December 24 In Jewish History
1166: Birthdate of King John of
England
. King John is known to history as the brother of Richard the Lionhearted whom he followed to the throne in 1199. He is also the monarch who was so rapacious that the English nobles banned together and forced him to sign the Magna Charta, which placed limits on the power of the King. John’s record in dealing with the Jews was uneven, to say the least. Since Jews fell outside of the norms of the feudal world of the Middle Ages, special provisions were needed to deal with them. Two years after coming to power, King John issued a special charter guaranteeing the rights of the Jews while he reigned as long as they conformed to all laws and decrees i.e. provided a steady flow of funds to the royal treasury. In essence, the Jews were “the king’s possession” to do with as he pleased. So this same King John, when he needed more money, imprisoned several wealthy Jews in a castle at
Bristol
in 1210 and held them until they paid a ransom of 66,000 marks. John’s son followed his father’s pattern of behavior in dealing with the Jews. His grandson would expel the Jews from
England
after squeezing them of all their financial value.
1294: Pope Boniface VIII is elected Pope.In 1298, four years after Boniface came to power, 628 Jews are killed after a priest Nuremberg, Germany, spreads a story that Jews drove nails through communion hosts, "thereby crucifying Christ again". There are those who hold Boniface accountable for this murderous act, if for no other reason that it took place during his “undistinguished” papal rule.
1354: The Jews of Speyer, Germany were given permission to open a school and synagogue.
1491: Birthdate Ignatius of Loyola, Spanish founder of the Jesuit order. Loyola was born one year before the Jewish expulsion from Spain. He lived during a period dominated by the Inquistion and Church sanctioned anti-Semitism. “It is accordingly much to their credit that the Jesuits were firmly opposed (particularly under Ignatius and his first three successors as Superior General of the Jesuits) to ecclesiastical anti-Semitism and to the Inquisition's persecution of suspected Jews. When Ignatius was accused of having partly Jewish ancestry, he replied, ‘If only I did! What could be more glorious than to be of the same blood as the Apostles, the Blessed Virgin, and our Lord Himself?’”
1529: According to various sources date on which Kabbalist, poet and author Shlomo Alkabetz (שלמה אלקבץ) married the daughter of one Yitzchak Cohen, a wealthy householder living in Salonica. His most famous work was 'Lecha Dodi', the hymn that marks the start of the Shabbat.
1610: Spain and the Dutch Republic signed a treaty recognizing free commerce between the Netherlands and Morocco, and allowing the sultan to purchase ships, arms and munitions from the Dutch. This was one of the first official treaties between a European country and a non-Christian nation, after the 16th-Century treaties of the Franco-Ottoman alliance. Samuel Pallache, a Jewish-Moroccan merchant, was the lead negotiator during the negotiations. He had been appointed as the Ottoman envoy to the Dutch Republic by sultan Zidan Abu Maali in 1608.
1696: On Christmas Eve, at
Evora
,
Portugal
, a group of alleged heretics were led from the palace of the Inquisition (still existing today) to the Roman square, the most visible height of the town, where they were burned. Evora, a provincial capital of
Portugal
, had been an important center for Marrano Jews.
1789: During the French Revolution, the National Assembly approved a law granting Protestants equal rights with Catholics. The Assembly refused to extend the same rights to the Jews of France.
1798: Birthdate of Adam Bernard Mickiewicz, poet, author and Polish nationalist who sought to organize a military force to fight against the Russians during the Crimean War. To that end, he worked with Armand Levy to organize a military unit made up of Russian and Palestinian Jews called the Hussars of Israel to fight against the forces of the Czar – the same Czar who was the impediment to Polish independence.
1814: The Treaty of Ghent is signed ending the War of 1812 which is also referred to as the Second War for American Independence. As has been the case in all other conflicts, Jews played an active role in the military. The most famous of them was Uriah P. Levy whose naval career would see him rise to the rank of Commodore despite having to deal with anti-Semitism. Captain John Ordronaux gained famed as a privateer. Several grandsons of Mordechai Sheftal, the Georgian who gained fame during the Revolutionary War fought the British as did one of the sons of Haym Solomon. Thirty Jews were part of the force that defended Fort McHenry. Captain Mordecai Myers distinguished himself on the water of Lake Ontario and Major Abraham Massaias helped to “foil British attempts to invade Georgia from the sea.” Last but not least is Judah Touro who would fight with Andrew Jackson’s forces at the Battle of New Orleans. As we all know, this most famous battle of the War of 1812 was fought on January 8, 1815, more than two weeks after the war had officially come to an end.
1834: A letter of this date written from Jerusalem stated “It should be known to you that from other lands, worthy people are actually streaming to the Four Holy Cities (Hebron, Jerusalem, Tiberias and Safed)” which is part of the proof offered by Arei Morgenstern in his book” Hastening Redemption: Messianism and the Resettlement of the Land of Israel” that there a significant number of Haredim had made Aliyah prior to the birth of the modern Zionist movement at the end of the 19th century.
1841: As the conflict between traditionalist and reformers in the Anglo-Jewish community becomes increasingly strident, The Voice of Jacob published an article with a relatively conciliatory tone under the heading ““The attempt to establish a secession synagogue in London.” The article’s author clung to the notion that “that reform group was unlikely to wield any influence.” Considering the names of the people tied to the Reform movement, this seemed like “a vain hope.”
1841: Birthdate of Flaminio Ephraim Servi, the native of Pitigliano, Tuscany who served as rabbi in several communities including Casael-Moneferrato where he was the Chief Rabbi.
1845(25th of Kislev, 5606): Jews in Texas observe Chanukah as members of an independent republic for the last time.
1849: Birthdate of Charles Ephrussi, scion of prominent Jewish banking family from Odessa who gained fame as an art critic and collector
1851: The President of the Hebrew Benevolent Associations attended tonight’s Anniversary Dinner commemorating the first landing of the Pilgrims hosted by the Sons of New England at the Astor House.
1855: Today’s “Parisian Gossip Column” reported a claim by French publicist and editor Taxila Delord that Mlle. Rachel, the famous Jewish actress is planning on returning to France from the United States without completing all of the performances to which she had agreed.
1857: Uriah P. Levy was restored to active duty. Naval officials had tried to end his career prematurely, due in part, to the fact that he was Jewish. Levy played a key role in putting an end to flogging as a punishment for common sea men. He also was responsible for saving the library that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson.
1864(25th of Kislev, 5625): First Day of Chanukah
1865: A group of Confederate veterans met in
Tennessee
and founded the Ku Klux Klan. The first leader of this violent hate group was
Nathan
Bedford
Forest
, the Confederate General who commanded troops at the infamous Fort Pillow Massacre. Klan members have attacked Blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants and just about everybody else who is not just like them. The Klan has fallen several times only to reappear in more virulent forms at a later date. The Klan is not just a Southern phenomenon. During the 1920's one of the largest groups of Klansmen could be found in
Indiana
. During that same decade, the hooded hate-mongers staged a parade in
Washington
,
D.C.
with no objection worth noting. Any attempt to rationalize or romanticize the Klan's behavior smacks of the worst form of revisionism.
1868(10thof Tevet, 5629): Asara B’Tevet
1868: Birthdate of Emanuel Lasker. Lasker was a mathematician who gained fame as a chess player. He was “World Champion” from 1894 through 1921. In one of those on-going ironies of the way history is recorded, Lasker is identified as a “German chess champion” even though he was the kind of German who was forced to flee for his life in the 1930’s. Lasker finally found refuge in the
United States
where he died in 1941.
1870(30thof Kislev, 5631): Rosh Chodesh Kislev
1871(19 Tevet 5631): Abraham Samuel Benjamin (The Ktav Sofer) passed away. Born in 1815, he was a Rabbi, educator and Orthodox leader of Hungarian Jewry. He was the son of Moses Sofer and took his father’s place upon his death in 1839. His Responsa and clarification on the Torah were published under the title Ktav Sofer.
1873: Birthdate of C.G. (Charles Gabriel) Seligman. He was a pioneer in British anthropology who conducted significant field research in
Melanesia
,
Ceylon
(now
Sri Lanka
), and, most importantly, the Nilotic Sudan. After completing his medical education, in 1898 he went with the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits. Subsequently, his interests turned from medical research towards anthropology. In 1904l he revisited
New Guinea
to distinguish the characteristic racial, cultural, and social traits of the peoples of the region. In the 1920's, he pioneered a psychoanalytic approach: studying cross-cultural similarity of dreams. He concluded that the psychology of the unconscious could provide an approach to some basic anthropological problems. He died in 1940.
1881: It was reported today that Baron Gustav Rothschild has purchased a “woodland tract around Chantilly for which he paid the state” approximately a million dollars.
1881: It was reported today that a near riot had broken out in Odessa, Russia, as people sought to buys tickets for the upcoming performances of Sarah Bernhardt.
1882: It was reported today that Judge Arnoux has lifted the temporary injunctions that restrained the police from arresting Jewish merchants who kept their stores open on Sunday. In his ruling, Arnoux said that the state legislature has designated the “first day of the week” as the day on which numerous commercial activities are prohibited and that it would be a violation of that stance to allow those who observe a different day of the week as a day of rest to remain open on Sunday. In other words, Jews who do business on Sunday are subject to arrest. The ruling did not prohibit Jewish merchants from contesting the constitutionality of the law if they face trial on such a violation.
1882: It was reported today that Annie Littlestein, the 19 year old Jewish immigrant from Poland who had been saved after she jumped into the East River had fled her home after a violent altercation with her jealous husband. The couple has one child whom the police gave back to its mother after the husband disappeared from the home. (Life in the new world was not always an easy walk on Streets Paved With Gold)
1883(25thof Kislev, 5644): Chanukah
1886: Birthdate of Hungarian born film director Michael Curtiz. He directed everybody from Errol Flynn to Elvis Presley. Like so many other Jewish immigrants he helped develop American Middle American culture with films like Yankee Doodle Dandy and White Christmas. But his most famous effort is the all time classic “
Casablanca
.”
1887: It was reported today that Bishop Potter, New York’s leading Presbyterian minister, publicly praised the contributions of the Jews of New York to the Sunday Hospital Fund and said that their generosity should serve as an example to Christians who have not been nearly as generous.
1887: It was reported today that among those contributing to the non-denominational Sunday Hospital Fund were Mrs. J.H. Lazarus ($10.00) and Congregation B’nai Jeshurun ($50.00)
1891: In Vienna, Rosa Korngut and Nathan Birnbaum gave birth to “Yiddish linguist and Hebrew paleographer,” Solomon Birnbaum
1893: The American Hebrew was founded byF. de Sola Mendes and Philip Cowen, the publisher of the paper.
1906: Birthdate of German-born American composer Franz Waxman. His film scores netted him 12 Oscar nominations and two back to back Academy Awards for “Sunset Place” and “
A Place
in the Sun.”
1907: Birthdate of I.F. (Isidore Feinstein) Stone. Stone was a left-wing journalistic gadfly who published “I.F. Stone’s Weekly.”
1910: Birthdate of author Fritz Leiber. The Phi Beta Kappa graduate won three Hugo awards for his science fiction writing including Ship of Shadows.
1912: Marguerite Thompson married William Zorach, the Lithuanian born American Jewish sculptor, painter, printmaker, and writer who won the Logan Medal of the arts.
1913(25thof Kislev, 5674): Jews observe Chanukah for the last time in a world that is not at war.
1913: Birthdate of Bernard Manischewitz, the native of Cincinnati, Ohio who was the last member of his family to preside over the worldwide kosher food empire that began when his grandfather opened a small matzo bakery in Cincinnati. Mr. Manischewitz was president of the B. Manischewitz Company for 26 years, until he supervised its sale to a group led by Kohlberg & Company in 1990. At the time, it had $1.5 billion in annual sales and exported its products, from gefilte fish to borscht, around the world. It then controlled 80 percent of the United States market for matzo, the unleavened bread eaten year-round but especially at Passover. Mr. Manischewitz's father, Jacob, gave him his first job with the company when he assigned him to inspect the production line to make sure the flat, cracker-like matzos did not break. He eventually became one of the three first cousins who ran the company in its third generation, continuing alone after the others died. The cousins followed the five sons of Rabbi Dov Behr Manischewitz, who began the bakery in 1888. In the company's early stages, the rabbi installed certain innovations that were challenged by rabbinical authorities as violating Jewish dietary laws. Rabbi Manischewitz, however, argued strongly that his methods were more sanitary and led to standardized quality. Rabbi Manischewitz also began insisting in advertisements that customers ask for his matzos by the name Manischewitz in order to counter imitators who copied his original name, Cincinnati matzos. In 1932, the company built a second factory, in Jersey City, which quickly became the center of operations. By 1949, Bernard Manischewitz's generation had taken over. He was president, D. Beryl Manischewitz was chairman and William Manischewitz was treasurer. An article in The New York Times in 1951 told how Bernard Manischewitz was leading the company into preparing more than 70 different kosher foods, in addition to matzo, including frozen fish and poultry, canned borscht and chicken soup, and the Tam Tam cracker. Wines with the name Manischewitz were sold throughout the country under a licensing arrangement. In an interview with The Times in 1956, Mr. Manischewitz suggested that those products signified the biggest change in Jewish domestic life since biblical times. He said all but the most strictly Orthodox homemakers had been released from "the compulsory obsession with the problems of cooking." He also noted that American processed kosher foods were selling well in Europe and even in Israel. All this expansion called for snappy — or at least memorable — advertising. One tongue-in-cheek radio ad advised listeners not to eat Manischewitz matzos in bed because they were crispier and so might cause "a crummy night's sleep." Bernard Manischewitz attended Syracuse University for a year and graduated from New York University with a business degree. He later took night courses in factory management. One of the last battles of his career came in 1990, when the company faced charges of conspiring to fix the price of Passover matzos. It ended in 1991 with the company pleading no contest to a single criminal indictment and paying a $1 million fine. Mr. Manischewitz was an intensely private man who avoided using his own name to register in hotels and make restaurant reservations, Dr. Hoffman said. He also believed that not dropping his name made good business sense. When he was in Alaska bargaining over the price of whitefish for making gefilte fish, Dr. Hoffman said, he feared that if people knew he was Mr. Manischewitz, they might expect a higher price. He passed away in 2003 at the age of 89. (As reported by Douglas Martin)
1913: Melech Epstein, the Russian born “Jewish American journalist and historian” arrived at Ellis Island. He was the author of Jewish Labor in U.S.A. and The Jew and Communism.
1914; During World War I The "Christmas truce" begins on the Western Front. For more about this amazing tale read Silent Night: The Story of The World War I Christmas Truce by the Jewish author, Stanley Weintraub's and you will see how a Christmas book can be considered a “Jewish Book.”
1916: The New York Times featured a review of Isaac Mayer Wise: The Founder of American Judaism, a biography of the founder of Reform Judaism, written by Max B. May
1918: Birthdate of Anwar El Sadat. Sadat served as President of Egypt from 1970 until his murder in 1981. Sadat’s trip to
Jerusalem
and subsequent signing of the Camp David Peace Agreement make him a “Profile in Courage.”
1920: Enrico Caruso gave his last public performance, singing in Jacques Halevy's ''La Juive'' (The Jewess) at the Metropolitan Opera in
New York
. Halevy was the son of a cantor. In writing “La Juive” he created the role of Eléazar one of the great favorites of tenors including Enrico Caruso. The opera's most famous aria is Eléazar's "Rachel, quand du Seigneur”.
1923: Birthdate of David Frank Friedman a film producer from Birmingham, Alabama, who cheerfully and cheesily exploited an audience’s hunger for bare-breasted women and blood-dripping corpses in lucrative low-budget films like “Blood Feast” and “Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.” (As reported by Bruce Weber)
1924: Albania becomes a republic. Jews had lived in parts of what is now
Albania
since Roman times. As part of the Ottoman Empire Albania provided a refuge for Jews fleeing from the Inquisition (a role it was to play again during the Shoah). An independent
Albania
had actually been created just before World War I in one of the on-going dismemberments of the
Ottoman Empire
. After the war, there were probably 200 Jews living in the country.
1925: In the Bronx, NY, Hetty and Max Schmertz gave birth to Eric Joseph Schmertz “who as one of the nation’s most relied-upon labor peacemakers helped resolve thousands of labor disputes, getting both the Rockettes and New York City cab drivers to end strikes in the 1960s.” (As reported by Dennis Hevesi)
1931: Birthdate of Argentinean born composer and director Maricio Kagel.
1932: Birthdate of Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus.
1936(10th of Tevet, 5697): Asara B'Tevet
1937: The Palestine Postreported that 11 Arabs were killed, scores wounded, and one captured, in a battle fought by a strong police and military force against a large Arab band northeast of
Nazareth
. An Arab gang attack was repulsed at Kibbutz Alonim. Telephone lines were cut in numerous places throughout the country.
1937: In a leading article the Post sadly reflected that at Christmas-time the world picture hardly presented a flattering reflection of a Christian ideal. The situation in
Europe
was painfully familiar and needed no elaboration, while in
Palestine
, in which the centuries-old history of Christianity had its roots, peace seemed intractable.
1938: Several members of the American Catholic hierarchy and leading Protestants sign a Christmas resolution expressing "horror and shame" in response to the Kristallnacht pogrom.
1940: Birthdate of Shaul Amor, the native of Morocco who made Aliyah in 1956 and was elected to the Knesset for the first time in 1988/
1940: In advising the Mandate Government as to how to deal with Jewish immigration to Palestine after the Patria incident Churchill sent a memo urging the government to consider their promises to the Zionists and to guided by general considerations of humanity towards those fleeing from the cruelest forms of persecution. The Permanent Under Secretary of State ignored Churchill’s request and successfully convinced his colleagues not let Churchill know of their decision to suspend Jewish legal immigration until September, 1941.
1940: Release date of the Czech film “Ecstacy” starring Hedy Lamar, who was the daughter of two assimilated Viennese Jews – Gertrude and Emil Kiesler.
1942: Following a successful attack on Nazi troops at the Cyganeria, a coffee house in Cracow, Poland, the German authorities launched a massive retaliatory campaign aimed at destroying the Jewish Fighting Organization.
1942: Hundreds of Jews were captured after another German manhunt in the woods of Parczew.
1942:On Christmas Eve before Barney Ross and his Marines were to go to battle the famous Father Frederic Gehring, a war-time chaplain who wrote regular correspondences for Reader's Digest magazine asked Ross to take part in what would become one of the most poignant such events of the war. During his time in Guadalcanal, Ross had begun what would be a life-long friendship with Gehring who considered Ross a national treasure who defied logic when it came to bravery and the defense of principle. Ross was the only one capable of playing a temperamental organ on the tropical island, so Gehring asked him to learn Silent Night and other Christmas songs for the troops. Barney played these songs and sang with the homesick young men, after which Gehring implored Ross to play a Jewish song. Ross played a melancholy song called "My Yiddishe Momma" about a child's love for his self-sacrificing mother. Many of the Marines knew the melody of the song because Ross always had it played when he entered the ring. But when the Marines heard the heart-rending lyrics, newspaper reports say they were all in tears. After Ross's single-handed victory in the battle at Guadalcanal, he was viewed as almost superhuman, particularly based on all he had to overcome in his troubled life.
1942: During his Christmas Eve address, Pope Pius mentioned “the hundreds of thousands who without any fault of their own sometimes only by reasons of their nationality or race are marked for death or gradual extinction.” Despite having been told about the fate of the Jews of Europe, the Pope chooses not to condemn those who are engaged in the slaughter known as “The Final Solution.”
1943: As the Soviet Army began advancing toward
Berlin
, the Nazis worked furiously to cover up the slaughter of the Jews. At the infamous Fort Number Nine (known as “the Slaughterhouse") in the Kovno Ghetto the Bobel Commando unit composed of 64 Jews dug up and assisted in the burring of 12,000 bodies out of the 70,000 that had been murdered there since the winter of 1941. On this Christmas Eve they attempted their escape while the guards celebrated. Nineteen would survive and tell the horror story of Bobel Commando Unit. In Borki, a similar attempt to escape was undertaken by its Bobel Commando Unit. Of 60 who tried, only 3 escaped to live through the war. One, Josef Sterdyner, testified at the trial of the Borki guards in 1962. Another, Josef Reznik, was a witness at the Eichmann Trial in
Jerusalem
in 1961.
1943: At
Borki
,
Poland
, 60 Jews working on an exhumation squad attempt to escape through a tunnel, but few of them are successful.
1943(27thof Kislev, 5704): New York’s Rabbi Louis Werfel a 27 year old chaplain sweving with the Twelfth Air Force Service Command in North Africa was killed in a plane crash in Algeria as he was flying back from conducting Chanukah services in Casablanca. Rabbi Werfel was the fourth Jewish chaplain to lost his life in the line of duty as of this date. He was known as “the flying rabbi” because of his propensity for using aircraft to travel to distant outposts to serve the unique needs of Jewish servicemen. After graduating from Yeshiva University he served as the rabbi for the Mount Kisco (NY) Hebrew Congregation and Knesseth Israel in Birmingham, Alabama, his last pulpit before joining the Army Air Force. In Birmingham he was on the board of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and the National Jewish Welfare Board’s Army and Navy Committee The wide range of Werfel’s activities could be seen from his request to the Jewish for 10,000 French-Hebrew prayerbooks for the Jews fighting with the Free French forces.
1944: As proof that for many British policy-makers keeping Jews out of Palestine was more important than saving them from the Holocaust, Lord Gort, the High Commissioner for Palestine telegraphed the Foreign Office from Jerusalem asking that the Soviet Government – whose troops had entered the Balkans – be asked to close both the Rumanian and Bulgarian frontiers on the grounds that Jewish immigration from South East Europe to Palestine was getting out of hand.
1945: Twenty-one year old Arnold Weiss who was serving as an officer in the United States Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps, began working on a project that would lead to the discovery of Hitler’s last will and political testament.
1946: Birthdate of Uri Geller, the Israeli who specializes in the para-normal.
1946(1st of Tevet, 5707): Rosh Chodesh Tevet
1946(1st of Tevet, 5707): Israel Levin is murdered in Tel Aviv, Palestine, for betraying Stern Group leader.
1946: TheWorld Zionist Congress ended with the Zionists calling for an end of terrorism. The Congress expressed its opposition to a UN trusteeship and want independence with no partition. The delegates also adopt resolution to boycott conference in London, England.
1947: Heavy sniping amounting almost to guerrilla warfare killed four Arabs and two Jews and wounded at least twenty-six other persons in
Haifa
during the last twenty-four hours.
1948: The Canadian Minister for External Affairs, Lester Pearson, informed Israel’s Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett that “ the state of Israel, in the opinion of the Canadian governments has given satisfactory proof that it complies with the essential conditions of statehood” including “external independence and effective internal government within a reasonably well-defined territory.” In plain English, the government of
Canada
recognized the state of
Israel
.
1948: On Christmas Eve, pilgrims are allowed to enter Bethlehem. But they have to pass through both Jewish and Arab checkpoints.
1948: Egyptian planes attack Nazareth, Haifa and Tel Aviv.
1950(15th of Tevet, 5711): Lev Simonovich Berg passed away. Born in 1876, Berg was the geographer and zoologist who established the foundations of limnology in
Russia
with his systematic studies on the physical, chemical, and biological conditions of fresh waters, particularly of lakes. Important, too, was his work in ichthyology, which yielded much useful data on the paleontology, anatomy, and embryology of fishes in
Russia
.
1951(25th of Kislev, 5712): As the Korean War drags on for a second year, the Jews observe Chanukah
1951: Idris I is proclaimed King as Libya gains its independence from Italy. Jews had lived in what was now Libya since the time of the Greeks and Romans. Jewish fortunes in Libya were already in decline before independence. The anti-Jewish policies of the fascists coupled with outbreaks against Jews following the creation of Israel had begun to take its toll on the Jewish population. The Six Days War in 1967 led to further attacks on the Jews. Idris realized that he could not protect his Jewish subjects and he allowed the Jewish community to leave the country. The Jews went to Rome with some of them moving on to Israel or the United States
1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that the new Mapai-General Zionists-Progressive government coalition won a 63-to-24 vote of confidence. The religious parties still hesitated, but were expected to join the coalition.
1952: The Jerusalem Post reported that 80 dunams of land and a house in the Zeita village in the Little Triangle were detached from
Israel
and handed over to
Jordan
by the Mixed Israeli-Jordanian Armistice Commission, according to the demarcation armistice lines, agreed upon at the
Rhodes
armistice negotiations. Arab residents of this area surrendered their Israeli identity cards and became Jordanians.
1952: As the third Israeli government ends and the fourth Israeli government takes power today, Moshe Sharett retained his position as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
1952: Yosef Burg replaced Mordecahi Nurock as Minister of Postal Services, making him the second person to hold this position. Nurock was the first person to hold the position now known as the Communications Minister
1952:Israel Rokach replaced Haim-Moshe Shapira as Interior Minister in Israel.
1955(9th of Tevet, 5716): Hugo Chaim Adler a Belgian composer, cantor, and choir conductor passed away. “Born in Antwerp to Jewish parents, Adler studied at the Hochschule für Musik Köln from 1912-1915. In 1915 he was drafted into the German Army during the First World War; serving for three years in the infantry until he was wounded at Argonne. In 1918 he was appointed cantor and teacher at St. Wendel in the Saarland. He left there in September 1921 to become second cantor at the synagogue in Mannheim, rising to head cantor there in 1933. While in Mannheim he studied music composition at the Mannheim Conservatory with Ernst Toch. In 1939 he fled Germany for the United States after having been imprisoned due to his Jewish ancestry by the Nazi regime. From September 1939 until his death of cancer in December 1955 he was cantor of Temple Emanuel in Worcester, Massachusetts. He remained active as a choir conductor and composer of sacred music during these years. Several of his works were published by Sacred Music Press and Transcontinental Music Publishers in New York City. He is the father of composer and conductor Samuel Adler.”
1959: The desecration of a new synagogue in
Cologne
,
Germany
sparked a wave of anti-Jewish incidents throughout
Western Europe
, the
Americas
,
Australia
, and
Africa
.
1969: On Christmas eve, five small boats showing almost no lights slipped out of Cherbourg harbor into the teeth of a Force 9 gale which kept even large freighters from venturing out. Built for the Israel Navy, the vessels had been embargoed at the beginning of the year by French president Charles de Gaulle.
1971: Birthdate of Tamir Bloom. A champion fencer, Bloom was a member of the 1996
U.S.
Olympic team.
1970: Nine Jews were convicted in
Leningrad
for hijacking a plane. In the post-Cold War era, some of us may have forgotten about the Refusniks and the battles Jews waged to immigrate to
Israel
.
1970: The New York Times reports that Jews and Arabs are living harmoniously on the plain near Meggido--believed to be the Biblical Armageddon--where St. John said in Revelations that the forces of good and evil would fight the last great battle at the end of time.
1975(20th of Tevet, 5736): Composer Bernard Herrmann passed away. Born in 1911, Herrmann gained fame for writing musical scores for a wide variety of films including Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Psycho. In fact he died the day after he completed the score for the film Taxi Driver
1982:”Bombs in Australia Hit Jewish and Israeli Sites’ published today described attacks on the Israeli Consulate and a Jewish social club in Sydney.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9406E2DE153DE533A25757C2A9649D94639FD7CF
1984(30th of Kislev, 5745): Rosh Chodesh
1984: Yitzhak Peretz replaced Shimon Peres as Internal Affairs of Minister.