This Day, May 7, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 7



833 BCE (2 Iyar 2928): Traditional date on which King Solomon began building the Temple in Jerusalem.

351: Gallus, who had been appointed “Caesar” of the East by his cousin, the Emperor Constantius II arrived in Antioch. Antioch was the capital of his domain which included Palestine. At the time of his arrival a revolt broke out among the Jews of Sepphoris, a town in Palestine and spread to the Galilee and Lydda.  According to different sources, the revolt was led by Isaac who came from Sepphoris and a little known figure named Patricus.  The revolt was not anti-Christian even though Constantius II had given the Church free reign in a campaign of persecution aimed at the Jews and other non-Christians. The revolt may have been aimed at the corrupt rule by Gallus.  Or it may have been a last gasp effort by the Jews in Palestine to gain freedom from Rome.  This was a period of great instability in the Empire and the Jewish leaders may have been encouraged by reports of Imperial defeats in the western part of the Empire.  They also may have thought that the Persians, who were enemies of the Roman Empire, would come to their aid.  The revolt lasted only a year and was put down by Uriscinnus, one of Gallus’ more seasoned commanders who probably defeated the Jewish forces at a battle near Acco.  The Romans moved south laying waste to Tiberia, Sepphoris and Lydda, each of which was rebuilt after the fighting stopped.  [Editor’s Note: Considering the fact that this revolt took place 280 years after the Great Revolt and 215 years after the Bar Kochba Revolt, it would seem to indicate that there was a sizeable Jewish population still living in Palestine, that the population was made up of a handful of scholars, that the Nasi did not control all aspects of Jewish life, that Jews make lousy subjects and that Jews do not seem to learn from their “mistakes.”]

962: Pope John XII crowns Otto I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Among his subjects is Gershom ben Judah, who will gain fame as Rabbeinu Gershom Me'Or Hagolah ("Our teacher Gershom the light of the exile") had been born two years earlier in Metz.  Mainz, the city he would move to as an adult, was already the center of Talmudic learning in this part of the Holy Roman Empire with Yehuda ben Meir serving as its leading scholar at this time.

973: Emperor Otto I passed away. Under Otto Jews “were regarded as possessions of the Emperor.”  In 965, Otto “gave the Bishop of Magdeburg jurisdiction over all merchants and Jews for taxation purposes. In general, the Jews were not expelled or forcibly converted and were considered the personal property of the King. In the individual towns the Jews were offered privileges, usually through a contract whereby they would be protected by the crown in return for financial fealty.” (As reported by The History of the Jewish People)

1205: Coronation of King Andrew II of Hungary. At first during his reign of King Andrew II appointed Jews to serve as Chamberlains and mint-, salt-, and tax-officials. The nobles of the country, however, induced the king, in his Golden Bull (1222), to deprive the Jews of these high offices. When Andrew needed money in 1226, he farmed the royal revenues to Jews. This led to an outcry from his Christian subjects.  Pope Honorius III excommunicated him. In 1233, he took an oath promising the papal ambassadors that he would enforce the decrees of the Golden Bull directed against the Jews and the Saracens. In addition to which he would enforce the new pope’s decrees that forced Jews to wear badges of identification and forbid them from buying or keeping Christian slaves.

1312: As he entered Rome today, Emperor Henry VII was hailed as a ‘deliverer” by the citizens including the Jews who can be seen in illustrations in the Codex Balduini Trevirensis welcoming the ruler.

1342: Clement VI, whose reign took place during the Black Death began his papacy today. When pogroms erupted in Europe in response to the belief that the Jews were responsible for the plague, Clement issued two bulls condemning the belief and the violence and urged the Catholic clergy to take steps to protect the Jews.  (Editor’s note – I can find no reason for this unusual Papal behavior but it does stand out against the anti-Semitism that was so dominant in much of the Continent.)

1348: Charles University in Prague (Universitas Carolina/Univerzita Karlova) is established as the first university in Central Europe. Starting sometime during the last two decades of the 18^th century Jews, as well as Protestants, were allowed to attend the University.  In 1911, Einstein was appointed to a full professorship at the school; a position he held until 1914.  Today the CIEE Center at Charles University offers courses in Jewish Though and Jewish History including  one styled  “The History of the Jews in Bohemia and Central Europe” and another styled “Torah, Modern Jewish Religious Thought, and Czech Literature.”

1355: Twelve hundred Jews of Toledo Spain were killed by Count Henry of Trastamara.  The Jews were caught between the opposing forces in a fight between King Peter and Count Henry, his half-brother who sought the throne for himself.  The events surrounding this dynastic quarrel marked the beginning of the decline of the Jewish community in Spain.

1634: William Prynne, an opponent Jews settling in England was pilloried for the first time as part of his punishment for opposing the production of plays.

1680: An attempt to keep the Jews of Corfu from practicing law made in 1679 ended today when the Jews were granted that right today.

1718: The city of New Orleans is founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. In 1724, the French adopted The Code Noir which dealt primarily with the issue of slaves but also mandate the expulsion of the Jews from the city. The arrival of Isaac Rodrigues Monsanto in 1757 provides the first recorded evidence of Jewish settlement in the Crescent City.  The real birth of the Jewish community dates from the time of the Louisiana Purchase when the Americans took over and did away with the Black Code.

1727: Two years after the death of Peter Great, Jews were expelled from Ukraine by his widow, Empress Catherine I of Russia.  Catherine was merely following the wishes of her late husband who had stated that he did not want any Jews living in Russia.  Daniil Pavlovich Apostol, the Hetman of the Cossacks, “was the first one to apply to the senate to modify the harsh law.” Eighty years ago, the Cossacks had driven the Jews from their lands.  Since then, they had found out “that they could not get along very well without Jewish merchants” because they were indispensable when it came to facilitating commerce between the Ukraine and the Polish and Lithuanian provinces..

1769(30^thof Nisan, 5529): Nathaniel Weil passed away at Rastatt. Born in 1687, this son of Naphtali Zvi Hirsch Weil was a noted Talmudist who served as a rabbi in Karlsruhe and was the author Korban Netan’el

1786: “The Russian Senate published a decree defining the economic and civil rights of the Jews of White Russia.” For much of its history, Russia had been almost free of Jews due to the exclusionary and anti-Semitic policies of a succession of Czars. As an example of the law of unintended consequences, Russia acquired a large Jewish population following the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18^thcentury.  This move by the senate was the first in a series of official attempts to deal with this “Jewish problem.”  Throughout the 19^th century, Russian policy would vacillate regarding its Jews; but in the end anti-Semitism and bigotry would win the day. (As reported by Abraham Bloch) 

1789: The Judenordnung provided for the abolition of discriminatory laws enacted against the Jews of Galicia

1804: Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, “the Acre based Ottoman governor of Sidon” who forced Napoleon to retreat from Palestine thus making null and void his promises to the Jews and included among his advisors Haim Farhi passed away today.

1807: Lieutenant-General George FitzRoy, 2nd Baron Southampton and Frances Isabella gave birth to Henry Fitzroy the British politician.  In 1839, he married Hannah, the daughter of Nathan Mayer Rothschild by whom he had two children Arthur Frederic FitzRoy and Blanche FitzRoy.

1811: Seventy-nine year old Richard Cumberland, the British dramatist who wrote “The Jew” passed away today.  “The Jew” which was premiered in May of 1794 is the first play written for the English theatre that portrayed a Jewish moneylender as a heroic figure. 

1812: In London, Sarah Anna (née Wiedemann) and Robert Browning gave birth to Robert Browning the author of “Rabbi ben Ezra” that begins with the immortal lines, “Grow old along with me!  The best is yet to be…” He was a friend of Emma Lazarus and “both his verse and private correspondence show that he kept an interest in the” persecution of the Russian Jews. There are those who contend that Browning was of Jewish descent. His father was a clerk in the employ of the Rothschilds at a time when their bank “employed scarcely any but Jews.”  The name “Bruning” (a Germanic form of Browning) was very common among Jewish families in North Germany.”

1815: Birthdate of Marco Mortara, the Italian rabbi from Viadana who was a “disciple” of Samuel David Luzzatto.

1815: Isaac Solomon married Ann Barnett at the Hambro Synagogue today.

1817: In The Hague, Leonardus Levy Abraham Verveer and Caroline Elkan to Mauritz Leonardus Verveer, “the Dutch 19^th Century artist whose work has been featured in exhibitions at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam

https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Maurits-Verveer/E67CA0DF45D797B8



1824: German rabbi Lazarus Jacob Riesser and his son Gabriel began a correspondence today that would include 20 letters before it ended.

1826: Moses Henry Myers married Sarah Abrahams to at the Hambro Synagogue.

1830(14^thof Iyar, 5590): Pesach Sheni

1830: Today, in one of its first formal forays into the Middle East, the United States signed a treaty of commerce and navigation with the Ottoman Empire whose American diplomatic representatives have included Oscar S. Straus, Solomon Hirsch, Henry S. Morgenthau, Sr. and Abram I. Elkus whose territory included Palestine.

1833(18^thof Iyar 5593): Lag B’Omer

1833: Samuel Michael Emanuel married Sarah Jacobs today which, according to some Jews is the first time since the start counting the Omer on which weddings could take place.

1834: In Savanah, GA, in what must have seemed liked a joining of dynasties, thirty seven year old Philadelphia born ophthalmologist Isaac Hays, a member of the distinguished Gratz family married Sarah Ann “Sally” Minis, the daughter of Isaac and Divinah (Cohen) Minis, descendants of the Minis family who “were among forty-one Jewish settlers who departed England in 1733” to settle in Georga.

1842(27^thof Iyar, 5602): Today’s earthquake in Haiti “killed the only daughter of French diplomat Frédéric Cerfberr who would die from injuries sustained today as he sailed back to France.

1844(18^thof Iyar, 5604): Lag B’Omer which according to some Jews is the first day since the start of the counting of the Omer on which Jews can wed as can be seen by the two entries that follow.

1844: Benjamin Woolf married Rachel Hart at the Great Synagogue today.

1844: Elias Mocatta married Rachel Goldsmid today at Bloomsbury, London, UK.

1844: Today, in Presburg, Archduchess Maria Dorothea attended the inaugural ceremonies for a primary school for which Austrian financier and philanthropist Herman Todesco had paid 25,000 gulden

1844: Founding of New York State Normal School, now known as the Sate University of New York at Albany which according to a poll taken in 2015 ranks 17^thon a list of the “top 60 Public Universities by Jewish Population.”

http://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/university-at-albany

1844: Joshua Barnett married Nancy Benjamin today at the Great Synagogue.

1847: Birthdate of Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, 1st Earl of Midlothian who in 1878 married Hannah, the only child of Baron Mayer de Rothschild.  She was one of the wealthiest women of her time since she was the primary heir of her father who had passed away in 1874.

1848: Birthdate of William J. Stone, the U.S. Senator from Missouri who as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee had held hearings on the resolution to create Jewish Relief Day in 1916 – a proposal which he supported – and who was one of only six senators to vote against the U.S. declaration of war on Germany.

1849(15^thof Iyar, 5609): Eighty-nine year old banker Olry-Hayem Worms, one of those who attended the Grand Sanhedrin of Napoleon in 1807 passed away today in Paris.

1854: In Cincinnati, OH, “Eva and William Solomon Milius” gave birth George Washington Milius, the husband of Pauline Milius with whom he had four children – Evelyn, William, Dorothy and Helen.

1855: Birthdate of Max Schloss, the husband of Rose Sheuerman Shloss and father of Irma Shloss Mannheimer.

1857: In New York “Nathan and Ernestine (Erdmann) Cohen gave birth to Dartmouth graduate William Nathan Cohen, the Columbia trained attorney who served as a “Justice of the New York State Supreme Court.”

1863(18^thof Iyar, 5623): Lag B’Omer is observed one day after the Union Army’s disastrous defeat at Chancellorsville during which Sergeant Henry Hiller had fought with such distinction that he earned the Congressional Medal of Honor and Lt. Col. (later General)  Edward Solomon led the forces of the 82nd Illinois which contained an all Jewish company from Chicago.

1865: The Vicar-General of Velletri issued an order permitting Jews to remain in the town for ten days if they are conducting “lawful and honest business.” While in town they must return to their lodgings by one o’clock in the morning.  They are forbidden to approach all monasteries, academies and other “pious places under Episcopal jurisdiction. When having any contact or conversation with Christians, the Jews “are to refrain from familiarity. The violation of any of these regulations will be punished by imprisonment and a fine of five crowns.

1870: In Lithuania, Nachum and Freida Leah Hurwitz gave birth to future New Yorker Ezra Hurwitz, the husband of Bertha Hurwitz.

1870: Birthdate of theatre owner and film company executive, Marcus Loew, the son of Lower East Side of immigrant parents, who became involved with films at the turn of the century when he opened his first "penny arcades."  Later he converted a penny arcade in Cincinnati into a movie theatre that drew an unheard of 5,000 customers on its first day.  Loew began converting other penny arcades into movie theaters which became a national chain bearing the owner's name.  In the 1920's, he and Louis B. Mayer joined forces to create the MGM Movie Studio.  Loew needed the studio to fill the public's demand for movies at his theatres.  Loew died of a heart attack at the age of 57, one of the many Jews who revolutionized the American (and the world's) entertainment industry.

1872: Julian Henriques, the son of Jacob Quixano Henriques and Elizabeth Waley, was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1872: Two days after he had passed away, 82 year old Isaac Salaman, the son of Aaron Solomon and the husband of the former Jane Raphael with whom he had had five children, was buried today at the “Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.”

1874: Rabbi Sounescheim was one of the speakers at tonight's session of the Unitarian Conference which is being held in St. Louis, MO.

1876: Frank Keenan, the future father-in-law of Ed Wynn “made his debut” today “as a spear carrier at the Tremont Street Opera House.

1876: The French government has ordered part of its Navy to sail to Salonica, a Mediterranean seaport which is part of the Ottoman Empire and which has been the site of recent outbreaks of violence between Christians and Moslems.  This is in keeping with the French government’s view of itself as the protector of Christians throughout the Middle East i.e. those living under Ottoman rule. Salonica is home to 20,000 Jews and their well-being is threatened any time there is an outbreak of violence among different groups of non-Jews.  In this case, the Christians are primarily Greeks and the Greeks have attacked the Jewish community in Salonica in the past.  The presence of the French will serve to pacify the situation, thus helping to protect the Jewish population.

1878(4^thof Iyar, 5638): Samuel Jefferson,” “a farmer in the Mud Creek community of Lamar Co., AL who was  “the second of three sons born to Isaac and Zipporah Mordecai, the husband of the former Martha Louisa Tarrant with whom he had ten children and the great-grandson of Rabbi Mordecai Moses Mordecai, passed away today.

1879(14^thof Iyar, 5639): Pesach Sheni observed today as Californians went to the polls and adopted the new constitution “by a vote of 77,959 to 67,134.

1881: The Symphony Society which had been co-founded by Leopold Damrosch in 1877 “reached its climax” today “in the great musical festival held in the armory of the 7^th regiment in New York City

1882(18th of Iyar, 5642): Lag B'Omer

1884(12th of Iyar, 5644): Judah P Benjamin passed away.  "Born in the West Indies in 1811 to observant Jewish parents, Benjamin was raised in Charleston, South Carolina. A brilliant child, at age 14 he attended Yale Law School and, on graduation, practiced law in New Orleans. A founder of the Illinois Central Railroad, a state legislator, a planter, Benjamin was elected to the U.S. Senate from Louisiana during the 1850's.  When the South seceded, Benjamin joined the Confederate government serving as Attorney-General, Secretary of War and Secretary of State.  He was called "old brains" by his admirers and an "Israelite in Egyptian clothing" by his detractors.  After the war, Benjamin sought refuge in England where he began life again as a barrister and writer.  His only offspring was a daughter who had him buried in a Parisian cemetery.

1884(12^thof Iyar, 5642):Dov Ber Goldberg, the native of Poland who gained fame as the French scholar who “devoted himself to the publication of editions of Jewish manuscripts in European libraries´passed away today in Paris.

1886: In “Baranovka, Russia,” “Jacob and Brucha (Cantor) Gusman gave birth who in 1901 came to the United States where he worked in a factory “making pocketbooks,” before rising to the Presidency of Import Drug Specialties and then becoming a banker in Cleveland where he lived with his wife Hanna C. Epstein served as Treasurer of the Cleveland United Palestine Appeal and President of B’nai B’rith.
1887: Birthdate Benjamin Glazer, the Belfast born born director and Oscar winning writer who “was one of the founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences passed away today.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-10680141.html

https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt4z09n74z/

1888: Sixty-six year old Leone Levi passed away.  Born in Italy, as soon as he arrived in Liverpool, he applied for British citizenship and gave up Judaism for membership in the Presbyterian Church.  He may have seen this as the only path to a successful legal career.

1889: In Charleston, SC, William Cecil Cohen married Agnes McKee.

1891: “Jewish Persecution Suspended” published today described the sudden decision of the Russian government to suspend the expulsion of the Jews from Moscow.

1893 In Ashville, North Carolina founding of Congregation Beth Ha Tephilla (House of Prayer) that owned a cemetery on Riverside Drive.

1893: “Tales The Rabbis Told” published today provides detailed review of Stories From The Rabbis by Abram S. Isaacs, the Professor of Hebrew at the University of the City of New York

1893: Based on cablegram from Harold Frederic, its London correspondent, the New York Times reported that in February the Russian government had issued an edict of expulsion that will affect each of the 1,500,000 Jews living in Poland.  For two months, the Russians kept the edict of expulsion a secret.  Word only leaked out as the Jews began to approach the borders of various European countries.  Today’s story in The Times was the first report of the expulsion to be published in an American newspaper.  The report has fallen like a “thunderclap among the Jews of New York.” 

1893: “Polish Jews Thrust Out” published today verified that that “a wholesale expulsion of Jews has begun in the Kingdom of Poland.” There are approximately a million and half Jews in Poland, “about four times the number affected by the Passover edicts of 1891 in Russia.”

1894(1^stof Iyar, 5654): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1894(1^stof Iyar, 5654): “A Jew-baiting” mob attacked the Jewish section of Grajewo, Poland “looting the shops and houses, beating the men and insulting the women” before setting fire to several stores.

1895: Seth Low and Isidor Straus opened the East Side Free Art Exhibition at the Hebrew Institute on East Broadway and Jefferson.

1895: William Jack of Scotland received $600 as part of the Hebrew Fellowship awarded during the Commencement exercises of the Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, NJ

1896: Dr. Walter T. Scheele “who is a fierce and aggressive Jew hater” attacked the Jews at Kruger’s Saloon” and was then “forced to leave the place” and “run for his life.”

1896: Birthdate of Joe Jacobs, the manager of Max Schmeling.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jacobs-joe

1897:  Eighty year old Ion Ghica “who was Prime Minister of Romania five times” and who “was a valuable ally for Yiddish theatre in Bucharest” having obtained, in 1881, for the National Theater the costumes that had been used for a Yiddish pageant on the coronation of King Solomon, which had been timed in tribute to the actual coronation of Carol I of Romania” passed away today.

1898: As the opening lecture in his series on “What Christendom Owes to the Jew” Dr. Madison C. Peters has chosen talk on “The Jew as a Patriot.”

1898: Birthdate of Maclyn F. “Mac” Baker the NYU basketball star whose career was interrupted by two years of military service in World War who decided not play professional baseball to pursue a career a medical career as a surgeon and a team doctor for Seton Hall University.

1898: Birthdate of Minsk native Samuel Leaf who “started various candy companies beginning in the 1920’s” and who founded Leaf Brands in Chicago in 1947 when he merged his various candy making operations.

https://leafbrands.com/about-us/

1898: Captain Albert Steinhauser of New Ulm and Privates Joseph Abel and Henry Heller of Winona were among those who were mustered into the service today as members of the 12^th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry.

1898: Private Samuel O. Abrams of Minneapolis and Privates Herman E. Heller and Frank H. Wesenberg both of St. Paul were among those who were mustered into the service today as members of the 13^th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry.

1899: Thanks to the efforts of the Mt. Zion Hospital Association the new Jewish hospital in San Francisco began accepting patients today including “poor person who are admitted regardless of creed or color.

1899: Punch and Judy visited the Hebrew Infant Asylum this afternoon and “entertained the youngsters with their antics.”

1899: Sargent George M. Appel completed his service with the First United States Volunteer Engineers.

1899: Dr. Felix Adler is scheduled to “deliver an address on ‘More Light’” this morning in the Music Hall.

1899: “The last Sunday service for this season” is scheduled to be held this morning at Temple Beth-El “when Rabbi Samuel Schulman will preach on the subject of ‘Youth.’”

1899: “The East Side Physician” published today described the desperate conditions of druggists and physicians (some of whom get paid only five cents for patient visit)  who are working on the lower East Side where the population is predominately Jewish.

1899: According to a summary of their April report published today, the United Hebrew Charities received 2,510 applications for aid that impacted 8,637 individuals.

1899: Tonight, the Rev. Dr. Madison C. Peters of the Bloomingdale Reformed Church began a series of Sunday evening lectures on "What Christendom Owes to the Jew." Dr. Peters took for his subject "The Jew as a Patriot." He said: "One of the gravest charges ever brought against the Jew is that he is not and cannot be a patriot.

1900: In Cincinnati, OH “at a joint meeting of the Executive Board of American Hebrew Congregations, the Board of Governors of the Hebrew Union College and of the Alumni Association of the Hebrew College an appeal was issued “to the Jews of the United States” asking for their support “of the efforts now being made to create an endowment fund for the permanent support and maintenance of the Hebrew Union College to be known as the Isaac M. Wise Memorial Fund.”

1901(18^thof Iyar, 5661): Lag B’Omer

1901:  Herzl finally receives an audience with the Sultan.

1902: It was reported today that plans have been filed “for the new building to be erected for the Jewish Theological Seminary” and that name of Jacob H. Schiff, who has helped to endow the institution, “appeared as owner in connection of the plans” that were filed for the three story building designed by A.W. Brunnner which is projected to cost $75,000.

1903: Today, at the 135^th annual meeting of the New York Chamber of Commerce, August Blemont was named to serve on the Finance and Currency Committee.

1904(22^ndof Iyar, 5664): Parashat Behar-Bechukotai

1904: Paintings by J. Campbell Phillips, including “many from Palestine” are on display at the new Hogarth Head art gallery.

1904: “A Biblical Story” published today provides a review of In Old Egypt by H. Pereira Menes which “is as the subtitle indicates a story about the Bible but not in the Bible.”

ttps://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1904/05/07/101391331.html?pageNumber=31

1905: Anti-Jewish violence broke out today in Zhitomir, the capital of Volhynia, Russia.

1906(12^thof Iyar, 5666): Fifty four year old Max Judd passed away.  Born in Galicia, he came to the United States in 1862 where he became a successful cloak manufacturer who found the St. Louis Chess Club.  President Cleveland refused to bow to Austrian anti-Semitism and insisted on appointing Judd as U.S. Counsel to that kingdom.

1906: Birthdate of Sydney Harry “Syd” Cohen, the brother of New York Giants second baseman Andy Cohen who pitched for three years during the 1930’s with the Washington Senators where his teammates included Buddy Myer, Fred Sington and the most mysterious baseball player of all times – Moe Berg!

1907: Today, the representatives of Jewish aid associations of Berlin, Frankfort, Paris and Bucharest who are meeting in Vienna, decided that they did not have the funds available to aid the thousands of Romanian Jews who are fleeing the anti-Semitic violence in that country and sent letters to “Jewish associations” in New York and London apprising them of the situation.

1908: French author and playwright Ludovic Halévy passed away.  His pedigree is not that unusual a tale for European Jewry in the period between Waterloo and Sarajevo.  His father was Jewish.  He converted so that he could marry a Christian woman.

1908(6^thof Iyar, 5668): Fifty-three year old Bohemian born “Arabist and archeologist” Eduard Glaser who made three separate expeditions to Yemen passed away today in Munich where his grave “contained the words ‘The greatest and the best man of all has left us.’”

https://www.wdl.org/en/item/16771/

1909: Birthdate of Leo Henryk Sternbach, the Polish chemist who escaped Hitler’s Europe in 1941 and continued his career in the United States where he discovered benzodiazepines.

1909: Birthdate of Edwin H Land.  Born in Bridgeport, Conn., this Harvard dropout contributed to scientific advances in the fields of photography and human optics.  His most famous invention was in the field of instant photography.  In 1947, he unveiled an instant imaging camera.  Within two years, the Polaroid was producing the camera and it became a commercial success.  Land passed away in March of 1991.

1910: Birthdate of Philadelphia native, Saul Nathan Lev, and the University of Pennsylvania trained electrical engineer.

1911: Porfirio Diaz, under whose Presidency (or dictatorship) the Jewish community began to grow because of their connection with is call for foreign investors to come to the country issued a manifesto giving the terms under which he would leave office.

1912: Columbia University approved plans for awarding the Pulitzer Prize in several categories. The award was established by Joseph Pulitzer. When he died in 1911, Pulitzer left $2 million for the establishment of a school of journalism at Columbia University and a fund that established annual prizes for literature, drama, music and journalism. Since 1922 Pulitzer Prizes have also been awarded to cartoonists.  Yes, the highest award in "American Letters" was started by a German-Jewish immigrant.

1913: In Salt Lake City, Utah, Clara (Trestman) and Benjamin Ramo gave birth to Simon Ramo who played a leading role in developing the ICBM and the founding of what became TRW.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/business/simon-ramo-dies-at-103-helped-develop-icbms-in-the-cold-war.html?_r=0

1913: Mrs. Charlotte E. Rubel sang for those attending the 17^th annual meeting of the Isaiah Women’s Club which Mrs. Victor Frankenstein was elected President and Mrs. Abraham Weil was elected Vice President

1914: Today, at the resumption of the hearing into charges that bribery was used to obtain affidavits exonerating Leo Franks of the murder of Mary Phagan the defense “will introduce some new evidence bearing on the Epps, Isom and Allen affidavits” before closing its case.

1915: It was reported today that Jewish Publication Society has announced “the forthcoming publication of a new English translation of the Bible, the annual American Jewish Year Book and Max Radin history of the Jews among the Greeks and Romans.”

1915: The RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by “The German U-boat U-20” off the coast of Ireland “causing the deaths of 1,198 passengers and crew” and helping to pave the way for the entrance of the United States into the war on the Allied side two years later. (For more read Dead Wake:  The Last Crossing of the RMS Lusitania by Erik Larson which is available in both hardback and paperback)

http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2016/04/03/jewish-library-dead-wake/

1915(23rd of Iyar, 5675): A month and a week before his 59^th birthday, American theatrical producer Charles Frohman died when the RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by  “The German U-boat U-20” off the coast of Ireland.

http://www.rmslusitania.info/people/saloon/charles-frohman/

 1915: It was reported today that “among the many petitions” “received daily” by the Governor of Georgia asking “for a commutation Leo Frank’s sentence” was one “signed by the members of the Cornell Alumni Association of Western Pennsylvania attesting to the character of Frank who was an alum of the university.

1915: In Chicago, “plans for a ‘Leo M. Frank Day’ on which hundreds of women of all nationalities equipped with petitions will ask citizens to sign protests against Leo Frank’s execution are being completed by the Leo M. Frank Committee.”

1916: “Jews, Greeks, Romans” published today provides a review of The Jews Among the Greek and Romans by Max Radin which starts “at the time of Alexander when the Jews as one of the Mediterranean nations began to come into closes contact with Greek civilization” and ends at with the beginning of the dominance of Christianity.

1916: In Philadelphia, PA, Jacob H. Schiff is scheduled to deliver the address this evening at the annual meeting of the Jewish Publication Society of America with Henry Miller Serving as President and Henry Fernberger as Treasurer.

1916: Supreme Court Justice Hugo Pan of Illinois spoke on “Preparedness and the Jews” at tonight’s dinner sponsored by the Federation of Jewish Charities of Brooklyn which was attended by more than 1,000 people including Rabbi Nehemiah Boynton and Justice Luke B. Stapleton of Brooklyn.

1916: As of today, The Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War of which Harry Fischel is Treasurer has collected “more than $1,080,000

1916: In Peekskill, NY Louis and Gussie Rubenfield gave birth to the eldest of their six children, Leonard Rubenfeld, a graduate of the University of Alabam and Fordham Law School and WW II Army combat veteran who held a variety of legal and judicial positions in and around Peekskill and Westchester Country.

1917: Three days after she had passed away, 78 year old Rosa (Esther) Salomons the daughter of Rueben Salomons and Sarah Hurwitz was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1917: “Rabbi Stephen S. Wise came to Simsbury and delivered an address on “The World War for the Liberation of Humanity” to a standing room only crowd. So many people turned out to hear him that his lecture was delayed as chairs were sent for to accommodate the standing crowd at the rear of the hall. ‘It was the most successful mass meeting held in Simsbury’, wrote Julia E. Pattison, League Secretary. There is a story attributed to Rabbi Wise that upon meeting a rather aloof New England gentleman with ancestors that he wore on his sleeve the man announced that his antecedent had signed the Declaration of Independence. Rabbi Wise paused and replied that his ancestors had signed the Ten Commandments.

1917: It was reported today that Russian Cantor Josef Rosnblatt is making a tour of thirty American cities where his concerts are intended to raise part of the ten million dollars that the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War needs to reach its goal for this year.

1917: In London, the Jewish Chronicleprovides further details based on eyewitness accounts of the plight of Jews living in Palestine, which is under the control of the Ottoman Empire.  According to these accounts, the evacuation of the civil population of Jaffa that had been ordered by the Turks as a military measure was aimed against the Jews since all Jews including those of Turkey’s allies – Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire – were forced to leave while Mohammedans and Christians, regardless of nationality, were allowed to stay.  In all, 8,000 Jews were forced from their homes in Jaffa. The homes of the Jews of Jaffa and neighboring Tel Aviv were looted by mobs as the authorities looked on without taking any action.  Two Jews were hanged at the entrance to Tel Aviv as a warning to those who might resist and an ad hoc unit of Jewish guards was arrested and imprisoned. The deportations stretched to the ancient Jewish community in Jerusalem where three hundred Jews were deported “amid circumstances of the utmost cruelty.”

1917(15^thof Iyar, 5677): Retired stock broker Agil Cantor, the “brother of former Borough President Jacob A. Cantor of Manhattan” passed away today in his 63^rdyear.

1917: It was reported today that “preparations for the election of delegates of the American Jewish Congress are no proceeding and al through this week meetings will held here to stimulate enthusiasm and interest in this week.

1917: “The Annual meeting of the local section of the Council of Jewish Women took place today at Temple Emanu-El.

1918: During their convention in Philadelphia, The Mizrachi Zionist Organization adopted the single tax plan of land control “as the best system under which the Jews can return to take possession of Palestine under the protection of the Allies.”  The plan is based on the concept that “the land be assessed and valued at the figures at which it stood before the war in 1914, making allowances for improvements.”

1919: Birthdate of Boris Slutsky, a Russian poet, whose work incorporated Jewish themes, including Jewish tradition, anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic phenomena in the Soviet society and the Holocaust. He translated the works of Kvitko, Verghelis, Galkin, Shvartzman, Y.Sternberg and others from Yiddish into Russian.

1919: President George Kurtzon declined re-election at Temple Judea’s annual meeting this evening in Chicago.

1919: During the peace negotiations at Versailles, “when faced with conditions dictated by the victors, including the “War Guilt Clause” Foreign Minister Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau the head of the German delegation   told the Allied Leaders – Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson  - "We know the full brunt of hate that confronts us here. You demand from us to confess we were the only guilty party of war; such a confession in my mouth would be a lie.”  This treatment of the Germans at Versailles, contributed to the lack of support for the treaty and would serve to strengthen the hand of the Hitlerites in their quest to destroy the Weimar Republic

1921(29^thof Nisan, 5681): Parashat Achrei Mot

1921(29^thof Nisan, 5681): After a week of riots came to an end in Jaffa with 48 Arabs and 47 Jews killed and 73 Arabs and 140 Jews wounded.

1922: In Michigan, Samuel and Celia Kaufman gave birth to Donald Bruce Kaufman, the husband of “Glorya Kaufman.”

1923(21st of Iyar, 5683): Eighty-three year old Adolf Neubauer, the son of Karl and Theresia Neubauer and husband of Klara Neubauer passed away today in what is now the Czech Republic.

1923: Just days before her death, Mrs. Gussis Goldberg was taken to the Rockaway Beach Hospital with an injured hip.  The 106 year old widow and mother of Joseph Goldberg, was “believed to the oldest resident of Far Rockaway.” (As reported by JTA)

1924: In Upper Sielsia, David Lustiger and his wife gave birth to Arno Lustiger Holocaust survivor, businessman and amateur historian who document “the history of Jewish resistance under Nazi rule.”

1926: Birthdate of Joseph Ehrenkranz, the native of Newark, NJ. who served as rabbi of Congregation Agudath Sholom in Stamford, CT and “who played a leading role in Jewish Catholic dialogue.”

1927: In Cologne, Germany Marcus and Eleanora gave birth to Ruth Prawer who gained fame as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala award winning novelist and Academy Award winning screenwriter.  She won Oscars for “Room with a View” and “Howards End.”

1929: The Flonzaley Quartet which had played the String Quartet No. 1 by Erin Schulhoff “broadcast their farewell concert over radio station WEAF” today.

1930: Birthdate of Totie Fields.  Born Sophie Feldman, in Hartford Connecticut, Ms. Fields switched from mildly unsuccessful singer to highly successful comedienne.  Her pudgy physique was her comedic “shtick” as made fun of her weight, appearance and the diet industry.  She died from health problems.  “I went on a diet for two weeks and all I lost was fourteen days.”

1933: In Savannah, GA, a large crowd of Jews and Christians attend a ceremony at Congregation Mickve Israel to mark the 200^th anniversary of the arrival of Jews in what was then the colony of Georgia.

1934: The district of Birobidzhan in Russia was established as a Jewish Autonomous Region which was to cover an area of 36,000 sq. km. Its official language would be Yiddish. Within two years Stalin had a change of heart and its Jewish socialist leaders were liquidated. Although a library and theater were established, it never reached a population of more than 18,000, less than one-fourth of the total population of the region, partly due to its primitiveness and remoteness.

1936: Despite the High Commissioner's warning Arab leaders at a general conference held in Jerusalem representing all Arab towns unanimously called for a campaign of civil disobedience by all Arabs in Palestine including the refusal to pay taxes and “a boycott of everything Jewish.” Jerusalem Mayor Khalidi has become so active in the Arab cause that he did not attend the meeting of the Jerusalem City Council; an absence which was condemned by the six Jewish councilors.

1936: In Romania, “approximately 2,000 students belong to the Iron Guard” “assaulted Jews in the streets today and attempted to prevent professors and other students from entering buildings” at the “Bucharest University.”

1936: “A cheap diamond ring, said to have been pledged in a transaction involving $200 led” today “to the arrest of Miss Mary Berd, 36 year old secretary of Rabbi Zeida Schmellner” whose arrived in the United States from Rumania in 1925 was an important enough event to rate a reception hosted by the Mayor

1936: Anti-Semitic students who had been arrested for assaulting Jews issued “a manifesto” from their jails today saying that “Rumanian students are prepared to die for their fatherland to free the country from corruption and degeneration and wipe out these tools of Jews and Free Masons.”  (Editor’s note – another clue as to why the Germans had so much success in murdering six million Jews.)

1936: After 169 performances the curtain came down on “Jubilee” a musical comedy with a book by Moss Hart at the Imperial Theatre.

1937: “Café Metrople” a drama written by Gregory Ratoff who also appeared in the role of “Paul” was released in the United States today.

1937: During the Spanish Civil War, The German Condor Legion, arrived in Spain to provide air cover for the fascist forces of Francisco Franco.  The Germans used the Spanish Civil War as a training ground for its forces which accounted for some of their early successes starting in 1939. The failure of the western liberal regimes to counter the German efforts was one more step on the road to the war that would lead to the Holocaust.  Hitler thought that the Spanish should have become active members of the Axis alliance as payment for his help. 

1938: Today Ohio St. alum Sidney Bernard Finn, the award winning Harvard trained dentist who was the married Irma Harriet Rubens with whom he had two children – Catherine and Andrew.

1938(6th of Iyar, 5698): “Moses Phillip Ginzburg, founder and publisher of the Daily Jewish Courier and a leader of Chicago’s Jewish community for more than half a century passed away today at the age of 75.”  Born in Poland, Ginzburg came to Chicago in 1883.  Five years later he founded the Jewish daily which would play a major role in his and his wife, Feige Rachel Levin’s, lives.  A month before his death, the couple was honored at a dinner attended by 1,500 guests who celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.

1938: Birthdate of Gordon Davidson, the Brooklyn born electrical engineer who became a Tony Award winning director.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/gordon-davidson-moses-of-las-theater-scene-dies-at-83/

1939(18^thof Iyar, 5699): Lag B’Omer

1939: In Montreal, “Ray (Arlin), a textile worker, and Victor Altman, a grocer” gave birth to Sidney Altman, the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University who shared in the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1989.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1989/altman/biographical/

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/sidney-altman

1940: President Roosevelt me with Nathan Straus, the Administrator of the U.S. Housing Authority this morning at the White House.

1940(29^thof Nisan, 5700): Seventy-one year old Homanna, Hungary native Morris Newfield who in 1894 came to the United States  where graduated from Hebrew Union College, became the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, married Leah Ullman, the daughter of Samuel Ullman, with whom he raised four children, Emma, Mayer, Lena and John Newfield passed away today.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/newfield-morris

http://americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/2007_59_01_02_doc_langston.pdf

1941: As Arab continued their violent attacks on the Jews of Iraq, "a number of Arabs youths burst into a circumcision ceremony, knives in hand, murdering a young boy and wounding his brother."  (In Ishmael's House by Martin Gilbert)

1942: Nazi decree orders all Jewish pregnant women of Kovno Ghetto executed

1943: During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Pawel Burskin led a group of Jewish fighters through the sewers to the "Aryan ‘sector. They were ambushed by German troops, captured and shot.

1943: Sephardic-Jewish homes in Tunisia are ransacked and looted by departing German troops.

1944(21^stof Iyar, 5704): Pesach Sheni

1944(21^stof Iyar, 5704): Twenty-three year old Philadelphia born Flying Officer Elmer Oscar Aaron (RCAF) who had enlisted in 1942, received his commission in 1943 and flown 14 mission was killed while “participating in a raid on Tours, France.

1944: During WW II, one month before the Normandy invasion, 1,500 bombers from the U.S, 8^th Air Force attacked Berlin today.

1945: Hitler makes the cover of Time Magazine again but this time with a giant X across the cover.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19450507,00.html

1945: Under the headline “Foreign News: Dachau” published today, Time magazine gave its readers the following description of the German concentration camp.



When all other German prison camps are forgotten the name of Dachau will still be infamous. It was the first concentration camp set up for Hitler, and its mere name was a whispered word of terror through all Germany from the earliest days of Nazi control. It was one of the largest of the camps to which opponents of Naziism were sent. And here, too, was concentrated the flower of Nazi sadists whose business was torture and death. Last week the U.S. Seventh Army entered Dachau and liberated 32,000 of its still living inmates. With them went TIME Correspondent Sidney Olson. His report: Beside the highway into Dachau there runs a spur line off the Munich railroad. Here a soldier stopped us and said: "I think you better take a look at these box-cars." The cars were filled with dead men. Most of them were naked. On their bony, emaciated backs and rumps were whip marks. Most of the cars were open-top cars like American coal cars. I walked along these cars and counted 39 of them which were filled with these dead. The smell was very heavy. I cannot estimate with any reasonable accuracy the number of dead we saw here, but I counted bodies in two cars and there were 53 in one and 64 in another. The main entry road runs past several largish buildings. These had been cleared; and now we began to meet the liberated. Several hundred Russians, French, Yugoslavs, Italians and Poles were here, frantically, hysterically happy. They began to kiss us, and there is nothing you can do when a lot of hysterical, unshaven, lice-bitten, half-drunk, typhus-infected men want to kiss you. Nothing at all. You cannot hit them, and besides, they all kiss you at the same time. It is no good trying to explain that you are only a correspondent. A half-dozen of them were especially happy and it turned out they were very proud: they had killed two German soldiers themselves. Skeleton Stacks. We went on, and the great size of the establishment of Dachau began to open before us. Buildings and barracks spread on and on. Outside one building, half covered by a brown tarpaulin, was a stack about five feet high and about 20 feet wide of naked dead bodies, all of them emaciated. We went on around this building and came to the central crematory. The rooms here, in order, were: 1) the office where the living and the dead were passed through and where all their clothing was stripped from them; 2) the Brausebad (shower) room, where the victims were gassed; and 3) the crematory. In the crematory were two large furnaces. Before the two furnaces were hooks and pulleys on rafters above them. Here, according to a number of Frenchmen, the SS men often hanged prisoners by the necks or by the thumbs or whatever their fancy dictated. From here the victims could watch while being whipped and tortured as their comrades were slid into the furnace. Each of these pitiful, happy, starved, hysterical men wanted to tell us his home country, his home city, and ask us news and beg for cigarets. The eyes of these men defy my powers of description. They are the eyes of men who have lived in a super-hell of horrors for many years, and are now driven half-crazy by the liberation they have prayed so hopelessly for. Again & again, in all languages, they called on God to witness their joy. Heart of Darkness. But though we were tired from the long journey, we were lured on and on and on, from building to building. What lured us was a sound which at first we had thought was the wind in the pines of Dachau. Then after a while we knew it was cheering — the sound of thousands of men cheering and cheering again. At last we came to a high wooden wall and went through the gates'. Before us stretched the great prison compound of Dachau. This must be at least one square mile in extent. In & out of this vast stretch of open compound studded with low barracks were swarming the liberated men of Dachau. I cannot pre tend to estimate the number with any exactness. But there were many thousand. These men, cheering as hard as their feeble strength would permit, tore them selves getting through the barbed wire to touch us, to talk to us. Some of them were nearly mad with joy. Here were the men of all nations whom Hitler's agents had picked out as prime opponents of Naziism; here were the very earliest Hitler haters. Here were German social democrats, Spanish survivors of the Spanish Civil War, a correspondent for the Paris Soir, who cried so hard I could not get his name. Joy in the Inferno. We went into one barracks after another. So many men were sick and possibly dying of starvation and beatings that they merely lay or leaned or sat shoulder to shoulder, too weak to do more than grin glassily. It was here that we even found some Hindus. All this time the cheering went on, and we were being forcibly mobbed by hundreds of men strong as only the half-insane can be, kissed and kissed again by men who stank like the inferno, obviously sick toward death of all kinds of illnesses. One giant Russian held me for at least 30 seconds while he kissed all over the U.S. insignia on my coat. They shouted in all languages but sometimes in American phrases; one little Pole ran beside us until he dropped flat, shouting desperately: "Hello, boys!"



1945: At 02:41 in the morning at SHAEF headquarters in Reims, France, the Chief-of-Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, General Alfred Jodl, signed the unconditional surrender documents for all German forces to the Allies. The surrender would go into effect on the following day, May 8, 1945 which would mean the end of the Holocaust. 

1945(24th of Iyar, 5705):  Hungarian novelist Andor Endre Gelleri, age 38, dies at the Mauthausen, Austria, slave-labor camp two days after liberation.

1945: One day before her 21^st birthday Gerda Weissman Klein, “a Polish-born American writer and human rights activist whose autobiographical account of the Holocaust, All but My Life was adapted for the 1995 short film, One Survivor Remembers, which received an Academy Award” met her future husband Lieutenant Kurt Klein, whose parents had been murdered at Auschwitz and whose part of the force liberating in Volary, Czechoslovakia..

1946: Birthdate of English author Michael Rosen.

1946: “A rise in discrimination against Jews, including veterans of the war, was reported today in the regular monthly bulletin of the National Community Relations Advisory Council following a survey of employment conditions in fifteen major industrial centers.”

1947: “Observance of the second anniversary of V-E Day must be tempered by the realization that most of Europe's Jews "still know no peace," leaders of the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York said” today in statement signed by Mrs. David M. Levy, Barney Balaban, Samuel Hausman, Herbert H. Lehman and Edward M.M. Warburg, “the five co-chairman of the local drive for $65 million which is part of a national campaign for $170 million.

1948: “American opposition to the partition of Palestine is blocking the hopes of Arabs and Jews alike for freedom from ‘colonial oppression’ the Moscow radio charged in an English-language broadcast tonight.”

1948: “The Arabs agreed today to a cease-fire in all Jerusalem beginning at noon tomorrow, and the Jews said they would comply if the Arabs actually halted their firing.”

1949(8^thof Iyar, 5709) Parashat Achrei Mot-Kedoshim

1949: Two thousand Jews who have escaped from Communist Hungary are getting to spend their first celebrated their first Shabbat in the free city of Vienna.

1949: Officials of the American Jewish Committee, reported today at the opening session of the spring meeting of its executive body, that only permanent peace between the Arab nations and Israel could assure the solution of Israel's pressing economic and rehabilitation problems.

1950: “The Damned Don’t Cry,” an “American film noir crime-drama directed by Vincent Sherman” who also co-authored the script, produced by Jerry Wald and edited by Rudi Fehr

1950: The government is scheduled to send its formal reply to the United Nations concerning “the Palestine Conciliations Commission’s proposal for peace negotiations.”  Israel is willing to send delegates to a meeting that is held without pre-conditions while the Arab states have announced that they will only come if the “return of Palestine refugees is the first item on the agenda.”

1952: A cheering crowd of 5,000 greeted Haifa’s Mayor Abba Khoushy and New York’s Mayor Impellitteri at official ceremonies at City Hall. Speakers at City Hall and a luncheon that followed at the Waldorf-Astoria “emphasized Israel’s devotion to democratic concepts and the need to consolidate the nation’s economic position as a bulwark of democracy in the Middle East.”

1953: Birthdate of Boston native James Braidy “Jim Steinberg, the Harvard and Yale Law School graduate who has served Democratic presidents in a variety of foreign policy positions including United States Deputy Secretary of State.

1954: Birthdate of movie director Amy Heckerling, the Bronx native whose first commercial success was “Fast Times at Ridgemont Hight.”

1956: In the suburbs of South Manchester, UK, “barrister Benet Hytner and his wife Joyce gave birth to director Sir Nicholas Robert Hytner.

1958: TodayIsraeli Prime Minister DavidBenGurionrejected a request by B’nai Brith that Ze’ev Jabotinsky be reinterred in Israel explainingin a letter written B’nai Brith Vice President, Joseph Lamm, that"Israel does not need dead Jews, but living Jews, and I see no blessing in multiplying graves in Israel." Could Ben Gurion’s refusal to grant what was a wish contained in Jabotinsky’s last will and testament been nothing more than a measure of revenge exacted against the Revisionist leader whose followers would become the Irgun.  With the approval of Levi Eshkol, Jabotinsky and his wife were finally laid to rest in Jerusalem at Herzl Cemetery in 1964.

1958: U.S. premiere of “The Left Handed Gun” starring Paul Newman as “Billy the Kid.”

1959: Paul Newman and Joan Woodward gave birth to Eilinor Teresa Newman who “runs Newman’s Own Organics.”

1960: After only 21 performances the curtain came down on the original Broadway production of “From A to Z” a musical revue with a book by Woody Allen.

1960: Los Angeles Dodger Catcher Norm Sherry hits an 11th inning homerun to give his brother, Pitcher Larry Sherry, a 3 to 2 victory over the Phillies.  At the time, the Sherry brothers were the first and only Jewish battery (pitcher and catcher) in major league baseball.  From 1959 to 1962 the Dodgers had three Jewish players on their roster (the other was Sandy Koufax) which some felt made them the "Jewish" baseball team.

1960: Birthdate of Adam Bernstein, the native of Brooklyn who “won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series” and who “married actress Jessica Hecht in 1995.”

1960: Larry Blyden appeared for the last time in the role of “Sammy Fong” in Flower Drum Song; a portrayal for which he received a Tony Nomination for Best Actor in a Musical.

1960(10th of Iyar, 5720): Seventy-six year old Charles Edward Sebag-Montefiore passed away.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F00B16FC3E5916738DDDA00894DD405B808AF1D3

1962: “Rabbi Moshe Yaffe, the executive director of the Chief Rabbinate at Jerusalem” opened “a week-long ‘Festival of Israel’ in celebration of that country’s anniversary was opened today at Sterling Forest Park, a botanical garden in suburban Tuxedo” featuring daily programs “of costumed folk dancing and folk singing by Zionist youth groups lectures on and about modern Israel, photographic displays and exhibits of Israeli books, postage stamps and Israeli exports

1963(13th of Iyar, 5723): Theodore von Kármán, a Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics passed away.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jplhistory/learnmore/lm-vonkarman.php

1964:Birthdate of Elliot Perlman,an Australian author and barrister.

1965(5^thof Iyar, 5725): Seventy-five year old Samuel Lewin-Epstein the Jerusalem born son  of Eliyahu Ze'ev (Wolf) Lewin-Epstein and Judith Lewin-Epstein, the husband of Madeline Lewin-Epstein and “the father of Professor Jacob Lewis-Epstein and Noah Lewin-Epstein” passed away today in “Rechovot, Israel.”

1968: Sixty-seven year old English actress Olga Lindo, the daughter of Jewish actor Frank Lindo and his non-Jewish wife passed away today.

1968: Premiere of “Where It’s At,” a comedy directed by Garson Kanin co-starring Don Rickles.

1970: NBC broadcast the final episode of “Daniel Boone” a television series based on the American frontiersman produced by Aaron Rosenberg and Barney Rosenzweig with a theme song co-authored by Lionel Newman.

1973(5^thof Iyar, 5733): Yom HaAtzma’ut

1973(5^thof Iyar, 5733): Sixty-four year old Egon Hostovský a Czech author and distant relative of Stefan Zweig who was memorialized by the creation of the Egon Hostovsky (Literary) Prize passed away today.

1973: Liora Reich became the first woman to win the International Bible Quiz

1973:  Carl Bernstein shares in the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Watergate Scandal.

1973: Maxine Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for her volume of poetry entitledUp Country: Poems of New England.

https://jwa.org/thisweek/may/07/1973/maxine-kumin

1975: “The Day of the Locust” a film version of Nathaniel West’s novel by the same name, directed by John Schlesinger, produced by Jerome Hellman and featuring Natalie Schafer as “Audrey Jennings” was released today in the United States.

1978(30th of Nisan, 5738): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1978(30^th of Nisan, 5738): Sixty-three year old Mortimer “Mort” Weisinger ” an American magazine and comic book editor best known for editing DC Comics' Superman during the mid-1950s to 1960s” passed away today.

http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Mort_Weisinger

1978: “Stamps” by Samuel Tower published today described Israel’s philatelic offers in honor of her 30^th anniversary including the issuance of five stamps honoring “five heroes of the Israeli Underground Movement including Abraham Stern, Yitzhak Sadeh, David Raziel, Dr. Moshe Sneh and Eliyahu Golomb

1981(3^rd of Iyar, 5741): Yom HaAtzma’ut

1981: Jewish Heritage Week came to an end.

1981: A revival of Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” opened at the Martin Beck Theatre with Elizabeth Taylor as “Regina.”

1981(3^rd of Iyar, 5741): Yom HaAtzma’ut

1982: “Paradise” a romantic adventure film starring Phoebe Cates and featuring Yosef Shiloach as “Ahmed” which was filmed by cinematographer Adam Greenberg was released today.

1982: “Death Valley” a horror film written by Richard Rothstein was released today in the United States.

1983: At Cannes, premiere of  “War Games” one of the first movies to center around computer hacking produced by Leonard Goldberg, featuring Maury Chaykin and with music by Arthur B. Rubinstein

1983: Today a recording of “It Might Be You” which was performed in “Tootsie” starring Dustin Hoffman “with music written by Dave Grusin, and lyrics written by Alan & Marilyn Bergman” which “was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1983” hit the number 25 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

1984(5^th of Iyar, 5744): Yom HaAtzma’ut

1984(5th of Iyar, 5744): Painter and art director Marvin Israel passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/08/obituaries/marvin-israel-is-dead-at-61-an-art-director-and-painter.html

1985:”Memory of the Camps,” a documentary dealing with “Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps” was broadcast during season three of “Frontline.”

1986: John Corry reviewed “The Precious Legacy of Czech Jews” a film directed by Dan Wiessman and co-produced by Weissman and Nelson E. Breen.

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/07/arts/the-precious-legacy-of-czech-jews.html

1987: NBC broadcast the final episode of Season 3 of “The Cosby Show” co-created by Ed Weinberger.

1986: Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s “La Cage aux Folles” had its West End premiere at the London Palladium today with the same creative team as the Broadway production.

1988(20^th of Iyar, 5748): Parashat Emor

1988(20^th of Iyar, 5748): Centenarian Columbia trained attorney Saul B. Ackerman, “a founding partner of Ackerman, Salwen and Glass” passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/10/obituaries/saul-b-ackerman-lawyer-100.html

1989(2nd of Iyar, 5749): Just 23 three days before his 76^th birthday CCNY basketball star Moe Goldman who went on to play professionally for the Philadelphia Spa and pursue a career as a New York City school teacher passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/09/obituaries/moe-goldman-ex-basketball-player-75.html

1992: The Chicago Sun Times reports that Eddie Schwartz is leaving WGN for WLUP.

1994(27th of Iyar, 5754): Seventy-three year old Aharon "Aharale" Rabinovich Yariv passed away. The Moscow native made Aliyah at the age of 15 and then pursued a career in the military and politics that included service in the Knesset.

1994(27th of Iyar, 5754): Clement Greenberg, the most famous American art critic since Bernard Berenson who was born in 1909 to a Yiddish-speaking socialist family and was brought up in Brooklyn and the Bronx passed away today. (As reported by Raymond Hernandez)

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/08/obituaries/clement-greenberg-dies-at-85-art-critic-championed-pollock.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

1994(27th of Iyar, 5754): Haim Bar Lev, the IDF's Chief of General Staff from 1968 to 1971, passed away. Bar Lev played a key role in the Yom Kippur., He came out of retirement and served as the Chief of the Southern Command at the request of Prime Minister Meir.  He provided the steadying influence and keen perception that was necessary to halt the Egyptian advance and snatch victory from the apparent jaws of defeat. (As reported by Joseph Finkleston)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-ltgen-haim-barlev-1434903.html?printService=print

1998: The 6^th Annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival began today.

1999: “Rabbi Jacob Lustig and five others from his Kneseth Israel Congregation stood side by side as they entered the pleas in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court” in what prosecutors describe as a “massive fraud” involving instant bingo games throughout Greater Cincinnati. (As reported by Dan Horn)

1999: “The Mummy” a classic horror film co-starring Rachel Weisz and music by Jerry Goldsmith was released in the United States today.

2000(2nd of Iyar, 5760): Eighty three year old Holocaust survivor and champion “Race Walker” Henry Laskau passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/09/sports/henry-laskau-race-walker-is-dead-at-83.html

2000: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including“The Human Stain” by Philip Roth and the recently published paperback edition of “A Journey to the End of the Millennium: A Novel of the Middle Ages”
A. B. Yehoshua’s novel about a North African Jewish merchant “who travels to Europe with his two wives and his Muslim partner in the year 999 explores the gaps between Jews and Christians, Jews and Muslims and men and women.”

2000: The curtain came down on a revival of Arthur Laurents “The Time of the Cuickoo” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre.

2000: ABC broadcast “Geppetto” “a made for television musical” version of Pinocchio starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus today for the first time.

2000: Bruce Fleisher won The Home Depot Invitational.

2000: “War and Love,” a Malayalam language film filmed by cinematographer Adam Greenberg was released today in India.

2001: Dalia Rabin-Pelossof joined “One Israel” which later became Labor Meimad.”

2001: IDF naval commandos captured the Santorini, a fishing boat used for smuggling weapons into Gaza that included Katyusha rocket launchers, surface-to-air (SAM-7) anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

2002: Israeli Prime Minister met with President George Bush at the White House.

2002: Psychologist Carol Gilligan published "The Birth of Pleasure"

2002: Perhaps the moment that signaled open season for Jews on campuses occurred today at San Francisco State University when “Muslim students and their leftist supporters launched a mini-pogrom against pro-Israel Jewish students.” (As reported by Caroline B. Glick)

2002(25^thof Iyar, 5762): Hamas claimed responsibility for today’s bombing at Rishon LeZion where 15 people were killed and another 55 were wounded.

Pnina Hikri (60), Sharuk Rassan (42), Shoshana Magmari (51), Anat Temporush (36), Haim Rafael (64), Daliah Massah (64), Nir Lobatin (31), Avi Biaz (26), Rahamim Kimche (58), Edna Cohen (61), Yisrael Shikar (45), Yitzhak Bablar (58), Esther Bablar (54), Regina Malka Boslan (62), Nawa Hinawi (51)

2003(5^thof Iyar, 5763): Yom HaAtzma’ut

2003: In Tel Aviv, Mike’s Place re-opened after suffering a suicide bombing attack on April 30.

2004(16^thof Iyar, 5764): Twenty-six year old Nicholas Evan “Nick” Berg was decapitated by Islamist terrorists in Iraq today.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25401-2004May13.html

2005(28^thof Nisan, 5765): Parashat Kedoshim

2005(28^thof Nisan, 5765): Eighty-seven year old Brooklyn native and CCNY grad Harry Minkoff, the veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, founder of Gift-Pax and husband of Ruth Minkoff with whom he raised three children – Jane, Larry and George – and who was an active member of Temple Beth El in Great Neck and the UJA Federation of New York passed away today.

2006: Jacobo Kaufman delivered a major address at the "Colloquium in Memory of Antonio José da Silva (the Jew)", on the occasion of this great Portuguese playwright´s 300^th anniversary celebration at Bar Ilan University. The event was supported by both Portugal and Brazil whose ambassadors attended the event.

http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleid=1819

2006:  Israel disappeared…from the news and opinion sections of the New York Times.  In one of those rare Sundays, the Jewish state was not a subject of any news stories in the Times.

2006: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Everyman” by Phillip Roth and “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977” byGershom Gorenberg.

2006: The World Zionist Organization announce the 2006 winners of the third annual Herzl Award, initiated by the Department for Zionist Activities to commemorate the Centenary of Herzl's passing.  The winners are Owen Kevin Futeran, South Africa, Andrea Uzan, Denmark, Ted Ekeroth, Sweden, Adrian Gluck, Argentina, Moises Mitrani, Mexico, Stanislav Skibinski, Germany, Nathan Feldman, Mexico, Phil Koningham, New Zealand and Stephen Rosenthal, United Kingdom

2006: In Los Angeles, a community-wide celebration of Israel’s 58^th Independence ‘day  is kicked off by the LA County Sheriff Department Golden Stars Skydiving team floating into Woodley Park while the Tampa Jewish Community Center brings Israel to downtown Tampa for the first time with  independence day activities featuring Israeli vendors, an Israeli rock band and Israeli cuisine.

2007: Time Magazine featured an article entitled “The End of a Zionist Idyll.” The article reported on the Israeli reaction Degania’s announcement that it was giving up its socialist ideals and going private.  In the future, members could own homes and earn salaries based on how hard they worked. Degania was the first Kibbutz to be founded during the Second Aliyah.  It was the paradigm for the new Jew and the new Jewish way of life.  This announcement represents the closing of a chapter in Jewish and Israeli history.

2007: Newsweek Magazine featured a review of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.

2007(19th of Iyyar, 5767): Donald Ginsberg a physicist who became a leading expert on the production and functioning of superconductors passed away at the age of 73 in Urbana, Illinois.

2008(2nd of Iyar, 5768): Yom Hazikaron – Israel Remembrance Day. A two-minute memorial siren sounds at 11 a.m. Wednesday, followed by official ceremonies at 43 military cemeteries. The Defense Ministry said that since 1860, when the first Jewish settlers began establishing Jewish neighborhoods outside the Jerusalem city walls, 22,437 men and women have been killed in defense of the Land of Israel. Sixteen Israeli civilians were killed in terrorist attacks in the first four months of the year, bringing the total of civilian terror-related deaths to 1,634 since the creation of the state 60 years ago. Remembrance Day draws to a close Wednesday night at 8 p.m. with the traditional torch-lighting ceremony at Jerusalem's Mount Herzl marking the sudden transition from sadness to joy with the start of Israel's 60th Independence Day.

2008: As Israel celebrates its 60^th anniversary, the population nears 7.3 million with 76% of the population being Jewish On the eve of its independence day, Israel's population numbers 7,282,000, 75.5 percent of which is Jewish, and 20.1 percent Arab, Central Bureau of Statistics show. The remaining 4.4 percent is made up largely of immigrants and their children who are not registered as Jews in the Interior Ministry's population rolls. By 2030, the projected population will be some 10,000,000.Over the past year, 156,400 babies were born in Israel. At present, some 69 percent of the Jewish population is made up of native-born Israelis, as opposed to only 35 percent in 1948. About 18,000 people immigrated to Israel over the past year. The figure for total population does not include foreign nationals in Israel, whose number, in 1996, was found to be 186,000.

2008: Elie Wiesel is the guest speaker at a fund raising dinner designed to benefit the new Padres Katz Special Education campus of Aleh, an organization dedicated to helping disabled children in Israel.

2008: Release date for “Waves of Freedom,” a film that “is a reminder of the American Jewish sailors who braved British soldiers and the high seas to transport Holocaust survivors and refugees from Europe to the shores of prestate Palestine.”

2009: Ruth Reichl, a former restaurant critic and now the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, discusses and signs “Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way” at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

2009: The Jacob’s ladder Spring Festival opens. http://jlfestival.com/index.asp

2009: After Etan: The Missing Child Case that Held America Captive by Lisa Cohen was published by Grand Central Publishing.  A native of Manitoba, Cohen is a graduate of the University Pennsylvania who has made a career in electronic journalism with stints at ABC and CBS news.

2009, Madoff Bankruptcy Trustee, Irving Picard filed a lawsuit against J. Ezra Merkin seeking to recover almost $500 million withdrawn from Madoff accounts in the last six years

2010: In Tel Aviv, the three-day Good Life Festival is scheduled to come to an end.

2010(23^rdof Iyar, 5770): Bernard Schoenbaum, who in hundreds of cartoons in The New Yorker needled the relatively affluent, the media-conscious, the irony-besotted and the socially competitive — in other words, the readers of The New Yorker passed away today at the age of 89.     (As reported by Bruce Weber)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/books/18schoenbaum.html?pagewanted=print

2010: In Cedar Rapids, Temple Judah is schedule to host a Potluck Dinner before Friday Night Services where Samuel Horowitz of the Jewish Federation is scheduled to be the guest speaker.

2011: In Potomac, MD, Congregation B’Nai Tzedek is scheduled to hosts theSpring Gala which will feature The “Second City” from Chicago.

2011: Bruce Raynor is scheduled to resign as president of Workers United and as executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union.

2011: “The Matchmaker” is scheduled to be shown at the Israel Film Festival.

2011: The Traditional Minyan at Temple Judah is scheduled to host its annual “Mother’s Day Shabbat.”

2012: Israeli pianist Roman Rabinovich, Israeli violinist Itamar Zorman and the Jupiter musicians will perform are scheduled to perform at the Good Shepherd Church in New York City.

2012: James Carroll, author of Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews is scheduled to deliver an address entitled “The Church and the Jews: A Personal Journey and Assessment” as part of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation Spring Speaker Series.

2012: Jews and the Left, a two day conference sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research with

American Jewish Historical Society, is scheduled to come to an end.

2012: Cleveland  Mayor Frank Jackson is scheduled to be among the community leaders attending this evening’s Jewish American Heritage Month Celebration at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage.

2013: Pamela Weisberger (President and Research Coordinator, Gesher Galicia) is scheduled to speak on “Unique & Unusual Resources in Galician Genealogy” at the Weiner Library in London.

2013: “Street Labs” an outdoor exhibition featuring Israel’s top Sci-Tech students presenting their award winning inventions is scheduled to play at Union Square Park.

2013: San Jose City Hall is scheduled to celebrate the history of Jewish contributions to American culture and the Jewish American heritage that has helped shape the San Jose community with the raising of the Israeli flag at City Hall followed by a kosher lunch.

2013: A “Garden of Ellie" that contains a statue of Ellie Greenwich was placed next to Hofstra University's music school. The sculpture was commissioned by Greenwich's family and created by Peter Homestead

2013: According to Image Books, On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family and the Church in the 21st Century, will be available today in the United States and Canada. “The book is the transcript of wide-ranging conversations between then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina and Rabbi Abraham Skorka, the rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary. Topics include God, atheism, abortion, the Holocaust, same-sex marriage, fundamentalism and globalization. Francis previously has published 11 books, all in Spanish. Francis, who was elected pope last week, has referred to Skorka as his “brother and friend.” As the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he attended services at Skorka’s synagogue and also arranged for Skorka to receive an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Argentina. The two also shared billing on an Argentinian TV talk show on religious issues.” (As reported by JTA)

2013: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has ordered a freeze in tenders for West Bank settlement construction amid a US push to renew the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Army Radio reported today.

2013: Seventy years ago the Jewish people could not protect itself and had to plead for others to “save them.” Today that is no longer the case, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said today, just days after allegations that Israeli war planes attacked weapons depots near Damascus.

2013: Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky presented his proposal on the Women of the Wall to the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women today

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/176123/confusion-reigns-as-women-plan-monthly-prayer-at-w/#ixzz2SeO5uTUx

2014: The Center for Jewish History and American Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to present “Native Genius,” “a night of entertainment celebrating the history of the Jewish contributions to American Theatre from 1800-1860.

2014: President Obama “will be honored by Stephen Spielberg as Ambassador for Humanity at the USC Shoah Foundation’s 20^th anniversary gala event” which is scheduled to take place in Los Angeles today.

2014: “Over the Ocean,” a film about a Canadian family contemplating Aliyah is scheduled to shown at the Israel Film Festival sponsored by Agudas Achim in Coralville, Iowa.

2014: In honor of Jewish American Heritage Month “A Call to Serve: Florida Jews and the U.S. Military is scheduled to be shown in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

2014: “Rock the Casbah” is scheduled to be shown at The National Center for Jewish Film’s 17^th Annual Film Festival.

2014: The 16^th annual Lenore Marwil Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end in West Bloomfield, Michigan.

2014: “Amid a spate of violent altercations between IDF soldiers and settlers from Yitzhar in the northern West Bank, an Israeli report said today that residents of the radical settlement were mulling the legality — according to Jewish law — of attacking, and even killing, IDF soldiers “under certain circumstances.” (As reported by Yifa Yaakov)

 2014: Mark Lewis is scheduled to discuss his prizewinning book, The Birth of the New Justice, a history of international criminal courts and new international criminal laws from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Cold War at The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide in London.

2015: As voters in the U.K. are scheduled to go to the polls today, Laborite Ed Miliband seeks to become the nation’s first Jewish Prime Minister.

2015: Joan Adler, Executive Director of the Straus Historical Society is scheduled to discuss her latest work For the Sake of the Children, The Letters Between Otto Frank and Nathan Straus Jr., at The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center

2015: In Atlanta, GA, Israeli-Ethiopian singer Ester Rada is scheduled to present “The Birth of Ethio-Soul.”

2015: Dr. Jonathan Sarna is scheduled to lead a discussion about his newest book Lincoln and the Jews: A History at the National Archives.

2015: “À la Vie (To Life)” is scheduled to be shown at 18^th Annual Film Festival of the National Center for Jewish Film’s

2015: The Washington Jewish Music Festival kicks is scheduled to start its 16th year to with Neshama Carlebach the Glory to God Baptist Choir

2015: As part of Jewish American Heritage Month, the Spertus Institute in Chicago is scheduled to host cartoonist Liana Fink who will talk about the creative process behind "A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York,"

2015: At the National Museum of American Jewish History Simon Malkes, author of The Righteous of the Wehrmacht is scheduled to tell the amazing true story of how a Nazi officer helped save the lives of a hundred Jews, including Simon and his family during the Holocaust

2015: In keeping with a tradition that began with his arrival in Little Rock more than two decades ago, Chabad, under the leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Ciment is scheduled to host its “BBQ Festival” complete “with all of the trimmings.”

2015(18^thof Iyar, 5775): Lag B’Omer

2016: As we get ready for the “Run for the Roses’ this afternoon, we remember the Kentucky Derby of 80 years ago (1936) which was won by the “Sons of Moses.” The winning horse was Bold Venture, owned by Morton Schwartz, trained by Max Hirsch and ridden by Ira Hanford. All of the human beings involved in this equestrian event were Jewish. And even though it was Shabbat, some say that for the day Bold Venture was Jewish too.



2016: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host an “Interactive Survivor Experience” featuring Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-illinois-holocaust-museum-3d-survivor-stories-ent-0428-20160426-column.html

2016(29^thof Nisan, 5776):  Machor HaKodesh;

2016(29^thof Nisan, 5576): Ninety-two year old Holocaust survivor and fundraiser Ernest Michel passed away today. (As reported by Sam Roberts)

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/nyregion/ernest-michel-who-survived-auschwitz-and-led-jewish-charities-dies-at-92.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=1

2016(29^thof Nisan, 5576): Eighty-six year old Howard Garfinkel the high school basketball scout who had an impact on the careers of such stars as Michael Jordan, LeBron James and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/sports/basketball/howard-garfinkel-who-discovered-and-groomed-top-basketball-talent-dies-at-86.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

2017: The New York Times featured books written by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Stranger in a Stranger Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem by George Prochnik, The Ideas of Industry by Daniel W. Drezner,  All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan and recently published paperback editions of Black Hole Blues: And Other Songs From Outer Space by Janna Levin and In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies by David Rieff.

2017: At the Breman Museum, Eugen Schoenfeld is scheduled to tell how he survived Auschwitz and Dachau, refused to kill one of the brutes guarding him and rose to become the Chair of the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University.

2017: Natan Sharansky is scheduled to speak at the Hirsch Theatre this evening on Eliyahu Shama Street in Jerusalem.

2017: “German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier paid a solemn visit to Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial” today.

2017: The Yeshiva University Museum is scheduled to host a lecture by Eric Goldman entitled “Lens on Israel: A Society Through Its Cinema.”

2018: The Center for Jewish History and YIVO are scheduled to “five-time space shuttle astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman” who will discuss “his experiences as a Jew in orbit who brought a Torah, a tallis, a dreidel, and other Judaica on his trips into space.”

2018: The Yerushalmi Theatre Group is scheduled to present “Good Morning Mr. Heimer,” “a theatrical adaption of the work by Amnon Shmoosh “at Beit Mazia.”

2018:  As part of the 25^th anniversary observance, the U.S. Holocaust Museum is scheduled to host “a discussion about the complexities of Holocaust history with leading scholars.”

https://www.ushmm.org/watch/big-questions?utm_source=mkto&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1805MKTEM03879-event-text-button

2018: “In cooperation with the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington, New York University professor Hasia Diner is scheduled to present a lecture titled “Roads Taken: Jewish Peddlers and their American Journeys.”

2018: “GI Jews: Jewish Americans in World War II” is scheduled to be shown this evening at the Washington Jewish Film Festival.

2018: “Libya: The Last Exodus” is scheduled to be shown at the 26^thToronto Jewish Film Festival.

2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to co-host an “interfaith discussion of scripture from the perspectives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.”

2019: In Walnut Creek, CA, Congregation B’nai Shalom is scheduled to host an Israel Memorial Day program featuring a talk by “Lt. Col. (IDF Retired) Amos Guiora on ‘The Role of the IDF in Israel.’”

2019: The Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans and the Jewish Children’s Regional Service are scheduled to participate in “GiveNOLA Day!”

2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “Above and Beyond” produced by Nancy Spielberg (Elusive Justice) and directed by Roberta Grossman (Blessed Is the Match), that tells the story of the pilots who risked their lives to create Israel’s air force at the time of the creation of the state in 1948.

2019: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America by Daniel Okren is scheduled to go on sale today.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Guarded-Gate/Daniel-Okrent/9781476798035

2020: Virtually using Zoom, the Streicker Center is scheduled to host Amy-Jill Levine as she lectures on “Jesus and the Jews.”

2020: Temple Emanuel of Newton is scheduled to present a virtual “Paper Mosaic ‘Tree of Life’ Workshop.”

2020: The Vilna Shul is scheduled to host a virtual lecture by Layah Kranz Lipsker as she discusses “Unorthodox,” the newly released four-part series on Netflix” and “the Chassidic world of her childhood and answer questions about the authenticity of this series and others like it.”

2020: The National Museum of American Jewish History is scheduled to host via Facebook Live the first lecture in its Scholar Series as part of JAHM.

2020: Via Zoom, Rabbi Roger Klein of Temple Terfieth Israel is scheduled to host an hour of poetry readings and interactive discussion of this art form.

2020: Israelis are scheduled to make alternative plans for celebrating Lag B’Omer following yesterday’s approval by the government to ban “all traditional bonfires.”

2020: Prime Minister Netanyahu  appears to be able to forward today following the High Court of Justice found that Netanyahu's unity government deal with his election rival Benny Gantz does not violate the law, dismissing arguments that it unlawfully shields him in a corruption trial.”

2020: The 92^nd Street Y is scheduled to host “a live streamed program from the home of pianist Roman Rabinovich in Canada; featuring works that include Haydn’s B Minor and E-flat Major sonatas, a new piece by Israeli composer Matan Porat, and a Sonatina by Rabinovich himself.

2020: The San Francisco Fringe festival is scheduled to host a virtual performance of “Marla,” “Ali Littman’s play about the 2002 Hebrew University bombing that killed nine people, including 24-year-old UC Berkeley graduate Marla Bennett.”

2020: In Cedar Rapids, the Hadassah Book Club is scheduled to a social hour over Zoom.

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May 8



336: Emperor Constantine prohibits Jews from negatively interacting with their co-religionists who have converted to Christianity. "Jews are not allowed to disturb any man one has converted from Judaism

to Christianity, nor may they assail him with any outrage. Such behaviour will be punished according to the nature of the act

336: In a further move to secure the primacy of Christianity over Judaism Constantine decreed "If a Jew should purchase and circumcise a Christian slave or a slave of any other sect, he shall not keep that circumcised person in slavery. The slave who endured such treatment will receive the privilege of freedom." [CT 16.9.1]

589: Reccared summoned the Third Council of Toledo. Reccared or Recared I was Visigoth King of Hispania (think modern day Spain). His reign marked a climactic shift in history, with the king's renunciation of traditional Aryanism in favor of Catholic Christianity in 587. He was a favorite of Pope Gregory for submitting to the papal see and for promulgating an edict of intolerance that included limiting the freedom and daily activities of the Jewish community.  He zealously followed the promulgations of the Council of Toledo which included “restrictions on Jews, and the conversion of the country to orthodox Christianity led to repeated persecutions of Jews.^” Of the 23 cannons adopted by the Council of Toledo, the fourteenth canon “forbade Jews to have Christian wives, concubines, or slaves, ordered the children of such unions to be baptized, and disqualified Jews from any office in which they might have to punish Christians. Christian slaves whom they had circumcised, or made to share in their rites, were ipso facto freed.”

1147: Encouraged by Peter the Hermit, a mob attacked the Jews on the second day of Shavuot in Ramerupt, France. Rabbenu Tam was one of its victims. After being stabbed five times (to match the five wounds of Jesus) he was saved by a passing knight. His house was ransacked, and a Torah scroll was destroyed.

1435: The Jews were expelled “forever” from Speyer by decree that said, “The council is compelled to banish the Jews; but it has no designs upon their lives or their property: it only revokes their rights of citizenship and of settlement. Until November 11 they are at liberty to go whither they please with all their property, and in the meantime they may make final disposition of their business affairs.

 1492: The first printed edition of Mishnayotwith commentary by Maimonides was published in Naples. The term Mishnayot is plural form of the word Mishna, which part of the Oral Law. By appearing in printed form, the commentaries of one of Judaism greatest teachers on one of its core text was available to what today we would be called, "the mass market."  This is an event worth nothing since it goes to prove that even in the worst of years, something good can happen.

1612 “Dr. Eliua da Luna Montalto, a Marrano who had” returned “to Judaism wrote…to his wife’s sister, Isabella de Fonseca, and her husband, Dr. Pedro Rodrigues, imploring them to return to” the faith of their fathers. He wrote, in part, “There are so many arguments which prove the truth of biblical prophecy…nobody has an excuse for not understanding it…I protest against your following a road which leads to the brink and the undoing of your soul.” Montalto was a distinguished physician whose patients included Queen Marie de Medicis of France.  (As reported by Abraham Bloch)

1705: Birthdate of António José da Silva, a Portuguese-Brazilian dramatist, known as "the Jew" (O Judeu). His parents were descended from Portuguese Jews and they became targets of the Inquisition when it turned its attention to Marranos living in Brazil. Eventually he would be found guilty of “judaizing” and would be strangled deather following which his body was burnt as part of “auto de fe.”

1737: Birthdate of English historian, Edward Gibbon, author of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Gibbon wrote authoritatively about the Jewish origins of Christianity. “The history of the church of Jerusalem affords a lively proof …of the deep impression which the Jewish religion had made on the minds of its sectaries. The first fifteen bishops of Jerusalem were all circumcised Jews; and the congregation over which they presided united the Law of Moses with the doctrine of Christ.”

1773(14^thof Iyar, 5533): Pesach Sheni

1773: In Egypt, Ottoman rebels revolt, killing Ali Bey, Mamluk Sultan of Egypt.

1794: English playwright Richard Cumberland's The Jew; or the Benevolent Hebrew, the first English language play to feature a Jewish moneylender as the benevolent hero of a stage comedy premiered today at the Drury Lane Theatre in London.



1794: “Sheva, the Benevolent” an adaptation of English playwright Richard Cumberland's “The Jew; or the Benevolent Hebrew,” the first English language play to feature a Jewish moneylender as the benevolent hero of a stage comedy premiered at the Drury Lane Theatre in London.

1796: Joseph Cohen married Mariane Joachim today at the Great Synagogue.

1800(Iyar 13)): Rabbi Joseph of Piltz, author of “Maaseh Choshev” passed away today.

1800: In Hamburg, banker Salomon Heine and his wife gave birth to their third daughter Amalie Friedlander, who was the cousin of poet Heinrich Heine.

1806(20^thof Iyar): Rabbi Feibus Cohen passed away.

1808: Financier Carl Friedrich Buderus, a friend of Wilhelm and Rothschild, was arrested as French officials attempted to establish a connection between plots against French rule and the exiled Landgrave and his Jewish financier. 

1827: In Cardiff, Wales, Ann Michael and Mark Lyon Marks, “a watchmaker, auctioneer and leader of the Cardiff Jewish  community gave birth to London portrait painter Barnett Samuel (B.S.)Marks

1827(11^thof Iyar, 5587): Fourteen days before his 67^th birthday Rabbi Naftali Zvi Horowitz of Ropshitz who “was born on the day that the Baal Shem Tov died, “who was reputed to have had tens of thousands of followers” and was “a crucial figure in the development of Galician Hassidism” passed away today after which he was buried in Łańcut, Poland.

1829: In New Orleans, London born Ashkenazi business Edward Gottschalk and Aimée Marie Bruslé, a French Creole gave birth to Louis Moreau Gottschalk an American composer and pianist

1831: One day after he had passed away, 79 year old Henry Naftali Isaacs, the husband of Ellen Isaacs and the father of Isaac Isaacs was buried today at the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.”

1837: Having been prevented from moving to Prague by immigration authorities, historian Heinrich Graetz arrived at Oldenburg where he spent three years with his patron Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, “as a pupil, companion, and amanuensis.”

1838: Birthdate of Alsace native Solomon Haff, the Texas husband of Fannie Levi Halff with whom he had two children.

1841: In New York Rabbi and Mrs. Myer Samuel Isaacs gave birth to Judge Myer S. Isaacs who co-founded the Jewish Messenger and who served as President of the Baron de Hirsch Fund.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F50D1FFE3A5913738DDDAC0A94DD405B848CF1D3

1843: In Grätz, Grand Duchy of Posen, Dr. Markus Moses, a noted physician and his wife gave birth to German publisher and philanthropist” Rudolf Mosse

1846: In Stetin, which at that time was in Prussia, Abraham and Berthe Hammerstein gave birth to New York “theatrical and operatic manager Oscar Hammerstein who after having a falling out with his family, arrived in the United States in 1864 and parlayed his success in the cigar and tobacco business into a career that included producing grand opera at the Met but his best known by most as the grandfather of Broadway composer Oscar Hammerstein II.

https://www.nytimes.com/1919/08/02/archives/o-hammerstein-long-in-coma-dies-famous-impresarios-end-comes-at-72.html?searchResultPosition=2

1847: Birthdate of Oscar Hammerstein, businessman, theater impresario, composer in New York City and the grandfather of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.

1847: “In Obernbreit am Main in present-day Germany,”  “Elias and Babette (Mandelbaum Heller) Sanger” gave birth to Alexander Sanger, who in 1865, came to the United Sates”  where he became a leading Texas merchant who was part of Sanger Brothers and the founder of what became Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, TX.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsa54

1852: The New York Times reported that following the fining of MP David Salomons for his attempt to take his seat in the House of Commons all the work of “emancipation” that has been done on behalf of the Jews will have to be done over again because given the hereditary nature of the House of Lords and the life expectancy of the members nothing will change for at least 20 years.

1855: The Prussian Bankruptcy Code adopted today” provided Hermann Makower with him with topic for his legal study which was published in 1861.

1857(14^thof Iyar, 5617): Pesach Sheni

1857: In Manchester, England the Art Treasurers of Great Britain, one of the largest art exhibition held in the U.K. opened for a third day.

1858: Henry Lewis Raphael and Henrietta Raphael gave birth to Arthur Lewis Raphael, the husband of Marianna Floretta Raphael.

1859: Birthdate of Ukrainian native Isaac Piroshnikof, “the founder of the Warsaw Conservatory” and “military bandleader at Vilna” who in 1912 came to the United States where “he organized the Workmen’s Circle chorus…and several children’s choruses”

https://www.jta.org/1933/06/16/archive/isaac-piroshnikoff-dies-popular-concertina-artist

1864: Major Adolph Proskauer of the 12th Alabama was wounded so severely at Spotsylvania Courthouse that he could no longer serve.  A native of Germany, Proskauer "was among the few Jewish immigrants who became a high-ranking Confederate Officer. ("Jews of the Civil War")

1870: The Hebrew Leader, a weekly newspaper; published in New York city by Jonas Bondy, cautioned its readers about the possible success to be enjoyed as a result of the upcoming meeting of the Conference of Evangelical Alliance.

1870: According to today's Religious Items column " The Hebrew Leader referring to the coming Conference of the Evangelical Alliance says: 'No fear; what these gentlemen achieved in London, Paris, Berlin, Geneva and Amsterdam they will achieve in New York: Nihil.'"

1871: In Temple Emanu-El “abolished the ceremony of Bar Mitzvah” and “the custom of publicly blessing a mother on her first appearance in a synagogue after giving birth to a child.”

1871: The Omaha Bee was a pioneer newspaper in Omaha, Nebraska founded today, by Edward Rosewater, a Bohemian Jewish immigrant who supported abolition and fought in the Union Army.

1873: British philosopher John Stuart Mill whose views on the Jewish people were explored by Professor Edward Alexander in an article entitled “John Stuart Mill and the Jews” passed away. 

1874: Today’s Jewish Times quoted Judge Charles P. Daly as saying that “the history of his own race has taught him to practice charity in the widest sense, and if the country had been the first to extend the full privileges of freedom to the Jews, they, in their turn, have richly returned the precious gift by their efforts, their labors, their examples of frugality, thrift and industry, which have helped lift this country to the proud position which it occupies today.

1874: Special letter of administration were granted with the consent of the Earl of Beaconsfield who is the executor of the of the estate of Mary Anne Disraeli, Viscountess of Beaconsfield, that would allow stocks belonging her to be passed on to the Reverend William Lewis Price when she passed away.

1876(14^th of Iyar, 5636): Peach Sheni

1876: Birthdate of Reinhold Quaatz, the German political leader who espoused anti-Semitic positions despite having a Jewish mother but avoided being shipped to a concentration camp.

1876: It was reported today that a part of the French Mediterranean fleet has received orders to set sail for Salonica, formerly known as Thessalonica.  The fleet is being sent to in response to fighting in the city between Christians and Moslems.  The city’s population includes approximately 20,000 Jews who have lived there for centuries.  Unfortunately, attacks based on the religious differences between Moslems and Christians have a way of spilling over to harm the Jewish population. (The ancient Jewish community of Salonica would be a casualty of the Shoah).

1877: “The Jews in Roumania” published today reported the Turkish Legation in Washington, DC has been told by its government that there are no Turkish troops or inhabitants on the west bank of the Danube River, where the Jews living in Giurgevo (have been attacked. According to the Turks, this area is controlled by the government at Bucharest. Furthermore, “Israelites” have “equal rights in Turkey with all other Ottoman subjects of whatever religion” and the government is determined to protect them.  As “new proof of the …impartiality of his Majesty the Sultan” and Israelite named “David-chon Effendi” has been nominated as a Senator of the Empire.  [Today all of this sounds like meaningless gibberish. The treatment of the Jews of Romania was a grave matter in the second half of the 19^th century.  Sometimes it got caught up in the on-going Balkan crises and the slow demise of the Ottoman Empire.  On top of that newspaper reports of the time were not always accurate when it came to names leaving us to guess.  Giurgevo probably refers to Giurgiu which was an ancient fortress town on the Danube.  Effendi may refer to a prominent Turkish Jew of the time who was an admiral in the Sultan’s navy.]

1878(5^thof Iyar, 5638):  Kowel native Meir Auberach, part of the Rabbinic Auerbach family, who “was president of the Jewish court at Koło”, and after immigrating to Palestine “was appointed the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and headed the Poland Kollel” passed away today.

https://www.rabbimeirbaalhaneis.com/Rabbi%20Meir%20Auerbach.asp

1879: Birthdate of Russian native, NYU trained attorney and New York City municipal judge Abraham Harawitz.

1879: “Revolutionary Papers In Russia” published today described discoveries made by government officials regarding “an anonymous revolutionary organ called “Semla i Schwaboda” (Land and Liberty.”  Three days after the police successfully found the printing presses that produced the paper, a Polish Jews was found murdered in a Moscow tavern “with a paper on his breast containing the words ‘Death to Traitors.’” The Polish Jew was reported to be the informer who guided the authorities to the presses. [Once again Jews are bad guys on both sides of the street.  They were portrayed as anti-Czarist revolutionaries and as betrayers of the revolutionaries.  Ah, anti-Semitism!]

1880: In Chicago. Rosa Flora Eisendrath, the German born daughter of Moses Samson Eisendrath and Bertha Braunchen Eisendrath and her husband Emanuel Raphael Weil gave birth to Leon Eisendrath Weil

1881: Two days after she had passed, 35 year old Ida Schlosser wife Of Ernest Schlosser was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1882: Edward J. King’s Will which was dated today includes bequests to Mount Sinai Hospital, the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum, Congregation B’Nai Jeshrun, the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews of New York and the United Hebrew Charities.

1883: Birthdate of German native Richard B. Feibelmann the holder of a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Munich who went from teaching to research chemist to chemical company manager before, in 1935, coming to the United States where “he developed starch solubilization processes for use in the textile and paper finishing industries” while raising his daughter with his wife Carla.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1948/03/26/93792659.pdf

1884: Birthdate of Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States.  If David Ben-Gurion is the "father of the state of Israel" then Truman might be considered the godfather-the one who held the baby at the moment of birth.  Standing up against pressure from the British and his own top advisors, Truman helped garner the votes that led to the U.N. resolution that created Israel in 1947. Standing up to even stronger pressure, Truman gave the new state the aura of legitimacy by being the first to recognize.  At 6:00 p.m., Washington D.C. time, the state of Israel came into existence.  At 6:11 p.m., the United States recognized the existence of the state of Israel.  Recognition might have come a few minutes sooner, but the representatives of the newly created government had not been sure of the name to use for their new country.  Jewish voters heavily supported Truman for this bold act as well as his progressive social views and his strong stance against the emerging Stalinist menace.

1885(23^rd of Iyar, 5645): Six days before his 65^thbirthday, Morris Rosenbach, the husband of Isabella H. Polock and the father of Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, the creator of the Rosenbach Museum and Library passed away today.

1885: In Chicago, the Dearborn Station designed by Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz opened today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dearborn_Station#/media/File:Dearborn_Station_from_west.jpg

1885: Birthdate of Georg Abrahamsohn who was transported from Berlin to Terezin in 1942 and in 1944 from Terezin to Auschwitz where he was murdered.

1886:  Dr. John S. Pemberton sells the first Coca-Cola at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia.  Jacob’s Pharmacy was owned by Joseph Jacobs, the son of Gabriel and Ernestine Hyman Jacobs.  The Georgia native opened the Athens Pharmaceutical Company in Athens.  He later bought out his competition in the Five Points section of Atlanta.  The first Coke was served at the Five Points location.

1886: Twenty-eight year old Richmond (VA) High School graduate Laurence Eugene “Lon” Myers, the Jewish “sprinter and middle distance runner”  “beat W.G. George of England by six yards in a 1,160 yard match at Madison Square Garden today. (As reported by Bob Wechsler)

1888(27^th of Iyar, 5648): Professor Leone Levi, “an economic writer” passed away today.

1888: Birthdate of Polish born, Maine-raised producer Phil Rosen the co-founder of the American Society of Cinematographers whose career spanned 35 years

1890(18^th of Iyar, 5650): Lag B’Omer

1891: “The Karlsbrucke” published today described the history of Prague’s historic bridge including the fact that the oldest of the figures on its buttresses was “a large stone crucifix..which was built with money wrung from the Jews.”

1891: Rabbi Levy officiated at the wedding of Selig Behrman and Sarah Saundinsky at the Hasell Street Synagogue.

1892: Dr. G. Stockston Burroughs, the Samuel Green Professor of Biblical History and Interpretation will conduct classes in the Semitic and Hebrew languages at Amherst College.

1892: “Johns Hopkins University” published today described activities at the Baltimore school including the decisions of Dr. Cyrus Adler to lead a group that “are organizing an America-Jewish historical association to collect and preserve records and memorials of the Jews of America.”

1892: Most of the 3,000 people attending tonight’s lecture at Cooper Union which had been called by various Socialist groups were young Jews from Russian and Poland.

1893: “Jews Might Be Kept Afloat: Expelled by Russian and Excluded by this Country” published today describes the plight of the millions of Russian and Polish Jews who are being expelled by the Czar’s government.  The new situation is even more catastrophic than the Passover Edicts of 1891 that resulted in the expulsion of 400,000 Jews.  The changes in American immigration laws and the attitude of various European governments limit the options of where these Jews might settle.  The article goes to describe the efforts – financial, political, and communal – to provide havens for their coreligionists. 

1893: The five-story double tenement house at 33 and 35 Suffolk Street which “is inhabited by more than twenty families” most of whom are Jews from Poland was the scene of fire that started in the apartment of Abraham Barnett.

1893: The Hartford (CT) Courant provided an account of “documentary evidence that the Russian government has begun a wholesale expulsion of the Jews from Poland” where 1,500,000 of them live.

1894:”Anti-Jew Riot In Poland” published today described how troops fired on a mob that was attacking Jews in Grajewo

1895: Two days after he has passed away, Henry Rothschild, the husband of Rebecca Rothschild with whom he had eight children was buried today at the “West Ham Jewish Cemetery.”

1895: The third East Side Free Art Exhibition sponsored by the University Settlement Society and the Hebrew Educational Alliance will open today at the Hebrew Institute at East Broadway and Jefferson Street.

1898(16^th of Iyar, 5658): Zvi Hermann Schapira, the mathematician born in Lithuania in 1840  who attended the First Zionist Congress and was the first to suggest the creation of what became the Jewish National Fund passed away today in Cologne.

1898: Private Roy Wiseman of Minneapolis and Private Charles Markowitz became U.S. soldiers today when the 14^th Minnesota Voluntary Infantry was mustered into the United States Army.

1898: “The Triumph of Titus” published today provides a summary of information that first appeared in Open Court, a magazine specializing in philosophy, science and religion describing the celebration at Rome of the victory over Judea that included a display of “the sacred vessels of the temple,” the scourging and throttling “of Simon, the real leader” of the revolt and imprisonment for life of John.”

1899: George M. Appel began serving as Second Lieutenant in the Second U.S. Volunteer Engineers.

1899: “Jews True Patriots” published today described a speech given by Dr. Madison C. Peters which says that “history does not tell of braver men. After describing the leading role of European Jews in the military including Napoleon’s Marshal Massena and Albert Goldsmid, Sir Jacob Adolphus and Sir David Ximines of the British Army, he described the leading role of the Jews in the American military including Isaac Franks and Benjamin Moses in the Revolutionary War, Moses Albert Levy, Leon Dyer and Henry Seligson in the Mexican War, and a long list in the Civil War including Edward S. Soloon, Leopold Blumberg and Simon Levy and his three sons to name but a few. According to Dr. Peters, four thousand Jews served in the military during the just completed war with Spain including Sergeant Maurice Justh of the First California Jews, a regiment that included 100 Jews and seven Jewish Rough Riders whom Theodore Roosevelt praised for their “most astonishing courage.”

1899: According to a list published today the leadership of the Hebrew Infant Asylum includes President Ester Wallenstein, Solomon Japha, Maurice Untermyer, S.F. Bleyer, Robert J. Gerstler and A.N. Steinhart.

1900: Mandelbaum and Levine bought “three six-story flats on 8^thAvenue between 57^th and 58^th Streets.

1901: In New York, “Israel Unterberg” and “Bella E. Epstein” gave birth to Clarence Ephraim Unterberg the “textile engineer” and husband of Marjorie K. Unterberg.

1901: The Order of Ancient Maccabeans (also Maccabaeans), an Anglo-Jewish charity which was established in 1894 was registered today under the ‘Friendly Societies’ Act.”

1902: In Ainay-le-Château, Allier Marie (Siminovitch), an artist, and Solomon Lwoff, a psychiatrist gave birth to Andre Michael Lwoff, French microbiologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.  He passed away in 1994.

1903: New York Mayor Low is scheduled to attend tonight’s performance “The Destruction of Kishinieff” which is part of the effort to raise funds for the Jews of Kishineff who, along with their non-Jewish sympathizers have been under attack by mobs starting in late April.

1904: Five hundred forty-eight delegates, including “8 female delegates” attended “the Eighteenth Annual Convention of the Independent Order of Brith Abraham” which took place today in New York City.

1905(3^rd of Iyar, 5665): After two days of rioting in Zhitomir (Russia) twenty Jews have been killed by the mob and an untold number have been injured while an additional ten Jews were killed in the village of Troyanov as they tried to come to the aid of their co-religionists.

1905(3^rd of Iyar, 5665): Yaakov Shlomo Margalit, the son of Moshe Dov Ber Margalit and Taibe (Yona) Margalit passed away today in his native Petach Tikva.

1905: In a move that presaged the Righteous Gentiles of the Shoah, Nicholas Blinov, a Christian student, was killed when he came to the aid of the Jews of Zhitomir.

1906: “Trade School’s New Home” published described the opening of the new home of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls described as “The House Beautiful” which is a five story building  with “a gymnasium, auditorium for stage performances, a counting room and a dressmaking and millinery room.

1906: “The congregation of Temple Emanu-El unanimously extended a call tonight to the Rev. Dr. Judah Leon Magnes, rabbi of Temple Israel, to be associate rabbi of their temple with the Rev. Dr. Joseph Silverman.”

1907: “Immigration Commissioner R o b e r t Watchorn caused a stir at the eighty-second annual meeting of the American Tract Society by criticising the work of Dr. Shearers missionaries on Ellis Island, where they distributed tracts to Jew, Christian, and heathen immigrants alike immediately on their landing” saying that “a great many of our  immigrants are Hebrews who are on their way from persecution by one style of Christians and when they have Christian tracts – print in Hebrew – put in their hands, apparently with the approval of the United States government, they wonder what is going to happen to them here.”

1908: “An anti-Semitic demonstration” broke our during a debate in the Duma where Zamislovsky delivered “a rabid speech urging the immediate exclusion of Jews from the army”

1908: Today in the Duma, Delegate Roditcheff, the Constitutional Democratic leader defended the Jews saying that the congestion in the ghettos and inhuman of the Jews for centuries were the criminal causes for Jewish bodily defects” and that “the sole remedy was to lift the disabilities of the Jews.’

1909(17^th of Iyar, 5669): Parashat Emor

1909: “New Light Cast Upon Old Egypt” published today provides a review of Professor Steindorff’s Baedericker guide book that includes a chapter which “discusses the record which alone of all the multitudes in the hieroglyphic character contains the name of ‘Israel’”

1910: “The eighty-seventh annual meeting of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum Society was held today, and the report submitted by its President, Louis Stern, showed that the society is in better condition than at any time in its history.”

1911: Birthdate of Vienna native and refugee from Nazi Europe Rudolf Flesh, the holder of a PhD from Columbia and husband of Elizabeth Terpenning best known for his popular work Why Johnny Can’t Read.

https://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/19903-the-legacy-of-rudolf-flesch

1912:  In London, Baron Heyking, the Russian Consul-General published a letter in the Times “protesting against British denunciation” of ritual murder reportedly taking place in Russia.1912: Founding of The Paramount Company.  This giant of the motion picture industry began as a merger of 11 film rental bureaus. Among those involved were Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor.  Zukor would go on to become a dominant figure in the direction and production of movies.  He would eventually become the top executive of Paramount, another of the Jews "present at the birth" of the American film industry.  

1913: Birthdate of Solomon Joel Cohen, the Johannesburg native who went from being a hairdresser to an English actor and comedian known as Sid James.

1913: Today Iowa State Normal School (University of Northern Iowa) graduate Tom Taubman, the Cedar Falls, IA born son of William and Mary Taubman and the husband of Minnie Samuels began serving as the United States Marshal “for the district of South Dakota.”

1913: Dr. Moses Hyamson, Senior Dayan, or Chief Judge, of the Ecclesiastical Court of the United Synagogue of London, has been elected rabbi of the Congregation Orach Chaim, at Lexington Avenue and Ninety-Fifth Street. The new rabbi will receive a salary of $5,000. Hyamson succeeds Dr. Joseph Hertz who was chosen over Dr. Hyamson as the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain.

1914: Eleanor, the daughter of Woodrow Wilson – the President who appointed the first Jew to serve as a Supreme Court Justice and was a supporter of Zionism- was married today in the White House

1915: At their convention in Memphis, Tennessee, the National Conference on Jewish Charities adopted a resolution creating a committee to conduct a survey of Oriental Jews in the United States.

1915: In Worcester, MA, Benjamin and Mary Meltzer gave birth to historian and author Milton Meltzer. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/books/25meltzer.html?mabReward=relbias:r&_r=0&action=click&adxnnl=1&region=searchResults&module=Search&url=http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/?action=click&region=Masthead&pgtype=Homepage&module=SearchSubmit&contentCollection=Homepage&t=qry825#/milton

1915: “The Exchange Telegraph Company” today “received the following telegram from Copenhagen: ‘Berlin newspapers print the news of the sinking of the Lusitania in colossal type and hail the successful torpedoing of the ship as a new triumph for Germany’s naval policy.”

1916: It was reported today that Hugh Dorsay, one of the prosecutors in the Leo Frank case has announced his candidacy for Governor of Georgia.

1916: It was reported today that Henry Morgenthau, the former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey was unable to speak at the dinner sponsored by the Jewish Charities of Brooklyn so Supreme Court Justice of Hugo Pan of Illinois filled in for him speaking on “Preparedness and the Jews.”

1916: During an investigation into allegations that Jews were being discriminated against when they tried to enlist in certain units of the New York National Guard Charles E. Klein testified today when “he had applied for membership in Battery D, Lieutenant Charles J. McCronan asked the nationality of his father and when Klein said he was Russian McCronan then asked if he was a Jew to which he replied “I am” and then asked what difference it made.

1917: It was reported today that during the forced deportation of Jews from Palestine “two Jews were hanged at the entrance to Tel Aviv, the object being, it was explained to indicate the fate in store for any Jews who might be so foolish as to resist the Turkish order for evacuation.”

1917: It was reported today the young men from the Jewish settlements who had organized to protect refugees from bands of robbers were arrested by Turkish authorities and imprisoned “after suffering considerable maltreatment.”

1918:Vilmos Vázsonyi, who championed the recognition of the Jewish religion by the state completed his second and final term in office as Minister of Justice for Hungary.

1918: It was reported today that “the peace treaty signed by Germany and her allies with Rumania consists of eight clauses” one of which provides for “equality of all religions in Rumania” and includes a provision that Jews will have the same rights as all other Rumanian subjects.

1919: In Tel Aviv, David Remez (born David Drabkin), one of those who signed the Israeli Declaration of independence and his wife gave birth to Aharon Remez, who flew combat missions with the RAF in World War II before becoming  the second commander of Israel’s fledgling Air Force serving from 1948 through 1950.  He went on to a successful career as a “civil servant, politician and diplomat. 

1919: Mrs. M.M. Straus, pianist Mrs. Sidney Pollak and violinist Elinor Rose Isaacs are scheduled to provide musical entertainment at the meeting of the Deborah and Deborah Juniors in the Sinai Social Center.

1920: Birthdate of Saul Bass the New York native who designed motion picture title sequences for films such “The Man with the Golden Arm” and “North by Northwest” and corporate logs for Bell Telephone System and United Airlines and was the husband of fellow artist Elaine Makatura Bass

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/27/movies/saul-bass-75-designer-dies-made-art-out-of-movie-titles.html

1921(30th of Nisan, 5681): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1921: High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel agrees to the appointment of Haj Amin al Husseini, a leading Arab nationalist, as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and head of the Supreme Muslim Council. Samuel rejects protests by the Jewish leadership.

1921: Birthdate of Allard Roen, the native of Cleveland, Duke University baseball player and WW II Navy veteran who was the husband of Evelyn Roen and “Managing Director of the Desert Inn and the Stardust Resort and Casino in Paradise, Nevada.”

http://lasvegassun.com/news/2008/sep/01/desert-inn-stardust-chief-helped-integrate-las-veg/

1922: Louis Stern, President of Stern Brothers, which became the largest retail store in the United States in 1910, underwent a major operation at Mt. Sinai Hospital just prior to leaving for Paris.

1922: In Blackpool, England, Cyril and Ann Constant Levy gave birth to Reginald Levy, the Sabena pilot who would play a key role in thwarting an Arab attempt to hijack his aircraft.

1924(4^thof Iyar, 5684): Seventy-five year old Prague born photographer Leopold Adler passed away today.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/58646687@N08/11952366745

1924: In Beilsko, Poland, business executive Julius Weissmann and his wife Helene (nee Mueckenbrunn) Weissmann gave birth to Gerda Weissmann who gained fame as Gerda Weissmann Klein, author of the autobiographical account of the Holocaust All but My Life which “was adapted for the 1995 short film, One Survivor Remembers, which received an Academy Award and an Emmy Award, and was selected for the National Film Registry.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/klein-gerda-weissmann

1925(14^thof Iyar, 5685): Pesach Sheni

1926: In Queens, New York, insurance and clothes sales man Max Rickles and the former Etta Feldman gave birth to Donald Jay “Don Rickles.  After graduating from high school, Rickles served in the United States Navy.  After World War II he began working as a comic in a variety of venues.  Eventually, he turned to the "insult comedic" mode which has become his stock and trade.  His big break came in 1957 when Frank Sinatra caught his act and loved it.  Rickles also has numerous film and television appearances to his credit.  According to his semi-official biography, one of his proudest accomplishments was the construction of a gym named in his honor (he raised the money) at Temple Sinai in Los Angeles.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/arts/television/don-rickles-dead-comedian.html?_r=1

1927: In Philadelphia, Nacham Lerner and “the former Goldie Levine” gave birth to documentarian Murray Lerner. (As reported by Neil Genzlinger)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/movies/murray-lerner-who-filmed-musics-biggest-stars-dies-at-90.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

1928: Birthdate of Theodore “Ted” Sorensen, speech writer for John F. Kennedy who “helped” to write Profiles In Courage.  Sorensen’s mother was a Russian Jew.  His was father was Christian.

1929:Today “through an agreement signed with Albert Kahn by President of Amtorg Saul G. Bron, the Soviet government contracted the Albert Kahn firm to design the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, the first tractor plant in the USSR

1933: Lucienne Bolch took the pictures which “are the sole visual record of the great Diego Rivera's ill-fated Rockefeller Center fresco with its doomed depiction of Lenin” known as “Man at the Crossroads.”

(As reported by Robert McG. Thomas, Jr.)

1933: Birthdate of Alfred “Al” Lerner the New York born son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who became Chairman of the Board of MBNA and the owner of the Cleveland (football) Browns.

1934: Eleanor Neyens was born in Dubuque County, Iowa.  As Eleanor Schueller she became the mother of Deb Schueller who as Deb Levin is responsible for the technology and patience that makes these daily offerings possible.

1934(23^rd of Iyar, 5694): Forty-eight year old Harry Louis Falk, the Cincinnati born son of Louis and Hattie Falk and husband of “Miriam Martha Danziger Falk” passed away today after which he was buried in the Metairie Cemetery in Orleans Parish, LA.

1934: Birthdate of Leonard Hubert “Lennie” Hoffman, the South African born British barrister who became a leading Jurist.

1935(5^th of Iyar, 5695): Sixty-eight year old Vilna born American journalist I. Leon Dalidansky who in 1906 came to the United States where wrote for the Jewish Daily News while raising two children – Cecilia and Ezra – with his wife Mary passed away today.

1935: “The plight of thousands of young women refugees arriving in Palestine from Germany and other countries was outlined today at luncheon of the Women’s League for Palestine” held at the Hotel Astor.  The speakers appealed for additional funds to provide homes for these refugees.  Mrs. Albert Einstein and Mrs. Elisheeva Kaplan, Chairman of the Working Women’s Council of Palestine were guests of honor.

1936: Brooklyn District Attorney William F.X. Geoghan said that “nearly $2,000,000 in funds may have passed through the hands of” of Rabbi Zeida Schmellner’s 36 year old secretary Mary Berd who has been charged with grand larceny”



1936: Emperor Hailie Selassie of Ethiopia, who has been forced to flee his native land because Italy has conquered it, arrived in Haifa aboard the British cruiser Enterprise. The Emperor whose official title includes the appellation “Lion of Judah” and his royal household then took the train to Jerusalem where they were greeted by a cheering crowd. When he heard the crowds chanting “Long Live Ethiopia” and “Long Live Haile Selassie” the exiled monarch broke into tears.  [Editor’s Note:  Ethiopia and the Jewish people each shared the dubious honor of being early victims of the Axis and the world turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to both of them.  Also, the British officer Orde Wingate played a role in the lives of the Jews and the Ethiopians.  Wingate served a tour in Palestine where he helped the Zionists self-defense forces in their fight against the rioting Arabs.  During World War II, Wingate played a leading role in liberating Ethiopia from its Axis occupiers.]

1936: “Emergency measures were invoked to preserve order following the decision of 150 Arab leaders to launch a campaign of civil disobedience, including a rigid boycott of everything Jewish.

1936: As Arab violence continued “a Jewish-owned envelope factory at Atlith was set on fire” today “and Jewish officials who work in the city of Jaffa were instructed not to report to work.”

1936: Today in Geneva, “the first Jewish world was convoked officially for August 8^th.”

1936: In Cairo, “authoritative sources said tonight that two companies of British infantry totally 300 men had been sent to Palestine as reinforcements for troops at Jerusalem and other cities” as Arab unrest and violence continued.

1936: Otto A. Rosalsky, a senior judge of the court of General Sessions and an active member of the Jewish community has an operation today for a minor ailment at Mt. Sinai Hospital – an operation that would not prevent his death a few days later.

1936: In Warsaw, “police said they had seized a quantity of powerful explosives” after arresting 100 “anti-Semitic extremists today for an alleged plot to bomb Jewish restaurants and night clubs.”

1937: Mrs. Edward Jacobs who had returned from a fact finding tour in Palestine last week said today that Jewish settlers felt that British should be doing a better job of protecting them from Arab attackers since they had entered the country under the terms of the Mandate which included the terms of the Balfour Declaration.  She said that the vast majority of the 400,000 Jewish settlers were neither discouraged nor willing to abandon their efforts. Finally, she said that it might be necessary to divide the country into Jewish and Arab “zones of influence to minimize friction.”

1937: Several Jews were beaten today during riots at Grabow.

1938(7th of Iyar, 5698): Sixty-six year old Birmingham born architect turned set designer Sidney Ullman passed away today in Los Angeles.

1938: The Jerusalem Postreported that one of the top Arab terrorist leaders in the Hebron area, Issa Battat, was shot and killed by police near Beit Govrin.

1938: In Port Chester, NY, Dorothy and James Stewart gave birth to Alice Stewart who gained fame as Alice Stewart Trillin, the wife of author Calvin Trillin

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/13/us/alice-trillin-63-educator-author-and-muse-is-dead.html

1939(19th of Iyar, 5699): Ten days before his 54^thbirthday, former Reichstag member Kurt Löwenstein who had founded the German socialist organization the Falcons and the husband of chemist Mara Kerwel passed away today in Paris.

1939: In St. Louis, “Alma Weil Michaels (née Weil), a playwright and theatrical producer and Ephraim London, a civil rights attorney” gave birth to “feminist” Sheila Babs Michaels. (As reported by Margalit Fox)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/us/sheila-michaels-ms-title-dies-at-78.html

1939: Admiral Sir Barry Edward Domville the famous British naval officer who was among those who expressed pro-German and anti-Semitic views during the 1930’s wrote an endorsement for The Case For Germany by Dr. Arthur Pillans which praises Hitler and National Socialist while attacking the Jewish people. (Editor’s Note – Seven decades after WW II, many are unaware of the pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic views held among many in the upper-echelon of British society)

1940: Broadway producer Julian Goldman, the inventor of contract bridge and a confidant of FDR met with the President in the White House today.

1940: Birthdate of Canadian political leader Irwin Cotler who has proven to be a proponent of human rights and a staunch foe of “the new anti-Semitism.”

1941: In response to the pro-Nazi coup led by Rashid Ali which would include a Pogrom in June, British forces “began their assault on Rutbah Fort” today.

1942: The Battle of the Coral Sea, which was the first naval battle in which airpower was responsible for the outcome and which stopped the Japanese advance towards Australia came to an end today.

1942: Muriel Rukeyser was among the recipients of awards presented by The National Institute of Arts and Letters http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/08/1942/muriel-rukeyser

1942: “In This Our Life,” the movie adaptation of the novel with a screenplay by Howard Koch and music by Max Steiner was released today in the United States.

1942: “Sunday Punch” a comedy with a script co-authored by Fay Kanin and featuring Sam Levene as “Roscoe” and Leo Gorcey as “Biff” was released today in the United States.

1943 (3rd of Iyar, 5703): On Shabbat, The Leaders of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising meet death as the flame of resistance flickers out. The massive German forces that had been brought into the former Warsaw Ghetto to fight the Jewish rebels burned the ghetto street by street. Only by torching the buildings could the fighters be flushed out and forced to seek another place to hide and fight. Terror and inferno raged in the improvised underground bunkers as the Germans made the fighters come out in the only way possible-by hurling grenades into the bunkers or by pumping in tear gas. The ZOB command bunker, staffed by Mordechai Anielewicz and other leaders of the resistance, fell on May 8.   Mordecai Anielewiczhad been born in 1919.  He had accomplished the seemingly impossible twice.  First, he united the various factions in the ghetto and then conducted an armed resistance against what had been the world's greatest killing machine.  Anielewicz was an ardent Zionist and his memory lives on at a Kibbutz established by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. With the destruction of the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street, outside the confines of the ghetto the German commander General Juergen Stroop bragged that "there is no longer a Jewish quarter in Warsaw." On May 19, Warsaw was declared Judenrein. But this handful of rabble had actually engaged in armed combat with the Nazis for a longer period of time than some of the professional armies of Europe.

1944: An internal memo of this week from the United States Government War Refugee Board states that

it would not be wise to transport Jewish refugees to Afghanistan, as it is a "fanatically Moslem country" with a "primitive economy and low standard of living." Though Jews live in Afghanistan, they are "not popular".

1944: Keel was laid down for the HMS Springer, a submarine which be sold to Israel in 1958 and be renamed “Tanin” which Hebrew for Crocodile

1945: Birthdate of Bruce Mark Cohen one of three children of Emil Cohen a New York State Supreme Court Justice. Cohen became a rabbi serving Mishkan Israel in New Haven, Connecticut. He worked to promote peace through better understanding of ordinary Jews and Arabs. Along with Farhat Agbaria he found Interns for Peace.

1945: As of today an additional 53 of those who revolted at Sobibor “had died of other causes between October 14, 1943, the day of the revolt” and today.

1945: Hilde Nathan “was freed from” Theresienstadat “after it was liberated by the Soviet Army today.”

http://www.timesofisrael.com/over-200-israelis-attend-funeral-of-holocaust-survivor-they-did-not-know/

1945: V.E. (Victory in Europe) Day; the surrender Germany signed on May 7, 1945, goes into effect.  Unfortunately, this did mean an immediate end to the fighting.  Units of the SS continued to resist and German U-Boats, once they got the order to surface, were often scuttled by their crews instead of making for the ports designated by the victorious allies.

1945: “Dutch teacher and child psychologist Bloeme Evers-Emden was liberated by the Soviets at Liebau”

1945: “In a pastoral letter”  Conrad Gröber, the archbishop of the Archdiocese of Freiburg “declared that no one should succumb to any extreme anti-Semitism. In his eyes the Holocaust was wrong because it forced the Jews into a defensive position from which they could cause the State greater harm than many a powerful enemy army.”

1945: The U.S. Army competed an investigation into allegations that soldiers under the Command of Colonel Felix L Sparks  had killed Nazi guards at Dachau after they had surrendered came to an end.

1945: With the end of World War II, the question of what do with the refugees at Fort Ontario most of whom were Jewish – repatriation or settlement in the United States – became a pressing matter that had to be resolved.

1945: “Sixty million Americans tuned in to hear ‘On A Note of Triumph,’ narrated by Martin Gabel, Norman Corwin's radio masterpiece marking the end of World War II in Europe” which was “lauded by Carl Sandburg as "one of the all-time great American poems," it was the most listened-to radio drama in U.S. history.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4668028

1946: The Dov Hoz, carrying 675 Ma’apilim and the Eliahu Golomb carrying 339 Ma’apillim left La Spezia bound for Palestine.”

1946: “The Dark Corner,” a film “based on a story in Good Housekeeping by Leo Rosten” with music by Emil Newman was released today in the United States.

1946: U.N. Assistant Secretary General Benjamin Cohen of Chile was among the speakers who participated at Hunter College’s World Friendship exercises which were designed to mark the first anniversary of the end of WW II in Europe.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F50B12F9345413738DDDA00894DD405B8688F1D3

1947(18th of Iyar, 5707): Lag B’Omer

1947:  Birthdate of H. Robert Horvitz, American biologist on the faculty of M.I.T. who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in in Physiology or Medicine.

1947: Leonard Bernstein has been invited to conduct the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra at the second International Music Festival which is scheduled to begin today in Prague.

1947:As the international community began its deliberations that Jews hoped would lead to the creation of their state, Dr. Abba Hillel Silver, a Reform Rabbi from Cleveland Ohio, “appeared before the United Nations as a spokesman for the Jewish Agency and formally voiced the demands of his people for national recognition and for the right to reestablish a national state in the ancestral home.”  Silver had worked “closely with David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Shertok in preparing the presentation of the Jewish Agency.” Silver, who was head of the American section of the Jewish agency “spoke first because the plane bringing Ben-Gurion from Palestine was delayed. According to David Geffen, Silver concluded his speech with these words. “The Jewish people places great hope upon the outcome of the deliberations of this great body. It has faith in its collective sense of justice and fairness; and in the high ideals which inspire it.“We are an ancient people, and though we have often, on the long, hard road which we have travelled, been disillusioned, we have never been disheartened... The Jewish people belongs in this society of nations. The representatives of the Jewish people of Palestine should sit in your midst – the representatives of the people and of the land which gave to mankind spiritual and ethical values, inspiring human personalities, and sacred texts which are your treasured possessions.”“Twenty-five years ago a similar international organization [League of Nations] recognized the historic claims of the Jewish people, sanctioned our program and set us firmly on the road of realization... The Jewish people was confirmed in its right to rebuild its national life in its historic home. It eagerly seized the long-hoped-for opportunity and proceeded to rebuild that ancient land of Israel in a manner which evoked the admiration of the whole world. It has made the wilderness blossom as a rose.”

1947(18th of Iyar, 5707): “A Jewish settler named Joel Drubin, 21 years old, was shot dead today” when he and two other settlers were attacked by 8 Arabs in an area between Kfar Uriah and Hulda “two Jewish settlements southeast of Tel Aviv.  The Arabs got away and the British were unable to find them.

1948 Nazi collaborator V-Mann Antonius van de Waals sentenced to death.

1949: “The Rev. Theodore Lewis of Dublin, Ireland, was formally installed today as Rabbi of the Congregation Jeshuat Israel at Newport, R.I.in the historic 186-year-old synagogue.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1949/05/09/84563448.html?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0&pageNumber=18

1950: An announcement was made today at Geneva that “Israel has accepted the proposal of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine to proceed with direct negotiations with the Arab states while the commission acts as mediator for the settlement of all outstanding issues.”  However, this announcement by Israel may not immediately lead to negotiations since the Arabs have pre-conditioned their participation on the demand that Jewish state must recognize the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel.

1951: Today, the concert at New York Town Hall was “devoted exclusively” to the music of Marion Bauer.

1952: Birthdate of New York born British academic Anna Brechta Sapir Abulafia, the Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

1953: The Jerusalem Postreported that, the Histadrut Executive unanimously to accept Arab workers into its Trade Unions starting on May 15, 1953.

1953: The Jerusalem Postreported that jobs for 40,000 workers were envisaged following the approval, by the Knesset Finance Committee, of a special IL70m “Development Budget.”

1953: The Jerusalem Postreported that, approximately 800 persons were killed in traffic accidents during the past four years.

1953: The Jerusalem Postreported that, Syria had appealed to all Arab States to tighten the economic blockade of Israel as "the best way to kill Israel peacefully."

1954: In Amsterdam Hans Ever and Bloeme Evers-Emden gave birth to Rabbi Raphael Evers, exactly nine years to the day after Bloeme had been liberated from a concentration camp by the Soviets.

1955: “Make Me an Offer,” the movie version Wolf Nankowitz’s novel of the same name was released today in the United Kingdom.

1956: Aaron Albert “Al” Silvera played his last game as an outfielder with the Cincinnati Reds.

1957: “Saint Joan” the movie version of the play by the same name directed and produced by Otto Preminger with music by Mischa Spoliansky and title sequences and theatrical posters by Saul Bass was released today in the United States.

1958: In Westport, CT, Howard Newmark and Gilda Gourlay (née Rames) gave birth to Brooks Phillip Victor Newmark, the Conservative MP and Cabinet member and son-in-law of historian John Keegan who left Parliament under a cloud of personal scandal.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-29585203

1959(30th of Nisan, 5719): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1959(30^th of Nisan, 5719): Fifty-eight year old Lithuanian born Yeshiva University professor Dr. Julius B. Maller the holder of doctorates from Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary and husband of Rose Ruth Aronowitz with whom he raised three children – Julie, Jeanne and Michael – passed away today while serving as the “director of research and statistics in the New York State Department of Audit and Control.”

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1959/05/09/89195990.pdf

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/maller-julius-bernard

1960: While exploring caves in the Judean desert an archaeological expedition led Yigael Yadin discovers fourteen letters written by Simon Bar-Kokhba, leader of the Jewish revolt against the Romans in 132 - 135 CE. One letter is written on wood and the rest are written on papyrus. Bar Kokhba is called Shimon Ben Kossiba in the letters. Once again, archeology helps to establish another of what some had called the “myths of Jewish history.”

1960:Gideon Hausner is appointed attorney general in Israel.

1960: Gertrude Berg, better known as “Molly Goldberg” appeared for the second time as the “mystery guess” on “What’s My Line?”

1960(11^thof Iyar, 5720): Sixty-two year old Sir Hersch Lauterpacht passed away.

http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/ajil55&div=12&id=&page=

1962(4^thof Iyar, 5722): Yom HaZikaron

1962: During his address to the nation today, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion will discuss the plans for “a special compulsory savings plan that will absorb some 60,000,000 Israeli providing for repayment over a five to seven year period.” (JTA)

1962: “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum,” a Stephen Sondheim musical with a “book” co-authored by Larry Gelbart starring Zero Mostel and featuring Jack Gilford and Ruth Kobart with lighting design by Jean Rosenthal opened today at the Alvin Theatre.

1964: Birthdate of Melissa Gilbert, child star on “Little House on the Prairie.”

1965: Gary Lewis’ “Count Me In” reached number two on Hot 100’s list today.

1966: CBS broadcast a television adaptation of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” produced by Daniel Melnick and David Susskind, co-starring Lee J. Cobb and George Segal and featuring Bernie Kopell and Gene Wilder.

1967(28^thof Nisan, 5727): Yom HaShoah

1970: In Montreal, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, who is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story and Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility gave birth to Naomi Klein Canadian journalist, author and activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.

1972 Four Palestinian terrorists from Black September boarded Sabena Flight 571 from Vienna to Tel Aviv. Twenty minutes after taking off from a scheduled stop, the hijackers took control of the flight and instructed the captain to continue as planned to Israel’s Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion International Airport).  Less than 24 hours later, Israeli commandos, among them today’s most prominent Israeli leaders launched a daring operation to rescue the flight’s passengers and retake the plane.

1972: Fiftieth birthday of airline pilot Reginald Levy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/world/europe/05levy.html

1974: ITV broadcast the 26^th and final episode of The World at War” a documentary about WW II “created by Jeremy Isaacs” and “directed by David Elstein.”

1974: “Kazablan” an “Israeli musical film directed by Menahem Golan and written by Menahem Golan and Haim Hefer starring Yehoram Gaon, Efrat Lavie, Arieh Elias, Etti Grotes and Yehuda Efroni was released today in the United States by MGM.

1976: After only seven performances, the curtain came down on “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” a musical created by Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner at the Mark Hellinger Theatre.

1978(1st of Iyar, 5738): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1978: The Jerusalem Postreported that in New York, the Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, appealed to the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, to "renew the spirit of our talks in Jerusalem"

1978: The Jerusalem Postreported that the New York police estimated that a crowd of 750,000, gathered in and around the Central Park, at an event which marked Israel's 30th anniversary, and listened to a 20 minute address by the Prime Minister.

1978: ABC TV airs "The Stars Salute Israel at 30" in honor of Israel's thirtieth Independence Day.

1980: Friends and family, including Elsa Leibler and Max Stern are scheduled to mark the passing of Sue Freedman Mintz, the wife of Jack Mintz and the mother of Terry Scharf and Dr. David Mintz at a pre-funeral gathering this evening.

1980: Three months after being released in the United States, “Saturn 3” a sci-fi film directed and produced by Stanley Donen, starring Kirk Douglas and Harvey Keitel and with music by Elmer Bernstein was released in the United Kingdom

1981: “Second-Hand Hearts” a comedy filmed by cinematographer Haskell Wexler was released in the United States today.

1981: Sixty-one year old Hamburg, Germany native George Saloman who in 1937 came to the United States where he was a member of the American Jewish Committee and wrote “on Jewish subjects” passed away today in Great Neck, NY.

1981(4th of Iyar, 5741): Eighty-three year old Uri Zvi Greenberg, a Hebrew and Yiddish poet, fighter for the independence of Israel and a member of the Knesset passed away today. “A representative of the new wave of 20th-century Jewish poetry, Mr. Greenberg drew on the tradition of biblical prophecy to write poems combining personal experience with an impersonal Jewish messianic destiny. Born in 1898 in Galicia, he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I and later emigrated to Palestine. He published his first volume of poetry in Yiddish in 1912.  Mr. Greenberg served in the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a and as a member of Israel’s parliament for one term.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/uzgreenberg.html

1981: In “Efforts To Rehabilitate Crown Heights Apartment Houses,” Alan Oser described efforts to dealing with challenge of providing affordable housing in a neighborhood so closely connected with the Chabad movement.

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/08/business/about-real-estate-efforts-to-rehabilitate-crown-heights-apartment-houses.html

1982: Shimon Peres meets with a dozen leaders of the Labor Party to report on a plan conceived by Defense Minister Arik Sharon for a massive military operation in Lebanon aimed eliminating the PLO presence and influence from that country.

1982: The original London production of They're Playing Our Song a musical with a book by Neil Simon, lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager, and music by Marvin Hamlischwhich which had opened in October, 1980 closed today

1982(15^thof Iyar, 5742): Forty-nine Sue Pritzker, the widow of Donald Pritzker who had died ten years ago, passed away today.

1983: Mr. and Mrs. Harry M. Rosenfeld of Albany have announced the engagement of their daughter, Susan Margot Rosenfeld, to Dr. Stuart Wachter, son of Mr. and Mrs. Irving Wachter of Flushing, Queens

1984(6^thof Iyar, 5744): Eighty-five year old CCNY basketball star Nathan “Nat” Krinsky  the “father of Paul L. Krinsky, former superintendent of the United States Merchant Marine Academy, and Edward M. Krinsky, former Director of Operations for the United States Basketball League” passed away today.https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/08/obituaries/nat-krinsky-all-american-at-city-college-and-a-coach.html

1985(23^rdof Iyar, 5645): Seventy-seven year old Notre Dame, U of Wisconsin and Brooklyn Dodgers football player Robert Sherman Halperin, a decorated WW II Naval officer, Bronze Medal sailor and CEO of Commercial Light Company passed away today after which he was buried next to his wife at Arlington National Cemetery.

https://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/athletes/ha/bob-halperin-1.html

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-05-09/news/8501290068_1_mr-halperin-palm-springs-landing

1985: “The Dewey House, also referred to as Building 29, North Chicago VA Medical Center, an historic building” designed by David Adler was added to the National Register of Historic Places today.

1986: NBC broadcast the final episode of season 4 of Family Ties, a sitcom created by Gary David Goldberg.

1986(29^thof Nisan, 5746): Emanuel “Manny” Shinwell, the trade unionist who was elevated to the peerage as Lord Shinwell passed away today at the age of 101.

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/08/obituaries/lord-shinwell-101-unionist-who-rose-to-british-cabinet.html

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-05-10/sports/sp-5046_1_lord-shinwell

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

1986(29^thof Nisan, 5746): Eighty-five year Ukrainian born American sculptor and watercolorist Eugenie Gershoy passed away today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenie_Gershoy#/media/File:Archives_of_American_Art_-_Eugenie_Gershoy_-_3049.jpg

http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-eugenie-gershoy-13135

1988: Today, on Mother’s Day the Feminist Taskforce (FTF) convened a conference in Philadelphia on Women and Poverty” during which a “panel discussion led by Adrienne Rich addressed the reality of high poverty rates among all women and discussed how stereotypes of Jewish wealth work to hide the poverty many Jewish women struggle with.”

1991(25th of Iyar, 5751):Rudolf Serkin, one of the world's great concert pianists passed away at the age of 88. The cause of death was cancer. A lanky man once described as looking "like a benign and slightly befuddled chemistry professor," Mr. Serkin performed for much of the 20th century. He made his concert debut in 1915, at age 12, and had his last major concert in 1988.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/10/obituaries/rudolf-serkin-88-concert-pianist-dies.html

1992: After having premiered last year in Portugal, “Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue” directed by Zalman King who also wrote the script, was released today in the United States.

1993(17^thof Iyar, 5753): Parashat Emor

1993(17^thof Iyar, 5753: Eighty-six year old Brooklyn native Irving Philip Kartell the St. John’s University trained lawyer, “an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York from 1947 to 1953” and the Justice of the State of Supreme Court in Brooklyn who “ruled in favor of women bus drivers in a landmark discrimination case while raising two children –James and Karren – with his wife, the former Leonore Sweedler” passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/10/obituaries/irving-p-kartell-86-new-york-state-justice.html

1993(17th of Iyar, 5753): Avram Davidson passed away.  Born in 1923, Avram Davidson is considered by some to be "one of the most original, charming, neglected and undervalued writers of our time.” A self-taught, bearded Orthodox Jewish, Davidson's work started with science fiction and then moved into more extreme areas of fantasy.  Readers who like him compare his works to Rudyard Kipling, Isaac B Singer and S.J. Perelman.

1995: According to reports published today stamps portraying the comic strips “Lil’l Abner” and Rube Goldberg Inventions” were two of the twenty classic strips being issued by the U.S. Postal Service “in commemoration of the 100^th anniversary of the American comic strip.”

1996(19th of Iyar, 5756): Ninety-five year old Serge Chermayeff, the only Jew to chair the architecture departments at both Yale and Harvard passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/10/arts/serge-chermayeff-95-architect-taught-at-harvard-and-yale.html

1999: “Rabbi Admits Theft Charge” published today described a “massive fraud” in which Rabbi Jacob Lustig of Cincinnati’s Kneseth Israel Congregation reported that their bingo game had brought in half a million dollars between 1996 and 1997 when in fact the games had earned two million dollars.

2000: “The national labor federation staged a one-hour warning strike today to protest provisions in the proposed tax package, which will be submitted to the parliament next month” “but in a rare show of cohesion, Prime Minister Ehud Barak's coalition cabinet endorsed the long-awaited tax plan with a 17-0 vote with two ministers abstaining.”
2001: The BBC broadcast “The British Wars” the 8^th episode of “A History of Britain a documentary series written and presented by Simon Schama” which began its second season tonight.

2001: Chandra Levy’s aunt, Linda Zamsky calls D.C. police Detective Durant and tells him that her niece had been having an affair with Congressman Gary Condit.

2001: Thirteen year old Yaakov “Koby” Mandell and fourteen year old Yosef Ishran were kidnapped while hiking near their village and subsequently brutally murdered.

2002: In a column entitled “The Politics of Victimhood,” Todd Gitlin makes the argument that “victimhood has become a default position for Jews and Palestinians alike – with bloody consequences for both peoples.”

2002(26^th of Iyar, 5762):A Palestinian terrorist detonated a suitcase packed with explosives in a crowded gambling and billiards club near Tel Aviv, killing at least 15 people and wounding 58. The attack apparently was timed to coincide with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's visit to the United States, where he met with President George W. Bush and other administration officials to discuss a new proposal for ending the conflict.

2003: The 19^th Israel Film Festival opens in Chicago with the premiere of A Trumpet in the Wadi

2003: “According to testimony gathered by journalist Philippe Broussard for today’s issue of Le Monde” Saddam Hussein’s “regime removed most the discriminatory anti-Jewish laws.”

2004(17^th of Iyar, 5764): Parashat Emor

2004: At Congregation Beth Israel, in West Hartford, CT. Rabbi Stephen Fuchs officiated at the wedding 31 year old Syracuse graduate Marisa Blake Pearlman, the daughter of Nancy and Robert Pearlman and 39 year old Syracuse grad Scot Benjamin Lerner, a real estate leasing and marketing specialist at the Max Capital Management Corporation in New York.

2005: The New York Timesincluded reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950” by Mark Mazower and a 75^th anniversary edition of “Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud.

2006, Pulitzer prize winning author David  Remnick gave an interview on The Daily Show to promote his book “Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker.”

2006: “The Communists Who Saved The Jewish State” published today describes a little known aspect (at least in the West) of the “miracle” that made it possible for the Jewish David to defeat the Arab Goliath.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/the-communists-who-saved-the-jewish-state-1.1872212006: Germany's national Holocaust memorial has drawn an estimated 3.5 million visitors in the year since it was inaugurated according to figures made public today. The memorial - a vast field of more than 2,700 gray slabs situated close to the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin - opened to the public on May 12 last year. Some 3.5 million people are estimated to have wandered through the monument since then, said Uwe Neumaerker, a top official with the foundation that manages it. The memorial is freely accessible around the clock. About 490,000 visitors have been registered at the site's underground information center, at one end of the site, with exhibits on the fate of some of the Nazis' six million Jewish victims. Although the slabs are covered with an anti-graffiti coating, in the first year, five swastikas, four stars of David and one other piece of graffiti had been reported, Neumaerker said. Last year's inauguration of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe followed 17 years of wrangling among German politicians over the design and message of the monument. Writer Lea Rosh, who proposed the memorial in 1988, said that the reaction "was fifty-fifty, and so it has stayed." She said she hoped the monument could still win over skeptics, some of whom have argued that it is too abstract.

2007: Dr. Tamara Levitz presents "Kurt Weill's Kol Nidre and Jewish Memory" at New York’s Center for Jewish History. Tamara Levitz, associate professor at UCLA, and currently a visiting professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, explores Kurt Weill's use of the Kol Nidre melody in three Jewish works composed in American exile: The Eternal Road; We Will Never Die; and A Flag is Born.

2007: “Paula Abdul's second greatest-hits CD, Greatest Hits: Straight Up!, was released by Virgin Records” today.

2007: “The J.A.P. Show, Jewish American princesses of Comedy” is performed at Actors Temple Theatre in New York City.

2007: Belgian Prime Minster Guy Verhofstadt publicly apologized for Belgian authorities’ involvement in the deportation of Jews to Nazi extermination camps during World War II.  The apology came on the day that the government-backed report “Submissive Beligium was published.  It lays bare the responsibility of high-ranking officials and municipalities in collaborating with the the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

2007: The Associated Press reported today that researchers claim they’ve found Herod’s tomb, a find that could provide insights into one of the Bible's most reviled figures.



“Under a baking sun, pieces of limestone carved with borders of rosettes and geometrical designs lay in three excavated pits Tuesday — a desert site Israeli archaeologists say is the tomb of King Herod, who ruled the Holy Land when Christ was born. The find, which could provide insights into one of the Bible's most reviled yet influential figures, includes hundreds of pieces of an ornate sarcophagus, but no bones and no inscription that would seal the identification. Although the tomb was shattered and empty, leaders of the Israeli team that unearthed it said Tuesday they will dig on in the hope of finding jewelry, other artifacts or even the biblical monarch's remains. Hebrew University archaeologist Ehud Netzer said he has been leading the search for Herod's tomb at the king's winter palace in the Judean desert, in an Israeli-controlled part of the West Bank south of Jerusalem, for 35 years. Last month, his team started unearthing limestone fragments, from which emerged the picture of an ornately carved sarcophagus with decorative urns of a type never before found in the Holy Land."It's a sarcophagus we don't just see anywhere," Netzer told reporters at the university. "It is something very special."The complete sarcophagus would have been about nine feet long, the university said. Herod was the Jewish proxy ruler of the Holy Land under imperial Roman occupation from 37 B.C. His most famous construction project was expanding the Jewish Second Temple in Jerusalem. Remnants of his extensive building work in Jerusalem are still visible in Jerusalem's Old City, and he undertook major construction projects in Caesaria, Jericho, the hilltop fortress of Masada and elsewhere. At the excavation site, on the steep, rocky slopes of a cone-shaped hill 2,230 feet high, Netzer's assistant, Yaakov Kalmar, said that an account of Herod's funeral by the first-century historian Josephus Flavius left little doubt that it took place at Herodium. The newly discovered tomb was regal in its opulence. "We have here all the attributes of a royal funeral," Kalmar said. "We didn't find inscriptions so far... The work is not finished." The site sits halfway up the hill, atop a warren of tunnels and water cisterns built to serve the palace at the summit. Stephen Pfann, an American expert in the Second Temple period at the University of the Holy Land, called the find a "major discovery by all means," but said the lack of an inscription hindered full verification. "We're moving in the right direction. It will be clinched once we have an inscription that bears his name," said Pfann, who did not participate in Netzer's dig. Eric Myers of Duke University, who has excavated in the Holy Land, said initial descriptions of the tomb pointed to its authenticity as belonging to Herod. "We know he was buried at Herodium," he said by telephone. "It's a significant find after a long search. "Myers said that among key clues were that the sarcophagus was placed on a raised platform rather than in the underground tombs used for those of lesser rank, and that in accordance with Jewish religious law, it was not decorated with any human image. "It sounds as if Herod was respectful of his Jewish tradition right up to the end," he said. David Owen, a biblical historian and archaeologist at Cornell University who has done extensive field work in Israel, was not surprised by the find."That's where Josephus says he was buried," said Owen. "He built that entire palatial complex and there are few doubts that his tomb would be there." The Herod of the Bible and of Christian tradition was a bloodthirsty megalomaniac, who flew into a paranoid frenzy when he encountered the three wise men on their way to Bethlehem with gifts for the baby Jesus, and telling of the birth of a new king of Israel. "Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceedingly wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under..." (Matthew 2:16). The biblical massacre figures in paintings such as Peter Paul Rubens' 17th-century "Massacre of the Innocents." However the account, does not appear in other Gospels, and experts are not convinced of its accuracy, especially the implications of mass infanticide. Some believe the decree applied only to Bethlehem, a small town at the time, where there may have been as few as 15 toddlers. Historians do agree that toward the end of his reign Herod slaughtered many political rivals and perceived plotters against him, among them one of his 10 wives and three of his sons. Josephus says that as the elderly Herod lay riddled with disease, he ordered the cream of the local Jewish aristocracy to be executed on his demise, so that his passing would bring widespread and genuine mourning. After Herod's death, Herodium became a stronghold for Jewish rebels fighting Roman occupation, and the site suffered significant battle damage before it was conquered and finally destroyed by Roman forces in A.D. 71, a year after they destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Kalmar said the sarcophagus could have been destroyed during Roman attacks or smashed by the rebels, who reviled the memory of Herod as a Roman puppet. "We know that Herod had a lot of enemies," he said. Roi Porat, another of Netzer's assistants on the digs, said it was possible that the Jews removed Herod's remains after his tomb was reduced to rubble.

2007: Tight-end Michael Andrew "Mike" Seidman signed with Indianapolis Colts after having been cut by the Carolina Panthers.

2008: In an ongoing program designed to share Jewish culinary traditions Hillel offers another cooking class taught by Cordell Braverman of Cooking Cottage

2008:In Rockville, Maryland Joyce Antler, a professor of Jewish history and culture discusses You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother (recently published in paperback) at a luncheon event at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington

2008(3rd of Iyar, 5768): Yom Ha”Atzmaut – Israeli Independence Day

2008: On Israel's 60th Independence Day, eight organizations are awarded the Israel Prize for a lifetime contribution to the state and society. The recipients are the Perah work-study mentoring program at universities, the Jewish Agency, the Manufacturers Association of Israel, the Youth Movements Council incorporating 14 movements, Ezer Mizion - Israel's largest paramedic support organization, and the three major women’s organizations that have been active since pre-state days: WIZO, Na'amat, and Emunah.

2008: Italian President Giorgio Napolitano opened the prestigious Turin book fair in the northern Italian city, despite international Muslim anger over the choice of Israel as the event's guest of honor. "No dialogue is possible if there is a refusal to recognize Israel," Napolitano said at Israel's special stand at the fair. There can be no "rejection of the reasons for its birth [60 years ago] or of its right to exist in peace and security." The state of Israel was created almost 60 years ago overtop of mostly Palestinian lands recently cleansed of their inhabitants by force, or threat thereof, by Jewish forces. Over 700,000 Palestinian became refugees in the process. Israel's stand was swamped by hundreds of people, many draped in the Israeli flag. One group held a banner reading, "I feel Jewish today." Like its Parisian counterpart in March, the Turin fair is honoring Israel on the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state's creation. Prominent Israeli authors Abraham B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Amos Oz, Aaron Appelfeld and Meir Shalev will be among those featured at the fair. Turin's chief rabbi, Alberto Moshe Somekh, said that the city had shown "great courage" in deciding to honor Israel. At a special service in the city's main synagogue, he said the tribute marked also marked "4,000 years of our presence on the world stage as 'People of the Book.'"

2009:Pope Benedict XVI began his eight day pilgrimage which will take him to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

2010: “The Portuguese gave us fried fish, the Belgians invented chips but 150 years ago an East End boy united them to create The World’s Greatest Double Act” published today described the role Joseph Malin, a 13 year old Jewish boy in created the delicacy known as “Fish & Chips.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1275320/The-Portugese-gave-fried-fish-Belgians-invented-chips-150-years-ago-East-End-boy-united-create-The-Worlds-Greatest-Double-Act.html

2010: The Yom HaAtzmaut Spring Marathon 2010, an evening of dancing, ushering in the delights of spring in celebration of Israel’s independence is scheduled to begin tonight at 8:45 this evening at the 92^nd St Y.

2010: “Giants of Jazz on Film - Benny Goodman and the Kings of Swing” is scheduled to begin at 8 pm at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.

2010: Hamas or another group fired a rocket, which landed in open ground near Ashkelon today. Approximately 50 rockets have landed in Israeli territory since the beginning of 2010.

2010:The fans of a Polish professional soccer team displayed an anti-Semitic banner during a match. Fans of Resovia Rzeszow at a May 8 match put up a large banner showing a caricatured hook-nosed Jew with a blue and white yarmulke -- the colors of the opposing team -- and the phrase “Death to the Crooked Noses.”

2010(24^thof Iyar, 5770): Andor Lilienthal, the last of the original 27 chess grandmasters, who played 10 world champions and beat 6 of them, passed away today at his home in Budapest at the age of 99 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/crosswords/chess/12lilienthal.html

2011: Rabbi Kenneth Ehrlich, Dean, Cincinnati campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is scheduled to facilitate “The People of the Book” a lecture/discussion designed to review the rich and varied experience of the Jewish people in America in words and images created by American Jewish literary artists

2011: Roman Arkadyevich Baranovichi was ranked # 3 on the Sunday Times Rich List 2011 which was published today. Shlomo Moussaieff and his wife and business partner, Alisa, were ranked #315

2011: The Jewish Historical Society of Delaware is scheduled to hold its Annual Meeting, featuring a presentation by the Delaware Art Museum’s Executive Director and noted art historian Dr. Danielle Rice. In her lecture, “The Jewish Contribution to Art in Delaware,” Dr. Rice will highlight the Delaware Art Museum’s holdings by Jewish artists and the worlds from which they come.

2011:In honor of Yom Hazikaron (Israeli Remembrance Day) and Yom Ha'atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) Yeshiva University Museum and Center for Jewish History with American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research are scheduled to present: “Remembering 1948 - In Color” featuring “I Was There In Color,” Avishai Kfir’s  documentary that uses recently discovered footage, shot by Fred Monosson, a Jewish-American businessman to show the birth of the Jewish state in living color.

2011: The Los Angeles Timesfeatured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag” by Sigrid Nunez

2012: Mr. David McKenzie, Interpretive Programs Manager of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington will discuss, the award winning exhibit “Jewish Washington: Scrapbook of an American Community” an “exhibit created by the Jewish Historical society of Greater Washington that tells stories about the Jewish community in Washington from 1795 to the present.”

2011(4^th of Iyar, 5771): On Mother’s Day, 97 year-old Holocaust survivor Rose Linder passed away.  As a young woman she had clerked for Raphael Lemkin, the Polish born attorney credited with coning the term “genocide.”  After fleeing Poland, Mrs. Linder worked as a teacher and employment counselor in the Chicago metropolitan area.

2012(16^th of Iyar, 5772): One-hundred one year old Polish born American violinist Roman Totenberg, the husband of Melanie (Shroder) Totenberg who was his business manager for 50 years and father of NPR Correspondent Nina Totenberg and Judge Amy Totenberg passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/arts/music/roman-totenberg-violinist-and-teacher-dies-at-101.html

2012(16^th of Iyar, 5772): Eighty-nine year old “Louis H. Pollak, a federal judge and former dean of two prestigious law schools who played a significant role in major civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case” passed away today. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/us/louis-pollak-judge-and-civil-rights-advocate-dies-at-89.html?_r=2&hpw&

2012: The 18^th annual World of Hope Charity Golf Classic for the benefit of The Rabbi Itzhaq M. Klirs Adult Education Fund & Caring Capital is scheduled to take place at the Twin Lakes Golf Course in Centerville, VA.

2012(16^th of Iyar, 5772): Eighty-three year old “Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche” passed away today (As reported by Margalit Fox)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/books/maurice-sendak-childrens-author-dies-at-83.html?ref=books

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/books/understanding-children-yet-wanting-them-to-grow-up-a-bit.html?_r=1&hp

2012: Alon Yavnai Big Band with special guest Dave Liebman is scheduled to perform at Joe’s Pub in New York City.

2013(28^th of Iyar, 5773): Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Reunification Day

2013: “Settling In,” an exhibition that “examines the experience and acculturation of immigrants to Oregon through the lens of Jewish experience” is scheduled to open at the Oregon Jewish Museum.

http://ojmexhibitmedia.weebly.com/

2013: University of Iowa Professor Dr. Robert Cargill, biblical studies scholar, classicist, archeologist, author and digital humanist is scheduled to a lecture entitled "The Five Defenders of Jerusalem: A Study of Cities (not people) that defended Jerusalem from attacks including Hazor, Meggido, Gezer, Lachish and Azekah."

2013(28^th of Iyar, 5773): One hundred one year old violin virtuoso Roman Totenberg passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/arts/music/roman-totenberg-violinist-and-teacher-dies-at-101.html

2013: American Society for Jewish Music and American Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to present “A Living Connection: The Musical Lives and Legacies of Morris Hollender, Sonia Victor, and Marty Levitt.”

2013: Yeshiva University Museum is scheduled to present “It’s a Thin Line: The Eruv and the Jewish Community in New York and Beyond”

2013: Stephen Hawking, the noted British physicist, has reportedly opted to endorse the academic boycott of Israel and withdraw from the fifth annual Presidential Conference in Jerusalem in June, where he was slated to give a talk, the British daily Guardian reported today.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/stephen-hawking-opts-out-of-israeli-conference/

2013: Today the Jordanian Parliament voted unanimously in favor of petitioning the government to expel Israel’s ambassador in Amman and recall Jordan’s ambassador in Tel Aviv in protest of alleged Israeli desecration of holy sites in Jerusalem

2013: Eighty-eight year old “Geza Vermes, a religious scholar who argued that Jesus as a historical figure could be understood only through the Jewish tradition from which he emerged, and who helped expand that understanding through his widely read English translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls” passed away today. (As reported by William Yardley)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/world/europe/geza-vermes-dead-sea-scrolls-scholar-dies-at-88.html?hpw&_r=0

2013: President Shimon Peres delivered remarks at the state memorial ceremony for the Jews of Ethiopia who died on their journey to Israel

2014: Observance of “Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust”  a memorial day championed by director Steven Spielberg.



2014: “Circus Palestina” is scheduled to be shown at the Israel Film Festival hosted by Agudas Achim under the leadership of Rabbi Jeff Portman.



2014: “A new Anne Frank play premieres in Amsterdam today, promising to bring the troubled teenage girl’s identity out from behind the shadow of the Holocaust’s most famous victim.”

http://www.timesofisrael.com/new-anne-frank-play-attempts-to-wrest-girl-from-symbol/





2014: “Closer to the Moon” is scheduled to be shown at the National Center for Jewish Films 17^th annual film festival.

2014: Tzvi Arieli told JTA today that “Ukrainian Jewish with combat skills have a rapid intervention force” which he leads “to stop anti-Semitic attacks.”

2014: “Schools near the Dead Sea were shut and several roads in the area were blocked by authorities this morning as a rare tropical storm dumped rain across the country causing flash floods and wreaking havoc in the south of the country.”

2014: As part of Jewish American Heritage Month, in Philadelphia, PA, the National Museum of American Jewish History is scheduled  to host a presentation by the official Historian of the Major League Baseball, John Thorn on “Jackie Robinson: Outside Hero.”

2014(8^thof Iyar, 5774): Ninety-six energy economist Morris A. Adelman passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/business/morris-a-adelman-dies-at-96-saw-oil-as-inexhaustible.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&_r=0

2014: Richard A. Flak completed his service as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967

2014: Closing night of The Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival.

2015(19^thof Iyar, 5775): Eighty-two year old “Israeli painter and sculptor Menashe Kadishman passed away today in Ramat Gan.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/15/menashe-kadishman-obituary

http://new.menashekadishman.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menashe_Kadishman#/media/File:Kadishman1.jpg

2015: “A judge declared a mistrial in the Etan Patz case today after jurors said for a third time that they could not reach a verdict despite three weeks of deliberation, leaving unresolved a missing-child case that vexed New York City for decades and led to a sea change in the way Americans view the security of their children.”

2015: In Cedar Rapids, Temple Judah is scheduled to host its final Musical Shabbat for 5775

2015: Ruth David “a former Tel Aviv district attorney” who was arrested in a corruption scandal “fainted on the steps of the Jerusalem District Court” today “ahead of a hearing for the extension of her remand.”

2015: “Dancing Arabs” is scheduled to be shown at the 18^th Annual Film Festival sponsored by the National Center for Jewish Film’s

2015: A day after the general election. Ed Miliband, the leader of the Britain’s Labour Party offered to resign today.

2015: The Cultural Services of the Israeli Embassy is scheduled to co-sponsor “A Literary Quest” at the Westbeth Center for the Arts that includes Assaf Gavron and Carlos Fraenkel

2015: Susan Veronica Kramer complete her service as the Minister of State for Transport in the United Kingdom.

2015: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to co-host a “Community Wide Commemoration of the 70^th Anniversary of Victory Day” “honoring the victory of Soviet and Allied forces in World War II and Holocaust Survivors.”

2015: The Washington Jewish Music Festival is scheduled to host Shabbat In Song.

http://www.wjmf.org/shabbatinsong

2015: Juliana Maio is scheduled to speak on “When Cairo Was Paris” at the 92^ndStreet Y where she will described Egypt in the first half of the 20^thcentury when “Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together harmoniously and Cairo and Alexandria were among the most cosmopolitan, glamorous and pluralistic cities in the world.

http://us6.campaign-archive2.com/?u=94315597763486b9c71e83935&id=dfe5d7e1c6&e=f43f6f1665

2016(30^thof Nisan, 5776): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

2016: “The Women of the Wall organization proceeded with its plan to hold a priestly blessing at Jerusalem’s Western Wall today, despite a ruling from the attorney general barring the group from doing so.

2016: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story by Matti Friedman and the recently issued paperback editions of Frank:  A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage by Barney Frank and Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen

2016: The Illinois and Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host a speech by Zev Rogalin who survived the Siauliai Ghetto and the Stutthof Concentration Camp.

2016: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to host a Spring Walking Tour where participants will “learn what Jewish life and worship was like in the historic Seventh Street, NW, neighborhood from 1850 to 1950.”

2016: In Philadelphia, the National Museum of American Jewish History is scheduled to celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month by opening its doors without charge today, Mother’s Day.

2016: CBS television broadcast the last episode of “The Good Wife” starring Julianna Margulies today.

2016: The American Society for Jewish Music is scheduled to host “Music in Our Time”

2016: After seven very successful seasons, CBS broadcast the final episode of “The Good Wife” starring Julianna Margulies.

2016: The Center for Jewish History and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research are scheduled to host Dr. Samantha Hill on “Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil.”

2017: “The Wonders” is scheduled to be shown today at the Vancouver Jewish Film Center.

2017: NEH Senior Scholar Naomi Seidman is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “My Unconscious Speaks Yiddish at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

2017: Genealogist Daniel Horowitz of MyHeritage is scheduled to share techniques, resources and repositories in the US and in the world that helped him discover the US branch of his family in a lecture at the Library of Congress.

2017(12^thof Iyar, 5777): Eighty-seven year old Harvard graduate Julian I. Edison, the St. Louis born son of Mark and Ida Edison and husband of Hope Rabb Edison with whom he raised two sons Mark and Aaron who was Chairman of Edison Brothers Stores, Inc. passed away today.

https://www.stljewishlight.com/life_cycle/obituaries/julian-i-edison-former-shoe-executive-philanthropist-dies-at/article_303a5d3c-3f10-11e7-b063-9bf78f8ab380.html

2017: “The "Immortal Regiment" march was held in the Israeli city of Ashdod today.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201705091053400888-israeli-ashdod-immortal-regiment/

2017(12^thof Iyar, 5777):  Seventy-seven year old author Judith Stein passed away today. (As reported by Sam Roberts)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/books/judith-stein-dead-historian-author-on-marcus-garvey.html

2017: Today “President Donald Trump directed the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to make a case against FBI Director James Comey in writing.

2017: For the first time Senior Sephardi Rabbi Joseph Dweck reportedly said “the LGBT revolution had been a “fantastic” development for humanity” for which he would be condemned by Rabbi Shraga Feivel Zimmerman, the Rov of Gateshead.

2017: Susan Kramer completed her service as the Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for the Treasury.

2018: The “Out with the Old” and “Tevye’s Daughters” are scheduled to be shown at the Washington Jewish Film Festival today.

2018: “Saving Auschwitz?” and “The Invisibles” are scheduled to be shown at the 26^thToronto Jewish Film Festival.

2018: The Yeshiva University Museum, Commentary Magazine and The Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought are scheduled to present “Moses on Film – from Ten Commandments to the Prince of Egypt.”a

2018: The Streicker Center is scheduled to host “Israel: A Conversation Across Generations with Professor Jonathan Sarna, Leah Sarna, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and Naomi Telushkin.”

2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host screenings of “Ben Gurion, Epilogue” and “The Red House” which tells the story of the Tel Aviv edifice built in 1924 that “was first used as a textile factory” before becoming in turns a synagogue and an art gallery.

2019: In South Bend, IN, the Michiana Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to host a screening of “From Cairo to the Cloud”

https://www.cairotothecloud.com/about-the-film

2019: The Jewish Museum in London is scheduled to host “Money and Daddy: Social Responsibility and Hollywood's 'Jewish American Princess'” this evening during which “Dr. Julia Wagner explores representations of Jewish women on screen, focusing on young protagonists from wealthy families who use their privileged positions for social good, including Private Benjamin, Dirty Dancing and Clueless.” 

2019(3^rdof Iyar, 5779): Yom Hazikaron

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/yom-hazikaron-israels-memorial-day/

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/yom-hazikaron-israeli-memorial-day

2019: In Pleasanton, CA, Congregation Beth Emek is scheduled host an Israel Independence Day Program where Lt. Col. Amos Guiroa (IDF, retired) will deliver the keynote address on “Post-Election Israel: Will the Peace Process Move Forward?”

2019: “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away” is scheduled to open today at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/arts/design/auschwitz-museum-of-jewish-heritage.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

2019: In New Orleans, “the Clergy Council and the Jewish Community Center” are scheduled to host “a  service marking Yom Hazikaron, Israel's Official Memorial Day for her fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism”  followed immediately by “the community dinner celebrating Israel's 71st birthday!!”

2020(14^thof Iyar, 5780): Pesach Sheni

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/470865/jewish/Pesach-Sheni.htm

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pesach-sheni

2020: As the world prepares to celebrate the 75^th anniversary of VE Day, “Jewish Care residents and volunteers recall celebratory scenes in Paris and Trafalgar Square – as well as memories of narrowly escaping bombing raids on London and enduring evacuations and rationing.”

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/ve-day-was-the-best-day-of-our-lives/

2020: The Contemporary Jewish Museum is scheduled to host a virtual presentation of “The Man Who Captured Time” during which “Contemporary Jewish Museum school program manager Cara Buchalter talks about Eadweard Muybridge, a Victorian photographer, murderer and inventor of the motion picture” who was also an inspiration for Phillip Glass’s opera, “The Photographer.”

2020: The Illinois Holocaust Museum, together with The Peter Polsky Freedom Fund and The Chicago Association of Veterans of WWII is scheduled to host a special virtual event commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII.

2020: The Steicker Center is scheduled a virtual presentation on “The Jewish Tradition of Protest” with Dr. David Kraemer.

2020: The Breman Museum is scheduled to host the “third installment of its partnered virtual series with the Jewish Educational Alliance and Savannah Jewish Federation, featuring guest speaker Mark K. Bauman retired as professor of history at Atlanta Metropolitan College.

2020: OneTable is scheduled to host on line “Welcoming Sacred Time With Song” featuring “reflection, ritual and joyful song led by Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife, executive director of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute.”

2020: In Pepper Pike, OH, via, Zoom B’nai Jeshurun Congregation is scheduled to host Cantor Aaron Shifrman as he talks about “The How and Why of Jewish Ritual.”

This Day, May 9, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 9

1408: Gabriele Condulmer, who as Pope Eugene IV “would decree and order that from now on, and for all time, Christians shall not eat or drink with the Jews, nor admit them to feasts, nor cohabit with them, nor bathe with them. […]  They cannot live among Christians, but in a certain street, separated and segregated from Christians, and outside which they cannot under any pretext have houses” was elevated to the position of Cardinal1457 BCE: In the 15^thcentury BCE, Battle of Megiddo between Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition under the King of Kadesh. The victory of Thutmose extended the orbit of Egyptian influence into Canaan and Syria which might help explain some of the events described in the last chapters of Genesis and the opening portion of Exodus.  According to one source, the Exodus took place in 1456 which would not be consistent with the information surrounding the battle. Other sources indicate that Joshua and the Israelites crossed the Jordan around 1200 BCE.  Based on archeological evidence, Megiddo was a site of military importance during the time of King Solomon and he kept a chariot force stationed there.  The Judeans lost a battle with the Egyptians in 609 BCE and the British scored a significant victory over the Turks at the same site in 1918. Fighting at Megiddo would play a significant role during the War of Independence as both sides sought to control the Jezreel Valley. It is the first battle to have been recorded in what is accepted as relatively reliable detail.  According to Christian doctrine, there is supposed to be a battle between the forces of good and evil in th end of days.  The battle is known as Armageddon which is Greek form of the Hebrew Har-Megiddo (Mt of Megiddo).

1224: Innocent IV issued “Impia Judoerum Perfidia,” a papal bull that ordered the French King to burn the Talmud and forbade Jews from employing Christian nurses.

1317: In his will dated today, the infanteDon Pedro, ordered that Judah Abravanel be paid: (1) 15,000 maravedis for clothes delivered; (2) 30,000 maravedis as part of a personal debt, at the same time requesting Judah to release him from paying the rest. Judah had been in great favor with King Alfonso the Wise, with whom he once had a conversation regarding Judaism.

1664: In Lemberg and Cracow, Poland, anti-Jewish riots by students and peasants resulted in damages and death in both communities. In Lemberg, the cantor was killed during when the synagogue was attacked.

1712: In Berlin, the cornerstone of the first public synagogue was laid in Heiderentergasse.

1775: Birthdate of Moses Philippson the Jewish writer, teacher, translator and publisher who was related to 16^th century Rabbi Joshua ben Joseph Hoseschel and who taught at the Jewish School in Dessau.

 1775: David Salisbury Franks was released after having been under arrest for six days on charges of having spoken “disrespectfully” about King George III. Franks, who was living in Montreal at the time, became such an ardent supporter of the American Revolution that he joined the Continental Army.

1778(12th of Iyar): Chasidic Rabbi Samuel Shmelke Horowitz, author of Divrei Shmuel, passed away today.

1788(2nd of Iyar): Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, autheo of “Peri Ha-Aretz,” passed away

1798: Napoleon Bonaparte arrived at Toulon as the French prepared for a military campaign that would take them Jaffa, Acre and a promise by the French leader to restore the Jews to a state in Palestine.

1800(14^thof Iyar, 5560): Pesach Sheni

1800: Birthdate of Justus Olshuasen, the German philologist who published a textbook on the Hebrew Language in 1861 and Emendation of the Old Testament.

1800: Birthdate of abolitionist John Brown best known for his seizure of Harper’s Ferry.  However, he had played an active role in the fighting between slave owners and free soilers in Kansas during 1850’s.  When he led the raid on Pottawatomie, Kansas, he was joined by three Jews – August Bondi, Jacob Benjamin and Theodore Weiner. 

1805(10^thof Iyar, 5565): Sixty-six year old Boston businessman Moses Michael Hays, the New York born son of Dutch Jewish immigrants Judah Hays and Rebecca Michaels, husband of Rachel Myers and brother-in-law to New York silversmith Myer Myers and Rabbi Isaac de Abraham Touro who was a supporter of the American Revolution and founder of the Massachusetts Bank which survives today as the Bank of America passed away today at which he was “at The Colonial Burying Ground in Newport.”

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/moses-michael-hays

1809: Birthdate of Middlesex native Ralph Disraeli.

1812: Birthdate of Egyptian-born Indian civil servant, Henry Edward Goldsmid.

1822(18^thof Iyar, 5582): Lag B’Omer

1822(18^thof Iyar, 5582): Seventy-six year old Bavarian born Jacob Naphtali Hart, the husband of Lean Nathan passed away today in New York City.

1824: In Sejny, Poland, R' Moses Bacharach and Sheina Bacharach gave birth to Jacob ben Moses Bachrach, the “grammarian and rabbi” who was the husband of Reva Bachrach.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/bachrach-jacob-ben-moses

1828: Birthdate of Somerville, OH and Jefferson Medical College trained physician Levi Cooper Lane

https://web.archive.org/web/20110907063027/http://www.cpmc.org/professionals/hslibrary/collections/archives/lane.html

1837: Elisa Morpurgo (Parente) and Giuseppe / Joseph Baron von Morpurgo gave birth to Emilio Isacco Baron de Morpurgo

1841(18^thof Iyar, 5601): Lag B’Omer

1841: Leon Lewis Isaacs married Fanny Abrahams at the Great Synagogue today.

1841: In Charleston, SC, Rabbi Pozhanski officiated at the wedding of Judah Bensadon and Leah Hyams.

1849: In London, Rabbi Moses Henry Myers, the London born son of Rabbi Henry Henoch Myers and his wife Sarah H. Myers gave birth to Victor Myers

1850: In Albany, NY, “Dr. Joseph Lewi and Bertha Schwarz” gave birth to “Isidor Lewi,” an “editorial writer for the New York Tribune” and publisher of the New Era Illustrated Magazine.

1852: As a sign of Christian determination to gain Jewish converts, Reverend William Ramsay is scheduled to deliver the annual sermon before the American Society for the Meliorating the Condition of the Jews in New York City.

1855: The new building for the Jews Hospital in New York, located on 28^thStreet between 7^th and 8^th Avenues, has been completed.  The building which cost $35,000 is four stories high and has room for 150 patients.  Dedication ceremonies are scheduled for May 17.

1856: An “English gossiper” described a meeting with Sir Lionel Goldsmid, Lord Mayor Salomons and Sir Moses Montefiore in an article entitled “Three Great Jews” published today.

1859: One day after she had passed a way, Catherin Jacobs, the wife of Isaac Jacobs with whom she had had six children was buried toda at the “Halfway (Queensborough) Jewish Cemetery.”

1863(20^thof Iyar, 5623: On Shabbat, during the Civil War, Lieutenant L.S. Lipman died while serving with the 5^th Louisiana.

1864(3rd of Iyar, 5624): Lieutenant W.M. Wolf died while serving with Hagood’s S.C. Brigade.

1864: John Engel, a native of Maryland who had been working as a clerk in Mecklenburg County (NC) enlisted in the Confederate Army today.

1864: Walter Goodman arrived in Cuba where he worked as an artist and painting theatrical sets and journalist writing articles and letters to the New York Herald, using the nom de plume el Caballero Inglese.

1865: At Nashville, TN, Union Brigadier General Frederick Knefler led the 79^thIndiana Infantry Brigade in final review of the army under the command of General George Thomas. Following the review, Knefler, one of the highest ranking Jewish officers to serve in the U.S. Army during the Civil War, took his troops back to Indianapolis where they were mustered out of service.

1868: The city of Reno, Nevada, is founded. Jews have been part of the Reno community since the founding of the city.  According to the history prepared by Temple Emanu-El “One of the first Jewish organizations was the "Reno Hebrew Benevolent Society" established in 1879. The Society's purpose was to secure a piece of land for a cemetery, assist sick members and, in case of death, provide for a decent internment. The initial membership fee was $2.50 with a monthly membership payment of fifty cents.’ For more about the history of the Jews in Reno see Jews in Nevada: A History by John Marschall.

1871: Lipman Emanuel “Lip” Pike played in his first major league baseball game as a member of the Troy Haymakers.

1872: The American Society for the Promotion of Christianity Among the Jews held its second anniversary meeting this evening at the Union Presbyterian Church in New York City.  While the report of Reverend Abraham C. Tris stated “that the progress of the work have been very encouraging” it never provided any number of Jews who had actually converted as a result of the society’s efforts.

 1873: Myer Stern, President of the Hebrew and Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society, a trustee of Temple Emanu-El and a prominent businessman and political figure was one of three people nominated by the Mayor to serve as Commissioners of charities and Correction in New York City.

1874: Birthdate of Posen, Germany native, Simon Peiser who in 1892 came to the United States where he graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1896, was ordained as a Rabbi at the Hebrew Union College and married Amelia Buchman in 194, “two months after becoming Superintendent” of the Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum.

1876(15^thof Iyar, 5636): Pesach N. Rubenstein who had been convicted of murdering Sara Alexander starved himself to death before he could be hanged for his crime.

1878: Russia promulgated another set of regulations pertaining to the military service of the Jews today.

1881: Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Shpola and Ananyev, Russia.  This was part of a wave of anti-Semitic violence that would sweep back and forth across Russia until the start of World War I.  It was consistent with the Czars 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 policy for the Jews.  Things would be so bad for the Jews that one third would convert, one third would leave the country and one third would die.  And Russia would be free of its Jewish Problem

1882: In “Biala, Russia,” “Raphael Shalom and Cheyah Sarah (Pilatsky) Rosenblatt gave birth to the “King of the Cantors, Josef “Yossele” Rosenblatt, the husband of “Taube Kaufman.”

http://thejewniverse.com/2010/a-hazzan-in-the-opera-house/?utm_source=Jewniverse+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5c383a1f2c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b48fb1c44e-5c383a1f2c-27129561

1885: Rabbi Alexander Kohut of Grosswardein, Hungary delivered his first sermon at Temple Ahavath Chesed in New York City.

1886: In New York “500 people met at the Salem Fields Cemetery” today to dedicate a monument honor Jewish philanthropist Seligman Solomon.  Among other things, the 20 foot high granite shaft honored his work with the Hebrew Orphan Asylum calling him “A Father to the Orphan and Humanity’s Nobelest Volunteer.”

1890: In the upper house of the Prussian Diet, right-wing politician Count Pfeil moved that the government take measures to limit the educational opportunities of Jewish students.

1892: “Bay State Republicans” published today described status of the Massachusetts Republican Party as it prepares for the upcoming national convention in Minneapolis.  This includes the role to played by party secretary Ratchesky, “a very clever, shrewd and cunning Jewish politician who has been useful in in the past in keeping his people in line for the Republican ticket. He is a member of the Boston Common Council, a keen debater and a man of unlimited political resource.” He is one of two men described as exercising “absolute control over the machinery” of the Republican Party. 

1892: Five days after she had passed away, Sarah Eliza Henriques, “the widow of Joseph Gutteres Henriques” and the mother of Alfred and Frederick Henrqiues was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1893: John B. Weber, the former Commissioner of Immigration expressed his views on reports that the government of Russia has issued edicts expelling the Jews from Poland. He is concerned that this latest wave of immigrants will not benefit the United States and that the Czar and the Europeans are dumping their unwanted Jews on the Americans.

1893: The decision of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions to actively work to convert Jews in the United States was made public today.

1893: As of today, Annie Weisberg, the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants was the only person reported to have been injured in the fire at the tenement house on Suffolk Street.

1893: Adolph Marix, a native of Germany who had enlisted in the Navy while living in Iowa and was the Secretary to the Board of Inquiry that investigated the sinking of the battleship Maine was promoted to the rank of Lt. Commander today.

1893: Based on information that first appeared in the Hartford Courant it was reported today the wholesale expulsion of Jews from Poland began in the middle of February and has continued unabated since then.

1894: In Prague, Eduard and Elisabeth Bondy gave bird to Pavel “Paul” Bonday who would be murdered at Riga during the Holocuast.

1894: Esther Ruskay spoke on "The Revival of Judaism" at the founding meeting of the New York section of the National Council of Jewish Women

1895: The members of the New York Branch of the Jewish Woman’s Council was held today at Temple Emanu-El

1895: “The East Side Art Exhibition” published today praised the selection of the paintings being shown at the East Side Free Art Exhibition taking place at the Hebrew Institute which will continue for the next thirty days.

1896: The Young Men’s Hebrew Association will hold its 19^th annual strawberry festival at Lenox Lyceum.

1896: The palatial mansion of Diamond mogul Barney Barnato located in the Mayfair section of London is reported to be nearing completion. Barnato’s new home is on Park Lane, near the home of another Jewish Diamond Mogul, Alfred Beit.

1897: In Little Rock, AR, B'nai Israel, a Reform Congregation, dedicated its new house of worship which was designed by architect Charles Thompson.  Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Reform Judaism gave the keynote address at the ceremony.  The building was used until May, 1975 when the Temple B’nai Israel moved into it current home in western Little Rock.

1898: It was reported today that among fifty Jewish families who were at a mass meeting praying for the success of the American Army in the war with Spain were among  200 people left homeless by a fire that swept through Duluth, MN.

1898: Captain Bernard W. Salomonsky of Norfolk was among those who were mustered into service today as the mustering in process began today for the 4^thVirginia Volunteer Infantry.

1898: Private Will H. Freudenstein of St. Louis was mustered in today at Jefferson Barracks, MO as members of Light Battery A Missouri Volunteers

1899: Birthdate of Zhitomir, Ukraine native Max Cutler, the 18 year old “Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Georgia” and John Hopkins University trained physician who founded the Chicago Tumor Institute while raising three daughters – Nina, Nancy and Susie – with “his wife, the former Bertie Berger.” (As reported by Wolfgang Saxon)

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/14/obituaries/dr-max-cutler-85-is-dead-pioneer-in-cancer-treatmnet.html

1900: During the Konitz Affair, a blood libel in West Prussia,  “the Staatsbürgerzeitung, the leading anti-Semitic organ of Berlin, said: ‘No one can help forming the impression that the organs of the government received orders to pursue the investigation in a manner calculated to spare the Jews’” even though the opposite was quite true as could be seen by  the detectives and judges eagerly listened to “the most improbable statements implicating Jews, while Christian witnesses withheld important testimony.”

1901 Australia opens its first parliament in Melbourne. Elias Solomon, a native of London who became an auctioneer in Freemantle was among the members of the first parliament having won the Australian House Representative seat of Fremantle for the Free Trade Party.

1901: In Russia, chemical engineer Ospivoch Ephrussi, the son of Kishinev banker Joseph Ephrussi, and his wife gave birth to “Boris Ephrussi, the Professor of Genetics at the University of Paris.”

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.ge.14.120180.002311?journalCode=genet

1901: Sir Isaac Isaacs began serving as a Member of the Australian Party representing the Division of Indi which is located in north-eastern Victoria. This is but one of many governmental positions that Isaacs held during a long career dedicated to public service. 

1901: Together with David Wolffsohn and Oskar Marmorek, Theodor Herzl traveled to Constantinople in his quest to gain support from the Sultan for a Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel. The trip will last until May 23.

1902(2^ndof Iyar, 5662): Ashe I Myers, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle who doubled and then trebled the readership of this English journal passed away today.  (Other sources show his death date as May 11.  This date comes from an article written in 1913)

https://books.google.com/books?id=iBQcAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA769&lpg=PA769&dq=Take+Ionescu+and+the+jewish+people&source=bl&ots=wKpMTWqN4p&sig=wtZjR9a68JlGd_J0ODH8ztoUvEo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj1nbim3dfUAhWI64MKHeojBFIQ6AEIKDAB#v=onepage&q=Take%20Ionescu%20and%20the%20jewish%20people&f=false

1903(12^thof Iyar, 5663): Parashat Achrei Mot-Kedoshim

1903: Half the proceeds of tonight’s performance “The Destruction of Kishineff” at the Windsor Theatre are to go to fund being raised to help the victims of the pogrom at “the capital city of Bessarabia.”

1904: In Galicia, Israel David Irom and Sabina "Shifra" (Sadie) Blau gave birth Abraham Simcha Irom who in 1915 came to the United States where he earned a BS from Columbia and ordained as a rabbi by Yeshiva College while raising two children – Joseph and Renee – with his wife Pauline Irom.

1904(24^thof Iyar, 5664): Hungarian born actress Jenny Gross who made her debut in 1878 in Vienna passed away today in Berlin.



1904: Nissan Katzenelson visited Herzl in Franzensbad and reports the results of his trip to London. Jacob Schiff had declared himself ready to negotiate a loan for Russia if it proved to do something for the Jews.

1905: “The rumors of a massacre of Jews at Zhitomir” in southwestern Russia were confirmed from St. Petersburg based on “a dispatch to the Novosti” that “says the rioting began on” May 7 and continued for 48 hours during which “Orthodox Christians fell upon the Jews in the streets.”

1906(14^thof Iyar, 5666): Pesach Sheni

1906:It was reported today that Congregation Temple Emanu-El has re-elected James Seligman as President of the Board of Trustees, Moses H. Moses as Vice President and James Seligman, Daniel Guggenheim and A.J. Dittenhoefer as Trustees for three years.

1907: “Tracts For Jews No Help” published today described a conflict between Dr. Shearer and his American Tract Society who missionaries have been passing out tracts to Jews and other immigrants “immediately on their landing” and Immigration Commissioner Robert Watchorn who is concerned that Jewish immigrants who received these Hebrew documents will scare them into  hinking  that converting them to Christianity is some sort of U.S. government policy.

1908(8^thof Iyar, 5668): Parashat Emor

1908: It was reported today that during a debate the Duma about conscripting non-Russians into the Czar’s army, “M. Krupensky, a Marshal of the nobility” who was part of the a anti-Semitic cohort of deputes “moved to strike Jewish recruits from the conscript list and to impose a head tax on them instead.

1909(18^thof Iyar, 5669): Lag B’Omer

1909: “Before an audience which crowded the pews and aisles of the Free Synagogue, in West Eighty-First Street, to the doors Rabbi Leon Harrison of Temple Israel, St. Louis, made a passionate appeal today to his fellow-Jews against intermarriage with Christians.”

1910: In what some say is a strange twist, Reverend Frank W. Stanford said that sixty-six people from Portland, ME who had returned from “the Holy Land” had abandoned their plans to establishment a settlement in Palestine.

1910: It was reported today that the Hebrew Orphan Asylum “is celebrating the 50^thanniversary of the opening of its first home at 1 Lamartine Place” and that during those fifty years, the society has “brought nearly 6,000 children with only 57 deaths.”

1911: The Vatican placed the works of Italian author Gabriele D'Annunzio in the Index of Forbidden Books. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum The List of Prohibited Books or The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of publications prohibited by the Catholic Church was begun in the 16^th century under Pope Paul IV.  Pope Paul VI finally discontinued it in 1966.  The lengthy list of forbidden includes some names that are not surprising including Martin Luther, Voltaire and Rabelais. Among the few “Jewish” names are Maimonides, Spinoza and Heine.  Mein Kampf never made the List of Prohibited Books!

1912: A cablegram that had been from London was received by the Jewish Daily News in New York reporting “that ITO has decided to consider an offer by Portugal to establish a Jewish colony in Angola.”

1913: Today, Milton J. Rosenau of Brookline, Massachusetts was named an Assistant Surgeon in the Medical Reserve Corps in the same month in which he was “nominated by the Governor to be a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Health.

1914(13^thof Iyar, 5674): Parashat Acrhrei-Mot Kedoshim

1914: President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation that officially establishes the first national Mother’s Day holiday to celebrate America’s mothers

1915: According to reports received by Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs in London, Henry Morgenthau, the United States Ambassador to Turkey, has been successful in his attempts to halt, at least temporarily, actions by the Turkish government which were proving to be inimical to the Zionist settlements and Jewish communities in Palestine.

1915: It was reported to that “Detectives Lehon, Tedder, Rogers and Whitfield who would have on the Leo Frank case for W.J. Burns” detective agency “are to be tried this week for alleged misdemeanors in connection with their investigation.

1915: It was reported that “the trial of the Rev. C.B. Ragsdale and R.L. Barber who accused W.J. Burns operatives Lehon, Tedder and Arthur Thurman of bribery in the make of alleged false affidavits for the Leo Frank Defense is set for this week.

1915: In “What Is To Be Done With Turkey?” published today French politician Gustave Hervé described his plan for carving up the Ottoman Empire after the war including giving Russia Constantinople – a proposal to which no one would object “if a Russian Government really resuscitated Poland by granting it full autonomy, gave the Jews equal civil and political rights,” and lived up to the promises made to the Dumas in 1906. (Editor’s note:  The issue of improving the treatment of the Jews of Eastern Europe was one that people spent a lot of time talking about but did little to make a reality.)

1915(25^thof Iyar, 5675): London resident 2^nd Lt. Herman Stern was killed today while serving with His Majesty’s Forces.

1916: The British and the French finalize the Sykes-Picot Agreement.  This was a secret treaty between the French and the British concerning the dismemberment of Turkey that would take place once World War I would come to a close.  France was to gain control over most of what is now Syria and Lebanon.  Britain would control what is now Jordan, Iraq and effectively Saudi Arabia.  The British were also to control a small enclave around Haifa.  The rest of what is now Israel and the West Bank was to be under some form of international control.  This secret agreement contradicted Allied promises that would be made to the Jews and the Arabs later during the war.  The treaty became public after the Russian Revolution when Lenin released the archives of the former Russian government to public view.  In part, the Middle East is still living with the end product of imperial duplicity as typified by the work of Sykes and Picot.

1916: Today, President Wilson appointed Louis A. Sussdorf as a secretary of the United States Embassy

1916: Today “President Leon Sanders of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society received a telegram from Secretary State Lansing” saying “that Isador Herschfield “ who has been in Europe for eleven months “investigating conditions among Jews in the war zones” has set sail from Rotterdam bound for New York.

1917: The University of Washington “Menorah Society presented ‘The Family’ by Louis L. Schwartz” today “at the Moore Theatre” in Seattle.

1917: Rabbi Nathan Krass, a member of the American Jewish War Relief Commission returned to New York today from a fund raising lecture tour in the western United States.

1917: “Replying to a question in the House of Commons today as to whether any pledges had been given to France or Italy which might interfere with the establishment of an independent, integral Jewish Palestine under American or British protection, Lord Robert Cecil, Minister of Blockade, said he was afraid he could not answer any question with regard to pledges which might or might not have been given to Great Britain’s allies in connection with the terms of peace.

1917: Birthdate of Fay Mitchell who as Fay Kanin the wife of Michael Kanin was “half of the husband-and-wife team that wrote the Clark Gable-Doris Day comedy “Teacher’s Pet” and the writer of television movies including Emmy-winning vehicles for Maureen Stapleton and Carol Burnett…´(As reported by Alean Harmetz)

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/31/fay-kanin

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/arts/fay-kanin-95-writer-for-movies-and-tv.html?_r=1

1918: In Brookline, MA, “Zina Wallik, who had come to the United States from a Russian shtetl before the turn of the 20th century” gave birth to Myron Leon Wallace who gained fame as American broadcast journalist Mike Wallace.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/business/media/mike-wallace-cbs-pioneer-of-60-minutes-dead-at-93.html

1919: Birthdate of prodigy Julius Heldman, who earned his Ph.D. from Stanford at the age of 23, played a key role in the Manhattan project and raised a daughter, Carrie, with his wife Gladys, the publisher of World Tennis magazine.

1920: Birthdate of Philip Klass, the London native who gained fame as American science fiction writer William Tenn.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/books/14tenn.html

1921(1st of Iyar, 5681): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1921: Fiorello La Guardia, the son of Irene Coen “a Jewish woman from Triest” who chose to father in father’s Catholic footsteps mourned the loss of his daughter Fioretta Thea who passed away today.

1921: Birthdate of Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose resistance group whom the Nazis was executed by guillotine. Scholl was a Lutheran, a truly Righteous Gentile who did what she could to stop Hitler.

1923: In Alexandria, LA, Bernard F. and May Violet Kaffie Rosenthal gave birth to Tulane grad, attorney and Democratic Party leader Arnold Jack Rosenthal.

1926: “Louis W. Osterweis, a New York attorney, was elected President of the District No. 1, Independent Order B’nai B’rith, the largest American Jewish fraternity with a membership of over sixty thousand, at the seventy-fourth annual convention of the Order held today at the Astor Hotel. He succeeded Bertram M. Aufsesser. (As reported by JTA)

1926: U.S. premiere of “Shipwrecked,” a silent adventure film starring Joseph Schildkraut as “Larry O’Neil.”

1926(25^thof Iyar, 5686): Seventy-five year old Oscar Solomon Strauss passed away. A successful businessman he served two tours as U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire and was Teddy Roosevelt’s choice to serve as Secretary of Commerce and Labor making him the first Jew to serve as a Cabinet Secretary.http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/straus-sarah-lavanburg

1928: “A preliminary meet was held at the home Aaron Hein to discuss the organization of Men’s Club at Congregation Beth El in Camden, NJ.

1930: Birthdate of Mordechai “Motta” Gur who commanded the division that reunited Jerusalem in 1967 and served 10^th Chief of Staff of the IDF.

1931(22nd of Iyar, 5691): Seventy-eight year old Nobel Prize Winner, Albert Abraham Michelson passed away.  Born in Prussia in 1852, Michelson came to the U.S. two years later.  He grew up in San Francisco graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1873, something highly unusual for a Jewish youth of his day.  After finishing his naval career, Michelson went to enjoy a distinguished career in the United States and Europe as a physicist with a specialty in optics.  He won the Nobel Prize in 1907.  He was 87 at the time of his death.

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1907/michelson-bio.html

1931: Birthdate of Tel Aviv native and Israeli politician Amnon Rubinstein.

1934: U. S. premiere of “Sadie McKee” a romantic drama based on "Pretty Sadie McKee” by Viña Delmar, produced by Lawrence Weingarten with lyrics by Arthur Freed.

1935: “The Informer” a film version of the novel by the same name with music by Max Steiner was released today in the United States.

1935: The American Jewish Olympic team arrived in New York today on the Italian liner Conte di Savoia. The United States athletes were returning from the second World Maccabiah staged at Tel-Aviv, Palestine.

1936: The world takes another step toward a general war when Italy formally annexed Ethiopia after taking the capital Addis Ababa.  The Western Powers did nothing to stop the Italian dictator and the League of Nations was totally helpless in stopping Mussolini. This lack of will and impotence gave Hitler further proof that he could swallow up much of Europe without firing a shot.  Orde Wingate, the British officer who would play a critical role in the liberation of Ethiopia was serving in Palestine and was one of the few British officers who sympathized with the Jewish settlers and helped train them in self-defense when they came under attack from armed Arab gangs bent on mayhem and murder.

1936: It was reported today that “among the questions to come before” the first Jewish World Congress which is scheduled to meet in August “will the defense of Jewish equality, re-establishment of the rights Jews in Germany, the struggle against anti-Semitism and the participation in Jewish reconstruction work in Palestine.”

1936: A detachment of British tanks is scheduled to be shipped from Alexandria, Egypt to Palestine in response to the Arab attacks and violence.

1936: At the 25^th anniversary dinner of the Syracuse University chapter of Zeta Beta Tau “Dr. James Grover McDonald, former High Commissioner of the League of Nations for Refugees from Germany was extolled as one of the world’s outstanding contributors to the cause of international understanding” as he was named the recipient of the “Gottheil Medal which is given annually to the American who has, in the previous year, done the most for Jewry.”

1936: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee reported today that services agencies it supported help more than 1,500 “German Jews and German Jewish refugees to migrate from their homes” during the month of January.

1937: For the second day in a row, Jews in Grabow were beaten by a mob angered at reports that Pole had been stabbed in an altercation with a Jew.

1937: “Make Way For Tomorrow” produced by Adolph Zukor and featuring Maurice Moscovitch as “Max Rubens, the Jewish shopkeeper” was released in the United States today.

1938: The Arabs continued their boycott of the Partition Commission and refused to meet personally with the British officials.  But they did submit a memorandum to the commission today rejecting any “scheme” that would result in partition.  They demanded an entity in which the Jews “would remain a minority” with what are called “full guarantees.”

1938: La Acion, the Judeo-Spanish newspaper of Salonica wrote that the community of Salonica had never been richer with the public property have a value totaling 2,000,000 Drachmas.

 1938: The Palestine Post reported that the 101st Session of the League of Nations opened with a negative balance of unsolved problems like the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, the German occupation of Austria and the Japanese invasion of China. The German and Italian intervention in Spain, where they fought against the democratically-elected government and the steadily growing refuge problem also figured high on the League's distressing agenda.

1939: The Rothschild-Hadassah University Hospital and Medical Center was opened on Mt. Scopus. Mt. Scopus would be cut off from the Jewish held section of Jerusalem at the end of the War for Independence.  When the city was re-united, Mt. Scopus again became part of Israel and Jewish institutions were re-built and revitalized.

1940: Rabbi Louis Finkelstein met with President Roosevelt in the White House today.

1940: As he continued his flight in the face of Nazi conquests Leo Bretholz entered a hospital in Antwerp for hernia surgery.

1940: The visas of the family of Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker expired today “just as the Nazis invaded the Netherlands”

1940: As he tried to escape from Germany, Hugo Gutman, “an officer in the very regiment in which Adolf Hitler was an enlisted man” received his immigration visa today so that he and his family could catch the train for France.

1941 “Billie Holiday recorded the classic jazz song ‘God Bless the Child’” which she had written with “Arthur Herzog, Jr in 1938.”

1942: Belgrade becomes the first Axis-conquered city to murder or eliminate its Jewish Population, largely with the help of Serbian collaborators.

1942: The first deportation train set out from Eisenach for the Belzyce Ghetto

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/may/06.asp

1942: The Jews of Markuszow, Poland, led by Shlomo Goldwasser, Mordechai Kirshenbaum, and the brothers Yaakov and Yerucham Gothelf, escaped to nearby forests.

1942: American poet Ezra Pound, who was working for the Fascist Italian government, broadcasted from Italy: "You would do better to inoculate your children with typhus and syphilis" than allow more Jews into the United States. America, Pound continues, is ruled by Jews and their allies, who are "the dirtiest dirt from the bottom of the Jew's ash can."

1943: On the eve of the 10^th anniversary of a mass book burning in Nazi Germany, Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican nominee for President of the United States declared that the Nazis, “arrogant with power…burned books which contained the accumulated the truth of centuries.”  However, “those very flames lit horizons of the spirit everywhere and today liberty-loving men are united to wipe out the forces of barbarism and brutality – forces which cannot live where men read books.” (Willkie’s sentiment are a case of war driven revisionism since  Americans did not see the threat of the Nazis until after the attack on Pearl Harbor and even then for many it was a reluctant realization.)

1943(4th of Iyar, 5703): The Skalat, Ukraine, Jewish community is destroyed.

1943: Despite the death of most of the leadership at the Headquarters at Mila 18, the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto continues.

1943: Twenty-six year old Eddie Turchin played his first big league game as a member of the Cleveland Indians.

1944: Today, “The Soviet 4^th Ukrainian Front captured Sevastopol” where approximately 4,000 Jews had been murdered by the Nazis during their two year occupation of the city.

https://www.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/database/index.asp?cid=623

1945: Friedrich Krüger, an SS-Obergruppenführerresponsible for mass exterminations of Polish Jews, committed suicide.

1945: By the time that Red Army liberated Prague today, two-thirds of city’s 92,000 Jews had “perished in the Holocaust.”

1945: On the day after World War II ended in Europe, Captain Bo Foster flew captured Nazi leader Hermann Goering to the U.S. 7^th Army’s headquarters for interrogation.  Foster and a group of officers from the Army's 36th Infantry Division gathered on a tiny airstrip outside Kitzbuhel, Austria, to transport the highly-prized war prisoner back to Germany in an unarmed, two-man reconnaissance plane. Then he took one look at the one-time heir to Adolf Hitler and commander of the fearsome Luftwaffe — all 300-plus pounds (136-plus kilos) of him — and knew he needed a bigger plane. According to Foster, "They wanted to get him back where he could be debriefed. There was a strong rumor that in a mountainside in the Alps right down there in Bavaria there was a concentration of (German) military," Foster said. "He just acted as though it was a nice, friendly trip." Goering, 52, had surrendered to the US Army's 36th Infantry Division the day before. He had fallen out of favor with Hitler and hadn't played an active role at the end of the war, though he remained Reichsmarschall of Nazi Germany. Before his capture, Goering wrote a letter to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, offering to work with Eisenhower on the conditions of the German army's surrender, according to an account of Goering's capture by Brigadier Gen. Robert Stack kept by the 36th Infantry Division Association. After receiving the letter, Stack and a group of soldiers drove from the division's base near Kitzbuhel across the border into Germany and intercepted a convoy that included Goering, his wife, daughter, sister-in-law, household servants and military aides, according to the account. Goering agreed to surrender unconditionally but asked that his family be cared for, and the Nazi leader was delivered to Foster for transport the next day. The 33 year-old Foster didn't fear getting shot down carrying such precious cargo alone in an unescorted, unarmed plane. He didn't worry about Goering taking advantage of the lack of a guard to wrest control of the aircraft. The main problem was getting the two of them off the ground — the nimble, lightweight Piper L4 that Foster piloted in his artillery spotting missions wouldn't support both him and Goering. But the division only had the small airstrip that was fine for Foster's aircraft, but was problematic for taking off and landing larger planes. They'd have to upgrade to the one L5 in the division's inventory, a slightly larger aircraft Foster hadn't flown in years. Goering stood on the tiny airstrip in a plain, gray uniform that was unadorned but for a pistol at his hip and a medal around his neck. Still wearing the pistol, he stepped toward the plane. A Goering aide emerged from the group that had gathered and relieved Goering of the weapon. The Nazi leader settled into the back seat and tried to fasten his seat belt. It wouldn't stretch across his belly. He held the strap in his hand, looked at Foster and said, "Das goot!"— that's good. The two men spent the 55-minute flight from Kitzbuhel to Augsburg, Germany, conversing in a mix of German and English. Goering asked Foster to avoid any talk of Hitler or the war but appeared to relish pointing out the sites below them. In a letter to his wife, Virginia Lou Foster, written soon after the mission, Foster told her that the Nazi leader was "effeminate" and "gave me the creeps." [Foster returned to Montanan where he became a General in the National Guard and was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his World War II service.  (As reported in the Jerusalem Post)

1945: Due to quirk of time zones, in the Soviet the ninth and not the eighth of May is the official end of WW II.

1946: Based on the rulings of courts in Poland, today is the date used for people whose death date was not documented but in all likelihood occurred during World War II including the Polish children’s author Janusz Korczak who used the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit and died at Treblinka with the children from his Warsaw orphanage.

1947: “Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who may resume the role of world Zionism's chief spokesman when the United Nations debates the future of Palestine in the autumn, entertained the British High Commissioner, Lieut. Gen. Sir Alan Cunningham, at lunch today.”

1948: Pinchas Ben Porat “was one of ten pilots who left Israel to enroll in Avia S-199 training in Czechoslovakia.”

1949: In the Bronx, German born classical pianist Howard (Helmuth) Joel, the son Meta and Karl Amson Joel, and the former Rosalind Joel, the daughter of Philip and Rebecca Nyman, gave birth to William Martin Joel who gained fame as singer and piano player, Billy Joel the brother of Judith Joel and half-brother classical conductor Alexander Joe.

1952: “The Sniper” a film about what would someday be labeled as a serial killer, produced by Stanley Kramer was released in the United States today.

1953: Birthdate of Roslyn, NY, doctor Judith Steinberg who became Judith Steinberg Dean when she married fellow medical student Howard Dean, the future governor of Vermont.

1954: Gertrude Berg made her first appearance as the “mystery guest” on What’s My Line, signing in as Molly Goldberg, the iconic character she had created.

1955: Ten years and one day after VE Day, West Germany joined N.A.T.O. which raised concerns about how quickly the home of the Nazis and the Holocaust was being normalized in the cause of the “fight against Communism.”

1956: In Brooklyn, “award winning Yiddish and English poet Menke Katz” and his wife gave birth to “Yiddish author, educator and cultural historian” Dovid Katz, the editor of the website DefendingHistory.com

1956: Outfielder Cal Abrams played his last major league baseball game with the Chicago White Sox.

1957: The Libyan government issued a decree ordering all Libyan Jews with relatives in Israel to register with the Libyan boycott Office, the main pressure group opposed trade with Israel.  Since more than ninety per cent of Libyan Jews had left the country between 1949 and 1952, this decree applies to almost every Jewish family in Libya." (In Ishmael's House by Martin Gilbert)

1958: U.S. premiere of the psychological thriller “Vertigo” with music by Bernard Herrmann

1958: Otto Brinkman, who “had been convicted in the Einsatzgruppen Trial” was released from Landsberg Prison today at the conclusion of the U.S. War Crimes program.

1959(1^stof Iyar, 5719): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1959: Hank Greenberg resigned from the Chicago White Sox. Following his successful career as a baseball player, Greenberg became an equally successful executive.  He was the general manager of the 1954 Cleveland Indians that broke the Yankee's pennant winning streak.  He then became a part-owner and executive of the Chicago White Sox who beat the Yanks for the pennant in 1959.  Greenberg left baseball to become a successful investment banker.

1961: “Fiorello!” a musical about New York’s most famous mayor who spoke Yiddish when he campaigned for Congress moved from the Broadhurst Theatre to the Broadway Theatre where it continued its first run on Broadway.

1962(5^thof Iyar, 5722): Yom HaAtsma’ut

1962: In the New York City Council Chamber, Mayor Robert F. Wagner is scheduled to “officially proclaim today as Israel Independence Day.”

1964: The day after her birth Paul Gilbert and Barbara Crane adopted actress Melissa Gilbert best known for her portrayal of Laura Ingalls in “Little House on the Prairie” where he television father was the Jewish actor Michael Landon.

1965: CBS broadcast the last episode of “For the People” a legal drama created by Stuart Rosenberg and starring William Shatner (before he was Kirk) and Howard Da Silva

1965: Birthdate of journalist Mark Leibovich who “is the chief national correspondent for the New York Times Magazine.”

http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/times-dc-bureau-raids-washington-post-leibovich-leaves-two-others-staying/

1968(11^thof Iyar, 5728): Seventy-three year old producer, director and author Albert Lewin, the holder of an MA from Harvard who, with the support of Irving Thalberg, “produced his first picture, ‘The Kiss,” which was Greta Garbo’s last silent film” passed away today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/05/10/77087938.pdf

1972: A day after Sabena Flight 571 was hijacked by four terrorists from Black September demanding the release of 315 convicted Palestinian terrorists in exchange for the passengers, a rescue mission was mounted.  A group of commandos led by Ehud Barak that included Benjamin Netanyahu took back control of the plane, free the passengers with the loss of only one life, not counting the two dead terrorists.

1973(7th of Iyar, 5733: Comedian Jack E Leonard passed away.  Born Leonard Lebitsky in Chicago, Illinois, Leonard was a heavy-set, cigar-smoking practitioner of an aggressive form of humor.  His movie credits included the “Disorderly Orderly,” “The Fat Spy,” and “Target: Harry.”

1975(28^thof Iyar, 5735): Yom Yerushalayim

1976: Anne Bernays received the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award for her novel, "Growing Up Rich,"

1978 -The Jerusalem Postreported that a clear consensus developed in the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of a compromise, proposed by the former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, which paved the way for the sale of 60 F-15 fighters to Saudi Arabia. The Senate agreed to support this sale, provided that the Administration agreed to increase the number of planes slated for Israel.

1979(12^th of Iyar, 5739): Seventy-three year old Lan Adomain the Russian born son of a cantor who served with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War passed away today.

https://alba-valb.org/volunteers/lan-adomian/

1979(12^th of Iyar, 5739): Habib Elghanian “ a prominent Iranian Jewish businessman and philanthropist who served as the president of the Tehran Jewish Society and acted as the symbolic head of the Iranian Jewish community in the 1970s” was executed by a firing squad after having been convicted by an Islamist Court.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/community/article/recalling_elghanians_execution_30_years_later_20090506

1980 Funeral services are scheduled to held for Sue Freedman Mintz, the wife of Jack Mintz and the mother of Terry Scharf and Dr. David Mintz at a pre-funeral gathering this evening.

1981(5^th of Iyar, 5741): On Shabbat, seventy-two year old author Nelson Algren winner of the National Book Award for Man With a Golden Arm, which later became a successful film, passed away today.

http://www.biblio.com/algren-nelson/author/1580

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/10/obituaries/nelson-algren-72-novelist-who-wrote-of-slums-dies.html

1981: After 40 performances at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, the curtain came down on “Fools” a comedy written by Neil Simon, directed by Mike Nichols with a cast that included John Rubinstein and Harold Gould.

1981: Rabbi David Posner of Temple Emanu-El officiated at the marriage ceremony of Celine Leah Perle and Jeffery Martin Sinaw which was held in his study.

1982: In “Oppenheimer – Examining the Scientist’s Relationship With Society,” Michael Billington reviews ‘Oppenheimer,’ an upcoming television mini-series that provides a portrait of the complex Jewish-American who was known as the father of the atomic bomb and who lost his security clearance during the Red Scare.

1984(7^thof Iyar, 5744): Eighty-three year old Israeli writer and poet Miriam Yalan-Shteklis passed away today.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/yalan-stekelis-miriam

1984(7th of Iyar, 5744): Eighty-one year old Nudie Cohn, the Kievan born tailor famous for
“decorative rhinestone-covered suits” passed away today,

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/automobiles/a-rhinestone-cowboy-who-grabbed-cars-by-the-horns.html

1985: NBC broadcast the final episode of the first season “The Cosby Show” co-created by Ed Weinberger

1986(30th of Nisan, 5746): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1986(30th of Nisan, 5746): Herschel Bernardi passed away at the age of 62. Born in New York in 1923, Bernardi came from a long line of Yiddish performers.  According to one legend, it was his mother's portrayal of a character called Yente that moved that term from a proper name to a descriptive term.  As an actor, Bernardi had trouble finding work outside of ethnic productions and because of his political views which led to him being blacklisted in the 1950's.  His career finally took off when played Lt. Jacoby, on the hit detective series "Peter Gunn" a role for which he won an Emmy.  Bernardi's unique voice made him the voice for Charlie the Tuna and the Jolly Green Giant.  He was the second actor to play Tevye in the Broadway hit "Fiddler on the Roof." 

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-05-10/local/me-4847_1_herschel-bernardi

1987(10^thof Iyar, 57467): American financier and national president of the Boy Scouts of America, John Mortimer Schiff passed away. (As reported by William G. Blair)

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/10/obituaries/john-schiff-a-philanthropist-and-investment-banker-dies.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

1989(4^thof Iyar, 5749): Yom HaZikaron

1991: Michael Landon appeared on The Tonight Show where he discussed the pancreatic cancer that would claim his life.

1992: NBC broadcast the final episode of “The Golden Girls”  a long-running sitcom created by Susan Harris and co-starring Beatrice Arthur and Estelle Getty.

1993(18^thof Iyar): Lag B’Omer

1993: “2 Views of a Horror” published today described differing views of the Holocaust held by Israelis and Americans.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-05-09/news/9305090113_1_israeli-jews-holocaust-lesson-warsaw-ghetto-uprising

1994(28th of Iyar, 5754): Yom Yerushalayim

1996:Pursuant to Article VII of the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, dated September 28, 1995, the Israelis and the Palestinians agree to the establishment of a Temporary International Presence in the city of Hebron ("TIPH"). This agreement will remain in force until such time as Israeli forces redeploy from Hebron, whereupon it will be superseded by a new agreement to be negotiated by the two sides and the TIPH established by this Agreement will be replaced by a new TIPH to be established under the new agreement ("the new TIPH").

1997: In a story entitled “Saga of Yanov Torah recounted at Yom Hashoah Rites,” the San Diego Jewish Press Heritage recounts Rabbi Erwin Herman’s moving story of the Yanov Torah and how it how survived the Holocaust and found a home in this southern California metropolis

http://www.jewishsightseeing.com/usa/california/san_diego/lawrence_family_jcc/sd5-9yanov_torah.htm

1997: “Father’s Day” a comedy directed by Ivan Reitman who served as producer along with Joel Silver, with a script co-authored by Lowell Ganz and co-starring Billy Crystal was released in the United States today.

1998: NBC broadcast the final episode of season one “Veronica’s Closet,” created by Marta Kauffman.

1998: Ninety-three year old comedy writer Nat Perrin who was also a prolific producer of scripts for movies and television passed away today.

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/14/local/me-49635

1999: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers includingBetty Friedan. And the Making of 'The Feminine Mystique': The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism by Daniel Horowitz and Betty Friedan: Her Life by Judith Nennessee. 

1999: Michael Ovitz Is on the Line

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/09/magazine/michael-ovitz-is-on-the-line.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

1999: In “Family Politics,” published today, Aaron L. Friedberg examined the Madeline Albright’s reaction to revelation about the Jews in her family tree.

http://partners.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/reviews/990509.09friedbt.html

2000(4^thof Iyar, 5760): Yom HaZikaron

2000: Prime Minister Ehud “Barak and his advisors dropped hints today” that the date for Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon “could be advanced…as a way to put pressure on Lebanon to help curb the violence or to negotiate a withdrawal arrangement.”

2001: The bodies of two Israeli teenagers – Yaakov “Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran  - who had been kidnapped yesterday were found in a cave in the Judean Desert near their home which was covered with the boy’s blood “reportedly smeared by their killers” who had bound them, stabbed them and beaten them to death with rocks.

2001(16^thof Iyar, 5761): Ninety-three year old producer and director Saul Elkins, the brother of Leon and Michael Elkins, passed away today Nevada.

2002: “Roger Dodger” a comedy co-starring Jesse Eisenberg premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

2002: The 38-day stand-off in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem came to an end when the Palestinians inside agreed to have 13 suspected terrorists among them deported to several different countries. The terrorists had taken over the Christian shrine as they were pursued by Israeli security forces.  Interestingly there was no complaint by Christian leaders over this desecration of one of their holy places.

2002: Yom Yerushalayim begins this evening.

2003 (7^th of Iyar, 5763): Seventy-one year old playwright Jack Gelber, the Chicago born son of “Molly (Singer) and Harold Gelber” passed away today. (As reported by Mel Gussow)

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/10/theater/jack-gelber-71-connection-playwright.html

2003: “Leaders Honor Ghetto Fighters” published today described a joint tribute that the Presidents of Israel and Poland paid to those who fought in the 1943 uprising.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-05-09/news/0305090267_1_ghetto-death-camps-holocaust-survivors

2004(18th of Iyar, 5764): Lag B’Omer

2004: The curtain came down on a revival of Baby for which David Shire wrote the music at The Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, New Jersey

2004(18th of Iyar, 5764): Comedian Alan King passed away.  “It’s not how long you lived, but how well you lived.” (As reported by Bruce Weber)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/arts/alan-king-comic-with-chutzpah-dies-at-76.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm





2004: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including ‘Our Mothers' War': The Just-as-Great Generation by Laura Shapiro.

2005: In Berlin, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder led a delegation “of the senior member of Germany’s government” at the ceremonies dedicating “The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” designed by Peter Eisenman.

2006: At New York’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin delivers a lecture on his new book A Code of Jewish Ethics followed by a book party and book signing.

2006(11th of Iyar, 5766): Ruth Gay, a writer known for her nonfiction books documenting Jewish life in the Old World and the New, died in the Bronx. She was 83 and lived in Manhattan. She had been suffering from leukemia, and died at Calvary Hospital, her family said. Ms. Gay's books include "Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II" (Yale University, 2002), which dealt with a little-studied subject: the more than 250,000 Jews who returned to Allied-occupied Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II. She also wrote "The Jews of Germany: A Historical Portrait" (Yale University, 1992), which chronicled Jewish life in Germany from the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 to the rise of Hitler in 1933. (As Reported by Margalit Fox)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/11/books/11gay.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

2006:Israeli archaeologists working for Israel's Antiquities Authority announced today that they have uncovered a large concentration of stone utensils on the southeastern rim of the city which were used by prehistoric man hundreds of thousands of years ago. 

2007: As part of Jewish Heritage Month, the National Archives presented The Rape of Europa, a feature documentary that tells of the systematic theft, deliberate destruction, and miraculous survival of Europe’s art treasures during the Second World War. The film skillfully interweaves the history of Nazi art looting with contemporary stories of restitution. Tonight, following a screening of the 117-minute film, a distinguished panel will participate in a discussion and a question-and-answer session with the audience. Panelists include Lynn Nicholas, author of “The Rape of Europa,” the award-winning book on which the film is based; Robert M. Edsel, author of “Rescuing Da Vinci”and a co-producer of the film; and Michael J. Kurtz, Assistant Archivist for Records Services at the National Archives.

2007: Students from Beit Hannah participate in the main ceremony on Karl Marx Boulevard in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, commemorating the victory over the Nazis in 1945.

2007: “Under Pressure, New Rep Cancels Play” describes the cancellation of “To Pay the Price” about the Raid on Entebbe because it was going to be paired with “My Name Is Rachel Corrie.”  The pressure came from the family of Yoni Netanyahu, the only person killed when Israeli commandos rescued Jewish hostages being held by Arab terrorists.

2007: In “A Life Made Out of Wood, Metal and Determination,” published today Andreak K. Scott reviews an exhibition styled “The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend,” a compact survey of 66 works organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport for the Jewish Museum which is her first New York museum show in 27 years and examines the career of this late-blooming artist. “Life isn’t one straight line. Most of us have to be transplanted, like a tree, before we blossom.”

2008: The Holocaust memorial in Berlin hosts a classical concert on the third anniversary of its opening. Conducted by Lothar Zagrosek, the Kammersymphonie Berlin orchestra will perform the world premiere of a modern experimental piece by composer Harald Weiss. The musicians will spread out among the 2,711 gray concrete slabs that make up the monument, and the audience will be able to move freely across the site, the organizers said. Designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial, located close to Berlin's signature Brandenburg Gate cost 27.6 million euro (US $43.6 million) to build. The site is open to the public around the clock. More than 8 million people have visited the memorial since its 2005 opening.

2008(4th of Iyar, 5768): In Tel Aviv, Shmuel Katz, who was a close adviser to Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but who later became a vociferous opponent of Begin’s peace efforts with Egypt and the Palestinians, passed away at the age of 93.

2009(15^th of Iyar, 5769): Noted editor and author David Marcus, the County Cork native whose work included To Next Year in Jerusalem, Who Ever Heard of an Irish Jew? and Other Short Stories and Oughtobioraphy – Leaves From the Diary of a Hyphenated Jew.

http://www.irishwriters-online.com/marcus-david/

2009: Canadian born tennis pro Sharon Fichman who also holds Israeli citizenship was the “runner-u[“ in the Portugal Open, clay court tournament played in Estroril, Portugal.

2009: The Jacob’s Ladder Spring Festival comes to a close. http://jlfestival.com/index.asp

2009: As part of the Shabbat Lecture Series, the 92^nd Street Y presents “Jewish Giants of the

American Songbook: Rodgers and Hammerstein” which examines the collaboration that produced a series of musicals that began with adaption of “Green Grow the Lilacs” into “Oklahoma” and continued with  Carousel, The King and I, South Pacific and The Sound of Music.

2009: “The Man That Got Away: After Ira, George” opens at the 92^ndStreet Y in New York.

2010: Fradle Freidenreich is scheduled to lead a panel discussion entitled “More Than a Book Launch...Passionate Pioneers: The Story of Yiddish Secular Education in North America, 1910-1960” at the Center for Jewish History.”

2010: In honor of Yom Yerushalayim, Young Israel of Southfield (Michigan) is scheduled to show “Alone on the Ramparts,” a film that tells the story of the battle for Jerusalem during the War of Independence.

2010: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Trials of the Diaspora:A History of Anti-Semitism in England by Anthony Julius, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 by Emmanuel Faye, Stranger From Abroad:Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness by Daniel Maier-Katkin, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942 by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, Dimanche And Other Stories by Irène Némirovsky and The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy by Richard A. Posner.

2010:The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial institution is scheduled to hold a ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany beginning at 5:00 p.m. this evening at the Yad Vashem's Memorial to the Jewish Soldiers and Partisans. Hundreds of Jewish World War II veterans of the Allied armies, the majority from the former Soviet Union, are scheduled to attend the ceremony, along with Jewish partisans, wounded soldiers from the war against the Nazis, underground fighters, volunteers from the Yishuv who fought in the British forces and veterans of the Jewish Brigade, as well as diplomatic representatives from the Allied countries.

2010:The Obama administration announced today that indirect, American-brokered talks had resumed between Israel and the Palestinians, capping a year of efforts by Washington to revive the peace process.

2011:The Center for Jewish History, American Society for Jewish Music and Center for Traditional Music and Dance are scheduled to  present: The Weimar Klezmer Republic: Creating a Center for Yiddish Culture in Germany

2011(5^th of Iyar, 5771): Seventy-two year old television news director Dennis Gralnick passed away. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/business/14gralnick.html?_r=1

2011(5^th of Iyar, 5771): Yom Hazikaron – Israel Remembrance Day

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/yomhazikaron.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Hazikaron

2011: At 11 AM today a two-minute siren sounded throughout the country to mark Memorial Day, followed by ceremonies at Israel's 44 military cemeteries.

2011:The 2011 Independence Day ceremony is scheduled to take place at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Among the torch lighters are Orit Dror, a member of Kibbutz Lavi who, together with her husband, donated her son's organs after he died of a terminal illness, and saved the life of a 13-year-old girl; Zehava Dankner (mother of businessman Nochi Dankner), a philanthropist who supported, among others, residents surrounding Gaza, and who is involved in matters of education, security and health; Barbra Goldstein, a representative of Hadassah, the women's Zionist organization of America, which is marking its 100th anniversary this year; Yovi Tsuma, a social activist who participates in a group of young Ethiopian volunteers who help members of the immigrant community who have encountered difficulties in absorption; and Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, a member of the Chabad movement, who lost his daughter and son in law in the November 2008 terrorist attack at the Chabad house in Mumbai. This annual ceremony in Jerusalem that marks the transition from the solemn Yom Hazicharon (Memorial Day) to the joyous Yom Ha'atzmaut (Independence Day.)

2011:Moshe Cohen, director of Heichal Hatora – an Orthodox Jewish Day School in Buenos Aires - was hit in the head with an iron bar as his assailant shouted "Jew, Jew." Cohen was hospitalized with a serious head injury. The attacker was arrested. Buenos Aires was the scene of one of the most murderous attacks on Jewish civilians outside of Israel.

2012(16^th of Iyar, 5572): Eight-four year old Vidal Sassoon passed away today (As reported by Bruce Weber)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/fashion/vidal-sassoon-hairdresser-and-trendsetter-dies-at-84.html?pagewanted=print

2012: Kadima council chairman Haim Ramon marred the celebrations in the party over its chairman Shaul Mofaz’s joining the cabinet t0day, when he sent Mofaz a fiercely worded letter announcing that he was quitting his post and leaving the party altogether. (As reported by Gil Hoffman)

2012(16^th of Iyar, 5572): Eighty-four year old CPA Milton Adler, the son of Leo and Bella Adler and the husband of Marion Adler passed away today in Cherry Hill, NJ.

2012:A special benefit concert for Woman to Woman - The Jerusalem Shelter for Battered Women is scheduled to take place at the City Winery in New York City.

2012: The Leo Baeck Institute is scheduled to present “Autobiography and Biography: Herzl, Freud, and Stefan Zweig, during which Professor Mark Gelber is scheduled to discuss Stefan Zweig’s brilliant but problematic depictions of Herzl (and Zionism) and Freud (psychoanalysis, anti-Semitism, and Jewish survival) in his late autobiographical work written predominantly during the period of his American exile, The World of Yesterday

2012:Dr. Erica Brown is scheduled to address the annual meeting of The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.

2012: “Barbara Bain Remains ‘Love Struck’ When It Comes To Theatre” published today describes the career of the Emmy award winning actress who will be forever remember for her role in “Mission Impossible.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/09/entertainment/la-et-barbara-bain-20120509

2012:The Jewish Historical Society of New Jersey is scheduled to sponsor a public forum titled "Jews and Jazz" in Whippany, NJ.

2012: The 2nd Annual Cleveland’s Funniest Rabbi Contest and Lag B’omer Celebration is scheduled to take place tonight at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage.

2012: The United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012, which was sponsored by House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), passed today by a vote of 411-2

2013:The National Archives will show the Academy Award-winning HBO documentary of Gerda Weissman’s life, “One Survivor Remembers” and then the celebrated author, 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and Holocaust survivor will discuss the film after the screening.

2013: Shiva minyan for Miles Lane, the brother of Harriet Gasway and the brother-in-law of Bill Gasway as held this evening in Cedar Rapids.

2013: The Skirball Center for Adult Center for Jewish Learning is scheduled to present a lecture by /Dr. Avivah  Gottlieb  Zornberg entitled “To  Be or Not to Be: A Tale of Five Sisters” based on Torah narrative about the five daughters of Zelofchad.

2013: Researchers from Tel Aviv University are tentatively positing that they may have discovered the origin of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Despite immense amounts of research into dementia and other cognitive diseases that affect vast numbers of people around the world, and significant progress in addressing the illnesses, there are no known cures. The Israeli research points at a protein in the brain called tomosyn as a possible key to the diseases, Israel Radio reported today.

2013:Criticism of Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s proposed budget cuts and tax hikes mounted today, with social protest groups announcing two planned demonstrations against perceived violations of Lapid’s pre-election campaign promises.

2013(29^thof Iyar, 5773): Eighty-seven year old Alan Abelson the former editor of Barron’s and iconoclastic business columnist passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/business/media/alan-abelson-barrons-columnist-and-editor-dies-at-87.html?hpw&_r=1&

2013(29^thof Iyar, 5773): Ninety-three year old Baruch Spiegel, “one of the last surviving” Warsaw Ghetto fighters passed away today in Montreal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/world/europe/boruch-spiegel-who-battled-nazis-in-warsaw-ghetto-uprising-dies-at-93.html

2014: “The Wonders” and “Joe Papp in Five Acts” are scheduled to be shown at the National Center for Jewish Film’s 17^th annual Film Festival.

2014: Noah Thalblum and Curtis Litow are scheduled to “share their respective about their experiences in Israel last summer” as Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids celebrates another year of Israesli independence.



2015: The Temple Emanu-El Skirball Center is scheduled to present “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother” with Judy Gold.

2015: “The Outrageous Sophie Tucker” is scheduled to be shown at the 18^thannual Jewish Film Festival.

2015: Israeli composer and sound artist Maya Dunietz is scheduled to present the U.S. premiere of her solo work at the Abrons Art Center.

2015: Israeli cellist Michael Katz and pianist Reanna Gutman are scheduled to perform as part of “Echoes of Hope, “ a celebration of the work and lives of brilliant composers who were directly affect by WW II and the Holocaust.”

2016(1^stof Iyar, 5776): Rosh Chodesh Iyar; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/

2016: “A nascent Jewish community was officially born in Madagascar starting today when 121 men, women and children began the Orthodox conversion process on the remote Indian Ocean island nation” be coming before a beit din “comprised three rabbis with Orthodox ordinations: Rabbi Oizer Neumann of Brooklyn, Rabbi Achiya Delouya of Montreal and Rabbi Pinchas Klein of Philadelphia” at the Le Pave Hotel..

2016: In St. Augustine, FL, the City Commission of America’s Oldest European City is scheduled to proclaim May as “St. Augustine Jewish Heritage Month” at the Commission’s regularly scheduled meeting at 5:00pm this evening.

2016: “Artis, in partnership with the School of Visual Arts (SVA), and the International Center for Photography (ICP) is scheduled to present a lecture with acclaimed photographer Miki Kratsman an Argentinean-born photographer who has lived in Israel since 1971.

http://www.artiscontemporary.org/programs/lecture-with-miki-kratsman/

2017: Lynn Downey is scheduled to speak about her book Levi Strauss: The Man Who Blue Jeans to the World at the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society this evening.

2017: Dr. David Kraemer is scheduled to lecture on “The Books Jewish Tradition Forgot – But Shouldn’t Have” this evening at the Streicker Center in New York City.

2017: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “The Zookeeper’s Wife.”

2018: The Streicker Center is scheduled to host an evening with Mel Brooks during which he will talk about “his favorite film clips,” “growing up Jewish in Brooklyn: and “his career an actor, producer and director.”

2018: “How Michael Cohen, Denied Job in White House, Was Seen as Its Gatekeeper” published today described the fate of the man who said “he would take a bullet for Mr. Trump.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/us/politics/michael-cohen-shell-company.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

2018: Today, “CNN reported that investigators from the Special Counsel investigation have questioned “Ukrainian born Viktor Vekselberg, “the owner and president of Renova Group “about hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments his company’s US affiliate had made to Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer” and self-avowed “fixer,

2018: “Simon and Theodore” and “Another Planet” are scheduled to be shown at the 26^thToronto Jewish Film Festival this evening.

2018: The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to host “Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of the Middle Eastern Jewish Civilization Vanished” in which “Lyn Julius, a British journalist (Guardian, Standpoint) and daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, explores the mass exodus of Middle Eastern Jewish minority communities, the clamor for recognition, redress, and memorialization, and how their cause can further peace and reconciliation between Israel and the Muslim world.”  (Editor’s Note: This is the “Middle East Refugee Problem” that nobody talks about.)

2018: “Back to Berlin” and “The Dead Nation” are scheduled to be shown at the Washington Jewish Film Festival.

2018: In New Orleans, Temple Sinai is scheduled to co-host “Do Justice: Meaning and Action Across Our Traditions, a free social justice-themed course.”

2018: The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is scheduled to host a presentation by Holocaust survivor Susan Warsinger.

2019: “Firefighters who were called to put out a fire in the Mea Shearim neighborhood. were attacked by dozens of residents who tried to take down the Israeli flag from the fire truck,”

2019: After being introduced by Speaker of the House Nancy Peolosi, Omar Suleiman, “an imam who has wished for the end of Zionism, called for a third Intifada and likened Israel to Nazi-era Germany delivered the opening prayer for a session of the US House of Representatives” today which coincides with the celebration of Israel Independence Day. (As reported by Ron Kampeas)

2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “Outdoors,” the winner of “Best Screenplay” award at the Haifa International Film Festival.

2019: The Jewish Book Council and Tablet Magazine are scheduled to host Dani Shaprio, author of Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Fraternity and Love and Stephanie Butnick as they discuss “how we become who we are, how Judaism shapes how we think about our identity, and society's expectations on female artists and Jewish women.”

2019: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host Chicago Tribune columnist Howard Reich, the author of The Art of Inventing and child of Holocaust survivors as he “looks back on his greatest opportunity as a writer and journalist: numerous conversations with the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.  Howard will appear in conversation with another child of Survivors, Regine Schlesinger, veteran WBBM News Radio 78 broadcast personality.”

2019: Alarmed by Rev. Michael Pfleger’s invitation for Louis Farrakhan to speak at his church, Illinois Holocaust Museum officials spoke out this afternoon against Pfleger for “giving hatred a platform

2019(4^thof Iyar): Yom Ha’atsama’ut – Israel Independence Day --- Seventy-one years and counting.

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/yom-haatzmaut-israel-independence-day/

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/yom-ha-atzmaut-israeli-independence-day

2020(15^thof Iyar, 5780): Parasha Emor and Chapter Four Pirke Avot; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/

2020: Netta Yersushalmy is scheduled to present the livestream premier of part six of Paramodernities, “A Response to Balanchine with special guest Perter N. Miller.”

2020: As of today, thanks to a ruling by Israel’s High Court and an amendment to the Basic Law passed by the Knesset there appear to be no obstacles to the formation of a unity government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and supported by the Blue & White party under Benny Gantz.

2020: Based on published reports, Israel’s total virus-related deaths has reached at least 245 victims.

2020: B'nai Jeshurun Congregation is scheduled to host via Zoom “Starbucks, Bread & Torah Online.”

This Day, May 10, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 10



70: During the Siege of Jerusalem, Titus, the commander of the Roman legions and the son of Emperor Vespasian, opens a full-scale assault on Jerusalem and attacks the city's Third Wall to the northwest.

1013: After three long years of fighting which destroyed the cities of Jaen, Algecrias, Malaga and Valencia, the Muslim Berber tribesmen from North Africa took over the city of Cordoba, replacing the Umayyad Arabs. This shift in power did not have a negative impact on the Jewish population of Moorish Spain as they continued to play a similar role in the more decentralized world of the Berbers.

1267: A Church synod, meeting in Vienna, ordered Jews to wear distinctive garb.

1293: King Dinis I of Portugal who resisted pressure from the clergy to apply the anti-Semitic restrictions of the Fourth Council of the Lateran and “maintained a conciliatory position” regarding his Jewish subjects “advanced the interests of the Portuguese merchants, and set up by mutual agreement a fund called the Bolsa de Comércio, the first documented form of marine insurance in Europe,” which was approved today.

 1427: All Jews were ordered expelled from Berne, Switzerland. Expulsions of Jewish communities continued unabated throughout the 15th century: Treves, 1419; duchy of Austria, 1421; Cologne, 1424; Zurich, 1436; archbishopric of Hildesheim, 1457; Schaffhausen, 1472; Mayence, 1473; Warsaw, 1483; Geneva, 1490; Thurgau, 1491; Spain, Sicily, Sardinia, Lithuania, 1492; Mecklenburg and Arles, 1493; Portugal, 1497; Nuremberg 1499; Provence, 1500. 

1484(15th of Iyar): First auto-da-fe was held in Saragosa, Spain.

1484: The Inquisitor at Saragossa, General Gaspar Juglar was found dead, possibly the victim of a poisoning. This happened shortly after the first auto-de-fe took place in the city.

1529: Suleiman the Magnificent launched his campaign to secure control of Hungary.  The campaign would lead to the unsuccessful siege of Vienna in the fall which would mark the high-water mark of Turkish attempts to take control of Europe with all that that would mean for Christians, Moslems and especially Jews.

1634: William Prynne, an opponent Jews settling in England was pilloried for a second time as part of his punishment for opposing the production of plays.

1655: The British capture Jamaica from Spanish opening the door for Jews to settle in the island colony.

1682(2^ndof Iyar, 5442): The largest auto da fe was held in Lisbon: One hundred and seventeen persons were judged within three days, including a ninety-one year old woman.

1682(2^ndof Iyar, 5442): Abraham Lopez Pereira and Isaac da Fonseca were burned at the stake.

1754(18^thod Iyar, 5514): Lag B’Omer

1772: Birthdate of Mathias Bush, the native of Prague who came to “New York in the 1740’s” before moving on to Philadelphia where he became a naturalized citizen in 1749, married into the Gratz family, became a leading merchant, a supporter of the American Revolution and the patriarch of the Bush clan that included Solomon Bush who rose to the rank of Lt. Col. In the Continental Army.

1774: Abraham Solomon married Elizabeth Low at Marblehead, Massachusetts.  Solomon was Jewish, a fact reinforced by the fact that he signed his name in Hebrew on the muster roll so that he could receive his pay while serving in the Continental Army. 

1774:  Louis XVI begins his reign as King of France.  Basically, Louis followed the policy of his predecessors when it came to the Jews of France.  “The established, finance ally comfortable Sephardim of Bordeaux, Bayonne and Marseilles” enjoyed the privileges granted by Louis XV.  “These privileges had been purchased with a ll0, 000-livres payment in honor of his coronation.”

The Ashkenazi community of Alsace suffered the abuse and taxation that had been their lot since the days of Louis XIV.  Of course part of this difference in treatment may have been caused by the fact that Alsace was Germanic province that France had taken as a spoil of war.  The French were always suspicious of those living in this border province, Jew and non-Jew alike.

1789: Birthdate of Jared Sparks, the American historian, Unitarian Minister and President of Harvard who “became interested in Haym Solomon’s career and validated the importance of the Jewish businessman to the American revolution when he wrote “that Salomon’s associations with Robert Morris ‘were very close and intimate and that a great part of the success that Mr. Morris attained in his financial schemes was to the skill and ability of Haym Solomon.’”

1792(18^thof Iyar, 5552): Lag B’omer

1792: Asher Jacobs married Esther Israel at the Great Synagogue today.

1797(14^thof Iyar, 5557): Pesach Sheni observed for the first time during the Presidency of John Adams.

1799: French troops under Napoleon make one last assault in their futile attempt to conquer Acre.  If the assault had succeeded would history have been changed?  Would Bonaparte have honored the grandiose statements about making Palestine a home for the Jews?  Given his “inconsistency” in other areas, it would probably have depended on his needs at the time.  

1801: Birthdate of Paul Tulane the businessman whose endowment paved the way for the renaming of the university which was originally known as the Medical College of Louisiana to Tulane University whose many Jewish graduates include Professor Stephen Whitfield.  As of 2009, Tulane’s Jewish population ranked number 9 in a list of 30 private universities. Tulane is home to a Jewish Studies program that has been led by the distinguished author and educator Professor Brian Horowitz.

http://tulane.edu/liberal-arts/jewish-studies/

1801: American involvement in the Middle East would begin when the Barbary Pirates of Tripoli (North Africa, not Lebanon) declares war against the United States in what became known as the First Barbary War.  American Jews first became involved in the area when Colonel David Franks negotiated a treaty with Morocco back in 1786.  Jewish involvement would continue when President Madison sent Mordecai Manuel Noah to negotiate with Tunisia based Barbary Pirates for the release of imprisoned American sailors in 1813.  The appointment of Noah “helped establish a tradition of appointing American Jews to Middle Eastern diplomatic posts.  (For more about this fascinating intersection of American and Jewish history see Power, Faith and Fantasy by Michael B. Oren.)

1807: Netherlands native David Cromelien and his wife Adeline Cromelien gave birth to Leon Cromelien.

1808: The Westphalian chief of police, a French official named Savagner, entered “The Green Shield.”  The Green Shield was both the home and the business center for Rothschild in Frankfurt.  Savagner and the troopers, who accompanied him, searched the premises looking for proof that Rothschild was plotting with Whilhelm.

1810(6th of Iyar): Rabbi Joshua Ha-Kohen Perahyah, author of Vayikra Yehoshua passed away today

1813: Birthdate of Gustav Christian Schwabe a German-born British “merchant and financier who funded companies such as John Bibby & Sons, Harland and Wolff and the White Star Line.”  At the age of six, Schwabe and his family “were forced to convert to Lutheranism.”

1815: Gabriel Oppenheim married Elizabeth Davis at the Great Synagogue today.

1815: Samuel Solomons married Sophia Davis at the Hambro Synagogue today.

1816: Birthdate of Joseph Mayer Montefiore, the native of London who was a nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore

1829: Two days after he had passed away, “watch maker, optician and jeweler” David Davis, the husband of Elizabeth Lazarus and father of Aaron Davis was buried today “at the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery” in London.

1837: As the Panic of 1837 (a 19^th century version of the 20^thcentury Great Depression) worsens banks in New York fail and unemployment reaches record levels. Some Jews prospered during this period while others struggled. Isaiah Moses, a South Carolina merchant and planter was forced to borrow money from Beth Elohim’s charity fund, Karen Kayemet to help maintain his lifestyle. On the other hand August Belmont, representing the Rothschilds, arrived in New York during the Panic. He used his newly created August Belmont & Company to reform and improve the business interests of the House of Rothschild over the next five years.

1838: Sixty-one year old Heinrich Marx, the father of Karl Marx, who unlike his was Prussian patriot and monarchist and who became a Lutheran because the law forbade Jews to hold positions in the legal system passed away today.

1839: Ernestine Jaffé and Schiee Jaffé gave birth to Alwine Waldenburg

1842: In  Rhenish Palatinate, Jacob Sulzbacher and Regine Schwartz gave birth to Louis Sulzbacher, the husband of Pauline Flersheim and the United States for the Western District of Indian Territory and “first continental American appointed as Associate Justice of the newly created Supreme Court of Puerto Rico in 1900.”

1843: Birthdate of Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, leader of the Reform Movement in the United States.  Born and educated in Germany, Kohler came to the United States in 1869 to serve as Rabbi at Congregation Beth El in Detroit.  The following year he married the daughter of Dr. David Einhorn, the Rabbi at Congregation Beth El in New York and the leading Reform rabbi of his day.  Kohler followed his father-in-law in that position and supported his views when he helped write the 1885 Reform Platform.  He was elected President of Hebrew Union College and died in 1926.

1849(18th of Iyar, 5609): Lag B'Omer

1849: Bernard Sondheim served with the Tenth Regiment of New York State Militia when it quelled the Astor Place Riot, also known as the Forrest-Maready Riots, a unique outbreak of public violence caused by competing fans of two different thespians.

1852: In Krumbach, Deutschland, Elias Landauer, the German born son of Raphael Löb Landauer and Lucia Pessel Landauer and his wife Karoline Kehle Landauer gave birth to Isidor Landauer

1855: A group of Jews who have converted to Christianity are scheduled to meet tonight at the

Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church in Manhattan under the auspices of the American Hebrew Christian Association.

1860(18^thof Iyar, 5620): Lag B’Omer

1860: Lewis Collins married Martha Cohen today on the first day during the counting of the Omer on which Jews can marry.

1861: Secretary of War Cameron and President Lincoln officially accepted Major Mordecai's resignation thus ending a 38 year military career of what was at that time, the highest ranking Jewish officer in the U.S. Army.

1864: Alfred A. Rinehard, a Captain serving with Company of the 148^thRegiment was wounded at Po River, Viriginia.

1865(14^thof Iyar, 5625): Pesach Sheni

1865: As the Confederacy crumbled at the end of the Civil War, Judah P. Benjamin completed his terms as the third and last Secretary of State of the CSA.

1865: In New York, “John F. and Bertha May Manges” gave birth Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons trained doctor and husband of Julia Hirschhorn who was the consulting physician at Mt. Sinai Hospital and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum as well as a “contributor to several medical journals on the subject of clinical medicine.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1944/01/28/87443068.pdf

1866:Ion Ghica who “was a valuable ally for Yiddish theater in Bucharest” and “on several occasions expressed his favorable view of the quality of acting, and even more of the technical aspects of the Yiddish theater” completed his service as Prime Minister of Romania today.

1866: In Vilna, Boruch M. Friederman and his wife gave birth to Solomon Jacob Friederman who was ordained by Rabbi Isaac Eichanan Spector in Kovno before serving as the rabbi of Congregation Shaarei Jerusalem and Congregation Kol Israel in New York City.

1866: Birthdate of Belarus native Lev Rosnberg who gained fame as Leon Bakst a Russian painter and scene- and costume- designer who revolutionized the arts he worked in” and who in 1893 produced a self-portrait that hung in the Sate Russian Museum in, St. Petersburg.

1868: “Mr. Disraeli and Judaism” published today summarized the view expressed by The Jewish Chronicle that Benjamin Disraeli has been a Christian since he was either five or six years old at which time a friend of Disraeli’s father took young Benjamin to a church in Hackney where he was baptized.

1868: Abraham Nathan married Katherine Lyons today at the Great Synagogue.

1868: In Medina, NY, Levi Adler and Theresa Wile gave birth to Harvard trained lawyer, Isaac Adler, the “53^rd Mayor of Rochester, NY” and the husband of Cora Barnet with whom he had four daughters.

1869: The First Transcontinental Railroad, linking the eastern and western United States, is completed at Promontory Summit, Utah (not Promontory Point, Utah) with the golden spike. When the Union Pacific, one of the two companies building the railroad, entered Utah the Auberach brothers (Fred, Sam and Theodore) opened tent stores in Bryan, Wyoming and Promontory, Utah to meet the needs of the burgeoning population  The Auberachs were so successful that they opened a permanent store in Ogden, Utah in 1869 and Salt Lake City in 1873.

1872:  Birthdate of Marcel Mauss, “a French sociologist best known for his role in elaborating on and securing the legacy of his uncle, Émile Durkheim and the Annee Sociologique and the author of The Gift. He passed away in 1950.

http://www.aaanet.org/committees/commissions/centennial/history/092mauss.pdf

1873: Myer Stern the President of the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society and a trustee of Temple Emanu-El was among the mayor’s nominees for Commissioners of Charities and Correction in New York City. Born in 1824, Stern came to the United States at the age of 16 and has lived in New York since 1847.  “A large, robust vigorous-looking man with a rather pleasant expression,” Stern is a Reform Democrat who had the support of the Republicans when he ran for the State Senate.

1873: Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis received a patent for their unique manner of manufacturing jeans.

1874: Birthdate of Moses Schorr, a Polish Rabbi, Polish historian, politician, Bible scholar, Assyriologist and orientalist who died in Soviet prison camp in 1941.

1877:  Romania declares itself independent from Turkey.  Under the Treaty of Berlin signed in 1878, the Jews of Romania were to receive full citizenship. 

1877: The will of Henry Grass, a New York clothier who died in April, was filed in Surrogate’s Court today.  The estate was valued at $75,000. The will opened with an invocation “In the name of the God of Israel, Amen.”  Grass left $300 to his niece Jetha and a thousand dollars to the daughters of his brother Abraham “on condition that they ‘marry according to the Jewish law.’”  He left $100 bequests  to the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum , Mout Sinai Hospital and the Hebrew congregation on 57^th street between 1^st and 2^nd avenues.  He left one third of the residue of the estate to his wife Rebbeca and the remainder was to be divided equally among his six children.

1879: Today’s “Foreign News” column reported that there had been a massacre of Jews in Satschcheri in the Caucuses. At the beginning of April the body of a child was found in the woods. Seven Jews were accused by the Christian villagers of having killed the child and then having hid the body as part of their Easter Sacrifice.  The accused were taken before a local Judge who dismissed the charges after “a medical witness” testified that the child had died of natural causes and that the wounds on the body “were the work of wild animals.  The Jews celebrated their deliverance with a party which was interrupted by a an axe wielding Christian mob.  The mob, which had been incited by an Orthodox Priest broke into the house killing six of the Jews and injuring many more.

1879(17^thof Iyar, 5639): Seventy-five year old Russian Hebrew scholar Benzion Berkowitz known for his study of the Targum Onkelos passed away today at Wilna.

1879: Based on information provided by a correspondent for the Neue Zilricher Zeitgung it was reported today that in the first week of April the Jews of Satschcheri had been massacred after the body of a Christian child had been found in the woods. Seven Jews were accused by the Christian villagers of having killed the child and hidden the body to be used in a holiday sacrifice. The district judge dismissed the charges because the medical witness said the child had died of natural causes and the wounds on the body had been inflicted by wild enemies. Ax-wielding Christian villagers attacked the Jews who were celebrating their deliverance, killing at least six and wounding several more.  The correspondent claimed that the local Greek Orthodox priest had incited the attack.
1881: Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Wasilkow and Konotop, Russia.

1882: Alliance, a Jewish agricultural settlement, was founded in New Jersey. Alliance was financed by Alliance Israelite Universelle headquartered in Paris. It was part of a movement to have Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settle away from major metropolitan areas in the United States and Great Britain. 

1883: In Pittsburgh, of Jacob Isadore Affelder and Catherine "Kate" Affelder gave birth to Case School of Applied Science graduate Harry /Fleishman Affelder, the Cleveland “envelope manufacturer and husband of Rhoda E. Affelder who was the father of Lewis Jacob Affelder and Ruth Jane Hexter Goodfriend

1883: Birthdate of Eugen Leviné, the Russian born, German educated communist revolutionary.

1883: Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Craiova, Rumania.

1883: Josephine and 27 year old Henry Morgenthau, Sr. were wed today in New York City

1885(25^thof Iyar, 5645): Seventy-three year old composer and conductor Ferdinand Hiller whose star pupil was Max Bruch the non-Jew who composed the cello elegy for Kol Nidrei passed away today.

1885(25^thof Iyar, 5645): Sixty year old Russian author Grigori Isaacovich Bogrov whose first work, Memoirs of a Jew, “portrayed the vicissitudes of his life and surroundings’”

1885: “Welcoming a New Rabbi” published today described the first service conducted by Rabbi Alexander Kohut at Temple Ahavath Chesed.  The Hungarian native had replaced another Hungarian native, Adolph Huebsch who passed away last October. In his opening sermon, Kohut paid tribute to his new home, promised to be an apostle of peace and spoke so movingly of his predecessors that some of the congregants were moved to tears.

1887: Birthdate of Indianapolis, IN, born attorney Leo Kaminsky who was active in B’nai B’rith and the Reform movement.

1888(29th of Iyar, 5648): Sixty-five year old Michael Heilprin passed away.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7500-heilprin-michael

http://www.jewish-history.com/civilwar/heilprin.html



1888: In Vienna, Gábor Steiner, “a Viennese impresario, carnival exposition manager, and inventor, responsible for building the Wiener Riesenrad” and his wife gave birth to Maximilian Raoul Walter Steiner who gained fame as Max Steiner was born in Vienna and supposedly studied under Mahler.  He came to the United States in the 1930's, a composer for films who  produced musical themes for such films as “Casablanca,” “The Caine Mutiny,” “The Summer Place” and most famous of all “Tara’s Theme,” the award winning score  “Gone With the Wind.”

http://www.hollywoodsgoldenage.com/moguls/max-steiner.html

1890: It was reported today “the upper house of the Prussian Diet has adopted a resolution calling upon the government to remedy the evils arising from the large number of Jews in the public schools”  by excluding “the juvenile Jews while still taxing the adult Jews for the cost of public education.

1890: “Complaining of the Jews” published today described the reaction of Her von Gosler, the Minister of Public Instruction in Prussia to proposals that Jewish children be excluded from public schools.  He said that “such an attempt would force the nation in a position leading to disruption instead of union.”  To him, this is a matter of educational policy and not subject to “political demand.”

1891: “Tories Not So Happy Now” published today described the rising fortunes of the Liberal Party which is due in part to a return of the Jews to this political party.  “Under the glamour of Disraeli’s example it became quite the fashion for” Jews to join the Conservative Party. Now, as Jews are confronted with “outside persecution” they recall the debt they owe to the Liberal Party.  Among those leading the change are Baron de Stern and H.S. Leon, the son of clockmaker who has reportedly amassed a fortune of 15 million dollars and has sought to be a leader of the Anglo-Jewish community.

1891: The increase of this week’s issue of The Hebrew Standard from 16 to 24 pages is reported to be permanent.  The Hebrew Standard “is now the largest Jewish paper published in the United State. “It is intended to be a Jewish family paper” without any congregational affiliation.

1891: Nearly three hundred Jewish children were vaccinated today the Bureau of Contagious Diseases.

1892: “Strikes Turn Into Riots” published today described the violent attacks on the Jews of Lodz by workers who have been on strike since May Day. After attacking the mills where they had worked the strikers turned their wrath on the Jewish community which actively defended itself.  Local authorities could not quell the disturbance, but the military units called in showed their sympathy with the rioters and did not defend the Jews.

1893: Three people escaped being asphyxiated today at a tenement on Eldridge Street which is occupied by Jewish immigrants from Russia.

1893: In can only be described as a “starting” development, it was reported today that the Russian government to hold a meeting of Rabbis in the Autumn to discuss “the Jewish question.” This comes in the wake of the governments announced plan for expelling a million and half Jews living in the Polish part of the Russian Empire. 

1894: Today, “in the shtetl of Byaroza-Kartuskaya, a teacher in a cheder and his wife, who “ran a dry goods store and a factor for making rye kvass, gave birth to poet and Yiddishist Kadia Molodowsky who settled in the United States in 1935 where she lived with her husband Simcha Lev and wrote with such skill that in 1971 she was “a recipient of the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish letters.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/molodowsky-kadya

1895: In “Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, “Aaron Brode, drapery traveller, and his wife Jane, née Magid, immigrants from Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania “ gave birth to their second son, Sir Israel Brodie, the Jews’ College and Oxford educated rabbi who served “as a British Army Chaplain in France from 1917 to 1919, worked as a congregational rabbi in Australia in the inter-war years and “as an army chaplain in France, was one of the last evacuees from Dunkirk.”

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/brodie-sir-israel-9586

1895: “Meeting of Jewish Woman’s Council” published today described the groups plans for holding a fundraising fair in December and a request from London to assist in establishing schools for Russian Jews who have moved to Jerusalem.

1895: Birthdate of Oskar Klein who was murdered at Jajdanek in 1942

1895: Birthdate of Laura Maria Buntenbach-Kugler, the wife of Victor Kugller who was one of those who helped to hide Anne Frank and her family.

1896(27th of Iyar, 5656): Lea "Lisette" Koppel Waldstein, the wife of Ephraim Walstein and the mother of Sophie and Zadok Waldsein, passed away today in Munich.

1897: In New Orleans, Prague native Reform Rabbi Maximilian Heller, the son of Simon Heller and Mathilde Kassanowitz and Ida Annie Heller gave birth to Ruth Heller who was the wife of George Lion Cohen and Albert Steiner.

1897: Two days after he had passed away, 43 year old John Solomons was buried today at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery” in London.

1898(18^thof Iyar, 5658): Lag B’Omer

1898: First Sergeant Frank Wolf of Lincoln, Sergeant Henry Jacob of Bellwood and Privates William Assenheimer, William J. Koopman, Eugene Meyer and Guy D. Solomon, of Omaha, were among those who joined the United States military when the 1^st Nebraska Volunteer Infantry was mustered into the Army.

1898: In London Alfred Mond, 1st Baron Melchett and his wife Violet Goetze gave birth “to their only son Henry Ludwig Mond, 2^nd Baron Melchett” who “having been brought up in the Church of England” “reverted in the 1930s to his family’s original Judaism and became a champion of Zionism.”

1898: Privates James W. Rosenberger and Tylor H. Rosenberger both of Winchester were among those who joined the U.S. Military when federal government began the process of mustering the 2^nd Virginia Volunteer Infantry in the service of the United States.

1898: Birthdate of Bialystok native Jacob Perlman who came to the United States in 1912, earned all three of his college degrees at the University of Wisconsin and went to become a world class economist.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/04/10/89131020.pdf

1899: Memorial services honoring the late Baroness Hirsch are scheduled to be held at the Hebrew Institute and Temple Emanu-El

1899: In Richmond, VA, Rachel and Jacob Levy Ezekiel gave birth to “agrarian economist” Mordecai Ezekiel, the holder of a BA from U. of MD, an MA from the University of MN and a Ph.D from Brookings Institute who was instrumental in creating the New Deal’s Agriculture Adjustment Administration.

https://www.geni.com/people/Mordecai-Ezekiel/6000000015434830469

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordecai_Ezekiel

https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=i8bUXMTBAu6wtgXi2qKoBg&q=Mordecai+Joseph+Brill+Ezekiel&oq=Mordecai+Joseph+Brill+Ezekiel&gs_l=psy-ab.12..33i160.8525.21900..22613...0.0..0.602.4087.15j10j0j2j1j1....2..0....1..gws-wiz.....0..0j0i131j0i10j0i22i30j0i22i10i30j33i299.1DnNnnfGQHI

1899: Birthdate of composer Dimitri Tiomkin.  Born in Russia, Tiomkin worked in lived in Western Europe before coming to the United States in the 1930's where enjoyed an almost unparalleled career writing scores for film productions. His credits include everything from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, to Giant, to The High and The Mighty and the Guns of Navaronne.  One of his classic was the theme for the 1952 classic western, High Noon.  He won an Oscar for that one and Tex Ritter gained musical immortality for singing it.  His biggest contribution to television was theme for Rawhide.  He passed away in 1979, yet another Jew who helped create popular American culture.

1900: Austrian Prime Minister Ernest von Koerber delivered his “Language Bill” Speech which was entirely different than the one he had asked Herzl to write for him.  Herzl responded to this apparent slight by asking if the Prime Minister only valued his “secretarial services" or that he thought that Herzl wants “a decoration or something like that?” In fact, Herzl only wrote the speech as way of getting the Prime Minister to help him arrange a meeting with the Sultan of Turkey so that he could make a presentation on the benefits of creating a Jewish home in Palestine

1901: The Jewish Comment reported today that Massachusetts State Legislature had rejected Samuel Hyman Borfosky bill exempting “persons observing the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath from any penalty for keeping shops open or for performing secular business and labor on the first day of the week” which in the days of Sunday Closing Laws would have meant that Jews could close on their Shabbat and not lose a day’s business since they would be open on Sunday.

1902: Birthdate of Joachim Prinz, the Prussian born Rabbi who came to the United States in 1937 where he became a leader of the Zionist and Civil Rights movements.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/01/obituaries/joachim-prinz-leader-in-protests-for-civil-rights-causes-dies-at-86.html

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/59863/the-plot-for-america?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=c2e48cf2e6-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-c2e48cf2e6-206644398

1902: In Pittsburgh, of silent film director Lewis J. Selznick and his wife gave birth to producer David O. Selznick, the son-in-law of MGM's Louis B. Mayer who worked for MGM for years before setting up his own production company which produced  Academy Award winner, Gone With the Wind.  Selznick died in 1965.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0510.html

1902: Birthdate of Antaole Litvak director of the film Anastasia

1903: Birthdate of philosopher Hans Jonas. Born and educated in Germany, Jonas would move to Eretz Israel 1933, join the British Army, serving as a combat soldier for five years, return to Israel to fight at the age of 45 as soldier in the War for Independence before moving to Canada and the United States where he wrote and taught until his death in 1993.

1903: Zionists are scheduled to conduct a house-to-house campaign today in New York to raise funds for those victims of the anti-Semitic riots that began in “Kishineff” in April.

1904: In Amsterdam, Aron Belinfante and Georgine Antoinette Hesse gave birth to Frieda Belinfante the Dutch-American cellist and conductor who was a member of the Dutch resistance during WW II.

1905: “A dispatch…from Odessa says it is reported there that thirteen Jews have been killed in riots at Melitopol, in the Government of Taurida, South Russia.

1905: “The Associate Press is informed” that 15 of the 18 people killed at Kieff from May 6 through May 7 were Jews.

1906: Birthdate of New York mobster Abe "Kid Twist" Reles

1907: Birthdate of James Joseph Packman, the native of Biala, Poland who came to the United States in 1910 and served as he managing editor of The Milwaukee Sentinel, the Newark Star Ledger and the San Francisco Call-Bulletin.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/packman-james-joseph

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1969/02/13/77439631.pdf

1908: “The movement among the Jews of” New York City “to urge a general observance of the Jewish Sabbath by shopkeepers and merchants took definite form” tonight when members of the Sabbath Observance Association and took steps that would lead to a “boycott all Jewish bakers within a certain section of the east side who do not agree to close shop on Saturday.

1909: It was reported today that there is still a possibility that the million dollar bequest by the late Louis A. Heinsheimer may be given to six New York City Charities on condition that they form a federation.  Alfred M. Heinsheimer, the residuary legatee under the will, is trying to find a way to accomplish the descendant’s desires desipted the fact that Louis Stern, President of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum has expressed his continued opposition to the creation of such a federation.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F0DE6DF1E31E733A25753C1A9639C946897D6CF

1910: In Sheffield, England, Julius Isaacs, the Lithuanian born son of Isaac and Sarah Postawelsky and his wife Matilda (Tillie) Isaacs gave birth to “Albert Edward (Teddy) Isaacs”

1911: In Brooklyn Rabbi Hyman Goodekowitz and his wife gave birth to Rabbi Alexander David Goode the Washington, DC raised graduate of the University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College and holder of a Ph.D from Johns Hopkins who was the husband Al Jolson’s niece Teresa Flax who gained fame as on the Four Chaplains aboard the Troopship Dorchester.

1911: In Berlin, medical student Michael Kaufman and his wife Lala Rabinowitz Kaufman, a daughter of Sholem Aleichem gave birth to New York school teacher Bel Kaufman best known for writing Up the Down Staircase.(As reported by Margalit Fox)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/26/arts/bel-kaufman-up-the-down-staircase-writer-dies-at-103.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

1912: Today “revolution in Paraguay was defeated after government troops overcame the rebels” at a time when a large number of Sephardi families from the Ottoman Empire were joining the small group of Ashkenazim who had settled there at the end of the 19^th century.

1913(3^rdof Iyar, 5673): On Shabbat, Samuel Straus who had served as an “Indian agent” passed away in Chattanooga, TN.

1913: In Cincinnati, OH, The Board of Governors of Hebrew Union College is scheduled to host an “exercise” in honor of Dr. Koffman Kohler’s 70^th birthday in chapel of the Hebrew Union College Building.

1913: Seventieth birthday of Dr. Kaufmann Kohler who for twenty-four years was Rabbi of Temple Beth-El, at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street and is now Honorary Rabbi of that congregation.



1914(14^thof Iyar, 5674): Pesach Sheni

1914: Following yesterday’s proclamation, the U.S. observed the first official Mother’s Day which falls on the second Sunday of May.

1914(14^thof Iyar, 5674): Sixty-three year old Israel Dov Frumkin who move to Palestine at the age of 9 and was an earlier developer of modern Jewish culture including the revival of Hebrew as a modern language as can be seen by his work the newspaper Havatzelet passed away today in Jerusalem.

1914: Benjamin “Benny” Snyder murdered Philip “Pinchy” Paul “at the behest of ‘Joe the Greaser,’ and east side rival of ‘Dopey Benny’ Fein.  (All of these colorfully named characters are Jewish gangsters)

1915: “Dramatically asserting his innocence of the murder of Mary Phagan and with impassioned declaration that ‘he was to die for the crime of another,’ Leo M. Frank was today sentenced by Judge Ben H. Hill in the General Court to hang on June 22.”

1915: After weeping silently, the wife of Leo Frank “screamed, collapsed and sank limp in her chair” after he husband was resentenced to death in an Atlanta courtroom “for a crime of which a great majority of his countrymen believe him to be innocent and for which he was never fairly tried.”

1915: It was reported today that “Warsaw has 60,000 refugees, a third of them Jews.”

1915: The International Congress of Women at which “Rosika Schwimmer’s proposal for a Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediate between the belligerents was adopted” came to a close today in The Hague.

1915: It was reported today that “a Warsaw rabbi” has “assured” Robert Crozier Long, “an author and special correspondent for the Associated Press” who has toured “the war-devastated districts of Poland” “that 100,000 Jews from the towns of Lodz, Piotrkow and Lowicz were without homes” with “many thousands huddled in the tottering fragments of cottages while 10,000 are shivering in the abandoned trenches and terraced Russian dugouts at Skaryszom.”

1915: According to reports “just received by Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs” in New York City, “an international loan” to which American Jews were major contributors has “saved the large orange-raising industry of the Jewish colonies in Palestine” which “represents an investment of $3,000,000” and twenty years of hard work.”

1915: A summary of the manifesto recently issued by distinguished Russians protesting again persecution of the Jews of Russia during the war” the full text of which had been published in the Jewish Chronicle of London was published in the United States today ending with a declaration by “members of the Duma, members of the Imperial Council, Princes and distinguished professors and letterateurs” that “we are sure that the disappearance of all kinds of persecution of the Jews and their complete emancipation so as to be our equal in all rights of citizenship will form one of the conditions of a really constructive imperial policy.”

1916: It was reported today that Isador Herschfield who is returning from Europe where he has been investigating “the distribution of Jewish relief funds” raised in the United States will be “able to give valuable advice as to the best use to be made of money raised in the future” and well as provide comfort to many living in New York since he has several thousands of letters from those living in the war zones addressed to friends and family in the United States.

1916: According Max J. Klein, when he applied for membership in the Second Field Artillery tonight, “he was told that there no vacancies in the regiment and he and the other 12 Jewish applicants were not sent for medical examinations while several other applicants all of whom were Jewish were sent for the medical examinations which were the next step in joining the unit.

1917: Rabbi Nathan Krass, a member of the American Jewish War Relief Commission “announced that he had raise $100,000 for Jewish war relief work” during his recent lecture tour.

1917: “Ex-President Taft applauded vigorously” tonight” at a dinner sponsored by the American Jewish Friends of Free Russia “when Jacob H. Schiff…praised Theodore Roosevelt for his efforts, while President, to bring the Russian autocracy to a realization of the wrong committed against their Jewish subjects.”

1917: The Jews of Amsterdam held a meeting today where “a resolution was passed hailing the American Jewish Congress and similar movements in Russia and other countries as the beginning of an organization comprising the entire Jewish people for the formation of legitimate representation at the peace conference.



1917: On the last day of the British War Mission’s visit to Washington A.J. Balfour, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affiars, spoke with Justice Brandeis this afternoon, possibly about the establishment of “a Zionist Republic in Palestine” – a subject “that the British do not desire to discuss too fully in the present disturbed situation.” (That “disturbed situation is also called World War I)

1917: “Jacob Biliikopf, Executive Director of the $10,000,000 campaign of the American Jewish Relief committee in Behalf of the Jewish War Sufferers in Europe announced” tonight that $1,000,000 has already been pledged.

1917(18^thof Iyar, 5677): Lag B’Omer

1917(18^thof Iyar, 5677): In Philadelphia, PA, “communal worker” L.G. Pape passed away today.

1918: It was reported today that “the Kehillah has just published the Jewish Communal Register” which “provides some interesting facts regarding the Jews in New York.”

1919: Birthdate of Daniel Bolotsky, who gained fame as  “Daniel Bell, the writer, editor, sociologist and teacher who over seven decades came to epitomize the engaged intellectual as he struggled to reveal the past, comprehend the present and anticipate the future.” (As reported by Michael T. Kaufman)

1920(22^ndof Iyar, 5680): Sixty-one year old Clarence Isaac de Sola, the “son of Cantor Abraham de Sola and Esther de Sola and husband of Belle Maud de Sola with whom he had four children passed away today passed away today in Boston after which he was buried in his native Montreal.

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/de_sola_clarence_isaac_14E.html

http://imjm.ca/location/1092

1920: Four days after she had passed away Leah Hopter, the wife of Alexander Hopter who died on the same day she had, was buried today at the “East Ham Jewish Cemetery.”

1921: Eugen Schiffer began serving at the Minster of Justice for the second time.

1922: Birthdate of David Joshua Azrieli, CM, CQ the “Canadian builder, designer, architect, developer and philanthropist.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2014/07/09/canadian-israeli-real-estate-tycoon-david-azrieli-dies-at-92/

http://www.haaretz.com/business/1.603922

1923: In Vienna, at tonight’s session of the World Conference of Jewish Women, Dr. Kahn, the German delegate “stated in her report on emigration that as a result of pogrom and various persecutions “3,300,000 Jews migrated from Eastern Europe from 1881 till 1922 of whom 2,630,000 went to America” and that “the situation of the Eastern European Jews has become desperate, owing to the restriction of American immigration.”

1924: Dr. Kaufmann Kohler, President Emeritus of Hebrew Union College at Cincinnati, Honorary President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and known as one of the greatest Jewish scholars of America, celebrated his eighty-first birthday at his home at 2 West Eighty-Eighth Street among a gathering of relatives, friends and scholarly disciples.

1926: Rabbi Stephen S. Wise is scheduled to receive Zeta Beta Tau’s  Gottheil Medal “for distinguished service to the cause of Judaism” this evening at the Hotel McAlpin.

1926: “Jew and Gentile” published in today in Timemagazine provided the following portrait of the American Jewish Community in the middle of the Roaring 20’s which had come to include a genteel form of anti-Semitism at America’s leading universities



On the upper end of Manhattan Island there are arising some gorgeous, massive buildings in an Americanized Byzantine manner— rigid facades; a squatty dome; ornate yet severe decoration. They represent the first independent stand on education ever taken by Jewry in the 2,000 years of its exile. Out of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary has grown the Yitzchok Elchanan Yeshivah, in which there will be the first Jewish college ever established in the U. S., equipped to grant "the same academic degrees as other American colleges in a background thoroughly Jewish and thoroughly American in spirit." Such an institution has become more and more inevitable, for a reason implicit in remarks made last week by Gustavus A. Rogers, Manhattan lawyer, who addressed 60 prominent Jews at the Bankers' Club: "We will cater ... to the Jews who have been barred from Christian schools for non-scholastic reasons."  There was simple fact in Mr. Rogers' assertion that U. S. universities— he named Columbia, Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown and Princeton — discriminate against Jews in accepting matriculants. Polite evasion by those institutions notwithstanding—except in Columbia's case — Jewish undergraduates form an element in the undergraduate bodies which, if it has not occasioned official discrimination, is a subject for much restless discussion and action among Gentile undergraduates, and this constitutes, for the Jews, discrimination of a most definite sort—exclusion from clubs, preference in athletics, elections, etc. It has seemed to many Gentiles high time that the Jews, with their plentiful resources, relieve themselves of embarrassment by building their own colleges, just as they have their own churches, dwelling colonies (e. g., Long Beach, L. I.), and even hotels (e.g., the Hotel Libby, at Delancey and Chrystie Streets, Manhattan, which opened formally last week for Jews only). Another speaker at the Bankers' Club gathering—met to discuss a music festival to be held this month in Madison Square Garden to raise a fifth of the five millions needed to build the Yeshivah— was Adolph Lewisohn, one of the most intelligent and effective workers on human relationships in the U. S. He referred to the Yeshivah as "the salvation of Judaism," where Jews could acquire a college education in Jewish surroundings and without breaking the Sabbath and other holy days. He said that his own grandsons had been excluded "by one of the East's largest universities." There was a tinge of irony in Mr. Lewisohn's position, whether the grandsons had been excluded for social or for academic reasons. He came to this country from Germany as a lad of 16, in 1865. His brother Leonard was already here and the two built up a big mercantile business, Lewisohn Bros. In 1868 they began specializing in metals, particularly copper, and soon led in world markets. Leonard died in 1902. Adolph, now 77, is one of the world's greatest mining and industrial potentates. He sent his son, Sam Adolph, to Princeton ('04) and to Columbia Law School ('07), then took him into the firm, now Adolph Lewisohn & Sons. As wealth accumulated he entered philanthropy in the educational and artistic fields. He housed the Columbia School of Mines with a gift of $300,000. He assisted the College of the City of New York to form a German library, to build an athletic stadium. He collected paintings—Blakelock, Bellows and other moderns as well as Rembrandt, Titian, Dürer—and put them where they could be enjoyed by the people as well as himself. Now his grandsons, because of the pressure of an affluent Jewish population, are uncomfortable in surroundings to whose peace and prosperity he has contributed much. He hears of requests from the colleges to the heads of preparatory schools to "leave the Jews out" when they fill their quotas of certificate scholars. But Adolph Lewisohn understands the nature of social irony, and instead of berating the Gentiles, he has simply noted their frame of mind and thrown his weight behind a movement to supply the people of his race and creed with an institution which, without in turn discriminating against other creeds, will put the children of Israel on an equal educational footing with their Gentile countrymen.

1925(16^thof Iyar, 5685): Seventy-year old Sir Isidore Newman passed away today in England

https://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib2_1221577973

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41335896?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

1925: “Judaism’s Future in America” published today provides a review of American Judaism:The Religion and Religious Institutions of the Jewish People in the United States: A Historical Surveyby Joseph Leiser,

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1925/05/10/101664483.html?pageNumber=39

1926: Following the success of the original in 1925, the second incarnation of Rodgers and Hart’s Garrick Gaieties under the direction of Philip Loeb opened today.

1926: Large contributions towards the campaign to save the Franc by voluntary subscriptions are being made by French Jews. Louis Dreyfus contributed the amount of 500,000 Francs today. The Union of Presidents of Jewish Societies in Paris has announced its first contribution of 6,335 Francs.

1926: New light upon the life, achievements and opinions of Walter Rathenau, late German Jewish statesman who was killed by anti-Semites, is contained in two volumes of the writings of Rathenau and documents pertaining to his life, released here today. The volumes contain about eight hundred letters of Rathenau and cover a period of forty years. The volumes contain material hitherto unknown in which Rathenau emphasized his loyalty to Germany and Judaism.

1927: In Berlin, Sali and Alex Friedlander gave birth to Rabbi Friedlander.

1927: “The Bordellos of Algiers” with music by Artur Guttmann was released in Germany today.

1928: Birthdate of Alfred Gilbert Aronowitz, an American rock journalist best known for introducing Bob Dylan and The Beatles in 1964.

1929(30^thof Nisan, 5689) Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1929: A joint memorandum to the Mandatory Government by the chief rabbis, the National Council and Agudat Israel demands a halt of all construction work carried out by Muslims near the Western Wall.

1930: Birthdate of Chicago native and Washington University Ph.D. Samuel Halperin  who taught political science at Wayne State University who went to be an influential “legislative specialist” with HEW while raising two children – Elan and Deena – with his wife Marlene Epstein Halperin.

1931: Today, after having received “menacing letters warning Jewish traders to leave Mexico with 24 hours,” a Jewish delegation left a petition with President Rubio “drawing attention to the desperate position of the Jews of Mexico” and requesting he issues an order to end the “anti-Jewish boycott.” (JTA

1933(14^thof Iyar, 5693): Pesach Sheni

1933(14^thof Iyar, 5693): Fifty-eight year old operatic soprano Selma Kurz lost her battle with cancer and passed away today in Vienna.

http://www.operavivra.com/artists/sopranos/selma-kurz/

1933: Ezriel Carlebach “attended as an observer the central book-burning on Opernplatz in Berlin, where his books were thrown into the fires

1933: Books deemed of "un-German spirit," most of them Jewish, are burned on Unter den Linden, opposite the University of Berlin, and throughout Germany. More than 20,000 volumes are destroyed, including works by John Dos Passos, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Émile Zola, H. G. Wells, André Gide, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky, Helen Keller, Friedrich Forster, Marcel Proust, Jack London, and Erich Maria Remarque. Among those who witnessed the burnings were Sinclair Lewis, Eve Curie and Bella Fromm.

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/may/02.asp

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/book-burning?utm_source=mkto&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1805MKTEM03879-three-col-link-2&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTURnd01XWXdObUl5TlRrMSIsInQiOiJZZk0xYmw1N2VTTVExNURJeGlWd09nSHN5OEs1V2FiZzg5eDlcL3hic3lOb3A2bVZUdDJFdXh1NmZWZFJrczZOaW92aGdia2RBc3RxeHZwZnZTOHN5b0M3Y2pRZGFHYXVqSEpKRUk2SDhLSWFNQUFMOHk4ZHMzYm5UMFdRVzYzU1gifQ%3D%3D

1933: Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife had already moved to Southern France when his works were burned during today’s book burnings in Germany. The famous novelist had been forced to flee because he was Jewish, because he was an out-spoken critic of the Nazis and because he was friend with such decadents as Bertol Brecht.

1933(14^thof Iyar, 5693): Seventy-three year old Samuel “Frenchie” Marx the French born tailor who was the husband of Minnie Marx and the father of The Marx Brothers passed away today in Los Angeles, CA.

http://www.marx-brothers.org/biography/parents.htm

1935: After premiering in Los Angeles last month “Bride of Frankenstein” produced by Carl Laemmle, Jr with music by Franz Waxman opened in New York City.

1935: Two days after he had passed away, funeral services were held today for sixty-eight year old Vilna born American journalist I. Leon Dalidansky who in 1906 came to the United States where wrote for the Jewish Daily News while raising two children – Cecilia and Ezra – with his wife Mary followed by burial “at Mount Judah Cemetery in Brooklyn.”

1936(18^thof Iyar, 5696): Lag B’Omer

1936(18^thof Iyar, 5696): Seventy-two year old Emilie Eisler, the daughter of Catherine and Samuel D. Klauber and the wife of Juris Doctor Alois Eisler passed away today in Moravia.

1936: Today is Mother’s Day which is being observed “by thousands of Jews in the United States by purchasing trees to be planted in Palestine in honor of Jewish mothers” – a plan that was promoted by Hadassah.

1936: The 80^th anniversary of the founding of Congregation Beth Israel Anshei Emes in Brooklyn “was celebrated at dinner” tonight “at the Hotel St. George attended by more than 100 members and guests” including Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Justice Edward Lazansky of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court and Harold L. Turk, president of the Congregation.

1937: HMT Dunera, the ship which was the nautical vehicle of “an infamous care of wartime…injustice” when it was used by the British to deport 2,542 detainees classified as ‘enemy aliens’” the largest contingent of which “2, 036 anti-Nazis most whom were Jewish refugees” to Australia under the most barbaric conditions imaginable, was launched today.

1938(9^thof Iyar, 5698): Sixty-eight year old “Taub (Yona) Margalit, the Bialystok born daughter of Elijah and Sarah Golda Bloch” and the wife of Moshe Dov Bear Margalit passed away today it “Petah Tikvah, Israel.

1938(9th of Iyar, 5698): Author and Zionist leader Alter Druyanow passed away today.

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

1939: In Glasgow, thirty-three French featherweight Maurice Holtzer ended his fifteen year pugilist career with a loss on points today.

1940: During World War II, British forces occupied Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, as part of Operation Fork.  The British took the action to forestall seizure of the neutral island-nation by the Nazis.  The Anglo-Jewish sailors and marines who were part of the occupation force found that city contained a small Jewish population but no synagogue.  By Yom Kippur the disparate groups of Jews had coalesced into a semblance of a community. About twenty five Jewish soldiers from England, Scotland and Canada gathered with eight Jewish refugees and Hendrik Ottósson to observe the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar.

1940: Birthdate of Parisan Dora Frydenzon (née Skurnik) the daughter of Polish Jews who had fled to France in 1936 and who would survive the war thanks to the efforts of Alfred Le Guellec.

1940: The Germans invaded the Low Countries and France putting an end to the so called Phony War.  The Blitzkrieg would bring the Holocaust to the existing Jewish populations of these nations as well as to the untold thousands of Jews who had sought refuge in the West since the rise of Hitler during the 1930's.

1940: Today’s Nazi bombing of Antwerp meant that Leo Bretholtz’s hernia operation was canceled leading to his discharge from the hospital and arrest and imprisonment at St Cyprien.

1940: This morning President Roosevelt met with six of his closest advisors including Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

1940: Author and illustrator Hans Rey was at his desk in Avranches touching up a page of “Fifi” as the Nazis were invading France and the Benelux countries.  Unbeknownst to Rey, this major military catastrophe would trigger events that would send him and his wife on race against death that would lead them through southern France and ultimately to the United States.

1941: In London, “the Great Synagogue” was destroyed today.

1941: As Axis forces drive into Egypt, Churchill receives secret word of a new threat to the Jews of Palestine.  Hitler is pressuring Turkey to allow German troops to cross their borders threatening Palestine from the North.  Churchill reminds his new Colonial Secretary, Viscount Cranborne of his previous support of arming the Jews for self-defense and urges him to get done all that he can.  Realizing the danger of a pincer attack, the British now encourage the Jews to build fortifications on the crest of Mount Carmel so that they can respond to attacks from the north and the south.

1941 (12th of Iyar, 5701) In Suresnes, France, Aaron Beckermann was the first Jew in France to be shot for resistance.

1941: Raymond Raoul Lambert wrote in his diary: "In view of the persecutions being initiated by the new order in France, against foreigners in general and foreign Jews in particular, in light of what has happened elsewhere, in view of the racist laws and the 'Commission on Jewish Affairs' being run in Vichy from Berlin, I wonder whether this collaboration won't bring about a yet more rigorous Statut [the anti-Jewish laws of October 7, 1940]... There are days when I don't dare listen to official bulletins on the radio; they wound me, because I still feel French and call myself a Frenchman. If I didn't have my wife and my three sons, I should be sorry not to have died honorably in action... or sorry to have survived my mother..." As a staunch supporter of pan-Europeanism, Paul Lambet had repeatedly censured nationalistic writers and opposed the more militant French attitudes toward Germany. He believed that "Germany and France, after having been combatants, have to collaborate or decline," a prophetic thought, but expressed too early. Lambert's strong identification with France and its interests did not prevent him from taking a deep interest in Jewish affairs. A prolific writer for various French and Jewish publications, he had even published a collection of poems on Jewish themes and had assisted in the founding of the French Jewish Literary Review. He strove to bring French Jewish youth to a better understanding of the need to build "a new notion of a universal order." He was pleased to see the Zionist achievements in Palestine, but his very deep sentiment for liberal France prevented him from showing any special interest in the Zionist movement. Lambert's diary offers us a very interesting description of his service in the defeated French army in World War II, the creation of Vichy and the unprecedented rise of French anti-Semitism.

1941: Tonight during the Blitz, the Luftwaffe destroyed the boardroom of the Bayswater Synagogue and completely destroyed London’s “Great Synagogue” and the “1870 Central Synagogue.”

1941: Following tonight’s Blitz that destroyed the Great Synagogue of London, “Sandys Row Synagogue” which had been founded in the 1850’s “by workingmen of Dutch Ashkenazi background, employed as cigar makers, diamond cutters and fruit traders” became the oldest surviving Ashkenazi synagogue in London

1942(23^rdof Iyar, 5702): Seventy-four year old Joseph M. (Joe) Weber, the Weber in the burlesque team of Weber and Fields, the husband of the former Lily Friedman, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Friedman passed away today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1942/05/11/85536919.pdf

1943: “A Bundist member of the Polish government in exile, Szmul Zygielbojm, committed suicide in London to protest the lack of reaction from the Allied governments. In his farewell note, he wrote:



"I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people."

1943: Famous actor Ralph Bellamy read from “They Burned the Books” by Stephen Vincent Benet to a thousand people who gathered in front of the New York Public Library “as part of the nation’s observance of the tenth anniversary of the burning of books in Germany.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F30815FC3E581B7B93C3A8178ED85F478485F9

1943: This afternoon, in cooperation with the Council on Books in Wartime, New York radio station WQXR will broadcast “Books Never Die” to mark the 10^thanniversary of the first mass Nazi book burning. The broadcast will include a message from Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and addresses by Sinclair Lewis, Eve Curie and Bella Fromm who were in Germany at that time.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F7071FFF3E581B7B93C2A8178ED85F478485F9

1943: Two Jews were successfully smuggled out of Dobele, Latvia, and hidden in a haystack

1944: In Shorewood, WI, “Louise M. (née Ogens), an educational researcher, and Norman S. Abrahams, a lawyer” gave birth to director, producer and screenwriter James S. Abraham, the colleague of the brothers Jerry and David Zucker and the husband of Nancy Cocuzzo.

1945: At Theresienstad, Herman Rosenblat “was scheduled to die in the gas chamber at 10:00 A.M.  But at 8: A.M. he “heard shouts, and saw people running in every which way” because the Russians had liberated the camp.  Rosenblat went to find his brothers who had also survived the last Nazi attempt at genocide. (Herman Rosenblat wrote the “fictitious memoir” Angel at the Fence.)

1945: Theresienstadt was liberated by the Soviet Army.  Located in the Czech town of Terezin (Theresienstadt was its German name), the ghetto gained some measure of fame as a show place where the Nazis brought representatives of the International Red Cross to show how well the Jews were being treated in the Third Reich.  Eventually most of the Jews of Theresienstadt met the same fate as others in the various Death Camps.  Sadly, after the liberation there was an outbreak of typhus which raged until August, claiming even more victims.  There is a collection of children's art and from this strange ghetto entitled I Thought I Never Saw Another Butterfly.

1946: “A Night in Casablanca” starring Groucho, Harpo and Chico Marx, with music by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and a script co-authored by Joseph Fields was released today in the United States.

1946: “In Hull in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, Maurice Julius Lipman, a tailor and Zelma Pearlman gave birth to award winning British actress, writer and supporter of Israel, Maureen Diane Lippman the wife of dramatist Jack Rosenthal an the mother of  Amy and Adam Rosenthal.

1947: Today “Twelve German generals, including Wilhelm List and Maximilian von Weichs, were indicted at Nuremberg on charges of war crimes.”

1948: “In an attempt to see if war with Transjordan could be averted, the Jewish Agency sent one of its most formidable negotiators, Golda Meir, on a second secret mission to King Abdullah of Transjordan.  In a mission that would credit to James Bond, Mrs. Meir traveled at night disguised in the robes of an Arab woman.  Mrs. Meir offered a plan along the lines of the U.N. approved partition plan.  Abdullah wanted the Jews to drop their demand for free immigration and give up their aspirations for a state.  Instead, the Jews could have autonomy under Jordanian rule with Jewish representation in a Jordanian parliament. Considering the lack of democracy in Jordan, this offer was a rather a hollow one in terms of power sharing.  As to the substitution of autonomy instead of sovereignty; this would be consistent with the traditional Moslem view of Arab-Jewish relationships.  The Jews would be accepted as long as they would always accept a second class position.   

1948: Tzfat (Safed) was secured by the Haganah. Located in the northern Galilee, Tzfat is one of the four holiest cities for Jews in Israel.  It has been the home to Jewish mystics for centuries; a center for the study of Kabbalah and the place where Lecha Dodi was created.  Tzfat was the scene of fighting in April and May 1948 as the Arabs sought to destroy the Jewish community before the end of the Mandate.  Tzfat had a small Jewish population and matters were not helped by the departing British commander who turned the keys of the police station (with its arms) which was the local citadel to the Arab insurgents.  The Palmach and the Hagana prevailed despite being outnumbered and outgunned.  Most of the Arab population fled when Jewish victory seemed imminent.  According to the Churchill's biographer Martin Gilbert, "With the invasion of Palestine by regular Arab armies believed to be imminent...many Arabs felt prudence dictated their departure until the Jews had been defeated and they could return to their homes."  And thus began the "Palestinian Refugee Problem" that is with us to this day.

1948: Since she could not reach Ramot Naphtali, Lorna Wingate, the widow of Order Wingate flew over the settlement in a Piper Cub and dropped a Bible into the compound.  The note attached to it read, "This bible accompanied Wingate on all his campaigns and inspired him.  Let represent a covenant between us - in victory or defeat, now and forever

1948: Units of the Moslem Brotherhood were driven back after they had attacked Kefar Darom

1949: It was announced today, that, thanks to the efforts of the Joint Distribution Committee, the International Refugee Organization and the Canadian Jewish Congress, “some 300 Jewish refugees trapped in Shanghai will be flown to Canada by Alaska Airlines, Inc.”

1950: The Mediterranean coastal district of Israel is reported to be fighting an outbreak of polio.

1951(4^thof Iyar, 5711): Despite being surrounded by enemies on all sides, dealing with the challenge of absorbing tens of thousands refugees and host of other problems, Israel celebrates Yom HaAtzmaut

1951: Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, escorted by high ranking Israeli officials, journeyed to West Point this morning and placed a wreath on the grave of Col. David (Mickey) Marcus, who was killed in 1948 while serving with the Israeli forces during the war in the Holy Land.

1952: Temple Israel in Akron, Ohio lays the cornerstone for its new addition.

1953: Birthdate of John Diamond, the native of Hackney, London, who became a bio-chemist and fashion designer who was the husband of television personality and author Nigella Lawson.

http://web.archive.org/web/20091216113301/http://www.lastingtribute.co.uk/tribute/diamond/2603916

1953(10^thof Iyar, 5713): Seventy year old Belfast born, American composer and orchestra leader Harry Rosenthal passed away today in Beverly Hills.

1955(18^thof Iyar, 5715): Lag B’Omer

1955: Birthdate of Greenwich, CT native Christopher James "Chris" Berman, “also known by the nickname Boomer, the American sportscaster who anchors SportsCenter, Monday Night Countdown, Sunday NFL Countdown, Baseball Tonight, U.S. Open golf, the Stanley Cup Finals and other programming on ESPN and ABC Sports.”

1959: Betty and Dr. Jacob Levin gave birth to attorney Lawrence “Larry” Levin, the husband of Sandee Levin and the creator of the Iowa Kosher for Passover Care Package.

1959(2^ndof Iyar, 5719): Seventy four year old Petrikov, Russia native Max Zaritsky, the son of a rabbi and husband of Sophie Zaritsky who in 1906 came to the United States where he rose the Presidency of the United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union passed away today.

https://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w6h995qg

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1959/05/11/80575988.pdf

https://www.jta.org/1959/05/12/archive/max-zaritsky-leading-american-jewish-labor-leader-dead-was-74

1960: Following the closure of the Broadway production of Flower Drum Song the eighth musical by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II “a U.S. national tour began today in Detorit.

1960(13^thof Iyar, 5720): Seventy-year old Maurice Schwartz, the Russian born American actor who founded the Yiddish Art Theatre passed away today.

http://www.jta.org/1960/05/11/archive/maurice-schwartz-leading-actor-of-jewish-stage-dies-in-israel-was-72

1961(24^thof Iyar, 5721): Fifty-six year old Cleveland born Lloyd H. Feder, the husband of Lillian Feder and father of Suzie Bloom of Louisville, KY passed away today in his home town.

1964: “Treblinka was declared a national monument of martyrology today during an official ceremony attended by 30,000 people.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franciszek_Duszeńko#/media/File:Treblinka_memorial.jpg

1966: In an example of how the Arab-Israel conflict was entwined in the Cold War, Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin arrives in Cairo where he will convince Nasser “that a mutual defense pact between Cairo and Damascus (guaranteed by Moscow) would be in the best interest of all concerned. Israel enjoyed no such reciprocal relationship with the United States or her western allies which reinforced the Israeli notion that in any crisis, Israel would be facing millions of armed Arabs backed by the military might of the Soviet Union.

1968(12^thof Iyar, 5728): Eighty-one year old George Frankenthaler, a former State Supreme Court Justice and New York County Surrogate passed away today.  An accomplished lawyer, Frankenthaler was so highly respected that both President Franklin Roosevelt and Governor Thomas Dewey urged to seek election to the State Supreme Court.   In 1948, Frankenthaler who was a Republican became the first non-Democrat to be elected to the Surrogate’s Court in over half a century. Active in several Jewish charities, he had served as President of the 92^nd Street Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F50D13FB39541B7B93C0A8178ED85F4C8685F9

1968(12^thof Iyar, 5728): Ninety-four year old Samuel Bloomingdale, the son of Lyman Bloomingdale and Hattie Collenberger passed away today.

1970(4^thof Iyar, 5730): Yom HaZikaron

1972(26^thof Iyar, 5732): Edward Henry Pinto, the London born son of a cigar merchant and WW I veteran who was the Joint Managing Director of Compaction Ltd and author of Treen and Other Wooden Objects passed away today.

1973: At Ramat Gan, writer and poet Yehonatan Geffen and Nurit Makover gave birth to rock start Aviv Geffen.

1975: “The Other Side of the Mountain” a biopic directed by Larry Peerce, son of Cantor Jan Peerce, produced by Edward S. Feldman and with a screenplay by David Seltzer was released today in the United States.

1977: Final broadcast of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” Norman Lear’s hugely popular spoof of that uniquely American mainstay of daytime broadcasting – the Soap Opera.

1978(3rd of Iyar, 5738): Yom HaZikaron

1981: In “From Genesis to Jesus Christ Superstar, published today, Paul Kresh described the veritable explosion of recent recordings of Biblical literature that have been recorded for the mass market including, Abba Eban reading Psalms and Ecclesiastes, Theodore Bikel reading ''Poetry and Prophecy of the Old Testament''   Claire Bloom’s reading “Ruth,” Claude Rains and Claire Bloom reading “The Song of Songs,”  supply Howard Sackler's clever condensation and direction of the Book of Job, with Herbert Marshall suffering beautifully as the severely tested servant of God, surrounded by a large cast including Martin Balsam as Elihu, Clarence Derwent as Eliphaz (one of Job's non-comforting comforters), and Joseph Holland awesomely cosmic as the Voice Out of the Whirlwind. (Editor’s note –You have to be of a certain age to appreciate the star quality of the performers.  Also in an age of downloading, i-pods, etc., it is difficult to appreciate the technological and social significance of these works.)

1981: Final broadcast of Season 6 of “One Day At A Time” starring Bonnie Franklin

1981: In “The Final Solution in Argentina,” Anthony Lewis reviews Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without a Number by Jacobo Timerman

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/10/books/the-final-solution-in-argentina.html?pagewanted=all

1983: Eighty-five year old Herbert Benjamin, Communist Party leader turned small businessman, passed away today in Rockville, MD.

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/14/obituaries/herbert-benjamin-85-leader-of-us-communists-in-30-s.html

1983:  Birthdate of Tiberias native Moshe Peretz, the popular singer and composer married to Yarden Gozland and father of Michaela, Noam and Guy who fell afoul of Israeli tax laws.

1984: NBC broadcast the final episode of season two of “Family Ties,” a sit com created by Gary David Goldberg.

1986(1st of Iyar, 5746): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1988: NBC broadcast the last episode of “Crime Story” co-starring Joseph Wiseman and Ted Levine, a self-described “Hill-Billy Jew.”

1989(5^thof Iyar, 5749): Yom HaAtzma’ut

1991: U.S. premiere of “The Switch” based on a George Axelrod play, starring Ellen Barkin under the management of Executive Producer Arnon Milchan.

1992(7th of Iyar, 5752): At New York City's Algonquin Hotel, Sylvia Syms finished singing her last song, raised her right arm to acknowledge the audience's standing ovation, and collapsed of a heart attack.  (As reported by Stephen Holden)

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/11/arts/sylvia-syms-singer-dead-at-74-cabaret-artist-with-saloon-style.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm

http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/10/1992/sylvia-blagman-syms

1992: “Israel Commemorates Start of the Holocaust,” published today Jed Stevenson describes the surprising choice for the commemorative medal that the Israelis have made this year. 

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/10/style/coins-israel-commemorates-start-of-the-holocaust.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm

1995: “A Little Princess,” a World War I drama co-produced by Dalisa Cohen and Amy Ephron, filmed by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki at Barry Levinson’s Baltimore Studios and co-starring Eleanor Bron was released today.

1995(10th of Iyar, 5755): Eighty-six year old Steffie Spira, the German actress and Communist whose Jewish father Fritz Spira died today in Berlin.

1996(21st of Iyar, 5756): Seventy-seven year old architect Zelma Wilson who moved to Paris after her husband screenwriter Michael Wilson was blacklisted passed away today.

http://articles.latimes.com/1996-05-14/local/me-4057_1_michael-wilson

1996: “Original Gangstas” directed by Larry Cohen was released today in the United States.

1996: “Twister,” a combination a romantic comedy disguised as a disaster film co-starring Jami Gertz and featuring Joey Slotnick was released today in the United States.

1998: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Time of Our Time” by Norman Mailer and the recently released paperback edition of “The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin” by Joan Peyser.

1999(24th of Iyar, 5759): Sheldon Allan "Shel" Silverstein passed away. Born in Chicago in 1930, Shel Silverstein gained fame as a poet, songwriter and author.  He wrote the lyrics to the Johnny Cash hit, “A Boy Named Sue.” The Grammy Winning song was written in response to a bet that Silverstein couldn’t write a country and western hit during a bus ride back to Los Angeles, or so goes the legend.   He authored several books including “The Missing Piece,”“A Light in the Attic,” “Where the Sidewalk Ends” “Falling Up” and“The Giving Tree.”  These works are often referred to as children’s literature, but anybody who has read them knows that they transcend that genre and speak to readers of all ages.

2000(5^thof Iyar, 5760): Yom HaAtzmaut

2000: Four days after he had passed away, funeral service are scheduled to be held today for 87 year old WW II Army veteran Joseph Sheftall, the Russian born son of Benjamin and Hoda Sheftall, the husband of Willma Shetall and the father of Fred and Steven Shefall who “began his career as a business agent for local 325 in Brooklyn, New York” before he emerged as an important force in the labor movement.

2001: Having obtained a search warrant, D.C. police search Chandra Levy’s Washington apartment looking for clues as to her whereabouts.

2001: Publication of a review of William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?” a must read tome.

http://www.dts.edu/reviews/william-g-dever-what-did-the-biblical-writers-know-and-when-did/

2002(28th of Iyar, 5762): Yom Yerushalayim

2002(28^thof Iyar, 5762): Ninety-two year old sociologist and author The Lonely Crowd David Riesman passed away today

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/11/books/david-riesman-sociologist-whose-lonely-crowd-became-a-best-seller-dies-at-92.html

http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/footnotes/mayjun02/indextwo.html

2002: Operation Defensive Shield which had been launched following the “Passover Massacre” came to an end.2003(8th of Iyar, 5763): Dr. Leonard Michaels, author and professor of English at the University of California at Berkley, passed away.

2004: Two days after she had passed away, funeral services are scheduled to be held at “The Riverside” for 92 year old Silvia Paulson, the of wife of the late Martin Friedlander and Philip Paulson who was a “scholar, teacher and lover of life.

2004: “The Palestinian Authority said today that it would begin holding its first municipal elections late this summer, in a bid to stem public anger over corruption and mismanagement” while Prime Minister Sharon is pursuing his own plan to withdraw Israeli soldiers and settlers from territory heavily populated by Palestinians” despite opposition from his own Likud Party. (As reported by James Bennet)

2005(1^stof Iyar, 5765): Rosh Chodesh Iyar

2005: Meg Wolitzer, the Brooklyn born “daughter of novelist Hilma Wolitzer (née Liebman) and psychologist Morton Wolitzer” “was a guest on NPR's program Fresh Air” where she discussed her novel The Position

2005: Today, speaking on Army Radio, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said that “withdrawal from the Gaza Strip will not be called off under any circumstances rebuffing suggestions by Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom that the pullout should be canceled if Hamas wins parliament elections this summer.”

2006(12th of Iyar, 5766):  Eighty-four year old Abraham Michael "A.M." Rosenthal passed away.  The Canadian native began his career with the New York Times in 1943.  He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in 1960 and served as executive editor from 1977 until age requirements forced him to leave the post in 1988.  (As reported by Robert D. McFadden)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/11/nyregion/11rosenthal.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

2006: Results show that Elliot Yamin, was among three people who named as the top three finalists for American Idol

2007: “Less than two months before his death, Joel Siegel spoke before the C.E.O. Roundtable on Cancer, an association of corporate executives that was formed when former President George H. W. Bush asked corporate America to do something "bold and venturesome" about cancer. Bush and his wife Barbara were in the audience when Joel spoke at the Essex House in New York City. He began and ended his presentation by saying, "I want to thank you for what you are doing for cancer patients."

2007: An exhibit of works by local artists Paula Christie and A.D. Lane at the Etz Chaim Synagogue. Crete’s only Synagogue, comes to an end. Etz Chaim was rededicated in 1999.

2007: The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective entitled “The Magic of Paul Mazursky” comes to an end.  He is probably best remembered for directing the 1969 sexual spoof, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.”

2008: Early this morning the IDF confirmed air strikes on Hamas police stations in the Gaza Strip, killing five Hamas operatives hours after a fatal barrage of mortar shells fired by Palestinian gunmen killed one man in a Kibbutz in the western Negev. Jimmy Kedushim, a 48-year-old father of four, was killed when a mortar shell landed in the front yard of his house in Kibbutz Kfar Aza Three others were wounded in the attack, one moderately and two lightly. Magen David Adom teams at the kibbutz treated a number of people for shock, Israel Radio reported. A number of buildings in the kibbutz were damaged in the barrage.

2008: At the Jerusalem Cinematheque, a screening of “Faithful City” \ קריה נאמנה.Made in 1952, the film deals with children survivors of the Holocaust who came to Israel on the eve of the war of independence full of fears and problems.

2008: As part of its Israel at 60 Celebration, the 92^nd Street Y hosts a Yom Ha'Atzmaut Spring Dance Marathon.

2008: Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said during a parliamentary conference that he "would burn Israeli books myself if found in Egyptian libraries."

2009: Mark Strauss, a Holocaust survivor, signs copies of his new novel, “Four Plus Five” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Bookstore.

2009:  As part of the LABA Festival The 14th Street Y, a Jewish Community Center in the East Village, presents a screening of “Water Marks,” a documentary film by Yaron Zilberman, produced by Yonatan Israel. “

2009: The Washington Post featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Third Reich at War” by Richard J. Evans and “Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy by Leslie H. Gelb

2009: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace” by Ayelet Waldman “Conversations with Frank Gehry” by Barbara Isenberg and three books by Amy Krouse Rosenthal – “Little Oink,” “Spoon” and “Yes Day.”

2010: An exhibition entitled “The Works of Mordechai Rosenstein” is scheduled to open at the Fine Family Art Gallery and the Katz Family Mainstreet Gallery of the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MJCCA).

2010: “Forward 50,” a panel discussion featuring recent Forward 50 Honorees is scheduled to take place at the Historic 6^th& I Synagogue in Washington, D.C.

2010: President Barack Obama announced at the White House that he is nominating U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. If Kagan is confirmed, it would be the first time that the nine-member Supreme Court would have three Jews and three women on the bench.

2010: “The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) invited Israel to become a member of the organization.”

2010: Israel Air Force planes bombed two targets in the southern Gaza in the early hours today warning in retaliation for a rocket attack on Saturday night, the army said.

2011: Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story is scheduled to be shown at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

2011: Professor Brian Horowitz is scheduled to give a talk at a conference entitled, In the Mirror’s Reflection: The Encounter between Jewish and Slavic Cultures in Modernity at U.C.L A.

2011: Rabbi Eliezer Diamond is scheduled to present a lecture “Do We Mean What We Pray, Do We Pray What We Mean?” at Congregation Beth El in Bethesda, MD.

2011: In “An Insider Views China, Past and Future,” Michiko Kakutani reviewed On China by Henry Kissinger, the first Jew to serve as U.S. Secretary of State.

2011(6^th of Iyar, 5711): Ninety-one year old broadcast executive Burt Reinhardt, who served as President of CNN in those early years when it was changing the face of television news, passed away today in Marietta, GA. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/business/media/12reinhardt.html?_r=1

2011(6^th of Iyar, 5711): Yom Ha’atzmaut, ,יום העצמאות‎, Israel Independence Day, is observed.  Yom Ha’atzmaut is normally celebrated on the 5^th of Iyar, the anniversary of the day on which Israel declared its independence.  Since 2004, if the 5^thof Iyar falls on a Monday, which it did in 2011, the festival is postponed until Tuesday. http://www.biblicalzionist.com/facts.htm     

2011: On Independence Day, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported that Israel had a population of 7,746,000, 75% of which is Jewish.  In the past year 178,000 babies were born and 24,500 immigrants made Aliyah

http://www.biblicalzionist.com/facts.htm

2012: The Jewish American Heritage Parade is scheduled to take place this morning in Albany, NY.

2012: “The Jewish Woman In America: 1654-2012,” a course that will study the vital contributions that Jewish women have made to American Jewish life, from the time of the first Sephardic arrivals to New Amsterdam in 1654, down to the present sponsored by the Board of Jewish Education of Atlantic and Cape May Counties is scheduled to begin tonight in Margate, NJ.

2012: Chabad of Iowa City is scheduled to sponsor a Lag Ba'Omer BBQ in West Branch, Iowa, which is the home of the Herbert Hoover Memorial Library. Jews will remember Hoover as the President who appointed Justice Benjamin Cardozo to the Supreme Court giving the U.S. two Jewish Supreme Court Justices at a time of rising anti-Semitism.

2012: At the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center Howard Reich, jazz critic for the Chicago Tribune and son of Holocaust survivors, is scheduled to moderate a panel discussion where American and foreign born Jewish GIs reflect on their wartime experiences, and the impact their religious affiliation had on their time in the service

2012: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present the Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series Spring Concert including the great masterpiece of Jewish music, “Shlomo”, a Hebrew rhapsody for cello by Ernest Bloch

2012: Jazzrael - a Festival of Israeli Jazz and World Music featuring the Avi Avital Trio is scheduled to take place at Joe’s Pub in New York City.

2012: At the Wiener Library in London, Professor Carrier Tarr is scheduled to present a lecture on Secularism, difference and the family as portrayed in Roschdy  Zem’s film “ Mauuvaise foi” which “s a comedy that revolves around the consequences of the secular Jewish heroine’s discovery that she is pregnant, and the increasingly problematic decision she and her equally secular Arab-Muslim boyfriend take to keep the baby and tell their not-so-secular families.”

2012: New York's kosher law, which regulates the labeling and marketing of kosher food, does not violate the Constitution's First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled. The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled today in a constitutional challenge to the New York State Kosher Law Protection Act of 2004. Previously, kosher was defined legally as “according to orthodox Hebrew religious requirements.” Several butchers challenged the law in a 1996 suit. (As reported by JTA)



2013: The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide and the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism are scheduled to present “Sanctioned Laughter: Humour, War and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Europe.

2012: David Rakoff was featured on This American Life's live broadcast, "Invisible Made Visible" from the Skirball Theater, NYU.

2013: “No Place On Earth” is scheduled to open at the Catamount Film and Arts Center in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

 2013(1^st of Sivan, 5733): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2013(1^stof Sivan, 5733): Eighty-eight year old author Morris Renek passed away today. (As reported by Daniel Slotnik)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/books/morris-renek-novelist-of-hard-boiled-stories-dies-at-88.html?hpw

2013(1^stof Sivan, 5773): Sixty-one year social activist Barbara Brenner passed away today. (As reported by Denise Grady)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/us/barbara-brenner-breast-cancer-iconoclast-dies-at-61.html?_r=0

2013::At more than 100 Jewish day schools in 38 cities around the world, parents and children are gathering across six continents to study Torah together as part of a joint initiative of global Jewish unity, called Generation Sinai.Tens of thousands of parents and children will be studying the same section of the Torah on the same day in their individual schools as part of one integrated international campaign which began in South Africa.

http://generationsinai.com/

2013: Clashes erupted at Jerusalem’s Western Wall plaza early this morning, as thousands of ultra-Orthodox teenagers attempted to prevent the Women of the Wall from holding their monthly egalitarian prayer session at the site.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/haredi-women-mass-at-kotel-for-standoff-with-feminist-group/

2014: Sarah Cohen is scheduled to be called the Torah as a Bat Mitzvah at Agudas Achim in Coralville, Iowa.

2014: “Zeitgeist” is scheduled to be shown at the 22^ndannual Toronto Jewish Film Festival.

2014: “Kidon” is scheduled to be shown at the National Center for Jewish Film’s 17^th annual Film Festival.

2014: In honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, the New World Symphony is scheduled to present an evening of music by celebrated Jewish American composers at Miami Beach, FL.

2014: Thousands marched in Afula tonight in commemoration of 19 year old Shelly Dadon whose body was found earlier this month “in what is believed to be a nationalistically motivated killing.”

2014: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu his wife and two sons left for a week-long state visit to Japan tonight 

2015: “Mr. Kaplan,” “The Kindergarten Teacher” and “His Wife’s Lover” are scheduled to be shown on Mother’s Day at the 18^thAnnual Film Festival sponsored by the National Center for Jewish Film’s.

2015: ZUSHA, a “folk/world-soul band of ‘neo-Hasidic hipsters’” is scheduled to make its DC-area debut today.

2015: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to conduct an “in-depthtour of sites related to Jewish history and military heroes, including the Confederate Memorial by Sir Moses Ezekiel (seen here) and the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle Memorials.”

2015: As part of the Krum Concert Series, young artists are scheduled to perform works by Mieczyslav Weinberg, a Jewish composer whom Shostakovich considered exceptional but who was ignored by the Soviet musical establishment.

2015: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Timur Vermes’ Look Who’s Back, a novel about Hitler in which “the first mention of the Jews doesn’t arrive until after Page 50” and Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword by David K. Shipler who won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1987 for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land.

2016: The Consulate General of Israel and the 92^nd Street Y is scheduled to a host a Yom Hazikaron or Memorial Day Serving “honoring the soldiers who have their lives in defense of the State of Israel and the victims of terrorist attacks.”

2016: In Philadelphia, PA, The National Museum of American Jewish History is scheduled to host an evening with “filmmaker Artemis Joukowsky who will share excerpts from his upcoming documentary, Two Who Defied the Nazis, about Martha and Waitstill Sharp, an American social worker and Unitarian minister who provided aid to refugees fleeing Nazi persecution.”

2016: In New York, the Upper West Side’s annual five day celebration of Israel is scheduled to begin with “Sharim Vezochrim: Songs and Remembrance for Yom Hazikaron with Moshe Bonen” at JCC Manhattan.

2016: Effective today, the archives of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington are scheduled to be closed until September, 2016 while historic synagogue museum moves locations.

2017: New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman and historian Jenna Weissman Joselit, the author of Set in Stone: America's Embrace of the Ten Commandments are scheduled “to explore the impact of the ancient biblical code on American culture.”

2017: Donniel Hartman is scheduled to deliver a lecture on “Jewish Identity, Belonging and Community” sponsored by the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and B’nai Jeshurun.

2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host “hotdog and movie night” that will also include veggie burgers.

2017: “Ben-Gurion, Epilogue” is scheduled to have its premiere showing at the 2017 East Bay International Jewish Film Festival.

2017: “Between Myth and Reality,” an exhibition of the works of Anglo-Israeli sculptor and artist Chaim Stephenson is scheduled to come to an end today.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/sculptors-work-on-refugees-takes-on-increased-resonance-in-new-london-exhibit/

2018: “An Act of God” is scheduled to open at Le Petit Theatre in New Orleans

2018: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is scheduled to host a presentation by Holocaust survivor Albert Garih.

2018: “Saving Neta” and “Assumed Identity” are scheduled to be shown at the Washington Jewish Film Festival.

2018: “Falling Backward” and “The Invisibles” are scheduled to be shown at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival.

2018: After having been “selected by the Arizona Cardinals in the first round in the 2018 NFL Draft” Quarterback Josh Rosen “signed four year deal worth $17.84 million with an $11 million signing bonus.”

2018: Approximately 20 Iranian rockets were fired at Israeli positions in the Golan Heights today which brought about a response from IAF jets.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/09/iran-fires-20-rockets-syria-golan-heights-israel

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/world/middleeast/israel-iran-syria-military.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

2018: The American Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to present ‘20^th Century American Jewish Stardom: Between Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker”

2019: In New Orleans, Gates of Prayer is scheduled to host its annual meeting and installation of congregation officers.

2019: Today the Frida, the mother Israeli r Itay Steinberg Z”L the gifted photographer who was killed at the age of 21 while rescuing one of his comrades during the 2006 war in Leanon “took part in an international exhibition in Venice Italy, to display the art that she said was created together with her son’s energy and legacy.” (As reported by Yaakov Lappin)

2019: In Lafayette, CA, Temple Isaiah is scheduled to host “Yom HaAtzmaut Shabbat featuring Isaiah’s Adult Choir.”

2019: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host Jerusalem of Gold an evening marking Israel’s 71^st birthday that includes a performance and remarks by “Shuli Natan, followed by an extended Oneg with a DJ and Israeli food.”

2019: This afternoon, The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled present a performance of Nabucco, an opera by Verdi which “was made famous with the Hebrew Chorus ‘Va Pensiero” and starring David Serero starring as Nabucco.

2019: Erev of Shabbat is a double portion of joy for the friends and family of Larry Levin who is celebrating a Milestone Natal Day.

2020: “On the Sunny Side of the Street: The Songs of Dorothy Fields” scheduled for today as part of the Molly Blank Concert Series has been postponed by the Breman Museum.

2020: Via Zoom the Jewish Community Library is scheduled to host a “Virtual Drop-In Book Club” featuring a discussion of On Division by Goldie Goldbloom.’

2020: UK Jewish Film is scheduled to host the final on-line screening of “Redemption.

2020The retrospective exhibition Eli Content: So Much I Gazed on Beauty that features highlights from his idiosyncratic oeuvre from the past forty years is scheduled to come to a close today at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

2020: The American Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to host through Zoom a “Virtual Class: Soapbox Yoga.”

2020: Based on figures published last night, in Israel as of this morning the national virus death toll has reached at least 247

2020: While the Commandment to Honor thy father and mother preceded Wilson’s first proclamation of Mother’s Day in 1914, it serves as a reminder the “All Women are Mothers in the House of Israel.

2020: For  Betty Levin today’s Mother Day celebration should be enhanced by the celebration of the natal day of her youngest offspring, Larry Levin

2020: The exhibition “Zoya Cherkassky: Lost Time” is scheduled to come to a close today.

http://www.fortgansevoort.com/?utm_source=Master+Opening+List&utm_campaign=eed858d40f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_09_05_08_30_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0e03183dcc-eed858d40f-251921239

This Day, May 11, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

May 10, 2020, 6:56 pm

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May 11

330: Roman Emperor Constantine I changes the name of the ancient city of Byzantium to Nova Roma (New Rome) as it becomes the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.  The city will be known as Constantinople (the city of Constantine). The move is indicative of the growing power of Constantine, the emperor who redefined relations between Jews and Christains that exists into modern times.  The name New Rome also helped to the schism between the Western (Catholic) Christians and their Eastern (Orthodox) co-religionists since the Christian leader of New Rome thought his powers should be equal to the Christian leader (the Pope) at old Rome. 

1175: Thirteen assassins were foiled in their attempt to murder Saladin. Thirteen years later Saladin would drive the Crusaders from Jerusalem and allow the Jews to return. Maimonides provided medial services to the great Muslim leader.

1189: Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor set off on the Third Crusade.  He would drown before he reached the Holy Land.  On balance, Barbarossa’s reign was a positive one for the Jews since he viewed the Jews as his special subjects, which means he afforded them protection because they were a source of financial benefit to the monarch.

1304: Mahmud Ghazan who had converted to Islam in 1295 marking the start of a downgrading of the conditions of the Jews in Persia because they were forced back into the role of “dhimmis” – official second class citizens—passed away today.1415:  Edict of Benedict XIII: Benedict XIII was enraged by the lack of voluntary conversions after the Christian "victory" at the Tortosa disputation. As a result, he banned the study of the Talmud in any form, instituted forced Christian sermons, and tried to restrict Jewish life completely.

1415: Today, “in the hope of mass-conversions, Benedict issued a bull consisting of twelve articles, which, in the main, corresponded with the decree ("Pragmática") issued by Catalina, and which had been placed on the statutes of Aragon by Fernando. By this bull Jews and neophytes were forbidden to study the Talmud, to read anti-Catholic writings, in particular the work "Macellum" ("Mar Jesu"), to pronounce the names of Jesus, Maria, or the saints, to manufacture communion-cups or other church vessels or accept such as pledges, or to build new synagogues or ornament old ones. Each community might have only one synagogue. Jews were denied all rights of selfjurisdiction, nor might they proceed against "malsines" (accusers). They might hold no public offices, nor might they follow any handicrafts, or act as brokers, matrimonial agents, physicians, apothecaries, or druggists. They were forbidden to bake or sell matzot, or to give them away; neither might they dispose of meat which they were prohibited from eating. They might have no intercourse (sex) with Catholics, nor might they disinherit their baptized children. They should wear the badge at all times, and thrice a year all Jews over twelve, of both sexes, were required to listen to a Catholic sermon.”

1421:  At Styria, Austria, a large number of Jews were burned. Those who were not killed were expelled from the country.

1572(18th of Iyar, 5332): Moses Isserles, “the Rema” passed away today in Cracow, Poland. Moses Isserles, also spelled Moshe Isserlis, who had been born at Cracow in 1520, “was an eminent Ashkenazic rabbi, Talmudist, and posek, renowned for his fundamental work of Halachah (entitled ha-Mapah (lit., "the tablecloth"), an inline commentary on the Shulkhan Aruch ( "the set table"). His work opened up this Sephardic work to the Ashkenazim. “He is also well known for his Darkhei Moshe commentary on the Tur. Isserles is also referred to as the Rema, (or Remo, Rama) (רמ״א), the Hebrew acronym for Rabbi Moses Isserle.”  [This brief entry cannot do justice to the life and work of this sage.]

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/111847/jewish/Rabbi-Moshe-Isserles-The-Remo.htm

1610: Fifty-seven year old Father Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary living in China whose manuscripts described the existence of ten or twelve Jewish families in Kaifeng that may have been living there for five or six hundred years, passed away today.

1647: Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam to replace Willem Kieft as Director-General of New Netherland, the Dutch colonial settlement in present-day New York City. Seven years later, Stuyvesant will be the governor of New Amsterdam when the first Jews arrive in 1654. He will do everything in his power to keep the Jews from settling there and enjoying the full rights of citizenship.

1660: English preacher and political leader Hugh Peters who supported the ideas of Roger Williams which included “writing on behalf of the toleration of Jews” was arrested today as the restoration of the House of Stuart was taking place following the end of the Cromwell era.

1685: Isaac Benjamin Wolf Liebmann began serving as rabbi for the Jews of Berlin although he reportedly lived at Landsberg-on-the-Warthe.

1764: A letter written today from Empress Catherine II opened the way for limited settlement of Jews in Riga.

1766: In Enfield, Middlesex, England Benjamin D’Israeli, “a Jewish merchant who had emigrated from Cento in 1784 and his second wife,Sarah Syprut de Gabay Villa Real” gave birth to author and “man of letters” Isaac D’Israeli, the father of the future Prime Minister Benjamin D’Israeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield.

1773(18^thof Iyar, 5533): Lag B’Omer is observed just three days after Parliament passed the Tea Act which, unbeknownst to any one, was one of the steps on the road to the Revolution and the creation of the United States of America.

1778(14^thof Iyar, 5538): Pesach Sheni was observed seven days after Congress ratified the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce which guaranteed French financial and military support for the Americans which was critical to defeating the British and securing the independence of the 13 colonies.

1784: Birthdate of G.B. Depping, the German born French historian author of Les Juifs dans le moyen âge, essai historique sur leur état civil, commercial et littéraire  a history of the Jews he wrote in response to a competition sponsored by the Royal Academy in 1821 to write a history describing the life of the Jews living in France during the Middle Ages.

1795(22nd of Iyar, 5555) Seventy-two year old Austrian banker Joachim Edler von Popper who was “Court Jew” to the Habsburgs and who was the second Jew to be “ennobled” by the Emperor passed away today.

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

1800(16^thof Iyar, 5560): Asher Anshel  Weiner, the “son of Shimon Wiener and Mrs. Simon Winer and the husband of Slava Viener with whom he had four children passed away today after which he was buried in “Miskolc, Hungary.

1808(14^thof Iyar, 5568): Pesach Sheni observed for the last time during the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson.

1814: Birthdate of Wolf Pascheles, the native of Prague who went from selling Jewish books to printing them in a publishing house that he began and which produced everything from prayer books for women to popular annotated calendars.

1820: “In Halberstadt, Province of Saxony, Kingdom of Prussia, the son of Rabbi Löb Glee Hildesheimer, a native of Hildesheim, Electorate of Hanover and his wife gave birth to Azriel Hildesheimer one the leading rabbis of the 19^thcentury who is considered to be one of the founders of “Modern Orthodox Judaism,

http://israelphilately.org.il/en/catalog/articles/2228/Rabbi%20Azriel%20Hildesheimer

1830(18^thof Iyar, 5590): Lag B’Omer observed four days after the United States signed a treaty of commerce and navigation with the Ottoman Empire” which at that time may have still have had the largest Jewish population of any single political entity.

1836: Alexander Levi advertised in today’s issue of the Dubuque Visitor, one of Iowa’s first newspapers. Levi may have been the first Jew to settle Iowa.  He settled in Dubuque, shortly after its founding, and played an active role in its commercial, civic and Jewish life until his death in 1893.

1838: In London English portrait painter Julia Salaman and London linen draper and town councillor, Louis Goodman gave birth to British painter, illustrator and author Walter Goodman

1846: “In Shossmaken, Courland, Russia, Jekuthiel Gerson Deinard and Leah Cohn” gave birth to Ephraim Deinard , a bookseller and bibliographer, the husband of Margolia Jaffe and the driving force to established a failed “Jewish agricultural colony in Nevada in 1897.”

1847:  Adolphus Simeon Solomons received a certificate of discharge from Third Regiment of the Washington Grays, which was part of the New York State Militia. Born in 1826, he had joined the Grays when he was 14 and was promoted to the rank of Sergeant five years later. After leaving the military, he would pursue a successful career in business and politics including playing an active role in the inaugurations of all the Presidents from Lincoln to McKinley. He would also serve in a number of important roles in Jewish communal affairs including serving as acting President of the Jewish Theological Seminary Association.

1852: In the House of Lords, the first reading of a bill designed to remove the disabilities imposed upon persons refusing to take the “oaths of abjuration.” Lord Lyndhurst cited the recent case of David Salomons, the Jew who had refused to take the standard oath and sought to be seated in the House of Commons nonetheless.

1853(Iyar 3): Rabbi Isaac Farhi, author of Marpe la-Ezem, passed away today.

1853: A theatre critic for the New York Times pained the performance of “The Merchant of Venice” at Wallack’s Theatre saying that “there is no delineation of internal passion; no metaphysical reading of the Jew’s revengeful soul…”

1855: Birthdate of Carbondale, PA, native and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Williams College, Emanuel Cohen the Philadelphia and Minneapolis lawyer who was the husband of Nina Morais.

1857: In the Catherine Palace, Czar Alexander II and his wife Maria Alexandrovna gave birth to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia the influential, reactionary advisor to his brother Alexander III and his nephew Nicholas II and Governor of Moscow who zealously oversaw the violent expulsion of that city’s Jewish population starting in 1891.

1858:  Minnesota is to the Union as the 32^ndstate in the United States.  The establishment of the Mount Sinai Hebrew Association of St. Paul, in 1857 means that the first synagogue was established before Minnesota achieved statehood. The founding of Har Tzion (Mt. Zion) marks the start of the Jewish community in Minnesota.

1859: Seventy-seven year old Archduke John of Austria who helped Moses Sachs submit his “program for the settling of Jews as farmers in the land of Israel under Austrian protection” to the Austrian government which in turn submitted it the Ottomans who rejected it passed away today.

1859: Wolf Alois Meisel who had been serving as the rabbi at Stettin since 1848 moved to Budapest where he took up a similar position today.

1859: At Wien, Professor Dr. Simon Spitzer and Marie Spitzer gave birth to Dr. of Jurisprudence Leopold Spitzer

1860: Sir George Jessel, and Amelia Moses gave birth to British barrister and businessman Sir Charles James Jessel, 1^st Baronet, Ladham House.

1863: Two days after she had passed away, Elizabeth (Lazarus) Davis, the wife of David Davis and the mother of Helen, Louise and Sarah Davis was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1863: Otto von Bismarck, Minister President of Prussia, initiated written correspondence with socialist and reform leader Ferdinand Lassalle. (Lassalle was Jewish; Bismarck was not)

1863: Two days after he had passed away, 44 year old Angelo Bennett, the son of Solomon and Elizabeth Bennett and the husband of Gertrude Sarah Emanuel with whom he had had seven children was buried today at the “Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.”

1864: In San Francisco, Leopold Seligmann and Julia Levi gave birth to David Emil Seligman

1865: General Jeremiah Cutler Sullivan resigned from the Union Army.  In 1862, Sullivan was serving under General Grant in Tennessee.  He “refused to execute Grant’s Order 11 on the grounds that he thought he was an officer of the army and not of a church.”

1867: The independence of Luxembourg which was originally granted in 1839 is finally recognized by all of the European great powers including Prussia and France. The Grand Duchy’s first rabbi had served from 1843 until 1866 when Luxembourg had just one synagogue.  By 1880, there were approximately 140 Jewish families throughout the Grand Duchy and there were three synagogues in Luxembourg by the end of the 19^th century.

1869(1st of Sivan, 5629): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1869: In Charleston, SC, J.D. Harby of Galveston, TX, married Leah Cohen, “the fourth daughter of Marx E. Cohen.

1869: In New York City, Shaaray Tefila (Gates of Prayer) dedicated its new sanctuary located on 44^th Street, between Broadway and 6^thAvenue.  During the ceremony Leopold Cohn, chairman of the Building Committee gave the keys for the building to Barnet Solomon, the President of the Congregation.  Rabbi Samuel Isaacs officiated at the impressive ceremony. The building, which cost $125,000 is smaller than Temple Emanu-El but compares favorably to it in terms of richness and architectural quality.

1869: Birthdate of Henrich Lowe, a German born Zionist who was known as a journalist, linguist and student of folklore.

1871: In Natchez, Mississippi, Samuel Ullman, the author of the poem “Youth” and his wife gave birth to Sidney Ullman who worked as an architect in Birmingham, Alabama from 1899 until 1916 after which he moved to Los Angeles, where he continued to practice as an architect from 1917 until 1922 when he began working as a set designer.

1872: Today, in Allegheny City, PA, Daniel and Amelia Stein gave birth to “American art collector and critic Leo Stein, the brother of Gertrude Stein”

1873(14^thof Iyar, 5633): Pesach Sheni

1873: Birthdate of Russia native Morris Bank, the husband of Ida Bank and a member of “Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation” in Baltimore, MD.

1873(14^thof Iyar, 5633): Seventy-four old Marx Oppenheimer, the son of Zacharias Oppenheimer and Fratel Oppenheimer passed away today.

1876: In New York, Joseph M. Lichtenauer and Rebecca Deutsch gave birth Joseph Mortimer Lichtenauer, the husband of Irma Lena Kaufrman Lichetenauer who “received the President’s prize for design for mural decorations and whose “portraits and decorative pictures were exhibited at the St. Louis Exposition.”

1877: In Kozlov, Czech Republic, Adolf Neubauer, the son of Karl and Theresia Neubauer, and his wife Klara Neubauer gave birth to Emilie Hoffer

1878: The Young Men’s Hebrew Association met for the first time in their new facility at 110 West 42^nd Street in New York City.  Most of the members were in attendance at this all male affair. Mayor Ely was the guest of honor.  I.S. Isaacs, the association’s president, opening remarks included a brief history of the association.  The association, which was formed in 1874, has almost a thousand members and boasts a healthy back account.  Rabbis Gottheil, Henry Jacobs and H.B. Mendez all addressed the group briefly.

1879: “The Old Pessimists” published today notes that while there was a strongly pessimistic tone in a few books of the Bible – Job and Ecclesiastes - the “national religion of the Hebrews was optimistic in a high degree.” This stands in stark contrast to the deeply pessimistic religious utterances and literature of the ancient of the Greeks and the Romans While the Jews said “The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord” they were declaring that “the land and the sea are full of evils”

1879: “Assyrian and Biblical History” published today described unresolved conflicts in the dating used by these two ancient civilizations. While both seem to agree as to the date of the eclipse that took place in the 8^th century BCE, there is disagreement for the dates of subsequent events.  For example, the Assyrians say that the invasion of Judea took place in 701 BCE while the Jewish version would have set the date at 713 BCE. Some researches indicate that the discrepancies are the result of a propensity among Assyrian monarchs who had a propensity for not reporting defeats and unsuccessful campaigns.  This was left to their successors.

1879: Eighty year old Samuel Gobat, who had been serving as the Protestant Bishop of Jerusalem since 1846, passed away.  Unlike his predecessor, Gobat refrained from trying to convert Jews and Moslems and worked among Christians.  He and his wife who had also died while living in Jerusalem are buried in Mount Zion Cemetery.

1879(18th of Iyar, 5639): Lag B'Omer

1879(18^thof Iyar, 5639): Seventy-five year old Benzion Judah Ben Eliahu Berkowitz who devoted much of his literary efforts to works related to Targum Onkelos passed away today in Wilna.

1879(18th of Iyar, 5639): Bernhard Wolff the editor of the Vossische Zeitung, founder of the National Zeitung and founder of Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau one of the first press agencies in Europe and one of the three great European telegraph monopolies until the World War II-era, the other two being the English Reuters and the French Havas, passed away today in his native Berlin. (Editor’s note -  All three of these famous wire-services had a Jewish connection.)

1879: Eighty-year old Samuel Gobat, the Protestant Bishop of Jerusalem who ended his predecessor’s policy of trying to convert Jews, passed away today and following his funeral was buried in Mt. Zion Cemetery in Jerusalem.

1881: In Budapest, “Helen Kohn, who was from a leading Bohemian family, and Mór Kármán who was a leading professor of philosophy and education” gave birth to Theodore von Kármán the Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who was a descendant of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel and who responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization.

1881: Herzl fights his only duel in the fraternity Albia.

1881: As a wave of pogroms race across Russia Czar Alexander III receives a delegation of Jews led by Baron Horace de Gunzburg.  He assures them that the government is opposed to the violence which he blames on socialists and elements following the anti-Christ.

1882: In Luka, Hermann Ullmann and Bertha Ullmann gave birth Berthold Ullman who was murdered at Auschwitz.

1884: In Bucharest, Zara and Leon Feinsohn gave birth to Reba Fesinsohn who gained fame as the American soprano and recording artist, Alma Gluck.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/gluck-alma

https://www.nytimes.com/1938/10/28/archives/alma-gluck-dead-operatic-soprano-former-star-of-metropolitan-was.html

1884: In Russian, Benjamin and Bessie (Reichberg) Rosenblatt, gave birth to Columbia Ph.D. and sociologist Frank F. Rosenblatt, the husband of Katherine Golding who published works included “The Chartist Movement, in Is Social and Economic Aspects” and who was a member of the Jewish Social Association and the Workmen’s Circle Club.

1884: Birthdate of Samuel B. Peiper, the native of Philadelphia who was ordained at JTS and served as a rabbi in Brooklyn.

1885(26^thof Iyar, 5645): Seventy-three year old “composer, conductor and writer” Ferdinand von Hiller who students included Max Bruch the non-Jewish “composer of the cello elegy Kol Nidrei, based on the synagogue hymn sung at Yom Kippur” passed away today.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_International_Encyclop%C3%A6dia/Hiller,_Ferdinand

1886(6 Iyar, 5646): Sixty-nine year old Isidor Kalish the German educated Reform Rabbi who came to the United States where he led several Reform congregations starting with Tifereth Israel in Cleveland and was a driving force behind creating the Reform Movement in his adopted country passed away http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=KI1

1886(6 Iyar, 5646): Rabbi James Koppel Gutheim passed away today in New Orleans.  Born in Westphalia, Germany, he came to the United States in 1843 and became active in the Cincinnati (Ohio) Jewish community, the home of Reform Judaism in the United States.  Guttheim moved to New Orleans where he served as Rabbi at Shangarai Chesed.  He left the Crescent City after a dispute about a memorial to the late Judah Touro and his refusal to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Union during the Civil War.  After serving as rabbi to congregations in Montgomery, Alabama and Columbus, GA, he returned to New Orleans where he served as rabbi at Temple Sinai until his death.

1887: Birthdate of Paul Wittgenstein.  The Austrian-born pianist lost his right arm fighting for Austria during World War I.  After the war he gained fame for arranging and playing numerous pieces with his left hand.  After fleeing the Nazis during the 1930’s he came to the United States where he became a citizen and continued his career.

1888: In the Russian Empire Lena Lipkin Beilin and Cantor Moses Beilin gave birth Isadore Beilin who gained fame as composer Irving Berlin whose works included “White Christmas” which is reportedly “the all-time leader in the holiday music category.”

 http://www.irvingberlin.com/biography

http://www.irvingberlin.com/

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/irving-berlin

1889: Zadoc Kahn the Chief Rabbi of France who helped to found  Société des Études Juives  in 1879 delivered an address to entitled "La Révolution Française et le Judaïsme" to help mark the centenary of the French Revolution.

1889: In San Francisco, grocery store chain owner Abraham Haas and Fanny Koshland gave birth to Walter A. Haas, Sr. the chairman of the board of Levi Strauss and Company.

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/08/archives/walter-haas-sr-90-exchairman-joined-levi-strauss-in-1919.html

http://www.jmaw.org/hass-jewish-los-angeles/

http://www.jmaw.org/hass-jewish-san-francisco/

1890: It was reported today that former President Grover Cleveland and his wife have accepted an invitation to attend the upcoming Strawberry Festival, a fund-raiser sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.

1890: Charles Bernheim was re-elected as President during the annual meeting of the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews which began at 10 o’clock this morning.

1890: “Barons Alphonse and Nathaniel Rothschild have warned Emperor Franz Joseph and …the Minister of the Interior, that if oppression of the Jews is continued at Vienna, they will be forced to transfer their business” to Budapest.  They claim that the leadings banks will follow them in moving their business.

1891: A fire, which was allegedly set by a Jewish immigrant from Poland name Solomon Crizar, broke out at 222 Johnson Avenue in Brooklyn.

1891: In New York City Henry Morgenthau, Sr., a real estate mogul and diplomat, and Josephine Sykes gave birth to Henry Morgenthau Jr. a neighbor of FDR.  It was this friendship rather than his financial wizardry that led to his appointment as US Secretary of the Treasury in 1934.   He held that post until 1945, when Harry Truman took office.  Morgenthau was the author of the so-called Morgenthau Plan which, according to critics, sought to turn Germany into one large farm after World War II.  After two world wars in less than fifty years, Morgenthau was not alone in thinking that the only way to avoid another German Reich was to demilitarize and de-industrialize the country.  The realities of the looming Cold War, among other concerns, derailed any such notions.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007408

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Morgenthau.html

http://www.jta.org/1967/02/08/archive/henry-morgenthau-jr-ex-secretary-of-treasury-dead-at-age-of-75

1892(14^thof Iyar, 5652): Pesach Sheini

1892(14^thof Iyar, 5652): Yosef Dov Soloveitchik the great-grandson of Rabbi Chaim Volozhin and author of Beis Halevi passed away today.

1892: Leaders of several congregations met tonight to discuss the possibility of establishing a school that would train men and women to serve as teachers at Jewish Sunday Schools.

1892: “Vaccination Day” published today described the annual springtime program designed to provide vaccination for hundreds of Jewish, Polish and Italian children that takes place at the Health Office on Mulberry Street.

1892: In “Turov, Polyesy, Ayzik-Ber Goldin, author of the religious work, Otiyot maḥkimot (Enlightening letters)” and his wife gave birth to Osher-Arye Goldin who worked as an author and translator before moving to the United States in 1913 where he gained fame a Yiddishist Leon Goldin.

http://yleksikon.blogspot.com/2015/05/osher-arye-goldin-leon-goldin.html

1893: There were a dozen Polish Jews aboard the Majestic when it arrived today in England.

1893: Acting at the behest of Josef Deckert, an anti-Semitic Austrian priest, Paulus Meyer, a baptized Jew, declared in the Vaterland “that a number of Russian rabbis from Lentschna had performed a ritual murder in his presence.”

1895: Sir Matthew Nathan began serving as secretary to the Colonial Defense Committee today.

1895: The Young Men’s Hebrew Association hosted a strawberry festival to mark the end of this season’s programs of study and entertainment.

1895: Several Polish Jews were arrested in Kingston, NY on charges of being counterfeiters.

1897: Birthdate of Kurt Gerson the native of Berlin whose medical studies ended with his service in WW I and who gained fame as actor and director Kurt Gerron – none of which kept him from being killed at Auschwitz.

http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/camps/western-europe/westerbork/gerronkurt/

1898: Two days after she had passed away, 76 year old Annie Myers, the “widow of Eliezer Myers” was buried today at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery” in London.

1898: Rabbi Leucht of Newark, NJ, officiated at the wedding of Moses Schloss and Miss Minnie Krieger of Philadelphia.  Schloss is the manager of S. Scheurer & Co of Plainfield, NJ.

1898: On day after she had passed away, 28 year old Sarah Perse was buried today at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery” in London.

1899: “De Hirsch  Memorial Service” published today described the services held at Temple Emanu-El in honor of the late Baroness Clara de-Hirsch-Gereuth, the widow of the late Baron Hirsch. Among those who address the packed sanctuary were Myer S Isaacs, President of the Baron de Hirsch Fund and William Rhinelander Stewart, President of the State Board of Charities. The service began with Mendelssohn’s Funeral March and ended with a recitation of the Kaddish led by Rabbi William Sparger and a benediction by Rabbi De Sola Menes

1900: It was reported today that family of 55 year old Benjamin F. Houseman, a “prominent Jew” living in Philadelphia claims that his death “was due to the accidental discharge of pistol” and not a suicide as reported by the police

1901: Birthdate of Rosalie Beatrice Scherzer who gained fame as the poet Rose Auslander.

1902(4^thof Iyar, 5662): Asher Isaac Myer, the managing editor of the Jewish Chronicle passed away today. (This is the date supplied by the Jewish Encylopedia)

1902: Birthdate of Louis K. Diamond, the native of Kishinev who graduated from Harvard Medical School and is known as “the father of pediatric hematology.’

1903: Birthdate of Victor Candell, the native of the Budapest “the award-winning painter” “who works included a mural on the outside of the Iraqi pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.”

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/20/archives/victor-candell-73-painter-muralist-at-iraq-pavilion.html

1903: The El-Arish project fails. Herzl writes in his diary: "I thought the Sinai plan was such a sure thing that I no longer wanted to buy a family vault in the Döbling cemetery, where my father is provisionally laid to rest. Now I consider the affair so wrecked that I have already been to the district court and am acquiring vault No. 28."

1904: Prime Minister Balfour responded to charges that the Aliens Bill was a sign that ant-Semitism had come to England by writing today that “Aliens bill was designed to protect the country not against the Jew but against the undesirable alien quite irrespective of nationality or creed” and that he “should regard the or the grown of any anti-Semitic feeling in this country as a most serious national misfortune.”

1905: The Jewish Chronicle is quoted as saying that in Russia, “a measure is more than just under consideration which will give unhoped-for relief to the Jews” and that “absolute freedom of movement and residence will granted” to the Jews “in all cities and towns but not in villages” out of fear for of more violence such as that which took place in Kishineff.

1906: Boston archeologist William Copely Winslow announced that “Professor Flinders Petrie, the well-known Egyptologist” has discovered the remains of the Temple Onias at Tel-el-Yahudich (the Mound of the Jews) 18 miles north of Cairo” and “that in all probability the professor has identified the treasure city of Ramses built by the Israelites” the construction of which “is referred to in the first chapter of the Book of Exodus

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1906/05/12/101778081.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0

1907(27^thof Iyar, 5667): Parashat Behar Bechokotai

1907: “Salome Divides Paris” published today described a campaign led by “The Libre Parole which is notoriously anti-Semitic” against the performance of Richard Strauss’s opera saying that it is decadent  and “places a large share of the responsibility for the production on the Jews “two of whom organized the production of the work of a third.”

1908: The U.S. Consular Agency at Aleppo which contained one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world and was the home of the famous Aleppo Codex, was upgraded to a Consulate.

1909: The results of the election held on May 1 became public in Finland and showed that the Socialist Democrats and Constitutional Democrats had tripled the number of seats they held in the Landtag which means “the recently drafted laws against the Jews will be considerably amended, if not rejected” and Jews may gain the right to vote since both parties had this as a plank in their platforms.

1910: It was reported today that in Virginia “practically the entire Jewish population of Richmond is indignant over the ejection of two prominent Jewish young men from the dormitories of the Young Men's Christian Association by order of the Board of Directors.”

1910: “A special meeting of the Board of Trustees of Temple Emanu-El was held tonight to consider action by the board as a result of a widespread discussion aroused throughout the congregation by a recent Passover sermon of the Rev. Dr. J.L. Magnes, associate rabbi with the Rev. Dr. Joseph Silverman, advocating a change in the reformed ritual and service now in vogue.”

1911: In Brooklyn, Saul and Sarah (née Handler) Silver gave birth to their “eighth and youngest child” Philip Silversmith who gained fame as comedian Phil Silvers, best known to many for his role as Sgt. Ernie Bilko.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/02/arts/phil-silvers-tv-s-sergeant-bilko-dead-at-73.html

1911: Conservative Young Turks blame Zionists for desecration of the Mosque of Omar.

1912: In London, engineer Mortiz Kahn and his wife gave birth to journalist and photographer Albert Eugene Kahn.

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/19/archives/albert-e-kahn-a-writer-critical-of-government-in-mccarthy-era-an.html

http://brandeisspecialcollections.blogspot.com/2012/11/albert-eugene-kahn-papers.html

1912(24th of Iyar, 5672): Parashat Behar-Buchukotai

1912: “The original production” of “Princess Caprice, a musical theatre work described as a "comedy with music", in three acts, with music by Leo Fall,” the son of Mortiz Fall opened today “at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London.”

1912: Samuel and Edith Bass gave birth to Dr. Bernard Brass, the husband of Pearl L Hochman Brass.

1912(24^thof Iyar, 5672): Seventy-eight year old Rabbi Samuel Baeck, the father of Rabbi Leo Baeck, the son of Rabbi Nathan Baeck, the grandson of Rabbi Abraham Baeck who was the husband of Eva Placzek, the daughter of Rabbi Abraham Placzek passed away today in Lissa.

1913: It has been reported that “after having promised” for several years “the telephone system has at last been installed at Jerusalem.”

1913: It has been reported that “he Nationalist have introduced a bill into the Duma which contains a clause to the effect that Jews should only be allowed to edit newspapers in the Pale” the purposed of which “is to banish Jewish influence from the most influential organs in St. Petersburg and Moscow.”

1913: Mrs. Ella Flagg Young is scheduled to address the Chicago Hebrew Institute at its “Annual Meeting and Supper” this evening

1913: In Chicago, at the Isaiah, Rabbi Joseph Stolz is scheduled to deliver a sermon on “The Mother In Israel” at the congregation’s “concluding Sunday service of this season.”

1914(15^thof Iyar, 5674): Sixty-one year old Daniel De Leon, the native of Curacao who became a champion of the rights of the working man and leader of the Socialist Labor Party of America passed away today.

http://www.slp.org/De_Leon.htm

1915: In “Jews With Wilson, Says the Warheit” published today the American Yiddish language newspaper took issue with a statement in the Frankfurter Zeitung saying “that the United States cannot declare war” on Germany “because of the millions of German, Irish and Jews being in the way” saying that “the Jews should very much like the” German newspaper “and other to refrain from mentioning them in their discussions of a war between the United States and Germany. If mentioned they must be, then let it be said in their name: ‘The Jews of the United States will all, to the last man, stand behind President Wilson and the United States Government.” (Editor’s note: While many Jews were Socialists and wanted to stay out of the war because of their pacifism, and others did not want to fight on the side of the Russians whom they saw as oppressor of Jews, there was a handful of Jews from Germany who did not want to take up arms against what they saw as their enlightened fatherland.  In the end, the Germans overplayed their hand and misread American Jewry as badly as they did other others and American Jews flocked to support their new found home in what they saw as an American fight for freedom)

1915: “Dr. Perry M. Lichtenstein, a physician at the Tombs prison,’ is scheduled to “speak tonight before the Harlem Jewish League at the Belvedere on the “Dope Fiend.”  (Yes, 100 years ago there was “the war on drugs” debate)

1915:  “In his sermon at the Tabernacle tonight, the Reverend Billy Sunday expressed himself strongly in favor “of freeing Leo M. Frank.

1915: “With the death date for Leo M. Frank fixed for June 22” “fifteen thousand petitions for clemency for Frank were brought to the Capitol “at Atlanta “today which are to be delivered to Governor Stanton.”

1916: Isador Herschfield, an agent of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society is currently on board the steamship New Amsterdam which left Rotterdam and is making its way to New York.

1917: Birthdate of Irving Jay Cohen “who was known as King Cupid of the Catskills for his canny ability to seat just the right nice Jewish boy next to just the right nice Jewish girl during his half-century as the maître d’ of the Concord Hotel…” (As reported by Margalit Fox)

1917: Two days after she had passed away, 74 year old Dinah Saunders, “the widow of the late Harris Saunders” and mother of Isaac, Simon and Moses Saunders was buried today in London’s “Plashet Jewish Cemetery.”

1917: It was reported today from Amsterdam that “an appeal” has been “made to Jews to participate in the struggle aiming at national autonomy and the securing of Palestine for the Jews.”

1917(19th of Iyar, 5677): Seventy year old L.G Pape, a native of Philadelphia who most recently has been working with the Memphis Agency of the Equitable Life Assurance Society in Memphis and who has been President of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and the driving force behind the construction of the new Temple at Popular Avenue and Montgomery Street passed away today at Memphis leaving behind a wife the former Miss Florie Bloom of Memphis.

1917: It was reported today that Julius Rosenwald of Chicago has promised to contribute ten percent of the total contributions made by those in Illinois to the Jewish Relief Committee in Behalf of the Jewish War Sufferers in Europe which is trying to raise a total of four million dollars.

1918: It was reported today that the Jewish Welfare Board, “is cooperating with British and French organizations in Paris and back of the western front to care for the” Jewish soldiers and sailors serving abroad.

1919: The first Estonian Congress of Jewish congregations held its opening session today.  The organization was going to have deal with the new realities of living in an independent Estonia that was no longer part of the old Czarist Russian Empire or its Bolshevik successor.

1919: Birthdate of Polish native Rubin Partel, the Holocaust survivor who began a new life in the United States in 1947.

1921: One day after he had passed away Melville Samson Toplitz was buried today

http://www.cemeteryscribes.com/getperson.php?personID=I2574&tree=Cemeteries

1921:  Tel Aviv became the first all-Jewish municipality under the Mandatory Government.

1922: Birthdate of Tawfik Toubi a Christian Arab politician and who was elected to the Knesset in 1949 when Israel held its first parliamentary elections.  Toubi would serve until he retired in 1991.  His death in 2011 marked the end of an era since he was the last surviving member of Israel’s First Knesset.

1924: The first conference of the General Zionist movement begins in Jerusalem. It decides to establish a General Zionist Federation to amalgamate all centrist factions in Palestine.

1924: Birthdate of Leonard Garment who served as White House Counsel during the Watergate Scandal.

1924: Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz merge their companies to form Mercedes-Benz.  The “Mercedes” in Mercedes Benz comes from the daughter of Jewish businessman Emil Jellinek who was known as Mercedes.

1925(17^thof Iyar, 5685): Sixty-nine year old “Isak Isaac Itzig Speier, the German born son of “Leiser and Tels Delza Speyer, the “husband of Flora Speier” and “father of Leo Speyer” passed away today.

1925: In Cleveland, Ohio, Betty and Ben Glasser gave birth to William Glasser, the psychiatrist who was also a successful author on books about mental health.

1926: According to figures released today, 1,650 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine during the month of April

1926: The list of the newly elected members of the Executive Committee District No. 1, Independent Order B’nai Brith published today included “Maurice Bloch of New York, first vice-president; David Ruslander of Buffalo, second vice-president; Joshua Kantrowitz of New York, president of the Home; Joseph Rosenzweig of New York, treasurer; Max Levy of New York, Secretary; Louis Lorence of New York, chairman of the Committee on Finance; Judge Albert Cohen of New York, chairman of the Committee on Law; Isidore H. Fox of Boston, Chairman of the Committee on Religious Activities; Wilfred B. Feiga of Worcester, chairman of the Committee on Intellectual Advancement; Ely Rosenberg of New York, chairman of the Committee on Endowment Reserve Fund; Herbert T. Rosenfeld of New York, chairman of the Committee on Social Service; Max L. Pinansky of Portland, Maine, Chief Justice of District Court; Morris B. Moskowitz of New York, chairman on Committee on Membership; Nestor Dreyfus of New London, Conn., chairman of Committee on General Fund and Charitable Objects, Abraham K. Cohen of Boston, chairman on Committee on Anti-Defamation; Henry Lasker of Springfield, Mass., chairman of Committee on Women’s Auxiliaries; Leo J. Lyons of Boston, chairman of the Committee on Exemplification of Degree; Nathan H. Friedman of Taunton, Mass., chairman of Committee on Publicity; Nathan E. Goldstein of Springfield, Mass., Chairman of Committee on District Deputies; and Louis M. Singer of Toronto, Can., chairman of Committee on Canadian Activities.” (As reported by JTA)

1927:  Birthdate of Mort Sahl.  Born in Montréal Canada, Sahl was one of a new breed of comedians that appeared in the late 1950's.  Many of them were more cerebral than slapstick; more likely to have started in coffee houses like the Hungry Eye in San Francisco than burlesque theatres. Sahl would come on stage in his trade mark orange sweater, newspaper under his arm and sitting on a stool, begin to take potshots at the political and social leaders of the day. 

1927: A cross section of thirty six leaders in the infant movie industry founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Academy is responsible for honoring the accomplishments of the film industry through the annual Oscar ceremonies.  Many of the original 36 were Jewish including Cecil B. DeMille, Louis Mayer, Joseph Schenk, Jake Lasky, Irving Thalberg, George Cohen, Edwin Loeb, Jack Warner and Harry Warner Yes, do the math.  The Jewish representation is definitely statistically disproportional.

1928: Morris “Moshe” Baran and his family arrived in the United States.  Amongst the three children in the family was Paul Baran, who as an engineer working at RAND Corporation “outlined the basic idea for what has become the Internet.

1928: Birthdate of Joe Schlesinger the Austrian born refugee from Nazi Europe who gained fame as a Canadian television journalist and author.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Schlesinger

1928:  Birthdate Yaacov Agam. Israeli-born Yaacov Agam was educated at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem and the Atelier d'Art Abstrait in Paris. Agam has had exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum, the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His work is in the collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Joseph Hirshhorn Collection in Washington, D.C. (editorial comment - I am no art critic or student of art so I will not even pretend to fake it on this subject.  But I happened to have seen some of his work and there is something really interesting about.  There are several websites where you can see his work.)

1929(1^stof Iyar, 5689): Parashat Kedoshim; Rosh Chodesh Iyar

1929: Birthdate of Samuel Charles Cohn.  This native of Altoona, PA, would gain fame as Sam Cohn “the powerful talent broker” who founded International Creative Management (ICM) and represented a panoply of top talent including Woody Allen, Robin Williams, Arthur Miller, E.L. Doctorow and Whoopi Goldberg to name but a few.  He died in May of 2009 at the age of 79. (As reported by Bruce Weber)

1929: “Eternal Love” a silent romantic film directed by Ernst Lubitsch and produced by Joseph Schenck was released in the United States today.

1930: A Zionist youth group gathered in Berehovo, Carpatho-Russia, Czechoslovakia today.

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/may/01.asp

1931: The Creditanstalt which was founded in 1855 by Salomon Mayer von Rothschild's son Anselm declared bankruptcy today after having been forced by the Austrian government to assume the debts of another institution in 1929 “making it one of the first major bank failures that initiated the Great Depression.”

1932: During today’s session of the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the assembly’s President, Rabbi Israel Levinthal of Brooklyn, delivered his annual address in which he said many members were suffering financially and serious thought needed to be given to establishing a permanent relief fund.  As further proof of the impact of the Great Depression on Jews and Jewish organization, the seminary is expanding its placement service to help its graduates find work.

1932: Professor Louis Finkelstein, President of JTS, Sol M. Stroock, Chairman of the JTS Board of Directors, Professor Louis Ginzberg, and Rabbi Israel Goldstein of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, were among those who spoke at tonight’s dinner at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F10D14F83E5A13738DDDAB0994DD405B828FF1D3

1933: “Zeppo Marz and his wife left” Los Angeles “by train tonight to his father’s body back to New York for burial” where their arrival is awaited by Groucho, Harpo and Chico Marx.

1934(26^th of Iyar, 5694): Seventy-five year old Lazăr Şăineanu “a Romanian-born philologist, linguist, folklorist and cultural historian: who was “a specialist in Oriental and Romance studies, as well as a Hebraist and a Germanist, known for his contribution to Yiddish and Romanian philology” passed away today in Paris.

1934: Birthdate of Guinter Kahn, the native of Trier who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and development a “remedy for baldness.”

http://www.omaha.com/obits/kahn-m-d-guinter/article_3968bda0-21f4-5fa6-bc45-f98c4fe8aacb.html

1935(8^th of Iyar, 5695): Parashat Emor

1935: “In response to an appeal from Lord Marley, chairman of the World Committee to Aid the Victims of German Fascism” today is the first of two Tag Days designated by the Washington Heights Child Aid Committee as part of its drive to raise funds to build a home for children to replace the one destroyed by the Nazis when they took over the Saar.”

1936(19th of Iyar, 5696): Sixty-two year old Judge Otto Rosalsky, “the dean of the General Sessions bench passed away this morning at Mount Sinai Hospital where his family including his wife Mamie Rosalsky, his brothers Justice Joseph S. Rosalsky, Dr. Harry W. Rosalsky and Alexander Rosalsky and his sisters Mrs. Joseph Morrison and Mrs. Bella Shapira were at his bedside.

1938: “I Married An Angel,” a Rodgers and Hart musical comedy opened at the Shubert Theatre today.

1938:  The Palestine Post reported that Hanita beat off another heavy terrorist attack. Arab terrorist gangs continued to enter Arab villages demanding ransom money and valuables. Those villagers who refused such demands were usually kidnapped and their bodies were later found in the neighboring fields. A forest neighboring the Tiberias Hot Springs was set on fire. The Dutch border was closed to refugees after about 2,000 Austrian and 15,000 German Jews succeeded to get in. Holland claimed that despite the fact that it suffered from a heavy unemployment, it had offered residence to over 26,000 refugees.  During the 1930’s the Jews were caught in two pronged anti-Semitic orgy.  In Europe they were condemned because they were permanent outsiders even though they desperately tried to fit into the social fabric of the various nations in which they lived.  In Palestine, the Jews were under attack because they were trying to establish a national home where Jews could live as Jews.  The point of this is that anti-Semitism is irrational and those who hate Jews will grab any excuse and those looking for a scapegoat will grab any Jew.

1939: Jews are prohibited from working in travel agencies by Nazi Germany

1939: Premiere of crime drama “Blind Alley” directed by Charles Vidor.

1940(3^rd of Iyar, 5700): Parashat Emor

1940: “Contraband, “a spy film with a screenplay by Emeric Pressburger was released in the United Kingdom today/

1940: One day after Germany invaded the Low Countries and France, President Roosevelt issued a proclamation reasserting “the neutrality of the United States in the war between Germany, Belgium Luxembourg and the Netherlands.”  (In six weeks the all of these countries would fall to the Nazis sealing the fate of the Jews trapped in the Final Solution.)

1941(14^th of Iyar, 5701): Pesach Sheni

1941:  In the Warsaw ghetto, children are seen playing with a corpse in a courtyard. In each of the prior two months, 500 - 600 more Jews died of starvation.

1941: During the Blitz, The Great Synagogue on Dukes Place in London is destroyed in an air raid.

1942:  Alter Dworetsky, a member of the Jewish Council at Diatlovo, Belorussia, escapes to a nearby forest, only to be shot to death by Soviet partisans after refusing to hand over his pistol.

1942: One day after he had passed away funeral services were held today for seventy-four year old Joseph M. (Joe) Weber, the Weber in the burlesque team of Weber and Fields, the husband of the former Lily Friedman, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Friedman after which, per his request, he was cremated.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1942/05/11/85536919.pdf

1942: “Native Land” a documentary about the trade union movement directed and produced by Leo Hurwitz who also co-authored the script and with music by Marc Blitzstein was released in the United States today.

1942: Damon Runyon published “Sam Dreben’s Spirit Marches On” a column that uses the career of this Jewish career soldier who won the Distinguished Service Cross to dispel notions of Jewish cowardliness and lack of patriotism.  The column was written “on the occasion of the posthumous conferring of the DSC on Lt. Henry D. Mark of Los Angeles. (As reported by Abraham Bloch)

1942: The Biltmore Program is adopted in an emergency meeting (at the Biltmore Hotel in New York) of the Conference of American Zionists. The program proposed by Ben Gurion and Abba Hillel Silver totally rejected the British White paper and called for the establishment of a Jewish state. There was opposition to the proposal by the "non- Zionists" and those who believed in a bi-national state (HaShomer HaZair).

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-biltmore-conference-1942

http://www.zionism-israel.com/dic/Biltmore_Conference.htm

1942: “Go Down Moses,” the collection of short stories by William Faulkner is published today.  The title is based on the spiritual that compares the slavery experience of African-Americans in the United States with the enslavement of the Jews by Pharao1943: Birthdate of Thomas Buergenthal, the native of Ľubochňa, Czechoslovakia, who survived Aushwitz and Sachsenhausen to become an American attorney and a Judge serving on the International Court of Justice.

1943: During WW II, the Battle of Attu began when American forces that included Dr. Abraham Koransky confronted Japanese forces in the only WW II battle fought on the American mainland.

1944: HMCS Beauharnois, a Canadian corvette, was launched today.  She would be acquired by the Israelis and was renamed Josiah Wedgwood, in honor of Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, the British M.P. who wanted to remove the obstacles to Jewish immigration to Palestine and opposed the British appeasement of Hitler during the 1930’s.

1944: Anne Frank writes in her diary, "I'd like to publish a book called 'The Secret Annex.' It remains to be seen whether I'll succeed, but my diary can serve as the basis

1944: Dr. Salomon Gluck, a French Army veteran who had been honored with the Croix de Guerre for bravery in facing the Nazis on the Maginot Line and a member of the Resistance was deported from Drancy aboard convoy 73.  He was number 21530 and the convoy was unusual in that all of the almost 900 prisoners were men. The men did not know that they would meet an ignominious end.

1944: Allied forces begin their final assault on the German lines at Monte Casino, the seizure of which will open the Road to Rome with the concomitant saving of the lives of Italian Jews hiding in and around the eternal city.

1945: “Asserting that Palestine will offer one of the best markets for American exports after the war, Julius Simon, president of the Palestine Economic Corporation disclosed today that he had been authorized to arrange for the purchase of $60,000,000 worth of industrial and agricultural machinery for various enterprises in that country.”

1946: Fifty-eight of the 61 defendants in “The Mauthausen Camp Trials” were found sentenced to death today.

1947:”Speaking at a dinner sponsored by the United Zionist-Revisionists of America at the Hotel Biltmore” Senator Claude Pepper of Florida “declared that the United States should take a firm stand against any proposal by Great Britain and the Arab states to end the Palestine mandate” and “characterized the policy of Great Britain in Palestine as ‘a long, sad story of inaction, vacillation and violation of the mandate” while asserting “that the only solution to the Palestine problem was ‘an immediate transfer to Palestine under the auspices of a Jewish national authority.’”

1948: “In an interview” given today “in his apartment at the Ansonia Hotel Al Shean of the famous comedy team of Gallagher and Shean “said he had nothing special planned to mark” his eightieth birthday which falls on May 12.

1948:  Haganah took control of the port of Haifa. Haifa is Israel's northern port.  In 1948, it had enough of a Jewish majority to have elected the town's mayor.  But the city also had a considerable Arab population.  The fighting during April to control the city was fierce.  However, the three major Arab leaders left the city when they realized they were not going to any more help from the King of Jordan.  This demoralized the local Arab population.  Despite being urged by the Jews to stay and remain calm, the majority left by sea for Lebanon and by land for Nazareth.  Matters were not helped by the Arab Higher Committee which urged the Arabs to leave, in part, because the committee was sure that Haifa would be bombed by Arab air forces thus ending the Jewish presence in Haifa.

1949:  Today Israel is admitted as the 59th member of the U.N., on the anniversary of Turkey's declaration, in 1917, of its intention to free Eretz Israel of the entire Jewish population.

1949:  Today, Zero Mostel appeared on “Toast of the Town” hosted by Ed Sullivan.

1950: In a speech given tonight at Madison Square Garden, Governor Dewey declared that Israel must be armed to defend its frontiers against aggression because a strong Israel "is the surest guarantee to peace in the Near East."

1953:  The Jerusalem Post reported that restitution negotiations were expected to begin shortly between the Austrian government and various Jewish Community representatives. The Israeli Cabinet decided to impose a "special unemployment relief tax" after the number of jobless reached 16,000. The Jerusalem Labor Exchange which had been closed for a week, following an attack by a mob of unemployed, reopened and offered forestation jobs to 30 workers. Over 550 workers were already employed in forestation projects carried out by Keren Kayemet, the Jewish National Fun.  In the first decade of the 21^stcentury people see Israel as a place of lush vegetation with a vibrant western style economy.  It is quickly forgotten that in the early days of Israel’s existence the economy was quite shaky with high unemployment, large numbers of immigrants with limited skills and a land that had been denuded and neglected for centuries.

1954(8^th of Iyar, 5714): Fifty-seven year old Newark native and WW I Navy veteran Jacob Kay Lasser, the NYU and Penn St. University educated tax expert who became famous with the publication of the 1939 handbook “Your Income Tax Guide” and who raised two children – Barbara and Donald – with his wife Terese Reuben Lasser passed away today after which his eyes were donated “to the Eye-bank for Sight Restoration, Inc. per his wish.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1954/05/12/84120828.html?pageNumber=31

1955:  Israel attacked Gaza.  In 1955, Gaza was under control of Egypt.  It was a base for fedayeen (from Israel's point of view, terrorists) who would cross into Israel planting roadside bombs and shooting up passing vehicles.  Israel's move into Gaza was temporary, lasting only long enough to destroy the bases from which these people operated.  David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, was always adamant that Israel should never want to hold on to Gaza.

1959: Tonight “fifty ambassadors from foreign countries, many of the delegates to the United Nations and numerous distinguished Americans attended a farewell dinner in honor of Israel Ambassador Abba Eban
 who has been Israel’s permanent UN representative for the last 11 years.

1959(3^rdof Iyar, 5719): Seventy-four year old Jacob Loeb Langsdorf, the son of Blanche and Isadore Langsdorft, husband Louise Silberman Langsdorf with whom he raised two children Blanche and Benjamin passed away today.

1959: The original production of “Once Upon a Mattress” “a musical comedy with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Marshall Barer” “opened at the off-Broadway Phoenix Theatre” today.

1960:  Adolf Eichmann, charged with the implementation of the "final solution", was captured in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Eichmann was in charge of all transportation required for the shipment of Jews to the extermination camps. The height of his career was reached in Hungary in 1944, when he managed to transport 400,000 Jews to the gas chambers in less than five weeks.  Eichmann was found guilty and is the only person who ever executed by the Israeli the government.

1961: President John F. Kennedy appointed Walworth Barbour as U.S. Ambassador to Israel.

1963: Lesley Gore’s recording of “It’s My Party” “entered the Billboard Hot 100” today.

1963(17th of Iyar, 5723): Seventy-four year old Dr. Herbert S. Gasser, winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize for Medicine passed away tonight in New York City.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=FA0E1EFC3858137A93C1A8178ED85F478685F9

1966(21^stof Iyar, 5726): Sixty year old “Monument Man” James Joseph Rorimer, a Jew from Cleveland who was a director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he helped create the Cloisters passed away today after suffering a heart attack.  (For more see Survival: The Salvage and Protection of Art in War by James Joseph Rorimer http://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/the-heroes/the-monuments-men/rorimer-lt.-cdr.-james-j.http://chronicle.augusta.com/life/2014-02-08/look-real-man-portrayed-monuments-men

http://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/the-heroes/the-monuments-men/rorimer-lt.-cdr.-james-j.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/life/2014-02-08/look-real-man-portrayed-monuments-men

1966: In New York City, “Ronnie I. (née Posner) and Lawrence David Ackman, the chairman of a New York real estate financing firm, Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group” gave birth to “William Albert "Bill" Ackman an American investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist who was the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, a hedge fund management company.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/business/william-ackman-pershing-valeant.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1

1967: Abba Eban and his wife tour Israel’s northern border area with General David Elazar, commander of the region.

1968: Rolling Stone magazine featured a photograph of Eric Clapton taken by Linda McCartney today making it the first time that a photograph by a woman “was featured on a front cover.”

1968: It was reported today that Max Perlman who has been “absent from the Second Avenue scene for two seasons” is scheduled to return to New York from Tel Aviv “to star in the perennial fall production at of Jacob Jacobs at the Anderson Yiddish Theatre.”

1969: In “Jean Rosenthal 1912-1969” published today Leo Lerman provided a portrait of the lighting genius who “lit up” the Broadway productions of “Hello Dolly,” “Plaza Suite,” “Cabaret” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9C06E2DC1F30EE3BBC4952DFB3668382679EDE

1969: Sir Harry Charles Luke who served as assistant Governor of Jerusalem in 1921 and was a member of the Haycraft Commission that investigated the May riots in Jaffa and who served as acting High Commissioner to the Government of Palestine for six months during 1928 passed away today

1969: “Singapore officially recognized the State of Israel and diplomatic relations were established between the two countries.” (As reported by JewishVirtualLibrary)

1970(5^thof Iyar, 5730): Yom HaAtzma’ut

1970: “Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon” a comedy directed and produced by Otto Preminger and filmed by cinematographer Boris Kaufman was released in the United States today.

1970: “Leo the Last,” a British drama produced by Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler and starring George Tabori whose “father Cornelius died at Auschwtiz in 1944, was released today in the United Kingdom.

1971: “The Second Leningrad trial, with “Hillel Butman, Mikhail Korenblit, Lassal Kaminsky, Lev Yagman, Vladimir Mogilever, Solomon Dreisner, Lev Korenblit, Viktor Boguslavsky, Victor Shtilbans” as defemdmts begam tpdau/

1973:  Citing government misconduct, Daniel Ellsberg has his charges for his involvement in releasing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times dismissed.  Contrary to a popular misconception, Ellsberg was not Jewish.  His parents had been Jewish but they raised their son as a Christian Scientist.  However, the following list of people involved with the Pentagon Papers reads like a who’s-who of Jews during the 1970’s.  How many of these names ring a bell? “To name just a few, we have Leslie Gelb, the chief author of the Pentagon Papers; Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security advisor and Ellsberg's former Harvard colleague; Leonard Weinglass and William Kunstler, two of Ellsberg's attorneys; Max Frankel and Arthur O. Sulzberger of The New York Times which first published the secret papers; Sidney Zion, the maverick reporter who named Ellsberg as the leaker; Seymour Hirsh, the investigative journalist and one of Ellsberg's few close friends; Barbra Streisand, who sang to raise money for Ellsberg's legal defense fund; Louis Marx, the toy tycoon and Ellsberg's father-in- law; Bernard Barker, the Watergate burglar; Noam Chomsky, the hard-Left Ellsberg defender; and Ellsberg's countless Jewish colleagues and acquaintances at Harvard, at the RAND Corporation, in the government and in the anti-Vietnam War movement.”

1975: Israel signed an agreement with European Economic Market.  This helped the Israelis to increase their involvement in what was then a new and burgeoning market for its products including fresh flowers and fresh produce.  At a time when Israel was being isolated in the U.N., this agreement served as a tonic for the besieged state.

1975: Saboteurs derailed a freight train near Jerusalem.

1976: Three people were injured when terrorist set off a bomb in a Tel Aviv movie theatre.

1978(4th of Iyar, 5738): Yom HaAtzma'ut

1981: ABC broadcast “Best Little Girl In the World” starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as “Casey Powell” for the first time.

1982(18th of Iyar, 5742): Lag B’Omer

1982: Birthdate of Evan Goldberg, the native of Vancouver, who has collaborated with his fellow Canadian Jewish boyhood friend Seth Rogen to produce several films “including Superbad.”

1982: The High Court of Australia decided Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen in which barrister Aaron Ronald "Ron" Castan “played a leading role.”

1982: The initial one-hour installment of ‘‘Oppenheimer,'' a seven-part dramatized biography of the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer; it stars Sam Waterston as ''the father of the atomic bomb'' will be broadcast tonight as part of the ''American Playhouse'' series. (As reported by Michael Billington)

1983(28th of Iyar, 5743: Yom Yerushalayim

1983: In Miami, Arthur and Shirley Sotfloff gave birth to Steven Joel Sotloff the journalist beheaded by ISIS.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/ISIS-beheads-US-journalist-Steven-Sotloff/articleshow/41551162.cms?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2741355/Friends-relatives-pay-tribute-murdered-Steven-Sotloff.html

1984: “The Natural,” the feel-good cinematic treatment of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel of the same name directed by Berry Levinson with music by Randy Newman was released today in the United States.

1985: Amy Eilberg was ordained today by the Jewish Theological Seminary making her the first female rabbi in the Conservative Movement.

1986: Anatoly B. Shcharansky was the featured “speaker at the annual Solidarity Sunday for Soviet Jewry, a rally at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in Manhattan.”  Sharansky, who has taken the Hebrew name of Natan was released from a Soviet prison in February thanks to a massive, long-term campaign led by his wife Avital.  ''My K.G.B. interrogators, my prison guards, they tried to convince me that I was alone, powerless in their hands,'' Mr. Shcharansky told the crowd, some of whom had marched to the plaza near the United Nations along a parade route that began at Fifth Avenue and 64th Street. The police estimated the audience at 300,000. 'All of You Were With Me'  ''But I knew I was never alone,'' he added. ''I knew my wife, my people and all of you were with me. They tried their best to find a place where I was isolated. But all the resources of a superpower cannot isolate a man who hears the voice of freedom, a voice I heard from the very chamber of my soul.'' (As reported by Jane Gross)

1987:  Klaus Barbie goes on trial in Lyon for war crimes committed during World War II.  In 1941, Barbie was posted to the Bureau of Jewish Affairs and sent to Amsterdam and later, in May 1942, to Lyon - there, he earned the sobriquet "Butcher of Lyon" as head of the local Gestapo. He was accused of a number of crimes, including the capture and deportation of forty-four Jewish children hidden in the village of Izieu and the torturing to death of Jean Moulin, the highest ranking member of the French Resistance ever captured. All told, the deportation of 7,500 people, 4,342 murders, and the arrest and torture of 14,311 resistance fighters were in some way attributed to his actions or commands.  For several years after the war, Barbie was protected by British and American intelligence agencies because they thought he could provide information to help fight the Cold War.  In the end, Barbie would be found guilty and die in prison from cancer of the pancreas.

1987: Time magazine published “Essay: Was He Normal? Human? Poor Humanity” by Elie Wiesel.

http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,964332,00.html

1989: NBC broadcast the final episode of season five of the “Cosby Show,” a sitcom co-developed by Ed Weinberger.

1989: “Going Overboard,” a comedy written by Adam Sandler who made his “film debut” in this film was released today in the United States.

1991: “Amen,” a sitcom created by Ed Weinberger and included a two years of Elsa Raven playing “Inga” was broadcast on NBC for the last time.

1993: Yithak Rabin replaced Aryeh Deri as Minister of Internal Affairs.

1994(1^stof Sivan, 5754): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1994(1^stof Sivan, 5754): Violinist Leonard Friedman passed away. Friedman was born in London's East End, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.  He was the father of another generation of performers, Sonia, Maria and Richard Friedman.  Richard Friedman is the second generation of violinists in the family. 

1995: NBC broadcast the final episode of season 6 of “Seinfeld” which was the number 1 rated show according to Nielsen.

1997(4^thof Iyar, 5757): Yom HaZikaron

1997: IBM's Deep Blue chess-playing supercomputer defeats Garry Kasparov in the last game of the rematch, becoming the first computer to beat a world-champion chess player. Kasparov claims to be half Armenian and half Jewish.  Regardless of his chess playing skills, Kasparov literally embodies the victims of the two most famous cases of genocide in the 20^thcentury.

1997: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interst to Jewish readers including “The American Century” by Norman F. Cantor.

1998: In his column for the Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer wrote:

"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store."

2000: The lawyer for said Shlomo Helbrans, “a Hasidic rabbi on parole in Rockland County after serving a prison term for kidnapping a teenager under his tutelage was deported to Israel today, even as his conviction was being appealed…”

2001(18^th of Iyar, 5761): Lag B’Omer

2001: The Austin Chronicle reviews “Silent Heritage: The Sephardim and the Colonization of the Spanish North American Frontier, 1492-1600” by Richard Santos

2002: “The city of Rochester” declared today “Hyam Plutzik Day in recognition of his contributions to the community.”

2002: Robert Kraft’s New England Patriots open their brand new stadium, Gillette Stadium.

2003:The New York Times featured books by Jewish writers and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The God of Old: Recovering Theological Imaginings” by James Kugel

2003: Three days after she had passed away funeral services are scheduled to be held at in Wilmington, DE for 64 year old Barbara Tavel-Lipnick the daughter of Rabbi Henry Tavel and Charlotte Tavel

2004: Today, “friends and family of Nicholas Berg, who was killed by his captors in Iraq as generous, remembered him as outgoing and funny.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2004/05/12/friends-kin-mourn-berg/



2004: The Village Voice publishes “The Jesus Landing Pad” in which author Rick Pearlstein describes the here-to-for undocumented role of certain Christian groups in forming the Bush Administration’s Middle East Policy. According to Pearlstein, the American people “we're not supposed to know the National Security Council's top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.”

2005: It was reported today that an official from the village of Malakhova and Berl Lazar, “Russia’s chief rabbi believe that “a fire that gutted historic synagogue in the village just outside of Moscow may have been arson.”

2005: Four days after he had passed away, a memorial service was held for CCNY graduate Harry Minkoff the veteran of the Battle of the Bulge and founder and president of Gift-Pax who raised three children – Jane, Larry and George – with his wife Ruth.

2005: Observance of יום הזכרון לחללי מערכות ישראל - ד'באייר Yom Hazikaron - Israel Remembrance Day or Israel Fallen Soldiers Remembrance Day.  This is a day to remember all those who have fallen in the defense of the Jewish homeland including those who have died at the hand of terrorist.  This national day of remembrance always comes one day before Israel Independence Day, which is the fifth of Iyar.  However, according to Israeli law, when the fifth of Iyar falls on a Friday or Saturday, as is the case in 2005, the observance of Independence Day is always moved to Thursday.  This means that Yom Hazikaron is moved to Wednesday.
2006: At The 92nd Street Y Joseph Telushkin delivers a lecture on his book "A Code of Jewish Ethics", followed by a book signing.

2006: According to “Hevesi's Advice Stirs Questions On the Coast” published in the New York Sun, New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi “faced a conflict of interest allegation in relation to a private capital fund named ‘Markstone’".

2006(13th of Iyar, 5766): Writer, actor and singer Yossi Banai, one of Israel's most beloved and admired artists passed away at the age of 74 after a serious illness. He is survived by his wife and three children, one of whom is Mashina soloist Yuval Banai. The winner of the 1998 Israel Prize, Banai was celebrated as an extraordinarily talented actor, singer and writer. In addition to performing on stage and screen, Banai wrote and staged numerous performances, including skits for five productions of the Hagashash Hahiver entertainment group, of which his brother, Gavri Banai, was a member. Banai started out his career as an actor at Habima, where he continued to perform for over 50 years. Over time, he performed in every major Israeli theater as well as in numerous other venues. He was also well known for his renditions of French songs by Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens, and other French singers, adapted into Hebrew by Naomi Shemer.  Banai was born in the Mahaneh Yehuda neighborhood of Jerusalem, and grew up in an observant home. Last year, he issued a CD on which he read verses from Psalms, accompanied by music composed by Yonatan Bar-Giora. "At an older age, as an actor and also offstage, I began to realize how much poetry this enchanted text contained," he said in an interview following the release of the CD. "The Hebrew language, as it appears in Psalms, is simply sublime - so that even nonbelievers who do not treat the verses as a love song to divinity can read them as pure poetry."

2007: Jennifer Bleyer is the featured speaker at the Shabbat dinner sponsored by the JCC of Manhattan. “Jennifer is a journalist who founded Heeb Magazine, and became its first editor and publisher. She is currently writing for the City section of The New York Times, and has written about her own personal Jewish journey in Yentl's Revengeand The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt.

2007: In Postville, Iowa, 200 workers walked off the job at Agriprocessors, the largest kosher slaughtering operation in the United States.

2007(23^rdof Iyar, 5767): The attempt to bury Joseph Chuckrow who had passed away today touched off a legal dispute between the Chuckrow family and Temple Beth El in Troy, NY.

https://www.vosizneias.com/30556/2009/04/23/new-york-non-member-of-synagogue-wins-court-case-to-place-headstone-in-their-cemetery/

2007(23rd of Iyar, 5767): Robert Gordon, the blacklisted writer who was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia passed away.  One of his best known quality screen efforts was 55 Days at Peking. During his “black list” period, Gordon served as one of the writers on “Hellcats of the Navy” starring Ronald Reagan and his future wife, Nancy Davis

2008: Leonard Cohen began his first tour in 15 years at Fredericton, New Brunswick.

2008: As part of Israel Independence Celebrations, The First International Writers Festival opens in Mishkenot Sha'ananim in Jerusalem. The festival, which is the first of its type here, provides a common meeting ground for Israeli writers and prominent international colleagues. The festival is the site of roundtable discussions and encounters with readers, in a variety of languages, as well as a number of events for children. Among the guests at the first festival are Jewish-American writers Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss and Nathan Englander.

2008: “One of a Kind,” a play that Yossi Vassa co-wrote with Shai Ben Attar about his family’s flight from Ethiopia in the mid-1980s ends its week long run at The New Victory Theater in New York City.  “One of a Kind,” which deals with conflicts in Vassa’s family around the decision to leave Ethiopia, is dedicated to the playwright’s grandmother, who died in Sudan before the rest of the family emigrated via Operation Moses, the covert effort in which thousands of Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel. The play has already had a three-year run in Israel, where it won multiple theater awards. It was recently translated into English, and the original cast members, all of whom were born in Ethiopia, are taking it to America and Canada.

2008: The Sunday New York Times section features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or on topics of Jewish interest including How I Learned Geography, a children’s book written and illustrated by Uri Shulevitz, Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene by Masha Gessen, Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer, The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journalby Lily Koppeland Peace by Richard Bausch of which the reviewer writes, “ One senses some inherited autobiography here. Robert Marson, the novel’s central character is the grandson of German immigrants; his comrade, Asch, is the grandson of a German Jew who fought for the Kaiser in World War I. Bausch has dedicated the book to a father who “served bravely in Africa, Sicily and Italy.”

2008: The Washington Post book section features reviews of Reflections of a Wine Merchant by Neal I. Rosenthal and Audition: A Memoir by Barbara Walters.

2009: Rabbi Denise Eger assumes the leadership of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.  She is the first woman and the firs lesbian to head this organization.

2009: The Pope arrives in Israel for a four-day stay, which will include visits to the Palestinian Authority and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as well as meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres, who will be his official host.

2009: Sports Illustrated reports on the recent death of Salamo Arouch, the Greek born Jewish boxer who survived Auschwitz by winning fights staged by the camp guards.  After the war, he moved to Palestine where he fought in the War of Independence.  He was 86 when he died.

2009: Final performance of “The Man That Got Away: After Ira George” at the 92^nd Street Y in New York.

2010: Andy Christie's The Liar Show featuring Ophira Eisenberg, Mark Katz, Michaela Murphy and Andy Christie is scheduled to appear at the DCJCC

2010: Yom Yerushalayim, “For the sake of Jerusalem I will not be silent,” a night of activism on behalf of Israel is scheduled to take place at the Mt. Kisco Hebrew Congregation.

2010: A Prague court has recognized an artist's right to the image he designed of the Golem. Today the Prague Municipal court recognized the right of the daughter of the late sculptor Jaroslav Horejc, who created an image of a burly clay giant for the Czech film "The Emperor's Baker/The Baker's Emperor," to the image of the character, according to Radio Prague. According to legend, the Prague Golem was created by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the chief rabbi of Prague in the late 16th century, to defend the Prague ghetto from pogroms. Horejc's image was the first time that the Golem was shown as a giant, inhuman figure and not a human figure, according to the report.

2010: David Miliband completed his term of office as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs under Prime Minster Gordon Brown.

2010: Peter Mandelson completed his service as First Secretary of State and Lord President of the Council in Great Britain.

2011: Rachel Gordan is scheduled to lead a conversation, entitled “Post-World War II American Judaism: How Judaism Became an American Religion,” at the Vilna Shul, Boston’s Center for Jewish Culture in Boston, MA.

2011: The Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, is scheduled to  hold an informal 10-minute conversation on “Jozef Israëls, The Sewing School at Katwijk which provide more information about this masterpiece painted by the Jewish artist dubbed the 19th-century Rembrandt.

2011: Katherine Scharhon is scheduled to lead the first part of a two part series “A Taste of Sephardic Foods” in which participants willlearn to make (and eat) borekas, those divine filled pies and biscochos, the lovely simple cookies that can be sweet or savory and shaped for a variety of occasions in Seattle, Washington, home to the third largest Sephardic community in the United States.

2011: Hundreds of Jewish World War II veterans marched in the streets of Jerusalem today on the 66th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany.."

2011: Following the attack on Moshe Cohen, director of Heichal Hatora, in Buenos Aires, Dr. Angel Schindel, vice president of the DAIA Jewish political umbrella organization, plans to file a lawsuit today in the federal justice department based on a violation of Argentina’s anti-discrimination law, which penalizes with jail time attacks motivated by racial or religious hatred. (As reported by JTA)

2011(7^thof Iyar, 5771): Ninety-four year old Leo Kahn, the founder of Staples, passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/business/13kahn.html

2011: In “At 100, Still a Teacher and Quite a Character,” Joseph Berger describes the remarkable life of Bel Kaufman, the granddaughter of Shalom Aleichem who gained fame as an author in her own right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/nyregion/bel-kaufman-at-100-still-a-teacher-and-a-jokester.html?ref=books

2011(7^thof Iyar, 5771): Centenarian Maurice Goldhaber, the physicist who as Director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory oversaw experiments that led to 3 Nobel Prizes passed away today. (As reported by Kenneth Chang) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/science/18goldhaber.html?_r=1

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/25/local/la-me-maurice-goldhaber-20110525

2012: Amos Kollek’s “Chronicles of a Chrisis” a documentary that includes an examination between the writer/director and his father who was Jerusalem’s most famous mayor finishes its opening week debut at the Quad Cinema in New York City.

2012: In “Holocaust documents reveal story behind Obama’s tailor” published today Ned Martel tells the story of Washington tailor and Shoah survivor Martin Greenfield.http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/holocaust-documents-reveal-story-behind-obamas-tailor/2012/11/05/0cc40e68-2523-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_blog.html

2012: In the Western Galilee the Matte Asher and Maale Yosef regional councils are scheduled to host a jeep trip from Lake Monfort to the Tzuriel Crater, Alkosh Forest and Goren Park

 2012: Israeli President Shimon underwent surgery for a hernia at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer.

2013: Israeli born pianist Shai Wosner is scheduled to perform at the Kenned Center Terrace Theatre as the Washington Jewish Music Festival comes to an end. 

2013: Several thousand people marched around central Tel Aviv tonight to protest the budget plan presented earlier this week by Finance Minister Yair Lapid. (As reported by Ben Hartman)

2013: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced heavy criticism today after it was revealed he spent $127,000 (over 450,000 shekels) of taxpayers’ money having an El Al plane fitted out with a double-bed in an enclosed bedroom for his five-hour flight to London last month to attend the funeral of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

2014: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Exodus: A Memoir by Deborah Feldman and Daughter of the King by Sandra Lansky (daughter of Myer Lansky) and William Stadiem.

2014:  The 22^nd annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end.

2014: The National Center for Jewish Film’s 17^th annual film festival is scheduled to come to an end.

2014: “Twenty IDF reservist commanders sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today, in which they stressed that over 100 soldiers under their command hadn't undergone any training exercises for three-and-a-half years, and therefore were unprepared for any military conflict the country may face.”

2014: “A settlers’ group filed a police complaint against iconic Israeli author Amos Oz today, even as the writer doubled down on widely publicized weekend statements in which he called the perpetrators of the recent wave of so-called”price tag” hate crimes throughout the country neo-Nazis, and accused the country’s leadership of being cowed by “settler rabbis.”

2015: The Jewish Historical Society of England is scheduled to host Yanky Franchler delivering a lecture on “1000 Years of Jewish Blood Libels.”

2015: Michael Walzer, author of The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions and Paul Berman are scheduled to explore India and its Hindu militants, the ultra-Orthodox and messianic Zionists of Israel, and Algerian Islamic radicals” at the Center for Jewish History.

2015: “Felix & Meira” and “A la Vie” are scheduled to be shown at the 18^thannual Jewish Film Festival.

2015: The Jewish Historical Society of England is scheduled to host Saul Sapir delivering a lecture on “The Heritage of the Jews of Mumbai (Bombay).”

2015: In Tel Aviv, at The Israel Museum birthday which is scheduled to take place today, “There will be no charge to enter the museum and anyone turning 50 on the same day will received a free lifetime membership to the museum.”

2016(3^rdof Iyar, 5776): Yom Hazikaron – The Day of Remembrance

(Yom Hazikaron l'Chalalei Ma'arachot Yisrael ul'Nifge'ei Pe'ulot. "The Day of Remembrance for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel and Victims of Terrorism" is on the 4^th of Iyar, but is observed this year on the 3^rdto avoid a conflict with Shabbat)

2016: “Teens and adults from Hashomer Hatzair Youth Group and Stephen Wise Free Synagogue Religious School are scheduled to participate in “Mizikaron Le'atzmaut: From Remembrance to Independence” – a commemoration of the memory of Israeli soldiers followed by “a concert Israeli songs by the a\ Afro-Hebrew band Milk and Honeys.”

2016: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education and the Portland Symphonic Choir are scheduled to present “A Child of Our Time” – Michael Tippett’s work written in response to Kristallnacht and performed for the first time in 1944.

2017: Three days after he had passed away funeral services were held at Temple Israel for eighty-seven year old Harvard graduate Julian I. Edison, the St. Louis born son of Mark and Ida Edison and husband of Hope Rabb Edison with whom he raised two sons Mark and Aaron who was Chairman of Edison Brothers Stores, Inc.

https://www.stljewishlight.com/life_cycle/obituaries/julian-i-edison-former-shoe-executive-philanthropist-dies-at/article_303a5d3c-3f10-11e7-b063-9bf78f8ab380.html

2017: Dr. Scott Gottlieb began serving as the 23^rd Commissioner of Food and Drugs today.

2017: Alesssio Assontis and Gabriele Mancuso are scheduled to lecture on “Like the Medici: Jewish Dynasties in Renaissance Florence” at the Streicker Center.

2017: Authors Matti Friedman and Nicole Strauss are scheduled to present “Writing Between Two Jewish Worlds” at the Central Synagogue.

2017: In “Songs of the Nation” Maskilic Readings of the Psalms After Moses Mendelssohn” Dr. Yael Sela-Teichler is scheduled to discuss “the 1791 edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s German translation of Psalms, The Book of the Songs of Israel, exploring maskilic renderings of the music of the Hebrews that reclaim biblical poetry as Jewish musical heritage and challenge traditional notions of exile.”

2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host and interfaith Friday night with its “Baha’I friends.”

2018(26^thof Iyar, 5778): Eighty-two year old publisher Peter Mayer who most popular claim to fame was the publication The Satanic Verses, whose author Salman Rushdie was fair game for anybody who wanted to murder him. (As reported by Neil Genzlinger)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/obituaries/peter-mayer-publisher-of-the-incendiary-satanic-verses-dies-at-82.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

2018: Today, “a jury found” former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon “Silver guilty of corruption charges convicting him on counts of extortion and honest services fraud…”

2018: “The Live Feed Creative residency program” at the New York Live Art Studios is scheduled to present Netta Yerushalmy’s “Paradmodernites.”

2018: The UK Jewish Film is scheduled to sponsor two screenings today in London of “Entebbe.”

2018 (26th of Iyar, 5778): Ninety year old “Oscar-nominated screenwriter” Josh Greenfield passed away today. (As reported by Neil Genzlinger)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/obituaries/josh-greenfeld-who-chronicled-his-sons-autism-dies-at-90.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

2019: The D.C. Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to host a screening of “Cairo to the Cloud: The World of the Cairo Geniza” followed by a Q and A with Filmmaker Michelle Paymar.

2019: In New Orleans, this evening Gates of Prayer is scheduled to host its “Gala Fundraiser.”

2019(6^thof Iyar, 5779): Parashat Kedoshim; Pirke Avot Chapter Two

2020: As part of the Modern Jewish Literature series at LSJS, Dr. Aviva is scheduled to present a virtual exploration of Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

2020: The Streicker Center is scheduled to host, on-line, “Artists’ Beit Midrash – Jewish Artists in Post-War Art” with Tobi Kahn and Rabba Wendy Amsellem

2020: Jay and Shira Ruderman are scheduled to host Isaac (Bougie) Herzog, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, to discuss Israel’s role and responsibilities when Jewish communities face crisis.

2020: The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to present, live on Zoom Professor Zvi Zohar as he discusses “Value and Consequences in the Halakhic Process: A Sephardi Perspective.”

2020: The Virtual Sonoma County JCC Israeli Film Festival is scheduled to host a “live streaming” of “Love in Suspenders,” a Hebrew language film with English subtitles.

This Day, May 12, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 12

940: Sixty-two you are old 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 10^th century which included a description of the Great Revolt in 70.

1191: Richard I of England marries Berengaria of Navarre. This was an arranged marriage to the extreme.  Richard was already leading the Third Crusade in the Holy Land when it came to marry Berengaria.  Richard had to break off his fight and come to Cyprus to marry his queen.  Richard spent most of his reign outside of the British Isles which was unfortunate for the Jews because he was not given to the ant-Semitic behavior of his English counterparts.

1258: In Valladolid, Alfonso X and Yolanda, the daughter of James I Aragon gave birth to Sancho IV of Castile, who treated the story of the affair between Rahel la Fermosa, a Jewish woman from Toledo, and King Alfonso VIII as fact and not fable, began his reign today.

1267: A large group of church leaders, including a most of the German churchmen, met in Vienna under the leadership of the papal legate Gudeo.  They confirmed every canonical law that Innocent III and his successors had pass for the branding of the Jews.  Jews were not allowed to have any Christian servants, were not admissible to any office of trust, and were not to associate with Christians in ale-houses or bars.  Christians were not permitted to accept any invitation from Jews or to enter into discussion with them. 

1267: A special session of the city council of Vienna decided to force all Jews to wear a cone-shaped headdress in addition to the badge. It was called the Pileum cornutum and was to become distinctive attire which is prevalent in many medieval woodcuts illustrating Jews.

1393: The Jews of Sicily were forbidden to display any funeral decorations in public.

1540: Paul III issued “Licet Judaei,” a papal bull “clearing the Jews Of the charge that they practiced blood rituals.”

1670: Birthdate of Augustus II the Strong for whom Issacher Berend Lehman served as “the Court Jew.”

1700(23^rdof Iyar, 5460): Joseph Athias, the native of Cordoba who served as a rabbi in Amsterdam where he published two editions of the Hebrew Bible passed away today.

1728(4^thof Sivan, 5488): The brothers Hayyim and Joshua Reizes of Lemberg, famous for their piety and scholarship, were tortured and executed on charges of influencing the apostate Jan Filipowicz to return to Judaism.

1786(14^thof Iyar, 5546):Pesach Sheni was observed on the same day the Thomas Jefferson, the American Ambassador to France and future President of the United States wrote John Jay, the U.S Secretary for Foreign and future Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court about Denmark’s desire to negotiate a treaty of commerce with the United States, another sign of European recognition of the reality of the success of the American Revolution.

1797(16^thof Iyar, 5557): Seventy-eight year old Rachel Franks Levy, the London born wife of Isaac Mendes Seixas passed away to in New York City.

1800(Iyar 17): Rabbi Moses Hayyim Ephraim of Sadilkov, author of “Degel Mahaneh Ephraim” passed away

1804: Lyon Israel Samuel married Fleurette Baruch Weil today at “Remiremont, Vosage, France.”

1805: Birthdate of German-Jewish orientalist Julius Furst who works included Cultural and Literary History of Jews in Asia.



1807: Rothschild’s “official” balance sheet shows that his assets on this day totaled 1,973,192 gulden. His assets had quadrupled since 1797.

1811: Hayim ben Moses married Leah bat Phineas Zelig at the Western Synagogue today.

1811: An article published in The Star described the dedication of a new synagogue. "On Friday last a new Synagogue was consecrated at Sheerness, which was very numerously attended, and the service performed by Messers Leos and Phillips, who went from London for that purpose. The music was composed by one of the Mes. Leos, and was perhaps as grand as has been witnessed, as Mr. Leo led the band in a most excellent manner. Several persons of distinction were admitted to see the ceremony performed."

1815: Jacob Baruch and G.G. Uffenheim wrote a petition today addressed to Prince Hardenberg on behalf of the Jews of Frankfort.

1816(14^thof Iyar, 5576): Pesach Sheni is observed on a day in the Year without Sun” when “waves of frost capture Quebec City, “waves of cold air cross the St. Lawrence from Canada and fall on New England” and “snow and sleet fall on towns and fields closed to London.”

1820: Birthdate of Florence Nightingale who gained fame for her nursing work with British forces during the Crimean War which had its roots in Christian competition for control over the “Holy Places” in Palestine and whose ranks included Henry Jessel, the decorated corporal who live until he was 98.

1824(14^thof Iyar, 5584): Pesach Sheni is observed for the last time during the Presidency of James Monroe of “Monroe Doctrine” fame.

1835: Robert le diable (Robert the Devil) an opera in five acts composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer was performed for the first time in the United States “at the Théâtre d'Orléans in New Orleans.”

1838: In London, Dinah Levy and Jacob Farjeon gave birth to British writer Benjamin Leopold Farjeon.

1840: In England, the Brighton Railway Station designed by David Mocatta “opened for trains to Shoreham” today.

1842: Birthdate of Amos Kidder Fiske the author of The Great Epic of Israel: The Web of Myth, Legend, History, Law, Oracle, Wisdom and Poetry of the Ancient Hebrews and The Jewish Scriptures: The Books of the Old Testament in Light of their Origin and History

1850: Birthdate of Henry Cabot Lodge, United States Senator from Massachusetts. Lodge led the fight to defeat the Versailles Treaty and to keep the United States out of the League of Nations. The failure of the United States to join the League of Nations was one of the root causes of World War II, a war that destroyed European Jewry.  Lodge was more interested in wounding President Wilson than he was creating a new way for nations to solve their disputes peacefully. Lodge was the co-sponsor “of the 1922 joint Congressional resolution (known as the Lodge-Fish resolution) that endorsed the creation a Jewish national home.  The bill commended the ‘building up of new and beneficent life in Palestine’ as an act of ‘historic justice’ and ‘an undertaking which will do honor to Christendom and give to the House of Israel its long-denied opportunity to reestablish a fruitful Jewish life and culture in it ancient land.’”  Elihu D. Stone, the leading Zionist in Boston “persuaded Lodge to present the resolution to Congress on the eve of” Passover in 1922, since in Stone’s word “this too was to an act of freedom for the Jewish people…”  Lest anybody thing the Lodge had become an ardent had become an ardent Zionist at least one historian makes the strong case that the resolution, which was non-binding, was an attempt to mollify Jews who were upset with the Republican supported anti-immigration that had been passed the year before. (As described in The Jews of Bostonedited by Jonathan D. Sarna, et al)

1851: Moses and Esther Lazarus, gave birth to Eleazar Frank Lazarus, one of the brothers of poet Emma Lazarus.

1851: Birthdate of Joseph Kemp Toole who while Governor of Montana laid the cornerstone for Temple Emanu-El

1857(18^thof Iyar, 5617): Lag B’Ome

1857: David John Davis married Sophia Hart at the Great Synagogue today, the first day, according to traditionalists that Jews can marry since the start of the counting of the Omer.

1858: Sixty-nine year old Protestant Hebraist J.G.B. Winer passed away today.

1859: In Vienna, Eleanor and Josef pick gave birth to Maximillian Pick

1859: In the United Kingdom due to nationwide scare over the possibility of war with France, today the War Office gave sanction for the formatting of volunteer corps out of concern for home defense to which Lazarus Simon Magnus responded. This would lead to the formation of the Kent Voluntary Artillery, a 19^thcentury version of the Home Guard that would be formed to face Hitler in 1940.



1860: The Rhode Island Republican described the early development of Newport which benefited from the introduction of the first chandlery factory in America by Jewish immigrants from Portugal. 

1861: Three weeks after Rabbi David Einhorn, a leading abolitionist had escaped to Philadelphia, a delegation from Har Sinai asked him to return to Baltimore.  While they were sympathetic with his views, they said the request was conditional on his promise not to speak out on slavery, secession or the war.

1862: Second Lieutenant Charles Leo of Company H and the Regimental Adjutant resigned today after six months of service.

1864: In Munich, Germany, “Simon and Regina (Levinger) Steinhardt” gave birth Frank Maximilian Steinhardt, the husband of Alice Florence Ledden who joined the U.S Army in 1882, served as Chief Clerk under Generals Schofield, Crook, Terry Miles and Ruger and, starting in 1898 as chief clerk of the First Army Corps before transferring to Cuba “as chief clerk of the military government and final serving as the agent of the War Department “with residence in Cuba.”

1866: In Elgin, Illinois, Leopold and Rose Adler gave birth to Manasseh Max Adler, the concert violinist who became an executive with Sears Roebuck and Co after marrying Sophie Rosenwald , the sister of Julius Rosenwald which gave him the where-with-all to pursue a life of philanthropy including the building of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium.

1868: In Dornum, Germany, Fanny and Levi or Louis Schoenberg gave birth to Abraham Elieser Adolph Schönberg who gained fame Al Shean, one half of the famous vaudeville team of Gallagher and Shean who was an uncle of the famous Marx Brothers.

https://www.marx-brothers.org/marxology/shean.htm

1869: In Dornum, Germany, Fanny and Levi Schoenberg gave birth to Abraham Elieser Adolph Schönberg who gained fame as Al Shean half of the vaudeville team Gallagher and Shean, and as the uncle of the Marx Brothers

1869: Nathan Woolf Jacobson married Rebecca Levy at the Great Synagogue today.

1870: The Manitoba Act was given the Royal Assent, paving the way for Manitoba to become a province of Canada on July 15, 1870. According to a census taken the following year there were only 1,115 Jews living in Canada, most of whom were found in the major metropolitan areas in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Jewish settlement in western Canada began in earnest under the aegis of the Baron de Hirsch Foundation and the Jewish Colonial Association in 1890. The Association financed a series of agricultural settlements including those at New Hirsch and Narcisse in Manitoba.

1871: The American Christian Society for Promoting Christianity in the city of New York and elsewhere held their first anniversary meeting at Cooper Institute. The society has one branch – in Somerset, Iowa. According to the society there are 65,000 Jews living in New York and 250,000 in the whole United States.

1872: Birthdate of Eleanor Florence Rathbone an independent British Member of Parliament and long-term campaigner for women's rights. She was a member of the noted Rathbone family of Liverpool. In the House of Commons, the courageous Eleanor Rathbone attacked the British government for the defeatist attitudes expressed at the Bermuda Conference and noted that the Allies are responsible for the deaths of any Jews if they refuse to help.

1872: Benjamin Novra, the son of George Novra and Rebecca Abrahams, was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1873(15^th of Iyar, 5633): Forty-three year old Emanuel Oscar Menahem Deutsch, the Orientalist trained by his uncle David Deutsch who promoted Semitic studies while working at the British Museum passed away today at Alexandria, Egytp.

1875: In Philadelphia, The Young Men's Hebrew Association was organized today with Mayer Sulzberger as president. This new organization replaced a predecessor, The Hebrew Association. The object of the association is "to promote a higher culture among young men".  The organization would grow to over 1,000 members, under the presidency of Adolph Eichholz.

1876(18^th Iyar, 5636): Lag B’Omer is celebrated for the last time during the Presidency of U.S. Grant, the first American president to make a cash contribution of a synagogue;

1877: According to a column published today titled "Russian Interior" a revolt has broken out in the Crimea and the "Jews of Jassy have been warned that if they continue prayers in their synagogues for the success of the Turks they will be severely punished."

1878: An article published today entitled “Works of the Rabbis: The Talmud and other Jewish Books; A Supposed Dangerous Work and What Was Done to Suppress It – The Great Change it Wrought by Time - How The Talmud Originated and of What It Consists – The Ten Targums or Interpretations of Scripture – The Principal Commentaries on the Bible – The Masora and Cabala” provides a comparative lengthy and detailed history of Jewish writings and the various attempts to suppress or destroy them.

1880: Birthdate of Baltimore native and Syracuse undergrad Aaron Morton Sakolski, the holder of a Ph.D. from John Hopkins and Professor of Economics at NYU and CCNY who was a prolific author and a member of the Jewish Historical and the Civic and Judeans clubs.’

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1955/12/31/issue.html

1884: France expanded its colonial empire in North Africa by forcing Tunisia to become a French protectorate.  The Jewish community of Tunisia dated back to Biblical times and by the middle of the 18^thcentury, they made up about one sixth of the population and had access to 27 synagogues. (Jewish Virtual Library)

1884(17th of Iyar, 5644): Czechoslovakian composer Bedrich Friedrich Smetana passed away.  The melody for Hatikvah was written by Samuel Cohen who based his composition on a musical theme found in Smetana's "Moldau."  During the Mandate, when the British forbade the playing of Hatikvah, many Jews would play records of the piece by Smetana.  The words for Hatikvah which means Hope were written by Naphatali Herz Imber an English poet born in Bohemia

1885: Birthdate of Paltiel Daykan, a Russian born Israeli Jurist who was awarded the Israel Prize in 1957.

1885: “Samuel and Ida (Soloway) Sweddler, gave birth to Brooklyn Law School trained attorney Nathan Sweedler, the husband Ada L. Meyer, the director of the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities and founder of the Brooklyn Jewish Chronicle.

1886: Birthdate of Max Adler.  A native of Elgin, Illinois, this son of German-Jewish immigrants gave up a career as a concert violinist to become a vice president of Sears Roebuck & Co after he married Sophie Rosenwald, the sister of Julius Rosenwald.  Adler retired in 1928 to pursue a life of philanthropy that included the creations of the Adler Planetarium, the first planetarium built in the Western Hemisphere.  He passed away in 1952.

1888: In Cincinnati, Ohio, Max and Sarah Hexter gave birth to Maurice Beck Hexter

1899: Sixty-one year old Bessarabia native Joseph Rabinowitz who had been baptized in Berlin in 1885 and was the founder of a sect called Novy Israel which was thinly veiled disguise for getting Jews to convert passed away today.

1889:  Birthdate of Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank.

1889: Today, “when the Bayswater Synagogue had been in existence for twenty-six years, illuminated addresses were presented to the three Ministers, who had been in office since the establishment.”

1890: “The Shatchen” by Henry Doblin and Charles Dickson featuring the character “Meyer Petowsky” as the marriage broker premiered at the Start Theatre in New York City tonight.

1890: The list of the newly elected officers of the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrew published today included Charles L. Bernheim, President; Mrs. Henry Gitterman, Vice President; Charles Sternbach, Treasurer.

1891: “Russia and the Jews” published today stated that the object of the Czar’s government “apparently is the banishment of a million Jewish families, or, at a low estimate 5,000,000 Jews, men women and children” with the effect of creating suffering that “is literally appalling.”

1892: It was reported today that behavior of Polish strikers show “a blind hatred for all Jews and a brutal delight in murdering Jews…”  Anti-Semitism is so endemic to the general population that “if Russia were…under a constitutional Government, there is no reason to believe that the Jews would be any more decently treated than they are under the Government of the Czar.”  (Events in the 20^th century would prove these words to be prophetic.)

1892: “Polish Rioters Punished” published today described the ongoing labor violence at Lodz “and the attendant Jew baiting.”

1892: Birthdate Fritz Nathan Kohn, the native of Vienna, who gained fame as Fritz Kortner, Austrian stage and film actor gained performing in Germany. He played Alfred Dreyfus in the 1930 film “Dreyfus” based on a novel by Bruno Weil. He fled Germany in 1933 for the United States but returned to Germany in 1949 where he gained additional fame for his directorial skills in the “legitimate theatre.”  He passed away in 1970.

1892: “Better Teachers Wanted” published today described the efforts to improve the quality of the Jewish Sunday Schools in New York.  According to Miss Julia Richmond of the Hebrew Free School Association and a leading public school educator, most of the teachers are “willing and intelligent” but lack the proper training.  Her solution is to create a two year program that would include course in Hebrew, Bible and ancient history mixed with actual classroom experience.  A committee composed of Rabbis Kohler, Kohut, Isaacs, Silverman, Harris and De Sola Mendes and Miss Richmond has been formed to pursue the matter.

1893: One thousand immigrants, most of whom were Russian Jews arrived at Ellis Island today aboard the steamship Dania.

1893: A number of Polish Jews were aboard the SS Lahn which arrived in England today.

1894: During a court hearing in Glogua, Count Walter Puckler-Muskau, the “German anti-Semitic agitator declared that the use of such terms “beat the Jews,” “ crack their skulls,”  “kick them out” and “thrash them” were figurative and meant no harm to the Jews”

1895: It was reported today during the last year, the expenses for operating Mt. Sinai Hospital exceeded all sources of income by $6,000.despite several sources of revenue including generous bequests by the late Sarah Burr, the last of which totaled $35,000.  The board headed by President Hyman Blum and Vice President Isaac is working to remedy the situation.

1895: “Through With Their Studies” published today described the season ending activities of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association which “will open it twenty-second season next fall with a membership of over 500.”  In addition to its other activities, the Association will continue to operate a school that offers courses in Jewish history and stenography.

1895: In Springfield, OH, “Rabbi Mendel and Tillie Kagen Finkelstein” gave birth to the fifth child and only son Rabbi Joseph Lionel Fink and the husband of Janice Gutfruend.

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/11/27/archives/dr-joseph-fm-rabbi-69-is-dead-spokesman-for-reform-jews-led-buffalo.html

http://collections.americanjewisharchives.org/ms/ms0105/ms0105.html

1895: Zene Barkuskie and Vincent Oustra form Jersey City and Mr. and Mrs. Tony Stelitzka of Kingston, NY, all of whom are Polish Jews are waiting on Commissioner Shields to take action following their arrest yesterday on charges of counterfeiting.

1895: Selma Kurz “made her début in the title role of Ambroise Thomas's opera Mignon at the Hamburg Stadttheater” today.

1895: “Golden Wedding Tablets in a Temple” published today described the two tablets that Amalie and William S. Rayner donated to Congregation Har Sinai in Baltimore in honor of their golden wedding anniversary.  The two marble tablets which are six feet by 3 feet by 3 feet were created by William A. Gualt.  They are inscribed with two Hebrew statements and their English translations which are “Hear Israel! The Eternal is God; The Eternal is One” and “Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thysef.”

1896(29^thof Iyar, 5656): Seventy-eight year old French physician Germain Sée who “specialized in the study of lung and cardiovascular diseases” passed away today.

1897: Herzl decides to create a Zionist paper. ("Mit allem war ich gleich im reinen, nur mit dem Titel nicht" - "I saw everything clearly right away - except for the name.")

1898: Hammerstein’s Lyric Theatre is scheduled to host this afternoon’s benefit performance featuring members of the Professional Woman’s League.

1898: New Yorker Samuel Feldman, an enlisted man serving aboard the S.S. New York was injured today “in an attack on the fortifications of San Juan, P.R.” during the Spanish-American War

1899(3^rdof Sivan, 5659): Sixty-six year old Nathan Jacobs, the father of Micah and Judith Jacobs passed away today at Bath

1899: Roswell P. Flower, the Governor of New York who appointed Edward Jacobs, a member of the Buffalo, NY, Jewish community to serve as Loan Commissioner, passed away today.

1899: The court at Glogau accepted the plea of Count Puckler-Muskau, the “anti-Semitic agitator” that “his appeals to violence were figurative and meant no harm to the Jews.”

1900:  Birthdate of German born actress Helene Weigel, wife of Bertholt Brecht. Her father was Jewish; her mother was not.  She died in East Berlin in 1971.

1900: In a letter to the New York Times, Jacob Schiff expresses his opposition to the “project of the Baron and Baroness de Hirsch Monument Association.  A long-time friend of the Baron, Schiff believes that he and his wife would not want a monument built in their honor preferring instead that their good works serve as their memorial.  Schiff did not question the good intentions of those wishing to build the monument but did challenge the project as being totally inappropriate.

1900(13^thof Iyar, 5660): Italian author and member of Parliament Attilio Luzzato a member of family from Udine province that traces its origins back to the 17^thcentury when two Luzzato brothers came there from Venice passed away today.

1901: In Chicago, “Isidor Sam and Ethel (Sher) Bernstein” gave birth to Armour Institute of Technology graduate Jack Bernstein, who rose from being a draftsman to working in building design and civil engineering while being a member of the Young Men’s Jewish Charities in Chicago

1901: In Great Britain, “Solomon Greenbaum, a tailor of Polish origins gave to Hyam Greenbaum  an accomplished violinist, film score arranger and conductor for several BBC orchestras.  https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095906257

1902: “The boycott on beef by the Jewish residents of the east side, in sympathy with the butchers of that race who are fighting the wholesalers, in keeping their shops closed until the price of the kosher meat is reduced, assumed larger proportions today when it was announced that the boycott had spread to all the boroughs.”

1903: In Dallas, TX, “at a public mass meeting at Temple Shaareth Israel a resolution was adopted condemning the outrageous acts on the Jewish communities at Kishineff” and a “committee was elected to raise funds for the relief of the sufferers.”

1904: The liners Lorraine and Deutschland will sail from New York today carrying a record nine million dollars in gold, $1million of which is from Lazard Freres and $1.5million is from Goldman, Sachs and Co.

1905: Theatre owner Sam Shubert was injured in train wreck at Harrisburg, PA in which he sustained injuries that would end his life.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/stars/shubert-brothers/

1906(17^thof Iyar, 5666): Parashat Emor

1906: While defending the expulsion for Russians today in the Prussian Landtag today, Minister of the Interior Bethmann Hollwegg said “that most of the Russians who settled in Prussia were Jews” and while “he did not desire to emphasize the religious aspect of the matter, no one could his eyes to the part the Jews had taken in in the Russian revolution” or deny that “the expulsion of these impecunious aliens was necessary in view of the depressed condition of the labor market.”  (Editor’s note – Pure anti-Semitism years before the defeat in WW I which was the rationale offered by some for the Rise of Hitler)

1907:  The Hawthorne School of the Jewish Protectory and Aid Society, which “will be used as a reformatory for the Jewish boys who have been sentenced in the Children's Court,” was formally opened today in the assembly hall of the school at Hawthorne, Westchester County.

1908: Dr. Francis Brown, “one of the most distinguished Hebrew Scholars in America” who is now in Jerusalem serving as “the Director of the American School for Oriental Study and Research in Palestine” was elected was elected President of the Union Theological Seminary in New York this afternoon.

1909: “Finn Elections Help Jews” published today described how the change in the makeup of the Landtag will help the Jews because the majority will work to get the Jews the vote and amend or rescind the anti-Jewish legislation adopted the party referred to as “the Old Finns.”

1910: It was reported today that “the Carl Schurz prize essay on technical education had been readby Abraham Weinstein at the recent graduation ceremonies of the Hebrew Technical Insitute.”

1911: “The provincial governor of Yekaterinoslov, Russia, gave orders for the expulsion of all Jews who did not possess permits of residence from the villages of the province” and threatened to severely any police man who failed “to discover those subject to expulsion.”

1912:  In Leeds, UK, the Shehitah Board met and rendered a decision “that Jewish butchers may no long slaughter for non-Jewish trade by any other than Jewish methods.”

1913: Eighty-four year old Joseph Unger, the “Austrian jurist and statesman” who had converted to Christianity, passed away today in Vienna.

1913(5th of Iyar, 5673): In London, Rabbi Abraham Rosenberg passed away today.

1914: “Wants Primary Advanced” published today described several amendments introduced by Assemblyman Sulzer designed to ensure ‘an honest primary election next Fall” included a resolution calling “for the shifting of the primary election this year from September 29, the dated provided for in the law, to September 22 on the ground that the Jewish Feast of Atonement” falls on September 29 “and thus thousands of Jews would be barred from voting in the primaries.”

1915: More than 5,000 letters arrived at the headquarters of the Leo M. Frank Committee in Chicago chaired by Lester L. Dauer joining 80,000 others that have coming to the office “asking for the commutation of the death sentence of Leo M. Frank to life imprisonment.”

1915: “The commencement exercises of the Hebrew Technical Institute on Stuyvesant Street which currently has 295 pupils are scheduled to held this evening at Cooper Union” under the leadership of President Joseph L. Buttenweiser, Vice Presidents Irving Lehman and Eugene Speigelberg and Treasuer Mortimer L. Schiff.



1915: It was reported that Govern Edward F. Dunne has been asked to speak at Leo Frank Day on May 16 – a day devoted to gathering tens of thousands of signatures for a petition demanding clemency for Frank from the Governor of Georgia.

1915: Following a tempestuous (for Victorians) competition of suitors Venetia Stanley wrote to Prime Minister Asquith that she had finally accepted Edwin Samuel Montagu’s proposal of marriage – a relationship that would be consummated in July after her conversion to Judaism.

1915 It was reported today that the 15,000 petitions asking for clemency for Leo Frank that were collected “by Miss Eleanor Post, a writer on a Cincinnati paper” weighing seventy-five pounds joined another 25,000 letters asking for clemency that were sitting in the reception room of the Governor of Georgia.

1915: It was reported today that Evangelist Billy Sunday has said that “If I were Governor of Georgia, (Leo) Frank would go free tomorrow.”

1916: Date of death shown on the tombstone of Shalom Aleichem. Actually it said “12a). He died on May 13. But he suffered from triskaidekaphobia, which is a showboating way to say that he had a fear of the number 13. He used 12a in numbering the pages of his manuscripts. (As reported by Clyde Haberman)

1916(9^thof Iyar, 5676): Sixty-nine year old Morris Shaprio who had passed away today, was buried at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery” in London.

1916: On behalf of the Secretary of State, Alvey A. Adee, the Second Assistant Secretary, wrote to Simon Wolf saying that he “is in receipt of a telegram dated May 11^th from the American Ambassador at Petrograd stating that the Russian Easter has passed without incident.”  i.e. attack s on the Jews

1917: It was reported today that the Isaac L. Rice Memorial Fountain was formally dedicated last week in Brooklyn, NY.

1917: It was reported today that “the late Julius Robertson, a trustee of the Montefiore Home left an estate worth over a million and a quarter dollars of which he bequeathed $33,500 to various local charities.

1917: It was reported today that “the East-West Players” are scheduled “to end their season of Yiddish plays in English this week.”

1917: A mass meeting is scheduled to be held this evening in the Bronx to raise funds to equip “a Jewish medical unit for Palestine

1917: The late “Samuel Hirsh, of the Hebrew Technical Institute left $100,000 to the United Hebrew Charities, $10,000 to the Hebrew Technical Institute, $50,000 to the Council of Jewish Women and an additional $15,000 to other local charities.

1918: The Jewish drive for the relief fund came to an end tonight with the people of Baltimore having raised $500,000 which exceeded the goal of the drive by $150,000.

1918: The Provisional Zionist Committee distributed a letter from David Lubin, the American delegated to the International Institute of Agriculture in which he expressed a change in his view about Zionism because now that it would have the protection and guidance of England as opposed to being un Turkish control he was in full support of their goal.

1918: Birthdate of Julius Rosenberg.  Rosenberg and his wife would become the center piece in a spy ring that gave Atomic secrets to the Soviets.  The Rosenbergs were executed for treason in 1953.

1919: Thirty-eighth anniversary of the laying of a corner stone at the synagogue in Oran, Algeria. At its peak, the Jewish population was about 2,000.  After Algeria gained its independence in 1962, the Jewish community left for France and Israel.

1920: David Kessler, “one of the leading Yiddish actors in the United States” who also managed Kessler’s  Second Avenue was taken to the hospital tonight “after being stricken with a severe intestinal ailment during a performance at the Lyric Theatre” where he was appearing in “Jacob Gordin’s dramatization of Tolstoy’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata.’”

1920: Charles Edward Sebag-Monteifiore and Muriel Alice Ruth de Pass gave birth to Hugh William Montefiore

1920: Birthdate of Vilém Flusser the Czech born Jewish philosopher and author who was a long time resident of Brazil before finally settling in France.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vil%C3%A9m_Flusser

1922: In the Bronx, cabdriver Irving Gerhenzwit and his wife Ellen gave birth to Morris Gershenwit who would gain fame running “a used record store in Los Angeles” that was really “an international archive of more than 300,000 records.”



1922: In New York, playwright and author David Freedman and his wife Beatrice (née Rebecca Goodman) gave birth to Noel Freedman who gained fame as David Noel Freedman the Presbyterian convert and minster and biblical scholar who “was one of the first Americans to work on the “Dead Sea Scrolls.”

1922: Birthdate of Paul Milstein, the prominent businessman and philanthropist  who used profits from the family flooring business to build a real estate empire in New York City, distinguished by major projects begun in uncertain neighborhoods and totaling 50,000 apartments, 8,000 hotel rooms and 20 million square feet of office space.”

1923: In Poland, Jewish physicians issued a protest against the memorandum published by the Medical Faculty of the Krakau University justifying the demand for a percentage norm against the Jewish medical students on the ground that the Jewish physicians have "low moral standards". The Jewish doctors demanded a retrataction. (As reported by JTA)

1923: The Joint Distribution Committee announced that it has decided to continue its support for Hebrew Schools operated by the Tarbut Organization. “Tarbut was a Zionist network of Hebrew-language educational institutions founded in 1922, when the first Tarbut conference was held in Warsaw.

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

 1923: "Kaufman Kohler Sabbath" was observed by Reform Synagogues throughout the United States today in celebration of the eightieth birthday last Thursday of Dr. Kaufman Kohler. The 80 year old Rabbi expressed his concern that “idealism has given way to materialism and opportunism.”  He believes that “the world is passing from a disturbed phase of thought to a higher plane” and that he sees women as playing a vital role in the spread of religious values.

1924: “In Chicago, Richard Cooper, a General Electric distributor and his wife Gladys gave birth to actress Maxine Cooper Gomberg, the wife of screenwriter and producer Sy Gomberg.

https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-maxine-cooper15-2009apr15-story.html

1924: Otto Frank, the future father of Anne Frank turned 35 today.

1925(18^thof Iyar, 5685): Lag B’Omer

1925: Edith Hoolander married Otto Frank today at a synagogue in Aachen. (Editor’s note – was their choice of a wedding date driven by the custom of Lag B’Omer, the thirty-third day of the counting of the Omer, being the first time people could celebrate joyous occasions such as wedding during the season of counting the Omer?)

1926: JTA reported that in Great Britain many public functions of Jewish bodies and societies will have to be postponed if the general strike does not come to an end this week including the scheduled monthly meeting of the Board Jewish Deputies.

1926: It was reported today that Lord Allenby's unveiling of the Jewish World Memorial at the synagogue in Stepney, has been postponed as result of the General Strike that is gripping the United Kingdom.

1926: The role of Sir Herbert Samuel, former High Commissioner of Palestine and chairman of the British Royal Coal Commission, in the settlement of the general strike, the first event of that nature in Western Europe, was disclosed today in the official statement issued by the Trades Union Congress. It appears that Sir Herbert played the main part as the mediator between the strikers and the government. Immediately upon his return to London from a vacation, Sir Herbert made efforts toward mediation, as chairman of the Royal Commission, with a view toward settlement. He obtained the memorandum of the Trade Unions which was accepted by the government. (As reported by JTA)

1926: "No attempt toward the economic reconstruction of European Jewries will succeed unless we stem the anti-Semitic wave," declared Dr. William Filderman, president of the Union of Rumanian Jews, on the eve of his departure for Europe on the Berengaria today. "There is no use educating Jewish artisans if anti-Semitic prejudice deprives them of any market for their products," he explained.

1928: In Kansas City, MO, Irma M. (née Freeman) and Mark Bertram "Bert" Bacharach, a well-known syndicated newspaper columnist” gave birth to Grammy and Oscar winning son writer Burt Bacharach.

http://bacharachonline.com/

https://www.songhall.org/profile/Burt_Bacharach

1929: In St. Louis, MO, Mark and Ida Edison gave birth to Harvard graduate Julian I. Edison, the Chairman of Edison Brothers Stores and the husband of Hope Rabb Edison with whom he raised two sons Mark and Aaron.

https://www.stljewishlight.com/life_cycle/obituaries/julian-i-edison-former-shoe-executive-philanthropist-dies-at/article_303a5d3c-3f10-11e7-b063-9bf78f8ab380.html





1930: During this evening’s annual meeting of the American Jewish Physicians' Committee, Dr. Nathan Ratnoff, president of the organization announced, that “$100,000 would be raised this year for an administration building for the proposed medical college at the Hebrew University of Palestine.  The medical school will be erected on land bought by the committee in 1922 located on Mt. Scopus in Jerusalem.

1932(6^thof Iyar, 5692): Eighty-five year old Moravian native Rosa Sonneschein, the wife of Rabbi Solomon Sonneschein , leader of the St. Louis Jewish community and the “editor of the American Jewess, the first English-language periodical targeted to American Jewish women” passed away today in St. Louis

http://americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1980_32_02_00_porter.pdf

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9823733/

1933: Zeppo Marx and his wife who left Los Angeles yesterday are traveling today by train to take the body of Sam Marx to New York where his sons Groucho, Harpo are waiting to bury their father. Samuel Marx” published today

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9D01E6DB1538E333A25751C1A9639C946294D6CF

1935: Today “Four cities in various part of the United States led by the Jewish community which has a quota of $200,000 will launch their fundraising efforts on behalf of the UJA, which represents the Joint Distribution Committee and the American Palestine Campaign in a national effort to raise $3,250,000 for the relief of the Jews of Germany and other lands for the settlement of Jews in Palestine.” (JTA)

1935: Polish dictator Jozef Pilsudski dies. From here on Jews will experience more anti-Semitism in Poland. The government and most Polish political parties will call for discrimination, economic boycott, expulsion, and physical violence against Jews. The Polish Catholic Church, most priests, the Catholic press, and schools will sanction discrimination and/or violence against the Jews.

1936: It was reported today that New York Governor Lehman responded to the death Judge Otto A. Rosalsky with a telegram to his wife that began “I have just learned with very great sorrow of the passing of your distinguished husband” while Felix Warburg telegraphed, with Judge Rosalsky’s “passed a splendid patriot, a Jew of wonderful qualities and I feel that I have lost a valuable friend” and Irving Lehman wrote, “the community has lost a great leader and I have lost a dear friend.”1937(2nd of Sivan, 5697): Fifty-four year old petroleum geologist Leon J. Pepperberg passed away today.http://archives.datapages.com/data/bull_memorials/021/021007/pdfs/970.htm

1938: The Palestine Postreported the Jewish Labor declaration that the Arab terror will merely strengthen the determination of the Jewish people in their development of uninhabited areas and other up building tasks.

1938: The Palestine Postreported that an armed Arab gang robbed and burned the tents of the Ghazzabiya Bedouin tribe near Beit Shean after its demands failed to be met. Bodies of Arabs kidnapped from the neighboring villages by Arab terrorist gangs were found near Safed.

1939: Filming of Babes in Arms the film version of the 1937 Rogers and Hart musical began today with Arthur Freed as the producer.

1939(23rd of Iyar, 5699): Sixty-nine year old Cäcilie Epstein the older sister of mathematician Paul Epstein passed away today, three months before he passed away.

1940: On this day the German blitzkrieg (lightning war) breached the French defenses. At the time Sousa Mendes was the General Consul of Portugal to Bordeaux, France. Thanks to Mendes' actions it is believed that around 30.000 refugees were saved, among them 10.000 Jews avoided death in the Reich’s death camps. It was said Mendes was descendant from Jewish family.

1941(15^thof Iyar, 5701): Two days after having been “injured at Crutch Friars,” 33 year old Abraham Lewis, “a Fireman in the A.F.S” and the husband of Rita Lewis died today after which he was buried in Raiham Jewish Cemetery

1941: Two days after Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland on what he claimed was a “peace mission,” the Nazi issued a statement blaming his behavior on “mental illness” and Hitler ordered the arrest of any one who had helped him

1941: Following the nighttime bombing Buckingham Palace and the Commons Chambers, the House of Commons met today in the House of Lords in a sign of defiance during the Blitz.

1942(25th of Iyar, 5702): Four days after the Ghetto at Radun was sealed off, 3,400 Jews were marched to the outskirts of town and shot, row-by-row, into ditches dug by other Jews.

1942(25th of Iyar, 5702): One thousand, five hundred Jews from Sosnowiec are gassed in Auschwitz. Another 2,750 Jews from Turobin, joining several other thousands of Jews were crammed into railway box cars and deported to Sobibor to meet their extermination

1943: The remains of the Warsaw Ghetto go up in flames.

1943: In New York thousands of Jews attended the funeral of Dr. Chaim Zhitlowsky, the Russian born intellectual who had passed away in Calgary (As reported by JTA)

1943 (7th of Iyar, 5703): Seventeen-year-old Frania Beatus, active in the Warsaw Ghetto underground, commits suicide rather than surrender to the Nazis.

1943 (7th of Iyar, 5703): Another round up of Jews who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto during the uprising were caught and executed.

1943 (7th of Iyar, 5703): In London, Shmuel Zygielbogm committed suicide. He was one of two Jewish representatives of the Polish-Government-In-Exile in London. His final letter was a cry of agony and despair.  He was crushed that the world would do nothing to save the Jews.  His wife and son perished in the Ghetto.  He felt his life had been a failure and hoped that his death might shock the world into action.  At one point he wrote that he could not live ‘when the remnant of the Jewish people in Poland . . . is being steadily annihilated.'

1943: The first Aliyah to the Negev began with the establishment of Kibbutz Gevulot. The first three settlements, Gevulot, Revivim, and Bet Eshel, were experimentally established in 1943 to determine the feasibility of permanent settlements in the Negev. As a result of the information gathered in the experimental stage, eleven new settlements were established in the Negev in 1946, and an additional seven in 1947. These settlements served also as strong-points to defend the Yishuv from attack by an enemy advancing from the south. The Egyptian army suffered its first defeat at Nirim, one of the settlements established in 1946, on the anniversary of the first Aliyah to the Negev.

1944: In London, “Dorothy Mary (née Creagh), a dress designer, and Morris Kestelman, an artist” from a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia gave birth to actress Sara Kestelman

http://www.filmreference.com/film/46/Sara-Kestelman.html

1944: “Cobra Woman” a South Seas melodrama directed by Robert Siodmak was released today in the United States.

1945: During battle for Okinawa, the USS Bunker Hill was successfully attacked by two Kamikazes in a thirty second interval.

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/military/ww2/photos/images/ww2-52.jpg

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/military/ww2/photos/images/ww2-67.jpg

1945: Sam Gilbert took a photo of “Some of the bodies being removed by German civilians for decent burial at Gusen Concentration Camp, Muhlhausen, near Linz, Austria.

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/military/ww2/photos/images/ww2-180.jpg

1945: As mopping up operations continued today, German units of Army Group Centre surrendered to the Russians.

1945: Birthdate of Dermot Keogh author of Jews In Twentieth Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust which was awarded the 1999 James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize by the American Conference for Irish Studies in the history/social science category.

1946: In Łódź, Poland, Shoah survivors Dora and Nachman Libeskind gave birth to Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind who “won the competition to be the master plan architect for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.”

1947: Today, at Lake Success, NY, “Dr. Fadhel Jamah of Iraq” told “the Political and Security Committee of the General Assembly” that “any support of Jewish national aspirations in the Holy Land” is “very clearly a declaration of war, and nothing less.”

1947: Today, at Lake Success, NY, Moshe Shertok, “the head of the Jewish Agency’s political department” reminded “the Political and Security Committee of the General Assembly” Arab Higher Committee of Palestine is led by “Haj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who spent the war years in Berlin” and who “was directly involved…in the Nazi policy of the extermination of European Jews.”

1948: Bet-Shean was captured by the Haganah; specifically the 13^thBattalion of the Golani Brigade.  Bet-Shean is one of the oldest cities in the world having been first built in the fifth century B.C.E.  The bodies of King Saul and Jonathan were hung from its walls after their defeat at Mt. Gilboa.  Bet-Shean is in the eastern portion of Israel, in the Jezreel Valley.  After the war thousands of Moroccan Jews settled there.  It has been the site of a great deal of archeological discovery. One of the battalions was commanded by Avraham Yoffe

1948: U.S. Secretary George Marshall “appealed to Ben-Gurion to hold off a decision for independence.  Courteously, but firmly the appeal was refused.” Marshall told Moshe Sharett head of the Jewish agency’s U.N. delegation to ignore the the assurance of Jewish military leaders that they can win out against the Arabs.  He advised him to put off the declaration of independence and accept a UN trusteeship.  This marked the high point in the clash between Marshall and Truman over the recognition of the Jewish state.  Marshall had even threatened to resign over the matter.  Marshall’s opposition was based on what he considered the realities of the geo-political situation in the Middle East.  Fortunately for all concerned, Marshall remained at his post and the team of Truman and Marshall continued to work together as America dealt with challenges of Soviet Imperialism.

1948: Yigael Yadin, the Haganah's chief of operations, put the odds of the nascent Jewish state surviving the onslaught by the Arab armies at 50-50

1948: David Ben-Gurion convened an emergency meeting of the Provisional Council, the governing body of the unborn Jewish state. The issue at hand was a proposal that there should be a delay in declaring statehood.  According to one report as much as half of the council wanted to postpone the declaration and accept some sort of cease-fire with the Arab forces already fighting the Jews.  The news the council was not good.  Mrs. Meir reported on the failure of the talks with the Jordanians.  She later reported that she was relieved to see that her report did not dissuade Ben-Gurion from deciding that the Jewish state would be born when the British mandate ended in forty-eight hours.  The Council also heard from Yigal Yadin, the military leader who brought the negative reports about the pending destruction of the Etzion Bloc of settlements.  Ben-Gurion closed the debate by outlining all of the risks.  In the end, the Council voted by six to four to reject the offer of a cease fire and push forward with the declaration of statehood. 

1948(3rd of Iyar, 5708): Pianist and composer Isidor Achron passed away. Born in Warsaw in 1892, Achron came from a musical family.  His older brother Joseph was a famed violinist.  Achron's early musical career was interrupted by a three year stint in the Czar's Army during World War I.  After the war, he came to the United States where he served as the principal accompanist for Heifitz for ten years.  During the 1930's and 1940's he created his own compositions while pursuing a career as a soloist at such venues as Carnegie Hall. He passed away suddenly at the age of 55.

1948: Having withstood the onslaught of the Arab Legion during the fight for Mishmar Ha-Emek, Lehi launched a successful operation on five villages directly to the west the Kibbutz.

1948: U.S. premiere of “The Iron Curtain” produced by Sol C. Siegel with music by Alfred Newman.

1949: “Home of the Brave” the movie version of the play by Arthur Laurents who co-authored the script with Carl Foreman, directed by Mark Robson, produced by Stanley Kramer and with music by Dimitri Tiomkin was released in the United States today.

1950: As of today, doctors in Israel are “exhausting supplies of the drug Aureomycin in an attempt to curb the worst polio epidemic in” the history of the Jewish state.

1950: The Government of Israel said today that farmers in the Hebron area had "extended the cultivation of lands" within Israel, but denied that this had been done under the guns of heavily armed troops. 

1953: The Jerusalem Postreported that Israel agreed to review the acute border infiltration problem in high level talks with Jordan.

1953: The Jerusalem Postreported that The Special Commission which studied the problems of the Jerusalem Municipality severely criticized the staff, and recommended that the Mayor should be deprived of all executive and fiscal powers, which should be rendered to an appointed City Manager.

1954: In Washington Heights, “novelists Jose Yglesias and Helen Yglesias”gave birth novelist and screenwriter Rafael Ygelsias, the husband of Margaret Joskow and the father of “journalist Matthew Ygelsias and novelist Nicholas Yglesisas.

1957(11th of Iyar, 5717): Erich von Stroheim passed away.  As a director, von Stroheim ranks up there with D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.  As an actor he was noted for playing Germanic characters.  His most famous role was that of the loyal servant Max von Mayerling, in Billie Wilder’s cinema noir classic Sunset Boulevard.

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/186040%7C48342/Erich-von-Stroheim/

1958: Birthdate of Yitzhak Vaknin a member of Shas who has been an MK since 1996.

1959: For its time, a celebrity bombshell was dropped as two Jewish entertainers, Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher were married -she for the fourth time and he for the second time after ending his all-American marriage to Debbie Reynolds.

1959 4th of Iyar, 5719): Yom HaZikaron

1960:The Yossele Shumacher affair makes headlines when the child's ultra-Orthodox grandfather, Nahman Shtarks, is arrested on suspicion of abducting him from his parents.

1960: Today in Liberty, NY, at the 60^th annual convention of the Rabbinical Seminary, “Dr. Louis Finkelstein, chancellor of JTS urged the members “to work for a summit meeting at which there would be ‘hope for a permanent peace, rather than merely a cessation of the cold war.’”

1961(24^thof Iyar, 5721): Fifty-six year old Cleveland born Lloyd H. Feder, the husband of Lillian Feder and father of Suzie Bloom of Louisville, KY passed away today in his home town.

1963(18th of Iyar, 5723): Lag B'Omer

1963: Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, walked off the Ed Sullivan (television variety) Show.

1963: Final broadcast of the “Dinah Shore Chevy Shoe,” starring Dinah Shore (AKA Frances Rose Shore)

1964(1^stof Sivan, 5724): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1964: Barbra Streisand won the Grammy for Best Female Vocalist for “The Barbra Streisand Album.”

1964: U.S premiere of “What A Way To Go” a comedy with a screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden starring Paul Newman as “Larry Flint” and featuring Holocaust survivor Marcel Hillaire as “a French Lawyer.”

1965(10^thof Iyar, 5725): Sixty-seven year old Franz Josef Kallman ,the German born “son of Marie (née Mordze / Modrey) and Bruno Kallmann, who was a surgeon and general practitioner”  who fled to the United States in 1936 and “was one of the pioneers in the study of the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders” passed away today in New York

1965:  Israel and West Germany exchange letters beginning diplomatic relations.  For Jews in general, and Holocaust survivors in Israel, this was and is a sensitive topic.  The issue of whether or not to trade with Germany, to enter into arms agreements and/or accept reparation payments for the Holocaust touched off major political debates in Israel. 

1966: In Seattle, Washington, Temple Beth Am published Statement of Principles that declared “...let our congregation be religious, democratic, creative, relevant and learned...”

1966: Birthdate of Louis Phillip Spector and Garry Phillip Spector, twin brothers adopted by Phil Spector.

1967: Oded Kotler wins the Best Actor Award in the Cannes Film Festival for his leading role in the Israeli film: "Three Days and a Child

1967: In Moscow, an Egyptian parliamentary delegation including Anwar Sadat was told to expect “an Israeli invasion of Syria immediately after Independence Day, with the aim of overthrowing the Damascus regime.”

1968(14^thof Iyar, 5728): Pesach Sheni

1968: Three days after he had passed away, funeral service as scheduled to be held in New York for seventy-three year old producer, director and author Albert Lewin, the holder of an MA from Harvard who, with the support of Irving Thalberg, “produced his first picture, ‘The Kiss,” which was Greta Garbo’s last silent film”

1968: Israel defeated Hong Kong in a 1968 AFC Asian Cup match at Amjadieh Stadium in Tehran, Iran.

1970: Birthdate of Israeli-American musician Ifar "Eef" Barzelay

https://myspace.com/eefbarzelay

1972(28^thof Iyar, 5732): Yom Yerushalayim

1972: Birthdate of Matthew Hiltzik the graduate of Cornell and Fordham Law School, founder of Hiltzik Strategies who has worked on the campaigns of Chuck Shumer, Eliot Spitzer and Hillary Clinton while contributing to Jewish culture with several activities including producing the marvelous documentary “Paper Clips.”

1973(10^thof Iyar, 5733): Sixty-four year old Austrian born British photographer and Soviet spy Edith Tudo-Hart passed away today

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9897504/Edith-Tudor-Hart-the-Soviet-spy-with-a-conscience.html

1974: At the Center 55^th Street Theatre, the curtain came down on the final performance of “Music! Music,” “a cavalcade of American music with footnotes by Alan Jay Lerner.”

1975: In Boulder, Colorado, Stephen Schutz and Susan Poli Schutz gave birth to Democratic Congressman Jared Schutz Polis.

1976: The Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreements – “The Helsinki Monitoring Group in the USSR” is formed in Moscow, led by dissident Yuri Orlov,

1977: The second of the five part “Nixon Interviews” which were a product of Swifty Lazar’s “hustle” and produced by Marvin Intoff were broadcast tonight.

1978: The Jerusalem Postreported that on the occasion of Israel's 30th anniversary, the Chief of Staff, Rafael Eytan, declared that Zahal will be unable to defend Israel without the West Bank, and urged both his soldiers and civilians to "stop being naive about the subject." He was thus countering the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's declaration made at the same time in New York, which demanded that Israel returns the Gaza Strip to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan.

1980: Birthdate of award winning Israeli actress Maya Maron.

1980: Sixty-nine year old Lilian Roth, the movie start who had converted to Catholicism in 1948 passed away today.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/roth-lillian

1985: In “Garden Where Biblical Plants Come To Life,” Matthew Nesvisky describes Israel's Neot Kedumim Biblical Landscape Reserve.

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/12/travel/garden-where-biblical-plants-come-to-life.html?pagewanted=all

1985: Thirty year old Amy Eilberg was ordained in New York as the first female Conservative Rabbi which must have been a source of pride to her husband Louis E. Newman “the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies, and Associate Dean of the College and Director of Advising at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.”

http://www.jewishannarbor.org/page.aspx?id=210056

http://louisnewman.net/

1987: NBC broadcast the final episode of “Gimme A Break” a sitcom created by Mort Lachman and Sy Rosen and co-starring Jonathan Silverman.

1987: James Angleton, a senior officer with the CIA from its earliest days in 1947 passed away today at the age of 69.  Angleton was best known for his counter-intelligence work but Angleton also “handled one of the agency's most sensitive relationships with an allied intelligence service, its ties to the Israelis. Mr. Angleton handled ''the Israeli account'' as it was termed in C.I.A. argot, for more than a decade. Indeed, Mr. Colby, the agency director who forced his resignation, earlier insisted that Mr. Angleton relinquish his control over Israeli matters.” (As reported by Stephen Engelberg)

1989: “Night Visitor” a horror film starring Elliot Gould and Allen Garfield was released today in the United States.

1991(28^thof Iyar, 5751): Yom Yerushalayim

1993: ABC broadcast the final episode of “The Wonder Years” starring Fred Savage and narrated by Daniel Stern.

1994(2^ndof Sivan, 5754): Ninety-one year old Erik Homberger Erikson, the German-American psychoanalyst passed away today. (As reported by Morton Schatzman)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor-erik-erikson-1436255.html

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/03/erik-erikson/

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0615.html

1994(2^nd of Sivan, 5754): Eighty-three year old Helen Marion Levin Eichenbaum, the wife of architect Howard Samuel Eichenbaum, the mother of Lee Eichenbaum and a member of Congregation B’nai Israel passed away today after which she was buried in the Oakland and Fraternal Historic Cemetery Park in Little Rock, AR.

1994: Peter Mandelson “chose to back (Tony) Blair for the leadership” of the Labor Party “in his contest with Gordon Brown.

1995: “Crimson Tide” a movie that confronts the issue of accidental nuclear warfare and command responsibility produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and with music by Hans Zimmer was released in the United States today.

1995: While visiting the Ukraine, President and Mrs. Clinton go to Babi Yar.  Escorted by a Chasidic Rabbi, they pay homage to the 30,000 Jews of Kiev who were massacred by the Nazis with the help of the local populace in 1941.

1995(12th of Iyar, 5755): Movie director Arthur Lubin passed away.  Lubin was an actor during the 1920's, moving behind the camera in the 1930's when he started working with Abbot and Costello.  His re-make of Phantom of the Opera with Claude Raines is considered a classic.  Lubin is credited for two of the most famous talking animals.  He directed the Francis the Talking Mule films and then moved over to television with Mr. Ed.  Lubin passed away at the age of 95.



1996(23rd of Iyar, 5756): Eighty-six year old German jazz pianist who escaped the Nazis by going to the Netherlands but eventually ended up at Theresiendstadt where he and his “Jazz Swingers” were forced to play in a propaganda film before being ship to Auschwitz passed away today.

1997(5^thIyar, 5757): Yom HaAtzma’ut

1997:”The Ice Storm” the film version of the novel of the same name with a screenplay by James Schamus, the Detroit bornson of Clarita (Gershowitz) Karlin and Julian John Schamus” and husband of Nancy Kricorian

1999(26th of Iyar, 5759): Saul Steinberg Romanian born cartoonist and illustrator whose work graced numerous issues of The New Yorker passed away at the age of 85. After coming to the United States in 1942, he did 85 covers and 642 illustrations for what was, in its day, the nation’s most sophisticated weekly.

https://saulsteinbergfoundation.org/

2000: After premiering in Los Angeles on May Day, “Gladiator” the Roman epic with music by Hans Zimmer was released today in the United Kingdom.

2001: “Sing America” which was co-written by Dr. Sherwin Kaufman the son of Sholom Aleichem was played at the Ellis Island Medals of Honor Awards Gala,. As an invited guest at this black-tie event, he “heard the song played at the beginning of festivities and then as a musical background during a video of the ceremony.”

2002: The New York Times featured books by Jewish writers and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “'Hester Among the Ruins” by Binnie Kirshenbaum and “Somebody's Gotta Tell It'' by Jack Newfeld

2002(1^stof Sivan, 5762): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2002(1^stof Sivan, 5762): Forty-three year old Nisan Dolinager of Pe’at Sadeh was shot and killed today by a Palestinian laborer.

2002:  “The Golem” “…a new English version of the Yiddish classic” based on the legend surrounding a 17^thcentury Rabbi living in Prague was performed for the last time today.

2003: The body of the second terrorists who had helped to blow up Mike’s Place “washed ashore” on the beach at Tel Aviv.

2004: After his father’s leg had been amputated because of complications from diabetes David D’Or returned to Istanbul to perform today at the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest.

2004: Two days after she had passed away,funderal services were held today for Ruth Gruber, the widow of Frank Gruber  and a member of Temple Israel in Great Neck, NY

2004: It was reported today that Salama Hamad of Hamas said that they were holding “parts, bodies and brains” of Israeli soldiers killed in an ambush: and Islamic Jihad were holding “what they called the head of an Israeli soldier” which the Arabs plan on exchanging for Palestine prisoners held by the Israelis.”

2005: A revival production of Jerry Bock’s musical “The Apple Tree” staged by the Encores opened today.

 2005: Observance of Yom Ha'atzma'ut (יום העצמאות yom hā-‘aṣmā’ūṯ), Israeli Independence Day, which commemorates the declaration of independence of Israel in 1948. Yom Ha'atzma'ut falls on the 5th day of Iyar ( ה'באייר) on the Hebrew calendar. When the 5th of Iyar falls on a Friday or Saturday, as in 2005, the official celebration may be moved to the preceding Thursday. The Gregorian date for the day in which Israel independence was proclaimed is May 14th 1948 when David ben Gurion publicly read the Proclamation of the establishment of the State of Israel.  However, when the fifth of Iyar falls on Friday or Saturday as it does in 2005, Israeli Independence Day is celebrated on the preceding Thursday to avoid any possible violation of the Sabbath.

2006(14^thof Iyar, 5766): Pesach Sheni

2006: In Israel, events begin marking the start of the 15th annual Historic Site Preservation Week, an initiative of the Society for Preservation of Israel Heritage Sites (SPIHS)

2006: Harvey Sheldon launched for the first time in the world, WORLD JEWISH NETWORK on the internet. The format will be 24 hours a day, 7 days a week of nothing but popular Jewish and Israeli music, that you can listen to and dance.

http://www.harveysheldontv.com/

2007: In Detroit, Michigan, Ayal Mendelsohn, son of Mr. and Mrs. David Mendelsohn, is called to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah.

2007: In an article styled “Women add to Torah Dialogue,” the Cedar Rapids Gazette reports on a Torah commentary written by female rabbis and female Jewish scholars that will be published in the autumn of 2007.



2007: The Cedar Rapids Gazette reports on labor troubles at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa.  Agriprocessors is controlled by the Rubashkin family and is the largest kosher slaughtering operation in the United States.

2008: The Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies presents “A Short History of Anti-Semitism,” the second of four lunchtime session taught by historian Dr. Dean Bell that covers anti-Judaism in the classical world, the Crusades and expulsions in the Middle Ages, tolerance and restrictions in the early modern period, and racial anti-Semitism in both the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

2008: In “Wage the Warrior” published today David Mamet tackles mixed martial arts,” Sports Illustrated reviews “Redbelt,” Mamet’s latest cinematic effort.  “Redbelt” is set in the world of mixed martial art which seems a far cry from the world of the man who wrote The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred and the Jews. On the other hand, the sixty year old man of letters and motion pictures is “a serious jiu-jitsu practitioner.”

2008: The prestigious Turin Book Fair which is honoring Israel on the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state's creation came to an end today.

2008:More than 300 people here have already been arrested at Postville, Iowa, in what is being called the largest operation of its kind in Iowa, federal officials said this afternoon. At 10 a.m., Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered Agriprocessors, Inc., as part of an ongoing investigation and to execute criminal search warrants for aggravated identify theft, fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and other crimes, as well as a civil search warrant to find people living illegally in the United States.  At a 2 p.m. news conference in Cedar Rapids, ICE spokesman Tim Counts said most of the arrests so far are for administrative immigration violations, although more information about the identities and jobs of those arrests are not being released at this time. Agriprocessors is the world’s largest kosher meatpacking plant.

 2008: In a front page article entitled “Time To Go” appearing in The Cedar Rapids Gazette Kathy Goldstein, the Musical Voice of Temple Judah and a Clinton supporter expresses her views on Hillary Clinton’s exit strategy. “The race is over, and I think she should go out in grace and style,” said Katherine Goldstein of Cedar Rapids. “If she does it now, she looks like a queen. If she keeps fighting, she’ll look like a fool.” Once she makes that decision, it may take a while for Clinton’s backers to accept her decision, said Goldstein, a retired teacher. “But once they do, they’ll understand this is the only thing she can do.” Goldstein expects Clinton to put the party first and support Obama, and “we’ll all take our cue from her.” Clinton’s partisans are divided as to whether Obama will — or should — offer her the vice presidency. “It would look very nice, even though she represents the old and he represents the new,” Goldstein said. “The fact she is a woman would trump their differences.”

2008(7th of Iyar, 5768):An elderly woman was killed by a Kassam rocket that scored a direct hit on a western Negev community, hours after Israeli leaders said they were leaning toward accepting an Egyptian cease-fire deal with Hamas. Shlomit Katz, 75 of Kibbutz Gvar'am, was killed while visiting Moshav Yesha in the Eshkol Regional Council. The deadly attack came four days after a mortar shell barrage killed Jimmy Kedoshim, 48, a father of four, as he stood in the yard of his house in Kibbutz Kfar Aza in the Negev.

2008:Irena Sendler - a Polish social worker who helped save some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto and giving them false identities - has died today at the age of  98. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/world/europe/13sendler.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

2009 (18 Iyar): Lag B’Omer – 33^rd Day of the Omer

2009: As part of its Centennial Celebration, Tel Aviv hosts a special conference on education attended by prominent educators, academics and researchers who will address the key educational and pedagogic issues facing the city's future generations, as well as educational policy and curriculum unique to Tel Aviv-Yafo.

2009: Today U.S. President Barack Obama declared May Jewish American Heritage Month, saying that the "United States would not be the country we know without the achievements of Jewish Americans."

2009: Today the Freie Universitat in Berlin launched a project that will give high school students across Germany access to more than 50,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses.

2010(28th of Iyar, 5770) Yom Yerushalayim

2010: The story of Russ & Daughters is scheduled to be featured in the premiere episode of New York Originals, a documentary series profiling “classic one-of-a-kind shops and mom-and-pop businesses that have stood the test of time.”

2011: An Israeli delegation of religious leaders is going to present Syrian opposition members to Chief Rabbi of Holon Avraham Yosef, the son of Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and a member of the rabbinate’s council, will be one of the more high-profile religious leaders in the group that took off from Israel yesterday – one week after the original delegation was postponed.day with a list of sites in Syria holy to Judaism, to be safeguarded if Bashar Assad’s regime collapses.

2011: Former concentration camp guard John “Demjanjuk was convicted as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews and sentenced to five years in prison.”

2011: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present The 2011 Spring Concert as part of the Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series. “The Spring Concert will highlight the works of two great Jewish composers: Lazar Weiner, the prominent American composer of Jewish art songs, and Joseph Achron, the outstanding Russian-born violinist and composer, student of Arnold Schoenberg and one of the co-founders of Jewish Folk Music.”

2011: The National Museum of American Jewish History is scheduled to present a screening of “Jewish Soldiers in Blue & Gray” “a …documentary that reveals the little-known struggles that faced Jewish-Americans both in battle and on the home front during the Civil War” including the 7,000 who fought for the Union, the 3000 who fought with the Rebels and the “five Union Jewish soldiers received the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

2011(8^thof Iyar, 5771): Seventy-nine year old Jay D. Fischer, the attorney “who negotiated a monetary settlement with the Palestine Liberation Organization on behalf of the family of Leon Klinghoffer after his murder during a 1985 hijacking” passed away today.

2011(8^thof Iyar, 5771): Seventy-six year old Jack Keil Wolf, an engineer and computer theorist whose mathematical reasoning about how best to transmit and store information helped shape the digital innards of computers and other devices that power modern society passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

2012: Jan Kasoff is scheduled to deliver a talk based on his 36 years as an NBC cameraman entitled Behind the Scenes at SNL and NBC!! at the JCC of Northern Virginia

2012: Those living in the Washington Metropolitan area have a chance to party to a unique mix of Israeli hip-hop, bhangra, baile funk, radio remixes, 80s freestyle and a live performance by Israeli-American emcee and rapper Kosha Dillz as part of the Washington Jewish Music Festival.

2012: Jazzrael - A Festival of Israeli Jazz & World Music: Israeli Jazz/World Music Concert is scheduled to take place at Temple Israel in NYC.

2012: Mendy Cahan, founder of Yung Yiddish in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv is scheduled to lead an interactive workshop about the craft of presenting Yiddish song for contemporary audiences at the Workman’s Circle in New York City. 

2012: Thousands rallied in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square this evening, and in cities around the country, in the largest “social justice” protest held since last summer’s wave of cost-of-living demonstrations. (As reported by Ben Hartman and Melanie Lidman)

2013: The Maccabeats are scheduled to perform at the Jewish Federation of Princeton in Princeton, NJ.

2013: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Business of Baby by Jennifer Margulis, Tirza by Arnon Grunberg and the recently released paperback edition of Thinking, Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

2013: A 1500 year old Byzantine era mosaic floor was discovered under the fields of Kibbutz Beit Kama in the Negev, the Antiquities Authority announced today. The mosaic was discovered by the authority prior to the imminent paving of the southern extension of Highway 6, the Trans-Israel Highway.

http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Byzantine-era-mosaic-floor-found-on-Negev-kibbutz-312893

2013: A Foreign Ministry economic plan for 2013-2014, to be submitted for cabinet approval this week, revealed that Israel has established a diplomatic mission in an unnamed state in the Persian Gulf, one of 11 new diplomatic missions set up in various states around the world since 2010. The new diplomatic missions include: embassies in New Zealand, Ghana, Albania, Turkmenistan and a general embassy in the Caribbean; consulates in Guangzhou (China), Munich (Germany) and São Paulo (Brazil); a diplomatic mission in the Pacific islands; and the diplomatic office in the Gulf, whose host state was not revealed, Haaretz reported today

2014: The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is scheduled to host an evening with Susan Abrams who will lead a discussion on the future of the center and the development of “a truly global human rights culture.

2014:The Fountainheads, an energetic group of young Israeli singers, musicians and dancers, is scheduled to headline the upcoming Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) celebration at the Uptown Jewish Community this evening. (As reported by the Crescent City Jewish News, the source for all things Yiddishkeit in Cajun Country)

2014: Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch is scheduled to visit several site in Yokne’am which were recently subject to ‘price tag’ attacks and to meet with the mayor to discuss the surge in hate crimes in the city. (As reported by Ilan Ben Zion

2014: In honor of American Jewish Heritage Month the Cedar Village Retirement Community in Mason, OH, is schooled to host “Broadway Musicals: The Jewish Legacy…Jews revere the site as the tomb of King David, which is on the ground floor of the same building.”

2014: “Israeli President Shimon Peres was met by political anger and protests over his country’s policies in the West Bank during a visit to Norway today.”

2014: Today, at the the Jaffa Salon of Art in Warehouse 2 at the Jaffa Port Israelis will be able to view pictures of “the face of war” as captured by Jean Mohr ata new exhibition, “War from the Victim’s Perspective,” being launched to mark the 150th anniversary of the First Geneva Convention.

2014: Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered today near the reputed scene of Jesus’s last supper in Jerusalem demanding that Israel keep sovereignty over the site where Pope Francis will celebrate mass.

2015(23rd of Iyar, 5775): Seventy-six year old Belda Lindenbahm, a co-founder of Midreshet Lindenbaum who served “as president of the board of the Drisha Institute for Women and president of the American Friends of Bar Ilan University” passed away today.

2015: Gary Shteyngart is scheduled to join Professor Sasha Senderovich for a conversation and reading from Little Failure: A Memoir, a candid account of Shteyngart’s experiences as a Jewish-Russian immigrant in New York, his haphazard college pursuits, and his initial forays into a literary career at the National Museum of American Jewish History.

2015: The Jewish Historical Society of England is scheduled to host a lecture on “Jewish Settlements in Palestine in the Century before 1948as seen by an Ephemerist & Postal Historian” by Dennis van der Velde.

2015: “Welcome to Kutsher’s” is scheduled to be shown at the Borscht Belt Film Festival this morning.

2016(4^th of Iyar, 5776): Yom Ha’atsma’ut – Israel Independence observed because the fifth of Iyar falls erev Shabbat.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/israelis-mob-national-parks-beaches-for-68th-independence-day/

2016: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to a “Community Discussion” on “The Ethics of Photography.”

2016: As of today, Goldie Michelson “became the oldest living person in the United States – a title she would hold for less than two months due to her demise in July.

https://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/3378751/sc/fb/jewish/Goldie-Michelson-the-Oldest-American-Passes-Away-at-Nearly-114.htm

2016: The Iowa City Jewish Federation is scheduled to sponsor the Yom Ha’atzmaut Dinner at Agudas Achim this evening.

2016: “Metal-Man – The Story of Sculptor Victor Ries” a film “that takes us through his early life in Germany, fleeing Nazis for Palestine in 1933, emigration to America during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and beginning his American career as a founding member of the legendary Pond Farm art school/cooperative in Guerneville, California” is schedule to be shown in Woodland Hills, CA as part of Jewish American Heritage Month.

2016: In a talk entitled "Women of the Bible: Paintings of The House of Abraham and The House of David," artist Richard McBee is scheduled to discuss his paintings that explore the narratives of Sarah, Hagar, Tamar, and Lot’s Daughters at the Biederman Library in the Bronx.

2017: LIMMUDFSU NY is scheduled to begin today

2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host the Vice Chancellor at its Shabbat dinner.

2017: In “A Moving Holocaust Memoir for Younger Readers, and Older Ones Too” published today Ruth Sepetys reviewed Survivors Club: The True Story of a Very Prisoner of Auschwitz by Michael Bornstein.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/books/review/survivors-club-auschwitz-michael-bornstein-debbie-bornstein-holinstat.html

2017: As American Jews prepare to welcome the Sabbath Queen they may be contemplating a week’s worth of stories that began with Nicole Meyer courting Chinese investors and ended with Rod Jay Rosenstein, “the nation’s longest serving U.S. attorney” and newly appointed United States Deputy Attorney General, the number 2 man at the DOJ.

2018: As part of its Mother’s Day weekend celebration, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to admit all Moms free of admission today.

2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host a full day of Shabbat activities including morning services, lunch, mincha and Seduah Shlisit.

2018: “The Hero” and “The Cakemaker” are scheduled to be shown at the Washington Jewish Film Festival.

2018: “Today I Am A Fountain Pen” and “The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick” are scheduled to be shown at the 26^th Toronto Jewish Film Festival.

2018: Final two portions of Viykra (Leviticus) -- Behar and Bechukotai;

2018: Princeton graduate and billionaire hedge fund manager Steven Feinberg, a Donald Trump loyalist assumed office today the Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

2018: In Silver Springs, MD, the AFI Silver Theatre is scheduled to host a screening of “From Cairo to the Cloud.”

2019: The Illinois Holocaust Museum is schedule to host Marguerite Mishkin as part of its Survivor Speaker series.

2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “The Keeper.”

2019: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb, Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy by Michael J. Mazarr and The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks.

2019: Today’s celebration of Mother’s Day takes on a whole new meaning as friends and family of Sandee Levin, mother of Phillip and Laura Levin, wife of Larry Levin gather to celebrate her milestone natal day.

2020(33^rdday of the Omer): Lag B’Omer

2020: Today is a double Simcha as the friends and family of Sandee Levin prepare to celebrate her natal day on Lag B’Omer

2020: In honor of Lag B’Omer at 7:30 a.m. CST, The London School of Jewish Studies is scheduled to host a “Virtual Tour of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.”

https://www.lsjs.ac.uk/lag-baomer-virtual-tour-of-the-national-gallery-in-trafalgar-square-1122.php

2020: “Teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, are scheduled to host a virtual poetry workshop that will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem.”

2020: ASF IJE Travels in Jewish History is scheduled to present “Virtual Lag Ba’Omer” as Diarna Geo-Museum Tours digitally transports pilgrims to shrines in multiple countries, including Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, and Morocco.

2020: The Riverway Project is scheduled to celebrate Lag B’Omer, the 33rd day of the Omer, with a roaring (virtual) fire, campfire songs” combined with “viewers own homemade s’mores.”

2020: Via Zoom, the Streicker Center is scheduled to host Traffy Brodesser-Akner as she discusses her best-selling novel Fleishman is in Trouble.

2020: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present live on Zoom “Jewish Thought and Messianism in the Colonial Puritan Imagination: The Case of Judah Monis”

2020: In San Rafael, CA, Congregation Rodef Sholom is scheduled to host a virtual “Borschtfest” where Rabbi Elana Rosen-Brown leads a session on cooking a borscht that includes lots of garlic.”

2020: In Iowa, Jewry makes the news as Governor Reynolds goes into “modified quarantine” because of her exposure to those who came to Iowa including Vice President who had been exposed to V.P. Press Secretary Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller and reports are published that the Republican Jewish Coalition will support a primary challenger to Representative Steve King which seems sort of problematic since King is a political ally of Governor Reynolds and many of his ideas are representative of the views of the state’s Republicans.

2020: Burt Bacharach turns 92.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/margiegoldsmith/2020/02/20/burt-bacharach-strong-at-92-still-writing-hit-songs/#364b683e463e













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This Day, May 13, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 13



1333:  Birthdate of Reginald III of Guelders, a duchy in the Kingdom of Prussia.  In 1349 the Duke of Guelders, was authorized by the Emperor Louis IV of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany to allow Jews to live in his duchy.  This may have been considered somewhat unusual because Jews were being expelled from other parts of the realm in response to the Black Death.

1497: Pope Alexander VI excommunicates Girolamo Savonarola. Alexander VI was one of the Renaissance popes whose religious qualities might best be summed up by stating that he was the father of Cesare and Lucretzia Borgia.  His lack of concern with Church matters benefited the Jews especially the Jews and Marranos fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.  He admitted so many refugees to Rome, that Ferdinand and Isabella registered major protests to his policy.  Savonarola was a Dominican monk who opposed Alexander on grounds of morality of ethics which is what led to his excommunication.   Savonarola’s enmity for the Pope had led him to “expel the Pope” from the Florentine region under his control.  At the same time, Savonarola banned Jews from this area as well.  So, from a Jewish point of view Alexander trumps Savonarola regardless of the moral stance of the two men.

1534: The first Hebrew printing press in Poland located in Cracow published its first book Sha’arei Duro a code of dietary laws by Rabbi Isaac ben Reuben

1610: Coronation of Marie de Medicis, as Queen consort of France and Navarre. Despite the ban on Jews living in the realm, she employed Elijah Montalto as her personal physician.  He was a Marrano, who had been raised as a Christian in Portugal before settling in Venice after publicly returning to “the faith of his fathers. Born in 1567, he passed away in 1616 and was buried at Amsterdam in Beth Haim of Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, the oldest Jewish cemetery in the Netherlands.

1635: Today, in Hungary, the Diet set the explicit deadline of Christmas Day 1635 for the Sabbatarians” a sect that rejected the divinity of Jesus, read the old Testament, celebrated the holidays described and the Torah, followed the dietary and observed the Seventh and not the First day of the week as the Sabbath, “to convert to one of the four accepted Christian religions of the Principality.” (While not Jews, their following Jewish practices to the exclusion of traditional Christianity brought them to the same fate as the Jews.)

1636(8th of Iyar): Rabbi Menahem Monish Chajes of Vilna passed away today

1665: A statute was enacted in Rhode Island, offering “freemanship” with no specifically Christian requirements, thus effectively enfranchising Jews

1728: Hayyim and Joshua Reizes of Lvov (heads of the Rabbinical court and the yeshiva respectively) were arrested when a Jesuit priest, Zoltowskiki, discovered that Jan Filipowicz (soon tortured and killed), a convert, had reconverted to Judaism. They were accused of complicity. Condemned to death, Joshua committed suicide by cutting his own throat. For three days his brother Hayyim refused to convert to Christianity. His tongue was then torn out, his body quartered and he was finally burnt. Their property was then confiscated.

1778: Amsterdam native Solomon da silva Solis and London born Benvenida de Henriques Valentine, the parents of Elias and Samuel Solis, were married today.

1779: Birthdate of Jakob Salomon, the Berlin born Jew who converted, took the name Jakob Salomon Bartholdy as he furthered his diplomatic career.

1781: Joseph II, the son and successor of Maria Theresa let Chancellor Count Franz Esterhazy know that he intended to improve the condition of his Hungarian Jewish subjects.

1782: Friedrich Albrecht August, the Jewish born Catholic convert passed away today.

http://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/tje/view.cgi?n=2135

1787: Captain Arthur Phillip of the Royal Navy and his eleven convict laden ships set sail for Botany Bay Australia.  There are reportedly 17 Jews among the 1500 convicts.

1792:  Birthdate of Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti who would become Pope Pius IX. “Pius IX's relations to the Jews remain ambiguous. He repealed laws that forbade Jews to practice certain professions, and that required them to listen to sermons four times per year aimed at their conversion. Judaism and Catholicism were the only religions allowed by law (Protestant worship was allowed to visiting foreigners, but strictly forbidden to Italians). But the testimony of a Jew against a Christian remained inadmissible in courts of law, a tax levied only on Jews supported schools for converts from Judaism to Catholicism, and Jews continued in various other respects to be discriminated against by law. At the beginning of his pontificate, Pius IX opened the Jewish ghetto in Rome, but after his return from exile in 1850 re-instituted it again. In 1858, in a highly publicized case, a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, was taken from his parents by the police of the Papal States. It had been reported that he had been baptized by a Christian servant girl of the family while he was ill because she feared he would die and go to Hell, otherwise. At this time, the law did not permit Christians to be raised by Jews, even their own parents. Pius IX steadfastly refused calls from numerous heads of state including Emperor Franz Josef (1848–1916) of Austria-Hungary and Emperor Napoleon III of France (1852–70) to return the child to his parents.

1797: In London, Daniel Cohen D’Azevedo, the of Haham Moses Cohen d'Azevedo and Sara de Haham Moses Cohen D'Azevedo and his Ester Rodriques Cohen D'Azevedo gave birth to David Daniel Cohen De Azevedo

1798: In Switzerland, the town council of Schwyz which in 2011 hosted “a special exhibition ‘Did you see my Alps? A Jewish Love story’” surrendered to French Troops.

1799(8th of Iyar, 5559):Isaiah Berlin an 18^thcentury German Talmudist passed away. Born at Eisenstadt, Hungary in 1725, “Berlin studied under Ẓevi Hirsch Bialeh (Ḥarif), the rabbi of Halberstadt, at the latter's yeshivah. In 1755 Berlin moved to Breslau where he engaged in business. In 1793, when already advanced in years, he was elected to a rabbinical post, being appointed to succeed Isaac Joseph Te'omim as rabbi of Breslau. His election was marked by a dispute between the members of the community and the local maskilim, who had begun to organize themselves as a body and opposed Berlin, who, despite his love of peace, openly attacked their ideas. Berlin was elected by an overwhelming majority. Berlin was greatly admired, even by persons who differed with him in religious views. According to Hasidic sources, Berlin was sympathetically disposed toward that movement and extended a friendly welcome to one of its emissaries, Jacob Samson of Spitsevka. Further, Joel Brill, Aaron Wolfsohn, Judah Bensew, and many other Maskilim of Breslau often visited him to seek advice on scientific questions. As the Maskilim always carefully avoided wounding Berlin's religious feelings, he on his part met them half-way in many things. On the occasion of the Peace of Basel, for instance, he held a solemn service in the synagogue and exceptionally permitted the use of instrumental music, he himself delivering a discourse which was highly praised by the press ("Schlesische Zeitung", 1795, No. 59). Thus Berlin, conciliated the hostile elements of his congregation, and his death was mourned equally by all. Berlin's had the habit of annotating almost every book he read; mentioning the sources, or noting parallel passages and variant readings. Such glosses by Berlin have been published on the following books: the Bible (Pentateuch, Dyhernfurth, 1775; the other books, ib., 1807); the prayer-book, ed. Tiḳḳun Shelomoh (ib., 1806); Maimonides' Yad ha-Ḥazaḳah (ib., 1809); Alfasi (Presburg, 1836); the "Ḥinnuk", by Aaron ha-Levi of Barcelona (Vienna, 1827); Malachi b. Jacob's methodology, "Yad Malachi" (Berlin, 1825); Elijah b. Moses de Vidas' book of morals, "Reshit Ḥokmah" (Dyhernfurth, 1811). Although the terse yet clear notes contained in these volumes reveal the immense learning and critical insight of their author, yet Berlin's lasting place of honor among the pioneers of Talmudic criticism rests on the following works, which treat principally of the Talmud:  "'Omer ha-Shikḥah" (Forgotten Sheaf), Königsberg, 1860, containing a large number of Halakot on the Talmud not noted by the codifiers;  "Oẓar Balum" (Full Treasure), in the edition of Jacob ibn Ḥabib's "'En Ya'aḳob", published at Wilna in 1899, tracing all the Talmudic passages quoted without sources in the different commentaries on the haggadic elements of the Talmud;  "Haggahot ha-Shas" (Notes to the Talmud), textual corrections and notes on the origin of parallel passages (Dyhernfurth, 1800, and in nearly all the editions of the Talmud);  "Hafla'ah Sheba-'Arakin" (Detached Orders) (part i., Breslau, 1830; part ii., Vienna, 1859), containing, as the title indicates, explanations and glosses on the 'Aruk;  "Ḥiddushe ha-Shas", novellæ on the Talmud (Königsberg, 1860, and in several editions of the Talmud);  "Minè Targuma" (Dessert Dishes), Breslau, 1831, remarks on the Targum Onkelos (the word "Targuma" signifying both "Targum" and "dessert", equivalent to the Greek τράγημα) and on the Palestinian Targum;  "Kashiyot Meyushab" (Difficulties Answered), Königsberg, 1860, treating of the Talmudic passages which end with, and written by Berlin in fourteen days; (8) "Rishon leẒion" (The First for Zion; Dyhernfurth, 1793; Vienna, 1793, and several times reprinted, the title being a play on, "Zion", and, "index"), a collection of indexes and parallel passages in the Midrash; (9) "She'elat Shalom" (Greeting of Peace), Dyhernfurth, 1786, a commentary on Aḥa of Shubḥa's "She'iltot." Berlin's responsa collection and his commentary on the Tosefta deserve especial mention, though nothing is known of their fate.Berlin, was the first—at least among the Germans—who showed an interest in the history of post-Talmudic literature; and it was he, who opened the Kalir question (compare his letter to his brother-in-law, Joseph b. Menaḥem Steinhart, in the latter's "Zikron Yosef", No. 15.

1800(18^th of Iyar, 5560): Lag B’Omer is celebrated for the last time during the Presidency John Adams and for the first time in the 19^thcentury.

1804: Birthdate Daniele Fonseca, who gained fame as Daniele Manin, the Italian patriot.  Manin was born a Jew, but converted as a child at which time he changed his name out of respect for his patron.

1805(14^th of Iyar, 5565): Pesach Sheni is observed as Napoleon prepares to face an array of united enemies in what became known as “The War of the Third Colaition

1812: Rabbi Samuel Marx, the uncle of non-Jew Karl Marx and Michle Brisac gave birth to their second child and first son Marcus or Marc today.

1819: Ezekiel Jacobs married Sarah Levy today at the Great Synagogue.

1823: Aaron De Symons married Matilda Israel today at the Great Synagogue.

1825: Eighty-five year old “ Yettelah bat Israel the wife of Mordecai” was buried today at the “Chatham Jewish Cemetery.”

1832: The government confirmed the election of Menahem Nahum Trebitsch as "Landesrabbiner" of Moravia, in succession to Mordecai Benet, and granted him a salary of 600 florins; he was the last Moravian "Landesrabbiner" of the old school.

1837: The Jews of Leipzig were given permission to organize as a religious community and establish a synagogue

1838: Jacob Falcke married Isabella Woolf today at the Western Synagogue.

1838: Three days after she had passed away, Patty (Martha) Emdon, the wife of Abraham Emdon was buried today at the “Plymouth Hoe Burial Ground.”

1838: Lesser Friedlander married Elizabeth Assur today at the Great Synagogue.

1839(24th of Iyar, 5699): Rabbi Israel Ashkenazi of Shklov, leader of the Aliya of the followers of the Gaon of Vilna to Eretz Yisrael passed away. The dynamic force of early Hasidism clashed head-on with the dynamic force of Ashkenazic traditionalism generated by the GR"A. The momentum of both movements created the two major aliyot of the pre-Zionist times. Rabbi Israel of Shklov arrived in Eretz Yisrael in 1808. In 1815 he moved to Jerusalem, where he founded the modern Ashkenazic community. The location of his grave was unknown for a long time. It was discovered in 1964, 125 years after his death, in Tiberias.

1842: Löbl Strakosch and Julia Schwarz gave birth to their youngest child Chaile Caroline

1843(13th of Iyar, 5603): Dr. Daniel Levy Maduro Peixotto the eldest of son of Moses Levi Maduro Peixotto, a native of Curaco who had brought his family to New York from Amsterdam passed away today. The elder Peixotto was a successful businessman who served as Chazan at Shearith Israel. Daniel who was born in Amsterdam in 1800 graduated from Columbia at the age of sixteen and earned his medical degree in 1819 at the age of 19. After a few years of travel he returned to New York in 1823, where he pursued his profession with success, and gained a place among the foremost practitioners of his day. He was one of the physicians of the city dispensary in 1827, and president of the New York county medical society in 1830-'1832, and took an active part in public charitable work as well as in Jewish educational movements. One of his eight children, Benjamin Franklin, went on to become a prominent newspaper man and politician who served in several diplomatic posts during the post-Civil War period. Dr. Daniel was quite proud of his Jewish heritage as can be seen from a speech he delivered while he was vice president of the Medical Society of the City and County of New York. “The writings of the Hebrews are generally acknowledged to be unequaled for the simplicity and dignity - the strength, conciseness and boldness of their style; the perfect truth to nature of their imagery; their animated eloquence and sublime figures. The conceits and puerile vanities which disgrace much of classical literature are altogether banished from their pages. It may, however, be suggested that these writings were inspired. This assertion is more imposing by its speciousness than forcible by its application. The great truths and sublime doctrines which were inculcated by Moses and the Prophet were undoubtedly

derived from immediate communication with the Almighty.” [From “Moses and Daniel Peixotto” by Dr. Yitzchok Levine]

1846: The United States declares war on Mexico officially marking the start of the Mexican-American War.  As has been true in all other wars, Jews were active participants in this fight with Mexico.  Like their gentile neighbors, Jews from Texas were active combatants. These included Adolphus Stern, David Kaufman and Leon Dyer each of whom would be prominent office holders in the early days of the Lone Star State.  Baltimore Jews formed a company of volunteers whose three commanding officers were Jewish.  David Camden de Leon of South Carolina was the most famous and colorful Jew to serve in the fight with Mexico.  A surgeon by trade, de Leon literally swapped his scalpel for a sword at the Battle of Chapultepec where he led a successfully led a cavalry charge after the other officers had been killed or wounded and could not lead the troops.  Fifteen years later, de Leon would be named Surgeon General of the Confederate Army.

1853: “In Adelaide, South Australia, Judah Moss Solomon, a member of the South Australian Legislative Council and Lord Mayor of Adelaide from 1869 to 1870” and his wife gave birth to Vabien Louis Solomon who “was the 21st Premier of South Australia, a member of the first Australian Commonwealth parliament and the nephew of Vaiben Solomon

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/solomon-vaiben-louis-8577

1853: “The Jewish Disabilities Bill” published today described efforts in the British Parliament to make it possible for Jews to sit in the House of Commons.  “The British House of Commons has again decided in favor of striking out the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ from the oath administered to Members of Parliament.” According to the author, the House of Lords will surely reject the attempt to change the in the oath as part of the continued to keep Jews from sitting in Parliament.  While “notorious non-believers” take the oath “without a scruple” the only way a Jew could take the oath would be to convert from the faith of his fathers.

1859: Sixty-year old “philanthropist and merchant Philipp Schey Freiherr, the Baron von Koromla “the first Jew in Hungary to be made an Austrian noble” was granted his patent of nobility today by King Francis Joseph I who cited “his services to the imperial dynasty during the revolution in 1848 and 1849” and “the great benevolence exercised by him "toward suffering humanity, regardless of creed."

1860: Birthdate of Henry Samuel Morais the son of Rabbi Sabato Morais, a well-known national Jewish leader, Rabbi of Congregation Mikveh Israel of Philadelphia, and founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

1863:  Philadelphian Michael Baer completed his service in Company F of the 123^rd Regiment where he had been promoted from the rank of 1^st Lieutenant to Captain.

1864: The jury was unable to reach a decision in the case of Solomon Ullman vs. The Congregation B'Nai Israel.  The unusual case revolved a claim by Ullman, a former congregant, that the synagogue had illegally removed his father’s tombstone from their cemetery.

1865: Following the defeat of the Confederacy, as Judah P. Benjamin was fleeing from Union troops he “reached Monticello, Florida” and then continued alone on horseback seeking to reach the Gulf Coast where he could find a ship to take him to Great Britains.

1866: The Pennsylvania Legislature passed an act today that allowed the children who were attending a school operated under the auspices of the Hebrew Education Society of Philadelphia to attend the Boys' and Girls' High School, Philadelphia.

1871: “American Christian Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews” published today described the work of the organization which has an auxiliary branch in Somerset, Iowa in trying to change the religious persuasion of the “65,000 Israelites in New York” and the quarter of million living in the United States.

1872(5^thof Iyar, 5632): Fifty year old author and German parliamentarian Mortiz Harmann passed away today outside of Vienna.

1872: Secretary of State Hamilton Fish wrote to Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, the U.S. Counsel in Bucharest, that while it is usually the policy of the government not to interfere in the internal affairs of other country’s an exception is to be made in this case since all else has failed.  The State Department will support whatever measure Peixotto may take in joining with other diplomats “to avert or mitigate further harshness” shown toward the Jews living in Romania. (Peixotto was Jewish and he was purposely chosen by President Grant in an attempt to ameliorate the suffering of the Jews in Romania.  This is yet another proof that Grant was not an anti-Semite)

1877: “Jute” published today describes the origins and modern uses of this plant. The author claims that jute has been used since ancient times citing the story of Samson and Delilah as one of his proofs.  “The seen green withes that had never been dried” which the Philistines had given to Delilah so that she might bind the Israelite prophet were “jute withes.  “The basis for this supposition is the fact that the word translated ‘withes’ is in the Hebrew reading jeter – that means cordage or roping stuff of any kind.” In the 17^th century the Jewish connection was so strong that a form of jute called or Tossa jute (Corchorus olitorius), was popularly referred to as ‘Jews mallow.’ [Editor’s note – Apparently the term Jews mallow is one known to many cooks as can be seen from the recipe for a dish called Jews Mallow Soup http://www.food.com/recipe/molukhia-jews-mallow-soup-151132]



1878: A review of Religion of China by Dr. Richard Edkins published today noted that during Edkins visit to China he found that "the Jewish colony had dwindled to a few hundred members none of whom can read Hebrew."  In what must be a reference to Simchat Torah, Edkins reported that until their synagogue was destroyed by fire the Jews "had an autumn festival when they walked in procession around the hall taking the scrolls of the law with them."  Until recently, they had twelve copies of the Pentateuch, some of which are now in England.  According to some, the first Jews arrived during the Han Dynasty - 200 BCE to 200 CE while others came later from Persia

1881: Birthdate of Anna Meingast, who worked as Stefan Zweig’s secretary in Salzburg from November 1919 to March 1938.

1884(18th of Iyar, 5644): Lag B'Omer

1886: Birthdate of violinist and composer Joseph Achron. Born in Warsaw, Achron was a child prodigy from a musical family.  He moved to St. Petersburg in 1899 and joined the Society for Jewish Folk Music in 1911.  His first Jewish work called "Hebrew Melody" became famous thanks to the interpretation by Jascha Heifetz.  Achron lived in Berlin and Palestine before settling in the United States in the 1920's where he continued performing and composing.  One of his most compositions was "Golem."  When he passed away in 1943, one obituary called him "one of the most underrated modern composers.

1886: In “Zhagroy, Russia,” “Bernhard and Yetta  (Shochet) Blumberg gave birth to German trained mathematician Dr. Henry Blumberg who taught at the University of Nebraska and the University of Illinois before becoming a full Professor at Ohio State University in 1924.

1888: Birthdate of Zelig Harry Lefkowitz who gained fame as "Big" Jack Zelig a New York City thug who was one of the last leaders of the Monk Eastman Gang.

1888: Thirty-one year old Max Pinkus married Hedwig Oberländer the daughter of Moritz J. Oberländer and Marie Oberländer

1888(3^rdof Sivan, 5648): Ohio Medical College graduate Joseph Aub the Bavarian and Viennese trained oculist who settled in Cincinnati where he “was one of the first to use the electromagnet for removing foreign bodies from the eye” passed away today.

1890: The Amusements column published today provided a detailed review of “The Shatchen” a play written by Henry Doblin and Charles Doblin starring M.B. Curtis in the title role of this comedy about a Jewish marriage broker.

1891: Two Jews were killed today and several more were injured when new violence broke out today in Corfu.

1891: In Riga, Shneur Zalman Seligson and Keilia Leybovna Berlin gave birth to Abraham-Aba (Albert) Zeliksohn

1892: “Jews Ordered From Russia” published today reported that “ten thousand foreign Jews in Odessa have been order to leave” the Czar’s kingdom immediately.

1892: Rector Alhwardt, the notorious anti-Semite went on trial today on charges that he libeled the firm of Loewe & Company when he charged that the company had furnished defective rifles to the army.

1893: “Germany’s Political Crisis” published today described the surprise that has resulted from “the fact that the anti-Semitic electors of Arnswalde have again nominated Rector Ahlwardt, the notorious Jewish Baiter” despite the fact that he is serving a term in prions for having libeled the Jewish firm of Lowe & Company

1893: One Polish Jew arrived in the United States aboard the SS New York

1893: Three hundred twenty-seven Polish Jews arrived  aboard the SS Dania, 245 of whom were bound for New York, seven of whom were bound for Boston, two of whom were bound for New Haven, CT, one of whom was bound for Iowa, five of whom were bound for Amsterdam, 13 of whom were bound for Amsterdam, NY 13 of whom were bound for Philadelphia, 13 of whom were bound for Pittsburg, 6 of whom were bound for Buffalo, 29 of whom were bound for Chicago, 5 of whom were bound for Saratoga, NY and one of whom was bound for Milwaukee,

1893: “A press association dispatch sent from Berlin” today “asserts, in contradiction of the recent dispatches from” the New York Times correspondent in London “that there is no movement for the expulsion of Jews from Poland.”

1893: Relying on information that first appeared in the Jewish Messenger, “The Expulsion of the Jews from Poland” published today decried the fact that Russia is allowed to treat her Jewish inhabitants in a manner that is both brutal and laced with bigotry while the Great Powers remain passive in the face of this menace to civilization that smacks of medieval barbarism.

1893: The examination of another 200 of the 1,000 Russian Jews who arrived yesterday at Ellis Island aboard the steamship Dania will resume today.  Immigration officials said that many of those already examined “were absolutely destitute” and that a number of them will be returned to the ship.

1894: It was reported today that “there appears to have been a series of savage popular” attacks on the Jews in a number of towns in Southern Russia at Easter time.  The bloodiest took place at Ekaterinoslav.

1894: It was reported today that in response to new outbreaks of violence a renewed exodus of Jews has begun from Odessa.  In the last week 2,200 have left the port, 800 bound for Argentina; the rest bound for England and the United States.

1894: It was reported today that the official returns from the by-election in Schlochan (Germany) will require a run-off between the Conservative candidate and the first runner-up because the anti-Semitic candidate made “deep inroads in the traditional Conservative majority.

1894(7^thof Iyar, 5654): Twenty year old Edwin Bach, the son of Sigmund J. and Rosalie Bach passed away today.

1895: A dramatized version of “Oliver Twist” opened at the Star Theatre with H.G. Carleton playing the part of Fagan, “the awful Jew.”

1896: Solomon Schechter discovered a fragment of the original Hebrew text of “Ecclesiasticus” that had come from the Cairo Genizah.

1897:  Theodor Herzl wrote, "Über Nacht fiel mir der Titel des Blattes ein: Die Welt. Mit dem Mog'n Dovid, in der der Globus hineinzuzeichnen wäre, mit Palästina als Mittelpunkt." -"Overnight the name for the paper occurred to me: Die Welt. [The masthead comes] with a Mogen Dovid [Star of David], inside which a globe should be drawn, with Palestine as the central point."

1897: Two days after she had passed away, 56 year old Minnie Levy, the wife of Aaron Levy was buried in London today at the “Plashet Jewish Cemtery.”

1898: In Harlem, Temple Israel began celebrating its 25^th anniversary and the 10^th anniversary of the dedication of its current facility today.

1898: During the Spanish American War George Jessel Jones, Morris Conheim and Carl Meyer were mustered in as members of the 1^st Missouri Volunteer Infantry.

1898: “Hebrew Charities Building” published today described the plans of Solomon Loeb of Kuhn, Loeb & Co to build a new four-story structure at 21^stStreet and Second Avenue which will be called The Hebrew Charities Building.  De Lemos & Cordes have been retained for the project that will cost $150,000 on top of the $60,000 that has been paid for the land.

1899: Memorial services for Baroness de Hirsch were held this afternoon in the auditorium of the Educational Alliance at East Broadway and Jefferson Street.

1899: Ohio native and West Point Graduate Major George W. Moses was honorably discharged today

1899: It was reported today that Doubleday & McClure will soon be issuing an abridged version of The Future of War by Jean de Bloch the Polish Jew who began as a peddler in Warsaw and rose to become a financier with a wide variety of interests in railways, banking and science.

1899: “The first anti-Jewish measure was promulgated” by the Russian government “under which the stay of all – even foreign – Jews is prohibited in St. Petersburg; a prohibition that even applies to French Jews.

1899: “Yiddish: Literature in the Mixed Tongue Produced in This Century” published today provided a review The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century by Leo Weiner. (Weiner was a Polish born Jew who lectured on Slavic Languages at Harvard and became the first American Professor of Slavic Literature, at a time before leaders at Harvard decided there were too many Jews at their college.)

1899: “Asks Aid of United Hebrew Charities” published today described the decision to reject a request for $125 to pay for a family’s transportation back to German “because the demands upon the treasury…have been so great, the society cannot afforded to expends so large a sum on an individual case.”

1900(14^thof Iyar, 5660): Pesach Sheni

1900: Three days after he had passed away, 65 year old Israel Simons was buried today in London at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery.”

1900 (14^th of Iyar, 5660): Sixty-year old Hermann Levi, the Jewish maestro who conducted the first performance of Wagner’s “Parsifal” at Bayreuth passed away today.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Wagner.html

1900: Herzl made a Zionist speech at the "Israelitische Allianz".

1900: In responding to Jacob Schiff’s criticism of the work of the Baron and Baroness de Hirsch Monument Association, Isador Straus agreed that these two great philanthropists required no monument since their good works spoke for themselves.  Building the monument was an act of gratitude and hopefully, those who would view it would be moved to emulate the generosity of the Baron and Baroness.

1901(24^thof Iyar, 5661): Seventy-five year old Austrian born and retired butcher Hyman Epstein, the husband of Rosalie (Glazier) Epstein and the father of Emmanuel, Sarah, Robert, Isaac “Ike” Epstein passed away today after which he was buried at New Mount Sinai Cemetery and Mausoleum in Affton, MO.

1902: It was reported today that during a dispute Reverend E.O. McFarland, the pastor of the Bethany Church in Newark, NJ and Joseph M. Hauber, the church’s treasurer, the pastor responded to one of the treasurer’s comments by saying, from the pulpit, “That’s what you would expect from a Jew”  and then continuing “I called this brother a name,” “I married this brother and got the record of his father and mother” and his “name is that of a Jew.” (Editor’s note – an insult is an insult; genteel anti-Semitism is still anti-Semitism)

1902: As “the boycott on beef by Jewish residents” of New York’s east side which is in sympathy with Jewish butcher who are fighting to get the wholesalers to reduce the price of Kosher beef continues, it is expect that today all the east side Kosher butcher shops “will be closed and the inhabitants, estimated at a quarter of a million people will take to a diet of milk, eggs and vegetables in order to bring the wholesalers to terms

1903: Mordecai Raisman of Philadelphia received a letter from his son Aaron Raisman written containing an eyewitness account of the “massacre at Kishineff” where the riot in which “people were slaughter, killed and torn to pieces” began “on the first day of Easter at 5 p.m. and continued for a second day after which “the place was ruined and pillaged” with “more than three fourths of the city reduced to absolute ruin” leaving “three hundred wounded of whom two hundred are at the point of death.”

1904: Herzl writes to Wenzel von Plehve asking for an audience for Katzenelson.

1905: Birthdate of Israeli graphic designer Franz Kraus.  Born in St. Pölten, Austria he passed away in 1998 in Tel Aviv.

1905: Twenty six year old American producer Sam Shubert, one of the three Shubert theatre owning Shubert brothers passed away today as the result of injuries suffered in a train accident in Pennsylvania while traveling on business. (According to some sources, Shubert actually died on May 12 and not on May 13.  So far, I have not been able to resolve this discrepancy. The official marker shows the May 13 date.)

1906: The Bezalel Art School opened in Jerusalem

1906: In Chicago, “The building known as the Marks Nathan Jewish Orphan Home was formally dedicated” today where 19 orphans resided under the care of Mr. Saul Drucker as superintendent and Mrs. Saul Drucker as matron.

1907: It was reported today that the Directors of the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews have expressed their gratitude to Mrs. J.Z. Coblens and Mr. Frederick Nathan for their 25 years of service in furthering the interests of the institution by presenting Mrs. Coblens with “a silver dish” and Mr. Nathan with “a loving cup.’

1908: “The gold taken from assay office today for shipment to Europe amounted to $5,750,000” of which $1,000,000 was from Goldman, Sachs and Co.

1909: Today, “Abraham Sakolik, a pushcart man” received a notification from Acting Commissioner Joseph Murray of Ellis Island that further delay could be granted and that Immigration Department had ordered the deportation” of his two year old son Gerschon back to Odessa because he has ringworm” which means his wife Esther will also not be entering the country because “the immigration authorities are merciful enough to see to it that if the baby is sent way its mother must go to.”

1910: The order by Premier Stolypin suspending the “expulsion of Jews residing illegally in Kiev” as approved by the Duma, is ended today as can be seen by the fact that the expulsion of the Jews is scheduled to resume tomorrow.

1911(15^thof Iyar, 5671): Parashat Emo

1911: In the wake of “ugly rumors of a threatened massacre of Jews tomorrow” at Kieff, “the governor issued a proclamation today saying the he would suppress with a firm hand any attempt at disorders on Sunday” which the Jews put so little trust in that “it is reported that they have divvied he city into districts for organized self-defense.”

1911: In Yekaterinosflaff, “the provincial has issued a circular forbidding Town Councils to give Jews certificates of artisanship on testimonials from working establishments and hand craftsmen.”

1912: Birthdate of Rabbi Judah Nadich.  As a Lt. Colonel and Army chaplain, Nadich would play a key role in the treatment for the Jews of Europe after W.W. II.  As President of the Rabbinical Assembly, he would play a key role in gaining equality for women in Conservative Judaism.

1912: The office of Chief Rabbi of England was formally declared to be vacant today and it was announced that applications for the position were now being accepted.

1913: It was learned today “that the Dr. Jacques Loeb of the Rockefeller Institute, one of the leading investigators in biological research in the country” has been denied membership in the Century Association, which is described as a private club for those showing “distinction in literature or the arts” and that Dr. J. McKeen Cattell, who proposed Loeb for membership claims the decision was made because Loeb is Jewish.

1914: Today in Amsterdam, Levie Van Praag married Sabiena Cohen both of whom were murdered in Sobibor.

1915: Leslie L. Dauer, the temporary Chairman of the Leo M. Frank Committee in Chicago reported that “many organizations such as the Iowa State Society for the Prevention of Cruelty and the Board of Trade of Missouri have joined the movement” to seek clemency for Frank and “the campaign in Frank’s behalf is being carried on over the whole country and is meeting with enthusiastic response everywhere.:

1916 (10th of Iyar, 5676): Sholem Aleichem passed away.  Born Shalom Rabinowitz in the Ukraine, he grew up in the town of Vornokov which served as the model for the fictitious town of Kasrilevke that appears in his writings.  Shalom Aleichem began writing in Hebrew.  In 1883, he began writing in Yiddish which is when he adopted the pen name of Shalom Aleichem.  He used a pen name because he did not want to offend friends and family (including his father) who thought Jews should be writing in Hebrew.  Following the pogroms of 1905, he now famous author moved to the United States.  He died while living in the Bronx at the age of 59.  Shalom Aleichem employed humor and pathos to create a picture of the Shtetl.  He was called the Jewish Mark Twain.  His most famous character was Tevye who became a worldwide favorite in the hit show and movie, “Fiddler on the Roof.”  [Ed. Note: There is no way this brief guide can do justice to this man or his work.  The best way to “say Kaddish” for him is to read one of his stories]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/nyregion/18nyc.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

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

1917: Rabbi Stephen S. Wise’s Free Synagogue sponsored a performance of “Little Lord Fauntleroy” for school age children this afternoon.

1917: Mr. Jack Silverman is scheduled to perform a violin solo and Miss Bluma Bernstein is scheduled to provide a dramatic reading at today’s meeting of the Big Sister Movement of Chicago at the Auditorium Hotel.

1917: Oscar Straus is scheduled to preside over the third of three public meeting where he will lead a “general discussion with respect to the organization of the Free Synagogue of Washington Heights.

1917: Pope Benedict XV “personally consecrated Nunci Eugenio, the future Pope Pius XII” whose behavior during the Holocaust has been criticized by many, as an Archbisop.

1917: Dr. Henry Moskowitz criticized the Zionist “movement as romantic and impracticable” while Dr. David De Sola Pool “made a strong appeal for the settling of Palestine as the only to restore Hebrew ideals” “at a symposium on the Jewish question” held tonight at Temple Emanu-El.

1918: Birthdate of Edwin S. Shneidman, “a psychologist who gave new direction to the study of suicide and was a founder of the nation’s first comprehensive suicide prevention center.” (As reported by William Dicke)

1918: Approximately 500 carts crowded in the three blocks of Orchard Street between Delancey and Houston Streets where “the bearded Jews in long overcoats” had discarded their usual wares to sell supplies of Thrift and War Saving Stamps as a way of helping to repay the debt they owe to the country that has provided them with a refuge and a home.

1919: During the Russian Civil War the Jews of Boguslav, a city in the Kiev district of the Ukraine were attacked by gangs of marauding peasants that killed 20 Jews,

1919(6^thof Iyar, 5673): Fifty-one year old Esther Lefkowitz passed away today after which she was buried with other family members at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, NY

1920: In Union City, TN, Rebecca and Morris Kaufman gave birth to Ruth Kaufman, the Miami Beach High School and Pratt Institute trained interior designer and cartoon colorist who became Ruth Kaufman Hecklering when she married Philip E. Heckerling with whom she had two children Stephanie and Dale.

1921: The Palestinians have expressed their dissatisfaction with the reply made by Winston Churchill to the petition of the Moslem-Christian Association, which consisted of thirty-two typewritten pages and contained all their grievances “against the colonization of their country by the Zionist immigrants, who are arriving at the rate of 1,000 a month.”

1922: In New York City, Philip Frankel and his wife the former Rebecca Pressner gave birth to Bernice Frankel, who as the actress Bea Arthur played Yentel the Matchmaker in the premiere of “Fiddler on the Roof” and gained lasting fame in the role of Maude Findlay, a character first created for the hit series All In the Family, and then spun off for Maude, a hit show in which she was the lead.  She gained further success as Dorthoy Zbornak, one of the lead characters in the television hit, “The Golden Girls.”

1922: In New York, “New York Court of Appeals Judge George Medalie” and his wife gave birth to Gladys Medalie, who married Julius Heldman and as Gladys Heldman gained fame as a tennis player and the founder, editor and publisher of World Tennis.

http://www.jewishsports.net/BioPages/GladysHeldman.htm

1923: President Judge Jacob Caplan of New Haven, First Vice President, Louis Fabrican of New York; Second Vice-President, Bertram M. Aufsesser or Albany; Treasurer, Herman Asher of New York, Secretary, Max Levy were elected as officers of District #1 of the B’nai Brith Lodge today.

1923: During a meeting held at the Hotel Astor, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization addressed members of four congregations located on New York’s West Side. Mr. H. Leonard Simmons announced that the $100,000 quota for the West Side would be forthcoming shortly. Captain Gloster Armstrong, British Consul General in New York assured the attendees that Great Britain intends to fulfill its commitments in Palestine under the terms of League of Nations’ mandate. (As reported by JTA)

1923: Mayor David E. Fitzgerald addressed a meeting of the B’nai B’rith lodges in the Eastern United States. 

1924: Birthdate of Harry Heinz Schwartz, a South African lawyer, opponent of apartheid and South African ambassador to the United States. He served as defense lawyer for James Kantor, who was the defense attorney for Nelson Mandela during the infamous Rivonia Trial.

1925: “A bequest of some common stock” in the Nature’s Rival Company which is headed by Clarence Mayer of Chicago, was made to Mrs. Amalie Bourne the sister of Julius M. Mayer, the former Judge of the United States circuit Court of Appeals for the Southern District of New York subject to a contract dated today.

1926(29^th of Iyar, 5686): Sixty-nine year old Sir Stuart Montagu Samuel, the elder brother of Herbert Samuel, 1sr Viscount Samuel passed away today.  He was elected to the House of Commons in 1900 replacing his uncle Samuel Montagu, 1^stBaron Swaything.  He served until 1916.

1926:It was reported today that David M. Bressler, announced that contributions to the United Jewish Campaign in New York reached the sum of $4,835,867. (JTA)

1926: The New York Times reported that during his recent visit to Palestine, Yasha Heifetz performed a concert in the Valley of Jezreel near the site of the “legendary battle of Armageddon.” During the five day tour, Heifetz took part in seven concerts including one attended by 10,000 workers in Tel Aviv.

1927: Solomon Furth won three events today as the New York University freshman track team finished an undefeated season.

1927: In Brooklyn, Harry Hellerman, “a Jewish immigrant from Riga” and the former Clara Robinson gave birth to Fred Hellerman, a member of the Weavers, the group that brought folk music to whole generation of youngsters who knew that there was more to music than “crooners” and “rock stars.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/arts/music/fred-hellerman-last-of-the-weavers-folk-group-dies-at-89.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=1

1927: In Brooklyn, Martha (Grundfast) and Louis Chester Ross gave birth to “actor, choreographer, director and producer.” Herbert David Ross.

1927: Forty members of the National Socialist Party, responsible for the recent anti-Semitic riots on Kurfuerstendamm, were arrested by the police today. In a statement issued by the chief of police, he declared that the police will combat terrorism in the streets of Germany's capital. (As reported by JTA)

1928: Six months after premiering in Germany “Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis” with a script by Karl Freund and Carl Mayer was released in the United States.

1928: “The proposal that officers of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union be elected by membership through a national referendum was defeated tonight by a vote of 13 to 56 after an all-day debate in which the elements in the International opposing Morris Sigman sought to secure passage of the resolution.” (As reported by JTA)

1928: Officials of the Hebrew National Orphans Home, led by its President, State Supreme Court Justice Aaron J. Levy, launched a drive today for an additional 10,000 members.

1929: In Palestine, The Mandatory Government announces an immigration quota of 2.400 permits for a half-year period, beginning in April.

1929(3^rdof Iyar, 5689): After she passed away today, Russian born Jenny Rebeca Herbert, the wife of Aaron Herbert and the mother of Leo, Sophia and Eley Herbert was buried today in the Belfast Jewish Cemetery in Northern Ireland.

1929: Marcia Glick, the daughter of Bernard Glick and Alma Gluck and the stepdaughter of Efrem Zimabliest became Marci Davenport today when she married Russell Davenport, the editor of Fortune magazine.

1930: Talks between the heads of the Colonial Office and the Palestinian Arab delegation are concluded. Demands to end the growth of the Yishuv, immigration and land settlement remain unfulfilled.

1934: Birthdate of archaeologist Ehud Netzer who led the excavations at Heriodum for 30 years and who discovered “the Wadi Qielt Synagogue, the oldest synagogue ever found.”

1935: Sixty-five year old former United States Senator from Georgia, John S. Cohen who was raised in the Episcopalian faith of his mother Ellen Gobert Wright and not in the faith of his Jewish father, Philip Lawrence Cohen passed away today.

http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=C000597

1935: Birthdate of composer Professor Yizhak Sadai the native of Bulgaria who moved to Israel in 1949 and became “one of the most regarded and influential music teachers in Israel.”

1935: Pepsodent Toothpaste began sponsoring Albert Pearce’s radio broadcast on the Blue Network and NBC today.

1936: Birthdate of Romanian native Ruth Wisse whose literary works include The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Literature and Culture, The Best of Sholem Aleichem, If I Am Not for Myself…: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, and Jews in Power and whose brother is “David Roskies, a professor of Yiddish and Jewish Literature at JTS.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/wisse-ruth-r

1936(21st of Iyar, 5696):“Two Jews, Ruben Klapholtz and Alter Cohen were shot to death by Arabs in the Old City of Jerusalem today, one as he left his home and the other as he passed an Arab Cafte.

1936: Tonight, “thirty Arabs attacked a Jewish stone-crushing plant outside of Jerusalem” killing “one of three Arabs working there, wounding another” before setting fire to the plant.

1936: “One Rainy Afternoon” a comedy produced by Jesse Lasky with a screen story by Emeric Pressburger and René Pujol, starring Francis Lederer and featuring Mischa Auer was released today in the United States.

1936: Following a funeral procession that police said was watched by 10,000 people, Rabbi Leo Jung delivered the eulogy at the funeral service for Judge Otto A. Rsalsky in the Jewish Center following which Cantor Pincus Jassinowsky chanted “El Mole Rachamin the Hebrew prayer for the dead.”

1937: In New York City, “Russian Jewish immigrants Rachil Eriss, a draper and hatmaker, and Morris Lampert, an architect and ironworker” gave birth to University of Chicago and actress Zora Lampert, the wife of “broadcaster and novelist Jonathan Schwartz.”

1938: The Palestine Postreported that an Arab police constable who was expected to offer his testimony in the District Court was shot and killed by an Arab terrorist in a Haifa's market cafe. An Arab woman who came into the line of fire was also severely injured and later died from her wounds.

1938: The Palestine Postreported that at the League of Nations Britain requested "for the sake of peace" that all nations recognize the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.

1938: The Palestine Postreported that Poles became suddenly aware of the rapid Nazification of the local German community.

1938: Birthdate of Manhattan born, Queens raised Francine Pascal who gained fame as Francine Pascal the wife of John Pascal and the creator of “the Sweet Valley series of young adult novels.”

1939: SS St Louis departs Hamburg for Cuba with 937 Jews on board.  This tragic episode was portrayed in the book and the film, Voyage of the Damned.  Having been denied entrance to Cuba, the ship was turned away from the United States.  Steaming off the shore of Florida, the refugees could see the lights of Miami.  Coast Guard vessels tracked the ship to make sure nobody escaped and to keep the captain from running his ship aground in American waters.  In the end, the ship returned to Europe.  About half of the passengers survived the war.

1939: Nineteen year old George Jellinek and the family of Peter Gay were among the passengers aboard the SS Iberia when it docked today in Havana, Cuba.

1939: “Miriam (née Klein) and Harry Keitel, Jewish immigrants from Romania and Poland, respectively” gave birth to actor Harvey Keitel.

1940: Tonight, in Miami, with the help of the Young Judea group, Junior Hadassah “honored their mothers in a special program” during which the girls gave their mothers “certificates stating that a tree had been planted in Palestine in their honor.

1940: As the British brace for an invasion by the Nazis who have already death lists for UK’s Jews, Winston Churchill delivered his speech to the House of Commons where the Prime Minister famously told his people, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat” which passed into popular folklore as I have nothing to offer but blood, sweat and tears.

1940: “As the German forces approached Amsterdam” today, the family of Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker whose visas had expired four days ago fled without this vital documentation and found “passage on the SS Bodegraven, in part because a soldier on guard recognized Dési who had given a concert for the troops.”

1940: Hans Rey, who is best known for creating Curious George, wrote in his diary today, “Songs English very slowly because of the events.”  “Songs English” refers to a book of French and English rhymes on which he was working.  “The events” refers to the German blitz driving across France.

1941: In Vienna, musician Josef Berger and teacher Therese Jany gave birth to Senta Berger, the actress who co-starred as an Israeli soldier, Karen, with Kirk Douglas in “Cast A Giant Shadow” and who co-founded Sentana Film with her husband Michael Verhoeven.

1941: The Nazis interned 3,600 naturalized Jews of Russian origin.

1942: U.S. premiere of “This Gun For Hire” which provided Albert Maltz with his “first screenwriting credit.”

1942: In Brooklyn Teddy and Esta Makowsky gave birth to their eldest daughter Renee Rivka who gained fame as “Rivka Haut, a prominent champion of Orthodox Jewish women fighting for divorce in rabbinical courts and seeking to pray together as a group.” (As reported by Jennifer Medina)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/us/rivka-haut-dies-at-71-championed-rights-of-jewish-women.html?_r=1

1942(26th of Iyar, 5702): On day after his 41^st birthday Hyam Greenbaum, British violinist, composer and conductor passed away today

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095906257

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Name/Hyam-Greenbaum/Conductor/98534-3

1943: Hans Frank sent Hitler a list of the "Jewish concealed and stolen goods," that were recovered including 94,000 men's watches, 33,000 women's watches, 25,000 pens and 14,000 scissors. Many of the watches were melted down for their gold or platinum content.

1944: Dr. Samuel Levy, chairman of the board of directors announced that Dr. Samuel Belkin, Talmudist and scholar, will be inducted as second president of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, which includes Yeshiva College on May 23.  The 33 year old Belkin is assuming a position left vacant by the death of Dr. Bernard Revel, the founder and first President of Yeshiva College.

1944(20^thof Iyar, 5704): Eighty year old Florence Guggenheim passed away today.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/guggenheim-florence-shloss

1944: Throughout the Nazi camp system, inmate tattoo numbers gain a new series, prefaced with the letter "A." The intention is to conceal the number of prisoners at Auschwitz.

1945: Commissioning of HMS Sanguine, a Royal Navy submarine that would be sold to Israel in 1958 and renamed the Rahav

1945: The Soviet Union “halted all offensive operations” in Europe today.

1945: “The CBS, NBC, Blue and Mutual networks broadcast a second live production of the epic dramatic poem “On a Note of Triumph,” a commemoration of the fall of the Nazi regime in Germany and the end of World War II in Europe narrated by Martin Gabel.

1945: The photo of the “Raising a flag over the Reichstag” taken by Jewish photographer Yevgeny Khaldei was published today in Ogonyok magazine meaning that the two iconic flag raising photos of 1945 (the other being Iwo Jima) were taken by Jews.  (Add these to Robert Capa’s D-Day Invasion photos and the Life cover with the sailor kissing a girl at Times Square and you get a sense of connection between Jews and photo-journalism)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_a_flag_over_the_Reichstag#/media/File:Soviet_flag_on_the_Reichstag_roof_Khaldei.jpg

1945: During Winston Churchill's famous broadcast speech "Five years of War", Britain’s wartime Prime Minister remembers the valor of Lance-Corporal John Patrick Kenneally who won the Victoria Cross for his exploits in Tunisia in 1943.

1946: In Brooklyn Abe Wolfman, a policer officer and his wife Fay gave birth to Marv Wolfman former Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics

1946: A year and a day before he married Arlene Francis, the mother of his son Tikun editor Peter Gabel, “CBS, NBC, Blue and Mutual Networks broadcast a second live production of “On a Note of Triumph, a commemoration of the fall of the Nazi regime in Germany and the end of World War II in Europe” narrated by Martin Gabel, the Philadelphia born son of Ruth and Israel Gabriel.

1946: “The Max Nordau, carrying 1,754 immigrants, was captured by the destroyers HMS Jervis and HMS Chequers

1946: As result of a hunger strike and threats to blow up the ship, the 675 passengers aboard the Dov Hos and 735 passengers aboard the Eliahu Golomberlanded legally in Palestine.

1947(23^rdof Iyar, 5707): Seventy-three year old Philadelphia born Harry Bachrach, the Republican Mayor of Atlantic City and Postmaster serving under Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt and founder of the “Jewish Community Center in Atlantic City who was the husband of Hattie Bacharach and the brother of Benjamin Bacharach, the President of Beth Israel Synagogue and Congressman Isaac Bacharach who “represented the Second District

1947: The U.N. General Assembly established the United Nations Special committee on Palestine, also known as UNSCOP.

1948: The “Dov Hoz” with 675 ma’apilim on board and the “Eliahu Golomb” with 339 ma’apilim on board arrive at Haifa today.

1948: As the British began their withdrawal from the Old City, the Haganah awaited the attack by 20,000 Arab soldiers who were determined to capture Jerusalem.

1948: Chaim Weizmann calls Abba Eban out of a meeting at the United Nations seeking reassurance that the proposal to create a trusteeship for all of Palestine (a proposal that would kill the creation of the Jewish state) would not succeed.  Eban assures Weizmann that U.N. Secretary General has said that trusteeship is a non-issue.

1948: The Arab Emergency committee and the Haganah High Command signed the terms for the Arab surrender of the town of Jaffa.  Despite Jews pleas to stay, 67,000 of the city’s 70,000 inhabitants of the city left, many by boat for Lebanon.

1948: In a daring nighttime firefight, Jewish forces seized the fort at the ancient town of Gezer at the southern end of the Tel Aviv – Jerusalem road.  This is the same Gezer that the Pharaoh gave to King Solomon as a wedding gift.

1948: On the day before Israel declares her independence, Arab irregulars perpetrate The Kfar Etzion massacre. Armored cars of the Arab Legion broke through the final defense line of Kfar Etzion.  In the last message sent by the defenders to Jerusalem, the defenders described “a Masada –like battle.”  The handful of Jewish defenders came out under a white flag and surrendered.  Fifteen of the defenders stacked their weapons, and then, lined up to be photographed.  Instead of the click of the camera, the Jews were treated to a burst of machinegun fire that killed all of them.  Was this planned or a freak accident?  To this day, the question has never been answered.  The victorious Arab Legion did kill an Arab family that had remained in Kfar Etzion with their Jewish friends.

1948: A motorbike courier delivers an envelope the Tel Aviv apartment of 32 year old Arieh Handler. The envelope contained an invitation to the ceremonies marking the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The envelope also contained a request that the arrangements be kept secret because of a fear that the British might stop the ceremony or the Arabs might use the ceremony as pretext to attack. 

1948: Maury Atkin was offered a job as executive officer and agriculture attaché of the first Israeli embassy. The embassy actually would not exist for another 24 hours.

1949: Today Samuel A. Snieg, chief rabbi of the U.S. Zone, presented the first copy of the” Survivors  Talmud (“also known as the U.S. Army Talmud) “to General Lucius Clay, Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone in Germany, with the words, ‘I bless your hand in presenting to you this volume embodying the highest spiritual wisdom of our people.’”

1950: Eliahu Elath, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, was named Ambassador to Great Britain today.  Abba Eban is expected to succeed Elath.

1950: After premiering in New York in April, “I Was a Shoplifter,” produced by Leonard Goldstein and filmed by cinematographer Irving Glassberg was released in the rest of the United States today.

1951: “That’s My Boy” a comedy co-starring Jerry Lewis and featuring Polly Bergen was released in the United States today.

1952: The first degrees of Doctor of Medicine were awarded to 62 graduates of the Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School.

1953: Hans “Eisler's opera project was discussed in three of the bi-weekly meetings "Mittwochsgesellschaft" [Wednesday club] of a circle of intellectuals under the auspices of the Berlin Academy of Arts beginning” today.

1953: Tennis player, promoter, and women's advocate Gladys Heldman released the first issue of World Tennis Magazine 

1953:The Jerusalem Post reported that a Bill had been introduced in the Knesset by the Minister of Education and Culture, Prof. Benzion Dinur, for the establishment of "Yad Vashem" (an everlasting name), for the memory of the six and a half million Jews who perished in the Holocaust and were granted Israeli honorary citizenship. The Yad Va'Shem archives and museum were to be set up in Jerusalem, "The Heart of the Jewish People

1953: Hans “ Eisler's opera project was discussed in three of the bi-weekly meetings "Mittwochsgesellschaft" [Wednesday club] of a circle of intellectuals under the auspices of the Berlin Academy of Arts starting today.”

1954: “Lasser’s Eyes To Blind” published today described the decision Mrs. Jacob K. Klasser, the widow of the recently deceased tax and accounting expert to consent to his wishes and donate his eyes “the Eye-Bank for Sight Restoration, Inc.” which will use them for corneal grafting operations in Baltimore and Houston

1954: The original Broadway production of Pajama Game featuring features a score by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross opened today and ran for 1,063 performances.

1954: The original Broadway production Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’ “The Pajama Game” opened today.

1957(12^thof Iyar, 5717): Seventy year old Michael Fekete, the Hungarian born Israeli mathematician who won the Israel Prize of Exact Sciences in 1955 passed away today.

1959(5th of Iyar, 5719): Yom HaAtzma'ut

1959: Birthdate of British comedian and author Benjamin Charles “Ben” Elton, the grandson of German Jewish historian Victor Ehrenberg and the son Lewis Elton, a refugee from Hitler’s Europe and Mary Foster, a product of the Church of England.

1959: Birthdate of Israeli author Zeruya Shalev. A native of Kibbutz Kinneret and an editor at Keshet Publishing house, she survived a suicide bombing in January of 2004.

1960: “Papyri Found In Judean Cave Identified As Letters From Bar Kochba” published today described the discovery of “eleven letters, written by Simon Bar Kochba” “in a cave near the Dead Sea.”

1961: Actor Jeff Chandler (Ira Gorssel) entered a Culver City hospital and had surgery for a spinal disc herniation, the complications from which would ultimately lead to his death.

1962(9th of Iyyar, 5722): Franz Kline abstract expressionist painter passed away at the age of 51.

1965: Labour Political leader Lewis Cohen became Baron Cohen of Brighton when he “was raised to the Peerage” today.

1965: Germany established diplomatic relations with Israel. (This comes 20 years after its unconditional surrender, at the end of World War II, and 17 years after the establishment of the State of Israel.)

1965: Several Arab nations broke ties with West Germany after it established diplomatic relations with Israel.  This came during the height of the Cold War when Communist East Germany was trying to establish itself as the real German government.  The West Germans knew what it would cost them in them in the international arena if they recognized Israel, but they went ahead and did it anyway.

1967: Birthdate of American singer, songwriter, guitarist and musical genre innovator, Charles Michael "Chuck" Schuldiner.

1967: Egyptian troops move into the Sinai, which is a demilitarized zone. Egypt radio sets the tone of propaganda ("Egypt, with all its resources, is ready to plunge into a total war that will be the end of Israel.")

1968: A funeral service for New York jurist George Frankenthaler is scheduled to be held at Temple Emanu-El starting at 2 pm.

1968(15^thof Iyar, 5728): Seventy-nine year old Budapest born Dr. George Vajna who served as government official and publisher in his native Hungary and came to the United States in 1939 where he eventual founded Transatlantic Arts, Inc. passed away today in Hollywood, FL.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/05/23/76947985.pdf

1969: Boris Kochubievsky goes on trial in Kiev charged with “slander against the Soviet regime.”

1970: “Getting Straight” a marvelous little comedy starring Elliott Gould was released in the United States today.

1971(18^thof Iyar, 5731): Lag B’Omer

1971: “Four Nights of a Dreamer” in which Alabama born film critic appeared as an extra shortly after having arrived in Paris was released in France today.

1972(29^thof Iyar, 5732): Parashat Bamidbar

1972(29^thof Iyar, 5732): Sixty year old Norfolk born physicist Dr. Julius Halpern who helped to develop radar during WW II passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/05/16/archives/julius-halpern-physigist-was60-professor-at-pennsylvania-who-worked.html

1973: Sixty-three year old Dutch war criminal Dries Riphagen who conned Jews out of their valuables by promising them protection and safety and then turning them over to the Nazis passed away today, having never had to face justice for his evil deeds

1973: Reconstructionist Rabbinical College ordained its first graduate

1975:"Rodgers & Hart" opens at Helen Hayes Theater in New York City for 108 performances.

1978: After a month, in Miami, the curtain came down for the last time on National Touring Company’s presentation of “Annie” with lyrics by Martin Charnin and music by Charles Strouse.

1980: ABC broadcast the last episode of season two of “Taxi” starring Judd Hirsch and created by James L. Brooks and Ed Weinberger.

1980: A Stradivarius built in 1734 was stolen today after Roman “had played an all-Mozart recital” at the Longy School of Music In Cambridge.

1981: Birthdate of Luciana Clare Berger the Laborite MP known as Luciana Berger who was the great-niece of trade union official and Labour MP Manny Shinwell.

1982: ABC broadcast the final episode of the short-lived sit-com “No Soap, No Radio starring Steve Guttenberg.

1983(1st of Sivan, 5743): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1983: Philip H. Dougherty reported that the “Israel Ministry of Tourism is more than tripling its advertising budget in the United States from last year, to $2.5 million, and may even add another $3 million to lure more American travelers and make up for the European falloff that followed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The advertising, created by Needham, Harper & Steers/Issues and Images, will promote a friendliness and warmth of the Israeli people toward travelers with the new theme line: ''Come to Israel, come stay with friends.''

1984: Newark, NJ born violinist and composer Max Pollikoff, the creator of the 92^ndSt Y’s “Music in Our Time” series passed away today.

http://archives.nypl.org/mus/20059

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/14/obituaries/max-pollikoff-violinist-dies-created-music-of-our-time.html

1984(11^thof Iyar, 5744): Seventy-nine year old Stanislaw Marcin Ulam, the Polish born American physicist who played a key role in the development of the hydrogen bomb today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/15/obituaries/stanislaw-ulam-theorist-on-hydrogen-bomb.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1984/05/16/mathematician-stanislaw-ulam-leader-in-bomb-research-dies/08ce9d61-b174-4814-ab3c-7b7f9e6412a5/?utm_term=.0a4946709aab

1985(22^ndof Iyar, 5745): Sixty-four year old Canadian born American comedic actress Selma Diamond best known for role as a bailiff on “Night Court” passed away today in Los Angeles.

http://articles.latimes.com/1985-05-14/local/me-19057_1_night-court-actress-selma-diamond

1985(22nd of Iyar, 5745): Sixty-nine year old former Albright College lineman Leo “Moose” Disend who as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers NFL team played in the first ever televised professional football game in 1939 before going to play tackle for the Green Bay Packers passed away today.

1985: “Kiss of the Spider Woman” for which Héctor Eduardo “Babenco was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director” making him the first Latin American to be nominated in this category, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

1986(4th of Iyar, 5746): Yom HaZikaron

1986: In New York painter Carroll Dunham and photographer Laurie Simmons gave birth to Emmy Award nominated actress, author, screenwriter, producer and director Lena Dunham.

1986: Natan Shcharansky is scheduled to meet with President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz in Washington, where he is to receive the Congressional Gold Medal at a reception in the Capitol Rotunda. (As reported by Jane Gross)

1987: Leonard Bernstein will serve as guest conduct of the Israel Philharmonic as the IPO marks its 50^th anniversary.

1988: Jack Lang began serving as Culture Minster of France for the second time.

1988: “The Wrong Guys,” a comedy directed by Danny Bilson who co-authored the script and co-starring Richard Lewis and Richard Belzer was released in the United States today.

1988: “Maniac Cop” produced and written by Larry Cohen was released today in the United States.

1988: Vincent Canby reviews “The Lighthoresman,” an Australian made film that depicts the heroism of 800 Australian mounted soldiers who triumphed over thousands of Turks and Germans at Beersheba, in southern Palestine, on Oct. 31, 1917. The battle was a key to the eventual Allied victory over the Turks during World War I which was a critical step in the creation of the modern state of Israel.  As mechanized vehicles and machine guns came to dominate the modern battlefield, the Australians climatic cavalry charge against the Turks proved to be the last great, successful endeavor of this kind.

1993: CBS broadcast the final episode of “Knots Landing” one of the longest running prime time soap operas which was created by Baltimore native David Jacobs.

1994: It was reported today that “the common story that psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s mother and father had separated before his birth” was not true and the “closely guarded fact was that he was his mother’s child from an extramarital union” who “never saw his birth rather of his mother’s first husband.”

1996(24th of Iyar, 5756): Eighty year old Professor Chaim Menachem Rabin, the native of Germany who became one of Israel’s premiere expert on Hebrew, especially as found in such ancient documents as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

https://memim.com/chaim-menachem-rabin.html

1998(24^thof Iyar, 5756): Eighty-nine year old Harry Wagreich, a Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at CCNY and the brothers Drs. Samuel and Paul Wagreich passed away today.

1998:A souvenir sheet of three illustrations by Kariel Gardosh (Dosh) showing postal activities and featuring the character of "Srulik": a service counter at a post office, philately, and post boxes is issued by the Israeli Postal Authority.

1999(27th of Iyyar, 5759): Mary Ellen “Meg Greenfield” famed political columnist and editor of the Washington Post Editorial Page,   passed away.

1999: On his 32nd birthday, famed musician Chuck Schuldiner was diagnosed with pontine glioma, a type of brain cancer that invades the brain stem, and immediately underwent radiation therapy.

2000(8^th of Iyar, 5760): Parashat Emor

2000: It was reported today that “the parents of an Israeli-American teenager killed in a 1996 terrorist attack in Jerusalem filed a $600-million lawsuit in Chicago yesterday against several Islamic charities, nonprofit groups and individuals, contending that they raised money in the United States for Hamas, the militant Palestinian group.”

2001: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Holocaust on Trial” by D.D. Guttenplan, “Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial” by Richard J. Evans and the recently released paperback edition of “Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart” by Steven Bach “a careful, clear-eyed account of the life of the playwright, director and actor  who collaborated with Broadway's best and pleased many people many times without making large claims for his own significance.”

2001: Premiere of “Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.” directed and written by Claude Lanzman and starring Yehuda Lerner.

2003: Susan Page reviewed An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 by Robert A. Dallek, the Brooklyn born son of Rubin and Esther Dallek, the Bancroft Prize winning historian who specializes in
“big biographies” about American presidents.

https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2003-05-12-kennedy_x.htm

2003: A memorial service is scheduled to be held this morning at the Chicago Yacht Club for Arnold Horween Jr. a successful Chicago business owner who once dined with former President George Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush.”

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-05-04/news/0305040211_1_harvard-friends-arnold

2004: In “What the Nazis Stole, Museums Tend to Keep” published today, Alan Riding described how “despite all the headlines, relatively little of” the art Nazis looted from Jewish homes “has been resituted.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/international/europe/what-the-nazis-stole-museums-tend-to-keep.html?searchResultPosition=42

2004: As the fighting in Gaza continued for a third day, Israeli troops continued their “search for the remains of five soldiers killed yesterday and “polls show that a solid majority of Israelis favor Prime Minister Sharon’s proposal to pull out of Gaza even though his Likud Party had rejected it.

2005: In “Reform Jews, Adrift in a Sea of Black Hats” published today Andy Newman described what it is like for members of “Progressive Temple Beth Ahavath Shalom” to live and pray in the Orthodox enclave of Borough Park.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/nyregion/reform-jews-adrift-in-a-sea-of-black-hats.html?searchResultPosition=25

2005: Eighty five year old Hugh William Montefiore, The Bishop of Birmingham and the great-great-nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore, who converted to Christianity while attending Rugby School – a famous English day and boarding school- passed away today.

2006: Eighty-nine year old Russian History Professor and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Peter Viereck whose views stood in stark contrast to those of Nazi-sympathizing father, George Viereck, passed away today. (As reported by Margalit Fox)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/arts/19viereck.html?_r=1

2006: Approximately 3,000 people came a to a Toronto bookstore to see Leonard Cohen who was making his first public appearance in 13 years. 

2007: The Wolf Prizes are presented at ceremony in the Knesset.  Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute and George Feher of U.C. San Diego won the Chemistry Prize.  The Art Prize went to Italian Michelangelo Pistoletto.

2007: After 90 days The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition, including some original scroll fragments never before displayed in the United States comes to a close at the Union Station in Kansas City. The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition is a joint production of Union Station Kansas City and the Israel Antiquities Authority.

2007: The Sunday New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon and Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek which presents a detailed examination of the relationship between America’s first Jewish Secretary of State and his Presidential patron whose dark sided included a predilection for making anti-Semitic remarks.

2007: The Sunday Washington Post featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer and The Diary of Petr Ginz, 1941-1942 edited by Chava Pressburger. Petr Ginz was a budding writer and artists who died at Auschwitz in 1944.

2007: The New York Times Magazine publishes “Writings in the Dark” by David Grossman in which “an Israeli novelist reflects on what literature can accomplish in a time of permanent political emergency and personal loss.”

2007(25th of Iyar, 5767): Harvey Weinstein, a formalwear manufacturer and former chairman of Lord West formal Wear, passed away at the age of 82

2008: Houston Astros catch Brad Ausmus got his 1,500^th career hit making him one of eight catchers in major league history to get 1,500 hits and steal at least 100 bases.

2008: The 92^nd Street Y presents “Andy Borowitz, Jonathan Alter, Susie Essman, Calvin Trillin & More: Countdown to the Election” during which award-winning satirist Andy Borowitz of The New Yorker hosts an irreverent look at the upcoming presidential election, featuring Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, comedian Susie Essman and humorist and writer, Calvin Trillin.

2008: Rabbi Asher Lopatin of Lakeview's Anshe Sholom B'nai Israel Congregation leads a discussion of Rashi's Daughters Book 1: Joheved by Maggie Anton as part of the Spertus Book Review series. “In 1068, the scholar Salomon ben Isaac — better known as Rashi — returned home to the family winemaking business. He embarked on a path that indelibly influenced the Jewish world, writing the first Talmud commentary and secretly teaching Talmud to his daughters. In the first book of Maggie Anton’s dramatic — and romantic — trilogy, Joheved finds her spirit awakened by religious study, but has to keep her passion hidden. Must she choose between marital happiness and her study of Talmud?

2008: U.S. President George W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and media mogul Rupert Murdoch are among the 13 heads of state and 3,500 guests expected to attend President Shimon Peres' Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, which begins today and is being held in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary.

2008: Best-selling author and Harvard psychology professor Tal Ben-Shahar was the guest speaker at today’s gala for the International Sephardic Education held at the Plaza Hotel, Daniel Roubeni received a Young Leaders Award. ISEF president Nina Weiner received the Lifetime Achievement Award.

2008: Maj.-Gen. Ido Nehushtan assumed his new post as the 16th commander of the Israel Air Force.  Nehushtan took up his new post during a ceremony at the IAF's Ramat David Base in the North and during which he replaced Maj.-Gen. Elazar Shkedy, head of the air force for the past four years. A pilot with thousands of hours on his flight log, Nehushtan, who previously served as head of the IDF Planning Division, holds degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Northwestern University and Harvard University's Advanced Management Program.

2008: “A New Editor at the Forward” published today described he ascension to this position by Jane Eisner.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/business/media/13forward.html?fta=y

2008: At today’s gala for the International Sephardic Education Foundation, held at The Plaza, Iran-born real estate maven Daniel Roubeni, a Young Leaders Award recipient, got teary-eyed as he described leaving Germany (where he had grown up) “to find a Jewish wife in the U.S.”

2009(19^th of Iyar, 5769): One-hundred eight year old Wlademar Levy Cardoso, who fought with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force in WW II and was the last living Field Marshall in the Brazilian Army passed away today.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2250826/posts

2009: At the National Archives in Washington, D.C., Michael Lasser, host of National Public Radio's "Fascinatin' Rhythm," presents a lecture on the music of the Great Depression, "Let's Go Slumming, Nose-Thumbing, at Park Avenue." Lasser is co-author of “America's Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley” so the lecture is followed y a book signing.

2010: Professor David Ruderman is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “The People And The Book: The Invention of Printing And The Transformation of Jewish Culture.”

2010: The Wolf Prize Awarding Ceremony is scheduled to take place at 6:30 pm the Knesset Building in Jerusalem. The awards are scheduled to be presented to the recipients by the President of the State of Israel, in the presence of the Chairman of the Knesset, the Minister of Education, the Chairman of the Wolf Foundation Board of Trustees, and members of the Foundation´s Council.

2010: A cross section of rabbis and Jewish leaders met in the White House today with administration leaders in the second of two meetings that are part of a “charm offensive” designed to reassure the American Jewish community of the Obama administration’s positive view of Israel.

2010: Oz Goffman of the Ministry of Agriculture said today that parliament must still approve the proposal to ban fishing on the Sea of Galilee for the next two years before it takes effect.

2011: On the secular calendar “Friday the 13^th”. Friday the 13^th has not always been a lucky day for the Jews.  In Strasbourg, the Jews were arrested by a newly installed town council on Friday 13, 1349 on charges that they were responsible for the Black Plague. The Jews were burned the next day, St. Valentine’s Day. Sholom Aleichem, who died on the 13^thof May suffered from triskaidekaphobia – the fear of the number 13. Arnold Schoenberg experienced triskaidekaphobia “which possibly began in 1908 with the composition of the thirteenth song of the song cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten Op. 15 (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 96).”  His fear of the number 13 is especially odd since he was born the 13^thof September and died on the 13^th of July. In her novel “Paternity” Susan Baruch created a character who was born on the 13^th and suffers from triskaidekaphobia. For the most part, the Jewish view of the number “13” runs contrary to the Western concept that associates it with bad luck.  Bar and Bat Mitzvah are associated with the number 13.  The TaNaCh lists 13 attributes of God.  There are six hundred and 13 commandments. Maimonides Creed contains 13 principles of Judaism.  There are 13 months in the year. I know, this is not really history, but every so often you have to have a little fun.

2011:The International Young Israel Movement and the Maimonides Heritage Center are scheduled to present: Shabbaton in the Holy City of Teverya

2011(9^th of Iyar): Ninety-five year old cellist Bernard Greenhouse, a founding member of the Beaux Arts Trio, passed away today, (As reported by Margalit Fox)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/arts/music/bernard-greenhouse-cellist-dies-at-95.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss.

2011(9^th of Iyar): Centenarian Vivian Myerson a political activist in Los Angeles and later a member of the city’s Human Relations Commission passed away today. (As reported by the Eulgizor)

2011: After protracted contract negotiations, Michael Rosenbaum returned to play “Lex Luthor” in the season finale of “Smallville” which was broadcast today.

2012: As part of Yom Hashoah events, artist Wendy Weisel is scheduled to speak during the presentation of her painting "Es Brent"– "It is Burning" at Tifereth Israel in Washington, DC.

2012: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer.

2012: The Los Angeles Times features a review of The Crisis of Zionismby Peter Beinar

2012: “Mazel Tov! A Jewish Celebration of Jewish Weddings” an exhibit that explores the mores, symbolic artifacts, and celebration unique to the Jewish wedding is scheduled to open at the JewishMuseum of Milwaukee.

2012: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu congratulated Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz on his joining the government coalition during his opening remarks at the weekly cabinet meeting today

2012: Presentation of the Wolf Prizes.

2012: Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan today called on the government to cut off the supply of electricity to the Gaza Strip in order to avoid electricity shortages it is feared could affect Israel this summer. (As reported by the Jerusalem Post

2013: Fred Lorber, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Des Moines was among the speakers at today’s groundbreaking ceremony for a Holocaust memorial that is being built “alongside the walkways leading up the west terrace of the Iowa Capitol grounds, near the intersection of East Seventh Street and Grand Avenue.”

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2013/05/14/iowans-remember-holocaust-at-memorial-groundbreaking/article

2013: Philadelphia born professional tennis player Julia Cohen today “peaked at world number 121 in the doubles ranking.

2013: The 92^nd Street Y is scheduled to host “Baseball: Kosher Style” featuring Larry Ruttman, Jeffery Lyons, Bob Tufts and Alan Dershowitz

2013: The Center for Jewish History with the Center for Traditional Music and Dance’s An-sky Institute for Jewish Culture are scheduled to present: “Tsimbl un Fidl – Uncovering the Lost Jewish String Music of Eastern Europe

2013: In Little Rock, AR, the Chabad Center for Jewish Life under the leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Ciment is scheduled to host an open house that will feature an appearance by an authentically trained and certified Sofer.  This rare event is part of the preparations for Shavuot

2013: The Leo Baeck Institute is scheduled to present: Berlin Book Evening – “Jews in Berlin” and Essays by Kurt Tucholsky

2013(4^th of Sivan, 5773): Eight –five year old Dr. Joyce Brothers passed away today (As reported by Margalit Fox)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/arts/television/dr-joyce-brothers-psychologist-dies-at-85.html?hpw&pagewanted=print

2013:The operating budget for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s official and private residences jumped some 80 percent from 2009 to 2012, according to figures made public today following a request by the Movement for Freedom of Information.

2013: Until now, new immigrant nurses have had to prove they can converse with patients in basic Hebrew, but physicians -- who have less direct contacts with the sick were exempted. Now the Knesset Labor, Social Affairs and Health Committee today approved regulations that would require doctors and two other types of professionals in healthcare to show their Hebrew proficiency as well.

2014: The Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism is scheduled to host a panel discussion on “Nationalities and Parliaments Now. What Can We Learn From the Past?”

2014: In the aftermath of the Holyland corruption case “Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in prison, a two-year suspended term, and a fine of NIS 1 million ($289,000) in the Tel Aviv District Court.”

2014: The Anti-Defamation League released the results of its global survey on anti-Semitism today.

2015: “Rosenwald,” a documentary about Julius Rosenwald, “the part owner of Sears and Roebuck” who funded the building of 5,400 schools across the segregated American South, providing 660,000 black children with access to education” is scheduled to be shown at the 18^th Annual Film Festival sponsored by the National Center for Jewish Films.

2015: Annette Libeskind Berkovits is scheduled to discuss In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags, and Soviet Communism her new biography about her father at the Center for Jewish History.

2016: In Olney, MD Rabbi David Golinkin, “who was named by the Jerusalem Post as one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world:  is scheduled is scheduled to speak on “Earthly or Heavenly? Will the real Jerusalem Please Stand Up?” at Shaare Tefilah.

2016: Congregation Rodeph Sholom is scheduled to host “a Shabbat Evening Celebration of Israel.”

2016: The Biennial Convention of the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America is scheduled to open in Baltimore, MD.

2016: International Hummus Day

http://thejewniverse.com/2016/just-in-time-for-international-hummus-day-survey-finds-israelis-are-really-really-into-hummus/

2016(5^th of Iyar, 5776): On the fifth of Iyar 5708 (May 14, 1948) the state of Israel was born.

2017(17^th of Iyar, 5777): Parashat Emor;

2017: International Humus Day celebrating a food that “93% of Israelis eat more than once a week.:

2017: Centerfielder Kevin Pillar today “became the American League leader in hits with 47, after a 3-for-4 performance against the Seattle Mariners.”

2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host Seudah Shlishit and havdalah following by a Lag B’Omer celebration completed with a bonfire, smores, singing and drinking.

2017: “A Story of the Land of Israel through the Lens: A History of Photography in Palestine-Israel” and “Israel’s Nationalism: The Original Conflict within Zionism and its Transformation in the Course of Its Implementation” are two of the presentations scheduled to be offered at today’s session of LIMMUDFSU NY.

2017: A monument honorig Captain Witold Pilecki, “non-Jewish Polish Army officer who reported on atrocities at Auschwitz after allowing himself to be captured and later fought in the resistance was unveiled in Warsaw” today. (JTA)

2017: The PIcon Union Project and the Jewish Music Commission of LA are scheduled to host “Niki Jacobs & Nikitov in Concert with special guest Mostly Kosher.”

 2017: Cedar Rapidians are marking the 101^stanniversary of the death of Shalom Aleichem by attending a production of Fiddler on the Roof performed by the students at Jefferson High School.  These talented youngsters have not only mastered song, dance and drama while doing all of the behind scenes work like building their own sets, thanks to the efforts of their teacher and director, Lynn Jensen they have learned about culture and customs in a time and  place that was unknown to them.  Thanks to Mrs. Jensen, there is a Cedar Rapids Shtetl that makes the community proud.

2018: The 26^th annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to end today.

2018: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Memento Park by Mark Sarvas, Healing From Hate: How Young Men Get Into – and Out of – Violent Extremism by Michael Kimmel and  Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer

2018: In Atlanta, The Breman Museum is scheduled to host the opening of the “Chasing Dreams: Baseball and Becoming American,” a “traveling exhibition that highlights the story of Jewish immigration and diverse communities and how they are integral to baseball’s role in teaching American Culture.”

2018: Yeshiva University Museum is scheduled to present a concert of music inspired by the City of Gold, featuring cellist Elad Kabilio and an ensemble of musicians from MusicTalks for a selection of music ranging from Ladino and Klezmer to Opera and Israeli song.

2018: The Washington Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end today.2018(28th of Iyar): Yom Yerushalayim

2018(28^th of Iyar): Eighty-three year old Lean Rose Napolin the Alfred University graduate who gained fame as the playwright who created the Broadway hit “Yentl” passed away today. (As reported by Neil Genzlinger)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/obituaries/leah-napolin-whose-yentl-adaptation-made-broadway-dies-at-83.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

2018: In Columbus, Ohio, Rachel Levin is among those taking part in Closing Day Religious School activities at Congregation Tifereth Israel.

2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “The Samuel Project” starring Hal Linden.

2019: In New Orleans, AIPAC is scheduled to host its “Annual Community Event with Bret Stephens” this evening.

2019: “In conjunction with the exhibit “Lest We Forget,”  the S.F. Civic Center, with ADL and the Israeli consulate, is  hosting a panel talk today on the recent rise of global anti-Semitism.”

2019: Eighty-nine year old Holocaust survivor Sophie Tajch Klisman “welcomed US Army veteran” Doug Harvey “to her suburban Detroit home today and thanked him for taking part in the 1945 liberation of the German concentration camp where she was being held.” (As reported by Mike Householder)

https://www.timesofisrael.com/holocaust-survivor-has-emotional-meeting-with-us-veteran-who-liberated-her-camp/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2019-05-14&utm_medium=email

2019: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host the “Orchestra of St. Luke’s Vivaldi Concerto” this evening.

2019: “The Goethe Institute, the Consulate General of Israel and the ADL in conjunction with ‘Lest We Forget,’ a Holocaust remembrance project” are scheduled o present “Anti-Semitism, Yesterday and Today,” a “panel discussion on the global resurgence of anti-Semitism and its relationship to white nationalism and other forms of hatred and bigotry.”

2019: The Yeshiva University Museum is scheduled to co-host curator Ilona Moradof’s tour of “Kindertransport – Rescuing Children on the Brink of War, illuminating the organized rescue efforts that brought thousands of children from Nazi Europe to Great Britain in the late 1930s”at the Center for Jewish History z:

2019: Millions of lovers of Sabra, “the official dip sponsor of the National Football League” can celebrate National Hummus day by chowing on this marvelous culinary creation

2020: As part of its Educator Workshop program, the National Museum of American Jewish History is scheduled to host “The Power of Objects: Enhance Your Virtual Teaching Through Objects.”

2020: The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience is scheduled to present “The Syrian-Jewish Community of NY: Similarities & Differences to other Jewish Communities.”

2020: As part of its on-line Pop-Up Israeli Restaurant series, the Streicker Center is present “Lior Lev Sercarz, the country’s most sought-after spice expert – author of Mastering Spice and owner of La Boîte – as he conjures up entirely new tastes with unique blends.

2020: As Jews deal with the effects of the endemic they also can digest the ADL’s report that “last year saw the most anti-Semitic incidents in the United States since at least 1979” since “the 2,107 incidents recorded in 2019 reflect a 12% increase from 2018 and are more than double the 942 incidents recorded just four years earlier, in 2015.”

2020: JDC is scheduled to host a Webinar, “as JDC Archives Fellow Emily Bengels discusses Interagency Efforts for Child Rescue and Immigration to the U.S. from 1939 to 1942.”

2020: In California, Rodef Sholom is scheduled to host via Zoom “Lunch and Learn for Lag BaOmer: Stories around the Campfire with Rabbi Elana Rosen-Brown.”2020: On-line the London School of Jewish Studies is scheduled to host Dr. Lindsay Simmonds as she explores Talmudic lessons offered by Dr. Ruth Calderon, author of Bride for One Night.

This Day, May 14, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 14

1141: As he journeyed towards Jerusalem, Yehuda Halevi set sail for Palestine today from Alexandria, Egypt. According to legend, Halevi was killed by an Arab horseman when as he reached his ultimate destination.

1288: Thirteen Jews in Troyes, France were burned at the stake by the inquisition

1316: Birthdate of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor. Charles viewed his Jewish subjects as “servi camerae” and issued numerous letters ordering that they not be harmed.  The title of Holy Roman Emperor sounded grand but had very limited power so these letters went unheeded for the most part.  However, when the Jewish community of Breslau was attacked, Charles ordered the killers to be arrested and punished for their crimes.

1482: As the Christians continued their push to take control all of the Iberian Peninsula King Ferdinand took command at Alhama during the Granada War.

1483: Coronation of Charles VIII of France ("Charles l'Affable"). In the second year of his reign, following accusations of usury, the inhabitants of Marseilles, the port city of the recently acquired territory of Provence, attacked the Jewish neighborhoods pillaging them and killing numbers of Jews in 1484 and again in the early months of 1485, leading to an exodus of Jews from the city, especially to Sardinia which became home to about 200 Jewish families of Marseilles. However, King Charles VIII was not inclined to conform to the popular demand of expelling the Jews from Provence. He decreed that all Jews wishing to leave should be allowed to leave Marseilles unharmed on condition they had fulfilled all their engagements with the Christians. The city authorities, on the other hand, were not prepared to let the Jews leave Marseilles with their property and took various measures in order to reduce their emigration, among others they organized an inventory of the Jewish property in Marseilles in 1486. The resulting protests of the Jews assured the royal intervention and a few additional years of protection. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 brought new Jewish inhabitants to Marseilles. In 1492 the Jewish community of Marseilles ransomed 118 Jews of Aragon captured by the pirate Bartholemei Janfredi, having paid the sum of 1,500 écus, which it borrowed from a Christian. Renewed anti-Jewish attacks in 1493 eventually led to the general expulsion of the Jews from Marseilles three years after Charles passed away in 1498.

1507: Hernando de Talavera, the archbishop of Granada and Confessor of Queen Isabela who came from a family of “Conversos” passed away today. (Editor’s note – he is but one example of how those with “Jewish Blood” held positions of power and responsibility much to the consternation of Old Christians in Spain.)

1572: Gregory XIII begins his papacy. “Gregory's policy toward the Jews cannot be distinctly characterized, since it swayed between relative favor and severity. Soon after his election, he protected the Jews in the ghetto of Rome who were in danger of being attacked by the soldiers. Further, an order issued by his notary threatened with hanging any non-Jew found in the ghetto or its vicinity without a valid reason. Gregory authorized once more moneylending with a maximum interest rate of 24%. He guaranteed the safe-conduct of Jews coming into Italy or passing through the country. Although Marranos were also able to benefit from this concession, Gregory nevertheless allowed the Marrano Joseph Saralbo, who had returned to Judaism in Ferrara, to be condemned to the stake in 1583. Gregory was also responsible for organizing regular compulsory missionary sermons, often with the collaboration of apostate preachers The Jewish community was compelled to defray the costs of this institution, as well as the expenses of the House of *Catechumens. The new prohibitions against Jewish physicians treating Christian patients contributed to the decline of medical science among Italian Jews. However, shortly before his death, Gregory intervened with the Knights of Malta to obtain the release of Jewish prisoners in their hands, even though the ransom he offered was lower than the sum demanded.” (As reported by Jewish Virtual Library)

1590: On this date the Sumptuary Laws were enacted aimed at the Jews of Casale (Italy). These were laws regulating what Jews may wear, how they may marry, what they may serve at a wedding, and all manner of what might be called social intercourse. These laws were commonplace in Europe and designed to humiliate and punish the Jews in the name of Christ

1610: Nine year old Louis XIII began his reign as king of France with his mother Marie de Medici, whose Italian family at this time “invited Jewish merchants to settle in Livorno” and granted them unlimited access to trade, serving as regent

1637: The Jews of Venice were denied the right to practice law

1643: Louis XIII, who in 1615 had “signed letters patent renewing the expulsion order against not only Jews but also those who profess and practice Judaism” and in 1632, while visiting Metz “granted the Jews letters of patent which declared their presence in the a necessity” passed away today

1643:  Four-year-old Louis XIV becomes King of France upon the death of his father, Louis XIII. Louis reigned until his death in 1715.  His record of dealing with the Jews was uneven, based primarily on financial needs and attempts by Catholic French merchants to use religion to oust their Jewish competitors.  Five years before his death, he issued a final ban against Jews living in France, a ban that was not fully enforced.

1726(13^thof Iyar, 5486):  Rabbi Moshe Darshan, author of Torat Ahsam, passes away.

1756(14^thof Iyar, 5516): Pesach Sheni was observed on the same day that the British Ambassador to Prussia was reassuring Frederick that France was not gaining influence with Russia which seems ludicrous when you consider that the Seven Years War, in which Russia and France would join ranks to fight the Prussians was only days away from beginning.

1761: Birthdate of the infant daughter of New York resident Moses B. Franks who died in fancy at the age nine months.

1775(14^thof Iyar, 5535): Pesach Sheini was observed four days after the Second Continental Congress, which would become the political voice of the American Revolution began meeting in Philadelphia and four days after the rebels seized Fort Ticonderoga, whose guns would eventually be used to drive the British from Boston, was seized by rebel militia.

1794(14^thof Iyar, 5554): Pesach Sheni was observed as the Polish and Lithuanian forces at Vilnius the home of a large and long-standing Jewish community led by the Vilna Gaon, prepared for a return of a Russian Army that was determined to put down the rebellion in this most recently acquired part of the Russian Empire.

1797(18^thof Iyar, 5557): Lag B’Omer is observed for the first time during the Presidency of John Adams.

1803: Birthdate of Salomon Munk, the German-born French Orientalist. In his formative years he was a trained in Torah and Talmud before moving on to Berlin where he became well versed in the classical languages and cultures.  He moved to France, because as a Jew, he could not be hired to work in his chosen profession.  In France, he developed an expertise in the works of Aristotle and Maimonides.

1807: The newly created grand duchy of Baden recognizes “Judaism as an officially tolerated religion” mean they are “emancipated.”  At the same time Jews are still exclude from being employed in the civil service.

1808: Birthdate of Leon Hyneman, a native of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania  who settled in Philadelphia where he was a leading Mason and the father of eight children including Leona Moss who gained fame as an actress using the stage name of Leona Moss and Alice  Hyneman, a noted author.

1811: In Georgetown, SC, Abraham Myers, a veteran of the American Revolution and his wife gave birth to 1833 West Point Graduate and veteran of the Seminole and Mexican wars Abraham Charles Myers, the husband of Marion Twiggs and Quartermaster General of the CSA who was the a descendant of Rabbi Moses Cohen, the father of Lt. General John Twiggs and the namesake for the city of Ft. Myers, FL.

1813(14^thof Iyar, 5573): Pesach Sheni is observed as American troops regroup and refit in New York after having defeated the Canadians at York during the War of 1812.

1817: Birthdate of Moses Polock “a well-known and somewhat eccentric antiquarian bookseller” who was the maternal uncle of Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach.

1819: In Bavaria, Moses and Sprinz Schmitt Anker gave birth to Mary Anker who became Mary Anker Bendel when she married Henry Bendel with whom she had nine children.

1820: Birthdate of Morris Rosenbach, the husband of Isabella H. Polock and father of Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach, his eighth and youngest child who became one of America’s leading collector of rare books and manuscripts.

1824: The Justices of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, meeting in Lancaster, a city that for one day in September, 1777 was capital of the nascent United States of America, "carefully perused and examined" the Constitution of the Jewish congregation known as Kaal Kadosh Mickve Israel (The Holy Congregation Hope of Israel) in Philadelphia which decrees that services in the Philadelphia synagogue shall always be according to the custom of the Portuguese Jews. The finding of Justices Tilghman, Gibson and Duncan was that this, and everything else in their proposed constitution, was lawful. It was a beautiful example of the novus ordo seclorum "the new order of the times" promised on the Great Seal of the United States. Let us strive to remember this in our day when this new order is under constant attack, both at home and abroad.

1828: Lewis Raphael married Rachel Mocatta today.

1832: Birthdate of Rudolf Lipschitz, the German mathematician who gave “his name to the Lipschitz continuity condition.”

1832: The premiere of “L'elisir d'amor” which would later be produced by Max Maretzek took place at the Teatro della Canobbiana, Milan

1843(14^thof Iyar, 5603): Pesach Sheni

1843(14^thof Iyar, 5603) Forty-two year old Amsterdam born and Columbia College educated physician Daniel Levy Maduro Peixotto, the “son of Moses Levy Maduro Peixotto who served as “president of the Willoughby Medical College in Cleveland before returning to New York where he practiced medicine until his death today.

https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/person/daniel-levy-maduro-peixotto

1846: Birthdate of Ernst Herter, the German sculptor who created the Lorelie Fountain, a memorial to Heinrich Heine that was unveiled in the Bronx because the city of his birth, Dusseldorf, rejected it due the prevailing anti-Semitic views in the “Fatherland.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorelei_Fountain#/media/File:Heine_Bronx_1.jpg

1847: Composer Fanny Mendelssohn passed away.  She was the granddaughter of Moses Mendelssohn.  Her grandfather was one of the founders of what would become Reform Judaism.  Unfortunately, Fanny was not Jewish.

1853: Word reached the United States today, as reported in the New York Times,that Holy Week had seen outbreaks of violence in Jerusalem. Greeks and Armenians fought with each in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher while 24 “missionaries of the London Protestant Association” had “a scuffle with the Jews in the streets of Jerusalem.”

1853:  According to reports published today, J. Lewis Levy Esq., who is Jewish, has been returned as guardian of the Cathedral City of Rochester (U.K.)

1853: The New York Times reported that the Earl of Aberdeen has told the House of Lords that he had changed his mind about the Jewish Disabilities Bill.  Two years ago he had voted against the bill.  Now he was prepared to vote for it because “he regarded the exclusion of the Jews from civil privileges as a remnant of the spirit of persecution which prevailed in former times throughout Christendom.”

1854: The American Society for Meliorating the Conditions of the Jews celebrated its sixth anniversary with a meeting tonight at the Reformed Dutch Church in New York City.  The organization is dedicated to converting Jews to Christianity.  The Society is convinced that the Jews of the United States are ripe for conversion.  However according to its own figures there are more than 40,000 Jews living in the United States and the society has successfully converted 79 of them.

1855(26th of Iyar, 5615): Eighty-eight year old French banker Beer Léon Fould the son of Jacob Bernard Fould and the father of Achille Fould, the French Finance Minister for Napoleon III passed away today in Paris.

1858: In Andover, CT, Susan and Joel Foote Bingham gave birth to Theodore Alfred 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.

1859: Isaias W. Hellman and his brother Herman W. Hellman arrived in Los Angles from Bavaria and went subsequently went to work in a dry goods store owed by their cousins.

1859: Mr. R. J. de Cordova, a well-known humorist is scheduled to give a lecture this morning at Temple Emanu-El in New York City.  Mr. de Cordova is scheduled to give a lecture every third Saturday for the rest of the year.

1861(5^thof Sivan, 5621): Erev Shavout

1861: Birthdate of Alfred J. Cohen, the native of Birmingham, England who moved to the United States in 1887 and as Alan Dale became a leading and often “despised” theatre critic.

1861: A copy of the War Department order announcing Major Mordecai's resignation reached the arsenal at Watervliet, NY which forced Mordecai to relinquish command to his subordinate before his unnamed replacement had arrived.



1864(8th of Iyar, 5624):Baron Salomon de Rothschild died in Paris today at the age of 29, only two years after his marriage and less than a year after the birth of his daughter, Helene. He was buried at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in the family vault. Of his death, the Goncourt brothers wrote "Cabarrus, the Rothschild's doctor, told Saint-Victor that the young Rothschild who died the other day really died of the excitement of gambling on the stock exchange."

1864: Emma Mordecai had a dispute with her sister-in-law Rosina over reports of a victory by the Confederates under General Lee.  Rosina, who was not Jewish, doubted the report.  Emma, who was Jewish and was an ardent Southern patriot, insisted that the report must be true.  Mordecai's outburst was intemperate since she was a refugee staying at her sister-in-law's Virginia farm

1865(18^thof Iyar, 5625): Lag B’Omer

1865: In Galicia, Marcus Langbank and Rachel Langbank gave birth to Dr. Lucian Mayer Langbank.

1867: Birthdate of Kurt Eisner, author and critic turned politician.  Eisner opposed the Kaiser during World War I and became the first democratically elected leader of Bavaria after the war.  He was assassinated in 1919.

1869(4^thof Sivan, 5629): Sixty-five year old “Talmudist and bibliographer” Gabriel Jacob Polak, whose works include “Dibre Kodesh, a Dutch-Hebrew dictionary passed away in Amsterdam today.

1872: In response to a U.S. Senate resolution of March 28, today, President Grant sent to the Senate copies of all correspondence regarding “the persecution and oppression of the Israelites of Romania.” The correspondence consisted of a series of letters from Benjamin F. Peixotto, the American Consul at Bucharest and Hamilton Fish, the U.S. Secretary of State.  In the correspondence, Peixotto described the attacks on the Jews and the failure of the government to punish the attackers.  He also described the efforts made by the representatives of several European governments, except for the Russians, who attempted to intercede with the government of Prince Michael on behalf of the Jews.  For his part, Secretary Fish wrote to Peixotto expressing his support for any action that might “avert or mitigate further harshness toward” toward the Jews living in Romania. [Editor Note – The Grant Administration’s support of the Jews of Romania is but one of several actions that would tend to show that Grant was not an anti-Semite and that the order of expulsion he issued during the Civil War was an aberration and a mistake he regretted rather than a sign of deep character flaw.]

1873(17^thof Iyar, 5633): Seventy-six year old Gideon Brach the Austrian physician and surgeon who was the nephew of Moritz Steinschneider passed away today.

1873: The New York Times reviewed Sketches of Jewish Life and Historyby Henry Gersoni which was published by the Hebrew Orphan Asylum Printing Establishment.

1875(9^thof Iyar, 5635): Seventy-five year old linguist and literary historian Gottfried Bernhardy passed away today.

1876: Birthdate of Etta Karesh Levin, the wife of Julius Levin and the mother of Sidney Levin who after her death in 1952 was buried in KKBI Cemetery in Charleston

1877: One day after he had passed away, Solomon George Collins the son of “Isaac Van Kollem and Maria Mozes,” the husband of Catherine Isaacs and the father of Adelaide and William Collins was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1879: An article subtitled “Frenchmen of Foreign Origin: Distinguished Instances of Aliens Attaining Position in France” published today provides background information on several non-native Frenchmen who rose to prominence in France and who played key role in the life of the country.  Of the Jews who fit into this category, the article mentions “the ancestor of the bankers Pereire [who] was a Portuguese Jew who introduced into France the teaching of the deaf and dumb; Bisschoffsheim, another banker is a self-made Jew…Bauer a Hungarian convert from Judaism [who] was court preacher to Napoleon III…Salomon Munk, another orientalist was a German Jew. So too was Jules Oppert, whose religion obliged him to seek a professorship in France.” [Editor’s Note – The references to Munk and Oppert are self-explanatory, although the column makes one mistake.  It was Munk, not Oppert, who came to France because his religion precluded him from being hired in his native Germany.  Bauer probably refers to Abbe Bauer who reportedly trained as a Rabbi before converting to Roman Catholicism.  Bisschoffsheim is probably Raphael Louis Bischoffsheim, the banker whose philanthropy included the founding of the Nice Observatory. Pierre probably refers to Emile and Isaac Pierre the 19^thcentury bankers of Sephardic origin, who were the sons of Jacob Rodrigues Pereira, who was “one of the inventors of a manual language for the deaf.”



1879: Mary Nolhes swore out a complaint in the Essex Market Police Court today “charging her husband, Joseph, a Polish Jew with abandonment.”  The complaint was dismissed after the court determined that Joseph was “a henpecked husband” who had been abandoned by his wife.  Gustav Diner, a “young and muscular man” who was the complainant’s brother, left the court with the couple.  Once outside of the building, Diner, who apparently thought he could not be seen by anybody from the court “began to pound his brother-in-law unmercifully.” A police officer named Ryan “collared Ryan” and took him back to Court where he was jailed on charges of assault and battery.

1882: In Bloomington, Illinois several members of the Jewish community met at the B’nai B’rith hall to discuss the organization of congregation which would be founded later in the year as Moses Montefiore Congregation with Aaron Livingston as President.

1884(19th of Iyar, 5644): Forty year old Karel Abraham Wertheim, the son of Johannes Jonas Wertheim and Marie Rosenick and the husband of Henriette van Heukelom passed away today in the Netherlands.

1884: Max Shloss and Rosa Shnerman were married today in Des Moines Iowa.

1885: Birthdate of conductor and composer Otto Klemperer.  Born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) Klemperer was a child prodigy taking his first music lessons at the age of four.  Like so many of his generation, Klemperer had two lives.  The first was in Germany, the second in the United States.  His musical contributions to his native land were recognized by President Hindenburg who gave him the Goethe Medal "for his contributions to the advancement of German Culture."  A few years later, in 1933, the Nazis confiscated his property and issued a warrant for his arrest.  Klemperer came to the Klemperer came to the United States in 1934 with the reputation as a world-famous conductor.  Over the years he led orchestras in New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh and was director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra for six years.  He also continued his distinguished career as a composer.  He died in 1973 at the age of 88.

1886: Birthdate of Polish born Dutch businessman Abraham Icek Tuschinski who built several movie theatres in the Netherlands and was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.

1888: Two days after he had passed away, Jamaica native Charles Emanuel Morrice, the “fifth son of Phoebe and Samuel Morrice” was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemtery.”

1889(13^thof Iyar, 5649): Thirty-five year old Sophie Walter, the wife of Mortiz Walter and the daughter of Joseph and Babette Seligman passed away today.

1889(13th of Iyar, 5649): Samuel Hirsch, a major Reform religious philosopher and rabbi, passed away in Chicago, Illinois. Born in 1815 at “Thalfang, (Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany (formerly part of Prussia), he received his training at Metz. He attended the University of Bonn, the University of Berlin, and the University of Leipzig. He first became rabbi at Dessau in 1838 but was forced to resign in 1841 because he promoted a radically liberal form of Judaism, later to become known as classic German Reform Judaism. In 1843 he published his "Die Messias-Lehre der Juden in Kanzelvorträgen" and "Religionsphilosophie der Juden." In 1843 he was appointed chief rabbi of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg by King William II of the Netherlands. During this period he published his "Die Humanität als Religion." He took an active part in the annual rabbinical conferences held at Brunswick (1844), Frankfurt am Main (1845), and Breslau (1846). In 1844 he published his "Reform im Judenthum." Having received a call from the Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1866, he resigned his post in Europe and moved to the United States. There he succeeded Dr. David Einhorn. From his arrival onward he became closely identified with, and an open advocate of, radical Reform. In 1869 he was elected president of the rabbinical conference held in Philadelphia, at which the principles of Reform Judaism were formulated. In that year he engaged also in numerous ritual and doctrinal controversies. Hirsch remained officiating rabbi of the Philadelphia congregation for twenty-two years, resigning in 1888, after having spent fifty years of his life in the ministry. Moving to Chicago, he took up his abode there with his son, Emil G. Hirsch. During his rabbinate in Philadelphia Hirsch organized the Orphans' Guardian Society, and was the founder of the first branch in the United States of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Hirsch is best known as the author of the "Religionsphilosophie," a work written from the Hegelian point of view, but for the purpose of vindicating the claim of Judaism to the rank denied it by Hegel, the rank of an "absolute religion." In this book he proved himself to be an original thinker (see "Allg. Zeit. des Jud." 1895, pp. 126 et seq.). His "Katechismus der Israelitischen Religion" was also constructed on original lines; he considered the Biblical legends to be psychological and typical allegories, and the ceremonies of Judaism to be symbols of underlying ideas. From this attitude his Reform principles are derived. He denied that Judaism is a law; it is Lehre ("teaching" or "lore") but is expressed in symbolic ceremonies that may be changed in accordance with historic development. He was the first to propose holding Jewish services on Sunday instead of the traditional Jewish Sabbath Shabbat. He contributed to the early volumes of The Jewish Times (1869-1878). His principal works were first issued in Germany, among them What is Judaism? (1838), sermons (1841), and Religious Philosophy of the Jews (1843).”

1890: Birthdate of London born American munitions maker, Republican political leader and Special Assistant Secretary of Labor Murray Garsson who married Rose Levy Garsson after the death of Rose Garsson and who after becoming a munitions maker was convicted of war profiteering.

1891: Claims have were filed by many of the unsecured creditors of Levy Brothers & Co with the Sheriff today

1891: In Iassy, Rumania, Morris and Marie Kauffman gave birth to University of Berlin trained economist and health educator Savel Simand who in 1913 came to the United States where he wrote for the New York Times, lectured at Yale, Harvard and Columbia while serving as the “administrative director of the Bellevue-Yorkville Health Demonstration and director of public education for the New York City Health Deaprtment.

1891: Solomon Crizar, a Polish Jew was still in custody today facing charges for setting fired to a tenement on Johnson Avenue in Brooklyn, NY

1891: A detachment of troops has been sent from Athens to Corfu to restore order after an outbreak of violence that has resulted in the death of 2 Jews and all businesses owned by the Jews closed. At the same time the Prefect of Corfu has been summoned to Athens to explain the outbreak of violence

1892: In Germany, the liberal newspapers express the hope that the libel action brought by Loewe & Co against Rector Ahlwardt, the well-known Jew-baiter will put an end to his false claim that this Jewish firm supplied defective rifles to the army.

1892: Mrs. Schloss purchased a picture embroidered by a little girl from the Hebrew Orphan Asylum on the last night Actors’ Fund Fair.

1892(17^thof Iyar, 5652): Fifty-two year Asher Simchah  Weissmann, who in 1889 founded  a German periodical, "Monatsschrift für die Litteratur und Wissenschaft des Judenthum," which was issued with a Hebrew supplement passed away today in Vienna.

1892: “Columbia Likely to Get More Books” published today described the successful efforts of Professor Richard Gottheil and E.R.A. Seligman to secure the books in the library of Temple Emnau-El for Columbia College.  The school already has a Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages.

1893: Harold Frederic sent a cable from London “announcing that the exodus of Jews from Poland had actually begun and that the refugees were already arriving in America.”

1893: It was learned today that many of the Jews arriving at Ellis Island from Hamburg were not German Jews, but Polish Jews who had spent the winter the German port.

1893: “New Jersey Religious Bodies” published today provides a picture of denominational membership in the Garden State. There are 19 Orthodox congregations with 2,521 members and 5 Reform congregations with 1,755 members scattered through the state.  The total number of Jews in the state is thought to be closer to 15,000 than the published 4,276. The discrepancy is created by the fact that most congregations tend to just count the head of the family instead of all family members.

1893: It was reported today that in Germany “the ultimate result of the elections will be a Reichstag considerably more reactionary than the last which will vote for the army bill in return for legislation” advancing the cause of anti-Semitism.

1893: It was reported today form London that “it turns out that the expulsion of Jews from Poland has been going on longer and on a gar large than scale that “previously suspected and that while “Sir Julian Goldsmith and one other official of the Jewish Board of Guardians” knew about it “nothing has been published” in the local press about the matter.

1894: In Denver, CO, Council No. 6 of the National Council of Jewish Women was organized today with a membership of 98 led by Mrs. C.S. Benjamin as President

1894: Two days after she had passed away, 60 year old Hannah Levy, “the daughter of Hart and Julia Levy” was buried today at the “West Ham Jewish Cemetery.”

art

1894: Birthdate of Jacob Meyer Levy, the native of the Ukraine who immigrated to Palestine at the age of 19, the Israeli educator and author whose works included five volumes of history textbooks “and the translation of four of French-Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson's books into Hebrew.”

1894: The London correspondent of the New York Times reported today that the Jewish immigrants being forced to leave Russia face an additional challenge – an outbreak of Cholera which has spread from southwestern Russia to areas near Hamburg and Riga which are the ports of embarkation used by these emigrants



1894:  A summary of the statistics that first appeared in the “new journal, the Rundschau” published by “the Jew-baiter” Herman Ahlwardt that the Jewish population in Berlin has gone from 6,500 in 1840, to 30,000 in 1870 to 75,000 in 1890 and that “46 per cent of all the houses in Berlin belong to Jews.” (This compares to a total population of 322,626 in 1840, 826,341 in 1871 and 1,578, 794 in 1890)

1895: Based on a review published today, “Oliver Twist” is no longer popular with New York theatre goers. Among other things, “the audience refused to take Fagin seriously” even though H. G. Carleton played the part with great skill.  Apparently, a play featuring an evil Jew no longer has the allure it did when Dickens wrote the novel on which the play is based.

1895: In Paris, Gaston Michel Calmann-Lévy married Hélène Calmann-Lévy

1895: Two days after he had passed away, 47 year old Nathan Isaacs, the husband of Louisa Lyons with whom he had had five children was buried today in the United Kingdom/

1895: Birthdate of Lew Lehr, the native of Philadelphia, PA comedian and writer in the pioneering days of film and radio whose works included Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=19500307&id=M5EpAAAAIBAJ&sjid=oOUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6834,3478241&hl=en

1896: Birthdate of Martin Riesenburger, the Berlin born dentist who survived the Shoah to help rebuild the Jewish community in post-war Germany.

1897(12th of Iyar, 5657): Seventy-five year old opera impresario Max Maretzek passed away at Pleasant Plains, New York

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10401-maretzek-max

1898: “Stories of the Ghetto” published today provides a review of The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto by Abraham Cahan.

1898: The Rabbi of Temple Israel in Harlem Dr. M. H. Harris presided over today’s events marking “the celebration of the 25^th anniversary of the founding of Temple Israel of Harlem and the 10^th anniversary of the dedication of the present edifice” which included an address by Dr. Emil G. Hirsh, the Chairman of the Semitic Literature Department at the University of Chicago on “Eternal Judaism.”

1898: At Jefferson Barracks, MO, during the Spanish-American War, among those who were mustered into the 3^rd Missouri Volunteer Infantry Privates Morris Franklin, Samuel P. Bachar, Hugh L. Herzberg, Mark Bidez, Robert Samuels, Max Cohen, Joseph D. Meyers, William Levin, Harry Heller and Corporal David A. Goodman, all from Kansas City, MO was as Privates Clarence Leftwich and Edgar W. Marks of Independence, MO.

1898: During the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired the USS Celtic, “a stores ship” on which Lt. Jr. Grade Stanford Moses served during the Philippine-American War.

1899: Three days after she had passed away, Esther Blashka, the wife of Isaac Blashka was buried to in London at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery.”

1899: Reverend Madison C. Peters of the Bloomingdale Reformed Church gave the second lecture in his series “Justice to the Jew” in which he is trying to correct many of the inaccurate conceptions about this “race that has been maligned.”

1899: In Krefeld, chemist Friedrich Auerbach, the son of Leopold Auerbach and his wife gave birth to zoologist and geneticist Charlotte “Lottie” Auerbach.

1899: “Russian Plans Against Jews” published today described various anti-Semitic policies being pursued by the Czar’s government, the first of which was the prohibition of Jews being in St. Petersburg, the nation’s capital.  The ban applies to foreign Jews including those from France, Russia’s primary military ally.

1899: “Opposed to Zionism” published today provided a summary of the views on Rabbi Samuel Schulman that first appeared in the Menorah in which the Reform  cleric “the movement as an outgrowth of Jewish despair” which is an “interruption of the work of education and Americanization of the Russian Jews” in the New York City.

1900: The 16^th annual report of the Hebrew Technical Institute showed “that the past year was an unusually successful for the institute and James H. Hoffman, the schools president was reported to have said that one of those most gratifying facts was that “not one of the graduates of the institute is unemployed” and that “the wages received by the graduates average from $5.25 per week for beginners to $25 and upward for the more experienced ones.”

1901: As a financial crisis threatens a “serious smash” in the London Stock Exchange Jacob Schiff was among the Directors of the National City Bank who met to discuss the matter which centers around the Northern Pacific Railway.

1902: Italian General Giuesppe Ottolenghi, a native of Lombardy was appointed Minister of War today.

1903: As “funds for the aid of the sufferers in Kishineff, Russia, continue to come to the committees having the matter in hand, and increase not only in number, but in amount,” Arnold Kohn, Chairman of the Central Relief Committee, said today that $2,000 had been contributed from the east side alone during the day, and that the checks coming from places outside New York City indicated that the sum total would be far beyond expectation.

1904: In Bern, Switzerland Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić gave birth to their second child and first son Hans Albert Einstein.

1904: Herzl writes to the Austrian Foreign Ministry. He reports on this audience with Agenor Goluchowsky, the Austrian Foreign Minister.

1905: “Some soldiers belonging to the Fifty-third Battalion of the infantry reserved pillaged several Jewish houses on Nichols Street” in Kishineff.

1905: It was reported today that the Kaiser, on learning that “Goldschmidt Rothschild, a grandson of the late Baron Rothschild of Frankfort, after having served for a year in a guard regiment was turned down for a commission (presumably because he was Jewish) appointed Rothschild a Court Chamberlain which to the officer’s staff of the regiment taking the hint and offering him a commission.

1908(13th of Iyar, 5668): Max "Kid Twist" Zwerbach, a New York gangster was gunned down.

1909: Samuel Elfenbein, the son of “Moses and Rosa Elfenbein and his wife Celia Elfenbein gave birth to Phillip P Elfenbein, the husband of Sarah Elain Elfenbein.

1910: A pogrom was perpetrated by a nationalist organization against the cultural institutions of the Russian Jews in Buenos Aires.

1911: Eighteen year old Morris Kolsky who gained fame as cinematographer Richard Freyer arrived in New York “on board the steamship Majestic.”

1911: One day after he had passed away, 40 year old Nery Leuria, the husband of Bertha Leuria with whom he had had six children was buried today at the “Belfast Jewish Cemetery” in Northern Ireland.

1912: The Tomb of Samuel Manasseh Ben Israel was restored at the Middleburg Portuguese Cemetery in Holland.

1912: In London an exhibition of the work of pupils from the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts and Jerusalem’s Evelina de Rothschild School came to a close today

1913: New York Governor William Sulzer approves the charter for the Rockefeller Foundation, which begins operations with a $100 million donation from John D. Rockefeller. Governor Sulzer enjoyed support among the Jewish community of New York City and signed The 1913 New York State Civil Rights Act into law.

1913: Mrs. B.M. Engelhard is scheduled to be installed as President of the Baron Hirsch Woman’s Club this afternoon in the Banquet Hall of the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago.

1913: Birthdate of Chelsea, Massachusetts native Ben “Red” Kramer, the standout guard and forward for Long Island University in the 1930 who went on to play professional ball from 1938 to 1945.

1914(18^thof Iyar, 5674): Lag B’Omer

1914: In an example of how Jewish culture was an integral part of Western civilization “Josephslegende (The Legend of Joseph) a ballet based on the Biblical story of “Potiphar’s Wife” premiered today at the Paris Opera.

1915: During WWI, the Alliance Israelite Universelle announced that it would continue all activities in its institutions in the Ottoman Empire.

1915: In expressing his support for President Wilson, “A.L. Shiplikoff, Secretary of the United Hebrew Trades said…’The 300,000 Jews represented by the United Hebrew Trades in this city are in favor of he abolition of war and the permanent establishment of international peace.”

1915: Plans were announced today for a public mass meeting in Minneapolis “to ask the Governor of Georgia to commute Leo M. Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment.

1915: “The Zionist Association and its affiliated organizations in America and England” are appeals “to obtain the State Department…to obtain the release from the detention camp at Ruhbleben near Berlin of Israel Cohen, Secretary of the International of Zionist Organization” who is the author ofJewish Life in Modern Times and was interned at the beginning of the war” because he was a British subject.





1916: As of today the American Jewish Relief Committee of which Felix M. Warburg is the treasurer had received additional contributions including $24 from the Menorah Society of Penn State University, $25 from the Cairo Thread Works and $100 from Zeta Beta Tau.

1916: “After Henry Morgenthau” who had just resigned as the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey “told of the pitiable plight of the outlawed Armenians at a mass meeting in Carnegie Hall this afternoon” those in the audience “started a $5,000,000 relief fund, with contributions of more than $30,000.”

1916: “At a meeting of the members of the American Jewish Committee held today at the Hotel Astor…a resolution was adopted to authorize the committee to unite with other Jewish societies for the calling of a congress of Jewish societies in June for he purposed of obtaining full rights for the Jews of all lands and the abrogation of all laws discriminating against them.”

1916: In Philadelphia, PA, the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War held a national conference where it was reported that the organization had raised $1, 074, 386.

1917: The Columbia Menorah Society sponsored a concert of Jewish music this evening at the Horace Mann Auditorium at Columbia University with the proceeds going to Jewish War Relief.

1917: The Cantor’s Association of American which had been founded in 1908 held its 8^thannual meeting under the leadership of President Solomon Baum.

1917: Dr. J.L. Magnus is scheduled to attend today’s meeting of the Chicago Rabbinical Association at the Stratford Hotel.

1918: “To Pray for Victory” published today described the call sent out by the Union the Orthodox Rabbis signed by Rabbis Moses S. Margolies, Solomon E. Jaffe and Israel Rosenberg among announcing that in accord with President Wilson request for a day of prayer and fasting on May 30 all synagogues would remain open for worship on that day and the fast would be treated in the same manner as official fast days on the Jewish Calendar.

1919: Today, “The University College of Wales established the world’s first Chair in International Politics with Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, a Christian who became an avid Zionist  as its first professor  

1920(26th of Iyar, 5680): Sixty year old “David Kessler, one of the leading Yiddish actors in the United States and the manager of Kessler’s Second Avenue Theatre” passed away this afternoon at Beth Israel Hospital.

1923: A check for $10,000 was handed by Mr. Felix Warburg to Dr. Chaim Weizmann just before the former sailed for Europe.

1923: “Until its reorganization today, the Oberat” the supreme council that directed the affairs of the Jewish community “was under state control

1923: It was reported today that The Committee on Higher Degrees of Columbia University has accepted the dissertation of Dr. Mordecai Saltes entitled “The Yiddish Press As A Force in America.” (JTA)

1923: A radical change in money raising methods for National Jewish philanthropies was proposed at the National Conference of the Jewish Social Service which began its sessions this afternoon here at the Hotel Washington. The proposal, made by Mr. Samuel A. Goldsmith of the Bureau of Jewish Social Research, New York, on behalf of the Committee of Nine appointed last year was that instead of these institutions obtaining their maintenance and other funds by direct, personal solicitation, a national budget be established based on the requirements of these institutions. (As reported by JTA)

1924: In Berlin, Alfred Schuman, a German Christian who converted to Judaism and his wife Hedwig née Rothholz Schuman gave birth to jazz musician Hein Jakob “Coco” Schumann who at 19 was shipped to Theresienstadt “where he became a member of the Ghetto Swingers” before being shipped to Auschwitz where he beat death a lived until liberation despite having contracted the deadly spotted fever.

1924: The first conference of the General Zionist movement concluded its meeting in Jerusalem. It decided to establish a General Zionist Federation to amalgamate all centrist factions in Palestine.

1924: Establishment of the city of Bnei Brak.  Bnei Brak is mentioned in the Bible as one of the cities of the tribe Dan.  Later it was famous as the site of Rabbi Akiva’s academy.  The city is mentioned in the Haggadah as the place where the all-night Seder of the Rabbinic sages took place.  The modern city was founded by charedi Jews from Poland and is famous for its yeshivot and Chassidic communities. Bnei Brak is northwest of Tel Aviv.

1925(10^thof Iyar, 5685): Sixty-seven year old investment banker Abraham G. Becker, the Warsaw born son of Nathan and Henrietta Schaffner Backer, the husband of Katherine Friedman Becker and father of Margaret, Helen, Louise and James Becker who in 1865 came to Chicago where he rose from being “an errand for the German National” to heading A.G. Becker while serving as “a trustee of the Hebrew Union College and Sinai Temple and director of the Jewish Charities of Chicago passed away today.

1925: In Chicago, Etta and Samuel Handmaker gave birth to Herman Handmaker

1925: Birthdate of Hungarian born historian Tibor Szamuely who served with the Red Army during World War II, served 18 months in a labor camp on espionage charges and produced a “major study of Soviet history, The Russian Tradition.

http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/tibor_szamuely_(historian)

1925: In New York City, Max Lowenthal and Eleanor Mack, the niece of Judge Julian Mack gave birth Columbia Law School trained attorney John Lowenthal, the WW II Navy veteran who was the defense attorney for Alger Hiss.

1925:  Birthdate of Yuval Ne’eman founder of Israel’s space program and a key figure in Israel’s nuclear program. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/may/15/obituaries.guardianobituaries

1926: Birthdate of Allen Mandelbaum, whose fluid, sensitive English version of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” stamped his reputation as one of the world’s premier translators of Italian and classical poetry (As reported by William Grimes)

1927: In Brussels, Max Stuckgold, an engineer and his wife Marsha who “were Jewish immigrants from Poland” gave birth to Julien Joseph Stuckgold who became a major New York real estate developer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/realestate/commercial/julien-studley-real-estate-broker-who-began-career-in-a-bedroom-dies-at-88.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

1927: Birthdate of Detroit native Seymour Austen Lipkin, the grandson of a professional violinist and the son of a doctor who played with the Doctors’ Symphony Orchestra who became a leading conductor and pianist.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/12008392/Seymour-Lipkin-pianist-obituary.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/arts/music/seymour-lipkin-pianist-and-conductor-dies-at-88.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

1928(24th of Iyar): Novelist Mordecai David Brandstaetter passed away today

1929: In Winnipeg, Canada, Rebecca and John Weidman gave birth to Barbara Weideman, who as Barbara Branden, the wife of Larry Branden “helped popularize Ayn Rand’s philosophy” but then upset her acolytes with an unauthorized biography of the “queen of self-interest.”

1929: Birthdate of William Jay Adler, Brooklyn born author and editor whose works included What to Name Your Jewish Baby. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/business/bill-adler-writer-editor-and-compiler-of-books-dies-at-84.html?hpw&rref=obituaries

1930: In Norwalk, CT, Henry Abrahams and “the former Minnie Koffman” gave birth to Elizabeth Abrahams who gained fame as “ceramic artist Elizabeth Woodman” and the husband of artist George Woodman.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/obituaries/betty-woodman-dies-spun-pottery-into-multimedia-art.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

1930: In New York, Ruth and Sol Peterman gave birth to famed opera singer Roberta Peters http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/peters-roberta

1930: Dr. Leon Pazi, who has just returned from Palestine, cheered delegates to the Argentine Zionist Congress which opened here today, with an optimistic report of the work of the Jewish colonies in Palestine. Zionists from all parts of Argentine are in attendance. Assurance of the support and sympathy of the people of Argentine for Zionism was given the congress by Senator Molinari while reports on the work of the Buenos Aires Zionist Federation during the riots in Palestine last Summer and on the aid being given Zionism by Zionists in Argentine were read to the delegates by the president of the Buenos Aires Zionist Federation. (As reported by JTA)

1931: In New York City,Eugene Picker, “a film pioneer and movie theatre executive of Loew’s Theaters” and his wife gave birth to David Picker, the Dartmouth graduate who “served as President and Chief Executive Officer for United Artists, Paramount, Lorimar and Columbia Pictures.”

1931(27th of Iyar, 5691): Playwright and stage producer David Belasco passed away.

http://www.broadway.tv/broadway-features-reviews/haunting-broadway-the-ghost-of-david-belasco

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Belasco.html

1933(18th of Iyar, 5693): Lag B’Omer

1933: Indignation against the Hitler regime in Germany is not confined to British Jewry but is shared by the British public of all classes and opinions, Leonard Montefiore, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association, told members of the Board of Jewish Deputies today

"We also enjoy the sympathy of the British Government, but the Government has other problems like disarmament and the World Economic Conference," he pointed out. "Nevertheless, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg realized the universal condemnation of British opinion."

The Archbishop of Canterbury has promised to speak at a public meeting in London if it is arranged as really representative of the country, Mr. Montefiore announced.

He declared the statement that Jewish soldiers in the war and Jews whose sons were killed in battle were exempt from dismissal from their positions in Germany was "pure camouflage. I met men possessing the Iron Cross debarred from the courts by administrative chicanery," he said.

The Joint Foreign Committee, which was organized by the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association to conduct foreign affairs, was urged by Simon Marks, who has been prominent in Zionist fund-raising activities, to ask the aid of Dr. Chaim Weizmann, former president of the World Zionist Organization, "in conducting the wider political work ahead." In reply, Nathan Laski declared that the Joint Foreign Committee had consulted Dr. Weizmann several times but that the organization cannot hand him the leadership, which, he said, would be abdication. He said the committee has also been in contact with Lord Reading and Sir Herbert Samuel (As reported by JTA)

1933: Boxer (and future mob boss) Mickey Cohen fought his last bout today in Tijuana.

1934: A natural disaster occurs in Tiberius when cloudbursts cause flooding and rockfalls. Homes are swept into Lake Kinneret.

1935: A court in Bern, Switzerland, pronounced the German edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a forgery.

1936:  Viscount Edmund Allenby passed away.  As General Allenby, he led the Allied forces that liberated Eretz Israel, including Jerusalem, from the Ottoman Turks.  Allenby’s victory gave practical meaning to the Balfour Declaration by creating facts on the ground.  Furthermore, a Jewish Legion fought under Allenby’s command and played a central role in some of the fighting with the Turks.

1936: A large Jewish delegation met with the British High Commissioner and discussed the worsening conditions in the country brought on by continued Arab attacks and violence. The Mayor of Tel Aviv questioned the ability of the British to deal with the situations and leaders from Hederah said they could mobilize 150,000 men to protect the Jews and their interests.  The High Commissioner praised the “exemplary Jewish behavior and self-control…He requested the Jews to fortify themselves with more patience.”

1937: Today’s March of Time included an “episode” describing pressure being brought by the Worker’s Alliance led by David Lesser on U.S. legislators to combat unemployment.”

1937: The Government today rushed police reinforcements into the Polesia province as anti-Semitic rioting in the town of Brzesc (formerly known as Brest-Litovsk), which caused injuries to 50 Jews and an estimated $400,000 damage, gave signs of spreading to neighboring villages.

Windows were broken, shops looted and Jews attacked in the streets in the rioting which occurred after a policeman had been fatally wounded, according to an official statement, by a Jewish butcher who resisted arrest for operating an unlicensed slaughterhouse. The butcher was wounded in the foot by a bullet.

The excesses raged all day and into the evening before the police, aided by reinforcements from Warsaw, got control. Three Jews were seriously injured. Most of the Jewish shops in the town were demolished and others closed their doors.

Many peasants attending market day in Brzesc participated in the rioting, dragging Jews from hansoms and beating them in the streets. Main trading streets suffered most from vandalism and looting. Market, May, Dluga and Dombrowska streets were thickly carpeted with glass from broken windows and destroyed merchandise.

Gazeta Polska and other Government newspapers said the anti-Semitic mob did not pillage the Jewish shops but only "threw Jewish goods out into the street where they were destroyed, while meat and bread taken from Jews were distributed gratis to poor Christians."

Polish newspapers said the pillaging began after a Jewish mob attacked police who arrived to confiscate illegally-slaughtered kosher meat (outside the strict Government quota for kosher meat) of the Jewish butcher Isaac Szczerbowski.

The policeman, Stefan Kedziora, was stabbed and later died in the hospital. The Union of Christian Tradesmen of Brzesc announced that shops of its members would be closed during his funeral.

Panic was still great today among the 25,000 Jews of the city. Deputy Emil Sommerstein left for Brzesc this morning while Senator Moses Schorr obtained assurances from the Interior Ministry that a special police force had been sent to prevent further outbreaks. The city known to Jews as Brisk, has a population of over 50,000.

Stringent restrictions on kosher slaughtering which went into effect Jan. 1 under a law enacted by Parliament, empowering the authorities to set monthly quotas of cattle to be slaughtered for Jewish consumption, have, in some cases, resulted in "bootleg" slaughterhouses being established.

Meanwhile, peasants in Zaista, near Malkin, attacked a group of anti-Semitic National Radicals who had rioted against Jews. The terrorists, known as Naras, called on the peasants to join in breaking windows of Jewish shops, but the peasants drove the rioters from the village.

The peasants later rebuked the Jews for closing their shops during the disturbances, declaring "the action is likely to incite further attacks." The peasants asked the Jews to reopen their shops, promising them protection. (As reported by JTA)

1937: Jews were forbidden today to give performances of Beethoven, Mozart and Goethe on the ostensible grounds that they must be allowed "to develop their own spiritual and creative genius."

Explanation of the ban was offered by Hans Hinkel, Nazi Commissar for Jewish Cultural Affairs, who said:

"Jews must be allowed to develop their own spiritual and creative genius. If they are unable to or show themselves so poor in spiritual endowments that they cannot develop their own culture, it is all the more necessary to show the world that we cannot allow them to become the masters of our cultural life." (As reported by JTA)

1938: Jean Martin Freud, Sigmund Freud’s son who was known as “Martin” left Austria for London today.

1938: Classic swashbuckler adventure film “The Adventures of Robin Hood” co-directed by Michael Crutiz (Manó Kaminer), co-produced by Hal B. Wallis and with music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold was released today in the United States.

1939(25^thof Iyar, 5669): Fifty-nine year old “Solomon/Samuel Max Handelman, the husband of Mollie Handelman and father of Seymour and Fred Handelman passed in the Bronx after which he was buried in Queens.

1940(4th of Iyar, 5700): Anarchist and feminist, Emma Goldman passed away.  Born in Russia in 1869, she fled Russia in 1885 during a period of intense anti-Semitism.  Over the years she became active in anarchist causes.  Her anti-war political activities cost her U.S. citizenship and deportation back to Russia to experience the Communist takeover in that country.  Goldman was anti-Communist and ended up escaping to Britain.  For the rest of her life she devoted herself to trying to save the world through anarchy and feminism.  She died in Toronto but the American government allowed her body to be buried in Chicago, the city that had so influenced her life.

1940: Three hours after the German’s delivered an ultimate “ordering the Dutch commander of Rotterdam” to begin a cease fire, German bombers killed over 30,000 of the city’s inhabitants when they fire bombed Rotterdam.

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/military/ww2/photos/images/ww2-184.jpg

1940: As the Blitzkreig replaced the “Phony War” the Nazis crossed the Meuse at Sedan and began chasing a French Army that “was running for its life” – a run that would end in Nazi victory, Vichy collaboration and the slaughter of French Jews.

1940: “Shortly before Brussels was occupied,” Hugo Gutman who served in the same regiment as Hitler during World War I and his family “escaped only with small suitcases taking the last train to France.”



1940: As of today, the Kindertransport which had started in December, 1938, had brought 7,500 Jewish children to Britain.

1940: At 12:30 pm, New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman met with President Roosevelt in the White House.

1940: One very last transport left on the freighter Bodegraven from Ymuiden on May 14, 1940 – the day Rotterdam was bombed, one day before Holland surrendered – raked by gunfire from German warplanes. The eighty children on deck had been brought by earlier transports to imagined safety in Holland. Altogether, though exact figures are unknown, the Kindertransports saved around 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. None were accompanied by their parents; a few were babies carried by children.

1940: Abraham Icek Tuschinski lost all of his movie houses in Rotterdam today “when the city was bombed by the Germans.”

1941: The Nazis arrested more than 3,600 Parisian Jews and sent to them concentration camps. This marked the start of the roundup of Jews in the Occupied Zone of France (the area directly controlled by the Nazis as opposed to Vichy France.  The roundup began with Polish Jews who had become naturalized French citizens but it did not stop here.

or

1941: Approximately 4000 Jews are deported from Paris, most to a camp at Pithiviers, France. “Pithiviers, near Orleans, was one of the infamous concentration camps where children were separated from their parents and imprisoned, while the adults were processed and departed to camps further away, usually Auschwitz.”  This camp, like the one at Drancy, was operated by the Vichy French and their collaborators.  Contrary to the image that the French have concocted about their behavior during World War II, French fascists, led by Petain and Laval, were active participants in the Nazi New World Order.  As to the Jews, the French were already handing them over even before the Germans asked for them.

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/may/07.asp

1941: The decision was made in Tel Aviv to establish the Palmach (Plugot Mahatz or ‘striking companies’ of the Haganah.  “The Palmach had two primary aims: the defense of the Yishuv against the Arab bands which would inevitably harass the Jewish towns and settlements and engage in local rioting as soon as the British retreated from Palestine; and the defense of the country against the Axis invaders.”  Yitshaq Sadeh, a Jew born in Russia in 1890, was the found and first commander of the Palmach.  He passed away in 1952.

1941: The Nazis interned 3,600 naturalized Jews of Russian origin.

1941: Today, Jan Peerce “made his stage debut as the Duke in ''Rigoletto'' in Philadelphia.”

1941: “East River Bank Sells Vacant City Realty” published today described the purchase of 24 lots by Elias A. Cohen’s Omnibus Reality Corporation” which also provides a mini-history course on the development of the East Side.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1941/05/14/85349766.html?pageNumber=38

1942(27th of Iyar, 5702): Noted Jewish Viennese pianist Leopold Birkenfeld is murdered at the Chelmno death camp.

1943(9^thof Iyar, 5703): Seventy-four year old Dutch citizen Johanna v. Engel-Gruenewald was murdered today at Sobibor.

1944: In Hungary, all hospital patients “newly-born babies, blind and deaf, all mental cases and prison inmates of Jewish origin were transferred to the ghettos.”

1944: In Long Branch, NJ, Howard Martin Lawn, “the president of Parkmobile Inc., and the Equity and Capital Company and Pearl H. Bergman a chemist and homemaker both of whom were staunch Democrats” gave birth to journalist Constance Ellen “Connie” Lawn who “at the time of her death was the longest-serving White House correspondent.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/obituaries/connie-lawn-independent-white-house-reporter-dies-at-73.html

1945: The HMS Springer a British submarine that would be sold to the Israeli in 1958 and be renamed the “Tanin” was launched today

1945: Representatives Andrew W. Somers and August W. Bennet presented a joint resolution in the House of Representative “asking for United States recognition of ‘the Hebrew Nation’ as an intergovernmental agency to repatriate Jews surviving in Europe to Palestine and for an administration to facilitate the establishment of a free state there guaranteeing civil, political and religious rights of all its inhabitants.”

1946: Martin Gabel, the Philadelphia born son of Ruth and Israel Gabriel married Arlene Francis in what would prove to be that rarity, a successful celebrity marriage, which produce scintillating repartee and a son, Peter Gabel, the Harvard trained attorney and association editor of Tikun.

1946: The SS Max Nordau, a Haganah ship containing 1,750 men women and children (300 of whom were orphans) was intercepted by the British off the coast of Palestine.  The refugees were shipped off for detention at Atlit while the crew was arrested and the ship confiscated by the British.  The vessel joined other such ships, including the Enzo Sereni, the Tel Hai and the Orde Wingate at a dock in Haifa.  The Palmach responded by simultaneously, blowing up eleven bridges that connected Palestine with surrounding countries.  This spectacular event came at the cost of 14 Palmach lives.

1947: Birthdate of Brandies graduate and music critic Jon Landau.

1947: Much to everyone’s surprise Andrei Gromyko, the permanent representative of the Soviet Union to the United Nations gave a speech before the General Assembly in which he said that “the Soviet Union would still prefer a ‘single Arab-Jewish state with equal rights for the Jews and the Arabs,’ but if the UN commission found the this ‘impossible to implement’ there was a ‘justifiable alternative: the partition of Palestine into two independent single states, one Jewish and one Arab.’” (Editor’s note – ironically, while the world including the United States dithered on the issues, the Soviet Union, for whatever reasons shifted the balance by declaring support for a Jewish state in Palestine now.)

1948(5th of Iyar, 5708): In one of the most stirring moments in Jewish history David Ben-Gurion led the ceremony establishing the State of Israel.  The British Mandate actually ended on May 15, 1948.  But that was a Saturday and the Jewish State would not be declared on Shabbat, so it was done the afternoon before. Herzl's prediction was off by one year.

http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+Process/Guide+to+the+Peace+Process/Declaration+of+Establishment+of+State+of+Israel.htm

1948: Rebecca Affachiner “the Betsy Ross Of Israel” unfurled her homemade flag which she had made from a cut-up bed sheet on which she had sewn a six-pointed blue star and two stripes colored with a blue crayon.” (As reported by the Jewish Women’s Archive)

https://cahjp.huji.ac.il/webfm_send/660

1948: Three resolutions were defeated at the United Nations by the Arabs and their allies to insure that Jerusalem would be an international city governed by the U.N.  The Arabs insisted that Jerusalem must be an “Arab city” even though it had a Jewish majority.  This lack of will on the part of the U.N. and Arab intransigence are the animating force by the refusal of Israeli governments to ever give up the city.

1948: Egyptian planes bomb Tel Aviv, the first time the city had been bombed since the Italians flew over in 1940

1948: The first broadcasts by Kol Yisrael, Israel's radio station.  Kol Yisrael is Hebrew for the Voice of Israel.

1948:”River Lady” a western film photographed by cinematographer Irving Glassberg was released today in the United States.

1948: Jordan’s Arab Legion captured the Jewish settlement of Atarot

1948: In violation of the U.N. resolutions, Jordan's Arab Legion captured Atarot, north of Jerusalem.  This was part of the Arab plan to cut off Jerusalem from the rest of the state of Israel.

1948: The United States became the first country to recognize the state of Israel.

1948:  "The Egyptian Prime Minister, al-Nukrashi Pasha, decided to proclaim a state of emergency and arrest all Communists declaring that all Jews were potential Zionists and that all Zionists were in fact Communists." (In Ishmael's House by Martin Gilbert)

1948: Sir Alan Cunningham drove out of Jerusalem, bordered a plane and flew to Haifa.

1948: When the Israeli flag was unfurled outside the Jewish Agency building in New York City, “throngs of Jewish youngster danced the hora outside and traffic on East 68^th Street came to a halt.”

1948: The bitter battle to keep the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem took a positive turn for Jewish forces as they occupied Beit Dagan the British police fortress.  At the same time, the Arabs were poised to seize the vital airport at Lydda.

1948: Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, was appointed Minister of Police, a position he held until a month before his death in January 1967. He served in fourteen governments and making him the country's longest continually serving minister.

1948: David Ben-Gurion begins serving as Israel’s first Minister of Defense.

1948: As the battle for Kfar Darom that pitted the Palmach against the Egyptian Army and the units of the Muslim brotherhood went into its second night Jewish units began an attack on the “Bedouin locality of Khirbat Ma’in.

1948: David Remez was appointed Minister of Transportation in David Ben-Gurion's provisional government.

1948: Yehuda Leib Maimon was appointed at Israel’s first Minister of Religious Services.

1948: Maury Atkin, who had been employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, opened the first Israeli embassy in the United States at 2210 Massachusetts, Avenue.  Atkin served as executive officer and agricultural consultant to the new Israeli Embassy until April 1950

1948: Following yesterday’s massacre of the Jews at Kfar Etzion, the rest of villages at Gush Etzion surrendered following which the Jews were taken prisoner and their homes “plunder and burned.”

1948: As of today Milt Rubenfeld, Modi Alon, Ezer Weizman, Lou Lenart, and Eddie Cohen and four S-199's “constituted the entire Israeli Air Force.

1949: After 252 performances the curtain came down on the last Broadway performance of “Love Life,” “a musical written by Kurt Weill (music) and Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics).”

1951: The Broadway production of “Flahooley” with lyrics and book by E.Y. Harburg and a score by Sammy Fain opened today at the Broadhurst Theatre,

1951: Today, in Israel the Shabak arrested Mordechai Eliyahu  and othermembers of the Brit Hakanim “a radical religious Jewish underground organization which operated against the widespread tread of secularization” by torching cars of people who on drove on Shabbat and butcher shops where non-kosher meet was sold.”

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported on the first visit to Israel of the U.S. Secretary of State, Mr. John Foster Dulles, who arrived, accompanied by a large entourage "for a frank exchange of views." Israeli leaders asked U.S. for a loan to meet their foreign currency debts which reached $70m., while another $40m. were due shortly. Dulles "was happy to be in Israel" and was certain that the talks will be "mutually beneficial."

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel received from West Germany $75m. on account of reparations.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that 102 new immigrants arrived from Iran.

1953: “The first railway line built by the State of Israel – 28 and a half miles of track running parallel to the coast between Hadera and Tel Aviv – was dedicated by Mrs. David Remez, widow of Israel’s first Minister of Communications who conceived the line in 1948.”  The opening of the rail connection will shorten the time it takes to travel between Haifa, Israel’s major port and Tel Aviv.

1955: On the seventh anniversary of Israel’s independence, a public memorial service is held at Carnegie Hall in honor of the late Albert Einstein.

1957(13^thof Iyar, 5717): Seventy-two year old Sir Sidney Solomon Abrahams, the older brother of Harold Abrahams (“Chariots of Fire”) and the 26^th Chief Justice of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) passed away today.

1957(13^thof Iyar, 5717): Seventy-two year old Sidney “Solly” Abrahams, the older brother of Harold Abrahams of “Chariots of Fire fame” who competed in the Olympics in the long-jump before pursuing a career that including “serving as Chief Justice of Ceylon and President of the London Athletic Club” passed away today.

1958(24^thof Iyar, 5718): Sixty-seven year old New York native Barnett Robert Brickner who served as the rabbi at Anshe Chesed for 33 years passed away today.

https://case.edu/ech/articles/b/brickner-barnett-robert/

1958: “I Married A Woman” directed by Hal Kanter and written by Goodman Ace premiered in Los Angeles.

1961(28^thof Iyar, 5721): Sixty-five year old Max Perlman, the City Deputy Commissioner of Markets who was a member of the Masons, B’Nai Brith and the Ancient Order of Hiberians and the husband of Rose Perlman and father of Joel and Gail Perlman passed away at his home in Brooklyn

1962(10th of Iyar, 5722): Prize winning architect Dov Karmi, the son of Hannah and Sholom Weingarten who designed the Culture Palace and Max—Liebling House in Tel Aviv passed away today.

1963: The sequel to “It’s My Party”, “Judy’s Turn to Cry” was recorded today by Lelsely Gore.

1964(3^rdof Sivan, 5724): Seventy-four year old Heinz Werner, the Viennese born son of Leopold Emile Klauber Werner, the engineering student, turned composer, turned psychologist who, after being forced to leave his position at the University of Hamburg by the Nazis, came to the United states where he taught at Brooklyn College and Clark University,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27849450

1964: “What a Way to Go,” a comedy produced by Arthur P. Jacobs with a screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and filmed by cinematographer Leon Shamroy was released today in the United States.

1966(24^thof Iyar, 5726): Parashat Behar-Bechukotai

1966(24^thof Iyar, 5726): Fifty-nine year old C. Irving “Irv” Constantine the Syracuse running back played one season in the NFL in 1931.

http://www.profootballarchives.com/playerc/cons00200.html

1967(4^thof Iyar, 5727): Yom HaZikaron

1967: Alfred Kazan and Nissim Ezekiel of the Bombay University were among the speakers at the six-day celebration of Henry David Thoreau sponsored by the Nassau Community College that came to an end today.

1967: According to statements made by Nasser in justifying the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, this is the day on which he discussed the Soviet report of the Israel’s planned invasion of Syria with the government in Damascus and formulated their military response.

1967: Israeli newspapers carried interviews with General Rabin, IDF chief of staff warning “Damascus” of the consequences that would arise from continued terrorist attacks.

1968: Birthdate of Lyon, France native Eric Vuillard, the author of the award winning Order of the Day which traces the rise of Hitler “from a meeting in February 1933 of the captains of German industry gathered to fiancé Hitler’s rise to absolute power, through March 12, 1938, the date of Anschluss, a prelude to the Final Solution that drove hundreds, perhaps thousands of Viennese Jews to suicide, all the way to the Nuremberg Trials and the vileness of German industry’s complicity in Hitler’s death camps.

https://www.amazon.com/Order-Day-Eric-Vuillard/dp/1590519698

1968(16^thof Iyar, 5728): Seventy year old Dr. Theodore Werner, the Viennese born English Zionist was the godson of Theodor Herzl passed away today. (As reported by JTA)?

1969: Today marked the end of Abe Fortas’ tenure as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

1970: Birthdate of mathematician and founder of Akamai Technologies Daniel “Danny” Mark Levin the native of Denver and raised in Israel who was stabbed to death on American Airline Flight 11 reportedly making him the first person to die on “9/11.”

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/09/tech/innovation/danny-lewin-9-11-akamai/

1970:  After 13 preview performances, a revival of George S. Kaufman’s “Beggar on Horseback” opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre.

1970: The Court of Appeals of the State of New York decided the “Matter of Palitz” today.

http://leagle.com/decision/197056727NY2d540_1475.xml/MATTER%20OF%20PALITZ

1973: Frontiero v. Richardson, in which Ruth Bader Ginsburg represented Frontiero  was decided by the Supreme Court today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiero_v._Richardson

1974(22nd of Iyar, 5734): First Lieutenant Rami Zusman and Sergeant Reuven Brinenberg were killed just two weeks before Henry Kissinger negotiated a separation of forces agreement between the Syrians and Israelis.

1977: The first official images of the Merkava were released to the American periodical Armed Forces Journal

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported on the changed mood in the Cairo media which claimed that the deadlock in the Israeli-Egyptian peace negotiations moved the whole Middle East to the situation which preceded the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The Egyptian press warned that President Sadat's pledge of "no more war" would not be fulfilled, unless Israel dropped its refusal to relinquish all the territories it captured in the 1967 war.

1979( 17th of Iyar, 5739): Eighty four year old August “Augie” Ratner, the middleweight boxer who knocked out Jack Delaney “in the first round of prize fight in New York City in 1922” passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/05/18/archives/obituary-1-no-title.html

1979: “The Rebels” a television mini-series featuring Tom Bosley as “Ben Franklin” was broadcast for the first time tonight.

1980(28^thof Iyar, 5740): Yom Yerushalayim

1980: The full orchestral version of “Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards”  an orchestral piece composed in 1979 by Steve Reich was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony at the War Memorial Auditorium in San Francisco

1981(10^th of Iyar, 5741): Fifty-four year old journalist,ant-fascist and founder of Searchlight  Maurice Julian Ludmer, whose mother was a Hebrew teacher and whose life was transformed when while serving in the British Army during WW II he visited Belsen Concentration camp

1982: U.S. premiere of “Wrong is Right” a “thriller” directed and produced by Richard Brooks who also wrote the script.

1982: The Moscow refusenik and Hebrew teacher Pavel Abramovich was summoned to the KGB for the first of what would be four times in the next thirty days.

1982: Richard F. Shepard reviewed Max and Helen by Simon Wiesenthal

1983: It was reported today that Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger delivered a speech to the American Jewish Committee in which he said the Soviet government was “making a profound and dangerous mistake if it thought it could force the United States to abandon its commitment to Israel’s security.”

1983: A new advertising campaign created by Needham, Harper & Steers/Issues and Images, which will promote a friendliness and warmth of the Israeli people toward travelers with the new theme line: ''Come to Israel, come stay with friends'' premieres today with two new 30-second television and radio commercials.

1984: Birthdate of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame.

1986(5th of Iyar, 5746): Yom HaAtzma'ut

1986: The Institute for War documents published Anne Frank’s complete diary.

1987: As the IPO celebrates its 50^th anniversary, Leonard Bernstein conducts the symphony for a second night.

1989: NBC broadcast the final episode of “War and Remembrance, an American miniseries based on the novel of the same name written by Herman Wouk” co-starring Jane Seymour, Polly Bergen, Sami Frey, Steven Berkoff and Topol.

1989: “Chu Chem,” billed as “the 1^st Chinese-Jewish Musical” with Molly Picon comes to a close today after 68 performances on Broadway.

1989: NBC broadcast the final episode of “Family Ties” the sitcom created by Gary David Goldberg.

1990: In Los Angeles, director Steven Spielberg and actress Kate Capshaw gave birth to American actress Sasha Rebecca Spielberg.

1993: In the U.K. premiere of Cup final an Israeli film written by Eyal Halfon and directed by Eran Riklis.

1993: CBS broadcast the final episode of “The Golden Palace” a sitcom co-starrubg Estelle Getty featuring theme music by Andrew Gold.

1996(25^thof Iyar, 5756): Seventeen year old Yeshiva student David Bum was murdered by a terrorist who fired on students “as a hitchhiking post at Beit El.”

1998: The Sixth Annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival came to an end today.

1998: Performance of the last episode of Seinfeld on NBC with commercials selling at $2 million for a 30 second slot.

2000: “Yiddishkayt Los Angeles,” the largest festival in the United States honoring Yiddish opened today.

2000: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II”
by Joshua B. Freeman and the recently released paperback edition of “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” by Thomas L. Friedman The New York Times columnist deploys a torrent of anecdotes and vignettes to probe the causes and effects of globalization and the transforming power of technology.

2000: “Requiem for a Dream,” an American psychological drama film directed by Darren Aronofsky premiered at Cannes today.

2000: Karl Jay Shapiro, a native of Baltimore who was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946 passed away in New York.

http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/stadler_center/shapiro/

2001: The 54^th Cannes Film Festival where Dover Kosashvili’s “Late Marriage was screened in the Un Certain Regard Section” opened today

2002:“The vote by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's political party against the establishment of any independent Palestinian state may limit his room for maneuver but will not tie his hands, Israeli politicians and political analysts said today.”

2003: Allan Kornblum was appointed as a federal magistrate for the northern district of Florida.

2003: Dorrit Moussaieff an Israeli-born British jewelry designer, editor and businesswoman married the President of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson,

2004: Peace Now led the 'Mate ha-Rov' ("majority camp") demonstration today in Tel Aviv, in order to pressure the Israeli government to adopt the Disengagement Plan

2004: Mayyim Hayyim, a community mikveh [ritual bath] and education center in Newton, Massachusetts, opened its doors.

.http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/14/2004/mayyim-hayyim

2005(5^thof Iyar, 5765): Parashat Emor

2005(5^thof Iyar, 5765): “Vice president of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's international directors council, and director of the Byrd Hoffman Foundation Elaine Terner Cooper, the first wife of art dealer and banker Robert E. Mnuchin and the mother of Goldman Sachs bankers Alan and Steven Mnuchin the latter of whom became Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury.

2005: U.S. premiere of “The Fallen Ones” featuring Tom Bosley

2006(16th of Iyar, 5766): One hundred year old  American poet and two time Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz passed away.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/stanley-kunitz

2006: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a "Desk Murderer" by David Cesarani and the recently released paperback edition of “Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop” by Joseph Lelyveld which is a memoir of his “often painful Midwestern childhood” featuring his “warring parents: a literary mother and a political father, who was a Reform rabbi and a committed civil-rights activist.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/books/review/14gewen.html

2006: On NPR's Weekend Edition, Daniel Schorr mentioned a meeting at the White House that took place with colleague A. M. Rosenthal and president Gerald Ford. Ford mentioned that the Rockefeller Commission had access to various CIA documents, including those referring to political assassinations. Although scolded at first for his television report by former CIA director Richard Helms, Schorr was vindicated by the text of the Pike Committee, which he obtained from an undisclosed source and leaked to The Village Voice. [Editor’s Note – Schorr and Rosenthal were Jewish.  Ford and Helms were not.]

2006: The following tours were scheduled as part of the 15th annual Historic Site Preservation Week, an initiative of the Society for Preservation of Israel Heritage Sites (SPIHS: "Bauhaus on Bialik Street" - a tour of this street will mark the designation of "the White City" as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); Free guided tours of the old city of Be'er Sheva and other historic sites in the capital of the Negev; a free guided tour of The National Museum of Science, Technology and Space in Haifa which was formerly the site of the historic Technion Israel Institute of Technology Building.

2007: The JCCin Manhattan presents a film screening “Be Fruitful and Multiply: What’s A Mother to Do?” followed by a panel discussion.“For many - if not most - modern women motherhood involves concerns about the biological clock, career versus family, co-parenting, etc. But the subjects in Be Fruitful and Multiply lead dramatically different lives. Shosh Shlam’s documentary features ultra-orthodox women with 10, 12 or even 16 children, pregnant or nursing most of their lives, as well as two ultra-orthodox women who have limited their family size and suggest that many of the perpetually pregnant are not as happy as they claim. The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) will present a panel discussion following the film. Panelists will include Moderator Dr. Michelle Friedman, a psychiatrist in private practice and director of pastoral counseling at YCT (Yeshivat Chovevei Torah) Rabbinical School in Manhattan; Viva Hammer, a Research Associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute who is intrigued by the question of why Orthodox families have increased in size at the same time that family sizes have shrunk in most of the developed world and has done extensive interviews on the subject; Shosh Shlam, the director of Be Fruitful and Multiply who attended the Theatre Program at Tel Aviv University and the Film School at New York University; and Pearl Stroh who is featured in the film, has eleven children and is the Director of the Chabad Early Learning Center in New York City.

2008: “The World Stamp Championship Israel 2008” opens under F.I.P patronage in Tel Aviv. “WSC Israel 2008” is organized by the Israel Philatelic Federation in cooperation with the Israel Post Ltd. and its Philatelic Service. Over 70 countries will be present with a variety of 2,500 exhibition frames of the world's finest philatelic collections at the weeklong event.

2008: As US President George W. Bush lands in Israel for a three-day visit the IDF starts reducing its operations throughout the West Bank. The orders were delivered earlier this week to the IDF's Central Command by the political echelon.

2008: A shopping mall in Ashkelon was hit this afternoon by a long-range rocket fired from the Gaza Strip injuring around 90 people, four of them seriously. Two militant groups, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, claimed responsibility. Among those seriously hurt are a 24-year-old mother and her infant daughter, both of whom were flown to Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, for treatment. They suffered head injuries. Two others sustaining serious injuries were rushed to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon for emergency surgery. Most other injuries were light.

2008(9^thof Iyar, 5768): Eighty-six year old cartoonist and satirist Will Elder passed away today (As reported by William Grimes)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/arts/design/18elder.html

2009:The Foundation for Jewish Studies presents a free lecture with Dr. Robert Alter speaking on “The Challenge of Translating the Bible” at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center.

2009: The 92^nd Street Y presents a lecture by Susanne Vromen entitled “Sanctuary from Hell: Belgian Nuns Who Saved Holocaust Children” in which this Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Bard College author of “Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis” shares the “riveting stories” of the Belgian Jewish children who were hidden in Roman Catholic convicts and orphanages starting in 1942.  Vromen is in a unique position to tell the story since she “was living in Belgium when the Germans invaded the country in 1940 and lived under the Nazi occupation before she and her family were able to escape and find refuge in the Belgian Congo.

2009: Today Jordan's king pressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to immediately commit to the establishment of a Palestinian state, as the monarch pursued a sweeping resolution of the Muslim world's conflicts with Israel. King Abdullah II made the comments during a meeting in the Red Sea city of Aqaba with Netanyahu, who made an unannounced, lightning visit to neighboring Jordan. He urged the Israeli leader to immediately declare his acceptance of the Arab peace initiative and to take necessary steps to move forward toward a solution, according to a royal palace communiqué. The statement did not give Netanyahu's response, and a spokesman for the Israeli leader was not immediately available for comment.

2009(20^thof Iyar, 5769): Beatrice Israel Muhlendorf, passed away today at the age 93 in Sheffield, Alabama. Mrs. Muhlendorf was a native of Worcester, Mass., and a member of Temple B'Nai Israel. She attended Florence State Teachers College and graduated from the University of Alabama in 1936.She was the co-founder of the Rho chapter of Sigma Delta Tau sorority at the University of Alabama and served as president in 1935. a lifelong sustaining member of the Muscle Shoals District Service League, past board member of the YMCA of the Shoals and Northwest Alabama Easter Seals Rehabilitation Center, Turtle Point Yacht and Country Club and was past president of the Temple B'Nai Israel Sisterhood. She worked for the Navy department during World War II, where she met her husband, Jack, and married in 1942. She, along with her father and husband, co-founded Paper and Chemical Supply Co. in 1949, where she served as a chairman of the board until her passing. She was preceded in death by her husband, Jack Muhlendorf

2009: Sholom Rubashkin, the man who ran Agriprocessors, has been named in a new 142 count indictment that adds 70 new charges that  include criminal acts related to bank fraud, money laundering and document fraud.

2010(1 Sivan, 5770): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2010: “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” a sequel to “Wall Street” in which Eli Wallach played the part of “Julius Steinhardt” in what was the last film in his long and storied career premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

2010: Forty-six year old Jennifer Gorvotiz was named CEO of the San Francisco based Jewish Community Federation today making her “the first woman to head on the North American’s 20 largest Jewish Federations.” (As reported by Jweekly.com)

2010: Rabbi Shira Stutman and musician Sheldon Low are scheduled to lead a musical and interactive Shabbat at the Historic 6^th& I Synagogue in Washington, D.C.

2011: Liliana Schulder is scheduled to be called to the Torah as a Bat Mitzvah at The Temple, Atlanta’s oldest synagogue which was founded in 1867.

2011: The Cincinnati Art Museum is scheduled to present “A Jewish View of Cincinnati” will “explore art from ancient times that relates to Jewish history; paintings of biblical stories and themes, and works by Jewish artists.

2011: Pianist Menahem Pressler is scheduled to appear with the Jupiter Quartet as part of the Peoples’ Symphony Concerts in New York City.

2011: “Footnote” a film about the mistaken award of the Israel Prize premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the award for best screenplay.

2011: The managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was taken off an Air France plane at Kennedy International Airport minutes before it was to depart for Paris on today, in connection with the sexual attack of a maid at a Midtown Manhattan hotel, the authorities said. Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, who was widely expected to become the Socialist candidate for the French presidency, was apprehended by detectives of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in the first-class section of the jetliner, and immediately turned over to detectives from the Midtown South Precinct, officials said.

2011(10^thof Iyar, 5771): Ninety-year old Joseph Wershaba, the colleague of Edward R. Murrow who helped to expose Senator McCarthy, passed away today. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/business/media/18wershba.html?_r=0

http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=seeitnow

2011(10^thof Iyar, 5771): Eighty-nine year old Murray Handwerker, the man who turned Brooklyn based Nathan’s hot dog stand into a nationally known institution passed away today. (As reported by Reed Abelsson)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/nyregion/murray-handwerker-who-made-nathans-more-famous-dies-at-89.html

2012: At the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, Dr. Pamela S. Nadell, Chair of the Department of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University is scheduled to survey 350 years of the American Jewish experience through the prism of National Museum of American Jewish located on Philadelphia's Independence Mall.

2012: The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music is scheduled to present an evening of performances celebrating its Israeli alumni, students, and international collaborators

2012: Todd Hasak-Lowy author of Here and Now: History, Nationalism, and Realism in Modern Hebrew Fiction is scheduled to participate in A Dalkey Archive Translators Night as the McNally Jackson Bookstore in New York City.

2012: Roberto Rodriguez and the Cuban Jewish All Stars are scheduled to perform at the Washington DCJCC.

2012: Center for Jewish History and Center for Traditional Music and Dance are scheduled to present “Bay mayn mames shtibele: The Women's Art of Yiddish Folksong.”

2012: In London, The Wiener Library is scheduled to hold a workshop for new recruits and experienced veterans of the Wiener Library’s Volunteer Translation Program.  The program began with one translator in 2009.

2012: Offensive lineman Mitchell Schwartz, a second-round draft pick of the Cleveland Browns, signed a four-year, $5.17 million contract with the team. Schwartz, a tackle from the University of California, Berkeley, was selected 37th overall in April’s draft. The Jewish player was among eight draft picks signed by the team today. His older brother Geoff is in his fourth season as an NFL player ( As reported by Mary Oster)

2012(22^ndof Iyar, 5772): Nine-four year old “David M. Helpern, the business side of the husband-and-wife apparel design team known as Joan & David, who popularized elegant, comfortable — and non-high-heeled — shoes for working women in the 1960s before expanding their line internationally to include clothing,” passed away today.  (As reported by Paul Vitello)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/business/david-m-helpern-chief-of-joan-david-apparel-brand-dies-at-94.html?hpw

2012: Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times did not address the graduating class at Barnard College because she was pre-empted by President Obama.

2013: The refurbished Jerusalem Train Station is scheduled to host its first major event today.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-trains-in-the-station/



2013: The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox, the doyenne of New York Times obituary writers goes on sale today.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-222883-3

2013: “Fire In My Heart: The Story of Hannah Senesh” is scheduled to open at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center.

2013(5th of Sivan, 5773): Erev Shavuot

2013: 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—“was released on the American iTunes Store” today.

2013: As part of the observance of Shavuot, Bentlee Birchansky and Noah Thalblum will celebrate their Confirmation at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Editor’s Note – I had the pleasure of teaching both of these youngsters.  They are two of the brightest, nicest, most diligent students I ever worked with in the last fifty years. They have much to be proud of and even more to look forward to.)

2013: On the secular calendar, 65^th anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel!

2013: The Jerusalem Post ranks Yair Lapid, the founder of Yesh Atid at the top of its list of most influential Jews followed by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew in second place.

2014(14^thof Iyar, 5774): Pesach Sheini

2014(14^thof Iyar, 5774):

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/112312/jewish/Rabbi-Meir.htm

http://www.rabbimeirbaalhaneis.com/history_rmbh.asp

2014: Nick Kotz, whose recent book, The Harness Maker's Dream, tells the story of his Jewish Ukrainian grandfather's journey to the United States and ensuing life in Texas is scheduled to moderate a panel discussion “A Nation of Immigrants: How They Have Shaped America.”

2014: In Danville, CA, the Reutlinger Community for Jewish Living is scheduled to host a special screening “American Jerusalem,” a “documentary that tells the story of San Francisco Jews became Jews.”

2014: The New York Times fires Jill Abramson as Executive Editor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/15/business/media/jill-abramson-being-replaced-as-top-editor-at-times.html?hp&_r=1

2014: A senior FSA official said that the Free Syrian Army (FAS) “could tactically collaborate with Israel in toppling the Assad regieme as long as such cooperation is carried out in utter secrecy.”

2014: US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro and Amos Gilad of the Defense Ministry met U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the airport this evening as he prepared to begin a two day visit to Israel.

2015: Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is scheduled to lecture on “Letter from an Unknown Woman: Joseph’s Dream” at the Skirball Center

2015: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition was formally sworn in tonight after a raucous Knesset session that saw constant heckling, along with accusations by opposition leader Isaac Herzog that the freshly inaugurated government was “a circus.”

2015: Violinist and composer Ittai Shapira is scheduled to premiere his newest composition, “Ethics” at a the Concert Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Theresienstadt Concentration Camp

2015: “Raise the Roof” is scheduled to be shown at the 18^th Annual Film Festival sponsored by the National Center for Jewish Films.

2015: Steve Richards is scheduled to his book Sitting on Top of the World at Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center.

2016(6^thof Iyar, 5776): Shabbat Kedoshim

2016: In Baltimore, the JCCs of North America continue their Biennial Convention for a second day.

2016: Rabbi David Golinkin, the President of the Schechter Institutes, Inc. and a Professor of Jewish Law is scheduled to lecture on “What can do about the state of Judaism in the Jewish State?” as part of Shaary Tefillah’s Scholar in Residence program.

2016: “As an extension of Yom Hashoah 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the New Orleans Opera, in a special collaboration with The National WWII Museum and assisted by Temple Sinai are the Jewish Endowment Foundation of Louisiana, are scheduled  present the celebrated children's opera, Brundibar”

2017(18^thof Iyar, 5777): Lag B’Omer

2017: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Dorre Shafrir’s debut novel Startup,  A Man and His Presidents: the Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley, Jr. by Alvin S. Felzenberg, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy co-authored by Sheryl Sandberg and Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Familyby Syma Solovitch and Bruce D. Haynes who is currently “contracted with New York University Press for a book entitled Hear O' Israel:  Voices of African American Jews about Black Jews in America and Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond by Gideon Rachman

2017: The exhibition “500 Years of Treasures from Oxford” that “will showcase in America for the first time an extraordinary array of ancient manuscripts, books, and silver, including what has been called “the most important collection of Anglo-Jewish manuscripts in the world” is scheduled to open at Yeshiva University Museum today.

2017: LIMMUDFSU NY is scheduled to come to an end today

2017: Oxford students are scheduled to check “out JSoc's and Chaplaincy's stalls at the Lag B'Omer fair on Broad Street this afternoon!

2017: Today, Tunisia’s culture minister said that this North African country “plans to seek UNESCO World Heritage status for the island of Djerba, site of Africa’s oldest synagogue and an annual Jewish pilgrimage”

https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2017/05/000_OE164-1.jpg

2017: Today “US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said President Trump was deliberating whether relocating the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem would help or harm peace prospects, prompting Prime Minister Netanyahu to release a statement saying it will boost efforts, in that it will “shatter Palestinian fantasies” of Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.”

2017: Mother’s Day - all women are considered to be mothers in the House of Israel and we honor them all for their contributions without which we would not have survived for the last four thousand years – from the Matriarchs to Deborah to Golda Meir and all of the women of valor in between.

2017: Continuing a tradition begun in the 1990’s when lamplighter Rabbi Ciment first settled in Little Rock, Chabad is scheduled to host an elaborate Lag B’Omer Celebration that has, like so much of his efforts gone from strength to strength.

2017(18th of Iyar, 5777): In Los Angeles, ordination ceremonies are scheduled to take place at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion,

2018: More than 100,000 people from Gaza are scheduled to take part in the “March of Return” an attempt to breach the anti-terrorist fence on the border with the Israel which in reality is an attempt by those committed to destroying Israel to invade the country.

2018: President Trump’s daughter Ivanka, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin are among the dignitaries expected to attend events marking today’s move of the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

2018: Gov. Eric Greitens of Missouri is scheduled to go on trial in St. Louis on a charge of invasion-of-privacy stemming from an affair he had “with his former hairdresser.”

2018: In New Orleans, “Sabena Hijacking: My Version” is scheduled to shown at the JCC as part of the Cathy and Morris Bart Jewish Cultural Arts Series.

2019: “The Palestinian Islamic Jihad has said it will disrupt the Eurovision Song Contest due to begin today in Tel Aviv.

2019: Today, Esther Hayut, “the chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court made a speech in Nuremberg, Germany that expressed implied criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned judicial reforms and invoked that Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930’s.” (As reported by Michael Bachner)

2019: In New Orleans, author Judith Viorst whose works include Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible No Good, Very Bad is scheduled to talk about latest book Nearing Ninetyat the Jewish Community Center.

2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “The Keeper.”

2020: On line, JIMENA and Harif are scheduled to host “author Lyn Julius as she talks about her book, Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight which “examines the post-1948 displacement of 850,000 Jewish refugees from the Middle East.”

2020: The ADL is scheduled to host it latest “Fighting Hate from Home webinar” which “is an important dive into the results of ADL’s latest Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, and its far-ranging implications.

2020: Einat Admony, author of Shuk and owner of Balaboosta, Taim and Kish-Kash, who adds the Yemenite and Persian influences of her childhood to create an innovative take on Israeli cuisine is scheduled to be the last present in the on-line series,The Pop-Up Israeli Restaurant

2020: Jewish Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Boston is scheduled to celebrate 100 years of community service by honoring Karen and Steven Sisselman and raising the glasses with ‘Virtual Toasts.”

2020: Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies is scheduled to present on-line Penn State professor Lior Sternfeld talking “about how Jews in Iran went from politically and economically marginalized in the early 20th century to wealthy and politically central by the 1979 revolution.”

2020: The Streicker Center is scheduled to host on line Dr. Diane M. Sharon as she presents “Canaanite 101 – The Gods of Ugarit.”

2020: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host, virtually, Lawrence Douglas as he discusses The Right Wrong Man which “presents the incredible story of the last major Holocaust trial to galvanize world attention.”

2020:  The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host “Jami for an interactive online webinar on students managing uncertainty and prioritizing self-care to enhance our wellbeing during COVID-19.”

2020: On Facebook, “The Civil War, JAHM Scholar series” is scheduled to present the Museum's lead historical advisor, Jonathan D. Sarna, Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University.

2020: It was reported today that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed President Reuven Rivlin and outgoing Knesset Speaker Benny Gantz yesterday evening that he has managed to form a government within the two weeks allocated to him.” (As reported by Moran Azulay)

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This Day, May 15, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 15



392: Theodosius I, who had been emperor of the eastern half of the Roman Empire became the last ruler of the entire Roman Empire (east and west) “A general of Spanish origin, and the son of another general, was chosen to replace Valens who had been killed fighting the Visigoths. He refused to condemn Judaism believing that it was a legitimate religion. Theodosius prohibited the destruction of synagogues by zealot Christians.

756 CE: Abd Al-Rahman won the battle against his co-religionist outside the city walls of Cordoba. He entered the city as victor.   After he set up his Umayyad administration, Abd Al-Rahman mandated all Jews and Christians pay a jizya, a discriminatory mandated tax in accordance with the Koran for their "protected" status as dhimmis.

1004: In Pavia, Henry II, who as Holy Roman Emperor would expel Jews from various German cities, was crowned King of Italy today.

1248: Odo of Chateaubroux "investigated" the Talmud and then condemned it. This was the second condemnation of the Talmud after an appeal was made by the Jewish community of France.

1252:  Pope Innocent IV issues the papal bull Ad Exstirpanda, which authorizes the torture of heretics as part of the Inquisition. Torture quickly gains widespread usage across Catholic Europe.  There would be several Inquisitions during the Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance. The primary aim was to destroy Christians who did not accept the doctrine as commanded by the Popes at Rome.  Of course if you were going to rack or dunk or flay Christians, certainly there were those who would think that it would be alright to do the same to Jews.  Interestingly, there were some Popes who disagreed saying that it was alright to treat the Jews badly, but not to actually do them physical harm.

1648: The Treaty of Westphalia was signed as part of series of treaties that brought an end to the Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years War between Spain and the Netherlands.  The treaty officially recognized the independence of the Dutch from the Spanish Empire.  This guaranteed the independence of a European nation that had give Jews a place to grow and prosper.  Ironically, many of these were Sephardic descendants of those who had been expelled by the Spanish in 1492 or were Morrano refugees who had grown weary of the ever present Inquisition. The end of the Thirty Years provided a respite to Jews living in Central Europe including the communities of Frankfort, Worms and Jena each of which was the scene of at least one pogroms.

1742: In Westphalia, Judah Zuntz and his wife gave birth to Alexander Zuntz, the husband of Rachel Zuntz with whom he had seven children, the Loyalist who worked with the Prussians during the Revolution and remained in his adopted homeland where he helped found the New York Stock Exchange.

1745: In Prague, after many appeals and petitions, Empress Maria Theresa revoked her decree banishing all Jews in Moravia and Bohemia, allowing Jews to live there for an unlimited time. Only the Jews in Prague itself who were actually banished 3 years earlier were still under the order, but they were soon permitted to return on a restricted basis.

1755: Villa de San Agustin de Laredo which is now known as Laredo, Texas, was founded by Don Tomás Sánchez while the area was part of the Nuevo Santander region in the Spanish colony of New Spain. According to the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies, Sanchez came from a family with Jewish origins. For about this and other facets of Jewish life in this Texas border town see “Tomas Sanchez, founder of Laredo” by Carlos M. Larralde, PhD and “History of Laredo's Jewish Community” by Stan Green.

1756:  The Seven Years War begins when England declares war on France.  In America, the war is known as the French-Indian War. Officially there were no Jews living in Canada at the start of the war since Canada was a French colony and Jews were forbidden by law to live there. This changed as a result of the war.  The first Jews entered Canada with the forces of Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the English military leader who conquered Montreal.  There were several serving in his regiments including four officers.  One of them, Aron Hart, remained, settled at Three Rivers where he became a large landowner and the father of four sons who helped to form the nucleus of the Jewish community in Montreal.  On the other side of the line, some sources contend that a Converso was in the Commissary General for the French forces.



1767: Birthdate of Canadian entrepreneur and politician, Ezekiel Hart Jewish. Contrary to the image of Jews coming to the New World and assimilating, Hart fought to maintain his Jewish identity when he took his seat in the Canadian legislature.  Hart scored a posthumous victory when the wording of the oath was changed.

1773: Birthdate of Klemens Wenzel, Prince von Metternich, known to history simply as Meternich.

http://www.guidetomusicaltheatre.com/shows_r/rothschilds.htm

1774(5^thof Sivan, 5534): Erev Shavuot is observed five days into the reign of King Louis XVI who had assumed the throne five days earlier when  King Louis XV passed away and at the same time that British troops are sailing to Massachusetts to close the port of Boston. (All three of these events would have their effect on the American Revlution)

1778(18^thof Iyar, 5538): Lag B’Omer is observed 11 days after the U.S. Congress ratified the two treaties with France that ensured the Americans would have the financial, military and diplomatic support that would lead to victory over the British.

1792: At Frankfur-am-Main, Mayer Amschel Rothschild and Guttle Schnapper gave birth to their fifth and youngest son James Rothschild who established the French banking house for the family/

1799: Birthdate of Adolf B. Marx, composer and educator.  Marx was supposed to be a lawyer, but changed his mind after graduation and moved to Berlin to begin his musical studies.  While composing, he also served a lecturer on Music at the famed University of Berlin and started the Stern Music Conservatory which became one of the leading musical schools of its time.  Marx died in 1866, two days after his 67th birthday.

 1800: An English Jew named D.M. Dyte saved the life of King George III when he thwarted an assassin’s attempt to shoot the monarch. “George III. attended the Drury Lane Theater to witness a comedy by Colley Cibber; and while the monarch was acknowledging the loyal greetings of the audience, a lunatic named Hadfield fired a horsepistol pointblank at his Majesty. Two slugs passed over the king's head, and lodged in the wainscot of the royal box. The king escaped unhurt; but it was only subsequently realized that Hadfield had missed his aim because some man near him had struck his arm while in the act of pulling the trigger. This individual was Dyte, father of Henry Dyte, at one time honorary secretary to the Blind Society. It is said that Dyte asked as his sole reward the "patent" of selling opera-tickets, then a monopoly at the royal disposal. (As reported by James Picciotto in Sketches of Anglo Jewish History)

1800: A community of Jewish slaves, captured over a period of two centuries and held for ransom by the Knights of St. John on the island of Malta, was officially dissolved.

1808(18^thof Iyar, 5568) Lag B’Omer

1808: Birthdate of Irish composer and conductor Michael Balfe who took the unusual step of hiring a Jew, Max Maretzk as his assistant at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London which was a critical step on his road to success as an impresario and musician in Europe and the United States.

1817: Jean Lafitte, moved from Matagorda Bay to Galveston today, after having purchased supplies from João da Porta.  João da Porta (also José da Porta or Joseph de la Porta was a Portuguese Jewish merchant, who along with his older brother, Morin, “played an important in the early settlement of the Texan coast. João was born in Portugal but attended school in Paris, France, before moving to Brazil, the British West Indies, and finally New Orleans, Louisiana. Along with his brother, João provided the financing for the privateer Louis Michel Aury, who established his base at the site of the future Galveston, Texas, in 1816. The same year, Mexican revolutionary general Francisco Javier Mina visited and successfully encouraged Aury to join him in an invasion, which failed. Morim left Galveston and soon died, and João sold Aury's camp and supplies to Jean Lafitte, In 1818, João was appointed supercargo for trade with the Karankawa Indians. João later returned to New Orleans after Lafitte had left Galveston.

1818: Birthdate of Bogumil Dawison, the native of Warsaw who became a leading actor on the German stage noted for his portrayals of Mark Antony, Richard III and King Lear, amongst others.

1822: Birthdate of Bohemian-Jewish author Leopold Kompert.

1827(18^thof Iyar, 5587): Lag B’Omer

1827: Joseph Harris married Elizabeth Levy today at the Great Synagogue.

1827: Alexander Levi married Esther Asher today at the Great Synagogue.

1829: Daniel O’Connell whose fight for Catholic Emancipation paralleled the fight of the Jews for the same rights tried to take his seat in the House of Commons “without taking the oath of Supremacy.”

1831: Birthdate of Scarborough native Sir Edward J. Harland who in 1861 joined with Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, the nephew of German Jewish financier and merchant Gustav Christian Schwabe, to form the ship building company Harland and Wolff whose most famous vessel was the ill-fated RMS Titantic.

1832: Seventy-three year old German music teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter whose pupils included Giacomo Mayerbeer, Fanny Mendelssohn and Felix Mendelssohn, who was such a favorite of his that he “wrote to Goethe boasting of the 12 year old’s abilities.”

1833(26^thof Iyar, 5593): Anna Virginia Nones, the two week old daughter of Anna and Henry Benjamin Nones passed away today at East River, VA.

1833: Forty-five year old English actor Edmund Kean whose portrayal of Shylock which first took place in 1824 was described as the personification of a character in “a chapter out of the Book of Genesis” passed away today.

1834: Birthdate of German native Herman Felsenthal who in 1852 came to the United States, where he was a banker and school board member in Chicago and the father of nine children that he raise with his wife Gertrude Hyman Felsenthal.

1842(6^thof Sivan, 5602) Shavuot

1845: In Ivanovka which is now part of Ukraine, “lya Ivanovich Mechnikov, a Russian officer of the Imperial Guard” and “Emilia Lvovna (Nevakhovich), the daughter of the Jewish writer Leo Nevakhovich gave birth to Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov who gained fame as Nobel Prize winning immunologist  Élie Metchnikoff

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1908/mechnikov-bio.html

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/elie-metchnikoff

1847: Seventy-one year old Daniel O’Connell whose “Catholic Emancipation campaign served as the precedent and model for the emancipation of British Jews, the subsequent Jews Relief Act 1858 allowing Jewish MPs to omit the words in the Oath of Allegiance "and I make this Declaration upon the true Faith of a Christian" passed away today.

1853: One day she had passed away, 87 year old Hannah Ralph, the husband of Judah Ralph and the mother of Samuel, Frederick, Amelia and Abraham Ralph was buried today at the “Plymouth Hoe Burial Ground.”

1855: In Baltimore, MD, Theresa (née Hutzler) and Elkan Bamberge gave birth to Newark, NJ merchant and philanthropist Louis Bamberger who when he sold L. Bamberger and Company split one million dollars among his employees and who was the brother of Caroline Bamberger and brother-in-law of fellow businessman Felix Fuld.

https://www.brandeis.edu/press/books/brandeis-series-american-history/louis-bamberger.html

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1944/03/12/96574141.html?pageNumber=38

1858(2^ndof Sivan, 5618): Marcus Durloch, a member of the Independent Order of Free Sons of Israel passed away today.  His widow was the person to received benefits from the organizations Widows and Orders Fund that had been incorporated earlier in the year.

1859: Levi Goldsmith, the German born son of Seligmann Falcke Goldschmidt and Schönchen Hinka Alexander and his wife Henrietta Goldsmith gave birth to Estelle Goldsmith who became Estelle Rothschild when she married Solomon Rothschild with whom she had four children

1861(6^thof Sivan, 5621): Shavuot is observed for the first time during the Civil War.

1861: During the Civil War, Philadelphian Sergeant Oscar H. Benjamin began serving in Company B of the 41^st Regiment

1862: In Vienna, Hungarian laryngologist Johann Schnitzler and Luise Markbreiter gave birth to playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler who was a central figure in the Viennese literary community that spanned the last decades of the 19th century and the first three decades of the twentieth century.  Schnitzler was a contemporary of Herzl and used him as a character in one of his novels.  Schnitzler passed away in 1931.   His works were later banned by German and Austrian Nazis.

1864: Moses Jacob Ezekiel fought at the Battle of New Market at as a member of the VMA Cadet Battalion.

1864: Emma Mordecai apologized to her sister-in-law for their quarrel over whether or not reports of General Lee's victory were accurate.  Mordecai's apology pointed up the precarious position of this unmarried Jewess who had sought refuge from the war at her relative's farm in rural Virginia.

1865: Captain Alfred A. Rinehard who had been wounded at Po River, Virginia while serving with Company D of the 148^thRegiment completed his service in the Union Army today.

1867: In a letter written to his wife today, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison described his shipboard encounter "with three Jewish former slaveholders.  "Sitting opposite me at the table, are three German Jews, Louisiana planters, who have lost all their slaves, now that they are free, will be unable to take care of themselves!  Of these Israelites it cannot be said that they are without guile; ("Jews of the Civil War: A Reader")

1868: Birthdate of Vilna native Leon Zolotkoff, the “editor of the Jewish Daily News of New York, one time assistant district of Cook County and founder of the Chicago Jewish Courier” who was an early and ardent Zionist and the husband of Fannie Zolotkoff with whom he had four children, “Julia, Sydney, Hyman and Albert.”

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1938/08/01/98172085.pdf

1872: “Jews in Romania” published today described the decision of the Grant Administration, as conveyed Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, to have its representative in Bucharest work with the other powers to alleviate the suffering being inflicted on the Jews living in Romania.

1873: Birthdate of Paris native, Victor David Hecht, the modernist watercolorist who studied at the  Académie Julian-Student, Art Students League of New York and passed away in New York in 1931;

1876: Professor Felix Adler delivered the opening address at the first meeting of the Ethical Culture Society.

1877: In the Swiss Canton Aargau, the Grand Council granted citizens' rights to the members of the Jewish communities of Endigen and Lengnau, giving them charters under the names of New Endingen and New Lengnau

1878: In Kletzk, Russia, “Solomon and Goldie (Helfand) Adler gave to Rabbi turned businessman Joseph Adler, the husband of Jennie Resnick who in 1909 came to the United States where he returned to the rabbinate leading several congregations including the New People’s Synagogue in New York City while serving as director of the Downtown Keren Hayesod and the Jewish Sabbath Alliance.

1879: Seventy-five year old German architect Gottfried Semper who designed a synagogue built in Dresden between 1838 and 1840 that “is noted for its Moorish Revival interior style” known as the Semper Synagogue passed away today

1879: Lewis Myer Myers and his cousin Ephraim Laman Zox dissolved their partnership in a warehouse business after which Zox “set up his own” business “as a financial agent and arbitrator” on Collins Street West in Melbourne, Australia.

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/zox-ephraim-laman-4912

1880: In Charleston, Rabbi Levy officiated at the marriage of Adolf Lederberger and Albertine Levy.

1881: Anti-Jewish riots break out in Odessa, Russia.

1882(NS): The May Laws, a series of anti-Semitic regulations proposed by Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Ignatyev were signed into law today by Czar Alexander III.

1882: In Bialystok, “Jacob and Guth (Segal) Rosenbuam, gave birth to the Hebrew Union College trained rabbi and hold of a Ph.D from the University of Chicago, David Rosenbaum, the husband of Ida Adelman who led Reform congregations in Waco, TX, Amsterdam, NY and Austin, TX before settling in at Temple Judea in Chicago and also served as an “instructors in Semitics at the University of Texas.”

1882: Alexander III issued the May Laws which were designed to "cause one-third of the Jews to emigrate, one-third to accept baptism and one-third to starve." Jews were banished from all rural areas and towns of less than ten thousand people, even within the Pale of Settlement. These laws remained in quasi-effect until 1914 and provided the impetus for migration to America as well as expanded interest in the settlement of Eretz-Israel.

1883: Birthdate of Russian-American painter, illustrator and WW I veteran Alfred Feinberg

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/04/07/archives/alfred-feinberg-87-anatomical-artist.html

https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/21799562_2-alfred-feinberg-watercolors-ny-1883-1970#&gid=1&pid=1

1885: In Budapest, “Herman and Bertha (Atlas) Ungerleider gave birth to “Samuel Ungerleider, the husband of Selma Dallet” who was the owner of Wheeling Liquor Company in Wheeling, W. Va., the Aeon Liquor Company in Bridgeport, OH and founder of an investment firm in Cleveland while serving as the “U.S. Asst. Fuel Administrator” in Ohio during WW I.

1885: In New Zealand, Samuel Shrimski was appointed to the Legislative Council today

1887(21^stof Iyar, 5647): Seventy-eight year old German philanthropist, Wilhelm Königswarter a native of Furth passed away at Meran.

1888(5^thof Sivan, 5648): Erev Shavuot

1889: Birthdate Bessie Abramowitz, known as Bessie Hillman who was active in the labor movement designed to alleviate the sweatshop conditions in the garment industry. She was active in the 1910 strike against Hart-Shaftner and Marx.  The strike paid two dividends - the creation of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the first meeting with her future husband, labor leader Sidney Hillman.  An early role model for feminists, Hillman continued her labor work even after giving birth to her two daughters.

1889: Rabbi Mendelsohn of Wilmington, NC officiated at the wedding of William Fatman and

Fannie Mantoue, the “daughter of Benjamin Mantoue of Charleston, SC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vogel_(Russian_writer)

1889: President Benjamin Harrison named Solomon Hirsch to serve as Minister to Turkey, making him “the third Jew to hold that diplomatic rank” – the other two being Benjamin Franklin Piexotto appointed by President Grant and Isidor Straus appointed by President Cleveland.

1890: Birthdate of Menasah Skulnik, the seventh of nine children who began his theatre career “by carrying drinks to actors” in a Warsaw theatre specializing in Shakespeare” and became a star in the Yiddish Theatre and on Broadway. (The NYT shows his birthdate as 1892.  I have not been able to resolve this discrepancy.)

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9C00EFDA103EE034BC4D53DFB066838B669EDE

1890: Birthdate of author Katherine Anne Porter whose novel Ship of Foolsportrays the rise of Nazism who described herself as “in direct, legitimate line” of the English language accused Jewish writers of “trying to destroy it and all other living things they touch.”

1891: The will of Nathan Littauer, a benefactor of many Jewish charities, was filed in the Surrogate’s office today.

1891: Birthdate of David Vogel, the native of the Pale of Settlement who used Hebrew in his poetry Lifney Hasha'ar Ha'afel("Before the Dark Gate"), novels and diaries and who died at Auschwitz in 1944 after having been interred at Drancy.

1892(18^thof Iyar, 5652): Lag B’Omer

1892: Birthdate of Nashville native and WW I veteran Julius Arky Haiman, the graduate of Peabody College and Vanderbilt University Medical School and WW I veteran who pursued a career as an Otolaryngologist serving as an “adjunct professor for ear, nose and throat at Polyclinic Hospital and an associate attending physician at the Hospital for Joint Diseases during the 1920's and 1930's.”

1892: “The Israelite Alliance has sent the Sultan of Turkey an address in commemoration of the admission of the exiled Spanish Jews to the Turkish Empire in 1492.”

1893: “Mission Work Among Jews” published today described a potential conflict between the New York Presbytery and the Presbyterian Home Board.  The New York wants to begin a program to aggressively convert Jews. Up until now the national organization has not endorsed such an effort aimed directly at the Jews.

1893: Birthdate of Harry Rosenthal, the Belfast (Ireland) native who gained fame in London and the United States as an actor, composer and pianist.

1893: It was reported today the Jews have been coming to the United States from Poland every month this year “in gradually increasing numbers.”  Twenty –one came in January, seventeen in February and 316 in March, 306 of whom had less than $30 when they arrived.

1893: “Jews of Poland” published today refutes claims from correspondents in Berlin “that there is no movement for the expulsion of Jews from Poland based on eyewitness accounts of the arrival in London of scores of Jews who have been expelled from Poland.  They carry copies of orders of expulsion some of which show that the movement against the Jews began in January. “Russian officers will say that they are expelling no one but merely moving subjects about inside of the empire.” However, “the ‘moved’ subject stripped of his possessions and deprived of this home, must starve or get out of the country.”

1894: A policeman discovered that crockery store owned by the Rosenblatts on 10^thAvenue was on fire.  The officer entered the building which was also home to the Rosneblatts and dragged them to safety.

1894: A picture of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum was found in the studio of Henry Alexander who took his life today.  The picture was one “that he prized dearly.”

1894: Francis Bedford passed away.  Born in 1816, he was a noted artist and photographer who helped to found the Royal Photographic Society in 1853.  He accompanied the Prince of Wales on his tour of the Middle East.  His photographs of Palestine were some of the earliest and best of those taken in the 19^th century. They were published in 1865 providing many with their first real look at the Holy Land as it actually was.

1894: Birthdate of Abraham Samuel Samuels, the native of Woltzin Polan who came to the United States in 1922 where he served as Rabbi in Elmira, NY and was active in a number of Jewish organizations including the United Charities for Palestine.

1895: Birthdate of Fanny Goldstein, a librarian and the founder of Jewish Book Week

1898: Two days after he had passed 39 year old Joseph Shapsowitz was buried today in London at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery.”

1898: In Harlem, Temple Israel completed its three day celebration of the 25^thanniversary of the congregation and the 10^th anniversary of occupying its current facility.

1899(6^thof Sivan, 5659): Final observance of Shavuot in the 19^th century.

1899: The Sanitarium for Hebrew Children of the City of New York which helps “sick and destitute” Jews as well as providing free summer excursions has released its annual report.  It showed that last summer the sanitarium provide nine boat excursions and 24 trains excursions while aiding a total of 15,445 people.

1899: According to an article by Leopold Sanders, Jews are “the most anciently cultured people” since in the Book of Genesis they were the first to give the world various prehistoric legends of Babylonian origin.

1902: Rosa Strauss, the husband of Joseph Strauss and the mother of Otto, Augusta, Edward and Charles Strauss was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1902: Jewish housewives on the Lower East Side poured into the streets, breaking windows and throwing meat. The women were protesting a jump in the price of kosher meat from 12 to 18 cents a pound http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/15/1902/kosher-beef-boycott-of-1902

1903: “Twenty-five thousand rubles were sent to Kishineff, Russia, by cable today for the relief of the sufferers in the antiSemitic riots which raged throughout that city on April 19, 20, and 21, in which Jewish men, women, and children were butchered by the Russian mob, and the entire Jewish quarter looted.”

1904(29th of Iyar, 5664): Hayyim Selig Slonimski passed away in Warsaw. Born in Poland in 1810 when it was part of the Russian empire, his accomplishments included the invention of a calculating machine for which the Russian Academy of Sciences awarded him the Demidov Prize in 1844 and the establishment of Ha-Tsefirah, a weekly paper published in Hebrew.

1904: In Brooklyn pharmacist Isidore Michael and Grace Elizabeth Fadiman, Russian-Jewish immigrants gave birth to super-intellectual who gained fame during the golden age of radio.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/21/arts/clifton-fadiman-a-wordsmith-known-for-his-encyclopedic-knowledge-is-dead-at-95.html

1905: Birthdate of businessman Abraham Zapruder, whose famed home movie documented the assassination of JFK

1905: Founding of Las Vegas, Nevada. According to an article in Hadassah Magazine there is little documented proof concerning the first Jewish families living in Las Vegas.  Names like Bergman and Berman appear in the 1910 census In the 1920’s a family named Goldring served kosher food and proudly announced that they had produced the first Jewish baby born in the town.  Other sources provide a replica of cattle brand found on bovines belonging to a Las Vegas Jew named Charles Field.  The brand consisted of a diagonal “I” with the letter “C” superimposed over it.  Of course the first two Jewish names that come to mind when mentioning Las Vegas are Meyer Lansky and his protégé Ben “Bugsy” Siegel.  Today Las Vegas has one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the United States.

1906:Kuhn, Loeb and Company as brokers for the sale of the $50,000,000 in notes that would provide the Pennsylvania Railroad with the fund for “the company to meet expenses in connection with the extensive improvement work with the company has under way” including the New York tunnel and “additions to the terminal yards.

1907: In Berlin, “Economist and Demographer Robert René Kuczynski and his wife Berta Gradenwitz/Kuczynski, who was a painter” gave birth to their second child Ursula Maria Kuczynski who gained fame as author and WW II Soviet spy Ruth Werner.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/jul/11/guardianobituaries.richardnortontaylor

1907: Birthdate of Philip “Phil” Piratin the son of a small Jewish businessman who became active in the Communist Party and was one of the leaders in the “Battle of Cable Street” --

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-phil-piratin-1526400.html

1907: In San Francisco, political boss Abraham “Abe” Reuf pled guilty to charges of bribery, the day before he appeared a grand jury looking into corruption in the city.

1908: Birthdate of Frank Glassman who “played college ball at Wilmington and Bliss College and then played guard and tackle in the NFL with the Buffalo Bisons in 1929.”

1909: The cornerstone for a new building to be used by the Hebrew Infant Asylum is scheduled to be laid today.

1910: “Dr. Felix Adler, head of the Ethical Culture Society, occupied the pulpit of the Free Synagogue in Eighty-first Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, this morning, the occasion being the centenary of Abraham Geiger, the pathfinder of the Reform Judaism of Germany; or, as Dr. Adler put it, "the geologist of Judaism.”

1910: “Mayor Gaynor opened the twenty-fourth annual convention of the Independent Order Brith Abraham, the largest Jewish fraternal organization in the world, this morning at 10 o'clock, at Cooper Union, with a speech that called forth great applause from the audience

1910: “Declaring that the American Reformed Judaism as exemplified in the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati was really only "deformed Judaism," some 200 members of that faith pledged financial support tonight to an institution whose purpose should be to counteract the influence of the Cincinnati school.”

1911: In Poland, Yiddish theatre personalities Yakov and Ruzha Fuchs gave birth to actor Leo Fuchs who came to the United States and began his career in the Yiddish Theatre. Fuchs appeared in "Broadway Plays" in New York and in London.  He was seen on the television hit Mr. Ed.  His film credits include The Frisco Kid and Avalon.  He passed away in 1994.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituaries-leo-fuchs-1568528.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruzha_Fuchs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Fuchs

1912 Morris Lasker and Nettie Heidenheimer Davis Lasker gave birth to film producer Edward Lasker.

1912(28^thof Iyar, 5672): Eighty-two year old merchant Aaron Ullman, the son of Sophia Schatz Ullman, the husband of Mina Rothschild Ullman and Clarence Aaron Ullman passed away today after which he was buried in the “Mt. Zion” plot of the Springdale Cemetery in Peoria, IL.

1912: In Lower Saxony, Frantz Seligmann and Erna Seligmann gave birth to Werner Julius Seligmann, the husband of Irma Seligmann.

1912: Birthdate of composer Arthur Victor Berger, the Bronx native and  graduate of NYU and Harvard who was well known in his native America as a composer, teacher and music critic, but was better known in Britain as a writer on music, particularly on the academic, musicological side.  He passed away in 2003 at the age of 91.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/10/arts/arthur-berger-composer-and-music-critic-is-dead-at-91.html?scp=1&sq=Arthur+Berger&st=nyt

1913: It was reported today that  East Side Evening High School for Men which has a seventy percent Jewish student body was closed closed for the recent Jewish holidays which fell on April 22 and April 28.

1914: In Lower Saxony Frantz and Erna Seligman gave birth to Werner Julius Seligman, the husband of Irma Seligman

1914: Premiere in Germany of The Miracle a British color silent film based on the play by Max Reinhardt.

1914: Konrad von Preysing, who would become a leading anti-Nazi prelate was made Honorary Chamberlain of His Holiness today.

1914: Architect Louis Isadore Kahn, who had been born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky in Estonia in 1901, became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

1914(19^thof Iyar, 5674): Sixty-six year old Yitzhak Isaac Halevy Rabinowitz, a rabbi, Jewish historian, and founder of the Agudath Israel organization whose works included Dorot Harishonim or Dorot Harischonim  passed away today.

 1915:  Birthdate of American economist Paul Samuelson.  Samuelson won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1970.   Jews account for 40% of all winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics.  Fifty-four percent of the Americans who have won the award are Jewish.

1915: As the United States wrestles with a decision to go to war with Germany following the sinking of the RMS Lusitania it was reported that A. I. Shiplikoff, Secretary of the United Hebrew Trades has said his members “are in favor of the abolition of war and the permanent establishment of international peace..”

1915: It was reported today that Dr. S. N. Deinard is scheduled to preside over the upcoming meeting in Minneapolis designed to pressure the Governor of Georgia to grant clemency in the case of Leo M. Frank.

1916: In Solano County, CA Otto Oscar Dannenberg and Iceophine Elsie Dannenberg gave birth to Iceophine Roberta Goepfert

1916: Five days after Charles E. Klein who was Jewish was told that there were no openings in Battery D of the New York National Guard, Frank J. Conaton, who was not Jewish, was given an application blank by Captain Sullivan and told to go home and have his mother sign it since he was underage and could only be accepted with her consent.

1916: “Rabbi Stephen S. Wise drew a parallel between the Armenians and the Jews in Russia” saying that “My fellow Jews in Russia could gain relief by forsaking of their fathers” and “the Armenians could obtain surcease from sorrow by becoming Moslems.”

1916: It was reported today that Congressman Goldfogle, Rabbi Leventhal, Harry Fischel and Leon Kamisky were among those who had spoken at a meeting of The Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War in Philadelphia.

1916: Shalom Aleicheim was buried today at Old Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, NY.

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

1917: Today, in London, “official sources” confirmed the rumors “that whole Jewish population of Jaffa” had been expelled from Jaffa during Passover and forced to leave in a northerly direction.

1918: Birthdate of Saul Laskin, the native of Fort William who was the first mayor of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

1918: Two Jewish journalists – Landau and Goldsky – were among those who had worked for the Bonnet Rouge newspaper who were sentenced to prison today after being convicted of treason in Paris.

1918: In Montreal, Louis and Pearl Rubin (née Ruchwarger) gave birth to Joseph Wiseman, the American trained actor who played “Dr. No.”

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-joseph-wiseman21-2009oct21-story.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/arts/20wiseman.html

1919: “The Jewish sports club Maccabi București was founded in Bucharest.”

1919: In the Winnipeg General Strike “virtually the entire working population of Winnipeg had walked off the job. 30,000 to 35,000 people were on strike in a city of 200,000. Even essential public employees such as fire fighters went on strike, but returned midway through the strike with the approval of the Strike Committee. The Winnipeg Police were technically on strike but remained on patrol in practice.” Opponents of the strike, especially those in the press including The New York Timesdemonized the strikers as Bolsheviks and Jews.  Cartoons were produced depicting the strikers as hooked nosed Jews.  In 2005, this historic event would become part of the popular entertainment world through a musical called “Strike” by Danny Schur.  The hit play (in Canada) focused on the treatment of the Jewish and Ukrainian workers and carried a message of universal brotherhood. 

1919: Birthdate of Samuel Abraham Goldblith a food scientist who studied malnutrition while after having been taken prisoner by the Japanese at Corregidor and who developed the techniques for preserving food that were critical to the U.S. manned space program.

1919(15^thof Iyar, 5679):Aaron Aaronsohn…”one of the most extraordinary figures of the 20th century — a world-renowned scientist, a diplomat and a spy whose daring exploits enabled British General Edmund Allenby to capture Jerusalem, a turning point in WWI vanished without a trace

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/aaron-aaronsohn

https://jewoughtaknow.com/aaron-aaronsohn

http://www.patriciagoldstone.com/?page_id=12

1920: It was reported that the funeral for Yiddish actor David Kessler who passed away yesterday will take place tomorrow since today is the Sabbath – a day of rest when Jews do not bury their dead.

1922: The German-Polish Convention signed today guaranteed all minorities in Upper Silesia, including the Jews, equal civil and political rights.

1923:  In New York City, Jacob Israel Avedon, was a Russian-born immigrant who advanced from menial work to starting his own successful retail dress business on Fifth Avenue, called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue and his wife Anna gave birth to “fashion and portrait photographer” Richard Avedon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/01/arts/01CND-AVED.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/arts/design/richard-avedon-portraits-go-to-israel-museum.html

1926: Leopold Damrosch Mannes was appointed a Guggenheim Fellow today for creative work in musical composition and a study of musical literature.

1926: In Liverpool, Reka (née Fredman) and Jack Shaffer, an estate agent gave birth to twins Sir Peter Levin Shaffer and Anthony Shaffter both of whom became playwrights.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/arts/peter-shaffer-dies-at-90-playwright-won-tonys-for-equus-and-amadeus.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

1927: Judge Julian W. Mack is scheduled to be the principle speaker at the banquet this evening that will mark the start of Philadelphia’s United Palestine Appeal drive.

1927: Birthdate of Bezalel Rakow “an orthodox rabbi who headed Gateshead’s Jewish community and was the chair of the Council of Torah Sages of Agudas Yisroel of Great Britain.”

1928: Julius Rosenwald admitted today that he has given away so much money that he does not the dollar value of his philanthropies.

1928(25^thof Iyar, 5688): Sixty-six year old Herione May, social worker and founder of the Jewish Women’s Federation passed away.

1928: Samuel Goldwyn hosted a testimonial dinner at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel in honor of Al Lichtman, General Manager of Distribution in the United States and Canada for United Artists Corporation.

1928: Birthdate of a French–born American “novelist and academic, known also for poetry, essays, translations, and criticism who taught at the University at Buffalo, wrote in “the experimental style, that sought to deconstruct traditional prose” and whose books included “Double or Nothing.” 

1929: David Wuntch of Tyler, TX, was elected president of the Texas Zionist Association which concluded its silver anniversary convention today.

1930: It was announced today that “a request for an audience with the Roumanian Regency in connection with continuing attacks on Jews in various parts of the country will be made by the Union of Roumanian Jews” Dr. William Filderman is President of the Union.

1930: “Eliel Loefgren, former foreign minister of Sweden; Charles Barde, a Swiss jurist, and A. Van Kempen, a former Dutch colonial official, were today announced as members of the international Wailing Wall Commission to investigate the Moslem and Jewish claims to the Wailing Wall. The names were submitted to the Council of the League of Nations by Arthur Henderson, British foreign secretary.”

1930: The High Commissioner’s office has announced that, effective today, all immigration into Palestine is suspended pending the completion of a report being compiled by Sir John Simpson dealing with immigration and land settlement problems.

1931: Birthdate Norma Diane Fox who gained fame as award winning author Norma Fox Mazer.

1931: Italian born Giorgio Polacco, the conductor at the Met from 1915 to 1917, the Chicago Civic Opera from 1921 to 1930 “remarried Edith Mason” today.

1932: Hitler’s "Voelkischer Beobachter" advised the Jews of Germany to leave the country because “we National Socialists will certainly clear all Jews out of every position they occupy in Germany.

1933: The Secretariat of the League of Nations rejected petitions protesting the treatment of the Jews of Silesia because the treaty guaranteeing them their political and civil rights requires that the citizens of Silesia file the grievance and representatives of member nations.  The League chose to ignore the reality of the claims.

1933: In Germany, “a plan to expel Jewish barbers and tobacconists from their positions was initiated here today.”

1933 (19th of Iyar, 5693): Dr. Alfred Strauss, a Jewish lawyer, was killed in Dachau.

1934(1st of Sivan, 5694): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1934: Jewish candidates are running in both the Democratic and Republican primaries being held in New Jersey today.  Among the candidates are Samuel Raff, a Republican seeking a seat in the General Assembly and four candidates for the Justice of Peace Passaic County -  David Ehrlich, Democrat, and Benjamin Rosenfelt, Toby Schneider, and Morris Rosenberg, Republicans.

1935: “The Italian Crown Prince Umberto and the Crown Princess Maria, who are now on an official visit to Tripolitana, today visited the Jewish quarter in the town of Tripoli”.

1935: Representatives of several Jewish communities in Poland were considering taking part in a project to plant a forest in Palestine in honor of Marshal Josef Pilsudski

1935: Birthdate of Ingram Berg Shavitz, the Manhattan native who gained fame as Burt Shavitz, the creator of a line of personal care products.

http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/311468/burt-shavitz-jewish-burts-bees-founder-dies-at-80/

1935: The Gazeta Warszawska, organ of the anti-Semitic National Democratic Party, was expelled today from the Press Association of the Polish Republic for its "tactless attitude" while the nation was mourning the death of Marshal Pilsudski. The Press Association comprises all newspapers in Poland. The expulsion was decided on at a special session called for this purpose (JTA)

1936: The Italian consul denied today in a statement to the press that Italian agents are responsible for disorders in Palestine. London newspapers had charged Italian agents with fomenting the outbreak in an attempt to embarrass Great Britain in the Italo-Ethiopian situation. (JTA)

1936: As Arabs gather in their mosques for prayers today, “the curfew in the Old City…was extended to a large outside the Old City Walls” due to the threat of increased violence.

1936: On the first day of the official Arab campaign of civil disobedience aimed at ending Jewish immigration violence breaks out forcing the British to cordon off Tel Aviv from Jaffa.

1937: In Cincinnati, Ohio, Richard Jacob Mack, the son of Jacob William Mack and Bertha Mack and Elizabeth Mack gave birth to Alan Richard Mack

1937:  Birthdate of Madeleine Korbel Albright. A native of Czechoslovakia, Albright was raised as a Roman Catholic.  In 1996, Albright discovered that her grandparents had been murdered at Auschwitz and Terezin. Her parents had converted to Roman Catholicism to escape the Holocaust.  Albright has stated that she did not know she had Jewish ancestors until she was an adult. In 1997, she was the first woman to be named Secretary of State.

1938: The Palestine Post reported that while the armed Arab gangs continued to carry out robberies, commit arson, blow up culverts, dig holes in the roads and set up mines throughout the country, at least one such gang suffered heavy casualties when engaged by British forces near Acre. Many arrests were carried out in Tamra and the neighboring villages. Two British officers were wounded in this operation. An Arab mukhtar, village elder, was murdered near Nablus after he refused to pay ransom

1939: Giorgio Polacco, the conductor of the Metropolitan Opera and Chicago Civic Opera re-married Edith Mason today.

1939: Wilfrid Israel “an Anglo-German businessman whose father was the founder of Israel’s Department Store which was “one of the largest and oldest stores in pre-World War II Germany” and who was active in the rescue of Jews from Nazi Germany “left Berlin for London” today where he would live until 1943 when his flight was shot down by a Luftwaffe fighter while he was returning from Lisbon, where had been on a mission for the Jewish Agency for Palestine arranging entry certificates for refugees.

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/wilfred-israel-the-mystery-philanthropist-who-helped-save-thousands/

1939 The SS St. Louis leaves Hamburg. Most of the thousand or so passengers are Jewish escapees from Nazi Germany. They have landing passes for Cuba as well as quota numbers that could allow them entry into the United States three years hence;

1939 A women's concentration camp opens at Ravensbrück, 50 miles north of Berlin.

1940: Thousands of refugee Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia are trapped behind German lines as Nazi forces push through Holland. The Dutch Army surrenders

1941(18th of Iyar, 5701): On Lag B’Omer, 12 Polish Jews who have traveled by sealed train from the Biala Podlaska Jewish POW camp to Konskowola are murdered after the train's Nazi overseers discover that four of the POWs have escaped.

1941: Nazi occupiers in Netherlands forbid the playing Jewish music

1942: As of today, an additional 11,000 more Jews had been to Chelmno bringing the total shipped to the death camp from Lodz to approximately 55,000.

1943: In Rohatyn, Jewish ghetto police secretly plan to buy weapons and form escape parties to the nearby woods. Three weeks later the plan is foiled and all 1,000 Jews of the ghetto are killed.

1943: The Warsaw ghetto was reduced to ashes and the uprising came to an end after an active resistance of four weeks.

1943(10th of Iyar, 5703): After days of being crammed in a box car, Salamo Arouch, a Greek-born Jewish boxer, his parents, three younger sisters and his brother arrived at Auschwitz at 6 p.m. His mother and sisters were immediately taken to the gas chambers.

1943: The first issue of Liberal Judaism, a new illustrated monthly journal of opinion and letters appeared today.

1943: The Adelaide Advertiser published excerpts from the pamphlet “Let My People Go” published in 1942 in which Victor Gollancz wrote “that between one and two million Jews had already been murdered in Nazi controlled Europe and "unless something effective is done, within a very few months these six million Jews will all be dead.”

1944: In a letter, dated today, addressed to the Zionist leadership in Palestine (under British rule) Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl called on the Zionist leadership to take stronger action on behalf of European Jewry which was systematically being destroyed by the Nazi lead genocide:

And you - our brothers in Palestine, in all the countries of freedom, and you, ministers of all the kingdom — how do you keep silent in the face of this great murder ? Silent while thousand on thousands, reaching now to six million Jews, were murdered. And silent now while tens of thousands are still being murdered and waiting to be murdered? Their destroyed hearts cry to you for help as they bewail your cruelty. Brutal you are and murderers too you are, because of the cold-bloodedness of the silence in which you watch

1944: Nazi deportation of Jews from greater Hungary began with the deportation of 14,000 Jews from Munkacs to Auschwitz. The roundup is directed by Eichman with “the full cooperation of the Hungarian police.”

1944: As part of the Nazi proposal to swap Jews for supplies including ten thousand trucks, Joel Brand is flown from Budapest to Istanbul to meet with two representatives of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.  The two will listen to Brand and take the offer back to Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv.

1944: On the eve of the Allied invasion of Europe, 878 Jews are deported from Drancy, France, to the Reval, Estonia, slave-labor camp. At the very time when Rommel, the Nazi General who is in charge of preparing to face the Allied onslaught, is bemoaning the lack of men and equipment, the Germans are busy shipping Jews to their death.  This provides further proof that the creation of a Jew-Free Europe was an integral part of the German effort and not some tangential activity.

1944: Dr. Salomon Gluck, the brother of Rose Warfman, was deported on convoy 73 which left Drancy today.  He would reportedly die five days later.

1945: Reb David Werdyger  was liberated today at the Linz Labor Camp

1945: The Soviet NKWD arrested Otto Armster, a German intelligence officer who took part in the July 20 to kill Hitler and subsequently took him back to the U.S.S.R.

1945: Birthdate of Gail J. Koff, who would be considered the silent partner in the national law firm Jacoby & Meyers after she opened their New York offices six years after the firm, began operations in Los Angeles, California.

1945: In Yugoslavia, fighting between 30,000 Nazi soldiers and a group of Yugoslav partisans known as the Battle of Poljana came to end when the Axis surrendered in what may have been the last formal combat operation in the European Theatre during WW II.

1946:”The Austrian Parliament disclosed today that it had discovered a close relationship between Austria's future treatment of Jewish restitution claims and the treatment that Austria herself could expect to receive.”

1946: “Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld, director of the Community on Unit for Palestine of the ZOA criticized the American Council of Judaism” tonight “in an address at the East Midwood Jewish Center for it announced support of the Anglo American inquiry in the Near East” which “would delay the transfer of 100,000 European Jews to Palestine…”

1947: The government in Palestine is scheduled to publish “the new immigration quota for the month ending June 14” which will allow “for the admission of 1,500 Jews, 200 Arabs and others.”

1947: It was reported today that the United States has refused to grant a visa “Razim Khalidi” because of his activities in Germany during the war “that have been regarded as pro-Nazi.

1947: Today “the UN General Assembly formally established an 11-nation committee of inquiry into the Palestine questions” while urging the “Palestinians” (Jews and Arabs) to refrain from violence pending a decision” this autumn.

1948(6^thof Iyar, 5708): Parashat Kedoshim

1948: Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia invade the state of Israel on its second day of existence.  As soon as the Mandate ended, the Arab armies attacked with the aim of driving the Jews into the sea.

1948: As the first day dawned on the new Jewish state, the Israeli military force had grown from 4.500 to 36,600 in the six months since the partition vote. This seemingly impressive total includes everybody not just combat troops.  And it pales in comparison to the size (not to mention the equipment) of the invading Arab armies. At least 1,200 Jews had fallen in fighting during the same period and this does not count civilian casualties. 

1948: On Cyprus, the British open the gates of the detention camps.  Thousands of Jews who had been imprisoned in their attempt to reach Eretz Israel, would now be free to leave for the new national Jewish home.  Within days, many of those released would be fighting in the front lines against the invading Arab armies. 

1948: Mordechai Ruttenberg took part in one of those small actions, described below, which helped to change history.

In Jerusalem, a young teenager and a member of Gadna (Gedudei Noar--Israeli youth corps offering pre-military training of teenagers) helping to defend Jerusalem “found a crate of Molotov cocktails in the Notre Dame Monastery, got really scared, and hid it. The Jordanians tried every possible way to break into the city, and on that day armored vehicles arrived via Damascus Gate and took up positions below the windows of the monastery. Someone shouted from the street, 'Hey, kid, where are the cocktails?' I didn't know what to do, so he explained to me how to throw them. From the window I threw one of the bottles onto the first armored vehicle, which immediately started to burn, and the Jordanians beat a hasty retreat. Afterward people wrote that the Molotov cocktails saved Jerusalem, because otherwise the Jordanians would have entered the city. I pretty much forgot the whole thing, but one day I heard a tour guide telling about the boy with the bottle, and I came out of the closet and said, 'I am that boy.'"  That boy was the future Professor Mordechai Rotenberg who Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who taught at Hebrew University in the social work school, the criminology institute and the department of psychology.

1948: The American office of Magen David Adom (the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross) opened a blood bank for Israel in New York City that was soon packed with donors.

1948: Voice of Israel (Kol Israel) was born simultaneously with the birth of the State of Israel. Operations for Kol Israel were in the old Palestine Broadcasting Service facilities left behind when the British left Palestine. The first Kol Israel broadcast was made from Tel Aviv as David Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of Independence for the Jewish State.

1948: In a radio Broadcast Menachem Began said today "It is Hebrew arms which decide the boundaries of the Hebrew State; so it now in this battle; so it will be in the future."

1948: On the day after Israel declared its independence Jews in Baghdad "walked liked shadows, terrified about their own destiny and that of their brothers in the Land of Israel."

1948: The Battles of the Kinarot Valley began tonight when Israeli observers reported that “many vehicles with full lights” were “moving along the Golan ridge east of the Sea of Galilee.” The observers were describing the movement of a Syrian infantry brigade accompanied by at least one tank battalion and one artillery battalion that was on its way to attack Kibbutz Ein Gev.  Among the Jewish forces facing the Syrians were elements of the Golani Brigade.  Thanks to an arms embargo, the Israelis had no artillery, tanks or combat aircraft to face this onslaught. 

1948: Moshe Sharett became Israel’s first Foreign Minister.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/sharett.html

1948: Etan Liivni who had been freed from Acre Prison in 1947 during the great prison break, returned to Israel today from his hiding place in Europe so he could fight in the War for Independence. 

1948: An Iraqi brigade invaded at Naharayim on May 15, 1948, in an unsuccessful attempt to take the kibbutz and fort but the Arabs were able to occupy and loot the power plant which was the creation of Pinhas Rutenberg.

1948: On the first day of the invasion of Israel by five Arab Armies, the Egyptian 6^thBattalion, “backed by armored vehicles, mortars, cannons and aircraft, attacked Kibbutz Nirm which was defended by a force of forty Jewish fighters who after seven hours drove the attackers who retread “leaving behind somewhere between 30 and 35 dead.”

1948(6^thof Iyar, 5708): Holocaust survivor Rivka Salzman died today during the crucial Battle of Nirim – the only woman to die in the successful thwarting of Egypt’s initial attempt to destroy the state of Israel.

http://www.izkor.gov.il/HalalKorot.aspx?id=23546

1949: In Philadelphia, PA, opening of “3rd Sculpture International” which includes the works of Chaim Gross, Jacob Epstein, Jacques Lipschitz and William Zorach.

1949(16^thof Iyar): Rabbi Chaim Tchernowita, author of “Toledot haHalakah” passed away

1949: Sixty-seven year old Mary Antin, a champion of immigrant rights and author whose work included The Promised Land, the 1912 autobiographical tome about her “Americanization “ passed away today.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F00C13F93B5F177B93CAA8178ED85F4D8485F9

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/antin-mary

1950: The remains of Oscar Grusenberg, the Russian Jewish lawyer who defended Mendel Beilis against blood-ritual charges were interred in Israel

1951:  Birthdate of Frank Wilczek winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.

1951: Pitcher Saul Rogovin is traded from the Tigers to the White Sox and still compiled a league leading 2.78 Earned Run Average.

1952: Abba Khoushy, Mayor of Haifa, attended the United States Conference of Mayors at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

1952(20^thof Iyar, 5712): Fifty-three year old Brooklyn born Maurice D. “Red” Kann, the “original editor of Motion Picture Daily and the husband of Frances Kann passed away today in Los Angeles.

1952: Founding of Sde Boker (Cattle Rancher's Field) in the central Negev hills.  Sde Boker began as a horse-breeding community.  Later sheep were added to the breeding activity.  As the desert was reclaimed orchards were planted by the settlers.  Sde Boker's most famous settler was David Ben-Gurion who first moved there in 1952 when he resigned as Prime Minister in 1952.  Ben Gurion saw Sde Boker as a key to reclaiming the Negev.  In turn Ben Gurion saw reclamation of the Negev - making the desert bloom - as a key to the ultimate success of the new Jewish state.

1952: “A resolution proposing the establishment of a small body in the United States with full authority to bring about co-ordination between the United Jewish Appeal and the Israel Bond Drive was presented to the Zionist Actions Committee by Nahum Goldmann on behalf of the Jewish Agency executive.” (JTA)1953(1st of Sivan, 5713): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that a new railway line linked Hadera with Tel Aviv. The entire new track was constructed out of the French-manufactured material acquired with the aid of French railways. The funds came from the Development Budget.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Bavarian Cabinet had decided to ban the return to Bavaria of Jewish Displaced Persons who left Germany for Israel after World War II and now decided to return to Germany.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that Kfar Saba celebrated its 50th anniversary.

1956(5^thof Sivan, 5716): Erev Shavuot

1956: Those living in the Jewish quarter of Constantine, Algeria are spending their first full day living behind an Army cordon put up yesterday on orders from Maj. Gen. Jean Noiret, commandant of French troops in eastern Algeria in an attempt to “prevent any repetition of the violence that occurred on May 12 and May 14.

1958: Premiere of the film version of the Lerner and Loewe musical “Gigi’ produced by Arthur Freed and filmed by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg.

1959: The movie version of the Broadway comedy “the Tunnel of Love” produced by Martin Meclcher and Joseph Fields who also wrote the script was released today in Germany.

1959(7th of Iyar, 5719): Charlotte Lipsky passed away today at the age eighty.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lipsky-charlotte

1960(18^thof Iyar, 5720): Lag B’Omer is celebrated for the last time during the Presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower.

1960: “The Swiss post office” is scheduled to “issue a special Herzl Day stamp” which “will have seven start within a Star of David and a Lion of Judah” today “to commemorate the 100^th birth of the founder of political Zionism.”

1960: Dr. Nahum Goldman the president of the World Zionist Organization and Pinchas Rosen, the Israel Minister of Justice are scheduled to address “a central memorial meeting organized by the Jewish Agency and the Israel Government in Basel’s historic Casino Hall.” (JTA)

1962: NBC broadcast the final episode of “Cain’s Hundred,” a crime series with scripts by Eliot Asinof, Fred Freiberg, directed by Irvin Kershner, Sydney Pollack and Boris Sagal, and featuring appearances by Edward Asner, Martin Balsam, Sammy Davis, Jr., Jack Klugman, Leonard Nimoy, Norman Fell and Don Rickles.

1964(21^stof Iyar, 5723): Fifty-nine year old Brooklyn Law School trained attorney Moses A. Feuer a partner in a firm whose other named partners were his wife Gertrude Caesar Feuer and his son-in-law Milton Fischel passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/05/16/archives/moses-a-feuer-lawyer-headed-queens-bar-unit.html

1967: Israel holds the Independence Day parade in Jerusalem without the usual numbers of heavy artillery and tanks. The full parade is not held because of an agreed limitation of tanks in the city, as laid down in the armistice agreement with Jordan. Egypt accuses Israel of having sent the "missing tanks and other weaponry to the north." Egypt names May 17 as the day on which Israel will invade Syria. A new song is born: "Yerushalayim shel Zahav" - "Jerusalem of Gold" by Naomi Shemer is performed for the first time on Independence Day. It soon becomes a kind of second national anthem.

1967: During a parade in Jerusalem marking the 19^th anniversary of Israeli independence, a messenger brings word to Prime Minister Eshkol that “large Egyptian forces were moving into Sinai and advancing westward.” The message continued that in Cairo rumored reports had Nasser ordering the removal of the UN Emergency Forces from the Sinai and the Straits of Tiran.

1967: “While on a photo assignment in London, Linda Eastman met Beatle Paul McCartney at the Bag O’Nails.

1968: U.S. premiere of “The Swimmer” for which Sydney Pollack provided uncredited directorial work and for which producer Sam Spiegel hired Marvin Hamlisch to write the music.

1969: Associate Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas resigned over a controversy concerning past legal fees.

1969: “Thirty five Arabs were injured by terrorist grenade attacks in Gaza, Jabaliya, Kahn Yunis, Rafa, and Deir el Balah,”

1970: “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” a Billboard topper by Burt Bacharach and Hal David iwas released today.

1973(13^thof Iyar, 5733): Seventy-three year old Ralph Kahn, the son Baruch Kahn and Constance Kenendel Lang and the husband of Edith Sommer passed away today in Montpellier, France.

1973: President Richard Nixon awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to Air Force Sergeant John L. Levitow, the only enlisted airman to be so honored during the Viet Nam War.  The citation reads as follows: “For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his own life above and beyond the call of duty. Sergeant John L. Levitow (then Airman First Class), U.S. Air Force, distinguished himself by exceptional heroism on 24 February, 1969, while assigned as a loadmaster aboard an AC-47 aircraft flying a night mission. On that date, Sgt. Levitow's aircraft was struck by a hostile mortar round. The resulting explosion ripped a hole through the wing and fragments mad over 3,500 holes in the fuselage. All occupants of the cargo compartment were helplessly slammed against the floor and fuselage. The explosion tore an activated flare from the grasp of a crewmember, who had been launching flares to provide illumination for Army ground troops engaged in combat. Sgt. Levitow, though stunned by the concussion of the blast and suffering from over forty fragment wounds in the back and legs, staggered to his feet and turned to assist the man nearest to him, who had been knocked down and was bleeding heavily. As he was moving his wounded comrade forward and away from the open cargo compartment door, he saw the smoking flare ahead of him in the aisle. Realizing the danger involved and completely disregarding his own wounds, Sgt. Levitow started toward the burning flare. Sgt. Levitow struggled forward despite the loss of blood. Unable to grasp the flare with his hands, he threw himself bodily upon the burning flare. Hugging the deadly devise to his body, he dragged himself back to the rear of the aircraft and hurled the flare through the open cargo door. At that instant, the flare separated and ignited in the air, but clear of the aircraft. Sgt. Levitow, by selfless and heroic actions, saved the aircraft and its entire crew from certain death and destruction. Sgt. Levitow's conspicuous gallantry, his profound concern for his fellowmen and his intrepidity at the risk of his own life above and beyond the call of duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Air Force and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.”  Born in in 1945, Levitow passed away at the age of 55 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

1974(23rd of Iyar, 5734): A cell from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine infiltrated into Israel from Lebanon. They entered an apartment in Ma’a lot, killing the Cohen family including their four year old son. The terrorist then stormed Netiv Meir School.  “They took 105 students and 10 of their teachers hostage.  They were from a religious high school in Safed and who were staying the school during a class trip.”  The terrorists killed 22 students and three of the teachers before the IDF could mount an effective rescue mission.

1978: In Queens, “Michael Krumholtz, a postal worker and his wife Judy, a dental assistant gave birth to actor David Krumholtz whose portrayal of math wizard “Charlie Epps” in the crime-comedy series “Numbers” might be seen as a bit of ethnic stereotyping.

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Embassy in Washington reiterated that "the supply of advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia and Egypt creates a serious threat to the security of Israel." President Sadat of Egypt, in a major policy speech, threatened domestic critics of his policy of negotiating with Israel, and took great pains in explaining why he had deposited one million pounds, received from Katar, in his personal account.

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Cabinet, by a vote of 14 to three, backed the Chief of Staff, Raphael Eitan's declaration that Israel cannot defend itself without Judea, Samaria, and the Golan.

1979: ABC broadcast the last episode of the first season of “Taxi” the sit com created by James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels and Ed Weinberger and starring Judd Hirsch.

1981: President Anwar el-Sadat called on Syria and Israel today to adopt a policy of ''hands off Lebanon'' and urged the Palestinians to form a provisional government because ''the day will come when Israel will sit with you.'' Mr. Sadat's remarks came in a two-and-a-half-hour address to Parliament, which was devoted in large measure to a scathing denunciation of Egypt's small opposition Socialist Labor Party. The President dealt only briefly with the Lebanese crisis and did not address himself to a question that has been arising with some frequency here - What would Egypt do if Syria and Israel went to war?

1982(22^ndof Iyar, 5742): Parashat Behar-Bechukotai

1982(22^ndof Iyar, 5742): Eight-eight year old Yale Law School graduate and worker’s comp specialist who was survived by his wife Jessie passed away today in New Haven, CT.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/17/obituaries/louis-sachs.html

1983: Rabbi Charles Kroloff of Temple Emanu-El in Westfield officiated at the wedding of Lisa Ehrich and Robert Bernstein.  He was assisted by cantorial student Jill Spasser.

1983: In “Psychological and Moral Dilemmas” published today, Robert Alter reviews Eight Great Hebrew Novels edited by Alan Lelchuck and Gershon Shaked.

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/15/books/psychological-and-moral-dilemmas.html?pagewanted=all

1983: In “New Life For A Prescient Novel About Nazism” published today Frederick S. Roffman described the film being made based on The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger.

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/15/books/new-life-for-a-prescient-novel-about-nazism.html

1986: NBC broadcast the final episode of season 2 of the “Cosby Show” co-created by Ed Weinberger which was the number sitcom for the 1985-1986 season

1986(6th of Iyar, 5746):  Seventy one year old author and journalist Theodore White passed away.  White first gained fame covering China during World War II for the Time/Life media empire.  His honest reporting got him in trouble with Right Wing Americans and he ended up coming back to the States after the war.  White had been so effective as a reporter because he spoke Chinese, a language he learned quite by accident while studying at Harvard.  A whole new generation of Americans came to know him for his prize winning popular political science treatise, The Making in President which told the story of the Nixon-Kennedy campaign in 1960.  It provided many Americans with their first insight as to how the American electoral system really worked.  Although he was to write several “making of a President” books, none would come close to the original effort which spawned a whole new genre of political reporting.

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-05-16/news/mn-5696_1_white-house

1988(28^thof Iyar, 5748): Yom Yerushalayim

1989: French premiere of “Brenda Starr” a film based on the comic strip reporter with a script by “Jenny Wolkind,” better known as Delia Ephron.

1990: The Cemetery Club produced by Philip Rose opened on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.

1994(5^thof Sivan, 5754): Erev Shavuot

1994(5^thof Sivan, 5754): Seventy-eight year old Russian born British economist Alexander Nove whom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher described as “one of the most significant scholars of 'Soviet' studies in its widest sense and beyond” passed away today.

http://www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk/biography/?id=WH0168&type=P

1995: The Chicago Sun Times reports that Eddie Schwartz has left WLUP after having failed to obtain the same success he had enjoyed with WGN.

1995(15^thof Iyar, 5755): Eighty-one year old “American real estate investor” Seymour B. Durst, “a philanthropist and the inventor of the National Debt Clock” passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/20/obituaries/seymour-b-durst-real-estate-developer-who-led-growth-on-west-side-dies-at-81.html

1995: “My so-called Life” a teen drama created by Winnie Hotlzman and produced by Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz was officially canceled today.

1997: NBC broadcast the final episode of season seven of “Seinfeld.”

1998: “The Horse Whisperer” a movie version of the novel of the same name with a script by Eric Roth and featuring Jessalyn Gilsig.

1998: “Quest for Camelot” an animated musical fantasy with a script by David Seidler and starring Jessalyn Gilsig and Don Rickles was released in the United States today.

1998: “Clockwatchers” a comedy co-starring Lisa Kudrow was released in the United States today.

1999: In the West End at the Lyric Theatre final performance of a revival of “Animal Crackers” a musical with lyrics and music by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and the book by George S. Kaurfman and Morrie Ryskind.

2000: Israel and Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) reestablished diplomatic relations.

2000: By decree of the French Republic President, Israeli diplomat, Dr Meir Rosenne, has been made Commander in the National Order of the Legion of Honour.

2001(22^ndof Iyar, 5761): Twenty year old Idit Mizrahi of Rimonim was murdered today when terrorists fired bullets at car carrying her, her father and her brother who were traveling to attend a family wedding.

2001: One Israel, a party formed by Ehud Barak in 1999 ceased to exist today.

2001:The BBC broadcast “Revolutions” the 9^th episode of “A History of Britain a documentary series written and presented by Simon Schama” which began its second season earlier this month.

2001: In “Let the Circle Be Unbroken,” published today Mimi Sheraton laments the latest assault on “The Bagel” – Pillsbury’s Toaster Filled Bagels.

 Bagel purists have had a lot to swallow as their favorite nosh has come in for its share of creative rethinking. The basic flour-water-salt-yeast-malt dough that should be shaped and then boiled before being baked is now often steamed or not moistened at all, so that it lacks the inimitable yeasty, chewy inner texture. Pizza or pumpernickel doughs are often used now, and the traditional crust that should be plain, with a golden, shiny finish, may be pockmarked with poppy or sesame seeds, garlic or onions, while the correctly neutral, cool interior is adulterated with cinnamon and raisins, nuts and berries. Economic considerations, like high labor costs, have fostered mammoth bagels that fetch mammoth prices even though they resemble inner tubes more than they do the compact, true bagel that ideally measures about 3.5 inches in diameter. It's a wonder we permit these versions to be called bagels at all. But the single characteristic of the bagel that has always been honored, no matter what other attributes go by the board, is its shape. A bagel is ring-shaped -- round with a hole in the center. At least until now; The Pillsbury Company’s ''filled bagels'' -- described in the advertising copy as ''highly evolved'' -- are more like Pop-Tarts than bagels. Each 3- by 4-inch rectangle of ''tasty bagel crust'' is filled with cream cheese and, of all things, strawberry jelly. Although sweetness is antithetical to true bagel connoisseurship, the jelly and the cheese suggest the red-and-white color combination (visible through three slashes on the top crust) of cream cheese and smoked salmon. Real fish, of course, would not work, being too perishable for both freezer and toaster. The greatest attribute of these ''filled bagels,'' promises the ad copy, is: ''No gloppy mess. Next breakfast, it's freezer, toaster, done.'' Following Pillsbury's instructions, this highly evolved taster found the crust (neither baked nor steamed, I bet) to have the flavor and texture one might expect from a dampened, heated manila folder enclosing a crowd-pleasing, sweet and creamy filling. But please, Pillsbury Doughboy, go back to your creative copywriters and marketing talents and come up with another name. The new product you so proudly hail may not be totally terrible, but it is totally not a bagel. Where is the circle? Where is the hole?

2002: President Bush welcomes forty-five leaders from the United Jewish Communities to the White House.

2003: Today, a Paris court rejected a lawsuit brought by Kurt Werner Schaechter, 82, an Austrian-born French Jew, charging France's national railroad company with the equivalent of complicity in crimes against humanity for deporting Jews to Nazi death camps during Germany's wartime occupation of France.”

2004: After being called up from Triple-A Pawtucket today Kevin Edmund Youkilis “went 2 for 4 in his major league debut” with the Boston Red Sox.

2005(6th of Iyar, 5765):  Alan B. Gold, Chief Justice of the Quebec Superior Court passed away at the age of 87.

2005: “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” co-starring Natalie Portman and Frank Oz premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

2005: The New York Timesincluded reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including the recently released paperback editions of “After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust,” Eva Hoffman’s essay that “thoughtfully conveys the conflicted inner lives of a generation of children of Holocaust survivors” and “The Sea House”  Esther Freud’s “intricate English novel, inspired by the letters of Esther Freud's grandfather (Sigmund's son), which is set along the Suffolk coast and tells two stories separated by half a century.”

2006: Over 150,000 people attended the celebrations at the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai on Mount Meron in the Galilee, where a large feast is traditionally held.

2006: Daniel Barenboim was named principal guest conductor of La Scala opera house, in Milan,

2006: Daniel Barenboim was named principal guest conductor of La Scala opera house, in Milan, after Riccardo Muti's resignation

2007: In Washington, D.C. Theater J presents the last of performances of Arnold Wesker's “Shylock,” a landmark re-imagining of the three stories which inspired Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Featuring beloved international performer Theodore Bikel in the title role and Edward Gero as Antonio, this staged concert readingis presented in conjunction with the Shakespeare in Washington Festival.

2007: In London, the ZF presents “A Special Commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of the Reunification of Jerusalem” featuring a speech by Moshe Arens, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States who also served as the Israeli Defense Minister and Foreign Minister.

2007: Four people were wounded by a barrage of at last 19 Qassam Rockets fired by Hamas terrorists at the western Negev town of Sderot.  Palestinian leaders said that Hamas was trying to divert attention from internecine fighting in the Gaza Strip by renewing hostilities between Israel and the Palestine Authority.

2007(27th of Iyar, 5767):  Ninety-five year old Italian-Jewish architect Giorgio Cavaglieri, passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/arts/design/18cavaglieri.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

2008: In Mishkenot Sha'ananim in Jerusalem, The First International Writers Festival comes to a close.

2008: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington marks the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel with a series of book talks by Laura Cohen Apelbaum on “Jewish Washington: Scrapbook of an American Community” (the companion to the award-winning exhibit of the same name) beginning at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. It is co-sponsored by the Embassy of Israel and the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum

2008: President George Bush is schedule to address the Knesset on the second day of his visit to Israel; a visit designed to honor Israel on its sixtieth anniversary as well as to try and advance peace talks with the Palestinians.

2008: A conference is held at the Beit Chail Haavir in Herzlia by the National Road Safety Authority, Or Yarok, and the Institute of Technological Studies in order to promote new technological advances to improve road safety in Israel.

2008: Google co-founder Sergey Brin lauded Israeli innovations in technology and environmental efforts, saying Israel "takes our climate challenges very seriously." Brin, visiting as a delegate to President Shimon Peres' Presidential Conference, told Haaretzthat these challenges have "great geopolitcal ramifications on this country, in addition to environmental ones."

2008: Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch told a panel in Jerusalem on Thursday that promoting technology throughout the Middle East could help advance peace. "When people have the skills - to build better lives for themselves and their families, their societies become more peaceful and Israel will have better neighbors," Murdoch said during a debate on new media and the internet at President Shimon Peres'"Facing Tomorrow" conference. "We'll continue to do what we can to help Israel maintain its competitive edge. Yet we must also look for new ways to expand human capital throughout the Middle East."

2008: "Waltz With Bashir” a daring new animated documentary which follows Israeli director Ari Folman as he tries to piece together memories of the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila camps is screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

2009: Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” discusses his most recent book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Md., in an event sponsored by Politics and Prose Bookstore.

2009:Rabbi Shefa Gold, a leader in Aleph, The Alliance for Jewish Renewal leads Friday night services for Congregation Bet Mishpachah at the Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C.

2009(21^stof Iyar): Ninety-one year old Edwin S. Shneidman, a psychologist who gave new direction to the study of suicide and was a founder of the nation’s first comprehensive suicide prevention center, passed away today at his home in Los Angeles. (As reported by William Dicke)

2010: Before Shabbat morning services start at Temple Emanuel in Denver, Rabbi Steven Foster is scheduled to discuss "Reform Responsa: Applying Jewish Text to Modern Day Questions."

2010(2^ndof Sivan, 5770): Moshe Greenberg, one of the most influential Jewish biblical scholars of the 20th century, died today at his home in Jerusalem at the age of 81. As reported by Dennis Hevesi

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/arts/20greenberg.html?pagewanted=print

2011: Joel and Ethan Coen, the Oscar award-winning producer-director team that created films like The Big Lebowski and A Serious Man are expected to attend the ceremony in Israel today at which they will be formally awarded The Dan David Prize “for their contribution in film making.”  The committee that made the selection “called the duo a unique example in cinematic history for their abilities to tell a simple story in a complex manner.”  “The Dan David Prize is named for the businessman and philanthropist and is administered by a board of directors headed by Tel Aviv University President Professor Yoseph Klafter. Ten percent of the recipients' prize money is donated on their behalf to doctorate and post-doctorate student grants.”  Each recipient receives a million dollars. The other million-dollar prize winners for 2011 are University of California at San Francisco Professor Cynthia Kenyon and Harvard Medical School Professor Gary Ruvkun for their work in gerontology, and Stanford University Medical School Professor Marcus Feldman for his work in the evolutionary sciences. President Shimon Peres and 2010 prize winner Italian President Giorgio Napolitano are expected to attend the award ceremony, the tenth year that the prizes will be awarded.

2011: A Brazilian production of the musical “Baby” with music by David Shire opened today.

2011: The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to present a symposium entitled: “2,000 Years of Jewish Life in Morocco: An Epic Journey.”

2011: In what would prove to be a case of “rush to judgment” the New York Police Department arrested Dominique Strauss-Kahn at 2:15 a.m. today “on charges of criminal sexual act, attempted rape, and an unlawful imprisonment in connection with a sexual assault on a 32-year-old chambermaid in the luxury suite of a Midtown Manhattan hotel yesterday” about 1 p.m., Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said.  (As reported by Al Baker and Steven Erlanger)

2011: Young Jewish Professionals are scheduled to take part in The Lox, Stock & Bagel Scavenger Hunter where they will “explore the heart of the Lower East Side that is changing right before your eyes. Highlights include Russ & Daughters, Katz's Deli, the birthplace of B'nai B'rith, Economy Candy, and much more.”

2011: Avraham Granted was fired today as Manager of West Ham United “after the club was relegated to the Football League Championship

2011: In honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, the Mizel Museum will open its doors free of charge” today “for visitors to tour its new permanent exhibit 4,000 Year Road Trip: Gathering Sparks,” which offers “a dynamic journey through art, artifacts and digital media that narrates and celebrates Jewish culture and history.”

2011: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Wizards of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust” by Diana B. Henriques and the recently released paperback edition of “The Sabbath World:Glimpses of a Different Order of Time” by Judith Shulevitz

2011: The Los Angeles Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including 'Say Her Name' by Francisco Goldman.

2011:Four people were reportedly shot dead by Israel Defense Forces troops today as they opened fire on large numbers of infiltrators trying to breach Syria's southern border with Israel. Another four people were said to have been killed on the Lebanese side of its shared frontier with Israel, as Palestinian protests for the annual Nakba Day, which mourns the creation of the State of Israel, took hold across the region.

2011: Cedar Rapids native, John Lipsky, brother of Temple Judah congregant Ann Lipsky is named as acting managing director of the IMF.

2011(11th of Iyar, 5771): Eighty year old Rebbetzin Hesa Halberstam, the widow of Grand Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Halberstam passed away today.

2011:Dozens of Im Tirtzu activists gathered outside the offices of UNRWA in Jerusalem holding signs and chanting, "They expelled, they attacked, they lost.” Im Tirtzu takes its name from the saying of Theodor Herzl "If you will it, it is no dream."

2012: The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Book by Matti Friedman went on sale today.

http://www.workman.com/products/9781616200404/

2012: Basya Schecter is scheduled to perform “Songs of Wonder” which sets the Yiddish poetry of the civil rights activist and Jewish philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel to music at the Washington  DCJCC.

2012: Cellist Yoed NIr is scheduled to join Regina Spektor in tonight’s performance at the United Palace Theatre.

2012:Ellen Cassedy is scheduled to read from and sign her new book, We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust at the National Museum of American Jewish Military History

2012: Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times will receive an honorary degree to at Farleigh Dickinson University’s 69^thcommencement exercises.

2012:Arab terrorists attacked southern Israel with a Kassam rocket early today and attacked Jews in the Hevron area with two firebombs overnight as “Nakba Day” began

2012: Twenty-four year old Majid Jamali Fashi was hung today by Iran after having been “convicted for Israel and assassinating an Iranian nuclear scientist.”

http://www.timesofisrael.com/topic/majid-jamali-fashi/

2012: “Sisters Joined by Tumult, Grown Apart in Time” published today provides a details review of I Am Forbidden, a noble by Anouk Markovits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/books/i-am-forbidden-a-novel-by-anouk-markovits.html?ref=books

2012(23^rdof Iyar, 5772): Eighty-eight year old Holocaust survivor and scholar Arno Lustiger passed away today.

http://www.northjersey.com/obituaries/Holocaust_survivor_and_scholar_Arno_Lustiger_dies_at_88.html

2013(6^thof Sivan, 5773): First Day of Shavuot

2013: Scheduled opening of the Ein Gev Shavuot Festival

2013: “Pedro Hernandez, Charged With Murder Of Etan Patz, To Face Trial”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/15/pedro-hernandez-etan-patz-murder-case-trial_n_3278117.html

2013: For the first time since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising, two mortar shells exploded in the Mount Hermon area this morning. There were no reported injuries or casualties. The area in the Hermon, the mountain range that straddles the Lebanese-Syrian border and the Golan Heights, was promptly closed to hikers for several hours on the Shavuot holiday.

2013: Israel will continue to take military action to prevent the transfer of advanced weaponry to Syria, The New York Times quoted a senior Israeli official as saying today, a day after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi to discuss the troubled situation.

2014: The Oregon Jewish Museum is scheduled to host Peter Zisa in program celebrating the music of two Jewish composers – Alexandre Tansman and Mario Castlenuovo-Tedesco.

2014: The Israel Action Center at the JCRC is scheduled to present “Israel at 66: Spies and Defenders” with CBS News correspondent Dan Raviv and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman.

2014: Today, “in the wake of outcry from the public, gay rights organizations and politicians, Yaakov Ariel, the rabbi of Ramat Gan who “advised a landlord not to rent…an apartment to a lesbian couple” was “summoned by Ramat Gan Mayro Israel Singer to explain his remarks.”(As reported by Gavriel Fiske)

2014: “A Jewish woman was attacked at a bus stop in Paris’ Montmartre district by a man who shook her baby carriage and said, “Dirty Jewess, enough with your children already, you Jews have too many children, screw you.” (Tablet)

2014: “Two IDF soldiers from the 50th Battalion of the Nahal Brigade have been dismissed from their unit for campaigning on Facebook against orders to evict Jewish settlers on the West Bank, the army said today”

2014: Tatiana Maslany was cast in a principal role as the younger version of Helen Mirren's character, “Maria Altmann” in the upcoming film “Woman in Gold.”

2014: The Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism is scheduled to host a lecture by Professor Maud Mandel of Brown University entitled “Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict.”

2015: Lewis Black is scheduled to perform at the Paramount Theatre in Charlottesville, VA.

2015: “The Kindergarten Teacher” is scheduled to be shown on the final day of the 18^thAnnual Film Festival sponsored by the National Center for Jewish Film’s.

2015: Centenarian Elisabeth Bing, whose parents fled Nazi Germany because they had been Jewish before converting to Christianity and was leader in the natural childbirth movement, passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/health/elisabeth-bing-mother-of-lamaze-dies-at-100.html

2015: Today “at an art storage facility in southern Germany. “more than 70 years after its disappearance and after a year and a half of hard-nosed negotiations,” "Femme Assise," was handed over to Christopher A. Marinello, an attorney representing the descendants of Paul Rosenberg, “one of the world’s leading dealers in Modern art…whose collection was looted by the Nazis.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/arts/international/matisse-gurlitt-collection-femme-assise-seated-woman.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-middle-span-region&region=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region&_r=1

2015: In “Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s New Justice Minister, Shrugs Off Critics in Her Path” Jodi Rudoren provided a profile of a rising political star.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/world/middleeast/ayelet-shaked-israels-new-justice-minister-shrugs-off-critics-in-her-path.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1

2015: Rabbi Barry Fruendal is scheduled to be sentenced to after “pleading guilty to 52 counts of misdemeanor voyeurism for installing secret cameras in the shower room of the mikvah adjacent to Kesher Israel, the prominent Washington Orthodox synagogue he led for some 25 years”

2016: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Little Labors by Rivka Galchen, The Secret War: Spies, Cyphers and Guerrillas 1939-1945 by Max Hastings, A Self-Made Man” The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1849 by Sidney Blumenthal and We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement by Andi Zeisler

2016: Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is scheduled to host the first annual city-wide 5K Race for Humanity.

2016: The Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines is scheduled to sponsor an Israel Independence Day Celebration Lunch featuring Israeli falafel followed by a screening of the Mickey Marcus biopic “Cast a Giant Shadow” starring Kirk Douglas.

2016: In New York, B’nai Jeshurun is scheduled to host “an interactive performance of Lea Goldberg’s Israeli children’s book “Dira Lehaskir -Apartment to Let”! narrated by actress Shira Averbuch”

2016: Ari Shavit, author of A Promised Land , Georgetown Hillel Rabbi Rachel Gartner, and emerging leader Harry Reis are scheduled to participate in “Israel Forum: Zionism and Liberalism

for a New Generation” at JCC Manhattan.

2016: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to host “Gala 2016.”

2016: At the Jewish Women’s Circle in Malta, NY, the Chabads of Saratoga County is scheduled to “Finding Your Small Miracles” featuring, Yitta Halberstam Co-author of the Small Miracles Series: Heartwarming stories of Extraordinary Coincidences from everyday Life 

2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to co-sponsor a weekly interfaith discussion, this week's topic TBC, from the perspectives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, looked at in a variety of texts and scriptures “at the Harold Wilson Room, Jesus College.”

2017: (19th of Iyar, 5777): In Los Angeles, graduation ceremonies are scheduled to take place at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion

2017: As part of the lecture series “Israel: The Land and its People” Henry Abramson is scheduled to lecture on “Theodore Herzl: Father of Zionism” at the Avenue J campus of Touro College

2017: MJE is scheduled to host “Conversations Remix” with Rabbi Mark Wildes.

2017: Joan Nathan is scheduled to talk about her new book King Solomon’s Tablewhich “explores Jewish cooking from around the world.”

2017: The Association for Jewish Studies and Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host a lecture by Yael Landman on “Is There a Biblical "Law"? Law in the World of the Bible.”

2017: The exhibit “Menorah: Worship, History, Legend” is scheduled to open simultaneously at both the Jewish Museum and the Braccio de Carlo Magno Museum in the Vatican.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/world/europe/vatican-rome-menorah-exhibit-jewish-museum.html

a2017: Obituary writer Margalit Fox is among those scheduled to speak at a symposium describing how the Times Obituary Team “captures a life in 500 words.”  (Editor’s note- this is one time I wish I lived in New York.  The Times obits are not only literary gems, they are an invaluable tool for historical research.  In addition to which, the writers are very patent people who take their time to respond to inquiries even when they come from an “am ha’aretz in eastern Iowa.)

2017: “MGM Television and Daniel Silva announced today that MGM had acquired the adaption rights for the Allon series, a series of spy novel whose “main focus is Gabriel Allon, an Israeli art restorer, spy and assassin” whose executive producers would be Silva and his Jewish wife Jamie Gangel, the television journalist.

2017: At the start of the weekly Yisrael Beytenu meeting today, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman rebuked “his fellow ministers for publicly going head-to-head with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the upcoming Trump visit, in an apparent reference to Education Minister Naftali Bennett.”

2017: “Eliran Saada, the owner of Express Target Marketing, which has operated the binary options companies InsideOption and SecuredOptions, was arrested in Tel Aviv on suspicion of fraud, false accounting, forgery, extortion and blackmail.”

2018: Leo Baeck Institute is scheduled to host Gettysburg College professor Kerry Wallach discussing her latest work Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany in which she “challenges the notion that Jews in Weimar-era Germany sought to be invisible or indistinguishable from other Germans by “passing” as non-Jews.”

2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host another session of “Shtisel Watch and Learn” where the chaplains lead a discussion after viewing an episode of “the award winning Israeli Television series” about a “haredi family” living “in Jerusalem’s religious neighborhood of Geula.”

2018(1st of Sivan, 5778): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2019: “The Orthodox Jewish of Commerce Committee and JBNF are scheduled to host the 2nd OJC Jerusalem Annual Anglo Israeli American -Expo and Conference today at the Jerusalem Gardens Hotel.

2019: In South Bend, IN, at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at the University of Notre Dame, the Michiana Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to host a screening of “From Cairo to the Cloud” this evening.

2019: In London, the Phoenix is scheduled to host “a special preview screening of ‘Rory's Way,’ a new film from Israeli directors Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnun.”

2019: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host a presentation by “architectural historian and author Anthony W. Robins” on “Urban Genealogy – Researching New York City’s Buildings.”

2019: The East Bronx History is scheduled to host “a presentation by Joan Adler about Nathan Straus, Jr. and his role in the creation of Hillside Homes, one of the first subsidized housing projects in the United States.”

2019: In Coralville, IA, Agudas Achim is scheduled to host its “first monthly Bereavement Support Group” and its first gathering of the “Anti-Semitism Discussion Group.”

2020: In keeping with the sentiments expressed by Rabbi David Kaufman when Vice President Pence was in Iowa peddling plans for “re-opening” in Cedar Rapids, Temple Judah is scheduled to host virtual Friday night services.

2020: Temple Israel of Boston is scheduled to present on-line “Qabbalat Shabbat.”

2020: The Batsheva Dancers are scheduled to host the opening of their Online Festival.

2020: The Streicker Center is scheduled to present, on-line Dr. Mark Weisstuch as he lectures on “The Trial of Jesus – A Jewish Perspective.”

2020: The Eden-Tamir Music Center is scheduled to a host a piano recital with Malachi Rozenbaum.

2020: As part of its “Online Speaker Series,” the Breman Museum is scheduled to present “Jews of the American South” during which Jeremy Katz, Director of the Cuba Family Archives, delves into Southern Jewish History” and describes how families, culture, and life succeeded and persevered in The American South”

This Day, May 16, In Jewish History by MItchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 16 



0942(21^stof Iyar, 4702): Saadia Gaon passed away. Born in 882, Saadia Gaon was the head of the Talmudic Academy of Sura (Babylonia). He was a recognized authority on the Talmud, and a profound student of philosophy and philology. Saadia was forced to deal with the challenge of assimilation of the upper-class Jews of Babylonia who were attractedto the Greek philosophers whose works had been translated intoArabic. Saadia wrote a philosophic work, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, in magnificent flowing Arabic. In it, he defended the rational underpinnings of Judaism and showed logically that every rational Jew could believe in the Torah as well as Aristotle and Plato. He wrote the first Hebrew grammar book which explained how the holy language worked. He provided a Hebrew dictionary plus a compendium of rhyming words for Hebrew poets. He was the first to write an Arabic translation of the Bible. He included commentaries, explanations, and grammatical notes as well. His translation continues to be the authoritative Bible for Jews in Arab lands. He also led a successful fight against the Kararites, a sect which rejected Rabbinic commentary as law.

1165: Maimonidesand his familyarrived at Acre, Palestine.Having been forced to leave Spain because he would not convert to Islam, Maimonides and his family settled in Fez, Morocco. His work with Jews who had been forced to convert to Islam attracted attention of the local authorities and the family moved on to Palestine. Do to the poverty of the land and the uncertain conditions there, Maimonides finally settled in Egypt where he served both as a physician and leader of the Jewish Community.

1474:Minister Pacheco of Spain used an attack he organized against "new Christians" as a diversion in order to enable him to capture the citadel of Segovia (and maybe the King). Although the plot was discovered in time, the Marranos were attacked by the organized mob, and men, women and children were murdered.

1477: Abraham dei Tintori produced the first printed edition of the book of Job with a commentary by Levi ben Gerson was published today in Ferrara, Italy

1487: Joseph Solomon Sonciino produced the first printed edition of Seder Tahanunim at Soncino, Italy

1507: Ginevra Sforza, whose father Alessandro Sforza ,the patron of “Jewish Italian dancer and dancing master Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro” who converted to Roman Catholicism, passed away today.

1527: Florentines drove out the Medici for a second time and re-established a republic The recreation of the Republic led to the expulsion of the Jews. This event took place in the Jewish year 5300 (a year with Jewish mystical connotations), fueling messianic hopes helping to layer the ground for the rise of Solomon Molcho.

1573: Today Polish nobles elected Henry, as the first elected monarch of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. However, the Lithuanian nobles boycotted this election, and it was the Lithuanian ducal council who confirmed his election. Poland elected Henry, rather than Habsburg candidates, partly in order to be more agreeable to the Ottoman Empire (a traditional ally of France through the Franco-Ottoman alliance), with which a Polish-Ottoman alliance was also in effect.. He owed his election to Solomon Ashkenazi, a “Rabbi” who was an advisor to the Sultan.  He was in effect the Sultan’s foreign minister.  In an unusually blunt statement, Ashkenazi wrote Henry “I have rendered you majesty most important service in securing your election; I have effected all that was done here.” The last statement refers to his behind the scenes work at the Sultans Palace.  See Volume 4  p 605 0f Graetz

1611: Birthdate of Pope Innocent XI. During his papacy, “Innocent showed a degree of sensitivity in his dealings with the Jews within the Italian States. He compelled the city of Venice to release the Jewish prisoners taken by Francesco Morisini in 1685. He also discouraged compulsory baptisms which accordingly became less frequent under his pontificate; but he could not abolish the old practice altogether. More controversially in 1682 he issued an edict by which all the money-lending activities carried out by the Roman Jews were to cease. However ultimately convinced that such a measure would cause much misery in destroying livelihoods, the enforcement of the edict was twice delayed.”

1617(11^th of Iyar, 5377): Judah Löb Sarava, the Rabbi at Venice who is quoted in the ritual work "Mashbit Milḥamot," in connection with a question in regard to the ritual bath” and “translated into Hebrew Saadia's commentary on Canticles” passed away today.

1648: During the great Cossack uprising which brought death and destruction to hundreds of thousands of Jews, Bohdan Khmelnytsky's forces overwhelmed and defeated Commonwealth forces under the command of Stefan Potocki at the Battle of Zhovti Vody.

1667: Sixty-eight year old Samuel Bochart, “a French Protestant biblical scholar” whose “two-volume Geographia Sacra seu Phaleg et Canaan exerted a profound influence on seventeenth-century Biblical exegesis” passed away today.

1669: Birthdate of “Dutch Christian Hebraist Campegius Vitringa author of a Commentary on Isaiah and De Synagoga Vetere Libri Tres.

1746(26^th of Iyar, 5506): Moshe Chaim Luzzatto passed away. Born in 1707, this Italian rabbi known by the Hebrew acronym RaMChal was noted philosopher and student of kabbalah.

1754: Fire ravaged the Ghetto in Prague.

1756: Abigail Franks, the daughter of Moses Levy, who had been married to Jacob Franks for 44 years and who had had two children by 1719 passed away today.

1761: In Trevellas, Cornwall, England “Edward Opie, a master carpenter and his wife Mary (née Tonkin) gave birth John Opie the youngest of their five children who painted “The Old Jew,” a “portrait of a Jewish man” that he completed “in the months before” he moved to London in 1780.

1764(14^th of Iyar, 5524): Pesach Sheni observed as the smallpox epidemic continues in Massachusetts Bay Colony.

1774(6^th of Sivan, 5534): Shavuot is observed for the last time in Thirteen Colonies loyal to King George since by the following year the American Revolution would have begun and with armed militia beginning their siege of Boston.

1775(16^th of Iyar, 5535): Veitel-Heine Ephraim who served as “Jeweller to the Prussian Court and Mint Mast under the Prussian Kings Frederick William I and Frederick the Great for whom he played a critical role in financing the Seven Years War passed away today.

1785(7th of Sivan): Rabbi Chaim Abraham ben Moses Israel of Ancona, author of “Bet Avraham” passed away.

1786(18^th of Iyar, 5546): Lag B’Omer is observed on the same day that John Adams, the American ambassador to Great Britain and future President of the United States wrote to Thomas Jefferson, the American ambassador to France and future President of the United States asking him to provide a letter of introduction to an American citizen traveling from London to Paris as well as providing him information about domestic politics in the very disunited United States of America.

1789: Birthdate of Michael Creizenach, the native of Mainz who edited the Hebrew periodical “Zion” with I.M. Jost and who was the father of Theodor Creizenach who followed in his literary footsteps

1790: Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Warsaw.

1791: One day after he had passed away, Barnet Levy, the husband of Esther Elias and the father of Betsy and Levi Levy was bured today at the Falmouth Jewish Cemetery.

1799: Birthdate of Alexander McCaul the Dublin born Christian missionary who spent a decade in Poland trying to convert the Jews but who was no anti-Semite since he opposed the accusations of the “blood libel.”  He returned to England where “he became professor of Hebrew and rabbinical literature at King’s College.”

1801: Birthdate of William H. Seward who served as Secretary of State under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson (1861-1869).  Shortly after he assumed office, Seward met with Henry I. Hart, President of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites and assured him that he would continue the push to end the discrimination practiced by the Swiss against American Jews. In 1863, Seward instructed American diplomats to do all that they could to stop the attacks on the Jews of Morocco.

1807(8th of Iyar): Joseph Abraham Stelicki, Ger Zedek of Nikolai passed the son a butcher who had been raised Catholic but who converted to Judaism in 1785 passed away today.

1815: “The Jewish community of the Aachen, Germany offered an homage in its synagogue to the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm the third.”

1816: Seventeen year old Rachel N. Cardozo, the Pennsylvania born daughter of Sarah Hart and Isaac Nunez Cardozo married her first husband, Simon Cauffman

1816: Birthdate of Adam Gimbel, the native of Bavaria who came to the United States in 1834 and parlayed a trading post he opened in Vincennes in to the chain of Gimbel’s Department Stores which would become the fabled rival of Macy’s.

1820(3rd of Sivan, 5580): Nathan Salomon the Rabbi at Hombourg who was one of those attending The Grand Sanhedrin of Napoleon that took place at the Town Hall of Paris in February, 1807 and whose parents were Reitz and Marx Salomon passed away today.

1821: Economist and MP David Ricardo, the son of Sephardic Jews Abigail Delvalle and Abraham Israel Ricardo “who converted to the Unitarian faith when he eloped” voted today in favor of an inquiry into the Peterloo Masscare

1823: Birthdate of Heymann Steinthal the brother-in-law of Mortiz Lazarus who taught at The Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, or Higher Institute for Jewish Studies.

1824(18^th of Iyar, 5584): Lag B’Omer is celebrated for the last time during the Presidency of James Monroe.

1826: Birthdate of Danish banker and Member of Parliament David Baruch Adler.

1828: In Frankfurt, Baron Carl Mayer von Rothschild of Naples and Adelheid Hertz gave birth to Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild, who would become head of the Frankfurt branch of the Rothschild banking empire.

1828: Birthdate of Marcus Kalisch, the native of Pomerania who was “one of the pioneers of the critical study of the Old Testament in England, a secretary to the Chief Rabbi  and a tutor in the Rothschild family” which gave him “the leisure to produce his commentaries and other works.”

1829: Abraham Alexander Wolff “assumed office as chief rabbi of Denmark” today.

1835: Birthdate of Hesse-Nassau native and University of Paris trained German professor Sigmund Mannheimer who in 1865 came to the United States where he “became a professor and librarian at Hebrew Union College while raising two sons who became rabbis and one daughter, Jennie Mannheimer also known as Jennie Manners, the college professor and dramatist who was one of the first two women to earn a degree from Hebrew Union College, with his wife Louise Herschman Mannheimer, the Prague born author, teacher and social reformer.

1838: In Bavaria, Jacob Rice and Augusta Mannstein gave birth to Ignatius Rice, the husband of Cornelia Diana Stern, President of the Home for Aged Infirm, Trustee of the National Hospital for Consumptives at Denver, Colorado who resided at 122 East 79^th Street in New York,

1838: Augusta and Lewis Feuchtwanger gave birth to Rebecca Feuchtwanger

1839: George Moss married Lucy Lippshutz at the Great Synagogue today.

1845: Birthdate of Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, also known as Eli Metchnikoff. Born in the Ukraine, he was a Russian microbiologist best remembered for his pioneering research into the immune system. Mechnikov received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1908, for his work on phagocytosis. He passed away in Paris in 1916.

1846: One day after she had passed away, Sarah (Moses) Hart, the wife of Michael Hart was buried today at the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.

1853: The New York Times provided more information about outbreaks of violence that had occurred in Jerusalem during Holy Week (Palm Sunday thru Easter). A group of English missionaries were forced to leave the Church of the Holy Sepulcher because “they behaved in an unseemly manner when the Procession of the Host passed on Good Friday.”  One of the missionaries delivered a sermon outside of a synagogue while the Jews were attending services in which he used “invectives” in talking about the Talmud.  One of the Jews reportedly threw a dead cat at the missionary and a fight broke between the rest of the missionaries and the Jews who sought to defend their religious beliefs.   

1853: The New York Times reported that the recent defeat of the Jewish Disabilities bill in the House of Lords had bitterly disappointed supporters of the measure since they had anticipated that the Lords would follow their usual path and approve legislation that had been approved by the House of Commons. The action of the Lords, according to the Times, shows the great gulf between the aristocracy and the rest of the citizenry.  Despite the prominence of such families as the Rothschilds, “the Jew in England is no better off than he was in the days of King John.”

1853: The New York Times reported that thousands of Prussians including Alexander Von Humboldt have petitioned the Second Chamber (one of the two houses of their bi-cameral legislature) demanding that Jews be allowed to hold government jobs and allowing for full freedom of religious opinion.  The petitions were in response to vote by the First Chamber to exclude Jews from public employment.

1854(18th of Iyyar, 5614): Lag B’Omer

1854: According to an article published today the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews reported that there are 17 synagogues in New York City that show a membership totaling 25,000. The last census shows that there are 46,000 Jews in the entire United States.  The society believes that the census figure is a case of underreporting because it only records people as being Jewish if they self-report. “It is a well-known fact that one-half or more of the Jews in this country call themselves Frenchman, German, Poles, Hungarians and Englishman and never make themselves known as Jews in governmental connections.”

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F30916FB3E5C1B7B93C4A8178ED85F408584F9

1856: In Slutsk, Belorussia, Chaim Masliansky and his wife gave birth to Zvi Hirsch Masliansky “the popular Yiddish orator who was the most eloquent and influential Maggid on the American scene at his time.

http://yleksikon.blogspot.com/2017/07/tsvi-hirsh-maslyanski-zvi-hirsch.html

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/masliansky-zvi-hirsch

1857: In Marshall, TX, Meyer and Rosalie Doppelmayer gave birth to James Doppelmayer the husband of Bella Davis Doppelmayer and the father of Marguerite, Walter and Rose Marie Doppelmayer who worked in the family dry goods store with his brother Moses passed away today in Marshall where his father Meyer and his Uncle Daniel and his Uncle Isaac Woolf had arrived in the 1850’s which later led to his cousin Joe Weisman settling there,

1859: In London, “the first meeting of the Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor was held at the Great Synagogue Chambers

1861(7^th of Sivan, 5621): Second Day of Shavuot celebrated on the same day that Kentucky, the home state of Dembitz and Brandies families enacted a resolution of neutrality which would be rendered meaningless when Union forces thwarted attempt by the Confederates to occupy the home state of both Lincoln and Davis in September.

1863(27^th of Iyar, 5623): Jonas Ennery passed away. Born in 1801 at Nancy he became head of the Jewish school at Strasbourg. He served as a Deputy in the French Parliament and compiled a Dictionnaire Général de Géographie Universelle, He was the brother of Marchand Ennery, the chief rabbi of Paris.

1864: In Vienna, Menachem Mendel Birnbaum, a merchant, from Ropshitz, Galicia, and  Miriam Birnbaum (née Seelenfreund), who was born in northern Hungary (in a region sometimes called the Carpathian Rus), of a family with illustrious rabbinic lineage gave birth to Nathan Birnbaum the Austrian journalist, Jewish philosopher and founder of a Jewish nationalist organization "Kadimah."  Kadimah was formed ten years before Theodor Herzl became the leading spokesman of the Zionist movement. Birnbaum is credited for coining the term "Zionism". He died in 1937.

1864: In New York, the "Open Board of Stock-Brokers" adopted its constitution.  Among the signatories was Mendez Nathan, the son of Seixas Nathan.

1864: Birthdate of Julia H. Kohlman who was buried next to her husband Sigmund Kohlman in Mobile, Alabama when she passed.

1866: In Philadelphia, PA, Werner David Amram and Esther Hammerschlag gave birth to University of Pennsylvania graduate David Werner Amram, the husband of Beulah Brylawski and law school professor who wrote The Jewish Law of Divorce According to Bible and Talmud and Leading Cases in the Bible and was active in numerous Jewish organization the “Hebrew Education Society, Jewish Maternity Association and Congregation Mickve Israel.”

1867(14^th of Iyar, 5657): Pesach Sheni

1868: President Andrew Johnson was acquitted in his impeachment trial in the United States Senate. According to one source, Johnson made several virulent anti-Semitic statements during his political career prior to becoming President. Considering the fact that the “Tarheel Tailor” was illiterate until adulthood, his anti-Semitic statements may be more a case of ignorance than anything else.

1869(6^th of Sivan, 5629): Shavuot is celebrated for the first time during the Presidency of U.S. Grant.

1875: The Board of Trustees of B’nai Jeshurun met today in New York City and approved a proposal to allow members of the opposite sex to sit together in the same pews during services.  This put an end to the separate seating that had been the rule at the synagogue since its founding.  The decision would be contested by Israel J. Solomon a member of the congregation who brought a suit in the Court of Common Pleas to over-turn the decision. His suit would fail.

1876: Ida Kuhn married Eduard Cohen and became Ida Cohen

1877: As the constitutional crisis in France came to a head, 363 parliamentary deputies passed a vote of no confidence in the new government championed by Royalist President Patrice MacMahon. The leaders of the opposition would be defended by Raphael Basch a liberal French Jewish political leader and journalist.  Basch was the father of Victor-Guillaume Basch who would be murdered by the Vichy French in 1944.

1879: In Pittsburgh, PA Jacob and Kate Affelder gave birth to William L Affelder, the brother of Louis, Oscar, Harry and Minnie Affelder,  the Penn State University trained mining engineer who was Vice President of the Hillman Coal and Coke Company in Pittsburgh.

1880(6^th of Sivan, 5640): Shavuot

1880: Birthdate of Julius Tannen the New York born comedian and monologist whose career included vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood where he his most famous performance was in “Singing In the Rain.”

1881: Birthdate of Amy Loveman, a founding editor of the Saturday Review.

1881: “A comic melodrama entitled “Sam’l of Posen, or The Commercial Drummer” premiered at Haverly’s Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/27502012?uid=3739640&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102217661721

1885: Birthdate of David de Sola Pool, the native of London whose family roots go back to the Sephardim of Medieval Spain who came to New York City in 1907 to begin as 63 year career as the leader of Congregation Sheaerith Israel, also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue

1888(6^th of Sivan, 5648): Shavuot celebrated for the last time during the Presidency of Grover Clevealdn

1890: It was reported today that former President Grover Cleveland, Oscar Straus and Joseph Blumenthal will be among those who have purchased boxes for the upcoming Strawberry Festival, a fund raiser sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.

1890: Birthdate of Polish native and former Swiss textile businessman Alexander S. Haberman who in 1941 came to the United States where he became a successful “a real‐estate investor, developer and builder of apartment houses and singlefamily houses” and president of the Beth Israel center and the Blezer Rabbinical Seminary in Jerusalem while raising two sons “Simon V. and Rabbi Jacob Haberman with his wife Esther Lebowitz Haberman.

1891: It was reported today that among the bequests made by the late Nathan Littauer were$1,500 to Mt. Sinai Hospital for the permanent endowment of a bed in memory of his daughter Louise; $1,000 each to the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society and the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews; $500 to the Board of Relief of the United Hebrew Charities.

1892: Justice George C. Barrett officiated at the wedding of Albert Kohn and Sophie Kupfer. The nuptials which were one of the most fashionable events in the Jewish community, took place at the home of Henry Kupfer on east 78^th Street.

1892: In Kovno, “Chaim Nathan and Base (Gibberman) Burak gave birth to Lithuanian trained rabbi Aaron D. Burack who in 1914 came to the United States where he married Esther Inselbuch and led congregations “Etz Chaim Velozin” and “Ohel Moshe Cohevrah Thilim” before becoming an “instructor in Talmud at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.”

1893(1^st of Sivan, 5653): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1893: In Great Britain, the Board of Guardians is scheduled to meet today where Sir Julian Goldsmith will talk about the expulsions of the Jews from Poland – a matter that heretofore has been denied or kept secret.

1893: George Kennan, the explorer and newspaper man who has become a critic of the Czar and advocate for Russian democracy stated his belief that Polish and Russian Jews will be coming to the United States as a result of the edicts of expulsion issued by the Russian government.

1893: “Myer S. Isaacs, Chairman of the Trustees of the Baron Hirsh Fund for the aid of Russian Jews” in the United States said today that he and his associates “had not considered the question of an influx of Polish Jews” because they did not except any abnormal increase in immigration from that region. (Editor’s note – Based on contemporary reports there was a great deal of disagreement about Russian edicts of expulsion and the potential major influx of Jews from Poland and Russia)

1894: Birthdate of NYU trained lawyer Charles Marks, the supporter of the YMHWHA and the controversial State Supreme Court Justice who presided over the Malcom X murder trial and who was the husband of “the former Beatrice Engelhart Rubin” and the father of three children – Howard, Lester and Lucille – from his first marriage to the former Paula Unger,

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/03/archives/charles-marks-exjustice-dies-presided-in-state-trial-of-malcolm-x.html

1894: It was reported today that while Herman Rosenblatt stood in the smoldering ruins of his crockery store, a local ruffian pointed at the Jew and shouted “There is the man who set the fire” causing a mob yelling “Lynch him” to chase after Rosenblatt.  Rosenblatt outran the mob and found sanctuary in the 47^th Street Police Station.

1896: In a cable from London, Harold Frederic provided a scoop for the New York Times when he broke the news about Baron Hirsch’s grandchild, who is the daughter of the Baron’s son Lucienne and a French governess. As confirmed by a copy of the Baron’s will, the child will inherit a large portion of the Hirsch millions.

1896: In Birmingham, England Laura (née Greenberg) and Louis Balcon gave birth to English movie producer Sir Michael Elias Balcon.

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/447085/index.html

1897: Three days after he had passed away, 60 year old  Aron Salomon, the husband of Jeanette Salomon, was buried in London at the “Plashet Jewish Cemtery.”

1898: The Daughters of Jacob are hosting a Strawberry Festival at Terrace Garden for the benefit of a Home for Aged Hebrews of the down-town east side. They have already sold 3,000 tickets at fifty cents each, and have received presents of large quantities of goods that will be sold at the festival.

1898: Joseph J. Corn, the Vice President Temple Culture Society spoke yesterday about the purpose of the society. He said “that in these days of cheap philosophy and what has come to be known as ethical culture there is a need for Jewish culture.  In an effort to combat the notion that religious education ended with confirmation, the society is holding weekly meetings devoted to the study of Jewish history and Jewish philosophy.  Among other things, the programs should help Jews answer the question “Why are you Jews in this Christian world and yet not of it?”

1898: During the Spanish American War the 4^th Missouri Volunteer Infantry whose members included Captain Max Mannheim (St. Joseph), Sergeants Lewis F. Stein (Carrollton) and Herman Weil (St. Joseph) and Privates Fred E. Wise, Lloyd F. Houseman and Abraham J. Friedman and Artificer Arthur Newsbaum was mustered into federal service today.

1899: Second Lieutenant George M. Appel of the 2^nd U.S. Volunteer Engineers was mustered out of service today.

1899(7th of Sivan): Eighty-six year Jacob Ezekiel, the husband of Catherine Myers Castro, author of The Jews of Richmond and Persecutions of the Jews in 1840 and the secretary of the board of governors of the Hebrew Union College from 1876 to 1896 passed away today

1901: Today’s shipment of $2,200,000 in gold to Europe included a shipment of one million dollars in gold to Paris by Goldman, Sachs and Co.

1902: Sixteen year old Louis Lefkowitz, the founder of “Louis Lefkowitz and Brothers, manufacturers of leather belts” and other similar items and the husband of Sadie Leah Weiss came to the United States today from his native Hungary.

1903: At a meeting held under the auspices of the English Zionist Federal a resolution was adopted “declaring that the establishment of a home in Palestine was the only practical solution of the Jewish question.”  Israel Zangwill had given an impassioned speech in support of the motion during which he invoked the bloody images of the atrocities committed against the Jews of Romania and Kishineff.

1904: Herzl's diary breaks off with a report to Jacob Schiff. Schiff was a successful banker and financer. He was one of the leaders of the Jewish community in the 19th and early 20th century. He actively intervened on behalf of the Jews suffering in Tsarist Russia. Although he had reservations about Zionism, he was increasingly drawn to Herzl’s concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a practical way of lessening the suffering of Russia’s Jews.

1905: “The Yiddish Shylock of Jacob P Adler” published today provided a review of the Jewish actor in that role in the drama that opened last night at the American Theatre.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1905/05/16/issue.htm

1905: In Russia, the Committee of Ministers is reported to indorse the “Jewish reforms” proposed Sergei Witte which cover “military conscription, participation in local government and removal of residential disabilities.”

1906: “Pennsylvania Plans Its $50,000,000 Loan” published today described the role of Kuhn Loeb & Co. in the quick placement of this issue notes which was vital to the growth of one of America’s leading railroads.

1907: A day after pleading guilty to charges of bribery Abe Ruef “testified before a grand jury incriminating the Mayor of San Francisco which led to his conviction and removal from office.

1908(15^th of Iyar, 5668): Parashat Behar

1908: It was reported today that the publishing house Messrs. L.C. Page & Co is preparing to issue Race or Mongrel, American or Pan-European which warns “against unrestricted immigration” and cites “the Jews as an example of a race preserved in strength by abstention from foreign marriage.”

1909: Birthdate of  Yehiel Feiner whom the world would come to know as Yehiel De-Nur or Dinur, a survivor of Auschwitz who used his experience as the basis for several books including “The House of Dolls.”

1910: It was reported today that the commission that was appointed to examine the “question of the expulsion of Jews residing illegally in Kiev and elsewhere outside of the Pale has finished its works and the 170 families of the 1,500 examined will be allowed to remain and not forced to move elsewhere in Russia.

1911(18^th of Iyar, 5671): Lag B’Omer

1911: Masliach Effendi of the Turkish government ridiculed the idea that Jews could become a menace to Turkey. He suggests appointment of committee to examine the whole question of Zionism.
1912: Birthdate of Rita Kanarek. In her senior year at N.Y.U. she married Alex Hillman founder and President of Hillman Periodicals. Mrs. Hillman became president of the Alex Hillman Family Foundation where she pursued her passions as an art collector and philanthropist. Among the beneficiaries of her largesse was the Phillips Beth Israel School of Nursing in Manhattan. She passed away at the age of 95 in November, 2007.

1912: Birthdate of author, historian and broadcaster, Studs Terkel. “My family was Jewish but not religious. My mother went through the rituals; my father didn't. He was a freethinker.” He passed away at the age of 93.

1913(9^th of Iyar 5673): Ninety-one year old banker William Scholle passed away today in New York.

1913: Rabbi Tobias Schaafarber is scheduled to deliver the Friday night sermon at the Chicago Hebrew Institute.

1913: Three years after the death of his first wife, Max Rabinoff married Helene Gaubert today

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/Rabinoff/

1914 20^th of Iyar): Isaac Halevy (Rabinowitz) author of “Dorot ha-Rishonim” passed away.

1914: “The preliminary paper of Dr. Harry Plotz of Mount Sinai Hospital in which he tells for the time of his isolation of the germ of typhus fever and Brill’s disease, appeared in the of The Journal of the American Medical Association published” today.

1915: In Chicago, on Leo M. Frank Day, famous attorney Clarence Darrow will address “a big mass meeting” scheduled to be held today “at which it is expected 100,000 signatures will be obtained on petitions appealing to Governor J.M. Slation and the Prison Board of Georgia to commute Frank’s death sentence.

1915: “Prominent speakers will tell of the trial of Leo Frank and the many injustices to which it is alleged he was subjected because of the high racial feeling in the South” at a mass meeting scheduled to be held in Minneapolis, MN in an attempt “to ask the Governor of Georgia to commute Leo M. Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment.”

1915: Today “the Kosher Butchers’ Union opened co-operative butcher shops at 149 Orchard Street, 214 East 102^ndStreet and 501 Wilkins Avenue in the Bronx” the proceeds from which will be used to finance the plan strike by the Union.

1915: Felix Warburg was presented a silver trowel today when the cornerstone was laid for the new building of the Yorkville Jewish Institute and Talmud Torah at 123 East 85^th Street where the attendees heard speeches by several notable including Professor Mordecai M. Kaplan of JTS and Borough President Marcus M. Marks

1915: Professor Max L. Margolis and Horace Stern are scheduled to speak at the annual meeting of the Jewish Publication Society of America which is being held at Dropsie College in Philadelphia, PA.

1916: Birthdate of Ephraim Katzir, former President of Israel. Born Katchalski in Kiev, Katzir came to Palestine in 1925. A biophysicist, Katzir taught at Hebrew University and served as department hair at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. One result of his research was the creation of a synthetic fiber for internal surgery that can be dissolved by body enzymes. He served as Israel's fourth President(a largely ceremonial position) from 1973 to 1978

1916: As the French and British negotiated the post-war disposition of Ottoman Empire, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey sent a letter to Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador to the Court of St. James ratifying Cambon’s version of the partition plan that would eventually be known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-sykes-picot-agreement-1916

1916: The will of Shalom Aleichem was published in the New York Times and read into the Congressional Record of the United States.

1917: The Chess Club is scheduled to play an exhibition game at the Sinai Social Center before which Edward Lasker, the leading Chess champion will deliver an introductory speck on “Chess, an Aid in the Struggle of Life.

1917: The Annual meeting of the Jewish Training School of Chicago is scheduled to be held this evening at the Standard Club.

1917: Today, President Wilson told Judge Aaron J. Levy of New York that “at present” the government is “unable to do anything further to relieve the situation of the Jews in Palestine” which has been pictured “as very serious.”

1917: Dr. A. B. Yudelson and Nathan D. Kaplan are scheduled to speak about the issues facing the American Jewish Congress at this evening’s meeting The South Side Jewish Men’s Club at the Jewish Educational Center.

1918: Two Jewish French journalists – Landau and Goldsky—expressed their desire to address the court today after having been sentenced to prison on charges of treason yesterday.

1918: Rabbi H.S. Margolies, Rabbi Philip Klein, Rabbi S.E. Jaffe and Rabbi M.L. Preil were among those who signed a letter issued today by the Rabbinical Association “urging the Jews of America to subscribe generously to the Red Cross fund.”

1919: Sir Harry Lawson Webster Levy-Lawson “was created 1st Viscount Burnham of Hall Barn in the County of Buckingham.”

1919: The first Estonian Congress of Jewish congregations which had been convened on May 11 to discuss the new circumstances Jewish life was confronting came to a close today. This is where the ideas of cultural autonomy and a Jewish Gymnasium (secondary school) in Tallinn were born. Jewish societies and associations began to grow in numbers. The largest of these new societies was the H. N. Bjalik Literature and Drama Society in Tallinn founded in 1918. Societies and clubs were established in Viljandi, Narva, and elsewhere. In 1920, the Maccabi Sports Society was founded and became well-known for its endeavors to encourage sports among Jews. Jews also took an active part in sporting events in Estonia and abroad. Sara Teitelbaum was a 17-time champion in Estonian athletics and established no less than 28 records. In the 1930s there were about 100 Jews studying at the University of Tartu. In 1934, a chair was established in the School of Philosophy for the study of Judaica. There were five Jewish student societies in Tartu Academic Society, the Women’s Student Society Hazfiro, the Corporation Limuvia, the Society Hasmonea and the Endowment for Jewish Students. All of these had their own libraries and played important roles in Jewish culture and social life. Political organizations such as Hasomer Hazair and Beitar were also established. Many Jewish youth traveled to Palestine to establish the Jewish State. The renowned kibbutzim of Kfar Blum and Ein Gev were set up in part by Jews from Estonia.

1920: The funeral for sixty year old Yiddish actor and theatre manager David Kessler was scheduled to be held this morning “under the auspices of the Jewish Actors’ Club.”

1923: Birthdate of economist Merton Miller, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Economics.

1923: Birthdate of Manuel D. Plotkin, the native of Chita, Russia who was appointed Director of the Census Bureau by President Carter in 1977.

1923 In New Canaan, CT, Jewish immigrants Morris Yudain and Berta Jaffe gave birth to their seventh child, Sidney Lawrence Yudain the journalist who created “Roll Call.”

1923: The first aerial display in Palestine took place at Ramleh today, a squadron of 14 aeroplanes of the British Royal Air Force participating. The exhibition program included flying, air races, a baloon hunt, mimic air fighting and a bombing demonstration. The aerial derby was over the circuit of Ramleh, Raselain, Jaffa, Ramle... Lieut. Martyn, flying a Vickers Vimy biplane, won the air race covering a distance of twenty-seven miles.



1924: “Having been convicted of conspiracy to carry stolen securities into the District of Columbia, Nicky Arnstein” the husband of Fanny Brice “entered Leavenworth prison, where he remained for three years.”



1924: In Manhattan, Herman and Sara Aaronson Mankiewicz gave birth to Frank Fabian Mankiewicz “a writer and Democratic political strategist who was Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s press secretary, directed Senator George S. McGovern’s losing 1972 presidential campaign and for six years was the president of National Public Radio.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/us/politics/frank-mankiewicz-press-secretary-to-robert-f-kennedy-dies-at-90.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

1924: Birthdate of Joseph Zalman Margolis, the native of Newark, NJ, who “has held the Laura H. Carnell Chair of Philosophy at Temple University” since 1991.

1926: In Brooklyn, businessman Harold A LIfton and Ciel (Roth) Lifton gave birth to Dr. Robert Jay LIfton the psychiatrist whose works include Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism; Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima; and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

1926: Dr. James Simon is scheduled to preside over today’s celebration marking the 25^th anniversary of the establishment of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, a “German Jewish organization founded in 1901 to improve social and political conditions of Jews in Eastern Europe and Orient.”

http://www.geschichteinchronologie.ch/judentum-aktenlage/migration/EncJud_hilfsverein-dt-juden-ENGL.html

1927(14^th of Iyar, 5687): Pesach Sheni

1927(14^th of Iyar, 5687): Sixty-four year old American actor and vaudevillian Sam Bernard, the Birmingham, England, born son of Benjamin and Charlotta Bernard and the husband of Florence Deutsch who began his career at the age of 13 in “the Grand Duke’s Theatre” passed away today while on board the liner Columbus which was the first leg on a trip to Carlsbad, Germany where he planned on getting relief from his rheumatism.

https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=J28tAAAAIBAJ&sjid=-4sFAAAAIBAJ&pg=5728%2C2804723

1927: It was reported today that four thousand six hundred and twenty-eight persons are now living in 41 settlements in Palestine created by the Keren Hayesod, according to the latest figures given out by the Department of Agricultural Colonization of the Palestine Zionist Executive. Sixty-five per cent of this population are workers, and the remainder children. (JTA)

1928: Three Jews, who are reported to be Communists, were scheduled to be deported from Palestine.  One of the deportees “was found guilty in Jerusalem of belonging to an illegal organization” while the other two were being deported after having served short jail terms for participating in “May Day riots in Tel Aviv.”

1929: In Baltimore, MD, Arnold Rice Rich and Helen Gravely Jones Rich gave birth to Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century. Her father was Jewish.  Her mother was not. (As reported by Margalit Fox)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html?_r=2&hp

1929: The 1st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honoring the best films of 1927 and 1928 and took place today at a private dinner held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, in Los Angeles, California. The awards, popularly known as Oscars, were created by Jewish movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, founder of Louis B. Mayer Pictures Corporation.

1931: Birthdate of Manhattan native Alfred William Alberts, a pioneering researcher in the field cholesterol as it related to cardio-vascular problems. (As reported by Gina Kolata)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/obituaries/alfred-alberts-unsung-father-of-a-cholesterol-drug-dies-at-87.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

1932: The Nazis are demanding the removal of Bernhard Weiss from his post as the Vice-President of the Berlin Police Force.  Their objections are two-fold: Weiss is Jewish and he ordered the arrest of four Nazis for their role in attacking a former Nazi named Schotz who had left the party.

1932(10^th of Iyar, 5692): Eighty year old Edward Lawrence Levy the London born winner of the first World Weightlifting Competition in 1891 and “member of the International Weightlifting Jury at the first modern Olympics at Athens in 1896 passed away today while working as an agent of the Midland District of the National Trade Defense Association.

1934: Three days after she had passed away, funeral services are scheduled to be held today for sixty year old Henrietta Jaskow, “a member of the board of directors of the Foster Mothers Association of America” and supporter of Mt. Sinai Hospital.

1934: “Benes Calms Fears of Jews On Nationalism” published today described a meeting that Czech Foreign Minister Eduard Benes had with a delegation of Jews from the City of Uzhorod in which he assured them that the government “would not attempt to force Czechoslovakian nationalism on the Jews” living in that area.

1934: In Brooklyn, NY, Rubin Dallek (a business-machine dealer) and Esther (Fisher) Dallek. Gave birth to Robert A. Dallek, the Columbia University Ph.D. historian who won the Bancroft Prize for his 1979 book Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945

1935: “A convention of delegates from national Jewish youth organizations will meet tonight in room 327 of the Chanin Building, 122 East Forty-Second Street, to consider the syllabi which will be presented to the seminars to be held on June 9 at the Metropolitan Conference of Jewish Youth Organizations. The meeting, under the auspices of the youth division of the American Jewish Congress, will consider such problems as anti-Semitism, boycott of the 1936 Olympics, Zionism, Jewish youth and economic discrimination and Jewish education.” (JTA)

1936: Tonight “the Icor, the association for Jewish colonization in Soviet Russia, celebrated the second jubilee of the Jewish autonomy in Biro-Bidjan, U.S.S.R. where a Jewish Soviet Republic is being built, with a concert at Town Hall.”

1936(24th of Iyar, 5696): A bomb thrown by Arabs kills three Jews at the Edison cinema in Jerusalem. The Haganah demands permission to retaliate, but Ben Gurion refuses. The Edison Cinema was not just a movie theatre. It was a “citadel of secular European culture in Jerusalem. It opened in 1932 with a performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” sung in Hebrew. The Edison was the third largest cinema in the city and popular sport for British soldiers and officials.

1936: “Steel helmeted police maintained comparative quiet in the Holy Land today following” demonstrations that had broken out yesterday when the Arab campaign of civil disobedience officially began.



1936: At Shabbat morning services Rabbi Louis I. Newman is scheduled to deliver a sermon at Rodeph Sholom on “Do Christians Understand Jews? – A comment on the Christian Century Articles”



1936: At Shabbat morning services Rabbi Nathan A. Perilman is scheduled to deliver a sermon this morning at Temple Emanu-El on “The Pitfalls of Self-righteousness



1937(6^th of Sivan, 5697): Shavuot



1937: Birthdate of Dr. Anthony Saidy, the physician and Internal Master of Chess who was a mentor to Bobby Fisher.



1937: The Polish government launched two investigations into the attacks on Jews that took place last week in Brzesc, which was known as Brest-Litovsk, the site of the peace negotiations between the Germans and the Russians that resulted with the latter surrendering to the former.



1937: Dr. Bernhard Kahn and David J. Schweitzer, European director and vice-president, respectively, of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee issued a report today that described“the role of the cooperative credit system established by the American Jewish Joint Reconstruction Foundation in aiding some 500,000 Jews in eleven European countries by facilitating issuance of $28,000,000 in credits in nine months

1937: In Romania, “The first motion to exclude Jews from professional associations came today when the Confederation of the Associations of Professional Intellectuals (Confederația Asociațiilor de Profesioniști Intelectuali din România) voted to exclude all Jewish members from its affiliated bodies, calling for the state to withdraw their licenses and reassess their citizenship.”

1938: The Palestine Post reported on the continued fighting between the police and British army units in the Acre District. At least 23 terrorists were killed there and numerous arrests were made. Jewish settlements repulsed numerous terrorist attacks, but complained that they were supplied with insufficient arms and too small a number of supernumerary constables for a successful defense. The Iraq Petroleum Co. pipeline was again set on fire.

1938: Today “the British government set out the objectives of the Women's Voluntary Service for Civil Defence” which had been founded by Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading, Baroness Swanborough who served as chairman of the WVS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Isaacs,_Marchioness_of_Reading#/media/File:Housewives!_Wvs_Needs_Your_Help!_Art.IWMPST19869.jpg

1938: After two and half weeks of touring the country, Britain’s Palestine Partition Commission began its first official session.  Because of the continued Arab violence, the meeting was held “in camera under heavy guard.’  While Arab leaders continued to boycott the commission, Jewish leaders Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion, Moshe Shertok and Dr. Bernard Joseph met with the British to discuss possible implementation of partition proposals.

1939: “British troops patrolled strategic points throughout the Holy Land tonight as part of extensive precautions to avert threatened disorders over the British Government's Palestine plan, to be published tomorrow”

1940: This afternoon Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. met with President Roosevelt at the White House today.

1940: It was reported today that the 27^th annual Palestine Flower Day is scheduled to be held on May 19, 1940.

1940(8th of Iyar, 5700): Forty-two year old Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker died tonight while fleeing from the Nazis in a freak accident when he feel through an open hatch aboard the SS Bodegraven in the English Channel and broke his neck.

http://www.stairgalleries.com/about/news-events/the-incredible-story-of-dutch-art-dealer-jacques-goudstikker/

1940: In New Canaan, CT, “Asher Margolies, a Macy’s executive, and the former Ethel Polacheck, a painter” gave birth to John Samuel Margolies, Americas “foremost photographer of vernacular architecture.” (As reported by Margalit Fox)

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/03/arts/john-margolies-photographer-of-whimsical-architecture-dies-at-76.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

1941: “Nearly 5,000 foreign Jews of Paris, many of them crying hysterically, arrived at a concentration camp at Orleans today as the government extended its new social measures by withdrawing licenses of hundreds of foreign doctors and druggists.”

1942(29^th of Iyar, 5702): Parashat Bamidbar

1942(29^th of Iyar, 5702: Sixty-sevem year old theatre producer Morris Gest, the husband of Reina Gest and the son-in-law of David Belasco passed away today.

1942: “Sobibór became fully operational and began mass gassing operations.

1943: The famous Tolmatsky Synagogue of Warsaw was dynamited by order of General Jurgen Stroop. It marked the last German "major operation" in the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

1943:SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop reports the final liquidation of the Jewish ghetto at Warsaw, although some Jews remain in hiding. The Germans reportedly lost 300 troops.Amazingly the Jewish resistance had proved fierce, by comparison than that of the French Army in 1940. The number of Jewish dead does not matter, since they would have perished in the showers and ovens any way. Death was not the question; the manner of death was the matter of choice. There were a few survivors of the Ghetto, one of them being the mother ofMarshaFensin, the former Cantor of Temple Judah.

1943(11^th of Iyar 11): Yiddish author Chaim Zhitlowsky passed away

1943: Today, in what is now neighborhood of Tel Aviv, “the Sarona assembly hall was bombed by the Irgun, injuring six people.”

1944(23^rd of Iyar, 5704): Four year old Eldad Davidovics who had been transported from Brno to Terezin today was transported from Terezin to Auschwitz where he was murdered.

1944: The first ofmore than 180,000 Hungarian Jews reached Auschwitz.

1944: Seventy year old Berlin native Olga Lehmann who had been deported to Terezin in 1942 was shipped to Auschwitz today.

1945: Today, the Palestine police accused a “group of lawless Jewish political extremists “which has been inactive since last Fall” and which believes their activities “can hasten the emigration to Palestine of surviving European Jews “was responsible for the “sabotage of telephone communications in the last few days.”

1946: It was reported today that Crown Publishers will Old Country by Sholem Aleichem on June 17.

1946: On the same day that it was reported that the “Arabs are in no mood to compromise on the pont of 100,000 Jews being permitted to enter Palestine, “twenty armed Jews, including several young girls, reportedly participated in several robberies today” in Palestine.

1947: Three days after he had passed away, funeral services are scheduled to be held for NYU trained lawyer Louis Fabricant, the “attorney-in-chief of the legal aid society and leader in B’nai B’rith who raised three children –Herbert, Helen and Sarel – with his wife.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1947/05/15/88781033.pdf

1947: Birthdate of New York City native and Boston University graduate Andrew Lack who went from acting in commercials and “off-Broadway productions” to a behind the camera career that culminated with his being named “chairman of the NBCUniversal Worldwide News Group.”

https://pagesix.com/2019/06/13/nbc-news-chief-andy-lack-and-wife-betsy-kenny-have-split-up/?_ga=2.132191754.503085456.1560520869-1684604245.1537203133

1948: In New York City, the American Zionist Emergency Council sponsored a celebration of the creation of the Jewish state at Madison Square Garden that was so well attended 75,000 people had to be turned away.

1948: Based on a telegram from David Ben Gurion and Moshe Sharett, Abba Eban and not Mordechai Elisah, is to be Israel’s chief spokesman at the the United Nations.

1948: Israel issued itsfirst postage stamps.

1948: At the Landsberg DP Camp, survivors of the Holocaust held a celebratory parade in honor the creation of the state of Israel

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/may/16.asp

1948: Tonight, “after driving away the enemy” “company of the third battalion of the Yiftach Brigade occupied the Tegart fort called Metzudat Koach by the Israelis which overlooked the Hula Valley.

1948: Chaim Weizmann was chosen Chairman of the Provisional State Council of Israel which effectively made him the first president of the State of Israel.

1948: The Egyptian army suffered its first defeat at Nirim, in the Negev.

1948: The Egyptians entered Gaza. They would not “leave’ until 1967.

1948: At approximately one o’clock in the morning Syrian artillery began shelling Kibbutz Ein Gev.  At dawn, Syrian aircraft attacked the Kinarot valley villages.  Later in the day “Syrian aircraft made bombing runs on Masada, Sha'ar HaGolan, Degania Bet and Afikim.” This was the opening round in the Syrian attempt to sweep the Jews from the Galilee. To any one observing events of that day, it would appear that the victory would go to the Syrians with their tanks, artillery and combat aircraft.

Metzudat Koach, a Tegart fort built by Solel Boneh during the British Mandate” that “was a key observation point on the Naftali heights, overlooking the Hula Valley” which had been seized by the Arabs thus threatening the existence of kibbutzim in the Upper Galilee.1948: Christopher Mayhew, the future Lord Mayhew, an anti-Zionist ally of British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, writes in his diary, “I must make a note about Ernest’s anti-Semitism, which has come out increasingly sharply these past few weeks with the appalling crisis in Palestine. There is no doubt to my mind that that Ernest detests Jews. He makes the odd wise-crack about the ‘chosen people’ and declares that the Old Testament is the most immoral book ever written…” This view of Bevin is fascinating when his role in enforcing the White Paper and his opposition to a Jewish homeland is being considered.

1948: “JEWS IN GRAVE DANGER IN ALL MOSLEM LANDS; Nine Hundred Thousand in Africa and Asia Face Wrath of Their Foes” published today described the precarious position of the 900,000 Jews living “Arab and Moslem countries stretching from Morocco to India.”  “There is a tendency” in some Moslem states “such as Syria and Lebanon” “to regard all Jews as Zionist agents and fifth columnists.  There are indications that that the stage is being set for a tragedy of incalculable proportions” which the United Nations has done nothing to prevent.  These fears are based in part on Arab League announcements that at some unspecified date, “all Jews except citizens of non-Arab states, would be considered ‘members of the Jewish minority state of Palestine.’ Their bank accounts would be frozen and used to finance resistance to ‘Zionist ambitions in Palestine.’  Jews believed to active Zionists would be interned and their assets confiscated.”  In Syria, “virtually all” Jewish civil servants have already been fired and in Iraq Jews are not allowed to leave the country without posting a $20,000 bond to guarantee their return.  However bad conditions are now, it is predicted that in the event of an all-out war in Palestine, “the repercussions will be grave for Jews all the way from Casablanca to Karachi.”

1949:  Milton Berle appeared on the cover of Time Magazine.

1950:Out of a large collection of 120 styles of knit fashions brought to this country from Israel, for merchandising, forty were shown this afternoon at the Plaza Hotel to buyers. The presentation, under the auspices of Service for Palestine, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, was its first show to promote Israel-made products in the American market.

1950: “The Jackie Robinson” a biopic about the integration of baseball for which Ross Hunter served as the dialogue coach was released in the United States today.

1952: “New Faces of 1952” a revue that included music by Sheldon Harnick and Arthur Siegel as well as “Of Fathers and Sons” a parody of Clifford Odets “Golden Boy” written by Mel Brooks opened on Broadway today at the Royale Theatre.

1952: It was reported today that “Senator Herbert H. Lehman will be awarded the 1952 Gold Medal of Merit of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States” for his “distinguished service to the nation, to Jewry and to his fellow veterans.”

1953(2^nd of Sivan, 5713): Parashat Bamidbar

1953(2^nd of Sivan, 5713): Ninety-year old Bavarian born, Iowa raised “philanthropist, Zionist” WW I anti-War activist, Mary Fels,the wife of Joseph Fels passed away today

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/fels-mary

https://www.jta.org/1953/05/18/archive/mrs-mary-fels-philanthropist-dies-took-intererest-in-palestine

https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/8173

1954: In Elizabeth, NJ, Joseph Kushner, “a construction worker, builder and real estate investor” and Rae Kushner, both of whom were Holocaust survivors, gave birth to “real estate developer Charles Kushner”, the founder of Kushner Companies, brother of  Murray Kushner and Esther Schulder and father of Jared Kushner.

1955: Birthdate of actress Debra Winger, the star of “Officer and a Gentleman.”

1955: Birthdate of Edgar Bronfman Jr., CEO of Seagram and Warner Music

1956(6^th of Sivan, 5716): Shavuot

1956: U.S. premiere of “While the City Sleeps” a film based on The Bloody Spur, a novel by Charles Einstein and directed by Fritz Lang.

1959(8th of Iyar, 5719): Seventy year old Hall of Fame Bowler Mort Lindsey passed away today.

http://www.jewishsports.net/BioPages/MortimerLindsey.htm

1960: Theodore Maiman operates the first optical laser at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.

1960: “An abridged version of the Mel Brooks musical “Shinbone Alley” “was broadcast under the original title archy & mehitabel[ as part of the syndicated TV anthology series Play of the Week presented by David Susskind.”

1961: Birthdate of Jean Hanff Korelitz the author of Admission which “was adapted for the 2013 film of the same name”

1964: After having been performed successfully in the UK, “The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd” directed by Anthony Newley and produced by David Merrick opened today at the Shubert Theatre in New York City.

1965: Eightieth birthday of Rabbi de Sola Pool who had retired from the active leadership of Congregation Shearith Israel – the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in 1957 after serving as Rabbi for fifty years.

1965: In Canada, Dr. Victor Goldbloom was the first guest to appear on “Cross Country Check-up,” a Sunday afternoon radio show whose hosts have included Moses Znaimer.

1966: Two people were killed today during a “landmine attack between Sea of Galilee and Almagor.”

1967: General Fawzi, the Egyptian chief of staff, sent a message to the commander of the UN Emergency Force, General Rikhye of the Indian Army requesting the withdrawal of the UNEF from Egypt. The Egyptian Foreign Minister sent a cable to U Thant, UN Secretary General tell him that the Egyptian government had decided to immediately terminate the presence of UNEF in Egypt and the Gaza strip.

1968(18th of Iyar, 5728); Lag B'Omer

1968(18^th of Iyar, 5728): Seventy-five year old Ben Dalgin, the New York City born son of Mr. and Mrs. Max Dalgin who worked his way from being a teenage “printer’s apprentice” to serving as “director of art, photography and reproduction for the New York Times” passed away today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/05/17/77088555.html?action=click&contentCollection=Archives&module=ArticleEndCTA&region=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article&pageNumber=47

1969(28^th of Iyar, 5729): Yom Yerushalayim

1969: Barbra Streisand appeared at a Friars Club Tribute

1969: In the Soviet Union, Boris Kochubievesky, a “refusnik” is scheduled to “3 yards hard labor” at the end of sham trial where he was accused of slandering the Soviet regime.

1971(21^st of Iyar, 5731): Seventy-seven year old “Austrian actor, cabaret performer, refugee from the Nazis and the husband of Anny Han passed away today in his native Vienna.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/706103-Karl-Farkas

https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-staff/karl-farkas-7044

1973: Birthdate of actress Tori Spelling.

1973(14th of Iyar, 5733): Famed Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz passed away. His body was flown to Jerusalem for burial.

1974: Birthdate of Adam Richman who earned an undergrad degree from Emory and a Master’s from Yale before pursuing a career as an actor and television personality.

1974: Despite a terrorist attack the previous day on a school at Ma’alot, Prime Minister Golda Meir tells Secretary of State Kissinger that talks with the Syrians will continue. After a one day hiatus, she says, “We had all better back to peacemaking.

1974: “Dybbuk,” a ballet based on the Ansky’s play created by Jerome Robbins using the music of Leonard Bernstein debuted at the New York State Theatre, Lincoln Center.

1975(6^th of Sivan, 5735): Shavuot

1975:  In “Before the Founders and Sons” published today Richard F. Shepard provided a review of Amos Elon’s latest work Herzl, a biography of “the man acknowledged as the founder of the Jewish state.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1975/05/16/archives/books-of-the-times-before-the-founders-and-sons.html

1975:  “Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York” the movie version of the novel by Gail Parent starring Jeannie Berlin and featuring Sam Melton as “Mannie” was released in the United States today.

1976(16^thof Iyar, 5736): Seventy-seven year old Shlomo H. Bardin, the son of Hairm and Miryam Bardinstein and the husband of Roth Bardin, with whom he had two sons – David and Hillel – and “who studied at the University of Berlin, University College and Columbia University after which “he founded the Haifa Technical High School and Haifa Nautical School passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/05/17/archives/dr-shlomo-bardin-77-dies-founded-brandeis-institute.html

1977: "Boulevard Montmartre, in the Afternoon Rain," by Camille Pissarro the son of Frederick Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew, was sold today, at Christie's in New York for $275,000

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that in his 28th Annual State Comptroller's Report Dr. Yitzhak Nebenzahl called for a "Ministry of Administration." He said that while there are many links that tie people to its government, in Israel the administration is the weakest link in this chain. "A government," he explained, "is like an automobile. No matter how fine the car is, it will not ride well unless all four wheels are intact." The Report claimed a massive maladministration, and was specifically highly critical of the Treasury.

1982: Final broadcast of the 7^thseason of “One Day At A Time,” starring Bonnie Franklin.

1984(14th of Iyar, 5744): Comedian Andy Kaufman passed away. Born in 1949, Kaufman is best remembered for his many appearances on ‘Saturday Night Live’ andfor his portrayal of Latka on thetelevision hit “Taxi.” He was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer and was 35 at the time of his death.

http://andykaufman.jvlnet.com/core.htm

1984(14th of Iyar, 5744): Irwin Shaw passed away at the age of 71. Born Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff in 1913 in the Bronx, his Jewish immigrants from Russia changed the family to Shaw and moved to Brooklyn. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1934, Shaw wrote scripts for radio shows including Dick Tracey. After serving in the Army during World War II, Shaw produced his "great American war novel"The Young Lions, which became the basis for a successful film of the same name.Among other works by this highly prolific writer was Rich Man, Poor Man which became a hit t.v. mini-series.

http://www.irwinshaw.org/

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/17/obituaries/irwin-shaw-extolled-for-short-stories-dies.html?pagewanted=all

1985: American painter, editor, and book artist, Susan Bee and poet Charles Bernstein gave birth to their first child Emma Bee Bernstein.

1986: David Pleat left Luton Town Football  Club to become manager of Tottenham Hotspur “one of the biggest football clubs in England” (Editor’s Note – Football in England is what Americans call soccer)

1986(7^th of Iyar, 5746): Sixty-five year old Yehuda Hellman passed away today. http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/18/obituaries/yehuda-hellman-dies-headed-jewish-groups.html?pagewanted=print

1987: For the third and final night Leonard Bernstein conducted the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra as part of the IPO’s 50^thanniversary celebration

1987: Birthdate of Can Bonomo, the Turkish born Jewish singer who “represented Turkey in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012 at Baku.

1988: CBS broadcast the final episode of “Cagney and Lacey” produced by Barney Rosenzwieg and Joseph Stern and co-starring Al Waxman as the title characters supervisor “Lt. Bert Samuels.

1990(21st of Iyar, 5750):  Multi-talented entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. passed away at the age of 64. Born in Harlem in 1925, began his show business career at the age of four. Davis was the son of a popular vaudeville entertainer. He learned how to dance from the legendary BoJangles. He begandancing with the Will Mastin Trio and moved on to asinging career that included opening for Frank Sinatra. Davis was part of theRat Pack and starred with them in the cult classic “Ocean’s Eleven.” During the 1950's Davis was in an automobile accident in which he lost his eye. It was during this period of his life than he converted to Judaism.He will be remembered not just for his talent but for his support of the Civil Rights Movement as well. (As reported by Peter Flin)

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1208.html

1991: The Los Angeles Times featured a review of “Wartime Lies,” the first novel written by Louis Begley. "Wartime Lies is the story of a ‘lucky’ little boy. Lucky goes in quotation marks; the child went through terror and degradation. On the other hand, no one in his small family of well-to-do Polish Jews went to a concentration camp. Only two--his grandfather and grandmother--were killed; he, his father and his aunt survived and were able to prosper after the war, even before emigrating.”

1993: A third revival of “3 Men on a Horse” featuring Jewish thespians Tony Randall, Jack Klugman, Jerry Stiller and Ellen Green closed today in New York City

1994(6th of Sivan, 5754) First Day of Shavuot

1994(6th of Sivan, 5754): Shaul Ben-Tzvi, the second commander of the Israeli Navy passed away today.  Born Paul Hamah Schulman in Connecticut in 1922 he graduated from the U.S. Navy Academy and served with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during WW II.  Following his discharge he worked to bring Jews to Palestine during the mandate and then helped to establish a naval arm for the infant Jewish State.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/18/obituaries/paul-shulman-72-headed-israeli-navy.html?pagewanted=1

1995: “Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs,” Michael Nymans 25^th Album was released to by Argo Records.

1996: NBC broadcasts the final episode of season 7 of ‘Seinfeld.”

1996(27^th of Iyar, 5756): Fifty-six year old Admiral Jeremy M. Boorda, the Chief of Naval Operations passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/18/us/admiral-in-suicide-note-apologized-to-my-sailors.html

https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/people/chiefs-of-naval-operations/admiral-jeremy-m--boorda.html

1999: Angela Warnick Buchdahl was invested as the first Asian American cantor. Two years later, she became the first Asian American rabbi.

http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/16/1999/angela-warnick-buchdahl

1999: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Return of Depression Economics byPaul Krugman and recently released paperback editions Aharon Appelfeld’s “The Iron Tacks,” the “Israseli novel…about a concentration camp survivor who wanders through Austria buying sacred books and other remnants of the Jewish culture that once flourshed there while searing for the Nazi officer who murdered his parents” and “Bronstein’s Children” by Jurek Becker, “a novel about the psychic aftershocks of the Holocaust in which an 18yearold German Jew stumbles on his father and two other camp survivors as they torture a former Nazi Guard.”

2000:''Yiddishkayt Los Angeles” is scheduled to continue for a third day.

2000: “For the first time in almost four years, Israelis and Palestinian forces exchanged gunfire in the West Bank today as a wave of violent protest swept through the Palestinian territories. Despite the fighting, Prime Minister Ehud Barak won his Parliament's approval to cede three villages near Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority in an effort to advance the peace talks.” (As reported by Deborah Sontag)

2001: Today “behind the closed doors of a Tel Aviv courtroom, Israeli prosecutors began their trial of Itzhak Yaakov, a 75-year-old retired general accused of divulging classified information related to Israel's nuclear weapons program.” (As reported by William Orme)

2001: A Palestinian bus driver, 35 year old Khalil Abu Elba, who plowed his bus into a crowd and killed eight Israelis, including seven soldiers, in February was convicted of murder.” (As reported by Deborah Sontag)

2002(5th of Sivan, 5762): Erev Shavuot

2002: U.S premiere of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones with Natalie Portman as “Senator Padme Amidala” and Frank Oz doing the voice of “Yoda.”

2002: The “severed head and decomposed body” of Danny Pearl “were found cut into ten pieces, and buried—along with the jacket of a tracksuit Pearl was wearing when photographed by his kidnappers—in a shallow grave at Gadap, about 30 miles (48 km) north of Karachi.”

2003(14^th of Iyar, 5763): Pesach Sheni

2003: “In a sign of the turmoil inside the governing Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians' chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, has submitted his resignation after being cut out of high-level talks between the adversaries that are planned for tomorrow night.”

2003:Dave Kehr provided a review of Oscar award winning documentary filmmaker Aviva Slesin’s newest film “Secret Lives” Hidden children and Their Rescuers During World War II.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/movies/film-in-review-secret-lives-hidden-children-their-rescuers-during-world-war-ii.html?searchResultPosition=3

2004(25^th of Iyar, 5764): Eight-six year old singer and lyricist June Carroll passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/nyregion/23hurewitz.html?_r=0

2004: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including the recently released paperback edition of “Part of Our Time: Some Ruin and Monuments of the Thirties” in which Murray Kempton re-evaluate “the radical movements and personalities of the 1930’s focusing on such ‘ruins and monuments’ as Paul Robeson, Whittaker Chambers, Algers Hiss and …Walter Reuther.”

2005: A revival production of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s “The Apple Tree” by the Encores came to an end today.

2005: “A History of Violence” a movie version of the novel by the same name directed by David Cronenberg premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

2005: Funeral services for Elaine Terner Cooper, the mother of future Secretary of the Treasury Steven Munchin are scheduled to take place at Park East Synagogue followed by interment at “Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, NY.”

2006(18^th of Iyar, 5766): Lag B’Omer

2006: Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard received the prestigious B'nai B'rith international Presidential Gold Medal for his "outstanding" support of Israel and the Jewish people at a ceremony in Washington.

2006: A French politician and his sister sued France's state-run SNCF railway for transporting their father and three relatives to a wartime transit camp that sent Jews off to Nazi concentration camps

2007: Thomas Cole, Rose Dobrof, Marc Kaminsky, Penninah Schram, Mark Weiss, and Steve Zeitlin present “Stories as Equipment for Living: Last Talks and Talesof Barbara Myerhoff” at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

2007: (28 Iyar, 5767) Yom Yerushalayim - Jerusalem Reunification Day; Celebrating forty years of the return of Jerusalem to its rightful place as, one, undivided city serving as the capital of the Jewish state. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning. May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.”(Psalms 137:5-6)

2007(28th of Iyar, 5767): Rabbi Mordecai Simon, chief administrator of the Chicago Board of Rabbis for thirty two years and host of the Sunday morning television show “What’s Nu?” passed away in Highland Park, Il, at the age of 81.

2007: Richard J. Pratt was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Medal for Corporate Citizenship. This is given to is executives who, “...by their examples and their business practices, have shown a deep concern for the common good beyond the bottom line. They are at the forefront of the idea that private firms should be good citizens in their own neighborhoods and in the world at large”

2008: At the Channel Inn in Washington, D.C., as part of the monthly meeting/luncheon of the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of the District of Columbia, The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington marks the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel with a series of book talks by Laura Cohen Apelbaum on Jewish Washington: Scrapbook of an American Community (the companion to the award-winning exhibit of the same name) co-sponsored by the Embassy of Israel and the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum.

2008(11th of Iyar, 5768): Ninety-three year Middle East scholar J. C. Hurewitz, passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/nyregion/23hurewitz.html?_r=0

2008: "Furo" is being performed for the first time in Israel, in a special temporary pavilion designed by Giora Porter on the Tel Aviv Port boardwalk.

2009: The New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division  struck down a lawsuit that sought to prevent the state of New York from using eminent domain to seize the property where Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project is being built.

2009: Ronald Radosh and his wife, Allis Radosh, discuss and sign their new book, “A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel” at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C.

2009:At the Dennis and Phillip Ratner Museum in Bethesda, Md. Rabbi Shefa Gold, a leader in Aleph: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal and a composer of six albums of Jewish liturgical music, reads from and discusses her new book, “In the Fever of Love: An Illumination of the Song of Songs” (with illustrations by Phillip Ratner) followed by a Havdalah Service.

2009(22^nd of Iyar, 5769): Mordechai Limon, the first commander of the Israel Navy, passed away today at the age of 85. “During World War II, he volunteered for the British Merchant Marine, where he learned the art of naval commanding, and after the war he commanded ships that brought clandestine immigrants to the Land of Israel in defiance of the British mandatory authorities. Limon is best remembered for his role in the Cherbourg Affair, directing the operation that brought five warships from France to Israel that French President Charles de Gaulle sought to prevent Israel from receiving, even though they had been paid for. Limon was subsequently expelled from France and retired from the Navy, becoming a private businessman.”

2009: An Israeli entrepreneur who has started what is believed to be the world's first tuition-free on-line university said today “he hopes the effort will expand education to less fortunate people around the world. Shai Reshef said University of the People has about 150 students from 35 countries who have enrolled since the school began two weeks ago. (Jerusalem Post)

2009: “A heart in Jerusalem, a head in Crumlin” published today described he life and times of Leopold Bloom.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/a-heart-in-jerusalem-a-head-in-crumlin-1.765048

2009:“Editor and writer who dedicated his life to promoting Irish literature” published today describes the life Irish author David Marcus.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/editor-and-writer-who-dedicated-his-life-to-promoting-irish-literature-1.765118

2010:HBO broadcast the final episode of the mini-series “The Pacific” featuring theme music by Hans Zimmer, over-seen by executive producer Steven Spielberg and featuring Ashley Zukerman and Jon Bernthal.

2010:Linda Levi, Director of Global Archives for The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is scheduled deliver a talk entitled “The JDC Archives: Resources for Genealogists” in New York City.

2010: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Finding Chandra:A True Washington Murder Mystery by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz and Innocent by Scott Turow.

2011: “2,000 Years of Jewish Life in Morocco: An Epic Journey,” a two day symposium focusing on the Jews of Morocco, sponsored by The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to come to an end.

2011:Rabbi Matthew Kraus, Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Cincinnati is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “The Nature of Jewish Life in America” in which he explores “the impact of the move to the suburbs on Jewish spiritual life--how Jews pray, how Jews practice, and how Jews relate to the Almighty”

2011: Rabbi Matthew Kraus, Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Cincinnati is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “History of the JQC (Jewish Queen City)” which traces the history of Cincinnati’s Jewish community “from its humble origins to the glory days of Plum Street Temple and the Manischewitz Baking Company to the start of the Big Brothers organization at the turn of the century and so much more!”

2011: Tonight, the Great White Way of Broadway will light up as stars, including Dudu Fisher and Tovah Feldshuh, perform in “Broadway Sensation,” a benefit celebrating Israel’s future. The event, which will raise proceeds for the Jewish National Fund, the OR Movement and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, will be broadcast live in Times Square, and feature over 100 performers from popular shows including Wicked, The Scottsboro Boys and Next to Normal.

2011: Rahm Emanuel took the oath of office today to become Chicago’s 46^th mayor and the first mayor of The Windy City.

2011: “Vidal Sassoon Interview” published today.

http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG8480525/Vidal-Sassoon-interview.html

2012: A screening of “Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray” is scheduled to be shown at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood, Ohio.

2012: Professor Steven Bowman is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled Italian Hebrew Renaissance of the 10th-11th Centuries at Cedar Village in Mason, Ohio

2012: Movie critic Carrie Rickey is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled Untold Stories:The Films of Aviva Kempner Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, PA.

2012: Chilean singer-songwriter Yael Meyer is scheduled to perform at the Washington DCJCC.

2012: During an interview today, Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress said that his organization is urging European governments to quickly adopt measures to tackle anti-Semitism and the threat of right-wing extremist.

2012: David Levin beams with joy as Elizabeth Levin graduates from Columbia Medical School after which this accomplished young woman will begin a vascular surgery residency at UCLA.

2012: Pierre Moscovici began serving as Minister of Finance in France.

2013: The Weiner Library is scheduled to host Ray Farr’s film “A Different World” which “concentrates on the vibrant lives of Polish Jews before their arrival at the Third Reich’s killing centers.”

2013: As part of the Books That Shaped America Series, Professor Pamela Nadell, the recipient of the American Jewish Historical Society’s Lee Max Friedman Award will lead a discussion of Jacob Riis’ How the Other Lives which among other thing presented an accurate picture of the Lower East Side, home to tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

2013: The Poetry Festival at Metulla, Israel’s most northern town is scheduled to come to an end today.

2013: The annual Indigo Festival, a huge dance fest on the shores of the Sea of Galilee is scheduled to begin today.

2013(7^thof Sivan, 5730): Second Day of Shavuot/ Yizkor

2013: A demonstration staged by the radical Eda Haredit organization turned violent tonight, with haredi protestors throwing rocks, glass bottles and other objects at police, injuring at least eight officers, two of whom were taken to hospital in moderate condition.

http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Thousands-of-haredim-protest-IDF-enlistment-legislation-313416

2013: Michelangelo had it right. Most synagogues around the world have it wrong. The two tablets of stone, divinely inscribed with the 10 Commandments and bestowed upon Moses at Mount Sinai, did not have the rounded tops familiar from their depictions in most houses of worship and popular art since the Middle Ages. And the Chabad (Lubavitch) Hassidic movement is encouraging synagogues to correct the misrepresentation. Rabbi Menachem Brod, Chabad’s spokesman in Israel, noted today that the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, accurately depicted the two tablets as perfect squares as early as the 1940s, in writings for Chabad youth, and said many Chabad synagogues now feature the accurate artistic representations of the tablets. He said the image of the tablets had been skewed over the centuries in Christian tradition, and it was time for the Jews to reclaim the true representation of the two stones.

2014: A Shabbat Weekend Retreat in memory of Rabbi Betzalel Jacobson OMB 1^stYarhrzeit is scheduled to begin in West Des Moines, Iowa.

2014: In London, the Wiener Library is scheduled a talk by John Izbicki, author of Life Between the Lines: A Memoir during which  he will talk about the horrors of Kristallnacht that he experienced at age 8 and his family’s escape to the U.K. in 1939.

2014: “Israel’s UN mission Friday launched a campaign to get official UN recognition for Yom Kippur, the most sacred Jewish holiday, alleging “discrimination.” The United Nations has decreed 10 official holidays, including Christmas and the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr, but there is no corresponding Jewish holiday recognized on the body’s official calendar, said Israel’s UN Ambassador Ron Prosor in a letter to his colleagues

2014: “Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv won a place tonight in the Euroleague Final after a thrilling victory over CSKA Moscow.”

2014: Today, local officials are scheduled to gather at the 113 year old B’Nai Yisroel Synagogue in South Bend, Indiana and “dedicate a plaque denoting that the building” which “has been renovated and incorporated in the city’s Found Winds Field minor league baseball complex” as a historic landmark.  (As reported by JTA)

2014: “How Four Israeli Fighter Pilots Stopped A Massive Arab Invasion In 1948” published today

http://www.businessinsider.com/four-israeli-aircraft-stopped-a-huge-arab-army-in-1948-2014-5

2015 Rocking throwing Palestinians attacked firefighters trying to reach two burning synagogues in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev today which was Shabbat.

2015: Kentucky Derby winner “American Pharaoh” owned by Ahmed Zayat is scheduled to run in the Preakness today in an attempt to win the second jewel of the Triple Crown.

2015: The Eden-Tamir Music Center is scheduled to host “The best of Chamber Music Cello and Piano” featuring Kirill Mihanovsky on cello and Arnon Erez on piano

2015: Lewis Black is scheduled to perform at the Bergen P.A.C. in Englewood, NJ.

2015: The 17^th Docaviv International Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end today at Tel Aviv.

http://www.docaviv.co.il/org-en/

http://www.docaviv.co.il/2015-en/

2016: “Today’s Generational Sea Change” is scheduled to be the opening session at the JCCs of North America Biennial at Baltimore.

2016: In Philadelphia, PA, PlayPenn is scheduled to present a reading of “Schlueterstrasse 27” a play that “follows a woman's search to better understand her family from the initial discovery of her grandfather's diary at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum all the way to Berlin, Germany.”

2016: “Taste of Israel: A Discussion About Israel through Food” an interactive discussion and cooking demonstration focusing on Israel with a Middle Eastern Food Historian from Tel Aviv is scheduled to be held at the Durgin Pavilion on Lake Todd as part of fund raiser for Camp Courageous.

2016: “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” a film adaptation of “an autobiographical novel by Amos Oz” that marked the directorial debut of Natalie Portman had its “gala festival screening” at Cannes today.

2016:  “In Celebration of Jewish-American Heritage Month, the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington and The Hebraic Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division, The Library of Congress are scheduled present a lecture by Dr. Janette Silverman on “The Blumenthals of the upper-Lower Peninsula of Michigan”

2016: The Center for Jewish History and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research are scheduled to host “A Forgotten Genocide: The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-1919, and their Impact on Memory and Politics.”

2017: “The American official who sniped at his Israeli counterparts that the Western Wall, the holiest place for Jews to pray, is not part of Israel and not Israel’s responsibility was named today in a TV report as David Berns, the political counselor at the US Consulate in Jerusalem.” (As reportedby Raphael Ahren and Eric Cortellessa)

2017: “The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said today that the US embassy should be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, upholding a campaign promise of US President Donald Trump, and that the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem is part of Israeli territory.”

2017: The Eden Tamir Music Center is scheduled to host an evening of “Pre-War Warsaw Tangos in Yiddish and Polish” featuring the singing of Olga Avigail.

2017: Oxford University is scheduled to host an “Interfaith Formal” followed by “a talk led by the chaplains of the Abrahamic faiths.”

2017: A fourteen year old boy was arrested “at his home near the Beth Hamedrah Hagadol synagogue in connection with a fire that seriously damaged the historic synagogue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and “injured two firefighters.”

2017: BOOKlynites is scheduled to host Jewish Mindfulness leader and author Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg who will discuss her recently released book God Loves the Stranger.

2017: Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion is scheduled to host its fourth annual benefit “Honoring Women’s Leadership of the West.”

2017: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is scheduled to host “New Frontiers:

Technology and the Preservation and Presentation of Memory” moderated by Michael Haley Goldman, Director, Future Projects, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

2017: In Des Moines, IA, at a meeting of educators and clergy, Dr. Stephen Gaies, the Director of the UNI Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to speak on "Is there a benefit to teaching about the Holocaust and genocide concurrently? If so, why and how?" 

2018: The Center for Jewish History and American Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to present Professor Jonathan Sarna and Forward editor Jane Eisner discussing “Rupture and Renewal in American Jewish History as part of The History Matters series.

2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host a pub trip as a replacement for the scheduled Whiskey and Wine tasting event.

2018: Today, “it was announced that Aly Raisman and the other survivors of the USA Gymnastics sexual abuse scandal would be awarded the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.”

2019: The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to host Marc Leepson’s lecture on “Saving Monticello: The Little—Known Story of the Levy Family’s Stewardship of Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Essay on Architecture’” including the role played by “U.S. Navy Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy and Representative Jefferson Monroe Levy, the Sephardic saviors of Jefferson’s iconic house at Charlottesville, Virginia,.”

2019: In Coralville, IA, Agudas Achim is scheduled to host a Russian guitar concert, “Vikings in Odessa.”

2019: In Boston, Simona Di Nepi,, the Curator of Judaica at the  Museum of Fine Arts is scheduled to introduce a screening of “From Cairo to the Cloud.”

2019: In New Orleans, the Jewish Family Service is scheduled to host its “annual fundraiser” at The Cannery.

2019: “Contemporary art purchased today by Robert Mnuchin,” the son of Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, “broke the record price for a work by a living artist.”

2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host the final screenings of “The Keeper” and “The Samuel Project.”

2019: “Jews Schmooze Podcast” featuring writer/director David Schneider, journalist Rachel Shabi, barrister Adam Wagner and director of Yachad Hannah Weisfeld discussing “Jews and Money” is scheduled to broadcast from London this evening.

2019: In Tel Aviv, Erez Tal, Bar Refaeli, Assi Azar and Lucy Ayoub are scheduled to host the second “semi-final” of the Eurovision Song Contest.

2020: This afternoon, in Cedar Rapids, IA, the “Temple Judah family” is scheduled to take part in a drive-by graduation celebration for Gabriella “Gavi” Thalbum who has earned her BS in micro, cellular, and developmental biology. (Editor’s note; Not totally objective about this item.  She was one of my pre-Confirmation students years ago and she sure did liven up those Sunday mornings. When you pictures of her peers flocking to the beaches and other venues, you have to give her high marks for maturity and judgment)

2020: Via Zoom, The Village for Families with Young Children at Temple Israel of Boston is scheduled to host “TGIS at Home,” a special live service with Wayne Potash and a member of the Temple Israel clergy for those between the ages of 6 days and 6 years who love to dance, sing, play and pray.

2020: In San Rafael, CA, Congregation Rodef Sholom is scheduled to host via zoom “Daf Yomi Talmud Study with Rabbi Elana Rosen-Brown

2020: “Via Zoom, “the Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host Havdalah at 9:45.

2020: MusicTalks is scheduled to host a virtual afternoon of cello music with Elad Kabilio as he “shares the stories behind Bach's Cello Music and its connections to American music by Corigliano, Crumb and Philip Glass.”

http://www.eladkabilio.com/

2020: “Bosnia’s most senior Catholic clergyman” is scheduled to host a memorial service today for Croatian civilians and soldiers of the Nazi-allied Ustasha forces despite protests from the Israeli government and Jews in Bosnia whose views were expressed by “The Jewish Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nonprofit representing local Jews, who called the planned Mass a “memorial service for criminals responsible for the suffering of Sarajevans.” (As reported by Cnaan Lipshiz)

2020: Thanks to a ruling this week by The Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards issued earlier this week Conservative congregations can livestream services on Shabbat during the coronavirus pandemic

2020(22^ndof Iyar, 5780): Parsahat Behar and Bechukotai and Chapter 5 Pirke Avot; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/

This Day, May 17, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 17 



142 BCE: “Simon the Hasmonean captured the citadel of Jerusalem and expelled its Syrian garrison ad the Hellenized Jews” who had fought with them. Simon was the last surviving Hasmonean brother.  His victories completed the fight begun by the more famous Judah who had taken possession of Jerusalem in 165 BCE but had not been able to take control of the citadel.

1012: Benedict VIII began his papacy. During his reign, “a number of Roman Jews were executed on Cecil Roth has called the ‘improbable charge of mocking a crucifix.’  The accuracy of this is open to debate since a contemporary chronicler, Ademar of Chabannes, “this occurred after an earthquake accompanied by a severe storm erupted on Good Friday, prompting a Roman Jews to inform the papal palace that some of his coreligionist had mocked a crucifix in their synagogue. After those found guilty were beheaded the earthquake ceased.

1220: Second coronation of King Henry III in Westminster Abbey which was ordered by Pope Honorius III who did not consider that the first had been carried out in accordance with church rites. In 1253, King Henry established The Domus Conversorum (House of Conversion) which was a building and institution in London for Jews who had converted to Christianity. It provided a communal home and low wages.

1315: Today, during the reign of Louis X, “an ordinance was issued” concerning the rights and treatment of the Jews when and if they were allowed to return to France.

1338: The Bishop of Strasbourg formed an alliance for the pursuit of the Armleder assassins who were responsible for the massacring of Jews in Alsace.

1594: Today “The Jew of Malta” was entered in the Stationer's Register, a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London which a held monopoly over the printing industry in England.

1500: In Mantua, “Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua and Isabella d'Este” gave birth to “Federico II of Gonzaga, the ruler of the Italian city of Mantua at the time of the birth of Leone de' Sommi, the first “unapologetically Jewish playwright and poet” and a ruler who enjoyed Jewish comedians enough to hire “Solly and Jacob,” two “ebrei istrioni” (ham actors) for a wedding celebration in 1520.” (As reported by Simon Schama)

1607: Today for the third time the Inquisition took action against “Jorge de Almedia, a Portuguese residing in Mexico, the prosecuting attorney renewed the motion that he be adjudged in contumaciam (in contempt) “but the Inquisitors upon consideration of the antecedents of the case and wising to give the said Jorge de Almeida a further proof of kindness and benignity, decided to grant him sixty days more, during which he may come and appear in obedience to the summons.”

1617(12^thof Iyar, 5377): Rabbi Judah Löb Saraval passed away He translated Saadia’s commentary on “Canitcles” into Hebrew. [Canticles is another name for the Song of Songs.] “He is quoted in the ritual work "Mashbit Milḥamot," in connection with a question in regard to the ritual bath. Although he was reported to have died in Venice, Filosseno Luzzato found his tombstone in Padua.

1660: As the aftermath of Civil War raged across England the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury was taken from English preacher and political leader Hugh Peters who supported the ideas of Roger Williams which included “writing on behalf of the toleration of Jews.”

1714: Michael Hasid who had “succeeded to the rabbinate of Frankfort after the death of Aaron Benjamin Wolf” was appointed chief rabbi of Berlin.

1727: Catherine I of Russia passed away. The Catherine was the second wife of Peter the Great. She ruled for two years after Peter’s death. In that time she issued an edict expelling the Jews from the Ukraine and the rest of Russia and denying them the right to ever return.

1756: On the day before Lag B’Omer Britain declared war on France marking the start of the Seven Years War from which you can draw a line to the American Revolution, The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars all of which had major impacts on Jews in Europe, the New World and the lands of the Ottoman Empire.

1774(7^thof Sivan, 5534): Second Day of Shavuot observed on the same day that “the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations issued the first call for an "Intercolonial Congress" that eventually met as the First Continental Congress

1779(2^ndof Sivan, 5539): Raphael Levi Hannover the native of Franconia who was so skilled in mathematics and astronomy that he served as the secretary for Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and whose works included "Luḥot ha-'Ibbur,” passed away today. 

1784: The Jewish public school was opened in Hungary

1786(19^thof Iyar, 5546): Moses Zarah Eilitz, who taught Talmud without accepting compensation even though he was impoverished himself, passed away today.

1795: Rabbi Isaiah Berlin led a special service in the synagogue at Breslau in honor of the recently signed Peace of Basel that ended the War of the First Coalition.  From a Jewish point of view, the service was unusual because Berlin permitted the use of instrumental music.

1776: During the American revolution the U.S. Congress called on Americans to raise their voices in prayer, and among the verses read by the "anxious" Jews of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation of New York was, "…And they shall beat their swords into plow-shares."

1786(19^thof Iyar): Moses Eidlitz, author of “Melehet Mah-shevet” passed away.

1792: The New York Stock Exchange is founded when the Buttonwood Agreement was signed by 24 stock brokers outside of 68 Wall Street in New York under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street. Benjamin Seixas, brother of Gershom Seixas, was one of the five Jews included in the list of the twenty-four founders of the New York Stock Exchange

1795: Rabbi Isaiah Berlin officiated at service celebrating the Peace of Basel where he allowed instrumental music to be played in the synagogue.

1799(12^thof Iyar, 5559): Seventy-six year old Daniel Itzig, the husband of Miriam Wulff, the grandfather of Lea Solomon, the mother of Felix Mendelson and Fanny Hensel, the father-in-law of David Friedlander who was “court Jew” Frederick II, the Great and Frederick William II of Prussia and one of the very few Jews in Prussia to receive full citizenship privileges, as a "Useful Jew" passed away today.

1805(18th of Iyar, 5565): Lag B'Omer observed as Lewis and Clark were traveling through modern day Montana as they made their way west towards the Pacific.

1814: The Constitution of Norway is signed and the Danish Crown Prince Christian Frederik is elected King of Norway by the Constitutional assembly. The first Jews arrived in what is now Norway in the last decade of the 15th century. They were Sephardim escaping the Inquisition and were referred to as “the Portuguese Jews.” This constitution included in its second paragraph a general ban against Jews and Jesuits entering the country. In principle, Portuguese Jews were exempt from this ban, but it appears that few applied for a letter of free passage. When Norway entered into the personal union of Sweden-Norway, the ban against Jews was upheld, though Sweden at that point had several Jewish communities. In 1844, the Norwegian Ministry of Justice declared: "... it is assumed that the so-called Portuguese Jews are, regardless of the Constitution’s §2, entitled to dwell in this country, which is also, to [our] knowledge, what has hitherto been assumed. “After tireless efforts by the poet Henrik Wergeland, the Norwegian parliament lifted the ban against Jews in 1851 and they were awarded religious rights on par with Christian "dissenters." In 1852, the first Jew landed in Norway to settle, but it wasn't until 1892 that there were enough Jews to form a synagogue in Oslo.

1826: In Nice, Rabbi Abraham Belais and Naomi Belais gave birth to Solomon Belais.

1829(14^thof Iyar, 5589): Pesach Sheni observed on the same day that John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States passed away.

1830: The second reading of bill designed to free the Jews from their “civil disabilities” “was rejected” in the House Commons by a vote of 265 to 228 despite the presentation of “a sizable petition it its favour from 14,000 citizens of London.”

1830: In Kosiv, Rabbi Chaim Hager of Kosiv and his wife, the daughter of Rabbi Israel Friedman of Ruzhyn gave birth to Menachem Mendel Hager who was named as Rebbe at the age of 24.

1835: Lewis Isaacs married Phoebe Davis today at the Great Synagogue.

1835: Samuel Magnus married Rose Cohen today at the Hambro Synagogue.

1836: Birthdate Wilhelm Steinitz. Born in Prague, which was part of the Austrian Empire, Steinitz was the first official World Champion of Chess holding the title from 1886 to 1894. He suffered from a variety of mental problems after losing his championship. At one point he claimed to have played a game of Chess with God. He passed away in 1900 while living in Brooklyn.

1844: Warder Cresson became the first person commissioned to serve as Consul at Jerusalem by the United States State Department. Cresson would convert to Judaism while serving in Jerusalem and take the name Michael Boaz Israel ben Abraham

http://www.jewish-history.com/cresson/warderc.html
1844: Birthdate of Julius Wellhausen, the German biblical scholar who, in his 1878 "History of Israel," first advanced the JEDP Hypothesis, claiming that the Torah was a compilation of four earlier, literary sources.
1848(14^th of Iyar, 5608): Pesach Sheni is observed as the Revolutions of 1848 swirl across Europe with the revolutionaries gaining grants in Austria and parts of modern day German and Italy.

1849: In St, Louis, The Great Fire occurred when at 10 p.m. a fire broke out on the steamboat "White Cloud". Within 30 minutes, 23 steamboats were engulfed in flames. The fire swept up the levee, destroying tons of freight and 15 blocks of residences, warehouses, and stores. Businesses destroyed that were owned in whole or in part by Jews include: Isaac Jacobs, Abraham Jacobs, Lewis M. Levy, Simon Lewis, Raborg & Shaffner, Helfenstein & Co., Charles Roderman, Weil & Bros., L. Newman, Helfenstein, Gore & Co., Levy & Bros., H. Cohen, and Simon Abeles.

1850(6^thof Sivan, 5610): Shavuot

1850: Rabbi Jacobs delivered a sermon at the Shavuot service using the text – Deuteronomy XVI 9.

1852: The New York Times reported that the first reading of a bill designed to remove the disabilities imposed upon persons refusing to take the “oaths of abjuration” (known as the Jews Bill) had taken place in the House of Lords. During the debate, Lord Lyndhurst cited the recent case of David Salomons, the Jew who had refused to take the standard oath and sought to be seated in the House of Commons nonetheless. In what was seen as a turn for the better, Lord Derby had not offered any opposition to the measure.

1852: Birthdate of Cincinnati native and 1870 Ohio University graduate Dr. Philip Zenner who “received his license to practice medicine in 1896” and who “was a charter the Jewish Hospital medical staff” and a Professor Neurology at the University of Cincinnati.

1855: In New York ceremonies were held today marking the official opening first hospital building in the United States devoted solely to alleviate the suffering of poor Jews.  The ceremonies featured uniquely Jewish liturgical motifs including a display of Torah Scrolls. In addition to all of the modern conveniences one would expect to find in a new hospital, there is a synagogue on the 2^nd floor.  John Hart is president of the board of directors and Benjamin Hart is the vice president.

1855: Over five hundred ladies and gentlemen attended a banquet at Niblo’s Saloon that was intended to raise funds for the newly opened Jew’s Hospital.  The Grace before and after dinner were chanted in Hebrew by Rabbi J.J. Lyons and Anthony Leo. 

1857: In Vienna, Josef and Eleanor Pick gave birth to Julia Pick who became Julia Heller when she married Jakob Heller.
1860: Alliance Israelite Universelle was launched by a group of French Jews under the direction of Adolphe Cremieux. It was designed to defend Jewish rights and to establish world-wide Jewish educational facilities. Charles Netter was one of the six founders of the organization which had been formed in response to anti-Semitic incidents such as the abduction of Edgardo Mortara and the Damascus affair. The Franco-Prussian War diminished its universality and separate organizations were formed in Germany and England.

1865: Sergeant Levi Arnold who had begun his service in the Union Army in 1862 and transferred to the Veteran Reserve Corps in 1863 completed his military service today.
1866(3rd of Sivan, 5626):  Composer Adolf Bernhard Marx passed away at the age of 70.

1872: Moss Ansell who had been born at London in 1823 to Hyam and Fanny Answell was buried today at West Ham Jewish Cemetery, eight days after he had passed away.

1872: In Hungary, Rabbi Joel Margareten and Julia Yetta Margareten gave birth to Frederick Fred Margareten, the husband of Regina Margareten and father of Julia Ellenbogen; Samuel Margaretten; Selma Margaretten; May Weiss and Lilian Rose Sokolow

1872: "The Jews in Romania"  published today reported that the Italian government has sent a communication to to the government of Prince Charles of Romania protesting against the persecution and oppression of the Jews in that country.

1873: Birthdate of “French novelist, French Communist Party member” and “lifelong friend of Albert Einstein” who suffered the indignity of having his books burned and blacklisted by the Nazis even though ye was not Jewish.
1874: In Lemberg, Galicia, “Solomon Klakah, a poor brush manufacturer and amateur violinist” and “Babette Halber Kalakh, a seamstress who often made costumes for local theaters” gave birth to Beylke Kalakh who gained famed as Bertha Kalich the wife of Leopold Spachner and the star of American Yiddish theatre http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/17/1874/bertha-kalich

1876(23^rdof Iyar): Aaron Zevi Friedman, the author of “Tuv Ta’am” passed away

1877: Haemet was published for the first time in Vienna under the leadership of publisher Aaron Samuel Liebermann.

1877: In Lithuania, “Abraham and Sarah Malz” gave birth to Bernard M. Maltz who in 1890 came to the United States where he married Lena Sherry, and worked as a salesman for “National Biscuit Company and Standard Oil” before going into real estate development and the construction in Brooklyn while also serving as a director with numerous organizations including the Federation of Jewish Charities in Brooklyn, the Pride of Judea and Yeshiva College.

1877: An American Jewish couple living in England were parties to litigation surrounding their marriage.  Benjamin Levy sued his wife Deborah Isaacs Levy and her alleged lover on grounds that the two were partners in an adulterous relationship. After a few minutes of deliberation, the jury found that they had been guilty of adultery but also found that Levy “had contributed to his wife’s misconduct.  Therefore, they declined to assess any damages against either the respondent or the co-respondent.

1878(14^thof Iyar, 5638): Pesach Sheni

1879: The third annual meeting of Felix Adler’s Society for Ethical Culture had its final meeting in New York City.

1880(7^thof Sivan, 5640): Second Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1880(7^thof Sivan, 5640): Seventy-four year old Amsterdam born French “numismatist and bibliographer” Henry Cohen passed away today in Paris.

http://www.virtualcohen.com/henry-cohen-s-work

1881: Today, Lazard Kahn, the brother and business partner of Felix, Saul and Samuel Kahn, all of whom played an active role in the Estate Stove Company of Hamilton, OH, “married Coralie Alice Lemann of Donaldsonville, LA with whom he raised five children – Marie, Milton, Bertram, Lucian and Jerome.

1885: In New York City, Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Guggenheim gave birth to Meyer Robert Guggenheim, a member of the famous Guggenheim family who served as U.S. Ambassador to Portugal at the beginning of the Eisenhower Administration

1885: Birthdate of Frederic Zelnik, a native of Czernowitz which was part of the Austro-Hungarian at the time who was a leading German movie producer and director until Hitler came to power and he moved to the United Kingdom.

1885: A week after she had passed away, Miriam bat Avraham was buried today at the Brompton Jewish Cemetery.

1888(7^thof Sivan, 5648): Second Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1890: C.J. Schwab is scheduled to conduct a 24-piece orchestra today at the 13^thannual Strawberry Festival sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association at the Lenox Lyceum a fundraising event for which E.B. Levy is in charge.

1890: In Helena, Montana, founding of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Society of Temple Emanu-El.

1891: It was reported today that contrary to official government announcement “Greek troops” in the Ionian Islands, are not “suppressing disturbances and punishing ringleaders” but instead are “openly exhibiting sympathy with the Jew-baiters” and that the condition of the Jews “will be worse before they are better.”

1891: It was reported today that “all the latest news” from Russia regarding the Jews “is of the extension of edicts of expulsion to numerous districts hitherto unmentioned and fresh cruelties and hardships” used “everywhere in the merciless enforcement of these dark-age decrees.”

1893: A delegation from New York led by Oscar S Straus met with Secretary of State Gresham in Washington, D.C. to discuss the situation of the Jews in Russia.  They asked him to intervene on their behalf with Czar with the hope that he would take action mitigating the “severe edicts and penalties” that have been imposed upon them in the last few years.

1893: According to Dr. Joseph Senner, the Superintendent of Immigration at Ellis Island the SS Didam which arrived today “had brought the worst set of men, women and children he had ever seen” and that “many of them were Russian or Polish Jews.

1893: Explorer, journalist and advocate for democratic reform in Russia, George Kennan and his wife are sailing for England today.  Before leaving he expressed his firm belief that an influx of Russian Jews will be coming to the United States; forced to do so because of the Czar’s edicts.  In response to a question about aid for these immigrants he said that the Baron de Hirsch Fund has a definite, major role to play in assisting Russian Jewish immigrants.

1893: It was reported today that Myer S. Isaacs, Chairman of the Trustee of the Baron Hirsh Fund expects that the only Jews who will immigrate to the United States from Russia will come of their own volition , will have money to take them to where they desire to settle “or will have friends who can help them.” “They will not be a burden to anybody and…they will make very good citizens. He said that the fund is still experimenting with its trade schools and industrial farm which all the help they can offer for the foreseeable future. (This is neither the first, nor the last time that Jews in America would underestimate the desperation of their European co-religionist)

1893: “A rich Jewish banker, who desired” to remain anonymous “for the present” was reported to have said that if there should be an unusual increase in Jewish immigration from Poland and Russia, he would be interested in meeting with fellow Jews “to devise ways and means of caring for all refugees that might come.

1893(2nd of Sivan, 5653): Jacob Reinowitz, affectionately known as Reb Yankele, the native of Wilkowisk, Poland who served his home town as rabbi for 30 years before moving to England in 1876 where he became the “Preacher” for a Talmud Torah “established by Eastern European immigrants at Whitechapel and a member of the London Beth Din under the leadership of Chief Rabbi N. M. Adler, passed away today.

1895: “Rubinstein’s Religion” published today discussed the religious beliefs of the late Anton Rubinstein, the Russian pianist, composer and conductor. Although born a Jew, he “was baptized when a mere infant…and was forced…to follow the prescribed” religious “forms once a year.”  “It is worthy of notice and stands greatly to his credit, that in Russia, where it is better to be born a dog than a Jew, Rubinstein, despite his baptism, never sought to deny his Jewish origin.  In a certain way he was proud of it, and always boldly acknowledged it.”

1895(23^rdof Iyar, 5655): Sixty-eight year old Wilhelm von Gutman who founded the largest coal company in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and served as President of the Jewish Community of Vienna passed away today.

1895: “W.W. Wilson Becomes a Convert to Judaism” published today described the decision of Brooklyn lawyer Wayne W. Wilson to join the Jewish faith.  The ceremony took place at Temple Israel in Brooklyn. Wilson said that he “joined Temple Israel because the doctrine of the Reformed Jew my views exactly.”

1895: Birthdate of Saul Adler, the Russian born Israeli who helped find a cure for malaria.

1897: Birthdate of Oswald Rothaug, the Nazi Jurist who eagerly “presided over the trial of Leo Katzenberger in March 1942, ordering his execution for "racial defilement" in May 1943.”

1898: In New York City, “a Yiddish-speaking animal skinner who had fled Russia in 1889 to escape the pogroms” and his wife gave birth to Abraham Isaac “Abe” Lasfogel who began with the William Morris Agency in 1912 and worked his to the presidency of the world’s leading talent agency. 

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/27/obituaries/abe-lastfogel-agent-dead-a-william-morris-executive.html

1898: During the Spanish American War Jacob Schrob and Bernard Schwarzenberg were mustered into federal service along with the other members of Battery B of the 1^st Regiment Connecticut Volunteer Artillery.

1899: Sixty-one year old “Jewish Christian” Joseph Rabinowitz passed away today.

http://www.jewsforjesus.org/publications/messianic-book-review/v04-n01/kjaer

1899: Following his conversion to Christianity earlier in the year German architect Alfred Messel “received the Order of the Red Eagle, 4^th Class.”

1899: Private Nathan Levy began serving with Company F, 18^th Infantry today following which he would fight in the Philippines for 3 months.

1900: Birthdate of Herberts Cukurs, the Latvian aviator who was never punished for his crimes during the Holocaust.

1901: Temple Beth Elohim, “the oldest synagogue in Brooklyn” began today began the celebration of “its golden jubilee.

1901: Birthdate of Hugh Joseph Schonfied a London born Bible expert and one of the first people to work on the Dead Scrolls who was “a liberal Hebrew Christian” and who “was expelled from the Executive Committee of the International Hebrew Christian Alliance.”

1901: Herzl met with the Sultan of Turkey to discuss the establishment of a Jewish state and the obtaining of a charter. He failed in both attempts. However, The Sultan bestows on Herzl the Grand Cordon of the Mejidiye and authorized Hertzl to declare that the ruling Khalif was a friend and protector of the Jewish people. Herzl believed that a Jewish homeland could be created by getting approval of the venture from the political leaders of the day. That is why he sought out the support of the Kaiser. The state of Israel would eventually be a product of changed realities on the ground – the settling of the land by the Zionists – and political support from various political leaders such as Harry Truman in 1948.



1902: “During Shabbat Torah services women interrupted prayers with a call to support the boycott” of kosher butcher shops on the Lower East Side. “Women left their seats in the balcony to persuade men to back their cause and gain communal support.” (As reported by Jewish Women’s Archives)

1903: Birthdate of Arthur “Artie” Auerbach, the newspaper photographer “who became famous as ‘Mr. Kitzel’ on the Al Pearce and Jacky Benny radio shows.”

http://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2014/11/he-didnt-like-mr-kitzel.html

1905: Wolf Perelberg, who gained famed as movie producer William Perlberg, the son of Israel Jakob Perelberg, came to the United States today “with his mother and three siblings.”

1905: The Pall Mall Gazette published “A Street in the East End” today by M.J. Landa

1907: Rabbi Maurice Harris officiated at tonight’s services dedicating the new sanctuary at Temple Israel of Harlem which began with the officers and trustees of the congregation placing the Torah scrolls in the ark followed by the kindling of the Eternal Light “by one of the young women of the congregation

1908: The Jewish American Historical Society held its 16^th annual meeting today at the Hotel Astor.  During the morning session, Leon Huelmer presented a paper on “Jewish Privaterring in the Eighteenth Century.”  During the afternoon session Dr. Herbert Friedenwald presented a paper on “Why This Is Not a Christian Country.” At the evening session, the attendees approved a measure championed by Cyrus Adler, the society’s President to amend the constitution allowing the society to study “Jewish history in general instead of limiting it to” the study of American Jewish history.

1908: Charles Towne and Daniel P. Hays were the principle speakers at tonight’s memorial service sponsored by the Hebrew Union Veteran Association and the Hebrew Veterans of the War with Spain to honor the soldiers and sailors who had died in the service of their country.  The service was held at New York’s Rodeph Shalom and guest included Rear Admiral Joseph B. Coghlan and Grand Marshal Isidore Isaacs of the Grand Army of the Republic and his staff.  The Grand Army of the Republic was large national Civil War veterans association that was a forerunner to the American Legion formed after WW I.

1908(16^thof Iyar, 5668): Percival Menken the eldest son of Jules and Cornelia Menken and husband of Getrude Davies Menkien, who was born at Philadelphia, PA in 1865, passed away today in New York City where he was a member of the bar, President of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and a director of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was laid to rest at Beth Olom Cemetery in Queens, NY.

1908: “Charles Louis-Dreyfus a merchant and ship-owner, and Sarah Germaine Hément” gave birth French Resistance fighter and businessman Pierre Louis-Dreyfus the grandson of Leopold Dreyfus, the founder of the Louis Dreyfus Group.

1909: The Jewish Communal Council “of which Supreme Court Justice Samuel Greenbaum is Chairman is responsible for the settling “the differences between Mrs. William Einstein who recently formed the Widow Mothers’ Fund and the United Hebrew Charities which she served as Vice President until her recent resignation.

1910: Sir Charles Walston, the Anglo-American archaeologist married Florcence Walston

1910: The Sixth Biennial Session of the National Conference of Jewish Charities in the United States opened today in St. Louis, MO.

1912: “Merchants in southern Russia” protested to the “Premier and Minister of Commerce against the expulsion” of the Jews and the confiscation of their property.

1912: The Governor of Kiev, declared that he “will expel and confiscate the property of every Jewish merchant “who is unable to produce a certificate of uninterrupted payment of the First Guild fee for fifteen years.”

1913(10^thof Iyar, 5673): Parashat Behar

1913: The Annual Meeting of the Associated Jewish Charities of Chicago is scheduled to take place this evening at the Auditorium Hotel where attendees will among other things, vote on those who will serve as directors for the next three years.

1914: " We should remember that the Mexicans are not worth fighting when we consider all this war talk of upholding the honor of our flag," Nathan Straus said tonight in an impromptu address at the joint memorial services of the Hebrew Union Veteran Association and the Hebrew Veterans of the War with Spain at the Temple Rodeph Sholomo, Sixty-third Street and Lexington Avenue.”

1915: In response to a request from Leo Frank’s attorneys “members of the State Prison Commission” is scheduled to “hold a conference” this “morning to decide on the date for hearing arguments on the petition of Leo M. Frank for a commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment.”

1915: In Pittsburgh, PA, “Oscar William Oppenheimer and Claude Siesel” gave birth to James Siesel Oppenheimer the father of Thomas James Oppenheimer.

1915: A tribute in praise of Woodrow Wilson’s “peaceful policies” offered by the Jews attending the cornerstone laying ceremony for the Yorkville Jewish Institute and Talmud Torah were published today.

1915: The last British government formed by the Liberal Party fell from power. The party of reform, the Liberal Party produced the first openly Jewish Member of Parliament. Lionel Nathan de Rothschild was first elected in 1847. However, Rothschild would not take his seat until 1858 since it took 11 years to pass the Jewish Disabilities Bill that made it possible for Jews to swear an oath that was not Christian. After World War I, the Labour Party would supplant the Liberal Party as the chief opposition to the Conservatives.

1915: Birthdate of Joseph Liegbott who was a Tech Sergeant with the 101^stAirborne during WW II.  Although he was the Catholic son of Austrian immigrants many of his comrades assumed he was Jewish because of his name, his appearance and his hatred of Germans.  (What’s worse than being Jewish – not being Jewish but having people think you are.)

1915: Today, following yesterday’s Leo M. Frank Day, petitions will be circulated among the citizens of Chicago calling for the commutation of Frank’s sentence.

1915: “Today’s early mail brought…more than 3,000 letters seeking clemency for Leo Frank” to the office of Georgia Governor Slaton, including ones from Philander C. Knox, ex-Senator and Secretary of State, Myron T. Herrick the former Governor of Ohio and Ambassador to France, Frank Walsh, Chairman of the United States Industrial Relations Commission; Fred A. Delano of the Federal Reserve Board and Senators Borah, Thomas, Reed and Newlands.

1915: It was reported today 5,000 men would go on strike because “at present there is no limit on the hours” which kosher butchers must work and that “many of them had to work ninety-six hours a week

1915: David Ben Gurian and Yitahak Ben Tzvi: arrived in New York today from Egypt and were allowed to enter the U.S. as immigrants even though they lacked the proper papers.

1916(14^thof Iyar, 5676): Pesach Sheni

1916: Birthdate of Frances Kroll Ring, the last secretary of F. Scott Fitzgerald who told her tale in Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald which was turned into a really slick little film, “Last Call.”  (Editor’s note - double bias since I am intrigued by Fitzgerald and I like the movie)

1917: The 1916-1917 academic year for The Teacher’s Institute of the Hebrew Union College is scheduled to come to an end today.

1917: Based on information dispatch sent from Amsterdam, it was reported today that Reichstag Deputy Cohn, an Independent Socialist, said that at the end of March Djemal Pasha, commander of the Turkish forces in in Syria had ordered all Jews removed from Jaffa saying that this was required by “military conditions” even though “his German Chief of Staff said” such a move “was unnecessary.”

1917: Twenty-two year old featherweight box Danny Frush (born David Frush, Jr) made his boxing debut at the Clermont Avenue Rink in Brooklyn, NY.

1918(6^thof Sivan, 5678): Last Shavuot of World War I

1918: According to reports published today, the American Jewish Relief Committee for Suffers from the War has raised $2,786,400 for its 1918 fund but that the committee will have to raise an additional fifteen million dollars in the coming year to deal with the increased suffering among the Jews of Poland and Russia.

1918: “While speaking at an official dinner for the Governor of Jerusalem, Dr. Chaim Weizmann said Jewry was returning to Palestine to build up a great moral and intellectual center which would not be a determent to any of the communities already established in Palestine and that Arab fears that they would ousted from their present position were unfounded.

1919: It was reported today that Dr. Joseph Merzbach, the heart and throat specialist at the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn has passed away – ironically a victim of heart disease.

1919: It was reported today that Dr. Haim I. Davis of Chicago “who is the first American to return to New York with a personal account of conditions” in Poland said Jews “in Warsaw, Pinsk, Brest-Litovsk and other parts of the new Poland” are “dying like flies” having in many cases “neither seen or eaten bread for months.”

1921: Fannie Hurst was among the first to join the Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to preserve their maiden names which had its initial meeting today at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City.

1921: In Atlantic City, NJ, Sadie Abrahams and James Arthur Levan gave birth to Henry Robert Merrill Levan who gained fame as songwriter Bob Merrill

https://www.songhall.org/profile/Bob_Merrill

1921: Birthdate of New York native and NYU and University of Florida trained attorney Philip Ephraim Heckerling, who raised two children – Dale and Ruth – with his wife Ruth.

1921: Birthdate of Judith Coplon, the native of Brooklyn and former Justice Department employee who became a sensation in 1949 when she was accused of being a Soviet spy.

1922: The USS Celtic, a navy supply ship on which Lt. Jr. Grade Stanford Moses had served during the Spanish American War was “taken out of service today.”

1922(19^th of Iyar, 5682): Forty-year old motor car pioneer Dorothy Levitt passed away today.

http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Dorothy_Levitt

1923: The Wiener Morgenzeitung (The Vienna Morning Newspaper) was highly critical of The London house of Rothschild and the Paris representatives of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. ‘for what the paper regards as excessive cordiality shown towards the representatives of the Horthy regime, who are negotiating a loan in European capitals. Heinrich Margulies edited the paper before he moved to Palestine in 1925 where he became a Director of the Anglo-Palestine Bank.

1923: Sir Wyndham Deedes, who has just resigned as the Civil Secretary of the Palestine Administration, addressed a meeting at the Grand Central Hotel called by the English Zionist Federation. Declaring that he favored Zionism because by enabling Jews to return to Palestine the world was righting a wrong committed by Christians 2,000 years ago, Sir Wyndham said only lack of money was hampering Zionist progress in all directions. (JTA)

1925: “Garrick Gaieties ,a revue with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart” who were creating their first Broadway hit, opened at the Garrick Theatre toda.

1926(4^thof Sivan, 5685) Sixty-four year old Isaac Aaron passed away today after which he was buried at the Scholemoor Jewish Cemetery Bradford.

1926: David M Bressler announced that nearly $6,000,000 was raised in New York toward the $25,000,000 United Jewish Campaign at a rally of 1,500 workers.

1926: Leading Jews of the East Side were guests at dinner tonight of Max Bernstein, proprietor of Libby's Hotel, the first modern Jewish hotel on the East Side, which was opened to the public yesterday. The hotel is at Delancey and Chrystie Streets. The hotel will serve kosher food. It was elected at a cost of $3,000,000. (JTA)

1928: “Seventy-five men and women assembled at” the New York home of Aaron Kheel this “evening to bid farewell to Dr. Chaim Weizmann who is returning to Europe next week.

1929: In Manhattan, attorney Frederick Weinberg and the firmer Lillian Hyman gave birth to George Henry Weinberg, the psychotherapist who invented the word “homophobia.” (As reported by William Grimes)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/us/george-weinberg-dead-coined-homophobia.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=1

1930: Today Hadassah announced that a new hospital will be opened in Tiberias on May 25.  The hospital will be named in honor of Peter J. Schweitzer and his widow will be going to Palestine to attend the dedication ceremonies

1930)19^th of Iyar, 5690): On Shabbat, 73 year old Florence Liveright the daughter Abraham and Rebeccah Kahn and the wife of Simon Liveright passed away today in Philadelphia.

1931(1^st of Sivan, 5691): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1931(1^st of Sivan, 5691: Seventy year old Frances Corinne “Fannie” Peixotto Bloom, the Cleveland, OH born daughter of Benjamin and Hannah Straus Peixotto and the wife of Isadore Nathan Bloom passed away today after which she was buried in The Temple Cemetery in Louisville, KY.

1933: In Norway, Vidkun Quisling establishes the Norwegian Fascist Party as well as the Hirdmen (King's Men), a collaborationist organization that's modeled on the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA). When the Nazis invade Norway during World War II Quisling will become the head of the Norwegian government. Quisling was such a notorious traitor that his name has now become a word in the English language that means “traitor.”

1933(21^stof Iyar, 5693): Communal worker George W. Patke passed away today in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
1933:  A petition is submitted to the League of Nations by representatives of the Comite des Delegations Juives protesting Germany’s anti-Jewish legislation, called the Bernheim Petition, named for imprisoned Silesian Jew Franz Bernheim.

1934: Today Mrs. Edgar Lowell was elected chairman of the Women’s Auxiliary Council of the Jewish Braille Institute of America at the inaugural meeting of an organization that “will solicit support for the Jewish Braille Review, the only Anglo-Jewish magazine in Braille which is distributed without charge to English reading Jewish blind persons throughout the world.”

1934:  At New York's Madison Square Garden, thousands attend a pro-Nazi rally sponsored by the German-American Bund. Critics of Roosevelt’s policy towards Jewish refugees often overlook the reality of anti-Semitism in the United States. The Bund rally was merely the most public venue for this reality of the pre-war American landscape.

1935: Birthdate of Avraham Heffner, the native of Haifa who went to be an award winning director and screenwriter

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/185197/avraham-hefner-israeli-cinema

1936(25^thof Iyar): Seventy-seven year old Zionist leader Nachum Sokolow passed away

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Sokolow.html

1936: A curfew order, forbidding residents of Jerusalem to leave their homes at night, was issued today by Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, the High Commissioner of Palestine, following the killing of three Jews last night at a motion-picture theatre.

1936: This morning in Jerusalem, more than 30,000 Jews marched in the funeral procession for three Jews murdered the night before at a local move theatre.  Isaac Ben Zvi, President of the National Jewish Council, told the mourners that he held the British government responsible for this because it was the duty of the government to protect its citizens.  An editorial published in today’s Palestine Post said that “ if this is a war of extermination declared y the Arabs on Jews, the Arabs had better know that the shooting down of 400,000 Jews will not alter the course of history and will not shake the Jews’ determination to resettle the land of their fathers…This movement of the Arab Supreme Council seeks tnot only to terrorize the Jews.  It aims to throw the land back to the Dark Ages.”

1936: This morning, at the Free Synagogue in Carnegie Hall, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise is scheduled to deliver a sermon “President Roosevelt’s Leadership of American: Is It Good or Bad?”

1936(25^th of Iyar, 5695): Twenty-seven year old Isaac Jalowski who was married six weeks ago, Dr. Svi Spachowski a recent arrival from Poland whose wife is an expectant mother and Alexander Polonski, “a student at the School of Oriental  Studies at Hebrew University” were all killed by Arabs today in Jerusalem.

1936: Oswald Garrison Villar, associate editor of The Nation delivered a speech tonight at a dinner of the American Committee Appeal for the Relief of Jews of Poland at the Hotel Commodore in which he asked the United States “to protest to the Polish Government about the persecution of the Jews in Poland.

1936: This evening, Temple Adath Israel, on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx is scheduled to celebrate its fortieth anniversary with a concert of liturgical music presented by the Cantors’ Association of America.

1936: Two thousand people filled the pews at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue for the 41^st annual memorial services of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States.

1937(7^th of Sivan, 5697) Second Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1937: Hundreds of Jews were injured during riots at Brest-Litovsk which is now located in Poland

1938: A. H. Skinner, organizer and manager of the “newly organized American Palestine Securities Company which was registered with the SEC last week” and is designed “to deal in securities originating in the Holy Land” descried “the rapid growth of large-scale undertakings in Palestine in the last five years.  In reporting on the economic conditions in Palestine, Skinner said that there were twelve companies with capital of more than $500,000 and that poplation had grown from 40,000 in 1920 to 400,000 in 1938.

1938: Arthur Sweetser, a director of the secretariat of the League of Nations wrote in his diary, “The President’s proposal took a large place in the League’s refugee deliberations this past week.” By the “President’s proposal” Sweetser was referencing Roosevelt’s plan to “get all the democracies to unite” in an effort to settle all of the Jewish refugees from Europe in their respective territories.”

1938(16^th of Iyar, 5698): Sixty-year old Jakob Ehrlich, the Viennese Zionist leader who was deported after the Anschluss passed away today at Dachau.

1939: The British government issues a White Paper (commonly called the MacDonald White Paper) that limits Jewish immigration to 10,000 a year for five years. The White Paper allows 75,000 Jewish immigrants (up to 10,000 per year, plus an additional 25,000 if certain conditions are met) to enter Palestine. The White Paper also restricts Jewish land purchases in Palestine. British government policy will succeed in keeping the actual numbers of Jewish immigrants far below the quotas for settlement in England and Palestine. The White Paper was issued after two years of orchestrated Arab violence. Recognizing the White Paper as a death sentence for a Jewish homeland, the leaders of the Yishuv prepare to bring “illegal immigrants” into Palestine. The White Paper also sealed the fate for Europe’s Jews as it closed the last place of refuge. When World War II broke out Jewish leaders were caught on the horns of a dilemma. In true Jewish fashion when confronted with two choices, the Zionists came up with a third solution. “We will fight the war as if there is no White Paper and we will fight the White Paper as if there is no war.” The Arabs had no such problems as the fact that the Grand Mufti spent the war in Berlin proves.

1939: There were only 679 Jews still living in Magdeburg. Eleven years earlier, there were more than three thousand Jews living in this ancient German city in which Jews had been living since the 10^th century.

1939: Fighting broke out in Jerusalem as police sought to disperse 5,000 demonstrators who had gathered to protest the White Paper.

1940 “My Favorite Wife” with a script by Samuel and Bella Spewack and filmed by cinematographer Rudolph Mate was released today in the United States.

1940: Today, Portugal's Premier Antonio de Oliveira Salazar issued an order that "Under no circumstances" was any visa to be granted, unless previously authorized by Lisbon on a case-by-case basis which meant he was currying favor with the Axis powers but leaving the Jews trapped north of the Pyrenees with one less hope of escape

1940: In New York, “Composer Eric Zeisl and his wife Dr. Gertrud S Zeisl (Jellinek) gave birth to Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg, the wife of Ronald R. Schoenberg and the mother of E. Randol Schoenberg who “received her PhD in German Language and Literature from University of California, Los Angeles and taught at Pomona College.”

http://zeisl.home.mindspring.com/pomona1.html

1940: Birthdate of Tama Gottlob, the younger sister of Salomon Gottlob. At age 2 she joined her 7 year old brother on Convoy 25 that left Drancy with 285 children all of whom were going to Auschwitz.

1940: “Waterloo Bridge,” based on 1930 play of the same name directed by Mervin Leory, with a script by S.N. Behrman and George Froseschel and filmed by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg was released in the United States today.

1941(20^thof Iyar, 5701): In cooperation with British Army intelligence, David Raziel, the commander of the I.Z.L. (Irgun Zva-i Leumi) led a group to sabotage the oil depots on the outskirts of Baghdad. Raziels car was bombed and both he and the liaison British officer were killed. Yes, this is Menachem Begin’s Irgun, the same Irgun that will attack the British in Palestine after the war is over; the same Irgun that blew up the British headquarters in the King David Hotel in 1947

1942(1^stof Sivan, 5702): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1942: “Whispering Ghosts” a mystery produced by Sol Wurtzel, starring Mitlton Berle and with music by Emil Newman was released today in the United States.
1942: Two thousand Jews were deported from Theresienstadt to Sobibor, 500 miles away. Also, 2,000 Jews from Pabianice reached the Lodz Ghetto. All children under 10 were torn away from their parents and sent "elsewhere."

1942: Liane Berkowitz, and Otto Gollnow, two members of the anti-Nazi Resistance were given the task of putting up about 100 posters in the Kurfürstendamm-Uhlandstraße section of west-central Berlin which protested against the Nazi "Soviet Paradise" propaganda exhibition being held in the city. Six months later, Berkowitz would be arrested for the act. Despite attempts to gain clemency for her because she was pregnant, Berkowitz would ultimately be executed.

1943: The United States Army contracted with the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School to develop the ENIAC. Herman Heine Goldstine who passed away in 2004 at the age of 90 was one of the orginial developers of ENIAC. Adele Goldstine, his wife, wrote the technical description for ENICA.
1943: The Nazis deport 395 Jews from Berlin to the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
1944: Joel Brand was flown in a German courier plane from Budapest to Istanbul where he met with two representatives from the Jewish “agency for Palestine, Wnja Pomeranz and Menahem Bader. Brand was a Hungarian Jew active in Va’adah (Vadat Ezra Vehatzala), the Jewish Resuce Agency in Hungary who was carrying the terms of Eichman’s offer to trade a million European Jews for 10,000 trucks, 1,000 tons of coffee or tea and 1,000 tons of soap. Eichman assured Brand that the trucks would only be used on the Eastern Front. At the same time, he told Brand that the Jews could go anywhere except Palestine because “the furhrer had promised his friend the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini” that he would not permit that. Pomeranz and Bader took the proposal back to Ben Gurion who then informed the British of the proposal. British Foreign Minster Eden and Secretary of State Hull would not persue the offer because they feared that if the Russians go wind of the negotiations, they would become even more suspicious of the western Allies (remember this was before the Second Front had opened) and might still make their own peace with Hitler. To ensure that nobody else heard about the negotiations, the British sent Brand to Syria for “temporary internment.” Of course the Soviets might have already known about the negotiations since Brand had been a Communist agent working in Berlin during the 1930’s.

1945: U.S. Army Corporal Edward Belfer photographed “a German girl who is overcome as she walks past the exhumed bodies of some of the 800 slave workers murdered by SS guards near Namering, Germany, and laid here so that townspeople may view the work of their Nazi leaders."

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/military/ww2/photos/images/ww2-183.jpg

1946(16^thof Iyar, 5706):Eighty-six year old Lewiston, Maine “clothing merchant” and former state legislator Isaac B. Isaacson, the father of Harriet M. Joseph and the brother of Anna Klein passed  away today

1947: “Hatikvah” which in a former life had been the Coast Guard cutter Tradewinds used as an icebreaker on the St. Lawrence River, was intercepted by the British today and taken to Haifa after which its cargo of 1,414 Jewish refugees whom the English labeled as “illegals” were interned in Cyprus.

1947: At the Adelphi Theatre, after 148 performances the curtain cam on “Street Scene” an American by Kurt Weill with choreography by Anna Sokolow.

1948(8^thof Iyar 5708): Twenty-year old Private Meir Ben Bassat was killed today as the third battalion of the Yiftach Brigade finished taking Metzudat Koach, a Tegart fort built by Solel Boneh during the British Mandate” that “was a key observation point on the Naftali heights, overlooking the Hula Valley” which had been seized by the Arabs thus threatening the existence of kibbutzim in the Upper Galilee.

1948: Egyptian warplanes were strafing and dive-bombing Tel Aviv for the third straight day.  Arab sources were claiming unverified as yet, the surrender of the Jews of Old Jerusalem, with claims and counterclaims flying on both sides on the progress of the invading armies of Egypt, Syria and Transjordan.

1948: During the Battles of the Kanarot Valley, as the Syrians attempted to wipe out Ein Giv, a company attacked the Israeli-held water station with heavy weapons killing all but one of the workers.
1948: At dawn, the Syrians renewed their attack on Tzemah as they attempted to take control of the Jordon River Valley.  In an attempt to limit damage to their tanks, the Syrian infantry without armor to lead them, attacked the village's northern positions. Despite a shortage of ammunition and suffering heavy casualties, the Israelis halted the Syrian advance.

1948: In Tel Aviv, as Battles of the Kinarot Valley rage into their third day.  David Ben Gurion orders Moshe Dayan, the Haganah commander in the area, to ‘Hold the Jordan Valley’ no matter the cost.

1948: Russia recognized Israel. Much to Stalin’s dismay, he lost the recognition race to the United States. Stalin had not fallen in love with the Jews. He saw Israel as a wedge that would lead to the breakup of one his nemesis, the British Empire. With its large population of refugees from Russia, the state of Israel was never in danger of being seduced by Stalin or the Communists.
1948: During the War for Independence, Israeli forces liberated Acre, Nebi Yusha, and Tel el-Kadi, Yes; this is the same Acre where Maimonides and his family landed when they first arrived in Eretz Israel.

1948: A convoy consisting of 12 trucks filled with military supplies arrived in Jerusalem. It would be the last convoy to reach the city. "The siege of Jerusalem was now complete."

1949: In Beirut, authorities today allowed five Lebanese Jews who were suspected of being pro-Israel to emigrate to the Jewish state so they could avoid prosecution for their political sympathies.

1949: For "saving the dignity and the structure of the United Nations" by his success in restoring peace to Palestine, Dr. Ralph J. Bunche received the thanks of Mayor O'Dwyer yesterday at City Hall.

1950: The special committee reinvestigating the assassination of Count Bernadotte in 1948 submits its report to the Israeli cabinet today. 

1950:  “Annie Get Your Gun,” the film version of the Broadway musical directed by George Sidney, “with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin and a screenplay by Sidney Shelton” was released today in the United States.

1950: Israeli fighter planes forced down a four-engine Royal Air Force Sunderland that was flying outside ‘the prescribed air corridor.”

1950: In Baltimore, MD, “Shirley Thelma (née Glass) and Raymond Albert Ashman, an ice cream cone manufacturer” gave birth to playwright and lyricist Howard Ashman.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/15/obituaries/howard-ashman-is-dead-at-40-writer-of-little-shop-of-horrors.html?scp=1&sq=%22Howard+Ashman%22&st=nyt

1951: The Tales of Hoffmann “a British Technicolor film adaptation of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann,” co-directed by Emeric Pressburger was released today in the United Kingdom.

1952(22^ndof Iyar, 5712): Parashat Behard-Bechukotai

1954(14^thof Iyar, 5714): Pesach Sheni

1954: Birthdate of American lyricist David Zippel.

1954(14^thof Iyar, 5714): Sixty-three year old Latvian native, WW I Army Chaplain and attorney Maurice Hirsh Gelfand, the son of of Isaac and Ida Gelfand and the husband of Rachel Shapiro Gelfand passed away today in Cleveland.
1956: In Philadelphia, PA supermarket executive Benjamin Saget and his wife Rosalyn “Dolly” Saget gave birth comedian Robert Lane “Bob” Saget.

1956(7^thof Sivan, 5716): Second Day of Shavuot

1956(7^thof Sivan, 5716): Poet and author Jacob Fichman passed away.

1956: Sixty-seven year old Dickinson College and JTS graduate Louis Jacob Haas who served as a rabbi congregations in “Harrisburg and Reading, PA, Stamford, CT and Woodside, Queens” as well a chaplain at Bellevue Hospital and as “vice president of the National Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs” passed away today in Gloucester, MA.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1956/05/20/90501336.pdf

1956(7^thof Sivan, 5716): Dr. Judah David Eisenstein, the self-educated Hebrew scholar, writer, editor and publisher passed away today at the age of 101.  In 1891, he published the first Hebrew and Yiddish translations of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  Born in Poland, he came to the U.S. in 1872 where he became a successful businessman by day and a self-taught scholar by night.  “He was the editor and publisher of ‘Otzar Yisrael,’ a ten volume Hebrew Encyclopedia that was last revised in 1951.

1959: The Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School was opened in the western section Jerusalem. The original facility had been on Mt. Scopus. When the Jordanian Army illegally captured the eastern section of Jerusalem, the facility on Mt. Scopus became untenable. The Israelis would return in June, 1967.

1960: Today at the request of Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu and the Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yithak Nissim, Chaim Yosef David Azulai known as “the hida was laid to rest at Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem.”

1961: “Professor Mamlock” a film about a Jewish surgeon living in the last days of the Weimar Republic directed by Konrad Wolf who co-authored the script along with Friedrich Wolf was released today in East (Communist) Germany.

1962(13^thof Iyar, 5722): Fifty-nine year old Marcus Rayner Caro, the Polish born son of Albert and Ernestine (Rayner) Caro who in 1912 came to the U.S where he earned a B.S. in 1925 and a M.D. in 1927 and pursued a career in dermatology while being married to Adeline B. Cohen with whom he raised two children – Ethel and William – passed away today.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/527630

1964(6^thof Sivan, 5724): Shavuot is celebrated for the first time during the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

1965: In New York City, “Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the co-founder of Ms. magazine, and Bert Pogrebin, a management-side labor lawyer” gave birth to Abigail Pogrebin, “the author of the 2005 book Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish.”

1965: In New York City, “Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the co-founder of Ms. magazine, and Bert Pogrebin, a management-side labor lawyer” gave birth to Robin Pogrebin, the ABC producer and New York Times reporter who is the twin sister of Abigail Pogrebin.

1966: “And Now Miguel,” the movie version of novel by Joseph Krumgold was released today in the United States.
1967: In what would be a prelude to the Six Day War, President Abdul Nasser of Egypt demands dismantling of the peace-keeping UN Emergency Force in Egypt. The UN force had been established as part of the peace agreement following the Suez War of 1956. Much to Nasser’s surprise, U Thant, the UN Secretary General immediately gave into Nasser’s demand an removed the peace keeping force. Israelis viewed the UN as the umbrella that closes when it starts to rain. The departure of the UN force gave the Arabs carte blanche to move large forces into the Sinai threatening the survival of Israel.

1968: Funeral services are scheduled to be held this morning “in Musicants Jewish Memorial Chapel in Hackensack, NJ” for seventy-five year old Ben Dalgin, the New York City born son of Mr. and Mrs. Max Dalgin who worked his way up from being a teenage “printer’s apprentice” to serving as “director of art, photography and reproduction for the New York Times.”

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/05/17/77088555.html?action=click&contentCollection=Archives&module=ArticleEndCTA&region=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article&pageNumber=47

1970)11^th of Iyar, 5730): Seventy-eight year old Nobel Prize winning poet Nelly Sachs passed away today.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1966/sachs-bio.html

1971:”Godspell” with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz opened at the Cherry Lane Theatre in NYC.

1971(22^ndof Iyar, 5731): Sixty-one year old “Alfred A. Tananbaum, one of three brothers who built Yonkers Raceway into a leading harness track” passed away today after which he was buried at Westchester Hills Cemetery at Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/05/18/81941365.pdf

1973(15^thof Iyar, 5733): Sixty-four year old ‘an Austrian-British photographer, communist-sympathiser and spy for the Soviet Union’ passed away today.

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

1974: “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry” a car chase movie co-starring Vic Morrow was released in the United States today.

1975(7^thof Sivan, 5735): Second Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1975: The anti-Zionist trial of Lev Roitburd began in Odessa today.

1975: Terrorist bombings taking place in Ramallah and El Bira.

1975: “The Man in the Glass Booth” directed by Arthur Hiller and produced by Ely Abraham Landau was released in the United States today.

1975: Twenty people were injured when a bomb hidden in a picnic box went off at Ein Fashkha,

1976: Birthdate of Jeremiah Luber, the grandson of Harvey and Elaine Luber, pillars of the Little Rock Jewish community

1980: In Washington, DC, first release of “The Empire Strikes Back” directed by Irvin Kershner, with a script co-authored by Lawrence Kasdan, filmed by cinematographer Peter Suschitzky featuring Frank Oz as the voice of “Yoda.”

1980: “Union City” a crime film with music by Chris Stein was released today in the United States.

1981: Birthdate of Shiri Maimon, the Sephardic Jewess born at Haifa and raised a Kiryat Haim, who is a popular Israeli singer, actress and television personality.

1981: In “Fiddler Plays at Darien Dinner Theatre,” Haskel Frankel expresses his love for this musical based on the life of Tevye but is less than enthusiastic about the version now on view at the Darien Dinner Theatre in Connecticut.

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/17/nyregion/theater-fiddler-plays-at-darien-dinner-theater.html

1983: Representatives of the United States, Lebanon and Israel signed an agreement that was supposed to bring peace to the two warring Middle East nations.  The government of Lebanon was not able to honor the terms of the agreement so the peace was “still born.”

1984: Lia van Leer inaugurated the first Jerusalem Film Festival.
1985(26^th of Iyar, 5745): Abe Burrows, (Abram Solman Borowitz) songwriter, composer, and writer passed away. Known in his own right for such hits “How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying” Burrows was the father of James Burrow the director of the hit sitcom “Cheers.

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/19/nyregion/abe-burrows-broadway-writer-director-is-dead.html

1985: “Goodbye, New York,” an “Israeli-American comedy-drama produced, directed and written by Amos Kollek, who also co-stars in his directorial debut” was released today in the United States.

1991: Premier of “What About Bob?” a comedy directed by Frank Oz, produced by Laura Ziskin and co-starring Richard Dreyfus

1992(14^thof Iyar, 5752): Pesach Sheni

1992(14^thof Iyar, 5752): Ninety-one year old Canadian Olympic athlete and journalist Sydney David Pierce who when appointed as Canada’s ambassador to Mexico became the first Canadian Jew to such a diplomatic position passed away today.

1992: NBC broadcast the first episode of Cruel Doubt, a two-part mini-series co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

1993(26^thof Iyar, 5753): Eighty-five year old native of Brest-Litovsk, seventy year resident of the Nation’s Capital,WW II Navy Veteran and sports reporter for the Washington Daily News Louis Abraham Litman, the son of Jacob Litman who converted “the family’s grocery store on Wisconsin Avenue” into Luros Carryout Shop & Restaurant passed away today having been pre-deceased by his wife Rose Litman with whom he had four children

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1993/05/19/earl-chudoff-representative-from-pa-dies/fc2d1781-67b7-421d-962c-90bd32ef2dd2/?utm_term=.379295f00100

1994(7th of Sivan, 5754): Second day of Shavuot

1994(7th of Sivan, 5754: Rafael Yairi (Klumfenbert), age 36, of Kiryat Arba and Margalit Ruth Shohat, age 48, of Ma'ale Levona were killed when their car was fired upon by by terrorists in a passing car near Beit Haggai, south of Hebron.

1996(28^thof Iyar, 5756): Yom Yerushalyim

1996: NBC broadcast the final episode of season four of “Homicide: Life on the Street” based on David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streetsco-starring Richard Belzer and Yaphet Kotto

1998(21^stof Iyar, 5758): Seventy-six year old Rabbi Moshe, the long-time president of Agudath Israel of America passed away this afternoon. (As reported by Gustav Niebuhr)

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/19/nyregion/rabbi-moshe-sherer-76-who-contributed-to-rise-of-orthodoxy-s-right-wing-in-us.html

1998: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Jews: The Essence and Character of a People” by Arthur Hertzberg and Aron Hirt-Manheirmer and “Richard Rodgers” by William G. Hyland

1998: Funeral services for Harry Wagreich, the Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at CCNY are scheduled to be held this afternoon in New York City.

1999: Avigdor Kahalani completed his services as an MK.

1999: Labor Party leader Ehud Barak unseated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israeli elections

1999: CBS broadcast the final episode of season 1 of “The King of Queens” co-starring Jerry Stiller

2000: “Stardom” featuring Benjamin David “Jamie” Elman was released today in Canada and France.

2001: “Late Marriage,” a film directed by Dover Kosashvili” was released today in Israel and France.

2002(6^thof Sivan, 5762): First Day of Shavuot

2002: Maria Grullich and Alberto Kusnier participated at a Shavuot celebration today in Buenos Aires' Belgrano neighborhood organized by the local Tzedaka social service organization and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Grullich, 63, lost her drugstore last year after it was robbed and she had no money to restock it.Optician Kusnier, 54, was fired a few months ago from another drugstore and hasn't been able to find a new job. This Shavuot event was meant to bring together an Argentine Jewish community that has been devastated by the country's economic crisis. The organizations sponsored packed Shavuot celebrations in 26 Jewish institutions in Buenos Aires and another 14 elsewhere in the country. But the Argentine crisis was a special guest that no one could avoid. Grullich and Kusnier both were invited to attend the Shavuot celebration in Belgrano, where six institutions -- including synagogues, schools and clubs -- were celebrating together.

2002: Alan Joseph Shatter completed his service as a member of Teachta Dala today after almost eleven years.

2002(6^thof Sivan, 5762) Dave Berg passed away. Born in 1920, the cartoonist may be best known for his work in Mad Magazine

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/may/24/local/me-berg24

2003(15^thIyar, 5736): “A pregnant Israeli woman and her husband were killed when a suicide bomber detonated himself next to them in a public square in Hebron. Hamas claimed responsibility.”
2004(25^th of Iyar, 5764) Tony Randall passed away. Born Leonard Rosenbeg in 1920, this native of Tulsa, Oklahoma enjoyed a successful career in film, theatre and television. Most people know him as Felix Unger in the television version of “The Odd Couple.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/theater/tony-randall-84-dies-fussbudget-felix-in-odd-couple-he-loved-the-stage.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

2005: As the Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History marked the 50th anniversary, an exhibition entitled “Starting Over: The Experience of German Jews in America, 1830-1945” opened today.  The exhibit includes photos, letters, documents, sketches, paintings, maps, medals and other rare artifacts of German-Jews who settled across the United States, many of which are being viewed by the public for the first time.

2006: Opening of the first Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival

2006(19^thof Iyar, 5766): Ninety-five year old Broadway producer Cy Feuer passed away today. (As reported by Richard Severo and Jesse McKinley)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/arts/18feuer.html?pagewanted=all

2006: David Blaine was submerged in an 8 feet (2.4 m) diameter, water-filled sphere (isotonic saline, 0.9% salt) in front of the Lincoln Center in New York City for a planned seven days and seven nights, using tubes for air and nutrition.

2006: Eliot Yamin was eliminated from American Idol” today, after the tightest race; each of the three top contestants received an almost exactly equal percentage of the viewer votes necessary for advancement to the remaining two spots

2006: In Congress, Representative Daniel Lipinski rose “today to honor Joel M. Carp of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago for his outstanding contributions to the Federation, as well as to the community at large” who 28 years of outstanding service is retiring.

2007: Bernard Kouchner began serving as French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs.

2007: As part of Jewish Heritage Month, the National Archives presents a lecture entitled “Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the South.” Peter M. Ascoli, grandson of Julius Rosenwald, tells the remarkable story of Rosenwald’s lifelong devotion to hard work and success and of his giving back to the nation in which he prospered. The son of German Jewish immigrants, Julius Rosenwald—president and CEO of Sears, Roebuck & Co.—was an exemplary businessman, pioneering philanthropist, and true humanitarian who played an important part in the history of America at the start of the 20th century. Yet few know the story of this immensely talented figure. His commitment to social justice and equality led him to involvement in a wide range of philanthropic projects—among them the building of more than 5,300 schools for African Americans in the rural South and the issuing of an unprecedented $1 million challenge grant to aid Jewish victims of World War I.

2007: Rabbi Simon Jacobson presents “Mysteries of Sinai: Find Revelations in the Everyday “at The Sixth Street Community Synagogue in New York City.

2007: An exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art by photographer Barry Frydlender, the first Israeli to have a solo show at the museum

2008: The Jerusalem Cinematheque presents “A Sacred Duty \ חובהמקודשת” a major documentary on current environmental threats and how Jewish teachings can be applied in responding to these threats.

2008 (12th of Iyar): Anniversary of the Jews of Rome being granted additional privileges by the head of the Catholic Church. On the 12th of Iyar, 1402, the Jews of Rome were granted "privileges" by Pope Boniface IX. They were given legal right to observe their Shabbat, protection from local oppressive officials, their taxes were reduced and orders were given to treat Jews as full-fledged Roman citizens.

2008: At the JCC in Manhattan the international premiere of new episodes from the Israeli comedy series “Arab Labor (Avoda Aravit)” followed by a conversation with writer and creator Sayed Kashua. “Arab Labor” is a satirical look at the Arab status In Israeli society, the controversy surrounding issues of identity and the sensitivities of both populations. Through humor, the series explores the daily conflicts that Arabs face between the desire to integrate and their own values and traditions.

2009: An exhibition at Williams College Museum of Art entitled “The ABCD’s of Sol LeWitt” that features artist’s drawing and sculptures as well as items from his private art collection comes to an end.

2009: Hadassah meets in the Twin Cities where its members celebrate Jewish Women in the Arts and recognize the Charter Member of the Region Chai Society

2009: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Third Reich At War” by Richard J. Evans, “A Failure of Capitalism” by Richard A. Posner and the recently released paperback editions of “Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century” by Tony Judt and “The Dream: A Memoir” by Harry Bernstein.2009: The Washington Post featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Paul Newman: A Life” by Shawn Levy and “Valkyrie” by Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager   2009:At least five people were arrested today after a clash between anti-Semitic demonstrators and Jews in Argentina. “The fighting broke out when demonstrators waving anti-Semitic signs crashed a Buenos Aires ceremony held by a Jewish group marking Israel's 61st Independence Day, which was celebrated last month. An anti-discrimination police unit had to escort Israeli Ambassador Daniel Gazit away from the scuffle, AFP reported. Argentina's large Jewish community has been targeted by two deadly terror strikes. In 1994, 85 people were killed and 300 were wounded in a car bombing at the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires, and two years earlier, 22 people were killed and 200 were hurt in an attack on the Israeli embassy.”

2009(23^rd of Iyar), 5769:  Daniel Carasso passed away today at the age of 105. The member of a famed Sephardic family, this native of Salonica who was the son of Isaac Carasso created the company that many of us know for one of its most famous products, Dannon Yogurt. (As reported by William Grimes)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/business/21carasso.html?_r=1

2010:Professors Raanan Rein and Jeffrey Lesser are scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled Jewish-Latin American Historiography: The Challenges Ahead Lecture at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

2010: “The Associated Press reported today that the synagogue in Worms had been firebombed.

2010: Elena Kagan completed her service as the 45^thUnited States Solicitor General.

2010: In “Reading to Recall the Father of Tevye”, Clyde Haberman explores the life Bel Kaufman and her grandfather Shalom Aleichem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/nyregion/18nyc.html

2010:A Facebook group called “Comedy Central – I.S.R.A.E.L. Attack game is offensive. Remove it” had more than 1,500 members as of today. The game, “Drawn Together,” which is currently available on Comedy Central’s websiteis based on the network’s politically incorrect animated series of the same name, depicts “Jew Producer,” a character that has a speaker for a head and is taken to task for failing to kill certain animated characters. A robot called “the Intelligent Smart Robot Animation Eraser Lady” (I.S.R.A.E.L.) is then sent in to do the job, unleashing destruction and murdering children

2011: Jenna Weissman Joselit, Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at The George Washington University is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Beth Sholom in Potomac, MD, entitled “Romancing the Stone: America's Embrace of the Ten Commandments” during which she will explain “The cultural and historical processes by which a covenant with the ancient Israelites became a covenant with America.”

2011: Sam Brylawski and Karen Lund are scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry” under the auspices of The Hebraic Section, African and Middle Eastern during which they will discuss the role of Emile Berliner “an unsung hero of recorded sound …Emile who invented the gramophone.”

2011: The building housing the world’s first green-certified synagogue Congregation Beth David in San Luis Obispo, Calif., is scheduled to be up for auction today to satisfy an unpaid loan of 3.3 million dollars.

2011: A course entitled “Oasis in Time: The Gift of Shabbat in a 24/7 World” is scheduled to be held at the Center for Jewish Life, the Chabad center in Little Rock, AR under the leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Ciment. 

2012: DeLeon, a Sephardic Indie Rock Band is scheduled to appear at the Washington Jewish Music Festival.

2012: Premiere of Yossi an Israeli film directed by Eytan Fox starring Ohad Knoller, Oz Zehavi and Lior Ashkenazi.

2012: A production of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” opened in the West End today.

2012: Elio Toaff, the former Chief Rabbi of Rome was awarded the Prize Culturae within the Italian National Festival of Cultures in Pisa today.

2012: 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 lecture by  Irvin B. Nathan entitled “The Challenges of a D.C. Attorney General

2012(25^th of Iyar, 5772): Seventy-four year old Israeli politician Gideon Ezra passed away today.

2012(25^th of Iyar, 5772): Eighty seven year old publicist and theatrical manager Herbert Breslin passed away today. (As reported by Daniel Wakin)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/arts/music/herbert-breslin-pavarottis-publicist-and-manager-dies-at-87.html?hpw&_r=0

2013; “No Place On Earth” is scheduled to premiere at theatres in Atlanta, GA and Key West, FL.

2013: The 3^rd annual Celebrating India in Israel Festival is scheduled to come to an end.

2013: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to do whatever it takes to protect Israelis in the unstable Middle East, following a meeting with the German foreign minister in Jerusalem today (As reported by Yoel Goldman)

2013:Multiple clashes broke out across the West Bank today that involved, Palestinians, the IDF, Border Police and settlers.

2013: Today“Frances Ha,” a “comedy –drama” directed, produced and written by Noah Baumbach which had “premiered at the Telluride Film Festival” had a limited release in the United States

2013: Today, “the Washington Post reported that the United States Department of Justice had monitored the activities” of “journalist and television correspondent” James Samuel Rosen “by tracking his visits to the State Department through phone traces, timing of calls and his personal emails.”

2013(8^th of Sivan, 5773): Ninety-four year old Albert Seedman who served as the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives during a time when the Black Liberation Army killed four police officers and the gangland shooting of Joseph A. Colombo, Sr. and Joey Gallo rocked the Big Apple and who was an anomaly – “the Jewish cop…in an Irish universe” passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/nyregion/albert-seedman-former-chief-of-detectives-in-new-york-dies-at-94.html

2014: Chabad is scheduled to host the second of a three-day retreat in West Des Moines, Iowa.

2014(17^th of Iyar, 5774): Eighty-four year old biologist Gerald Edelman 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/science/gerald-m-edelman-nobel-laureate-and-neural-darwinist-dies-at-84.html?_r=0

2014: According to police estimates, “hundreds of thousands of people were headed to Mount Meron in the Gallilee to celebrate the holiday of Lag B’Omer in a gathering which marks the passing away of Kabbalist sage Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochai who is buried at the site.

2014: “A newly revealed NSA document highlights and corroborates allegations carried by Newsweek that Israel aggressively spies on the US, the magazine reported today.”

2014: In Springfield, VA, Congregation Adat Reyim is scheduled to host “Adat on the Rocks.”

2015: In Portland, Oregon, the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to host a gala celebrating their one year anniversary as a combined organization.

2015: The 2015 Washington Jewish Music Festival is scheduled to come to an end today.

2015: Dr. Robert Cargill is scheduled to lecture on “From Shalem to Jerusalem: The Etymology and the Historiography of the Name Jerusalem” at Agudas Achim in Coralville, Iowa.

2015: “When Comedy Went to School,” a 2013 documentary about the Borscht Belt’s role as the birthplace of modern stand-up comedy, featuring interviews with top comics who once performed on its stages, including Robert Klein, Jerry Stiller, Sid Caesar, Jackie Mason, and Dick Gregory – is scheduled to be shown this afternoon at the Borscht Belt Film Festival.

2015: In Dimona, a city-wide strike to show “solidarity with the striking workers of Israel Chemicals and about 60 employees of Meteor, a local producer of agricultural netting that is in danger of shutting down” is scheduled to take place today.

2015: London barrister, Jonathan Arkush was elected today to serve as Presdient of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

2015: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks, Goebbels: A Biographyby Peter Longerich and Voices in the Night: Stories by Steven Millhauser

2015: The funeral session for Rabbi Moshe Levinger is scheduled to begin this morning at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and will end “at the city’s ancient cemetery.”

2015(28^thof Iyar, 5775): Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Day

2016: The National Museum of American Jewish History is scheduled to host “God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors.”

2016: In New York, the Jewish Book Council and Drisha are schedule to host a lecture and discussion with National Jewish Book Award finalist Dr. Benjamin D. Sommer about his book Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition.

2016: In Seattle, the Washington State Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to host an event featuring Cynthia Flash Hemphill author of A Hug from Afar in the new WSJHS exhibit gallery.

2017: As a sign of the vitality of small Jewish communities, in Coralville, Iowa, the Agudas Achim book group is scheduled to discuss Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer.

2017: Holocaust survivor Nat Shaffir is scheduled to speak in Washington as part of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museums “First Person Series.”

2017: “Shabtai Shavit, who led the Mossad in the 1990’s” today “fired off harsh criticism aimed at Donald Trump aying his actions put international information-sharing efforts at risk, in light of reports that the US president divulged classified intelligence to Russia last week.” (As reported by Judah Ari Gross)

2017: The “Made in Jerusalem Festival” is scheduled to open at Beit Avi Chair.

2017: David G. Dalin is scheduled to “introduce his new book Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court: From Brandeis to Kagan” at lecture in the Kovno Room of the Center for Jewish History.

2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host “The Annual Shavuot Cheesecake Bake-Off this evening.

2018: The Center for Jewish History, Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research are scheduled to host “Searching for Joseph Heritage with Joseph Berger” in which the “former New York Times reporter and author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American after the Holocaust shares stories and photos from his trip to his parents’ hometown in Poland.

2018(3^rdof Sivan, 5778): Ninety-four year old Richard Pipes, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Poland who specialized in the history of Russia, especially the period starting with the Revolution in 1917 and the Communist take-over passed away today. (As reported by William Grimes)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/obituaries/richard-pipes-historian-of-russia-and-reagan-aide-dies-at-94.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

https://spongobongo.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/professor-richard-pipes/

2018: In Memphis, TN, Rabbi Feivel Straus is scheduled to “lead a discussion on Shavuot: The Holiday about Owning Your Judaism” at Temple Israel.

2018: As part of Jewish American Heritage Month, the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to sponsor a lecture on “Before the Freedom Fighters: The Fight to Integrate Glen Echo Amusement Park.”

2018: Holocaust Survivor Sam Ponczak is scheduled to lecturer at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

2019: The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to host a performance of “Nabucco,” “an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, adapted by and starring David Serero as Nabucco” which builds on the Biblical accounts of the Babylonian Exile found in Jeremiah and Daniel” and which “combines political and love intrigues with some of the greatest songs ever written (including “Va, pensiero, The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves”).”

2019(12^th of Iyar, 5779): Just ten days before his 104^th birthday, Pulitzer prize winning playwright and author Herman Wouk, the Bronx born son Abraham and Esther Wouk and husband of Betty Wouk Z”L best known for The Caine Mutiny (novel, Broadway play and movie) who loved his Judaism and the United States passed away today. (Editor’s note – There is no way that this blog can do justice to him as an author or as person.  Besides which, I am a big fan so anything more would not be “objective” history.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/obituaries/herman-wouk-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/05/26/herman-wouk-and-the-jew-in-the-public-square/?utm_content=blog1&utm_medium=daily_email&utm_campaign=email&utm_source=internal/

2019: In Norway, members of the Jewish community are scheduled to follow their annual procedure of “laying roses on the grave of Henrick Wergeland, the author of the poem “Christmas Eve” which helped to end “Norway’s constitutional ban on Jews.”

2020:  Via Zoom, Congregation Beth Am is scheduled to present “a discussion led by Rabbi Janet Marder, of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, on “The New Order” by Karen Bender and New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 by Shelly Oria.

2020: “David Wolff’s final cantorial concert at Hebrew College is scheduled to be live-streamed on FaceBook from Framingham’s Temple Beth Am, where David will be installed as cantor in July.”

2020:Congregation Shearith Israel’s Sexton Zachary Edinger is scheduled to lead a virtual tour of the Chatham Street Cemetery.

2020: Due to the Pandemic, in, the Breman’s “Historic Jewish Atlanta Tour: The Beltline” has been canceled.

2020: The National Public Library of Israel is scheduled to reopen today.

2020: As part of its “Virtual Family Program Series,” The American Jewish Historical Society” is scheduled to host “Meet Emma Lazarus,” a “live interactive program, children have the opportunity to engage with the famous poetess about her life and the issues of her time.”

2020: In Amsterdam, an exhibition at the Jewish Historical Museum featuring the works of photographer and artist Sarah Mei Herman is scheduled to come to an end today.

https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Sarah-Mei-Herman--Germano/2BD1C696A746BA41

This Day, May 18, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 18

323BCE: Alexander dies at the age of 32.  Despite the legend, there is no proof that Alexander ever came to Jerusalem.  He did pass through Judea on his way to conquer Egypt and on his way from the victory.  He left the Jews in peace to practice their religion and to live in a semi-independent status.  This was his standard treatment for all those who did not oppose him.  He and his subordinates encouraged Jews to settle in Egypt and throughout Asia Minor.  The Jews were allowed to live in their own communities where they were governed by their own councils and courts.  Alexander was viewed as an enlightened monarch in much the way that Cyrus the Great had been.

363: The first of a series of earthquakes that would last for two days rocked the Galilee.

576: Over 500 Jews were forcibly baptized in Clermont-Ferrand, France.

1096(4856): Jews of Worms (Germany) were massacred by Crusaders. The survivors hid in the Bishop's palace for one week, after which they were either murdered or forcibly baptized.

1152: Henry II, King of England marries Eleanor of Aquitaine. This marriage produced two future Kings of England – Richard I (known as the Lionhearted) and King John, the monarch who signed the Magna Charta.  For the Jews, Henry’s reign was an improvement over that of his predecessor, King Stephen.  While Richard was semi-protective of his Jewish subjects, they suffered at the hands of those who wielded power while he was off crusading or fighting to protect his lands in France.  In the first part of his reign, John maintained a positive relationship with his Jewish subjects, but as time went on he turned on them and made unrealistic financial demands on the community.

1268: Following the Battle of Antioch the Principality of Antioch, a crusader state, falls to Baibars I the Mamluk Sultan. During the Mamluk Sultanate, there was an upswing in anti- dhimmī feeling although much of this was really aimed at the Christians who held positions in the government and the Jews were just “tangential beneficiaries” of this attitude. 

1291: A year after the Jews were expelled from England, after a two month siege, the fortress at Acre (Israel) falls to the Fatimid Egyptians, thus bringing about the end of the Crusades. Subsequently, the various crusading armies never succeeded in uniting as a cohesive force. The infighting and separate treaties defeated them as well as the Fatimid armies. “The founder of the Fatimid dynasty was Ubeidullah, known as the Mahdi. He was accused of Jewish ancestry by his adversaries the Abbasids, who declared him the grandson of Abdullah ibn Maymun, by a Jewess.”

1418: Representatives from the Jewish communities of central and northern Italy met to discuss raising funds for self-defense as well as instituting sumptuary regulations so as "not to show off in the presence of Gentiles." It is plausible that the issuing of these sumptuary regulations, influenced Pope Martin V to issue a protective Bull the following year

1530: The Edict of Innsbruck issued today confirmed a charter of protection for the Jews of Germany that Josel of Rosheim had obtained from Charles V shortly after he had “ascended the throne at Accehn in 1520.”

 1721: In Madrid, 96 year old Maria Barbara Carillo was burned alive making her the oldest known victim of the Inquisition.

1729(19^thof Iyar, 5489): Mordeccai Mokiach, the father of Judah Lob Mokiach and the grandfather of David Berline Mokiach and Isaiah Berlin Mokiach who preached that Sabbatai Zevi, the “False Messiah” would return in three years to finish his work, passed away today in Pressburg.

1753(14^thof Iyar): Pesach Sheni is obserbed four days before the House of Commons passed The Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753

1756(18^thof Iyar, 5516): Lag B’Omer

1756: Abigail Franks, the wife of Jacob Franks who had married her in 1712 was buried today.

1775((18^thof Iyar, 5535): Lag B’Omer is celebrated on the same day that Second Continental Congress learns that British forces are on their way from England to North America which means King George and Parliament are not going to talk but are going to put down the Resolution by force of arms.

1792(26^thof Iyar): Canadian Jewish leader Levy Solomons passed away

1792: Start of the Polish-Russian War which lead to further partition of Poland and Lithuania with all of the negative consequences that would have for the Jews of that region.

1793: Aaron Lazarus and Sophia Lehman were married at the Great Synagogue in London.

1794(18^thof Iyar, 5554): Lag B’Omer

1794: Betty Hart, the first American female convert to Judaism, married Moses Nathans

1810(14^thof Iyar, 5570): Pesach Sheni observed on the first day of the May Revolution in Beunos Aires, which marked the start of the first successful South American revolt against Spain.

1813(18^thof Iyar, 5573: Lag B’Omer observed as can be seen by the following two items.

1813: Nathan Benjamin and Catherine Moses were married today at the Great Synagogue in London.

1813: Myer Marks married Elizabeth Davis today at the Great Synagogue.

1817: Henry Naphtali Solomon and Fanny Phillips were married at the Great Synagogue in London.

1825(1st of Sivan, 5585): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1825: Joseph Levy and the former Bluma Jacobs gave birth to Nery Levy

1832: Eliakim Carmoly, a French-born Talmudist and author, was named to serve as a rabbi in Brussels.

1830: In Keszthely, Hungary Chazan Ruben Goldmark and his wife gave birth to violinist and composer Karl Godmark.

1837: In Saxony, the Jews “were empowered to organize themselves into communities with chapels of their own, and were granted citizenship, with the exception of municipal and political rights.

1839: In the Netherlands Jacob Hirschel Kann and Amalie de Jonge gave birth to Henrik Jacob Kann

1842: Chilo Myers and Caroline Medex were married today at the Great Synagogue in London.

1847(3^rdof Sivan, 5607): Moses Calmus Lissa passed away

1843(18^thof Iyar, 5603): Lag B’Omer

1847: Mark George Simmons married Caroline Lazarus at 32 Finsbury Square in London. (As reported by Cemetery Scribes)

1850: In Krotoschin, Germany, Simon Gienenstock, the Berlin born son of Robert Bienenstock and his wife Helena gave birth to Emma Lowewen, the wife of David Loewen.

1852: In Amsterdam, Jacob and Rebecca Mozes Gans gave birth to Isaac Jacob Gans, “the husband of Vogeltje Dooseman” and the “father of Rebecca Gans; Jacob Gans; Betje 'Isaac' Gans and Anna Frank.”

1854: District Rabbi Jonas Wiesner and his wife Estra gave birth to Rosa Wiesner Lowi.

1854: Fifty-two year old French journalist Samuel Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy “the son of Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy” “was elected to the Académie française” today.

1859: In Great Britain, the General Elections which saw David Salomons re-elected as the MP for Greenwich came to an end.

1860: In Chicago, Illinois, the Republican Party nominates Abraham Lincoln for President of the United States. Lewis Naphtali Dembitz, a 28 year old lawyer from Louisville, Kentucky, was one of the three delegates who put Lincoln’s name in nomination. Dembitz was the uncle of Louis Dembitz Brandeis, who would emulate his uncle’s legal career and then excel it as the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice.

1863: Birthdate of Danville, VA native J. Hamilton “Ham” Lewis who as a Congressman from Illinois supported a “proviso in the Balfour Declaration that Jews going to Palestine to live could retain their original citizenship instead of automatically becoming British subjects” and who as U.S. Senator led “a protest against the possible transfer of American Jews from their present homes in Palestine to other parts of the country”

1863: “The Battle of Vicksburg” in which Marcus M. Speigel, the son of Rabbi Moses Speigel and the brother of Joseph Spiegel, the founder of Speigel Catalog led the 120^th Ohio Volunteer Infantry began today.

1865(22nd of Iyar): David ben Moses Frankel, editor of Sulamith, passed away.

1865: In San Francisco, Joseph M. Brandenstein and his wife Jane gave birth to Manfred Bransten

1868: As the United States entered into a Presidential election year, The New York Times published excerpts an article from the Jewish Messenger describing the role of “Hebrews” in the political life of Europe and the United States.  In the United States, Jews are not “a compact body for political purposes…In the coming campaign, Hebrews will work, and talk, and vote precisely according to their convictions as citizens and in no respect will their political action be dependent upon their religious character as a body.  There is no national Hebrew vote.”

1869: Birthdate of Henriette Moses, who was shipped from Berlin to Terezin in 1942 and from Terezin to Auschwitz, where she died in May of 1944.

1870: “Mount Sinai Hospital” published today reported that the New York Times was wrong when it said that Mount Sinai Hospital was maintained by Jews for use by Jews.  “The institution is supported by Jewish contribution and its directors” are Jewish “but it has always opened its doors to patients without the slightest regard to creed.”  [In fact the hospital had been started before the Civil War to serve the needs of immigrants and indigent Jews.  During the Civil War that role definitely changed as it became a treatment cite for thousands of Union wounded beginning with McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign in 1862.] 

1872:  Birthdate of Lord Bertrand Russell, British mathematician and philosopher.  Lord Russell was pro-Palestinian describing them as innocent refugees and describing Israel as occupying land‘given’ by a foreign power to the Jewish people for the creation of a new state.

1873: Two days after he had passed away, 49 year old Henry Levy, the son of Joseph Levy and Hannah Isaacs was buried today at the “Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.”

1873: An informal reception was held today the recently opened home for aged and infirmed Hebrews at 63^rd street and Lexington Avenue. The building, which can accommodate 50 individuals, is currently home to 26 women and 2 men. They range in age from 70 to 95.  Mrs. P.J. Joachimsen is President of the Board of Directors.

1876: Wyatt Earp starts work as a lawman in Dodge City, Kansas. When he died, Earp’s ashes were buried in a Jewish cemetery in Colma, California.  No, the famous marshal was not Jewish but his wife Josie was and her family had enough power and influence to wriggle around the laws forbidding such burials.

1876: In Ogdensburg, NY, Rabbi Mordecai Joseph Brill and Lottie (Tumim) Brill gave birth to Abram Brill, a graduate of the University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College and husband of Edna Goldstein who led congregations in Helena, AR, Greenville, MI, Wheeling, W.Va, and Meridian, MI before beginning his tenure as rabbi at B’nai Zion Temple in Shreveport, home of Centenary College which honored him with an “Honorary Degree of Doctor Of Laws.”

1876: The New York Times featured a review of “Stray Studies From England and Italy” a collection of essays by John Richard Green.  “Mr. Green shows how mistaken the modern conception” is when it comes to understanding the treatment of English Jews during the Middle Ages.  “That conception is accurately represented by Scott’s picture of Isaac of York in “Ivanhoe,” timid, silent crouching under oppression.  The Jew was really…the favorite ‘chattel’ of the king was protected by the crown not only against the people but against the law. Each Hebrew settlement in England was secured from the common taxation, the common justice, the common obligations of Englishman.  The Jewry was a town within a town, with its own language, its peculiar dress, commerce, law and religion.  No bailiff could penetrate it; the Church itself was even powerless against the synagogue which it contained.  In England, at least, the attitude of the Jew was to the end, one of haughty defiance.  His extortion was sheltered from the common law.  His bonds were kept under the royal seal.  Heavy penalties were enforced against outbreaks of popular violence upon the Jews.  Mentioning the story of the Red King’s forbidding the conversion of a Jew, because a valuable property would be lost to him.” [Editor’s note – The Red King may refer to the third son of William the Conqueror, William II who was known as William Rufus.  Green was an English clergyman who turned to writing histories when his health forced him to leave the pulpit.  His description stands in stark contrast to the exploitation that English Jews suffered and makes no mention of their expulsion.

1879: An article published today "The Family Sentiment in Americans" claims that people in the United States are changing their views about family history and genealogy saying that "next to the Jews, we are becoming the genealogical nation on the face of the earth."

1879: A prominent New York banker who is a member of Temple Emanu-El said today that Lewis May, one of the most outspoken advocates for replacing Saturday morning services with Sunday morning serves has just been re-elected as the congregation’s President.  In his acceptance address, Mr. May expressed a personal distaste for the change  but said he recognized it as a necessity since many of the younger men belonging to the Temple could not attend services on Saturday for commercial reasons.

1879: Three days after she had passed away, Clairette Bensadoun, the “daughter of Roubin and Marion Bensadoun” was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1879: An article published today entitled “Some Old Graveyards” describes early burial sites in New York City including one on the east side of the New Bowery below Chatham square known as the Olivers Street Burying Ground which was the original cemetery belonging to Shearith Israel, also known as the Nineteenth Street Congregation.  The plot was conveyed to the congregation by Noyes Willey of London who received thirty English Pounds for the land. The Jews had been using the land for burials since the 17^th century since there are tombstones there bearing the dates of 1669 and 1684. The congregation formally stopped using this cemetery in 1820 when a city ordinance banned burials in that part of the city. 

1880: Rosa Sonneschein read “The Pioneers: An Historical Esssay” at a meeting of the Society of Pioneers.



1880: In Szczecin, Heinemann Vogelstein and his wife gave birth to their third son banker and industrialist Theodor Vogelstein.

1885: In Bleckede, Germany, clothing shop owner Bernhard Lowenstein and the former Jeanette Blumenthal gave birth rabbi turned Socialist political leader Kurt Lowenstein, the husband of chemist Mara Kerwel.

1890: Today’s “Amusements” column includes a review of “The Shatchen” which opened at the Star Theatre last week.  M.B. Curtis dominates the comedy with his “droll caricature” of the German Jewish businessman.

1890: “For An Educational Fund” published today described the successful Strawberry Festival sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association during which three thousand attendees raising $3,500 that will go to the association’s educational department.

1891: “Oriental Records” published today contains a detailed review of Records of the Past, an English translations of the Ancient Monuments of Egypt and Western Asia, edited by A. H. Sayce

1891(10^th of Iyar): Rabbi Hillel Lichtenstein, leader of Hungarian Jewry, passed away

1893: “Hardships of Russian Jews” published today described the benefits of efforts by the United States to lessen the suffering Jews living under the Czar.  Doing so would cut down on the number of immigrants coming to the United States and at the same time would lessen the burden on those Americans trying to find jobs and homes for immigrants from Poland and Russia.

1893(3^rd of Sivan, 5653): In Pennsylvania, Isaac Rosenwig and Harris Blank “the only people of the Jewish faith ever executed for murder in this country” were hug after being found guilty of murdering eighteen year old Jacob Marks, a peddler whom they had robbed of his goods.

1894: Members of the Board of Trustees of the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society were those who attended the funeral of Sigmund J. Bach as requested by Myer Stern and the Board of Trustees.

1895: Justice Ingram gave the managers of the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews of New York City to mortgage its property at 106^thStreet and Columbus Avenue to the Bowery Savings Bank for $75, 000.

1896: The United States Supreme Court rules in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” is constitutional.  This decision marked the legal nadir in the field of civil rights in general and race relations in particular.  It was from this pit that several organizations, many of them funded by Jews and/or with a statistically disproportionate Jewish involvement, had to climb until the High Court would declare in 1954 that separate but equal was inherently unequal.

1896: Based on information supplied by The London Times, the New York Timesreported today that the work of the Jewish Colonization Association will continue despite the recent death of its founder and benefactor, Baron Hirsch.  Dr. S.H. Goldschmidt of Paris will now service as President of the Association with assistance from Herbert G. Lousade of the Anglo-Jewish Association of London.  Currently, 1,222 families occupy the 225,000 acres in Argentina under the association’s control.

1896: Birthdate of Tampa, FL native David Archer Falk, the Washington and Lee trained lawyer who had earned his bachelor’s degree from the same institution.

Colonel J.E. Bloom manager of the Baron de Hirsch Trade School

1897: Today, William W. Morrow, who championed the cause of Adolph Kutner, a Jew who was afraid to return to his native land because of the Czar’s policies “was nominated by President William McKinley to a joint seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the United States Circuit Courts for the Ninth Circuit.”

1897: Anti-Semitic violence broke out in Algeria when “the main synagogue of Nestaganem, Algeria was sacked by anti-Jewish rioters.”

1898: During the Spanish American War, 2^nd Lt. Charles Wolf, Sergeant Charles Olschefskie and Privates Simon J. Bush, Simon Freund and Samuel Shapiro were among those in Company A of the 1^st Connecticut Volunteer Infantry who were mustered into the United States Army.

1898: One day after he had passed away, 32 year old Leon Ziff was buried in London at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery.”

1898: During the Spanish American War, Corporal John Fehliman of Kansas City and Privates Samuel Marolis, Philip Steinman, Wlater Gans, Levi Cubine, Adolph Rubel and Charles B. Solomon (the last two from Mexico, MO) were among those who part of the 5^th Missouri Volunteer Infantry which was mustered into federal service at Jefferson Barracks, MO.

1899: Randolph Guggenheimer, President of the Municipal Council will the deliver the address at this afternoon’s ceremonies dedicated the new Hebrew Charities Building at 21^st Street and Second Avenue.

1899(9^thof Sivan, 5659): Fifty year old Julius Hirsch , native of Mannheim, Germany who came to New York In 1870 where he became “a prominent member of the Produce Exchange” passed away today.

1900: In an article entitled “Topical Study” published today in Die Welt Isaac Rulf warned Jews of the danger presented by an increase in anti-Semitism in Germany, including the possibility of murder by the millions. Ruif died a year later but his children did not escape the Holocaust. One son died at Auschwitz and the other committed suicide before he could be shipped to the camps.

1900 In Pilsen, “journalist and theatre director Julius Hirsch and his wife Camilla gave birth to David Hirsch the actor and director known as Wolfgang Heinz.

1901: Herzl is called to the palace again. He is presented a tie-pin with yellow stones. Herzl hands out the sum of 40.000 francs to Nouri Bey and Crespi for having brought the audience about.

1901(29^thof Iyar, 5661): Parashat Bamidbar

1901: The celebration marking the golden jubilee of Temple Beth Elohim, “the oldest synagogue in Brooklyn” continued for a second day.

1902: Herzl receives a letter from Constantinople that his letter concerning a request for the creation of an Israelite University in Jerusalem was submitted to the Sultan.

1902” “East Side Boycotters Meet and Organize” published in the New York Times described the formation of The Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association which plans to establish co-operative stores if the price of beef being sold on the Lower East Side is not lowered

1903: The Times of London published a letter from Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Russian Minister of the Interior to the district’s governor, dated 12 days before the riots known as the Kishinev Pogroms, advising the governor not to act against rioters. “The Russian government asserted that it was a forgery and provided a bogus claim that the pogroms had started when a Jewish carousel owner hit a Christian woman. Christians defended themselves and then the Jews attacked them, killing one gentile.”

1903: Arthur Paul Nicholas Cassini, the Russian Ambassador to the United States justified the Pogrom at Kishinev during an interview given today.



There is in Russia, as in Germany and Austria, a feeling against certain of the Jews. The reason for this unfriendly attitude is found in the fact that the Jews will not work in the field or engage in agriculture. They prefer to be money lenders. ... The situation in Russia, so far as the Jews are concerned is just this: It is the peasant against the money lender, and not the Russians against the Jews. There is no feeling against the Jew in Russia because of religion. It is as I have said—the Jew ruins the peasants, with the result that conflicts occur when the latter have lost all their worldly possessions and have nothing to live upon. There are many good Jews in Russia, and they are respected. Jewish genius is appreciated in Russia, and the Jewish artist honored. Jews also appear in the financial world in Russia. The Russian Government affords the same protection to the Jews that it does to any other of its citizens, and when a riot occurs and Jews are attacked the officials immediately take steps to apprehend those who began the riot, and visit severe punishement upon them."



1904: Birthdate of Senator Jacob K Javits.  Born in New York, Javits graduated from NYU Law School.  He served in the Army during World II.  Following the war he became active in Republican politics in New York.  Before coming to the Senate, Javits served in the House of Representatives and as Attorney-General for the state of New York.  Javits was a leader of the liberal wing of the Republican Party and staunch supporter of the Civil Rights movement.  Javits served until January, 1981.  Having been defeated he resumed his law practice and lectured at Columbia.  He passed away in 1986.

1905: In Vienna, Kamilla (Feitler) and Siegmund Zeisl gave birth to composer Erich Zeisl.

http://www.zeisl.com/

1905: Frederick Kerry arrived in the United States.  Now a Roman Catholic, at birth Kerry was a Jew named Fritz Kohn.  He and his Jewish wife Ida were baptized in 1901 to avoid the stigma associated with being Jewish in Austria.  Frederick Kerry is the grandfather of Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.  At least two of his relatives perished in the Holocaust.

1906: Birthdate of New York City native and JTS ordained Rabbi Joseph Zeitlin, the holder of degrees from CCNY, Dropsie College and Columbia who became the leader of Ansche Chesed in Manhattan.

1907(5^thof Sivan, 5667): Parashat Bamidbar, erev of Shavuot

1907: Shabbat morning services are held for the first time in the office new home of Temple Israel in Harlemn

1909: It was reported today that at meeting of a committee appointed by the Jewish Communal Council whose members included State Supreme Court Justice Samuel Greenbaum, Cyrus L. Sulzberger, Edward Lauterbach, Leopold Stern, Marcus Marks, Jonas Weil, Charles Dittman, Nathaniel Myers and Mortimer L. Schiff the Institution for the Improvement and Instruction of Deaf Mutes will be re-organized under Jewish control and “that $30,000 has been raised” for this project.

1910: Turkish Minister of Education advocates adoption of Hebrew as national language of Turkish Jews.

1910: The Sixth Biennial Session of the National Conference of Jewish Charities in the United States continued to meet for a second day in St. Louis, MO.
1910: Franz Kafka and a few of his friends gathered to observe Halley’s Comet.

1911: Bruno Walter was at the deathbed of Gustav Mahler who died today at the age of 50.  Born Jewish, Mahler converted to Catholicism, so he could become head of the court opera in Austria.  His conversion did not spare him the contempt of his enemies.

1912: Hans Kelsen, “the son of middle class German speaking Jews, who had converted to Catholicism while working on his dissertation married Margaret Bondi today, just days after converted Lutheranism.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kelsen-hans

1912: In Philadelphia, PA, Russian Jewish immigrants gave birth to Richard Saxs who as Richard

Brooks gained fame as film writer, director and producer. Brooks was received Oscar nominations for the screenplays for Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, In Cold Blood and The Professionals.  He won an Academy Award in 1960 for Elmer Gantry.  

1913: In Hawthorne, NY, dedication of the “Brooklyn Cottage of Jewish Protectory.”

1913: In Peabody, MA, founding of Anshe Sfard synagogue.

1914: It was reported today that five hundred people had attended the “memorial services of the Hebrew Union Veterans Association and the Hebrew Veterans of the War with Spain” at Temple Rodeph Sholomo where the speakers included Congressman Abraham Blum and Colonel Samuel H. Mildenberg.

1915: A day after Sir Edgar Speyer wrote to Prime Minister Asquith him to revoke his baronetcy and Privy Council Membership in response to chauvinistic assaults on his patriotism, the Globe published an editorial demanding “that Anglo-German publish ‘loyalty letters.’”

1915: “A number of the most prominent business men of Paterson, NJ, who have interested themselves in the nation-wide campaign to secure clemency for Leo M. Frank of Atlanta, GA met today and passed resolutions to add their pleadings to those of the great multitude who are endeavoring to influence Governor Slaton.

1915: Twenty year old Boston native Henry Landers Bostick the University of Denver student and right-handed infielder made his major league debut with the Philadelphia Athletics (now the Oakland A’s)

1915: In Worcester, MA, Benjamin and Mary Meltzer gave birth to “Milton Meltzer, a historian and prolific author of nonfiction books for young people who helped start a movement away from the arid textbook style of the past.”  (As reported by Dennis Heveis)

1915: It was reported today that the Governor of Georgia has received “more than 75,000 letters and telegrams all parts of the United States urging that Leo Frank be saved from death” while “fewer than twenty letters” have been received suggesting “that the death sentence be executed.”

1917(26^thof Iyar, 5677): Seven year old Stanley Bernstein, the son of Ike and Jean Bernstein passed away at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago.

1917: According to “official advices received in Washington” today, “Turkish military authorities in Palestine are in engaged in driving the Jews into the hinterland and away from the Mediterranean Coast”

1918(7^thof Sivan, 5678): Second Day of Shavuot; Yizkor

1918: “The Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs announced” today “that the Italian Government through its Ambassador at the Court of St. James has officially signified its approval of the English and French declarations in favor of the Zionist movement and of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.”

1918: “The Neighborhood House and Talmud Torah” recently consecrated by the Sisterhood of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue which started as the Ladies’ Sewing Circle in 1847, announced that will offer special activities designed to meet the needs of “Oriental Jews” many of whom are poor but “decline to accept charity” which being eager to gain employment “and the education that will prepare them for citizenship.”

1918: Georg Nicolai writes to Albert Einstein telling him that he should not reproach himself for not taking an even more active role in protests against the war.

1919(18^thof Iyar, 5679): Lag B’Omer

1919: Hortense Adamsky and Lester B. Yates are among those scheduled to be confirmed this morning at Sinai Congregation, on the south side of Chicago.

1921: In Philadelphia, “Lester Waas and the former Alice Maybaum gave birth to Lester Morton “Les” the man responsible for creating the Mister Softee jinge.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/business/les-waas-mister-softees-songwriter-dies-at-94.html?ribbon-ad-idx=6&rref=obituaries&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Obituaries&pgtype=article1

1921: Ra'anana, an agricultural settlement is founded in the Sharon region.

1921: The Nation included an essay by Lily Winner entitled "American Emigrés."http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/18/1921/lily-winner

1922: In Revere, MA, Mollie (née Friedopfer) and Michael Garber, a manufacturer gave birth to Wolf Martin Garber who gained fame as actor Bill Macy best known for his role of Walter Findlay in the sitcom “Maude.”

1924(14^thof Iyar, 5684): Pesach Sheni

1924(14^thof Iyar, 5684): Seventy-eight year old Esther Anna Phillips, a native of Liverpool passed away today after which she was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Natchitoches, LA “adjacent to Harold Phillips.”

1924: After two years of “being sickly,” Albert H. Loeb, the Vice President of Sears, Roebuck and Company displayed symptoms of heart trouble.

1925: In New York City, “Samuel David and Anna Robins (Block) Kasindorf” gave birth to Hunter College and NYU educated public school teacher Blanche Robins Kasindort who rose through the administrative ranks become a public school principal in Brooklyn starting in 1965.

1926: In the Bronx, “Leon and Ida (Granowski) Bregman” gave birth to producer Martin Leon Bregman whose body of work included “Serpico” and “Scarface.” (As reported by Anita Gates)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/obituaries/martin-bregman-dead-serpico-scarface-producer.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

1926: In Chicago, Professor James H. Breasted announced that Julius and William Rosenwald have donated $30,000 to be used in building a library near Luxor, Egypt that will be used by the veritable army of visiting scholars and scientist who come to the area each year.  The Rosenwald’s general philanthropy was evident in a variety of secular and Jewish charitable activities.

1926: At the Brooklyn Hebrew Maternity Hospital, “a sultry dancer named Mollie Charleston who went by the name of Mollie Charleston” gave birth to Albert Schneider who claimed to be Alan Gershwin “the long-lost son of George Gershwin.” (As reported by Margolick)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/obituaries/alan-gershwin-who-claimed-a-famous-father-is-dead-at-91.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

1927: Mayor Walker and more than 1,000 women welcomed Nathan Straus and Mrs. Straus on their return from a pilgrimage to Palestine at a tea given today at the Hotel Commodore by the Brooklyn Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization. During his address to the group, Mr. Straus officially presented Hadassah with the $250,000 health centre which is being built in Jerusalem.

1928: Today a project for a municipal milk supply in Warsaw was defeated in the City Council by the combined vote of the Polish Nationalist and the Jewish middle-class Alderman. The municipal plan was backed by Pilsudski Party and Jewish Socialists.

1929(8^thof Iyar, 5689): Parashat Emor

1929(8^thof Iyar, 5689): Albany, NY, native Edward Henry Bendel, the son of Henry and Mary Bendel and the husband of Caroline Goldman Bendel passed away today in Indianapolis, Indiana.

1930: Birthdate of Senator Warren B Rudman.  Born in Massachusetts, Rudman grew up in New Hampshire. A Korean War Era Veteran, Rudman practiced law in New Hampshire before being elected to the Senate as a Republican in 1980. He served until January 1993, having chosen not to run for re-election.  He is best known for the Graham-Rudman-Hollings Act, also referred to as the Balanced Budget and Deficit Control Act.

1930: Birthdate of Barbara Goldsmith, author of “Little Gloria: Happy At Last.”

1930: “Sunny Skies,” a musical directed by Norman Taurog and starring Benny Rubin was released today in the United States.

1931: In New York City, Leon and Ida Bregman gave birth to Martin Bergman who went from entertainment agent to movie producer.

1932(12^th of Iyar, 5692): Seventy-three year old Pauline Heilbronner Hirschfeld, the wife of Leopold Hirschfeld with she had two children – Laura and Bella – passed away today after which she was buried at the Laupheim Jewish Cemetery in Stuttgart, Germany.

1933:  As part of the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt signs the law creating the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).  David Lilienthal, the son Jewish immigrants from Czechoslovakia, was the Director of TVA responsible for its early success and its ability to participate in the Manhattan Project during World War II.

1934: The Academy Award is called Oscar in print for the first time by Sidney Skolsky.  Skolsky was a close friend of Al Jolson and was responsible for the movie biography of the man who made the first “talkie

1934: It was reported today that "Leaping Lena" Levy has been Chicago sportswriter “that King Levinsky, the Windy City Walloper, otherwise known as the Chicago Assassin, the Personality Kid, and as plain Harry Krakow, is reported to be suffering from a nervous breakdown.” Levinsky was one of a veritable army of Jewish pugilists who fought during the 1920’s and 1930’s when the fight game was a Jewish game.

1935: In Chicago, civil engineer Solomon Kupperman and the former Sara Fischer gave birth to Joel Jay Kupperman, the holder of a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cambridge and the long time Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut who was best known as one of the original Quiz Kids. (As reported by Penelope Green)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/arts/television/joel-kupperman-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries

1936: It was announced in the House of Commons that a Royal Commission of Inquiry would be set up to investigate the cause of unrest in Palestine.  The Commission became known as the Peel Commission because its chairman was Lord Peel.

1936: “All Jewish national institutions in Palestine closed at noon today in mourning for Dr. Nahum Sokolow who died yesterday in London” and memorial services were held in the Jewish Agency Building with Menahem M. Ussishkin, president of the Jewish National Fund…and David Ben Gurion chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive as the principal speakers.”

1936: “Occupants of a speeding automobile fired shots into a Jewish barber shop in the Rehavia quarter of Jerusalem.”

1936: It was reported today that “A curfew order, forbidding residents of Jerusalem to leave their homes at night, was issued by Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, the High Commissioner of Palestine following the killing of three Jews at a motion-picture theatre."

1936: The British government responded to a request by the Jewish Public Works asking for police protection for its workers by advising “the department to give its employees their annual vacations.

1936: In London, “the Colonial Secretary informed the House of Commons today that the Cabinet had made its decision” “to appoint a royal commission to investigate Arab and Jewish grievances on the spot” “without having consulted Arab or Jewish leaders.”

1936: According to reports published today, the United Palestine Appeal is seeking to raise $3, 500,000 in the United States “to finance Jewish colonization and land purchase in” Palestine after the Palestine Foundation Fund, the Jewish National Fund and the German Settlement Bureau of the Jewish Agency for Palestine had spent $2,061,720 “from October 1, 1935 to April 1, 1936 to aid the settlement in Plaestine of Jews from German, Poland and other lands.”

1937: Archbishop George Mundelein speaks out against the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany

1937: In Brooklyn, NY, Dewey and Adeline Weissfeld Albert gave birth to Jerome Lewis Albert “who with his father…created and operated Astroland, the space age-themed amusement park that breathed new life into the Coney Island Boardwalk in the 1960s, a time when it was losing its lure.” As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

1938: As Arab violence continued to escalate,The Palestine Post reported that Arab terrorists killed an Arab constable in Hebron. Arab farmers were robbed by Arab terrorists in villages around Jenin. The Public Works Department property was set on fire in Nablus and Jewish settlers near Hadera found their tractors and other machinery severely damaged.

1939: A gathering of members of the Hashomer Ha’tzair movement took place at Wieliczka, Poland.

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/may/05.asp

1939: As Jews throughout Palestine protested against the White Paper with its limit of 75,000 Jews allowed to enter the country each year and the creation of a state that condemn the Jews to permanent minority status in violation of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, a resolution for Palestine Jewry was read aloud at the three hour long demonstration in Tel Aviv that stated in part: “Palestine Jewry declares the betrayal policy will never materialize…Palestine Jewry does not recognize the arbitrary restriction of immigration.  No power in the world can deter the natural right of our people to come home…  Palestine Jewry will not consent to leave the land of the country desolate, but undauntedly will continue reviving it.”

1940(10^thof Iyar, 5700): Parashat Behard

1940: Today, in Florida, Fred Bergman is scheduled to be Bar Mitzvahed at Beth David Synagogue.

1940: Bernard Baruch ate lunch today with President Roosevelt at the White House.

1941: Jewish veterans honor their dead

1941: Seventy-three year old German Werner Sombart author of Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Modern Capitalism) in which he documented “Jewish involvement in historic capitalist development” in which “he argued that Jewish traders and manufacturers, excluded from the guilds developed a distinctive antipathy to the fundamental of medieval commerce” and Deutscher Sozialismus  in which he contended that “the antithesis of the German spirit is the Jewish spirit, which is not a matter of being born Jewish or believing in Judaism but is a capitalistic spirit” and the "chief task" of the German people and National Socialism is to destroy the Jewish spirit.”

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-jews-and-modern-capitalism-by-werner-sombart/

1942: The New York Times carried a report by a United Press International correspondent who had been trapped in Berlin at the outbreak of the war in December of 1941 and who reached Lisbon after being traded as part of a swap for Axis nationals in Allied hands.  According to the story 100,000 Jews had been slaughtered by the Nazis in the Baltic States, almost that many in Poland and twice as many in western Russia. 

1941: Lee Shubert and Harry Hershfield are scheduled to be among the honorary pallbearers at today’s funeral for 61 year old “theatrical producer Morris Gest” “in the Central Synagogue” at which Rabbi Jonah B. Wise will lead the service.

1942: During a public protest of Nazi anti-Semitism staged in Berlin by Herbert Baum and his followers, portions of "The Soviet Paradise," a government-sponsored anti-Bolshevik exhibition, are set afire. Most members of Baum's group, as well as approximately 500 other Berlin Jews, are arrested.

1942: Another 1,420 Jews arrived in the Lodz ghetto from Brzeziny. Like the Jews who arrived the day before, their children were taken away from them. They were sent to Chelmno to be gassed.

1943: Nearly every resident of the Polish farming village of Szarajowka is shot or burned alive by the SS, Wehrmacht troops, and Gestapo agents. After the massacre, the village is razed. What was the crime for which the villagers were being punished? Sheltering Jews

1944 (25th of Iyar, 5704): Jewish partisan leader Aleksander Skotnicki was killed as his unit battled the armored SS Viking Division near the Parczew Forest in Poland.

1944: Deportations from Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, to Auschwitz end with the transport of 2500 Jews.

1944: Paul Alfred Cullen, who would reach the rank of Major General in the Australian Army began serving with “Headquarters 16^th Brigade.”

1944: In Hungary deportations of Jews to Auschwitz would begin today with a total of 437,000 being shipped to the death camp through July 7, 1944. 

1944: The Battle of Monte Cassino which Michał Waszyński filmed “as a member of the army film unit” attached to the 2^nd Corps of the Polish Army came to an end today. 

1945(6^thof Sivan, 5705): First observance of Shavuot after VE Day

1945: “In the East New York section of Brooklyn cabdriver Morris Finkelstein and “former Zella Ordanski” gave birth to Arthur Jay Finkelstein” a conservative political operative who has supported such candidates as “President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” (As reported by Sam Roberts)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/us/politics/arthur-finkelstein-innovative-influential-conservative-strategist-dies-at-72.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

1945: In Minneapolis, MN, Jewish mobster Davie Berman and Betty Ewald gave birth to journalist Susan Jane Berman who would be brutally murdered by Robert Durst.

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-the-literary-life-and-death-of-susan-berman-robert-durst-victim-20150316-story.html

1946: "Laughing on the Outside (Crying on the Inside)" by Dinah Shore,” the Tennessee born daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants “hit #1 on the Billboard Honor Roll of Hits”

1947: The unveiling “of a monument in memory of William Eisenberg is scheduled to take place this afternoon Mount Judah Cemetery.

1947: Wrigley Field in Chicago recorded the largest regular season paid attendance in its history when 46,572 people came out to see Jackie Robinson make his first appearance at the ballpark for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team with a disproportionately large number of Jewish fans including the author of this blog.

1948: Moshe Dayan, who had been born in Degania, was given command of all forces in the area, including the settlements in the Kinarot Valley, after having been charged without creating a commando battalion in the 8th Brigade just a day before. A company of reinforcements from the Gadna program was allocated, along with 3 PIATs (a bazooka-like weapon). Other reinforcements came in the form of a company from the Yiftach Brigade and another company of paramilitaries from villages in the Lower Galilee and the Jezreel Valley. The Palmach counterattack on the police station on the night of May 18 gave the Israeli forces an additional day to prepare defense and attack plans

1948: Syrian aircraft bombed the Israeli village Kinneret and the regional school Beit Yerah, on the southwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

1948: After two days of fierce fighting a Syrian brigade including tanks overran Zemach, killing all forty-two of the Jewish defenders. 

1948: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay, and Nicaragua recognized Israel.

1948:  The Arab Legion captured the police fort on Mt. Scopus.  The illegal occupation of Mt. Scopus would end with the June War in 1967. 

1948: Between today and May 20, a unit of the Etzioni Brigade made repeated attempts to fight their way into the Old City at the Jaffa Gate.  Despite taking heavy casualties, the Jewish fighters failed in their effort. The brigade was fighting the Arab Legion, the name given to the Jordanian Army which was trained and led by British officers.

1948: Fighting under Egyptian command Saudi Arabia joined the other Arab armies in their invasion of Israel.

1948: "At midnight, Egyptian police" ransacked the home of Levan Zamir in Helwan.

1948: While at school today in Egypt, Levana Zamir's teacher told her that her uncle had been taken to prison allegedly because he was a Zionist.  The uncle was freed two years later and placed on a ship bound for France. 

1948: “According to Israeli historian Benny Morris” Kibbutz Bror Hayil was founded today. (The founders themselves claim the date should be May 5)

1948: “Another Part of the Forest” based on the play by Lillian Hellman directed by Michael Gordon was released in the United States today.

1949: “Miss Mary Antin Wrote Noted Book” published today described the career of the late Jewish author.

http://www.massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=352

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F00C13F93B5F177B93CAA8178ED85F4D8485F9

1949: Birthdate of Appleton, Wisconsin native Terry Zwigoff, the son of Jewish dairy farmers who was raised in Chicago before pursuing his musical and film-making passions.

1950: As a result of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, 120,000 Jews fleeing Iraq were brought to Israel over the course of a year's time.

1950: Israel has released the eight crewmen of an RAF flying-boat that had been forced down yesterday by Israeli fighter planes.  According to the pilot, the plan was flying from Bahrain to the Suez Canal when it wandered off course due to a navigational error.

1950: Colonel Harry D. Henshel and Charles L. Orenstein announced that the United States will be represented in the third World Maccabiah Games opening in Tel Aviv on September 27.  Henshel and Orenstein are co-chairman of the national committee for United States participation and Orenstein will chair the committee that will select the athletes.

1952: After discussing the oil situation in Israel today “in light of Britain’s refusal to grant the Jewish State credits for the purchase of crude oil stocks” the Israeli Cabinet set up “a special Ministerial committee…to prepare regulations for a fuel economy program.

1952: Funeral services are schedule to be held today for Professor Theodore Goodman, CCNY graduate class of 1915 and the husband of Lillia Goodman.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that Abu Eliahu, 40, and Eliahu Ephraim, 45, two watchmen in the Jerusalem "corridor" were murdered by infiltrators.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that The Government approved the special unemployment relief tax scale and hoped to collect IL15m compulsory advance payment on account of future taxes.

1953: In Haifa, Oskar and Tikva Deutsch gave birth to David Deutsch the British physicist whose doctoral advisor was Dennis Sciama and was awarded the Dirac Prize in 1998.

1954: Rose Fischel Wald, the New York born wife of Albert Wald, the mother of Judith Wald and leader of the “women’s division of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations passed away today in NYC.

1956: “In the prosperous suburbs of south Manchester,” “barrister Benet Hytner and his wife, Joyce” gave birth to their eldest child, theatre and film director Sir Nicholas Robert Hytner.

1958(28^thof Iyar, 5718): Seventy-six year old Jacob “Yakov” Fichman who “received the Bialik Prize for his book of poetry Peat Sadeh ("A Corner of a Field")” passed away today.

1958: The 11^th Cannes Film Festival where one of the entrants was “The Brothers Karamazov” directed by Richard Brooks, produced by Pandro S. Berman, with a script by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Richard Brooks and featuring William Shatner in his film debut came to an end today.

1958(28^thof Iyar, 5718): In Cleveland, eventy-eight year Samuel Phillipson, the father of Mrs. Louis Becker of Elyria, OH passed away today at the Highland View Hospital.

1961: “The original London production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘The Sound of Music’” opened today.

1962(14^thof Iyar, 5722): Pesach Sheni

1962(14^thof Iyar, 5722): Seventy-two year old Hebrew Union College graduate and St. John’s University trained attorney, Sidney Saul Tedesche, the son of Alexander Tedeshe and Jeanette Greenfield and the holder of Ph.D. from Yale who served as a rabbi at Brith Sholom in Springfield, Beth El in Providence, Bethel El in San Antonio, Mishkan Israel in New Haven and Union Temple in Brooklyn while raising two daughters – Carol and Jeanne – with his wife “the former Irma Goldman passed away today

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/05/19/140578272.pdf

1962: Two off-duty police detectives, Luke J. Fallon and John P. Finnegan, were killed today in a botched robbery of the Boro Park Tobacco Company.  Jerry Rosenberg, whose jailhouse nickname was Jerry the Jew and Anthony Portelli would be found guilty of the first double homicide of New York City police officers since 1927 and sentenced to death. Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller would later commute their sentences to life in prison.  At the time of his death in 2009, Rosenberg would be the longest serving convict in the New York State prison system.

1962(14^thof Iyar, 5722): Fifty-seven year old P. Wolf Winer, the Harvard trained attorney and “instructor of law at the School of Business at City College who “was the first president of the Great Neck Chapter of the American Jewish Congress, the husband of Penina Winer and the father of Jaqueline, Lucy and Thomas Winer suffered a fatal heart attack today in New York’s Pennsylvania Station today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/05/19/140578362.pdf

1964(7^thof Sivan, 5724): Second Day of Shavuot; Yixkor

1965 (16th of Iyar, 5725): Israeli spy Eli Cohen was publicly executed by the Syrians. This execution was aired on national Syrian television. After his execution, a sign with Anti-Zionist messages was placed on his hanging body. His body was left to hang for six hours.Eli was born in Alexandria, Egypt on December 26, 1928. The son of two Syrian Jews, Eli was raised in a strong Jewish and Zionist educational environment. True to their Zionist ideals, the Cohen family moved to Israel in 1949. However, Eli stayed behind to organize Zionist and Jewish activities in Egypt. Eventually, Eli moved to Israel and began training with the Israeli intelligence organization. His preparation was extensive and exhaustive. From weapons to Arab customs to espionage technology, he was trained to know everything about the craft of being a spy. In 1961, the Chief of Military Intelligence, Chaim Herzog, authorized Eli Cohen to be used as a spy for the State of Israel. Soon after, he was escorted to the airport with a ticket for Argentina where he would begin to establish his portfolio under his new assumed identity, Kamal Amin Ta'abet. While in Argentina, he established his cover as a Syrian émigré and began to make inroads within the Syrian community of Buenos Aries. In time, he established himself as a successful businessman and began to establish relationships among the Syrian diplomatic corps in Argentina. It was during this time that Eli met Col. Amin al-Hafez. Through his extravagant hosting of his diplomatic contacts, he was eventually invited to visit Syria to set up business operations. Late in 1961, Eli returned to Israel for a short visit with his wife. It was during this visit that he finalized requirements for his mission in Syria. There was no question that Eli was already making impressive progress within the Syrian political and social circuits. Staring in 1961, the Syrian Ba'ath Party was beginning its rise to power within the Syrian government. It was important to Eli that he travel to Syria as the party began to gain power and influence. Eli arrived in Damascus in 1962, acting as an Argentinean entrepreneur returning home to Syria. It was during this time in Syria that Eli was very careful to develop his relationships with members of the Ba'ath party. True to his style in Argentina, Eli hosted parties and hob-nobbed in the highest social and political circles. As Eli gained the trust of these high officials, they openly discussed matters of military and political importance with him. Between 1962 and 1965, Eli made three secret trips home to be with his wife and children. When the Ba'ath party seized power in 1963, Eli Cohen was well established and entrenched within the social elites of Syria. He became a “trusted friend” of the highest-ranking members of the Ba'ath party, all the while transmitting vital information home to Israel via a transmitter that was hidden in his home. His ability to pierce the highest ranks of the government continued the longer he stayed in Syria. He was invited to discussions regarding Syria's intentions to divert water from the headwaters of the Jordan River. In 1963, Eli transmitted the details regarding the diversion of the waters back to the Israelis. As a result, the IDF Air Force was able to effectively destroy Syrian plans for this project. Cohen exhibited another example of his daring espionage when he visited the Syrian-held Golan Heights, bordering Israel. The Golan was a “strategic asset” for Syria, which allowed them the ability to facilitate acts of aggression against the northern Israeli towns. The Golan was considered a top secret area open only to the top members of the Syrian military. Cohen, skilled in his craft, was able to not only get a tour of the area, but able to get a comprehensive military briefing of the Golan and all its positions. It was during this trip that the “famous” eucalyptus trees were planted. As Eli was being briefed as to the Syrian fortifications of the Golan, he suggested that they plant eucalyptus trees to give the Israelis the impression that the locations were not fortified, and also to offer shade for the Syrian soldiers. As the story goes, his ideas were implemented, and as a result, the Israelis knew where every single fortification was located as a result of the eucalyptus trees. His old contact from Argentina, Col. Amin al-Hafez had risen in the Ba'ath party and eventually became Prime Minster of Syria. After Col. Hafez came to power, he even considered appointing Cohen the Deputy Minister of Defense for Syria. In November, 1964, Eli made another visit back to Israel. During this trip he expressed his desire to end this assignment since changes were taking place in Syria that were not favorable to his cover. After much debate, Eli agreed to return for one more tour of Syria. The intelligence that Eli had provided was too valuable. During his final stay in Syria, Eli was less careful of his espionage transmissions. Alarmed that information was leaking out of the country, the Syrians, with the help of their Soviet advisors, conducted a comprehensive probe to find the intelligence leak. During January 1961, transmissions were pinpointed to Eli's home. Syrian intelligence caught Eli in the act, transmitting information back to Israel. He was apprehended and tortured, but didn't release any information of real value to the Syrians. Syria staged a public show and Eli Cohen was found guilty of espionage. Attempts were made to save Eli Cohen. World leaders and prominent businessmen, along with the Israeli government and the Pope attempted to arbitrate a solution for Eli, but with no success. Clearly, Eli's espionage contributions toward the security of the State of Israel were unmatched most. He was so skilled at his craft that he was easily able to assimilate into the day-to-day life within Damascus. He was able to achieve the unthinkable and befriended the highest echelons of the Syrian government and military. Not only was he able to gain access where others could not, he was in the position to provide input that allowed him to influence government and military decisions. There is no question that the intelligence that he compiled was highly instrumental in allowing Israel to quickly and effectively defeat the Syrians and gain the Golan Heights during the Six Day War. For his heroism and skill, Eli Cohen is known as Israel's greatest spy. But in all actuality, he might be a contender for the greatest secret agent of the 20th century

1970: In “Centenarian Recalls Suffragette Days” published today Mrs. Sigmund Pollitzer, the widow dermatologist Sigmund Pollitzer, a mother of two daughters and at this time the “only living member of the first graduating class at Barnard College” provided insights into the fight for the vote and equal right for women.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1970/05/18/80024973.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0

1969: In Detroit, Michigan, Rhoda Yura and Dan Glickman, the former Kansas Congressman, Secretary of Agriculture, and president of the MPAA gave birth to producer and MGM President Jonathan Glickman

1972(4th of Iyar, 5732): Yom HaZikaron

1973: Having been denied the right to read from the Torah on a Saturday morning, 13 year old Elena Kagan read from the Book of Ruth tonight, on Friday night.

1973(16th of Iyar, 5733): Israeli poet and Editor Avraham Shlonsky passed away. A native of Russia, he was a driving force in the creation of Modern Hebrew literature. Among other accomplishments he won both the Bialk and Israel prizes. 

http://www.haaretz.com/life/books/biography-the-founding-father-1.361063

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2011/02/abraham-shlonsky-toil-from-hebrew.html\

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avraham_Shlonsky

1975(7^thof Iyar, 5735): Eight-seven year old University of Michigan chemistry professor Dr. Kasimir Fajans the holder of a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University who raised two sons – Stefan and Edgar – with his wife Salome passed away today in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

https://lsa.umich.edu/chem/about/department-history/kasimir-j--fajans---1887-1975-.html

1976(18^thof Iyar, 5736): Lag B’Omer

1976: “Missouri Breaks” a western movie produced by Elliot Kastner and featuring Steve Franken as “Lonesome Kid” was released today in the United States.

1977: Menachem Begin became Israel's Prime Minister.  Begin's election marked a major shift in Israeli politics.  Begin was a disciple of Jabotinsky, leader of the Irgun, and the polar opposite of the Labor Zionists who had dominated Israeli politics even before the state had been created.  Begin proved to be more of a pragmatist than had been expected.  He met with Sadat and signed the Camp David Accords which led to the swapping of the Sinai for a peace treaty with Egypt.  Despite international furor, Begin bombed an Iraqi reactor, an action that people came to appreciate after the first Gulf War.  Begin resigned after the death of his wife and went into a state of semi-seclusion. He passed away in 1992.

1977(1st of Sivan, 5737): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1977: Samuel Lewis, the new U.S. Ambassador to Israel, arrived today to take up his ambassadorial post.

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported the UNIFIL's admission that it had allowed the terrorists to move, together with their arms, into South Lebanon.

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Government and the Jewish Agency were considering steps how to stop HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrants Aid Society), from helping Russian Jewish emigrants to go to destinations other than Israel. Only 72 out of the 1,086 Jews who left Russia in April, 1978, made their way to Israel.

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Mifal Hapayis designated IL7m. for education and health in the West Bank and Gaza.

1980: In Israel, a stone marker was unveiled in a memorial forest of 3,500 trees which had been created to honor Major Noel S. Jacobs who had commanded the Jewish Company of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps.

1981(14^thof Iyar, 5741) Pesach Sheni observed for the first time during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan.

1983(6^thof Sivan, 5743): Shavuot

1984: “Under the Volcano” with music by Alex North premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

1986: Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir “demanded to prosecute Avraham Shalom, head of the GSS” (General Security Service) as part of his investigation into allegations that two terrorists had been murdered by the GSS.

1986: Richard Edelman, President and CEO of Edelman married Rosalind Ann Walrath at the Harvard Club of New York.

1987: Final broadcast of “Fame” a television series based on the movie of the same name co-starring Valerie Landsburg

1988: Braving a steady rain, 750 supporters of Shimon Peres attended a rally for the Israeli foreign minister at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan today.

1990: “Bird On A Wire” a comedy produced by Rob Cohn, with a script by David Seltzer, co-starring Gold Hawn and with music by Hans Zimmer was released today in the United States.

1991: “Barton Fink” directed, produced and written by  Joel and Ethan Coen and starring Michael Lerner premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

1991: The Associated Press reported that the B. Manischewitz Company was given a $1 million fine by United States District Judge Harold Ackerman for conspiring to fix the price of Passover matzoth. Manischewitz had pleaded no contest to a criminal indictment last month, saying it could not defend charges it conspired to fix prices from 1981 to at least April 1986. The indictment said Manischewitz, based in Jersey City, had conspired to raise the price of $25 million worth of Passover matzoth in cooperation with Horowitz Brothers & Margareten and with Aron Streit Inc., both of New York. Horowitz has since been taken over by Manischewitz. The Government has not said why Horowitz and Aron Striet were not indicted. The merchant banking firm of Kohlberg & Company acquired Manischewitz in January and had nothing to do with the scheme.

1993:  “Cup Final” an Israeli movie directed by Eran Riklis was released in the United Kingdom today

1994: Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in what was supposed to have been one step along the road to peace with the Palestinians.

1995: Simone Veil “born Simone Annie Liline Jacob, the daughter of a Jewish architect” completed her second term as French Minister of Health.

  1996(29^th of Iyar, 5756): English businessman and racehorse owner Simon Weinstock passes away at the age of 44

1997: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case by Mordecai Richler.

1997: Today, the Chicago Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to “present a film about the first hundred years of Jewish history in Chicago.”

1998: This evening Angela Landsburg is scheduled “to host the 92^nd Street Y Tribute to Maurice Levine” the “founder of the 92^nd Street YMHA’s Lyrics and Lyricist Series.”

2000: Israeli troops began evacuating southern Lebanon “preparation for an overall pullout from the area which is to be completed by the end of July.

2000: Despite denials by Greek and Israeli officials “a Palestinian legislator said eggs were thrown at President Costas Stephanopoulos of Greece as he toured the walled Old City, to protest his position on Jerusalem.”

2001(25^thof Iyar, 5761): Tirza Polonsky, 66, of Moshav Kfar Haim; Miriam Waxman, 51, of Hadera; David Yarkoni, 53, of Netanya; Yulia Tratiakova, 21, of Netanya; and Vladislav Sorokin, 34, of Netanya were killed in a suicide bombing at Hasharon Mall in the seaside city of Netanya, in which over 100 were wounded. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack (Jewish Virtual Library)

2001(25^thof Iyar, 5761): Lt. Yair Nebenzahl, 22, of Neve Tzuf (Halamish), was killed and his mother seriously wounded, in a Palestinian roadside ambush north of Jerusalem.

2002(7^thof Sivan, 5762): Second Day of Shavuot

2002(7^thof Sivan, 5762): Zypora Spaisman, Polish born American actress and longtime supporter of the Yiddish theatre, passed away at the age of 86.

2003: The New York Times featured books by Jewish writers and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Heart, You Bully, You Bully, You Punk” by Leah Hager Cohen.

2003(16^thof Iyar, 5763): “Seven people were killed and 20 wounded in a suicide bombing on Egged bus #6 near French Hill in Jerusalem. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. Half an hour later, a second suicide bomber was killed when he was intercepted by police at a road block in northern Jerusalem. The victims: Olga Brenner, 52, of Jerusalem; Yitzhak Moyal, 64, of Jerusalem; Nelly Perov, 55, of Jerusalem; Ghalab Tawil, 42, of Shuafat; Marina Tsahivershvili, 44, of Jerusalem; Shimon Ustinsky, 68, of Jerusalem; and Roni Yisraeli, 34, of Jerusalem.”

2003: Steve Averbach “was on a bus heading to work when a Palestinian terrorist dressed as a fervently Orthodox Jew got on board. Averbach realized immediately that he was a suicide bomber. As he reached for his handgun, the terrorist blew himself up, killing seven people and seriously injuring 20, including Averbach. Israel’s internal security ministry later wrote Averbach a letter saying, “An investigation of the incident revealed that you were courageous, brave, and selfless in attempting to prevent a mortal attack.” It said the bomber had planned to blow himself up in the crowded center of town or in the bus station, where the death toll would have been far higher.”

2004: American Jewish Heritage Torah Day as proclaimed by Albany, NY Mayor Kathy Sheehan

2004:The IDF launched Operation Rainbow in response to the deaths of 13 soldiers, the majority of whom were killed after their armored personnel carriers were blown up in the southern Gazan town of Rafah. The goal of the eight-day operation was to uncover weapons-smuggling tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor, and to prevent the smuggling of Strella shoulder-to-air anti-aircraft missiles from the Sinai into Gaza.

2005: In Belgium, premiere of “Or” (My Treasure) an Israeli-French production that had won five awards at the Cannes Film Festival.

2006: Ex-Movie Exec Isn’t Silent About Films published today provides Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Oscar Winner Roger Mayer’s view of the industry to which he devoted 53 years of his life.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/lifecycles/article/exmovie_exec_isnt_silent_about_films_20060519/sound_advice

2006: The daughter of the late Ruth Laredo, the classical pianist who had passed away in 2005, organized a concert to honor the memory of Ruth Laredo at “the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.”

2008: After eight years, FOX broadcast the final episode of “That '70s Show,” a sitcom co-starring Mila Kunis.

2006:A Sarajevo publisher announced that The Sarajevo Haggadah, a centuries-old Jewish holy book that survived the Spanish inquisition, the Nazi Holocaust and Bosnia's 1992-1995 war has been reprinted in limited editions. “The Sarajevo Haggadah” was made into 613 copies on hand-made paper that recreates the appearance of the 14th century original by 95 percent, the head of the Rabic publishing house, Goran Mikulic, told Agence France Presse. The number of copies was chosen to symbolize the number of commandments, or mitzvoth, that Jews are obliged to observe. "The edition was printed in Italy and almost everything was done by hand," Mikulic said. The original handwritten manuscript on bleached calfskin illuminated in copper and gold is the world's oldest Sephardic Haggadah, containing the text recited by Jews on the Passover holiday.

2006: “The White House announced that Donald Kohn had been nominated by President George W. Bush to serve a four year term as the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve System.

2006: Rabbi Ada Zavidov is declared the new chairwoman of the Reform Movement's Rabbinic Council at the opening of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism's 18th Biennial Convention.  About 1,000 rabbis and movement members, including Rabbi Elliott Kleinman, vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism in America attend the conference, which focuses on the Jewish family. Zavidov, granddaughter of Aba Achimeir - one of the founding fathers of the Revisionist Party in pre-state Israel - is the first female Israeli native to chair the rabbinic council.

2007: Rosh Chodesh Sivan, 5767

2007: The fifth season of Kokhav Nolad, the popular Israeli television show, began today.

2007: The five candidates for the leadership of the Labor Party face off in a Labor central committee meeting in Tel Aviv that will decide whether Labor should leave Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government.

2007: The University of Teramo closed one of its campuses to prevent a planned lecture by Robert Faurisson, a retired French professor who denies gas chambers were used in Nazi concentration camps.

2008: Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon declared today, "Jewish News of Greater Phoenix Day" in honor of the newspaper's "exemplary service to the community and the Jewish people".

2008: Veteran journalist Jane Eisner was appointed to be the first female editor of the Forward.

https://jwa.org/thisweek/may/18/2008/jane-eisner

2008: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington marks the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel with a series of book talks by Laura Cohen Apelbaum on Jewish Washington: Scrapbook of an American Community (the companion to the award-winning exhibit of the same name) the third of which is held at Barnes & Noble in Rockville, Md.

2008: The New York Times book section featured a review of Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planetby Jeffrey D. Sachs.

2008: The Washington Post book section featured a review of Ellen Feldman’s novel entitled Scottsboro which “painstakingly recreates the infamous Scottsboro case, complete with all the twists and turns and society-exposing foibles.”  Two Jewish lawyers, Samuel Leibowitz and Joseph Brodsky, saved the lives of the defendants in this infamous case.

2008: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Temple Judah hosts it’s Temple Wide Picnic marking the close of the Religious School year; farewell until Fall.

2008: The appointment of Jane R. Eisner, former editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer as editor of The Forward is officially approved at today’s meeting of The Forward Association

2008:  The Quad City Jewish Federation hosts Israeli Yom Ha’Azma’ut Rally in Bettendorf, Iowa featuring Sasha Grishkov, finalist from the Israeli television series A Star is Born (Israeli version of American Idol) who will perform with her Israeli band.

2008: “Pamela's First Musical,” written with Cy Coleman and David Zippel, based on Wendy Wasserstein's children's book, received its world premiere in a concert staging at Town Hall in New York City today.

2008(13^thof Iyar, 5768): Ninety-six year old actor and director Joseph Pevney “the son of a Jewish watchmaker” passed away today. (As reported by Ronald Bergan)

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/may/31/television

2009; New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman address the Class of 2009 at Grinnell

College’s commencement exercises where he receives an honorary degree along with

Jodie Levin-Epstein, deputy director of the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, D.C.

2009: The Arizona Chapter of the American Jewish Committee presented the Greater Phoenix Jewish News with the RosaLee Shluker Community Service Award in honor of its 60th anniversary.

2009: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with President Barak Obama in Washington, D.C.

2009: In an article about The Tribeca/ESPN Sports film festival, Sports Illustrated singles out “A Matter of Size,” an Israeli film about Herzl Musiker, a middle aged fat Israel waiter, who discovers his salvation in the world of Sumo Wrestling.

2009: In a Lecture on Nazi Propaganda at the Library of Congress,Dr. Gabriel Weimann, a Professor of Communication at Haifa University, Israel and at the American University, Washington, D.C., examines the social and psychological mechanisms activated by the sophisticated and powerful Nazi propaganda. The multi-media presentation includes posters, movies, speeches, public events, books, cartoons and other media used by the Nazis.

2009: In the best tradition of genteel British anti-Semitism, movie director Ken Loach called for people to boycott the Edinburgh Film Festival if festival’s sponsors accept a 300 pound grant from the Israeli embassy that will enable “Tel Aviv University graduate Tali Shalom Ezer to travel to Scotland for a screening of her film, ‘Surrogate.’”

2009: Michael Sandel gave the 2009 Reith Lectures on "A New Citizenship" in London

2009, American money manager and Bernard Madoff association Jacob Ezra Merkin's control of Ascot, Gabriel and Ariel hedge funds are to be placed into receivership for liquidation by Guidepost Partners

2010(5th of Sivan, 5770): Erev Shavuot

2010: Founding editor of DoubleX Hanna Rosin and Slate editor David Plotz are scheduled to let loose on the Bible while Alyssa Shelasky of Apron Anxiety is scheduled to whip up a dairy dish and Shavuotini for all to taste as part of “The Ten: An Alternative Shavuot Experience” in Washington, D.C.

2011: Convicted white-collar crook, Andrew Fastow was released to a Houston halfway house for the remainder of his sentence.

2011: The YIVO Institute is scheduled to present a special evening with acclaimed novelist Philip Roth during which Roth will read excerpts from his new novel, “Nemesis” which tells the story of a terrifying polio epidemic raging in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944 and its devastating effect on the closely knit, family-oriented community and its children.

2011: Charlotte Dubin, award-winning writer and editor for many publications, including Michigan Jewish History and the Detroit Jewish News is scheduled to receive the Leonard N. Simons History Award at  the

Jewish Historical Society of Michigan’s Annual Meeting

2011: Shelomo Alfassá, a writer, author, editor, curator and historian, whose focus has been on Iberian and Ottoman Jewish history, culture and Jewish law, is scheduled to deliver an illustrated lecture that “will give an overview of the history of Sephardic Jews – from Spain and Portugal to New York City” sponsored by the Derfner Judaica Museum at The Hebrew Home at Riverdale, New York City.

2011: David McKenzie is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “Jewish Life in Mr. Lincoln's City” sponsored by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington

2011: The "Arbeit Macht Frei” sign stolen from Auschwitz and cut into three pieces has been repaired.

The iron sign was unveiled today in the laboratory of the camp museum. Repairs to the sign, which measures 16 feet across and means "Work makes you free," took several months. It was stolen from the former Nazi concentration camp on Dec. 18, 2009 and recovered elsewhere in the country 72 hours later. It was found cut into three pieces.A copy of the sign has been placed above the entrance gate. The repaired sign will likely become part of a new exhibition, the BBC reported. Five Polish men were convicted of carrying out the theft on behalf of a Swedish citizen, Anders Hogstrom, who acted as a middleman for a neo-Nazi buyer. Hogstrom founded the far-right National Socialist Front party in Sweden in 1994.

2011: Philip Roth, the much-lauded author of "Portnoy's Complaint", won the biennial Man Booker International Prize today, adding to a collection of prizes that includes two National Book Awards.

Roth, whose work includes his noted 1959 debut "Goodbye, Columbus", has also won the Pulitzer Prize for "American Pastoral", featuring favored narrator Nathan Zuckerman.In October, he told Reuters that he disliked e-books and the distracting influences of modern technology, which he felt diminish the ability to appreciate the aesthetic experience of reading books on paper.."It is a shame. It is also what is happening, and there is nothing at all to do about it," he said. The prize, announced during the Sydney Writers' Festival, is worth 60,000 pounds for the winner, and living authors whose works of fiction are either originally in English or generally available in English translation are eligible. It honors a writer's body of work as opposed to the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which is awarded for a single book.

Other nominees for the award included Rohinton Mistry, Philip Pullman and Anne Tyler. British author John LeCarre, known for spy classics including "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold", had rejected his nomination, saying he did not compete for literary prizes, but the judges kept him on the shortlist anyway, citing their admiration for his work. Chinese writers featured in the 2011 shortlist for the first time in the form of Wang Anyi, who wrote "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" published in 1996, and Su Tong, whose novella "Wives and Concubines" was the basis of the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated movie "Raise the Red Lantern". Previous winners of the award were Canadian writer Alice Munro (2009), Nigeria's Chinua Achebe (2007), and Albanian Ismail Kadare, who scooped the inaugural prize in 2005. The prize will be awarded at a ceremony in London on June 28.

2012: Facebook, the creation of Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to have it initial public offering (IPO)

2012: Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital, Partnership for Jewish Life and Learning, Temple Micah, Temple Sinai Nursery School and Washington Hebrew Congregation are scheduled to sponsor ShirLaLa Family Shabbat Service and Dinner featuring Shira Klein.

2013: The 721 general assembly commissioners representing the Church of Scotland are scheduled to vote on “The Inheritance of Abraham,” a report which says scripture” provides no basis for Jewish claims to Israel” (As reported by JTA)

2013: The IPO String Trio is scheduled to perform two musicales in the San Francisco Bay area.

2013: In Israel the Indigo Festival on the Sea of Galilee and the Abu Gosh Festival are scheduled to come to an end.

2013: “Bezalel on Tour” will be on view for the first time at G91 Loft in New York City.

2013: Cantor Joel Caplan of Agudath Israel in Caldwell, NJ, will lead Shabbat morning service at Agudas Achim, as the Iowa City congregation dedicates its new facility in suburban Coralville.  Cantor Caplan is the son of Dick and Ellen Caplan, pillars of the Iowa City Jewish community. Cantor Caplan began his Jewish odyssey at Augdas Achim under the guidance of Rabbi Jeff Portman and began his musical odyssey at West High in Iowa City.

2013: The advanced S-300 Russian air defense system, which Moscow has pledged to deliver to Syria, could be transferred to  Hezbollah and beyond, a senior defense official warned today. Amos Gilad, head of the security-diplomatic branch of the Defense Ministry, told Channel 2, "These weapons are dangerous. If Hezbollah and Iran support Syria, why shouldn't they [the Syrians] transfer these weapons to Hezbollah? It's a threat to us, a threat to the Americans, and a threat to the Persian Gulf."

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Amos-Gilad-S-300-can-reach-Hezbollah-via-Syria-313554

2013: There is no chance that Israel could reach a peace agreement with Hamas, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni said this evening in an interview with Army Radio.

http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Livni-No-chance-Israel-can-reach-peace-deal-with-Hamas-313558

2014: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including American Innovations by Rivka Galchen and To Rise at a Decent Hour by University of Iowa graduate Joshua Ferris

2014(18^thof Iyar, 5774): Lag B’Omer

2014: “The Sturgeon Queens” is scheduled to be shown at the Rockland County JCC.

2014: In Rockville, MD, as part of the B’nai Israel Distinguished Scholar Series, Mark Smith and Elizabeth Bloch-Smith are scheduled to speak on “Roots of Israelite Monotheism: Evidence from Archaeology & Texts.”

2014: “Jewish reggae star Matisyahu” is scheduled to perform with cantor Jessica Hutchings at Temple Menorah in Redondo Beach, CA.(As reported by Renee Ghert-Zand)

2014: “The “Holocaust Cellar” is scheduled to open today, as part of the Holocaust museum located in Wiesel’s pre-World War II home, which sits in the old Jewish Ghetto of Sighet in Maramures County.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/elie-wiesels-childhood-home-to-become-education-center/

2014: The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington is scheduled to host “Israel@66” celebrating Israel’s 66^th birthday

2014: “Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv won the Euroleague basketball final 96-86 tonight against Real Madrid in Milan in an overtime victory.”

2014: “Israel’s tourism ministry said today it expects the papal visit later this month to give a sharp boost to tourism by Christians, who already account for a majority of tourism to the Holy Land.”

2014: New Jersey Governor and Republican presidential hopeful “gives the keynote address today at the Champions of Jewish Values International awards gala in New York.”

2015: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host a screening of Wing and a Prayer followed by a panel discussion of the documentary that describes the role of a handful of mostly foreign pilots in the creation of the State of Israel.

http://cjh.org/event/2654

2015: “In a historic decision” Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the head of the IDF General Staff today “decided to disband the IDF’s homogeneous Druze battalion, a storied unit that no longer drew the top recruits from within the community and seemed to symbolize a segregation whose time had long since passed.”

2015: “Reform and Conservative rabbis blasted the Orthodox rabbinical group Tzohar today for its decision to veto their participation in an upcoming Shavuot all-night learning program in Tel Aviv.”

2015: Alicia Jo Rabins is scheduled to “examine the Book of Ruth through midrash and art” as part of JWA’s first-ever on-line lunch and learn.

2015: A special screening of “A Wing and a Prayer” was held in New York.

2015: In partnership with the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington and the Library's Hebraic Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division Historian and storyteller Tammy Hepps is scheduled to present "In Search of a Usable Past: Reconstructing the Jewish History of Homestead, Pennsylvania."

2015(29^thof Iyar, 5775): Eighty-year of “quiz kid” Ruth Duskin Feldman passed away today. (As reported by Margalit Fox)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/06/arts/ruth-feldman-a-quiz-kid-who-later-distilled-the-experience-in-a-book-dies-at-80.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

2015: Charles Philip “Chuck” Rosenberg began serving as the Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

2015(29^thof Iyar, 5775): Recitation of Tefillat HaShlah - the Shelah's Prayer since Rabbi Isaac Horowitz wrote that the eve of the first day of the Hebrew month of Sivan is the most auspicious time to pray for the physical and spiritual welfare of one's children and grandchildren, since Sivan was the month that the Torah was given to the Jewish people.

http://www.shemayisrael.co.il/orgs/key/shlokey.htm#english

2016(10^thof Iyar, 5776): Seventy-five year old political scientist and author Susan J. Tolchin passed away today. (As reported by William Grimes)

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/books/susan-tolchin-political-scientist-who-foresaw-tide-of-voter-anger-dies-at-75.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

2016: The Shekel, The Journal of Israel and Jewish History and Numismatics, published since 1968, is scheduled to publish its first special issue--dedicated to Jewish American Heritage Month today.

2016: In Baltimore, MD, the JCCs of North America Biennial Convention is scheduled to come to an end.

2016: In Philadelphia, Rabbi Lance J. Sussman is scheduled to present “Suburban Frontiers: Jewish Life in Philadelphia Since 1960.”

2016: In Cedar Rapids, IA, the Hadassah Book Club is scheduled to discuss Helga’s Diary by Helga Weiss.

2016: The Jewish Book Council is scheduled to presentRabbi David Wolpe in conversation with the 2016 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Authors;Winner Lisa Moses Leff, Choice Award Recipient Yehudah Mirsky and Fellows Dan Ephron, Aviya Kushner, and Adam D. Mendelsohn.

2017: Today, “one of Ehud Olmert’s attorney was caught by prison officers with classified material belonging to the former prime minister after a visit to his jail” triggering “a search of the cell” during which “security officers found additional classified documents.”

2017: The Streicker Center is scheduled to host “Six Days and Fifty Years: Military Miracle and Political Dilemma” featuring Ambassador Dennis Ross and journalist Yossi Klein Halevi.

2017: After six days, JW3 is scheduled to host the final screening of “The Zookeeper’s Wife.”

2017: Holocaust survivor Julius Menn is scheduled to speak at the USHMM in Washington, DC.

2018: “Choreographer Andrea Miller and Gallim (Hebrew for “waves”) are scheduled to perform at the Met Breuer with new works designed to engage with the Museum’s galleries and great spaces” this evening.

2018: In response to suit for breach of contract filed by conductor James Levine who has been fired “by the Metropolitan Opera for sexual misconduct” the Met has sued him “arguing in court papers filed today “that Mr. Levine harmed the company and detailing previously unreported accusations of sexual harassment and abuse against him.” (As reported by Michael Cooper)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/arts/music/james-levine-metropolitan-opera.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

2018: In Memphis, TN, Temple Israel is scheduled to host its third “Unplugged Shabbat” featuring Dan Nichols.

2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to hold elections for President and Vice President after the Friday Night Dinner.

2019(13^thof Iyar, 5779): Parashat Emor; Pirke Avot Chapter 3; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/

2019: As Jews observe Shabbat, they are coping with yesterday’s news of the death of author Herman Wouk and the report that over a twenty year period Dr. Richard Strauss, a physician at Ohio State University had abused “at least 177 students” most of whom were athletes and that the University which prides itself on its athletic program did not report the abuse to authorities as required by law and let me him “retire voluntarily with emeritus status.

https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/news/local_news/osu-investigation-doctor-strauss-abused-at-least-students-university-personnel/article_f7831704-0521-5c2b-9d92-66f98feccfa3.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/obituaries/herman-wouk-dead.html?ref=headline&nl_art=&te=1&nl=book-review&emc=edit_bk_20190517

2019: Adam Burstain, the son of Todd and Jen Burstain, a smart and caring young man, is scheduled to become an alum today as he graduates from Tulane University today.

2019: In Tel Aviv, the final session of “the Eurovision Song Contest 2019” is scheduled to begin today “at 22:00 IDT.”

2019: In Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts is scheduled to host a screening of “Cairo to the Cloud: The World of the Cairo Geniza.”

2020: Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies is scheduled to host a virtual presentation by “Emory professor Miriam Urdel talking about the ideology behind Yiddish books for children and how they cultivated resilience”

2020: The Virtual Sonoma County JCC Israeli Film is scheduled to host a screening of “The Dove Flyer,” “a 2014 historical drama about a 16-year old Zionist activist in 1950’s Baghdad.

2020: The Jewish Community of the North Shore is scheduled to present Ariela HaLevi “for an online evening of hope and healing.

2020: The Steicker Center is scheduled to host “Takin on the NRA” during which a panel led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg will answer the question “Will Federal gun legislation ever pass?”

2020: The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience is scheduled to present “Values and Consequences in the Halakhic Process: A Sephardi Perspective” with Bar-Ilan University Professor Zvi Zohar

2020: LSJS is scheduled to host Rabbi Joseph Dweck and Rabbi Dr Zarum in another 'Epic' shiur, during which they look at the book of Vayikra, “discuss the 'guts' of the Torah and put the book in a whole new light.”

This Day, May 19, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 19 



363: For a second day in a row, a series of earthquakes that took place along a fault-line stretching from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba shook the region around the Galilee. According to some, this seismic event was part of the reason the Temple in Jerusalem was not rebuilt despite Emperor Julian’s support for the project.

614: According to some date of the Christian led revolt in Jerusalem against the Sassanids began today during which an untold number of Jews were killed

1103 (10 Iyar 4063): Isaac Alfasi passed away. Born in Fez in 1013, he is also known as the "RIF". He compiled the first codification of Jewish law, called Sefer Halachot. It still appears today in every volume of the Talmud. Joseph Caro later used it as a basis for his work. Sefer Halachot was the most important codex until Maimonides'Mishna Torah. Alfasi was 25 years old when Hai Gaon died. He was called Gaon by many authorities and his death marked the very end of that (Gaonic) period. His students included Judah Halevi and Josef ibn Migash.

1581: “The proclamation controlling usury was issued today” making the subject of “Three Ladies of London,” an Elizabethan comedy about usury by Robert Wilson which is unusual and noteworthy as a philo-Semitic response to the prevailing anti-Semitism of Elizabethan drama and the larger contemporaneous English society” quite topical since it was first performed in 1581.

1588: The Spanish Armada set sail from Lisbon.  The Armada was the most massive fleet of its day including 130 ships and 30,000 soldiers and sailors.  The Armada was designed to take control of the English Channel and facilitate the invasion of England from the Netherlands.  The English were at a great a disadvantage in terms of ships and manpower.  The all-important question was when would the Armada begin its trip north?  Until the English knew this they would not when or where to make their first move.  Dr. Hector Nunes, a secret Jew living in England provided the information about the Spanish departure.  The Jews may have played a small part in one of the great turning points in history, but it was a small part that made a big difference.

1604: The city of Montreal was founded today. Jews would not start arriving in Montreal until the 18^th century following the British defeat of the French.  Today Montreal boasts a vibrant Jewish community number approximately 90,000 which some describe as the “most Orthodox” in North America.  However it has lost its position as the leading Jewish community in Canada to Toronto because of the rise of the French separatists and their political party, Parti Quebecois.

1707(17^thof Iyar, 5647): Chief Rabbi Saul ben Joshua Heschel passed away today in Breslau while on his to Amsterdam.

1762: Birthdate of German philosopher and anti-Semite Johann Gottlieb Fichte who “in his defense of the ideals of the French Revolution in 1793, singled out Jews and Judaism as constituting a ‘state-within-a-state’ that was ‘predicated on the hatred of the entire human race’ and ‘spreading through almost all lands of Europe and terribly oppressing its citizens.’”

1769: Giovanni Vincenzo Antonio Ganganelli, who as councilor to the Holy Office had issued a memorandum declaring that the Jews were innocent of the “Blood Libel”, was elected Pope Clement XIV today.

1771: Birthdate of Rahel Levin, the prominent 19^th century literary figure who converted when she married and gained fame as Rahel Varnhagen who was the subject of a biography by Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess.

1792: The Russian army entered Poland.  Ultimately Poland would be partitioned among its three imperial neighbors.  Much to the dismay of the Russians, the partition brought them a large mass of Jews, something they found quite upsetting to say the least.

1794(19^thof Iyar, 5554): Fifty-four year old Hyam Simon passed away today in the UK.

1798: As the French Army set sail from Toulon in campaign designed to weaken British access to India by taking control of territory from Egypt to Syria that included Palestine, Napoleon delivered one of those visionary speeches intended to inspire the forces to perform beyond their capability.

1799(14^thof Iyar, 5559): Pesach Sheni observed for the last time in the 18^thcentury

1802: The Légion d'Honneur is founded by Napoleon Bonaparte. Among the Jewish recipients are Rabbi

Langer of New York’s Congregation Orach Chaim, Rabbi David Feuerwerker,a veteran of the French Army who served with the Marquis during World War II, David Saul Marshall, political leader in Singapore and Victor Attias and Henry Smadja who were members of the Jewish Resistance in Tunisia during World War II.

1813: In Strasbourg, Babette Marx married Alexandre Blum and “moved with him to Algiers.”

1818: Eliza Frances (née Campbell) and Mr. Lionel Prager Goldsmid, an officer in the 19th Dragoons, and a scion of the well-known London family of that name whose maternal grandmother's father was Revolutionary War aide-de-camp David Franks gave birth to Sir John Goldsmid who would rise to the rank of Major General in the British Army

1820(6^thof Sivan, 5599): Jews in the United States celebrate Shavuot in tranquility since the nation has just avoided a potential breakup over the issue of slavery with the adoption of the Missouri Compromise.

1832: Birthdate of German native Abraham Hart who rose to the rank of Captain in the 73^rd Pennsylvania Infantry during the Civil War and raised 6 children with his wife Bertha Swope Hart.

1839(6^thof Sivan, 5599): As American Jews celebrate Shavuot they are forced to contend with an economic panic that will continue to cause ripples into the next decade.

1858(6^thof Sivan, 5618): Less than a month before Abraham Lincoln delivered his “House Divided Speech” American Jews celebrate Shavuot

1860: The New York Times reviewed The Throne of David by Rev. J.H. Ingraham, which “illustrates the grandeur of the Hebrews at the height of their power and splendor.”

1861: In San Francisco, CA, J. P. Davis, the President of  the Hebra Bikur Holim, (Society for Visiting the Sick) presented a new Torah Scroll to Congregation of Sherith Israel.

1863(1st of Sivan, 5623): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1863(1st of Sivan, 5623): Jonas Ennery passed away. Born at Nancy, France, in 1801, he worked at the Jewish School of Strasbourg for 26 years.  In 1843 he published “Le Sentier d’Israel” and he helped to edit "Prières d'un Cœur Israélite," (Prayers of a Jewish Heart) which was published in 1848. Despite anti-Jewish rioting in Alsace, Ennery was elected representative to the French National Assembly as a representative for the department of the Lower Rhine. After the coup d'état that brought Louis Napoleon to power Ennery was exiled forced into exile.  He moved to Brussels, where he lived as a teacher until his death. Ennery's brother, Marchand Ennery, was the chief rabbi of Paris.

1886(5^thof Sivan, 5625): Parsashat Bamidbar; erev Shavuot

1866(5th of Sivan, 5626): Seventy-six year old Solomon Ludwig Steinheim the German philosopher passed away.  The Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute was named in his honor.

1867(14^thof Iyar, 5627): Pesach Sheni

1867: Vernon and Herman Ehrenthal gave birth to Karolina Lina Hubsch

1867: According to reports published today, The Hebrew Educational Society of Baltimore has adopted the Christian plan of Sabbath school instruction.

1869: Miss Rebecca Fenster of Charleston, SC was married this evening.

1870: In Kings County, NY, Solomon and Betty Loeb gave birth to Nina Jenny Loeb who became Nina Warburg when she married Paul Mortiz Warburg.

1871(28^thof Iyar): Meir Halevi Letteris passed away.

1873: Sixty-two year old German psychiatrist Friedrich Karl Steel whose parents had become Lutherans passed away today.

1873: In Cortland, NY, Louis and Rachel (née Ganz) Silverman gave birth to their third child Simon J. “Sime” Silverman, the journalist and publisher “best known as the founder of the weekly Varietyin New York in 1905 and the Hollywood-based Daily Variety in 1933

https://archive.org/stream/variety111-1933-09#page/n208/mode/1up

https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FetPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=31QDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2362%2C1534076

1873: “The New Home for Aged and Infirmed Hebrews” published today described the opening of this facility in New York City which was first envisioned by Mrs. Henry Leo in 1870.  She enlisted the support of the Bnai Jeshurun Benevolent Society to help her make the home a reality.  Unfortunately, Mrs. Leon did not live to see her dream come to fruition.

1876: Edward Elias Samuel was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.

1877: Birthdate of London native Montague N. Cohen the graduate of Jews College who while serving as a rabbi in Tacoma, WA, in 1928 supported “the creation of a united Jewish Agency for the rebuilding of Palestine.”

1878: According to todays “Home and Foreign Events” column “at the suggestion of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, the Alliance Israelita Universelle will issue invitations for a conference of representatives of the Jew Jewish organizations of Europe and America.  The conference will be held in Paris and it will be open to the discussion of all subjects affecting the interests of Judaism.”

1873: Sixty two year old German psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Stahl, whose parents had become Lutherans while he a small child, passed away today.

1874: Theodore Pincus and Sarah Hart were married today at the Great Portland Street Synagogue in London.

1879: The Rothschild Family: The Greatest Financiers of the Age,” published today purports to provide “an authentic history of the Rothschilds in Frankfort, London, Paris and Vienna” including how the founder of the family acquired his wealth and anecdotes about “family peculiarities.

1879: Joseph H. De Meza “a young Cuban Jew” was arrested today for stealing clothing from Mrs. Charles A. Lillie in New York City. De Meza came to Mrs. Lillie’s home and asked for “an outfit of her husband’s clothing” claiming that the husband had fallen into the East River at the Fulton Ferry and that he had sent De Meza to get a dry outfit.

1879: “Sunday Services for Hebrews” published today described reaction among various Jewish leaders to the recently announced plans by Temple Emanuel to start holding “Sabbath” services on Sunday.

1880: Birthdate of Leopold Einstein who at the age of 62 was deported from Nuremberg to Terezin where he was murdered at the age of 63.  (Editor’s note – the next time somebody refers to people who carry Nazi flags or utter Nazi chants as “good” people think of this 62 year old man being loaded into a box car.)

1880: Eighteen year old Matthew Nathan, the son of Jonah Nathan joined the Royal Engineers

1880: It was reported today that Joseph Seligman’s will names his widow, Babet, as executrix of his estate, and his brothers James and Jesse and his son David as executors. The will provides that they may use $25,000 for contributions to the charities of their choice and sets up the terms for the disbursement of his estate so that it will provide for his wife and his children.

1881: In Paris, Adelaide and Baron Edmond de Rothschild gave birth to their second child Maurice de Rothschild, the husband of Noémie de Rothschild and father of Edmond de Rothschild who was noted for his vineyards and who was able to escape the Holocaust thanks to Aristides de Sousa, the Portuguese diplomat who defied his government and risked his career by issuing visas to an untold number of Jews fleeing the Nazis.

1881: In Alsace, France, Charles and Emilie Kahn Weill gave birth to Felix Weill who was buried at “Hebrew Rest Cemetery” in the rural town of Opelousas, LA when he passed away at the age of 18.

1882(1^stof Sivan, 5642): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1882: The Leadville, CO Jewish community suffered a financial loss when a building owned by New Yorkers Caesar J. Kaskel and Jacob Michaels burned.  The building was the home to a clothing store managed by Julius W. Kaskel.

1882: As part of a blood libel investigation an entourage of mounted policemen arrived in Tisza-Eszlar, a small Hungarian village. The investigation revolved around the disappearance of a fourteen year old Catholic housemaid named Esther Solymossy. 

1882: In Tisza-EszlarJoszef Sharf, custodian of the local synagogue and his wife were arrested in connection with the disappearance of Esther Solymosi, a Christian peasant girl fourteen years old whom the locals claim was the victim of a Jewish blood lust.

1883: Yiddish actor Sigmund Mogulesko and his wife actress Amalia “Molly” Finkelstein gave birth Dr. Julius Lawrence “Mortimer” Mogulesko the graduate of Columbia Medical School who specialized in Bacteriology.

1886: The future Sir Mathew Nathan was promoted to the rank of Captain in the Royal Engineers

1887: Birthdate of Lemberg native and University of Vienna trained physician Dorian Feigenbam, the psychoanalyst and pupil of Freud, who in 1924 came to the United States where he became an “instructor in neurology” at Columbia and co-founded the Psychoanalytic Quarterly while raising two children – Daniel and Lou Esther – with his wife Yaffa Feigenbaum.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1937/01/03/506511422.pdf

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21674086.1937.11925305

1887: Fifty-five year old Otto Stobbe, the gentile German historian who is best known for “a scholarly work on Jews in Germany during the Middle Ages called Die Juden in Deutschland während des Mittelalters

1889(18th of Iyar, 5649): Lag B'Omer

1889: In Mogileff, Russia, Louis and Rose Rabinoff gave birth Sophie Rabinoff the American “pediatrician and professor of medicine.”

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rabinoff-sophia

1890: Samuel Hutch, a Jewish peddler was seen alive for the last time near Wurtsborough, NY.

1890: “New Publications” published today includes a review of A Visit of Japheth to Shem and Ham

1891: Barney Greenman, a fourteen year old Jewish boy came to the Barge Office in New York and asked the immigration officials to send him back to Rotterdam.

1891: Three days after she had passed away, 76 year old Julia Myers, the daughter of Hyman Collins and Mary Davis and the wife of Lionel Alman Myers was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1891: The Czar has issued a new proclamation or “ukase” ordering the expulsion of the Jews from the Asiatic provinces of the Russian Empire.

1894: Birthdate of Lothar Mendes, the German born British director whose works included “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” and “International Squadron” which chronicled the role of Americans serving as pilots in the RAF.

https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=Lothar%20Mendes&item_type=topic&sr=50

1894: “Literary Notes” published today described the upcoming publication of Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries by Dr. Meyer Kayserling, the German born rabbi and historian.

1895: “Hebrew Home to be Mortgaged” published today described plans by the managers of the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews of New York City to build a new facility with funds gained from taking out a mortgage on the property at 106^thStreet and Columbus Avenue.

1895: Most of the 4,000 “uptown people” who had been invited to a tea at the Hebrew Institute attended this event which gave them a chance to observe the various activities of the educational organization.

1895: “In A Wide Labor Field” published today provided a detailed description of the work of the Educational Alliance which was formed in 1892 under the direction of the Hebrew Free School Association, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and the Aguillar Free Library Society

1899: Today, David J. Varon, the Siberian born son of Isaac and Rachel (Mevorach Varon,”, the employee of the Edmond de Rothschild colonies in Palestine who came to the United States in 1905 where he was a “Professor of Architectural Design at Syracuse University” and later lived in New York City where he wrote Indication in Architectural Design, lectured on architecture at Cooper Institute and became a member of the Association of Staten Island Architects married Henriette Behar.

1896: The village of Metula was founded with funds supplied by Baron Rothschild.  Metula was the northern most town in Palestine and would become the northern most town in Israel.  Metula is close to the border with Lebanon. 

1896: In Birmingham, England, Jewish immigrants Laura (nee Greenberg) and Louis Balcon gave birth to movie producer Sir Michael Elias Balcan

1896: Herzl is received by Agliardi, the Papal Nuncio in Vienna.

1897:  Oscar Wilde is released from Reading Gaol.  In “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Wilde created a Jewish theatre manager named Isaacs whom he describes as “A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt…He was such a monster.” This does not mean he was an anti-Semite.  After all, Ada Leverson, the English Jewess, invited Wilde to her Salon after he had been arrested.

1897: “Shearith Israel congregation consecrated its new edifice at Central Park West and 70th street” today.

1897: Birthdate of Israel Schultz Becker who had held a series of more responsible positions at CBS culminating as the “vice president in charge of business affairs while raising his son Arnold with his wife Celia passed away today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/06/05/89533497.pdf

1898: Birthdate of Langley, SC native Benet Polikoff, the graduate of the University of South Carolina and WW I veteran who was “a partner in the New York law firm of Polikoff and Clareman” and Chairman of the United Palestine Appeal.

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/12/18/archives/benet-polikoff-sr-counsel-to-actors.html

1898: During the Spanish American War, Privates Samuel Cowen, Michael G. Greenberg and Arthur S. Loeb were part of Battery A, 1^st Regiment Connecticut Volunteer Artillery which was mustered into federal service today.

1898: “Gladstone’s Career” published today contained a summary of the late English political leaders life including his rivalry with Disraeli which began with a battle over the budget when Gladstone was made Chancellor of the Exchequer and continued even after Disraeli took his seats in the House of Lords.

1899: The new Hebrew Charities Building that was dedicated yesterday “will provide accommodation for the relief work of the United Hebrew Charities, afford convenient offices and meeting rooms for…various Jewish charitable and philanthropic enterprises” and to provide a meeting place large enough to accommodate gatherings of those supporting various Jewish agencies and institutions.

1899: “At Grenoble, a hostile crowd” followed “notorious Jew baiter Max Regis” as he made his way to the railway station following his acquittal “on the charge of inciting murder and incendiarism.”

1899: At Grenoble “a mob marched to the Officers’ Club cheering for Dreyfus” which touched off a riot.

1899: In Algiers, fifty anti-Semitic rioters were arrested when a mob marched on the Jewish quarter.

1900(20^thof Iyar, 5660): Parshat Behar

1900: Lawrence Nadler, a recent arrival from Hungary was swindled for a second time in as many days which will probably hasten his return to his native land since he cannot locate the aunt with whom he was supposed to stay.

1901(1^stof Sivan, 5661): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1901: Herzl sends a letter to the Sultan and asks for a final audience before his departure.

1901: Today, Bernard M. Maltz, the Lithuanian born son of “Abraham and Sarah Malz” gave birth to Bernard M. Maltz who in 1890 came to the United States where he worked as a salesman for “National Biscuit Company and Standard Oil” before going into real estate development and the construction in Brooklyn while also serving as a director with numerous organizations including the Federation of Jewish Charities in Brooklyn, the Pride of Judea and Yeshiva College married Lena Sherry.

1902: As violent attacks were taking place, Mrs. Caroline Schitzberg presided over a meeting of the Ladies’ Ant-Beef Trust Association which was attended by approximately six hundred men and women at the little Grand Street Hall.

1902: It was reported that 250 delegates from all across the United States had attended “the Qin-Quintal Convention of the Free Sons of Israel” in Atlantic City.

1903: Menachem Ussishkin arrives in Vienna to prepare for his visit to Palestine to make land purchases for the Geulah Committee and to organize the Yishuv.

1904(5^thof Sivan, 5664): Erev Shavuot

1905 Birthdate of Vienna native Paul Phillip Gelles, who “came to the United States in 1920,” graduated from NYU after which he pursued a career in business that led him to serve as Chairman of the Board at “B.V.D.” a company best known for manufacturing men’s underwear and who was the husband “of the former Jeanne Peterzell with whom he had two children – Harry and Leda.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/09/25/89647267.pdf

1906: Birthdate of Gerd Bucerius, the German journalist and lawyer whose Jewish wife took refuge in the United Kingdom when the Nazis came to power.  He remained behind and defended numerous Jewish clients facing charges from the German authorities.

1906: In Providence, R.I., “Adolph and Sophie (Himowitz) Bask” gave birth to Harvard trained physician and WW II veteran Henry Jacob Bakst, the husband of Ruth Elene Miller and father of David Allan Bakst who rose from serving as an instructor of medicine at Boston University to dean of the School of Medicine at Boston Univeristy.

1907(6^thof Sivan, 5667): Shavuot

1907: It was reported today, that following allegations that the Jews of Odessa have formed a self-defense league and that other Jewish communities were following their example Count Konofonia wants to ask the Czar “authorize the Societies of True Russian Men to disarm these enemies of the autocracy.”

1908(18th of Iyar, 5668): Lag B'Omer

1908: Three days after had passed away, 57 year old Hyam Hart, the Australian born son of Ashe Hart and Rachel Joseph was buried today at the “Willesden Jewish Cemetery.”

1908: Birthdate of Sylvan N. Friedman, the native of Natchez, LA, the father of Sam Friedman and the nephew of Leon and J. Isaac Friedman who served in both the Louisiana State House of Representatives and the Louisiana State Senate

1909:  Birthdate of composer Shlomo Yoffe or Schlomo Joffe. Born in Warsaw he studied piano theory in Samara, Russia from 1918 until 1921 and, in 1924 in Warsaw joined the Zionist movement Hashomer Hatza'ir, playing the mandolin, tuba, baritone and clarinet in its folk orchestras. He graduated from the Teachers' Seminarium in Poznan (Poland) in 1928, and in 1930, following agricultural studies in Brno (Czechoslovakia), moved to Palestine, helping to establish a kibbutz in 1932. Only after 1940 did he begin to be involved with music again, at first teaching and arranging music at the kibbutz Beit Alpha. After a period of concentrated study (1947-53), with Prof. J. Tal and Prof. O. Partos at the New Jerusalem Academy of Music, and privately with A.A. Boskovich, he devoted himself to composition and teaching at the district conservatory for kibbutzim at Beth-She'an Valley, where he was director until 1973. In the 1950s, under Boskovitch's influence, he used elements of Near Eastern Jewish song, maqam, heterophony and a form of chromatic modality, often in the expression of biblical and Israeli dramas, for example in the cantata "Tales of Mount Gilboa" (953), but also in his Prokofiev-like neo-classical symphonic works. These features remained evident in later works, despite the influence of Schoenbrg in the compositions of the 1960s and the influences that followed a visit to Darmstadt in 1962 and meetings with Lutoslawski and Penderecki. His cantata "Rising Night after Night" (1978), for example, exhibits many contemporary aspects, including extended vocal techniques, clusters and a deformed folk melody, but despite these developments, Joffe always remained, through his teaching, association and biblical roots, a 'kibbutz composer'.

1909: Birthdate of Sir Nicholas George Winton, MBE a Briton who 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. The UK press has dubbed him the "British Schindler".

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007780

1910: The Sixth Biennial Session of the National Conference of Jewish Charities in the United States came to a close today in St. Louis, MO.

1911: The Turkish government instructs its Minister at Teheran to protest the Persian government attacks against lives and property of Ottoman Jews at Kermanshah.
1911: The King of Italy confers Knighthood of Order of Crown on Rabbi Abraham Elbgen, Chief Rabbi of Crete.

 1911: Jews of Constantinople take a prominent part in the celebrations of the anniversary of the Sultan's accession to the throne.
1911: Plans are made in Cairo to form a Federation of Synagogues.

1912: Alterations in the ritual used at the New West End Synagogue was “agreed to at a meeting of seatholders” today in London.

1913(12^thof Iyar, 5673): Fifty-four year old Rabbi and Editor Isaac Suwalsky passed away today in London.

1913: Three days after she had passed away, 78 year old Phoebe (nee Neuberger) Duis, the husband of Levy Duis, was buried today in London at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery.”

1914 “Harry Rapf, an executive and film producer at MGM” and his wife gave birth to Dartmouth alum and second generation movie maker Maurice Rapf, “a founder of the Writers Guild of America”

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/18/arts/maurice-rapf-88-screenwriter-and-film-professor.html

1914:  Birthdate of Max Perutz, Austrian-born British molecular biologist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962.

1915(6^thof Sivan, 5675): Shavuot observed for the first time during WW I.

1915: Birthdate of Irving Gertz, the native of Providence RI and graduate of the Providence College of Music who gained fame for creating the scores for dozens of horror and sci-fi films.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/movies/21gertz.html

1915: Twenty year old Boston native Henry Landers Bostick the University of Denver student and right-handed infielder played his last major league baseball game with the Philadelphia Athletics (now the Oakland A’s)

1915: “Petitions bearing 50,000 signatures have been obtained” in Buffalo, NY “in the effort to save Leo M. Frank from execution.”

1915: “Mas Meeting to Aid Frank” published today described for a meeting to be held by the League of Foreign Born Citizens that will “appeal for justice for Leo M. Frank” who has been “sentenced to die next month for the murder of Mary Phagan.”

1915: The text of a telegram to J.H. Slaton, the Governor of Georgia signed by several prominent leaders from Paterson, NJ, including Samuel Goldstein, Morris A. Goldstein, Arnold Levy, Nathan Levine, Herman Orbach, David Gordon, Harry Dunn, Benjamin Lowenthal, Solomon D. Stern and Isadore F. Rosenthal begging “to intercede with your Excellency to bestow clemency upon Leo Frank” was published today.





1915: While the State Prison Commission has not set a date for “the hearing of Leo M. Frank’s petition for a commutation of his sentence” today is the first possible date on which the Commission might take such action.

1916: Birthdate of Victor Lucas, the son of a London drapery shop owner who “was appointed inaugural President of the British Property Federation” in 1974 and “was one of the first Jews of Eastern European parentage” to play a major role in “the Anglo-Jewish communal leadership” was can be seen by election to the vice presidency of the Board of Deputies and the presidency of Anglo-Jewish Association.”

1917: The Central Committee of the Jewish Committee for the Care of the Fugitives for the Galilee was elected today.

1917: It was reported today that the Turks have driven the Jews away from the coast forcing them to leave behind their property which is unprotected from looters and to “suffer great destitution” as they tried to make their way to Jerusalem where conditions are not much better.

1917: “Further confirmation that the Turkish military authorities in Palestine” and the civilian Turkish population “are committing terrible atrocities against Jews in Palestine reached Washington today in official reports”

1917(27^thof Iyar, 5677): Fifty year old Adolph J. Meyers, the brother of Mrs. Abe Adler and Mrs. H.M. Marks passed away today at North Chicago Hospital.

1917: “The Petrograd correspondent of the Jewish Daily Forward cabled” today that in Russia and Romania, “efforts were being made to provide equal rights for Jews.”

1918: Birthdate of Louis Sachwald, who was among the brave American soldiers who battled the Japanese during the dark days of WW II at Corregidor and survived a brutal imprisonment to become a successful business man in Maryland

1918: Benjamin Bernstein, the President of the Hebrew Association for the Blind and Leo Woolfson were among the speakers at “a patriotic meeting” sponsored by the association where attendees were urged to contribute to the $25,000 fund be raised to help care for blind Jewish soldiers returning from France who want to be employed even though they have lost their sight in service of their country.

1918: Birthdate of Abraham (Bram) Pais a Dutch-born American physicist and science historian.

1918: Bainbridge Colby, the United States Shipping Commissioner spoke tonight “at the joint memorial service of the Hebrew Union Veteran Association and the Hebrew Veterans of the Spanish War…at Temple Beth El” where he assured attendees that the navy is on the verge of mastering the threat of the German submarines and that at least “fifty ships of major size” would be commissioned in June.

1919: In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk moves to Samsun from Istanbul with a few followers, to oppose the Ottoman government, which eventually leads to the Turkish War of Independence and the creation of the modern Turkish state. As part of his reform programs Ataturk made religious faith a matter of individual conscience. He created a truly secular system in Turkey, where the vast Moslem majority and the small Christian and Jewish minorities are free to practice their faith. As a result of Atatürk's reforms, Turkey -unlike scores of other countries- has fully secular institutions.

1919: The Sinai Choral Club is scheduled to provide the closing program this evening at the meeting of the Sinai Open Forum in Chicago.

1919: The twenty-sixth biennial council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations begins in Boston.

1919: Today, Russian born and Columbia and NYU trained biochemist William Marias Malisoff, married Sally Juster with she raised three children – Marias, Eda and Vera Malifsoff.

1920: Following Britain’s refusal to allow an American prospector to look for oil in Palestine, U.S. Ambassador Davis “pointed out that the American as not asking for any concession and suggested that the British authorities might well make a distinction between concession-hunters and individuals who were merely conducting investigations.”

1920: It was reported today that “seventy-five delegates and alternates to the All-Russian Zionist Congress, which met here late in April, have been arrested.”

1921: The Emergency Quota Act passes the U.S. Congress establishing national quotas on immigration. Because of the convoluted quota system established by this law, immigration from southern and eastern Europe effectively came to an end.  This had the effect of closing the American Door for the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia.  The strict enforcement of this law would also mean that European Jews would have no place to go when Hitler came to power.

1926(6th of Sivan, 5686): Shavuot

1926: “As part of the observance of the Shavuot holiday, appeals will be made today in Jewish temples and synagogues throughout the city on behalf of the United Jewish Campaign for $15,000,000 to aid the needy Jews of Eastern Europe.”

1928: In the Bronx, Romanian Jewish immigrants “Tina (née Michel), a homemaker, and Carl Schayes, a truck driver for Consolidated Laundries” gave birth to NBA great Adolph "Dolph" Schayes.

1929: “The Valiant” starring Paul Muni is his film debut and produced by William Fox was released today in the United States.

1930: The world executive of the Mizrachi (Orthodox Zionists) sent a telegram to Dr. Chaim Weizmann today calling for an immediate meeting of Zionist congress that would address the announcement by the British High Commissioner to suspend immigration to Palestine.  The appeal stated that “the new immigration ban reveals a new British government tendency to disregard the principles of the mandate.”  This “tendency endangers the Zionist work.”  Protests against the new British policy are already taking place in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the Emek Valley. The Jewish Agency and the Vaad Leumi are meeting in a joint session to deal with this issue.

1931(3^rdof Sivan, 5691): Sixty-eight year old Russian born American newspaperwoman and socialist Mrs. Adella Kean Zametkin, the author of A Woman’s Handbook and the wife of Michael Zametkin, the first editor of The Jewish Daily Forward passed away today in NYC.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1931/05/20/96200629.pdf

1931: Birthdate of Jerome Kurtz, the native of Philadelphia who became a successful tax lawyer and Commissioner of the IRS.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/jerome-kurtz-irs-commissioner-under-carter-dies-at-83/2015/03/05/4adf10fe-c282-11e4-9ec2-b418f57a4a99_story.html?tid=hpModule_9d3add6c-8a79-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e&hpid=z11

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/business/jerome-kurtz-83-dies-headed-irs-in-carter-administration.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=1

1934: In Brooklyn Rabbi Isaac Landman is scheduled to deliver a sermon entitled “Two Sets of Commandments” at Congregation Beth Elohim.

1934: Rabbi I. Mortimer Bloom is scheduled to deliver a sermon entitled “The Reign of Law” at Temple Oheb Shalom.

1934: Rabbi Louis I. Newman is scheduled to deliver a sermon entitled, "Goebbels' Speech and the Madison Square Garden Meeting-What Do They Conceal?" at Congregation Rodeph Sholom

1934: Dr. Samuel H. Goldenson is scheduled to deliver a sermon entitled “Who is Who-With Respect to Life's Values" at New York’s Temple Emanu-El.

1934(5th of Sivan, 5694): Erev Shavuot

1934: Rabbi Milton Steinberg is scheduled to lead Shavuot Services at Park Avenue Synagogue at 6 p.m. this evening.

1935: T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, died from injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident. Lawrence is connected in the popular mind with his role in providing British support for the Arab Revolt during World War I.  But Lawrence was not one of those British Arabists who were, at best, disdainful of the Jewish people. As can be seen from the following, Lawrence welcomed the settlement of the Jewish community in Palestine. “In 1919 Lawrence drafted a letter for Emir Feisal for a meeting with Felix Frankfurter, a leader of American Zionists. In his letter Feisal wished “the Jews a hearty welcome home” and asserted “our two movements complete one another.” “There is room in Syria for both of us” he concluded. The letter was published in the New York Times on March 5, 1919. In “The Changing East,” Lawrence wrote of “the Jewish experiment” as a conscious effort, on the part of the least European people in Europe, to make head against the drift of the aces, and return once more to the Orient from which they came. The colonists will take back with them to the land which they occupied for some centuries before the Christian era samples of all the knowledge and technique of Europe. They propose to settle down amongst the existing Arab-speaking population of the country, a people of kindred origin, but far different social condition. They hope to adjust their mode of life to the climate of Palestine, and by the exercise of their skill and capital to make it as highly organised as a European state. The success of their scheme will involve inevitably the raising of the present Arab population to their own material level, only a little after themselves in point of time, and the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world. It might well prove a source of technical supply rendering them independent of industrial Europe, and in that case the new confederation might become a formidable element of world power. However, such a contingency will not be for the first or even for the second generation, but it must be borne in mind in any laying out of foundations of empire in Western Asia “1936(27th of Iyar, 5696): “A 43 year old Jew named, Feivil Schnitzer, was shot and killed early this morning by an Arab in the Armenian quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. It was the twenty- sixth murder of a Jew by Arabs since the present disturbances began, and in every case the assassins are still at large.”

1936: “Love in Exile” produced by Max Schach, with a script co-authored by Herman J. Mankiewicz and music by Benjamin Frankel was released today in the United Kingdom.

1936: Carl J. Austrian, chairman of the Greater New York campaign of the Joint Distribution Committee is scheduled to act as the toastmaster for the this evening’s testimonial dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria honoring merchant Edwin Goodman, the President of Bergdorf-Goodman who is also chairman of the dress industry division of the Joint’s fundraising campaign.

1936: It was reported today that the “publication of the periodical Judenkenner (Observe of Jews) the organ of the Anti-Jewish World Alliance has been discontinued until after the Olympic Games” but that it is understood that publication will resume “after the Olympic Games are over and competitors and visitors have gone home.”

1936: “Tel Aviv celebrated the inauguration of its new port today.  Tens of thousands gathered around a provisional jetty to watch the arrival and unloading of two steamers with cargoes of cement.” Tel Aviv’s aged and ailing Mayor, Meir Dizengoff, left his sick bed to watch the Jewish porters unloading bags of cement. “Now that my eyes have sevenths, I am ready to die.”

1936: Today “The Stuermer, Julius Steicher’s anti-Semitic weekly published a list of thirty two Jews who had been arrested or punished on charge of ‘race defilement’ under the Nuremberg racial laws” including one who had committed suicide after arrest” and nineteen who had been “sentenced to prison terms ranging from six months to two years.”

1937: Premiere of “Room Service” a play featuring Sam Levene as “Gordon Miller” which was “the basis of the Marx Brothers film of the same title.”

1937(9^th of Sivan, 5697): Eighty-three year old Emilie Badt, the daughter of Fanny and Rabbi Wolf Landau passed away today in her home town of Dresden, Germany

1937(9^th of Sivan, 5697): Eighty two year old Samuel Sale who had served as the Rabbi for Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis from 1887 to 1919 passed away today.

1938: Simon W. Gerson, an aide to Manhattan Borough President Stanley M. Isaacs spent three hours testifying before the Joint Legislative Committee on Law Administration and Enforcement chaired by state senator John J. McNaboe.  The committee spent very little time questioning Gerson about the aleteration of his name on Municipal Court records in the a rent case which was supposed to be the focus of the hearing and a lot of time questioning Gerson about his political views.  Gerson, who was Jewish, was a self-described Communist who, along with his wife, has been very critical of the American political and economic system. His boss, Borough President Isaacs was also Jewish but he was a leading member of the Republican Party. 

1939(1^st of Sivan, 5699): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1939(1^st of Sivan 5699): Fifty-three year old Karl Radek, the Lemberg born Communist who “was sentenced to years of penal labor” after being convicted in a show trial during Stalin’s great purge reportedly was killed today by a fellow inmate/

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

1939: Services marking the installation of Norman Gerstenfeld as the Rabbi of Washington Hebrew Congregation were held today in the District of Columbia.

1939: In defiance of the White Paper, 309 “illegal Jewish immigrants” landed on the “shores of Southern Palestine.”  Before they were discovered by British troops, the group, including 74 women and 14 children were attacked by an armed mob of Arab villagers.

1940: Today is the last day on which Hans Rey would paint his illustrations on French soil.

1941: In New York, “noted playwrights and screenwriters Henry and Phoebe (née Wolkind) Ephrom” gave birth award winning novelist, screenwriter and director Nora Ephron whose second marriage to award winning journalist Carl Bernstein provided the fodder for the novel and movie Heartburn.

https://www.biography.com/writer/nora-ephron

1941: The Palmach ("peluggot mahaz" - "assault companies") commando units were established by Yitzhak Sade as a defense from any Axis (Germany and Italy) attack on Eretz Israel. Later they assisted in planning and executing the dropping of Parachutists in occupied Europe. At its peak (November 1947) it had approximately 5000 members which were mainly responsible for capturing Safed and Tiberias as well helping to open the road to Jerusalem.

1942: In the Bronx, “homemaker Dorothy (Serating) Shopsin” and “Kenneth Henry Shopsin, the owner of a paper manufacturing company” gave birth to Kenneth Henry Shopsin, who with is wife created the restaurant Shopsin’s General Store.  (AS reported by Neil Genzlinger)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/obituaries/kenny-shopsin-dead.html

1943: Liberal Judaism, a new illustrated monthly journal of opinion and letters, has been issued by The Union of Hebrew Congregations, it was announced today. The cover of the first, or May, issue, published last Saturday, is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, founder of Reform Judaism in the United States.

1943: Berlin was declared "Judenrein", Jew Free.

1943: In the House of Commons, the courageous Eleanor Rathbone attacked the British government for the defeatist attitudes expressed at the Bermuda Conference and noted that the Allies are responsible for the deaths of any Jews if they refuse to help.

1943: Ben Hecht’s “We Will Never Die” was performed at the Chicago Stadium, with guest stars John Garfield and Burgess Meredith in the lead roles. An estimated 20,000 people attended as the stadium, “scene of many a hectic convention and gaudy circus, was turned into a house of worship,” as the Chicago Daily Newsput it.[Jewish Virtual Library]

1944(26th of Iyar, 5704): Jews deported from Paris to Kovno, Lithuania, are machine-gunned by guards in a fenced enclosure after some of the prisoners attack SS troops.

1944: George Henry Lane, a Hungarian born English Jew serving with the British commandos was captured on a pre-D-Day raid on the French coast but was able to avoid being executed under Hitler’s Commando Order by hiding his Jewish origins and fooling no less an authority than Field Marshall Rommel that he was Welsh which led to his being imprisoned instead of executed.

1944: The Germans transported Hungarian Jew Joel Brand to Turkey so he could deliver a proposal from Adolf Eichmann that would have required the Western Allies to exchange 10,000 trucks for one million Eastern European Jews. Eichmann called it "blood for trucks." Arrested by the British, Brand was sent to Lord Moyne (resident minister of state in the Middle East), who comments: "What shall I do with those million Jews?"

1944:Mel Mermelstein the man who would defeat the Institute for Historical Review in an American court and had the occurrence of gassings in Auschwitz during the Holocaust declared a legally incontestable fact was deported to Auschwitz along with the rest of the Jewish community of Munkacs, which was part of Czechoslovakia at that time.

1945(7^thof Sivan, 5705): For the first time since VE Day, Yizkor is recited on the 2^ndday of Shavuot.

1945: It was reported today that French government has forbidden Jews in Algeria to hold “a meeting to discuss the future of Palestine” which was to be addressed by David Ben Gurion because such a meeting “might lead to a clash with the Algerian Arabs”

1946: Seventy-six year old Pulitzer Prize winning author Booth Tarkington, whom some would say engaged socially acceptable genteel anti-Semitism, passed away today.

http://dramatic-insights.org/tarkington/index.php/2012/tarkington-antisemite/

1947: Italy which had been on both sides during the war and at one time emulated the race laws of their German ally, applied for membership in the United Nations today.

1948: Israeli forces abandoned Bet ha-Aravah and the potash works on the northern end of the Dead Sea.

1948: The provisional government of Israel declared a state of emergency.

1948: As the undermanned and outgunned Israeli units sought to keep the Syrians and Iraqis from taking the Jordan Valley, a second raid, by a Yiftach company, crossed the Jordan and struck the Syrian camp at the Customs House, near the main Bnot Yaakov Bridge After a short battle, the Syrian defenders (one or two companies) fled. The Palmachniks destroyed the camp and several vehicles, including two armored cars, without losses.”

1948: In Jerusalem, “the Arabs recaptured the Sheikh Jarrah area”

1948: The Iraqis, who were about to drive west through Nablus toward Tulkarm, “asked the Syrians to make a diversion in the Degania area to protect their right flank. The Syrians complied, their main objective being to seize the bridge across the river north of Degania Alef, thus blocking any Israeli attack from Tiberias against the Iraqi line of communications.”

1948: During the War for Independence two civilian leaders from Kibbutz Deganya arrive at Ben Gurion’s offices begging for help in fighting off the attacking Syrian armored column.  Ben Gurion responded candidly “We don’t have enough artillery, enough airplanes. Every front needs reinforcements.  The situation is extremely grave in the Negev, in the Jerusalem area and in the Upper Galilee.”  And if anything, Ben Gurion was understating the desperate situation.  So far the only help he had to send to Deganya was Moshe Dayan who had little more than his eye-patch with which to face the Syrians, Iraqis and Jordanians.  Ben Gurion sent the two leaders to Yigal Yadin, his Chief of Staff.  Yadin listens to the report and then advises them to let the Syrian tanks breach the kibbutz so that the defenders can disable them with Molotov cocktails.  Their angry response shocks Yadin into action.  If Daganya is lost the North is lost.  With the Egyptians advancing from the Negev and the Arab Legion besieging Jerusalem, Yadin’s position seems more like Custer than King David.  Yadin meets with Ben Gurion. In a table-pounding dispute, Yadin attempts to convince the Old Man to send four 65 millimeter artillery pieces that had been intended for Jerusalem north to Deganya.  This is the sum total of the Israeli artillery reserve and the weapons lack sights (you know, the things you aim the gun with).  Ben Gurion agrees to send two of the canon North with Dayan under the condition that they be returned promptly to help with the fighting around Jerusalem. 

1948: The provisional government council of Israel proclaimed a state of emergency.

1948: The Scotsman quoted a report by Thomas Wasson Consul General for the United States in Jerusalem “saying the British Consul had a “narrow escape” when the Consulate came under gunfire.”

1948: "A tiny force of the Palmach took Mount Zion and broke through to the Jewish Quarter."  The unit was forced to withdraw several hours later when reinforcements could not come to their aid.

1949: “Dr. Maurice N. Eisendrath, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, called on American Jews tonight for greater support of the organization's religious and cultural institutions.”

1950(3^rdof Sivan, 5710): Eighty year old “German-born rabbi, Jewish theologian, and philosopher of religion” Julius Guttman, the son of Rabbi Jakob Guttman who was serving Professor of Jewish Philosophy at Hebrew University passed away today.

1950(3rd of Sivan, 5710):  The Aliyah of Iraqi Jews began. The first deportation of Eretz Yisrael Jews to Babylonia took place in 597 B.C.E. The bulk of Eretz Yisrael Jewry followed them to Babylonia 11 years later, in 568 B.C.E. The first return of some Babylonian Jews to Eretz Yisrael took place in 539 B.C.E. The majority, however, remained in Babylonia, where they were destined eventually to make a major contribution to Judaism through the creation of the “Babylonian Talmud” and the “Geonic Responsa.” It was not until 1951, 2,548 years after the arrival of the first Jewish deportees in Babylonia, that this ancient Jewish community began its own liquidation through an Aliyah to Israel.

1951(13th of Iyar, 5711): David Remez passed away.  Born David Drabkin in Russia in May of 1886, he made Aliyah in 191.  Trained as a lawyer and teacher, he worked as field hand on several agricultural settlements. A founding member of Mapai and a leader of Histadrut, he was a true founding father as one of the signatories to Israel’s Declaration of Independence.  He was the first Minister of Transportation and was serving as Minister of Education at the time of his death.

1951: Menachem Cohen became an MK replacing the deceased David Remez.

1952: Moshe Keren, Israel’s Charge d’affairs in London is scheduled to be one of the Israeli and Jewish observers attending “the conference on Germany’s pre-war external debts which opens today in London

1952: In South Africa, “the Minister of Justice, served two notices on Emil Solomon Sachs in terms of the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950. The first was an order to resign as an official of the GWU within 30 days. It also prohibited him from participating in the activities of various organizations. The second restricted his movements to the Transvaal and prohibited him from attending any meetings other than religious, recreational and social gatherings.”

1953(5th of Sivan, 5713): Erev Shavuot

1953:A call went to 3,750 Jewish communities throughout the country, to assure the successful financing this summer of the most important agricultural development program to be launched in Israel since the establishment of the state, was issued here today by the United Jewish Appeal on the eve of Shavuos, the Festival of Pentecost, which in the ancient days celebrated the appearance of the first fruits of summer.The appeal was made by Rabbi Jonah B. Wise, a national chairman of the UJA. "There can be no greater observance of this ancient festival commemorating Jewish attachment to the soil than support of the United Jewish Appeals current special effort to help Israel achieve agricultural self-sufficiency and maturity." he said.Rabbi Wise called specific attention to a special emergency drive for $25,000,000 in cash launched by the UJA for a five-week period beginning May 1. The cash fund is being sought for establishment in Israel by the end of June of 36 new agricultural settlements, for the immediate channeling to the new colonies of large, recently-discovered water sources, and for speeding a rise in the productivity both of the soil and those newly placed on it as immigrant farmers.

1954: Nicholas Winton, a Briton who organized the rescue of 669 mostly Jewish children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War relinquished his commission of “flying officer” in the RAF while retaining the rank of “flight lieutenant.”

1956: “The Killing,” a crime film directed by Stanley Kubrick who also wrote the screenplay and featuring Jay Adler, the son of Jacob and Sarah Adler, was released today in the United States.

1959: As reported in today’s New York Times, Richard Tucker was among those who appeared at the “Puccini Night” open air concert at Lewisohn Stadium in New York City. The stadium was named in honor of Adolph Lewisohn, the German-Jewish banker who donated the money to pay for its construction.

1962: Birthdate of French journalist and musician Ariel Wizman the Sephardic Jew from Casablanca, Morocco.

1962: In Minneapolis, MN, Jack and Bette Kozlen gave birth to Amy Kozlen who became Amy Barnum when she married her college Joel Barnum with whom she settled in Cedar Rapids, where they raised three wonderful children – Emma, Sasha and Gail – and she became a pillar of the Jewish community which she infused with her own unique brand of kindness, warmth and joy.

1964: In Manhattan, “Beverly and Peter Panken” gave birth to Aaron David Panken, a graduate “from Johns Hopkins University electrical engineering program” who became “Rabbi Aaron D. Panken, the president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/06/obituaries/rabbi-aaron-panken.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

1966: It was reported today that 75 year old Lazarus Joseph who served as New York City Comptroller from 1946 to 1953 had fallen ill.

1966: The emblem for the Israeli town of Arad, a square with a hill and a flame, was adopted today.

1969: Palestinian terrorists from Jordan bombard the Musa Alami School near Jericho.

1972(6^thof Sivan, 5732): Shavuot

1972: The Bernard M. Baruch College of the City University of New York scheduled final exams today.  It was the only college in the system to do so.  (The exams would be moved to May 30 after a major protest led by Hillel, the ADL and other major Jewish organizations.)

1974(27th of Iyar, 5734): Sandy Sasso was ordained as the first female Reconstructionist rabbi by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia

https://jwa.org/thisweek/may/19/1974/sandy-sasso

1975: The New Yorker published “The New York Review of Gossip” by Marshall Brickman.

1976(19^thof Iyar, 5736): Eighty-eight year old Jeanette Wolf, “one of the best-known German Jewish women in post-war Germany” passed away today.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/wolff-jeanette

1977: Bella Abzug received 5 out of 231 votes for Mayor at the convention of the Liberal Party held today.

1977: A bi-national foundation, designed to promote joint industrial research and development between the United States and Israel was established in Washington today at a formal ceremony between Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs C. Fred Bergsten and Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz. The move to establish the Bi-national Industrial Research and Development Foundation, followed President Carter's signing into law Congressional legislation which stipulated that Israel and the U.S. would each contribute $30 million to create an endowment to promote activities of mutual interest and benefit to both countries. An agreement for the project was signed in Jerusalem March 3, 1976. The Joint Israel-American Committee for Investment and Trade, whose objective is to foster economic ties, initiated the project which is expected to provide direct mutual economic gains such as the development and participation in new external markets and increase the flow of materials and services between the two countries. According to a spokesman for the Government of Israel Investment Authority, which is headquartered in New York, the Foundation "is the first of its kind established between the United States and another country." For a project to be supported by the Foundation it must show promise of tangible direct benefits to the national economies of both countries, according to a statement issued by the U.S. Treasury Department. The Foundation will be governed by a board consisting of three officials of each government (JTA)

1978: Leonard B. Sand began serving as Judge of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York

1987: “Thank God It’s Friday,” a musical comedy co-produced by Rob Cohen, co-starring Jeff Goldblum and Debra Winger and featuring Valerie Landsburg was released in the United States today.

1980: Time magazine reported today that “Died: Arthur Levitt, 79, New York State comptroller from 1955 to 1978, whose nonpartisan dedication, thrift with public funds and relentless criticism of fiscal chicanery endeared him to voters, who returned him to office five times with huge majorities; in New York City. A Brooklyn lawyer and nominal Democrat, Levitt served under four Governors, tightening the state's auditing procedures, including "performance audits" of state agencies, and eventually giving his office prestige and power virtually beyond politics.”

1981: Former Finance Minister Yigal Hurvitz joins Moshe Dayan's Telem party.

1983(7^thof Sivan, 5743): Second Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1983: “President Reagan said today that he would notify Congress ''in a day or two'' that he wants to go ahead with the sale to Israel of 75 F-16 fighter jets that he held up after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon last June.”

1985(28^thof Iyar, 5745): Yom Yerushalayim

1985: Two famous Jewish men of letters are joined together in Harold Bloom’s review of Zuckerman Bound by Philip Roth

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/19/books/his-long-ordeal-by-laughter.html?pagewanted=all

1987: The Royal Shakespeare Company staged a production of “Kiss Me, Kate” with a book by Samuel and Bella Spewack at London's Old Vic Theatre, which opened today.

1989(14^thof Iyar, 5749): Pesach Sheni

1988: Shimon Peres is scheduled to address commencement ceremonies at the Jewish Theological Seminary this afternoon.

1989(14th of Iyar, 5749): Dr. Abel J Herzberg passed away.  Dr. Abel J. Herzberg was a lawyer in Amsterdam when he was arrested in 1943, along with his wife, and taken to the Dutch transit camp at Westerbork. He was sent to Bergen-Belsen in January 1944 and, as a Zionist, he was put on the list of 1300 Jews who were available to be sent to Palestine in exchange for German citizens held as prisoners by the Allies. He was on the list of 272 Jews who were selected in April 1944 to go to Palestine, but at the last minute 50 names were crossed off the list and Dr. Herzberg had to go back into the Star Camp with the other Dutch Jews. Dr. Herzberg survived and after the war, he went back to being a lawyer in Amsterdam. He published the diary that he kept in Bergen-Belsen.  It appeared in English under the title, “Between Two Streams: A Diary From Bergen-Belsen.”

1989: Morton Isaac Abramowitz completed his term as Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research which left him free to accept appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey.

1989: After having first been seen at the Toronto Film Festival, “The Miracle Mile” featuring Alan Rosenburg was released today in the United States.

1991(4^thof Iyar, 5751): Yom HaAtzma’ut observed since the 5^th of Iyar fell on Friday

1993(28^thof Iyar, 5753): Yom Yerushalayim

1993: “Fiorile” an Italian drama co-starring Michael Vartan that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival was released in several European countries today

1992: Broadcast of the second and final installment the miniseries “Cruel Doubt” co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow

1993(28^thof Iyar, 5763): Yom Yerushalayim

1994: NBC broadcast the final episode of season five of “Seinfeld.”

1996(1st of Sivan, 5756): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1996: Admiral Jeremy Michael Boorda, “the first American sailor to have risen through the enlisted ranks to become the Chief of Naval Operations, the highest-ranking billet in the U.S. Navy” “was interred at Arlington National Cemetery” today “with a tombstone marked with the Star of David.”

1997: David Blaine's first television special, David Blaine: Street Magic aired on NBC

1999: Conductor Yakov Kreizberg made his debut appearance with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

1999: Members of the of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society are scheduled to attend a “Special Tribute commemorating the 10^th anniversary of the passing of Dina Haplern and honoring Danny Newman for his contribution to Yiddish culture today at the Harold Washington Library Centrer.

1999: U.S. premiere of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace starring Natalie Portman as Queen Padmé Amidala and Frank Oz as the voices of “Yoda.”

2000: “One Day in September,” a documentary that examined the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics was released today in the UK

2000: “Shanghai Noon” the first in series of buddy films produced by Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber and Jonathan Glickman and with music by Randy Edelman was released today in Malaysia.

2001(26^thof Iyar 5761): Parashat Behar-Bechukotai

2001(26^thof Iyar, 5761): It was reported that “a  Palestinian suicide bomber killed at least 5 Israelis and wounded more than 100” and Israeli army officer was killed on a West Bank Road, which led to Israeli retaliating by sending aircraft to attack “the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the first time since the 1967 war.

2002: In The Observer Michael Sfard the lawyer representing Israeli conscripts who refuse to serve beyond the 1967 ceasefire lines explains why a growing number of soldiers are disobeying orders, in order to protect the basic values on which Israel was founded.

2002(8^thof Sivan, 5762): Yosef Haviv, 70, Victor Tatrinov, 63, and Arkady Vieselman, 40, all of Netanya, were killed and 59 people were injured - 10 seriously - when a suicide bomber, disguised as a soldier, blew himself up in the market in Netanya. Both Hamas and the PFLP took responsibility for the attack. “Viselman, a chef at the Park Hotel had survived the Passover bombing” that had taken place in March.

2003: Forensic experts said today that the second terrorist who had participated in the bombing of Mike’s Place had met death by drowning. Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades who had claimed joint responsibility for the murderous attack identified the terrorist and his compatriot as being Muslims from Great Britain.

2003(17^th of Iyar, 5763): Avi Zerihan, 36, of Beit Shean, Hassan Ismail Tawatha, 41, of Jisr a-Zarqa[2]

Kiryl Shremko, 22, of Afula were murdered today and seventy others were injured by a Palestinian suicide bomber at a mall in Afula – an act of terror for which at least two Arab organizations took credit.

2003: A Palestinian suicide bomber riding a bike failed to blow up a jeep near Kfar Darom when he detonated his explosives.

2003: Broadcast of the final episode of season five of The King of Queens” co-starring Jerry Stillar

2004(28^th of Iyar, 5764): Yom Yerushalyim

2004: In response to a request from the online science magazine “Seed,” psychologist Steven Pinker “engaged in a four dialogue with novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.”

 2004(28th of Iyar, 5764): Yom Yerushalayim - Jerusalem Day - is the anniversary of the liberation and unification of Jerusalem under Jewish sovereignty that occurred during the Six Day War. Yom Yerushalayim is celebrated on the 28th of the month of Iyar (one week before Shavuot). In 2004 Iyar 28 corresponds to May 19 on the secular calendar.

2004: Broadcast of the final episode of season 6 of The King of Queens co-starring Jerry Stillar.

2005(10th of Iyar, 5765): Steven Budeysky, a member of the U.S. Army’s 105th Military Intelligence Battalion was killed today while serving in Iraq.  “Budeysky was born in Moldova in the former Soviet Union and went on to learn English as part of a singing group that toured Europe. When Budeysky was 12 years old, he and his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Chicago, where he attended Ida Crown Jewish Academy. He was also known as Baruch or Boris to his friends. A 2001 graduate of Northwestern University with a degree in economics and history, Budeysky was pursuing a graduate degree in political science from Troy University when he enlisted in the Army in 2002.”

2005: “Free Zone,” a film about relations between Arabs and Jews directed by Amos Gitai and co-starring Natalie Portman “made its debut today at the 200t Cannes Film Festival.”

2005: North American premiere of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith starring Natalie Portman as Padmé Amidala and Frank Oz as the voice of Yoda.

2006: The Jewish Chronicle revealed that the Claims Conference highest-paid official, executive vice-president Gideon Taylor was awarded $437,811 (£240,000) in salary and pension (2004 numbers).  An advisor to British survivors in compensation claims in the 1990s, Dr Pinto-Duschinsky, commented: "It is wrong for the executive vice-president to earn annually the same as the compensation for several hundred former slave laborers. The moral authority of the leading Jewish organizations is gravely weakened by excessively high salaries for top officials."

2006: In “Long, long ago, when basketball was kosher” published today Haaretz reported on a gathering of about 125 Yeshiva University (YU) alumni and friends at the school's Jerusalem campus  for a nostalgic evening with "The YU Dream Team of the 1950s" - six former basketball players from New York City who later immigrated to Israel.

2006: Two days after being shown at Cannes, The Davinci Code with a script by Akiva Goldsman was released today in the United States.

2006(21st of Iyar, 5766): Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, the last founding giant of Israel’s left wing, died two months short of his 100th birthday. A controversial figure on the Israeli political scene, he was one of the first to call for the return of all territories occupied by Israel in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and reached the peak of his career as secretary-general of the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation.

2007: After a two-month tryout at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England, a London revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” opened today  at the Savoy Theatre starring Henry Goodman as Tevye, Beverley Klein as Golde, Alexandra Silber as Hodel, Damian Humbley as Perchik and Victor McGuire as Lazar Wolf. The production was directed by Lindsay Posner. Robbins' choreography was recreated by Sammy Dallas Bayes (who did the same for the 1990 Broadway revival), with additional choreography by Kate Flatt.

2007: After 13 performances at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Felicja Blumental International Music Festival comes to a close.

2008: At the Israel Museum opening of an exhibition entitled “Swords into Plowshares the Isaiah Scroll and Its Message of Peace.” On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel, the Israel Museum presents the longest, best preserved, and most complete Dead Sea Scroll document ever found, in a special installation in the Shrine of the Book. Never before shown in an extended public display, this 2.60 meter-long section of the Isaiah Scroll comprises the first twenty-eight chapters of the Book of Isaiah, including Isaiah’s celebrated message of peace: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares…" (Is. 2:4). In order to illustrate this important message, iron tools from the days of the prophet Isaiah (8th century BCE) will be displayed alongside the Scroll. A Hellenistic seal depicting a dove carrying an olive branch, newly excavated and never before displayed will also be on view. Adolfo Roitman, Head of the Shrine of the Book and Curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Michal Dayagi-Mendels, Chief Curator of Archaeology are the curators for the exhibition. An international conference on Dead Sea Scrolls research will be held in July and is scheduled to coincide with the exhibition.

2008: At the Stephan Wise Free SynagogueStephan Wise Free SynagogueStephan Wise Free SynagogueStephan Wise Free SynagogueStephan Wise Free SynagogueStephan Wise Free SynagogueStephan Wise Free SynagogueStephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, an evening of Israeli music entitled “The Sharett Sisters in Concert.”

2008 (5768): Pesach Sheini

2008: Today “it was reported that Haim Saban had "offered $1 million to the Young Democrats of America during a phone conversation in which he also pressed for the organization's two uncommitted superdelegates to endorse Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for president.”

2008: Laura Weisberger’s 3^rd novel, Chasing Harry Winston, was released today in the United Kingdom.

2009: Time magazine reports on the recent passing of “Jewish boxer Salamo Arouch” at the age of 86.  Arouch survived the Holocaust by winning boxing matches staged by the guards at Auschwitz.  “He was the subject of the film ‘Triumph of the Spirit’ starring Willem Dafoe.”

2009: At Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C., children's author Amy Krouse Rosenthal reads from and discusses her new picture book, “Duck! Rabbit!”

2009:Rivka Galchen discusses her debut novel, “Atmospheric Disturbances,” in conversation with Ron Charles, Book World's deputy editor, as part of the Nextbook series at the D.C. Jewish Community Center.

2009:Today the Edinburgh International Film Festival returned a 300-pound grant from the Israeli embassy, after bowing to pressure from director Ken Loach. The grant was intended to enable Tel Aviv University graduate Tali Shalom Ezer to travel to Scotland for a screening of her film, Surrogate. Ezer's film is a romance set in a sex-therapy clinic, and makes no reference to war or politics. It recently won the award for best film at an international women's film festival in Israel

2009:This evening, Israel Air Force (IAF) jets attacked targets throughout Gaza after a woman was lightly injured from a rocket explosion in Sderot. During the attack, the IAF succeeded in hitting two weapons factories and four smuggling tunnels, used by Hamas terrorists to restock their supply of armaments.

2009(15^th of Iyar, 5769): Shlomo Shamir whose life reads like something out a James Bond novel, passed away. Born Shlomo Rabinowitch in Russia in 1915, he made aliyah ten years later.  He was an active member of the Haganah from 1929 until 1940 when he joined the RAF and rose to the rank of major before his discharge in 1946. During the War of Independence he played a key role in the fighting around Latrun and the creation of the Burma Road. After the war, he served as the 3^rd commander of the Israeli Navy and the 3^rdcommander of the Israeli Air Force. After leaving the military he graduated from Tel Aviv University and Harvard.  He was an entrepreneur who developed several successful businesses.

2009(15^th of Iyar, 5769): Ninety-two year old Noble Prize winning bio-chemist Robert Francis Furchgott passed away today.

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1998/furchgott-bio.html

2009: Ninety year old Sheikh Jabr Muadi, a Druze Israeli politician who served in the Knesset from 1951 to 1981 passed away today.

2010(6^th of Sivan, 5770): First day of Shavuot

2010: Tulane alum Martin Leach-Cross Feldman assumed the position of Judige of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

2010(6^th of Sivan, 5770):At Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, IA, Melanie Abzug, Miriam Maikon and Sam Sarasin are scheduled to Confirmed during Evening Shavuot Services.

2010(6^th of Sivan, 5770): Martin Cohan, 77, who co-created the ABC sitcom "Who's the Boss?" and was a prolific TV writer and producer, died today at his home in Pacific Palisades after a two-year battle with large-cell lymphoma, his family announced. Cohan and his business partner, Blake Hunter, created the sitcom starring Tony Danza and Judith Light, which ran from 1984 to 1992. The two men also served as creative consultants for a British version of the TV show called "The Upper Hand," which debuted in 1990 and ran for seven seasons. Besides his work as executive producer and writer for "Boss," Cohan wrote hundreds of scripts for such popular TV series as "The Bob Newhart Show,""Diff'rent Strokes,"" Mary Tyler Moore" and "Silver Spoons." Born July 4, 1932, in San Francisco, Cohan graduated from Stanford University in 1955 after studying theater arts. He found work as a stage manager and assistant director at ABC Television, his family said. He got his break on "Mary Tyler Moore" as an assistant director in 1971 and won a Writers Guild of America award in 1972 for best comedy episode. He went on to write, direct and produce for "The Bob Newhart Show."

2010: The Washington Postreviewed Jules Feiffer's account of his multifaceted career which will delight that generation of readers for whom his whimsical, sardonic and often politically barbed Village Voice cartoons were a cultural touchstone. Those whose understanding of Feiffer's achievements is not enhanced by the warm glow of nostalgia, however, may have less patience with this shambling, highly episodic book. “Backing Into Forward” starts with the author's account of growing up urban and Jewish, complete with a domineering mother and raging adolescent hormones. This back story has the ill fortune of sounding remarkably similar to that of Feiffer's friend Philip Roth: not a face-off that Feiffer -- or anyone else -- is likely to win. Feiffer is an energetic storyteller, but structurally the book is so haphazard that it's often hard to keep track of where we are in the arc of the artist's career. Feiffer wins points, though, for the acuity of his insights on the craft of cartooning. He's also remarkably modest. He repeatedly speaks of encounters with Marlene Dietrich, Lauren Bacall, George Plimpton and many others with a fan's sense of awe and good fortune

2010: “The Frozen Rabbi” by Steve Stern is among the books briefly reviewed in today’s “Newly Released” Column.“When an electrical storm causes a power failure in his parents’ home, 15-year-old Bernie Karp meets the family heirloom stored in the basement freezer: a 19th-century Polish rabbi, now defrosted and ready to savor life in suburbia. In chapters that toggle between past and present, Mr. Stern’s comic novel explains just how Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, the famed “Boibiczer Prodigy,” came to be encased in a block of ice, and follows his chilly journey from a European shtetl to the Lower East Side to the Karp household in Memphis. While “finding an old Jew in the deep freeze did not at first alter Bernie Karp’s routine in any measurable way,” things soon change. He meets a nice, if not-so-Jewish, Goth girl, and discovers the ability to make his soul leave his body. Yet his rabbi-mentor, who learned English — and more — from a diet of trashy daytime television, quickly discovers that spirituality sells. It’s up to Bernie to get the rabbi back on the “path to righteousness.”

2011: The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington is scheduled to honor Dennis Berman, The Kramer Family and Esther B. Newman at tonight’s annual fundraising dinner in Potomac, MD.

2011: Ed Goldberg and the Odessa Klezmer Band are scheduled to perform at the Marlboro branch of the Monmouth County (NJ) Library.

2011: The Second Annual Atlanta Jewish Music Festival is scheduled to take place at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur, GA.

2011: “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, 1910-65” a “colorful new exhibition that celebrates the many Jewish composers of the American Songbook and their great contribution to American popular culture including Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein is scheduled to open  today at The Bainbridge Library in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

2011: The Center for Jewish History and Leo Baeck Institute are scheduled to present “Follow the Fugue” a concert featuring the Phoenix Chamber Ensemble.

2011: Prosecutors announced today that a grand jury had indicted Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn on charges related to the alleged sexual assault of a hotel housekeeper at the Sofitel New York.

2011: A judge granted Dominique Strauss-Kahn bail today, allowing the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund to be freed from Rikers Island to stay in a Manhattan apartment while his sexual assault case is pending.

2011: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said today Israel would object to any withdrawal to "indefensible" borders, adding he expected Washington to allow it to keep major settlement blocs in any peace deal.  In a statement after President Barack Obama's speech outlining Middle East strategy, Netanyahu said before heading to Washington that "the viability of a Palestinian state cannot come at the expense of Israel's existence".

2011: Lars von Trier was expelled from the Cannes Film Festival today, a day after joking at a news conference that he was a Nazi and expressing sympathy for Hitler. The Danish director’s film “Melancholia” is in competition at the festival and seen as a contender for the top prize.  (As reported by Melena Ryzik)

2011: Swiss producer Arthur Cohn, a six-time Oscar winner, was honored for his body of work by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Cohn’s grandfather the chief rabbi of Basel. He invited Theodor Herzl to hold the first Zionist Congress there after rabbis elsewhere objected.

2012: Mendy Cahan is scheduled to at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York City.

2012: In Springfield, VA, Congregation Ada Reyim is scheduled to present “A Night of Magic and More.”

2012: As part of the Ahavat Yisrael Weekend, Moshav is scheduled to perform at Adas Israel in Washington, DC.

2012: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the family and many friends of Amy Barnum have a chance to celebrate her birthday.  An ayshish chayil she has raised three marvelous daughters, provided leadership for Temple Judah and Hadassah and is the glue for the annual traditional High Holiday services. “Her children (and everybody else) call her blessed.”

2012: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg updated his status to "married" today.

2013: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker and the recently released paperback edition of The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stiglitz

2013: The Alexandria Kleztet is scheduled to perform for the Jewish Community Association at Riderwood Village in Silver Spring, MD.

2013: David Senesh, the nephew Hannah Senesh is scheduled to Dr. Louis D. Levine in a talk about the brave young Jewish poet and paratrooper and whose life and work are being honored at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie with an exhibition “Fire In My Heart.”

http://www.mjhnyc.org/hannah/poetry.html

2013: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington is scheduled to sponsor a walking tour of Downtown Jewish Washington which will give participants a chance to experience the neighborhood along Seventh Street, NW as it was from 1850 to 1950.

2013: In Little Rock, AR, the friends and family of Rabbi PInchus and Estie Ciment are scheduled to gather to celebrate the Bat Mitzvah of their daughter Zissie.  The Ciments are the quintessential “lamplighters” who have brought the light of Chabad Lubavtich to the Arkansas Jewish Community.

2013: Israel will go ahead with its candidacy for an unprecedented seat on the UN Security Council in 2019 despite Germany’s determination to run against it, diplomatic officials told The Jerusalem Post today

2013: Iran’s state radio says authorities have executed two men convicted of spying for Israel’s Mossad and the American CIA spy agency. Today’s report says Mohammad Heidari, who was accused of providing Mossad with classified information in return of money, and Kourosh Ahmadi, who allegedly gave the CIA intelligence on Iran, were hanged.

2013: “With Wheelchair and Lively Baton, Levine Commands Carnegie Hall” published today described the return of the famous conductor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/arts/music/james-levine-returns-to-the-podium-at-carnegie-hall.html?hp

2013: Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, “The Effie Wise Ochs Professor of Biblical Literature and History at the Reform Jewish seminary Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles” “was ordained as a rabbi by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion” toda.

2013: Damascus has put a number of advanced weapons on standby to strike Israel, should Jerusalem hit targets inside Syria again, the UK’s Sunday Times reported. According to the report, satellite images show Syria has readied its stock of Tishreen missiles for use against Tel Aviv

2014: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to “host a special preview screening of Watchers of the Sky, the Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary that uncovers the forgotten life of Raphael Lemkin who coined the term “genocide” and campaigned for international laws that would prevent and punish this crime against humanity.”

2014: On the second day of the Jerusalem International Writers Festival Ayelet Waldman and Lihi Lapid are scheduled to participant in discussion entitled “Bad Mother-Good Mother.” (As reported by David B. Green)

2014: On Nicholas Winton's 105th birthday, it was announced he was to receive the Czech Republic’s highest honour, for giving Czech children "the greatest possible gift: the chance to live and to be free

2014: “In Honor of Jewish American History Month,” Marvin Kalb is scheduled to moderate a panel discussion with Martin Goldsmith and Dr. Diane Afoumado “Voyage of the St. Louis” marking the 75^th anniversary of “of the sailing of the SS St. Louis, ‘the saddest ship afloat.’”

2014: A survey released today by the Paris based Siona organization of Sephardic French Jews showed that 75% of the participants are considering making Aliyah. (As reported by JTA and Times of Israel.)

2014: “Warning that the army was operating under unprecedented financial constraints, IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz said today that he had cancelled reserve training for the rest of the year because of cuts to the defense budget.” (As reported by Times of Israel)

2014: At the Library of Congress, Sanford Sternlicht, Emeritus English Professor at Syracuse University, is scheduled to discuss his book, The Tenement Saga: The Lower East Side and Early Jewish-American Writers.

2014: A poll of 3,833 French Jews reveals 74 percent have considered emigrating. (Tablet)

2015: Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, Davis Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Georgia, and Rabbi David S. Sperling, Professor of Bible, Hebrew Union College are schedule to discuss “Exodus: What Really Happened” at the Skirball Center.

2015: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host “Sara Levy’s World” Music, Gender and Judaism in Enlightenment Berlin.”

http://cjh.org/event/2619

2015: At Beth Shalom in Columbia, MD, Rabbi Susan Grossman is scheduled to discuss Heroines and Harlots: Women in the Book with Rabbi Susan Grossman

2015: Philadelphia’s PBS station, WHYY, is scheduled to host a free screening of “A Wing and A Prayer” open to the public at 6:30 p.m.

https://www.aptonline.org/catalog.nsf/vLinkTitle/WING+AND+A+PRAYER+A

http://aboveandbeyondthemovie.com/

2015(1^stof Sivan, 5775): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2015(1^stof Sivan, 5775): Seventy year old Robert S. Wistrich, the Hebrew University Professor whose expertise in the field of anti-Semitism can be seen the 29 volumes he wrote on the topic passed away today. (A reported by Sam Roberts)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/world/europe/robert-s-wistrich-scholar-of-anti-semitism-dies-at-70.html?login=email&_r=1

2016(11^thof Iyar, 5776): Eighty-four year old Morley Safer, the Toronto born son of Austrian Jewish immigrants Anna (nee Cohn) and Max Safer, the award winning CBS journalist passed away today in Manhattan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/business/media/morley-safer-dies.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-morley-safer-dies-at-84/

2016: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is scheduled to host a session of the First Person 2016 Series featuring a “conversation with Holocaust survivor Irene Weiss.”

2017: For the second day in a row, “farmers, vintners and cheesemakers from the Modiin region are scheduled to bring their crops, goods and crafts to the Tel Aviv port at Hangar 2.”

2017: “Open House Tel Aviv, or Batim Mibifnim, an urban festival of architecture and design…showcasing the city’s chic style” is scheduled to continue for a second day.

2017:  “A food and literature festival at The Banquet as Jerusalem’s Mishkenot Sha’ananim” where visitors can “hear chef Eyal Shani and musician Asaf Roth debate the poetics of food and recipes, or listen to author Meir Shalev and chef Haim Cohen discuss food motifs in Shalev’s books” is scheduled to come to a close today.

2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host a Shabbat dinner during “Interfaith Week.”

2017(23^rdof Iyar, 5777): Seventy-seven year old poet and Hebrew translator Chana Bloch passed away today. (As reported by William Grimes)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/books/chana-bloch-died-poet-and-translator.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&rref=obituaries&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Obituaries&pgtype=article2017: In announcing that “Jesse Eisenberg will play Marcel Marceau in ‘Resistance,’ a film…that focuses on the legendary mime’s involvement in the French resistance during World War II,”  writer and director Jonathan Jakubowicz  today “told the Associated Press” that “the story of Marceau and the resistance is one of the most striking secrets of World War II.”

2018: Stacy Hart offered a cheesecake recipe fit for today’s Royal Wedding and this evening erev Shavuot celebrations.

http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/bake-off-star-stacey-harts-cheesecake-fit-for-the-royal-wedding/

2018: Forty-ninth Day of the Omer

2018: Bernard Lewis, the historian and prolific author who specialized in the world of Islam, long before there was any real interest in the subject passed away today at the age of 101. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/obituaries/bernard-lewis-islam-scholar-dies.html

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/06/bernard-lewis-obituary

https://www.amazon.com/Bernard-Lewis/e/B000AP9JRK

2018(5^thof Sivan, 5778): Parasahat Bamidbar – begin the Book of Numbers;

2018(5^thof Sivan, 5778: Seventy-nine year old music publicist turn newspaper publisher Michael Goldstein, the husband of Nancy (Arnold) Goldstein and father of Jocelyn, Marissa and Gillian Goldstein passed away today.  (As reported by Vincent M. Mallozzi)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/obituaries/michael-goldstein-publicist-who-started-soho-weekly-news-dies-at-79.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

2018: In Memphis, TN, Temple Israel is scheduled to host a “Shavuot Celebration and Havdalah Concert with Dan Nichols.

2019(14^thof Iyar, 5779): Pesach Sheni

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pesach-sheni

2019: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Rabbits For Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum and the recently released paperback edition of Robin by Dave Kitzkoff.

2019: The Loft at City Winery is scheduled to host a performance by award winning Jerusalem born singer and musician Tamar Eisenman.

2019: Starting this morning, the Center for Jewish History is scheduled to host “Legacies of Violence: The Pogroms of the Russian Civil War at 100.”

https://programs.cjh.org/event/legacies-of-violence-2019-05-19

2019: The Jewish Genealogical Society and American Sephardi Federation are scheduled to host “What's in a Name? A Case Study of (Re)Discovering Jewish Identity on (and off) an Unlikely African Archipelag”

2019: The Jewish Review of Books is scheduled to host a presentation by Professor Jack Wertheimer, author of The New American Judaism at its 4^thannual conference

https://mailchi.mp/tabletmag/dara-horn-robert-alter-and-more-at-the-jewish-review-of-books-conference?e=7682f0c5c9

2019: The Guy Mintus Trio, led by Israeli pianist and composer Guy Mintus is scheduled to perform tonight at a “New York release party.”

2019: Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum is scheduled to host the “fifth annual Greek Jewish Festival.”

https://www.kkjfestival.com/

2020: The Breman museum is scheduled to host “a live virtual show from local musician and Executive Director of the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival, Joe Alterman.”

2020: Via Zoom, the Streicker Center is scheduled to host “Judith Viorst, author of the New York Times bestseller Necessary Losses, who “will talk about her new book, Nearing 90, which tackles the complicated joys and everyday tribulations of becoming a nonagenarian with signature savvy and humor.”

2020: The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is scheduled to host “Livestream: The Global Resurgence of Anti-Semitism.”

2020: In San Rafael, CA, Congregation Rodef Shlom is scheduled to host, via Facebook, “Chasidic Tales and Melodies with Rabbi Elana Rosen-Brown,:

2020: Vilna Shul, Boston’s Center for Jewish Culture is scheduled to host a “discussion via Zoom with Dr. Jordan Kassalow, founder of VisionSpring.”

2020: Via Zoom The London School of Jewish Studies is scheduled to host Debbie Meyer as she lectures on “The Trials of King David: Hands of Blood.”

2020: “The inaugural Great Big Jewish Food Fest featuring Jewish culinary talents like Michael Solomonov, Joan Nathan and Michael Twitty” is scheduled to begin today. (As reported by Joe Bauer)

This Day, May 20, In Jewish History by Mitchell A.and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 20



68(3rd of Sivan, 3828): During the Great Revolt, Vespasian captured Jericho and slaughtered the Jewish inhabitants.

325:  The First Council of Nicaea, convoked by Emperor Constantine, opens.  Among other things, the Council dealt with the issue of setting the date for Easter.  Going forward, Easter would never again be celebrated on the same day as the first day of Pesach.

526: An earthquake, with an epicenter in Syria that reportedly killed 300,000 people, is felt throughout much of the Near East including at least two towns now located in the modern state of Israel – Acre and Beit Jann.

1092: During the reign of St. Ladislaus the Synod of Szabolcs decreed that Jews in Hungary should not be permitted to have Christian wives or to keep Christian slaves. This decree had been promulgated in the Christian countries of Europe since the fifth century, and St. Ladislaus merely introduced it into Hungary.

1217: At the age of 70 (or close to it) William Marshal the English lead who had regarded King John’s policy towards the Jews …as harmful to the state” led the forces loyal to King Henry III to victory over the French at the Battle of Linocln  which led to their expulsion from country

1285: Henry II, the second surviving son of Hugh III succeeded his brother John I who may have been poisoned, as “the last ruling and first titular King of Jerusalem” a meaningless title from the point of Jews.

1293: King Sancho IV of Castile creates the Study of General Schools of Alcalá which would become one Spain’s oldest and finest universities.  During the 1930’s the school would prove to be haven for Jewish intellectuals fleeing anti-Semitism in other parts of Europe.  The school would cease to be a haven when Franco led his coup in 1936 that became the Spanish Civil War and brought facism to the Iberian Peninsula.

1530: Ninety year old Avraham HaLevi Mintz the husband of Livo Minz and Chief Rabbi of Padua,passed away today at Padua, Italy.

1549: In a decision rendered by Queen Bona (sforza), bearing today’s date, the following regulations, modifying and defining the rights of the Jewish community of Grodno, are introduced:  (1) Jews are to pay 17 percent of the taxes the government assessed against the city;  (2) they are freed from some special taxes paid in kind;  (3) houses and lands formerly bought by Jews from citizens are freed from citizens’ taxes; those bought by citizens from Jews are freed from Jewish taxes.  But thenceforth no Jew may buy a house from a citizen without royal permission

1631: The city of Magdeburg in Germany is seized by forces of the Holy Roman Empire and most of its inhabitants massacred, in one of the bloodiest incidents of the Thirty Years' War. For once, there were probably no Jews among the dead.  The Jews had been explled from the town in 1493 and would not be readmitted until 1671 during the reign of the great elector, Frederick William.

1648: King Wladislaus IV of Poland passed away. Wladislaus was the king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth when the Chmielnicki, Uprising began in January of 1648.  According to some, the King and his advisors underestimated the size and the strength of the uprising.  They suffered to major defeats as the Cossacks moved westward.  His death left the Poles leaderless at a crucial time in their history and may have been a contributing factor to the success of the uprising which brought death and destructions to hundreds of thousands of Jews living throughout the area.

1671: Frederick William of Prussia permitted 50 Jewish families who had been expelled from Vienna to settle in his dominion.

1764(18^thof Iyar, 5524): Lag B’Omer was observed Indian raids continued the Virginia frontier in the wake of what was known as “Pontiac’s War.”

1769(13^thof Iyar): Rabbi Nethanel Weil of Prague, author of “Korban Nethanel” passed away.

1794: A day after he passed away, Hyam Simon was buried today at the Alderney Road Jewish Cemetery.

1802: Benjamin Friedberg and Jane Mordecai was married today at the Great Synagogue in London.

1806: Birthdate of British philosopher John Stuart Mill

http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs12115-000-1008-z.pdf#page-1

http://www.joshyuter.com/2006/08/10/judaism/jewish-thought-theology-machshava/john-stuart-mill-on-orthodox-judaism/

1806(3^rdof Sivan, 5566): Talmudist and author Samuel ben Nathan Ha-Levi Loew, who had been born in Bohemia in 1720 and who “presided over a yeshiva at Boskovice, Moravia for almost 60 years” passed away today.

1813: Isaac Samuel Wormser, the German born son of Samuel Isaac Wormser and Elkele Simon Wormser and his Scheinle Ephraim gave birth to their second “stillborn” Child.

1818(14^thof Iyar, 5578); Pesach Sheini

1819(25^thof Iyar, 5579): Rosey Aaron, the wife of Sander bar Aharon passed away today in England.

1819: Rica Meldola, the eldest daughter of Raphael Meldola married David Aaron de Sola, the senior rabbi at Bevis Marks Synagogue in London.

1820(7^thof Sivan, 5580): Second Day of Shavuot; Yizkor

1820: In Warsaw, Gabriel Berekson, the son of Berek and Temerl Bergson and his wife gave birth to composer and pianist Michal Bergson.

1820: Rabbi Löb Glee Hildesheimer, a native of Hildesheim and his wife gave birth to Esriel or Azriel Hildesheimer, a German rabbi who was a leader in the formation of Modern Orthodox Judaism.

1822: Birthdate of author Emile Erckmann who along with Alexandre Chatrian co-authored the 1869 play “Le Jeuf Polonais” (The Polish Jew) which was the basis for “The Bells.”

1835: Michael Rose, the Great Synagogue’s first Rabbi, arrived in Sydney, Australia.

1839(7^thof Sivan, 5599): Second Day of Shavuot; Yizkor

1842: Arch abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote an article in his newspaper the Liberator, referring to Mordecai Noah, one of the most prominent Jews of the period as "a Jewish unbeliever, the enemy of Christ and Liberty."  Garrison felt that Noah had expressed sentiments that were hostile to the abolitionists when, as a Judge, he was delivering a charge to a Grand Jury.  Garrison would continue his attacks on Noah describing him as "the miscreant Jew", that lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the Cross” and as a "Shylock" who "will have his pound of flesh at any cost." 

1842: One day after he had passed away, Jacob Abraham Wood, the husband of Hannah Simmons was buried today at the “Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.”

1847: Consecration of the New Netherdutch Synagogue took place in New York. The congregation was organized so they could, "have a Synagogue where they can worship according to the Amsterdam Minchag. They number about sixty members. The service was performed by the S. E. C. Noot, the Chazan of the congregation, assisted by several young men."

 1851: Birthdate of inventor Emile Berliner. Born in Germany, Berliner came to the United States in 1870.  His most famous invention was the flat phonograph record which replaced the cylinder that had been invented by Thomas Edison.  Berliner made many other contributions through his work at the Bell Labs.  He also was an early developer of the helicopter.  At the end of his life, he supported the rebuilding of Palestine and was very active on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He died in 1929. 

1852: Birthdate of Dr. Immanuel Munk, the native of Posen and brother of Hermann Munk who became a leading physiologist.

1855: Birthdate of Saul Frank.  A Dutch Jew, whose parents were Sephardic, he was a successful businessman who settled in California and married Sarah Vasen the Iowa educated physician who became the first Jewish woman doctor in Los Angeles.

1856: A meeting was organized with the Ottoman Grand Vizier Aali Pasha upon his visit to London today where an agreement on the principles to establish a railway between Jaffa and Jerusalem was signed today

1857: In Philadelphia, PA, “Mayer and Fanny Rice” gave birth to Columbia trained physician Joseph Mayer, the husband of Deborah Levinson, who after practicing medicine in New York, studied psychology at the Universities of Jena and Leipzig, served as the editor The Forumand founded the Society of Education Research.

1858(7^thof Nisan, 5618): Second Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1864(14^thof Iyar, 5624): Pesach Sheni observed on the same day that Confederates were defeating Union Forces under the incompetent political General Benjamin Butler at the Battle of Ware Bottom Church which thwarted part of Grant’s plan to squeeze Lee’s army today.

1866(6^thof Nisan, 5626): Shavuot

1867(18^thof Iyar, 5657): Lag B’Omer

1867: A fair was held today at the Concordia Opera House in Baltimore, MD.  Proceeds from the event are to be used for the building of the Hebrew Hospital which, when completed, will offer services to all indigent citizens without regard to religious affiliation.

1868: Birthdate of Bavaria native Louis A. Behr who in 1890 settled in Pittsburgh where he became president of the Rosenbaum Company, Chairman of the Board of the National Department Stores and a leader of the Jewish community was can be seen by his service as “a director of the Jewish Federation of Philanthropies, the Jewish Home for the Aged and the Hebrew Instate while being married to the former Elsie Rosenbaum, the daughter of Max Rosenbaum.

1873: Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis, a tailor from Reno, received patent 139,121 which protected their invention of blue jeans with copper rivets in areas of stress including the pocket corners and the button fly.
1874: Levi Strauss marketed blue jeans with copper rivets charging $13.50 per dozen.  Strauss arrived in San Francisco with canvas that he thought he could use for making tents to sell to the miners.  But what the miners needed were stout pants, which Strauss gave them using the canvas.  He later changed to heavy blue denim called genes in French which became jeans in to the people of California.  The copper rivets were used because the miners put nuggets in their pants pockets and regular stitching would not hold them.

1876: In Cologne, Germany, “Simon Van den Berg and Catherine Van Stratum” gave birth Brahm van den Berg, the child prodigy pianist who gained fame in Europe “as an operatic conductor and served on the faculty of the Cincinnati Conservatory.

1877: Thirty year old Dr. Ignatz Kornfeld married 24 year old Harriet Singer today.

1879: Joseph H. De Meza a young Cuban Jew pleaded guilty to charges that he had tried to steal clothing from Mrs. Charles A. Lillie by swindling her.  He was held over because he could not raise $3,000 in bail.  During the proceedings, De Meza told the court of various swindles he had taken part since his family left Cuba six years ago.  According to De Meza, his family had been forced to flee from their home in Matanzas because they were part of the insurgency aimed at overthrowing the Spanish rulers of Cuba.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F30916FA385A137B93C3AB178ED85F4D8784F9

1880: Birthdate of University of Georgia undergrad and Columbia trained attorney Leonard Hass, the defense attorney for Leo Frank and “the first representative of the ACLU in Georgia” who was the father of John and Leonard Haas, Jr.

1881: In “Posvol, Lithuania, Wolf and Chaija Esther (Shalowitz) Bernstein gave birth to Johns Hopkins undergrad and U. of California Ph.D. Benjamin Abram Bernstein ,the husband of Rose Davidson, brother-in-law of sculptor Jo Davidson and longtime Professor of Mathematics at the Cal, Berkley.

https://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/hstc/search?author=&item=77

1882: After a night-long interrogation, five year old Samuel Scharf “confessed to police” describing the role that his father and several other Jews has played in the ritual murder of Andreas Huri at Tisza-Eszlar.

1884: Birthdate of Philadelphia, PA native Leon Schlesinger, motion picture producer “behind Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1930’s and 1940’s” who “oversaw the creation of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd” and who was the husband of Bernice Schlesinger.

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/classic/leon-schlesingers-obituary-6088.html

1885(6^thof Sivan, 5645): Shavuot

1885: NYU trained physician, Zionist and “American patriot” Joseph Isaac Bluestone, the Lithuanian born son of Chaim (Hyman) Bluestone and Golde Chaya Bluestone and his wife Sarah Rachel Bluestone gave birth to Rose Celia Bluestone

1886: Birthdate of Jake Guzik, the native of Cracow who became the “Treasurer” responsible for the financial well-being for Al Capone which did not preclude him from taking part in a myriad of other criminal activities.

1887: In Poland, Solomon and Rose Goldstock Kolko gave birth to Nathan Kolo, the husband of Sara Alpert Kolko with whom he had six children.

1888: At Cologne, Rudolf Mosse, the son of Dr. Marcus Mosse and Ulrike Mosse and his wife Emilie gave birth to Felicia Lachmann-Moses

1888: Birthdate of Rabbi Moses Aaron Poleyeff, the native of Minsk who came to the United States in 1920 where he served on the faculty of Yeshiva College.

1889(19^thof Iyar): Italian Jewish leader Samuel Altari passed away

1890(1st of Sivan, 5650): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1890: Kentucky native Frank Lyon, who during the Spanish American War served on board the USS Oregon as an Assistant Engineer “with the rank of Ensign” joined the U.S. Navy today.

1891: “He Wants to go Home” published today described the plight of Barney Greenman who came to United States with his parents a year ago.  The teenager who has received help from the United Hebrew Charities, wants to go back to Rotterdam where he can rejoin his parents who went back because they “did not succeed in make a fortune…”

1891: In London, as the number of destitute Russian Jews seeking refuge in Great Britain, The Evening News “warns authorities that if the Hebrew ‘invasion’ is not checked…an anti-Hebrew movement…will grow up in England.”

1891: Louis Raphael shot his fiancée, Rachel Weinberg this evening and then turned the gun on himself.

1890: It is alleged that two or more unidentified individuals threw the body of Samuel Hutch, a Jewish peddler, down an abandoned mine shaft near Wurtsborough, NY.

1891: Dr. Henry M. Leipziger was unanimously elected Assistant Superintendent of Schools in New York City.

1893: As the condition of Jews in Russia worsened it was reported today those living in the Asiatic part of the empire are to be expelled in the same manner as their co-religionist in the Polish part of the empire.

1893: Birth of Herzl's daughter Margarethe Gertrude (always known as "Trude").

1894(14^thof Iyar, 5654): Pesach Sheini

1894: Birthdate of “middleweight boxer August “Augie” Ratner, the Minneapolis “gangster and owner of Augie’s Theatre Lounge.

https://www.amazon.com/Augies-Secrets-Minneapolis-Hennepin-Strip-ebook/dp/B01N9OWCZ7

http://www.hazelandwren.com/2013/what-were-reading-augies-secrets/

1895: In Brooklyn, a judgment in the amount of twelve dollars was awarded to the landlord who owned the building at 116 Seigel Street to be paid by Congregation Havercham which had failed to pay rent for the month of May.

1896: In New York the laying of the cornerstone took place for the new Synagogue of Congregation Shearith Israel at 70th Street and Central Park West. At the entrance to the synagogue, there are two millstones that were from Mill Street, the location of the town miller during the early colonial period.

 1896: Max Bodenheimer, leader of the Cologne Zionists, invites Herzl to speak. Bodenheimer was a lawyer in Cologne and one of the main figures in German Zionism. Close to Theodor Herzl, he was the first president of the Zionist Federation of Germany and one of the founders of the Jewish National Fund. After his flight in 1933 from Nazi Germany, and a short sojourn in Holland, he settled in Palestine in 1935.  He passed away in 1940.

1897(18th of Iyar, 5657): Lag B'Omer

1897: According to a compilation of the May Laws published today, the right of Jews “to become shareholders in stock companies, or directors, managers, or superintendents of real property belonging to corporations and situated outside of towns or townlets in the Pale” was severely limited.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10508-may-laws

1898: District of Columbia native Franklin Hart the future paymaster of the “Celtic” joined the U.S. Navy today.

1898: The Jewish Messenger reported that Congregation Orach Chaim had resolved to purchase its first building at 221 East 51st Street. The edifice was formerly used as a church. Prior to this, the congregants had been worshipping in rented space, reportedly above a beer saloon. During the meeting at which the decision to make the purchase was reached, long-term president Meyer Dannenberg "...arose and surprised members by giving toward the new edifice $5,000 in behalf of his son, Hon. Isaac Dannenberg."

1898: One day after she had passed away, 38 year old Elizabeth “Bloomah” Van Gelder, the daughter of Louis Van Gelder and Lydia Park, was today buried in London at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery.”

1898(28 of Iyar, 5658: Sixty-two year old Rabbi Herman Phillips, a teacher at the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society for the last six years passed away at his home on 3^rd Avenue. A native of Germany, he served as cantor at the synagogue on west 44^th Street in Manhattan before serving as a rabbi at congregations in Boston and Toronto

1899: “French Cheers for Dreyfus” published today described the reaction in Paris to the acquittal of the notorious Jew baiter, Max Regis on charges of inciting to murder.  An angry mob followed him to the train station and the marched to the Officers’ Club where they cheered for Dreyfus and Picquart.  When the French officers turned a water hose on the crowd, they were pelted with stones some of which injured the anti-Dreyfus military men.

1899: It was reported today that police arrested fifty rioters who attacked the Jewish quarter in Algiers where they wrecked several houses.

1900: The 48^th Convention of District No.2 of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith opened today in St. Louis.

1901: The celebration marking the golden jubilee of Temple Beth Elohim, “the oldest synagogue in Brooklyn” came to an end today.

1902: Today Frank Maximilian Steinhardt, the Munich born son of Simon and Regina Steinhardt, the husband of Alice Florence Ledden, who joined the U.S Army in 1882, completed his service in Cuba as chief clerk of the military government under General Leonard Wood.

1903: Miss Anita Sutherland discovered the unconscious body of Washington Seligman, the son of James Seligman, at the Hotel Rossmore, where he had used a safety razor blade to cut the left side of his throat in a failed attempt at suicide and rushed him to Roosevelt Hospital where his life was saved.

1904(6^thof Sivan, 5664): Shavuot

1904: Birthdate of Kiev native Frank Philip Cohen who in 1911 came to the United States where he went on to practice law after graduating from Boston University.

1904: Birthdate of Meir Tobianski

http://israelsdocuments.blogspot.com/2013/01/killing-meir-tobianski.html

1905: Birthdate of Washington, DC and George Washington University graduate Joseph Henry Abel, the architect who designed such buildings The Broadmoor and The Shoreham Hotel

1906(25th of Iyar, 5666): Raphael Louis Bischoffsheim, a Dutch-born French banker, politician, philanthropist and founder of the Nice Observatory passed away today.

1907: Incorporation of Dropsie College in Philadelphia, PA

1907(7^thof Sivan, 5667): Second day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1911: In Chicago, birthdate of Jerome Morton Comar “the chairman of the executive of the Maremont Corporation and leader of the Jewish community as can be seen by his  service as “director of the Chicago Young Men’s Jewish council and president of the Jewish Federation and Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago

https://www.jta.org/1975/09/23/archive/jerome-m-comar-dead-at-64

1912: In New York, Nathan Finkelstein and Anna Katzenellenbogen gave birth to Moses Isaac Finkelstein, who gained fame as Sir Moses I. Finley

1913: In Bryan, TX, founding of Frieda Temple

1912: The Independent Order of True Sisters which had been organized in 1846 and now has 20 lodges and 4,815 members including Biana B. Robitscher heled 122^ndSemi-Annal or 63^rd Annual session of the Grand Lodge today in New York City.

1913: Mrs. M.L. Rothschild is among those scheduled to be considered for a three year directorship at the annual meeting of the Chicago-Winfeld Tuberculosis Sanatorium tonight.

1914: In Jerusalem, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Shapira gave birth to Avraham Elkanah Shapira who served as the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1983 to 1993.

1914: “Henry Siegel, the indicted dry goods merchant and banker is scheduled to set sail from London on the White Star liner Olympic” for his return to New York after claiming that he had not intended to escape the long arm of the law by going to England.

1915(7^thof Sivan, 5675): Second Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

 1915: In the famous kibbutz Deganya, Shmuel and Devorah Dayan, Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Zhashkiv gave birth to Moshe Dayan who as a teenager joined the Haganah, lost an eye in an attack on Lebanon with an Australian Division and who during the War for Independence, Dayan played a key role in the relief of Deganya. He rose in the ranks of the Israeli army becoming Chief of Staff and Minister of Defense and then resigning after the Yom Kippur War because he was criticized for Israel's lack of preparedness. In 1977 he joined the Begin government.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/moshe-dayan

https://www.idf.il/en/minisites/past-chiefs-of-staff/lt-gen-moshe-dayan-1953-1958/

1915: The Ottoman government allowed Hebrew to be used once again as a written language for letters, although it will be censored by the military.

1915: The Philadelphia Inquirer described the function of the Hebrew Free School in Camden as being “to teach the Hebrew language and to translate it into to English.”

1915: As of today, “thousands of Atlanta businessmen, including practically every banker in the city, a Basil Stockbridge, a former assistant to Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey, have signed their names to petitions pleading for a commutation of Leo M. Frank’s death sentence.”

1917: The Ottomans allowed the Jews to return to Jaffa and Tel Aviv reversing the order expelling them from their homes.

1917: The Sisters of Fidelity are scheduled to hold an informal dancing party this evening at the new ballroom of the Auditorium Hotel.

1917: Joseph Fienberg will represent Congregation Ohavo Emuno Beth Hamedrosh Hachocesh, the oldest Jewish Orthodox congregation in Chicago founded in 1859 as a delegate to the American Jewish Congress meeting today at Chicago and S. M. Jess will represent the congregation as an alternate.

1917: The Hebrew Union Veteran Association and the Hebrew Veterans of the War with Spain are scheduled to hold their annual joint memorial services today at Temple Ansche Chesed in Harlem.

1917: In Chicago a mass meeting tonight raised over $500,000 for the Jewish Relief Committee for War Sufferers with largest contribution coming from Mr. and Mrs. Julius Rosenwald who contributed $150,000.

1917: The Jews of Chicago are scheduled to celebrate the emancipation of Russian Jews with a series of mass meetings to be held throughout the city this afternoon concluding with a banquet at the Hotel La Salle.

1918: Today, Vizefeldwebel Fritz Beckhardt a German Jewish fighter ace in World War I, completed three months of service with Jagdstaffel  which he had joined after upgrading “to fighter pilot status.

1918: It was reported today that Benjamin Berinstein, Leo Wolfson and Herbert S. Goldstein are leaders of the movement to raise funds for blind soldiers returning from France that is being spearheaded by the Hebrew Association for the Blind.

1919 Today, the board of directors of Weinstock, Lubin and Company, a Sacramento, CA department store founded in 1874, “decided to recognize more fully the right of the employees to take their part, definitely and consciously, in the management of the affairs of the store” and took the first step by placing “the actual carrying on the busiess into the hands of the Board of Managers, composed entirely of employees of the store.”

1920: Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, with a circulation of seven hundred thousand, "discussed" the Jewish problem.  Ford was an anti-Semite and his paper followed his lead.

1921: It was reported today that “Captain Elkan Voorsanger, the former senior chaplain of the 77^th Division” who spent two years after the World War working to aid Jews in the famine wracked parts of Europe has begun working to raise funds for 150 bed hospital on Dyckman service which will serve as a memorial “the boy in the Army, Navy and Marine Corps who died in the World War.”

1922: “The first Jewish municipal bond issue in history, amount of 80,000 pounds has been authorized by the Palestine Government for the township of Tel-Aviv…The obligations are secured by taxation, the bonds being used at 6 per cent, repayable in twenty years.

1922: Birthdate of Lithuania native Sarah Doron who made Aliyah in 1933 and eventually pursued a political career that including serving as a member of the Knesset and Minister without Portfolio.

1923(5^thof Sivan, 5683): Erev Shavuot

1923: Birthdate of Brooklynite, Columbia graduate and USAAF second Lieutenant Stephen Falk Krantz, the writer and producer whose greatest accomplishment may have been encouraging his wife Judith to became a successful writer

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/obituaries/12krantz.html

1923: Birthdate of Israel Gutman the native of Warsaw “who took part in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, survived three Nazi concentration camps and became a prominent historian of the Holocaust.” (As reported by Isabel Kershner)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/world/israel-gutman-who-survived-and-documented-holocaust-dies-at-90.html?hpw&_r=0

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/ringelbum/ringelblum_gutman.asp

1925: In Chicago, Morton David Cahn, the son of Joseph and Miriam Cahn and his wife Julia Elizabeth Cahn gave birth to Morton David Cahn, Jr.

1925: Founding of Davar, the Hebrew language newspaper of the labor movement in Palestine.

1926(7^thof Sivan, 5686): Second Day of Shavuot

1926: Actress Helen Menken, the daughter of Frederick and Katherine Menken married Humphrey Bogart (who was not Jewish) today.

1926: In Brooklyn, businessman and community activist Harry Plissner and his wife Charlotte gave birth to Marty Plissner, the “longtime political director for CBS News who helped expand the role of television in covering elections.” (As reported by William Yardley)

1927: According to published reports, today John D. Rockefeller sent the United Jewish campaign a check for $100,000 “with a letter expressing the opinion that the drive should receive the support of people of all creeds and all races.”

1928: In Camden, NJ, “The Junior League is” scheduled to give “a Concert and Dance at the Beth El Synagogue.

1928: In Manhattan, hematologist Carl Reich and school administrator Eleanor (Lesinsky) Reich gave birth to Yale University trained attorney Charles Alan Reich the author of The Greening of America. (As reported by Sam Roberts)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/books/charles-reich-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries

1928: Birthdate of Alfred Gilbert Aronowitz “an American rock journalist best known for introducing Bob Dylan and The Beatles in 1964.”

1930: Sir John Hope-Simpson arrives in Palestine.  “Upon the recommendation of the Shaw Commission the British authorities conducted an investigation into the possibilities for future immigration to and settlement of Palestine. The investigation was headed by Sir John Hope-Simpson, who spent a relatively short amount of time in Palestine reviewing the situation. Hope-Simpson's main concern was that there was not sufficient land to support continued immigration. According to his report, Arab farmers were suffering from severe economic difficulties. Many were tenant farmers who owed large amounts of money and lacked the means to ensure successful agricultural endeavors. Others were simply unemployed. The report indicated that the Jewish policy of hiring only Jews was responsible for the deplorable conditions in which the Arabs found themselves. Due to these conditions, Hope-Simpson recommended the cessation of Jewish immigration. Only after new agricultural methods would be introduced in Palestine, would room be made for an additional number of immigrants. In response, Jewish leaders in the Yishuv argued that Hope-Simpson had ignored the capacity for growth in the industrial sector. Stimulating economic growth through increased demand would most likely benefit the Arab economy as well. Hope-Simpson disagreed, seeing the future of Palestine in agriculture, not in industry. Jews also claimed that since they had made a principle of using Jewish labor only, the cessation of immigration would in fact have no effect on Arab unemployment. The Hope-Simpson Report was published in October, 1930. At the same time, the Passfield White Paper was issued, clarifying British intentions in Palestine.”

1930: “The Chief Rabbinate of the Jewish Community of Palestine has joined in the call for a general strike of protest against the suspension of immigration.”

1931: Birthdate of Israeli political leader Yisrael Kessar.  Born in Yemen, he made aliyah at the age of two.  His service in the military was followed by course work in economics and sociology at Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University.  Following an active career with Histadruit, he was elected to the Knesset and served Minister of Transportation from 1992 to 1996.

1931: “Up Pops the Devil,” the movie version of the play by the same name with a script co-authored by Arthur Kober was released today in the United States.

1932: Birthdate of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, a groundbreaking and wide-ranging scholar of Jewish history whose meditation on the tension between collective memory of a people and the more prosaic factual record of the past would influence a generation of thinkers.  (As reported by Joseph Berger)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/nyregion/11yerushalmi.html

1934:Jack Benny is among those who will be featured at the “Friars Frolic” which is scheduled to take place tonight at New York’s Forty-fourth Street Theatre.

1934(6th of Sivan, 5694): First Day of Shavuot

1934: Rabbi William F. Rosenblum is scheduled to lead Confirmation Services at Temple Israel.

1934:Rabbi Samuel J. Levinson is scheduled to lead Confirmation Services at Temple Beth Emeth of Flatbush (Brooklyn).

1934: Rabbi Israel Goldstein is scheduled to lead Confirmation Services at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun on 257 West Eighty-Eighth Street.

1934:Rabbi Samuel Buchler is scheduled to deliver a sermon entitled “The Ten Commandments in Our Generation;" at New People's Synagogue on Clinton Street.

1934:Rabbi Stephen S. Wise is scheduled to deliver a sermon entitled "Young Israel and the Undying Jew;" at the Free Synagogue meeting at Carnegie Hall.

1934: The 1934 edition of the "Friars Frolic" will be presented at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre this evening. It will be staged under the direction of Lou Holtz, Jack Benny and Nat Burns. The show, which will offer a series of original and intimate sketches and playlets, which have been presented at private "Frolics," will also enlist the services of more than one hundred stars of the stage, screen and radio. With his plain vanilla looks, bland speech pattern and neutral name, Benny was the most “un-Jewish” of Jewish comedians. 

1934: Birthdate of Moshe Shahal the Baghdad native who made Aliyah in 1950 and pursued a political career that included serving Deputy Speaker of the Knesset.

1935: Birthdate of Michael Rose, the native of Bedford-Stuyvesant who gained fame as screen writer Mickey Rose

1936: Miguel Mariano Gómez began his service as President of Cuba during which he negotiated with Congressman William I Sirovich about the possibility of “Cuba opening her doors to at least 100,000 persecuted German Jews”

1936: J. H. Hertz, chief rabbi of the British Empire is scheduled to deliver an oration at the Willesden cemetery during the funeral services for Dr. Nahum Sokolow, one of the founders of political Zionism.” (As reported by JTA)

1936: A memorial service is scheduled to be held this evening at the Great Synagogue in London in honor of Dr. Nahum Sokolow of blessed memory.

1936: It was reported today that “the Solingen Tageblatt revealed a case in which the Nuremberg racial laws had been used in an attempt to blackmail a wealthy Jew” – a case which resulted in the man being imprisoned for three months and “the woman was sent to prison for two months.”

1936: “Today all Palestine railways were placed under rigid curfew regulations” and Christians have “joined Jews in evacuating the Old City of Jerusalem” where “only 200 Jewish remains out of a former total Jewish population of 5,000.”

1936: “You Can’t Fool Antoinette” a comedy filmed by cinematographer Boris Kaufman and with music by Casmir Oberfeld who will die at Auschwtiz, was released today in France.

1936:As Arab violence continued, all railways in Palestine were placed under rigid curfew regulations.  “Christians joined Jews in evacuating the Old ‘City of Jerusalem.”  As of today, only “200 Jewish families out of a former total of 5,000 remained in the Old City.”

1938: The Palestine Post reported that Arab terrorists set on fire a special experimental agricultural farm, set up by the government, for the benefit of Palestinian Arab farmers.

1939: Despite the recent outbreaks of violence in response to the White Paper, as the Sabbath came to an end, Jews peacefully “paraded in their customary fashion on the main streets of Jerusalem.”  In an attempt to bridge the gap between Jews and Arabs, the Sephardic community issued a statement that expressed solidarity with the rest of the Jews of Palestine in the struggle to annul the betrayal of the White Paper appealed to the Arabs saying “Brethren in race, our hand is outstretched today as ever for a true peace, for collaboration in an honorable and lasting peace.  The mandatory proposals will lead to the ruin of the country and the impoverishment of both Jews and Arabs instead of construction and revival.

1939: “Sons of Liberty, a short drama film directed by Michael Curtiz, which tells the story of Haym Solomon” and winner of “an Academy Award for Best Short Subject” was released today in the United States. At the 12th Academy Awards, held in 1940, it won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject

1940: A concentration camp begins functioning at Auschwitz in Poland. Because most of Europe's Jews live in Poland and Eastern Europe, the six concentration camps called death camps will be established there: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibór, and Majdanek.

1940: This morning FDR met with labor leader David Lasser in the White House and this afternoon he ate lunch Treasure Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

1941(23^rdof Iyar, 5701): Thirty year old David Raziel, a founder of Irgun, was killed today.  Raziel was serving with the British in Iraq in their fight against the pro-Axis government when a bomb from a German aircraft kill him and the British officer with whom he was serving.

1941(23rd of Iyar, 5701): Dutch physicist Leonard Salomon Ornstein passed away. Born in 1880, he studied theoretical physics with Hendrik Antoon Lorentz at University of Leiden. He subsequently carried out Ph.D. research under the supervision of Lorentz, concerning an application of the statistical mechanics of Gibbs to molecular problems. In 1914 he was appointed professor of physics, as successor of Peter Debye, at University of Utrecht. In 1922 he became director of Physical Laboratory (Fysisch Laboratorium) and extended his research interests to experimental subjects. His measurements concerning intensities of spectral lines brought Physical Laboratory in the international limelight. He is also remembered for the Ornstein-Zernike theory (named after Ornstein and Frederik Zernike) concerning correlation functions. Together with Gilles Holst, director of Philips Research Laboratories (Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium), he was the driving force behind establishing the Dutch Physical Society (Nederlands Natuurkundig Vereniging, NNV) in 1921. From 1939 until November 1940 he was Chairman of this Society. From 1918 until 1922 Ornstein was Chairman of the Dutch Zionist Society (Nederlandse Zionistische Vereniging). Immediately after the involvement of the Netherlands in the World War II (see Battle of the Netherlands), a friend from the United States of America, the astronomer Peter van de Kamp, offered to bring Ornstein and his family to America. However, Ornstein did not accept this offer, since, as he put it, he would not leave his laboratory in Utrecht. Owing to his Jewish heritage, Ornstein was summarily dismissed from University in September 1940; he was even barred from entering his own laboratory. In November 1940, he was officially dismissed from University. On his own initiative, in 1940, Ornstein withdrew his membership of the Dutch Physical Society. During this period he increasingly distanced himself from public life, to the degree that he no longer wished to receive guests at home. Ornstein died six months after being barred from University. One of the five buildings of Department of Physics of University of Utrecht, Ornstein Laboratorium, is named in his honor.

1941: In France, more laws were put into place restricting Jewish movements in all aspects of life. Jews are prohibited from engaging in wholesale and retail trade.  They cannot own banks, hotels, or restaurants

1941: Goering commanded that no Jew would be allowed to emigrate from any occupied territory..."in view of the imminent final solution". This was the first official reference of THE FINAL SOLUTION.

1942:  Three hundred train cars of clothing taken from those who had been killed Chelmo arrived in Lodz for sorting by Jewish workers. Ironically this meant that the death of Jews gave the Lodz Jews work which meant they got to live. 

1943: As the Allies begin to win the Battle of the Atlantic which was critical to winning WW II and ending the Shoah, an RAF B-24 sunk the U-258.

1944 “Russian Rhapsody” an animated short subject featuring the voice of Mel Blanc “was released to theatres” today.

1944(27th of Iyar, 5704): Reportedly the day on which Salomon Gluck, a French doctor and leader of the French Resistance was assassinated in Kaunaus.  He had been shipped from Drancy on convoy 73 along with 878 other men all of whom were murdered.

1944(27^thof Iyar, 5704): Sixty-nine year old Dr. Hans Leo Przibram, the son of Gustav and Charlotte Przibram and Austrian zoologist who was barred from the institution he had founded after the Anschluss because he was Jewish died today at Theresienstadt.

1944: In Jerusalem, Zev and Esther Vilnay gave birth to Matan Vilnai.  Zev had been born in Kishinev and moved with his parents to Haifa at age 6.  He worked as a topographer for the Haganah and the IDF.  He pursued a career as leading geographer, author and lecturer. Mata joined the IDF where he served with the paratroopers, the Sayeret Matkal and deputy commander of the assault force for the Entebbe Raid. He rose to the rank of Major General and served as Deputy Chief of Staff before retiring to civilian life where he served in the Knesset and as Minister for Home Front Defense. 

1945: Between today and May 27, four Polish Jews who return to their hometown of Dzialoszyce are murdered by Poles.

1946: In what would appear to be an ideological self-contradiction, Britain’s Labour government which was trying to hold on to the Empire, including Palestine successfully passed a bill nationalized the UK’s coal industry, part of the plan to bring socialism to the British Isles.

1947: The Palmach “blew up a coffee house in Fajja, specifically in retaliation for the murder of two Jews in nearby Petah Tikva.”

1948: Twenty-six year old George Frederick “Buzz Beurling, “Canada’s most famous WW II fighter pilot” who had been recruited to fly for the IAF, “fatally crashed his Noorduyn Norseman transport aircraft while landing at Aeroporto dell'Urbe in Rome” while on his way to Israel.

1948: First appearance of the Israeli Air Force.  Real combat aircraft bearing the Star of David would not appear until later in the week.

1948: Heavy Syrian shelling of Degania Alef started at about 04:00 this morning from the Tzemah police station, by means of 75 mm cannons, and 60 and 81 mm mortars. The barrage lasted about half an hour. At 04:30 the Syrian army began its advance on the Deganias and the bridge over the Jordan River north of Degania Alef. Unlike the attack on Tzemah, this action saw the participation of nearly all of the Syrian forces stationed at Tel al-Qasr, including infantry, armor and artillery. The Israeli defenders numbered about 70 persons (67 according to Aharon Israeli's head count), most of them not regular fighters, with some Haganah and Palmach members. Their orders were to fight to the death. They had support from three 20 mm guns at Beit Yerah, deployed along the road from Samakh to Degania Alef. They also had a Davidka mortar, which exploded during the battle, and a PIAT with fifteen projectiles. At night, a Syrian expeditionary force attempted to infiltrate Degania Bet, but was caught and warded off, which caused the main Syrian force to attack Degania Alef first. At 06:00, the Syrians started a frontal armored attack, consisting of 5 tanks, a number of armored vehicles and an infantry company.[5] The Syrians pierced the Israeli defense, but their infantry was at some distance behind the tanks. The Israelis knocked out four Syrian tanks and four armored cars with 20 mm cannons, PIATs and Molotov cocktails.[33] Meanwhile, other defenders kept small arms fire on the Syrian infantry, who stopped in citrus groves a few hundred meters from the settlements. The surviving Syrian tanks withdrew back to the Golan.At 07:45, the Syrians halted their assault and dug in, still holding most of the territory between Degania Alef's fence and Samakh's police fort. They left behind a number of lightly damaged or otherwise inoperable tanks that the Israelis managed to repair.

 1948:  Jewish fighters scored their first victory over the Syrians at Deganya.  At 4:30in the morning, Syrian troops crossed the Jordan and attacked the Kibbutz with tanks and flamethrowers.  By noonthe tanks were inside the perimeter of Deganya when two 65 mm. howitzers and additional fighters under the command of Moshe Dyan arrived. When they went into action, the Syrians were so startled that they retreated.  One of the Syrian tanks that had penetrated the kibbutz and was destroyed remains to this day at Deganya as a memorial to the bravery of the defenders.  What seemed like a miracle was the result of a bold gamble by Yigal Yadin, the man who sent the guns in the first place.

 1948: The siege of Gesher ended when the two field pieces that had saved Deganya from the Syrians were rushed southwards.  The guns opened fire on the Iraqi forces besieging the Jewish fighters.  Faced with modern weapons, the Iraqis fled rather than fight.

1948: Foreign Minister Moshe Sharet informed Secretary-General Trygve Lie that Abba Eban was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations.

1948: Mordechai "Modi" Alon and the rest of the Jewish pilots who have been training in Czechoslovakia board a DC-54 transport plane and begin their flight back to Israel.  Although they have not completed their training, the pilots are anxious to get home since they have heard that the Egyptian Air Force has been attacking the newly created Jewish state.

1948: Operation Balak officially begins with its first flight from a Czech airfield code named ‘Etzion.’ Operation Balak was the name given to secret program for purchasing and shipping arms to the infant Jewish state.

1948: The United Nations named Count Folke Bernadotte to serve as mediator between the Jewish and Arab states.

1948: “The River Lady,” a western filmed by cinematographer Irving Glassberg premiered in New York City today.

1949: Today the leader of Umm al-Fahm “signed on oath of allegiance to the State of Israel, which was in the “Little Triangle,” which had been awarded to Israel by the Lausanne Conference of 1949.

1949: “The Lady Gambles” in which Tony Curtis, appearing in only his third motion picture, plays the “bellboy” who has four lines and 10 seconds of screen time, was released in the United States today.

1950: Hedda Sterne signed a letter to President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 20 to protest aesthetically conservative group-exhibition juries. Born into a Jewish home in Bucharest, she was the “only woman in a group of Abstract Expressionists known as "The Irascibles.”

https://jwa.org/thisweek/may/20/1950/hedda-sterne-protests-monster-national-exhibition

1950: Birthdate of Brooklyn native Alan Zweibel who has worked on several television shows starting with writing skits for “Saturday Night Live” and won the 2006 Thurber Prize for American Human for his novel The Other Shulman.

http://www.alanzweibel.com/

1951(14^thof Iyar, 5771): Pesach Sheni

1951: In Manhattan, Bill Schwartz, a professor of social work at Columbia University, and social worker Ruth (Efron) Schwartz gave birth to Brandeis grad Gil David Schwartz, the CBS executive who wrote under the name of “Stanley Bing.” (As reported by Richard Sandomir)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/business/media/gil-schwartz-dead-wrote-as-stanley-bing.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries

1951(14^thof Iyar, 5771): Fifty five year old Solomon Landman, the Cincinnati born “son of Louis H. and Ada Gedalish Landman, the husband of “the former Rita Boehm,” father of Doris, Joan, Louis and Nathan Landman and graduate of the University Cincinnati and Hebrew College who began his rabbinic career B’rith Sholom Temple in Springfield, Il, founded the Hillel Chapter at the University of Wisconsin and was leading Temple Isaiah in Kew Gardens, Queens when he passed away today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1951/05/21/87260846.pdf

1951: One day after he had passed away, funeral services were held “this afternoon in the village of Zichron Yaakov, near Haifa, for 64 year old David Remez, the Israeli Education who had begun his life in he village working as a laborer thirty-seven years ago and whose body had lain in state all night in Jerusalem where mourners including President Chaim Weizmann paid their respects.

1953(6th of Sivan, 5713) First Day of Shavuot

1953(6^thof Sivan, 5713): Seventy eight year old University of Pennsylvania trained oral surgeon and Spanish American War veteran Dr. Morris I. Schamberg, the founder of “the division of oral surgery at the Vanderbilt Clinic” and the “head of orgal surgery at the New York Post Graduate Hospital who was the husband of Jean M. Chamber and the father of John Schamberg passed away today in Great Neck, NY.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1953/05/21/96623770.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0

1953(6^thof Sivan, 5713): Sixty-seven year old Austrian native Nettie Kinsbruner, the daughter of Shmuel and Rachel Stettner and the wife of David Kinsbruner passed away today in Miami Beach.

1954(7th of Iyar, 5714): Selig Brodetsky, “a British Professor of Mathematics, a member of the World Zionist Executive, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the second president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem” passed away today.

1954: Release date for “Three Coins in A Fountain,” produced by Sol C. Siegel with music by Victor Young

1955(28^thof Iyar, 5715): Seventy year old Russian born American artist Charles Polowetski passed away today.

http://www.askart.com/artist/Charles_Ezekiel_Polowetski/117580/Charles_Ezekiel_Polowetski.aspx#

1957(19^thof Iyar, 5717): One worker was killed when a terrorist “opened fire in the Arava region.”

1957: Birthdate of Steven Leiber, a San Francisco art dealer and collector who became an expert in artists’ ephemera and built an archive that became an important resource for scholars and curators. (As reported by Roberta Smith)

1958: In Savannah, GA, a fire broke out at Adler’s Department Store which had been founded by Leopold Adler and subsequently run by his son Sam G. Adler, the husband of Elinor Grunsfeld Adler and his grandson Lee Adler, the husband of Emma Morel Adler.

1960: In Atlanta, GA, “the remodeled and expand facilities” of the Temple which had been bombed by segregationists following an appearance by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1958 are scheduled to be dedicate today.

1960: Birthdate of actor Tony Goldwyn

1961(5^thof Sivan, 5721): Parashat Bamidbar; Erev Shavuot

1961(5^thof Sivan, 5721): Seventy-five year old Myer Solomon Cohn, the Russian born son of Leo Cohn and the husband of Sadie Cohn passed away today in Hyattsville, MD.

1962(16^thof Iyar, 5722): Fifty-six year old German born journalist turned American Social Worker Dr. Kurt Pine who came to the United States in 1940 where he eventually became “executive director of the Shorefront Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association” in Brooklyn and raised two children – Alfred and Annie – with his wife, “the former Bessie Halder” passed away today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/05/21/94102891.pdf1962: Two days after he had passed away funeral services are scheduled to be held in Brooklyn’s Union Temple for Hebrew Union College graduate and St. John’s University trained attorney, Sidney Saul Tedesche the Elmwood, Ohio born son of Alexander Tedesche and Jeanette Greenfield and the holder of Ph.D. from Yale who served as a rabbi at Brith Sholom in Springfield, Beth El in Providence, Bethel El in San Antonio, Mishkan Israel in New Haven and Union Temple in Brooklyn while raising two daughters – Carol and Jeanne – with his wife “the former Irma Goldman.”

https://www.geni.com/people/Sidney-Tedesche/6000000002717858029

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/05/19/140578272.pdf

1962: An Orchestra Hall Concert of the Halevi Choral Society with Hyman Reznick conducting and featuring Cantor Jacob Barkin as guest soloist was recorded live today.

htp://faujsa.fau.edu/music-data/301854/301854.pdf

1966: Birthdate of actress Mindy Cohn, who played Natalie on the sitcom “Facts of Life.”

1968(22^ndof Iyar, 5728): Fifty-six year old concert pianist Ray Lev, the Rostov-on-Don born daughter of Cantor Moses whose last performance was on April 28 “when she played the Schuman concerto” passed away today.

https://broadcast41.com/biography/lev-ray

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/05/21/77089120.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0





1970: U.S. premiere of “Too Late the Hero,” a WW II film with a script by Lukas Heller.

1971: The Second Leningrad anti-Zionist trials in which Hillel Butman and Lev Yagman were two of the defendants came to an end today.

1972(7^thof Sivan, 5732): Second Day of Shavuot

1972(7^thof Sivan, 5732): Forty-three year old Irvin Milton “Bootsy” Lazarus, the son of Sam and Annie Lazarus passed away today.

1973(18th of Iyar, 5733): Lag B’Omer

1973: “Letter bombs were sent to Jewish and Israeli addresses in Britain and Holland” after which two Arabs were arrested by police and expelled from Great Britain.

1973(18^thof Iyar, 5733): Sixty-three year old Charles Brasch, “a New Zealand poet, literary editor and arts patron who was the founding editor of the literary journal Landfall passed away today.

http://jewishonlinemuseum.org/charles-brasch

http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/landfall/index.html

1974(28th of Iyar, 5734): Leontine Sagan, Austrian born actress and founder of the National Theatre of Johannesburg passed away at the age of 85.

1974(28th of Iyar, 5734): Yom Yerushalayim

1977: JTA reported that “The Senate has confirmed President Carter's appointment of Manuel Plotkin, 53, a marketing research expert and executive of Sears Roebuck and Co., to be director of the Census Bureau. He will be the first Jew to hold that office of which Thomas Jefferson was the original incumbent in 1790. Senate approval of the appointment was without dissent. Plotkin, who was born in Irkutsk, Siberia, was taken by his parents to Mexico City at the age of three. The family moved to Chicago in 1929 where they have lived ever since. Plotkin and his wife, the former Dianne Weiss, are members of Temple Sholom in that city. As head of the Census Bureau, which is part of the Department of Commerce, Plotkin will oversee about 8000 employees, more than half in Washington and the rest in various points around the U.S. They comprise the field force for monthly population surveys including employment figures for the Department of Labor. Plotkin had been for two years the price economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics at its Chicago regional office and a year as survey coordinator in the Bureou's Washington office.”

1978: Three members of the PFLP (Peoples Front for the Liberation of Palestine) a terrorist organization, killed a policeman  near El Al airlines at Orly Airport outside of Paris, France.

1979: After 857 performances at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, the curtain came down today on the original Broadway production of “I Love My Wife,” the Cy Coleman and Michael Stewart musical.

1981:The Israeli Cabinet reportedly will meet today to discuss proposals made by Philip C. Habib, President Reagan's envoy who has been meeting with the President of Syria over the threat posed by his missiles located in Lebanon.

1983: “Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone” a sci-fi film starring Peter Strauss and with a score by Elmer Bernstein was released today in the United States.

1983: Journalism professor and author Nicholas Lemann was married today in a union that produced his two sons Alexander and Theodore.

1983: Due to being in a coma that followed an attack of pneumonia, Jan Peerce was not able to perform at was to have been his “comeback” concert scheduled for today.

1984(18^th of Iyar, 5744): Lag B’Omer

1985: Israel exchanges 1150 Palestinian prisoners for 3 Israeli soldiers

1988: Leonard Cohen performed a show in San Sebastian, which “Spanish TV station RTE televised” in its entirety.

1988: “Willow” a fantasy film featuring Kevin Pollak, was released in the United States today.

1989(15th of Iyar, 5749): Forty-two year old Comedienne Gilda Radner famed for her roles on “Saturday Night” Live died of ovarian cancer today.

http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/20/1989/gilda-radner

 1992: Poet and college professor Charles Bernstein and artist Susan Bee gave birth to their second child, Felix Bernstein

http://felixbernstein.com/bio.html

1993: NBC broadcast the final episode of season four of “Seinfeld” tonight.

1993: The Jerusalem Post reported that in her 43rd State Comptroller's Annual Report, the State Comptroller, Dr. Miriam Porat, warned that pension funds may soon begin defaulting on payments, if urgent steps are not taken to reduce their huge actuarial deficits. The problem, she disclosed, was compounded by the abuses of the Histadrut, whose funds represented 93 per cent of all fund members. The Histadrut, she pointed out, often forces workers to sign up for its funds via collective wage agreements, and then assigns them to these with large actuarial deficits.

1994(10^thof Sivan, 5754): Staff Sgt. Moshe Bukra, age 30 and Cpl. Erez Ben-Baruch, age 24 were shot dead by HAMAS terrorists at a roadblock one kilometer south of the Erez checkpoint in the Gaza Strip

1994(10^thof Sivan, 5754): Eighty-nine year old Meer Parodenck “the founder and president of the Parodneck Foundation for Self-Help Housing and Community Development, and president of the board of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board” passed away today.  (As reported by Richard D. Lyons)

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/22/obituaries/meyer-parodneck-89-advocate-for-the-poor-of-new-york-dies.html

1997: “Roseanne,” a sitcom creating by, and starring Roseanne Barr ended its final season.

1998(24^thof Iyar, 5758): Seventy-three year old author Cyril Wolf Mankowitz passed away today in County Cork.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-wolf-mankowitz-1158253.html

2000(15^thof Iyar, 5760): Parashat Behar

2000: “A week that began in violence ended violently here, with bloody clashes in the West Bank and Gaza and intensified fighting in southern Lebanon.”

2001:The New York Times featured books by Jewish writers and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “Tell Me A Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television” by Don Hewitt the son of German Jewish and Russian Jewish immigrant who transformed television journalism.

2002(9th of Sivan, 5762): Sixty-year old Stephen Jay Gould an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of science who was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation” passed away today. (As reported by Carol Kaesuk Yoon)

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/21/us/stephen-jay-gould-60-is-dead-enlivened-evolutionary-theory.html?mcubz=0

2002, today, two years after being released in the United States “Escape: Human Cargo,” co-starring Sasson Gabai was broadcast for the first time in Finland.

2002: Yitzhak Vaknin left the position of Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Welfare.

2002: Hamas claimed credit for the highway bombing at Afula.

2003(18^thof Iyar, 5763): Lag B’Omer

2003: Today on C-Span, author and historian Robert Caro, the son of Yiddish speaking Jewish refugee from Warsaw, talked about Master of the Senate, the third in his planned five volume biography of Lyndon Johnson.

2004: “An Israeli court today convicted Marwan Barghouti, a top aide to the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and an emblem of resistance, on murder charges relating to attacks that killed five Israelis, brushing aside his protests that Israel had no right to try him.

2005: “Tamar Schwartz and her daughter, Hadas, 4, were sleeping when the mortar, grenade and rifle attack came early this morning” at Kfar Darom.

2006: “'It's Your Birthday, Clifford Odets! A Centennial Exhibition' at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery” published today provides a window into the artistic side of man whom most of us think of as a playwright.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/theater/20odet.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%7B%222%22%3A%22RI%3A17%22%2C%221%22%3A%22RI%3A8%22%7D

2007: The New York Times published an op-ed piece by novelist and commentator Mark Helprin arguing “that intellectual property rights should be assigned to an author or artist as far as Congress could practically extend them”

2007: In New York City, rededication of Kehila Kedosha Janina. Eighty years ago, Kehila Kedosha Janina opened its doors to serve the small Romaniote Jewish community on the Lower East Side joining hundreds of other Jewish houses of worship in the neighborhood. By the 1940’s there would be other Romaniote synagogues in the New York area. Today this is the only Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere and one of only five original Jewish houses of worship on the Lower East Side that still functions as an active synagogue.

2007: The Upper Mid-West Region of Hadassah presents “Zay Gesunt – You Should Live and Be Well” in Bloomington, Minnesota.

2007: The New York Times features reviews of books written by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson and Einstein: A Biography by Jürgen Neffep; translated by Shelley Frisch.

2007: The Los Angeles Times and The Sunday Washington Post each feature a review of Shakespeare’s Kitchen by Lore Segal. “The protagonist of Shakespeare's Kitchen is Ilka Weisz, a scrappy, opinionated Jewish refugee who has appeared in slightly different guises in Segal's earlier novels, Her First American and Other People's Houses.

2007: Herzalyia Mayor Yael German presented Eliahu Hacohen with the Herzl Award, “the high priest of research into Israeli songs, who has dedicated his life to strengthening the link with our cultural heritage.”

2007(3rd of Sivan, 5767): Ben Wiesman a classically trained pianist, who helped write nearly 60 songs for Elvis Presley, passed away at the age of 85.

2007(3rd of Sivan, 5767): Barcuh Kimmerling, Professor of Sociology at Hebrew University and author of The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military, passed away.

2007: In Cleveland, Ohio, Case Western Reserve University confers an honorary Doctor of Humanities on Morton Mandel who served as a Case Western Reserve University trustee from 1977 through 1992, and is now an honorary trustee. In addition, he is a recipient of the university's Newton D. Baker Distinguished Alumni Award. Mandel has been involved in numerous national and international activities, the Council of Jewish Federations, the Mandel Leadership Institute, and the World Conference of Jewish Community Centers.

2008: Mashina is an Israeli pop rock band considered by many to be Israel's most important and influential rock band. Their musical style took inspiration from ska and hard rock, among others. Mashina is an Israeli pop rock band considered by many to be Israel's most important and influential rock band. Their musical style took inspiration from ska and hard rock, among others.Mashina, one of Israel’s most influential pop rock bands plays at Webster Hall in New York.

2008: At Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, Michael Levin successfully defends his dissertation.  “A Doctor Is Born.”

2009: Kevin Youkilis, “the first baseman and cleanup hitter for the Red Sox returned from the 15-day disabled list today night and promptly went 3-for-5 to raise his average to .404.”

2009:John Simon Bercow officially announced that he was seeking the Speakership of the House of Commons.  Victory would make him the first Jew to serve in this position

2009:  Final day for The Tel Aviv Centennial Multimedia Exhibit at Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Station, NY

2009: In New York, City Winery celebrates Israel’s 61^st Year of Independence with a tasting featuring wines from over 15 Israeli Wineries paired with Israeli singing sensation David Broza for the post-tasting entertainment.  The event would appear to show tjat Jews have gained their independence from the syrupy taste of the Concord grape concoction that was the staple of Jewish homes for decades.

2009: For the last time Lt. Col. Shawn M. Pine mailed a box of scarves to his sister Michelle Lefkowitz. He purchased the scarves on a weekly basis from a little girl in Afghanistan who sold them to support her family.

2009(26^thof Iyar, 5769): Fifty-one year old Army Lt. Colonel Shawn M. Pine was killed today when a vehicle in which he was riding in was struck by an explosive device near Kabul, Afghanistan.  A second generation soldier, Pine served six years in the IDF before graduating from Georgetown University and pursuing a career in the U.S. Army.  He is buried next to his father at Arlington National Cemetery. (As reported by Maia Efrem)

2009(26^thof Iyar, 5769): Twenty-one year old USAF First Lieutenant Roslyn L. Schulte  was killed today when a vehicle in which she was riding in was struck by an explosive device near Kabul, Afghanistan. An intelligence officer, she was the first female USAF Academy graduate to have died in combat.  She was killed in the same attack that took the life of Lt. Col. Pine. (As reported by Maia Efrem)

2009:Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced today that Iran has successfully test-fired a new advanced missile with a range of about 1,200 miles, far enough to strike Israel and southeastern Europe as well as U.S. bases in the Gulf.

2009:As described in the articled archaeologists from Israel’s Antiquities Authority (IAA) have revealed two important artifacts recently discovered in Jerusalem, both dating from the First Temple Period.

The first, a bone seal engraved with the name “Shaul” was found in an excavation being conducted under the auspices of the IAA, in cooperation with the Nature and Parks Authority in the Walls Around Jerusalem National Park, located in the City of David. The dig, which is underwritten by the “Ir David Foundation” (City of David) is being carried out under the direction of Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the IAA.The seal, which is made of bone, was found broken and is missing a piece from its upper right side. Two parallel lines divide the surface of the seal into two registers in which Hebrew letters are engraved. A period followed by a floral image or a tiny fruit appear at the end of the bottom name. The name of the seal’s owner was completely preserved and it is written in the shortened form of the name, Shaul, which is known from both the Bible (Genesis 36:37; 1 Samuel 9:2; 1 Chronicles 4:24 and 6:9) and from other Hebrew seals. Another Hebrew seal and three Hebrew bullae (pieces of clay stamped with seal impressions) were previously discovered nearby. The second artifact, an ancient jar handle bearing the Hebrew name “Menachem” was uncovered in the neighborhood of Ras el ‘Amud during an excavation prior to construction of a girls’ school by the Jerusalem municipality. The jar handle, inscribed with the name "Menachem" carved in Hebrew, was found among settlement remains dating to different phases of the Middle Canaanite period (2200 – 1900 BCE), and the last years of the First Temple period (8-7 BCE) that were recently uncovered during the excavation. The name Menachem Ben Gadi is noted in the Bible as that of a king of Israel who reigned for 10 years in Samaria, as one of the last kings of the Kingdom of Israel. According to Kings II, Menachem Ben Gadi ascended the throne in the 39th year of Uzziah, King of Judah (Judea). The names Menachem and Yinachem both are expressions of condolence, noted excavation director Dr. Ron Be’eri, who speculated they might be related to the death of family members. The archaeologist added that such names already appeared earlier in the Canaanite period, on Egyptian pottery sherds and a document about an Egyptian governor on the Lebanese coast. This is the first time that a handle with the name “Menachem” has been found in Jerusalem.

2009:Four men arrested were arrested tonight, shortly after planting a 16.78-kilogram mock explosive device in the trunk of a car outside the Riverdale Temple and two mock bombs in the backseat of a car outside the Riverdale Jewish Center, another synagogue a few blocks away, authorities said. Police blocked their escape with an 18-wheel truck, smashing their tinted Sport Utility Vehicle windows and apprehending the unarmed suspects. Authorities said the men also plotted to shoot down a military plane. James Cromitie, 55; David Williams, 28; Onta Williams, 32; and Laguerre Payen, all of Newburgh, were charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States and conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles. An official told The Associated Press that three of the men are converts to Islam. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss details of the investigation.

2010(7^th of Sivan, 5770): Second Day of Shavuot

2010(7^th of Sivan, 5770): Eighty-two year old Leonard Wolfson (Baron Wolfson) passed away today.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/leonard-wolfson-businessman-and-philanthropist-1990944.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jun/17/lord-wolfson-obituary

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance-obituaries/7750834/Lord-Wolfson.html

2010: The First Festival of Israeli Jazz NY is scheduled to open at The Stone in the East Village.

2010:The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum reopened parts of its grounds to visitors on today after floodwaters from the nearby Vistula and Sola rivers seemed to peak and begin to recede.

2010: Hedy Lamarr was chosen from 150 IT people to be featured in a short film launched by the British Computer Society

2011:Cedar Village in Mason, Ohio is schedule to host an event entitled “Memory and Jewish Identity” during which Dr. Adrian Parr, associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and affiliate faculty, Department of Philosophy and Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati will use the narrative of her grandmother’s survival of the Holocaust and her own subsequent discovery of her Jewish identity to explore the importance of Jewish cultural memory for keeping Jewish identity alive amidst adversity.

2011:Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met with President Obama the White House today.

2011:Violin virtuoso Gil Shaham is scheduled to play “Walton’s sublime and rarely performed Violin Concerto, a masterpiece of the violin literature commissioned and debuted by Jascha Heifetz in 1936, with one of the world's greatest ensembles, The Philadelphia Orchestra.”

2011: In “Perched in Berlin With Hitler Rising,” Janet Maslin reviewed In The Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson.  Just when you thought you knew all you needed to know about the Hitler era, along comes Larson who provides a fascinating, informative snapshot of the pre-war world focusing on the life of William E. Dodd, FDR’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Berlin and his exotic daughter.

2011: Despite political unrest, pilgrims are scheduled to celebrate Lag B’Omer at the El Ghriba synagogue.  The normally vibrant celebrations will take a more muted form because of the unstable conditions in Tunisia.

2011(16^th of Iyar, 57771): Just a week before his 96^th birthday, Arieh Handler, on the founders of the Religious Zionist movement and the last living person to have present at when Israel declared her independence passed away today.

http://www.thejc.com/news/israel-news/49280/arieh-handler-dies-israel

2012: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the family and friends of Dr. Todd Burstain, a hameshah mensch who has raised four fantastic sons, are looking forward to celebrating his birthday today.

2012: Eirc Greitens was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Tufts University when he gave the commencement speech at the school's 156th commencement

2012: In Flushing, NY, the Free Synagogue is scheduled to host the Second Annual Sacred Sites Open House organized by The New York Landmarks Conservancy

2012: Dr. Hal Lewis, President and CEO of Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, is scheduled to deliver the keynote address as part of Let My People Know, an afternoon of Jewish education at the Mayerson JCC in Cincinnati, Ohio.

2012: A Jerusalem Day family celebration featuring a concert by Peter Himmelman is scheduled to take place at Ohev Shalom in Washington, D.C.

2012: Schmekel, “Brooklyn's only 100% transgender, 100% Jewish, schtick-rock sensation” is scheduled to appear at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room in Washington, DC

2012:JSSA (Jewish Social Service Agency) is scheduled to hold its largest annual fundraiser, Gala 2012, in Washington, DC.  JSSA Gala 2012 – An Evening of Passion and Purpose – will feature performance artist, David Garibaldi.

2012: The NMAJMH and the JSC are scheduled to devote a special afternoon to “Family Stories: Daughters, Mothers and Bubbes.”

2012: In Cleveland Ohio, the Hadassah chapter will host a celebratory Centennial Birthday brunch to honor the accomplishments of the largest Jewish volunteer organization in America and present the Centennial Award to life member, Moreland Hills resident Roz Abraham.

2012: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Cause co-authored by Eric Alterman and Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen

2012: Security forces intercepted a Palestinian squad that attempted to kidnap Israeli citizens in the West Bank, the Shin Bet indicated today, adding that the squad's purpose was to negotiate the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jail.

2012(28^th of Iyar, 5772): Celebration of Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Reunification Day – 45years of Jerusalem being undivided and under control of the rightful owners.

2012(28^th of Iyar, 5772): Seventy-eight year old London born human rights activist David Gerald Littman passed away today.

http://www.dhimmitude.org/littman-biography.html

 2013: Dr/ Ted Merwin, associate professor and director, Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College will speak on the topic "American Jews in Entertainment" at JFK Airport as part of the US Customs and Border Protection service’s celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month.

2013: Friends and family of Dr. Todd Burstain gather in Cedar Rapids to celebrate this father of four of the finest young men imaginable – a real credit to the Jewish community

2013: Ira Forman, who led President Obama’s reelection campaign in the Jewish community, was appointed as the State Department’s envoy to combat anti-Semitism today.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-jewish-dems-chief-tapped-for-anti-semitism-post/





2013: Grafitti reading 'Torah tag' and 'Women of the Wall are wicked' that had been painted on a wall leading up to the apartment of Peggy Cidor, a longstanding member of the board of Women of the Wall was discovered this morning.

2014: Today’s session of the 4th International Writers Festival begins “with a poetry encounter for high school students with the works of Yehuda Amichai, and ends with singing the songs of Amichai.” (As reported by Jessica Steinberg)

2014: “The US called on Israel today to open an investigation into the deaths of two Palestinian teenagers shot during clashes with the IDF in the West Bank last week, after video emerged showing them unarmed during the incident” even though the Israeli government has already said that the video was heavily “doctored” and did not show the level of threat facing the Israelis.

2014: “Bulgaria is making progress in hunting down the terrorists responsible for a July 2012 bombing in the resort city of Burgas that killed five Israelis, the country’s leader said today in Jerusalem.”

2014: “An IDF raid on the Jenin refugee neighborhood in Samaria today exposed weapons and improvised explosive devices, as well as knives and various kinds of ammunition. In the course of the raid, local terrorists fired live rounds at the soldiers but no members of the IDF were hit.”

2014: “The Sturgeon Queens” is scheduled to be shown at the JCC in Manhattan

2014(20^thof Iyar, 5774): Ninety-year old Arthur Gelb, one of those “Times Men” who shaped the national culture and helped set the national agenda passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/business/media/new-york-times-editor-arthur-gelb-dies.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/business/media/new-york-times-editor-arthur-gelb-dies.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&_r=1

2015: Ten Jewish Baltimoreans are scheduled to be inducted into the Baltimore Jewish Hall of Fame at the JCC “for their contributions to the arts, business, education, philanthropy and community building.”

http://jewishtimes.com/36994/hall-of-fame/

2015: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to host a screening of “Iraq N’ Roll.”

http://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-movements-strife-over-shavuot-night-event/

2015: Jean Naggar is scheduled to discuss her memoir Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt at the Center for Jewish History.

2015(2^ndof Sivan, 5775): Ninety-two year old “Julia Hartman, one of the last surviving fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during WWII passed away” this morning.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4659808,00.html

2015: “Two Border Police officers – a man and a woman – were wounded” this morning “in a vehicular terror attack in Jerusalem on the ascent to the Mount of Olives.”

2015: In Philadelphia, PA, the National Museum of American Jewish History is scheduled to host “Portraits & Politics: The Resonance of ‘Family Affairs.’”

http://www.nmajh.org/CalendarEvent.aspx?eventid=316

2015: “Ten Jewish Baltimoreans” including Lois Blum Feiblatt and television executive Barry Levinson were “inducted into the Baltimore Jewish Hall of Fame at the JCC.

2016: The Eden-Tamir Music Center is scheduled to host the Chamber Music Ensembles - Competition Winners - of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.

2016: The Israeli Consulate is scheduled to host the 2016 “Beyond Conference.”

2016: In the United Kingdom, the Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host “Bring A Friend Shabbat Dinner” this evening.

2016:”Israel’s defense minister,” Moshe Alone,” abruptly announced his resignation today, saying he had lost faith in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was “fearful for Israel’s future” after his job had apparently been offered to a rival in a far-right party.”

2016: In Coralville, Iowa, Agudas Achim is scheduled to host is annual “Mediterranean-style Family Shabbat Dinner.”

2017(24^thof Iyar, 5777):  Finish Vayikra with the reading of Behar and Bechukotai

2017(24th of Iyar, 5777): In Cincinnati, ordination ceremonies are scheduled to take place at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion.

2017: “Open House Tel Aviv, or Batim Mibifnim, an urban festival of architecture and design — now in it’s 11th year — showcasing the city’s chic urban style” is scheduled to come to an end today.

2017: Holocaust survivor Sonia Kaplan, the author of My Endless War is scheduled to appear at the USHMM as part of the “meet the author” program.

2018: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including White Houses by Amy Bloom, Fascism: A Warning by Madeline Albright with Bill Woodward, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? by Robert Kuttner and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World by Samuel Moyn

2018(6^thof Sivan, 5778): Shavuot

2018(6^thof Sivan, 5778):Ninety-seven year old Bill Gold, the Brooklyn born son of “Paul and Rose (Sachs) Gold, whose name you might not know but whose posters for such movies as “Casablanca” are classics passed away today in Greenwich, CT. (As reported by Robert D. McFadden)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/obituaries/bill-gold-dead-movie-posters.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

2018: In Little Rock, AR, the Chabad Jewish Center under the leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Ciment, the quintessential “Lamplighter” is scheduled to host “a special reading of the Ten Commandments followed by a dairy Kiddush featuring cheesecake and ice cream”

2018 In Iowa City, a scheduled double header includes a Shavuot Service at the Chabad House followed by “a Kiddush in honor of Yasha Leba” the daughter of Chaya and Rabbi Avrohom Blesofsky.

2019: As charges of corruption swirled around Prime Minister Netanyahu tonight “Israel’s parliament announced that an “immunity bill,” filed by a Netanyahu loyalist, was among 200 measures slated for votes in the current session.”

2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “The Testament,” a Holocaust film with a strange twist.

2019: The Center for Jewish History, the American Jewish Historical Society, Yeshiva University and the Museum of the Jewish People are scheduled to host Alfred H. Moses, “President Clinton’s first ambassador to Romania” and the author of Bucharest Diary: Romania’s Journey from Darkness to Light and former Senator Joe Lieberman “as they discuss Moses’s historic work and key diplomatic role in Romania’s transition from its Communist past to democracy - and from “darkness to light.”

2019: The Marlene Meyerson JCC in Manhattan is scheduled to host “Israel Story Live, an evening of magical live radio with the creators of Israel Story—the award winning radio show and podcast that public radio icon Ira Glass calls ‘the Israeli This American Life’.”

2019: At Tifereth Israel Synagogue in Des Moines, IA, the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines is scheduled to “Ethiopian-born diplomat Ariella Rada” as she speaks about “The People of Israel: A Study in Diversity.”

2019: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host Dan Abrams as his talks with Chris Cuomo about Abrams’ latest book, Theodore Roosevelt for the Defense.

2019: “Lest We Forget” which has been on display outside of the City Hall in San Francisco since April 15 is scheduled to come to a close today. 2020

https://www.jccmanhattan.org/arts-ideas/conversations/israel-story-live/

2020: Via Zoom, the Streicker Center is scheduled to present “Becoming Ruth” with Dr. Avivah Zornberg

2020: The Vilna Shul, Boston’s Center for Jewish Culture is scheduled to host on “Behind ‘Unorthodox’: Debunking Myths of Ultra-Orthodoxy.”

2020: Chabad in Iowa City, is scheduled to celebrate the birthday of Chaya Blesoksky, the wife of Rabbi Abrohom Blesofsky in honor of which 42 women will be lighting Shabbat candles in her honor on May 22.

2020: Via Zoom, the Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to a shiur on Abraham and Jonah” where will “be looking at the implications of poor communications in the Tanakh, and how we relate this to our everyday lives.”

2020: Via Zoom, from San Francisco Sherit Israel is scheduled to host “The victims of COVID-19: A discussion on how the virus affects its oldest and youngest patients with Dr. Bennett Zier & Dr. Valerie Flaherman will be interviewed by Dr. Jonathan Graf.

https://www.sherithisrael.org/event/covid-19-a-conversation-from-the-front-line3.html

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May 21

383: As the emperor struggles to make Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire he promulgates a law that denies anybody who converts from Christianity to another religion the right to make a will.  This law may have had some impact on the Jews but the real target were the Romans who sought to become pagans or Manichaens, followers of the Persian prophet Mani.  (Sometimes Jews are just “collateral damage” in other people’s struggles for power)

878: Syracuse is captured by the Muslim sultan of Sicily. This change from Christian to Muslim rulers seems to have had little effect on the Jews of Syracuse. Israelite traders who visited the ancient colony when it was ruled by the Greeks were probably the first Jews to settle in Syracuse.

The Jewish population grew after the destruction of the Second Temple when the Romans brought Jewish slaves to Sicily.  Life for the Jews of Syracuse would take a negative turn in 1492 when Sicily came under Spanish domination.

996: Otto III begins his reign as Holy Roman Emperor which included modern day Germany.  Records exist that show Jews had been living in Cologne during the reign of Otto’s predecessor, Otto II and the community grew enough so that a synagogue was constructed in the first decade of the 11^th century.

1529: Thirty Jews were burned in Bosnia, Hungary

1577: Portuguese Marranos were granted permission to settle in Brazil

1671: Frederick William the Hohenzollern the Margrave of Brandenburg readmitted the Jews to his domain including the capital at Berlin. Although they were permitted to live and trade where they wished they had to pay a protection tax of 8 Thalers, and a gold florin for every wedding and funeral. In addition, Jews were not allowed to sell their houses to other Jews and were only permitted to have prayer rooms but no Synagogues

1674: John Sobieski was elected by the nobility to be the King of Poland. The Jews of the Polish town of Przemysl had suffered economic reverses and had been forced to borrow from nobles prior to John Sobieski’s coming to the throne.  In 1678, there was a major fire in the Jewish section of Premysl and the King John granted them special dispensation from their debt re-payment so that they could rebuild their portion of the town. King John would make further extensions for his Jewish subjects because he was concerned that they would leave the kingdom and take their mercantile and managerial skills with them.

1759: Thirteen year old Sampson Gideon, the son of Sampson Eardley, 1^stBaron Eardley, “a Jewish banker” and advisor to the British government, was “created a baronet today.

1760(6th of Sivan, 5520): As England and France clash during the Seven Years War, British Jews observe the First Day of Shavuot.  The Jews had been expelled from France so there was nobody in Paris to observe the festival.

1769(14^thof Iyar, 5529): Pesach Sheni is observed a week after Charles III of Spain had sent out Spanish missionaries, who found missions in San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco and Monterey which meant the Inquisition could come to what is now the state of California.

1779(6^thof Sivan, 5539): Shavuot is observed as Benedict Arnold is beginning his betrayal of the forces arrayed against the British in the American fight for independence.

1796: In London, New York native Joseph Hart Myers and the former Leah Jacobs gave birth to Naphtali Hart Myers.

1798(6^thof Sivan, 5558): Two days before the Society of United Irishman, a group including Protestants and Catholics start a rebellion against British rule, Jews observe the First Day of Shavuot

1799: French troops under Napoleon retreated from Acre thus ending a two months siege of the Ottoman held city.  The retreat marked the end of Napoleon’s dream of an eastern empire which included a promise to the local Jews that Palestine would become their home.

1802: Benjamin Moses Van Praagh married Elizabeth Joseph Speyer today in the United Kingdom.

1809(6^thof Sivan): As the Napoleon faces the Austrians on the first day of the Battle of Aspern-Essling, Jews observe the first day of Shavuot

1814(2nd of Sivan): Rabbi Aryeh Leib Berlin passed away

1817(6^thof Sivan, 5577): For the first time during the Presidency of the newly inaugurated James Monroe, Jews in the United States observe Shavuot.

1819: Sander bar Aharon’s wife Rosey Aaron who passed away yesterday was buried today at the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.

1820 (NS): Birthdate of Nikolaus von Giers, who served as Foreign Minister while Alexander III promulgated the infamous May Laws. 

1823: In Naples, Carl Mayer von Rothschild and Adelheid von Rothschild gave birth to Adolph Carl (Karl) Rothschild

1826(14^thof Iyar, 5586): Pesach Sheni observed as the Turks appear to be successful in putting down the Greek revolt against the Ottoman Empire.

1827: Birthdate of Hermann Byk, the son of Alexander Mendel Byk.

1829(18^thof Iyar, 5589): Lag B’Omer

1829: Jacob Ansell married Rachel Isaacs at the Great Synagogue today.

1829: In Frankfurt-on-Main Solomon Michael Geiger, the eldest brother of Abraham Geiger and his wife gave birth to philosopher and philologist Lazarus Geiger

1832: In Charleston, SC, Abraham Moise and Caroline Moses gave birth to Edwin Warren Moise. A Sephardic Jew whose family had made its way from Alsace to the French Caribbean before settling in South Carolina’s major seaport, pursued a career as a lawyer, soldier in the CSA and adjutant general in the post-Civil War Palmetto State. (As reported by Robert N. Rosen)

1844: Nathan Elias married Sarah Moses at the Great Synagogue in London.

1847(6^thof Sivan, 5607): Shavuot

1848(18^thof Iyar, 5608): Lag B’Omer

1848: Lazarus Jacobs married Ann Isaacs at the Great Synagogue in London on the first day when allowed by Jewish tradition. (See above)

1850: Birthdate of Hermann Frenkel, the Danzig born banker who also a noted art collector.

1852: The New York Times reported that in Germany “the citizens of ‘Luboc’ have referred to a committee a decree of the Senate” that would place Jews on an equal footing  with other citizens.”

1853:The New York Times reported that the Trieste Gazette had published a letter from Jerusalem dated March 27 in which it described the outbreak of violence between English missionaries and a group of Jews on March 24.  The missionaries had gathered in front of the Great Synagogue and while the Jews were praying inside they began giving “speeches against the Jews and the Talmud.  A Jew threw a cat at one of the missionaries which sparked a fight between the two groups.  Eventually, the English retreated and the Chief Rabbi went to the European consular officials to protest the offensive behavior.

1854: The Washington Sentinel printed an editorial entitled “The Jews as Citizens” which said that the “the absence of applications for relief was…not an index of Jewish affluence” but a result of the Jewish community providing for the financial needs of their co-religionist. After noting that Jews were absent from the jails and poorhouses, the editorialist concluded that Jews “are among the best, most orderly well disposed of our citizens.”

1863: Fifty-eighty year old Culling Eardley whose support of the Jaffa to Jerusalem railway was based on his belief that “the railway would serve Christen missionary activity” caused Moses Montefiore to back away from the project, passed away today.

1864(15^thof Iyar, 5624): Parashat Behar was read on the same day that the two week segment of Grant’s Overland Campaign, known as the Battle of Spotsylvania came to end with Lee’s Army still uncaptured but being forced ever further back on Richmond.

1864: Birthdate of George Moses Price, the native of Poltava who came to the NYC in 1882 where he earned a medical degree from New York University and became a leader in the field of sanitation.

http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/KCL05244.html

1866(7^thof Sivan, 5626): Second Day of Shavuot

1866: In Baltimore, MD, Max White and Annie Lewin gave birth to Henry “Harry” White a labor leader in the garment industry who has served as general secretary of the United Garment Workers of America (AFL) which he help to found since 1896 and is the Editor of The Garment Worker and The Weekly Bulletin of the Clothing Trade.

1866: The New York Times features a review of “Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church Part II” by Arthur P. Stanley in which the author traces the history of the Jews from Samuel to the Captivity.

1868: Birthdate of Heinrich Brody (German) or Bródy Henrik (Hungarian) “a Hungarian (after 1918 Czechoslovakian) rabbi. He was born in Ungvár, a town historically part of Hungary, now of the Ukraine. He was a descendant of Abraham Broda. Educated in the public schools of his native town and at the rabbinical colleges of Tolcsva and Pressburg, Hungary, Brody also studied at the Hildesheimer Theological Seminary and at the University of Berlin, being an enthusiastic scholar of the Hebrew language and literature. He was for some time secretary of the literary society Mekiẓe Nirdamim, and in 1896 founded the "Zeitschrift für Hebräische Bibliographie", of which he was coeditor with A. Freiman. Brody was the rabbi of the congregation of Náchod, Bohemia and chief rabbi of Prague (both cities then part of Austria-Hungary), before moving to Palestine. In Czechoslovakia, he was the leader of the Mizrachi movement. He passed away in 1942.

1870: Birthdate of Sarah Vasen, the first Jewish woman doctor in Los Angeles and first superintendent and resident physician of Kaspare Cohn Hospital (later Cedars-Sinai Hospital) (As reported by Julie Beardsley)

http://home.earthlink.net/~nholdeneditor/Sarah%20Vasen.htm

1871: Reverend Howard Crosby delivered an address to group interested in the exploration of the Holy Land.  During his speech he described plans for an upcoming expedition that hoped to find “the actual tombs of the Kings, the ark of the covenant and the tables of stone written on by the fingers of God…”

1872: It was reported today that the U.S. House of Representatives adopted a motion by Mr. Cox, requesting the President to join with the Italian government in its protest against the intolerance and cruelty practiced towards the Jews of Romania.

1872: One day after he had passed away, 73 year old Abraham Edmon, the son of Eliaser Abraham and Kitty Emdon, the husband of Lydia David and father of Eleanor Emdon was buried today at the “Plymouth Hoe Burial Ground.

1872: Mr. Benjamin J. Hart presided over tonight’s annual meeting of the Convention of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites which was held at the Forty-fourth-street Synagogue in New York City. The deteriorating condition of the Jews of Romania dominated most of the evening’s discussion.  A letter that Secretary of State Hamilton Fish had sent to the United States Consul at Bucharest instructing him to intercede with Romanian government was read to the convention.  The delegates outlined a plan of action to help bring pressure on the Romanians and created a Committee on Immigration to help those who had been forced to flee to the United States due to the persecution in Eastern Europe.  The delegates voted to hold the next annual convention in Washington, D.C.

1872: The Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin reported that General Henry C. Wayne who had served the Confederacy as the Adjutant-General of Georgia during the Civil War, was supporting Grant over Horace Greely in the upcoming Presidential election. In explaining Southern support for the General who defeated them he wrote, “We cannot stand being carried in the pockets of a foreign Jew banker though Tammany finds it a profitable investment.”  [The “foreign Jew banker may have been a reference to August Belmont, who was Chairman of the Democratic Party after the Civil War.  He resigned the post following the Presidential election of 1872.]

1872: Charles Netter wrote a letter today describing how pupils from Mikveh Israel who had spent Passover with their parents in Jerusalem “were subject to persecutions and publicly vilified.”  According to Netter, the parents were urged to withdraw their children by Rabbis who did not object to Jewish children being sent to schools run by Protestant missionaries. The rabbinic objection to attendance at Mikveh Israel, was based on a fear that they would get less in the way of Halukkah funds. Halukkah refers to funds collected in the galut to support Jews living in Palestine; a collection that dated back to the Middle Ages.  Founded in 1870, Mikveh Israel was the first agricultural school operated by the Alliance Israelite Universelle.

1876: “The Temple At Jerusalem,” published today reported that more has been written about The Temple in Jerusalem than any other building in history and that most of it has been totally inaccurate.  The article included references to modern efforts to map the Temple Mount including Frederick Catherwood’s survey in 1833 and the even more accurate work done by Captain Charles Wilson in 1864 and 1865.

1876: Judge P.J. Joachimsen of New York presided over today’s annual convention of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites in Philadelphia, PA.  The report of the executive committee dealt primarily with the conditions of the Jews of Palestine and Roumania. During the afternoon, the delegates visited a Jewish hospital and in the evening elected officers to serve during the coming year. 

1876: In Detroit, Michigan, David W. Simons and his wife gave birth to University of Michigan trained attorney Charles C. Simons and husband of Lillian Bernstein who was appointed by President Harding to serve as a U.S. District Judge in February, 1923.

1878(18th of Iyar, 5638): Lag B'Omer

1878: Birthdate of Odessa native and Menshevik leader Lydia Dan, the sister Julius Martov and the wife of Fyodor Dan who fell afoul of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and went into exile in 1923, which given the purges of the 1930’s probably saved her life.

1879: Birthdate of Ada Rosenthal Salus the wife of University of Pennsylvania trained lawyer and Republican political leader Samuel Salus and the mother of Arthur S. Salus.

1881: The American Red Cross is established by Clara Barton.Washington business man Adolphus Simeon Solomons, a member of a prominent Sephardic family, played a key role in the founding of the humanitarian organization.  In fact Clara Barton called him her "good vice president and kind counselor."

1885(7^thof Sivan, 5645): 2^nd day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1885: Birthdate of Samuel E. Paulive, the native of Kalvaria, Lithuania, who came to the United States in 1897, settled in Massachusetts and became a real estate and insurance broker as well as a member of the Jewish Welfare Board and the YMHA.

1886: Construction was begun today for a new Sephardic synagogue to be used by the Moses Montefiore Congregation.

1886(16^th of Iyar): David Gordon passed away.  Born in Vilna in 1831 he was a supporter of Hibbat Zion and was an editor for HaMaggid, the first Hebrew newspaper.http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/gordon.html

1889: Rabbi David Levy officiated at the wedding of Walter Irving Harby of Sumter, SC and Jacqueline Ellen Levy the daughter of Charles F. Levy at the Hasell Street Synagogue.

1889: The Moses Montefiore Congregation was dedicated in Bloomington, Illinois at a ceremony which began at four o’clock this this afternoon, erev Shabbat.

1890: The Board of Estimate and Apportionment authorized the transfer of $30,000 from last year’s balances to be used for the furnishing of the new school to be opened in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum Building on 77^th Street near 3^rdAvenue.

1890: Today, Marcus M. Marks, president of several clothing industry trade associations and future Manhattan Borough President married “suffragist Esther Friedman” the mother of his son Johnny Marks, who ironically wrote “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”

1891: The manager of a “‘Shelter,’ an institution established for the reception” of Russian Jews arriving in England disputed claims that a large number destitute refugees are arriving in his country.  According to him, on average, only 20 destitute Jews arrive each week and nine-tenths of them move on to the United States “or the English colonies.” The Shelter provides them with enough funds so that they can show they are capable of earning a living once they arrive at their final destinations.

1892: Among the bills that the Governor Flowers of New York allowed to die today was one introduced by Assemblyman Stein that would have provided a tax exemption for the Hebrew Children’s Sanitarium at Rockaway Beach.

1892: Max Cohen has just released by the annual report of the Maimonides Library.

1893(6^thof Sivan, 5653): Shavuot

1893: There were a number of Polish and Russian Jews among the three hundred steerage passengers aboard the SS Amalfi which had sailed from Hamburg and arrived at Ellis Island today.

1895: It was reported today that a congregation that has been worshipping at 116 Siegel Street in Brooklyn for several years has been ordered to pay its back rent to the landlord.

1897(19^thof Iyar, 5657): Eighty-two year old Solomon Solomon Nunes Carvalho, the native of Charleston, SC and husband of Sarah Miriam Carvalho passed away today in Pleasantville, NY

1898(29^thof Iyar, 5658): Parashat Bamidbar

1898: In Chicago, Fred and Hattie University gave birth to Cornell University graduate and President of the Chicago Board of Trade Richard Frederick Uhlmann, the husband of Rosamond Goldman with whom he had three children – Audrey, Janis and Frederick

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/14/obituaries/richard-f-uhlmann-grain-dealer-91.html

1898: William O. Cohn began his service with the U.S. Navy

1898: Richmond residents Nathan Bernstein, Harry Bernstein, Isidore Cohen and Jack Flegenhiemer were among those who joined the U.S. Military when federal government began the process of mustering the 2^nd Virginia Volunteer Infantry in the service of the United States.

1898: The will of Aaron Hershfield, which contained bequests to numerous Jewish charities was executed today naming his son-in-law Daniel P. Hays and his sons Levi N. and Mitchell Hershfield as executors.

1898: In New York City, Julius and Rose (Lipshitz) Hammer gave birth to businessman Armand Hammer the owner of Occidental Petroleum who was also an art collector and philanthropist.

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/12/obituaries/armand-hammer-dies-at-92-industrialist-and-philanthropist-forged-soviet-links.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/11/obituaries/armand-hammer-dies-at-92-executive-forged-soviet-ties.html

1899(12^thof Sivan, 5659): Forty-nine year old Leopold S. Levy, a salesman who lived with his wife on West 26^th Street  passed away today in the New York Hospital  after having had his skull fractured “at his home by a crowd of boisterous young men who struck him with a lobster and a tin can.”

1899: Mrs. Leopold S. Levy, the wife of the late Leopold S. Levy is in critical condition at New York Hospital after having been brought there by a janitress at her tenement who thwarted her attempt to commit suicide by taking laudanum..

1899: Dr. Felix Adler is scheduled to officiate at the funeral of Julius Hirsch, a native of Germany who was a partner in the tobacco firm of Hirsch, Victorious & Co.

1899: The Hebrew Technical Institute was among the many organizations that endorsed the Women’s Memorial presented to the just completed Peace Conference held in New York City.

1899: The Hebrew Free School Associated hosted the confirmation exercises today for the 118 boys and girls who had completed the six year course of study.

1900(22^ndof Iyar, 5660): After having irreparably damaged his health a year ago while helping to put out a fire at Virginia Tech, 19 year old David Jacobs passed away today at his parent’s home in Richmond.

1900: Herzl turns to Prime Minister Ernest von Koerber to intervene for the Rumanian Jews who have no permission to cross the border to Austria.

1900: Anti-Semitic riots broke out in Stolp and Bütow

1901: Herzl dictates the résumé "for the special benefit of the weak understanding of His Imperial Majesty of the Khalifate."

1901: In Harlem, Russian immigrant Hannah and Max Jaffe gave birth to the fourth and youngest child, producer and agent Sam Jaffe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/19/arts/sam-jaffe-98-hollywood-agent-represented-the-icons-of-his-day.html

1902(14^thof Iyar, 5662): Pesach Sheni

1902: Birthdate of Mikhail Anatol Litvak, the native of Kiev and refugee from Nazi German who gained as American filmmaker Anatole Litvak who directed several films with future Oscar winner but whose finest cinematic moments may have been the making of a series of film warning of the Nazi menace and the  “Why We Fight” series.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anatole-Litvak

1903: During a conversation on this date, Dr. Cyrus Adler of the Smithsonian Institution, Secretary of the International Jewish Association, and editor of the Jewish Year Book, discussed the massacre of Jews in Russia, including the official utterances on the subject by Count Cassinf, the Russian Ambassador.

1904(7^thof Sivan, 5664): Second day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1904: Herzl returns to Vienna after an unsuccessful therapy in Franzensbad.

1905: Birthdate of grocery store owner Arnold Kohn, the native of Dobrovac (now part of Croatia) and Auschwitz survivor whose community work earned him the “Medal of the Socialist Alliance of Working People”

1906: It was reported today that the Y.M.H.A. whose employment bureau has filled 593 jobs will be lead by Directors Dr. Louis Fischer, Simon Gottschall, Kaufman Mandel, Julius Mayers, Rabbi F. De Sola Mendes, William Brager and Henry F. Toch for the next three years.

1907: The proprietors of the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel in Atlantic City apologized to Bertha Rayner Frank for her experience with anti-Jewish discrimination at their hotel.

1907: In Amsterdam, Alexander Polak, violin builder and concertmaster of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Janet Kiek, who founded the first Home Economics Budget Bureau gave birth to Fred Polak “one of the founding fathers of future studies…best known  for theorizing the central role of imagined alternative futures in his classic work The Image of the Future.”

1909: Birthdate of Guy Édouard Alphonse Paul de Rothschild the Parisian who was the son of Baron Édouard de Rothschild, who had headed the bank before Baron Guy, and the great-grandson of James, who founded the French branch of the Rothschild empire in 1812 (As reported by Paul Lewis)

1910: Birthdate of Luisa Kramer who became Luisa Abrahams when she married Sir Charles Myer Abrahams.

http://www.radio.cz/en/section/one-on-one/lady-luisa-abrahams-a-truly-remarkable-life-1

1911(23^rdof Iyar, 5671): Eighty-five year old Solomon Belais, the son of Rabbi Abraham Belais and Naomi Belais and the husband of Jael Belais passed away in New York.

1912(5^thof Sivan, 5672): Erev Shavuot

1912: David Defilipov, a chemist who was born in the Ukraine, immigrated to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century and Sonia née Gerdstein, gave birth to “singer, director, producer and impresario Edis De Philippe, who founded the Israel National Opera Company in 1947 and ran it with an iron hand until her death.” (Jewish Women’s Archives)

1913(14^thof Iyar, 5673): Pesach Sheni

1913(14^thof Iyar, 5673): Sixty-five year old merchant Herman Shwarz passed away today in Napa, CA.

1913: “While the Fulton County Grand Jury was considering evidence of the murder of 14 year old Mary Phagan today, disclosures showed that the case had become entangled in a local political fight involving the war that has been waged against Chief of Police Beavers.”

1913(14^thof Iyar, 5673): Fifty-nine year old wholesale grocer Isaac Horner passed a way today in Chicago.

1914: In Vilna, Mina Owczyńska,a Litvak actress from Švenčionys and Arieh-Leib Kacew a businessman from Trakai gave birth to Roman Kacew who gained fame a novelist Romain Gary.

1914: “The charge of ‘ritual murder’ in connection with the killing last December 9 of Yoshel Pashkoff at Fastoff, 40 miles from Kiev, was abandoned today by the Public Prosecutior” since “after investigation authorities decided that the murder was an ordinary crime.”

1915: Rabbi Leventhal is scheduled to deliver a talk at the semi-annual examinations of the Hebrew Free School in Camden, NJ. 

1915: “Judge Arthur G. Powell, a former member of the State Court of Appeals” wrote to Govern Slaton and the Prison Commission declaring his conviction that Leo M. Frank did not murder Mary Phagan” and “as an intimate friend of the late Judge Roan who presided at Frank’s Trial” asserted “that Judge Roan did not believe Frank was guilty.”

1915: Samuel Sonnenschein who has been locked up in Ludlow Street Jail “because he could not pay a judgment for $169” was still a prisoner tonight despite “efforts” being “made by the United Hebrew Charities to get a surety bond for him.”

1915: As of today, “there are said to be several hundred petitions in circulation in Atlanta” and hundreds of others” in the rest of the state asking Governor Slaton to commute Leo Frank’s death sentence

1916(18^thof Iyar, 5676): Lag B’Omer

1916: Birthdate of Joseph Janni, the native of Milan who immigrated to England in 1939 and after a brief internment on the Isle of Man began decades-long career as a British movie producer.

1916: U. of Michigan trained attorney Arthur Marowitz, the Omaha born son of Harry and Anna Marowitz who served as the Director of the Assoc. Jewish Charities, the Secretary of the Jewish War Victims Relief committee and the organizer and president of the El Dorado Lodge of B’nai B’rith married Esther Epstein, the mother of his son “Milton Harley.”

1916: “Histadrut Ibrith,” an organization dedicated to the “revival of the Hebrew Language and Culture” was organized today with offices in New York City

1916: Birthdate of novelist Harold Robbins author of a series of bestsellers including Moneychangers, Carpetbaggers and Betsy.

1916: The Hebrew Sheltering Home was dedicated in Chicago, Illinois.

1916: The Jewish Home for the Aged was dedicated in New Haven, CT.

1916: The Central Jewish Institute was dedicated in New York City.

1917: Mr. Louis Marshal had come to Chicago to “address the War Sufferers’ mass meeting” spoke at luncheon at the Hotel La Salle sponsored by the Chicago Branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America which was attended by Mrs. Benjamin Davis, Max Schulman, Nathan D. Kaplan, S.P. Platt, Nathan Shure and A.S. Roe among others.

1917: In London, Solomon Kirsten, the husband of Sarah Kirsten with whom he had had eight children was buried today at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery.”

1917: The Great Atlanta Fire destroyed over 300 acres and 2,000 homes in Georgia and the South’s leading metropolis. The fire was confined primarily to the city’s Fourth Ward, which had a significant Jewish population on its north side. Following the fire Rich’s, the Jewish owned department store “assisted bereaved customers financially, even providing burial clothes for many of the victims” without regard to whom they were.

1918: According to the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs, the German People’s Party is pressuring the government to close “the old frontiers of Germany” to any Jewish settlers coming from Poland, Courland and Lithuania, all of which have been occupied by the German Army during the course of the World War.

1919(21^stof Iyar, 5679): In Pittsburgh, Jacob Affelder, the husband of Kate Affelder and the father of Minnie, Morris, Louis, Oscar, William and Harry Affelder passed away today.

1920: “Mourning Turned to Thanksgiving in Jerusalem” published today reported that “the shofar was sounded in Jerusalem when the news of the restoration of the Jewish National Homeland through Great Britain’s mandate over Palestine reached the Jewish quarter of the Holy City, the first time in 2,000 years of Jewish history that the trumpet of hope was ever heard outside of the ceremonies of the two most sacred Jewish holidays, the Day of Atonement and the New Year.”

1921(11^thof Iyar): Author Akiva Fleischman passed away.

1921: “Hundreds of Ku Klux Klansmen marched through downtown Dallas, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” as they passed the Majestic Theatre” during a decade when the Jewish community feared for its physical well-being as this hood band of rightwing bigots and racist exercised political power based on the same kind of coercion and nativism that would wash across the streets of Germany in the 1930’s.

1921: Birthdate of New York art dealer and historian Louis Pollack.

1921: Birthdate of Harold Lane David, the son of Jewish immigrant who owned a Brooklyn delicatessen owner, later known as Hal David the award winning lyricist who created such musical questions as What’s it all about?,” “What’s new, pussycat?,” “Do you know the way to San Jose?” and “What do you get when you fall in love?,” (As reported by Rob Hoerburger)

1922: Birthdate of Eugene Harold Ehrlich, a self-educated lexicographer who wrote 40 dictionaries, thesauruses and phrase books for the “extraordinarily literate,” not to mention people just hoping to sound that way. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/books/15ehrlich.html

1923(6^thof Sivan, 5683): Shavuot

1923: “Aren’t We All?” a comedy featuring Leslie Howard premiered on Broadway today.

1923: For the first time (but not the last) Stanley Baldwin becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain following the resignation of Arthur Bonar Law.  Baldwin will serve in this capacity, off and one throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s.  He is viewed as one of those politicians who turned a blind eye to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and thus helped to bring on World War II with all that that would mean for the Jewish people.  On the other hand, in 1938, a year after he left office, Baldwin “led a major appeal to provide financial assistance for Jewish refugees from Nazi brutality.”

1923: Seventy-five year old Ferdinand Esterhazy, the French officer who was the traitor selling secrets to the Prussians – a crime for which Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted – died today.

1924: University of Chicago students Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr. murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in a "thrill killing."  The two killers and their victim were all members of wealthy Jewish families.

1925: Lord Herbert Charles Onslow Plumer is named High Commissioner in Palestine. Born in 1857, Plumer had a long, distinguished career in the British Army.  He actually was one of the few competent commanding officers on the Western Front during World War I and was promoted to the rank of Field Marshall after the Armistice.  The appointment to Palestine came when he was 68 and lasted until 1928.  He proved to be a capable administrator who resisted Arab attempts to undermine the terms of the Mandate.  The economic down turn that occurred during his tenure was not of his making. He returned to England where he served in the House of Lords until his death in 1932.

1927: National Jewish Book is scheduled to begin today.

1927: On the day that Charles Lindbergh completed his trans-Atlantic flight, Jewish businessman and airplane enthusiast Charles Levin announced that his airplane would fly farther on a $15,000 transatlantic flight challenge from America to Germany and carry a passenger.”  Levine’s plane had been sitting the hanger, grounded because of a court battle, when Lindbergh had taken off for Paris.  Levine would accomplish his goal the following when he flew aboard the Columbia, as a passenger while Clarence Chamberlin was at the controls.

1928: In Newark, NJ, Dr. Ralph Shapiro and “the former Sylvia Smith, a reporter for the Newark News” gave birth to Dorthea Shapiro who gained fame as “art historian and critic” Dore Ashton. (As reported by William Grimes)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/arts/design/dore-ashton-art-critic-who-embraced-and-inhabited-modernism-dies-at-88.html

1928(2^ndof Sivan, 5688): Sixty-seven year old British born American drama critic Alan Dale, the husband of Carrie L Frost and father of Margaret Dale, who had changed his name from Alfred J. Cohen passed away today while traveling on a train headed for his native Birmingham, England

https://librivox.org/author/1735?primary_key=1735&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results

1928: “The first Pacific Coast Jewish Social Service Conference” under the chairmanship of Mrs. M.C. Sloss” opened this evening at Yosemite Valley, CA marking “the first time that representatives of all Jewish social service agencies” serving the entire Pacific coast from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada have gathered together.

1928: A dinner honoring Dr. H. Peretra Mendes was to have been held this evening.  The dinner was postponed until October.

1928: The House of Representatives is schedule to consider the Jenkins Bill which is designed to grant enlarged preference within the quota to the wives and children of aliens

1929: Today the ballet Le Fils Prodigue premiered in Paris at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt named “after the renowned actress Sarah Bernhardt, who produced there from 1899 for nearly two decades.”

1930:Racecar driver Woolf Barnato, the son of Fanny Bees and Barney Barnato took delivery on “a streamlined fastback” known as the “Sportsman Coup” which “became known as the Blue Train Bentley.

1932: U.S. premiere of “Attorney for the Defense” produced by Harry Cohn with a script co-authored by Jo Swerling.

1932: “The Rich Are Always with Us” a romantic comedy produced by Samuel Bischoff was released in the United States today.

1934(7^thof Sivan, 5694): Second Day of Shavuot

1934: The New York Council of Mizrachi Youth of America is scheduled to hold a Shavuot celebration tonight at 224 Henry Street with proceeds going toward the Hachshara farm, a Mizrachi training camp for Palestinian pioneers.

1934: U.S. premiere of “Murder at the Vanities” co-starring Kitty Carlisle.

1934: Dr. I. Mortimer Bloom is scheduled to deliver a sermons today entitled "Pilgrims of Eternity" at Temple Oheb Sholom on West 93^rdStreet.

1934: Rabbi Milton Steinberg is scheduled to deliver a sermon entitled "Time and Religion" at the Park Avenue Synagogue.

1934: Dr. Samuel Benjamin is scheduled to deliver a sermon entitled "Jews Without Memory;" at Congregation Hope of Israel in the Bronx.

1934: Rabbi Solomon Reichman is scheduled to deliver a sermon entitled "Sinai-a Symbol of Israel" at the Bronx Y. M. and Y. W. H. A.

1934: Rabbi Robert Gordis is scheduled to officiate at Yizkor services today at Temple Beth-El, Rockaway Park.

1934: Rabbi Henry Fisher is schedule to deliver a sermon entitled “Belief and Practice” at Congregation Derech Emunoh.

1934: “Murder at the Vanities” a musical starring Kitty Carlisle was released in the United States today.

1936: A crowd of Arabs fired from the hilltops on a Jewish-operated bus coming from Tel Aviv seriously wounding a Jewish man and girl.  According to officials at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital, dum-dum bullets had been used by the Arab attackers.

1936: Two British soldiers were wounded by Arabs when the Cameron Highlanders were attacked 12 miles outside of Jerusalem as they attempted to restore order along the highway.

1936: It was reported today, that in the wake of Arab attacks, “only 200 Jewish families out of a former total Jewish population of 5,000 remained in the Old City.”

1938:  In Poland, the ruling party adopted "13 articles pertaining to Jewish affairs," stating that the Jews are 'an element which hinders the normal development of the forces of the Polish nation and state."

1939: In a column published in Davar the pro-labor Hebrew language newspaper, David Ben Gurion said of the White Paper, “This document is not the final word of the British people.  This document meanwhile is only a proposal of their government.  The conscience of Britain and the whole world still can be awakened.” [Ed. Note: This time B-G got it wrong]

1939:The British arrest the Irgun leadership, including Commander David Raziel. In February, 1938 the Revisionists under Jabotinsky had held a Zionist Congress in Prague.  They rejected the notion that Jews could not settle on either side of the Jordan.  More importantly, after two years of Arab violence they decided that the Jewish Agency’s policy of restraint was not working.  The Irgun was to respond to each act of Arab violence with force and alacrity.   The increased tempo of attacks against the British and Arabs must be viewed against the backdrop of the times: the worsening situation of the Jews in Europe, the issuance of the White Paper that would close Palestine to the Jews and guarantee a permanent Arab majority and the unabated violence of the Arabs.  The Irgun and the Revisionists did not reflect the majority view of the Jewish population.  Finally, in 1948, Ben Gurion took military action to bring the Irgun under control.  Ironically, Menachem Begin, the leader of Irgun, would be the right wing politician who broke the hold of the Labor Zionists on the Israeli government.

1940: Chairman Willem Vogt fired all Jewish employees at AVRO, the Dutch broadcasting company

1941: Dutch Singer and Nazi collaborator Johan Heesters visited Dachau concentration camp.

1941: A collaborationist group, Nederlandse Arbeids Dienst (Dutch Labor Service), is established in Holland.

1942(5th of Sivan, 5702): Erev Shavuot

1942(5th of Sivan, 5702): In Koritz, on the eve of Shavuot, 2,200 Jews were taken to the edge of town and shot into pre-dug pits. The dead included the wife and 13 year old daughter of Moshe Gildenman who was soon to become famous as the partisan “Uncle (Dyadya) Misha”. Gildenman succeeded in escaping with his son, Simcha, and a few others with one pistol and five rounds of ammunition. His groups slowly grew in strength and were eventually absorbed into Saburov’s brigade group. They were always known as Uncle Misha’s Jewish groups. During the war, Gildenman received the Order of the Red Star and finished the war with his son in Berlin. After the war, his son returned to Koretz and upon meeting the Ukrainian who killed his mother and sister - shot him.

1942: Release date for “Tortilla Flat co-starring Hedy Lammar and John Garfield, featuring Sheldon Leonard, with a script co-authored by Benjamin Glazer and music by Frank Loesser and Franz Waxman.

1943: Birthdate of CUNY philosophy professor Michael Levin, the husband of Professor Margarita Levin.

1943: Denise Madeline Bloch, the French Jewess who would be murdered at Ravensbruck because she an SOE agent, arrived in London after a twenty-two day trip across occupied France.

1943(16th of Iyar, 5703):  Three thousand Jews driven from Brody, Ukraine, to a waiting transport train revolt, killing four Ukrainians and a few Germans. Many of the Jews break free after being put on the train, only to be machine-gunned. The remainder is killed upon arrival at the Majdanek death camp.

1943(16th of Iyar, 5703):  Members of the Jewish community at Drogobych, Ukraine, are exterminated in the Bronica Forest

1944: The SS President Warfield, a packet steamer built in the 1920’s to carry passengers and cargo between Norfolk and Baltimore (sheltered waters), was returned by the British so she could serve in the U.S. Navy.  The Warfield would become famous as the SS Exodus.

1944(28^thof Iyar, 5704): Forty-five year old WW I Marne veteran Errold Baum Lapowski, the Gainesville, TX born son of Nathan and Eva Lapowski, the husband of Eleanor Lapowski and the father of Jean and Emily Lapowski passed away today after which he was buried at the Temple Mt. Sinai Cemetery in El Paso, TX.

1944(28^thof Iyar, 5704): A day after her husband famed Austrian biologist Hans Leo Przibram died at Theresienstadt, his wife Elizabeth committed suicide.

1944: The Gestapo imprisons all 260 Jews of Canea, Crete, at Rethymnon, Crete

1945: Members of the Jewish Brigade posed for a photo with trucks from the Beriha Movement.

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/may/15.asp

1945: Today, many liberated survivors continue to live at the Dachau concentration camp two weeks after the end of the war.

1945: German war criminal Heinrich Himmler was captured

1945: Lauren Bacall (born Betty Pinsker) and Humphrey Bogart were married. (She was Jewish; Bogy was not.)

1945: “Flight from Folly” a British musical filmed by cinematographer Otto Heller and with music by Benjamin Frankel was released in the United Kingdom today.

1946: One of several post-war Hungarian pogroms took place today at Kunadaras where peasants murdered two Jews and wounded eighteen others.

1947: “William Gallacher, Communist member of the House of Commons, was ignored today during a discussion of Palestine when he asked this question: "In view of the fact that the mandate laid it down that Palestine was to be provided as a home for the Jews how then could there be such a thing as an 'illegal immigrant' ?"

1947: “Haganah, which has long been sitting on the sidelines merely watching developments, sent a punitive expedition tonight against Arab brigands operating against Jewish settlers in the Petah Tiqva area near Tel Aviv.(Editor’s note – Brigands, what nice word for terrorists.)

1948: For the second time in two days, the 53^rd and 54^thbattalions attacked the Egyptian-held fort of Iraq Suwayden which the British had handed over to Muslim Brotherhood as they departed Palestine.  The irony is that the British had built the fort in the 1930’s to help quell the infamous Arab Revolt.

1948: Today, “at dawn the Golani staff reported that the enemy was repelled but that they were expecting another attack. The full report read:

‘Our forces repelled yesterday a heavy attack of tanks, armored vehicles and infantry that lasted about 8 hours. The attack was repelled by the brave stand of our men, who used Molotov cocktails and their hands against the tanks. 3" mortars and heavy machinery took their toll on the enemy. Field cannons caused a panicked retreat of the enemy, who yesterday left Tzemah. This morning our forces entered Tzemah and took a large amount of booty of French ammunition and light artillery ammunition. We have captured 2 tanks and an armored vehicle of the enemy. The enemy is amassing large reinforcements. We are expecting a renewal of the attack.’”

1948: Haganah troops returned to Tzemah today “and set up fortifications, the damaged tanks and armored cars were gathered and taken to the rear. The settlers returned that night to identify the bodies of their comrades in the fields and buried them in a common grave in Degania”

1948: Abba Eban names Arthur Louie, Jacob Robinson, Moshe Tov, Michael Comay and Gideon Rafael as his alternates and advisers at the United Nations and names I.L. Kene as the delegation’s spokesman.

1948: The former American icebreaker USCGC Northland became “the first warship of the Israeli Sea Corps” when it was commissioned as the INS Eilat.  The ship would be renamed INS Matspen in 1957 when it began serving as a barracks.

1948: “Egyptian dive-bombers struck at Tel Aviv four times today without, however, causing serious damage” while other “Egyptian planes, flying high on their regular visits throughout the day, dropped clusters of small bombs on the city’s fringe.”

1948: “In the South, Beit Eshel was shelled by the Egyptians and Yad Mordechai was a target for heavy infantry assaults” all of which were repulsed.

1949(22^ndof Iyar, 5709): Parashat Behar Bechukotai

1949(22^ndof Iyar, 5709): Forty-two year old Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas and Katia Mann (who was Jewish) passed away today.

1949: The National Geographic Society issued new maps of Europe and the Near East which show “Palestine partitioned into Israel and the Arab states.”

1950(5^thof Sivan, 5710): Erev Shavuot

1950: “Cairo Road,” a crime film co-starring Laurence Harvey and featuring Abraham Sofaer was released in the United Kingdom today.

1950: As a sign that Israel was taking its place among the family of nations, the government announced that Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett will meet with South African Prime Minister Daniel F. Malan during his upcoming trip to the African state.

1951: Birthdate of comedian turned U.S. Senator, Al Franken

1952(26th of Iyar, 5712):  Actor and film star John Garfield passed away at the age of 39. Born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in New York City, he was sent to a school for problem children after the early death of his mother. It was there that he was introduced to boxing and acting. He won a scholarship to an acting school hosted by Maria Ouspenskaya, and made his Broadway debut in 1932. The play Golden Boy that featured a young prize fighter was written for him, but he was passed over for the role. He decided to leave Broadway and try his success in Hollywood. He earned an Academy Award nomination for his role in the 1938 film Four Daughters. He gained further fame as the handyman drifter in the Postman Rings Twice. He appeared in several war movies during WW II, usually playing the part of the wisecracking enlisted man (once as the gunner on a B-17 and once as a seaman aboard a sub) who sees the light and comes to understand why America was in the war.  Garfield’s liberal politics brought him to the attention the McCarthyites during the Red Scare of the late 1940’s and 1950’s.  He was forced to appear before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee; an appearance which proved detrimental to his career

http://tyforum.bravepages.com/artc/p-2-67.html

1952: During a meeting of HUAC a letter from Lillian Hellman was read that stated "I cannot and will not cute my conscience to fit this year's fashions..."

1953:The Jerusalem Post reported that upon his return to the U.S., Mr. John Foster Dulles, the U.S. Secretary of State, expressed satisfaction from his first, recent visit to Israel, and recommended to his government a sizeable aid for the country's quick development.

1953:The Jerusalem Post reported that two marauders who shot at an Israeli patrol in Jerusalem's "Corridor" were killed in an exchange of fire.

1953: “The President’s Lady” a biopic about President Andrew Jackson directed by Henry Levin, produced by Sol C. Siegel and with music by Alfred Newman was released in the United States today.

1953(7th of Sivan, 5713: Second Day of Shavuot

1954(18th of Iyar, 5714): Lag B'Omer

1956(11^thof Sivan, 5716): Eighty-one year old Johns Hopkins graduate and Columbia Law School trained attorney Bernard M. Cone, the Baltimore born son of Herman Moses Cone and Helen Guggenheimer Cone and the husband of Elain Wolf Cone who owned several mills in North Carolina which in 1945 were “re-organized un Proximity Manufacauring” and the in 1948 merged with Revlution cotton to form Cone Mills, Corp., “the largest producer of flannel in the world” passed away todayin Greensboro, NC after which he was buried in Cone Cemetery.”

1957: Birthdate of New York City native Seth Andrew Klarman the Cornell and Harvard Business School trained fund manager and billionaire and husband of Beth Schultz Klarman who was one of a handful of Republican major donors who urged their “comrades” to contribute to the Democrats because Donald Trump was unfit to be President.

1958: The Savanah Morning News published pictures of the nine hour long fire at Adler’s Department Store which had been founded by Leopold Adler and subsequently run by his son Sam G. Adler, the husband of Elinor Grunsfeld Adler and his grandson Lee Adler, the husband of Emma Morel Adler and was the worst such conflagration to strike the city since 1899

1959: Gypsy a musical with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents opened at the Broadway Theatre for the first of 702 performances.

1961(6^thof Sivan, 5721): Shavuot

1961(6^thof Sivan, 5721): Yiddish comedian Israel Shumacher who worked with Shimon Dzigan passed away today.

1963: Birthdate of Richard Appel who tried to follow in the footsteps of his parents, Nina Appel the Dean of Loyola Law School and Alfred Appel  who was a professor of literature at Northwestern.  Appel graduated from law school before turning to a life of writing and producing comedy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Appel

1966: In Boston, MA, Dr. Alvin Edelstein and his wife Bonnie gave birth to actress and playwright Lisa Edelstein.

1968: Lt. Governor Samuel Harvey Shapiro began serving as the 34^thGovernor of Illinois when the incumbent “resigned to accept an appointment” as a federal judge which made him the second Jew, after Henry Horner, to hold the post

1969: Israeli planes shot down three Egyptian Mig 21s in the Suez Canal zone during what would become known as the War of Attrition.

1969: A group of about 10 saboteurs was intercepted today near Nahal Argaman in the Jordan Valley. One saboteur was killed in a clash with an Israeli unit. Another was wounded and a third escaped and joined other members of the gang hiding in caves. After the area was surrounded, the saboteurs were ordered to surrender. Six gave themselves up and two who resisted were killed

1969: Robert Kennedy's murderer Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death.  At the time, the Jordanian youth said Kennedy had to die because of his support of Israel.

1973(19^thof Iyar, 5733): Eighty-nine year old of New York City native and attorney Edwin Chester Vogel, a partner in the firm of Elkus, Vogel, Gleason and Proskauer, a prominent art collector and a trustee of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and Mount Sinai Hospital passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/05/22/archives/edwingvogel-89-collector-of-art-philanthropist-exofficer-of-cit.html

1973: “Panel of Jewish Scholars Translating the Bible” published today described a two-decades long project led by Dr. Harry M. Orlinsky to produce a new English translation of the Bible sponsored by the Jewish Publication Society within the next two years.

1974: Elizabeth Holtzman, the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, castigated the government for laxness in allowing Nazi war criminals into the U.S.

1974(29^thof Iyar, 5734): Eighty-three year old Hungarian figure skater Lily Kronberger passed away today.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/kronberger-lily

1975(11^thof Sivan, 5735): Eight-four year old movie producer Samuel Bischoff whose career spanned more than four decades from “Mixed Nuts” in 1922 to “The Strangler” in 1964 passed away today.

http://www.cyranos.ch/spbish-e.htm

1975: While casting parts for “Network” Paddy Chayefsky wrote a “letter to Paul Newman offering him ‘any part in this picture you want’”  -- an offer Newman turned down.

1977: "Fiddler on the Roof" closed at the Winter Garden Theatre in NYC after 167 performances

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli security men and French policemen killed three gunmen who attacked the El Al desk at the Paris Orly airport. One French policeman was killed in this Arab terror attack and three French passengers were wounded. Most El Al passengers were employees of a French insurance company, who later left to tour Israel.

1979: Iran: A National Still in Torment published today described the execution of Habib Elghanian, a plastics manufacturer and the first Jew to be condemned who was convicted of spying for Israel, was said to have made huge investments in Israel and to have solicited funds for the Israeli army, which the prosecution claimed made him an accomplice "in murderous air raids against innocent Palestinians."“The conviction of Elghanian caused concern among some Jewish businessmen in Iran, who feared that they too could be charged with contributing money to Israel.

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,920359,00.html

1980(6^thof Sivan, 5740: Shavuot

1980: Four days after premiering in Washington, D.C., “Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back” directed by Irvin Kershner was released in the United States.

1981: ABC broadcast the final episode for season three of “Taxi” a series created by James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels and Ed. Weinberger.

1982: In “Housing Surge Alters Borough Park,” Alan Oser described the five year growth in the Brooklyn neighborhood which he attributed to a steady expansion of Borough Park's population of Orthodox Jews, about half of them Hasidim. They require large apartments for large families, and accommodations near synagogues and denominational schools.”  The article provides an interesting snapshot of the needs of this unique community.

1982: Delia Ephron married Jerome Kass.

1982: A week after having been summoned to “meet” with the KGB, Moscow refusenik and Hebrew teacher Pavel Abramovich was summoned to the KGB for a second time.

1982(28^thof Iyar, 5742): Yom Yerushalayim

1983: David Mark Rubenstein the co-found of The Carlyle Group married “Alice Rubenstein (née Alice Nicole Rogoff), founder of the Alaska House New York and the Alaska Native Arts Foundation and owner of Alaska Dispatch News.”

1987: James Levine is scheduled to conduct the IPO as part of the orchestra’s 50^thanniversary celebrations.

1988(5th of Sivan, 5748) Erev Shavuot

1988: Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is scheduled to address a dinner tonight hosted by a group calling itself "Concerned Citizens for New York," an alliance of black businesspeople. The dinner is being held at Terrace in the Park, a kosher catering facility owned by Allen Sherel and Stanley Lewin.  The owners agreed to rent the facility before they found out that Farrakhan was the speaker.  The two Jewish owners promised to donate every penny they make from the dinner to Jewish charities.

1990(26^thof Iyar, 5750): Sixty-two year old Morris “Mo” Levy, “owner of Roulette Records and the Birdland jazz club passed away today 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

1993: An exhibition, at the International Monetary Fund Art Forum featuring the works of Fritz Ascher, came to a close today in Washington, DC.

1993: Birthdate of Arizona native and Barry University Laura Elizabeth the right wing writer activist who was banned from the March 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

1994: Israeli commandos captured Shiite guerrilla leader Mustafa Dirani

1996: CNN broadcast today’s public memorial service for Admiral Jeremy Michael Boorda, the 25^th Chief of Naval Operations live from the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

1997: CBS broadcast the final episode of “Wings” a sitcom co-starring Rebecca Schull.

1998: Jack Lew began serving his as Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton.

1999(6^thof Sivan, 5759): Shavuot

1999: NBC broadcast the final episode of seven season of “Homicide: Life on the Street:” which was based on David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

1999: U.S. premiere of “The Love Letter” featuring Sasha Spielberg as the “Girl with Sparkler.”

2000: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea That Rules the World” by David Berlinski.

2000(16^thof Iyar, 5760): Ninety-six year old George Marshall, civil rights advocate and conservationist and son of Lewis Marshall passed away today. (Wiki erroneously reported this as having happened on May 15)

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/18/nyregion/george-marshall-96-pioneer-in-the-civil-rights-movement.html

2001(28^thof Iyar, 5761): Yom Yerushalayim

2001: Radio broadcast of the annual Alfred Deakin Lecture; this year entitled "My Country – A Personal Journey"in which Robert Mamre describes what it is like for the son of Jewish immigrants to grow up in an Australia that is considered Anglo-Celtic. Author and historian Robert Manne is the Associate Professor of Politics at La Trobe University, a columnist for The Age, The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, and a regular commentator on ABC Radio and Television

2001: The Houston Post reports that American Jewish Congress v. Bost would be heard in federal district court. American Jewish Congress v. Bost was an establishment clause lawsuit concerning the separation of church and state based on events that took place in Brenham, Texas. The case was the first constitutional challenge to a charitable choice contract. In the community of Brenham, Texas, the American Jewish Congress and the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a lawsuit against a social services program that they believed used a tax-funded jobs program to support religious practices that violated the separation of church and state. Other accusations include use of funds to proselytize, purchase bibles, and coerce participants to "accept Jesus."  The lawsuit went back and forth between state and federal courts and was twice appealed. In January of 2003, the lawsuit that is believed to be the first constitutional challenge to a "charitable choice" contract, came to a conclusion. The case was finally dismissed "on the ground that there was no live controversy."

2002: “Prime Minister Ariel Sharon fired ministers from the rigorously Orthodox Shas Party from his cabinet tonight after they voted against an emergency economic package in Parliament.”

2003: “New York University is using a gift of more than $3 million from the Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation to form a research center for the study of modern Israel. It will be called the Taub Center for Israel Studies and will be part of the university's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.”

2003: “Israeli Who Loves Israel Listens, Sees and Weeps” published today provides a review David Grossman’s Death As A Way of Life.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/21/books/books-of-the-times-israeli-who-loves-israel-listens-sees-and-weeps.html?searchResultPosition=1

2004(1^stof Rosh Choesh Sivan 5764): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2004: “The catchy show opening today at the Jewish Museum is the first big New York retrospective of Amedeo Modigliani since 1951…” (As reported by Michael Kimmelman)

2004: “Arab leaders gathering today for a summit meeting on Saturday and Sunday in this North African capital are expected to issue a collective criticism of the United States for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and what they view as the anemic American effort toward ending the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

2005: In an article entitled “BioHazards,” New York Books reviews “The History of Love” by Nicole Krauss.  Krauss willingly talks about her second novel but refuses to talk about her husband, the Jewish writer Jonathan Safran Foer.

2005(12 of Iyar, 5765): Eighty-six year old actor Stephen Elliot passed away.

http://articles.latimes.com/2005/may/24/local/me-elliott24

2005(12^thof Iyar, 5767): Ninety-one year old New York native Moe Frankel, the son of Minnie and Sender Alexander Frankel passed away today in Hackensack, NJ.

2006: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including the recently released paperback editions of “Any Place I Hang My Hat” by Susan Isaacs, “The History of Love” by Nicole Krauss and “Indecision” by Benjamin Kunkel.

2006: Haaretz reported that author A.B. Yehoshua predicted that Diaspora Jews would move to China if it were to become a world power.  Dr. Avrum Ehrlich, a professor at the Center for Judaic and Inter-Religious Studies at the University of Shandong (China) says that this process is actually already under way. ‘The Jewish community in Hong Kong is thriving,’ he explains, ‘and there are at least 300 Jews now living permanently in Beijing alone.’”

2006: The first Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival comes to an end.

2006: After 109 performances, the curtain came down on a revival of Neil Simon’s Theatre at the Cort Theatre.

2006: The United Jewish Community/Jewish Federation of Las Vegas hosts its biggest and best Yom Ha’Azma’ut festival at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and the Jewish Agency arranged a variety of day-long activities to celebrate Israel Independence Day in downtown Budapest. 

2007: The JCC in Manhattan presents a program entitled “Bernstein & Robbins: Dybbuk in Music & Dance.” Jean-Pierre Frohlich, ballet master and former soloist with the New York City, discusses his work with Robbins in staging the ballets and presents several dancers performing excerpts from Dybbuk. Ellen Sorrin, director of The George Balanchine Trust and advisory council member of The Jerome Robbins Trust, serves as moderator.

2007(4 Sivan 5767): Shir-El Friedman is killed when a Hamas rocket struck vehicle near a bakery next to shopping mall in Sderot. The35 year old woman was struck by shrapnel and succumbed to her injuries as she was being rushed to the hospital.

2007: Mark Helprin “was said to be shocked” by the negative response reported in today’s New York Times to his op-ed piece “in which he argued that intellectual property rights should be assigned to an author or artist as far as Congress could practically extend them.”

2008:AJHS hosts the 2008 Emma Lazarus Statue of Liberty Award Dinner, commemorating the Jewish Chaplains who led survivors of the Holocaust from DP camps to Israel and the US. Sid Lapidus will be honored for his deep commitment to the American Jewish Historical Society.

2008: The finals of the European Champions League, soccer’s most prized club competition, will have a decidedly Jewish flavor. Not on the field of the Loujniki stadium in Moscow, where none of the 22 players of English teams Manchester United and Chelsea will be Jewish — but on the sidelines. To wit, in the VIP lounge, Chelsea’s owner, Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich, will square off against American billionaire Malcolm Glazer, who bought Manchester United three years ago. In addition, Chelsea’s coach is an unheralded 52-year-old Israeli by the name of Avram Grant. A discreet man with no reputation in the soccer world, he has incurred a constant flow of criticism for his lack of knowledge and for the defensive style of his team. But the mood has changed drastically. Grant managed to bring his club to the finals for the first time since Abramovich began spending millions in 2003 to build a contender, igniting a buying spree of top soccer clubs in England by such likeminded moguls as Glazer, who also owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team. Grant wears his Judaism on his sleeve — literally. In the semifinals game, he wore a yellow armband bearing the Star of David to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day. After the victory, he took a day off to travel to Auschwitz with his two teenage children to honor the memory of his father’s family. His father, Meir, now 80, lost his parents and five of his six siblings while they were hiding in a Russian forest to escape the Nazis. Now Grant is going back to Russia to become the first Israeli coach to win on the big European stage.

2008:  In Jaffa, System Ali plays on the roof of Mishkenot Ruth Daniel. Over the past year, System Ali has been performing in different venues throughout Jaffa, Tel Aviv and beyond, drawing impressive crowds whose diversity reflects that of the individuals on stage.”

2008: The 92^nd Street Y presents “The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis.”Moises Salinas explores the way psychological factors impede the peace process. 

2008; Jewish Braille International dinner was held at the Harmonie Club. “Founded in 1931 as the Jewish Braille Institute by Leopold Dubov, the blind son of a rabbi, and Rabbi Michael Aaronson, who had been blinded in World War I, today the JBI library serves 35,000 individuals in 30 countries in eight languages — all at no charge.”

2009: Michael Sandel delivered the 2009 Reith Lectures on “A New Citizenship” today at Oxford, UK.

2009:The Center for Jewish History and the Leo Baeck Institute presented“Happy Birthday, Felix: Music of Felix Mendelssohn and His Contemporaries” withPhoenix Chamber Ensemble performing rare arrangements of Felix Mendelssohn's Hebriden, op.26 and Ruy Blas, Op.95 Overtures and Symphony No.1 in C minor for 1 piano-4 hands, violin and cello and Robert Schumann's 12 Four-Hand Piano Pieces for Small and Big Children, Op.85

2009: Writer and essayist Phillip Lopate discusses “Notes On Sontag,” his reflections on the late Susan Sontag and her role as essayist, novelist and playwright, at Politics and Prose Bookstore, in Washington, D.C.

2009: Fred Hochberg, the first son of Lillian Vernon and Samuel Hochberg “was sworn in” today as Chairman and President of the Export-Import Bank

2009: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivered a speech at Ammunition Hill in memory of soldiers who fell in the Six-Day War in 1967 in which he said, “Jerusalem was always ours, will always be ours, and will never again be divided.”

2009: The four men arrested last night in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y. were petty criminals who appeared to be acting alone, not in concert with any terrorist organization, the New York City police commissioner said today. The four men arrested are all Muslim, a law enforcement official said. According to a police informant James Cromitie, one of the four men who was arrested said  that he was upset about the war in Afghanistan and that that he wanted to do “something to America.” and “the best target” — the World Trade Center — “was hit already.” According to the same informant the four men made statements if “Jews were killed in this attack and that would be all right.”

2010: The 92^nd St Y schedules two events to celebrate Shabbat: in the morning a Shabbat Bakery where participants can bake their own Challah and a Shabbat Rooftop Dinner, an intergenerational family Shabbat dinner experience in a meaningful and welcoming environment.

2010: Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, “was honored at Wagner College during the 123rd Graduation Ceremony today with an Honorary Doctorate.”

http://www.jwi.org/Page.aspx?pid=781#sthash.rHwxUyZt.jmCWHQmG.dpbs

2010: As part of her Bat Mitzvah weekend at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, IA, Shannon Williams and her family will be participating in Friday night services.

2011: “The Source” directed by Radu Mihăileanu  premiered in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival

2011: The AJMF Festival is scheduled to host its Closing Night Party at Center Stage.

2011: Korin Alal and Eran Zur are scheduled present a joint concert at the JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly, NJ.

2011: Defense Minister Ehud Barak said today that the differences between Israel and the United States on the peace process are smaller than they seem.

2011: In “Harold Bloom: An Uncommon Reader,” Sam Tanenhaus reviewed The Anatomy as a Way of Life, the latest literary effort by 80 year Jewish man of letters Harold Bloom.

2012: In recognition of Jewish American Heritage Month, the DC Public Library to present a lecture entitled “Jewish Civil Life at a Time of Civil War: American Jewry in the Mid-19th Century” during which Dr. Lauren Strauss, assistant professor of History and Judaic Studies at the George Washington University, will discuss the Jewish-American experience before 1870, with a focus on the status of the Jewish community in the decades surrounding the Civil War.http://www.dclibrary.org/node/30617

2012: In a great example of “acts of loving kindness”, The Derfner Judaica Museum located at The Hebrew Home at Riverdale, Bronx, NY is scheduled to offer private group tours for individuals with dementia and their family members or care partners that will focus on select highlights of this fascinating institution. 

2012: Tefillat HaShlah - the Shlah's Prayer should be recited today before sunset.  The prayers was composed Isaiah Horowoitz, a noted 17^th century rabbi who moved to Palestine in the 1620’s, living there until his death ten years later. “Rabbi Horwitz wrote that the eve of the first day of the Hebrew month of Sivan is the most auspicious time to pray for the physical and spiritual welfare of one's children and grandchildren, since Sivan was the month that the Torah was given to the Jewish people. He composed a special prayer to be said on this day, known as the Tefillat HaShlah - the Shlah's Prayer”

2012: The Buchmann-Mehta School of Music Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Zeev Dorman is scheduled to perform at Carnegie Hall

2012: Aaron Swartz delivered the keynote address at the F2C: Freedom to Connect 2012 event in Washington, D.C. following the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

2012: Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman is among those scheduled to perform at the Good Shepherd Church in New York.

2012: The Yellow Ticket with Alicia Svigals is scheduled to be the final performance at the 13^th Annual Washington Jewish Music Festival.

2013: The 7^th independent conference for the Hannah Arendt Circle sponsored by The Institute of Jewish Studies and the Centre for Philosophy of Culture at the University of Antwerp in Belgium is scheduled to come to an end.

2013: The IPO annual Young Leadership concert is scheduled to take place in Manhattan

2013: Dudu Fisher is scheduled to perform at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, NJ.

2013(12^thof Sivan, 5773): Eighty-year old Leonard Marsh the founder of the Snapple Beverage Corporation passed away today.  (As reported by Margalit Fox)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/business/leonard-marsh-80-dies-a-founder-of-snapple.html?hpw&_r=0

http://blog.aarp.org/2013/05/28/fun-facts-about-leonard-marsh-snapple-co-founder-ice-tea-drinks/

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324659404578499524275374196

2013: Eric Garcetti was elected Mayor of Los Angeles making him the first Jewish person to hold this position.

2013: Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon and the IDF said today that Israel has destroyed an unspecified Syrian target after fire from the Syrian side of the Golan Heights border damaged an IDF vehicle

2013: As the debate over the operating hours of the capital’s largest and newest (yet-toopen) movie complex Cinema City continues, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat – who launched his reelection campaign last week – said today he supports its forced Shabbat closure.

2014: Today, at the 4^th International Writers’ Festival, S.Y. Agnon is scheduled to be honored with “a series of events, including a visit to his home and library in the neighborhood of Talpiot. The day’s events also include a writing jam with Eshkol Nevo and Orit Gidali, and one of the Writing Here, Writing There conversations, this time between A. B. Yehoshua and Nicole Krauss.” (As reported by Jessica Steinberg)

2014: The opening reception for “The Hidden Passengers” organized by Avi Lubin is scheduled to begin this evening.

2014: “Pope Francis will adhere to a policy of “total balance” regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his close friend Rabbi Abraham Skorka said today in Jerusalem, though he noted that Francis’s scheduled laying of a wreath at the grave of Theodor Herzl would be “a meaningful act.”  (As reported by Raphael Ahren)

2014: “Australian energy giant Woodside Petroleum pulled out of the massive Leviathan gas joint venture off the coast of Israel — one of the largest deposits found in the world.”

2014: Today, “the commander of the Israeli Air Force described a top-to-bottom change that has led to a 400 percent increase in the IAF’s firepower over the past two years, drastically shortening the time it would take Israel to win a future war.” (As reported by Mitch Ginsburg)

2014: A court hearing is scheduled today for Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, associate director at the Arab American Action Network in Chicago whose failure to disclose her conviction for killing two people with a bomb in Jerusalem in 1969 should lead to her deportation under U.S. Immigration law.

2015: The Jewish Historical Society of England is scheduled to host a lecture on Do Jews Believe in Saints? A Medieval Rabbi and his Posthumous Travels by Lucia Raspe.

2015: Professor David Rechter is scheduled to deliver a lecture on “Trauma on the Eastern Front: European Jews and the First World War: at the University of London

2015: The Anti-Defamation League announced today that Lady Gaga had accepted its Making a Difference award for “work championing positive social change” through her Born This Way Foundation.

2015: In “One of earliest known copies of Ten Commandments sees the light of day” published today William Booth described the importance of  “4Q41” and its rare public appearance the Israel Museum.

2016: The Eden-Tamir Music Center is scheduled to present “Sounds of the Flute in Ein Kerem – The French Connection featuring Noam Buchman on the flute and pianist Pazit Gal.

2016(13^th of Iyar, 5776): Shabbat Emor;

2017: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro and an interview with actor Michael Tambor.

2017(25th of Iyar, 5777): In Cincinnati, graduation ceremonies are scheduled to take place a the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion

2017(25^th of Iyar, 5777): “Shulamit “Shula” Cohen-Kishik, a spy for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency who worked undercover in Lebanon for 14 years” passed away today.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-spy-shulamit-cohen-kishik-dies-at-100/

2017: Gilia Almagor is scheduled to perform her one-woman show “The Summer of Aviya” at the Streicker Center.

2017: Andres Roemer, “the Mexican diplomat who was from his ambassador position for walking out an anti-Israel vote by a United Nations agency” is scheduled to “be awarded the International Sephardic Leadership Awards at a ceremony at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

https://www.jta.org/2017/04/30/news-opinion/world/mexican-diplomat-to-be-honored-for-challenging-unesco-on-anti-israel-vote

2017:Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and Dayan Menachem Gelley, Rosh of the London Beth Din, walked the grounds of a new United Synagogue cemetery in Bushy and buried a Torah scroll as part of the consecration of the £8 million site. (As reported by Jewish News)

2017: The Jewish Federation of Houston is scheduled to present “The Big Gig” with Seth Meyers.

2017: “Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the nation’s largest aerospace and defense company, said today it has received an additional $630 million contract to supply long-range surface-to-air missile (LRSAM) defense systems for four ships of the Indian navy.” (As reported by Shoshanna Solomon)

2017: Cantor Aaron Shifman, along with Joshua Nelson and Pey Dalid are scheduled to host “Joyful Sounds” the annual concert spring at B’nai Jeshurun Congregation in Pepper Pike,Ohio.

2017: The Cleveland History Center is scheduled to celebrate the completion of “the Soviet Jewish Oral History Collection, an archive at the Cleveland History Center of the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland.”

2018(7^thof Sivan, 5778): Second Day of Shavuot;

2018(7^thof Sivan, 5778): Eighty-seven year old Elaine Markson, the Brooklyn born daughter of Catskill hotel owners Leon and Lilyan Kretchmar and the wife of “experimental novelist David Markson” who was one of “the first women to own a literary agency” which she used “to further the careers of fledgling feminist authors” passed away today (As reported by Sam Roberts)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/obituaries/elaine-markson-literary-agent-for-feminist-authors-dies-at-87.html?action=click&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=Article&region=Footer&contentCollection=Obituaries

2018: Susan “Herbst announced that she would step down from her role as president of the University of Connecticut when her contract expired on July 1, 2019, but would remain on the faculty, teaching political science at the Stamford campus.

2018: In Little Rock, the Arkansas Jewish Center under the leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Ciment is scheduled to offer a full day of holiday observance including Shacharis, Yizkor, Mussfa and a Kiddush followed by Mincha.

2019: JB and Yeshiva University Museum are scheduled to host “Child Separation and Refugee Crises From the Kindertransport to Today,” during  which “Mark Hetfield, CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and Alex Aleinikoff, Director of the New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration & Mobility and the former UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees, discuss the history of popular opposition to refugees and especially how it has impacted children, from the Kindertransport to the Trump Administration’s child separation policy.”

2019: In London, “the friends of the Rambam Medical Centre” are scheduled to present “the world pre-premier of ‘Rocketman’.”

2019:The Queen” The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth by Josh Levin iss scheduled to go on sale to the general public today.

2019: Rabbi Raphael Zarum, the holder of a PhD in theoretical physics and the Dean of the London School of Jewish Studies is scheduled to lecture this afternoon on “Neo-Assyrian Empire and Northern Kingdom of Israel.”

2020: Despite the fact that the Global Nação conference has been postponed The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience is scheduled to present “a glimpse into the world of Western Sephardim through an academic perspective”

2020: United with Israel is scheduled to host a “special webinar program today in honor of Jerusalem Day.”

2020: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host via zoom the only Varsity match that actually matters, as Oxford and Cambridge JSocs battle it out to be crowned the winner of Jewniversity Challenge!

2020: The AJHS is scheduled to host “Photographs of the Depression: a Jewish Angle” a Virtual Program Exploring The AJHS Photograph Collections.

2020: The Pozez JCC of Northern Virginia is scheduled to host and Les Bergen is scheduled to host on line “Jewish Washington: A Scrapbook of an American Community” which provides a chronicle of the people, places, and events that shaped the history of the Washington area's Jewish community from 1795 to the present,

2020: Millions of lovers of Sabra, “the official dip sponsor of the National Football League” can celebrate Hummus Day which is not to be confused with “National Hummus Day” by chowing on this marvelous culinary creation

https://www.checkiday.com/354460d6cb20abb1746ace8ccb006319/hummus-day

2020: Yom Yershualayim Day is scheduled to begin at sundown.

2020: In a unique response to the Pandemic, Congregation Or Atid is scheduled to host via Zoom Rabbi Louis Polisson for bedtime songs and stories to help youngsters have a Lilah tov.

2020: Stanford Text Technologies, Stanford University Libraries is scheduled to host “The Cairo Geniza in the Digital Age: A Webinar with Marina Rustow”

https://events.stanford.edu/events/878/87869/

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This Day, May 22, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 22

334 BCE:  The Macedonian army of Alexander the Great defeated Darius III of Persia in the Battle of the Granicus. This was the first step of a “journey” that would lead to the turning Egypt and Asia Minor (a territory that included Jerusalem and Judea) into bastions of Hellenistic culture.  This would create a collision course with Jewish values that would lead to the Maccabee Revolt followed by decades of internecine fighting that would really not come to an end until the Second Temple was destroyed.

124 BCE (23rd of Iyar, 3618):  Simon the Hasmonean, drove the “Greeks” – the Syrians and their Hellenized Jewish allies – out of the citadel which was their last stronghold in Jerusalem. While Jews celebrate Chanukah, it is this victory, 40 years later, under Judah’s youngest brother that marks the defeat of the Syrians that led to an independent Jewish state under the Hasmonean dynasty.

337:  Constantine, known as the first Christian Emperor of the Roman Emperor for legalizing the practice of Christianity in the Roman Empire passed away. As the following entry shows, Constantine not only promoted Christianity, he was instrumental in the creation of hostile environment for the Jewish people. “Constantine instituted several legislative measures regarding the Jews: they were forbidden to own Christian slaves or to circumcise their slaves. Conversion of Christians to Judaism was outlawed. Congregations for religious services were restricted, but Jews were allowed to enter Jerusalem on Tisha B'Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. Constantine also supported the separation of the date of Easter from the Jewish Passover stating in his letter after the First Council of Nicaea: "... it appeared an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most holy feast we should follow the practice of the Jews, who have impiously defiled their hands with enormous sin, and are, therefore, deservedly afflicted with blindness of soul. ... Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd; for we have received from our Saviour a different way." Theodoret's Ecclesiastical History 1.9 records the Epistle of the Emperor Constantine addressed to those Bishops who were not present at the Council: "It was, in the first place, declared improper to follow the custom of the Jews in the celebration of this holy festival, because, their hands having been stained with crime, the minds of these wretched men are necessarily blinded. ... Let us, then, have nothing in common with the Jews, who are our adversaries. ... avoiding all contact with that evil way. ... who, after having compassed the death of the Lord, being out of their minds, are guided not by sound reason, but by an unrestrained passion, wherever their innate madness carries them. ... a people so utterly depraved. ... Therefore, this irregularity must be corrected, in order that we may no more have any thing in common with those parricides and the murderers of our Lord. ... no single point in common with the perjury of the Jews."

1176:  Murder attempt by the Hashshashin (Assassins) on Saladin near Aleppo. This attempt on the Muslim Warrior-King was part of the on-going clash between sects of Islam.  From the Jewish point of view, Saladin’s survival is good news.  After capturing Jerusalem from the Crusaders, Saladin allowed the Jews to return to the City of David during a century long ban imposed by the Christians.  The event was eloquently described by the Jewish poet Al-harizi in 1190.  Saladin reportedly hired Moses Maimonides to serve as his personal physician.

1370: After killing a rich Jew in Brussels, Belgium, the perpetrators tried to cover their tracks by accusing the Jews of host desecration. The perpetrators escaped in the ensuing confusion. A few hundred Jews were killed and the rest banished from the country. A holiday was declared by the local churches.

1377: Pope Gregory XI issues five papal bulls to denounce the doctrines of English theologian John Wycliffe. Wycliffe’s doctrines were part of the heresies threatening Papal authority throughout northern Europe. This is the same Pope Gregory who had ordered the burning of Jewish books a year earlier in 1376, an act that might be seen more as a way of enforcing Papal authority and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church.

1549: Queen Bona Sforza rendered a decision today issued “regulations modifying and defining the rights of the Jewish community of Grodno” including a requirement that Jews “pay 17 percent of the taxes the government assessed against the city” while freeing the Jews “from special taxes paid in kind” but denying the Jews to “buy a house from a citizen without royal permission.

1608: Jacob Wolfgang, a German Jew who converted to Christianity became a reader at the Bodleian Library today.

1649: Birthdate of “German Orientalist,” Matthew Frederick Beck, the Augsburg “preacher” who “published a translation of the Targum on Chronicles” and the translator of “several other works from including a description of “the travels of Benjamin of Tudela.” (As reported by Joseph Jacobs and Richard Gottheil)

1753(18^thof Iyar 5513): Lag B’Omer

1753: The Jewish Naturalization Act 1753 passed the House of Commons

1760(7th of Sivan, 5520): Second Day of Shavuot

1760: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Rubin of Linsk and his Beila the daughter of Rabbi Yitzchak Halevi Horowitz of Hamburg gave birth to Rabbi Naftali Zvi Horowitz of Ropshitz, “the first Ropshitzer Rebbe”

1760(7th of Sivan, 5520): Rabbi Israel (Yisroel) ben Eliezer (רבי ישראל בן אליעזר better known as the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Chasidic Judaism, passed away. [Hopefully this brief entry will spur readers to find out more about a person who had such an impact on the Jewish people.]

http://www.chabad.org/generic_cdo/aid/388609/jewish/The-Baal-Shem-Tov.htm

1771: Today Moses de Lyon married Rose Solomons in New York City.

1787: In London, Daniel Cohen D'Azevedo, the son of Haham Moses Cohen d'Azevedo and Sara de Haham Moses Cohen D'Azevedo  and his wife Ester Rodriques Cohen D'Azevedo gave birth to Abagail Daniel Cohen De Azevedo

1793(17th of Iyar 5553): Rabbi Ezekeil Landau passed away. Born in 1713, in Prague, he was a brilliant Talmudist and Halachic authority. Landau was also unusual in that he endorsed the idea of leaning math and science, and supported the traditionalist element within the Maskilim (Enlightenment) movement. Landau helped to establish the first Jewish school in Prague. His magnum opus is called the Nodeh B'Yehuda which is still very popular today. It contains eight hundred and fifty-five Responsa divided into two volumes.

1796(14^thof Iyar, 5556): Pesach Sheni observed for the last time during the Presidency of George Washington.

1799: In Paris, Le Moniteur Universal published a short statement sent from the French forces besieging Acre that: "Buonaparte a fait publier une proclamation, dans laquelle il invite les juifs de l'Asie et de l'Afrique à venir se ranger sous ses drapeaux, pour rétablir l'ancienne Jérusalem; il en a déjà armé un grand nombre, et leurs bataillons menacent Alep." This has been translated in English as: "Bonaparte has published a proclamation in which he invites all the Jews of Asia and Africa to gather under his flag in order to re-establish the ancient Jerusalem. He has already given arms to a great number, and their battalions threaten Aleppo.”  Unbeknownst to the newspaper, Napoleon had already abandoned the siege of the Acre, leaving it in the hands of the Ottomans and surrendering his designs to create a French empire in the Orient.

1802: Birthdate Bavarian poet Leopold Feldmann.

1804: Birthdate of Pharmacologist Jonathan Perieira, the native of London whose “book on Materia Medica was the first great English work on Pharmacology.”

1806(5^thof Sivan, 5566): Erev Shavuot observed as Lewis and Clark made their way through what is now Montana on their way to the Pacific coast.

1809(7th of Sivan, 5569): Second Day of Shavuot

1811: Birthdate of Leopold Löw, Hungarian rabbi and theologian.

1813: Birthdate of composer Richard Wagner.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Wagner.html

1814: Birthdate of Joshua Heschel Schoor, “Galician Hebrew scholar, critic, and communal worker.”

1817(7^thof Sivan, 5577): Second day of Shavuot; Yizkor

1820: Birthdate of Isidor Binswanger, a leader of the Philadelphia Jewish community who served as President of Maimonides College, the first Jewish institution of higher learning in the United States and the father of Fanny Binswanger Hoffman.

1823: In London, Abraham Jacob Mocatta and the former Miriam Brandon gave birth to Miriam Mocatta.

1825(5^thof Sivan, 5585): Erev Shavuot celebrated for the first time during the Presidency of John Q. Adams.

1835: Sixty-eight year old Isaac Lazarus was buried today at the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.

1836(6^thof Sivan, 5596): Shavuot is celebrated for the last time under the Presidency of Andrew Jackson.

1838: In Manchester, England, Phillip Solomon and Catherine Hart gave birth to Jacob P. Solomon, who studied at Notre Dame and earned a law degree from Columbia before marrying Frances Stitch and becoming the editor of several publications including the Jewish Record and the Hebrew Leader while also writing “Chronicles of the Rabbis” “Chips from Masonic Quarries” and “The Modern Wandering Jew.”

1839(9th of Sivan, 5599): Yisroel ben Shmuel Ashkenazi of Shklov, a disciple of the Vilna Gaon who “became the head of the German and Polish congregations of Safed and then of Jerusalem” passed away today at Tiberias

1842: Two days after she had passed away, Esther Norden, the daughter of Jacob Norden and Catherine Jacobs was buried today at the “Brompton (Fulham Road ) Jewish Cemetery.”

1843: “The first major wagon train” heading for that part of the Northwest Territory now known as Oregon…”departs from Elm Grove, Missouri traveling along the Oregon Trail.  According to Scott Cline, author of Community Structure on the Urban Frontier: The Jews of Portland, Oregon Jacob Goldsmith and Lewis May who arrived in Portland, Oregon in 1849. They were the first Jewish settlers in Portland and possibly in all of Oregon.

1843: Birthdate of Adolf Aron Baginsky, a leading German physician who was a staunch defender of his people against the growing anti-Semitism in his homeland. “He is also the author of an essay entitled, "Die Hygienische Bedeutung der Mosäischen Gesetzgebung," in which he comes forward as a stanch defender and enthusiastic admirer of the hygienic laws of Moses” and as a leader of the Berlin Jewish community opposed moving Sabbath services to Sunday.

1846: One day after she had passed away, Catherine Barnet, the wife of Godfrey Barnet, was buried today at the “Brady Street Jewish Cemetery.”

1846: A wagon train owned by Albert Speyer left Independence, MO today headed for Santa Fe New Mexico.  A native of Prussia, Speyer had been operating wagon trains since 1843.  Two of the 25 wagons making this trip were reportedly filled with Yager rifles and ammunition that had been ordered by Angel Trias, the governor of Chihuahua, Mexico.  At this time, Santa Fe was still a part of Mexico and Speyer had no way of knowing the United States was about to go to war with its neighbor to the south. 

1847(7^thof Sivan, 5607): 2^nd Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1848: In Bavaria, Ephraim and Lea Kopple Waldstein gave birth to Zadok “Oskar” Waldstein, the brother of Sophie Waldstein.

1848: Birthdate of Elise Lehmann who was buried at the Jewish Cemetery in Morgan City, LA, when she passed away in 1923.

1850: The following article published today entitled “Paris—Foundation of a Jewish Hospital” described work being done to establish a Jewish hospital in Paris and provided a snapshot of the French Jewish community.

The editor of the “Archives Israelites,” in his May number, says: “Among the establishments, the most imperiously demanded is a Jewish hospital. Let the individual opinions of each of us concerning our ceremonies, especially those which concern dietetic laws, be more or less rigid, it is nevertheless the duty of an Israelitish administration to take care of those under their charge, who would sooner die than enter an hospital, where the observance of their religious rules is impossible. Moreover, when we think of the interference of the clergy, who seek to fish for souls, and who often find auxiliaries against the tolerant wishes of the directors of hospitals, in the sisters (of charity) who attend on the sick, no one can deny that a Jewish hospital is necessary.”—After some farther remarks he continues: “Thanks to Mr. James Rothschild, Paris will have a Jewish hospital. He has just purchased a piece of ground in Rue Picpus, Nos. 62, 64, and 66, measuring 7,500 metres, of which 800 are occupied by buildings, and the other 6,700 are laid out in gardens, walks, &c. The buildings consist of three houses contiguous to each other. The price of the purchase, with the expenses and building, will reach nearly 120,000 francs, about $22,800. A large portion of the land can be taken, independently of the hospital, for the use of the poor class.” The consistory of Paris very properly called on Mr. Rothschild, on the 22d of May, to thank him for his generosity. Dr. Cahen, in a few, well-chosen words, expressed the gratitude felt by the whole community, and used this remarkable phrase: “God has given you wealth, but He has also given you a heart to make, so charitable a use of it as this is.” Mr. R. was greatly moved by the act, and the words addressed to him; and made a suitable reply. His wife was present, and active as she is in all that is charitable, she took part in the conversation which afterwards sprang up between them and the deputation, and Mr. R. made particular inquiries after many matters of interest to the congregation, and showed himself ready to continue them his kindness.—It is not often, our readers will confess, that we praise the rich; but such an act of true benevolence as this just exhibited by Mr. Rothschild of Paris richly deserves to be recorded in our magazine; and we hope to hear that he has found imitators in this country; for though we have none who control such ample resources, there is no lack of means among us, if their possessors could once be persuaded that they could devote a considerable portion of their wealth to worthy objects of charity without robbing their families, the usual

1851(20th of Iyar, 5611): Mordecai Manuel Noah, author, diplomat and one of the most influential Jewish leaders in the first half of the 19th century passed away. Born in 1785, he was a diplomatic representative for the U.S.in North Africa when the new nation was making its foray into the Moslem world.  In a later episode he gained the support of Adams, Jefferson and Madison (all founding fathers and U.S. Presidents) in reiterating the American belief in the separation of church and state.  He may best be remembered for his attempt to create a utopian refuge for displaced European Jewry on an island on the Niagara River called Ararat.  [Editor’s note: this blog does not have a enough space to do justify to the life of this fascinating Jewish American leader who set the tone for American Jewry – proud to be both Jewish and a citizen of the United States.]

1851: In Luxembourg, Rabbi Samuel Hirsch and his wife gave birth to Emil Gustav Hirsch, the American Rabbi was a major leader of Reform Judaism.

http://americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1952_04_02_00_martin.pdf

1852: Birthdate of Emil Gustav Hirsch the son of Rabbi Samuel Hirsh and the son-in-law of Rabbi David Einhorn who was a major leader in the Reform movement in the United States.

1853: In Baden, Germany a local brewer and his wife gave birth to William Simon, who at the age of 18 came to the United States where worked for different brewers before settling in Buffalo in 1888 and  in 1894 becoming  the sole proprietor of the John Schusler Brewing Company while raising two sons and three daughters with the former Theresa Bronsetetter.

1854: At Freetown, Prince Edward Island, Robert and Lydia Schurman gave birth to Jacob Gould Schurman who in 1905, while serving as President of Cornell University, sent a check to Jacob H. Schiff, the treasurer of the Jewish Relief Fund along with a letter that said, “I enclose herewith my check for the fund in relief of the suffering Jews of Russia, whose terrible condition appeals to the universal heart of mankind.

1855(5^thof Sivan, 5615): Erev Shavuot

1856: Astronomer Hermann Goldschmidt discovered asteroid 41 Daphne.

1858(9^thof Sivan, 5618): Author and publicist Marion H. Spielman passed away today in England.

1858(9^thof Sivan, 5618): Maimonides scholar David Ottensosser passed away today.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0015_0_15272.html

1859(18th of Iyar, 5619): Lag B’Omer

1859: Lipman Nathan and Phoebe Silver were married today in London.

1860: Today, “in the United States Senate” Louisiana Senator “Judah P. Benjamin spoke in scathing terms of Stephen A. Douglas and lauded Lincoln, the question under consideration being measures introduced by Jefferson Davis on the subject of States Rights and Slavery.” (Benjamin was Jewish – the rest were not.)

1861: In Philadelphia, Abraham and Cecilia (Adler) Goldmsith gave birth to Milton Goldsmith the President of Goldsmith – Tobias Advertising Agency and the author of Rabbi and Priest and A Victim of Conscience who was the husband of Sophie Hyman.

1864: During the Civil War, the Red River Campaign in which Colonel H. Newbold of the 14^thIowa was killed came to an end.

1866: Daniel DeLeon arrived in Hamburg from Curacao.

1867: One day after he had passed away, 56 year old Asher Jacobs the son of Isaac and Catherine Jacobs and the husband of Caroline Cohen was buried today in Sheerness, at the “Halfway (Queensborough) Jewish Cemetery.”

1869: Ferdinand Esterhazy, the real villain in the Dreyfus Affair began his military career by joining the Roman Legion today having failed the entrance exams for Saint-Cyr.

1871: In Detroit, Kaufmann Kohler, the rabbi at Beth-El Congregation and the former Johanna Einhorn, the “third daughter of leading Reform Rabbi David Einhorn” gave birth to Max James Kohler, the Columbia Law School graduate and assistant U.S. District Attorney who was a leader of the American Jewish community and an advocate for immigrant rights, regardless of their nation of origin.

https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/max_/Max%20James%20Kohler.pdf

1871: Reverend Howard Crosby chaired a meeting at New York’s Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church where plans were discussed to explore the area along the Jordan River this October.  The explorers hoped to find tombs of the Israelite Kings, the Ark of the Covenant and/or the tablets of stone.  Crosby pointed out that a previous expedition had found a large Moabite stone with letters that were more like English than ancient Hebrew.

1872: “Another Influential Southerner Declares For Grant” published today described the decision of Georgia General Henry C. Wayne to support the man who defeated the Confederacy because he did not want to support a party “being carried in the pockets of a foreign Jew banker” referring to August Belmont.

1873: Birthdate of Polish native Herman Gessner who was chosen to serve on the National Executive Committee at the Convention of the ZOA held in Cleveland in 1921:

1874(6^thof Sivan, 5634): Shavuot

1875: Henrietta Held joined the people of Israel in conversion ceremony held following afternoon services at a the synagogue located on Sixth Street near Second avenue in New York City

1877: Birthdate of Rangoon native and barrister Elisha Arakie Cohen the first husband of journalist Ruth Collie whom he married in 1908 in Cambridge, England.

1878: The funeral of Rabbi Samuel M. Isaacs took place this morning at Shaari Tephila on West 44th Street in New York City.  Rabbis A.S. Solomon, Menes and Morais of Philadelphia participated in the service.  Burial took place at Cypress Hill Cemetery

1880(12^thof Sivan, 5640): Controversial reforming Rabbi Joseph Aub passed away in Berlin.

1880: Birthdate of Posen native Felix Pinner, the German “economist and journalist” who came to the United States as a refugee in 1937

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.weltbuehne-lesen.de/pinner.html&prev=search



1883: One hundred thirty houses belonging to Jews were destroyed during a riot tonight at Rostoff.  The riot began after it was reported that an unnamed Jew had murder a Russian.

1885: In Illinois, Max and Sophia Reens Brunwasser gave birth to Jacob H. “Jack” Brunwasser, the third of their six children.

1885: French author Victor Hugo passed away. His works included “Cromwell,” a play about the English leader that included a portrayal of Manasseh Ben Israel that was “a grotesque travesty, ”  “Marie Tudor” a play that includes a “despicable Jewish ursuer” and “Toquemada,” a play about the Spanish Inquisition that was really “a protest against the Pogroms in Russia” that were occurring at the time of the play’s production.

1887: In Providence, R.I., “Herman and Sarah (Eisenberg) Boas gave birth to Brown, University of Chicago and Harvard educated English professor Ralph Boas and husband of Louise Schultz who gave birth to mathematician Ralph Boas, Jr while teaching at Whitman College and who taught at Holyoke where his son spent his gap year.

1889: In Dombrad, Hungary, Chana Moskovitz and her shoemaker husband Vilmos Maltz gave birth to Herman Maltz, the founder Maltz Furniture Company in Los Angeles, CA.

1889: Newspaper coverage published today described the new building of the Moses Montefiore Congregation in Bloomington, Illinois “as, not only the handsomest and most unique in design of any building in the city, but comparable to the best of any Jewish synagogue in the West” and went on to say that the construction “was accomplished by a group of 24 members.”

1890(3^rdof Sivan, 5650): Fifty year old Edmund H. Abrahams, the son of Alexander and Hannah Abrahams, the husband of Cecelia Solomons Abrahams and father of Edmund H. Abrahams passed away today.

1891(11^thof Sivan, 5762): Louis Raphael who had shot his fiancée Rachel Weinberg before turning the gun on himself died today from the self-inflicted gunshot wound.

1891: Two days after he had passed away, three days after he had passed away, Alfred Goldsmid, the son of Alexander Goldsmid and Eliza Israel and the husband of Constance August Mocatta, was buried in the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1891: Sir Robert Fowler who in 1883, while serving as Lord Mayor of London refused to allow Adolf Stocker, the German “Jew-baiter” to lecture at the Mansion House passed away today.

1891: “Dr. Henry M Leipziger” published today described the career of the newly elected Assistant Superintendent of the New York Public Schools who had become the Director of the Hebrew Technical Institute in 1884 where he transformed the school in “a model institution of this kind.”

1892: It was reported today that in 1891 The Maimonides Library circulations amounted to 47,471, an increase of 20 per cent over that of 1890 and 30 per cent over that of 1888.

1893: A number of the Polish and Russian Jews who arrived yesterday aboard the SS Amalfi are being held at Ellis Island because they are destitute which means they may not be able to enter the United States.

1893: In an interview with a reporter from the New York Times, Rabbi Adolph Rabin denied accusations that he had not provided solace and comfort to convicted murders Isaac Rosenwig and Harris Blank before their execution in Pennsylvania.  He claimed that the difficulty in meeting with them arose from the fact that the killers wanted him to help them commit suicide.

1894: The first conference of Hebrew and Christian Workers Israel in the United States and Canada was held today at Park Street Church in Boston, MA.

1894: The first American Congress of Liberal Religious Societies met at Temple Sinai in Chicago, Illinois.

1895: The Monte Relief Society, which was founded by Mrs. Sofia Monte Loebinger, is scheduled to host a fund raising festival today at the Grand Central Palace.

1898: In Vienna, 30 year old Siegfried Reginald Wolf married Ida Wolf.

1898: In Philadelphia, “Mayer Sulzberger delivered the decennial address” today at the annual meeting of the Jewish Public Society of America at Keneseth Israel.

1898: Dr. Stephen Wise is scheduled to officiate at the funeral services for 62 old year Herman Phillips “a teacher connected with the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society” who previously served as a rabbi at synagogues in Boston and Toronto, Canada.

1898: During the Spanish-American War, Sergeant Max J. Heinberg and Private William L. Hahn of Tampa, FL of Company H of the 1^st Florida Volunteer Infantry were mustered into federal military service today.

1898: During the Spanish-American War, Texans Sam Cooper, Company A, Gus L. Berkman, Company C, , Herman H. Blum, Company M, Max Blumberg, Company B, Walter Falk, Captain’s Orderly Company A, Morris Farber, Company L, Henry Perlman, Company D, Charles Fischl, Company E, Harry Friedman , Hospital Corps Company M, Sol Gordon, Company K, H.S. Hyneman, Company F, Charles C. Jacobs, Company M and Joseph Levy, Regimental Band Company M all of the 1st Volunteer Infantry were among those who were mustered into federal service today at Galveston, TX.

1898: The Grand Lodge No. 1 of the Independent Order Free Sons of Israel hosted a patriotic service tonight at Temple Rodolph Sholom.

1898: “In Foreign Lands” published today described the “about-face” taken by French journalist Henri Rochefort, a leading anti-Dreyfus leader.  At first he accused Dreyfus and his family of being responsible for the Spanish-American War.  Now he claims that the Dreyfus family and the Rothschilds are responsible for the support shown by the French press for the cause of Spain.

1899: The Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls opened its doors on New York's East 63rd Street.

http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/22/1899/clara-de-hirsch

1899: The widow of Leopold S. Levy who died when ruffians fractured his skills is still hospitalized in New York Hospital following a failed attempt to take her own life.  According to a note that was found, she was despondent and depressed by the death of her husband.

1900: Anti-Semitic riots came to an end at Stolp and Butow

1900: Birthdate of Voronezh, Russia native Dr. William Dameshek, the graduate of Harvard Medical School who became “the preeminent hematologist of our time.”

http://www.hematology.org/About/History/Legends/2077.aspx

1901: Over three thousand people attended the ceremonies marking the laying of the “cornerstone of the new building for Mount Sinai Hospital.”

1902: In Newark, NJ, “fish and eggs were at premium today in the Jewish quarter” because none of the 2,000 or 3,000 chickens usually killed by kosher butchers on what is known as Chicken Day because all of the butchers are still closed following the riots that took place earlier this week.

1903: “Arnold Kohn the Treasurer of the Central Committee said today that he had received $500 from the Federation of Zionists and a ‘substantial check from New York Mayor Low.”

1905: It was reported today the newly elected officers of the Jewish Publication Society are: President – Edwin Wolf; First Vice President – Henry M. Leipziger; Second Vice President – Sol Blumenthal; Trustees Cyrus Adler, Henry M. Leipsizer, Judge Mayer Sulzberger, Edwin Wolf and Morris Newburger.

1906: Birthdate of comic Harry Ritz of the Ritz Brothers. Born Harry Joachim, Harry was the 'middleman' of the Ritz Brothers, and was an inspiration for Danny Kaye and Sid Caesar. In 1934, The Ritz Brothers appeared in their first film, "Hotel Anchovy". The team worked for Fox and later Universal. He died of cancer in 1986

1907: Birthdate of Harry Ritz, the youngest of the “Ritz Brothers.”

1908: Birthdate of Sheboygan, Wisconsin native and University of Wisconsin Law School trained attorney David Rabinovitz who served as Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin during the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

https://www.fjc.gov/node/1390336

1908: Birthdate of Sheboygan, Wisconsin native and University of Wisconsin Law School trained attorney David Rabinovitz who served as Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin during the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

https://www.fjc.gov/node/1390336

1909(2^ndof Sivan, 5669): Parashat Bamidbar

1909: “According to a special imperial order just issued Jews will be admitted to the health resorts in the Caucasus” which reserves the order issued six weeks ago denying Jews admission “to the Caucausus during the coming season.

1910: “Answering a recent pulpit utterance of the Rev. Dr. Magnes of Temple Emanu-El, Dr. Stephen S. Wise of the Free Synagogue in West Eighty-First Street ardently defended the Jewish reform movement this morning.”

1911: In “Dr. Wise Attacks Fifth Avenue Clubs” published today the distinguished rabbi said of the New York social clubs that banned Jewish members, “It is honoring to be shut out of some Fifth Avenue clubs in our city – the qualifications for admission to these being apparently a capacity for unlimited idleness and for an almost unlimited measure of strong drink.”

1912(6^thof Sivan, 5672): Shavuot

1912(6^thof Sivan, 5672): Brigadier General Morris Horkheimer, the Commissary General of the West Virginia National Guard, who was also a successful businessman and civic leader passed away today at Atlantic City, NJ where he was visiting in attempt to improve his failing health.

http://www.ohiocountylibrary.org/wheeling-history/4279

1912: In London, “Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Zhitomir, Pearl (née Gorinstein) and Charles Brovarnik, a hardware store manager and carpenter gave birth to Herbert Brovarnik who gained game as Herbert Brown, the American chemist who earned a B.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1979 with George Witting, while giving public credit to the support given to him by his wife Sarah Baylen

https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2004-12-21-hbrown-obit_x.htm

1913: Britain’s King George V who as Prince of Wales had attended a Seder in Jerusalem and would be the first English monarch to reign the Yishuv, Germany Kaiser’s Wilhelm II who would blame the Jews for him losing his throne and WW I and Russian Tsar Nicholas II the last in a long line of anti-Semitic rulers gathered in Berlin to attend the wedding the wedding Princess Luise, the Kaiser’s daughter.

1914: The Becker-Rosenthal trial in which Charles Becker and members of the Lenox Avenue Gang faced charges for having murdered bookmaker Herman Rosenthal came to a close.

1914(26^thof Iyar, 5674): Rabbi Joshua Coblentz passed away today in Bath Beach, NY.

1914: Birthdate of Lipman “Lipa” Bers, the native of Riga who became an award-winning American mathematician and human rights activist.

http://www.ams.org/notices/199501/bers.pdf

1915: President harry Hersh was the toastmaster at “the fourth annual Banquet of the Wisconsin Menorah Society” which “was held today in the Women’s Building of the University.”

1915:  It was reported today that Judge Arthur G. Powell, a former member of the State Court of Appeals in Georgia who has already written to the governor expressing his belief in the innocence of Leo Frank has “said he understand other prominent lawyers would write letters asserting their belief that Frank was not guilty, or at least that his guilt had not been sufficiently established.”

1915: According to reports published today, the Atlanta Journal is scheduled to publish “an editorial demanding clemency for Leo M Frank.”

1915: “The final effort to save the life of Leo M. Frank is in the hands of William W. Howard of Augusta, an ex-Congressman, who has been selected by friends of Frank to present the case to the State Prison Commission.”

1915: In Macon, GA, “Governor-elect Nat E. Harris announced this afternoon that if it should fall to his lot to render the final decision in the case of Leo M. Frank, he would deal with the matter from a purely Georgian standpoint.”

1915: “The petition for the life of Leo M. Frank to which a million names are to be signed before it is sent to the Governor of Georgia and the Pardoning Commission of that state, is nearing completion according to an announcement made” tonight “by the members of the Woman’s Peace Society who are procuring the signatures at Booth 3 in the Cosmopolitan Garden

1916: In Chicago, at a meeting of the Woman’s Board of Missions of the Interior, Henry Morgenthau, the former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, described “the conditions which led to the massacre by the Turks of hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Syrians” and said “that the remaining half million people of these races now face death by starvation and exposure unless immediate was given to them.”

1916: In an interview at Chicago, Henry Morgenthau said “No Republican will elected this year” since Wilson who enjoys the highest respect in Europe “will nominated and elected” because his “the best President” the United States “the can select in this crisis.”

1916: Henry Morgenthau said tonight that he had “good reason to believe that following this war the Turks can be persuaded to sell Palestine” and that Jews of the world should not buy Palestine, but rather “Jews and Christians should jointly unite in the purchase of this sacred land” which should then be turned “into a small free republic…”

1916: The Senate Committee on the Judiciary today distributed a letter from Dr. Charles W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University, endorsing Louis D. Brandeis of Boston for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Dr. Lowell, President of Harvard, has signed a memorial opposing Mr. Brandeis's confirmation on the ground that he was unfit for the Supreme bench. The confirmation process for Brandeis was a bruising affair laced with anti-Semitism.

1917(1^stof Sivan, 5677): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1917(1^stof Sivan, 5677): “Attorney, cotton broker and President of the Jewish Immigration Information Bureau” Felix Bath, the German born son of Abram Bath, passed away today after which he was buried at the Hebrew Rest Cemetery in Ft. Worth, TX.

1917: In Brooklyn, Yiddish comedian Isidor Meltzer, the brother of screenwriter Lewis Meltzer and his wife gave birth to Sidney Meltzer who gained fame character actor Sid Melton – a name you might not know but a face you will not forget.

1917: In Chicago, funeral services are scheduled to be held for Adolph J. Meyers, the brother of Mrs. Abe Adler and Mrs. H. J. Marks.

1917: In Chicago, funeral services are scheduled to be held for Caroline Newman, “the wife of the late Adolph Newman” with internment at Graceland cemetery.

1917: The Annual meeting of the Chicago-Winfield Tuberculosis Sanatorium is scheduled to be held this evening at the Standard Club at Michigan Avenue and 24^thStreet.

1918: “Dozens of important people lined the staircase” at Beit Yehudayoff, known as “the Palace” “in a fabulous reception for General Allenby.”

1919: The Rumanian government granted citizenship to all native-born Jews.

1919: The annual meeting of the Jewish Aid Society, of which Mrs. Ralph J. Rosenthal is secretary, is scheduled to take pace this afternoon at the Standard Club on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

1920(5^thof Sivan, 5680): Parashat Bamidbar; erev Shavuot

1920: The Dearborn Independent, owned by Henry Ford, began publishing the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

1920:  Birthdate of astrophysicist Thomas Gold. Gold was bron in Austria and educated in Switzerland and Great Britain, In early 1959, when Cornell University offered him the opportunity to set up an interdisciplinary unit for radio-physics and space research, and take charge of the Department of Astronomy, he accepted the appointment. He remained at Cornell until his death.

1922:  Birthdate of Quinn Martin, head of Quinn Martin Productions.

1922: Today’s Dallas News reported that 789 Klansman had participated in their march through downtown Dallas which increased the feeling of fear among the Jewish community of Dallas whose mayor was said to be a Klan sympathizer, whose “police was thought to be a Klansman,” whose “district attorney was on the side of the KKK” and whose police and fire departments were home to “a high percentage of Klan members.”

1922: “Silver Wings” produced by William Fox and photographed by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg was released in the United States today.

1922: In Manhattan, Mr. and Mrs. Solomon Klein gave birth to Judith Klein whom the world would come to know as film critic Judith Crist.

1923(7^thof Sivan, 5683): Second Day of Shavuot

1924: Cornerstone laying ceremony for the construction of the building housing the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva began today.

1924: In Romania students hired a servant girl to run through the street screaming, "My Jewish employers dragged me down into the cellar and wanted my blood for ritual purposes."  This had the result of causing attacks on Jews in the country. Several months later in Aleppo, Syria, the same charges of "blood ritual" surfaced against the Jews.

1924: In Chicago, the ransom note mailed by Nathan Leopold yesterday arrived at the home of Robert “Bobby” Franks the teenager was already dead.

1925: With the approach of summer Beth-El Congregation in Camden, NJ held the last of its “late services on Friday evening.

1926: It was announced today that Mrs. Bertha V. Guggenheimer of Lynchburg, Va., has a established a $50,000 trust fund that will build playgrounds in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv, as well as other cities and farming settlements in Palestine. The playgrounds will operate on a non-sectarian basis meaning they are open to Christian, Moslem and Jewish children.

1926: Dr. Lewis Browne the English born American author who was an ordained Reform Rabbi set sail today aboard the steamship Leviathan a tour that will include visits to England, France, Switzerland, Germany. Belgium, Holland, Poland, Lithuania, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, Italy and Spain after which he will write articles for the Jewish Daily Bulletin describing “the Jewish situation in each of these countries.”

1927(20^thof Iyar, 5687): Sixty-one year old Louis Bandes, the journalist who wrote under the name of Louis Miller passed away today.

http://www.yiddishkayt.org/miller-bandes/

1928: “Unveil Tablet At First London Synagogue Site” published today described the ceremony under the leadership of Sir Francis Montefiore, where a “where a wall tablet marking the site of the first London synagogue which was used in the days of Cromwell” was unveiled followed by Rabbi David Bueno de Mosquita’s prayer “offered in memory of the founders of the modern London Jewish community.” (JTA)

1929: “The Brandenburg Arch” produced by Joe Pasternak was released today in German.

1930: The Jewish community in Palestine begins a general strike to protest the blocking of immigration

1930: In Woodmere, NY, William Milk and Minerva Karns gave birth to Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s first openly homosexual member of the City Council who along with the Mayor of San Francisco was brutally gunned down in 1978 by a political rival who would get off on the Twinkie Defense. 

1931(6^thof Sivan, 5691): Shavuot

1931: In Camden, NJ, Rabbi Nachman S. Arnoff officiated at Confirmation Services this morning where Ruth Kaplan, the President of the Confirmation Class presented the class gift to the synagogue.

1931(6^thof Sivan, 5691): One day before his 66^th birthday Solomon Barnato Joel, one of the nephews of Barney Barnato who made a fortune in the diamond mining business which enabled him to became an owner and breeder of thoroughbred racehorses passed away today.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joel-solomon-barnato

1931: “Svengali,” a horror film featuring Carmel Myers, the daughter of a San Francisco rabbi was released in the United States today.

1931: After enlisting in the 1^st Heavy Brigade of the Austrian Garrison Artillery, in 1927, Paul Alfred Cullen received his commission today

1931: In Camden, NJ, Ruth Kaplan offered the “Opening Prayer” to start Confirmation Services at Congregation Beth-El

1932: The Hakoah All-Stars rallied in the second half to gain a tie with the German All-Stars in what was billed as goodwill soccer game at the Polo Grounds. The contest was sponsored by leading Jewish and German citizens as a means of promoting interracial understanding. Mayor Walker, honorary chairman of the sponsoring committee kicked off the ball at the start of play. At half time, Carol Sherman, former Attorney General of New York Stated presented medal to the Americans who had competed in the International Jewish Olympics recently held in Tel Aviv.

1932: Birthdate of Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, a groundbreaking and wide-ranging scholar of Jewish history whose meditation on the tension between collective memory of a people and the more prosaic factual record of the past influenced a generation of thinkers.

1933(22^ndof Iyar, 5693): Fifty-nine year old Sandor Ferenczi, the noted Hungarian psychoanalyst and friend of Sigmund Freud passed away today.http://www.maccoby.com/Articles/ReviewSFerenczi.shtml

1933: “Irving Wexler, better known as Waxey Gordon, wealthy beer distributor and all-around racketeer” spent tonight in the Federal House of Detention after having “pleaded not guilty to income tax evasion today.

1934: Birthdate of Ya'acov Ra'anan, the native of Vienna who made Aliyah in 1939, who served as the commander of the INS Dakar on its last voyage.

1934: Photo of Dr. George Gordon, the Director of the Minneapolis Talmud Torah who “began his career as a Jewish education at the first Hebrew Free School on Minneapolis’s north side, where as a twenty-year old he helped to the teach the Hebrew alphabet to young students.”

http://reflections.mndigital.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/jhs/id/165/rec/3

1934: Mrs. Samuel W. Halprin, “the national president of Hadassah” who has recently returned from a trip to Palestine, is scheduled to this evening “on the weekly radio program of the Jewish Daily Bulletin on the subject of “Palestine in 1929 and 1934.”

1935(19th of Iyar, 5695): Max Hans Kohn, a Jewish student died in Dachau. Reportedly he was the first Jew to die there in 10 months.

1936(1^stof Sivan, 5696): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1936(1^stof Sivan, 5696): Seventy-three year old Richard Gottheil the son of Rabbi Gustav Gottheil, and a noted scholar, Zionist leader and the founder of Zeta Beta Tau (ZBT) passed away today.

http://jewishmag.com/118mag/richard_gottheil/richard_gottheil.htm

1936: Jewish-operated buses were again fired at today on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road, but there were no casualties and the curfew in Jerusalem was extended starting a half hour earlier (6:30 p.m.) in response to escalating Arab violence.

1936: Based on information based on “hints in the German press” it was reported today that “negotiations are now under way to explore the possibilities of the emigration of no fewer than 20,000 German Jews to Ethiopia” which has been cruelly conquered by the Itlanians.

1936: British aircraft “flew over Jaffa and helped police to search the hills adjoin the Jerusalem-Jaffa road for Arabs involved in the ambush of Jewish bus in which two Jews and a British soldier were wounded.”

1937: According to a report “made public” today by the American Joint Distribution Committee, there are 35,500 “refugees from Germany…in other European countries” of whom “about 29,000 ae Jewish and 6,500 are Aryan or non-Aryan Christians” and that of the less than 400,000 Jews in Germany, “100,000 are jobless and in need of aid.

1938: Birthdate of actor/ director Richard Benjamin whose work includes Goodbye Columbus and He& She.

1938: As Arab terrorism escalated, The Palestine Post reported that the Government forces practically occupied Arab villages in Galilee in an effort to check the increasing terror and lawlessness. Jewish settlements of Ein Hazorea and Mishmar Haemek came under a concentrated Arab terrorist fire. The Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline was cut once more and set on fire near Nazareth.

1938: The Palestine Post published a special, 20-page Palestine-British supplement to mark the Empire Day.

1938: In New York City drama coach Lee Strasberg and actress Paula Strasberg gave birth to Susan Strasberg who was the original Anne Frank.

1938(21st of Iyar, 5698): Rabbi Simon Glazer passed away.  Born in 1878 at Kovno Russia, Glazer the Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogues in Montreal (1907-1918); Chief Rabbi of Kansas City (1920-1923); Rabbi of Beth Hamidrash Hagadol in NYC (1923-1927); Temple Beth-El in Brooklyn (1927-1930); Maimonides Synagogue of NYC starting in 1930.  Glazer had also served as President of the Central Council of Rabbis of America and Chairman of its Executive Committee.  He wrote or translated 26 books including a “History of Israel” and translations of the works of Maimonides and the High Holiday prayer books.

1939: Germany signs a "Pact of Steel" with Italy.  This is one more step on the road to World War II.

1939(4th of Sivan, 5699): Ernst Toller, a German-Jewish playwright and active anti-fascist, who had fought for the Kaiser in World War I and whose sister and brother had been taken to a concentration camp, hung himself at the Mayflower Hotel.  W.H. Auden memorialized him with a poem entitled “In Memory of Ernst Toller” published in 1940 in an anthology called Another Time.

1940(14^thof Iyar, 5700): Pesach Sheni

1940(14^thof Iyar, 5700): Hyman I Vener, the recently elected president of the Southern California Public Health Association passed away today.

1940: This afternoon at the White House, FDR met with a group of military leader and one civilian, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

1941: Jews in Croatia are forced to wear yellow badges.

1941: Germans stole a 16th century Torah scroll from the Sephardic community at Salonica.   This Torah was said to have come from Spain. The Germans then burned all the books and three Sefer Torahs. When the chief rabbi returned, he found all of the libraries and Jewish manuscripts destroyed.

1942(6th of Sivan, 5702): First Day of Shavuot

1942: Herbert Baum and his wife Marianne were arrested today for their part in “an arson attack on an anticommunist and anti-Semitic propaganda exhibition prepared by Joseph Goebbels at the Berliner Lustgarten.”

1942(6th of Sivan, 5702): In an exercise conducted in a forest outside Mielec, Poland, Gestapo agents "cast" Jews as partisans, beat and mutilate them, and then kill them.

1942(6th of Sivan, 5702): Three hundred children are taken away and sent to Chelmno where they were gassed to death.

1943(17^thof Iyar, 5703): Parashat Behar

1943: It was reported today that ant-Semitic elements in French North Africa that do not like the policies of General Henri Honore Giraud’ “doctrine of racial equality have” rallied around General de Gaulle’s standard with one woman in Tunis saying, “The French follow de Gaulle, the Jews are for Giraud.”

1944: George Mandel-Mantello, a Jewish diplomat who, while working for the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, Switzerland, saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by providing fictive Salvadoran citizenship papers and by publicizing the deportation of Jews from Hungary to the death camps” left Switzerland for Bucharest .https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/MandelMantello.html

1944:  In London, the Bevis Marks Synagouge held a “Service of Mourning and Prayer for the Martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto” where Rabbi Joseph delivered a sermon “The Battle of Warsaw.”

1944: As part of the campaign to convince the West, that the Soviet Union was a benign partner in the fight against fascism, a campaign in which Stalin used many Soviet Jews whom he later liquidated, “the Communist International” or Comintern was dissolved today.

1944(29th of Iyar, 5704): For five days Jews readied for rail transport from Munkács, Ukraine, and from the Hungarian town of Sátoraljaújhely resist being loaded. Some are shot.  Resistance began on May 22 and ended on May 27.

1945(10th of Sivan, 5705): Polish freebooters stopped a train in the Bialystok region of Poland and beat and abduct a Jew named Mejer Sznajder. This took place after V.E. Day and the end of Holocaust.

1946: Karl Frank, Nazi protector of Bohemia-Moravia, was executed in Prague.

1946(21st of Iyar, 5706): Two Jews were killed and another fifteen were injured in pogrom begun because a crowd of Hungarians in Kunmadras believed the Jews had made sausage out of Christian children.

1947: It was learned today that “the Russian military administration has granted permission to the American Joint Distribution Committee to send food to Jewish communities in the Russian zone” of occupied Germany.

1947: In Rome, “Jacob I. Trobe, director of Italian operations for the American Joint Distribution Committee called attention to the plight of 25,000 displaced Jews in Italy” for whom no arrangements have been made when “UNRA ceases operations” on June 30.

1948: David Ben-Gurion ordered Yigal Yadin, the Chief of Staff, to launch an attack on the police fort at Laturun “without delay.”  Ben-Gurion wanted Yadin to use the Seventh Brigade for the attack.  Yadin was opposed to the attack.  The brigade was composed of 2,000 troops several hundred of whom were Holocaust survivors who had just gotten off the boat from the Cyprus detention camps.  They had little or no training.  Many of them did not speak Hebrew.  In other words, the Seventh Brigade was a brigade in name only.  Yadin knew they were not a fighting force and sending them to attack a hilltop fortress manned by the Jordanian Arab Legion was a recipe for disaster.  To make matters worse, the Seventh lacked basic equipment, including water bottles or canteens.  Considering the heat, a lack of water would hamper even veteran troops.  Ben-Gurion’s stubborn insistence must be seen against the backdrop of the times.  Despite a great deal of criticism, Ben-Gurion had accepted the partition plan even though it meant Jerusalem would not be part of the Jewish state,  Instead it was to governed by an international body.  The Arabs rejected this concept and turned Jerusalem into a battleground.  They laid siege to the city and sought to cut it off from the rest of the Jewish state.  Ben-Gurion was determined to do whatever it took to ensure that Jerusalem would be Jewish.  The hilltop fortress of Latrun was the main obstacle to opening the road to from the coast to Jerusalem.  Hence his insistence on the attack even if it flew in the face of the best advice from is commanders

1948: Troops from the Carmeli Brigade took up positions at Masada and Sha'ar HaGolan in expectation of a counter-attack from the Arabs that did not come.  After a week, despite their edge in armor and artillery, apparently, they had had enough.

1948: The fighting that had begun on May 15 known collectively as the Battles of the Kinarot Valley came to an end. The most memorable fighting took place between the Israelis and the Syrians at Dagania Alef and Degania Bet. Words cannot describe the heroism of the Jewish fighters who stood their ground against overwhelming odds. 

1948: It was reported today that Thomas C. Wasson, the U.S. Consul General for the United States in Jerusalem had attempted to stop the Arab Legion shelling of the Hadassah Hospital and Hebrew University on Mount Scopus: "The American Consul is reported to have contacted the Legion requesting it to stop firing on Jewish positions in and around the buildings. The Legion Commander replied that the buildings were being used by Jewish forces to mortar and machine-gun the Arab-occupied Sheikh Jarrah quarter and handed the Consul surrender terms to convey to the Jews. The Commander asked that all fighting Jews in the hospital and University surrender as prisoners of war and that all doctors, nurses, professors, and scientists be handed over to the Red Cross.”

1948: “Just after 2.00pm, Consul General Thomas C Wasson was shot while returning to the US Consulate from a meeting of the UN Truce Commission at the French Consulate in Jerusalem. While crossing Wauchope Street (now Abraham Lincoln/Hess) to enter the alley leading to the Consulate, he was shot by a .30 caliber rifle. The bullet entered his chest via his right upper arm and left level to his second costal cartilage

1948: To the amazement of everybody, it was reported today that of the five Armies and Air Forces “now fighting on the borders and within Palestine only the Arab Legion has made any important advances” and that “in the north, none of the armies has been able to keep its forces in Israel’s territory and the Syrians are now digging in on their own side of the border.”

1949: In “A Communist’s Career: The Story of Eisler,” Ira Henry Freeman recaps the career of “Gerhart Eisleer…the professional, international, Communist revolutionary.”

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1949/05/22/96458624.pdf

1950(6th of Sivan, 5710): First Day of Shavuot

1950: Russian spy Harry Gold confessed to the FBI.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that according to the Jordanian complaint, Israel occupied three Arab villages in the Jordanian-occupied Latrun area and two in the Tulkarm District. Israel denied all such allegations, but claimed frequent Jordanian marauders' infiltration.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that Mr. Shimon Peres, the Director-General of the Ministry of Defense, claimed at an exhibition of the locally-manufactured products, that few countries in the world produced as wide a variety of armaments as Israel.

1954: Bar Mitzvah of Robert Zimmerman who gained famed as Bob Dylan.

1955: “The television play ‘A Catered Affair,’ written by Paddy Chayefsky, was first shown on television as part of the Philco Television Playhouse.”

1955: Final broadcast of the “Jack Benny Program” on CBS radio. Benny, whose real name was Benjamin Kubelsky, would continue to broadcast on television until 1965.

1956(12^thof Sivan, 5716): Sixty-eight year old mezzo-soprano Maria Winetzkaja passed away today.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9E04E6DB1F3BE333A05750C2A9639C946792D6CF

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/winetzkaja-maria

1959: Birthdate of David Blatt, the Princeton graduate who played for and coached several Israeli basketball teams.

1959: Final performance of “Tall Story” “based on the 1957 novel The Homecoming Game by Howard Nemerov featuring Marian Winters as “Myra Solomon.”

1961(7^thof Sivan, 5721): Second Day of Shavuot

1961: “Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, and his wife Serena Dunn Rothschild” gave birth to their “eldest child” Hannah Mary Rothschild the documentarian and author whose first novel was The Improbability of Love.

1962(18^thof Iyar, 5722): Lag B’Omer

1965(20^thof Iyar, 5725): Parashat Behar

1965(20^thof Iyar, 5725): Sixty-six year old Samuel Cooke  the founder and chairman of the Penn Fruit Company which opened its first store in 1927 using the “revolutionary self-service concept” and an active supporter of the Jewish Farmer School who raised two daughter – Lily Beth and Geraldine – with his wife, “the former Doris Beyer” passed away today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1965/05/23/101548661.pdf

1965: Birthdate of Shlomo Lahiani, the Israeli political leader who has served as mayor of Bat Yam.

1967: In violation of international agreements, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran, blocking all Israeli shipping from the south, thereby raising tension in the Middle East. In Israel, a broad based coalition was formed under Levi Eshkol with Menachem Begin and Yoseph Sapir and Moshe Dayan who became the Minister of Defense. Under international law, blockade is an act of war and this action by Egypt actually gave Israel the legal right to go to war, a fact conveniently ignored at that time and by the current generation of revisionist historians.

1967: Two months after being released in the UK, “The Honeypot” a comedy directed and written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz was released today in the United States.

1969(5th of Sivan, 5729): Erev of Shavuot

1969: Female Palestinian artist Mona Saudi, Iraqi Suheir Razzak and Swede Rolf Svensson were imprisoned in Copenhagen on suspicion of plotting to murder David Ben-Gurion.

1969: U.S. premiere of “Winning” starring Paul Newman.

1969: Mayor John V. Lindsay greeted his Jewish constituency today on the eve of Shavuot, which begins tomorrow. Speaking of the Jewish people's receiving of the Torah, which the holiday celebrates, the Mayor said: "From that hallowed event on Mount Sinai, through the ages, from the days of ancient Palestine, and up to our times and the rebirth of the State of Israel, the Torah has been at the very heart of the Jewish experience. Moses...stands as a towering figure not only in the life of the Jewish people but in the life of our civilization."

1970(16th of Iyar, 5730): Arab terrorists killed 9 children and 3 adults on a school bus

1971(27^thof Iyar, 5731): Parshat Behar-Bechukotai

1971(27^thof Iyar, 5731): Seventy-seven year old Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading, Baroness Swanborough, the secretary to the wife of the Viceroy of India, Rufus Isaacs, 1^st Earl Reading who married him shortly after her became a widower who went to a life of public service including the founding of the Women’s Voluntary Service which played such a vital role during WW II, passed away today.

http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/houseoflords/house-of-lords-reform/overview/first-life-peers/stella-isaacs/

http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/stella_isaacs,_marchioness_of_reading

1972: Time published “Israel: Battle of Flight 517”

Sabena Flight 517 from Brussels to Tel Aviv was 20 minutes out of Vienna last week when two Arabs waving pistols rushed the cockpit. "As you can see," Captain Reginald Levy calmly informed his 90 passengers, "we have friends aboard." The friends—the men and two women, who produced explosives from under their skirts—were members of a Palestinian guerrilla organization called Black September.* Their audacious plan: to land the Boeing 707 at Tel Aviv and embarrass Israel by threatening to blow up the plane on a Lod Airport runway unless 317 imprisoned fedayeen were released.  Levy's radioed alert that his plane had been commandeered rang top-level alarms in Israel. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Chief of Staff General David Elazar hurried to the airport to supervise the troops mustered to meet the jet. As soon as Levy touched down in the Tel Aviv dusk and rolled to an isolated runway, mechanics at Dayan's orders immobilized the plane by deflating its tires and draining the hydraulic system.  After presenting their demands for the prisoners' release to Lod's control tower, the skyjackers were alarmed to discover that they could not take off again. Emotionally, they kissed one another goodbye and prepared to detonate the explosives. Levy started a conversation to calm them down, and kept on chatting through the night. "I talked about everything under the sun," he said later, "from navigation to sex."  Next morning, in response to Levy's plea, Dayan promised to prepare the plane for takeoff and produce the fedayeen. A group of bogus prisoners were shown to the skyjackers from a distance and Dayan had an airplane taken out to a runway, supposedly to fly the released fedayeen to Cairo. From the control tower, one of the "prisoners"—actually an Arabic-speaking Israeli soldier—lulled the skyjackers: "They tell me I'm being sent to Cairo. Is that true? Praised be Allah." Meanwhile, out of sight, commandos were practicing assault tactics on a 707. When they were able to force the doors, swing aboard and start shooting in 90 seconds, Elazar deemed them ready. His "ground crew" approached the jet, allowed themselves to be frisked by Red Cross negotiators who had been called in at Arab request. No pistols turned up in the search; they had been hidden in boots or tool boxes. Suddenly the "mechanics" burst into the plane with guns blazing. The two male skyjackers died from bullets in the head and one of the two women was wounded. In all, the action took precisely 90 seconds.  Israelis hailed the jet's recapture as a military victory—and as an example of how other nations ought to handle skyjacking. Dayan himself was host at a dinner for Levy, a British citizen with a Jewish father and a Christian mother who was celebrating his 50th birthday. Prime Minister Golda Meir later threw a second dinner for all the participants. She kissed Levy and cried, "We love you." Publicly, Mrs. Meir justified the recapture, citing "the terrible significance of submission" to terrorism.  Elsewhere the response was less enthusiastic. The International Air Line Pilots Association protested the danger to passengers in such go-for-broke shootouts. As it happened, three aboard Flight 517 had been wounded. One 22-year-old Israeli was in critical condition; she had leaped up in panic when the firing started and was shot in the head by a commando who mistook her for one of the Arabs. The International Red Cross angrily cried that it had been duped by the Israelis. Arabs nevertheless accused the agency of complicity. In Beirut, where Red Cross week was in progress, volunteers soliciting donations were attacked on the street by Black September supporters. The leader of the group, who called himself Captain Rafat, was later identified as Ali Tasha, 34, a onetime Jerusalem tour guide and seasoned skyjacker.  In 1968 he helped divert an El Al jet to Algeria.

1973: Avner Shaki left the National Religious Party and continued to sit as an Independent in the Knesset until the election in 1974

1975: Seventy-four year old historian George W. F. Hallgarten the grandson of Charles Hallgarten and the great-grandson of Lazarus Hallgarten passed away today.

1976: NBC broadcast “Call of the Wild” a made for television adaptation of the novel of the same name with music by Peter Matz this evening.

1977(5th of Sivan, 5737): Erev of Shavuot

1978: “The Off-Broadway production” of “Torch Song Trilogy” a collection of three plays by Harvey Fierstein opened today at the Players Theatre.

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel empowered the Minister of Defense and the Chief of Staff to discuss with U.N. and UNIFIL the arrangements aimed to prevent the terrorists in South Lebanon from attacking Israel and harming local inhabitants. The UNIFIL assured the Christian leader, Major Saad Haddad, that it is prepared to recognize his 600-men strong force and that the humanitarian "Good Fence", which allowed Lebanese villagers to receive aid and work in Israel, will continue even after the complete Israeli withdrawal.

1978: ABC began broadcasting “The Bastard” a mini-series co-starring Lorne Greene as “Bishop Francis” William Shatner as “Paul Revere” and Tom Bosley as “Benjamin Franklin.”

1980(7^thof Shavuot, 5740): 2^nd day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1981(18th of Iyar, 5741): Lag B’Omer

1981(18^thof Iyar, 5741): Fifty-eight year old movie director Boris Segal passed away today. (As reported by Shawn G. Kennedy)

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/24/obituaries/boris-sagal-58-movie-director-dies-after-a-helicopter-accident.html

1981: “The Outland” a sci-fi thriller directed and written by Peter Hyams, with music by Jerry Goldsmith and featuring Steven Berkoff was released today in the United States.

1981: Jack Lang began serving as Culture Minister of France for the first time.

1981: “The Four Seasons,” a romantic comedy produced by Martin Bregman was released today in the United States.

1981: Antatole Boyard reviewed Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories by Israeli author Amos Oz.

1983: “An estimated 180,000 people took part in a New York rally on the occasion of the 12th annual Solidarity Sunday for Soviet Jewry.”

1983: The New York Times featured a review of Art & Ardor by Cynthia Ozick.

1985: “Rambo: First Blood Part II” co-starring Steven Berkoff as “Lt. Col. Podovsky” and with music by Jerry Goldsmith was released in the United States.

1985: “The play ‘White Rose’ by Scottish playwright Peter Arnott that portrays Lydia Litvyak's imagined political thoughts, with her character discussing war and Soviet women's resistance against Nazism. It was first performed today at the Edinburgh Festival, in the Traverse Theatre.”

1986: In Redwood City, California, Angie and Francis Edelman gave birth to Boston Patriots wide-receiver Julian Edelman

1986(13^thof Iyar, 5746) Seventy-three year old Martin Gabel the Philadelphia born Jew known both for his film career and being the husband of Arlene Francis with whom he appeared on “What’s My Line?” passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/23/obituaries/martin-gabel-actor-director-and-producer-is-dead-at-73.html

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-05-24/local/me-7505_1_broadway-actor

1986: In Philadelphia, PA, “Nina Zebooker and William Ephraim gave birth to Princeton University graduate Molly Ephraim who pursued a career in acting which included six years playing the role of “Mandy Baxter” the middle daughter in the sitocom “Last Man Standing.”

1988(6th of Sivan, 5748): First Day of Shavuot

1990: In The Los Angeles Times, Sheldon Teitelbuam reviewed A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturersby Lawrence Weschler, the grandson of Viennese-Jewish émigré composer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Ernst Toch.

1990: For the first time CBS broadcast “A Killing in a Small Town” starring Barbara Hershey who “won a 1990 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress - Miniseries or a Movie” for her performance

1992: “Alien3” a sci-fi thriller with music by Elliot Goldenthal was released today in the United States.

1992: On the final episode of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson which was aired tonight, Doc Severinsen and the NBC Orchestra closed the show with "I'll Be Seeing You" a popular song, with music by Sammy Fain and lyrics by Irving Kahal published in 1938, because “it was one of Carson's favorite songs.”

1992: “Encino Man” a comedy co-starring Pauly Shore and featuring Richard Masur was released in the United States today.

1992: “Far and Away” co-produced by Brian Grazer and filmed by cinematographer Mikael Salomon was released in the United States today.

1993: For the first time ABC broadcast “Deadly Relations” the made for television movie co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow as “Carol Ann Fagot Applegarth Holland”

1995: “Brian Kowitz hit a 1-2 pitching into right field for a single with two out and the bases loaded in the 10^th inning giving the Richmond Braves a 2-1 victory over the Norfolk Tides in the International League. (As reported by Bob Wechsler)

1998: The Times of London included a review ofIsrael by Martin Gilbert which like all of his work is historically accurate while having the flow of a well written novel.  If you read no other book about the history of the Jewish state, this is the one you must read.

1998: The Baltimore Jewish Times described the New Yorker who is the first rabbi to win honor from pope

As another in a series of recent Roman Catholic overtures toward the Jewish community, Baltimore's Cardinal William H. Keeler last week presented a papal honor to a New York rabbi long active in Catholic-Jewish relations. In an afternoon ceremony at St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore, Rabbi Mordecai Waxman of Great Neck, N.Y., became the fifth Jew, and the first rabbi ever, named a Knight Commander of Saint Gregory the Great. Pope John Paul II bestowed the award on Waxman "in recognition of his extraordinary leadership over the past several decades in fostering improved relations between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church," Keeler said. Waxman, 81, is chairman of the National Council of Synagogues and a past chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, where he did much of his work toward healing Catholic-Jewish relations, according to Keeler. In 1987, when Waxman was president of the Synagogue Council of America, the predecessor to the National Council, he and then-Bishop Keeler began a tradition of regular meetings between rabbis and Catholic bishops that continues today, Keeler said. Waxman helped prepare the pope's visits with American Jewish leaders in 1987, and he addressed the pontiff on behalf of the Jewish community in Miami that year. "Over the years, Rabbi Waxman has been a consistent peacemaker and worked for reconciliation between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church," Keeler said. Waxman praised the pontiff for his interest in Catholic-Jewish enterprises, including the Vatican's recent statement of repentance for the Holocaust. "That he has undertaken to honor Jews for such activities and has bestowed such recognition upon several of my co-religionists for their notable contributions is typical of the innovative thinking which he has brought to world affairs," Waxman told an audience of more than 100, including scores of his congregants who traveled from Temple Israel, where the rabbi has presided for 50 years. The Order of St. Gregory the Great was created by Pope Gregory XVI in 1831 in honor of his predecessor, Pope St. Gregory. It has several classes, the highest being the Grand Cross. Previous Jewish recipients include Sir Sigmund Sternberg of London, a recent Templeton Prize winner; the late Joseph Lichten, who was European director of the Anti-Defamation League; Gerhardt Riegner, a former general secretary of the World Jewish Congress; and, most recently, conductor Gilbert Levine, one of Waxman's congregants. For his part, the rabbi acknowledged and tried to assuage the continuing suspicion many Jews hold toward the Catholic Church, despite 30 years of papal teachings against anti-Semitism. But he said future generations will see the fruits of the current efforts. "That perhaps is what the Talmud means when it says, `There are things that take fruit of which a man enjoys in this world...but the capital endures for all time. And among these is the effecting of peace between man and his fellows.'"

1998(26th of Iyar, 5758): Seventy-two year old Yitzhak Moda’I passed away. Born in Tel Aviv in 1926, he became an Israeli political leader who served in the Knesset and who held several cabinet positions including Minister of Justice and Minister of Economics which is fitting for a man who studied both at the London School of Economics.

1998: “The Opposite of Sex” co-starring Lisa Kudrow was released in the United States today.

1998: “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” a movie version of the novel by the same name featuring Ellen Barkin, Laraine Newman and Jeanette Goldstein was released today in the United States

1999(7^thof Sivan, 5758): Shavuot is observed for the last time in the 20^thcentury.

2000: “Prime Minister Ehud Barak recalled his peace negotiators from Sweden today after a firebomb critically wounded a 2-year-old Israeli girl in a car passing through the sleepy Palestinian-ruled city of Jericho.”

2001:The BBC broadcast “Britannia Incorporated” the 10^th episode of “A History of Britain a documentary series written and presented by Simon Schama” which began its second season tonight.

2002(11^thof Sivan, 5762): Sixteen year old Elmar Deshabrielov and 65 year old Gary Tauzniaski were killed and forty people were wounded “when a suicide bomber detonated himself in the Rothschild Street downtown pedestrian mall of Rishon Lezion.” (Jewish Virtual Library)

2002: Final broadcast of “Felicity” a television series created by J.J. Abrams.

2002: David Blaine began another of his highly publicized “feats” when a crane lifted him “onto a 100-foot (30 m) high and 22-inch (0.56 m) wide pillar in Bryant Park, New York City.”

2003: Hamas claimed responsibility for today’s bus bombing at Netzarim where nine people were injured.

2004(2^ndof Sivan, 5764): Parashat Bamidbar

2004: It was reported today that IDF has announced it was redeploying some of the forces it had sent into Gaza earlier this week as part of a major operation it said was intended to sever weapons-smuggling routes in tunnels from Egypt” following the killing of 13 Israeli soldiers last week.

2005: The Wolf Prizes were awarded by the President of the State of Israel Mr. Moshe Katzav at the Chagall Hall at the Knesset, in the presence of the Minister of Education and Chairperson of the Wolf Foundation Council, Mrs. Limor Livnat, the Speaker of the Knesset MK Reuven Rivlin and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Mr. Zeev Schleisner

2005: The New York Times included reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Good, The Bad, And Me In My Anecdotage by Eli Wallach and The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank by Ellen Feldman, an appealing and inventive novel about Peter van Daan, one of Anne Frank’s companions in the secret annex that imagines what his life might have been like if he'd survived to take on a new identity as a gentile in postwar America.

2006: Haaretz reported that the Dan David Prizes went to cellist Yo-Yo Ma, four journalist and two medical researchers.  The Dan David Prizes are distributed annually to people who embody realms of human achievement related to the past, present and future.  They are endowed by the Dan David Foundation headquartered at Tel Aviv University.

2007: Nineteen tombstones were toppled in the Jewish cemetery in Chernigov, an eastern Ukraine city.

2007: As part of Jewish Heritage Month, the National Archives presents a lecture entitled “Einstein: His Life and Universe” during which Walter Isaacson will discuss his latest work, Einstein: His Life and Universe.

2007(5th of Sivan, 5767): Erev of Shavuot – Confirmation Ceremony at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Those reaching this milestone are Zach Burstain, son of Jennifer and Todd Burstain; Nathan Cooper, son of Mary and Bob Cooper; Kelsey Fisher, daughter of Ann Hagie; Joel Gasway, son of Julie and Scott Gasway; Cassy Novick, daughter of Denise Novick and Don Novick of blessed memory; Josh Siegel, son of Kris and Ken Siegel.  This is an impressive number for a “small community” on the banks of the Cedar River.  Am Yisroail Chai – The Jewish People Lives!

2007: A rare Torah scroll fragment from the Book of Exodus dating back to the 7th century that includes the famous “Song of the Sea” is put on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, The manuscript, which is a fragment of a Torah scroll from the Book of Exodus (13:19-16:1), comes from the six-hundred year period from the 3rd through 8th centuries known as the "silent era," from which almost no Hebrew manuscripts have survived.

2008: The JCC Manhattan and The Museum of Biblical Art in New York presents “The History and Legacy of Greek Jews” during which Steve Bowman, Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Cincinnati Professor Bowman looks at the history of Jews in Greece - their ancient origins, their contribution to Jewish culture, and fate within the larger Christian community.

2008: Today, , at a ceremony held at the US State Department in Washington, DC,” eighty-eight year old  Max “Kampelman was presented by the National Endowment for Democracy with its Democracy Service Medal in recognition of his lifetime achievement in advancing the principles of freedom, human rights, and democracy.”

2008: As part of the celebrations of Israel at 60, The Quad Cities Jewish Federation sponsors a recital by Carmel Harel, Israeli Shlicha of New Hampshire. A graduate of Israel Art and Science Academy in Jerusalem, she will play the piano and sing Israeli songs from the last 60 years.

2008: In Israel's answer to the Woodstock Festival, nearly half a million people gather on a Galilee mountaintop, where they pitch tents and engage in 24 hours of feasting, singing and ecstatic dancing. They are taking part in the annual celebrations held on the Yahrzeit of second-century sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai at his burial place on Mount Meron, near the northern Israeli city of Safed. The Yahrzeit coincides with the minor festival of Lag B’Omer. The celebrations are widely viewed as a resounding display of Jewish unity. "All shades of the rainbow come. There are Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Hasidim and knitted kippah-wearers, religious and secular," said Shlomo Shalvash, head of the Sephardic trust for the upkeep of the site. What makes bar Yohai such a crowd pleaser is the fact that he did not merely rule on matters of Jewish law. He is believed to have left the answers to life, the universe and everything, making him a figure of fascination for all these people. Bar Yohai is the purported author of the “Zohar,” the central text of Kabbalah.

2008: The Cedar Rapids Jewish community watches with pride as Ben Handler and Vanezzia Levi take part in the graduation ceremonies at Washington High School.

2009(28th of Iyar, 5769): Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Reunification Day

2009: Opening of Conference 2009 hosted by The Philadelphia Kehila for Secular Jews

2009(28th of Iyar, 5769: Funeral services are held at Temple B’nai Israel in Little Rock, AR, for Mrs. Joyce Ehrenberg, “dear and loving wife of Mr. Harry L. Ehrenberg, Sr. of blessed memory, and deeply proud mother of Harry L. Jr., and his sisters Linda and Terry. A consummate promoter in helping those that were less fortunate, Mrs. Ehrenberg lived a richly meaningful life.”

2009: IDF forces killed two armed terrorists who approached a security fence in southern Gaza before dawn today.

2010(9th of Sivan, 5770): At Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, IA, Shannon Williams is called to the Torah as a Bat Mitzvah.

2010: “Jacob’s House” August Schulenburg’s play based on the life of the Biblical character is scheduled to have its final performance the Access Theater in New York.

2011: To avoid desecration of Shabbat, the traditional Sephardi bonfire in Meron marking Lag B’Omer will be lit tonight instead of last night.

2011: The AIPAC Policy Conference is scheduled to open today in Washington, D.C.

2011; The Jewish community of metropolitan Washington, DC, is scheduled to celebrate Israel’s birthday at Israel@63.

2011: In Cincinnati, Ohio, Rabbi David Ellenson, president of HUC-JIR, is scheduled to speak about the important place of the Jewish seminary in American life and scholarship in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month and the 100th anniversary of the Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

2011: Chabad Lubavitch of Iowa City is scheduled to hold the grand opening of Iowa City’s Kosher Co-op, the first such emporium in the Iowa City – Cedar Rapids Corridor.

2011(18th of Iyar, 5771): Lag B’Omer

2011(18^thof Iyar, 5771): Seventy-three year old composer and one-man movie making machine Joseph Brooks whose jingle “You’ve got a lot to live, and Pepsi’s got a lot to give” was known to millions even his name was not passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/arts/music/joseph-brooks-a-maker-of-jingles-songs-and-films-dies-at-73.html

2011: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life” by Harold Bloom, “2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America” by Albert Brooks and “The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism” by Deborah Baker which tells the story of “how a Jewish girl from Larchmont became an Islamic polemicist.”

2011: President Obama addressed American Israel Public Affairs Committee this morning.

2012: The annual meeting of the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan featuring a speech by Arthur Horwitz, President of Renaissance Media and former publisher of the Detroit Jewish News and presentation of the Leonard N. Simons History Award is scheduled to take place this evening at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, MI.

2012: In recognition of the contributions of Jewish Americans to literature, poet Jody Bolz, editor of Poet Lore, America's oldest poetry magazine, is scheduled to read her work in Washington, DC.

2012(1st of Sivan, 5772): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2012: “The Bad Guys” featuring Raviv “Ricky” Ullman opened at a theatre on the Upper West Side in New York City.

2012(1^stof Sivan, 5772): Fifty-three year old Aharon Zandi a mechanic from Sarna and “a pillar of Yemen’s dwindling Jewish community” was murdered today. (As reported by Elhanan Miller)

2012: Israeli radio reported today that 24 year old Nadav Ben Yehuda went to the aid of a stranded climber which put an end to attempt to become the youngest Israel to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

2012: Israel responded with immediate skepticism to reports that the UN had concluded an agreement with Iran to probe that country’s suspected nuclear site

2013: The American Jewish Historical Society and Beta Israel of North America are scheduled to present a screening of “Leah,” a documentary that depicts the experiences of Ethiopian Jews trying to adjust to life in Israel.

2013: In Denver, CO, the Mizel Institute is scheduled to present Pat Bowlen, the owner of the Denver Broncos with its 2013 Community Enrichment Award.

2013: The Matlz Museum of Jewish Heritage is scheduled to host a panel discussion entitled “How We Survive.”

2013: “Juadica,” the first ever Jewish film festival to be held in Lisbon is scheduled to open today.

2013: Rashad Hussain, the United States Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) will join newly appointed Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism Ira Forman will leave for Poland today “to visit Jewish communities, the site of the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and other Holocaust historical sites.” JPost)

2013: Anthony Weiner announced today that he was running for Mayor of New York City

2013: City Councilman Eric Garcetti defeated Controller Wendy Greuel to become next mayor of Los Angeles after a campaign in which he depicted his rival a pawn of powerful labor bosses. With all precincts reporting today, the city councilman grabbed 54 percent of the votes against his fellow Democrat. Greuel had 46 percent.

2014: The final full day of the 4^th International Writers’ Festival is scheduled to open with dancer Ohad Naharin and Nicole Krauss discussing the language of writing and of movement followed by encounters and conversations with Marilynne Robinson, Jake Wallis Simons, and Jan-Philip Sendker, and a final one between Krauss and David Grossman. (As reported by Jessica Steinberg)

2014: The 92^nd Street Y is scheduled to host “an intimate evening” with Israeli cantor and stage performer Dudu Fisher.

2014: In Germany, the Federal Court of Justice ruled today “that 95-year-old Michael Karkoc’s service as a commander in the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion made him the “holder of a German office” which means that “Germany the legal right to prosecute him even though he is not German, his alleged crimes were against non-Germans and they were not committed on German soil.” (Times of Israel)

2014: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present “War Children Just the Same.”

2014: Forty-eight year old Rainer Hoess, the grandson of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hosess, “tweet a picture of himself standing about Tel Aviv’s marina today and described the location as ‘very nice.’”

2014(22^ndof Iyar, 5774):  Eighty-six year old Don Levine, the developer of the G.I. Joe action figure passed away today.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/don-levine-who-developed-gi-706992

2015: In an attempt to reassure American Jews of his support for Israel, President Obama addressed 1,000 people at Washington’s Adas Israel – the large Conservative synagogue – saying that the nuclear agreement with Iran did change the fact “that the United States had an “enduring friendship with the people of Israel” and “unbreakable bonds with the state of Israel” that could never be weakened.”

2015: Today “The United States blocked a global document toward ridding the world of nuclear weapons, saying Egypt and other states “cynically manipulated” the process by trying to set a deadline for Israel and its neighbors to meet within months on a Middle East zone free of such weapons.”

2015: The Eden Tamir Music Center is scheduled to host a concert at noon as part of the Israel Festival.

2015: Among the 11 Democrats and one Republican pledged to observe “Solidarity Sabbath” which begins this evening is Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), the Senate minority leader and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), one of two Muslims in Congress. The sole Republican so far pledged is Rep. Peter King (R-NY).

2015: Rabbi Susan Grossman is scheduled to lead a discussion on the “Jewish View - To the Huppah and Beyond: Egalitarian Marriage and Divorce in Jewish Law” at Beth Shalom in Columbia, MD.

2016: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky, The Romanovs:1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore and The Politicians and Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics by Sean Wilentz.

2016: The Jewish Museum of Florida – FIU is scheduled to present a “special edit-a-thon in partnership with the Miami Book Fair” the goal of which is “to edit and create Wikipedia pages about American Jewish Authors, Musicians, Artists and other cultural influencers.”

2016: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Ukrainian Jewish Encounter and NYC Depart of Cultural Affairs are scheduled to host “A Tribute to Sholem Aleichem.”

2016: In Marion, Iowa at The Giving Tree Theatre the curtain is scheduled to come down on Wendy Kesselmans’ adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” the three week long performance of which has been sponsored by The Thaler Holocaust Memorial Fund which “was established in 1995 by Dr. David and Joan Thaler to provide support for education about the Holocaust to residents and students at the local colleges in Linn County, Iowa.”

2016: Adas Israel is scheduled to host a ceremony adding Father Joachim Alexopoulous, who in 1943 as Archbishop of Volos “devised a plan for hiding 700 Jewish residents of Volos -- saving them from deportation and almost certain death” to is Garden of the Righteous.

2016: In New York City, the Jerusalem Post is scheduled to host its 5^thannual conference today with the theme of “Israel, the US and the Free World in the Shadow of Terror.”

2016: The Breman Museum is scheduled to host a tour of Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery which will included an exploration of the history, burial customs and symbolism found throughout the Jewish Grounds of this powerful city landmark” as well as a recounting of the “stories of life and persistence as waves of Jewish immigrants entered and adapted to the culture of Victorian America.”

2016: “Sixty-Minutes” is scheduled to include a special memorial segment honoring Morley Safer, the long-time CBS correspondent who considered himself first and foremost a writer which makes last name, for those who know Hebrew, extremely appropriate.

http://www.jta.org/2016/05/19/news-opinion/united-states/morley-safer-of-60-minutes-dies-at-84

2017: President Donald Trump is scheduled to “touch down at Ben Gurion International Airport” this
afternoon “for a 28 hour visit to Israel and the West Bank.”

2017: Per the orders of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all members of his cabinet are scheduled to attend the airport welcome ceremony for visiting US President Donald Trump

2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to co-host a weekly interfaith discussion looking at issues “from the perspectives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.”

2017: “After learning that some of his ministers planned to skip the ceremony,” “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu order all members of his cabinet to attend today’s airport welcome ceremony for U.S. President Donald Trump.”

2017: Today, Donald Trump “became the first sitting American President to visit the Western Wall.” (As reported by Marissa Newman)

2017: Hallie Bram Kogelschatz, the CEO of shark & minnow is scheduled to discuss the need to modernize Judaism’s “mainstream identity” at Tribe Talk “an informal discussion series at the Landmark Centre in Beachwood, Ohio

2017: “French-Jewish celebrity intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy” “present a new documentary – ‘The Battle for Mosul’ – at the annual Tel Aviv film festival DocAviv.”

2018: Choreographer Andrea Miller and Gallim are scheduled to begin their second round of performances at The Met Breuer.

2018(8^thof Sivan, 5778):  Eight five year old award winning novelist Philip Milton Roth, the Newark born son of Herman Roth, a frustrated life insurance agent and “the former Bess Frankel” and author of such noted works as Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye Colum and Sabbath’s Theatre, passed away today. (As reported by Charles McGrath)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/obituaries/philip-roth-dead.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

2018: It was reported today that images have been released showing a Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter belonging to the IAF flying over Beirut which is the “first-ever combat mission” flowing by the state of the art aircraft.

2018: “The Australian wing of Toys "R" Us, part of the chain founded by Charles Lazarus entered voluntary administration” today.

2018 Ailing PA President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to remain in the hospital for one more night amidst reports by Saeb Erekat “that Palestinian institutions are robust enough to endure the post-Abbas era.” (As reported by Alexandra Lukash and Nir Cohen)

2018: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to host “a concert featuring a variety of chamber music by Joachim Stutschewsky and composers of his coterie both in Russia and in Israel, as well as the premiere of a new composition by Ofer Ben-Amots, commissioned by YIVO” preceded by a lecture by Neil W. Levin on Joachim Stutschewsky’s life and work.

2019: JBI and Yeshiva University Museum are scheduled to present “a tour of ‘Kindertransport – Rescuing Children on the Brink of War’” which illuminates “the organized rescue efforts that brought thousands of children from Nazi Europe to Great Britain in the late 1930s” lead by curator Ilona Moradorf.

2019: The American Sephardi Federation is scheduled to present a performance of “Nabucco,” “the opera by Giuseppe Verdi, “adapted by and starring David Serero as Nabucco” which builds “on the Biblical accounts of the Babylonian Exile found in Jeremiah and Daniel” and which “combines political and love intrigues with some of the greatest songs ever written (including “Va, pensiero, The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves”).

2019(17^thof Iyar, 5779): Ninety-five year old British author Judith Kerr, the Berlin born daughter of theatre critic Alexander Kerr and composer Julia Anna Franziska Weismann, the sister of British jurist Michael Kerr and wife of Nigel “Tom” Kneale passed away today.(As reported by Laura Holson)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/obituaries/judith-kerr-dead.html

 2019: In Edmonton, Alberta, the Edmonton Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to host a screening of “From to the Cloud” which tells the story of the World of the Cairo Geniza.

2020: Today during a special LSJS Torah Show, Bidud Beyachad, celebrating Yom Yerushalayim. Rabbi Zarum is scheduled to link LIVE to the Old City of Jerusalem to walk and talk with expert tour guide and archaeologist, Rabbi Barnea Selavan.

2020: CJP’s Boston-Haifa Connection is scheduled to host a special Kabbalat Shabbat program marking Jerusalem Day and Memorial Day for Ethiopian Jews honoring the 4,000 Ethiopian Jews, known as the Beta Israel, who died during this mass immigration.

2020: Via Zoom, “Francesco Spagnolo, Curator of the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, University of California, Berkeley, is scheduled to host a presentation on the current exhibition “Threads of Jewish Life: Ritual and Other Textiles from the San Francisco Bay Area” during which Spagnolo will explore early Jewish life in San Francisco through the textiles and objects on view in the exhibition, including the mysterious origins of the exhibition's extraordinary Torah ark.

2020(28^thof Iyar, 5780): Yom Yerushalayim

This Day, May 23, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 23

142 BCE (23^rdof Iyar): Simon the Hasmonean drove the Syrians and their allies out the citadel which was their last stronghold in Jerusalem.

1052: Birthdate of Philip I, King of France who passed away in 1108.   Philip’s life overlapped that of Rashi (1040-1105).  In his day, Philip certainly was more powerful than the wine merchant of Troyes. But how many people study Philip today and how many Rashi read.  Philip was the king during the First Crusade.  However, he was not allowed to participate because Pope Urban II had excommunicated him. This may account, to some extent, why the Jews of France did not suffer in the same as did their Germanic co-religionist during what turned out to be the start of one of the deadliest periods of Jewish history.

1275: King Edward I of England ordered the cessation of persecution of Jews of Bordeaux, France.  This was at a time when English kings still had holdings in France and dreams of sitting on the French throne. This is the same Edward who will eventually banish the Jews from England after draining them of all of their wealth.

1420: Albert V (Austria) accused a rich Jew, Israel of Enns, of purchasing a wafer in order to desecrate it. All the Jews in the territory were jailed, dispossessed of their property, separated from their families and then subjected to attempts at forced conversion.

1420: At the behest of the Church, Duke Albrecht ordered the forcible conversion of the Jews of Austria. Those that had not converted or escaped or been sent off in the boats were burned at the stake on March 12, 1421, and their beautiful synagogue destroyed.

1421: Those Jews still remaining in Austria were imprisoned and/or expelled.

1423: Benedict XIII, the Avignon-based "antipope" known for his relentless persecution of the Jews died today.

1498: Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican monk who was a violent opponent of the comparatively philo-Semitic Pope Alexander VI was convicted as a heretic and burned at the stake on the Piazza della Signoria in Florence.

1510: Emperor Maximilian of Germany rescinded a previously issued order to burn all Hebrew books.

1524: Ismail I, Shah of Persia and founder of the Safavid dynasty passed away. Conditions for the Jews of Persia declined under the Safavids when they adopted Shia Islam as the state religion. “Shi'ism assigns importance to the issues of ritual purity ― tahara. Non-Muslims, including Jews, are deemed to be ritually unclean ― najis. Any physical contact would require Shi'as to undertake ritual purification before doing regular prayers. Thus, Persian rulers, and the general populace, sought to limit physical contact between Muslims and Jews. Jews were excluded from public baths used by Muslims. They were forbidden to go outside during rain or snow, as an "impurity" could be washed from them upon a Muslim.”

1533: The marriage of King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon is declared null and void. As a condition to their marriage, Henry’s father promised Catherine’s Spanish parents that Jews would never be allowed to settle in England.  When Henry decided to divorce Catherine he claimed that the marriage had taken place in violation of biblical law.  He sought the support of Italian rabbis in making this claim.  The Rabbis did not support the English monarch, probably figuring that there was no reason to antagonize the Pope (who was a lot closer) than a distant English monarch.

1536: In Portugal, Pope Paul III acting upon the petition of King John III, issued a Bull providing for the establishment of the inquisition based on the Spanish archetype. It lasted until September 1774 with the last auto da fe held in October 1765.

1552: Sebastian Munster, the first Christian to publish a complete edition of the Bible in Hebrew passed away.

1555: Paul IV began his Papacy during which he issued Dudum postquam, the papal bull that expanded a 10-ducat tax on Jewish synagogues to help finance catechumen houses in Rome and Cum Nimis Absurdum, the papal bull that “ordered the creation of a Jewish ghetto in Rome.”

1568: Netherlands declared independence from Spain. Protestant Dutch rebels led by Louis of Nassau, brother of William I of Orange, defeat Jean de Ligne, Duke of Aremberg and his loyalist troops in the Battle of Heiligerlee, opening the Eighty Years' War. The conflict combined politics and religion as Protestant Dutchmen rebelled against Catholic Spain.  Holland had provided a haven for Sepharidic Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition.  A community of Portuguese merchants had settled in Amsterdam prior to the outbreak of hostilities.  The Protestant clergy were not exactly thrilled about the Jews settling in the country and it took several decades for the Jews of Holland to gain full acceptance.

1572 (18 Iyar 5332): On Lag B’Omer Moses Isserles, also known as the Rama passed away  Born sometime between 1520 and 1525, he was the son of Israel Isserles, “ a wealthy leader of the Cracow community who, in 1553, received royal dispensation to build a synagogue in memory of his wife which is known as the Ream Synagogue.”  Moses Isserles served as Rosh (Head of the) Yeshiva in Krakow. His main work was called Mappah Hashulchan ("The Tablecloth") which adapted Caro’s Shulchan Aruch to the needs and customs of Ashkenazi Jewry, It was called the “The Tablecloth” because it “covered” the Shulchan Aruch which is translated as “the prepared table.” In other words he covered Caro’s Sephardic Table with an Ashkenazic Tablecloth.  An earlier work, Darke Moshe Hakatzar (The Ways of Moses Abridged) was written in response to Caro’s comprehensive book on Jewish law called Beit Yoseph. He was known as well for the almost 100 Responsa he published. Isserles tried to strengthen the stature of many customs, elevating them almost to the level of Halachah (Jewish Law). On the other hand he was very lenient when it came to cases of stress or financial loss.

1578: The Ottoman Sultan rescinded the order to deport the wealthy Jews of Safed to the island of Cyprus. He did this because the Jews of Safed were said to be paying taxes which were used to help maintain the Dome of the Rock.

1618: In Prague, an assembly of Protestants threw three Catholic officials out of the window after they had found them guilty of violating a law concerning religious expression.  This event precipitated the Thirty Years War, so called because it lasted from 1618 to 1648.  Much of the war was fought in the Germanic principalities.  During the war Jews suffered at the hands of both sides with pogroms taking place in Frankfort, Worms and Jena.

1633: The French government issues an edict allowing only Catholics to settle in Canada.  The target of the ban was the Huguenots but it applied to the Jews as well.  Jews would not be able to settle in Canada until after the British were victorious in what Americans call the French-Indian War

1637(28^thof Iyar): Seven Jews, including Rabbi Abraham ben Isaac, were murdered today in Cracow.

1638: Today, in Hungary, “Sabbatarian believers were tortured and their writings confiscated in Kolozsvár and Marosvásárhely”



1708(4th of Sivan): Rabbi Solomon ben David de Oliveria, author of “Ez Hayyim” passed away today.

1749(7^thof Sivan, 5509): Second Day of Shavuot

1749(7^thof Sivan, 5509): Abraham ben Abraham, who had been a Polish noble named Count Valentine Potocki  before he converted to Judaism, was burned at the stake because he had renounced Catholicism and becoming a practicing Jew.

1764: Esther Etting and David Barrack Hays, the parents of Bedford, NY native Charity Hays and the in-laws of Jacob da Silva Solis were married today.

1773: Distinctions between Old Christians and New Christians were banned in Portugal. It was said this was because of a huge bribe from the Jews, but either way, this ban became law.

1788: South Carolina becomes the eighth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Thanks to John Locke who wrote South Carolina’s original constitution Jews, along with heathens and dissenters were guaranteed “freedom of conscience.” Jews began voting in the colony’s elections in 1702.  By 1750, there were enough Jews in the colony to warrant the building of the first synagogue in Charleston “which called itself “Beth Elohim” (House of God).  Francis Salvador was the most prominent Jewish leader when the Revolution began in 1775.  In 1790, South Carolina enacted legislation that was intended to abolish religious discrimination.

1794: Birthdate of Isaac Moscheles the native of Prague who gained fame as composer and pianist Ignaz Moscheles, one of many of his era who found a trip to the baptismal font to be a stepping stone on the ladder of upward social mobility.

1799(18^thof Iyar, 5559): Lag B’Omer

1799: Aaron Worms married Rachel Lamart at the Great Synagogue in London delivered a speech in favor Reform legislation “at the Westminster anniversary reform dinner.”

1806(6^thof Sivan, 5566): Shavuot observed as Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Exploration continue to work their way towards the Pacific Ocean.

1822: Influential 19^th economist David Ricardo the son of Anglo-Sephardic Jews who became a Unitarian when he married Priscilla Anne Wilkinson

1825(6^thof Sivan, 5585): First Day of Shavuot

1825: Alexander Jacobs, the son of Israel Jacobs and the former Elizabeth Abrahams was circumcised today in London.

1833(5^thof Sivan, 5593): Erev Shavuot

1837(18^thof Iyar, 5597): Lag B’Omer

1838: In Moravia, during what appeared to be an internal conflict in the Jewish community, the government issued a decree canceling the chief rabbi’s “privilege of proposing candidates’ to serve as rabbis at local congregations.

1838: Birthdate of Emile Worms, the French jurist born in Luxemburg, “educated at the University of Heidelberg” who earned his Dr. of Laws at the University of Paris in 1864 before becoming an assistant professor of law at his alma mater and professor of law at the University of Rennes.

1844(6^thof Sivan, 5604): Erev Shavuot observed on the same day that “the Báb announced that He was a new divine Messenger sent to herald a new age for humanity and to prepare the way for Bahá’u’lláh, the universal Messenger of God expected by people of all religions.”

1845: Samuel Henry Gluckstein and Hannah Joseph were today at the Great Synagogue in London.

1846: In Fürth, Bavaria, Joel and Babette (Elsasser) Krakauer gave birth to Adolph Krakauer who came to New  York in 1865 and then to Texas where became a successful merchant and leading businessman in San Antonio and El Paso, Texas before his death in 1914. 

1847: Levy Zachariah was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.

1848:  Birthdate of Otto Lilienthal German born aviation pioneer.  He died in 1896 after one of his gliders failed to work properly.

1849: In London, Betsey Philips married 27 year old Montague “Myer” Gluckstein and became Betsey Gluckstein.

1851: Richard Lalor Sheil an Irish writer, orator, and Member of Parliament passed away. Jews should remember Sheil as a supporter of measures to allow Jews to sit as members of Parliament in the United Kingdom. Following the Rothschild’s election to the House of Commons Sheil delivered a speech entitled “On Disabilities of the Jews” that began included these words in the opening paragraph, “A British subject ought in every regard to be considered a British citizen; and inasmuch as the professors of the most ancient religion in the world, which, as far as it goes, we not only admit to be true, but hold to be the foundation of our own, are bound to the performance of every duty which attaches to a British subject, to a full fruition of every right which belongs to a British citizen, they have, I think, an irrefragable title. A Jew born in England cannot transfer his allegiance from his sovereign and his country; if he were to enter the service of a foreign power engaged in hostilities with England and were taken in arms he would be accounted a traitor. Is a Jew an Englishman for no other purposes than those of condemnation? I am not aware of a single obligation to which other Englishmen are liable from which a Jew is exempt; and if his religion confers on him no sort of immunity it ought not to affect him with any kind of disqualification.”

1855(26^thof Sivan, 5615): Shavuot observed on the same day that the Daily Ohio Statesman reprinted a speech by Senator Henry Clay in which he defended the “American System” and praised “the immigrants who daily arrived on America’s shores.”  (Editor’s note - the defense of immigrants (including Jews) by a prominent national leader when the Known-Nothing Party mentality was on the rise was a an act of political bravery)

1856(18^thof Iyar, 5616): On the day after Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner in the halls of Congress over the issue of slavery and the day before Pottawatomie Massacre, which also tied to the fight over slavery, the Jews observed Lag B’Omer

1856: Birthdate of Congressman Henry Mayer Goldfogle who urged President Wilson to “designate January 27, 1916 as the date for collecting funds for the relief of suffering Jews in Europe.”

https://bioguideretro.congress.gov/Home/MemberDetails?memIndex=G000260

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/henry-mayer-goldfogle

1856: Birthdate of Cracow native Leopold Zinsler who came to the United States in 1883 where he served as the rabbi at “the Bohemian Congregation in Newark,” “Congregation Shahre Zedek” and “Congregation Anshe Emeth.

1858: Birthdate of Isaac Tuck, the native of New York’s Old Seventh Ward and “pioneer in fruit trade journalism who “was one of the founders of the Fruit Trade Journal and Produce Record” and the Fruit and Produce Trade Association of New York City as well as a member “of the South Brooklyn Board of Trade and the Twelfth Assembly District Democratic Club.”

1859: Two Polish Jews, Philip Moses and Samuel Preiss filed a complaint today claiming that a tailor name William Meyer had attacked Preiss and stolen his watch while Preiss was in his store. The two plaintiffs gave such contradictory stories that it led the Judge to believe that Meyer was actually the victim of blackmail attempt.  He charged Moses and Preiss with attempted blackmail and filing a false police report.  The two complaining witnesses are now defendants and since they could make bail they are awaiting trial in the city jail. [So all of our ancestors weren’t Kohanim or psalmists, so what?]

1863(5^thof Sivan, 5623): Parashat Bamidbar; Erev Shavuot

1863: Ferdinand Lasalle formed the General German Workers ’Association (ADAV), Germany’s first labor party today.  He also began serving as its President, a position he would hold until his death in August of 1863.

1865: In London’s East End, “Joel Joel (a London tavern keeper of the King of Prussia), and Kate Isaacs, who was a sister of Barnett Isaacs (Barney Barnato) gave birth to Solomon “Solly” Barnato Joel the brother of Jack and Woolf Joel with whom he made a fortune in the South African diamond mining trade and the husband of actress Ellen Nellie Ridley.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joel-solomon-barnato

1866: Birthdate of Edgar James Banks, the oriental language professor and amateur archeologist who climbed Mount Ararat “in search of Noah’s Ark” and who sold the clay tablet that became known as Plimpton 322 which provided a window into the world of Babylonian mathematics and linguistics passed away today.

1867(18^thof Iyar, 5672): Lag B’Omer observed on the same that Jesse James and his gang “robbed a bank in Richmond, MO, killing two and getting away with four thousand dollars.

1870: The annual meeting of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites was held this evening at Temple Shaaray Tefila in New York City. The report of the Executive Committee included a comprehensive look at conditions of Jews in a various communities. The committee reported that the Governor of Syria had agreed to allow the purchase of land for a Jewish agricultural school.  Construction will begin as soon as the government at Constantinople gives its approval.  Romanian Jews, including those living in Bucharest, Vacco and Salatz have been the victims of violent attacks.  Jews continued to suffer in Russia and they continue to subject to laws prohibiting them from living near the frontier. Halevy has not begun his trip to China where he is to gain information on the condition of the Jews living there. At its recent meeting in Paris, the Universal Alliance reported that it had 12,000 members around the world. The committee urged that other states adopt laws similar to the one in New York that allows Jews who observe the Sabbath to work on Sunday, despite the existence of “Blue Laws.” The committee urged the Jewish population to support Maimonides College.  The committee credited “the good sense of the American public” that organizations attempting to Christianitize the U.S. Constitution had meant with little success.

1871: An Imperial Ukase (proclamation) has been issued order the Jews of Poland to change their appearance by doing away with their long black coats and trimming their beards and side-curls.

1873: Birthdate of Rabbi Leo Baeck. His most famous work was The Essence of Judaism. He believed in ethical monotheism as part of the core of Judaism. Unlike contemporary rationalists, he also acknowledged that the mystery of God was also essential to Jewish belief. He saw the need for the experiencing God at the emotional level. This experience would lead to the ethical behavior. Also, Baeck saw the need for ritual as an affirmation of the concept of people hood. Baeck chose not to leave Germany. He was imprisoned at Terezienstadt. His faith survived the experience. He passed away in 1956.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/baeck.html

1874(7^thof Sivan, 5634): Second Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1874: Birthdate of “Ephraim Moses Lilien an art nouveau illustrator and printmaker particularly noted for his art on Jewish themes who is sometimes called the "first Zionist artist” whose works included a photograph of Herzl taken 1901https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephraim_Moses_Lilien#/media/File:Herzl_Basel_1901.jpgand “The Queen of Sabbath” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephraim_Moses_Lilien#/media/File:Juda_13.jpg

https://streetsofisrael.wordpress.com/2014/01/



1875: “An Interesting Jewish Ceremony” published today described the conversion ceremony of Henrietta Held at which Rabbi Marx Cohn officiated.

1875:  “Michel Levy: The Life of a Great French Publisher” published today described the shock in Paris at the death of this 54 year old literary leader and provided a detailed account of his life and accomplishments.

1877: In Paterson, NJ, Judge Barkalow will begin to hear evidence in divorce case involving Moses Fananholz (or Tananholz) originally from Chicago and his wife the former Rachel Blumenthal from Montreal.  The wife claims that her husband only married her for her money; that she that the ceremony was only for a betrothal under Jewish custom and not a marriage ceremony; and that since she was under the age of 18 (the age of consent) when the ceremony was performed the marriage was illegal.

1877: At Buffalo, NY, in the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, architect Cyrus Lazelle Warner Eidlitz the son of architect Leopold Eidlitz married Jennie Turner Dudley.

1879: An article published today entitled “Proposed Hebrew Convention” described the preparations that are being made for the upcoming meeting in New York of delegates representing the “various branches of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.  Agenda items will include a report on charitable activities and a report on the activities at the college the Union controls which trains young men to serve as rabbis.  One major topic of discussion will be the proposed to change Jewish Sabbath services from Saturday to Sunday.

1879(1st of Sivan, 5639): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1880: In Jerusalem, Joseph Raphael, the chief justice of the Sephardi community of Jerusalem and president of the community council and his wife gave birth to Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel “the Sephardi chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine from 1939 to 1948, and of Israel from 1948 until his death in 1953.”

1883: In Denver, CO, 49 year old Pennsylvania native Hezekiah Charles Ullman, the son of German-Jewish immigrants Lazarus Ullman and Lydia Abrahams and Ella Adelaide gave birth to Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman who gained fame as “swashbuckling” movie star Douglas Fairbanks.

1884: As the May Laws took effect “Jews who had served in the army encountered difficulties, at the expiration of their terms of service, in resettling in the villages in which they had dwelt.”

1886: Birthdate of Moshe David Drabkin known as David Remez the native of Belarus who made Aliyah in 1913 with his wife Liba. At the end of his long, rich career he was one of those who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1948 and served as cabinet minister in Ben-Gurion’s first two governments.

1886: Rachel Montefiore was buried today at the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.

1886: Ninety-year old German historian Leopold von Ranke who described Mosaic monotheism and “its revolt against nature worship” as the “principle on which is built a civil society which is alien to every abuse of power” in his Universal History, passed away today.

1887: Oscar S. Straus, the new United States Minister to Turkey and his family arrived in Constantinople today.  They had been expected ten days earlier but were delayed when their daughter became ill in Vienna.

1889: Birthdate of New York native Louis brand who played basketball for CCNY from 1907 through 1909.

1890: It was reported today Mrs. Charles Peterson claims an unnamed Jewish peddler had pitched her nine month old daughter into a tub of water.  The mother claims she “was absent at the time” and has not offered a basis for the claim.

1890: All of the children of the late Herman Frohman “applied for and secured from the Court of Common Please a writ de lunatic” which will force their mother, Mary Frohman, to answer charges that she is “a lunatic.”  This is part of a dispute over the estate of the deceased Jewish butcher.

1891: A fire broke early today at tenement house at 38 Ludlow Street which is home to 18 Jewish families.

1892: In New York City, “Selig and Goldie (Feigen) Peshkin gave birth to Dr. Morris Murray Peshkin, the Fordham graduate and husband of Lillian Rapaport who served as the clinical professor of medicine and pediatric allergies at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the national president of the Asthmatic Children’s Foundation.

1892: “A resolution of sympathy for the Jews of Russia was introduced and passed” at today’s session of a conference of Methodist leaders being held in Omaha, Nebraska. “The resolution declared that it was the sense of the conference that the Jews in Russia were being unmercifully persecuted” and that “it was the hope of the conference that Russian Jews would soon enjoy the same rights as other people.”

1893: It was reported today there are only two Jewish murderers imprisoned at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Sixty year old Adolph Reich is serving a life sentence for having killed his wife.  He had been sentenced to death, but the Governor commuted his sentence. Charles Lovitz was found guilty of murder in the second degree after having shot his wife.

1894: On the second day of the First American Conference of Hebrew and Christian Workers for Israel, Reverend James Adler delivered a talk on “Dry Bones” which included a recitation of his problems in trying to convert Jews.

1894: “Congress of Liberal Religionists” published today described meetings being held at Temple Sinai in Chicago, Illinois that include representatives of Reform Movement and other denominations such as the Unitarians and the Ethical Cultural Movement with the hope “of securing closer cooperation between the denominations of liberal religious societies.”  The congress is an outgrowth of the Parliament of Religions which was held in Chicago during the World’s Fair.

1895: It was reported today that Max Casten, alias “Jew Sam” has been arrested in St. Louis, MO, on charges of stealing $2,500 worth of diamonds

1898: Martin Beir, the Rochester fire insurance agent, was in New York on business today

1898: “Patriotism of the Jews” published today included a declaration by Rabbi Rudolph Grossman that the United States war with Spain “was of Divine ordering” and that Spain’s kingdom in the western hemisphere is “finished

1898: It was reported today that there one thousand Jewish officers in the Austro-Hungary Army, that one further of the officers in the French Army are Jews and that there were 10,000 Jews in the Union Army.

1898: During the Spanish-American War, Corporal Leo Witkovski of Tampa, FL serving in Company M of the 1^st Florida Volunteer Infantry was among those mustered into federal service today.

1899: Charles Latimer who has been accused of being one of the men who attacked Leopold Levy is being held by police.  Levy has died of from the wounds that Latimer and his unknown compatriots inflicted on the 49 year old salesman.

1900: In Kiev, Bella and Nachum D. Petchersky gave birth to New York real estate executive and philanthropist Solomon N. Petchers, who served on the board of the American Association for Jewish Education and helped to fund the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Central Library for the Blind in Jerusalem.

1900: Birthdate of Franz Leopold Neumann “a German-Jewish left-wing political activist and labor lawyer, who …is considered to be among the founders of modern political science in the Federal Republic of Germany.”

1900: Herzl seeks support at a meeting with Ernest von Koerber, Austrian political leader who served as Prime Minister from 1900 to 1904.

1901: According to the petition of Bushrod M. Watts of Baltimore City by Isaac Lobe Straus,today Watts “caused to be served by personal service upon Republican Samuel Affelder, a Baltimore City Councilman, a notice of contest for said seat in the First Branch of the City Council of Baltimore City from the Fourteenth Ward…”

1902: In the North, South and West Ends of Boston all of the Solomont kosher meat stores were operating today after “disturbances occurred among the Hebrews yesterday” in front the establishments.

1903: In Buffalo, NY, a special committee submitted a resolution to the American Baptist Missionary Union condemning “the recent massacre of the Jews in Russia.”

1903: Following the Kishinev Pogrom Wenzel von Plehve, Russian Minister of the Interior “rebuffed a Jewish delegation that asked for a condemnation of the massacre and relaxation of anti-Jewish rules.”

1903: Herzl writes to Wenzel von Plehve, Russian Minister of the Interior and to Konstantin Pobiedonostzev asking them to arrange an audience with the Czar. Herzl also turned to Bertha von Suttner and asks for her assistance in this matter. Von Sutter was an Austrian writer, pacifist and the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Peace.

1904: In Cincinnati, 37 year old “lawyer and stockbroker Alfred Holzman and 31 year old Rachel Florence Workum Hlozman gave birth to University of Cincinnati graduate Elizabeth Lloyd Holzman the Blues singer and actress who gained fame as Libby and who at her death was known as “Mrs. Libby Holman Reynolds Schanker, widow of a Reynolds tobacco heir and the wife of artist Louis Shanker.

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/22/archives/libby-holman-is-dead-at-65-famed-for-moanin-low-and-body-and-soul.html?searchResultPosition=1

1905(18^thof Iyar, 5665): Lag B’Omer

1905: It is believed that the speech Feodor Chaliapin gave today to workingman at Karkoff “in which he urged the audience not to molest the Jews who after all he were their brothers, prevented another Jewish massacre.

1906: New Atlantic Hall was crowded” tonight “with pushcart peddlers who are members of the East Side Pushcart Peddlers Association” who contend “that for two years the Bureau of Licenses has refused to issue peddler’s licenses to Jews” and “that every pushcart license held by a Jew on the east side represents ‘graft’ paid to someone whom they call a ‘politician.’”

1907: In Albany, NY, State Senator Martin Saxe introduced a bill “which provides for important amendments to the Civil Rights Act” which was prompted by the refusal of the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel in Atlantic City to  rent rooms Mrs. Bertha Rayner-Frank and her nieces because they were Jewish.

1907: “Apology to Mrs. Frank” published today described events surrounding the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel’s refusal of service to Mrs. Bertha Rayner Franks and her two nieces because they were Jewish and the subsequent apology by Josiah White & Sons, the Atlantic City hotel’s owner.

1908: Birthdate of architect Max Abramovitz. Two of his most famous designs were Lincoln Center and the UN building.

1909(3rd of Sivan, 5669): Elias Solomon, an Australian politician, passed away. Born in 1839, in London, England, he 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.

1910: Celebration of the Geiger Centenary.

1910: Birthdate of bandleader Artie Shaw. Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky in New York, he became a popular "big band" bandleader whose hits included "Come'on my House".

1911: Dedication ceremony of the New York Public Library.  Over the next century, the library would provide countless generations of Jews a variety of cultural and educational opportunities.  The library’s “Dorot Jewish Division is one of the great collections of Judaica in the world and the most accessible for both scholarly and personal use. While the collection offers commentary on all aspects of Jewish life it also includes Hebrew and Yiddish-language texts on general subjects.”

1912(7^thof Sivan, 5672): Second Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1912: “The remains of the late General Morris Horkheimer” who died yesterday at Atlantic City “accompanied by his family” are scheduled to arrive in Wheeling, West Virginia “at 9:30 this morning…and will be removed to the family home at 800 Main Street and arrangements for the funeral.

1912: Tonight, at a meeting of the American Immigration and Distribution League at the Hotel Manhattan, Montefiore G. Kahn, Acting Secretary of the organization, announced that he would give the league 13,000 acres of farming and clay lands in New Jersey, valued by the donor at more than $2,600,000. The land was to be parceled out free to deserving immigrants who desire to become farmers.

1912: Today, The Hamburg-American Line under the leadership of general director Albert Ballin launched the SS Imperator, which at that time was reported to be “the world’s largest Ship.

1913: In New York founding of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, now known as the American Cancer Society which helps in the fight against a disease with Jews have a unique history.

1914: Birthdate of actor and critic Leo Lerman, author and editor for style setting magazines including Mademoiselle, Vogue and Vanity Fair.

1915: “The Illinois Equal Suffrage Association, Political Equality League and Women’s Club” are among the organizations supporting the gathering of “Chicago women…in the big banquet hall of the Auditorium Hall” scheduled to take place this afternoon to protest the execution of Leo M. Frank.

1915: In response to questions about clemency for Leo Frank, the Governor-elect’s views published today state that “You can just say for Nat Harris that if the matter of dealing executive clemency to the condemned man is to be considered by him, the entire outside world will not be taken into consideration one it.  It is entirely a Georgia matter.”

1915: “A report telling of the relief work for the benefit of war sufferers in Palestine was issued today by the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs” chaired by Louis D. Brandeis.

1915: In New York, “the local Kehillah, or Jewish community meeting in the Concert Hall of Madison Square Garden today, endorsed the idea of holding a conference of delegates from Jewish organizations throughout the country to consider the plight of European Jews and to determine what could be done for the amelioration of their condition after the war.”

1915: “In remarks preceding his sermon this morning,” Dr. Madison C. Peters of the North Baptist Church on West Eleventh Street said, “I know the people of Georgia and it is unfair to judge all by those who are clamoring for the life of a man who by common consent I not innocent, has never had a fair trial.  The outcries of the mob against the defendant were not against Leo Frank – it was a cry against the Jew.”

1915: In New York this afternoon “at a meeting of the Alliance Israelite Universelle…a resolution was adopted after being seconded by Professor Richard Gottheil of Columbia to prepare a protest in the name of the Jews of the United States against the execution of Leo Frank” because those at “the meeting took the stand that the Frank verdict was the result of race prejudice…”

1915: “A letter from Leo Frank was received today by Harry A. Lipsky of the Daily Jewish Courier” in which the condemned man expresses his appreciation for the support of the Chicago community and stating “I am well and putting up as good a fight as I know how.”

1915: It was reported today that ex-Congressman William W. Howard of Augusta has been chosen to argue the case to grant clemency in the case of Leo M. Frank before Governor Slaton should the appeal to the State Prison Commission fail.

1916: Isidore Hershfield an attorney “who went to the war zone last October to represent the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society,” “visited all of the battles fronts and distributed relief to Jews in the war area” is expected to arrive in New York today aboard the New Amsterdam.

1916: The last in a series of notes were exchanged between the Russians, French and British which finalized the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement which effectively “divided” the Ottoman Empire among the Allies while the outcome of WW I was still in doubt.

1916: Henry Morgenthau, the former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey is scheduled to address the Illinois Manufacturers Association at noon today after which he will leave for St. Louis and Kansas City “where he will continue his pleas for aid for the war sufferers.”

1916: A resolution was unanimously adopted by 1,400 at the convention of the Independent Order of B’rith Abraham requesting that the Governor of New York institute a public investigation of “the charges made by Max J. Klein that, because he was a Jews, he was barred from the Second Field Artillery, National Guard of NY by Captain Howard E. Sullivan of Battery D.

1916: At the concluding session of the 13^th annual convention of the Independent Order of B’rith Abraham at the Amsterdam Opera House the following officers were elected: Grand Master – Leon Sanders; Deputy Grand Masters: Gustave Hartman, Abraham Rosoff, Max H. Schoen, Emil Zuker, Dr. George Sulton, Phillip P. Levy, Otto S. Hirsch, Hyman Winick, Jacob Zuckerman and Jacob Eaton; Grand Secretary – Max Hollander; Grand Treasurer – David Goldberg; Grand Trustee – Benjamin Eherenfeld and Counsel of the Order – Adolph Stern.

1916: “The organization of the first Kehillah on Washington Heights was completed at a meeting of of about 500 Jews” tonight in the Washington Heights Synagogue” on 161^st Street where the speakers included Rabbi Judah L. Magnes, Chairman of the Kehillah of New York, Emanuel Hertz, and Dr. Elias Margolies.

1917: Funeral services are scheduled to be held this afternoon at Temple Jehosuah for fifty-eight year old Fannie Schwager, the wife of Morris Schwager

1917: This evening, “the workers of the Central Jewish Institute” hosted “a farewell banquet to mark the departure of Rabbi Herbert S. Goldman” for his new venture to improve life in the Jewish district centered on 116^th Street which he called the “hell” of the city of New York.

1917: Funeral services are scheduled to be held this afternoon for Mrs. Abe Siegel the mother of Lawrence Siegel at Free Son’s Cemetery in Chicago.

1917: The annual meeting of the Jewish Home Finding Society of Chicago of which Mrs. Adolph Kurz is Secretary is scheduled to take place this evening at the Standard Club.

1917: The joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association, “two of the most influential bodies of British Jewry” issued a statement opposing “Jewish resettlement in Palestine, as planned by the Zionist organizations.”

1918: White Russia native Leon Cheifitz, a resident of “Canada at the age of 9” and a member of “Poale Zion at the age of 15, left for camp after having joined the Jewish Legion in which he would rise to the rank of Sergeant before being demobilized in 1921.

1918: It was reported today that “a dispatch from Paris states that the Jewish National Council has issued a protest against the atrocities committed upon the Jewish population in occupied Russia” while also charging “that pogroms have been organized by the German authorities who have aroused the peasants against the Jews.”
1919: Dr. Emil G. Hirsch and Julius Rosenwald are scheduled to be two of the guests of honor at luncheon hosted this afternoon by The Council of Jewish Women at the La Salle Hotel in Chicago.

1920(6^thof Sivan, 5680): Shavuot observed for the last time during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson

1922: Premier of "Abie's Irish Rose."  This was the first of over 2,500 performances seen by an estimated fifty million attendees.

1923: Birthdate of Bessarabia native Boris Dorfman who authored about 1000 articles on Jewish issues in Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and German for publications including Birobidzhaner Shtern, who was one of the founders of Shofar, the first Jewish newspaper in the former USSR and the father of American publicist Michael Dorfman.

1924: Police in Chicago pursued the investigation into the murder of Bobby Franks, whom they now knew was not being held for ransom since his corpse had been discovered.

1925: Birthdate of photographer Henry Wolf, owner of Henry Wolf Productions and the 1976 recipient of the American Institute of Graphic Arts Medal for Lifetime Achievement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/business/media/16wolf.html

1925: Esther Goldenbaum Schulman Lederberg and Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Lederberg gave birth to Dr. Joshua Lederberg “an American molecular biologist who is known for his work in genetics, artificial intelligence, and space exploration. He was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in 1958 for his research in genetic structure and function in microorganisms. The other half of that year's prize was shared by Edward Lawrie Tatum and George Wells Beadle. In addition to his contributions to biology, Lederberg did extensive research in artificial intelligence. This included work in the NASA experimental programs seeking life on Mars and the chemistry expert system Dendral. Lederberg’s parents had moved to the United States from Palestine in 1924.  His father was an Orthodox Rabbi. Fortunately for the world of science when Lederberg was Bar Mitzvahed in 1938 he received a copy of Bodansky's” Introduction to Physiological Chemistry,” a book that he said had a tremendous impact on his scientific development.

1926: Birthdate of Amos Degani, the Tel Aviv native whose political career included serving as an MK from 1957 to 1969.

1926: Birthdate of Yossel Mashel Slovo, the native of Lithuania who as Joe Slovo became a leader in the anti-Apartheid movement while serving as a leader of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-joe-slovo-1566935.html

1926: In Wilno Max Weinreich and Regina Szabad gave birth to linguist Uriel Weinreich.

1926: The United Jewish Campaign in New York is scheduled to come to an end today.

1927: Birthdate of Dieter Hildebrandt, the German non-Jew who directed the Academy Award nominated documentary “The Yellow Star – The Persecution of the Jews in Europe 1933-45.”

1929: Birthdate of Marvin J. Chomsky who won Emmy Awards for his direction “Holocaust” in `978 and “Inside the Third Reich” in 1982.

1928: Having delivered an address last night in which he called “upon the Zionist of America to ‘refrain from fratricidal war’” Dr. Chaim Weizman is scheduled to leave today for Lond.

1929: “The Crown,” a play by David Calderon premiere in Tel Aviv in a production directed by Alesksei Dikiy.

1929: In Palestine, the leaders ofAhdut HaAvoda and Hapoel HaTzair, the two major labor parties signan agreement that will merge the two parties into one.  The merger is slated to take place on July 25.

1930: After having earned his LL.B in February and passed the New York State Bar Exam, Chicago White Sox Catcher Moe Berg, who had injured his knee during an exhibition game with the Little Rock Travelers, “returned to the starting line-up” today.

1930: “Westfront 1918,” a German movie about World War I featuring Wladimir Sokoloff was released in Germany today.

1930: In Brooklyn, David and Eva Kellman gave birth to Dr. Charles D. Kelman, the clinical professor of ophthalmology and “father of phacoemulsification.”

http://ophthalmologytimes.modernmedicine.com/ophthalmologytimes/content/charles-kelman-md-father-phaco-dies

1931(7^thof Sivan, 5691): As the United State sinks into its second year of the Great Depression, Jews observe the Second Day of Shavuot and Shabbat.

1932(17^thof Iyar, 5692): Eighty-year old textile manufacturer and philanthropist James Simon who provided funding for several archaeological digs passed away today.

http://www.meaus.com/109-james-simon-memorial.htm

1932: “The Tenderfoot,” a film based on George S. Kaufman’s play “The Butter and Egg Man” as released today in the United States.

1933: It was reported today that detectives who had questioned Waxy Gordon (born Irving Wexler) about the murders of Max Hassel and Max Greenberg “got the impression that he might welcome a jail sentence” for federal income evasion “since rival gunmen are said to be out to murder him and his associates.”

1933: Birthdate of Alvin Ira Malnik, the St. Louis born businessman “with long-lasting business and personal relationships with members of the Rat Pack” who “purchased and remodeled The Forge restaurant in Miami Beach” with the late Jay Weiss.

http://www.almalnik.com/

1933: Birthdate of Paris native Rabbi Aharon Lictenstein who uniquely received semicha from Yeshiva University  after which he earned “a PhD in English Literature from Harvard” where he met his future wife Tova, the daughter of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2014/04/who-is-aharon-lichtenstein/

http://www.timesofisrael.com/renowned-rabbi-aharon-lichtenstein-dies-at-81/

1933: The all-Jewish Platoon of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps was expanded to an all-Jewish company under the command of Captain Noel S. Jacobs. While the unit’s chaplain was Rabbi Mendel Brown, the leader of the Sephardic community, most of the members were Russian Jews

1934: The Palestine Jewish National Assembly orchestrated a general strike against the immigration ban that was scheduled to last from noon until 7 p.m. this evening. During the strike, fifty Jewish strikers in Tel Aviv were wounded in clashes with the police. Twenty of the wounded were described as being in serious condition.

1934(9^thof Sivan, 5694): Sixty-six year old Harvard trained lawyer Simon Louis Adler a judge of the United States court for the western district of New York, died of a heart attack today after which he was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY.

1934(9^thof Sivan, 5694): Fifty-seven year old composer and arranger Gustave Salzer who served as the musical director for several Broadway shows including “Animal Crackers,” “Sweet Adeline” and “The Dubarry” passed away today.

1935: Joseph "Yosky" Toblinsky participated in the hijacking of a truck while driving through Sullivan County today escaping with $8,000 worth of pharmaceutical drugs.  He also kidnapped the driver and his assistant.  Born in 1879, Toblinsky “was a New York City racketeer who, as head of an independent gang on East Side Manhattan, was involved in extortion and poisoning horses with the Yiddish Black Hand during the early 1900s. He was… sent to Sing Sing Prison for cruelty to animals in 1902.”

1936: As Arab violence continued, “on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road, just outside of Jerusalem, two light tanks and two trucks carrying troops were fired upon from the Arab Village of Ainkarem.”

1936: Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes is scheduled to deliver an address which will broadcast this evening from the Astor Hotel where the New York United Palestine Appeal is hosting a dinner to mark the start of it drive to raise $1,500,000 for the aide of European Jews seeking settlement in Palestine.

1936: “Night riders of the Black Legion, a terroristic secret society” whose “prospective members are asked if they will take arms against Jews, Negroes and Catholics” are the leading suspects in the murder of a 32 year old Works Project Administration (WPA) worker in Detroit.

1936: Declaring that German refugees in France, Holland, Czechoslovakia and other European countries were in a ‘precarious’ condition the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee announced” today “emergency appropriations were being made to meet the needs of the victims” over and above the five thousand dollars sent monthly to Holland, the ten thousand dollars sent to Czechoslovakia and the more than twelve thousand dollars sent to Austria.

1937: Birthdate of Jerome Rosenberg who would hold the dubious distinction of being the longest serving prisoner in New York State when he died.

1937: “In accordance with the proclamation of Dr. Stephen S. Wise declaring today as National Shekel Day, 10,000 volunteers” conducted “a house-to-house canvass seeking 250,000 members for the 1937 enrollment of American Zionists.

1937: Ninety-seven year old John D. Rockefeller passed away.  To the world at large, he was the founder of Standard Oil, one of the robber barons, etc.  But he was also the founder of the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/rockmuseum.html

1938(22^ndof Iyar, 5698): Fifty-three year old Richmond physician and vice president of the ZOA Dr. Lazarus Karp the Latvian born son of decorated war hero Israel Joseph Karp and father of Columbia University graduate Mina Karp passed away today.

1938: As Arab violence continued unabated, The Palestine Post reported that Yitzhak Yitzhaki, 55, was attacked and stabbed to death by two Arabs near the Beit Vegan quarter of Jerusalem. Ezekiel Muncik, 25, a supernumerary constable from Kfar Yona was shot and killed during one of the Arab attacks on Hanita. Another young settler, Abraham Katz was severely wounded only one hour later and it was impossible to Ctake him to hospital. A police sergeant, injured in an earlier attack, died of his wounds in the Haifa hospital. Two Arabs were injured by a bomb explosion in Tiberias.

1939(5^thof Sivan, 5699): Erev Shavuot

1939: Following the adoption of the infamous MacDonald White Paper which all but put an end to Jewish immigration in Palestine, Winston Churchill, who was still a political outcast, spoke in favor of Jewish immigration telling the House of Commons, "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population.  Now are being asked to decree that all this is to come to an end.  We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, to an agitation which fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda."  (According to Martin Gilbert, Churchill was right. "Between 1922 and 1939 more Arabs had entered Palestine than Jews."  Many of these immigrants were drawn to Palestine by the improving economic conditions which were often a product of Jewish settlement.  Ironically, these Moslems who came from a variety of North African and Middle Eastern countries would be counted among the "Palestinian refugees" that are with us to this date.)

1939: During a debate on the Peel Commission’s White Paper, Winston Churchill defends the Balfour Declaration and criticizes Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for betraying the Zionists and turning his back on a document he had so ardently supported twenty years before.  “They (the Jewish settlers) have fulfilled his (Chamberlain) hopes.  How can he find it in his heart to strike them this mortal blow?” Upon hearing of the speech, Weizmann telegraphed Churchill” “Your magnificent speech may yet destroy this policy.  Words fail me to express thanks.”

1939: The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Long, criticized the McDonald White Paper in a speech in the House of Lords.

1939: In Palestine, on the eve of the Shavuot holiday, seven new settlements are established simultaneously. In all, twelve new settlements are established in May, expressing the faith that even in the grim new circumstances of the White Paper, settlement was one of the essential means of fighting for the Zionist aim.

1939: Isaac Nachman Steinberg a Russian born Zionist who was a leader of the “Territorialist Movement” arrived in Perth, Australia and began trying to gain support for the “Kimberly Scheme” – a plan in which “75,000” Jews fleeing Europe would be settled in the western part of Australia.

1940: In what may be one of the strangest meetings in the history of the Roosevelt White House, FDR met with Louis E. Krstein, Chairman of Feline’ Department Store.

1940: Archibald Henry Maule Ramsay the anti-Semitic, pro-fascist Member of Parliament was arrested and lodged in Brixton Prison on an order under Defence Regulation 18B

1940: As French forces fled from the attacking German Army, Margaret and Hans Rey returned to Paris from Normandy.

1940: The Broadway production of “Keep Off the Grass,” “a musical revue produced by Lee Shubert and J.J. Shubert” opened today at the Broadhurst Theatre where it “ran for a total of 44 performances.

1940:  Frustrated by "illegal" immigration into Palestine, British High Commissioner for Palestine Sir Harold MacMichael insists that Hungary accept the return of two Jews who had left Hungary and settled in Palestine in 1934 on tourist visas. The Hungarian government replies that there are an "excessive" number of Jews in their country and the government's aim is "that as many as possible should be encouraged to emigrate."

1940: Lord Lloyd, the Secretary of State for Colonies express his opposition to Prime Minister Churchill’s plan to arm the Jews of Palestine so that he could bring the 20,000 British troops stationed in Palestine home to defend against a possible German invasion.  Lloyd feared the reaction of the Arabs to what Churchill saw as a way of providing for self-defense while meeting the Nazi menace.

1941: Birthdate of Zalman King Lefkowitz  who as Zalman King gained fame as “a filmmaker who mixed artistic aspiration, a professed empathy for female sexuality and gauzy photography to bring soft-core pornography to cable television — particularly with his Showtime series “Red Shoe Diaries” in the 1990s…´(As reported by Douglas Martin)

1942(7th of Sivan, 5702): Second Day of Shavuot

1942(7^thof Sivan, 5702): After having been tortured by the Nazis for at least two months, George Politzer was murdered by a firing squad.

1942: The Nazis deported the Jews from Stopkov, Slovakia, including the Findling family today and sent them to Auschwitz

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/may/08.asp

1942: “Grand Central Murder” produced by B.F. Zeidman and featuring Same Levene “as Inspector Gunther” was released in the United States today.

1943: Nazi Aktionen kill thousands of Ukrainian Jews at Przemyslany and Lvov.

1943: U.S. premiere of “Mission to Moscow” a film treatment of the memoir of the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union directed by Michael Curitz, with a script by Howard Koch and a musical score by Max Steiner.

1944(1st of Sivan, 5704): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1944: In New York, Rabbi Samuel Belkin was inaugurated as President of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and Yeshiva College. An honorary degree of Doctor of Law was conferred upon Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone and an honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred on Rabbi Isaac Rubinstein, former Chief Rabi of Vilna and a twenty six year member of the Sejm (the Polish Senate.) 

1944: In Peekskill, NY, June and David Polis gave birth to Susan Polis who gained fame as Susan Polis Schultz an American poet, producer of greeting cards and the mother of Colorado Congressman Jared Polis.

1945: Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler committed suicide.

1945: “Acting on SHAEF's orders and with the approval of the Soviets, American Major General Rooks summoned Dönitz aboard the Patria and communicated to him that he and all the members of his Government were under arrest, and that their Government was dissolved.”

1945: Two weeks after the German surrender, Chaim Weizmann writes to Prime Minister Winston Churchill appealing for an end to the White Paper and restrictions on Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel.  The appeal would fall on deaf ears.

1946: In “Harrow, north London…Jewish hairdressers” gave birth to Stephen Anthony Solomon Marks who gained game as Stephen Marks, “a British fashion retailer and founder, chairman and chief executive of the French Connection brand.”

1946: “The Devil’s Mask” directed by Henry Levin, with music by Irving Getz and featuring Ludwig Donath as “Dr. Karger” was released in the United States today.

1946: James Work was elected president of the National Farm School, after having served “as Acting President for many months during the illness of President Louis Nusbaum. The school was the creation Joseph Krauskoph, a leading American Reform Rabbi.

1946: A mob of rioting Poles attacked Zypora Frank and her family today which was Zypora’s birthday. According to Mrs. Frank, ''They threw stones, they were yelling, 'You take our coal and give us the Jews,' and somebody threw a grenade.'' Two people were killed, one right next to the 11-year-old girl, spattering her birthday dress with blood.  Following another pogrom in July, Mrs. Frank’s parents would decide to send their children to Palestine. They were sure that the Poles would finish what the Germans had begun.

1947: The British intercepted a three-masted Italian schooner today off the shore of Palestine containing 1,457 Jews who were trying to enter the country.  The Jews, most of whom were Polish, Russian or Hungarian, had been on the ship for over two weeks.  They had named the vessel Mordei Hagetaoth (Ghetto Fighters) and placed a sign on the deck, written in English proclaiming “From the ruins of the ghetto to our own country – our only refuge – Open the gates.

1947: It was reported today the “Zwi Brik, the former director of the Palestine Office in Lithuania” “the first Jewish refugee to be given a visa for Cyprus” “where more than 13,000 visaless Jews are confined” has set sail from Naples bound for the British controlled Island.

1948: Thomas C. Wasson, the Consul General for the United States in Jerusalem, died today after having been shot in an alley “by a .30 caliber rifle.”

1948: Today “New York Times reported that Thomas Wasson "on his death bed stated that Arabs had shot him," but two weeks later retracted this statement.’

1948: The only advance of the Arab Legion beyond the Old City walls into "Jewish Jerusalem" was halted in front of Notre Dame. The commander of the Arab Legion, Sir John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pasha), considered that battle to be the worst defeat suffered by the legion throughout the war.

1948: Israeli forces take control of Ramat Rahel

1948(14^thof Iyar, 5708): Rabbi Yitzchak Avigdor Orenstein, the Western Wall’s first rabbi and his wife were killed today during the shelling of Jerusalem by the Jordanian forces trying to seize the entire city for its King.

1948(14^thof Iyar, 5708): “An Air Transport Command C-46 Curtiss Commando aircraft which flew from Czechoslovakia to Israel with the fuselage and engine of the first S-199 to be assembled in Israel, crashed as a result of heavy fog which covered Tel Nof and Sde Dov airfields. The navigator Moshe (Moses Aaron) Rosenbaum was killed. Ed Styrack the radio operator was badly injured, and both the aircraft and its cargo were destroyed.”

1948: The settlement of Allonei Abba was established by Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia, Romania and Germany. Even as the war with the Arabs was heating up, Jewish settlements were being started.  When you consider the conditions in Israel at the time, this hast to make the Jews “the eternal optimists” in the truest sense of the term.  The name of the settlement came from two Hebrew words.  Allonei is a form of the Hebrew word Allon, meaning Oak which served as a reminder of the Tabor Oaks that grew nearby.  Abba was the first name of Abba Berdichev.  Berdichev had parachuted into Czechoslovakia in 1943 with orders to assist British clandestine forces and aid Jews trapped in Hitler’s death trap.  Like so many of the others sent on such missions, Abba Berdichev was captured and killed.

1948: Egyptian forces began its attack on the Jewish settlement of Negba with an artillery barrage. The Egyptian force consisted of 2,000 well-armed troops as well as support from the Egyptians Air Force.  The Jewish force at Negba consisted of 70 soldiers from the Haganah and 75 members of the settlement.  They lacked artillery, air cover and pretty much anything else that a modern might need.  Negba had to be held to keep the Egyptians from reaching Tel Aviv.  The fight would last for nine days.

1949: The Federal Republic of Germany (also known as West Germany) is established.  There was a great deal of apprehension among Jews around the world to see an independent German nation rise four years after Hitler’s defeat.  During the 1950’s West Germany would pay reparations to the Jews and the state of Israel.  Additionally, Germany would provide military and economic support to the Jewish state despite pressure from a wide array of Arab states. 

1949: In the UK, release date for “The Perfect Woman,” featuring David Hurst in his first film role as “Wolfgang Winkel.

1950(7th of Sivan, 5710): Second Day of Shavuot

1951:Twenty year old Hyman “Hy’ Cohen who would make to the Majors for seven games in 1955, pitched a shutout while playing for the Des Moines (IA) Cubs.

1952: Birthdate of Tehran native and B.A. Pace University graduate Fred Ohebshalom who in 1964 where he became a real estate mogul and philanthropist sitting on the boards of the Iranian American Jewish Committee and of the Bet Hadassah Iranian Jewish Center while raising four children, two of whom work in their father’s real estate empire, with his wife Yovonee.

1958: Birthdate of Mitch Albom

1960(26^thof Iyar): Rabbi Joshua Chaim Kasovsky, editor of “Mishnah Concordance” passed away.

1960: Prime Minister David Ben Gurion announces in the Knesset that Adolf Eichmann, an Nazi SS officer, was abducted from Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Israeli agents and flown to Israel to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people.

1960: In an article published in Lifemagazine, cartoonist Al Capp wrote "The secret of how to live without resentment or embarrassment in a world in which I was different from everyone else was to be indifferent to that difference.http://books.google.com/books?id=3k4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA129&dq=Al+Capp&as_pt=MAGAZINES#v=onepage&q=Al%20Capp&f=false

1965: In New York, filmmaker Hava Kohav Beller gave birth to author and Editor Thomas Beller.

http://www.therestlessconscience.com/interview.html

1966(4^thof Sivan, 5726): Seventy-five year old Lazarus Joseph the NYU basketball player, New York State Senator, New York City comptroller and active champion for the “rehabilitation of Jewish survivors of Nazism” whose son Jacob, a U.S. Marine died during the Battle of Guadalcanal, passed away today.

1967:  Egypt closes the Straits of Tiran and blockades the port of Eilat at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping, laying the foundations for the Six Day War.  A blockade like this is an act of war under international law.  In addition to which, it was a violation of the U.N. agreements that had ended the Suez Crisis in 1956-57.  After the Six Day War, there was a lot of nit-picking about whose planes attacked first i.e. who fired the first shot.  The fact of the matter is that this blockade was an act of war and anything the Israelis did afterwards was an act of self-defense.

1968: Birthdate of Los Angeles native Laura Allison Wasser, the Loyola Law School trained attorney who is called by some the “Queen of Divorce Lawyers.”

https://www.kveller.com/jewish-divorce-lawyer-laura-wasser-is-the-queen-of-celeb-splits/

https://forward.com/schmooze/350455/8-things-about-angelina-jolies-a-list-jewish-divorce-lawyer/

1969(6th of Sivan, 5729): Shavuot is celebrated for the first time during the Presidency of Richard M. Nixon.

1969: As Israelis were celebrating Shavuot, Israeli security forces arrested numerous terrorists as they foiled attacks in on both sides of what had been the Green Line.

1970: Birthdate of Yigal Amir, the coward who murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

1971(28^thof Iyar, 5731): Yom Yerushalayim

1971(28^thof Iyar, 5731): Sarah Alpert Kolko, the daughter of Isaac S. Alpert and the wife of Nathan Kolko passed away today after she was buried at the Britton Road Cemetery in Monroe County, NY.

1972: Thomas Paul Malone began serving as Canadian Ambassador to Israel.

1976: Twenty year old Amy Alcott won the LPGA Classic in Jamesburg, NY.

1977(6th of Sivan, 5737): First Day of Shavuot

1977(6^thof Sivan, 5737): Eighty year old former major leaguer Sam Bohne, the San Francisco born son of Louis Coen who named his Samuel Arthur Cohen who played second from 1916 to 1926 for the Cardinals, Reds and Brooklyn Robins passed away today.

1978:  The Jerusalem Post reported that the Army Ombudsman, Rav-Aluf (Res.) Haim Laskov, complained that the cruel harassment of recruits by their non-commissioned officers and officers was still a recurrent phenomenon in Israel Defense Forces.

1979(26^thof Iyar, 5739): Three people were killed and thirteen more were injured when a bomb was detonated at a bus stop in Petach Tikva.

1979: Joseph Brodsky Russian born Jewish poet and essayist who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and would be chosen Poet Laureate of the United States (1991-1992) was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

1980: “Die Laughing,” a comedy co-produced, co-written and co-starring Robby Benson was released today in the United States.

1981(19th of Iyar, 5741): Entertainer George Jessel passed away.

1981(19th of Iyar, 5741): Russian-born Canadian lawyer and political leader David Lewis passed away. His son is an official with the UN dealing with AIDS in Africa and his grandson Avi Lewis is a broadcast journalist.

1981: Syria claimed that it had shot two Israeli drones while Israel admitted the loss of only one pilotless plane.  The aircraft which were flying a recon mission over eastern Lebanon fell victim to Syrian missile batteries stationed in the Syrian occupied portion of that country.

1981: U.S. Presidential envoy Philip Habib arrived in Beirut on a mission designed to keep the situation on the Syrian-Lebanon –Israel border from exploding into war.

1981: Rabbi Ronald B. Sobel, senior rabbi of Temple Emanu-El officiated at the wedding of Sheryl E. Israel and Barry J. Spiegel. The bride’s father is Kenneth M. Israel, president of Cinema Shares International Television Ltd., and chairman and chief executive officer of the Excel Video International Corporation,

1982(1st of Sivan, 5742): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1982:  The New York Times featured a review of Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood by Kate Simon who “grew up Jewish in the Tremont Avenue section of the Bronx, having been brought there by her young immigrant parents direct from the Warsaw Ghetto, with only a brief stopover on the Lower East Side.”

1982: At Cannes, premiere of “Pink Floyd – The Wall” starring Bob Geldoff, the grandson of “Amelia Falk, an English Jew from London and with music by Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen

1983: “One Day At A Time” starring Bonnie Franklin completed its 8^thseason.

1984: At the Cannes Film Festival, premiere of “Once Upon a Time in America” the crime film based on The Hoods the novel by Harry Grey (born Herschel Goldberg) the tells the tale of Jewish boys from the Lower East Side who grow up to be big time hoods.

1985: Ronald Reagan awarded Sydney Hook the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

1987: As part of the IPO’s 50^th anniversary celebration, James Levine conducts the orchestra for a second time.

1988(7th of Sivan, 5748): Second Day of Shavuot; Yizkor

1988(7^thof Sivan, 5748): Seventy-three year old former French speaking CBS Paris correspondent David Schoenbrun, one of “Murrow’s Boys” who brought us the news in the golden age of foreign reporting passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/24/obituaries/david-schoenbrun-is-dead-at-73-veteran-journalist-for-cbs-news.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1988/05/25/david-schoenbrun-73-dies/347ed55f-7dfa-491e-890f-a3838c99c86e/?utm_term=.1af88f5b269d

1989(18^thof Iyar, 5749): Lag B’omer celebrated for the first time during the Presidency of George Bush.

1990(28th of Iyar, 5750): Yom Yerushalayim

1990: Today “Eusébio da Silva Ferreira — considered by many to be one of the greatest soccer players of all time — took a short trip to the Jewish section of Vienna’s central cemetery to pray by the grave of the late Béla Guttmann, a Hungarian Jew and soccer legend, buried there in 1981.” (As reported by JP O’Malley)

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/european/europa-league-final-seville-0-benfica-0-what-is-the-curse-of-bela-guttman-and-where-does-it-rank-9373886.html

1993: In “Remembering Irving Howe” published today Leon Wieseltier examined the life of his co-religionist and author known to many for his seminal work World of Our Fathers was published today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/23/books/remembering-irving-howe-1920-1993.html

1994: In “Richard Avedon” published today, Paula Chin examined the career of the famous photographer who "as the only son of Jacob Israel Avedon, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who started a successful retail dress business on Fifth Avenue.”

https://people.com/archive/richard-avedon-vol-41-no-19/

1995: ABC broadcast the final episode of “Full House” a sitcom starring Bob Sage

1996(5th of Sivan, 5756): Erev Shavuot

1999: “Michael Landon, the Father I Knew,” a biopic written and directed by Michael Landon, Jr. the son of the actor best known as the father on “Little House on the Prairie” was broadcast for the first time on CBS.

1999: The Chicago Jewish Historical Society is scheduled host “Preserve Your Family and Community History” an Oral History Workshop at the Spertus Institute.

1999(8^thof Sivan, 5759): Eighty-eight year old “Edith Lewin, who with her husband, Bernard, amassed the largest privately owned collection of Mexican modernist art and then gave it away” passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/28/arts/edith-lewin-88-mexican-art-collector.html?searchResultPosition=19

1999: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers includingAnother Life: A Memoir of Other People by Michael Korda.

2000(18^thof Iyar, 5760): Lag B’Omer

2000: “Proof” the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning drama starring Ben Shenkman as “Ben” premiered off-Broadway today.

2001(1^stof Sivan, 5761): Rosh Chodesh

2001(1^stof Sivan, 5761): “Asher Iluz, 33, of Modi'in was killed outside Ariel en route to supervise a road paving in the area, when Palestinian gunmen opened fire in an ambush.” (Jewish Virtual Library)

2001: Broadcast of the final show of series three of “Felicity” created by J.J. Abrams, starring Greg Grunberg as ‘Sean Blumberg.”

2002: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon replaced Eli Yishai as Minister of Internal Affairs.

2002: David Azulai completed his services as Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs.

2002: A member og Hamas detonated bomb at the Pi Glilot gas depot north of Tel Aviv failed to set off a catastrophic explosion.

2003: After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001, “Manic” starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt was released today in the United States.

2004: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including ''Still Life With Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terrorism'' by David Horovitz and ''How Israel Lost: The Four Questions” by Richard Ben Cramer.

2004: “Regarding the Torture of Others” by Susan Sontag was published today in the New York Times Magazine.

http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/23/2004/susan-sontag

2004(3^rdof Sivan, 5764): Eighty-nine year old historian, sociologist and orientalist Maxime Rodinson, whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz, passed away today.

2005: Today, “President George W. Bush nominated Rod Rosenstein to serve as United States Attorney for the United States District Court for the District of Maryland

2006: “In Israel, New Reflections on Holocaust” published today,The New York Times reported on evolving Jewish methods of remembering the Shoah. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/world/middleeast/23holocaust.html?_r=0

2006: Release date of “Blue Alert,” an album co-written by Leonard Cohen.

2007(6th of Sivan, 5767): First Day of Shavuot.

2007: The two day Tel Aviv Poetry Festival comes to an end.

2007: Amy Barrett and novelist Jonathan Lethem whose mother was Jewish gave birth to Everett Barrett Latham.

2007: Today tennis player Jesse Levine “lost his first college match in the quarter-finals in the NCAA Men’s Singles.”

2008: Norman Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel today “because, according to unnamed Israeli security officials, of suspicions that ‘he had contact with elements 'hostile' to Israel" including’ a top Hezbollah commander in Lebanon.” Finkelstein “visited south Lebanon and met with Lebanese families during the 2006 Lebanon War.” While ther he said: “Hizbullah represents the hope. They are fighting to defend their homeland, they are fighting to defend the independence of their country, they are defending themselves against foreign marauders, vandals and murderers and I consider it to be genuinely to be an honor to be in their presence.”

2008(18th of Iyar, 5768): Lag B’Omer.

2008: Bradlee Birchansky leads Friday Night Services at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa as part of his Bar Mitzvah weekend.

2008: In Plymouth (UK), police detained two men linked to the bombing of a Giraffe’s restaurant that had taken police yesterday. According to authorities, 22-year-old Nicky Reilly, a recent convert to Islam who police said had a history of mental illness, was wounded when a bomb went off in the Giraffe restaurant at a shopping center in Exeter, Devon.Giraffe, which has 25 restaurants around the UK, is owned by Jewish partners.

2008: In a story entitled “Public allowed rare chance to view Dead Scrolls,” The Columbia Dispatch reports on the public display of the 2,100 year old 24 foot scroll with the text of the bible’s book of Isaiah at the Israel Museum. Israel put the Dead Sea scroll containing the Book of Isaiah on display for the first time since 1967. The calfskin parchment was locked away because of deterioration. It will be available to the public for three months as part of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish state. http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/faith_values/stories/2008/05/23/deadscrolls.ART_ART_05-23-08_B7_CPA8I63.html?print=yes&sid=101

2009(29th of Iyar, 5769): On Shabbat, start reading the Bamidbar, Book of Numbers.

2009: Day 2 of “Conference 2009” hosted by the Philadelphia Kehilla For Jews at Aracadia University in Glenside, PA.

2009: A 24-year-old man was diagnosed with the swine flu on today, becoming the eighth person in the Jewish State to come down with the virus. He had recently returned from the United States and was presumed to have contracted the illness there. A second man had also been hospitalized due to concerns that he may have the virus as well.

2009: Franklin H. Littell, a father of Holocaust studies who traced his engagement with the subject to the revulsion he felt as a young Methodist minister while witnessing a big Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1939, died today at his home in Merion Station, Pa., outside Philadelphia today at the age of 91. Dr. Littell also became an enthusiastic supporter of Israel, in part because he believed that its very existence refuted theologies that foresaw or favored the withering away of the Jewish people. He rejected the theology of some Christian backers of Israel that Jews must ultimately become Christian…” (NYT)

2010: “Dancing Alfonso” and “Ida’s Dance Club” are scheduled to be shown at the Israeli Film Night sponsored by Magen David Sephardic Congregation in Rockville, MD.

2010(10^thof Sivan, 5770): Irwin Rosten, an award-winning documentary filmmaker perhaps best known for "The Incredible Machine," which took PBS viewers on a revolutionary voyage inside the human body in 1975, passed away today at the age of 85.,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/arts/04rosten.html

2010(10^thof Sivan, 5770): David Ginsburg, a liberal lawyer and longtime Washington insider who helped found the Americans for Democratic Action and led the presidential commission on race relations whose report, in 1968, warned that the United States was “moving toward two societies — one black, one white, separate and unequal,” died today at his home in Alexandria, VA at the age of 98 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/us/25ginsburg.html

2010: Despite gray skies that threatened rain, tens of thousands of people turned out for a massive celebration of Israel today, at the annual Salute to Israel Parade on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Marching bands, groups hoisting colorful signs and costumed marchers converged along the parade route, running up Fifth Avenue between 57th Street and 74th Street. Celebrities, elected officials and dignitaries were on hand, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has been the parade’s grand marshal in the past. This year, parade organizers made a concerted effort to mobilize the Israeli community living in New York, said Michael Miller, executive vice president and CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which oversees the event.

2011:The Ellis Island Old World Folk Band is scheduled to perform at the Reutlinger Community for Jewish Living in Danville, CA

2011:Phyllis Newman, who was married to Adolph Green for over four decades is scheduled to take part in program entitled “Carried Away: Being Comden and Green” that highlights the work of the team of Adloph Green and Betty Comden that created such hits as “On the Town,” “ Wonderful Town,” “ Bells are Ringing” and “Singin' in the Rain.”

2011: For the first time HBO broadcast “To Big to Fail,” a cinematic treatment of “Andrew Ross Sorkin's non-fiction book Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves”, co-starring Edward Asner and featuring Evan Handler.



2011:El Al flight 027 carrying 279 passengers landed safely at Ben Gurion Airport this morning after it was forced to make an emergency landing when a technical fault was found in one of its left wheels. The plane took off en route to New York late last night but was forced to turn back and perform an emergency landing when the pilots noticed that one of the left wheels had become jammed. 

2012: Dr. Leo Hershkowitz, Adjunct Professor of History at New York University and CUNY Queens College (ret.) is scheduled to deliver a lecture about the early history of Jews in New York City at the NYC Department of Small Business Services

2012: In London, The Wiener Library is scheduled to host a screening of “SS-3: The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich,” a film about the British inspired plan to kill the ruthless ruler of Bohemia, person favorite of Hitler and a key planner of the Final Solution

2012: Film critic Aviva Kempner who was the founder of the Washington DC Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to deliver a lecture on a documentary film on which she is working that traces the life of Jules Rosenwald, the man who led Sears, Robebuck & Co during its glory days and was one of the nation’s leading philanthropists.

2012: Filming began for “Iron Man 3” a film based on characters created by Stan Lee and co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

2012: Nancy Margulies, the daughter of Joan Thaler – the doyen of the Cedar Rapids Jewish Community- is scheduled to perform her one-woman show “Deaf Poets Society” at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  Her most recent book, a spook entitled Klassic Koalas: The Koala Museum of Modern Art Catalogue is on sale at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.

2013: Nineteen year old Corporal Roi Alphi was killed when a landmine exploded in the Golan Heights laid to rest tonight in the military section of the cemetery of his hometown, Gan Yavne.

2013: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present 'Jews, You Should Fight to the Bitter End:' Bogoraz's Literary Response to the Gomel' Pogrom

2013: The Israel Festival, an annual showing drama, theatre, dance and music is scheduled to open in Jerusalem.

2013(14^th of Sivan, 5773): Seventy nine year old singer/songwriter Giuseppe Mustacchi the son of Sephardic Jews from Corfu, passed away today

2013:A sketched map of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s land-for-peace offer to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 — hurriedly drawn up by Abbas after a meeting with Olmert that December, and made public for the first time today — suggests that Israel was prepared to withdraw to borders very similar to the pre-1967 lines and swap areas of northern and southern Israel in return for maintaining the larger settlement blocs.

2013: The Louvre museum in Paris opened its first-ever Israeli exhibit today, displaying a 1,700-year-old mosaic floor that was recovered from a garbage dump near Lod in central Israel.

2014: “Jewtopia” is scheduled to be shown at noon-time in Mason, Ohio, as part of Jewish American Heritage Month.

2014: “Donald Sterling has agreed to surrender his stake in the Los Angeles Clippers to his estranged wife, and she is moving ahead with selling the team, a person with knowledge of the negotiations told The Associated Press today.

2014: A revised version of Assi Dayan’s “The 92 Minutes of Mr. Baum” is scheduled to open today in the United States.

2014: On the final morning of the 4^thInternational Writers’ Festival, Etgar Keret and musician Shlomi Saban are scheduled to sing, read and chat in a one-off event. (As reported by Jessica Steinberg)

2014: “With the words of the Kaddish and a sprinkle of earth over his remains, Avner Less, the Israeli official who interrogated Adolf Eichmann was reburied today in Berlin’s Wannsee neighborhood, not far from the house where the senior Nazi who helped organize the Holocaust outlined his genocidal plans in 1942.” (As reported by David Rising)

http://www.timesofisrael.com/eichmanns-interrogator-reburied-in-germany/

2015: Parsha Bamidbar

2015(5^th of Sivan, 5775):  In the evening, Erev Shavuot

2015: The JCC Manhattan is scheduled to host “The Paul Fieg Tikkun Leil Shavuot.”

2015: Today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked President Barak Obama for blocking a UN moved at forcing Israel to come clean on its nuclear capabilities en route to a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons.” (As reported by Times of Israel)



2015: In Cedar Rapids, IA, Temple Judah is scheduled to celebrate Shavuot and the Confirmation of Jessica Heeren, Ben Sarasin and Gabrielle Thalblum

2015: According to an article published today in Rai al-Youm, “a London-based Arab newspaper,” “Saudi Arabia recently rejected an Israeli offer to provide it with Iron Dome rocket defense technology.”

2016: Professor Todd Endelman of the University of Michigan is scheduled to speak on “The Emotional Toll of Antisemitism and its Consequences” at Birbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury.

2016: In Des Moines, IA, Congregation Beth El Jacob is scheduled to offer “Chevra Kadisha Training.”

2017: According to information supplied “by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office,” President Trump is scheduled to “arrive at Yad Vashem at 1 p.m.” and to begin his speech at the Israel Museum at 2:00 p.m.

2017: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled to host “a delicious 3 course meal and a group discussion.”

2017: At sundown events marking a Jerusalem Day that is special because it marks the 50^th anniversary of the reunification of the Jew are scheduled to begin.

2017: The Vancouver Jewish Film Centre is scheduled to host a screening “The History of Love.”

2017: ELI Talks, “a nonprofit organization devoted to nurturing and transmitting inspired Jewish ideas is scheduled to host an evening Beth Huppin, a Jewish Education from Seattle, Macy B. Hart, President and Founder, Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL) and Sam Novy a “social entrepreneur” from Baltimore,  MD.

2018: In Lyndurst, Ohio, Oheb Zedek-Cedar Sinai Synagogue is scheduled to host a screening of “Big Sonia.”

2018: A “Drop-In Tour” of Temple Tifereth Israel Gallery at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage is scheduled to take place this afternoon.

2018: A photographic exhibition “Elderly Jews and Holocaust Survivors in Dimona” is scheduled to come to an end today at the Streicker Center.

2018: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to a book launch of Hasidism: A New History by David Biale and Samuel Heilman

2018: “The Labor of Life” by Hanoch Levin is scheduled to open to a sold-out house at the 14^th Street Y

2019: In Alberta, Canada, the Edmonton Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to host a screening of “Tel Aviv on Fire.”

2019: The Center for Jewish History and the American Jewish Historical Society are scheduled to host “A Dad’s Mission After Parkland” in ABC News Chief National Correspondent Matt Guttman talks to Fred Guttenberg whose “14 year old daughter Jamie was one of 17 people killed by a gunman at Marjory Stoneman Dough High School” about his crusade “for stricter gun control and public safety laws.”

2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host the final two screenings ‘The Testament.”

2019: As part of the “Music of Remembrance” program, the San Francisco Conservatory is scheduled to host the world premiere of “The Parting” and “chamber works by three Hungarian Jewish composers whose lives were cut short by Nazi persecution.”

2019: As part of Jewish American Heritage Month, the National Archives is scheduled to host an evening author Dr. Pamela Nadella she talks a variety of American Jewish women including “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Barbie inventor Ruth Handler, poet Emma Lazarus, labor organizer Bessie Hillman, and convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg.”

2019(18^th of Iyar, 5779): Lag B’Omer

2019(18^th of Iyar, 5779): The former Edith Graff, the mother of “Iris Morse and Ellen Graff” and the wife of Columbia University Historian Henry F. Graff whose translation of intercepted messages provided key information for the Allies before D-Day and the imminent surrender of Japan after the dropping of the Atomic Bomb.

2020(29^th of Iyar, 5779): Parashat Bamidbar. For more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/

2020: On line, Temple Israel of Boston is scheduled to present “Clergy Havdalah, Cocktails and Mocktails”

2020 Rodef Sholom@Home is scheduled to fill Shabbat with the look and feel of the real thing with Torah Study, followed by Shabbat Services and a Havdalah experience designed to “enrich our souls and lift us as we begin a new week.”

2020: Aliya Institute in Crown Heights which had shut down voluntarily on March 10 and which held a daily minyan yesterday is scheduled to have services this morning.

2020: In Bexley, OH the scheduled Bat Mitzvah of Rachel Levin was “short-circuited” by the Pandemic, but a virus was no match for the bright, talented, accomplished young lady who found a way to share her Haftarah and D’var Torah.  (Editor’s note – Rachel makes the words l’dor v’dor more than just a few words in the Prayer Book.  Thanks to her determination and hard work, she is the fourth generation of her family to be called to the Torah in the United States keeping alive the dreams of Litvak tailor who came to the United States in the 19^th century. In so many ways, she makes us all so proud.)

This Day, May 24, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 24

1218:  The Fifth Crusade leaves Acre for Egypt. The driving forces behind the crusade were two Popes who broke new ground in the mistreatment of the Jews – Innocent III and his successor, Honorius III.   One of their most infamous innovations was the creation of “the Jew Badge,” which usually took the form of circle or square of saffron yellow cloth.  The Crusade itself was a debacle and the forces of Islam continued to hold onto Jerusalem.  Given a choice, at this time, for the Jews this outcome was the lesser of two evils.

1241( 5001): The community of Frankfort-on-Main was attacked after Jews tried to prevent a child from being baptized. As a result, a number of townspeople were killed. Seeing no option the Jews set fire to their houses. The fire spread to the rest of the community destroying nearly half the city. One hundred and eighty Jews died while twenty-four agreed to be baptized.

1293 (5053): Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg passed away. Born circa 1225, he was the last of the Tosophists and the leading Rabbi in Germany. Convinced that there was no future in Germany, he agreed to lead a large contingent of families to Eretz-Israel. While waiting for the other families, he was seized by the Bishop of Bas. The Emperor ordered him held in prison as a lesson to any of "his Jews" who would try to leave Germany and thus cause him financial loss. He refused to be ransomed, saying that it would serve as an impetus for further extortion. He died in a prison near Colmar, and his body was held there until it was ransomed some years later.

1490: In Toledo, Spain 21 Jews or Judaizers were burned at the stake and another “eleven were sentenced to imprisonment for life.”

1588(14th of Sivan): 24 Jews lost their lives in an auto-da-fe in Barcelona

1738: On a day now celebrated annually by Methodists as Aldersgate Day, John Wesley is converted, essentially launching the Methodist movement. According to Building New Bridges in Hope  the official statement of the United Methodist Church on Christian-Jewish relations, “Christians and Jews are bound to God though biblical covenants that are eternally valid… that God has continued, and continues today, to work through Judaism and the Jewish people

1749(7^thof Sivan): Abraham Valentine Potocki the Polish count who had converted to Judaism  was burned at the stake

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12317-potocki-pototzki-count-valentine-abraham-b-abraham

1765: Elia Judah Piza and Ester Leon were married today in London.

1776(6th of Sivan, 5536): As the Founding Fathers debate the question of declaring independence from Great Britain, Jews observe the first day of Shavuot.

1785: In New York City, Grace Menes Nathan, the Strafford, CT born daughter of “Isaac Mendes Seixas and Rachel Franks Seixas, and her husband Simon Nathan gave birth to Isaac Mendes Seixas Nathan

1795(6^thof Sivan, 5555): Shavuot

1804: In Cologne, Salomon Oppenheim, Jr. and his wife Therese Stein gave birth to their second son Abraham Oppenheim.

1806(7^thof Sivan, 5566): Second day of Shavuot and Shabbat

1810: Birthdate of Rabbi Abraham Geiger the native of Germany who became an early leader of the movement that became Reform Judaism and passed away in 1874.

1812: Godfrey Elias and Eli Rachel were married today in the Great Synagogue in London.

1813: Henry Neumann of Spain became a U.S. citizen today.

1814(5^thof Sivan, 5574): S.Wilhelm Königswarter’s mother Elisabeth passed away today.

1818(18^thof Iyar, 5578): Lag B’Omer

1818: In Charleston, SC, Mr. Moses Joseph of Amsterdam married Miss Abigail Audler.

1820: Theodore Solomon Hart and Rose Friedberg were married today in the Great Synagogue in London.

1820: Two days after she passed away, Julia Henry, the three year old daughter of Abraham Henry and Emma Lyon was buried today in England.

1824: Two days after she had passed away, Julia Henry, the daughter of Abraham Henry and Emma Lyon was buried today.

1825(7^thof Sivan, 5585): Second Day of Shavuot observed for the first time during the presidency of John Q. Adams

1830: In London, Abraham Davis, a Shamas at the Great Synagogue in London, and his wife gave birth to Isaac Davis, “the prime mover in the establishment of the Home and Hospital for Jewish Incurables” and “one of the founders’ of the Jews’ Deaf and Dumb Home” who was “warmly thanked by King Edward VII” for his service as “a treasurer of the East London Committee of the People’s Palace.”

1833(6^thof Sivan, 5593): Shavuot on the same day that Virginia native John Randolph, the United States Minister to Russia under Andrew Jackson passed away.

1837: In Antwerp, Meyer Joseph Cahen d'Anvers and Clara Bischoffsheim gave birth to future French banker Louis Raphaël Cahen d'Anvers.

1842: In Balaton-Kojár, Hungary, Gabriel L. Dessauer and his wife gave birth Moritz Dessauer, the German rabbi whose works included a book about Hobbes and Spinoza.

1844(6^thof Sivan, 5604): Shavuot observed on the same day “Samuel F.B. Morse dispatched the first telegraphic message” was taken from Numbers 23:23 “over an experimental line from Washington, D.C.(Editor’s Note: The Jews begin reading the Book of Numbers on the Shabbat just prior to this event.

1850: The Jewish Chronicle reported that Rabbi Jacobs delivered a sermon on Shavuot based on Deuteronomy, Chapter 16, verse 9.

1852(6^thof Sivan, 5612): Shavuot

1852: Birthdate of Harris Lebus the English born son of Prussian cabinetmaker “who joined his father’s firm” and turned it into “the largest furniture factory in the world” which along with his communal activities earned him a knighthood in 1946.

http://www.harrislebus.com/

1855(7^thof Sivan, 5615): Second day of Shavuot

1855: In London, “Lucy (née Daines) and John Daniel Pinero, a solicitor” gave birth to actor Sir Arthur Wing Pinero whose paternal grandparents were Sephardic Jews and his maternal grandparents were English Christians.

1856: Abolitionist John Brown and his men killed five slavery supporters at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. Three of his followers - August Bondi, Jacob Benjamin and Theodore Weinter – have been identified as Jews according to the historian Rufus Learsi.

1861: Major Mordecai and his family left the arsenal at Watervliet, NY.  For reasons of personal safety they left in the evening without any fanfare since there were those who felt that Mordecai had betrayed his country. Mordecai was one of the most prominent Jewish officers serving with the U.S. Army prior to the Civil War.  A Southerner by birth, he had tried to arrange a transfer to a post in the West that would enable him to serve his country without having to actually fight family and friends.  When this attempt failed, Mordecai resigned.  But unlike other Southerners, he refused all of the offers to join the Confederate Army.  He entered civilian life and never wore a uniform again.

1862: In Paris, Jacques and Hérminie Offenbach gave birth to Auguste Offenbach

1863(6^th of Sivan, 5623): Shavuot observed as Grant is laying siege to Vicksburg

1864(18th of Iyar, 5624): Lag B’Omer observed as Grant perused Lee across northern Virginia in a series of battles called the Wilderness Campaign,

1868: A public meeting of Hebrew Christians was held at Room No. 24, Cooper Institute, this evening, for the purpose of presenting the claims of the Messiah to their inquiring brethren.[Editor’s Note – this is a 19^th century version of the Jews for Jesus]

1870: In New York City, Rebecca Washington (née Nathan) and Albert Jacob Cardozo, members of a distinguished Sephardic family whose “ancestor had immigrated to the British colonies from London before the American Revolution gave birth Columbia trained attorney and jurist Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, the second Jew to serve on the Supreme Court, an appointment he owed to a Republican from Iowa, Herbert Hoover and whose nomination “sailed’ through the confirmation process that greeted the nomination of Justice Brandeis.

https://www.oyez.org/justices/benjamin_n_cardozo

1870: A house at No. 215 West Seventeenth in Manhattan was dedicated today as a Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews. It is the first such institution in New York State.  The home is for those over the age of 60 who, for reasons beyond their control, are not able to receive care and treatment anywhere else. When the Home opened, it cared for only three people. (By 1876 that number would grow to 57)/

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9804E2D81E3FE73BBC4B52DFB566838D669FDE

1871: Birthdate of James A. Samuel, the native of London who served as a member of the Council of the United Synagogue and of the Board of Management of the East London Synagogue and the Secretary of East London Orphan Aid Society.

1872: Adolph Marix,  the native of Germany who joined the Navy while living in Iowa and who would serve as “Secretary to the Board of Inquiry” that investigated the blowing up the battleship Maines, was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant today.

1873(27^thof Iyar, 5663): Parashat Behar-Bechukotai

1873(27^thof Iyar, 5663): Fifty-five year old American actor James William Wallack, the London born son “actor-manager Henry John Wallack and Fanny Jones” passed away today in South Carolina

https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-William-Wallack-II

http://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1801197

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1873/05/25/80319891.pdf

1874: In Omaha, Nebraska, “Edward and Leah (Colman) Rosewater gave birth to Cornell educated newspaper executive Charles Colman Rosewater, the husband of Julia Alice Warner, who began his career as the business manager of the Omaha Bee before moving on to the Los Angeles Express, the Los Angeles Times, the Kansas City Journal and the Seattle Post Intelligencer before finally serving as the director of publications for Success Magazine in New York.

1857: In Salisbury, Simon Ulman, the Pennsylvania born son of Sarah and Joseph Ullman and his wife Caroline Ulman gave birth to Hannah Ulman

1876: Delegates from fifteen congregations representing New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Baltimore and Brooklyn met in New York today to plan for the establishment of Jewish theological seminary or college.  Mr. Lewis May was chosen to preside over the group and M.S. Isaacs served as secretary.  Mr. May informed the group that Temple Emanuel had already voted to spend $2,000 a year to support any Jewish school that was established as a result of these meetings.

1876: Today, at the sixth session of Presbyterian General Conference being held in Brooklyn, the delegates adopted the recommendation that the “mission to English speaking Jews” should be discontinued. This unique action came amidst a flurry of other motions to continue or expand missionary efforts a wide group of people including Native Americans and citizens of China.

1876: Rabbi Rubin officiated at the wedding of Kaufman Marks to Miss Jennie Baum of Charleston, SC at the Synagogue on St. Philip Street.

1876: Rabbi David Levy of Charleston, SC, officiated at the wedding of Robert Caccavajo to Lena Levy in Kingstree, SC, the hometown of both the bride and groom.

1877: In Philadelphia, Jacob da Silva and Miriam (Binswanger) Solis-Cohen gave birth to University of Pennsylvania trained physician Myer Solis-Cohen the husband of Lotta Teschner and a Major in the Medical Reserve Corps of the United States Army who served in France, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical College and the Woman’s College of Pennsylvania, an author of more than sixty medical journals who was a member of Mikve Israel and Temple Beth-El in Philadelphia.

1877: In Patterson, NJ, Judge Barkalow heard further testimony regarding an application for the annulment of the marriage of Moses Tanneholz and Rachel Blumenthal.  Tanneholz is a cigar dealer living in Patterson.  Miss Blumenthal, who is seeking the annulment, is the eighteen year old daughter of well to-do resident of Montreal, Canada.  Blumenthal claims that she had not wanted to marry Tanneholz; that she thought the marriage ceremony was only a betrothal ceremony; and that she was only 17 at the time of the “marriage” which meant that she was under-age according to New Jersey Law. Furthermore, she had gone to New York right after the ceremony and the couple had never consummated the marriage.  The Justice who performed the ceremony testified today that the bridge seemed to be fully cognizant of the fact that it was a marriage ceremony.  The matter of her age only became important when he had been told after the ceremony that this was a “runaway marriage” and he told the groom that he would need affidavit signed by the bride saying that she was at least 18 years of age.  Because of the prominence of the families involved, this case has generated interested among the Jewish communities in the both New Jersey and Montreal.

1878:The curtain came down on the final performance of “The Sorcerer” in which Giulia Warwick (born Julia Ehrenberg) had been performing “in the leading soprano role of Aline”

1880: Felix Adler married his “helpmate” Helen Goldmark Adler, whose“book An Outline for Child Study, Intelligently Directed Observation for Mothers was one of the first manuals of its kind” and who was the mother of Waldo, Laurence, Eleanor and Margaret Adler

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1948/03/21/96588695.pdf

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/adler-helen-goldmark

1882(6^th of Sivan, 5642): Shavuot

1882: A Pogrom began in Rostov, Russia

1884: Birthdate of Martha Schallek Wallenstein, the wife of Joseph S. Wallenstein.

1886: Birthdate of Upper Silesia native and multiply married art collector Hugo Perls who came to the United States in 1941, worked at the Perls Gallery founded by his Klaus and devoted himself to writing about philosophy

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1977/08/16/75296131.pdf

1887: This evening “Adolf Raffmann of Charleston, SC, married “Pauline Ritzwoller, of Peoria, Illinois” in the residence of her parents.

1888: Today, Felix J. Dreyfus introduced a “bill which called for the creation of a Police Board for the City of New Orleans” part of a movement to reform the Crescent City’s Police Department which earned him “the unofficial title of Father of the Policemen of New Orleans.”

1890: The summaries of affidavits from two of the daughters of Mary Frohman – Lena Frohman Vollman and Bertha Frohman – and the family physician Thomas Courtney were published today which purport to show that “Mrs. Frohman is insane” and should be prevented from disposing of her late husband’s estate and returning to Germany.

1891: In Coquimbo, Chile, American Methodist missionaries Cornish and Wilbur Finley Albright gave birth archeologist and Bible scholar William F Albright, a graduate of Upper Iowa University whose archeological studies or the studies of those whom he inspired are the source of much about what we know about the history of ancient Israel

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/09/20/archives/dr-william-f-albright-dead-biblical-archeologist-was-80.html

1891: In New Haven, CT, “Benjamin and Bessie (Mendoza) Bretzfielder” gave birth to the Philadelphia College of Osteopathy and Columbia University physician Karl Benjamin Bretzfelder the husband of Amelia Kafka who was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army’s Medical Corps, a surgeon for the New Have Police Department and physician for both the Jewish Home for the Aged and the Jewish Orphans while serving as an active member of the Horeb Lodge of B’nai Brith and Congregation Mishkan Israel.

1891:The Jaffa–Ramla section of the Jaffa-Jerusalem was fully opened for use today.

1891: It was reported that Joseph Roth was responsible for preventing a major fire at a tenement house on Ludlow Street.  Roth discovered a bundle of smoldering rags under the staircase which he stomped on to keep them from breaking into flames, thus saving the building that is home to 18 Jewish families  including Max Rudolf, a tailor who lived in the building with his family.

1892(27^th of Iyar, 5652): This morning in Budapest a wealthy Jewish land owner named Karsay was mortally wounded in a duel.

1892: “A special train left Long Island City carrying over 100 people left Long Island City bound for Rockaway Park where they would attend the formal opening of the new sanitarium that has been built for Jewish children.

1892: It was reported today that Reverend Johnson of Sweden expressed his opposition to a resolution adopted by a conference of Methodist ministers that called upon the Czar to end the persecution of the Jews in Russia.  He contended that the resolution would “tend to aggravate the Russian Government against the Methodist Church” and jeopardize the Methodist missions in that country.

1894: “For the third time in the last two days Register Ferdinand Levy” today “secured a summons from Justice Feltner of the Yorkville Police Court for Florian Sicher…who is charged with annoying respectable people of all nationalities and especially Hebrews” as can be seen from the signs in his sausage store in which he advertises “Anti-Semitic Sausages”  “Do Not Buy From the Jews” and “No Sale Made to Jews.”

1894: Moses and Julia Levy, who used to own a millinery store on Broadway are being held in the Tombs Police Court having been charged with “secreting goods with intent to defraud.”

1894: “Theodore Seligman, an executor and trustee under the will of his father, Jesse Seligman filed a petition with the Surrogate’s Court” that was one of the preliminary actions necessary to presenting the will for probate.

1894: It was reported that the American Conference of Hebrew and Christian Workers for Israel has formed a committee “to discuss the proper methods of teaching Christianity to the Jews.”

1895: Birthdate of Marcel Janco “a Romanian-born Israeli painter and architect” who was “one of the founders of the Dada movement.”

1895: A written request for a meeting from Theodor Herzl is received by French railroad tycoon and philanthropist Baron Moritz de Hirsch.

1895: A Jew named Samuel Samuelson who lives with his wife and family in Miles Alley was shot this afternoon by an unknown assailant.

1895: In New York, “Meier Neuhaus, was an immigrant from Vitebsk, Belarus; and Rose (née Arenfeldt), from Austria-Hungary” gave birth to “the eldest of their eight children,” Solomon Isadore Neuhaus who gained fame as Samuel Irving Newhouse, American publisher and philanthropist whose  publications included Parade Magazine, Vogue and Glamour.

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/30/archives/samuel-i-newhouse-publisher-dies-at-84-samuel-i-newhouse-builder-of.html

1896: The New York Times describes the various provisions of the last will and testament of the late Baron Hirsch.  The big winner is his wife who is named as “universal heiress.”  In one sense, the biggest loser is the Jewish Colonization Association which would have come into possession of the inheritance had the Baroness predeceased the Baron.

1897: Colonel Nicolas Jean Robert Conrad Auguste Sandherr the first person to accuse Dreyfus of treason passed away.

1897: After a motion to impeach Count Casimir who had clashed with anti-Semitic parties in the Austrian parliament had been introduced, a riot triggered by the opposition broke out causing “a suspension of the session to avoid a repetition” of this violence.

1898: Birthdate of Ovid, MI and Detroit College of Law trained attorney who represented “James Crouch, alias Diamond Jim Crouch’ when the latter appealed his conviction of having altered Federal Reserve notes with intent to defraud….”

1898: It was reported today that an insurance agent named Martin Beir has been elected Governor for the New York State chapter of B’nai B’rith

1898: Privates Julius T. Lansberg and Ike Lobisky were among the members of the 4^thVirginia Volunteer Infantry who were mustered into U.S. Service.

1898: During the Spanish American War, in Boston, Maurice M. Goldstein enlisted today and began serving with Battery C, 2^nd U.S. Artillery.

1899: Birthdate of Warsaw native Louis Isenberg who in 1912 came to Canada, joined the Jewish Legon in May of 1918 “and served in Palestine with 38^thRoyal Fusiliers” before being demobilized in 1919 and returning to Canada.

1899: Herman Lichtner, a Hungarian tailor who has lived in the United States for the last 15 years set sail on the White Star Liner Cymric with his daughter as they made their way back to Europe.

1901(6^thof Sivan, 5661): Shavuot

1901: Seventy-seven year old Charlotte May Yonge the author of The Patriots of Palestine, a tale of the Maccabees passed away today.

1902(17^thof Iyar, 5662): Parashat Behar

1902: Birthdate of New York native and Columbia educated Dr. Michael Alper who was ordained by the Jewish Institute of Religion and served as “a director of Jewish Education of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum” while editing several Jewish magazines and authoring “several textbooks” passed away today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1955/01/31/92844715.pdf

1902: It was reported today that sixteen Jews including Sarah Goldstein has each been fined three dollars for their part in demonstrations in front of kosher butcher shops in Boston.

1903: A copy of the memorandum adopted by the American Baptist Missionary Union in Buffalo, NY, condemning the massacre of the Jews at Kishinev was published today being with the opening declaration, “The recent massacre of Jews in Russia calls for our sympathy, our prayers and our protests.”

1904(10th of Sivan, 5664): Eighty year old Kalonymus Wissotzky, “the largest tea manufacturer in Russia, noted philanthropist and leading member of Choveve Zion” passed away today in Moscow.

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

1904(10th of Sivan, 5664): Myer S. Isaacs, for years President of the Baron de Hirsch Fund and leader in many other charitable and philanthropic movements of the Jewish people, died in the Equitable Building, 120 Broadway, this afternoon from heart disease, a condition that had afflicted him for an extended period of time.  Born in 1841 at New York City, he was the oldest son of Rabbi Samuel M. Isaacs.  He graduated from University of the City of New York in 1859 and graduated from its law school in 1862.  He passed the bar exam on May 8, 1862. His successful business and legal career included serving as vice President of the Real Estate Exchange (1867), serving as Justice of the Marine Court (1880), Justice of the Superior Court (1891) and State Supreme Court Justice (1895). He was active in Jewish affairs.  In 1857, he and his father founded the Jewish Messenger. He served as President of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites and the Hebrews Free School Association.  He also played a key role in establishing the United Hebrew Charities, the Montefiore Home, the Hebrew Technical Institution and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. He was preceded in death by his wife the former Marie Solomon and is survived by 6 children including I.S. Isaacs and Louis Isaacs

.http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50D1FFE3A5913738DDDAC0A94DD405B848CF1D3

1905: Sixteen year old Herman Maltz, the future owner of a furniture store in Los Angeles arrived at Ellis Island.

1907: “Bill To Protect Jews In Hotels” described legislation that has been introduced by New York State Martin Saxe to see to it that nobody is banned from a hotel because of their religion as happened to Mrs. Berth Rayner-Frank of Baltimore.  She and her nieces were turned away from a hotel in Atlantic City because they were Jewish.  Legislators in the Empire State who were unmoved by what happened to the Seligman family at Saratoga Springs in the 1870’s now want to take action.

1907: In London, Cantor “Bernard and Janie (Spector) Schacthel gave birth to University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College graduate Hyman Judah Schachtel who began his rabbinic career at New York’s West End Synagogue before beginning more than three decades of service at Houston’s Congregation Beth Israel which included delivering the inaugural prayer for LBJ in 1965 while raising two children with his wife Barbara.

1911: The New York Public Library opened. Abraham Solomon Freidus was the first head of the library’s Jewish Division.

1912: Today, Titanic survivor Miriam Kantor, the widow of Sinai Kantor, who died when the ship went down “received her husband’s clothing, Russian passport, notebook, telescope, corkscrew, “silver watch and strap,” and Russian, German and English currency.”

1912:Montefiore G. Kahn's mother publicly addresses her concern that the reports her son have given to the American Immigration and Distribution League are not accurate.  She fears that her son misspoke himself or was misunderstood.

1912: In Russia, the peasants in the villages of “Zasela and Kherson” “unanimously decided to ask the authorities to declare” their place “a townlet” so that the Jews can settle there.”

1912: In Russia, the “Minister of the Interior and Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod” expressed “sympathy with the demands of a deputation of anti-Jewish agitators from the South of Russia for new measures of ‘protection’ against the Jews.”

1912(8^thof Sivan, 5672): Less than a month before his 56^th birthday, Sir Edward Albert Sassoon, the eldest surviving son of Sir Albert Sassoon, who was a successful British businessman and political leader passed away today.

1913: A murder indictment was returned against Leon Frank by a grand jury in the death of Mary Phagan.

1913: As the police continue to look for the person who had strangled Mary Phagan, Jim Conley, the pencil factory's janitor, who was a suspect in the case, continued to give conflicting testimony as to what had happened. By now, he was attempting to implicate Leo Frank in the murder

1914: In Posen, “Dr. Alfred Peiser, a German Jewish surgeon and Rose Lissman, an Austrian Jewish stage actress gave birth to Lili Marie Peiser who gained fame as award winning actress Lilli Palmer.

1914: In Budapest, Kornél Tábori, who would die at Auschwitz in 1944 and Elsa Tábori gave birth to György Tábori, who gained fame as George Tabori the playwright and director who would flee to England in 1936 where he would continue a career that included Alfred Hitchcock’s “I Confess” and the 1955 BFTA award winning “The Young Lovers.”

1915(11th of Sivan, 5675): Seventy-one year old Rebecca Henriques Valinetine, the native of Middlesex and wife of David Moss passed away today.

1915: Birthdate of Brooklyn native Joel Edward Saltzman the “vice president and director of Twayne Publishers who attended NYU and Columbia and was the husband of Hilda Kluger Saltzman with whom he had two children – Roslyn and Lawrence.

1915: The body of Charles Frohman, who had died when the Lusitania was torpedoed, “arrived back in New York City” today in flower covered coffin.

1915: “Calls Frank Victim of Cry Against Jews” published today provides a summary of Dr. Madison C. Peters, a Baptist minister, views on the Leo Frank case including his belief that “The American believes in a square deal, a fair trial should be given to Frank.  To commute his sentence only adds to the outrage. Nothing less than a fair trial is just. What has happened to Frank may happen equally as well to any citizen of the Republic.  If you believe that Frank has not gotten a fair deal, say so.” (Editor’s note – Peters was an unusual figure when you consider that among the many books he wrote you would find Justice to the Jew and The Jew as a Patriot.)

1915: It was reported today that “the jurors who found Leo Frank guilty will meet this week to decide whether to ask the Prison Commission to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment.

1915: “A resolution appealing for” the commutation of Leo Frank’s death sentence is scheduled to “be submitted to the Governor” by a “body of ministers” who include Dr. John E. White, pastor of the Second Baptist Church and Reverend C.B. Wilmer of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta.

1915: The list of the newly elected officers of the American branch of the Alliance Israelite Universelle published today included Justice Leon Sanders, President and Major Kaufman Mandel, U.S.A. (ret) Treasurer.

1915: In remarks published today Justice Leon Sanders “said the Jews in the eastern theatre of the European War were the worst sufferers and express the hope that when the time came for peace treaties provision would be made for the advancement of the Zionist movement for a home for Jews in Palestine.”

1915: Louis H. Levin, Superintendent of the Federation of Jewish Charities in Baltimore, MD, who went to Palestine aboard the Vulcan which was carrying $100,000 in relief funds from the United States via Alexandria to Jaffa is now in charge of the relief work in Palestine.

1915: At Atlantic City, NJ, “Resolutions lauding President Wilson for his stand in relation to the Lusitania disaster were adopted and telegraphed to Washington today at the convention of the United States Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Sons Israel” which stated “that the President in his note to Germany had expressed the sentiments of every loyal member of the Jewish race in America…”

1915: Over 4,000 letters asking for clemency for Leo M. Frank were received by Governor Slaton today including epistles from Senator Lawrence Y. Sherman of Illinois, Governor James E. Ferguson of Texas, Judge Glendy B. Arnold of the Circuit Court of St. Louis and Judge Ben B. Lindsey of the Juvenile Court in Denver, Colorado.

1915: A resolution adopted by the Alliance Israelite Universelle in New York protesting” in the name of the Jews of the United States against the execution of Leo Frank” based on the belief “that the Frank verdict was the result of race prejudice” was reportedly being sent to the Governor of Georgia.

1915: Birthdate of opera singer Rena Galibova the daughter of Bukharan Jewish parents “who was named the People’s Artist of Tajikistan.

1915: In Chicago, today is scheduled to be “known as Frank Day” since hundreds of women “will be stationed on street corners and at other public places” seeking signatures for the petition calling for clemency for Leo Frank.

1915: Today, on the day “known as Frank Day” approximately 400 members of fifty women’s organizations are scheduled to canvass the streets of Chicago seeking signatures on petitions asking for clemency for Leo Frank.

1916: “Dr. J.L. Manges, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Kehillah said” tonight “ that further complains of Jews, who had conclusive proof to offer that they had been prevented from joining the National Guard because” they were Jewish “would be investigated if presented at the offices of Kehillah” on Second Avenue.

1916: Over 500 young men and women attended a meeting at Temple Emanu-El to hear speakers including Dr. J.L. Magnes talk about the work of the Kehillah.

1916: It was reported today that Isidore Heshfield, the lawyer who has been working for the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society distributing aid to Jews in war-torn Europe, was the guest of honor at banquet at the home of Mrs. Sarah Spurney which was a celebration of his return to the United States.

1917: The Turkish minister at The Hague, Netherlands, issued a statement regarding deportation of the Jews in Palestine and denied reports that they were being slaughtered.

1917: David Lindo Alexander and Claude Montefiore, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association signed a letter published in today’s Times of London which declared "grave objections" to two claims in the "published statements of the Zionist leaders": "The first is a claim that the Jewish settlements in Palestine shall be recognized as possessing a national character in the political sense... the second... is the proposal to invest the Jewish settlers in Palestine with certain special rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population".

1917: Funeral services are scheduled to be held this morning for Amalie Freudenberg, the wife of Charles A. Freudenberg at a chapel on 4649 Prairie Avenue in Chicago.

1917: Following a funeral service, Sol Bloom, the husband of Carrie Hartz Bloom is scheduled to be interred at the Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago.

1917: Funeral services for Julia Frieler Stein, the wife of Bernhard Stein, are scheduled to be held today at the Zion Temple on the corner of Washington Boulevard and Ogden Avenue.

1917:The Times of London published an anti-Zionist manifesto issued by the Conjoint Foreign Committee of British Jews. Lucien Wolf, historian, author and advocate for Jewish rights was a leading member of the Conjoint Foreign Committee of British Jews. He had already written to James de Rothschild, arguing against Zionism which he believes sees "Jews as aliens in foreign lands" thus making it similar to anti-Semitism in insisting that Jews will never be integrated into other cultures. David Lindo Alexander and Claude Montefiore, the president of the Anglo Jewish Association were co-signatories of this document.

1917: Birthdate of sculptor Milton Elting Hebald.

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-milton-hebald-20150108-story.html#page=1

1918: Four days after he passed away, Barney Barret was buried today at the Plashet Jewish Cemetery in London.

1918: As of today, the news officers “of the American branch of the Alliance Israelite Universelle” were Leon Sanders, President, who “said Jews in the eastern theatre of the European war were the worst suffers” and Major Kaufman Mandel, Treasurer.

1918: Birthdate of Samuel M. Rubin who was known as "Sam the Popcorn Man" for making popcorn almost as popular in New York City movie theaters as jokes and kisses. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

1919: In Ellenville, NY, Samuel and Sarah Leventhal gave birth to music manager and song plugger Harold Leventhal. (As reported by Margalit Fox)

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E0D61130F935A35753C1A9639C8B63

1919: “Jewish Post-Biblical History Through Great Personalities” published today provided a review Jewish Post Biblical History by Adele Bildersee, “an experienced teacher in the New York High Schools who has been in charge of the Religious School of Temple Beth EL” which covers the period from Joachanan ben Zakkai to Moses Mendelsohn

1920(7^th of Sivan, 5680): Yizkor is recited on the Second Day of Shavuot for the last time during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson.

1920(7^th of Sivan, 5680): Fifty-two year old Abraham Adelberg passed away today after which he was buried in Flushing at the Mount Hebron Cemetery.

1921: Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti began.  Harvard law professor and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter would play an active role in what would ultimately be their futile defense.

1923: Birthdate of Stanley H. Biber, the Des Moines, Iowa, native and graduate of the U of I Medical School  who became the internationally renowned  dean of sex-change surgery. (As reported by Margalit Fox)

1923: In New York City, Albert Israel Becker and Miriam Rosner Becker gave birth to “David V. Becker, a pioneer in using radioactive materials to diagnose and treat thyroid disease and an expert on the thyroid damage caused by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in 1986.”  He passed away in 2010 at the age of 86.

1925: A law was put into force in Salonica demanding Sunday as a day of rest. The Jewish community formally disputed this, and in the end the Council of the Jewish Community at Salonica resigned to the governor general of Salonica.

1926: “The United Jewish Campaign to raised six million dollars in Greater New York for the relief of the Jews in Eastern Europe ended” today “with a rally in the Biltmore Hotel.”

1926: In Religion Section entitled “Jew and Jew”, published today TimeMagazine describes the philanthropic activities of some of the America’s leading civic and business leaders.

Greek wars with Greek; Jew helps Jew ..." a procurator wrote to his Emperor, Trajan. He was not the first to observe what he expressed so pithily: the racial loyalty of the Jewish people, a loyalty that has kept them together, like a colossal freemasonry, while other nations light the world for a while, then crumble down. For some weeks past the Jews in various U.S. cities, animated by this tradition, have been working to raise money for the relief of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Felix Warburg, Louis Marshall, William Fox and other rich Jews are on the committee which, with headquarters in Biltmore Hotel, Manhattan, has sent its representatives and its publicity up and down the country — the most intense activity being in Greater New York. "There is one hope for the Jews in Eastern Europe," great posters state; "that hope is in the drive for fifteen million dollars. . . ." Speakers have outlined the purposes, the causes of the campaign: "Women and children are dropping dead of hunger on the streets in Bessarabia. Many others are found dead in their homes in Poland. A horrible scourge of typhus is sweeping over the Jews in both lands. . . Children eat what they can find in garbage cans . . . sleep in alleys, in cellars. . . . Hundreds are killing themselves . . . the Jews of America must respond. . . ." To emphasize this appeal, posters in streetcars, on the pillars of subway stations, the billboards of vacant lots, present the picture of a woman in a shawl. Her chin is pressed to the pivot of her wrist; her eyes are smeared with black. She might be any age, this sad, sharpened Jewess; the thing that has pointed her bones and thinned her flesh is not age but weariness; she is the incarnation of the most desolate of physical woes, fatigue. "Are You Tired of Giving?" asks the caption. "You Don't Know What It Is to Be Tired. . . ." Money came in fast. Felix Warburg gave $400,000, Herbert Lehman, Mrs. S. W. Straus, Mortimer Schiff gave $50,000 each; Louis Marshall, William Fox, Benjamin Winter made big contributions, and a disabled veteran sent $28 (government allowance for war wounds). Advertisers, art-goods makers, bag-makers, bankers, butter, egg, and dairy firms; chain stores, crockery companies, cloak and suit houses; the dental, the funeral, the grocery, the hosiery, the laundry, millinery, musical and neckwear trades; opticians, pawnbrokers, petticoat cutters, physicians, rubber-goods makers, rabbis, underwear and umbrella manufacturers — all were appraised for definite amounts, all came near to filling their quotas. Adolph S. Ochs, genius of the New York Times, by many revered as the greatest U. S. newspaper proprietor and the greatest U. S. Jew, swung into the campaign handsomely. His paper advocated the fund far more than any other Manhattan journal, exhorted, reported extensively, published stimulating daily lists of contributors. Nor were Jews the only people to help Jews. Onetime Ambassador James Gerard spoke at a meeting, and a bellboy contributed $5 that he had won on a baseball game. Senator James W. Wadsworth composed a plea, Governor Alfred Smith of New York sent a check by messenger, a Negro elevator man gave two dollars, and Thomas Burke, editor of the official organ of the Irish Temperance Society, wrote "I'm an Irishman . . . but I've advised my race to imitate the good qualities of yours." Meanwhile, reflective Jews and Gentiles asked: "What is the matter with the Jews in Eastern Europe? Are they any worse off than the Christians there? Do they really need 15 million dollars?" They do need their $15,000,000 and untold millions more.* Indeed, when the leaders of the Fund Campaign and of the cooperating organizations† realized that the sum fixed would be oversubscribed in the two weeks allotted (April 25 -May 9), they raised the goal to $25,000,000 and extended the formal collection period another week, well knowing that the donation momentum would continue. The whole country and Canada besides have contributed — not only the cities of close Jewish concentration — New York City, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia — but also the hamlets where a stray Jewish family persists in traditional pioneering. The whole $25,000,000 more than the original goal was not reached, yet was approximated. There will be no cessation of ingathering or of giving. Fertile lands, of high Jewish concentration appropriated after the War from Tsarist Russia by Romania. In the past $60,000,000 have been donated and spent for East European Jews.

1928(5^thof Sivan, 5688): Erev Shavuot

1928: The resumption of State Attorney General Albert Ottinger's investigation into the conduct of certain Jewish cemeteries brought out testimony in support of charges that the Baron Hirsch Cemetery of Port Richmond, S.I. charged unjust fees, barred cars from the burial ground forcing mourners to walk to gravesites and fees for grass cutting had been raised from fifty cents to two dollars a lot.

1928: In the Bronx, “Frank Solomon, a textile manufacturer” and his wife, “the former Dora Sado” gave birth to Leonard Burke Solomon who changed his last name to Sand and as Leonard B. Sand, became a leading federal jurist

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/sand-leonard-b

1929(14^thof Iyar, 5689): Pesach Sheni

1929: The Marx Brothers made cinematic history with the opening of their first film, The Cocoanuts

1930: Leo Adler, the son of “Baer and Fannie Adler” and his wife Bella (Worms) Adler gave birth to Gunther Adler.

1932(18^thof Iyar, 5692): Lag B’Omer

1932: In London, Leah and Joseph Wesker gave birth to British dramatist Sir Arnold Wesker. Dr. Samuel Sacks, the father of Oliver Sacks delivered the youngster.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/theater/arnold-wesker-british-playwright-known-for-working-class-dramas-dies-at-83.html?ribbon-ad-idx=8&rref=obituaries&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Obituaries&pgtype=article&_r=0

1932: In Chattanooga, TN, shopkeeper Louis Diamond and his wife, the former Esther Deich gave birth to Henry Louis Diamond, the lawyer turned conversation crusader.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/nyregion/henry-diamond-lawyer-at-forefront-of-conservation-movement-dies-at-83.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

1933(28th of Iyar, 5693): Dr. Alfred Strauss was murdered at Dachau today.

1933: Birthdate of Aharon Lichtenstein the Paris born American Orthodox rabbi and rosh yeshiva.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/renowned-rabbi-aharon-lichtenstein-dies-at-81/

1935: In Omaha, Nebraska, “Doris (Shoshone) and Maurice David Micklin gave birth Sarah Lawrence College graduate Joan Micklin who became Joan MIcklin Silver when she married Raphael D. Silver, the son of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver and under which name she gained fame as an award winning movie director whose films included the marvel “Crossing Delancy” while raising three daughters --- Dina, Marisa (a director) and Claudia (a producer)

1936: At Lansing, Michigan, Captain Ira. H. Marmon, head of the Michigan State Police ordered “a state-wide man hunt to arrest every ranking officer of the Black Legion, the night riding terror gang” which has “decreed that each member should fight for white Protestants and bear arms against Jews, Communist, Catholics and Negroes.”

1936: Rabbi B. Benedict Glazer and Religious School Committee Chairman Frank L. Weil presided over the closing exercises of the Temple Emanu-El Religious School where “Marjorie Frankenthal, daughter of Supreme Court Justice and Mrs. Alfred Frankenthaler, who received the Lewis May Medal for scholarship” “delivered the closing words” in which she “pointed out that her classmates would have to face anti-Semitic hatred.

1936: In “Britain Will Protect Her Hold in Near East” published today Harold Callender attributed the violence in Palestine to “the effendi or land-owning class – many of who have sold their land to the Jews – who are most active in stirring up discontent among the Arabs and making propaganda against the Jews of whose success they are bitterly jealous. Moslem intolerance toward non-Moslems combines with antagonism to new ideas and customs in creating Arabian hatred of both the Jews and the British in Palestine.”

1936: Samuel Blitz, the Executive Director of the United Palestine appeal “reported that of the $1,208, 145.66 already raised of the national quota of $3,500,000, $490,247 was contributed by New York City.

1936: A contribution of $3,500 to the United Palestine Appeal by Governor Lehman was announced today.

1936: Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes is scheduled to be the guest of honor at a dinner in the Hotel Astor that is part of the New York chapter of the United Palestine Appeal’s effort to raise funds “for the settlement in Palestine of persecuted Jews of Germany, Poland” and other European countries.

1937: An “Institute of Bible Study” “which will be attended by a large proportion of the more than forty educators, theologians and Orientalists who are members of  the Semi-Centennial Committee of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America” is scheduled to begin today.

1937: “Three million Jews in Poland went on strike for two hours today to protest against the latest serious out-break of anti-Semitic violence…in which 1,200 shops and were wrecked and looted.” (Editor’s note – the attempt to of the Polish government to distance itself from the Holocaust is belied by these stories of violent anti-Semitism during the 1930’s.)

1938: Robert Hollitscher, the son-in-law of Sigmund Freud, and his daughter Mathilde left Vienna for London.

1938: In Haifa, 3 Arabs were killed during a gunfight with members of the Irgun.

1939(6^thof Sivan, 5699): Shavuot

1939(6^thof Sivan, 5699): Fifty-eight year old Barney Pelter a pitcher with the St. Louis Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles) and Washington Senators (now the Minnesota Twins) who earned the nickname “The Yiddish Curver” when in 1906 his record of 16 and 11 was coupled with an ERA (Earned Run Average) of 1.59 passed away today.

1939: After reading about Churchill’s speech opposing the White Paper, Nathan Laski wrote to him from Manchester: “May I congratulate you upon the great and statesmanlike speech you made on the Palestine questions last night.  I think it is not exaggerating to say that you will get the blessings of millions of Jews all over the world.”

1940: Today FDR met with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, JR at eleven o’clock at the White House.

1940: Birthdate of the Russian born, American poet Joseph Brodsky who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and was U.S. Poet Laureate in 1991.

1941:  Birthdate of Bob Dylan.  Born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth MN, Dylan has enjoyed a successful career as a singer and songwriter while bouncing back and forth between Judaism and other religions.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Bob_Dylan.html

1941: U.S. premiere of “Crook’s Tour” featuring the Burmese-Jew Abraham Sofaer as “Ali.”

1942: Birthdate of Aron "Ali" Bacher, the native of Johannesburg who “is an administrator of the United Cricket Board of South Africa. He was born to Lithuanian-Jewish parents who emigrated to South Africa and got his nickname "Ali" at the age of seven from Ali Baba. Ali married Shira Teeger, and they have two daughters and one son. His nephew Adam Bacher played for South Africa in the 1990s. Ali started playing cricket while at school and represented Transvaal at the age of 17. He played in 12 Tests for South Africa, three against England and nine against Australia; he was captain in the last four. In a first-class match for Transvaal against the visiting Australian cricket team in 1966/67, he made a high score of 235 in the second innings. He captained the national team in only one series: in 1969/70 against Australia at home in which the South Africans won all the Tests in the four match series. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand and became a general practitioner. In 1981 he had heart bypass surgery.”

1943:  Birthdate of British conductor James Levine

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/james-levine-mn0000155653

1943: While training at an Army boot camp in South Carolina, future Mayor Ed Koch wrote in his diary “Had an argument with several of the boys over anti-Negro prejudice, this led to arguments over Jews and the usual line. It’s a pity that there are so few liberals in the land and so many ignorant people.”Read more:

1943: Dr. Josef Mengele arrived at Auschwitz shortly after celebrating his thirty-second birthday. He began conducting horrific medical experiments on the Jews. Aside from his ‘experiments' he would also personally inject his victims with phenol, gasoline, chloroform or air. With a wave of his hand, Mengele dispatched the old, injured, crippled, children, and pregnant women to their death in the gas chambers because they were not fit for work.

1943:  A Jewish partisan group organized by Judith Nowogrodzka escapes from the Bialystok (Poland) Ghetto. The escape is led by Szymon Datner.

1943: The Period known as Black May, which marked the climatic month in the Battle of the Atlantic, Admiral Karl Donitz, ordered “a temporary halt to the U-Boat campaign” which meant that the Allies could now send increasing amounts of men and supplies that would be critical to the success of the Normandy invasion a year, an event that was a milestone on the road to saving at least a remnant of European Jewry.

1944: Violette Szabo who was in reality an agent for Special Operations Executive (Britain’s fabled SOE) who would eventually be murdered at Ravensbruck was promoted to Ensign in the FANY (The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Princess Royal's Volunteer Corps) which had to be one of the more bizarre cover stories in the history of spycraft.

1944(11th of Sivan, 5770):  At Auschwitz, Hungarian Jews being led to the gas chamber scatter but are shot down by the SS

1944: The deportations from Hungary to Birkenau are now averaging 13,000 Jews per day.

1945: According to figures released by the Jewish Agency, of the 1,500,000 Jews who appear to have survived in Europe 30,000 are in Rumania, 175,000 “in Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary,” 170,000 in France and “250,000 Polish-Jewish refugees inside Russia.”

1946: The Arab Higher Committee under the chairmanship of Jamal el Husseini today rejected “the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee on Inquiry” and “demanded the establishment of an ‘Arab Independent State of Palestine,’ the withdrawal of all foreign troops and an immediate end of Jewish immigration.”  (Editor’s note - And where is the part of the two-state solution?)

1947: Jewish underground fighters, believed to be Stern Gang members, raided two bridge clubs in the all-Jewish city of Tel Aviv early today and escaped with $3,200 in cash from one of them.

1947: The British loaded 1,457 Jewish refugees onto a ship that would take them to detention camps on Cyprus.  According to the British, some of the Jews used crowbars in an attempt to break down the barbed-wire enclosures in the hold of the vessel but the Tommies were able to subdue them with water hoses and the firing of weapons in the air. The Jews had been caught the day before trying to enter Palestine in violation of the British blockade.

1948: South Africa recognized Israel.

1948: The Egyptian army captured Yad Mordecai. Yad Mordecai was one of the kibbutzim blocking the road to Tel Aviv. The Egyptian army and air force had attacked Yad Mordecai on May 19. The Jewish force was the size of a company composed of farmers and handful of Haganah troops.  For five days the Jews fought off the Egyptians.  Before dawn, on May 24 the final Egyptian assault began with two infantry battalions, one armored battalion and one artillery regiment. That night, having used all of their ammunition, the defenders snuck through the Egyptian lines carrying their wounded with them.  Four hundred Egyptian soldiers lay dead.  More importantly the defenders of Yad Mordecai had bought the Israelis five precious days to strengthen their position at Ashdod and Tel Aviv.  According to at least one expert, those five days saved Tel Aviv. 

1948: Yitzhak Rabin, commander of the Jewish forces in Jerusalem sends Ben Gurion a desperate plea for help.  While the Israelis had been able to thwart an attack by Jordanian armored forces at the New Gate, Rabin feared they could not beat back an additional attack.  Also, the city was faced with Egyptian forces to the south which had attacked Ramat Rahel.

1948:  In the evening, the Seventh Brigade begins its attack on the fortress at Latrun that is blocking the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  One of the first companies into the fray was led by a sabra named Ariel Sheinermann.  Sheinermann would survive the wounds he suffered that day and as Ariel Sharon, would become one of Israel’s most daring and controversial generals.

1948: Ariel Sharon, the future IDF General and Prime Minister leads a platoon during the IDF’s attempt to capture the Latrun Police Compound.

1949: In Atlantic City, “The Rabbinical Council of America today reaffirmed its call to American Jews to recognize the Chief Rabbinate of Israel as the central religious authority for world Jews”

1949: “Contributions totaling $2,500,000 were made” tonight “to the United Jewish Appeal at a series dinners held throughout” New York City, the largest of which was the Cotton Goods Dinner that raised $750,000.

1950: “An authoritative source said today that Israel would pay an indemnity of $54,000 to the family of Count Folke Bernadotte, United Nations Mediator who was assassinated in Jerusalem in September, 1948.”  Israel “was also expected to pay $3,000 to the United Nations as a special premium on war risk insurance carried by the Swedish mediator and other United Nations in personnel in Israel.”

1950: Foreign Minister Moshe Sharret leaves Israel today on a “good-will” mission to South African Jewry.

1950: According to Health Minister Moshe Shapiro the Polio outbreak continues to spread with 191 cases reported in May as opposed to 83 cases in April.  The outbreak in Israel follows the pattern seen in nations in Western Europe and the United States.

1950: Sixty-seven year old Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell who “in August, 1937, was transferred to Palestine, during the Arab Revolt to be General Officer Commanding (GOC) British Forces in Palestine and Trans-Jordan” passed away today.

1951(18^thof Iyar, 5711): Lag B’Omer

1951(1ith of Iyar, 5711): Fifty four year old Charles Pores the son of Samuel and Celia Pores and the husband of Adele Meltsner who was a member of the Irish American Athletic Club which had been organized by Tammany politicians who used it as vehicle for attracting support among Jewish immigrants.

1951: Fanny Brice suffered a stroke which would prove fatal.

1952: In the fight against Apartheid, Emil “Solly” Sachs addressed 15 000 people on the steps of the Johannesburg City Hall at a meeting arranged by the Garment Workers’ Union in defiance of the decrees issued by the Minister of Justice.

1954: In Helsinki, Finland, Abram Zyskowicz who had survived Sachsenhausen and his wife Ester gave birth to Ben Zyskowicz the first Jew elected to the Finnish parliament

1961: Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion left Israel for a visit to the United States that would include his first meeting with President John Kennedy who had assumed office in January of 1961.

1962: “The Inspector,” a film about “a Dutch-Jewish girl who survived Auschwitz” and produce by Mark Robson was released today in the US and UK.

1963(1^stof Sivan, 5723): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1964: Birthdate of David I. Adelman, the New York native turned U. of Georgia Bulldog with a law degree from Emory University whose political career included a stint in the Georgia State Senate and service as the U.S. Ambassador to Singapore.

1965(22^ndof Iyar, 5725): Seventy-eight year old Fannie Eitingon, the wife of Motty Eitingon “a New York fur dealer who had been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and whose connections with the Soviet Union made him the largest trader in the world but also led to his being questioned by the FBI.

1966: “Mame” a musical with lyrics and music by Jerry Herman and a “book” co-authored by Jerome Lawrence premiered on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre.

1967: “Belle de Jour” a French film “based on the 1928 novel Belle de jourby Joseph Kessel was released in France today.

1967: After 233 performances the curtain came down on the original U.S. production of “Eh?” “which marked “the first major critical success in Dustin Hoffman’s career, garnering him a Theatre World Award and Drama Desk Award for his performance.”

1967: CIA Director Richard Helms reports that there are no nuclear weapons in the eastern Mediterranean or the adjacent territory.  The report was in error since the Soviets had ships in the area armed with nuclear weapons and instruction to use them against Israel if need be to support the Arabs.

1969(7th of Sivan, 5729): Yizkor is recited on the Second Day of Shavuot for the first time during the Presidency of Richard M. Nixon

1970(18^thof Iyar, 5730): Lag B’Omer

1971: Arkadii Spilberg, Rut Alexandrovich, Mikhail Shepshelovich, Boris Maftser went on trial in Riga.

1970: During the “War of Attrition” Abba Eban and Yitzchak Rabin meet with Nixon and Kissinger to discuss ways of ending the violence between Egypt and Israel.

1975: Larry Blyden videotaped a pilot for “Showoffs,” a game show created by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman.

1976(24^thof Iyar, 5736): Sixty-two year old historian Mary Plug Handlin the wife and colleague of Professor Oscar Handlin passed away today

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/5/25/mary-flug-handlin-dies-at-62/

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/05/25/archives/mary-handlin-historian-dies-coauthor-of-books-on-america.html?searchResultPosition=1

1977(7th of Sivan, 5737): Second Day of Shavuot

1979: Funeral services are scheduled to be held today Lawrence Schiff, the husband of Gertrude Schiff and the father of David and Mortimer Schiff who a leader of the Brooklyn division of the UJA, a supporter of the Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Center and a board member of the Jewish Hospital and Medical Center of Brooklyn

1981: It was reported today that Ukrainian Jewish activist Kim Friedman was sentenced to year in prison for “parasitism.” He would be released in 1982 but would have to wait another six years before he could make Aliyah.

1981: In “By Train Through A Sandstorm From Aswan to Cairo” David K. Shipler, the New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem described how Arie Kandel, an Israeli travel agent in Egypt “saved his trip to the land of the Pharaohs.

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/24/travel/by-train-through-a-sandstorm-from-aswan-to-cairo.html?pagewanted=all

1982: Psychologist Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice, the first book to argue that women's psychological development could not be understood by studying men.

http://jwa.org/thisweek/may/24/1982/carol-gilligan

1986: Final broadcast “Krovim Krovim” “an Israeli sitcom created by Ephraim Sidon.

1987: In an article entitled “An English Rainbow,” Annasue McCleave Wilson portrays the history of Exbury, the estate originally created by Lionel de Rothschild and describes the postwar rejuvenation undertaken by Major Edmund de Rothschild, which has turned the estate into one of the ten most visited properties in England.

1991: Israel conducts Operation Solomon, evacuating Ethiopian Jews to Israel. “Operation Solomon was a 1991 covert Israeli military operation to take Ethiopian Jews to Israel. In 1991, the sitting Ethiopian government, the Mariam regime, was close to being toppled with the recent military successes of Eritrean and Tigrean rebels, threatening Ethiopia with dangerous political destabilization. Several Jewish organizations, including the state of Israel were concerned about the well-being of the sizable population of Ethiopian Jews, properly referred to as Beta Israel, residing in Ethiopia. Also, the Mariam regime had made mass emigration difficult for Beta Israel residing in Ethiopia, and the regime's dwindling power presented a promising opportunity for those Beta Israel who had been wanting to emigrate to Israel. In the previous year, 1990, the Israeli government and Israeli Defense Forces, aware of Mariam's worsening political situation, made covert plans to airlift the Beta Israel population in Ethiopia to Israel. This became the largest emigration of Beta Israel to date. In 36 hours, non-stop flights of 34 El Al C-130s, filled to absolute capacity with seats transported 14,325 Beta Israel émigrés from Ethiopia to Israel, where they were given food and shelter. After it was over, Operation Solomon took twice as many Beta Israel émigrés to their spiritual homeland as Operation Moses and Operation Joshua combined.”

1991: During Operation Solomon a world record was set for single-flight passenger load when an El Al 747 carried 1,122 passengers to Israel (1,087 passengers were registered, but dozens of children hid in their mothers' robes). "Planners expected to fill the aircraft with 760 passengers. Because the passengers were so slight, many more were squeezed in. Two babies were born during the flight. Operation Solomon was a 1991 covert Israeli military operation to take Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

1994(14th of Sivan, 5754): Yehuda Mor-Mirkovsky Israeli kibbutz-founder passed away at the age of 96.

1994: The INS Eilat, a Sa’ar 5 class corvette was commissioned today.

1996(6th of Sivan, 5756): Shavuot

1996: Jews praying in an egalitarian minyan at the Western Wall in the early hours of Shavuot morning were verbally and physically attacked by Orthodox men and boys, according to participants in the prayer group. The group of about 50 men and women, some of whom were from the Conservative and Reform movement's rabbinical seminaries in Jerusalem, had studied throughout the night, as is customary on Shavuot. Before dawn, they, along with thousands of other Jews, walked from other parts of Jerusalem to the Wall. Members of the egalitarian minyan began praying shortly after 5 a.m. in the rear right-hand corner of the plaza that fronts the wall, near the flagpoles that stand at the back. A few guys in tallitot stood in the front so that others could not see the women wearing tallitot and kipot and to prevent any possible problems. As they finished the Morning Prayer on Shavuot, the minyan swelled to about 125 people, and as they continued by reading the Book of Ruth, most of the minyan sat down. It was at that time that the trouble began as Haredi men soon walked up and began to curse and shout at members of the egalitarian minyan. An Orthodox woman who had been part of a prayer group next to the egalitarian minyan approached the haredi men to ask them to be quiet, because they were disturbing other prayers besides those of the mixed group. They spit on her and threw rocks at the man chanting haftarah.

1998: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Soldier of Peace: The Life of Yitzhak Rabin, 1922-1995 by Dan Kurzman and Crossing the Jordan: Israel's Hard Road to Peace by Sameul Segev.

1998(28th of Iyar, 5758): Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Day

1998: In New London, CT, an op/ed article in The Day reminded readers of the courage of Hiram Bingham when it wrote, “Collectively Bingham and 10 righteous diplomats from other countries "clandestinely saved 200,000 lives from the Holocaust, by writing visas and affidavits of eligibility for passage, and planning escapes from Europe, circumventing their superiors' orders. There are an estimated 1 million descendants of these survivors."

1999: UPN broadcast the last episode of “The Sentinel” a Canadian television series created and written by Danny Bilson.

1999: Congressman Paul Ryan identifies Ayn Rand as one of the two authors who has the most influence on him.  The other is the “author” of the Bible.

1999: A joint U.S.–Israeli team which was searching for the remains of the INS Dakar used information received from U.S. intelligence sources that led to the detection a large body on the seabed between Crete and Cyprus, at a depth of some 3000 meters (9800 ft). The team was led by subcontractor Thomas Kent Dettweiler of the American Nauticos Corporation,

2000:  Israeli troops leave southern Lebanon after 18 years.

2000: The final episode of the second season of “Felicity” created by J.J. Abrams was broadcast today.

2001: “The Temptation of St. Anthony” by Jan Wellens de Cock, “the first painting from a Dutch art collected looted by the Nazis and almost sold at auction was returned “ today by “Christie's to Marei von Saher, the widow of the son of the collection's owner, Jacques Goudstikker, who died escaping the Nazis.”

2002: In Tel Aviv, a security guard at Studio 49 Disco killed a Palestinian terrorist who “was attempting to detonate a car bomb.”  Despite his quick action, five people were seriously injured.”

2002(13^thof Sivan, 5762): Twenty-three year old Sergeant First Class Oren Tzelnik of Bat Yam was killed by terrorists and two of his comrades were seriously wounded. (Jewish Virtual Library)

2003(22^ndof Iyar, 5763): Parashat Bechuokotai

2003: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said today that Israel was ''prepared to accept the steps'' in a new international peace plan, after the Bush administration said it would ''fully and seriously'' address Israel's reservations while seeking Arab-Israeli peace and a Palestinian state within three years.(As reported by James Bennet)

2004: ''Anne Frank: A Private Photo Album'' which  includes 8 original photographs, 69 copies, a facsimile of Anne Frank's diary and reproductions of family photo albums assembled by Otto Frank, the girls' father, and his wife, Edith is on display at the Kraushaar Galleries, 724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets in Manhattan

2005: IDF soldier Majde Halabi was reported missing. He was assumed to have been taken hostage or killed by Arab terrorist.

2005: Opening session of Biotech-Israel 2005

2006: An exhibit entitled “Dear Dr. Janzow” opened at the Sydney (Australia) Jewish Museum. “Dear Dr. Janzow is an exhibition of original letters from the Lutheran Archives in Adelaide, curated by Dr Peter Monteath, Senior Lecturer in History at Flinders University. In 1938 the Lutheran Churches in Australia announced they would help European Jews escape the clutches of Nazi Germany. The announcement appeared in the London Times November 18 edition. Such was the intensity of their despair at that time that many Jews responded to the offer by writing to the General President of the Australian Lutheran Synod, Dr. William Janzow. Altogether 73 letters were received, extraordinary moving testimonies to those bleak times.”

2006: The U.S. Postal Service began selling “Distinguished American Diplomats’ stamps and first day covers today. The six diplomats honored included Hiram Bingham IV who risked his career and his life to issue “live-saving visas” to Jews and non-Jews fleeing Hitler’s Europe.

2007(7th of Sivan, 5767): Second Day of Shavuot – Yizkor

2007(7^thof Sivan, 5767): Seventy-two year old U.S. Army Lt. General Sidney T. “Tom” Weinstein” whose career earned him induction into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame passed away today in Great Falls, VA.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052502231.html

2007: The Hekhal Haness Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Geneva was severely damaged by a fire today. Nessim Gaon, the Sudanese born Swiss financier who created the Noga Company, and has served as President of the World Sephardi Federation is one of the congregation’s most prominent members.

2007: The three day Metula Poetry Festival comes to an end.

2007(7th of Sivan, 5767): Ninety-three year old Philip M. Kaiser, a retired diplomat and high-ranking Labor Department official who served as an ambassador to four nations passed away today.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/24/AR2007052402429.html

2007: At Cannes, first showing of “Ocean’s Thirteen” co-starring Elliot Gould and Carl Reiner, featuring Ellen Barkin, Bob Einstein, Jerry Weintraub and Scott L. Schwartz, with a script by Brian Koppelman and produced by Jerry Weintraub.

2007: In Ireland, Alan Joseph Shatter began serving his second term as a member of Teachata Dala.

2008: Bradlee Birchansky celebrates his Bar Mitzvah at Shabbat Morning Services at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

2008 (5768): Finish Vayikra, Book of Leviticus

2008: The Cedar Rapids Jewish community watches with pride as Dan Abramson takes part in the graduation ceremonies at Kennedy High School.

2009(1st of Sivan, 5769): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2009: Seventh season of “A Star is Born” begins on Israeli television.

2009: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including “One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict” by Benny Morris, “The American Future: A History” by Simon Schama, “Rhyming Life and Death” by Amos Oz; translated by Nicholas de Lange and “The Amos Oz Reader”selected and edited y Nitza Ben-Dov; translated by Nicholas de Lange and others.

009: As he ended a four-day trip to Israel today, Canada's minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism warned against a "new anti-Semitism" that emanates from an alliance of Western leftists and Islamic extremists is more dangerous than the "old European" form of Jew-hatred."The existential threat faced by Israel on a daily basis is ultimately a threat to the broader Western civilization," said Jason Kenney, explaining the staunchly pro-Israel positions of his government, led by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. "It's a threat that comes from profoundly undemocratic forces that don't have the same conception of human dignity or freedom, and which abuse Israel as a kind of representative of the broader West and Western liberal-democratic values," said Kenney. "I also very acutely understand the nature of the new anti-Semitism, and I think it's even more dangerous than the old European anti-Semitism."Kenney said many anti-Israel attacks come from adherents of a form of anti-Semitism that who appear to view a Jewish homeland as illegitimate. "Israel is not perfect, obviously," Kenney said. "Israelis should be the first to admit that. But we acknowledge that so much of the criticism Israel faces is motivated by a dangerous form of anti-Semitism that tries to hide behind anti-Zionism and is represented by a coalition of the far left in the West with extreme currents of jihadi Islam that seek the destruction of the Jewish nation. They seem to believe that the Jewish people are the only people in the world that don't have a right to a homeland." The 40-year-old, who earlier this month was elected Canada's "Best Overall MP" by fellow parliamentarians, prides himself on being responsible for his country's decision to shun the United Nations-sponsored Durban II conference on racism, based on fears it would be misused as a platform for unfair criticism of Israel. Canada was the first country to announce its boycott of the meet, even ahead of Israel. Before coming to Israel, Kenney visited Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, as Canada is home to many immigrants from these countries, he said. After arriving Thursday, he visited a Jewish Agency absorption center in Mevasseret Zion, outside Jerusalem, and met with his Israeli counterpart, Immigration Minister Sofa Landver. He also spoke to Minority Affairs Minister Avishay Braverman and Information and Diaspora Minister Yuli Edelstein, who is also the former chairman of the antiparliamentary Canada-Israel Friendship Group.

2010: Fifth anniversary of Majdi Halabi, the druse IDF soldier who disappeared while hitchhiking from his home at Daliyat al-Karmel to the military base where he was serving on active duty.

2010: Shami Leibowitz, the grandson of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, was sentenced to 20 months in prison today after having “pleaded guilty…to knowingly and willfully disclosing five Secret level FBI documents to a blogger who then published information derived from those documents on the blog.”

2010: In New York, the YIVO is scheduled to present a lecture entitled “Coming to America?  Max Weinreich and the Making of YIVO in New York, 1939-41.”

2010: In a case of Jew versus Jew, following today’s after the University of Michigan dismissed the charges surrounding its football program, journalist Jonathan Chait claimed the Michael Rosenberg’s claims that the school “had operated a football sweatshop has been totally debunked.”

2011:The AIPAC Policy Conference is scheduled to come to a close in Washington, DC.

2011:In celebration of Jewish-American Heritage Month, the Frequency String Quartet is scheduled to perform a program entitled “Different Trains: Stories From the Holocaust Told Through Music” at   the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, OH.

2011:YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present a lecture by Lecture Natan M. Meir, Lorry I. Lokey Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies, Portland State University entitled "A ‘Russian Zion,’ or a Jewish Nightmare?:  Jewish Life in Tsarist Kiev.”

2011: "Jews, Slavery, and the Civil War" a program sponsored by The Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program, The Center for Southern Jewish History at the College of Charleston and The Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina is scheduled to open this evening with a screening of “Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray.”

2011:"Marseille Port", “a work by Romanian born artist Marcel Janco, one of the founders of Dadaism who later in life moved here and established the Ein Hod artist village, is the top lot in Bonhams Israeli Art & Judaica auction in London which is scheduled to take place today.  The painting is estimated to sell for £120,000-180,000 at Bonhams. “Born in 1895, Janco was among the principal founders of the Dada Movement which was opposed to war, aggression and the changing world culture. Dadaist events included poetry, avant-garde music, and mask wearing dancers in elaborate shows, but the movement also tested cultural conventions about the role of art in society and its apparent irreverence enraged audiences. Dada came as a direct result of artists’ shock in view of the carnage of World War I but the movement was not all nihilistic; Dadaist ideas evolved in the 1920s into Surrealism, arguably one of the most influential streams in 20th century art. Janco had an eclectic style which brilliantly combines abstract and figurative elements, expressionist in nature. In 1941 he moved to Eretz Israel, seven years before the establishment of the state. Here he painted idyllic watercolor and oil images and was captivated by the exotic sights of his new surroundings. Ein Hod was established in 1953 and the northern village now boasts the Janco Dada Museum, dedicated to the artist’s work. In 1967 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Painting. In the last years of his life he worked together with friends to erect the museum, dying just ten months after its inauguration in 1984.

2011: “Jerusalem, City Center” a work painted by Israel Hershberg in 1989-1990 is scheduled to go on sale at Bonham’s in London. It is expected to sell for anywhere from £100,000 to £150,000. Hershberg is an Israeli realist painter and who founded the Jerusalem Studio School. He “was born in 1948 in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria. In 1949 he was brought to Israel but at the age of nine he immigrated to the United States. Following an extensive program of studies in the US Hershberg moved back to Israel with his wife and family in 1984. In 1991, he was awarded the Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art and in 1998 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art Prize for Israeli Art.

2011(20^th of Iyar, 5771): Eighty-two year old Arthur Goldreich, a native of South Africa who was an ally of Nelson Mandela in the fight to end apartheid, passed away today in Tel Aviv. (As reported by Douglas Martin)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/world/africa/27goldreich.html?_r=1

2011: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress this morning.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/netanyahu-to-congress-ready-to-make-painful-compromises-but-jerusalem-will-not-be-divided-1.363802

2012: Israeli composer Guy Barash’s musical series “Eavesdropping” is scheduled to return to The Tank in NYC.

2012: As his mother Debbie looked on with pride, Josh Rosenbloom graduated from medical school today.

2012: NYC Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced that man was in custody who had implicated himself in the disappearance of Etan Patz.

2012: Anouk Markovits, the author of I Am Forbidden, is scheduled to do a reading at Corner Bookstore in New York.

2012(3^rdof Sivan, 5772): Sixty-three year old Kathi Kamen Goldmark passed away today.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F50E13FA395F10738DDDAD0A94DD405B8085F0D3

2013: In London, The Wiener Library is scheduled to host a presentation by Dr. Helen Roche entitled “Why we knew nothing about Auschwitz”  in which she will explore the diverse reactions to the trouble legacy of the Holocaust demonstrated by those who had attended an elite Nazi school.

2013: The IPO Patron Trip to Israel is scheduled to begin today.

2013: In Portugal, the Lisbon Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end

2013: Opening of “No Place On Earth” in Coral Gables, FL and Tulsa, OK

2013: A Carlebach-inspired service honoring the Jewish Fallen Heroes of Iraq and Afghanistan is scheduled to be held at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, DC.

2013: The landmine of the type that exploded in the Golan Heights on Tuesday, killing Cpl. Roi Alphi, was known to be faulty and susceptible to heat, Hebrew media reports said today.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/mines-that-killed-soldier-this-week-were-known-to-be-faulty-had-exploded-in-summer-heat-before/

2013: The time has come for Israeli and Palestinian leaders to take difficult steps in pursuit of peace, US Secretary of State John Kerry said as he spoke with reporters in Ben-Gurion International Airport today at the end of a two-day visit.

http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Kerry-Israelis-Palestinians-nearing-crunch-time-314265

2014: Zohar Hodis is scheduled to be called to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah at Lubavitch of Iowa City under the leadership of Rabbi Avrohom Blesofsky.

2014: Pope Francis is scheduled to begin his trip to “the holy land”

2014: “Pope Francis sent his good wishes to President Shimon Peres and to the Israeli people via his pilot as he flew to neighboring Jordan to kick off his regional “pilgrimage of prayer” tour.Peres reciprocated with a message of his own, telling the pope that Israel will receive him “with love and appreciation, as a pope who builds bridges of peace between religions.”

2014: Belgium stands “united” against the “abhorrent” attack today at the Brussels Jewish Museum that killed three people and critically injured one, Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo said hours after the shooting

http://www.timesofisrael.com/belgian-pm-condemns-abhorrent-attack-on-brussels-jewish-museum-that-kills-3/

2015(6^th of Sivan, 5775): Shavuot

2015(6^th of Sivan, 5775): Sixty-three year old Harvard Law School Professor and Principal Deputy Counsel to President Barack Obama Daniel Meltzer, the son of Nuremberg prosecutor Bernard D. Meltzer and husband Ellen Semonoff passed away today.

https://today.law.harvard.edu/in-memoriam-daniel-j-meltzer-75/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

2015: In “Art Garfunkel Lashes Out at Paul Simon in New Interview” published today the former Columbia architecture student and AEPi brother described his singing partner as “having a Napoleonic complex” which prevented the two from experiencing a “re-union tour.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/art-garfunkel-lashes-out-at-paul-simon-in-new-interview-20150524

2015: “The harrowing Holocaust drama “Son of Saul,” offering unflinching depictions of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, claimed the runner-up Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival” today.

2015: “Two Israeli teens were moderately injured after being stabbed near Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate” early this morning.

2015: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including another Holocaust novel, The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard and The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime by Harold Bloom.

2016: The retrial of 55 year old man “accused of killing Etan Patz, the 6 year old boy who vanished in 1979, will begin after Labor Day, a judge ruled” today.

2016(16^th of Iyar, 5776): Eighty-nine year old award winning cartoonist Mell Lazarus passed away today. (As reported by Sam Roberts)

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/arts/design/mell-lazarus-cartoonist-of-miss-peach-and-momma-dies-at-89.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

2016: Marcia J. Zerivitz, founding Executive Director of JMOF-FIU is scheduled to deliver a PowerPoint lecture on “Impact of Jacksonville’s Jews at the Jacksonville, FL Historical Society.

2016: Prof Yuli Tamir, President of Shenkar College in Ramat Gan is scheduled to give the opening remarks where the public will have their last chance to see the Boi Kalah (Here Comes the Bride) exhibit at Temple Emanu-El featuring “12 bridal gowndesigned by Shenkar students, integrating the heritage of the Jewish People with present-day fashion.”

2016: “The Law Library of Congress in collaboration with the Embassy of Italy and the University of Maryland” are scheduled to “mark the 500^th anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto of Venice” today “with a program on the history of the segregation of the Jewish community in Venice from the surrounding society.”

2016: The Sousa Mendes Foundation and the American Sephardi Federation are scheduled to host a screening of “With God Against Man” that tells the story of “Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul-General in Bordeaux, France, who courageously rescued thousands of refugees, many of them Jews, from the Nazis in the spring of 1940 by issuing visas in defiance of the strict orders of his government.”

2017(28^th of Iyar, 5777): Yom Yerushalayim or Jerusalem Day which takes on a special meaning this year since it marks the 50^thanniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, the capital city of Israel.

2017: The American Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to host a performance of “Isle of Klezbos,” “Eve Sicular’s six-piece all-gal band.”

2017(28^th of Iyar, 5777): Eight-nine year old novelist Ann Birstein, the ex-wife of Alfred Kazin and the mother of Cathrael Kazin passed away today. (As reported by Sam Roberts)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/books/ann-birstein-dead-novelist-and-wife-of-alfred-kazin.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

2017: The USHMM is scheduled to host an appearance of Holocaust survivor Sylvia Rozines as part of its “First Person Series.”

2017: ELI Talks is scheduled to host presentations by Chicago Social Worker Beth Horwitz, Debbie Cosgrove, the President of the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York and Bradley Solmsen, the Executive Director of Surprise Lake Camp

2018: In Des Moines, IA, the Jewish Federation is scheduled to host a screening of “RBG” the film about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

2018: “Israeli pianist Daniel Gorlter” is scheduled to return “to the Jewish Museum” today “for a performance honoring American composer John Corigliano’s 80^th birthday.”

2018: “Choreographer Andrea Miller and Gallim” are scheduled to perform for the last time tonight at the Met Breuer.

2018: Holocaust survivor Michel Margolis is scheduled to talk about his experiences today at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

2018: JW3 is scheduled to host the final screening of “The Young Karl Marx” today in London.

2019: As Israel continues to cope with the combination of high heat and catastrophic fires, based on the warnings from Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, Israelis are preparing “for the possibility that a national emergency will be declared with today’s temperatures expected to eclipse 100 degrees F throughout the country. (As reported by Jacob Magid)

2019: In response to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s call for help from the international community to help fight the fires plaguing Israel, aircraft from Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Croatia are scheduled to depart for Israel this morning.

2019: A screening of Avi Kempner’s “The Spy Behind Home Plates” is scheduled to be shown at the Avalon Theatre in Washington, DC.

2019: The Oxford Jewish Society is scheduled to host Kabbalat Shabbat services this evening followed by Friday night dinner.

2019: A touring company led by “Tony-winning director Bartlett Sher and Israeli choreographer Hofesh Schecter is scheduled to perform “Fiddler on the Roof” in San Jose , CA.

2020(1^st of Sivan, 5780): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2020: Ma’ayan is scheduled to host “First Fruits: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Bikurim and Happiness” with Tal Attia.

2020: Shearith Israel is scheduled to join with “sister Congregations in Amsterdam, Bayonne Curacao, Livorno, London Manchester, Montreal, Paris, Philadelphia and Rome for a reading of the Azharot” which brings together almost all of the Spanish and Portuguese communities extant today.”

2020: The Contemporary Jewish Museum is scheduled to host a “Sunday Stories” on Facebook Live that examines director Stanley Kubrick’s movies and uncovers the Jewish context behind his biggest hits.

2020: KlezCalifornia is scheduled to host an online conversation for fluent Yiddish speakers.

2020: The Consulate General of Israel is scheduled to collaborate in the concert Yotam Silberstein #JazzfromHome .

2020: The New York Timesfeatures books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Arab Winter: A Tragedy by Noah Feldmanv

This Day, May 25, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

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May 25

1085: Pope Gregory VI passed away.  Gregory opposed Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor who saw himself as a protector of the Jews.  Henry contended that the Jews, regardless of where they lived, were his subjects.  He granted them special dispensations and exemptions in matters of trade and taxes.

1085: Alfonso VI of Castile took Toledo back from the Moors. As Moslem Spain came under the control of increasingly intolerant religious leaders, Jews and liberal Moslems found refuge in the tolerant world of Christian Toledo.  As many as 40,000 Jews are reported to have fought in the armies of Alfonso against the Almoravides.  Ironically, there were thousands of Jews fighting with the Almoravides as well.

1096: Massacre of the Jews of Worms who took refuge in the city's castle during the First Crusade. Simcha Bar Isaac haKohen was "torn to bits" by Crusaders in a church for stabbing the bishop's nephew while pretending to submit to compulsory baptism.  (Editorial comment: I’ll bet that scene is in not in any of the blockbuster hits about the noble Crusaders and their noble Moslem opponents.)

1241: First attack on Jewish community of Frankfort-on-the-Main Germany.

1261: The Papacy of Alexander IV, who brought the Inquisition to France, ended today.

1490: In Toledo, 400 Judaizers and “many Hebrew books” were burned “1t a great auto da fé “where a woman who wished to die as a Jewess expired with the word "Adonai" on her lips.”

1648: Chmielnicki's pogroms, which resulted in the massacre of more than 300,000 Jews, broke out.  This slaughter took place in the Ukraine.  This was the worst slaughter of Jews until the Holocaust.

1710(5^thof Iyar): Rabbi Benjamin Ozer of Zolkiev, author of “Even ha-Ozer” passed away

1717: Johann Christian George Bodenschatz, the native of Hof, Germany who “devoted his life to Jewish antiquities, and is said to have made elaborate models of the Ark of Noah and of the Tabernacle in the wilderness.”

1738(6^thof Sivan, 5498): “Moshe Neta, the son of Avi passed away today in Yablonov.

1741(10^thof Sivan): Daniel Christian Jabolonski, who printed the Talmud passed away in Berlin today.

1757(6^thof Sivan, 5517): Shavuot

1757(6^thof Sivan, 5517): Italian Rabbi and Poet Jacob Daniel Olmo Ben Abraham passed away today.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0015_0_15085.html

1759: Judah Lob Ben Nathan Krysa, an 18^th century Frankist leader from Galacia “declared that the cross symbolized the "holy trinity" spoken of in the Zohar, and the seal of the Messiah.”  Krysa also “asserted before the ecclesiastical dignitaries that the Talmud prescribes the use of Christian blood. Like his master Jacob Frank and most of the Frankists, Krysa” would later embrace Christianity.

1768: Levi Sheftall and Sarah de la Motta, the parents of Savannah native Rachel Sheftall were married today in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, the homeland of the bride.

1769(18^thof Iyar, 5529): Lag B’Omer

1772(22^ndof Iyar): Rabbi Aaaron ben Solomon Amarillo, author of “Penie Aharon” passed away.

1776(7th of Sivan, 5536): Second Day of Shavuot

1779: In the United Kingdom, Jonathan Jones and the former Catherine Phillips gave birth to Rachel Jones.

1784: Jews are expelled from Warsaw by Marshall Mniszek

1787: Opening session of the Philadelphia Convention which would become known as the Constitutional Convention because its fifty-five delegates would write the U.S. Convention. While there were no Jewish delegates at the Convention, the framers took action that had a profound effect on the Jewish people that has lasted to the 21^st century. Article VI of the document states: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”  In other words, from the beginning of Jews, at least at the federal level, were eligible to hold office.  Lewis Charles Levin would be the first Jew elected to Congress, winning election to the House of Representatives in 1844.

1798: In St. Mary Axe, Raphael Raphael, and the former Ashe Julia gave birth to Henry Raphael.

1800 :(1^st day of Sivan, 5560): Rosh Chodesh Sivan observed for the first time in the 19^th century.

1815: One day she had passed Leah bat ? was buried today at the Brady Jewish Cemetery.

1817: Birthdate of Saul Solomon the native of St. Helena, the leader of South Africa’s Liberal Party who is called the “Cape Disraeli” because, like Benjamin Disraeli, he converted to Christianity.  And like Disraeli, he retained a sense of pride in his ethnic origins.  He passed away in 1892.

1820: In New York, David and Henriette Cromelien gave birth to Washington Cromelin who is buried at Mikveh Israel Cemetery in Philadelphia.

1821: Influential 19^theconomist David Ricardo the son of Anglo-Sephardic Jews who became a Unitarian when he married Priscilla Anne Wilkinson voted for the abolition of the death penalty for forgery.

1821:Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich began serving as 1^stState Chancellor of the Austrian Empire. Metternich was an extremely complex character whose treatment of Jews depended on the needs of the Austrian Empire.  Thus he could favor rights for Jews in Germany while opposing them for Jews in Austria. Henry Kissinger, the first Jewish Secretary of State wrote his thesis on Metternich and eventually published A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22

1822(5^thof Sivan, 5582): Parashat Bamidbar; Erev Shavuot observed as the Greeks wage war against the Ottomans for their independence.

1826(18^thof Iyar, 5586): Lag B’Omer

1826: Bavarian Lewis Eisenmann, “took out his first papers” – a step to becoming a citizen of the United States.

1826: Uri Feivel ben David married Blumah bat Samuel today at the Western Synagogue.

1827: One day after he hd passed away, Prague native Reuben Lyon was buried today at the Brompton (Fulham Road) Jewish Cemetery.”

1831: In Philadelphia, PA, Mary Levy Moss and Eleazer (Eugene) Moss gave birth to Lucien Moss.

1831: Henry Jones married Elizabeth Benjamin today at the Great Synagogue.

1832(25^thof Iyar): Rabbi Jacob Lorberbaum of Lissa, author of “Netivot ha-Mishpat” passed away.

1833(7^th of Sivan, 5593): Second day of Shavuot

1839: Birthdate of Vienna native Yehuda Porges, who gained famed as “Paris based financer” Jules Porgès and husband of Rose-Anne Wodianer who played a major role in the development of diamond and gold mining in South Africa

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jules_Porgès_at_Rochefort75.jpg

1839: "The British Vice-Counsel in Jerusalem, William Tanner Young, wrote a report comparing the conditions of the Jews in Palestine to that of their counterparts in Egypt.  Young wrote that the Governor of Egypt, Ibrahim Pasha, showed 'more consideration' for the Jews than the Christians did.  Young also wrote that he had heard several Egyptian Jews acknowledge that 'they enjoy more peace and tranquility under this Government, than they have ever enjoyed here before.' But he then observed that, in contrast, 'the Jew in Jerusalem is not estimated in value much above a dog - and scarcely a day passes that I do not hear of some act of tyranny and oppression against a Jew.'" (In Ishmael's House by Martin Gilbert)

1842: Angel Haas married Elizabeth Cohen at the Great Synagogue in London today

1844(7^th of Sivan, 5604): Second Day of Shavuot

1844: Today, during the reign of Louis Philippe, major changes were made in the way members were chosen for the Jewish consistory which Napoleon convened first as the Assembly of Jewish Notables and later as a “Grand Sanhedrin.”

1845: In New York City, Jane and Emanuel Boaz Pike gave birth to Lipman Emanuel "Lip" Pike reportedly was the first Jewish baseball player and the first baseball player to play the game for cash meaning he was the first professional baseball who was the husband of Zila Pike with whom he had three children – Boaz, Minnie and Emanuel.

1846: Birthdate of Theodore Minis Etting, the native of Philadelphia, PA who served in the U.S. Navy from 1862 until 1877 when he resigned to pursue a career as a lawyer a civic leader that culminated in his election “

1852: In Chicago, fourteen Jews organized B’nai Sholom, the second oldest congregation in the city.

1852: “Jewish Disabilities” published today began with the sentence “No more accurate gauge for advancing civilization could probably be chosen, than the political condition of the Jews” is worth reading in its entirety for anybody seeking to understand the unique nature of the American Jewish experience.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9E01EEDC1531E13BBC4D51DFB3668389649FDE

1854: Today during the second reading of the Jewish Disabilities Bill sponsored by Lord Russell, Benjamin Disraeli voiced his opposition to the measure.  In part, Disraeli’s opposition was based on a desire to divorce the bill, which is designed to allow Jewish MP’s to sit in Parliament, from a move to provide full rights of citizenship to British Roman Catholics.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9403E2DB153DE334BC4B52DFB066838F649FDE&scp=1&sq=The+Jews+In+Parliament&st=p

1854: German author Paul Heyse arrived in Munich where he had been appointed professor of Romance philology at the city’s university.  Heyse, who father was not Jewish and whose mother Julie was the daughter of the Prussian court jeweler Jakob Salomon, is considered by some to be the first Jew to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

1859: Birthdate of Russian native Isaiah Agat, who served as the Rabbi at Chicago’s Congregation Moses Montefiore which had been founded in 1875 and which during his tenure offered a three-day religious school and looked to the Sisters of Moses Montefiore, as an Auxiliary Service to help with congregational projects.

1859: In Philadelphia, PA, “David and Eva (Baum) Blumenthal” gave birth to “Hart Blumenthal,a trustee of the Jewish Publication Society, chairman of the Keneseth Israel Free Library and a noted collector of Lincolniana” with his wife Ida Ratwitch raised Walter Hart Blumenthal, the Clinton, IA native precocious enough  to the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 16 before going on to a career as an author.

http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/ead/ead.html?id=EAD_upenn_rbml_PUSpMsColl1104

1863: Birthdate of Parisian born opera composer Camille Erlanger.

1865: Today the Jewish Messenger“published an appreciation of Abraham Lincoln in Hebrew by Isaac Goldstein which began with “Happy are thou, Lincoln, Who is like unto thee! Among Kings and princes thou art exalted…”

1863(7^thof Sivan, 5623): Second Day of Shavuot

1863: In Kovno, Jehuda Zwie Finkelstein and his wife gave birth to Simon I. Finelstein who served as rabbi at a several American congregations including Congregation Bikur Cholim, Baltimore, Md., 1886-1890; Beth T'flla, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1890-1897; and Poale Zedek, Syracuse, N. Y., 1897-1902 and Congregation Ohave Sholom, Brooklyn NY

1867: In Odessa, Nathan Sanders and his wife gave birth to Leon Sanders who was admitted to the New York bar in 1895, Married Bertha Fisher in 1896 and served as Tammany Hall leader in a series of legislative capacities before being elected “as justice of the Thirteenth District of the Municipal Court of the City of New York.”

1868: The New York Times reviewed “The Book of Genesis,” translated from the original Hebrew by Dr. T. J. Conant.  The translation is accompanied “with copious notes and an introduction.”

1870: At 3 o'clock this afternoon the corner-stone of the Mount Sinai Hospital was laid at the corner of Sixty-sixth-street and Lexington-avenue. The ceremony included addresses by New York Mayor Abraham Hall and Judge Cardozo.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9C07E0D61E3CE13BBC4E51DFB366838B669FDE

1871(5th of Sivan, 5631): 49^th Day of the Omer; Erev Shavuot

1873: “A Jewish Ceremony” published today described “a very curious ceremony called ‘The Burying of the Law.’”  Such a ceremony which takes place once every eight or ten years recently took place “in the Spanish Synagogue in Jerusalem”  which has a “subterranean cave” in which “every old leaf torn out from any holy book, every old worn-out Bible, Gemara and phylactery” has been deposited “by all the Jewish residents of Jerusalem” regardless of their Minhag. Every 8 to 10 years, these materials are made into bales and then, after following the applicable rituals, the bales are carried out of the Zion Gate by a procession of Jews who descend “into the valley of Jehoshaphat where a very deep well is located.  The bales are then drop into the well “amid the singing of the joyous crowd.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F06EFD6173AE63BBC4D51DFB3668388669FDE

1874: Birthdate of Roemerstadt, Austria native Dr. Otto Marburg, the leading neurologist who became a “clinical professor of neurology at Columbia” after fleeing the Nazis in 1938 and who said of the United States, “I am full of gratitude to this great nation which wants nothing for itself but helps as much as possible those who need help.”

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1948/06/14/84538495.pdf

1875:This evening Professor Felix Adler, of Cornell University, addressed the American Geographical Society at Association Hall in New York City. His topic was "The Influence of the Physical Geography of Palestine on Hebrew Thought." The opening of this address was devoted to the statement and citation of the effects of climate on the character and thoughts of people born in it.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9803E7D71E39EF34BC4E51DFB366838E669FDE

1876: A meeting of delegates representing Hebrew congregations from various U.S. cities which was being held at The Harvard Rooms in New York City came to an end.  The delegates discussed the possibility of establishing a seminary that would teach Jewish theology and the Hebrew language while preparing students to become Rabbis.

1877: An article published today entitled “A Romance in Paterson: The Marriage of a Pretty Jewess Under Peculiar Circumstances” described the suit for an annulment that Miss Rachel Blumenthal, the daughter of wealthy Montreal Jew, is bringing against Moses Tannenhoz a cigar dealer from Patterson, NJ. The 18 year old Miss Blumenthal claimed that she was tricked into marrying Tannenhoz and that she was not of the age of consent when the ceremony took place. 

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9A01E3DB1738E23ABC4D51DFB366838C669FDE

1879:The yearly meeting of the United Hebrew Charities was held this morning at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, in East Seventy-seventh-street.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9D0DEEDB133EE63BBC4E51DFB3668382669FDE

1880: In Amsterdam, a merchant named Jacob Samuel Hillesum and his wife Esther Hillesum-Loeza gave birth to their 4^th and youngest child Levie (Louis) Hillesum, the father of Esther "Etty" Hillesum.  Years later, Etty would keep a diary of life under Nazi occupation that would not surface until after her death at the age of 29 in Auschwitz.

1882(7^thof Sivan, 5642): Second Day of Shavuot

1882(7^thof Sivan, 5642): English publisher and convert to Judaism Thomas Jones passed away

1882: In Lithuania, Hannah-Dvorah Hersch (née Blumberg) and Meyer Dovid Hersch gave birth to Pesach Liebmann Hersch who gained fame as the pioneering demographer and statistician Liebmann Hersch, the husband of Liba Lichetenbaum with whom he had three children Irene, Joseph and philosopher Jeanne Hersch

http://www.yivoarchives.org/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=34147

1887: In “Ukraine, Pinchus and Chava (Geiro) Bodansky” gave birth to Cornell University educated biochemist Dr. Aaron Bodansky, the husband of Marie Syrkin, who worked at the Research Laboratories of Upjohn in Kalamazoo while writing “numerous scientific papers on enzymes and hormones” before going on to “enzymes and hormones.”

1889: Birthdate of Philadelphia native and NYU trained attorney Jacob Axelrad.

1890(6^thof Sivan, 5650): First Day of Shavuot

1890: At Temple Emanu-El, Rabbi Gottheil will officiate at Confirmation Services.

1890: At Temple Beth-El, Rabbi Kohler will officiate at Confirmation Services.

1890: At Temple Ahawatch Chesed, Rabbi Kohut will officiate at Confirmation Services.

1890: At the Temple on East 15^th Street, Rabbi Raphael Benjamin will officiate at Confirmation Services.

1890: Rabbi H.S. Jacobs will lead Shavuot Services today at B’nai Jeshurun.

1890: Rabbi De Sola Mendes will lead Shavuot Services today at Shaarai-Tephilla.

1890: The body of Samuel Hotz, a Jewish peddler, was found in an old mining shaft at Wurtsborough, NY.

1890: “Republican Origins” published today described the reaction to The Origins of the Republican Form of Government in the United States by Oscar Straus which has now been translated into French by Madame Jessie Catherine  Couvreur

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F40711FA395F10738DDDAC0A94DD405B8085F0D3

1890: It was reported today that President Carnot’s meeting with the Chief Rabbi of France has “called forth a host of letters on the ‘second Babylonish captivity’ and the freedom of the Jews in modern times.”

1890: It was reported today that the Republican Club in New York City continues to refuse to admit Jews with several members publicly committed to using the blackball to accomplish this end.

1890: It was reported today that the Internal Revenue Collector and “boss of one-half of the Republicans of Kings County,” Ernst Nathan began his career as a cigar maker. Today he owns several rows of houses, “has made many thousands of dollars in real estate” and is worth a half-million dollars. His political power stems from his ability to name those who will occupy important elected positions including two state Assembly districts as well as the party candidates for Senator and Third District Congressman.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F60B11FA395F10738DDDAC0A94DD405B8085F0D3

1891: It was reported today that resolutions passed six months under the leadership of the Duke of Westminster beseeching the Czar to show some pity for his Jewish subjects have been met with “unseemly contempt” and no let-up in the expulsion of the Jews.  In response, the Hebrew Lovers of Zion has been formed in London with the aim of finding a home for the Jewish refugees in Palestine.  Their attempts have been met approval in England and the United States where anti-immigrant sentiment is growing.

1891: It was reported today that the flood of refugees is gaining, not losing “headway.” During April 7,501 Russian and Polish immigrants arrived in the United States “an increase over 1890 of 3,291. While German immigrants are described as “sturdy” and Scandinavians are described as “honest, lusty workers” these immigrants are described as being poor, degraded and in “pitiable condition” who would be better settled in the lands of the Sultan (Palestine).

1891:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F50816FE3C5E10738DDDAC0A94DD405B8185F0D3

 

1892: “Mortally Wounded In A Duel” published today described the circumstances around a duel fought in Hungary Baron Aczel, a member of the Diet and a rich Jewish landowner named Karsay who was denied a chance to participate in the celebration of the jubilee of the coronation of the King because of his religion.

1892: The building of the new sanitarium for Jewish children located at Rockaway Park which cost $20, 975 was overseen by the Board of Managers whose officers include Nathan Lewis, President; Dr. Horatio Gomez, Vice President; Hezekiah Kohn, Treasurer; Joseph Davis, Secretary.

1893: According to Israel Schwartz who has been living at the Ladies’ Deborah Nursery for nine years, today, “in school I talked to other boys against” following which “my teach Byron Reilly wrote to Superintendent Engel of the nursery about me.”

1894: “Annoyed by a Sausage Dealer” published today described the store owned by Florian Sicher, the Yorkville butcher which includes signage advertising “Anti-Semitic Sausages” as well as banners on the awning reading “Do Not Buy From Jews” and “No Sales Made to Jews.”

1894: Two days after she had passed away, 35 year old Sophia Isaacs ,the daughter of Lewis and Sarah Isaacs was buried today at the “West Ham Jewish Cemetery.”

1894:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F60C1EF6345D15738DDDAC0A94DD405B8485F0D3

 

1894: The Longman publishing company will publish Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries by Rabbi Meyer Kayserling today.

1894(19th of Iyar, 5654): Alexander Kohut, the Hungarian born Rabbi who was elected rabbi of Congregation Ahavath Chesed in New York in 1885 and helped to found the Jewish Theological Seminary passed away. He was the father of the scholar and author George Alexander Kouth.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/9436-kohut-alexander

1895: Andrew McCran, the next door neighbor of Samuel Samuelson, has been arrested on suspicion of shooting the Jew living in Miles Alley.

1896: The New York Times reported that Baron Hirsch had left “only” thirty million pounds to his heirs and beneficiaries, the primary one of which is his widow.  While there are rumors floating around London that the Baron had destroyed the IOU’s of a prominent royal personage (possibly the Crown Prince) those in the know do not believe that the Baron was of such a forgiving nature.

1898: Birthdate of French writer Robert Aron

1898: In Manhattan, “Gustave Cerf,a lithographer and Frederika Wise, the heiress to a tobacco-distribution fortune” Bennet Alfred Cerf, the founder and CEO of Random House” who was best known for being a panelist on the Sunday night television show, “What’s My Line?”

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/cerfb/profile.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/08/29/archives/bennett-cerf-dies-publisher-writer-bennett-cerf-publisher-and.html

1898: Birthdate of Russian-born American composer and concert pianist Mischa Levitzki.

1899: Dr. Henry M. Leipziger was re-elected as President of the Judeans who held their annual meeting this evening at the Tuxedo. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise spoke of the political progress being made by the Jews as can be seen by the appointment of Oscar S. Straus as U.S. Minister to Turkey and the election of Joseph Simon as U.S. Senator from Oregon, making him the fourth Jew to serve in Upper House of Congress. He compared the Jewish condition in the United States to Russia which is in the grips of the “outrage of anti-Semitism and France where Dreyfus is still not free.

1899(16th of Sivan, 5659): Rosa Bonheur French realist painter and sculptor passed away. Born in Bordeaux in 1822, she was one of four children all of whom were artists.  According to some reports, as a child she was known as Rosa Mazeltov.

1900: The four daylong meeting of the Actions Committee and Trust began today. During the meeting a new Bank Commission was appointed and a decision was reached to hold the next Zionist Congress in London.

1901(7^thof Sivan, 5661): Second day of Shavuot

1901(7^thof Sivan, 5661): Samuel Joseph Rubinstein passed away.  Born in Mitau in 1817, his father sent him to the U.K. when he reached the age of 12 – the age at which he would have been forced to join the Russian Army. He traveled with his aunt who was joining her husband in Glasgow.  When Rubinstein reached the Scottish city, he was befriended by the Davis family who members of the local Jewish congregation.  They took him in, gave him work to do so that he could earn some money and treated him as if he were a member of the family.

1902(18^thof Iyar, 5662): Lag B’Omer

1902: In Lisbon, a foundation stone is laid for the first synagogue built in Portugal since the expulsion of the Jews in 1497.

1902: At Temple Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan, Joseph J. Corn presided over the first public meeting of the Israelite Alliance of America where resolutions were adopted “approving the passage of the resolution of Congressman Henry M. Goldfogle urging the government of the United States to insist that Russia end its discrimination against American Jews and observe the treaty of 1832.”

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9C03E6DE113DEE32A25755C2A9639C946397D6CF

more 2016

1903: In Islington, Rosa Enoyce and George Barnes, a Jewish policeman gave birth to English actress Gertrude Maude “Binnie” Barnes.

1904: “Myer S. Isaacs Dead” published today recounted the life of the recently deceased Judge Myer S. Isaacs who had served as President of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, President of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites and of the Hebrew Free School Association.  A lifelong Republican, Governor Cornell had appointed him to the Marine Court in 1880.  He was nominated to the Superior Court in 1891 and the Supreme Court in 1895.

1905: In Baden-Wurttemberg, Samuel and Malchen Jeselsohn gave birth to Sigmund “Shimon” Jeselsohn the husband of Karolina Jeselsohn.

1906(1st of Sivan, 5666): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1907(12^thof Sivan, 5667): Parashat Naso

1907: It was reported today that a group of prominent Jews have appointed a committee chaired by Michael Furst “to raise the sum of $18,000 to build an addition to the Jewish Protectory at Hawthorne, NY which will be maintained by Jewish charitable societies in Brooklyn”

1908: It was reported today that The Jewish Publication Society of America has “announced that the Board of Publication had finally completed arrangements for the successful carrying on of the Bible translations, which it is expected will now be accomplished in a short time.”

1909(5^thof Sivan, 6669): Erev Shavuot

1909: Today, Jacob H. Schiff, who is staying at the Ritz in London, told the New York Times correspondent “that the report that he had committed himself to the plan for planting Jewish colonies in Mesopotamia was erroneous.”

1910: The Chief Rabbi of Salonica protests that despite assurances to the contrary, during his departure, Jews were enrolled in the Army on Saturday. The Minister of Interior telegraphs the Governor General, and instructs him to not let this be repeated. Of 1,908 Jews enrolled at Salonica, 1,719 entered active service; the remaining 189 went into the reserves.

1911: In St. Louis, MO, Rose Pfeiffer and Samuel Elijah gave birth to “coin collector” Eric Newman. (As reported by Robert D. McFadden)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/obituaries/eric-newman-dead-leading-authority-on-coins.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=region&region=region&WT.nav=region&_r=0

1912: Austran jurist Hans Kelsen married Margarete Bondi, few days after converting “to Lutheranism of the Augusburg Confession,” – a conversion that would not save him from being treated as a Jew the Nazis.

1912: Founding of the East Boston Hebrew Free School

1913: The Independent Order of B’rith Abraham which had been organized in 1887 opened its 26^th Annual Convention today in New York City.

1913: Birthdate of Lee Tabor Shalom, the Paris, Illinois, native who as a director was known as “Roll ‘Em” Sholem.

1913: Birthdate of film and television screenwriter Sidney Carroll

1913: Dedication of the Sarah Morris Hospital for Children of Michael Reese Hospital

1913: Dedication of B’nai Jacob synagogue in New Haven, CT.

1913: Dedication of Beth David Hospital in New York City.

1913 Dedication of Tifereth Israel in Lincoln, Nebraska.

1915: The conclusion of Judge Ben B. Lindsey asking for clemency for Leo Frank which read “I was born and raised in the South and I haven’t any doubt of the sincerity and certainty of the people of Georgia as well as your Excellency and the honorable Board of Pardons, doing anything but justice in this matter.  That is why I join the appeal in behalf of the commutation of the sentence of Frank with perfect confidence that your action will be in accord with what seems to me to be the universal opinion throughout the country and that the sentence of Frank should at least be commuted to life imprisonment.”

1914: Today, ten years after Herzl wrote in his diary that Pope Pius X had said “Jerusalem must not get into the hands of the Jews” Pius created 25 new cardinals.

1915: The list of candidates published today those of who might replace M.S. Stern as the Grand Master of the United States Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Sons of Israel  who has held the office for thirteen years includes Solon J. Liebeskind, Louis Hess and Emil Tausig of New York City.

1915: One of the last acts of the Michigan Legislature which “formally concluded its 1915 session today” “was the adoption of resolutions urging the Governor of Georgia to commute the death sentence of Leo M. Frank to life imprisonment.”

1915: In Springfield, Illinois, Governor Edward F. Dunne addressed a mass meeting at the State Arsenal tonight in behalf of Leo M. Frank during which he “declared capital punishment to be ‘barbarism’ and asking that the Governor of Georgia to commute his sentence to life imprisonment.”

1916: Dedication of the Grace Aguilar Home in Philadelphia, PA.

1916: “As Chairman of the Board of Delegates of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and as resident member of the Executive Committee of the International Order B’nai B’rith” Simon Wolf wrote to President Woodrow Wilson asking him to express himself “as far as is consistent and proper at this juncture” as supporting the “securing of equal rights for” the Jews throughout the world, “especially those in Russia and Romania” when the terms of peace ending the World War are agreed upon.

1916(22^ndof Iyar, 5676): Fifty-five year old Morris Weslosky, the native or Riddleville, GA, who was the husband of Julia Weslosky passed away today in New York City.

1916: It was reported today that “there are about 1,500,000 Jews” in New York City” and there “about 3,500 Jewish organizations of all kinds – religious educational, social philanthropic, industrial and mutual aid.”

1916: It was reported today that “Governor Whitman will be asked to broaden the inquiry into discrimination against Jews alleged to have practice in selecting recruits for Battery D, Second Field Artillery, New York National Guard to a general investigation of similar conditions alleged to exist in other companies and regiments” including the 22^nd regiment of the National Guard.

1916: It was reported today that “an Army and Navy Committee of the Young Men’s Hebrew and Kindred Associations is being formed to continue the work of a special committee that takes care of the wants of the estimated 5,000 Jews in the United States Army and Navy.

1916: Isidore Hershfield, the Director of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America, returned to New York, “after being abroad for many months” during which, “with the permission of the military authorities of both the Austro-Hungarian and German Government, he established a means of communication between the war sufferers and their friends and relatives in the United States.”

1917: In Minsk, Russia, Yiddish was recognized as a second official language.

1917: Funeral services are scheduled to be held for Minnie Weil, the widow of the Benjamin Weil at the home of her son Isaac Weil followed by burial at Free Sons’ Cemetery in Chicago.

1917: Funeral services are scheduled to be held today for 47 year old Dwight S. Hirsch, the husband of Mae Hirsch followed by interment at Mount Maariv.

1917: “Diversions of the Turk” summarized “the account sent to Jewish bodies in the United States by the British Ambassador at Washington” that “shows the Turks driving the Jews out of Jaffa during Passover” sacking their houses and robbing them while the Jews who resisted the pillagers “were hanged.”

1918: The Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs announced tonight that an uncensored letter from a correspondent with the British Army in Palestine, reported that General Allenby’s army had renewed its offensive in Palestine and that the campaign will carry these forces beyond the borders of “the Holy Land.”  This marked the end of three month halt in the campaign during which the British troops had plenty of time to establish good relations with the Jewish population including the people of Tel Aviv, the site of a major English encampment.

1919: KAM (Kehilath Anshe Ma’arav or "Congregation of the Men of the West"), “the oldest Jewish congregation in Chicago” is scheduled to host the last regular meeting of its Junior Alumni today.

1921:  Birthdate of Jack Steinberger, German-born American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988. In talking about his escape from Germany, Steinberger said, “In 1934, the American Jewish charities offered to find homes for 300 German refugee children. We were on the SS Washington, bound for New York by Christmas 1934.”

1921: Birthdate of lyricist and song writer, Hal David. He is a prolific producer of tunes, many of which were written in collaboration with Burt Bacharach.  "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" won an Academy Award as the score for the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Don't Make Me Over", "Close to You", and "Walk on By" are all in the Grammy Hall of Fame. "What's New Pussycat,” “Alfie” and "The Look of Love" received Oscar nominations. He also wrote many country music hits, including Willie Nelson's "To All The Girls I've Loved Before".

1921 The Hurwitz Educational League sponsored a lecture and recital featuring Dr. A.A. Roback of Harvard University and his wife on “Folk Music Among Jews and Other Nations” in the auditorium of the Young Women’s Hebrew Association on 31 West 110 Street in New York City.

http://books.google.com/books?id=yoAzAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA870&lpg=PA870&dq=solomon+mandelkern+obituary&source=bl&ots=3fTXUo6tPE&sig=MvNsKkbVvQSXQzXHHEOCyVhAwMQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=thcuU42FEsKmyQHUiYH4Cg&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

1922(27^thof Iyar, 5682): In Chicago, political economist Joseph Pedott passed away today.

1923: Britain recognized Transjordan with Abdullah as its leader. In this illegal action, Britain paid off part of its debt to one Arab family for its part in fighting the Turks during World War I.  There are those who contend that by this act Britain effectively portioned Palestine and created an Arab state out of it

1925: The Camden Section of the Junior Hadassah met this evening at the Beth-El Synagogue.

1926: "No attempt toward the economic reconstruction of European Jewries will succeed unless we stem the anti-Semitic wave," declared Dr. William Filderman, president of the Union of Rumanian Jews, on the eve of his departure for Europe on the Berengaria today. "There is no use educating Jewish artisans if anti-Semitic prejudice deprives them of any market for their products," he explained.

1926: Sholom Schwartzbard assassinated Symon Petliura, the head of the Paris-based government-in-exile of Ukrainian People's Republic.  Schwartzbard had lost both of his parents in pogroms and he held Petliura accountable for the anti-Semitic violence that had been part of the war in the Ukraine.  Anti-Semitic violence was part and parcel of life in the Ukraine, as can be seen in the Chmielnicki's pogroms of 1648, the pogroms in Kiev at the start of the 20^thcentury and the slaughter at Babi Yar during World War II.  Schwartzbard’s case was taken up by the French Jewish community and he was acquitted of the charges.

1926: Molecular biologist Alfred Ezra Mirsky married children’s author Reba Paeff

1927: The United Palestine Appeal in Philadelphia, PA is scheduled to come to an end today.

1927: Three weeks after its first screening in Los Angeles of “7^th Heaven” a movie that produced at least one Oscar with a screenplay written by Benjamin Glazer opened at New York City.

1928(6^th of Sivan, 5688): Shavuot

1928: Birthdate of Henry Baron, the first Jew to sit on the Irish Supreme Court

1929: Birthdate of Beverly Sills. Born Belle "Bubbles" Miriam Silverman in Brooklyn NY, Sills gained fame as operatic soprano and patroness of the arts.

1929: According to reports published today “industrial establishments in Palestine have increased to 513, employing 5,000 workers” with a total of $7,500,000 in invested capital.  The actual figures could have been higher but the Ruttenberg Works which has 700 employees was not included in the survey.

1930: Birthdate of John Strugnell who would become editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1984.  Strungell was not Jewish but he spent a major portion of his academic life working with these texts and his comments about Judaism in Haaretz turned into a major cause célèbre.

1930: Birthdate of Sonia Fils, the native of Paris who gained fame as fashion designer Sonia Rykiel.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/fashion/sonia-rykiel-dies.html?_r=0

 

1930: The Peter J. Schweitzer Memorial Hospital, a modern health institution operated at level comparable to those found in an American hospital, opened today in Tiberius in the Valley of the Galilee.

1931: Birthdate of Herbert Eser Gray, “Canada's first Jewish federal cabinet minister, and  one of only a few Canadians ever granted the title The Right Honourable who was not so entitled by virtue of a position held.

 

1931: In New York City, Sol and Anna Winkler gave birth movie producer and director Irwin Winkler who “won an Oscar for Best Picture for ‘Rocky’.”

1931: In Palestinevoting began to select the representatives tothe 17th Zionist Congress to be held in June. When the voting ends, the Yishuv delegation of 36 consists of 24 Mapai and HaShomer HaTzair, 7 Revisionists, 2 Mizrachi, 2 Hapoel HaMizrachi and 1 Yemenite.

1933(29th of Iyar, 5693): Louis Schloss, a Jewish lawyer was murdered in Dachau.

1934: Ernest Peixotto of the Fontainebleau School arrived in New York after having crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the same liner that carried the chairman of the board of the French Line.  Peixotto reported that he had offered American student of the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts the honor of decorating one of the cabins on the Normandie, the largest ship in the world which is now under construction.

1935(22^ndof Iyar, 5695): Parashat Bechukotai

1935(22^ndof Iyar, 5695): Fifty-six year old Russian born NYU trained attorney and New York City municipal judge Abraham Harawitz passed away today. (Some sources show May 24)

https://www.jta.org/1935/05/26/archive/judge-harawitz-dies-elected-over-panken

 

1936: The Jewish Auxiliary Police, "Ghaffirs", was established to guard Jewish settlements and rural roads.

1936: “Hannah Gluckstein (the artist known as Gluck) “married Nesta Obermer, a socialite married to an American businessman” – an event that provided the inspiration for Gluck’s work “Medallion” that “pictured the two together at a performance of Don Giovanni.”

1936: The body of thirty-six year old Jacob Rasili, a laborer belonging to the Jewish Federation of Labor, was found this morning near the Hebrew University library and the doctors reported he had been murdered when “he had been struck on the head with a heavy cane or iron bar.”

1936: It was reported today that Governor Lehman has contributed $3,500 to the United Palestine Appeal and that Maurice Levin and his half-brother J.M. Kaplan have contributed $50,000 to the same cause.

1937: “The League of Frightened Men” co-starring Lionel Stander the Bronx born son Russian Jewish immigrants was released in the United States today.

1938(24^thof Iyar, 5698): Shihata Abdalla Saltoun passed away today after which he was buried in Khartoum, Sudan

1938: In Brooklyn Jack and Rose Israel gave birth to “living theatre performance artist” Steven Ben Israel (As reported by Paul Vitello)

1938: As Arab violence continued unabated The Palestine Post reported that in Jerusalem 30 year old Moshe Proper was killed and there were other casualties including 12 Arab victims and seven Jewish victims. A curfew was imposed to stop stoning and shooting incidents. A number of Jewish youths were arrested and a 120 pounds fine was imposed on the Jewish quarter of Montefiore. A number of Revisionists, just released from the Acre prison, were rearrested. Nahum Bibi, a Jewish laborer was fatally shot at Safed and a Bedouin sheikh was murdered by an Arab gang roaming Galilee.

1939(7th of Sivan, 5699): Second Day of Shavuot

1939(7th of Sivan, 5699): Sir Joseph Duveen passed away. The son of Sir Joseph Joel Duveen who had 13 children, he followed in the footsteps of his father and his uncle Henry J. Duveen, and became one of the leading art dealers of his time.

http://snbehrman.com/library/newyorker/51.10.6.NY.htm

1940(17^thof Iyar, 5700): Parashat Bechukotai

1940: As the Allied position in Western Europe crumbles before Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, Churchill’s War Cabinet meets to decide if Britain should continue to the fight against Germany.  The ‘peace party’ is led by Foreign Minister Lord Halifax who will make a strong case for a deal with Germany as the debate rages for three days.

1940: FDR began his day in the White House by meeting with Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter.

1940: Judge Samuel I. Rosenman was among the five people who had dinner in the White House with FDR.

1940: U.S. premiere of “Torrid Zone” featuring George Tobias as “Rosario La Mata.”

1940: Hans Biebow today issued orders for factories to be set up in the ghetto (called Arbeitsressorte, or work sections). Provided with very cheap labor, these factories were to serve the Nazis as a source of easy profits and exploitation. The Jews in the ghetto, cut off as they were from all other possible sources of livelihood, were prepared to work for no more than a loaf of bread and some soup. The exploitation of the Jews imprisoned in the ghetto yielded a profit to the ghetto administration estimated at 350 million reichsmarks ($14 million). (As reported by Yad Vashem)

1941: Koestler’s anti-­Soviet novel “Darkness at Noon” received a rave cover review in the New York Times Book Review Section: “A splendid novel,” Harold Strauss declared, “written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling and with such persuasive simplicity that it is as absorbing as melodrama. It is a far cry from the bleak topical commentaries that sometimes pass as novels.”

1942: Birthdate of Barry K. Schwartz, the Bronx native who joined with his boyhood friend Calvin Klein to form Calvin Klein, Inc. in which he enjoyed so much success that he could indulge his passion for thoroughbred horse racing.

1943: “At the Auschwitz a group of 1,035 Gypsies (507 men and 528 women) were killed in a single day.”

1943: Four deportations of Jews from Holland to the death camps at Auschwitz and Sobibór total 8000 people.

1943: The expulsion of the Jews from Sofia, Bulgaria, began today.  1944: Birthdate of Actor Frank Oz

1944: Release date of “Mr. Skeffington,” a film about Job Skeiffington, a Jew living in high society directed by Vincent Sherman with a script by Julius and Philip Epstein who produced it along with Jack L. Warner.

1944: In Budapest, the German representative, General Edmund Veesnmayer reported that 138,870 Jews had been deported in the past 10 days.

1944: Hundreds of fleeing Hungarian Jews are killed during a revolt at Auschwitz.

1944: Pioneer television station WPTZ (now KYW-TV) in Philadelphia presented a special, all-star telecast which was also seen in New York over WNBT (now WNBC) and featured cut-ins from their Rockefeller Center studios. Cantor, one of the first major stars to agree to appear on television, was to sing "We're Havin' a Baby, My Baby and Me". Arriving shortly before airtime at the New York studios, Cantor was reportedly told to cut the song because the NBC New York censors considered some of the lyrics too risqué. Cantor refused, claiming no time to prepare an alternative number. NBC relented, but the sound was cut and the picture blurred on certain lines in the song. This is considered the first instance of television censorship

1945: Just three weeks after the surrender of the German capital, pharmacist Erich Zwilsky became the Berlin Jewish Hospital’s managing director, assuming responsibility for the only Jewish institution that had remained in operation throughout World War II.

1945: “Investigating Team 6822, part of the U.S. War Crimes Program to create legal standards and judicial systems to prosecute Nazi crimes” completed its investigation into the murder of prisoners being moved from Rottleberode subcamp to Neuengamme concentration and sent a report to General William Hood Simpson, the Supreme Commander of the United States 9^th Army.

1946:  Abdullah I becomes King of the Kingdom of Transjordan. From 1921 until 1946 Abdullah had been Emir of the Emirate of Transjordan. On the eve of the creation of state of Israel in 1948, Abdullah met secretly with Golda Meir.  Meir sought to keep the Jordanians from attacking the soon to be created Jewish state when the British withdrew.  Abdullah offered to let the Jews peacefully as subjects of Jordanian Kingdom that would include all the land of the Palestine mandate.  Abdullah’s army invaded Israel, seized what is called the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem.  In 1951, Abdullah would be assassinated by an Arab fanatic at the Al Aqsa Mosque. He thought Abdullah was involved in secret peace talks with the Israelis

1946: Switzerland signs the Washington Agreement, under which the Swiss government will voluntarily contribute $58.1 million in gold to an Allied commission established to help rebuild Europe. The Allies are aware that this payment will come from Swiss stores of looted gold taken from Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution. Regardless, the Allies agree not to press the Swiss for additional claims. At this time, Switzerland holds between $300 and $400 million in looted gold.

1947: “The Web,” a “film noir thriller” filmed by cinematographer Irving Glassberg was released in today in the United States.

1947: Perry Belmont, the former Congressman and diplomat who was the son of August Belmont passed away.  The Belmonts had passed out of the Jewish world when August married Caroline Slidell, the daughter of a Confederate diplomat and descendant of American naval hero Matthew C. Perry, the man who “opened up Japan.”

1948: The Old City of Jerusalem falls. Defended by local residents, Etzel members and about 80 Haganah soldiers, they were outnumbered and out-gunned by the Arab legionaries. After weeks of desperate fighting it was decided to surrender and save the almost 2000 mostly elderly Jews who were still living in the Old City.

1948: British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin says that the Negev should not be included in a Jewish state because no Jews lived there and that Jaffa and Acre “should be given back to the Arabs” because they were “purely Arab towns.

1948:  The attack on Latrun, begun the night before continues.  The forces of the Arab Legion are able to fire down on the attacking Jews.  As the Jews fall victim to the barrage of bullets, they are forced to confront a second enemy, the searing heat which many of these recent refugees from Europe are not used to.  To make matters worse, many of them went into battle without canteens.  Their pleas for water are met by sniper fire from the Arabs.  Realizing that the attack has failed, the Israelis withdraw with eighty dead and uncounted others wounded.  Among the dead is Reuven Oppenheim who had survived the Holocaust.  He fought with partisan forces in that part of the Soviet Union known as White Russia.  Miraculously, Oppenheim’s immediate family (mother, father and sister) survived with him and came to Palestine in 1947.  The price for a Jewish state was high indeed.

1948: The government of Egypt "issued a proclamation stipulating that no Jew could leave Egypt with a special visa from the Ministry of the Interior.  This...applied to the many thousands of Jews who held foreign passports."  (In Ishmael's House by Martin Gilbert)

1948: The Scotsman, a newspaper published in Edinburgh, “quoted an Israeli government statement that Thomas C. Wasson,” the Counsel General for the United States in Jerusalem who days before “had attempted to stop the Arab Legion shelling of the Hadassah Hospital and Hebrew University on Mount Scopus”  "was killed by Arab bullets."

1949: Chaim Weizmann went to the White House as President of Israel at the invitation of President Harry Truman.

1950: “Israel's mounting immigration troubles became more apparent today with the interim report of Malben, which handles the country's hard core cases. This organization has discovered that its six month-old budget of $17,500,000 is about half what it needs to handle the handicapped immigrants under its care.”

1950: Tonight, “The decision of the United States, Britain and France to include Israel in their over-all plan for supplying the countries in the Middle East with arms for defense purposes was greeted” in Israel “with satisfaction by a Foreign Ministry spokesman.”

1950: “In an effort to further stabilize the Armistice Agreements, and to control the flow of arms to the Middle East, France, Britain and the United States announced, today, their decision to stabilize the situation in the region by an agreement among themselves not to supply weapons to a state harboring aggressive designs. They also agreed to take action both within and outside the U.N. to prevent any change in the armistice lines. Text of the Declaration follows.”

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/tripartite-declaration-may-1950

1951: In a handwritten letter proposes, Abba Eban proposed periodic meetings between himself and the leaders of major American Jewish organizations “to exchange views and impressions about the American-Israeli relationship.”

1952: King Features launched the Sunday version of the comic strip “Big Ben Bolt” written by Elliot Caplin, the brother of Al Capp.

1953: In New York City, Arthur Ensler, a Jewish food industry executive and his non-Jewish wife Christ gave birth to award winning playwright Eve Ensler, “best known for her play The Vagina Monologues.”

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Cabinet was discussing the deteriorating security situation in border areas.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that Thomas Harlan, son of Veit Harlan, a notorious Nazi film producer, was in Israel working on a film which would "atone" for the sins of his father.

1954: The Pittsburgh Pirates traded Cal Abrams to the Baltimore Orioles.

1954(22nd of Iyar, 5714): Robert Capa, possibly the most famous photo journalist of the 20^th century was killed while on assignment cover the French- Indochina War.  The Jewish native of Hungary waded ashore with the first wave of troops at Omaha Beach, providing the first photographic record of the assault.

From the Spanish Civil War, “Death of Loyalist Soldier”

”D-Day Landing - 1944

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capa,_Death_of_a_Loyalist_Soldier.jpg

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capa,_D-Day2.jpg

http://www.army-photographer.com/index.php/robert-capa

http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL535353

1955(4^thof Sivan, 5715): Eighty-five year old  Regina “Rae” Mayer Sabath, the Baden-Wurttemberg born daught of Willam and Sarah (Stern) Mayer and wife of Judge Joseph Sabath who whom she married in 1888 and whom she had three children -  Albert, Stella and Milton Sabath -  passed away after which she was buried in Chicago at the Rosehill Cemetery and Mausoleum.

1957: NBC broadcast the final episode of “Caesar’s Hour” starring Sid Caesar and his comedic sidekicks Howard Morris and Carl Reiner.

1957: After 49 performances at the Broadway Theatre, the curtain came down on “Shinbone Alley,” a musical with a book by Mel Brooks orchestrated by Irwin Kostal.

1958(6^thof Sivan, 5718): Shavuot

1958: After only 4 months, ABC broadcast the final episode of “Sid Caesar Invites You” which “briefly united” the comedian with a group of writers that included Carl Reiner, Neil Simon and Mel Brooks.

1963(2^ndof Sivan, 5723): Parashat Bamidbar

1963(2^ndof Sivan, 5723): Fifty-year old New York Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos, the husband of Marian Sulzberger and son-in-law of Arthur Hays Sulzberger who guided the paper through the 114 day long newspaper strike passed away today.

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1963/05/26/page/3/article/orvil-dryfoos-dies-head-of-n-y-times

1963: During his Shabbat Sermon, at Tremont Temple in the Bronx, Rabbi Maurice J. Bloom declared that because of his divorce and recent remarriage Governor Rockefeller is morally obligated to press for an easing of New York State's divorce laws.  If New York State had a proper marriage and divorce code neither the Governor nor his first wife, nor his current wife would be forced to participate in actions that are variance with the laws that the Governor is sworn to uphold as the state’s chief executive.  Furthermore, the Rabbi contended that it is not fair that divorce is only open to the wealthy who can afford to take up temporary residence in other states with more lenient laws related to terminating a marriage.  Tying the contemporary issue to Jewish tradition, Rabbi Bloom said, “Judaism believes in making strict marriage laws to safeguard marriage and easy divorce laws to make it possible to repair mistakes made by the application of those strict laws. Judaism stresses the sanctity of marriage, and for that reason it does not condemn people to live together where strife and incompatibility would mar good family life.”

1963:  After 43 performances, the curtain came down on the original Broadway production of “Hot Spot,” a musical with “lyrics by Martin Charnin, music by Mary Rodgers, and additional lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim”

1964: “The Subject Was Roses,” the Pulitzer Prize winning play directed by Israel Ulu Grosbard and starring Jack Albertson “premiered on Broadway at the Royale Theatre” today.

1965(23^rdof Iyar, 5725): Sixty-four year old Irving Isaacs, the husband of the “former Bertha Goldman” and the father of Albert and Morton Goldman, who was the “owner of Abalon Kosher Caterers in the Bronx” passed away today “in Westchester Square Hospital.”

1965: Shimon Peres completed his term as Deputy Minister of Defense.

1966(6^thof Sivan, 5726): Shavuot

1966: Opening in the United Kingdom, “It Happened Here” a film based on a mythic successful invasion of England by the Nazis filmed by Peter Suschitzky was released today in Australia.

1966: U.S. premiere of “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming” co-starring Carl Reiner, Alan Arkin and Theodore Bikel with music by Johnny Mandel.

1966: Helen Reddy, who had converted to Judaism before the ceremony married Jeff Wald today.

1967: U.S. premiere of “Barefoot in the Park” the movie adaption of the play by Neil Simon, directed by Gene Saks, produced by Hal B. Wallis, featuring Herb Edeleman as “Harry Pepper”, Mabel Albertson as “Harriet” and Fritz Feld.

1968(27^thof Iyar, 5728): Parashat Emor

1968(27^thof Iyar, 5728): Sixty-four year old agent and movie producer Charles K. Feldman, the husband of Clotilde Barot, whose film credits included “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the timeless comedy “The Seven Year Itch” and cowboy classic “Red River” passed away today.

https://www.fandango.com/people/charles-k-feldman-204477

 

1969: Release date of “Midnight Cowboy” directed by John Schlesinger and starring Dustin Hoffman.

1969:An Israeli vehicle was damaged Sunday night after hitting a mine near Maoz Chaim in the valley. There were no casualties

1971: The board of directors of Yonkers Raceway announced today that 51 year old Stanley Tananbaum has been named president replacing his late brother Martin Tananbaum

1972: Filming of “Ciao! Manhattan” co-directed, co-produced and co-written by David Weisman was completed today after which it premiered “in Amsterdam…to critical acclaim.”

1976(25^thof Iyar, 5736): A guard at Ben Gurion Airport was killed and nine others were injured when a bomb planted in a suitcase by a terrorist went off prematurely.

1977: Samuel W. Lewis, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel presented his credentials today.

1977: Star Wars opened.  This would be the first in a whole series of films that would include the villain Darth Vader. According to Adams Walls, “Even though it's too small to see on screen, part of Darth Vader's chestplate features three lines of Hebrew, one of which appears to be upside down. What the lines say is a matter of much online debate among Jewish "Star Wars" fans. On TheForce.net, which features photos of the Hebrew script in question, one blogger believes it's a play on a section from Exodus 16 about repentance, while another thinks the lines read: "His actions/deeds will not be forgiven until he is proven innocent" and "One shall be regarded innocent until he is proven guilty."

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported the official denial of reports that Israel sought control over the West Bank's absentee property owned by Arabs residing abroad, and that there were plans to establish a Jewish urban quarter near Nablus. Officials of the Land Administration were instructed to lift a ban on transactions affecting property owned by local Arab residents, residing abroad.

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that The Knesset Speaker, Mr. Yitzhak Shamir, accepted an invitation to visit Germany at the head of the Knesset delegation.

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that a six-lane divided highway, which would cut through the Sacher Park and expand the Kirya, was approved in Jerusalem.

1978(18^thof Iyar, 5738): Lag B’Omer

1979(28th of Iyar, 5739): Yom Yerushalayim

1979: “The Brood” a sci-fi film directed by David Cronenberg who also wrote the script was released in the United States today.

1979: Israel begins to return the Sinai to Egypt as part of the Camp David Peace Accords.

1979: A graveside funeral service is scheduled to held “at the Jewish Memorial Cemetery in Racine, Wisconsin today for seventy-four year old Dr. Ralph P Rosenberg, the son of “Barnet and Rose (Weislander) Rosenberg and the husband of Leah (Davidson) Rosenberg, the holder of a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin who was a “Professor of German and the Humanities at Yeshiva University in New York for 38 years.

1979: Six year old Etan Kalil Patz disappeared in Lower Manhattan, New York City as he walked to catch the school bus. .  He would be the first missing child to be pictured on the side of a milk carton.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/nyregion/etan-patz-jury-murder-trial.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

1981(21^stof Iyar, 5741): Sixty-five year old UK native Leonard Blake, the son of Harry and Gertrude Balke and the husband of Gabrielle Blake passed away today in Marbella, Spain.

1981: “News Summary” published today included charges by Prime Minister Menachem Begin made for the first time that “Soviet advisers are entering Lebanon accompanying large Syrian Army Units.”

1982: In a meeting today with Alexander Haig, Philip Habib repeated what he had already said many times before: "Terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews in Europe are not included in the cease-fire agreement.”

1983(13th of Sivan, 5743): Eighty-four year old journalist and author Zelda F. Popkin whose works included Quiet Street which “was based on the siege of Jerusalem during the Israeli War of Independence.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/27/obituaries/zelda-f-popkin-84-author-of-14-books-had-been-reporter.html

1983: “Demonstrations protesting against the persecution of refuseniks were held simultaneously in New York, Washington, Paris, London and Lisbon.”

1983:Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi with a script by Lawrence E. Kasdan and Frank Oz performing as “Yoda” was released today in the United States.

1985(5th of Sivan, 5745): Erev of Shavuot

1985(5th of Sivan, 5745):Robert Gruntal Nathan “an American novelist and poet” passed away. “Nathan was born into a prominent New York family. He was educated in the United States and Switzerland and attended Harvard University for several years beginning in 1912. It was there that he began writing short fiction and poetry. However, he never graduated, choosing instead to drop out and take a job at an advertising firm to support his family (he married while a junior at Harvard). It was while working in 1919 that he wrote his first novel—the semi-autobiographical work Peter Kindred—which was a critical failure. But his luck soon changed during the 1920s, when he wrote seven more novels, including The Bishop's Wife, which was later made into a successful film starring Cary Grant, David Niven, and Loretta Young. During the 1930s, his success continued with more works, including fictional pieces and poetry. In 1940, he wrote his most successful book, Portrait of Jennie, about a Depression-era artist and the woman he is painting, who is slipping through time. Portrait of Jennie is considered a modern masterpiece of fantasy fiction and was made into a film, starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten. In January 1956 the author wrote, as well as narrated, an episode of the CBS Radio Workshop, called "A Pride of Carrots or Venus Well-Served." Nathan's seventh wife was the British actress Anna Lee, to whom he was married from 1970 until his death. He came from a talented family — the activist Maud Nathan and author Annie Nathan Meyer were his aunts, and the poet Emma Lazarus and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo his cousins.”

1987: James Levine is scheduled to conduct the IPO tonight in a performance that will include Mahler’s Third Symphony.

1990(1st of Sivan, 5750): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1990: Showtime broadcast the last episode of “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” a sitcom “created by Garry Shanling and Alan Zweibel.”

1990(1^stof Sivan, 5750): Seventy-nine year old Vienna born and refugee from the Nazis Harry Bachrach, the husband of Katherine Bachrach and the father of Alfred, George and Frances Bachrach who was “the president of Harry Bachrach Inc., a Manhattan textile company specializing in neckties” passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/29/obituaries/harry-bachrach-necktie-maker-79.html

 

1991: Israel began the evacuation 14,000 Ethiopian Jews. This was done as a secret operation and served as a reminder of the role of Israel as a haven for all Jews.

1991: Final broadcast of “Out of This World” a sitcom co-starring Donna Pescow.

1993(5th of Sivan, 5753): Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Friedman, the founder and former spiritual leader of the Garment Center Synagogue in Manhattan, passed away today at the age of 95. He was a rabbinical graduate of Yeshiva University's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. He was ordained in 1921 and, a decade later, founded the Garment Center Synagogue. The synagogue, at 205 West 40th Street, was established primarily to serve the many Jews who worked in the garment trade. Born on Nov. 13, 1897, in Jerusalem, Rabbi Friedman came to the United States with his mother and brother in 1918 to escape famine in his homeland. His father had arrived a year earlier. Trained as a scribe, Rabbi Friedman began his rabbinical studies in 1919. After his ordination, he was appointed rabbi of Congregation Ezrath Israel in Ellenville, N.Y., a position he held for four years before moving to Brooklyn. In 1931, after serving at several synagogues in New York City, Rabbi Friedman founded the Garment Center Synagogue. In the mid-1950's, he was named rabbi emeritus. Rabbi Friedman's wife, Charlotte, died in 1980.

1994: In Needham Massachusetts, Lynn (née Faber), a former high school gymnast, and Rick Raisman gave birth to Alexandra Rose Raisman who gained fame as Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman, the victim of sexual abuse who was “awarded the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.”

http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/its-official-the-worlds-most-famous-jewish-sports-star-is/

1996(7^thof Sivan, 5756): Second Day of Shavuot

1997(18^thof Iyar, 5757): Lag B’Omer

1997: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Actual by Saul Bellow and the Wisdom of the Body by Sherwin B. Nuland

1999: Final broadcast of season one of “Felicity” created by J.J. Abrams staring Greg Grunberg as “Sean Blumberg.

1999: A production of “The Phantom of the Opera” starring Paul Stanley (Stanley Bert Eisen) opened today in Toronto.

2000: Publication of Bee Season by Myla Goldberg.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/06/18/reviews/000618.18garnert.html

2000(20^thof Iyar, 5760): Centenarian Francis Lederer, an actor who enjoyed successful careers in Europe and the United States passed away today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/27/arts/francis-lederer-dies-at-100-actor-known-for-suave-roles.html

2000: Israel withdraws the last of its forces from Lebanon.

2001: The terrorists of Palestinian Islamic Jihad took credit for the bombing today the Hadera bus station where 65 people were injured but nobody was killed.’

2001: The 54^th Cannes Film Festival where Dover Kosashvili’s “Late Marriage was screened in the Un Certain Regard Section” came to an end today

2001: The terrorists of Hamas took credit for the bombing at a mall in Hadera today where there were no reports of any fatalities.

2002: “Last Call,” the film version of the book by Frances Kroll, the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last secretary and personal assistant, who portrayed herself as playing a key role in his last and uncompleted novel, The Last Tycoon, was released in the United States today.  (Editor’s note – watched on Amazon or Netflix and for some reason really enjoyed it.)

2002:  An exhibition opens at the Tate in London entitled “Ori Gersht: Afterglow” which features the work of Israeli artist Ori Gersht.

2003:The New York Times featured books by Jewish writers and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Last Good Season by Michael Shapiro.

2004(5th of Sivan, 5764): Roger Williams Straus, Jr. passed away. Born in 1917, “Strauss was co-founder of Farrar, Straus and Giroux a New York book publishing company. Straus, along with John Farrar, began the influential firm of Farrar and Straus in 1945. In 1955, the company hired editor Robert Giroux away from rival Harcourt, Brace, who brought along authors such as T. S. Eliot and Flannery O'Connor, among others. Ultimately, in 1994, twenty years after his partner Farrar had died, Straus determined he could no longer run the company, retired, and sold the business to a German publishing conglomerate, Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the type of company he had long disdained and spoke out against. Straus was regarded as one of the last, old-fashioned publishers, faithful to his company and tight with his money, but emphasizing quality over commercial success. His dedication to the publishing business earned him several Nobel Prize-winning authors, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordime, Czeslaw Milosz and T. S. Eliot, and Pulitzer Prize authors such as Robert Lowell, John McPhee, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud. Straus grew up in a wealthy and influential family. His mother was Gladys Guggenheim, heir to one of the largest fortunes in America. His father, Roger W. Straus, was chairman of the American Smelting and Refining Co., which was owned by his wife's family. Straus' paternal grandfather, Oscar S. Straus, served as Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt.”

2004(5^thof Sivan, 5674): Erev Shavuot

2004(5^thof Sivan, 5674): Eighty-seven year old publisher Roger Williams Straus, Jr, the “son of Gladys and Roger Williams Straus” and the “brother of Oscar Solomon Straus, II” passed away today after which was buried in Manhattan.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/roger-straus-k9zn5b9g9r7

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1463001/Roger-W-Straus-Jr.html

2004: In Israel, striking lifeguard returned to work today as part of what they called “a goodwill gesture” for Shavuot which begins this evening.

2005(16^thof Iyar, 5765): Sixty-seven year old concert pianist Ruth Laredo whose career spanned three decades lost her battle with ovarian cancer today.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/27/AR2005052701445.html

http://www.ruthlaredo.com/

2005: At U.C Santa Cruz, The Jewish Studies Program is scheduled to present a lecture by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, titled “Seduced into Eden: The Beginning of Desire.” Zornberg's first book, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire won the National Jewish Book Award for nonfiction in 1995.

2006(27^thof Iyar, 5766): Rabanit Yocheved 'Jackie' Wein z"l, the first wife of Rabbi Berel Wein passed away today.

2006: In “New Stamp to Honor WWII Envoy” published today Christopher Lee described plans to honor “Hiram Bingham IV, a blue-blood American diplomat in France who defied U.S. policy by helping Jews escape the Nazis in the early years of World War II.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/24/AR2006052402467.html

2006: During the Sydney Writers’ Festival at the Sydney (Australia) Jewish Museum Professor Konrad Kwiet leads a discussion with editors and journalists from major Sydney newspapers where they examine the role of free press in a democratic society including the need, if ever, for limits on freedom of the press and the need for the media to demonstrate a sense social responsibility.

 “Books can be entertaining, insightful and at their best, life changing. But are there some books that just should not be read? Are they indeed dangerous? Books like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, have spawned some of the most evil Books can be entertaining, insightful and at their best, life changing. But are there some regimes the world has known. Yet should we limit our access to these ideas? The intrinsic virtues of free speech are often touted throughout the West, however in countries such as Australia Anti Racial Vilification Legislation limits what can and cannot be said in public forums. What can or should be the role of the media in these kinds of debates? A free press is one of the basic tenets of a democratic society, but are there times when this freedom is taken too far? Does the press have a social responsibility and if so, what is it?

2007: In Israel, Avner Itai the lead Israel Chamber Orchestra oboist, one of the greatest conductors in Israel and a professor for choir conducting  joins Ora Seitner and guitarist Oded Schub in performing folk songs and works from Catalonia and France at the Abu Gosh Festival.  He will play an oboe d'amore that he bought this year. Itai will conduct instrumentalists from the Philharmonic and his choir, Collegium Tel Aviv, in Bach's "Mass in B Minor."

2007: Ryan Joseph Braun made his major league debut with the Milwaukee Brewers.

2008 Efram “Sneh announced that he would be leaving the Labor Party and creating a new party, Yisrael Hazaka.”

2008: The Wolf Prizes were awarded today at the Chagall Hall by the President of the State of Israel, Mr. Shimon Peres, in the presence of the Minister of Education and Chairperson of the Wolf Foundation Council, Prof. Yuli Tamir, and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Mr. Zeev Schleisner.

2008: Barry Levinson's tale of an embattled Hollywood producer entitled “What Just Happened?” closes this year's Festival de Cannes. The movie is based on his memoir about his experiences as a producer.

2008: The winner of the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award is announced in New Orleans at the 62nd Reuben Awards Ceremony.  Mad Magazine Veteran Al Jaffee is one nominees for this year's Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. The Reuben Award (a statuette designed by and named after the NCS' first president, Rube Goldberg is presented to the "Cartoonist of the Year." This is one more example of Jewish involvement with the comic and cartoon industry.

2008: The Cedar Rapids Jewish community watches with pride as Daniel DeClue takes part in the graduation ceremonies at Prairie High School.  A dedicated student of Judaica, a regular at Saturday morning services and an all-around great guy, he will be truly missed while he is away at college.

2009: As Americans gather to observe Memorial Day, the following we are reminded of the role that Jews have played in defense of this country from Asher Levy in New Amsterdam to Corporal Mark Evnin, the first Jewish casualty in Iraq.

2009: Israel is likely to face simultaneous missile strikes and terror attacks across the country in the event of a war breaking out, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said today. Vilnai made the comments during a session of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, in which he said the Home Front Command would simulate defending against such an assault as part of a large-scale drill to be held next week. "This isn't an imaginary situation. This isn't detached from reality and if there is a war, it's very likely that this is what will happen," said the deputy minister. The Israel Defense Forces drill, codenamed "Turning Point 3, has been billed as the largest exercise ever in Israel's history. IDF Brig. Gen. (res.) Ze'ev Zuk-Rom, the National Emergency Authority chief, also participated in the briefing. He said the drill will be based on lessons learned in different exercises held over the last two years, including ones learned during the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead, Israel's recent offensive against Hamas in Gaza. "In every future confrontation with one enemy or more the home front will suffer the brunt of the offense. The better prepared Israel is, the smaller the number of casualties and the lesser the damage to vital national infrastructure will be." committee chairman MK Tzachi Hanegbi said at the end of the meeting. "The committee is satisfied that the upcoming drill was planned in a professional and reliable way and that its contribution to saving lives is of supreme importance," Hanegbi concluded.

 

2009(2nd of Sivan, 5769): Amos Elon, author of “The Israelis: Founders and Sons,” passed away at the age of 82.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/amos-elon-writer-who-became-disillusioned-with-zionism-and-advocated-palestinian-self-determination-1691760.html

 

 

2010: "The Adventures of Hershele Ostropolyer," a new musical adaptation of the classic Yiddish play by Moyshe Gershenson, is scheduled to premiere tonight at The Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York City.

2009: Conference 2009 hosted by The Philadelphia Kehilla For Secular Jews came to an end.

2010: Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., officially reopened the Etan Patz case today.

2010: American Olympic figure skating champion Sarah Hughes “graduated from Yale and received a bachelor's degree in American studies with a concentration in U.S. politics and communities.”

 

2010: Elizabeth Holtzman announced that she had decided not to run for New York State Attorney General.

 

2010: The 49th Israel Festival, arguably one of Israel's most important cultural and artistic events, will commence with performances by Nuevo Tango, Ahavat Olamim, a tribute to Charlie Parker by Anchipolosvky, the King's Singers, and a dance performance entitled Vertigo, Birth of the Phoenix.  The three week festival centered in Jerusalem will feature music, dance, and theater from Israeli and international artists that hail from the U.S., Britain, Lithuania, Germany, Denmark, France, Iceland, India, Japan and Korea.  Events will occur in venues throughout the city.

 

2011: Jonathan D. Sarna is scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “That Obnoxious Order”: Ulysses S. Grant and the Jews at Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, SC.

 

2011: Joan Nathan is scheduled to sign copies of “Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous” at the National Archives following a presentation that “explores the rich tapestry of more than three centuries of Jewish cooking in America.

 

2011:The New England Archives of the American Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to present a lecture, “Among Mishpocha: At Home in the Boston Jewish Community” by Dr. Michael Feldberg in the Education Center of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston.

 

2011: Ken Spiro is scheduled to deliver a lecture on the accomplishments of the Jews throughout history entitled “What Would the World be Like without the Jews?” in Greenwich, CT.

 

2011: Six Israeli women from Beit Shemesh-Mateh Yehuda are scheduled be at the JCCNV to cook foods from different origins (Moroccan, Kurdish -Iraqi, Persian, Russian

and Yemenite) as part of “Taste of Israel: Ethnic Cooking at its Best.”

 

2011: Opening of “Jews, Slavery and the Civil War” a conference hosted by the College of Charleston.

 

2011: US President Barack Obama said today that a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was "more urgent than ever." And while expressing confidence that a two-state solution was achievable, the US president made it clear that seeking Palestinian statehood in the United Nations would be "a mistake." Speaking alongside UK Prime Minister David Cameron at a press conference in London after the two met privately, Obama stated that the Palestinians must understand "they have obligations as well."

 

2012: Gil Shohat is scheduled to conduct a Brahms Marathon at the Henry Crown Concert Hall as part of the Israel Festival.

 

2012: The Centre Daily Times reported that Graham Spanier “is suing” Penn State University in order to force them the school to turn over some e-mails related to the Jerry Sandusky scandal.  The paper also reported that Spanier “was listed as one of four officials at the center of the school’s faiure to respond to Sandusky’s predatory behavior.”  Spanier had been President of Penn State until he was forced to resign for his failure to act to react to reports of Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of young boys. (Spanier is Jewish, Sandusky is not)

 

2012: As Americans begin their Memorial Day Weekend by Cantor Larry Paul and musician Robyn Helzner are scheduled to lead a special Shabbat Eve service at the Historic 6^th& I Synagogue honoring the memory of the Jewish Fallen Heroes of Iraq and Afghanistan. National Museum of American Jewish Military History President, Norman Rosenshein, is scheduled to deliver the opening remarks. During the service, the names of the more than 40 fallen heroes will be read as a sign of solemn remembrance

 

2012: The confirmands and their families attended Shabbat evening services at Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati, Ohio.

 

2013: Zubin Mehta is scheduled to conduct the IPO at a gala concert in Israel featuring Itzhak Perlman.

 

2013: The Alexandria Kleztet is scheduled to perform at the Potomac Overlook Regional Park in Arlington, VA.

 

 2013: Syrian web activists loyal to the regime of Basher Assad launched a failed cyber-attack on Haifa's water supply system, a senior scientist and web expert revealed today.

http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Syrian-hackers-attempted-to-attack-Haifas-water-supply-314315

 

2013: Dozens of protesters demonstrated tonight in Ramat Gan around Energy and Water Minister Silvan Shalom's residence over the government's intention to approve the export of natural gas from Israel, Army Radio reported

http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Protest-around-ministers-home-over-gas-exports-314346

 

 

2014: Forty-six year old Carla Brui, the Italian born former first lady of France is scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv.

 

2014: The funeral for Don Levine, the creator of “GI Joe” is scheduled to be held at Temple Beth-El in Providence, RI

 

2014: French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve “condemened” yesterday’s atrack in front a synagogue in Créteil, a Paris suburb on what he describe as members of “the Jewish faith.” (Tmes of Israel)

 

2014: “Prosecutors today said they are looking for a lone suspect in the lethal weekend shooting spree at the Brussels Jewish Museum that left three people dead and one in critical condition. “ Two of the victims have been identified as an Israeli couple Mira and Emmanuel Riva.The other victims have only been idenitied as a murdered French woman and an injured Belgian.

 

2014; “AOL Inc said today it is starting a program in Israel to assist start-ups, and that it will invest at least $100,000 in as many as 10 projects at a time.”

 

2014: At Ben Gurion Airport President Shimon Peres “welcomed Pope Francis, saying "On behalf of the Jewish people and in the name of all the people of Israel, I welcome you with the age old words from the Book of Psalms: 'Welcome in the name of the Lord.' Welcome at the gates of Jerusalem." (As reported by Attila Somfalvi)

 

2014: In Durham, NC, Hundreds of people are scheduled “to witness the internment of a cake of ashes given to an American soldier by a Dachau survivor in 1945” at the Durham Hebrew Cemetery. (As reported by Rene Ghert-Zand)

http://www.timesofisrael.com/dachau-human-remains-come-to-rest-in-north-carolina/

 

 

2014: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and or of special interest to Jewish readers including Sons of Wichita by Daniel Schulman (reviewed by Nicholas Lemann) and in-depth interview of Leah Hager Cohen author of No Book but the World.

 

2014: In a front-page ad in today’s edition of Haaretz, “the New Association  For a Better Future”  “called on MKs” to support  88 year old former Defense Minister Moshe Arens for the Presidency of Israel.

 

2014: In Spain, residents of the town of Castrillo Matajudos (Castrillo Kill Jews) will vote on changing the town’s name to Mota Judios or Mota Judious, both of which means Mound of the Jews.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/spanish-town-of-kill-jews-to-vote-on-name-change/

 

2015(7^thof Sivan, 5775): Second Day Shavuot – Yizkor

2015(7^thof Sivan, 5775): Ninety year old Morris Wilkins passed away today. (As reported by Sam Roberts)

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/us/morris-wilkins-dies-at-90-lured-lovers-to-poconos.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

2015: Today, “judges sentenced former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to serve an additional eight months of prison over a graft conviction, tacking the sentence onto a separate six-year jail term the ex-politician is set to serve for another conviction.”

 

2015: This evening the Historic 6^th& I Synagogue in Washington, DC is scheduled to host Café Nite, an exploration of several learning options with MesorahDC.

 

2015: Memorial Day observed as Americans remember those who made the supreme sacrifice for the United States and her citizens.

https://kaplancenter.org/memorial-day-and-united-jewish-people

http://forward.com/news/135331/profiles-of-our-fallen/#ixzz1DeAMPaIh

http://www.algemeiner.com/2011/07/18/jews-in-the-military/

 

2016: Despite the issuance of a “severe travel advisor for Tunisia” by Israel’s Counter-Terroirsm Bureau, “many Jews who” come the former French colony are scheduled to travel, as they do “each yearto the island of Djerba in the country’s south, the historic home of an ancient community of Jewish priestly families, to celebrate the Lag B’Omer holiday, which” begins this evening.

 

2016: The Skirball Center is scheduled to present Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg speaking on “Lech Lecha: Becoming Abraham,”an examination of “Abraham’s odyssey through a combination of psychoanalysis, rabbinic commentary, art history and other disciplines…”

 

2016: The Leo Baeck Institute and the American Society for Jewish Music are scheduled to present “An Erwin Schulhoff Retrospective with the Downtown Chamber Players” who will perform compositions of the Czechoslovakian composer and pianist who died in 1942 in the Wurzburg concentration camp in Bavaria.

2017(29^th of Iyar, 5777): Ninety-three year old Eliezer David Jaffe “the founder and president of The Israel Free Loan Association and a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem” passed away today.

https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/news/local_news/former-clevelander-eliezer-jaffe-israel-free-loan-assn-founder-dies/article_b060949c-4170-11e7-aea7-731b9da8c1f6.html

 

2017: “The premiere of Nania” and a performance of “Tech It Away” is scheduled to take place tonight at “Catamona Rave, a one-night party at Beit Alliance” in Jerusalem.

2017: “The annual Shavuot Festival in White” is scheduled to begin today.

2017: “A Night of Philosophy” is scheduled to “be held at several locations throughout Tel Aviv, including Beit Alma and the Nachum Gutman Museum.”

2017: The USHMM is scheduled to host a talk by Holocaust survivor Marcel Drimer as part of its “Fist Person Series.”

2017: ELI Talks is scheduled to host presentations by Andrew Belifnfante, Director of Public Programs at Mechon Hadar, Amy Reichert and singer and songwriter Neshama Carlebach.

2018: JW3 is scheduled to host a pre-Shabbat screening of “Entebbe” this afternoon in London.

2018: Professor Dr. Robert Harris of JTS is scheduled to teach present the final session of “Medieval Jewish Commentaries of the Hebrew Bible.”

2018: The 14^th Street Y is scheduled to present a performance of “The Labor of Life” by Hanoch Levin and directed by Ronit Muszka Tblit

2018: In Iowa, as part of the Jewish Federation of the Quad Cities Jewish Culture Series Holocaust Survivor Eva Schloss a step-sister of Anne Frank, and creator of the exhibit "Paintings Created in Hiding by Erich and Heinz Geiringer" which will be permanently housed at the Danville Station Museum in Danville, Iowa” is scheduled to speak this evening at the Tri-City Jewish Center in Rock Island, Illinois.

2019(20^th of Iyar, 5779): Parashat Behar and Chapter Four of Pirke Avot; for more see http://downhomedavartorah.blogspot.com/

2019: In Washington, DC, the Avalon Theatre is scheduled to host a screening of Aviv Kempner’s “The Spy Behind Home Plate.”

2019: The Illinois Holocaust Museum is scheduled to host a presentation by Leonie Bergman as part of their Survivor Speaker series.

2019: On Shabbat, Israelis prepared to deal with the third day of massive wildfires, Prime Minister is reported to have thanked the international community for their response, including two helicopters sent by Egypt to fight the conflagration

2020: The Virtual Sonoma County JCC Israeli Film Festival is scheduled to host a screening of “Turn Left at the End of the World,” a 2004 drama about culture clashes between Indian and Moroccan Jews who have immigrated to Israel and the love between two girls on opposite sides

2020: Memorial Day is scheduled to be observed in the United States since the start of the pandemic

https://kaplancenter.org/memorial-day-and-united-jewish-people

http://forward.com/news/135331/profiles-of-our-fallen/#ixzz1DeAMPaIh

http://www.algemeiner.com/2011/07/18/jews-in-the-military/

2020: The History Channel is scheduled to host the first in a three-part miniseries about U.S. Grant, infamous for Order Number 11 but also known for his positive relationship with the Jewish community that led to its support for him at the ballot box and included his attendance at the dedication of Adas Israel to which he made a contribution.

2020: Aish is schedule to host a “special live class with Rabbi Benjamin Blech” who will speak on “How the Torah Changed the World,” “a 40-minute exploration on the 10 commandments and personal fulfillment.

2020: As they arise this morning, Israelis will be confronting the realities of the Pandemic and the reality of Prime Minister standing on trial for corruption.

2020: The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience is scheduled to present a Webinar on “Value and Consequences in the Halakhic Process: A Sephardi Perspective” with Professor Zvi Zohar.

 

This Day, May 26, In Jewish History by Mitchell A and Deb Levin Z"L

May 25, 2020, 6:29 pm

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May 26

1096(1st of Sivan): The Crusaders massacred the Jews of Neuss, Germany

1135:  Alfonso VII of León and Castile was crowned in the Cathedral of Leon as Imperator totius Hispaniae, "Emperor of all of Spain". At the start of his reign he curtailed “the rights and liberties which his father had granted the Jews. He ordered that neither a Jew nor a convert might exercise legal authority over Christians, and he held the Jews responsible for the collection of the royal taxes.” After a few years, he adopted a more positive policy towards his Jewish subject.  He restored the rights granted by his father and then granted new ones including the granting of a special fuero (charter) in 1136 that permitted the Jews of Guadalajara to outfit themselves like the Christian Knights of his kingdom. Judah ben Joseph ibn Ezra (Nasi) was one of the King’s most influential advisors.  After the conquest of Calatrava in 1147, the king placed Judah in command of the fortress, later making him his court chamberlain. The king held Judah ben Joseph stood in such high esteem that he granted Judah’s request to let the Jews who had fled from the Almohades to settle in Toledo.  The reigns of Alfonso and his father are proof that Jews prospered, and suffered, under both Catholic and Moslem rule, depending upon the ruler and the time period.

1171: The first ritual murder accusation in Europe occurred in Blois, France. Fifty-one Jews were burned, seventeen of them women. As they were burning, they chanted the hymn 'Aleinu' (composed in Talmudic times). Rabbenu Tam declared a day of fasting and prayer in England, France and the Rhineland. One of those killed was Pulcinella (Puncelina), a favorite of Count Theobald, who tried to use her position to convince the count to release the Jews. The count decided to expel all the Jews left in his county but "allowed" himself to be persuaded to change his mind by a payment of 2000 pounds.

1232: Pope Gregory IX began the Inquisition in Aragon

1352: After Jewish leaders promised the City Council in Nuremberg that if they were allowed to return to the city as citizens, “they would remit all debts the citizens owed them, would sell all houses held in pawn; agreed to settle only where the citizens permitted, asking merely to be protected against the nobility” an imperial edict was issued permitting the Jews to settle in the city.

1512: Bayezid II, the Ottoman Sultan who welcomed the Jews to his realm after the expulsion from Spain passed away. He not only sent a fleet under the command of Admiral Kemal Reis to evacuate the Jews, he sent a firman to all provinces telling the leaders to welcome the Jews.  When you consider the large swath of territory he controlled (including much of southeastern Europe) this was quite gift. His Jewish subjects included Mordecai Comtino, Solomon ben Elijah Sharbit ha-Zahab, Shabbbethai ben Malkiel Cohen and poet Menahem Tamar.

1552: Sixty-four year old “Christian Hebraist” Sebastian Münster, “a disciple of Elias Levita “who edited the Hebrew Bible accompanied by a Latin translated” and who “in 1537 published a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew which he had obtained from Spanish Jews he had converted” passed away today.

1566: Birthdate of Sultan Mehmed III. During the reign of Sultan Mehmed III, Gabriel Buonaventura was appointed ambassador and established contacts with Spain. Solomon Eskenazi, Doctor Benveniste and Doctor Moshe Korina held positions at the palace. In 1597 Solomon Abenyaes (Marrano Name: Alvaro Mendez) prepared a treaty that was intended to ally the Ottoman Empire with England in the fight against king Philip of Spain.

1615(27^thof Iyar): Abraham Samuel Bacharach, a leading Rabbi in Worms, passed away. Born in the Grand Duchy of Hesse in 1575, he had married Eva Bacharach, the daughter of Isaac ben Simson ha-Kohen and the granddaughter of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel.  She was the mother of Rabbi Moses Samson Bacharach and the grandmother of Rabbi Yair Bacharach, author of “Hawwot Yair.”

1648: As the Cossack uprising continued to gain momentum a force of Cossacks and Crimean Tatars attacked and defeated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth forces at the Battle of Korsun. The defeat of the Polish-Lithuanian forces followed the pattern seen at the battle at Zhovti Vody. The Poles retreated and the Cossacks continued moving westward gaining support as they went The slaughter of the Jews was about to begin in earnest.

1697(16^thof Sivan, 5457): The British colony of South Carolina issued naturalization papers to Simon Valentine.

1712: The leaders of the Dutch Jewish community decided to dismiss Tzvi Hirsch ben Yaakov Ashkenazi as the Chief Rabbi of the Ashkenazi congregation of Amsterdam at the end of the three year term described in the letter of appointment he had been given in January of 1710. Ashkenazi vowed to fight the dismissal which apparently had been orchestrated by Aaron Polak Gokkes.

1724: Beginning of the papacy of Benedict XIII, the pope who issued “Emanavit nuper,” a Papal Bull, dealing with “the necessary conditions for imposing Baptism on a Jew.”

1744(15^thof Sivan, 5504): Moses Abraham passed away today after he which he was buried at the “Hoxton Old Jewish Burial Ground” where the tombstone shows the Hebrew calendar date.

1751(2^ndof Sivan, 5511): Lob Minden ben Moses the chazzan at Minden-on-the Weser who was the author of Shire Yehuda, a collection of “Hebrew songs with Germans translations” passed away today.

1753: In Zhitomir, the castle court under the influence of Bishop Solik of Kiev sentenced 33 Jews to death for the "ritual murder" of a Christian child. The entire evidence was based on the "confessions" of the innkeeper and his wife which had been made after being tortured, although they later retracted their statements. Thirteen of them were released upon converting. Many others, including the local Rabbi, were quartered alive. One couple converted on the spot and was granted a beheading.

1754(5^thof Sivan, 5514): Erev Shavuot

1757(7th of Sivan): Rabbi Jacob Daniel of Ferrara author of “Eden Arukh” passed away.

1775(26th of Iyar, 5535): Veitel-Heine Ephraim, the husband of Elke Fraenkel who had passed away in 1769, the “Jeweler to the Prussian Court and Mint Master under the Prussian Kings Frederick William I and Frederick the Great” passed away today in Berlin

1779: In London, Daniel Cohen D'Azevedo, the son of Haham Moses Cohen d'Azevedo and Sara de Haham Moses Cohen D'Azevedo married Ester Rodriques Cohen D'Azevedo

1792(5^thof Sivan, 5552): Parashat Bamidbar ; erev Shavuot is celebrated as George Washington was finishing his first term as the first President of the United States.

1796(18^thof Iyar, 5556): Lag B’Omer is celebrated as Jefferson and Adams vie to become the successor to George Washington.

1799: Friedrich Wilhelm Grantzow, a tailor's apprentice in Berlin and great-grandfather of Oswald Spangler “married a Jewish woman named Bräunchen Moses whose parents, Abraham and Reile Moses, were both deceased by that time and who was baptized shortly before the wedding ceremony”

1820: Birthdate of Dr. Samuel Kristeller, the native of Posen who graduated from the University of Berlin in 1844.

1822(6^thof Sivan, 5582): Shavuot is observed Rothschild and others work to deal with “the deploarable Frankfort Jewish matter.

1841(6^thof Sivan, 5601): Shavuot

1847: Hyam Hyams married Amelia Abrahams at the Great Synagogue in London.

1848: As part of its policy to force the Jews to assimilate, the Russian government issued a decree providing for the establishment of a rabbinical committee to be attached to the Ministry of Interior who “was one of the founders of the Medical and Gynecological Society of Berlin.”

1850: In Cleveland, Ohio, founding of Tifereth Israel, a reform congregation created after Rabbi Isidor Kalisch and 47 families left Anshe Chesed, the city’s orthodox synagogue and whose most famous leader was Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver who played a major role in gain U.S. support for the creation of Israel.

1853: George Joel Marks married Elizabeth Samuels at the Hambro Synagogue.

1854: Birthdate of Samuel Morais Hyneman a Philadelphia born lawyer who “was a member of the board of managers of Mikve Israel congregation, a member of the board of trustees the  Jewish Theological Seminary at New York, and of the board of trustees of Gratz College, Philadelphia. He also served as president of the Young Men's Hebrew Association in Philadelphia, and served as an officer of The Hebrew Education Society in Philadelphia

1858: Eighty-one year old Sarah Levy, the wife of Jonas Levy was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1860(5^th of Sivan, 5620): Parashat Bamidbar: erev Shavuot observed at a time when southern firebrands are plotting to make secession a reality if the results of the presidential election do not put an end to talk of freeing the slaves.

1861: In Karlsruhe, Germany, “Fanny and Josef Jesses Weil” gave birth to Ferdinand Weil, the “husband of Hella Weil.”

1863: Rebecca Simon, the wife of Isaac Simon, was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1865(1st of Sivan, 5625): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1867: In Hoboken, NJ, Edward Stieglitz and the former Hedwig Ann Werner gave birth to Leopold Stieglitz who “was attracted to medicine” and his twin brother chemist Julius Stieglitz who were the younger brothers of photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/stieglitz-julius.pdf

1868: Daniel Angel, the husband of Rachel Angel and the father of Morris, Jane, Josephine, Philip and Edward Angel was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1869: Mark and Priscilla Collins were married today at Maiden Lane Synagogue.

1869: Boston University is chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. BU was founded by three Methodist businessmen who had been active in the abolitionist movement. “From the day of its opening, Boston University has admitted students of both sexes and every race and religion.”  According to one source, BU has the second largest enrollment (by percentage) of any private university in the United States.  According to the Hillel Foundation, which has a chapter on campus, three thousand of the school’s twenty thousand undergrads are Jewish and five hundred of the ten thousand grad students are Jewish. The school offers approximately thirty Jewish studies courses.  The school offers both a major and a minor in Jewish Studies.

1871(6th of Sivan, 5631): First Day of Shavuot

1871: “The Pentecost Festival” published today gives an amazingly detailed description of the Jewish festival of Shavuot.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9C02E5DA173AE63BBC4E51DFB366838A669FDE

1871: The New York Times reported that “the feast of Pentecost, in Jewish parlance,” Shavuot, “or, as the German Jews call it” Shavuos, “began last evening and will be observed in all Jewish houses of prayer today.

1877: In New York City, David and Sarah Brickner gave birth Bienvenida Solis Davis, the wife of Goodman Richard Davis and the mother of Walter Alan Davis and Goodman Richard Davis, Jr.

1874: Judge P.J. Joachimsen presided over the annual meeting of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites which was being held tonight at New York’s Temple Shaaray Tefillah. The Executive Committee recommended sending funds to aid the Jews of Romania and to support an agricultural school in Jaffa. (The funds for Romania reflected the concern of western Jewry for the worsening conditions of their co-religionists in that newly independent eastern European country.  Funding for the school in Jaffa is one of the earliest examples of American Jewish support for what became the Zionist movement).

1875: In Mobile, AL Herman and Mollie Kaufman  gave birth to Lottye Kaufman who became Lotty Loeb when she married Leopold Loeb.

1876: It was reported today that at a recently adjourned meeting of delegates representing Hebrew congregations from various U.S. cities the possibility was discussed of establishing a seminary that would teach Jewish theology and the Hebrew language while preparing students to become Rabbis.

1878(23^rdof Iyar, 5638): One day before his 67^th birthday Dutch jurist Abraham de Pinto who had been president of the Sephardic congregation passed away at the Hague

1881(27th of Iyar, 5641): Jakob Bernays a German philologist and philosophical writer passed away. The native of Hamburg German was born in 1824. His father, Isaac Bernays the first orthodox German rabbi to preach in the vernacular (German) his brother, Michael Bernays, was also a distinguished scholar. “Jakob studied from 1844 to 1848 at the University of Bonn, whose philological school, under Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker and Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl was the best in Germany. In 1853 he accepted the chair of classical philology at the newly founded Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, where he formed a close friendship with Theodor Mommsen. In 1866, when Ritschl left Bonn for Leipzig, Bernays returned to his old university as extraordinary professor and chief librarian. He remained at Bonn until his death.”

1881: Birthdate of Sophie Munk, who gained fame as Austrian-American therapist and write Sophie Lazarsfeld, the wife of attorney Robert Lazarsfeld and the mother of Paul Lazarsfeld.

1885: Australian political leader Simeon Phillips, the “son of Solomon Phillips and Caroline Solomon” and his wife Rosetta gave birth to Maurice Lewis Phillips today

1886: Birthdate of Asa Yoelson, better known as Al Jolson.  Jolson's father was a cantor at B'nai Israel Synagogue at Fifth and Eye Street in Washington, D.C.  Instead of following in his father's footsteps, Jolson ran away to New York where he began his career in show business.  His greatest claim to fame was his starring role in The Jazz Singer, the first talking motion picture.  Although Jolson never served in the Army (he was turned down when he tried to enlist during the Spanish American War for being too young) Jolson was an active participant in Bond Drives during subsequent wars.  He also entertained the troops during World War I and Korea.  In fact, he died after a trip to Korea in 1950. 

1889: Birthdate of Warsaw native Jacques Maliniac, the American plastic surgeon..

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/03/06/archives/jacques-maliniac-a-plastic-surgeon.html

1890(7^thof Sivan, 5650): Second Day of Shavuot

1890: Founding of the Samuel Kristeller Fund which aimed “to assist young Jews who wish to learn a trade and to help Jewish mechanics” trying to establish themselves. It was named for the Berlin physician who “was a member of the executive committee also of the Society for Propagation of Handicrafts Among the Jews

1890: In New York City, “Dr. Abram Brothers, a well-known surgeon who was also a writer, an actor, and a violinist” and Minnie Epstein Brothers gave birth to Viola Brothers who gained fame as writer Viola Brothers Shore.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/Shore-Viola-Brothers

1890(7^thof Sivan, 5650): Hirschel Eliazer Kann, one of the co-founders of  the Dutch banking house Lissa & Kann passed away today.

1890: “New Publications” published today included a detailed review of Jeremiah and His Times by Dr. T.K. Chenye a Professor at Oxford.  He divided his work into two parts: “Judah’s Tragedy Down to the Death of Josiah” and “The Close of Judah’s Tragedy”

1890: It was reported today that Rabbi Kaufman Kohler will be officiating at the upcoming confirmation services for the students at the Hebrew Free School.

1890: At a dinner held this evening by the Grand Army of the Republic in Lowell, MA, General Benjamin Butler delivered a speech in which he claimed that during the Civil War the soldiers had been paid “in depreciated currency while Jew bankers were paid in gold with interest.” During the Civil War, Lincoln had tolerated Butler as a general because he needed his political support.  He was a politician, not a general as could be seen by his inept performance in the field.

1891: Birthdate of Washingtonian Dr. Harry E. Isaacs, “founder of the American Jewish Physicians Committee, an affiliate of the American Friends of the Hebrew University and the former Chief of Surgery at Beth El Hospital>

1891: In Budapest, “Mária (née Zilahy) and János Lukács, an advertising executive” gave birth to Pál Lukács” who gained fame as Paul Lukas who an Oscar for Best Actor for his role in WW II film “Watch on the Rhine.”

1891: “Russia Home Policy” published today described the various aspects of the Czar’s anti-Semitic policies.  Police are being sent throughout St. Petersburg with orders to arrest an Jews they find and ship them back to the Pale. Conditions are so bad in Kiev that even Jews who have a legal right to live there are allowing themselves to be expelled.  The governor of Kiev has said “I will make Kiev too hot for the whole brood of rascals, rights or no rights.”

1892: Opposition was expressed today in the House of Representatives to an appropriation for the upcoming World’s Fair since exhibits would be open on Sunday in violation of the Christian Sabbath.  No such concern was expressed for being open on Saturday.

1892: “Rome and the Hebrews” published today described the recent meeting that Jesse Seligman and Dr. O’Connell rector of the American College had with Cardinal Rampolla, Papal Secretary of State.  In response to a request for protection of the Jews by the Catholic Church, Rampolla said that “the Popes…had always been the protectors of the Jews.”  (Considering the behavior of the Popes following the revolts of 1848, this statement can best be described as, at best, “disingenuous”

1893: According to Israel Schwartz, a 13 year old boy who has been living at the Ladies’ Deborah Nursery for the last 9 years, he made up his mind to run away after having been called into Superintendent Engel’s office where he was beaten after having refused to write to his father and tell him about his “bad conduct” which ad consisted of talking to other boys in class which is against the rules.

1893: “Paulus Meyer Arrested” published today described the arrest of Paulus Meyer a Jewish convert and ex-Russian Talmudist “who asserted that he was an eye witness to a terrible massacre of Jews in Russia.  He was arrested at the request of the German Supreme Tribunal at Leipzig.

1893: Birthdate of Viennese native and movie producer Isadore Goldsmith, who like so many of his generation fled the Nazis living first in Britain and then the United States where he met his wife, novelist and fellow screenwriter Vera Caspary.

1894: Emanuel Lasker became a World Champion chess player.  Born in Germany, Lasker’s father was a cantor who feared that his son’s love of chess would take him away from his studies.  Lasker won the championship when he was 26 which made him the youngest champion of his time.

1894: Theodore Seligman who is one of the executors of the will of his father, the late Jesse Seligman, filed “a statement of the condition of the estate” and “an itemized list of the bequests to the family and charitable societies in the Surrogate’s Office.

1894: Birthdate of Bessarabia native and University of Pennsylvania graduate Harry Viteles who worked with Joint Distribution Committee before moving to Palestine to serve as bank general manager while serving with the United Hebrew Charities of Philadelphia.

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/03/03/archives/harry-vitele-77-in-coop-movement.html

1894: In Hermanville, Mississippi, “Solomon W. and Caroline S. (Herman Bodenheim) gave birth to thrice married poet and author Maxwell Bodenhiem who “co-founded The Chicago Literary Times” with another Jewish author and later Zionist activist Ben Hecht.

https://poets.org/poet/maxwell-bodenheim

1895: Three days after she had passed away, 71 year old Matilda Jacobs, the daughter of John and Frances Nathan and the wife of Myer Jacobs was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”

1895: Esther Walenstein delivered the opening remarks at the dedication of Hebrew Infant Asylum on Mott Avenue and 149^th Street in the Bronx after which the board presented with a portrait of herself which she could see every day for the next 8 years during which ran the institution.

1895: “In The World Of Art” published today acknowledgement is made of the generosity of the men who arranged the East Side Art Exhibition in the auditorium of the Hebrew Institute which attracted a large throng of the less fortunate for whom this was the first opportunity to see such works.

1895: Birthdate of Professor Salo Wittmayer Baron, the author of a sweeping multivolume history of the Jews who “was undoubtedly the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century…” (As reported by Peter Steinfels)

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/26/obituaries/salo-w-baron-94-scholar-of-jewish-history-dies.html?scp=2&sq=Salo+Wittmayer+Baron&st=cse&pagewanted=print

1895: Rabbi Joseph Silverman is scheduled to deliver the opening prayer at today’s ceremony dedicating the new Hebrew Infant Asylum. Following remarks by New York City Mayor Strong, Rabbi Kaufman Kohler and N.S. Rosenau will address the attendees. Cecilia Goldsmith is among those responsible for providing refreshments at the end of the event.

1896: Eben Israel Cemetery, the Jewish Cemetery in Cedar Rapids that served both the Orthodox Beth Jacob and Reform Temple Judah congregations opened.  Max Oshman was one of the founders of the cemetery which is still in use at the start of the 21^st century.

1896: Nicholas II becomes Tsar of Russia.  Nicholas was the last of the Tsars.  He was a weak man who lacked the skill to rule.  He was also totally out of touch with what was going on in his country.  The fact that he had three rabbis at his coronation did not mean that his views about Jews were any different from those of his predecessors.  There were Pogroms both before and after the first uprising against the Tsar in 1905.  The Tsar spent a great deal of money on anti-Semitic literature including mass distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  He also supported the trumped up charges in the Bellis Case, the scandalous trumped charges in one of the last “Ritual Murder” of the 20^th century.  During his reign, the Tsar declared,” During my reign Jews in Russia will not enjoy equal rights.”  

1898: The Chicago Jewish Courier opened a drive to help defray the expenses of a newly formed Jewish military organization that is volunteering to serve in an Illinois Regiment that will probably join the fight against Spain.

1898: During the Spanish American War Sergeant George M. Klein and Corporal Isaac Bradfield of Company A of the 1^st Mississippi Volunteer Infantry were among those mustered into federal service in Jackson, Mississippi.

1898: Three days after he had passed away, 70 year old Joel Woolf, the son of Isaac and Jane Woolf and the husband of Helen Solomons was buried today in London at the “Plashet Jewish Cemetery.”

1899: The Hebrew Union Veterans’ Association held its annual memorial service tonight at Temple Emanu-El.  The event, which was well attended, began with the veterans marching en masse to house of worship by a drum and bugle corps.

1899: A list published today of the institutions receiving aid from the state of New York and the amount they are getting included: Sanitarium for Hebrew Children - $5,080; Hebrew Benevolent Society - $100,000; Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society - $99,500;

1899: Isaac Wallach, the President of the Mt. Sinai Hospital Association said today that “the land on which the hospital will be built consists of thirty city lots situated between one Hundred and One Hundred and First Streets and Madison and Fifth Avenues” which cost about $400,000 and that buildings will cost one million dollars of which $750,000 “has already been subscribed.”

1899: As of today the officers of the Judaens are Dr. Henry M. Leipziger, President; Professor Gottheil, Vice President; Philip Cowen, Secretary; Albert Ulmann, Treasurer; and Samuel Greenbaum, Samson Lachman and Cyrus L. Sulzberger, Directors.

1900: Samuel Elfenbein, the “son of Moses and Rosa Elfenbein” and Celia Elfenbein gave birth today to Maurice Elfenbein.

1901(8^thof Sivan, 5661): Eighty year old Ludwig Lewysohn, the native of Posen who served as the rabbi Frankfort-on-Oder, Worms and Stockholm passed away today in the Swedish city.

1902: The Nożyk Synagogue which “would be the only surviving prewar Jewish house of prayer in Warsaw” “was officially opened to the public” today.

1902: After having graduated from NYU Law School in 1901, future Congressman Isaac Siegel, “was admitted to the bar” today.

1902: “Russia’s Treatment of American Jews” published today described a speech Unitarian minister Thomas R. Slicer  in which he declared that he “would not have been a Christian but for the teachings of the Hebrews” and that while “the Russians are nominally Christians with a strong prejudice against the Jews and it is impossible to reason against prejudice.”

1903: Herzl meets the Portuguese ambassador in Vienna to ask for a territory habitable and cultivable by Europeans.

1903: In Newport News, VA, Charles Friedlander and Blanche Peyser gave birth to Mark Peyser Friedlander who would be buried in Washington, D.C’s Hebrew Cemetery.

1905(21st of Iyar, 5665): French banker Mayer Alphonse de Rothschild passed away.  Born in 1827, Alphonse was the son of James, the founder of the French branch of the House of Rothschild.  He succeeded his father just before the Franco-Prussian War.  After the French were defeated, Alphonse arranged the financing to pay for the indemnity the Germans extracted from the French as part of the peace settlement.  The loan was a key to the re-emergence of France as a major European power.  Rothschild also served as head of the French Jewish Community and was famed for his generous philanthropy.  As a patron of the arts, he donated major works of art to over two hundred museums and galleries throughout France.

1905: A pogrom broke out in Minsk, Russia.

1908: At Masjid-al-Salaman in southwest Persia (Iran), the first major commercial oil strike in the Middle East is made. The rights to the resource are quickly acquired by the United Kingdom.  The connection between the oil strike the quest to establish a Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel is too obvious to have to explain.

1909(6^thof Sivan, 5669): Shavuot

1909: Birthdate of Richard Maibum, the New York City native, who came to the University of Iowa in 1930 where he studied in the Speech and Dramatic Arts Department, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1931, earning a Master’s in 1931 and who gained fame “for his screenplay adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/09/obituaries/richard-maibaum-screenwriter-for-james-bond-films-dies-at-81.html

1910: Birthdate of Adolph Ignatievich Rosner, the native of Berlin who gained fame as jazz musician Eddie Rosner.

http://us5.campaign-archive1.com/?u=ba13d322ff1efbe114aeb6779&id=727854ab29&e=632ced0f1f

1910: Political trailblazer Belle Moskowitz wins passage of bill regulating New York dance halls

1911: In the Bronx, Gittle “Gussie” Weinstein and Yithak Asher “Isaac” Ephron gave birth to Henry Ephron.  While he was a noted playwright , screenwriter and producer, his greatest claim to may be that he was the father of four daughter – Nora, Dilia, Hallie and Amy – who became famous writers in their own right.

1911: In Wilkes-Barre, PA, Jacob and Bessie Kushner gave birth to Aid Kushner, the Oak Park, Michigan, resident “who for many years…constructed models of famous synagogues from around the world including the state of Michigan as well as a model of President Truman’s home in Independence and an early British fort built at Detroit before it became part of the United States.

1912: The annual meeting of the Jewish Publication Society of America was held this evening at Keneseth Israel Temple in Philadelphia, PA.  Edwin Wolfe, the president of the society, called the meeting to order.  Oscar Solomon was the only member from Cedar Rapids, IA.

1913: The annual meeting of the Home for Jewish Friendless and Working Girls of which Jennie Mandel is the secretary is scheduled to take place this evening at the Standard Club.

1914: Anglo-Jewish art dealer said today “that dispatches from New York were his first intimation that a syndicate of dealers heady by Duveens would hold a sale of the Morgan art treasures in London.”  He said that in his opinion, “the story is false.”

1915: Herbert Samuel, 1^st Viscount Samuel, began serving as Postmaster-General under Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith.

1915: It was reported today that former Governor Richard Yates was among the thousands of people who had attended a mass meeting in Springfield, Illinois where speeches were delivered calling for clemency for Leo M. Frank.

1915: Former Congressman W. M. Howard who is in charge of Leo Frank’s appeal to the State Prison Commission announced today that Leo Frank’s wife, who was not allowed to testify at his trial under Georgia law, will submit an affidavit at the hearing and that Frank himself appear in person.

1915: In Boston, Mayor James M. Curley, ex-Governor Eugene N. Foss, Dr. John W. Coughlin, a member of the Democratic National Committee and Dr. Samuel Goodman of Atlanta were among the speakers at tonight’s meeting in Faneuil Hall protesting against the execution of Leo M. Frank.

1915: Today, the American Jewish Relief Committee of New York received word from Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan that “American Ambassador at Constantinople cables as follows” There are approximately 1,500 Jews from Gallipolis and Dardanelles who have been obliged to leave their homes.  They are quartered at Pauderma, Rodosto and Constantinople and they are in absolute want.  The Grand Rabbi and committee beg for prompt assistance for them and for indigent Jews in Constantinople who number about 5,000.”

1915: The text of a letter from “the Board of Governors, the Georgia Society of the State of New York, Inc., an association in New York City whose membership is composed exclusively of Georgians, the descendants of Georgians and person who have been educated in Georgia or have married a Georgian” to the Prison Commission of Georgia calling for the commutation to Leo M. Frank’s sentence, was published today.

1915: “Louis Marshall, President of the American Jewish Committee received a letter from the State Department in regard to the numerous inquiries from men in this country as to the unfortunate condition of their wives and children who were caught in Galicia when the war broke out and have been unable to come to this country.”

1916: The Zion Mule Corps was disbanded after the end of the Gallipoli Campaign.  The disbanding of this Jewish group did not represent a failure.  The British were impressed with the bravery and diligence of the Jews and this led to the formation of a Jewish combat force in the British Army later in World War I.  This was one more of the halting steps that would lead to the creation of the modern IDF.

1916: It was reported today that Adjutant General Louis Stotesbury who opened a public investigation in charges made by Maurice Simmons, Chairman of the Kehillah Committee for the Protection of the Good Name of Immigrant Peoples, that anti-Semitism exists in the New York National” said that now is the time for “any evidence of the exclusion of any man physical and morally qualified for sever in the National Guard on account his religious belief” to be presented.

1916(Iyar 23): Judah Leib Kantor, editor of Ha-Yom, passed away.

1917(5^thof Sivan, 5677): Parashat Bamidbar; erev Shavuot

1917: “Shabuoth Festival Today” provides a secular newspapers description of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9401EFD8123AE433A25755C2A9639C946696D6CF

1917: “A Word About Our Schools” published today provides a sketch of various  Jewish institutions of higher education including Hebrew Union College, Jewish Theological Seminary, The Rabbinical College of America, The Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning and The Gratz College

1917: It was reported today that Tulane University has a total enrollment of 2,708 students of whom 54 or 2% are Jewish.

1918: The Georgian Republic declared its independence. With independence came freedom of speech, press, and organization, which improved the economic situation of the Jews of Georgia.

1918: Following the Russian Revolution, “the Georgian Republic declared its independence” today which led to “improved economic conditions for the Jews of Georgia” – a situation that would come to an end when the Red Army invaded Georgia in 1921 “prompting a mass exodus” of between 1,500 and 2,000 Georgian Jews.

1918: The New York Chapter of Hadassah which “is preparing to a send a complete medical unit to Palestine” sent out a public appeal for an additional $1,000 to pay for a truck which is the only piece of equipment that has not been acquired.

1918: Henry Morgenthau, the former Ambassador to Turkey; “Dr. Boris Bogen of the Joint Distribution Committee of the Jewish War Relief Funds; Jacob Billikopf, Executive Chairman of the American Jewish Relief Fund and Rabbi Nathan Krass were the featured speakers this “afternoon at a luncheon at the Robert Treat Hotel in Newark, NJ,” “where 150 prominent Jews from all parts of New Jersey” gathered to express their support for the 1918 campaign that was raising “funds for the relief of Jews in the war-stricken countries of Europe.”

1919: The Conference of Jewish Women’s Organizations is scheduled to meet this afternoon at the Congress Hotel in Chicago.

1919: Birthdate of New York native and WW II veteran Donald Samuel, an investment company exctuive and a trustee of the Jewish Family and Children Services.

1920: Dr. H. Pereira Mendes resigns as Rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York after 43 years.

1920: Birthdate of Jan Wiener, a Czech Jew who fought in the British air force during World War II after fleeing Nazis in Germany and Czechoslovakia.

1920(9^thof Sivan, 5680): Julius J. Lyons, the son of the late Rabbi Jacques J Lyons, who had served as Director and legal counsel to the State Bank passed away at San Diego, CA.  He was born in New York in 1843 and was active in several Jewish institutions including the Montefiore Home, Mount Sinai Hospital and the Hebrew Technical Institute.  He had gone to California a year ago to stay at the ranch of his son Edwin where he had hoped to regain his health.

1921(18th of Iyar, 5681): Lag B'Omer

1921: In what was then Breslau, Germany, overalls manufacturer Fritz Laqueur and “homemaker Elsa (Berliner) Laqueer gave birth to Walter Ze'ev Laqueur the American historian who escaped his native Prussia for Palestine but whose parents were trapped and died in the Holocaust. (As reported by Sam Roberts)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/obituaries/walter-laqueur-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries

1923(11^thof Sivan, 5683): Dr. Hugh L. Wintner, the native of Kortvelyek, Hungary who came to the United States in 1863 and “officiated at various congregations in the western and southern United States” before coming to “Brooklyn in 1878 to serve as the Rabbi at Temple Beth Ehlohim,” “the oldest synagogue in Brooklyn which celebrated its golden jubilee in 1901,” passed away today.

1924(22nd of Iyar, 5684): Eighty-four year old Rosa Bloom, the daughter of Lob and Bina Oppenhimer and husband of Simon Marx and Isidor Bloom passed away in New York City.

1924: The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the National Origins Act, and Asian Exclusion Act which was “vigorously opposed” by Congressman Emanuel Cellar and severely limited the number of Jews who could enter the United States was enacted today.

1925: In Bayonne, NJ, Isaac and Lillian Goodman Cohen gave birth to Robert B. Cohen whose chain of Hudson News shops at airports, bus terminals and railroad stations across the country offered untold numbers of people a respite from the tedium of travel…(As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

1925: The Camden, NJ, Section of the Council of Jewish under the leadership of Mrs. Philip Wendkos held a banquet this even in the Beth-El auditorium which will mark the end of the organization’s business year.

1926: “Ten students received their degrees tonight at the first graduation exercises of the Jewish Institute of Religion founded four years ago by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise as the only liberal Jewish theological seminary in New York.”  Honorary degrees were conferred on Calude G. Montefiore, nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore and Chaim Nachman Bialik.

1926: Shalom Schwarzbard traveled from the Ukraine to Paris to avenge his parents' death at the hands of S. V. Petlura.  He was responsible for the Ukrainian anti-Jewish riots of 1919-1920. After days of stalking, Shalom confronted Petlura, shot him and surrendered to the police. He was acquitted by the court of Assizes on all charges. The court may have been influenced by the fact that S.V. Petlura, and his followers were responsible for 493 pogroms in which 50,000 Jews lost their lives.

1928(7^thof Sivan, 5688): Second Day of Shavuot including recitation of Yizkor for the last time during the Presidency of Calvin Coolidge.

1931: Elections began today in forty-five countries in Europe to selected delegates for the World Zionist Congress to be held in June.

1932(20^thof Iyar, 5692): Five days after celebrating his 82^nd birthday German-Jewish banker Hermann Frankel passed away.  Ironically he owned the Wannsee Villa, which ten years later would be the site ofthe conference that would establish the metrics for the final act of the Final Solution. 

1933(1st of Sivan, 5693): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

1933: Helen Dora Cohen married fellow student and future bookstore owner Louis Schucman “in a ten minue ceremony in a local rabbi’s office” today.

1934: In Tel Aviv, the third biennial Levant Fair comes to an end.

1935: Egyptian Chief Rabbi Haim Nahum officiated at services in the Ashkenazi Synagogue of Cairo. He was there to lead a memorial service for the Polish Jews of Egypt, who were honoring Marshal Josef Piludski. The respected Russian revolutionist and Polish nationalistic military leader had died May 12, 1935, and was buried in Lithuania.

1935: In Tel Aviv a group of Yiddish authors sponsored a lecture in observance of the 70^thbirthday of Dr. Chaim Zhitlowski, social critic, political activist and author who was a “Yiddishist.” Members of Betarim, “a young military Revisionist-Zionist group” were responded violently to the fact that the lecture was conducted in Yiddish instead of Hebrew.  They cut off the electricity, pelted members of the audience with stones and were so disorderly that police had to break up the meeting.

1935: It was reported today that in Cedar Rapids, IA, “Mrs. Raymond Klass has been unanimously re-elected president of the local chapter of the Senior Hadassah” while Mrs. A.W. Basss was elected Vice President, Mrs. Nathan Greenberg was elected recording secretary, Mrs. Jack Yager was elected recording secretary and Mrs. Ted Yarowsky was elected treasurer.”

1936: For the first time ever, the Mandatory government in Palestine today mobilized Jewish settlers for self-defense as an open Arab revolt swept the country. Settlers at Rehoboth were armed and prepared to repel further assaults by Arabs after two days' of their marauding had resulted in the destruction of various “agricultural enterprises.”

1936: In London, “Emanuel List, a naturalized American singer who is now appearing at Covent Garden has…declined an invitation to attend a function at the German Embassy” saying “I left after the Nazi regime came in. My mother is a Jewess.  I could not there remain in a country where not only Jews members of other religions are so cruelly treated.

1936: “The first mass attack on a Jewish settlement took place” today “at Kfar Tabor at the foot of Mount Tabor in the Galilee district” when “a band of hundreds of Bedouins began firing at” the Jews “but police supported by the young Jewish farmers, repelled the attackers without casualties.

1936: After a lumber yard was set on fire and nine bombs were tossed by Arab attackers in Nevei Shalom, Jewish settlers fled to Tel Aviv.

1936(5th of Sivan, 5696): Erev Shavuot; in Jerusalem, the British relaxed the curfew in the Jewish section of the city delaying its start from 7 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. so that the Jews could gather to observe the start of the festival.

1936: British women and children were evacuated tonight from the troubled town of Nablus in an atmosphere made increasingly tense by bold Arab terrorists. They were sent to Jerusalem where it was thought they would be safe from Arab attacks.

1936: “Malcom MacDonald, Secretary for the Dominions announced in the House of Commons tonight that order had been restored at Gaza and that in addition to other measures the High Commission for Palestine had taken steps to restrict the movements of agitators and strike leaders.”

1936: Premiere of “Kid Galahad” directed by Michael Curitz, produced by Samuel Bischoff, Hal B. Wallis and Jack L. Warner, with music by Max Steiner and starring Edward G. Robinson

1937: Birthdate of composer Yehuda Yannay

1938:  The House Un-American Activities Committee met for the first time.  HUAC would become the tool of right-wing political leaders who would use it attack “the Communist Conspiracy,” something that many of them equated with a Jewish conspiracy.

1939(8th of Sivan, 5699): Rabbi Ya'akov Meir, Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, passed away. Jacob Meir was born in Jerusalem in 1856 when it was part of the Ottoman Empire. Born to a notable merchant of the community, Mercad Meir, young Jacob grew to be a merchant who worked in Yaffa. He worked as a merchant for over ten years, then in his thirties wealthy Jew he knew talked him into going into the rabbinate. After becoming a rav he traveled to countries raising funds for those in Jerusalem. From the mountains of Bokhara to the deserts of Tunis and Algeria he collected charity funds, and in Jerusalem acted as civil assessor to the Bet Din. On the death in 1906 of his friend and advisor Chief Rabbi Saul Eliasher, Rav Jacob Meir, age 50, was unanimously chosen to fill his place. Soon after a dispute arose, and resigned to accept a "call" to the large Jewish community at Salonica. In years later when the Sultan of Turkey visited Salonica, he presented Meir with a gold watch emblazoned with the royal arms as a mark of esteem. In 1920 Meir was appointed by Sir Herbert (later Lord) Samuel to be head of the Spanish Jewish Community of Palestine and soon after received the Commander of the Order of the British Empire award for service to the British. Herbert Samuel was appointed as the first British High Commissioner of Palestine in 1920. He was Jewish and also a Zionist. Under his direction, thousands of Jewish immigrants settled in the land. In each of the years between 1920 and 1923, about 8,000 Jews entered Palestine. In 1924 the number jumped to 13,000 and the following year to more than 33,000. Sadly, many Jewish people came to Palestine because they could go nowhere else. America closed its doors to mass immigration in 1924. After he died, over 10,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem, representing all sections of the population took part in his funeral. The Blue and white colors hung from half-mast from the offices of all Sephardic associations and other Jewish public institutions. His body was brought to the large synagogue at the Sephardic orphanage on Yaffa Road. Around his coffin which stood on the stage gathered members of the Chief Rabbinical Council, other rabbis, and groups of youths in the uniforms of their organizations, acting as honor guards.

1940(18^thof Iyar, 5700): Lag B’ Omer is celebrated on the same day that “Anthony Eden told General Lord Gort, Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the BEF, that he might need to "fight back to the west", and ordered him to prepare plans for the evacuation” in what would become known as “Dunkirk,” Jews

1940: Today James Rosenman and Samuel I. Rosenman were FDR’s “houseguests” at the White House.

1941: Approximately one thousand people attended a tea at the Hotel Commodore sponsored by “the metropolitan branch of the Women’s League of the United Synagogue of America where attendees heard national president Mrs. Samuel Spiegel said that seven thousand dollars has been raised “in supported of the Cyprus Adler Scholarship Fund.”

1941: “Jews and gypsies were forbidden today to participate in press, theatre, film and radio activity in Serbia by order of the German military commander.”

1942: Belgian Jews were required by Nazis to wear a Jewish star.

1943(21^stof Iyar, 5703): Sixty seven year old Tufts Medical trained physician Isador Henry Coriat, the Philadelphia born son of Clara Einstein and Hyram Coriat and the husband of Etta, who was a pioneer in the field of psychoanalysts passed away today.

1943: Jews rioted against Germany in Amsterdam.

1943(21^stof Iyar, 5703): Seventy-one year old Jennie Mannheimer, the New York City born daughter of Hebrew Union College Professor Sigmund Mannheimer and Prague born author Louise Hershman Mannheimer, “the sister of two rabbis” and “one of the first two women to earn a bachelor’s degree in Hebrew Letters from HUC, who gained famed as “Jane Manner, the “acting coach and teacher of speech and drama” passed away today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/05/28/88538424.pdf

1944: In Bogota, Columbia, Polish refugees Rifka and Israel Joseph Lederman gave birth to David Mordechai Lederman, the doctor “who led the team of scientists that developed the first fully implantable artificial heart.”  (As reported by David Hevesi)

1944: Mordechai and Yehuda Eldar arrived at Auschwitz.  Mordechai Adler was slated to die in October but through a fluke received a reprieve when he was one of 50 prisoners chosen to work in “Canada,” the warehouse operation where the Nazis greedily stored the belongings of their Jewish victims. In 1947, Eldar and two of his sisters (the only surviving members of his extended family) sailed to Palestine on the SS Exodus.  Sent back to Hamburg by the British, he returned to Tel Aviv in June of 1948.  He joined the IDF and served for 30 years before retiring as a colonel in 1978.

1944: Birthdate of Jan Schakowsky, Congresswoman representing the 9^thDistrict of Illinois.

1945(7^thof Sivan, 5705) Second Day of Shavuot

1945: “After showing concern over the alleged intentions toward Palestine of the newly form Arab League, leaders of Jewish organizations voiced satisfaction today over ‘safeguards’ which, they said the United Nations Conference was erecting around the rights, notonly ofp resent Jewish inhabitants of Palestine but of those who might emigrate there in the post-war years to set up a national home.

1946(25^thof Iyar, 5706): Sixty-eight year old Galcian born “Sigmund Thau, the founder and president of the Mutual Lamp Manufacturing Company and leader of the Jewish community as can be seen by his service as “treasurer of the JNF” and founder and director of the Jewish Settlement House of the East Side who married Rose Thau after the death of his first wife Devorah and who was the father of Sophie and Morris Thau passed away today.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1946/05/27/94052727.pdf

1946: “Demands that governmental and intergovernmental agencies assume full responsibility for basic assistance to Jewish survivors abroad and permit voluntary agencies to concentrate on supplementary aid and rehabilitation were made” in Atlantic City, NJ “tonight at the opening session of the four-day National Conference of Jewish Social Welfare.”

1947(7^thof Sivan, 5707): Second Day of Shavuot

1947(7^thof Sivan, 5707): Seventy-two year old Louis Satenstein, the Kovno born son of Harris Satenstein and the former Pauline Schaffer and husband of the former Harriet Johnson with whom he raised five children while serving as “president, treasurer and chairman of the board of American Book-Stratford Press and President of the Jewish maternity hospital passed away today.

1947: Gershon Hirshon, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency that “there has been no split in the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Palestine” when David Ben-Gurion “had said that a Jewish state in the areas populated principally by Jews, in addition to the barren desert, might be acceptable in lieu of a Jewish state in all Palestine” because the Chairman was merely expressing his personal views.

1948: At the United Nations, the Arabs “indicated a willingness to stop the fighting on condition that the Jews would regard the proclamation of statehood as null and void and that no further Jewish immigration would be accepted.  Abba Eban responds publicly; “If the Arab states want peace with Israel, they can have it.  If they want war, they have that, too.  But whether they want peace or war, they could have only with the sovereign independent state of Israel.”

1948: Esther Cailingold, the British born daughter of Jews from Poland who had gone to Jerusalem to teach in 1946 who stayed to fight in defense of the city in 1948 had her spine severed when the building she was in collapsed following an explosion.

1948: The position of Jewish forces in the Old City was beyond desperate.  "There was nothing to eat; nothing to shoot with..."  One hundred Haganah troopers had been killed with even more wounded as the Arab Legion pressed its attack on all sides.

1948: As part of a plan to avoid fighting among different military forces that had been established during the Mandate, the newly formed government of Israel asserted its control over military force with the issuance of “Defense Army of Israel Ordinance No. 4” that “established the Israel Defense Forces, which would be comprised of "land forces, a navy and an air force".

1949: “Tulsa” a drama set in the oil fields produced by Walter Wagner was released in the United States today.

1950: The United States, Great Britain and France announced a plan to regulate arms sales in the Middle East which would equalize sales between the Arab states and Israel. The three western powers also promised to see to it that the frontiers or armistice lines dividing the states would not be violated.

1950: The Israeli government announced that Aubrey S. Eban has been appointed as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States. [Yes, Aubrey Eban is the man whom we know as Abba Eban.]

1952: President Harry S. Truman addressed a dinner sponsored by the Jewish National fund.

1952: Emil Sachs, the Secretary of the Garment Workers’ Union of South Africa, and opponent of Apartheid appeared in court today following his arrest at mass meeting “on the steps of the Johannesburg City Hall.”

1953: The Jerusalem Postreported that Dr. Dov Joseph, the Acting Minister of Finance, introduced in the Knesset a Bill on "Income Tax Advances for Relief Works" and described the scheme which was expected to provide 2,650,000 work days for the country's unemployed for the next six months.

1953: The Jerusalem Postreported that the rationing of potatoes came to an end and potatoes were put on the free market sale for the first time in four years. Over 250 immigrants were expected to arrive from Iran.

1954: Meir Har-Zion was part of ten-man squad “from the newly formed 890^th Paratroop Battalion led by Ariel Sharon which carried out a raid near Khirbet Jinba” today.

1954(23^rd of Iyar, 5714): Eighty-year old Marguerite F. Falk, the wife of Gustave Falk passed away today after which she was buried with her husband at Hebrew Rest Cemetery#2 in New Orleans.

1955(5^th of Sivan, 5715): Erev Shavuot

1955: New York City premiere “Love Me or Leave Me” directed by Charles Vidor, Produced by Joe Pasternak with a script by Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart.

1956: In London, “Jonathan Charkham, an adviser to The Bank of England and economist, and Moira Elizabeth Frances Salmon, daughter of Barnett Alfred and Molly Salmon” gave birth to Fiona Sara Charkham who gained fame English Solicitor Fiona Sara Shackleton, Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia known as the Steel Magnolia.”

1957: “In the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago…Edward Wasserman, a psychoanalyst, and the former Eileen Kronberg, a homemaker” gave birth to “historian and filmmaker Suzanne Wasserman.” (As reported by Richard Sandomir)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/nyregion/suzanne-wasserman-dead.html

1958(7^th of Sivan, 5718): Second Day of Shavuot, Yizkor

1958(7^th of Sivan, 5718): “Four Israeli police officers were killed in a Jordanian attack on Mount Scopus, in Jerusalem.”

1958: “At 1654 Local time Lieutenant-Colonel Flint of the Mixed Armistice Commission was killed apparently by a single sniper round while trying to evacuate the dead and wounded Israelis from an Israeli police patrol.”

1959(18th of Iyar, 5719): Lag B’Omer

1964 The third AFC Asian Cup football (what Americans call soccer) tournament opened in Israel today.

1964: Birthdate of musician Lenny Kravitz

1964: Sylvia Rothschild’s novel “Sunshine and Salt” was released today

1965(24^thof Iyar, 5725): Eighty-three year old Dr. Solomon Ullman, the native of Hungary who became the Belgian Chief Rabbi and Chief Jewish Chaplain of the Belgian Army passed away today in Brussels. (As reported by JTA)

1965: “Mirage” a thriller based on a novel by Howard Fast co-starring Walter Matthau was released today in the United States.

1966: Fifty-nine year old of director and screenwriter Edmond T. Greville who based “on 23andMe genetic testing of his daughter and grandson in 2017,  was in fact Ashkenazim Jewish from the likely area of Odessa, a fact never known to him during his life time passed away today.

1967: As the crisis that would result in the Six Day War intensified, President Nasser of Egypt declared, “the battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.”  While President Johnson worked to develop an international response that would open the Straits of Tiran, the Soviet Union let the members of the Security Council know that Moscow would veto any proposal that was not in accord with the wishes of Syria and Egypt.

1967: As the crisis that will lead to the Six Days War worsens, Military intelligence chief Aharon Yariv tells the Israeli cabinet that “the roots of the current situation are connected to the active Soviet regional initiative” that began “over a year ago.”

1968(28th of Iyar, 5728): Yom Yerushalayim

1968: Eighty-two year old “Austrian ethnologist, ancient historian, and archaeologist, and a grandnephew of poet Heinrich Heine” Robert von Heine-Geldern passed away today

http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/handle/10125/19123/AP-v13n1-obit.pdf?sequence=1

1969: Abdel el Rahman el Latifi, a 65-year-old Jerusalem Arab who stabbed a soldier outside the Damascus gate last year, was sentenced today to 10 years' imprisonment by the district court here. There was no apparent reason for the act, but the court rejected the defense plea of insanity.

1970: In Manhattan, Joan and Morton I. Hamburg gave birth to screenwriter and director John Hamburg

1971: In Huston, “economics professor Gerald Whitney Stone and Sheila Lois Belasco” who was Jewish gave birth to cartoonist Matt Stone co-creator of South Park

1971: “Man From La Mancha” with music by Mitch Leigh moved to the Mark Hellinger Theater (named in honor of the Jewish theatre critic) for the last month of its original Broadway run of 2,329 performances.

1973:The BBC broadcast the first episode of “That’s Life!” a mixture of news and satire featuring Esther Rantzen as Presenter.

1973: The IDF announced a state of emergency today “and reserve troops were called up in response to a movement of Egyptian troops. The state of emergency was cancelled when it became clear that this was only an exercise. This event had a major impact on the General Staff, as it led them to believe that the Egyptian forces were not preparing for war, later that year, on Yom Kippur. After the war however, it became apparent that these frequent maneuvers carried out by the Egyptians were part of an elaborate ruse meant to induce complacency in the Israelis regarding the true intentions of Egyptian troop movements at the time the actual attack took place.”

1974: “Mr. and Mrs. Max Gerstein: announced the engagement of their daughter New Yorker magazine fiction department employee Nancy Ellen Gerstein to Lawrence Kudlow in what might described as clothing merger since the bride’s mother “is presient of Petrie Stores Corpoation, a retail chain of women’s clothing store” and the groom’s father, Irving H. Kudlow “is a partner of Sondra Incorporated, manufacturer of textiles for men's clothing.”

1975: Lisa Selesner, the model and actress known as Lisa S, was born in Monaco to a French father and a Jewish American mother today.

http://www.alivenotdead.com/lisas

1976: “Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood” directed by Michael Winner, written by Arnold Schulman and co-starring Madeline Kahn, Phil Silvers and Ron Leibman was released in the United States today.

1976: German philosopher Martin Heidegger passed away.  Although considered a major force in the world of philosophy by some, Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party and remained in Germany during the war.  Strangely enough, Heidegger had several extramarital affairs, including two very important ones with Jewish women who were his students, Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Blochmann. Apparently Arendt knew more about Nazis than she let on when she was writing about “the banality of evil.”

1977: The fourth of the Nixon Interviews which were arranged by Swifty Lazar and produced by Bob Zelnick was broadcast today.

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported how John Henry Weidner, 65, a Dutchman now living in U.S. led so many groups of Jews, allied pilots and other victims of the Nazi persecution across the border of the German-occupied France into Switzerland that he knew the way "blindfolded." He was awarded the Righteous Gentile Medal by the Yad Va'shem Chairman, Gideon Hausner, who told him: "You are a soldier of humanity in the world's darkest years."

1980: An Israeli police officer was injured in a stabbing attack at Hebron

1980: In Monaco, Gary and Peggy Selesner gave birth to Lisa Selesner, the international model known as “Lisa S.”  Her mother was Jewish, her father was not

http://www.alivenotdead.com/lisas/blog.html

1981: After receiving a knighthood in 1980, Max Beloff “was created a life peer, taking the title Baron Beloff, of Wolvercote in the County of Oxfordshire” today.

1983(14^thof Sivan, 5743): Ninety-year old Louise Weiss the daughter of Protestant mining engineer Paul-Louis Weiss and Jeanne Javal a member of an Alsatian Jewish family gave birth to “who was an influential voice in French and international affairs from the 1920s” passed away today.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/weiss-louise

1985(6^thof Sivan, 5745); Shavuot

1985(6^thof Sivan, 5745): Seventy-seven year old Oscar award winning producer Harold Hecht passed away today.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/28/movies/harold-hecht-film-producer-and-a-burt-lancaster-partner.html

1987(27^thof Iyar, 5747): Seventy-three year old psychiatrist, entrepreneur and philanthropist Arthur Sackler passed away. (As reported by Grace Glueck)

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/27/obituaries/dr-arthur-sackler-dies-at-73-philanthropist-and-art-patron.html

1987: Amnon Rubinstein completed his service as Communications Minister.

1990: After three years, Fox network broadcast the last episode of “The Tracey Ullman Show” whose creators included James L. Brooks, Jerry Belson and Heide Perlman.

1991: “Fund Guides Jobless Soviet Immigrants,” published today Kathleen Teltsch describes the challenges facing the Baron de Hirsch Fund in helping the latest wave of Jewish immigrants from Russia “make new lives in America.”  “The fund was created in 1891 by Baron Maurice De Hirsch, a prosperous German Jewish financier who wanted to help Jewish families fleeing Czarist Russia make a fresh start by becoming farmers. Thousands came to the United States at the turn of the century and became poultry farmers, mainly in southern New Jersey.” This latest influx of refugees from the Soviet Union will be looking for help in fitting into the urban environment including jobs in the health care and construction industries.

1993(6th of Sivan, 5753): Shavuot is observed for the first time during the Presidency of Bill Clinton

1994: “A streamlined Off-Broadway revival” of “Merrily We Roll Along,” a Stephen Sondheim musical “based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart” opened today “at the York Theatre in St. Peter’s Church where it ran for 54 perfromaces.

1995(26^thof Iyar, 5755): Eighty seven year old Mordechai Surkis, the veterans of the Haganah and the Jewish Brigade who was the first mayor of Kfar Saba passed away today.

1995(26^thof Iyar, 5755): Eighty-nine year animator Friz Freleng, the man behind such icons as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Yosemite Sam to name but a few, passed away today

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-friz-freleng-1621602.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/28/obituaries/isadore-friz-freleng-dies-creator-of-cartoons-was-89.html

1996(8th of Sivan, 5756):  Resistance fighter and politician Halka Grossman passed away at the age of 76.

1998(1st of Sivan, 5758): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2000: After premiering a week ago in Malaysia, “Shanghai Noon” the first in series of buddy films produced by Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber and Jonathan Glickman and with music by Randy Edelman was released today in the United States.

2001:In “Latest Disaster Tests Resiliency of Jerusalem's Residents,” published today Deborah Sontag describes how the residents of Israel’s capital city are coping with the latest wave of Arab terror. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/26/world/latest-disaster-tests-resiliency-of-jerusalem-s-residents.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm

2002: The New York Timesfeatured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including the recently released paperback edition of “O’Neill: Life With Monte Cristo” by Arthur and Barbara Gelb.

2002: An exhibition of the work of 18^th century New York silversmith Myer Myers came to a close at the Skirball Cultural Center.

2003: According to “Battle of Brooklyn” published today Ari Taub has received the  Best New Director award at the Brooklyn International Film Festival for his new film “Letter from the Dead” which “focuses on a doomed unit of German and Italian soldiers” fighting in Italy in 1944.

2004(6th of Sivan, 5764): First Day of Shavuot

2004: What is believed to be the largest cheesecake in the world has been baked in Haifa for Shavuot. The cake measured more than three yards in diameter and was more than one yard high.

2004: A five-foot tall safe belonging to Brooklyn’s Kane Street Synagogue founded in 1856 was opened with a crowbar today and officials “discovered the seven books and assorted loose leaf papers written in the terse shorthand common to meetings minutes” which revealed some of the challenges faced by the congregation in the 19^th century (As reported by Jake Mooney)

2004: As the controversy surrounding Judith Miller’s coverage of the Iraq war continues to grow “a New York Times editorial acknowledged that some of the paper's coverage in the run-up to the war had relied too heavily on Ahmed Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles, who were bent on regime change” and “expressed "regret" that "information that was controversial [was] allowed to stand unchallenged."

2005: Closing session of Biotech-Israel 2005

2005(17^thof Iyar, 5765): Ninety year old journalist and political activist Israel Epstein passed away in Beijing, China (As reported by Douglas Martin)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/international/asia/02epstein.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1491973/Israel-Epstein.html

2005: In his, joint press conference welcoming Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to the White House, President Bush said “The imminent Israeli disengagement from Gaza, parts of the West Bank, presents an opportunity to lay the groundwork for a return to the road map.... To help ensure that the Gaza disengagement is a success, the United States will provide to the Palestinian Authority $50 million to be used for new housing and infrastructure projects in the Gaza.” But he also said, “Any final status agreement must be reached between the two parties, and changes to the 1949 Armistice lines must be mutually agreed to. A viable two-state solution must ensure contiguity of the West Bank, and a state of scattered territories will not work. There must also be meaningful linkages between the West Bank and Gaza. This is the position of the United States today, it will be the position of the United States at the time of final status negotiations.”

2005: Percussionist, composer and Grammy nominee Roberto Rodriguez, brings his signature blend of Latin rhythms and Jewish melodies to the Skirball Cultural Center’s World Mosaic series.  In 2002 Rodriguez recorded his first album “El Danzon de Moies” or “The Dances of Moses.”  The cover of the album combines Latin and Jewish images.  It is the red, white and blue of Cuba but the Star of David replaces the star usually found on the Cuban flag.

2006(28th of Iyar, 5766):  Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Reunification Day

2006: In Congress today, Representative Rahm Emanuel delivered a speech in recognition of the contributions of Joel M. Capr who is retiring “from the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago after almost thirty years of service.”

2006:  The Jerusalem Post reported that Holocaust victims' names may remain in Mormon database. 2007: Ryan Braun hit his first major league home run with the Milwaukee Brewers.

2007: As part of an escalating wave of violence, a Border Policeman and an Israeli security guard were moderately to seriously wounded this evening when two Palestinian gunmen opened fire on an Israeli roadblock near the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Saad. The security forces - two security guards and two Border Policemen - were manning the roadblock on the Jerusalem bypass road when they were ambushed by militants. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack.

2007(9th of Sivan, 5767):: British foreign correspondent Edward Behr, the Parisian native who was the son of Russian Jewish refugees passed away at the age of 81. His wide travels and reporting experiences inspired a number of books, including The Algerian Problem(1961), The Last Emperor(1987), Hirohito: Behind the Myth (1989) and Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite (1991) about the now-fallen Romanian dictator and his wife .He provided a telling look at his own trade with Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? (1981), a query reportedly called out by a British reporter looking for sources during a crisis in Congo.

2008:Today, Texas Rangers All Star second baseman Ian Kinsler knocked one out of the ballpark in a game against the Tampa Bay Rays, in the process slugging the 2,500th home run by a Jewish player in the game’s history, according to Jewish Major Leaguers, Inc.

2008(21^st of  Iyar, 5768):Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay as director, producer and sometime actor whose star-laden movies like "The Way We Were,""Tootsie" and "Out of Africa" were among the most successful of the 1970s and '80s, passed away today at the age of 73.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/movies/26cnd-pollack.html?_r=0

2008: Tensions rose between Egypt and Israel when 45 elderly Jews, most of whom were born in Egypt, were forced to cancel their four-day trip to Egypt

2008:Memorial Day observed. The National Museum of American Jewish Military featured a Memorial Day tribute to those Jewish servicemen and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. http://www.nmajmh.org/docs/jahm08/May%2026%20Memorial%20Day.pdf

2009: The 92^nd Street Y presents “Women’s Prominence, Women’s Femininity: From Biblical Times to Today” during which Israeli novelist Eva Etzioni-Halevy, the author of the novels “The Song of Hannah,” “The Garden of Ruth” and “The Triumph of Deborah,” and Maggie Anton, the author of the Rashi’s Daughters series, engage in a spirited conversation about Biblical women who broke through the glass ceiling and the lessons we can learn from them today. Maggie Anton is the award-winning author of “Rashi’s Daughters, Book I: Joheved,” “Rashi’s Daughters, Book II: Miriam,” and for younger readers, “Rashi’s Daughter: Secret Scholar.

2009:For the first time since its founding, the Knesset is officially marking today as Yiddish Language and Culture Day. A Yiddish-Hebrew Knesset lexicon was released for the occasion. The date for the parliamentary nod to Yiddish, a language once spoken by more than 12 million Jews, was selected to mark 150 years since the birth of the Yiddish author Shalom Aleichem. This past week was also the 20th anniversary of the founding of Yiddishshpiel, Tel Aviv's all-Yiddish theater. The day's events include a joint meeting of the Knesset's Absorption, Immigration and Diaspora Committee and the Education and Culture Committee to discuss Yiddish culture. The Knesset is also holding a special session to discuss the place of Yiddish in modern Israeli society. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Deputy Minister of Pensioners Affairs Leah Ness are delivering the main speeches of the session. Ahead of the unique Knesset session, a lexicon of the Yiddish translations of several key phrases often used by Israeli parliamentarians was distributed to all Knesset members. A few key phrases from the lexicon that veteran MKs may find useful include:

Ich hob eich nisht geshtert, toshter nisht mir! - "I didn't interrupt you, don't interrupt me!"

Ich ruf eich tzum seder dus ershte mol.... - "I am calling you to order for the first time...."

Ordners, derveitert im fun zal! - "Ushers, remove him from the hall!"

Vehr siz far, zol veilen 'far'. Vehr siz keigen, zol veilen 'keigen'. - "Whoever is in favor, vote 'in

favor'. Whoever is opposed, vote 'opposed'."

2010(13^th of Sivan, 5770): Eighty-three year old author Arthur Herzog III, who may best known for writing the novel that inspired the sci-fi thriller “The Swarm” the son of song-writer Arthur Herzog Jr and the husband of Leslie Mandel Herzog passed away today. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/arts/09herzog.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20100605032429/http://www.t2conline.com/news-room/headliners/550-writer-arthur-herzog-dies

2010: Zemer Chai, Washington, DC’s premier Jewish Choir is scheduled to present a concert entitled “Psalm Enchanted Evening” at Ohr Kodesh Congregation in Chevy Chase, Maryland. 

2011: “The Great Kugel Throwdown” is scheduled to take placed at the Washington State Historical Society in Seattle, Washington.

2011:Congress decided tonight that a memorial commemorating US Jewish chaplains who died in battle will be erected at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia,. “This memorial will be a fitting commemoration of 13 chaplains who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation,” bill sponsor Sen. Charles Schumer said.

2011: "Jews, Slavery, and the Civil War" is scheduled to have its final sessions in Charleston, South Carolina. 

2011: The JCC in Manhattan is scheduled to present an evening with Eran Zur& Korin Alal, two of the freshest musical voices in Israeli culture.

2011:Gail Barnum, daughter of Joel and Amy Barnum,Natalee Birchansky, daughter of Lee and Cyndie Birchansky and Marissa Carson, daughter of Bill and Laura Carson, each of whom is part the Temple Judah “family” are scheduled to graduate from Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, IA this evening.

2011: Benjamin Levin, son of David R. Levin graduated from Harvard Law School making him the third generation of Levin Lawyers!

2011(22^ndof Iyar, 5771): Eighty-nine year old dental expert Irwin D. Mandel passed away. (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/nyregion/dr-irwin-d-mandel-expert-on-dental-chemistry.html

2011: The New York Mets announced that David Einhorn had agreed to buy a minority share of the baseball team for $200 million

2011: David Einhorn called for Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, to step down after Microsoft had been passed by both IBM and Apple in market value

2011: Elaine’s the restaurant that the late Elaine Kaufman turned into a New York icon will close tonight.

2011: Vermont Governor Peter Elliot Shumlin “signed a bill to establish a state health care exchange under the Affordable Care Act and to develop future universal insurance coverage for all residents, making Vermont the first state to initiate a plan for single-payer health care.”

2012(5^thof Sivan, 5772): Erev of Shavuot

2012(5^thof Sivan, 5772): “Award-winning author, teacher, mentor and fierce fighter for social justice, Ellen Levine” passed away today.

http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/press-release/award-winning-author-ellen-levine-1939-2012-dies-age-73

2012: The Chabad Center of Rechavia, 8 Ramban Street is scheduled to host a traditional all-night learning session as part of the Shavuot celebration. 

2012: Can Bonomo “placed seventh” singing “Love Me Back” as Turkey’s representative in the Eurovision Song Contest of 2012.

2012: The Carlebach Minyan of the Old City is scheduled to offer an all-night Shavout learning session.

2012(5^thof Sivan): Tessa Cohen, Curtis Litow and Sarah Maikon were confirmed tonight at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

2012(5^thof Sivan, 5772): Eighty-six year old educator Irving I. Lipskind passed away today.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/irving-i-lipskind-elementary-principal/2012/06/07/gJQA1NhhLV_story.html

2013:“Threshold to the Sacred: The Ark Door of Cairo's Ben Ezra Synagogue” is scheduled to come to an end at the Walters Museum in Baltimore, MD.

http://thewalters.org/events/eventdetails.aspx?e=2568

2013: The final performance of “Sherlock Holmes” by the late Greg Kramer is scheduled to come to an at The Segal Centre for the Performing Arts.

2013: The IPO is scheduled to perform a special concert with violinist Itshak Perlman

2013: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 by Thomas Doherty, The Guns At Last Light” The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 by Rick Atkinson and ‘Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America by Naomi Schaefer Riley 

2013:Hundreds gathered at Ammunition Hill in the capital this evening to witness the swearing-in of the Netzah Yehuda Battalion, the only haredi (ultra-Orthodox) unit in the IDF. The battalion, currently numbering close to 1,000, is responsible for military operations in and around Jenin

http://www.jpost.com/Defense/IDFs-only-ultra-Orthodox-battalion-sworn-in-314443

2013: A rocket was fired from south Lebanon towards Israel today, Lebanese residents and security sources said, but it was not clear where the rocket landed and there were no immediate reports of damage inside Israel.

http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Report-Rocket-fired-from-south-Lebanon-towards-Israel-314448

2014: Hubbard Street Dance Chicago 12 days of performance at the Joyce Theatre, which included two programs that feature Three to Max, a work by Ohad Naharin, the Artistic Director of Israel's Batsheva Dance Company, and Too Beaucoup by choreographer Sharon Eyal, a former company dancer” is scheduled to come to an end.

2014(26^thof Iyar, 5774): Ninety-one year old actress Anna Berger passed away today. (As reported by Daniel E. Slotnik)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/arts/anna-berger-an-actress-with-a-gift-for-matriarchs-dies-at-91.html?hpw&rref=obituaries

2014: A “500-page report authored by historians Martin Kukowski and Rudolf Boch and published today, revealed that German car giant Audi’s predecessor company used slave labourers from concentration camps during World War II on a massive scale, a new report has found.”

2014: Pope Francis is scheduled to visit the Grand Mufti, the Dome of the rock, the Western Wall, Mount Herzl Cemetery, Yad Vashem, Rabbis Yitzhak Yosef and David Lau, President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several priests and Christian leaders before departing for Rome this evening.

2014: “The Palestinians will demand that Israel be suspended from soccer’s international association unless Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recognizes the status of the Palestinian Football Association, PFA Chairman Jibril Rajoub threatened today.” (As reported by Avi Isaacharoff)

2014:Pope Francis spent today in Israel visiting the Temple Mount, Yad Vashem, a terror victims’ memorial and other sites, as well as holding meetings with Israeli leaders and others. Throughout the day the pontiff prayed and urged for peace in the region.

2015: “The world premiere of the 30 minute musical history of Jews in Rock and Roll by Ben Sidran, musician and author of There was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream” is scheduled to take place at City Winery in New York

2015: “Air raid sirens sounded in towns across southern Israel this evening at 9:02 p.m, as the IDF confirmed that at least one Grad rocket fired from Gaza struck near the community of Gan Yavneh, near Ashdod.” (As reported by Ari Soffer)

2015: “Journeys” is scheduled to open at the Jewish Museum in London.

http://jewishmuseum.org.uk/journeys

2015: Ruth Porat, the former chief financial officer of Morgan Stanely is scheduled to begin serving as Google’s CFO today.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/new-google-cfo-ruth-porats-family-a-mirror-of-american-jewry/

2016(18^th of Iyar, 5776): Lag b’Omer

2016(18^th of Iyar, 5776): Seventy-six year old photographer John Margolies passed away today. (As reported by Margalit Fox)

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/03/arts/john-margolies-photographer-of-whimsical-architecture-dies-at-76.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=1

2016: Lubavitch of Arkansas is scheduled to host its annual Lag B’omer Bar Bar-B-Que Festival – an event which was the first public celebration hosted by Rabbi Pinchas Ciment when he brought the torch of “the lamplighter” to Little Rocks more than twenty years ago!

2016: Tunisian Jews who traveled “to the island of Djerba…the historic home of an ancient community of Jewish priestly families” to celebrate Lag B’Omer did so despite “a severe travel advisory” that had been issued by Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau.”

2016: Yeshiva University Museum, The Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought and the Center for Israel Studies are scheduled to present a lecture in which “Rabbi Meir Soloveichik  reflects on the relationship between Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik - the Rav - and Israel, and the significance the Rav's views on Israel have for future generations.

2016: Barnes & Noble Bookstore is scheduled to host Peter Doran who will discuss Breaking Rockefeller: The Incredible Story of the Ambitious Rivals Who Toppled an Oil Empire in which he “traces Marcus Samuel, Jr.'s rise into the British aristocracy, Henri Deterding's conquest and Rockefeller's collapse.”

2016: Producer and actor Yaniv “Nev” Schulman the younger brother of “actor and filmmaker” Ariel "Rel" Schulman became engaged today.

2016: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to host the Midwest premiere of “Munich ’72 and Beyond” the “new documentary film that provides a fresh perspective on the story of the 11 Israeli athletes killed during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.”

2016:The Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University is scheduled to present “author Ayelet Waldman who will be giving the 2016 Sara Glasgow Cogan Memorial Lecture, "There's No Business Like Shoah Business: Why Is a Nice Jewish Girl from New Jersey So Obsessed With her People's Greatest Tragedy?"

2017: “Norway’s foreign minister today condemned the Palestinian Authority for naming a women’s center in the West Bank, funded in part by the Scandinavian country, after a female terrorist.”

2017(1^st of Sivan, 5777): Rosh Chodesh Sivan

2017: “The Women’s Balcony,” “#1 film of the year in Israel” is scheduled to open at the Lincoln Plaza and Quad cinemas.

2017: In Jerusalem, the Bible Lands Museum is scheduled to host a lectures on “Who Were You, Bar Kochva?”

2017: David Orlowski, the son of Miriam Winter is scheduled to sign copies of Trains, his mother’s memoir, at the US Holocaust Museum.

http://www.miriamwinter.com/reviews.htm

2018(12^th of Sivan, 5778): Parashat Naso; 2018: In honor of Shabbat, admission is free today at the Jewish Museum in NYC.

2018: The Oxford University Jewish Society is scheduled Shabbat service followed by lunch, Mincah and Seudah Shlishit

2018: This evening the 14^th St Y is scheduled to host the penultimate performance of Hanoch Levin’s “The Labor of Life.”

2018 (12^th of Sivan, 5778): After having “suffered a severe head injury when an Arab terrorist threw a marble block at his head,” twenty year old Sergeant Ronen Luvarski, a Rehovot resident succumbed to his wounds and died today.

2019: In Atlanta, GA, the Breman Museum is scheduled to host “Magic in the Death Camp,” an interview with Holocaust survivor Werner Reich who “was captured and imprisoned when he was 15 years old and spent time in three different concentration camp” including Auschwitz where “he saw a magician--the Great Nivelli--do a card trick, and this spawned a lifelong interest in magic.”

2019: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond and  Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg.

2019: In Iowa City, a memorial service is scheduled to be held at Oaknoll for Gusti Kollman who made her way to Iowa after escaping the Nazis and built a long, fulfilling life.

https://www.lensingfuneral.com/obituaries/Gusti-Kollman?obId=4263536#/obituaryInfo
2019: A screening of “The Tobacconist” is scheduled to part of the closing night of the Washington Jewish Film Festival.

2019: In Amsterdam “the Arts and Dialogue Foundation” and the “Menasseh ben Israel Institute” are scheduled to present a screening of “From Cairo to the Cloud,” that tells the story of the “World of the Cairo Geniza.

2020: Alone Together, part of the Covid-19 Concert Series, the Eli Degibri Quartet, led by the Israeli jazz saxophonist is scheduled to showcase “four incredible musicians.”

2020: Live on Zoom, the Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present “Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 17th Century.”

2020: The Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action is scheduled to present on line “Schmoozefest: Social Justice Conversation, Music and Comedy.”

2020: The ASF’s Institute of Jewish Experience is scheduled to present “The Global Nação’s

Western Sephardi Synagogues Tour with Joshua Mendes.”

2020: The American Jewish Historical Society is scheduled to host a virtual poetry writing workshop inspired by Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus.”

2020: The London School of Jewish Studies is scheduled to present “Whole In One” during which Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis will address the meaning of Shavuot today “and give us advice about how we can personally maintain and renew our connection to the Torah, the central text of Judaism.”

2020: S.F. JFCS Holocaust Center is scheduled to co-present a virtual talk by Warsaw Ghetto escapee George Elbaum, author of the Holocaust memoir Neither Yesterdays Nor Tomorrows

https://neitheryesterdays.com/about/