July 13 In Jewish History
100 BCE: Birthdate of Julius Caesar. When Caesar and Pompey fought for control of the Empire, the Jews supported Caesar because of the evil Pompey had done to the Jewish people including desecrating the Temple and shipping thousands of Judeans to Roman slave markets. Caesar returned Jaffa to Judean control and allowed the walls of Jerusalem to be rebuilt. The Jews of Rome were allowed to organize as a community and Jews living on the Italian peninsula were able to improve their economic condition.
1105: On the secular calendar Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac also known as Rashi passed away. Rashi is a Hebrew acrostic for Rabbi Shlmoh ben Isaac. Born in 1040 he was the leading rabbinic commentator in his day on the TaNaCh and Talmud. His work is so basic to Jewish study, that it is said when we study Torah we must study Rashi. Rashi lived at the time of the Crusades. He passed away five years before the birth of that other great medieval sage, Maimonides. (See the attachment for a fuller treatment of his life.) While there is much to be learned from the teachings of Rashi, there are also lessons that we can learn from his life. While he studied with the greatest teachers in Germany, he lived in a French town with a comparatively small Jewish population. For those living in small towns this should serve as a reminder that living in small town is no reason not to study. Rashi was a Rabbi. He was also a successful businessman. He was a wine merchant who was able to care for his family and support students and yeshivas. In other words, just because most of us have to work for a living, we can still find time for study. Rashi had five daughters and no sons. Unlike the example of the mythical Tevye, Rashi’s daughters were all educated scholars. According to the stories told about them, all five wore tefillin. In other words, for Rashi, women were not to be "barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen." His example means we should be providing a full Jewish education for all of our community, regardless of sex. (See Maggie Anton’s books about Rashi’s daughters for more about this)
1148: Anti-Jewish riots take place in Cordova, Spain.
1391:The richest Jew in Valencia, “the great Don Samuel Abravalla,” was baptized to in the palace of En Gasto. He is now known as Alfonso Ferrandes de Villanueva.
1564: In Brest Litvosk (Lithuania), Abraham, the son of a wealthy and envied Jewish tax collector was accused of killing the family's Christian servant for ritual purposes. He was tortured and executed. King Sigmund Augustus forbade the charge of ritual murder.
1608: Birthdate of Ferdinand III the Holy Roman Emperor who awarded the Jewish community their own banner in recognition for their services in the defense of Prague during the Thirty Years War.
1756: Birthdate of artist and caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson a non-Jew who born in Old Jewry, a street that takes its name from the fact that it was part of a Jewish quarter that had first existed at least as far back as the 13thcentury.
1787: The Continental Congress enacts the Northwest Ordinance establishing governing rules for the Northwest Territory. It is important to note that there were no religious qualifications to settling in the area, owning land or taking part in political activities. This openness encouraged Jews to settle the lands west of the Allegheny Mountains. It also forced some of the east coast states to remove their remaining religious qualifications for participating in state government
1798: Birthdate of Warder Cresson, the Quaker born Philadelphian who changed his name to Michoel Boaz Yisroel ben Avraham when he converted to Judaism. After surviving a sanity hearing, Cresson became an ardent supporter of Jewish settlement in Palestine moving to Jerusalem where he married a Sephardic women, raised a family a eventually passed away.
1815: Future President John Q. Adams wrote in a letter: 'The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, I should still believe fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.'
1841: Birthdate of Austrian architect Otto Wagner.
Budapest
's Rumbach Synagogue, built in the 1870s, was his first major work. There seems to be some dispute as to whether or not Wagner himself was Jewish. We post his name because of the synagogue construction since we have not been able to verify whether or not he was Jewish.
1852: In New York, the Board of Alderman approved placing gas lamps in front of the synagogue on Greene Street.
1859: Sir Moses Motefiore was informed that in an interview Mr. Odo Russell, a British diplomat, had with Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, a senior Vatican official closely associated with the Pope, the latter said that the issue of Edgardo Mortara was “a closed question.” In other words, Vatican was standing fast on the seizure of the Jewish child and had no intention of returning him.
1861: In Nevada, Israel ben Joseph Benjamin, a German-Jewish traveler who was a passenger on one of the first scheduled daily overland stagecoaches passed through Jacobs Well “a foundling way station for changing horses or mules on the Daily Overland Mail stage.”
1863: During the Draft Riots which began today in New York City, mobs came down the street where the Hebrew Orphan Asylum was located but passed the building without attacking.
1865:An article published today entitled "Russia: Extensive Fires" reported that a fire has destroyed 108 houses in Gerdok most of which belonged to Jews. Two children died in the fire. A fire in the Jewish quarter at Grodno destroyed eighty-two houses. The Synagogue in Borisoff was among the buildings that fell victim to the flames when fire swept the town.
1872: According to reports published today, The Jewish Messenger endorsed the proposal of the New York Times that poor and orphaned children in New York should be able to enjoy at least one excursion during the month of July. In urging its readers to contribute to this cause the Messenger reminded that among the beneficiaries would be at least four hundred Jewish children.
1873: An article published today entitled “Cleanliness Versus Godliness” took issue with the contention of the historian Eusebus that the Apostle James never took a bath. “The assertion is most improabable, for not only were all the apostles strict Jews, but St. James, the Bishop or Jerusalem, could least of all have afforded to despise so sacred a Jewish habits as cleanliness” since James “was held in the highest esteem by the Judaizing party in the Church.
1874: Jewish leaders from all over the United States are gathering in Cleveland, Ohio for tomorrow’s meeting of the Council of the American Union of Hebrew Congregations.
1875: Representatives from a group of Jewish congregations from across the United States held their second annual meeting in Buffalo, NY. Joseph Cohn of Pittsburg, PA was elected President; Henry Brock of Buffalo was elected Vice President; Lippman Levy of Cincinnati was elected Secretary; S. J. Lowenstein of Evansville, Indiana was elected Assistant Secretary.
1877: The New York Times featured a review of Poet and Merchant by Bethold Auerbach, “a Jewish romance” in which all but a couple of the characters are Jews.
1878: At the conclusion of the Congress of Berlin, the European powers sign the Treaty of Berlin designed to officially the end of the Russo-Turkish War. One of the issues settled by the treaty was the question of independence for Romania. The Romanians promised that they would improve the treatment of the Jews living in Romania. Rather than trust the Romanian leaders, the authors of the treaty bowed to pressure from influential European Jews and insisted “that Romania must guarantee Jewish political emancipation before her sovereignty could be recognized.” The requirement was incorporated into the Treaty of Berlin under Article 62.
1879: A delegation of Rabbis from congregations across the United States, including both Reform and Orthodox came to house of Rabbi David Einhorn and presented him with a resolution enumerating his various accomplishments as his decades long career. The 72 year old native of Bavaria is retiring as the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth-El with a pension of $3.500.
1879: An article published today based on information from The Saturday Review, a London weekly magazine, examined the life of the late Lionel Rothschild. Rothschild was held in high esteem for his philanthropies that included an unexpectedly large donation for the relief of those who suffered during the Irish Famine in the 1840’s. Rothschild was praised for being more than “nominally a Jew” and for taking a leading role in the affairs of the Jewish community. Rothschild was “too rich too powerful and too socially important to be tempted to seek to rise by a calculated conversion.” On a personal level, one of Rothschild’s crowning moments came when he won the Epsom Derby in 1879 thanks to the efforts of “Sir Bevys.” Much of the prejudice that Jews have experienced in England has dissipated due, in part, to the example of the Rothschilds which includes the unique Jewish trait of “setting as much store on the attainment of high education and the development of business faculties in the women as in the men.”
1881: It was reported today that a resolution was introduced at the 8th annual council of the Union of American Hebrew congregations calling upon the Union to the steps that would lead to the abolition of the Religious Department of the Census Bureau. Those in favor of the proposal felt that the “Church and State were separated by a wide gulf” and that the government did not have any right to ask Americans about their religious beliefs. Those who were opposed to the proposal felt that the Hebrew Union did not have the right to interfere with the operations of the government. The latter view prevailed and the motion was withdrawn.
1882: President Lotte of Cincinnati presided over a meeting of the Executive Board of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations at Saratoga, NY. The Board represents 15 congregations.
1883: It was reported today that the expenses of the Hebrew Union College have exceeded income by $18,200. The shortfall was covered by money taken from the Sinking Fund. In order to avoid further financial problems the Union will collect a head tax of one dollar for each congregant belonging to the congregations across the country.
1885: Marcus Berheimer delivered a welcoming address to the delegates from the United Hebrew Relief Associations from the principle cities in the United States who had gathered in St. Louis to form a union of the Hebrew Charities into a national organization.
1887: At 14thannual meeting of the leaders of the Hebrew Congregations of America, leaders of the Reform Movement expressed their disgust with the treatment of Jewish-American citizens doing business with, or visiting, Russia. The group wants changes made to the Russo-American Treaty that will guarantee American Jews will be treated with same respect as is shown to American Catholics and Protestants.
1889: “Harlem Club and Senator Cantor” published today described attempts to minimize the action of club members. They claimed that the Jewish political leader had not been blackballed; merely postponed. While it was thought that a majority of the members would vote in favor of membership, the “blackball system” would keep that from happening.
1894: Birthdate of Isaak Babel Russian short-story writer and dramatist. He is known by many as the author of "Red Calvary."
Babel
’s artistic career ended when he was arrested by the Soviet secret police in one of those periodic purges brought on by Stalin’s paranoia.
Babel
was shot after a secret trial proved he was a traitor.
1896: Birthdate of Israeli painter Mordecai Ardon. Born in
Poland
when it was part of the Russian Empire, Ardon later moved to
Germany
where he was a student at the "Bauhaus" School from 1920 to 1925. This was the period in German history known as the
Weimar
Republic
. Ardon moved to
Jerusalem
in 1933. He had his first American exhibition at the Jewish Museum in
New York
in 1948. There are numerous websites where you can view his works. He passed away in 1992. One of his most famous is the "Ardon Windows" in the Jewish National and University Library
1896: Herzl meets with representatives of Hovevei Zion Britain.
1904(1st of Av, 5664): Rosh Chodesh Av
1909(24th of Tamuz, 5669): Jacob Bettelheim, the Viennese born dramatist and author passed away in Berlin.
1910: Fire destroys 21 buildings in the Jewish quarter of Salonica, damage near 600,000 Francs.
1911(17th of Tamuz, 5671): Tzom Tammuz
1913: As the wars continue in the Balkans, the Turks capture the Greek city of Didymoteikhon which is ruled by the Bulgarians. Unfortunately for the Jews, who had suffered property losses when the Bulgarians took the city in 1912, the economy continued to deteriorate under Ottoman rule.
1919: Birthdate of Eliot Asinof whose journalistic re-creation of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Eight Men Out became a classic of both baseball literature and narrative nonfiction. Eliot Tager Asinof was born in
Manhattan
and grew up in
Manhattan
and
Cedarhurst
,
N.Y.
His grandfather Morris, a Russian immigrant, was a tailor who eventually opened a men’s store in
Manhattan
.Eliot’s father, Max, worked there, and when young Eliot went to work there as well, it was a tenet that he had to sew a suit before he would be allowed to sell one. The dexterity he developed served him well. Mr. Asinof was an accomplished amateur pianist and sculptor. He was also a carpenter who in 1985, with his son, built the Ancramdale house he lived in for the rest of his life. He shot his age on a golf course for the first time at 79. After graduating from Swarthmore, Mr. Asinof played baseball briefly in the minor leagues — he was a first baseman in the Philadelphia Phillies organization — before he joined the Army. When he returned, his son said, the Phillies invited him to return, but he pulled a muscle during his first practice, and that was it for his sports career. He turned to writing. He also had a gift for finding the company of other gifted people. A compact man with a gravelly voice and a
New York
accent, he was gregarious and shrewdly charming. “A writer whose shrewdness and insight trumped his style, which was plainspoken and realistic, Mr. Asinof was productive and versatile. He wrote more than a dozen books, including a novel, Final Judgment that is set on a college campus and concerns a protest to keep President Bush from delivering a commencement address, and is to be published in September by Bunim & Bannigan. Weeks before his death, his son said, Mr. Asinof completed a memoir of his World War II service in the Army Corps on
Adak
Island
in the
Aleutians
. Seven Days to Sundayhis 1968 account of a week in the life of the New York Giants football team as it prepared for a game, was an early if not groundbreaking enterprise of journalistic embedding in the world of sports. His first novel, Man on Spikespublished in 1955 and based on a longtime friend who spent years in the minor leagues, was a prescient condemnation of baseball’s feudal control over the players. That system was not dissolved until 1975 with the abolition of the so-called reserve clause in standard contracts, which allowed teams to retain in virtual perpetuity the services of players in their employ. Mr. Asinof also wrote for television and the movies, although his published credits were limited, probably because he was among the many writers who were blacklisted in the 1950s. In his case, he once wrote after he got hold of his F.B.I. file, the blacklisting came about because “I had at one time signed a petition outside of Yankee Stadium to encourage the New York Yankees to hire black ballplayers.” But he is best known for “Eight Men Out,” published in 1963, and for the 1988 movie of the same title. The book is an exhaustively reported and slightly fictionalized account of how eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox allowed their anger at the parsimonious team owner, Charles Comiskey, to corrupt their integrity, leading them to welcome the overtures of gamblers, who persuaded them to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. A seminal event in the history of the game, it led to the appointment of the first baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Mr. Asinof spent nearly three years researching the book, including interviewing the two members of the team, Joe Jackson and Happy Feltsch, who were still alive. In the end, “Eight Men Out” was a book that made plain the connection between sport and money and between sport and the underworld. “Here is the underbelly of baseball vividly dissected,” said Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner. In the Camelot of the Kennedy 1960s, the book also made plain, if only by inference, the unsavory potential in American culture, a theme that ran throughout Mr. Asinof’s work. Twenty-five years later, “Eight Men Out” was made into a popular film directed by John Sayles, with a script by Mr. Sayles and Mr. Asinof.” He passed away at the age of 88 in June, 2008.
1919:
London
Jewish Hospital opens for out-patients
1921: Birthdate of Ernest Gold, composer of the score from the hit film “Exodus” for which he won an Oscar.
1921(7th of Tamuz, 5681): Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann a Franco-Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference, later known as the Lippmann plate passed away.
1924: Birthdate of Gyorgy Deutsch the native of Hungary and Holocaust survivor who gained fame as “George Lang, a restaurateur and cookbook writer who in the 1970s transformed Café des Artistes into one of New York’s most romantic, beloved dining spots and in the 1990s helped restore the historic Budapest restaurant Gundel to its former glory.” (As reported by William Grimes)
1925: Flo Ziegfeld and his Ziegfeld Follies begin the creation of what would become an American Icon. Comedian W.C. Fields went home to attend his mother's funeral. In a last minute desperate move, a comparatively unknown cowboy from
Oklahoma
named Will Rogers began his comedic career.
1926: Birthdate of composer Meyer Kupferman.
1930: Robert Sarnoff, head of RCA (Radio Corporation of
America
) tells the in New York Times "TV would be a theater in every home." Okay, so it is not Micah or Jeremiah, but it is a Jew providing prophecy in one sense of the term.
1930: Birthdate of Naomi Shemer one of Israel's most important and prolific song writers. During her lifetime, she was hailed as the "First Lady of Israeli Song." Born Naomi Sapir, Shemer did her own songwriting and composing, as well as setting famous poems to music, such as those of the Israeli poet, Rachel, and adapting well-known songs into Hebrew, such as the Beatles songs "Hey Jude" and "Let it Be" ("Lu Yehi"). Israeli songwriter Naomi Shemer's grave on the shores of the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret)]. The stones were left by visitors, in keeping with an ancient Jewish custom Naomi Shemer was born and raised in Kevutzat Kinneret, a kibbutz that her parents had helped to found, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. In the 1950s she served in the Israeli Defense Force's Nahal entertainment troupe and studied music at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem. She married Mordechai Horowitz and had two children, Lali and Ariel. In 1983, Shemer received the Israel Prize for her contribution to Israeli culture. Several of Shemer's songs have the quality of anthems, striking deep national and emotional chords in the hearts of Israelis. Her most famous song is "Yerushalayim shel zahav" ("Jerusalem of Gold"). She wrote it in 1967, before the Six Day War, and added another stanza after Israel captured East Jerusalem and regained access to the Western Wall. In 1968, Uri Avnery, then a member of the Israeli parliament, proposed that "Jerusalem of Gold" become the Israeli anthem. The proposal was rejected, but the nomination itself says something about the power of Shemer's songs. Shemer continued to write and perform until her death. She died of cancer in 2004 at the age of seventy three.
1933: In
Germany
, Nazism was declared the sole German party.
1935:Birthdate of Tillie Lewis. Born Myrtle Ehrlich, in
Brooklyn
,
NY
, Lewis left high school after one year to work in a wholesale grocery. Noticing the high demand for imported cans of Italian tomatoes, she formed the idea of growing the same variety domestically. Discouraged by agriculture specialists at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, who told her it could not be done, Lewis moved on to other things, studying business and working briefly on Wall Street. However, Lewis returned to her tomato-growing idea in 1934, when the federal government raised the tariff on imported tomato products by 50%. Already on her way to
Italy
for a vacation, Lewis met an Italian exporter, Florindo del Gaizo, worried about losing his American customers. Lewis convinced him that Italian tomatoes could be grown in
California
, and they combined parts of their first names to create Flotill Products Inc. On
July 13, 19
35
, her 34th birthday, Lewis opened the first Flotill cannery in
Stockton
,
California
. Two years later, when del Gaizo died, Lewis bought out his share of the business. By 1940, she had made
San Joaquin
County
the top tomato-producing county in the
United States
. In addition to tomatoes, Lewis's Flotill Products, Inc., canned other fruits and vegetables, baby food, and frozen juices; during the Second World War, the company also became the largest producer of C-rations for the U.S. Army. By 1951, Flotill Products, later known as Tillie Lewis Foods, Inc., was earning $30 million per year, making it one of the five largest canning companies in the country. In the same year, Lewis was named "businesswoman of the year" by the Associated Press. In 1952, the company introduced a line of diet foods using low-calorie sweeteners and known as Tasti-Diet. Tillie Lewis Foods was eventually bought by the Ogden Corporation, which made Lewis one of its directors. Lewis died in 1977, but the Italian pomodora tomatoes she introduced to the
U.S.
are still a staple of American agriculture.
1936: The Palestine Post reported that two Jews were seriously injured by Arabs in
Jerusalem
. Figures prepared by this newspaper indicated that 41 Jews had been killed and over 150 seriously injured since the outbreak of the Arab disturbances on April 19. British forces lost five men. The estimated damage to Jewish property was over 100,000 pounds. The
Tel
Aviv
Port
jetty had been lengthened to 200 meters.
1937(5thof Av, 5697): Edgard Cattaui, the son of Moise Cattaui and Ida Ross and the husband of Lia Cattaui passed away today in Cairo.
1938:Declaring that the maintenance of a proper Supreme Court was of paramount concern to the country, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg urged in a speech here tonight that an extra session of the Senate be called before the Supreme Court convened in October to confirm or reject President Roosevelt's nominee to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo
1938:The immediate transfer to Palestine of "tens of thousands of Jewish children now trapped in Germany, Austria and Poland" was urged by Hadassah, the women's Zionist organization of America, in a message sent today to the London executive of the Jewish Agency for Palestine for transmission to the Intergovernmental Refugees Committee, meeting in Evian, France. The message was signed my Mrs. Moses P. Epstein, president of the organization and sent on behalf of Hadassah’s 70,000 members.
1941: Birthdate of Ehud Manor “an Israeli songwriter, translator, and radio and TV personality.”
1942: French police arrested author Irene Nemirovsky, as “a foreign Jew.” She was shipped to
Auschwitz
where she died five weeks later at the age of 39. She gained famed in the 21stcentury with posthumous publication of two newly discovered manuscripts, Suite Francaise and Fire in the Blood.
1942: Five thousand Jews of Rovno (Polish Ukraine) were executed by the Nazis.
1942: The Einsatzkommando returned to daily actions of murder. Seven thousand Jews were rounded up in Rowne ghetto. Over the next two days, the SS would slaughter 5,000 of them.
1944: The Red Army liberated
Vilna
,
Lithuania
. Eight thousand Nazis and their allies had been killed during the five day fight. The legions of the Red Army included the Jewish partisans led by Abba Kovner and his two closest associates, Vita Kempner and Ruzka Korczak. On this day, the Jewish partisans first met Ilya Ehrenburg, “a Jew from Russia, a writer and poet whose dispatches from the front had been a tremendous inspiration” for these and other partisans fighting in the woods and marshes of Eastern Europe. Ehrenburg took pictures of the Jewish brigade and was the first to tell their story to a wide, non-Jewish audience.
1945:Birthdate of Ilan Shlagi, an Israeli political leader who served in the Knesset and held several cabinet positions including Minister of the Environment and Minister of Science & Technology
1946(14th of Tammuz, 5706): Alfred Stieglitz passed away. Born in 1864 Stieglitz was the first born son of German Jewish immigrant parents. He became one of
Americas
most famous and prominent photographers. He was also instrumental in promoting modernist art to the American mainstream public.
1947: Emil Andsrom and two his UNSCOP colleagues held a secret meeting with the leaders of the Haganah in the
Jerusalem
suburb of Talipot. They wanted to know if the Haganah had the means and the will to protect the Jewish areas against Arab attack in the event of the establishment of a Jewish state. The six Haganah representatives, including Yigael Yadin, made a strong case in the affirmative. Their arguments were based, in part on their zeal, in part on their determination and, in part, their ability to artfully dodge the questions being asked.
1948: During the War of Independence Abba Eban spoke before the U.N. Security Council. He questioned why the Arabs had rejected the U.N. request to extend the cease fire between the Arabs and the Israelis for another ten days. Using the majestic tones of a
Cambridge
graduate he asked, “What are the ambitions which rest upon so flimsy a moral foundation that they cannot endure tend days and nights of peace?”
1948: During the War of Independence, Israeli forces continued their efforts to widen the corridor between Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem
. To that end, they captured the
village
of
Tsora
– the birthplace of the Biblical figure Samson – from the Egyptians. This gave the Israelis control over another section of the railway running between the coast and the City of
David
.
1948: During the War of Independence, an Irgun unit began a night attack on Malah that lasted into the early hours of July 14. “Seventeen Irgunists were killed including Nathan Cahsman, from
London
, who had arrived in
Israel
on the ill-fated Atalena.
1950: At Boston’s Suffolk Downs, a three year old named Tel Aviv runs in the Fourth Race, a six furlong claiming event.
1950: In discussing the guiding principles of Israel’s foreign policy, Moshe Sharett said “that in the ideological struggle between the democratic and communist social orders Israel had definitely chosen democracy…Israel is most eager to promote friendly relations with all nations, regardless of their internal regimes. Yet it was impossible to ignore the fact that it only in democratic countries that Jewish communities enjoyed freedom of organization, expression and independent activity.”
1951(9th of Tamuz, 5711): Arnold Schoenberg passed away. Born in
Vienna
in 1874, Schoenberg enjoyed a brilliant musical career. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was dismissed from his post as a director of a school for musical composition at the
Prussian
Academy
of Arts in
Berlin
. His response was a formal, public return to the Jewish faith, which he had left early in life.
America
offered a haven and became his home. He wrote numerous works using Jewish themes including the Holocaust and the birth of the state of
Israel
.
1951: Birthdate of Edith Bernstein who morphed into
Didi
Conn
, an actress who has appeared in film on the stage, and in television.
1951: The Jerusalem Post reported that 128,000 immigrants entered Israel during the first half of 1951 (one every two minutes). Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion presided over the meeting of the government-Jewish Agency's Coordination Board responsible for the newcomers' housing, employment and the state of sanitation in transit camps. "The attainment of freedom and security often takes precedence over personal convenience," David Ben-Gurion told a large audience in
Beersheba
.
1955:Birthdate of Ehud Havazelet an award-winning American novelist and short story writer who was born in Jerusalem. His father, Meir Havazalet, a rabbi and professor at Yeshiva University immigrated to the United States in 1957. He graduated from Columbia University in 1977, and received an M.F.A at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1984. He became a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, from 1985 to 1989, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He taught creative writing at Oregon State University from 1989 to 1999. Since 1999, he has taught creative writing at the University of Oregon.
1963: Israel adopts a law prohibiting the raising of pigs in Jewish settlements.
1969:The New York Times featured a review of The Story of Masada by Yigael Yadin; retold for young readers by Gerald Gottlieb.
1972: Carroll Rosenbloom, owner of the Baltimore Colts, traded teams with the owner of the Los Angeles Rams. Rosenbloom was now the owner of the Los Angeles Rams, which became the St. Louis Rams.
1976: The Jerusalem Post reported that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Knesset, at the special festive session marking the
US
bicentennial, that a strong and confident
America
was needed to assure freedom, democracy and peace. The Knesset sent a special, congratulatory message to the US Congress.
1976: The Jerusalem Post reported that in London, the British minister of state announced that there was little doubt that Mrs. Dora Bloch was dead and that the Ugandan government must bring those responsible to justice.
Britain
regarded all Ugandan explanations as "totally unacceptable."
1978: Alexander Ginzburg, Soviet poet and political dissident was sentenced by a Soviet court to 8 years in prison. Although he was a practicing Russian Orthodox Christian, he adopted his mother's Jewish family name as a young man to protest Stalin's anti-Semitic campaigns.
1979: A 45-hour siege began at the Egyptian Embassy in
Ankara
,
Turkey
. Four Palestinian guerrillas killed two security men and seized 20 hostages. Now that
Egypt
was at peace with
Israel
, she was fair game for attack by Palestinian terrorists.
1989: Thirteenth Maccabiah comes to an end.
1989: At
six o’clock
in the evening al public transport in
Jerusalem
stopped for one minute in memory of a terrorist attack that had taken place on July 6 that targeted bus 405 that ran between Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem
.
1992: David Levy steps down as Israel’s Foreign Minister.
1992:Rafael Pinhasi finished his term as Israel’s Communication Minister. Born in Kabul in 1940, Pinhasi made Aliyah in 1950. A member of Shas, he has held a variety of positions in local and national governmental positions.
1992: Labor Party MK Moseh Shahal began serving as Communications Ministers
1992:Binyamin Ben-Eliezer was appointed Minister of Housing and Construction in Yitzhak Rabin's government.
1992: Moshe Shahal begins serving as Israel’s Communication Minister. Born in 1934 in Iraq, he made Aliyah in 1950. After graduating with a law degree from Tel Aviv University, he began a political career that included a variety of governmental positions and membership in the Alignment and Labor Parties.
1992: Yitzhak Shamir completed his second term as Prime Minister of Israel.
1997: In an article entitled “Israel Games Draw Westchester Athletes,” Chuck Slater provides a graphic portrait of Lorin Ambinder, Nina Zeitlin, Matthew Deutsch and Scott Grayson, the four young athletes from Westchester County who are in Israel to represent the United States in the 15th Maccabiah Games, opening tomorrow.
1997: The Sunday New York Times book section features a review of The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History by Isaiah Berlin and Man Without A Face the autobiography of East Germany’s spymaster Markus Wolf, the German Jew, who while head of Stasi, provided training camps for the PLO in East Germany where they could master the use of guns, explosives and guerilla tactics. Yes, Isaiah
Berlin
and Markus Wolf are both Jews which raises the question, “what is a typical Jew?”
1998: Silvan Shalom succeeded Michael Etian as Minister of Science and Technology.
2000:Jan Karski, a liaison officer of the Polish underground who infiltrated both the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp and then carried the first eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to a mostly disbelieving “West,” died in Washington. Mr. Karski, a retired professor of history at
Georgetown
University
, was 86 years old. He died of heart and kidney ailments at
Georgetown
University
Hospital
, the university said. In the late summer of 1942, Mr. Karski, then a 28-year-old clandestine diplomat in
Warsaw
for the Polish government-in-exile in London was preparing for a secret mission to carry information from Nazi-occupied
Poland
to
London
and
Washington
. Before leaving
Warsaw
, he was visited by two leaders of the Jewish underground who had managed to leave the Ghetto briefly to tell him about what they called ''Hitler's war against the Polish Jews.'' They said that by their calculations, more than 1.8 million Jews had already been killed by the Germans and that 300,000 of the 500,000 Jews jammed into the Warsaw Ghetto had been deported to an obscure village about 60 miles from
Warsaw
where the Germans had set up a death camp. They asked him if he could carry their information to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. They also asked if he would be willing to enter the Ghetto and see for himself what was happening. Mr. Karski, a Roman Catholic from a patriotic Polish family who seems to have been blessed with a photographic memory, agreed. By that time he had already endured a horrible war. Karski was his nom de guerre; he had been born Jan Kozielewski, the youngest of eight children, in Lodz, Poland's second-largest city, in 1914. He was a prize student and was recruited into the Polish diplomatic service, where he was quickly given coveted assignments to
London
and
Paris
. But as war approached, he enlisted in the army and was serving as a cavalry officer in 1939 when German soldiers, followed less than two weeks later by Russian troops, invaded
Poland
and divided the country. Mr. Karski was captured by the Soviets and placed in a detention camp. He escaped and joined the Polish underground; most of the Polish officers imprisoned with him were later executed by Soviet troops. Mr. Karski became a skilled courier for the underground, crossing enemy lines as a liaison between the Polish fighters and the West. He was captured by the Gestapo while on a mission in
Slovakia
in 1940 and was savagely tortured. Fearful that he might reveal secrets, he slashed his wrists and was put into a hospital. An underground commando team helped him escape, and he resumed his work as a clandestine liaison officer. In October 1939, the Germans enclosed the main Jewish areas in
Warsaw
with barbed wire. In less than a year the Ghetto was walled in, trapping half a million Jews. By July 1942 the first mass deportations of Jews to extermination camps had begun. In the third week of August 1942, Mr. Karski entered the cellar of an apartment house on the so-called Aryan side of the Ghetto wall and met with a youth from the Jewish Combat Organization, then secretly being formed in the Ghetto. The youth gave him some ragged clothes and an armband with a blue Star of David and led him through a recently dug tunnel. As they emerged, Mr. Karski saw the Ghetto streets and tenements crowded with haggard, hungry and dying Jews. Decades later, when asked to describe what he had seen, Mr. Karski would usually simply say, ''I saw terrible things.'' But on some occasions, for example in ''Shoah,'' Claude Lanzmann's classic documentary about the Holocaust, he would tell of seeing many naked dead bodies lying in the streets, and describe emaciated and starving people, listless infants and older children with expressionless eyes. He remembered watching from an apartment while two pudgy teenage boys in the uniforms of the Hitler Youth hunted Jews for sport, cheering and laughing when one of their rifle shots struck its target and brought screams of agony. One of the Jews who had prompted Mr. Karski to enter the Ghetto, and who escorted him, was Leon Feiner, a lawyer. Mr. Karski recalled that Mr. Feiner kept murmuring, ''Remember this, remember this.'' There was also another escort whose name Mr. Karski never learned. They both urged Mr. Karski to tell what he was witnessing to as many people in the West as he could, though they knew the facts would be hard to believe. At the time of Mr. Karski's visit, the expulsions from
Warsaw
had temporarily subsided, but they were to intensify in September as the liquidation of the Ghetto resumed in earnest. Mr. Feiner was among the hundreds of thousands who died. There were five points that the two men in the Ghetto asked Mr. Karski to pass on to the Allied leaders: *Preventing the extermination of the Jews should be declared an official goal of the Allies fighting Hitler. *Allied propaganda should be used to inform the German people of the war crimes taking place and to publicize the names of German officials taking part. *The Allies should appeal to the German people to bring pressure on Hitler's regime to stop the slaughter. *The Allies should declare that if the genocide continued and the German masses did not rise to stop it, the German people would be held collectively responsible. *Finally, if nothing else worked, the Allies should carry out reprisals by bombing German cultural sites and executing Germans in Allied hands who still professed loyalty to Hitler. Mr. Karski later said that the Jews' proposals were ''bitter and unrealistic,'' as if they knew such a program could not and would not be carried out, and that he had told them their five points went beyond international law. For the rest of his life he remembered the response of the man accompanying Mr. Feiner: ''We don't know what is realistic, or not realistic. We are dying here! Say it!'' Mr. Karski asked what he should say to Jewish leaders abroad. Unhesitatingly his hosts told him that such leaders should consider hunger strikes, fasting to death if necessary, to shake the conscience of the world. Mr. Feiner then asked if Mr. Karski was still ready to carry out another fact-finding mission: Would he be willing to see for himself what was happening at one of the camps to which the trainloads of Jews were being sent? Mr. Karski consented, and a few days later he and a member of the Jewish resistance went by train from
Warsaw
to Izbica, a small town near
Warsaw
. There, his Jewish guide turned him over to the owner of a hardware store who was a member of the Polish underground. Mr. Karski was given the uniform of a Ukrainian militiaman working under the German command who had been bribed to take the day off. Another Ukrainian guard -- also bribed -- then led him to a large area encircled by barbed wire. Mr. Karski heard keening cries of men and women and thought he smelled burning flesh. Soon he witnessed the arrival of several thousand starving and frightened Jews who had been brought to the camp from
Czechoslovakia
. He watched as their valises and bags were taken away from them. Then he saw Jews being beaten and stabbed. Ranks of uniformed men pressed the crowd onto waiting box cars that had been coated with quicklime. Those who fell or fainted or who could not move were thrown into the cars. When no more bodies could fit inside, the doors were shut. Mr. Karski was told that the trains were heading for a camp not far away where their human cargo would be led into gas chambers. But he was also told that sometimes the trains were just left on sidings until those inside starved or suffocated. Mr. Karski returned to
Warsaw
to prepare himself for his dangerous journey to
London
. He was given a key whose soldered shaft contained microfilm of hundreds of documents. He went to a dentist and had several teeth pulled so that the resultant swelling could provide him with a reason why he couldn't talk if he was stopped by Germans; he was certain his Polish-accented German would give him away. Using local trains, he went to
Berlin
, the capital of the Reich, then through
Vichy
France
to
<st1:place w: