December 5
63 BCE: Cicero read the last of his Catiline Orations which exposed Cataline’s conspiracy to overthrow the government of Rome. There is no record of how Cataline felt about Jews, but Cicero said that Judaism was a barbarous superstition whose adherents were born to be slaves.
220 (22nd of Kislev, 3981): On the secular calendar Rabbi Judah Hanasior Judah the Patriarch passed away. Born in Eretz Israel in 138 (three years after the last rebellion against Rome) Judah, as the Nasi and head of the Sanhedrin, was both the religious and political leader of the Jewish community. His greatest claim to fame was his role as the compiler of the Mishna. The Mishna is a compilation of Oral Law which would serve as the basis for both the Babylonian Talmud and Jerusalem Talmud. The Mishnah is divided into six "orders": Zeraim - Seeds, Mo'ed - Festivals, Nashim - Women, Nezikim - Damages, Kedushim - Holy Matters, Taharot - Purity. There are a total of 63 "tractates." It was compiled in Hebrew and intended to be memorized. It served and still serves as a code for regulation of all Jewish life. Some of his more famous sayings include: “Be as punctilious in observing a light as a weighty commandment, for your do not know their relative reward.” “Contemplate three things and you will avoid transgressions: above you (in Heaven) is an eye that sees, an ear that hears and all your deeds are faithfully recorded.” And the favorite of all those who teach, “I have learned much from teachers, more from my colleagues, but most from pupils.”
663: Fourth Council of Toledo takes place. Among the other things the council adopted stringent measures that should be used against baptized Jews who had relapsed into their former faith.
1349: During the Black Death Riots 500 Jews were massacred at Nuremberg.
1443: Birthdate of Pope Julius II, the prelate who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. Julius entrusted his health to a Jewish physician named Samuel Sarfatti. “More importantly for Jews at large, the pope’s mind-set…did not include attacking Jews. Benevolent neglect was indeed welcome.”
1484: Pope Innocent VIII issued the Summis desiderantes, a papal bull that deputizes Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger as inquisitors to root out alleged witchcraft in Germany and leads to one of the most oppressive witch hunts in European history. Innocent VIII seemed to have a penchant for Inquisitions since he was successfully in getting the King of Portugal to establish one aimed at the Jews and Marranos who had fled Spain. Those caught suffered long imprisonment or death by fire.
1496: King Manuel expelled the Jews from Portugal. Manuel of Portugal befriended the Jews during his first year of reign, but his desire to unite the Iberian Peninsula through marriage to the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella changed all that. Four years after the expulsion of Jews from Spain, he ordered them expelled from Portugal within 11 months.
1497: King Manuel I proclaimed an Edict which demanded the Jews convert to Catholicism or leave the country. However, fearing most Jews would leave rather than convert, the Crown closed the ports, thus halting any potential Jewish sea escape.
1590: Niccolò Sfondrati was elected Pope and as Gregory XIV followed the comparatively benevolent policies of his predecessor Sixtus V including “allowing Jews to settle in the Papal States.
1633: In Bohemia, an order was issued “to the head of the administrative of the castle of Reichenberg: “The Bassewi Jews, who have the privilege to direct their business affairs in your town without any hindrance and a copy of whose privilege is in your possession, shall be supported and protected in the best way and shall have any support that they require to ensure their freedom.” (The Bassewi Jews refers to the family or followers of the “Prague banker and merchant Jacob Bassewi” who “was the first Jew in the former Austria to achieve the status of nobility.)
1678: Josel (Joseph) Witzenhausen and Joseph Athias defied warnings from powerful secular and religious leaders and today began printing their version of “a Judaeo-German edition of the TaNaCh.”
1693(17th of Kislev, 5454): Sara d’Andrade, the marano who openly acknowledge her Judaism in either 1647 or 1648 who was the wife Portuguese born Marano Diego Teixara and kept a princely house, which, in 1654, was for some time the residence of Queen Christina of Sweden, passed away today.
https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/14351-texeira
1707:The first informal meeting of the modern Society of Antiquaries, whose first Jewish member may have been naturalist Emanuel Mendes da Costa occurred today at the Bear Tavern on The Strand
1755(1stof Kislev, 5516): Rosh Chodesh Kislev observed on the same day that George Washington wrote to wrote Robert Dinwiddie, the Royal Governor of Virginia concerning financial and other needs growing out of fighting during the French and Indian Wars.
1757: “In Berlin, the head rabbi delivered a patriotic sermon of thanksgiving: following the victory of “the glorious King of Prussia over the united and far superior forces of the Austrians in Silesia.”
1768(25thof Kislev, 5529): Chanukah
1771(28thof Kislev, 5532): Fourth Day of Chanukah
1776(24thof Kislev, 5537): For the first time the Chanukah candle is kindled in the newly independent United States.
1776:Phi Beta Kappa, the first and most prestigious American scholastic fraternity was founded at William & Mary College. Some of the Jewish members of the honor society include Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann, Jonas Salk, Daniel Boorstin, Betty Friedan, Henry Kissinger, Arlen Specter, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Gloria Steinman, Robert Rubin, Nadine Strossen, Joseph Lieberman, Ben Bernanke, Eliot Spitzer and Daniel Pearl.
1779(26thof Chanukah, 5540): Second Day of Chanukah observed as General George Washington is establishing winter quarters for the Continental Army at Morristown, NJ.
1782: Birthdate of Martin Van Buren, eighth President of the United States, who intervened in the so-called Damascus Affair, seeking to use the good office of the Presidency to protect the lives and well-being of a group of Syrian Jews who had been falsely accused in another round of the “blood libel.”
1790(28thof Kislev, 5551): Fourth Day of Chanukah
1792: William Moultrie began his second term as Governor of South Carolina. Moultrie may have been the first Governor to attend the consecration of a synagogue. In 1794, he was present for the consecration of the new synagogue housing Beth Elohim in Charleston, SC.
1792: Samuel Raphael married Charlotte Levy at the Great Synagogue today.
1792: In New York City, Leah Nathan and Joseph Naphtali Hart best birth to Esther Hart, the wife of Alexander Marks with whom she had fourteen children.
1792: Moses Jacobs, “a self-described bachelor” was buried today at the “Alderney Road (Globe Rd) Jewish Cemetery.
1795(23rdof Kislev, 5556): Parashat Vayeshev
1795: In Manhattan, PhiladelphianativeLeah Thérèse Nathan Hart and Bavarian born Jacob Naphtali Hart gave birth Esther “Hetty” Hart who became Esther Marks after she Alexander Marks in 1816 after which she bore him ten children.
1797: In Darmstadt, Germany, Sara Haas and Alexander ben Moses Billstein gave birth to Baruch Sender Billstein, the husband of “Beilie Wertheim” with whom he had eleven children.
1798(27thof Kislev, 5559): Third Day of Chanukah observed on the same day that the Peasants’ War, which was part of the French Revolutionary wars came to an end.
1799: In Frankfurt am Main, Gutle Schott and Moses Yantoff Oppenheim gave birth to “Sebastian Oppenheim,” the husband of Henriette Strauss with whom he had eight children
1805: Today, “was proclaimed a day of general thanksgiving for Trafalgar” during which “All the Churches and Chapels were crowded, all distinctions of sects were done away and Christian and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, all united in the expression of one feeling of piety and gratitude to the Almighty.” “The Chief Rabbi, Solomon Hirschell, and the Haham (spiritual leader of the Sephardim), Raphael Meldola, jointly prepared “The Order of Service and Special Prayer of the Hebrew Thanksgiving”, recited in all London synagogues. Hirschell, whose normal vehicle was Yiddish, preached a commemorative sermon at the Great Synagogue that was subsequently translated into English and printed; Meldola delivered one at the Sephardi synagogue, Bevis Marks.”
1807: In London, Matilda de Metz and Levy Salomons gave birth to Esther Salomons.
1809(27thof Kislev, 5570): Third Day of Chanukah, observed on the natal of Edmond Le Boeuf, who rose to the rank of Marshall in French Army while seeing action during the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War.
1810: Israel Moses married Deborah Cohen, the daughter of Jacob Raphael Cohen almost thirty-eight years before she passed away in St. Joseph, FL.
1819: Joshua Poland married Esther Isaacs at the Great Synagogue today.
1824: Jacob Mandelbaum, a native of “Sachsen-Weimar” and Bella Epstein gave birth to their sixth and youngest child Vogel Mandelbaum today.
1820: In the UK, Emma Lyon and Abraham Henry gave birth to Julia Henry.
1825(25thof Kislev, 5586): Chanukah observed for the first time during the Presidency of John Q. Adams
1828(29thof Kislev, 5589): Fifth Day of Chanukah celebrated for the last time during the presidency of John Q. Adams, who “like his father supported the rebuilding of Judea as an independent nation
1831(1stof Tevet, 5592): Rosh Chodesh Tevet; Sixth Day of Chanukah
1831(1st of Tevet, 5592): Sixty-three year old Isaac Gomez, Jr. the author of “a manuscript entitled ‘The Genealogy of the Gomez Family Down to the Year 1826’” passed away today in New York City.
1831: Forty-eight year old Samuel Ottenheimer, married his second wife Amalie Wimpfheimer today.
1832: Birthdate of Hamburg native Ernst Jacob Oppert, the merchant who traveled to Hong Kong in 1851, founded a business in Shanghai and traveled to Korea before returning to Hamburg, the hometown of his brother Jules Opert.
1832: Birthdate of Hamburg native Ernst Jacob Oppert, a German merchant who “went to Hong Kong in 1851…founded a business in Shanghai…and traveled through Korea” in the 1860’s.
1834: In Binau, Germany, Sarah and Manassa Sheuerman gave birth to Rose Sheuerman who became Rose Adler when she married Leopoled Adler with who she had eight children.
1839: In Charleston, SC, Jacob I. Moses of Columbus, GA, married Rinah Ottolengui, the daughter of Abraham Ottolengui.
1844: Birthdate of Penrose Felisher, who upon passing away in 1931 would be buried at Mt. Sinai Cemetery in Philadelphia.
1849(20thof Kislev, 5610): Baruch ben Judah Lob Lindau the native of Hanover who gained fame as a German mathematician passed away today in Berlin.
1850(30thof Kislev, 5611): Sixth day of Chanukah
1850: In Lubeck Germany, Moses Heinemann Heymann Lissauer and Betty Bertha Lissauer gave birth to Abraham Adolph Moses Lissauer, the husband of Frieda Lissauer, the daughter of Fanny and Abraham Mendel Auerbach.
1850: Birthdate of Bernhard Baron, the Russian born inventor of a cigarette making machine that led to his being the managing director of the National Cigarette Tobacco Company of New York and the patent for which he sold to the United Cigarette Machine Company for £120,000 who was the husband of Rachel Baron and the father of Louis Baron.
1854: Solomon and Jane Green were married today at the Great Synagogue.
1855(25thof Kislev, 5615): First Day of Chanukah observed as pro and anti-slavery forces clash in what became known as Bloody Kansas
1859: Birthdate of Solomon Lazarus Lee, who gained fame as Sir Sidney Lee, the graduate of Balliol College, Oxford where he majored in modern history and rose to be the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica/Lee,_Sidney
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Times/1926/Obituary/Sidney_Lee
1860: Herman W. Hellman who arrived with his brother Isias in Los Angeles in 1859, today left the “forwarding and commission business of General Banning” and went to work in the “book and stationary business.”
1861(2ndof Tevet, 5622): Eight Day of Chanukah.
1861: The Grand Jury of Monmouth County returned a bill of indictment charging a man named Radski with the murder of a German Jew named Sigismund Fellner.
1861: Birthdate of Benjamin J. Kohlman who was interred at the Springhill Avenue Temple Cemetery in Mobile when passed away.
1861: A detachment of Union troops reportedly under the command Gabriel Netter, a French born Jew who had settled in Kentucky, seized a railroad bridge at Whippoorwill, KY that was held by Confederate forces and burned it.
1862: Four days after he had passed away, 55 year old Solomon Joseph, the husband of Priscilla Samuel with whom he had had five children, was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”
1863(24thKislev, 5624): As General Grant assumes command of the Union Armies and prepares the national campaign that will put an end to secession and ensure the newly won freedom of African-Americans Jews read Parasha Vayeshev and kindle the first Channukah candle.
1866(27thof Kislev, 5672): Third day of Chanukah
1868: “La Périchole an opéra bouffe in three acts by Jacques Offenbach” was first seen outside of France when it was performed today in Brussels.
1868: Isaac Phillips and his second wife Miriam Trimble Phillips gave birth to Naphtali Taylor Phillips a lawyer he held various political offices, e.g.: he was member of the New York state legislature, served on the judiciary and other committees and as a member of the Joint Statutory Revision Commission of that body (1900); and deputy comptroller of the city of New York (from 1902). He also was a trustee of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, and a member of the Sons of the American Revolution and of the New York Historical Society. He served as treasurer of the Jewish Historical Society and has contributed several papers to its publications. For fifteen years he was clerk of Congregation Shearith Israel. In 1892 Phillips married Rosalie Solomons, daughter of Adolphus S. Solomons. Mrs. Phillips was an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
1869: In Memphis, TN, Sarah and Jacques Gaisman gave birth to multi-talented inventor Henry Jacques Gaisman, whose patented safety razor made him a wealthy man and who married his former nurse, Catherine “Kitty” Gaisman when he was eighty years old
1871: In Sulzburg, Sara and Baruch Dukas gave birth to Julius Dukas, brother of Moritz, Charlotte and Eduard Dukas.
1871: Birthdate of Pittsburgh, PA, native Louis J. Affelder, the U. Pittsburgh educated civil engineer, “assistant division manager of the American Bridge Co, civic leader and husband of Estelle May Affelder with whom he had one son and two daughters.
1874(26thof Kislev, 5635): Parashat Vayeshev; Second Day of Chanukah
1874(26thof Kislev, 5635): Thirty-one year old Edudora H. Hart, the Charleston, SC born daughter of Hetty Maria Gomez and Hyman Hart and the wife of Gratz Nathan with whom she had two children, Constance and Frank, passed away today in New York.
1875: An interview of the three men waiting to be hung for the murder of Abraham Weissburg, a Jewish peddler, was published today.
1875: It was reported today that an English missionary named Dr. Stern appeared before the Jews of Yemen claiming “that he was the bearer of happy tidings.” The Yemini Jews accepted him as a co-religionist until he attempted to convince them that Messiah was the founder of the Christianity at which point they told him to leave their community. The missionary complained to the Sultan who told the Jews “Listen ye Jehuds, you are a miserable people. You pray in your synagogues that Allah may send you the Messiah and now when the good tiding is brought to you that he has come long ago, you ridicule the report as you have ridiculed and slandered our nebbi (prophet). In punishment for your conduct you shall pay double the head tax this year.” [The nebbi refers to Mohammed] This episode an unnamed Jewish teach to proclaim that God had ordered him to gather all the Jews and lead them Jerusalem. Large numbers of Jews across Arabia flocked to his leadership and viewed him as the Messiah promised in the TaNaCh. At the same, Yemen was conquered by Turkey and this unnamed Messiah gave up his leadership role rather than face the Ottomans.
1875(7thof Kislev, 5636): Abram Kurtz, William Lasser, William Meyers, Abram Dietz and Aaron Dietz were among the 278 people who perished in the Brooklyn Theatre Fire.
1875: Birthdate of Chicago native Edwin Frank Mandel, the chairman of the family business – Mandel Brothers Department Store – and philanthropist who donated untold millions to Michael Reese Hospital.
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/2755.html
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/07/18/80452377.pdf
1877: In Kensington, London, Florence Justina Cohen and Abraham de Mattos Mocatta gave birth to Effie Bertha Mocatta.
1877(29thof Kislev, 5638): Fifth Day of Chanukah
1877(29thof Kislev, 5638): Sixty-two year old Henry Emanuel Goldsmith, the Dutch born son of Emanuel Levie Goldsmith and Alijda Joseph Joel Goldsmith and the husband of Anna Goldsmith and Pauline Goldsmith passed away today in NYC after which, in 1880 his widow wrote to Sabato Morais in 1880 offering donate the books belong to him and his father to the “Theological Seminary
1878: In Boston, founding of the Hebrew Women’s Sewing Society which was “affiliated with the Federation of Jewish Charities.
1880: It was reported today that the library of the late Baron James De Rothschild of Paris will soon be sold at auction.
1880: It was reported today that Trubner & Co has just published Early Hebrew Life: A Study in Sociology by John Fenton
1881: In New York City, Tillie Roth and Simon Wels gave birth to NYU trained attorney Isidor Wels, the husband of Belle Hoffman and senior part of the law firm of Moss, Wels and Marcus who belonged to Temple B’nai Israel and the American Jewish Committee
1881: It is reported today that Russian Jews are excited by the prospect of Count Schovaloff replace General Ignatieff as Minister of the Interior given the former’s enlightened attitude towards deal with the Jewish population.
1882(24thof Kislev, 5643): Kindle the first Chanukah Candle
1882: It was reported today that “five soldiers of a regiment of dragoons…have been condemned to 15 years at hard labor in the mines…for taking part in riots against the Jews.”
1882: A warrant procured by Bernard Jaworower of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society for the arrest of Hahal and Abraham Bronstein, two Jewish immigrants from Russia living at Ward’s Island was given to the Harlem Police so they could take them into custody.
1884: “Virchow and Herr Stoecker” published today described the electoral contest between liberal democrat Rudolf Virchow, the renowned pathologist and “the Jew baiting Court Chaplain Adolph Stoecker” in which Virchow appears to have won thanks to the support of the Socialists.
1884: Mother Mandelbaum, the noted “receiver of stolen goods” and her son Julius arrived in Montreal tonight where they are staying with a Jewish family that used to live in Brooklyn.
1884: In Milwaukee, WI, Riekchen Katz and Abe Meissner gave birth St. Louis businessman Edwin B. Meissner, the president of the St. Lous Car Company and board member of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis who was the husband Vassar College graduate Edna Rice Meissner, a leader of the National Council of Jewish Women.
1884: Customers at Kaplan’s Coffee House identified the man who shot himself in the park last night as Jacob Asch a native of Posen who came to the United States 20 years ago where he went into the millinery business, married, had four children and moved to Chicago. He had come back to New York in what proved to be a futile attempt to improve his fortune; a failure that apparently led to his death.
1885: In Brooklyn, NY, Judith Bensinger and Jacob Kronheim gave birth to Sylvan Kronheim the manager of the men’s department at Maison-Blanche in New Orleans and the merchandise manager for the Rosenbaum Company in Pittsburgh who went on to found the Kronheim Continental Company which opened two men’s apparel stores in New York while raising two children Myron and Judith with his second wife ethe former Cecile Younger.
1886: University of Cincinnati graduate and HUC trained rabbi, Joseph Silverman, the Cincinnati born son of Ulrika Piorkowsky and Michael Henry Silverman married Henrietta Block in Galveston, TX while leading Temple Israel in Galveston and before moving on Temple Emanu-El in New York.
1887: Reverend E. D. Simons of New Bloomfield, NJ, is scheduled to read a paper today entitled “Why the Jews Crucified Christ”
1888(1stof Tevet, 5649): Rosh Chodesh Tevet; Seventh day of Chanukah
1888: Birthdate of Berezino, Russia native Joseph George Cohen who in 1891 came to New York City where he earned a Ph.D. from NYU and became the director of the graduate division of Brooklyn College.
1889: The Hebrew Free School Association held its annual meeting today at the house of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association
1889: It was reported today that Mayor Hugh Grant will preside at the official opening of the upcoming Hebrew Educational Fair in New York City.
1890: In Vienna, Anton Lang and the former Pauline Schlesinger, a Jew who had convert to Roman Catholicism gave birth to director Fritz Lang whose trouble with the Nazis stemmed as much from his art as did the fact that under the Nuremberg Laws he was Jewish.
1890: Plans were published today for the upcoming meeting of The Hebrew Free School Association in Manhattan.
1890: In Birmingham, “Polish Jewish immigrant leatherworker Abraham Bomberg and his wife gave birth to Painter David Garshen Bomberg, one of the “White Chapel Boys” who received assistance from “The Jewish Educational Aid Society which enabled him to go to the Slade 1911-13, winning the Tonks Prize for a drawing of fellow student Isaac Rosenberg and who in the 1920’s lived in Palestine where he worked for the Zionists and furthered his painting career
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/david-bomberg
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/the-whitechapel-boys
1892: Birthdate of Al Boasberg, the native of Buffalo career who began his career doing vaudeville with Jack Benny before pursuing a career writing scripts for films, the most of which might have been the Marx Brothers, “A Night at the Opera.”
https://travsd.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/al-boasberg/
http://www.buffaloah.com/h/boasberg/index.html
1892: Jacob Gerber arrived back in Omaha, Nebraska after having spent the last 18 months in Siberian Exile to which he had been condemned when he returned to Russia to help his family leave the Czar’s domain.
1892: The secret documents that had been presented in camera at the libel trial of Hermann Ahlwardt which showed the 520 of the 939 Loewe rifles tested required repairs were read in open court today.
1892: Pasot Hermann Ahlwardt, an avowed anti-Semite, who is “on trial for slandering Herr Loewe, the Hebrew small arms manufacturer” was elected to Germany's Reichstag.
1893(26thof Kislev, 5654): Second Day of Chanukah
1893(26thof Kislev, 5654): Budapest born Benjamin Solomon Spitzer, the rabbi and leader of Austrian Orthodox Jewry known Reb Zalman Spitzer who married the daughter of R. Moses Sofer passed away today.
https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13975-spitzer-benjamin-solomon
https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/spitzer-solomon
1894: The Young Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s League of the Montefiore Home held its first annual reception in the recital chamber of the Music Hall. The League’s purpose is to aid in raising funds for the Montefiore Home.
1894: “An enthusiastic and appreciative audience” representing some “of the best elements” of Jewish society attended the fundraiser hosted by the Monte Relief Society tonight at the Lexington Avenue Opera House.
1894: In New Orleans, LA, today’s session of the convention of American Hebrew Congregations (Reform) a group of rabbis led by Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, the President of the Hebrew Union College protested the opening speech by Leo Levi Galveston in which he asserted that “reformed Judaism” was “endangering the very edifice of the Israelite faith.”
1895: Birthdate of David-Zvi Pinkas, the native of Sopron who was active in Zionist youth groups before making Aliyah in 1925 which led him to a political career that included service in the First Knesset and as the first Minister of Transport.
1895: In La Jolla, CA, Esther and Morris Starrels gave birth to HUC and University of Cincinnati graduate Solomon Elihu Starrels, the first rabbi to lead Congregation B’nai Jershurun in Lincoln, Nebraska and the husband of Gertrude Starrels.
1895: Hermann Ahlwardt, a member of the Reichstag who is about to commence a speaking tour in the United States said that he stands “on the grounds of racial, not religious anti-Semitism” and the he is “striving to unite the working people and the artisans against the Jews” who “achieve nothing through their own honest efforts.”
1895: Dr. S. Solis Cohen of Philadelphia is scheduled to deliver a lecture on “Judaism a Living Force,” the second in a series of talks sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association followed by a performance of the Amateur Philharmonic Orchestra.
1896: Oscar Altman and Rose Wachtel became engaged according to information she later included in her breach of promise suit filed against Altman.
1897: Birthdate of Gerhard Scholem, the German born Israeli-Jewish philosopher and author who gained fame as Gershom Scholem who served as the first Professor Of Jewish Mysticism at Hebrew University where he pursued his ground-breaking academic study of the Kabbalah.
1896: Birthdate of Dr. Gerty Theresa Radnitz Cori who was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, in 1947, which was shared with her husband, Dr. Carl F. Cori, and Dr. B.A. Houssay of Argentina. Austrian born biochemist.
1898: “Gen. Porter and the Dreyfus Case” published today contains Henri Rocherfort’s accusation that General Horace Porter, the United States Ambassador “recently said England had financed the Dreyfus syndicate with a view of dividing and weakening France” followed by Porter’s response that “that the statement was a fabrication, pure and simple.”
1900: Today Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy signed a treaty providing that their navies would work together in the event of an attack on either nation by France or Russia which was yet another of the interlocking treaties that led to WW I, the disaster for so many European Jews that led to that even greater disaster, the Shoah.
1900: Today, twenty-two year old Oscar Berman, the Kovno born son of Charles Meyer and Sophia Berman and younger brother of Jacob Berman, the Chief Rabbi of Berditchev who in 1893 came to the United States where he settled in Cincinnati, OH where he founded the Crown Overall Manufacturing Company married Cora Frank with whom he had two sons, Benjamin and Arnold.
1901: In Chicago, Illinois, Elias and Flora Disney, gave birth to father of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck – Walt Disney whom some have accused of being an anti-Semite despite the fact that he “donated regularly to Jewish charities and “was named 1955 Man of the Year by the B’nai B’rith Chapter in Beverly Hills.”
1902: The Convention of the National Council of Jewish Women continued for a fourth day at the Eutaw Place Synagogue in Baltimore, MD.
1902: Birthdate of Brooklyn native Herman Jacobs the holder of a BS from NYU and an MA from Columbia who worked with the YMHA and YWHA in the New York City are while serving as the executive director of the Jewish Community Council and as an officer with the National Association of Jewish Center Executives.
1902: In Miskolc, Hungary, Kálmán Pressburger, estate manager, and his second wife, Kätherina (née Wichs gave birth to Imre József Pressburger who gained fame as movie director Emeric Pressburgerwho won his only Oscar in 1942, for Best Writing for the original story of The Forty-Ninth Parallel.
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/447372/index.html
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp71284/emeric-pressburger-imre-josef-pressburger
1903(16thof Kislev, 5664): Parashat Vayhislach
1903: It was reported today that in Russia “no new rules have been issued in connection with admission of Americans or other Jews” and that “visas are still declined to Jews of all nationalities in accordance of long-standing policy.”
1903: Leopold Greenberg and Herzl hold consultations about the line of activity to be pursued in England. Herzl has the impression that the British government is withdrawing the East African offer. Greenberg is to press once more for Sinai and El-Arish.
1904(27thof Kislev, 5665): Third Day of Chanukah observed for the first time in the UK under the leadership of Prime Minister Sir Henry Bannerman, the successor to Arthur Balfour of Balfour Declaration fame.
1905: Representative Goldfogle of New York introduced a resolution in the United States House of Representatives condemning the massacre of the Jews of Russia, expressing the sorrow of the House over these killing and asking the President to intervene with the Russian government.
1905: “In Perth Amboy, NJ, “at a meeting at Temple Shaarey Tefiloh, fifteen hundred friends of the victims of the Russian massacres became so wrought up by the addresses made that they threw watches and jewelry into the contribution basket when relief funds were asked for.”
1905: It was reported today that Louis Marshall told those attending a mass memorial service for the Jewish victims of Russian violence that “how in 685 communities within the Russian pale, 25,000 human beings had been trampled into the soil on which for five centuries their ancestors had dwelt, and 100,000 unfortunates had been maimed, disfigured and disgraced.
1905: It was reported today that in addition to all of the memorial services that had been held in synagogues in New York, the actor Jacob P. Adler spoke to those attending the Grand Theatre about the plight of Russian Jews.
1905: Mr. Simon Wolfe, the Jewish communal leader, sent a letter today to the National Committee working to relieve the suffering of the Russian Jews from Carl Schurz in which the famous German born American reformer wrote, “Let me congratulate you on the word you are doing for the Jews in Russia. Nothing in modern times has been more terrible than their situation and to save them a fight has to be carried on not only against the barbarism of the Russian government, but, what is far worse, the barbarism of the populace.”
1905: “Camden Hebrews Memorial Service” published today described the service held the Sons of Israel Synagogue at 8th and Sycamore Streets to honor the Jews who had been murdered the Odessa Pogrom.
1905: It was reported today that the Sons of Israel in Camden, NJ has raised over $700 to be sent to the Jews in Russia who have suffered from a wave of pogroms.
1905: In “Wiznitz, Austria-Hungary (present-day Vyzhnytsia, Ukraine),” “Josefa (née Fraenkel) and Markus Preminger” gave birth to producer/director Otto Preminger whose credits include “Luara” and the film adaptation of Leon Uris’ best-selling novel, Exodus.
https://www.biography.com/people/otto-preminger-9446387
1906: Birthdate of New York City native and CCNY graduate Harry Louis Levy, the holder of a Ph.D from Columbia, the classical scholar who served dean of Students at Hunter College and Vice Chancellor of City University in New York before becoming a visiting professor of classical studies at Duke University where his wife, the former Ernestine Friedl is dean of arts and sciences at the University’s Trinity College.
1907(29th of Kislev, 5668): Fifth Day of Chanukah
1907: “Aaron and Esther (Enteen) Rabinowitz” gave birth to Brooklyn trained attorney and Democratic Party activist Samuel G. Rabinor.
1907: As part of a determined effort to have the public see the Department of Commerce and Labor as an entity that can improve “commercial operations” in the United States, Oscar Straus, the recently appointed Secretary of that department and the first Jew to hold a cabinet post is scheduled to host a meeting today in Washington “of representatives of the various Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce and other commercial organizations.”
1908: Birthdate of Estelle Strossman, the wife of Brooklyn native Samuel L. Multer and the mother of Rhode Island basketball star Barry Multer.
1908: Birthdate of “Shobha Magdolna Friedmann Nehru, a Hungarian Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, married into India’s leading political family.” (As reported by Ellen Barry)
1909: Many of New York City’s most prominent Jewish leaders took part in a memorial meeting this afternoon in honor of the Rabbi Joseph Mayer Asher, Professor in the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and rabbi of the Orach Chaim Synagogue, who passed away unexpectedly at the age of 37 on November 9. It was held under the auspices of the Jewish Community of New York City in the auditorium of the Hebrew Charities Building, at Second Avenue and Twenty-First Street.
1910: In New York City, “Russian Jewish immigrants, Henry and Rebecca (née Rosoff) Polonsky gave birth to Abraham L Polonsky, an American born writer and director, whose political views led to him being blacklisted following World War II. After being “rehabilitated” he made one of his most famous works, “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here.”
1911(14thof Kislev, 5672): Eighty year old Leopold Seligman, seventh of the eight Seligman brothers and co-founder of the Anglo-Californian bank and “who with his brother Isaac” headed “the well-known banking firm in London of Seligman Brothers” passed away today in the English capital city.
1911: Today, twenty-nine year old Johns Hopkins trained medical doctor Solomon Strouse, the Baltimore born son of Benjamin and Fannie (Kahn) Strouse and associate professor of Northwestern University married Edith J. Mayer in Chicago.
1911:Birthdate of Polish pianistWładysław Szpilman. He worked as pianist for Polish radio in Warsaw until 1939. He was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto where he continued playing while helping to smuggle weapons into the ghetto. When the rest of his family was sent to Treblinka, Szpilman escaped. Eventually he was captured by the Germans. However, thanks to Wilm Hoseneld, a Wermacht Captain who had become disillusioned with the Nazis, Szpilman survived the war. His autobiography became the source for the script of the 2002 film entitled “The Pianist.”
1911: Forty-six year old Russian born painter and portrait artist Valentin Alexandrovich Serov passed away. For a display of his work including his self-portrait seehttp://www.tanais.info/art/en/serov.html
1912(25thof Kislev, 5673): Chanukah
1912(25thof Kislev, 5673): Forty year old Hoboken, NJ philanthropist A.E. Solomon passed away today at Jacksonville, FL.
1912: In Warsaw, “David Grobsmith, a shoe designer, and Lonia Grobsmith née Babicz, a corsetiere” gave birth to Kaila Grobsmith, who gained famed as Hunter College graduate and author Kate Simon who married Robert Simon after the death of Stanley Goldman.
1912: Two days after he had passed away, 70 year old Sigmund Pollitzer, the husband of Rebecca Pollitzer with whom he had had four children was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”
1912: Today, “Rabbi Schanfarber addressed the Jews of Michigan City” today “and “urged the formation of Sabbath School.
1912: The ninth convention of the Rivers and Harbors Congress which Jacob A. Cantor is attending as a delegate from New York continued for a second day in Washington, D.C.
1912: Birthdate of Senetta Punfud, the native of Fürth, Germany who gained married Giroa Yoseftal and gained fame as Israeli political leader Senetta Yoseftal, a founder of Kibbutz Galed and Knesset Minster.
1913(6thof Kislev, 5674): Seventy-year-old Cincinnati native and Civil War veteran Jacob Trost, the son of Wolf and Hannah Kahn Trost and the husband of Carrie Solomon Trost with whom he had had two children – Belle and Jeannette – passed away today after which he was buried at the Judah Touro Cemetery in Cincinnati.
1913: According to a report published in “La America” after the sisterhood’s old Neighborhood House “became inadequate” the facility was moved to Orchard Street.
1914: “War Hits Zionism, Says Zangwill” published today provides the views of the Israel Zangwill of the war on the Jewish people. Among other things he believed “that the present war will for some years make it impossible to have German, English, Austrian and Russian Jews meet on a common basis, that the establishment of a national home in Palestine will not solve the problems of discrimination faced by most Jews and that at this time he will work to have Lord Gray, the British Foreign Secretary, pressure the Russians to improve the conditions of Russian Jewry.
1915: “A new Jewish theological seminary which is to be called the Rabbinical College that has been established by the Yeshibath Etz Chaim and the Rabbi Isaac Elchana Seminary” for the purpose of training Orthodox rabbis located at 9 and 11 Montgomery Streets” is scheduled to be formally dedicated this morning in New York City.
1915(28thof Kislev, 5676): Fourth Day of Chanukah
1915: A hoped for 5,000 volunteers were scheduled to take part in Zion Flag Day which was supported by numerous organizations including David Wolfsohn Zion Club in Manhattan, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in the Bronx and the Young Judean Club in Brooklyn
1915: The New York Chapter of Hadassah is scheduled to host a Chanukah celebraton this eveing at the Hotel Majestic to raise money for the Emergency Fund providing aid to the suffering Jews of Palestine which will feature “a program of Hebrew and Yiddish Songs” and “a dramatic reading by Miss Jennie Mannheimer of Cincinnati.
1915: As previously decided by the Executive Committee of the Federation of American Zionists, Flag Day is scheduled to be celebrated today.
1915: It was reported today that in Russia “it is not feasible to replace coal with timber, which is abundant in the Russian forests, because the timber trade is exclusively in the hands of the Jews and they have been decimated by the most cruel pogroms or expelled from the west and the northwest which is the great forest land of Russia. (Given a choice between anti-Semitism or winning the war, it looks like the Czar preferred the former to the latter.)
1915: “At the opening session of the seventh annual convention of the Federation of Jewish Farmers of America held in the auditorium of the Education Alliance Building” tonight “Jacob H. Schiff predicted that after the war there will be a tide of immigration of European Jews to” the United States “because of the persecutions they are undergoing in Russia and Poland” and “plans must be made to accommodate these people in” rural areas because the cities are already overcrowded with immigrants.
1915: Among those listed today as having made contributions to the American Jewish Relief Committee to provide funds for those living in the war zones include $104 from the Fargo, North Dakota, Association of Jewish Charities, $200 from the Calgary, Canada Jewish Relief Fund, $1,000 from the Des Moines, Iowa Jewish Community and $100 from the Jewish Conference of Minneapolis, MN.
1916: Birthdate of Hilary Koprowski the Polish-born Jewish virologist and immunologist, and inventor of the world's first effective live polio vaccine. (As reported by Margalit Fox)
1916: Twenty-four year old University of Pennsylvania attorney, Louis E. Levinthal, the Philadelphia born son of Bernhard and Minna (Kleinberg) Levinthal who became a member of the National Executive Committee of the ZOA and member of the board of trustee of JPS married Lenore Chodoff today.
1917: As Imperial forces battled their way to Jerusalem, the advanced guard of the 53rd (Welsh) Division also known as Mott’s Detachment moved three miles north of Hebron under the cover of darkness.
1917: At a time “when the Turks under German control are deporting Jews wholesale from Palestine,” The Frankfurter Zeitung published an account supplied by Count Ernst Graf zu Reventlow “of a secret anti-Semitic movement which is collecting funds for a violent German campaign against Jews” which is “to open directly after peace is concluded.” (Reventlow was an anti-Semite who joined the Nazis)
1917: Rabbi Joel Blau of Rochester, NY delivered an address on “Israel After War” at the meeting of the Menorah Society in which he declared that “Jewish freedom can mean only one thing: not merely freedom everywhere, but a free Israel in its own land, Palestine.”
1917: The convention of the Association of American Jewish Rabbis that has been meeting at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association adjourned today after reaffirming its previously adopted motion express thanks to the British government for the promulgation of the Balfour Declaration.
1918: Lord Curzon chaired a meeting of the Cabinet Eastern Committee attended by General Jan Smuts, Lord Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil, General Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, T. E. Lawrence and representatives of the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Admiralty, the War Office, and the Treasury at which the status of Palestine was discussed. (Editor’s Note – This list of attendees should prove that the issue of the future of Palestine was one of major concern to the British as they prepared to deal with the post-war world.)
1919(13th of Kislev, 5680): Clara S. Kraus, the wife of Louis Kraus and mother of Muriel Kraus passed away today in Chicago where she was a member of Temple Sholom.
1919: Mortimer L. Schiff, Chairman of the Finance Committee of the Jewish Welfare Board was among the passengers on board the SS Mauretania that set sail for Great Britain today. Schiff was accompanied by George W. Perkins, Chairman of the Finance Committee of the War Work Council of the YMCA. The trip which representative of kind of inter-religious harmony unique to the United States, was the first step in assessing how the funds collected by these two organizations could best be used to alleviate the suffering in post-war Europe.
1919: A delegation of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) including Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Mrs. Joseph Fels, Louis Robinson and Bernard Flexner set sail from New York for London where they will meet with leaders of other Zionist organizations, including the Zionist Political Committee.
1919: The Turkish Minister of War issues a decree releasing all Jews (as well as Greeks and Armenians) from obligation in the military.
1920(24thof Kislev, 5681): Kindle the first Chanukah Candle
1920: At 10 o’clock today, “the clubs on Washington Heights” are scheduled to “present a program of Jewish plays, tableaux, recitations and motion pictures at the Audubon Theatre” as part of the Channukah celebration.
1920: Cornell graduate and Long Island College Hospital trained medical doctor Murray Burnes Gordon, the New York City born son of Pera Lichtman and Isaac Gordon married Harriet Engel today after which he became the president of the medical staff of the United Israel Zion Hospital
1921(4thof Kislev, 5682): Eighty-nine year old Austrian feminist Ottilie Bonday, the daughter of Johanna and Dr. Aloys Isidor Jeitteles passed away in Munich.
1922: At the Conference of Lusanne, Russia pursued its goal to control the Dardanelles which has had a long running effect on the Middle East, by demanded “the closure of the straits, in peace and war, to the warships and aircraft of all nations except Turkey.
1922: In London, Major Harry Louis Nathan, 1st Baron Nathan and Eleanor Joan Clara Nathan gave birth to Captain Roger Carol Michael Nathan, 2nd Baron Nathan
1922: Birthdate of Lois Ruth Mell, who would become known as Casey Ribicoff, the wife Abraham Ribiccoff a great liberal Democrat and decent man who served as U.S. Senator from Connecticut and Secretary of HEW.
1922(15th of Kislev, 5683): Benjamin Levinsky was shot and killed this morning “by William Lipshitz while entering a Broadway loft building where he was employed as a cutter for the Levinson Brothers. He had driven to work in a taxi with Benjamin Massauer, an ex-convict who had spent the night at his home, and who had told the driver to stop the cab when two shots were heard shortly after Levinsky entered the building. As a crowd gathered in front of the building, Lipshitz ran out from the doorway and into a patrolman who had arrived at the scene. When questioned, he denied any knowledge of the shooting and claimed to have been buying a suit when the murder took place. Both Lipshitz and Massauer were taken to the Mercer Street police station where they were further questioned by police. Lipshitz maintained he had no involvement in Levinsky's murder but was caught lying when he claimed to have no criminal record. He had been using the alias William Levine but admitted to being William Lipshitz when confronted with his photo in the precinct's Rogue's Gallery. A witness also claimed to have seen he and Levinsky fighting in the doorway when the shooting occurred. Lipshitz was eventually charged with Levinsky's death while Massauer was held as a material witness until paroled in the custody of lawyer Hyman Bushel who had been hired by Levinsky's family. Although police suspected his murder had been committed by a personal enemy, Bushel later issued a statement from the family claiming that Levinsky had been murdered as the result of a murder contract by businessmen. Benjamin Levinsky, who was born in 1893, was an American gang leader, labor racketeer and organized crime figure. Spending almost twenty years in and out of reformatories and prisons, Levinsky had a lengthy criminal record prior to the start of Prohibition. He was first arrested in 1902 for incorrigibility and sent to a reformatory asylum. He was caught pickpocketing five years later and was imprisoned on a variety of charges over the next decade including petty theft, grand larceny, felonious assault and vagrancy. He became involved in labor racketeering in Manhattan's Lower East Side and, prior to the third "Labor Slugger War", Levinsky reportedly became "a thorn in the side of clothing contractors". Due to his unionizing activities, he apparently became the target of assassination by certain business interests. Other sources claim he headed a gang of gunmen and thieves which began muscling in on the territory of other "labor sluggers” particularly that of newsboy and labor racketeer William Lipshitz.”
1923(27thof Kislev, 5684): Third day of Chanukah
1923: American Jews absorbed the warning reported yesterday that Chaim Weizmann said “a wave of anti-Semitism sweeping over Eastern Europe is endangering the lives of eight million Jews.”
1924: In Baltimore, MD, “the former Florence Decker, an amateur painter” and her husband Gustave gave birth “comic-book artist” Samuel Joseph Glanzman. (As reported by Richard Sandomir)
1925 After 319 performances on Broadway, the curtain came down on “Louis XIV” featuring the music of Sigmund Romberg.
1925(18thof Kislev, 5686): Parasha Vayishlach
1925: New York native Bernhard Baron who made his money in the tobacco business in London celebrated his seventy-fifth birth today “by giving £50,000 to charity from his private fortune” which “brings the total of his gifts to charities and to his employee in the present year to £200,000 and for all years £700,000.”
1925(18th of Kislev, 5686): Yehuda Leib Levin, oldest of the Hebrew poets in Russia, known for more than half a century under his pen name ‘Jahalel,’” passed away today in Kiev. Born in Minsk in 1844, Levin studied Talmud, worked as a teacher before serving as a treasurer for local flour and sugar mills. The first collection of his poetry was published in 1871 under the title Sifte Raananim.” In 1877, “Kishron Massech” his poem “devoted to a description of the social conditions of Russian Jews” was published. In a case of Jew meets Jew, Levin translated Disraeli’s Tancred into Hebrew.
1926: Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," debuted. Eisenstein was a famed Russian director whose father was a Jewish architect. As a “child of the Russian Revolution,” Eisenstein did not profess a belief in any religion.
1927: In the Czech Republic, Ernst Löw the Czech born son of Karl Löw and Rosa Löw and his wife Rosa / Růžena Rosalie Löw gave birth to Herbert Löw,
1928(22ndof Kislev, 5689): Fifty-six year old Sarah A. Moses, the Montgomery, AL born daughter of Jeanette Nathan and Alfred Huger Moses who were married in 1871 at Louisville passed away today in St. Louis, MO.
1928: “According to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency dispatch sent today from Warsaw “an anti-Jewish boycott has been started in Upper Silesia threatening 6,000 Jewish peddlers with economic ruin.” (Editor’s note – so much for the myth that the treatment of the Jews by the Poles during the Holocaust was because “the Germans made them do it.”
1928: At the opening meeting of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, Dr. S. Parkes Cadman said “that he considered himself radio minister to Jews and Gentiles as the committee in charge of the programs was not confined exclusively to Christians.”
1929: “Jewish Honor Roll Lists 4 Christians” published today reported that the soon to be published “annual Who’s Who issue of the American Hebrew will list four Christians” – Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia; Dr. A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard; Dr. W.H.P. Fuance of Brown and John D. Rockefeller, Jr – “among those listed as having performed outstanding work the Jewish people in 1929…”
1930: The Baltimore Jewish Times reported that Cantor Abba Yosef Weisgal’s Adolph Coblenz was his “first rabbi in Baltimore, MD.”
1930: In Los Angeles, “a jeweler and an actress” gave birth to Frederick Lawrence Kert who gained fame as singer Larry Kert, best known for playing the lead in Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway hit “West Side Story.”
1930: “The Blue Angel,” a tragi-comedy directed by Josef von Sternberg who also co-authored the script with music by Friedrich Hollaender and Franz Waxman was released in the United States today.
1931(25thof Kislev, 5692): Chanukah
1931: “A Governor’s warrant for the extradition of Montefiore E. Kahn from to New York City to New Jersey will be sought today by…the Prosecutor of Hudson County following Kahn’s indictment yesterday on a charge of embezzlement of $100,000 from Oil Shares, Inc. of which he was vice president.”
1931: The False Madonna, with a screenplay co-authored by Arthur Kober was released today in the United States.
1932(6thof Kislev, 5693): Eighty-one year old German born Cincinnati businessman William Ornstein, an officer with B’nai B’rith passed away today.
1932: Birthdate of Farhat Ezekiel Nadira, a member of a prominent Baghdadi Jewish family who gained fame as Nadria, a leading Indian movie actress.
1932: “German” physicist Albert Einstein was granted a visa. Einstein was the kind of German who had to use his visa to flee to the United States where he could continue his work and, more importantly, continue to stay alive. To history he may have been a “German” but to the Germans he was one more candidate for the Final Solution. As those who studied Jewish History on Monday nights at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids learned, “who writes history often determines what the history is.”
1932: In New York, Jewish immigrants Bella (Rubin) and Lewis Gluchovsky, a plumber gave birth to Sheldon Glashow who developed the Electroweak Theory and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979.
1933:Edith Frank-Holländer and her daughter Margot join their father Otto in Amsterdam. Her sister Anne will leave Germany and join them in February of 1943
1933(17th of Kislev, 5694): Fifty-eight year old Columbia trained physician Alfred Fabian Hess, the husband of the former Sara Strauss, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Strauss with whom he had four children and the developer of the Hess Test which came about while studying “the role of nutrition in scurvy and rickets” passed away today.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/1176548
https://library-archives.cumc.columbia.edu/obit/alfred-fabian-hess
1933: Utah becomes the 36th State to ratify the 21st Amendment marking the end of Prohibition at the federal level in the United States.
http://americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1991_43_02_00_sprecher.pdf
http://forward.com/articles/143791/prohibition-tells-changing-story-of-jews-in-americ/
1934: In response to questions from Labor MP Colonel Josiah C. Wedgwood, “Colonial Secretary Sir Phillip Cunliffe-Lister” told the House of Commons “that between January 1 and November 24, 627 Jews were deported from Palestine” at cost unknown to him at this time.
1934: In Newark, NJ, H. Jerome Sisselman and his wife gave birth to art collector Naomi Wilzig, the wife of Siggi Wilzig, an Auschwitz survivor and an early leader of the U.S. Holocaust Museum,
1935: Birthdate of Auckland, New Zealand native Maxwell Harold “Max” Gimblett the American artist and the husband of Canadian born scholar Barbara Kirsheblatt-Gimblett.
http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2016/04/28/max-gimblett-and-the-art-of-remembrance/
1935: In Kansas City, MO, Edythe and Abe Trillin gave birth to Calvin Trillin, the journalist, humorist novelist and creator of comic verse, best known for his writing about cooking and food. A few of his famous one-liners include: “Following the Jewish tradition, a dispenser of schmaltz (liquid chicken fat) is kept on the table to give the vampires heartburn if they get through the garlic defense.” “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”
https://www.thenation.com/authors/calvin-trillin/
1936: It was reported today that Dr. Wildhagen, an Aryan who “sits on the bench of the Leipzig Supreme Court” was among those whose books were banned the National Socialist Party because they erroneously identified him as being Jewish.
1937:The Palestine Post reported that Sir Alfred MacMichael, governor of Tanganyika since 1934, had been appointed to replace Sir Arthur Wauchope as the High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief of Palestine and the High Commissioner for Transjordan.
1937: The Palestine Post reported that in Jerusalem Abraham Perlman, 20, was shot dead and two young girls were wounded when they strolled together towards the King David Hotel.
1937: An article published today entitled "A Trio by the Thames" described the opening of a four week season of the Habima Players in London. By November 19, at the end of the first of the four weeks, the Palestinian troupe had displayed "the Habima Method" in a faultless performance of the Dybbuk.
1938: Following Kristallnacht, 18 year old Helmut Newton fled Germany today with the intention of going to China but ended up in Singapore where he pursued his career as a photographer :first for the Straits Times and then as a portrait photographer”
1938: Birthdate of Stepney native and “footballer” Mark Lazaurs whose career reached a high point “when he scored the final goal for QPR against West Bromwich Albion in the 1967 League Cup Final at Wembley Stadium.”
1938: As the Arab uprising intensified, Abd el Bader Abu Saleh, an Arab leader was shot dead by Arab terrorists. Snipers attacked Jewish settlements as well as military and police installations in Gaza. Damage done to the railroad running between Lydda and Tel Aviv was repaired within hours after having been discovered.
1938: The following article entitled “Germany: Ad Nauseam” published today proves the world was not ignorant of the fate of German Jewry.
How 62 prosperous German Jews were forced to run a bloody gantlet at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was reported last week in the Liberal News Chronicle of London. Two long ranks of Adolf Hitler's personal Schutzstaffel formed the gantlet, down which the 62 Jews were forced to run. "As they approached between the ranks, a hail of blows fell on them," said the News Chronicle. "As they fell, the Jews were beaten further. The orgy lasted half an hour. . . . Twelve of the 62 were dead, with skulls smashed. All the others were unconscious, some with eyes out and faces flattened in. ... Police, unable to bear the cries, turned their backs." This nauseating atrocity, whether or not the honest News Chronicle was correctly informed as to exactly what happened, is undoubtedly the truth in the sense that such atrocities do occur today in many parts of Germany, especially the countryside. The case for antiSemitism, as it appears to strong-stomached Nazis, was taken last week before the bar of German public opinion. It is to be kept there for many weeks, with more than 1,500 major anti-Semitic mass meetings, scheduled throughout Germany, plus countless anti-Semitic lectures—all under the showmanship of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels. Dr. Goebbels is sometimes described in print as a barking, brawling, screaming propaganda maniac. Actually the Minister for Propaganda & Public Enlightenment is one of the great political orators of this century. He opens suavely, is restrained most of the time, mellifluent, knows how to whip a point over with the sting of humor, a trifle crude at times—or very crude if Dr. Goebbels is radiorating to the masses. The importance in Dr. Goebbels' mind of the "educative campaign" he was starting last week caused him to summon 2,000 of his picked Nazi stooge-orators to meet him in the Kroll Opera House. "I have never made anti-Semitic propaganda in the outside world," said Orator Goebbels softly. "The dear Jews have done that for themselves. . . . Anti-Semitism is latent among all peoples. The Jews awaken it. ... All we have done is to eliminate Jews from public life in Germany. Let the English say what they will, what we do is our business! . . . After five-and-one-half years of National Socialism, the Jews still have in Germany proportionately four-and-one-half times as much wealth as the Aryans!" From this Dr. Goebbels proceeded to an economic attack on the Jewish Question. According to him, if the average German owned as much as the average German Jew still owns today, the national wealth of the Reich would be not as at present some 200 billion marks but over 900 billion marks. As though for a Liberty Loan Drive, the Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment rushed to German "educative meetings" Dr. Goebbels' brand new "educational film" prepared weeks ago—Jewry Without The Mask. This was not all, by any means. With typical German thoroughness, Dr. Goebbels forced the Jewish Theatre of Berlin, which wished to remain closed, to re-open last week and ordered a Jewish director Fritz Wisten brought directly from a concentration camp to put on a comedy, The Wind And The Rain—or else. A policeman then noted in his little book and reported back to his Nazi superiors what was also noted by the Associated Press correspondent: The bedraggled Jewish audience "occasionally applauded" this comedy which they were obliged to sit through by Dr. Goebbels so that his 2,000 orators can "truthfully" tell the German people such things as this: "There is right now a Jewish theatre going full blast in Berlin and playing comedies at which the rich Jews laugh and applaud while poor Jews are starving!" Such despotic acts of State are the most effective form of 1938 streamlined propaganda, but Orator Goebbels of course uses many first-rate German orators—as well as his 2,000 regimented speakers. First-rate Orator Dr. Robert Ley, führer of the Labor front of 20 million German workers (who have to take him as their trade union boss whether they like him or not), declared last week: "The resurgence of the German people had three stages: first, unification under a Führer; second, the bursting of the Versailles bonds; third, exposure of the Jewish enemy and the battle with him."* Dr. Ley did not forget that he was addressing, among other German workers, many more or less devout Catholics, all of whom know that Pope Pius XI has taken the strongest stand against anti-Semitism and inferentially against Naziism (TIME, Aug. 14). Attacking His Holiness directly, Labor Front Ley blasphemed: "The Pope is wrong because he recognizes only one Catholic race. But Almighty God was not so papal as the Pope. He made differences among races! There are positive and negative elements in the human race and the negative can exist only as parasites—as witness the Jews!" Herren Hitler, Goebbels, Ley et al. are the remorseless leaders and directors of the Nazi program to liquidate the Jews. But the merciless hand of 185,000 who eagerly carry out their orders to the hilt and then some are the 185,000 bullyboys of the Reich—the Schutzstaffel, the vicious elite of the Nazi storm troops. Their organ, and that of the Gestapo (secret police) is Das Schwarze Korps. This Party paper recently stated it as a fact that international Jewry had declared war on Germany. Last week Das Schwarze Korps, descended from appalling generalities to particulars. It proposed this program to destroy Germany's Jews as follows: first impoverish them; this will end in the Jews' having no other means of livelihood than to descend to criminality; "at this stage of development we should therefore face the hard necessity of exterminating the Jewish underworld in the same fashion in which ... we exterminate criminals generally—by fire and sword. "Because it is necessary, because we no longer hear the world's screeching and because, after all, no power on earth can hinder us, we will now bring the Jewish question to its totalitarian solution," declared Das Schwarze Korps. "The program is clear. "The Jews must be quartered in streets and housing blocks where they will be among themselves and come into touch with Germans as little as possible." No one of the ghettos which would be Stage 1 of the Schtitzstaffel's plan had yet been set up in Germany last week. But the laws to put Jews outside Germany's social and economic life were being promulgated daily. No German Jew may enter any non-Jewish place of entertainment or education. No Jew may conduct any commercial business or service. The professions had not been entirely closed to them. That would come later. Meantime, blustering Reich Master of the Hunt Hermann Göring withdrew all Jewish hunting licenses. *Newshawks who few weeks ago reported that Germany's famed folk song, Heinrich Heine's Lorelei, had been banned because its author was a Jew, discovered that Dr. Ley had nonetheless named his newborn daughter Lore Ley.
1939: German authorities seize Jewish property in Poland. Items that are appropriated include businesses, homes, furniture and other household goods, currency and bank accounts, art, jewelry, and other valuables. Now economically helpless, the Jews have virtually nothing with which to sustain themselves.
1940: British government official Sir John Schuckburgh wrote that "the Jews have no sense of humor and no sense of proportion."
1940: “The Thief of Bagdad” a fantasy produced by Sir Alexander Korda, with contributions by Vincent and Zotlan Korda, the other two siblings of this fascinating trio of Hungarian born Jews was released in the United States today.
1941: “Jewish Army Urged To Win Just Peace” published today described plans for a volunteer force of 200,000 Jews that would be trained in Canada and receive equipment under lend-lease that was supported by, among others, Colon John H. Patter, the English Commander of the Jewish Legion in World War I who “had long advocated the formation of a Jewish army because he knew it would help win the war and second because he believe that that without such an army there will be no just peace, no any true democracy after the war.”
1941: The Nazis collected 7,000 Jews in the town courtyard at Nowogrodek, Poland. After a night in the court yard, the Jews were selected to the left for work, or to the right for death. Five thousand of the Jews went to the right.
1941: Two days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, “Mr. Bug Goes to Town,” the film that ended the partnership between Max and Dave Fleischer had a limited release.
1942: Four days after his 38th birthday Czech journalist Josef Taussig and his parents – Otto and Frederike, née Federer, Taussig – and “at least five of his other relatives” were shipped to Theresienstadt.
1943: The New York Times reported today that 34 of the Jews arrested by the British during their search for arms at Ramat HaKovesh were released during the last weekend in November, 1943.
1944: In “Bids Jews of U.S. Take Judaism Lead” published today, it was reported that Dr. Ignacy Schwartzbart of the Polish National Council told the American Jewish Conference “the destiny of the Jewish people throughout the world now rests with active and responsible leadership from the American Jews.”
1945(1stof Tevet, 5706): Rosh Chodesh Tevet; Sixth Day of Chanukah
1945: “1,000 at Hanukah Dinner” published today described a dinner at the Hotel Commodore sponsored by the JNF where each of the attendees have given enough money to purchase one dunam or a quarter of an acre of land in Palestine.
1945: Birthdate of Moshe Katsav, future President of Israel.
1946: “Till The Clouds Roll By” a musical biography of Jerome Kern, produced by Arthur Freed and featuring Dinah Shore was released in the United States today by MGM.
http://emanuellevy.com/review/till-the-clouds-roll-by-9/
1947: Cartoonist and Chairman of Marvel Comics Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber) married Joan Clayton Boocock today.
1947: The U.S. State Department announced that no arms will be sent to the Middle East. [This American arms embargo worked to the advantage of the Arabs who had standing, well-armed militaries the best of which was the Arab Legion, the Jordanian Army supplied by the British with equipment and officers.]
1947: “The Jewish Agency announced the call-up of all men and women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five for national service.” This was part of the Yishuv’s response to the immediate increase in Arab violence following the vote to adopt the UN back partition plan.
1948: “An Act of Murder” based on a novel by Ernst Lothar, an Austrian Jew who escaped the Nazis and a screenplay by Michael Blankfort was released in New York City today.
1948: At its meeting in Tel Aviv, the Knesset publicly declared the Jerusalem was the capital of the new Jewish state.
1948: First day of Operation Assaf, a campaign by the IDF to secure the western Negev by dislodging the Egyptians who had invaded the area out the outbreak of the war. The first day was a success for the IDF which captured several Egyptian positions without sustaining serious casualties.
1949: “Prime Minister proclaimed Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.”
1950(26thof Kislev, 5711): Second Day of Chanukah
1950(26thof Kislev, 5711): Sixty-eight year old Dr. Benjamin Gruskin, the Lithuanian born son of Leon Gruskin and a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and Rush Medical School who was “a leader in experimental medicine” “credited with several medical discoveries” including the discovery of the therapeutic value of chlorophyll, blood and skins tests for cancer, a test for inactive tuberculosis and a pregnancy test” passed away today in a hospital in Durham, NC after which he was buried at the Beth Shalom Cemetery in Pittsburgh, PA.
1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that it was decided to proceed with the release of accounts held by Arab refugees in banks in Israel. Arab states made no such offer of releasing funds of Jewish refugees held in Arab banks in such places as Morocco or Yemen. At the UN Britain joined Canada in urging the Arab states to enter into direct peace negotiations, without any preconditions, with Israel.
1954: Birthdate of music promoter Ruth Polsky,
http://thejewniverse.com/2017/this-jewish-punk-heroine-died-tragically-young/
1955: It was reported today that Jules Levey, the former general sales manager for R.K.O. who has not produced a picture “for about seven years” “will return to independent production by filming the bestselling novel The Tontine.
1956: During the Suez Crisis, Golda Meir addressed the General Assembly. In part of her speech Mrs. Meir compared Israeli treatment of Jews who had been forced to flee from Arab countries with the pitiful conditions under which Arab nations forced the refugees in Gaza to live. “While Israel ‘fed those babies and cured their diseases, the fedayeen were sent in to throw bombs at children in synagogues and grenades in baby homes.’”
1956: Tonight, in front of 15 million viewers, Charles Van Doren, the epitome of WASP New York defeated Herb Stempel, the Brooklyn born CCNY grad on the quiz show “Twenty-One” in what was a totally rigged event that Stempel, out of anger, exposed during that Quiz Show scandal which in those simpler days rocked the nation.
1957: “Sayonara” a film adaption of the novel produced by William Goetz, with music by Franz Waxman and co-starring Red Buttons was released in the United States today Warner Bros.
1957:New York City passed the Fair Housing Practices Law making it the first city to legislate against racial or religious discrimination in the housing market. A decade after the Holocaust, it was still legal to keep a people from buying a house because they were Jewish.
1958(23rdof Kislev, 5719): Sixty-five year old Frampol, Russia native Aaron Maiberg who served with the 39th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and “was one of the first settlers of Shechumat Borochov” and who established his home at Idofit passed away today.
1959: “Operation Petticoat” a comedy with a script co-authored by Stanley Shapiro, co-starring Tony Curtis and music by David Rose was released today in the United States.
1960: Jewish Ministers Cantor Association of America & Canada held its 60thAnniversary Concert at Madison Square Garden.
1961(27thof Kislev, 5722): Third Day of Chanukah
1961(27thof Kislev, 5722): Eighty-three year old NYU trained attorney and former owner of the Boston Braves of the National League Emil Edwin Fuchs, the son of Hermann and Henrietta (Wollenberg) Fuchs, and husband of Aurelia “Oretta” Marcovich, who gave Babe Ruth his last chance to play in the Major Leagues passed away today.
https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/judge-emil-fuchs/
1962: Comedian Lenny Bruce “was arrested at the legendary Gate of Horn folk club in Chicago.
1962(8thof Kislev, 5723): Thirty-six year old author Edward Lewis Wallant, whose best-known work may have The Pawnbroker which was made into moving film starring Rod Steiger, passed away today.
1963(19thof Kislev, 5724): “New Year of The Chassidim”
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/335659/jewish/19-Kislev-The-New-Year-of-Chassidism.htm
1963(19thof Kislev, 5724): Eighty-five year old Herbert H. Lehman, the former governor of New York passed away today.
https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/mep/displaydoc.cfm?docid=erpn-herleh
1963” “Charade” a film based “The Unsuspecting Wife” by the screenwriter Peter Stone, directed and produced by Stanley Donen and co-starring Walter Matthau was released today in the United States.
1965(11thof Kislev, 5726): Fifty-seven Russian born, and Columbia trained physician Dr. Sidney Tarachow, the former member of the faculty of Iowa State University and director of the division of psychoanalytic education of the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and clinical professor of psychiatry passed away today.
1965(11th of Kislev, 5726): Joseph Erlanger passed away. Born in 1874, Erlangerborn was an American physiologist who discovered that fibers within the same nerve cord possess different functions. In 1910 he accepted the chair of physiology at Washington University in St. Louis, which he held until his retirement in 1946. While his department became one of the major research centers in physiology in America, Erlanger continued his work on cardiovascular physiology. During WW I, he carried out research on the problem of shock. In 1921 he shifted his interests to neurophysiology, and began joint work, with colleague Herbert Gasser, on the amplification and recording of nerve action potentials with the cathode ray oscilloscope, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1944.
1967: PoetAllen Ginsberg was arrested protesting Vietnam War
1968(14thof Kislev, 5729): Eighty-four year old Newark, NJ attorney Aaron Levinstone, the Grodno, born son Yeruchim and Esther Levinstone. the husband of Etta G. Goldstein and Jewish community leader who was Chairman of the United Palestine Appeal, a member of the National Executive of the Z.O.A and a member of Temple B’nai Abraham passed away today after which he buried B’nai Abraham Memorial Park in Union, NJ.
In Grodno, Yeruchim and Esther Levinstone gave birth Newark, NJ attorney Aaron Levinstone, the husband of Etta G. Goldstein and Jewish community leader who was Chairman of the United Palestine Appeal, a member of the National Executive of the Z.O.A and a member of Temple B’nai Abraham.
1968: “Jimmy Shine,” a play with music written by Murray Schisgal and starring Dustin Hoffman in the title role opened on Broadway today at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.
1969: Four mid-eastern terrorists were arrested thwarting an attack on a plane the London airport
1969: In landmark case involving “Dr. – Patient Confidentiality” Dr. Joseph Lifschutz who had “refused a court order to testify about one his patients” was cited for contempt of court “and sent to the San Mateo Jail.
1969: Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark, the mother of the Duke of Edinburgh and the mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II passed away. During World War II, “After the fall of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in September 1943, the German Army occupied Athens, where a minority of Greek Jews had sought refuge. The majority (about 60,000 out of a total population of 75,000) were deported to Nazi concentration camps, where all but 2,000 died. During this period, Princess Andrew hid Jewish widow Rachel Cohen and two of her five children, who sought to evade the Gestapo and deportation to the death camps.[40] Rachel's husband, Haimaki Cohen, had aided King George I of Greece in 1913. In return, King George had offered him any service that he could perform, should Cohen ever need it. Cohen's son remembered this during the Nazi threat, and appealed to Princess Andrew, who with Princess Nicholas was one of only two remaining members of the royal family left in Greece. She honored the promise and saved the Cohen family.”
1971(17thKislev, 5732): Eighty-four-year-old Columbia trained engineer Maurice L. Sindeband the inventor of several devices, including an automatic train con trol system, an automatic re actor for electric power circuits, an electronic voltage regulator for generators and a method of preventing lightning from damaging high‐tension transmission lines and the husband of the former Lyllian Levy with whom he had two sons Seymour and Allan passed away today.
1972(29thof Kislev, 5733): Fifth Day of Chanukah
1972: “Five former Gestapo agents received prison terms today of up to five and one‐half years for assisting in the 1942 killings of about 5,000 Jews in German‐occupied Poland.”
1973: U.S Premiere of director Sidney Lumet’s crime classic “Serpico” co-produced by Martin Bergman with a script co-written by Norman Wexler and filmed by cinematographer Arthur Ornitz.
1974: “Premier Yitzhak Rabin said today that Israel was prepared to Make far‐reaching territorial compromises with the Arab nations in return for peace, but he ruled out a return to the borders that existed before the 1967 war.”
1975(1stof Tevet, 5736): Rosh Chodesh Tevet; Seventh Day of Chanukah
1975(1stof Tevet, 5736): Eighty year old pioneer Zionis and five time member of the Knesset passed away today.
https://jwa.org/people/idelson-beba
1976: “Bound for Glory” a cinema adaption of the autobiography of the same name produced by Harold Leventhal, filmed by cinematographer Haskell Wexler and featuring Bernie Kopell was released in the United States today.
1976(13thof Kislev, 5737): Seventy-three year old Bessie Bassok Warshawsky, the Russian born daughter of Nathan Bassok, the wife of Samuel Warshawsky whom she married in 1923 and the mother of Irving Warshawsky passed away today in Lowell, MA after which she buried in the Montefiore-Israel Brotherhood Cemetery in Pelham, N.H.
1977(25thof Kislev, 5738): First Chanukah during the administration of Pres. Jimmy Carter.
1977:The Jerusalem Post reported Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's warning that if Israel wanted the previous month's mutual non-aggression pledge to stand, it had better bring a softened negotiating position to the planned Arab-Israeli talks in Cairo.
1977: “Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?” a documentary film narrated by Henry Winkler was released in the United States today.
1977: In response to the Declaration of Tripoli Egypt breaks diplomatic relations with Syria, Libya, Algeria, Iraq and South Yemen. The Declaration of Tripoli was part of an Arab attack on Sadat for his visit to Israel and his willingess to recognize the Jewish state.
1979(15thof Kislev, 5740): Ninety-seven-year-old Minnie Lichtenstein Marcus, the daughter of Hattie Mittenthal and Meyer Lichtenstein and wife of Herbert Marcus, one of the founders of Neiman Marcus which she served as vice president while pursuing her interest in horticulture passed away today.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/marcus-minnie-lichtenstein
1979(15th of Kislev, 5740): Sonia Delaunay, one of the foremost painters of her day and one of the last survivors of the Parisian art world before 1914 died today in Paris at the age of 94. (As reported by John Russell)
1982: Rabbi Louis Stein officiated at the marriage of Debra Michele Freedman and Andrew William Sideman at the Westbury Hotel.
1982(19th of Kislev, 5743): Eighty-year old English critic, novelist, and journalist Carly Brahms passed away.
1982: Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally and Years of Upheaval by Henry A. Kissinger are among the twelve books chosen by the New York Times Book Review to the best books published in the country during the preceding year.
1983: For the first time NBC broadcast “Choices of the Heart” starring Melissa Gilbert as a nun who was brutally murdered “by a Salvadoran death squad.”
1986(3rdof Kislev, 5747): Seventy year old Moshe Baram who first served as an MK for Mapai and who served both as Minister of Labor and Minister of Welfare, passed away today.
1984: Beverly Hills Cop an American action comedy film directed by Martin Brest, co-produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and featuring Paul Resier as “Jeffrey” was released in the United States today.
1989: “Mencken Was Pro-Nazi, His Diary Shows” published today described the negative views author and columnist H.L. Mencken had where it came to Jews and Blacks.
1990: Responding to growing fear over a rash of Palestinian knife attacks on Jews, the police broadened surveillance of Arab workers in Israel today with spot checks, searches and a new network of roadblocks along the West Bank. More than 20 Israelis have been stabbed over the last two months. Five of the victims died of their wounds and seven Arab attackers were killed. Until this fall, anxiety about knife attacks had been limited largely to Jews in the occupied territories and along the boundaries between Arab and Jewish sections of Jerusalem. But recent stabbings have also frightened Israelis in the heart of the country, in Tel Aviv, the Galilee and the southern coast. Requests for gun permits have soared, and thousands of Jews have begun carrying pistols, knives and mace.
1991: "Catskills on Broadway" a comedic celebration of a slice of Jewish culture, opens at Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York City for the first of452 performances.
1991(28thof Kislev, 5752): Eighty-four year old Sir Raphael "Roy" Welensky whose father was a Jew from Lithuania and was “the second and last prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland” passed away today
1993(21st of Kislev, 5754): David Mashrati, a reserve soldier, was shot and killed by a terrorist attempting to board a bus on route 641 at the Holon junction. The Islamic Jihad Shekaki group claimed responsibility for the attack.
1993:Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy by John Gross is among the twelve books chosen by the New York Times Book Review to the best books published in the country during the preceding year.
1994(2nd of Tevet, 5755): Jacob Kaplan, the former Grand Rabbi of France, died in his home in Paris today. He was 99 years old. Rabbi Kaplan was known both for his openness to dialogue with the Christian churches of France and for his staunch support of Zionism. He spoke out during World War II against anti-Jewish measures adopted by the collaborationist Vichy Government. Rabbi Kaplan, who was born in Paris on Nov. 7, 1895, was wounded in action during World War I and received the Croix de Guerre. He completed his rabbinical studies after the war and served as a rabbi in Mulhouse in eastern France from 1922-29 and then in Paris. He became the Grand Rabbi of Paris in 1950, and was elected Grand Rabbi of France in 1955, serving as spiritual leader of France's 700,000 Jews until his retirement in 1981.
1994(2nd of Tevet, 5755): 8th day of Chanukah
1994: Outfielder Brian Kowitz “was again drafted by the Minnesota Twins as part of the Rule 5 draft…”
1994(2ndof Tevet, 5755): Eighty-four year old “Academy Award-winning film designer” Harry Horner the father of Oscar winning composer James Horner, scenic designer Christopher Horner and pediatric immunologist Anthony Horner, M.D., passed away today.
1995: “Bush v. Vera” a voting rights case in which Edward Blum was one of six plaintiffs “challenging 24 of the State of Texas’ 30 congressional districts as racial gerrymanders” was argued before the Supreme Court Today.
1997: “Dedication of the Hanna Sachs Library at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society “on the 50th anniversary of his death” which “was also the 65thanniversary of his invitation to become” the society’s “first permanent training analyst.”
http://openvault.wgbh.org/exhibits/boring_and_sachs/article
1997: Funeral services are scheduled to be held at noon today at Rodeph Sholom in Bridgeport, CT for Dr. Maxwell Bogin the husband of Edith Bogin and the father of Deborah Abby.
1999: The New York Times list of the Best Books of 1999 contains the following works about Jewish related subjects or by Jewish authors including Reading the Holocaust by Inga Clendinnen and An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton
by Richard A. Posner.
1999: ABC broadcast “Tuesdays with Morrie” the movie version of Mitch Albom’s book based on “the time he spent with Professor Morrie Schwartz of Brandies University.
2000:In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum began serving as “Secretary of the Environment of the Federal District” today.
2000: The funeral for Neale D. Katz, who served as “Israel Representative and Director General of the United Israel Appeal and who played a role in the success of Operation Moses is scheduled to be buried in Jerusalem.
2001: A suicide bomber exploded a powerful bomb shortly after 7:30 AM on King David Street in Jerusalem. A number of people waiting at a nearby bus stop were lightly injured. The terrorist was killed in the blast. Police are investigating whether the bomb, packed with nails and shrapnel, went off prematurely. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.
2001: A Villager article published today about Grand Street co-ops selling briskly after going market rate noted that Harold “Heshy” Jacob “prided himself on having operated the complexes without increasing carrying charges for nine years.”
2002(30thof Kislev, 5763): Rosh Chodesh Tevet; Sixth Day of Chanukah
2002: In what would prove to be one of the most destabilizing statements in modern history for the Middle East and the World “The White House…said President Bush has ‘solid’ evidence (that) Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.”
https://nypost.com/2002/12/06/prez-ive-got-goods-on-saddam/
Welsh became interested in aeronautics after he observed Orville Wright's flights at Ft. Myer, VA, in 1909. In 1910, Orville and Wilbur Wright accepted him into their first flying class, where he worked closely with them, first as a student and, subsequently, as a pilot and instructor at the Wright Flight School in Dayton, OH. Among the people Welsh trained were Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, who later became a five-star general and U.S. Army Air Chief of Staff during WWII. In 1912, the Wrights sent Welsh to the U.S. Army Signal Corps in College Park, MD, to serve as a civilian test pilot for a new plane for the War Department. On June 11, 1912, Welsh, accompanied by Signal Corps Lt. Leighton W. Hazelhurst, was attempting to complete final military tests of the Wright Model C airplane when the airplane buckled under its 450- pound load. Both men were killed instantly, the first-ever fatalities at College Park. The Washington Times, Jewish Forward, and various aviation publications, including Fly and Aero: America's Aviation Weekly, covered Welsh's death.
2004: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Jews of Oudtshoorn, South Africa, celebrated the 120th anniversary of their town, which was known as the "little Jerusalem of Africa."
2004: The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with commentary by Robert Alter appears on the New York Timeslist of "100 Notable Books" of 2004 and the Washington Post listing of the "best books of 2004." The Cedar Rapids Gazette had previously published a review praising this volume describing as a great gift for either Christmas or Chanukah. Considering the text itself and the nature of the commentary this is another reminder that despite oft repeated reports of the demise of the Jewish people, Am Yisroail Chai.
2005(4th of Kislev, 5766): Five people were killed and 50 wounded after a suicide attack at a Netanya shopping mall. The five known dead are Eliyah Rozen, 39, of Bat Hefer, Daniel Golani, 45, of Nahariya, Haim Amram, 26, of Netanya, Keinan Tzoami, 20, of Petah Tikva and Alexandra Zarnitzki, 65, of Netanya. Islamic Jihad proudly took credit for the attack on the northern seaside town.
2005: Frits Phillips, the former head of the Dutch electronics giant Philips, who helped save the lives of hundreds of Jewish workers during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, passed away at the age of 100. During the war years, when Philips supplied electronics to Germany, he secured positions at his factory in the Vught prison camp for as many Jews as possible, delaying their deportation to the Auschwitz death camp. Frits Philips was imprisoned by the Nazis after a strike during the war. He was awarded the Yad Vashem medal by Israel in 1995 for his efforts to save Jewish workers - almost 380 prisoners survived out of 496 who started work. He said he was no hero and that many others had helped to save lives. According to the staff at Yad Vashem, "Frits Philips, in risking his life to save Jews during the Holocaust, showed extraordinary courage in the face of terrible circumstances."
2005: A London production of “Once in a Lifetime” by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman opened at the Royal National Theatre.
2006: Haaretz reported on the development of new flavors and styles of sufganiyot. The original red jam filling has been replaced by a variety of baked and deep-fried “delicacies including ones filled with Roquefort cheese, chocolate and halva cream. (Can chocolate chip latkes be far behind?)
2006(14th of Kislev, 5767): Chess grandmaster David Bronstein passed away at the age of 82.
2007: The Maymana dance troupe produces “Adraba” for its seventh Chanukah celebration at Heichal Hatarbut in Rishon Letzion.
2007: Eli Nissman and Ashdod’s municipal cultural organization put on the children’s song festival, “Yeled Pele” (Wonder Child) as part of the Chanukah celebrations in Ashdod.
2007: Sixty one years after he was buried at a cemetery in southeast Washington, the exhumed remains of Stephen Theodore Norman, the only grandchild of Theodor Herzl will be buried on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem, thus finally joining his famous grandfather in his famous resting place.
2007(25th of Kislev, 5768): First Day of Chanukah
2007: “The Golden Compass,” directed and written by Chris Weitz was released today in the United Kingdom.
2008: At the Ma’ariv service being reciting הכרבל רטםו לט (Dew and rain) for a blessing. Normally this is done at Ma’ariv on December 4, but when it is leap year on the civil calendar, then the change is made on December 5. [Editor’s Note: I have not been able to find out why this change is tied to the civil calendar instead of the Jewish calendar.]
2008: Lital Levy, assistant professor of comparative literature at Princeton presents "Israel, Interrupted: When Arabs Write Hebrew and Jews Write Arabic as part of the Friday lunch works-in-progress seminar sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Judaic Studies.
2008: Palestinian rocket fire on the western Negev continued today, with five Kassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip throughout the day. One rocket landed in Sderot, and the other four landed in open areas near the city. No casualties or damage were reported in the attacks. Also today, two mortar shells fired from the northern Gaza Strip landed in the Eshkol region. No casualties or damage were reported.
2008 (8 Kislev 5769): Richard Topus, a pigeon trainer in World War II, passed away at the age of 84.
2008 (8 Kislev 5769): A. Bernard Ackerman, a founding figure in the field of dermatopathology who trained a generation of doctors to recognize skin diseases under the microscope passed away today at his home in Manhattan at the age of 72.
2009: In Cedar Rapids, Saturday morning traditional minyan at Temple Judah is dedicated to Jewish Book Month.
2009(18thof Kislev, 5770): Levi Yitzchak Horowitz, the second Rebbe of the Bostoner Chasidim (Boston Chassidic Sect) passed away today in Israel. According to some sources the Bostoner Chasidim are the first Chassidic organization to have started in the United States as opposed to having here from Europe.
2009: Mark Eliyahu and percussionist/clarinetist Daniel Yaakov Zol will be accompanying Wieder-Magen and the TCJ when they perform at Mishkenot Sha'ananim at 9 p.m.
2009: In Washington, D.C., the 20th Washington Jewish Film Festival includes screenings of “Camera Obscura,” a film about life among a colony of 19thcentury Argentinean Jews and “My Mother’s Courage,” in which the renowned Hungarian Jewish playwright, director and actor George Tabori who passed away in 2007, tells the true story of what happened to his mother Elsa (Pauline Collins), 50 years earlier during the deportation of the Hungarian Jewish community.
2009: Opening of the 24th Annual New York Israeli Film Festival. The opening gala honors Elliott Gould with 2009 IFF Lifetime Achievement Award; Donald Krim with the 2009 IFF Visionary Award; Paul Schrader with the2009 IFF Achievement in Film Award.
2010: "My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish, and I'm Home for the Holidays!," is scheduled to have its final performance in Charlotte, NC.
2010: Yeshiva University Museum is scheduled to presents its “Chanukah Extravaganza!”
2010: After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United is scheduled to have its DC premier at the 21st Washington Jewish Festival
2010: The LA Times includes a review of Job by Joseph Roth, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin.
2010: The Washington Postfeatures reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Scorpions:The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices by Noah Feldman and The Witness House: Nazis and Holocaust Survivors Sharing a Villa During the Nuremberg Trials by Christiane Kohl.
2010: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including They Live by Jonathan Lethem
2010: The New York Times“100 Notable Books of 2010” list includes the following works by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, Great House by Nicole Krauss, The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010 by Edward Hirsch, The Long Song by Andrea Levy, The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine, To The End of The Land by David Grossman, Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, Finishing The Hate: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic by Michael Scammell and The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time by Judith Shulevitz
2010: Cuban President Raul Castro celebrated Hanukkah today with Cuba's tiny Jewish community, a heavily symbolic act at a time when his government is holding a Jewish-American subcontractor on suspicion of spying.
2010: Shalshelet’s 4th International Festival at Congregation Ansche Chesed, New York City came to an end today.
2010(28thof Kislev, 5771): Ninety-one year old “Heda Margolius Kovaly, a Czech writer and translator whose memoir, “Under a Cruel Star,” described her imprisonment by the Nazis during World War II and her persecution by the Communists in the 1950s and became a classic account of life under totalitarianism, died today at her home in Prague.” (As reported by William Grimes)
2010: Evelyn Selig, 64, a Laredo retailer and widow and Irving Greenblum, an 81-year-old investor and retired furniture store owner plan to enjoy a Chanukah party with 50 other co-religionists at the conservative synagogue in Laredo, Texas.
2011: Tony Kushner, the Jewish Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter, and polarizing political voice, is scheduled to be awarded $100,000 for “Creative Citizenship” at The Nation Institute’s Annual Gala in New York.
2011: The Tulane University Hillel Executive Committee is scheduled to meet at the Goldie & Morris Mintz Center for Jewish Life.
2011: Today “Kraft announced that Irene Rosenfeld would stay on as chairperson of the $31 billion global snacking company, which will be called Mondelēz International, Inc.”
2011: “Through the Eye of the Needle,” “The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz,” “Letters Home” and Yizkor are four of the films scheduled to be shown today the Washington Jewish Film Festival.
2011: Lebanon filed a complaint in the United Nations against Israel today for its retaliation to Katyusha rockets fired into Israel late last month, Lebanese newspaper the Daily Star reported.
2011: Israel's Education Ministry issued an unusual order today forbidding any school trips to take place around the southern Israeli city of Eilat, following warnings against a possible terror attack on the Israel-Egypt border, Channel 10 reported.
2011(9thof Kislev, 5772): Muriel Kadoorie, the widow of Lawrence Kadoorie, Baron Kadoorie passed away today.
2011: Today Kraft announced that Irene Rosenfeld would stay on as chairperson of the $31 billion global snacking company, which will be called Mondelēz International, Inc. making her one of the most powerful Jewish businesswomen in the world.
2012(21stof Kislev, 5773): Eighty-four year old Felix Weinberg, who survived the death camps to eventually become Emeritus Profess or Combustion Physics at Imperial College London passed away today.
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/117808/tribute-felix-weinberg/
2012: Dalia Itzik announced she was “taking a break from politics.”
2012: Ya’akov Erdi, a member of Kadima, announced he would not be taking part in the upcoming elections.
2012: Professor Bob Moore of the University of Sheffield is scheduled to deliver an address entitled “Integrating Self-Help into the History of Jewish Survival in Western Europe´ at the Weiner Library. Moore is the author of 'Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Europe'.
2012: The Joint Distribution Committee is scheduled to sponsor “Una Noeche: An Inside Look At Cuba’s Jewish Community” at the Maritime Hotel in New York City.
2012: Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean & Founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is scheduled to introduce “It’s No Dream: The Life of Theodore Herzl” before it is shown at The Jewish Center on West 86th Street.
2012: United Nations forces based inside Syria to monitor a longtime ceasefire between Syria and Israel will bring in armor to reinforce their security because of a threat posed by an influx of Syrian rebels, the UN peacekeeping chief said.
2012: Police appealed to the public today to help in locating a missing soldier amid fears he may take his own life. Liraz Benbenishti, 20, left his base near Gedera yesterday and police said he was seen on Medinat Hayehudim Street in Herzliya later that day. However, since then he has vanished without a trace.
2012: With polls indicating “Kadima either barely getting into the Knesset or not even passing the threshold” in the upcoming elections Marina Solodkin announced that she would not be a candidate.
2013(2ndof Tevet, 5774): 8th Day of Chanukah
2013(2ndof Tevet, 5774): Eighty-five year old General Danny Matt, the native of Cologne who made Aliyah in 1934 and fought in five wars starting with the War for Independence and climaxing with the Yom Kippur War passed away today
2013: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to present a lecture by Dr. Peter Hayes entitled “Antisemitism and Homophobia in Nazi Germany: Commonalities and Differences”
2013: The Holocaust Education Program & Adult Jewish Education is scheduled to host the opening reception of “Raoul Wallenberg: Modern Day Hero.”
2013: Ohad Meromi is scheduled to present his recent video Worker! Smoker! Actor! (2012), for its debut screening in NYC, followed by a conversation with curator and artist Naomi Lev at the ICI Curatorial Hub.
2013: The Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to present “Joy of Israel with Jamie Geller.”
2013: NPR’s Larry Abramson is scheduled to moderate a panel discussion “Discovery and Recovery: Eyewitness Accounts” that looks at the retrieval “of water-logged treasures from Baghdad’s Jewish past.”
2013: Nelson Mandela passed away today.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/nelson-mandela-was-close-to-jews-resolutely-loyal-to-palestinians/
2013: The Houston Rockets’ Omri Casspi, the first Israeli hoopster to ever play in the NBA, relished the honor of meeting US President Barack Obama today (As reported by Spencer Ho)
2013: A wet and cold winter storm hit Israel this morning, bringing welcome rain to much of the country and raising the Sea of Galilee by one centimeter in a matter of hours.
2014: Lewis Black is scheduled to appear at the Music Box in Atlantic City, NJ.
2014(13thof Kislev, 5775): Sixty-two year old “culinary historian” Gil Marks passed away today. (As reported by Bruce Weber)
http://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-food-historian-gil-marks-dead-at-62/
2014(13thof Kislev, 5775): Ninety-six year American photographer Arthur Leipzig passed away today.
2014: The UK Jewish Comedy Festival is scheduled to host “Friday Night Supper Club” where attendees “will learn how to improve their joke-telling skills and learn gags they'll be dining out on for months to come.”
2014; Gal “Mekel signed a two-year, non-guaranteed contract with the New Orleans Pelicans
2014: “Starting today, when Digital Einstein is introduced, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to share in the letters, papers, postcards, notebooks and diaries that Einstein left scattered in Princeton and in other archives, attics and shoeboxes around the world when he died in 1955.”
2014: “Reports indicated today that the Labor Party headed by Isaac Herzog and the Hatnua party led by former justice minister Tzipi Livni were considering running together in the March 2015 elections.”
2014: “Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche, suspected of killing four people at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in May, was remanded in custody for another three months today, judicial officials said.”
2014: Talya Lavie’s “Zero Motivation” is scheduled to be shown at the Film Forum in New York.
2015: In Alexandria, Beth El Hebrew Congregation is scheduled to host “Songs in the Key of Light” an evening of song with Cantor Jason Kaufman, Eric Schnobrick and Leo Morris.
2015(23rdof Kislev, 5776): Shabbat Va-yayshev
2015(23rdof Kislev, 5776): Eighty-eight year old literary agent Timothy Seldes passed away today. (As reported by Bruce Weber)
2016: “A.K.A. Nadia” and “Nazareth Cinema Lady” are scheduled to be shown at the 10thAnnual Other Israel Film Festival.
2016: The Center for Jewish History, Forward, American Jewish Historical Society, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Jewish Book Council are scheduled to host “Have I Got a Story for You: More than a Century of Fiction from the Forward,
2016: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to host “Jewish Voice, “an annual event with readings by prominent Jewish poets and writers.”
2016: Today, “Gimlet Media announced” that Arnold Stephen “A.J.” “Jacobs would be the host of Twice Removed, a podcast focused on genealogy.”
2016: “Atlanta Collects” which celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Breman Museum by highlighting diverse pieces from Jewish collectors in and around Atlanta” is scheduled to open today.
2016(5thof Kislev, 5777): Yahrtzeit of Talmudic commentator Rabbi Shmuel Eliezer Edeles (MaHaRSHA) who passed away on the 5th of Kislev, 5392
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/111910/jewish/Rabbi-Shmuel-Eliezer-Edeles.htm
http://www.jewishhistory.org.il/history.php?startyear=1550&endyear=1559
2016: The Marcus Foundation, established by Bernard Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot and his wife Billi said today “it would make a $38 million donation to a new Hillel staffing initiatives – Talent Grants.”
2017: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to offer the third part of Yitzhak Lewis’ “Introduction to Gershom Scholem”
2017: Jewish Book Month, an annual event that provides us with a chance to contemplate Jewish books and the lives of authors such as Rufus Learsi whose works included The Jews In America: A History one of the first Jewish history books I ever read, continues today.
2017: The USCJ Convention is scheduled to come to an end today in Atlanta.
2018(27thof Kislev, 5779): Third Day of Chanukah
2018: Fifty-six year old Claudia Sheinbaum, “the second daughter of chemist Carlos Scheinbaum Yoselevitz and biologist Annie Pardo Cemo and a graduate of UNAM began serving as “head of the Government of Mexico City.”
2018: “Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London are scheduled to speak tonight at “this year’s Chanukah in the Square celebrations in London.”
2018: 85th Anniversary of the repeal of prohibition which among other things put an end to Welch’s ill-fated attempt to sell grape juice as “kosher unfermented wine” and provided the Bronfmans, with “a unique marketing opportunity because, unlike most of its American competitors, their Seagram Distilleries had large supplies of aged whiskeys on hand” with which to quench the thirst of those in “the lower 48.”
2018: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “Disobedience.”
2018: Beit Avi Chai is scheduled to host a performance of “A First Candle Tale,” “a play inspired by Nathan Alterman’s poem, ‘This Happened in Hanuka’.”
2019: Pianist Yefim Bronfman is scheduled to join the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4.
2019: In San Francisco, the Herbst Theatre is scheduled to host a performance of Handel’s “Judas Maccabaeus.”
2019: In Berkley, CA, Congregation Beth El is scheduled to host “Israel’s Elections: An Endless Cycle? “during which Koret visiting scholar Tomer Persico and J. editor-in-chief Sue Fishkoff discuss what has shifted in Israeli society/politics, what hasn’t and what the future might hold.”
2019: In New Orleans, “at historic St. Augustine Hight School,” “the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans” is scheduled to host “the Federation's second annual Alex Schoenbaum Jewish Scholarship Fund award ceremony and assembly.”
2019: Jessica Tisch begins serving as the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication.
2019: The Yeshiva University Museum and the American Sephardi Federation are scheduled to host “Elad Kabilio and the MusicTalks ensemble featuring Ariella Edvy” in a celebration of “the music of Yemenite Israeli singers including Ofra Haza, Izhar Cohen and Gali Atari.”
2019: The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is scheduled to host “Reconsidering the Catholic Church and the Holocaust” including a “special film screening followed by discussion.”
Special Film Screening and Discussion
2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host the last screening of Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story.”
2019: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host “Anita Hill: Speaking Truth to Power.”
2019: Today “in this year's Pfeffer Family Forum, leading 20th-century political propaganda scholar David Welch, Director of the Center for the Study of Propaganda and War at the University of Kent (England) is scheduled to speak to the power and perils of propaganda throughout history, and why combating hateful rhetoric today is so critical.”
2019: In La Jolla, CA, Congregation Beth El is scheduled to host “Crying Hands: The Deaf Experience under Nazi Oppression.”
2020: This evening The Other Israel Film Festival is scheduled to host a screening of “Til Kingdom Come
followed by a Q and A.
202019thof Kislev): On the Jewish calendar, The “New Year” of Chassidism.
2020: This evening, the San Francisco Yiddish Combo is scheduled to perform a “streaming concert by a group that blends klezmer, jazz, blues, folk and hip-hop.”
2020: Jewish Family and Children’s service is scheduled to present on an “Inclusive Torah Study with Jewish life coordinator Alex Maslow.
2020(19thof Kislev): In one of those calendar quirks, the Hebrew and secular birthdates of Avraham Elimelch ben Yosef coincide making him the same age as they “in the streets and in the Shul.”
2020(19thof Kislev): On the Jewish calendar Yahrtzeit of the “Maggid of Mezrech (1710-1772), the successor of the Baal Shem Tov.”
https://www.aish.com/dijh/Kislev_19.html
2020(19thof Kislev, 7801) Parashat Vayishlach
2021: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age by Debbie Applegate and Garbo by Robert Gottlieb.
2021: Via Zoom, in Iowa, the Ames Jewish Congregation is scheduled to host a candle lighting.
2021: The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience to present Eid Al-Banat.
2021: The Jewish Heritage Museum of Monmouth County is scheduled to present via Zoom “Hollywood Yiddishkeit: Jewish Images in American Film” with John Kenrick.
2021: In Little Rock, AR, Lubavitch of Arkansas under the leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Ciment is scheduled to host it “Annual Chanukah Parade of Light and Love”
2021: Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein is scheduled to take part in an in-person conversation with Moment Magazine editor-in-chief Nadine Epstein about her new intergenerational book, RBG’s Brave and Brilliant Women: 33 Jewish Women to Inspire Everyone followed by a Hanukkah candle lighting with Rabbi Rachel Gartner, Director of Jewish Life at Georgetown University, in memory of RBG and other brave and brilliant women who have helped keep the struggle for gender equality alive.
2021: In New Orleans, Krewe du Jieux-Chanukah Parade is scheduled to resume its annual tradition of dancing through the Quarter to the music of Panorama Jazz Band and lighting menorahs and enjoying a nosh at the Café du Monde.
2021: In partnership with Menemsha Films, The Jewish Heritage Museum of Monmouth County is scheduled to host a screening of “Here We Are” on the final night of the Hanukah Film Festival.
2021(1stof Tevet, 5782): Seventh Day of Chanukah; Rosh Chodesh Tevet
2022: The Center for Jewish History and LBI are scheduled to present a screening of Reckonings which recounts the tense negotiations between Jewish and German leaders over compensation for the survivors of the largest mass genocide in history which was directed by award-winning filmmaker Roberta Grossman.
2022: Martin Kaufman is scheduled to deliver the final lecture on Maimonides’ Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Scripture at the Streicker Center.
2022: Based on previous published information, it is official now that Tulane University, home of the Tulane Jewish Studies Department and the Tulane Hillel Chapter of which Mitchell A. Levin was once president is going to the Cotton Bowl!
2022: President Herzog is scheduled to complete his historic visit to Bahrain and then leave for a visit to the United Arab Emirates.
December 5
63 BCE: Cicero read the last of his Catiline Orations which exposed Cataline’s conspiracy to overthrow the government of Rome. There is no record of how Cataline felt about Jews, but Cicero said that Judaism was a barbarous superstition whose adherents were born to be slaves.
220 (22nd of Kislev, 3981): On the secular calendar Rabbi Judah Hanasior Judah the Patriarch passed away. Born in Eretz Israel in 138 (three years after the last rebellion against Rome) Judah, as the Nasi and head of the Sanhedrin, was both the religious and political leader of the Jewish community. His greatest claim to fame was his role as the compiler of the Mishna. The Mishna is a compilation of Oral Law which would serve as the basis for both the Babylonian Talmud and Jerusalem Talmud. The Mishnah is divided into six "orders": Zeraim - Seeds, Mo'ed - Festivals, Nashim - Women, Nezikim - Damages, Kedushim - Holy Matters, Taharot - Purity. There are a total of 63 "tractates." It was compiled in Hebrew and intended to be memorized. It served and still serves as a code for regulation of all Jewish life. Some of his more famous sayings include: “Be as punctilious in observing a light as a weighty commandment, for your do not know their relative reward.” “Contemplate three things and you will avoid transgressions: above you (in Heaven) is an eye that sees, an ear that hears and all your deeds are faithfully recorded.” And the favorite of all those who teach, “I have learned much from teachers, more from my colleagues, but most from pupils.”
663: Fourth Council of Toledo takes place. Among the other things the council adopted stringent measures that should be used against baptized Jews who had relapsed into their former faith.
1349: During the Black Death Riots 500 Jews were massacred at Nuremberg.
1443: Birthdate of Pope Julius II, the prelate who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. Julius entrusted his health to a Jewish physician named Samuel Sarfatti. “More importantly for Jews at large, the pope’s mind-set…did not include attacking Jews. Benevolent neglect was indeed welcome.”
1484: Pope Innocent VIII issued the Summis desiderantes, a papal bull that deputizes Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger as inquisitors to root out alleged witchcraft in Germany and leads to one of the most oppressive witch hunts in European history. Innocent VIII seemed to have a penchant for Inquisitions since he was successfully in getting the King of Portugal to establish one aimed at the Jews and Marranos who had fled Spain. Those caught suffered long imprisonment or death by fire.
1496: King Manuel expelled the Jews from Portugal. Manuel of Portugal befriended the Jews during his first year of reign, but his desire to unite the Iberian Peninsula through marriage to the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella changed all that. Four years after the expulsion of Jews from Spain, he ordered them expelled from Portugal within 11 months.
1497: King Manuel I proclaimed an Edict which demanded the Jews convert to Catholicism or leave the country. However, fearing most Jews would leave rather than convert, the Crown closed the ports, thus halting any potential Jewish sea escape.
1590: Niccolò Sfondrati was elected Pope and as Gregory XIV followed the comparatively benevolent policies of his predecessor Sixtus V including “allowing Jews to settle in the Papal States.
1633: In Bohemia, an order was issued “to the head of the administrative of the castle of Reichenberg: “The Bassewi Jews, who have the privilege to direct their business affairs in your town without any hindrance and a copy of whose privilege is in your possession, shall be supported and protected in the best way and shall have any support that they require to ensure their freedom.” (The Bassewi Jews refers to the family or followers of the “Prague banker and merchant Jacob Bassewi” who “was the first Jew in the former Austria to achieve the status of nobility.)
1678: Josel (Joseph) Witzenhausen and Joseph Athias defied warnings from powerful secular and religious leaders and today began printing their version of “a Judaeo-German edition of the TaNaCh.”
1693(17th of Kislev, 5454): Sara d’Andrade, the marano who openly acknowledge her Judaism in either 1647 or 1648 who was the wife Portuguese born Marano Diego Teixara and kept a princely house, which, in 1654, was for some time the residence of Queen Christina of Sweden, passed away today.
https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/14351-texeira
1707:The first informal meeting of the modern Society of Antiquaries, whose first Jewish member may have been naturalist Emanuel Mendes da Costa occurred today at the Bear Tavern on The Strand
1755(1stof Kislev, 5516): Rosh Chodesh Kislev observed on the same day that George Washington wrote to wrote Robert Dinwiddie, the Royal Governor of Virginia concerning financial and other needs growing out of fighting during the French and Indian Wars.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-02-02-0203
1757: “In Berlin, the head rabbi delivered a patriotic sermon of thanksgiving: following the victory of “the glorious King of Prussia over the united and far superior forces of the Austrians in Silesia.”
1768(25thof Kislev, 5529): Chanukah
1771(28thof Kislev, 5532): Fourth Day of Chanukah
1776(24thof Kislev, 5537): For the first time the Chanukah candle is kindled in the newly independent United States.
1776:Phi Beta Kappa, the first and most prestigious American scholastic fraternity was founded at William & Mary College. Some of the Jewish members of the honor society include Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann, Jonas Salk, Daniel Boorstin, Betty Friedan, Henry Kissinger, Arlen Specter, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Gloria Steinman, Robert Rubin, Nadine Strossen, Joseph Lieberman, Ben Bernanke, Eliot Spitzer and Daniel Pearl.
1779(26thof Chanukah, 5540): Second Day of Chanukah observed as General George Washington is establishing winter quarters for the Continental Army at Morristown, NJ.
1782: Birthdate of Martin Van Buren, eighth President of the United States, who intervened in the so-called Damascus Affair, seeking to use the good office of the Presidency to protect the lives and well-being of a group of Syrian Jews who had been falsely accused in another round of the “blood libel.”
1790(28thof Kislev, 5551): Fourth Day of Chanukah
1792: William Moultrie began his second term as Governor of South Carolina. Moultrie may have been the first Governor to attend the consecration of a synagogue. In 1794, he was present for the consecration of the new synagogue housing Beth Elohim in Charleston, SC.
1792: Samuel Raphael married Charlotte Levy at the Great Synagogue today.
1792: In New York City, Leah Nathan and Joseph Naphtali Hart best birth to Esther Hart, the wife of Alexander Marks with whom she had fourteen children.
1792: Moses Jacobs, “a self-described bachelor” was buried today at the “Alderney Road (Globe Rd) Jewish Cemetery.
1795(23rdof Kislev, 5556): Parashat Vayeshev
1795: In Manhattan, PhiladelphianativeLeah Thérèse Nathan Hart and Bavarian born Jacob Naphtali Hart gave birth Esther “Hetty” Hart who became Esther Marks after she Alexander Marks in 1816 after which she bore him ten children.
1797: In Darmstadt, Germany, Sara Haas and Alexander ben Moses Billstein gave birth to Baruch Sender Billstein, the husband of “Beilie Wertheim” with whom he had eleven children.
1798(27thof Kislev, 5559): Third Day of Chanukah observed on the same day that the Peasants’ War, which was part of the French Revolutionary wars came to an end.
1799: In Frankfurt am Main, Gutle Schott and Moses Yantoff Oppenheim gave birth to “Sebastian Oppenheim,” the husband of Henriette Strauss with whom he had eight children
1805: Today, “was proclaimed a day of general thanksgiving for Trafalgar” during which “All the Churches and Chapels were crowded, all distinctions of sects were done away and Christian and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, all united in the expression of one feeling of piety and gratitude to the Almighty.” “The Chief Rabbi, Solomon Hirschell, and the Haham (spiritual leader of the Sephardim), Raphael Meldola, jointly prepared “The Order of Service and Special Prayer of the Hebrew Thanksgiving”, recited in all London synagogues. Hirschell, whose normal vehicle was Yiddish, preached a commemorative sermon at the Great Synagogue that was subsequently translated into English and printed; Meldola delivered one at the Sephardi synagogue, Bevis Marks.”
1807: In London, Matilda de Metz and Levy Salomons gave birth to Esther Salomons.
1809(27thof Kislev, 5570): Third Day of Chanukah, observed on the natal of Edmond Le Boeuf, who rose to the rank of Marshall in French Army while seeing action during the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War.
1810: Israel Moses married Deborah Cohen, the daughter of Jacob Raphael Cohen almost thirty-eight years before she passed away in St. Joseph, FL.
1819: Joshua Poland married Esther Isaacs at the Great Synagogue today.
1824: Jacob Mandelbaum, a native of “Sachsen-Weimar” and Bella Epstein gave birth to their sixth and youngest child Vogel Mandelbaum today.
1820: In the UK, Emma Lyon and Abraham Henry gave birth to Julia Henry.
1825(25thof Kislev, 5586): Chanukah observed for the first time during the Presidency of John Q. Adams
1828(29thof Kislev, 5589): Fifth Day of Chanukah celebrated for the last time during the presidency of John Q. Adams, who “like his father supported the rebuilding of Judea as an independent nation
1831(1stof Tevet, 5592): Rosh Chodesh Tevet; Sixth Day of Chanukah
1831(1st of Tevet, 5592): Sixty-three year old Isaac Gomez, Jr. the author of “a manuscript entitled ‘The Genealogy of the Gomez Family Down to the Year 1826’” passed away today in New York City.
1831: Forty-eight year old Samuel Ottenheimer, married his second wife Amalie Wimpfheimer today.
1832: Birthdate of Hamburg native Ernst Jacob Oppert, the merchant who traveled to Hong Kong in 1851, founded a business in Shanghai and traveled to Korea before returning to Hamburg, the hometown of his brother Jules Opert.
1832: Birthdate of Hamburg native Ernst Jacob Oppert, a German merchant who “went to Hong Kong in 1851…founded a business in Shanghai…and traveled through Korea” in the 1860’s.
1834: In Binau, Germany, Sarah and Manassa Sheuerman gave birth to Rose Sheuerman who became Rose Adler when she married Leopoled Adler with who she had eight children.
1839: In Charleston, SC, Jacob I. Moses of Columbus, GA, married Rinah Ottolengui, the daughter of Abraham Ottolengui.
1844: Birthdate of Penrose Felisher, who upon passing away in 1931 would be buried at Mt. Sinai Cemetery in Philadelphia.
1849(20thof Kislev, 5610): Baruch ben Judah Lob Lindau the native of Hanover who gained fame as a German mathematician passed away today in Berlin.
1850(30thof Kislev, 5611): Sixth day of Chanukah
1850: In Lubeck Germany, Moses Heinemann Heymann Lissauer and Betty Bertha Lissauer gave birth to Abraham Adolph Moses Lissauer, the husband of Frieda Lissauer, the daughter of Fanny and Abraham Mendel Auerbach.
1850: Birthdate of Bernhard Baron, the Russian born inventor of a cigarette making machine that led to his being the managing director of the National Cigarette Tobacco Company of New York and the patent for which he sold to the United Cigarette Machine Company for £120,000 who was the husband of Rachel Baron and the father of Louis Baron.
1854: Solomon and Jane Green were married today at the Great Synagogue.
https://archive.org/details/alifewilliamsha04leegoog
1855(25thof Kislev, 5615): First Day of Chanukah observed as pro and anti-slavery forces clash in what became known as Bloody Kansas
1859: Birthdate of Solomon Lazarus Lee, who gained fame as Sir Sidney Lee, the graduate of Balliol College, Oxford where he majored in modern history and rose to be the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica/Lee,_Sidney
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Times/1926/Obituary/Sidney_Lee
1860: Herman W. Hellman who arrived with his brother Isias in Los Angeles in 1859, today left the “forwarding and commission business of General Banning” and went to work in the “book and stationary business.”
1861(2ndof Tevet, 5622): Eight Day of Chanukah.
1861: The Grand Jury of Monmouth County returned a bill of indictment charging a man named Radski with the murder of a German Jew named Sigismund Fellner.
1861: Birthdate of Benjamin J. Kohlman who was interred at the Springhill Avenue Temple Cemetery in Mobile when passed away.
1861: A detachment of Union troops reportedly under the command Gabriel Netter, a French born Jew who had settled in Kentucky, seized a railroad bridge at Whippoorwill, KY that was held by Confederate forces and burned it.
1862: Four days after he had passed away, 55 year old Solomon Joseph, the husband of Priscilla Samuel with whom he had had five children, was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”
1863(24thKislev, 5624): As General Grant assumes command of the Union Armies and prepares the national campaign that will put an end to secession and ensure the newly won freedom of African-Americans Jews read Parasha Vayeshev and kindle the first Channukah candle.
1866(27thof Kislev, 5672): Third day of Chanukah
1868: “La Périchole an opéra bouffe in three acts by Jacques Offenbach” was first seen outside of France when it was performed today in Brussels.
1868: Isaac Phillips and his second wife Miriam Trimble Phillips gave birth to Naphtali Taylor Phillips a lawyer he held various political offices, e.g.: he was member of the New York state legislature, served on the judiciary and other committees and as a member of the Joint Statutory Revision Commission of that body (1900); and deputy comptroller of the city of New York (from 1902). He also was a trustee of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, and a member of the Sons of the American Revolution and of the New York Historical Society. He served as treasurer of the Jewish Historical Society and has contributed several papers to its publications. For fifteen years he was clerk of Congregation Shearith Israel. In 1892 Phillips married Rosalie Solomons, daughter of Adolphus S. Solomons. Mrs. Phillips was an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
1869: In Memphis, TN, Sarah and Jacques Gaisman gave birth to multi-talented inventor Henry Jacques Gaisman, whose patented safety razor made him a wealthy man and who married his former nurse, Catherine “Kitty” Gaisman when he was eighty years old
1871: In Sulzburg, Sara and Baruch Dukas gave birth to Julius Dukas, brother of Moritz, Charlotte and Eduard Dukas.
1871: Birthdate of Pittsburgh, PA, native Louis J. Affelder, the U. Pittsburgh educated civil engineer, “assistant division manager of the American Bridge Co, civic leader and husband of Estelle May Affelder with whom he had one son and two daughters.
1874(26thof Kislev, 5635): Parashat Vayeshev; Second Day of Chanukah
1874(26thof Kislev, 5635): Thirty-one year old Edudora H. Hart, the Charleston, SC born daughter of Hetty Maria Gomez and Hyman Hart and the wife of Gratz Nathan with whom she had two children, Constance and Frank, passed away today in New York.
1875: An interview of the three men waiting to be hung for the murder of Abraham Weissburg, a Jewish peddler, was published today.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9500E6DD103BEF34BC4D53DFB467838E669FDE
1875: It was reported today that an English missionary named Dr. Stern appeared before the Jews of Yemen claiming “that he was the bearer of happy tidings.” The Yemini Jews accepted him as a co-religionist until he attempted to convince them that Messiah was the founder of the Christianity at which point they told him to leave their community. The missionary complained to the Sultan who told the Jews “Listen ye Jehuds, you are a miserable people. You pray in your synagogues that Allah may send you the Messiah and now when the good tiding is brought to you that he has come long ago, you ridicule the report as you have ridiculed and slandered our nebbi (prophet). In punishment for your conduct you shall pay double the head tax this year.” [The nebbi refers to Mohammed] This episode an unnamed Jewish teach to proclaim that God had ordered him to gather all the Jews and lead them Jerusalem. Large numbers of Jews across Arabia flocked to his leadership and viewed him as the Messiah promised in the TaNaCh. At the same, Yemen was conquered by Turkey and this unnamed Messiah gave up his leadership role rather than face the Ottomans.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9C00E5DD103BEF34BC4D53DFB467838E669FDE
1875(7thof Kislev, 5636): Abram Kurtz, William Lasser, William Meyers, Abram Dietz and Aaron Dietz were among the 278 people who perished in the Brooklyn Theatre Fire.
1875: Birthdate of Chicago native Edwin Frank Mandel, the chairman of the family business – Mandel Brothers Department Store – and philanthropist who donated untold millions to Michael Reese Hospital.
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/2755.html
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/07/18/80452377.pdf
1877: In Kensington, London, Florence Justina Cohen and Abraham de Mattos Mocatta gave birth to Effie Bertha Mocatta.
1877(29thof Kislev, 5638): Fifth Day of Chanukah
1877(29thof Kislev, 5638): Sixty-two year old Henry Emanuel Goldsmith, the Dutch born son of Emanuel Levie Goldsmith and Alijda Joseph Joel Goldsmith and the husband of Anna Goldsmith and Pauline Goldsmith passed away today in NYC after which, in 1880 his widow wrote to Sabato Morais in 1880 offering donate the books belong to him and his father to the “Theological Seminary
1878: In Boston, founding of the Hebrew Women’s Sewing Society which was “affiliated with the Federation of Jewish Charities.
1880: It was reported today that the library of the late Baron James De Rothschild of Paris will soon be sold at auction.
1880: It was reported today that Trubner & Co has just published Early Hebrew Life: A Study in Sociology by John Fenton
1881: In New York City, Tillie Roth and Simon Wels gave birth to NYU trained attorney Isidor Wels, the husband of Belle Hoffman and senior part of the law firm of Moss, Wels and Marcus who belonged to Temple B’nai Israel and the American Jewish Committee
Who's who in American Jewry - Google Books
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1881: It is reported today that Russian Jews are excited by the prospect of Count Schovaloff replace General Ignatieff as Minister of the Interior given the former’s enlightened attitude towards deal with the Jewish population.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9402E4D91730E433A25756C0A9649D94609FD7CF
1882(24thof Kislev, 5643): Kindle the first Chanukah Candle
1882: It was reported today that “five soldiers of a regiment of dragoons…have been condemned to 15 years at hard labor in the mines…for taking part in riots against the Jews.”
1882: A warrant procured by Bernard Jaworower of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society for the arrest of Hahal and Abraham Bronstein, two Jewish immigrants from Russia living at Ward’s Island was given to the Harlem Police so they could take them into custody.
1884: “Virchow and Herr Stoecker” published today described the electoral contest between liberal democrat Rudolf Virchow, the renowned pathologist and “the Jew baiting Court Chaplain Adolph Stoecker” in which Virchow appears to have won thanks to the support of the Socialists.
1884: Mother Mandelbaum, the noted “receiver of stolen goods” and her son Julius arrived in Montreal tonight where they are staying with a Jewish family that used to live in Brooklyn.
1884: In Milwaukee, WI, Riekchen Katz and Abe Meissner gave birth St. Louis businessman Edwin B. Meissner, the president of the St. Lous Car Company and board member of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis who was the husband Vassar College graduate Edna Rice Meissner, a leader of the National Council of Jewish Women.
1884: Customers at Kaplan’s Coffee House identified the man who shot himself in the park last night as Jacob Asch a native of Posen who came to the United States 20 years ago where he went into the millinery business, married, had four children and moved to Chicago. He had come back to New York in what proved to be a futile attempt to improve his fortune; a failure that apparently led to his death.
1885: In Brooklyn, NY, Judith Bensinger and Jacob Kronheim gave birth to Sylvan Kronheim the manager of the men’s department at Maison-Blanche in New Orleans and the merchandise manager for the Rosenbaum Company in Pittsburgh who went on to found the Kronheim Continental Company which opened two men’s apparel stores in New York while raising two children Myron and Judith with his second wife ethe former Cecile Younger.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/10/05/88568385.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
1886: University of Cincinnati graduate and HUC trained rabbi, Joseph Silverman, the Cincinnati born son of Ulrika Piorkowsky and Michael Henry Silverman married Henrietta Block in Galveston, TX while leading Temple Israel in Galveston and before moving on Temple Emanu-El in New York.
1887: Reverend E. D. Simons of New Bloomfield, NJ, is scheduled to read a paper today entitled “Why the Jews Crucified Christ”
1888(1stof Tevet, 5649): Rosh Chodesh Tevet; Seventh day of Chanukah
1888: Birthdate of Berezino, Russia native Joseph George Cohen who in 1891 came to New York City where he earned a Ph.D. from NYU and became the director of the graduate division of Brooklyn College.
1889: The Hebrew Free School Association held its annual meeting today at the house of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association
1889: It was reported today that Mayor Hugh Grant will preside at the official opening of the upcoming Hebrew Educational Fair in New York City.
1890: In Vienna, Anton Lang and the former Pauline Schlesinger, a Jew who had convert to Roman Catholicism gave birth to director Fritz Lang whose trouble with the Nazis stemmed as much from his art as did the fact that under the Nuremberg Laws he was Jewish.
1890: Plans were published today for the upcoming meeting of The Hebrew Free School Association in Manhattan.
1890: In Birmingham, “Polish Jewish immigrant leatherworker Abraham Bomberg and his wife gave birth to Painter David Garshen Bomberg, one of the “White Chapel Boys” who received assistance from “The Jewish Educational Aid Society which enabled him to go to the Slade 1911-13, winning the Tonks Prize for a drawing of fellow student Isaac Rosenberg and who in the 1920’s lived in Palestine where he worked for the Zionists and furthered his painting career
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/david-bomberg
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/the-whitechapel-boys
1892: Birthdate of Al Boasberg, the native of Buffalo career who began his career doing vaudeville with Jack Benny before pursuing a career writing scripts for films, the most of which might have been the Marx Brothers, “A Night at the Opera.”
https://travsd.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/al-boasberg/
http://www.buffaloah.com/h/boasberg/index.html
1892: Jacob Gerber arrived back in Omaha, Nebraska after having spent the last 18 months in Siberian Exile to which he had been condemned when he returned to Russia to help his family leave the Czar’s domain.
1892: The secret documents that had been presented in camera at the libel trial of Hermann Ahlwardt which showed the 520 of the 939 Loewe rifles tested required repairs were read in open court today.
1892: Pasot Hermann Ahlwardt, an avowed anti-Semite, who is “on trial for slandering Herr Loewe, the Hebrew small arms manufacturer” was elected to Germany's Reichstag.
1893(26thof Kislev, 5654): Second Day of Chanukah
1893(26thof Kislev, 5654): Budapest born Benjamin Solomon Spitzer, the rabbi and leader of Austrian Orthodox Jewry known Reb Zalman Spitzer who married the daughter of R. Moses Sofer passed away today.
https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13975-spitzer-benjamin-solomon
https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/spitzer-solomon
1894: The Young Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s League of the Montefiore Home held its first annual reception in the recital chamber of the Music Hall. The League’s purpose is to aid in raising funds for the Montefiore Home.
1894: “An enthusiastic and appreciative audience” representing some “of the best elements” of Jewish society attended the fundraiser hosted by the Monte Relief Society tonight at the Lexington Avenue Opera House.
1894: In New Orleans, LA, today’s session of the convention of American Hebrew Congregations (Reform) a group of rabbis led by Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, the President of the Hebrew Union College protested the opening speech by Leo Levi Galveston in which he asserted that “reformed Judaism” was “endangering the very edifice of the Israelite faith.”
1895: Birthdate of David-Zvi Pinkas, the native of Sopron who was active in Zionist youth groups before making Aliyah in 1925 which led him to a political career that included service in the First Knesset and as the first Minister of Transport.
1895: In La Jolla, CA, Esther and Morris Starrels gave birth to HUC and University of Cincinnati graduate Solomon Elihu Starrels, the first rabbi to lead Congregation B’nai Jershurun in Lincoln, Nebraska and the husband of Gertrude Starrels.
1895: Hermann Ahlwardt, a member of the Reichstag who is about to commence a speaking tour in the United States said that he stands “on the grounds of racial, not religious anti-Semitism” and the he is “striving to unite the working people and the artisans against the Jews” who “achieve nothing through their own honest efforts.”
1895: Dr. S. Solis Cohen of Philadelphia is scheduled to deliver a lecture on “Judaism a Living Force,” the second in a series of talks sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association followed by a performance of the Amateur Philharmonic Orchestra.
1896: Oscar Altman and Rose Wachtel became engaged according to information she later included in her breach of promise suit filed against Altman.
1897: Birthdate of Gerhard Scholem, the German born Israeli-Jewish philosopher and author who gained fame as Gershom Scholem who served as the firs t Professor Of Jewish Mysticism at Hebrew University where he pursued his ground-breaking academic study of the Kabbalah.
1896: Birthdate of Dr. Gerty Theresa Radnitz Cori who was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, in 1947, which was shared with her husband, Dr. Carl F. Cori, and Dr. B.A. Houssay of Argentina. Austrian born biochemist.
1898: “Gen. Porter and the Dreyfus Case” published today contains Henri Rocherfort’s accusation that General Horace Porter, the United States Ambassador “recently said England had financed the Dreyfus syndicate with a view of dividing and weakening France” followed by Porter’s response that “that the statement was a fabrication, pure and simple.”
1900: Today Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy signed a treaty providing that their navies would work together in the event of an attack on either nation by France or Russia which was yet another of the interlocking treaties that led to WW I, the disaster for so many European Jews that led to that even greater disaster, the Shoah.
1900: Today, twenty-two year old Oscar Berman, the Kovno born son of Charles Meyer and Sophia Berman and younger brother of Jacob Berman, the Chief Rabbi of Berditchev who in 1893 came to the United States where he settled in Cincinnati, OH where he founded the Crown Overall Manufacturing Company married Cora Frank with whom he had two sons, Benjamin and Arnold.
1901: In Chicago, Illinois, Elias and Flora Disney, gave birth to father of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck – Walt Disney whom some have accused of being an anti-Semite despite the fact that he “donated regularly to Jewish charities and “was named 1955 Man of the Year by the B’nai B’rith Chapter in Beverly Hills.”
1902: The Convention of the National Council of Jewish Women continued for a fourth day at the Eutaw Place Synagogue in Baltimore, MD.
1902: Birthdate of Brooklyn native Herman Jacobs the holder of a BS from NYU and an MA from Columbia who worked with the YMHA and YWHA in the New York City are while serving as the executive director of the Jewish Community Council and as an officer with the National Association of Jewish Center Executives.
1902: In Miskolc, Hungary, Kálmán Pressburger, estate manager, and his second wife, Kätherina (née Wichs gave birth to Imre József Pressburger who gained fame as movie director Emeric Pressburgerwho won his only Oscar in 1942, for Best Writing for the original story of The Forty-Ninth Parallel.
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/447372/index.html
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp71284/emeric-pressburger-imre-josef-pressburger
1903(16thof Kislev, 5664): Parashat Vayhislach
1903: It was reported today that in Russia “no new rules have been issued in connection with admission of Americans or other Jews” and that “visas are still declined to Jews of all nationalities in accordance of long-standing policy.”
1903: Leopold Greenberg and Herzl hold consultations about the line of activity to be pursued in England. Herzl has the impression that the British government is withdrawing the East African offer. Greenberg is to press once more for Sinai and El-Arish.
1904(27thof Kislev, 5665): Third Day of Chanukah observed for the first time in the UK under the leadership of Prime Minister Sir Henry Bannerman, the successor to Arthur Balfour of Balfour Declaration fame.
1905: Representative Goldfogle of New York introduced a resolution in the United States House of Representatives condemning the massacre of the Jews of Russia, expressing the sorrow of the House over these killing and asking the President to intervene with the Russian government.
1905: “In Perth Amboy, NJ, “at a meeting at Temple Shaarey Tefiloh, fifteen hundred friends of the victims of the Russian massacres became so wrought up by the addresses made that they threw watches and jewelry into the contribution basket when relief funds were asked for.”
1905: It was reported today that Louis Marshall told those attending a mass memorial service for the Jewish victims of Russian violence that “how in 685 communities within the Russian pale, 25,000 human beings had been trampled into the soil on which for five centuries their ancestors had dwelt, and 100,000 unfortunates had been maimed, disfigured and disgraced.
1905: It was reported today that in addition to all of the memorial services that had been held in synagogues in New York, the actor Jacob P. Adler spoke to those attending the Grand Theatre about the plight of Russian Jews.
1905: Mr. Simon Wolfe, the Jewish communal leader, sent a letter today to the National Committee working to relieve the suffering of the Russian Jews from Carl Schurz in which the famous German born American reformer wrote, “Let me congratulate you on the word you are doing for the Jews in Russia. Nothing in modern times has been more terrible than their situation and to save them a fight has to be carried on not only against the barbarism of the Russian government, but, what is far worse, the barbarism of the populace.”
1905: “Camden Hebrews Memorial Service” published today described the service held the Sons of Israel Synagogue at 8th and Sycamore Streets to honor the Jews who had been murdered the Odessa Pogrom.
1905: It was reported today that the Sons of Israel in Camden, NJ has raised over $700 to be sent to the Jews in Russia who have suffered from a wave of pogroms.
1905: In “Wiznitz, Austria-Hungary (present-day Vyzhnytsia, Ukraine),” “Josefa (née Fraenkel) and Markus Preminger” gave birth to producer/director Otto Preminger whose credits include “Luara” and the film adaptation of Leon Uris’ best-selling novel, Exodus.
https://www.biography.com/people/otto-preminger-9446387
1906: Birthdate of New York City native and CCNY graduate Harry Louis Levy, the holder of a Ph.D from Columbia, the classical scholar who served dean of Students at Hunter College and Vice Chancellor of City University in New York before becoming a visiting professor of classical studies at Duke University where his wife, the former Ernestine Friedl is dean of arts and sciences at the University’s Trinity College.
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/12/obituaries/harry-levy-ex-official-at-city-u.html
1907(29th of Kislev, 5668): Fifth Day of Chanukah
1907: “Aaron and Esther (Enteen) Rabinowitz” gave birth to Brooklyn trained attorney and Democratic Party activist Samuel G. Rabinor.
1907: As part of a determined effort to have the public see the Department of Commerce and Labor as an entity that can improve “commercial operations” in the United States, Oscar Straus, the recently appointed Secretary of that department and the first Jew to hold a cabinet post is scheduled to host a meeting today in Washington “of representatives of the various Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce and other commercial organizations.”
1908: Birthdate of Estelle Strossman, the wife of Brooklyn native Samuel L. Multer and the mother of Rhode Island basketball star Barry Multer.
1908: Birthdate of “Shobha Magdolna Friedmann Nehru, a Hungarian Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, married into India’s leading political family.” (As reported by Ellen Barry)
1909: Birthdate of New York native Harold Joseph Huberman who gained fame as Harold Huber the NYU graduate and began his career on Broadway with an appearance in “A Farewell to Arms” in 1930.
1909: Many of New York City’s most prominent Jewish leaders took part in a memorial meeting this afternoon in honor of the Rabbi Joseph Mayer Asher, Professor in the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and rabbi of the Orach Chaim Synagogue, who passed away unexpectedly at the age of 37 on November 9. It was held under the auspices of the Jewish Community of New York City in the auditorium of the Hebrew Charities Building, at Second Avenue and Twenty-First Street.
1910: In New York City, “Russian Jewish immigrants, Henry and Rebecca (née Rosoff) Polonsky gave birth to Abraham L Polonsky, an American born writer and director, whose political views led to him being blacklisted following World War II. After being “rehabilitated” he made one of his most famous works, “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here.”
1911(14thof Kislev, 5672): Eighty year old Leopold Seligman, seventh of the eight Seligman brothers and co-founder of the Anglo-Californian bank and “who with his brother Isaac” headed “the well-known banking firm in London of Seligman Brothers” passed away today in the English capital city.
1911: Today, twenty-nine year old Johns Hopkins trained medical doctor Solomon Strouse, the Baltimore born son of Benjamin and Fannie (Kahn) Strouse and associate professor of Northwestern University married Edith J. Mayer in Chicago.
1911:Birthdate of Polish pianistWładysław Szpilman. He worked as pianist for Polish radio in Warsaw until 1939. He was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto where continued playing while helping to smuggle weapons into the ghetto. When the rest of his family was sent to Treblinka, Szpilman escaped. Eventually he was captured by the Germans. However, thanks to Wilm Hoseneld, a Wermacht Captain who had become disillusioned with the Nazis, Szpilman survived the war. His autobiography became the source for the script of the 2002 film entitled “The Pianist.”
1911: Forty-six year old Russian born painter and portrait artist Valentin Alexandrovich Serov passed away. For a display of his work including his self-portrait seehttp://www.tanais.info/art/en/serov.html
1912(25thof Kislev, 5673): Chanukah
1912(25thof Kislev, 5673): Forty year old Hoboken, NJ philanthropist A.E. Solomon passed away today at Jacksonville, FL.
1912: In Warsaw, “David Grobsmith, a shoe designer, and Lonia Grobsmith née Babicz, a corsetiere” gave birth to Kaila Grobsmith, who gained famed as Hunter College graduate and author Kate Simon who married Robert Simon after the death of Stanley Goldman.
1912: Two days after he had passed away, 70 year old Sigmund Pollitzer, the husband of Rebecca Pollitzer with whom he had had four children was buried today at the “Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery.”
1912: Today, “Rabbi Schanfarber addressed the Jews of Michigan City” today “and “urged the formation of Sabbath School.
1912: The ninth convention of the Rivers and Harbors Congress which Jacob A. Cantor is attending as a delegate from New York continued for a second day in Washington, D.C.
1912: Birthdate of Senetta Punfud, the native of Fürth, Germany who gained married Giroa Yoseftal and gained fame as Israeli political leader Senetta Yoseftal, a founder of Kibbutz Galed and Knesset Minster.
1913(6thof Kislev, 5674): Seventy-year-old Cincinnati native and Civil War veteran Jacob Trost, the son of Wolf and Hannah Kahn Trost and the husband of Carrie Solomon Trost with whom he had had two children – Belle and Jeannette – passed away today after which he was buried at the Judah Touro Cemetery in Cincinnati.
1913: According to a report published in “La America” after the sisterhood’s old Neighborhood House “became inadequate” the facility was moved to Orchard Street.
1914: “War Hits Zionism, Says Zangwill” published today provides the views of the Israel Zangwill of the war on the Jewish people. Among other things he believed “that the present war will for some years make it impossible to have German, English, Austrian and Russian Jews meet on a common basis, that the establishment of a national home in Palestine will not solve the problems of discrimination faced by most Jews and that at this time he will work to have Lord Gray, the British Foreign Secretary, pressure the Russians to improve the conditions of Russian Jewry.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=950CE5DF1438E633A25756C0A9649D946596D6CF
1915: “A new Jewish theological seminary which is to be called the Rabbinical College that has been established by the Yeshibath Etz Chaim and the Rabbi Isaac Elchana Seminary” for the purpose of training Orthodox rabbis located at 9 and 11 Montgomery Streets” is scheduled to be formally dedicated this morning in New York City.
1915(28thof Kislev, 5676): Fourth Day of Chanukah
1915: A hoped for 5,000 volunteers were scheduled to take part in Zion Flag Day which was supported by numerous organizations including David Wolfsohn Zion Club in Manhattan, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in the Bronx and the Young Judean Club in Brooklyn
1915: The New York Chapter of Hadassah is scheduled to host a Chanukah celebraton this eveing at the Hotel Majestic to raise money for the Emergency Fund providing aid to the suffering Jews of Palestine which will feature “a program of Hebrew and Yiddish Songs” and “a dramatic reading by Miss Jennie Mannheimer of Cincinnati.
1915: As previously decided by the Executive Committee of the Federation of American Zionists, Flag Day is scheduled to be celebrated today.
1915: It was reported today that in Russia “it is not feasible to replace coal with timber, which is abundant in the Russian forests, because the timber trade is exclusively in the hands of the Jews and they have been decimated by the most cruel pogroms or expelled from the west and the northwest which is the great forest land of Russia. (Given a choice between anti-Semitism or winning the war, it looks like the Czar preferred the former to the latter.)
1915: “Four hundred members of New York’s police force headed by Commissioner Arthur Woods attended the annual service in memory of their departed brothers of the Jewish faith at Temple Emanu-El where they were greeted by Chaplain Blums, heard music from the police band and the temple choir and listened to an address by Rabbi Joseph Silverman on “Our Duty to the City.’”
1915: “At the opening session of the seventh annual convention of the Federation of Jewish Farmers of America held in the auditorium of the Education Alliance Building” tonight “Jacob H. Schiff predicted that after the war there will be a tide of immigration of European Jews to” the United States “because of the persecutions they are undergoing in Russia and Poland” and “plans must be made to accommodate these people in” rural areas because the cities are already overcrowded with immigrants.
1915: Among those listed today as having made contributions to the American Jewish Relief Committee to provide funds for those living in the war zones include $104 from the Fargo, North Dakota, Association of Jewish Charities, $200 from the Calgary, Canada Jewish Relief Fund, $1,000 from the Des Moines, Iowa Jewish Community and $100 from the Jewish Conference of Minneapolis, MN.
1916: Birthdate of Hilary Koprowski the Polish-born Jewish virologist and immunologist, and inventor of the world's first effective live polio vaccine. (As reported by Margalit Fox)
1916: Twenty-four year old University of Pennsylvania attorney, Louis E. Levinthal, the Philadelphia born son of Bernhard and Minna (Kleinberg) Levinthal who became a member of the National Executive Committee of the ZOA and member of the board of trustee of JPS married Lenore Chodoff today.
1917: As Imperial forces battled their way to Jerusalem, the advanced guard of the 53rd (Welsh) Division also known as Mott’s Detachment moved three miles north of Hebron under the cover of darkness.
1917: At a time “when the Turks under German control are deporting Jews wholesale from Palestine,” The Frankfurter Zeitung published an account supplied by Count Ernst Graf zu Reventlow “of a secret anti-Semitic movement which is collecting funds for a violent German campaign against Jews” which is “to open directly after peace is concluded.” (Reventlow was an anti-Semite who joined the Nazis)
1917: The Jewish Ministers’ Association of American which was organized in March and is led by President Aaron Yudelowitz of Boston held the opening session of its first annual convention in New York City.
1917: Rabbi Joel Blau of Rochester, NY delivered an address on “Israel After War” at the meeting of the Menorah Society in which he declared that “Jewish freedom can mean only one thing: not merely freedom everywhere, but a free Israel in its own land, Palestine.”
1917: The convention of the Association of American Jewish Rabbis that has been meeting at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association adjourned today after reaffirming its previously adopted motion express thanks to the British government for the promulgation of the Balfour Declaration.
1918: Lord Curzon chaired a meeting of the Cabinet Eastern Committee attended by General Jan Smuts, Lord Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil, General Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, T. E. Lawrence and representatives of the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Admiralty, the War Office, and the Treasury at which the status of Palestine was discussed. (Editor’s Note – This list of attendees should prove that the issue of the future of Palestine was one of major concern to the British as they prepared to deal with the post-war world.)
1919(13th of Kislev, 5680): Clara S. Kraus, the wife of Louis Kraus and mother of Muriel Kraus passed away today in Chicago where she was a member of Temple Sholom.
1919: Mortimer L. Schiff, Chairman of the Finance Committee of the Jewish Welfare Board was among the passengers on board the SS Mauretania that set sail for Great Britain today. Schiff was accompanied by George W. Perkins, Chairman of the Finance Committee of the War Work Council of the YMCA. The trip which representative of kind of inter-religious harmony unique to the United States, was the first step in assessing how the funds collected by these two organizations could best be used to alleviate the suffering in post-war Europe.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9D05EFD71239E13ABC4E53DFB4678383609EDE
1919: A delegation of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) including Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Mrs. Joseph Fels, Louis Robinson and Bernard Flexner set sail from New York for London where they will meeting with leaders of other Zionist organizations, including the Zionist Political Committee.
1919: The Turkish Minister of War issues a decree releasing all Jews (as well as Greeks and Armenians) from obligation in the military.
1920(24thof Kislev, 5681): Kindle the first Chanukah Candle
1920: At 10 o’clock today, “the clubs on Washington Heights” are scheduled to “present a program of Jewish plays, tableaux, recitations and motion pictures at the Audubon Theatre” as part of the Channukah celebration.
1920: Cornell graduate and Long Island College Hospital trained medical doctor Murray Burnes Gordon, the New York City born son of Pera Lichtman and Isaac Gordon married Harriet Engel today after which he became the president of the medical staff of the United Israel Zion Hospital
1920: “Captain Anthony de Rothschild unveiled the War Memorial in the churchyard of All Saints Church at Wing, Buckinghamshire honoring his brother” “Evelyn who died of combat injuries suffered at the Battle of Mughar Ridge” “and his Wing comrades killed in World War I.”
1921(4thof Kislev, 5682): Eighty-nine year old Austrian feminist Ottilie Bonday, the daughter of Johanna and Dr. Aloys Isidor Jeitteles passed away in Munich.
1922: At the Conference of Lusanne, Russia pursued its goal to control the Dardanelles which has had a long running effect on the Middle East, by demanded “the closure of the straits, in peace and war, to the warships and aircraft of all nations except Turkey.
1922: In London, Major Harry Louis Nathan, 1st Baron Nathan and Eleanor Joan Clara Nathan gave birth to Captain Roger Carol Michael Nathan, 2nd Baron Nathan
1922: Birthdate of Lois Ruth Mell, who would become known as Casey Ribicoff, the wife Abraham Ribiccoff a great liberal Democrat and decent man who served as U.S. Senator from Connecticut and Secretary of HEW.
1922(15th of Kislev, 5683): Benjamin Levinsky was shot and killed this morning “by William Lipshitz while entering a Broadway loft building where he was employed as a cutter for the Levinson Brothers. He had driven to work in a taxi with Benjamin Massauer, an ex-convict who had spent the night at his home, and who had told the driver to stop the cab when two shots were heard shortly after Levinsky entered the building. As a crowd gathered in front of the building, Lipshitz ran out from the doorway and into a patrolman who had arrived at the scene. When questioned, he denied any knowledge of the shooting and claimed to have been buying a suit when the murder took place. Both Lipshitz and Massauer were taken to the Mercer Street police station where they were further questioned by police. Lipshitz maintained he had no involvement in Levinsky's murder but was caught lying when he claimed to have no criminal record. He had been using the alias William Levine but admitted to being William Lipshitz when confronted with his photo in the precinct's Rogue's Gallery. A witness also claimed to have seen he and Levinsky fighting in the doorway when the shooting occurred. Lipshitz was eventually charged with Levinsky's death while Massauer was held as a material witness until paroled in the custody of lawyer Hyman Bushel who had been hired by Levinsky's family. Although police suspected his murder had been committed by a personal enemy, Bushel later issued a statement from the family claiming that Levinsky had been murdered as the result of a murder contract by businessmen. Benjamin Levinsky, who was born in 1893, was an American gang leader, labor racketeer and organized crime figure. Spending almost twenty years in and out of reformatories and prisons, Levinsky had a lengthy criminal record prior to the start of Prohibition. He was first arrested in 1902 for incorrigibility and sent to a reformatory asylum. He was caught pickpocketing five years later and was imprisoned on a variety of charges over the next decade including petty theft, grand larceny, felonious assault and vagrancy. He became involved in labor racketeering in Manhattan's Lower East Side and, prior to the third "Labor Slugger War", Levinsky reportedly became "a thorn in the side of clothing contractors". Due to his unionizing activities, he apparently became the target of assassination by certain business interests. Other sources claim he headed a gang of gunmen and thieves which began muscling in on the territory of other "labor sluggers” particularly that of newsboy and labor racketeer William Lipshitz.”
1923(27thof Kislev, 5684): Third day of Chanukah
1923: American Jews absorbed the warning reported yesterday that Chaim Weizmann said “a wave of anti-Semitism sweeping over Eastern Europe is endangering the lives of eight million Jews.”
1924: In Baltimore, MD, “the former Florence Decker, an amateur painter” and her husband Gustave gave birth “comic-book artist” Samuel Joseph Glanzman. (As reported by Richard Sandomir)
1925 After 319 performances on Broadway, the curtain came down on “Louis XIV” featuring the music of Sigmund Romberg.
1925(18thof Kislev, 5686): Parasha Vayishlach
1925: New York native Bernhard Baron who made his money in the tobacco business in London celebrated his seventy-fifth birth today “by giving £50,000 to charity from his private fortune” which “brings the total of his gifts to charities and to his employee in the present year to £200,000 and for all years £700,000.”
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1925/12/04/99370416.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
1925(18th of Kislev, 5686): Yehuda Leib Levin, oldest of the Hebrew poets in Russia, known for more than half a century under his pen name ‘Jahalel,’” passed away today in Kiev. Born in Minsk in 1844, Levin studied Talmud, worked as a teacher before serving as a treasurer for local flour and sugar mills. The first collection of his poetry was published in 1871 under the title Sifte Raananim.” In 1877, “Kishron Massech” his poem “devoted to a description of the social conditions of Russian Jews” was published. In a case of Jew meets Jew, Levin translated Disraeli’s Tancred into Hebrew.
1926: Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," debuted. Eisenstein was a famed Russian director whose father was a Jewish architect. As a “child of the Russian Revolution,” Eisenstein did not profess a belief in any religion.
1927: In the Czech Republic, Ernst Löw the Czech born son of Karl Löw and Rosa Löw and his wife Rosa / Růžena Rosalie Löw gave birth to Herbert Löw,
1928(22ndof Kislev, 5689): Fifty-six year old Sarah A. Moses, the Montgomery, AL born daughter of Jeanette Nathan and Alfred Huger Moses who were married in 1871 at Louisville passed away today in St. Louis, MO.
1928: “According to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency dispatch sent today from Warsaw “an anti-Jewish boycott has been started in Upper Silesia threatening 6,000 Jewish peddlers with economic ruin.” (Editor’s note – so much for the myth that the treatment of the Jews by the Poles during the Holocaust was because “the Germans made them do it.”
1928: At the opening meeting of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, Dr. S. Parkes Cadman said “that he considered himself radio minister to Jews and Gentiles as the committee in charge of the programs was not confined exclusively to Christians.”
1929: “Jewish Honor Roll Lists 4 Christians” published today reported that the soon to be published “annual Who’s Who issue of the American Hebrew will list four Christians” – Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia; Dr. A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard; Dr. W.H.P. Fuance of Brown and John D. Rockefeller, Jr – “among those listed as having performed outstanding work the Jewish people in 1929…”
1930: The Baltimore Jewish Times reported that Cantor Abba Yosef Weisgal’s Adolph Coblenz was his “first rabbi in Baltimore, MD.”
1930: In Los Angeles, “a jeweler and an actress” gave birth to Frederick Lawrence Kert who gained fame as singer Larry Kert, best known for playing the lead in Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway hit “West Side Story.”
1930: “The Blue Angel,” a tragi-comedy directed by Josef von Sternberg who also co-authored the script with music by Friedrich Hollaender and Franz Waxman was released in the United States today.
1931(25thof Kislev, 5692): Chanukah
1931: “A Governor’s warrant for the extradition of Montefiore E. Kahn from to New York City to New Jersey will be sought today by…the Prosecutor of Hudson County following Kahn’s indictment yesterday on a charge of embezzlement of $100,000 from Oil Shares, Inc. of which he was vice president.”
1931: The False Madonna, with a screenplay co-authored by Arthur Kober was released today in the United States.
1932(6thof Kislev, 5693): Eighty-one year old German born Cincinnati businessman William Ornstein, an officer with B’nai B’rith passed away today.
1932: Birthdate of Farhat Ezekiel Nadira, a member of a prominent Baghdadi Jewish family who gained fame as Nadria, a leading Indian movie actress.
1932: “German” physicist Albert Einstein was granted a visa. Einstein was the kind of German who had to use his visa to flee to the United States where he could continue his work and, more importantly, continue to stay alive. To history he may have been a “German” but to the Germans he was one more candidate for the Final Solution. As those who studied Jewish History on Monday nights at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids learned, “who writes history often determines what the history is.”
1932: In New York, Jewish immigrants Bella (Rubin) and Lewis Gluchovsky, a plumber gave birth to Sheldon Glashow who developed the Electroweak Theory and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979.
1933:Edith Frank-Holländer and her daughter Margot join their father Otto in Amsterdam. Her sister Anne will leave Germany and join them in February of 1943
1933(17th of Kislev, 5694): Fifty-eight year old Columbia trained physician Alfred Fabian Hess, the husband of the former Sara Strauss, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Strauss with whom he had four children and the developer of the Hess Test which came about while studying “the role of nutrition in scurvy and rickets” passed away today.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/1176548
https://library-archives.cumc.columbia.edu/obit/alfred-fabian-hess
1933: Utah becomes the 36th State to ratify the 21st Amendment marking the end of Prohibition at the federal level in the United States.
http://americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1991_43_02_00_sprecher.pdf
http://forward.com/articles/143791/prohibition-tells-changing-story-of-jews-in-americ/
1934: In response to questions from Labor MP Colonel Josiah C. Wedgwood, “Colonial Secretary Sir Phillip Cunliffe-Lister” told the House of Commons “that between January 1 and November 24, 627 Jews were deported from Palestine” at cost unknown to him at this time.
1934: In Newark, NJ, H. Jerome Sisselman and his wife gave birth to art collector Naomi Wilzig, the wife of Siggi Wilzig, an Auschwitz survivor and an early leader of the U.S. Holocaust Museum,
1935: Birthdate of Auckland, New Zealand native Maxwell Harold “Max” Gimblett the American artist and the husband of Canadian born scholar Barbara Kirsheblatt-Gimblett.
http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2016/04/28/max-gimblett-and-the-art-of-remembrance/
1935: In Kansas City, MO, Edythe and Abe Trillin gave birth to Calvin Trillin, the journalist, humorist novelist and creator of comic verse, best known for his writing about cooking and food. A few of his famous one-liners include: “Following the Jewish tradition, a dispenser of schmaltz (liquid chicken fat) is kept on the table to give the vampires heartburn if they get through the garlic defense.” “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”
https://www.thenation.com/authors/calvin-trillin/
1936: It was reported today that Dr. Wildhagen, an Aryan who “sits on the bench of the Leipzig Supreme Court” was among those whose books were banned the National Socialist Party because they erroneously identified him as being Jewish.
1937:The Palestine Post reported that Sir Alfred MacMichael, governor of Tanganyika since 1934, had been appointed to replace Sir Arthur Wauchope as the High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief of Palestine and the High Commissioner for Transjordan.
1937: The Palestine Post reported that in Jerusalem Abraham Perlman, 20, was shot dead and two young girls were wounded when they strolled together towards the King David Hotel.
1937: An article published today entitled "A Trio by the Thames" described the opening of a four week season of the Habima Players in London. By November 19, at the end of the first of the four weeks, the Palestinian troupe had displayed "the Habima Method" in a faultless performance of the Dybbuk.
1938: Following Kristallnacht, 18 year old Helmut Newton fled Germany today with the intention of going to China but ended up in Singapore where he pursued his career as a photographer :first for the Straits Times and then as a portrait photographer”
1938: Birthdate of Stepney native and “footballer” Mark Lazaurs whose career reached a high point “when he scored the final goal for QPR against West Bromwich Albion in the 1967 League Cup Final at Wembley Stadium.”
1938: As the Arab uprising intensified, Abd el Bader Abu Saleh, an Arab leader was shot dead by Arab terrorists. Snipers attacked Jewish settlements as well as military and police installations in Gaza. Damage done to the railroad running between Lydda and Tel Aviv was repaired within hours after having been discovered.
1938: The following article entitled “Germany: Ad Nauseam” published today proves the world was not ignorant of the fate of German Jewry.
How 62 prosperous German Jews were forced to run a bloody gantlet at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was reported last week in the Liberal News Chronicle of London. Two long ranks of Adolf Hitler's personal Schutzstaffel formed the gantlet, down which the 62 Jews were forced to run. "As they approached between the ranks, a hail of blows fell on them," said the News Chronicle. "As they fell, the Jews were beaten further. The orgy lasted half an hour. . . . Twelve of the 62 were dead, with skulls smashed. All the others were unconscious, some with eyes out and faces flattened in. ... Police, unable to bear the cries, turned their backs." This nauseating atrocity, whether or not the honest News Chronicle was correctly informed as to exactly what happened, is undoubtedly the truth in the sense that such atrocities do occur today in many parts of Germany, especially the countryside. The case for antiSemitism, as it appears to strong-stomached Nazis, was taken last week before the bar of German public opinion. It is to be kept there for many weeks, with more than 1,500 major anti-Semitic mass meetings, scheduled throughout Germany, plus countless anti-Semitic lectures—all under the showmanship of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels. Dr. Goebbels is sometimes described in print as a barking, brawling, screaming propaganda maniac. Actually the Minister for Propaganda & Public Enlightenment is one of the great political orators of this century. He opens suavely, is restrained most of the time, mellifluent, knows how to whip a point over with the sting of humor, a trifle crude at times—or very crude if Dr. Goebbels is radiorating to the masses. The importance in Dr. Goebbels' mind of the "educative campaign" he was starting last week caused him to summon 2,000 of his picked Nazi stooge-orators to meet him in the Kroll Opera House. "I have never made anti-Semitic propaganda in the outside world," said Orator Goebbels softly. "The dear Jews have done that for themselves. . . . Anti-Semitism is latent among all peoples. The Jews awaken it. ... All we have done is to eliminate Jews from public life in Germany. Let the English say what they will, what we do is our business! . . . After five-and-one-half years of National Socialism, the Jews still have in Germany proportionately four-and-one-half times as much wealth as the Aryans!" From this Dr. Goebbels proceeded to an economic attack on the Jewish Question. According to him, if the average German owned as much as the average German Jew still owns today, the national wealth of the Reich would be not as at present some 200 billion marks but over 900 billion marks. As though for a Liberty Loan Drive, the Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment rushed to German "educative meetings" Dr. Goebbels' brand new "educational film" prepared weeks ago—Jewry Without The Mask. This was not all, by any means. With typical German thoroughness, Dr. Goebbels forced the Jewish Theatre of Berlin, which wished to remain closed, to re-open last week and ordered a Jewish director Fritz Wisten brought directly from a concentration camp to put on a comedy, The Wind And The Rain—or else. A policeman then noted in his little book and reported back to his Nazi superiors what was also noted by the Associated Press correspondent: The bedraggled Jewish audience "occasionally applauded" this comedy which they were obliged to sit through by Dr. Goebbels so that his 2,000 orators can "truthfully" tell the German people such things as this: "There is right now a Jewish theatre going full blast in Berlin and playing comedies at which the rich Jews laugh and applaud while poor Jews are starving!" Such despotic acts of State are the most effective form of 1938 streamlined propaganda, but Orator Goebbels of course uses many first-rate German orators—as well as his 2,000 regimented speakers. First-rate Orator Dr. Robert Ley, führer of the Labor front of 20 million German workers (who have to take him as their trade union boss whether they like him or not), declared last week: "The resurgence of the German people had three stages: first, unification under a Führer; second, the bursting of the Versailles bonds; third, exposure of the Jewish enemy and the battle with him."* Dr. Ley did not forget that he was addressing, among other German workers, many more or less devout Catholics, all of whom know that Pope Pius XI has taken the strongest stand against anti-Semitism and inferentially against Naziism (TIME, Aug. 14). Attacking His Holiness directly, Labor Front Ley blasphemed: "The Pope is wrong because he recognizes only one Catholic race. But Almighty God was not so papal as the Pope. He made differences among races! There are positive and negative elements in the human race and the negative can exist only as parasites—as witness the Jews!" Herren Hitler, Goebbels, Ley et al. are the remorseless leaders and directors of the Nazi program to liquidate the Jews. But the merciless hand of 185,000 who eagerly carry out their orders to the hilt and then some are the 185,000 bullyboys of the Reich—the Schutzstaffel, the vicious elite of the Nazi storm troops. Their organ, and that of the Gestapo (secret police) is Das Schwarze Korps. This Party paper recently stated it as a fact that international Jewry had declared war on Germany. Last week Das Schwarze Korps, descended from appalling generalities to particulars. It proposed this program to destroy Germany's Jews as follows: first impoverish them; this will end in the Jews' having no other means of livelihood than to descend to criminality; "at this stage of development we should therefore face the hard necessity of exterminating the Jewish underworld in the same fashion in which ... we exterminate criminals generally—by fire and sword. "Because it is necessary, because we no longer hear the world's screeching and because, after all, no power on earth can hinder us, we will now bring the Jewish question to its totalitarian solution," declared Das Schwarze Korps. "The program is clear. "The Jews must be quartered in streets and housing blocks where they will be among themselves and come into touch with Germans as little as possible." No one of the ghettos which would be Stage 1 of the Schtitzstaffel's plan had yet been set up in Germany last week. But the laws to put Jews outside Germany's social and economic life were being promulgated daily. No German Jew may enter any non-Jewish place of entertainment or education. No Jew may conduct any commercial business or service. The professions had not been entirely closed to them. That would come later. Meantime, blustering Reich Master of the Hunt Hermann Göring withdrew all Jewish hunting licenses. *Newshawks who few weeks ago reported that Germany's famed folk song, Heinrich Heine's Lorelei, had been banned because its author was a Jew, discovered that Dr. Ley had nonetheless named his newborn daughter Lore Ley.
1939: German authorities seize Jewish property in Poland. Items that are appropriated include businesses, homes, furniture and other household goods, currency and bank accounts, art, jewelry, and other valuables. Now economically helpless, the Jews have virtually nothing with which to sustain themselves.
1940: British government official Sir John Schuckburgh wrote that "the Jews have no sense of humor and no sense of proportion."
1940: “The Thief of Bagdad” a fantasy produced by Sir Alexander Korda, with contributions by Vincent and Zotlan Korda, the other two siblings of this fascinating trio of Hungarian born Jews was released in the United States today.
1941: “Jewish Army Urged To Win Just Peace” published today described plans for a volunteer force of 200,000 Jews that would be trained in Canada and receive equipment under lend-lease that was supported by, among others, Colon John H. Patter, the English Commander of the Jewish Legion in World War I who “had long advocated the formation of a Jewish army because he knew it would help win the war and second because he believe that that without such an army there will be no just peace, no any true democracy after the war.”
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9902E0DF173AE233A25756C0A9649D946093D6CF
1941: The Nazis collected 7,000 Jews in the town courtyard at Nowogrodek, Poland. After a night in the court yard, the Jews were selected to the left for work, or to the right for death. Five thousand of the Jews went to the right.
1941: Two days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, “Mr. Bug Goes to Town,” the film that ended the partnership between Max and Dave Fleischer had a limited release.
1942: Four days after his 38th birthday Czech journalist Josef Taussig and his parents – Otto and Frederike, née Federer, Taussig – and “at least five of his other relatives” were shipped to Theresienstadt.
1943: The New York Times reported today that 34 of the Jews arrested by the British during their search for arms at Ramat HaKovesh were released during the last weekend in November, 1943.
1944: In “Bids Jews of U.S. Take Judaism Lead” published today, it was reported that Dr. Ignacy Schwartzbart of the Polish National Council told the American Jewish Conference “the destiny of the Jewish people throughout the world now rests with active and responsible leadership from the American Jews.”
1945(1stof Tevet, 5706): Rosh Chodesh Tevet; Sixth Day of Chanukah
1945: “1,000 at Hanukah Dinner” published today described a dinner at the Hotel Commodore sponsored by the JNF where each of the attendees have given enough money to purchase one dunam or a quarter of an acre of land in Palestine.
1945: Birthdate of Moshe Katsav, future President of Israel.
1946: “Till The Clouds Roll By” a musical biography of Jerome Kern, produced by Arthur Freed and featuring Dinah Shore was released in the United States today by MGM.
http://emanuellevy.com/review/till-the-clouds-roll-by-9/
1947: Cartoonist and Chairman of Marvel Comics Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber) married Joan Clayton Boocock today.
1947: The U.S. State Department announced that no arms will be sent to the Middle East. [This American arms embargo worked to the advantage of the Arabs who had standing, well-armed militaries the best of which was the Arab Legion, the Jordanian Army supplied by the British with equipment and officers.]
1947: “The Jewish Agency announced the call-up of all men and women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five for national service.” This was part of the Yishuv’s response to the immediate increase in Arab violence following the vote to adopt the UN back partition plan.
1948: “An Act of Murder” based on a novel by Ernst Lothar, an Austrian Jew who escaped the Nazis and a screenplay by Michael Blankfort was released in New York City today.
1948: At its meeting in Tel Aviv, the Knesset publicly declared the Jerusalem was the capital of the new Jewish state.
1948: First day of Operation Assaf, a campaign by the IDF to secure the western Negev by dislodging the Egyptians who had invaded the area out the outbreak of the war. The first day was a success for the IDF which captured several Egyptian positions without sustaining serious casualties.
1949: “Prime Minister proclaimed Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.”
1950(26thof Kislev, 5711): Second Day of Chanukah
1950(26thof Kislev, 5711): Sixty-eight year old Dr. Benjamin Gruskin, the Lithuanian born son of Leon Gruskin and a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and Rush Medical School who was “a leader in experimental medicine” “credited with several medical discoveries” including the discovery of the therapeutic value of chlorophyll, blood and skins tests for cancer, a test for inactive tuberculosis and a pregnancy test” passed away today in a hospital in Durham, NC after which he was buried at the Beth Shalom Cemetery in Pittsburgh, PA.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1950/12/07/91122526.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that it was decided to proceed with the release of accounts held by Arab refugees in banks in Israel. Arab states made no such offer of releasing funds of Jewish refugees held in Arab banks in such places as Morocco or Yemen. At the UN Britain joined Canada in urging the Arab states to enter into direct peace negotiations, without any preconditions, with Israel.
1954: Birthdate of music promoter Ruth Polsky,
http://thejewniverse.com/2017/this-jewish-punk-heroine-died-tragically-young/
1955: It was reported today that Jules Levey, the former general sales manager for R.K.O. who has not produced a picture “for about seven years” “will return to independent production by filming the bestselling novel The Tontine.
1956: During the Suez Crisis, Golda Meir addressed the General Assembly. In part of her speech Mrs. Meir compared Israeli treatment of Jews who had been forced to flee from Arab countries with the pitiful conditions under which Arab nations forced the refugees in Gaza to live. “While Israel ‘fed those babies and cured their diseases, the fedayeen were sent in to throw bombs at children in synagogues and grenades in baby homes.’”
1956: Tonight, in front of 15 million viewers, Charles Van Doren, the epitome of WASP New York defeated Herb Stempel, the Brooklyn born CCNY grad on the quiz show “Twenty-One” in what was a totally rigged event that Stempel, out of anger, exposed during that Quiz Show scandal which in those simpler days rocked the nation.
1957: “Sayonara” a film adaption of the novel produced by William Goetz, with music by Franz Waxman and co-starring Red Buttons was released in the United States today Warner Bros.
1957:New York City passed the Fair Housing Practices Law making it the first city to legislate against racial or religious discrimination in the housing market. A decade after the Holocaust, it was still legal to keep a people from buying a house because they were Jewish.
1958(23rdof Kislev, 5719): Sixty-five year old Frampol, Russia native Aaron Maiberg who served with the 39th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and “was one of the first settlers of Shechumat Borochov” and who established his home at Idofit passed away today.
1959: “Operation Petticoat” a comedy with a script co-authored by Stanley Shapiro, co-starring Tony Curtis and music by David Rose was released today in the United States.
1960: Jewish Ministers Cantor Association of America & Canada held its 60thAnniversary Concert at Madison Square Garden.
1961(27thof Kislev, 5722): Third Day of Chanukah
1961(27thof Kislev, 5722): Eighty-three year old NYU trained attorney and former owner of the Boston Braves of the National League Emil Edwin Fuchs, the son of Hermann and Henrietta (Wollenberg) Fuchs, and husband of Aurelia “Oretta” Marcovich, who gave Babe Ruth his last chance to play in the Major Leagues passed away today.
https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/judge-emil-fuchs/
1962: Comedian Lenny Bruce “was arrested at the legendary Gate of Horn folk club in Chicago.
1962(8thof Kislev, 5723): Thirty-six year old author Edward Lewis Wallant, whose best-known work may have The Pawnbroker which was made into moving film starring Rod Steiger, passed away today.
1963(19thof Kislev, 5724): “New Year of The Chassidim”
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/335659/jewish/19-Kislev-The-New-Year-of-Chassidism.htm
1963(19thof Kislev, 5724): Eighty-five year old Herbert H. Lehman, the former governor of New York passed away today.
https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/mep/displaydoc.cfm?docid=erpn-herleh
1963” “Charade” a film based “The Unsuspecting Wife” by the screenwriter Peter Stone, directed and produced by Stanley Donen and co-starring Walter Matthau was released today in the United States.
1965(11thof Kislev, 5726): Fifty-seven Russian born, and Columbia trained physician Dr. Sidney Tarachow, the former member of the faculty of Iowa State University and director of the division of psychoanalytic education of the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and clinical professor of psychiatry passed away today.
1965(11th of Kislev, 5726): Joseph Erlanger passed away. Born in 1874, Erlangerborn was an American physiologist who discovered that fibers within the same nerve cord possess different functions. In 1910 he accepted the chair of physiology at Washington University in St. Louis, which he held until his retirement in 1946. While his department became one of the major research centers in physiology in America, Erlanger continued his work on cardiovascular physiology. During WW I, he carried out research on the problem of shock. In 1921 he shifted his interests to neurophysiology, and began joint work, with colleague Herbert Gasser, on the amplification and recording of nerve action potentials with the cathode ray oscilloscope, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1944.
1967: PoetAllen Ginsberg was arrested protesting Vietnam War
1968(14thof Kislev, 5729): Eighty-four year old Newark, NJ attorney Aaron Levinstone, the Grodno, born son Yeruchim and Esther Levinstone. the husband of Etta G. Goldstein and Jewish community leader who was Chairman of the United Palestine Appeal, a member of the National Executive of the Z.O.A and a member of Temple B’nai Abraham passed away today after which he buried B’nai Abraham Memorial Park in Union, NJ>
In Grodno, Yeruchim and Esther Levinstone gave birth Newark, NJ attorney Aaron Levinstone, the husband of Etta G. Goldstein and Jewish community leader who was Chairman of the United Palestine Appeal, a member of the National Executive of the Z.O.A and a member of Temple B’nai Abraham.
1968: “Jimmy Shine,” a play with music written by Murray Schisgal and starring Dustin Hoffman in the title role opened on Broadway today at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.
1969: Four mid-eastern terrorists were arrested thwarting an attack on a plane the London airport
1969: In landmark case involving “Dr. – Patient Confidentiality” Dr. Joseph Lifschutz who had “refused a court order to testify about one his patients” was cited for contempt of court “and sent to the San Mateo Jail.
1969: Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark, the mother of the Duke of Edinburgh and the mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II passed away. During World War II, “After the fall of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in September 1943, the German Army occupied Athens, where a minority of Greek Jews had sought refuge. The majority (about 60,000 out of a total population of 75,000) were deported to Nazi concentration camps, where all but 2,000 died. During this period, Princess Andrew hid Jewish widow Rachel Cohen and two of her five children, who sought to evade the Gestapo and deportation to the death camps.[40] Rachel's husband, Haimaki Cohen, had aided King George I of Greece in 1913. In return, King George had offered him any service that he could perform, should Cohen ever need it. Cohen's son remembered this during the Nazi threat, and appealed to Princess Andrew, who with Princess Nicholas was one of only two remaining members of the royal family left in Greece. She honored the promise and saved the Cohen family.”
1971(17thKislev, 5732): Eighty-four-year-old Columbia trained engineer Maurice L. Sindeband the inventor of several devices, including an automatic train con trol system, an automatic re actor for electric power circuits, an electronic voltage regulator for generators and a method of preventing lightning from damaging high‐tension transmission lines and the husband of the former Lyllian Levy with whom he had two sons Seymour and Allan passed away today.
1972(29thof Kislev, 5733): Fifth Day of Chanukah
1972: “Five former Gestapo agents received prison terms today of up to five and one‐half years for assisting in the 1942 killings of about 5,000 Jews in German‐occupied Poland.”
1973: U.S Premiere of director Sidney Lumet’s crime classic “Serpico” co-produced by Martin Bergman with a script co-written by Norman Wexler and filmed by cinematographer Arthur Ornitz.
1974: “Premier Yitzhak Rabin said today that Israel was prepared to Make far‐reaching territorial compromises with the Arab nations in return for peace, but he ruled out a return to the borders that existed before the 1967 war.”
1975(1stof Tevet, 5736): Rosh Chodesh Tevet; Seventh Day of Chanukah
1975(1stof Tevet, 5736): Eighty year old pioneer Zionis and five time member of the Knesset passed away today.
https://jwa.org/people/idelson-beba
1976: “Bound for Glory” a cinema adaption of the autobiography of the same name produced by Harold Leventhal, filmed by cinematographer Haskell Wexler and featuring Bernie Kopell was released in the United States today.
1976(13thof Kislev, 5737): Seventy-three year old Bessie Bassok Warshawsky, the Russian born daughter of Nathan Bassok, the wife of Samuel Warshawsky whom she married in 1923 and the mother of Irving Warshawsky passed away today in Lowell, MA after which she buried in the Montefiore-Israel Brotherhood Cemetery in Pelham, N.H.
1977(25thof Kislev, 5738): First Chanukah during the administration of Pres. Jimmy Carter.
1977:The Jerusalem Post reported Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's warning that if Israel wanted the previous month's mutual non-aggression pledge to stand, it had better bring a softened negotiating position to the planned Arab-Israeli talks in Cairo.
1977: “Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?” a documentary film narrated by Henry Winkler was released in the United States today.
1977: In response to the Declaration of Tripoli Egypt breaks diplomatic relations with Syria, Libya, Algeria, Iraq and South Yemen. The Declaration of Tripoli was part of an Arab attack on Sadat for his visit to Israel and his willingess to recognize the Jewish state.
1979(15thof Kislev, 5740): Ninety-seven-year-old Minnie Lichtenstein Marcus, the daughter of Hattie Mittenthal and Meyer Lichtenstein and wife of Herbert Marcus, one of the founders of Neiman Marcus which she served as vice president while pursuing her interest in horticulture passed away today.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/marcus-minnie-lichtenstein
1979(15th of Kislev, 5740): Sonia Delaunay, one of the foremost painters of her day and one of the last survivors of the Parisian art world before 1914 died today in Paris at the age of 94. (As reported by John Russell)
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F00617F6385A12728DDDAF0894DA415B898BF1D3
1982: Rabbi Louis Stein officiated at the marriage of Debra Michele Freedman and Andrew William Sideman at the Westbury Hotel.
1982(19th of Kislev, 5743): Eighty-year old English critic, novelist, and journalist Carly Brahms passed away.
1982: Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally and Years of Upheaval by Henry A. Kissinger are among the twelve books chosen by the New York Times Book Review to the best books published in the country during the preceding year.
1983: For the first time NBC broadcast “Choices of the Heart” starring Melissa Gilbert as a nun who was brutally murdered “by a Salvadoran death squad.”
1986(3rdof Kislev, 5747): Seventy year old Moshe Baram who first served as an MK for Mapai and who served both as Minister of Labor and Minister of Welfare, passed away today.
1984: Beverly Hills Cop an American action comedy film directed by Martin Brest, co-produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and featuring Paul Resier as “Jeffrey” was released in the United States today.
1989: “Mencken Was Pro-Nazi, His Diary Shows” published today described the negative views author and columnist H.L. Mencken had where it came to Jews and Blacks.
1990: Responding to growing fear over a rash of Palestinian knife attacks on Jews, the police broadened surveillance of Arab workers in Israel today with spot checks, searches and a new network of roadblocks along the West Bank. More than 20 Israelis have been stabbed over the last two months. Five of the victims died of their wounds and seven Arab attackers were killed. Until this fall, anxiety about knife attacks had been limited largely to Jews in the occupied territories and along the boundaries between Arab and Jewish sections of Jerusalem. But recent stabbings have also frightened Israelis in the heart of the country, in Tel Aviv, the Galilee and the southern coast. Requests for gun permits have soared, and thousands of Jews have begun carrying pistols, knives and mace.
1991: "Catskills on Broadway" a comedic celebration of a slice of Jewish culture, opens at Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York City for the first of452 performances.
1991(28thof Kislev, 5752): Eighty-four year old Sir Raphael "Roy" Welensky whose father was a Jew from Lithuania and was “the second and last prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland” passed away today
1993(21st of Kislev, 5754): David Mashrati, a reserve soldier, was shot and killed by a terrorist attempting to board a bus on route 641 at the Holon junction. The Islamic Jihad Shekaki group claimed responsibility for the attack.
1993:Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy by John Gross is among the twelve books chosen by the New York Times Book Review to the best books published in the country during the preceding year.
1994(2nd of Tevet, 5755): Jacob Kaplan, the former Grand Rabbi of France, died in his home in Paris today. He was 99 years old. Rabbi Kaplan was known both for his openness to dialogue with the Christian churches of France and for his staunch support of Zionism. He spoke out during World War II against anti-Jewish measures adopted by the collaborationist Vichy Government. Rabbi Kaplan, who was born in Paris on Nov. 7, 1895, was wounded in action during World War I and received the Croix de Guerre. He completed his rabbinical studies after the war and served as a rabbi in Mulhouse in eastern France from 1922-29 and then in Paris. He became the Grand Rabbi of Paris in 1950, and was elected Grand Rabbi of France in 1955, serving as spiritual leader of France's 700,000 Jews until his retirement in 1981.
1994(2nd of Tevet, 5755): 8th day of Chanukah
1994: Outfielder Brian Kowitz “was again drafted by the Minnesota Twins as part of the Rule 5 draft…”
1994(2ndof Tevet, 5755): Eighty-four year old “Academy Award-winning film designer” Harry Horner the father of Oscar winning composer James Horner, scenic designer Christopher Horner and pediatric immunologist Anthony Horner, M.D., passed away today.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/08/obituaries/harry-horner-84-designer-of-films-plays-and-operas.html
1995: “Bush v. Vera” a voting rights case in which Edward Blum was one of six plaintiffs “challenging 24 of the State of Texas’ 30 congressional districts as racial gerrymanders” was argued before the Supreme Court Today.
1997: “Dedication of the Hanns Sachs Library at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society “on the 50th anniversary of his death” which “was also the 65thanniversary of his invitation to become” the society’s “first permanent training analyst.”
http://openvault.wgbh.org/exhibits/boring_and_sachs/article
1997: Funeral services are scheduled to be held at noon today at Rodeph Sholom in Bridgeport, CT for Dr. Maxwell Bogin the husband of Edith Bogin and the father of Deborah Abby.
1999: The New York Times list of the Best Books of 1999 contains the following works about Jewish related subjects or by Jewish authors including Reading the Holocaust by Inga Clendinnen and An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton
by Richard A. Posner.
1999: ABC broadcast “Tuesdays with Morrie” the movie version of Mitch Albom’s book based on “the time he spent with Professor Morrie Schwartz of Brandies University.
2000:In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum began serving as “Secretary of the Environment of the Federal District” today.
2000: The funeral for Neale D. Katz, who served as “Israel Representative and Director General of the United Israel Appeal and who played a role in the success of Operation Moses is scheduled to be buried in Jerusalem.
2001: A suicide bomber exploded a powerful bomb shortly after 7:30 AM on King David Street in Jerusalem. A number of people waiting at a nearby bus stop were lightly injured. The terrorist was killed in the blast. Police are investigating whether the bomb, packed with nails and shrapnel, went off prematurely. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.
2001: A Villager article published today about Grand Street co-ops selling briskly after going market rate noted that Harold “Heshy” Jacob “prided himself on having operated the complexes without increasing carrying charges for nine years.”
2002(30thof Kislev, 5763): Rosh Chodesh Tevet; Sixth Day of Chanukah
2002: In what would prove to be one of the most destabilizing statement in modern history for the Middle East and the World “The White House…said President Bush has ‘solid’ evidence (that) Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.”
https://nypost.com/2002/12/06/prez-ive-got-goods-on-saddam/
2003:The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington (JHSGW) joins Adas Israel in honoring the memory of synagogue member Arthur Welsh (z'l), an aviation pioneer who flew for the Wright Brothers. The presentation in the Kogod Chapel will feature a rendition of “the relatively unknown story of Arthur Welsh's role as an aviation pioneer, his relationship with the Wright Brothers, and his life as a member of Washington, DC's Jewish community.” Welsh is buried in the synagogue's Alabama Street cemetery in Southeast Washington. The evening’s presentation will also “include a discussion of Welsh's life as a Jewish Washingtonian as well as the milieu of early aviation. Several never-before- seen photographs and mementoes of Welsh's work from the JHSGW archives, including a small black and white photograph depicting Welsh preparing for a two-hour test of the Wright military planes on June 3, 1912, will be on display.”
Welsh became interested in aeronautics after he observed Orville Wright's flights at Ft. Myer, VA, in 1909. In 1910, Orville and Wilbur Wright accepted him into their first flying class, where he worked closely with them, first as a student and, subsequently, as a pilot and instructor at the Wright Flight School in Dayton, OH. Among the people Welsh trained were Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, who later became a five-star general and U.S. Army Air Chief of Staff during WWII. In 1912, the Wrights sent Welsh to the U.S. Army Signal Corps in College Park, MD, to serve as a civilian test pilot for a new plane for the War Department. On June 11, 1912, Welsh, accompanied by Signal Corps Lt. Leighton W. Hazelhurst, was attempting to complete final military tests of the Wright Model C airplane when the airplane buckled under its 450- pound load. Both men were killed instantly, the first-ever fatalities at College Park. The Washington Times, Jewish Forward, and various aviation publications, including Fly and Aero: America's Aviation Weekly, covered Welsh's death.
2004: The Jerusalem Post reported that the Jews of Oudtshoorn, South Africa, celebrated the 120th anniversary of their town, which was known as the "little Jerusalem of Africa."
2004: The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with commentary by Robert Alter appears on the New York Timeslist of "100 Notable Books" of 2004 and the Washington Post listing of the "best books of 2004." The Cedar Rapids Gazette had previously published a review praising this volume describing at as a great gift for either Christmas or Chanukah. Considering the text itself and the nature of the commentary this is another reminder that despite oft repeated reports of the demise of the Jewish people, Am Yisroail Chai.
2005(4th of Kislev, 5766): Five people were killed and 50 wounded after a suicide attack at a Netanya shopping mall. The five known dead are Eliyah Rozen, 39, of Bat Hefer, Daniel Golani, 45, of Nahariya, Haim Amram, 26, of Netanya, Keinan Tzoami, 20, of Petah Tikva and Alexandra Zarnitzki, 65, of Netanya. Islamic Jihad proudly took credit for the attack on the northern seaside town.
2005: Frits Phillips, the former head of the Dutch electronics giant Philips, who helped save the lives of hundreds of Jewish workers during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, passed away at the age of 100. During the war years, when Philips supplied electronics to Germany, he secured positions at his factory in the Vught prison camp for as many Jews as possible, delaying their deportation to the Auschwitz death camp. Frits Philips was imprisoned by the Nazis after a strike during the war. He was awarded the Yad Vashem medal by Israel in 1995 for his efforts to save Jewish workers - almost 380 prisoners survived out of 496 who started work. He said he was no hero and that many others had helped to save lives. According to the staff at Yad Vashem, "Frits Philips, in risking his life to save Jews during the Holocaust, showed extraordinary courage in the face of terrible circumstances."
2005: A London production of “Once in a Lifetime” by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman opened at the Royal National Theatre.
2006: Haaretz reported on the development of new flavors and styles of sufganiyot. The original red jam filling has been replaced by a variety of baked and deep-fried “delicacies including ones filled with Roquefort cheese, chocolate and halva cream. (Can chocolate chip latkes be far behind?)
2006(14th of Kislev, 5767): Chess grandmaster David Bronstein passed away at the age of 82.
2007: The Maymana dance troupe produces “Adraba” for its seventh Chanukah celebration at Heichal Hatarbut in Rishon Letzion.
2007: Eli Nissman and Ashdod’s municipal cultural organization put on the children’s song festival, “Yeled Pele” (Wonder Child) as part of the Chanukah celebrations in Ashdod.
2007: Sixty one years after he was buried at a cemetery in southeast Washington, the exhumed remains of Stephen Theodore Norman, the only grandchild of Theodor Herzl will be buried on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem, thus finally joining his famous grandfather in his famous resting place.
2007(25th of Kislev, 5768): First Day of Chanukah
2007: “The Golden Compass,” directed and written by Chris Weitz was released today in the United Kingdom.
2008: At the Ma’ariv service being reciting הכרבל רטםו לט (Dew and rain) for a blessing. Normally this is done at Ma’ariv on December 4, but when it is leap year on the civil calendar, then the change is made on December 5. [Editor’s Note: I have not been able to find out why this change is tied to the civil calendar instead of the Jewish calendar.]
2008: Lital Levy, assistant professor of comparative literature at Princeton presents "Israel, Interrupted: When Arabs Write Hebrew and Jews Write Arabic as part of the Friday lunch works-in-progress seminar sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Judaic Studies.
2008: Palestinian rocket fire on the western Negev continued today, with five Kassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip throughout the day. One rocket landed in Sderot, and the other four landed in open areas near the city. No casualties or damage were reported in the attacks. Also today, two mortar shells fired from the northern Gaza Strip landed in the Eshkol region. No casualties or damage were reported.
2008 (8 Kislev 5769): Richard Topus, a pigeon trainer in World War II, passed away at the age of 84.
2008 (8 Kislev 5769): A. Bernard Ackerman, a founding figure in the field of dermatopathology who trained a generation of doctors to recognize skin diseases under the microscope passed away today at his home in Manhattan at the age of 72. Dr. Ackerman was also a forceful voice on a wide range of subjects, including the causes of melanoma and the ethical issues that arise when doctors testify in court. In the 1960s he developed a diagnostic method that involved viewing skin tissue at low magnification until he saw a broad pattern, which he called a silhouette. Only later would he zoom in to the cellular level to refine the diagnosis. Dr. Ackerman trained a generation of doctors to use his method on an 18-headed microscope, through which they could view slides from dozens of cases at a sitting. He was a prolific researcher, the author of more than 700 papers and more than 60 books.,“He had his detractors and he had his sycophants, but everyone recognized that he was the force in his field,” said Dr. Geoffrey Gottlieb, managing director of the Ackerman Academy of Dermatopathology, which Dr. Ackerman founded in 1999. He often argued for unpopular positions. Recently he expressed strong skepticism that exposure to sunlight causes melanoma, saying the case was not proved. He also lamented what he saw as a trend toward overtreatment of benign skin conditions. “There has been a mania for taking off these moles that are of no consequence,” he told The New York Times in 2005. “We’re talking about billions and billions of dollars being spent, based on hype.” As a resident at the University of Pennsylvania hospital, Dr. Ackerman was sent to work at Holmesburg prison, where inmates were paid to endure exposure to toxic chemicals. His experience there led to a lifelong preoccupation with medical ethics. After serving as an expert witness in more than 200 trials, Dr. Ackerman had a personal brush with the law in 2000, when he reluctantly reached a $2.7 million settlement in a malpractice suit in a skin cancer death in which he said there had been fraudulent medical testimony. In 2003, he started a Web site to expose expert witnesses whom he saw as unreliable; it can now be found at truthfultestimony.org. He founded two professional journals, The American Journal of Dermatopathology and Dermatopathology: Practical and Conceptual, as well as the medical publisher Ardor Scribendi. With his nephew Andy Zwick in 1999, he started Derm101.com, an online resource for the diagnosis and treatment of skin diseases. Albert Bernard Ackerman was born on Nov. 22, 1936, in Elizabeth, N.J. He earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his medical degree at Columbia. His medical residency was interrupted by two years of service at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. In 1969, Dr. Ackerman was hired at the University of Miami, and in 1973, he joined the faculty of New York University Medical School, where he ran the Skin and Cancer Institute. His laboratory there was one of the first to screen for early signs of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a fatal skin cancer now understood to have been closely linked to the AIDS epidemic. In 1992, he moved to Philadelphia to teach at Jefferson Medical College. He returned to New York City in 1999 to found his own institute, the Ackerman Academy of Dermatopathology, one of the largest training centers for the diagnosis of skin diseases in the world; it is now part of Dermpath Diagnostics, which is owned by Quest Diagnostics. Dr. Ackerman recently endowed a professorship for the study of culture and medicine at Harvard University. This year, he donated his collection of antique microscopes to Massachusetts General Hospital. Asked to describe himself in an interview with a medical journal, Dr. Ackerman used the terminology of the microscope. He said he was “dogmatic and unyielding at scanning magnification” but “reasonable and accommodating at high power” and “humane and empathic up close.”Little escaped his keen diagnostic eye. One of the last papers he published bore the title, “An Inquiry Into the Nature of the Pigmented Lesion Above Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Left Eyebrow.”
2009: In Cedar Rapids, Saturday morning traditional minyan at Temple Judah is dedicated to Jewish Book Month.
2009(18thof Kislev, 5770): Levi Yitzchak Horowitz, the second Rebbe of the Bostoner Chasidim (Boston Chassidic Sect) passed away today in Israel. According to some sources the Bostoner Chasidim are the first Chassidic organization to have started in the United States as opposed to having here from Europe.
2009: Mark Eliyahu and percussionist/clarinetist Daniel Yaakov Zol will be accompanying Wieder-Magen and the TCJ when they perform at Mishkenot Sha'ananim at 9 p.m.
2009: In Washington, D.C., the 20th Washington Jewish Film Festival includes screenings of “Camera Obscura,” a film about life among a colony of 19thcentury Argentinean Jews and “My Mother’s Courage,” in which the renowned Hungarian Jewish playwright, director and actor George Tabori who passed away in 2007, tells the true story of what happened to his mother Elsa (Pauline Collins), 50 years earlier during the deportation of the Hungarian Jewish community.
2009: Opening of the 24th Annual New York Israeli Film Festival. The opening gala honors Elliott Gould with 2009 IFF Lifetime Achievement Award; Donald Krim with the 2009 IFF Visionary Award; Paul Schrader with the2009 IFF Achievement in Film Award.
2010: "My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish, and I'm Home for the Holidays!," is scheduled to have its final performance in Charlotte, NC.
2010: Yeshiva University Museum is scheduled to presents its “Chanukah Extravaganza!”
2010: After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United is scheduled to have its DC premier at the 21st Washington Jewish Festival. “In 2004, Bnei Sakhnin was the king of Israeli soccer as the first team from an Arab town to win the country’s Cup and represent Israel in the European competition. Owned by an Arab and coached by a Jew with Arab, Jewish and foreign-born players, the team became a symbol of coexistence and a potential bridge between Israel and its 1.4 million Arab citizens.” This is but one in a day long series of films and events that range from a Chanukah celebration to Jews and Baseball that are scheduled at this major Beltway event.
2010: The LA Times includes a review of Job by Joseph Roth, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin. “Here are the tribulations, the Angela's ashes of Mendel Singer, a God-fearing man, a poor teacher in Russia at the precipice of World War II. You can picture him like a folded crow, his black frock coat flapping as he hurries home to his suffering wife and their four children. The two oldest, who are boys, go off to war—one defects, however, to America, where he becomes wealthy and writes for his family to join him. The third, a daughter, runs off with a Cossack and ends up in an insane asylum. The fourth, Menuchim, is crippled. His mother believes what the rabbi told her, that she must never leave him. When she goes with her husband and daughter to join their son in America, leaving Menuchim wailing on the threshold, she believes her sin has destroyed them. Like the story of Job, Mendel's life is one endless test, with a twinkling possibility for miracles. His god's capriciousness beats like black wings through the novel, driving the characters, scattering their fates. Yes, there is a moral here, but not necessarily the one on the marquee in the biblical tale.”
2010: The Washington Postfeatures reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Scorpions:The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices by Noah Feldman and The Witness House: Nazis and Holocaust Survivors Sharing a Villa During the Nuremberg Trials by Christiane Kohl.
2010: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including They Live by Jonathan Lethem
2010: The New York Times“100 Notable Books of 2010” list includes the following works by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, Great House by Nicole Krauss, The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010 by Edward Hirsch, The Long Song by Andrea Levy, The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine, To The End of The Land by David Grossman, Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, Finishing The Hate: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic by Michael Scammell and The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time by Judith Shulevitz
2010: Cuban President Raul Castro celebrated Hanukkah today with Cuba's tiny Jewish community, a heavily symbolic act at a time when his government is holding a Jewish-American subcontractor on suspicion of spying. Neither Castro nor those assembled at Havana's Shalom synagogue mentioned the name Alan Gross during the gathering, which was broadcast on the state-television newscast this evening. Castro wore a suit and a yarmulke and was given the honor of lighting the first candle of the menorah. It was the first time in more than a decade that either Castro or his brother Fidel appeared with the Jewish community at a religious celebration like Hanukkah.The brothers have gone out of their way to show their support for the Jewish people in recent months. Fidel Castro took time out from his warnings about a looming nuclear war pitting the US and Israel against Iran to say that he disagreed with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denials of the Holocaust. He said: "I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews" adding that Jews "were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world." The comments won rare praise from President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Raul Castro, who took over the presidency from his brother in 2006, thanked his hosts for a "very enjoyable afternoon," and said he hoped to have more time on another occasion to come and talk about "the Hebrew community in Cuba and the fabulous history of the Hebrew people."
2010: Shalshelet’s 4th International Festival at Congregation Ansche Chesed, New York City came to an end today.
2010(28thof Kislev, 5771): Ninety-one year old “Heda Margolius Kovaly, a Czech writer and translator whose memoir, “Under a Cruel Star,” described her imprisonment by the Nazis during World War II and her persecution by the Communists in the 1950s and became a classic account of life under totalitarianism, died today at her home in Prague.” (As reported by William Grimes)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/books/09kovaly.html
2010: Evelyn Selig, 64, a Laredo retailer and widow and Irving Greenblum, an 81-year-old investor and retired furniture store owner plan to enjoy a Chanukah party with 50 other co-religionists at the conservative synagogue in Laredo, Texas.
2011: Tony Kushner, the Jewish Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter, and polarizing political voice, is scheduled to be awarded $100,000 for “Creative Citizenship” at The Nation Institute’s Annual Gala in New York.
2011: The Tulane University Hillel Executive Committee is scheduled to meet at the Goldie & Morris Mintz Center for Jewish Life.
2011: Today “Kraft announced that Irene Rosenfeld would stay on as chairperson of the $31 billion global snacking company, which will be called Mondelēz International, Inc.”
2011: “Through the Eye of the Needle,” “The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz,” “Letters Home” and Yizkor are four of the films scheduled to be shown today the Washington Jewish Film Festival.
2011: Lebanon filed a complaint in the United Nations against Israel today for its retaliation to Katyusha rockets fired into Israel late last month, Lebanese newspaper the Daily Star reported. In response to the four rockets fired from Lebanon, the IDF pounded the launch sites with artillery shells. The Lebanese report claimed that only one rocket was fired from Lebanon into Israel and that the IDF fired six artillery shells. The UN complaint alleges that the IDF action was a violation of UNSC Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War, as well as international law. Immediately following the rocket attack the IDF filed a complaint with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which launched an investigation into the attack. The UN force called for restraint from both sides. “This is a serious incident in violation of UN Council Security Resolution 1701 and is clearly directed at undermining stability in the area,” a UNIFIL statement said. An organization associated with al-Qaida claimed responsibility for firing the rockets. The IDF said it held the Lebanese government responsible for the attacks and that it needed to take action to prevent future rocket fire. Home Front Defense Minister Matan Vilna’i said that “the Lebanese government is responsible for everything that happens in Lebanon and everything that leaves its borders.”
2011: Israel's Education Ministry issued an unusual order today forbidding any school trips to take place around the southern Israeli city of Eilat, following warnings against a possible terror attack on the Israel-Egypt border, Channel 10 reported. All schools and youth groups were barred from the area south of Highway 12, which runs along the border and was the site of a terror attack on August 18 which resulted in the deaths of eight Israelis. The Education Ministry said that following the warning issued by the Defense Ministry yesterday, it was decided to cancel all trips in the area. Field trips inside the actual city of Eilat, however, will take place. Yesterday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on the current security situation on Israel's southern border, saying that it poses a difficult security challenge,
"We are working hard to complete the security fence along the Egyptian border," he said. The fence is significant in terms of security in light of the rising instability in the Sinai Peninsula."
2011(9thof Kislev, 5772): Muriel Kadoorie, the widow of Lawrence Kadoorie, Baron Kadoorie passed away today.
2011: Today Kraft announced that Irene Rosenfeld would stay on as chairperson of the $31 billion global snacking company, which will be called Mondelēz International, Inc. making her one of the most powerful Jewish businesswomen in the world.
2012(21stof Kislev, 5773): Eighty-four year old Felix Weinberg, who survived the death camps to eventually become Emeritus Profess or Combustion Physics at Imperial College London passed away today.
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/117808/tribute-felix-weinberg/
2012: Dalia Itzik announced she was “taking a break from politics.”
2012: Ya’akov Erdi, a member of Kadima, announced he would not be taking part in the upcoming elections.
2012: Professor Bob Moore of the University of Sheffield is scheduled to deliver an address entitled “Integrating Self-Help into the History of Jewish Survival in Western Europe´ at the Weiner Library. Moore is the author of 'Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Europe'.
2012: The Joint Distribution Committee is scheduled to sponsor “Una Noeche: An Inside Look At Cuba’s Jewish Community” at the Maritime Hotel in New York City.
2012: Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean & Founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is scheduled to introduce “It’s No Dream: The Life of Theodore Herzl” before it is shown at The Jewish Center on West 86th Street.
2012: United Nations forces based inside Syria to monitor a longtime ceasefire between Syria and Israel will bring in armor to reinforce their security because of a threat posed by an influx of Syrian rebels, the UN peacekeeping chief said.
http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=294730
2012: Police appealed to the public today to help in locating a missing soldier amid fears he may take his own life. Liraz Benbenishti, 20, left his base near Gedera yesterday and police said he was seen on Medinat Hayehudim Street in Herzliya later that day. However, since then he has vanished without a trace.
2012: With polls indicating “Kadima either barely getting into the Knesset or not even passing the threshold” in the upcoming elections Marina Solodkin announced that she would not be a candidate.
2013(2ndof Tevet, 5774): 8th Day of Chanukah
2013(2ndof Tevet, 5774): Eighty-five year old General Danny Matt, the native of Cologne who made Aliyah in 1934 and fought in five wars starting with the War for Independence and climaxing with the Yom Kippur War passed away today
2013: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is scheduled to present a lecture by Dr. Peter Hayes entitled “Antisemitism and Homophobia in Nazi Germany: Commonalities and Differences”
2013: The Holocaust Education Program & Adult Jewish Education is scheduled to host the opening reception of “Raoul Wallenberg: Modern Day Hero.”
2013: Ohad Meromi is scheduled to present his recent video Worker! Smoker! Actor! (2012), for its debut screening in NYC, followed by a conversation with curator and artist Naomi Lev at the ICI Curatorial Hub.
2013: The Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to present “Joy of Israel with Jamie Geller.”
2013: NPR’s Larry Abramson is scheduled to moderate a panel discussion “Discovery and Recovery: Eyewitness Accounts” that looks at the retrieval “of water-logged treasures from Baghdad’s Jewish past.”
2013: Nelson Mandela passed away today.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/nelson-mandela-was-close-to-jews-resolutely-loyal-to-palestinians/
2013: The Houston Rockets’ Omri Casspi, the first Israeli hoopster to ever play in the NBA, relished the honor of meeting US President Barack Obama today (As reported by Spencer Ho)
http://www.timesofisrael.com/casspi-celebrates-hanukkah-at-the-white-house/
2013: A wet and cold winter storm hit Israel this morning, bringing welcome rain to much of the country and raising the Sea of Galilee by one centimeter in a matter of hours.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/storm-drenches-israel-ending-long-dry-spell/
2014: Lewis Black is scheduled to appear at the Music Box in Atlantic City, NJ.
2014(13thof Kislev, 5775): Sixty-two year old “culinary historian” Gil Marks passed away today. (As reported by Bruce Weber)
http://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-food-historian-gil-marks-dead-at-62/
2014(13thof Kislev, 5775): Ninety-six year American photographer Arthur Leipzig passed away today.
2014: The UK Jewish Comedy Festival is scheduled to host “Friday Night Supper Club” where attendees “will learn how to improve their joke-telling skills and learn gags they'll be dining out on for months to come.”
2014; Gal “Mekel signed a two-year, non-guaranteed contract with the New Orleans Pelicans
2014: “Starting today, when Digital Einstein is introduced, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to share in the letters, papers, postcards, notebooks and diaries that Einstein left scattered in Princeton and in other archives, attics and shoeboxes around the world when he died in 1955.”
2014: “Reports indicated today that the Labor Party headed by Isaac Herzog and the Hatnua party led by former justice minister Tzipi Livni were considering running together in the March 2015 elections.”
http://www.timesofisrael.com/labor-hatnua-parties-consider-alliance/
2014: “Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche, suspected of killing four people at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in May, was remanded in custody for another three months today, judicial officials said.”
http://www.timesofisrael.com/brussels-jewish-museum-suspect-killer-remanded-in-custody/
2014: Talya Lavie’s “Zero Motivation” is scheduled to be shown at the Film Forum in New York.
2015: In Alexandria, Beth El Hebrew Congregation is scheduled to host “Songs in the Key of Light” an evening of song with Cantor Jason Kaufman, Eric Schnobrick and Leo Morris.
2015(23rdof Kislev, 5776): Shabbat Va-yayshev
2015(23rdof Kislev, 5776): Eighty-eight year old literary agent Timothy Seldes passed away today. (As reported by Bruce Weber)
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/books/timothy-seldes-literary-agent-dies-at-88.html
2016: “A.K.A. Nadia” and “Nazareth Cinema Lady” are scheduled to be shown at the 10thAnnual Other Israel Film Festival.
2016: The Center for Jewish History, Forward, American Jewish Historical Society, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Jewish Book Council are scheduled to host “Have I Got a Story for You: More than a Century of Fiction from the Forward,
2016: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is scheduled to host “Jewish Voice, “an annual event with readings by prominent Jewish poets and writers.”
2016: Today, “Gimlet Media announced” that Arnold Stephen “A.J.” “Jacobs would be the host of Twice Removed, a podcast focused on genealogy.”
2016: “Atlanta Collects” which celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Breman Museum by highlighting diverse pieces from Jewish collectors in and around Atlanta” is scheduled to open today.
2016(5thof Kislev, 5777): Yahrtzeit of Talmudic commentator Rabbi Shmuel Eliezer Edeles (MaHaRSHA) who passed away on the 5th of Kislev, 5392
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/111910/jewish/Rabbi-Shmuel-Eliezer-Edeles.htm
http://www.jewishhistory.org.il/history.php?startyear=1550&endyear=1559
2016: The Marcus Foundation, established by Bernard Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot and his wife Billi said today “it would make a $38 million donation to a new Hillel staffing initiatives – Talent Grants.”
2017: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to offer the third part of Yitzhak Lewis’ “Introduction to Gershom Scholem”
2017: Jewish Book Month, an annual event that provides us with a chance to contemplate Jewish books and the lives of authors such as Rufus Learsi whose works included The Jews In America: A History one of the first Jewish history books I ever read, continues today.
2017: The USCJ Convention is scheduled to come to an end today in Atlanta.
2018(27thof Kislev, 5779): Third Day of Chanukah
2018: Fifty-six year old Claudia Sheinbaum, “the second daughter of chemist Carlos Scheinbaum Yoselevitz and biologist Annie Pardo Cemo and a graduate of UNAM began serving as “head of the Government of Mexico City.”
2018: “Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London are scheduled to speak tonight at “this year’s Chanukah in the Square celebrations in London.”
2018: 85th Anniversary of the repeal of prohibition which among other things put an end to Welch’s ill-fated attempt to sell grape juice as “kosher unfermented wine” and provided the Bronfmans, with “a unique marketing opportunity because, unlike most of its American competitors, their Seagram Distilleries had large supplies of aged whiskeys on hand” with which to quench the thirst of those in “the lower 48.”
2018: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host a screening of “Disobedience.”
2018: Beit Avi Chai is scheduled to host a performance of “A First Candle Tale,” “a play inspired by Nathan Alterman’s poem, ‘This Happened in Hanuka’.”
2019: Pianist Yefim Bronfman is scheduled to join the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4.
2019: In San Francisco, the Herbst Theatre is scheduled to host a performance of Handel’s “Judas Maccabaeus.”
2019: In Berkley, CA, Congregation Beth El is scheduled to host “Israel’s Elections: An Endless Cycle? “during which Koret visiting scholar Tomer Persico and J. editor-in-chief Sue Fishkoff discuss what has shifted in Israeli society/politics, what hasn’t and what the future might hold.”
2019: In New Orleans, “at historic St. Augustine Hight School,” “the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans” is scheduled to host “the Federation's second annual Alex Schoenbaum Jewish Scholarship Fund award ceremony and assembly.”
2019: Jessica Tisch begins serving as the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication.
2019: The Yeshiva University Museum and the American Sephardi Federation are scheduled to host “Elad Kabilio and the MusicTalks ensemble featuring Ariella Edvy” in a celebration of “the music of Yemenite Israeli singers including Ofra Haza, Izhar Cohen and Gali Atari.”
2019: The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is scheduled to host “Reconsidering the Catholic Church and the Holocaust” including a “special film screening followed by discussion.”
Special Film Screening and Discussion
2019: In London, JW3 is scheduled to host the last screening of Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story.”
2019: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is scheduled to host “Anita Hill: Speaking Truth to Power.”
2019: Today “in this year's Pfeffer Family Forum, leading 20th-century political propaganda scholar David Welch, Director of the Center for the Study of Propaganda and War at the University of Kent (England) is scheduled to speak to the power and perils of propaganda throughout history, and why combating hateful rhetoric today is so critical.”
2019: In La Jolla, CA, Congregation Beth El is scheduled to host “Crying Hands: The Deaf Experience under Nazi Oppression.”
2020: This evening The Other Israel Film Festival is scheduled to host a screening of “Til Kingdom Come
followed by a Q and A.
202019thof Kislev): On the Jewish calendar, The “New Year” of Chassidism.
2020: This evening, the San Francisco Yiddish Combo is scheduled to perform a “streaming concert by a group that blends klezmer, jazz, blues, folk and hip-hop.”
2020: Jewish Family and Children’s service is scheduled to present on an “Inclusive Torah Study with Jewish life coordinator Alex Maslow.
2020(19thof Kislev): In one of those calendar quirks, the Hebrew and secular birthdates of Avraham Elimelch ben Yosef coincide making him the same age as they “in the streets and in the Shul.”
2020(19thof Kislev): On the Jewish calendar Yahrtzeit of the “Maggid of Mezrech (1710-1772), the successor of the Baal Shem Tov.”
https://www.aish.com/dijh/Kislev_19.html
2020(19thof Kislev, 7801) Parashat Vayishlach
2021: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age by Debbie Applegate and Garbo by Robert Gottlieb.
2021: Via Zoom, in Iowa, the Ames Jewish Congregation is scheduled to host a candle lighting.
2021: The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience to present Eid Al-Banat.
2021: The Jewish Heritage Museum of Monmouth County is scheduled to present via Zoom “Hollywood Yiddishkeit: Jewish Images in American Film” with John Kenrick.
2021: In Little Rock, AR, Lubavitch of Arkansas under the leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Ciment is scheduled to host it “Annual Chanukah Parade of Light and Love”
2021: Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein is scheduled to take part in an in-person conversation with Moment Magazine editor-in-chief Nadine Epstein about her new intergenerational book, RBG’s Brave and Brilliant Women: 33 Jewish Women to Inspire Everyone followed by a Hanukkah candle lighting with Rabbi Rachel Gartner, Director of Jewish Life at Georgetown University, in memory of RBG and other brave and brilliant women who have helped keep the struggle for gender equality alive.
2021: In New Orleans, Krewe du Jieux-Chanukah Parade is scheduled to resume its annual tradition of dancing through the Quarter to the music of Panorama Jazz Band and lighting menorahs and enjoying a nosh at the Café du Monde.
2021: In partnership with Menemsha Films, The Jewish Heritage Museum of Monmouth County is scheduled to host a screening of “Here We Are” on the final night of the Hanukah Film Festival.
2021(1stof Tevet, 5782): Seventh Day of Chanukah; Rosh Chodesh Tevet
2022: The Center for Jewish History and LBI are scheduled to present a screening of Reckonings which recounts the tense negotiations between Jewish and German leaders over compensation for the survivors of the largest mass genocide in history which was directed by award-winning filmmaker Roberta Grossman.
2022: Martin Kaufman is scheduled to deliver the final lecture on Maimonides’ Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Scripture at the Streicker Center.