooklyn Frieda (née Shapkin) and Elias Berlinger, a building contractor gave birth to actor Warren Berlinger whose career included everything from appearing in the original Broadway production of “Annie Get Your Gun” to the ever-popular kids’ show “Howdy Doody.”



1937: The violence orchestrated by Arab leaders that was designed to end Jewish immigration and land purchases continued with seven Arab attacks on Jews in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Karkur. Three Jews and four Arabs were killed and there were many wounded. Moshe Goldenberg, the mukhtar (village elder) of Beit Alfa, had a narrow escape when shot at in Beit Shean.   (Yes, this is the same Beit Shean where the bodies of Saul and his sons were taken as described in the Book of Samuel.)  Jewish and Arab leaders were summoned by district commissioners who appealed for the restoration of law and order.



1938: Moslem terrorists sought to extend their power by killing other Arabs.  “Tewfik Shantin an Arab broker was shot dead in the waiting room of an Arab doctor in Jaffa” while an unnamed Arab village chieftain was shot to death while walking with a friend in the Old City of Jerusalem.



1938(4th of Elul, 5698): Mordecai Leznick, a Jewish policeman riding on an Arab owned bus traveling between Lydda and Jaffa was shot to death by an Arab passenger.



1938(4th of Elul, 5698): In Tel Aviv Schmuel Weiner died from wounds sustained when he was stoned last Friday while riding through Ramleh.



1939: The last day of peace in Europe before the outbreak of World War II.  Every one waited to see if the Poles would cave into German demands.  Every one waited to see if the British would betray the Poles as they had the Czechs in 1938.  What the world did not know was that Hitler issued Directive no.1, 1939 ordering the attack on Poland to begin at dawn the following day. Already, 1,500,000 German troops were poised to enact Case White, the invasion of Poland,  The plan to create a fake attack by Polish troops on a German transmitter was about to be enacted.  By the next “Polish casualties” (actually the corpses of concentration camp inmates) would provide Hitler’s proof of Polish perfidy and the Blitz of Poland would be on its way.



1939: Nazi Germany mounts a staged attack on Gleiwitz radio station giving them an excuse to attack Poland the following day, starting World War II.



1940: From July 9 through today, Chiune Sugihara, the Vice Counsel for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania issued over 2,000 visas to Polish Jews so that they could escape from the Nazis.  This does not count the three to five thousand visas issued to Lithuanian Jews without his government’s approval that enabled them to escape as well.



1940: The National Encampment of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States continued for a third day.



1941: Churchill received 17 reports of the shooting of Jews and Russians in numbers ranging between 61 and 4,200.  These reports covered the two month period beginning with June, 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and the special Killing Squads began their work.



1941: In response to a Jewish reprisal raid on a German patrol, all Jews were confined to their homes. That evening the "action" commenced. The entire Jewish section of Vilna was raided.  As a result 2,019 women, 864 men, and 817 children were taken away to pits in Ponar forests and all shot dead. This event is notable for two reasons. First it is unusual because it includes the report of Jewish resistance. Second it is unusual because the Nazis supplied a specific reason for killing Jews other than their usual anti-Semitic drivel.



1941: As the month came to a close, “the Vichy Government of France had enacted laws that discriminated against Moroccan Jews” by setting quotas on the number of Jewish doctors and lawyers, which forced many Jews living in the European quarters to move to the mellahs.



1942: One day after he had passed away funeral services are scheduled to be held this afternoon at the Park West Memorial Chapel for fifty-two year old Nissim Joseph Ovadia, the Turkish born chief rabbi of Vienna and Paris who came to the United States after the French surrendered to the Nazis



1942: A story headlined "Jewish Children Interned by Vichy" appeared in today’s Chicago Sun.



1942: By the end of August SS officer Kurt Gerstein has failed in his attempt to publicize his knowledge of the mass gassings of Jews. He is rebuffed in his approach to the German papal nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo



1942: In Ternopil, western Ukraine, at 4.30 am, German SS organize the first deportation of Jews from Ternopil ghetto to death camp in Belzec, about 5,000 Jews were deported to face death in Belzec. When the Germans captured Ternopil, about 18,000 Jews lived in the city.



1943(30thof Av, 5703): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1943: The Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen was given clearance by the Chief Legal Officer Gösta Engzell to issue Swedish passports in order to "rescue Danish Jews and bringing them here".



1943: The USS Drum, an American submarine, with Maurice Rindskopf serving as Executive Officer sank a Japanese cargo ship while patrolling off New Georgia



1943: During its meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria the “American Jewish Conference adopted a resolution accusing the American Council for Judaism of an ‘attempt to sabotage the collective Jewish will to achieve a unified program’ by its statement made public” yesterday “in Philadelphia opposing the creation of a Jewish state.”



1943: By the end of August, 47 Jewish women and 50 Jewish men are executed after being discovered in the "Aryan" section of Warsaw.



1943: “Vice Chancellor John O. Bigelow ordered an audit of the first accounting of the estate of Abraham Wolff of Morristown, NJ who was a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co.



1943: In Toronto, the Group on Racial Relations presented a report today in which “Christians were called up to accept Jews a members of the community on a basis of complete equality and to take drastic action in opposing discrimination” in both the personal and social interactions.



1943: “Zionists in England have exceeded the £250,000 goal set for this year’s Palestine Foundation Fund campaign, Mrs. Archibald Silverman reported today at a luncheon in her honor held at the Belmont Plaza Hotel by the Palestine Fund and the Jewish National Fund.”



1943: In Halifax the Army Show which had first been seen by “an all service audience” staring the comedy team of Frank Shuster and Johnny Wayne who came to be known simply as Wayne & Shuster was seen by a civilian audience for the first time tonight.



1944(12th of Elul, 5704): Fifty-three year old Yiddish actor Ludwig Satz passed away today.



http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/yt/lex/S/satz-ludwig.htm



http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=23149236



http://www.jta.org/1944/09/03/archive/ludwig-satz-star-of-yiddish-stage-dies-in-new-york-was-53



1944: Jews liberated from the Novaki labor camp joined the battle for Banska Bystrica. Four weeks later Eichmann exacted revenge for the Slovak Uprising by deporting 8,975 Slovak Jews to Birkenau where most met their deaths.



1944: Over the next four days Jews formerly interned at the Nováky labor camp fight in a Slovakian uprising against the Germans. In all, more than 1500 Jews join 16,000 Slovak soldiers and partisans. One partisan battalion commander, a Jewish woman named Edita Katz, covers the retreat of her men with a machine gun and hand grenades until she is killed by Germans and the Hlinka Guard. Another Jewish partisan, Tibor Cifea, is shot by Germans and left hanging for three days.



1944: A photograph was taken of a small group of survivors from the Kovno, a town in Lithuania that had been liberated on August 1.  At the start of the war there were approximately 40,000 Jews living there. There were only 2,000 still alive at when the Soviets liberated the city.



http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/august/14.asp



1945: The Liberal Party of Australia is founded by Robert Menzies. During the Parliamentary elections in August, 2010, The Liberal Party sought the support of the Jewish community by picturing itself as being a better friend of Israel than the Labor Party.



1945: President Truman endorsed a proposal for 100,000 Jews to be immediately admitted to Palestine and so informed the British Prime Minister.  Mr. Atlee was, to say the least, not pleased.



1945: Birthdate of Itzhak Perlman. Born in Tel Aviv, Perlman was stricken with polio. He triumphed over the adversity to become one of the world’s greatest violinists.



1945: Lt. Col. Louis Geffen, a judge advocate in the US Army who was sailing across the Pacific to his new duty station was allowed to use an area on the bow of the ship for Kabbalat Shabbat services.



1947: UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, published its report.  Under the plan, Palestine was to be partitioned into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.  Jerusalem was to be a demilitarized, neutral city governed as an international trusteeship under the United Nations.



1948: In New York City, Jean (née Farber) and Irving Ganz, an arts supply executive gave birth to screenwriter Lowell Ganz



1948: Birthdate of Steve Soboroff, successful businessman, Republican political leader and executive for the Los Angeles Dodgers.



1950: Birthdate of David Bedein, a journalist who established the Israel Resource News Agency and “serves as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.”



1950: “Summer Stock,” a corny musical produced by Joe Pasternak, based on a story by Sy Gomberg for which he won an Oscar and with songs by Harold Arlen was released today in the United States.



1950: Business leaders, Cabinets members and leading representatives from the Knesset held an all-day session to discuss Israel’s worsening economic conditions.  “The economic troubles stem mainly from the fact that the expansion of production is unable to keep up with the growth of the population, which increased in 27 months from 655,000 to 1,125,000.” 



1951(29thof Av, 5711): Ninety-one year old Abraham Cahan the socialist newspaper editor whose name is synonymous with the Jewish Daily Forward passed away today.



http://college.cengage.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/late_nineteenth/cahan_ab.html



http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/cahan.html



1952: In Monmouth County, Sidney Goldman, Justice of the Superior Court of New Jersey was the principle speaker at the cornerstone laying for Temple Beth Miriam’s new facility.



1952: The final draft of the Reparations Agreement signed at The Hague was sent to Bonn. It was still waiting for the West German government's formal approval. The UN submitted to Bonn for special consideration a list of more than 380 survivors of the Nazi scientific experiments conducted in concentration camps. More than 200 such victims were still living in Germany.



1954: Operation Binyamin 2 led by Ariel Sharon and Meir Har-Zion came to an end with the capture of 3 Jordanian soldiers.



1955:In response to repeated attacks from Fedayeen (the term for terrorists at this time) forces under the command of Mordechai “Motta” Gur and Rafael “Raful” Eitan led an attack which destroyed the military installations at Khan Yunis in what was known as Operation Elkayanm.



1959: Premiere of “Middle of the Night” a drama featuring a May to December romance deftly told in a script by Paddy Chayefsky which features “future Oscar winners Martin Balsam and Lee Grant.



1961: Those “sons of Moses,” the Sherry brothers, combined their efforts to give the Dodgers a 5 to 2 victory over the Cubs. Norm Sherry hit a two-run homer for the Los Angeles Dodgers today and Larry Sherry pitched well enough in relief to get credit for the “save.”



1962(1st of Elul, 5722): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1962: Seventy year old Henrikas Rabinavicius, “the only Jew to have served in the Lithuanian diplomatic corps” after it gained its independence following World War I, and the husband of the former “Ethel Edna Kabat, passed away today in New York.



https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/09/01/83515186.pdf



1962: In Egypt Alaa al-Zayat “a prominent doctor and professor of medicine” and his wife gave birth to Ahmed Zayat who gained fame as Ephraim David Zayet  the American businessman who owns 2015 Triple Crown Winner “American Pharoah.”



1962:  Trinidad and Tobago become independent. The Jewish community dates back to the 18th century.  At the time of independence there were approximately 700 Jews living in the two islands.



1967(25th of Av, 5727): Ilya Ehrenberg, Soviet author, journalist, apologist and political survivor par excellence, passed away.



1968: Birthdate of Yossef (Joseph) Cedar the native of New York who “grew up in the Bayit VeGan neighborhood in Jerusalem” and became an award winning director and screenwriter best known for the 2011 tale of clash between academics and fathers and sons – “Footnote.”



1972: Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, both of whom were Jewish “answered the advertisement of Peter Criss in Rolling Stone that would lead to the formation of KISS.



1972(21st of Elul, 5732): Seventy-six year old David Abraham Jessurun Cardozo, the Dutch born, English educated Sephardic rabbi who was the assistant rabbi at New York’s prestigious Spanish and Protuguese Synagogue and the first Rabbi to led Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in Spain since the 1492 Expulsion passed away today.



https://www.nytimes.com/1972/09/05/archives/rabbi-cardozo-dies-a-sephardic-leader.html



1977: “You Light Up My Life” a romantic comedy written, directed and produced by Joseph Brooks who also composed the score and starring Didi Conn was released in the United States today by Columbia Pictures.



1977: US Undersecretary of State Philip Habib assured Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz that the US would block any Arab attempt to change UN Security Council Resolution 242.  This UN Resolution included a guaranteed of the right of Israel to exist and was part of the diplomatic efforts surrounding the Six Day War.  Various Arab leaders have erroneously claimed that this resolution required Israel to return to the truce lines that existed in June, 1967. 



1979: “Time After Time” a sci-fi film directed by Nicholas Meyer who also wrote the screenplay was released today in the United States.



1981(1st of Elul, 5741): Rosh Chodesh Elul



1981(1st of Elul, 5741):Prof. Elias J. Bickerman, a historian and authority on the influence of the Greeks in the Middle East at the time of Jesus and before, died today in Tel Aviv, where he was on vacation. He was 85 years old and lived in Manhattan.



1981(1st of Elul, 5741): Eighty-two year old businessman and philanthropist Joseph Hirschhorn whose name became famous because of the art museum of which he was “the founder and benefactor” passed away today. (As reported by John Russell)



http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/02/obituaries/joseph-hirschhorn-dies-financier-art-patron.html?pagewanted=all



1983: Flight 007, among whose passengers were 23-year-old Alice Ephraimson-Abt, the daughter of Hans Ephraimson-Abt completed “a refueling stop in Alaska” and “took off for Seoul.”



1987: “On the occasion of a meeting in Rome today of representatives of the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, the then President of the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, announced the intention of the Commission to prepare an official Catholic document on the Shoah.”



1988(18th of Elul, 5748): Seventy-five year old Lin Jaldati, the Dutch born Holocaust who brought Yiddish music Communist controlled countries in Asia passed away today.



https://yiddishkayt.org/art-is-my-weapon/



https://www.davidshneer.com/art-is-my-weapon.html



1989(30th of Av, 5749): Eighty-nine Morris Barney Dalitz, the gangster known as Moe Dalitz passed away today.



http://lasvegassun.com/news/1989/sep/01/las-vegas-gaming-pioneer-moe-dalitz-dies-89/



1990: Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, the first female Jewish chaplain in the U.S. military, was profiled in the Omaha "Jewish Press"



1994(24th of Elul, 5754): Harry Rosenblatt, one of the last survivors of the Jewish Legion of World War I, which fought with the British against the Turks in Palestine, passed away.  He was 101 years old. A native of Rovno, Ukraine, he came to New York at the age of 17.  He joined the British Army after hearing a speech in Union Square by Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1916 in which the Zionist leader called for volunteers to join in the fight to help the British wrest control of the Palestine from the Ottoman Empire.  “Mr. Rosenblatt was among the troops entering the city, and his picture and biography are on display in the Museum of the Israeli Defense Forces.”  After the war, “he returned to New York, became a U.S. citizen and opened a tailor shop which he kept open until he turned 90.”



1995: Ninety-four year old Gertrude Luckner, a Christian social worker who resisted the Nazis and provided food and assistance to Jews during the Shoah passed for which was named as a righteous among the nations by Yad Vashem passed away today.



http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/stories/luckner.asp



1997: The New York Times featured a review ofPrivate Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life by Janna Malamud Smith the daughter of Bernard Malamud.



2000(30th of Av, 5760): Rosh Chodesh Elul



2000: Graveside services for Gertrude Schaefler, the widow of the late Leon Schaefler were held today.



2000: “In the Penal Colony,” an opera composed by Philip Glass, based on a story by Franz Kafka, premiered today in Seattle, Washington.



2001: Adel Mughrabi purchased the MV Karine A sothat the Palestinian Authority could use it to smuggle a large shipment of arms to terrorists



2001: Stanley “Stan” Fischer completed his term as First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.



2001: “Children of a Vanish World” an exhibition of photographs by Roman Vishniac is scheduled to come to a close at the Spertus Museum in Chicago.



2001(12th of Elul, 5761): Seventy-five year old Lord Hamlyn, the son of refugees from Hitler’s Germany and became a publishing mogul passed away today.



https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/sep/03/guardianobituaries.politics



https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/sep/03/guardianobituaries.politics



2001(12thof Elul, 5761: Seventy-nine year old child prodigy violinist Jacob Morris Kramalnick, who served as concert master with several orchestras passed away today.



https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Jacob-Krachmalnick-former-concertmaster-of-2881754.php



2001: An exhibition entitled “Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in 19th-Century Art” comes to a close at Yeshiva University Museum in Manhattan.  Oppenheim was one of the first Jewish artists to become successful in the 19th century.  His “chief claim to fame was as a portraitist to the Rothschild family.  He was called ‘the painter of the Rothschilds, and the Rothschild of painters.’”



2002: The Israeli Defense Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, issued a statement expressing "regret" over "harming" civilians in Tubas when an Israeli helicopter fire four missiles at a car in which the local leader of the al-Aqsa brigade was thought to be riding but which actually contained five civilians and one teenager accused of being part of the terrorist organization



2003: Luis Sandoval and two unidentified co-conspirators went to Cafe Bazel, a chic restaurant popular with expatriate Israeli artists in the Encino area, and fatally shot a man suspected of stealing 76 kilograms of Ecstasy tablets from Moshe Malul and Itzhik Abergil. This hit appears to have been the high point of the Israelis' collaboration with the Vineland crew.



2003: The Sunday New York Times book section includes a review of Off With Their Heads:
Traitors, Crooks and Obstructionists in American Politics, Media and Business
by Jewish political consultant Dick Morris.



2004(14th of Elul, 5764): Hamas suicide bombers blew up two buses in Beersheba, Israel, killing 16 passengers and wounding 100’s more.  The dead included Shoshana Amos, 64; Aviel Atash, 3; Vitaly Brodsky, 52; Tamara Dibrashvilli, 70; Raisa Forer, 55; Larisa Gomanenko, 48; Denise Hadad, 50; Tatiana Kortchenko, 49; Rosita Lehman, 45;  Karine Malka, 23;  Nargiz Ostrovsky, 54;  Maria Sokolov, 57; Roman Sokolovsky, 53; Tiroayent Takala, 33; Eliyahu Uzan, 58 and Emmanuel Yosef (Yosefov), 28 all from Beersheba.



2004: The Philadelphia Inquirer featured a review of a biography of Jewish born violinist Efrem Zimbalist entitled Efrem Zimbalist: A Life by Roy Malan.



2005(26th of Av, 5765):  Sir Joseph Rotblat passed away at the age of 96.  The physicist was the only scientist who quit working on the development of the atomic bomb for “moral reasons.”  The Polish born scientist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to him and the Pugwash conferences in 1995 for their work in trying to limit and ultimately eliminate nuclear weapons.



2005: “The Constant Gardner” a movie version of the novel by the same name starring Rachel Weisz was released today in the United States.



2005: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russian born Jewish oligarch and businessman, announced that he would run for parliament.



2006: A mass rally calling for the release of the three kidnapped IDF soldiers, Gilad Shalit, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser attracted thousands to Tel Aviv Rabin's Square.



2006(7th of Elul, 5766): Bernard J. Wohl passed away at the age of 76. An advocate for New York’s poor and homeless; he served as Executive Director of the Goddard Riverside Community Center for 26 years.



2006(7thof Elul, 5766): Sixty-two year old Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Ph.D. the Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and award winning author whose works included Reading the Women of the Bible passed away today.



http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/nas.2007.-.13.252



https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/archaeologists-biblical-scholars-works/tikva-frymer-kensky-1943%E2%80%932006/



2007: In Jerusalem, clarinetist Karl-Heinz Steffens joins members of the Jazz Faculty of the Israel Conservatory of Music for a Jazz Concert.



2007: The ZF conference entitled “Israel at 60” opens in London.



2007: In an address given at the annual meeting of the Islamic Society of North America Rabbi Eric Yoffee, president of the Union for Reform Judaism “pleaded with American Muslims to transcend the differences that have their people for decades and Join Jews to confront the extremist factions and prejudice that plague both religious traditions.”



2007: Today,Rabbi Israel Rubin took his students on an unusual field trip. They went to Barn 70 on the backside of Saratoga Race Course on Friday morning to see a trainer about a horse. The trainer was Bob Baffert, and the horse, Maimonides, was a fast one, who just may capture the Kentucky Derby next May. Maimonides cost $4.6 million at last year’s Keeneland September Sale, and last month he appeared as if he was worth every penny when he won his debut by 11 ½ lengths. He is one of the favorites Monday to win the Grade I $250,000 Hopeful Stakes, a seven-furlong sprint for 2-year-olds. None of that, however, interested Rubin or his charges. He does not attend horse races or gamble. In fact, upon hearing about the colt, Rubin thought long and hard before arranging to take his students here. “Some may think this is sacrilegious,” he said. Ultimately, however, the rabbi and his students were drawn here from the Maimonides Hebrew Day School in Albany for what is in a name. The school and the colt are named for Moses Maimonides, who lived more than 800 years ago and is considered among the greatest Jewish philosophers. He was the chief rabbi of Cairo and the physician to the sultan of Egypt.  “He blended religious study and intellect with worldly manners to heal the sick and guide the healthy,” Rubin said.  “He was respected and honored by both Jews and Arabs. This is especially relevant now in our life and times.” Maimonides is owned and was named by Ahmed Zayat, an Egyptian now living in New Jersey. He did not know about Rubin’s visit, and, indeed, was flying back from San Diego and Del Mar on Friday morning. When told of the smiles of the youngsters petting the nose of his expensive colt, however, Zayat was beyond gratified. He is a Muslim who grew up in a suburb of Cairo and had put much time and effort into bestowing the name Maimonides on his prize purchase.“ He was a very special man who was highly regarded by all people, regardless of faith,” Zayat said of Maimonides. “What has happened with Sept. 11, Iraq, and what’s going on in the region is contrary to the way I grew up. If this horse was going to be a superstar, I wanted an appropriate name. I wanted to say something with the tool I had, which was a horse. I wanted it to be pro-peace, and about loving your neighbor.” When Zayat tried to register the name Maimonides with the Jockey Club, however, he discovered that it had been reserved for more than nine years by Earle I. Mack, a New York real estate investor and a former ambassador to Finland. In 1997, Mack, then the chairman of the board for the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, was instrumental in bringing King Juan Carlos I of Spain to New York to accept the school’s Democracy Award. Mack had been moved by the king’s remarks about how much Spain’s culture had lost when the country expelled its Jews in 1492 as part of the Inquisition. The king mentioned Maimonides, who was born in Córdoba, Spain, in 1135, and who, with his family, was forced out of the country while Spain was ruled by Muslims. “I was just waiting for a horse good enough to deserve the name,” Mack said. He has owned and bred horses for more than 40 years, and knew that Zayat’s colt, a son of Vindication, was bred to be special. Each also understood the other’s good intentions. Zayat donated $100,000 to Cardozo to commemorate the king’s visit there, and to promote tolerance. Mack released his claim to the name Maimonides. “He had the right horse, and the right motives,” Mack said. “We are all after the same thing: to touch people across cultures.” Zayat and Mack know that horse racing is an unpredictable business, and a thoughtfully named horse hardly guarantees future fame and fortune. When Eli O’Brien, 14, patted Maimonides between the ears and promised to say some prayers for him, Baffert nodded enthusiastically. “We’ll take anything you can give us,” Baffert said.



2008: The Sunday New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including g Still Alive! A Temporary Condition: A Memoirby Herbert Gold and two books by Adam Krisch; Invasions and The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry.



2008: The Washington Post featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Man in the Dark by Paul Auster, Dough: A Memoir by Mort Zachter, issued in paperbackand Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, now reissued for the 40th anniversary of those groundbreaking 1968 presidential conventions.



2008: At Yeshiva University Museum, an exhibition entitled “The Six Day War Series: Painting by Ira Moskowitz” comes to an end. “Eight oil paintings gifted to the Museum Collection by the family of Ira and Ann Moskowitz in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem. This series depicts emotionally powerful scenes after the Six-Day War in June 1967. Artist Ira Moskowitz (1912-2001) employs vivid color and expressive brushwork to convey the euphoria of this victorious moment in Israel's history. Born in Poland and educated in Prague, Moskowitz studied at the Art Students League and spent extended periods in Israel.”



2008: Dr. Andrew G. Bostom, author of The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History a book that describes what it was like living as Jew under Moslem rule, was interviewed on Israel National Radio's Tamar Yonah Show. During the interview he “shared the dramatic account of a young Moroccan Jewess in her teens who lived in the 1800's, named Sol Hachuel.  Falsely accused on charges of "apostasy" from Islam, she was offered riches and special rights if she embraced Islam - or prison, torture and death if she did not.  Sol Hachuel chose to be imprisoned, starved, tortured and then decapitated in the town square rather than give up her Judaism.  "I was born a Jew, and I shall die a Jew," she boldly stated to the Islamic court, according to Bostom's accounts.  On the show, Bostom read her historic speech that inspired the Fez Jewish community to remain committed to their Judaism despite the hardships of constant false charges, unfair heavy taxes, violence and murder.”



2009(11THof Elul, 5769): Fifty-five year old documentary film maker Elliot Berlin who made “Paperclips” one of the best Holocaust related movies ever passed away today.



http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2009/09/07/elliot_berlin_at_55_was_noted_film_documentarian/



2009: Opening night of the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.



2009 The Education Ministry announced this evening that an agreement to enroll Ethiopian students initially banned from some of the city's schools had been reached following a meeting between Petah Tikva Mayor Yitzhak Ohayon, Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar (Likud) and other Education Ministry officials.



2009: The stock of Africa Israel investments, a real estate firm owned by Lev Leviev “fell another 13.7 percent today as the firm floated the idea of renegotiating the terms of its debts with bond holders and banks.” (As reported by Marcy Oster)



2010: An exhibition, The Works of Mordechai Rosenstein, on display at the Fine Family Art Gallery and the Katz Family Mainstreet Gallery of the MJCCA is scheduled to come a close today in Atlanta, GA.



2010: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his negotiating team took off for Washington this morning, ahead of the relaunch of peace talks with the Palestinians.



2010(21stof Elul, 5770): Sixty-five year old Gail Koff a partner in Jacoby & Meyers, passed away. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/nyregion/03koff.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print



2010(21stof Elul, 5770): Four Israelis were shot dead in their car today near the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba less than a day before Israeli and Palestinian leaders meet in Washington for a summit to announce the resumption of direct peace talks. The attack, for which Hamas has claimed responsibility, shattered years of relative calm in the West Bank. The victims are a couple from the settlement of Beit Hagai and two residents of Kiryat Arba. One of the dead was a woman believed to have been pregnant. The Beit Hagai couple has been identified as Yitzhak and Tali Ames, 45 and 47. They are survived by six children, the oldest 24 and the youngest 5. Just six months ago, the Ames couple celebrated the birth of their first granddaughter. Tali worked as an account manager in various offices in the area and Yitzhak was a tour guide who accompanied groups to the Temple Mount area every Wednesday. Beit Hagai, a tiny settlement in the South Hebron Hills, is home to 100 families. A spokesman for Hamas' military wing, the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, announced Tuesday that members of the organization carried out the shootings. A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, said the Islamist group praises the attack and considers it a natural response to "the crimes of occupation." Another Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, said the attack was meant to highlight the failure of the security cooperation between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. A senior PA official who is in Washington for today's official launch of direct peace talks with Israel expressed outrage over the attack and accused Hamas of attempting to thwart the negotiations. The Fatah-dominated Palestinian security forces in the West Bank launched their own investigation into the incident in an effort to track down the gunmen. The South Hebron Hills, where the attack took place, is considered an area in which Hamas cells have heightened their presence. The commander of the West Bank division, Brig. Gen. Nitzan Alon, said the authorities believe that Hamas is telling the truth in claiming the attack. After the incident, Israeli troops and police were stationed at major checkpoints and junctions along West Bank roads in an effort to track down the gunmen. In addition, the police's operations branch has issued instructions to officers throughout the country to stay alert. The Israel Defense Forces said it had located the gunmen's car. IDF sources said there had been no indications that an attack was imminent. Defense officials now believe that Palestinian terrorist organizations may seek to sabotage the peace negotiations. The authorities are also worried that far-right settlers may try to provoke unrest as well. At around 7:30 P.M. this evening, gunshots were heard near the Bnei Naim junction just south of Kiryat Arba. A preliminary investigation revealed that the gunmen drove alongside the car and opened fire. Authorities believe it is possible that after the driver was shot and the car was forced off the highway, the gunmen approached the vehicle to ensure that all the car's passengers had been killed. Guy Gonen, a Magen David Adom paramedic who arrived at the scene, told Channel 2 that his crew saw "a car that was pierced with dozens of bullets and inside there were four bodies. There was absolutely no chance of helping." Defense Minister Ehud Barak was briefed on the attack by IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin. Barak conferred by telephone with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was on his way to Washington. He also spoke with Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom, who is serving as acting prime minister while Netanyahu is abroad. "Unfortunately we are once again witness to the fact that while we are working to find ways to co-exist and create a reality of peace, there are those who continue to take the path of terror and are busy killing innocents," said Shalom. "Today it is clearer more than ever that the real obstacle to peace is terrorism and the extremists who will do anything to send the entire region up in flames. It is incumbent on the Palestinian Authority to fulfill its obligations in the territories that are under its purview," Shalom said. "We are giving full backing to the prime minister during the talks in the United States." According to Barak, "This apparently is an attempt by depraved terrorists to harm efforts to move the diplomatic process forward and to try to harm the chances of peace talks that are beginning in Washington." The attack prompted sharp reactions from West Bank settler leaders, who were quick to draw a link between the killings and the peace talks that are set to get underway. "It's about time that the leaders of Israel wake up from their delusions of an imaginary peace," said Zvi Bar Hai, the head of the South Hebron Hills regional council.



2011(1stof Elul, 5771): Rosh Chodesh Elul



2011: Rami Feinstein, “a widely popular Israeli artist who has developed a diverse and devoted following over the last seven years” is scheduled to perform at the Bitter End in New York City



2011: Today, the head of the government-appointed committee on socioeconomic change in Israel, Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg, defended the recent criticism cast upon the leaders of the social protest, and explained they were simply "inexperienced." Today marked the committee's last meeting with representatives from the public, which included the participation of 17 representatives from tent encampments from across the country.



2011: Summer rainfall took Israelis by surprise today when slight showers were felt in Hadera, Netanya, and even Tel Aviv.



2011: Over 20,000 are expected to attend the 7th Annual Jerusalem Beer Festival tonight and tomorrow night at the Old Train Station in Jerusalem.


2012: Israel responded bitterly today to comments by the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, who said yesterday that he did not want “to be complicit” if Israel were to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. Dempsey’s comments were “strange” and characterized the failure of the United States to take a determined position against Iran’s nuclear drive, a source in Jerusalem was quoted as saying


2012: The White House today dismissed statements made by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney yesterday that the Obama administration had “thrown allies like Israel under the bus” regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “Cooperation with Israel between our military and intelligence communities has never been closer” under the Obama administration, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters.


2012: The Fifteenth Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival is scheduled to open today.


2012: After premiering at the Sundance Film Festiva.  “For a Good Time, Call” a comedy starring Ari Graynor and Lauren Miller, who co-authored the screenplay was released today in the United States.


2012:  In Leesburg, VA, Congregation Sha'are Shalom is scheduled to greet the Sabbath Queen with a Musical Shabbat and Ice Cream Social


2012: “Labor on the Bimah” is scheduled to begin Erev Shabbat.



2012(13thof Elul, 5772): Seventy-nine year old British composer whose family was murdered at Auschwitz and “a world authority on the Dreyfus Affair” who cred the Dreyfus Centenary in 1994 passed away today.


2013: At the Rose and Crown Theatre the curtain came down on a London production “Little Me,” a Neil Simon musical


2013: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiated at the wedding of Michael Kaiser and John Roberts “in what was the first-ever instance of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice performing a same-sex marriage.”


2013: An exhibit celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Columbus (Ohio) Jewish Center which was developed by the Columbus Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to come to an end today.


2013: The Tel Aviv Woodwind Quintet is scheduled to play Ligeti’s “6 Bagatelles For Wind Quintet” at the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.


2013: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa Temple Judah marks Selichot a study session, services and the Changing of the Torah Covers ceremony.


2013: “Ivri Lider, one of the most successful Israeli musicians of his generation” is scheduled to perform at the Budapest Music Center.


2013: Israeli communications company Spacecom has successfully launched a state of the art satellite to space tonight from the Zenit launching pad in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.


2013: Labor MK Omer Bar-Lev today criticized Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avigdor Liberman for refusing to call a meeting of the committee to discuss a possible US strike on Syria and its implications on Israel.


2014: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness by Joel Gold and Ian Gold and a Q & A with Rick Pearlstein whose most recent work is The Invisible Bridge: The Fall Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.


2014: Dr. Judith Rosenbaum is scheduled to succeed Dr. Gail Reimer as Executive Director of the Jewish Women’s Archives.


2014(5th of Elul, 5774): Twenty year old Paratrooper Shahar Shalev passed way today as a result of wounds suffered from an IED explosion four and a half weeks ago that took place while he was working to locate and destroy the Hamas terror tunnels during Operation Protective Edge. (“In life he was loved and admired; he was swifter than eagles and stronger than lions.”)


2014: “The Israeli Air Force downed an unmanned drone (UAV) over the Golan Heights as it attempted to enter Israeli airspace from Syria.” At this time, the IDF does not know who launched the drone or if it was weaponized. (As reported by Uzi Baruch)


2014: Tenth anniversary of the Beersheba Bus Bombings.


2015: A Classical Trio Concert featuring Gabriel Chouraki - violinist and Eyal Heiman - cellist is scheduled to take place at Migdalei haYam haTichon in Jerusalem.


2015: In Coralville, Iowa, Hebrew School is scheduled to begin today.


2015: The Toronto Blue Jays announced that Mark Shapiro would become their new president and chief executive officer (CEO) at the end of the 2015 season


2015: After a weeklong trial, jurors deliberated for about two hours before convicting Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., 74, a former Ku Klux Klan leader with a history of racist and anti-Semitic actions in the shooting deaths of three people a year ago at a Jewish community center and an assisted living facility in suburban Kansas City.


2015: The Jewish Historical Society of Great Washington is scheduled to co-sponsor screening “Rosenwald” “the documentary by Aviva Kempner” that “tells the incredible story of how businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald (who made his fortune at the helm of Sears, Roebuck and Co) joined with Booker T. Washington and African-American communities in the South to build schools during the early part of the 20th century.”




2016: “The improbable story of the man who won history’s ‘biggest murder trial’ at Nuremberg” published today tells the tale of Ben Ferencz, “the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials.”



2016: Today, “a U.S. appeals court threw out a $655.5 million verdict against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization for damages suffered by American families from terrorist attacks in Israel.”


2016(27thof Av, 5776): Eight-six year old photographer Nathan Lyons passed away today.



2016: In Memphis, TN, The Temple Israel Chazak Campaign is scheduled to come to a close.


2017: Esther Hugenholtz, the Congregation Agudas Achim’s new rabbi is scheduled to arrive this evening at the Eastern Iowa Airport.


2017: “Energy Department official William Bradford who is Jewish and was appointed by President Trump to lead the Office of Indian Energy and who made disparaging remarks about President Barack Obama’s Kenyan ancestry and called Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg a “self-hating Jew” resigned today. (CJN)


2017: The Diver Festival, three weekends of modern dance in and around Jaffa and Tel Aviv is scheduled to begin today.


2017: JW3 is scheduled to host the two final screenings in London of “Alone in Berlin,” a haunting tale about a German husband and wife who were guillotined for mounting an anti-Hitler postcard campaign.


2018: “As a Blue Star Museum, the Illinois Holocaust Museum” is scheduled to begin offering “free admission to active-duty military personnel and up to five of their family members” today which will continue through Labor Day Monday.


2018: Starting at 6 pm the Ayalon Highway Company was scheduled to close the Ayalon Highway for twenty-four hours in the first of six weekend closures so the “construction of a pedestrian and cycling bridge” could be completed until Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz order a halt in response to threats from “Haredi parties.” (As reported by Roi Rubinstein, Moran Azulay)


2018: The Jerusalem Centre for the Performing Arts is scheduled to host screenings of “Her Love Boils Bathwater” and “Transit.”


2018(20 Elul): Yahrzeit of Dr. Jacob  Levin, of blessed memory, beloved husband of Betty, loving father of Michael (Gigi Cohen) Levin, Stephen (Dian Garton) Levin, Sharon (Philip) Wein and Lawrence (Sandra Morrison) Levin and proud Zaide to a whole tribe of grandchildren.   To his brother Joe, he was the incomparable “Yaenkel” and to me his was my wonderful Uncle Jack – living proof that good guys finish first.


 


 

This Day, September 1, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 1


September is an auspicious month in terms of Jewish History.  Like most things in the world of Jews, it is a mixed bag-- a combination of the bitter and the sweet. 
Today we mark the anniversaryof the start of World War II.  By the end of the war, the world of European Jewry would lie in ruins.  After two thousand years of growth and contribution, that civilization would cease to exist as we had known it.
September also marks the anniversary of the beginning of the Jewish community in the United States.  From twenty-three stormed tossed refugees has come one of the most dynamic civilizations in Jewish history. 
1312 BCE (10th of Tishrei): According to the Bible, the day on which Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with the second set of Tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed.
992: In Limoges, France, A Jewish apostate named Sechog ben Ester planted a wax figure in the ark of the local synagogue and then accused the local Jews of using it to curse the local Lord by devil magic. Although they succeeded in deflecting the accusation, the idea that Jews were devil worshippers was gaining more acceptance in the Christian world. A brief account...
1181: Lucius III, who issued Ad Abolendam – a Papal Bull condemning heresy which created the Inquisition – was elected Pope today/
1199(8th of Tishri): Maimonides wrote to Samuel Ibn-Tibbon, who as translating the "Guide to the Perplexed from Arabic into Hebrew.  The letter included advice on how to do this as well as plea that Ibn-Tibbon not undertake his planned trip from France to Egypt to visit him.  The distance was too great and he would be too busy since to see him for more than an hour since each day except Shabbat he must travel from Fostat to Cairo where he spends half a day ministering to the Sultan and his court.  Then he travels back to Fostat where he is besieged by Jews, Moslems, et al all seeking his medical skill and advice.
1267:  Ramban (Moses Nachmanides or Moses ben Nachman) arrived in Jerusalem. Born in 1194, Nachmanides was a famed commentator on the Torah and Talmud and a major communal leader in Spain.  He also was the court physician to King James of Aragon (a part of Spain).  King James forced him to defend Judaism in a public debate with Pablo Christiani, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism.  To make a long story short, Nachmanides vigorous defense angered the Dominican friars and Nahcmanides was forced to flee.  He gave life to a Jewish community in Jerusalem that had fallen on such hard times that it had trouble gathering a minyan.  Among other things he built a synagogue in Jerusalem that was the sole such building for several centuries to come.  Nachmanides moved to Acre in 1268 where he led that community until 1270.
1271: Gregory X, the pontiff who will issue “Sicut Judaeis” in 1272 which absolved the Jews of “using Christian blood for ritual purposes” begins his papacy.

1566: Birthdate ofEdward Alleyn “a major figure of the Elizabethan theatre” known for his portrayal of Barabbas in “The Jew of Malta.”



1577: Pope Gregory XIII, reconfirming the Bull off Pope Nicholas III, decreed that one hundred and fifty Jews must hear conversion sermons in Rome every week. He reissued a similar Bull a few years later in 1584.
1584: Gregory XIII issued Sancta Mater Ecclesia, a Papal Bull concerning the obligatory preaching of Christian sermons to Jews.  The Bull required that 100 men and 50 women be sent every Saturday to listen to conversion sermons delivered in a church near the ghetto.
1592: Archbishop Salikowski ordered the Jews to build a church in Lvov Poland marking a period of increasing persecution.


1614: Vincent Fettmich expelled the Jews from Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany.


1749: The delegates of the Hungarian Jews, except those from Szatmar County, assembled at Pressburg and met a royal commission, which informed them that they would be expelled from the country if they did not pay this tax. The frightened Jews at once agreed to do so; and the commission then demanded a yearly tax of 50,000 gulden. This sum being excessive, the delegates protested; and although the queen had fixed 30,000 gulden as the minimum tax, they were finally able to compromise on the payment of 20,000 gulden a year for a period of eight years. The delegates were to apportion this amount among the districts; the districts, their respective sums among the communities; and the communities, theirs among the individual members. The queen confirmed this agreement of the commission, except the eight-year clause, changing the period to three years, which she subsequently made five.


1715: King Louis XIV of France dies after a reign of 72 years.  The Sun King’s record in dealing with the Jewish people was never good, but it got really awful just before his death.  Seized with the deathbed religious fervor the debauched, he came fully to accept the position of the Church and the Jesuits when he banned all Jews from Marseilles Toulon and the rest of Provence in 1710. “The Jews were ordered, in his words, ‘to leave the kingdom without any belongs’ and local officials were told to take any and all means to expel the Jews ‘because that is our wish.’”


1749: “The delegates of the Hungarian Jews, except those from Szatmár County, assembled at Pressburg and met a royal commission, which informed them that they would be expelled from the country if they did not pay the ‘toleration-tax’ that had been imposed on them during the reign of Queen Maria Theresa the daughter of Charles III  The commission wanted 50,000 gulden; the queen wanted 30,000 gulden and the Jews ended up paying 20,000 gulden a year for an agreement that allowed them to stay in their homes for five years (Ant-Semitism is a money maker)


1752: The Liberty Bell arrived in Philadelphia. The Bell is inscribed with words from the 25th chapter of Leviticus, "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. It is but one of many examples of how Jewish culture and values had an impact on Western civilization in general and, in this case, early American culture specifically. 


1761: Birthdate of German theologian Heinrcih Paulus, author of the “The Jewish National Separation: Its Origin, Consequences and the Means of its Correction” a pamphlet in which he “argued that "Jews were a nation apart, and would remain so as long as they were committed to their religion, whose basic intent and purpose were to preserve them in that condition. In a country that was not their own, therefore, Jews could not claim more than the bare protection of their lives and possessions. They might certainly not claim political equality."


1763: Catherine II of Russia endorses Ivan Betskoy’s plans for a Foundling Home in Moscow. Betskoy was an educational reformer and accepting his plan was in keeping with Catherine’s self-image of being “a child of the Enlightenment.” This happened a year after Catherine came to the throne in a period when her hold on the office was still shaky due to the way she had gained her crown.  At this time, Catherine was also gingerly working her way around the anti-Jewish laws of her late mother-in-law “quietly” allowing “useful” Jews such as doctors, contractors and businessman to work in St. Petersburg. Catherine’s accepting view of her Jewish subjects would change during the last years of her reign, when the limitations she place on them began the creation of what would become the Pale of Settlement.


1795: Birthdate of James Gordon Bennett, Sr., the found of the New York Herald. When he died in 1872, he would be memorialized as “an honest supporter and true friend” of the Jewish people whose newspaper “always gave firm and true support to” the Jewish people.


1800: Lyon Nathan married Hannah Benjamin at the Great Synagogue today.


1805:During the dispute sparked by the publication of ‘Emeḳ ha-Shaweh (Vale of the Plain), Rabbi Moses Münz summoned two rabbis to come to Óbuda to form with him a tribunal before which would hear the case against the author, Rabbi Aron Chorin.


1819(11thof Elul, 5579): Seventy-six year old Abigail Seixas, the daughter of Isaac Menes Siexas and Rachel Franks Levy passed away today in Richmond, VA.


1820: Former President Thomas Jefferson wrote to Dr. Jacob De La Motta of Savannah, GA.  Jefferson repeated his belief in religious freedom and his happiness at “restoration of the Jews” especially as regards “their social rights.”  He looks forward to the day when they will take “their seats on the benches of science” as preparation to “their doing the same at the board of government.”  (As reported by the Jewish Virtual Library)


1822: Brazil declared its independence from Portugal. Soon after this declaration of independence many Spanish Jews from Morocco migrated to the area. By 1879 Sephardim had settled all the way down to the Amazon rain forest area.


1827: Löbl Strakosch and Julia Schwarz gave birth to their sixth child Samuel.


1830: Barnet Emanuel married Amelia Isaacs at the Great Synagogue today.


1835: Birthdate of Yosef Chaim, the Baghdad native who is also known as Ben Ish Chai which is the name of his seminal work on halachah.  Ben Ish Chai is Hebrew for “son of man who lives,” a term that harkens back to Ezekiel and the Valley of the Dry Bones (Son of Man, can these bones live?).


1836 Reconstruction begins on the “Synagogue of Rabbi Judah Hasid” in Jerusalem.


1841: John Jacobs married Frances Samson in Liverpool, UK.


1841: Based on the advice given to him by the Duke of Sussex that travel would improve his work, Solomon Alexander Hart left England on his way to Italy “where he made many architectural and other drawings, originally intended for publication as a series of engravings but which were ultimately used as studies for his pictures of Italian history and scenery.”


1844: Birthdate of “Dutch philologist Herman Josef Polak” the native of Leyden who “in 1894 was appointed professor of Greek at Gröningen University.”


1848: In Suvalki, Poland, Abraham Feinberg and his wife gave birth to Moses Feinberg who came to the United States in 1868 where he served as a cantor for Congregations New Beth Israel, Poale Zedek and Adath Yeshurun.


1853: The New York Times reported that civil unrest continues to rock Venezuela.  “At Barcelona, the government of General Monagas has published a ‘warning”” aimed at foreigners in general and Jews in particular accusing them of being the instigators of the unrest.  After a delegation of Jews and other foreigners sought help from the Dutch Consul at Caracas, a Dutch man-of-war sailed to Barcelona where it could offer protection to those who have been threatened.


1854: Thirty year old James (Jacob) Seligman and Rosa Seligman gave birth to Samuel Jefferson Seligman.


1855:Mademoiselle Rachel, the great French Tragedienne, is scheduled to make her New York debut today. Mademoiselle Rachel is Elizabeth Rachel Felix, the daughter of a German-Swiss Jew named Felix and his wife Esther Haya.


1857: Banker Henri Louis Bischoffsheim and his wife gave birth to Ellen Odette Cuffe, Countess of Desart, née Bischoffsheim, the wife of William Cuffe, the 4th Earl of Desart “who has been called ‘the most important Jewish woman in Irish history.’”


1857:It was reported today that a decision has been made to carry the question of admitting Jews to Parliament has been carried over to the next session much to the relief of Lord Russell.


1857: In Philadelphia, PA the Judith Simha Solis and Myer David Cohen gave birth Dr. Solomon Solis Cohen, an 1883 Jefferson Medical School graduate who taught at Dartmouth College.


1858: The New York Timespublished a report today that Pierre Soule has arrived in Washington.  Mr. Soule was described as “a man of power” who “possesses undoubted influence over public affairs.” The article also reported that if Soule decided to run for the Senate he could defeat John Slidell. Furthermore, the article reported that like Judah P. Benjamin, the Senator from Louisiana, “Mr. Soule is a Jew, and the Hebrew element is a rising one in the aggregate intellect of the country.”  [Editor’s note – If Soule were in fact Jewish, the author is saying that Louisiana would be the first state in the Union to be represented in the U.S. by two Jews.]


1861: Thomas Jordan General Beauregard’s Assistant Adjutant-General sent a letter on behalf of the Confederate Commander to Rabbi M.I. Mechelbacker of Richmond denying his request to grant furloughs to Jewish Soldiers starting on September 2nd and lasting through September 15th so that might attend services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  The Confederate generals are sure that Jews in and out of the army will understand given the military situation which finds Southern forces “bivouacked in full view of the capitol of the late United States.”  Jordan assured the Rabbi that the God who “released your people from Egypt bondage” will understand.  (Like many Southerners, Jordan did not see the irony of the side that was fighting to preserve slavery invoking the liberation from Egyptian bondage.)


1861: Philadelphian Emil Meyer began serving as a Second Lieutenant in Company G of the 174th Regiment.


1861 Paul Weinberger “transferred to the 29th Regiment of the New York Volunteers” today.


1862: Jacob Rosentell who would rise to the rank of Sergeant and was wounded in the Battle of Wilderness, began serving in company F of the 139th Regiment.


1863: “Abraham Dusch” who had been serving with Company C of the 27th Regiment transferred today to the “Veteran Reserve Corps.”


1864: Private Henry Arnold, who would rise to the rank of Corporal before his discharge, began serving in Battery of I of the 204th Regiment of the Fifth Artillery.


1867(1st of Elul, 5627): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1868: In Egeln, German, Selig Bumenthal, the son Salomon and Lea Blumentahl and his wife Juliane Blumenthal gave birth to Max Meyer Blumenthal, M.D.


1868: Twenty-seven year old Isaias Wolf Hellman co-founded Hellman, Temple and Co., the second official bank in the city of Los Angeles which would be followed by Hellman co-founding Farmers and Merchants Bank of Los Angeles in 1871 which proved to be the city “first successful bank.”


1869: In Brooklyn, Jacob Baiz, the Venezuelan born son of Abraham and Sarah Miriam Baiz, and his wife Emily Mendes Baiz gave birth to Anita Baiz


1873: A Jewish peddler named Samuel Bendtersar was arrested this morning in Flushing on charges of having assaulted Johanna Fatsner.


1874: Birthdate of Ismar Elbogen the German born rabbi and historian whose work included Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History published in 1913 and translated into English by Raymond P. Scheindlin in 1993






1876:Sir Julius Vogel completed his services as Prime Minister of New Zealand.  Vogel was the first Jew to hold this position.


1876: Hyman B. Isaacson and his wife, daughter of Russian cigar maker Reuben Pupkin, gave birth to their only son Nachum Isaacson who started a boy’s clothing manufacturing company in New York where he worked until he passed away at the age of 38.


1877: “Notes from the Capital” published today described the recent dedication of Washington Hebrew Congregation during which Rabbi Szold of Baltimore delivered the sermon.  President Rutherford B. Hayes, who had promised to attend, “sent a message expressing his regret at being unable to fulfill his promise.”


1877: In Boston, Massachusetts, Fishel Currick and his wife gave birth to Max C. Currick the graduate of University of Cincinnati a Hebrew Union College who served as a rabbi at Fort Smith in western Arkansas before assuming the leadership of Anshe Chesed at Erie, PA in 1901.



1878: It was reported today that 200 delegates attended the opening session of the Pan-Jewish Conference in Paris.  Adolph Cremieux presided over the meeting at which it was reported that the organization had 24,000 members and had collected 111,000 francs in the past year.  The delegates sought ways to improve the moral, intellectual and political conditions of the Jews living in various parts of the world. 


1878: It was reported today that there were those in England who claimed Disraeli would play the ultimate joke when he died by renouncing his youthful conversion to Christianity and being buried next to his Jewish father.  Others claimed that Disraeli would do no such thing, choosing to be buried next to his wife.



1878: It was reported today that among the donations made to help those suffering from the Yellow Fever Epidemic in the Deep South was $100 from the Hebrews of the St. Joseph Mission earmarked for the Howard Association in Memphis, Tenn.


1879: “Henry O’Brien’s Experiment” published today described the 12 year old Irish boy’s attempt to find out how a Jew, in this case Harris Goldstein, would react when tricked into eating pork. (It must have been a slow news day in New York)



 


1882: In Fifth District Civil Court in New York City, Civil Justice Alfred Steckler heard Freund versus Selig in which the plaintiff sought to force the defendant Louis Selig to repay what he claimed was a ten dollar loan.  Selig, a well-known Jewish police officer claimed that the ten dollars in questions was not a loan but a gift made on his behalf as a political contribution.


1882: It was reported today that large numbers of unemployed Jewish refugees “continue to besiege” the Hebrew Aid Society on State Street in search of financial assistance.


1882: Theobold Michael, President of the Synagogue and Talmud Torah at 622 Fifth Street, appeared at the Essex Market Police Court where he filed a complaint against Charles A. Leopold claiming that the defendant “annoyed the congregation” during services “by swearing at them, using insulting language” and throwing mud into the synagogue.  Leopold denied the allegations and claimed that the Jewish prayers disturbed his invalid wife.  The Judge let Leopold go after telling him that he not “disturb the congregation.”


1883: The military fired on a mob of two thousand peasants today who “had invaded” the town of “Krapina…for the purposed of attacking the Jews.


1883: It was reported today that Herr von Tisza, the President of the Hungarian Council has instituted news measures to protect Jews from any more attacks.  From now on, any rioter who attacks a Jew and is condemned to death under a decree of martial law will be put to death within three hours after being sentencing.



1884: In Paterson, NJ, founding of B’nai Israel which holds services daily, owns a cemetery in Bergen, NJ and whose members include “Louis Urdond, Harris Jacob, Harris Rome, Nathan Elkind, David Etkin, Bernot Grazinsky and Lipman Simon.”


1884: Birthdate of May H. Friedman Fleisher the wife of Philadelphian Willis Fleisher.


1884: Birthdate of Charles Ezekiel Polowetski, the Russian born American painter.



1884: It was reported today that fifty-five year old Daniel Weinberger whose body was discovered yesterday in his room on South Halstead Street left a note for his landlord Winter Meyer asking that his remains “be taken in a Jewish hearse to a Jewish burying ground” where he would be buried by a Jewish burial society. 


1885: Anthony M. Keiley, former mayor of Richmond who had been designated as the U.S. Minister to Austria-Hungary and who had a Jewish wife wrote to Secretary of State Thomas Francis Bayard, President Cleveland’s Secretary of State that “no American citizen…who commits the crime, “in Austria’s eyes of marrying a Hebrew wife, shall be received in diplomatic circles in Vienna, or permitted to represent the interests of the United Sates at the Austrian court” which means that “Austria claims the right to prescribe a religious test for office in the United States and to determine what creed shall constitute the disqualifications.”


1885: “A Fight In A Synagogue” published today described a dispute between Sol Goldstone and Abraham Jacobs that turned violent during the annual meeting of a Jewish congregation in Montreal, Canada.


1886: Coroner Levy, the President of the Jewish Immigrants’ Protective Association sought an interview with Immigration Superintendent Jackson to protest the treatment of Mr. and Mrs. Manheim and their 5 year old child who were being denied entrance to the United States.


1887: The San Diego Union noted that congregants at Beth Israel were talking of building a synagogue estimated to cost $20,000.


1888: Sixty immigrants, most of whom were Russian Jews, were detained at Castle Garden before being sent to Blackwell’s Island.  They were treated in this manner because they had been identified as “paupers.”


1889: The formal dedication of the new Sephardic synagogue to be used by the Moses Montefiore Congregation was scheduled to take place today.


1889: It was reported today that the only hotel in Tétouan, Morocco is “kept by a native Jew” which is unusual in area dominated by Berbers and Arabs.


1889: “The History of the Jews” published today provided a review of History of the People of Israel from the Reign of David up to the Capture of Samaria by Ernest Renan.


1890: In the Essex Market Police Court Justice Hogan Jacob Rohnewitch accuses Israel Simovitch of stealing $90 worth of jewelry from him on August 8. Simovitch denied the charge and claimed that the charges were trumped up so that he would pay out the $40 he had saved to “bring his wife from Russia.”


1890: The Central Labor Federation had its own Labor Day Parade today in New York which included large number of “Hebrew” workers including members of “the shirt and cloak makers who have recently made themselves to the public by their strikes.


1890: During today’s Labor Day Parade, the “United Cloak and Suit Makers” stopped at cottage serving an informal reviewing stand where Coroner Ferdinand Levy presented them with a silk flag.”


1890: In Scranton, “the extensive alterations” at the synagogue are scheduled to be completed today which means the congregation will can stop holding services in the local Y.M.H.A.


1891: In Borispol Golda and Joseph Ya’acvo gave birth to Joseph Zaritsky, Israeli painter who was one of the founders of “Ofakim Hadshim” (New Horizons) art movement


1891: It was reported today that “the Argentine Republic frowns upon the wholesale immigration of the” Jews expelled from Russia.


1892: Leo M. Franklin began serving as the Rabbi for Temple Israel in Omaha, Nebraska.


1892: In Elizabeth, NJ, the city Board of Health plans on asking the City Council “for an appropriation of at least $20,000 to help deal with the sanitation problems including the installation of sewers in the First Ward which is inhabited primarily by Russian and Polish Jews


1893: “The Reverend Dr. Christian Adolf Stoecker, ex-Chaplain of the Court of Berlin…who is one of the founders of Christian Socialism and a vigorous anti-Semite” arrived in New York aboard the SS Augusta Victoria.


1893: Max Feldman of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum was among the ten boys listed today as winners of the scholarships “offered by Joseph Pulitzer to boys desirous of preparing for an taking a college course.”


1894(30th of Av, 5654): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1894: In Duluth, MN 43 Jewesses formed Council No. 10 of the National Council of Jewish Women


1894: Eight hundred “finishers of clothing” who are Jewish are going on strike today to demand a increase in wages.


1894: Harry White and Meyer Schoenfeld will address a mass meeting of cloakmakers at New Irving Hall where they will discuss the “advisability of going out on strike.”


1895: As New York Police enforce the Sunday Saloon Closing laws an unidentified Russian Jewish who operates a saloon on Clinton Street told authorities that one of his neighbors was “selling openly” and offered to take the police to correct address.


1896: In “Kuznica, Russia, Wolf and Odessa Tarlowski” gave birth Salomon Tarlowski who “emigrated to the United States in 1914 where as Solomon “Sol” Tarlow he worked as a tailor in the dry goods store of his brother-in-law Sam Stolaroff in Roswell, NM where he and his wife Audra had three children – “Mildred, Edith and Sherrill.”


1896: The attorney for the jewelry firm of Julius M. Lyon went to police headquarters tonight to meet with Julius Stein to find out when Stein stole the thousands of diamonds from Lyon and the value of the stolen jewels.  The self-confessed thief refused to make any comment.


1897: In Omaha, Nebraska, founding of Bait Hamidrash Hagadol (formerly B’nai Israel).


1897: It was reported today that  at the concluding session of the Zionist Congress delegates heard reports “that the colonies in Palestine were flourishing,” appointed a commission to report on the feasibility of creating a university at Jerusalem and voted to hold the 1898 meeting in Jerusalem.


1898: On the Lower East Side, “an immigrant tailor” and his wife “who operated a candy store gave birth to Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Meyer “Mike” Berger.



1898: The first meeting of the International Congress of History began today in The Hague.


1898: As part of the on-going cover-up to protect the French General Staff and keep Captain Dreyfus in prison Major Ferdinand Esterhazy who had already been put on pension shaved off his mustache and fled to England where he lived for another 25 years contenting himself with writing anti-Semitic articles.


1899: All the newspaper comment published today in London, Berlin, Vienna and other cities “regards” the reversal of Dreyfus conviction as “inevitable.”


1899: Bennett Cassal, the husband of the former Dinah Nathan and the father of Solomon Cassell was buried today in the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery” in London.


1899: “Cardinal Richard, Archbishop of Paris paid a visit to Premier Waldeck-Rousseau on behalf of Jules Guerin, the anti-Semite agitator and his companions now besieged in the headquarters of the Anti-Semite League on the Rue de Chabrol.”


1899: Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch of Sinai Congregation, who returned to Chicago today from Europe, said “Capt. Dreyfus will again be convicted of treason” because “the French people are bound to have Dreyfus found guilty” and “the whole of Paris echoes and re-echoes… with the ravings of the anti-Semitic forces…”


1899: The Biblical World published “The Return of the Jews from Exile” by William Rainey Harper”


1899: “Emanuel Hospital Plans” published today described plans for the new facility “which will be used principally as a lying-in asylum” and will receive support from the United Hebrew Charities Society.


1899: Israel Zangwill addressed fears that the dramatization of his novel The Children of the Ghetto “will present the Jews from a standpoint undesirable to them” by saying that “it will found that Jew has actually received his first and truthful and considerate attention when my play is produced.”


1900: Mose Levi the Hahambashi of Turkey presented an address to Sultan Abdul Hamid on the occasion of his 25th anniversary of his accession to the throne. The term Hahambashi means Head of Rabbis and is the appellation for the Grand Rabbi of Turkey.  The Hebrew term for "wise man"Chacham has been adopted in Turkish to mean "Rabbi." This is to avoid the use of the word "Rabbi" since in Arabic the word "Rab" is one of the names of God and may not be applied to a human.


1901: In Vienna, Dr. Armand Ahron Noach Kaminka, the son of Wolf and Sura Beile Kaminka and his wife Klara Kaminka  gave birth to Ephraim Felix David Kaminka


1903(9th of Elul, 5663): Thirty eight year old author and Jewish activists Bernard Lazare (Lazare Marcus Manasse Bernard) who was an early vocal supporter of Dreyfus and who attended the First Zionist Congress passed away today.


1903: It was reported today, that “a movement is afoot to establish a Jewish hospital in Fall River, Massachusetts.


1904: In England, “Samuel and Bronwyn (Pachman) Gerstenfeld” gave birth Dr. Norman Gerstenfeld the long time rabbi of Washington Hebrew Congregation, the oldest Jewish congregation in the District of Columbia.



1905: Alberta became the eighth province of Canada. Two brothers, Jacob and William Diamond were among the first Jewish people to settle in Alberta, in 1888 and 1892, respectively. They made the long journey from their home in Lithuania. The Diamond brothers went on to be successful merchants in Alberta, and, perhaps, more notable, they organized for a High Holy Day service attended by other Jewish Albertans who had arrived. Unlike the Diamond brothers, early Jewish immigrants came to Alberta to establish farm colonies, settling in central and southern Alberta, near places such as Pine Lake, Trochu, Medicine Hat and Lethbridge. This first attempt at farming was not overly successful. Many of those who came were city-dwellers who had grown up in the cities of Europe. A Jewish relief agency in London England raised $400 to distribute the destitute Jewish pioneers. Because of the difficult conditions in Alberta and the Jewish people’s inexperience in farming, many of the immigrants left Alberta soon after, some going to the United States. By 1906, the community had largely reestablished itself in Calgary.


1905: Saskatchewan became the ninth province of Canada. Six Jewish farming communities were formed in Saskatchewan between 1886 and 1906. The first of these colonies was a novelty and evoked considerable curiosity in the district. Locals dubbed the colony "The New Jerusalem." Due to inadequate winter shelter against sub-zero temperatures, wind, driving snow, drought, etc., this settlement lasted only six years. Another colony, Hirsch, Saskatchewan was founded in 1892. Landau enlisted the assistance of the French financier-philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Hirsch regarded the creation of a Jewish state as a fantasy; however, he took a great interest in Jewish agricultural colonization. Baron de Hirsch established the Jewish Colonization Association to facilitate mass emigration of Jews from Russia and the establishment of agricultural colonies in North and South America. Hirsch was the only Jewish farm colony in Canada that was directly organized and funded by the Jewish Colonization Association. Hirsch favored colonization of Argentina rather than Canada. Edenbridge was founded in 1906. It no longer exists, but some of the members of the founding families live in the area. The Beth Israel Synagogue, built by the settlers in 1908, still stands today. It is a wooden structure similar to many Russian churches of that period. The synagogue served as a place of worship until 1964. Today it is a Saskatchewan historic site. The Saskatchewan Wildlife Association maintains the synagogue building, the adjacent cemetery, and the 40 - 100 acres of wooded lands.


The settlers of Edenbridge were Lithuanian Jewish refugees who had temporarily settled in South Africa. They were lured to Canada by a federal government promise of 160 acres of farmland for only $10. Charles Vickar, whose father settled Edenbridge in 1906, stated that owning land was everything to the Lithuanian Jews. When the refugees were assured that they could freely practice their religion they jumped at the opportunity. They had no knowledge of farming. They did not know how to use a plough or an axe. They were Talmudic students and petty tradesman.


These Lithuanian Jews took the Canadian Railroad as far west as it went at the time. When they arrived at the end of the line, the Jewish pioneers opted to go north where they heard there was more wood and water. The farther north you go in Saskatchewan the more woods there are. Instead of joining some of the established farming communities in the level open country, they picked a spot by the Carrot River. The name, Edenbridge, means Jew's bridge. The settlers devised the town name in 1907, when a bridge was constructed over the Carrot River.


The Jewish farm population in Canada reached a peak of 2,568 by 1921. Sixty-nine percent of Jewish farmers lived in Western Canada with the majority residing in Saskatchewan. By 1939, it was estimated that one out of every 16 Jews who were working on the Canadian prairies made his livelihood on the farm. Most of the Jewish farming colonies lasted to the mid-point of this century. Jewish farm colonies disappeared as a result of the great drought and depression.


1908: First Conference for the Yiddish Language which had been convened by Nathan Birnbaum continued for a third day in Czernowitz


1909: Classical school and for Iowa State University professor Berthold Louis Ullman married Mary Louis Bates who were the parents of noted geographer Edward Ullman


1909: In Vienna, “Egon and Edith Lucy Amalia Hedwig (Weissel) von Grunebaum” gave birth to European trained Orientalist and Arabist Gustave Edmund von Grunebaum and husband of Giselle Steuerman who after the Anschluss in 1938 came to the United States which he made his personal and professional home until his death in 1972.




1911: The headquarters of the Zionist Movement was transferred from Cologne to Berlin


1911: At Bucharest, the Premier of Romania receive “a deputation who requested relief from political disfranchisement of several hundreds of Jews in Dobrudscha.”


1911: Herr Wolfsthal was appointed Attorney-General at Frankenthal, making him the first Jew to hold such a position in Bavaria.


1911: As part of the celebration of its 500thAnniversary, the University of St. Andrews conferred an honorary degree on Dr. Georg Brandes, the Danish born Jew who served as Professor of Literature at the University of Copenhagen and Professor Raphael Meldola, the British chemist and entomologist.


1912: In Everett, MA, founding of Tifereth Israel synagogue.


1912: In New York, at Greenpoint, founding of the Hebrew Educational Alliance.


1912: In Hancock, Michigan, founding the Congregation of Israel Synagogue.


1913: Max Drob who had resigned “from the pulpit of Congregation of Adath Yeshuron in Syracuse” is scheduled to begin serving today as the Rabbi at Temple Bethel in Buffalo, NY which “is the largest orthodox congregation outside of New York City.”


1914: Birthdate of Ralph Goldman, the native of Lehovitz who was a WW II veteran, close confidant of David Ben-Gurion and a “leader of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.”


1914: Birthdate of Ben L. Salomon, the Wisconsin born graduate of the USC Dental School who was one of only three dental officers to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor – in his case for a display of uncommon valor during the Battle of Saipan.



1915: Birthdate of Sholom (Seymour) Jacob Pomrenze, the World War II veteran who “was the first director of the Offenbach Archival Depot” making him one of those who really were Monuments Men.



1915: It was reported that arrangements have been made “to issue each synagogue in the United States subscription blanks for the relief of Jews” in war-torn Europe and Palestine which “are numbered” as part of an attempt “to obtain an approximate census of the Jews in the” United States.


1915: It was reported today that the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America has made arrangements with similar national organizations in Russia, Austria, Germany, England and France so that communication may be re-established between relatives” who have been separated because of the World War.


1915: Birthdate of New York native Bernard “Bernie” Opper who took the unusual step for his time of going south and playing basked at the University of Kentucky where he as an All-American Guard and the mowed on to the pros where he played for three teams including the Philadelphia Sphas, the ABL team with Jewish roots.


1915: In New York, a new law went into effect requiring that meat sold as kosher must “bear the imprint of the supervising rabbi at the slaughter house.”



1916: Today “The Jewish Chronicle welcomed the entry of Rumania into the war on the ground that it ‘completes the circle of Jewish questions which have troubled the world and which must now come up for settlement” including those of Russia, Palestine and Rumania.


1917(14th of Elul, 5677):Parashat Ki Teitzei


1917: Henry H. Rosenfelt, the assistant to the executive director of the American Jewish Relief Committee announced today a campaign to raise $1,000,000 toward the $10,000,000 Jewish War Relief Fund will be conducted during the upcoming Jewish holidays starting with Rosh Hashanah on September 17 and ending with Yom Kippur on September 26.


1917: “After making more than a thousand pictures, the Lubin Film Company, founded by optometrist Siegmund Lubin “went out of business” today because it had lost its European market due to the outbreak of WW I, forcing the founder to return to his earlier career.


1917: In Paris, “the Minister of Foreign Affairs bestowed the decoration of the Legion of Honor upon Mrs. Henry Morgenthau, the wife of the former American Ambassador to Turkey, in recognition of the work she did at the French Hospital in the early part of the War.


1918: The Supplement, a monthly publication, tied to “the interests of the Eight Avenue Temple” was established today in Brooklyn.


1918: During the Battle of Mont-Saint Quentin, Australian troops under the command of Sir John Monash “broke into Péronne and took most of the town.”


1918: “Ferdinand Lassalle” a film based on the life of the 19thcentury German Jew directed and produced by Rudolf Meinert was released today in Germany.


1918: In Columbus, OH, the Temple News, the Temple Israel fortnightly, was established.


1918: It was reported today that “the British Foreign Office has decided that the Ottoman subjects of Jewish Nationality resideing in the British Empire shall be exempt from the restrictions applicable to enemy and that the Greek government has adopted a similar policy regarding the Jews of Salonika


1919: Rabbi Abraham I. Kook arrived in Palestine today to assume his role as Chief Rabbi.


1919: Charles J. Freund completed his service as the Rabbi for Temple Emanuel in Grand Rapids, Michigan.


1920: In Germany, premiere of “Sumurun” (One Arabian Night) a silent film directed by Ernst Lubtsch who also played “Yeggar, the Hunchback Beggar.”


1921:With delegates and visitors from every part of the world in attendance, the International Zionist Congress opened its sessions in the ancient drill hall at Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia.


1923(20th of Elul, 5683): Parashat Ki Tavo and Leil Selichot


1923: The Great Earthquake struck Honshu the main island of Japan. Forty Jewish families living at Yokohama cabled the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society pleading for aid.  “Help us or we perish.” Two thousand dollars was sent by the Joint Distribution Committee. (As reported by JTA)


1924: “Sinners in Silk” a silent film with a script by Benjamin Glazer was released in the United States today.


1926: In Atlanta, GA, “Fannie (Segal) Goldstein, a gifted pianist” and Irving Goldstein gave birth Stanley Goldstein who, before enrolling at the University of California, Berkley, changed his name to David Cavell, the name he would during a career that led to a professorship at Harvard.



 


1926: In the Bronx, “Harold Colan, an insurance salesman, and Winifred Levy Colan, an antique dealer” gave birth to Eugene Jules Colan “a towering figure among comic-book artists, whose depictions of some of the best-known characters in the genre were lauded for their realism, expressiveness and painterly qualities.”  According to Margalit Fox, the family’s name had been Cohen before changing it to Colan.


1927:The Weizmann Administration, the Palestine Government and the British Government as the mandatory power were severely criticized on the second day of the Fifteenth Zionist Congress which is in session here. Criticism came from several sources including Isaac Greenbaum, a member of the Polish Parliament and Dr. Stephen S. Wise, leader of the American Zionists.


1928: In Brooklyn Michael and Eiga Charmatz gave birth to Rita Charmatz, the wife of David Sternheimer Davidson, the Yale law school graduate who as Rita Charmatz Davidson “the first woman to serve on the Maryland Court of Appeals




1929: Amir el-Hussein, Grand Mufti and President of the Supreme Moslem Council warned of “a grave national revolt” by 60 million Muslims if Great Britain persists in enforcing the Balfour Declaration.


1929: A crowd numbering more than 15,000 attending a meeting at London’s Albert Hall protested against Arab violence and urged the British government to restore order, punish the guilty while making reparations for the loss of Jewish life and property.


1929:  The British High Commissioner said that he would enforce the Jewish right of access to the Western Wall despite violent Arab opposition.


1931: In Voivodeship, Poland, Dr. Israel Abraham Rabin and Dr. Else Rabin gave birth to Professor Michael Oser Rabin, “Israeli computer scientist and a recipient of the Turing Award.”


1931: Birthdate of Frank Magid.Frank Newton Magid was born in Chicago and served in the Army during the Korean War. He graduated from the University of Iowa and received a master's degree there in 1956 in the fields of social psychology and statistics. After teaching at Iowa's Coe College and the University of Iowa, Mr. Magid launched his company in 1956. His first client was a bank; his fourth was WMT-TV, now KGAN-TV, in Cedar Rapids. By creating careful surveys and polling random samples of a population, Mr. Magid and his employees were able to provide highly accurate data that gave television its first serious consumer research. The work paid off for the Iowa station, and the station's manager recommended Mr. Magid for a job at Time-Life's newly acquired KOGO-TV in San Diego. That, too, was successful, and it led to a contract for all the Time-Life stations. "And that really was our launching pad because they were very kind to us and began to do some considerable amount of advertising to the trades, talking about how they were listening to the public through this rather new, and at that time quite unique, kind of research,'' Mr. Magid told Electronic Media. His firm, from which he retired in 2002, also advised AM radio stations to get into the FM field, and urged broadcasters to invest in cable TV. He helped identify viability of direct broadcast satellite television and did the first research that determined the viability of digital video recorders. Now based in Minneapolis, the privately-held company has about 200 employees and advises all kinds of media, including The Washington Post, through its MORI Research division.


1931: As the fight for control of Cutters Union 4 of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America came to a head, Sydney Hillman addressed a meeting of 1,000 workers at Webster Hall where he denounced the ousted officers Philip Orlofsky and Isidor Machlin


1931: In Los Angeles, 125  members of Tifereth Israel attended groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Temple being built on Santa Barbara Avenue.


1931: Birthdate of Michael Oser Rabin “an Israeli computer scientist and a recipient of the Turning Award.”


1933: Birthdate of Professor Leonard Cole, the native of Paterson, NJ, an expert on terrorism who “was national chairman of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs” and the author of Terror: How Israel Has Cope and What America Can Learn.



1933: The Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, the central representative body of German Jews emphasizing education, is established; it is led by Otto Hirsch and Rabbi Leo Baeck. It is the only organization officially allowed to represent German Jews.


1934: “Gift of Gab” a comedy directed by Karl Freund, produced by Carl Laemmle, Jr., and with a script co-authored by Philip G. Epstein.


1934: In Denmark, a collaborationist SS organization, National Socialistike Ungdom (National Socialist Youth), is established.


1935(3rd of Elul, 5695): Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook passed away today at the age of 69. His distinguished career was capped off by his appointment as Chief Rabbi of Palestine in 1919.


1935:The problem of who is to be president of the World Zionist Organization was dramatically settled in Lucerne, Switzerland, early today when Dr. Chaim Weizmann, noted scientist and internationally famous Zionist leader, announced his readiness to assume the full leadership of the Zionist movement.


1935: “A world conference of Jewish doctors opened in Lucerne tonight to discuss Jewish health problems and to consider the advisability of convoking a world Jewish medical conference in Tel Aviv.”


1935: Currently Jerusalem, Jaffa and Tel Aviv have ordinances in effect similar to those in several European cities that limit and/or ban the honking of horns in the late night hours.  Police in Palestine have adopted the slogan of “Don’t use your horn.  Use your brains.”


1936: It was reported today that in discussing the challenges facing the three major religious groups in the United States, Rabbi L.L. Mann of Sinai Temple in Chicago said that religions faced a common foe, the recrudescence of paganism, irreligion and totalitarianism”  and that “religions must united against poverty, human exploitation, unemployment, crime, corruption and war.”


1936: It was reported today the actions committee of World Zionist Organization which has been meeting in Zurich “endorsed a world emergency campaign for $1,500,000 to aid the Jews in Palestine” who have been  suffering during the violence of the Arab Revolt.


1936: “Tudor Rose” a dramatization of English period with music by Louis Levy and filmed by cinematographer Mutz Greenbaum was released today in the U.K.


1936: Polish born Republican political leader Nathan Pearlman completed his term in office as a New York City Magistrate today.


1936(14th of Elul, 5696): Dr. Isaac Max Rubinow passed away.  Rubinow really had two careers.  He was a medical doctor, who among other things played a key role in developing health services in Palestine immediately after World War I. He went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in Economics which provided him with a platform to deal with the issues of health care and its finances.  He was a co-founder and the first president of the organization now known as Casualty Actuarial Society. In 1934, he published the Quest for Security which pre-dated and greatly influence the creation of the New Deal social net including Social Security.



1937: Birthdate of Allen Weinstein, the son of Jewish delicatessen owners in New York who became a leading academic, author and archivists.



1937: “A special tax on eligible males who fail to serve in the military forces” which “will fall heaviest on the Jews who are by law disqualified from service” is scheduled to go into effect today in Germany.


1937: Four Arab villagers were shot and killed by unknown persons, apparently Jews, near Hadera. The authorities suspected that Jewish extremists were involved and carried out many arrests. The National Committee for Palestine Jewry (Val'ad Leumi) issued an appeal for national discipline.


1938: In New Orleans, the Fountain Lounge opened at the Roosevelt Hotel which is now controlled by Seymour Weiss


1938: On the Island of Rhodes, newspapers carried the announcement of anti-Jewish laws.  Ritual slaughter was banned and all Jews who had come to Rhodes after 1919 were told they had to leave.


1938: A concentration camp is established at Neuengamme, Germany.


1938 Premier of “You Can't Take It With You,” the screen adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, two of the Jewish giants of Broadway with a screenplay by Robert Riskin and music by Dimitri Tiomkin.


1938: In Williamsburg, Brooklyn Claire (née Ringel) and Harry Dershowitz the co-owner of Merit Sales Company and “a founder of the Young Israel Synagogue” gave birth to Harvard Law Professor and outspoken commentator on Jewish affairs Alan Dershowitz.




1938: Mussolini canceled civil rights of Italian Jews and expelled all foreign-born Jews.


1939: Leading Jewish-German jurist Gerhard Leibholz, stripped of his position at the University of Göttingen in 1936, escapes to Switzerland with his wife and two daughters


1939: This date marked the beginning of World War II with the German attack on Poland. German forces overrun western Poland, instigating World War II. Three thousand Jewish civilians die in the bombing of Warsaw. German troops enter Danzig, trapping more than 5000 Jews. Throughout Germany and Austria, Jews may not be outside after in the winter and in the summer Out of the 3,351,000 Jews in Poland, 2,042,000 came under Nazi rule while 1,309,000 came under Soviet rule. Remember, the Soviets invaded Poland from the west after the Nazis had begun their blitz from the West.  Within two days the British and French declared war on Germany. During the war a million and a half Jews fought on the side of allied forces: 555,000 for the USA; 500,000 for the Soviet Union; 116,000 for Great Britain (26,000 from Palestine and 90,000 from the British Commonwealth); and another 243,000 for other European nations.


1939: “Heinrich Himmler issues a decree forbidding Jews from going outside after 8PM.”



1939: With the outbreak of World War II and the closure of German borders the “Leica Freedom Train” came to an end.




1939: Mrs. Max Lowenstein, the widow of Nuremberg chazzan Max Lowenstein and the adopted mother of Heinz Bernard planned to leave Germany today to join her son whom she had sent on ahead to England which was to be “a way-station” on their trip to the United States.  Her plans were thwarted by today’s invasion of Poland.


1939: As of this date, there were “185,000 Jews in ‘integral’ German, together with 70,000 in Austria and 190,000 in Czechoslovakia.”


1939: Arnold Bernstein who had served in the German Army in World War and who had survived German prisons arrived in New York having been stripped of his shipping company and all other possessions by the Nazis who knew that anti-Semitism was a good business.


1939: From September 1 to October 25, 1939 Operation Tannenberg, carried out by SS Einsatzgruppen (mobile kill squads), leads to the murders of Polish Jews and Catholic intellectuals and to the burnings of synagogues in Poland.


1939: “Hitler Appoints Karl Brandt & Philipp Bouhler to Lead Nazi T-4 Euthanasia Program.”



1939: With the outbreak of WW II today, the headquarters of the WJC was moved from Paris to Geneva where it was thought that Switzerland’s neutrality would “facilities communications with Jewish communities throughout Europe.


1939: General George C. Marshall is named Chief of Staff of the United States Army.  Marshall is the unsung hero of World War II.  He was a critical force in convincing a reluctant Congress to accept peace time conscription in 1940 so that America was not completely unprepared for war when it came to America at Pearl Harbor.  He was the architect who managed a war that raged across the entire globe in day before the e-mail, the internet and computers.  He won the Nobel Prize for Peace for the Marshall Plan.  It is most unusual for a top military leader to have this award.  The only chink in Marshall’s armor was his opposition to the creation of the state of Israel.  He feared that American support of the Jewish state would destroy American stature among the Arabs and open the way to Soviet domination of the Middle East.  He also did not believe that the Israelis could defeat the Arabs and feared the slaughter that would follow.  There is no record of how his views may have changed once the Israelis proved they could survive without the need of American military support. 


1939: Today, “while at Oxford University Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl who would be “the first to demand that the Allies bomb Auschwitz” volunteered to return to Slovakia as an agent of World Agudath Israel.


1939: Premiere of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” with a script by Edwin H. Blum


1939: Because of the outbreak of WW II, the last of the eight “Winton Trains” did not leave because “all borders controlled by Germany were closed” and the 250 children on board “were never seen again” leading to the assumption that all “perished in concentration camps.”


1939: “The Women” a comedy directed by George Cukor, starring Norma Sheater and filmed by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg was released in the United States by MGM.


1940: The National Encampment of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States is scheduled to come to an end today in Boston.

1940(28th of Av, 5700): Seventy-three year old Lillian D. Wald the Cincinnati born graduate of New York Hospital’s School of Nursing whose contributions to society included the founding of the Henry Street Settlement House and play a role in the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. passed away today.



1940: Polish underground officer Witold Pilecki penetrates the main camp at Auschwitz with the intention of organizing secret resistance groups inside the camp.


1940: Soviet authorities order Japanese Consul Sempo Sugihara to leave Kovno, Lithuania, where he has issued 3500 exit visas to Jews


1940: “The official newspaper of the diocese of Freiburg, where Conrad Gröber is archbishop, describes the victories of German soldiers as proof that God guides history.”



1941: Birthdate of Tzvi Gal-Chen a sabra who would gain fame for his work in retrieval of wind and thermodynamic variables from a single Doppler radar.


1941: In Hungary, Einsatzkommandos, with the help of some Hungarian militia, murdered 11,000 Jews. In August, Hungary had pushed 17,000 stateless Jews across the border to Kamenets-Podolski in the Ukraine. The German army protested that the large number of refugees interfered with the war effort and Hungary took a few thousand back as slave laborers, leaving the rest in the hands of the Germans. There were no survivors.


1941: Wearing the yellow star became obligatory for all Jews in the Reich. 


1941: The Ukrainian newspaper Volhyncarried the following - "The element that settled our cities (Jews). . . must disappear completely from our cities. The Jewish problem is already in the process of being solved.”


1941: “Lady Be Good” a musical produced by Arthur Freed with a score by Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein and George and Ira Gershwin and co-starring Phil Silvers was released today in the United States by MGM>


1941: Birthdate of Tzvi Gal-Chen father of author Rikva Galchen. Tzvi grew up as an Israeli Sabra on a collective farm. He served in the Israeli Army. He earned a B. Sc. and M. Sc. in 1967 and 1970, both from Tel Aviv University, with specialization in applied math and physics which he used in his studies of wind and thermodynamic variables.


1942: As Daniel Schwarzwald jumped from the window in the Lvov Ghetto he was shot by the Germans.


1942: Moshe Skoczylas and Michael Majtek formed Jewish partisan units at Dzialoszyce, Poland.


 1942: Fourteen thousand Jews are taken to gravel pits at Piatydni, Ukraine, and machine-gunned.


1942: German troops reach the Caucasus and begin exterminations of indigenous Jews.


1942: SS chief Heinrich Himmler suggests that camp inmates be put to work in on-site arms factories. Armaments chief Albert Speer objects, offering a compromise accepted by Hitler: Himmler's inmates will be made available to Speer for labor in conventional arms factories.


1942: New York Congressman Emanuel Celler submits legislation to allow French Jews about to be deported to their deaths in Eastern Europe to immigrate to the United States. The bill is killed by the House Committee on Immigration.


1942: As Jews are being deported from France to their deaths in the Third Reich, the Vichy Ministry of Information urges the press to remember "the true teaching of Saint Thomas and the Popes...the general and traditional teaching of the Catholic Church about the Jewish problem."


1942(19th of Elul, 5702): An SS guard on a deportation train headed for the Belzec death camp shoots and kills Jadzia Beer, a Polish girl from Jaworów, after her skirt becomes caught in a railcar window and she dangles helplessly from the window.


1942: Thousands of Jews from Stry, Ukraine, are murdered at the Belzec death camp.


1942: A German shepherd that licks the face of a Jewish baby at the Treblinka extermination camp is savagely beaten by its SS master before the guard tramples the baby to death


1942: Security forces raid five hospitals in the Lódz (Poland) Ghetto, evacuating and slaughtering patients. Babies are thrown out of an upper-story windows, some bayoneted before they hit the ground.


1942:  In the town Wlodzimierz Wolynski, the Germans asked the Jewish Council to gather 7,000 Jews for transport. Jocob Kogen a member of the council committed suicide because he did not want to bear the responsibility of sending people to their death. Wlodzimierz Wolynski was in eastern Poland at the start of World War II.  This was the part of Poland that Hitler had ceded to Stalin as part of the price for their infamous Non-Aggression Pact.  In 1941, the Germans seized the town as they moved forward with the plan to conquer the Soviet Union.  Some Poles rationalized the slaughter of the Jews by claiming that they had collaborated with the Soviets during their occupation of the town. These same sources also said the Jews had earned their death because they had lived so much better than the Poles before the war.  To understand the success of the Holocaust, one must understand the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in European society.


1943(1st of Elul, 5703): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1943(1st of Elul, 5703): Eighty-eight year old retired banker Edward S. Rothschild passed away tonight at the City Hospital “an hour after” being struck “by taxicab at Fifth Avenue and 47th Street.”


1943(1st of Elul, 5703): Sixty-nine year old Albert Klein the founder and President of the American Food Company until his retirement twelve years ago passed away today in Newark, NJ.  A native of Czechoslovakia, he moved to Newark at the age of 17.  He is survived by his widow Kamilla Cohn Klein.


1943: The Belgian news agency reported “that armed Belgian patriots had intercept a train on which 1,500 Jews were being taken from Malines, Belgium to Poland.” The Belgians “fought a gun battle with the German guards and relased part of the captives from the cattle cars in which they were being transported.”



(For more on this see The Twentieth Train by Marion Schreiber


1943: Germans send a Polish labor battalion into the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto to flatten any walls and other structures still standing following the German assault of the previous spring. Most survivors of the April-May "liquidation" die during this demolition.


1943: The American Council for Judaism declares that Jewishness exists in a religious sense only, and that attempts to establish a Jewish homeland would be disloyal to the homeland nations of individual Jews.


1943: “Palestine Goal Passed” published today described a fundraising luncheon where the attendees heard from Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the JNF and Bernard A. Rosenblatt, president of the Palestine Foundation Fund.


1943: Jews at the Sobibór death camp attack SS guards with stones and bottles. All attackers are killed.


1943: Jewish women and children, as well as the elderly and the sick, left on the island of Rab after deportation from Dalmatia, Serbia, are transferred to a concentration camp at Zemun, Yugoslavia, and killed. Others remain on the island and are protected by partisans.


1943: Hundreds of Jews escape from Vilna, Lithuania, and head east toward the Soviet front line.


1943: Vilna-based partisan Vitka Kempner blows up an electrical transformer located in the city. A day later, she enters the labor camp at Keilis, near Vilna, and smuggles several dozen prisoners to safety. Still later, she travels with five other partisans to Olkiniki, Poland, where she helps torch a turpentine factory.


1943: In Paris, three Jewish partisans ambush and assassinate Karl Ritter, aide to Nazi slave-labor Chief Fritz Sauckel.


1943: After refusing for months, the Hungarian government accedes to German demands for Jews to be used as slave labor at copper mines at Bor, Yugoslavia.


1943: There was an uprising in Vilna, Lithuania. After the disaster of July and the death of Yitzhak Wittenberg, many of those in the underground decided to flee the city. The German entry into the ghetto was a surprise and there was no time to organize. Forty fighters led by Yechiel Scheinbaum fought until they were all killed. Approximately 200 more left the ghetto and joined the partisans. A second Aktion on September 23 marked the end of the ghetto


1943: “Jewish Conferees Assail Rival Plan” published today



1943: The Army Show, a musical comedy review featuring Frank Shuster and Johnny Wayne was performed for a final time before a civilian audience in Halifax, Canada.


1944: In Los Angeles, Felix Slatkin, “the violinist, conductor and founder of the Hollywood String Quartet” and cellist Eleanor Aller gave birth to orchestra conductor Leonard Slatkin whose brother Frederick is a cellist.



1944(13th of Elul, 5704): Barbara (née Drapczyńska) Baczyński, the pregnant wife of poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński who was killed by a German sniper on August 4, 1944, the fourth day of the Warsaw Uprising, passed away today after having been “mortally wounded when a shard of glass pierced her skull.”



1944: Five thousand women and 500 men are evacuated from Auschwitz north to Stutthof, Germany. Three thousand interned women are evacuated from Auschwitz northwest to Neuengamme, Germany.


1944: Following American bomber hits on factories at Auschwitz, the SS gives wounded inmates excellent medical attention as well as flowers and chocolate--a propaganda ploy for the benefit of German media. Once recovered, the inmates are exterminated. 44: The Gestapo and SS men in Przemysl, Poland, execute eight members of a non-Jewish Polish family and a little Jewish girl after discovering the group playing together in a courtyard.


1944: Despite the objections of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Prime Winston Churchill finally ordered the creation of a Jewish Brigade of Palestinian Jews in the British Army. Churchill had long supported the creation of such a unit.


1944: Birthdate of Margaret H. Marshall the 24th Chief Just of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the wife Jewish columnist Anthony Lewis.


1944: Aufbau,“a journal targeted at German-speaking Jews” begun by members of the German-Jewish Club of New York began printing lists of Jewish Holocuast survivors as well as lists of the victims.


1944: “In a note written in Yiddish” today, “Hirsch Brik wrote from Kovno, Lithuania, to friends in Palestine:


I’m alive and I’m free. After three torturous years, I am back to being a man like all other men. The German bastards have murdered my entire family. … There isn’t a long enough paper to list all the names of our common friends who have been savagely murdered.”


1945: As his ship sailed west across the Pacific Lt. Col. Louis Geffen, a judge advocate in the US Army who was trying to organize Rosh Hashanah found ”his Baal Koreh. This gentleman had no Torah to read from but he would use the Humash - Hebrew five books of Moses.”


 1945: Ichud (Unity), a Jewish political organization, is established by the leadership of the Landsberg displaced-persons (DP) camp. It initially acts as an intermediary between DPs and the United States Army in negotiations for DP immigration to Palestine.


1945(23rd of Elul, 5705): Yaakov Waldman, a survivor of a 1942 death march, is murdered by Poles in Turek


1946: Birthdate of Adrienne Cooper, an American-born singer, teacher and curator of Yiddish music.



1946: Birthdate of Shalom Hanoch, the native of Kibbutz Mishmarot and rock star who founded two bands – The Churchills and Tamouz


1946: Birthdate of Adrienne Cooper, the singer who played a major role in reviving Yiddish culture and music with a special emphasis on Klezmer.




1946: “A tentative agreement was reached between the Rabbinical Association of the American Zone in Germany and the JDC religious department creating a pool of religious supplies and agreeing in principle to cooperate in their distribution.”


1947: Date on which UNSCOP is scheduled to provide its findings to the U.N. General Assembly.


1947: After premiering in Chicago a month ago in August, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” a movie based on the short story character of the same name produced by Samuel Goldwyn, starring Danny Kaye and featuring songs by Sylvia Fine and a score by David Raskin, was released in the United States today.


1947: “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer” a comedy directed by Irving Reis, produced by Dore Schary and a script by Sidney Sheldon premiered today in New York City.


1948(27th of Av, 5708): Sixty-one year old Leon Friedman who served as Louisiana State Representative from Natchitoches Parish from 1932 to 1940 following in the footsteps of an older brother J. Isaac Friedman  who had served in both house of the state legislature.


1948: “Sorry, Wrong Number,” a “film noir” direct and produced by Anatole Litvak with music by Franz Waxman was released in the United States today.


1949: Birthdate of Leslie Feinberg, author of Stone Butch Blues.



1948: “Long is the Road” “the first German-made film to accurately portray the Holocaust” was released today.


1950: Today, Israel charged Jordan with “’full and absolute responsibility for continual acts of aggression’.  A government spokesman said Jordon condoned murder and sabotage by allowing infiltrators and criminals to cross the border into Israel and by taking no action to discourage or punish these criminals.


1951: Birthdate of singer-songwriter Steven D. Grossman.


1951: The Yugoslav representative in the U.N. Security Council voted in favor of a resolution guaranteeing all nations the right to use the Suez Canal.  The resolution was considered a victory since it was designed to overcome the Arab closure of the international waterway to ships that had docked in Israel or that sailed under an Israeli flag.  The issue of canal usage would be part of the reasons for going to war in 1956.


1951:The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, parent body of Reform Judaism in the United States and Canada, moved into its new $1,000,000 headquarters at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-Fifth Street


1952: The Israeli government announced that extra rations for meat and poultry would be available for the High Holy Days.  Those people who only know of then comparatively affluent society of present day Israel should remember that life during the early years of the Jewish state were quite grim.  Between the austerity of the land, the in-gathering of the exiles and the attacks from surrounding Arab states, life in Israel was more akin to living on the American frontier than a modern Western state.


1952: During the fiscal year which begins today MGM is scheduled to make 38 pictures as opposed to the 40 made during the previous fiscal year according to a previous announcement by Nicholas M. Schnenck, the President of Loew’s and Dore Schary who is in charge of production


1952: Zev Zahavy was appointed to serve as rabbi of East Park Synagogue.


1953: "Human Ornithosis in Israel" by Dr. Aaron Valero appeared in today’s issue of, Harefuah, a medical journal published by the Israel Medical Association. Dr. Aaron Valero was a an Israeli physician born in 1913 “who helped establish hospitals and medical schools, authored medical publications and contributed greatly to the advancement of medical education in Israel in the latter half of the 20th century.” He passed away in 2000.


1954: “Romeo and Juliet” a movie version of Shakespeare’s drama starring Laurence Harvey as “Romeo” was released in the U.K. today.


1954: In Perth Amboy, NJ, Robert N. Wilentz and Jacqueline Malino Wilentz gave birth to award winning author, journalist and professor of English Amy Wilentz who is married to Nicholas Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times.


1955: Birthdate of Efraim Gur, the native of Georgia SSR who made Aliyah in 1972 and eventually became an MIK and cabinet minister


1955(14th of Elul, 5715): Actor Philip Loeb passed away. Loeb played the role of Jake in the early television sitcom “The Goldbergs.”  The show starred actress Molly Goldberg and revolved around the life of an obviously Jewish family living in Brooklyn.  Loeb was 61 at the time of his death.


1957: “Slaughter on 10thAvenue” a crime-buster biopic featuring Walter Matthau and Sam Levene was released in the United States today by Universal-International.


1968: In “Henry James and the Jews: A Critical Study” published today Leo B. Levy examines the great author’s depictions and views of the “chosen people.”



1964:Rabbi Martin Riesenburger delivered the sermon and Canotrs Werner Sander, Estrongo Nachama and Leo Roth provided the music during today celebration of the 30h anniversary of the Rykestrasse Synagogue in Berlin.


1965: Outfielder Richie Scheinblum made his major league début with the Cleveland Indians.


1962:Jack Benny’s latest contract with CBS takes effect. Benny is 68 and the contract is for two years which means the famedtightwad will have a source of income until he is 70.


1967: British poet and author Siegfried Sassoon passed away.  His father was Alfred Sassoon, a member of the wealth and distinguished Indian –Jewish Sassoon family.  His mother was an Anglo Catholic.  The family disinherited the elder Sassoon when he married her and Sassoon was not raised as a Jew. 


1967: Sixty year old Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and Majdenek, hung herself at Aichach, Germany where she was serving a life sentence for a string of crimes that led her to be dubbed “the concentration camp murderess.


1969: Pitcher Lloyd Allen made his major league début with the California Angels.


1969: Twenty-seven year old Muammar Qaddafi staged a successful coup and replaced King Idris as head of Libya. By the time that Qaddafi came to power the Libyan Jewish community which was 2,500 years old had been reduced to a couple of hundred souls. He exacerbated their plight, as well as that of the Jewish exiles, by confiscating all property owned by Jews and by canceling all debts owed to those Libyan Jews whose property had already been seized or destroyed. He also attempted to make himself a leader in the fight to destroy Israel by giving untold millions to the PLO.


1970: Shimon Peres begins serving as Communications Minister of Israel.


1970: Yosef Burg replaced Golda Meir Minister of the Interior


1970: Palestinian terrorists attack King Hussein of Jordan’s motorcade in a failed attempt to assassinate him and bring an end to the Hashemite Kingdom.  Hussein was a complex figure whose whole kingship was influenced by the assassination of his grandfather by fanatics who thought he was going to make peace with Israel.  In the end, Hussein’s vision overcame his fears and he signed a peace treaty with Israel.


1971(11th of Elul, 5731):Mordechai Ofer passed away at the age of 47.  An Israeli politician, he served as a member of the Knesset for the Alignment and Labor Party from 1965 until his death. Born in Kraków in Poland in 1924, Ofer made aliyah to Mandate Palestine the following year. He joined the Mandate-era Jewish Police force, and served in the IDF during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. After being demobilized in 1950 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, he began working for Egged. He became a member of the co-operative's board, and from 1961 until his death, served as director of its Finances department. In 1965 he was elected to the Knesset on the Alignment list. He was re-elected in 1969, but died in office while still in office.


1971: Moshe Shahal took his seat in the Knesset as a replacement for the deceased Mordechai Ofer.


1974: Eighty “leading Soviet Jewish activists from Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and other cities issued statement advising caution in negotiations on the Jackson-Vanik Amendment.”


1974:Yuri Vudka, of Ryazan, wass released from labor camp after serving seven year sentence for “anti-Soviet activities”.


1976(6th of Elul, 5736): MK Zvi Guershoni who had made Aliyah in 1936 passed away today.


1976:As part of a mass demonstration, Uri Geller’s photograph appeared on the cover of the magazine ESP with the caption "On Sept. 1, 1976 at 11pm E.D.T. THIS COVER CAN BEND YOUR KEYS."


1977: The Prime Minister Menachem Begin won a flat “No” on the subject of the recognition of what he described as ‘the murder organization called the PLO.’ The Knesset vote was 92 to four.


1977: Birthdate of actress Shoshana Elise Bean.


1978: In Los Angeles, mystery novelists Faye Kellerman and Jonathan Kellerman gave birth to American author Jesse Oren Kellerman.


1979(9th of Elul, 5739): Sixty-seven year old All American football player and movie producer Aaron Rosenberg passed away today.



1981: Seventy-six year old Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, confidant and convicted war criminal who beat the hangman’s rope died a free man to today in London.

1982:  Washington announces the “Reagan Plan” that included the principle of self-government for the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Banks in association with Jordan.  The Americans saw it as the next step after the Camp David Accords.  The Begin government would reject the plan because it was not prepared to give up control of what it called Judaea and Samaria. 


1987: Today representatives of the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations “were received at Castel Gandolfo by His Holiness Pope John Paul II, who affirmed the importance of the proposed document for the Church and for the world. His Holiness spoke of his personal experience in his native country and his memories of living close to a Jewish community now destroyed. He recalled a recent address to the Jewish community in Warsaw, in which he spoke of the Jewish people as a force of conscience in the world today and of the Jewish memory of the Shoah as "a warning, a witness, and a silent cry" to all humanity.”


1983: Henry "Scoop" Jackson Democratic Senator from Washington passed away at the age of 71. Jackson was an outspoken supporter of Israel and the Jews in the Soviet Union.  In 1974, Jackson co-sponsored the Jackson-Vanik amendment with Charles Vanik, which denied normal trade relations to certain countries with non-market economies that restricted the freedom of emigration. The amendment was intended to allow refugees, particularly religious minorities, specifically Jews, to escape from the Soviet Bloc. Jackson and his assistant, Richard Perle also lobbied personally for some people, who were affected by this law — among them Natan Sharansky.


1983(23rd of Elul, 5743): Twenty three year old Alice Ephriamson-Abt the daughter of Hans Ephriamson-Abt was among the 269 passengers aboard KAL 007 who were killed when the plane which was bound for Seoul was shot down by Soviets who claimed “the flight was a spy plane.” Her death would lead her father to become “an internationally known advocate for families of air-crash victims.”


1989: In Warsaw, Leonard Bernstein conducted concert commemorating outbreak of World War II.


1990: In “Roots of Muslim Rage” published today Bernard Lewis explains “why so many Muslim deeply resent the West and why their bitterness will not be easily mollified.”



1990: After 622 performances at the Plymouth Theatre the curtain comes down on Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prizing winning drama “The Heidi Chronicles


1990(11th of Elul, 5750): Parashat Ki Teitzei


1990: Eighty year old Syracuse native Alexander “Mine Boy” Levinsky, the nine year NFL veteran passed away today.



1991: Uzbekistan  declares independence from the Soviet Union.  Depending upon which version of history you believe Jews have been living in what is now Uzbekistan since the period following the destruction of the first Temple or the period of Persian domination of Judea.  At the time of the declaration there were approximately 15,000 Jews living in the country centered in four major population centers.


1991: Rabbi Sir Jonathan Henry Sacks was appointed Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.


1991(22nd of Elul, 5751): Eighty year old Canadian political leader Allan Grossman, the son of Russian immigrants and the father of Canadian political leader Larry Grossman  passed away today.


1991: Publication of Politics, Religion and Love: The Story of H.H. Asquith, Venetia Stanley and Edwin Montagu, Based on the Life and Letters of Edwin Samuel Montagu by Naomi Levine.



1992(3rd of Elul, 5752): Nine-four year old Morris Carnovsky the native of St. Louis whose 60 year acting career was inspired childhood visits to the Yiddish theatre passed away today. (As reported by James Barron)



1994: “Il Postino: The Postman” directed by Michael Radford premiered at the Venice Film Festival.


1994: Stanley "Stan" Fischer began serving as First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund


1995: Graham B. Spanier who would become a major player in the Jerry Sandusky- Penn St. child abuse scandal assumed his duties as President of Penn State University.


1998: The curtain came down for the last time on the Open Air Theatre, Inner Circle, Regent's Park, London, production of the Jule Styne musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” which had opened in July.


1999: The Jew in the Lotus an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama by Rodger Kamenetz   which inspired a PBS documentary of the same name produced and directed by Laurel Chiten, was on Independent Lens today.


2002: The New York Timesincluded reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including The Book of Illusionsby Paul Auster.


2003(4thof Elul, 5763): David Adelman, who is memorialized at B’Nai Israel in Spartanburg, SC, passed away today.


2003: Publication of Who Killed Daniel Pearl? by Bernhard-Henri Levy.


2004: “Palestinians celebrate deadly Israeli bus bombings” published today described how “thousands of joyful Hamas supporters took to Gaza's street , throwing sweets in the air and singing songs to celebrate a twin suicide bombing that killed 16 people on Israeli buses.”


2004: “Promised Land” by Amos Gitai premiered at the 61st  Venice International Film Festival which opened today.


2005: In Israel approximately 1,700,000 pupils begin the new school year.


2005: At the Vienna International Film Festival, premiere of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” one of the most significant films of the decade produced by Grant Heslov.


2005: As of today, the IDF “had withdrawn 95% of its equipment” from Gaza.


2005: In Hong Kong, Nancy Ann Kissel was found guilty of murdering her husband Robert Kissel, a senior banker with Merrill Lynch. First she gave him a milkshake laced with sleeping medications and crushed his skull.  Then she wrapped his body in a carpet and stuffed into a moving box.  The jury did not believe that Mrs. Kissel had acted in self-defense.  The scandalous murder trial sent shock waves through the financial communities in Hong Kong and New York as well as the Jewish community in Hong Kong.  It included everything from Mrs. Kissel’s extramarital affair to a multi-million dollar New York real estate fraud involving the descendant’s brother Andrews Kissel.  Who says Jews are only good for stories about Talmud and Accounting?  


2006: In a strange twist of fate, two Moslem countries are making plans to send troops to serve as part of the UN peacekeeping force designed to maintain peace along Israel’s border with Lebanon. Turkey's government submitted a resolution to parliament to send peacekeepers to Lebanon despite public opposition to the deployment. Israel has dropped its objections to Indonesia joining the UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, and discussions are underway as to when Jakarta would send a planned contingent of 1,000 troops


2006:An Orthodox Jewish man was removed from an Air Canada Jazz flight in Montreal for praying.


2007: In Jerusalem,Larry Fogel and Moni Arnon perform "Simon and Garfunkel" music. The duo provides an authentic rendition of the famed Americans’ acousitc harmonies in their performance at the Bible Lands Museum tent.


2007: Craig Breslow “was promoted to the Boston Red Sox” from the minors.


2007(18th of Elul, 5767): Parashat Ki Tavo


2007(18th of Elul, 5767): Eighty-three year old Sir Abraham Goldberg, the son of Jewish immigrants who rose to be “one of the most outstanding physician scientists of his generation” passed away today.



2007: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Saturday of Labor Day Weekend, the traditional Shabbat morning service at Temple Judah (a reform congregation with just over 100 families as members) attracted sixteen congregants confounding critics who are always predicting the demise of the American Jewish Community while The Cedar Rapids Gazette featured an article entitled “Kosher gardening shows Jewish law in practice.”


2007: (Elul 18) Birthdates of the Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Schneur Zalman Liadi, founder of Chabad-Lubavitch.


2007: A Des Moines rabbi who was named Friday in online media reports as planning to marry two gay men said he didn't know of the plan. Rabbi David Kaufman of Temple B'nai Jeshurun in Des Moines said today that he couldn't have married Sean Fritz and Tim McQuillan because neither man was Jewish. The pair were married Friday before a ban on same-sex unions was reinstated. Kaufman said he would have referred the couple to Unitarian Minister Mark Stringer, who performed the ceremony. Following is Kaufman's statement on the events: “Someone who knew that I would be willing to perform same sex ceremonies evidently decided that I was going to do one for two gay friends of hers and let the press know about it. Neither of the men was Jewish. I didn't know anything about the plan, much less participated in it, and couldn't do a wedding this morning (Friday) anyway, since I was otherwise committed. I wouldn't have done this particular ceremony because neither was Jewish in the first place. Instead I would have referred them to Rev. Mark Stringer of the Unitarian Church, who I know is a strong proponent of civil marriage and same sex ceremonies and who eventually did the marriage anyway. I commend him for so doing. In the meantime, it was posted for a while on the DM Register website that I was doing the ceremony and the news media, including national news media with multiple TV cameras, showed up at the Temple. The phone was ringing off the hook for about two hours. Meanwhile, I wasn't even in the building and had another life cycle event to perform at the time that the media was gathered. For those interested, I both support Civil Marriage and I would do a same sex commitment ceremony, but my requirements for so doing would be exactly the same as for a non-homosexual couple. Someone has to be Jewish and the couple must either be prepared to raise their children as Jews or have discussed it or not decided. I do not act as "Justice of the Peace" in a secular capacity. When I do weddings of any kind, I represent the Reform Jewish tradition in general and my beliefs as a Reform Jewish Rabbi in particular. I am there as a Rabbi, not as Justice of the Peace. Meanwhile, let me offer a hearty Mazal Tov to Sean and Tim."


2008: A busy day in Israel on a variety of fronts as 1.4 millions pupils ended their summer vacation and began the 2008/09 school year


2008: Mike Slive, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference is scheduled to begin serving as Chair of the Division 1 Men’s Basketball Committee for the 2008-2009 academic year today.


2008: Athletic mogul Arkadi Gaybamak sacked the entire Betar management team


2008:The WUJS Arad program relocates from the southern desert town to the Central region. The program moves to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for the fall session, which is expected to draw 50 participants from overseas. The five-month program will be extended by a month for that term.


2008(1st of Elul, 5768): Rosh Chodesh Elul Rosh; Begin blowing the Shofar at Shacharit


2008: Deadline for submitting entries to the D.C. Jewish Community Center's third annual writing contest entries for which must come from residents of the Washington Metro area and must consist  short essays or stories that illuminate how humor has been helpful in difficult times -- is looking for entries.


2008 (1 Elul, 5768):  Eighty-five year old comedy writer Sheldon Keller passed away today. (As reported by Margalit Fox)



2008 (1 Elul, 5768):  Forty-six year old Oded Schramm, who melded ideas from two branches of mathematics into an equation that applies to a multitude of physics problems from the percolation of water through rocks to the tangling of polymers, died in a fall at Guye Peak near Snoqualmie Pass in Washington State. (As reported by Kenneth Chang)




2008:The fifth AICE Israeli Film Festival opened on today at the Palace Como, South Yarra. More than 400 people attended the Opening Night of the Festival, officially launched by The Ambassador of Israel, H.E. Yuval Rotem. Other speakers on the evening included Tony Lupton MP, Cabinet Secretary of Victoria and Evan Thornley MP, Deputy Cabinet Secretary (both of whom represented the Victorian Premier, John Brumby), guest of the Festival Gal Zaid, leading member of the Aboriginal community, Warren Mundine, Founder and Chairman of AICE, Albert Dadon AM and AICE Executive Director, Keith Lawrence. Australian actress Kerry Armstrong, international jazz pianist Joe Chindamo, Sir Zelman and Lady Anna Cowen, Melbourne Film Festival director Richard Moore, award-winning film and television producers Sue Maslin and Ros Tatarka were just some of the guests at the opening night. The opening film was the multi-award winning 'The Secrets', written, directed and produced by Avi Nesher, whose previous film, 'Turn Left at the End of the World' opened the festival in 2005. Awards include Best Film and Best Script at the 2008 Jackson Hole International Film Festival and nominations for 8 Israeli 'Ophirs' (including Best Film).


2009: During a breakfast reception at the Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia, Governor Tim Kaine provides a briefing on his recent trip to Israel highlighting visits with top elected officials and business leaders. The Virginia Israel Advisory Board hosted Governor Kaine's Israel mission with support from the JCRC. 


2009: In Israel, the start of the 2009-2010 school year


2009: At Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Park, Madonna appears at the first of two concerts that are the last stop on her “Sticky and Sweet” tour. She first appeared at Hayarkon Park 16 years ago as part of her Girlie Tour, and also visited Israel in 2006 during the Jewish High Holidays along with 2,000 other students of Kabbalah.


2009: Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky told Jewish students at the Lipman Jewish Day School in Moscow today how much has changed in their country since he fought for the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union and spent nine years as a political prisoner.


2009, A special "Winton train" set off from the Prague Main railway station. The train, consisting of an original locomotive and carriages used in the 1930s, headed to London via the original Kindertransport route. On board the train were several surviving "Winton children" and their descendants, who were to be welcomed by Nicholas Winton in London. Sir Nicholas George Winton organized the rescue of 669 mostly Jewish children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War in an operation later known as the Czech Kindertransport. Winton found homes for them and arranged for their safe passage to Britain


2009: An investor group including Andreessen Horowitz (Ben Horowitz) announced it had acquired a majority stake in Skype for $2.75 billion


2009: After having been “convicted of embezzling millions of shekels from the National Workers Labor Federation while he was its chairman” Avraham Hirchson “began serving his five years and give months” prison sentence.


2010: Meiron Reuven is scheduled to begin serving as Israel’s new ambassador to the UN.


2010: President Barack Obama is scheduled to host a dinner attended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and former British Prime Minister Tony Balir this evening prior to the start of peace talks which are scheduled to begin tomorrow.


2010(22ndof Elul): 25th Yahrzeit of Joseph B. Levin, of blessed memory; Husband of Deborah, father of Judy Rosenstein of blessed memory, David Levin and Mitchell Levin.  You wouldn’t be reading this if it hadn’t been for him and that statement is true in more ways than one!


2010: Today Defense Minister Ehud Barak spoke about yesterday’s fatal terror attack in Kiryat Arba, promising that "the IDF will do everything possible to quickly bring the perpetrators to justice, to prevent the possibility of a wave of terror attacks from developing, to prevent other terror missions from disrupting the fabric of relationships and relative quiet which has been created in the area in recent years and even the intent to harm the coming peace talks." 


 2010: Kol Shira performed at a Taste of the Market- Iowa City's Farmers Market


2010: President Obama today began the arduous process of coaxing and pressing the main Middle East participants to define and embrace a comprehensive peace settlement, declaring that “the status quo is unsustainable.” 


2010: Archaeologists in Jordan have unearthed a 3,000-year-old Iron Age temple with a trove of figurines of ancient deities and circular clay vessels used for religious rituals, officials said today. The head of the Jordanian Antiquities Department, Ziad al-Saad, said the sanctuary dates to the eighth century B.C. and was discovered at Khirbat 'Ataroz near the town of Mabada, some 20 miles (32 kilometers) southwest of the capital Amman. The Moabites, whose kingdom ran along present-day Jordan's mountainous eastern shore of the Dead Sea, were closely related to the Israelites, although the two were in frequent conflict. The Babylonians eventually conquered the Moabites in 582 B.C.


2011: Shlomo Benizri began serving his prison term after having been “convicted of accepting bribes, breach of faith, obstructing justice, and conspiracy to commit a crime for accepting favors worth millions of shekels from his friend, contractor Moshe Sela, in exchange for inside information regarding foreign workers scheduled to arrive in Israel.”


2011: The Ohr Chadash Academy, a new Modern Orthodox day school is scheduled to open at Park Heights Jewish Community Center in Baltimore, Maryland.


2011; The family of Nahum Itzkovich, Jerusalem district psychologist of the Israel Employment Service and husband of The Jerusalem Post’s veteran health and science reporter Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, sits shivah for the last time today.


2011: The school year is scheduled to begin today in Israel.


2011: Between the Lines a novel written by Marv Levy is scheduled to be published today by Ascend Books.


2011: The 7th Annual Jerusalem Beer Festival is scheduled to come to an end tonight.


2011: The Tel Aviv District Court ruled today to release singer and Kohav Nolad (A Star is Born) judge Margalit Tsanani to house arrest.Tsanani is being charged with extorting a previous agent.The decision came after the prosecution had asked the court to remand her in custody for the duration of the trial because they alleged she posed a threat to the public because of her connections with underworld figures.


2011:Vandals destroyed a monument to victims of a World War Two pogrom against Jews in Poland, covering it with racist inscriptions and swastikas in green paint, police said today. It was the latest in a recent series of racist and xenophobic acts of vandalism targeting the small Jewish and Muslim communities in eastern Poland as well as the tiny Lithuanian minority.


2011:Approximately 300 Israelis of Ethiopian descent, including students and their parents, demonstrated this morning outside the Nir Etzion School in Petah Tikva. They were upset that despite city provisions, the school, which they considered an "Ethiopian ghetto" because the student population was made up of nearly only Ethiopian children, was not closed and the children not integrated throughout other schools in the area.


2011: “Radio pulled its coverage of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in London this evening as a small number of anti-Israel protestors disrupted the concert by shouting anti-Israel slogans at the orchestra, which was performing as part of the prestigious annual BBC Proms classic music festival.”


2011: The New York Mets baseball team announced that it broken off negotiations to sell a minority interest to hedge fund manager David Einhorn.  The Mets are owned and /or run by Fred Wilpon, Sault Katz and Jeff Wilpon.


2011(2nd of Elul, 5771): Ninety-two year old jurist and legal scholar Sidney H. Asch, passed away today. (As reported by Paul Vitello)


 
2012: “Frances Ha,” a “comedy –drama” directed, produced and written by Noah Baumbach “premiered at the Telluride Film Festival”



2012: The 15th annual Jerusalem International Chamber Music is scheduled to open today.


2012: Temple Judah is scheduled to host the Labor Day Shabbat traditional/egalitarian minyan.


2012(14thof Elul, 5772): Ninety-one year old lyricist Hal David passed away today in Los Angeles (As reported by Rob Hoerburger)



2012: Eighty-six year old Sy J. Schulman who helped create Riverbank State Park passed away today at White Plains, NY. (As reported by Leslie Kaufman)



2012: “An Israeli military strike has been granted increased legitimacy due to the events of the past week, former minister Tzachi Hanegbi said today at a cultural event in Kiryat Motzkin. The airstrikes came after several rockets were fired at Israel over the past week, one of which struck and damaged a home in Sderot early yesterday morning.” (As reported by JPost staff)


2012: IAF aircraft struck two centers of terrorist activity in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to rockets fired from the coastal territory into southern Israel, according to the IDF Spokesman's Office.


2012:Three people were injured during a rock-throwing fracas in Jerusalem this afternoon. “The incident began when a group of haredim started throwing stones at the Arab neighborhood of Shuafat in the capital’s northeast. Police arrested three haredim, two minors and an adult, for throwing rocks.” (As reported by Melanie Lidman


2013: Jeremy Jones is scheduled to moderate “Appeasing Hitler – Nazi Supporters Down Under as part of Sydney Jewish Writer’s Festive being held at the Eric Caspary Learning Centre, Shalom College, University of New South Wales


2013: András Schiff and the Erlenbusch Quartet are scheduled to perform Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34 at The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival


2013: Ephraim Mirvis took office as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth replacing the retiring Lord Sacks.


2013: The New York Times book section included two features: “Jonathan Lethem: By the Book” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/books/review/jonathan-lethem-by-the-book.html?ref=review and“Articles of Faith” by Dara Horn that explores her belief that “a number of contemporary Jewish writers are engaging with religious belief in their works”



2013: “Security forces led by the Shin Bet announced t0day that they had foiled a bomb attack plotted by Hamas in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, timed for the High Holy Days.” As reported by Yaakov Lappin and Yonah Jeremy Bob)


2013(26th of Elul, 5773): Seventy-four year magazine editor Judith Daniels passed away today. (As reported by Margalit Fox)



2014: According to Forbes, “Sheldon Adelson has returned to the top 10 richest in the world for the first time since 2007 after making an average of $32 million a day over the last year, third-most of anyone on the planet’ meaning the eighty-one year old Chairman and CEO of Las Vegas sands is worth approximately $33.2 billion.


2014: Four days after she had passed away, graveside services are scheduled to held at Sharon Memorial Park this afternoon for Shirley (Berlin) Kahn, the widow of Arnold L. Kahn with whom she had three children – Jeffrey, Jill and Jonathan.


2014: “After a summer dominated by Code Red sirens and few days of real vacation, 2,105,394 students are scheduled to return to school in some 2,100 new classrooms and 495 preschools that were built to meet demand in the new school year.” (As reported by Shahar Hay)



2014: Peter Schaefer, “a German academic who had previously led Princeton University‘s Judaic studies program,” is scheduled to replace W. Michael Blumenthal as Director of the Jewish Museum Berlin. (As reported by JTA)


2014: “A three-year-old toddler was lightly wounded tonight by Arab terrorists that hurled rocks through the window of the bus she was riding in, as it passed through Uzi Narkis Street in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat.” (As reported by Ido Ben-Porat, Ari Yashar)


2014: “Justice Minister Tzipi Livni today condemned a government decision to appropriate about 1,000 acres of land near the West Bank settlement of Gva’ot, in the Etzion Bloc, asserting that the move would prove detrimental to Israel’s security and damage the country’s reputation with the international community.” (Times of Israel)


2015: In Falls Church, VA, Temple Rodef Shalom’s Treasure Gift Shop is scheduled to be open for a special pre-Rosh Hashanah evening of sales complete with a 10% discount.


2015: “Proceedings to determine the punishment for “Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., 74, a former Ku Klux Klan leader with a history of racist and anti-Semitic actions” who “was convicted of capital murder yesterday in the shooting deaths of three people a year ago at a Jewish community center and an assisted living facility in suburban Kansas City.”]


2016(28thof Av, 5776): Yarhrzeit for Larry Rosenstein, of blessed memory, husband of Judy Levin Rosenstein, of blessed memory.  Gone too soon but always remembered! 


2016(28thof Av, 5776): Eighty-nine year old Fred Hellerman, the last surviving member of the Weavers, a driving force behind the folk music and social justice movements passed away today. (As reported by William Grimes)



2016: “Is That You? The Road Not Taken” a film that tells the story of a 60 year old Israel projectionist is scheduled to be shown for the last time at Cinema Village.


2016: The screening sponsored by UKJF of “Mr. Gaga” is scheduled to be shown for the last time.



2017: 78thAnniversary of the start of World War II


2017:“1917: How One Year Changed The World” is scheduled to open in New York at the American Jewish Historical Society.


2017: “Lady Bird” produced by Scott Rudin and featuring Beanie Feldstein “premiered at the Telluride Film Festival” today.


2017: The Jeff Portman era really comes to an end as Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz is scheduled to lead services this evening for the first time at Congregation Agudas Achim.


2017: As Jews across Texas and the United States prepare for Shabbat, they are coming to grips with Taryn Baranowski,’s estimate that at least “Seventy-one percent of the city’s Jewish population of 63,700 lives in areas that have experienced high flooding.


2017: The Diver Festival continues for a second day in Tel Aviv with performances of modern dance


2017: In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, Greene Family and Young Judea camps continue to offer shelter to families who have lost everything.


2017: The new school year began in Israel this morning “with a total of 2,272,000 students filling the classrooms throughout the country.”


2017: Today, in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey “Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Technologies announced a thirty-six million dollar donation today to the Rebuild Texas Fund “established by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation


2017: As the Texas Gulf Coast grapples with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey the Jewish-Herald Voice,“Houston and the Texas Gulf Coast's Jewish Community Newspaper Since 1908” is prepared to “offer a free e-edition.”http://jhvonline.com/


2018(21stof Elul, 5778): Parashat Ki Tavo; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/


2018: In Cedar Rapids, the Bat Mitzvah of Hannah Homrighausen-Hoer is scheduled to take place at Temple Judah.


2018: The Jerusalem Centre for the Performing Arts is scheduled to host a screening of Jacob Gladwasser’s “Laces.”


 

This Day, September 2, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 2


44 BCE: Cicero delivers the first of his fourteen Philippics (oratorical attacks) on Mark Antony. He will make 14 of them over the next several months. From a Jewish perspective it might be proper to say “a pox on both of your houses.”  Cicero was anti-Semite.  Once when addressing the Senate he was reported to have told his colleagues that he must whisper lest the Jews hear him.  He described Judaism as “’a barbarous superstition’” and derided the Jews as “a race born in slavery.” When defending a Roman official against charges that he had stolen a large sum of gold bound for Jerusalem, the famous orator used “all the anti-Jewish canards” of the day to defend his client.  Antony was no prize either.  After he and Octavius had triumphed at the Battle Of Philippi, Marc Antony went to Asia Minor, an area under his control.  Antony violently rejected several groups of Jews who sought to meet with him concerning the need to replace Herod.  While Herod had made the mistake of siding against Antony before the Battle of Philippi, the vile monarch kept his throne.  Why did Antony favor him over Antigonus?  Given the greed and the debauchery of the man, a bribe seems a likely explanation.  Also, Antigonus was a reformer and Herod along with his new ally the High Priest Hyrcanus, could be counted on to keep peace in the Jewish kingdom.


31 BCE:  Octavian defeated Marc Antony and Cleopatra in the naval Battle of Actium off the coast of Greece. The outcome of the battle can be viewed as a positive event for the Jews of that time. The defeat sealed Antony’s fate and ensured that Octavian would succeed his great-uncle Julius Caser as head of the Roman government.  Antony was not popular with the Jews living in Judea since he had given Cleopatra the area around Jericho for her own kingdom.  Octavian, who ruled Augustus, continued the relatively benevolent policies toward the Jews practiced by Julius Caesar.  He exempted the Jews from emperor worship, banned the Roman Eagle from Jerusalem and forbade pagan altars being in the Jewish capital.  He allowed Diaspora Jews to send contributions to the Temple in Jerusalem, exempted them from court appearances on Shabbat and ensured that their holy books were not disturbed. 


1192: The Third Crusade ends as English king Richard the Lion-Heart and Islamic sultan Saladin sign a peace treaty that allows Christian pilgrims’ access to Muslim held Jerusalem. Saladin is remembered as the ruler who readmitted the Jews to Jerusalem in 1190 (4950) as ecstatically recounted by the Jewish poet Al-harzi.


1347: Coronation of Emperor Charles IV, who classified his Jewish subjects as vassals of the Emperor which meant he received an annual payment from them, as King of Bohemia


1492: Jews are expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand & Queen Isabella


1504: In Pilsen, “the councilors and aldermen” decreed “that all Jews both local and visiting must wear Jewish coats so they can be distinguished from other people, and that Jewish women must wear a veil with a broad yellow and white ribbon. If Jews were found without such clothing, the penalty would be five coppers for each offence. It was emphasized that Jews must not manufacture veils or undertake any other gentile business.”


1649: In Italy, the Jews of Castro found refuge in Pitigliano when forces supporting Pope Innocent X at the end of the Wars of Castro.  The Jews had nothing to do with the fighting and their flight is what we would call today “collateral damage.”


1666: The Great Fire of London breaks out and burns for three days, destroying 10,000 buildings. While Jews had already returned to London we can assume that none of the buildings that burned were synagogues.  In 1656, the Jews had been denied the right to build a synagogue or buy land for a cemetery.  The famed Bevis Marks synagogue was not built until 1701.


1686: When imperial troops recaptured Buda, most Jewish residents were massacred, while a “lucky few” were captured and later released for ransom.


1728: An edict issued today allowed the Jews “to attend the fairs of Little Russia, provided they carried on wholesale business only.” (As reported by Herman Rosenthal)


1731: In response to an application by Danil Pavlovich Apostl, who was Hetman of the Cossacks, Jews were permitted “attend the fairs of Little Russia, provided they” only engaged in wholesale business activities.


1735: Lewis Gomez, a Jewish merchant in New York sold 25 loads of lime to the city for £6 pounds, 5 shillings. Gomez advertised his "lime" in the newspaper as "good stone-lime."


1752: England and its American colonies use the Julian calendar for the last time, dropping it in favor of the Gregorian one.  Eleven days (September 3 – 13 inclusively) vanish as the calendar was adjusted forward so that September 14 followed September 2.  This does not directly affect Jewish history, but it is worth noting since it accounts for some of the seeming discrepancies in providing dates for events.


1763: Moses Lindo, the Surveyor and Inspector-General of Indigo, Drugs and Dyes wrote a letter from Charleston, South Carolina to Emanuel Mendez da Costa containing “an account of a New die from the Berries of a Weed in south Carolina.


1777(30th of Av, 5537): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1777: The will of Aaron Franks, the brother of Isaac Franks was dated tdaoy.


1778: Birthdate of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Emperor Napoleon, who thanks to his brother ruled Holland from 1806 to 1810.  During his short reign he sought to improve the condition of the Jews with such steps as moving market day from Saturday, abolishing the “Oath More Judaico” and allowing Jews to serve in the military for the first time by creating two battalions with Jewish enlisted men and officers.


1796: In Holland which now was called the Batavian Republic, the National Assembly voted in favor of emancipation for the Dutch Jews who numbered approximately 50,000 – 20,000 of whom lived in Amsterdam. The Jews of Holland were emancipated as the Dutch state became the Batavian Republic.


1789: Founding the United States Department of the Treasury.  Although there is some anecdotal evidence that the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, was Jewish, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. is listed as the first Jewish Secretary of the Treasury.  He was appointed by FDR and served from 1934 until 1945.  Morgenthau was chosen because he was country squire neighbor of FDR and not for financial acumen. 


1806: Birthdate of Mikhl Yosef Gusikow (Michael Joseph Gusikow) “a Klezmer musician from Shklov who was popular in German and France during the 1830’s.”


1807: Barnett Nathan married Julia Solomons today.


1818: Laurence Lazarus married Catherine Phillips at the New Synagogue today.


1825: Mordecai Manuel Noah led a large group of Christians and some Jews to St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Buffalo, NY where they participated in a dedicatory ceremony marking the founding of Ararat, which was to be a Jewish colony on an island in the Niagara River.


1831: Thirty-seven year old Daniel Lessmann, a veteran of the Battle Lutzen who converted in 1824, possibly to advance his career as a poet and history.


1832: Hart Lyon, Moses Cohen D’Azevedo, Meyer Abrahams, Abraham Finzi, Levi Eleazer and Joseph Hart were among those who attended “a meeting of the Vestry” today.


1833: Oberlin College is founded by John Shepherd and Philo P. Stewart. Today Oberlin has about 800 Jewish students out of a student body of 3,000. It offers ten courses in Jewish Studies as well as both a Major and a Minor in Jewish Studies.


1839: Birthdate of London born Australian politician Elias Solomon, an Australian who migrated to Australia as a child. He had no formal education, but in 1868 became a clerk and auctioneer in Fremantle in Western Australia. In 1877 he was elected to the Fremantle City Council. In 1892, he was elected to the Western Australian Legislative Assembly as the member for South Fremantle, where he remained until 1901. In that year, he transferred to federal politics, winning the Australian House of Representatives seat of Fremantle for the Free Trade Party. He was defeated by Labor's William Carpenter in 1903. Solomon died in 1909.


1839: Three days after he had passed away English portrait painter Solomon Polack, the husband of Sarah Polack with whom he had five children was buried today at the “Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.



1844: In Bavaria, Emanuel Grabfelder and his wife gave birth to Samuel Grabfelder the husband of Delia Griff who served President of the Guardians of Public Children of Louisville and the Jewish Free Hospital and President and a trustee of Temple Adath Israel in Louisville, KY.


1850: In Silesia, “railway entrepreneur and coal mine owner Rudolf Pringsheim  and his wife Paula, née Deutschmann” gave birth to “German mathematician and patron of the arts” Alfred Pringsheim.


1851: Lazarus Powell began serving as the 19th Governor of Kentucky who in an act that was totally disingenuous condemned General Grant’s General Order No.11 two years after it was issued and withdrawn as part of his on-going attempt to thwart Lincoln’s policies to save the Union and free the slaves – something that Powell opposed.


1852: Birthdate of Paul Charles Joseph Bourget one of several French authors including Maurice Barres, Charles Maurra and Leon Daudet who engaged in “literary anti-Semitism” that “portrayed Jews as cosmopolitan financiers, rapacious parasites, unscrupulous parvenus, intruders and strangers, very different from ‘ordinary’ Frenchman.” (Alan Corcos)


1856: The "Foreign Correspondence” column published today reported that when the subscription books opened to buy shares in the Zurich Credit Mobilier, Bavarian Jews with with millions in their bags, were reportedly seen in the crowd of purchasers.


1857” Solomon Isaacs married Jane Abrahams at the Great Synagogue today.


1857: Young Barney Aaron the son of “Hall of Famer Barney Aaron” “became the first Jewish fighter to a win a championship” when he defeated American Lightweight Champion Johnny Moneghan in Providence, RI in a fight that went 80 rounds and lasted 3 hours and 20 minutes,


1857: Simon Goldman married Julia Phillips at the Great Synagogue today.


1861: Birthdate of Felix Albert Bettelheim, the son of Rabbi Aaron Siegfried Bettelheim, who became a successful doctor in the United States.


1863: Birthdate of Budapest native, Isidore Phillip, “the French composer and pianist.”



1863: Three days after she had passed away, 11 year old Isabella Kisch, the daughter of Simon Abraham Kisch and the former Flora Davis was buried today at the “Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.


1864: The 79th Indiana Infantry Regiment under the command of Colonel Knefler fought the Rebels in Georgia at the Battle of Lovejoy’s State.


1864: Solomon B. Kaufman who rose to the rank of Sergeant began serving with Company B of the 202nd Regiment.


1864: Corporal Adam Salzmann began serving with Battery G of the 204thRegiment.


1864: Birthdate of Abraham “Abe” Reuf, the native of San Francisco and graduate of Hastings College of Law who began his career as a fighter against political corruption but ended up “a big city boss” who served time for his mis-deeds.




1864: General Sherman and his Union soldiers capture Atlanta.


1877: Birthdate of Cecile M. Pilpel, the native of Wissembourg, France and wife of Emmanuel Pilpel who “became a leader in parent education and…an executive of the Child Study Association of America.



1877: A large group of Jews from New York and Brooklyn attended today’s dedication of the Salem Fields Cemetery which is adjacent to Cypress Hills.  The cemetery is the property of Temple Emanu-El on New York’s Fifth Avenue.  Several lots have been sold to other Jewish congregations and benevolent societies. Louis May, President of Temple Emanu-El and Rabbi Gottheil officiated during the event.


1878: The “Israelites” of Vicksburg, MS, have made an appeal to their co-religionists throughout the United States to provide aid for “their sick and destitute brethren” who are trying to survive the current Yellow Fever Epidemic.  Money should be sent to Alexander Kuhn Treasure of the Hebrew Relief Society of Vicksburg, Mississippi.


1881: Based on information that first appeared in the Daily News, it was reported today that an Anglo-Jew named Lewishon who has the support of Lord Granville has been given permission by the Russian Government to visit Novgorod. The British government intends to pursue the central issue – the right of citizens, including Jews to reside and conduct business in Russia under the terms of the treaty signed by the two countries.


1881: In Chicago, Moses Jacobs, a Polish Jew who was attacked by Thomas Kennedy at Clark and Taylor Streets is in critical condition.


1882: It was reported today that that Ignace Eprhussi & Co a Jewish banking house in Odessa was ceasing operations in Russia because of the persecution of Jews in the land of the Czars. Founded by Charles Joachim a Russian grain trader, the firm moved its operations to Vienna


1883: American labor leader Daniel De Leon and his wife gave birth to Solon De Leon, who followed in his father’s footsteps and who created The American Labor Who's Who which is a registry or directory of people involved in the American Labor Movement.


1883(30th of Av, 5643): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1883(30thof Av, 5643): Eighty-one year old Léon Halévy a French dramatist and historian who was the son of cantor Elie Halevy, the brother of composer and Jacques Halevy and the father of Ludovic Halevy passed away today.


1883: “The Hungarian Riots” published today described that renewed attempts by the military to stop the attacks on the Jews in Zala.


1885: Nine-year old Samuel Neuman was sent to the Riverside Hospital because he suffering from smallpox which he caught in Hamburg or while sailing to America on board the SS Firsa.


1886: It was reported today Jacob H. Schiff, Jess Seligman and the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co are among those who have contributed to a fund that will allow The Hebrew Technical Institute to move into new, enlarged quarters.  Founded in 1884 to provide instruction in the mechanical arts to poor Jewish boys, the institute now is serving 100 youngsters. 


1886: It was reported today that Mr. and Mrs. Harris Manheim and their five year old son have been sent back to England before Coroner Levy of the Jewish Immigrants’ Protective Association could meet with them.  It was alleged that the Manheims were indigent when in fact that they “had a valuable Jewish parchment which…could have easily sold for $200 or $300.


1888: In Brest, Richard and Sarah Brodsky gave birth to Samuel Brodsky.


1888: Three days after she had passed away “in her 88th year,” Ester (Aarons) Ellis, the wife of Samuel Ellis and the daughter of Aron Aarons was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”


1889: A review of The Jew In English Fiction by Rabbi David Philipson was published today.


1890: “Jews Ordered To Go” published today described the issuance of an by the Governor of the Transcaspian Territories of the Russian Empire expelling the Jews of that region.


1891: In the United States District Court in Brooklyn, Judge Benedict heard the case of 19 Russian Jews who were seeking to reverse the order of the Immigration Commissioner that would not let them remain in this country “because they had no visible means of support.”


1892: In New York, the Eldridge Street police, at the request of Justice Hogan, are looking for “some information” that will help him decide whether or not Israel Simovitch did or did not steal $90 of jewelry from his fellow Russian Jew Jacob Rohnewitch.


1892: As Europe deals with concerns about an outbreak of Cholera, it was reported today that “hundreds of Russian Jews” arriving at Stettin “by sea from Memel or by rail from Eidtkuhnen” are kept in quarantine until they board steamers headed for America.


1892: “Duels and French Duels” published today described the acquittal of Marquis de Mores on charges of having murder Captain Mayer, a Jewish officer in the French Army, because the killing took place during a duel and regardless of the letter of the law, the jury rendered a verdict “that is exactly what might expect from a jury in Mississippi or South Carolina.”


1892: A supply of flour arrived today at Zionsville, the Russian Jewish Colony in Gloucester County, NJ and was quickly turned in to bread to feed the “famished” Jewish “families.


1892: A “carload of Russian Jews arrived at Port Huron, Michigan tonight from Liverpool by way of Montreal. 


1892: In the UK, the Jewish Chronicle described the arrival of a group of Polish Jews at the Isle of Jersey and their desire to hold services if they can obtain a Sefer Torah.


1892: Gottlieb Deininger, a member of the Haifa Templer Colony passed away today leaving his widow Mary and their children an estate valued at 50,488 Piasters including stone house, a two and half acre vineyard and 243 gallons of “new Carmel wine.”  (The Zionists were not the only Europeans who were settling in this part of the Ottoman Empire prior to WW I)


1893: It was reported today that the Jews of Camden, NJ, have formed “The Hebrew Protective Club” to protect “the members from robbery, insult, assault and murder” and will be retaining a lawyer “who will be permanently engaged to look after their interests.”


1893: Dr. Christian Adolf Stoecker the former Chaplain of the Court of Berlin and leading anti-Semite who arrived in New York yesterday left from Philadelphia where he had stayed with the house surgeon of the German Hospital today for Chicago. Stoecker joined the anti-Semitic movement in 1888 “because he believed that the Hebrews in several cities and districts in Germany were persecuting and oppressing the Christians.” (This is four decades before the rise of Hitler)


1893: In what may be the first round of a general strike in the clothing industry, the finishers went on strike. Eighty per-cent of the 25,000 workers in the clothing in New York’s clothing industry are Jewish, most of whom are immigrants from Russia and Poland.


1893: Birthdate of Hobart, Tasmania, native Betty Lewis, who gained fame as Betty Isaacs the sculptor and “wife of City Magistrate Julius Isaacs.”



1894(1st of Elul, 5654): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1894: “Man’s Oldest Civilization” published today provided a lengthy review of New Light on the Bible and the Holy Land: Recent Discoveries in the East by Basil T. Evetts.


1894: Approximately 600 employees decided to go on strike at Julius Stein & Co in New York City.


1894:  Birthdate of Austrian author Joseph Roth best known for his family saga, The Radetzky Marchand for his novel of Jewish life Job.


1895: The tailors, most of whom are Jewish, “will celebrate their victory over the contractors today, Labor Day, with a big mass meeting and parade.”


1895(13thof Elul, 5655): Eighty-one year old Joshua Heschel Schorr a leading proponent of the Haskalah (Enlightenment Movement) whose criticism of traditional rabbis and their teachings were recorded in He-Haluz, a Hebrew magazine that he edited, passed away today in his hometown of Brody today


1896 Birthdate of Odessa native Shmuel Yeivin, the Israeli archaeologist who served as the Director of the Israeli Department of Antiquities from 1948 to 1961.


1896: “Stein’s Heavy Stealings” published today described how the jewelry firm of Julius M. Lyon was forced to close its doors do the embezzlement orchestrated by 26 year old Julius Stein, his most trusted employee, that cost the firm  over $200,000.


1897: Dr. Julius Wasserman conducted the funeral services for Lazarus Morgenthau at the residence of is son J.C. Morgenthau which were followed by burial “in the family vault at Salem Fields, Cypress Hills Cemetery.”


1897: Birthdate of concentration camp commandant who was hung for his crimes while his wife was sentenced to life imprisonment.


1897: Writing in the American Israelite, Reform Rabbi Isaac M. Wise expressed his belief in the impossibility of the Zionist dream due in part to Herzl’s ignorance about Judaism and the inevitable clash between him and Orthodox Jewry.


1898: At the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan where John Maxwell who would support the creation of the Zion Mule Corps but opposed a Jewish “fighting force” led he 2ndBrigade in a battle that helped to burnish the reputation of Winston Churchill who would go on to have close, yet strange relationship, with Jewish constituents and political leaders including Chaim Weizman 


1898: The “wealthy Jews” living at Hempstead, Long Island and surrounding villages are considering a plan to build a synagogue.


1898: During the Dreyfus affair, the presidential decision that ratified the board of inquiry’s decision to discharge Estherhazy “for habitual misbehavior” was made today, three days after Colonel Henry’s suicide.


1898: Herzl leaves Basel and sets out for the Bodensee island of Mainau, for an audience with the Grossherzog Friederich of Baden. The main topic of the audience is Kaiser Wilhelm's journey to Palestine.


1899: “Notes and News,” a compilation of information from various publishing houses reported today that the September issue of Century contains a “timely article” entitled “An American Forerunner of Dreyfus” that tells the story of a gallant naval officer who early in the present century was persecuted throughout his career because he was a Jew.”  (Editor’s note – this must be a reference to Commodore Uriah P. Levy)


1902(30thof Av, 5662): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1905: A disastrous fire in Adrianople, Turkey destroys 1500 Jewish homes and 13 synagogues. 10,000 Jews were rendered homeless along with the 40,000 who already were.


1906(12th of Elul, 5666): Rabbi Elias Epstein passed away


1907: Sir Matthew Nathan, the son of Jewish Paddington businessman Jonah Nathan became the 7thGovernor of Natal.


1908: The Conference for the Yiddish Language organized by Nathan Birnbaum continued to meet in Czernowitz.


1911: Alderman Henry E.  Davis was re-elected May of Gravesend in Great Britain.


1912: Birthdate of David Daiches, the Scottish literary critic and writer whose memoir was entitled “Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood.”


1913(30th of Av, 5673): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1913: Birthdate of Israel Gelfand, the prize-winning Soviet mathematician.


1913: The 11thWorld Zionist Congress met today in Vienna where it approved a resolution “to establish a Hebrew University in Palestine.”


1915: “Brooklyn Jews Greet Gov. Alexander” published today described plans for the upcoming visit of Idaho Governor Moses Alexander, the only Jewish person to serve as a state chief executive.


1915: Two weeks after the lynching of Leo Frank, Tom Watson equated the hanging with an act of God as he wrote in The Jeffersonian, “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” 


1915: The circulation of Tom Watson’s The Jeffersonian reached 87,000 today, triple the number of issues sold before Watson began writing articles condemning Leo Frank as the murder of Mary Phagan.


1916(4th of Elul, 5676): Glasgow-born Lt Edwin Schonfield, 2/19 London Regiment was killed today on the Western Front.


1916: “The Joint Distribution Committee of the Funds for the Relief of Jewish War Sufferers announced” today “that it had been notified from Washington that the cruiser Des Moines now at Barcelona had been ordered to Alexandria by the Secretary of the Navy to carry” medical supplies for the hospitals in Palestine which had been embargoed by the Allies to the port of Jaffa.


1916: It was reported today that Jacob de Hass, the Secretary of the Provisional Committee for General Zionists had recently written a letter in which he took exception to a report by three teachers from American colleges in Turkey who said “that on their visit to Palestine they learned that all the Jews had been deported from Jerusalem with the exception of a few who had accepted the Moslem faith.”


1917: It was reported today that it is imperative that the drive to raise at least a million dollars in the upcoming drive for the Jewish War Relief Fund to be successful for Julius Ronsewald of Chicago to make good on his offer “to give an amount equal to 10 per cent of all funds raised in America.”


1917: “A committee of 100 women to canvas the east side of New York for money to be used in relief work among the families of Jewish soldiers was organized” today “in the office of Dr. Louis Glucksman…where the committee will have its headquarters.


1917: The American Jewish Congress meeting did not take place today as planned because it was postponed until November based on a recommendation made by the Administrative Committee.


1918: “Australians of the Second Division” under the command of Sir John Monash completed their capture of the rest of Peronne during the Battle of Mont Saint-Quentin.


1918: Private Daniel Stern who had been drafted in February, 1918 and landed in France where he served as a bugler was totally blinded for six week after he was gassed during fighting today in the Argonne.


1921: “Roswolsky's Mistress” a silent German filed directed by Felix Basch based on a novel by George Froeschel who wrote the script along with Henrik Galeen and Hans Janowitz.


1923: Universal Pictures released the Irving Thalberg production of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”


1924: In Wolomin, Poland, Izaak Krasucki and his wife gave birth to French trade unionist Henri Krasucki.


1926: Birthdate of department store mogul, political activist and philanthropist Betsy Bloomingdale.


1926: The opinion that there is unity in American Jewry and the only real division is on the question of Jewish nationalism and Zionism is voiced by today’s “American Israel” Referring to the various rabbinical seminaries that have been established in American Jewry, the paper continues thus: "These widely varying institutions are typical of the divisions in American Jewry. We have the strictly orthodox, the moderately orthodox, the middle of the road, the moderately reform, the ultra-reform and the Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana and Kaddish Jew, each holding firmly to his own views. "In a number of instances these differences of opinion have resulted in the useless duplication of philanthropic institutions, especially hospitals, homes for indigent aged and infirm and orphans homes. "Here the main dividing factor is the matter of 'Kashruth,' not only according to the commands of Mosaic Law, but also the requirements added after the Scriptural era by the Rabbis and other Talmudic authorities. "Yet all these divisions in American Jewry, irremediable as they apparently appear are, after all, not so wide, not so important as they seem. "Whenever persecution becomes violent, as it is at present in Europe, and misfortune in its direct forms comes upon our brethren anywhere, the truth of the old maxim. 'All Israel are brethren' is sure to be again verified and help is given unstintedly by all Jews, regardless of the particular kind of Judaism they may profess. This has been splendidly exemplified during the last few years in which brief-period American Jewry, in addition to private benefactions, has contributed not less, probably more than one hundred million dollars for the alleviation of the misery brought upon suffering coreligionists through the fanaticism and barbarism of their Christian countrymen. "After all, there is more or less unity in American Jewry. If there is any real division today it is on the question of Zionism and that, except as it refers to Nationalism, is of no vital importance."


1928: Birthdate of Sir Patrick Hamilton Moberly who “worked at the British embassy in Israel as Counsellor (Commercial) from 1970 to 1974” and “served as British Ambassador to Israel” from 1981 to 1984.


1929(27th of Av, 5689): Forty-four year old avant-garde German film make Paul Leni passed away today in California where he had been working since 1927 when “he accepted Carl Laemmle's invitation to become a director at Universal Studios and moved to Hollywood.”




1931: New York state Supreme Court justice Alfred Frankenthaler will hear a motion this morning seeking “to restrain the national officers” of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America “from interfering with the activities of the local Cutters Union 4.


1932: Birthdate of Arnold Shepard Greenberg, the Brooklyn native who founded beverage giant “Snapple” with his brother-in-law.


1932: In Hamburg, Germany, George Mengers and Ruth Levy gave birth to “Sue Mengers, a powerful agent who represented stars like Barbra Streisand and Steve McQueen and helped shape Hollywood’s vibrant revival in the 1970s” (As reported by Michael Cieply)


1934: Dr. Joseph H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom officiates at consecration of the Wembly United Synagogue


1935: Hundreds of mourners attended the funeral for Herman Bernstein in New York City. During the eulogy, Rabbi Clifton Harby Levy said that “Herman Berstein was a fine exemplar of the Jewish American who chooses the United States for his home for what he can give, not for what he can get…He was an American Jew, faithful to America and faithful to Judaism. A native of Russia, Bernstein was educated in the United States where he wrote for several publications including the New York Evening Post, The Nation and the New York Times.  In 1921, he wrote History of a Lie, which exposed the Protocols of Zion as being “a notorious forgery. His diplomatic career included a stint as Ambassador to Albania. Burial was in the Montefiore Cemetery.


1935: The funeral for Rabbi Avraham Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook is scheduled to take place today at l p.m.  All cafes, theatres and places of amusement throughout Palestine will remain closed until after the funeral is over.


1936: In Budapest Maria and George Gróf gave birth to András István Gróf who as American businessman Andrew Stephen “Andy” Grove “was one of the founder and the CEO of Intel.”



1936: Premiere of “The General Died At Dawn” directed by Lewis Milestone (Leib Milstein) with a script co-authored by Clifford Odets.


1936: “The Seven Arts Feature Syndicate, which serves fifty-nine English-Jewish weeklies made public today Jewish New Year’s greetings from President Roosevelt and Governor Lehman.”


1937(26th of Elul, 5697): NYPD Lieutenant (Retired) Otto Raphael, the son of Anna Raphael and Raphael Raphael, a butcher from Russia who was a friend of New York City Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt the future President who was often his sparring partner passed away today after having retired in 1921.




1937: The Mandatory administration and police took summary action in connection with the recent wave of Jewish-Arab violence. In Hadera 15 Jews, mostly Revisionists, were arrested and summarily sentenced, under the prevention of crime ordinance, to one year's imprisonment. In Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Hadera many Jews were held for interrogation.  The Mandatory administration was usually much effective at arresting Jews than Arabs.


 1937: An Arab constable was shot and killed by Arab terrorists at the high commissioner's summer residence at Atlit.


1937: Birthdate of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky. Born Selma Schwarzwald in Lvov (Lwow, L'viv), Poland, she would gain fame for her stuffed bear named “Refugee” a replica of which would be taken into outer space by Space Shuttle Discovery Commander Mark Polansky in December of 2006.


1938: “On the border of Jaffa and Tel Aviv,” an Arab threw “a bomb…into a vegetable market wounding nine Jews, including one woman.


1938: “A synagogue in the Givat Moshe quarter,” on the border of Jaffa and Tel Aviv “was destroyed by fire early this morning after heavy Arab sniping” kept the fire brigade from approaching this building


1939: The Germans established, a camp for "civilian prisoners of war" at Stutthof, Poland


1939: As 1,400 Jews escaping from Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia land on a Tel Aviv beach, British soldiers shot and killed two refugees.


1939: In Mirecourt, Vosges, France. Roger Lang and Marie-Luce Bouchet gave birth to French political leader Jack Mathieu Émile Lang 


1939: “Thirty-six hours after the German invasion of Poland… there was widespread indignation in the House of Commons when” Prime Minister Neville “Chamberlain spoke of the possibility of German troop withdrawal to be followed by a territorial settlement with which Britain would be willing to be ‘associated.’” (Editor’s note – as can be seen by this information provided by Sir Martin Gilbert, the willingness to make deals with Hitler was a rot that infected Europe and the United States and helps to explain, but not excuse, the inability and unwillingness to do anything about that unique genocide known as the Holocaust.”


1940: German occupation authorities in Luxembourg introduced the Nuremberg Laws. All Jewish businesses were seized and handed to "Aryans."


1940: Bishop Theophil Wurm, head of the provincial Lutheran Church at Württemberg, Germany, sends a second letter to German Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick expressing his objections to "euthanasia" killings.


1941: The Germans open an exposition in Paris called "The Jew and France." Visitors see sculptures and paintings of hideous mythical Jews, Jews allegedly cursed to wander the world forever because of their supposed attack on Jesus Christ, and Jews allegedly out to control the world. Other exhibits portray the Jew as a repulsive monster destroying France. In the first few days, more than 100,000 Parisians visit the exhibit


1941: Romanians and Germans force nearly 150,000 Jews into death marches to internment camps in Bessarabia, Ukraine. Many die of beatings, random shootings, fatigue, hunger, thirst, exposure, and disease.


1941: Chemists and mechanics at the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) Criminal Technical Institute develop an execution van with engine exhaust directed to the sealed rear-cargo area.


1941: Jews in Slovakia, Bohemia, and Moravia are ordered to wear Yellow Stars, effective September 19, and to suspend all business activity.


1941 Ukrainian nationalist Ulas Samchuk, editor of the newspaper Volhyn, writes that Jews and Poles "must disappear completely from our cities."


1942: Over the next three days, 6,000 more Jews from Wlodzimierz would join the 7,000 Jews gathered the previous day for transport to the death camps. Babies were dropped to their death from hospital windows. One enterprising German began catching them with his bayonet.


1942: The Nazis liquidated the Mir ghetto


1942: Ten thousand Jews in Dzialoszyce, Poland were gathered. Two thousand were killed in a bloody purge during the day. Eight thousand were deported to Belzec.


1942 In Oslo, Norway, Julius Samuel, the chief rabbi of Norway, refuses to go into hiding or to flee the country. He is arrested and interned in a camp at Berg, south of Oslo. 


1942: At Lachva (aka Lachwa) in Belorussia, which at that time was part of the Soviet UnionGerman troops, together with Belorussian police, surrounded the ghetto which still contained 2,000 people. Dov Lopatin head of the Judenrat refused the German request to line up for deportation. Although many of the town’s elders were against taking any initiative, Lopatin and the youth leaders decided to resist even without weapons. As the Germans entered, most of the town attacked them even though they were only “armed” with axes, sticks, and Molotov cocktails. Between 600 and 700 Jews were killed fighting, and a further 600 succeeded in reaching the forests after killing or wounding about 100 Nazis. The rest were shot by the Germans. Many of those who reached the forests were killed by local police units. Approximately 90 people survived. The resistance ended on the following day.


1942: Birthdate of attorney Robert Shapiro, part of O.J. Simpson’s Dream Team who cofounded LegalZoom.


1943: “Proposals for the immediate rescue of as many Jews as possible from the Nazi-controlled countries of Europe, for the post-war rehabilitation of Jewish life in those lands and for an international bill of rights to safeguard their political status in the future were approved” today “by the American Jewish Conference as it brought to a close its five day meeting at the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria.”


1943: One thousand Jews are deported from Paris to Auschwitz


1943: Ten thousand Jews from Tarnów, Poland, are deported to Auschwitz and the Plaszów slave-labor camp.


1943(2nd of Elul, 5703): Fifty-one year old Joseph Diamond, a World War I veteran, former vaudevillian and clothing manufacture passed away today Rochester, NY. He was a Republican and a member of Temple B’rith Kodesh


1943: During the next 48 hours, 3,500 Jews are deported from Przemysl, Poland, to Auschwitz.


1943: At Treblinka the Jews who were left behind to clean out the recently closed camp revolted against their guards. Wearing a guard's uniform, Seweryn Klajnman led his fellow 12 inmates out of the camp to their freedom. The remaining Jews would be sent to Sobribor after the final dismantling of Treblinka. Treblinka was plowed over and turned into a farm.


1944(14th of Elul, 5704): Forty-eight year old Bella Rosenfield Chagall, the first wife of Marc Chagall whom she met when he was a penniless painter in 1909, married in 1915 and posed for several of his pictures including “Bella with White Collar passed away.



1944(14th of Elul, 5704): Forty four year old New York City native Pincus “Pinky” Match who played for CCNY from 1923 to 1925 when it was a national powerhouse passed away today.


1944: Walter Suskind, who had been released from Westerbork transit camp, finds out that his family is about to be shipped to Theresienstadt and joins them for what will be a trip that leads to their death at Auschwitz-Birkenau.


1944: Approximately 2000 Jews deported from Plaszów, Poland, are gassed to death at Auschwitz.


1944: Diarist Anne Frank and her family were placed on the last transport train from Westerbork to Auschwitz. They would arrive at their destination three days later.


1945: World War II officially ended as Japan signed the terms of surrender on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri.


1945: Among those attending the surrender of Japan was Bernard Schwartz who was serving aboard the submarine tender U.S.S. Proteus. Year’s later actor Tony Curtis would say, “That was one of the greatest moments of my life.


1946:  Ayn Rand begins writing Atlas Shrugged.


1947: After having been part of the American delegation that attended the opening of the UN in 1945 at San Francisco, Congressman Sol Bloom at attended the Rio Conference where today the Rio Pact, a ground breaking mutual defense pact for nations in the Western Hemisphere was signed.


1950: In Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Yashuva Kolontarov and Tamara Khanimova Kolontarova gave birth to Tajik-American dance Malika Kolontarova, known as the “Queen of Tajik & Eastern Dance.”


1950: Birthdate of Los Angeles native and University of Chicago Law School grad, Harvey Robert Levin, the Emmy Award winning founder of TMA and “longtime partner of Chiropractor Andy Mauer.”



1951: In the wake of the assassination of Jordan’s King Abdullah, Israel has informed the Big Three (U.S., Great Britain and France) that it will not stand idly by if there is a change in the Middle East that would result in Jordan’s union with Syria or Iraq.  Israel will take act to protect its self if Syrian or Iraqi troops take up positions on the east bank of the Jordan River. 


1952: “Monkey Business” produced by Sol Siegel with a script by Ben Hecht and I.A.L. Diamond was released in the United States by 20th Century Fox.


1952: Yosef Opatoshu, the 65-year-old Polish-born Yiddish writer, arrived aboard the SS Kedma, as a guest of the Histadrut Executive.  Optashua was famous in his own right but he is also known as the father of American character actor David Opatoshu.  One of David Opatoshu's most famous roles was that of the Zionist leader Arik in the movie “Exodus.”  The character was loosely based on Menachem Begin.


1953: Attackers infiltrated from Jordan, and reached the neighborhood of Katamon, in the heart of Jerusalem. They threw hand grenades in all directions. No one was hurt.


1953: Birthdate of multi-talented musician John Zorn who is the leader of “the musical group Masada.”


1954(4th of Elul, 5714): Franz Leopold Neumann a German-Jewish political activist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best-known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism passed away today at the age of 54.  He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of his career in the United States. Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Arnold Bergstraesser, Neumann is considered to be among the founders of modern political science in the Federal Republic of Germany.


1957: Arthur Hiller made his directorial debut today with the release of “The Careless Years” in the United States by United Artists – a movie that included a musical score by Michael Kamen.


1964(25th of Elul, 5724): Eighty-six year old Rudolph Lessing, the son of Simon and Clara Lessing and husband of Milly Lessing the native of Bamberg who moved to England where he was the chief chemist at the Mond Nickel Company, a member of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society and Prsident of the National Society for Clean Air.


1965: Rabbi Amram Blau, the legendary leader of the extremist, ultra-Orthodox group Neturei Karta married Ruth Ben-David in a Bnei Brak yeshiva.


1967: Uwe Kohler at Aichach women's prison today where he found out that his mother, Ilse Koch who was serving a life sentence for her murderous crimes during WW II had committed suicide the day before.


1969: The last episode of the original “Star Trek” television series is broadcast.  Most people did not know that the actors playing the Captain and his loyal first officer were played by Jewish actors.


1968: In Brooklyn, Myron and Regina Rosen gave birth to James Samuel Rosen, the graduate of Johns Hopkins and Northwestern universities, FOX news personality and author who married Sara Ann Durkin in 2004.



1969(19th of Elul, 5729): At Qiryat Shemona two people, one of whom was a child, were killed today and five more were injured by artillery shells fired from Lebanon.


1973: Eighty-seven year old Fritz Konrad Ferdinand Grobba Nazi Germany’s Ambassador to Iraq in 1941, who played a key role in the coup that led to the Farhud, the pogrom in Baghdad in which “nearly 300 Jews were killed, over 2,000 Jews were injured and 600 Jewish businesses were looted.”


1974: “Monument of Jewish sculptor Ernst Neizvestny was installed on the grave of Nikita Khrushchev.”


1974(15th of Elul, 5734): Sixty-nine year old Ruven Avinoam, who as Chicago native Ruben Grossman, moved to Palestine in 1929 where he taught English literature at Hezliyyah high school, became a published author, serve as “supervisor of English studies at the Israel Ministry of Defense” and raised a son Noam, an author who died in the War of Independence passed away today.


1975: Thomas Paul Malone completed his service as Canada’s ambassador to Israel.


1975: “Jewish leaders agree in Paris to hold a Second World Conference on Soviet Jewry in Brussels in February 1976.”


1975: Yasir Arafat was awarded a gold medal by the World Peace Council an organization that traces its origins back to Cominform (a Soviet organization known as the Communist Information Bureau)


1976(7th of Elul, 5736): Ninety-seven year old Colonel Ernest Albert Rose who married Julie Eda Lewis at the Synagogue Princes Road Synagogue in Liverpool passed away today.


1978: Italian premiere of “Dawn of the Dead” co-starring Gaylen Ross as “Francine Parker.”


1987: The Holocaust themed film, ''Flames in the Ashes,''  opens at Film Forum 1 asking the question, ‘Who is more heroic, one who goes in the woods to fight with a gun or one who decides to go that last road and die with his family? 


1991: “McBain,” a film about violence and revenge “written and directed by James Glickenhaus”


1991: Jerry Lewis' 26th Muscular Dystrophy telethon raised $45 Million.


1994: “The Hudsucker Proxy” a comedy directed by Joel Coen, produced by Ethan Coen with a script written by the brothers and Sam Raimi and starring Paul Newman premiered in the United Kingdom.


1997(30th of Av, 5757): Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning passed away. There is no way to justice to the man or his writings in this brief space.  If you have not read Man’s Search for Meaning, you should.  If you have read it, you should read it again.“Don’t aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run - in the long run, I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it." - Man's Search for Meaning




1998: “The musical revival group 42nd Street Moon in San Francisco, presented a staged concert of Redhead,” “a musical with music composed by Albert Hague and lyrics by Dorothy Fields, who with her brother, Herbert, along with Sidney Sheldon wrote the book/libretto.”


2000(2nd of Elul, 5760): Ninety-eight year old author and screenwriter Curt Siodmak passed away today.




2000: “The Man Who Cried,” a film about “young Russian Jewish girl who grows up in England” featuring an appearance by Ukrainian born Israeli actor Mark Ivanir premiered today at the Venice Film Festival.


2001: The New York Times included reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest includingThe Marble Quilt: Stories by David Leavitt.


2002: “Far From Heaven,” a film that looks behind the façade of mid-20th century suburbia with music by Elmer Bernstein and filmed by cinematographer Edward Lachman premiered today at the Venice International Film Festival.


2003: The appointment of 49 year old Jill Abramson as the managing editor for news gathering at the New York Times takes effect today.


2003: The Boeing Company named David Ivry who had served as commander of the IAF and Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, as President of Boeing Israel.



2004(16th of Elul, 5764): In Honolulu Marilyn M. Lichton, co-founder of the Hadassah-Hawaii chapter and secretary of Temple Emanu-El passed away at the age of 74.


2005: Funeral services in Cedar Rapids for Leo Handler, father of Mark Handler and Barbara Feller.  Mr. Handler passed away on September 1 at the age of 85.


2005: Writer and director Noah Baumbach married actress Jennifer Jason Leigh today.


2005: Funeral services were held in Brookfield, Wisconsin for Ruth Swider Gelbart (Ruchl bat Szaja Pesach v'Rivka Laiya), mother of Marsha Fensin, former Cantor at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids.  Mrs. Gelbart was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto.  She made her way to Palestine while it was still under the control of the British before moving to the United States after the untimely death of her husband.  


2006:Security forces said they had arrested two Palestinian militants suspected of trying to launch rockets from the West Bank into central Israel with the backing of Hezbollah. At the same time, Italian troops started arriving in Lebanon as part of the UN peacekeeping force that will enable Israeli forces to withdraw under the terms of the UN brokered cease fire with the same Hezbollah organization.


2007:As part of European Day of Jewish Culture and Heritage the Manchester Jewish Museum is fully playing its part on this day when important Jewish buildings throughout Europe are freely open to the public. The theme of the day is “Testimonies”. Visitors hear testimonies from the extensive collection of interviews with Manchester Jews about their lives as newcomers to Manchester in which they described the joys and sorrows of growing up in Manchester in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries. At well known raconteur Stanley Hyman entertains and amuse with his vivid recollections of Manchester Jewish life.


2007: The Sunday New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Marc Chagall by Jonathan Wilson, Jews and Power by Ruth R. Wisse, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman and Away by Amy Bloom.


2007: The Sunday Washington Post book section featured a review of Interventionsby Jewish gadfly Noam Chomsky.


2007: In London, the ZF conference, entitled “Israel at 60” comes to an end.


2007: In Glenn Kessler’s recently released The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy Rice is described as thinking that Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was a weak disappointment and that President Bush’s signature Mideast peace program was unworkable.


2007: On the eve of the Labour Day classic Canadian Football League game which he was to host, Canadian sport journalist Elliotte Friedman shaved his head bald in secret without telling many family members or friends. This was in recognition of a young boy he met at a shopping mall whose parents informed him their child was a big fan of his and watched all his broadcasts. Unfortunately, the boy was afraid to greet Elliotte due to the fact that he was bald as a side effect of his chemotherapy. As a result, Elliotte shaved his head in secret in order to show the young man that there is nothing wrong with being bald.


2007: Craig Breslow was sent back to the minors today after having been called up to the Big Leagues yesterday by the Boston Red Sox.


2008: A new 120mm mortal shell with a built-in guidance system that allows operators to direct the shell to its target with a laser-honing device was unveiled at a press conference held at Israel Military Industries (IMI) headquarters in Ramat Hasaharon.


2008: In a story entitled “Entrepreneurs Find Ways to Make Technology Work with Jewish Sabbath,” Dan Levin describes how “the rabbis, scientists and engineers of the Zomet Institute are trying to solve the problems that arise when technology and the Torah collide.


2009: Just before the start of the High Holidays, The Jerusalem Theater presents a festive concert of classic pieces from the cantorial repertoire, including "Mamale” and Rosenblatt's "All of Israel are Brothers."


2009: Archaeologists digging in Jerusalem have uncovered a 3,700-year-old wall that is the oldest example of massive fortifications ever found in the city, the Israel Antiquities Authority said today.


2009: At Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Park, Madonna appeare at the second and last of two concerts that are the final stop on her “Sticky and Sweet” tour


2010: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met today in Washington, DC as peace talks resume under the auspice of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton.



2010: Today, a Hamas spokesman said the group was responsible for another attack in which two settlers were shot and wounded just as Mr. Obama began his White House meetings. Reuters quoted a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, as saying “operations of resistance will continue” and neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority would be able to thwart them.



2010: Yula and The Extended Family, featuring Tel Aviv native Yula Beeri, are scheduled to perform at the Highline Ballroom in New York. 



2010(23rd of Elul, 5770): Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt, a native of Warsaw passed away in Jerusalem today.



http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3948435,00.html



http://www.donlevine.com/uploads/1/1/3/8/11384462/_eisenstadt_obituary-dlevine.pdf



2010(23rd of Elul, 5770):Ninety-one  year old deputy police inspector Seymour Pine who led the raid on the Stonewall Inn passed away today. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/nyregion/08pine.html



2011: Madelyn Kent, an award-winning theater artist and published writer with an MFA from New York University, is scheduled to teach the first session of a four week long Jerusalem Memoir Workshop.



2011:In Washington, DC, at the Historic Sixth & I Synagogue, Rabbi Shira Stutman is scheduled to lead an egalitarian, chavurah-style service and celebrate “Labor on the Bimah,” an initiative of Jews United for Justice. Labor on the Bimah weaves together labor issues, social justice and Judaism, in an effort to bring meaning and reflection back into Labor Day.



2011:Germany's Foreign Ministry announced today that it will not take part in the UN-sponsored Durban III anti-racism conference on September 22, because of the possibility that the event can be turned into a forum for anti-Semitic statements.



2011: Turkey said today it will seek to prosecute all Israelis responsible for the deaths of nine Turkish activists during an IDF raid on a ship bound for the Gaza Strip in May 2010.



2012: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including When We Argued All Night by Alice Mattison, “a book about the trajectories of 20th-century Jewish life” and the recently released paperback edition of Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in Englandby Anthony Julius



2012:Jewish Homegrown History: Immigration, Identity and Intermarriage” is scheduled to have its final showing at the Skirball Cultural Center



2012: In the wake of Hurricane Isaac, Congregation Beth Israel is scheduled to dedicate its new facility in Metairie.  The original building was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.



2012: All 50 families living in the Migron outpost evacuated their homes today in advance of a court-imposed military evacuation set for September 4th.



2012: A long-lost poem by Hannah Szenes, titled “Hora to an exiled girl,” was revealed on Army Radio this morning, 68 years after the its Jewish paratrooper author was executed by a Nazi firing squad



2013: James Franco is scheduled to be roasted on Comedy Central


2013: “Fill the Void” is scheduled to open at Kimball Theatre in Williamsburg, VA.


2013: Mihaela Martin, Latica Honda-Rosenberg, Ori Kam, Madeleine Carruzzo and Julian Steckel are scheduled to perform Mozart’s String Quintet in C Major, K515 at The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.


2013: In Budapest, the Jewish Summer Festival is scheduled to come to an end.


2013: Today, “Pope Francis assigned a senior church official to investigate the current ban on Jewish and Muslim religious slaughter in Poland, where such practices have been illegal since January…The Pope also reiterated a statement he made earlier this year that “a Christian cannot be an anti-Semite” (As reported by Sam Sokol)


2013: A 92-year-old who served in the Waffen-SS, Adolf Hitler's elite Nazi troops, goes on trial today in the western city of Hagen on charges of having shot in the back and killed a Dutch resistance fighter at the end of World War II.



2014: Dr. Efraim Lev and Dr. Moshse Lavee are scheduled to begin a week-long visited to the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut.


2014: At Temple Judah, choir rehearsal begins in preparation for the High Holidays.


2014: “The Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court issued an injunction today against an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school that took over part of a secular Beit Shemesh public school, ordering it to leave the building amid protests over a “creeping conquest” into secular institutions in the deeply divided city.” (As reported by Yifa Yaakov and Marissa Newman)


2014: Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said that “the direct cost of Operation Protective Edge stands at more than $9 billion.” (As reported by Itay Blumenthal)


2014: “Two French teenage girls are arrested for plotting to blow up a synagogue in Lyon. A Central Directorate of Homeland Intelligence source said the teens were “part of a network of young Islamists who were being monitored by security services.” (As reported by Stephanie Butnick)


2014(7thof Elul, 5774): The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant released a video of the beheading of a man they identified as Steven J. Sotloff.




2015: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to sponsor a lecture by Professor Wallace J. Mlyniec of Georgetown University Law Center on “The Old East End: Civil War to the Modern Revival.”


2016(29thof Av, 5776): Seventy-five year old music manager Jerry Heller passed away today. (As reported by Christopher Mele)



2016: “The Kind Words” a comedy about three Jewish Israeli siblings who learned that the man who raised them was not their biological father is scheduled to be shown in Columbus, Ohio.


2016: Erev Shabbat, “Jonathan Rideau, member of the Jewish community of Porto arrived at The Kadoorie Mekor Haim Synagogue in Porto” a town in northern Portugal whose Jewish community was wiped out in the 15th century but today has become “a safe haven for Jews despite the growth of anti-Semitism in other parts of Europe.



2017(11thof Elul, 5777): Parashat Ki Taytzay


2017(11thof Elul, 5777): Ninety-year old photographer and documentarian Murray Lerner passed away today. (As reported by Neil Genzlinger)



2017: At Shabbat services this morning, Jews will be mourning Shelly Berman who passed away erev of Shabbat.


2017: Israel lost to Macedonia 1-0 tonight which probably put an end “any hope it might have had a making to the World Cup.


2017: “Hall of Fame NFL coach and World War II veteran Marv Levy, attended a ceremony marking the 72nd anniversary of V-J Day, today at the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C


2017: Tony Levine, the special team’s coordinator is scheduled to take the field as Purdue begins its football season today.


2017: As Iowa begins its 2017 football season, Esther Hugenholtz is scheduled to lead her first Shabbat morning service at Agudas Achim.


2017: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education is scheduled to offer free admission to those coming to see the Bill Graham Exhibit honoring “the rock impresario who used music for social change.


2018: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure co-authored by Jonathan Haidt and the recently released paperback edition of Improvement by Joan Silber


2018: The Jerusalem Centre for the Performing Arts is scheduled to host a screening of “The Unorthodox” in Uzi Wexler Hall.


2018: In Des Moines, IA, The Jewish Federation is scheduled to co-host a matinee screening of the newly released “Operation Finale.”


2018(22ndof Elul, 5778): Thirty-third yahrzeit of Joseph B. Levin, husband of Deborah Levin and father of Judy, Mitchell and David who in a strange twist of fate is responsible for this blog.


 


 


 


 

This Day, September 3, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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141 BCE (18th of Elul, 3619): The fight begun by Matthias and Judah came to a successful conclusion when Simon was elected High Priest and was recognized as the governing authority of an independent Jewish state.



301: San Marino, one of the smallest nations in the world and the world's oldest republic still in existence, is founded by Saint Marinus. During World War II the 15,000 people of San Marino provided a refuge for 100,000 fleeing the fascists, including a large number of Jews.


590: Gregory I, known to history as St. Gregory and/or Gregory the Great became Pope at the age of 50.  At first blush, Gregory seems to be a classic anti-Semite.  He regarded Judaism as “depravity” and Jewish interpretation of the Bible as “perverse.”  For all intents and purposes he banned conversion to Judaism.  He banned Christians from working for Jews.  He also limited opportunities by ordering Christians not to use Jewish doctors and forbidding the clergy from employing Jewish clerks.  Following the precedent of Justinian, he barred Jews from holding public office, forbade the building of new synagogues and urged the rescuing of Jews from “their false” doctrines i.e. conversion to Christianity.  At the same time, Gregory opposed forced conversion, calling on church officials to use “gentleness and kindness to make the Jews desire to change their way of life.”  For Jews who did not wish to convert he said, We will not have the Hebrews oppressed and afflicted unreasonably.”  On more than one occasion Gregory intervened on behalf of the Jews when they were attacked even by mobs led by officials of the Church. When synagogues were invaded, Gregory ordered the buildings to be restored to the Jews and repairs made to any damaged items.  When a converted Jew entered a synagogue and tried to make it into a church, Gregory responded with the following admonition, “Just as the law forbids he Jews the building of new synagogues, it also guarantees them preservation of the old ones.”  Gregory strongly opposed Judaism, but compared to his contemporaries and successors, he “did not lack scruples.”


1189: Many Jews living in London were killed in riots during the coronation of Richard I. One of the victims was Rabbi Jacob of Orleans a student of the famous Rabbenu Tam.  Richard the Lionhearted was not an anti-Semite.  In fact he moved to stop the riots.  Unfortunately Richard was so busy with the third Crusade and fighting to hold his lands in France that he had no time to protect the Jews.


1260: The Mamelukes defeat the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine, marking their first decisive defeat and the point of maximum expansion of the Mongol Empire. The battle was fought in the Jezreel Valley in the Galilee.  It seems a little strange to those who connect this geography with David and Goliath to think of the Mongols of the Kahns fighting to control Eretz Israel. The Mamluks were Moslems.  Their immediate connection with the Jewish people can be traced to one of the founders of the Egyptian Caliphate, Saladin who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem.  After 1260, inland Jewish communities such as Safed grew replacing coastal communities such as Acre in importance. The battle was the high water mark for Mongol attempts to conquer the land that came to be known as the Ottoman Empire.


1658: Oliver Cromwell the Lord Protector of England, died at the age of 59. Cromwell gets high marks in terms of Jewish history.  He was responsible for bringing openly practicing Jews back to Englandafter a three and one half century absence.  Even with Cromwell championing their cause, the road to readmission was not smooth.  However by 1657, a year before the Lord Protector’s death, the Jews of London felt secure enough in their position to purchase a building to serve as a synagogue.


1730: Sixty-year old Nicholas Mavrocordatos, the Prince of Moldavia and Wllachia who employed Daniel de Fonseca, a Marano from Portugal as his personal physician passed awa today.


1758(30th of Av, 5518): Rosh Chodesh Elul             


1758: During a power struggle in Portugal, failed attempt to assassinate King Joseph I during a period when the Portuguese Inquisition was punishing untold numbers of conversos throughout the empire.


1777(1stof Elul, 5537): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1777: During the American Revolution in New Castle County, Delaware, “British and Hessians defeated American militia” today.


1778: Forty three year old Ezekiel Solomon and the former Marie Elizabeth Louise Dubois gave birth to Elisabeth Solomon.


1783: The American Revolutionary War ends with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The majority of Jews in the Colonies had supported the American cause.  The treaty ensured them and their progeny a life in “the last best hope of man.”


1808: Birthdate of Michael Sachs, one of the first rabbis to a Ph.D. from a “modern university” who led congregations in Prague and Berlin before retiring because of his strong opposition to the rising Reform movement.


1814: In London, English merchant Abraham Joseph and his wife gave birth to James Joseph who gained famed as mathematician James Joseph Sylvester.


1813: In Buda, Ignacz baron Eötvös de Vásárosnamény and Anna von Lilien gave birth to József baron Eötvös who began advocating Jewish emancipation in 1841 and succeeded in having “the diet pass his bill for the emancipation of the Jews” in 1867.


1819: “Le Moniteur Universel reported today in an article from Hamburg…that quarrels and fights erupted every night” in Hamburg where “if a Jew dared to be seen on a public walkway or enter a coffeehouse frequented largely by Christians, he would certainly meet violent opposition.”


1826: Coronation of Czar Nicholas I anarrow-minded, reactionary, despot who was so incompetent that he led Russia to disaster in the Crimean War. As a totalitarian dictator, Nicholas was fully responsible for all of his action aimed at his Jewish subjects.  These included but were 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.  And this list does not include the mistreatment of the general populace with such measures as the establishment of a secret police system designed to stamp out any manifestation of democracy or Western values.”


1834:Birthdate of German rabbi, Hermann Tietz.


1836 (21st of Elul, 5596):Daniel Mendoza who was boxing champion of England from 1792 to 1795 and is called “the father of scientific boxing” passed away.


1837: “Representatives of New York’s three synagogues and two benevolent society launched the city’s first communal charity drive.”


1839: Birthdate of Charles Wessolowsky an immigrant from Prussia who became a leading citizen in Albany, GA.


1845: In Besançon, France, Adelaide (née Friedmann) and Leopold Herz, gave birth to Cornelius Herz a pioneer in the field of electricity who “was the founder, along with Alphonse de Rothschild, of the American Syndicate of Electricity.”


1845: Hyam Samuel married Miriam Levy at the Great Synagogue today.


1849: In Philadelphia, Max Friedman a native of Mulhausen who arrived in the United States in 1848 at the age of 23 and became a successful businessman married “Adeline J. Comelien, the daughter of Rowland and Amelia (nee Judah) Cromelien “today.


1851: Today Charlotte Rothschild,  “regretfully noted” that she “could not that much improvement had taken place since last December” in the academic progress of her son “Natty” and decided she was to “determined to have a new” tutor.


1852:  Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Stockholm.


1853(30thof Av, 5613): Parashat Re’eh; Rosh Chodesh Elul


1853(30thof Av, 5613): Daniel Block, a German or Bohemian born butcher who arrived in St. Louis in the late 1840’s and who was a founder of the B’nai B’rith Synagogue also known as the “Bohemian shul” which later merged with two other congregations – Emanuel and United Hebrew – “to form B’nai El Congregation passed away today leaving behind four children – Heinrich, Jacob, Dora and Abraham – who donated the tombstone in the New Mount Sinai Cemetery.




1855: Birthdate of Heinrich Conreid, the Silesian native who became director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.


1855: In London, birthdate of communal worker Oswald John Simon.


1855: In Cincinnati, Ohio, founding of Sherith Israel whose members included Joseph Lazarus, Dave Dreifus, William Levendorf, Meyer Weil, Joseph Block, Louis Loeb, Emanuel Marks and Morris Tuch.


1857: In Kokomo, Indiana, Abraham Hays and Fanny Kahn gave birth to Emma Hays Eckhouse, the husband of Moses Eckhouse and resident of Indianapolis who was the Director of the Auxiliary to the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives in Denver, vice president of the Hebrew Ladies’ Benevolent Society and a delegate to the National Conference of Jewish Charities.


1858: Birthdate of San Francisco native Louis Solomon Haas, a “member of the stock brokerage firm of Sutro and Company who was “president of the Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum.”


1859: Birthdate of French socialist leader Jean Jaurès who was an early and energetic defender of Alfred Dreyfus.


1860: Birthdate of Edward Albert Filene, Boston merchant.  Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Filene was one of long list of American Jews who gained wealth and power as “merchant princes.”  As president of the Boston firm of William Filene's Sons he pioneered in scientific and ingenious methods of retail distribution: the "bargain basement" was one of his innovations. He planned and helped organize the Boston Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber of Commerce of the United Statesand served in World War I as chairman of the War Shipping Committee. He was active in civic reform movements and was the founder of the Cooperative League, which became the Twentieth Century Fund. He wrote several books on business methods and on economics. His liberal economic and political views made him a controversial figure.


1862: Birthdate of Moses Hyamson, the Russian born Rabbi who served as Chief Dayan (Judge) of the London Beth Din and acting Chief Rabbi of the British Empire.


1863: In Kotteso, Hungary, Joseph Deutelbaum and Fannie Zalenka gave birth Leopold Deutelbaum, the graduate of the Royal Jewish Teacher’s Seminary in Budapest and the National German-German Teachers’ Seminary in Milwaukee and husband of Johanna Kurz who lived in Cleveland from 1892 to 1900 where taught at the Jewish Orphan Asylum and the Sabbath Schools of Tifereth Israel and Anshe before becoming the Superintendent of the Chicago Home for Jewish Orphans in 1900.


1863: In Philadelphia, Lazarus and Barbara (Kahnweiler) Shloss gave birth to Florence Shloss Guggenheim.



1864: Birthdate of Samuel Abraham Poznański, “the Polish Reform rabbi, known for his studies of Karaism and the Hebrew calendar who was a delegate to the First Zionist Congress.


1864: The Varieties Theatre which would eventually become a Jewish theatre opened today at 37 Bowery.


1864: Birthdate of Francis Crawford Burkitt, the British scholar and divinity professor at Cambridge whom Solomon Schechter trusted to go through many of the Greek language manuscripts that had been found in the Cairo Geniza.  (For about this see “Sacred Trash” by Hoffman and Cole).


1872(30th of Av, 5632): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1872: “John H. Morton, boatswain of the Packetship Charles H. Marshall of the Black Ball line appeared before U.S. Commissioner of Emigration Osborne on charges of having inhumanly treated Meyer Velt, a German Jew who was a passenger on board the ship.”  Velt claimed that he had been tied up by Morton and the “repeatedly cuffed, kicked and beaten.”  Credence was added to his charges by the fact that several others on the ship complained of “bad treatment” and because similar charges had been brought against the Charles H. Marshall before.  The Commissioner sent Morton back to Castle Garden expressing regret that the law did not allow him to punish the boatswain but suggested that he be sent to Police Court to answer for his crimes.



1875: Birthdate of Albert von Breitenbach, the native of Cologne, Germany who gained fame as American songwriter Fred Fisher whose works including “Come Josephine In My Flying Machine” and “Peg O’ My Heart.”


1877: A synagogue that followed the Sephardic ritual and funded by contributions by Daniel Orsis located on the Rue Buffault in Paris was dedicated today.


1879: Three days after she had passed away “Dimante bat Moshe wife of Issachar bar Baruch HaLevi” was buried today at the Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.


1879:It was reported today that Vasile Boerescu , the Romanian Foreign Minister, has been visiting governments in Europe in an attempt to gain modifications of those parts of Treaty of Berlin which committed his government to emancipating its Jewish population.  Boerescu justified Romania’s treatment of the Jews by comparing it to the plight of Chinese in the United States.


1880(27thof Elul, 5640): Fifty-six year old Charles Steckler, a leading merchant in Jackson, CA passed away today, apparently having taken his own life.



1881: It was reported that the Board of Estimate and Apportionment has made the distributions to several New York charities including $1,957.14 to the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society.


1882: “Cairo, A Mountain Town” published today provides a description of this Catskill mountain village which provides a summer retreat for a variety of visitors “a good many” of whom “are Jews who “don’t care anything about…Sunday” and “want to play croquet, play the piano and go out riding.” According to the locals the Jews “are just like anybody else.  There’s nice Jews and there’s them that aint nice.”


1883(1stof Elul, 5643): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1883:  G.D.  Ginsburg wrote to his daughter that he had spent a month to make sure that the recently discovered scroll of Deuteronomy presented by Moses Shipra was a fake because the forger had shown “extraordinary cleverness” and skill and his diligence would make it impossible “for this clever band of rogues to” traffic in any more take antiquities.


1885: In Vienna, discovery of 250 Bettina  a large main belt asteroid “named in honour of Baroness Bettina von Rothschild, the wife of the prominent Viennese banker Albert Salomon von Rothschild who had bought the naming rights for £50.”


1885: Salomon Linnewel married Rebecca Van Biene in Amsterdam today.


1885: In New York City the apartment belonging to the family of Samuel Neuman and the adjacent schhol for Jewish children are scheduled to be fumigated today as the Health Department continues its fight against small-pox.  Neuman, the son of a Jewish tailor, was found to be infected with the disease and is being treated at Riverside Hospital.


1890: Coroner Levy went to Bellevue Hospital and had Lemuel Jaynes arrested after he ascertained that the nurse had mistakenly administered a lethal dose of carbolic acid to a typhus patient.


1891(30th of Av, 5651): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1891(30thof Av, 5651): Two months before his 2nd birthday, Frank T. Fleisher passed away today after which he was interred at Mt. Sinai Cemetery in Phildelphia.


1891: A special inquiry is to be made into the fitness of Hirsch Birchanski to remain in the United States. The Russia Jew contends that contrary to the contention of Immigration Commissioner, he does have the ability to support himself and tis therefore eligible to enter the United States.


1892: Birthdate of Brigadier General Henning Linden led a group of reporters including Marguerite Higgins and a detachment of the 42nd (Rainbow) Infantry Division as the soldiers received the surrender of the camp commander, generating international headlines by freeing more than 30,000 Jews and political prisoners


1892: As concerns of a cholera outbreak worsened, members of the Peekskill, NY, Board of Health began inspecting the streets and houses in neighborhood populated primarily by Hebrews, Hungarians and Italians. (The immigrant population was thought to be the primary carry of the disease which had broken out in Europe.)


1892: It is reported that a group of Russian Jews who had been “expelled from Odessa and traveled to Paris by way of Constantinople” under the sponsorship of the Israelite Alliance have left for Dieppe where they will set sail for Canada.  Many of the Jews sailing for Canada really want to settle in the United States and doing this to avoid the cholera quarantine at several U.S ports.


1892: “Suffering at Ziontown” published today described the desperate condition of the fifty Russian Jews at the settlement in New Jersey who are so poor that they “have been subsisting on berries and fruit picked by the wayside.”


1892: Based on reports published today, Baron de Mohrenheim, the Russian Ambassador to France believes that the Parisian press is “in the hands of the Jews” and “that the Rothschilds had opposed the Russian loan…in order to promote” a financial “collapse.”


1892: It was reported today that any plans by England, the United States and “Continental countries” to shut off the flow of immigrants from Russia because of the threat of cholera might be part of plan to stop the flow of Jews from that country, which is a problem in and of itself for these same countries.


1892: As Europe and the United States contend with a possible cholera epidemic, the “officials of Jewish relief societies confirm” that no Russian Jews are entering the Thames, the gateway to London.


1893: “Dramatic Debut…In The House” published today described the maiden speech of Coningsby Disraeli the son of Ralph Disraeli and the nephew of Benjamin Disraeli in the House of Commons.


1893: that Moses Hirschdorfer, who was facing charges of embezzlement while serving as the manager of the offices of banker, broker and steamship passage agent Bernhard Weinberger, was seen by his neighbors for the last time today.


1893: “Sketches of Business Men in New York City” published today provided a detailed sketch of the life of Oscar S. Straus.


1893: “Individual Wealth” published today traced the history of wealth distribution back to Biblical times when “The Old Testament indicates that the trade of the Jews with the East was in the hands of Solomon and that is profits enriched the King and not the people.” In modern times “the colossal fortunes of Hirsh or Rothschild…are really insignificant when contrasted with the wealth of a nation” but they attract attention like the point of a pyramid while no one looks at the base where the real wealth is.


1894: Three days she had passed away, Priscilla Levy, the daughter of Aaron Hendricks and the former Ann Mosely and the wife of Benjamin Levy was buried today at the West Ham Jewish Cemetery.


1894: “Renan’s Final Volume” published today provides as detailed review of Histoire Du Peuple D’Israel by Ernest Rean, the fifth volume of the French Jewish authors History of Israel.


1894: Members of the boards of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and United Hebrew Charities will attend the funeral of Jacob Bamberger which begins at ten thirty this morning at Temple Emanu-El


1894: About 400 clothing cutters, most of whom are Jewish held a meeting at Metropolitan Sienger Hall today and voted to go out on strike.


1894: Birthdate of Worcester, MA native and Harvard Law School graduate Joseph Talamo who was a served in WW I and was a member of the Zionist Organization of America.


1896: Based on information that first appeared in The Menorah Monthly“Jules Simon” published today reiterated the fact that the late French Prime Minister was not a Jew although he was often attacked for being one by his anti-Semitic detractors.  He was a member of the Israelite Universal Alliance and was a close friend of Aoldphe Cremieux, the French leader who was Jewish.


1896: Jesse Isidor Strauss, the son of Isidor Strauss and nephew of Oscar Solomon Strauss “began working at Macy’s” today 37 years before he began serving as U.S. Ambassador to France.


1896(25thof Elul, 5656): Eliezer ben Moses Bregman a successful Grodno businessman who gave “more than 100,000 rubles for charitable institutions” passed away today in Teplitz, Bohemia.


1897: Nathan Straus decided to stop the sale of raw milk following the arrest of one of the employee’s at the milk booth at the Hebrew Institute “on charges of selling milk below the required standard.” Straus had begun the sale of milk in 1893 as part of his campaign to improve the health of the immigrant and poor populations.


1898: In Hempstead, Long Island, Rabbi Cohen of Manhattan was among those attended a meeting at the home of Dr. A.D. Rosenthal where plans were discussed for holding High Holiday services which led to a discussion for the need for a permanent place of worship.


1898: It was reported today that according to the Irish author Edward Dowden, the tale of Shylock wanting a pound of flesh is actually a variant on a Persian tale in which the “Jew is not impelled to cruelty because the money is not returned to him but for the reason that he is in love with debtor’s wife and” he wants to get the husband out of the way.


1899(28thof Elul, 5659): Sixty-five year old Offenbach, Germany native Herman Felsenthal who “came to the United States in 1852 and pursued a banking career in Chicago and who married Gertrude Hyman Felsenthal with whom he had “nine children” passed away today after which he was buried in the Rosehill Cemetery.


1899: “Prodded the Prince of Wales” published today described a park-bench encounter at Marienbad between the Prince of Wales and an un-named Polish Jew who carried on a conversation with the future British monarch without knowing his identity that ended with him “digging his Royal Highness in the ribs and telling him he looked too healthy to need the water cure.”


1899: In The Hague, the first meeting The International Congress of History, of which Oscar S. Straus is a member of the American Section, came to a close.


1899: “Hebrew New Year Cards” published today described the growth in the sale of these “fancy affairs, ornamented with lace and flower and each with a motto or greeting in English and Hebrew” which “have been sold for some time in the Jewish stores” but a now being sold in the large department stores.


1899: It was reported today that “throughout Austria, the Radicals and Socialists are now practically united in demanding their Constitutional rights” and “complete equality for the Jews.”


1899: In Albuquerque, NM, the cornerstone for the building to house Congregation Albert was set but it would not be until April of the following year that the building would be dedicated with Pizer Jacobs who had succeeded Dr. William H. Greenburg serving as the Rabbi.


1899: “The Jews” published today provide Mark Twain’s current view on these people.


1899: Selma Kurtz made her debut at the Viennese theatre that “would become her artistic and spiritual home” today in the role of “Mignon” in the opera of the same name.


1901: Pitcher Bill Cristall made his major league debut with the Cleveland Blues.


1902(1stof Elul, 5662): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1902: Two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation Beth Israel at Hamburg. There were no celebrations.


1903: Fire destroys a synagogue at Travnik, Bosnia.


1908: In Czernowitz, theFirst Conference for the Yiddish Language comes to a close.




1910: Birthdate of Maurice Papon “a senior police official in the Vichy regime” who used his authority over the Jewish population to send over 1,500 Jews to their ultimate death at Auschwitz.



1911: Birthdate of British author Naomi Lewis, the native of “Great Yarmouth” who was the daughter of “a Latvian Jewish herring exporter” and a talented artist and musician whose name she took to avoid the anti-Semitism prevalent in the 1930’s.



1911: At its annual convention the Independent Order of Ahawas Israel passed “resolutions advocating abrogation of the Treaty of 1832 with Russia.



1911: Founding of Beth Hamidrash Hagadol in Philadelphia, PA.


1912: In Dorchester, Massachusetts, founding of Temple Beth El.


1913(1st of Elul, 5673): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1913: Former President William Howard Taft elected President of the American Bar Association.


1914: Birthdate of Paula Adelsheimer who was transported from Stuttgart to Terezin to Auschwitz where she was murdered in 1944


1914: Giacomo Paolo Giovanni Battista della Chiesa was elected Pope serving as Benedict XV who dealt with issues related to the suffering European Jewry during WW I and the early days of the implementation of the Balfour Declaration under the British mandate.


1915(24th of Elul, 5675): Ernst Nathan, the former Collector of Revenue under President Benjamin Harrison and prominent Brooklyn Republican passed away in his 74th year. A native or Prussia, Nathan had served as President of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, Temple Beth Elohim and the Jewish Federation of Brooklyn Charities.


1915: Governor Moses Alexander of Idaho, the only serving in that capacity in the United Sates is scheduled to visit Congregation Shaare Zedek in Brooklyn this evening as part of his trip to New York City.


1916: It was reported today that “there is a deplorable need for medicines and medical supplies in the Jaffa and Jerusalem districts” which is extremely for the local population since “practically the whole population of Palestine both Jew and Mohammedan, relies on the Jewish hospitals.


1916: “After a journey of nearly 20,000 miles with her three year old son Mrs. Etta Kaufman was reunited with her husband Aaron Kaufman, formerly a professor at the Royal Petrograd Conservatory of Music in Brooklyn today thanks to information provided by the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society on East Broadway.


1916: In a raid that would pre-sage the Blitz of WW II when over 20,000 Londoners would be killed including an untold number of Jews, thirteen Zepplin’s raided England “eastern counties” tonight with three of them making their way to outskirts of London where they met by anti-aircraft fire and attacks from British Air Service bi-planes.


1916(5th of Elul, 5676): Second Lieutenant Andrade Haines, 11th East Surrey, the son of Louise and Marcus Haines, the chazzan at the New West End Synagogue and the step-son of Stephen Simon Hyam was killed on the Western Front.


1917: It was reported today that Mr. Henry Morgenthau, the former American Ambassador to Turkey and his wife who just received he Legion of Honor for her work with the wounded and sick French citizens in Constantinople plan to sail from France for the United States “on the first steamship on which they obtain suitable accommodations.”


1917: It was reported today that Hugo Freund of 47 Fort Washington Avenue has said that the $10,000 he had given to the American Jewish Soldiers Bureau would be available for the use of “the committee chaired by Mrs. Louis Glucksman to raise funds for Jewish soldiers.


1917: “The Federation of Oriental Jews of America announced” today that it had received cables stating that the “recent disastrous fire at Salonika, Macedonia” that destroyed “practically the entire city” which has a large Jewish population “was caused by the explosion of enemy bombs.”
 
1917: The British cabinet formally discusses the document that will be known as the Balfour Declaration.  While most ministers favored the declaration, Edwin Montagu a Jewish member of the cabinet spoke out against the declaration.  He feared that the declaration of Palestineas the Jewish National Home would undermine the progress that British Jews had made on the road to full acceptance in their English homeland. As secretary of state to India, Montagu claimed that the pro-Zionist statement would inflame the Moslem population of India. 


1918: The Republican Parity Primary in which Solomon Levitan of Madison, Wisconsin, the President of the Commercial National Bank, is a candidate for State Treasurer, is scheduled to be held today.


1918: As of today, untold thousands of Jews are scattered in locations east of the Urals in such places as Harbin and Vladivostok as well as in Japan.


1919: In Philadelphia, “Alix and May Stern, Jewish immigrants from Russia” gave birth to photographer Philip Stern.



1920: The Inwood Country Club (a golf club on Long Island that accepted Jewish members) is scheduled to host “an extra golf tournament” today that “will be an eighteen hold medal play.”


1920: The American Hebrew published an excerpt from The Valley of Hinnon, a novel of the Urkaine by Daniel L. Mordovstev.


1920: Applications for admission to the Hebrew Technical Institute may be made in person today.


1920: Rabbi Max Reichler led Friday night services at Sinai Temple.


1920: Rabbi I Mortimer Bloom delivered a sermon on “Suffrage Achieved – the Next Step” this evening at the Hebrew Tabernacle on Broadway.


1920: Rabbi Norman Salit delivered a sermon at Friday nights entitled “Gerizim Against Ebal” at Adath Israel; pm East 169thStreet.


1920: The 12 week’s seasons of concerts sponsored by Columbia University, one of which was given at the Montefiore Home came to an end this evening.


1921: In Boston, Massachusetts, Mary Ruby and Samuel Orkin gave birth photographer and photojournalist Ruth Orkin whose assignments included photographing the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra on its first tour of the United States in 1951 photographing Jewish refugees from Iraq as they arrived in Israel.


http://www.orkinphoto.com/photographs/europe-and-israel/



http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/ruth-orkin-1921-1985-iraqui-jewish-refugees-5123335-details.aspx



https://www.pinterest.com/pin/150026231307475169/




1922: Birthdate of Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan, the Soviet born American expert in Byzantine studies.


1923: “Merry-Go-Round,” a feature film produced by Carl Laemmel, directed by Erich von Stroheim who along with Irving Thalberg wrote the scenario was released in the United States today by Universal Pictures.


1924:  Pitcher Happy Foreman made his major league debut with the Chicago White Sox.


1925: In Tajik, Sivyo Davydova and Rubin Mullodzhanov gave birth Shoista Mullojonova, the Bukharian Jewish singer.


1926: In Oklahoma City, OK, Theodore and Esther Greenberg gave birth to Alan Greenberg the future leader of Bears Stearns.


1926:A heated debate marked today's session of the Council of the League of Nations when it came to consider the report of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations on the situation in Palestine.” (As reported by JTA)


1926: A fight broke out today between a group of Bedouins and the residents of  Avodath Israel after the Jews refusing the shepherds’ request to their sheep graze on land belonging to the settlement.  The Jews refused because they it would be a violation of the government quarantine imposed in response to the current cattle plague.  (As reported by JTA)


1926: “The Son of a Sheik” a silent adventure film with music by Artur Guttman was released today in the Unites States today.


1926: The “Philadelphia Jewish Times” expressed its agreement with the statement made by Louis Marshall  “that the rights guaranteed by the national minority treaties are essentially the same as those guaranteed to citizens by the United States Constitution and therefore the Turkish Jews had no right to renounce their minority rights.” (The Turkish Jews were responding to the reform movement in Turkey where the leaders were trying to create a secular state.)


1928: In San Francisco, businessman Sydney Fisher and cabinetmaker Aileen Emanuel gave birth to Donald Fisher who with his wife Doris co-founded The Gap clothing stores.


1929: British forces repulsed an Arab raiding party this evening at El Mesha, a village east of Mount Tabor.  The Arabs suffered 26 casualties to one wounded British private. Fourteen Arabs were killed when they attacked Yesod Ha’Maalah and two others were killed when they attacked Nishmar Ha’Yarden.


1931: Elmer Berger, a Reform Rabbi who would emerge as a lead of the anti-Zionist movement, married Seville Schwartz today.


1931(21st of Elul, 5691): Sixty-five year old Eliza Aria, the London born daughter of photographer Hyman Davis and wife of “Jamaican-born merchant David Bonito Aria” who “was described as the most successful journalist of the day” passed away


1933: Birthdate of Dr. Charles Joseph Epstein, the geneticist who survived an attack by the Unabomber.


1934: The United Singers Society of Newark sponsored a Labor Day program at Union Singers Park featuring band music, fireworks and folk dancers dressed in authentic German costumes.  The program was attended by 4,000 people.  While the park was decorated with a variety of banners and flags emblematic of the German groups participating in the event, there were Nazi decorations or pictures of Hitler.  The Singers Society was a conservative organization that had distanced itself from the pro-Hitler elements in the United States.


1935: Sir Julien Cahn XI, a cricket team formed and captained by Sir Julien Cahn played Lancashire.


1936: While speaking “before the Midwest Institute of Human Relations at Lawrence College,” “Roger W. Straus, a New York engineer and co-chairman of the National Conference of Jews and Christians called for protecting of each individual man and woman “through the affirmation of religious liberty” while declaring “that a diversity of religious belief is in itself a safeguard of the tolerant conception of religion.”


1936: In his New Year’s greeting to the Jewish population published today, President Roosevelt  wrote, “Mindful of the signal part taken by the Jewish people of America in upholding the traditions and aims of our country it gives me special pleasure to extend cordial greetings to all those of the Jewish faith on this Rosh Hashanah” and expressed the hope “that the new year will bring to our fellow Jewish citizens great prosperity and happiness.”


1936: In his New Year’s greeting to the Jewish population published today, New York Governor Lehman wrote, “At this season, American Jews can with grateful hears join in thanksgiving because, in love and pride of country they can look forward with high confidence to a year of increased prosperity for American and of security for all who live here” which stands in stark contrast to “our brethren in many other lands” for whom “the past year has brought unjust oppression imminent danger and underserved distress.”


1937: “Big City” starring Luise Rainer, with a script by Dore Schary and filmed by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg was released in the United States today by MGM.


1937: After premiering in New York, “Soul at Sea” featuring Joseph Schildkraut as Gaston de Bastonet was released in the rest of the United States today.


1938:The Italian newspaper Tevere,which has been publishing harshly anti-Semitic material for several years, praises the Mussolini decree rescinding the citizenship of all Jews who entered Italy after 1919.


1938: The curtain came down on “You Can’t Take It With You” a three act play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart which had been playing at the Booth Theatre so the production could be moved to another Broadway theatre.


1938: “Exile From Italy” published today examined possible reasons for Mussolini following the lead of Hitler by adopting “the extraordinary and ruthless decree…ordering all Jews who have taken up residence in Italy since the World War to leave that country within the next six months” which will result in “some ten thousand people who have been living quietly and peacefully and no doubt usefully in Italy” to “pull up stakes and seek refuge in a cheerless world.”


1939: Britain and France declared war on Germany. The response of Britainand Francewas a bit on the puzzling side to say the least.  The two allies had waited forty-eight hours to declare war.  The two western Allies were so inactive after the Germans took Poland that the following period was known as the Phony War.  For the Jews of Poland the war was not phony as they fell under the Nazi boot.


 


1939: As a result of the UK’s declaration war on Germany mathematician and codebreaker Max Newman’s wife Lyn and his two sons – Edward and William – would be evacuated to the United States where they would stay until they returned in October, 1943.


1939(19th of Elul, 5699): The SS executed 26 Jews in the Polish frontier town, Wieruszow. The victims included Israel Lewi, Abraham Lefkowitz, Moseh Mozes and Usiel Baumatz.  Their fate presaged the fate of all the Jews of Poland.


1939: In Mannheim, Germany, the Gestapo ordered all “able-bodied Jews” including Ernst Wolfgang Michel “to report to the local train station where they were to be sent to forced-labor camps” which in the case of Ernest Michel would eventually mean Auschwitz.


1939: At a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, an organization informally recognized as the ad hoc Jewish government of Palestine, David Ben-Gurion vows that Jews will fight Hitler. A total of a million and a half Jews will fight in the armed forces of nations opposing Germany: 555,000 Jewish servicemen and women in the American Armed Forces; 500,000 for the Soviet Union; 116,000 for Great Britain (26,000 from Palestine and 90,000 from the British Commonwealth); and 243,000 Jews for other European nations.


1939:German troops invaded the home in Bielsko, Poland 15 year old Gerda Weissmann, the future American author and human rights activist.


1939: Franny Krongold and Jacob Silberman, the parent of Rosie Silberman Canada’s first Jewish woman judge, were married today in Poland.


1939: In response to today’s declaration of war by Britain against Germany, “Iraq deported German officials and broke off diplomatic relations with Germany” but the Arab kingdom did not comply with the terms of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty and declare war on the Nazi government – a movement that helped to set the stage for the Fahud.


1939: The last Kindertransport, did not begin its scheduled trip because of the outbreak of World War II.


1940: Birthdate of Los Angeles native Joseph Stern, the actor and producer best known as “the founder of the Matrix Theatre Company.”


1941(11thof Elul, 5701): Sixty-two year old Philadelphia born, NYU Law School graduate City Court Justice Israel J.P. Adlerman and husband of Saide Adlerman with whom he had three daughters – Marion, Leona and Elaine – passed away today.



1941: The Germans hung three Jewish brothers in Dubossary. Dubossary was in Moldaviawhich was part of the Soviet at this time.  Six hundred elderly Jews of Dubossary were thrown out of their homes, brought into eight synagogues, where each house of worship was then burned to the ground.Six Jews who refuse to serve on the Jewish Council at Dubossary, Ukraine, are publicly hanged. Later, 600 elderly Jews are driven into Dubossary's eight synagogues and burned alive when the synagogues are set ablaze.


1941: In Romania, Jews began wearing the “yellow badge” in response to an order from the national government.


1941: The Germans test Cyclon B for effectiveness at Auschwitz.  The tests were declared a success as all of the “subjects” were killed.  Cyclon B will be the extermination weapon of choice for the Final Solution. Six hundred Soviet prisoners of war and 300 Jews are "euthanized" at Auschwitz.


1942: At Lachva, Belorussia, more than 800 Jews battle Nazis in a revolt led by Dov Lopatyn. Most of the rebels are killed


1942 The Geneva-based World Jewish Congress learns of deportations of French Jews.


1942: The Germans informed Dov Lopatyn, the head of the Judenrat in Łachwa, Poland was to be liquidated today.  Lopatyn rejected the Nazi offer to spare his life if he would cooperate when he led the uprising that day claimed the life of approximately 1,100 Jews but enabled another 1,000 to escape. Yitzhak Rochzyn, one of the leaders of the uprising was killed by the Germans but Lopatyn escaped, joined a partisan unit with whom he fought until he was killed in 1944. “Either we all live or we all die” is a statement attributed to Lopatyn which Jews of the 21st century might do well to remember.


1942: Josef Kaplan, a leader of the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization), is arrested in Warsaw, joining another leader, Yisrael Zeltzer, in detention. When another ZOB leader, Shmuel Braslav, is stopped in the street by German troops, he is shot dead after trying to pull a knife. Another ZOB leader, Reginka Justman, is shot after being stopped while carrying the ZOB's arms cache to a new hiding place; the arms are seized.


1942: The Times of London began running articles describing the deportations of French Jews. The articles ran until September 14.


1943: The New York Times published an article entitled “50,000 Jews Dying In Nazi Fortress.”


1943: During World War II, the Allies invaded mainland Italy.  The Nazis moved south bringing with them their racial laws and exposing the Italian Jews to the reality of the Holocaust.  The Nazis would fail to dislodge the Allies, but thanks to the ineptitude of allied commanders, the fight up the Italians peninsula would waste lives and fail to shorten the war. 


1943: “Rothchild Rites Planned” published today summarized the accomplishments of the late Edward S. Rothchild the banker who “is believed to have built the first sizable office building in San Francisco after the San Francisco Fire and Earthquake.”


1943: Judge Louis E. Levinthal, President of the Zionist Organization of America was reported today to have issued a statement “hailing the resolution” adopted by the American Jewish Conference “calling for the right of Jewish refugees who can reach Palestine to establish permanent homes” as “an impressive manifestation of the overwhelming and enthusiastic support of American Jewry for the reconstruction of Palestine as a Jewish Commonwealth.”


1943: In Dordogne, France, David Feuerwerker and of Antoinette Feuerwerker gave birth to historian Atara Marmor.


1944:Bloeme Evers-Emden was placed on the last transport from the Netherlands bound for Auschwitz.


1944: The day after famous painter Felix Nussbaum arrived at Auschwitz, his brother was sent to the Nazi death camp.


1944: The Allies begin air evacuations of Jews from partisan-held regions of Yugoslaviato Allied-occupied Italy.


1944: Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Kahn and their nurse Lea Schweiger were among the 2,500 people who were pack into freight cars for the trip to Theresienstadt.


1944: A senior Italian police officer named Giovanni Palatucci was arrested in the German-held Yugoslavian city of Fiume for aiding Jews, is sent to the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany, where he would die.


1944: The Frank family, including sisters Margot and Anne, were put on the first of the three final trains at Westerbork concentration camp that shipped its human cargo to Auschwitz.


1945(25thof Elul, 5705): Fifty-four year old Vienna born American movie composer Artur Guttman  who created the music for “The Son of the Shiek,” the 1926 Rudolph Valentino silent epic.


1945: The Shanghai Ghetto which, despite its name, provided a safe haven for many stateless Jews fleeing the Nazis was officially liberated today.



1946: Those charged with war crimes and the evidence against them was returned to Dachau when the Soviets failed to arrive at the border zone and take possession of them


1946(7th of Elul, 5706): Eighty-three year old pianist and composer Moriz Rosenthal who studied with Franz Liszt passed away today.


1946(7thof Elul, 5706): Sixty-five year old Russian born American Reform Rabbi Isaac Landman, an ardent supporter of better relations between Christians and Jews and author who testified as an opponent of Zionism before Congress in the 1920’s passed away today.





1948: “Larceny” a crime film produced by Leonard Goldstein, starring Shelley Winters and filmed by cinematographer Irving Glassberg opened in New York City today.


1949: Birthdate of Raik Haj Yahia, an Israeli Arab who served in the Knesset in 1998 and 1999 as a member of the Labor Party.


1950: Dr. Pinchas Churgin, President of the Mizrachi Organization of America announced today that a tract of land has been set aside in Tel Aviv for the construction of new college of arts and sciences patterned after American undergraduate colleges.  The plan is for the new school to begin accepting applicants within the next three years.


1951: President Harry Truman sent a message to Alexander Kahn, general manager of the Forward expressing his sorrow over the death of Abraham Cahan whom he described "as a teacher and guide to generations of Jewish immigrants" (As reported by JTA)


1951: CBS broadcast the first episode of “Search For Tomorrow” a popular soap opera in which Lee Grant played the role of “Rose Peabody.”


1951(2ndof Elul, 5711): Eighty-five year old Russian born French surgeon Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff passed away today.




1951: According to published reports Israel is facing the worse food crisis that has confronted the Jewish state since its birth three years ago.  Except on the black market, fruits and vegetables have been all but unavailable on the local market.  The meat ration has been canceled for the last three weeks and there was no sugar ration available during August.  The cause of the shortage is the continued flow of new immigrants to the country which means that the food supply is always outstripped by the ever-increasing demand.


1954: The German U-Boat U-505 begins its move from a specially constructed dock to its final site at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. Ironically, this captured Nazi ship would be a must-see stop each time a certain Jewish family visited Chicago during the summers of the 1950’s


1963(14thof Elul, 5723): Sixty-one year old Dr. Asher Isaacs, the Cincinnati born “son of Abraham and Rachel (Friedman) Isaacs and husband of Flora Meyers, the University of Cincinnati Undergrad who earned his MA and Ph.D from Harvard before pursuing an academic career in economics that led to his being name Chairman of the Department of Economics at Pittsburgh passed away today.


1969: In Brooklyn Georgia Brown and Jonathan Baumbach gave birth to screenwriter and director Jonathan Baumbach


1969: “The Valley of Gwangi” starring Holocaust survivor and Israeli actress Gila Golan with music by Jerome Moross that was filmed by cinematographer Erwin Hiller was released today in the United States.


1972: Thirty-six year old Israeli racewalker who had survived Bergen-Belsen placed 19thin the 50-kilometer walk with a time of 4 hours, 24 minutes and 38 seconds at the Munich Olympics.


1972(24thof Elul, 5732): Eighty-seven year old Mrs. Blanche Cohen Schlang Nirenstein, founder and past president of the Manhattan chapter of the Mizrachi Women's Organization passed away today.




1974: “Shimon Grillius and Oleg Frolov were released from Perm camp 36 after serving five year sentences”


1974(16thof Elul, 5734): Seventy –four year old Russian born American painter Moses Soyer passed away today.



1975: As the Soviets continue their policy of allying themselves with the Araba nations that want to destroy Israel, the USSSR Supreme Soviet ratified “an agreement on Soviet-Libyan cultural co-operation that had been signed in Tripoli.


1975(27thof Elul, 5735): Eighty-six year old Isidore Ostrer  the husband of Helen Ostrer and father of actress Pamela Ostrer, a wealthy industrialist and banker who became president of the Gaumont British Picture Corporation in the early 1920s passed away today.


1976: ABC broadcast “Death at Love House” a Leonard Goldberg/Aaron Spelling film featuring Sylvia Sydney and Bill Macy.


1984(6th of Elul, 5744): Songwriter Arthur Schwartz passed away after suffering a stroke. He was 83. Born in Brooklynin 1900, Schwartz supported himself as a piano player while going to NYULawSchool.  After graduating, Schwartz decided to follow his artistic bent and became a highly successful song writer for vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood. Unfortunately, most of his hits were of the popular mode and have not stood the test of time.


1985(17thof Elul, 5745): Seventy-eight year old Cecile Gwendolyn Pofcher Strauss, the wife of the late Harry Strauss passed away today in Massachusetts.


1989: On the 50th anniversary of the Anglo-French declaration of war on German The Independent published Time for Mourning” by Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill and one of the outstanding historians of the 20th century.



1999: The Times of London reviewed The Rich and the Poor: Jewish philanthropy and social control in nineteenth-century London by Mordechai Rozin.


2000:The New York Times included reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest includingIt Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, Stella in Heaven: Almost a Novelby Art Buchwald and JEW VS. JEW  The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewryby Samuel G. Freedman which is reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield the smartest person I ever met at Tulane University. He now teaches at Brandeis University.


2000: A ceremony was held at the site where the Struma was sunk to commemorate the tragedy. It was attended by 60 relatives of Struma victims, representatives of the Jewish community of Turkey, the Israeli ambassador and prime minister's envoy, as well as British and American delegates. There were no delegates from the former Soviet Union


2000: The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) expressed concern at the Vatican’s beatification of Pope Pius IX, who was responsible for the 1858 abduction of a six-year old Jewish child through the following statement issued by Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.



2001: The nations of Israel and Georgia “jointly issued postage stamps to honor Shota Rustaveli. Designed by Yitzhak Granot, the Israeli stamp (3.40 NIS) showed the author with Hebrew text in the background.” A fresco depicting the Georgian poet can found at the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. (This serves as another reminder of the multi-national and multi-religious affiliations that have been part of the history of the Israeli capital for centuries.)


2001(15th of Elul, 5761): Eighty-two year old film critic Pauline Kael, passed away today. (As reported by Lawrence Van Gelder)



2001: In Jerusalem, three people were injured during a series of car bombings.


2002: Pitcher Justin Wayne made his major league debut with the Florida Marlins.


2002: Today, “Nigella Lawson opened the John Diamond Voice Laboratory at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London’ which was named in memory of journalist and broadcaster John Diamond who had died of throat cancer.


2002: A production of “Pacific Overtures,” “a musical written by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman” set in Japan when the Americans were arriving in 1853 opened at the Eisenhower Theatre of the Kennedy Center.


2004:The Seventh Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, under the musical direction of pianist Elena Bashkirova, opens in Jerusalem.


2004: Jonathan David Leibowitz was sworn as a member of the Federal Trade Commission.


2004: “The Take” a documentary directed by Avi Lewis and written by Naomi Klein both of whom narrated the film was premiered at the Venice Film Festival.


2004: Governor Vilsack proclaimed this as Celebrate 350 Day in Iowa. The proclamation marked the start of various community activities in Iowa marking the birth of the American Jewish Community


2005: Premiere in Deauville, of “The Ice Harvest” directed by Harold Ramis


2005: The end of the summer holidays proclaims the start of the performing arts season and it begins with Dan Ettinger on the podium at the Rishon Performing Arts Center.


2005: The Jerusalem Post reported that Palestinian leaders were “upset” with Pakistani officials for meeting with Israeli government officials in Turkey.  The high level meeting was viewed by the Palestinians as a reward for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza; a reward which they felt was unwarranted.


2005: As evidence of the vitality of the century old Cedar Rapids Jewish Community,Natalee Birchansky celebrated her Bat Mitzvah at Temple Judah.


2005:Mike Bloom married a woman named Farah at Caleo Resort & Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona


2006: The New York Times featured a review of Janna Levin’s A Madman Dreams of Turing Machinesa historical novel featuring Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing as characters.


2006: The Washington Post featured reviews of Richard Grant’s Another World, a novel about an “unlikely hero who goes behind Germany's front line to retrieve evidence of the Nazis' Final Solution and A.B. Yehoshua’s A Woman In Jerusalem“a dreamlike novel by an Israeli master” in which a Jewish human resource manager is sent on an odd quest. [Speaking from experience, there is more fact than fiction to this since Jewish human resources professionals spend a lot of time dealing with odd requests.]


2007: Maimonides finishes third in the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga.  Maimonides is named for the Jewish sage and is owned by Ahmed Zayat, an Egyptian living in New Jersey.

 
2007: In Jerusalem, the weeklong festival known as Jewish Music Days begins with a grand opening concert at Beit Shmuel, featuring Frank London and the AndraLaMoussia Ensemble. “London is an internationally acclaimed musical artist and a founder of the Klezmatics who will create unique encounters with the Jerusalem-based ensemble, a mosaic of traditions and originality.”



2007: On Labor Day a statue of labor leader Samuel Gompers was unveiled in Chicago’s Gomper’s Park. Up until now, the park, named in honor of the longtime President of the American Federation of Labor had no monument to the man who led the fight for the eight hour day. 


2007(20th of Elul, 5767): Dr. Jacob Levin passed away in Highland Park, Illinois.  There is not enough space to record the virtue of this man.  Suffice it to say that he was a mensch par excellence. 


2007:Rabbi Aaron Sherman, of Temple Judah said he supports same-sex marriage in Iowa. "I don't find that two people of the same sex getting married in any way diminish the sanctity of marriage," he said.


2008: In Washington, D.C., Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the award-winning family memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,discusses and signs his new book of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, at Politics and Prose Bookstore.


2008: The Budapest Short Film Festival opens featuring “Mother Economy” as an official selection. The nineteen minute film is artist Maya Zack’s powerfully imaginative meditation on Holocaust remembrance and on the myth of the Jewish mother.


2008:Brad Meltzer reads from and signs his new thriller, The Book of Lies, at Barnes & Noble, in Bethesda, Maryland.


2008: A critically acclaimed fully staged off-Broadway production of Joseph Stein’s “Enter Laughing: The Musica”l opened at the York Theatre. Stein is the son of Charles and Emma (Rosenblum) Stein, two Jewish immigrants from Poland.


2009:Agi Mish'ol launches his new book Bikkur Bayit (House Call) at Mishkenot Sha'ananim in Jerusalem. “Agi Mishol was born in 1947 in Hungary to Holocaust survivor parents and came to Israel as a very young child. She earned her BA and MA in Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew University, her first volume of poetry appearing in 1972. Co-winner of the first Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize in 2002, (and a previous winner of the Tel Aviv Foundation and the Israeli Prime Minister’s awards) she is also a peach and persimmon farmer, and a teacher of poetry in the MA Creative Writing Program at Ben Gurion University, as well as other workshops venues, a teacher of literature at Alma College in Tel Aviv, a literary critic for radio and written media, and a translator of poetry and esoteric literature. Agi Mishol serves on the editorial board of the Helicon poetry journal. Her poetry has appeared in English in The American Poetry Review, The Mississippi Review Online, and in Leviathan Quarterly 2 & 4 (England), as well as other magazines, and in the anthology The Defiant Muse (Feminist Press/CUNY); a bilingual edition of 18 poems was published in Ireland in 1998.”


2009:Beit Avi Chai presents Part 4 of a workshop for people interested in Rambam (Maimonides), his unique philosophy, and its significance today.  


2009: The Antiquities Authority said a 3,700-year-old wall that is the oldest example of massive fortifications ever found Jerusalem will be opened to the public beginning today.


2009: The Washington Postfeatures a review of Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow  


2010:In Washington, DC, Adas Israel is scheduled to kick-off the Labor Day Weekend and Erev Shabbat observance with L'Dor VaDor - The Back to Shul BBQ  


2010: The Minnesota Vikings trade quarterback Sage Rosenfels to the New York Giants today.


2010: The New York Timespublished a review of Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends by Tom Segev. In the book, the author reports for the first time that Wiesenthal received financial support from Mossad and that he played a key role in the capture of Adolph Eichmann.


2010(24 Elul, 5770):Sixty year Standup comic Robert Schimmel, a frequent guest on Howard Stern's radio show, has died after suffering serious injuries in a car accident..


2011: The 14th Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival is scheduled to open.


2011; Matisyahu is scheduled to perform in Lowell, MA.


2011: Kandi Abelson is scheduled to perform at the Off The Wall Comedy Basement in Jerusalem.


2011:An estimated 460,000 people gathered across the country this evening to protest for social change as part of the "March of the Million," Channel 10 news reported.


2011:An estimated 400,000 Israelis are marching across the country as part of the 'March of the Million,' a rally which organizers hope will grow to be the biggest social protest in Israel's history. According to initial estimates over 300,000 people have amassed in Tel Aviv's Kikar Hamedina square, where the central event is currently taking place.


2011:Egypt's military has begun an operation to close a network of smuggling tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border following tension with Israel, security officials said today. Hundreds of tunnels snake under the 9-mile (14-kilometer) border, where smugglers bring Gaza supplies and fuel limited by an Israeli blockade. Israel charges Gaza's Hamas rulers get weapons, ammunition and rockets through the tunnels and smuggle militants out.


2012: “Labor on the Bimah,” a three-day social justice activity that “focused on the importance of workers' rights and organized labor and the challenges workers face” is scheduled to come to an end.


2012: The French Israeli singer Françoise is scheduled to perform her Paris-Jazz show at Avram’s Bar in Jerusalem.


2012: Retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel Ayala Procaccia is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State: Freedom of Religion and Freedom from Religion.” This event is in memory of Sir Zelman Cowen, a leading legal mind who served as 19th Governor General of Australia.


2012:A member of the Jewish community of Alexandria today denied reports that Egyptian authorities had canceled Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur prayers in the city – citing security concerns – saying he would personally lead the services during the High Holidays. Youssef Gaon, the caretaker of the Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue, was quoted by a Jewish official as saying prayers will be held at the 180-year-old house of worship this year, albeit without an ordained rabbi or cantor.


2012:A new public elementary school named after a Holocaust survivor opened in Silver Spring, Md. The Flora M. Singer Elementary School, whose name was unanimously approved by the Montgomery County Board of Education on May 8, opened its doors to students today.]


2012: On Labor Day, American Jews can reflect on their role in the American Labor Movement:




2013: “Fill the Void” is scheduled to open at the Biltmore Grande Stadium 15 in Asheville, NC


2013: “Under the Skin” directed by Jonathan Glazer is scheduled to debut at the Venice Film Festival.


2013: Elisabeth Leonskaja and Jerusalem Quartet are scheduled to perform Dvořák’s Piano Quintet no. 2 in A major, op. 81 at The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.


2013:“Two Palestinians in a speeding truck penetrated the first security barrier at Ben Gurion International Airport overnight today, prompting the initiation of emergency protocol and shutting down the airport for an hour.” (As reported by Yoel Goldman


2013: Russia raised a brief alarm in the Middle East today after apparently detecting a joint Israel and US missile launch test in the Mediterranean (As reported by Joshua Davidovich and Mitch Ginsburg)


2014: Dr. Moshe Lavee of University of Haifa, Israel, is scheduled to lecture on  "The Egyptian Midwives: Gender and Identity in Lost Aggadic Traditions from the Genizah" at the University of Connecticut.


2014: “Israel signed a memorandum of understanding with Jordan today, under which it will supply the Hashemite Kingdom with $15 billion worth of natural gas from its Leviathan energy field over 15 years.” (As reported by Marissa Newman)


2014: As he prepares to lead an Israeli delegation to Washington in an effort to pressure the White House on Iran, Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz says that unless there is a “dramatic development” in nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1, Israel won’t be able to accept the outcome of the negotiations,


2014(18thof Elul, 5774): Eighty-five year old museum curator Mildred Friedman passed away today.



2014: Michael Bloomberg announced today that he would be resuming the senior leadership role at Bloomberg L.P. at the end of this year.


2014: Steven Sotloff’s family broke their silence today, describing the journalist not as a hero but “a mere man” who tried through his reporting to show the plight of people in Syria. “He was no war junkie,” family spokesman Barak Barfi said, reading a statement from the family.


2014(8thof Elul, 5774): Forty-eight year old Andrew Madoff, the surviving son of Bernard Madoff passed away today.



2015: Seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Shanghai Ghetto.




2015(19thof Elul, 5775): Ninety-four year old Daniel Thompson, the husband of Ada Schatz whom he had married in 1946 and the man who invented a commercially viable bagel making machine passed away today.




2015: China’s celebration of the victory in the “Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War” (WW II) which has included the launching of a new exhibition of “a new exhibition at a museum dedicated to Jewish refugees” that promotes Shanghai’s role in sheltering Jews from the Nazis is scheduled to culminate with “a giant military parade in Beijing.”


2015: Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman told the Associated Press today, just prior to the Jerusalem premier of “A Tale of Love and Darkness” that when she read the book on which was based for the first time she could visualize an entire film in her head and “it was so personal” she could related to it because of the family stories with which she had grown up with. (As reported by Aron Heller)


2015: Today, “an official from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the leading pro-Israel lobby in the US, blasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for harming the opposition to the Iran nuclear deal by insisting on addressing Congress on the issue in March.”


2016(30thof Av, 5776): Parashat Re’eh; Rosh Chodesh Elul


2016(30thof Av, 5776): In one of those quirks of the calendar that some find fascinating today, on both the secular and religious calendars we mark the 163rdYahrzeit of Daniel Block, one of the early leaders of the St. Louis, MO Jewish community.


2017: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy by Erin Carlson, Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio by David Thomson and You’ll Never Know, Dear by Hallie Ephron.


2017: “As part of History Week 2017, The Sydney Jewish Museum is scheduled to host “The Buchenwald Boys” which offers “a unique opportunity to hear three Polish Holocaust survivors; Kuba Enoch, George Grojnowski and Jack Meister in discussion with Museum Education Officer, Dr Rebecca Kummerfeld.”


2017: The Australian Jewish Historical Society and the Sydney Jewish Museum are scheduled to host a viewing of “the current exhibition Battle of Beersheba followed by an address from Sam Lipski” entitled “Audacity and Watershed on the charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba.


2017: “Paul Simon: Words and Music” is scheduled to come to a close at the Skirball Cultural Center.


2018: As Labor Day is celebrated in the United States, Jews, who are commanded to Labor for six days before they can rest,  might want to contemplate their changing views and roles in the history of the American Labor Movement (Lest we forget, in the garment industry it was often Jewish owners versus Jewish sweatshop workers





2018: JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “Dough” a film that is quite timely considering the tensions existing between various ethnic and religious groups.


2018: In an attempt to enhance Labor Day enjoyment and to honor the sacrifice of Americans in uniform and their families, the Illinois Holocaust Museum is scheduled to “offer free admission to all active duty personnel and their family members.”


2018: Tourists walking through Times Square can look up and see a billboard that reads “My name is Marc, I need a Kidney, YOU can Help!” “alongside a photo of a smiling Marc Weiner” who has “lost both of his kidneys and his bladder.:


2018: The President of the Philippines, “Rodrigo Duterte, who has stirred controversy with comments about the Holocaust in the past, is scheduled to continue the second of his four day visit to Israel.


This Day, September 4, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 4


 
476:The German general Odoacer defeated Orestes and deposed the child emperor Romulus Augustus marking the “official end of the Roman Empire.”  Actually this was the end of the Empire in the West. The Eastern Empire continued to rule. Although this is the official date, the imperial system had already effectively ended in the West.  The anarchy that immediately preceded and followed the so-called “Fall of the Roman Empire” was not good for any segment of the population. – Jew and gentile alike. But as is so often the case the effects of anarchy and lawlessness fell heavier on the Jews than on their neighbors.  The last decades of the Roman Empire were a period of unrest and uncertainty for the Jewish people living in Palestine and Europe.  The adoption of Christianity as the religion of the empire led to a variety of discriminatory practices aimed at the Jews.  On the other hand, the Jerusalem Talmud was completed in the first half of the fifth century.  The real of seat of learning and Jewish culture had moved to Babylonia where scholars and sages would continue to develop traditions and commentaries including the Babylonian Talmud. 



1261: Urban IV, who in 1262 would write “Bela, the Hungarian King using Jews as agents “reproaching him for giving opportunities to Jews whom their own sin has condemned to eternal servitude, to exercise official authority over Christians”was crowned Pope at Viterbo who in 1264 would ask “the bishop of Burgos to resolve the impasse that the Bishop of Calahorra had reached with the Jews and Muslims of his diocese over their non-payment of tithes” and in that same year would request “the help of the prior and canon of Troyes in collecting debts which the archbishop of Sens owed Jewish merchants in that city


1320: Pope John XXII issues a bull against the Talmud. Calling it "the damned initiatives of the perfidious Jews," he orders that "the plague and deadly diseased weed [of Judaism] must be pulled out by its roots." (As reported by Austin Cline)


1554(27thof Elul, 5314): Cornelio da Montalcino - a Franciscan Friar who converted to Judaism - was burned alive in Rome, Italy.


1578:Pope Gregroy XIII “ordered the Jews of Rome to contribute 1,100 gold scudi (Approximately $12,600) toward the maintenance of the Casa dei Catecumeni (Home for Converts to Christianity). One scudo was roughly $125 in today’s terms. (The History of the Jewish People)


1609(5thof Elul, 5369):  Rabbi Judah Loew Ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, passed away.  Born in 1525, he spent most of his life in Prague where he gained fame for his philosophic works and his commentaries including one on Rashi's Commentaries.  He was an advocate of reforming Jewish education, drawing on the words of Pirke Avot for his inspiration.  His fame was not limited to the Jewish community and the Emperor Rudolph was counted among his admirers.  For many the Marhal's greatest claim to fame was tied to a fictional creation called the Legend of the Golem.  That legend is a medieval version of the story of Frankenstein, according to which the Maharal breathed life into a human-like figure by sticking a slip of paper with the Tetragrammaton to his forehead.  This gigantic figure would be called forth to protect the Jews whenever they were in danger. Such was his popularity that there is a statue of him near the old city hall - a singular honor for Jew from the Middle Ages.   The term Maharal comes from the first Hebrew letters of the phrase (Moreinu ha-Rav Loew, "Our Teacher and Rabbi Loew").  According to some Orthodox Jews, the Mahral is a descendant of King David.  In more recent times, there are those who claim that the family of John Kerry be descended from the Maharal.  Now if that is true, and Kerry were to win the election, that would mean that a descendant of King David was living at
Sixteen Hundred Pennsylvania Avenue
.


1654: “"23 souls, big as well as little," arrive in North America”



1746(19thof Elul, 5506): Grammarian Solomon be Judah Hanau whose pointed literary criticism led moves Frankfort, to Hamburg to Amsterdam to Furth and finally to Hanover where he passed away today.


1758(1st of Elul, 5518): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1770: In Amsterdam, Abraham Emden and Martha Van Minden gave birth to Solomon Emden who was circumcised as Pinchas Zelig ben Avrahom


1781: Los Angeles, California, is founded as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (the City of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of the Little Portion) by 44 Spanish settlers.  Los Angeles would become part of Mexico and eventually part of the United States following the Mexican-American War.  Given the realities of Spanish life, any Jews who might have settled in the city in its earliest days would have been conversos, Marranos or some other variant of “secret Jew.”  One of the first known Jews to have settled in Los Angeles was a tailor named Jacob Frankfort who came to the city in 1841 after fleeing from New Mexico. While the records appear to be a little sketchy, more Jews arrived in 1849 and the Sephardic Community traces its roots back to the 1850’s. To put things in proper perspective the Jewish community was still so small that when the UAHC conducted the first national Jewish census between 1876 and 1878 Los Angeles community was so small that it did not appear in the count. It is estimated that there were approximately 400 Jews living in California based on U.S. Census records of 1880.  From such humble beginnings has come one of the largest and most vibrant Jewish communities in the United States!


1827(12thof Elul, 5587): Rabbi Simcha Bunim Bonhart of Peshischa, a leader of the Chasidic movement passed away today.


One of the more famous oral teachings attributed to Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peschischa goes as follows:

 
Everyone must have two pockets, with a note in each pocket, so that he or she can reach into the one or the other, depending on the need. When feeling lowly and depressed, discouraged or disconsolate, one should reach into the right pocket, and, there, find the words: "For my sake was the world created."


 
But when feeling high and mighty one should reach into the left pocket, and find the words: "I am but dust and ashes."[



 
1836: One day after she had passed a way, Catherine Abrahams was buried in the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.


1851: In New York, the first interment to place today at the Salem Fields Cemetery. By September of 1877, over 7,000 burials had taken place at this Jewish burial ground adjacent to Cypress Hills.


1853(1stof Elul, 5613): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1855: Lazarus Powell, who would attempt to exploit the issuance of General Order Number 11 for his own political ends during the Civil War, completed his term as the 19th Governor of Kentucky.


1859: In Brooklyn, Regina (Wehle) Goldmark and Joseph Goldmark, the “chemist and inventor” who as a young man had fought in the unsuccessful revolution of 1848 in Vienna, gave birth to Helen Goldmark who gained fame as Helen Adler, the wife of Felix Adler.



1858: In Laeken, Belgium, Jacques Errera and his wife gave birth to botanist Leo Abram Errera.


1860:In New York a Jewish man and women were locked in a custody battle.Today an application for the Custody of a Child was made before Justice Ingrahamat theChambers of the Supreme Court. “The application was made to obtain the custody of a female child, five years of age, and claimed to be of illegitimate birth. The complainant “claimed that the father of the child, Louis Ephraim, was an improper person to have the care of it, and that he treated it in a cruel manner. These charges were denied by Ephraim, who averred that the child was born in wedlock. Both of the parties in the case ‘were married some years since, being subsequently divorced, and each again marrying. The Compliant “now claims that the first marriage was solemnized by a person not authorized to perform the ceremony, and that, for that reason, it was void, and the child illegitimate. On the other hand, it was claimed that the divorce was illegally obtained, and that the marriage was lawful and binding.”


1860: “The Political Horizon; Anti-Slavery Excitement in the South” published today reported that in Montgomery County, Texas, two German Jew peddlers named Friederman and Rotensburg  have been arrested and examined by the Rusk Vigilance Committee. Friederman was released because there was not enough evidence to hold him. Based on evidence provided by “several Negros” Rotenbeurg was accused of “inciting them to insurrection. His case was finally submitted to a jury of fifty men, from various parts of the County, and the accused was allowed counsel. After a patient examination of the evidence, a vote was taken on the question of hanging him, and it stood eighteen for and thirty-two against -- the latter believing him guilty of very improper conduct towards the negroes, but that the evidence did not warrant a death punishment. The jury was unanimous in ordering the accused to leave the County within forty-eight hours and the State in four days. Rotenberg's family resided in New-York.”


1860: “Jobson Convicted of Libel” published today described the trial of David Wemyss Jobson in Great Britain. Because of the nature of the case, several prominent Englishmen were called as witnesses including Benjamin Disraeli. When sworn in as a witness, Disraeli identified himself as a “member for Buckinghamshire.” The first question asked by the Defense on cross-examination was “Are you a Jew now or not?” to which Disraeli replied “I am what I always was -- a Christian.” When the Defense tried to ask several other offensive and irrelevant questions of Mr. Disraeli, the presiding official cut him off saying he “would not allow a Court of Justice to be made the medium of insulting any one.”  When Mr. Disraeli said that he had always been a Christian, one must wonder if he had forgotten the fact that he was born a Jew, something that was common knowledge at the time.


1861(29th of Elul, 5621): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1861: Nineteen year old German born Philadelphian Joseph Kiline who fought in the Battles of Yorktown and Williamsburg and died at Fair Oaks during the Peninsula Campaign, began serving in Company I of the 61st Regiment.


1862: During the Civil War, August “Belmont wrote President Lincoln to share negative correspondence from Europe and to urge the reinstatement of General George B. McClellan as head of the army: "The people are ready to bring every sacrifice for the restoration of the Union, but right or wrong they have lost confidence in the head of the War department. They have seen the fearful results of the intermeddling of civilians in military affairs & they want to see an experienced soldier at the helm.” Belmont was Jewish; McClellan and Lincoln were not.


1862: Jacob Cohen, a private serving with the 27th Ohio Infantry wrote today the Jewish Messenger describing his units march from Camp Clear Creek to Iuka, Mississippi.


1863: During a riot of Confederate soldiers' wives in Mobile, Alabama, a Jewish merchant struck one of the women as they were breaking into local stores.  The policemen, who had ignored the rioters who were carrying banners inscribed "Bread or Blood,""Bread or Peace," and other similar inscriptions, arrested the Jew and beat him severely.


1866: In Cracow, Simon M. Winkler and the former Mathilde Greiwer gave birth to Max Winkler the Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard who became a Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Michigan where he had earned his Ph.D. in 1892.


1869: In Tucson, Arizona, William Zeckendorf, a prominent Jewish merchant, caught burglars in his store and “firing his pistol put them in flight.”


1869: Dr. Kaufmann Kohler who was the sixth person to serve as Rabbi of Beth El Congregation in Detroit, Michigan, delivered his first sermon (in German) – “The Qualities of a God-called Leader in Israel.” He would leave for Chicago’s Temple Sinai two years later but his impact on the community could be seen by the formation The Gentlemen’s Hebrew Relief Society.


1870: Two months into the Franco-Prussian war, it was reported today that there are over 30,000 Jews serving in the German armies.


1870: The Third Republic was proclaimed in France. The ThirdRepublicis bracketed by French defeats at the hands of the Germans.  It came into being after the disastrous Franco – Prussian War. It came to an end in 1941 when the Germans defeated the French in World War II.  The French Jewish community started this period at a disadvantage since the French lost control of Alsaceand Lorrainewith its large Jewish population to the Germans in 1870.  At the same time, the ThirdRepublicnever had the total support of the French people.  The anti-Republic forces used anti-Semitism to advance its cause as can be seen in the Dreyfus Case.  At the same time the French Jews played an active part in a variety of fields.  The French House of Rothschild became the financial patron of the early Jewish settlements in Palestine.  Leon Blum would break new ground by becoming the first Jew to serve as Prime Minister of France.  Artists such as Chagall and Modigliani settled in Paris, while Camille Pissarro helped to found the movement known as French Impressionism.  Of course all the creativity of the ThirdRepublic came to naught as anti-Semitism triumphed in Vichyand in the zone of occupation where the French turned on their fellow citizens who happened to be Jewish.


1870: Adolphe Cremieux was chosen to serve as a member of the government of national defense.


1870: Leo Frankel, who had been arrested in Paris “for his political activity” was liberated in the aftermath of today’s revolution.


1871: Three days after she had passed away, 75 year old Sarah Simmons, the wife of John Simmons was buried today at the “Brompton (Fulham Road Jewish Cemetery)


1871:Décret Crémieux (named for Adolphe Cremieux) conferred French citizenship on all Jews living in Algeria, which had been a department of France. Arabs and Berbers were not made French citizens which meant that there was a reversal in the centuries old relationship between Moslems and Jews.


1872(1st of Elul, 5632): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1872: At Castle Garden, the Commissioners of Emigration began an investigation of the treatment of passengers aboard the SS Charles H. Marshall.  Most of the 11 passengers called to testify as to the crew’s mistreatment were Russian Jews immigrating to the United States.  After hearing evidence of physical abuse and the lack of food, the commissioners decided to continue the investigation tomorrow.


1877: Birthdate of Heidelberg native Max Schloessinger, the philologist and theologian who after being ordained as a rabbi came to the United States to work on the editorial staff of the Jewish Encyclopedia after which he lived in Palestine where he worked to establish the Hebrew University before returning to New York where he died in 1944.



1877: It was reported today that a Jew from Eski-Saghra, Bulgaria, had his coat, in which he had hidden his money, stolen by a Circassian in Adrianople.


1879: In Detroit, found of Congregation Beth Jacob.


1880: “A Sad Affair” published today described the life and death of Charles Steckler one of the “oldest…most respected and prosperous merchants” in Amador, CA.



1880: It was reported today that at the end of its last fiscal year (May 1,1880) the United Hebrew Charities had collected $58,268. 21 and spent $46, 988.06 on everything from almost 1,500 tons of coal to a variety of clothing items including “70 cloaks.” All told, the charities had provided services to almost 28,000 people.


1881: “End of the Stern Divorce Suit” published today described the Judge’s decision to have Otto Stern pay his wife 6,000 francs immediately and 4,000 francs for the next 18 months while his wife is getting a divorce in America.  Stern was born Edward Moses Stern but changed his name to Otto when he became a Lutheran.


1881: It was reported today that the “Sultan favors the scheme” of a group of “Germans and Englishman interested in the welfare of the Jews.” They are working on a plan to “obtain a grant of land in Syria” from the Ottomans that can be settled by Jews who are seeking to flee from countries “where they are not subject to persecution. 


1882: It was reported today that there were 2,525 Jews enrolled in Sunday Schools in New York and 493 Jews enrolled in Sunday Schools in Brooklyn.


1882: Three days after he had passed ways, 73 year old Mathew Hyman, the father of Albert and Lizzy Hyman, was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cememtry


1884: “The Commissioners of Emigration received a copy of a dispatch from J.H. Baily, United States Consul at Hamburg” claiming that “28 paupers” who had been returned to Germany on SS Westphalia were going to be sent back to the United States “by a Hebrew benevolent society.


1884: Two days after he had passed away,


1884: “Love Letters in Court” published today described the divorce proceedings between Carrie and Simon Uhlman which has been going on for the last eight months.


1887: “The Euphrates Railway’ published today described the so-far unsuccessful attempt to gain approval for the construction of railroad from Constantinople to Baghdad including the role played by “Mr. James Alexander, a Caledonian Hebrew” who represented the interested British businessman at the Ottoman capital. (Caledonia is another name for Scotland)


1888: “Anonymous Enemies” published today describes what Telemaqua T. Timaneynis claims was the Jewish reaction to his two anti-Semitic books, The Original M. Jacobs and The American Jew. (The story’s report of Jewish boycotts and threats of violence have been published elsewhere without mentioning the fact that they were Timaneynis’ unsubstantiated claims.)


1889: The court of Common Pleas in New York was the site of dueling legal Jews when the judge was asked to decide Alexander S. Rosenthal’s claim that when S.D. Levy ate breakfast with him in the morning and then served him with papers in the evening, he was guilty of a breach of ethics.


1890: In New York, “a local paper published a meagre account of” the allegations of misconduct “toward several young girls” at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn by Adolph Eisner the Superintendent who mysteriously disappeared last week.


1891(1st of Elul, 5651): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1891: In the Grand Duchy of Baden, “Emil Todt and his wife Elise née Unterecker” gave birth to Fritz Todt the Reich Minister for Armaments and Ammunition, whose construction company “administered all constructions of concentration camps” and who escaped being tried as a war criminal only because he died mysteriously in 1942 plane crash.


1891: A meeting was held tonight at Cooper Union where the speakers denounced the Free Employment Bureau operated by the United Hebrew Charities under the management of Arthur Reichen.  They claim that the Bureau has established a trade school where newly Russian Jewish immigrants are trained in the clothing trade creating a glut of workers which has depressed the wages from $18 a week to $10 a week.


1892: In Aix-en-Provence, France, Gabriel Milhaud, an almond importer and Sophie Allatini Milhaud gave birth to composer Darius Milhaud.



1893: The Jewish Women's Congress opened as part of the World Parliament of Religion at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. Press accounts of the Congress reported that "women elbowed, trod on each other’s toes, and did everything else they could without violating the proprieties" to find a place in the overcrowded hall. Over four days, they heard twenty-five women from all over the United States, many of whom had never spoken publicly before, address questions of Jewish women's roles in religion, history, and philanthropy.


1893: When Jewish depositors threatened to break down the doors of the offices of banker, broker and steamship agent Bernhard Weinberger after they found out that they had been closed all day they were told that they were closed because it was Labor Day, but in reality the offices had been closed by orders of the manager Moses Hirschodorder.


1893(23rdof Elul, 5653): Ninety-year old Joseph Barrow Montefiore the London born son of Eliezer Montefiore who moved to Australia where he became a successful banker and leader of the Jewish community.  In the latter role he purchased land for the first Jewish cemetery in 1832 and organized a society that would eventually become the Sydney Hebrew Congregation. After retiring, Barrow returned to the city of his birth.


1893: “Charles Frohman’s comedians” are scheduled to open at the Garden Theatre in New York.


1893: “The Jew in Hard Times” published today provided a detailed review of a novel by Edward King entitled Joseph Zalmonah


1893: “A Jewish View of Christ’s Coming” published today provided a detailed review of History of the Jews Volume II, From the Reign of Hyrcanus to the Completion of the Babylonian Talmud by Heinrich Graetz.


1893: “Earliest of American Jews” published today provided a detailed review of The Settlement of the Jews in North America by Charles P. Daly.


1894: Two days after he had passed away, 76 year old Joseph Abraham the London born son of Victor Abraham and the former Rebecca Levy, was buried today at “The Walnut Hills Jewish Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio.”


1894:  Approximately 12,000 tailors in New York City went on strike to protest the existence of sweatshops.  The vast majority of workers in the "needle trades" were Jewish immigrants.  This would not be their last strike. Six years later, these workers would launch two unions - The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (women's apparel) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Of America (men's apparel).  These two Jewish dominated unions would work to improve the working conditions first for those in the garment industry and later for workers regardless of where they toiled.  Ironically, some of the owners of the sweatshops were German Jews.  Thus the schism between German and eastern European Jews was based on economics as well as religious conditions.


1894: Birthdate of Sholom Secunda a Jewish composer, born in Ukraine and educated in the United States. Along with Abraham Ellstein, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Alexander Olshanetsky, he was one of the "big four" composers of his era in New York City's Second Avenue Yiddish theatre scene. He wrote the melody for the popular song "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" in 1932. Together with Aaron Zeitlin he wrote the famous Yiddish song "Dos kelbl (The Calf)" (also known as "Donna Donna") which was covered by many musicians, including Donovan and Joan Baez. He passed away in 1974 at the age of 79.


1895: John Reilly and Patrick Finn stole pears from Cohen Friedman, an “aged” Jewish peddler and then attacked him when he asked to be paid for his fruit.


1895: Birthdate of Hymen Alpern, the long-time New York City high school principle and “author of books on Spanish literature” whose education included a BA from CCNY, an MA from Columbia and PH.D from NYU and as the husband “of the former Belle Kopperman” with whom he had three children – Stanley, Dorothy and Rosylyn.




1896: In Hoboken, two policemen arrested Peter Brume after they learned he had falsely promised to help 12 Jews from Poland get passage on ship returning to Europe.


1897: Clara Engles who met her future husband in Athens in 1895 and died in the influenza epidemic in 1918 married Friedrich Münzer the German scholar who would find out that he was “Jewish” when the Nazis came to power and died at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.


1897: After closing five free milk booths yesterday, the sixth and last booth located at City Hall Park was closed today by Nathan Strauss after Board of Health Inspectors charged one of his employees with selling “below the required standards” – a charge which Straus vehemently denies in what he views as part of conspiracy to return the milk business the hands “to the crooked men in the milk business” who have lost money due to his efforts.


1898: “New Synagogue Projected” published today described plans of wealthy Jews living in and Hempstead, Long Island, to begin building a permanent place of worship that will replace the temporary location in which they will hold high holiday services this year.


1898: The Comte de Bejon who has been an observer at the court martial of Captain Dreyfus and wants to share his views with others on the subject registered at the Brevoort House today.


1898: It was reported today that the police have not found the 17 year old  who beat sixty year old Louis Rosenbloom to death even though they know that John Schlecta was the bully who murdered the “venerable scholar”


1899(29thof Elul, 5659): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1899: “The fifth week of the second trial by court-martial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the artillery charged with treason in communicating secret papers to a foreign Government began today with largest attendance yet seen in the Lycee.”


1899: This evening, at Temple Rodolph Sholom Rabbi Rudolph Grossman’s sermon will be “Where Is the Lamb for the Offering.


1899: This evening, at Temple Beth-El Rabbi Kauman Kohler will deliver a sermon entitled “Life’s Ministry and Life’s Mastery.”


1899: In Harlem, those attending services at Temple Israel will hear a sermon entitled “A Greeting of Peace.”


1899: This evening at B’nai Jeshurun, Rabbi S.S. Wise will deliver a sermon entitled “Behind and Before.”


1899: Over two thousand Jews attended Rosh Hashanah services led by Cantor Weingart at Tammany Hall which was “decorated with palms and evergreens” for this event – the first of its kind in the history of the storied building.


1900: Jacob J. Goldstein of New York and Henrietta Goodman of Charleston, SC were wed today at the German Artillery Hall.


1902: In Russia, Meyer and Elda Cutler gave birth to United States emigre Harry Cutler, the husband of Rose Cutler


1902: During a conference of Russian Zionists, Ahad Ha’Am stressed the links between Zionism as a movement for national revival, and the cultural needs of the Jewish people.


1904: In Berlin the Rykestrasse Synagogue was inaugurated with Handel's prelude in D major and the Ma Tovu prayer led by cantor David Stabinski ,  Rabbi Josef Eschelbacher  illuminating the ner tamid and Rabbi Adolf Rosenzweig delivering the sermon.


1904(24thof Elul, 5664): Seventy-eight year old Dr. Hermann Barr who had served as Superintendent of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York for the past 23 years passed away today.  A native Stadthagen, Germany he worked at the Jacobson Schule before moving to Liverpool where he worked for a Jewish congregation for 10 years. He moved to the United States in 1867 where he lived in Washington and New Orleans before moving to New York, where in addition to his other work he wrote for The American Hebrew and wrote a three volume Bible history for children.


1905: In Charleston, SC, Rabbi Simenhoff officiated at the wedding of May Lins and Jake Sharnoff.


1907: In Trieste, Bianca Castelli, a member of a wealthy family of coffee importers and Ernest Kraus gave birth to Leo Krauss who gained fame as New York art dealer Leo Castelli. (As reported by Leo Castelli)



1908:  Birthdate of Edward Dmytryk an American film director, one of the "Hollywood Ten who passed away in 1999 at the age of 90 who was not Jewish but who directed "Crossfire" in 1947, one of the first films to deal with anti-Semitism. He directed "The Young Lions” which is listed by some as one the Top Fifty Jewish Movies of the 20th Century.  And he directed "The Cain Mutiny" which was written by Herman Wouk.  Because of his foreign sounding name, his association with Communists and these and other films, he is erroneously listed by several anti-Semitic websites as being Jewish or part of the Jewish Conspiracy


1908: “The Czernowitz Conference,” “the first international conference in support of the Yiddish language” which had begun on August 30th came to an end today.



1909: Prussian born German movie producer Paul Davidson, “the son of Moritz Davidson” “oppend the Union Theater” today in Berlin.


1909: In Allahabad, Brijlal Nehru and Rameshwari Nehru gave birth to Braj Kumar Nehru, the husband of Holocaust survivor Magdolna Friedman.



1912: Birthdate of Alexander Liberman, the Kiev native who escaped the effects of the Russian Revolution to pursue a career in photography and fashion that led to him being the real power at Conde Nast Publications. (As reported by Deirdre Carmody)



1912:  Birthdate of film composer David Raksin. The Philadelphia native graduated from Penn and played with Benny Goodman before settling down to writing scores for films  Two of his early and famous works were for Hitchcock’s Life Boat and Otto Preminger’s Laura.


1913: In Brooklyn, NY, Fanny Cohen and her husband gave birth to mobster Mickey Cohen.


1914: Forty-one year old French author Charles Pierre Péguy who followed the lead of Lucien Herr and became a one of those seeking to overturn the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus (Dreyfusard) and whose writings would be cited by those opposed to the anti-Semitism of the Vichy government was shot in the head “on the day before the beginning of the Battle of the Marne.”


1914: Following the outbreak of World War I, L.J. Greenberg’s Jewish Chronicle showed its support for Great Britain and its Russian ally by stating "From the Russian people Jews have never experienced anything but the deepest sympathy, and with the Russian people they have ever felt on mutually agreeable terms." Before the outbreak of hostilities the Jewish Chronicle had been a vocal critic of Russia and its treatment of her Jewish citizens.  Once Germany violated Belgium’s neutrality, the event that brought the UK into the war, Greenberg was determined to show his and Jewish support for the country that had proved to be such a hospitable homeland.


1915:  Birthdate of pianist Irving Fields nightclub entertainer and practitioner of a Latin/Hebrew hybrid style of music.


1915: As Germany sought to sway public opinion in its favor, The Daily Chronicle reported that Count Johann von Bernstorff, Berlin’s emissary to the United States “issued a manifesto” portraying the Germans as the universal emancipator including her role as the emancipator of the Jews. (As strange as this claim might sound to some, there were those who saw German Armies as the liberator of Russian Jews living under the Czarist despot.)


1915: “American correspondents in London” were reminded that Great Britain intends “fight on with the object of freeing Europe from the menace of militarism” (a code word for the Kaiser and German) and that in fact the German peace program “as it became known in London did not include Jewish freedom.”


1915: “More than three hundred delegates from Jewish organizations met at Cooper Union tonight” under the auspices of The National Workmen’s Committee on Jewish Rights “to launch a movement for the emancipation of the Jews in Russia after the war.”


1915: In Cleveland, opening of the Jewish National Workmen’s School and Institute.


1916: “War Refugees Reunited” published today tells of the 20,000 mile journey through Russia made by Mrs. Etta Kaufman and her three year son so they could rejoin their husband and father, Aaron Kaufman the former professor at the Royal Petrograd Conservatory of Music, in New York City where he had taken refuge to avoid being drafted into the Czar’s army.


1916: Approximately 3,000 people attended the opening day of “the bazaar for the relief of the Jews in Galicia and Bukharan, a week long affair sponsored by the Federation of Galician and Bukharin Jews


1917:Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII and current Apostolic Nuncio to Germany, writes to Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, Vatican Secretary of State, about a request from German Jews to have a shipment of palm fronds from Italy released. He advised him to refuse the request for these items that are necessary for the observance of Sukkoth.


1917: A statement issued by the Federation of Oriental Jews of America included a request that contributions for the relief of the men, women and children of Salonika who lost everything during a fire started by “enemy bombs” “be sent to the Joint Distribution Committee for the Relief of War Sufferers of which Felix M. Warburg is Chairman and Arthur Leman is Treasurer.


1918: During World War I, the Battle of Mont St. Quentin comes to an end.  The British commanding general described the spear-head advance of the Australian Corps under Sir John Monash as “the greatest military achievement of the war.”  Monash was the Australian born son of two Jewish immigrants from Germany.


1918: The Zionist Organization of America received a cable today stating that the American Zionist medical unit which had left the United States in June had arrived in Eretz Israel. The unit established its main headquarters in Tel Aviv and set up branch offices in Jerusalem and Jaffa.


1919: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, gathered a congress in Sivas to take decisions of the future of Anatolia and Thrace. Atatürk, the general who played a key role in thwarting the Allies at Gallipoli was the secular leader who created the modern state of Turkey.  This congress was one of the steps on the road to that creation.  There are unproven reports that he had Jewish ancestors.  Regardless of that, he created a state that recognized the rights of Jews. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Attaturk sought to convince German Jewish scholars that they should move to Turkey. Turkey was neutral during the war, but unlike neutral Switzerland, Turkey followed the example set by the now deceased Attaturk and did what it could to provide a haven for Jews fleeing from Hitler’s Europe.


1919:  In the Bronx, “Elsie and Hugo Morris, a rubber company executive” gave birth to Howard “Howie” Morris who gained fame as the “third banana” on the 1950’s hit Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” with Carl Reiner as the “second banana.”  Morris passed away in 2005.


1920: Rabbi Max Reichler is scheduled to deliver a Shabbat morning sermon on “A Religion of Joy” at Sinai Temple in New York City.


1920: Rabbi I. Mortimer Bloom is scheduled to deliver a Shabbat morning sermon on “The Big Me” at the Hebrew Tabernacle in New York City.


1920: Rabbi Aaron Eiseman is scheduled to deliver a Shabbat morning sermon on the “Portion of the Law” at Mt. Neboh Congregation on 150th Street near Broadway.


1920: A film made by “six of the best American Jewish cameramen” who escaped Warsaw before the arrival of the Bolsheviks and eluded capture by the Polish police that provides “a complete story of Jewish Poland as it is today” that is accompanied by a score especially prepared by “Josiah Zuro, former conductor of the Manahattan Opera Company” is scheduled to be shown for the last time tonight at Madison Square Garden.


1921: “A Virgin Paradise,” a “silent adventure movie filmed by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg was released in the United States today by Fox Film Corporation.


1921: In Berlin Rabbi Ezekiel Landau and Helen (Grynberg) Landau gave birth to conductor and composer Siegfried Landau, one of those fortunate to escape Nazi Germany and settle in the United States.


1922: It was reported today that the Philadelphia branch of the Jewish Peoples’ Relief Committee has contributed ten thousand dollars toward the national committee’s campaign to raise a million dollars for a fund “to aid Jews in Western Europe.”


1923: Today at Saranac Lake, NY, “more than $6,000 was pledged at the start of a nation-wide campaign” to raise “funds to erect a permanent center for welfare work among the “Jewish health seekers who flock here from all parts of the world.”


1926: It was reported today that Sir Austin Chamberlain, British Foreign Secretary, and Aristide Briand, French Foreign Minister have accused the Permanent Mandates Commission  of overstepping its authority and threatening to undermine their authority in Palestine and Syria, respectively. (Once again, we are reminded that trouble in the Middle East is not always connected to the Jews or the Zionists. In fact, blaming them as the sole cause of unrest in the region has actually made matters worse.)


1926(25thof Elul, 5686): Aspiring Hungarian artist Emerich Loewi committed suicide today after having been denied admittance to the Hungarian Art College under the terms of a numerous clausus law that limited the number of Jews would attend education institutions.


1928: Birthdate of New York native movie producer Jerome Hellman, “best known for being the 42nd recipient of the Academy Award for Best Picture for Midnight Cowboy.”


 


1933: “I Was a Spy,” a “British thriller” produced by Michael Balcon with music by Louis Levy was released in the United Kingdom today by Woolf & Freedman Film Service.


1933: After having premiered in France at the end of July, “On the Streets” (Dans les rues) based on the French novel, directed by Victor Trivas , with music by Hans Eisler and filmed by cinematographer Rudolph Mate was released today in the United States.


1936: “Swing Time,” a musical comedy produced by Pandro S. Berman with music by Jerome Kern was released in the United States by RKO.


1936: Funeral service for “Dr. Isaac Max Rubinow of Cincinnai, a pioneer in the American social security movement and international secretary of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith” who is survived by his widow and three children - Raymond, Laura and Dr. Olga Rabinow – are scheduled to be held this morning at the Free Synagogue on West 86th Street in New York City


1936: Arthur T. Buch, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Buch delivered a sermon on “Nazis of Jews?” after he was inducted this evening as the Rabbi at Temple Gates of Israel in New York.


1936: Birthdate of Tel Aviv native Judea Pearl, the IDF veteran and American trained computer scientist, the husband of Ruth Pearl and the father of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by terrorists because he was an American Jew which led to the writing of I Am Jewish, edited by Judea and Ruth Pearl.




1936: “The Road to Glory” a WW I movie featuring Gregory Rattoff, and Julius Tannen was released today in the United States.


1936: “Four religious leaders” including Rabbi Morris Lazaron of Baltimore joined today “in a statement through the Good Neighbor League asserting that more progress had been made toward establishment of economic principles of organized religion during the Roosevelt administration than in the preceding thirty years.”


1936: In Paris, “a plan for implementing the decisions of The World Jewish Congress” made at its first meeting at Geneva in August is scheduled to “be presented to a meeting of the executive committee” whose members include Dr. Stephen S. Wise, the chairman and Louis Lipsky of New York today.


1936: The Midwest Institute of Human Relations ended its six days of deliberation today at the end of which Dr. John A. Lapp, a Catholic layman, Dr. Felix Levy of Temple Emanu-El of Chicago and Dr. James M. Yard, the executive secretary of the Chicago Round Table of Jews and Christians said they recognize that one of the main causes of prejudice “is the implanting of false ideas of religions, races, people and institutions in the mind of our youth, either in the schools, on the playgrounds or in the homes.”


1937: Eliezer Gerstein was badly wounded by a young Arab while returning from prayers at the Western Wall.  For those of you who thought that Arabs only got mad when Sharon goes to the Western Wall guess again.


1938: Dr. Appaly, the President of the Medical Association of Danzig announced today without any prior warning that effective October 1, Jews, including those who had served in the German Army during the Great War, would not be allowed to practice medicine.


1938: At Andover, NJ, “Fritz Kuhn, the newly re-elected national leader of the German-American Bund” announced to the thousands of Bundists at Camp Nordland a nineteen point program which included a demand that in a “white, gentile-ruled United States” “no Jews shall hold ‘positions of importance’ in government, national defense forces and educational institutions.”


1939: Seventy-seven Jewish children ranging in age from 15 through 17, who are refugees from Germany and hold certificates for entrance into Palestine, were put on a board an Italian steam ship at Trieste by representatives of Youth Aliyah.  It is unknown if the ship will dock at Haifa or Tel Aviv.


1939:Captain Archibald Henry Maule Ramsay, a Scottish Unionist Member of Parliament and vicious anti-Semite wrote a poem that would “later…be printed and distributed by the Right Club” that began “


Land of dope and Jewry


 Land that once was free


All the Jew boys praise thee


 Whilst they plunder thee


1939: In air raid by the Luftwaffe on the Polish town of Sulejow, over a thousand Jews were listed among the dead. The entire Goldblum family was wiped out. From the outset of the war, the German air force conducted bombing attacks on urban population without regard to civilians.  In other words, there was no attempt to limit attacks to military targets. Recent books by revisionist historians have complained about the suffering of the German population at the hands of Allied air men.  These writers make little or no mention of attacks like those at Sulejow or even worse ones to follow at Warsaw.


1939: Germany occupied Kalisz, Poland which has a Jewish population of 30,000.


1939: Warsaw is cut off by the German Army.


1939(20th of Elul, 5699): The invading Nazis shot 180 Jews in the city of Czestochowa. When the Jews refused to burn the Torah, the Germans burned the rabbi, Abraham Mordechai


1939: “The Germans occupied Bendzin, and just a few days later, they burned down the synagogue and damaged some 50 adjacent houses, while their Jewish inhabitants were inside.”  (Yad Vashem)



1940: Chiune Sugihara the Japanese Vice-Consul had to stop issuing visas to Jewish refugees when he was forced to close his office in Lithuania.


1940: Eva Schott Berek celebrated her 19th birthday a week after she and her parents, who had fled the terror of Nazi Germany, arrived Angel Island Immigration Station


1941: J.D. Salinger who had been corresponding with Marjorie Sheard, a Toronto woman about his own age provided her with literary advice when he wrote today, “Seems to me you have the instincts to avoid the usual Vassar-girl tripe” and then suggested the names of some smaller publications “where she could submit her work” even though “You can’t go around buying Cadillacs on what the small mags pay,” he wrote, “but that doesn’t really matter, does it?”


1941: Jewish Resistance members based in Dubossary, Ukraine, and led by Yakov Guzanyatskii assassinate a German commander named Kraft. Another group blows up a large store of German arms.


1942: In the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburg, Sarah and Joseph Filner gave birth to Bob Filner future California congressman and Mayor San Diego.


1942: Jews in Macedonia are required to wear the Yellow Star.


1942: Lódz (Poland) Ghetto's Jewish Council leader, Chaim Rumkowski, acquiesces to Nazi demands for deportation of the community's children and adults who are over the age of 65. During the action which will last until September 14, Germans fire randomly into crowds, execute individual Jews, and invade Jewish hospitals. They deport approximately 15,000 people.


1942: Young Jews take on the Gestapo in act of desperate resistance in Lachwa, Poland.  One thousand Jews died on this day while 600 escaped into the surrounding woods.  Of these an estimated one hundred survived the war


1942: Premiere of wartime spy thriller “Across the Pacific directed by Vincent Sherman who stepped into the job after the original director joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps, produced by Jerry Wald


1943 Six months after the overthrow of Mussolini, prisoners at Ferramonti, the largest Italian concentration camp for Jews were released.


1943: A private funeral is scheduled to be held today for Edward S. Rothchild who died after being struck by a cab. The 88 year old former banker is survived by his widow Stella M. Rothchild and his son Lewis H. Rothchild.


1944: Jacobus Hnericus Kann, “banker and owner of Lisa & Kann Bank” whose “bureaucratic transport number was XXIV/7” was deported from Westerbork today.


1944: Funeral services are scheduled to be held today for Yiddish actor Ludwig Satz.



1944: The British 11th Armoured Division liberates the Belgian city of Antwerp. The Jewish population of the city had been reduced from 35,000 to 15,000 as a result of Nazi attacks and those from their Flemish supporters.


1944: At Lugos, Hungary, hundreds of Jews are massacred by Hungarian Fascists.


1945: “Dead of Night,” “a British anthology horror film produced by Michael Balcon was released today in the United Kingdom by Eagle-Lion Distributors Limited.


1945: At 8:00 pm WEVD broadcast “the news in Yiddish.”


1945: In New York this evening, WEVD broadcast “The Jewish Philosopher.


1945: From 11:30 pm until midnight WEAF broadcast the play “Behold the Jew” with Aline McMahon as the narrator.


1945(26thof Elul, 5705): Seventy-two year old Montefiore Bienenstok, a reporter for the St. Louis Star and editor of The Owland the author of “short accounts about the Jews of St. Louis” as well as a novel on a Jewish theme who also served as “Assistant Secretary of the Jewish Charitable and Educational Union, Manager of the Free Employment Bureau of the United Jewish Charities and Secretary of the Home for Aged and Infirm Israelites” and who was the St. Louis born son of Charles Bienenstok and Sarah Davis, passed away today in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.



1945: Ruben Fine won 4 simultaneous rapid chess games blindfolded.  Fine is one of a long line of great Jewish chess players.  In addition to his chess playing skills, Fine spent part of World War II calculating the probability of German submarines surfacing at certain points in the Atlantic Ocean.


1945: Birthdate of David Monsonego who is now known as David Magen an Israeli politician who served as a Minister without Portfolio and Minister of Economics and Planning in the 1990s. “Born in Fes in Morocco, Magen made aliyah to Israel in 1949, where he attended high school in Jerusalem. Between 1976 and 1986 he served as mayor of Kiryat Gat. In 1981 he was elected to the Knesset on the Likud list, and was re-elected in 1984 and 1988, becoming chairman of the party's local authorities elections headquarters in 1989. In March 1990 he was made a Minister without Portfolio by Yitzhak Shamir, becoming Minister of Economics and Planning in June that year. Although he retained his seat in the 1992 elections, Likud lost power and Magen lost his ministerial position. He returned to the cabinet after Binyamin Netanyahu's victory in the 1996 elections, and was reappointed Minister without Portfolio. However, he left the cabinet in May 1997. In February 1999 he was amongst the Likud MKs to break away from the party and establish Israel in the Center (later renamed the Centre Party). Magen lost his seat in the 1999 elections, but returned to the Knesset in March 2001 as a replacement for Amnon Lipkin-Shahak. He lost his seat again in the 2003 elections.”


1945: German soldiers who had been operating a weather station at Svalbard since September of 1944 and who did not know the war was over “were picked up by a Norwegian seal hunting vessel and surrendered to its captain” making them the last German soldiers to lay down their arms.


1946: “A Flag Is Born,” a play promoting the creation of a Jewish State in the ancient land of Israel opened on Broadway on today. The cast included Paul Muni, Celia Adler and Marlon Brando. Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, Ben Hecht was the playwright; it was directed by Luther Adler with music by Kurt Weill. It was produced by the American League for a Free Palestine, an organization headed by Hillel Kook, known in America by the anglicized name Peter Bergson.



http://findingaids.cjh.org/?pID=365562


1946(8th of Elul, 5706): Sixty-five year old Reform Rabbi Isaac Landman whose accomplishments included editing the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia but who was an ardent ant-Zionist passed away today.



1946(8thof Elul, 5706): Fifty-two year old otolaryngologist “Dr. Louis S. Deitchman, the former Army surgeon” discharged in April with the rank of Lt. Colonel and “chief of staff of the Mahoning Tuberculosis Sanatorium” who is married to “the former Anna Galen” passed away today in Youngstown, Ohio.



1948: Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands abdicated for health reasons. In 1939, when the government had proposed building a refugee camp for German Jews fleeing from the Nazi regime, Wilhelmina complained about the planned location because it was “too close” to her summer residence. The camp was finally erected about 10 km from the village of Westerbork.  This is the camp from which the Anne Frank would be shipped to Auschwitz.


1948: Warner Brothers released “Two Guys from Texas,” a musical comedy co-authored by I.A.L. Diamond and produced by Alex Gottlieb.


1950: “A new immigrant village named Kfar Trujman in honor of the American President was established near Lydda Airport.  Eighty families from Poland, Rumania and Jungary comprise the first settlers.  A scroll lauding President Truman for his assistance to Israel was read at a dedication ceremony attended by fifty American Jewish leaders.”


1951: After meeting with David Ben Gurion, Mr. Warburg, General Chairman of the United Jewish Appeal announced that the UJA would work to rasie 35 million dollars to pay the cost of moving   60,000 Jews from Eastern Europe and Moslem countries to Israel by the end of the year.


1954: “In today’s issue of The British Medical Journal” Holocaust survivor Dr. Joel Elkes and Dr. Chrmian Elkes, his wife at the time “concluded that the drug chlorpromazine “may have its place” in the management of psychosis, the signature symptom of schizophrenia.”


1955: Birthdate of David Broza, a multi-platinum Israeli singer-songwriter and guitarist.



1955: Following the successful completion of Operation Elkayam, “the U.N. mediated a ceasefire today” with Egypt which decided to halt, even if temporarily, the infiltration of the terrorists called Fedayeen into Israel.


1961: Pitcher Joe Holen made his major league debut with the Chicago White Sox.


1963(15thof Elul, 5723): Eighty-three year old University of Wisconsin Law School graduate Alexander A. Landesco, the Romanian born son of Abraham and Vera Landesco who founded the Mohawk State of Ohio in Cincinnati before spending “25 years with Lazard Freres and Company and who was the husband of Olga Speigel Landesco with whom he had two sons, Alex Jr. and Frederick passed away today in New Rochelle, NY.



1964: Ken Harrleson “created” the prototype of the modern batting glove when he wore a golf glove to protect his blistered hand in a game between the K.C. Athletics and the N.Y. Yankees. But it would Irving Franklin, working with Phillies’ 3rdbaseman to actual make the first true batting glove which was adopted as the official standard by Major League Baseball in the 1980’s. (As reported by Douglas Martin)


1964: Birthdate of Anthony Weiner, New York political leader and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives.


1965: Pitcher Ken Holtzman made his major league debut with the Chicago Cubs.


1966: NBC broadcast the last episode of “Branded” a television western created by Larry Cohen


1967: CBS broadcast the last episode of “Coronet Blue” a dramatic series created by Larry Cohen and produced by Herbert Brodkin.


1968(11th of Elul, 5728): In Tel Aviv, one person was killed and 71 were wounded when three bombs exploded “in and near a bus station.”


1972: This evening, at the Munich Olympics, Israeli athletes watched Shmuel Rodensky the role of Tevya during a performance of “Fiddler On the Roof.”


1972:  Mark Spitz won a record seventh gold medal by with a victory in the 400-meter relay at the Munich Summer Olympics.  Spitz victories would prove to be bitter-sweet.  The medal winning triumph would be followed by the slaughter of Israeli athletes by the Arab terrorists.  Spitz was spirited out of Munich to make sure that as a Jew he would not meet the same fate.


1974: “Jewish activist Vitali Rubin, a specialist in Chinese philosophy, suffered a heart attack when arrested by police for “parasitism"


1975: The USSR did not attend today’s signing of the Sinai Interim Accord between Israel and Egypt which took place in Geneva.


1976: BBC1 broadcast the first episode of “The Duchess of Duke Street” featuring June Brown as “Mrs. Violet Leyton.”


1977: Moshe Dayan flew to Morocco, where, in a secret meeting with King Hassan, he asked the King to help expedite a meeting between Begin and Sadat.


1978: Talks begin at Camp David between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.


1980: ABC broadcast the final episode of “Angie” the sitcom starring Donna Pescow with theme music created by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox.


1986(30th of Av, 5746): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1986(30thof Av, 5746): Sixty year old former NYU basketball great Sid Tanenbaum was murdered in bicycle shop today.



1986(30th of Av, 5746): Hank Greenberg passed away.  Greenberg was a slugger for the Detroit Tigers.  He was the first Jew who was a national hero in what was at that time, the national pastime.  He endured his share of anti-Semitic catcalls and abuse.  He would later provide aide and comfort to another more famous baseball pioneer – Jackie Robinson.  One of the great debates that swirled around Greenberg was whether or not to play ball on the Jewish High Holidays.





1987: ''World of Yesterday: Jews in England 1870-1920,'' an exhibition that is part of the Jewish East End Celebration is scheduled to come to an end.


1992: “Bob Roberts,” a “mockumentary” featuring Bob Balaban, Jeremy Piven, Shira Piven and Jack Black was released today in the United States and the United Kingdom.


1993: Catcher Eric Helfand made his major league debut with the Oakland Athletics.


1994(28th of Elul, 5754): Twenty-four year old Sergeant Victor Shichman was gunned down at the Morag junction while on patrol.


1994: Woody Allen’s “Bullets over Broadway” premiered at the Venice International Film Festival today.


1995(9th of Elul, 5755): Attorney and activist William Kunstler passed away at the age of 76. (As reported by David Stout)



1997(2nd of Elul, 5757): In Jerusalem three Hamas suicide bombers simultaneously blew themselves up on the pedestrian mall, killing five Israelis including three 14 year old girls -- Sivann Zarka, Yael Botvin and Smadar Elhanan, “the daughter of peace activist Nurit Peled-Elhanan and the granddaughter of Israeli general and politician Mattityahu Peled.


1998: “The Rounders,” a dark drama about the world of high stakes poker co-starring Martin Landau with a script by David Levien and Brian Koppelman premiered at the Venice Film Festival.


2001: Hamas took credit for today’s bombing on Hanevi’im Street in Jerusalem which injured 20 innocent civilians.


2005: The New York Times included reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest includingA History of the Jews in the Modern World by Howard M. Sachar.


2005: Haaretz reported that Israel's World Cup qualifying match against Switzerland ended in a 1-1 draw.  Unfortunately, the sporting event was marred by pro-Palestinian demonstrators who ran across the field during the match.  Hopefully the Palestinian protestors will remain non-violent and not follow the path of


the terrorists who murdered Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics.


2005(30th of Av, 5765): Rosh Chodesh Elul


2005:  In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the Israeli government has offered everything from a field hospital, to specially trained disaster forensic teams, to organized prayer in an attempt to help the United States cope with this disaster.  In addition to sending words of official condolences, Israeli government officials conceded that this would not be a good time to go to Washington asking for additional aid for those who have left Gaza. 


2006: Jerry Lewis host’s the annual Muscular Dystrophy Telethon.  Tikun Olam comes in many forms.


2007:The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, a Jewish supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, which challenges the free market policy of Jewish economist Milton Friedman was published today.


2007:  In Jerusalem, the weeklong festival known as Jewish Music Days continues with a second concert at Beit Shmuel, featuring the HaYona Ensemble in its own blend of traditional Jewish "piyut" music with Sufi music.



 



2007: In New York, Prof. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir was named this year’s recipient of the Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska Prize. Endowed by Professor Jan Karski at YIVO in 1992, the $5,000 prize goes to authors of published works documenting Polish-Jewish relations and Jewish contributions to Polish culture.



2007:The New York Board of Rabbis unveiled its official Jewish New York History and Heritage Map today at an event attended by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The illustrated map, poster and guide lists scores of noteworthy sites throughout the city, spanning Jewish history since 1654, when Jewish settlers arrived in New Amsterdam from Recife, Brazil, founding what is now Congregation Sheartih Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue on Central Park West.



The sites include historic and cultural landmarks, to be sure, but also a hodgepodge of places of interest to those who closely follow popular culture. A sampling, by borough, follows.



Brooklyn



·         Baith Israel-Anshei Emeth (Kane Street Synagogue),
236 Kane Street
, where Aaron Copland had his bar mitzvah.


·         The BrooklynHeightshomes of Arthur Miller (
31 Grace Court
) and Norman Mailer (142 Columbia Heights).


·         The Midwood homes where Woody Allen spent his teenage years (
1144 East 15th Street
) and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg of the Supreme Court spent her childhood (
1584 East Ninth Street
).


Bronx



·         The childhood home (663 Crotona Park North) of Hank Greenberg, the Jewish baseball star.


·         The childhood homes of Ralph Lauren, formerly Lifshitz (
3220 Steuben Avenue
) and Calvin Klein (
3191 Rochambeau Avenue
), who grew up two blocks apart in Norwoodin the early 1950s but apparently never met.


·         The Sholom Aleichem Houses (
Sedgwick Avenue
and
Giles Place
), named after a Yiddish writer, and the childhood home of Bess Myerson, who became the first Jewish Miss America.


Queens



·         QueensCollege, the alma mater of the comedian and actor Jerry Seinfeld.


·         The childhood homes of Paul Simon (
137-62 70th Road
) and Art Garfunkel (
136-58 72nd Avenue
), the songwriting duo who grew up blocks apart in Kew Gardens Hills.


Manhattan
The Jewish deli which has been a bit of an obsession for some readers (and writers) on this blog, is not a focus of the map, which lists just two Lower East Side eateries:



·         Guss’ Pickles (
35 Essex Street
), which, as this blog has noted, is the
subject of a dispute over who truly has the right to call themselves by that name.


·         Kossar’s Bialys (
367 Grand Street
, near
Essex Street
).


Staten Island



RichmondCounty is not known for having a rich Jewish history, but the map includes this site:



·         BaronHirschCemetery (
1126 Richmond Avenue
), in Willowbrook, which opened in 1899 and includes the tomb of what the map calls “Staten Island’s most famous Jewish resident,” the publisher Samuel I. Newhouse.


The map was produced with city funds and includes statements by Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, welcoming visitors to the city. The back of the map also states, “The map is inclusive and includes those who identify themselves as Jewish and are seen as such by certain segments of the Jewish community.” Although copies of the map were made available to journalists at a news conference yesterday, the map is not publicly available yet, and we were not given permission to share it here. The New York Board of Rabbis intends to put a copy on its Web site after the High Holy Days this month. The map is the result of a two-year effort by a committee that included several scholars and writers, including Ilana Abramowitz, Gerald Chatanow, Joseph Dorinson, Mark Gordon, Oscar Israelowitz and Deborah Dash Moore. Ron Schweiger, the Brooklynborough historian, and Lloyd Ultan, the Bronxborough historian, were also on the panel. “I think it’s important when we do a map that people realize that the community has many components,” Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis and the honorary chairman of the map project, said in a phone interview. “We live in a time when it’s easy to exclude the other. The real spirit of this map is that it is embracing. There is room for everyone on the map and I would hope that’s a paradigm for living today.



2008: Haaretz reported that leaders in the US Reform Movement said they hope the privately run Aliyah organization Nefesh B'Nefesh will support programs developed with the Jewish Agency to attract liberal Jews who want to split their time between Israel and their existing homes in North America



2009: Performance of “Zero Hour.” Written and performed by Jim Brochu “Zero Hour” channels Zero Mostel’s wild moods, crazy humor and righteous anger.



2009:It took 70 years for this reunion, but when the vintage steam train pulled into London today with a group of elderly Holocaust survivors, the emotions started to flow. Under the sprawling canopy of the Liverpool Street Station, the survivors were reunited today with the man who as a fearless young stockbroker saved every one of them from the Nazis. Nicholas Winton, now at 100 frail and leaning on a stick, greeted some of the hundreds of Jewish children that he worked so hard to evacuate from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. "It's wonderful to see you all after 70 years," he said, shaking hands with former evacuees as they stepped off the train. "Don't leave it quite so long until we meet here again." The three-day trip from Prague - by rail and ferry - recreated the fateful journey the survivors made as children, part of the "kindertransports" organized by Winton that carried 669 mostly Jewish children to safety in England. Winton, as a 29-year-old visiting what was then Czechoslovakia, had become alarmed by the flood of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis and was determined to save as many children as he could. The train today carried about two dozen survivors, along with members of their families, 170 people in all. Some survivors gave Winton flowers, while others posed for photographs as a band played festive music. "I am very glad he had the strength and energy to meet us. It is emotionally very important," said 80-year-old Joseph Ginat, who was 10 when he traveled to England in August 1939 with his brother and two sisters. His mother died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. "For me, he is like a father," Ginat said. "He gave us life." Some of the survivors were meeting Winton for the first time. The passengers traveled from Prague to The Netherlands in vintage German and Hungarian railway coaches pulled by 1930s steam locomotives. After crossing the North Sea by ferry, they completed the journey in a refurbished British steam train. Other survivors of the transports who did not make the anniversary journey from Prague gathered at the station to meet the train."It's amazing. It happened so many years ago, yet I remember it so vividly," said Otto Deutsch, 81, who lives in Southend, southern England. "I never saw my parents again or my sister. My parents were shot and what they did with my sister I really don't want to know." In late 1938, Winton, a 29-year-old clerk at the London Stock Exchange, traveled to what was then Czechoslovakia at the invitation of a friend working at the British Embassy. Alarmed by the influx of refugees from the Sudetenland region recently annexed by Germany, Winton immediately began organizing a way to get Jewish children out of the country. He feared, correctly, that Czechoslovakia soon would be invaded by the Nazis and Jewish residents would be sent to concentration camps. Winton persuaded British officials to accept the children - who agreed as long as foster homes were found and a 50-pound guarantee provided for each one. He then set about fundraising and organizing the trip, arranging eight trains to carry children through Germany to Britain in the months before the outbreak of war. The youngsters were sent to foster homes in England, and a few to Sweden. Few saw their parents again. The largest evacuation was scheduled for Sept. 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany. That ninth train never left Prague, and almost none of the 250 children trying to flee that day survived the war. Winton's story did not emerge until 1988, when his wife found correspondence referring to the prewar events. "My wife didn't know about it for 40 years after our marriage, but there are all kinds of things you don't talk about even with your family," Winton said in 1999. "Everything that happened before the war actually didn't feel important in the light of the war itself." Winton's wife persuaded him to have his story officially documented. A film about Winton's heroism won an International Emmy Award in 2002, and then-Prime Minister Tony Blair praised him as "Britain's Schindler," after the German businessman Oskar Schindler, who also saved Jewish lives during the war. Winton rejected the comparison, and the description of himself as a hero. Unlike Schindler, he said, his life had never been in danger. But for many of those he saved, he is unambiguously a hero. It is estimated there are 5,000 people around the world who owe their lives to Winton - the children he saved and their descendants. The children saved by Winton include the late film director Karel Reisz; Joe Schlesinger, a one-time Associated Press translator who became one of the Canada's most prominent TV journalists; and British lawmaker and peer Alfred Dubs. "He doesn't think that what he did was a big deal," said Marianne Wolfson, 85, who traveled from her home in Chicago to take the train journey from Prague. "But we got our life back."



2010: At Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, IA, Bentlee Birchansky, son Dr. Lee and Cyndie Birchansky, was called to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah



2010 (5770): This evening, Rabbi Todd Thalblum is scheduled to conduct his second Selichot service as the leader of Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.


2010: A Kassam rocket launched from Gaza exploded in the southern Israel Negev area on Saturday morning. There were no reported injuries.



2010:IDF bombed smuggling tunnels in the Gaza Strip to night.The bombing was a reaction to the Hamas shootings in the West Bank earlier this week, and the kassam rocket fired into Israel from Gaza hours earlier. The army said it struck two tunnels leading to Egypt, and one that led to Israel, and was used by Hamas terrorists planning to kidnap and commit terror acts against Israeli soldiers and civilians. This was the first IDF act in Gaza since Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas relaunched peace talks in Washington two days ago.



2010:Yael Rapaport Schoenbaum enjoyed her first Shabbat. She was born today in Bethesda, MD much to the joy of her parents Michael Schoenbaum and Elisa Rapaport and her grandparents Dr. David and Mrs. Schoenbaum of Iowa City, IA.



2011: Anita, a film about a young Jewish woman with Down syndrome, is scheduled to be shown at the Ninth Annual Jewish Film Series sponsored by The Jewish Federation of the Quad Cities.



2011: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Sleeping with the EnemyCoco Chanel’s Secret War by Hal Vaughan which says that Chanel’s “anti-Semitism was vociferous and well-documented,” The Emperor of Lies, a novel by Steve Sem-Sandberg that paints a picture of the Lodz Ghetto including the role of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski and Except When I Write: Reflections of a Recovering Critic by Arthur Krystal



2011: The Los Angeles Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein by Julie Salamon and The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man: A Picture Book by Michael Chabon, with illustrations by Jake Parker



2011:The National Union of Israeli Students began folding up its campsite on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard this afternoon, the day after more than 400,000 Israelis hit the streets in a series of social justice protests across the country. Students said the decision to break down the camp was made as the protest movement enters a new phase in which the campistes are no longer relevant.



2011:Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered Israel's top security bodies to keep mum about intelligence information gathered prior to the terror attacks in the south two weeks ago, it emerged today.



2011(5thof Elul, 5772): Seventy-nine year old Eliyahu Naim died today “in a Jerusalem hospital, two weeks after hitting his head while running for shelter in Ashkelon” during a “massive rocket barrage on southern Israel” that took place two weeks ago. His death brings the toll from that attack to three.  Sixty-two year old Varda Nachimas and 38 year old Yossi Shushan died earlier.



2012(17thof Elul, 5772): Eighty-three year old Abraham Avidgdorov who was received the Hero of Israel Award (the forerunner of the Medal Valor) “for destroying two Bren machine gun positions on March 17, 1948 passed away today.  (As reported by Boaz Flyer)



http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4277294,00.html



2012(17thof Elul, 5772): Eighty-seven year old Tony Award winning director Albert Marre passed away today. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)





2012: Shir Hadash is scheduled to offer training in how to blow a ram’s horn at its Shofar Workshop and a course in Jewish ethics and values – A Taste of Judaism.


2012: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present a lecture by Marc Caplan and Beatrice Lang Caplan entitled “Watch the Throne: Spectacle and Specters in the Stories of Reb Nakhmen and Der Nister.”


2012: The Israeli Opera is scheduled to present a performance of “The Magic Flute.”


2012: A new film series sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Embassy of the Czech Republic titled “Doc in Salute” which focuses “on interesting personalities who have been touched by Jewish themes” is scheduled to open today with a showing of “What Doesn’t Kill You.”


2012: Cyprus hopes to begin importing liquefied natural gas from Israel by early 2015, Cypriot Commerce, Industry and Tourism Minister Neoklis Sylkiotis was quoted as saying by Famagusta Gazette Online today. Israel is in favor of supplying Cyprus with between 0.5-0.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas for electricity production, he reportedly said. The island country is planning to import natural gas in the short-term.


2012: The New York Times featured a review of Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon


2013: “Rock Hashana: 10 Stars of the New Jewish Music” published today provides a look at what is no longer “your bubbe’s Jewish music”



2013: After serving more than three years David I. Adelman completed his term as U.S. Ambassador to Singapore.


2013: Latica Honda-Rosenberg and Yaron Kohlberg are scheduled to perform Hindemith’s Violin Sonata in E flat major, op. 11/1 at The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.


2013: “Fifteen Palestinians were arrested Wednesday morning, including seven youths ahead of the Jewish New Year after they threw stones and clashed with police on the Temple.” (As reported by the Times of Israel Staff)


2013: In an interview published in Yedioth Ahronoth today acting Bank of Israel Governor Karnit Flug said her gender may have something to do with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to overlook her for the top post at the central bank.(As reported by the Times of Israel Staff)


2013(29th of Elul, 5773): Erev Rosh Hashanah


שנה טובה, כתיבה וחתימה טובה.


 



2014: “The solo Exhibition ‘Lotus Eaters’ presenting paintings by Canadian-Israeli artist Melani Daniel is scheduled to open at the Asya Geisberg Gallery


2014: “The Shin Bet released further information about the abduction and killing of three Israeli teens in June, including the transfer of money from Gaza to Hebron to fund the triple killing and the failed escape to Jordan of Hussam Kawasme, who allegedly helped bury the three teens on his land and was indicted Thursday in a military court.” (As reported by Mitch Ginsburg)


2014: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy announced that David Makovsky, a member of the State Department’s Middle East peace team, is returning which is seen as “a signal that the Obama administration is retreating from its efforts to broker a peace deal.” (JTA)


2014:“The IDF returned fire at a Syrian army position along the northern border this afternoon, after a mortar shell struck Israeli territory.”


2014: After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, “My Old Lady” a marvelous little comedy with a twist which marked the directorial debut of Israel Horovitz who also wrote the script and was produced by Rachael Horovitz was released in the United States today by the Cohen Media Group.


2014(9thof Elul, 5774): Eighty-one year old comedian Joan Rivers passed away today.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/arts/television/joan-rivers-dies.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0



2015(20 Elul): Yahrzeit of Dr. Jacob  Levin, of blessed memory, beloved husband of Betty, loving father of Michael (Gigi Cohen) Levin, Stephen (Dian Garton) Levin, Sharon (Philip) Wein and Lawrence (Sandra Morrison) Levin and proud Zaide to a whole tribe of grandchildren.   To his brother Joe, he was the incomparable “Yaenkel” and to me his was my wonderful Uncle Jack – living proof that good guys finish first.



2015: The Jerusalem Sacred Music Festival is scheduled to come to an end.



2015: In “Israeli Terrorists, Born in the U.S.A.” published today, Sara Yael Hirschhorn described a segment of society that Prime Minister Rabin had described as “an errant weed” that “sensible Judaism spits out.”



2015: Just in time for Rosh Hashanah, David Tanis provided recipes for holiday treats.



http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/09/dining/jewish-new-year-apple-kuchen-recipe.html?hpw&rref=food&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well



2016(1stof Elul, 5776): Rosh Chodesh Elul – Begin reciting Psalm 27 and blowing the shofar.



2016: Israeli songwriter Yoram Teharlev and The Quartet are scheduled to perform this evening at the the 14th Street Y in New York.



2016: “Women of the Wall prayed under police presence at the Western Wall this morning after the group complained to Israel’s attorney general about the lack of protection at their monthly prayer service” which did not stop their opponents from expressing their “holiness” by blowing whistles to disrupt the davening.



2016; “Israel Railways restored full services this evening, at the end of a day in which trains ground to a halt after political wrangling delayed weekend maintenance work, leaving tens of thousands commuters stranded.”



2016: According to statements made to by Baruch Abramzaiov, the country’s chief rabbi, “Uzbekistan’s Jews are not worried for their future after the death of the country’s longtime President, Islam Karimov,”



2016: As part of Mekudeshet, “a joint house of prayer” is scheduled to open today “at the Louis & Tillie Alpert Youth Music Center of Jerusalem in the Wolfson Garden for followers of the three major monotheistic faiths — Judaism, Christianity and Islam.”



2016: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to host its third and final summer-time Docent Tour of the Oregon Holocaust Memorial



2016: “Israel targeted Syrian Army artillery in the Golan Heights” tonight “hours after a mortar shell landed on the Israeli side of the DMZ.”



2016: The New York Times Book Section featured an interview with Daniel Silva, the author of the Gabriel Allon thrillers.



 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/books/review/daniel-silva-by-the-book.html?ref=headline&nl=bookreview&emc=edit_bk_20160902.



2017: On Labor Day, American Jews can reflect on their role in the American Labor Movement:




2017: “The 2nd Original Red Beans & Rice Cook-Off, co-sponsored by the Crescent City Jewish News, is scheduled to be held today from 12:00 – 2:30 pm at Torah Academy with all profits going to the Jewish Community Day School and Torah Academy


2017: On Labor Day, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to honor all military personnel and their families by waiving the admission fee.


2017: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “The Venice, Ghetto, 500 Years of Life.”


2018: After having visited Yad Vashem yesterday, the President of the Philippines is scheduled to continue his visit to Israel for a third day.


2018: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host two screenings of “Dough.”


2018: This is evening in Jerusalem, Beit Avi Chai is scheduled to host “Food for the Soul” featuring Professor Dalia Marx and Shmil Holland who will present “a culinary encounter in honor of Rosh Hashanah with lessons on symbolic New Year foods and practical cooking tips to prepare sumptuous meals for the holiday table.”


2018: “The members of the Joint List are scheduled to meet today with EU Foreign Affairs Chief Federica Mogherini as part of the series of meetings the party is holding in the international arena in protest against the Nation-State Law.” (As reported by Itay Blumenthal)


 

This Day, September 5, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 5

394: Battle of Frigidus between Emperor Theodosius who ruled the eastern Roman Empire and Eugenius, ruler of the western part of the empire. Theodosius’ victory brought the two halves of the empire back under on ruler for one last time. This is viewed as battle between Christianity (Theodosius) and a resurgence of pagan worship (Eugenius). The victory did ensure Christianity’s hold on the Roman Empire, much to the detriment of the Jewish people. But Theodosius was not anti-Semitic or particularly opposed to the Jewish people. For example, in 388 when a Christian mob burned a synagogue in a town on the banks of the Euphrates River. Since the local bishop had had a hand in the arson, the governor was afraid to act and turned to Theodosius for help. The Emperor “reprimanded” the governor and ordered the official “to demand that the bishop build a new synagogue.” By now, though, the Church had gained so much power that Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, “forced the emperor to publicly withdraw his orders.”
1187: Birthdate of Louis VIII of France whose attempts to exploit the Jews for his personal gain brought him into a major conflict with Theobald IV the powerful Count of Champagne, who had his plans for extorting money from his Jewish subjects.


1236: “In a letter written to the archbishop of Bordeaux, Pope Gregory IX expressed his outrage at the ant-Jewish atrocities perpetrated in France” and “issued orders to several archbishops and bishops of southwestern and western France to compel the crusaders to make good the losses the Jews had suffered at their hands.” (Jewish Virtual Library)


1236: Pope Gregory IX sent a “Request to Louis IX, king of France, to punish the crusaders, murderers and despoilers of the Jews, and to compel them to make restitution."
1288: Nicolas IV issued “Turbato corde,” a papal bull that dealt with the conversion of Christians to Judaism. Any Jew thought to be involved in such an action could be held by the authorities who could confiscate their property, among other penalties.


1319: Birthdate of Peter IV of Aragon during whose reign the “Ordinance of the Jews of the Crown of Aragon” was adopted.


1566: Suleiman the Magnificent passed away.



1638: Birthdate of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France. During his long reign the French monarch’s towards the Jews vacillated based primarily on economic need. But in the end, the real Louis shone through when “he ordered the Jews ‘to leave the kingdom without any belongs,’ and told the local officials to take any and all means to expel Jews ‘because that is our wish.’”
1654: Twenty-three Sephardic Jews, seeking sanctuary from the Spanish Inquisition, arrive in New Amsterdam [New York], from Pernambuco, Brazil. They had arrived at their final destination on the ship St. Catherine (also referred to in the literature as the St. Charles).


1708: In Lisbon, Portugal, Abraham Mendes Seixas and Abigail Mendes Seixas gave birth to Isaac Mendes Seixas who would settle in Newport, Rhode Island.
1725: King Louis XV of France married Maria Leszczyńska. Jews may well have taken part of the wedding celebrations since Louis XV had publicly guaranteed the rights of the Jews living in southern France when he came to throne in 1723. This change in policy from his father Louis IV may have been the result of 110,000 livres payment made in honor of “the joyous event of his Majesty’s coronation.”


1726: In New York City, Moses Raphael Levy and Grace Mears gave birth to Benjamin Levy.
1736: Many leading Jews of Posen, Poland were imprisoned and tortured a following blood libel.


1764: In Berlin, Esther and Benjamin de Lemos gave birth to Henriette Herz née De Lemos, the emancipated Jewess who converted after the death of her husband
1781: During the American Revolution, General George Washington rode into Chester, a town on Chesapeake Bay where he found out that French Admiral de Grasse had arrived with his fleet; a decisive event in defeating Cornwallis made possible because Admiral Sir George Rodney had opted to continue looting St. Eustatius where he displayed an anti-Semitic animus toward the Jewish merchants instead of intercepting the French Fleet as he had been ordered to do.


1783: In Charleston, SC, Moses Cohen and Judith De Lyon gave birth to Rinah Cohen.


1785(1stof Tishrei, 5564) Rosh Hashanah


1789: In New York City, Jacob Naphtali Hart and Leah Nathan gave birth to Zipporah Hart.


1791: Birthdate of Giacomo Meyerbeer. Born Jacob Liebmann Beer, Meyebeer was a successful German- born composer for opera. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Meyerbeer saw no need to give up his Judaism to gain artistic success. He passed away in 1864.



1793: In the wake of the French Revolution, The Reign of Terror began today during which Alsatian born Jewish businessman and philanthropist Herz Cerfbeer of Medelsheim  (Naphtali Ben Von-Geer) was imprisoned for a year on charges that he had been a supporter of the Ancien Regime.


1797: Simon Medex married Elle Cert in Eysden, Holland.
1800: Malta was conquered by Great Britain. According to legend the Jewish community on Malta began over 3,000 years ago when members of the tribes of Zebulon and Asher arrived on the island with the Phoenicians. The Jewish community of Malta had its ups and downs over the centuries. The British conquest found the community at an “up point.” In 1789, Napoleon had conquered Malta on his way to Egypt and Palestine bringing the French laws abolishing slavery and establishing liberty and equality for all to the citizens of Malta including the Jewish population.


1807: After twenty days, the British bombardment of Copenhagen, during which 24 year old Ludwig Lewin Jacobson “served as a military surgeon at the lazaretto of the Freemasons' academical lodge” came to an end following which the Danish Jewish surgeon obtained permission to “inspect the British field-hospitals” as a matter of scientific inquiry.


1807: The Battle of Copenhagen, which destroyed the family property Danish Poet Henrik Hertz who had been raised by the newspaper M.L. Nathanson after the death of his father, came to an end


1810: John Pesman married Esther Capua at the Great Synagogue today.


1811: In Frankfurt am Main David Philipp Schloss and Malchen Schloss gave birth to Adelheid Goldschmidt the wife of Herz Simon Goldschmidt.
1816: Louis XVIII has to dissolve the Chambre introuvable ("Unobtainable Chamber"). Jews remember Louis XVIII as the French monarch who would not renew the rights the Jewish people had won under the Republic and Napoleon thus forcing them to revert to the status they “enjoyed” prior to the French Revolution.


1816: Five years after being appointed rabbi at Glogua a royal rescript was issued making him chief district rabbi at Breslau, a position he held until his death in 1820.


1818(4th of Elul, 5578): Joseph Haltern “who wrote ‘Esther,’ a Hebrew adaptation of Racine’s drama of the same name” passed away today in Berlin.


1842(1stof Tishrei, 5603): Rosh Hashanah
1848: The Jews of Hanover, Germany, were granted equality.


1848: Nassereddin Shah Qajar, whose personal doctor was Bohemian born Jewish physician Jakob Eduard Polak, began his reign as King of Persian today.


1853: Sixty-nine year old Georges Bernard Depping, the author of Les Juifs dans le moyen âge, essai historique sur leur état civil, commercial et littéraire (History of the Jews during the Middle Ages) which was written in an attempt to win a prize offered by the French Royal Academy “for a work describing the condition of the Jews in France during the medieval period” passed away today.


1858(26thof Elul, 5618): Sixty-three year old “Austrian satirical writer and journalist Moritz Gottlieb Saphir uttered his final words "Now all is over, I have to go” as he passed away today at Baden.
1859: “Quarrel Over a Jewish Bible” published today described a dispute over ownership of a Bible by the Jews of Troy, NY. On one side is led by a tailor named Herman Levy, a Jewish tailor, Julius Lawrence, his son-in-law. Levy claimed to have bought the Bible for $34 in 1858. His opponents claim that they paid $80 for it eleven years ago. The disputants came to blows and Levy was twice imprisoned - first on charges of assault; second on charges of perjury for having lied about his claim to the sacred text.
1860: Lewis Hart married Elizabeth Hart today at the New Synagogue.
1861(1st of Tishrei, 5622): Rosh Hashanah finds Jews wearing Blue and Gray facing each other across the battle lines of the Civil War.


1861: In Prague, Leopold and Sofie Sara Pick gave birth to Franziska Fanny Kun /Kohn


1865: In New York City, Betty Loeb and Salomon gave birth to their daughter Guta who married Isaac Seligman making her Guta Seligamn
1865: In New York City, “J. Daniel and Fannie (Marshuetz) Mayer” gave birth to Columbia Law School graduate Julius M. Mayer, the Attorney General for the State New York and U.S. District Court Judge.
1865: It was reported today the Mr. R. J. De Cordova, the humorist and author, has lately received a legacy from a deceased relative in England, amounting to quite a fortune. It is to be presumed, therefore, that Mr. C. will have no further occasion to be amusing. [The presumption was in error since Mr. De Cordova, who was Jewish remained humorous and popular.]
1870: It was reported today that a group of German Jews in Philadelphia have just finished building a new synagogue.
1872: The investigation of the mistreatment of the passengers aboard the SS Charles H. Marshall, which included numerous Jewish immigrants from Russia, was scheduled to continue today at Castle Garden, NY.
1876: Birthdate of Silesian born journalist turned movie producer Lothar Stark who was among the Jews living in Denmark that was saved during the Holocaust by being spirited away to Sweden.


1878: It was reported that Thomas Fallon, a Roman Catholic, and his wife, a 15 year old Jewess named Rachel Cohen have gone to live in their home on Baxter Street, after a judge had dismissed the complaint by the bride’s father, Lowenthal Cohen that the girl had been kidnapped and not married.


1879: It was reported today that the Skuptschina, the National Assembly of Serbia, which was supposed to settle the issue of Jewish emancipation will not be meeting as scheduled. This has led to speculation that the so-called great powers of Europe will bring pressure on the Serbian cabinet to resolve the issue.


1880: “The Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau” published today gives a detail description of the performance the anti-Semitic drama.


1880: It was reported today Baron Sunzburg is the President of the “society for the diffusion of Jewish knowledge among the Jews of Russia.”  The society supported 25 schools and supplied “various…libraries, societies, and writers” with a variety of Jewish literature.
1881: Alfred Marks, alias Charles Sarridge, a handsome well-dressed Jewish “flim flam” man whose con involves getting merchants to change his larger bills for smaller ones was arrested in New York City today.


1881: “State Affairs In Europe” published includes a description of conditions in Russia where the anti-Jewish riots are seen as “the prelude to other disorders.  The attacks on the Jews of Kiev and Tchernigoff are “chronic” and the authorities “do not even attempt” to bring them to an end.  Eventually, “the nineteenth century will witness a return to the ages of barbarism in Russia.”


1882: The first United States Labor Day parade is held in New York City. While Jews have been active in the American labor movement for more than a century, Labor Day has taken on a new meaning for at least some Jews. Labor Day weekend is the now the time when the The Ball – “biggest Jewish singles event of the year” – takes place.


1882: In New York, the Board of Health heard a report from its inspectors the building occupied by the female department of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum which is home to 125 children is not connected to a sewer system.  After hearing Mr. Myer Stern’s statement that the Asylum has not had any response from the Department of Public Works to its application for sewer connection, the board adopted a resolution asking the Department of Public Works to cooperate with the Jewish organization in this matter.


1884: It was reported today that at Coventry the fundraising effort to restore St. Michael’s Church has been an ecumenical affair with Jewish citizens having contributed to the $130,000 raised so far.


1884: “Paupers Coming Back” published today described plans to send 3,000 Jewish immigrants from Romania to the United States that are being organized by Edward A. David on behalf of Romanian bankers.


1885: It was reported today that a figure of Sir Moses Montefiore will be added to the large collection at Eden Musee.


1886: As New York experiences a series of strikes amongst various trade groups, 700 Jewish tailors are schedule to go on strike today which is Sunday, the first day of their workweek.


1886: In New York Rosalie Jacobs and Leonard Lewisohn gave birth to Irene Lewisohn “the founder of the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Museum of Costume Art who was the sister of Alice Lewisohn.


1889: In New York Judge Van Hoesen was scheduled to rule on motions related to a squabble between S.D. Levy and Alexander S. Rosenthal, the lawyers involved in the divorce proceedings between Simon and Anne Weinstein which have lasted for more than 5 months. (All of the parties are Jewish except the Judge.)


1889(1stof Tishrei, 5660): Rosh Hashanah


1889: In “Bella, Czechoslovakia,” Jacob and Charlotte Newgeboren Drachsler gave birth to Julius Drachsler, who, at the age of 14 came to the United States where he earned a BS at CCNY and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia after which he became an Assistant Professor of Sociology and CCNY and wrote Democracy and Assimilation and Intermarriage in New York City.



1889: Birthdate of Vilna native and physicist Jonas Bernard Nathanson who in 1896 came to the United States earned a Ph.D. at Ohio State, taught at Carnegie Tech and authored such works as The Reflecting Power of the Alkali Metals.



1890: In Bialystok, Louis Leib Surazski Zuro, the son of Arke (Aaron) Surazski and Pesza Sourasky and his wife “Leah Sourasky  gave birth to William “Wolf” Zuro


1890: As of today, Adolph Eisner who has been Superintendent of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum for the past six years has been missing for over a week amidst allegations about his “conduct toward several young girls in his charge.”  However, a committee has investigated the charges and said that at worse he “had been very indiscreet in his language to some of the older girls.”


1891: Mr. Bauman who runs a training school for people working the garment industry financed by the Baron Hirsch Fund and managed by the United Hebrew Charities denied charges that his trainees were taking jobs away from experienced workers.  He said that if the immigrants were not trained they would become peddlers or go out without work.  He said that his trainees could not compete with experienced workers because the latter were not as skilled and the school did everything it could to send its graduates to work in cities outside of New York.


1892: Birthdate of Hungarian born violinist Joseph Szigeti


1892: “Rabbi Sonnenschein’s Problems” published today described the marital problems of prominent St. Louis Rabbi Solomon H. Sonnenschein who is seeking a divorce from his wife Rosa who is currently in Chicago and has announced her attention to cross file.  (While may not know their names today, they were a Jewish Power Couple and she would go to found The American Jewess.)


1892: The body of an unidentified Jewish peddler thought to be a cousin of Harris Glckman was found in New Utrecht


1893: In Norma, NJ, “Yocheved Perski and Aaron Rovine gave birth to Sarah Rovine, the future wife of Abraham Brodsky.


1893: It was reported today that Herr Paasch the “notorious anti-Semite” who persistently attacks government officials for “showing a leaning toward the Jews” “has been pronounced a dangerous lunatic and has been sent to an asylum.”


1893: A hearse containing the body of a Jewish infant under the care of undertake Solomon Goodman and driven by Moses Bernstein and David Rich was struck by a trolley in Brooklyn on its way to the Hebrew Cemetery at Flatbush.


1894: Wolf Siegel petitioned Judge McAdam to issue a writ of mandamus ordering the “Society Chevia Gwat Aushi Poland” reinstate him as a member. Siegel claimed he had been dismissed from the organization because he trimmed his beard, a claim denied by the Society.


1894: “Kaybles War On Jews” published today described the attacks by this tribe of Berbers on Jews living in several communities in Morocco where the synaogues have been looted, men tortured and killed and the children “outraged and sold into slavery.”


1895: John Reilly and Patrick Finn were arrested and jailed today for having attacked Cohen Friedman


1897: The Hebrew Free School Association sponsored a free entertainment for 500 children at the Education Alliance Building at East Broadway and Jefferson Street.


1897: Birthdate of Morris Carnovsky, the St. Louis native whose acting career was interrupted by being placed on the infamous “blacklist.”



1897(8thof Elul, 5657): Thirty year old Abraham Moss fell from his bicycle in Brooklyn today and died.


1897: “A Jewish State in Palestine an Impossibility” based on information that originally appeared the American Israelite provided Rabbi Isaac M. Wise’s reasons why the conflict between religion and rationalism would doom Dr. Herzl’s dream of creating a Jewish state Palestine.


1898: Comte de Bejon de Larouziere who just arrived in New York from France where he has watched events concerning the Dreyfus Affair first hand said that it did not matter if Colonel admitted that the letter used against Dreyfus was a forgery, there would never be a rehearing of the case because “the aristrocratic element and great masses of Frenchmen would be opposed to it;” that there would be a revolution if a new trial were granted while no revolution will take place if a new trial is not granted and that the leaders of the French military are against a new trial.


1898: A despondent Polish Jew who had been swindled by Peter Brume is hospitalized at St. Mary’s Hospital after having tried to drown himself by jumping off the bow of a ferry boat.


1899(1stof Tishrei, 5660): Rosh Hashanah is observed for the last time in the 19thcentury.


1899: Dr. Rudolph Grossman will deliver a Rosh Hashanah sermon entitled “What Does It Mean to Be a Jew?”


1899: Congregants at Temple Beth-El will hear a sermon entitled “The Kingdom of God.”


1899: At B’nai Jeshurun, Rabbi S.S. Wise will deliver a sermon entitled “New Year Thoughts and New Year Hopes.”


1899: In Rennes, during the second Dreyfus trial, the court did not hear testimony from a Serbian expatriate testifying for the Prosecution because it spent most of the day reviewing an “espionage dossier” in a secret session.


1900: Birthdate of Muscovite filmmaker Yelizaveta Svilova, “lifelong collaborator and wife of Dziga Vertov” and sister-in-law of cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman who in own right was most famous for her filming of the liberation of Auschwitz and the creation of a documentary about the Holocaust using that footage.


1900:Herbert Stern, 1st Baron Michelham, the son Hermann, Baron de Stern and Julia Goldsmid and his wife Aimee Geraldine Bradshaw gave birth to  Herman Alfred Stern, 2nd Baron Michelham



1902: Eighty year old award winning German scientist Rudolf Carl Virchow who “attempted to provide a rationale for the sense of Jewish acculturation” (in Germany) but who “still assumed that Jews were a separate and distinct racial category” passed away today.


1902: In a letter to Wenzel von Plehve Herzl reports on the just completed meeting of the Zionist Congress
1902: Birthdate of Darryl F Zanuck Hollywood producer and motion picture executive. Zanuck was not Jewish. He was of Greek ancestry. But he made the Academy Award winning film Gentlemen's Agreement. Filmed in 1947, this controversial movie dealt with the subject of anti-Semitism in the United States; not the goose-stepping, brown-shirted variety of the Nazis, but the culturally accepted American variety of quotas and "the unwritten, gentlemen's agreement" that Jews should be excluded from certain clubs, hotels, business opportunities, law firms, etc. Jewish film makers at Warner Brothers and MGM did not want Zanuck to make this movie. They knew how real certain forms of anti-Semitism were and they feared a backlash. They also cautioned Zanuck that in the unsettled political environment of the late 1940's, such a film might be detrimental to his career. Their fears proved to be unfounded as Gregory Peck gave one his signature performances and helped the film win three Oscars.
1905: The Russo-Japanese War comes to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth. President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the fighting. In additional to the Medal, there was a cash award four thousand dollars some of which TR donated to the Jewish Welfare Board.   Today’s Japanese victory was due, in part of the efforts of loans made by Jewish financers to Japan which made it possible for the Empire of the Rising Sun to buy the munitions needed for victory. As a result of the loan that Jacob Schiff procured for Japan through Kuhn, Loeb & Co, the Jewish financier received the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star which he received from Emperor Meiji in the Imperial Palace.  One can only wonder if Schiff’s efforts were driven, in part, by the vicious anti-Semitism of the Czarist regime.  On the other hands, Joseph Trumpeldor, who would become one of the early heroes of the Zionist movement, was a highly decorated soldier serving in the Russian Army who lost his arm during the ill-fated fight at Port Arthur.  (Jewish history is never a simple affair)


1905: In Budapest, Henrik Koestler and Adela Jeiteles Koestler gave birth to Arthur Koestler.  Koestler was a journalist and author who wrote about everything from Communism to the origins of European Jewry to Yoga and Zen Buddhism. His life is so richly textured that it reads like a character out of a piece of fiction. Two of his most famous works are Darkness at Noon and The God That Failed, which deal with his disillusionment with Communism, a doctrine he had embraced before World War II. He wrote at least three books dealing with Jewish topics. Thieves in the Night was based on his experiences living on Kibbutz before the war. Promise and Fulfillment is a history of Palestine from the Balfour Declaration to the founding of the state of Israel. Thirteenth Tribe is based on the Khazars and Koestler's belief that most European Jews are descended from them. Koestler suffered from Leukemia and Parkinson's Disease and passed away under tragic circumstances in 1983.



1909: Birthdate of Old Testament scholar and biblical archaeologist George Wright who led digs at Shechem and Tell Gezer.


1909: Birthdate of Detroit native Harry Lawrence Newman the star quarterback for the Michigan Wolverines who led them to three Big Ten Championships that included an undefeated season and national championship in 1932 before going on to a successful NFL career in the late 1930’s.


1911: In London, George W. Seligman married Mrs. R.C.W. Wadsworth a widow who was the daughter of James Benedict of New York City.


1914: During WW I, the pivotal Battle of the Marne, which represented the last chance for the Allies to halt the advance of the Germans on the Western Front began with armies that came to include tens of thousands of Jews on both sides.
1914: During World War I, “on the Eastern Front, the first award of the Cross of St George, the equivalent of the Victoria Cross in Britain,” went to Leo Osnas, a Jewish soldier, “for exceptional bravery on the field of battle.”


1914: Forty one year old French Roman Catholic author Charles Peguy, an ardent Dreyfusard (supporter of the French Jewish military officer)


1914: Stoker William Stern was among the 250 British sailors who died today when the HMS Pathfinder was sunk today by the U-21 in what was the first sinking of a surface vessel by a submarine using a motor powered torpedo.


1915(26thof Elul, 5675): Orthodox Jews in New York and other cities in the United States observed a special fast day which had been called for by a group of rabbis meeting at the Henry Street Synagogue to express sympathy for suffering being experienced by the Jews of Europe because of the World War and to pray for peace at special services being held on this day.


1915: Rabbi M.S. Margolis conducted services from five until 8 this morning during which he delivered “ a sermon on the sufferings of the European Jews” and called for financial contributions from American Jews to aid the their co-religionists in the war zones.


1915: In Toledo, Ohio, founding of Anshe Sfard Synagogue


1915: “Jacob Panken, the attorney for the Hebrew Trades acted as the temporary Chairman of today’s meeting in Beethoven Hall where delegates from “a number of Jewish trade unions and the National Workmen’s Committee on Jewish Rights” met “to consider ways and means by which American Jews can assist European Jews during and after the war.”


1915: The American Jewish Relief Committee a cable message from the Jewish Colonization Committee at Petrograd stating “Referring our cable fifth June, seeing daily increasing acutest, indescribable distress. Sums collected and half million Government contribution completely exhausted.”


1915: “Speaking before the Council of the Empire” today “Baron Rosen former Russian Ambassador to the United States declared that it was the duty of the legislature to take the initiative in introducing bill abrogating all legislation restricting the rights of Jews.”


1915: In Atlantic City, NJ, the Fourth Annual Convention of the Associated Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Associations opened today at Beth Israel Temple with a speech by Joseph Brenner of New York who declared “that young Jews are growing up in ignorance of the history and the achievements of the great men of the race.”


1915: Leon Trotsky attended an International Socialist conference in Zimmerwald, Switzerland that issues a manifesto demanding immediate peace and civil war between the classes throughout Europe.


1915: The bazar sponsored by the Galician and Boukowinian Jews which has a member of 60,000 is scheduled to continue for a second day.


1916: “Asks Jews To Drop Congress Program” published today described efforts by the Jewish Congress of Committee of Brooklyn under that leadership of Chairman Professor Isaac A. Hourwich and Vice Chairman Joseph Barondess to get its counterparts throughout the United States to repudiate “the peace agreement” that is designed to lead to the meeting of an American Jewish Congress because of disagreement over the method of electing delegates and choosing members of the executive committee.


1916: Birthdate of Canadian comedian Frank Shuster, the Shuster in the team of “Wayne and Shuster” who was the cousin of Jos Shuster, one of the creators “Superman.”


1916: Today, the New York Times published a list of friends or relatives of Jews living in the New York area supplied by acting general  manager Jacob Fain whom the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America is trying to find on behalf of needy Jews living in Russia.


 


1917: Pavel Axelrod of the Organization committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party and Karol Radek and Jacob Hanecki of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania were among the delegates attending the “Third Zimmerwald Conference” – a meeting of anti-War Socialists – that opened today in Stockholm


1918: Prior to the Battle of Nablus, in Palestine “the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade took over the left sector of the valley defences, continuing active patrolling.”


1918: “In the ravine de L’Homme Mort, near Vauxcere between the Vesle and Aisne Rivers,” after a bursting shell blew off both of this feet, William Shefrin, a cook serving with Company C, 306th Infrantry, “although mortally wounded, cooly directed the work of rescuing and caring for other wounded men of the kitchen department” who had been injured with their transport was struck.


1920: Seats for the upcoming High Holiday services are on sale today at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun and the West End Synagogue (Congregation Shaaray Tefillah)


1920: Grand Rabbi Meilech Horowitz and Cantor Marcus Ornoff are scheduled to officiate this afternoon “at the dedication ceremonies of the new gate to be opened at Mt. Carmel cemetery by the Congregation Beth H’Kneseth Anshee Mieletz of which Mendel Z. Schapiro is president.”


1920: Birthdate of Ontario, Canada, native Selma Diamond who wrote comedy for radio and television before establishing herself as a comedic character actress.



1921: In Brooklyn, Harry Gotbaum and the former Mollie Bernstein gave birth to labor leader Victor Harry Gotbaum. (As reported by Steven Greenhouse)



1922: Birthdate of Istanbul native Mordecai Weinstein who gained fame as Mordechai Gazit, the older brother of Shlomo Gait, Haganah veteran and “an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir., ambassador to France, and as Director-General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry”


1923: In the aftermath of the Earthquakes that struck Japan in August, “Rabbi Abram Simon, the President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis…issued a call to all members to obtain subscriptions to the Japanese relief fund of the American Red Cross.”


1925: Birthdate of Justin Kaplan the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer whose subjects included Mark Twain, Walt Whiteman and Lincoln Steffens.


1926: Rabbi David de Sola Pool, the spiritual leader of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, reported on his recently completed trip to Palestine. He said that one of the things that impressed him the most was the “complete public security in Palestine and Transjordan.” He reported that he and his family traveled between the two entities with the same sense of security one would have in traveling from New York to Montreal. He was also impressed with the economic growth in the region which was exemplified by the newly completed public works project in Jerusalem that will bring “copious” amounts of water to the City David; a change that will benefit Jews, Moslems and Christians.


1927(8th of Elul, 5687): Fifty-seven year old movie mogul Marcus Loew who formed MGM and Loews Theatre Chain passed away.



1927: Thirty-two year Samuel Holtzman the lightweight boxer who fought under the name of Frankie Callahan passed away toay.


1927: “The Master of Nuremberg” starring Julius Falkenstein and featuring Maria Matray and Hermann PIcha was released today in Germany.


1927: Three quarters of the houses in the town Kotsk or Kock in Eastern Poland were destroyed by a fire which broke out tonight. The town was the home of Menachem Mendel Morgensztern of Kotzk, better known as the Kotzker Rebbe.



1928: A group of Jews from Wembley, in the London Borough of Brent, held their first meeting at which it was decided to form the Wembley Hebrew Congregation and Mr. H Hooberman was appointed Chairman of the Congregation.
1929: As Arab violence abated, a large number of Arab leaders met in Jerusalem under the auspices of the Arab Executive.
1929: In Haifa, Jewish shops remained closed while casualties from the fighting at Safed, where the British repulsed invading Bedouin forces, arrived in the northern port city.
1929: A committee of leading physicians of Jerusalem today issued a strong denial of a government official statement that there were no mutilations of the bodies of Jews massacred at Hebron. The physicians emphatically asserted that among the fifty-nine slain Jews buried at Hebron a great number of unspeakable mutilations were disclosed. The committee demands the exhumation of these victims in the presence of European doctors and the Consular Corps for the purpose of proving their contention. The committee also states that many Jews are being treated in Jerusalem hospitals for mutilations and that these are still available for inspection.


1931: A week after premiering in New York City, : “Street Scene” the movie version of the Pulitzer Prize winning play Elmer Rice, produced by Samuel Goldwyn and with music by Alfred Newman was released today in the rest of the United States.


1931: In Alexandria, Egypt, “Dora and Haim Victor Mizrahi, a store clerk” gave birth to Moshe Mizrahi the Egyptian born, award winning Israeli film director Moshe Mizrahi



1931: Birthdate of Amnon Rubinstein, the native of Tel Aviv who became a legal scholar, politician, columnist and member of the Knesset serving from 1977 through 2002.
1932(11th of Elul, 5692): Forty-two year old director Paul Bern, a colleague of Irving Thalberg and the new husband of film star Jean Harlow was found dead today, with a gunshot in his head and gun by his side. For more see
http://www.historictruecrime.com/how-did-paul-bern-die-the-mysterious-death-of-jean-harlows-husband/


1933: First baseman Phil Weintraub made his major league debut with the New York Giants.
1934(24th of Av, 5694): Baevski Myer passed away. Born Simcha Myer Baevski in Russia, in 1878, the Australian businessman and philanthropist, best known for creating Myer, Australia's largest chain of department stores.


1935: Artist Lucienne Bloch, the daughter of composer Ernest Bloch, married Stephen Pope Dimitroff today.


1936: “The Arab Supreme Committee decided today to continue the general strike against Jewish immigration and the sale of land to Jews…” which so far has claimed the lives  300 people including seventy-nine Jews.


1936: The American Committee for the Relief of Jews announced today that “leading rabbinical and synagogue organizations throughout” the United States “have joined in the committee’s High Holy Days’ appeal which is aimed at ameliorating “the distress of about 3,500,000 Jews in Poland.”


1936: The Democratic State Committee announced that “a resolution endorsing President Roosevelt and Governor Lehman has been adopted delegates representing about 50,000 owners and workers in the cleaning and dyeing industry.”


1936: During the Spanish Civil War, Robert Capa photographs “The Falling Soldier.”




1937(29thof Elul, 5697): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1937(29thof Elul, 5697): Seventy-four year old “tobacco manufacturer and philanthropist” Sir Albert Levy, the son of Moses Levy, founder Adrath Tobacco Company, a member of the West London Synagogue and supporter of “a wide range of Jewish causes who was knighted in 1929 passed away today leaving an estate of £130,000.



1937: “One Hundred Men and a Girl” a musical comedy directed Henry Koster, produced by Joe Pasternak, with a score by Charles Previn and featuring Mischa Auer as Michael Borodoff was released in the United States by Universal Pictures.
1938: The Racial Laws were passed today in Italy which excluded all those of Jewish background from universities, schools, academies and other institutions.


1938: When the National Socialist Party held its annual convention in Nuremberg today, Nazis did not have to look on “the old synagogue and administrative buildings of the Jewish Cultural Society on Hans Sachs Platz” because in August Julius Streicher had ordered that the demolition of these buildings that he called “the disgrace of Nuremberg” were to destroyed before the party faithful gathered.


1938: After a two day hiatus, “You Can’t Take It with You” by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart continued its Broadway run when it re-opened at the Imperial Theatre.

1939: As the Nazis continued their sweep through Poland, the Germans tried to set fire to the predominantly Jewish section of Sulejow, Poland. Six Jews died in the flames while five were shot as they fled.
1939: Germany asked Russia to invade Poland from the east in accord with the pact that Hitler and Stalin had signed in August of 1939. Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister replied that they would "at a suitable time."
1939: “Golden Boy,” a film version of the play by Clifford Odets, with a script by Daniel Taradash and Lewis Meltzer, music by Victor Young and filmed by cinematographer Karl Fruend was released in the United States today.
1940: Assistant Secretary of State, Breckinridge Long, a proponent of curbing Jewish immigration, sent a memo to his consulates that stated in part: "The list of Rabbis has been closed and now it remains for the President's Committee to be curbed." Long's attitude was typical of many officials in the US State Department and helps explain why so little was done to help the Jews escape Nazi persecution both before and during the war. His "genteel band of anti-Semitism" was but another form of the "gentlemen's agreement" only this time with deadly consequences


1941: U.S. Premiere of Citizen Kane, which had premiered in New York last May, with music by Bernard Hermann and which earned Herman Mankiewicz earned an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
1942: Eight hundred women were gassed at Birkenau.


1943(5th of Elul, 5703): Seventy-seven year old Julian W. Mack who served a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for 38 years and whose leadership of the Jewish community included serving as President of the Zionist Organization of America passed away today.



1943: An old shoe warehouse in the Lódz (Poland) Ghetto takes delivery of 12 freight cars filled with shoes stolen from murdered Jews


1944: Bernhard Bästlein a German Communist who was active in the anti-Nazi resistance “was sentenced to death today for the crimes of conspiracy to commit high treason, aiding the enemy and undermining military strength.” (He was not Jewish but we should remember that there were those who risked their lives to combat the Nazis,)
1944: The SS closes the concentration camp at Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands.


1944: At Kibbutz Ein-Harod, Atara and Nachman Prag gave birth to Zvi Prag who perished about the Submarine Dakar in January of 1968.


1945: Of his meeting this morning with Herman B. Baruch, the brother of financier Bernard Baruch, President Harry S. Truman said, "Flatterer. Wants to be ambassador to France. Conniver like his Brother."


1947:Rusztem Vámbéry, the son of famed orientalist Armin Vambery began serving as Hungarian ambassador to the United States.


1948(1stof Elul, 5708): Rosh Chodesh Elul – the Shofar is sounded for the first time In a Jewish state since 70 CE.


1948: Leon Blum completed his term as Vice-Premier in the cabinet of Andre Marie.
1948: Betty and Jacob Levin are married in Chicago, starting a fifty-nine year life-time partnership that was a blessing and inspiration to all who came to know them.


1951: In Los Angeles, premiere of “The Blue Veil” directed by Curtis Bernhardt, produced by Jerry Wald and with music by Franz Waxman.
1951: Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion greeted the delegates of the 12th annual conference of The Women’s International Zionist Organization at its opening meeting in Jerusalem. The organization has 180,000 members in fifty-one countries. The organization which focuses on social work activities does not have branches in the United States, since Hadassah already fills that niche.
1951: At the end of four days of war games in the Negev watched by representatives of the U.S. and U.K., Major General Yigal Yadin, the IDF’s Chief of Staff expressed unbounded confidence in the ability of his troops to repel attacks by an aggressors.


1951: As America is gripped by a right-wing witch hunt, former Communist Karl Wittfogel told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Rutgers University professor Moses Finkelstein was a communist.  This accusation would touch off a series of events that would lead to Finkelstein losing his position, moving to England where his career led to a knighthood.


1951: The funeral for Abraham Cahan the retired editor of the Forward is scheduled to take place today.
1954(7th of Elul, 5714): Ninety-four year old Eugen Schiffer, a long time German political leader who survived the Holocaust living in a ghetto in Berlin passed away today.


1954: Twenty-five year old southpaw Morris “Moe” Savransky pitched his last game for the Cincinnati Reds in his one and only major league season.


1956(29thof Elul, 5716): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1956(29thof Elul, 5716): Forty-nine year old society  photographer Sterling Henry Nahum, “known professionally as Baron, a friend of Prince Phillip and a “Court Photographer to the British Royal Family passed away today.




1957(9th of Elul, 5717): Seventy-four year old St. Louis native Evelyn Scharff passed away today in New York City.


1958: Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was published in the US. Born in 1904, Pasternak became something of a hero during the 1930's when he refused to write in a manner consistent with the rules laid down by Stalin. He actually began writing Doctor Zhivago during the 1930's. Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature but was forced to reject the award. If he had accepted, he would have been exiled.
1960(13th of Elul, 5720): Sixty-six year old William I Teichner, “an engineer for the New York Board of Transportation and the Transit Authority,” “a vice president of the Sea Gate Jewish Congress and a trustee of the Coney Island Lodge of B’nai B’rith” who was the husband of Sonya Teichner and the father of “Dr. Victor J. Teichner” passed away today.



1961 Milk and Honey, “a musical story centers on a busload of lonely American widows hoping to catch husbands while touring Israel and is set against the background of the country's fight for recognition as an independent nation” began a pre-Broadway run at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, MA.


1962: In Haifa, Leah and Benjamin Ga-Or, both of whom “are professors at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, gave birth to Amir Gal-Or who “served as pilot in the Israeli Air Force” for almost a quarter of a century before becoming a successful entrepreneur who founded Maayan Ventures.


1967: CBS broadcast the first episode of “Good Morning, World,” a sit-com created by Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard and starring Goldie Hawn.


1971: “Consecration of the first Canberra Community Centre (the ACT Jewish Memorial Centre), featuring both an orthodox synagogue and provision for liberal services in the Dr. Fanny Reading Auditorium.”


1971: CBS broadcast the last episode of “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” featuring Wolfe Morris as Thomas Cromwell.
1972: Palestinian guerrillas attacked the Israeli delegation at the Munich Olympic Games; 11 Israelis, five guerrillas and a police officer were killed in the siege. The group who carried out this outrage was called "Black September." Their name had nothing to do with Jews or Israelis. Rather, their named commemorated the violent expulsion of the PLO from Jordan at the hands of the Jordanian government. The hostage crisis moved from the Olympic Village to the Fürstenbruck airport near Munich. That is where the Israeli Olympic sportsmen were killed by eight Arab gunmen. Israel never forgot Yosef Gottfreud, Ze¹ev Friedman, Ya¹acov Springer, Moshe Weinberg, Eliezer Halfin, Mark Slavin, Kehat Shorr, Andre Spitzer and Amihud Shapira. The Israeli government promised that it would pursue and punish the murderers and those who aided them. How did the world respond to this first act of terror in what is now called the War on Terror? The Olympic Games continued at Munich. The UN would condemn Zionism as a form of racism. The General Assembly would applaud wildly as Yassar Arafat, the father of this terror, stood with pistol on his hip addressing the international body dedicated to peace.



1972(26th of Elul, 5732): Yossef Romano, a Libyan-born, Jewish Israeli weightlifter with the Israeli team that went to the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, was the second of eleven Israeli team members murdered in the Munich massacre by Black September terrorists during that Olympics today. He was the Israeli weight-lifting champion in the light and middle-weight divisions for nine years. Romano competed in the middleweight weightlifting division in the 1972 Olympics, but was unable to complete one of his lifts due to a ruptured knee tendon. He was due to fly home to Israel on September 6, 1972 to have an operation on the injured knee.


1972: Israeli race-walker Shaul Paul Ladany was awakened by wrestling Coach Yoseef Gutfreund enabling him to escape from the terrorists and sound the alarm to officials that the attack was underway.


1973: Five Palestinians were arrested in Rome thwarting a planned attack that was to be made on an El Al plane flying over room using ground-to-air rockets supplied by the Soviet Union, Egypt, Iraq and Syria.


1973: In Paris, Arab terrorists attacked the Saudi-Arabian Embassy following which “French authorities allowed the terrorists to fly from France with six Saudi diplomats as hostages aboard a Syrian plane which landed in Kuwait.


1975(29thof Elul, 5735): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1975: During New Year’s Eve services Jews clashed with militia outside Moscow synagogue


1976: The cabinet decided to appoint Aldin Yadlin, former head of the Histadrut's economic enterprises, governor of the Bank of Israel to succeed Moshe Sanbar


1976: Today’s Mass Market Paperbacks Best Sellers list included, #2 The Eagle Has Landed, Jack Higgins’ novel about a Nazi plot to assassinate Churchill, #5 Ragtimeby E. L. Doctorow and #10 Ninety Minutes to Entebbe by William Stevenson.


1977: In order to qualify as the 22nd member of the Arab League, Djibouti barred all Israeli shipping from its port.
1977: Kibbutz Kfar Etzion celebrated the 10th anniversary of its re-establishment.
1978: Sadat, Begin and Carter began the peace conference at Camp David, Maryland. These talks would produce the first peace treaty between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors. The treaty has lasted. The peace may be "cold" but there have been no "hot" wars.


1985(19thof Elul, 5745): Eighty-four year old Margareta Nyiszli who along with her husband Mikilos, the author of Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Accountand her daughter Susanna survived the Holocaust, passed away today.


1986(1stof Elul, 5746): Rosh Chodesh Elul


1986: Sixty-eight year old Reverend John Stanley Grauel, a Methodist Minister who supported Zionism and served as a crewman on the S.S. Exodus in 1947 passed away today.



1987: An exhibition entitled ''Boris: The Studio Photographer 1900-1985,'' documenting the life and work of the portrait photographer Boris Bennett, which is part of the Jewish East End Celebration is scheduled to come to an end.
1988: Jerry Lewis' 23rd Labor Day telethon raises record $41,132,113


1991: First performance of The Death of Klinghoffer an opera based on the murder of Leon Klinghoffer which was controversial because of its portrayal of his killers took place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.


1991: Two weeks after the rioting in Crown Heights, Anthony Graziosi, an Italian sales representative with a white beard dressed in dark business attire, was driving in the neighborhood “six blocks away from where Yankel Rosenbaum had been murdered” was surrounded by “a group of black men, one of whom shot and killed him” leading to allegations “State Attorney General Robert Abrams, former Mayor Ed Koch, and a number of advocacy organizations, that Graziosi's resemblance to a Hasidic Jew precipitated his murder.”
1992(7th of Elul, 5752): Author Fritz Leiber passed away. He was best known for his science fiction works several of which won Hugo Awards.


1993(19thof Elul, 5753): Seventy-seven year old Irma (Silverbach) Seligmann the wife of Werner Julius Seligmann passed away today in Montevideo, Uraguay.


1996: Holocaust denier David “Irving filed a libel suit concerning Deborah Lipstadt’s book Denying the Holocaust naming the author and her publisher, Penguin Books as defendants” while also suing “Holocaust historian Gitta Sereny for libel for an article” she had written about him.
1997(3rd of Elul, 5757): Hungarian born conductor Sir George Solti passed away.
1997(3rd of Elul, 5757): Twelve Israeli naval commandos were killed in an attack against a Hezbollah installation.


1998: Seventy-seven year old actor and director Leo Penn who had the unique distinction of risking his life as a bombardier in WWII only to be blacklisted and who was the “father of musician Michael Penn and actors Sean Penn and Christ Penn, passed away today.(As reported by Kathryn Shattuck)



1998: Premiere of Radu Mihăileanu’s Train of Life (Train de Vie) one of the most off-beat movies ever made about the Holocuast.
1999(24th of Elul, 5759): Alan Funt, creator of Candid Camera, the original television reality show passed away.


1999: A Hamas bombing at Egged bus 960 at Tiberias failed to murder anybody.


1999: A Hamas bombing at the Haifa Central Bus Station failed to murder anybody.
1999: The New York Timesincluded reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including The Last Survivor: In Search of Martin Zaidenstadt by Timothy W. Ryback, Jafsie and John Henry: Essays by David Mamet, Modern Girls, Shining Stars, The Skies of Tokyo: Five Japanese Women by Phyllis Birnbaum and American Odyssey: Letters and Journals, 1940-1947 by Wilhelm Reich.
2000: “Evan and Jaron” the second album by twin brothers Evan Mitchell Lowenstein and Jaron David Lowenstein was released today.


2003: David “Blaine began his 44-day endurance stunt sealed inside a transparent Plexiglas case suspended 9 metres (30 ft) in the air next to Potters Fields Park on the south bank of the River Thames, the area between City Hall and Tower Bridge in London. The case, measuring 3 feet (0.9 m) by 7 feet (2.1 m) by 7 feet (2.1 m), had a webcam installed so that viewers could observe his progress. During the 44-day period, Blaine went without any food or nutrients and survived on just 4.5 litres of water per day.”


2003(8th of Elul, 5763): Twenty-seven year old Mordechai Laufter of Netanya died today of wounds suffered during a bus bombing in the Shmuel HaNavi Quarter of Jerusalem.


2004: The New York Timesincluded reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick andSecrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis by Eli Zaretsky
2004: “Focus on the Soul: The Photographs of Lotte Jacobi” closes after three months of being on displayed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.
2005: In Little Rock, AR, the bris of Rabbi and Estie Ciment newborn son.
2005(1st of Elul, 5765): Rosh Chodesh Elul; the Shofar will be sounded at the end of all morning services except on Shabbat until the penultimate day of the month. Psalm 27 is recited daily from this date until Shemini Atzeres.
2005:
Haaretz
reported that the opening of the Israeli diplomatic mission in Dubai several weeks ago was the culmination of a series of elaborate contacts Israel has been developing with the United Arab Emirates for years. By using secret diplomacy, the Foreign Ministry has succeeded in adding the Emirates to the list of Arab countries that have diplomatic ties with Israel.
2006: In its first-ever public recruiting drive, the Shin Bet security service is calling on high-tech geeks to join the anti-terror battle. "If you thought the only way to fight terror was with Arabic, think again," says the campaign's slogan. Shin Bet sources admit the ad campaign is also intended to change the organization's image. For many, the first thing that springs to mind at the mention of Shin Bet is torture. The people in the service are tired of that. They want the Shin Bet to be associated with advanced technology and software development. "We want the public to know other sides [of the service], not only the investigations and dark rooms," a Shin Bet source said on Monday. "The public doesn't know the service's technological side, which is an essential tool of preventive security. Part of the campaign's aim is to bring that to mind."


2006: The BBC reported that Randy Lerner now owned 85.5% of the Aston Villa football club.
2006: Once the scene of Nazi pogroms and massacres against Jews, the Polish city of Kielce changed colors. Sixty years after the Holocaust, it opened its doors to 16 Israeli defense industries exhibiting their wares at the 14th MSPO International Defense Industry Exhibition taking place in the city. Located in southeastern Poland, Kielce was once home to 24,000 Jews who were all - except two - killed during the Holocaust. In 1941, a ghetto was built in the city, and most of the Jews were moved there before being transferred to Nazi concentration camps. In July 1946, local Poles murdered 46 Jews who had returned to the city after the war to rebuild the destroyed Jewish community.
2007(22nd of Elul):Yahrzeit of Joseph B. Levin; still remembered and still missed after 22 years.


2007)22ndof Elul, 5767): Eighty-six year old Charlotte Zucker, the wife of Burton Charles Zucker and the mother of “directors Jerry and David Zucker and actress Susan Breslau” who was often cast in a small bit parts in her son’s movies (like one of the Lucille Ball impersonators in Rat Race, and Vincent Ludwig's secretary, Dominique, in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!) passed away today.
2007: Norman Finkelstein announced his resignation from DePaul after coming to a settlement with the university on generally undisclosed terms.


2007: In Highland Park, Illinois, the funeral of Dr. Jacob Levin; more could be said but there would never be enough room to say it all! He is loved and missed. Ironically, Jacob Levin is buried on the same day as the Yahrzeit of his brother Joseph is observed.


2007: After premiering at Tribeca, “I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With” starring Sarah Silverman and Jeff Garlin who also directed, produced and wrote the film was released today in the United States.


2008: “The Wrestler” a sports film directed and co-produced by Daniel Aronofsky, written by Robert Siegel and featuring Mark Margolis, Todd Barry and Judah Friedlander premiered today at the Venice Film Festival.


2008: NBC aired a segment on “Dateline” convicted hedge fund manager Samuel Israel III.
2008: “A Secret” (a Holocaust themed film) opens in New York. Claude Miller’s haunting new movie, called “A Secret” (“Un Secret”) opens in New York. The Holocaust themed film is based on a novel by Philippe Grimbert.


2009: In another one of those cases of Jews vs. Jews, for the first time Anthony Oliver “A.O.” Scott appeared as one of the critics on “At the Movies” replacing Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz.


2009: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Temple Judah hosts its annual Hebrew Labor Day Traditional Shabbat Service featuring Hebrew prayers and Hebrew National Hot Dogs at a “Completely Kosher Kiddush.”
2009: NiCad, an international rock band featuring Israeli vocalist and drummer Gilad Woltsovitch appears at Talking Head Club in Baltimore, MD.


2009:  Today “an Associated Press story quoted legal experts as saying that filing for bankruptcy reorganization might offer Annie Leibovitz her best chance to control and direct the disposition of her assets to satisfy debts.”
2009: At the Jerusalem Theatre a performance of "Yerid Hamizrach" a collection of songs that is a polished, dramatic mix of the personal biography of the poet Haim Guri and his Israeli experiences, from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and Yaffo, and onwards. The names of David Ben Gurion, Yosef Trumpledor, Y. H. Brenner, Yonatan Ratush, Natan Alterman, and others, are an inseparable part of the historical events that defined the stormy period in Israel and the personal lyric of Guri's life in the land. In "Yerid Hamizrach" has drama, parody, is many faceted, and fascinating. Guri himself and the show's creators participate in the event.
2010: BuckUSY a United Synagogue Youth (USY) Chapter, based out of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Columbus, Ohio is scheduled to begin its road trip to Sandusky, Ohio.
2010: The Los Angeles Timesfeatured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Sonderberg Case by Elie Wiesel.
2010: The New York Timesfeatured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Wherever You Go, Joan Leegant’s “first novel, in which three American Jews suffering from various shades of misguidedness visit Israel in search of meaning (or closure or salvation or . . . you get the picture) and their lives collide in (what else?) an act of terror.”
2010: The Washington Postfeatured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Bob Dylan In America by Sean Wilentz.
2010: At the U.S. Open, third-seeded Venus Williams defeated Israeli Shahar Peer, who was 16th-seeded, 7-6 (3), 6-3 on the second straight windy day in Arthur Ashe Stadium


2010: Last Night at Chateau Marmont by Lauren Weisberg, the “debuted today at No. 9 on the New York Times Bestseller List.
2010: Yona Metzger, great-rabbi of Israel and Zsolt Semjen, Hungarian vice-prime minister, attended the rededication of Óbuda Synagogue in Obuda, Hungary. Jews had been living in the area since the early decades of the 18th century. The synagogue was originally built in 1820.
2011: "Hansel and Gretel: The End of the Fairy Tale" is scheduled to be performed by Florence Fisch-Hacham at Bet Avi Chai in Jerusalem.
2011: The Yad Elie Benefit Concert is scheduled to take place at Waimann’s house in Jerusalem.
2011: The Brit of Rabbi and Estie Ciment’s son is scheduled to take place at the Chabad Jewish Center in Little Rock, AR. The “tribe” of a true Tzaddik continues to increase.
2011: On Labor Day in the USA, The DC Beit Midrah is scheduled to sponsor a “Labor on the Bimah” event at the DC Jewish Community Center.


2011: The civil administration with the help of hundreds of border police destroyed three homes at the Migron outpost in the West Bank early Monday morning. In so doing they made good on a pledge by the state to the High Court of Justice that the three would be taken down in September 


2012: The Alexandria Kleztet is scheduled to perform at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, MD.


2012: 40thAnniversary of the Munich Massacre


2012:Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles is scheduled to deliver the invocation at a session of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.


2012: The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Greater Washington and The Embassy of Israel is scheduled to sponsor a tribute and commemoration on the 40th anniversary of the 1972 Olympics massacre –“ A Memorial: Remembering the Munich 11.” 2013


2012:Democrats amended the party platform this afternoon to include language supporting Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The last-minute change came in the wake of mounting criticism from Democratic members of Congress incensed that the 2008 platform's declaration backing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel had been removed from the 2012 text. Sources close to the platform drafting process said US President Barack Obama personally intervened on reinstating the Jerusalem language.


2012: Relatives of the Israeli Olympians slain by Palestinian gunmen during the 1972 Games in Munich today marked the 40th anniversary of the attack with Israeli and German officials at the air base where most of the 12 victims died.


2012: The Air Force struck a terror cell that was about to launch rockets into Israel, the IDF said tonight. The cell had been involved in past rocket fire on southern Israel, the IDF added.


2013: A clash between commerce and Kavanah takes place with the opening of New York City’s Fashion week on the first day of Rosh Hashanah (As reported by Eliora Katz)


2013:Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman who has seen his mayoral prospects dwindle in light of embarrassing revelations regarding his behavior on Twitter, once again made headlines early today, this time over controversial remarks directed at him by a prospective Jewish voter in Brooklyn


2013: Sixty-six year old Stephen Chron passed away today.



2013(1stof Tishrei, 5774): Rosh Hashanahh


2014: Two members of the University of Haifa faculty, Dr. Efraim Lev and Dr. Moshe Lavee, complete a week-long series of meetings and presentation at The Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Connecticut.


2014: Comedian Lewis Black is scheduled to appear at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH.


2014:Hundreds of mourned gathered today for a memorial service at a Miami synagogue for slain journalist Steven Sotloff, who was executed by Islamic State extremists it was reveal earlier this week.Nearly a thousand mourners paid their respects, filling to capacity the Temple Beth Am synagogue that housed the somber ceremony, according to the Miami Herald. (JPost)


2014: Israel radio reported today that “a Nigerian visiting Israel was quarantined in Jerusalem for fear she may have contracted the Ebola virus.” (JTA)


2015(21stof Elul, 5775): Parasaht Ki Tavo; Leil Selichot


2015: In Jerusalem, Rav Yaakov Moshe Poupko is scheduled to his lecture T’shuva with the Flick of the Wrist?” at the Orthodox Union’s Israel Center.


2016: It was reported today that Katrina Lantos Swett, “the daughter of the late, Hungarian-born US Congressman Tom Lantos” was among 100 recipients of the Knight’s Cross who returned their award “to Hungary to protest the bestowing of the same award on journalist and writer Zsolt Bayer who has made anti-Semitic and racist references in his articles.”


2016: The 2nd Annual Red Beans and Rice Cook-off sponsored by the Crescent City Jewish News, Torah Academy and the Jewish Community Day School is scheduled to be held this afternoon in Metairie, LA.


2016: Starting today “radio shows with the Israel Story podcast will be brought to St. Andrew’s Church as part of this year’s Jerusalem Season of Culture or Medkdeshet.


2016: “Rabin, The Last Day” is scheduled to be shown at JW3, also known as Jewish Community Centre London


2016(2nd of Elul, 5776): Eighty-eight year old “Eliyahu Yosef She’ar Yashuv Cohen, a former chief rabbi of Haifa known for his Torah scholarship, interfaith work and strict vegetarian lifestyle” passed away tonight,



2016: On Labor Day, American Jews can reflect on their role in the American Labor Movement:





2017: In Memphis, TN, the Temple Israel Sisterhood is scheduled to host an evening devoted to “Women’s Health Issues and Breast Cancer.”


2017: In London, JW3 hosted a screening of “The Venice, Ghetto, 500 Years of Life.”


2017: The Hebrew Congregation of St. Thomas is scheduled to offer the first session of three week course – An Introduction to Judaism.


2017: 45thAnniversary of the Munich Massacre


2018: Beit Avi Chai is scheduled to host “the Israeli Klezmer in a performance dedicated to the month of Elul” featuring “guest musicians Mark and Peretz Eliyahu.”


2018: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host an evening with Pulitzer Prize winner Linda Greenhouse, author of The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction and “ACLU National Director David Cole” as they discuss issues surrounding the Supreme Court.


 


 

This Day, September 6, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 6

 
3761 B.C.E.: The first day of the Hebrew Calendar. "The epoch of the modern Hebrew calendar is Monday, October 7, 3761 BCE, being the tabular date (same daylight period) in the proleptic Julian calendar corresponding to 1 Tishri AM 1 (AM = Anno Mundi = in the year of the world). This date is about one year before the traditional Jewish date of Creation on 25 Elul AM 1! A minority place Creation on 25 Adar AM 1, about six months after the modern epoch. Thus adding 3761 to a Gregorian year number will yield the Hebrew year number beginning in autumn (add 3760 for that ending in autumn). This holds until the Gregorian year 1 BCE. After that (due to the lack of year 0), adding 3760 to the Gregorian year yields the Hebrew year beginning in autumn (3759 for that ending in autumn). Because the Hebrew year drifts relative to the Gregorian year, this actually only works until the year 22,203, but it's a fairly good rule of thumb."  IF this makes any sense to any of you, you are a better at this than I am.  I included it because I found it, not because I understand it.



394: The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius I defeats and kills the pagan usurper Eugenius on the second day of the Battle of the Frigidus. This marked the final triumph of Christendom in the Roman Empire.  The pagans, including those found among the Roman nobility could and did convert.  For the Jews, it was a different matter.  In one of those strange twists of fate, the victory actually helped to weaken the Empire and led to a further of the split between the Western and Eastern empires.


1556: The reign of Suleiman the Magnificent came to an end. Suleiman provided a welcoming Oriental home to the Jews as could be seen by arrival and rise to power of Dona Garcia and Joseph Nassi, the settlement of thousands of Jews on the shores of Lake Kinnerth and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.  He was willing to protect Jews against all-comers including the powerful Pope Paul IV who had wanted to subject the Jews of Ancona to his Inquisition.


1581: Seventy year old Guilaume Postel “Normandy native Guillaume Postel the linguist, diplomat and Cabbalist who “became the first scholar to recognize the inscriptions on Judean coins from the period of the Great Jewish Revolt as Hebrew written in the ancient "Samaritan" character” and who collected Latin translations of the Zohar, the Sefer Yetzirah, and the Sefer ha-Bahir, the fundamental works of Jewish Kabbalah” as well as other Cabbalistic texts, such as his own commentary on the Cabbalistic significance of the Menorah, which he published in 1548 in Latin and subsequently in Hebrew” passed away today.



1628: The Puritans settle Salem which will be incorporated into the Massachusetts Bay Colony which was also controlled by the Puritans.  The Puritans were heavily influenced by what they called “The Old Testament.”  They saw themselves as “modern Israelites.”  The name of the town “Salem” is a form of the Hebrew word Shalom.  Oliver Cromwell, the most famous leader of the English Puritans, was a key player in the return of the Jewish people to the British Isles.  English Puritans were part of the early Christian Zionist movement which championed the return of the Jewish people to Palestine hundred years before Herzl held his first congress in Switzerland.  While the American branch of the Puritans was influenced by Jewish tradition in the form of the Old Testament, the Puritans had no use for Jews (or anybody else) who did not conform to their stringent form of Christianity. 


1666: Birthdate of Czar Ivan V.  During his reign his elder sister Sophia supported a program of persecution aimed at Jews and pagans.


1683:  Jean-Baptiste Colbert passed away.  He was Finance Minister to Louis XIV at the time of his death.  Colbert’s drive to improve the economic condition of France under the Sun King led to him champion the cause of the Jewish people.  In 1671, Colbert convinced Louis XIV “to issue a charter of liberty for Jews under royal authority.  Marseilles merchants, upset over the king’s declaration of their port as an open harbor where Jews could freely trade, complained” to Louis.  Colbert wrote the official reply for Louis which was striking in its candor.  “Commercial envy will always impel the Christian merchants to persecute Jews.”  But before they complained too much Christians merchants should “ take into consideration the benefits the government derives from the industrial activity of the Jews, which comprises all parts of the world, thanks to their association with their coreligionists.”  


1705: On this day an auto-de-fe took place in Lisbon. An 1846 review of a work called The Inquisition and Judaism appearing in TheOccident and American Jewish Advocate provided the following description of the event.   "In the public square of Lisbonthere were led out to the stake a number of hapless victims, declared criminal by the tribunal of the Inquisition, for being suspected and afterwards convicted of Judaism, a crime than which that abominable institution knew none greater."


1729: Birthdate of German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Regardless of how one views his work, he was an important Jewish figure of the 18th century. To some he was the third Moses (the other two being the Biblical lawgiver and Moses Maimonides) with whom a new era opens in the history of the Jewish people. To others, he was a step into the beginning of assimilation and loss of identity for Jews and the dilution of traditional Judaism.  He passed away in 1786.  None of his grandchildren were Jewish.


1784(20th of Elul, 5544): Thirty three year old Bible scholar Nathan Wolf Ben Abraham author Pesher Dabar, a commentary on the Book of Job that was praised by Moses Mendelssohn and Naphtali Wessely passed away today at Dessau.


1785(2ndof Tishrei, 5546): As Jews observe the 2nd day of Rosh Hashanah, they can ponder the view of God presented in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s controversial tome -  Letters on the Teachings of Spinoza which was published this year.


1793(29thof Elul, 5553): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1794: Gabriel and Lucy Freeman were married in Wilkes County, GA.  Gabriel’s father was a Jew from England.  In an all too common occurrence on the American frontier, he married a Methodist woman.  


1799:Christian Phillip, Count Clam-Gallas from Tchernhausen (Černousy), issued a strongly-worded order that Jews were not to be tolerated in his ‘subject’ town and manor of Reichenberg.


1809: Birthdate of anti-Semitic philosopher Bruno Bauer.


1811: Twenty-three year old Hamburg native George Hartog who was the third generation of German-Jewish doctors received his commission today “or the 5th Line Battalion, King's German Legion. He saw action in the Peninsula, in Southern France, the Lowlands and at the Battle of Waterloo.”


1812(29thof Elul, 5572): In the first of what Americans call the War of 1812, Erev Rosh Hashanah


1826: Joseph Myers married Sarah Solomons at the Great Synagogue today.


1826: Birthdate of German newspaper publisher Leopold Ullstein who founded the published house of Ulletein-Veglag.


1838: Birthdate of Philadelphia native Henry Phillips the graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and archaeologist who was the author of a paper “On A Supposed Runic Inscription at Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.”


1840: Mehemet Ali released the surviving Jewish prisoners bringing an end to the infamous Damascus Affair.


1842(2ndof Tishrei, 5603): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1846: One day after he had passed away, 93 year old Philip Levy was buried in the Levy Street Jewish Cemetery.


1847: Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden Pond and moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson supported the efforts of many unconventional literary figures including the Jewish poetess Emma Lazarus. Their first meeting when she was seventeen led to a mentor-mentee relationship that included a correspondence that lasted until his death.


1848: As the opposition to Rabbi Abraham Kohn’s changes in the life of the Jewish community in Lemberg sharpened Abraham Ber Pilpel, who was said to in the pay of Kohn’s opponents “entered Kohn’s kitchen and poisoned the family’s dinner with arsenic.”


1850(29thof Elul, 5610): Erev of Rosh Hashanah


1853: In Marylebone, London, Jacob and Matilda Waley gave birth to Julia Matilda Waley who became Julia Matilda Cohen when she married Nathaniel Louis Cohen


1854: Bertha Cohen, the sister of Theresa (Cohen) Ottenberg and the daughter of Raphael Isaac Cohen, a rabbi in Hambrug became Bertha Lewis today when she married David Lewis of Liverpool “Sussex House (the Jewish boarding school and part-time synagogue in Dover founded by her father”


1854: In the Ukraine, Sossie Leya Petrokovsky Yaroslavskaya Burt and her husband gave birth to Ethel "Etta" Yaroshev Cutler the wife of Isaac Cutler whose murder “during the 1882 pogrom in Elizabethgrad”  “caused her to escape with their 2 children to America.”


1854: Birthdate of Georges Picquart, the French Army Major who first discovered the evidence that the documents that were used to convict Dreyfus were a forgery.  He risked his career to save Dreyfus.


1859(7th of Elul, 5619): Three weeks before his 62nd birthday Frankfurt-born and Giessen educated lawyer who returned to his home town to practice law in 1831 where he also served as “a member of the executive committee of the tariff commission” passed away today.


1859:In Budapest, the consecration of  “The Dohány Street Synagogue” which was also known as “the Great Synagogue” took place today.


1860: According to an article published today predicting how the people of Baltimore will vote in this fall's election states that  " those interested in lager-bier concerns, tobacco establishments, including Hebrews and others, not scrupulous of working and making money on Sundays, may go against reformers, who now rigidly enforce the Sunday law, causing all such concerns to be peremptorily closed during the Sabbath."  The author of the article failed to make the connection between Jewish opposition to the reformers and the fact that they were being led by a former "Know-Nothing," a now defunct political party that was anti-immigrant.


1861(2ndof Tishrei, 5622): 2nd day of Rosh Hashanah


1861: During the Civil War, Union forces under General Grant took control of Paducah, KY, helping to keep that state from falling into Rebel hands.  A year later, the Jews of Paducah would be victims of one of the most overt act of anti-Semitism in U.S. history when they are expelled from their homes by the same General Grant.  President Lincoln would rescind the order showing that the American Jewish experience was indeed different.  Grant never explained the order but the Jews apparently did not hold it against him.  They supported him when he ran for President.  And Grant was no anti-Semite as can be seen by his support for Washington’s traditional congregation, Adas Israel.


1865: According to a Ketubah that would be later be used in evidence for the first time in an English Court hearing a suit for divorce, Benjamin Isaacs, the son of Elias Isaacs married Deborah Levy, the daughter of Hyman Levy in New York City.


1865: Four days after he had passed away 68 year old John Hart, the son of Benjamin Hart and the husband of the former Elizabeth Jacobs with whom he had nine children was buried today as the Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.


1867: The Israelite published a “concise account of the dedication of Temple Beth El in Detroit which had taken place on August 30.


1869(1stof Tishrei, 5630): Rosh Hashanah


1869. Birthdate of author Felix Salten author of the children’s classic Bambi. Born Siegmund Salzmann in Budapest, Hungary he moved to Vienna as a toddler because the Jews had been granted full citizenship in the Austrian capital. Salten was inspired to write Bambi after a trip to the Alps, in 1923. In 1933, he sold the rights, and he did not make any money from the Disney movie based on Bambi released in 1942.  He moved to Switzerland to escape the Nazis.  He died there in 1945.


1870: In Étretat, France, playwright Ludovic Halévy and his wife gave birth to historian Élie Halévy



1872: Sculptor Mark Antokolski married Jelena Apatovas, the daughter of Vilnius merchant Judelis Giršovičius Apatovas.


1872: In St. Louis, MO, Progress Lodge No. 53 of the Independent Order of Free Sons of Israel was founded today.


1874: From March of 1862 until today there are no records of meeting of Congregation B’Nai Israel of Davenport, Iowa.


1876: Birthdate of New York City native and NYU trained lawyer, Max Salomon, the orphan raised by an aunt and uncle who was a “Judge of the Court of Special Sessions,” “vice president of the Hebrew National Orphans Home” and the husband of the former Kitty Schlappin with whom he had two daughters – Minna and Carolyn.


1879: The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society opened today in New York City.


1879(18th of Elul, 5639):Twenty-seven year old Leonard Montefiore, son of Nathaniel Montefiore, of London, England, grand-nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore, and nephew of the late Sir Anthony Rothschild, died this morning of acute rheumatism, at the Ocean House, Newport.


1879: A large crowd gathered today at New York’s Temple Beth-el to hear Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler’s inaugural address which was given in German. Kohler is succeeding his father Rabbi David Einhorn as spiritual leader of the large, prestigious Reform congregation.  Rabbi Kohler’s future sermons will be given in English.


1879: “The Religious Condition of Germany” published today Jews make up 1.2% of the nation’s population, 9.9% of the students in the gymnasia, 8.4% in the commercial schools and 5% of the students in “the higher grammar schools.”


1880(1st of Tishrei, 5641): Rosh Hashanah


1880(1st of Tishrei, 5641): Forty-nine year old German architect Edwin Oppler passed away today.



1880: The Memphis Avalanche Appeal printed a notice today stating that “‘Jewish ladies’ like Hattie Schwarzenberg, Birdies Hiesse and Mattie Goldsmith will tomorrow receive at their home the country boys who came to the city for the high holy days.”


1881: In St. Louis, MO, Nicholas Scharff and Carrie Bernheimer gave birth to Maud Scharff


1883: In Chicago, the house detective at the Grand Pacific Hotel arrested a man who was supposed to Max Guggenheim, the New York hotel thief but who claimed he was Theodore Katz.


1888(1st of Tishrei, 5649): Rosh Hashanah


1888: Stanford E. Moses who served aboard the Brooklyn during the Spanish-American War was appointed to the Naval Academy today.


1889(10th of Elul, 5649): German author and scholar Raphael Kircheim who was critical of the way funds for Palestine were distributed under the administration of Dutch community leader Hirsch Lehren and who criticized the work of Samson Raphael Hirsch passed away today.


1891: “Russia’s War On The Jews” published today relied on an eyewitness who wrote “that we are only at the beginning of the Jewish persecution…The situation of the Jews in Russia” is “far more terrible than the outside world imagines and that its miseries now literally defy adequate description.” (Reports like this explain the rising tide of desperate immigrants in Poland and Russia flooding the United States)


1891: “The Antiquity of Civilization” published today described the impact of recent discoveries that demonstrate the existence of “walled towns, chariots” and items fashioned from gold, silver, bronze and iron among the Egyptians, Acadians and Phoenicians at a time before “the pastoral Hebrew patriarchs found their way along the Euphrates, through Syria to Egypt.


1891: The reviewer of A Girl in the Carpathians points out that the author, Menie Muriel Dowie relies on the writings of the Jewish author Karl Emil Franzos for much of her information about life in Galicia.


1892: The 125 Russian Jews who arrived in Boston aboard the steamship Michigan were transferred by tugboat to the disinfecting rooms at Gallop’s Island outside of Boston.


1892: The USS Jamestown, a training vessel on which Adolph Marix had been serving since his return from Australia in 1889 was de-commissioned today while Marix “was transferred to the Hydrographic Office in New York.”


1892: “Jewish Colonization Experiment” published today described a plan of Jews in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to purchase a farm near here which will be worked by three or four immigrant families.  If the experiment works, the community will appeal to the Baron Hirsch Fund for assistance.


1893: Moses Bernstein who was driving a hearse carrying a Jewish infant that was struck by a trolley car “went to the office of the Brooklyn City Railroad Company to make a complaint against the motorman.”


1893: This afternoon a deputy sheriff seized the old Eagle Distillery owned by Bernard Weinberger where “kosher whisky drank principally during Jewish holidays” is made to satisfy a series of claims made by creditors including George Shapiro and M.O. Moses.


1895: A committee consisting of 13 year old Harry Bernstein, 15 year old Charles Glusker and 14 year old Isidior Krember from the Institute Street Cleaning League met with Mayor Strong gain his support for resolutions concerning pushcarts that had been adopted when the group met at the Hebrew Institute.


1896: John Zynoski, a Jewish pack peddler who was found bound to a tree in the woods between Kingston, N.H. and Brentwood tonight claimed that he had been robbed of ten dollars by two tramps.


1897: Mandolin player Fred Barris and Dave Edison were among the entertainers who were reported to have provided entertainment free of charge for a group of children at the Hebrew Institute.


1898: “No Chance For Dreyfus” published today included the claim that even that even if Colonel Henry “did admit to forging the letter naming Dreyfus…there is not the remotest chance of Dreyfus getting a new trial” because “the aristocratic element and great masses of French would be opposed to it” and “there would certainly be a revolution if a new trial were ordered.”


1899(2nd of Tishrei, 5660): Rosh Hashanah Second day


1899: It was reported today that the value of the late Clara Baroness von Hirsh estate in England has been assessed at (£)51, 277 3s while the total value of her estate was so great that her will “appears to have disposed of over (£)5, 350,000.


1899: With the release of the last will and testament of Clara, Baroness, von Hirsch, widow of the late Baron Moritz von Hirsch, The Times of London and The New York Times published a list of the bequests and legacies which includes $600,000 to a home for Jewish working girls in New York.


1899: Birthdate of composer and showman Billy Rose.  Born William Samuel Rosenberg in New York City, Rose first gained fame as the fastest stenographer in America.  He began his show business career as a lyricist before going on to become a Broadway producer and nightclub owner.  He produced Billy Rose's Aquacade at the 1939 World's Fair.  He gained additional notoriety for his marriage to and then his divorce from Jewish funny lady, Fanny Brice.  Rose made theatrical history in 1943 with his Broadway production of Carmen Jones. An adaptation of George Bizet's opera Carmen, the story was transplanted to World War II America by lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II and featured had an all-black cast.  It was later made into a movie for which Dorothy Dandridge received an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress.  This was the first such nomination for a African-American female actress Thus the play and the movie provided numerous African-Americans a showcase for their talents that might otherwise have not existed. Rose also founded the BillyRoseSculptureGardenin Jerusalem.  He passed away in 1966.


1901: President William McKinley was assassinated by Leon Czologosz in Buffalo, NY.  You may be surprised that McKinley supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  In 1891, he was one of many notables that signed petition that was presented to President Harrison which said, in part, “Why not give Palestine back to them again? According to God's distribution of nations, it is their home - an inalienable possession from which they were expelled by force." “They” and “them” refers to the Jewish people.  McKinley’s assassination fanned the flamed of those who wanted to end immigration and who were opposed to anybody living in America who was from eastern and southern Europe, including the mass of Jewish immigrants which had been coming from those parts of the world since the 1880’s.


1901: In Berlin, Robert Georg Alexander von Mendelssohn and Eleonora von Mendelssohn gave birth to Francesco Otto von Mendelssohn


1902: “The Jewish World published a detailed balance sheet of the accounts of the Jewish Colonization Association the trust created by the late Baron de Hirsch with a donation of $50,000 for the purpose of helping persecuted Russian Jews.” The Association was best known for establishing colonies of European Jews in Argentina. Israel Zangwill had recently challenged he administrators to produce a public accounting of the Association’s here-to-for secret financial dealings.  


1903: “A large number” children and adults “from all parts of Camden, NJ and Philadelphia” attended today’s “outing at Hoosey’s Grove on Camden’s East Side” hosted by “the Hebrew Social and Educational Club of Camden.


1904: The funeral for Dr. Hermann Baar, who had been Superintendent of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum for 23 years will be held this morning at that institution.


1904: “The Adath Israel Congregation of Camden, NJ, filed articles of incorporation at the County Clerk’s office” today.


1904:  Birthdate of "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom light heavyweight boxing champ from 1930 to 1934.   Born in Harlem, Rosenbloom gained his nickname because sometimes he seemed to slap his opponents instead of punching them.  Rosenbloom fought during a period when Jewish fighters dominated several of boxing various divisions.  Rosenbloom enjoyed success in Hollywood when he finished fighting.  He passed away in 1976.


1909: Birthdate of Baltimore native Irving Kunin Gordon, who gained fame as actor and director Michael Gordon one of the many victims of the McCarthy Era Blacklist.



1909: Birthdate of pianist Walter Landauer, the native of Vienna and longtime musical partner of Maryan Rawicz.



1911: Birthdate of Los Angeles native and New York Giants catcher Harry “Harry the Horse” Danning whose brother Ike played on season with the St. Louis Browns of the American League.



1911: As the Melvin Bellis Affair raged, Dimitri Bogrov, a young Jewish terrorist tried to shoot Czar Nicholas II while he attended the Kiev Opera.  He missed and ended up killing Pytor Stolypin, the powerful minister of the interior. Bogrov was summarily hung for his crime.


1911(13thof Elul, 5671): Sixty-five year old Wilhelm Herzog, the founder and editor of Korrespondenz Herzog and the father of Philipp Herzog, passed away today in Vienna.


1911: Following the outbreak of anti-Semitic riots at Tredegar, Wales, the Monmouthsire Welsh Baptist Association, meeting at Blackwood refused to pass a motion expressing sympathy for the plight of the Jews.  “One delegate argued that ‘resolutions did more harm than good and they encouraged the Jews.  There were about 100 Jews at Tredegar now, and if they had many more resolutions they would have 500 there.’”


1911: Waterville, Maine, native John Nathan Levine, who played football for Yale, is scheduled to be married today in Orange, NJ.


1912(24thof Elul, 5672): Twelve year old Markusch Wassermann passed away today.


1912(24thof Elul, 5672): Eighty-six year old “A. Cantor, a communal worker” passed away today at “St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia.”


1912: Today, Dr. Gotthard Deutsch submitted a report to the Board of Governors of Hebrew Union College in which he described the work he had done “during the Summer Quarter at the University of Chicago” where he taught two sections on modern Jewish History, the first of which was attended by 18 students and the second of which was attended by ten students which included at least two Christians – Professor Ashbaugh of Central Holiness University in Iowa and Professor Springling of Harvard.


1913: Rabbi Henry Pereira Mendes, President of the Union of Orthodox Congregations wrote a letter to the New York Timesin which he described the emerging doctrine of Zionism which had included a political variant, a practical variant and now contains a “spiritual” variant championed by such intellectuals as Achad Ha’am.


1914: While the French were fighting desperately at the Battle of Marne, some units of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) leisurely marched passed the country home of “Jimmy” Rothschild “where they longed to be able to stop and get some” of the pheasants running about the place while other units of the BEF worked to exploit the break in German lines by capturing bridges over the Marne and establishing a bridgehead from which they threatened the Kaiser’s forces.


1914: The English gamekeeper on the French estate of James Rothschild found an English private from the Royal West Kents hiding in a shed wearing civilian clothes during the Battle of the Marne.  (He would be shot as a deserter two days later) p 322 Max Hastings


1915: In Cleveland, Ohio, the Jewish National Workmen’s School and Institute is scheduled to come to an end.


1915: In Niagara Falls, NY, founding of Temple Beth El.


1915: “The Federation of Rumanian Jews in America today dedicated the new home for convalescents situated at Grand Views on the Hudson two miles south of Nyak” with “impressive ceremonies” attended by “twelve hundred members of the federation” who came up from New York on a special train under the leadership of their President, Dr. Julius Weiss.


1915: Today, delegates to the Fourth Annual Convention of the Associated Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Associations are scheduled to take up proposal designed to arouse the Jews to take action “in behalf of their suffering brethren in the war zones.”


1915: In Atlantic City, retiring President Harry S. Feller told those attending the fourth annual convention of the Associated Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association of New Jersey that “no final break between the orthodox and reform branches of Judaism ever would be possible” if the younger generation did its “full duty” and acted “as a link between these forces.”


1915: “The National Workmen’s Committee on Jewish Rights passed a resolution at the final session of its first convention today in Beethoven Hall urging all of the Jews in America to go on a one-day ‘strike’ when the peace conference is called to end the” World War “to demonstrate the solidity of American Jewry in its advocacy of equal national, civil and political rights for the Jews of Europe.”


1915: “John Halifax, Gentleman” a silent film produced by G.B. Samuelson and his G.B. Samuelson Productions company was released in the United Kingdom today.


1916: Forty-five Spanish Jews from Cavalla, Greece arrived today at Ellis Island aboard the Italian liner America.


1916: Birthdate of Montague Ullman “a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and parapsychologist who founded the Dream Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York” and was a faculty member at Yeshiva University.


1916: The charity bazar sponsored by the Federation of Galician and Bukharin Jews continued for a third day.


1917: Pavel Axelrod of the Organization committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party and Karol Radek and Jacob Hanecki of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania were among the delegates attending the “Third Zimmerwald Conference” – a meeting of anti-War Socialists – that continued for a second day in Stockholm


1918(29thof Elul, 5678): Erev of Rosh Hashanah


1918: Effective at noon today, by order of the Secretary of War, Jewish soldiers were able to go on furlough so they could observe the New Year.


1918: In his “Message to the Jews of America” published today, Judge Julian W. Mack wrote that “by the promulgation of the British Declaration and the taking of a large part of Palestine by the British military forces Zionism has become a program of action” and that “in order to take advantage of” these opportunities it is “the paramount duty of Jewry to organize its forces” which to him included joining the Zionist Organization of America.”


1918: Dr. S.M. Melamed wrote today that “the year 5678 will go down in Jewish history as the year of the great announcement of national redemption and also as the one in which the sun of Diaspora set and that of a Palestinian Jewish future rose.”


1918: It was reported today that “Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the well-known renegade Englishman and German author has received a letter of thanks and approval from the Kaiser for his leaflet entitled ‘The Will to Victory” in which he described the qualities of the British and the Jews as those of ‘low repulsive shopkeepers.’”


1918: Today the U.S. Army cited Second Lieutenant Frederick Hahn for the bravery he showed “near Cantigny between May 28 and May 30” when “he unhesitatingly went into heavy shell fire to supervise the repairs of telephone lines and to act as runner when the further maintenance of the wires became an impossibility.”


1919: “Bernard Horwich of Chicago, who has returned from several months of investigation in Poland as a Commissioner for American Jewish Relief agencies,” delivered a statement today “through the American Jewish Relief Committee that…described the condition of the Jewish population in Poland” which he said was “25 per cent less than the pre-war population” and about half of which “is dependent on relief.”


1923: “Potash and Perlmutter” a film version of the play “based on ethnic Jewish comedy” produced by Samuel Goldwyn was released in the United States today.


1923:in a letter replying to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's recent inquiry in regard to the introduction of Jewish immigrants to Australia, the Australian Government stated that it is not in a position at present to offer any special encouragement to Jews at present resident in southern European countries to migrate to Australia"."The Australian assisted immigration activities of the Commonwealth are for the present being confined mainly to the introduction of farmers, farm workers and female domestic servants from Great Britain, and the British government is cooperating with the Commonwealth Government in facilitating such immigration", states the official Secretary to the N.Y. Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Australia.


1923: JTA reported today that “Max Warburg, the well-known Jewish banker of Hamburg, has announced that he will file a suit for libel against the anti-Semitic organ "Der Hammer".The Paper which is the organ of the so-called "Aryan faction" charged that Warburg's banking firm had profited greatly by the war. The "Hammer" further charges that Warburg had been very intimately connected with the German military and official headquarters and had exploited the knowledge gained from these sources for his own profit. Warburg brands both of these charges as absolute lies declaring that his banking firm far from making money through the war, had actually suffered a considerable loss as a result of it. Mr. Warburg is a brother of the New York banker and social worker, Felix Warburg, of whom the "Hammer" spoke as the leader of the "banking world in America". This assertion, too, Herr Max Warburg characterizes as false.”


1923: JTA reported today that  “The Hungarian government has promised to legalize Zionist activity in Hungarian government has promised to legalize Zionist activity in Hungary.The change of attitude on the part of this government was announced by Israel Cohen, General Secretary of the British Zionist Organization, following his conference with the Hungarian officials.”


1923: JTA reported today that “Dr. Leo Motzkin, engineer Tiomkin and Rabbi Jochelman of London will compose the delegation of the Jewish World Relief Conference which will visit the United States on behalf of the organization. A delegation will also be sent to South America and northern Europe with a view to awakening the public sentiment of the various countries to the need of continuing the relief work in Europe.”


1923: JTA reported today that “officials of the Belgian government attended the funeral of Rabbi Armand Bloch, the Belgian chief Rabbi since 1891. As a tribute to the exceptional patriotism displayed by the late rabbi during the war and the German occupation, the funeral was marked by military honors.”


1923: JTA reported today that Reuter's news service has declared “that the report of the anti-Zionist London "Daily Express" that 400 employees of the Palestine Administration were slated for dismissal in the interests of retrenchment of expenses is unfounded.”  According to Reuters it was decided some time ago “to start a gradual reduction of the number of employees, but it was never contemplated to make it as sweeping as the Express report indicated. Moreover, instead of the Palestine natives losing their jobs, as the Express story stated, natives are gradually replacing the British officials.”


1924(7th of Elul, 5684): Fifty-six year old Nachman Syrkin passed away.  Born in Russia, he was a founding member of the labor Zionist movement who is created with being the first to promote the use of collective settlements in Palestine.  He died in New York before he could make Aliyah and it would take until 1951 for his remains to be re-interred at Kibbutz Kinneret  


1924: “Aaron Benjamin, a delegate of the Immigration Aid Society to the Jewish World Relief Conference in Carlsbad, sailed today aboard the SS Aquitania, for New York. It is understood here, that he will make definite proposals to the Hias concerning the co-operation between this body and the Jewish World Relief Conference in the aiding of Jewish immigrants.”


1924: JTA reported today that “The Government of the French Republic has conferred the Order of the Legion of Honor on Rabbi Mosche Sitruk, Chief Rabbi of Tunis, on the recommendation of the Resident General of Tunis.” [Rabbi Sitruk served in this position from 1921 until 1927. Rabbi Israel Zeitoun was his predecessor and Rabbi Nissim Yarhi was his successor.]


1927:Dr. Lee K. Franked member of the Jewish Agency Commission, who returned today on the Isle be France from an extended visit to Palestine on behalf of the Commission declined to make any statement as a result of his study. "I cannot make any statement until the Jewish Agency Commission meets." Dr. Frankel told the representative of the Jewish Daily Bulletin on his arrival. (As reported by JTA)



1929:According to a preliminary estimate of the rioting, made by the Zionist Executive, Jewish damages amount to several million dollars and 1,000 families, homeless and reduced to destitution, need $1,000 each for rehabilitation.” More than 1,500 refugees from areas under attack including Gaza and Hebron are staying in school houses in Tel Aviv.


1929:Criticism of the British authorities in Palestine, charging "betrayal" of the Jews during the Arab uprisings, is incorporated in a statement sent to the Zionist Organization of America today by Dr. Wolfgang von Weisl, a German newspaper man, who was in Jerusalem during the outbreak. He accused the British of a massive cover-up over the incident at the Wall. The government said that 2,000 Arabs “’visited’ the holy site of the Jews” and that a table was broken by “the pressure of the crowd and Jewish prayer books were burned.”  Based on his visit to the site and meetings with the Jews who were there, the “Jews had been beaten” during the “visit.” The table on which the Torah scrolls are placed had not been broken; it had been stolen y the mob.  They also stole a variety of other items including chairs wash bowls and towels.  Dr. von Weisl saw heaps of ashes which he assumed were burned copies of the books of Psalms and Lamentations.


1929: Henry Goldman of Rochester New York “made public” a letter written on June 18, 1929 by Jacob Goldman a former student at New York University living in Tel Aviv “telling of demonstrations by young Aras and the circulation of songs calling Moslems to ‘take up the sword’ against the foreign ruler and the Jews.’”



1931: Premiere of “Merely Mary Ann,” a cinematic adaption of the play by Israel Zangwill featuring an appearance by Harry Rosenthal.



1931: Today, in Austin, Agudas Achim dedicated a new “two-story synagogue which was built for $17,353” and “had a kitchen and a mikvah in the basement.” 


1932: “The eleventh annual encampment of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States
 attended by “more than eight hundred delegates and visitors” during which “J. George Fredman, Jersey City lawyer, was unanimously chosen Commander-in-Chief succeeding Harold Seidberg of Cambridge, Mass” came to an end today at Atlantic City, NJ.



1934: Seventy-six year old Theodore Alfred Bingham, the Andover, CT born son of Joel and Susan Bingham, who while serving as “Police Commissioner of New York  published an article in North American Review on "Foreign Criminals" in which he asserted that half the criminals in the city were Jews” – an assertion he retracted after creating this controversy passed away today.



1935: Following it premiere in New York last month, “Top Hat” a musical produced by Pandro S. Berman with music by Irving Berlin and Max Steiner was released in the United States today by RKO.



1936: “My Man Godfrey” a classic 1930’s comedy with a script co-authored by Morrie Ryskin, music by Charles Previn and featuring Mischa Auer who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor was released today in the United States.



1936: First broadcast on CBS of “The Gillette Original Community Sing” featuring Milton Berle.



1936: In “Toscanini’s Palestine Concerts,” G.E.R. Gedye, published today, The New York Timescorrespondent in Vienna reported on a conversation with Professor Bronislav Huberman that included details of the completion of Toscanini’s scheme for a Palestine symphony orchestra that will include an opening festival in Tel Aviv on December 26.



1936: Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein of the Rabbinical Council of America was quoted as expressing “the fear that the publicity given to the German situation had tended to ‘put the tragedy of our people in Poland into the background.’”



1936: “The Zionist Organization of America made public” in Washington “today messages from thirty United States Senators and Representatives expressing dep concern over the troubled situation in Palestine and express the hope and belief that Great Britain would not interfere with Jewish immigration or otherwise hinder the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland in Palestine.”



1936: It was rumored in Berlin today that Prime Minster Benito Mussolini may visit Hitler during or immediately after the upcoming National Socialist Congress which will be held in Nuremberg.



1937(1stof Tishrei, 5698): Rosh Hashanah



1938(10th of Elul, 5698): “In Tiberias, an Arab dressed in peasant clothes entered a Jewish owned shop, drew a revolver and shot the proprietor dead and then fired on an aged Jew, wounding him fatally, then aimed at another Jew and Arab in the shop, wounding both.”


1938(10th of Elul, 5698): While traveling on the highway between Haifa and Tel Aviv Yechiel Weizmann, Chaim Weizmann’s brother and Yechiel’s son were injured when their car overturned after being fired on by gunmen lying in ambush.  Another passenger, the son a prominent Haifa lawyer, died in the crash. 


1938(10th of Elul, 5698): A Jewish policeman was killed and another was severely wounded when Arabs attacked the orange groves at Pardress Hanna.


1938: Romanian King Carol resigned leaving the way for Ion Antonescu, the former Minister of Defense to take power. This paved the way for Romania to become a National Socialist (fascist) state complete with an SS-like anti-Semitic police force called the Iron Guard. During the war Romania was an ally of Germany. The Iron Guard would join the SS in the mass killings of Jews. In Romania 264,000 people (43% of the Jewish population) would be murdered.


1938: Pope Pius XII informally tells Belgian pilgrims that anti-Semitism is a movement in which Christians should not involve themselves. However, Pius says, each Christian has the right "to defend himself, to take means to protect himself against all that threatens his legitimate interest."


1939: Germany occupied Cracow, Poland. The Nazi noose grew tighter around one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe.


1939: As the Nazi blitz across Poland continued the Germans set fire to the Jewish quarter of Piotrkow.  People fleeing were gunned down by the Nazis.


1940: “Rhythm on the River” a musical written by Billy Wilder featuring Oscar Levant as Billy Starbuck was released in the United States today by Paramount Pictures.


1940: During the Battle for Britain, the German air campaign designed to defeat England and bring the Holocaust to the British Isles, the phase known as the “Eagle Attack’ which failed to destroy the Royal Air Force units stationed in the southern part of the country and included the first night bombings of industrial cities came to an end.


1941: Despite establishment of ghetto at Vilna, Poland, Jews were daily taken away. On this day, 3,434 Jews were taken to Ponary to be shot.  Eight year Joshua Salman the son of Szleime and Fejgele (Liberman) Salman, his little brother and his mother would be among those killed by the Germans at Ponary in the coming months.


1941: The Germans establish a "working ghetto" at Vilna, Lithuania.


1941: All Jews over age 6 in German territories were ordered to wear the Star of David.


1942(24th of Elul, 5702): More than 1000 Polish Jews are killed by Nazis in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto.


1942: Over the next two weeks, early 48,000 Jews from Warsaw are deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. Not all of the selected made it to the trains. One thousand would be shot in the streets over the next two days


1942: The Nazis ordered the liquidation of the Bialystok ghetto.


1943:Hanns Albin Rauter ordered the entire Hillesum family to be placed on the next transport to the death camps.


1943: Thirteen year old Zedenk Weinberger was shipped from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz today.  He was never heard of again. The Czech boy who had arrived at Theresienstadt in the summer of 1942 at the age of 12 had written a poem entitled “Vadem” a poem which described the desperate plight of the Jews as they confronted what he called “the German weasel” who “wants more and more blood.


1943: German and Estonian soldiers marched through the Vilna Ghetto with orders to seize two thousand Jews for Nazi work camps.  The Resistance Movement led by Abba Kovner was prepared to fight.  Kovner had divided his force into two battalions.  The fighters assembled at their rallying points as the Nazis began moving through the ghetto.  One of the battalions was surrounded by the Nazis before its arms arrived.  The unit had been betrayed, probably by an unnamed informer working for the ghetto’s Jewish governing body.  When word of the betrayal of the unit reached Kovner he prepared his battalion for battle and called upon the Jews of the ghetto to rise against their oppressors.  The Jews did not heed his call, responding instead to the governing Jewish body that still believed it could some how save more Jewish lives by wheeling and dealing with the Nazis.  Many considered Kovner and his colleagues to be rebellious youth who would make matters only worse.  The failure of the uprising led Kovner to eventually lead his followers out of the ghetto and become resistance fighters hiding in the neighboring swamps and woods.  For more about this fascinating chapter in Jewish history, read The Avengers by Rich Cohen.


1944(18thof Elul, 5704): Captain Isidore Newman and Marcus Bloom “together with forty-five others” were murdered by the SS at Mauthausan today.


1944(18thof Elul, 5704): The sister-in-law and niece of artist Felix Nussbaum were murdered at Auschwitz.  When his brother died in December, it marked the end of the Nussbaum family.


1944: Paramount Pictures released “Double Indemnity” directed by Billy Wilder.


1944: Today, Salmen Gradowski, who had been forced to work as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, “buried the notes which he had managed to write over the previous nineteen months…in which he described his own deportation and subsequent events in the camp.”  He put the notes, which were discovered after the war, into a metal canister and buried them in one of the pits of human ash. A letter buried with notes said, “I have buried this under the ashes, deeming it the safest place where people will certainly dig to find the traces of millions of men who were exterminated.”  According to Sir Martin Gilbert, who supplied this story, “Gradowski dedicated his notes to the members of his family ‘burnt alive at Birkenau,’ his wife Sonia, his mother Sara, his sisters Estera-Rachel and Liba, his father-in-law Rafael and his brother-in-law Wolf. In his letter he also wrote: ‘Dear finder, search everywhere, in every inch of soil.  Dozens of documents are buried under it, mine and those of other persons, which will throw light on everything that was happening here.  Great quantities of teeth are also buried here.  It was we, the Kommando workers, who expressly have strewn them all over the terrain, as many as we could, so that the world should find material traces of the millions of murdered people.  We ourselves have lost hope of being able to live see the moment of liberation.’”  Shortly after burying the canister, Gradowski was murdered.  [Editor’s note – I apologize for this lengthy entry.  It is the normal style.  However, in writing it, it is as close as we can come to saying Kaddish for those for whom there is nobody to say Kaddish.  With the approach of Rosh Hashanah (2010), it seemed like the least we could do.]


1944: An Einsatzkommando unit commanded by SS Captain Hauser entered Topolcany, Slovakia, to quell a Jewish uprising. Many leaders of the local Jewish community were arrested and killed, including former Deputy Mayor Karl Pollak, his wife, and Moritz Hochberger, who were set upon by SS troopers.


1944: After two days in a freight car Dutch banker Jacobus Henricus Kann, the owner of Lissa & Kann Bank arrived at Theresienstadt.


1944: Of the people with Anne Frank on a transport to Auschwitz, 549 Dutch Jews are gassed. Anne is saved for the time being because she is 15 years old. If she were 14, she would be immediately killed. Like all prisoners, she is tattooed and her head is shaved.


1945: Bob Brumby, a Mutual Broadcasting Company correspondent reported today that Joseph Alfred Meissinger, the German war criminal responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and for killing thousands of Polish Jews elsewhere in Poland has been captured in Japan by Captains Adolf Dressler and Theodore Holwitz and turned over to United States Army facilities.


1946: Exactly sixty-six years before his death the Cleveland Browns, which Art Modell would come to own in 1961, played their first game in Cleveland Stadium.


1948: Banker James Warburg, the son of Paul Warburg, married Joan Melber today.


1949:Allied military authorities relinquish control of former Nazi Germany assets back to German control.  This is another example of the realities of the Cold War trumping the quest for justice for the victims of Axis atrocities.


1951: Pitcher Duke Markell made his major league debut with the St. Louis Browns


1953: Sons of Jacob, the Conservative Congregation in Waterloo, Iowa, dedicated its new facility on Mitchell Avenue. The congregation was found in August of 1905.


1955: A Pogrom began in Istanbul that is aimed at the city’s Greek minority.  Unfortunately, the Jewish and Armenian communities became targets of the mobs as well. The attacks were well planned in advance.  The triggering event was the false news that the house in Thessaloniki, Greece, where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey, was born in 1881, had been bombed the day before.  According to some reports, Ataturk was descended from Spanish Jews who had come to the Ottoman Empire seeking refuge from the Inquisition.


1956(1stof Tishrei, 5717): As Ike and Adlai run against each for the Presidency, Jews celebrated Rosh Hashanah


1960(14thof Elul, 5720): Seventy-one year old Cincinnati native Roberts S. Marx, the son of William and “Rose (Lowenstein) Marx, and Captain of the University of Cincinnati Football team, the school where he earned his law degree who served as a Captain in 357th Regiment of the AEF, was general counsel for Schenley Distillers, a Superior Court Judge and the co-founder and first commander of the Disabled American Veterans, passed away today.




1961: Afl Honikman began serving as Mayor of Cape Town


1962: Sixty-four year old composer Hanns Eisler the son of Jewish philosophy professor Rudolf Eisler and Marie Ida Eisler who was Lutheran passed away today.



1964(29thof Elul, 5724): As Lyndon Johnson, the President of the United States responsible for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prepares to run against Barry Goldwater, one of the handful of Republican Senators who voted against the act, Jews attend light their candles and bless their wine erev of Rosh Hashanah


1963:Larry Sherry collaborated on a five-hit shutout tonight as the Los Angeles Dodgers maintained their five-game National League lead


1966:"Star Trek" premiers on NBC TV.  Little did most people realize that Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock were played by Jewish actors.


1968: In Chernovtsi, Alexander and Malka Ivanir gave birth to Mark Alexandrovich Ivanir, the grandson of Yiddishist Meshulem Surkis the Israeli actor who has gained success in American made films and television shows.


1970: Birthdate of Edward Einhorn “an American playwright, theater director, and novelist” whose works included “his Hanukkah drama, Playing Dreidel with Judah Maccabee.”


1970:In the Dawson's Field hijacking four jet planes bound for New York City were hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.


  • TWA Flight 741 from Frankfurt and rSwissair Flight 100 from Zürich-Kloten Airport landed at Zerqa, also known as Dawson's Field, a remote desert airstrip in Jordan formerly used as a British Royal Air Force base.[1]


  • The hijacking of El Al Flight 219 from Amsterdam was foiled; hijacker Patrick Arguello was shot and killed, whilst his partner Leila Khaled was subdued and turned over to British authorities in London. Two hijackers prevented from joining the El Al flight instead hijacked  Pan Am Flight 93, a, Boeing 747 diverting the large plane to  Beirut and then Cairo rather than the small Jordanian field.


  • A fifth plane, BOAC Flight 775 from Bahrain, was hijacked on September 9 by a PFLP sympathizer and brought to Dawson's Field in order to pressure the British to free Khaled.


David Raab, a seventeen year old from Trenton, N.J. was among the Jewish hostages.  He would write his account of the event in Terror in Black September.


1972: The Munich Massacre comes to an end. At 3:24 a.m., Jim McKay who has been reporting the events on ABC received the official confirmation


“When I was a kid, my father used to say "Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized." Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They’ve now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, nine were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone.  


1972: “Israel warned the Palestinian guerrilla organizations and indirectly the Arab nations today that they would be held accountable for the murders of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches in Munich” while “Premier Golda Meir expressed personal appreciation for the West German Government’s decision to take action for the liberation of the Israeli hostage and to employ force to this end.”


1972:  Eighty-four year old Avrey Brundage the President of the International Olympic Committee announced publicly today “that the Munich Olympics ‘must go on’ despite the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Arab terrorists.”


1972: Marcia Leventhal wrote today that she was “appalled and incensed by the tragedy at Munich in which several of my fellow Jews were brutally and senselessly slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists” while denouncing as “barbarism” “the cry voiced by the Jewish Defense League…for the random assassination of Arab diplomats and the indiscriminate shedding of Arab blood…”


1972: Dr. Paul Ravenna of Chicago wrote today that “Egypt and its Olympic team cannot escape responsibility for the massacre in Munich” since “the Egyptian Olympic team packed and fled from Munich without” making “any attempt to free the surviving Israeli athletes.”


1973: Richard Friedlander completed two years of service as Mayor of Cape Town


1973: David Bloomberg began serving as Mayor of Cape Town.


1975(1st of Tishrei, 5735): Rosh Hashanah


1976(11th of Elul, 5736): Ninety-one year old Polish born Nathaniel Phillips, NYU law school graduate and member of the Mayors Commission on Americanization and director of the National League for American Citizenship passed away today.


1976: On the day after the cabinet decided to appoint Asher Yadlin governor of the Bank of Israel, Police Minister Shlomo Hillel and Attorney-General Aharon Barak were informed that the police had been inquiring into allegations against Yadlin of improper conduct in the management of Kupat Holim


1977: Ted Mauerberger began serving as Mayor of South Africa.


1977(23rd of Elul, 5737): Eighty-four year old German born Oscar winning cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, the inventor of “the Schüfftan process, a special effects technique that employed mirrors to insert actors into miniature sets” passed away today in New York City.


1978(4th of Elul, 5738): Seventy-seven year old Benjamin Sonnenberg, a Russian-born American press agent who represented celebrities and major corporations, who was best known for the lavish entertaining he did for his clients and other notables passed away today.(As reported by William Grimes)



1979: Ted Mauerberger completed his years of service as Mayor of Cape Twon


1979: Solly Kreiner began serving as Mayor of Cape Town.


1980: Birthdate of Joshua Cohen, the native of Somers Point, NJ whose novels include Witz.


1985: A “staged concert” of the Follies a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Goldman was performed at the Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center.


1986(2nd of Elul, 5746): In Istanbul, two Arab terrorists from Abu Nidal’s terror organization kill 22 and wound six inside the Neve Shalom synagogue during Shabbat services.


1986: Barbra Streisand gave her first live concert in 20 years.


1987(12thof Elul, 5747): Ninety-two year old Forestville, CT” native Vera Buch Weisbord, the labor organizer whose autobiography A Radical Life was published in 1977, the same year when her radical husband Albert passed away died today.





1991(27thof Elul, 5771): Seventy-one year old  Eliyahu Moyal the native of Sale, Morocco who helped found Kibbutz Bror Hayil , served in the Knesset and was Deputy Minister of Communications, passed away today.


1992: Shaul Paual Landry the Israeli Olympic racewalker who survived Bergen-Belsen and the Munich Massacre visited the graves of his murdered teammates in Tel Aviv.


1992(8thof Elul, 5752): Eighty year screenwriter Henry Ephron passed away today.



1993: Birthdate of Israel Moshe Chaim Toister


1994(1stof Tishrei, 5755): Rosh Hashanah


1994: CBS broadcast the final episode of “Good Advice,” a sitcom written by Max Mutchnick and directed by Robby Benson


1995(11thof Elul, 5755): Sixty-nine year old award winning American film editor Ralph Rosenblum passed away today.



1996: “Bogus” a “fantasy film produced by Amon Milchan, with music by Marc Shaiman and featuring Al Waxman was released in the United States today by Warner Bros.


1998: The New York Times book section included reviews by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice
by Aryeh Neier, The Doctor Stories by Richard Selzer, The Seekers:The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His Worldby Daniel J. Boorstin and An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future by Robert D. Kaplan.


1999(25thof Elul, 5759): Eighty-seven Yair Sprinzak the Israeli political leader whose affiliations were the opposed of his father Yosef Sprinzak, a member of Mapai, passed away today.


2000: “Pollock” a biopic about the famous controversial artist with a script by Barbara Turner and (in a case of Jews playing Jews) featuring Matthew Sussman as Reuben Kadish and Jeffrey Tambor as Clement Greenberg was released in the United States by Sony Pictures.


2000: “A concert version” of Jerry Herman’s “Dear World” opened today in San Francisco.


2003(9th of Elul, 5763):Fred Kort, Holocaust survivor, philanthropist and founder/CEO of Imperial Toy Corporation, passed away at the age of 80http://articles.latimes.com/2003/sep/11/local/me-kort11


2003(9th of Elul, 5763): Harry Goz, an actor who was an understudy in ''Fiddler on the Roof'' and wound up playing the lead, passed away today at the age of 71. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/01/obituaries/01GOZ.html


 


2003(9th of Elul, 5763:Jules Engel, a Jewish-Hungarian American innovative animator and educator best known for choreographing dance sequences in the 1940 Disney animated feature ''Fantasia,'' passed away today at the age of 94.



 “Mr. Engel, who was adept in the high-art and mass-culture ends of animation, founded the program in experimental animation at CalArts in 1970. He was a founder of the UPA animation studio, where he helped develop popular cartoon characters, including the myopic, cantankerous Mr. Magoo.  For ''Fantasia,'' he choreographed the sublimely over-the-top sequence of slinky alligators squiring plump, tutu-clad hippopotamuses in a ballet set to Ponchielli's ''Dance of the Hours'' from ''La Gioconda,'' as well as the eye-popping proto-psychedelia of dancing mushrooms in the ''Chinese Dance'' and the Cossack-tasseled thistles cavorting in the ''Russian Dance.'' Known for his spirited treatment of movement and radical approach to color, as seen in the somber, chiaroscuro settings of Disney's ''Bambi'' (1942), Mr. Engel influenced a generation of animators as a teacher at CalArts for more than 30 years. His students have worked on features like ''Finding Nemo,''''Toy Story,''''The Lion King'' and ''The Nightmare Before Christmas.'' Born in Budapest in 1909, Mr. Engel attributed his ability to express motion to his early love for the Ballet Russe. After working for Disney and serving in the Hal Roach Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps during World War II, Mr. Engel helped start UPA, for United Productions of America, in 1944; there he adapted the palette of modern art to give the studio's cartoons a distinctive, sophisticated sensibility.  In 1959 he left to help found another animation studio, Format Films, where he worked on the squeaky-voiced singing trio of Alvin and the Chipmunks and collaborated with talents including the author of the Dr. Seuss books, Theodor Seuss Geisel; the noted film-title artist Saul Bass; and the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury.  His abstract animated shorts are also highly regarded, as are his brightly colored, Kandinskyesque paintings and prints, which have been exhibited in museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.” (As reported by Eric Nash)


2004: Gideon Ezra was named acting Minister of Public Security today replacing Tzachi Hanegbi.


2005: “Nothing Lasts Forever” a comedy produced by Lorne Michaels in 1984 that was not released to the public, co-starring Mort Sahl, Sam Jaffe and Eddie Fisher with music by Howard Shore was screened today at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theatre.Tzitzle Tzitzle


2005:  The Jerusalem Post reported on plans of Chabad Rabbi Shraga Sherman to renovate the historic General Wayne Inn and turn it into a synagogue, community center and upscale kosher restaurant


2006: New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer dropped several of the civil charges that had been included in the filings brought against, Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chairman and chief executive of the insurance giant American International Group. The lawsuit accused Mr. Greenberg of using accounting tricks to hide problems at the company.The amended complaint, has been narrowed to focus on claims that Mr. Greenberg and the company’s former chief financial officer, Howard I. Smith, masked underwriting losses and faltering reserves with various sham transactions, including one with General Re, a unit of Berkshire Hathaway.


2006: “Richard H. Jones, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, was sworn in as Ambassador to Israel by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick” today.


2007: In Jerusalem, the weeklong festival known as Jewish Music Days continues with a fifth concert at Beit Avi Chai entitled “In Those Days at This Time, Prayers and Piyutim in the Italian Jewish Tradition.”



2007: Pope Benedict XVI and President Shimon Peres discussed peace efforts in the Middle East with the Vatican saying the time seemed particularly favorable for Israelis and Palestinians to work to end decades of conflict. Peres renewed an invitation to Benedict to visit the Holy Land during the meeting at the pontiff's summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo, in the hills south of Rome, a Vatican statement said. Shortly after the meeting, Benedict held talks on the Middle East situation with the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal.


2007:An Israeli commando unit carried out a reconnaissance mission at an alleged Syrian nuclear reactor that was later destroyed by the Israel Air Force; the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported today. The 12-man unit was dropped by two helicopters onto the site, according to the report, where they proceeded to take soil samples and photographs.


2007: “Disengagement” the third film in Amos “Gitai’s Border Trilogy” premiered at the Venice Film Festival.


2007: “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” the last film directed by Sidney Lumet premiered today at the Deuaville American Film Festival in Deauville, France.


2007: The IAF conducted Operation Orchard, during which Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in Syria that had been set up in collaboration with North Korea.


2007: Opening of the Jewish Film Festival in Dallas, TX


2008: Canadian American character actress, Francis Bay “was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame today in large part thanks to a petition with 10,000 names which was submitted on her behalf.”


2008: The Annual Tefillah, Torah and Tailgate Shabbat Minyan at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa combined the Day of Rest with the start of the Iowa and Iowa State football seasons.


2008: Temple Judah’s very own Bentlee Birchansky plays Clarence the clarinetist and a newsboyin Theatre Cedar Rapid’s production of Gypsy at McKinley Middle school.


2008:The Young Leadership of ELEM - Israeli Youth in Distress sponsor “From Punk to Pink” Art for ELEM, an auction inspired by the personal story of a rescued teenager. Over 40 Israeli artists including Michal Rovner, Barry Frydlender, Buky Schwartz, Yigal Ozeri, Miriam Cabessa along with the freshest names in Israeli art today have generously contributed their work for ELEM’s Hafuch Al Hafuch program.


2008: Three Jewish counselors from the Bnei Akiva youth movement were attacked not far from the organization's central branch in Paris this afternoon. According to the head of Bnei Akiva's French desk, Binyamin Tuati, the boys, aged between 17 and 18, had just finished the Sabbath minha prayer when they were attacked by a group of Muslims, According to a press statement released by World Bnei Akiva spokesman Tzvika Klein, the youths were initially approached by a group of three Muslims and African immigrants who began to hurl chestnuts in their direction. When one of the counselors complained, the assailants began yelling out anti-Semitic remarks. Between 10 to a dozen other attackers wearing knuckle dusters joined the original three and began beating up the Jewish group until police arrived at the scene. The movement is now concerned over the fact that the incident occurred in an area central to the French capital's Bnei Akiva members at the 19th Quarter in Paris. The area, said Tuati, is close to a school and is visited by roughly 150 children every Shabbat. The incident marks the second anti-Semitic attack in the area of the Bnei Akiva branch in the last two months.


2008: The Beaux Arts Trio featuring pianist Manahem Pressler performed their final concert at Lucerne, Switzerland.


2009(17th of Elul, 5770):Ninety-three year old Gerhart Friedlander,  the pioneer nuclear chemist who helped develop the Atomic Bomb as part of the Manhattan Project passed away today. (As reported by Vicki Glaser)



2009: At the Avalon Theatre, a screening of Aviva Kempner’s “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” which “looks at the life and career of Gertrude Berg, the creator, writer and star of “The Goldbergs,” a popular 1930s radio show that was subsequently a weekly TV program.


2009: Irish-Jewish cricketer Jason Molins married Aoife Mulholland in Marbella, Spain,


2009: The Washington Post features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Why Jews Are Liberal by Norman Podhoretz and  The Year That Changed The World: The Untold Story Behind The Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer


2009:A rally against the drought tax, held in Tel Aviv today, turned into a shouting match between rival protesters over how to demonstrate and against whom.


2010:BuckUSY a United Synagogue Youth (USY) Chapter, based out of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Columbus, Ohio is scheduled to complete its road trip to Sandusky, Ohio.


2010: The JCC of Dallas (TX) is scheduled to sponsor its annual Labor Day Beach Party.


2010:Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called on his partner in peace negotiations Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas not to give up on a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today.


2010: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu can put an end to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians "if he wants to," according to a statement made by opposition leader Tzipi Livni (Kadima) today. During a New Year's toast for Kadima members in Petah Tikva Livni referred to the recently launched direct talks in Washington and said "we will support what is right, but will criticize what is wrong."


2010:As the Jewish New Year 5771 approaches, Israel's population continues to grow, according to Central Bureau of Statistics data released today. The population now stands at 7,645,000 people, continuing to grow at a steady rate of 1.8 percent per year for the seventh year in a row. Jews number some 5,770,000, or 75.5 % of the population; Arabs total 20.3%, or 1,559,100 people. The remainder, 4.2%, is classified as "other," and are mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not registered by the Interior Ministry as Jews.


2010 Haifa-born Dieter Graumann announced today that he plans to run for president of Germany’s 106,000-member Jewish community.  Such a move indicates a sea change for the Central Council of German Jews, the community’s powerful umbrella organization. The 60-year old Graumann would be the council’s first Israeli-born, non-Holocaust-survivor leader.


2010:Israel's Holocaust museum Yad Vashem signed an agreement with Poland today that gives it access to World War II-era documents held in archives across the eastern European country.


2010:The long fleet of luxury cars with white CD license plates that drove along the capital’s Jabotinsky Street today disgorged scores of ambassadors and chargés d’affaires at Beit Hanassi, for the annual Rosh Hashanah reception hosted by President Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Unlike on Independence Day, there were no spouses or military attachés. Dominating the buffet were the pomegranates traditionally associated with Rosh Hashanah, and which like apples, were dipped in honey.


2010: Ryan Kalish hit “another grand slam today at Fenway Park against the Tampa Bay Rays, which tied a Red Sox rookie record” that had stood since 1992.


2010: Seventy-six year old Thomas Buergenthal “resigned his pas as Judge of the International Court of Justice.


2010: “The King’s Speech” a film based on an episode in King George VI’s life written by David Seidler, filmed by cinematographer Daniel Cohen the grandson of refugees from Hitler’s Germany premiered at the Teulluride Film Festival.


2011: The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, the American Jewish Committee and the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists are scheduled to sponsor a brown bag lunch program entitled “The Battle Over Collective Bargaining and Public Employees.”


2011: Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum are scheduled to appear the 92nd St Y where they will promote their latest book.


2011: Today Jonathan Chait joined the staff of New York magazine after leaving his post of Senior Editor at The New Republic.”


2011:Concern grew tonight that rocket fire would increase against the western Negev after a member of the Popular Resistance Committees was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip.


2011:Hospital department managers and senior members from dozens of hospitals were scheduled to meet tonight at the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, Army Radio reported. The meeting will address the next step in the doctors' protest, including the possible establishment of a hospital organization as an alternative to the Israel Medical Association.


2011: Leaders of the social movement protest which started in Tel Aviv launched the second stage of the movement today in Jerusalem in front of the Knesset, in order to stress the importance of a wide-ranging government response to the protester’s demands.


2011: David Leonhardt began serving as chief of the Washington bureau of The New York Times.


 2011: Jill Abramson began serving as the Executive Editor of New York making her the first woman to serve in this position.


2011: Persian born Jewess Roya “Hakakian's latest book, Assassins of the Turquoise Palace– released” today “through Grove/Atlantic – is a non-fiction account of the Mykonos restaurant assassinations in Berlin” in which “four Kurdish and Iranian activists were killed following a pattern of assassinations of opposition leaders.”


2012: In the UK, The Wiener Library is scheduled to sponsor the Tour for European Day of Jewish Culture


2012: The Jewish Sacred Music Festival is scheduled to begin in Jerusalem.


2012: A symposium sponsored by the American Folklife Center entitled “The Stations That Spoke Your Language: Radio and the Yiddish American Cultural Renaissance” is scheduled to open in Washington, DC.


2012: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present a panel discussion entitled “Gefilte Talk.”



2012: Defense Minister Ehud Barak called today for a law allowing Israel to shut its sole border-crossing with Egypt, saying that Israelis needed to be protected from entering the region during times of high danger


2012(19th of Elul, 5772): Ninety-three year old Jerome Horwitz, the creator of AZT passed away today. (As reported by Paul Vitello)



2012(19th of Elul, 5772): Eighty-seven year old football mogul Art Brown who made history as the owner of the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Ravens and quietly left his mark as generous philanthropist passed away today.



http://www.timesofisrael.com/art-modell-hero-and-villain-of-cleveland-football-dies/


2013(2ndof Tishrei, 5774): Traditional Jews observed the 2nd day of Rosh Hashanah


2013: This evening, the Alexandria Kleztet is scheduled to perform in Arlington, VA.


2013: The Jewish community in Dusseldorf is urging a boycott of today’s concert by former Pink Floyd band member Roger Waters because he is an “intellectual arsonist” who used “anti-Semitic and National Socialist imagery.” (As reported by Naama Barak)


2013: Israeli police fired stun grenades to disperse Palestinian worshippers who threw rocks at them after morning prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site, a police spokesman said.


2014: Comedian and social commentator Lewis Black is scheduled to perform at the MGM Grand Theatre in Ledyard, CT.


2014: In Cedar Rapids, the traditional-egalitarian minyan is scheduled to observe Labor Day Shabbat reminding us all to “Honor the Dignity of Work and Protect the Dignity of Workers.”


Rabban Gamliel the son of Rabbi Judah HaNassi would say: An excellent thing is the study of Torah combined with some worldly occupation, for the labor demanded by them both makes sin to be forgotten. All study of the Torah without work must in the end be futile and become the cause of sin.  (Pirke Avot - Saying of the Fathers: Chapter 2, Verse 2


2014: Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar said that “the recent conflict…has changed the opinions of certain” unnamed “global players who now wish to hold dialog with” Hamas while at the same same calling for an armed uprising in the West Bank.


2014: “A French journalist held hostage for months by extremists in Syria identified one of his captors today as a Frenchman suspected of later killing four at the Brussels Jewish Museum, saying the militant had took sadistic delight in mistreating prisoners.”


2015(22ndof Elul): Yahrzeit of Joseph B. Levin, or Yosef Dov, the father of Avraham Elimelech and the son of Avraham Elimelch.


2015: “Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee announced” today “that she will support the nuclear agreement with Iran.”


2015: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Trigger Mortis: A James Bond Novel by Anthony Horowitz and The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth.


2015: The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is scheduled to host a tour that “offers an overview of the history of the Holocaust through close observation of Museum artifacts and documents.”


2015: In Iowa, Agudas Achim is scheduled to start is Rosh Hashanah season with an apple picking trip to Wilson’s Orchards.  (Nothing said about the honey)


2015: In Akron, Ohio the Jewish Food Fair is scheduled to take place this afternoon at Revere Road.


2015: The Berman Museum is scheduled to host “an exciting afternoon of "wild thing" inspired adventure and fun and a Rosh Hashana themed craft in the Where the Wild Things Are: Maurice Sendak in his Own Words and Pictures exhibition!”


2015: “Odd Birdz” is scheduled to be performed for the last time at the Players Theatre.



2016: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host a preview of “Defying the Nazis: Sharps’ War” a Ken Burns film narrated by Tom Hanks that “tells the story of an American minister and his wife from Wellesley, Massachusetts, who left their children behind in the care of their parish and boldly committed to a life-threatening mission that ultimately saved Jews and refugees fleeing Nazi occupation across Europe.”


2016: As University of Iowa Students settle into their second week of classes Hillel is scheduled to host a dinner and discussion.


2016: Today William “Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management purchased a 9.9% stake in Chipotle Mexican Grill” which Pershing described Chipotle as "undervalued" and "an attractive investment."


2016: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to a conversation between Judith Margles and Elizabeth Rynecki, author of Chasing Portraits, A Great Granddaughter’s Quest for her Lost Art Legacy“a memoir of one woman's emotional quest to find the art of her Polish-Jewish great-grandfather, lost during World War II.”


2016: Leila Hatoum, “a high level of Newsweek Middle East evoked what some called anti-Semitic tropes in a lengthy Twitter exchange” today in which she claimed that “Most Jews in Israel are not semites” and therefore have no claim to the land because “they are descendants of Europe’s Khazar tribes, mixed hybrids whose ancestors adopted Judaism.”


2016: Eat My Schwartz: Our Story of NFL Football, Food, Family, and Faith by the football playing brothers Geoff and Mitch Schwartz is scheduled to go on sale today.



2017: Historian Tobias Brinkman is scheduled to speak at the opening of an exhibition “Becoming German-Jewish in America” presented by the Leo Baeck Institute.


2017: “Stanley Fischer, the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, said today that he would resign in mid-October, an unexpected decision that gives President Trump greater leverage over central bank policy.”


2017: As of today, “some 99 people had donated $3,454” to “the GoFundMe campaign” that is trying “to raise $15,369 to ship two full pallets, or 3,072 salamis, for distribution by the Jewish federation in Houston” in the aftermath of the hurricane that had struck the Texas port city.


2017: In Memphis, Rabbi Feivel Strauss is scheduled to talk about Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan as part of The Greatest Jewish Thinkers of All Time series.


2017: “The Munich 1972 Massacre Memorial” is scheduled to open today.



2018: Adam Michnik, the author of Against Anti-Semitism: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Polish Writings is scheduled to discuss the history of Anti-Semitism – and efforts to resist it – in 20th-century Poland tonight at the Center for Jewish History.


2018: JW3 is scheduled to host the final London screening of “Dough.”


2018: The Women’s Leadership Committee is scheduled to host its “end of summer soiree” complete with silent auction at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center this evening.

This Day, September 7, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 7

70: On the secular calendar the date on which a Roman army under Titus occupied and plundered Jerusalem.


1191: The Crusader army led by King Richard the Lionhearted defeated the army of Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf, north of Jaffa. The victory proved to be a tactical one, since Richard was not able to wrest control of Jerusalem from Saladin.  From a Jewish point of view this was a definite plus since the Crusaders had butchered the Jews of Jerusalem while Saladin had permitted them to return to the City of David.


1307(2nd of Tishrei, 5068):  Alexander Susskind passed away.  Susskind gave his whole fortune as ransom for the body of Rabbi Meir of Rottenberg. Rabbi Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg was a Tosaphist (codifier and commentator on the Talmud), as well as a liturgical poet. He was imprisoned in the town of Ensisheim, which was located in Alsace in 1286.  When he died in 1293, the authorities refused to release the body.  Fourteen years later the authorities succumbed to their greed and allowed Susskind to buy it back.  The remains were given a proper burial at the town of Worms.


1312:  King Ferdinand IV of Castile passed away.  During his reign the monarch employed a Jew named Samuel as his treasurer.  Ferdinand followed his advice in political as well as financial matters.  This earned him the enmity of the dowager Queen, Maria de Molina who had ruled before Ferdinand reached his majority.  She, or her sympathizers, may have been responsible for the near fatal beating suffered by Samuel


1434: The Council of Basle instituted new measures against the Jews. The council, aside from adopting many of the old measures preventing interaction between Jews and Christians, prohibited Jews from entering Universities, and were forced to listen to conversion sermons. The council encouraged Christian study of Hebrew in order to "combat Jewish Heresy."


1533: Birthdate of Queen Elizabeth I.  There were no practicing Jews living in England during her reign but that did not keep anti-Semitism from being a part of the Elizabethan cultural environment as can be seen from Shakespeare’s merchants of Venice.  There was a handful of secret Jews and/or Marranos living in England during her reign. One of them was Dr. Hector Nunes who provided valuable intelligence to English leaders on the movement of the Spanish Armada.  On the other hand Dr. Roderigo Lopez who had served as the Queen’s physician, ended up being executed at Tyburn for his part (real or imagined) in a plot to poison the queen.  The fate of Lopez was the “led to new productions of The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe.


1559: Parisian printer and scholar Robert Estienne also known as Robert Stephens who “the first to print the Bible divided into standard numbered verses” and who twice he published the entire Hebrew Bible—"one with the Commentary of Kimchi on the minor prophets, in 13 volumes another in 10 volumes” passed away today.


1628: Opening day of the Battle in the Bay of Matanzas, a naval battle during the Eighty Year’s War fought off the coast of Cuba in which the Dutch captured the Spanish treasure fleet.  Moses Cohen Henrqiues, a Sephardic Dutch pirate helped Piet Pieterszoon, the Dutch commander win the victory


1654: A group of 23 Jews from Recife, Brazil arrived in New Amsterdam, 1654. They became the pioneers of the American Jewish community.  They arrived on a French frigate called the St. Catherine.  Their unofficial leader was Asser Levy.  Governor Peter Stuyvesant did want the Jews to remain.  Eventually they were allowed to stay with the stipulations that "The poor among them shall not become a burden to the community, but be supported by their own nation."  This statement would find fulfillment in a variety of Jewish immigrant aid societies and other such philanthropic endeavors.


1654: A petition by Jacques de la Motthe, the French master of the ship St. Charles requested payment for Jews and their freight which he brought to New Amsterdam from Cape St. Anthony. He said there were "23 souls, big and little, who must pay equally." After a week passed, the Jews belongings were put up for auction, and it was said many Christians bought the Jews belongings, only to give them back to the Jews.


1701: Today, during the War of the Spanish Succession, Austrian Emperor Leopold I, who relied on “court Jew” Samson Wertheimer and “Samuel Oppenheimer to procure the money necessary for” equipping and supplying the imperial army, along with the Dutch Republic and Britain “signed the Treaty of Hague” which renewed the Grand Alliance of 1689.


1787:Jonas Phillips, a member of a prominent Philadelphia Jewish family sent a petition to the delegates of what became known as the Constitutional Convention ( the body that wrote the U.S. Constitution) asking that they not adopt a religious test for Federal office holders.


1793(1st of Tishrei, 5554): Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat


1812(1st of Tishrei, 5573): Jews on both sides of the Atlantic were joined together by the observance of Rosh Hashanah but American and English Jews were separated by the conflict known as The War of 1812.


1814: Birthdate of German Jewish novelist Ludwig Kalisch.


1822: Brazil declared its independence from Portugal.  Brazil’s declaration of independence triggered an influx of Jewish settlers primarily from Morocco who “set up a synagogue in Belem (northern Brazil) called Porta do Ceu (Gate of Heaven) in 1824 and later one in Manaus (on the Amazon River).”


1827: The Russian government decreed that the draft of Jewish boys would begin at the age of 12. This was part of the Russian government's plan to deal with the Jewish problem.  This early draft was intended to separate the youngsters from their homes and families and force them to eventually adopt the Christian religion.


1835: Two days after he had passed away, Henry Harris was buried today at the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.


1836: In Gnesen, Prussia, Frintze and Julius Peyser gave birth to Philip Peyser the husband of Natalie Ann Kiliñski both of whom would be buried in the Hebrew Cemetery in Washington, D.C.


1837: Birthdate of chess master Samuel Rosenthal.


1845:St. Louis, Missouri, became the site of the first synagogue to be built in the Mississippi Valley. For more information about the history of the Jewish community in St. Louis, consult the two-volume Zion in the Valley by Walter Ehrlich is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.


1848(9th of Elul, 5608): Forty-one year old Abraham Kohn, the leading Reform Rabbi in Lemberg died today after having been poisoned yesterday Abraham Ber Pilpel who had been hired by traditionalist offended by impact that Reform was having on their concept of Judaism.


1850(1st of Tishrei, 5611): As Jews celebrate Rosh Hashanah, Americans breathe a sigh of relief with the passage this month of the legislation known as the Compromise of 1850 which avoided the outbreak of Civil War.  Unfortunately, the compromise did not hold and ten years later, America would cross the abyss.


1854(14th of Elul, 5614): Seventy-two year old Moses Elias Levy, a native of Mogador, Morocco and “the son of a local courtier and factor to the Sultan named Eliahu ha-Levi ibn Yuli who “founded a short lived Jewish refugee colony in Micanopy, Florida, a state his son David Levy Yulee represented in the United States and who finally settled in England where he worked to gain support for improving the conditions of Russian Jews, passed away today.



1859: Tuik Davis married Esther Emanuel at the Great Synagogue today.


1860: Giuseppe Garibaldi captured Naples today and set up a provisional government. Because of the family's close political connections with Austria and France, this put Adolf von Rothschild in a delicate position. He chose to take temporary sanctuary in Gaeta with the Bourbon king Francis II of the Two Sicilies but the Rothschild houses in London, Paris, and Vienna were not prepared to financially support the deposed king. With the ensuing unification of Italy, and the mounting tension between Adolf and the rest of the family, after forty-two years in business the Naples house closed in 1863.


1862: In New York Gustavus Speyer and Sophia Speyer (née Rubino) gave birth to Sir Edgar Speyer the American born financier and philanthropist who became a British subject whose loyalty to his adopted home led him to be created a baronet.


1862: Today “Florian Moss, a son of Joseph L. Moss of Philadelphia was appointed Captain’s Clerk on the United States Ship ‘Vermont’ which was attached to the South Blockading Squadron.”


1863: During the Civil War, Alfred Mordecai, Jr. was promoted from Captain to Major in the Union Army.  He would eventually become a Brigadier General.


1864: Corporal Joel J. Hertzog completed his three year enlistment with Union Army which included serving with Company M of the 28th Regimen and Company D of the 147th Regiment.


1866: Birthdate of Paul Bernard who gained fame as French man of letters and attorney Tristan Bernard and whose celebrity finally earned his release from Drancy during WW II


1871: One day after he had passed away, 16 year old Frank Phillip Eskell, “the son of Albert and Sarah Eskell” was buried today at the “Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.


1871: The German Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha conferred a barony on Julius Reuter, the German-born English pioneer of the newswire service which is known as Reuters.  This meant that Israel Beer Josafat, the son of a rabbi who had become a Lutheran would now be known as Baron de Reuter.


 


1871: “The Bed of the Tiber” published today described various attempts to retrieve relics from the Roman river and/or to divert it in attempts to clean its fetid waters. According to Addison’s His Remarks on Several Parts of Italy in 1701, the Jews had approached the Holy See with a proposal that they would clean the bed of the stream in exchanged for the right to keep whatever they might find among the debris.


1872: Birthdate of Samuel S. Koenig the Hungarian born American attorney and leader of the New York Republican Party.


1877(29th of Elul, 5637): Erev of Rosh Hashanah,


1877: Rebecca (Hart) Hallenstein, the wife of Edward Ruben Hallenstein whom she married in Australia and with whom she had eight children, was buried today at the Willesden Jewish Cemetery on Beaconsfield Raod


1877: Two days after she had passed and only three days before her 30th birthday, Helene (Samuel) Flack, the daughter of Lambert Samuel and Leopoldine Friedberger, and the wife of Ernest Flack, with whom she had five children was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemtery.


1877: “The Jewish New Year” published today reported that “this evening the Israelites throughout the world will commence the celebration of Rosh Hashanah or the New Year.”  After describing the differences in the observance of those “who still adhere to the Rabbinical ritual” and those “who have enlisted under the banner of reform” the article points out that “the celebration of the festival is considered as a preparation for the solemn fast of Yom Kippur or Day of Atonement.”


1879: Rabbi Isaac Noot officiated at this afternoon’s dedication service for the new synagoguehousing B’Nai Israel.  Located on 4th street, the building is simple edifice lacking the expected Moorish columns and stained glass windows. The congregation’s leaders include its President, Meyer Rosenthal and its Vice President, Lewis I. Schilt.


1879: The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society facility was officially opened to the public today in New York City.  The society is committed to provide for the needs of destitute and vagrant Jewish children.  Currently the society is provided shelter, food and education for 33 children ranging in age from 1 to 10 years.


1879: Rabbi E. M. Myers officiated at the rededication of Baith Israel which had reconfigured its pews to allow for mixed seating.


1880: It was reported today that “George Solomon, a Jewish writer” has published a new work – The Jews of History and the Jesus of Tradition Identified.


1881: Henry Lezinskey, a Jewish wholesale liquor dealer from New York was arrested in Long Branch, NJ on charges of stealing $775 from John J. Wheeler, the owner of the Germania Hotel.


1883: The Indianapolis News reported that “a tag on a pair of boots in front” of a store “on South Illinois Street” owned by a Jewish merchant reads “$1.25, not each.”  The reason for the strange wording is that a competitor advertises boots at a $1.25 and then charges the customer $2.50 because the each boot costs $1.25.


1884: “To Fight the Machine” published today described the battle for the First Congressional District in New Orleans between the regular Democratic organization and the self-style “reform Democrats” who are backing Carleton Hunt against General Adolph Mayer, “a millionaire Jew with an ace for social distinction.


1884: Four days after he had passed away, Michael Heymanson, the husband of the former Adelaide Jewell was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1885: Three days after he had passed away, Amsterdam native Sadok Schneiders was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1885: A delegation of “Hebrew working girls” will march in todays “working men’s parade under the leadership of Paul Mayer.


1888: “The Beaches at Rockaway” described economic and social conditions at various New York beaches during the just ended summer season. Among other things, the clientele at the Far Rockaway Beach has shifted from being “a fashionable resort” that attracted notables like Horace Greely, to being so heavily visited by those of Irish origins that it was called the “Irish Long Branch.”  However during the past three years there has been such a growth in the number of Jewish families that fewer and fewer old time families from Troy and Albany have been coming to the beach.


1889: In Frankfurt am Main Isa and Karl Flesh gave birth to Max Flesch-Thebesius


1890: As of today it is estimated that the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society will need $74, 850 from the City of New York in 1891.


1890: “New Publications” published today provided a review of Recha by Dorothea Gerard.


1891: It was reported today that at least one Jew has been arrested in Odessa on charges of having helped hundreds of wealthy Jewish youths evade the draft by injecting them with a combination of petroleum and cotton oil that gives them the appearance of “a serious skin infection.”


1891(4th of Elul, 5651): Heinrich Graetz, one of the intellectual giants of the 19th century and the author of multi-volume History of the Jews a seminal work in more ways than one, passed away.  (This blog cannot do justice to his accomplishments and impact)


1892: In Brooklyn, Dr. A.W. Shepard completed his examination of the corpse of Lazarus Aizenstat, and determined that he had been strangled by more than attacker since three coils of rope were used. Police believe that the Jewish immigrant from Odessa was killed by his roommate a man known variously as Isaacs or Solomon in an attempt to rob him 35,000 rubles alleged to have been in his possession.


1893: Moses Alvares Vega married Sara Teresea Ameringen in Amsterdam today.


1893: The funeral for Charles Frank, the Superintendent of the United Hebrew Charities will take place this morning at 58 St. Marks Place.


1893: Three days after he had passed away, ninety year, Joseph Barrow Montefiore, the husband of the former Rebecca Mocatta with whom he had fourteen children was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.



1893: "Women elbowed, trod on each other’s toes, and did everything else they could without violating the proprieties" to find a place in the overcrowded hall to hear women speak at the first-ever Jewish Women's Congress.


1893: Birthdate of (Isaac) Leslie Hore-Belisha, 1st Baron Hore-Belisha (of Devonport), statesman and inventor of belisha beacons. Born in London, he was British secretary of state for war (1937-40) who instituted military conscription in the spring of 1939, a few months before the outbreak of World War II.


1895: Birthdate of Joseph Richard Vogel who replaced Arthur Loew as President of MGM where approved the production as such hit films as “Gigi,” “North by Northwest” and “Ben Hur” as well as such flops as “Mutiny on the Bounty.


1895: The Magistrate at the Essex Market Police Court sent the son of Aaron Rosie Goldstein back to the New York Juvenile Asylum from which he had escaped months ago after having been convicted of being a burglar.


1896(29th of Elul, 5656): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1896: “As soon as the gun on Governors Island” was fired announcing that it was “sundown” Rosh Hashanah services began in a wide variety of venues and congregations in New York City.


1896: In the Bowery, large crowds attended services at the Thalia Theatre and the Liberty Theatre.  Rabbis Schengold and Silverman officiated at the Orthodox service at the Thalia while Romanian Jews attended the services at the Liberty.


1896: “Reader Isidor Kartschmaroff conducted services” at Congregation Beth Israel and Dr. Levi Kleeburg delivered a sermon on “the necessity of being as observant watchful the entire year as on its first day.”


1896: Rabbi Kauffman Kohler officiated at New Year’s services this evening at Temple Beth-El.


1896: Rabbis Joseph Silverman and Gustav Gottheil conducted New Year’s Eve services this evening at Temple Emanu-el.


1896: Rabbi Moses Maisner conducted New Year’s Eve services at Adath Israel Synagouge on 57th Street.


1897: “Mathew Sterling Borden, Yale ’95, the son of Chicago millionaire C.D. Borden” married “Mildred N Nerbaur, the daughter of Jewish tailor in New Haven; in Worcester, MA for the second time – the first marriage having ended in a divorce forced on the couple by the senior Borden.


1897: In Kiev, violinist Samuel Sherman who after the 1903 Pogrom fled to the Austro-Hungarian Empire where he became a concertmaster, first violinist and composer and his wife gave birth to Avrum Sherman who gained fame as Tin Pan Alley song writer Albert Sherman, the father of two other composers Robert and Richard Sherman.


1899: In a letter to Alfred Dreyfus, Ludovic Trarieux, the founding president of the League of Human and Civil Rights “told him that ‘the sorry spectacle of [his] trials has awakened feelings of solidarity and goodwill that were slumbering in all of us (…) [our thoughts] go out to the masses of the underprivileged and the meek to whom, in their abandon and their weakness, it may be even more necessary to extend a helping hand than to you.’"


1899: At the opening of today’s session of trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, his counsel Maitre Labori told the court that the former military attaches for Germany and Italy “would be unable to personally before the court” and asked that special measures be  taken to receive their depositions.  The court rejected the request.


1899: In Pittsburgh, Pa, Samuel and Lottie Ritz Parker gave birth to Benjamin Myron Parker, the eldest of their six children, a graduate of Cooper Union and the Jewish Institute of Religion from which he graduated in 1926 “with the degrees of rabbi and master of Hebrew Literature” and the spiritual leader of Mizpah Congregation of the Ochs Memorial Temple.”


1899: The second court martial of Colonel Dreyfus comes to an end.


1899: The Beth Moshav Z'keinim (Orthodox Home for Aged Jews), was organized today in Chicago., Illinois.


1899: Dr. Emil H. Hirsch, the rabbi of Sinai Congregation and a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago expressed his disapproval of the Jews of Memphis, TN petitioning the Kaiser “to allow any evidence he may control to appear in the Dreyfus case” because such a request, if made, should come from the American community, not the Jewish community because Dreyfus was being tried as a man and not as a Jew.


1903: S. H. Borofsky of Boston addressed “a mass meeting” sponsored by the Sons of Zion in Holyoke, Massachusetts.


1903: Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer described how the police in Camden closed down the amusements which were part of an outing sponsored by the Hebrew Social and Education Club on Sunday “much to the indignation of the members” because they violated the law.


1904: As of today, the trustees of Adath Israel Congregation in Camden, NJ were listed as Abe Zuberman, J.Z. Blank, Henry Pinsky, Louise Cade, William Fox, Harry Horwitz, William Blank, Philip Auerbach, Nathan Fuhrman, J.H. Perksie, Jacob Weinstein and Harry Neuere.


1904: Dr. Rudolph J. Coffee conducted today’s funeral service for Dr. Herman Baar, the former Superintendent of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York.  Among the attendees, were the children from the orphanage which currently serves almost 1,000 youngsters


1905: In Cleveland, OH Edith (née Joseph) and Louis Rorimer gave birth to James Joseph Rorimer, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who was the driving force behind the creation of “the cloisters” and would have remained unknown to most people were it not for his role as a member of U.S. Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section making him one the “Monuments Men” who was the character portrayed by Matt Damon in the film of the same name.


1905: Birthdate dermatologist Abraham “Dutch” Koransky, the Purdue University fullback, graduate of the University of Chicago’s Rush Medical School and decorated WW II Army Veteran who practiced medicine until 1985.


1906: A Pogrom took place in Shedlitz, Russia.  This was part of the pattern of unrest that preceded and followed the defeat of the Czar's army in the Russo-Japanese War.


1906: A 20 year old Russian Jew, David Gruen, landed at Jaffa.  History would come to know him as David Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion is Hebrew for Son of Gruen


1906: In Louisville, Adath Israel began three days of ceremonies and exercise marking the dedication of its new sanctuary under the leadership of Rabbi Hyman Gerson Enelow.


1909: Sigmund Freud Gives First of Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis at Clark University


1910: Eighty-three year old English painter William Hunt who in 1869 built a house at #64 Rehov HaNevi’im (Street of the Prophets) where he planted a pear tree that would provide the inspiration for a poem by Rachel Bluwstein.


1911(14th of Elul, 5671): Seventy-five year old Moses Freudeger de Obuda passed away today in Budapest, Hungary


1911: Ceremonies marking the dedication of Synagogue Oheb Shalom began today in Newark, NJ.


1913: “Jews of Today” provided a full-scale review of The Jews of Today by Arthur Ruppin with an introduction by Joseph Jacobs.


1913: Carl Jung made public break with Freud.


1913: Birthdate of Alexander Lerner, an expert in cybernetics and refusenik who met with Senator Kennedy at his Moscow apartment in 1974 and finally emigrated to Israel in 1988 where he worked “in the mathematis department at the Weizmann Institute of Science.”


1913: In Washington Heights, “Joseph Durst, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia” and the former Rose Friedwald gave birth to real estate developer Seymour Durst.


1914: As the Allies fought desperately at what was called the Battle of the Marne, the loss of which would mean a complete German victory, a legend was born when six hundred taxicabs each carrying five soldiers, brought re-enforcements from central Paris to the battle line at Nanteuil-le Haudouin.”


1915: Outfield Sam Mayer made his major league debut with the Washington Senators.


1915: As of today the officers of The Federation of Rumanian Jews of America include Dr. Julius Weiss, President; Samuel Goldstein, Vice President; and Isaac Abreman, Chairman of the Building Committee.


1915(28th of Elul, 5675): Sixty-three year old Herman Gross passed away in Chicago.


1915: In London, “The Jewish Chronicle, referring to alleged German peace proposals says: “We wonder whether it is really believed that the Jews of the United States or elsewhere could be deceived by such a transparent move, and whether any of our brethren anywhere are such downright simpletons as to act the part of Germany’s instruments and help the Germans to an opportune peace in return for a vague promise which they have neither the power nor the means to carry out. We should like to know since when this people, the patentees of anti-Semitism and its arch fomenters in Russia, have been bitten with such a passion for Jewish freedom that they must needs head a pro-Jewish campaign or perish.”


1916: “Came Here to Escape the War” published today described the plight of forty-give Spanish Jews who had been living in Greece where they “said bread was 50 cent a pound…and that there was great poverty on account of the war and for whom the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society will provide assistance until they find employment here in the United States.


1917: Pavel Axelrod of the Organization committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party and Karol Radek and Jacob Hanecki of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania were among the delegates attending the “Third Zimmerwald Conference” – a meeting of anti-War Socialists –  continued to meet for a third day in Stockholm


1918(1st of Tishrei, 5679): Rosh Hashanah


1918: The Jewish Welfare Board issued “a call to greater patriotic services” which was sent “every community which ended by saying “In loyal devotion to the understanding of serving the fighting forces of our country, may American Jewry find abundant happiness during the coming year.”


1918: Rabbi Samuel Buchler, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Ministers’ Association of America sent President Wilson a letter thanks him for his positive attitude to the creation of Jewish Homeland in Palestine.


1918: For the first time ever, in Washington Heights, Temple B’nai Israel is scheduled to hold Rosh Hashanah  services at the Y.M.H.A. building on St. Nicholas Avenue.


1918: Jewish sailors and naval officers were able to observe Rosh Hashanah because of furloughs granted by the Secretary of the Navy.


1918: At Temple Beth-El on 5thAvenue, Rabbi Samuel Schulman delivered a sermon on “Is God in the War?” that opened with the statement that “God is in the war because humanity is paying the retribution for universal sin and defeat will come to that power which most glaringly incarnates the sin of our civilization.”


1918: Consecration the “New Romanian Synagogue: in Manchester, UK.


1918: “Mounted militia and leaders of the Council of Workmen and Soldiers’ Delegates were summon to disperse the mob when anti-Jewish riots began at a leather factory in Moscow.


1918: In San Sebastian, Spain, Jewish New Year services were held for the first time in 400 years. The services were attended by 30 worshipers.


1919: Date which the mother of Isaac Asimov used to enroll him the first grade – which showed him to be almost a year older than he really was.


1919: Today, at the Broadway Central Hotel,“more than 800 people attended a convention of the Federation of Ukrainian Jews in America” it was decided “that the massacre of their brethren in Eastern Europe must finally be stopped and” the assistance of the United States is critical as can be seen by the fact that federation has already sought and received support from Secretary of State Lansing.


1920: The Hebrew Technical Institute, one of the oldest and “well-established Jewish institution” in New York whose nearly 2,000 graduates have gone on to be “architects, engineers, draughtsman, electricians and skilled mechanics, is scheduled to begin its Fall Term today.


1921: The first Miss America Pageant was held in Atlantic City, NJ.  Bess Myerson was the first Jew to win the contest in 1945.


1922(14th of Elul, 5682): Seventy-year old Russian born Yiddish author Joseph S. Glick who came to the United States in 1887 where he published a Yiddish paper in New York before moving to Pittsburg where among other things he published The Jewish Post, a weekly Yiddish paper passed away today.



1922: Birthdate of pianist Art Ferrante. This non-Jew gained fame as part of the duo Ferrante and Tachere which recorded the theme from “Exodus.”


1923: Birthdate of Yiddish speaking American actor Hy Anzell whose film credits included appearances in “Bananas” and “Annie Hall.”


1923: Birthdate of Holocaust survivor Peter David Bisseliches.


1923: JTA reported today that “Anti-Jewish disturbances broke out simultaneously in two places in Roumania this week. In Bacau student disciples of the anti-Semitic agitator, Professor Cuza, invaded en masse a hall in which a Jewish students' dance was being held and attacked the guests. The police, according to eye-witnesses' reports, received here, worked in cahoots with the mob, arresting Jews who attempted to fight back their assailants. Among those taken into custody are two officials, Solomon Pascal and Carl Meyerowici. Deputy Christo Vianu, liberal, who witnessed the attack issued a statement following the disturbance demanding the release of the officials. He confirms that the police favored the assailants. A thorough investigation of the attack and drastic punishment for the offenders is promised by the Minister of Justice, who hurried to Bacau on receiving reports of the disturbance.”With the beginning of the new semester at the University of Klausenberg, the rector Jacobovicci has promised police protection to the Jewish students who were routed from the campus. The Minister of instruction, in view of the disturbances, has announced he will facilitate the issuance of passports to Jewish students who desire to study in foreign countries.The government is still timerous about opening all of the universities on account of the fear of more trouble. The league of Non-partisan Students has issued a memorandum appealing to the authorities to open "the universities before we become gray".


1923: The JTA reported today that Lord Rothschild had presided at Leeds at a meeting called to reestablish the local branch of the Anglo-Jewish Association. Those spreading anti-Semitism contend, Rothschild said, that the Jew is incapable of becoming a good citizen. "We must prove to the world that this is a gross libel. We must prove that the Jew cannot only be a good citizen but can be a better citizen than anyone" he insisted. D'Avigdor Goldsmid who also spoke said that the Anglo Jewish Association has existed for 52 years and in all of that time had played an active part in Jewish affairs of the British Empire.The Association, he said, takes a great interest in Palestine, having pledged to support the British Government in the execution of the mandate and to do all possible to assist in the development of the Jewish Home land.


1923: The JTA reported that negotiations are now under way between representatives of the Vaad Ha-Ir, or Jewish Council of the city with the Municipality of Montreal over the issue of establishing schools for the Jewish children of Canada’s largest municipality.


1923: JTA reported that The American Keren Hayesod has made a second payment of $57,000 towards its 50,000 pounds subscription to the Rutenberg Electric Company, sponsoring the electrification project in Palestine.


1924: Anna Kasor Dantzig, the widow of Berry Dantzig passed away today in Kansas City MO.


1924: Birthdate of composer Leonard Rosenman the Brooklyn native who created the theme for the television hit "Marcus Welby, MD.”



1926: In Los Angeles, motion picture pioneer Samuel Goldwyn and actress Frances Howard gave birth to movie producer Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.



1926: JTA published figures portraying the employment picture in Palestine. Unemployment has increased since the cessation of the building activity in the country. In July 1925, the number of unemployed was 300, in August 950, September 975. October 1,750, November 2,000. December 2,700, in January 1926, 4,729, February 4,741, March 4,902, April 5,657, May 6,113 and June 6,400. Most of the unemployed are in Tel Aviv where they number 3,500; in Haifa there are 1,500 unemployed and in Jerusalem 300. About 2,000 of the unemployed in Tel-Aviv belong to the building trades In the period from January to June 1926, over 5,000 immigrants are reported to have entered Palestine, about 1,400 of them being absorbed in the colonies.


1926: In Montreal, “Morris Rosenfeld and the former Vera Friedman” gave birth to Ezra Rosenfeld” whose mother changed his name to Isadore which meant that he gained fame a cardiologist and author under the name of Isadore Rosenfeld.



1927: JTA reported that the largest bequest ever received by the National Jewish Hospital here was made by Louis Heineman of Jamestown, N. Y. A gift of $100,000 will be paid in 18 months by the Union Trust Co., of Jamestown, N. Y. from the estate of Louis Heinemann, who was a patient at the hospital 12 years ago. A sum of $100,000 was made in gifts to friends and relatives, and the remainder of the estate of $300,000 will go to the local Jewish Hospital and the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati.


1927: JTA reported that Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Relief Committee, has expressed his astonishment at the sensational charges made by Max D. Steuer on his arrival from Europe concerning the alleged existence of fraud in the administration of unnamed Jewish relief funds prior to 1925.


1927: JTA reported that Alfred M. Cohen international President of the Independent Order B'nai Brith returned on the steamer Hamburg from an extended tour in Europe. He was met at the pier by Dr. Boris D. Bogen, Executive Secretary of the Order and by numerous friends.


1927: JTA reported that a gift of $250,000 to the University of Chicago from Louis B. Kuppenheimer was announced by Vice President Frederick C. Woodward. The money will be used to establish an endowment fund to be known as the Louis B. and Emma M. Kuppenheimer Foundation. The income is to be used for a study of the structure, functions and diseases of the eye, and for the support of teaching and research in the department of ophthalmology [Louis Kuppenheimer was the son of Jonas Kuppenheimer and the brother of Albert Kuppenheimer, the trio who over fifty years ago came to Chicago and stared what has become one of the world’s largest clothing concerns in the world.]


1929: Based reports published today there are now 9,200 refugees scattered throughout Palestine as a result of Arab terror and violence. Of this number 2,500 are gathered in Jerusalem, 1,500 at Tel Aviv, 2,700 at Haifa and 2,500 at Safed.


1931: “Julius Sizzer” a “two reeler” in which Benny Rubin who co-authored the script, plays the parts of two brothers was released today in the United States.


1932: A memorial service was held in Baghdad to mark the passing of Sir Eskell Sassoon, the First Finance Minister of Iraq who was praised in a eulogy by the Prime Minister for his “character, culture, his outstanding personality, his vast knowledge, sense of duty and the proper fulfilment of that duty no matter how great the sacrifice was in time or in life.”


1932: It was reported today that Ethel Cohen of Providence, R.I. “was elected head of the ladies’ auxiliary” of the Jewish War Veterans at their convention which came to an end yesterday in Atlantic City, NJ.


1932: Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, who returned today on the Europa, accompanied by Mrs. Celler, predicted that beer and light wines would be legalized at the next session of Congress. In anticipation of this he said that he went abroad as a member of the Judiciary Committee to study the licensing systems of various European countries.


1933: Louis Gradner began serving as the Mayor of Cape Town, S.A.


1933: Seventy-one year old Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs at the start of World War I who signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement which has had such a significant impact on the Middle East and Israel and who in 1914 when asked by MP Herbert Samuel “about a homeland for the Jewish people” replied “that the idea had always had a strong sentimental appeal to him and he would be prepared to work for if the opportunity arose” passed away today.


1934: The New York Times reviewed Those Who Perish, Edward Dahlberg’s novel about “the psychological repercussions of Hitlerism on the people who worked for a Jewish community house in the town of New Republic, NJ.


1936: It was announced today that the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and its affiliate, the American Joint Reconstruction Foundation, appropriated $1,040,000 in 1935 to help Jews in Poland and other Eastern European Countries.


1936: A 25-percent tax is imposed on all Jewish assets in Germany.


1937: “Funeral services were held today a Golders Green Jewish Cemetery” for Sir Albert Levy, the founder of Adrath Tobacco Company and creator of the State Express cigarette brand who donated millions to bot Jewish and non-Jewish charities and instituions.


1939: During World War II, the Polish air force was now completely destroyed after less than a week of combat. Germany began plans to move troops to the West (French Border.) Despite being sworn to support Poland, France declined to attack or militarily engage Germany.  This inaction was a prelude to France’s feeble resistance to the German attack in the Spring of 1940 and the willingness with which many Frenchmen would collaborate with the Nazis.


1939: As the Wermacht and the SS death squads swept through Poland, persecution of the Jews began with the application of economic sanctions placed on the Jews of Bedzin.


1939: At approximately 5 p.m., Polish government, which had left Warsaw the day before, arrived at Łuck which would lead to bombing of the town since German intelligence quickly found out about it


1939: In keeping with the spirit of the non-aggression pact the Soviet Union signed with Hitler Stalin approved the new party line which was to be adopted by Communists throughout the world that the war being waged by the French and English was unjust and imperialist.


1940(4th of Elul, 5700): Parashat Shoftim


1940(4th of Elul, 5700): Eighty-one year old Baden native and owner of the “brush manufacturing firm J. Dukas and Company” Julius J. Dukas who came to the United States at the age of 19, married Sarah Hyman Dukas with whom he had one daughter and whose activities in the Jewish community included serving as “President of the Hebrew Free Loan Society for 35 years” passed away today.



1940: In a speech to a special SS Squad, Himmler said that there was only one goal, ". . . To create an order that will spread a consciousness of Nordic blood until we draw to us all the Nordic blood in the world."


1940Duneera arrives at Sydney, carrying Jewish refugees from Axis countries, incarcerated as enemy aliens.


1940: As the Luftwaffe attempted to make good on its promise of defeating the English through air attacks, the Nazi air force shifts tactics and begins daylight and nighttime bombing of London.


1941: British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden notes that "if we must have preferences, let me murmur in your ear that I prefer Arabs to Jews."  This strain of anti-Semitism was acceptable at certain levels of British society and certainly was part and parcel of the British Foreign Office.  Eden was Churchill’s protégé. Supposedly he was responsible for the policies that kept the British for doing more to rescue the Jews of Europe and to admit them to Palestine.  Eden finally became Prime Minister in the 1950’s.  His government fell as a result of the Suez crisis when Eden clumsily tried to remove Nasser from power; a ploy that included covert support for an Israeli strike across the Sinai Peninsula.


1942: At least 5000 Jews from Kolomyia, Ukraine, are deported to Belzec; 1000 are killed in the Kolomyia Ghetto itself.


1942: Third baseman Cy Block made his major league debut with the Chicago Cubs.


1942: The main article on the foreign page of The Time of London was headed "Vichy's Jewish victims, children deported to Germany." Where they were deported was not stated.  There was plenty of information floating around that England's "newspaper of record" could have at least speculated as their fate.


1943: A transport left Westerbork for Auschwitz.  Among those on board were Etty Hillesum and her family.


1943: Rabbi Stephen S. Wise officiated at the funeral of Judge Julian W. Mack, “prominent jurist and Zionist leader.” (JTA)


1944: After having been interrogated by the Gestapo for almost a month, Victor Kluger, one of those who helped hide the Frank family, “was moved to the prison on Weteringschans, in a cell with people sentenced to death.”


1944: Following the eruption of the Partisans’ Revolt in Slovakia, the Nazis resumed their deportations of the Jews which today resulted in the arrest of Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl, his wife, his four daughters and one son in Nitra which lead to their ultimate transport to Auschwitz.


1944: Hungarian authorities permit Ottó Komoly, a Jew, to rent buildings in Budapest to be used for the protection of Jewish children. Komoly will ultimately protect 5000 children in 35 buildings.


1945(29th of Elul, 5705): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1945(29th of Elul, 5705): Seventy year old “general medical practitioner” and graduate of Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons Milton A. Gershel, the “former house physician at Mt. Sinai Hospital and “resident physician for the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society” passed away today in Manhattan.



1945: Abe Bloomberg began serving as Mayor of Cape Town, SA.


1945: “In the reconstructed wing of a war-damaged synagogue in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin, 400 members of the capital’s remaining community of Jewish gather at sundown tonight for the first Rosh Hashanah observance since their liberation from a twelve year campaign of extermination.”


1945: “Americans Capture Warsaw Murder” published today described the capture in Japan of Joseph Alfred Meissinger, the German war criminal who “ordered the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and sent 10,000 Jewish children to a concentration camp where they were killed during the Rosh Hashanah holy days.


1945: The Hebrew Sheltering and immigrant Aid Society will conduct Rosh Hashanah services for detainees at Ellis Island “while other services will be held for recent arrivals” no longer convinced to the immigration facility “at the society’s synagogue at 425 Lafayette Street.


1945: “For the first time in fifteen years, Frank L. Weil, president of the National Jewish Welfare Board said all Jews could feel a surge of hope as they welcomed a New Year,” “but he added that the victory only highlighted the magnitude of the tragedy that has befallen the oppressed peoples and provided new outlets for traditional American generosity.


 1948: “Sundown Beach” by Bessie Breuer opened on Broadway in NYC.



1949: The USS Benjamin Peixotto, a decommissioned “liberty ship” that had been sold to China “went aground in Tola harbor at Hong Kong during a typhoon.


1950: Two Holocaust survivors from Budapest who moved to Israel Peter David Bisseliches and Agnes Steiner married today


1950:  Birthdate of Emmy award winning actress Julie Kavner.  Kavner is best known for her role as Brenda Morgenstern in “Rhoda”and the voice of Marge on “The Simpsons.”


1951: Fritz Sonnenberg began servings as Mayor of Cape Town, SA.


1951: “Spurred by the current food crisis, Israel has signed a contract with a private Ethiopian group for the purchase within the next year of 10,000 tons of meat equal to six months' rations for the entire Israeli population. Shipments from Eritrea through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba to the Israeli port of Elath are expected to begin in a few months.”


1953: Following the death of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev becomes head of the Soviet Central Committee. During the post-World War II period, Nikita Khrushchev had governed the Ukraine, an area of intense suffering for the Jews during the war and an area where the local population had worked with the Nazis to murder their Jewish neighbors. “Ukrainian Jews who fled to Soviet Asia during the occupation slowly returned to reclaim their homes, possessions and jobs. The Ukrainians who remained in the communities were hostile to the returning Jews. “The Khrushchev led government refused to interfere in the conflicts between the Russians and the Jews. As a result, anti-Semitic sentiments surfaced everywhere — in the nation’s literature and art, and through political propaganda.”  In his new position, Khrushchev was the first among equals.  He did not replicate Stalin’s paranoid anti-Semitism and Jews actually benefited from Khrushchev’s program of de-Stalinization that began in earnest in 1956.  Khrushchev would use his new position to support the Arabs in the Middle East.  He would proivde the arms and support for the Egyptians and the Syrians which made them a threat to Israel’s very existence in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.


1954: “Betrayed” a WW II spy story directed by Gottfried Reinhardt, featuring Theodore Bikel and with a musical score co-authored by Walter Goehr was released in the United States today.


1955(20th of Elul, 5715): Seventy-four year old Aline Bernstein, the pioneering Broadway designer passed away today.




1955: Birthdate of mathematician Efim Isaakovich Zelmanov.  Born in the Soviet Union, Zelmanov has taught in a number of American universities as he did the academic work that led to him winning the Fields Medal in 1994.


1955: In Istanbul, a pogrom aimed at the city’s Jewish, Armenian and Greek populations came to an end.


1956(2ndof Tishrei, 5717): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1956: In Columbus, OH, Florence Mazie (née Cohen), an amateur tap dancer, and Edward Feinstein, a sales executive for the Sara Lee Corporation and a former amateur singer gave birth to multi-dimensional musician Michael Jay Feinstein.


1959: In Detroit, Michigan, Clarita (Gershowitz) Karlin and Julian John Schamus gave birth to U.C. Berkley graduate James Allan Schamus the “award-winning screenwriter, co-founder of Good Machine production company, and the CEO of Focus Features.”


1959: In Chicago, the 3rd Pan American Games in which Eugene Selznick’s Volleyball team won the gold medal came to an end.


1960: Two days after he had passed away funeral services are scheduled to held at Riverside Chapel for 64 year old Jack David Tarcher, the husband of Mary Tarcher with whom he had three children – Jeremy, Judith and Miriam – who was a leader of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New Yew York, having served as a Trustee at Large for more than two decades


1961: Alf Honikman began serving as Mayor of Cape Town, SA.


1964(1st of Tishrei, 5725): As Jews observed Rosh Hashanah, they now enjoyed a new sense of inclusion thanks to the efforts passage two months ago of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed discrimination based on religion.  Jews would repay the efforts of Lyndon Johnson, the man who made this possible by voting for him in overwhelming numbers in the November elections.


1966: ABC broadcast the first episode of “The Monroes,” a family Western created by Milt Rosen and co-starring Barbara Hershey


1967: Walter Gradner completed two years of service as Mayor of Cape Town.


1969: During the ‘War of Attrition “Shayetet 13 carried out Operation Escort, raiding the Egyptian anchorage at Ras Sadat and destroying a pair of Egyptian P-183 torpedo-boats.”


1970(6th of Elul, 5730): Ninety year old the Warsaw born Zionist who was the first Interior Minister of Israel passed away today.



1972: “Preparations were under way today for a full state funeral” for the Israeli athletes murdered by the Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics which will take place after Brig. Gen. Mordechai Prion, the Chief Rabbi of the IDF has returned with the bodies.


1972: “Munich, 1972” published today questions the propriety of resuming the Olympic Games while “the bodies of the eleven Israeli athletes and coaches killed by Arab terrorists were still unburied”, places the blame for the slaughter on all “of the Arab nations” except for Jordan and asks “the basic question” of “how to guard the international community against the depredations of such fanatical madmen.”


1972: As the world reacted to the Munich Massacre, The White House issued a statement “saying that President Nixon ‘was deeply saddened at the outcome of the tragic incident and offers heartfelt sympathy to the victims” and “Pope Paul told a group of visiting pilgrims that the massacre at the Olympic Games ‘truly dishonors our time.’”


1972: In New York, “more than 2,000 people filled City Hall Plaza for a memorial ceremony honoring the Israeli athletes murdered at Munich “presided over by Mayor Lindsay” where many of those in attendance wept as Cantor David Koussevitsky changed El Mole Rachmim.”


1973: “Ha’aretz theatre critic Tzipora (Tzipi) Shoat” gave birth to Israeli classical composer Gil Shoat.



1975: As the Soviet Union continued to follow its path of increasing its influence in the Arab world “a delegation of army political workers from South Yemen began a week-long visit to the USSR.


1976: As relations continued to worsen between Uganda and Kenya, due in part to Idi Amin’s anger and embarrassment over the Israeli rescue mission at the Entebbe airport, “intelligence information reaching Paris today said that President Idi Amin has planned a ‘revenge operation’ against Kenya.”


1978(5th of Elul, 5738): Sixty-two year old Cecil Aronowitz , the South African viola player who was appointed “head of the String Department at the royal Northern College of Music in Manchester” passed away today at Suffolk while “performing a piece by Motzart.”



1985: “A staged concert” featuring music from Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” took place at Lincoln Center.


1985: “My Beautiful Laundrette” a comedy directed by Stephen Fears premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.


1986(3rd of Elul, 5746): Thirty-one year old music promoter Ruth Polsky passed away today “after being crushed by a runaway cab on the steps of the Limelight club in New York.”




1989: Today, “Barris Industries, Inc. an American game show production company that was founded by Chuck Barris” “was renamed Guber-Peters Entertainment Company”


1991: In “Seeking Symmetry Between Palestinians and Jews” Edward Rothstein reviews “Death of Klinghoffer” an opera that provides a rationalization for throwing a wheel-chair bound American Jew off the deck of cruise ship that had been hijacked by terrorists.



1992: After having ousted the incumbent, Bud Selig began servings as “acting commissioner” of Baseball.


1994(2nd of Tishrei, 5755): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1994: Eighty-two year old mathematician Dr. Abraham Gelbart, “the founding dean of the Belfer Graduate School of Science at Yeshiva University passed away today.



1994: “Mrs. Parker and The Vicious Circle” where in a case of a Jew plays a Jew when Jennifer Jason Leigh stars in the role of Dorothy Parker was released in the United States today by Fine Line Pictures.


1997: “In concert with the publication of Lauren Greenfields’s debut monograph, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, her first major show, "Fast Forward" had its US debut at the International Center for Photography (ICP) today


1997: The New York Times book section includes reviews of Uncrowned King:The Life of Prince Albert by Jewish author Stanley Weintraub and A Mad, Mad, Mad,Mad World: A Life in Hollywoodby Stanley Kramer


1998: Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Russian born Sergey Brin  and while they were students at Stanford Umiversity.  Sergey Brin was born to a Jewish family in Moscow. He moved to the United States at the age of six when his father took a teaching position at the University of Maryland.


2002(1st of Tishrei, 5763): Rosh Hashanah


2002(1st of Tishrei,5763): Uziel "Uzi" Gal the German-born- Israeli gun designer best remembered as the designer and namesake of the Uzi submachine gun passed away.


2003(10th of Elul, 5763): Rock musician and songwriter Warren Zevon passed away at the age of 56.  His father was Jewish and his mother was Mormon.


2003: “And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself” written and co-produced by Larry Gelbart and co-starring Alan Arkin was released in the United States today.


2003:The New York Timesfeatured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including Triangle: The Fire That Changed Americaby David Von Drehle. Woody Allen: A Life in Film by Richard Schickel


2005(3rd of Elul, 5765): Eighty-one year old Bessie Hope Wolf Garber who gained fame as actress and television personality “Hope Garber,” hostess of “At Home with Garber” passed away today.


2005: Haaretzreported that The Jewish Agency has invited university students in New Orleans - Jews and non-Jews alike - to study in Israel. According to the Jewish Agency, some 20 college students have taken an interest in the offer. Tens of thousands of students are enrolled in universities in New Orleans, 2,000 of them Jewish. The Agency's initiative was welcomed by universities in Israel, and will be funded by the United Jewish Communities of North America and the Hillel Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. The Jewish Agency put forth the initiative after it was discovered that Tulane University, in central New Orleans, was flooded and closed. The Jewish Agency has committed to partially funding the students' flights to Israel, and is also considering covering some of the tuition fees, although the amount of funding has yet to be determined.


2005: “The IDF announced that it planned to advance its full withdrawal from the Gaza Strip to September 12, pending cabinet approval.”


2006: Based on complaints from four different women, the police decided that they had enough evidence to indict Moshe Katsav.


2006: According to an article in Haaretz,“Britain’s Jewish community faces an unprecedented level of anti-Semitism and feels more threatened than ever, according to the report of the all-party parliamentary inquiry into anti-Semitism, which is to be released Thursday.


2007: On the first day of his three day trip to Austria, Pope Benedict XVI “paid solemn tribute to Holocaust victims, extending his ‘sadness, repentance and friendship’ to the Jewish People.”


2007: As part of his “private” visit to Israel Prince Edward, who is seventh in line for succession to the British throne attends a Shabbat dinner in Jerusalem with Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, as well as prominent members of the British community in Israel.  During his visit, Prince Edward went to Yad Vashem where a tree has been planted in honor of his grandmother Princess Alice of Greece, who was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" for sheltering a Jewish family in her Athens home during the Holocaust.


2007: Five Moroccan Jews, three of them women, ran in elections for positions in the Parliament of Morocco.


2007: “Iran’s Unlikely TV Hit” published today described the popularity of “Zero Degree Turn,” a drama that “centers on a love story between an Iranian-Palestinian Muslim man and a French Jewish woman” during the Holocaust.


2008: “The Fly,” an opera in two acts by composer Howard Shore was first performed at the Los Angeles Opera Company.


2008: Magen David Adom, Israel's emergency medical response service, opens this year's "Lifesaving Olympics" on the top of Masada. The four-day event, in which paramedic teams from all over Israel and the world will show off their lifesaving skills, will see 180 participants from thirteen countries competing.


2008: At Lester J. Morris Hillel at Michigan State University, UJC Network Midwest Cluster Leadership Meeting Hosted by the Jewish Federation of Greater Lansing.


2008: First day of Sunday School at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa marking the start of another year of Jewish education programs designed to meet the needs of this small, but vibrant eastern Iowa Jewish community.


2008: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, presentation of a concert titled “Klezmer to Clasiccal.” From the haunting sounds of Klezmer folk music to the classical beauty of works by Mendelssohn and lush 20thcentury harmonies of Gershwin and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Jewish composers have given us some of the world’s most transcendent and emotionally moving music. Klezmer to Classical honors the creative genius of these composers and features a little-known masterpiece by Czech composer Gideon Klein, composed shortly before his death in a concentration camp in 1945. In a display of the best of Cedar Rapids’ ecumenical spirit the concert is sponsored by Ann Lipsky, Harold and Robert Becker and the Thaler Holocaust in collaboration with the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library and is being held at First Presbyterian Church.


2008: The Washington Post book section featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or on topics of Jewish interest including Hot, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- And How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Steven Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanicsby Leonard Susskind and The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means by George Soros.


2008: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish reader including the recently paperback editions of Mort Zachter’s Dough: A Memoir and Yael Goldstein Love’sThe Passion of Darsky.


2009: Opening night of the Second annual Piyyut Festival in Jerusalem featuring Cantor David Riachi, an orchestra and a children's choir.


2009: Opposition leader and Kadima party chief Tzipi Livni blasted the Netanyahu government today, calling its policy amateurish and indecisive and denying she had any intentions of having Kadima join the government.


2009: Today, the Jerusalem Post obtained an exclusive letter from German President Horst Köhler criticizing the decision to award Germany's highest medal of honor - the Federal Cross of Merit - to anti-Zionist attorney Felicia Langer


2010: Notyetness, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Israeli-American Yael Kanarek is scheduled to open at Bitforms Gallery in New York City.


2010: The DVD of “The Round Up” a French movie “based on the true story of a young Jewish boy that depicts the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv) -- the mass arrest of Jews by French police who were Nazi accomplices in Paris in July 1942


2011: The Gilad Hekselman Quartet is scheduled to perform at the Jazz Standard in NYC where they will celebrate the release of Gilad's third album 'Hearts Wide Open' on Le Chant Du Monde label of Harmina Mundi


2011: Rabbi Mindy Avra Portnoy is scheduled to lead the opening session of “Not the Matriarchs: Lesser Known Women of the Hebrew Bible” at the JCC of Greater Washington.


2011: Day @ the J is  scheduled to feature a screening of the documentary "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story," a hot lunch, and an Israeli art exhibit, Expressions Fine Art at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, in Rockville, MD.


2011: Israeli settlers in the West Bank vandalized an Israel Defense Forces base today, carrying out a "price tag" operation against the army for the first time since adopting the policy in recent years.


2011: Today, Israel Police began dismantling social protest encampment sites in Tel Aviv and Holon, less than two months after activists set up the tent cities to demonstrate against the high cost of living in the country


2011(8th of Elul, 5771): Eighty-four year old William Lee Frost, the Jewish philanthropist who had succeeded his father a President of the Jewish Telegraphic agency passed away today. (As reported by JTA)



2011(8th of Elul, 5771): Daniel Rogov, Israel's leading food and wine critic and veteran writer for Haaretz, passed away today. Rogov, who wrote under a pseudonym, was born in the U.S.A. He finished his high school studies at the age of 15 and flew to Paris, where he began his journalistic career by writing articles about food and wine for American magazines and newspapers. He later widened his repertoire and wrote for publications in France and Switzerland, and appeared on television programs as an expert in the subject. He moved to Israel in 1978 and began writing for the Jerusalem Post, quickly establishing himself as the leading wine expert in Israel. He started writing for Haaretz in 1984. Rogov was the author of "The Rogov Guide to Israeli Wine,” an annual study of the year's best vintner selections. Rogov announced he was leaving Haaretz just three days before his death, due to his deteriorating health.  A month earlier, on August 29, top members of the wine industry organized an evening in his honor at the Dan Panorama hotel in Tel Aviv. Rogov contributed to Johnson's Pocket Wine Book, and the Tom Stevenson wine report, and managed the Wine Lovers Page website. Rogov prepared a goodbye message for members of the website’s forum. “When it comes to food and wine... I wrote about them throughout the years out of a sense of love and devotion, both emotional and intellectual," he wrote in the message.  As I hope I showed, food and wine for me are not just things that go into our bodies. They are a reflection of our anthropology, our history, our psychology, out social needs, and of course, enjoyment.” “Like all critics who take themselves seriously, I greatly enjoyed sharing my thoughts, and in a certain sense I consider myself as the Umberto Eco of wine and culinary criticism, my writing reflects both and accurate and post-modern, that leaves the intelligent reader to come to his own conclusions. At the end of the day, this was a good life.”


2012: A symposium sponsored by the Library of Congress entitled “The Stations That Spoke Your Language: Radio and the Yiddish American Cultural Renaissance” is scheduled to come to an end today.


2012: Elad Lassry’s Untitled (Presence) is scheduled to open at the Kitchen in NYC.


2012(20th of Elul): Yahrtzeit of Dr. Jacob Levin – a great man who lives on in so many ways.


2012: Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip fired two Kassam rockets into the western Negev early today. The rockets landed in open areas in the Sdot Negev Regional Council, close to Netivot. No damage or injuries were reported. Red alert sirens were heard in the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council, just north of the Strip, late this morning, but no rockets or mortars were discovered. (As reported by Times of Israel Staff)


2012: Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel may reoccupy parts of the Gaza strip in the future, while speaking at a meeting of the Fisher Institute on "Operation Cast Lead" today.


2013: Thanks to change in policy by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elections are scheduled to take place instead of on Yom Kippur as originally planned by his predecessor Julia Gillard.


2013(3rdof Tishrei, 5774): In Cedar Rapids, guest Chazan Ilan Caplan leads traditional Shabbat Shuvah services at Temple Judah.


2013(3rdof Tishrei, 5774): Ninety-four year old cellist Fred Katz passed away today. (As reported by Margalit Fox)



2013: As Israelis and Jews around the world wait for “the next shoe to drop” Egyptian troops move into the Sinai “to clean out insurgents,” CNN released videos showing victims of Syrian gas attacks and supporters of the Assad regime threaten all kinds of retaliation ranging from terrorism to cyber-attacks aimed at disrupting commerce and industry around the world.


2013: Israel drew 1-1 with Azerbaijan tonight in a disappointing performance which made the team’s World Cup 2014 hopes a very long shot.


2014: The New York Times published reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including 10:04 by Ben Lerner and Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth.


2014:  Zvi Eckstein is scheduled to speak on “The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History” at the Center for Jewish History


2014: As part of events marking the 50th anniversary of the premiere of “Fiddler on the Roof” the Slidell (LA) Little Theatre is scheduled to present its final performance of the Broadway hit. (As reported by the Crescent City Jewish News, the source of information about Jewish communities along the bayous and Gulf Coast)


2014: The Chicago Bears, led by Coach Mark Tressman, the only Jewish NFL coach opened their seasons by losing to the lowly Buffalo Bills.


2014: Bruce Levenson, the owner of the Atlanta Hawks announced today he will sell his controlling interest in the National Basketball Association franchise because of racially insensitive remarks he made, in an echo of a scandal involving the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team.”


2014: The memorial service for comedian Joan Rivers took place this afternoon at Temple Emnanu-El in New York City.


2014: “Rioters, angry over the today’s death of an East Jerusalem teenager from wounds sustained a week earlier after being shot by Israeli police during a riot threw rocks and attacked a gas station convenience store near the seam line between the East and West sides of Jerusalem Sunday night, as the capital saw the worst spate of violence since the killing of an East Jerusalem teen in June.” (Times of Israel)


2014: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to sponsor “a Sephardic-focused walking tour of South Portland, including a behind the scenes look at Portland’s Sephardic synagogue, Congregation Ahavath Achim.”


2014: Robyn Helzner, whose underground performances in the Soviet Union inspired countless Jews and refuseniks is scheduled to perform at the ceremonies marking the opening of “Voices of the Vigil: Documenting the Soviet Jewry Movement.”


2014: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Creative Corridor’s cultural season opens with the presenantion of  an “American Salute” featuring the music of those all-American composers, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.


2015: In Leeds, UK, Michael Meadowcroft is scheduled to deliver a lecture about the life of Joshua Samuel Walsh, the solicitor who was Lord Mayor of Leeds from 1966 to 1967.


2015: At the Neue Galerie, the exhibition “"Gustav Klimt and Adele Bloch-Bauer: The Woman in Gold" is scheduled to come to a close but the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimit is on permanent view at the gallery.



2015: At the University of Michigan, Janice Bluestein Longone is scheduled “kick-off her last show a look at the evolution of menus and guidebooks over the decades, titled “Dining Out: Menus, Chefs, Restaurants, Hotels and Guidebooks.”


2015: In Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, The Crescent Jewish News in partnership with Torah Academy is scheduled to present the 1st Original Red Beans & Rice Cook-Off.


2016: Dr. Steven Feller, the Chair of the Physics Department at Coe College is scheduled to be awarded today with one of three very special, and highly prestigious, Centenary Fellowships, which have been created to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the founding of the Society of Glass Technology (SGT) at the SGT100 Centenary Conference which is being held in conjunction with the biennial European Society of Glass Conference in Sheffield, UK.


2016: “The Jewish Book Council, Met Council, and the Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History” are scheduled to host “The Newest Dish on Jewish Fish” – a panel “discussion on the culinary histories of the most "acquired tastes" of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine” followed by a guided tour of the Yeshiva University Museum’s feature exhibit, “Nourishing Tradition: Jewish Cookbooks and the Stories They Tell.”


2016: As Border Police and Israel Police officers were leaving the Shuafat neighborhood in Jerusalem today, a car began to speed up in the officers' direction in an attempt to hit them. When the driver ignored warnings and continued driving at high speed toward the group, the officers fired, killing him


2016: Baxter St at CCNY is scheduled to host the opening reception for Polaris an exhibition that includes the works of Israeli born artist Ofri Cnanni.


2016: Michael Dell’s “Dell Inc. completed the acquisition of EMC Corporation, which “at $67 billion has been labeled the highest-valued tech acquisition in history.”


2017(16thof Elul, 5777): Ninety-four year old Buffalo born illustrator Jerimiah Goodman passed away today



2017: Rabbi Zamir Cohen and Rabbi Charlie Harary are scheduled to speak in Great Neck at today’s Hidabroot Event.


2017: The Jerusalem Sacred Music Festival is scheduled to begin today.


2017: In Memphis, TN, Temple Israel launches its latest museum exhibit, “Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939-1949.”


2017: Today “nearly 10 years to the day after Israel allegedly destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor,” the IAF “allegedly carried out an airstrike against a Syrian advanced weapons development facitly” known as the Scientific Studies and Research Center. (As reported by Judah Ari Gross)


2017: The Philos Project and American Sephardi Federation are scheduled to host “Nosotros: Strengthening Bonds Between Jewish and Latino Communities,” “an art exhibit featuring the work of three renowned Latino artists--Juan Bravo (Dominican Republic), Angel Urrely (Cuba), and Carlos Ayala (Puerto Rico)--as a symbolic recognition and “step forward” to improving Jewish-Latino relations. Each piece reflects the shared roots of Jewish and Latino communities and expresses hope for a more positive future from the perspective of each respective artist


2018: Beit Avi Chai is scheduled to host “Kabbalat Shabbat Elul” with a theme of anticipating the New Year with “forigiveness, hope and prayer for new and blessed beginnings.”


2018: The Jerusalem Centre for the Performing Arts is scheduled to host a screening of “Transit,” a tale of about escaping from the Nazis with a strange, romantic twist.


2018: The Meteor Musical Festival is scheduled to continue for a second day in the Upper Galilee.



2018(27thof Elul, 5778): Because of a quirk in the calendar, Shabbat falling on the 28thof Elul, the Shofar is blown for the last time in 5778.


 


 


 


 


 


 

This Day, September 8, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 8


 

70: On the secular calendar, Jerusalem is sacked by the 60,000 troops of Titus' Roman army after a six month siege. Over a million Jewish citizens perished in the siege and, following the city's capture, another 97,000 were sold into slavery. This event is commemorated on The Arch of Titus in Rome. [Date variations of one day, depend on the source.]

1100: “Antipope Clement III” “who,protested strongly when Emperor Henry IV permitted Jews who had become converted to Christianity during the anti-Jewish riots of the First Crusade to revert to Judaism” passed away today.  (Jewish Virtual Library)

1140: While traveling to Palestine, Judah Halevi arrived in Alexandria (Egypt) where “he was enthusiastically greeted by friends and admirers.”  He went on to Cairo where he turned down requests that he settle in the Egyptian city because he was determined to complete his journey to Jerusalem.


1157: Birthdate of King Richard I, the Lionhearted who decreed that the Jews of England should be left to live in peace. Unfortunately, he spent most of his time on Crusades or fighting in France which left the Jews to suffer at the hands of the Church and anti-Semitic nobles.


1207: Birthdate of King Sancho II of Portugal. Sancho II continued the struggle with the Church that had begun under his father Alfonso II which proved beneficial to the Jews. Sancho II ignored the Church’s prohibition against hiring Jews for positions of powers and appointed Jews as tax-farmers. “Probably it was he who appointed Don Joseph ibn Yaḥya as almoxarife; he also permitted him to build a magnificent synagogue in Lisbon.”


1264: The General Charter of Jewish Liberties known as the Statute of Kalisz was issued by the Duke of Greater Poland Boleslaus the Pious today in Kalisz. The statute served as the basis for the legal position of Jews in Poland and led to creation of a Yiddish-speaking autonomous Jewish "nation within a nation", which lasted until the Third Partition of Poland in 1795. The statute granted exclusive jurisdiction over Jewish matters to Jewish courts and established a separate tribunal for matters involving Christians and Jews. Additionally, it guaranteed safety and personal liberties for Jews such as freedom of religion, trade, and travel. The statute was ratified by subsequent Polish Kings: Casimir III of Poland in 1334, Casimir IV of Poland in 1453, and Sigismund I of Poland in 1539.


1425: King Charles III of Navarre passed away. Under his reign, the conditions of the Jews of improved over what they had been under his predecessor Charles II., who died in 1387. Soon after Charles II came to power, “the Jews presented him with 3,000 livres. In return he granted them several privileges, influenced, doubtless, by the fact that his court physician was Chief Rabbi Joseph Orabuena, whose son Judah was also a member of the royal retinue. During the king's journey to Paris in 1397 he was accompanied by four Jews—two physicians, a surgeon, and an astrologer. The Jewish residents of Navarre were so impoverished that they could no longer pay taxes; hence the king, while continuing a rigid collection from the Jews in Pamplona, who formed the richest community in the country, exempted their coreligionists of Tudela from the obligation to furnish beds, etc., during his stay in that city.”


1486: Joseph Günzenhäuser printed Hagiographa Variorum in Naples, Italy. [This probably was one of the first annotated copies of the section of the TaNaCh known as Ketuvim or Writings.]


1498: Torquemada died. Torquemada was descended from a family of Marranos which makes his role in history all the more ironic Torquemada is popularly known as the head of the Spanish Inquisition. In fact, he was not the first one to head the Inquisition; an act of evil that had the full support and control of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. According to some, the Queen was a stronger supporter of this activity than the King. More importantly, they let the Pope know that they and not he would control the Inquisition. After all, the monarchs had empty coffers to fill as well as souls to save.


1504: Michelangelo's David is unveiled in Florence. The naked statue of Israel’s greatest king has a flaw – David is uncircumcised. So did Michelangelo sculpt the likeness of a nude Florentine boy and call it David so as not to offend the sensibilities of Christian Italians? Considering that Moses is portrayed with Horns, anatomically and or texturally correct art was not the strong point of Renaissance artists.


1514: : In a bull issued today, Pope Leo X, “expressed his desire that the rights of the Jews should be respected, and repealed the edict of the Bishop of Carpentras, who had prescribed a special badge to be worn by the Jews of Avignon, Carpentras, and Venaissin”


1628: During the Eighty Years War, the Battle of Matanzas came to an end with Dutch defeating the Spanish and seizing their treasure fleet as spoils. Among those helping the Dutch was Moses Cohen Henriques a pirate whose family had been Sephardim from Portugal. Henriques moved to Brazil from the Caribbean when the Dutch captured it from the Portuguese. When the Portuguese recaptured Brazil, Henriques continued his pirating ways hooking up with the notorious Henry Morgan.


1636: New College is established in Massachusetts. Three years later it would change its name to Harvard in honor of clergy man John Harvard, one of the school’s earliest and most generous benefactors. Harvard has had an uneven history in terms of the Jewish people. At one time Harvard and its academic community were supporters of a quotas designed to limit Jewish enrollment. At the same time, Harvard boast numerous Jewish alumnae and faculty members. Today Harvard has approximately 2000 undergraduate students out of a population of almost 7,000 undergrads. There are 2,500 graduate students among Harvard’s approximately 11,000 grad students.


1664: The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was surrendered to the British who renamed it New York in 1669. Now you know how a handful of Dutch Jews became the first “New York Jews.”


1729: Congregation Shearith Israel laid the foundation stone of the first building specifically to be used as a synagogue on Mill Street in New York City.


1748: Abraham De Leon and his wife gave birth to Rebecca De Leon


1750: Isaac and Sarah De La Motta gave birth to Isaac De La Motta, the husband of Sarah Canter with whom he had three children.


1759(16thof Elul, 5519): Parashat Ki Tavo


1759(16thof Elul, 5519): Rebecca Tema Ansel passed away today in the United Kingdom.


1760: First official reports of Jews having settled in Canada.


1764: Birthdate of Emanuel Deutz, the native of Koblenz who married Judith Berman and served as Chief Rabbi of France from 1810 until he passed away in 1842.


1787: Abraham Gerstle and his wife gave birth to Isak Michael Gerstle, the husband of Sofie Weil with whom he had seven children.


1793(2ndof Tishrei, 5554): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1793(2ndof Tishrei, 5554): Mrs. Hannah Jacobs passed away today in the United Kingdom.


1812(2ndof Tishrei, 5573): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1812: Birthdate of Rebekah Gumpert Hyneman, a Jew by choice who was a successful authoress.


1814: “The most important institution connected with” “Israel ben Solomon Wahrmann, the first officially recognize rabbi of Pest Hungary” an elementary school called the Nationalschule which “was an important factor in raising the intellectual status of the community” was dedicated today.


1830: Benjamin Phineas Moses Spiers married Sara Wolf in Rotterdam today.


1830: Two days after she had passed away, 78 years old “Sarah Simmons, the wife of Nathan Simmons” was buried today at the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.


1831(1stof Tishrei, 5592): Rosh Hashanah


1839(29thof Elul, 5599): Erev Rosh Hashanah; as Jews prepare to celebrate the New Year, future President James K. Polk visited Huntsville, Alabama.


1840: In London, the will of John Aaron, the husband of Charlotte Aaron, with whom he had had four children – Thomas, Mary, Ann and Catherine – was probated today. (As reported by David Alexander)


http://synagoguescribes.com/blog/jewish-will-extracts-18th-19th-century-details/jewish-will-extracts-18th-19th-century/?value=6


1841: Josiah Solomon married Bella Hart at the New Synagogue today.


1841: In Charleston, SC, J. Cohen, Jr., Esquire, married Phila Moise, the daughter of Aaron Moise.


1847: In Philadelphia, PA, Rodef Shalom, one of the first German congregations organized in the United States moved to its new building on Julianna Street.  Rodef Shalom had been formed in 1801 by Ashkenazic Jews who were not comfortable attending Mickvah Israel, a Sephardic congregation.


1847: Today, Jefferson H. Nones, a Second Lieutenant om the Second United States Artillery and “the son of Captain Henry Nones was detailed to Puebla to the command of twenty-nine men to effect a recovery of mules stolen by Mexican guerrileros” which resulted a fight with “Mexican lancers” that resulted in ten Americans being killed and four being wounded including Lt. Nones who was wounded by a lance.


1848: Two days after he had passed away, Benjamin Chapman, the husband of Hannah Chapman, was buried today at the Lauriston Road Jewish Cemetery.


1848: Birthdate of German scientist Viktor Meyer. He was a German chemist who contributed greatly to knowledge of both organic and inorganic chemistry and invented an apparatus for determining vapor densities (and hence molecular weights), now named after him. In 1871, Meyer experimentally proved Avogadro's hypothesis by measuring the vapor densities of volatile substances (molecular weight, or relative molecular mass, is twice the vapor density). He went on to determine the vapor densities of inorganic substances at high temperatures. From benzene obtained from petroleum, Meyer in 1883 isolated thiophene, a heterocyclic compound containing sulfur, which much later was to become an important component of various synthetic drugs. He passed away in 1897.


1850(2nd of Tishrei, 5611):  Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1852: Birthdate of Henri Moissan, the Parisian who became the second Jew to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.


http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/moissan.html


1852: In Charleston, SC, at the Wentworth Street Synagogue, Rabbi Lyons officiated at the wedding Rachel Sampson, the only daughter of the late Samuel Sampson and Mr. Hendricks from Texas.


1852: Forty-two year old “Ernestine L. Rose” “the daughter of an Orthodox Polish rabbi who had married William Rose while living in England and who came to the United States in 1836” and “Jewish champion of women’s rights addressed the National Women’s Right Convention in Syracuse.”


1853: In “Marleybone, London,” “Jacob and Matilda Waley gave birth Julia Matilda Waley who became Julia Matilda Cohen when she married Nathan Louis Cohen with whom she had seven children.


1856: “A Jewish society was organized today in Grass Valley, CA


1858(29th of Elul, 5618): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1861(4thof Tishrei, 5622): Because the 3rd of Tishrei fell on a Saturday, the Tzom Gedaliah is observed today.


1862: Sergeant Levi Arnold began serving his three year enlistment by joining Company F of the 143rd Regiment, before transferring to the Veteran Reserve Corps in 1863.


1867: Birthdate of Russian socialist Russian Aleksandr Izrail Lazarevich Gelfand who become famous as Alexander Israel Helphand, the man who negotiated with the Germans during World War I to gain Lenin’s return to Russia from Switzerland which brought about the Communist Revolution and took Russia out of World War I.


1871: Adath Israel (Congregation of Israel) dedicated its new home, a brick structure on 57thStreet between First and Second avenues in Manhattan. As part of the ceremony, Dr. Wasserman delivered a talk in German and Vidaver delivered a speech in English that explained the purpose of the various objects in the synagogue.


1872: Birthdate of Clare Castel, nee Sammer one of the last nine Jewish residents of Kleinsteinach all of whom were killed at either Theresienstadt or Isbica.

1873: The Wandering Jew is scheduled to be performed at the Grand Opera House as part of the "fall season" in NYC.

1876: Birthdate of Israel Friedlander, the Polish born rabbi, educator and biblical scholar who co-founded the Young Israel movement with Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.

1877(1stof Tishrei, 5638): Rosh Hashanah


1877: Rabbi Gottheil and Lewis May, President of the Congregation, led services this morning at Temple Emanu-El in New York City.  Services for the Reform temple began at 10 o’clock while services at the city’s orthodox synagogues “began much earlier in the day.


1877: The Jewish inmates at Sing Sing Prison will celebrate the Rosh Hashanah this evening.  Services will be led by a chaplain who has been specially appointed for this purpose.  Mr. Gratz Nathan of the 19thStreet Synagogue and Mr. Adolph Levy of the 44th Street Synagogue will provide the funds for the service.


1879: “Beth Israel” published today described the “reconstruction of the Boerum Place Synagogue.”


1879: It was reported today that Vasile Boerescui, the Romanian Foreign Minister has been “partially successful” in getting the France and Germany to agree to a compromise that would delay the promised emancipation of the Jews living in his country. After a meeting with Count Andrassy, it appears that Austria agrees as well.


1881: It was reported today New York Jewish wholesale liquor dealer Henry Lezinskye was arraigned before Justice Brimley in Long Branch on charges of having swindled John J. Wheeler out of $775.  Chances of conviction would seem to be slim since the alleged offense took place more than seven years ago.


1881: Two days after he had passed away, Bavarian native Joseph Strauss who was “naturalized in 1864” and was the husband of Rosa Strauss was buried at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery today.


1881: A committee that has been formed to provide relief Russian Jewish immigrants who are expected to arrive in the next few days will have its first meeting this evening at the offices of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.  Judge Myer S. Isaacs presided over the meeting


1884: “Democratic Reform Work” published today described the rebellion in New Orleans’ First Congressional District where Colonel Adolph Meyer, a Jewish wealthy cotton merchant, is seeking the nomination.


1885(28thof Elul, 5645): Eighty-nine year old Kingston, Jamaica native Joseph Gutteres Henriques, the son of Sarah and Jacob Bueno Henriques and the husband of Eliza Henriques with whom he had two children, passed away today in London.


1886: Birthdate of poet and author Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon’s father was Jewish but his mother was not. Alfred Sassoon, Siegfried’s father was a member of the well-to-do Sassoon family of merchants. However, among English Jews, wealth was not an excuse of assimilation and Alfred was disinherited for marrying a Christian, even she did belong to one of England’s leading family of sculptors. Whether out of spite, or just plain insensitivity, Theresa Sassoon named her son for a leading character in a Wagner opera. His middle name was taken from that of a Christian clergyman with whom she was friendly.


1889: Rabbi Eugene Harfeld officiated at the wedding of his brother David Harfeld, and Sarah Marx. This marriage would figure in Harfeld’s later trial on charges of bigamy.


1890: During the services which “marked the opening of the new synagogue in Hammersmith declared that he had received unquestionable confirmation of recent statements in the newspapers about the persecution of the Jews in Russia.”


1890: Birthdate of Philadelphia native David J. Gaiter, the editor of the Jewish Exponents for twenty years while writing columns “under the pseudonym Baruch Haba” who was the President of the Jewish Book council of Philadelphia and the husband of Minnie Gaiter, with whom he had two daughters.


1890: “How The Jews Were Scattered” published today provided a detailed review of The Jews Under Roman Rule by W.D. Morrison.


1891: One hundred Russian Jews arrived in Montreal today.


1891: In Newburg, NY, Rabbi A. N. Coleman officiated at the dedication of Temple Beth Jacob


1892: “Aizenstat’s Murder A Plot” published today described the status of the police investigation into the murder of Lazarus Aizenstat, a Jewish immigrant from Odessa who was probably killed after an assailant so far only identified as Solomon and his confederates robbed him of the 35,000 rubles he was carrying which was to be used to buy a farm in Connecticut.


1893(27thof Elul, 5653): William Mordecai passed away


1893(27thof Elul, 5653): Seventy-seven year old journalist and champion of the Haskalah (Enlightenment) Aleksander Zederbaum who was the founder of Ha-Meliz the first Hebrew newspaper published in Russia, passed away today.


1893: Herman Appel announced that he was a candidate for Grand Master of the Independent Order of Ahavus Israel, a position that had been held by Bernard Weinberg, the disgraced banker


1894(7thof Elul, 5654): Mrs. Abraham Greenspahn of 117 Siegel Street, Williamsburg passed away after being hospitalized.


1896(1stof Tishrei, 5657): As Williams Jennings Bryan and William McKinley compete for the Presidency Jews observed the first day of Rosh Hashanah


1896: Birthdate of New York City native and Columbia University alum Howard Deitz, the prolific songwriter and WW I Navy veteran.


https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/01/obituaries/howard-dietz-songwriter-dies-at-86.html


1896: “The Fourth Assembly District Tammany Convention to elect delegates was not held tonight as in other districts because of” Rosh Hashanah.  Most of the members of the 4thDistrict organization are Jewish “and they would allow politics to interfere with the…observance of the occasion.”


1897: Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, the leader of the Reform movement wrote from Cincinnati on the impossibility and impracticality of a Jewish state describing the recently held Congress in Basel as “a novelty, a gathering of visionary and impracticable dreams who conceived and acted a romantic drama and applauded it all by themselves.”


1899: While visiting the New York State Fair, Governor Theodore Roosevelt delivered an address that covered several topics including the Dreyfus Case, saying that such an episode could not happen in this country because justice is applied equally to all be they Jew, Gentile, Irishman and or “those whose ancestors landed…at Plymouth Rock.”


1899: Baron Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice of England was among those who attended the trial of Captain Dreyfus which is in the fifth day of the fifth week.


1899: Birthdate of World War I veteran George M. “Chick” Feigin the 1922 graduate of City College “where he won four varsity letters and was captain of the basketball” after which he graduated from Fordham Law School in 1924 and founded Camp Chopee for Boys in Pennsylvania.


1899: “Jews Appeal To The Kaiser” published today described a telegram sent by the Jews of Memphis, TN asking Kaiser Wilhelm to allow German officials with knowledge that is germane to the Dreyfus to testify at the trial now being held at Rennes.


1899: In Washington, DC, Abraham Reingold, a young Jew from New York was discharged from Georgetown University Hospital even though he was “partly paralyzed” – a condition that seems to be related to the depression he is suffering as a result of a failed love affair.


1900: The deadliest hurricane in U.S. history which killed between 6,000 and 8,000 people and caused over $20 million in damage struck Galveston, TX taking its toll on a Jewish community whose leaders included Rabbi Henry Cohen of B’nai Israel, Rabbi Leo N. Levi, a supporter of the so-called Galveston Plan and I.H. Kempner who gave “interest free loans to local churches, the library, and the local orphans home to help them get back on their feet after the storm and who became Galveston’s first finance commissioner with the goal of helping the city regain its economic footing.


1900: Birthdate of Romanian native Isadore Blumenfeld a Jewish-American organized crime figure based in Minneapolis, Minnesota known as Kid Cann.


http://www.citypages.com/news/the-forgotten-crime-boss-kid-cann-the-original-teflon-don-reigned-over-minneapolis-6570344


1903: Yaakov Dovid Wilovsky also known as Ridvaz or Ridbaz was elected chief rabbi of the Russian-American congregations in Chicago after having been as the zekan haRabbanim (elder rabbi) of the United Orthodox Rabbis of America at their annual meeting in August of 1903


1904: As of today, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum is reported to be providing services to almost 1,000 children.


1905: “Headgear in Church: The Jewish View of Covering the Head” was published today in Judaicus.


1906: Hyman Gerson Enelow attended the second day of dedication exercises celebrating the opening of the new Temple in Louisville, KY.


1909: Jews in Aleppo telegraph the Hahambashi requesting he intervene with the government respecting taxes for exemption for military service, on account of their precarious financial situation. The Hahambashi prevailed and the Minister of Finance telegraphed the Aleppo authorities to collect only 20% of debt Jews owed, and to release prisoners from prison who could not pay.


1909: Today “Vitascope-Theater GmbH changed its name to Deutsche Vitascope GmbH, with Jules Greenbaum as the owner and managing director.”


1911: The German Emperor confers the Order of Red Eagle, Second Class, on Professor Hugo Munsterberg who has been serving as Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. “The Order of the Red Eagle was an order of chivalry that the Kingdom of Prussia awarded to both military personnel and civilians, to recognize valor in combat, excellence in military leadership, long and faithful service to the kingdom, or other achievements.” World War I flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, is probably the most famous recipient of the award. Hugo Münsterberg was an early leader in the fields of applied and industrial psychology. He died suddenly in December, 1916 while giving a lecture at Harvard.


1911: Monsieur Levy, Advocate-General at the Court of Appeals in Indo-China is appointed Procureur General and Chielf of Judicial Service in French Guiana.


1911: F.C. Hollander was re-elected Mayor of Durban, South Africa


1911: The cornerstone of the first synagogue in Alberta, Canada was laid.


1911: In Omaha, Nebraska, dedication of “Beth Hamedrosh Hagodol today.


1911(15thof Elul, 5671): Mrs. Chawe Mosche Chait passed away today.


1911(15thof Elul, 5671): David Rueben Hurwitz passed away today.


1911(15thof Elul, 5671): Lithuanian Rabbi Shlomo-Zalman Traub who was born in 1830 and succeeded his father, Rabbi Abraham Simon, as the rabbi of Keidan, passed away today


1912: In Malden, Massachusetts, founding of Agudas Achim.


1912: In Jersey City, NJ, founding of the Hebrew Free School.


1912: In Brooklyn, founding of the Machzikei Talmud Torah of Borough Park.


1912: In Philadelphia, founding of Adath Jeshurun Synagogue.


1912: The strike by furriers in New York, many of whom were Jewish, was settled today.


1913: In New York City, Minnie and Sender Alexander Frankel gave birth to Moe Frankel


1914: The Turkish government cancels capitulation measures, according to which foreign nationals are subject only to their consuls and not to the governments of the country in which they live. Thousands of Jews in Palestine with foreign citizenship worry about their fate.


1914: During the Battle of the Marne, German attacks at Nancy “tapered off” thanks in no small part of Joffre countermanding General Castelnau order to withdraw from this critical position.


1915(29thof Elul, 5675): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1915: In the evening Rosh Hashanah services are held for the first time at the recently organized “The New Synagogue” a liberal congregation founded on New York’s West Side by Rabbi Ephraim Frisch.


1915: At the Free Synagogue in Carnegie Hall, Dr. Stephen Wise “delivered a Rosh Hashanah sermon in which he discussed some of the issues inspired by Germany’s attitude toward submarine warfare.


1915: “On the eve of the Jewish holidays” approximately $1,000,000 has been raised in response “to the appeal of the American Jewish Relief Committee made to Jews throughout the United States in behalf of those suffering in Europe.”


1916(10thof Elul, 5676): Seventy-five year old Joseph Poznanski, the second born son of Esther G. Poznanski and Gustavus Poznanski, the “shochet and chazzan of New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel” who began serving Congregation Beth Elohim in 1836 after which he advocated such “Reform” measures as holding the service in English, observing only one day of each holiday and including organ music.


1916: Salonica government declares compulsory military service is now required and that all Jews over 21 cannot leave from its newly acquired provinces.


1916: Following the failure during the Taft administration of “a movement to have the Government establish a university as a memorial to Hyyam Solomon to be maintained by the interest on the money owed to Hyyam Solomon by the United States government, it was reported today that the heirs of Solomon, “who gave George Washington $660 to help finance the American revolution will petition to restore the money” which an earlier Congress had acknowledged was owed to him.


1917(21stof Elul, 5677): Seventy-six year Talmudic scholar Israel Lewy, the author of Ueber Einige Fragmente aus der Mischna des Abba Saul  passed away today.


1918(2ndof Tishrei, 5679): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1918: Jewish soldiers and sailors are able to observe the Jewish New York thanks to the Secretaries of War and the Navy having ordered that furloughs be granted for that purpose.


1919: In “France Is Pledged To Jewish Freedom” published today “Marcel Knecht, the Director of the Official Bureau of French Information in the United States is quoted as paying “official tribute to the patriotic services of the Jews in America and elsewhere” during World War I including the contributions of “Ambassadors Elkus, Henry Morgenthau and Oscar Straus, Justice Louis Brandeis, Bernard Baruch, Julius Rosenwald, Mortimer Schiff and Colonel Harry Cutler whose names are greatly cherished” in France.


1920(25thElul, 5680): Seventy-seven year old German Jewish publisher and philanthropist Rudolf Mosse who established one of the first advertising agencies in Berlin, when that “industry” was all but unknown passed away today.


1920: The first day of examinations for those wishing to attend the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary.


1920: Registration began today for all former and new pupils at The Hebrew School of Congregation of Petach Tikvah in Brooklyn.


1920(25thof Elul, 5680): In Cleveland, Ohio, “communal worker” Ilennan Peskind pass away today.


1921: Birthdate of Lou Goldstein, the native of Warsaw whose career became synonymous with Borscht Belt humor (As reported by Joseph Berger)


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/nyregion/lou-goldstein-borscht-belt-comedian-dies-at-90.html?_r=1&hpw


1922: In Yonkers, NY, Max Ziser and  his wife Ida (née Raphael gave birth to the youngest of their three sons Isaac Sidney Caesar who gained fame as comedian Sid Caesar whose greatest fame came in the 1950's when he starred in the weekly Sunday night, "Your Show of Shows."


http://www.timesofisrael.com/sid-caesar-comic-genius-of-1950s-television-dies-at-91/


1925: Outfielder Si Rosenthal made his major league debut with the Boston Red Sox.


1926(29thof Elul, 5686): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1927: The funeral of Marcus Loew, is scheduled to be held this morning at his estate in Glen Cove followed by burial at Maimonides Cemetery, Cypress Hills. “No estimate was obtainable of the size of Mr. Loew's fortune, but the extent of his interests and operations indicate it is a very large one. In 1924, Mr. Loew bought "Pembroke," the late Captain Joseph R. de Lamar estate for an announced price of $1,000,000 and he is said to have spent several millions more on it since. In February of this year he was reported to be carrying life insurance of $5,000,000, being one of the nine men in the country insured for that much or more. His holdings are said to be concentrated in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Corporation and Loew's, Inc.”


1929: Rothschild is in Yugoslavia where the London banker is believed to have discussed the possibilities of a loan with King Alexander I.


1930: Birthdate of Sanford “Sandy” C. Sigoloff, a corporate turnaround expert who called himself the Skillful Scapel. (As reported by Mary Williams Walsh)


1930: Public schools in New York City began teaching classes in Hebrew.


1931: Birthdate of Jack Morris Rosenthal CBE, an English playwright, who wrote 129 early episodes of the ITV soap opera Coronation Street and over 150 screenplays, including original TV plays, feature films, and adaptations


1932: After spending part of the summer in Palestine Rabbi Israel Goldstein, the spiritual leader of Congregation B’Nai Jershurun and the President of the Jewish Conciliation court report returned to the United States yesterday on board the SS Europa and reported that Jewish life was developing a sense of strength and permanence. He also noted that the major building activities have changed the complexion of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa.


1933: Birthdate of Detroit native Paul Fleiss, the California doctor best known as the father of Heidi Fleiss.


http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-paul-fleiss-20140720-story.html


1933: The Second World Jewish Congress met in Geneva and votes to organize a world-wide boycott of German goods in response to the actions of the Hitler government.


1933: Following the death today of King Faisal of Iraq, Ghazi bin Faisal began his reign during which he “fell under the saw of Dr. Fritz Grobba, Hitler’s ambassador to Iraq/”


1933: “One Man’s Journey” a doctor story produced by Pandro S. Berman was released in the United States by RKO.


1936: Following a greeting sent by President Roosevelt last week to American Jews on the occasion of the celebration of their upcoming holy days, “similar messages from two other Presidential candidates were announced today by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.


1936: A preliminary conference of Christian and Jews organized by the Pro-Palestine Federation of America which is trying to mobilize and encourage Christian interest in the right of the Jews to establish a national home in Palestine took place in the Hotel Pennsylvania which was presided over by Franklyn Hudgings who said “We Christians stand on the side of God if we help the Jews.”


1936: “Arab Terrorism Answered” published today which included a summary of the British response to the last five months of Arab violence and plans for future moves to quell the uprising end with the conclusion that “For peace and cooperation between Jew and Arab in the common task of rebuilding Palestine depend on Britain’s showing unmistakably its determination to maintain its obligations under the Balfour Declaration.”


1936: In a three minute speech at Nuremberg’s City Hall, “Chancellor Adolf Hitler…proclaimed his restoration of ‘full arms sovereignty’ to the German national during the last year.”


1936: A preliminary conference of Christian and Jews organized by the Pro-Palestine Federation of America which is trying to mobilize and encourage Christian interest in the right of the Jews to establish a national home in Palestine is scheduled to take place in the Hotel Pennsylvania


1937: Nathaniel Shilkret conducted “An American Paris” during the George Gershwin Memorial Concert which was broadcast from the Hollywood Bowl.


1938: Baron Louis Rothschild continues to be “detained at secret police headquarters” in Vienna “where he is not permitted to receive visitors.


1938: In Rome, “an authoritative source said today that Guido Serge, Italy’s Consul General in Boston has been recalled because he was Jewish while an official at the Italian Embassy took issue with that report because he claimed the decision to recall Serge had been made “prior to Mussolini’s announcement of the decree banning Jews from public posts.”


1939: Two hundred Jews were forced into the synagogue in Bedzin, Poland. The synagogue was then set on fire.


1939: Jews in Germany were ordered to mark all businesses with a Star of David


1941: One and half year old Joseph Brodsky and his family were among those trapped in Leningrad when the siege of that Russian, which would last for almost two and a half years, began today.


With the Germans having severed the last road out of Leningrad, the Siege of Leningrad began today


1941: The requirement Jews wear a yellow badge was annulled after five days by an order Romanian dictator Ion Antonesu issued today.


1942: In the House of Commons, Winston Churchill referred to the deportation of French Jews. No mention was made of the fate of rest of the Jews of Europe. This silence was not for lack of information available to the Allied governments.


1942: Composer, conductor and pianist Viktor Ullman whose “list of works had reached 41 opus numbers and contained an additional three piano sonatas, song cycles on texts by various poets, operas, and the piano concerto Op. 25” was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp


1943: On the day that Eisenhower announced that Italy had surrendered unconditionally, "six battalions of German paratroopers" marched into Rome causing panic among the citizenry including a report that "The Jews are in a panic and trying to leave the city.


1943: The five thousand Jews deported from the Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia Ghetto arrive at Auschwitz.


1943: In Croatia, the German Army occupied Dubrovnik which had been home to 250 Jews before the war and which is home to what is now the “oldest Sefardic synagogue still in use today.”


1943: Italian insurance executive and university professor Piero Scaerdoti took “refuge in Switzerland with his wife Ilse, his son Giorgio and his parents” to avoid further persecution by the Nazis who were now exercising greater control following Italy’s withdrawal from the Axis cause.


1944: Jermie Adler returned to Liege after it was liberated by U.S. troops today.  Adler was a Hungarian Jew who moved with his family to Liege before WW II.  The Nazis would kill them all except for one of his daughters.


1944: There were more reprisals in reaction to the Slovakia Uprisings. Einsatzkommando broke into Jewish homes and deported the Jewish population of Topolcany, Slovakia


1945(1st of Tishrei, 5706): Rosh Hashanah


1945: “Thousands of Jewish immigrants only recently freed from Nazi concentration camps celebrated the Jewish New Year in the Holy Land” where “Hebrew newspapers expressed the hope that the New Year would bring aid to all Jewish survivors of the Nazi plague in Europe including the 110,000 men, women and children now in Allied caps in occupied Germany.”


1945: In Vienna, General W. Mark W. Clark’s headquarters announced that all units were issuing twenty four hour passes so they could “join with the remnants of Austria’s Jewish population in the first open observance of the Jewish holy days in Austria since the Anschluss in 1938.


1945: In Vienna “3,500 Jews remaining from a pre-war Jewish population of 180,000 gathered in the ancient Stadt Temple for Rosh Hashanah Services.


1945: In his sermon today, Rabbi William F. Rosenblum of Temple Israel called “for a gathering of the world’s religious leaders a sequel to the San Francisco Conference” that created the United Nations.


1945: Rabbi J. Howard Ralberg of Congregation Ohav Shalom told worshippers that “we were now in an era of vigilance, work and enlightenment” and called “for continuous alertness against the recurrence of another catastrophe.”


1945” Rabbi David de Sola Pool of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue delivered a sermon on “The New Era of Peace.”


1945: At Temple Rodeph Shalom, Rabbi Louis I. Newman told his congregants “that in the midst of all discussions of a new age and new ways, we must remember that it is the heart and will of man which must be reconstructed.


1945: In a sermon delivered at the West Side Institutional Synagogue Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein “said that the religious of reconversion is at least as important as the material aspect.”


1945: In his sermon Rabbi Zev Zahavy of Congregation Ohab Zedek “compared the scientific strides made during the war to the great task still ahead of moving toward a higher level in the sphere of human relations.”


1945(1st of Tishrei,5706): Lt. Col. Louis Geffen, a judge advocate in the US Army conducted “improvised High Holiday services” on board his ship which was sailing across the Pacific from California to the Philippines.


1945: On Rosh Hashanah, 5706, Bess Myerson was the first (and only) Jew to be crowned Miss America. Miss Myerson went on to enjoy a successful modeling and television career before take an active role in New York City politics.


1947: The refugee ship Exodus is returned to Hamburg and its cargo of 4500 holocaust survivors removed by force. Some claim that this act more than any other helped force international public opinion against British policy. Others would contend that this is a slightly romanticized view of the outcome of this episode. The saga of the Exodus did supply the opening scenes, and title for, Leon Uris' epic novel Exodus


1949: “Under Capricorn,” the film version of the novel by the same name co-produced by Sidney Bernstein and with music directed by Louis Levy was released today in the United Kingdom.


.1950: In a letter to the editor published on this date in the New York Times, Alfred Wener is critical of those who think removing Dr. Bernard (Dov) Josepher as Minister of Supply and Rationing will solve Israel’s economic crisis. He reminds the readers that Israel was created a year ago as a result of a long, expensive war and that it has been absorbing tens of thousands of immigrants most of whom are indigent. Part of the solution to the crisis could be found in massive financial aid and assistance from “the world at large.”


1951: It was announced today that Israel's acceptance of the United Nation's Palestine Conciliation Commission's invitation to a conference in Paris next week to discuss possible settlement of outstanding Israeli-Arab problems will be delivered to the commission tomorrow or Monday.


1952(18th of Elul, 5712): Seventy-one year old Rabbi Eugene M. Mannheimer who had married Irma Shloss Mannheimer in 1917 passed away after which he was buried at Emanuel Cemetery in Des Moines, IA.


1952: Israel agreed to accept reparation money from West Germany. The issue of accepting reparation money from West Germany was the cause of much acrimonious debate. Many in Israel did not want to take the money because they felt that no amount of funds could "buy" forgiveness for the Holocaust.


1952: Leonard Bernstein becomes a father with the birth of his daughter, Jamie Anne Maria.


1952: Birthdate of Israeli political leader Eli Aflalo, the native of Casablanca who made Aliyah in 1962.


1956(3rdof Tishrei, 5717): Shabbat Shuva


1956(3rdof Tishrei, 5717): Sixty-two year old historian, translator and author Jacob Levy whose works included “the translation of four of French-Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson's books into Hebrew” as well a series of history textbooks based on his belief “that studying historical dates is less important that learning the processes that led to historical events.” (Editor’s note – MY KIND OF GUY)


1956(3rdof Tishrei, 5717): Fifty-nine year old Sam Ash, the Jewish immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire who founded “Sam Ash Music Corp.,  the largest family owned chain of musical instrument stores in the United States “ passed away today.


http://samashmusic.com/portal/


1961(27thof Elul, 5721): Seventy-one year old Maxwell Parnes, the son of Louis and Clara Parnes and the husband of Sarah Blumberg Parnes, passed away today after which he was buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, NY.


1962: Having gained its independence from France, Algerians voted to adopt a new constitution. “When Algeria attained independence in 1962, legislation granted Algerian citizenship only to those residents whose father or paternal grandfather were Muslims. Moreover, the Supreme Court of Justice of Algeria declared that the Jews were no longer under the protection of the Law. Most of Algeria's 140,000 Jews left the country for France together with the pied-noirs; only about 10,000 stayed, a number that would rapidly decrease.” When the issue of “Palestinian refugee” is discussed, facts like these are never mentioned.


1963(19thof Elul, 5723): Eighty-two year old Polish born Hyman Goldstein, the Chicago tailor turned real estate agent who married Rebecca Goldstein after the death of his first wife Bella, passed away today.


1963(19thof Elul, 5723): Eighty-four year old Hungarian born Rabbi Morris David Waldman, the “professional head of the American Jewish Committee, the President of the National Conference of Jewish Communal Service and “executive of the United Hebrew Charities of New York” passed away today.


http://collections.americanjewisharchives.org/ms/ms0023/ms0023.html


1964(2ndof Tishrei, 5725): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1964: Birthdate of professional wrestler Scott Levy.


1965: Martin and Ruth Bader Ginsberg gave birth to American record producer James Steven Ginsburg


1965(11th of Elul, 5725): Joshua Lionel Cowen passed away. Born in 1880, he was the American inventor of electric model trains who founded the Lionel Corporation (1901), which became the largest U.S. toy train manufacturer. At age 18, he had invented a fuse to ignite the magnesium powder for flash photography, which the Navy Department bought from him to be a fuse to detonate submarine mines. He designed an early battery tube light, but without practical application. (His partner, Conrad Hubert, to whom he gave the rights improved it and founded the Eveready Flashlight Company.) At age 22, he created a battery-powered train engine intended only as an eye-catcher for other goods in a store window. To his surprise, many customers wanted to purchase the toy train. Thus he started a model railroad company


1965: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Martin Ginsburg gave birth to record producer James Steven Ginsburg.


1966(23rdof Elul, 5726): Seventy-two year old Willard Hotel manager and long-time member of the United States Olympic Committee, Charles Lewis Manager who worked on physical fitness programs for the U.S. Army, helped to create the Maccabiah Games and was married first to the former Anne Bernstein, and then after she passed way, to the former Aletha Marlott passed away today.


https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/09/09/82903958.pdf


1966: “Kaleidoscope” a British film produced by Elliot Kastner premiered today in London.


1969: Two Arabs recruited by Al Fatah lobbed hand grenades at the El Al office in Brussels.


1969: In a case of “Jew plus Jew” Yaphet Kotto began playing the part of “Jack Johnson” in the Howard Sackler’s prize-winning play, “The Great White Hope.”


1971: In Washington, DC, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is inaugurated with the opening feature being the premiere of Leonard Bernstein's Mass. Yes, only in America would a civic opera house feature a Catholic themed musical creation written by a Jewish citizen.


1972(29th of Elul, 5732): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1972: “Chancellor Willy Brandt said today that his Government wanted a “frank” and “ruthless” inquiry into the killings touched off by an Arab terrorist raid on the Israeli Olympic team…”


1972: “Special prayers will be recited in synagogue and temples at sundown today for the slain Israeli Olympic athletes as the observance of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year of 5773 begins” this evening.


1972: In his sermon this evening at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, Rabbi Emanuel Rackmen said the Munich Massacre “was only one manifestation of the abandonment of reason by lunatics.”


1972: In his annual High Holiday message published today, “Rabbi Louis Bernstein, president of the Rabbinical Council of America asserted that Rosh Hashanah represented the ‘struggle between the spiritual and material for the possession of the hearts and minds of mankind” and “in a reference to the Munich Massacre called on all nations “to put an end to these wanton acts of murder.”


1972: In his annual High Holiday message, “Rabbi Irving Lehrman, president of the Synagogue Council of America” which “is the representative body of Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Congregations” “called on the American Jewish community not to neglect its own religious and culture needs.”


1972: “Rabbi Louis Bernstein, president of the Rabbinical Council of America said at the Young Israel of Windsor Park” in Queens, “that the council’s affiliated Orthodox rabbis through the country should memorialize the victims” of the Munich Massacre.


1972: “Condemning the Arab terror in Munich” Dr. Edward E. Klein, the senior rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue said that the attack “indicated the barbaric lengths to which Arab terrorism will go.


1972: In his annual High Holiday message which comes just weeks before the Presidential elections, “Rabbi Judah Nadich, president of the Rabbinical Assembly voiced the prayer that those ‘who aspire to high office in our country will speak and act in a manner which reflects the demands of Justice for all tempered by the demands of compassion for all.”


1972: It was reported today that while some claim that Black September which considered Jordan to be one of its enemies  has about 300 members, Israeli military sources say that the number is more in the thousands, that that terrorist group “has received support from leftist organization in Europe including the Bader-Meinhoff group as well as governments like Libya and that this terrorist group received the “$5 million ransom that the German government paid last winter for a hijacked Lufthansa jet.”


1973(3rdof Tishrei, 5717): Shabbat Shuvah


1975: As the Soviets continue to work to cement their relationships with their Arab client states, President Assad began a visit to Czechoslovakia.


1975: David Bloomberg completed two years of services Mayor of Cape Town, SA.


1976: It was reported today that Uganda’s National Defense Council warned President Amin against attacking Kenya because it would suffer the same economic dislocation it experienced after it threatened its neighbor last summer following “the Israeli raid to free the hostages at the Entebbe airport.


1977: In a case of Jew versus Jew, Roy M. Goodman defeated Barry Farber in today’s New York City Republican Mayoral Primary


1977:  Edward I. Koch won a plurality of the vote in today’s New York City Democratic Mayoral Primary running against a field that included incumbent Abraham Beame and Bella Abzug.


1977: Sir Arnold Wesker”s “The Merchant” (later renamed “Shylock” had it first out of town performance in Philadelphia, PA with Zero Mostel in the role of Shylock.


1977: Seventy-seven year old Friedrich Mandl, the Austrian arms dealer who flirted with fascism and tried to deal with Goering despite the fact that his father was Jewish and who was the husband of Hedy Lamar passed away today.


1977(25th of Elul, 5737): Zero Mostel whose most famous role came as Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof" passed away.


http://www.biography.com/people/zero-mostel-9416421#synopsis


1978: “I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses” a murder mystery directed and produced by Murray Markowitz who also wrote the script and featuring music by Howard Shore was released today in Canada.”


1978: “Almost Summer” a “youth” movie produced by Rob Cohen and featuring Didi Conn was released today in the United States.


1981: ''Ya'acobi and Leidental,'' a comedy by the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levine, will begin a two-week American premiere engagement tonight at the La Mama Annex, 74A East Fourth Street. The play,about three unhappy people who have let life slip by, will be performed in English by the Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv, regarded as the national theater of Israel. The actors, Zaharirah Charifai, Albert Cohen and Joseph Carmon, were also featured in the original Tel Aviv production in 1972. Mr. Levine, winner of Israel's highest artistic award, the President's Prize, has directed the production, which features music by Alex Cagan.


1983(1stof Tishrei, 5744): Rosh Hashanah


1985(22nd of Elul, 5745): Joseph B. Levin, former Assistant General Counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission, attorney at law and the most demanding teacher I ever had at Adas Israel Religious School passed away. Husband of Deborah and father of Judy, Mitchell and David Levin amongst other things he predicted that “someday somebody will pay you to write a simple declarative sentence.” Much to my surprise, he turned out to be right in a way he never could have imagined.


1986: Dr. Arthur M. Sackler “participated in ground-breaking ceremonies for the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University and the Jill Sackler Sculpture Court and Garden.”


1987: Birthdate of Danielle Frenkel, “the Israeli high jumper who was the first Israel to clear 1.90 meters.”


http://www.jpost.com/Sports/Frenkels-star-continues-to-rise-one-centimeter-at-a-time


1987: As employers search for qualified workers in the Northeast, the New York Times reports on the creative ways that employers are dealing with the labor shortage seeking including that of a small-business executive Brian Waxler, vice president of Bruegers Bagel Bakery, a chain of four profitable bagel-and-coffee shops in downtown Boston. For several weeks this summer, signs in the shops offered a dozen free bagels ''for any information leading to the hiring of a bookkeeper.'' A customer finally won the bagels by providing the name of a man who was hired for $21,000 a year, Mr. Waxler said. ''If he had wanted much more money, we would have gotten by without a bookkeeper,'' Mr. Waxler added.


1988: “Earth Girls Are Easy,” musical sci-fi comedy starring Jeff Goldblum premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.


1991(29thof Elul, 5751): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1991(29thof Elul, 5751): Eighty year old Oscar nominated composer, Chester, PA, native, Alex North (Isadore Soifer) passed away today in Los Angeles.  (Personal note: Author of this blog lived in Chester for three years at a time when the sign said “What Chester makes, makes Chester” referring to Baldwin locomotive works and Scott Toilet Paper)


https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/11/arts/alex-north-a-film-composer-80-had-40-year-hollywood-career.html


1993: New York State Attorney General announced his resignation today saying that it would take effect on the last day of 1993.


1994: Premiere of “Whale Music” a comedy drama starring Maury Chaykin.


1995(13thof Elul, 5755): Eighty-nine year old Israeli historian and archeologist Benjamin Mazar passed away. (As reported by Joel Greenberg)


1995: “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” a comedy film directed by Beeban Kidron was released today in the United States.


1995: Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya the long-time lover of Jewish author Boris Pasternak and the inspiration for the character “Lara” passed away today.


1996: Alfred H. Moses, the United States Ambassador to Romania, described the impact of his Jewish heritage on his career and his life.


http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=873557&ct=1126715


1996: Moses Montefiore, who made a fortune in the 19th century as an associate of the banking house of Rothschild, is the subject of an exhibition at Temple Israel in New Rochelle that opens with a reception today. “Montefiore, for whom the hospital in the Bronx is named, was born in Italy in 1784, but acquired his wealth and reputation as a diplomat and international advocate for Jews in his adopted country, England, where he lived for most of his 100 years. In 1837 he was knighted by Queen Victoria for his diplomatic work on behalf of the British Government, and in ameliorating the suffering of persecuted Jews in Russia, Syria and Morocco. He attained the rank of baronet in the 1840's and continued to travel around the world on diplomatic missions until he was 93, ceasing only because he was restrained by family and doctors.”


1998: Pitcher Keith Glauber made his major league debut with the Cincinnati Reds.


1998: “The Rounders” a dark film about the world of high-stakes poker with a script by David Levien and Brian Koppelman and co-starring Martin Landau was featured at the Deauville Film Festival.


2002: “Miss Peach,” “a syndicated comic strip created by Mell Lazarus appeared for the last time today.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Peach#/media/File:Misspeach52960.jpg


2002: A production of “Pacific Overtures,” “a musical written by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman” set in Japan when the Americans were arriving in 1853 came to a close at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theatre.


2002: After more than forty-five years, Mell Lazarus’s “Miss Peach,” a comic strip whose title character was a teacher” was printed for the last time in its original format.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Peach#/media/File:Misspeach52960.jpg


2002: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including Longitudes and Attitudes Exploring the World After September 11 by Thomas L. Friedman, The Fall of Berlin: 1945by Antony Beevor and Bronx Boy: A Memoir by Jerome Charyn.


2002: The first season of “The Wire” a gritty crime show set in Baltimore created by David Simon.


2003: On MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country” Alan Dershowitz said "I will give $10,000 to the PLO... if you can find a historical fact in my book (The Case For Israel) that you can prove to be false."


2003(11th of Elul, 5763): Canadian actress Jaclyn Michelle Linetsky passed away at the age of 17.


2004: Full of pride and joy, members and friends of Congregation Chasam Sopher celebrated the completed first phase of the restoration of the 150-year-old synagogue at 6 Clinton St. today and the beginning of a 12-month writing of a new Torah scroll.(As reported by Albert Amateau)

2004: Terrorists from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade failed to kill or injure anybody when they launched an attack at the Baka al-Sharkiyeh checkpoint attack.

2004: “Paperclips,” a documentary about middle school class in Tennessee that began a project designed to collect six million paperclips as a way of studying the Holocaust was released in the United States today.

2005: Today Robert Magnus began serving as the 30th Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps


2005: New Jersey state senator Byron Baer resigns from the New Jersey State Senate for reasons of health. “Shortly before he retired from the Senate, the New Jersey Association of Jewish Federations presented Baer with the Shem Tov and Distinguished Service awards. Jeffrey Maas, then executive director of the association, said Baer was responsible for making sure Jewish community centers, nursing homes, and social service agencies received extensive state funding.”


2005: In one of the most monumentally stupid remarks ever made by a Jewish leader (or anybody else for that matter) “Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a former chief rabbi and the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas movement, said today that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for U.S. President George W. Bush's support for Israel's Gaza pullout.”


2006(15th of Elul, 5766): Ninety-one year Hilda Bernstein an anti-apartheid activist and author whose husband was tried for treason alongside Nelson Mandela passed away today.


http://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/sep/18/guardianobituaries.southafrica


2007: Ruth Messinger speaks at Durham's Judea Reform Congregation on "Jews as Global Citizens." Messinger challenging Jews to increase their commitment to solving world crises


2007: In Jerusalem the sixth and the closing concert of Jewish Music Days is held at the Beit Avi Chai. This last concert, closest to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is aptly entitled Song and Prayer. The focus of this concert is a contemporary look at Spanish and Ethiopian poets of the Middle Ages combined with jazz and Jewish soul music.


2007(25th of Elul, 5767): In the evening, Selichot.


2008: The Yeshiva University Museum and the Center for Jewish History in cooperation with The Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German National Tourist Office hosts a reception for a program styled, “Erfurt: Jewish Treasures from Medieval Ashkenaz


2008: The American Israeli Paper Mills Group (AIPM; Niyar Hadera) showed President Shimon Peres their newest invention, pipes made of paper fibers and plastic. They are so strong, CEO Avi Brener told Peres, they are almost as tough as steel.


2008: “Before his final game as an Astro today the team paid tribute to Brad Ausmus with a humorous video” which may have been the inspiration for  the 2-run home run he it in the 3rd inning of the game.


2009: Journalist and videographer Max Blumenthal discussed and signed Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C.


2009: The Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem's Old City, hosts a nighttime concert of some of the best cantors, or hazzanim, around, singing those very songs that make the High Holiday services so long, yet special, and throwing in a few other "hits" as well.


2009: The British military announced today that it has installed its first-ever Jewish Civilian Chaplain to the armed forces. Rabbi Arnold Saunders will be responsible for the spiritual and pastoral care of serving Jewish personnel in all three services - army, navy and air force.


2010(29th of Elul, 5770): Erev Rosh Hashanah


2010: A mortar shell fired from the Gaza Strip this morning landed near several children’s' school buildings in a Sha'ar Hanegev regional council kibbutz, some 30 minutes prior to the students' scheduled arrival.


2010(29th of Elul, 5770): Major General Israel Tal, “who helped lay the foundations for the IDF” and played a key role in the Merkava, Israel’s premier battle tank, passed away today in Rehovet.  (As reported by Ethan Bronner)


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/world/middleeast/09tal.html?pagewanted=print


2010: Canadian actress Jessalyn Sarah Gilsig filed for divorce from Bobby Salomon today.


2010(29th of Elul, 5770): Eighty-four year old the literary magazine maven Thomas Guinzburg who founded The Paris Review, passed away today. (As reported by Bruce Weber)


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/arts/10guinzburg.html?pagewanted=print


2010(29thof Elul, 5770): Eighty-four year old folk music maven Irwin Silber passed away. (As reported by William Grimes)


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/arts/music/11silber.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print


2011: A unique concert featuring the stirring words of Holocaust survivors is scheduled to take today place at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. It will be performed by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and soloists and choirs from Israel and the United States.


2011: “Fallen Empires,” the second solo exhibition by Shai Kremer, is scheduled to open at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York City.

2011: An exhibition of new photography by Tal Shochat, “In Praise of a Dream” is scheduled to open at The Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York.

2011: Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum are scheduled to appear at the 6th& I Historic Synagogue where they will promote In That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back  another in a series of books by Mr. Friedman that offer the roadmap to save the world.


2011: This evening the Tel Aviv District Court issued a temporary injunction preventing the removal of the protest tents on Rothschild Boulevard, pending a response to a petition filed by protesters.


2011: A French court handed out a 6,000 euro ($8,421) suspended fine to John Galliano today after finding him guilty of anti-Semitic behavior, marking the end in a fall from grace for the former head designer of fashion house Dior.


2011: Noam Shalit told a news conference today that he came to New York to meet with diplomats from many countries and UN officials to press for his son's release ahead of expected Palestinian moves seeking UN recognition later this month.


2011: The pro-Israel organization J Street decided to reject the Palestinian statehood bid in its new position paper, aligning with the Obama administration's position to oppose the unilateral move.


2012: Kandi Abelson & David Kilimnick are scheduled to perform in Jerusalem at the Off the Wall Comey Basement


2012: An evening of Jerusalem Folk Music featuring Caanan Country and The Heeby Gee Bees is scheduled to take place Motzei Shabbat at Beit Yehudit.


2012: In the evening, Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is scheduled to observe Selichot with its annual Changing of the Torah Covers ceremony, services and study session. In the “heartland,” am yisroel chai.


2012: Iran accused Canada on Saturday of "hostile behavior" under Israeli and British influence after Ottawa cut diplomatic relations, and it raised the prospect of swift retaliation.


2012: Egypt and Israel are coordinating on Cairo's biggest security sweep in decades against militants in Sinai, in which 32 people have been killed, an army spokesman said today, the first clear statement on communication between the neighbors.


2013: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish writers and or of special interest to Jewish readers including Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Latham and examination of the question by Zoe Heller and Adam Kirsch “Are Novelists Too Wary of Criticizing Other Novelists?”


2013: The Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia is scheduled to sponsor its 4thAnnual Cycle Fest.


2013: Peter Shurman “was removed from the position” of PC Caucus Finance Critic “after a heated exchange with” his party leader “in which he refused to repay a housing allowance he had received for a Toronto apartment.”


2013: The Alexandria Kleztet is scheduled to perform at the Five Star Premier Residences in Chevy Chase, MD.


2013: “Fire In My Heart: The Story of Hannah Senesh” is scheduled to come to an at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center.


http://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/pages/special_exhibitions/21.php


2013: Israel complained to the US regarding Palestinian officials leaking classified details about ongoing peace negotiations, an Israeli government official said today. (As reported by Aaron Kalman)
2013: The Air Force set up an Iron dome missile defense battery in the Jerusalem area on Sunday, as the United States lobbied for domestic and international support for military strikes against Syria. The decision was made after situation assessments by the IDF. (As reported by Yoav Zitun)


2013: “The Jews of Egypt,” “a documentary on Egypt’s Jewish community” directed by Amir Ramses “won an award for ‘best documentary’ at the Malmo film festival in Sweden.” (Times of Israel)

2014: “The UN Permanent Mission of Palau and the Engr Aja Eze Foundation are scheduled to sponsor a conference on “Global Anti-Semitism: A Threat to International Peace and Security” at the United Nations Headquarters facility in New York City (As reported by Arutz Sheva)

2014: “Right-wing Israeli politicians came out in support of a reported Egyptian-proposed deal to cede land in the Sinai to a future Palestinian state as a means of resolving the refugee issue.”

2014: “A Special Film Viewing of Rare Archival Footage from a Century of the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC” is scheduled to take place this afternoon at the Center for Jewish History

2014: Indian security officials warned that the “likelihood of attacks traveling in India Has increased” “citing al-Qaeda’s recent public announcement of expansion into the Asian sub-continent.”

2014(13thof Elul, 5774): Eighty-eight year old health economist Rashi Fein who played a key role in the creation of Medicare passed away today.

2014(13thof Elul, 5774): Ninety-four year old impresario Tibor Rudas who was shipped to Begen-Belsen because his father was Jewish passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

2015: In Falls Church, VA, Rodef Shalom is scheduled to help its congregants prepare for the holiday season by offering a 10% discount tonight when it keeps its Gift Shop open for a special evening sale.

2015: The Jewish Historical Society of England is scheduled to host a lecture by Professor Michael Spiro on “The Story of Penicillin.”

2015(24thof Elul, 5776): Eighty-five year old real estate developer and television producer Merv Adelson passed away today. (As reported by Bruce Weber)

2015: Barry Freundal, the “rabbi who went to jail for installing secret cameras in the mikvah…adjacent to his synagogue wrote a letter of apology today in which he said, “I am sorry, beyond measure, for my heinous behavior and the perverse mindset that provoked by actions.”

2015: Under the leadership of Manford Levy, Post 436 of the Jewish War Veterans are scheduled to have their luncheon meeting in Maumelle, AR.

2016: “Five Arabs from northern Israel were sentenced to multiple-year jail terms” today “for joining the Islamic State and planning to carry out attacks in Israel in the terror group’s name.”

2016: As students return to the University of Iowa, Hillel is scheduled to host an evening of Bowling with AEPi fraternity.

2016: Thirty-two year old billionaire Dustin Moskovitz wrote about the 20 million dollars he is donating to defeat Donald Trump in a posting tonight on the website Medium.

2016: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host “Holocaust Reparations and Restitutions” where attorney William R. Marks, “a nationally-recognized expert in the field of German reparations and restitution will share his experiences.”

2016(5thof Elul, 5776): Ninety-two year Greta Zimmer Friedman, the Jewish refugee whose Times Square kiss from a sailor on the day World War II ended became an iconic photo passed away today.

For more see

2016: JW3, also known as Jewish Community Centre London is scheduled to host a final screening of “Rabin, The Last Day.”

2016: “The Kremlin announced today that Israeli and Palestinian leaders have agreed ‘in principle’ to resume peace talks in Moscow.”

2016: As part of year’s Jerusalem Season of Culture, or Mekudeshet, “a nighttime of sounds, voices and music around a bonfire” is scheduled to take place in the Jerusalem Forest.

2017: Today,  “House Republicans hissed and booed senior Trump administration officials” including Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin “as they pitched the President’s deal with Democrats to increase” the debt limit.

2017: A hearing is scheduled to be held concerning a temporary restraining order that has been to block the demolition of the Chevra Anshei Lubavitch Synagogue “which is housed in a structure built in 1906 and is the oldest operating synagogue in Borough Park.”

2017: Tony Levine, the special team’s coordinator is scheduled to take the field as Purdue plays its second game against Ohio University.

2017: The Stephen Wise Free Synagogue is scheduled to a “celebration of Shabbat for families with children of all ages featuring a cater dinner with wine, back-to-school-themed crafts and games, cookie decorating, and more.

2017: In Tel Aviv, the Israeli Society for Dance Research in collaboration with Diver Festival and with the Israeli Dance Archive Beit Ariela is scheduled to host “Retrospective – Body, material, object.”

2017: As Floridians await the scheduled arrival of Hurricane Irma, the Jewish community is making preparations including Temple Sinai in North Miami Beach where Rabbi Alan Litwak said “his synagogue has already cancelled programs that might coincide with the flood and Bet Shira Congregation where Rabbi Mark Kula has made arrangements to wrap the Torah scrolls “in two layers of plastic, put them in van and take them to a local banks where they are placed on table in a walk-vault built to sustain storms and floods.”

2017: “Israel’s Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced today that he intends to indict Mrs Netanyahu for fraud for allegedly diverting some NIS 360,000 ($102,000) of shekels in public funds for her own use.” (As reported by Raoul Wootliff)

2017: In Memphis, Temple Israel is scheduled to celebrate a “Musical Shabbat.”

2018: The three day Meteor Music Festival is scheduled to come to an end.

2018: Beit Avi Chai is scheduled to host “Shabbat-themed games, stories and performances” for family members 3 years of age and older.

2018(27thof Elul, 5778):  Last Shabbat of 5778; Parashat Nitzavim; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

This Day, September 9, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 9
 
337: Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans I succeed their father Constantine I as co-emperors dividing the Roman Empire between the three Augusti. Constantine was responsible for making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.  The sons would quarrel but would not reverse the father’s decision.



384: Birthdate of Honorious, one of the Roman Emperors who prohibited the practice of burning an effigy of Haman on Purim because early Christians saw it “as a disguised attempt to re-enact the death of Jesus and ridicule the Christian faith.”


As early as the fifth century, there was a custom to burn an effigy of Haman on Purim.[32] The spectacle aroused the wrath of the early Christians who interpreted the mocking and "execution" of the Haman effigy as a disguised attempt to re-enact the death of Jesus and ridicule the Christian faith. Prohibitions were issued against such displays under the reign of Flavius Augustus Honorius (395–423) and of


1087: William the Conqueror, first Norman king of England, passed away. The first verifiable Jewish population moved from Rouen in France to the British Isles in the wake of William’s victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.  Based on the continued acceptance of Jews in the kingdom by William’s son, the Jews were not there by accident.  Rather, the new English rulers saw them as a source for developing trade and commerce in their new domain.


1379; The Treaty of Neuberg was signed splitting the Austrian Habsburg lands between the Habsburg Dukes Albert III and Leopold III. According to historian Jacqueline Shields, “The position of the Jews became increasingly precarious during the reigns of Albert III and Leopold III starting in the middle of the 14th century and lasting into the early years of the 15thcentury.


1516: “A Judeo-conversa named María López” and her daughter Isabel were put trial on trial during the never-ending Spanish Inquisition for allegedly performing acts that were tantamount to observing Shabbat and the dietary laws.” (As reported by Renee Levine Melammed)


1553(1stof Tishrei, 5314): Under the auspices of Cardinal Caraffa, later to be Pope Paul IV, a “rabid” leader of the counter-Reformation, the Talmud was confiscated and publicly burned in Rome. The Cardinal chose the day of Rosh Hashanah of that year specifically so the Jews would feel the grief more strongly. Talmud burning would soon spread across many other parts of Italy.


1751: Joseph Solomon Ottolenghe wrote a letter describing his arrival in Savanah, GA.


1759: Rebecca Tema Ansel, who passed away on Shabbat, was buried today at the Hoxton Old Jewish Burial Ground.


1774: At Frankfurt-am-Main, Mayer Amschel Rothschild and Gutlé Schnapper gave birth to their third child and second son Salomon Mayer von Rothschild the founder of the Viennese branch of the “House of Rothschild” who passed away in 1855 while visiting in Paris.


1793(3rdof Tishrei, 5554): Tzom Gedaliah


1793: One day after she had passed away, Hannah Jacobs, the wife of Jacob Jacobs was buried today at the “Alderney Road (Globe Road) Jewish Cemetery.”


1796: The National Assembly of the Batavian Republic accorded equal rights to the Jews of the Netherlands.


1812(3rd of Tishrei, 5573): Jews in the UK and the US are divided by war between their two countries but they share in hunger as they observe Tzom Gedaliah


1820(1stof Tishrei, 5581): Two months before Americans elect James Monroe in the least contested Presidential Election in the history of the U.S. Jews celebrate Rosh Hashanah


1826: In Karlsruhe, “Grand Duke Leopold and his wife Grand Duchess Sophie” gave birth to their third son Frederick who as Grand Duke “appointed the Durlach lawyer, Moritz Ellstaetter, his minister of finance, making him the first German Jew to hold a ministerial position.”


1828: Birthdate of Russian author, Count Leo Tolstoy.  Tolstoy’s attitude towards Jews is a mixed bag.  He signed a petition sent to Alexander III protesting pogroms in 1881.  He strongly condemned the Kishnev Pogrom writing, “The outrages at Kishinev are but the direct result of the propaganda of falsehood and violence which our government conducts with such energy.”  At the same time he blamed Russia’s defeat in the war with Japan on Russia becoming a “pseudo-Christian civilization.” In this civilization “the struggle for money and success in so-called scientific and artistic pursuits” becomes the dominant factor. And it is the society in which “the Jews got the edge on the Christians in every country and thereby earned the envy and hatred of all.” As old age crept up on him he wrote, “I should like to write something to prove how the teachings of Christ, who was not a Jew, were replaced by very different teachings of the apostle Paul, who was a Jews.”  But in the end, Tolstoy noted that his physician Dushin Makovitsky would have been a saint except for one flaw – his hatred of Jews.”


1836: Members of Congregation B'ne Israel dedicated the first synagogue built in Cincinnati, Ohio.


1838: Birthdate of Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Leopold Karpeles, the native of Prague who earned the honor while serving the Color Sergeant in Company E, 57th Massachusetts during the Wilderness Campaign in 1864


1839(1stof Tishrei, 5600): Rosh Hashanah


1839: The Jewish community of Melbourne, whose members had begun arriving in 1835, held their first High Holiday services.


1841: One day after he had passed away, 61 year old Richard Solomon, the husband of Leah Solomon, was buried today at the “Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.”


1843: Three days after he had passed away, Louis Abelson, the husband of the former Julia Lazarus, was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”


1845: Birthdate of Ignatz Acsady, the Hungarian Jewish historian whose works include The Common State Law and the History of Politics and Jewish and Non-Jewish Hungarians after the Emancipation.


1850:  California joins the Union adding a 33rdstar to the U.S. flag. A year before California joined the Union there were enough Jews to hold Yom Kippur Services in San Francisco.  By the end of the decade there were ten congregations in San Francisco and one in Sacramento.  During this time there were two Jewish associate justices of the state court and at least one Jew was serving in the state legislature.


1850(3rd of Tishrei, 5611):Tzom Gedaliah


1852: In Charleston, Rabbi Lyons officiated at the marriage of Simond Hoseau of Pouseau and Mrs. Dorohea Abramowitch of St. Petersburg, Russia.


1857: Hermann Mayer Salomon Goldschmidt discovered Asteroid 56 Melete.


1858 (1st of Tishrei, 5619): As Lincoln debates Douglas in the Illinois Senate Contest, Jews observe Rosh Hashanah


1858: The City Items column published today reported “The most important of the annual religious festivals of the Jews, the "Rosh Hashannah," commenced today. It is not only one of the most important, but also one of the most ancient of Hebrew celebrations.” The writer then quoted the verses from Chapter XXII of Leviticus that describe the commands related to the observance of the holiday.


1859:  Dr. Maurice Raphall “the most celebrated Rabbi in the United States” delivered the Rosh Hashanah sermon at the Greene Street Synagogue.  Dr. Samuel Adler delivered the sermon at Temple Emanu-el.  Dr. Bondi, the new rabbi at the Norfolk Street Synagogue, delivered his first Rosh Hashanah sermon in New York.


1860: Hermann Mayer Salomon Goldschmidt discovered Asteroid 61 Danae.


1861(5thof Tishrei, 5622): Italian historian Samuel Romanin who became a college professor at Venice, passed away today having completed only three volumes in a projected nine volume History of Venice.


1861: As the Civil War entered its sixth month reports were published today that “there is a universal stampede of Jews southward, who have been engaged in running goods into the Southern Confederacy, caused by a report that the trains on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad would probably be stopped to-morrow.”  This would not be the first, nor the last, attempt to connect Jews with war profiteering.  These stories primarily emanated from the western theatre of fighting. The author of this particular item shows an ignorance of the pro-Union sentiment among Jews living in Kentucky as exemplified by Louis Naphtali Dembitz of Louisville who was one of the three men who placed Lincoln’s name in nomination for the Presidency.


1863: Mr. J. L. De Cordova, the humorist and author is delivered his famed lecture, "Fairy Land and the Fairies," at Dodworth's Hall this evening. The proceeds will be given to the Hebrew Free Sunday School Teachers' Association.


1864: In New York City, Gustave Pessels and Aloine Steenbock gave birth Constance Pessels, who studied at the University of Texas before earning a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1894, taught English at the University of Texas and whose works included “The Religious and Ethical Import of Judaism” published in the Proceedings of the 28th annual session of District Grand Lodge No. 7 of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith.


1864: In Kaschau, Hungary, Henrietta A. Weintraub and Rabbi Albert Bettelheim gave birth to Rebekah Bettelheim who as Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut, the wife of Rabbi Alexander Kohut, became one of the pioneering leaders in the fields of “in the areas of education, social welfare, and the organization of Jewish women” (As reported by Karla Goldman)



1867: In Farnworth, Widnes, Lancashire, German born chemist and industrialist Ludwig Mond and Frida Löwenthal gave birth to British chemist and archaeologist Sir Robert Mond, the brother of Sir Alfred Mond, first Baron Melchett.



1870: In Philadelphia, PA, Rabbi Marcus Jastow was serving as the spiritual leader of Rodeph Shalom, a German Jewish Congregation, which dedicated its new sanctuary on Broad and Mt. Vernon Streets today.  It replaced the congregation’s first synagogue that had been located on Julianna Street. 


1872(6thof Elul, 5632): Sixty-six year old Johanna Katharina Diamant, the wife of Herman Diamant passed away in Pest, Hungary.


1873: G.L. Fox played Goliath in tonight’s performance of “The Wandering Jew” at the Grand Opera House in New York City. “The Wandering Jew” or “Le Juif Errant” is an opera by Fromental Halevy’s based on the medieval Christian legend that claims a Jew who taunted Jesus at the Crucifixion is destined to wander the world until the Second Coming.


1873:  Birthdate of Maximilian Goldmann, who gained fame as director Max Reinhardt who fled Hitler’s Europe and settled in the United States where he passed away in 1943.


1877(2ndof Tishrei, 5638): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1877: Despite claims that it was too small, the little synagogue in Chatham square in New York City held Rosh Hashanah services in room that could hold anywhere from 300 to 400 people that could be accessed by a four-foot wide stairway which provided a satisfactory route for worshippers to enter and leave.


1879: Birthdate of Julius Pensak, the native of Gortlitz, Poland who came to the United States in 1883 where he pursued a career as an oral surgeon in Brooklyn after graduated from NYU Dental School.


1879: In Glasgow, “the finished Garnethill Synagogue was officially opened” to day with Rabbi Hermann Adler leading the consecration and officiating at the first worship service.


1881: “Russian Immigrants” published today described plans that are being made by prominent New York Jews to deal with the more than 500 Jewish refugees from Russia that are expected to arrive at Castle Garden in the next three months.  It is estimated that it will take more than $50,000 to meet their initial needs. 


1883: Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Agram, the city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire which is also known by its Croatian name – Zagreb.


1884: A group of Polish and Hungarian miners from Montana, PA, attacked a Jewish clothier and chased him and his assistants out town after stealing their packs.


1885(29th of Elul, 5645): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1885: Rabbi Henry S. Jacobs led services this evening at the new synagogue on Madison Avenue at 65th Street in Manhattan which had opened last March.


1889: “The Jews of London” published today provides a review of Reuben Sachs: A Sketch by Amy Levy.


“Reuben Sachs is a London lawyer whose political aspirations do not include marriage to Judith Quixano, the daughter of a respectable but unexceptional family. But without Reuben, a woman like Judith might have a bleak future in mid-19th century England: a loveless marriage or lifelong dependency are apparently her only options…” Amy Levy was 19th century Jewish author who led what was called at the time “an unconventional life.”


1890: Birthdate of Dr. Kurt Lewin, the German born American psychologist.


1890: “The St. Petersburg correspondent of the London Daily Graphic” noted today that there are “no less than 125,000 Jews in the military forces of the empire” and that “next year’s draft will…amount to no fewer than 50,000” which means that military service is one of the few rights of citizenship the Jews are allowed to enjoy and that the Czar’s government see nothing “strange in arming a body of men habitually oppressed by the State.”


1890: Joseph Ansell married Zillah Cohen D’Azevedo today.


1891: It was announced today that Rabbi Solomon Sonnenschein of Temple Israel has resigned because of health problems and will be returning to Germany. He must have recovered his health because in 1905 he was the Rabbi at Temple B’nai Yeshrun in Des Moines, Iowa.


1891: Yesterday’s ceremony dedicating Temple Beth-Jacob’s new facility was described today as an ecumenical affair since the speakers included Rabbis De Sola Mendez and A.S. Isaacs as well as Reverenc R. H. Barr of the Associate Reformed Church.


1891: Russian born American gynecologist for whom the Hiram N Vinerberg Research Fund is named married Lena Bernheim today.


1892: Today, “the New Orleans correspondent for the American Israelite discussed the work of elite Jewish women on behalf of Touro Infirmary and the Jewish Home for Widows and Orphans including Mrs. I.L. Leucht, Mrs. Charles Newman and Caroline Dreyfous, the wife of Abel Dreyfous. At this time, Caroline was the second vice-president of the Ladies Aid and Sewing Society. The correspondent singled out Caroline as one of three women deserving special mention.


1892: Rabbi Hirsch officiated at the dedication of a new synagogue located at on 50thStreet between 3rd and Lexington Avenues which was originally founded 34 years ago by French speaking Jews from Alsace when they started worshipping at a sanctuary on 45th Street between Second and Third Avenues


1892: “Driven From Their Homes” published today relied on first evidence supplied by a group of Russian Jews passing through Paris on their way to Canada to describe the plight of their co-religionists who were being expelled by Czar’s government.


1892: The Jewish Chronicle reported that “in response to our appeal Mr. A. Leon Emanuel of Southsea has offered to lend a sefer for the ensuing holydays.” (Rosh Hashanah, 5653 fell on September 22, 1892)


1893: Morris Goodhart has been elected President of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society to replace the late Priscilla J. Joachimsen who was the driving force behind creation of the society which oversees the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and has been its only President.


1893: Birthdate of Minsk native Naftoly H.J. Riff who came to the United States in 1916, who served as the Rabbi of the Orthodox Sons or Israel “from the early 1920’s through the late 1960’s.”


1894: Abraham Cahan addressed a mass meeting of tailors affiliated with the Knights of Labor at the Windsor Theatre.


1894: There were enough Jews at tonight’s mass meeting of tailors held at the Thalia Theatre that some of the speeches had to be delivered in Hebrew.


1894: Birthdate of Arthur Freed, the Charleston, SC, native who gained fame as a songwriter and movie producer whose work included the 1951 re-make of “Showboat” based on the novel by Edna Ferber.


1896(2ndof Tishrei, 5657): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1896: The Fourth Assembly District Convention was held this evening at 8 p.m. two hours after the end of the Jewish New Year.  All other district conventions had been held yesterday, but this one was postponed until this evening because the district has a large Jewish population and they would not participate in an event on Rosh Hashanah.


1898(22ndof Elul, 5658): Seventy-seven year old “London wool broker” Maurice Bedding, the son of Esther Moses and Henry Moses who left “an estate of £500,000 at his death” and the husband of  Hannah Maria Beddington who “was a founder of the Central Synagogue” and “a vice president of the Jew’s Hospital and Orphan Asylum passed away today.


1898: Alfred Aloe was commissioned today as a 2nd Lt. in the U.S. Army and assigned to the 18th Infantry.


1898: In Washington, DC, the Turkish Legations issued statement banning the entrance of foreign born Jews into Palestine.


1899: “Changing the Commandments” published today described a revision in the Decalogue of which the Jewish World is the authority so that now “By order of the Minister of Education in Russia, the fifth commandment shall read ‘Honor thy father and they mother, the Emperor and his officials that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee” leaving one to wonder if a Russian Jew declined garbling the text of the commandments” would he be sent to be a worker on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.


1899: In Rennes, crowds of anti-Dreyfusards expressed their pleasure at today’s verdict by marching through the streets shouting “Vive l'armée” and “Down with the Jews.”


1899: When J.M. Francoeur who plays the part of a French officer in the French far “The Girl from Maxim’s” playing at the Criteriorn Theatre first came on stage in his army uniform the audience show its anger over the verdict in the Dreyfus case by booing, hissing and calling out “Vive Dreyfus.”


1899: Tonight, after hearing of the verdict in the Dreyfus case, New York Deputy Assistant District Attorney Maurice B. Blumenthal began organizing “a committee of citizens” regardless of their religion, “including clergymen of all denominations” which would hold a mass protest meeting and send a committee to President McKinley requesting that he intervene with French President Loubert on behalf of Dreyfus.


1899: At tonight’s meeting in Kansas City, MO, the women of the Hebrew Relief Association adopted the following resolution: “We do hereby pledge ourselves not to visit the territory of the French Republic, buy or handle any merchandise or other thing manufactured or grown in any territory or possession of said republic until the truth of the innocence of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus shall be shown to the world by a fair and impartial trial.”


1899: Among the books listed today as having been received this week were The Modern Jew by Arnold White and The American Jewish Year Book: 5660edited by Cyrus Adler.


1899: Sixty-five year old James Biddle Eustis who had first-hand knowledge of the Dreyfus Affair because he had been the U.S. Ambassador to France from 1894 through 1897 passed away today before he could complete his book on the affair.


1899: Anti-Jewish riots occurred in Algeria.


1901: Toulouse-Lautrec passed away who painted Reine de joie, moeurs du demi-monde(Queen of Joy, The World of Easy Virtue) which depicts “Baron de Rozenfeld, a Jewish banker, a fictional  allusion to the French Baron Alphonse de Rothschild”


1903: For one of the first time, “Jewish self-defense units appearing during the pogrom in Gomel, Mogilev Province, Russia. (As described by John Klier)


1904: “The Catch of the Season” which was produced by American Charles Frohman opened at the Vaudeville Theatre in London.


1904: In the United Kingdom the will of pawnbroker Isaac Aarons, the husband of Kate Aarons was probated today. (As reported by David Alexander)


1905: Birthdate of movie producer Joseph Levine who founded Embassy Pictures that produced such interesting flics as “A Bridge Too Far” and “The Lion in Winter.”



1906: Ohev Sholom Congregation, which had been formed by “Russian immigrants in 1886 during the administration of Grover Cleveland,” moved to its third “location at 500 I Street, NW” in Washington, D.C. “where it remained for the next fifty years.


1906:  In Louisville, KY, the three day ceremonies dedicating a new temple came to an end.


1907(1stof Tishrei, 5668): Rosh Hashanah


1907: In Columbus, GA, the local newspaper that it “looked odd to see how many stores are closed” today “and that the number of closed businesses…reflected ‘how prominently the Jews are identified with city’s business life.’”


1908: Joseph and Pauline Canter gave birth to Edward Leo Canter, the father of Alan S. Canter.


1910: In Paris, Alice B. Toklas moves into the home of Gertrude Stein.  [Do you think these two daughters of Israel kept a kosher kitchen?]


1910: El Desperter a new Ladino newspaper appears in Tetuan. It is the first Jewish newspaper in Morocco. 1910: The Turkish government placed a tax on sales of kosher meat by local communities. Proceeds were promised to go to philanthropic purposes. Governors of all vilayets (provinces) informed and directed to assist chief rabbis in enforcing payment


1911: In New York Barnett and Augusta Goodman gave birth to writer and social commentator Paul Goodman.



1911: The first party of Jewish farmers arrived in Salt Lake City Utah, on their way to the Piute Project, to colonize Southern Utah.


1912: Twenty-six year old Joseph Josephson, the native of Vilnius who lived in Sweden and England before arriving today at Fremantle, Australia.


1912(27thof Elul, 5672): “Educator” Rosalie Moses passed away today in New York.


1912: In Batavia, NY, a year after “Orthodox Jews purchased a house on Liberty Street to use as a synagogue,” they began using their new building “Shomrei Emunah Temple” today.


1915(1stof Tishrei, 5676): Rosh Hashanah


1915: Sculptor Victor David Brenner, Director of the United Hebrew Charities Morris D. Waldman, Dr. Marcus A. Rothschild, John Levy, Joseph Shay and Samuel Lovenberg are among those attending Rosh Hashanah services at the newly founded “The New Synagogue” a liberal congregation on the West Side.


1915: In New York “in addition to the regular services at the temples and synagogues” additional services will held “in the auditorium of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association at Lexington Avenue and at the Young Women’s Hebrews Association Building.”


1915: Dr. Maurice N. Harris delivered a sermon on “The Arrested Sacrifice of Isaac” at Temple Israel in Harlem in which he said “it is difficult to say which is the harder lot, that of 400,000 Israelites fighting at the front, sacrificing their lives on the altar of nationalism or of the non-belligerents, women, the aged and children driven from their homes and their towns as each city falls into the hands of the conqueror” on the Eastern Front.


1915: Dr. Joseph Silverman delivered a Rosh Hashanah sermon on “The Greatest Need for Humanity” at Temple Emanu-El.


1915: At Temple Beth-El, Rabbi Samuel Schulman delivered a sermon on “The Destiny of the Jew in the Light of the World War.”


1915: At Temple Rodoph Sholom, Rabbi Rudolph Grossman delivered a sermon on “Peace” in which “he declared that those who believed that patriotism was responsible for the present war had a false conception of patriotism.”


1915: “Speaking before the Fee Synagogue in Carnegie Hall” on Rosh Hashanah “Dr. Stephen S. Wise declared the Jew must be something rather than have something” and “he must stand for something” as “evil’s resistless foe.”


1915: Based on dispatch from The Daily Telegraph’s correspondent in Petrograd, it was reported from London to that “complete cessation of religious persecution” and “removal of restriction upon the Jews” were “among the reforms in the program adopted by the progressive parties of the united Duma which control 300 out of the 439 votes in the House” which are now being considered by the Council of Minsters whose approval is necessary if the reforms are to become law.


1915: In Philadelphia founding of Tifereth Israel.


1915: An American doctor who arrived in New York from Liverpool today described conditions in Turkey including the government’s order for all Jews, Greeks and Armenians to leave Asia Minor which has meant that over 200,000 refugees have been sent to Nineveh.


1915:  The Associated Press Correspondent reported from Lodz today that “the Jews of Russian Poland, now in the hands of the Austrians and Germans appear to have suffered, prior to the Russian retirement more than normal hardship imposed by war” as could be seen by “a rather promiscuous execution by the Russians of Jews accused of espionage” and the “plundering of Jewish shops and houses by the Russian soldiery.”


1916: Second baseman Sam Bohne made his major league debut with the St. Louis Cardinals.


1916: In “For the Poor of Palestine” published today, A.B. Beaumont asked why students at Cornell could not “get up some entertainment or something and send the proceeds to help the destitute Arabian Jews.”


1916: Today, during the Battle of the Somme, Jack Melnick “a rifleman in the 12thLondon Regiment” and the father of Eva Melnick” “was listed as wounded and missing.


1916: Birthdate of Montague Ullman, the psychiatrist who founded the Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center.


1917: The New York Times reviewed The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text: a New Translation and The Story of Bible Translation by Max L. Margolis.  Dr. Cyrus Adler chaired the committee that was responsible for the translation and the late Dr. Solomon Schechter played a key role in this effort as well. 


1918(3rdof Tishrei, 5679): In the waning days of The Great War, Jews divided by combat were united in the observance of Tzom Gedaliah


1919: “Many Jews” were among the large group of intellectuals who gathered in Paris to form the “French League of Youth.


1920: In South Bend, Indiana, Samuel and Sophie Novak Plotkin gave birth Albert Plotkin, the graduate of Notre Dame and Hebrew Union College and Rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in Phoenix who played a key role in the development of the “Jewish Studies Program at Arizona State University.”


1920: Final day of registration for the Hebrew School of Congregation Petach Tikvah in New York.


1920: Second and final day for the Fall Entrance Examinations for admission to the Teacher’s Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary.


1920: A memorial service was held in New York in honor of Rabbi Bernard Cantor and Dr. Israel Friedlander, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary who had been murdered outside of Kiev while brining aid to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were suffering as a result of WW I and the Russian Revolution.


1922: Birthdate of Hartford, CT, native Pulitzer Prize winning historian Bernard Bailyn.




1923: Birthdate of David Rayfiel, the native of Corinth, NY a screenwriter who in a long creative relationship with the director Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford collaborated on many of their most successful films, including “Three Days of the Condor,” “Out of Africa” and “The Way We Were. ” (As reported by William Grimes)


1926(1st of Tishrei, 5687): Rosh Hashanah


1926: Thanks to a directive from the Director of Public Safety, Jewish policemen and firemen are to be excused from active duty today because of the High Holidays.


1926: As Jews in New York observed Rosh Hashanah, they contemplated the following message from Governor Alfred E. Smith, who would be the first Catholic to run for President of the United States in 1928.


"The minority of intolerant people in our land are soon hushed by the chorus of disapproval which arises when intolerance and hatred raise their voices. True Americanism does not tolerate anything so un-American and unpatriotic as intolerance of any race or any religion. Once again at the approach of the Jewish New Year, I want to extend to the Jewish citizens of the State my cordial and heartfelt greetings. I appreciate the sacredness of the time and have many memories of the deep solemnity with which my old friends and neighbors observed these Holidays. In our busy lives it is an inspiring thing to set aside days on which we take thought of our actions and our life during the past year and prepared for the future. Communion with God in the deepest spiritual sense is the basis of all true religion. I profoundly believe in the separation of church and State as a basic American principle and I could not believe otherwise. But I do not believe in the separation of religion from daily life. Each of us observes the requirements of his religion in his own way but together we are all children of the one God. The minority of intolerant people in our land are soon hushed by the chorus of disapproval which arises when intolerance and hatred raises their voices. True Americanism does not tolerate anything so un-American and unpatriotic as intolerance of any race or any religion. The Jews are notably a people of peace and in wishing my fellow Jewish citizens of the State of New York a good New Year, I hope that their prayers will join with mine that our Universal Father help us all to strengthen the time-honored American principles of toleration and religious freedom." (As reported by JTA)



 



1926:The New York Board of Jewish Ministers issued a New Year message, in which it declared:


 


"With Rosh Hashanah begins Israel's most solemn season of the year, culminating in Yom Kippur, the sacred Day of Atonement. It is a hallowed usage in the House of Israel that this season is a time for noting and estimating the individual and the collective situation."Crowded synagogues will once more attest to the call of the Faith which summons the Jew to scrutinize his soul and take inventory of his spiritual condition. May the Heavenly Father send light and guidance upon the path of every sincere supplicant who implores help from On High. "The celebration of the 150th anniversary of American independence brings vividly to mind the privilege as well as the responsibility with which the Jew has been entrusted in this blessed land. He has shared fully in the life of the nation, from its beginning, having made many sacrifices and received many benefits. Among the patriots who achieved the success of the Revolution, the Jewish names were plentiful, though the Jewish population was meager. The Jew therefore feels thoroughly at home in the land which he has helped to defend in times of war and to upbuild in times of peace. He appreciates the bounties, material and spiritual, which he, together with all American citizens, here enjoys; and with the same fervor that he prays for his personal well-being, he prays also for the well-being of the United States of America, its civil leaders, its citizens, and its institutions. "The collective situation of the House of Israel abroad gives promise of better things for the coming year." The lot of the Jew in Europe and in Palestine is showing measurable improvement. As the European nations regain their composure, the Jew regains his safety. The Peace and Welfare of Israel is intimately bound up with the Peace and Welfare of Humanity. Therefore the Prophetic Proclamation of the Holy Day season, 'Peace, Peace, afar and near,' is Israel's constant prayer."May the wounds of sorrow and suffering everywhere be healed. "May the New Year 5687 bring Peace and Blessing to Israel and to all Humanity."


1926: Establishment of the National Broadcasting Company.  NBC (first in radio and then in television) was the network dominated by David Sarnoff, Chairman of RCA.  With William Paley owning CBS, this meant that two Jews were at the top of the two major broadcasting networks.  Contrary to what the anti-Semites claim, having two Jews at the top did not translate into a Jewish controlled media; one look at the programming of these two broadcasters will tell you that these men aimed most of their programming at middle-brow, Middle America.  


1928: “Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” a silent film directed by William Wyler and produced by Richard Wyler was released today in the United States.


1928: In Pittsburgh, PA, Irwin and Esther Zwerling, Jewish emigrants from Austria and Romania, respectively, gave birth to “American character actor” Darrel Zwerling, the younger brother of Bernice Zwerling.



1929: “Joseph Absuhdid, one of the Jews wounded in Hebron during the massacre now recovering in a Jerusalem Hospital was taken by the police to Hebron where he identified eighty prisoners as a part of the mob which perpetrated the massacre on August 24.”


1932: Sehnsucht 202 (Longing 202) “a German musical comedy” that marked the debut of Luis Rainer was released in Austria today.


1933: In Bradford, Ontario, Harry and Anne Tulchinsky gave birth Jacob Joseph Tulchinsky the historian and author who specialized in the field of the History of the Jews of Canada. (As reported by Ron Csillag)



1933(18th of Elul, 5693): Hirsch Smulowitz, who although 109 years old only had twenty-seven birthdays because he was born on Feb. 29, died in his sleep at the New York Guild for Jewish Blind on St. John's Avenue today. He was one of the oldest men in the State.


1935: “Awake and Sing” a play by Clifford Odets, directed by Harold Clurman with a cast that included Luther Adler, Stella Adler, Morris Carnovsky, John Garfield and Sanford Meisner re-opened for a second run on Broadway.


1935: Birthdate of Chaim Topol, the native of Tel Aviv best known to American audiences for playing Tevye in the film version of "Fiddler on the Roof."


1936: In Le Pontet, France, “Sarah Levendel and her husband Max who owned a small haberdashery shop gave birth to their son Isaac the author of Not the Germans Alone: A Son’s Search for the Truth of Vichy


1936: “David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union urged twenty-seven labor leaders at a luncheon” today “in the Hotel New Yorker to support an exhibition soccer match between the Maccabee Palestine and local all-star team” which will raise money for the relief of Jews in Poland.


1936: Tonight at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, Hitler made “another savage attack on the Jews” that included coupling Judaism with democracy both of which he said were “destructive to civilization.”


1936: “More than 3,000 men and women filled Carnegie Hall” tonight “to hear the reports of sixteen American delegates to the World Jewish Congress held in Geneva last month” which was attended by representatives from 32 nations.


1937: The Palestine Post reported that the National Arab Congress, attended by delegates from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt, started its deliberations in a small summer resort of Bludan, in Syria. The Palestine Postwas the pre-Independence name of the Jerusalem Post.  It was only after the establishment of the state of Israel that the term Palestinian came to refer to Arabs.


1937: The Palestine Post reported that the stabbed and mutilated body of a young unidentified Jew was found in the Yarkon River. Another Jew, Willy Weiss, was robbed and killed by five armed Arabs on the Haifa-Nazareth road. His passenger, Michael Dubowsky, was also wounded and robbed, but left alive.


1937: The Palestine Post reported that during the first seven months of 1937, Ha’avara Trust Office transferred 18.8 million marks of Jewish capital from Germany to Palestine. The transfers were about 11m. in 1933-1934, 17.1m. in 1935, 20m. in 1936. Parts of the transfers consisted of goods, machines and raw materials.


1938: Premiere of “Boys Town” which told the story of Father Edward Flanigan directed by Norman Taurog and script co-authored by Dore Schary.


1938(13thof Elul, 5698): Eighty-four year old Joseph Schulen, the Munich banker who went into the brewery business in 1895, when he took over Munich’s bankrupt Unionsbrauerei and in 1904 “acquired Münchner Kindl, another failing brewery in Munich passed today as the Nazis sought to “Ayranize” his business holdings. (As described by Yardena Schwartz)


1938: Ahron Opher who for the last three years has been serving “as rabbi and director of religious education at the Hebrew Guardians Sheltering Society in Pleasantville, NY and the Hawthorne School of the Jewish Board of Guardians” was named today as the rabbi of “the Hebrew Tabernacle of Washington Heights.”


1938: In response to “the newly decreed race prohibitions which are applied by blood and not religion,” “the Italian Government announced today that separate elementary schools for Jewish children would be opened this Fall” thus assuring “schooling for all Jewish children, especially those of Jews converted to Catholicism. (Editor’s note - This puts to the lie the contention that the Italians did not follow the lead of the Nazis since this prohnition moves in lockstep with the Nuremberg Race Laws.)


1939: Birthdate of Reuven “Rubi” Rivlin, a native of Jerusalem who is a member of Likud and Speaker of the Knesset.


1939: Birthdate of literary agent Edward Victor, the Bronx born son of Russian Jewish immigrants “who was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to literature” in 2016. (As reported by Sam Roberts) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/business/media/ed-victor-dead-literary-agent.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well


1939:  Harry F. Guggenheim and his journalist wife launched Newsday, a tabloid designed to serve metropolitan New York City.


1940: Louis Werfel who graduated from Yeshiva College in 1937 and would be known as “The Flying Rabbi” while serving in the U.S. Army in WW II married Adina Gerstel whom he had met at the college’s cafeteria.


1940: Italian planes bombed Tel Aviv. One hundred seventeen people were killed.  The Jews of Palestine posed a threat to the fascists. With much of the Arab world supporting the Nazis, the area controlled by the Yishuv provided a safe area for British forces in the Middle East.  The oil refineries at Haifa were of great value to the Allies and were subject to bombing raids by the Italians.  At the outset of the war Weitzman had pledged the support of the Yishuv to the Allied cause.  Ben-Gurion spoke for many when he said the Jews would fight the White Paper (the closing of immigration) as if there were no war and fight the war as if there were no White Paper. 


1940: The Ordinance Judenkodex (Jewish Code) was adopted in Slovakia. This was part of a series of law designed to strip Jews of their sources of livelihood.


1942: The Vichy Government (Unoccupied France) ordered the arrest of all Catholic priests who were sheltering Jews.


1942(27th of Elul, 5702): Two thousand Jews were assembled at Kislovodsk, sent to nearby Mineralnye Vody, marched to a ditch and shot dead.   There were no survivors among the 2000. Kislovodsk is located in southern Russia. In 1987 Kislovodsk took part in a pioneering U.S. - Soviet venture in peaceful relations by becoming a sister city to Muscatine, Iowa. (You have to live in Iowa to really appreciate this one.)


1942(27thof Elul, 5702): Margarete Schiff, the daughter Dr. Josef Bauer whose works laid the foundation for the therapy that came to known as psychoanalysis, died today at Theresienstadt, a fate her sister Dora had avoided by committing suicide.


1942: Two thousand Jews are deported from the camp in Lublin, Poland, to Majdanek.


1944: Allied forces liberated Luxembourg today. Of the 3,500 Jews living there in 1939, 1,555 survived, by fleeing, hiding, or surviving in the camps; 1,945 were murdered, a third in the camps to which they had been deported from Luxembourg, and the rest in the country itself or in other occupied countries to which they had fled or been deported. (As reported by Yad Vashem)


1944: At the Chelmno Death Camp in Poland, an inventory was reported of 775 wrist watches and 550 pocket watches which had been collected since July from the victims of the Lodz ghetto cleansing.  At one level, the Holocaust was an economic venture with what might be called a reallocation of resources.  In other words, the Germans and their allies took the property of the Jews and gave it to themselves.  During the 1950's there was great deal of hoopla over the German Economic Miracle - the name given to quick recovery of the West German economy after the devastating defeat in 1945.  How much of this "miracle" was actually funded by the wealth confiscated from the victims of the Holocaust remains one of the great unasked and unanswered questions of the post war world.


1944: The U.S.N. Drum (SS-228) began its 11th war patrol that would take it to the enemy controlled Luzon Straits in the Philippines.  The submarine was under the command of Maurice H. Rindskopf who would earn the Navy Cross for his gallantry and intrepidity on this patrol. The Jewish “sailor” would rise to the rank of Rear Admiral before his retirement in 1972.


1944: The Germans established a weather station on Svalbard which almost a year to the day later would be the scene of the last surrender of Nazi forces.


1944: Major Ronald Edmond Balfour, “the Monuments Officer for the First Canadian Army” “arrived in Rouen today “and made his first report, carefully recording the city’s damage from the German air bombardment in 1940, the Allied bombardment in 1944, and the retreat of German forces.”


1944: In Philadelphia, PA Morris and Sally Seitz gave birth to their younger daughter Judith Seitz who gained fame as Judith Rodin, the 12th President of the Rockefeller Foundation and the wife of a former dean of the Tulane School of Law.



1945(2nd of Tishrei, 5706): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1945: It was reported today that American Jews have received greeting from Dr. Joseph H. Hertz, chief rabbi of the British Empire in which he paid “tribute to the 1,000,000 Jews who fought in the Allied Armies, acknowledged “the more than 5,000,000 Jews killed by Hitler’s assault on civilization” and “said that the establishment of Palestine as a free commonwealth with equal rights and opportunities for Jew and Arab would be a ‘historic act of Justice to Israel’s survivors from Nazi extermination.’”


1945: “At Shaare Zedek Synagogue, Rabbi Morris H. Goldberg declared that this Rosh Hashanah “impels us to determine to fashion an international society which will do justice to the nations of the earth but at the same time control the aggression of nations.”


1945: At Congregation B’nai Jeshuru, Rabbi Israel Goldstein declared that “if during the New Year the British and American Governments will proclaim as their policy the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish state it will be the world’s most moral act of statesmanship in nineteen centuries.”


1945: “Rabbi Philip Harris Singer urged his congregation at the West Side Institutional Synagogue to pray for the final breakdown of Godless state sovereignty and self-deifying power adoration and for its replacement by an enthusiastic subordination of all nations of the earth under the unifying Kingdom of God.”


1945: At Congregation Ohab Zedek, Rabbi Zev Zahavy “asserted that even though the war was over the basic struggle of humanity was continuing unababted.”


1945: At Ansche Chesed, Rabbi Joseph Zeitlin “declared that the Atomic Age had prodigious power for good or evil and he urged mankind to release the spiritual energy it possess in the direction of truth, justice and peace so that the dream of  world cooperation and blessing can be fulfilled.”


1945: Lt. Col. Louis Geffen, a judge advocate in the US Army, led Rosh Hashanah services on a naval transport crossing the Pacific Ocean.


1946: Birthdate of Glasgow native Gordon David Plotkin, “a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh who is probably best known for his introduction of structural operational semantics (SOS) and his work on denotational semantics.”


1947: In Camden, NJ, Louis L. Goldman oversaw the ceremonies during which Dr. Max Artz installed Philip L. Lipis as the rabbi at Congregation Beth El.


1950: Gimbel’s began selling sports coats from Tel Aviv this afternoon, making it the first New York Department store to sell clothes designed and manufactured in Israel.  The coats cost $98 plus tax.


1951: The draft of a mining law designed to promote oil exploration in Israel by foreign petroleum companies has been drawn up and will be submitted for Government consideration as soon as a new Cabinet is formed.  According to a report prepared by U.S. Petroleum engineer Max Ball, three are geological in three different locations in Israel that suggest the presence of oil.  The area of greatest interest is in the Negev. 


1951: Today Leonard Bernstein married Costa Rican born actress Felicia Montealegre-Cohn; an event which occurred during the same month when he was appointed Professor of Music at Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.


1951: “A basic reorganization of the United Palestine Appeal and other American Zionist fund-raising agencies is the principal item on the agenda of a forthcoming national conference to be called by the United Palestine Appeal, Rudolf G. Sonneborn, U.P.A. national chairman, announced today upon his return from a two-month stay in Israel. Mr. Sonneborn, who was a delegate to the recently concluded World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, declared that "the conference which will be convened as soon as possible in Washington, D.C., must implement the basic decision of the Congress to streamline and consolidate the Zionist Funds."


1951: The newspaper Le Monde reported today that of 7,700 newspapers and periodicals published in the Soviet Union in 109 different languages not one is being published in Yiddish.


1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that West Germany approved the terms of The Hague Reparations Agreement. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his government hoped that this act, apart from the contribution to the economic recovery of Israel will build a bridge of reconciliation. Parliamentary circles in Bonn believed that full diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel will be necessary to warrant the agreement¹s safe realization.


1954: Birthdate of Dr. Martin Seth Kramer, the Washington, DC who developed an expertise on the politics of Arabs and Islam


1954: In London premiere of “Sabrina” a classic directed and produced by Billy Wilder who co-authored the script with Ernest Lehman


1956(4thof Tishrei, 5717): Tzom Gedaliah observed on Sunday since the third of Tishrei fell on Shabbat.


1957: Alfred K. Stern and his wife Martha Dodd Stern “were indicted in absentia on espionage charges.” (Martha Dodd’s father was the first U.S. Ambassador to serve in Germany during the Hitler era.  She got to see the Nazis up close and this transformative experience shaped the rest of her life.)


1957: President Eisenhower signs the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such legislation enacted since Reconstruction.  Congressman Emanuel Celler was a driving force behind the act having introduced it into the House.  Celler would play a similar key role when it came to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 


1958: French Premiere of “The Goddess” with a script by Paddy Chayefsky and featuring Steven Hill as John Tower.


1960: Twenty-seven year old Abraham “Abe” Cohen the native of Plymouth, PA who played college football for the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga Mocs played today for the Boston Patriots (later the New England Patriots) in the first game of the American Football League.


1963: Funeral services were scheduled to be held today at the Riverside chapel for eighty-four year old Hungarian born Rabbi Morris David Waldman, the “professional head of the American Jewish Committee, the President of the National Conference of Jewish Communal Service and father of “Lynn Pearlstein, Pearl Glaser and Helen Eliezer.


1963(20th of Elul, 5723): Sixty-eight year old German-American historian Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, the German Army veteran whom Norman Cantor “suggested that, but for his Jewish heritage, Kantorowicz (at least as a young scholar in the 1920s and 1930s) could be considered a Nazi in terms of his intellectual temperament and cultural values” passed away today.



1964(3rdof Tishrei, 5725): Tzom Gedaliah


1964: Birthdate of documentary filmmaker Eyal Sivan, the native of Haifa who was raised in Jerusalem


1965: While on his way to start his freshman year at Tulane University, David Levin “rides out” Hurricane Betsy in a parked railroad car in Slidell, Louisiana as the storm makes its second landfall near the Crescent City, leaving 76 dead and $1.42 billion ($10-12 billion in 2005 dollars) in damages, becoming the first hurricane to top $1 billion in unadjusted damages


1965: The most famous Jewish player, Sandy Koufax pitched his 4th no-hitter; a perfect game in which the Dodgers beat the Cubs 1 to 0. (Hank Greenberg rates as the second most famous.)


1966: In Brooklyn, Judith "Judy" (née Levine), a nursery school teacher, and Stanley, an electrical engineer” gave birth to actor and comedian Adam Sandler who was raised in Manchester, NH.


1966: In London, opening of the Destruction in Art Symposium chaired by Gustav Metzger


1966: Schocken Books, Inc. is scheduled to publish today "Two Tales" by S.Y. Agnon, the Israeli who has been acclaimed as today's leading writer in Hebrew and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize. It will be the first English translation of a book by Mr. Agnon since 1948, and it will mark 50 years of association between the writer and the Shocken family.


1968(16thof Elul, 5728): Sixty-two year old New York City native and Pratt Institute graduate Louis A. Peirez, the “President of Viewlex, Inc,” manufacturers of “audiovisual, photographic and sound equipment” who “was a member of the national board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League” and the husband of Alexandra S. Nininger Peirez with whom he had two children – Helen and David – passed away today.



1969: Operation Raviv, a ten hour raid mounted against Egypt under the command of General Avraham Adan and Admiral Arvaham Botzer successfully destroyed a radar site at Ras Saafrana while playing havoc with Egyptian forces on that nation’s Red Sea Coast.



1970: A British  airliner is hijacked by the Popular From for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and flown to Dawson Field in Jordan. The names of the Palestinian terrorist groups may change but the goals remain the same; remove western influence from the Arab worlds and destroy the state of Israel.


1972(1st of Tishrei, 5733): Rosh Hashanah


1972: “During the 10-day period of the High Holy Days” that begins with Rosh Hashanah “the El Mole Rachamim (God Full of Mercy) the solemn prayer for the dead will be intoned for the athletes killed by Arab terrorists at Munich.”


1972: “Leaders of major Jewish secular and religious groups in their annual messaged cited the symbolic significance of Rosh Hashanah and called for the equality among all peoples and the restoration of full rights in the Soviet Union.”


1972: In a highly unusual move the National Conference of Catholic Bishops…called for prayers…on behalf of the Israeli athletes who were murdered by Arab terrorists” saying that “decent people everywhere can only be appalled by the tragic and outrageous killing at the Olympic Games.”


1972: A Syrian military spokesman said that “Syrian fight bombers inflicted heavy damage and casulaities today on Israeli position in the Golan Heights” after which three of the Soviet-built Sukohi 7’s and three Israeli Mirage jets were shot down in ensuing dogfights and by ground fire.”


1972: In an interview to be published today Chancellor Will Brandt said that it was his “deep conviction that we cannot allow the impression to arise and that we have to put all our cards on the table” when it comes to investigating events surrounding the Munich Massacre.


1972: “German newspapers complained today that the program for the Olympic closing ceremony did not take sufficiently into account the massacre of Israeli athletes by Arab” terrorists which took place “less than a week ago.”


1973(12th of Elul, 5733): American playwright and screenwriter Samuel Nathaniel Behrman passed away.



1974(22ndof Elul, 5734): Sixty-two year old award winning bio-chemist Gertrude Erika Perlmann passed away today.


1975: CTV broadcast the first episode of The Bobby Vinton Show” a creation of Chuck Barris Production.


1975: “Professor Aryeh Dvoretsky of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and President of the Israel Science Academy, lectured at a Jewish scientific seminar in Moscow, led by Alexander Voronel.”


1975: “British 35’s Women’s Committee launched a global campaign to collect 12 million signatures in 42 countries on behalf of persecuted Soviet Jewish women.”


1978(7th of Elul, 5738):  Eighty-six year old Jack Warner, founder of Warner Brothers Studio, passed away.




1980(28thof Elul, 5740): Seventy-eight year Harold Edgar Clurman one of the three founders of “New York City’s Group Theatre, influential drama critic and former husband of Stella Adler passed away today.



1982: The New York Times reviewed books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Leo Rosten’s Hooray For Yiddish!


1983(2ndof Tishrei, 5744): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1983(2ndof Tishrei, 5744): Ninety year old Samuel C. Feuerstein, “the Chairman of the Board of Malden Mills, the founder of “Torah Umesorah, the National Society for the Development of Hebrew Day Schools” and the husband of the “former Mitzi Landau with whom he had five children – Moses, Aaron, Felix, Irma and Juliette – passed away today in Boston.



1983: Today, President Reagan nominated Martin Feldman “to a seat on the United States District for the Eastern District of Louisiana.


1986: CBS broadcast the first episode of “The Wizard” starring David Rappaport as “Simon McKay.”


1987: “Late Nite Comic,” a musical produced by Philip Rose premiered at the Garde Theater in New London, Connecticut.


1988: “Running On Empty” directed by Sidney Lumet, written by Naomi Foner and starring Judd Hirsch and Steven Hill was released in the United States today.


1991(1stof Tishrei, 5752): Rosh Hashanah


1993: Aryeh Gamliel completed his term as Deputy Minister of Housing and Construction.


1993: The Palestine Liberation Organization officially recognizes Israel as a legitimate state. Future events would seem to indicate the PLO really did not do this. In point of fact no copy of the PLO’s National Charter has been published without the “many clauses declaring the creation of the state of Israel "null and void", since it was created by force on Palestinian soil calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.”


1995(14th of Elul, 5755): Eighty-nine year old Biblical archaeologist Benjamin Mazar passed away. (As reported by Joel Greenberg)



1995: In Dayton, The Ohio State Korean War Veterans monument which is “adjacent to the Jewish Temple” will be dedicated today. The memorial which overlooks the Great Miami River is the culmination of a six year effort that included the work of innumerable volunteers.


1995: “Unstrung Heroes” a comedy featuring Maury Chaykin as Arthur Lidz was released in the United States today by Buena Vista Pictures.


1997(7th of Elul, 5757): Gertude Lookstein passes away at the age of 90. Gertrude S. Lookstein, who with her husband, Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein, was a leader in the New York Orthodox community and was active in a number of organizations. Her maternal grandfather, Rabbi Moses Z. Margolies, was the leader of Congregation Kehilath Jeshrun in Manhattan. He was succeeded by her husband, who served also as president, then chancellor, of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, until his death in 1979. Their son, Haskel, succeeded his father in the rabbinate in Kehilath Jeshrun. Mrs. Lookstein was a national board member and New York chapter president of Amit Women. She was also involved in fund-raising for the Yeshiva University Women's Organization, the U.J.A. Federation and the Women's Branch of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.


1997: “Two Girls and a Guy” a comedy “written and directed by James Toback and co-produced by Edward R. Pressman” was released today in the United States.
 1999: “The Last Days” a documentary that “tells the stories of five Hungarian Jews during the Shoah” was released today in Hungary.


1999(28thof Elul, 5759): Seventy-six year old actress Ruth Roman the daughter of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants Mary Pauline (née Gold) and Abraham Roman passed away today.



2000: Abu Mazen delivered a speech at the meeting of the Palestinian Central Council in which he articulated the PLO’s view of peace negotiations.


2001(21stof Elul, 5761): Yigal Goldstein, 47, of Jerusalem, Morrel Derfler, 45, of Mevaseret Zion amd


Daniel Yifrach, 19, of Jerusalem were murdered today when a Hamas terrorist detonated a bomb in the Nahariya Railway Station in Nahariya, Israel


2001: A Hamas terrorist injured 17 people when he detonated a bomb Beit Lid Highway Junction in the Sharon region of Israel.


2002: Slovakia observed its first Holocaust Remembrance Day.


2002: At the Toronto International Film Festival, premiere of “Evelyn” a dramatic film co-starring Julianna Margulies.


2002: At the Toronto International Film Festival, premiere of “The Emperor’s Club” co-produced by Marc Abraham and starring Kevin Klein whose father was Jewish.


2003(12th of Elul, 5763): Physicist Edward Teller passed away.  Teller is known as the "Father of the H-Bomb."  With Oppenheimer as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb" and Rickover as the "Father of the Atomic Submarine" it is obvious that the Jews played a primary role in providing the United States with the nuclear deterrent during the Cold War. (As reported by Walter Sullivan)



2003(12thof Elul, 5763): Senior Warrant Officer Haim Alfasi, 39, of Haifa; Chief Warrant Officer Yaakov Ben-Shabbat, 39, of Pardes Hanna; Cpl. Mazi Grego, 19, of Holon; Capt. Yael Kfir, 21, of Ashkelon; Cpl. Felix Nikolaichuk, 20, of Bat Yam; Sgt. Efrat Schwartzman, 19, of Ganei Yehuda; Sgt. Yonatan Peleg, 21, of Moshav Yanuv and Cpl. Prosper Twito, 20, of Upper Nazareth were murdered this evening and 31 people of one of whom would later die from his wounds, were injured today when Hamas terrorist detonated a bomb at a bus stop “near Tzrifin,” a military compound.


2003(12thof Elul, 5763): Dr. David Applebaum, 51, of Jerusalem – head of the emergency room at Shaare Zedek Medical Center; Nava Applebaum, 20, of Jerusalem – David Applebaum's daughter who was to have been married the day after the bombing; David Shimon Avizadris, 51, of Mevaseret Zion;


Shafik Kerem, 27, of Beit Hanina;  Alon Mizrahi, 22, of Jerusalem – the Café Hillel’s coffee  security guard; Gila Moshe, 40, of Jerusalem and Yehiel (Emil) Tubol, 52, of Jerusalem were murdered today by a Hamas terrorist at the Café Hillel, a Jerusalem coffee house.


2003: Publication date for Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions by Ben Mizrachi the “son of Molli Newman, a lawyer, and Dr. Reuben Mezrich, a chairman of radiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine” who raised him in a conservative Jewish household.


2004: On the same that “Israeli forces continued a major operation in Gaza’ which was designed to suppress rockets being fired into Israel, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom “again warned that they were considering exiling” Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat.


2005: “Campfire” an Israeli film written and directed by Joseph Cedar which “won five Israeli Academy Awards and was Israel's official submission for the 77th Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category” was released today.


2005: Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf praised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as “courageous” for ordering the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza, but doesn’t plan to follow up a recent diplomatic breakthrough between the countries by meeting him at the United Nations this month.


2005: In a manner reminiscent of the American Judicial System, the Israeli justice system seemed to be sending mixed messages concerning the treatment of women. Former defense minister and retired army general Yitzhak Mordechai will not be stripped of his rank, despite his two convictions for sexual misconduct.  The three general panel felt he had been punished enough.  The government can appeal the decisions.  At the same time a” panel of High Court judges ruled Thursday that employers are not permitted to fire female workers for absence from work if this is due to their undergoing fertility treatment. However, the judges decided that the law does not provide women with general immunity against being dismissed for other disciplinary reasons, or if the fertility treatment does not justify absence from work.”


2006:Riding the Wave,” an Ashdod arts festival celebrating the beachside city's 50th anniversary which was held at Ashdod's Monart Center came to an end after three days with a singing contest.


2007: Ryan Braun hit a home run today helping “the Brewers to become one of only three teams in major league history to start a game with three straight homers.”


2007: The Sunday Washington Post book section featured a review of The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt and reported that two of the three books that the Post describes as “the most anticipated books of the season” are the products of Jewish authors – Alan Greenspan and Philip Roth.


2007: The Sunday New York Times book section features reviews of World War IV


The Long Struggle Against Islamofascismby Norman Podhoretz former editor of Commentary,


Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, which chronicles Antonia and Jan Zabinski’s successful efforts to save three hundred Warsaw Jews during the Holocaust and God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America by Hanna Rosin a Jewish Israeli born writer who has been covering religious issues for the Washington Post for ten years.


2007:Israeli archeologists announced that they've stumbled upon the site of one of the great dramatic scenes of the Roman sacking of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago: the subterranean drainage channel Jews used to escape from the city's Roman conquerors. The ancient tunnel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem in the days of the second biblical Temple, which the Romans destroyed in the year 70, the dig's directors, archaeology Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, told a news conference. The channel was buried beneath the rubble of the sacking, and the parts that have been exposed have been preserved intact. The walls - ashlar stones one meter deep - reach a height of 3 meters - in some places and are covered by heavy stone slabs that were the main road's paving stones, Shukron said. Several manholes are visible, and portions of the original plastering remain, he said. Pottery shards, vessel fragments and coins from the end of the Second Temple period were discovered inside the channel, attesting to its age, Reich said.


The discovery of the drainage channel was momentous in itself, a sign of how the city's rulers looked out for the welfare of their citizens by organizing a system that drained the rainfall and prevented flooding, Reich said. The discovery "shows you planning on a grand scale, unlike other cities in the ancient Near East," said anthropologist Joe Zias, an expert in the Second Temple period who was not involved in the dig. But what makes the channel doubly significant is its role as an escape hatch for Jews desperate to flee the conquering Romans, the dig's directors said.


Historian Josephus Flavius indicated in "The War of the Jews" that numerous people took shelter in the channel and lived inside until they fled the city through its southern end. "It was a place where people hid and fled to from burning, destroyed Jerusalem," Shukron said. Tens of thousands of people lived in Jerusalem at the time, but it is not clear how many used the channel as an escape hatch, he said.The discovery of the channel was unintended. Shukron said excavators looking for Jerusalem's main road in the time of the Second Temple happened upon a small drainage channel. That discovery led them to the massive tunnel that archeologists say lies beneath that road. "We were looking for the road and suddenly we discovered it," Shukron said. "And the first thing we said was, 'Wow."' The icing on the cake, he said, is that archeologists now know in what direction the road lies. About 100 meters of the canal have been uncovered so far. Reich estimates its total length will approximate one kilometer, stretching north from the Shiloah Pool at the Old City's southern end to the Temple Mount. Archeologists think the tunnel leads to the Kidron River, which empties into the Dead Sea.


2008:  “A Friend In Deed” published today describes the little known story of the relationship of Lyndon Johnson and the Jewish people; a relationship that stretched from the Hill Country to Capitol Hill.


2008:The Leo Baeck Institute presents “Shadows in Paradise” a film that recreates the stories of the exiled German and Austrian composers and writers who fled the Nazi regime, hoping to make a living in the movie industry in Hollywood.


2008: “An exhibition, "Erfurt: Jewish Treasures from Medieval Ashkenaz," went on display at the Yeshiva University Museum of the Center for Jewish History in New York City” today.


2008: The first criminal charges were filed against the owners of the country’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, Agriprocessors, in connection with a May immigration raid at the plant.


2008:Following the filing of criminal charges against Agriprocessors, the Orthodox Union announced today that it would withdraw certification from the kosher meat company, the nation's largest, unless new management is hired. 


2008: Avigdor Levin Tel Aviv city official said today that a 215-year-old Jewish manuscript stolen from a Tel Aviv library a decade ago will be returned by the German library where it surfaced.


2009 (20th of Elul): Yahrzeit of Dr. Jacob Levin who, if the legend of the 36 Righteous Men is true, certainly qualified.  He will always be missed.  He will always be remembered.  He will always be loved.


2009: In Pittsburgh, PA, the local klezmer-jazz ensemble The Ortner-Roberts Duo kicks off the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh’s Opus Concert Series this year with a “High Holiday Klezmer Fest Kickoff” concert.


2009: Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review and the paper's Week in Review section, discusses and signs his new book, The Death of Conservatism, at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.


2009: A rare Hebrew manuscript written in 14th century Germany is going on display for the first time, just before the Jewish New Year, Israel Museum officials said today.  The text, called the Nuremberg Mahzor, is one of the largest surviving medieval texts in the world. Written in 1331 in Germany, the prayer book remains mostly intact - only seven of its original 528 leaves are missing. Officials said the 1,042-page manuscript will be on display at the Israel Museum starting next Tuesday, days before Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year holiday, which begins Sept. 18.


The book has 22 illuminations inlaid with gold and silver. The text includes one of the largest collections of handwritten Ashkenazi, or northern European, prayers and liturgical poems. About 100 have never before been published. Also, rabbinical commentary is printed in the margins.


The manuscript is one of the heaviest surviving texts from the period, weighing more than 57 pounds (26 kilograms). It probably took about one year to complete, said Michael Maggen, the head of the paper conservation laboratory at the Israel Museum. "Mahzor" is Hebrew for holiday prayer book. The Nuremberg Mahzor got its name from its home for more than 300 years - the Nuremberg municipal library in Germany. The manuscript was originally commissioned for private study and synagogue use by a Jewish patron and was most likely used by the Nuremberg community after 1499. Sometime during the 19th century, 11 leaves were removed from the prayer book by Napoleon's army, museum officials believe. The Israel Museum spent about six months restoring the text after it was stored for 50 years in the Schocken Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Salman Schocken, a German-Jewish publisher and book collector, acquired four of the missing leaves in the 1930s after he fled Nazi Germany. He received the Nuremberg Mahzor as post-World War II restitution in 1951 for property confiscated by the Nazis.


Six leaves remain missing, and one is in a private collection. The exhibition is the latest at the museum's Shrine of the Book, where the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient manuscripts are displayed.


2010: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was a prisoner of his security detail over Rosh Hashanah, unable to go to the nearby Great Synagogue in Jerusalem because of security considerations that would seriously have inconvenienced the other worshipers. So instead of going to hear the shofar on the holiday, the shofar came to Netanyahu, with Eli Yaffe, director of the synagogue’s choir, going to Netanyahu’s official residence to sound the shofar blasts so the prime minister and his family would fulfill the commandment.


2010: Michael Kinsley “joined the staff of Politico as one the publication’s first opinion columnist.


2010: Jacques Attali was appointed as a member of the directorate of the Musée d’Orsay.


2010: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres to wish them a happy Rosh Hashana. During their conversation, Abbas told Peres that [the Palestinian people] want a peace agreement with Israel and hope that Israeli inhabitants will be able to achieve a peace that will include all Arab nations.” Peres told Abbas that “No one is more fitting than you to achieve peace for your people and the entire region.” He also wished Abbas and Muslims well on Id al-Fitr.


 2010(1st of Tishrei, 5771): Rosh Hashanah 5771


2011: Steve Ross is scheduled to present a Special Cabaret Concert featuring songs by George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Noel Coward at the 14thJerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.


2011: Jack Weinstein, the Commander, Twentieth Air Force, Air Force Global Strike Command, and Commander, Task Force 214, U.S. Strategic Command was promoted to the rank of Major-General.


2011: The Gilad Hekselman Quartet is scheduled to appear at The Falcon in New York City.


2011: Rabbi Shira Stutman and Sheldon Low are scheduled to lead 6thin the City Shabbat in Washington, DC.


2011: Standard & Poor's Ratings Service announced it was raising Israel's credit rating today, citing Israel's response to a global recession. Israel's new credit rating is A+ "with a stable outlook


2011: An Egyptian protester pulled down the Israeli flag today at the Jewish state's embassy in Cairo, the second time in less than a month. A protester climbed the building, where the Israeli embassy occupies the top floor, and took down the flag, witnesses said.


2011: “About 100 people gathered in” Pushkin, “a suburb of St. Petersburg – believed to be the northernmost point where the Nazis implemented their plan to annihilate the Jews – to remember the brutal killings that took place here 70 years ago.” 


2012: The 2012 London Paralympics, in which a 25 person Israeli team has been competing, are scheduled to come to an end today. (As reported by Aaron Kalman)


2012: As the NFL kicks off its first Sunday slate games some of the Jewish owners and executives include Bob Kraft (Patriots), Marv Levy (Bills). Stephen Ross (Dolphins), Daniel Snyder (Redskins) as well as a cadre of players


2012: The Los Angeles Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf and The End of Men by Hanna Rosin.


2012: “Zaytoun” an “Israeli adventurer film directed by Eran Riklis premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.


2012 The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon and Domestic Affairsby Bridget Siegel. 


2012: The Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court sentenced four people today to between nine months and four years imprisonment for stealing Jewish ritual and holy objects worth approximately $1 million from the Great Synagogue of Milan.


2012: School was canceled for students in Beeresheba and Ashdod today after two Grad rockets were fired towards southern Israel from Gaza a little after 2 a.m. this morning. 


2013: In Rockville, MD, Temple Beth Ami is scheduled to host MK Rabbi Dov Lipman who will speak about “The Future of Religious Cooperation In Israel.”


2013 (5th of Tishrei, 5774): Seventy-seven year old documentary filmmaker Saul Landau passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)




2013: Traces of the wild polio virus were detected in Jerusalem’s sewage system, the Health Ministry announced today. (As reported by Ilan Ben Zion)


2013: “Finding Vivian Maier” a documentary about the photographer “executive produced by Jeff


Garlin” and co-starring Joel Meyerowitz premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.


2013: Today Hebrew University researchers announced the discovery of a rare trove of Byzantine-era gold and silver artifacts, the most impressive of which is a 10-centimeter solid gold medallion emblazoned with a menorah and other Jewish iconography. (As reported by Ilan Ben Zion)


2014: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum historian Edna Friedberg is scheduled to lead a discussion entitled “Some Were Wives, Some Were Mothers: Female Perpetrators during the Holocaust.”


2014: In Chicago, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is scheduled to honor Fern and Manny Steinfeld with the National Leadership Award at luncheon where Doris Kearns Goodwin is the featured speaker.


2014: “Today Israel  tested the latest upgrade to its "Arrow 2" missile defense system, in conjunction with the Missile Defense Agency of the US Department of Defense” without making any comment “how successful the test had been.” (As reported Yoav Zitun) 


2014: TCM Presents the Jewish Experience on Film. Tonight is the second in this series. Starts tonight at 6 p.m. with a movie about Eddie Cantor and lasts until 5 a.m. with Judgment at Nuremburg. For more see http://www.tcm.com/projectedimage/


2014: “The United States has no information indicating beheaded was "sold" to Islamic State militants by moderate Syrian opposition rebels, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on today. Sotloff family spokesman Barak Barfi told CNN last night the family believed Islamic State paid up to $50,000 to rebels who told the militant group the 31-year-old journalist had entered Syria.”


2014: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to host a trip the National Museum of American Jewish History that will included a tour of the exhibition “Chasing Dreams: Baseball and Becoming American.”


2015: “Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York is scheduled to fly to Washington, DC to lobby Congress to reject the Iran deal.”


2015: Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon “told a close meeting of about 20 young Likud party members” today “that the defense establishment knows who firebombed the Dawabseh home in the West Bank village of Duma that claimed the life of 18 month old Ali Dawabsha.


2015: Vice President Joe Biden said today that “officials in Washington plan to meet with Israeli counterparts to discuss how the U.S. can ensure Israel’s military advantage over its enemies.”


2015: Barry Fruendel’s “letter of apology” was posted today on the website of the Washington Jewish Week.



2015:  “Into the Light: The Healing Art of Kalman Aron” is scheduled to open at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.


2016: “Portugal, The Last Hope: Sousa Mendes’ Visas for Freedom” an exhibition sponsored by the American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to come to an end today.


2016: “Demon” a horror film based “on the Jewish legend of the dybbuk” is scheduled to open at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema.


2016: Rescue workers at the site of a collapsed garage in Tel Aviv tonight removed a fifth body from the rubble, four days after the four-story underground complex caved in, burying construction workers under a pile of sand and debris


2016: Temple Judah is scheduled to hold its first Musical Shabbat of the year featuring Shir Yehuda.


2016(6thof Elul, 5776): Sixty-four year old former New York Times executive Daniel H. Cohen passed away today. (As reported by Sam Roberts)



2017(18thof Elul, 5777): Parashat Ki Tavo;


2017: The Stephen Wise Free Synagogue is scheduled to host a Tot Shabbat.


2017: In Passaic, NJ, Congregation Ahavas Israel is scheduled to host its “End of Summer Ice Cream Kiddush.”


2017: Samuel Maoz’s “Foxtrot” won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival today. (As reported by Jessica Steinberg)


2017: In New Orleans, Hadassah is scheduled to host its “Free the Tatas” Disco Ball this evening.


2017: The Levins are scheduled to perform the Repairing the World Concert at Temple Beth Shalom in Hudson.


2018: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or special interest to Jewish readers including 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari and the recently released paperback edition of Thanks, Obama by David Litt.


2018: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to close at 2:00 PM today for Erev Rosh Hashanah


2018(29thof Elul, 5778): Erev Rosh Hashanah 5779; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/


 


 


 

This Day, September 10, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 10


 

134 CE: The great Talmudic sage, Rabbi Akiva, was taken captive by the Romans, and executed five days later in Caesarea, Israel. Rabbi Akiva had been a 40-year-old shepherd who could not even read the Aleph-Bet. One day, he came across a stone that had been holed out by a constant drip of water. He concluded: If something as soft as water can carve a hole in solid rock, how much more so can Torah -- which is fire -- make an indelible impression on my heart. Rabbi Akiva committed himself to Torah study, and went on to become the greatest sage of his generation, with 24,000 students learning under him at one time. The Roman authorities eventually arrested him for "illegally" teaching Torah. As he was being tortured, Rabbi Akiva rejoiced in fulfilling the biblical command to "love God with all your life." As he died, Rabbi Akiva uttered the words of Shema Yisrael. His self-sacrifice for Torah continues to inspire Jews till today.


http://www.aish.com/dijh/Tishrei_5.html


877: Birthdate of Eutychius of Alexandria, the Greek who wrote Nazm al-Jauhar, a history, of what some may consider of dubious accuracy that began with Creation and ran through the 10th century which included a description of the Great Revolt in 70.


1191: During the Third Crusade, King Richard., the Lionhearted, captured Jaffa but throughout the remainder of 1191 and into the summer of 1192, he was unable to realize his ultimate goal of recapturing Jerusalem. Richard was facing Saladin, the Muslim leader who readmitted the Jews to Jerusalem in 1190.  Richard would leave the Holy Land and end up in an Austrian dungeon. His brother Prince John would pillage the English people to raise the ransom; the Jewish people were a special target for the Richard’s avaricious brother who would one day become King of England.


1197: As “the Crusader city of Jaffa is being threatened by Muslim forces,” “Henry II, Count of Champagne and King of Jerusalem, died in Acre when he accidentally fell from a balcony.


1199(8th of Tishri): Maimonides wrote to Samuel Ibn-Tibbon, who as translating the "Guide to the Perplexed from Arabic into Hebrew.  The letter included advice on how to do this as well as plea that Ibn-Tibbon not undertake his planned trip from France to Egypt to visit him.  The distance was too great and he would be too busy since to see him for more than an hour since each day except Shabbat he must travel from Fostat to Cairo where he spends half a day ministering to the Sultan and his court.  Then he travels back to Fostat where he is besieged by Jews, Moslems, et al all seeking his medical skill and advice.


1337: In Deckendorf, Bavaria, there was an alleged host desecration.  This allegation brought wide spread violence to over fifty communities in Bavaria, Bohemia and Austria. Host desecration was right up there with blood libel accusations when it came to inciting Christians to violent attacks on Jews.  Since the host was symbolic of the body of Jesus, the desecration of the host was treated like a repeat of the alleged betrayal of Jesus by the Jews that is at the core of the Good Friday/Easter celebration.


1349: Jews who survived a massacre in Constance Germany were burned to death.


1487: Birthdate of Pope Julius III.  As far as Popes went Julius was not the worst of the lot.  He did allow the burning of the Talmud and other “harmful books.”  At the same time condemned the use of the “blood libel” and the forced Baptism of children without the consent of their parents.


1515: Pope Leo X, whose “pontificate was very favorable for the Jews in general and for the Jews of Rome in particular” “invested Thomas Wolsey” who would try to twist the laws of marriage found in Deuteronomy to gain Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine, “as Cardinal in England’s Catholic Church.


1553(2ndof Tishrei, 5314) Second Day of Rosh Hashana


1663: Letters of denization were issued to Jacob Lumbrozo, a Sephardic Jew who was the first of his faith to settle in Maryland.  Denization was a level below full citizenship but included a several rights including the right to buy and own real estate. 


1671: The Jewish community of Berlin was organized.


1691: Eighty-six year old English Biblical school Edward Pococke whose works included “the Porta Mosis, extracts from the Arabic commentary of Maimonides on the Mishnah, with translation and very learned notes”  as well as a series of English language commentaries of several of the Jewish prophets. passed away today.


1718:  The Collegiate School at New Haven, Conn., changed its name to Yale.  Yale, of course is noted for the fact that Hebrew is used in its crest. This was not because of Jews attending the school but because Hebrew was one of the languages used in the Biblical studies at the college. Elihu Yale, for whom Yale is named, also had a slightly risqué relationship with the Jewish people.  While serving in Madras, he had an affair with the wife of Jewish merchant who was a leading member of the community.  The relationship apparently was open and ongoing and produced a son.  [I’ll bet that’s something that the Eli don’t sit around talking about down a Mory’s.]


1725: Emperor Charles VI., named Issachar Berush Eskeles "Landesrabbiner" of Hungary, a position which had been occupied by his deceased father-in-law.


1768(28th of Elul, 5528): In Newport, Rhode Island, Aaron Lopez does not open his businesses today because of Shabbat.


1798(29th of Elul, 5558): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1829: Michael Jones married Hannah Simmons at the Great Synagogue today.


1832: In Surinam, a fire destroyed the village at Jodensavanne including the synagogue.


1839(2ndof Tishrei, 5600): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1839: Having returned to London “from his academic travels in Africa and the Middle East” Louis Raphael wrote to his sisters that he was glad to be home and that he would send them money by the next post.


1840(12thof Elul, 5600): In Rozhniatov, Yenti, the daughter of Yehuda Pinchas passed away today.


1847(29th of Elul, 5607): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1851: Ernest Oppenheim married Clara Harris at the New Synagogue today.


1852: The New York Times reported that Lionel de Rothschild, "that eminent Hebrew," is resigning from Parliament since he cannot take his seat.  "The Jewish Colossus has, as it said, come to the conclusion that the post of 'dummy representative' confers no credit on him while it is a decided disadvantage to the city" of London.


1854: Birthdate of American journalist Poultney Bigelow who during the 1890’s presented himself as an expert on “the persecution of Christian Jews” and who, unlike others, represented “the Czar as a kindly man overruled by fierce and venal bureaucrats.”


1855 (27 Elul 5615)Rabbi Sholom Rokeach, also known as the Sar Sholom (“minister of peace”), the first Belzer Rebbe passed away. Born in 1779, Rokeach’s father was Rabbi Elazar, a member of the Brody Kloise sages. His grandfather was Rabbi Elazar Rabbi of Brody until 1736, then Rabbi of Amsterdam. Rabbi Sar Sholom grew up as an orphan, in his uncle's home in the polish town of Skohl. This uncle, Rabbi Yissachar Dov Ramraz, his mother's brother, was the head of the Jewish law courts in that town. The uncle raised him, taught him Jewish tradition, and married his daughter Malka to him. In the town of Skohl he was influenced by Rabbi Shlomo (Flam) the Rebbe of Skohl (also known as Reb Shlomo Lutzker). Rabbi Shlomo was the personal writer and second hand of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezeritch, the successor to the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Chasidus. Since his uncle (and father in law) was opposed to Hasidus, Rabbi Sholom would secretly be let down the window by his wife, to learn at Rabbi Shlomo Lutzker's Beis Midrash during the nights. He composed several songs - most still sung by the Belzer Chasidim, including one tune, to "Tzur Mishaelo", sung during the Shaleshudes third ritual meal on the Sabbath, which is still popular today. Many of his speeches, teachings, writings and ideas, have been saved in an anthology named "Midbar Kadesh". He reigned as rebbe from 1817 till 1855. He was a disciple of the Seer of Lublin.”


1856: In London Adam and Marian Spielman gave birth to Sir Adam Spielman, the educator and children’s advocated who was the brother of Isador and Marion Spielman’



1857: Birthdate of Flora Langerman Spiegelberg, the "grand lady of the southwest frontier.”  Spiegelberg was born in New York City.  She met her husband while she was on a visit to German.  Willi Spiegelberg also was visiting from the United States. The couple married in the ReformTempleat Nuremberg in 1874 and then returned to America.  Willi and his brothers were successful merchants in Sante Fe, New Mexico.  Flora settled there and became one of the leaders of the frontier community, starting among other things, the first non-sectarian school. Although her husband with some other relatives had already established a prosperous mercantile business in Santa Fe, Spiegelberg, upon her arrival, found that she was only the eighth woman in town. Instead of giving into culture shock, Spiegelberg devoted herself to improving her new community. The success of her husband's store enabled Spiegelberg to put all her energy into community service. In 1879, she helped to establish the first non-sectarian school in Santa Fe, and the following year raised $1,000 from the Santa Febusiness community to purchase an acre of land for a new three-room schoolhouse. In addition, she ran not one but two religious schools: a Hebrew school on Saturdays and a Catholic Sunday school. Spiegelberg also created the first children's playground and garden in Santa Fe. In addition to all of her efforts on behalf of Santa Fe's growing community, Spiegelberg was also a moderately successful children's writer, and some of her work was broadcast on the CBS radio network in the 1930s. In 1937, she published Reminiscences of a Jewish Bride of the Santa Fe Trail, a collection of stories from her own life.


1858: The City Items column published today reported that “Yesterday was kept strictly holy by those of our citizens who profess the Jewish faith. The day, until sunset, was observed with fasting and prayer.  During the morning the Synagogues were all open and were thronged with worshippers.”  “The day was not a mere nominal Day of Atonement since “all the Jews’ stores in the city were closed.”


1858:Hermann Mayer Salomon Goldschmidt discovered Asteroid 54 Alexandria.


1860: “In Mstislavl, Russia, Meyer Ya’akov Dubnow  a lumber merchant” and his wife gave birth to


Shimon Meyerovich Dubnow who gained fame as the great Jewish historian Simon Dubnow whom the world could not be bothered to save so he was murdered in the cemetery at Riga by the Nazis.  Although he was talking to the Jews of the Riga Ghetto when he said Yidn, shraybt un farshraybt"' (Jews – write and record)” he was reminding us all of the age old admonish to Zachor –Remember, which is a good enough reason to try one’s hand at history, at any level.





1862: Rabbi Jacob Frankel of Philadelphia becomes the first Jewish chaplain in the United States Army.


1864: Philadelphian Michael Baer began his second enlistment in the Union Army today as a Second Lieutenant in Battery I of the 204th Regiment.


1864: Twenty-seven year old Philadelphia native Lyon Levy Emanuel, “the brother of Louis Manly Emanuel” who had been serving since 1861 was promoted to the rank of Major while serving with the 82nd Regiment.


1866(1stof Tishrei, 5627): Rosh Hashanah


1871: It was reported today that The New Era, “a Hebrew magazine” that the days are long gone when the Jews could be thought of as forming their own nation.  Living for so long among other nations of the world, they have identified with the nations in which they live.  Thus Jews living in England are Englishman; Jews living in Germany are Germans, etc.  When nations go to war, Jews find themselves fighting each other which is in violation of what had been a core value – loyalty.  As to the establishment of modern Jewish state, “the idea of a restoration of a Jewish kingdom is an exploded theory and is now rejected by the great majority of our people.”


1871: In “Glories of the Temple at Jerusalem” published today, Reverend Buddington described the findings of the Excavations of Jerusalem project paid for by the Palestine Expedition Fund.  The project began in 1868 and was completed in 1870 under the leadership of Charles Warren and Henry Brittles. Among other things, the British explorers found evidence of the burning of Jerusalem, “the seal of Haggai” and pavement dating from the time when Jesus was supposed to have been in the city.


1871: Miss Isabel Burton’s account of her recent visit to Hebron was published today.  She described how the Moslems had co-opted the Cave Macpalah by building a mosque on the site and the limitations on placed on Jews trying to visit the site.


1874(28thof Elul, 5634): Thirty-five year old John Harris passed away today following which he was buried in Natchitoches, LA.


1874: It was reported today that Herr and Frau Heilbut had recently celebrated their Diamond (60th) Wedding Anniversary in Hamburg, Germany.  The Municipal Council had closed the area where the festivities were taking place to all vehicular traffic.  The celebration included services at the local synagogue, serenades by two choral societies and congratulatory visits from the Chief Burgomaster and the Director of Police.  Among the gifts were a “a magnificently bound prayer-book with a large diamond set in the cover presented by the Empress of Germany” a long with a persona note from her Imperial Majesty. [The Jews of Hamburg had only recently won full civil rights as German citizens.  This outpouring of official recognition gave a great deal of hope and comfort to the over 12,000 Jews living in a city whose Jewish citizens had included Moses Mendelsohn.]


1875: James Koppel Gutheim “was engaged as a guest rabbi to lead the inaugural services” for Temple Beth El’s new building in San Antonio, Texas. 


1875(10th of Elul, 5635):Rebekah Gumpert Hyneman a noted authoress from Philadelphia, PA passed away today.She was a regular contributor to The Masonic Mirror, published a volume of Tales for Children, and wrote essays descriptive of the women of the Bible and the Apocrypha. She also published a number of poems under the titles The Leper and Other Poems and The Muses.”


1876: “‘Becky Sharp’ On Stage” published today described a dramatization of Vanity Fair that had been performed in San Francisco, CA. (Thackeray’s novel contained several references to Jews, none of which were particularly faltering. Rhoda Swartz, a classmate of Becky’s is described as being the daughter of German Jew who was a slave owner.  Of a group of Jews who are among the attendees at a bankruptcy auction she say “Look at them with their hooked beaks…They’re like vultures after a battle.” As described by Marcus Ballenger)


1877: “The Jewish New Year” published today describes the differences in the way in which “Orthodox and Reformed” Jews observe the just completed holiday.  It points out that “the Jewish Church has in later years been somewhat divided on minor points, though” it is “thoroughly united in all material matters.”  For example one group considers it proper to use an organ which the other prohibits its being played.  One group observed the holiday for one day and blew the ram’s horn on Saturday; the other group only blew the ram’s horn on the second day of the holiday.


1877(3rd of Tishrei, 5638): Tzom Gedaliah


1878: “Joshua Stampfer came to Jaffa to supervise the found of Petach Tikhav, the first Jewish farming settlement latter referred to as ‘the mother of moshavot.’”  (255 green)


1878:Moses Ottinger and Amelia Gottlieb Ottinger gave birth to their son Albert Ottinger a lawyer who played a prominent role in New York politics. A Republican, Ottinger ran for Governor of New York in 1928.  He lost to a Democratic Party Ticket on which Herbert Lehman, who was also Jewish, was running as Lieutenant Governor.


1880: Simon Rosenheim, a Polish Jew went on trial today charged with having set fire to the Hester Street tenement house in which he lives.


1880: Birthdate of baseball pitcher Barney Pelter, the native of Farmington, MO, known as “the Yiddish Curver” who began his and ended his career with two American League teams that no longer exist - the St. Louis Browns who became the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Senators who became the Minnesota Twins.


1881(16thof Elul, 5641): Forty-eight year old Samuel Raphel, the husband of Anna Nathan Raphael passed away today after which he was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Natchitoches, LA.


1881: Based on information that first appeared in the Jewish World it was reported today that “Russia is at last taking active steps to suppress any further outrages” aimed at the Jews.


1882:`The Congress for the Safeguarding of Non-Jewish Interests, which opened in Dresden, Germany, was the first international assembly to promote anti-Semitism. This meeting is considered to be a major milestone in the development of anti-Semitism.  For the past two centuries, (see item above for an example) it appeared that Europe was slowly, if gradually, rejecting anti-Semitism and moving to admit Jews as full participants in legal, commercial and social affairs.  This meeting represented a major move backwards and, being held in Germany, which was considered a center of European culture made the shift seem even more significant.  Finally, the anti-Semitism that this Congress represented was more along "racial" lines - the pitting of the Aryans against the Semites.  Over time, this mentality would find its ugliest manifestation in the Final Solution.


1883: Communal elections which were supposed to have been held in Agram today were postponed following an outbreak of violence in which several houses occupied by Jews were attacked by a mob that did not disperse until two in the morning after the hussars fired several volleys in its direction.


1884: Law enforcement officers scoured the countryside around Montana, PA looking for the Polish miners who had attacked them when they attempted to arrest the miners after they had stolen the packs belonging to a Jewish clothing merchant whom they had refused to pay for the clothing they had ordered.


1885(1stof Tishrei, 5646): Rosh Hashanah


1885: Birthdate of Vienna native “Emilie ‘Emmy’ Heim” the singer and music teacher who lived in England before settling Canada.



1885: In New York, Rabbi Henry S. Jacobs delivered a sermon based “on the text in Isaiah: ‘For God is our King, and He will save us.’”


1885: In Alpena, Michigan, for the first time a professional cantor led services.


1886: Birthdate of Paul Burlin, a noted modern and abstract expressionist painter.


1886: Three days after he had passed away, Samuel Samuel, the son of Lazarus and Rachel Samuel and the husband of the former Sarah Brandon with whom he had two children – Lean and Rosa – was buried today at the Sawnsea Jewish Cemetery in Wales.


1886: Lawrence Barrett played the role of Shylock in tonight’s performance of “The Merchant of Venice” at the Star Theatre. Barrett’s portrayal stands out because unlike others he does not portray the Jew as loathsome caricature and portrays “the dignity of the representative of a shamefully abused race.” 


1887: Birthdate of Vienna native Rudolf Michael who gained game as American architect Rudolph Michael Schindler who help changed the landscape of mid-twentieth century Los Angeles.



1887: It was reported today that the term “That beats the Jews” when used in New York City is a “complimentary exclamation” that is used when a person accomplishes something that is particularly clever. As can be seen from the large number of businesses bearing German-Jewish names, Jews are increasingly successful in the world of commerce.  In the public schools, Jewish children are almost half of the graduates and they excel in the field of mathematics.  “The Jews are the great patrons of classical music and the dramatic arts” and their absence is felt when performances fall on their holidays. (Editor’s note – This complimentary description of New York Jews stands in stark contrast to the exclusionary movement that began in Saratoga Springs and the fearful response to the wave of eastern European Jewish immigrants which was beginning to swell the city’s population.)


1888: Birthdate of Israel Abramofsky, the native of Kiev who settled in Toledo, Ohio where he became a leading artist of the 20th century.




1889: Sixty-four year old Samuel Cox, who while serving as a Congressman from Ohio spoke out against the treatment of the Jews in Russia, describing the Jews, in a speech given in the House of Representatives as a “broken-hearted and scattered race” upon whom “the Czar of all the Russia” uses “enormities of his rule” to persecute this people “with a lineage unrivaled for purity, a religious sentiment and ethics drawn out of the glory and greatness of Mount Sinai.”


1889: Two days after he had passed away, 68 year old Alexander Aria, the father of Judith, Morris, Charles, Sarah Marie and David Aria was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1889(14thof Elul, 5649): Twenty-seven year old British poet and novelist Amy Levy, the first woman who attended Cambridge University and  whose friends included Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl Marx and Oscar Wilde passed away today.




1890: In Prague, Rudolf Werfel, “a manufacturer of gloves and leather good” and Albine Kussi, “the daughter of a mill owner” gave birth to the first of their three children, author and playwright, Franz Werfel.  a Jewish Czech who wrote in German and  was a contemporary of such famed intellectuals as Franz Kafka and Martin Buber.  Werfel was one of the intellectuals brought to the United Statesby American diplomat and righteous gentile, Adrian Frey.  Werfel died in California in 1945.  Two of his most famous American efforts were The Song of Bernadette and Jacobowsky and the Colonel, the film version of which featured Danny Kaye and Kurt Jurgens.




1890: Birthdate of New York City native and Columbia educated pharmacist David Irving Cohen, the husband of Bessie Cohen who made his home in Jersey City, NJ.


1890: In Kiev, Fanny Shafferman and Henry Finkelstein, “a distillery worker studying to be a rabbi” gave birth to Rose Finkelstein who gained fame as Rose Finkelstein Norwood the American labor leader.


1891: The trouble in connection with the 100 Russian Jews who arrived on September 8 is no closer to being resolved today than it was on the day they landed.


1891: Birthdate of Sam Born, the Russian born American “candy man’ who invented a machine that “inserted sticks into lollipops and created a candy company still thriving today.



1891: Four days after he had passed away, Russian born Alfred Monarch Kennard, the husband of the former Eva Eskell with whom he had four children was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1891: The platform of the New York Republican Party published today includes a “12thplank” that calls for the intervention of the national government to end “the cruelties and persecutions practiced upon the Jews in Russia” that “are abhorrent to the sense of justice of this people.”


1891: “Rabbi Soneschein Resigns” published today described the unexpected departure of Rabbi Solomon Soneschein as the leader of Temple Israel in St. Louis –  a change attributed to ill-health that resurrected reports of “scandalous stories…that have never been proved.”  [Editor’s note - His health could not have been all that bad since he went to serve as Rabbi of B’nai Yeshurun in Des Moines Iowa.  He and his wife Rosa, who was quite prominent in her own right, separated in 1891 and he divorced her in 1893. This personal misfortunes and frailties do not diminish the accomplishments of either of them.}


1891: The New York Times publishes an editorial calling for strict enforcement of laws designed to keep Russian Jews out of the United States.  After quoting statements by Lord Rothschild and Mr. Seligman that none of the funds of the late Baron Hirsch were used to settle Russian Jews in the United States, New York’s “paper of record” stated that “unlike their co-religionist from other countries they (Russian Jews) fail altogether to assimilate with our people or in any sense to become Americanized, but remain a class apart.”


1892: Mr. Thomas Sherman, the U.S. Consul in Liverpool, UK offered described the measures being used to keep sick immigrants from traveling to the United States including the fumigation of luggage belong to Russian Jews because of problems with small-pox.


1893(29thof Elul, 5653): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1893: “Festival of Rosh Hashanah” published today described solemn nature of the New Year which Jews throughout the world will begin celebrating tonight as 5654.


1894: The funeral was held this afternoon at Cypress Hills Cemetery for Mrs. Abraham Greenspahn of Williamsburg but her husband would later come to believe that the body buried belonged “to a Christian woman” and was not his wife.


1892: It was reported today that Samuel Ulmar is the only surviving member of a congregation started 34 years ago by French speaking Jews form Alsace


1894: “First American Bible” published today described preparation and printing of the Bay Psalm Book in 1640 including the reliance on Bishop Bedell to provide an accurate translation from the Hebrew – a task he was able to perform because he had studied the language with “Rabbi Leo, the chief chachan of the synagogue in Venice.”


1894: Based on information that first appeared in The Denver Daily News, “Dream of the Ages” published today described “the recent and sudden growth of the Jewish population in Palestine” in which 100,000 Jews have entered that land in the last seven years “as the beginning of the realization of the dream of centuries, the first practical step toward the restoration of the Jews to their ancient lands.”


1895: Birthdate of Melville J. Herskovits, “inventor of African-American Studies.”


1895: English author and historian Sir John Robert Seely, author of Ecce Homoand Natural Religion who believed that “the Hebrew Scriptures express in poetic form…the spirit of modern science” passed away today.


1895: Birthdate of Edwin R. Thiel the Seventh Day Adventist minister and archaeologist who The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, “a comprehensive work” that establishes the chronology of the Kings of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms.


1896: After more than a year of imprisonment on Devil’s Island where his jailers went out of their to treat him in the most abusive manner, a totally “depressed” Alfred Dreyfus “stopped keeping his diary, writing that he could not foresee on what day his brain would burst.


1897: In “A Jewish State Impossible” published today Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, the leader of the Reform Movement dismissed Zionist Congress held at as “a novelty, a gathering of visionary and impracticable dreamers who conceived and acted a romantic drama” and then “applauded it all by themselves.”


1897: Birthdate of Estera Guttmannova who was living in Prague when she transported to the Ujazdow labor camp where she was murdered.


1897:(13 Elul 5657): At the age of seventeen Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn married a distant cousin, Rebbetzin Nechama Dina Schneersohn, daughter of Rabbi Avraham Schneerson of Chişinău, son of Rabbi Yisroel Noach of Nizhyn, son of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn


1898: It was reported today that approximately ten per cent of the 350,000 Jews living in “Greater New York” belong to the 32 synagogues and temples in the city.


1898: In Paris, the Ministerial Council convened to hear General Émile Zurlinden, the newly appointed Minister of War’s account and recommendations on the Dreyfus case adjourned early because Zurlindent, who was an honorable man did not feel he had all of the information.


1898: Temple Beth-El is reported to be making plans for providing religious services for Jewish soldiers serving in the local military camps during the upcoming High Holiday season.


1898: “Palestine Closed To Jews” published today provided the official Turkish declaration which stated “The entrance into Palestine is formally prohibited to foreign Israelites and consequently the imperial Ottoman authorities have received order to prevent the landing of immigrant Jews in the province.”


1899: The day after his conviction, Captain Dreyfus signed the Application to the Court of Revision.


1899: On the day after his conviction, Captain Dreyfus told his wife “I am not uneasy regarding myself as I shall soon be free; but I think of you and my poor children.  They will be branded as the children of a traitor.” (Dreyfus had been sentenced to ten years but based on the time he had already served he thought he would be released in October)


1899: Evangelist Dwight L. Moody addressed a mass meeting at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn where he and other speakers expressed their displeasure with the verdict.  Moody said that Dreyfus “is suffering for his race. 


1899: In the Williamsburg section of New York, Reverend Roland S. Dawson responded to the Dreyfus verdict by telling worshippers at the Ainslie Street Presbyterian Church that “Justice and right are paralyzed in France before an unscrupulous military despostism.”


1899: John Most addressed a mass meeting of Anarchist at the Thalia Theatre which was held to protest the verdict in the Dreyfus Case.  Most said that “he had not come to shed tears over the verdict because tears would not do any good.”


1899: In Atlanta, GA, Mrs. David Eichberg received a letter today from the wife of Captain Dreyfus in which she said her husband could not accept a sword from the American people for which Mrs. Eichberg had been a leading fund-raiser.


1899: At the Baptist Temple in Brooklyn, Reverend Cortland Myers denounced the Dreyfus trail as persecution where the French have decided “Better that an innocent man go to prison and death than that the nation suffer.”


1899: In responding to the Dreyfus verdict, Dr. Madison C. Peters of Bloomingdale Church “took for his text the words from Isaiah, “Justice standeth afar off, for truth is fallen in the street and equity cannot enter.”  In part he said, “France has gone mad…The civilized world stands astounded that in the closing days of the nineteenth century the bloodhounds of anti-Semitism should be let loose upon an innocent man.”


1899: “At The Play and With The Players” published today described the offerings for this season’s dramatic entertainment in New York including the performance of three dramas about Jewish life – “Ben Hur,” “The Ghetto” by Henrik Hyermann and “Children of the Ghetto” by Israel Zangwill – which will appear at The Broadway Theater


1900: Birthdate of Itzik Feffer, the Yiddish poet who asa military reporter with the rank of colonel and was vice chairman of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee but who was murdered by Stalin after the war when the dictator’s anti-Semitism trumped the patriotism of Soviet Jews.


1904(1stof Tishrei, 5665): Rosh Hashanah


1904: Birthdate of Max Shachtman Polish-born American leftist who began as an associate of Lenin and evolved into anti-Soviet Socialist.  A spokesperson of the downtrodden, he espoused the cause of rights for African-Americans in the 1930’s when the issue was barely a blip on most advocates of social change. He passed away in 1972.


1906: Twenty-two year old Yiddish actor Sholem Perlmutter, a native of Galicia arrived in New York today.


1909(25thof Elul, 5669): Mrs. Hane Schilling passed away today


1909: Dr. Sigmund Freud received an honorary doctorate from Clark University where he is delivering five guest lectures.


1910: Birthdate of Chicago native Harris Krakow who gained famed as heavyweight boxer King Levinsky.


1911: In Russia, Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov rushed from St Petersburg to Kiev to provide additional false evidence to ensure the conviction of Mendel Bellis.


1911: After purchasing the territory in Clarion, Utah, Benjamin Brown, “a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant seeking to establish an Agro-Industrial cooperative like the one in the Jersey homestead” and twelve original colonists "chosen for their mechanical skills, experience with horses, and ‘seriousness,’” arrived at the settlement today


1911:  Delegates of the Mizrachi Party meeting in Berlin decided to secede from the main Zionist organization.


1913: In Denver, Colorado, Harry and Sarah Wilner Weinstock gave birth to Isadore Weinstock, the husband of Helen Weinstock.


1914: As the Battle of the Marne sputtered to an end, the Germans thwarted Joffre’s plans by holding the high ground “on the north bank of the Aisne” which would all but guarantee that the war would not end by Christmas but would grind on with all the evil implications that meant for Europe in general and the Jews in particular.


1915(2ndof Tishrei, 5676): Second day of Rosh Hashanah


1915: For a second day, New Year’s services in New York are held in unconventional venues including both the Lexington Avenue and Bronx branches of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association as well as the building at 110th Street near Lenox Avenue, home to the Young Women’s Hebrew Association.


1915: According to reports published today the Council Ministers “has discussed the program” of reforms presented by the new majority in the Duma which included “complete cessation of religious persecution and removal of restrictions on the Jews.”  (Editor’s Note-they would still be discussing this two years later when the winds of Revolution blew through Russia.


1916: It was reported today that among the contributions received by the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War were $20 from Anshe Chesed in Cleveland, $60 from Rabbi J.N. Rosenberg and $45 from H.G. TAnanebaum.


1916: After leaving New York aboard the Oscar II on August 17 and stopping in Berlin for two or three days Abram I. Elkus the newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to Turkey is scheduled to arrive in Constantinople today.


1916: Birthdate of Haim Landau, the Cracow native who made Aliyah in 1935 after which he became a leader of the Irgun and held several ministerial posts while serving as an MK.


1916: As of today, it was reported that The Joint Distribution Committee of the Funds of the American Jewish Relief Committee for Jews Suffering through the War “has received from committees and individuals in various parts of the country to date more than $4, 600,000.


1918: Today, “the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company issued a statement denying a published reported that it had discharge 500 of its Jewish employees because they had remained away from their work to observe the Jewish holidays on last Saturday and Sunday” although “it was admitted that twenty of the men had lost their employment for this reason.”


1919: Birthdate of Harry Schwartz, the New York native who became “an editorial writer for The New York Times from 1951 to 1979 and a specialist in Soviet and East European affairs who wrote and lectured extensively on the cold war and later on health care.” (As reported by Robert D. McFadden)


1919: Foreign Minister Eduard Benex signed Czechoslovakia’s own version of the Minorities Treaty which Czech President Jan Masaryk immediately incorporated in to the Czech Constitution.  “Henceforth, in common with others of Czechoslovakia’s ethnic communities, Jews were entitled to a full panoply of linguistic, communal and educational rights.”


1920: Today’s issue of the American Hebrew includes Otto H. Kahn’s “summary of his new book, Our Economic Problems of today and Gustav Blum’s column on “The Coming Theatrical Season” in which “he proves that the leading motives of Jewish stars on the English stage are far from monetary.”


1920: It was reported today that construction of nine cottages, the administration building gymnasium and power building for the new Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum in San Francisco is well under way “and that it is estimated that by next spring all of the structures will have been completed.”


1920: It was reported that 23 year old Israel Maizlish, who came to this country ten years ago and who “graduated last June from M.I.T. receiving both the B.S. and M.S. degrees” has assumed his new duties as an “instructor in mathematics and science at the University of Iowa” where he will continue his studies to earn a doctor of philosophy degree.


1922: Memorial services are held at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in the Bronx, NY for the late Colonel Harry Cutler, a leader of the America’s Jewish community whose positions included serving as executive director of the Jewish Welfare Board.


1922: “The Mother’s Club” of Beth El Congregation of the South Hill “presented the first Sefer Torah to the Pittsburgh congregation” today.


1923(29th of Elul, 5683): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1923(29thof Elul, 5683): Seventy-three year old Ukrainian born German author Mazimilian Bern died of starvation in Berlin today.


1923: Birthdate of award winning Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt.



1923: In Beckum, Germany, “Alfred and Hilda Ostermann gave brith to Helmut Ostermann who gained fame as Uri Avneri, Israeli author and politician who has traveled the political spectrum from membership in the Irgun to left-wing peace activist.



1924(11thof Elul, 5684): Twenty-two year old actress Eva May, the daughter of Mia and Joe May died today apparently of a self-inflicted wound.


1924: Leopold and Loeb were found guilty of murder.  The sons of two wealthy ChicagoJewish families killed the son of a third Jewish family.  Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney saved them from the hangman.  They were each sentenced to life in prison.  The story became the source for the novel (and a movie of the same name) called "Compulsion."


1926(2nd of Tishrei, 5687): Rosh Hashanah Second Day


1926: Jewish policeman and firemen in Newark, NJ are to be excused from active duty because of Rosh Hashanah as ordered by the Director of Public Safety.


1927: “7th Heaven” a silent film produced by William Fox with a screenplay by Benjamin Glazer was re-released in New York today.


1933: “The Concordat between Nazi Germany and the Holy See which guaranteed the rights of the Catholic Church under Hitler which had been signed by the Pope in July “was ratified and in force” as of today.


1934(1stof Tishrei, 5696): Rosh Hashanah


1934: At Lynbrook, NY, Rabbi Harold I Saperstein delivered a sermon at Temple Emanu-El entitled “The Call To Battle” which “contained a powerful endorsement of the boycott policy” which was intended to bring the Nazi regime “to its knees through economic stranglehold” – a policy supported by Rabbi Wise and the American Jewish Congress but opposed by the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith.


1935: Kurt Weil and his wife moved from Nichols, Connecticut to the St. Moritz Hotel in New York City.


1935: In Nuremberg, opening of the seventh Nazi Party Rally with a motto of Party Rally of Freedom, an allusion to Hitler’s renunciation of the Treaty of Versailles.


1936: It was reported today the Professor Horace M. Kallen, chairman of the World Jewish Congress Commission to Combat Anti-Semitism has said that “there is a great difference between the old anti-Semitism of the pre-war kind and the new anti-Semitism” because “the attack on the Jew now is based upon the nation that the world is divided into two races, the Aryan and the human race, and that the former is destined be master of all mankind.”


1936: In a speech given at Nuremberg during the Nazi Congress, Minister of Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels “declared that ‘almost exclusively Jews sit in the Soviet Government’” while asserting that “bolshevism constituted ‘a far-flung attempt by Jewry to obtain power over all the nations.’”


1937: The Palestine Post reported from Warsaw that a large number of Polish Jews were brutally attacked and beaten during the Jewish New Year period. According to the Post' special correspondent, the Polish government was to be blamed for being cognizant of, if not officially sympathetic to, the present wave of the anti-Jewish persecution. Yes, anti-Semitism was part of the Polish landscape before the German invasion of 1939.  And it lasted after the defeat of the Germans in 1945.


1937: The Palestine Post reported that the Palestine question figured fourth on the agenda of the League of Nations Council's meeting in Geneva. Discussions, however, of the problems involved were expected to take most of the council's time and attention.


1937: In Boston, Dr. Louis K. Diamond and Flora Kaplan gave birth to Pulitzer Prize winning author Jared Mason Diamond.


1937: The Palestine Post reported that Arab leaders from Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Iraq, met at Bludan, Syria, to discuss Arab-British relations. All of them were highly critical of the Royal (Peel) Commission's findings and the suggested partition of Palestine.


1938: Conservative Rabbi Israel H. Leventhal of the Brooklyn Jewish Center and Reform Rabbi Louis I. Newman of Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan issued a joint statement urging American Jews to help raise funds for the Jews of Poland by contributing to the American Committee Appeal.  Orthodox rabbis had already issued a similar appeal.


1938: The Third Betar Congress opens in Warsaw, Poland. “Betar is the Zionist revisionist youth movement established 1923, by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Betar is an acronym for ‘Brit Trumpeldor,’ and is also the name of Bar Kochba’s ancient fortress.


1939: Today, Sydney Simon Shulemson enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He graduated from flight school in 1942. He joined RCAF 404 Squadron in Wick in Scotland, flying a Bristol Beaufighter. Shulemson downed a German flying boat on his first sortie. He pioneered techniques for rocket attacks on Axis ships in the North Atlantic. After the war, Shulemson located aircraft and recruited pilots for Israel's growing Israeli Air Force.


1939: After ordering 50 Jews to repair a bridge, General Halder shot them all in their synagogue. For some Halder is some kind of "hero."  An anti-Nazi, he was part of an aborted attempt at a coup against Hitler prior to the war.  Despite his high rank in the German Army, he was imprisoned because he was alleged to have been part of the plot to kill Hitler in July, 1944.  But as this event during the early days of the Nazi invasion of Poland shows, the supposed anti-Nazi hero could serve Hitler and be a major player in the extermination of the Jews.  This episode also raises questions about the lack of involvement of the German Army in the Holocaust.


1939(26thof Elul, 5699): Sixty year old Austrian born American conductor and violinist Hugh Riesenfed who composed the scores for numerous movies passed away today.



1940: Rabbi Yaakov Ben Zion Mendelson “made an impassioned plea” at the convention of Knesset ha-Rabbanim (the Assembly of Hebrew Orthodox Rabbis of America and Canada) “to all American Jewry for the support of war refugees.”


1940: Ida Haendel, the British violinist who had been born in Chelm began her recording career for Decca today.  (Guess all Chelmites weren’t fools as the portrayed in the folk tales.)


1941: In Queens, NY, Leonard Gould “a court stenographer and a WW II veteran” and his wife Eleanor gave birth to American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould.



1941(18thof Elul, 5701): Fifty-four year old Pittsburgh native Jacob Stacel, who began serving as claims adjuster and real estate in the Department of Public service in January, 1916 and who was the husband of Minnie Stacel passed away today in Cleveland, Ohio.


1941(18thof Elul, 5701): Two days after, “the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court” had sentenced him to “death on the accusation of engaging in anti-Soviet agitation, 56 year old Fritz Noether, the Jewish mathematician who had sought sanctuary in the Soviet Union after the rise of the Nazis in his native Germany “was shot at the Oriel Prison” today.


1941: Pitcher Harry Feldman made his major league debut with the New York Giants.


1942: The Allies carry out an amphibious landing at Majunga, north-west Madagascar, to re-launch Allied offensive operations in the Madagascar Campaign. Madagascar played an odd role in the history of The Final Solution.  Prior to the war, anti-Semitic elements in the Polish government investigated the possibility of deporting Jews to the island.  The plan was revived by some of Nazi leaders after the defeat of France.  The infamous Stern Gang actually bought into this as a temporary solution for the survival of the Jews of Europe.  Of course, in reality, only extermination of the Jews fit the Nazi plan for victory in its “War Against the Jews.”


1942: In Belgium, foreign Jews are seized in Antwerp. They are sent to a camp in Mechelen, Belgium, and then to forced labor in northern France.


1942: Yehuda Joakob “Edi” Weinstein escaped from Treblinka and returned to his home town of Losice, Poland where he tried to warn the surviving Jews of the fate that awaited him.  Weinstein would survive the war and chronicle his life story in Quenched Steel: The Story of an Escape from Treblinka. The November 8, 2007 edition of the Jerusalem Post would describe the 83 old Weinstein as being the last known survivor of Treblinka II.


1943(10thof Elul, 5703):Riva (Rebecca) Bernstein and Levie (Louis) Hillesum the parents of Esther (Etty) Hillesum died today either during their transport to Auschwitz or in the gas chambers immediately upon their arrival at the German Death Camp.


1943: Nine month occupation of Rome by the Nazis begins today.


1943: Birthdate of Michael Dougall Bell who served two terms as Canada’s Ambassador to Israel first from 1990 to 1992 and again from 1999 to 2003.


1943: Jewish youths attack German troops at Miedzyrzec, Poland, killing two. Five Jews are shot.


1944: Fifty-two Jews hiding from the prior two days of SS reprisals at Topolcany, Slovakia, were discovered. They were brought to an open field, forced to dig deep ditches and then shot. Among the dead were six young children


1945: “New Year Prayers for Peace Are Said” published today took note of the fact conservative and orthodox Jews ended their observance of Rosh Hashanah yesterday “with the prayer that the Jewish year 5706 would see recent social and scientific gains put to work to assure a prosperous and peaceful world” a sentiment echoed by Reform Jews who ended their observance the day before.


1945(3rd of Tishrei, 5706): For the first time since 1939, Jews of the world observe Tzom Gedaliah


1946: “The French State sentenced” Paul Touvieer who had murdered “seven Jewish hostages at Rillieu-la-Pape” in 1944 “to death in absentia for treason and collusion with the Nazis.”


1946: Birthdate of history professor Shlomo Sand, the Austrian born son of Polish Holocaust survivors who became a professor of history at Tel Aviv whose unconventional views can be seen in several of his works including The Invention of the Jewish People.


1946: Birthdate of Kiev native Semyon Fishelevich Gluzman the psychiatrist and human rights activist who was imprisoned by the Soviets for his political beliefs.



1947: Third baseman Al Rosen made his major league debut with the Cleveland Indians.


1947: “Bombs Found on Jewish Ship: Battle Leaders Sent To Jail” published in the Glasgow Herald wrote today “Security fears seemed justified after the Jews were removed when a homemade bomb with a timed fuse was found on the Empire Rival .It was apparently rigged to detonate after the Jews had been removed, the cables indicate."


1947: “Bomb Found on Jewish” published today in the Glasgow Herald described the resistance by Jewish refugees aboard the Empire Rival led by Mordechai Rosman and Paul Bergman to being placed in DP camps in Hamburg by the British after they had been turned away from landing in Palestine.


1948: Birthdate of Nimrod Dori, the native of Kibutz Hulata who perished at the age of twenty aboard the Israeli Submarine Dakar.


1950: According to reports published today, the government of Israel will be issuing a stamp at harvest time picturing Stahveet, a cow which has produced 100,000 liters of milk, which may be a world’s record.


1950: “A Native Returns” published today described the how Josef Von Sternberg has resuscitated his career by directing “Jet Pilot, his first film in technicolor and taking on the filming of “Macao” a blockbuster with a $1,400,000 budget.


1951:The executive body of the World Jewish Congress will begin its annual meeting at Geneva today. Described by its members as the most representative body of world Jewry, they will discuss and try to formulate a policy on a number of matters of pressing interest to Jewish groups throughout the world.  “The resurgence of Germany as a leading independent power” is one of the major issues on the mind of many of the attendees.  The attendees hope to prepare a position paper to be circulated among the leading Western nations expressing Jewish concerns which include the failure of Germany to accept responsibility for War Crimes, failure to build in self-guards against a resurgence of anti-Semitism and any attempt to pay reparations to those who suffered at the hands of the Germans.  Rabbi Israel Goldstein is leading the U.S. delegation.  Dr. Nahum Goldman is serving as presiding officer, a position he had filled at the recently completed Zionist Congress that had met in Jerusalem.


1951: JTA reported that the Jewish organizations of Argentina have brought to the attention of the Federal Ministry of Interior the wounding of a Jew in the nearby city of Avellaneda in what they describe as a serious outbreak of anti-Semitism. A 23-year-old Jew, Jacob Chermenitzky, was on his way to work early yesterday morning when he was accosted by three men waving pistols. First they made the young Jew shout "Viva Hitler" and "Death to the Jews" then they shot him at close range. Cherminitzky was seriously wounded


1951: “Saturday’s Hero,” the film version of The Hero, a novel by Millard Lampell who co-authored the script with Sidney Buchman and featuring the first score by Elmer Bernstein was released in the United States today.


1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett told reporters, while leaving for Luxembourg to sign the Israeli-German Reparation Agreement, "that without complacency I can say that this journey gives expression to the change which came about in the Jewish people with the establishment of the State of Israel, and the achievements which the state means for the Jewish people."


1952: After six months of negotiations, the Claims Conference and the German federal government signed an agreement embodied in two protocols. Protocol No. 1 called for the enactment of laws that would compensate Nazi victims directly for indemnification and restitution claims arising from Nazi persecution. Under Protocol No. 2, the German government provided the Claims Conference with DM 450 million for the relief, rehabilitation and resettlement of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, according to the urgency of their need as determined by the Conference. Agreements were also signed with the State of Israel.


1952: Among those involved in the negotiations that led to the signing of the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany today was Benjamin B. Ferencz, a Hungarian born American lawyer, veteran of WW II and an investigator who gathered information for the trials of Nazi leaders.


1953:  Birthdate of actress Amy Irving.  Irving is the sister of director David Irving and the wife of Steven Spielberg.


1956: Birthdate of Israel archaeologist Eilat Mazar, the third in her line which began with her grandfather Benjamin Mazar.


1956: Following his graduation from the University of Iowa in 1955, Gene Wilder was drafted into the United States Army today.


1957: Pitcher Barry Latman made his major league debut with the Chicago White Sox.


1959: Charles Miller Metzner, the former “counsel to the General Jewish Council received his commission today to serve “on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.


1961(29thof Elul, 5721): Erev Rosh Hashanah – Jews prepared to celebrate the New Year for the first time during the Presidency of JFK.


1964: In Nottingham, England, Esther Aline (née Lowndes-Moir) and Rev. Dr Victor de Waal, who became the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral gave birth to British artist Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal, the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes which “tells the story of his family, the Ephrussi, once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty, centered in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, and peers of the Rothschild family” who” lost almost everything in 1938 when the Nazis aryanized their property” and the postwar attempts to recover at least some of what the Nazis had stolen.



1966: In London, The Destruction in Art Symposium chaired by Gustav Metzger, came to a close.


1969:“Shocked and angered by news of the raid” on the Red Sea Coast which the Israelis called Operation Raviv, “Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser suffered a heart attack.”


1969: Designated hitter Ron Blomberg made his major league debut with the New York Yankees.


1970: Birthdate of Jeff Marx, the Florida native whose musical talents gave us the Tony Award winning “Avenue Q.”


1971(20th of Elul, 5731): Ninety-four year old judge, philanthropist, and political activist Joseph Meyer Proskauer, a founding partner of Elkus, Gleason & Proskauer passed away today.



1972(2nd of Tishrei, 5733): Rosh Hashanah Second Day


1972: Under the auspices of the Committee on Justice and Peace of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, “more than 100 rabbis through the” United States are scheduled to begin “a five-day liquid fast” ‘to protest the Munich massacre as well as the war in Vietnam.”


1972: “Another Round in An Infernal Spiral” published today



1972: “The Planes’ Message: An Eye For an Eye” published today discusses Israel’s response to the Munich Massacre.



1974: Birthdate of Sarah Danielle Goldberg “an actress in the popular television series “7th Heaven.”



1975: Today, “in an interview with a Kuwati newspaper, President Sadat delivered an attack on the Russians who ‘failed’ us in the year of decision.


1977(27thof Elul, 5737): Parashat Nitavim


1977(27thof Elul, 5737): Sixty-five year old New York native Abraham L. Kaminstein, the former “register of copyrights in the Library of Congress” and winner of “the Richard Strauss Medal from the German Society for Performing and Mechanical Rights in Music” who was the husband of Barbara Kaminstein passed away today.



1977: Broadcast of the fifth and final Nixon Interviews with David Frost which were produced by Marvin MIntoff who was president of Frost’s production company.


1977: After having been released in the United States and Finland, “Getting Straight” starring Elliot Gould and featuring Jeannie Berlin (the daughter of Elaine May) and John Rubinstein (the son of pianist Arthur Rubinestein) was released in Spain today.


1980: “The Exterminator” a film about Vietnam veteran directed and written by James Glickenhaus was released in the United States today.


1982(10thof Elul, 5742): Eighty-three year old advertising pioneer Lawrence Valenstein passed away today. (As reported by Suzanne Daley)



1983(3rd of Tishrei, 5744): Shabbat Shuvah


1983(3rdof Tishrei, 5744): Seventy-eight year old Polish born labor Zionist and Yiddish author Shmuel Perlmuter passed away today at Bat Yam.



1983(3rd of Tishrei, 5744): Swiss born physicist and 1952 Nobel Prize winner Felix Bloch passed away today.



1986: Showtime broadcast the first episode of the sitcom “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” today.


1987: Leon Markovitz completed three years of services as Mayor of Cape Town, South Africa.


1988:Elazar Shach, a leading Haredi Rabbi who seemed to have quarreled with or disapproved of most Jewish leaders including the Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson wrote a letter today forbidding debate with Rav Adin Steinsaltz because he is a heretic.


1993: Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival of “Life According to Agfa,” an Israeli film directed by Assi Dayan.


1993: “True Romance” a “dark comedy featuring Michael Rapaport and Saul Rubinek with music by Hans Zimmer was released in the United States today by Warner Bros.


1993: First broadcast in the long-running television series “The X-Files” starring David Duchovny.


1994(5thof Tishrei, 5755): Shabbat Shuva


1998: The International Puppet Festival which provided a “a rare revival of the E.Y.”Yip” Habrburg musical “Flahooley” opened today in New York.


1999: Two months after opening the United States “Eyes Wide Shut” based on a novel by Arthur Schnitzer, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick who co-authored the script with Frederic Raphael featuring Sydney Pollack as Victor Ziegler was released today in the United Kingdom.


1999: Ten months after opening in the United Kingdom “B. Monkey” directed by Michael Radford who co-authored the script as well was released today in the United States.


2000: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories by Amy Bloom, The Head Game: Baseball Seen From the Pitcher's Moundby Roger Kahn,Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identityby Israeli historian Omer Bartov, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injusticesby Elazar Barkan, Dreams of Being Eaten Alive: The Literary Core of the Kabbalahby David Rosenberg and Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitressby Debra Ginsberg.


2000: Radio personality and commentator Scott Simon married Caroline Richard. They are raising their two daughters as part of what “they consider to be a Jewish family.”


2002(4th of Tishrei, 5763): Ninety-year old Louis Pollock, whose wife Marian had passed away in August, passed away today.


2003: At a banquet hosted by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Kerala Tourism Minister, K.V. Thomas gave Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a gift that “contained replicas of the Copper plates from the `Magna Carta' of the Jews of Kochi, which has the oldest synagogue outside Israel.”


 


2003: In Saskatchewan, Canada, the Rural Municipality of Willow Creek designed Beth Israel Synagogue and its cemetery as a municipal heritage site. The synagogue had been built by Jewish immigrants who came to Canada from Lithuania via South Africa and established the Edenbridge Hebrew Colony.  The colony was part of the attempts to settle eastern European Jews in areas outside of the major municipal centers.


2004(18thof Elul, 5764): Parashat Ki Tavo


2005:  The Jerusalem Post reported that replicas of the Sarajevo Haggadah - a 600-year-old Jewish manuscript - are to be sold to the public. Jakob Finci, the head of the Jewish community in Bosnia, said that a total of 613 replicas of the document are to be printed and made available by next Passover. It was decided to start with 613 replicas because there are 613 mitzvoth.


2006:  The Sunday New York Times featured a review of Jennifer Gilmore’s debut novel, Golden Country that details the complex history of two intertwined families: the Blooms and the Brodskys. Both are Jewish, both touched with genius and dishonesty, as they strive toward the twin goals of material success and social acceptance in America. Haaretz featured a review of Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution by Laurence Rees which the British Book Awards named "History Book of the Year" for 2006.


2006: “For Your Consideration,” a film about the fictional filming of a 1940’s movie entiteld “Home for Purim,” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.


2006: In an essay that appeared today in The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung German historian Arno Lustiger criticized “Günter Grass's treatment of his Waffen-SS membership in his latest book.”


2007: A lawyer representing Neta Shoshani, a student at the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem, sent one last letter to the Ministry of Defense requesting all documents related to the event that took place in Deir Yassin.


2007: In a moment of great irony, Haaretzreported that at a time when a German television network had fired a popular news woman who had praised Nazi values in a book she had published, Jewish residents of Petah Tikvah were enduring a two year long reign of terror by neo-Nazi, skinhead gangs whose membership comes from teenage immigrants from the former Soviet Union.


2007: In “Little Trends, Big Impacts” published today U.S. New & WorldReports, an American magazine,summarizes some of the findings found in Microtrends by Mark Penn including a heading styled “Pro Semites” which reports that “when Americans were asked how they feel about religious groups in the United States, Jews rated the highest of any, with a net positive of 54 percent…As love for Jews spreads, so do Jewish customs.  Non-Jews are having bar mitzvahs.  Americans consume over 8 million pounds of matzo per year – a sickening amount if divided only among the nation’s 6 million Jews.


2007: The New Republic features a review of The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedlander.


2008:Neal Karlen, noted journalist and author, discusses his book, The Story of Yiddish: How a


Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews at the U of Minnesota Bookstore in Coffman Memorial Union.


2008:The American Sephardi Federation presents the screening and discussion of “The Law Aliyah from Yemen” and “About the Jews of Yemen: A Vanishing Culture” - two films about the Yemenite Jewish Community.


2008: Today Gina “Gershon appeared in a video on funnyordie.com, parodying former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, titled "Gina Gershon Strips Down Sarah Palin" which she followed with "Gina Gershon Does Sarah Palin 2"


2008: The inaugural Library of Congress Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Writing of Fiction will be conferred upon bestselling author Herman Wouk, author of The Winds of War and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Caine Mutiny, at the library's Thomas Jefferson Bldg., Special guests William Safire, Martha Raddatz and Jimmy Buffet are among those who will read from Wouk's work, while Wouk himself will read from his unpublished literary diaries.


2009:Rich Cohen discusses and signs Israel Is Real: An Obsessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History at Politics and Prose Bookstore


2009: At Tulane University, the Jewish Studies program begins its Fall Colloquium and Film Series.: The *Colloquium is devoted to the subject of “Cultural Judaism: Experience, Concepts and Rival Perspectives”The first lecture of the series presented today by Ronna Burger is entitled, “"In the Wilderness: Moses as Founder and Legislator"


2009:A class-action lawsuit accusing a Los Angeles Jewish cemetery of dumping remains to make room for new interments was filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court claims that Eden Memorial Park, one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in the United States, instructed groundskeepers to “secretly break concrete vaults with a backhoe and remove, dump and/or discard the human remains, including human skulls, to make room for new interments.” According to the complaint, the cemetery management “took considerable steps to conceal their fraudulent actions by threatening employees and witnesses with retaliation and the loss of their jobs.” As many as 500 graves may have been affected over the course of 15 years, CNN reported. Service Corporation International, the largest owner of cemeteries and funeral homes in the United States, was accused by the state of Florida of similar allegations in 2003 in another Jewish cemetery. It settled with the family members of the interred whose bodies were desecrated for $100 million.


2009(21stof Elul, 5769): Ninety-nine year old Lou Bender, depression-era Columbia University basketball star, passed past away today. (As reported by Vincent Malliozzi)



2009: Cass Sunstein was confirmed by Senate as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.


2010(2nd of Tishrei, 5771): Rosh Hashanah II


2010: At the 67th Venice International Film Festival, premiere of Barney’s Version, the cinematic treatment of the novel of the same name written by Canadian author Mordecai Richler.


2010:‘Ahead of Time’ is scheduled to open at New York’s Angelika Film Center


2010:A Kassam rocket fired into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip exploded in the Sha'ar Hanegev Regional Council area this morning. No injuries or damage were reported in the attack.


The rocket marked the fourth such attack on southern Israel from Gaza in the last two days since the Rosh Hashana holiday began.


2010:At a news conference held today, University of Tennessee men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl “acknowledged that he had lied to NCCA investigators looking into recruiting violations at the Knoxville school.


2010(2nd of Tishrei, 5771): Eighty-year old advertising executive Joyce Beber, co-founder of Beber Silverstein & Partners and promoter of Leona Helmsley’s business ventures, passed away today.  (As reported by Douglas Martin)



2011: Renaud Capucon and Yefim Bronfman are scheduled to perform Beethoven’s Violin Sonata no.5 in F major, op. 24 Spring at the 14th Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.


2011: The Daniel Ori quintet is scheduled to play two sets featuring arrangements from their upcoming album “Emuna.” Ori is a native of Kfar Saba.


2011:Israel sent a pair of military jets into Cairo at dawn today to evacuate its embassy staff after six members had been trapped in the embassy overnight by thousands of protesters who invaded the building and tossed documents from the windows.


2011:In a televised statement tonight, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the violent riots outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo last night, during which a mob demolished the security wall surrounding the embassy and stormed the premises, forcing the Egyptian commando to evacuate six Israeli Embassy employees that were stranded inside the building in a special rescue operation. "We are acting along with the Egyptian government to quickly return our ambassador to Cairo," Netanyahu noted, stressing that "Israel intends to adhere to the peace treaty with Egypt."


2011:Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan today slammed US President Barack Obama, claiming he did not take interest in the Turkish-American citizen who died on board the Mavi Marmara during the 2010 IDF raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla.


2012: At the Toronto International Film Festival, premiere of a “Late Quartet,” a simply marvelous must see movie directed and co-produced by Yaron Zilberman, with a script by Seth Grossman and Yaron Zilberman.


2012: EMET is scheduled to host a noon time lecture entitled “11 Years After 9/11: What Went Wrong With American Policy?”  in Washington, DC.


2012(23rdof Elul, 5772): Eighty-six year old Holocuast survivor Eli Zborowski who founded the American and International Societies for Yad Vashem passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)



2012: Deploying military force against Iranian nuclear sites too early or without the United States' approval could ultimately be detrimental in preventing an Iranian bomb, former head of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin said today.


2012:Following a string of "Price Tag" attacks in the West Bank over the past few weeks, Israel Police are set to launch a new unit that will help investigate such crimes, Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich said today.


2102: A French Canadian adaptation of BeTipulis an Israeli television drama revolving around the personal and professional life of an Israeli psychologist, Reuven Dagan entitled "En thérapie" was shown for the first time on Canadian television.


2012: Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin called for the government to postpone continued construction of the separation barrier, during a visit to Gush Etzion today.


2013: MK Rabbi Dov Lippman and David Makovsky are scheduled to take part in a discussion entitled “Secular and Religious Jews in Israel: How to Shape a Better Future” at the JCC in Rockville, MD


2013: In Fairfax, VA, the JCCNV Special Needs Committee hosts a book club meeting that will discuss Touch of the Top of the World” A Blind Man’s Journey to Climb Farther Than the Eye Can See by Eric Weihenmayer.


2013: “Conference to Mark the 70th Anniversary of the Creation of the United Nations War Crimes Commission in 1943” co-hosted by  the Weiner Library is scheduled to open in London.


2013: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present “It’s a Thin Line: The Eruv and Jewish Community in New York and Beyond”


2013: Details of a deal to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international control are highly murky, Knesset foreign affairs chief Avigdor Liberman said today, warning that the plan could potentially serve the interests of the Assad regime. (As reported by Stuart Winer)


2013: A leaflet distributed today by the Fatah-affiliated Al- Aksa Martyrs Brigades called for launching terror attacks against Israel as of this coming Friday. The group called on all its “units and sleeping cells” to start launching attacks against “the Zionist enemy.” It said that Palestinians should regard Friday as a “green light from our consciences to all our units and sleeping cells” to launch terror attacks against Israel. (As reported by Khaled Abu Toameh)


2013: Publication of Wilson, a biography of the 28th President of the United States Woodrow Wilson by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Andrew Scott Berg


2014: Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman is scheduled to speak on “All the World: Universalism, Particularism and the High Holidays at Temple Emanu-El’s Skirball Center.


2014: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocuast Education is scheduled to host a screening of “American Jerusalem: Jews and the Making of San Francisco” followed by a Q & A by Professor Ellen Eisenberg.


2014: Friends and family are scheduled to celebrate the birthday of Rabbi Avrohom Blesofsky, the Lubavitch Leader of Iowa City.


2014: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host “Abraham Sutzkever: The Power in Poetry Lecture”


2014: At the University of Connecticut, the Center For Judaic Studies is scheduled to sponsor a “Yiddish Tish.”


2014: “Two weeks after the 50-day Israel-Hamas conflict ended, the Military Advocate General Corps has ordered an investigation into five cases, ranging from high-profile airstrikes to a simple case of alleged theft, a senior IDF officer said today.” (As reported by Mitch Ginsburg)


2014: “President Reuven Rivlin, who drew criticism before becoming Israel’s president for broadsides against non-Orthodox Jewish streams, told a group of Conservative Jews today that Jews are “all one family.”


2015: A special “shiva service” for Murray Wolfe of blessed memory, beloved husband of Charlene Wolfe, is scheduled to be held this evening in Cedar Rapids, IA.


2015: In London, The Jewish Museum is scheduled to host Judith Kerr “who will share the real-life stories behind her words and pictures.”


2015: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to host a “Book Talk” with the subject being Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis by Patrick Henry.


2015: The National Football League is scheduled to kick-off its 2015 season when owner Robert Kraft’s New England Patriots, led by his son President Jonathan Kraft square off against the Pittsburgh Steelers whose most famous Jewish player may have been Randy Grossman, nicknamed the “Rabbi” who helped his team win four Super Bowls.


2015: Thanks in part to the efforts of New York State Senator Todd Kaminsky, the National Grid announced a reversal of its policy and said it would not reinstate fees for disconnecting and reconnecting gas lines – a practice that had been beneficial to his constituents following Hurricane Sandy.


2015: “On Transience” featuring the works of Friderike Heuer is scheduled to open at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.


2016(7thof Elul, 5776): Parashat Shofetim and the anniversary of the Bar Mitzvah of Shelly Lubar,Z"L


2016(7thof Elul, 5776): Sixty-eight year old Eddie Antar, the creator of “Crazy Eddie Electronics” passed away today. (As reported by Niraj Chokshi)



2016: ZviDance which “exists to share with audiences the choreographic vision and movement vocabulary of Israeli-born Artistic Director, Zvi Gotheiner” is scheduled to perform an excerpt from “COUPLING” at Joe’s Pub.


2017(19thof Elul, 5777): Grandparents Day


2017(19thof Elul, 5777): Sixty-nine year old DC Comics creator Leonard Norman Wein passed away today. (As reported by Neil Genzlinger)



2017: Nadav Argaman, the head of the Shin Bet security service said today that “the security service has noted a significant increase in terrorist activities in the wake of July’s Temple Mount crisis.”


2017: Henry “Hank” Lewin is scheduled to tell the story “of his parents, Nora and Joel Lewin, who were married in Kovno, Lithuania, and endured separation and several concentration camps to survive the Holocaust” at the Breman Museum in Atlanta.


2017:”Bogdan’s Journey, a heartbreaking account of the pogrom that took place in the town of Kielce, Poland in July 1946 is scheduled to premiere in Manchester, UK


2017: The Jewish Children’s Regional Service (a charity that really delivers) is scheduled to host its annual Channukah-Wrap-A-Thon in Metairie, LA.


2017: In “Nicole Krauss: By the Book” this popular author answers several questions while explaining that she “prefers to read classic novels on the plane” because “twelve hours in economy is not the moment to gamble on a book.”



2017: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host a screening of “The Last Waltz,” the Martin Scorsese documentary that captures the final concert of the Canadian-American musical group The Band which was organized and promoted by Bill Graham.


2017: The Yeshiva University Museum is scheduled to present a “Paper-Art Workshop for Rosh Hashanah” facilitated by guest artist Marna Chester.


2017: Slichot Tours from the Tower of David to the Western Wall is scheduled to begin tonight.


2018(1st of Tishrei, 5779): Rosh Hashanah – 5779 לשׁנה טובה



 


 


 


This Day, September 11, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 11

 
1526: After the Turkish Army had defeated the Austrians and seized the city of Buda, Sultan Suleiman I entered the city.  Some of the Jews had remained in the city and before the Sultan arrived, they met with Ibrahim Pasha before whom they humbled themselves and begged to be spared.



1526: When he arrived at Buda today, Suleiman was handed the keys to the city by Joseph B. Solomon who presented the monarch with “lavish gifts” for which he was ‘rewarded with relief from the poll tax (jizya) that was normally levied on Jews under Ottoman rule as ‘protected’ people.”


1553(3rdof Tishrei): Two days after copies of the Talmud were publicly burned in Rome, Jews observed the Fast of Gedaliah.


1620: In Frankfort, Moses Bacharach, the son of Mendel Bacharach and the grandson of Isaac Bacharach passed away today.


1683: Battle of Vienna began as an army of European Christians led by King Jan III of Poland fought to end the Ottoman siege of the Austrian metropolis that had begun in July.  The defeat of the Ottomans was the “high water mark” of Moslem conquests in Europe.  There are those who date the beginning of the slow decay of the Moslem dominated world from this event.  There will be those who contend that this event was the impetus for choosing 9/11 as the date to blow up the TwinTowersin 2001.  With the exception of Holland, Jews were doing better in the land of the Ottomans than they were in Christian Europe.  For example, the Ottomans had provided a home the Jews who were expelled from Spain. However, as Ottoman power was receding, Jews enjoyed a growing amount of freedom as economic and social reform took hold in different parts of Western Europe.  Whether or not the shift in power marked by this was “good for the Jews” is up for the debate; the important thing is that it took place and had a profound impact on the general society as well as the Jewish component.


1771: Birthdate of Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer who “noted the presence of Jews in the region of Timbuktu” having been told “by an Arab he met near Walata of there being many Arabic speaking Jews in Timbuktu whose prayers were similar to the Moors.”


1779(1stof Tishrei, 5540): Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat


1789:  President George Washington appointed Alexander Hamilton as the first Secretary of the Treasury.  Hamilton’s parentage is a little murky to say the least. He was born out of wedlock reportedly to a Jewish woman and received his early education from Jews before moving to the North American mainland. He would be the first in a long line of Jews who would play a major role in U.S. government financial policies.


1798(1st of Tishrei, 5559): Rosh Hashanah


1803: Birthdate of Léon Gozlan, the native of Marseille who gained fames as a novelist and playwright.


1811: Louis Kofman married Rose Elkin in the Great Synagogue today.


1817(1stof Tishrei, 5578): Rosh Hashanah


1823:  Fifty-one year old David Ricardo, one of the most influential of the classical economists, passed away.  Born in Londonin 1772, Ricardo was the third of seventeen children in a Sephardic Jewish family that immigrated from The Netherlands to England just prior to his birth. At age 14 Ricardo's joined his father at the London Stock Exchange. Ricardo rejected the orthodox Jewish beliefs of his family and eloped with Quaker, Priscilla Anne Wilkinson, when he was 21. His father was so unhappy with this that he abandoned Ricardo and never spoke to him again. Around the same time Ricardo became a Unitarian.


1824: Birthdate of Jakob Bernays the “German philologist and philosophical writer” who served as the chairman of classical philology at the newly founded Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau.


1836(29thof Elul, 5596): Jews prepare to celebrate Rosh Hashanah for the last time during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson.


1839(3rdof Tishrei, 5600): As the United States struggled to deal with an economic crisis that had begun in 1837 Jews observed Tzom Gedaliah


1843(16thof Elul, 5603): Seventy-three year old businessman and philanthropist Lazarus Gumpel passed away in Hamburg.


1845: As signs of the blight that would lead to the Great Famine in Ireland continued to appear the Freeman's Journalreported on "the appearance of what is called 'cholera' in potatoes in Ireland, especially in the north. (The famine had little impact on Ireland’s comparatively small Jewish population but it provided an opportunity for Jews in England led by Baron Rothschild to come to the aid of the suffering, primarily Catholic populace of the Emerald Isle.


1847(1st of Tishrei, 5608): Rosh Hashanah


1847: Birthdate of August Seligman, the wife of Theobold Epstein and the mother of mathematician Paul Epstein.


1848: Baron Jozsef Eotvos, Hungarian statesman and who supported the emancipation of the Jews completed his service as Minister of Education of Hungary.


1848: As of today, there were “71 Israelites in Barbados” who led by Edward A. Moses who served as “Parnasss” and who supported a Sunday School staffed by “Mrs. Judith Finize, the wife of Abraham Finzi, Mrs. Sophia Daneils, the wife of Samuel Elias Daniels, Mrs. Sarah Lobo, the wife of Daniel Moses Lobo, Miss Clara Carvalho and Miss Belle Elkin,” who later passed away in London,


1852:Reports reached the United States that Marchand Ennery, the Chief Rabbi of Paris, had passed away in August.


1858(3rdof Tishrei, 5619): Shabbat Shuvah


1858(3rdof Tishrei 5619): Hette Steckler, a native of Rogasen, Prussia, the wife of Jackson, CA. merchant Charles Steckler passed away today.


1859: Estra (Therese) Wiesner and Rabbi Jonas Wiesner gave birth to Moritz Wiesner.


1860: The Jewish population of Baltimore must have reached a size where it was noticed by the general public.  A report published today describing how George Proctor Kane, the Chief Marshall of Police is strictly enforcing the Sunday closings laws states that "Cigar stores, lager-bier saloons, Hebrew establishments and all such are closed."


1860: Forty-three year old German historian Sigfried Hirsch who like his cousin and fellow historian Theodore Hirsch converted to Christianity passed away today.


1863: It was reported today that a group of 600 women and children who supposedly had husbands and fathers serving in the Confederate Army stormed through Spring Hill, Alabama carrying banners demanding “Bread or Blood.”  A Jewish merchant who was attempting to protect his store was arrested by the police and beaten for his efforts.


1864: Birthdate of Marc-André Raffalovich, the brother of Arthur and Sophie Raffalovich and “a French poet and writer on homosexuality” who converted to Catholcism.


1865(20thof Elul, 5625): Captain Leopold Rosenthal of the Fifth Cavalry who had been serving since August of 1861 and was wounded at Fort Magruder in Virginia in 1862 died today. 


1866(2ndof Tishrei, 5627): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1868: “Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, the founder of American Judaism and Rabbi Samuel Adler were the featured orators at today’s dedication of the new Temple Emanu-El Sanctuary on 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue which took place Erev Shabbat.


1869: Harper's Weekly featured a cartoon about a movement to oust August Belmont as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Belmont was the German born Jewish financier who opened a private bank in the United States before the Civil War.  He was a former employee of and a close associate of the Rothschilds.  He was also a power in the Democratic Party both before and after the war.


1872: Samuel J. Pietrowski, a Polish Jew and the proprietor of a dry-goods store in Key West, Florida, was arraigned at the Tombs in New York City on charges of bigamy. The complaint was filed by Bertha Pietrowski who claimed that Samuel had married her twenty four years ago in Poland.  She claimed he moved to Leeds, UK where married and had five children before moving to the United States with his second family.  Bertha claimed she had borrowed the money to come to United States where she discovered Samuel’s new life as well as the fact that he was worth “several thousand dollars. [Unfortunately, there were many instances of men coming to America and deserting the wives and families they had left behind.]


1874(29th of Elul, 5634): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1874: “The Hebraic New Year,” a column published today reported that the year 5635 on the Jewish calendar begins tomorrow with the celebration of Rosh Hashanah.  The article described the solemnity of the holiday but also highlights the differences in the celebration among the Reform and the Orthodox.  The Reform now celebrate the holiday for only one day and their shortened service includes music played by an organ.


1877: “The Russian Army of Invasion” published today described miserable the conditions of Czar’s forces as they move forward to fight the Turks. The Russians are addicted to alcohol which is supplied by people in “long gabardines,” a disparaging term for the Jews who are making a fortune off of their monopoly.  The article paints a picture of suffering Russian soldiers being “poisoned by spoiled provisions” supplied Isaac and Jacob whose “Jewish purses can pay their protectors from their ill-gotten gains.”


1878: In Washington, DC, “the Hebrew Committee” has collected $4,608 to aid those in the Deep South suffering during the current Yellow Fever Epidemic.


1879: It was reported today that Prince Gregorie Stourdza has arrived in Bucharest to assume the leadership of all the parties opposed to the Jews receiving full rights of citizenship in Romania.  The proposed party is modeled after the American Party also called the “Know-nothings” a nativist political party that enjoyed some success in the 1850’s.


 1880: It was reported today that on the day Simon Rosenheim allegedly set fire to the tenement in which he was living the place had received an anonymous letter containing these words: “To get insurance Polish Jew’ll set fire to his place…on Monday or Tuesday.”  The police arrested Rosenheim because the fire took place on Tuesday; he was a Polish Jew; and he lived at the tenement house described in the note. (Not exactly CSI material)


1881: In “What Germans Talk Of “ published today, Andrew White the President of Cornell and the former American Ambassador to Germany who has just returned from that country responded to a question about the “anti-Jewish crusade in Germany” by saying that “The worst of the trouble is over.  The sober second though has come and the Emperor of Germany has declared himself as opposed to the Jewish proscription.” After talking about the prominent role Jews play in finance and business, White said the Emperor thought “they were the best of his subjects” and that Bismarck has come around to that point of view.


1881: The Novoye Vremya reported from St. Petersburg “that it is proposed to appoint local commissions to consider the Jewish questions in places where the Jews predominate.


1882: The Chevry Bennei Bachemenim Anschel Schofchatchow, a Jewish charitable and benevolent society was incorporated today in the state of New York.


1882: It was reported that one of the railway lines from the coast of Egypt to Cairo passes by the ruine of Tel-el-Yahoodeh also known as the Mound of the Jews. (This is probably a refrence to Tel el-Yehudiyah  -Mound of the Jewess – which is supposed to cover the ruins of the Temple of Onais, a Jewish place of worship located in Helipolois.  For more see http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0015_0_15110.html


1882: In Dresden, Reverend Adolf Stoecker presided at the opening of the first Anti-Semitic Congress


1882: Birthdate of Paul Bekker, the native of Berlin the Director of the Wiesbaden Opera who was “deprived of his citizenship” in 1936 because “officials said ‘he favored Jews…”


1885: Three days after he had passed away, 89 year old Joseph Gutteres Henriques, the father of Frederick and Alfred Gutteres Henriques was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1886(11thof Elul, 5646): Fifty year old Ludwig Lowe, whose business ventures included the armaments company Loewe & Company and who was a member of the Reichstag passed away today.


1886: In Charleston, SC, Rabi David Levy officiated at the wedding of Julia H. Dessauer and Morris Hornik, of Kingstree, SC.


1886(2ndof Tishrei, 5627): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1887: Four days after she had passed away. 31 year old “Helen Maria Salomons, the wife of Henry H. Salomons and the daughter of Barnet S. and Philippa Phillips was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1887: Based on information that first appeared in the Times of London, it was reported today that the “persecution of the Jews” has been revived in several parts of the Russian Empire. Besides being subjected to riots and attacks in outlying provinces, Jews in St. Petersburg have been interrogated by the police in an attempt to intimidate them so that they will not conduct business in the capital city.



1891: The Jewish Colonial Association is officially established by Baron de Hirsh. He donated two million pounds and incorporated the Association in London. His plan was to remove three million Russian Jews and settle them in agricultural areas in other countries. This was one of several movements to further Jewish settlement in Palestine before the birth of the Zionist movement.


 


                                                       OR


 


1891:The Jewish Colonization Association (JCA, in Yiddish ICA) was created today by Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Its aim was to facilitate the mass emigration of Jews from Russia and other Eastern European countries, by settling them in agricultural colonies on lands purchased by the committee, particularly in North and South America (especially Argentina).Colonies were funded within the United States in southern New Jersey, Ellington, Connecticut (Congregation Knesseth Israel), and elsewhere. A Canadian Committee of the JCA was established in November 1906 to assist in the settlement of the thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Russia, and to oversee the development of all the JCA settlements in the country


1891: A critique of the platform adopted by the Republicans at their convention in Rochester dismissed the plank calling for an end calling for an end to the “cruelties and persecutions practiced upon the Jews in Russia” as “a rather awkward bid for the votes of a class” which is meaningless since the Democrats “will hardly” take “the opposite side.”


1891: In Brooklyn, U.S. Federal Judge Benedict “listened to additional arguments in the cases of the nineteen Polish Jews “ who are trying to overturn the decision of the Immigration Commissioner to deny them entry into the United States.


1893: The New York Times estimated that there are 225,000 Jews living in New York City.1893(1st of Tishrei, 5654): As Americans suffer through the Panic of 1893 (which had begun in January and was the worst economic crisis the country would suffer until 1929), Jews observed the first day of Rosh Hashanah


1893: New Yorkers who did not know that today was the Jewish New Year “were puzzled” by “the large number of stores and factories that were closed throughout the city.”1895: In City Court, Judge Botty ordered the release of Samuel Lustbader, a kosher butcher who had been imprisoned following his failure to pay a judgment obtained against him by default in a slander suit brought by one of his competitors.


1895: It was reported today that during the month of August the United Hebrew Charities received contributions totaling $10, 702.66 and disbursed $7, 513.12 to the needy.  During this period, the charity received 2,805 applications for relief reflecting the needs of 9,350 people.


1896: Birthdate of Israel Mandelkern, a member of the Yiddish Theatrical Alliance. (Not to be confused with author by the same name who wrote Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America.


1897:  It was announced from Odessa that the late Baron Hirsch's plant to colonize the Argentine Republic with Jews from Russia has been abandoned in favor of the establishment of Hebrew schools in Russia.


1898: Adath Jeshurun, which had been worshipping at 125 East 112th Street, dedicated its new synagogue at 112 East 110th Street in Harlem.  The congregation which is made up of Orthodox German Jews is using a facility that was previously home to the Portuguese Jews of Harlem.


1898: Herbert Louis Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel and Beatrice Miriam Samuel, Viscountess Samuel gave birth to Edwin Herbert Samuel, 2nd Viscount Samuel who colorful career including serving in the Jewish Legion and serving as the last Director of the Palestine Broadcasting Service.


1898: In Chicago, Dr. Isaac M. Wise laid the cornerstone for the building that would The Reform Congregation of Isaiah Temple which was designed by the Jewish architect Dankmar Adler.


1898: It was announced today that any Jewish soldiers at Camps Wikoff or Black or who are in New York on leave or furlough should contact Phillip Cowen, publisher of The American Hebrew or William Mitchell, superintendent of the YMHA if they wish to attend services celebrating the Jewish New Year that begins on the evening of September 16.


1898: Corporal Lichtenstein of New Orleans, who had been serving with Company K of the   1st Louisiana Volunteer Infantry was “discharged today on a certificate of disability.”


1899: Reverend Henry Morgan Stone is scheduled to officiate at the funeral of James B. Eustis who served as U.S. Ambassador to France during the first court martial of Captain Dreyfus and who had spent the past summers writing a review of the case which he was on the verge of finishing at the time of his death.


1899: Approximately 25 to 30 businessman and clergy including Rabbi Rudolph Grossman, Rabbi Joseph Silverman and Father Barholomew Montruchio of Jersey City met in the office of Assistant District Attorney Maurice B. Blumenthal to discuss plans for a mass meeting to be held on September 16 to protest the verdict in the Dreyfus Court Martial.


1899: Jonas Weil, President of Zichron Ephraim, was named as the executor in the will of Daniel Woolf which Roeder & Bernard filed in the Surrogate’s Court today.


1899: Assistant District Attorney Maurice B. Blumenthal to planning to ask President William McKinley “to request a pardon” for Captain Dreyfus.


1899: As the attorney representing Dreyfus began working on his appeal today, it was discovered that the verdict had not been unanimous; but the product of a five to two vote.  Also the police had believed in the possibility of acquittal since they had formalized a plan to sneak Dreyfus out of the court disguised in civilian clothers.


1899: Three days after she had passed away, Lydia Van Gelder “the five and a half daughter of Isaac Louis and Annie Van Gelder” was buried today at the Plashet Jewish Cemetery.


1899: “W.D. Stevens, a ship owner and Royal Commissioner declared that as a result of the Dreyfus verdict he will put his foot on French soil.  He adds that thousands of his countrymen will do the same.”


1903: Birthdate of Theodor W. Adorno, a German-born international sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist who was “the only child to the wealthy wine merchant Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund who had converted from Judaism to Christianity.  Adomo is an example of the many 19th& 20th century people lost to Judaism because a trip to the font made life more attractive.


1903: In Russia, during the Homel Pogrom, defense squads organized by the Zionists and Bundists fought back against the looting, murderous mobs.  The squads fought off the mobs for three days until Russian authorities intervened to end the violence.  The defense squads had been formed in response to the deadly events at Kishinevand gave the Jews a sense of pride and short lived self-confidence.


1903: Julia Richman, the Principal of P.S. 77, is nominated by the Board of district Superintendents to be District Superintendent succeeding Charles Haskell. "If appointed, Miss Richman will be the first female District Superintendent in the Manhattan." There are two female District Superintendents serving in New York City but both of them are in Brooklyn.


1904(2ndof Tishrei, 5665): Second Day of Rosh Hashana


1909: At Bordeaux, premiere performance of “Bacchus triumphant” an opera composed by Camille Erlanger.


1911: At the age of 24, Guy Zinn broke into major league baseball playing his first game with the New York Highlanders.


1911: Circuit Judge Rassieur of St. Louis, MO, denies incorporation to the Jewish Christian


 Association For Conversion of Jews to Christianity on grounds that it violates the religious liberty clause of the Constitution.


1911: In London, England, The Bethnal Green Board of Guardians rejected bids by Jewish contractors.


1912: “A proposal to restore the cross as part of the insignia of the Chaplain of the United States War Veterans” was unanimously defeated today at the National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ.


1912(29th of Elul, 5672): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1912(29thof Elul, 5672): Louis M. Lilienthal, a Rabbi in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn passed away today


1914: In the UK, at the start of WW I, a Royal Proclamation was issued that required “British subjects to have no links with companies doing business with Germany” which forced Sir Edgar Speyer to resign as a partner of the American bank controlled by his family.  This move did not quiet the whispering campaign aimed him that would eventually destroy his professional life.


1914(20th of Elul, 5674) Benjamin Aron Jacob Gutman passed away today.


1914: Birthdate of Sidney Hart, the London native who “retired as the highest ranking Jewish fireman in Britain” and who “represented the Southend and Westcliff Hebrew Congregation on the Board of Deputies.”


1915(3rdof Tishrei, 5676): Shabbat Shuva


1915(3rdof Tishrei, 5676): During WW I, Second Lieutenant Alexander Gorodisky passed away while serving with the Zion Mule Corps.


1916: Birthdate of Edwin Milton Sabol, the native of Philadelphia, the founder of Blair Motion Pictures, which created the visual world of the NFL.



1916: “Hugh M. Dorsey, who is a candidate for the nomination for Governor in tomorrow’s primary and who was the Solicitor General during the Leo Frank case issued a statement today saying that he had told Governor Slaton not to commute Frank’s sentence. 


1917: Word was received from the War Department today by the Jewish Board for Welfare Work in the Army and Navy that “furloughs have been granted to Jewish soldiers…in order that they may be able to observe the Jewish New Year.


1917: In France, George Wildenstein, the son of Nathan Wildenstein, and his wife gave birth to Daniel Wieldenstein the art dealer and race horse owner who headed the art dealership of Wildenstein & Co.



1918: Sergeant Abraham Blaustein of the 165th regiment (formerly the fabled 69th regiment) headed out for the St. Mihiel Sector in preparation for the next phase of what was called by some the “one hundred day offensive.”


1918: After three years of service, Samuel Bortzell, the native of Isrkutsk, Russia who had move to Australia before WW I was discharged from the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) after having have fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front.


1919: The funeral for 60 year old author and publisher Horace Traubel, the son of a Jewish lithographer Maurice Traubel and Katherine Grunder, who was not Jewish, was held today in New York.


1920: Today, “after an absence of 15 weeks,” “theatrical producer Marc Klaw” returned from Europe aboard the Adriatic and had in his possession several “English and Continental” shows that he will present in the United States during the upcoming theatrical season.


1921:  The first Moshav, Nahalal, was found in the Jezreel Valley.  Less famous than that other experiment in collective living called the Kibbutz, a moshav was "a village of smallholders in which elements of cooperative and private farming were combined.  Nahal was the Biblical name of town in this area connected with the tribe of Zebulin.  The Jezreel was an area of abundant water, but the water was often stagnant.  The first fifteen years or so of settlement was spent draining the water to put an to the malarial swamps in the region..


1922: The British mandate in Palestineofficially began.


1923(1st of Tishrei, 5684): Rosh Hashanah


1923(1stof Tishrei, 5684): Seventy-two year old Philadelphia optician and movie producer who had formed the Lubin Manufacturing Company to make movies in the City of Brotherly Love passed away today at his New Jersey home.



1923: The Lithuanian General Census, which originally was supposed to be taken today, has been postponed because today is Rosh Hashanah.


1923:In his Rosh Hashanah message to the Jews of Britain Chief Rabbi Hertz “paints a gloomy picture of conditions affecting Jewry throughout the world.”


 


"Nearly five years have passed since the close of the most devastating of wars. The earth is still reeling like a drunken man. The inhabitants thereof are bereft of reason by the poison gas of racial antagonisms in a world that was nearly destroyed by hate, and is seeking to save itself by hate, and Israel is the greatest sufferer in these distracted days."The forces of reaction and race hatred everywhere have joined hands in the unholy work of reviling and slandering the Jew. We are back once more in the Dark Ages. New Jewish massacres and on an unprecedented scale are openly advocated and systematically planned."The Russian monarchists declare that in the event of their regaining power they will slaughter every Jewish man, woman and child in that land. Western Jews do not sufficiently realize the infinite danger that hovers over four million of our brethren in Russia."


 


1923:  Daf Yomi was initiated by Rabbi Meir Shapira of Lublin. At the Congress of the Agudath Israel in Europein 1923, Rabbi Meir Shapira of Lublinhad proposed that Jews all over the world study the same page of the Talmud (Daf Yomi) simultaneously as a sign of a unifying commitment to Judaism and Jewish learning. In this way, observant Jewish males could complete the study of the Talmud every seven and a half years with a formal celebration marking the end of the learning cycle and the beginning of the new one. The proposal was accepted and a special calendar was created. Jews everywhere began to study the Daf. Rabbi Shapira participated in the first completion of the cycle in 1931. Observant Jews then integrated the Daf Yomi program into their lives. Tossed into a stormy sea when his ship was wrecked, the great Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva was given up for lost. This is how he later described his miraculous rescue to Rabbi Gamaliel: "A daf (plank) from the ship suddenly appeared as a salvation, and I just let the waves pass over me." When Rabbi Meir Shapiro, the rabbi of Lublin between the two World Wars, initiated the program for Jews all over the world to study the same daf yomi (daily page of Talmud), he explained the significance of this undertaking by paraphrasing Rabbi Akiva: "A daf is the instrument of our survival in the stormy seas of today. If we cling to it faithfully all the waves of tribulation will but pass over us." The entire Talmud is covered in seven years by those who keep to the prescribed daily pace. One individual who undertook such a project and help to give it a wider range of fame was the author Herman Wouk.


1923: The census was scheduled to take place today in Lithuania. However, because of the intervention of the Jewish National Council, the government of Lithuania, postponed it for a future, undisclosed date. (As reported by JTA)


1923: The Rosh Hashanah edition of the Jewish Tribune included “The Jew As a Philanthropist” in which Herbert Hoover paid “special tribute” to “the extraordinary generosity and liberality of the American Jew” in general and the Joint Distribution Committee in particular which had done so much to ameliorate the suffering of their co-religionist during the Great War and in the violent years that followed. (JTA)


1924: Birthdate of Canadian professor of Pharmacology, Rudolf Vrba.  Born Walter Rosenberg, Vrba would gain fame as an early escapee from Auschwitz who along with fellow escapee Alfred Wetzler told the Allies what was happening at the infamous concentration camp. 


1925: Birthdate of Alan Bergman who with his wife Marilyn Begman  has won three Academy Awards for Best Original Song and have been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.


1925(22ndof Elul, 5685): Seventy-four year old Hungarian born German “actor, dramatist and writer” Gustave Kadelburg best known for his comedic roles passed away today in Berlin.



1925: In Brooklyn, attorney Theodore Gutman and “the former Elsie Edenbaum, a legal secretary and homemaker gave birth to Robert William Gutman the award winning biographer of Wagner and Mozart. (As reported by Margalit Fox)



1926(3rd of Tishrei, 5687): Shabbat Shuva (no Fast of Gedaliah because it is the Sabbath)


1927:  Birthdate of G. David Schine who gained notoriety as the buddy of Roy Cohn when Cohn was riding high as the chief counsel for Joseph McCarthy's Communist hunting Senatorial Committee. Without going into too great detail, this relationship ended up with McCarthy and Cohn accusing the United States Army of being involved in a Communist Conspiracy.  These charges helped to break the Republican Senator from Wisconsin's grip on national power.  As the lives of these two Jews prove, Jews are not all Einsteins and Salks.  Sometimes they are lesser lights who might have done better had they never crawled out from underneath their rock


1929 (6 Elul, 5689): Louis B. Marshall passes away. Marshall was a successful lawyer, conservationist, champion of the rights for minorities and a leader of the Jewish community. He was a co-founder of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) who worked to protect the rights of Jews in Europeas well as those who wished to create a Jewish home in Palestine as can be seen by his support of the Balfour Declaration.




1933: In Quebec City, “Ernest Gillman, an immigrant from Russia who took over his father-law’s clothing factory” and his wife Rebecca gave birth to Rabbi Neil Gillman, “one of the premier theologians of the Conservative movement.




1934(2ndof Tishrei, 5695): Second day of Rosh Hashanah


1934: “Albert Lyons, son of Dr. Alexander Lyons, rabbi of the Eighth Avenue Temple, Brooklyn, a graduate of Columbia College, class of 1928, and Columbia Law School, class of 1930 was sworn in today at the Federal Building, Brooklyn, as Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District. (As reported by JTA)


1934: Filming of Director John Stahl’s “Imitation of Life,” the cinematic version of Fannie Hurst’s novel came to an end today.


1936: “Adolf Hitler gave a speech to Nazi political leaders in Nuremberg in which he says that so long as they do their duty to Germany and the German Volk, they can be sure that God will never abandon either them or Germany.”


1936: In a review published today, Ralph Thompson described The Brothers Ashkenazi, a novel by I.J. Singer and translated from the Yiddish by Maurice Samuel as “serious, solid and eloquent” – a memorable piece of fiction that tells the story of the rise and fall of two Polish Jews.”


1936: In their speeches tonight “Dr. Goebbels and Dr. Rosenberg “exceeded all their past performances as violent Jew-baiters.”


1937(6thof Tishrei, 5698): Shabbat Shuva


1937: “America should shun any form of dictatorship and return to its original ideals of democracy, Rabbi Abraham L. Fienberg said” today “in his sermon at the Mount Neboh Temple.”


1937: In his sermon at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun Rabbi Israel Goldstein “declared” today that “at this time of the year we should discard ‘obsolete ideas, unfounded prejudices and indefensible habits.’”


1937: In his sermon at Congregation Rodeph Sholom, Rabbi Louis I. Newman said “the desire for repentance must be translated into programs of actions.”


1937: In his sermon at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue Rabbi David DeSola Pool declared that “religion fails unless it succeeds in ‘stirring the public conscience to an active struggle against a torpid subservience and submission to evil’” and that “the churches should cry out against public evils” while molding “public opinion so the evils would be wiped out.’


1938: Shortstop Eddie Feinberg made his major league debut with the Philadelphia Phillies.


1938: Six Jewish constables were ambushed by terrorists as they escorted a group of telephone workers traveling between Jaffa and Gaza.  All six died but the workers escaped to the safety ofa nearby Jewish settlement.  When the shooting stopped, it was discovered that the attackers had taken the weapons, ammunition and uniforms of the dead Jewish policemen.  [Yes, they stripped the bodies of the dead!]


1939: For the first time the Luftwaffe bombed Łuck, the Polish city that would temporarily be a haven for Jews since it would end up in the Soviet, only to turn into a death trap after the start of Operation Barbarossa.


1940: The Jewish refugee ship Quanzastops to refuel at Norfolk, Virginia, after having been denied entry to the United States at New York and to Mexico at Vera Cruz. One passenger, a German Jew, is returned to the ship by U.S. Army guards after leaping overboard near the shore of Hampton Roads, Virginia. A State Department official granted the refugees visas at the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt enabling them to eventually disembark in the United States.


1940:Late dispatches from Palestine said tonight that at least 150 persons were killed today in the Italian bombing of Tel Aviv, modern Jewish city.


1941: “The Gestapo ordered the closure of the “Jüdischer Kulturbund, a Cultural Federation of German Jews established in 1933” that had somewhere between seventy and one hundred eighty thousand members


1941: Outfielder Sid Gordon made his major league debut with the New York Giants


1941:Rudolf Schoenheimer,German-American biochemist whose technique of "tagging" molecules with radioactive isotopes made it possible to trace the paths of organic substances through animals and plants and revolutionized metabolic studies, passed away.


 1941: Charles Lindbergh made an anti-Semitic speech on radio. The Lone Eagle or Lucky Lindy as he was called was an isolationist and part of the America First Committee.  He was impressed with the Nazis. He saw fascism as the wave of the future and believed that "the wave was rolling towards America. He saw World War II was being a continuation of centuries old European tribal feuds that had nothing to do with the United States.  He stood with those who believed that FDR's New Deal was "a Jewish concoction" and that a foreign policy supporting European democracies against the Nazis was the product of "Jewish interventionists."  In fact, Lindberg was scheduled to give a speech about why Americashould stay out of the war on the afternoon of December 7, 1941.  Of course reality overtook Lindbergh's fantasy.  In evaluating Roosevelt's reaction to the reports of the murder of European Jewry, one must be aware of the level of anti-Semitism in the United States at that time.  One must also be aware of the fact that even after Pearl Harbor there were plenty of people who believed that American involvement in the war was part of a Jewish plot. 


1942: Lucy Mandelstram, who was born in Vienna in 1926, her mother, and her sister were deported to Theresienstadt.


1942: As the Nazis wiped out the ghetto in Stolin, Poland, with the mass murders of 11,000 Jews, Jewish resistance is led by Moses Glazer and Asher Shapira


 1942: Meir Berliner, an Argentine Jew deported to the Treblinka death camp from Warsaw, stabs an SS officer, Max Bialas, to death with a penknife. In reprisal, Berliner and 150 other Treblinka inmates are executed.


1942: “Marcel Hoffman was one of 34 French railway workers who “risked their lives to help “save Jewish children from deportation by Nazi occupation forces” today.


 


1942: Five thousand Jews are deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. Among the deportees is noted author Hillel Zeitlin, age 71. Born in Belorussiain 1871, Zeitlin was raised as Chabad Chasid.  He was self-taught in secular subjects and came to question matters of religion and faith.  He became disillusioned with the secular world after the pogroms of 1905 and returned to Orthodox Judaism.  Zeitlin met death wrapped in his tallit and tefillin.


 1942: Ninety thousand Jews were sent to their deaths from the Warsaw ghetto. A total of 300,000 Jews were sent to Nazi killing camps during a 53 day period from Erev Tisha b'Av (the eve of the 9th day of Av) until Erev Rosh Hashanah (the evening on which Rosh Hashanah starts) that year.


1943: German troops occupied Kosovo-Metohien.


1943: The Nazis began the liquidation of the Minsk and Lida ghettos.


1943: One thousand Jews discovered hiding in Przemysl, Poland, are murdered.


1943: Starting on this date and ending 3 days later, the Jewish community at Minsk, Belorussia, is liquidated.


1943: Forty-sixth annual convention of the Zionist Organization of America opened this evening at Columbus, Ohio.


1943: The late Judge Julian W. Mack is scheduled to be honored with a special memorial service at the ZOA convention (JTA).


1944: Filming “Der Fuhrer schenkt den Juden eine Statdt” (The Fuher Gives the Jews a Town) comes to an end.  This bit of cinematic propaganda describing “the merits and virtues of the ghetto, was made at the command of authorities in Berlin under the immediate supervision of Karl Rahm, the last commandant of Theresienstadt.


1944: “Murder Incorporated” appeared today in Time magazine describing the scene at Majdanek.  You would never know from reading it that at least half of the victims were Jewish.


 


Fortnight ago a Soviet correspondent described the Nazi murder camp near Lublin. Last week TIME'S Moscow Correspondent Richard Lauterbach visited Maidenek with a party of non-Russian newsmen. His report: It was Sunday and the sun was hot. The Polish girls wore their best embroidered dresses to Mass and the men of Lublin chatted on street corners without a furtive, over-the-shoulder look. We drove out along the Chelm road about a mile from town. Dmitri Kudriavtsev, Secretary of the Soviet Atrocities Commission, said: "They called this 'the road of death.'" Kudriavtsev is a short man, with curly hair and a nice face. He has an even, soft way of talking. You could not guess that he has pored over more horrors in the past three years than any living man. Our car halted before a well-guarded gate. "This is Maidenek," Kudriavtsev said. I saw a huge, not unattractive, temporary city. There were about 200 trim, grey green barracks, systematically spaced for maximum light, air and sunshine. There were winding roads and patches of vegetables and flowers. I had to blink twice to take in the jarring realities: the 14 machine-gun turrets jutting into the so-blue sky; the 12-ft.-high double rows of electrically charged barbed wire; the kennels which once housed hundreds of gaunt, man-eating dogs. Gas Chambers. We got out to inspect the bathhouses. Said Kudriavtsev without emotion: "They came here first for a shower. Then the Germans said: 'Now you have had your wash. Go in there.'" He led us into one of four gas chambers. It was a solid grey concrete room, about 20 ft. square and 7 ft. high. A single large steel door sealed the entrance hermetically. There were three apertures, two for the pipes which brought in the gas, one, a thick glass peephole, protected by steel netting. It took about seven minutes for this "Zyklon B" to kill the occupants, as many as 250 at a time. Kudriavtsev was explaining: "The gas affects all parts of the organism. It is quicker when the body is warm, washed and wet." I took notes calmly, feeling little emotion. It was all so cold and bare. I wrote: "There are four chambers fed with these small, innocent, pale blue Zyklon crystals which give off cyanide when exposed to air. Two extra chambers for plain carbon monoxide. Maximum simultaneous capacity: 2,000." Kudriavtsev was still explaining: "On one day, Nov. 3, 1943, they annihilated 18,000 people—Poles, Jews, political prisoners and war prisoners."Death by Fire. We walked back into the sun. There was no horror left in Maidenek. It had evaporated with the Germans. We rode a little distance to some cabbage patches. The big, leafy cabbages were covered with a sooty, grey dust and next to them were high mounds of grey brown stuff. "This," said Kudriavtsev, "is fertilizer. A layer of human bones, a layer of human ashes, a layer of manure. This is German food production. Kill people; fertilize cabbages."The crematorium might have been a big bakeshop or a very small blast furnace. Here the Nazis carted the bodies, straight from the gas chambers. They cut them up scientifically. They put the chunks on iron stretchers, slid them on rollers into the five greedy mouths of the coke-fed ovens. They could disintegrate 1,900 people a day. "There was great economy," said Kudriavtsev. "These furnaces also heated the water for the camp."We heard about a young Polish girl who had refused to undress for a shower. The degenerate, sadistic Mussfelt who ran the crematorium ordered her shoved into the furnace alive. Her hair burned quick and bright. Then she crisped up like bacon on an over-hot skillet.Near the ovens were the remains of a room with a big stone table. Here gold fillings were extracted from the teeth. No corpse or piece of a corpse could be burned without a stamp on the chest: "Inspected for gold fillings."Skulls and Buzzing Flies. Kudriavtsev led us to some large, open graves. Here were buried the bodies of the camp's personnel, hastily shot and buried on July 21 in the last hectic days before the Red Army closed in. The pits stank in the warm sun. There were skulls and a piece of a Red Army cap and a buzzing of large flies. Around the pits, in the grass, poppies were growing. Orange red poppies. Big ones.Back in the camp we saw a room full of passports and documents. Papers of Frenchmen, Russians, Greeks, Czechs, Jews, Italians, Belo-Russians, Serbs, Poles. Records left behind by some of the 1,500,000 of 22 nationalities who were brought to Maidenek.820,000 Pairs of Shoes. We came to a large, unpainted warehouse. Not suspecting, I stepped up and went inside. It was full of shoes. A sea of shoes. I walked across them unsteadily. They were piled, like pieces of coal in a bin, halfway up the walls. Not only shoes. Boots. Rubbers. Leggings. Slippers. Children's shoes, soldiers' shoes, old shoes, new shoes. They were red and grey and black. Some had once been white. High heels, low heels, shoes with open toes. Evening slippers, beach sandals, wooden Dutch shoes, pumps, Oxfords, high-laced old-ladies' shoes. In one corner there was a stock of artificial limbs. I kicked over a pair of tiny white shoes which might have been my youngest daughter's. The sea of shoes was engulfing. In one place the sheer weight had broken the wall. Part of the wall had fallen out, and with it a cascade of shoes. Kudriavtsev said: "There are 820,000 pairs here and 18 carloads of the best were shipped to Germany. You will see the receipts at the Gestapo warehouse." Standing on the sea of shoes, Maidenek suddenly became real. It was no longer a half-remembered sequence from an old movie or a clipping from Pravda or chapters from a book by a German refugee living in Mexico City. The barbed wire had barbs which ripped flesh. The ashes on the big cabbages were the ashes of the brothers of the worn but pretty peasant women who had spoken to us that morning at Mass. "The loudspeakers from the camp kept screeching Strauss waltzes," a Polish woman in Lublin said to me. "The Beautiful Blue Danube can never be beautiful to us again." She paused and repeated the words so many Poles and Russians had said that day: "I hope you Americans will not be soft with the Germans."


 


1944: In Casablanca,Valentine Haroche, née Roubleva and Valentine Haroche gave birth to French physicist Serge Haroche  who “who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with David J. Wineland.”


1944: Victor Kugler, one of the people who helped to hide the Frank family, was transported from the prison in Weteringschans to a concentration camp in Amersfoort where he was selected for transport to Germany.


1945: Today “Jewish immigration into Palestine from western and central Europe virtually ended today when 340 displaced persons who had been sheltered in Switzerland after their liberation from concentration camps in Germany” and who had certificates based on the infamous 1939 White Paper which was still in effect after the Holocaust “arrived on board the Portuguese steamer at Lima at Haifa


1946: Today during a conference in Paris intended to iron out matters left over from the WW II victory, “the Russians opposed inclusion in the Hungarian treaty of clause guaranteeing the minority rights of Jews.”


1947: Outfielder Mickey Rutner made his major league debut with the Philadelphia Athletics.1947(26th of Elul, 5707: Sixty-nine year old Dr. Alex Kornfeld, the husband of Paula Mandl and the father of Peter and Ulrich Kornfeld and the father-in-law of Lorie Granitsch passed away today.


1948:Samuel Ralph "Subway Sam" Nahem appeared in his last major league baseball game as a member of the Philadelphia Phillies.


1949: A memorial plaque was put up at The Langenstein-Zwieberge concentration camp, an under-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp to mark the site “of the common graves.”


1950 (29th of Elul, 5710): Erev Rosh Hashana


1951: According to reports published today, American actress Yvonne de Carolo will cut short her current tour of Israel and return to the United States so that she can be filming “San Francisco Story” a movie in which she shares top billing with Joel McCrea.  [Editor’s note: We have no idea why she was touring in Israel.]


1951: David Horowitz, Israel’s director-general of the Ministry of Finance, arrived in New York today. As Israel faces an economic crisis caused by the in-gathering of the exiles and the continued state of war with its Arab neighbors, Mr. Horowitz has the United States to address a number of Jewish organizations sympathetic to the growth of Israel.


1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that in a secret, silent ceremony that lasted 13 minutes, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed in Luxembourg an agreement under which the Bonn Government agreed to pay 3,450 million marks, in various goods, as reparations for the material damage suffered by Jews at the hands of the Nazis. The first goods were expected to arrive in 1953, but the much-needed oil, a part of the reparations deal, would arrive in Israel within weeks.


1955: Birthdate of award winning Shakespearian author and Columbia University professor James S. Shapiro.



1956: Three days after he had passed away, Sseventy-two year old Willard Hotel manager and long-time member of the United States Olympic Committee, Charles Lewis Manager who worked on physical fitness programs for the U.S. Army, helped to create the Maccabiah Games and was married first to the former Anne Bernstein, and then after she passed way, to the former Aletha Marlott passed


1957: In Pittsburgh, PA, Harry Tepper, an accountant and Roberta Tepper, a elementary school teacher gave birth to the “second of three children” hedge fund manager, philanthropist and miniority owner of the Steelers, David Alan Tepper.


1958: “Wind Across the Everglades” produced by Stuart Schulberg and written by Budd Schulberg was released in the United States today by Warner Bros.


1959: U.S. Premiere of Director Sidney Lumet’s “That Kind of Woman” with a script co-authored by Walter Bernstein, filmed by cinematographer Boris Kaufman and co-starring Tab Hunter (Jewish father).


1960: Birthdate of Philadelphia native Annie Gosfield whose music “takes it inspiration from Jewish culture, history and the New York immigrant experience.


1960: The Summer Olympics during which American fencer Albert “Axelrod won the bronze medal in Individual Foil competition” came to a close today In Rome


1960: It was reported today that the Library of Congress had purchased a rare piece of Lincoln Memorabilia using funds left by the late Alfred Stern of Chicago.  The item, a sales circular advertising the sale of various Lincoln election items such as pins and button, will join Stern’s collection in the Rare Book Room.


1961(1stof Tishrei, 5722): Rosh Hashanah is observed for the first time during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy.


1962: Heinz Krug, “one of a dozen Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop weapons for” the Arab country committed to the destruction of the state of Israel vanished today, the victim it would later be revealed of an assassin’s bullet fired by foreman Nazi henchman Otto Skorzeny now in the employ of Mossad.



1963(22nd of Elul, 5723): Eighty-two year old German director Richard Oswald who was forced to flee when the Nazis came to power and who “made a number of films about sexuality and prostitution in collaboration with Magnus Hirschfeld” passed away today.


1965: Outfield Norm Miller made his major league debut with the Houston Astros.


1965(14th of Elul, 5725): Eighty-five year old Bethel Albert Herbert Solomons the Dublin born physician who was a noted rugby player as well as a supporter of Sinn Fein and the famous “1916 Rising,” a key moment in the Irish fight for independence.



1966: Three days after he had passed away, seventy-two year old Willard Hotel manager and long-time member of the United States Olympic Committee, Charles Lewis Ornstein who worked on physical fitness programs for the U.S. Army, helped to create the Maccabiah Games and was married first to the former Anne Bernstein, and then after she passed way, to the former Aletha Marlott was scheduled to be interred at Mt. Hope Cemetery today after services at the Riverside Memorial Chapel.



https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/09/09/82903958.pdf



1966: In London, The Destruction in Art Symposium chaired by Gustav Metzger, came to a close.



1969: In the aftermath of Israel’s successful raid on Egypt’s Red Sea coast called Operation Raviv, Egypt “launched a large 102-aircraft raid on Israeli positions in the Sinai, during which they lost a MiG-17, five MiG-21s and two Sukhoi Su-7s while claiming to have destroyed 3 Israeli aircraft.


1969: Giora Romm was taken prisoner today when the Egyptians shot down his Dassault Mirage.


1970: As part of the Dawson Field Hijackings, when members of the Palestinian terrorists group PLFP hijacked four jet and had forced them to fly to Jordan, the PLFP released over three hundred of the passengers.  The PLFP kept the Jews and Israeli citizens as hostages.


1971: CBS broadcast the first episode of “Help!...It’s the Hair Bear Bunch” an “animated television series featuring the voices of Paul Winchell and Joe E. Ross.


1972(3rd of Tishrei, 5733): Tzom Gedaliah


1972(3rd of Tishrei, 5733): Eighty-nine year old pioneer animator Max Fleischer whose Fleischer Studios brought to life several characters including “Popeye, the spinach eating sailor man” passed away.


1972: Avery Brundage, who would not do anything that might anger Hitler at the 1936 Olympics and who decided that the 1972 Olympics “must go on despite the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Arab terrorist” is scheduled to “officially” step down “as president of the International Olympic Committee” today.


1973: Israel Police minister Shlomo Hillel spoke to the International Police Association about confronting terrorism (including aviation terrorism). "Surrender to terrorism," said Hillel "results not only in the decline of the value of law but also degrades every international moral authority, encourages the growth of murder, terrorism and global extortionism, and pushes the world into a state of anarchy and chaos." (As reported by Adam Soclof). 


1973: A possible terrorist incident was thwarted today when Australian authorities arrested a member of Al-Fatah.


1974(24thof Elul, 5734): Eighty-three year old Chicago born Northwestern alum and WW I veteran Ralph Leroy Arnheim, “the son of Benjamin and Henrietta Arnheim” passed away today in Glencoe, Illinois


1974: The first of two demonstrations was held today in Moscow “by Jewish activists demanding exit visas.”


1974: Sylva Zalmanson who had been freed after serving 4 years of a 10 year sentence at Leningrad Trail in 1970 arrived in Israel today.


1974: NBC broadcast of the long-running series “Little House on the Prairie” starring Michael Landon who also served as Executive Producer and Melissa Gilbert in the role of “Laura Ingalls Wilder” the author of the book on which the series was based.


1977: The Jerusalem Post reported that US President Jimmy Carter's previously submerged anger towards Israeli action in establishing new settlements came into the open when he agreed with reporters that the Israeli government was apparently openly defying the US and constituted an obstacle to peace. In Israel, however, Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon, chief proponent of the settlement policy in the cabinet, said that the belt of the settlements he planned to establish would give Israel the security to reach "daring solutions" for peace with the Palestinian Arabs. Sharon:  settlements, peace with the Arabs - how much things change, how much they stay the same.


1978:  President Jimmy Carter, President Sadat and Prime Minister met at Camp David and agreed on a framework for peace between Israel and Egypt and a comprehensive peace in the Middle East.


1979: ABC aired the first episode of the second season of “Taxi” a sit-com created by James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels and Ed Weinberg and starring Judd Hirsch and Andy Kaufman.


1980(1stof Tishrei, 5741): Rosh Hashanah


1980: “Stephen Roy Reinhardt (born Stephen Roy Shapiro)” received his commission to begin serving as “Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit” today.


1981: Pitcher Larry Rothschild made his major league debut with the Detroit Tigers.


1982: At East Haddam, CT, the curtain came down on a revival production of “High Button Shoes,” a musical with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Sammy Cahn that had opened at the Goodspeed Opera House in July.


1982: Detroit pitcher Larry Rothschild played his last major league baseball game.  He then went on to a career as major league coach and manager.


1987(17th of Elul, 5747: Seventy-two year old Canadian born American actor Lorne Greene who gained fame as “Pa Cartwright” – a family patriarch based on his father Daniel Greene – passed away today.



1987: “Today, Allan Bloom, philosopher and author of Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, told undergraduates at DePauw University today. "You have four years of freedom to discover yourselves: the space between what is most likely the intellectual wasteland most of us leave behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits you after the baccalaureate."


1988(29thof Elul, 5748): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1988(29thof Elul, 5748): Seventy-nine year old Cornell University professor Isaac Rabinowitz who was an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls passed away today.



1988: Rabbi Arnold E. Resnicoff “was one of 100 religious leaders at” today’s “White House discussion with then President Bill Clinton on the way religion might combat violence in American schools.”


1988: “Miracle Mile” featuring Alan Rosenberg as “Mike” premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.


1989: “Eversmile, New Jersey” “an Argentine and British comedy with a script by Argentine writer Jorge Goldenberg was released in Canada today.


1992: “Sneakers” a computer comedy produced by Lawrence Lasker, the grandson of Albert Lasker, who also co-authored the script.


1993(25th of Elul, 5753):  Conductor Erich Leinsdorf passed away.


1994(6th of Tishrei, 5755: Shimon Avidan, “an Israeli soldier and officer, the commander of the Givati Brigade during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war,” passed away. Born Shimon Koch in Germany in 1911, he moved to Kibbutz Ayelet HaShahar in 1934 and then Ein Hashofet in Palestine. “He fought with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Avidan is also known for his activities in the Palmach in World War II. He led the "German Unit" of the Palmach, which was responsible for conducting guerilla operations against the Axis powers.[1] In 1945 he commanded the Saison operation against the Irgun and Stern Gang.[3] During the 1948 war he was the operational commander of Operation Nachshon, Operation Barak, Operation Pleshet and Operation An-Far. His troops also fought at Nitzanim as well as joining Operations Death to the Invader and Yoav. He resigned from the army after, according to Chaim Herzog, 'his extreme left-wing philosophy proved to be irreconcilable with Ben-Gurion's policies'. In 1975, he was appointed as the internal comptroller of the Ministry of Defense by the minister Shimon Peres.


1995: FOX broadcast the first episode of “Ned and Stacey” a sitcom starring Debra Messing.


1997: At the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of “Mr. Jealousy” directed by Noah Baumbach who also wrote the script.


1997: Felix Rohatyn began serving as “U.S. Ambassador to France and Monaco.”


1998: “A Simple Plan,” the movie version of the novel of the same name directed by Sam Raimi and music by Danny Elfman premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival today.


1998: “The Rounders,” which provides a dark view of the world of high stakes poker” co-starring Martin Landau, featuring Josh Mostel (son of Zero Mostel) and with a script by David Levien and Brian Koppelman was released in the United States today by Miramax Films.


1998: “L.A. Without a Map” featuring Lisa Edelstein premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival today.


1999(1st of Tishrei, 5760): Rosh Hashanah 5760


1999: On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, The Shanghai government permitted the Jewish community to use Ohel Rachel for 24 hours. This would be the first time a Jewish service was held at the Ohel Rachel Synagogue since 1952. Evening and morning services were held, with approximately 120 Jews in attendance. This was the highest attendance the modern ShanghaiJewish community had seen!


2001: Today marked Cpl. Dustin H. Schrage’s first day in the United States Marine Corps. The young Jewish Marine would lose his life while swimming across the Euphrates River in the Al Anbar province in 2004.


2001: The September 11 attacks destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City, part of The Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and downed a passenger airliner in Pennsylvania. In total, almost 3,000 were killed.  In one of the most offensive bits of anti-Semitic propaganda several websites, some of which were sponsored by Arab money, claimed that Jews had been warned to stay away from the WTC and/or that the attack was part of a Mossad conspiracy. The number of dead Jewish Americans and Israelis belied the canard, but truth never bothers an anti-Semite.



2001: Silverstein Properties owned the World Trade Center and will be represented by Proskauer Rose in litigation that will result from the attack and its aftermath.


2001: In an odd twist of fate Larry Silverstein, the owner of Silverstein Properties was at the dermatologist this morning instead of eating breakfast with new tenants at Windows on the World.


2001: Following today’s attacks in Washington, DC and New York City, demand for Robert D. Kaplan’s analysis of events as can be found in “The Coming Anarchy:How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet” and Warrior Politics increased.


2001: Following today’s terrorist attacks Geraldo Rivera “accepted a pay cut and went to work for the Fox News Channel as a war correspondent.”


2001: “In the wake of today’s attacks, Martin S. Bergman wrote an article concerning its implications on psychoanalysis called ‘Psychoanalytical Reflections on September 11.’’


2001: Following today’s attacks, “the Boston Symphony Orchestra cancelled a scheduled performance of extracts from” “The Death of Klinghoffer” “partly in deference to a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, who lost a family member on one of the hijacked planes, as well as due to perceptions that the work was overly sympathetic to terrorists.”


2001: Following today’s terrorist attacks British Labour MP and Zionist emerged as a “terrorism expert” thanks to the “reports on social violence published through his think-tank, the Centre for Contemporary Studies.”


2001: “Like so many other New Yorkers, John L. Tishman “could only watch helplessly on television as the events unfolded in Lower Manhattan” and “after the second jetliner hit the south tower and the 110-story building collapsed” he was in such shock that all he could was leave the Tishman Building withous saying goodbye to his colleagues and head for his hoe.


2001: Sixty-three year old Alice Trillin, who in addition to all of her own accomplishment was considered to be the inspiration for her husband Calvin Trillin, passed away today.



2002: The Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust will join with its colleague museums across the nation to participate in "Museums Celebrate America's Freedoms" to celebrate the freedoms that sustain the nation's strength.


2002: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg “lit an eternal flame to mark the first anniversary of the attacks on Washington, DC and New York City by Arab terrorists.


2003: “Sharon Delighted with Gift from Kochi” published today described the Prime Minister’s joyful reaction with being given “replicas of the Copper plates from the `Magna Carta' of the Jews of Kochi, which has the oldest synagogue outside Israel. According to some scholars, the Copper plates given by the then rulers of Kochi during the arrival of the Jews to that place, dated back to the 11th century. But the traditional date according to the Cochin Jews is 379 AD.”


2004(25thof Elul, 5764): Parashat Nitzavim-Yayelech; Selichot


2004:  Nathan Cooper is called to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 


2004: The 61st Venice International Film Festival which saw the premiere of “To Take a Wife” directed by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabet who also wrote the script” came to a close today.


2004(25thof Elul, 5764): Seventy-six year old lyricist Fred Ebb passed away today. (As reported by Jesse McKinley)




2005: The funeral for painter and Israel Prize laureate Lea Nikel is held at Kidron Cemetery. She passed away over the weekend at the age of 86. Nikel is the “grande dame of Israeli painting.” She was known as the “queen of abstract painting” and “queen of color and composition.  The works of this famous abstract expressionist hang in galleries throughout the world including London’s Tate Gallery


2005: Today “a ceremony was held when the last Israeli flag was lowered in the IDF's Gaza Strip divisional headquarters.”


2005, United States Senator Jon Corzine, the Democratic candidate for Governor of New Jersey, endorsed Loretta Weinberg for State Senate held by Byron Baer who was retiring. [Weinberg was Jewish; Corzine was not.


2005: Jewish authors continue to add to the richness of the general culture as they write on a variety of subjects. Where God Was Born by Bruce Feiler received less than glowing reviews in the Sunday New York Times.  This is the third in Mr. Feiler’s series on the Bible and religion, two things that he apparently did not study at an earlier age. Dvorak:Romantic Music's Most Versatile Genius by David Hurwitz which has now appeared in paperback received favorable reviews in the Sunday Washington Post book section.  Hurwitz takes the unconventional stand that the relationship between Brahms and Dvorak was not a one way street.  He contends that Brahms benefited from Dvorak’s influence every bit as much did Dvorak benefit from that of Brahms.


2005:Sidney Ferris Rosenberg failed to show up to host the Giants' pre-game show


2006: (Elul 18) Celebration of the birth of Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name) of simply the Besht.  He is the founder of the movement that would eventually come to be known as Chasidism.  There is too much to this man’s life and too many sources available to warrant even the most elementary summary.


2006: (Elul 18) Celebration of the birth of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of the Chabad Lubavitch branch of Chasidism.


2006:  In the Time Magazine edition of this date a report appeared that Leonard Nimoy, the Jewish actor who portrayed Mr. Spock had published a book entitled Shekina, which explores the mythological feminine aspect of God. 


2006: Seventy-nine year old German historian Joachim Fest who specialized in works about the Nazis and Hitler passed away today.




2006:Leonard Woolf by Victoria Glendinning was published today by Simon and Schuster



2007: The board of Deputies of British Jews released a statement “accusing the New Statesman, a weekly journal published in London of again demonstrating its ‘hostility to Israel’ and of being ‘mischievous’ and ‘irresponsible.’”


2007: Elul 29 – The Shofar is sounded for the last time in 5767.


2008:Setting the Stage,” Beit Lessin's ninth annual revelation of new plays by local playwrights opens at ZOA House in Tel Aviv


2008: In Manhattan the Center for Jewish History in collaboration with Levinas Ethical Legacy Foundation, Société International de Research Emmanuel Levinas, and the North American Levinas Society presents “Renewing the Colloque: Celebrating Levinas’ Talmudic Readings” during which human rights activists, rabbis and philosophers join in an evening of study and discussion in the spirit of the famous Paris colloquia at which Emmanuel Levinas delivered profoundly ethical Talmudic lessons for our day.


2008” According to documents released today, Ruth Greenglass, “a key prosecution witness whose testimony helped send Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair gave a different account at trial than she did before the grand jury in the famous Cold War spying case”


2008:Israel conveyed its displeasure to Washington today over remarks reportedly made by US Consul General Jacob Walles that it had agreed to start negotiations with the Palestinians over Jerusalem.


2009 (22nd of Elul): Yahrzeit of Joseph B. Levin


2009: William Blake’s World: A New Heaven Is Begun opened today and runs, at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Blake was a leading painter and poet during the Romantic Age. According to some, Blake was influenced by Kabbalah and that the dozen or so Hebrew inscriptions in his etchings and watercolors show that he was fluent in Hebrew. According to others “close analysis of the works, some of which are on exhibit at The Morgan Library & Museum, reveal that Blake had not even mastered the letter aleph. Reading Kabbalah in Hebrew without knowing the first letter of the aleph-bet would be as implausible as tackling Finnegan’s Wake with barely a grasp of the English alphabet.”2009:Art Capital Group withdrew its lawsuit against Annie Leibovitz and extended the due date for repayment of the $24 million loan which included an agreement, under which Leibovitz retains control over her work and will be the "exclusive agent in the sale of her real property (land) and copyrights".


 2009(22nd of Elul, 5770):Eighty-one year old comedy writer Larry Gelbart, the man who gave us the television version of “M*A*S*H passed away today. (As reported by Robert Berkvist)



2009: The Toronto International Film Festival features screenings ofA History of Israeli Cinema Part 1 (Historia Shel Hakolnoah and A History of Israeli Cinema Part 2 (Historia Shel Hakolnoah Israeli).  Both films are directed by Raphaël Nadjari who “was born in Marseille, France, and now lives in Israel. He began his career in French television before turning to cinema. He has written and directed the features The Shade (99), I Am Josh Polonski's Brother (01), Apartment #5c (02), Avanim (04), which won the Prix France Culture (Cinéma) for French filmmaker of the year at the Cannes Film Festival, and Tehilim (07). A History of Israeli Cinema (09) is his first feature documentary. “


2009:Israeli archaeologists have uncovered one of the earliest depictions of a menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum that has come to symbolize Judaism, the Israel Antiquities Authority said today. The menorah was engraved in stone around 2,000 years ago and found in a synagogue recently discovered by the Kinneret. Pottery, coins and tools found at the site indicate the synagogue dates to the period of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem, where the actual menorah was kept, said archaeologist Dina Avshalom-Gorni of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The artist might have seen the menorah during a pilgrimage and then recreated it in the synagogue, she suggested. A small number of depictions of the menorah have surfaced from the same period, she said, but this one was unique because it was inside a synagogue and far from Jerusalem, illustrating the link between Jews around Jerusalem and in the Galilee to the north.


2009:Several rockets fired from southern Lebanon slammed into Israel today triggering retaliatory artillery fire across the border, the Israeli military said


2010(3rd of Tishrei, 5771): Shabbat Shuva


2010(3rd of Tishrei, 5771):Eighty-six year old Harold Gould, an actor who succeeded in film, theatre and television who was never the star but was always there passed away today. (As reported by Bruce Weber)



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/arts/14gould.html?pagewanted=print



2010:After a 39-year absence, today the Israeli women’s national volleyball team qualified for the 2011 European Championships.



2011(12thof Elul, 5772): Eighty-seven year old Israeli tycoon Yuli Ofer passed away today. (As reported by Elad Benari)



http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/147776



2011:Alisa Weilerstein, Carolin Widmann and Matan Porat are scheduled to perform Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in C major, op. 56 at the 14th Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.



2011: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including That Used To Be Us:How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Backby Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum,



2011: The 2011-2012 Religious School Year is scheduled to begin today at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.



2011: In conjunction with the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, the ADL has issued “Decade of Deceit: Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Theories 10 Years Later.”



Decade of Deceit: Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Theories 10 Years Later



2011: The Seattle Jewish Chorale is scheduled to take part in an inter-faith service “Remember9/11: Blessed are the Peacemakers” which is one of many observances marking the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack on Washington, DC and New York City.  Rabbi Daniel Weiner of Temple de Hirsch Sinai is scheduled to co-officiate at the service.



2011:Shots were fired from Egypt across the border with Israel today, near the site of last month's terror attack in which eight Israelis were killed.



2011:Israel vowed to develop and defend gas platforms recently discovered in its waters, Energy Minister Uzi Landau said today, after Turkey declared its plan to boost naval patrols in the eastern Mediterranean in a deepening diplomatic feud.



2011: Turkish hackers are preparing to launch a wave of cyber-attacks on sensitive Israeli internet sites, the head of a major Israeli website building company warned today


2011: The Los Angeles Times reviewed Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield


2012: For those looking for a “Jewish” way to remember what this date means consider the following



2012:If Iran decides to make a nuclear weapon, the United States would have a little more than a year to act to stop it, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said today


2012:The chairman of Yad Vashem has been appointed the deputy chairman of the International Auschwitz Council. The appointment of Avner Shalev by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was announced by Yad Vashem today.


2012: Following a New Yorker article that appeared yesterday exposing details of the Israeli bombing of a Syrian nuclear facility in 2007, the IDF chief of staff at the time flatly today denied knowledge of the operation.


2013: “Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain” featuring a range of speakers including Nathan Arbrams of Bangor University sponsored by The Pears Institute for the study of Antisemistism in collaboration with the University of Kent and University of Sheffield is scheduled to take place at the University of London.


2013: In London, the Weiner Library co-hosts the second a final day of a “Conference to Mark the 70th Anniversary of the Creation of the United Nations War Crimes Commission in 1943” chaired by Justice Richard Goldstone.


2013:Bulgaria’s President Rosen Plevneliev announced on the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US that Bulgaria “experienced our September 11” last year in Burgas, in which alleged Hezbollah operatives murdered five Israelis and a Bulgarian national. (As reported by Benjamin Weinthal)


2013:To honor the memory of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including five Israelis, the Keren Kayemet LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund held its 12th annual memorial ceremony with the US Embassy this afternoon. The memorial, held at the 9/11 Living Memorial in the Arazim Valley in Jerusalem, was attended by US Ambassador Daniel B. Shapiro, KKL-JNF World Chairman Efi Stenzler, Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, as well numerous other dignitaries and mourners. (As reported by Daniel K. Eisenbud)


2014: In Rockville, MD, the Magen David Sephardic Congregation is scheduled to presentThe Israel-Gaza War: From A Local, Regional & International Perspective With Moran Stern.”


2014: “Craig Steven Wilder Professor of History and Head of the History Faculty at MIT, delivered a lectured on “The Paradox of the Jewish Indians: Religion and Race on the Colonial Campus” today.


2014 UK Jewish Film, a cultural charity dedicated to developing an environment in which Jewish themed films entertain, educate and enlighten diverse audiences in the UK and internationally, is scheduled to host the final showing of “Wakolda,” a film “set in 1960s Argentina, about an innocent family who unknowingly welcome Dr. Josef Mengele into their home.”


2014: “A senior Hamas official said that his movement may seek to negotiate with Israel, claiming that Islamic faith does not prohibit such contacts.”  But this does not changed the movement’s 1988 charter which states in article 13 that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” (As reported by Elhanahn Miller)


2014: “Jerusalem district firefighters and rescue volunteers, alongside US Marines and families of 9/11 victims, marked the 13th anniversary to the September 11 terrorist attacks that left nearly 3,000 people dead in a special ceremony held in the Jerusalem Hills.”


2014: Lewis Black is scheduled to perform at the National Arts Centre Theatre in Ottawa.


2014: At the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of “The Cobbler” starring Adam Sandler, Dustin Hoffman and Ellen Barkin.


2015: “Journeys” “the second in a series of three-crowd sourced exhibitions produced in collaboration between the Jewish Museum of London and the Cultural Institute at King’s College” is scheduled to come to a close.


2015(27thof Elul, 5775): Eighty-eight year old Lawrence S. Phillips, the Princeton University graduate, longtime chairman of the board of menswear company Phillips-Van Heusen and founder of the American Jewish World Service passed away today. (As reported by William Grimes)



2015: “Patrick Devedjian, a right-winger who served in the governments of president Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy” “stirred up controversy” today “after saying Germany ‘took our Jews and gave us Arabs’ as France began taking some of the thousands of refugees arriving in Germany.”


2015: “President Obama plans to host Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for a meeting in November, the White House said today, marking the start of efforts to repair a troubled relationship between the United States and Israel badly frayed over the nuclear agreement with Iran.”


2015: In Santa Rosa, CA, Lewis Black is scheduled to perform at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts.


2015: Final Shabbat of 5775 begins this evening.


2015: Patrick Devedjian, “a former French minister stirred up controversy today after saying Germany ‘took our Jews and gave us Arabs.’”


2016(8thof Elul, 5776): Forty-seven year old “Alexis Arquette, the transgender character actress and sibling of actors David, Rosanna, Richmond and Patricia Arquette, died this morning in Los Angeles.”



 


2016: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host “Symbolic by Design” a tour and talk that will described “how renowned Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman infused each space in the Museum with historical and emotional symbolism.”


2016: “In Between,” an “Israeli-French film “about three Arab-Israeli women sharing a flat in Tel Aviv” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival today.



2016: Frank Stern, a native of Frankfurt who went from Switzerland to England before sailing for the United States “on an armed merchant ship” in 1940 is scheduled to talk about his experiences as “a Holocaust survivor.”


2016: “Denial,” a film “based on History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.


2016: In Atlanta, GA, the Breman Museum is scheduled to host a workshop presented by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Georgia presenting “new research techniques from Yad Vashem.”


2016:Temple Emanu-El and the American Jewish Committee NYC are scheduled to participate in a 15th Anniversary Interfaith Commemoration and Walk in Remembrance of 9/11 that will start at Temple Emanu-El that will include members of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and the Islamic Society of Mid-Manhattan


2016: The Blue is scheduled to host a show this morning “premiering songs from Israeli jazz guitarist Assaf Kehati’s upcoming 4th album.


2016: In Des Moines, Iowa, Beit Sefer Shalom, the Jewish Federation Community School, is scheduled to host a family breakfast before classes resume this morning.


2016: Religious School is scheduled to resume at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, IA.


2016: “A new US military aid package to Israel — said to be the largest in American history — is expected to be finalized in the very near future, US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said” today.


2016: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, Where The Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzahn, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Regionby Masha Gessen and  She Made Me Laugh: My Friend Nora Ephron by Richard Cohen


2017: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host the first session of “Proust in Time: Swann’s Way” in which Rebecca Ariel Porte examines the writing of In Search of Lost Time.


2017: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “Bogdan’s Journey,” a heartbreaking account of the pogrom that took place in the town of Kielce, Poland in July 1946.


2017: In New Orleans, the Uptown JCC is scheduled to host poet and author Benjamin Morris in a reading from and discussion of his new book Ectone.


2018(2ndof Tishrei, 5779: 2nd Day of Rosh Hashanah; for more see



2018: Seventeenth anniversary of what is known as 9/11 which included the first successful attack on the Washington DC government complex since the War of 1812.


2018:  Francesco Bruni’s “Tutto quello che vuoi” is scheduled to be shown at The Jerusalem Centre for the Performing Arts.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

This Day, September 12, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 12



 

490 BCE: According to German scholar Philipp August Böckh, the Greeks defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon. The Persians were led by Darius I, the ruler under whom the Second Temple was built.  It would not be surprising if there Jewish soldiers in the Persian Army since one of the things loyal subjects did was serve in the army during times of war.
 
1213: During the Albigensian Crusade, Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, defeated Peter II of Aragon, at the Battle of Muret. The Albigensian Crusade was a twenty effort by the Roman Catholic Church to suppress one of the many heresies that bubbled up to challenge its authority.  The Jews were not the direct target of the Crusades but were the unintended victim of the effort.  The Jewish subjects of the Counts of Toulouse enjoyed a certain amount of freedom which dismayed Rome.  When Toulouse was defeated, the Catholics at Rome saw to it that the Jews lost their right to hold public office in this area in the south of France and that they would be treated like Jews in other parts of Europe dominated by the Church. 



1229: James I of Aragon began his conquest of Majorca by landing an army at Santa Ponça. When he conquered the island on the last day of the year, “he gave the Jews a quarter in the neighborhood of his palace for their dwellings, granted protection to all Hebrews who wished to settle on the island, guaranteed them the rights of citizens, permitted them to adjudicate their own civil disputes, to kill cattle according to their ritual, and to draw up their wills and marriage contracts in Hebrew. Christians and Moors were forbidden, under severe penalties, to insult the Jews or to take earth and stones from their cemeteries; and the Jews were ordered to complain directly to the king of any act of injustice toward them on the part of the royal officials. They were allowed to charge 20 per cent interest on loans, but the amount of interest was not to exceed the capital.”


1362: Pope Innocent IV passed away. In a period when copies of the Talmud were being confiscated and burned, Innocent IV responded positively to petition submitted by Abraham Bedaresi of Provencal and Meir of Rothenberg that they be allowed to keep their Talmudic writings.  He promulgated a decree banning forcible baptism of Jews which also stated that the Jews “should not be disturbed in the observance of their festivals.”  And finally he issued a strongly worded Papal Bull that exonerated the Jews of the charges of the Blood Libel and condemned those who fabricated these charges.  [Editor’s Note - Considering the era in which he lived and the position he held, we might assume that more than one Jew mourned the death of this prelate.]


1494: Birthdate of King Francis I of France. Strangely enough for a French monarch, Francis show an interest in the Hebrew language. After all, no Jew had legally lived in France for over a century.  But this King invited August Justiniani, the Bishop of Corsica who was reputed to be a serious student of Hebrew literature to move to France.  He also invited Elias Levita, the renowned Hebrew grammarian and poet, to move to France and accept a professorship in the Hebrew language. Levita declined the offer for obvious reasons.


1526: While demonstrating “a general of tolerance” towards Jews after his arrival in Buda, Suleiman “banished some Jews and forced them to flee south.”


1654(1st of Tishrei, 5415): Rosh Hashanah 5415


1654(1st of Tishrei, 5415): The Jews of what would become the United States celebrate the first Rosh Hashanah just five days after having arrived in New Amsterdam They held their service in secret in the second floor of a commercial building.  Gov. Stuyvesant (Dutch) wanted the Jews gone and they were afraid to pray in public.  Also, these were Sephardic Jews who had escaped the Inquisition so they knew about secrecy.  Within a few months, the Dutch East India Company would tell the governor to let the Jews stay.  Over time, the Jews would buy land for a cemetery, gain the right to serve in the militia and participate in the development of the Dutch colony.


1683: The second and final day of the Battle of Vienna.  During the Austro-Ottoman War, a coalition of Christian European Armies defeated the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Vienna.  Many historians date the beginning of the Ottoman Empire and therefore Islam from this event.  The Christians marked the start of the final drive to push the forces of Islam out of central and eastern Europe.  This was a mixed blessing for the Jewish people.  On the one hand the Ottoman Empire had provided a haven for Jews forced to leave Spain and Portugal.  On the other hand, the Christian victory had the unintended consequence ensuring that Europe would continue to be fertile ground for the growth of capitalism.  This economic system helped to provide European Jews with unprecedented economic social and economic opportunity.  “An oft-repeated story states that the bagel originated in 1683 in Vienna, Austria, when a local Jewish baker created them as a gift for King Jan III Sobieski of Poland to commemorate the King's victory over the Turks that year. The baked goods were fashioned in the form of stirrups (or horseshoe, tales vary) to commemorate the victorious cavalry charge. That the name bageloriginated from beugal (stirrup) is considered plausible by many, both from the similarities of the word and due to the fact that traditional handmade bagels are not perfectly circular but rather slightly stirrup-shaped. (This fact, however, may be due to the way the boiled bagels are pressed together on the baking sheet before baking.)”


1685: Jews in New Amsterdam petition to be allowed to worship their religion publicly. Their wishes were not approved, because they did not, "profess faith in Christ." During this time strict Christian observance was mandatory.


1691: Forty-four year old John Georg III, Elector of Saxony who in 1682 “issued a new decree, in which the onerous regulations relating to Jews passing through the country were somewhat modified, since those regulations were found to be detrimental to the yearly fairs at Leipsic” passed away today.


1695 (3rd of Tishrei, 5456): As Jews observed the Fast of Gedaliah, Jacob Abendana“hakam” (chief rabbi) of London passed away. He was the older brother of Isaac Abendana who would serve as hakahm of the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue after his death.


1695: The governor of New York was petitioned to allow the Jews to exercise their religion in public. It seems that the Charter of Liberties granted by James I of England in 1683, applied only to Christians. Therefore, the governor declined the petition.  Apparently this ban was not enforced since by the end of the 17th century, a building on Beaver Street in Manhattan was known as the Jewish Synagogue."  In 1730, Congregation Shearith Israel (Remnant of Israel) publicly dedicated its new house of worship.


1736(7th of Cheshvan, 5497): Austrian Rabbi David Ben Abraham Oppenheim whose work included novels and response and who developed one of the largest libraries of his time that he developed from a collection left by his Uncle Samuel Oppenheim


1759:  British soldiers capture the town of Quebec from the French.  This victory would play a key role in the British gaining control of Canada from the French thus opening the way for Jewish settlement of what those living in the “lower 48” call “their neighbor to the North.”   Under the French, the Jews were officially banned from settling in Canada.


1762: (21 Elul 5524): On the secular calendar, Rabbi Jonathan Eybeshutz passed away.  Born in 1690, in Cracow, Poland, Eybeshutz took his last name from the town in which his father served as a rabbi.  Eyebshutz was a child prodigy and was considered a great Talmudic scholar and kabbalist. He became head of the Prague yeshiva at the age of twenty-one and the was named Rabbi of the Triple Community -  Altona, Hamburg and Wandesbeck.  Unfortunately, Eybeshutz was caught up in the controversy of his time and some claimed that he had come under the influence of He was a kabbalist, author and Rabbi. Considered a brilliant authority on many subjects, Eybeshutz came under the influence of Shabbetianism.  This meant that he was a secret follower of the false messiah, Shabbetai Tzevi.  The depth of this controversy is meaningless to us today, but it was quit intense during the 18th century.  An accusation like this was akin to calling somebody a Communist back in the 1940's or 1950's. Although Eybeshutz was cleared of the charge, it stained his reputation and the controversy followed him to the grave.  In a collection of sermons published after his death, we might a clue to why some of his colleagues did not like Eybeshutz.  In his talks, he "assailed materialism praying by heart and the tendency of colleagues to preach only on safe topics."


1768(1st of Tishrei, 5529): Rosh Hashanah


1768: In Newport, Rhode Island, Aaron Lopez closed his businesses on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.


1792: Aaron Jones married Ann Benjamin at the Great Synagogue today.


1798(2nd of Tishrei, 5559): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1798: In the wake of the French capture of Mainz the gates of the ghetto were torn down. The Jews of Mainz remained French citizens until the end of the occupation in 1814. Mainz was (and is) a German city.  Wherever the French armies went, they carried the message of the French Revolution - "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality." This was a message of liberation for the Jews of Europe many of whom were living in ghettos and in an environment of something less than second class citizenship.  After the French were defeated, the conditions of the Jews in many of these countries reverted to the pre-Revolutionary state.  It would take several decades before the disabilities attached to the Jews would be removed in many of the countries of Central and Southern Europe.


1807: Birthdate of Moritz Veit, the scion of “a wealthy Jewish banking family” who was chairman of the Association of German Booksellers who was a leader of the Jewish community in Berlin.


1812: Birthdate of Reuben Joseph Wunderbar the native of Mitau who was known for being an author, tutor and principal of a Jewish school at Riga.


1812: Birthdate of Baron Moritz von Cohn the Jewish banker who managed the finances of the Dukes of Anhalft and the Prussian Crown Prince who became Kaiser Wilhelm I. 


1813: Mozes Aron married Ribca Eliezer Abendana in Amsterdam today.


1814: As the British began their attack on Baltimore which would come to a climax with the Bombardment of Ft. McHenry began with the British victory at the Battle of North Point.  “Although it’s not historically documented as such” the battle to defend the Maryland seaport “may have possibly been the largest gathering of Jewish soldiers at any time during the” War of 1812.


1817: In Börnecke, “evangelical pastor Klamer Wilhelm Frantz and his wife Karoline Auguste Katharine Frantz” gave birth to Constantin Frantz who opposed Bismarck’s drive to unify the German states into one nation which he attacked “in an anti-Semitic manner” describing it as an “Empire of Jewish nationality,” raised the age-old image of the Jews being unable to be loyal to the land here they lived and derying “an alleged Jewish influence in business and journalism.”


1820(4th of Tishrei, 5581): Abraham Ben Jehield Danzig passed away. Born in Lithuania in 1748, he was a noted author and codifier of Jewish Law who ranked just behind Joseph Caro and Mordecai Yafe.  His high level of personal ethics can be seen in his decision not to accept a paid position as a rabbi in Vilna because he “considered it improper to receive a stipend” for serving in that capacity.  He supported himself as a merchant while he pursuing his Jewish studies and writings


1821: Moses Samuel Married Harriet Israel at the Hambro Synagogue today.


1822: Sylvester Solomon married Rachel Elizabeth Raphael today at the Western Synagogue


1823: King Frederick William III of Prussia continued his policy of repudiating that Edict of 1812 that gave Jews the full rights of citizens by making “the minister of the interior responsible for ensuring that ‘no sects among the Jewries (Judenschaften) of my lands be tolerated.’” 


1825(29th of Elul, 5585): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1827: Solomon Marks married Amelia Joel at the Hambro Synagogue today


1830: In Stuttgart, Sarah (Wolf) Oppenheimer and Max Oppenheimer gave birth to Seligman Oppenheimer


1830: One day after he had passed away, 37 year old Solomon Levy was buried today at the “Lauriston Road Jewish Cemetery.


1830: Birthdate of William Sprague IV, the Senator from Rhode Island who said the Jews were to blame for the fact that they had been attacked by peasants in Romania.


1832: Elias David married Elisabeth Moses at the Great Synagogue today.


1832: In Scotland, Joseph Levi, a quill merchant who had died of cholera was the first person to be buried at the Glasgow Necroplis


1832: Lawrence Phillips married Sarah Worms at the Western Synagogue today.


1836 (1st of Tishrei, 5597): Rosh Hashanah 


1836: A rented room was over Max's Grocery and Restaurant, on the corner of Second and Spruce Streets was the site of the first known minyan in St. Louis, MO as Jews gathered to observe Rosh Hashanah, 5597. 


1837: Samuel Phillips married Sophia Levy at the Great Synagogue today.


1840: In New York City Augusta and Joseph Washington Feuchtwanger gave birth to Joseph Washington Feuchtwanger.


1840: Max and Sarah Oppenheimer gave birth to Adolph Marx Oppenheimer the husband of Julie Oppenheimer.


1841: Birthdate of Eugene Delmar, the New York born 19thcentury chess champ show four state championships in the last decade of the century. 


1846: Elizabeth Barrett elopes with Robert Browning. Relax; neither of them was Jewish.  But one of Browning’s most famous poems is “Rabbi ben Ezra” which begins with the immortal words. “Grow old along with me!  The best is yet to be…”


1847(2nd of Tishrei, 5608) Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1850:  Ferdinand Reichenheim, the son of Nathanael Reichenheim and Zipora Cäcilie Reichenheim, and Fanny Riechman gave birth to Antonie (Toni) Amalia Reichenheim who became Antoonie (Toni) Amalia Liebermann when she married Carol Theodor Liebermann


1852: In Morely, Emily Willans and Joseph Dixon Asquith gave birth to Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith who served as Prime Minister during the first two years of WW I.  For three years, Asquith pursued Venetia Stanley, competing with Edwin Montague for the affections.  Asquith lost out to Montague when Stanley converted to Judaism and married the Jewish leader of the Liberal Party.  His diary also contains references to taking Palestine and using it as home to “the scattered Jews” – a proposal that he feels Lloyd George is supporting not because he “cares a damn for the Jews or their past or their future” but because he but thinks it will be an outrage to let the Holy Places pass into the possession or under the protectorate of agnostic, atheistic France’”


1853: A review of Commentaries on the Laws of the Ancient Hebrews by a Congregationalist minister named Enoch Cobb Wines was published today.


1856: Birthdate of Amalia "Molly" Finkelstein Mogulesko, the Romanian born wife of actor and Yiddish comedian Sigmund Mogulesko.


1860: The Spanish and Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel consecrated a new synagogue in 19th street, in the place of the old Crosby street structure, and it furthermore secured the services of an associate preacher in the person of A. Fischell (1856-61


1861: Tobias Rosensteel who rose from the rank of second lieutenant to the rank of firs lieutenant, began his service with Company C of the Fourth Cavalry.


1861: Two days after he had passed away, “nine month old Montague Alexander Kisch, the son of Simon Abraham Kisch and the former Flora Davis was buried today at “Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.


1864: A party of Royal Engineers under the command of Captain Charles W. Wilson left England for Jerusalem where they were to begin the first modern survey of the ancient city including a variety of Biblical sites.


1866(3rd of Tishrei, 5627): Tzom Gedaliah


1866: “The Black Crook” which would provide Al Hayman with his first theatrical management opportunity, opened at Nibo’s Garden in New York.


1868: On Shabbat, Rabbi Einhorn delivered the first sermon at Temple Emanu-El on the occasion of the dedication of its new building.


1872: “Protection for Emigrants on Shipboard” published today described the treat of the eighty Jewish passengers on board the Charles H. Marshall who were unmercifully abused by the crew after their attempted mutiny failed.


1873: Rabbi I.M. Wise and Cantor Mortiz Goldstein officiated at today’s consecration of Anshe Chesed’s new sanctuary.  The congregation has moved from the old Norfolk Street Synagogue to its new location on the corner of Lexington and 63rdin Manhattan.


1874(1st of Tishrei, 5635): Rosh Hashanah


1874: In New York, Jewish businesses in the Bowery on Grand, Chatham and Catherine streets as well as those on 6th& 8thavenues and on Broadway were closed today because of the Jewish New Year.


1874: In the United Kingdom, Joseph Guedalla and Rowena (Florance) Guedalla gave birth to Abraham Guedalla.


1874: In London, Myer Salaman and his wife gave birth to Dr. Redcliffe Nathan Salaman who married Nina, the daughter of Arthur Davis in 1901 and who served as the Director of Pathological Institute of the London Hospital.


1875: Birthdate of Gertrude Hyman who as Gertrude Friedlander married Julian Albert Pollak.


1875: “The Jews of Lincoln” which first appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine and was republished today provides a brief history of the Jews of that part of England beginning with the loss of part of treasure that had belonged to Aaron of Lincoln in 1187 when some of the King’s ships were sunk during a voyage back to Normandy.  Like the Jews of York, Lynn and Stamford, the Jews of Lincoln had been slain and plundered by young Englishman who were going to King Richard on his Crusade to the Holy Land. The Jews of Lincoln have the additional memory of the slaughter tied Hugh of Lincoln, the Christian child whose death resulted in the first blood libel in the British Isles.


1878(29th of Elul, 5547): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1879: In Paris, antique dealer Alexander Rosenberg and his wife gave birth to art collector and historian Léonce Rosenberg who was the brother of gallery owner Paul Rosenberg.




1879: A large number of New York’s most prominent Jews attended this morning’s funeral for Leonard Montefiore, the nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore. Rabbi Gustav Gottheil officiated at the services which were held at Temple Emanu-El. Several of the city’s rabbis attended including Dr. Daniel Einhorn, H.S. Jacobs, Samuel Adler, H.S. Isaacs and Aaron Wise. Montefiore’s coffin was taken to the SS Britannic which will take it back to England for final interment.  Montefiore had come to the United States to study the republican social and political institutions that have developed in the United States so that he could write about them for his fellow Englishman.  Just prior to his death, the Times of London had published an article of his about the Oneida Community.


1880: In New York, police arrested Mina Blumenthal, for her role in her husband’s activities that included fencing stolen goods.


1880: In Baltimore Anna Margaret (Abhau) and August Mencken, Sr. gave birth to Henry Louis Mencken, better known as sharp tongued journalist H.L. Mencken whose diaries revealed a streak of anti-Semitism which did not keep him being “close friends” with Alfred Knopf and Ben Hecht, praising the work of Ayn Rand or that asserted that “books such as Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street by Eddie Cantor (ghost-written by David Freedman) did more to pull America out of the Great Depression than all government measures combined.”




1881: Siegfried Goldschmidt was appointed a professor at the University of Strasburg – a position he would not actually fill due to the suffering caused by “spinal consumption, the disease which ended his life.”


1881: It was reported today that it has been proposed in Russia “to appoint local commissions to consider the Jewish question in places where Jews predominate.”


1881: According to a review of Our Nationalities by James Bonwick, Milesius, the founder of the Milesians “was intimate with Moses.” 


1882: Second and final day of the first International Anti-Semitic Congress which was meeting in Dresden under the leadership of Reverend Adolf Stoecker.



1883: Joseph Blumenthal, the Chairman pro tem of the Board of Trustees of Shearith Israel said that the deadlock which has kept the board from choosing a new President is not caused by ill-will among the members and that he would in fact like to fill the office.  The deadlock exists because there are six trustees and the congregation is considering changing its by-law to increase that number to 7 which will end the tie votes of the last several months.


1883: It was reported today that in Hungary, “the Bishop of Veszprim has issued a pastoral letter in which he declares that Jew-baiting is most unchristian.


1883(10th of Elul, 5643)”: Sixty-three year old Avrohom Yaakov Friedman, the son of Rabbi Yisrael Friedman of Ruzhyn, who was  the first Rebbe of the Sadigura Hasidic dynasty passed away today.


1884: Social economist Mary M. Cohen presented “a paper on Hebrew charities” to the American Social Association” where “it was favorably received, discussed and published.”


1887: Birthdate of Samuel Alexander Persky the native of Russia who moved to New Haven in 1890 where he became a lawyer and journalist.


1890: Birthdate of Solomon Myer “Sol” Wurtzel, the New York native who became a successful movie producer.


1890: Joseph Bondy, a promising young Jewish attorney who has served on the Board of Supervisions is seeking the nomination for the Third Assembly District


1890: Mr. M. Resinkoff, a Jewish immigrant from Poland is working in New York City while awaiting for the return of his wife and children from Poland.  They had been sent back to Europe because of an error at the Barge office and it has taken the best efforts of the United Hebrew Charities and the Hamburg-American Packet Line to effect the upcoming reunion.


1891: In an editorial The London Times praised the scheme of “Baron Hirsch for colonizing in America the Jews for whom there is no place in Europe that it is the most remarkable scheme of the kind ever attempted by practical men.” The Times saw this as an example of Jewish leaders to” spend money as generously as they can accumulate it.”


1891: “Colonizing the Jews” published today quotes the London Times as saying that “the scheme of Baron Hirsch for colonizing in America the Jews for there is no place in Europe…is the most remarkable scheme of the kind ever attempted by practical men.”


1892: In New York, Ida Japhe and Samuel Knopf gave birth to Alfred A. Knopf, founder of Alfred Knopf, Inc., the famous American publishing house. “He went to college to become a lawyer, but he fell in love with literature and decided to devote his life to it. At the time, the publishing world was a kind of gentlemen's club and Knopf had a hard time fitting in because he was Jewish. He was the first Jewish employee at Doubleday. One of his first projects was to republish all of Joseph Conrad's books in a set, which he did with the help of H.L. Mencken. At the time that Knopf got into the publishing business, before television and widespread radio, people said that Americans didn't read books—they just read the newspapers. Knopf thought that Americans might be more likely to read good books if books were beautiful to look at. He used beautiful, easy to read type and high quality paper, and he was the first publisher to cover his books with brightly colored jackets. When Knopf founded his own publishing company, he didn't have enough money to publish big-name American authors, so he published European authors instead. Most American publishers didn't care about European literature, so Knopf was able to cheaply publish writers like Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus. When several of his authors won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. became known as one of the best literary publishing houses.” It was his Jewish wife Blanche Wolf Knopf who encouraged him to follow his dream and start his own publishing house.  She was more than just a cheerleader.  She was President of Alfred A. Knopf, while her husband served as chairman of the board.  She understood the publishing and was a driving force behind many of its major achievements.  Although the publishing company was sold in the 1960's it remains as a known imprint to this day.   Blanche died in 1966.   Alfred Knopf passed away in 1984.


 


1892: Of the 602 steerage passengers who set sail from Liverpool today aboard the SS Indiana are “a dozen Russian and Polish Jews” who spent twelve days in the English port “where their bedding and baggage were disinfected” as part of the attempts to avoid a cholera outbreak.


1893(2nd of Tishrei, 5654): On the Second Day of Rosh Hashanah “the Hebrew societies” of New York “sent…an abundance of delicacies” to “the Jewish immigrants detained at Ellis Island.”


1893: “They Should Be Excluded” published today includes excerpts from the report by Marine Hospital Bureau Inspector, Dr. Stimpson who described the Jews as being part of the “undesirable class of immigrants…who are a dark, swarthy race with long dark unkempt hair.” In addition to which “the Jews will not eat food prepared by Christians, bring their food with them and this food is most likely to contain cholera germs.”  (In light of the immigration battle ranging in the United States, the descendants of this undesirable class might do well to pay close attention to this)


1894: Abraham Greenspan who, according to Jewish tradition, had not seen the body of his wife before her burial went to Kings County Hospital claiming that they had given him the wrong body and demanding that they give him his wife; a claim that the hospital denied.


1895(23rd of Elul, 5655): Fifty year old Bernhard Mainzer who came to the United States 25 years ago and started working in the banking business passed away.  A member of the NYSE since 1879 he has been actively involved with the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the Hebrew Technical Institute and the Hebrew Educational Alliance.


1895: “War Between Two Butchers” published today described a battle between two competitors Louis S Newman and Samuel Lustbader which included accusations by each that the other was selling traif  (non-Kosher) meat and claiming that it was kosher.


1896: Birthdate of William Pinsker, the native of Novgorod Seversk, who moved to the United States in 1906 where he served as the Director of Jewish Educational Alliance in Savanah, GA and the YM-YWHA in Brockton, MA.


1896: Birthdate of Ella Kagan, the daughter of Jewish lawyer and music teacher living in Moscow, who gained fame as the French authoress Elsa Yur’evna Triolet.


1896: J. B. Greenhut opened its first store.  The company was founded by Joseph B. Greenhut a native of Austria, who had served as Captain with the 12thIllinois Infantry during the Civil War.


1898: Birthdate of Ben Shahn, famed painter, muralist and printmaker.  Born in Kovno Russia (now part of Lithuanian), Shahn’s family moved to New York in 1906.  Although not just a Jewish artist," much of Shahn's works contained Jewish themes, and his calligraphy frequently used the Hebrew alphabet as in the Alphabet of Creation, and Haggadah which was handwritten and illustrated by him in the 1967 Ecclesiast. In addition, he created murals for Jewish congregations including Mishkan Israel in New Haven, Connecticut, and Ohab Shalom in Nashville, Tennessee, as well as two mosaics for the Israeli oceanic ship Shalom. These mosaics were purchased by the New Jersey State Museum when the Shalom went out of service."   Shahn was a social activist as well as an artist.  "Ben Shahn said, 'I hate injustice. I guess that's about the only thing that I really do hate. and I hope I will go on hunting it all my life." His work reflects his concern with injustice, political freedom, and the state of humanity.'"  He passed away in 1969.  There are numerous websites where you can view his art.


1897: “Rome Fears the Zionist” published today described an appeal the Pope has made to France, “which protects Catholic interests in the Orient” “to prevent the success of the Zionist movement which is regarded with horror at Rome.”


1897: In Germantown, PA, Alfred and May Gibson gave birth to Walter Brown Gibson, Harry Houdini’s ghostwriter.


1898: As of today the officers of Adath Jeshurun are President Hermann Cohn, Vice President S.A. Diamond, Treasurer Max Slomka, Corresponding Secretary Isaac Sargent and Recording Secretary J.B. Jacobson.


1898: Birthdate of Soviet photographer Arkady Shaiket, who like Robert Capa and Joe Rosenthal was another Jewish photojournalist who provided iconic WW II photographs.



1899: Dr. Rudolph Grossman of Rodolph Sholom advised “coolness and carefulness” in planning for the mass meeting designed to protest the verdict in the re-trial of Captain Dreyfus and suggested selecting a committee of “100 prominent citizens” to play a leading role in the event.


1899: A meeting was held at Mandelbaum’s Hall at Willett and Delancey Streets, to make plans for the upcoming mass meeting where displeasure will be expressed with the verdict the Dreyfus court-martial


1899: Osias Maller presided at meeting in Liberty Hall sponsored by the Englander Family Society, where speakers, starting with Bethoven Englander decried the Dreyfus verdict which “is based on bigotry, intolerance and prejudice.”


1899: In Washington, DC, “about a thousand” people “attended a mass meeting at the Masonic Temple tonight to protest against the verdict of the Rennes court-martial in the Dreyfus case.  The speakers included men of all creeds – Jews, Protestants and Catholics.


1899: Louis Halle, who has been serving as treasurer for a group of 700 Chicagoans who were going to the Paris Exposition issued notices to the travelers should come and get their money since most of them have said they would not make the trip in light of the Dreyfus verdict.


1899: Among those listed as being recipients of equal portions of the estate of the late Daniel Woolf are Congregation Zichron Ephraim, the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum, the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society and Orphan Asylum, Mount Sinai Hospital, Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews and the Jewish Theological Society.


1899: The widow of the late Daniel Woolf plans to contest his will which leaves all of his estate to charity except for a dollar for her and each of his children.  Woolf said the children had been comfortably provided during his lifetime and his wife “owns much property in her own name.”


1901: Birthdate of comedian Ben Blue.  Ben Blue was one of several Jewish vaudeville stars who found fame and fortune in the early days of television.  Like Milton Berle, Blue starred in his own television variety program.  However, "all fame is fleeting," especially in the world of entertainment.  Blue died in 1975 and today this once successful star is a mere memory to even the most avid trivia maven.


1901: Gedera was attacked by Arabs. Gedera was a moshav founded in 1884 by members of the BILU Movement from Russia. It is several miles south of city of Rehovot. The settlers chose the name because it was near the site of a biblical town with that same name that had been in land belonging to the tribe of Judah.  In its early years, the settlers struggled to grow grapes and grains.  Gedera survived the attack and early privations and today is a thriving town with a population of 6,500.


1902(15th of Elul, 5763): Sixty-five year old Polish born French chess champion Samuel Rosenthal passed away today.


1903(20th of Elul, 5663): Seventy-one year old Fabian (Feibisch) Jolles passed away in Vienna.


1904(3rd of Tishrei, 5685): Tzom Gedaliah


1906: Today in South Carolina, Rabbi Simenhoff officiated at the wedding of H.L Garfunkel and Celia H. Lapedis.


1909: Adolph Kaluber writes a negative review of Israel Zangwill’s latest play, "The Melting Pot."


1909: Sir Montague Maurice Burton, the founder of “one of Great Britain’s largest chains of clothing stores and Sophie Amelia Burton gave birth to Barbara Jessie Burton.


1910: In Bacău, Betzalel Zeev Shafran and his wife gave birth to Alexandru Șafran who as Chief Rabbi of Romania intervened to rescue Jews during the Holocaust



1911: Birthdate of Gerhart Moritz Riegner


1911: Birthdate of SS Lieutenant Kurt Becher who “is best known for having traded Jewish living for money during the Holocaust.”


1912(1st of Tishrei, 5673): Jews celebrate the New Year for the last time during the Presidency of William Howard Taft.


1912: King of Italy makes Commanders Guido, Rava, Sforni, Mantua and Signor Sereni, Presidents of the Jewish Community at Rome, Grand Officers in the Crown of Italy.


1914(21st of Elul, 5674): Parashat Ki Tavo - Leil Selichot


1914(21st of Elul, 5674): Painter Louise Beatrice Horowitz, the daughter of Prussian born parents born in Islington best known for her work as a miniature portraitist passed away today.


1915: Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (Aide Association of German Jews) was informed that the inhabitants of Strumitza, fearing its occupation by Bulgarians, set fire to the town and fled. One hundred families went to Salonica and Doiran


1915: In Borough Park, founding of Zion Hospital.


1915: The Hebrew Ladies Aid Society was founded today in Quincy, Massachusetts, a town that was also home to Congregation Beth Israel, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association led by President Louis Lubarsky and Secretary Joseph Stoler and the Young Women’s Hebrew Association which was led by President Rose Schwartz and Secretary Eva Burson.


1915: It was predicted today that “the Czar’s proclamation removing the pale against the Jews will result in thousands” of them remaining in Russia instead of immigrating to America.


1915: Reverend Edgar Tilton of the Harlem Reformed Church said today that the World War “is not to be without tremendous benefits” including the fact that as a result of the conflict “the Jews are to have justice at last.


1916: Birthdate of Helmut “Henry” Laskau the top level distance runner who left Nazi Germany 1938 and who after serving with the U.S. Army developed into one of the “greatest racewalkers” of his time.



1916: “Dorsey Assails Slaton and Jews” published today described the attacks by Hugh M. Dorsey, the candidate for Governor of Georgia on his predecessor John M. Slaton who commuted the sentence of Leo Frank and “the Jews” including a national congress led by Louis Marshall “who have raised large amounts of money” to defeat him.


1916: Louis Marshall issued a statement completely denying all of the charges made by Georgia gubernatorial candidate Hugh M. Dorsey which he described “as the most shocking” pronouncements ever connected with the Leo M. Frank and describing his accusations about the Jewish Congress as being an example of “deliberate malice” aimed at the Jews in Dorsey’s “attempt to seek votes by stirring up religious animosity.”


1916: In what would prove to be another failed attempt to break the deadlock of WW I, the Allies launched the Monastir Offensive in Macedonia with goal of forcing the Bulgarians out of the war.


1916: “Bernard G. Richards, Secretary of the Jewish Congress Committee” issued a statement tonight “denying the charges made by Hugh M. Dorsey that members of the Jewish Congress organization had contributed to a fund intended to force Mr. Dorsey’s defeating in the upcoming gubernatorial election.”


1916: “Felix M. Warburg, Chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee for Jewish Relief announced” today “that the United States Cruiser Des Moines would leave soon for Alexandria and proceed to Jaffa to transport the medical supplies sent by the committee for the hospitals in Palestine.”


1916: In Minsk, Rabbi Yehezkel Abramsky and his wife gave birth to Chimen Abramsky, a graduate of Hebrew University and Oxford who became Professor of Jewish Studies at University College London and was the husband of Miriam née Nirenstein.




1917: Louis-Lucien Klotz began serving in the second government of Georges Clemenceau which led France to final victory in WW I.


1917: Alexandre Ribot, who had met with Nahum Soklow and expressed his government’s sympathy for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, resigned as Prime Minister of France today.


1917: Based on information provided The Morning Post in London “90 per cent of the Russian population” think that a world war is not the time for a socialistic experiment and that among the only supporters of the revolution are “hooligans, riffraff and several millions of the Jewish proletariat” which is offset by “the superior classes of Jews who are believed to already washing their hands of the movement.”


1917: “Jewish Holiday In Army” published today reported that the furloughs granted to Jewish soldiers to observe the New Year “extend from noon September 16 to the morning of September 19” and from “noon September 25 to the morning of September 27 for the observance of the Day of Atonement.”


1917:  In Stockholm the “Third Zimmerwald Conference” which Yakov Ganetsky and Karl Radek attended as delegates from Russia came to an end today.


1917: It was reported today that the Navy Department has granted a “similar leave absence” for its Jewish members to observe the upcoming holidays as has already been granted by the Army.


1917: Niemoe Rotterdamsce Courant published a “statement favoring Zionism made by the Dutch Minister of Finance to a representative of the Joodsche Korrespondenz of The Hague.”


1918: The AEF, including Sergeant Abraham Bluestein of the 165 Regiment, and additional force of French Troops launched the Battle of St. Mihel, part of the grand offensive designed to defeat the Germans on the Western Front and thus end the War to End All Wars.


1918: Birthdate of British Rabbi Ephraim Einhorn, the native of Vienna whose parents were killed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and who became one of two rabbis to serve Jews in Taiwan.


1918: It was reported today that as soon as the government became aware of the significance of September 16, “the Navy Department issued an order deferring the transfers of Jewish sailors and naval officers which had been scheduled to take place on that date because it was Yom Kippur” and the department changed its plans “so that Jewish boys might spend the day with their families or observe it in a fitting manner..”


1919: In Chicago, the Jewish ritual slaughters joined “the Amalgamated Meat-Cutters and Butcher Workers’ Union of North America.


1920(29th of Elul, 5680): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1920: As of noon today, Jewish soldiers may have furloughs to celebrate the New Year by order of Major General P.C. Harris, the Adjutant General of the Army.


1920: “Because it has outgrown its present structure,” “Temple Sholom, formerly the North Chicago Hebrew Congregation led by Rabbi Abraham Hirschberg is scheduled to hold services at the Medinah Temple which seats 4,500 people.”


1920: “San Francisco’s campaign” to raise “$350,000 for the relief of suffering Jews in Eastern Europe” is scheduled to begin today.


1920: Dr. Israel Elfenbein, the Rabbi of the west 95thStreet Congregation and Supervisor of W.S. Community House, “kindly reciprocated the many kind New Year’s greetings of his members and friends.”


1921: Birthdate of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Born in Lviv, Poland (now Ukraine) he studied to be a doctor, but had to go undercover and hide his Jewish identity when the Nazis invaded Poland. During World War II, he pretended to be a Christian mechanic and sabotaged as much Nazi machinery as he could without getting caught. After the war, he began to write fiction. He decided that regular realistic fiction wasn't sufficient to describe the world anymore, so he wrote fiction that took place thousands of years in the future. He's best known for his novel Solaris (1961), about a scientist who travels to a space station near a strange planet and meets the ghost of his wife. His most recent novel is Peace on Earth(1987), about a future where all wars are fought on the moon by machines, so that humans don't get hurt.”


1922: Birthdate of Mark Richard Rosenzweig, the Rochester born  research psychologist whose studies in animals found that the brain reshapes itself in response to experience, in adulthood as well as in early childhood.


1923(2nd of Tishrei, 5684): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1923: Sir Herbert Samuel, the High Commissioner, is expected to arrive in Palestine today.


1925: After 330 performances “Lady, Be Good” the George and Ira Gershwin musical was performed the last time at the Liberty Theatre.


1926(4th of Tishrei, 5687): Since the third of Tishrei fell on Shabbat, Tzom Gedaliah is observed today.


1927: Birthdate of Seymour Siegel the Conservative rabbi who served on the faculty of JTS and as executive director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.



 


 


1928: In Cleveland, Margaret and Irwin Siebert gave birth to Muriel Faye Sierbert “who became a legend on Wall Street as the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the first woman to head one of the exchange’s member firms.” (As reported by Enid Nemy)


1929: Jonah J. Goldstein, an attorney who is a member of the Executive Committee of the Joint Distribution Committee and the administrative committee of the ZOA sailed on the steamship Bremen tonight as he began his trip to Palestine.  Goldstein is going to aid in the investigation of recent uprising as well as to ensure those working for the Palestine Emergency Fund are providing the requisite support for the victims of the violence.  Goldstein is traveling at the behest of Felix Warburg the financier who also chairs the administrative committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.


1930(19th of Elul, 5690): Ninety-five year old Amalia Nathansohn Freud, the wife of Jacob Freud and the mother of Sigmund Freud passed away.


1931(1st of Tishrei, 5692): Rosh Hashanah


1931: First organized attack by Nazi storm troopers against Jews took place in Berlin.


1932: As the Weimar Republic continues its collapse that will bring Hitler to power newly appointed Chancellor Fritz von Papen lost a vote confidence forcing him to call for elections in November.


1933: While waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, Leó Szilárd conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction. The Hungarian born Jew would settle in the United States and work on the Manhattan Project.


1934: Birthdate of Abraham Telvi, the mobster who was one of those responsible for the vile crime of blinding Victor Riesel


1934: Birthdate of Alan Isler, the British born American novel whose first novel The Prince of West End Avenue won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994.


1935: The New Zionist Organization is founded in Vienna by Zev Jabotinsky. For many years there was tension between the World Zionist Organization and the Revisionist Party. Some of it was the result tactical differences, including the expansion of the Jewish Agency to include "non-Zionists." In addition there was still strong resentment and political tensions in the aftermath of the Alosoroff murder. The actual break came with a resolution to prohibit any independent political activity of Zionist organizations. Eleven years later they rejoined the WZO.  The formation of this organization was just another example of differences between Jabotinsky and his supporters (including Menachem Begin) on the one hand and the Labor Zionists on the other.  These differences have continued to this day and may be seen in the electoral politics of Israel in the 21st century


1935(14th of Elul, 5695): Mrs. Joshua Piza, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind who was the editor of the first Jewish prayer book in Braille.


1935(14th of Elul, 5695): Seventy-nine year old Hungarian native Benjamin Baruch who in 1900 came to the United States where in 1916 he began serving as President of of the Associaton of Orthodox Rabbis of New York (Va’ad Ho Rabbonim) passed away today.



1936(25th of Elul, 5696): Parashat Nitzavim-Vayeilech - Leil Selichot


1936:  Mrs. Julius Wolff, the chair of Community House reported today that enrollment in the nursery school on Forest Avenue in the Bronx supported by the New York section of the National Council of Jewish Women “is larger than in any previous year.”


1936: Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “Moral Preparedness” this moring at Temple Emanu-El.


1936: “A considerable representation of anti-Semitic foreigners were among the guests of” Julius Streicher “ at the Wittelsbacher Hotel this evening where it was “reported by persons present” that Streicher “announced that in the last analysis extermination is the only real solution of the Jewish problem.”


1936: Rabbi Louis I. Newman is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “Midsummer Madness: The New Attacks on Jews and Judaism” at Temple Rodeph Shlom.


1936: It was reported today that “the virulence of Dr. Goebbel’s attack and the bold manner in which he linked the Jews and the Communist International with the official Moscow regime made neutral diplomatic onlookers” at the Nuremberg Congress” gasp in amazement as did “the manifestations of intensified anti-Semitism as reflected in the chief speeches at the congress thus far.”


1937: The Palestine Post reported that the future of Palestine was discussed by the delegates of various countries at the League of Nations Council in Geneva. But British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden postponed his most important and much-awaited opening statement to the next meeting.


1937: The Palestine Post reported that at a meeting Bludan, Syria, Arab Foreign Ministers from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq decided to send special delegations to Geneva, London and other important European capitals in order to explain their opposition to Palestine¹s partition and to seek support for the Arab cause.


1937:  The Palestine Post reported that Shanghai Jews had created a special, volunteer Jewish Zionist defense force to protect their community.  Many of the Jews living in Shanghai had either come from Russia during the First World War or during the Civil War following the Russian Revolution.  Both of these upheavals had closed the western paths of immigration leaving Jews with no choice but flea across Asiatic Russia and cross into China.  Another group of Jews living in Shanghai were refugees from Hitler's Final Solution.  With the normal westerly routes closed, the flight east before and during World War II was an escape route.  Many of these refugees and their offspring came to the United States, including Michael Blumenthal, Secretary of the Treasury under the Carter Administration. 


1938: As the crisis over the Sudetenland came to a head, Hitler delivered “a violent speech blasting Czechoslovakia.”


1938: Ben Cohen and Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran two members of FDR’s Brain Trust known as the Gold Dust Twins appeared on today’s cover of Time magazine.  Cohen was Jewish.  Corcoran wasn’t.


1938: In “Troubles of Jews,” published today Timemagazine reported that:


 


·         People "of the Hebraic race" who have settled in the Kingdom of Italy, Libya or Italian Aegean Islands since Jan. 1, 1919 were last week ordered by the Italian Cabinet to depart before March 1, 1939 or be forcibly expelled. Commented No. 1 Fascist Newspundit Virginio Gayda: "These Jews, political or racial refugees of other countries, represent a foreign and perilous body and spirit inserted in the body and spirit of the Italian nation." The decree will oust about 20,000 of the estimated 85,000 persons in Italy "born of both parents of the Hebrew race." Next day the Cabinet decreed the ousting from all State-licensed schools of Jewish instructors and Jewish students numbering about 10,000. Jews who were already enrolled last year in Italian institutes of higher learning will be permitted to complete their courses.


 


·         Jews from all over the World met in Antwerp last week to launch an appeal for $10,000,000 in behalf of the Palestine Foundation Fund. Dr. Kurt Blumenfeld, Director of the Fund, urged a change in "Jewish methods of propaganda" to oppose Communism as well as Fascism. Treasurer Eliezer Kaplan of the Jewish Agency for Palestine complained: "Jews because of their indifference and failure to provide adequate funds are equally responsible with the British Government for the decline of Jewish immigration to Palestine."


 


·         In Brazil last week, wealthy Jews received extortion notes threatening physical violence, destruction of property unless they sent large "voluntary contributions" to Brazilian groups with allegedly Nazi affiliations. In Sao Paulo, police at once marched out to guard the premises of Jews who received threat-letters.


 


·         The Grand Duchy of Luxemburg barred its frontier to further Jewish refugees from Germany last week, continued to care for 315.


 


·         Swiss authorities declared that an estimated 140 Jews per day had been "clandestinely" fleeing from Germany into Switzerland, announced that barbed wire is being strung along the frontier to stem this "Jewish flood." Jewish refugee camps in Switzerland were reported jam-packed last week. The camp at Diepoldsau hoisted a banner reading: "THANKS TO THE SWISS PEOPLE."


 


·         Fearing Nazi oppression, about 30% of the Jewish population of the Free City of Danzig were announced to have fled abroad last week. Danzig Nazis of the Hitler Youth raided a synagogue, trampled and tore up the sacred Hebrew scrolls. Notice was served on 400 Jews owning houses in Danzig that next month Aryans will "purchase" their property. The Jews will be forced to sell out at Nazi-dictated prices.


 


·         Soviet police last week jailed numerous Komsomol (Communist Youth Organization) leaders in the Ukraine and White Russia, who were accused of fomenting pogroms, according to Swedish press reports from Moscow. Stirred up by Young Communists, citizens of Pedobanya of the River Nemiljana started beating up Jews and attacking their homes. Moscow dispatched a commission of inquiry which reported that in the Ukraine there is "organized and fairly widespread" anti-Semitism. In Kiev, the Soviet Ukrainian Capital, anti-Jewish riots were suppressed by Red Army troops.


 


1939: Thirty-two Jews taken away in trucks at Pilca, Poland, shot dead and left in woods


1939: Secretary of State Cordell issued a statement tonight extending “best wishes…to the Jews of the country on the eve of their observance of the Jewish New Year. (Editor’s Note: Apparently his wishes to did not extend to the Jews of Europe whose entry into the United States he had been helping to thwart for the last six years.)


1939: In Los Angles, Esther (née Silverman) and Ralph Louis Waxman gave birth to Congressman Henry Waxman


1940(6th of Tammuz, 5700): In New York, David Rosenthal, the husband of Bertha Steinhardt and the father of Beatrice R. Swaab and D. Anson Rosenthal passed away today.


1940: Birthdate of Congressman Stephen J. Solarz, who represents the largest Jewish congressional constituency in the country.


1941: One thousand, two hundred, sixty seven Jews were taken from Vilna and sent to Polna to be shot. General Keitel informed his commanders, "The struggle against Bolshevism demands ruthless and energetic measures, above all against the Jews."  William Keitel rose to the rank of Field Marshall in the German Army.  Statements such as these provide further proof of the complicity of the German military in "The War against the Jews".  Keitel was hung in 1946 after being convicted at Nuremberg.


1942(1st of Tishrei, 5703): Rosh Hashanah


1942: Birthdate of French television journalist Michel Drucher,the brother of “French Television executive Jean Drucker and the uncle of actress Lea Drucker.


1942: After seven straight weeks of uninterrupted deportation of close to 265,000 Jews from Warsaw and other towns to Treblinka, the transports stop. Being the Jewish New Year (5,703) was only a coincidence. No trains would arrive for another nine days.


1942: More than 4800 Polish Jews are deported from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination camp. A young Jew named Abraham Jakób Krzepicki escapes from Treblinka and makes his way to Warsaw, where ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum sees that Krzepicki's eyewitness camp testimony is taken down


1942: In a raid that ended today, 24 year old Malka “Mala” Zimetbaum  was arrested in Antwerpt “and sent to the Dossin Barracks sammellager in Mechelen” her first stop on the road to Birkenau.


1943: Sid Luckman out-tossed Slingin' Sammy Baugh of the Washington Redskins in an aerial duel today before 56,000 fans in Baltimore Stadium as the Chicago Bears defeated the National Football League champions, 21 -- 14, in an exhibition game.


1943: Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever, the famous Yiddish poet and his wife escaped from the Vilna Ghetto. Sutzkever’s mother and infant son had already been killed by the Nazis.  Before leaving the ghetto, Sutzkever hid a diary by Theodore Herzl and drawings by Marc Chagall from the Germans.  After escaping, Sutzkever joined with his fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginsky to fight against the Nazis as part of Jewish partisan unit under the command of Moshe Judka Rudnitski.


1944: Jewish slave laborers work near Lieberose, Germany, to build a vacation complex for German officers


1945: Admiral Paul Wenneker, the German naval attaché serving in Tokyo said today from his refugee in Karuizawa, that “the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was ‘utterly stupid’” but that “Germany had been anxious to get Japan into the war principally ‘because Germany, of course, lacked sea power, and to be assisted by a first-class sea power seemed wonderful.’”


1945: “Franz Josef Spahn, Germany’s ‘little Fuehrer’ in Japan complained today from his refuge in Karuizawa, “about the attitude of the Japanese toward Jews” saying that “they were even not so distinctly averse to Jews and did not support Nazi policy against them.”


1945: In East Orange, NJ, “Roslyn (Melnikoff) Thaler” and “Alan Maurice Thaler, a Toronto born actuary at the Prudential Financial in Newark, NJ” gave birth to University of Chicago professor and the 2017 recipient of “the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.”




1946: Birthdate of Jerry Edwin Abramson, the three-term Mayor of Louisville, Kentucky and the first Metro Mayor “of the merge city-county government known as Louisville Metro.


 


1947: While meeting in London, “as expected, the delegates of the seven Arab states gave seven sets of reasons today why they rejected the Anglo-American experts’ provincial-autonomy plan for Zionists and Arabs” while not expressing support for Arab state in Palestine.


1948: “Present Jose Figueres of Costa Rica has assured a representative of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that the status of some 1,000 Jewish immigrants who arrived in that country since the end of the war in Europe will be legalized soon, HIAS announced here today. The announcement followed a visit here by Louis Feigenblatt, HIAS representative in Costa Rica. Feigenblatt, who is also president of the Jewish community of San Jose, revealed that the status of the immigrants was challenged after the former government was overthrown by a revolution last May and Figueres installed.” (As reported by JTA)


1949: The Knesset passed a compulsory education law. As soon as the guns of the War for Independence were silent, the new Jewish state was validating the centuries old commitment of Jews to the importance of learning.  When the anti-Semites would burn copies of the Torah and the Talmud during the Middle Ages, they were not merely burning things, they were assaulting a basic form of Jewish identity; a form that they knew was part of the key to the on-going existence of the Jewish people regardless of their location.


1949: “An attempt to assassinate Premier David Ben Gurion and other members of the Israel Cabinet was foiled today when guards in the Knesset overpowered Avraham Tzafati a young Jew who aimed a loaded Sten gun at the Ministers of the Jewish state after jumping to the Speaker’s platform from the visitors’ gallery.”


1950 (1st of Tishrei, 5711):  As UN forces led by U.S. and  the ROK armies are breaking out of the Pusan Perimeter during the Korean War, Jews observe Rosh Hashanah


1950: The Israeli radio broadcasts Rosh Hashanah services.  According to published reports Israelis have shown up the nation’s synagogues in unusually large numbers possibly as a sign of thanksgiving for the great strides the country has made in the past year.


1951: The Cabinet approved today a declaration by Finance Minister Eliezer Kaplan that funds raised through the sale of Israeli bonds in the United States would be invested mainly in industrial and agricultural expansion and not diverted to meet "current and pressing emergency needs." Despite the worsening food situation, Mr. Kaplan said this action was necessary if Israel was to “achieve economic independence for our rapidly growing population.”  Prime Minister Ben Gurion endorsed the plan even though it could mean a great deal of privation for the current generation.


1952: NBC broadcast the first episode of “Bonino” a sitcom starring David Opatoshu, Mike Kellin and Conrad Janis, the son of art dealer Sidney Janis.


1952: The Jerusalem Post published the full text of the agreement on German reparations to Israel.


1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that the bodies of Haviva Reik and Raphael Reiss, who during World War II died on an Allied parachute mission against the Nazis in Slovakia, were laid to rest on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.


1953: Birthdate of photographer Nancy “Nan” Goldin the native Washingtonian whose best known work Is “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,’ “a 1985 slide show exhibition and 1986 artist's book publication of photographs taken by her between 1979 and 1986.”



1954: Leonard Bernstein conducts the IPO in performance of Serenade featuring Isaac Stern at Teatro La Fenice, Venice.


1955(25th of Elul, 5715): Eighty-two year old Edward Lazansky, the former Secretary of State of New York who was “a found and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, passed away today.


1955(25th of Elul, 5715): Eighty-eight year old Rumanian born New York “wholesale shoe merchant” Bernard Lebovitz, “one of the founders and a former president of B’nai Jacob Synagogue in South Brooklyn” and “the executive director of the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital” who was the husband of Hedvig Lebovitz” passed away today.



1956: Three Druze guardsmen - Nawaf Abu-Ghazi, Suleiman Hatoum and Rafik Abdullah – were killed tonight when a Palestinian Fedayeen squad entered Israel from Jordon and attacked the Ein Ofrarim facility near Hatzvea setting the stage for an Israeli response – Operation Shoshana.


1957: Birthdate of Academy Award winning composer Hans Florian Zimmer the native of Frankfurt am Main whose mother had escaped to England in 1939 because she was Jewish


1959: Premier of the western television hit “Bonanza.”  The popular Sunday cowboy show starred a father and his three sons.  Two of the four actors in the lead roles were Jewish. Lorne Greene played Pa Cartwright and Michael Landon played Little Joe.


1961(2nd of Tishrei, 5722): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1961: German physicist Carl Hermann passed away.  Hermann and his wife hid Jews during the World War II.  Hermann was arrested and imprisoned for this crime.  He survived and continued his work in the field of crystallography. 


1964(6th of Tishrei, 5725): Shabbat Shuva observed for the first time during the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson.


1968: Two days after he had passed away funeral services were scheduled to be held at the Fliedner Funeral Home, for sixty-two year old New York City native and Pratt Institute graduate Louis A. Peirez, the “President of Viewlex, Inc,” manufacturers of “audiovisual, photographic and sound equipment” who “was a member of the national board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League” and the husband of Alexandra S. Nininger Peirez with whom he had two children – Helen and David.


1969(29th of Elul, 5729): Erev Rosh Hashanah




1969: As the New York Mets gathered steam in their surprise drive to win the National League Pennant, Art Shamsky sat out a game with the Pittsburgh Pirates after discussing the matter with his manager, former Brooklyn Dodger great Gil Hodges.


1970(11th of Elul, 5730): Seventy-five year old New Jersey Law School graduate and “former vice dean of the University of Newark” Aaron Lasser, “an organizer and former President of the Newark Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association” and husband of Hazel Lasser with whom he had two children – Lawrence and John – passed away today.



 


1970(11th of Elul, 5730): Ninety-eight year old Ottilie Sutro, the Baltimore native who with her sister Rose formed one of the first (if not the very first) “duo-piano teams” passed away today.


1970(11th of Elul, 5730): Seventy-eight year old Montreal born American economist and University of Chicago Professor Jacob Viner passed away today




1970: NBC broadcast a television adaptation of “George M!” starring Joel Grey in the title role role.


1970: “Five Easy Pieces” directed by Bob Rafelson who also co-produced and co-authored the script was released in the United States today.


1972: CBS broadcast the first episode of “Maude,” a sitcom created by Norman Lear staring Bea Arthur and Bill Macy with music by Marilyn and Alan Bergman.


1974: For the second day in a row, a demonstration was “held in Moscow by Jewish activists deamanding exit visas” at the end of which “all ten participants were arrested.”


1975(7th of Tishrei, 5736): Seventy-seven year old Joseph A. “Joe” Alexander “a three-time All-America at Syracuse University, described by Walter Camp as ‘one of the greatest defensive guards ever seen on the gridiron’ who in 1925 was the first player ever signed by the New York Giants when the team organized” and who became a medical doctor passed away today.


1977(29th of Elul, 5737): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1977: CBS broadcast the first episode of the seventh and final season of “Maude,” a sitcom created by Norman Lear staring Bea Arthur and Bill Macy with music by Marilyn and Alan Bergman.


1977: Birthdate of Idan Raichal, the musician from Kfar Saban best known “his Idan Raichal Project” released in 2002.


1977: The Jerusalem Post reported that the cabinet was officially notified by Prime Minister Menachem Begin of the appointment of his two pre-1948 Irgun Zva'i Leumi comrades to top government posts: Ya'acov Aknin, an IDF brigadier, was appointed director-general of the Israel Lands Administration and Amihai Paglin was appointed the premier's adviser on the war against terror.


1978: ABC broadcast the first episode of “Taxi” a sit-com created by James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels and Ed Weinberger, starring Jud Hirsch as “Alex Rieger.”


1981: In “Israeli Comedy at La Mama Annex,” published oday critic Frank Rich provides a review of “Ya’acobi and Leidenthal.”



1981: “Under the leadership of first-year head coach Fred Goldsmith, Slippery Rock University “returned to the Big House  to face Wayne State (Michigan) in a season-opening game that drew a crowd of more than 35,000 fans, which also ranks among the top attendance totals in NCAA Division II football history.


1982(24th of Elul, 5742): Ninety-year old Louis Waldman, leading labor lawyer and founding member of the Socialist Party of America, passed away today.(As reported by Edward Gargan)



1986:  Birthdate of Emmanuelle Grey Rossum known as actress and singer and Emmy Rossum.


 


1988(1st of Tishrei, 5749): Rosh Hashanah


1990: “Reversal of Fortune” film adaption of Alan Dershowitz’s book produced by Edward R. Pressman and co-starring Ron Silver premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.


1995: Bella Abzug's plenary address to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing set a tone of international cooperation and commitment that helped define both the conference and its influential legacy. After a historic career as a pioneering U.S. Congresswoman and activist, Abzug approached Beijing as a symbolic moment of feminist possibility. A long-time advocate for women's equality as well as human rights, she insisted on taking part in the Beijing conference despite illness and her confinement to a wheelchair. The conference focused primarily on probing the living conditions for women including women's health, education, and economic status. Success in defusing the tensions over Zionism that had marked previous United Nations women's conference facilitated constructive dialogue among the 7,000 delegates. The Beijing conference managed to synthesize numerous conflicting nationalistic feminist approaches into an international human rights feminist vision, offering resolutions that have continued to define national agendas for changing women's lives around the world. In her address Abzug stated that, "Imperfect though it may be, the Beijing Platform for Action is the strongest statement of consensus on women's equality, empowerment and justice ever produced by governments. The Beijing Platform is a consolidation of the previous UN conference agreements in the unique context of seeing it through women's eyes... We are bringing women into politics to change the nature of politics, to change the vision, to change the institutions. Women are not wedded to the policies of the past."



1999: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including two children’s books, Moses and the Angelsby Ileene Smith Sobel; Illustrated by Mark Podwal and Journeys With Elijah Eight Tales of the Prophet,retold by Barbara Diamond Goldin; Illustrated by Jerry Pinkney.


2000: “Israel Police Northern District Commander Alik Ron requested an investigation of Hadash MK Mohammad Barakeh for inciting violence against police.”


2001: Forty-six year old Ruth Shua’I was shot by Palestinian terrorists today.


2001: The Rim Kwas renamed the Karine A when it was registered in Tonga today. It was under that name that she was used in an attempt to smuggle a massive amount of arms into Gaza.


2001: The Jewish Museum in Berlin opened to the public today housed in a building designed by Daniel Libeskind. (JTA)


2002: Eyal Golan married the Miss Israel of 2001 Ilanit Levi. The couple's eldest son Liam was born in 2003 and their youngest daughter Alin was born in 2006.


2003(15th of Elul, 5763): Thirty-seven year old Tova Lev died of wounds sustained during the Shmuel HaNavi Bus Bombing that took place in August, 2003


2003: “Lost in Translation,” the production and distribution of which was overseen by James Schamus was released in the United States today.


2004: An exhibition styled “Photographs of Otto Frank” closes in Amsterdam.  The exhibition was part of the commemoration of Anne Frank’s “75th birthday.”


2004: “The Boy from Oz” which had been adapted for American audiences by Martin Sherman was performed for the final time at the Imperial Theatre.


 


2004(26th of Elul, 5764): Ninety-three year old screenwriter and playwright Jerome Chodorov who was blacklisted in the 1950’s passed away today. (As reported by Jesse McKinley)



2004: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including Collected Stories: ''Gimpel the Fool'' to ''The Letter Writer''by Isaac Bashevis Singer.


2005: Sidney Ferris Rosenberg left WFAN today after failing to show up to host the Giants' pre-game show. As a result of the no-show, management at WFAN gave him the option to resign from the station, which he did. The New York Post reported that he would likely have been fired if he did not resign.


2005: “The eviction of all residents, demolition of the residential buildings and evacuation of associated security personnel from the Gaza Strip was completed” today.


2005: As the Kissufim Gates was closed, the last Israeli soldier left Gaza. 


2005: As reported in Haaretz,Palestinians moved into the abandoned Gaza Strip settlement of Morag before dawn after Israel Defense Forces troops pulled out of the area and set the synagogue on fire. Huge flames leapt into the sky. In another synagogue, gunmen climbed on the roof and waved flags of militant groups, including Hamas, shouting "God is great." Just hours earlier, the Palestinian Interior Ministry spokesman said the Palestinian Authority will destroy the synagogues left behind in Gaza by evacuating IDF troops


2006: The original version of “Fear Factor” a game show that Jeff Zucker used to keep NBC on top of the ratings game was broadcast for the last time today.


 

2006:An artistic tribute to beloved lyricist and media personality Ehud Manor opened at the Holon Mediatheque, where 70 works inspired by Manor songs will remain on display through October 23. Professional and amateur artists contributing to the show include sculptor David Gerstein and Aliza Olmert, wife of the prime minister. Manor, who died in April 2005 at age 64, wrote a number of Israeli classics during his prolific career, and past musical collaborators in attendance at Tuesday's opening will include Ohad Hitman and Corinne Alal. Works done in water color, pencil and with less conventional media including chocolate were selected for the exhibition, with Israeli Design Center Manager Amnon Zilber serving as one of the show's two curators.


2006: The Jerusalem Post reported that an al-Qaida-linked Algerian terror cell that was broken up by Italian police last fall was planning to carry out attacks on targets in Oslo, Norway, including the city's main synagogue.


2006: Eliot Spitzer defeated Thomas Suozzi in the New York Democratic gubernatorial primary.


2007(29th of Elul, 5767: Erev of Rosh Hashanah 5768


2007(29th of Elul): Anniversary of the birth of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch, third leader of Chabad.


2007: In “Looking Through Rose-Colored Glass Again at Shul,” Sewell Chan describes the restoration work being done at the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side.



2008: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa Temple Judah begins its Musical Shabbat Season II at Friday night services where the community will also celebrate Marilyn Sippy’s formal conversion to Judaism.


2008: With the assistance from Edward Mermelstein, and a payment of one million dollars to cover expense by Viktor Veselberg, the Lowell House Bells were transported from Harvard University “back to their orginial location in the Danilov Monastery.


2008: “Witness Changed Her Story During Rosenberg Spy Case” published today described how Ruth Greenglass “a key prosecution witness whose testimony helped send Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair gave a different account at trial than she did before the grand jury.”


2009: President Shimon Peres was rushed to hospital tonight after he fainted on stage while speaking at a Young Presidents Organization event in Ramat Aviv. Peres passed out while answering questions from the crowd, paramedics told reporters. The 86-year-old fainted and regained consciousness on his own a few seconds later, they added. Initially, Peres refused to be taken to hospital but eventually agreed to go to Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv for a checkup.


2009: Lebanon, an Israeli film that recounts Israel's 1982 invasion of its northern neighbor through soldiers' eyes, won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival today.


2009(23rd of Elul, 5769): Eighty-one year old Lawrence Slobodkin, a pioneer in the ecology movement, passed away today. (As reported by Carol Kaesuk Yoon)



2009( 23rd of Elul): Seventy nine year old Dr. Alfred Gottschalk, the Rabbi and scholar who left his imprint on Hebrew Union College and Reform Judaism, passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)



2009 (23rd of Elul, 5769): This evening, Rabbi Todd Thalblum conducts his first Selichot service as the leader of Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.


2010: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to present “Anna Shulman: The Queen of H Street,”  a one-woman show that tells the entertaining and true life story of Anna Shulman, her arrival in the U.S. and in Washington, and her impact on the H Street neighborhood, home to Jewish merchants in the 1920s and 1930s. 


2010:  The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Half A Life by Darin Strauss


2010(4th of Tishrei, 5771): Tzom Gedalia


2010: The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, signaled for the first time today that he was willing to limit, though not completely halt, construction in the West Bank settlements after a partial building moratorium expires later this month. The hints of flexibility came as diplomats worked to defuse a potential crisis over settlement building that threatens to derail fledgling Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.


2010: Antonina Pirozhkova, who as the widow of the renowned short-story writer Isaac Babel campaigned for more than half a century to keep his literary legacy alive after his execution by Stalin’s K.G.B., and who wrote a memoir about the last seven years of his life, passed away today at the age of 101.  Babel was Jewish.  She was not. 


2011: An exhibition that “explores the theme of conversation in Moses Mendelssohn’s life and legacy, including in his relationships, his writings, and his concepts of Judaism and the Enlightenment” is scheduled to open at the Center for Jewish History in New York.


2011: Israeli-born pianist and composer Matan Porat is scheduled to play Ullmann’s  Piano Sonata no.7at the 14th Jerusalem International Chamber Musical Festival.


 


2011: The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington is scheduled to present a special embassy of Israel briefing by Eliav Benjamin, the Counselor of Political Affairs.


2011: The home of a well-known left-wing activist in Jerusalem was defaced with graffiti proclaiming "death to the traitors" and "price tag Migron" last night, a move apparently carried out by rightists angry over the government's decision to demolish illegal structures in a West Bank settlement.


2011: Vandals have defaced a Jewish memorial in eastern Poland by rearranging bushes forming the Star of David into a Nazi swastika, police said today, in the latest of a string of anti-Semitic incidents in the area


2011: Some 66,000 Labor party members go to the polls today to choose the next party leader from among four contenders: Isaac Herzog, Amram Mitzna, Amir Peretz and Shelly Yachimovich.


2012: Yeshiva University Museum is scheduled to offer a Curators Tour - Microcosms: Ruth Abrams, Abstract Expressionist


2012: EMET is scheduled to present “The Road to a Culture of Peace in the Middle East: Track III Diplomacy” to members of Congress and selected invitees in Washington, DC.


2012: Rabbi Elliot Kukla is scheduled to lead an hour-and-a-half workshop focusing on holiday-related grief experiences and on tools for coping and finding comfort during the Days of Awe at Shir Hadash.


2012: Dr. Susan Gilson Miller presents a lecture entitled Jewish Rescue and Relief in North Africa during World War II


2012:Israel's population approached the eight million mark nearing Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, according to a report released today by the Central Bureau of Statistics



2013: Joshua M. Bernstein is the featured speaker at “Jews & Brews: Boot Camp for Beer Geeks” at the Karl Strauss Brewing Company in San Diego, CA.


2013: To mark the 69th anniversary of the final destruction of the Łódź ghetto in August 1944, Wiener Library intern and Wrocław University PhD student Iza Olejnik is scheduled to give an informal talk about the culture of the ghetto based on her own research in London, UK.


2013: For the second year in a row, the night before Yom Kippur will bring to Israel the annual Researchers’ Night, a celebration of all things scientific, with hundreds of events taking place at over a dozen universities and colleges. Via speeches, workshops, mass experiments, and demonstrations, all taking place tonight scientists will attempt to explain to Israelis of all ages and backgrounds some of the basic principles of astronomy, biology, chemistry, genetics, and more.


2013: It was announced today that “President Shimon Peres will award this year’s Presidential Medal of Distinction to a group that includes Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.”


2013: Israel Police forces, Border Patrol officers and volunteer policemen are on high alert ahead of Yom Kippur, with a special emphasis on mixed cities, like Acre and Jaffa, and areas of high sensitivity like the Temple Mount, Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino said today.


2013: Prime Minister Golda Meir’s testimony on the Yom Kippur War, as declassified today, omits all mention of her pivotal meeting in Tel Aviv with King Hussein of Jordan. (As reported by Mitch Ginsburg)


2014: Comedian and social commentator Lewis Black is scheduled to perform at the Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada.


2014: ‘An appreciation of David Hillman’s UK synagogue stained glass windows’ published today.



2014: Marc Courtade is scheduled to speak on “Shirley Temple: From Child Star to Diplomat” at the 92nd Street Y.


2014: French anti-Semitic watchdog group SPCJ reports 527 anti-Semitic incidents from Jan. 1 to July 31, 2014. There were 423 incidents reported in all of 2013. (As reported by Stephanie Butnick)


2014: The Historic 6th& I Synagogue is scheduled to host “6th in the City Shabbat” including a service led by Rabbi Shira and Sheldon Low followed by a Friday Night Dinner.


2014: “Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche, suspected of killing four people at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in May, was remanded in custody for another three months today, judicial officials said.”


2014: “Thousands of people attended a memorial service today to commemorate the Druze soldiers killed in action while serving in the Israel Defense Force.”


2014: “The President of Hillel International called on Ohio University to apologize to four pro-Israel students who were arrested during a protest.”


2015: Author Annie Cohen-Solal is scheduled to speak about iconic artist Mark Rothko at the Chilmark Library in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.


2015: Lior Shvil’s “Protocols” is scheduled to go on display at “Art in General” in Lower Manhattan.


2015: In Santa Barbara, CA, Lewis Black is scheduled to perform at the Arlington Theatre.


2015: Jeremy Corbyn, “the far-left MP who has empathized with Hezbollah and Hamas” and whose “ties to Holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright anti-Semites” has “alarmed” English Jews was chosen as the new leader of the Labour Party today.


2015: “After almost a week of choking dust blanketing Israel – the worse sandstorm to hit Israel in its history – the Environmental Protection Ministry said today that the thick yellowish-brown particles filling the air have begun to dissipate.”


2015(28th of Elul, 5775): Final Shabbat of 5775. 


2016(9th of Elul, 5776): Ninety-six year old economist Stanley K. Sheinbaum passed away today. (As reported by Sam Roberts)



2016: Violinist Itzhak Perlman announced today “that he would donate NIS 3.2 million (approx. $850,000) to organizations in Israel that connect people with disabilities with the classical arts” including NIS 940,000 (approx. $250,000) for the Tel Aviv Conservatory for a new Perlman-Genesis String Project and “another NIS 188,000 (approx. $50,000) to House of Wheels, a rehabilitation center for children and adults with impaired mobility.”


2016: “Four yeshiva students studying at the settle of Nahliel were arrested today for attacking law enforcement officers and allegedly vandalizing Palestinian property.”


2016: Daniel Snyder’s Washington Redskins are scheduled to kick off their 2016 NFL season.


2017: In Des Moines, IA, the Iowa Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to host “When Memories Unfold: A Luncheon with Celina” featuring readings and reminiscences by “Celina Karp Biniaz, the daughter of Irvin and Phyllis Karp and the youngest female survivor from Schindler's List”


2017: The Jerusalem Sacred Music Festival is scheduled to present “Harmonies in Time” featuring Israel’s Castle in Time Orchestra.


2017: “In an eight-to-one decision, the High Court of Justice today struck down Knesset legislation from 2015 that was meant to delay efforts to increase the rate at which ultra-Orthodox youth are drafted into the military.”


2017: A Senior Russian official revealed today that Moscow had advised Syrian President Assad not to respond to Israel's alleged attack on its state's Scientific Studies and Research Center, reassuring that if Iran increases its efforts to establish a foothold in the Golan, Russia will make sure to put a stop to it.


2017: As part of the events marking the first anniversary of the death of Shimon Peres, “his memoir No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination and the Making of Modern Israel” is being released today.


2017: The Jewish Federation of New Orleans is scheduled to host its “104th annual meeting” along with a meeting of the Jewish Endowment Foundation of Louisiana.


2018: Beit Avi Chai is scheduled to host an original production of “Prior to Arrival,” “a musical-theatrical show with original music, drama, and spoken word – all in pursuit of Elijah the Prophet.”


2018: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host three screenings of “Damascus Cover.”


2018(3rd of Tishrei, 5779): Fast of Gedaliah

 


 

This Day, September 13, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 13


586 BCE (3 Tishrei 3338): On the civil calendar assassination of Gedaliah ben Achikam. He had been appointed Governor of Judea by Nebuchadnezzar in an attempt to revitalize the Jewish community. His assassin, Ishmael ben Natanya, a descendent of the royal house, was convinced by neighboring nations that a revolt against the Babylonians could succeed. In fear of retribution, many of the remaining Jews fled to Egypt destroying what was left of the Judean government. This day is commemorated as a fast day, The Fast of Gedaliah.  Yes, on the Jewish calendar, the first two days of Tishrei are days of Joy - Rosh Hashanah.  This is immediately followed by a minor fast day - the Jew never forgets that life is a mixture of joy and sorrow.


81: The Roman Emperor Titus who gained fame for destroying the Second Temple passed away.


122: The building of Hadrian's Wall begins. The wall was named for Hadrian, the Roman Emperor who had it built as part of plan to set limits on the size of the Roman Empire and to essentially go over to a defensive posture.  For the Jews, Hadrian was no “prince of peace” since he is the suppressed the Bar Kochba Revolt with vehemence and violence.


335: In an example of the Religious Imperialism that afflicts the Jewish people, Emperor Constantine the Great consecrates the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Christians believe that this is the site where Jesus was crucified by the Romans as well as the site of Jesus' tomb.


531:  Kavadh I, the Sassanid King of Persia against who Mar Zuta revolted and established a Jewish state in Babylon that lasted for seven years passed away today. (The History of the Jewish People)


604: Today, Sabinian, a contemporary of Benjamin of Tiberias who was responsible for a revolt that led Jewish forces to take Jerusalem in 614, became Pope today.


1438: King Duarte of Portugal passed away.  During his reign he enacted laws prohibiting Jews from employing Christians. In 1433 Master Guedelha, a rabbi who served as doctor and astrologer for King Duarte prophesied “to King Duarte terrible events if he did not postpone his ascent to the throne of Portugal. A year later, Duarte and his army met with disaster at Tangiers and four years later - 1438 - King Duarte died of the plague - the Black Plague which decimated all of Europe.”


1503: Michelangelo begins work on his statue of David. While the statue may win high marks as Renaissance heart, it gets a big “F” in Halakah since the statue of the Jewish king is of an uncircumcised male.


1597(1st of Tishrei, 5358): Rosh Hashanah


1597: In Amsterdam a hall that had been “secured for worship” that was named "Beth Ya'aḳob," after one of its founders, Jacob Tirado consecrated it today.


1600: The Jews of Klausenburg, Hungary, were massacred.


1610: Bookseller Thomas Bushnell transferred his rights in “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus” which includes a reference to Rodrigo Lopez, the Marrano physician who served Queen Elizabeth, to John Wright.


1625: Rabbi Isaiah Horowith and 15 other rabbis were arrested in Jerusalem by an Arab leader and held for ransom.  Rabbi Isaiah ben Avraham Ha-Levi Horowitz, known as the Shlah after the title of one of his major works Shnei Luchos Ha-Bris, was a renowned Halachist, kabbalist and communal leader.  Born in Prague in 1565, he made aliyah in 1621 after the death of his wife.  Unlike most others, he settled in Jerusalem where he worked to rebuild the community.  After his release he moved to Tiberius where he was buried next to the grave of the Rambam. 


1629: Sixty-four year old Johannes Buxtorf “a professor of Hebrew for thirty-nine years at Basel, known by the title ‘Master of the Rabbis’ whose De Synagoga Judaicadocuments the customs and society of Germany Jewry” passed away today.


 1635: The Massachusetts General Court banished Separatist preacher Roger Williams, 32, for criticizing the Massachusetts Bay Company charter and for perpetually advocating a separation of church and state. Williams would end up with his own colony, Rhode Island, where rules of religious toleration would become the template for the future United States.  Of course, it was the values and vision of Williams that made the United States such a hospitable place for Jewish migration and development.


1708: “A Massacre of the Jews of Mstislav, Poland was averted by the intervention of Czar Peter the Great of Russia.” (Green book 258)


1721(21st of Elul, 5481):  Banker Mendel Menachem Emanuel Oppenheimer, the husband of Judith Gomperz and the son-in-law of Salman Gomperz passed away today in Vienna.


1762: Birthdate of Canadian politician Pierre-Stanislas Bédard the leader of Le Canadien, who argued against granting a seat to Ezekiel Hart in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada claiming that "no Christian nation had granted Jews the rights of citizens, not for unjust reasons, but because they themselves do not wish to be part of any country. They may make a country their residence to pursue their business dealings, but never their home. This state of affairs is a result of the Jewish tradition, which requires Jews to wait for the messiah, their prince; while waiting, they cannot pledge allegiance to any other prince.”


 1759: At the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the British defeat French near Quebec City in the Seven Years' War, known in the United States as the French and Indian War. This victory led to a peace treaty that made Canada an English Colony.  English colonies were usually more hospitable venues for the growth of Jewish communities.  In 1760, the first Jewish families arrived in Montreal and by 1768 they had formed the first congregation in Canada called Shearith Israel.


1768: In Newport Rhode, Island, Aaron Lopez closes his businesses on the Second Day of Rosh Hashanah.


1772: Birthdate of Hirschel Eliazer Kann, the Nederland native who was the found of the Lissa & Kann Bank.


1782: The Kahal Kadosh Mickvé Israel, the first Jewish congregation in Philadelphia, PA, dedicated its new building on Cherry near Third Street. Haym Salomon, of Revolutionary War fame, “agreed to pay one fourth of the cost” of the new building which had a price tag of £600. Gershom Mendez Seixas, the New York rabbi who had fled when the British occupied the city, was the spiritual leader of the congregation.  Rabbi Jacob Raphael Cohen replaced Seixas when he returned to New York after the war.


1783: In Prague Baruch (Benedict) Jeiteles gave birth to Ignaz Jeitels “a German writer and philosopher, who studied at the law school of Prague University but dedicated himself to classic languages and literature.”


1785(9th of Tishrei, 5546): In the evening, Kol Nidre


1798(3rd of Tishrei, 5559): Tzom Gedaliah


1800: Birthdate of Max Letteris a leading poet of the Enlightenment (Haskala) in Galacia who in 1852 edited “an edition of the masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible for a Christian missionary organization, the British and Foreign Bible Society.”


1806(1st of Tishrei, 5567): As Jews observe Rosh Hashanah they join their fellow Americans in mourning the death today of William Paterson, the Governor of New Jersey who had the courage to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1766.


1814:  During the War of 1812, the British begin the assaults intended to capture Ft. McHenry, the gateway to Baltimore.  There were at least thirty Jews among the defenders of the famous fort including Privates Jacob, Philip and Mendes Cohen and Second Sergeant Samuel Cohen all of the 1stRegiment Maryland Artillery and Solomon and Samuel Etting, the father & son duo of the Baltimore  Fencibles. (Editor’s Note: At night, the famous Bombardment of Fort McHenry would be observed by Washington attorney Francis Scott Key who was being held aboard a British ship)


1825(1st of Tishrei, 5586): Rosh Hashanah is observed for the first time during the presidency of John Quincy Adams.


1836(2nd of Tishrei, 5596): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah marking the final time that New Year prayers will be uttered during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson.


1837: In Birzi, Kovno, Yehiel Michel Sossnitz and Tony Zive gave birth to Joseph (Jehuda) Loeb Sosnitz, the husband of Freida Luria and Superintendent of the Jewish Asylum Riga who came to the United States where he founded the Uptown Talmud Torah in New York and wrote several articles on religious and secular topics including “On Three Branches of Astronomy.


1837: Isaac Levy married Elizabeth Russell at the Western Synagogue today


1845: Today, “The Gardeners' Chronicle announced: "We stop the Press with very great regret to announce that the potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland” which was the “official notice” that the Potato Blight that would trigger the great famine that would grip Ireland changing the immigration patterns in the United States and providing a challenge to Jewish philanthropists in Great Britain.


1846: Representatives of Rome's Jewish community send a message to Pope Pius IX complaining about the conditions they live in and asking for release from the many onerous restrictions that have been imposed upon them by recent popes.


1847(3rd of Tishrei, 5608): Tzom Gedaliah


1847(3rd of Tishrei, 5608): Rabbi Isaac Lob Wormser, the “Baal Shem of Michelstadt” whose reputation for miracles was so well known that during World War I, Jewish soldiers would stop and pray at his grave, passed away today.


1848: Lewis Jonas married Sara Levin at the Great Synagogue today


1851(16th of Elul, 5611): Fifty-two year old Oskar Ludwig Bernhard Wolff who while serving as a Professor of Literature at the University of Jena where one of his students was Karl Marx and who wrote and published “under the pseudonym "Pliny the youngest” passed away today.


1854: Isaac Levy married Isabella Salomonsen at Kobenhavn, Denmark today


1860(26th of Elul, 5620): In London, 73 year old Nathanial Levy, born Nathan ben Yehuda HaLevi in 1787, passed away today.


1861(9th of Tishrei, 5622):  During the Civil War, Erev Yom Kippur.  Jewish soldiers serving with the Army of Northern Virginia are in the trenches because the Confederate general in command rejected the request of a rabbi in Richmond to allow them to leave to observe the holiday.


1861: Philadelphian William Moss, the son of Joseph L. and Julia Moss began serving as a surgeon with the Seventieth Regiment.


1863(29th of Elul, 5623): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1863: In Van Buren, AR, Samuel and Sarah (Sulzberger) Adler gave birth to their third child Cyrus Adler who would become famous for his role as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., President of the Jewish Theological Society, a key player in the translation of the JPS Bible of 1917 and a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference (to name but a few of his accomplishments.)  The irony is that this giant of Jewish culture was born in Van Buren, Arkansas.




1864: Corporal Isaac Gause distinguished himself today when he captured the colors of the 8th South Carolina Infantry during a reconnaissance mission along the Berryville and Winchester Pike in Virginia.


1874(2nd of Tishrei, 5635) Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1874: “The Jewish New Year” published today  described the observance of the holiday by the Jews of New York City as well as a preview of the upcoming holiday of Yom Kippur, “the greatest and most solemn of all the Jewish religious days, it being the only one upon which Jews kneel in their devotions.


1874: It was reported today that there are upward of 100,000 Jews living in New York.


1874:  In the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, Samuel and Pauline Schoenberg gave birth to composer Arnold Schoenberg who “is particularly remembered as one of the first composers to embrace atonality, and for his twelve tone technique of composition using tone rows.”



1874: “The Hebrew Orphan Asylum” published today describes the results of an investigation of this institution “which has always been regarded with especial pride by the Jewish community.”  The investigation highlights the managerial shortcomings of Meyer Stern, President of this organization.


1874: An article published today questioned Myer Stern’s qualifications to serve as Commissioner of Charities and Correction in New York.  Stern’s supporters had argued that his experience as President of the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum qualified him for this public position. However, reports recently published in The  New Era, a Jewish publication cite his failures as evidence by the inability of any of the 173 youngsters at the institution to be able to recite the Ten Commandments in English or Hebrew and the poor quality of the food served “in one of the most liberally endowed institutions in the country.” 


1875: Birthdate of Edith Julia Morley “the daughter of a London dental surgeon” and literary scholar who fought gender discrimination to become a Professor at Reading College, making her “the first woman to be appointed professor at any British university.”


1877: Birthdate of Sophie Ranter, the mother of actor Gregory Ratoff and the wife of Benjamin Ratner.


1878(1st of Tishrei, 5548): As a Yellow Fever Epidemic ravages the Mississippi River Valley claiming the lives of at least 20,000 people, Jews observe Rosh Hashanah


1880: Birthdate of Jesse Louis Lasky, the San Francisco born motion picture industry pioneer who founded Paramount Pictures with Adolph Zukor and was the father of screenwriter Jesse L. Lasky, Jr.




 


 


1880(8th of Tishrei, 5641): Eighty-three year old Penina Moise, the Charleston native known for writing hymns and poetry, passed away.




1880:  “Teaching A Boy to Steal – One Blumenthal, Cigar Deal, Assumes the Character of Fagin the Jew” published today presents the unsubstantiated claims of August Jambert, who was caught stealing by his employer, that he was led into this life of crime by William Blumenthal.  The inflammatory and stereotypical headline shows that anti-Semitism was part and parcel of the American scene.


1882(29th of Elul, 5642): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1882: Members of Shearith Israel will attend services in their refurbished synagogue which has been undergoing alterations and repairs for the past three months.


1883(11th of Elul, 5643): Reb Avraham Yaakov Friedman zt’l a son of the Sabba Kadisha who led the Sadigur Chassidim for 30 years, passed away.


1883: Louise Brener, a widow and her child who arrived in New York today aboard the SS Canada told authorities that she had been here by The Hebrew of Society of Paris.


1883: It was reported today that the police in Agram have arrested the leaders of several secret societies which are “endeavoring to direct riots against the Jews.”


1885: Coroner Levy presided over a meeting at Pythagoras Hall that sought to take steps to protect the tens of thousands of newly arrived Jewish immigrants the bulk of whom come from Russia and Poland.


1885: Four year old John Franze, who contracted smallpox from a boy named Neumann who first showed signs while attending the Hebrew School on Pitt Street, was taken to the hospital today.


1887: Three days after he had passed away, Albert Alexander, the Jamaica born son of David Alexander and the former Rebecca Cohen was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1889: At its meeting in Buffalo, NY, the Polish Alliance Convention amended its by-laws to exclude “Jews and infidels” from its membership.


1889(17th of Elul, 5649): Hakham Adbdallah Somekh, the merchant turned Torah scholar who took a leading role in promoting the educational level of the Jews of Iraq passed away tonight during a cholera epidemic.


1890: A dozen newly arrived Polish Jews immigrants were placed in the detention pen at the Barge Office because no relatives or other responsible people had arrived to take them into New York.


1890 The surviving son and three daughters of the late Joseph Bossie are contesting the will of their father which “leaves his entire estate,” approximately $10,000, to the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews which they claim as a violation of the 1860 law “under which a person cannot leave more than one-half of his estate for charitable purposes.”


1891: As of today, in Montreal, a group of Russian Jewish immigrants is being housed at the Government Immigration Office and fed by the Baron de Hirsch Institute whose advisory board is planning on soliciting public to support to aid their destitute co-religionists.


1891: As an example of the law of unintended consequences, it was reported today that credit is no longer available in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, in part because “the Jews are calling in very available kopek of assets” as they leave in the country in response to government regulations.


1891:”Forty-two Polish and Russian Jews were arraigned at the Essex Market Police Court” this morning on charges of “having blocked the sidewalk at the corner of Delancy and Ridge Streets.


1891: “Mr. Kipling’s Stories” published today provided a review of Life’s Handicap, a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling that includes the “Jews of Shushan.”



1891: “New Books” published today included a brief review of A King of Tyre: A Tale of the Time of Ezra and Nehemiah by James Ludlow.


1891: Gustav Jacob Born married Bertha Epstein. Born’s first wife, Gretchen Kauffmann had passed away five years earlier.  This earlier union had produced Max Born, the Nobel Prize Laureate. The elder Born was famous in his own write for his work in the field of microscopy and embryology.


1892: “Justice Connelly of the Gates Avenue Court issued thirty warrants for the arrest of” Jews “in the section of the 26thWard called Brownsville for violating the regulations for the preservation of health and cleanliness.”


1892: “Two letters signed by passengers on board the Scandia…were sent to the office of the Hamburg-American Packet this morning” refuting claims about mistreatment and unsanitary conditions aboard the vessel including claims that “the Polish and Russian Jews…were placed in a compartment by themselves.”


1892: Dr. Alfred R. Gaul’s latest cantata “Israel in the Wilderness” was performed tonight for the first time in New York City under the direction of Alfred Stubbs Baker.


1893: Reverend James J Dougherty, the past of St. Monica’s Church attributed the attendance of six or seven Jewish children in his parochial school to a lack of classroom space in the public schools where there are not enough desks for each of the children.


1894: Birthdate of Julian Tuwim, the Polish born Jewish poet.


1894: “Not The Hebrews Of Fiction” published today describes the difference between “sensational romantic” depiction of Jews as “richly-fed men, extravagantly attired with diamonds…rubbing their hands and computing their tremendous and illicit gains with oily satisfaction” and the reality of life among the Jews living along Orchard and Broome Streets where “none of them have jewelry” and “all of them only too plainly suffer from a perpetual insufficiency of food.”


1895: A fire that is consuming vast amounts of timber and game lands” broke at Reega, NJ, which home is home to colony for Russian Jewish immigrants financed by the Baron Hirsch Fund. The fire appears to be of natural origin, fueled by the drought like conditions.


1895: Henry Budge, a partner in the banking firm of Hallgarten & Co who cut short his European trip when he heard of the tumor being removed from the throat of Bernhard Mainzer is scheduled to arrive in New York where he will learn that his partner passed away yesterday.


1896: In Bunkie, LA, Gisella Elias and Samuel Weiss gave birth to Seymour Weiss the long-time manager of the Roosevelt Hotel and confidant of Huey P. Long.


1896: It was reported today that the Armenian Relief Fund being formed in Hamburg includes the city’s “eminent and public spirited” Jews who have already displayed their “splendid philanthropy in the cause of their own suffering people” who are fleeing from Russia.


1896: Birthdate of Terrence MacDermot the native of Ropley Jamaica who served as Canadian Ambassador to Israel from 1954 to 1957.


1899: A resolution was sent to Secretary of State asking him to obtain “an official copy” of the testimony by a French minister “in which he said that the rigorous treatment of Dreyfus was due in part to the understanding that there was a plan on foot to rescue the prisoner by a party of Americans” so that this “slander” could be refuted.


1899: Robert J. Thompson, Secretary of the Lafayette Memorial Commission says he think the people of the United States are making a rash move in condiment the French nation because of the Dreyfus verdict.”


1899: In Chicago, Dr. Zuhn was been elected President of the Dreyfus Movement Auxiliary Society which is made up of a “100 prominent Jews.”


1899(9th of Tishrei, 5660): In the evening, Kol Nidre is chanted for the last time in the 19th century.


1899(9th of Tishrei, 5660): In Richmond, “Abraham Greenewald the oldest member of Beth Ahahab, passed away


1899: Jacob Wolf led services for 2,000 Jews at Tammany Hall.


1899: Yom Kippur services began at 6:30 pm at Temple Israel on the corner of 125th Street and 5th Avenue.


1899: Shouts of “Fire, fire” filled the air in the Thalia Theatre on the Bowery where Jews were attending Yom Kippur services.  It turned out to be a false alarm and the firemen had no use for their hoses when they arrived.


1899: “The Jewish Year Book” published today provides a “snapshot” of the American Jewish Community at the turn of the century.


1901(29th of Elul, 5661): As Jews prepare to observe Rosh Hashanah, President McKinley who is dying of gangrene brought on by an assassin’s bullet tells those surrounding his bed, “It is useless gentlemen.  I think we ought to have a prayer”


1902: Herzl writes to Austrian Prime Minister Ernest von Koerber. He encloses a copy of a letter Plehve addressed to Herzl. He expresses the hope that also Austria will support the Zionist undertaking.


1903: Birthdate of Fredric R. Mann, the Russian born Jewish-American industrialist and patron of the arts who helped finance music centers in Philadelphia and Tel Aviv.



1903: In New York, Henry Krensky married Julia Rabinowitz following which they would move to Waterloo, IA in 1908 where he owned a retail grocery store at 1500 Commercial Street.


1905: Birthdate of Zurich native Hans Jakob Polotsky, the Berlin educated son of Russian Jews who “became an Israeli orientalist, linguist, and professor for Semitic languages and Egyptology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.”


1907: In New York, Bessie (nee Mikofsky) Appel and Louis Appel gave birth to Layfette College graduate Benjamin Appel, the author of crime novels and husband of Sophie Marshak.



1908: Birthdate of György Dobó, the native of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who moved to France after WW I, converted to Catholicism and became Georges Devereux the name under which he is known as a leading ethnologist and psychoanalyst.


1909: Birthdate of British diplomat Sir John Coulson, who during the Exodus Crisis of 1947 “suggested how to spin the Jews’ confinement in the camps to score a publication relations victory.


1909: A total of 12,214 Jewish young men registered as recruits for the Turkish Army.


1909: The first English language version of “The Chocolate Soldier” an operetta composed a year earlier by Oscar Straus was performed for the first time in New York City.


1912(2nd of Tishrei, 5673): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah is observed for the last time during the Presidency of William Howard Taft.


1913: After leaving the Army, Sir John Robert Chancellor, began serving as Governor of Mauritius, the first step on a diplomatic career that would lead to him being named High Commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine, a post from which he expressed his anti-Jewish views.


1913: Seventy-six year old English composer Alfred Robert Gaul, whose work included “Israel in the Wilderness” passed away today.


1913: Harry Warner and his wife gave birth to their second child and first daughter, Dorise.


1914: Birthdate of Bronx born movie producer Max J. Rosenberg best known for “his horror and supernatural films” who found much of his success making films in the United Kingdom.





1914(22nd of Elul, 5674): Moses Hirschberg passed away today,


1914: As the Germans retreated to defensive positions following the Battle of the Marne most of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) crossed the Aisne Rive on pontoon bridges in an attempt to flank the Huns and keep faith with the concept that the troops would be home by Christmas. (Entries about WW I are significant because the prolongation of the war would have traumatic and dramatic impact on the Jews that have lasted into the 21stcentury)


1915: According to a report published in the Chicago Daily News that was based on a dispatch from Sofia, Bulgaria, “Henry Morgenthau, American Ambassador to Turkey recently made an offer to the Turkish Government to raise $1,000,000 to transport to America the Armenians who thus far have escaped the general massacres.” (Morgenthau was Jewish and the Armenian massacres, according to some presaged the Holocaust.)


1915: An agreement dated today between Morris Israel, the who “stowed” the hats and coasts of the Ritz Restaurant in Brooklyn and the owners stipulated that “Israel bound himself to pay $2,500 for the tip privilege for the first year and $3,000 for the second year


1915: According to a dispatch from Petrograd that first appeared in the Daily Mail, the dispute over the implementation of the reforms demanded by the Duma, including the full emancipation of the Jews, continues between the forces of reform and the Council of Ministers serving the Czar.


 


1916: It was reported today that “through the courtesy of the Secretary of the Navy permission has been granted for the cruiser Des Moines to take aboard at Jaffa the wives and children of American citizens who desire to leave and come to the United States”


1916: In New York, “Joseph Barondess asked the Board of Education…to excuse with pay those teachers and clerks who would from their duties on the Jewish New and Day of Atonement” because “they could not conscientiously attend” to their work “without violating their religious convictions.”


1917: Tonight, in New York, Harry Cutler, the Chairman of the Jewish Board of Welfare Work in the Army and Navy made public a telegram from Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels that read “I have sent a message to all commanding officers in the navy granting leave to all Jewish sailor on holy days, Sept. 17, 18 and 26 when it can be done without injury to the service.”


1918: Having liberated Pannes yesterday The AEF, including Sergeant Abraham Blaustein of the 165th Regiment left the French town that had been occupied by the Germans since 1914, “captured important coal fields and a rail center” as they drove toward St. Benoit.


1918: “Comment on the letter of Jacob Schiff” that expressed his positive “attitude toward Zionism, Dr. David Philipson, the Rabbi of the Rockdale Avenue Temple” in Cincinnati “said today, “Mr. Schiff’s intense sympathy with our suffering co-religionists in land of oppression causes him to overlook the dangers of Zionism…”


1919: In Peekskill, NY, Louis and Gussie (Yormark) Rubenfeld gave birth to Milton Rubenfeld who flew for the RAF and USAAF before becoming, in 1948, one of the founding pilots of the Israeli Air Force.


1919: In Vienna, Max and Rosa Weidenfeld gave birth to Arthur George Weidenfeld, Baron Weidenfeld, who came to Britain after the Nazis annexed Austria and became a major publisher and philanthropist. He has served as “Chairman of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev (1996–2004), Governor of Tel Aviv University, Governor of the Weizmann Institute and Vice-Chairman of the EU-Israel Forum.”



1920(1st of Tishrei, 5681): Rosh Hashanah


1920: In Chicago, Rabbi Abraham Hirschberg is scheduled to lead services at the Medina Temple, the temporary home of Temple Sholom which was formally known as the North Chicago Hebrew Congregation.


1920: Thanks to an order issued by Major General P.C. Harris, the Adjutant General of the Army, Jewish soldiers have a furlough for today so they can observe the Jewish New Year.


1923(3rd of Tishrei, 5684): Tzom Gedaliah


1923: In Newark, NJ, Mr. and Mrs. Isadore Laufer gave birth to Charles Harry Laufer, the high school teacher who created Tiger Beat.  (As reported by Douglas Martin)


1924: Birthdate of Israel Tal, the IDF general who was an expert in Tank Warfare and took the lead in developing the Merkava Tank.


1925(24th of Elul, 5685): Seventy-eight year old Bavarian Alexander Sanger the Texas merchant who was part of Sanger Brothers and the founder of what became Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, TX passed away today.




 


1925: Birthdate of Melvin Howard Tormé, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who gained fame as singer and jazz man Mel Tormé.




1925: The "Cinderella of the Sweatshop," Anzia Yezierska, received a glowing review in the New York Times for her best known novel, Bread Givers."Bread Givers enables us to see our life more clearly, to test its values, to reckon up what it is that our aims and achievements may mean. It has a raw, uncontrollable poetry and a powerful, sweeping design," the Times wrote. Yezierska, dubbed the "Cinderella of the Sweatshop" by the popular press, wrote Bread Givers about the daughter of an immigrant family who struggles against her Orthodox father's rigid idea of Jewish womanhood. Yezierska immigrated as a young girl with her family to the United States in the early 1890s. Her fiction centered upon the lives of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City around the turn of the century. Her work featured female protagonists struggling with issues of economic survival, Americanization, and the tension between immigrant parents and their children. In addition to Bread Givers, Yezierska wrote a number of other books. Her first, a collection of short stories entitled Hungry Hearts, was turned into a 1922 silent film. The film's producer, Samuel Goldwyn, offered Yezierska a $100,000 contract to write screenplays. Yezierska moved to Hollywood but was unable to feel at home there and moved back to New York City. Yezierska's first novel, 1923's Salome of Tenements, was also made into a silent film, though it did not become as well known.


1925: Birthdate of Leon Levy, “a hedge fund pioneer who began investing at 13 with $200 and went on to make many millions, enough to make him one of the main individual backers of archaeological research…” “His father, Jerome, a dry goods merchant, amateur economist and successful investor, predicted the stock market crash of 1929 and sold much of his stock before it happened. He taught his son many financial lessons, particularly the importance of corporate profits in charting overall economic directions.”


1926(5th of Tishrei, 5687): Eighty-one year old Jacob Baiz, the “son of Isaac and Rachel Baiz” and the “husband of Rebecca Baiz” passed away today in Curacao, Venezuela.


1926: Birthdate of Helmut Sonnenfeldt, “an expert on Soviet and European affairs who was known as “Kissinger’s Kissinger” for his influence in advising Henry A. Kissinger, the architect of American foreign policy.” (As reported by Douglas Martin)


1928: “The Woman on the Rack” a German silent film directed by Robert Wiene and produced by Josef Somlo was released today in Germany by Deutsche Fox.


1929: Today Rabbi Moses Blau and several Austrian Jewish refugees who had arrived in Vienna from Palestine gave their impressions of the situation in Eretz Israel. Blau was a leader among the oldest group of Jews who had settled in Palestine.  His family had settled there more than a century ago, long before the birth of the modern Zionist movement.


1930: In Cleveland, OH, Jacob Stacel, the son of Maria and Salomon Stossel and his wife Minnie W. Stael gave birth to Leroy Solomon Stacel


1931(2nd of Tishrei, 5692): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1931: Birthdate of Millicent Fogel, the Chicago native who gained famed as actress Barbara Bain best known for her role as “Cinnamon Carter” in the television hit series “Mission Impossible.”


 


1932: “Dreaming Lips” a film directed by Paul Czinner based on a play by Henri Bernstein was released today by Bavaria Film.


1933: “Lady For A Day” produced by Harry Cohn with script by Robert Riskin was released in the United States today by Columbia Pictures.


1933: “Leave It to Smith” an English comedy with music by Louis Levy was released today in the United Kingdom.


1934: Nahum Goldmann met Jozef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, in Geneva today to try to persuade him not to repudiate the Minorities Treaty. He was not successful in his attempt. 


1934: Poland revoked the minority treaty, fearing that Russia (now a League member) would become involved with her "private" affairs. This move meant more free-reign in the country's discrimination against the Jewish population.


1935: “The Bishop Misbehaves” produced by Lawrence Weingarten was released today in the United States by MGM.


1935: “The Gay Deception” a comedy directed by William Wyler, produced by Jesse Lasky and starring Francis Lederer was released in the United States today.


1936: In “Two Live That Dramatize an Epoch of Power” published today Louis Kronenberger reviewed The Brothers Ashkenazi by I. J. Singer which he compared to Sholem Asch’s Three Cities saying that Asch “has imbued his book with deeper feeling, with greater sense of humanity and with stronger ethical fervor” while “Singer has attacked his theme with a directness and power that Asch nowhere equals.”  “It matters less which is strictly the better book, however, than that the two books taken together picture a way of life and a phase of history beyond the need of any third.”


1936: “British To Apply Force In Palestine” published today described the decision by the British government, “after almost five months of hesitation” to take “the plunge” and “use overwhelming force against the turbulent Arabs in Palestine” which means calling up three thousand reservists and sending “a division of 12,000 men… from England” to end what the Colonial Office has described as “Arabian violence and outrage.”


1936: Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “The Conquest of Trouble” at the Jewish Science Society this morning.


1936: “Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, the High Commissioner” met with the Arab High Committee and “made it clear that it must decide immediately on the cessation of the strike and violence” adding that “unless the Arabs acted at once he would not be responsible for what might happen to them after General John G. Dill takes over the reins of government from him.”


1936: At Nuremberg, “Brown battalions of Storm Troops and regiments of black-clad Schutzstaffen paid homage to their Führer” in “a tribute that began at 8 o’clock in the morning and lasted until well past 4 o’clock this afternoon.”


1936: At Nuremberg,, “in a speech praising the achievements of the National Socialist press, Max Amman, president of the Reich Press Chamber” said today “that National Socialism had created a “true independence of the press by excluding all ‘non-Aryans’ and those related to ‘non-Aryans.’” (Editor’s note :  non-Aryans was a euphemism for Jews)


1936: In “Second Avenue Moves to Broadway” published today William Schack provided a preview of the upcoming New York theatre season “which officially opens as usual on the first day of Rosh Hashanah falling on Thursday, September 17” and which will feature “an unprecedented number of Yiddish playhouses” including “eight in Manhattan, four in Brooklyn and two in the Bronx.”


 


1936: Plans were published today describing plans for a testimonial luncheon honoring Mrs. Herbert H. Lehman the proceeds of which “will be added to the donations received by the Greater New York Campaign which is seeking to raise $1,500,000 for reconstruction work in behalf of Jews in Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe.


1936: In his laudatory review of The Jews of Germany: A Story of Sixteen Centuries by Marvin Lowenthal , Walter Littlefield included the observation that “as the German Jew sinks from the stage of history, he leaves in the very process of his demise a heritage richer perhaps than anything his genius or days of vigor achieved” and that is lesson for us all “that Jewish rights and universal rights are inseparable.”


1936: It was reported today that under the leadership of Mrs. A. H. Goodman the New York Section of the National Council of Jewish Women is planning to host Erev Rosh Hashanah services on Welfare Island led by “Dr. Leo M. Reichel, the new Rabbi followed by a dinner” as well as services on both days of the holiday and special bedside services for those too infirmed to participate in the communal worship.


1937: “Non-Stop New York” a sci-fi film with a script co-authored by Curt Siodmak and filmed by cinematographer Mutz Greenbaum opened in the United Kingdom today.


1937: Laurence Steinhardt began serving U.S. Ambassador to Peru.


1937: Birthdate of Fred Silverman; one of host of Jews who rose to fame in the broadcasting industry.  In Silverman's case he held top positions at both ABC and NBC.


1937: The Palestine Post's special correspondent, Molly Lyons, described in glowing terms how a group of American pioneers from Hadera established a new settlement on the hill of Jiara, a desolate, uninhabited area, some 22 kilometers away from Mishmar Ha'emek.


1937: In the Palestine Post, Lord Peel described the objective difficulties he and his colleagues faced as members of the Royal Commission, before they reached their unanimous decision recommending the partition of Palestine.


1937: “Mayerling” a quasi-biopic directed by Anatole Litvak, with a screenplay co-authored by Joseph Kessel was released in the United States today.


1938(17th of Elul, 5698): A Jewish policeman was shot dead tonight at Rishonlet Zion.


1938: In Washington, D.C., Jacob Perlman the native of Bialystok who earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin and the former Helen Aronson whom he married in 1935, gave birth to Judith Perlman who as Judith Martin became “Miss Manners” an Emily Post-like arbiter on equity.


1938 (17th of Elul, 5698): Professor Samuel Alexander, O.M., Litt.D., who had served as a  for Professor of Philosophy at Manchester University for over 30 years died at his home in Manchester, at the age of 79.  He was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college.


1939: Germany occupied Miclec, Poland, and murdered its entire Jewish population. Among those killed 35 Jews were burned alive at the slaughterhouse and 20 more were burned alive in their synagogue.


1939: Eighty year old Eugene Foss, who had employed Leo Frank in 1906 and who used his position as a former Governor of Massachusetts to work a commutation of his sentence passed away today.



 


1940: Private memorial services are scheduled to be held this afternoon for Bernice Marks Stearns at the residence of Mrs. Henry Dreyfuss.


1940: Congregation Rodeph Sholom announced the death of Rhoda Masius, the wife of Max L. Masius.


1940:  Italian forces begin their ill-fated invasion of Egypt.  The Italian failure will draw Germany into the fighting in North Africa.  Irwin Rommel will lead a drive that takes him figuratively to the gates of Cairo.  These German successes are cheered by the Arabs.  They also lead the British to enlist the aid of Jewish forces in Palestine.  The training and arms that they Jews received would later help in the fight for Israeli independence.


1941: Suspicious that the Allies may be decoding its radio messages, Berlin orders German commanders in the Soviet Union to send future reports of Nazi executions of Jews and other Soviet civilians by courier instead of radio.


1941(21st of Elul, 5701): Eleven members of the Jewish Council of Piotrkow, Poland, who had cooperated with the Jewish underground, are executed following two months of Gestapo torture.


1941: Charles and Anne Lindbergh, members of the America First Committee, attend a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, at which Lindbergh blames the Jews for "agitating for war...for reasons that are not American....Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." [Ed. Note: Anybody seeking to understand FDR’s response to the plight of Europe’s Jews must factor in the depth of anit-Semitism that existed in the United States.  Echoes of Lindbergh and the America First Movement can be heard today in the writings of Pat Buchanan a former Republican White House Speech writer who regularly appears on MSNBC.]


1942(2nd of Tishrei, 5703): Rosh Hashanah II


1942: The Jewish community at Checiny, Poland, is deported.


1942(2nd of Tishrei, 5703): Forty Rabbis of the ghetto of Lodz were killed by the Nazis.


1942: During the siege at Stalingrad, three days after her arrival at the airfield at Verkhnaia Akhtuba, on the east bank of the Volga rive,r Lydia Litvyak piloted one of  four Yak-1s that attacked “a formation of Junkers Ju 88s escorted by Messerschmitt Bf 109s and she shot down one bomber and one fighter plane.


1943: At Westerbrook, a 65-year old woman in Philip Mechanicus’ barracks “committed suicide” today to keep her daughter from joining her on the death train to Theresienstadat.


1943(13th of Elul, 5703): In the Lodz Ghetto, the Nazis hung Icek Bekerman, 34, for stealing a few pieces of leather with which he had planned to make himself a pair of shoelaces. The Lodz carpentry shop was ordered to build the gallows.


1944: At Fort Bragg, N.C., left-wing political activists Herbert and Fay Philippa Aptheker gave birth to self-described “Red Diaper Baby” Bettina Aptheker.




1944: The shipment of Jews from Westerbork, the Dutch concentration camp, to Auschwitz, Sobibor, Begen-Belsen and Thereisendstdat which had begun in 1942 came to an end.  Over 100,000 Jews were shipped to the camps during this period. The Frank Family were among those who were shipped from Westerbrook to the death camps.


1944: Eliane Plewman three other SOE agents - Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment and Noor Inayat Khan)-  were taken from their cell and forced to kneel in pairs before being executed by a single shot to the head by executioner Wilhelm Ruppert (They were not Jewish be we owe it them to hnor t heir lives and their sacrifice.


1944: Thirty-two year old Yolande Beekman, an SOE agent, was shot through the back of the head by her Nazi captors at Dachau.  (She was not Jewish – be we owe it to her to honor her life and sacrifice)


1945: Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa made public a letter that President Truman had written on August 31, 1945, to  Britain's Prime Minister Clement Attlee that the issuance of 100,000 certificates of immigration to Palestine would help to alleviate the refugee situation.


1945: The U.S.S. President Warfield, the ship that would gain fame as the SS Exodus, left active service with the United States Navy.


1945: Affidavit of Dr. Rudolf Kastner, former President of the Hungarian Zionist Organization



1947: Mutual Radio Network broadcast the first episode of a post-war revival of “Stop Me If You’ve Hear This One’ featuring panelist Lew Lehr and Morey Amsterdam.


1947: Mickey Rutner hit his only major league home run. He did it as a member of the Philadelphia Athletics in an 8-2 win over the Chicago White Sox. In the following interview with the NJ Jewish News, Rutner, who has made his retirement home in Georgetown, Tex., describes the big blow as well as providing insights on his diamond career.


“The guy threw me a curve ball, and I hit it quite well, and as I was rounding second I was thinking to myself, ‘Holy cow!’”He also had his first base hit, which had come a few days earlier in Yankee Stadium, against Joe Page. “That’s what you dream about. You always want to play at the Stadium against the Yankees,” said Rutner, who was born in Hempstead, NY, and attended St. John’s University. Actually, retirement is a relative term. Rutner, at 87, the oldest living Jewish ex-major leaguer, has been working for the public relations department of the Round Rock Express, the AAA affiliate of the Houston Astros owned by Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan. “I work as a greeter in the luxury suites,” he said. “I keep them away from Nolan so they don’t bother him during the game. I enjoy being out there. The people are very nice to me. I do a lot of handshaking.”Rutner played with Lou Limmer — who had been the oldest Jewish ex-major leaguer before passing away last April — in the Puerto Rican winter leagues. Like Limmer, he was a basically a New York kid who was shocked by the anti-Semitism he faced in the Deep South towns of the minor leagues. “It was an experience,” Rutner said. One of his teammates when he first started out was the author Eliot Asinof. “The manager of the team…said, ‘I can’t have two Yids on my team,’ so he released Eliot,” Rutner recalled. It turned out to be a good career move for his friend. “He was a bright man and he went on to play in a different league and then he wrote a few books.” One on those books, Eight Men Out, became the seminal account of the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal. Rutner himself was the subject of a novel by Asinof, Man on Spikes, the fictional account of Mike Kutner, a good career minor leaguer struggling to break into the bigs. “[Asinof] was visiting us at the house…and he was taking notes and he asked me if it would be all right if he wrote this book about me — but he wouldn’t use my name.”In Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing about It a Game, author Roger Kahn cites Man On Spikesas one of his favorite baseball books and offers an insightful observation on the subtleties of discrimination.“Rutner was Jewish; apparently Connie Mack held that against him,” Kahn wrote. “Asinof’s hero is not Jewish. He wears eyeglasses. The techniques of novelists can be every bit as fascinating as the techniques of lefthanded pitchers and center fielders.”Rutner said he hoped the novel, originally published in 1955, will be turned into a movie some day. Although he still enjoys good health and as much as he still loves baseball, Rutner doesn’t know if he’ll return to the Express in 2008; it might interfere too much with his weekly golf game.


 


1948(9th of Elul, 5708): Four Jews, including two children, were killed in Jerusalem today by shelling from the Arab Legion, the Jordanian army that had invaded Israel and has occupied the Old City.  Another four children were wounded in the shell.


1948: Two unidentified Jewish women died in a Jerusalem hospital today from wounds sustained in last week-end’s Arab shelling.


1948: In a violation of the truce agreement, the Arab legion shelled Jerusalem’s northern residential quarter as well as positions in the southern part of the city held by Israeli troops.


1949(19th of Elul, 5709): Eighty-three year old Cleveland native Salmon Portland Halle, the businessman who supported the work of the American Joint Distribution Committee for “more than a quarter of a century” passed away today in his home town.


1949: It was reported today that the Jerusalem municipality had “adopted unanimously a resolution reiterating opposition to the internationalization of the city. The resolution stated that “in view of the present efforts to reintroduce plans for the internationalization of Jerusalem the municipality once more declares in the name of the inhabitants that it will accept only full Israel sovereignty. Jerusalemites fought and shed their blood for the city when it was abandoned by all the world and they will continue to defend it so that it will remain the capital of Israel.” (As reported by JTA)


1950: Israeli forces have occupied an area at Naharayim along the border of Jordan because it is Israel's territory under the Rhodes armistice agreement with King Abdullah, an Army spokesman said today.  The territory controls the confluence of the Yarmuk and Jordan Rivers.  “The confluence is about six miles south of the Sea of Galilee and” near the Rutenberg hydroelectric works. 


1951(12th of Elul, 5711): Fifty-seven year old Polish born multi-talented Jewish artist passed away today.




1951: Ely Palmer, chairman of the United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commission meeting in Paris, “handed the Israelis a copy of five proposals that the commission drafted for the Arabs and Israelis in an effort to transform the armistice into a peace treaty.”


1951:  As David Ben Gurion continues to establish a new coalition government six weeks after the last national election, the Mapam Workers party broke off negotiations with the Prime Minister paving the way for a coalition made up of Mapai and the General Zionists.


1957(17th of Elul, 5717): Sixty-year old Sam Mintz, the Minks native who became a successful American screenwriter passed away today.


1959(10th of Elul, 5719: Sixty-one year old Pittsfield, Massachusetts native Lawrence Abraham “Larry” Weltman, the Syracuse football and basketball player who spent one year playing professional with the Rochester Jeffersons passed away today.


1959(10th of Elul, 5719): Fifty-six year old Gilbert Adrian, the costume designer known simply as “Adrian” passed away today.




1960(21st of Elul, 5720): Birthdate of Hungarian composer Leo Weiner.



1961(3rd of Tishrei, 5722): Tzom Gedaliah


1961(3rd of Tishrei, 5722): Fifty-three year old Bronze Medal winning bantamweight boxer Harry Isaacs passed away.



1967: Fifty-nine year old Varian Fry an American journalist who ran a rescue network in Vichy France  that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi occupied Europe and the Holocaust passed away today Among those Fry aided were the following:


  • Hannah Arendt

  • Andre Breton

  • Marc Chagall

  • Max Ernst

  • Lion Feuchtwanger

  • Heinz Jolles

  • Wilfredo Lam

  • Wanda Landowska

  • Jacques Lipchitz

  • Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel

  • Andre Masson

  • Otto Meyerhoff

  • Marcel Duchamp

  • Franz Werfel

  • Henrich Mann

  • Ylla



(This blog cannot do justice to the courage shown by Fry and you are urged to read more about him on your own.)


1968: Terrorists attacked a military police headquarters in the Golan Heights.


1969(1st of Tishrei, 5730): Rosh Hashanah


1969(1st of Tishrei, 5730): Fifty-one year old Howard Mandell a “tax expert, deputy mayor of the village of Hewlett Harbor and a member of the cabinet and executive committee of the Greater New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies” who was married to Lenore Mandell with whom he had three children – Marjory, Richard and James – passed away today.


1969: Though the Mets were trying to win a National League, Art Shamsky, with the approval of his manager did not play today.


1969: In her Rosh Hashanah message, Golda Meir “ushered in the year 5730 on the Hebrew calendar with a warning to the Arab nations by saying that "Attacks on the frontiers, sabotage attempts within Israel and attacks of piracy against Israelis abroad have fortified Israel's resolve never to return to the situation of constant peril which prevailed before the Six-Day War."


1970(12th of Elul, 5730): Eighty-two year old Morris Abraham “Two Gun” Cohen who “fought with the Canadian Railway Troops in Europe during World War I” and was “aide-de-camp to Sun Yat-sen and a major-general in the Chinese National Revolutionary Army” passed away peacefully today in England.



 


1970: Running of the first New York City Marathon which was co-founded by Holocaust survivor Fred Lebow.


1970: Birthdate of Louise Lombard who played the title role in “Esther” a film “that follows the biblical account very closely and featured F. Murray Abraham as Mordecai.


1972: Marcia Leventhal wrote today that she was “appalled and incensed by the tragedy at Munich in which several of my fellow Jews were brutally and senselessly slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists” while denouncing as “barbarism” “the cry voiced by the Jewish Defense League…for the random assassination of Arab diplomats and the indiscriminate shedding of Arab blood…”


1972: “China denounced Israeli air strikes into Syria and Lebanon today but maintained silence on the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists” which had been the cause of the attacks by the IAF.


1973: Syrian and Israeli planes clash over the Mediterranean.  The Israelis shoot down 13 Syrian MIGS while losing only one plane.  The subsequent mobilization of the Syrian armed forces is seen as a response to the Israeli air victory and not what it really was – preparations for all-out war that would being on Yom Kippur, 1973.


1974: Michael Kheifetz, a history teacher and writer was sentenced today “in Leningrad to 4 years strict regime in labor camp plus two years internal exile "for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation"


1975(8th of Tishrei, 5735): Shabbat Shuva


1975: Pravda and Izvestia published the “complete text of the Helsinki Final Act.”


1977(1st of Tishrei, 5738): Rosh Hashanah


1978: “Days of Heaven” a romantic epic that won an Oscar for Best Cinematography produced by Bert Schneider and Harold Schneider and filmed by cinematographer Haskell Wexler was released in the United States today.


1981: As his ten day trip to the United States was coming to a close Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel spent a busy day in New York seeking approval from sectors of opinion made wary by recent events in the Middle East while at the same time reassuring his followers that nothing had changed.


1982: Joseph Stephen Stanford completed his service as Canada’s Ambassador to Israel.


1984: Yitzhak Shamir completed his first term as Prime Minister


1984: The 21st government of Israel was formed today with Shimon Peres as Prime Minister.


1984: Haim Bar-Lev began serving as Minister of Public Safety, a ministry that had been abolished in 1977 and renewed in 1984.


1984: Moshe Shahal replaced Yitzhak Moda’I as Minister of Energy and Water Resources.


1984: Gideon Patt replaced Yuval Ne’eman as Minister of Science and Technology


1984: Amnon Rubinstein replaced Mordechai Tzipori as Minister of Communications.


1984: Yitzhak Rabin replaced Moshe Arens as Minister of Defense.


1984: Leonard Bernstein conducts the 40th anniversary concert of Jeremiah Symphony with PSO.


1984: Shimon Peres replaced Yosef Burg as Internal Affairs Mnister.


1985: The original hand-written copy of the lines that have inspired millions and served for generations as a symbol of America - ''Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free'' - are among the highlights of an exhibition opening today at the New-York Historical Society honoring the centennial celebration of the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus's famous poem, ''The New Colossus,'' was later inscribed on a bronze tablet on an interior wall of the pedestal, but the original copy will be on view in this exhibition.


1985: Eighty-eight year old Canadian General Edson Louis Millar Burns who served with the UN peace keeping forces during the Suez Crisis and who was author of Between Arab and Israeli passed away today.



1986: Leonard Bernstein led the premiere of Jubilee Games with IPO.


1986: In “The Novel Origins of ‘Gidget’” published today Charles Champlin describes the role that Frederick Kohner played in the creation of what became an American Icon.



1986: Pee-Wee’s Playhouse starring Pee-wee Herman (real name – Paul Rubens) was broadcast for the first time on CBS.


1987: ''Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings'' an exhibition at the White Chapel Art Gallery which is part of the Jewish East End Celebration was scheduled to close today.


1987: In Toronto, premiere of “Sister, Sister” starring Jennifer Jason Leigh.


1987: NBC broadcast the first episode of season six of “Family Ties” a sit-com created by Gary David Goldberg who wrote many of the scripts.


1989(13th of Elul, 5749): Arye Leon Dulzin, a former Israeli Government official and former chairman of the World Zionist Organization and of Israel's Jewish Agency, died after a prolonged kidney illness today in Tel Hashomer Hospital in Tel Aviv. He was 76 years old and had lived in Tel Aviv. Born in Minsk in 1913, Mr. Dulzin had a lifelong interest in Zionism and in the plight of Russian Jews. He immigrated with his parents to Mexico in 1928 and in time became secretary general of the Zionist Federation of Mexico, serving as president of the organization from 1938 to 1942. He later became chairman of the political committee and president of the Mexican branch of the World Jewish Congress and was a delegate to several sessions of the Zionist Congress in Jerusalem. Mr. Dulzin settled in Israel in 1956 and joined the Jewish Agency, where he headed the economic department and investment bureau until 1965. He then served as head of immigration, absorption and resettlement for the agency and was its treasurer from 1968 to 1978. As a member of the Israeli Liberal Party, Mr. Dulzin joined the Cabinet of Prime Minister Golda Meir as a Minister Without Portfolio in 1969 and was later affiliated with the Likud coalition headed by Prime Minister Menachem Begin. In 1986, he broke with the Liberals, and he and several other leaders formed the Liberal Center Party. Role in Settlements Mr. Dulzin was elected chairman of the World Zionist Federation in 1978 and a short time later became chairman of the Jewish Agency. As head of that organization, he was deeply involved in Jewish emigration to Israel, and as chairman of the World Zionist Organization, he was responsible for furthering the spread of the Hebrew language and Jewish culture and with promoting new Jewish settlements in Israel's occupied Arab territories. He retired in 1987. In 1980, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Yeshiva University in New York for his role in directing immigration and resettling Jews in Israel. Bernice S. Tannenbaum, chairman of the American section of the World Zionist Orgnization, described Mr. Dulzin as a leading force in modern Zionism who had helped draw the major religious streams of Judaism into the Zionist ranks.


1990(23rd of Elul, 5750): Eighty-five year old New York born author Marya Mannes, the daughter of David and Clara (Damrosch) Mannes and the sister of Leopold Mannes passed away today in San Francisco.



1990: Less than 48 hours after the government of Israel was successful in getting a preliminary injunction to stop the sale of By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer, “a nonfiction book by a former katsa (case officer) in the Israeli Mossad, Victor Ostrovsky and Canadian journalist and author Claire Hoy “an appeals court threw it out” enable the book to go one sale.


1991(5th of Tishrei, 5752): Movie producer Joseph Pasternak movie producer at the age of 89, a victim of cancer



1991: U.S. premiere of “Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare” part of the Nightmare on Elm Street series co-starring Yaphet Kotto who has described the difficulty of growing up as “a black Jew.”


1992(15th of Elul, 5752): Eighty-eight year old Julius Max Meyerhardt, the son of Max and Dora Mayerhardt passed away today after which he was buried in Jefferson City, MO.


1992: The Jerusalem Post reported that US President George Bush proposed legislation to Congress granting Israel a $10 billion loan guarantee for the absorption of Soviet immigrants. He also announced a proposed sale of 72 F-15s to Saudi Arabia with "compensatory steps to ensure Israel's military edge."  For those looking for evidence of Bush and Saudi ties, look no further.  President Bush would use aid to Israel as lever to for that government to take a "more conciliatory" view towards the Arabs.


1993:  Public unveiling of the Oslo Accords, an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement initiated by Norway


1993: In a triumph of hope over history, Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the P.L.O., shook hands today on the White House lawn, sealing the first agreement between Jews and Palestinians to end their conflict and share the holy land along the River Jordan that they both call home.


1993: A photograph was published today in People magazine documenting Alfred Eisenstaedt’s final formal photographic project the subject of which was President Clinton, his wife and his daughter as they spent their first presidential summer at Martha’s Vineyard.



1994(8th of Tishrei, 5755): Seventy-year old songwriter Arthur Siegel passed away today.



1996(29th of Elul, 5756): As Dole seeks to replace Clinton, Jews prepare to celebrate Rosh Hashanah


1997(1st of Tishrei, 5738): Rosh Hashanah


1998: The New York Times book section included reviews by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including A History of Palestine From Bonaparte and Muhammad Ali to Ben-Gurion and the Muftiby Thomas A. Idinopulos and The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up by Andrew Tobias


2000:At a meeting of the High Follow-up Committee for Arab citizens in Israel in Kafar Manda, United Arab List's MK Abdulmalik Dehamshe declared: "We will beat or forcefully attack any policeman and we will break his hands if he comes to demolish an Arab house … we are on the verge of an Intifada among Israel’s Arabs following Alik Ron’s incitement."


2001: Jennifer Jason Leigh began took over the lead role of “Catherine” in the Broadway production of “Prof.


2001: At the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of “The Grey Zone, based on the book Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account written by Dr. Miklós Nyiszli directed by Tim Blake Nelson whose maternal grandparents escaped from the Nazis just before the start of WW II.


2001: At the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of “The Man From Elysian Fields” starring Julianna Margulies.


2002: An exhibition styled “Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York came to a close at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Delaware.


2002: “One-Hour Photo” a dark tragedy co-starring Michael Vartan was released in the United States today.


2003: The Tel Aviv – Beit Shemesh section of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway and Beit Shemesh Railway Station were re-opened.


2003: Today’s bout between Oscar De La Hoya and Sugar Shane Mosely led to Robert “Bob” Arnum, the Crown Heights born lawyer and boxing promoter complaining about the judging during the fight and his suggesting that “there was a vendetta against him from a member of the Nevada State Commission.”



2004: The leadership of the National Religious Party approved the party’s remaining “in the government on condition that the government would not hold a general referendum (משאל עם, Meshal Am) regarding removal of the Israeli settlements, which would require a special majority, before the issue could be brought to a decision in the Knesset. If such a referendum would not be held, or if the government would approve a de-facto removal of Israeli settlements, the party would resign from the government.”


2005:  Despite the desecration and destruction of Synagogues in Gaza by Palestinians, the Jerusalem Post reported that Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar announced he was considering ostracizing any Jew that attacks mosques in retaliation. “I and other rabbis are considering putting a Cherem [ban] on any Jew that desecrates Mosques or other holy places…What right do Jews have to hurt the places of worship of other faiths? It is a good thing that the peoples of the world pray to God."  This is the latest example of Jewish leaders following an ethical path that differentiates the Children of Israel from its antagonists.


2005(9th of Elul, 5765): Sixty-eight year old Cyril Kitchener Harris, the native of Glasgow who served as Chief Rabbi of South Africa from 1987 to 2004 passed away today.


2005: In “How Curious George Escaped the Nazis,” published today, Dinitia Smith recounts the harrowing trip Hans and Margret Rey took to avoid being victims of the Holocaust.



2006:  Today’s offerings of the 2006 OyHoo Festival in New York includes


  • Homage to Lenny Bruce & Free Speech;

  • Jewish Music Showcase featuring some of the best Jewish Music from many great Jewish Labels such as Tzaddik and such performers as Paul Brody, Chana Rothman and Gary Lucas

  • By the Rivers of Babylon featuring Jewish Poetry as Music and Music as Poetry

  • The Big Quiz Thing, NYC's live-trivia spectacular, pitting Jewish bigwigs against each other in a game-show smack down of all things


 


2006: “The Knesset House Committee approved Moshe Katsav's request for leave of absence.”


2007(1st of Tishrei, 5768): Rosh Hashanah 5768


2007: According toPeter Applebome, Kehillat Lev Shalem, the Jewish congregation in Woodstock, NY, is scheduled to again hold the High Holy Days ceremonies outdoors in their beloved tent. The Rosh Hashanah service is scheduled to begin with the singing of the ’60s anthem “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with the congregation’s leader, Rabbi Jonathan Kligler playing guitar. Mr. Applebome sees this as “a tale of modern Jewish life” in a hippie outpost


2008: An historic event takes place in Vienna when the first festival devoted to Jewish and Israeli music ever held in Austria opens.



2008: Temple Judah hosts it first annual rustic Barbecue and HavdalahService” at Woodpecker Lodge, Pinicon Ridge Park, in Central City.


2008: “The King and I,” opens at the Englert Theatre in Iowa City featuring Temple Judah’s very own Cyndie and BentleeBirchansky.


2008: Today, Steve “Stone accepted the job as the color commentator for the White Sox television broadcasts for six years beginning with the 2009 season.”


2008: For the second time in less than a month, today, Israeli ice dance Galit Chait married Francesco Moracci in Florece Italy.


2008: At ZOA House in Tel Aviv, the curtain comes down on “Setting the Stage,” Beit Lessin's ninth annual revelation of new plays by local playwrights.


2009: Religious School begins at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, IA


2009: Jack Black led the audience at the MTV Video Music Awards in a Satanic prayer.


2009: The Sisterhood and Men's Club of Olam Tikvah presents historian, world traveler, and lecturer Claire Simmons who leads a discussion of "The Mystery of the Jewish Knapsack: What the Jews Packed for Their Journey into the Diaspora.”


2009: In Teaneck, NJ, a Beshert Moment as Debbie Rosenbloom and David Levin join together under the Chupah to begin a life together that should be marked only by health, happiness and the most sublime sense of joy possible. Mazel tov.


2009: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Why Jews Are Liberals by Norman Podhoretz, Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow and The Magicians by Lev Grossman.


2009: The Washington Post and Los Angeles Timesbook sections each featured a review of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein


2009(24th of Elul, 5769): Tragedy struck the family of late Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon again today, when his son Captain Asaf Ramon was killed in a crash while flying an Israel Air Force F16-A. Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut was one of seven crew members killed when the U.S. space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry on February 1, 2003. Asaf Ramon's aircraft crashed near the settlement of Bnei Haver, in the rugged terrain of the Hebron Hills. The Israel Defense Forces carried out an aerial and terrestrial search of the area for some 90 minutes before locating the crash site. IAF Blackhawk ("Yanshuf") helicopters carrying soldiers from 669, the Air Force's elite search and rescue unit, were the first to locate the plane, and they retrieved the pilot's body. At a press conference this evening, a grim-faced Brigadier General Yochanan Locker of the Israel Air Force confirmed the circumstances of the crash. "The plane crashed during a routine training flight," Locker said. "Helicopters, rescue forces from [elite unit] 669, grounds troops and rescue personnel were dispatched to the site. "The remains of the plane were found after an extensive search. The Air Force commander has established a committee of inquiry headed by a colonel to investigate the incident," he said. "It is a difficult day for the Air Force [when there is] an accident like this, in which people are killed." Asaf, 21, excelled in the IAF's grueling training course for pilots.  In June he received a presidential honor and was given his pilot's wings by President Shimon Peres. He then joined the squadron in which the course's advanced training program is carried out. The young pilot escaped another plane crash only half a year ago during a routine training flight. The Air Force commander, Major General Ido Nehushtan, called an official inquiry and halted training in Israel's F-16 squadrons until further notice, the military said in a statement. The IAF is investigating a number of possible causes and is looking into whether Ramon was suffering from any physiological problems, such as vertigo or a blackout, at the time of the crash. The young captain had passed a physical exam and was not known to have any medical problems. Ilan Ramon himself was a fighter pilot in the IAF, and the youngest to take part in Israel's 1981 air strike on Iraq's unfinished Osirak nuclear reactor. He was also the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors. People in Israel had tracked Ramon's journey into space as a welcome distraction from the violence of the second intifada; they responded to his death with shock and grief. Today Israeli TV stations screened footage of Ramon floating weightless in the space shuttle, swallowing floating drops of water and speaking about his love for his wife and children. Asaf, was the eldest of Ilan Ramon's four children. He was 15 when his father died; shortly afterward, he promised on a number of occasions that he would follow in his father's footsteps and serve as a pilot and possibly even as an astronaut in the future. He is survived by his mother, and his two brothers and sister. Shortly before receiving his wings, Ramon told the IAF journal that, "It was important to me to mention my father and tell his stories, because I am proud of him and proud to be his son. But I also want people to know me as Asaf and not just as the son of the astronaut Ilan Ramon."


2009: The Cedar Rapids Gazette features a review of Gertruda’s Oath: A child, a Promise and a Heroic Escape During World War IIby Ram Oren.


2009:The Israel Antiquities Authority researchers said today that a stretch of road in Jerusalem dating to the Second Temple and thought to be used by pilgrims on their ascent to the temple had been cleared over the past few months. The reclaimed section had been known to researchers for over 100 years, as it was discovered by British examiners at the end of the 19thcentury. The paved road leading up from the Pool of Siloam, toward the Temple Mount, has since been covered up and only now cleared by the IAA. Professor Roni Reich, who headed the excavation, said the exposed spot was "where Second Temple pilgrims began their ascent by foot. This is the southern tip of the street, a section of which is exposed along the western side of the Temple Mount." The excavation was run by the IAA in cooperation with Israel's Nature and Parks Authority and financed by the Elad foundation, which operates the nearby City of David site.


2010:David Broza who was raised and educated in Israel, Spain and England and is a superstar in his homeland of Israel, as well as a modern troubadour of urban folk-rock is scheduled to appear at the City Winery in New York City.


2010:The 6th Annual Behind the Scenes Gala, sponsored by the Jewish Ensemble Theatre is scheduled to take place in West Bloomfield, Michigan.


2010:Ben Gurion International Airport was shut down for nearly eight hours today due to a strike by Israel Aviation Authority workers over their pensions.


2010(5th of Tishrei, 5771): Eighty-eight year old William Coblenz, prominent San Francisco attorney and civic leader, passed away today. (As reported by Dan Pine)



2010: New York magazinefeatured a cover story about The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans by Mark Jacobson in which the author provides documentary proof that the skin of Holocaust victims was indeed used to make lampshades.


2011: The Ariel Quartet and Alisa Weilerstein are scheduled to perform Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, D. 956 at the 14th Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.


2011: The JCC of Northern Virginia is scheduled to present the first of a series of brown-bag programs with the theme of “In Search of Jewish Spirituality.”


2011:Turkey's Military Electronic Industry developed a new identification system for its F-16 fighter jets that will allow it to attack Israeli targets, according to report by the Turkish Star Gazette today. The previous US system automatically classified all Israeli targets as "friend" and disallowed any attacks on them. The new system will allow Turkey to determine whether or not a target should be considered "friend."


2011:Today MK Amir Peretz attacked his opponent for the leadership of the Labor Party, MK Shelly Yacimovich, saying that she had resorted to the "lowest possible tactics in Israeli politics," during Monday's primary election in which she slightly edged Peretz with 32 percent of the vote to his 31%.


2011:Hamas is weighing a resumption of suicide bomb attacks against Israeli civilians, a senior counter-terrorism expert warned in Herzliya today. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Fighel, a researcher with the Interdisciplinary Center's Institute for Counter-Terrorism, spoke at the Institute's eleventh annual terrorism conference


2011: Hakim Awad was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences today for murdering Ehud and Ruth Fogel, along with three of their young child-ren, Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and Hadas, 3 months old.


2011: Republican Bob Turner and Democratic Assemblyman David I. Weprin are facing each other in a special election being held today to fill the Congressional seat vacated by Representative Anthony D. Weiner.


2012: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present a lecture by Professor John Lukacs entitled: Anti-Semitism and Judaeophobia: A Critical Analysis of the Development in European Anti-Jewish Sentiment During The Interwar Period.”


2012:At a Rosh Hashanah reception at his residence, today, US Vice President Joe Biden said “there is no daylight” between the United States and Israel when it comes to Iran.


2012:A top Reform rabbi appeared with Libya's U.S. ambassador and Muslim and Christian leaders condemning the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya and the U.S. Embassy in Egypt, along with the anti-Muslim film that allegedly incited the violence.


2013(9th of Tishrei, 5774): In the evening Kol Nidre and the start of Yom Kippur


2013: Kol Nidre services will not take place tonight at the Chabad Synagouge in Boulder due to the unprecendneted flooding wreacking havoc across a large swath of Colorado.


2013: Expecting many thousands of Jewish worshipers to gather at the Western Wall in Jerusalem at the start of Yom Kippur this evening, police have preemptively undertaken numerous security measures to safeguard them for the duration of the fast, which ends tomorrow evening. Security crossings into Israel from the West Bank were temporarily closed today and will open again following Yom Kippur in accordance with security assessments adopted by the IDF. (As reported by Daniel K. Eisenbud)


2014:Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, an exhibition of photographs by the most important Soviet photojournalists” opened today.



2014: Social Commentator and Comedian Lewis Black is scheduled to appear at Centennial Hall in London, Ontario.


2014: “Syrian rebels are in control of almost the entire Syrian border with Israel, a monitoring group and the Al-Arabiya news network reported today.”


 


2014: “Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman, television host Bill Maher, Academy Award nominee Minnie Driver and owners of large Hollywood studios such as co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment Amy Pascal, Chairman and CEO of MGM Gerry Barber” weer among the members of the film industry who posted an additional ad in the New York Times expressing their “commitment to peace and justice” whjich included a condemnation of Hamas and continued support for Israel. (As reported by Yitzhak Benhorin)


2014: Korean Air is scheduled to resume flying to Israel “after shutting down flights to and from Israel at the beginning of Operation Protective Edge in mid-July.” (As reported by Yaakov Levi)


2015: As to today, Israel’s population will reportedly stand at 8.4 million people.


2015: The New York Times features books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Marvels, written and illustrated by Brian Selznick and Fear of Dying by Erica Jong.


2015: Jewish fans of the New York Giants are in for a disappointment as the Giants are scheduled to kick off their season at home against arch-rival Dallas at 8:30 this evening, well after the start of Rosh Hashanah.


2015: Unlike baseball great Sandy Koufax, New York Giants offensive lineman Geoff Schwartz is scheduled to play in tonight’s home opening NFL game.


2015(29th of Elul): Seventieth anniversary of the Erev Rosh Hashanah Services led by Martin Reisenberg being held “at a synagogue in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin where 400 members of the capital’s remaining community of Jews gathered for the first such observance since their liberation from a twelve-year campaign of extermination.”


2015: ‘The Palestinian Authority, Jordan and the Arab League slammed the Israeli government for an operation during which police officers found pipe bombs on the Temple Mount in the Old City in Jerusalem’ today.


2015: Police chief Bentzi Sau vowed today that protesters would not be allowed to threaten the security of visitors to the Temple Mount while Public Security Minster Gilad Erdan warned that access to the site could be affected by the discovery of a stash of pipe bombs.


2015(29th of Elul, 5775): In the evening Erev Rosh Hashanah


2016: Israeli cellist Maya Beiser is scheduled to “perform music from her new album TrnaceClassical at Le Poisson Rouge” this evening.


2017(22nd of Elul): Yahrzeit of Joseph B. Levin without whom this blog would not exist.


2017: Today, the “BBC announced that it had ordered a full series of ‘Tracey Breaks the News” starring Tracey Ullman.


2017: The Sydney Jewish Museum is scheduled to host Merav Michaeli, MK who will talk about her grandfather “Dr Yisrael Kastner, a Jewish Hungarian journalist and lawyer who lobbied in Budapest and other places to save Jews and who successfully rescued thousands from their deaths during the Holocaust.”


2017: As part of the Washington Jewish Film Festival Year-Round, the Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to co-present a screening of “Zuzana: Music is Life” “The triumphant story told by Zuzana Ruzickova, 90, about how she became a world-famous harpsichordist and interpreter of Bach in Czechoslovakia, despite three years in concentration camps and forty years of communist persecution.


2017: Center for Jewish History, The Berman Center for Jewish Studies at Lehigh University, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschun, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft,American Jewish Historical Society & Leo Baeck Institute are scheduled to present “a talk by Professor Susannah Heschel” on “Political Prophecy versus Liberation Theology.”


2017: The critically acclaimed theatre show “Simon and Garfunkel Story” is scheduled to being its Israeli tour at Ma Sherover in Jerusalem.


2017: In an interview broadcast today, Roni Alsheich, Israel’s national police chief “confirmed that investigators recently questioned Hollywood mogul Arnon Milchan was part of a corruption investigation involving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”


2017: Yigal GuettaYigal Guetta, “a lawmaker from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party resigned today after coming under fire from rabbis, who criticized him for attending his nephew’s gay wedding.”


2018: Bet Avi Chai is scheduled to present “Repentance from the Heart of Sea: Three Readings of Jonah” with Dr. Orit Avnery.


2018: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host the last three screenings of “Dough,” a tale of espionage featuring agents from Mossad.


 


 

This Day, September 14, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 14

 
81: Domitian, the third of the Falvians, became Emperor of the Roman Empire upon the death of his brother Titus.  Like his father Vespasian and his brother Titus, Domitian took great deal of pride in the victory over Judea.  On the way back from Jerusalem after the war, Titus and Domitian celebrated the latter’s birthday with a slaughter of Jews at Caesarea. Domitian’s treatment of the Jews was actually harsher than that of his two predecessors.  “He strictly enforced the special taxes” imposed on the Jews “and the ban on conversion to Judaism in Rome.  According to the Roman historian Seutonius  “In Domitian’s days, the Jews’ tax was collected with the utmost rigor.  Thos who observed Jewish customs without admitting it, and those who concealed their Jewish origin in order to evade the tax imposed on their nation, were denounced to the imperial treasure.  I still remember…how the procurator, in the presence of a crowd of assistants, inspected an old man of ninety to see whether he was circumcised.”   According to “another Roman historian, in the year 95, Domitian ordered the execution of Flavius Clemens, a nobleman closely related to the imperial house, for Judaizing tendencies and banished his wife Dimitilla.



407: St. John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople passed away today. Referred to in Catholic literature as "the man with the golden tongue" he was a virulent hater of Judaism, who disseminated his views through violent writings and preachings. He considered it meritorious to kill Jews


775: Byzantine Emperor Constantine V passed away.  During his reign Constantine V modified


a Byzantine law, dating from the tenth century that “demands that a Jew when swearing shall have a girdle of thorns around his loins, stand in water, and swear by "Barase Baraa" (Bereshit Bara), so that if he speaks untruth the earth may swallow him as it did Dathan and Abiram.”


786: Harun al-Rashid becomes the Abbasid caliph upon the death of his brother al-Hadi. During his Caliphate, al-Rashid honored Charlemagne’s request to send Jewish teachers to establish a Jewish Middle class in Europe. These came with Rabbi Machir who was given by Charlemagne a Princedom in Narbonne and was known as King of the Jews. In 807, al-Rashid forced Jews to wear yellow badges and Christians to wear blue badges.


1131: In what may to be a case of usurpation to those who believe in the David Kingship, the Crusaders make Count Fulk V of Anjou the Third King of Jerusalem.


1214: Albert Avogadro, Italian patriarch of Jerusalem passed away. While in this position, he wrote “a formula of life” for the Carmelites at their request.  The roots of the Carmelites “are traced to the 12th century (after the third crusade) when a group of hermits began practicing their Christianity on Mt. Carmel by following the ways of the Prophet Elijah. They lived in caves on Mt, Carmel for about a century, when they were forced to leave, in 1235, due to persecution by the Saracens. At the time they did not view anyone in particular as their founder but saw Elijah as one of the founders of monastic life.”  [Editor’s note – This is yet another example of how Judaism and Eretz Israel impacted those who lived in the land, even if they were not Jewish.]


1427(13th of Elul, 5187):Yaakov ben Moshe Levi Moelin, known as the Maharil (Our Teach, the Rabbi, Yaakov Levi) who was the son and pupil Moshe Levi Moelin the Rabbi of Mainz passed away today in Worms.


1560: Sixty-seven year old Anton Fugger, German merchant who hired Hans Dernschwam the German traveler who described the condition of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire including those “in Constantinople” where “the Jews were thick ‘as ants’” and “there were forty-two or more synagogues divided by nationality” serving a community that numbered “over Jewish men alone” passed away today.



1614: Mass murder of Jews in Salonica, killed while returning from the Dolia market.


1615: Today, Shabbtai Zvi became a Muslim when he was brought before the Sultan where took off his Jewish head dress, replacing it with Turkish turban. The repercussions of his conversion sent shock waves throughout the Jewish world and were to be felt for many years. Some of his followers claimed that it wasn't really him who converted; others professed that this was the proof that he was the Messiah by going to Islam to redeem them as well. The Sultan, aware that killing Shabbtai Zvi would have made him a martyr, had "convinced" Shabbtai that converting to Islam was in his best interest.


1666: After having considered the choice between death or converting, Shabbetai Zvi appeared before the Sultan and put on a Turkish turban; a sign of his acceptance of Islam.


1763: Birthdate of Moses ben Samuel Schreiber, the native of Frankfort also known as Moses Sofer. (Editor’s note – there seems to be some confusion about the birthdate.  We defer to the Jewish Encyclopedia)




1741: Handel began working on his three-act oratorio Samson, one of his many biblical-based works.


1752: The British Empire adopts the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days (the previous day was September 2). While this change may have been good science it creates a level of uncertainty when converting dates from the Jewish calendar to the secular calendar


1755(9thof Tishrei, 5516): Erev Yom Kippur


1755: The affair known as “The Battle of Balcony” began tonight at Congregation Shearith Israel in New York.



1762: Birthdate of Frankfort, Germany native Rabbi Moshe Sofer.



1776(1st of Tishrei, 5537): American Jews celebrate their first Rosh Hashanah (5537) as citizens of the United States following the signing of the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain.


1785(10thof Tishrei, 5546): Yom Kippur


1793(8thof Tishrei, 5554): Shabbat Shuva


1795(1stof Tishrei, 5556): Rosh Hashanah


1812: Birthdate of Samuel Bernheimer, the husband of Henrietta Cahn and the father of Marcus Bernheimer.


1812: As French grenadiers enter Moscow, “The 1812 Fire of Moscow” begins as soon as Russian troops leave the city. The fire was part of a scorched earth policy that left nothing for the conquering French armies.  A month later, the French would begin their long, disastrous retreat that would reduce the army from 400,000 to 40,000. Chasidic Jewry reacted differently to Napoleon’s invasion and subsequent retreat from Russia.  “During the French invasion of Russia, while many Polish Hasidic leaders supported Napoleon or remained quiet about their support, Rabbi Shneur Zalman openly and vigorously supported the Tsar. While fleeing from the advancing French army he wrote a letter explaining his opposition to Napoleon to a friend, Rabbi Moshe Meizeles: “Should Napoleon be victorious, wealth among the Jews will be abundant. . .but the hearts of Israel will be separated and distant from their father in heaven. But if our master Alexander will triumph, though poverty will be abundant. . . the heart of Israel will be bound and joined with their father in heaven. . . And for God's sake: Burn this letter. ” Some Polish Hasidic leaders supported Napoleon. Some argue that Rabbi Shneur Zalman's opposition stemmed from Napoleon's attempts to arouse a messianic view of himself in Jews, opening the gates of the ghettos and emancipating their residents as he conquered. He established an ersatz Sanhedrin, recruiting Jews to his ranks, and spreading rumors about his conquest of the Holy Land to make Jews subversive for his own ends.[10] Thus, his opposition was based on a practical fear of Jews turning to the false messianism of Napoleon as he saw it. It should be noted that Rabbi Yisroel Hopsztajn of Kozienice, another Hasidic leader, also considered Napoleon a menace to the Jewish people. However, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson identifies Rabbi Yisrael as the Chasidic leader who preferred that Napoleon defeat the Czar.


1814: Birthdate of Samuel Löw Brill the Hungarian Rabbi and Talmudic Scholar who was educated by his father, Azriel Brill.


1814: Birthdate Albert Cohn, the native of Hungary who found fame and fortune in France, where among other things he served as the tutor for three of children of Baron James de Rothschild.


1814: As the sun rose over the Baltimore harbor, the defenders of Ft. McHenry, including at least 30 Jewish soldiers and volunteers watched as a giant American flag was raised a sign of American victory to which the British responded by sailing down Chesapeake Bay for New Orleans and an even more decisive defeat in which Jews including Judah Touro and Barataria Pirates would play a role.


1825(2ndof Tishrei, 5586): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1828(6th of Tishrei, 5589): Fifty-nine year old Israel Jacobson, the German businessman and philanthropist who is one of the founders of Reform Judaism, passed away today.


.1829: The Ottoman Empire signs the Treaty of Adrianople with Russia, thus ending the Russo-Turkish War.  This was but one of a series of wars in which the European powers would nibble away at the power and territories of the Ottoman.  The last great nibble would be World War I, which when it ended, would find Palestine in the hands of the British, the authors of the Balfour Declaration.


1836(3rdof Tishrei, 5596): Tzom Gedaliah was observed for the last time during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson.


1842(10thof Tishrei, 5603): Yom Kippur


1844(1stof Tishrei, 5605): Rosh Hashanah


1847: During the Mexican-American War, General Winfield Scott occupies Mexico City following the United States victory at The Battle of Chapultepec. During The Battle of Chapultepec, Dr. David Camden de Leon of South Carolina, known as the “fighting doctor” because of his willingness to put down his scalpel and pick up a sword when the need arose, led two cavalry charges against Mexican positions after the line officers in command of the unit had either been killed or wounded. “Special note was taken of his gallantry by the U.S. Congress.”  South Carolina’s famous fighting Jewish physician had fought against the Seminoles during the 1830’s and would become Surgeon General in the Confederate army.


1852(1st of Tishrei, 5613): Rosh Hashanah


1853: Mier Danziger married Catherine Jacobs at the Great Synagogue today.


1854: In San Francisco, CA, Dr. Julius Eckmann officiated at the dedication of Congregation Emanu-El’s new synagogue.  Eckmann was the congregation’s first Rabbi.  The building cost $35,000.


1856: Dr. Sternberger officiated at the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Fauerbach who had come to Germany as children and who would serve as Superintendent and Matron of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society Orphan Asylum for 17 years.


1859: Three days after he had passed away, Frankfurt born English merchant Sigismund Stiebel, the son of Isaac Daniel Stiebel and the former Vogel Heinemann, and the husband of the former Eliza Jacob Mocatta with whom he had four children was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1860: Birthdate of Jules Guérin, the French journalist who founded The Antisemitic League of France (Ligue antisémitique de France) which played an active role in whipping up anti-Jewish sentiment during the Dreyfus Affair.


1861(10th of Tishrei, 5622):  During the first year of the Civil War, Jews in the North and South observe Yom Kippur.


1862(19th of Elul, 5622): During the Civil War, Philadelphian Jacob Miller was killed at the Battle of South Mountain while serving with company A of the 45th Regiment.


1863: In Piemonte, Italy, Giuseppe and Annetta Luzzati gave birth to Ida Dolce Foa Ghiron


1863(1st of Tishrei, 5624): Rosh Hashanah


1863: “Rosh Hashanah: The Jewish New Year’s Day” published today reported that


 


“In Leviticus xxiii, 23, 24 and 25, is found the following command:


 


‘23. And the Lord spake unto Moses saying,


 


24. Speak unto the children of Israel, saying. In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a Sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation.


 


25. Ye shall do no servile work therein: but ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord.’ Such is the ancient authority, direct from God, enjoining the commemoration of the great Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah, which commenced last evening.


 


The occasion is regarded by all good Israelites throughout the world as one of the most solemn and important character, and will be celebrated by the Jews of this community with all the services and ceremonies of the olden time. In order to throw some light upon the peculiar situation of this holiday in reference to the division of the Christian year, it may be well to recall the fact that the Jews, although like ourselves making it consist of twelve months, gave them twenty-nine and thirty days alternately. In their leap year, an entire month intervened between the sixth and seventh months, and consequently in the brief period of nineteen years they found no less than seven leap years, to wit, the third, sixth, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth. By these periods of nineteen years and seven leap years, they counted, the latter number being greatly venerated by their race. The beginning of the year, or New-Year's Day, was set for the first new moon after the recurrence of the Autumnal Equinox, or in the month which, as its name designates, was also the seventh mouth of the year under the old Latin arrangement -- the Tishri of the Jews. The day itself is made the commencement of the year, as it is reputed to be the anniversary of Adam's birth, and the first occupancy of our planet by man. With these majestic attributes is, also, united the characteristic that it is the Jom Haddin, or day of God's judgment upon the sins committed during the the past year, which it not absolutely atoned for are carried onward to the great account. It may, therefore, be imagined with what interest the return of this great day which marks so decisive an epoch in his individual destiny, and in the history of his race is regarded by every orthodox Israelite. In this City preparations have been in progress for a week past, and the various synagogues (some twenty in number) have all been purified and decorated for the festival. They were, yesterday evening, thrown open for the preliminary services, Rabbi Raphall officiating in the Green-street, and the Rabbi J.J. Lyons in the Nineteenth-street edifice.


 


In Numbers, xxix, 1, the offerings of the "Feast of Trumpets" -- the other name of New-Year's Day -- are prescribed:


 


"1. And in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, ye shall have a holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work: it is a day of blowing the trumpets unto you.


 


2. And ye shall offer a burnt-offering for a sweet savor unto the Lord, one young bullock, one ram and seven lambs of the first year, without blemish.


 


3. And their meat offering shall be of flour mingled with oil, three-tenth deals for a bullock and two-tenth deals for a ram.


 


4. And one-tenth deal for one lamb, throughout the seven lambs.


 


5. And one kid of the goats for a sin offering to make an atonement for you."


 


These sacrifices are to be independent of the ordinary ones for the day and the month.


 


The present anniversary is, according to the Jewish calendar, the five thousand six hundred and twenty-fourth since the creation of the world, and owing to the rapid changes going on in Jewish society, and the many removals and deaths occasioned among them in this country, by the existing war, will be observed with peculiar formality and impressiveness. The services of last evening were noteworthy chiefly for the solemn manner in which the Rabbin alluded to the waning orthodoxy of many worldly members of their synagogues, and reminded their hearers that, if the season should pass unimproved, the Angel of Death, preventing the enjoyment of another, may bear away with him to the dread record a list of sins beyond atonement. To-day and to-morrow, all but absolutely indispensable labor will cease in every good family of Israelites, and at noon upon each day the great Shofar or trumpet, will be blown in the synagogues amid the reverence of thousands of the Faithful.  On Wednesday, the 23d inst., or tenth day of the seventh month, will occur the Yom Kippur or "Day of Atonement" the most solemn and important of all the Jewish fasts. Upon the approach of that impressive period we may have occasion to allude to it at greater length. No more curious and instructive spectacle lies within the observation of our readers, than the solemnizing in our midst, and according to the ancient ritual, of these hoary anniversaries by the ancient people.”


1864: In Paris, France, banker Alphonse James de Rothschild and Leonora de Rothschild daughter of Lionel de Rothschild gave birth to their daughter Charlotte known as Beatrice who became Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild when she “married the Russian-born banker Maurice Ephrussi.


1864: One day after she had passed away, Isabelle Woolf, “the daughter of Annie and Israel Edward Woolf” was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1864: Today in Philadelphia, 27 year old silk merchant William Bower Hackenberg, the son of Judah Lazarus Hacekbenberg and Maria (Allen) Hackenberg, the founder of W.B. Hackenburg and Company who “is a supporter of almost every Jewish charity in Philadelphia” married “Adeline Schoneman, the daughter of Joseph and Clara Schoneman.”



1866(5th of Tishrei, 5627): Sixty-three year old French novelist and playwright Léon Gozlan passed away in Paris.


1868: In San Francisco, CA, Leopold Rosenbaum and Sabine Dreschfeld gave birth to University of Virginia Law School graduate Oscar H. Rosenbaum the vice-president of the Pittsburgh Industrial Removal Office, the director of the Pittsburg United Hebrew Charities and the president of District No. 3 of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith.


1871: In Altdorf, Germany, Jonas Weil and his wife gave birth to Benjamin J. Weil the Columbia Law School graduate who went into the real estate business with his father and his brother, L. Victor Weil with whom he formed B.J. & L.V. Weil Company, served as “trustee of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and President of Congregation Zichron Ephraim” and who was the husband of “the former Juliana Pollock”



1872: The New York Tribune, the paper controlled by presidential candidate Horace Greeley published a column entitled the “Christian Spirit of Liberalism.”  The column was an attempt to offset disparaging comments that Greely had made about Jews.



1874(3rd of Tishrei, 5635): Tzom Gedaliah


1876: Rabbi Dr. Henry W. Schneeberger delivered his first sermon as rabbi of Chizuk Amuno – ushering in what was to be a forty year association with this shul!


1876: It was reported today the B.F. Peixoto, the United States Consul at Bucharest and a prominent leader of the Jewish community will address the upcoming meeting of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.


1877: In Lithuania, Harris and Anne Mandelbaum gave birth to Annie Mandelbaum who became Annie Lillian Friedlander when she married Samson Friedlander.


1878: In New York, The Chamber of Commerce Relief Committee sent funds to a variety of organizations that will alleviate the suffering from the Yellow Fever Epidemic including $1,000 for the Hebrew Benevolent Society in New Orleans.


1878(2ndof Tishrei, 5548): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1878: As the Yellow Fever Epidemic continues to hold New Orleans in its deadly grip, it was reported today that Marx Moses who had served as the Rabbi of the Jackson Street Hebrew Congregation has lost most of his family including his wife, a son named Samuel and a daughter named Matilda.  One child is convalescing after suffering a bout of the fever. 


1879: “The Roumanian Hebrews” published today denied that Jews are being persecuted in Romania because of their religion.  Rather, the new government is failing to honor its treaty obligations and failing to make the Jews citizens for economic reasons. (Anti-Semites always do find a way)


1879: It was reported today that there are 21 clergyman among the new members of the Austrian Parliament one of whom is a rabbi.


1879: It was reported today that the Jews of Cooktown, Austrialia, presented an address welcoming the Anglican Bishop of North Queensland who was both “surprised and gratified” by this turn of events.


1880(9thof Tishrei, 5641): In the evening Kol Nidre


1880: It was reported today that “Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonment,…commences at sundown this evening.  During this period, orthodox Jews observe a strict fast, neither food nor drink being permitted to pass their lips for 24 hours.”


1881: A meeting is to be held at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association on 42ndStreet where a number of prominent New York Jewish leaders including Coroner Moritz Ellinger, Julie Bien and Adolph Sanger will make further plans for the Russian Jewish immigrants arriving in the city.  Those “who are suited to farm work” will be settled on land, primarily in Texas and Tennessee, purchased by these men who will also provide them with funds for farm impliments.


1882(1st of Tishrei, 5643): Rosh Hashanah – The following poem by Emma Lazarus entitled “Rosh Hashanah 1882” captured her feelings about the day:


"The New Year"


 


Rosh Hashanah, 5643


 


Now while the snow-shroud round


 


dead earth is rolled,


 


And naked branches point to frozen skies, --


 


When orchards burn their lamps of fiery gold,


 


The grape glows like a jewel, and the corn


 


A sea of beauty and abundance lies,


 


Then the New Year is born.


 


Look where the mother of the months uplifts


 


In the green clearness of the unsunned West,


 


Her ivory horn of plenty, dropping gifts,


 


Cool, harvest-feeding dews,


 


fine-winnowed light;


 


Tired labor with fruition, joy and rest


 


Profusely to requite.


 


Blow, Israel, the sacred coronet! Call


 


Back to thy courts whatever faint heart throb


 


With thine ancestral blood, thy need craves all.


 


The red, dark year is dead, the year just born


 


Leads on from anguish wrought


 


by priest and mob,


 


To what undreamed-of morn?


 


For never yet, since on the holy height,


 


The Temple's marble walls of white and green


 


Carved like the sea-waves, fell, and the world's light


 


Went out in darkness, -- never was the year


 


Greater with potent and with promise seen,


 


Than this eve now and here.


 


Even as the Prophet promised, so your tent


 


Hath been enlarged unto earth's farthest rim.


 


To snow-capped Sierras from vast steppes ye went,


 


Through fire and blood and


 


tempest-tossing wave,


 


Mighty to slay and save.


 


#


 


High above flood and fire ye held the scroll,


 


Out of the depths ye published still the Word.


 


No bodily pang had power to swerve your soul:


 


Ye, in a cynic age of crumbling faiths,


 


Lived to bear witness to the living Lord,


 


Or died a thousand deaths.


 


In two divided streams the exiles part,


 


One rolling homeward to its ancient source,


 


One rushing sunward with fresh will, new heart.


 


By each truth is spread, the law unfurled,


 


Each separate soul contains the nation's force,


 


And both embrace the world.


 


Kindle the silver candle's seven rays,


 


Offer the first fruits of the


 


clustered bowers,


 


The garnered spoil of bees. With prayer and praise


 


Rejoice that once more tried, once more we prove


 


How strength of supreme suffering still is ours.


 


For Truth and Law and Love.


 


1882(1st of Tishrei, 5643): Henry (Hayyim Gershon) Vidaver passed away today in San Francisco, CA. Born in Warsaw in 1833, he was a prominent rabbi, publisher, Hebraist, and orator in America. “In 1859, Vidaver immigrated to the United States, and became the rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia. In 1861 he resigned his position and moved to Germany then returned to the U.S. in 1865 to become rabbi of United Hebrew Congregation in St. Louis, Missouri where he withdrew his support for the Confederacy and wrote in praise of Abraham Lincoln. In 1867, he assumed the pulpit of the B'nai Jeshurun in New York and from 1874 until his death in 1882 served as rabbi of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco. Vidaver and Jacob Levinski co-authored the first abridged Hebrew Bible, which was published in 1869. He also commonly published poems in Hebrew about Jerusalem and other Jewish issues in Hebrew newspapers, such as Havatzelet.


 


1882: Rabbi Henry Pereira Mendes and lay-reader D. H. Nieto led Rosh Hashanah services today at Shearith Israel in New York. “Their pronunciation of Hebrews is according to the Spanish method.” (This is a reference to the fact that they used Sephardic instead of Ashkenazi pronunciation that was common among the Polish, German and Russian Jews.)


1882: In Bloomington, Illinois, the Moses Montefiore Congregation, a newly formed Reform congregation, held its first Rosh Hashanah service


1883: The Hebrew Charities found out that if they do not provided assistance to Louise Bremer, a widow who arrived aboard the SS Canada from France, she will be sent back to Europe.


1884: “Biblical Geography” published today provides a detailed review of Kadesh-Barnes: Its Importance and Probable Site With the Story of A Hunt For It by H. Clay Trumbull which includes “studies of the route of the Exodus” and a search for the Southern boundary of the Holy Land.


1885: Eight year old Abraham Schmidt who attends a Hebrew School at 127 Pitt Street was taken to the hospital after he was diagnosed as having smallpox.


1885: Birthdate of Marie Abelesová who was transported from Prague to Terezin where she was murdered in 1943 at the age of 57.


1885: It was reported today that from 1847 until January of 1885, 85,000 Russian Jews and 11,000 Polish Jews had come to the United States.  In the last 8 months, an additional 9,000 had arrived in America.  Currently, there are 69,000 foreign born Jews living in the United States.


1886: After a four year engagement, Sigmund Freud married Martha Bernays in the same year during which he opened his practice.


1886: The will of “Commission Agent” Joseph Aarons, the “son of John Aarons” and husband of “Julia Aarons” was probated today in the UK.


1888: The Hebrew Ladies’ Aid Society contributed $10.00 to the Mayor of New York’s Yellow Fever Fund.


1890(29th of Elul, 5650): On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Ray Frank became the first Jewish woman to preach formally from a synagogue pulpit in the United States. Frank worked as a correspondent for several Californian newspapers, and this work brought her to Spokane, Washington, on the eve of the High Holy Days. Frank was shocked to find that no synagogue services were scheduled, since many affluent Jews lived in the area. A prominent member of the community who knew of Frank's reputation for Jewish learning offered to arrange Rosh Hashanah services if Frank would give a sermon. Frank agreed, and word of the event spread; Jews and Christians alike came to hear her speak, filling the city's opera house. Frank's sermon entreated her audience to overcome the differences between Reform and Orthodox ritual that had divided Spokane's Jewish community and to form a permanent congregation. Frank so impressed her audience that they invited her to remain through the High Holidays, and she delivered a sermon on the eve of Yom Kippur as well. After these sermons, Frank was much in demand as a speaker throughout the 1890s across the country. The press speculated about Frank's rabbinic aspirations, and many headlines referred to her, incorrectly, as the first woman rabbi (America's first female rabbi was not ordained until 1972). Although Frank expressed no interest in becoming a rabbi, her actions forced American Jewry for the first time to consider seriously the possibility of women rabbis.


1890(29thof Elul, 5650): Rabbi Alexander Kohurt conducted services this evening at Temple Ahawath Chesed where the choir sang “By Thee, Oh God Inspired, Be True Devotion Shown” and “Though Ages Come and Go.”


1890(29thof Elul, 5650): Rabbi de Sola Mendes proved over services at Shaaray Tephilla which ended with the singing of “Yigdal.


1890(29thof Elul, 5650): At six o’clock services began at Temple Emnu-El where Rabbi Silverman delivered a sermon entitled “The Day of Reconciliation.”


1890: “Jews in Russian Service” published today described the surprise, first expressed in the Spectator that the Czar has forced thousands of Jews to join the army saying that “there is something strange in arming a body of men habitually oppressed by the state..


1890: As of today it is reported that there are 125,000 Jews in the Russian Army with another 50,000 scheduled to be drafted next year.


1890: Rachel Green and her two children arrived today aboard the SS Sorento where they were met by her two son Charles and Simon who had landed at Castle Garden three years ago.


1891(11thof Elul, 5651): Rabbi Zeev Wolf Landau, the son  of Rabbi Abraham "The Ciechanówer" Landa and Itta Landau passed away today.


1891: “Jews Made To Wait” published today described the arrest of 42 Polish and Russians who were arrested and later fined $2 each for failing to clear the sidewalk at the corner of Delancey and Ridge Streets fast enough to suit the local police – a failure brought on by the fact that the Jews did not understand what they were being told to do.


1892: In New York City, “Joseph and Bessie (Furman) Brickner gave birth to Columbia educated Barnett Robert Brickner the socially active and Zionist Reform Rabbi who lead Holy Blossom Congregation in Toronto before beginning thirty three years of service at Anshe Chesed



1892: In Kingston, NY, Rabbi Gustav Gotheil preached the sermon at the dedication of Temple Emanuel located on Abeel Street.  “Henry Abbey read a poem entitled ‘Emanuel’” as part of the ceremony.


1892: Flora Weinberg, who is suing her Jewish husband Abraham Weinberg for divorce, made an application for alimony in Superior Court today.


1893(4thof Tishrei, 5654): Joseph Goldstein, a young Jewish tailor shot his girlfriend  Rebecca Feinberg and then took his own life at Garfunkel’s ice cream parlor when his matrimonial plans appeared to be frustrated.


1894: The will of Dr. Bernard Grunhut was filed for probate in Kings County Surrogate’s office today “by the executors, Abraham Stern and William Gregory Ketcham.


1895: In New Jersey, there is no sign that the fire threatening the Jewish farm colony at Reega will abate and the Russian immigrants may lose “the haven” financed by Baron Hirsch.


1895(25thof Elul, 5655): Fifty-two year old Moritz Brasch, the chief editor of the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon. Passed away today in Leipzig.


1896: L'Eclairpublished "The Traitor," a retrospective article “which pretended to bring to light the real motives for the judgment” in Dreyfus case in 1894.


1897: Writing from Paris Rowland Strong described events at the recently concluded Oriental Congress where Monsieur Halevy delivered a paper about investigations that he had personally conducted in Abyssinia where he found a group of Essenes who “in every respect are similar to those existing in the time of Jesus Christ” and who “kept the Sabbath with extreme rigor…”


1898: Birthdate of movie producer Hal Wallis who is best known for his most famous work, The Maltese Falconstarring Humphrey Bogart. The producer did not explain how when he had changed from Walinsky, his birth name, to Wallis.


1899(10th of Tishrei, 5660): The final Yom Kippur of the 19th century.


1899: Jews in London’s East End carrying a banner that read “Dreyfus, the Martyr.  All the Civilized World Demands His Instant Release” marched through Spitalfields.


1899: At 6 a.m. services began at the Great Synagogue in London where Dr. N.M. Adler, the congregation’s Rabbi delivered a sermon on the injustice of the Dreyfus verdict in which he said this was as great a defeat for France as Waterloo or Sedan.


1899: Between three and four thousand people attended services today at Tammany Hall which lasted from seven until seven that were sponsored by the Odessa Musical and Benevolent Association


1899: At Temple Israel, Dr. Maurice Harris delivered a sermon in which he declared “There is one man in everyone’s thoughts today – Captain Alfred Dreyfus” who “once vilified, has now the sympathy and admiration of the whole world.”


1899: “Panic In The Thalia Theatre” published today described the chaos that broke out during Kol Nidre services when “a fight took place between some youths who crowded the upper gallery” and somebody shouted “fire”


1899: Ohio native George W. Moses was promoted to the rank of 1st Lt. with the 4th Cavalry in the United States Army.


1901(1st of Tishrei, 5662): Rosh Hashanah (See the item below – gives a whole new meaning to the term New Year)


1901: Theodore Roosevelt becomes President of the United States following the assassination of William McKinley. Theodore Roosevelt was the last Republican to receive significant Jewish support; his fierce independence and support of specific Jewish concerns made him a hero to many within this community. Theodore Roosevelt was the first President to appoint a Jew to a presidential cabinet. In 1906 he named Oscar S. Straus Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Theodore Roosevelt was also the first President to contribute his own funds to a Jewish cause. In 1919, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts while President to settle the Russo-Japanese War, Roosevelt donated some of his prize money to the National Jewish Welfare Board. And then there is the fact that he took office on Rosh Hashanah.


1903(22nd of Elul, 5663): Jews of Homel, Russia, were massacred.


1903: Feibisch Jolles who passed away two days ago at the age of 71 was buried in Vienna today.


1908: The first Jewish self-defense organization in Eretz Yisrael was founded. This is probably a reference to Ha-Shomer (in English "The Watchman") which other sources say was founded in 1909.  Made up of about forty members, Ha-Shomer was founded to protect the early kibbutzim and Jewish towns from attacks by marauding Arab robbers and others.  The early settlers were determined not to rely on others for their defense.  This mounted force that could blend in with the local population because they dressed liked Arabs and spoke Arabic had as its motto," By blood and fire Judea fell; by blood and fire Judea shall rise."


1909: At the request of the Hahambashi, authorities take important steps to suppress the White Slave Trade. Both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews did have involvement with this, but when Chief Rabbi Nahum provided the Turks with lists of names for investigations, they did nothing with them.


1912: Harry Horowitz and “Lefty Louis” Rosenberg were arrested in Queen today on charges of having participated in the murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal.


1912(3rdof Tishrei, 5673): Shabbat Shuva


1912(3rdof Tishrei, 5673): Mrs. Sara Simsohn passed away.


1914: Having failed to defeat the French and the British in a quick summer time offensive, the Kaiser replaced Helmuth von Moltke (the Younger) with Erich von Falkenhayn as German Chief of Staff.  (Editor’s note – this was the first of many German attempts to blame somebody for their failure to win, a blame game that would end with the infamous “stabbed in the back” canard that would be used to justify the rise of Hitler)


1914(23rd of Elul, 5674): Lt. Ronald Lucas Quixano Henriques of the Queen’s Regiment, a member of a long-established Sephardi family who attended Harrow and Sandhurst (the British West Point) was killed today making him the first Anglo-Jewish officer to die during WW I.


1915: Dr. Felix Kornfeld and Paula Mandl gave birth to their second child, Ulrich Kornfeld the husband of Lorie Granitsch.


1915: It was reported today that “Turks admit that the Armenian persecution is the first step in a plan to get rid of” several groups and “that the Jews also are marked for slaughter and expulsion.”


1915: Albert Lucas, Secretary of the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews suffering through the war announced today the organization of a new committee in Paterson, NJ.”


1916: Samuel Goldwyn resigned as Chairman of the Board of the Famous Players-Lasky after a series of dispute with Jesse Lasky, leading to a partnership with Edgar and Archibald Selwyn that would become known as Goldwyn Pictures with its distinctive “Leo the Lion” (the roaring lion)  trademark.


1916: “Instructions to arrange for transportation of sixty-five American women and children out of Palestine on the cruiser Des Moines were called by the State Department today to the American Constantinople.”


1916: It was reported today the motion made by Joseph Barondess and seconded by Leo Arnstein to allow Jewish teachers and clerks to be excused from work on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur which had been objected to by Arthur S. Somers, Dr. Ira S. Wiles and Thomas W. Churchill even after the motion was changed to make it leave without pay was referred to the Committee on By-Laws


1917: At Petrograd, the ringleaders of “Holy Russia” a secret society that published a newspaper Groza “that contained attacks on the Jews and the Allies, urged an immediate peace and declared that the Jews were responsible for the continuance of the war.”


1917: Yeshivas in Kovno, Vilna, Radin and Grodno received assistance from a committed founded “for that purposed by Orthodox Jews in Berlin.”


1917: In Jerusalem, the Hebrew daily Ha-Herut suspended publication.


1917: Three days after he had passed away, 17 year old Myer Ganz, the son of “Joseph and Jane Ganz” was buried today at the Plashet Jewish Cemetery.


1917: In Warsaw, the order of German authorities expelling all students who were not natives of the city from the colleges and universities led to a disproportionate number of Jews having to end their studies.


1917: It was reported today that Chairman Harry Cutler of the Jewish Board of Welfare Work in the Army and Navy has announced “hospitality at services on the high holy days would be extended to all men in military service who obtain a leave of absence” as permitted by the Secretary of the Navy or the Adjutant General who have ordered that furloughs be granted so long as granting them “does not interfered with public service.”


 


1918(8thof Tishrei, 5679): Shabbat Shuva


1918: By order of the War Department and the Secretary of the Navy, Jewish soldiers and sailors have been granted furloughs effective today so they observed their holy days.


1918: On the Western Front, Abraham Blaustein of the 165th regiment (formerly the fabled 69th regiment) was among the troops who entered St. Benoit where the Allies established[ML1]  their front line.


1918: “The Zionist Organization of America announced” tonight “that information had been received from Austria showing the existence there and in West Germany of a well-developed agitation to provoke the Christian population against their fellow-countrymen of the Jewish faith, which had grown to such a dangerous stage as to call for a public protest by the council of the Jewish Community of Vienna to which more than 400 communities in Austria have signified their approval.” (Editor’s note – this may explain why the Anschluss with its Anti-Semitism went so smoothly a mere 30 years later.)


1919(19thof Elul, 5679): Sixty-eight year old Polish born French chess master Jean Taubenhaus passed away


1919: Today, “The 22nd Annual Convention of the Zionist Organization of America…opened at the Auditorium Theatre” in Chicago.


1920(2nd of Tishrei, 5681): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1920: Rabbi Jacob Katz is scheduled to lead services this morning at B’nai Israel in Brooklym


1920: Rabbi Nathan Blechman  is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “God’s Way with Man” this morning at Montefiore Congregation in the Bronx.


1920: Rabbi David Davidson is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “The Survival of the Morally Fit” this mornings.


1920: Birthdate of economist and Nobel Prize Winner, Lawrence Klein.


1920: Best wishes for the New Year were extended to “members, patrons, donors and friends of Jewish Maternity Hospital on East Broadway of which Sam Finkelstein is the President.


1920: Prices of poultry were expected to be reduced from to 5 to 8 cents per pound for the New Year because the Health commissioner of New York’s decision “to issue a large number of licenses to prepare meats for the High Holy days in order to produce independent competition with the so-called kosher poultry trust.”


1922: “The Earl of Essex” a silent film about the English noble starring Eva May was released today in Germany.


1923: Three days after he had passed away, Siegmund Lubin, the Philadelphia ophthalmologist and movie producer was buried today following his funeral in New Jersey.


1923: Miguel Primo de Rivera becomes dictator of Spain. “The government of Miguel Primo de Rivera decreed that every Sephardi could claim Spanish citizenship. This right was used by some refugees during the Second World War, including the Hungarian Jews saved by Ángel Sanz Briz and Giorgio Perlasca. This decree was again put to use to receive some Jews from Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.”


1924: Birthdate of Willem Polak whose parents were murdered during the Holocaust and who served as Mayor of Amsterdam for six years.


1925(25th of Elul, 5685): Sixty-year old Max Pam who “read law in the offices of Adolph Moses” before gaining admission to the bar and whose clients included such blue chip companies as U.S. Steel and International which provided him with the wherewithal to serve as the benefactor of Hebrew Union College and Notre Dame where funded the School of Journalism passed away today.



1927(17th of Elul, 5687): Forty-six year old Mrs. Abraham Joseph Hyman (Esther Levy) the wife a Manchester, UK, grocery store who survived the sinking of the Titanic and with whom she had two children – Jonas and Rachel – passed away today.


1928: On New York’s Lower East Side, Mammie and Morris Shanker, Jewish immigrants from Poland gave birth to labor leader Albert Shanker, the President of the militant American Federation of Teachers which challenged the dominant teachers' organization, the NEA.




1928: “Sinner’s Parade” one of what have been the last “silent crime films” produced by Harry Cohn with a “story by David Lewis” was released today in the United States.


1929: In Manhattan, Mary Gutfreund and Manuel Gutfreudn, a butcher who became a meat wholesaler and distributor gave birth to financier John Gutfreund. (As reported by Jonathan Kandell)



1930: “German voters elect 107 Nazis to the Reichstag, elevating Hitler’s organization to major party status.


1930: Forty-eight year old Bet A. Polsky, the son of Abram and Mollie Bloch Polsky “opened his store in downtown Akron, Ohio today.”


1930: First baseman Hank Greenberg made his major league debut with the Detroit Tigers.


1930: Birthdate of Allan Bloom, the native of Indianapolis best known for championing an intellectual approach to education and literacy encapsulated in The Closing of the American Mind.



1931: Birthdate “Czech novelist and playwright Ivan Kilma.”



1932: Minnie and Max Koeppel gave birth to real estate developer Alfred J. Koeppel who followed in the footsteps of his grandfather Abraham Koeppel the founder of Koeppel and Koeppel.




1933: Mrs. Zackheim, the widow of a German-Jewish author attracted considerable attention as she sat behind the wheel of her taxicab in Tel Aviv.  Mrs. Zackheim appears to have been the first female cab driver in Palestine but she will not be the last if reports that “a cooperative group of women drivers, most of them refugees from Germany” is in its formative organizational stages prove to be correct.


1935: “Special Agent” a gangster movie produced by Samuel Bischoff was released in the United States by Warner Bros.


1935: A day before the Nuremberg laws were introduced “by the Reichstag at a special meeting convened at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party,” and while a debated was raging about boycotting the 1936 Olympics because of German racial policies, it was reported that “General Charles H. Sherrill, an American member of the International Olympic Committee had left Nuremberg” on September 13 after having been the personal guest of Hitler…


1935: Re-release of “Thirteen Women” produced by David O. Selznick, with a screenplay by Samuel Ornitz and music by Max Steiner.


1936(27th of Elul, 5696: Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who has been rated as one of the half dozen greatest pianists of his generation and is the Director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, passed away.  His wife Clara, the daughter of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and their daughter Nina were with him.



1936(27th of Elul, 5696):  Thirty-seven year old Irving Grant Thalberg, known was the “Boy Wonder” of filmdom  who was the creative force at MGM and the husband of actress Norma Shearer who converted to Judaism so she could marry him passed away today.




1936: The Maccabees of Tel Aviv, soccer champions of Palestine, arrived in New York City today for a tour of North America.


1936: Mrs. Amy G. Wyle is scheduled to preside over the testimonial luncheon honoring Mrs. Herbert H. Lehman “the proceeds” of which “will be added to the donations received by the Greater New York Campaign which is seeking to raise $1,500,000 for reconstruction work on behalf of Jews in Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe.”


1936: Two German Jews are among the thirty foreign aviators quartered at Cuatro Vientos Airport in Madrid where they have joined the fight against Franco and his fascists.


1936: At testimonial luncheon given today in her honor at the Hotel Commodore sponsored by the Women’s Division of the Greater New York Campaign of the Joint Distribution Committee that is raising $1,500,000 for the aid of Jews in Germany, Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, Mrs. Herbert H. Lehman described “the destitute condition of the oppressed groups in Europe, particularly the Jewish people of German” and made a please for supporting the work of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.


1936: Outfielder Morrie Arnovich made his major league debut with the Philadelphia Phillies.


1937(9thof Tishrei, 5698): Erev Yom Kippur, Kol Nidre


1937: WHN is scheduled to broadcast Yom Kippur services from Temple Emanu-El from 8 to 9:30 P.M.


1937: WABC Network is scheduled to broadcast a program arranged by the National Federation of Sisterhoods starting at 4:30 P.M. that will included the “singing of Kol Nidre by a choir under the direction of Ruth Best” and readings from the Union Prayer Book by Rabbi George Zepin, the Secretary of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations..


1937: Outfielder Goody Rosen made his major league debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.


1937: Today, “a group of 30 men announced the formation of the Rochester Professional Football Team, Inc. to continue operation of the Rochester Tigers” which were coached by former All-American quarterback Harry Newman.


1938:  Birthdate of actor and comedian Leonard Frey.


1938: During the crisis over the Sudetenland, French diplomat Georges Bonnet displayed the attitude of Western Weakness that would lead to WW II when today he told Sir Eric Phipps that “we cannot sacrifice ten million men in to prevent three and half million Sudetens joining the Reich.”


1938(18th of Elul, 5698): While escorting a laborer’s cart, Alfred Asher, a Jewish policeman, was shot dead on the road between Rehovoth and Givat Brenner.


1938(18th of Elul, 5698): Three Jews were killed when a land mine exploded under their car while they traveled on the road between Afuleh and Kirat Zion.


1938(18th of Elul, 5698): “Late in the afternoon Dr. Abraham Rosenthal, a well-known heart specialist in Jerusalem was shot dead at Ramleh while driving from Tel Aviv.


1939(1st of Tishrei, 5700): Rosh Hashanah 5700


1939(1st of Tishrei, 5700): On the first day of the Jewish New Year, 43 Jews were taken, forced to do labor and then shot to death at Przemsysl, Poland. Asscheer Gitter was among the dead.


1939: Order No.7 of German Civilian Administration transferred all Jewish industrial and commercial enterprises in Poland to "Aryan' hands.  This was part of the ongoing economic war that the Nazis conducted against the Jews wherever they went.  Killing Jews was the Final Solution.  But the first goal was to steal everything the Jews owned (so much for the nobility of the Aryans).


1939: “The German Army entered” Wloclawek, Poland “and aided by local sympathizers, began looting Jewish property, shooting Jews, and burning synagogues.” (Yad Vashem)


1939: For the second time in three days, the Luftwaffe bombed Warsaw which the Wehrmacht crossed the Bug River forcing the government of Poland which had left its capital to leave Luck and keep moving southwards/


1939: Eric Colcraft, a photographer with the English newspaper Planet News took a picture today of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, Poland, after the Germans had bombed the city



1940: Isaac Siegel began serving as Justice of the Domestic Relations Court in New York City – a position he held until his death.


1940(11thof Elul, 5700): Parashat Ki Teitzei


1940(11thof Elul, 5700): Sixty-one year old Prague native Ernst August Pribram, the son of Dr. Otto Primbram and Fanny Primbram, the Austrian Army, serologist and bacteriologist who settled in Chicago where he taught at Loyola University, passed away..


1941(22nd of Elul, 5701): Nine thousand Jews were killed by the Nazis in Slonim, Russia


1941: Dedication of Temple Emanu-El in Dothan, Alabama. Jews have lived in the Dothan area for over one hundred years.  The congregation was charted in 1929.


1942(3rd of Tishrei, 5703): Tzom Gedaliah


1942(3rd of Tishrei, 5703): Wellesley College graduate Sylvia Goulston Dreyfus, “a trustee of the New England Conservatory of Music” and “chairman of the Boston Committee of the Palestine Orchestra Fund” who was married to Carl Dreyfus with whom she had three children passed away today in Boston.



1942: Pitcher Harry Shuman made his major league debut with the Pittsburgh Pirates.


1942: Having shot down one bomber and one fighter yesterday over Stalingrad, according to authors, Lydia Litvyak shot down her second Messerschmitt, the fighter that was the pride of the Luftwaffe


1943: Jacob Gens, head of the Jewish Council of the Vilna Ghetto was summoned to Gestapo headquarters. He never returned.  Earlier in the Summer Gens had played a less than stellar role regarding armed resistance to the Nazis in Vilna.  A Jewish shoemaker named Itzik Vitenberg was the leader of resistance group that planned on fighting the Nazis in the ghetto.   Vitenberg was turned over to the Nazis by Jewish police chief in the Ghetto.  After he was rescued by his comrades, the Gestapo demanded that the Jews surrender him or suffer the consequences.  Gens urged the people to give him up; to not sacrifice the common good for one person.  The Vilna Jews felt that they had enjoyed a year and half of "peace" thanks to Gens working with the Nazis and ultimately Vitenberg was forced to give himself up. He was brutally murdered by the Nazis.


1944(26thof Elul, 5704): Wilhelm Haas, the husband of Eleasah (Elise) Haas, who is the granddaughter of Bella Baer the daughter of Rabbi Samuel Marx, the uncle of Karl Marx, died today at Theresienstadt.


1945: On the Friday before the Day of Atonment, WABC broadcast a Yom Kippur Service from 5 to 5:15 led by Chaplain Jacob P. Rudin, Cantor David Putterman and Chaplain Luther D. Miller.


1945: At 5:30 in the evening WQXR broadcast a services from Temple Emanu-El


1945: At 8:00 pm WEVD broadcast “News in Yiddish” followed fifteen minutes later by the “Jewish Philosopher.”


1945: According to reports published in the New York Times, Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, has sent $1,112,000 during the past four months to the Youth Aliyah (immigration) Bureau of the Jewish for the purpose of caring for young Jews who have survived the Nazi camps.


1946: Hank Greenberg drives in 7 Tiger Runs with 2 home runs and a double as Detroit defeats the Yankees in their final game of the season.


1947: Seventy-three year old soldier/statesman General Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope the High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief for Palestine and Trans-Jordan from 1931 until his retirement in 1938 – a period that was marked by “a three-fold increase in the Jewish population” and an “economic boom of sorts for Jewish commercial activities but was also marred by the Arab uprising passed away today.


1948: “Johnny Belinda,” a film version of the Broadway play produced by Jerry Wald and with music by Max Steiner was released today in the United States.


1948: David Ben-Gurion met with all 64 Palmach commanding officers.  He explained to them why he was abolishing the Palmach National Command which had acted as an army within an army since the establishment of the IDF.  Ben-Gurion was determined to see to it that there was only national military force in Israel and that it was under the control of the government.  Neither the Irgun on the right nor the Palmach on the left would be allowed to undermine this goal..


1948: With the sound of shellfire from Arab artillery in the background, Dr. Felix Rosenblueth, the Ministers of Justice swore in the first five justices to serve on Israel’s newly created Supreme Court.  Chief Justice Moshe Smoira and Justices Rabbi Simcha Assaf, Itzhak Olshan, Moshe Dunkelblum and Schneur Zalman Cheshin covered their heads and recited the oath “to maintain fidelity to the State of Israel and its laws and not to swerve from justice but to judge people properly.” This is the first Jewish court to sit in a Jewish state since the Sanhedrin met in the days of the Second Commonwealth


1948: Milton Berle started his TV career on Texaco Star Theater.  "Uncle Miltie" would become the first national television entertainment celebrity.  In the early fifties, this Jewish semi-successful vaudeville comic would dominant Tuesday nights in a way not since again until the creation of Monday Night Football.


1950: As tensions rise over the Israeli occupation of an area at Naharayim along the confluence of the Yarmuk and Jordan River, “Maj. Gen. William E. Riley, United Nations chief truce supervisor, said that, from an interpretation of a map, Israel undoubtedly was right in her claim to land disputed by Jordan, but that he had legal reservations arising from the fact that the land had belonged to Transjordan before the” fighting in 1948. The area in question is the site of the Israeli owned Rutenberg Hydroelectric Plant which had “been the most important source of electric power for Palestine “but had fallen into disuse due to the dispute with Jordan.  As night fell, Major General Yigal Yadin, the Israeli Army Chief of Staff expressed Israel’s determination to defend all of its land even if meant a renewed outbreak of hostilities.


1950: In New York, “Pamela (née Wolkowitz) and Murray Deutch, a music executive and publisher” gave birth to director Howard Deutch whose body of work includes “The Replacement” a comedy that will warm the heart of any Washington, DC football fan.


1953:”Always a Bride” a comedy with a musical score by Benjamin Frankel was released today in the United Kingdom.


1955: Birthdate of Yosef Yitzhak Paritzky, the Israeli lawyer whose political career has included serving as an MK and Minister of National Infrastructure.


1955: Birthdate of Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks whose works included People of the Book, a novel featuring the Sarajevo Haggadah.


1956(9thof Tishrei, 5717): Erev Yom Kippur; Kol Nidre


1956: The American Hebrew appeared for the last time before merging withthe Examiner to become The American Examiner.


1957: CBS broadcast the first episode of “Have Gun – Will Travel” that included an opening theme composed by Bernard Herrmann and over its six year history included episodes written by Bruce Geller and Irving Wallace as well as appearances by Martin Balsam, Sydney Pollack, Norma Crane, Suzanne Pleshette, Werner Klemperer and Dyan Cannon


1957: In Halifax, Beth El Congregation completed its new sanctuary located on the corner of Oxford Street and Coburg Road


1957: Birthdate of Pittsburgh born and educated hedge-fund manager David Alan Tepper who gave up his share of the Pittsburgh Steelers so that he could become owner of the Carolina Panthers.



1958(29thof Elul, 5718): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1958(29thof Elul, 5718): Eighty-two year old Frieda Fanny Warburg, the daughter of Jacob and Therese Schiff and wife of Felix Moritz Warburg passed away at White Plains, NY.




1959(11th of Elul, 5719): Seventy-two year, Scottish chemist Sir Ian Heilbron (born Isidor Morris) passed away today.



1959(11thof Elul, 5719): Fifty-five year old London born Dr. Joshua Trachtenberg, the holder of degrees from CCNY, Columbia and Hebrew Union College, a leading Rabbi in the Reform movement who sought to “further liberal Judaism in Israel” who was the husband of Edna Suer Trachtenberg with whom he had one child passed away today.



1960: The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is founded. The persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict finally triggered a response that transformed OPEC into a formidable political force. After the Six Day War of 1967, the Arab members of OPEC formed a separate, overlapping group, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, for the purpose of centering policy and exerting pressure on the West over its support of Israel. Egypt and Syria, though not major oil-exporting countries, joined the latter grouping to help articulate its objectives. Later, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 galvanized Arab opinion. Furious at the emergency re-supply effort that had enabled Israel to withstand Egyptian and Syrian forces, the Arab world imposed the 1973 oil embargo against the United States and Western Europe, while non-Arab OPEC members did not.


1962: “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 United States.


1964(8thof Tishrei, 5725): Fifty-eight year old Vasily Grossman, the Soviet journalist who provided first-hand accounts of the battles at Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin as well as riveting descriptions of the death camp at Treblinka, passed away tody.



1965: Pope Paul VI opened the fourth and final session of Vatican II which approved Nostra Aetate which said that “all Jews today are no more responsible for the death of Christ than Christians.”


1966(29th of Elul, 5726): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1966(29th of Elul, 5726): Actress Gertrude Edelstein Berg passed away.  Born in 1894, Berg gained fame as the Jewish housewife Molly Goldberg.  She began the role on radio in 1929.  She sharpened it in the 1948 Broadway hit Molly and Me.  She reached her apex of celebrity when The Goldbergs was a television hit from 1949 through 1955.  Berg was a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Hunt and the show was taken off the air.


1969(2ndof Tishrei, 5730): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


 


1969(2ndof Tishrei, 5730): As traditional Jews observe the second day of Rosh Hashanah the miracle Mets who survived Art Shamsky’s decision not to play on the Jewish New Year continue their drive for the National League Penant.


1969: “Sinai Tour Routes Avoid Suez Routes” published today described “one of the unexpected results of the six-day war of 1967” is a boom in tourism in the Sinai Peninsula


1972: The building on West Franklin Street that had been home to Beth Ahabah (Hebrew: House of Love) a Reform synagogue in Richmond, Virginia that was founded in 1789, was designated as part of the U.S. Historic District.


1972(6thof Tishrei, 5733): Eighty-four year old French playwright Jean-Jacques Bernard who was interned at Compiegne at the start of the Nazi occupation but who avoided deportation to one of the death camps passed away today in Paris.


1972: In the wake of the Munich Massacre it was reported today that the official Chinese government newspaper Jenmin-Jih Pao said that “the Israeli aggressors claimed to have bombed Syria and Lebanon in self-defense” but what they had committed was inexcusable aggression designed “to undermine the unity between the Arab nations and the Palestinian people.”


1973: Israel shot down 13 Syrian MIG-21s.  It was victories like this that bred the sense of over-confidence that some critics would later led to the successful sneak attack that started the Yom Kippur War (October, 1973).


1973: “Stateline Motel,” the movie version of the novel, starring Eli Wallach was released in Italy today.


1974: Broadcast of the first episode of “Friends & Lovers” a sitcom created by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns and starring Jack Gilford and Steve Landesberg.


1974: Birthdate of Evanston, Illinois native Lindsey Durlacher the All-American wrestler at the University of Illinois who the bronze medal in Men’s Greco-Roman Wrestling while representing the United States at the World Championships in 2006.



1975(9thof Tishrei, 5736: Erev Yom Kippur


1976: CBS broadcast “Rescue At Entebbe: How They Saved The Hostages” a “news special about the planning and execution of the recent Israeli commando raid in Uganda to free airline hostages.”


1976: “Bar Mitzvah Boy,” a British television play, written by Jack Rosenthal, was broadcast today.


1976: “Hard Line and Hijackings” published today reported that in the wake of the hijacking of a “New York-to-Chicago airliner” “the dominant view among aviation at the moment is that there is nothing wrong in governments adopting a “policy of toughness in dealing with hijackers” as exemplified by “the Israeli commando raid that freed hostages at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport earlier this year.”


1976: “Checking Out,” a Broadway play directed by Jerry Adler and starring Joan Copeland, Hy Anzell and Mason Adams opened at the Longacre Theatre tonight.


1977(2ndof Tishrei, 5738): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1978: The Democratic Movement for Change splintered with the different components dividing themselves between three other parties.


1979: Sofia Cosma a native of the Smorgon, a shtetl on the border between Latvia and Lithuanian took his final turn at the podium when he conducted Concerto No.1 by Tchaikovsky today



1981: Nigel Lawson began serving as Secretary of State for Energy.


1983: Birthdate of Amy Winehouse


1983: Ninety-three year old Ernst Moritz Hess who was Hitler’s commanding officer during WW I and lost his job as Judge after the passage of the Nazi Nuremberg race law because even though his father was Protestant and he had been baptized, he was classified as a Jew, passed away today.



1984: Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times, “published an article titled ‘The Simon Wiesenthal Center: State-of-the-art Activism or Hollywood Hype?’ analyzing whether Wiesenthal Center officials were truthful in marketing their Holocaust museum as a non-sectarian, humanitarian institution in order to receive funding from the state of California. This article was one of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of Special Reporting in 1985. The honor marked the first time an article in a Jewish publication was cited in the Pulitzer competition.”


1984(17th of Elul, 5744): Ninety-two year old Memphis, TN, philanthropist Abe Plough the native of Tupelo, MS who created a company that eventually became Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals of which he was chairman


1985: Premier episode of the Golden Girls. The show was the creation of Jewish television executive Brandon Tartikoff.  Two of the four lead characters in this long running television hit were Jewish – Beatrice Arthur and Estelle Getty.


1985(28th of Elul, 5745): Julian Beck, whose Living Theater expanded the frontiers of theatrical innovation for nearly 40 years, died of cancer today at the age of 60. (As reported by Samuel Freedman)



1989: The first Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeny Todd” opened at the Circle in the Square Theatre.


1989: Seven members of ACT UP, an organization co-founded by Larry Krammer “infiltrated the New York Stock Exchange and chained themselves to the VIP balcony to protest the high price of the only approved AIDS drug, AZT”


1990: “Death Warrant” an action movie written by David S. Goyer was released in the United States today by MGM.


1992: Today, the New Yorker published Ann Goldstein’s first translation, an essay by the Italian writer Aldo Buzzi.


1993: Yithak Rabin replaced Aryeh Deri as Minister of Internal Affairs.


1993: “A Bronx Tale,” a crime film produced by Jane Rosenthal premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.


1994(9th of Tishrei, 5755): Erev Yom Kippur


1994: Acting Commissioner Bud Selig announced the cancellation of the rest of the baseball season on the 34th day of a strike by players. Selig is one of a number of Jews who have found success as executives in the world of professional athletics.


1994: “Quiz Show” a movie based on Richard Goodwin’s Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties co-starring Rob Morrow and featuring Barry Levinson that describes the Quiz Show Scandals and centers around Herb Stempel was released today by Buena Vista Pictures.


1996(1st of Tishrei, 5757): Rosh Hashanah


1997: About 90 headstones at a Jewish cemetery on Staten Island were found overturned today and swastikas had been spray-painted on 5, the police said. Visitors to the Baron Hirsch Cemetery at 1126 Richmond Avenue in the Graniteville section alerted officers to the vandalism with a 911 call about 4:30 P.M., Officer Valerie St. Rose, a police spokeswoman, said the vandalism is being investigated as a bias crime.


1997: The New York Times book section featured reviews by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including Alice Hoffman’s 12th novel, Here On Earth and Watching My


Language: Adventures in the Word Trade by William Safire.


2000: A general strike began in Nazareth protesting what they described as "police incompetence in handling violence and crime" after the murder of a local resident,52 year old  Nabieh Nussier,


2000: U.S. premiere of “Dancing at the Blue Iguana” directed by Michael Radford who co-authored the script.


2002(8thof Tishrei, 5763): Shabbat Shuva


2002: A memorial services was held for Louise Rosenfield Noun, the Grinnell College graduate and social activist “at the Iowa State Historical Building in Des Moines.”



2003: Pitcher John Grabow made his major league debut with the Pittsburgh Pirates.


2003:The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including Law, Pragmatism and Democracyby Richard A. Posner and Mad Art: A Visual Celebration of the Art of MAD Magazine and the Idiots Who Create It by Mark Evanier.


2004: “A suicide bomber riding on a bicycle blew himself up at an agricultural gate” south of Kalanda injuring two.


2005: Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon shook hands in an apparent chance encounter in the corridors of the United Nations summit Wednesday. The handshake followed a landmark meeting between the foreign ministers of Pakistan and Israel last week, the first formal high-level contact between the Islamic and Jewish states.  Pakistan is the world’s second largest Muslim country.  Israel has sought to improve relations with non-Arab Muslim countries.


2005: “The Israeli cabinet approved, by a 9-1 majority, plans to compensate settlers who left the Gaza Strip, with only the NRP's Zevulun Orlev opposing. The government's plan for compensation uses a formula that bases actual amounts on location, house size, and number of family members among other factors. Most families should receive between U.S.$200,000 and 300,000.”


2005: Days after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza the Palestinian Religious Scholars Society issued a fatwa (Islamic religious decree) forbidding normalization with Israel. The fatwa came in response to a surprise ruling earlier this week by Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, head of Egypt's al-Azhar Mosque University, in favor of normalization with Israel.


2005: An opera titled Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence for which Jonathan Safran Foer wrote the libretto premiered at the Berlin State Opera today.


2006(1stof Tishrei, 5757): Rosh Hashanah


2006:Germany took a richly symbolic step in its long journey of historical reconciliation on as three men became the first rabbis ordained in this country since the Holocaust. In a ceremony that blended bright hope for the future with a solemn homage to the past, the three — a German, a Czech, and a South African — stood before a senior rabbi in Dresden’s starkly modern synagogue, as he told them they had been singled out, just as Moses had chosen Joshua, in Scripture. “All of Germany celebrates with us today, and all of Europe as well,” said Rabbi Walter Jacob, the president of a rabbinical seminary in Potsdam, near Berlin, where the three men studied. Each wore a black robe and white prayer shawl and stood as Rabbi Jacob laid hands on his shoulders.” Today, we have made a new beginning,” Rabbi Jacob said to the 250 in the congregation, many of them from the United States and Israel. The head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Ayyub Axel Köhler, was also present. German television broadcast the hour-long ceremony live from Dresden’s New Synagogue, a strikingly modern structure built in 2001. It is near the site of the Semper Synagogue, which the Nazis burned down in November 1938 during the Kristallnacht pogrom, auguring the violence to come. Germany’s Jewish population, which stood at 500,000 before the war and the mass killings at the hands of the Nazis, is modest but growing, thanks to an influx of Russian Jews since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. More than 100,000 Jews live here now, compared to 30,000 at the time of German reunification. But Germany has a dire shortage of rabbis, not having ordained any since the Nazi regime shut down the rabbinical seminary in Berlin in 1942. Only 30 rabbis are active here, all from abroad. After the ceremony, Rabbi Uri Regev, the president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, said: “You could feel the winds of history hovering over your head. For the first time since the horrific events that destroyed the Jewish community, you could see a renewal of that community.” German leaders hailed the ordinations as a milestone in the rebirth of Jewish life here — a day of “recognition and joy,” in the words of Chancellor Angela Merkel. After five years of studying in relative anonymity, the newly ordained German, Daniel Alter, 47, said the lavish domestic and international attention this week left him almost dazed. “I woke up to the fact that I was in a storm,” he said. Dresden itself speaks to the possibility of Germany’s rebirth. An Allied bombing raid in February 1945 reduced the city’s elegant old quarter to ashes — leaving it for years as a bleak testament to the horrors of war. Heinz-Joachim Aris, a local Jewish leader, said he survived the Holocaust only because three days before he was to be deported to a concentration camp, the bombing raid and subsequent fires threw Dresden into chaos, allowing him and other Jews to escape into the ruins. On this morning, however, sunlight danced off the waters of the Elbe River, the city’s meticulously restored buildings, and the Star of David hanging above the synagogue’s entrance. Rescued from the old synagogue, the star seemed an apt symbol for a day that linked past and present. Rabbi Alter will serve a population in the northern German city of Oldenburg, which is heavily Russian. The newly ordained Czech rabbi, Tomas Kucera, 35, also plans to stay in Germany, serving in Munich. The third rabbi — Malcolm Matitiani — will return home to South Africa. Rabbi Kucera, a native of Prague, said his knowledge of Russian might help him expand a Jewish community that is at the moment more American than Russian in flavor. “We have great potential to attract Russian Jews,” he said. “Many of them don’t even know about our community.” All three are Progressive Jews, members of the equivalent of the Reform movement in the United States. The Orthodox Jewish movement, which claims a larger following in Germany than the Progressive movement, is also training rabbis in Berlin. It plans to ordain four rabbis there in six months. For Germany, the ordination was the latest in a year of evolution in Germany’s handling of its dark legacy of war and genocide. One contributory even was serving as host to the World Cup soccer tournament, where the German hosts waved flags for the first time in decades without guilt. Another was Pope Benedict XVI’s visit this week to his Bavarian homeland, where he was greeted with unabashed pride, rather than the usual aversion to anything that might smack of nationalism. “I’m often asked if this represents a normalization of German-Jewish relations,” Rabbi Alter said in an interview. “I really don’t know; time will tell. But relations will improve if we keep the spirit of the World Cup, and if we don’t allow dark, right-wing forces to reappear in Germany.”  During the ceremony, Rabbi Jacob recalled that when his family fled the Nazis in 1939 — he was 9 then — it broke a family tradition of rabbis in Germany that stretched back 15 generations. “I thought I would be the 16th,” he said. Instead, he made his home in Pittsburgh. Rabbi Jacob maintained his ties to Germany, however, and six years ago, he and a friend, Rabbi Walter Homolka of Germany, helped establish a liberal rabbinical seminary as an institute of the University of Potsdam. The seminary is named after Abraham Geiger, a 19th-century German-Jewish theologian who founded the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin — which was closed by the Nazis. The Geiger seminary currently has 10 students enrolled in a five-year rabbinical course. Even those who do not stay in Germany, like Rabbi Matitiani, play a role in reconciliation, according to Rabbi Regev. “Germany sees it as an opportunity to send people out into the world with a message that this is a new Germany,” he said.


2006: Aharon Barak completes his service as President of the Supreme Court of Israel.


2006: “T-Slam” an Israeli rock band founded in 1980 “played a one-off reunion show with Rami Fortis and Berry Sakharof in Jerusalem.”


2006: Dorit Beinish was appointed the 9th President of the Supreme Court of Israel making her the first woman to hold this position.


2007(2ndof Tishrei, 5768): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


2007: “Toots” a film about America’s most famous saloon keeper during the 1940’s and 1950’s which was directed by his granddaughter Kristi Jacobson opens in New York at the Quad City Cinema on the afternoon of the Second Day of Rosh Hashanah. Ms. Jacobson will be at the Friday night showing of the film.


2007: In “Saggy pants reveal more than underwear” a column by Jill Fields in which she discusses current fashion among adolescent males, she writes, “Several decades ago, my teenage sister wore ‘hot pants’ to Friday night services at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California.  A congregant complained.  Rabbi Harold Schulweis later told us he had replied, ‘You should look into her eyes, not what she’s wearing.’”


2008(14th of Elul, 5768): Eight-five year old Hyman Goldman who along with his brother-in-law Leonard Marsh and Arnold Greenberg founded Snapple, the beverage company, passed away today.



 


2008: In Washington, D.C., The Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival opens with "Laughing for God's Sake: Humor in Jewish Literature," featuring interpretive readings by local actors (directed by Ian Armstrong) of work by the likes of Shalom Auslander, Faye Moskowitz and Nathan Englander. This event will feature the 10 finalists of the festival's writing contest


2008: On the occasion of the publication of the full translation of The History of the Yiddish Languagethe YIVO Institute for Jewish Research presents a symposium where panelists including Neil G. Jacobs, Ohio State University; Robert D. King, University of Texas; and Kalman Weiser, York University discuss this work by Max Weinreich.


2008: In Vienna, the first festival devoted to Jewish and Israeli music ever held in Austria comes to a close.


2008: The Washington Post book section includes a review of Philip Roth’s latest novel, Indignation.


2008: The Sunday New York Times book section featured books by Jewish authors and/or on topics of Jewish interest including Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, Is There a Right to Remain Silent? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11by Alan M. Dershowitz and


The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremismby Ron Suskind


2009: A special exhibit featuring the work of Will Ronis at this summer’s Rencontres d’Arles photography festival on view in Southern France comes to an end.


2009:Robert J. Samuelson, a columnist for both The Washington Post and Newsweek, discusses and signs The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence at the Bethesda Library, Bethesda, Md.


2009:Israel Air Force pilot Captain Asaf Ramon was laid to rest next to his father Ilan Ramon today, a day after he was killed in a training accident while flying an Israel Air Force jet. "You've trapped me," said Asaf's mother, Rona, standing over the graves of her husband and son. "It should have been me. You were supposed to bury me, old and happy, surrounded by millions of grandchildren. "Oh, what a God," she continued, her voice breaking. "Dad, Grandpa and Grandma, all your loved ones, will watch over you now, my child... My Asaf, take care of Dad. I know Dad will take care of you, and hug you now." The funeral began at 4 P.M. at Kibbutz Nahalal and was closed to the media, as requested by Rona Ramon. Hundreds of Ramon's relatives and friends, as well as a number of dignataries, accompanied the procession. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israel Defense Forces Chief Gabi Ashkenazi were also in attendance. Netanyahu postponed a scheduled afternoon meeting with Barack Obama's Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, who also attended the funeral. "The State of Israel is lowering its flag, as a whole nation mourns the death of our fallen son," Peres said in eulogy of Ramon. "All of our hearts are broken today, because the personal child of the Ramon family was a child of all of us.""The words that accompanied Asaf and his friends as they received their wings at graduation still echo in my ears - 'every plane that has flown in the sky, every star that lights up the eyes, reminds me of you' - those words, that touched the hearts of everybody at the parade grounds, have been crushed now before our eyes.""Rona was already a hero, she was and will remain a hero. There is no other Rona. There is no other hero," Peres said. "... These words can never fill the void." Ramon, 21, died when the F-16A Falcon jet he was flying crashed during a routine training flight near the southern Hebron Hills. His father was Israel's first astronaut, who perished onboard the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. Like his son, Colonel Ramon was an F-16 pilot. Prime Minister Netanyahu called the fatal crash that took Ramon's life a "double loss", almost on the level of "a biblical tragedy.""A father and son followed their hearts and soared to the heavens in chariots of steel, crashing to the Earth in chariots of fire," Netanyahu said. The prime minister also said the crash raises questions about whether or not children of mothers who had lost their husbands should be allowed to serve in combat units. "The dilemma here is very difficult, and the inclination is to say no [to combat service for children of bereaved parents]," Netanyahu said. Netanyahu added that in his time, his parents did not know that he was serving in the Israel Defense Forces' elite Sayeret Matkal reconnaissance unit in which his brother Yonatan also served until he was killed in Operation Entebbe in 1976. "My two brothers and I were together in the same unit. My parents didn't know where I served or any of the risks we took." The main focus of the investigation into Sunday's crash is on human factors, and there is a high probability that some physiological problem may have led to the crash. Barak told Israel Radio on Monday that news of Ramon's crash "hit me like a punch to the stomach." Barak also addressed the issue of allowing the children of bereaved parents to serve in combat units, saying "it rends the heart when things like this happen. These are not children - these are young men who were educated with values. They want to serve in the most demanding places. You can't take this right away from them." Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar directed schools to devote a lesson this week to the family of Ilan and Asaf Ramon. In a letter to school principals, Sa'ar called the Ramon family a "prime example of volunteerism, excellence, self-sacrifice." Sa'ar noted that the items astronaut Ilan Ramon took with him into space (a Torah scroll and an Israeli flag) reflected Ramon's ties to his Jewish and Israeli roots.


Sa'ar suggested the class discussion could refer to historical events such as the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, in which Ilan Ramon took part, and the fatal 2003 crash of the space shuttle Columbia.


2009:Israel commemorated the Munich Massacre of 1972 today in a state ceremony attended by politicians, athletes and relatives of the fallen.(As reported by Robbie Brown)


2010(8th of Tishrei, 5771):Ysrael Seinuk, a structural engineer who made it possible for many of New York City’s tallest new buildings to withstand wind, gravity and even earthquakes passed away today at the age of 78. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)



2010: Eric “Schneiderman was the Democratic Party nominee for New York Attorney General, defeating four other candidates in the Democratic Primary” today.


2010:Fireflies (Gachliliyot), a film tied to the Yom Kippur War is scheduled to be shown at The JCC in Manhattan.


2010: Mira Awad, who represented Israel in the Eurovision song contest 2009 alongside Noa with the song "There must be another way" from their duet album carrying the same name, is scheduled to appear at the Winery in New York City.


2010:  Ahmed Jaabari, leader of Hamas' military wing, issued a rare statement today threatening a wave of violence intended to derail the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.


several of the core issues that divide the two sides but not breaking an impasse over Jewish settlements.


2010:A royal box built at the upper level of King Herod's private theater at Herodium has been fully unveiled in recent excavations at the archaeological site, providing a further indication of the luxurious lifestyle favored by the well-known Jewish monarch, the Hebrew University announced in a statement released today.


2011: Israeli violinist Guy Braunstein and Frank Braley are scheduled to perform Hanns Eisler’s Eisler Duo for Violin & Cello, op. 7 at the 14thJerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.



2011: Galeet Dardashti is scheduled to perform a The JCC in Manhattan.



2011: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman ordered the early evacuation of Israel's embassy in Jordan today, over fears of violent anti-Israel protests similar to those which erupted in Cairo last week.



2011: British Prime Minister David Cameron decided that the UK would not take part in the UN-sponsored Durban III anti-racism conference on September 22 because he did not want the UK to engage in an event with anti-Semitic association, the Jewish Chronicle reported today.



2012: Izhar Patkin’s “The Messiah’s Glass” is scheduled to go on displace at the Jewish Museum.



2012: A revival of Stephen Schwartz’s Tony-Award winning musical Pippin opened at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre today.



2012: Tom Rothman, “the chairman and executive officer of Fox Filmed Entertainment” resigned today.



2012: U.S. President wished the world's Jews a happy new year today, issuing a video in which he called for reconciliation and peace.



2012: As the High Holidays begin, an argument between Shas and Meretz that has become an annual tradition rears its head yet again: When should daylight saving time end? MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz) slammed Interior Minister Eli Yishai today, saying the minister promised to pass a law to extend DST by 11 days, but buried it in the Shas-controlled Knesset Interior Committee.



2012: Jerusalem police clashed with hundreds of Muslim youth today after they left prayers atop the Temple Mount in the direction of the Damascus Gate. Police said the rioters were on their way to the US consulate, presumably to protest against a film denigrating the Prophet Mohammad, which has already sparked mass protests in Libya, Egypt and Yemen.



2013(10thof Tishrei, 5774): Yom Kippur



2013: While being held captive by ISIS, Steven Sotloff, who would eventually be beheaded secretly “fasted on Yom Kippur, by feigning illness.”



2013: Due the cataclysmic flooding that has hit parts of Colorado including Boulder, home of the University of Colorado, Yom Kippur services will not be held in the Chabad synagogue according to Rabbi Yisroel Wilhelm



2013(10thof Tishrei): In Cedar Rapids, Iowa Ilan Caplan keeps alive an unbroken streak dating back to the 19th century and the founding of Beth Jacob by leading traditional Yom Kippur Services.



2013: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's office had no comment tonight on the new US-Russian agreement on destroying Syria's chemical weapons stores, as Israel awaits the arrival of US Secretary of State John Kerry on tomorrow (As reported by Herb Keinon)



2013: “A four-year-old girl accidently drowned in a mikveh in Bnei Barak today, on what was otherwise a relatively quiet Yom Kippur in terms of medical emergencies.”



2014: The Congregation Olam Tikvah Sisterhood and Men's Club are scheduled to host a talk by MERCAZ USA's Executive Director Rabbi Golub on "Promoting Jewish Pluralism in a Changing Israeli Society"



2014: “The Good and the True,” a Holocaust based play is scheduled to have its final performance at the DR2 Theatre in Manhattan.


2014: The Jewish Women’s Archives is scheduled to celebrate its 18thanniversary by honoring Gail Twersky Reimer, the founding executive director.


2014: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to host a walking tour of Jewish Old Town Alexandria tracing the start of a community that dates back to the 1850’s.


2014: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Thirteen Days In September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David by Lawrence Wright, World Order by Henry Kissinger and The Monogram Murders by Sophie Hannah as well as an interview with Sara Paretsky, the author of the V.I. Warshawski novels.


2014: Today is the European Day of Jewish Culture.



2014: “The oldest book of Jewish liturgy, dating back to the ninth century, was en route to Israel today, and will be on display at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem until late October.”


2014:”The IDF will hand down a “sharp and clear punishment” to members of Unit 8200 who are refusing to serve in West Bank missions, IDF spokesman Moti Almoz said today.” (As reported by Spencer Ho)


2014: Following his surprise appearance at Lady Gaga’s Tel Aviv concert last night, Tony Bennett performed on his own in Tel Aviv


2015(1stof Tishrei, 5776) Rosh Hashanah


2015(1stof Tishrei, 5776): Sixty-four year old Alexander Levlovitz died in the early hours this morning “after he lost control of the car he was driving came under attack from rock-throwing attackers in East Talpiot, Jerusalem.


2015: British Labour MP Lucian Berger began serving as the Shadow Minister for Mental Health today.


2015: Based on previous statements made by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, he will lobby Congress to reject the Iran deal, but today, “when he stands before his congregation to welcome the New Year, he will not mention Congress, Iran or nuclear weapons.”


2015(1stof Tishrei, 5776):  Seventieth anniversary of the first celebration of the Jewish New Year in Vienna since the Anschluss in 1938 at the Statdt Temple.  Before the war Vienna had been home to almost 200,000 Jews who supported almost 100 Jewish houses of worship.  The Stadt was the only building to survive and the city’s Jewish population had been reduced to approximately 3,500.


2015: An unidentified “young Israeli man was lightly wounded by rock-throwers in Jerusalem” in what was assumed to be another attack by Palestinian Arabs.


2015: “Two people – a policeman and a young Jewish man – were hurt this morning as clashes resumed at the Temple Mount for the second consecutive day during which nine people were arrested.”


2016: Benjamin Goodman, Philip Solomonick, and Tomer Gewirtzman, Piano Yuval Herz and Barak Shossberger, Violin, Shmuel Katz, Viola and Oded Hadar, Cello are scheduled to perform at Carnegie Hall as part of the Young Israeli Artists in NYC series.


2016:


2016: In the early hours of the day (Israeli time), Shimon Peres’s office said he was in serious but stable condition” after having suffered a stroke yesterday.


2017: Shir Chadash, the only Conservative Congregation in the Greater New Orleans area is scheduled to host” Zemer Atik: Ancient Meoldies.”


2017: Members of the family of Shimon Peres, “world leaders and state and business leaders attended this morning’s ceremony at Mount Herzl Cemetery” marking the one year anniversary of the Jewish leader.


2017: In Jerusalem, Night Stroll 2017 is scheduled to include “Vincent’s Travels in the Holy Land.”


2017: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host the final screening of ”Bogdan’s Journey, a heartbreaking account of the pogrom that took place in the town of Kielce, Poland in July 1946 is scheduled to premiere in Manchester, UK


2017: The Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines is scheduled to host a screening of “Menahse.”



2018: The Bezalel Art Fair is scheduled to take place between 10 am and 4 pm today in Jerusalem.


2018: As Hurricane Florence strikes along the Carolinas, Ariela Davis,the Director of Judaics at Addlestone Hebrew Academy and the Rebbetzin of Brith Sholom Beth Israel, the historic shul of downtown Charleston, South Carolina is scheduled to ride out the storm in South Carolina coastal city.


 


 


 


 


 

This Day, September 15, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

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September 15

 
53: Birthdate of Trajan who was Roman emperor from 98 until his death of 117. In the last decade of his rule, Trajan began a campaign against the Parthians, a people living east of the Roman Empire.  Since this territory bordered Judea with its large Jewish population, Trajan sought to improve relations between Rome and his Jewish subjects.  There were even reports that Trajan would allow a rebuilding of the Temple.  However, as the Romans moved into Parthia, he met stiff military opposition, fueled, in part, by Jews living in Parthia who despised Romefor destroying the Temple.  At the same time, Jews in Egypt also rebelled against Rome.  The violence there forced Trajan to send legions to the land along the Nile which weakened his already doomed campaign as Parthia.



1199: Pope Innocent III published “Constitutio Pro Judeis: An Edict in Favor of the Jews”


1084: Rüdiger Huzmann, the Bishop of Speyer, signed and sealed a document explaining why he had invited the Jews to settle in his city and the terms and conditions under which this community was to live. Among other things, he stated that he “believed” it would “multiply” the “image” of Speyer “a thousand times by inviting the Jews” and “turn the village of Speyer into a city.”


1254:  Birthdate of explorer Marco Polo who told of meeting Chinese Jews in his 1286 journey to China.


1317: “The Jews of Berlin and Cöln (later incorporated with Berlin) are first mentioned in a law of Margrave Waldemar,” bearing today’s date “which provides that in criminal cases the Jews shall be amenable to the city court of Berlin


1348: On the Day of Atonement, three Jews and a Jewess in Chillon, a town near Lake Geneva were tortured in an attempt to get them to confess to charges of well poisoning that was the alleged cause of the Black Death.


1485: Pedro Arbues, Canon of the Cathedral of Saragossa was attacked while praying. He died two days later, and when the news went public, the Christian community gathered to swear revenge. The attack was planned by prominent Jews (Conversos) of Aragon including Sancho de Paternoy, Master of the Royal Household; Gabriel Sanches, the High Treasurer of the kingdom; and Francisco de Santa Fe, assessor to the Governor of Aragon. The results of this “were that nearly 200 people had revenge struck upon them, some were murdered outright and some were beheaded with their mutilated bodies put on display. Some were imprisoned, some committed suicide to alleviate their suffering, and some fled to France.” The Church later made Arbues into a Saint in 1867.


1497:Gershon Soncino published one of the first printed editions of “Selihot” in Braco, Italy.


1683: Germantown, Pennsylvania was founded by 13 immigrant families as a separate township outside of Philadelphia.  In 1793, Isaac Franks, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War, opened his Germantown home to President George Washington, when a yellow fever epidemic gripped Philadelphia which was the capital of the United States of America at that time.


1697:Frederick Augustus I or Augustus II the Strong crowned King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth “with the backing of Imperial Russia and Austria, which financed him through the Jewish banker, Berend Lehmann.”  He was also the monarch whom Naphtali Cohen “went to see to secure reinstatement in his former rabbinate of Posen.”


1730(4th of Tishrei, 5491): Sir Solomon de Medina passed away. A native of Bordeaux Medina was a wealthy Amsterdam Jew who went to England with William III, when he and Queen Anne gained the throne of the United Kingdom.  According to Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne “The first Jewish knight, created by Queen Anne, was Sir Solomon de Medina. It was Sir Solomon who provided the supplies, including the food that enabled the British Army under the Duke of Marlborough to win the decisive Battle of Blenheim – a vital turning point in the War of Spanish Succession and a swift kick in the shins to Louis XIV’s aspirations.”


1735: Birthdate of Issachar Bär ben Judah Carmoly an Alsatian rabbi. At the age of 10, he was sufficiently advanced in his training for the rabbinate to follow the elaborate lectures of Jonathan Eybeschütz. Later, Carmoly studied successively at Frankfurt, under the direction of Jacob Joshua, author of Pene Yehoshu'a, and at Metz, under Samuel Helman, who conferred upon him the title of rabbi. On returning home, in compliance with the wish of his father, Carmoly began the study of medicine under the direction of Jacob Assur, a physician of Nancy, but had to give it up, being engrossed with his Talmudical studies. The only benefit he derived from his tutor was a fair knowledge of mathematics, of which he made use later. He passed away in May of 1781. Carmoly married the daughter of a rich banker named Joseph Raineau. The latter persuaded the bishop of Sulz to create a rabbinate in his see; and Carmoly was appointed rabbi of Sulz. Carmoly was the author of a commentary on the Tosefta to the treatise Betzah, published, together with the text, under the title Yam Yissakar (Sea of Issachar; Metz, 1769). The grandson of the author, Eliakim Carmoly, claimed to have had in his possession the following manuscripts of his grandfather


1752:  The Merchant of Venice was presented in Williamsburg, Virginia.  It was the first dramatic production by a professional troupe in the 13 Colonies.  There is irony that Shylock made such an early appearance in the one place in the world where the stereotype did not even begin to fit.


1755(10thof Tishrei, 5516): Yom Kippur


1776: British troops occupied New York Citydisrupting Jewish life. Many Jewish supporters of the Revolution fled the city.  Several of them took refuge in Newport, Rhode Island.


1780: Birthdate of Jonas Daniel Meijer, the first Jew admitted to the Bar in the Netherlands.  As a lawyer, he worked to help the Dutch Jews gain full emancipation.


1780(15th of Elul, 5540): Jacob Rodrigues Pereira or Jacob Rodrigue Péreire an academic and the first teacher of deaf-mutes in France, passed away. Born Jacob Rodrigues Pereira in 1715 at Peniche, Portugal, “he was a descendant of a Marrano (Portuguese Crypto-Jews) family and was baptized with the name of Francisco António Rodrigues. He returned to Judaism together with his mother. His parents were Magalhães Rodrigues Pereira and Abigail Ribea Rodrigues. After his father's death his mother fled with her son from Portugal to escape the Portuguese Inquisition and the charge that she had relapsed into heresy, and about 1741 she settled at Bordeaux. Jacob Rodrigue Péreire formulated signs for numbers and punctuation and adapted Juan Pablo Bonet's manual alphabet by adding 30 handshapes each corresponding to a sound instead of to a letter. He is therefore seen as one of the inventors of manual language for the deaf and is credited with being the first person to teach a non-verbal deaf person to speak. In 1759, he was made a member of the Royal Society of London. A lifelong devotee to the well-being of the Jews of southern France, Portugal, and Spain, beginning in 1749 he was a volunteer agent for the Portuguese Jews at Paris. In 1777, his efforts led to Jews from Portugal receiving the right to settle in France. In 1876 Pereira's remains were transferred from the Cimetière de la Villette (where he had been buried the year in which that cemetery was opened) to that of the Cimetière de Montmartre. In Bordeaux the street "Rodrigues-Pereire" was named in his honor. His grandsons, the Péreire brothers, Emile Péreire (1800–75) and Isaac Péreire (1806–80), were well-known French financiers and bankers during the second empire who encouraged the construction of the first railway in France in 1835. In 1852, they founded the Société Générale du Crédit Mobilier.”


1793(9thof Tishrei, 5554): Erev Yom Kippur;  with France in the 10th day of the “Reign of Terror” Jews chant  Kol Nidre


1801: Coronation of Czar Alexander I who “declared the Blood Libel -- the infamous accusation that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in the baking of matzah for Passover, for which thousands of Jews were massacred through the centuries -- to be false.



1812(9th of Tishrei, 5573): Erev Yom Kippur


1812: The only Jews who would have chanted Kol Nidre tonight in Moscow would have been members of the French Army which had entered the Russian capital to find it devoid of the local population.


1814(1stof Tishrei, 5575): Rosh Hashanah


1814: Jews in Baltimore, Maryland, have a special reason to rejoice as they welcomed the New Year, since today marked the end of the “Battle of Baltimore” when the Americans withstood the British bombardment of Fort McHenry and thwarted their planned attack on the American port. 


1821: Birthdate of Victor Guérin a French explorer and archaeologist whose seven trips to the “holy land” resulted in the seven volume Geographical, Historical, and Archaeological Description of Palestine and who used such Jewish sources “as the Mishna and Talmud, as well as Jewish travelers such as Benjamin of Tudela and Isaac Chelo”


1821:Costa Rica declares independence from Spain. The first Jewish settlers in Costa Rica were Sephardim from Curacao, Jamaica, Panamaand the Caribbean who arrived in the 19th century. Jewish life in Costa Rica today is very vibrant and caters to the 2,500 Jews in the country.


1821: El Salvador declares independence from Spain. Except for the occasional transit of Portuguese Conversos, there were no Jews in the country until the first half of the nineteenth century when Sephardim from France settled in the town of Chaluchuapa. As of 2000, the Jewish population in El Salvador was approximately120.


1821: Guatemala declares independence from Spain. Documents in the archives of the Mexican Inquisition attest to the presence of Marranos in Guatemaladuring the colonial period. The origins of the present Jewish community, however, are from German immigrants who came to the country in the mid-19th-century.Approximately 1,200 Jews live in Guatemalatoday, and the majority of them reside in the capital Guatemala City.


1821: Honduras declares independence from Spain. Conversos, or New Christians, who converted to Christianity while secretly practicing Judaism, were believed to be among the Spaniards who succeeded in buying permits that allowed them to circumvent prohibitions against sailing to the New World during the period after the Jewish expulsion from Spain. Many of these conversos disembarked along the Gulf of Mexico, and the Honduran coast. It is possible that these were the first "Jews" to arrive in Honduras, but this is disputed by some historians.At the end of the 1800's Honduras experienced an influx of Jews. The majority emigrated from the Central European regions of Russia, Poland, Germany, Romania, and Hungary, while a few were of Sephardic origin, and came from Greece, Turkey and North Africa


1821: Nicaragua declares independence from Spain. The Jewish population of Nicaraguareaches its peak in the 1920’ when it numbered approximately 270.  During the Sandinista era, the population dwindled to ten.  Today, there are approximately fifty Jews in Managua that gathers for Shabbat services, at last report; the community lacked a Sefer torah and a rabbi.


1824: The first Jewish wedding took place in Cincinnati, Ohio today when Morris Symonds married Rebekah Hyams.


1824 Daniel Meyers married Hester Levy today at the New Synagogue.


1824: In Posen, Aaron Levin Lazarus and his wife gave birth to Moritz Lazarus, the professor of psychology at the University of Bern who was an outspoken opponent of ant-Semitism and who held several leadership roles in the German Jewish community including the presidency of Jewish Synod of Leipzig and the Berlin branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle.


1825(3rd of Tishrei, 5586):Tzom Gedaliah


1825(3rd of Tishrei, 5586): Mtailda de Symons the daughter of Arron de Symons and Matlida Israel passed away today after which she was buried in the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.


1825: The foundation stone for Ararat was laid in Buffalo, New York. Ararat was to be a city of refuge for displaced Jews. It was to be on Grand Island in the Niagara River. Apparently Mordechai Noah, the self-appointed leader of the Jewish community was not bothered by the conflict with today’s fast.


1829(17thof Elul, 5589): Alsace, France, native Mayer Lippmann, the “on of Raphaël Isaac Lippmann and Jutelé Lippmann” and husband of Madeleine Lippmann passed away today at Verdun.


1830: George Novra married Rebecca Abrahams at the Great Synagogue today.


1834:Birthdate of Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke, one of the first prominent German leaders to take a leading role in the anti-Semitic attacks that began in Germany in the last three decades of the 19th century.  His lament that “The Jews are our misfortune” would become the motto of Der Stürmer Nazi newspaper published by Julius Streicher the Nazi leader who was hung at Nuremberg after having been convicted of committing “crimes against humanity.”


1837: One day after they had died in a fire in the Strand Theatre, Harry Harris and his daughter Esther Harris were buried today at the Brady Jewish Cemetery.


1849: The first synagogue in South Africa, Tikvat Yisrael, was dedicated in Cape Town.


1850(9th of Tishrei, 5611): Erev Yom Kippur


1854: The second Jewish synagogue built in Boston was consecrated today.  The synagogue was erected by German Jews who had left the city’s other synagogue which was controlled by Polish Jews.


1856: Mina (Halfin) and Abraham Levi gave birth to Levi Napoleon Levi in Victoria, Texas.  Young Levi went “north” for college (The University of Virginia) where he earned an undergraduate and law degree by the age of 20.  Levi returned to the Lone Star State where he practiced law in Galveston and became a leader of the civil and Jewish communities. Eventually he would become President of the National Order of B’nai Brith.  He passed away in 1904.


1857: James Finn of the British Council in Jerusalem wrote to the foreign ministry offering a plan to settle Jews in agriculture in Eretz-Israel to help the land prosper.


1857: Birthdate of William Howard Taft.  Taft is the only man to serve as President and then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  Taft served one term of President sandwiched between Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.  Taft was the first President to attend a Seder.  In 1912, when he visited Providence, RI, he participated in the family Seder of Colonel Harry Cutler, first president of the National Jewish Welfare Board. Nineteen- twelve was an election year and possibly Taft’s attendance at Cutler’s Seder was an attempt to shore up his political support among Jewish voters.  In 1911, he had angered many Jewish leaders with his stand on the issue of passports for Jews wanting to go to Russia.  As part of a series of anti-Semitic actions, Russians were refusing to issue passports to American Jews who want to go to Russia for business reasons.  Taft basically told a meeting of American Jewish leaders to call off their pressure to get the Russians to stop this discrimination against American citizens.  To Taft’s credit he vetoed an immigration bill that contained a literacy requirement designed to keep Jews and others from Eastern Europe out of the United States.  The proposal came as Jews were seeking to flee the rising tide of pogroms that had swept Russia during the opening decade of the 20th century.


1858: In Montreal Cantor Abraham de Sola and Esther de Sola gave birth to Clarence Isaac de Sola, the husband of Belle Maud de Sola.


1862: During the Civil War, Company D of Cameroon’s Dragoons, a Union Cavalry regiment founded and commanded by Max Friedman took part in an expedition the left for Indiantown, NC, today while Companies F and H moved toward Drummond Lake.


1864(14th of Elul, 5624): Joel Ellis, “the infant child of J.J. Ellis and his wife Marguerite” passed away today after which he was buried at the Brompton Jewish Cemetery (As reported by Cemetery Scribes)


1863(2nd of Tishrei, 5624): As Jews observe the Second Day of Rosh Hashanah “President Lincoln used the authority granted him under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act to suspend habeas corpus throughout the Union in any case involving prisoners of war, spies, traitors, or any member of the military.


1869(10thof Tishrei, 5630): Jews observe Yom Kippur for the first time under the Presidency of U.S. Grant.


1870: In Baltimore, Arianna née Handy and Otto Sutro gave birth to Rose Sutro, the niece of the first Jewish mayor of San Francisco, who with her younger sister Ottilie  would form on of the first, if not the first, duo-piano teams.


1870: Birthdate of Rachel Hirsch, the daughter Mendel Hirsch, the director of the girls’ school serving the Jewish religious community in Frankfurt am Main.  In a move that was unusual for her time, she became a doctor in German and a professor at Charité.


1870: Future Dreyfusard Clément Moras became the imperial prosecutor in Saint-Girons


1871(29th of Elul, 5631): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1872: It was reported today that presidential candidate Horace Greely had “indecently insulted the Hebrews” while speaking in Chappaqua, NY.  [Greely was running against U.S. Grant who would garner the majority of Jewish votes]


1873(23rd of Elul, 5633): Seventy two Samuel Jacobs, a native of the Isle of Sheppey who became a “dealer in works of art” passed away today in London.


1873: In Bellefonte, PA, Rosa Grauer and Adolph Loeb gave birth to Herbert Adolph Loeb.


1874: Birthdate of Gomel native Nicholas Dobkin, the Columbia University trained medical doctor.


1876: Birthdate of German born American composer and conductor Bruno Walter




1877: Birthdate of Jakob Ehrlich the Austrian lawyer and early Zionist leader whose service in the Austrian Army during WW I did not save him from being beaten to death at Dachau.


1878(3rd of Tishrei, 5548): Shabbat Shuvah (the fast is put off out respect for the Sabbath)


1878: “Lessing’s Dramas” published today reviews the three finest plays by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing which include “Nathan the Wise” which was written in 1779. In Nathan the Wise, Lessing succeeds in his “aim is to present a perfect ideal embodiment of the spirit of toleration” which this “a powerful drama.” “The Germans love this drama” which features “this wise and noble hearted Jew” “and place it beside Faust as one of their two finest classics.”



1878: Birthdate of Jennie Weiner who was buried in Waldheim Jewish Cemetery when she passed away in 1927.


1879: It was reported today that the population of Romania is 4,582,602 of which 270,000 are Jewish.


1879: In Anykščiai, which is now part of Lithuania Abel Komaiko and Rebecca Zelesnik, an aunt of movie producer David O. Selnick gave birth to Solomon Barcuh Komaiko (S.B. Komaiko) whose varied career made him “one of the 100 most influential Chicago Jews in the 20th century, a champion of Lithuanian independence at the Versailles Peace Conference, an ardent Zionist and author whose style was compared to Shalom Aleichem.


1879: It was reported today that the Foreign Minister of Romania is continuing to offer arguments for not allowing Jews to become citizens of his country as was agreed to during the meeting of the European Powers in Berlin. He contends that they can be subjects without being citizen of the country.  He describes the Jews “by their customs, their traditions and their aspirations” as forming a “foreign colony, a species of German colony” in Romania.  (This charge comes at the same time that the growing anti-Semitic movement in Germany is attacking Jews as being aliens)


1880(10thof Tishrei, 5641): Yom Kippur


1880: “The Church Question” published today described the condition of religion in the United States which “is not a Christian nation.”  This is “a Christian land inasmuch as that form of religion prevails among our people…but the government has only government political relations with its subjects and makes no discrimination between Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, believers of any kind and absolute unbelievers.


1881: It was reported today that leaders of several Jewish communities in the eastern provinces of Germany have appealed to their co-religionist in Berlin “to exert their influence” with the authorities to provide them protections during riots which they fear will come during the upcoming holiday season which begins on September 23, Erev Rosh Hashanah


1881: Reports published today described the passage of 400 Russian Jews who have gone through Lemberg on their way to the United States.


1882(2nd of Tishrei, 5643): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


 1885: Birthdate of Hanover native Leopold Philipp, a graduate of the Hebrew Technical Institute and Colonel in the National Guard who went to become consulting engineer in New York where he was active in various civic organization including the Red Cross.


1885: it was reported today that 4 year old John Franze and Abraham Schmidt caught smallpox from a fellow student with whom they attend Hebrew School at 127 Pitt Street in New York.


 1888(10th of Tishrei, 5649): Yom Kippur


1889: Six days after she had passed away, 27 year old Amy Judith Levy, the daughter of Lewis Levy and the former Isabella Levin, was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.


1889: Judge Henry M. Goldfogle and Mr. Warley M. Patzek addressed the attendees at the ceremonies celebrating the dedication of the Temple to be used by Congregation of Mount Sinai which is located on 72nd Street in Manhattan.


1889: Members of Shaar Hashomyim (Gates of Heaven) gathered today to celebrate the dedication of their new sanctuary on East 15th Street near Third Avenue. The congregation was founded in 1839 and was moving from current facility on Rivington Street.  Built in 1865 with seating for 1,000, the congregation was forced to move again because it had outgrown this facility.


1890(1stof Tishrei, 5651): Rosh Hashanah


1890(1stof Tishrei, 5651): A fight broke out in a synagogue at Trenton, NJ, when Max Rodden, the congregation’s former rabbi and some of his followers tried “to take part in the prayers after they had been warned to keep away.


1890: “A September New Year’s Day” published today described the presentation of “a set of silver and gold ornaments” for the Torah by J.H. Schiff and Mrs. Theresa Schiff to Lewis May who accepted them on behalf of Temple Emanu-El


1890: It was reported today that as Rachel Greenberg and two of her children left the Barge House to begin their new lives in the United States she gave the fruit and candy which her two other sons had brought as welcoming gift to a group of Polish Jewish children who were still begin detained.


1891: The London Opera Company composed of six Polish Jewish men and 2 Polish Jewish women were stranded in Providence, R.I., tonight because the managers had fled and taken all of the money with them.


1892: The SS Nevada arrived in New York from Liverpool via Queenstown carrying 900 steerage passengers none of whom are Russian Jews which lessens the authorities that they will have deal with cholera.


1893: Seventeen year old Rebecca Feinberg who had been shot in the face by her frustrated boyfriend yesterday was a patient at Gouverneur Hospital where doctors say “she will be disfigured for life.


1893: Bernhard Weinberger, the banker who had offices in Essex, Grand and Huston Streets and who had suffered severe business losses checked into the Mount Vernon Hotel where he registered as “Fred Klein” in what may have been an attempt to avoid angry creditors.


1894: Birthdate of Oskar Klein.  The famed Swedish physicist was the son of the chief rabbi of Stockholm, Dr. Gottlieb Klein and Antonie (Toni) Levy.


1894: In Poland, Israel and Bluma Sendak gave birth to children’s author Philip Sendak “the father of Caldecott Medal winner Maurice Sendak and children's author Jack Sendak.”



1894: “The Jew Tenderly Handled” published today provides a review of Lesser’s Daughter by Mrs. Andrew Dean, the penname of Cecily Wilhelmine Sidgwick who also wrote Scenes of Jewish Life


1894: Among those listed today to receive bequests from the late Dr. Bernard Grunhut are Mt. Sinai Hospital and the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum of New York.


1895: Theatrical agent Marcus Mayer returned to the United States from Paris today with production material that will be produced “under the exclusive management of Charles Frohman and Al Hayman.


1895: Rabbi Gustav Gottheil of Temple Emanu-El officiated at the funeral for 50 year old Bernhard Mainzer,at his home on East 65th Street followed by burial in the Cypress Hill Cemetery.  Pall bearers included his partner Henry Budge, Ewald Blathasar, Morris Barr and Hans Sommerhof.


1895: In Dresden, art historian Cornelius Gurlitt and his wife gave birth to Hildebrand Gurlitt, who was able to overcome the fact that his grandmother was Jewish to become one of those who helped the Nazis in the looting of art during WW II and continue to hide that stolen art until his death.


1896: It was reported today that the German ant-Semite, Dr. Hermann Ahlwardt who has been in the United States since last December has founded The Gentile News, a paper that he uses to express his support for William Jennings Bryan as President while devoting the rest of the space “to violent attack upon the” Jews.


1896: Colonel George Picquart met with General Charles-Arthur Gonse, deputy chief of the French general staff.  Picquart presented the general with evidence proving that Dreyfus was innocent.  The general did not dispute the proof but told Picquart that it really did not matter.  The case was closed.


1896: Relying on information that first appeared in The Chicago Israelite, it was noted today that “Max Nordau and Theodor Herzl, the leaders of the ‘Zionist Movement’ are avowed Agnostics” who totally indifferent to Judaism yet “they appeal for and followers only among the more than extremely orthodox members of their race.”


1896: When David Meyer, an unemployed locksmith applied for a job at butcher shop owned by John Dangels he was assaulted by the owner who said “You can’t work here for I hate sheenys.”


1898: Fifty-three year old William Ulick O'Connor Cuffe, 4th Earl of Desart, the son-in-law of Jewish banker Henri Louis Bischoffsheim and the husband of Ellen Odette Cuffe “the most important Jewish woman in Irish history” passed away today.


1898: Birthdate of Novorodko, Russia, native Abraham Gribetz who came to the United States in 1902 who devoted his life to the Hebrew Free Loan Society.



1898: Birthdate of Isador Gottlieb, the native of Kiev who gained fame as basketball maven Eddie Gottlieb, the first coach and manager of the Philadelphia Warriors in the National Basketball Association.




1899: “The Ghetto” by Dutch dramatist Henrik Hyermann and with an English adaption by American author Chester Bailey Fernald is scheduled to open up tonight at the Broadway Theatre in New York under the direction of Jacob Litt.


1899: “Yom Kippur Fast Ended” published today described “the merrymaking” that took place on the lower east side “after the holiday ended” which found “the restaurants and dance hall…filled to overflowing.”


1899: In a letter published today, Michael Davitt, the Irish Nationalist MP said “English sympathy for” Dreyfus “is entirely due to the fact that he is a rich Jew instead of a poor one and to the desire to injure a rival nation.”


1900: Birthdate of Harvard and Oxford education David Wainhouse, “international lawyer, author and Deputy Assistant of State” who was the husband of the former Katherine Cohen.”


1901(2nd of Tishrei, 5662): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1902: The reorganized Jewish Theological Seminary of America which had been endowed by $500,000 and had been given a building by Jacob H. Schiff opened today “at 736 Lexington Avenue.”


1903: In Boston, installation of the officers of the Sons of Zion at Webster Hall.


1903: Birthdate of Izrael Icek Krysztal the native of the village of Malenie in what is now Poland who the world knows as Israel Kristals, the survivor of two world wars who lost his family in the Holocaust and who in 2016 at the age of 112 years and 178 days, he was declared the oldest man in the world. (As reported by Liam Stack)



1906: Birthdate of speed skater Irving Warren Jaffe, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who “won two gold medals at the 1932 Winter Olympics.”


1909(29thof Elul, 5669): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1909(29thof Elul, 5669): Reuters reporter James Heckscher the native of Hamburg and resident of London since 1856 who was the first English journalist “to send back news of President Lincoln’s assassination” and headed Reuter’s parliamentary staff where he served as a verbatim reporter” passed away today.


1911: In New York City, Supreme Court Justice Goff refuses the incorporation of congregation “Agudath Achim Kahal Adath Jeshurun on the grounds that the title should be in English.


1911: The police at Munich expel a large number of Jewish families who had migrated from Russia and Galicia on charges of peddling without a license.


1911: Birthdate of New York native Joseph Pevney, the son of Russian-Jewish watchmaker and WW II veteran whose career spanned from vaudeville, to the silver screen to the small screen (television)>



1912(4thof Tishrei, 5673): Tzom Gedaliah is observed for the last time during the Presidency of William Howard Taft.


1913(13thof Elul, 5673): Eighty-one year old world traveler and author Ármin Vámbéry passed away today.



1913: The trial of Melvin Bellis began.  Called the “Russian Dreyfus Affair”, the trial is covered by hundreds of journalist from Russia, Europe and the United States.


1914(24thof Elul, 5674): Wulf Hoffman passed away.


1914(24thof Elul, 5674): Bene Kirschner passed away.


1915: As of today, in Patterson New Jersey, the Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Trhough the War has raised “more than $4,000 of which $2,500 was contributed by Congregation B’Nai Israel and the remainder by Congregation Ahavath Joseph.


1915: Colonel John Henry, the non-Jewish commander of the British Legion, a unit in his majesty’s service described the Zion Mule Corps in the following words to the Jewish Chronicle:


These brave lads who had never seen shellfire before most competently unloaded the boats and handled the mules whilst shells were bursting in close proximity to them … nor were they in any way discouraged when they had to plod their way to Seddul Bahr, walking over dead bodies while the bullets flew around them … for two days and two nights we marched … thanks to the ZMC the 29th Division did not meet with a sad fate, for the ZMC were the only Army Service Corps in that part of Gallipoli at that time.’


1916:: “Plans for a canvass of more than 100 trades and professional on behalf of the 100 or so Jewish charitable institutions in New York were completed” this “afternoon at a luncheon in the Bankers’ Club, held by the Organization Committee of the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies” and it was also “announced that the federation would begin a campaign on September 18 to increase the yearly total of Jewish benefactions from $1,500,000 to $2,000,000.”


1916: “Abram I. Elkus, the newly appointed American Ambassador to Turkey” is expected “to take up his in the Turkish capital” today.


1916: It was reported today that 65 American women and children seeking to leave Palestine will board the U.S. Navy cruiser Des Moines at Jaffa and “will be taken by the cruiser to the nearest Italian port and transferred to ocean liners for the United States.”


 


1917: Felix Warburg, the Chairman of the Joint Distribution committee of the Funds for Jewish War Sufferers issued a statement today directed the Jewish population of the United States.  So far the committee has disbursed over $8,000,000 to alleviate the suffering their co-religionist trapped in war-torn Europe.  He reassured that representatives of the committee were directly, or indirectly, in contact with and providing aid to, Jewish communities in Russia, Palestine, Rumanian and various states in the Balkans.  He commended the American Jewish community for raising money for war relief while still meeting the demands of their local charities.  At the end of the statement he extended them “my most cordial good wishes for the New Year.”


1917: Birthdate of David Flusser, a professor of Early Christianity and Judaism of the Second Temple Period at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who passed away in 2000.


1918(9th of Tishrei, 5679): Erev Yom Kippur


1918: As Jews prepared to go to the synagogue for Kol Nidre, General John Pershing commander of the American Expeditionary Force fighting in Europe sent the following cablegram to Colonel Harry Cutler of Providence, Rhodes Island, Chairman of the Jewish Welfare Board, “The stirring message of greetings from the Jewish Welfare Board is much appreciated…The constant support and cordial assistance of our brothers of the Jewish faith and the thought that all creeds are united one banner gives courage to our army and urges us on to victory.”  Colonel Cutler replied by saying, “This message coming on the eve of the most sacred day of the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement will bring cheer to the hearts of millions of American citizens of the Jewish faith.”


1918: While serving with the 76th Company of the 6th Marines near Thiaucourt, France, H A (First Class) Bernard W. Herrman, USN displayed “conspicuous coolness” risking his life while under heavy artillery fire to evacuate an untold number of wounded men. (The Navy provided the Medical Corpsmen to serve with Marine combat units.


1919: Birthdate of Heda Bloch, the native of Prague who gained fame as “Heda Margolius Kovaly, a Czech writer and translator whose memoir, “Under a Cruel Star,” described her imprisonment by the Nazis during World War II and her persecution by the Communists in the 1950s.”


1919: Today, Louis Lipsky chaired the second session of the 22nd Annual Convention of the Zionist Organization of America.


1920(3rdof Tishrei, 5681): Tzom Gedaliah


1920: Dr. Harry J. Moss, the former superintendent of the Baltimore Hospital is scheduled to begin serving as the superintendent of the Brownsville and East New York Hospital, “a new institution in East Brooklyn”


1920: Today is the deadline for sending requests to the Chief Cemeterial Division of the War Department asking that the bodies of soldiers, including Jewish soldiers, who are buried in France are brought back to the United States.


1921: Birthdate of prize winning author and MK Moshe Shamir.





1923: In Brooklyn, Louis Mazlish and the former Lena Reuben gave birth to M.I.T. historian Bruce Mazlish. (As reported by Paul Vitello)



1924: Birthdate of Mordechai Hankovich-Hendin who as Mordechai Tzipori served in the Knesset and as Minister of Communication.  Tzipori was born at Petak Tikva, served with the Irgun before pursuing a career with the IDF.


1924: “With the opening of its founders'"dream store" today, Saks Fifth Avenue, the brainchild of Horace Saks and Bernard Gimbel, became the first large retail operation to locate in what was then primarily a residential district.”


1925: Today, Max Fleischer and Dave Fleischer who pioneered the use of the “Follow the Bouncing Ball” device “released “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” which “was the first film to use the follow the bouncing ball gimmick.”


1926: Southpaw featherweight Harry Blitman fought his third bout which was also his third victory – this time by a knockout.


1928(1stof Tishrei, 5698): As Al Smith, the first Roman Catholic to run for President campaigns against Herbert Hoover, Jews celebrate Rosh Hashanah.


1929:  Birthdate of famed physicist Murray Gell-Mann.Murray Gell-Mann was born in New York City. This physicist studied and clarified the puzzling phenomenon of elementary subatomic particles; classifying them as “quarks” within an ordering system he called the Eightfold Way. The achievement earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969. He also served on the faculties of ChicagoUniversity, PrincetonUniversity and the California Institute of Technology.


1929: Pitcher Ed Wineapple made his major league debut with the Washington Senators.


1931: Filming of “The Trunks of Mr. O.F.” co-starring Peter Lore and Hedy Lamarr began today.


1932(14thof Elul, 5692): Forty-nine year old Arkansas native Harry “Klondike” Kane (Harry Cohen) the southpaw who pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Brown and the Detroit Tigers in the first decade of the 20th century passed away today.


1932: A week after being released in Austria, “Sehnsucht 202,” a German musical produced by Arnold Pressburger and written by Emeric Pressburger that marked the screen debut of Luise Rainer was released in Germany today.


1933 (24 Elul 5693): Israel Meir Hacohen, the Hafetz Hayim passed away.  Born in 1838, he was prominent Talmudic leader and author who among other accomplishments wrote commentaries on the Sifraand Musser. Earning his living as a teacher and later founding a yeshiva, he consistently refused a rabbinical position. This was partly based on his belief that "he who hates gifts shall live." Rabbi Yisroel Meir HaKohen was one of the greatest figures in modern Jewish history. He was recognized as both an outstanding scholar and an extraordinarily righteous man. His impact on Judaism was phenomenal. It is interesting to note that, despite his great stature; he refused to accept any rabbinical position and supported himself from a small grocery run by his saintly wife in the town of Radin where they lived. Rabbi Yisroel Meir devoted himself to the study and teaching of Torah. “Rabbi Yisroel Meir is perhaps best known for his campaign to teach his fellow Jews about the laws of Lashon Hara (forbidden speech). His first book, Chofetz Chaim, was devoted to this topic. (The name comes from T’hilim (Psalms) 34, "Who is the man that desires life (chofetz chaim)… keep your tongue from evil…." He later published two more books on this subject. The Chofetz Chaim wrote on many subjects and ultimately published over 20 books. Some important ones are Ahavas Chesed (Love of Kindness) on the mitzvah of lending money, Machaneh Yisroel (The Jewish Camp) for Jews serving in non-Jewish armies, and Nidchei Yisroel(The Scattered of Israel) for Jews who moved to places where there were few religious Jews, particularly America. He wrote books about the importance of Torah study and many other important issues. Probably the most important book he wrote was the Mishna Berurah, a six volume commentary on Shulchon Aruch, Orach Chaim(which deals with the laws of daily life and holidays).”


1933: Anne Frank’s father flees Germany and moves to Amsterdam where he opens a firm that sells spices and pectin for jam.


1934: “The Scarlet Empress” a biopic about Catherine the Great directed by Josef von Sternberg who produced the film along with Emanuel Cohen and co-starring Sam Jaffe was released in the United States today


1935: The anti-Semitic Nuremberg racial laws were passed by the Nazis. The Nuremberg Laws defined Reich Citizenship. Citizens of Germany had to be of kindred blood.  All Jews were defined as not being of German blood as a matter of law.  This legalized the division between Aryans and non-Aryans.  Jews were defined as anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. The Jews are returned to the legal position they had occupied in Germanybefore their emancipation in the 19th century. Jews can no longer exist as German citizens or marry non-Jews.  At this time, the swastika was adopted as the official symbol of Germany; a symbolic sign of the Nazification of Germany.


1935(17thof Elul, 5695): Seventy-eight year old Chaim Hirschson, the  native of Safed and son of Yaakov Mordechai Hisrschson who was the editor of Jewish writings and Chief Rabbi of Hoboken, NJ passed away today.


1936: “President Roosevelt today extended New Year greetings to Jewish citizens, voicing the hope that the year would bring them prosperity and happiness.”


1936: “Julius Streicher again employed the opportunity provided by a Nazi party congress to further his plans for an international, not simply a German, campaign against Jews.”


1936: “The executive committee of the World Jewish Congress protested today to the League of Nations against ‘the campaign of threats and defamation organized methodically at the Nuremberg congress by the highest dignitaries of the German Government and the Nazi party’” declaring that “the German allegation that Judaism and bolshevism are identical is absurd.”


1936: U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hulll delivered a speech tonight at the dinner hosted by the Good Neighbor League in which he outlined the cornerstones and parameters of American foreign policy including that “in a democracy, even in the short run the policies of the government must rest upon the support of the people.”  (Editor’s Note – this view should be kept in mind by anyone trying to understand the actions of the Roosevelt administration when it comes to events leading up to and during the Holocaust.”


1936:Accompanied by officials and prominent members of the Federation of Polish Jews in America, the Maccabees of Tel Aviv, soccer champions of Palestine received an official welcome to New York from Mayor La Guardia at the City Hall.


1936: Birthdate of Toronto native Dr. Albert Stanley “Al” Bergman, the psychologist and McGill University professor best  known for having defined and conceptually organized the field of Auditory scene analysis (ASA) in his 1990 book, Auditory Scene Analysis: the perceptual Organization of Sound



1937(10thof Tishrei, 5698): Yom Kippur


1937: The Palestine Post reported that British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden addressed the League of Nations Council, meeting in Geneva. Edensaid that in the search for a successful solution to the Palestine crisis Britain was not committed to any definite scheme. He urged sending a new, special League of Nations Commission to Palestine to seek the ways to implement the Royal (Peel) Commission's recommended partition and to negotiate with Jews and Arabs on the provisional boundaries of their proposed states.


1937:  Abdel Barkawi, one of the leaders of the opposition to the Husseini family, was killed by an Arab terrorist in Jenin.


1938: In an article entitled “Arab Nations Lose Zeal on Palestine,” Joseph M. Levy reports that based on reliable information provided by sources in Syria, which is the “headquarters of the Palestinian Arab rebellion,” German and Italian money is subsidizing Arab terrorism in Palestine.


1938: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flies to Germany “where he meets with Hitler” at Berchtesgaden to discuss the crisis that the Nazi leader has manufactured over the Sudeten Land, a portion of Czechoslovakia populated by ethnic Germans.


1939: Charles Lindbergh delivers a speech where he calls for American neutrality that contains veiled implications that the Jews are behind any war effort when he asks “who owns and who influences newspaper, the news picture and the radio station.”


1940:Two massive waves of German attacks were decisively repulsed by the RAF. The German defeat caused Hitler to order, two days later, the postponement of preparations for the invasion of Britain. Although the Blitz would last until October, the decision to call of the invasion meant, among other things, that the Jews of the British Isles would not fall victim to the Shoah. Henceforth, in the face of mounting losses in men, aircraft and the lack of adequate replacements, the Luftwaffe switched from daylight to night-time bombing. There was a significant number of Jews (for the size of their population) serving with the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Among the Jews who flew for the RAF was Lt Michael Oser Weizmann, the son of Chaim Weizmann who was killed when his plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay in 1942.  The body was never recovered.


1940: Two days after he passed away erev Shabbat, funeral services are scheduled to be held for David Rosenthal at the Bethel Chapel of Temple Emanu-El


1940: “The unveiling of a monument to the memory of Mollie Greenberg is scheduled to take place this morning at Mount Zion Cemetery.”


1940: The unveiling of a monument to the memory of Sarah Kirsch, the wife of Hyman Hirsch and mother of May Shurock and Morris Kirsch is scheduled to take place this morning at the Montefiore Cemetery.


1940:  “At six in the morning, the police surrounded the house” where Leon Blum was staying and arrested him and incarcerated him “in a medieval castle at Chazeron in the Massif Central.”


1941(23rd of Elul, 5701): The Nazis killed 800 Jewish women at Shkudvil, Lithuania


1941(23rd of Elul, 5701): Eighteen thousand Jews are murdered at Berdichev, Ukraine.


1942: The Nazis begin deporting the Jewish community of Kalush, Ukraine, to the Belzec death camp. It will take 48 hours to complete this vile task.


1942: Mala Zimetbaum, the first woman and the first Jewish woman to escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau was shipped to from Belgium to Auschwitz today aboard Transport 10.


1942(4th of Tishrei, 5703): The Nazis began the week long process of murdering the Jewish community from Kamenka, Ukraine, at the Belzec death camp.


1942: Fifty-seven year old George Abrahamsohn left Berlin on a transport for Terezin, the next stop on his way to Auschwitz where he was murdered a month later.


1942: Sixty-nine year old Olga Lehman left Berlin on a transport for Terezin.


1942: One thousand Jews were deported from Lille, France to Auschwitz.  Among the deportees were Mozes Hirschsprung, his wife Helene and their two little children.  Mozes had been born at Auschwitz in 1901 and Helene had been born there in 1909.  At that time, it was border town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Between the world wars, the family had moved to Amsterdam.  They moved to Lille after the start of the war because it would be safer there.  In the end, they would be murdered two miles from the place of their birth. Forty-eight year old Fanny Yerkowski was also among the deportees.  A native of London, she had married a French man before WW II and had settled in Lille.  Twenty-one year old Bernice Winer was also a deportee. She was a citizen of neutral Switzerland.  To the Nazis, a Jew was a Jew was a Jew regardless of his or her nationality. [Source – Holocaust Journey by Martin Gilbert]


1943(15thof Elul, 5703): Sixty-seven year old Richard Beuthner one of the Jews who had survived in Berlin under the Nazis died today in the German capital city.


1943: By the middle of September members of the corpse-burning detail at the Sobibór death camp, had built an escape tunnel intended to lead them into the camp minefield. Most of the 150 members of the detail are killed.


1943: Commandant Kappler, the SS attaché at the German embassy in Rome summoned Ugo Foa, President of the Rome-Jewish Community to his office and informed him that the Jews of Rome might avoid deportation if they could give him fifty kilograms of gold with the next thirty-six hours.


1944(27thof Elul, 5704):Mala Zimetbaum, the first woman and the first Jewish woman to escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau was sadistically murdered today.



1944: One thousand, five hundred young boys were taken to the Children's Block at Birkenau. Three days later, on Rosh Hashanah Eve, they would be sent to the gas chambers.


1944: “Bride by Mistake,” a romantic comedy based on a story by Norman Krasna with a script by Phoebe and Henry Ephron was released today in the United States.


1945(8thof Tishrei, 5706): Shabbat Shuva


1945: At the West Side Institutional Synagogue, Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein said, “On this Sabbath of Repentance let us decide to return to our God in prayer and thanksgiving.


1945: It was reported today that “Jewish men and women in the armed forces both at home and abroad will receive opportunity to attend religious services” marking the observance of the Day of Atonement which starts tomorrow evening.


1945: “Declaring that the peculiar role of Israel is to call the world to repentance, the Synagogue Council of America” issued a Yom Kippur message today that read, in part, “The ravaged world, the millions of displace people of broken families of destroyed lands and decimated nations and above all, the terrifying implications of the discovery of atomic energy, are proof that humanity needs a new tur, a return to its spiritual and moral source.”


1946(19thof Elul, 5706): Eighty-five year old English author and manuscript collector Elkan Nathan Adler, the son of “Nathan Marcus Adler, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire” passed away today.



1947(1stof Tishrei, 5708): David Levin celebrates his first Rosh Hashanah


1947: “O’Dwyer Urges Haven for 250,000 Jews” published today described a speech by the Mayor of New York in he “proposed the United States” serve “as a haven for 250,000 Jews currently seeking admission to Palestine” and declaring that “If anyone says there isn’t plenty of room, I’ll show him where it is within 100 miles of New York City.”


1948: Catcher Joe Ginsberg made his major league debut with the Detroit Tigers.


1949: ABC broadcast the first episode of “The Lone Ranger” featuring the Masked Man and his Indian companion Tonto for which Stanley Frazen served as “the supervising editor.”


1949: President Truman nominated Casper Platt “to a seat on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Illinois”


1950: Today, Jordan’s King Abdullah said that if Israel did not remove its forces from the disputed land near the confluence of the Yarmuk and Jordan Rivers within four days, his government would take military action to dislodge the Israelis.


1950(4thof Tishrei, 5711): Fifty-six year old jazz violinist and bandleader Dol Dauber, the father of pianist and cellist Robert Dauber who “was imprisoned at Theresienstadt” before being shipped to Dachau where he died in 1945, passed away today.


1951: On the eve of Hadassah’s 37th annual convention, delegates received congratulatory telegrams expressing support for the organizations and its goals from Monnett B. David, United States Ambassador to Israel and President Chaim Weizmann.


1951: After 740 performances, the curtain came down on the original Broadway production of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” a Jule Styne musical with a book co-authored by Joseph Field


1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that the government decided to form a Reparations from Germany Purchasing Mission, attached to the Ministry of Finance. The mission undertook that it would purchase and use the received goods exclusively for the development in four fields: agriculture, industry, transportation and power.


1953(6th of Tishrei, 5714):Erich Mendelsohn a German Jewish architect, known for his expressionist architecture in the 1920s, as well as for developing a dynamic functionalism in his projects for department stores and cinemas passed away.


1955: Forty nine year old Eduard Strauch, a Nazi officer who played a key role in the murder of the Jews of Riga in the Rumbula forest and who had been sentenced to death twice beat the hangman when he died in a Belgium hospital today.


1955:Betty Robbins, the world's first female cantor, led Rosh Hashanah evening services at Temple Avodah of Oceanside, New York. Her appointment as cantor marked the first time that a woman performed the traditional role of cantor in a synagogue anywhere in the world. It generated a tremendous amount of publicity, even making the front page of the New York Times. Robbins had been unanimously approved as the Reform congregation's cantor by its board of trustees the previous July, after the congregation found itself without a cantor for the High Holidays. Although Robbins did not have formal training as a cantor, she had spent her childhood in Germanysinging with her synagogue's boys' choir, eventually becoming its soloist (once she adopted a boy's haircut to please the choir's director, who was reluctant to allow a girl to join). Robbins spent much of the rest of her career teaching religious school, and formed and directed several adult and children's choirs. In her retirement, Robbins has conducted religious services on many worldwide Jewish holiday cruises.


1956(10thof Tishrei, 5717): As Ike and Adlai faced off in the Presidential election, Jews observed Yom Kippur and Shabbat.


1958(1stof Tishrei, 5719): For the tenth year in a row, the citizens of an independent Jewish state celebrate Rosh Hashanah


1958: CBS broadcast the final episode of the “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show” for which Stanley Frazen served as the supervising editor was broadcast today.


1959: Final episode of “The Bob Cummings Show” a sitcom for which Stanley Frazen served as the supervising editor was broadcast today.


1960: “All the Fine Young Cannibals,” the film version of the novel produced by Pandro S. Berman and co-starring Susan Kohner, the daughter of producer Paul Kohner was released in the United States today.


1964(9thof Tishrei, 5725): Erev Yom Kippur – Kol Nidre was chanted for first time during the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnosn.


1966(1stof Tishrei, 5727): Rosh Hashanah


1966(1stof Tishrei, 5727): Eighty-one year old Illinois native Jacob H. “Jack” Brunwasser the son of Max and Sophia Reens Brunnwasser and the husband of Anna Detlefson Brunwasser passed away today after which he was buried at the Waldheim Jewish Cemetry.


1968: "Barbra Streisand: A Happening in Central Park" Show appeared on CBS TV.


1969(3rdof Tishrei, 5730): Tzom Gedaliah


1969: NBC broadcast the first episode of “My World… and Welcome to it” a sitcom created by Melville Shavelson, co-starring Harold J. Stone. 


1969: Funeral services are scheduled to held today for tax account and Jewish leader Herbert M. Mandell.



1971: A new paperback version of Tillie Olsen's classic short story collection Tell Me a Riddle was issued


1975(10thof Tishrei, 5736): Yom Kippu


1975: As proof of the continuing influence of the Communist Bloc in Arab-Israeli affair, the Rumanian News Agency reported that “over 1,500 young people from 17 Arab countries” are studying in Rumanian universities.


1976: The Auditorium Building which was designed by Dankmar Adler was designated as a Chicago Landmark today.


1977(3rd of Tishrei, 5738):Tzom Gedaliah


1977: The Jerusalem Post reported that Moshe Dayan, the new foreign minister, left for Washington with his draft of a proposed peace treaty with Arab states. He had also carried "an accompanying letter" explaining Israel's stance on the territorial question. In a special interview with this newspaper Dayan explained that there was some identity between his "functional ideas" and US thinking along the lines of a trusteeship for the West Bank.


1978: Meir Amit who had been appointed Minister of Transportation and Minister of Communications in Menachem Begin's government, resigned both posts today after the Democratic Movement for Change broke up. Before entering politics Amit had held the top post in military intelligence before serving as Director of Mossad.


1979(23rdof Elul, 5739): Parashat Nitzavim-Vayeilech; Leil Selichot


1979(23rdof Elul, 5739): Sixty-seven year old author and blacklist victim Albert E. Kahn passed away today.



1979: Premiere of “And Justice for All” a film that looks at the dark side of the judicial system with an Oscar nominated script co-authored by Barry Levinson, featuring Lee Strasberg, Darrell Zerwling and Sam Levene at the Toronto International Film Festival.


1981: Birthdate of “American actor, comedian and writer” Ben Schwartz.


1982: An Associated Press report published today stated, "Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, in a statement, tied the killing [of the Phalangist leader Bachir Gemayel] to the PLO, saying 'it symbolizes the terrorist murderousness of the PLO terrorist organizations and their supporters'."


1982: A memorial service is scheduled to be held today at the Riverside Memorial Chapel, to honor the memory of Louis Waldman, a former Socialist State Assemblyman who became one of the city's foremost labor lawyers,


1982: Israeli forces began pouring into west Beirut.  This was part of an ill-fated attempt by the Begin government to pacify Lebanonand destroy the PLO.


1983: Israeli premier Menachem Begin resigns.


1985 (29th of Elul, 5745): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1985: A DC-8 cargo plane returning from Iran and supposedly bound for Malaga, Spain, made an emergency landing in Tel Aviv. Investigation revealed that the plane— recently acquired from an obscure Miamifirm by a shadowy Brussels-based "Nigerian" company—had been flying Hawk missiles from the USto Iranvia Israel. A Boeing 707 registered to the company had been carrying loads of 1,250 TOW missiles from Israelto Iranvia Malaga.


1988: “Let’s Get Lost,” a documentary written by Bruce Weber who also directed and produced the film was released in the United States today.


1989: U.S premiere of “Sea of Love” produced by Martin Bregman and co-starring Ellen Barkin.


1991: Birthdate of Israeli singer Roni Daloomi


1991(7th of Tishrei, 5752): Eighty-three year old Andre Baruch who teamed with his wife Bea Wain to form “a husband-and-wife disc jockey team in New York on WMCA, where they were billed as Mr. and Mrs. Music” passed away today.


1991: “Jewish History in Provence” published today provides a history of the Cavaillon synagogue which was still standing in the last decade of the 20thcentury.



1993(29th of Elul, 5753): Erev Rosh Hashanah


1933: Two days after the Oslo Agreements were signed at the White House, at the 1,000-person Reconstructionist University Synagogue in Los Angeles, an American, an Israeli and an Arab were scheduled to read the speeches President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat had given at Monday's signing ceremony. Rabbi Arnold Rachlis planned to retell the biblical stories of Abraham's banishment of his son Ishmael--said to be the father of the Arab nation--and Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac--the ancestor of the Jews--to show contemporary connections.


1994(10th of Tishrei, 5755): Yom Kippur


1996(2ndof Tishrei, 5757): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah


1999: After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, “30 Days” starring Ben Shenkman and co-produced by Arielle Tepper Madover, the granddaughter of Philip and Janice H. Levin was released in the United States today.


2000: Four days after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, “30 Days” starring Ben Shenkman was released in the United States today,


2000: “In the Penal Colony,” an opera composed by Philip Glass, based on a story by Franz Kafka, premiered today in Seattle, Washington.


2000: The 2000 Summer Olympic in which canoer Rami Zur competed for Israel opened today.


2001(27thof Elul, 5761): Twenty-three year old Meir Weisshaus of Jerusalem “was fatally shot in a drive-by shooting today on the Ramot-French Hill Road.


2001(27thof Elul, 5761: Ninety year old television producer Fred De Cordova who was best known for his work with Johnny Carson on Tonight passed away today.



2001: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest includingWhat Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay byDaniel Mark Epstein, Middle Age A Romance by Joyce Carol Oates, An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War by Midge Decter and Venus In Exile:The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art by Wendy Steiner.


2002:The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including The Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Tellerby Gregg Herken, Why Terrorism works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge by Alan M. Dershowitz and Sharon: Israel's Warrior-Politician by Anita Miller, Jordan Miller and Sigalit Zetouni.


2004:Gary Bettman, the Jewish commissioner of the National Hockey League, announced that the owners again locked the players out prior to the start of the 2004–05 season. Three months later, Bettman announced the cancellation of the entire season with the words "It is my sad duty to announce that because a solution has not yet been attained, it is no longer practical to conduct even an abbreviated season. Accordingly, I have no choice but to announce the formal cancellation of play." The NHL became the first North American league to cancel an entire season because of a labor stoppage.


2004:The Seventh Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, under the musical direction of pianist Elena Bashkirova comes to an end.


2004: Today Jose “Pékerman was named coach of the Argentine national team, which qualified for the 2006 World Cup.”


2004: In the evening, Jews around the world begin the observance of Rosh Hashanah.  This marks the start of the year 5765.


2005:Israel's two chief rabbis meet with Pope Benedict XVI to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a landmark Vatican document on relations with Jews, and urge him to support the fight against anti-Semitism and terrorism.The meeting follows the historic visit by Benedict to the central synagogue in Cologne, Germany last month, the second time a pope had entered a Jewish house of worship. It also follows a diplomatic altercation between the Vatican and Israel that erupted over the pope's omission of Israel in a list of countries hit by terrorism. Prior to the meeting Israeli said the dispute had been resolved.


2005(11th of Elul, 5765):Hundreds of mourners gathered at Jerusalem's Har Hamenuhot cemetery to bury Cyril Harris, the former chief rabbi of South Africa whose body was flown from Cape Town after he died of cancer Tuesday. Harris, credited by many with aiding the transition process in South Africa from apartheid to a free democracy, was a close friend of former South African president Nelson Mandela and one of the only people to speak at Mandela's inauguration in 1994.


2005: The Bergen County Democratic Organization caucused today, to select a candidate to fill the seat for District.  In balloting to fill the position on an interim basis, Loretta Weinberg lost by a 114-110 margin to Charles Zisa. In a separate vote, by a 112-111 margin, Zisa was selected over Weinberg to be the party's candidate on the November ballot. (Weinberg was Jewish; Zisa was not).


2005: The Chair of the SEC Board of Presidents announced that “the contract of Southeastern Conference Commissioner Michael L. Slive has been extended through July 31, 2009.


 


 


2006: The Jerusalem Post reported that China has lodged a strong protest with Israel following this week's trip to Taiwan by a Knesset delegation that its ambassador learned about in The Jerusalem Post.


2007: The winners of the 2007 Lasker Awards, widely considered to be one of the most prestigious medical prizes, were announced to the public.  The awards are funded by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation.  Born in 1880, Lasker, a Jew who made his home in Chicago, is considered by many to be the father of modern advertising.  He passed away in 1952.


2007(3rd of Tishrei, 5768): Shabbat Shuva – Sabbath of Return


2008: Esther Jungreis, the Hungarian born founder of the international Hineni movement in the United States is photograph with the U.S. Ambassador of Hungary.




2008: On the second night of The Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival Adam Langer reads from his novel
Ellington Boulevard
.


2008: As part of the Annual Primo Levi Conference, Centro Primo Levi presents: Primo Levi: Historian and Public Figure. The event features the premiere screening of a documentary on Primo Levi from the archives of the Italian Broadcasting Company followed by a discussion of
Primo Levi's public profile vis-à-vis history and politics. For a full program see



2008: Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.  This marked the demise of a firm that traced its origins to three Jewish brothers from Bavaria – Henry, Emanuel and Mayer – who first settled in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1850’s before moving their operations to New York. The firm ceased to be a family company in the 1920’s.


2009:In Jerusalem,Beit Avi Chai presents "Singing Psalms" with the "Al Palgei Mayim" ensemble, which put Psalms to new tunes. For more than two thousand years, melodies have been hidden among the written words of the Psalms. The "Al Palgei Mayim" ensemble draws its lyrics from these ancient poems that so many of us know and find inspirational. This is a unique project based on new melodies for the Psalms from a contemporary perspective.


2009: Gabriel Oliver Koppell defeated his challenger for a seat on the New York City Council by winning 65% of the vote.


2009(26th of Elul, 5769): Eighty-seven year old Dr. Leon Eisenberg who was a pioneer in the field of autism, attention deficit disorder and other learning disabilities passed away today. (As reported by Benedict Cary)



2009: Rabbi David Kalb leads a program entitled Controversy and Conversion at the 92nd Street Y in which he acknowledges that “conversion is one of the most controversial issues in the Jewish community today and then delves into the different movements of Judaism as he explores each movement's separate approach to conversion and how these differences can create conflict.”


2006: Oliver Koppel won re-election to the New York City Council today


2009: Jerry Nadler was one of three Congressmen who introduced the Respect for Marriage Act today.


2010:  Israeli born pianist Shai Wosner is scheduled to perform tonight with the New York Philharmonic.


2010:U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Jerusalem.


2010:Two mortar shells and two rockets were fired into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip in the early this morning in what would appear to be Hamas's attempts to fulfill threats made by the group promising a wave of violence meant to derail Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.


2010:Israeli and Palestinian leaders are "getting down to business" and tackling the main issues of the Middle East conflict, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today in Jerusalem. "They have begun to grapple with the core issues that can only be resolved through face to face negotiations," she said before another round of negotiations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.


2010: Today Nevin Shapiro “pleaded guilty…to one count of securities fraud and one count of money laundering.


2010: At the Toronto International Film Festival, premiere of “Peep World” a comedy co-starring Ron Rifkin, Sarah Silverman and Ben Schwartz with narration by Lewis Black.


 


2010: Janet Maslin reviews Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race written and edited by Jewish faux newsman Jon Stewart, David Javerbaum, Rory Albanese, Steve Bodow and Josh Lieb


2011: Elisheva Carlebach, Salo W. Baron Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, is scheduled to give an illustrated talk in honor of the coming New Year on Jewish conceptions of time and how these are interwoven with the Jewish sense of history and represented in Jewish imagery entitled. The Center for Jewish History is sponsoring “Genesis: Imagining the Beginning of Time.”


2011:Israeli pianist Matan Porat and Alis Weilerstein are scheduled to perform Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no. 5 in D major, op. 102 at the 14th Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival.


2011: The New York Timesfeatures reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Grief of Other by Leah Hager Cohen and The Little Bride by Anna Solomon.


“Female orphan, Jewish, 16 years old, seeks husband to love, house to live in, preferably before the next pogrom. It’s the 1880s in Odessa, and Rosenfeld’s Bridal Service finds the girl, Minna, a match in America. Soon she is shipped off to Max, who has claimed land in the Dakota Territory to escape religious persecution himself. Minna arrives to discover she’s engaged to an old man (he’s 40), and, most inconveniently, will be stepmother to a strapping 18-year-old named Samuel. Max’s other son, Jacob, is a mere year younger than Minna. Max isn’t a bad guy, but he is a terrible farmer, losing his wheat crop to a storm after refusing to harvest on the Sabbath. They barely make it through the winter, their bodies and stifled longings all cramped together in a mud cave. Minna is a terrifically complex heroine: a little snobby, a little selfish and wholly sympathetic.”


2011:British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould announced today that the Queen of England has signed an amendment to a bill that will prevent the issuing of arrest warrants against Israeli officials.


2011:Thousands of Turkish protesters gathered outside the soccer stadium in Istanbul where Maccabi Tel Aviv was playing against Turkish team Beşiktaş, waving Hezbollah flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans.


2011:Dozens of Muslim Brotherhood activists held a demonstration in front of the Israeli embassy in Amman, Jordan, demanding the cancellation of peace accords between the two countries and calling for the deportation of the Israeli ambassador.


2011(16th of Elul, 5772): Ninety-two year Francis Bay, the Canadian born Jewish character actress passed away.




2011(16th of Elul, 5772): Ninety-year old Suzy Eban, the widow of Abba Eban, who charmed Americans into loving Israel while he served as Ambassador to the United States, passed away today.



2012: The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival is scheduled to come to an end.


2012: As the attacks by murderous Muslim mobs spreads from North Africa, to India, Indonesdia and Australia, the video that has supposedly enranged so many turns out to have been made by a expatriate Coptic Egyptian and not some mysterious Jew as originally reported.


2012: On the last Shabbat of 5722 and the second to the last day of that year, The Crescent City News published a summary of the events of the year “The year that was 5772.”


2012:The Palestinian Authority today accused Hamas of exploiting peaceful protests against the high cost of living to spread chaos and anarchy in the West Bank.


2013: The exhibition, "Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait," is scheduled to come to an at the Jewish Museum in London


2013: JCRS (Jewish Children Regional Services) volunteers are scheduled to wrap thousands of small gifts that comprise 2013's JCRS Hanukkah Gift Program at the Goldring/Woldenberg Metairie Campus. 


2013:The Lebanese newspaper Al-Mustaqbal reported today that “20 trucks laden with equipment used in the manufacture of chemical weapons were driven across the border from Syria into Iraq” for the last two days.


2013:Lawrence H. Summers, one of President Obama’s closest economic confidants and a former Treasury secretary, withdrew his name from consideration for the position of chairman of the Federal Reserve opening up the way for possible confirmation of another Jewish candidate – Janet Yellen.


2014: “As part of the European Days of Jewish Culture and Heritage, the Wiener Library is scheduled to host “a special tour exploring the experience of women with the archives.”


2014: “Stephen Mandel” began serving as the “21st Minister Health in the Alberta Government.”


2014: Dr. Harvey E. Goldberg, Professor Emeritus, The Sarah Allen Shaine Chair in Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem is scheduled to deliver a lecture on  "Ritual Mutuality in North Africa: Jews and Muslims listen to the Ten Commandments in the Synagogue” at the University of Connecticut.


2014: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host a screening of “The Fighting 69,” the first in a series of films to be shown about Jews and World War I.


2014(20 Elul): Yahrzeit of Dr. Jacob  Levin, of blessed memory, beloved husband of Betty, loving father of Michael (Gigi Cohen) Levin, Stephen (Dian Garton) Levin, Sharon (Philip) Wein and Lawrence (Sandra Morrison) Levin and proud Zaide to a whole tribe of grandchildren.   To his brother Joe, he was the incomparable “Yaenkel” and to me his was my wonderful Uncle Jack – living proof that good guys finish first.


2014: “Hundreds of members of UNDOF, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force stationed on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, crossed the border into Israel today, after recent clashes with al-Qaeda-linked militants.”


2014(20th of Elul, 5774): Eighty-seven year old Yithak Hofit, the Mossad chief who played a key role” in the Raid on Entebbe passed away today.



2014: Viennese native and Kindertransport traveler Harry Baum who “co-founded Euromic, coined the phrase ‘Destination Management Company’” passed away today.




2015(2ndof Tishrei, 5776): Second Day of Rosh Hashanah 



2015: “Rabbi Abby Jacobson of Conservative Emanuel Synagogue in Oklahoma City will not speak about Iran” because her congregants “are dwarfed by the surrounding culture and they tend to want to talk about something Jewish when they come” to services.


2015: “The Huffington Post Highline published Steven Brill's 15-part serial documentary, "America’s Most Admired Law Breaker,"[28] examining Johnson & Johnson's 20-year practice of illegally marketing a powerful drug, Risperdal, to children and the elderly, while concealing the side effects and earning billions of dollars in profit.


2015(2ndof Tishrei, 5776): Ninety-seven year old Terry Rosenbaum, a victim of the Right Wing’s anti-Communist mania passed away today. (As reported by William Grimes)



2015: “The Intern” a comedic look at the modern world of business directed and produced by Nancy Meyers who also wrote the script premiered in Belgium today.


2015: “Torrential rains and hail pelted southern Israel” this evening “forcing the closure of roads and flight delays just days after a severe sandstorm and high temperatures hit the region.” (Times of Israel)


2015. This evening Prime Minister Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein and representatives of the security forces” “to discuss the ongoing violence on the Temple Mount” which has already claimed the life of one Israeli. (As reported by Times of Israel)


2016: The Jewish Historical Institute said today that the entire Ringelbaum Archive “will be available for free on the Internet.


2016: Today, “a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia upheld Barry Freundel’s sentence in a unanimous 20-page ruling.”


2016: The Pace Gallery is scheduled to host a reception marking the opening of “Night” an “exhibition of a new body of work” by Israeli born artist Michael Rovner.


2017(24thof Elul, 5778): Eighty-seven year old playwright Myrna Lamb passed away today. (As reported by Neil Genzlinger)



2017: “Dozens of rabbis and community leaders,” including “50 prominent rabbis activists including Rabbi Uri Regev, Mayim Bialik and Michael Douglas” “signed a statement calling for sweeping reforms to Israel’s official religious establishment and its policies” was published this morning. (As reported by JTA)


2017: “Victor and Abdul,” a biopic directed by Stephen Fears, with music by Thomas Newman and filmed by cinematographer Danny Cohen was released in the United Kingdom today.


2017: The Jerusalem Sacred Music Festival is scheduled to come to an end.


2017: The critically acclaimed theatre show “Simon and Garfunkel Story continues its tour for a third day.


2017: In New Orleans, the Jewish Community Day School is scheduled to host its Shabbat Dinner.


2017: In Manhattan, Shabbat at Chabad Loft is scheduled to being a pre-Shabbat Happy Hour, followed by “a user friendly explanatory Kabbalat Shabbat Service.


2017: In Atlanta, the Bremen Museum is scheduled to host a program on “How can art and artifacts preserve history and tell stories?”


2018: In Chapel Hill, NC, services are not held at Kehillah Synagogue due to Hurricane Florence.


2018: In Andover, MA, Temple Emanuel is closed today in response to a gas crisis that had led to several explosions in communities north of Boston which have resulted in at least one death.



2018(6th of Tishrei, 5779): Shabbat Shuvah; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/


 


 


 


 


 

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