November 18
1648: Bogdan Chemielniki and his Cossacks began their attacks. Kamenets, in the western Ukraine is one of the first cities to be attacked, with thousands killed in the first few days. Chemielniki was leading a Ukrainian national uprising against their Roman Catholic Polish masters. The Russian Orthodox Ukrainians were bitter over the forced conversions to Catholicism led by the Jesuits and the unscrupulous taxes collected by some Jews for the nobles. The Jews managed the Ukrainian estates of the absentee Polish landlords. This volatile mixture of nationalism, religion and economic exploitation set the stage for the Cossack uprising. During the reign of Vladislav IV, the Zaporozhin Cossacks lived in a semi-autonomous kingdom called Sitch. Led by their leader - or Hetman - Chemielniki, they decided to avenge the people's rights. Their victories over the Polish army encouraged the serfs to join them. The Jews were even more hated than the Poles and were massacred in almost every town. In the ten tumultuous years that followed, over seven hundred Jewish communities were destroyed and between one hundred and five hundred thousand Jews lost their lives.
1804(15th of Kislev, 5565): First observance Purim of Abraham Danzig which is also called Pulverpurim or Powder Purim. Memorial Day established for himself and his family by Abraham Danzig, to be annually observed by fasting on the 15th of Kislew and by feasting on the evening of the same day in commemoration of the explosion of a powder-magazine at Wilna in 1804. By this accident thirty-one lives were lost and many houses destroyed, among them the home of Abraham Danzig, whose family and Abraham himself were all severely wounded, but escaped death (see Danzig, Abraham ben Jehiel). Danzig decreed that on the evening following the 15th of Kislew a meal should be prepared by his family to which Talmudic scholars were to be invited, and alms should be given to the poor. During the feast certain psalms were to be read, and hymns were to be sung to the Almighty for the miraculous escape from death.
1838: In Mainz, Lazarus and Eleonore Hallgarten gave birth to Charles Hallgarten who followed in his father’s footsteps as an American banker at Hallgarten & Company.
1842: In Cincinnati, Ohio, Lamle ‘Lewis’ and Judith Einstein gave birth to Edwin Einstein who was the Congressman from New York’s 7th district from 1879 until 1881.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/EEinstein.html
1844: Birthdate of Sir Benjamin Louis Cohen, Baronet, British businessman and Conservative politician.
1849: Birthdate of French banker and horse breeder Maurice Ephrussi, the native of Odessa who was part of the “Euphrussi family” and the husband of Beatrice de Rothschild, the daughter of Alphonse de Rothschild
1851: Birthdate of Austrian critic and journalist Anton Bettelheim.
1852: At the Paris Observatory, Hermann Goldschmidt confirmed his observations of November 15 that had led to the discovery of Asteroid 21 Lutetia.
1856: In Lancaster, PA, Congregation Shaarai Shomayim was incorporated today with Jacob Herzog serving aas the first president.
1858: At New York’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, popularly known as the Greene Street Synagogue, Rabbi Morris Raphall preached a Thanksgiving Day Sermon following the afternoon service based on the words of the Psalmist, “Thank ye the Lord, for He is good; His mercy endureth forever.” In his sermon, the Rabbi noted that the Governor’s Thanksgiving Proclamation had been written in such a manner that it did not offend the Jews making this a day that fulfilled the words of the Psalm, “How good, how beautiful it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.
1858: A Thanksgiving Day service was held today at Congregation Shearith Israel on Crosby Street. The service began at 11 a.m. and featured a sermon by Dr. Fischel based on the words of the Psalmist, “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman walketh but in vain.”
1863: King Christian IX of Denmark decided to sign the November constitution, which declared Schleswig as part of Denmark, what was seen by the German Confederation as a violation of the London Protocol and lead to the German–Danish war of 1864. If you look at history in the long haul, The Prussian war with the Danes was the first of a series of conflicts ultimately led to the creation of Modern Germany. In other words, there is a line from war with the Danes, to war with the Austrians, to war with France in 1870, to World War I to World War II and the Holocaust.
1869: In New York City, Rabbi James K. Gutheim delivered a Thanksgiving Day sermon at Temple Emanu-El based on Isaiah, XXXV, 17.
1873: “Give a Dog a Bad Name” by Anglo-English playwright Leopold Davis Lewis was published today.
1874: Rabbi De Sola Mendes delivered the first in a series of six lectures on Hebrew poetry at the Lyric Hall in Manhattan.
1875: The Cleveland (Ohio) Herald reported that an unnamed young woman living on the city’s west side has canceled her wedding. The bride assumed that her future husband, a local doctor, was a Roman Catholic. In fact he is a Jew who regularly attends services at his synagogue. The young woman sent word that she would not marry him unless he renounced his Judaism; something that he does not appear to be willing to do.
1878: It was reported today that during the recent Congressional elections in Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan delivered a speech opposing the candidacy of Colonel William Lowe in which he described Charles E. Mayer, the United States District Attorney and a Lowe supporter as being a “Jew dog.” The attack on Mayer resulted in many Jews who had opposed Lowe to support him in his bid for election. Lowe, who was opposed by the Bourbon Machine, won the election. Morgan was a bigot who sought to pass legislation legalizing lynching an repealing the 15th Amendment. Mayer served as U.S. District Attorney from 1876 through 1870.
1879: Bernard Williams, a Jew born in Poland now living in New Orleans, was one of the witnesses who testified before the Senate Sub-Committee looking into allegations of irregularities regarding the elections held in the Crescent City’s Seventh War in 1876. Allegations concerning voter fraud were a major issue in the South following the Civil War as the “Bourbons” sought to return to power by disenfranchising newly freed slaves and poor whites who would not support them.
1880(15th of Kislev, 5641): Arthur Lieberman, a Jew who had fled Russia to avoid arrest by the authorities took his own life today in Syracuse, NY.
1883: It was reported today that the Lord Mayor of London has received telegrams from Jews in the United States and Germany congratulating him on his decision to not let Herr Stoeckel, the anti-Semitic German religious leader speak at Mansion House.
1883: It was reported today that Herr Stoeckel, the anti-Semitic German minister, has had numerous offers to speak before sympathetic audiences in London.
1883: “Morris Ranger’s Career” published today traces the rise and fall of this native of Hesse-Cassel who joined the Liverpool Exchange and became the “Napoleon of the Cotton Speculators” before suffering financial reverses in the amount of £10,000,000.
1883: “Gossip of the Theatres” published today contained a clarification issued by Daniel Frohman, the Jewish American theatrical producer, expects “The Strangler” to run for another seven or eight weeks at the New Park Theatre. This play is a collaborative effort of all three Frohman brothers - Daniel, Charles and Gustave.
1884(30th of Cheshvan, 5645): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
1884: It was reported today that the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society for Children is providing lodging for “nearly 400 children who are homeless waifs.”
1884: The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society for Children sponsored a fund raiser featuring theatrical and dramatic performances by the Thalia Theatre Company
1885: “A New Jewish Platform” published today lists the 8 points of what will become known as the Pittsburgh Platform of Reform Judaism – that group’s controlling document for decades to come.
1885: The Hebrew Asylum Ball was held tonight at the Academy of Music in Brooklyn, NY.
1886: Chester A. Arthur, 21st President of the United States passed away. Elected as Vice President, Arthur became President after James Garfield was assassinated by a disappointed office seeker. Arthur was one of the least distinguished personages to occupy the White House. In 1882, when the United States finally ratified the Red Cross treaty, President Arthur appointed Adolphus SimeonSolomons as one of three delegates to represent the country at the Geneva Congress, where he was elected vice-president. Solomons was a successful Washington businessman who played an active role in the secular and Jewish communities
1888: “Searching For Her Husband” published today tells the story of Mrs. Hirschbeck, a Jew from Warsaw who has arrived in Buffalo, NY, her latest stop on a five year quest to find her husband, who is now known as Nathan Cohen. According to her, he was a dissipated man who deserted her and their five children.
1890: A conference of Protestant clergymen met today at the University of the City of New York where attendees spoke in favor of keeping religion out of the public schools because Roman Catholics and Jews “were partners in the public schools” and “their children were entitled to the benefit of them…without the liability of having” to change “their faith in the religion of their fathers.” The ministers felt it was the responsibility of churches and homes to provide moral and religious training.
1891: Tonight, in New York, Carnegie Hall will be transformed into an Oriental Bazaar such as those found in Palestine where items will be sold in various “stalls” to raise funds for the Louis Down-Town Sabbath and Daily School.
1892 (28th of Cheshvan): Seventy-six year old Hebrew scholar Senior Sachs passed away in Paris. Born in Russia he was trained in Talmud by his father Rabbi Tzemach Sachs. After studying in Berlin during the 1840’s he arrived in the French capital in 1856 where he worked as a private librarian and produced several works including Kanfe Yonah
1893: As two more Spanish regiments arrive Mellila to deal with the Rif Berbers “numbers of Jews continue to leave” the Spanish city on the coast of Morocco.
1893: In Morocco, 12 Spanish Jews were each “sentenced to six years’ penal servitude” after a court martial found them guilty of keeping rifles intended for the Riffians in their houses. (The Riffians were a group of Berbers who were rebelling against their European masters)
1894: In New York, Rabbi Joseph Silverman delivered a talk on “What Is The Attitude of Judaism to Christianity and Other Religions” which is “the first of a series of lectures on ‘Answers to Jewish and Christian Inquirers.”
1894: The Glasgow Herald published a theory propounded by one of its readers “that the Japanese are…descendants of the ten lost tribes” basing “his arguments on linguistic considerations point out that ‘Hiroshima’ has a very strong resemble to the Hebrew word for Jerusalem and that ‘Tokyo’ may be a corruption of ‘Tekoa.’”
1895: It was announced today that “Dr. Ahlwardt, the anti-Semitic leader of Berlin, Germany, is making arrangements to sail for the United States next month to deliver lectures” at the invitation of “a committee of German Americans in Milwaukee.” Given his nickname “Jew-baiter” there is little doubt as to the subject matter of the talks.
1896: Fannie and Irving Dittenhoefer married today in New York City.
1896: In Cleveland, Ohio, Micahelis Machol, the Rabbi at the Reform Temple on Scoville Avenue protested “against that portion of President Cleveland’s Thanksgiving proclamation of Christ as the mediator between man and God.”
1896: The delegates at the National Council of Jewish Women have changed the name of their organization to the Council of Jewish after Mrs. Mendola de Sola of Canada protested “the use of the word national.” The delegates then adopted “Faith and Humanity” as their motto.
1897: Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, “who has forced the government to reopen the Dreyfus case did not attend today’s meeting of the Senate so that he could meet with President Faure who told him that “I give you my word of honor that” the documents in the Dreyfus case that have been brought to my notice “contain irrefutable proofs of guilty” and “I beg you to cease this campaign by you are comprising the republic and yourself to no purpose.”
1897: In Albany, Chief Examiner Fowler of the State Civil Commission announced that candidates for the upcoming examination of interpreter for the First Judicial District must be able to interpret several languages including “Hebrew jargon.” (This may a reference to Yiddish)
1898: William Sparger conducted the Sabbath eve service at Temple Emanu-El which was a prelude to a Thanksgiving Service and a celebration of Dr. Guastav Gottheil’s silver anniversary as the Rabbi of New York’s leading Reform congregation.
1898: Following the meeting of Herzl and Kaiser Wilhelm II outside of Jerusalem, the London Daily Mail wrote today that: “An Eastern Surprise Important Result of the Kaiser’s Tour Sultan and Emperor Agreed in Palestine Benevolent Sanction Given to the Zionist Movement One of the most important results, if not the most important, of the Kaiser’s visit to Palestine is the immense impetus it has given to Zionism, the movement for the return of the Jews to Palestine. The gain to this cause is the greater since it is immediate, but perhaps more important still is the wide political influence which this Imperial action is like to have. It has not been generally reported that when the Kaiser visited Constantinople Dr. Herzl, the head of the Zionist movement, was there; again when the Kaiser entered Jerusalem he found Dr. Herzl there. These were no mere coincidences, but the visible signs of accomplished facts.” Reverend William Henry Hechler, an Anglican clergyman who supported the Jewish return to Palestine, was instrumental in arranging the meeting between the Zionist leader and the German monarch.
1899: Birthdate of Conductor Eugene Ormandy. Born in Budapest, Hungary, Ormandy was a child prodigy. He began playing the violin at the age of 4 and entered the Royal Academy at the age of 5. Ormandy’s father dreamed of his son becoming a great violinist. So he was disappointed when Ormandy pursued a career that would lead him to become one of the world’s greatest conductors. For most of his career, Ormandy was the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. This was no small accomplishment since he was following in the footsteps of the world-renowned Arturo Toscanini. He passed away in 1985.
1899: “Notes and News” published today described the decision of Harper & Brothers to published a second edition of The Jewish Question and the Mission of the Jews which include “much additional material” including an article on Captain Dreyfus. Originally published anonymously, the second edition will included the name of the author, Dr. Charles Waldstein, Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge, an American born Jew who graduated from Columbia.
1906: Birthdate of German novelist Klaus Mann. Klaus Mann was the son of Thomas Mann and Katia Pringsheimz. Pringshmeimz was Jewish which according to Halachah means Kalus Mann was Jewish as well. He was also part of the unit known as “Ritchie Boys.”
1906: Birthdate of biologist George Wald, American biochemist who received (with Haldan K. Hartline of the U.S. and Ragnar Granit of Sweden) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1967 for his work on the chemistry of vision
1906: In Brooklyn, Leopold Wintner, the Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Beth Elohim and Canto Leon Kourick officiated at the funeral of Raphael Benjamin the Rabbi of Beth Elhoim who was the subject of the eulogy delivered by Rabbi Joseph Silverman of Temple Beth Emmanuel in Manhattan.
1914: In Far Rockaway, NY Rabbi Stephen S. Wise addressed a group of orthodox and reform Jews at meeting at Temple Israel where $3,000 was raised to provide “relief for the Jews of Palestine.”
1914: The Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War announced today that as of today it had raised $19,463.
1917: Eleven young men in West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded Sigma Alpha Rho(ΣAP) the oldest, continuously run, independent Jewish High School Fraternity.
1919(25th of Cheshvan, 5680): Sixty year old German mathematician Adolf Hurwitz, the husband of Ida Samuel who helped develop the Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion (which I do not pretend to understand) passed away today in Zurich
1921: “President Warren Harding gave Rabbi Simon Glazer of Kansas City, Kansas, executive permission to adopt five children who are now in Romania.” Glazer already has five children of his own. The orphans lost their mother in one of the Ukrainian massacres last year and their father died in the United States. If it had not been for President Harding’s intervention, current immigration restrictions would have kept the rabbi from bringing the youngsters to the United States.
1921(17th of Cheshvan): Fifty-six year old journalist and author Micha Josef Berdyczewski passed away in Berlin. Born in Russia, the son of a Rabbi, he wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish and German. Sdot Micha, the moshav founded in 1955, was named in his honor
1922: Marcel Proust passed away. “Marcel Proust was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother. He himself was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never practiced that faith and as an adult could best be described as a mystical atheist, someone imbued with spirituality who nonetheless did not believe in a personal God, much less in a savior. Although Jews trace their religion through their mothers, Proust never considered himself Jewish and even became vexed when a newspaper article listed him as a Jewish author. His father once warned him not to stay in a certain hotel since there were "too many" Jewish guests there, and, to be sure, in Remembrance of Things Past there are unflattering caricatures of the members of one Jewish family, the Blochs. Jews were still considered exotic, even "oriental," in France; in 1872 there were only eighty-six thousand Jews in the whole country. In a typically offensive passage Proust writes that in a French drawing room "a Jew making his entry as though he were emerging from the desert, his body crouching like a hyena's, his neck thrust forward, offering profound `salaams,' completely satisfies a certain taste for the oriental." Proust never refers to his Jewish origins in his fiction, although in the youthful novel he abandoned, Jean Santeuil (first published only in 1952, thirty years after his death), there is a very striking, if buried, reference to Judaism. The autobiographical hero has quarreled with his parents and in his rage deliberately smashed a piece of delicate Venetian glass his mother had given him. When he and his mother are reconciled, he tells her what he has done: "He expected that she would scold him, and so revive in his mind the memory of their quarrel. But there was no cloud upon her tenderness. She gave him a kiss, and whispered in his ear: `It shall be, as in the Temple, the symbol of an indestructible union.'" This reference to the rite of smashing a glass during the Orthodox Jewish wedding ceremony, in this case sealing the marriage of mother to son, is not only spontaneous but chilling. In an essay about his mother he referred, with characteristic ambiguity, to "the beautiful lines of her Jewish face, completely marked with Christian sweetness and Jansenist resignation, turning her into Esther herself"--a reference, significantly, to the heroine of the Old Testament (and of Racine's play), who concealed her Jewish identity until she had become the wife of King Ahasuerus and was in a position to save her people. The apparently gentile Proust, who had campaigned for Dreyfus and had been baptized Catholic, was a sort of modern Esther. Despite Proust's silences and lapses on the subject of his mother's religion, it would be unfair, especially in light of the rampant anti-Semitism of turn-of-the-century France, to say that he was unique or even extreme in his prejudice against Jews. And yet his anti-Semitism is more than curious, given his love for his mother and given, after her death, something very much like a religious cult that he developed around her. His mother, out of respect for her parents, had remained faithful to their religion, and Proust revered her and her relatives; after her death he regretted that he was too ill to visit her grave and the graves of her parents and uncle in the Jewish cemetery and to mark each visit with a stone. More important, although he had many friends among the aristocracy whom he had assiduously cultivated, nevertheless when he was forced to take sides during the Dreyfus Affair, which had begun in 1894 and erupted in 1898, he chose to sign a petition prominently printed in a newspaper calling for a retrial. The Dreyfus Affair is worth a short detour, since it split French society for many years and it became a major topic in proust's life--and in Remembrance of Things Past. Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was a Jew and a captain in the French army. In December 1894 he was condemned by a military court for having sold military secrets to the Germans and was sent for life to Devil's Island. The accusation was based on the evidence of a memorandum stolen from the German embassy in Paris (despite the fact that the writing did not resemble Dreyfus's) and of a dossier (which was kept classified and secret) handed over to the military court by the minister of war. In 1896 another French soldier, Major Georges Picquart, proved that the memorandum had been written not by Dreyfus but by a certain Major Marie Charles Esterhazy. Yet Esterhazy was acquitted and Picquart was imprisoned. Instantly a large part of the population called for a retrial of Dreyfus. On January 13, 1898, the writer Emile Zola published an open letter, "J'accuse," directed against the army's general staff; Zola was tried and found guilty of besmirching the reputation of the army. He was forced to flee to England. Then in September 1898 it was proved that the only piece of evidence against Dreyfus in the secret military dossier had been faked by Joseph Henry, who confessed his misdeed and committed suicide. At last the government ordered a retrial of Dreyfus. Public opinion was bitterly divided between the leftist Dreyfusards, who demanded "justice and truth," and the anti-Dreyfusards, who led an anti-Semitic campaign, defended the honor of the army, and rejected the call for a retrial. The conflict led to a virtual civil war. In 1899 Dreyfus was found guilty again, although this time under extenuating circumstances--and the president pardoned him. Only in 1906 was Dreyfus fully rehabilitated, named an officer once again, and decorated with the Legion of Honor. Interestingly, Theodor Herzl, the Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper, was so overwhelmed by the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair that he was inspired by the prophetic idea of a Jewish state. In defending Dreyfus, Proust not only angered conservative, Catholic, pro-army aristocrats, but he also alienated his own father. In writing about the 1890s in Remembrance of Things Past, Proust remarks that "the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder." Typically, the ultraconservative Gustave Schlumberger, a great Byzantine scholar, could give in his posthumous memoirs as offensive a description of his old friend Charles Haas (a model for Proust's character Swann) as this: "The delightful Charles Haas, the most likeable and glittering socialite, the best of friends, had nothing Jewish about him except his origins and was not afflicted, as far as I know, with any of the faults of his race, which makes him an exception virtually unique." It would be misleading to suggest that Proust took his controversial, pro-Dreyfus stand simply because he was half-Jewish. No, he was only obeying the dictates of his conscience, even though he lost many highborn Catholic friends by doing so and exposed himself to the snide anti-Semitic accusation of merely automatically siding with his co-religionists.”
1922: Die Zaubernacht (The Magic Night), a children’s pantomime by Kurt Weil premiered at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm;
1927: Humphrey Bogart divorced his first wife, the Jewish actress Helen Menken. (Bogart’s fourth and final wife would also be Jewish)
1929: According to the report o the Palestine Committee presented at today’s meeting of Hadassah held in Atlantic City, NJ, “the outstanding event in Palestine heal work this year has been the completion an formal opening of the Nathan and Lina Straus health center in Jerusalem.”
1937: Establishment of military courts in Palestine to try civilians.
1936: Two weeks after meeting with Hitler, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich, “met with leading members of the German hierarchy of cardinals to ask them to warn their parishioners against the errors of communism.”
1937: The Palestine Post reported that a Jewish farmer, Yehuda Shpanov, was shot in Afula and died four hours later in the local hospital, where his wife was awaiting the birth of their child. An official amendment held that "no judgment over the proceedings of the Military Court shall be called in question or challenged in any manner whatever by or before any other Court."
1937: The Palestine Post reported that in Hamburg a baptized Jew, Dr. Theodor Wohlfahrt, was sentenced to 10 years penal servitude for having married a gentile and claiming in a German court that it was his right to do so.
1938: Hitler recalls Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, German ambassador to the United States, after President Franklin Roosevelt recalled the U.S. ambassador to Germany as part of America’s protest against Kristallnacht.
1938: The American Virgin Islands Assembly offers the islands as a haven for Jewish refugees. The American government does not explore this possibility.
1939: Hans Frank, the governor-general of Occupied Poland, reiterates Reinhard Heydrich's order of September 21 regarding the establishment of Judenräte in Jewish ghettos.
1939: The Nazis ordered the Jews of Cracow to wear a Star of David.
1941: J.D. Salinger “wrote to a young woman in Toronto,” Marjorie Sheard, “to look for a new piece of his in a coming issue of The New Yorker” which he described as “the first Holden story.” (As reported by Dave Itzkoff
1941: Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS General who developed the 8 point Jecklin System for murdering Jews was searching for the right place to slaughter of the Jews of Riga when he saw Rumbula for the first time.
1942: Birthdate of pianist Jeffrey Siegel.
1942: As part of the Holocaust German SS carry out a selection of Jewish ghetto in Lviv in the western Ukraine arresting 5.000 "unproductive Jews". All get deported to Belzec death camp.
1943: In an attempt to hide the Holocaust from the westward moving Soviet Army, 300 Jews at Borki were told that they were to dig up the trenches of 30,000 dead humans in Borki and then burn them all. One thousand bodies were placed on each pyre. The bones were ground to dust and taken away. The graves were emptied, disinfected, filled with earth and grass was planted over them.
1943: During the Holocaust, as part of Aktion Emtefest, the Nazis liquidate Janowska concentration camp in Lviv, western Ukraine, murdering at least 6.000 surviving Jews. The German SS leader Fritz Katzman declares Lviv (Lemberg) to be Judenfrei (free from the Jews).
1944(2nd of Kislev, 5705): Enzo Serini, Havivah Reik, Raffi Reiss and Zvi Ben Ya'acov were all murdered at Dachau. They were all Jews from Palestine who had parachuted behind German lines.
1944(2nd of Kislev, 5705): Alfred B. Nietzel died valiantly today during the Battle of Hurtgen Forest providing covering fire for his comrades “during an enemy advance threatening to overrun his position” – an action that would earn him the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor.
http://www.army.mil/medalofhonor/valor24/recipients/nietzel/?f=recipients&l=name
1945:At Zionist Organization of America meeting, Dr. Abba Hillel Silver is elected to succeed Dr. Israel Goldstein as president. A proposal is made to allow the Jewish National Fund of America to buy 500,000 acres of land in Palestine in defiance of British land transfer regulations. A budget is approved for immigration and settlement.
1945: In the wake of the latest British statements about Palestine it was reported today that “It was apparent that some sort of compromise will have to be forthcoming from outside Palestine as there is little possibility of the Arabs and Jews getting together on anything so far proposed.” (Editor’s Note – what was written in 1945 sounds as if it could have been written in 2012)
1945: Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization, says British foreign minister Ernest Bevin cannot divide Zionists and other Jewish People.
1946: Police and Jewish citizens clash in Tel Aviv
1947: “Stern Gang Hints at Truce” published today examined the possibility of “a respite from violence in Palestine” should among other things Lehi make good on its announcement to the press that it was “ready to resume its truce pledge.”
1947: Birthdate of Peter Shurman, the native of Ontario who went from being a radio talk show host to a career in politics as member of the Progressive Conservative Party.
1947: Birthdate of Michel-Jean Hamburger, a very successful French singer and songwriter of Jewish origin.
1947: British editor James Caunt was reported today to have expressed his belief that the accusations of seditious libel that had been filed after his assertions that anti-British propaganda “was financed by American Jews and “that if British Jews were really concerned by the shooting of British boys in Palestine they should ‘disgorge their ill-gotten wealth in try to dissuade their brothers in the United States from pour out dollars to facilitate the entrance into Palestine of European Jewish scum’” were politically motivated by those who believe that “anyone who criticizes the Jews must be a Fascist.”
1948:British state minister Hector McNeil offers the Political Committee a resolution calling for permanent settlement based on Bernadotte plan. Israel proposes compromise: it will withdraw all troops who arrived in Israel after October 14; troops who arrived before October 14 will stay to ensure that area does not fall to Egypt. Israel announces it is ready to begin armistice with Arabs.
1949:UN Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East proposes after a three-month study that the General Assembly set up program of relief and public works in various Arab countries for 652,000 Arab refugees from Palestine. No comparable fund would be suggested for providing aid to Israel when Jewish populations of Arab and Moslem countries were forced to flee from their homes.
1951: In Tel Aviv, second generation architect Yaakov Rechter and his first wife, Sara Safir gave birth to Israeli musical artist Yoni Rechtet, the stepson of Israeli actress Hanna Meron.
1951: Birthdate of David “Dudu” Fisher, the native of Petah Tivka who pursued a decades long career as a cantor before appearing as “Jean Valjean in the musical Les Miserables.”
1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that observers noted Arab protests over the German-Israeli Reparation Agreement were meant only to extort more trade and imports from their countries to Germany.
1955(3rd of Kislev, 5716): Sixty-five year old chess master Solomon Rosenthal passed away today.
1956: In case of “Jew on Jew,” Alfred Kazin reviews Saul Bellow’s most recent book, Seize the Day.
1958: The Assistant United States Attorney that the $4,790.44 that Charles A. Levine still owed the government as part of a $5,000 fine levied after he was convicted of smuggling in 1937 was not collectible.
1958: Jerusalem's new reservoir was opened ending a long history of water problems that made Jerusalem more vulnerable to siege. Water for Jerusalem had been a challenge going all the way back to Biblical times. Remember the story of how David took the city in the first place. Fear of siege was not paranoia for the Israelis. The Jews had nearly lost the city ten years earlier when the Jordanian Army (the Arab Legion) laid siege to it during the War for Independence.
1959: William Wyler’s film Ben-Hur premieres at Loew's Theater in New York City. William Wyler was Jewish. Judah Ben Hur was also Jewish.
1959: Opening of the Sephardic Bibliographical Exhibition in Madrid, Spain. The Exhibition was in conjunction with the World Sephardi Federation, Arias Montano Institute, the faculty of Philosophy of the Madrid University as well as the Royal Academy of Spanish Language. The Exhibition demonstrated rare Sephardic documents, books, maps and material showing the life of Jews in Spain up to 1492.
1962: Niels Henrik David Bohr passed away. “Bohr was a Danish physicist, born in Copenhagen, who was the first to apply the quantum theory, which restricts the energy of a system to certain discrete values, to the problem of atomic and molecular structure. For this work he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. He developed the so-called Bohr Theory of the atom and liquid model of the nucleus. Bohr was of Jewish origin and when the Nazis occupied Denmark he escaped in 1943 to Sweden on a fishing boat. From there he was flown to England where he began to work on the project to make a nuclear fission bomb. After a few months he went with the British research team to Los Alamos in the USA where they continued work on the project.”
1964: In London, UK, Neil Simon’s “Little Me” opened at the Cambridge Theatre.
1966: Sandy Koufax announces his retirement, due to an arthritic left elbow
1971(30th of Cheshvan, 5732): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
1973: Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis delivered a speech today at Madison Square Garden that led to the formation of “Hineni,” “one of the first Ba’al Teshuva movements.
1976(25th of Cheshvan, 5737): Eighty-six year old American born artist Man Ray passed away in Paris.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100127075614/http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c347_a17217/The_Arts/Museums.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20100127075614/http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c347_a17217/The_Arts/Museums.html
1977: Longtime feminist activist and U.S. Representative Bella Abzug presided over the first federally funded National Women's Conference.
1977: The Jerusalem Post reported that 60 Egyptians and 2,000 journalists arrived in order to prepare the historic visit of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Israel. Chaim Herzog, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, suggested that the General Assembly suspend the "acrimonious and counterproductive" debate on Palestine in order to be able to consider this historic event. It was also reported that Sadat¹s visit was partly prompted by a question that the Post¹s US correspondent, Wolf Blitzer, had asked Sadat in Washington last April.
1978(18th of Cheshvan, 5739): Judge Leo Frederick Rayfiel passed away. Born in 1888 to immigrant parents in Brooklyn, he was a graduate of New York University Law School. He was a member of the New York State Assembly and served two terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives before being appointed to the federal bench by President Harry S. Truman in 1947. Rayfiel was a voracious reader and die-hard Dodgers fan until the team left Brooklyn.
1983(12th of Kislev, 5744): Ninety-one year old publisher, George B. Eisler passed away today.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/09/obituaries/george-b-eisler.html
1988: In Tel Aviv, Orly Silbersatz and Yuval Banay gave birth to singer and guitarist Elisha Banai, older brother of Amalia and Sophie Banai and the grandson of another Israeli performer Yossi Banai.
1988: In New York City, Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles” premiered at the Playwrights Horizon.
1990(1st of Kislev, 5751): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
1990: The third Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof opened today at the Gershwin Theater. It ran for 241 performances at the George Gershwin Theatre. Topol starred as Tevye, and Marcia Lewis was Golde. Robbins' production was reproduced by Ruth Mitchell and choreographer Sammy Dallas Bayes. The production won the Tony Award for Best Revival.
1991(11th of Kislev, 5752): Eighty-three year old French Marxist Claude Cahen who has been described as “the doyen of Islamic social history and one of the most influential Islamic historians of [his] century” and who “neither self-identified as Jewish nor supported the State of Israel” passed away today.
2000(3rd of Kislev, 5762):St.-Sgt. Baruch (Snir) Flum, 21, of Tel-Aviv was shot and killed by a senior Palestinian Preventive Security Service officer who infiltrated the Kfar Darom greenhouses in the Gaza Strip. (St.-Sgt. Sharon Shitoubi, 21, of Ramle, wounded in the Palestinan shooting attack in Kfar Daromwould died of his wounds two days later.)
2001: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including The Complete Works of Isaac Babel: Edited by Nathalie Babel, Translated by Peter Constantine. Introduction by Cynthia Ozick, Somewhere For Me:
A Biography of Richard Rodgersby Meryle Secrest, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions by Martha C. Nussbaum, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945by Richard Overy and I’m Not Bobby by Jules Feiffer.
2002(13th of Kislev, 5763) Esther Galia, 48, of Kochav Hashahar, was killed in a shooting attack near Rimonim, on the Allon Road, some 15 kilometers northeast of Ramallah
2002: During the investigation of Jack Abramoff’s business activities in Guam a grand jury issued a subpoena demanding that the administrator of the Guam Superior Court release all records relating to the contract.
2002: “U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson of Montgomery, Alabama, orders the removal of Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument, finding that it violated the constitution's ban on government establishment of religion.”
2003(23rd of Cheshvan, 5764: Fifty-five year old Grammy award winning musician Michael Kamen passes away. While studying the oboe, he formed a rock classical fusion band called New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, which was on the first of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/20/arts/michael-kamen-55-award-winning-composer.html
http://www.michaelkamen.com/
2003(23rd of Cheshvan, 5764): Two IDF soldiers, Sgt.-Maj. Shlomi Belsky, 23, of Haifa, and St.-Sgt. Shaul Lahav, 20, of Kibbutz Shomrat, were killed by a Palestinian terrorist who opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle, hidden in a prayer rug, at a checkpoint on the tunnel bypass road, linking Jerusalem and the Gush Etzion bloc. The Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack.
2004(5th of Kislev, 5765): Cy Coleman, American composer, songwriter, and jazz pianist passed away. Born Seymour Kaufman, to Jewish immigrant parents, Coleman won or was nominated for 15 Tony Awards, 3 Emmy Awards and 2 Grammy Awards. (As reported by Robert Berkvist)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/19/theater/19cnd-coleman.html
2005(15th of Cheshvan, 5766): Harold J. Stone passed away. Born Harold Hochstein to a Jewish acting family in 1913, Stone practiced his craft on Broadway, in film and finally in television where he gained respect and a form of fame as “a character actor.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/nov/19/local/me-stone19
2005: The Jerusalem Post reported that Pope Benedict XVI responded positively to an invitation extended to him by President Moshe Katsav when the two met at the Vatican.
2006: Some eight thousand people gathered near Germany's biggest World War II soldiers’ cemetery to protest against far-right extremism.
2006(27th of Cheshvan, 5767: Jack Werber passed away at the age of 92. He was a Holocaust survivor who helped save more than 700 children at Buchenwald slave labor camp. He gained economic success in the mid-fifties by manufacturing coonskin caps during the Davey Crockett craze.
2007: The SundayWashington Post book section featured a review of The Conscience of a Liberal by Jewish economist Paul Krugman
2007: The Sunday New York Timesbook section featured reviews of three books about or by comedian Woody Allen including, Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking by Eric Lax, Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen and The Insanity Defense: The Complete Proseby Woody Allen.
2007: The Chicago Tribune business section reported on the growth of Chicago based Levy Restaurants. Since its founding in 1978 by brothers Larry and Mark Levy, Levy Restaurants has grown from a single delicatessen in Chicago to a specialized, industry-leading food organization with a network of internationally acclaimed restaurants; the leading market share of premium foodservice operations at sports and entertainment facilities; as well as a full-service consulting and advisory services group. The keeper of the Company’s precious culture is Eadie Levy, mother of Larry and Mark, and resident Mom to almost 15,000 team members.
2008: In Israel, members of the National Religious Party “voted to disband the party in order to join the new Jewish Home Party
2008: French and Israeli police discovered 43 of timepieces that had been stolen from the L.A. Mayer Institute for Islamic art in two French bank safes.
2008: Ethan Berkowitz himself conceded defeat in the race to fill the seat of U.S. Representative for Alaska's At-large congressional district, after counting of absentee and provisional ballots had mostly been completed and his Republican opponent Don Young had a clearly insurmountable lead.
2008: At Tifereth Israel Synagogue in Des Moines, Iowa AIPAC Midwest Political Director Jonathan Greenberg speaks on “Changes in the White House and on Capitol Hill: How It Impacts The Pro-Israel Agenda.” Of course, the presentation is based on the premise that AIPAC’s agenda and the “Pro-Israel Agenda” are one and the same.
2008: The Ninth Annual Rutgers New Jersey Jewish Film Festival presents: “The Counterfeiters” “One Day You’ll Understand,” adaptation of Jerome Clement’s autobiographical novel, Plus Tard, Tu Comprendras and “Two Ladies” a hopeful drama that offers a sensitive portrayal of the unlikely friendship two French women – Esther, who is Jewish, and Halima, who is Muslim – which defies the prejudice and hostility that surround them.
2008:As part of the "Jewish Encounters" series at the D.C. Jewish Community Center,writer and poet Adam Kirsch discusses and signs Benjamin Disraeli, his new biography of the British prime minister in which takes an in-depth look at the first—and only—Jewish Prime Minister of England.
2008: Michael Rosen was presented with the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature) by the Government of France at the French Ambassador's residence in London
2009 (1st of Kislev, 5770): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
2009: Moshe Holtzberg, son of Barvriel and Rivka Holztberg of blessed memory who were murdered by the terrorists in Mumbain in 2008, celebrated his third birthday according to the Jewish calendar. A party was held at Kfar Chabad which was attended by 2,000 people who stayed for a memorial dinner for his parents.
2009: In Fairfax, VA, Congregation Olam Tikvah hosts “Sacred Scripture: How do you understand your own? Can I try?” as part of its interfaith program.
2009: At the UK Jewish Film Festival, a screening of an episode from the groundbreaking TV drama "Good Intentions", which centers around two female chefs, one Palestinian and one Israeli, co-hosting a cookery show despite intense opposition from their respective communities.
2009(1st of Kislev, 5770): Seventy-five year old “Ari Kiev, a psychiatrist whose early work on depression and suicide prevention led to a career helping athletes and Wall Street traders achieve peak performance, passed away today in Manhattan. (As reported by William Grimes
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/business/30kiev.html
2009(1st of Kislev, 5770):James F. Berg, who as the chief negotiator for most of the major landlords in New York City was given large credit for an era of labor peace in their buildings because of the trust he inspired on both sides of the bargaining table, died today in Manhattan. He was 65 (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)
2010: “Precious Life” is scheduled to be shown at the Other Israel Film Festival today at the JCC in Manhattan.
2010: In New York, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present The Fall Concert which is part of The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series at YIVO:
2010: In response to a call by Chief Ashkenazi RabbiYona Metzger and Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo for the public to pray for rain during this draught-like period, today is scheduled to be a special day of fasting and prayer to atone for the sins that are likely preventing the direly missing rainfall.
2012: As published today in the Cedar Rapids Gazette
2012: After a few hours of relative quiet, a rocket fired from Gaza this evening hit a house near Kiryat Malachi. (As reported by the Jerusalem Post)
1095: Pope Urban II opened the Council of Clermont. Summoned to plan the First Crusade, it was attended by over 200 bishops. Among its official policies, the Council decreed that a pilgrimage to Jerusalem made every other penance superfluous. And so began one of the darkest periods in Jewish history.
1302: Pope Boniface VIII issues the Papal bull Unam sanctam that proclaimed, "outside of the Church there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins." It declares that those who resist the Roman Pontiff are resisting God's ordination. This is the same Pope Boniface VIII who issued the bull Exhibita Nobis, ordaining that Jews could be denounced to the Inquisition without the name of the accuser being revealed, so as to protect Christians against Jewish reprisals.
1489: Joseph Günzenhäuser, Yom-Tov ben Perez and Solomon ben Perez published “Hobot ha-Lebabot” (Duties of the Heart) by Bayha ibn Pakuda in Italy. Bahya ben Joseph ibn Paquda was a Jewish philosopher and rabbi who lived at Zaragoza, Spain, in the first half of the eleventh century. The same trio had printed “Eben Bohan” byKalonymus ben Meir ben Kalonymus in August of 1489. Kalonymus was a an author and translator who lived in Provence “Eben Bohan” (The Touchstone) was a seminal work on morality for the Jews living in southern France.
1570: In Ferra, Italy, the town where Azarya ben Moses dei Rossi is living was struck by an earthquake, which “miraculously” spared the Jewish Community. In the aftermath of the earthquake, Dei Rossi became aware of whole body of Jewish literature from the time of the Second Temple which was known to Christians but had been lost to the Jews because it was written in Greek. In twenty days he translated "The Letter of Aristas," from Greek into Hebrew. "The Letter of Aristas,""is supposed to be the discourse a Greek king gave about the wisdom of the Jews [Some sources give 1571 as the date for the earthquake.]
1576: Birthdate of Philipp Ludwig II of Hanau-Münzenberg who in 1603 “invited many wealthy Jewish” to live in Hanuah and provided them with “a definite legal status” as well as permitting them to build a synagogue.
1648: Bogdan Chemielniki and his Cossacks began their attacks. Kamenets, in the western Ukraine is one of the first cities to be attacked, with thousands killed in the first few days. Chemielniki was leading a Ukrainian national uprising against their Roman Catholic Polish masters. The Russian Orthodox Ukrainians were bitter over the forced conversions to Catholicism led by the Jesuits and the unscrupulous taxes collected by some Jews for the nobles. The Jews managed the Ukrainian estates of the absentee Polish landlords. This volatile mixture of nationalism, religion and economic exploitation set the stage for the Cossack uprising. During the reign of Vladislav IV, the Zaporozhin Cossacks lived in a semi-autonomous kingdom called Sitch. Led by their leader - or Hetman - Chemielniki, they decided to avenge the people's rights. Their victories over the Polish army encouraged the serfs to join them. The Jews were even more hated than the Poles and were massacred in almost every town. In the ten tumultuous years that followed, over seven hundred Jewish communities were destroyed and between one hundred and five hundred thousand Jews lost their lives.
1804(15th of Kislev, 5565): First observance Purim of Abraham Danzig which is also called Pulverpurim or Powder Purim. Memorial Day established for himself and his family by Abraham Danzig, to be annually observed by fasting on the 15th of Kislew and by feasting on the evening of the same day in commemoration of the explosion of a powder-magazine at Wilna in 1804. By this accident thirty-one lives were lost and many houses destroyed, among them the home of Abraham Danzig, whose family and Abraham himself were all severely wounded, but escaped death (see Danzig, Abraham ben Jehiel). Danzig decreed that on the evening following the 15th of Kislew a meal should be prepared by his family to which Talmudic scholars were to be invited, and alms should be given to the poor. During the feast certain psalms were to be read, and hymns were to be sung to the Almighty for the miraculous escape from death.
1838: In Mainz, Lazarus and Eleonore Hallgarten gave birth to Charles Hallgarten who followed in his father’s footsteps as an American banker at Hallgarten & Company.
1842: In Cincinnati, Ohio, Lamle ‘Lewis’ and Judith Einstein gave birth to Edwin Einstein who was the Congressman from New York’s 7th district from 1879 until 1881.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/EEinstein.html
1844: Birthdate of Sir Benjamin Louis Cohen, Baronet, British businessman and Conservative politician.
1849: Birthdate of French banker and horse breeder Maurice Ephrussi, the native of Odessa who was part of the “Euphrussi family” and the husband of Beatrice de Rothschild, the daughter of Alphonse de Rothschild
1851: Birthdate of Austrian critic and journalist Anton Bettelheim.
1851: Reverend Henry Giles delivered a lecture before the Mercantile Library Association entitled "The Greek Man: or the Man of Culture" in which he compared the ancient Greeks to the Jews. Among other things he said that "Among men of the higher races, the Hebrew man and the Greek man stand, perhaps, the most in contrast. The spirit of the Hebrew man went upward; the faculties of the Greek man went outward. In one was the idea of the divine: in the other, the idea of the Human. The Hebrew man abhorred all image of God; the Greek man had no Got but in an image...The worship of the Hebrew ascended to a single and supreme object; the worship of the Greek went diffusively abroad...The mere form of the Hebrew ritual was eminently ceremonial...the appeal was with a sublime and sacramental meaning of which that of the Greek had nothing...the Hebrew life was developed through faith and governed by authority. The Greek life was developed through imagination and was governed by art.
1852: At the Paris Observatory, Hermann Goldschmidt confirmed his observations of November 15 that had led to the discovery of Asteroid 21 Lutetia.
1856: In Lancaster, PA, Congregation Shaarai Shomayim was incorporated today with Jacob Herzog serving aas the first president.
1858: At New York’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, popularly known as the Greene Street Synagogue, Rabbi Morris Raphall preached a Thanksgiving Day Sermon following the afternoon service based on the words of the Psalmist, “Thank ye the Lord, for He is good; His mercy endureth forever.” In his sermon, the Rabbi noted that the Governor’s Thanksgiving Proclamation had been written in such a manner that it did not offend the Jews making this a day that fulfilled the words of the Psalm, “How good, how beautiful it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.
1858: A Thanksgiving Day service was held today at Congregation Shearith Israel on Crosby Street. The service began at 11 a.m. and featured a sermon by Dr. Fischel based on the words of the Psalmist, “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman walketh but in vain.”
1863: King Christian IX of Denmark decided to sign the November constitution, which declared Schleswig as part of Denmark, what was seen by the German Confederation as a violation of the London Protocol and lead to the German–Danish war of 1864. If you look at history in the long haul, The Prussian war with the Danes was the first of a series of conflicts ultimately led to the creation of Modern Germany. In other words, there is a line from war with the Danes, to war with the Austrians, to war with France in 1870, to World War I to World War II and the Holocaust.
1869: In New York City, Rabbi James K. Gutheim delivered a Thanksgiving Day sermon at Temple Emanu-El based on Isaiah, XXXV, 17.
1873: “Give a Dog a Bad Name” by Anglo-English playwright Leopold Davis Lewis was published today.
1874: Rabbi De Sola Mendes delivered the first in a series of six lectures on Hebrew poetry at the Lyric Hall in Manhattan.
1875: The Cleveland (Ohio) Herald reported that an unnamed young woman living on the city’s west side has canceled her wedding. The bride assumed that her future husband, a local doctor, was a Roman Catholic. In fact he is a Jew who regularly attends services at his synagogue. The young woman sent word that she would not marry him unless he renounced his Judaism; something that he does not appear to be willing to do.
1878: It was reported today that during the recent Congressional elections in Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan delivered a speech opposing the candidacy of Colonel William Lowe in which he described Charles E. Mayer, the United States District Attorney and a Lowe supporter as being a “Jew dog.” The attack on Mayer resulted in many Jews who had opposed Lowe to support him in his bid for election. Lowe, who was opposed by the Bourbon Machine, won the election. Morgan was a bigot who sought to pass legislation legalizing lynching an repealing the 15th Amendment. Mayer served as U.S. District Attorney from 1876 through 1870.
1879: Bernard Williams, a Jew born in Poland now living in New Orleans, was one of the witnesses who testified before the Senate Sub-Committee looking into allegations of irregularities regarding the elections held in the Crescent City’s Seventh War in 1876. Allegations concerning voter fraud were a major issue in the South following the Civil War as the “Bourbons” sought to return to power by disenfranchising newly freed slaves and poor whites who would not support them.
1880(15th of Kislev, 5641): Arthur Lieberman, a Jew who had fled Russia to avoid arrest by the authorities took his own life today in Syracuse, NY.
1883: It was reported today that the Lord Mayor of London has received telegrams from Jews in the United States and Germany congratulating him on his decision to not let Herr Stoeckel, the anti-Semitic German religious leader speak at Mansion House.
1883: It was reported today that Herr Stoeckel, the anti-Semitic German minister, has had numerous offers to speak before sympathetic audiences in London.
1883: “Morris Ranger’s Career” published today traces the rise and fall of this native of Hesse-Cassel who joined the Liverpool Exchange and became the “Napoleon of the Cotton Speculators” before suffering financial reverses in the amount of £10,000,000.
1883: “Gossip of the Theatres” published today contained a clarification issued by Daniel Frohman, the Jewish American theatrical producer, expects “The Strangler” to run for another seven or eight weeks at the New Park Theatre. This play is a collaborative effort of all three Frohman brothers - Daniel, Charles and Gustave.
1884(30th of Cheshvan, 5645): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
1884: It was reported today that the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society for Children is providing lodging for “nearly 400 children who are homeless waifs.”
1884: The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society for Children sponsored a fund raiser featuring theatrical and dramatic performances by the Thalia Theatre Company
1885: “A New Jewish Platform” published today lists the 8 points of what will become known as the Pittsburgh Platform of Reform Judaism – that group’s controlling document for decades to come.
1885: The Hebrew Asylum Ball was held tonight at the Academy of Music in Brooklyn, NY.
1886: Chester A. Arthur, 21st President of the United States passed away. Elected as Vice President, Arthur became President after James Garfield was assassinated by a disappointed office seeker. Arthur was one of the least distinguished personages to occupy the White House. In 1882, when the United States finally ratified the Red Cross treaty, President Arthur appointed Adolphus SimeonSolomons as one of three delegates to represent the country at the Geneva Congress, where he was elected vice-president. Solomons was a successful Washington businessman who played an active role in the secular and Jewish communities
1888: “Searching For Her Husband” published today tells the story of Mrs. Hirschbeck, a Jew from Warsaw who has arrived in Buffalo, NY, her latest stop on a five year quest to find her husband, who is now known as Nathan Cohen. According to her, he was a dissipated man who deserted her and their five children.
1890: A conference of Protestant clergymen met today at the University of the City of New York where attendees spoke in favor of keeping religion out of the public schools because Roman Catholics and Jews “were partners in the public schools” and “their children were entitled to the benefit of them…without the liability of having” to change “their faith in the religion of their fathers.” The ministers felt it was the responsibility of churches and homes to provide moral and religious training.
1891: Tonight, in New York, Carnegie Hall will be transformed into an Oriental Bazaar such as those found in Palestine where items will be sold in various “stalls” to raise funds for the Louis Down-Town Sabbath and Daily School.
1892 (28th of Cheshvan): Seventy-six year old Hebrew scholar Senior Sachs passed away in Paris. Born in Russia he was trained in Talmud by his father Rabbi Tzemach Sachs. After studying in Berlin during the 1840’s he arrived in the French capital in 1856 where he worked as a private librarian and produced several works including Kanfe Yonah
1893: As two more Spanish regiments arrive Mellila to deal with the Rif Berbers “numbers of Jews continue to leave” the Spanish city on the coast of Morocco.
1893: In Morocco, 12 Spanish Jews were each “sentenced to six years’ penal servitude” after a court martial found them guilty of keeping rifles intended for the Riffians in their houses. (The Riffians were a group of Berbers who were rebelling against their European masters)
1894: In New York, Rabbi Joseph Silverman delivered a talk on “What Is The Attitude of Judaism to Christianity and Other Religions” which is “the first of a series of lectures on ‘Answers to Jewish and Christian Inquirers.”
1894: The Glasgow Herald published a theory propounded by one of its readers “that the Japanese are…descendants of the ten lost tribes” basing “his arguments on linguistic considerations point out that ‘Hiroshima’ has a very strong resemble to the Hebrew word for Jerusalem and that ‘Tokyo’ may be a corruption of ‘Tekoa.’”
1895: It was announced today that “Dr. Ahlwardt, the anti-Semitic leader of Berlin, Germany, is making arrangements to sail for the United States next month to deliver lectures” at the invitation of “a committee of German Americans in Milwaukee.” Given his nickname “Jew-baiter” there is little doubt as to the subject matter of the talks.
1896: Fannie and Irving Dittenhoefer married today in New York City.
1896: In Cleveland, Ohio, Micahelis Machol, the Rabbi at the Reform Temple on Scoville Avenue protested “against that portion of President Cleveland’s Thanksgiving proclamation of Christ as the mediator between man and God.”
1896: The delegates at the National Council of Jewish Women have changed the name of their organization to the Council of Jewish after Mrs. Mendola de Sola of Canada protested “the use of the word national.” The delegates then adopted “Faith and Humanity” as their motto.
1897: Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, “who has forced the government to reopen the Dreyfus case did not attend today’s meeting of the Senate so that he could meet with President Faure who told him that “I give you my word of honor that” the documents in the Dreyfus case that have been brought to my notice “contain irrefutable proofs of guilty” and “I beg you to cease this campaign by you are comprising the republic and yourself to no purpose.”
1897: In Albany, Chief Examiner Fowler of the State Civil Commission announced that candidates for the upcoming examination of interpreter for the First Judicial District must be able to interpret several languages including “Hebrew jargon.” (This may a reference to Yiddish)
1898: William Sparger conducted the Sabbath eve service at Temple Emanu-El which was a prelude to a Thanksgiving Service and a celebration of Dr. Guastav Gottheil’s silver anniversary as the Rabbi of New York’s leading Reform congregation.
1898: Following the meeting of Herzl and Kaiser Wilhelm II outside of Jerusalem, the London Daily Mail wrote today that: “An Eastern Surprise Important Result of the Kaiser’s Tour Sultan and Emperor Agreed in Palestine Benevolent Sanction Given to the Zionist Movement One of the most important results, if not the most important, of the Kaiser’s visit to Palestine is the immense impetus it has given to Zionism, the movement for the return of the Jews to Palestine. The gain to this cause is the greater since it is immediate, but perhaps more important still is the wide political influence which this Imperial action is like to have. It has not been generally reported that when the Kaiser visited Constantinople Dr. Herzl, the head of the Zionist movement, was there; again when the Kaiser entered Jerusalem he found Dr. Herzl there. These were no mere coincidences, but the visible signs of accomplished facts.” Reverend William Henry Hechler, an Anglican clergyman who supported the Jewish return to Palestine, was instrumental in arranging the meeting between the Zionist leader and the German monarch.
1899: Birthdate of Conductor Eugene Ormandy. Born in Budapest, Hungary, Ormandy was a child prodigy. He began playing the violin at the age of 4 and entered the Royal Academy at the age of 5. Ormandy’s father dreamed of his son becoming a great violinist. So he was disappointed when Ormandy pursued a career that would lead him to become one of the world’s greatest conductors. For most of his career, Ormandy was the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. This was no small accomplishment since he was following in the footsteps of the world-renowned Arturo Toscanini. He passed away in 1985.
1899: “Notes and News” published today described the decision of Harper & Brothers to published a second edition of The Jewish Question and the Mission of the Jews which include “much additional material” including an article on Captain Dreyfus. Originally published anonymously, the second edition will included the name of the author, Dr. Charles Waldstein, Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge, an American born Jew who graduated from Columbia.
1906: Birthdate of German novelist Klaus Mann. Klaus Mann was the son of Thomas Mann and Katia Pringsheimz. Pringshmeimz was Jewish which according to Halachah means Kalus Mann was Jewish as well. He was also part of the unit known as “Ritchie Boys.”
1906: Birthdate of biologist George Wald, American biochemist who received (with Haldan K. Hartline of the U.S. and Ragnar Granit of Sweden) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1967 for his work on the chemistry of vision
1906: In Brooklyn, Leopold Wintner, the Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Beth Elohim and Canto Leon Kourick officiated at the funeral of Raphael Benjamin the Rabbi of Beth Elhoim who was the subject of the eulogy delivered by Rabbi Joseph Silverman of Temple Beth Emmanuel in Manhattan.
1914: In Far Rockaway, NY Rabbi Stephen S. Wise addressed a group of orthodox and reform Jews at meeting at Temple Israel where $3,000 was raised to provide “relief for the Jews of Palestine.”
1914: The Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War announced today that as of today it had raised $19,463.
1917: Eleven young men in West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded Sigma Alpha Rho(ΣAP) the oldest, continuously run, independent Jewish High School Fraternity.
1919(25th of Cheshvan, 5680): Sixty year old German mathematician Adolf Hurwitz, the husband of Ida Samuel who helped develop the Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion (which I do not pretend to understand) passed away today in Zurich
1921: “President Warren Harding gave Rabbi Simon Glazer of Kansas City, Kansas, executive permission to adopt five children who are now in Romania.” Glazer already has five children of his own. The orphans lost their mother in one of the Ukrainian massacres last year and their father died in the United States. If it had not been for President Harding’s intervention, current immigration restrictions would have kept the rabbi from bringing the youngsters to the United States.
1921(17th of Cheshvan): Fifty-six year old journalist and author Micha Josef Berdyczewski passed away in Berlin. Born in Russia, the son of a Rabbi, he wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish and German. Sdot Micha, the moshav founded in 1955, was named in his honor
1922: Marcel Proust passed away. “Marcel Proust was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother. He himself was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never practiced that faith and as an adult could best be described as a mystical atheist, someone imbued with spirituality who nonetheless did not believe in a personal God, much less in a savior. Although Jews trace their religion through their mothers, Proust never considered himself Jewish and even became vexed when a newspaper article listed him as a Jewish author. His father once warned him not to stay in a certain hotel since there were "too many" Jewish guests there, and, to be sure, in Remembrance of Things Past there are unflattering caricatures of the members of one Jewish family, the Blochs. Jews were still considered exotic, even "oriental," in France; in 1872 there were only eighty-six thousand Jews in the whole country. In a typically offensive passage Proust writes that in a French drawing room "a Jew making his entry as though he were emerging from the desert, his body crouching like a hyena's, his neck thrust forward, offering profound `salaams,' completely satisfies a certain taste for the oriental." Proust never refers to his Jewish origins in his fiction, although in the youthful novel he abandoned, Jean Santeuil (first published only in 1952, thirty years after his death), there is a very striking, if buried, reference to Judaism. The autobiographical hero has quarreled with his parents and in his rage deliberately smashed a piece of delicate Venetian glass his mother had given him. When he and his mother are reconciled, he tells her what he has done: "He expected that she would scold him, and so revive in his mind the memory of their quarrel. But there was no cloud upon her tenderness. She gave him a kiss, and whispered in his ear: `It shall be, as in the Temple, the symbol of an indestructible union.'" This reference to the rite of smashing a glass during the Orthodox Jewish wedding ceremony, in this case sealing the marriage of mother to son, is not only spontaneous but chilling. In an essay about his mother he referred, with characteristic ambiguity, to "the beautiful lines of her Jewish face, completely marked with Christian sweetness and Jansenist resignation, turning her into Esther herself"--a reference, significantly, to the heroine of the Old Testament (and of Racine's play), who concealed her Jewish identity until she had become the wife of King Ahasuerus and was in a position to save her people. The apparently gentile Proust, who had campaigned for Dreyfus and had been baptized Catholic, was a sort of modern Esther. Despite Proust's silences and lapses on the subject of his mother's religion, it would be unfair, especially in light of the rampant anti-Semitism of turn-of-the-century France, to say that he was unique or even extreme in his prejudice against Jews. And yet his anti-Semitism is more than curious, given his love for his mother and given, after her death, something very much like a religious cult that he developed around her. His mother, out of respect for her parents, had remained faithful to their religion, and Proust revered her and her relatives; after her death he regretted that he was too ill to visit her grave and the graves of her parents and uncle in the Jewish cemetery and to mark each visit with a stone. More important, although he had many friends among the aristocracy whom he had assiduously cultivated, nevertheless when he was forced to take sides during the Dreyfus Affair, which had begun in 1894 and erupted in 1898, he chose to sign a petition prominently printed in a newspaper calling for a retrial. The Dreyfus Affair is worth a short detour, since it split French society for many years and it became a major topic in proust's life--and in Remembrance of Things Past. Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was a Jew and a captain in the French army. In December 1894 he was condemned by a military court for having sold military secrets to the Germans and was sent for life to Devil's Island. The accusation was based on the evidence of a memorandum stolen from the German embassy in Paris (despite the fact that the writing did not resemble Dreyfus's) and of a dossier (which was kept classified and secret) handed over to the military court by the minister of war. In 1896 another French soldier, Major Georges Picquart, proved that the memorandum had been written not by Dreyfus but by a certain Major Marie Charles Esterhazy. Yet Esterhazy was acquitted and Picquart was imprisoned. Instantly a large part of the population called for a retrial of Dreyfus. On January 13, 1898, the writer Emile Zola published an open letter, "J'accuse," directed against the army's general staff; Zola was tried and found guilty of besmirching the reputation of the army. He was forced to flee to England. Then in September 1898 it was proved that the only piece of evidence against Dreyfus in the secret military dossier had been faked by Joseph Henry, who confessed his misdeed and committed suicide. At last the government ordered a retrial of Dreyfus. Public opinion was bitterly divided between the leftist Dreyfusards, who demanded "justice and truth," and the anti-Dreyfusards, who led an anti-Semitic campaign, defended the honor of the army, and rejected the call for a retrial. The conflict led to a virtual civil war. In 1899 Dreyfus was found guilty again, although this time under extenuating circumstances--and the president pardoned him. Only in 1906 was Dreyfus fully rehabilitated, named an officer once again, and decorated with the Legion of Honor. Interestingly, Theodor Herzl, the Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper, was so overwhelmed by the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair that he was inspired by the prophetic idea of a Jewish state. In defending Dreyfus, Proust not only angered conservative, Catholic, pro-army aristocrats, but he also alienated his own father. In writing about the 1890s in Remembrance of Things Past, Proust remarks that "the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder." Typically, the ultraconservative Gustave Schlumberger, a great Byzantine scholar, could give in his posthumous memoirs as offensive a description of his old friend Charles Haas (a model for Proust's character Swann) as this: "The delightful Charles Haas, the most likeable and glittering socialite, the best of friends, had nothing Jewish about him except his origins and was not afflicted, as far as I know, with any of the faults of his race, which makes him an exception virtually unique." It would be misleading to suggest that Proust took his controversial, pro-Dreyfus stand simply because he was half-Jewish. No, he was only obeying the dictates of his conscience, even though he lost many highborn Catholic friends by doing so and exposed himself to the snide anti-Semitic accusation of merely automatically siding with his co-religionists.”
1922: Die Zaubernacht (The Magic Night), a children’s pantomime by Kurt Weil premiered at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm;
1927: Humphrey Bogart divorced his first wife, the Jewish actress Helen Menken. (Bogart’s fourth and final wife would also be Jewish)
1929: According to the report o the Palestine Committee presented at today’s meeting of Hadassah held in Atlantic City, NJ, “the outstanding event in Palestine heal work this year has been the completion an formal opening of the Nathan and Lina Straus health center in Jerusalem.”
1937: Establishment of military courts in Palestine to try civilians.
1936: Two weeks after meeting with Hitler, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich, “met with leading members of the German hierarchy of cardinals to ask them to warn their parishioners against the errors of communism.”
1937: The Palestine Post reported that a Jewish farmer, Yehuda Shpanov, was shot in Afula and died four hours later in the local hospital, where his wife was awaiting the birth of their child. An official amendment held that "no judgment over the proceedings of the Military Court shall be called in question or challenged in any manner whatever by or before any other Court."
1937: The Palestine Post reported that in Hamburg a baptized Jew, Dr. Theodor Wohlfahrt, was sentenced to 10 years penal servitude for having married a gentile and claiming in a German court that it was his right to do so.
1938: Hitler recalls Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, German ambassador to the United States, after President Franklin Roosevelt recalled the U.S. ambassador to Germany as part of America’s protest against Kristallnacht.
1938: The American Virgin Islands Assembly offers the islands as a haven for Jewish refugees. The American government does not explore this possibility.
1939: Hans Frank, the governor-general of Occupied Poland, reiterates Reinhard Heydrich's order of September 21 regarding the establishment of Judenräte in Jewish ghettos.
1939: The Nazis ordered the Jews of Cracow to wear a Star of David.
1941: J.D. Salinger “wrote to a young woman in Toronto,” Marjorie Sheard, “to look for a new piece of his in a coming issue of The New Yorker” which he described as “the first Holden story.” (As reported by Dave Itzkoff
1941: Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS General who developed the 8 point Jecklin System for murdering Jews was searching for the right place to slaughter of the Jews of Riga when he saw Rumbula for the first time.
1942: Birthdate of pianist Jeffrey Siegel.
1942: As part of the Holocaust German SS carry out a selection of Jewish ghetto in Lviv in the western Ukraine arresting 5.000 "unproductive Jews". All get deported to Belzec death camp.
1943: In an attempt to hide the Holocaust from the westward moving Soviet Army, 300 Jews at Borki were told that they were to dig up the trenches of 30,000 dead humans in Borki and then burn them all. One thousand bodies were placed on each pyre. The bones were ground to dust and taken away. The graves were emptied, disinfected, filled with earth and grass was planted over them.
1943: During the Holocaust, as part of Aktion Emtefest, the Nazis liquidate Janowska concentration camp in Lviv, western Ukraine, murdering at least 6.000 surviving Jews. The German SS leader Fritz Katzman declares Lviv (Lemberg) to be Judenfrei (free from the Jews).
1944(2nd of Kislev, 5705): Enzo Serini, Havivah Reik, Raffi Reiss and Zvi Ben Ya'acov were all murdered at Dachau. They were all Jews from Palestine who had parachuted behind German lines.
1944(2nd of Kislev, 5705): Alfred B. Nietzel died valiantly today during the Battle of Hurtgen Forest providing covering fire for his comrades “during an enemy advance threatening to overrun his position” – an action that would earn him the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor.
http://www.army.mil/medalofhonor/valor24/recipients/nietzel/?f=recipients&l=name
1945:At Zionist Organization of America meeting, Dr. Abba Hillel Silver is elected to succeed Dr. Israel Goldstein as president. A proposal is made to allow the Jewish National Fund of America to buy 500,000 acres of land in Palestine in defiance of British land transfer regulations. A budget is approved for immigration and settlement.
1945: In the wake of the latest British statements about Palestine it was reported today that “It was apparent that some sort of compromise will have to be forthcoming from outside Palestine as there is little possibility of the Arabs and Jews getting together on anything so far proposed.” (Editor’s Note – what was written in 1945 sounds as if it could have been written in 2012)
1945: Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization, says British foreign minister Ernest Bevin cannot divide Zionists and other Jewish People.
1946: Police and Jewish citizens clash in Tel Aviv
1947: “Stern Gang Hints at Truce” published today examined the possibility of “a respite from violence in Palestine” should among other things Lehi make good on its announcement to the press that it was “ready to resume its truce pledge.”
1947: Birthdate of Peter Shurman, the native of Ontario who went from being a radio talk show host to a career in politics as member of the Progressive Conservative Party.
1947: Birthdate of Michel-Jean Hamburger, a very successful French singer and songwriter of Jewish origin.
1947: British editor James Caunt was reported today to have expressed his belief that the accusations of seditious libel that had been filed after his assertions that anti-British propaganda “was financed by American Jews and “that if British Jews were really concerned by the shooting of British boys in Palestine they should ‘disgorge their ill-gotten wealth in try to dissuade their brothers in the United States from pour out dollars to facilitate the entrance into Palestine of European Jewish scum’” were politically motivated by those who believe that “anyone who criticizes the Jews must be a Fascist.”
1948:British state minister Hector McNeil offers the Political Committee a resolution calling for permanent settlement based on Bernadotte plan. Israel proposes compromise: it will withdraw all troops who arrived in Israel after October 14; troops who arrived before October 14 will stay to ensure that area does not fall to Egypt. Israel announces it is ready to begin armistice with Arabs.
1949:UN Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East proposes after a three-month study that the General Assembly set up program of relief and public works in various Arab countries for 652,000 Arab refugees from Palestine. No comparable fund would be suggested for providing aid to Israel when Jewish populations of Arab and Moslem countries were forced to flee from their homes.
1951: In Tel Aviv, second generation architect Yaakov Rechter and his first wife, Sara Safir gave birth to Israeli musical artist Yoni Rechtet, the stepson of Israeli actress Hanna Meron.
1951: Birthdate of David “Dudu” Fisher, the native of Petah Tivka who pursued a decades long career as a cantor before appearing as “Jean Valjean in the musical Les Miserables.”
1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that observers noted Arab protests over the German-Israeli Reparation Agreement were meant only to extort more trade and imports from their countries to Germany.
1955(3rd of Kislev, 5716): Sixty-five year old chess master Solomon Rosenthal passed away today.
1956: In case of “Jew on Jew,” Alfred Kazin reviews Saul Bellow’s most recent book, Seize the Day.
1958: The Assistant United States Attorney that the $4,790.44 that Charles A. Levine still owed the government as part of a $5,000 fine levied after he was convicted of smuggling in 1937 was not collectible.
1958: Jerusalem's new reservoir was opened ending a long history of water problems that made Jerusalem more vulnerable to siege. Water for Jerusalem had been a challenge going all the way back to Biblical times. Remember the story of how David took the city in the first place. Fear of siege was not paranoia for the Israelis. The Jews had nearly lost the city ten years earlier when the Jordanian Army (the Arab Legion) laid siege to it during the War for Independence.
1959: William Wyler’s film Ben-Hur premieres at Loew's Theater in New York City. William Wyler was Jewish. Judah Ben Hur was also Jewish.
1959: Opening of the Sephardic Bibliographical Exhibition in Madrid, Spain. The Exhibition was in conjunction with the World Sephardi Federation, Arias Montano Institute, the faculty of Philosophy of the Madrid University as well as the Royal Academy of Spanish Language. The Exhibition demonstrated rare Sephardic documents, books, maps and material showing the life of Jews in Spain up to 1492.
1962: Niels Henrik David Bohr passed away. “Bohr was a Danish physicist, born in Copenhagen, who was the first to apply the quantum theory, which restricts the energy of a system to certain discrete values, to the problem of atomic and molecular structure. For this work he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. He developed the so-called Bohr Theory of the atom and liquid model of the nucleus. Bohr was of Jewish origin and when the Nazis occupied Denmark he escaped in 1943 to Sweden on a fishing boat. From there he was flown to England where he began to work on the project to make a nuclear fission bomb. After a few months he went with the British research team to Los Alamos in the USA where they continued work on the project.”
1964: In London, UK, Neil Simon’s “Little Me” opened at the Cambridge Theatre.
1966: Sandy Koufax announces his retirement, due to an arthritic left elbow
1971(30th of Cheshvan, 5732): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
1973: Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis delivered a speech today at Madison Square Garden that led to the formation of “Hineni,” “one of the first Ba’al Teshuva movements.
1976(25th of Cheshvan, 5737): Eighty-six year old American born artist Man Ray passed away in Paris.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100127075614/http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c347_a17217/The_Arts/Museums.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20100127075614/http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c347_a17217/The_Arts/Museums.html
1977: Longtime feminist activist and U.S. Representative Bella Abzug presided over the first federally funded National Women's Conference.
1977: The Jerusalem Post reported that 60 Egyptians and 2,000 journalists arrived in order to prepare the historic visit of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Israel. Chaim Herzog, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, suggested that the General Assembly suspend the "acrimonious and counterproductive" debate on Palestine in order to be able to consider this historic event. It was also reported that Sadat¹s visit was partly prompted by a question that the Post¹s US correspondent, Wolf Blitzer, had asked Sadat in Washington last April.
1978(18th of Cheshvan, 5739): Judge Leo Frederick Rayfiel passed away. Born in 1888 to immigrant parents in Brooklyn, he was a graduate of New York University Law School. He was a member of the New York State Assembly and served two terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives before being appointed to the federal bench by President Harry S. Truman in 1947. Rayfiel was a voracious reader and die-hard Dodgers fan until the team left Brooklyn.
1983(12th of Kislev, 5744): Ninety-one year old publisher, George B. Eisler passed away today.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/09/obituaries/george-b-eisler.html
1988: In Tel Aviv, Orly Silbersatz and Yuval Banay gave birth to singer and guitarist Elisha Banai, older brother of Amalia and Sophie Banai and the grandson of another Israeli performer Yossi Banai.
1988: In New York City, Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles” premiered at the Playwrights Horizon.
1990(1st of Kislev, 5751): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
1990: The third Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof opened today at the Gershwin Theater. It ran for 241 performances at the George Gershwin Theatre. Topol starred as Tevye, and Marcia Lewis was Golde. Robbins' production was reproduced by Ruth Mitchell and choreographer Sammy Dallas Bayes. The production won the Tony Award for Best Revival.
1991(11th of Kislev, 5752): Eighty-three year old French Marxist Claude Cahen who has been described as “the doyen of Islamic social history and one of the most influential Islamic historians of [his] century” and who “neither self-identified as Jewish nor supported the State of Israel” passed away today.
2000(3rd of Kislev, 5762):St.-Sgt. Baruch (Snir) Flum, 21, of Tel-Aviv was shot and killed by a senior Palestinian Preventive Security Service officer who infiltrated the Kfar Darom greenhouses in the Gaza Strip. (St.-Sgt. Sharon Shitoubi, 21, of Ramle, wounded in the Palestinan shooting attack in Kfar Daromwould died of his wounds two days later.)
2001: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or about topics of Jewish interest including The Complete Works of Isaac Babel: Edited by Nathalie Babel, Translated by Peter Constantine. Introduction by Cynthia Ozick, Somewhere For Me:
A Biography of Richard Rodgersby Meryle Secrest, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions by Martha C. Nussbaum, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945by Richard Overy and I’m Not Bobby by Jules Feiffer.
2002(13th of Kislev, 5763) Esther Galia, 48, of Kochav Hashahar, was killed in a shooting attack near Rimonim, on the Allon Road, some 15 kilometers northeast of Ramallah
2002: During the investigation of Jack Abramoff’s business activities in Guam a grand jury issued a subpoena demanding that the administrator of the Guam Superior Court release all records relating to the contract.
2002: “U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson of Montgomery, Alabama, orders the removal of Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument, finding that it violated the constitution's ban on government establishment of religion.”
2003(23rd of Cheshvan, 5764: Fifty-five year old Grammy award winning musician Michael Kamen passes away. While studying the oboe, he formed a rock classical fusion band called New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, which was on the first of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/20/arts/michael-kamen-55-award-winning-composer.html
http://www.michaelkamen.com/
2003(23rd of Cheshvan, 5764): Two IDF soldiers, Sgt.-Maj. Shlomi Belsky, 23, of Haifa, and St.-Sgt. Shaul Lahav, 20, of Kibbutz Shomrat, were killed by a Palestinian terrorist who opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle, hidden in a prayer rug, at a checkpoint on the tunnel bypass road, linking Jerusalem and the Gush Etzion bloc. The Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack.
2004(5th of Kislev, 5765): Cy Coleman, American composer, songwriter, and jazz pianist passed away. Born Seymour Kaufman, to Jewish immigrant parents, Coleman won or was nominated for 15 Tony Awards, 3 Emmy Awards and 2 Grammy Awards. (As reported by Robert Berkvist)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/19/theater/19cnd-coleman.html
2005(15th of Cheshvan, 5766): Harold J. Stone passed away. Born Harold Hochstein to a Jewish acting family in 1913, Stone practiced his craft on Broadway, in film and finally in television where he gained respect and a form of fame as “a character actor.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/nov/19/local/me-stone19
2005: The Jerusalem Post reported that Pope Benedict XVI responded positively to an invitation extended to him by President Moshe Katsav when the two met at the Vatican.
2006: Some eight thousand people gathered near Germany's biggest World War II soldiers’ cemetery to protest against far-right extremism.
2006(27th of Cheshvan, 5767: Jack Werber passed away at the age of 92. He was a Holocaust survivor who helped save more than 700 children at Buchenwald slave labor camp. He gained economic success in the mid-fifties by manufacturing coonskin caps during the Davey Crockett craze.
2007: The SundayWashington Post book section featured a review of The Conscience of a Liberal by Jewish economist Paul Krugman
2007: The Sunday New York Timesbook section featured reviews of three books about or by comedian Woody Allen including, Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking by Eric Lax, Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen and The Insanity Defense: The Complete Proseby Woody Allen.
2007: The Chicago Tribune business section reported on the growth of Chicago based Levy Restaurants. Since its founding in 1978 by brothers Larry and Mark Levy, Levy Restaurants has grown from a single delicatessen in Chicago to a specialized, industry-leading food organization with a network of internationally acclaimed restaurants; the leading market share of premium foodservice operations at sports and entertainment facilities; as well as a full-service consulting and advisory services group. The keeper of the Company’s precious culture is Eadie Levy, mother of Larry and Mark, and resident Mom to almost 15,000 team members.
2008: In Israel, members of the National Religious Party “voted to disband the party in order to join the new Jewish Home Party
2008: French and Israeli police discovered 43 of timepieces that had been stolen from the L.A. Mayer Institute for Islamic art in two French bank safes.
2008: Ethan Berkowitz himself conceded defeat in the race to fill the seat of U.S. Representative for Alaska's At-large congressional district, after counting of absentee and provisional ballots had mostly been completed and his Republican opponent Don Young had a clearly insurmountable lead.
2008: At Tifereth Israel Synagogue in Des Moines, Iowa AIPAC Midwest Political Director Jonathan Greenberg speaks on “Changes in the White House and on Capitol Hill: How It Impacts The Pro-Israel Agenda.” Of course, the presentation is based on the premise that AIPAC’s agenda and the “Pro-Israel Agenda” are one and the same.
2008: The Ninth Annual Rutgers New Jersey Jewish Film Festival presents: “The Counterfeiters” “One Day You’ll Understand,” adaptation of Jerome Clement’s autobiographical novel, Plus Tard, Tu Comprendras and “Two Ladies” a hopeful drama that offers a sensitive portrayal of the unlikely friendship two French women – Esther, who is Jewish, and Halima, who is Muslim – which defies the prejudice and hostility that surround them.
2008:As part of the "Jewish Encounters" series at the D.C. Jewish Community Center,writer and poet Adam Kirsch discusses and signs Benjamin Disraeli, his new biography of the British prime minister in which takes an in-depth look at the first—and only—Jewish Prime Minister of England.
2008: Michael Rosen was presented with the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature) by the Government of France at the French Ambassador's residence in London
2009 (1st of Kislev, 5770): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
2009: Moshe Holtzberg, son of Barvriel and Rivka Holztberg of blessed memory who were murdered by the terrorists in Mumbain in 2008, celebrated his third birthday according to the Jewish calendar. A party was held at Kfar Chabad which was attended by 2,000 people who stayed for a memorial dinner for his parents.
2009: In Fairfax, VA, Congregation Olam Tikvah hosts “Sacred Scripture: How do you understand your own? Can I try?” as part of its interfaith program.
2009: At the UK Jewish Film Festival, a screening of an episode from the groundbreaking TV drama "Good Intentions", which centers around two female chefs, one Palestinian and one Israeli, co-hosting a cookery show despite intense opposition from their respective communities.
2009(1st of Kislev, 5770): Seventy-five year old “Ari Kiev, a psychiatrist whose early work on depression and suicide prevention led to a career helping athletes and Wall Street traders achieve peak performance, passed away today in Manhattan. (As reported by William Grimes
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/business/30kiev.html
2009(1st of Kislev, 5770):James F. Berg, who as the chief negotiator for most of the major landlords in New York City was given large credit for an era of labor peace in their buildings because of the trust he inspired on both sides of the bargaining table, died today in Manhattan. He was 65 (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)
2010: “Precious Life” is scheduled to be shown at the Other Israel Film Festival today at the JCC in Manhattan.
2010: In New York, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is scheduled to present The Fall Concert which is part of The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series at YIVO:
2010: In response to a call by Chief Ashkenazi RabbiYona Metzger and Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo for the public to pray for rain during this draught-like period, today is scheduled to be a special day of fasting and prayer to atone for the sins that are likely preventing the direly missing rainfall.
2010:"Army of Islam," a group linked to Al Qaida, released today for the first time a statement in Hebrew threatening to avenge the killing of two senior members of the organization in the Gaza Strip yesterday
2010: Jacob Lew began serving as Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
2011: “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” is scheduled to be shown this evening at Jewish Eye World Jewish Film Festival.
2011: An opening reception is scheduled to take place at the Derek Eller Gallery marking the opening of “Rona Yefman: Marath a Bouke, project #4” in which Rona Yefman will present an installation about Martha Bouke, an 80-year-old grandfather and Holocaust survivor living in Tel Aviv who assumes a feminine persona…”
2011: It was reported today that Henry Kissinger in 1972 called Jews "self-serving" because of pleas from the community for the Nixon administration to increase the pressure on the Soviet Union to allow its Jews to leave. "Is there a more self-serving group of people than the Jewish community?" Kissinger, who is Jewish, asks Leonard Garment, also Jewish, in transcripts of a 1972 exchange released this week by the State Department and reported by The Associated Press. Garment, a special counsel to President Nixon, replied: "None in the world." Kissinger, who at the time was the national security adviser, added: "What the hell do they think they are accomplishing? You can’t even tell bastards anything in confidence because they’ll leak it.”Nonetheless, Kissinger tells Garment he will raise the issue with the Soviet ambassador. Kissinger resented the Jewish community's emphasis on releasing Jews, saying it detracted from the overall White House strategy of achieving detente with the Soviet Union -- a strategy he to this day maintains would have brought greater success for Soviet Jewry, although veterans of the movement adamantly disagree. Kissinger's office said he was traveling and not immediately available for comment. A request to Garment for comment, emailed to a law firm where he is last known to have had offices, went unanswered. Revelations of Kissinger's disparagement of Jews during his Nixon years have at times led to him apologizing; most recently, last December, he said he was "sorry" for telling Nixon in 1973 that it would not be an American concern if the Soviets were to consign Jews to death camps.
2011:Israel sent housing assistance for up to 1,000 people in Turkey affected by two earthquakes that hit the country in October. The mobile homes, which were requested by the government in Ankara, were delivered by the Defense Ministry this morning.
2012: The New York Times features reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe which “begins with Marvel’s best-known employees:” – Stan Lee (Stanley Martin Lieber) and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzburg) and the recently released paperback edition of A Train In Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women Friendship and Resistance in Occupied Franceby Caroline Moorehead which traces the fate of 230 women shipped to Auschwitz in January, 1943.
2012: The UK Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to come to an end.
2012: The American Society for Jewish Music and American Jewish Historical Society are scheduled to present The Hugo Weisgall Centennial Concer
2012(4th of Kislev, 5773): Eighty-six year old academic and diplomat Helmut Sonnenfeldt passed away today. (As reported by Douglas Martin
2012: Adas Israel Cantor Arianne Brown and the Charm City Klezmer are among those scheduled to perform at the Jewish Folk Arts Festival hosted at B’nai Israel in Rockville, MD.
2012: Global Day of Jewish Learning
2012: As published today in the Cedar Rapids Gazette
For weeks Arabs have been firing rockets into southern Israel. Israeli schools have been closed for days at a time. Citizens of several towns including Beersheba have had to stay within seconds of a “safe room” because that is all the warning that exists between the launching from Gaza and landing in Israel. In one sense, there is nothing new about this. The Arabs in Gaza did this in November of 2011, 2010, etc. The reason for the attacks is simple. Hamas is committed to the destruction of the state of Israel. When Israel left Gaza without any pre-conditions, the Arabs had a choice. They could start working on building a state or they could enhance their war of destruction aimed at Israel. Unfortunately, they chose the latter. Today, the Israelis had enough. They responded to these incessant attacks by killing one of the leaders responsible for these rocket terror attacks and unleashed a series of limited attacks on launch sites and the logistics net that supported it. Unfortunately, the American media chose not to cover the attacks of the last three weeks so all we have in the news tonight is the mean old Israelis attacking the poor Palestinians. http://thegazette.com/2012/11/17/weeks-of-arab-attacks-preceded-israeli-attack/
2012: After a few hours of relative quiet, a rocket fired from Gaza this evening hit a house near Kiryat Malachi. (As reported by the Jerusalem Post)
2013: The Center For Jewish History and the YIVO Institute For Jewish Research are scheduled to present a concert and lecture “Charles-Valentin Alkan: His Life and Music” as part of the Circles of Justice Program.
2013: “The Lesson” and “Mom, Dad, I’m A Muslim” are scheduled to be shown at The Other Israel Film Festival.
2013: The Embassy of the Czech Republic, Embassy of Israel and LCPA-Hebrew Language Table are scheduled to present “The Story of the Shipwrecked from the Patria.”
2013: French President Francois Hollande continued his official visit today, touring the Old City in Jerusalem, meeting with senior Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah and then visiting the Knesset, where he listened to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly call on PA President Mahmoud Abbas to break the diplomatic freeze and come address the Israeli parliament. (As reported by Moran Azulay)
2013: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-mmon walked through the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate as he began his to Auschwitz where he paid tribute to those murdered by the Nazis and their allies.
2013: “Former chief rabbi Yona Metzger was arrested today at the culmination of a long investigation into a litany of financial crimes involving millions of shekels.” (As reported by Stuart Winer)
2014: The Center for Jewish History is scheduled to present “Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev: Composing in War Time.”
2014: In Melbourne “Theodore Bikel: In the Shoes of Sholom Aleichem” and “King of the Jews” are scheduled to be shown at the Jewish International Film Festival.
2014: “Swim Little Fish” and “This Is Where I Leave You” are scheduled to be shown at the 18th annual UK Jewish Film Festival.