1920 CE - 1955 C
1920 CE: HAGANAH!
Palestine: The Haganah, a.k.a. “the Jewish Underground” is formed in Palestine.
It was the forerunner to Palmach (elite Strike Force) later to be established 1941 jointly by the Haganah and British military due to a temporary (approximately one year) convergence of interests. Leading into the War of Liberation, the Palmach was to be pitted against the British.
Ultimately the Palmach is incorporated into backbone of the IDF—the Israel Defense Forces—after the 1948 War of Independence.
1920 CE: WILLIAM SAMUEL PALEY
New York City: Radio and television pioneer. Paley began his career working in his father’s cigar manufacturing plant. In 1920, he bought a failing chain of radio stations and turned it into the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Paley was one of the first to forsee the possibilities of television right after WWII.
Paley’s father was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant.
1921 CE: MAN RAY MOVES TO PARIS
South Philadelphia: Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, he was the eldest child of recent Russian–Jewish immigrants.
(b. Aug. 27, 1890; d. Nov. 18, 1976)
Britannica –
“Photographer, painter, and filmmaker who was the only American to play a major role in both the Dada and Surrealist movements.
The son of an artist and photographer, he grew up in New York City, where he studied architecture, engineering, and art, and became a painter. As early as 1911, he took up the pseudonym of Man Ray…
In 1921 Man Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the Parisian Dada and Surrealist circles of artists and writers. Inspired by the liberation promoted by these groups, he experimented with many media. His experiments with photography included rediscovering how to make “cameraless” pictures, or photograms, which he called rayographs. He made them by placing objects directly on light–sensitive paper, which he exposed to light and developed…
Man Ray also made films. In one short film, Le Retour à la raison (1923; Return to Reason), he applied the rayograph technique to motion–picture film, making patterns with salt, pepper, tacks, and pins. His other films include Anémic cinéma (1926; in collaboration with Duchamp) and L’Étoile de mer (1928–29; “Star of the Sea”), which is considered a Surrealist classic.
In 1940 Man Ray escaped the German occupation of Paris by moving to Los Angeles. Returning to Paris in 1946, he continued to paint and experiment until his death. His autobiography, Self–Portrait, was published in 1963 (reprinted 1999).”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/492395/Man–Ray (accessed February 12, 2009)
1921 CE: `ABDU’L–BAHÁ MOURNED BY 10,000
Haifa: Nov 29: Over ten thousand people, Jews, Christians and Muslims, gather on Mt. Carmel in the Holy Land to mourn the passing of the son and chosen successor of Bahã U’llãh, founder of the Bahá’í religion.
Britannica –
BAHAI: “Religion founded in Iran in the mid–19th century by Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri, who is known as Bahã Ullãh (Arabic: “Glory of God”). The cornerstone of Bahã’í belief is the conviction that Bahã Ullãh and his forerunner, who was known as the Bãb, were manifestations of God, who in his essence is unknowable. The principal Bahã’í tenets are the essential unity of all religions and the unity of humanity. Bahã is believed that all the founders of the world’s great religions have been manifestations of God and agents of a progressive divine plan for the education of the human race.
Despite their apparent difference, the world’s great religions, according to the Bahã’í is, teach and identical truth. Bahã Ullãh’s peculiar function was to overcome the disunity of religions and establish a universal faith. Bahã’í is believe in the oneness of humanity and devote themselves to the abolition of racial, class, and religious prejudices. The great bulk of Bahã’í teachings is concerned with social ethics; the faith has no priesthood and does not observe ritual forms in its worship.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/48930/Bahai–faith (accessed February 15, 2009)
1922 CE: DEWITT WALLACE, 32
…and his new wife, Lila, 24, co–found Reader’s Digest (New York).
The publication will eventually emerge as one of the most profitable publications of all time.
1922 CE: HEBREW THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE: SKOKIE YESHIVA, ILLINOIS
The Paris Review –
“The Hebrew Theological College, also known as Beit HaMidrash LaTorah, also colloquially known as “Skokie Yeshiva,” is a private university located in Skokie, Illinois. It was chartered in 1922 as one of the first Modern Orthodox Jewish institutions of higher education in America, and is therefore also one of the oldest Jewish institutions in the United States outside of the New York area.
The school was founded in the city of Chicago in 1921 by Rabbi Chaim Tzvi Rubinstein and Rabbi Saul Silber. Rabbi Rubinstein (1872–1944) was an alumnus of Volozhin Yeshiva who arrived in America in 1917. Rabbi Silber (1876–1946) was a pulpit Rabbi in Chicago and served as president of the school for the first twenty–five years….”
The Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 1 Online, http://www.parisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4738 (accessed July 6, 2009)
1922 CE: SAUL TCHERNICHOVSKY LEAVES UKRAINE
[b. 1875, Mikhaelovka, then, Crimea, now, Ukraine; d. 1943, Jerusalem]
Hebrew Zionist poet and considered one of the fathers of modern Hebrew poetry. He was noted for his secular humanistic tendencies in modern Jewish nationalism. Tchernichowsky, who studied medicine, served as an army surgeon during World War I and later as a medical inspector of schools in Eretz Israel. He added much to the Hebrew terminology in botany and anatomy. He also edited a dictionary of Hebrew medical terms (1931) Sefer ha-Munnahim L’Refu’ah U’Le-Madda’ei ha-Teva (The Book of Medical and Scientific Terms) and settled in Erez Israel. He was fluent in many languages including Latin and Greek and he translated into Hebrew Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey as well as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Twelfth night and Macbeth.
1922 CE: JAMES JOYCE PUBLISHES ULYSSES
Paris: Joyce was an Irish–born (1882). He lived in Paris from 1920 until 1940, a year before his death in 1941. Joyce had fled to Zurich from Paris as the Nazi army advanced into France.
1922 CE: MORRIS COHEN (“TWO GUN COHEN”) HEADS TO CHINA
China: General, marksman, adventurer and gunrunner to the Chinese army. He served in World War I and later, due to his personal friendship with the local Chinese community in Canada, as Sun Yat Sen’s aide-de-camp, saving his life a number of times.
Chaing Kai-Shek appointed him a major general in the Kuomintang Army. He trained the Chinese army against Japan. Cohen was captured by the Japanese and tortured. He was only released after the end of the war. He was one of the few people who tried to reconcile the two Chinese factions (nationalist and communist) yet was always welcomed by both governments.
1922 CE: T. S. ELIOT, 40, WRITES THE WASTE LAND
Born 1888 in US, Eliot moved to the United Kingdom at age 25. He became a British subject at age 39, in 1927.
Eliot was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
Eliot –
“[My poetry] wouldn’t be what it is if I’d been born in England, and it wouldn’t be what it is if I’d stayed in America. It’s a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.”
1922 CE: IVY LEAGUE QUOTAS
Cambridge, Massachusetts: As Jewish enrollment at Harvard hit 20% in June, 1922 Harvard president Lowell announced a 10% upper–limit Jewish quota.
86 years later, in 2008, with Harvard quotas gone, Jewish Harvard enrollment bounced–back with a vengeance, and now surpasses 30%….
The university co–op (The COOP) in Harvard Square – and its online outlet – currently has its signature maroon sweatshirts – emblazoned with Harvard’s one word logo “Veritas”– for sale in one of three language characters – English, Hebrew or Chinese.
1923 CE: HENRY LUCE, 25, FOUNDS TIME MAGAZINE
1923 CE: FREUD
Austria: Sigmund Freud publishes “The Ego and the Id.”
Freud had been developing psychoanalysis since the 1890s in Vienna.
The field was impacted by numerous (primarily Jewish) luminaries including:
K. Abraham, N. Abraham, N. Ackerman, A. Adler, F. Alexander, E. Becker, B. Bettelheim, N. Chodrow, D. Cooper, H. Deutsch, E. Erikson, A. Freud, E. Fromm, K. Horney, S. Isaacs, E. Jacobson, E. Jones, C. Jung, H. Hesse, O. Kemberg, R.D. Laing, R. Lowenstein, T. Rank, W. Reich, T. Reik, G. Roheim, R. Schafer and R. Spitz, among others.
1923 CE: HILLEL INTERNATIONAL FOUNDED
Founded in Illinois: Hillel is the largest Jewish campus organization in the world. It encompasses 120 full (campus) Hillel foundations and maintains affiliates at an additional 400 campuses. Originally under the sponsorship of the Chicago Jewish community, Hillel was then under the auspices of B’nai B’rith until 1990. From 1989–2003 it was under the leadership of Richard Joel, who then segued to the presidency of Yeshiva University. As of June 2008, Wayne Firestone is at the helm.
1923 CE: KHALIL GIBRAN WRITES THE PROPHET
Boston: His classic work, written in English, is composed of
26 poetic essays.
Khalil, a Lebanese–American artist, philosopher and writer, was born in 1883 in a Maronite Christian town in what is now northern Lebanon. The family crossed the Atlantic and settled in Boston’s South End in mid–1895.
From his work Sand and Foam (1926):
“Half of what I say is meaningless,
But I say it, so that the other half may reach you.”
1924 CE: SPERTUS COLLEGE FOUNDED
Illinois: The College specializes in providing graduate programs primarily in Jewish studies, for adult learners. It is affiliated with the Asher Library.
1924 CE: “TECHNION”
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology – founded
Located in Haifa; it was originally founded by German–Jewish immigrants.
Funded initially by the German–Jewish fund, Ezra. Originally its classes were taught in German. The school switched to Hebrew post–WWI.
(Note: There are probably more Nobel laureates connected with the Technion, than there are with many continents.)
1924 CE: NATIONAL ORIGINS QUOTA OF 1924
a.k.a. Immigration Act of 1924...a.k.a. Johnson–Reed Act
The US Congressional act radically restricted Jewish immigration into the USA by limiting the number of immigrants from any country to 2% of the number from that country already living in the USA in 1890. Consequently, the act effectively also excluded Asian immigration totally.
1924 CE: ENGLISH NOVELIST E.M. FORSTER WRITES A PASSAGE TO INDIA
1924 CE: KOOK
Jerusalem: Rav Abraham Isaac Kook founds Mercaz HaRav Kook Yeshiva
The yeshiva will be known later simply as Mercaz HaRav.
A. I. Kook born 1865 CE in Griva, Latvia; dies 1935 CE in Jerusalem.
Kook becomes Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine in 1921...
His legacy includes major theological accommodations to/for secular Jews living in Palestine.
Kook authored, among other works (n Hebrew) Ayin Aiyah, Igorot HaRaiyah, Olat Raiyah, Orot, Orot HaKodesh, Orot Ha–teshuvah.
A corpus of translations exists, with many of the translations being by Samson and Fishman.
[Author’s note: Kook was uniquely extraordinary and extraordinarily unique.]
Rav Kook’s writings eventually gave birth to the Hardal Religious Zionist Movement.
His legacy institution, Mercaz HaRav, would tragically be the scene of a massacre in early March 2008 by an East Jerusalem Palestinian gunman, who infiltrated the premises, and then, the library, and gunned down eight students, with many other students wounded, most all in their teens.
*
The compendium work Lights of Penitence, English translation and Introduction by Ben Zion Bokser, presents selections of Kook’s choicest writings.
In The Moral Principles, p. 135 of Lights of Penitence:
“The heart must be filled with love for all. The love of all creation comes first, then comes the love for all mankind, and then follows the love for the Jewish people.”
on p. 137:
“Though our love for people must be all–inclusive, embracing the wicked as well, this in no way blunts our hatred for evil itself; on the contrary it strengthens it. For it is not because of the dimension of evil clinging to a person that we include him in our love, but because of the good in him, which our love tells us is to be found everywhere. And since we detach the dimension of the good to love him for it, our hatred for evil becomes unblunted [sic] and absolute.”
The following lines appear in Lights of Penitence, under
Poems, pp. 379 and 380:
Expanses, expanses,
Expanses divine my soul craves.
Confine me not in cages,
Of substance or of spirit.
My soul soars the expanses of the heavens,
Walls of heart and walls of deed
Will not contain it.
Morality, logic, custom —
My soul soars above these,
I am bound to the world,
All creatures, all people are my friends,
Many parts of my soul
Are intertwined with them,
But how can I share with them my light?
1924 CE: BIALIK
Tel Aviv: Bialik moves his Berlin publishing house, Dvir, from Germany to Tel Aviv. He then devotes himself to cultural activities and public affairs, including delivering the address that marked the opening of Hebrew University.
Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) was born in the Ukraine, Russia, He was a Jewish poet who wrote in Ashkenazi Hebrew. To this day he is recognized as “Israel’s National Poet.”
Known for long, nationalistic poems, Bialik leaves a legacy as a poet, journalist, children’s writer, and translator. Every step of the way he was “ahead of his time.”
1925 CE: SAPIRO LAWSUIT
California: Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish labor organizer in California stuns the American Establishment and sues Henry Ford’s anti–Semitic Dearborn Independent (Michigan) for libel against the Jews.
Sapiro “calls Ford’s cards.” Ford folds—and apologizes in print in 1927; the (inflammatory) Dearborn Independent closes that year.
1925 CE: THE SCOPES TRIAL
…a.k.a. “The [Scopes] Monkey Trial”
Dayton, Tennessee: The Theory of Evolution loses in its bid for a “seat at the table.”
Famed civil libertarian lawyer Clarence Darrow, for the defense of the teaching, as well, of Evolution (in Tennessee schools) v. famed statesman–lawyer William Jennings Bryan advocating the exclusive teaching of Creationism (in Tennessee schools)
The famous trial was later made infamous by the play (1955) and film (1960, 1965, 1988, and 1999) Inherit the Wind, which attacked assaults on intellectual freedom, in general.
1925 CE: WERNHER VON BRAUN, AGE 13, RECEIVES A TELESCOPE
–as a graduation gift from his mother
Germany: Later a leading world–expert in rocket technology, von Braun would first play a very leading rocket science role for the Nazis, and then, post–World War II for the USA.
1925 CE: MEIN KAMPF PUBLISHED
Munich, Germany: Begun in prison in 1924, Hitler’s work, “My Struggle” in English, combining autobiography and his National Socialist political ideology, includes his hatred of the Jews, and his intent to mass–murder them.
Included, as well, is Hitler’s basic blueprint for German expansion, and domination of Europe and Russia. All is essentially spelled–out in advance.
Hitler had feasted on anti–Semitic literature for years, and by the time of his writing the work, apparently was consumed with hatred for the Jews.
1925 CE: UNITED CHURCH OF CANADA FORMED
1926 CE: FRANKLIN W. DIXON, 23, WRITES HIS FIRST HARDY BOYS BOOK
–The Tower Treasure
Canada: In his first 52 years of writing (1926–1978), Dixon produces the 58 core Hardy Boys works. (Fortuitously, this coincided with my 1950s childhood).
Over 100 more titles were to follow under Simon & Schuster’s stewardship post–1979.
Note that for the duration of the entire Hardy Boys series, however, protagonists Frank and Joe Hardy remain always18 and 17 years–old respectively.
[Dixon’s given name was Leslie McFarlane.]
1926 CE: COCO CHANEL INTRODUCES HER SIGNATURE “LITTLE BLACK DRESS”
1926 CE: HEMINGWAY, 27, PUBLISHES THE SUN ALSO RISES
1927 CE: TREATY OF JEDDAH
May 20: Arabia: Treaty between United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Nejd and Hejaz signed.
The treaty recognizes the independence of the realm of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, (a.k.a. Abdul Aziz Al–Saud) and his sovereignty over it. By proclamation five years later (in 1932), the area was to be known as “Saudi Arabia.”
At age 22, starting in 1902, twenty–five years before the treaty with the British, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud was on the march. After re–capturing Riyadh, the Al–Saud dynasty’s ancestral capital, Ibn Saud continued his campaign onward.
Further conquests—and ententes—by Ibn Saud post–the Treaty of Jeddah, netted him 80% of the Arabian Peninsula by 1927–1932.
Vast oil reserves were discovered only later in 1938. These would provide Saudi Arabia with very significant leverage in the Middle East and beyond, particularly when combined with Saudi stewardship of Islam’s two holiest sites (those in Mecca and Medina), and combined, as well, with fine–tuned armed forces.
Thus, Saudi Arabia became a political amalgam of an oil power plus financial reservoir plus spiritual Mecca plus military power all under the stewardship of one astute family.
The founder of modern Saudi Arabia was succeeded upon his death by his eldest (surviving) son, King Saud in 1953. (Saud would father 53 sons and 56 daughters.)
King Saud, whose reign was marked by setbacks and issues, was deposed by a younger brother Faisal in 1964. Faisal, the third oldest son, was one of approximately 36 brothers of Saud, who left for exile In Greece after losing the power struggle.
Eleven years later, King Faisal assassinated by his nephew in 1975.
Faisal, in turn, was succeeded by King Khalid (same year in 1975).
Then, Khalid was succeeded in 1982 by King Fahd, the third son of Ibn Saud to become king.
[A 2000 Treaty of Jeddah (same name as this 1927 entry) resolved a Saudi–Yemen border dispute.]
In January 2008, King Abdullah reigns, having succeeded his half–brother King Fahd (who died in 2005).
*
With Iran, Saudi Arabia’s neighbor to the north across the Persian Gulf, newly emboldened by America’s neutering of Iran’s arch–rival and counter–weight Iraq, and with nuclear weaponry apparently within Iran’s grasp by 2011–2014, the politico–military equilibrium of the region is destabilized.
Iran not only looms over Persian Gulf shipping lanes, and not only looms over the territories of Saudi Arabia’s oil–rich allies around the Gulf, but Iran has de facto started to lay claim to regional hegemony, a denouement anathema to the Saudis.
Spring 2008: The astute Abdullah holds political trump cards over the Middle East peace process. And knows it.
Fortunately for all–concerned, his wisdom is not inconsiderable.
1927 CE: HENRY FORD HAS FINISHED PRODUCING HIS 15–MILLIONTH MODEL T
1927 CE: ROBERT MOSES
New York: In 1927, Robert Moses became New York State Secretary of State, among several other simultaneous NY State and NY City titles he collected. At one point, Moses held twelve state and city positions simultaneously, with his main power base being head of the Triboro Bridge Authority.
From the mid–1920s through the 1960s Moses wielded massive political and administrative power over manifold mega–construction projects in New York State. He re–did Long Island with highways and bridges connecting it to Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island….
Master builder/visionary/urban planner/megalomaniac, Moses was responsible for, among other major projects:
NYC/ Long Island roadways: Northern State Parkway, Wantagh State Parkway, Southern State Parkway, Belt Parkway, Laurelton Parkway, Cross–Bronx Expressway, Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, Staten Island Expressway, Meadowbrook Parkway
Bridges: Triboro, Throgs Neck, Bronx–Whitestone, Verrazano, Henry Hudson, Marine Parkway (bridge) Niagra Falls, NY area: Robert Moses Hydro–Electric dam, Robert Moses State Parkway
A prime mover behind: Jones Beach State Park, Jacob Riis Park, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the UN Headquarters, Taconic State Parkway (Westchester), moving the NY Aquarium to Coney Island (Brooklyn), as well as for ten gigantic swimming pools for city dwellers.
His Cross–Bronx Expressway project, in particular, had, as one of many consequences, a major “migration” (exodus) of Jewish Bronxites primarily to Queens and Long Island.
Born 1888 to German–Jewish parents in New Haven, CT, Moses was raised secularist, and proceeded to garnish degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Columbia. At his zenith Moses had 80,000 workers under him. He died at age 93, and his funeral services were held at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. Robert Moses was later the subject of a 1974 epic 1200–page biography The Power Broker by Robert Caro.
A champion of highways over mass transit, Moses himself never learned to drive.
1927 CE: PHILO FARNSWORTH DEVELOPS TELEVISION
Utah: September 7: 202 Garden Street laboratory, San Francisco: Farnsworth’s image dissector camera tube setup (forerunner of the video camera tube and television) transmitted its first image, a simple straight line.
Two years later, he transmitted his first human images,
including a three and a half inch image of his wife, Elma, with her eyes closed, due to the blinding light required for clear transmission.
Farnsworth would later ban his own children from watching TV, believing its content (at the time at least) to be worthless.
1928 CE: TY COBB RETIRES FROM BASEBALL
Georgia: At retirement, Cobb owned most of the contemporary batting records, but more importantly to his family, he owned a lot of Coca Cola stock, which made him a millionaire. This nest egg would serve them well through the Great Depression soon to unfold.
1928 CE: ERICH MARIA REMARQUE WRITES ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Germany: December: originally published In German Im Westen nichts Neues (literal translation: Nothing New In the West) in serial form In the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung. The English translation would follow in 1930.
The introduction to the work runs as follows –
This book is to be neither
an accusation nor a confession,
and least of all an adventure,
for death is not an adventure
to those who stand face to face with it.
It will simply try to tell
of a generation of men who,
even though they may have escaped shells,
were destroyed by war
1929 CE: B’NEI AKIVA
Palestine: Founded during the British Mandate of Palestine as the youth wing of the Mizrachi movement.
Bnei Akiva is the largest religious Zionist youth movement in the world: As of June, 2008, it had 125,000 youths enrolled in 37 countries (with 75,000 of those in Israel).
1930 CE: STATS
c. January 1: world Jewry statistics: (Wikipedia Online, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population (accessed February 2, 2008)
15,000,000 total, pre–Hitler *
Main countries:
USA 4,000,000
Poland 3,500,000 (11% of Polish population)
Soviet Union 2,700,000 (2% of Soviet population)
Romania, 1,000,000 (6% of Romanian population)
Israel 1,036,000 (17% of Palestine population)
Total for the five countries noted: 12.236 million, or 81.5% of the total Jewish world population.
* Thus, the 1930 15,000,000 total figure is essentially the same as the June, 2008 14,800,000 figure, at this book’s cutoff point, 78 years later.
1930 CE passive: GANDHI
India: March 12: Mohandas Gandhi, India, commences twenty–five day, 248 mile “Salt (protest) March.”
He marches to the sea (at Dandi) where he makes salt himself, protesting against the British–imposed tax on salt.
Gandhi’s prime political activity was In the 1930s and early 1940s. In modern times, he re–introduced satyagraha – his blend of non–violent resistance to tyranny through civil disobedience, a variation of Buddhist/Hindu/Jainist “ahimsa,” total non–violent Passive Resistance.
[As noted above, In 33 CE Jewish protesters against Rome employ precisely the same tactics in their march from Jerusalem to Caesaria and subsequent passive/non–violent sit–down protest against Pontius Pilate’s policies (back at the Temple in Jerusalem). Interestingly, the 1900–year–earlier Caesaria march was also a march from inland to the sea. As readers will recall, the Caesaria non–violent sit–down protest succeeded 100% with no blood shed]
Born 1869, a British–educated lawyer, Gandhi fought for Indian rights, first in South Africa, then in India. He fought against oppressive taxation, widespread discrimination, and for an end to “untouchability.” After assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress In 1921, Gandhi initially led nationwide campaigns for the alleviation of poverty and for the liberation of women, among other causes.
His campaigns included the pivotal campaign for Swarai, independence from foreign domination via self–government. His Quit India campaign incorporated, as well, swadeshi policy, the political program to boycott foreign made goods, specifically British ones. Linked to this program was his advocacy that khadi (homespun cloth) be worn by all Indians instead of their wearing British textiles.
Gandhi is credited with compelling/motivating the British to eventually quit India after WWII, after approximately one and a half decades of Indian passive resistance and civil disobedience commenced. Many thousands of Indians were killed/martyred in the ongoing saga.
As noted, the British Empire exited India post–WW II. However, it exited at its own deliberate pace. In India, Gandhi was subsequently recognized as the Father of the Nation, with his victory having a profound effect on civil rights’ aspirations and tactics worldwide. Gandhi’s humanity has impacted all humanity globally to this day. But, he himself was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu radical after the British had already quit India.
1931 CE: IRGUN FORMED
Palestine: Also known as “Etzel,” the Irgun was a more proactive and militant Jewish liberation force than the “establishment” Haganah from which it splintered. The Irgun was sometimes referred to initially as Haganah Bet or “Defense B” to mask its independent organizational militant objectives.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, was the Supreme Leader of the organization until his death in 1940. Under the stewardship of Menachem Begin, the Irgun proclaimed a revolt (which was opposed by the Jewish Agency) against the British Mandate government on February 1, 1944.
The militant organization was the predecessor to Israel’s rightist “Herut” (or “Freedom”) Party, which led to today’s “Likud” Party eventually to secure the premiership in 1977 under Menachem Begin’s historic stewardship.
With Nazi Concentration Camps in Europe and the British White Paper limiting immigration to Palestine as backdrops, the Irgun came under pressure from its own “right wing” to become more militant itself. In turn, the “Lechi” group splinters off from the Irgun in 1940.
“Lechi” (with the hard–to–pronounce open “ch” sound) was derogatively referred to by the British as the “Stern Gang” after the name of its founder–leader Abraham Stern, nemesis of both the British and the Jewish establishments.
Lechi was Hebrew acronym for Lohamei Herut Israel or “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel.” On some level resonant with the supra–aggressive Jewish Zealots of First Roman–Jewish War period c. 60–73 CE, this right–wing splinter off of a right–wing splinter (Irgun), Lechi was not the most popular historical Jewish militant group in Jewish history. The group never had more than a few hundred members but it was the bane of the British—and of the Jewish establishment.
Its founder Avraham “Yair” Stern was himself killed by the British in 1942. After being cornered solo in a Tel Aviv apartment hideout and handcuffed by British detectives, he was shot/murdered. The town Kochav Yair (Star of Yair) was founded in 1961 and named in his honor. In 1978 an Israeli postage stamp was issued in his honor, as well, de facto national absolution.
Future premier Yitzhak Shamir (in office October 1986 – July 1992) was a former member of the triumvirate which ran Lechi after Stern’s assassination.
1931 CE: BRITISH MANDATE GOVERNMENT
– decided that the Western Wall area was part of the Temple Mount and therefore was under the direction of the Moslem Wakf. Therefore Jews would henceforth not be permitted to blow the Shofar as part of prayers services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
1931 CE: GERALD WINROD
(1881-1971)
Kansas: A pro-Nazi Protestant preacher, spurred by his belief in Jewish Bolshevism, wrote The Hidden Hand, a book adulatory to the (virulently anti-Semitic) “Protocols.” He followed it with a slew of pamphlets and books as well as a magazine called The Defender, all anti-Semitic. He was dubbed “The American Streicher” by the German press. [The German Strecher was later hanged at Nuremberg.]
1931 CE: JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES FOUNDED
1931 CE: THE QUINTESSENTIAL JEWISH INVENTION
Budapest International Fair: László Bíró, journalist, introduces his invention, the ballpoint pen, developed with his brother Georg, a chemist. Biro then patented the invention in Paris in 1938. The patent, as well as the trademarked name, eventually entered the public domain. However, a ‘biro’ is still the colloquial name for a pen in Britain.
With the expiry of the French patents, László and his brother Georg moved to Argentina in 1943, and filed Argentinean patents.
László died in Buenos Aires in 1985. “Inventor’s Day” in Argentina is commemorated on September 29, his birthday.
– after Wikipedia
1932 CE: ALEXANDER CALDER, 34, INVENTS A NEW TYPE OF SCULPTURE
New York: French artist Marcel Duchamp labels the American’s sculpture a “mobile.” The appellation sticks for the genre.
1932 CE: OTTO RANK WRITES ART AND ARTIST
New York: W. W. Norton & Company publishes Rank’s work with new preface. The book was originally published in Paris, December 1930 (in German as Kunst and Kunstler).
1932 CE: DUBINSKY BECOMES HEAD OF THE ILGWU
New York City: Born Feb. 22, 1892; died Sept. 17, 1982
Britannica –
“American labor leader who served as president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) from 1932 to 1966.
[Jewish] the son of a baker in Russian Poland, Dubinsky was sent to Siberia in 1908 for his union activities. He escaped and emigrated to the United States in 1911. While working as a garment cutter in New York City, he renewed his union activities and became manager–secretary of Local 10 of the ILGWU in 1921, a post that he left in 1929 to assume the position of secretary treasurer of the entire ILGWU. He was elected president of the union in 1932.
Dubinsky transformed the ILGWU from a faction–ridden, insolvent regional union with 45,000 members into a model international union representing 450,000 workers. Under Dubinsky, the ILGWU pioneered initiatives in housing, pension plans, and health centers. An independent in both national union affairs and in politics, Dubinsky maintained his allegiance to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) but also supported the emergence of the CIO unions in the 1930s. He played a significant role in the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955. His autobiography, David Dubinsky: A Life with Labor, was published in 1977.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/172743/David–Dubinsky (accessed February 26, 2009)
1932 CE: CARDOZO APPOINTED TO THE SUPREME COURT
New York: Born May 24, 1870; died July 9, 1938
Britannica –
“American jurist, a creative common–law judge and legal essayist who influenced a trend in American appellate judging toward greater involvement with public policy and a consequent modernization of legal principles. Generally a liberal, he was less concerned with ideology than with the nature of the judicial process; largely for this reason, his importance—while universally conceded—is difficult to fix precisely. Although he was esteemed for his service as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1932–38), he was probably more significant for his work on the highest state tribunal in New York, the Court of Appeals (1914–32; chief judge from 1926).
A member of a distinguished Sephardic Jewish family, Cardozo enjoyed an unblemished personal reputation, although his father, Albert Jacob Cardozo, a New York Supreme Court justice with Tammany Hall connections, had resigned in 1872 under threat of impeachment. Admitted to the New York bar in 1891, Benjamin Cardozo was highly successful as a courtroom lawyer despite his mild, reserved manner. Elected to the state Supreme Court as a reform candidate in 1913, he was quickly promoted to the Court of Appeals. During his tenure, the quality of this appellate bench was thought by many to exceed that of the Supreme Court. In MacPherson v. Buick Motor Company (1916), Cardozo announced a doctrine that was later adopted elsewhere in the United States and Great Britain: an implied warranty of safety exists between a manufacturer and a private purchaser, despite intermediate ownership of the product by a retail dealer. His decision in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. (1928) helped to redefine the concept of negligence in American tort law.
After the resignation of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1932, President Herbert Hoover appointed Cardozo to the United States Supreme Court. In the New Deal period under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Cardozo usually sided with the liberally inclined justices Louis D. Brandeis and Harlan Fiske Stone…
Aside from his published opinions, Cardozo is noted for his jurisprudential work, especially The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921), based on lectures he delivered at Yale University. He was also among the early leaders of the American Law Institute, which was created to ‘promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs, to secure the better administration of justice, and to encourage and carry on scholarly and scientific legal work.’”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/95663/Benjamin–Nathan–Cardozo (accessed February 21, 2009)
1932 CE: EDWIN LAND FOUNDS THE POLAROID CORPORATION
Massachusetts: Originally, the firm was founded in 1932 as Land–Wheelwright Laboratories. Then, the firm was incorporated again in 1937 as the Polaroid Corporation.
Edwin Land was the grandson of Avram and Ella Salmononvitch—Jewish immigrants from Russia—whose last name was morphed to “Land” on Ellis Island.
Bridgeport, Connecticut–bred, Land was an on–again, off–again undergrad at Harvard. In the off–again stage, he was busy back home in the NY metropolitan area, inventing applications for polarized light. Out of Harvard and in need of a lab, via friends he somehow gained ongoing “untraditional access” to Columbia University’s physics lab uptown in Morningside Heights, Manhattan.
Land invented –
• inexpensive filters for polarizing light;
• a practical system of in–camera instant film processing; and
• his “retinex” theory of color vision
In the 1950s, Land became head of the Intelligence Section of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Technological Capabilities Panel. The section conceived the (high–flying) U–2 surveillance plane. Subsequently, in 1963 Land was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Land – “An essential component of creativity, is not being afraid to fail”
1933 CE: BRESLAU, GERMANY POGROM
March: Jewish lawyers and judges were attacked by the Nazis. This was possibly the first official violence against the Jews of Germany.
1933 CE: DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP
March 10, Germany
It was the first of the SS run imprisonment camps. A month earlier Germany passed a law which would allow people to be imprisoned for an unlimited period of time if they were deemed hostile to the regime. Soon after other camps were set up to hold such prisoners. Often factories were set up near the camps and paid for the “use” of laborers. Although not a “death or extermination camp” per se, Dachau and other camps like it practiced daily murder, starvation, and sadistic medical experiments on their inmates. Forty thousand Jews probably died in Dachau. Other camps included Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrueck (for women). Several of the camps had crematoria to get rid of the large number of corpses. According to an agreement with Himmler, the Gestapo were the ones to make the arrests while the SS ran the camps. Only in 1941 were the special death camps or extermination camps created.
– Eli Birnbaum
1933 CE: NEW YORK CITY PROTEST
March 27: Against the Nazi regime brought out over 50,000 people.
1933 CE: BOYCOTTS IN GERMANY
April 1: Jewish doctors, shops, lawyers, and stores boycotted.
1933 CE: ANTI–JEWISH LEGISLATION IN GERMANY
April 8: The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service
The Civil Service Law prohibited Jews from holding public service jobs. These included the civil service, army, labor service, commerce, teachers and lawyers.
– Eli Birnbaum
1933 CE: HAAVARA (TRANSFER) AGREEMENT
Germany: August 25: Authorized 60,000 German Jews to emigrate to Palestine by 1939 in a complex financial arrangement with Nazi Germany – criticized by (Revisionist Zionist leader) Jabotinsky.
The agreement was essentially between the German Zionist Federation working with the Jewish Agency (in Palestine) – and the Nazi regime.
1933 CE: MIES VAN DER ROHE
Germany: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was one of the founders of the International Style of architecture. He was forced by the Nazis to close the avant–garde Bauhaus architecture and design school in Berlin which he headed, which had been founded in 1919 in Weimer by architect/designer Walter Gropius.
Mies van der Rohe moved to the USA in 1937, and became head of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Later, in 1958 he would design the 38–story gold glass Seagram Building on Park Avenue in NY: Like the 24–story blue–green glass Lever Brothers Building icon across the street; (designed by Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) and the 39–story UN Secretariat Headquarters Building (designed by Walter Gropius lead architect / Le Corbusier design scheme 23a); several blocks south at water’s edge, the Seagram Building would somewhat define seminal glass box International Style, “skin and glass” modern architecture.
“Mies” also left some signature aphorisms about design for posterity –
“Less is more”
“God is in the details”
1933 CE: NICHTARIER (“NON–ARYAN”)
Germany: Became a legal classification, known as the Arierparagraph (Aryan Clause). According to this, anyone who had a Jewish grandparent was considered Jewish even if the person had converted. This made it “legal” to discharge a wider category of Jews from their position in the universities, hospitals, and legal professions. In some countries under later Nazi occupation (Italy, Bulgaria, etc.) this definition was modified so that it didn’t include the children of converts or converts who were married to local Christians.
– Eli Birnbaum
1933 CE: BISHOP WILHELM BERNING AND MONSIGNOR STEINMANN
Germany: Special envoys from the Pope met with Hitler. Hitler maintained that he was “doing Christianity a great service” with his policy regarding the Jews. The Vatican representatives described the meeting as “cordial and to the point.”
– Eli Birnbaum
1933 CE: FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT WINS THE PRESIDENCY
–The first of four such victories
Roosevelt will offer the nation “A New Deal.”
1933 CE: PROTESTANT AMERICAN THEOLOGIAN REINHOLD NIEBUHR SOUNDS THE ALARM
…within the Christian community—in the Christian
Century Magazine—against the Nazi “cultural annihilation of the Jews.”
Niebuhr (1892–1971) would play a key role in Christian–Jewish relations.
1933 CE: HERBERT LEHMAN ELECTED GOVERNOR OF NY
…and would serve until 1942.
New York: He subsequently served as the US Senator from NY from 1949 until 1957.
Herbert was the son of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant Mayer Lehman, one of the name partners of the Lehman Brothers investment banking firm, originally founded in Birmingham, Alabama in 1850. The Ashkenazi Jewish group of late nineteenth century Jewish–American pillars of NY society was chronicled in Stephen Birmingham’s 1967 book Our Crowd.
In September 2008, one hundred and fifty–eight years after its founding, and fifty–one years after Herbert Lehman retired from the US Senate, the implosion of blue chip Lehman Brothers, the focused target of aggressive short sellers – coupled with the US government’s (catastrophic) tactical decision not to protect the viability of Lehman’s key divisions from collapse – would shake the financial world, triggering the “Great Recession.”
By 1897 the Jewish population in the USA had already increased to 26,793 (3.5% of the population). Jews already played an important role in US industry, commerce, and banking before World War I… Jews made a large contribution to the rebuilding of the state from the ruins of the war and its consequences… However, once the Jews had made their contribution, the authorities began to force them out of their economic positions and to deprive them of their sources of livelihood.
1933 CE: ANNE FRANK, AGE 3, FLEES FOR SAFETY
Germany: She flees with her family from Hitler’s Germany to the presumed safety of the Netherlands.
1933 CE: BERLIN: HITLER APPOINTED CHANCELLOR AFTER ELECTION
Jan 30: President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, after his victory in free elections. Over the next few months (during the so–called Gleichschaltung) Hitler eliminated all rival political parties in Germany, so that by summer 1933 there was only one political party in Germany, the Nazi party. The remaining key power centers at–that–point were the army, and to a lesser extent, the semi–autonomous SA (the Sturmabteilung), a Nazi paramilitary organization, also known as the “brown shirts.”
By the time of the election of Adolf Hitler in 1933, the Jews of Europe as a group had been psychologically battered and hammered in Europe for over 19 consecutive centuries.
1933 CE: LATVIAN JEWISH COMMUNITY FOCUS
R. O. G. Urch. Latvia: Country and People. London, Allen & Unwin. 1938.
“The History of the Jews in Latvia dates back to 1571. Although the vast majority of the Jewish community was killed in the Holocaust, there is a small Jewish community in Latvia today.
The nucleus of Latvian Jewry was formed by the Jews of Livonia (Livland) and Courland, the two principalities on the coast of the Baltic Sea which were incorporated within the Russian Empire during the eighteenth century…In the middle of the nineteenth century; there were about 9,000 Jews in the province of Livonia.
In 1933 there were 98 Jewish elementary schools with approximately 12,000 pupils and 742 teachers, 18 secondary schools with approximately 2,000 pupils and 286 teachers, and four vocational schools with 300 pupils and 37 teachers. Pupils attended religious or secular schools according to their parents’ wishes. There were also government pedagogic institutes for teachers in Hebrew and Yiddish, courses for kindergarten teachers, popular universities, a popular Jewish music academy, and evening schools for working youth, a Yiddish theater, and cultural clubs. There was a Jewish press reflecting a variety of trends…
Before World War I there were about 190,000 Jews in the territories of Latvia (7.4% of the total population). During the war years, many of them were expelled to the interior of Russia, while others escaped from the war zone. In 1920 the Jews of Latvia numbered 79,644 (5% of the population)…in 1935, 93,479 (4.8% of the total)…”
University of Latvia site, http://www.lu.lv/studiju–centri/jsc/pilsetas/zemgale/kurzeme_zemgale.html (accessed July 6, 2009)
1934 CE: PUBLICATION HALTED AT “L”
Berlin: Goldmann’s Encyclopaedia Judaica project halted at “L.” Nachum Goldmann’s Eshkol Publishing, German–language Encyclopaedia Judaica had issued releases of its encyclopedia in the 1928–1934 period. The entries starting from Acch, and leading up to Lyra had been represented in the ten volumes (heading towards approximately 21–22 volumes), before Nazi persecutions halted the (clearly quite important) mega–project in 1934.
An English–language Encyclopaedia of the precise same name would be issued 37 years later in 1971–72 by KETER (Jerusalem) and MacMillan (New York). [See entry later in this TimeLine]
1934 CE: BIROBIDZHAN (USSR)
Russia: The district of Birobidzhan in south eastern Siberia was established as a Jewish Autonomous Region which was to cover an area of 14,000 square miles (36,000–square–kilometers). Its official language would be Yiddish. Within two years the government had a change of heart and its Jewish socialist leaders were liquidated. Partly due to its primitiveness and remoteness, it never reached a population of more than 18,000, less than a quarter of the total population of the region.
– Eli Birnbaum
1934 CE: BERLIN: NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES
Germany, June 30 – Jul 2: “The Night of the Long Knives (German: Nacht der langen Messer) or “Operation Hummingbird,” was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany between June 30 and July 2, 1934, when the Nazi regime carried out a series of political executions, most of those killed being members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), a Nazi paramilitary organization. Adolf Hitler moved against the SA and its leader, Ernst Röhm, because he saw the independence of the SA and the penchant of its members for street violence as a direct threat to his power…
At least 85 people died during the purge, although the final death toll may have been in the hundreds, and more than a thousand perceived opponents were arrested. Most of the killings were carried out by the [Nazi] Schutzstaffel (SS), an elite Nazi corps, and the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), the regime’s secret police.”
Wikipedia Online, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives (accessed March 11, 2008)
1934 CE: “ILLEGAL” IMMIGRATION – HA’APALAH (ALIYAH BET)
Israel: The arrival of the Vellos (chartered by the HeHalutz movement) and its 350 refugees signaled the beginning of organized efforts to save European Jewry. Although illegal immigration had been taking place since 1920, only now were major efforts begun. The Revisionist Zionist movement and Betar succeeded in the next two years to send out several ships, which saved thousands of lives. By 1938 illegal immigration had become an official part of the Zionist effort. An estimated 50,000 people managed to arrive illegally between 1920 and 1937. The Jewish Agency at the time was working with the British and hoped that the Peel Report (November 1936) would be favorable to the establishment of a state and as such was against “illegal immigration.”
– Eli Birnbaum
1934 CE: WEIZMANN INSTITUTE
–of Science founded.
The institute in Rehovot, Israel, only offers graduate programs—and only in the sciences. It is world renowned.
1934 CE: THE LONG MARCH
China: Oct: beginning of the “Long March” of Mao Zedong’s Communists.
The legendary “Long March” was actually a brutal retreat by the Chinese Communists from the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai–shek. But Mao’s leadership during the 8,000 mile trek consolidated his support among the members of the Communist party.
It is far from clear exactly how this dominance was achieved over the 8,000 mile odyssey, but Mao emerged at the conclusion of the march at the apex of the party.
1934 CE: THE PARTISAN REVIEW FOUNDED
“Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003…
Founded by William Phillips and Philip Rahv; it was originally sympathetic to Communist, but because stridently anti–Communist post–Stalin.
Many of its early authors were the children of Jewish immigrants from Europe. The journal reached its peak influence from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, but then gradually lost its relevance to modern American culture.
In 1949, Partisan Review awarded George Orwell £357 for the year’s most significant contribution to literature, Nineteen Eighty–Four.
Sabloff, Nicholas. “The Nursery of Genius: A brief survey of ten magazines of influence” http://www.nyrm.org/2007/sabloff_well.html (accessed June 14, 2009)
1935 CE: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT COMPLETES FALLINGWATER
Southwestern, PA: Fallingwater is also known as the Edgar S. Kaufman residence.
The architecturally daring edifice pivoted and perched over a waterfall, inspired Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead.
Not that well known is that the maids’ quarters received co–equal architectural attention as the principals’ quarters.
1935 CE: NUREMBERG LAWS
August 20: Nuremberg, Germany: Laws stripping the Jews of Germany of some important civil and legal rights, setting the stage, in turn, for Nazi “quackery science” lauding the Germans as a “super–race.”
Step–by–step the Nazis will strip–away layer after layer as regards the Jews.
Break their rights. Break their dignity. Break their composure. Break their equilibrium. Break their status. Break their shops. Break their synagogues. Break their careers. Break their honor. Break their neighborhoods. Break their institutions. Break their leaders. Break their legal protection. Break their businesses. Break their families. Break their self–esteem. Break their health. Break their hope. Break their spirit. Break their bodies. Break their hearts.
***
“The Churches and their theologians had formulated compelling religious, social, and moral idées forces that provided a conceptual framework for the Nazi Holocaust. The National–Socialist conception of the Jew as less than human, or inhuman, was based on the Christian conception of the Jew as traitor, murderer, plague, pollution, filth, devil, and insect, which “prepared both killers and victims for the Jews’ literal destruction.” Jewish deaths at the hands of Christians before 1933 amounted to millions. In the Christian mind, as John Bossy has put it, “the Jews were the original enemies of Christ, who had procured his crucifixion and death and had taken his blood upon their heads and upon those of their children. Nothing was easier for the average Christian to understand than that this was a crime that cried out for vengeance…” And over the nearly two millennia of the Christian era, vengeance has been taken by means of Church policies of degradation and only half–hearted protection during pogroms and mass murder of Jews from the Middle Ages on.”
– Robert Michael, Holy Hatred, p. 21.
(Palgrave MacMillan 2008)
1935 CE: FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT INTRODUCES THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT
1935 CE: CHARLES DARROW PATENTS THE BOARD GAME MONOPOLY
Pennsylvania: Earlier in 1904, a fellow–Pennsylvanian Quaker woman name Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Philips had actually invented/created—and patented—it’s direct ancestor board game, The Landlord’s Game.
Eventually (by the mid–1980s!) Parker Brothers, now a subsidiary of Hasbro, would fully buy out both of their patents, and finally settle all lawsuits.
MONOPOLY is widely considered the most popular commercial board game of all time. (Presumably non–commercial classics – historic chess, monopoly, shesh besh and checkers—were not in the counting.)
Monopoly has much lore surrounding its 70+ year tenure to date. On the British front during WWII, in 1941 the British Secret Service had John Waddington, Ltd., the licensed manufacturer of the game outside the USA; surreptitiously create a “special edition” of the game, which it eventually got past Nazi security via the Red Cross into the hands of Allied prisoners in Nazi POW camps. The “special edition” had hidden inside it, maps, compasses, and currency, which the POWs could use to aid in escaping. Presumably, the Red Cross was unawares.
The 1999 Guinness Book of Records, cites Hasbro’s previously articulated statistic of 500 million people as having played the game worldwide. (Later, the firm will up the figure by 50%).
There are local versions in various international capitals, customized for the locals, e.g. in London and Moscow.
On the local front, my personal preference is actually “Risk,” released in 1957 (I was seven), originally invented by the French movie film director Albert Lamorisse. The original name of that game was “La Conquête du Monde” (The Conquest of the World). The French had some prior practice. Also by Parker Brothers–Hasbro.
1936 CE: FRANCISCO FRANCO COMES TO POWER
He will rule Spain until his death in 1975.
1936 CE: GREGORY ZINOVIEV
Zinoviev was one of Lenin’s closest associates, co-authoring Lenin’s Against the Tide. Though a member of the Party’s central government, he was opposed to one-party rule which brought him into conflict with other leaders. After Lenin’s death he formed the triumvirate together with Stalin and Kamenev which forced Trotsky into exile.
Stalin then turned on him. Zinoviev was accused in a show trial of plotting to overthrow Stalin. Along with many other Communist leaders he was executed.
Zinoviev was Jewish and born by the name of Hersh Zvi Radomyslski.
– after Eli Birnbaum
(b. 1883, Yelizavetgrad, Russian Empire; d. 1936, Moscow, Soviet Union)
1936 CE: DAVID FRANKFURTER ASSASSINATES
(b. 1909, Daravur, former Austria-Hungary, today-Croatia; d. 1982, Tel Aviv]
Davos, Switzerland: As a Jewish Yugoslav medical student, he killed the Swiss Nazi, Gauleiter Wilhelm Gustoff. Gusttoff was the Swiss branch leader of the German NSDAP (Nazi Party).
Though the German government demanded the death penalty, he was sentenced to eighteen years instead. He was pardoned June 1, 12945 upon WWII’s conclusion. He moved to tel Aviv, then stil under the British Manfdate, and eventually secured a staffing position at the Israel Ministry of Defence after the 1948 War of liberation.
Some historians believe that his action served as a model for Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination of German Foreign Service Officer Ernst vom Rath inside the German Embassy in Paris, was used by the Nazi party as an excuse for an all-out attack on Jewish property and synagogues (Kristallnacht) across Germany.
1936 CE: THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
Geneva: Appointed Sir Neil Malcolm to succeed James McDonald as High Commissioner for Refugees. Sir Neil announced that the High Commissioner for Refugees “has nothing to do with the domestic policy of Germany... we deal with persons when they become refugees and not before.”
– Eli Birnbaum
1936 CE: JEWISH MUSEUM OF FLORIDA FOUNDED
The Jewish Museum of Florida is located in two restored historic buildings that were formerly synagogues, at 301 and 311 Washington Avenue in Miami Beach, Florida. The “311” building served originally as possibly Miami Beach’s first formal synagogue.
1936 CE: BEGINNING OF THE 36–39 RIOTS (ME’ORAOT)
Palestine: Arab headquarters called for a general strike and a rebellion against the Mandate in an effort to prevent Jewish immigration. Initially 80 Jews were murdered and 308 wounded. By the fall of 1939, over a hundred Jews had been killed in Arab attacks. The official Zionist policy at the time was havlagah (self–restraint).
– Eli Birnbaum
1936-1938 CE: WILLIAM PELLEY
North Carolina: American Fascist and leader of the Silver Legion, mailed three and a half tons of anti-Semitic literature within these 2 years. Even after Pearl Harbor he continued to attack Roosevelt, and accused the American government of lying to the people. He was eventually charged and tried for sedition and jailed until 1950.
1936 CE: POLISH PRIME MINISTER FELICJAN SLAWOJ–SKLADKOWSKI
June 4: Twenty days after being sworn-in as prime minister, endorsed an “economic war” against the Jews.
(Prime Minister: May 15, 1936 – Sept. 20, 1939)
1936 CE: SPANISH CIVIL WAR
–devastated Spain, July 1936 – Apr 1939
The Republicans: The Spanish Loyalists—with support of the International Brigades, the Soviet Union, and Mexico v. The Nationalists: (anti–Communists) with support of Italy, Germany and Portugal.
200,000–500,000 die in the brutal conflict.
The Nationalists under monarchist Franco win.
During WWII to follow, and especially after 1942, quasi neutral Spain had a quasi porous border as regards the Jews, and Spain was a quasi safe haven for Jewish refugees (lots of quasi–s).
1936 CE: WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS
WJC founded in Switzerland…
Later, 1951, it organizes the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany. Then, in 1982 it founds the World Jewish Restitution Organization.
Presidents: Stephen S. Wise, Nahum Goldmann, Philip Klutznick, Edgar Bronfman, Ronald Lauder.
1936 CE: MARTHA GRAHAM PROTESTS
–against the Nazis—and refuses to dance at the 1936 Nazi Berlin Olympics
1936 CE: START OF STALIN’S GREAT PURGE
Russia: Over a two–year period, Joseph Stalin, Dictator of the Soviet Union arrested and then executed approximately 2 million Soviets on various pretexts or trumped–up charges. Many millions more were sent to the Soviet Gulag, Stalin’s vast political prison network spanning Siberia. The “crime” was generally that of being a hypothetical threat to Stalin’s power in any shape, manner or form.
Included in the dragnet were the great bulk of the senior military staff and all the senior members of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Moscow “show trials” were held for the political VIP arrestees, who apparently ‘confessed’ after prolonged torture and deprivation.
It was dangerous to be a hero in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The denuded military high command would face Hitler’s blitzkrieg advance in June 1941.
1936 CE: CONDUCTOR ARTURO TOSCANINI
Dec 26: Tel Aviv
– conducts the first concert of the Palestine Orchestra, which later became known as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
(b. 1867, Parma, Emilia-Romagna; d. 1957, Riverdale, Bronx, NY)
1937 CE: RACIST LOUIS DARQUIER DE PELLEPOIX
France: Founded and headed the Rassemblement anti-Juif de France. His program included promoting the “Protocols” and his own magazine, La France Enchaines, as well as calling for the expulsion or extermination of the Jews. During the war he became Commissioner General for Jewish affairs and helped deport nine thousand foreign Jews to German camps.
– after Eli Birnbaum
1937 CE: MIT BRENNENDER SORGE
March 1937: Mit brennender Sorge (German for “With burning anxiety”) was a Roman Catholic Church encyclical of Pope Pius XI Ambrogio Achille Ratti. The encyclical included very sharp criticism of all racism.
The encyclical was written in German and not in the usual Latin of official Roman Catholic Church documents in order that it would be readily understood when read in the parish churches of Germany. There was no pre–announcement of the encyclical, and its distribution was kept secret, so as to forestall any Nazi interference with its planned reading.
This encyclical condemned particularly the paganism of the national–socialist ideology, the myth of race and blood, and the fallacy of their conception of God.
selected passages –
“The Holocaust: What Was Not Said”, First Thing Magazine, November 2003 (accessed 30 June 2009)
8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds...
10. This God, this Sovereign Master, has issued commandments whose value is independent of time and space, country and race. As God’s sun shines on every human face so His law knows neither privilege nor exception. Rulers and subjects, crowned and uncrowned, rich and poor are equally subject to His word. From the fullness of the Creators’ right there naturally arises the fullness of His right to be obeyed by individuals and communities, whoever they are. This obedience permeates all branches of activity in which moral values claim harmony with the law of God, and pervades all integration of the ever–changing laws of man into the immutable laws of God.
11. None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are “as a drop of a bucket” (Isaiah xl, 15).”
*
Interestingly, in the context of a 21st century Vatican hell–bent on trying to ram through the “sainthood” of Ratti’s successor, the “silent pope” Pacelli, Pius XII, one does not seem to hear much of “sainthood” for Ratti, Pius XI, Pacelli’s predecessor, the author of Mit Brennender – a pope of unblemished courage, integrity, scholarship and bona fide ecumenicism.
*
Regrettably, with the cancer of Jew–hatred having already achieved critical mass of toxicity in the corpus of Europe, courtesy of the Church–demonizations over the centuries by the very same Vatican, Ambrogio Achille Ratti’s courageous encyclical will fall on deaf ears in 1937.
*
Hatred, subtly wrapped–in–theology, is one of the unique Vatican contributions to the sordid history of anti–Semitism. And this Church–inspired hatred tended to take deep root, often multi–generational root, even without new reinforcement. For the random twisted Jew hater will not only be doing the devil’s work; in addition, in his own mind, he will also be doing quasi–theological work, i.e. in line with the “theology” imparted to him by his pastor at Church, by his teachers at Passion Sagas, and by his parents at bedtime when he was a youngster. The Jews were diabolical, were they not? They had killed our Deity, had they not? They were doomed to suffer, were they not?
The saintly Pope Pius XI, as well heir to this Vatican legacy of hate–sowing, would prove no match for the tsunami of hatred now reaching critical mass after almost 20 centuries of hatred–sowing by many of his direct–line predecessors. It was hatred looking for a big–time demagogue. And the two primitive forces rendezvoused with each other in Berlin in the 1930s.
The encyclical of Pius XI, a bona fide beacon in a flowing sewer of hatred, would not save the now–doomed Jewish children of Europe and their families. The die of genocide, which the Vatican had instigated over the centuries, was cast.
*
Having incubated a climate of hatred and denigration in Europe for 19 centuries, and having adroitly ridden that 1900 year–old wave of hatred to consolidate its power and “corroborate” its theology, the Church would see a mutant offspring of hatred–denigration, Nazism, emerge and turn around and bite the Church itself.
Then the Church would, of course, legitimately position itself as adversarial to—and then as a victim of—Nazism.
Nazism sought to destroy the Jews.
Nazism and the Vatican were in opposition.
However, the adversary of Nazism, the Vatican, was, unfortunately not the friend of the Jews.
Rather, the Vatican had been the “predecessor tormentor” of the Jews. In this regards, it had “paved the way.”
It had even “provided the road signs.”
For nineteen centuries, on–and–off, the Vatican denigrated and instigated persecution of the Jews. Setting the stage for the same by the Nazis in the 1930s, almost chapter and verse, In the 1940s, the Nazis took matters to the “logical” next level, and began the systematic “industrial scale” mass murder of the Jews.
Without the Church’s proactively coating Europe for 19 centuries in hatred and denigration of the Jews, there could never ever have been a Holocaust. And never ever a miscreant psychotic hate–monger Adolf Hitler, consolidating so much terrible power in the 20th century.
By 1937, the Vatican saw the Nazi–monster baring it fangs and gnarling at the Vatican itself. The attack–dog of Jew–hatred, bred and groomed by the Vatican over the centuries, had inadvertently empowered a now potential mortal foe of the Vatican itself.
The Church had for centuries, incubated the emotional ingredients necessary for the emergence of the particular Nazi monster. And then “cried wolf” when the wolf came back to bite it—and cause the deaths and killings of over approximately 70 million people, and the suffering of 100+ million more, including, of course, several million of the Church’s historic target, “the Jews.” Hatred begets hatred. And by the 1930s in Europe, there was plenty of hatred sown, to go around.
***
Post–Holocaust, with the stock of anti–Semitism devalued, and Pius XI’s legacy now shining brighter, Mit Brennender would be quite enthusiastically and publicly embraced, expo facto, [after the fact], by a far–wider circle of Church luminaries, than when it was first issued. With the photographs of the living Jewish corpses liberated at Buchenwald circulating around the world in 1945, prescient Mit Brennender of 1937 suddenly looked much more “fashionable” to be associated with. Assorted Church luminaries would claim association with it and arrange corroboration of same, one way or another.
Pius XI happened to put his own legacy and life on the line by signing it. “Ghost–writers” had assiduously stayed carefully “beneath the radar,” when Ratti had sailed against the wind originally, and unleashed his missile against Nazism “in the face” of the Nazi monster. When the wind changed post–Holocaust, with the Nazis annihilated and anti–Semitism déclassé, the “ghost writers” would suddenly make an appearance on stage.
***
Of course, only one individual, Achille Ratti, Pope Pius XI, actually had his name on the document. Only one individual actually took the heat both from the Nazis, and then from his Right Wing for his extended comments in 1938 to Belgian pilgrims, condemning anti–Semitism in particular.
But, Mit Brenender, controversial inside the Vatican in 1937, and not without consequence, looked good in retrospect post–Holocaust, and others would now retroactively seek to bask in its retrospective glow.
However, Pius XI’s, explicit condemnation the following calendar year in 1938, of anti–Semitism as directly contrary to Christian theology, was perhaps too explicit for the Right Wing of the College of Cardinals, 6 million Jewish corpses notwithstanding.
The saintly Pius XI would conveniently be skipped over whenever sainthood is brought up by the Church powers that be. Pius XI, had, of course committed the most unpardonable of Church sins. He not only actually practiced “Love Thy Neighbor” vis à vis the Jews, the gravest of all Vatican crimes until recently, but he actually publicly rejected anti–Semitism en toto as both morally and theologically taboo.
1937 CE: THE (GERMAN) LUFTWAFFE FIREBOMBS GUERNICA
Apr 26: Spanish Civil War
Guernica was a small town located in Spain’s Basque country.
1937 CE: WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES ESTABLISHED
Geneva: Currently a fellowship of about 340 churches, of which 157 are official members. Its membership includes most of the Orthodox Churches and numerous Protestant Churches. The Eastern Churches would seem to have hegemony within the organization.
The group stresses ecumenicism; however, this apparently translates to the usage of the term meaning attempted ecumenicism across Christian denominations. The Roman Catholic Church sends observers to official meetings, but is not a member. Politically, the WCC over the decades has typically and fairly consistently been more pro-Arab and anti-Israel than the Vatican.
The WCC is not, shall we say, on the Top Ten List of friends of Judaism and the Jews. It would officially profess rejection of anti-Semitism, but many of its constituent Churches make the Vatican look good in that regards.
One can make the case that anti-Semitism embedded within the informal ideology of some of the constituent Orthodox Churches, finds its expression in the consistently (and often strident) anti-Israel official postures of the WCC.
This potential phenomenon, just-noted, is hard to distinguish from political anti-Semitism, an often virulently anti-Israel quasi-theology which has vexed, if not traumatized, Jewish students at college campuses around the world, including Jewish-American students at many dozens of campuses across North America and beyond.
In the parallel universe occupied by political anti-Semitism, Arab terror is ignored or justified; Israeli counter-measures are painted as genocidal.
1937 CE: GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
May: Opened in San Francisco
At the time of its opening, it had the longest main suspension span (4,200 feet) in the world; it retained that title until 1964.
As of the closing–point of this work, June 2008, the Akashi–Kaikyo Bridge in Kobe, Japan, had the longest center suspension span (6,529 feet) and the Golden Gate was ranked 9th behind New York’s Verrazano Narrows Bridge (4,250 feet).
1937 CE: PICASSO
Spain: July: Picasso’s Guernica mural christened.
The painting memorializes via art–form, the victims of the bombing of the Guernica by German and Italian warplanes. The bombing was at the behest of the Spanish Nationalist forces during the ongoing Civil War at that time.
The huge mural (11 feet tall x 25+ feet wide), first displayed at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, focuses on Guernica, but is actually a more universal protest/cry against war, in general.
Picasso, Spanish, one of the most extraordinary artists and sculptors of the 20th century, lived 1881–1973.
Founder, along with Braque, of Cubism
1937 CE: AMELIA EARHART DECLARED MISSING
July 2: She disappears over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island during an attempted circumnavigation of the globe.
Earhart had been the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic (May 20–21, 1932) Newfoundland > Paris in 14 hours, 56 minutes.
1937 CE: WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES ESTABLISHED
Geneva: Currently a fellowship of about 340 churches, of which 157 are official members.
Its membership includes most of the Orthodox Churches and numerous Protestant Churches. The Eastern Churches would seem to have hegemony within the organization.
The group stresses ecumenicism; however, this apparently translates to the usage of the term meaning attempted ecumenicism across Christian denominations.
The Roman Catholic Church sends observers to official meetings, but is not a member. Politically, the WCC over the decades has typically and fairly consistently been more pro–Arab and anti–Israel than the Vatican.
The WCC is not, shall we say, on the Top Ten List of friends of Judaism and the Jews. It would officially profess rejection of anti–Semitism, but many of its constituent Churches make the Vatican look good in that regards.
One can make the case that anti–Semitism embedded within the informal ideology of some of the constituent Orthodox Churches, finds its expression in the consistently (and often strident) anti–Israel official postures of the WCC.
The potential phenomenon, just–noted is hard to distinguish from political anti–Semitism, an often virulently anti–Israel quasi–theology which has vexed, if not traumatized, Jewish students at college campuses around the world, including Jewish–American students at many dozens of campuses across North America and beyond.
In the parallel universe occupied by political anti–Semitism, Arab terror is ignored or justified; Israeli counter–measures are painted as genocidal.
1937 CE: NANJING (CHINA) MASSACRE
Dec 13, 1937 – Feb 1938: 200,000–300,000 Chinese massacred by the occupying Japanese Army. Rape (the 80,000 figure is oft–cited) and pillage were apparently rampant.
Nanjing is a port city in northeast China, and was formerly the seat of government of the ROC (Republic of China) before the Chinese Civil War in 1927.
1938 CE: “COMITÉ CENTRAL DE LA COMUNIDAD JUDÍA DE MÉXICO”
In 1938 The Central Committee for the Jewish Community of Mexico… emerged as the umbrella organization for the varying ethnic and religious Jewish communities in Mexico; its analysis and opinion agency is called the Tribuna Israelita.
Benjamin Netanyahu –
“Jews have lived in Mexico since the times of the Inquisition…
There have been Jews in Mexico since Hernando Cortes conquered the Aztecs, accompanied by several Conversos. Later, there arrived Jews escaping the Inquisition. Some of these Spanish Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism (Converso Jews), but many maintained their Jewish religious practices in secret (for which many were killed in what is known as the Mexican Inquisition). However some Conversos and their progeny maintained the conversions to Christianity and to continue to classify them as Jews one has to accept the racial definition of Jewishness.
Due to the power of the Catholic Church in Mexico, few Jews migrated there during the Spanish Colonial Period [1701–1821]. In the 1860s, a large number of German Jews settled in Mexico as a result of invitations from Maximilian I of Mexico. Beginning in the 1880s many Ashkenazic Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and Romania came to Mexico. Another large wave of immigration occurred as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, leading many Sephardic Jews from Turkey, Morocco, and parts of France to flee. Finally, a wave of immigrants fled the increasing Nazi persecutions in Europe during World War II.”
B. Netanyahu. The Origins of the Spanish Inquisition. The New York Review of Books, 1995.
1938 CE: ANSCHLUSS
Vienna: Mar 11–12: sellout
The Austrian Nazi Party (Austrian National Socialist Party) seized control of neighboring Austrian state institutions on March 11, and on March 12 “officially” transferred control of Austria to Germany. German troops immediately entered Austria to prop–up the canard. A manipulated plebiscite was held “ratifying” (by 99.73 percent) the incorporation. Nazi Germany then “officially” annexed Austria.
Having ceased to exist as an independent nation for the duration of the Nazi regime, after WWII only a Provisional Austrian Government was set up (in 1945). It would not be until 1995, fifty seven years after the Anschluss, that Austria would regain full sovereignty.
1938 CE: PENICILLIN
England: One of the great medical advances of all time
Its major initial development was primarily 1938 CE – 1944 CE in the United Kingdom and the USA…
Penicillin’s discovery is usually attributed to Scottish scientist, Alexander Fleming; its development as a medicine is generally attributed to Australian scientist, Howard Walter Florey.
1938 CE: FREUD FLEES CONTINENTAL EUROPE
–after the Gestapo raids his Vienna apartment
He flees to London.
1938 CE: CLAUDE BLOCH
Admiral and commander–in–chief of the United States Fleet 1938-1940. Bloch was a graduate of the Naval Academy and fought in both the Spanish-American War where he was decorated and in the Chinese expedition to suppress the Boxer rebellion. Bloch became a Rear Admiral in 1923 and in 1927 he commanded the battleship California. In 1938 Bloch was made commander-in-chief of the United States Fleet and served as the Commander of the Shore Installation at Pearl Harbor. Bloch retired a year later (he was 64). He continued to serve on the Naval Board until 1946.
Bloch was the highest ranking Jewish officer in the US Armed Forces until well after WWII.
[b. 1878, Woodbury, KY; d. 1967, Washington, DC]
1938 CE: FATHER COUGHLIN GIVES NAZI SALUTE
…at Bronx, NY isolationist rally:
“When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.”
Father Charles Edward Coughlin (1891–1979) was a Roman Catholic priest in Royal Oak, Michigan, teacher at Assumption College, in Windsor, Ontario, and US radio personality in the 1930s. More than forty million tuned in to his weekly radio broadcasts. By 1934, Coughlin was the preeminent Roman Catholic spokesman on political and financial issues.
Via his virulently anti–Semitic newspaper Social Justice, and his inflammatory broadcasts, Coughlin plied his trade of hate. The Reverend Walton E. Cole, a Unitarian minister, in Toledo, Ohio, tried to no avail to prevail upon the Roman Catholic hierarchy to have Coughlin stopped.
In 1942, four years and a torrent of anti–Semitic hatred later, the new bishop of Detroit (finally) ordered Coughlin to cease his “political” activities.
1938 CE: DAPHNE DU MAURIER, 31, WRITES REBECCA
The book commences–
“Last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay again.”
1938 CE: LAW REGARDING CHANGE OF NAMES
Germany: Jewish men were required to add the name “Israel” and Jewish women, the name “Sarah” to all legal documents.
1938 CE: “SHANGHAI SAFE HAVEN”
China: Battle of Shanghai in 1937 results in Shanghai being occupied by Imperial Japan – but in a legal quirk of history, the city became the only place in the world not requiring a classic visa or a passport. Into this legal vacuum of sorts, starting slowly in August, 1938, eventually almost 20,000 European Jews made their way, generally by lumbering railroad across vast Siberia into ultimately a one square–mile area in the Hongku District of Shanghai, to be known as the “Shanghai Ghetto.”
Chinese Consul General Ho Feng Shan in Vienna, Austria and Japanese consul Sugihara in Kaunas, Lithuania heavily impact Jewish history at this point. Both issue the thousands of special Temporary Visas necessary to provide a legal patina to the life–saving and historically unique immigration. [Shan over the 1938–1940 span; Sugihara in c. August 1940].
Subsequent Nazi pressure on their Japanese allies to hand over the Shanghai Jews in 1943–1944, resulted only in Japanese stonewalling. It is not clear to this day as to why. Some say that the Japanese protected the Jews out of loyalty to Jewish–American financier Jacob Schiff who financed the Japanese side of the Russo–Japanese War earlier in the century.
In any event, the various Jewish relief organizations worldwide provided massive “no questions asked” funds to the Shanghai Jews… The famous line is that a telegram was sent to the AJDC, the American Joint Distribution Committee in NY advising that funds were needed, with the response being, “Fine. Just give us the figure.”
In parallel, the Shanghai presence and activism of legendary ex–Baghdad Jews Victor Sassoon and Horace Kadoorie provided crucial local political leverage over the duration…
Among many notable “Shanghai graduates”:
Future artist Peter Max, future Hollywood Executive Michael Medavoy, future US Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal, future Israel–Asian financial mogul Shaul Eisenberg, as well as noted future Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe….(Chinese language skills included).
[See later entry 1940 CE: SUGIHARA]
1938 CE: KRISTALLNACHT!
Nov 9: The “Night of Broken Glass,” Germany
–A Nazi government–inspired nationwide riot against the Jews and Jewish institutions and property.
Approximately 100–250+ Jews were murdered, and another approx. 30,000 sent to concentration camps…
On the property–front, over 7,000 Jewish shops were vandalized, and approximately 1,670 synagogues (essentially practically every synagogue in Germany) were destroyed or damaged.
1938 CE: KINDERTRANSPORT!
Nov: A few days after Kristallnacht, Britain agreed to take in unaccompanied (only) predominantly Jewish children from Europe. The children were placed in foster homes, hostels and farms. Nearly 10,000 Jewish children made it across the English Channel and lived out the war in England. The majority of them, however, had lost home and family forever, back in the murder camps of Europe.
1939 CE: FELIX FRANKFURTER APPOINTED TO THE SUPREME COURT
Born Nov. 15, 1882; died Feb. 22, 1965.
Britannica –
“Associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1939–62), a noted scholar and teacher of law, who was in his time the high court’s leading exponent of the doctrine of judicial self–restraint. He held that judges should adhere closely to precedent, disregarding their own opinions, and decide only “whether legislators could in reason have enacted such a law.”
Frankfurter was the son of a Jewish merchant who left Vienna for New York in 1893. Young Frankfurter was educated at the City College of New York and at the Harvard Law School, where he later taught (1914–39). He served as assistant to Henry L. Stimson when Stimson was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (1906–09) and secretary of war under President William Howard Taft (1911–13). Frankfurter’s influence on President Franklin D. Roosevelt was largely responsible for Stimson’s return (1940) as head of the War Department during World War II.
Frankfurter was a legal adviser to President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference (1919). During the immediate postwar period he was one of the most active American Zionists, and he helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (1920)...
When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president (1933), Frankfurter, who had advised him during his term as governor of New York, advised him on New Deal legislation and other matters. He was appointed by Roosevelt to the Supreme Court on Jan. 5, 1939.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/217283/Felix–Frankfurter (accessed March 2, 2009)
1939 CE: HITLER THREATENS
Germany: Announced to the Reichstag “If international Jewry...should involve the European people in a new war...the result will (be) the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.”
1939 CE: MEIR BAR ILAN FOUNDS HATZOFEH NEWSPAPER
As noted in Encyclopaedia Judaica on Meir Bar Ilan {1997} [CD–ROM] –
“Bar–Ilan (Berlin), MEIR (1880–1949), leader of religious Zionism. Bar–Ilan was born in Volozhin, Russia, the son of R. Napthali Zevi Judah Berlin. He completed his studies in yeshivot at Volozhin, Telz, Brisk (Brest–Litovsk), and Novogrudok. As a young man he joined the Mizrachi delegates, he voted against the Uganda Scheme. In 1919 he was appointed secretary of the world Mizrachi movement, working in Berlin, and he coined the Mizrachi slogan “Erez Yisrael le–Am Yisrael al Pi Torat Yisrael” (“The land of Israel for the people of Israel according to the Torah of Israel”). He moved to the United States in 1915, served as president of the U.S. Mizrachi, representative in Zionist and yishuv institutions, including clandestine committees for defense. Between 1929 and 1931 he was a member of the Zionist Executive. A leading civil disobedience and complete non–cooperation of the Jewish population toward the British government.
After the establishment of the State of Israel, he organized a committee of scholars to examine the legal problems of the new state in the light of Jewish law, and was an initiator of the National Religious Front, the group of religious parties that presented a united platform in the first Knesset elections. A central figure in the Zionist religious movement, Bar–Ilan founded and edited a religious Zionist weekly, Ha–Ivri (“The Hebrew”), which was published in Berlin from 1910 to 1914 and in New York from 1916 to 1921.
Between 1938 and 1949 he was editor in chief of the Mizrachi daily, Hatzofeh, in Tel Aviv. Some of his articles were collected in his books Bi–Shevilei ha–Tehiyyah (“In the Paths of Renaissane,” 1940) and Kitvei Rabbi Meir Bar–Ilan (1950). His memoirs, Mi–Volozhin ad Yerushalayim (“From Volozhin to Jerusalem,” 1939–40), were originally published in Yiddish. He also wrote a book about his father, entitled Rabban shel Yisrael “Rabbi of Israel” (1943). He initiated and organized the publishing of the Talmudic Encyclopaedia, begun in 1947.
He also founded the institute for the publication of a new complete edition in his honor, as is the Meir Forest in the Hebron hills, and the moshav Bet Meir near Jerusalem.”
1939 CE: MADISION SQUARE GARDEN
New York: Feb 20: Thousands attend a pro-Nazi rally sponsored by the German–American Bund and its leader Fritz Kuhn. The German-American Bund, active from 1934-1941, claimed to be “100% American.” Their proclaimed goal was to be for the “constitution, flag and a white gentile ruled, truly free America.”
– Eli Birnbaum
1939 CE: BRITISH (MACDONALD) WHITE PAPER
–Limiting total Jewish emigration to Palestine over the next five years to 75,000 combined.
Backtracking on the Balfour Declaration (of 1917) to appease, this time, the Arabs, the British cut off the key survival line of the Jews of Europe. The “lifeline” to Palestine is 95% cut. Issued May 17, 1939.
1939 CE: LOU GEHRIG, 36, RETIRES FROM BASEBALL
May 2: Two months later, on Independence Day, he addressed the fans and the world at a tearful July 4 ‘Official Farewell’ at Yankee Stadium. “The Iron Horse” had been stricken with ALS (now called Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
He retired after 17+ seasons, having played in 2,130 consecutive games (over his last 15+ seasons), which incorporated and a historic playing–streak which would not be trumped for over half a century (by Cal Ripken of the Baltimore Orioles in 1995).
First baseman Gehrig was one of the greatest Yankees of all–time, a Triple Crown winner included in his legacy, as well as having been a member of the legendary Yankee’s Murderer’s Row lineup.
1939 CE: JOHN STEINBECK PUBLISHES THE GRAPES OF WRATH
–at the tail end of the Great Depression (in April)
By May, the book will be selling ten thousand copies a week. By this point, ten years after the Great Depression had run its course, some Americans actually had a dollar or two in their pockets to buy a book relating to the ten–year economic trauma they had just suffered through.
1939 CE: HMS ST. LOUIS
June 4: The German ship, laden with (primarily) German–Jewish refugees was refused permission to unload its desperate passengers either at Cuba or on the East Coast of the USA. It was forced to return to Europe, with most of its passengers eventually presumed killed in the Nazi genocide.
Author – It is unfortunate that the captain of the doomed ship did not run it aground off the Miami coast….
1939 CE: EINSTEIN “LETTER TO ROOSEVELT”
Aug 2: The letter is believed drafted by the Hungarian Jewish expatriate nuclear physicist Leó Szilárd, in consultation with fellow physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner.
…for review and potential signature by hitherto “pacifist” Einstein. Einstein reviewed the matter carefully, and was a “GO.”
The key and pivotal “Letter” alerted Roosevelt to the imperative of researching, then potentially building, an atomic bomb to preempt Hitler.
The “Letter” was delivered – and summarized verbally – personally to Roosevelt, Oct 11 (over two months after signature) because of Roosevelt’s pre–occupation with
Hitler’s September 1 invasion of Poland.
It was delivered/articulated by Alexander Sachs, a high–level multi–hat advisor to the White House and Cabinet. Upon hearing the Sachs summary, Roosevelt authorized the Uranium Advisory Board (see Trinity Test below in July, 1945).
The Sachs “presentation” would thereby alter the history of the planet.
1939 CE: EUGENE O’NEIL WRITES THE ICEMAN COMETH
1939 CE: MOLOTOV–RIBBENTROP PACT
August 24: Signed in Moscow
–a Non–aggression treaty between Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, colloquially named after the Soviet and Nazi foreign ministers respectively.
Nominally freeing–up Germany’s eastern front, the pact justifiably sent shivers across Europe. Less than a week after the signing of the pact, Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1.
A secret protocol in the pact carved–up Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania into Russian and German spheres of influence, anticipating fairly imminent “territorial and political re–arrangements” of these countries. All these countries were subsequently invaded and/or intimidated into ceding territory. Of the group, only Finland was to stand up to all military and political moves against it, and remain an independent democracy.
Ultimately, the Nazi monster–state abrogated the pact, and invaded the Soviet monster–state in Operation Barbarossa, June 22, 1941. The world may have been shocked, but Stalin certainly was not.
1939 CE: BILL BLASS VOTED “BEST DRESSED”
–and “Least Likely to Succeed.”
–by his graduating classmates at South Side High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Blass would later go into the fashion business.
1939 CE: GERMANY INVADES POLAND
Sept 1: Then, in response, England, France and assorted British Commonwealth nations immediately “Declare War” on Germany.
1939 CE: BALTIC STATES > RUSSIA
September 28: Russia continues to absorbed Baltic States, pursuant to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (signed August 23, 1938) which divided-up Poland between Germany and Russia.
Over the next 6 months, these ‘absorptions’ would include Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and parts of Bessarabia, Galicia, Belarus, and Bukovina. This added 2,170,000 Jews to Russia’s population of 3 million Jews. Russia would give some of the Baltic States only a vague semblance of independence which created resentment and prepared the way for their eventual welcoming of the Germans in June 1941. Around 1 million Jews were later killed in those areas, many of them by local special police who were active participants in their murder.
1939 CE: THE MURDER REICH
Germany, 1939–1945: The psychopaths from the Munich Beer Hall gained control of the reins of power of Nazi Germany and then of Nazi–occupied Europe. They held their mortal metaphysical enemy, the Jews, in their death grasp. The Nazis were apparently intent not just on murdering the Jews, but on “breaking them” prior, as well.
The logistics of setting up an apparatus murdering millions would turn out to be manageable for the “ever so efficient” Third Reich.
The harder part, that of neutralizing the hundreds of millions of Christian denizens of Greater Europe from protesting too strongly, had been taken care of for the Nazis in the preceding centuries leading up to the Holocaust by another institution, also masters of demonization, the Catholic Church.
1939 CE: THE NAZI FREIGHT CAR DEATH TRANSPORT (1939–1945)
Germany – A Third Reich gambit both to transport victims to Concentration and Death Camps, and to simultaneously to inflict severe abomination, debasement, trauma and humiliation on (millions of) decent people (overwhelmingly Jewish) over (generally) 1–9 day sustained periods of deprivation of essentially all the basic human needs (except some limited air). 50–100+ persons were ordered into a freight car. No food or water was provided and one toilet bucket per freight car.
Aside from the de facto psychological death sentence unfolding fairly quickly, many died physically in the freight cars from starvation, asphyxiation, debasement or the temperature (whether freezing cold or stifling hot, or both during a 24 hour period). In other words, rolling torture chambers.
Severely degrading their targeted victims (most often family–units) psychologically and physically, in preparation for the salient Nazi “contribution to history”: the Nazi gas chamber.
1939 CE: NAZI DEATH CAMPS / CONCENTRATION CAMPS:
1939 CE – 1945 CE
AUSCHWITZ
1,260,000 Jews murdered
140,000 non–Jews murdered
Technical category: “Death Camp”
Location: Poland
BELZEC
540,000 Jews murdered here
60,000 non–Jews murdered here
Technical category: “Death Camp”
Location: Poland
CHELMNO
288,000 Jews murdered here
32,000 non–Jews murdered
Technical category: “Death Camp”
Location: Poland
JASENOVAC
20,000 Jews murdered here
600,000 non–Jews murdered here
Technical category: “Death Camp”
Location: Croatia
MAJDANEK
330,000 Jews murdered here
30,000 non–Jews murdered here
Technical category: “Death Camp”
Location: Poland
MALY TROSTENETS
59,000 Jews murdered here
6,000 non–Jews murdered here
Technical category: “Death Camp”
Location: Belarus, USSR
SOBIBÓR
225,000 Jews murdered here
25,000 non–Jews murdered here
Technical category: “Death Camp”
Location: Poland
TREBLINKA
783,000 Jews murdered here
87,000 non–Jews murdered here
Technical category: “Death Camp”
Location: Poland
DACHAU
12,000 Jews murdered here
24,000 non–Jews murdered here
Technical category: “Concentration Camp”
Location: Germany
BERGEN–BELSEN
25,000 Jews murdered here
25,000 non–Jews murdered here
Technical category: “Concentration Camp”
Location: Germany
TERESENSTADT
30,000–40,000 Jews murdered here
Unknown number of non–Jews murdered here
Technical category: “Concentration Camp”
Location: Czechoslovakia
MAUTHAUSEN
Approx. 125,000 Jews murdered here
Approx. 125,000 non–Jews murdered here
Technical category: “Mass–murder via hard–labor”
Location: Austria
Concentration Camps had existed in Germany
since the early 1930s:
Dachau (1933)…Sachsenhausen (1936)…
Buchenwald (1937)…Flossenbürg (1936)…
Mauthausen (1938)…Ravensbrück (1939)
The line between “concentration camp” and “death camp” is often blurred – as all resulted in mass murder of one form or another.
Approx. 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust,
including 1+ million children.
1/3 of world Jewry;
2/3 of European Jewry;
9/10 of Polish Jewry.
Number of Roma (gypsies) killed:
consensus is approx. 225,000–275,000 …
1939 CE: THE HORROR REICH 1939–1945
Slave labor; human “medical” atrocities; extortion via incarceration of family members; torture as a daily enterprise The Third Reich “left no abomination unturned.”
1939 CE: YEDIOT AHRONOTH FOUNDED
Tel Aviv: by Nachum Komarov.
Since the 1970s, the most widely circulated paper (Hebrew) in Israel.
It currently emphasizes “drama and human interest over sophisticated analysis.” You know what that means.
1939 CE: BRITAIN CALLS FOR VOLUNTEERS IN PALESTINE
Eretz Israel: Most of the Jews boycotted the call to join British army since the British refused to allow Jews to serve in combat units.
– after Eli Birnbaum
1940s CE: FIRST CLASS
The Nazis employed First Class Death Trains, however, for murder–transport of Jewish veterans of the German Army and Navy. First Class trains to the Death Camps. Many of these veterans were war veterans of WWI. Jewish German generals and admirals included. Medals–included.
The Nazis “spared–no–expense” for their war veterans.
1940 CE: CHURCHILL BECOMES PRIME MINISTER OF ENGLAND
Hitler is on the march.
Churchill tells his countrymen in his first speech:
“All I have to offer is blood, sweat and tears.”
Hitler had not factored that in. Churchill, with a little help from the Yanks, will prevail.
1940 CE: LODZ, POLAND
Nazi Germany ordered the setting up of the Lodz Ghetto. Before the war, Lodz was the second largest Jewish community in Poland with 233,000 Jews, one-third of the city’s residents. As the Germans arrived, around 75,000 fled the city. By May 1st, 160,000 Jews were funneled into the ghetto renamed Litzmannstadt. Of the more than 200,000 who were to pass through in the ghetto, only about 10,000 would survive.
– Eli Birnbaum
1940 CE: FIRST DEPORTATION, GERMANY
February 12: First deportation of German Jews into occupied Poland.
The Nazis forcibly deport 17,000 Jews to Poland. Poland refused them entry, forcing them to remain in No Man’s Land. Germany continued to expel small groups, often using force to prevent them from reentering Germany after they were turned away at the Polish border by the Polish police
1940 CE: H. F. DOWNIE, ENGLAND
The British Head of the Middle East Department of the Colonial Office stated that “the Jews are enemies just as the Germans are, but in a more insidious way,” and that “our two sets of enemies [Nazis and Jews] are linked together by secret and evil bonds.” A year later (March 15, 1941), he wrote” one regret[s] that the Jews are not on the other side in this war.”
1940 CE: DUNKIRK EVACUATION
France, May 26 – June 4: British military “Operation Dynamo”
–The evacuation of British and Allied soldiers from the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk, France
The German Army had stopped the British and French troops at the Battle of Dunkirk. The “greatest [British] military defeat for many centuries,” recalls Winston Churchill.
He warned that “the whole root, the core, and brain of the British Army” was stranded in Dunkirk. Churchill called the subsequent rescue of 338,226 soldiers a “miracle of deliverance.” Many hundreds of small British civilians merchant boats, fishing boats, and even pleasure–craft participated in the historic, partially ad–hoc rescue.
1940 CE: NETHERLANDS FALLS
Just four days after the German invasion and one day after Queen Wilhelmina fled to London, the country surrendered to the Germans. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian lawyer who had played an important role in the Anschluss, was appointed Reich commissioner. Almost all of Holland’s Jews lived in three cities with 60% in Amsterdam alone, making it very easy for the Germans to concentrate their efforts. Out of Holland’s 140,000 Jews, 80% would perish in the Holocaust. Seyss–Inquart was later hung after the Nuremberg trials.
1940 CE: LA MER ET L’ENFANT
– becomes the first social welfare organization in occupied France. Under the guidance of David Rapoport, “Mother and Child” helped thousands of Jews. Rapoport and his wife were arrested by the Nazis in June 1943 and deported to Auschwitz where they perished. The La Mere et l’Enfant was originally founded at a day camp known as the Colonie Scolaire which was located at 26 Rue Amelot. There were also known by some as the Rebels of the Rue Amelot.
1940 CE: THE SOVIETS INVADES LATVIA
June 17: And occupy it until the Nazi invasion/occupation of Latvia 13 months later in July 1941.
Immediately after the establishment of the Nazi authority, mass killings of the Jewish and Gypsy populations commenced, with a major killing taking place in Rumbula.
During the Nazi occupation, designated killing campaigns murdered 90,000 Latvians, of whom 70,000 were Jews.
[Contemporary note: By the early 2000s, around 9,000 Jews remained in Latvia (similar to the mid–nineteenth century figure) mostly in Riga, where an Ohr Avner Chabad school was in operation.]
1940 CE: SUGIHARA
Lithuania, July 31: The office/residence compound of Japanese Vice Consul in Kaunas, (central) Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara:
(Lithuania is just south of Latvia. It was a historic cradle of Jewish religious scholarship. In parallel to Latvia’s travail during WWII, Lithuania was occupied first by the Soviets and then by the Nazis.)
Sugihara had been besieged for several weeks by many hundreds of Jewish refugees (from Poland and internally from Lithuania itself) seeking transit visas through Japan, to escape the approaching Nazis.
Lithuania had recently been occupied by the Soviet Army, but was under imminent invasion–threat from the Nazis, who had occupied Latvia just to the north that month (July).
In general, Japan required the presentation of both end–destination visas as well as proof of financial strength, as pre-requisites for issuing transit visas.
The Jews at hand held end–destination visas to Curacao or Dutch Guiana, issued by the Dutch consul in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk. These “official end–destination visas” were considered sketchy (as indeed they were) by the Japanese authorities back in Tokyo. In the proof of financial strength department, at the moment at hand, this was not a strong “arrow in the quiver” of these refugees either.
Nevertheless, Sugihara telegrammed back to Tokyo for approval to issue the transit visas. After three rejections in three weeks by the Japanese Interior Ministry back home, on July 31, Sugihara elected to unilaterally issue the visas. Between July 31 and September 4th (when the consulate was literally physically shut down by the Japanese Home Office), Sugihara issued individual or family visas which had the effect of allowing 6,000–10,000+ Jews to cross Russian Siberia and into Japan.
Sugihara single–handedly saved basically the entire Mir Yeshiva, the only European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust relatively intact.
[It is generally accepted that the Soviets charged the desperate refugees almost five times the regular fare to use the aforementioned Trans Siberian Railroad across the Soviet Union.]
(See also prior entry 1938 CE: “SHANGHAI SAFE HAVEN”)
1940 CE: BATTLE OF BRITAIN
Summer to fall 1940: The German Luftwaffe’s attempts to gain air superiority over the (British) Royal Air Force
(The Royal Air Force at that time was also known as the “RAF” and as “Fighter Command.”)
The name (“Battle of Britain”) derives from a speech made on June 18, 1940 in the House of Commons by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin…”
The battle was the first major campaign to essentially be fought by opposing air forces and was the largest Nazi bombing campaign to that date. The Nazis failed to destroy Britain’s air defense or to force them to surrender. This was the first major Nazi defeat and a crucial turning point in the war.
1940 CE: CHARLES SCHULZ’S CARTOONS ARE REJECTED
…by his high school yearbook.
Central High School of St. Paul, Minnesota, may not have appreciated him, but ten years later, in 1950, Schulz’s syndicated comic strip Peanuts would commence a 50–year uninterrupted run.
Peanuts would appear in over 2,600 newspapers spanning 75 countries.
1940 CE: “HANKA LAMET” IS 3 YEARS OLD
b. 1937; d. 1943
(The little girl in the Warsaw Ghetto photo)
After 17 centuries of poisoning the masses of Europe against the isolated and politically powerless Jews, the Roman Catholic Church’s unrelenting and insidious demonizations and dehumanizations of the Jews, laced with incendiary Passion Saga incarnations, had finally reached ‘critical mass’ at the hands of the grandmasters of hate, the Nazis.
Author’s note: The Vatican may feel it has some unique mandate from Heaven to demonize a powerless and miniscule minority group when it is intermittently politically convenient for the Church to do so, to play “silent partner” in the meat–grinder it put the Jews through for 19 centuries; however, respectfully, we have not seen this celestial moral exemption.
As a singular example of just one of the millions of victims of this centuries old Vatican– gambit, focus, perhaps through a time lens into the Majdanek (Poland) Death Camp Gas Chamber in December 1943…focus on just one single quite young person…
[The individual, the locations and the dates are real and accurate; the particulars of the death–scene details are a composite]
Focus on a now quite alone in the world, terrified Jewish six–year–old girl, brown–haired, blue–eyed, Hanka Lamet—originally of an upper–middle–class cosmopolitan Warsaw, Poland household, complete with Friday Night Sabbath white linen on the polished wood dining table and silver candlesticks holding the lit Sabbath Candles….22 months prior pulled–out of her nursery playgroup.
At that point, 22 months ago, together she had two fine parents, one older brother and one younger sister.
Now, 22 months later, late in 1944, she is quite, quite alone—and quite terrified. After a nightmare, five–hour wretched Death Train freight–car “horror ride” packed with 310 other former members of Jewish society jammed into the same Nazi freight car, with basically no food or sanitation, a noxious, catastrophic, hellish death ride. Hanka Lamet is now on the final stages of a torture–vector to hell.
“Greeted” at 3 A.M. in the 0 degrees centigrade cold, upon the sliding–open of the freight–car doors at the Majdanek Death Camp fright–train disgorgement platform, by howling German Shepherds and Nazi Storm Trooper hand searchlights, Hanka Lamet has now entered the epicenter of a parallel universe – the “Universe of Nazi Torture–Death.”
Her siblings are missing; her parents are dead from the train “ride.” All Hanka has, clutched in her left hand, is her dad’s small silver pocket–watch, which she salvaged from his suit–pocket as he died in the horror–carnage inside the freight train. Coated in grime, among other severe humiliations, Hanka Lamet is now forced by Nazi Storm Troopers first into transport trucks and then, into a huge cement–block building to disrobe the remnants of her now human–soiled clothes… Then she is “ushered” by guards into a 250–person freezing “shower room”; but the foul–smelling heavy disinfectant coating all–around makes it clear that this is, after all, the notorious Nazi Gas Chamber, no longer a surreal nightmare, but a real and heavily noxious Nightmare.
Parents dead, siblings gone, dignity gone. All hope now gone. Spirit destroyed. Naked and alone and desperately clutching her father’s small silver pocket–watch. Shivering. Humiliated. Starving. Alone.
Alone….among hundreds of other terrified and trembling still barely alive females.
Now, all painfully, quite slowly and quite horribly asphyxiating to death on the hydrogen cyanide gas from the Zyklon B pellets being dropped–into the ‘shower’ chamber. Surrounded by hundreds of frantic, screaming, vomiting and terrified other girls and their naked trembling mothers and aunts…the dead and the dying now piling–up on each other’s agonizing bodies in their death throes….actually creating a writhing pile–up of the dead and the near–dead – against the bolted metal door….. as brown–haired seven–year–old Hanka Lamet left hand finally releases its desperate grip, and drops the silver pocket–watch onto the concrete floor, Hanka’s blue veins slowly start exploding—and her lungs convulsing—in December 1943 in the Majdanek’s Gas Chamber… Seven–year–old trembling Hanka, at this moment in time, gasping–now for her very final breaths, surrounded by the purplish–now, screaming near–dead, may have at this point in time somewhat failed to discern the Church’s immortal moral grandeur…and failed to appreciate all the very fancy–footwork of the very fancy Greek prose in the gospel–truth heavily politicized, “let’s demonize the Jews” Passion Sagas which poisoned—while it entertained—the masses of Europe, and demonized its Jews for centuries ongoing.
1940s CE: EINSATZGRUPPEN
Russia: Early 1940s, Ukraine, in particular…
Marauding Nazi S.S. Death squads in Ukraine (and Belarus) (generally following behind regular German Army Wehrmacht troops) commit mass murder.
Einsatzgruppen killers murder one million (1.3 million – historian Hilberg) Jews at close–range…generally “one bullet only allowed” to “conserve” Nazi ammo… many of the innocents take days to die… open–air shootings…often into mass–pits [too gruesome to relate further here].
The mass–murder at the Babi Yar (Ukraine) Ravine has achieved the most historical notoriety of the many hundreds of gruesome massacres.
The mass atrocities of the Einsatzgruppen spanning thousands of miles and hundreds of individual massacres known for their severe cruelty and sadism remain unsurpassed in Western annals.
1940 CE: WHITE CHRISTMAS
Irving Berlin in America composes “White Christmas.”
Born Israel Isidore Beilin in (either Belarus or Tyumen) Russia into an Orthodox Jewish family, he eventually composed over 3,000 songs.
He was an “equal opportunity” composer.
1940 CE: THE CHANCELLOR
Dr. Louis Finkelstein, author, scholar and visionary, appointed Chancellor of JTS (the Jewish Theological Seminary) in NY.
A preeminent leader of the Conservative movement in the 20th century, Finkelstein was the head of JTS from 1940–1972. He oversees its historic growth over his 32–year tenure.
1940 CE: 1580 JEWS DEPORTED BY THE BRITISH TO MAURITIUS
December 26: Mauritius, island in the Indian Ocean about 500 miles east of Madagascar, where Jewish refugees from Central Europe – passengers of the Atlantic – were put into detention during World War II after being forcibly deported from Palestine by the British as “illegal” immigrants. On their arrival in Mauritius (Dec. 26, 1940), they numbered 1,580 persons.
They were repatriated to Haifa, Israel, in August, 1945.
1941 CE: LEND–LEASE
March: Lend–Lease approved the US Congress.
The program would eventually supply the United Kingdom and other US allies against Hitler (Russia, France and China) with vast amounts of war materiel between 1941–1945. Approximately $50 billion–worth total, of which about 60 percent would go to the UK.
Lend–Lease was Roosevelt’s not–so–delicate dance to circumvent strong isolationist sentiment in the USA, and Roosevelt’s own campaign promises.
1941 CE: BISMARCK SUNK!
10:39 A.M. May 27: Denmark Strait: Nazi super–battleship sunk by the British Navy after previous British attacks the prior day had crippled its rudder.
Churchill gets his quarry...having previously issued the now–legendary order – “Sink the Bismarck!” – 3 days prior to the Royal Navy.
The British; pride of the fleet battle cruiser HMS HOOD, had been destroyed by the Bismarck in the first skirmish 3 days earlier...with 1415 of the original 1418 Hood sailors killed when the HOOD blew up in a tremendous explosion and then sunk under Bismarck’s barrage.
All but 5 of Bismarck’s 2100 sailors died—either in the naval battle or by the delayed British rescue attempt.
1941 CE: DAVID RAZIEL (1910-1941)
In cooperation with British Army intelligence, David Raziel, the commander of the I.Z.L. (Irgun Zvai Leumi) lead a group to sabotage the oil depots on the outskirts of Baghdad. Raziel had been captured by the British in 1939 but was released at the outbreak of the war. The next day, while on an intelligence gathering mission, Raziel’s car was bombed and both he and the liaison British officer were killed.
Yaakov Meridor, who accompanied him on the mission, was appointed commander in his stead.
– Eli Birnbaum
1941 CE: GREECE
– was occupied and was broken into three zones German, Italian and Bulgarian. Germany occupied eastern Thrace, Salonika and Crete. Italy occupied “old Greece,” and Bulgaria annexed western Thrace, Macedonia and the Ionian islands. Salonika which had been occupied by the Germans on April 9th immediately began to institute anti-Jewish measures. The areas occupied by Italy did not institute any harsh measures until the Nazi occupation (see Sept. 1943) The Bulgarians only “cooperated” after strong German pressure and then only in Thrace and part of Macedonia (March 9, 1943). Thirteen hundred Jews, 300 of them former soldiers join the partisans. Out of Greek population of 70,000 Jews, 58,000 were murdered.
– Eli Birnbaum
1941 CE: OPERATION BARBAROSSA
June 22: The Nazi (surprise) invasion of Russia.
(Note: June 24 was the anniversary of Napoleon’s ill–fated invasion of Russia in 1812)
Over 4.5 million troops of the Nazi–led Axis powers invaded the USSR eastward along an 1800–mile front.
The primary operational objective was the rapid conquest of the European part of the Soviet Union, which included the Ukraine. The ultimate objective was to enslave the entire Soviet Union.
Of the compound, inter–related objectives, only the initial conquest of the economically important Ukraine was achieved. It was primarily in the Ukraine that the Nazis murdered a million+ Jews, as noted above in the section Einsatzgruppen (1940s).
A separate 1,000–page book would probably be necessary to properly cover this invasion. However, in short: the Nazis lost; the Russian army and the Russian winter won.
The epic “battle to the death,” poised the two megalomaniac mass–murderers, Hitler and Stalin against each other, with the Russian winter tipping–the–balance to the defenders of their erstwhile motherland.
Operation Barbarossa remains the largest military operation, in terms of manpower, area traversed, and casualties (over 4.5 million, at a bare minimum), in human history.
Operation Barbarossa’s failure, opened the door for the momentum of a Soviet counter–offensive westward across Russia, then through Eastern Europe, and ultimately into Germany and then Berlin itself (May, 1945).
***
The debacle which unfolded for the Nazis as a direct consequence of their invasion of the Soviet Union, leaves one pause, because on multiple levels Hitler’s Nazi forces aped the precise mistakes made by Napoleon’s French forces who had attempted a similar grand gambit eastward against Russia c. 1812.
1) They both attacked much too late in the Spring/Summer; indeed they both attacked within two June days of each other (instead of say 60 days earlier mid–April).
2) They both had fatally over–extended supply lines
3) They both fatally had the wrong mix of military equipment supplies for the harsh Soviet winter
4) They both had the wrong (substandard) winter clothing for their troops for the harsh Soviet winter
5) They both under–estimated the resolve of the Russian people defending their key cities.
Now, considering that a random 10–year–old in Europe/Russia in 1941 probably knew the core causes of Napoleon’s defeat, one is left to ponder the calculations of the Nazi General Staff.
But –
• Perhaps the Nazi killing techniques only really worked ‘well’ against unarmed civilians, or hopelessly outgunned armies.
• Perhaps the Nazis were just simply better at their historic forté of “following orders” than at truly sophisticated strategy...
• Perhaps they were so busy deciding that everyone but them was “sub–human,” Slavs and Russians included, and that they didn’t deal objectively with reality...
• Perhaps they were too busy kissing–up to Hitler, to plan truly intelligently.....
***
Note to the Wehrmacht: If planning on world conquest, best to be smart,
Respectfully
• Do not attack with 27% of the tanks and 38% of the aircraft which your enemy can potentially bring–to–bear.
• If you can’t win before winter sets in, try another plan.
• Try to “think things through a bit” before attacking.
• Dress warmly, if playing–in–the–snow.
***
(more below in 1942 [July] entry, the Battle of Stalingrad)
(more above 1940s entry, Einsatzgruppen)
1941 CE: JASSY MASSACRE
Jassy, Romania: Romanian and German troops murder thousands of Jews and deported the rest with the active participation of local residents. It is estimated that there were 12,000 victims. Jassy had been considered the capital of Romanian anti-Semitism during the late 19th century when Alexander Cuza, the Romanian nationalist and anti-Semite, taught at the university. After the Antonescu government seized power in November 1940, the city of Jassy became the “capital of the Iron Guard.” [The ‘Iron Guard’ being a far right movement and political party in Romania from 1927 into the early part of WWII.]
– after Eli Birnbaum
1941 CE: CATHOLIC ATROCITY IN POLAND
July 10: Jedwabne, Poland: Independent of the Nazis, local Catholic Poles round up the local Jews and murder dozens in the town square. The 400 surviving Jews who were not murdered in the village square, are run down Cemetery Road to Bronislaw Sleszynski’s thatch-roofed barn. Kerosene was poured on the barn and set alight, burning all 400 alive.
The atrocity was almost forgotten until 1999, when the historian Jan Gross (of NYU) assembled evidence that Jadwabne’s Jewish pogrom was not, as local lore had it, the work of under-siege Polish townsmen acting on orders from the advancing Nazi SS. Instead, documents and eyewitness accounts confirmed that local Catholic Poles unilaterally organized and carried-out the massacre of their Jewish neighbors.
In due course, in 2001, the president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, came to Jadwabne to apologize to (the ghosts of) the Jews for what Poles of one faith unilaterally did to Poles of another faith.
In trials in 1949 and 1953 more than a dozen Poles were convicted of murder in the killing of Jedwabne’s Jews.
The state public prosecutor – who opened his own investigation 17 years later in 2000 – issued his formal report in January 2003. It relates that half the adult Catholic men in Jedwabne, along with Catholic women and children took part in the pogrom, some watching, some helping to round up those Jews trying to escape, and others killing Jews with their bare hands.
On the heels of the state prosecutor’s report, Michal Chajewskis, Jedwabne’s newly–elected mayor said bluntly, apparently, that “it is time to finish with this circus.” “Besides,” he said, “Jedwabne was only one of more than two dozen towns in the region where anti–Jewish pogroms were carried out.” ***
*** NY Times: February 8, 2003
“Polish Town Still Tries To Forget Its Past” by Peter S. Green
note: The advancing Nazis apparently encouraged pogroms throughout regions of Poland.
1941 CE: MARTYRDOM – KOLBE
July: Political prisoner at Auschwitz, Maximilian Kolbe, Polish Conventual Franciscans friar, volunteers to replace another prisoner, a stranger, who was selected for starvation torture death in a notorious Nazi starvation chamber. The Nazis accept his offer.
There is a problem footnote with the Kolbe narrative, however. It is asserted in Constantine’s Sword (p. 4) that Kolbe, who rescued the non–Jewish prisoner, had been editor of an anti–Semitic Catholic journal prior to the war.
1941 CE: MARIA CALLAS, 17, DEBUTS AS TOSCA
Athens, August: The future opera diva was born in NY received her musical education in Greece and developed her career in Italy.
The extraordinary Callas will be referred to as “the God–Given.”
1941 CE: JOSEPH B. SOLOVEITCHIK
New York: Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (a.k.a. “The Rav”) succeeds his father.
–as head of (“Rosh Yeshiva” of) RIETS (Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary) at Yeshiva University in Washington Heights (upper Manhattan).
Soloveitchik ordained over 2,000 rabbis and is a seminal figure in Modern Orthodox Judaism. He was the “standard–bearer,” as well for the 250 year Soloveitchik rabbinic/scholarship dynasty (incorporating the Lichtenstein and Twersky luminaries).
Soloveitchik’s works include: “The Lonely Man of Faith”; “Halakhic Man”; “Halakhic Mind”; Kol Dodi Dofek [My Love (God) Beckons]
(b. 1933 in then–Russia; d.1993 in NY)
1941 CE: “PALMACH”
Palestine: Elite military strike–force wing created by the Jewish settler leadership.
It would ultimately form the leadership cadre of the IDF – the Israel Defence Forces.
The Palmach sprang from the Haganah, the “mainstream” defensive shield of the Jewish settlements.
The Haganah, in turn, itself was originally Ha–Shomer (The Guild of Watchmen), established in 1907 to guard Jewish settlements in Palestine.
***
The “Palmach” wing was created 34 years into the Haganah’s duration.
“Palmach” is an acronym for “Plugot Machatz” – forward–strike companies.
The Palmach was established by the British military and the Haganah on May 15, 1941 to protect Palestine from the potential Nazi German threat. In addition, it was to assist in a potential Allied invasion of Vichy–occupied Lebanon and Syria, which was contemplated at that point in time.
However, after the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt in 1943, the British ordered the dismantling of the Palmach. Instead, the organization went “underground.”
At that point, it formally realigned militarily with the Haganah and aligned, as well, with the kibbutz movement in a textured security–alliance.
The Hach’shara Meguyeset program – Drafted/Recruited Training program – was an eventual outgrowth of the kibbutz alliance.
Later on, a symbiotic alliance evolved with the Nahal (para–military) settlements and the Zionist youth movement.
Forty one years into the Haganah’s duration, upon the creation of the Jewish state in May, 1948, the Haganah morphed into the (to–be vaunted) IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, with Palmach veterans in key positions.
Haganah cadres included many 13–27 year–old European Jewish male youth who had tenaciously survived Hitler.
Illustrious/legendary members of the Haganah included Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Rehavam Zeevi, Dov Hoz, Yitzhak Sadeh, and Yigal Allon.
1941 CE: B. H. LIDDELL HART
Maverick British military theoretician publishes STRATEGY: The Indirect Approach
His stratagems were later incorporated (extraordinarily successfully) by Israeli General Moshe Dayan into Israeli military doctrine, particularly in desert tank warfare.
In particular Dayan and the IDF employed Lidell Hart’s tactics in the Sinai Campaign (1956) and then, eleven years later in the Six Day War (1967). Both sagas resulted in lightning–like (less than 4–5 days each) Sinai desert conquests by the adroit Israeli armored divisions.
1941 CE: Pearl Harbor! DECEMBER 7
“a day which will live in infamy”
– FDR in subsequent address to the nation
Three hundred fifty three Japanese aircraft from six aircraft carriers (plus five midget submarines) attack Oahu, Hawaii harbor and airfields beginning at 7:48 A.M. Hawaii time... Eighteen American ships were sunk, including five battleships...2,310+ American servicemen and 56+ civilians were killed...185 American aircraft destroyed.
Author: Had the Japanese sunk 5 aircraft carriers instead of 5 battleships, the subsequent war against Japan may have looked messier in American history books. But none of America’s 5 aircraft carriers were in Pearl at the time of the attack. A lucky—and crucial—break for the US Navy. For, the “era of the aircraft carrier” had arrived; and the Japanese war planners had initially not necessarily fully grasped its overarching dimensions.
1941 CE: CHELMNO/KULMHOF DEATH CAMP, POLAND
The first camp to be created specifically as a death camp was opened using the toxic exhaust from mobile vans. Herbert Lange was the first commandant, followed by Hans Bothmann. Approximately 340,000 people were murdered there. Death camps or extermination camps were created for one purpose - to kill Jews and dispose of the bodies as ‘efficiently’ as possible. The Nazis need to find more direct ways to implement their goal of a “Jew Free” Europe increased as a result of the influx of Jews from the East. In addition to Chelmno, there were five other main death camps: Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Treblinka. Other smaller death camps were established near Vilna, Riga, Minsk, Kovno, and Lvov.
Down the road, in 1963, twelve of the camp’s SS officers were sentenced to prison terms ranging form 1 to 20 years. Bothmann hanged himself in April 1946 after his arrest. There is no information on the whereabouts of Lange.
1942 CE: MADELEINE DREYFUS LEVY
–joins the French Resistance
Toulouse, France: Twenty–two year old social worker and granddaughter of exonerated [Jewish] French artillery officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus (reinstated as a major in 1906), Madeleine Dreyfus is arrested by the Nazis in 1943 after a curfew violation. She is sent to Drancy Internment Camp, and from Drancy she is sent onward to Auschwitz Death Camp. In Auschwitz she is gassed to death.
1942 CE: CHESTER CARLSON RECEIVES PATENT #2,297.691
–for a process he will later call xerography
Originally his invented process was called electrophotography.
1942 CE: “ME–MA–A–MAKIM KARASI YAH”
“from the depths I cry to You”
Early 1940s…. Jewish prisoners laying tefillin…(putting on tefillin) in the corpse–laden death pits of Poland’s death camps (1942 CE – 1945 CE, in particular).
Force–marched through the gates of hell, and now in the very depths of hell, these surreal Orthodox Jews, hounded into Poland’s death camps on a vector towards their enslavement and mass–murder, will face their torturers unflinchingly, and on their own terms, “keeping the Covenant” ad extremum.
[Tefillin, phylacteries, are ritually strapped around the head and the (weaker) arm by male Jewish adults for the (non–Sabbath or Holiday). Morning Prayer sequence (Shacharit)].
1942 CE: “WANNSEE CONFERENCE”
January: Berlin suburb: Meeting of Nazi “high command” (translation: gathering of the psycho–freaks who controlled Germany) January 20, 1942….“Final Solution” fine–tuned to focus on mass–killing Death Camps fed by rail–links and employing gas chambers—to facilitate “industrial–scale” murder of the Jews.
1942 CE: NORMAN COUSINS BECOMES EDITOR–IN–CHIEF OF THE SATURDAY REVIEW
Born June 24, 1912; died Nov. 30, 1990
Britannica –
“American essayist and editor, long associated with the Saturday Review.
Cousins attended Teachers College, Columbia University, and began his editorial career in 1934. From 1942 to 1972 he was editor of the Saturday Review.
Following his appointment as executive editor in 1940, he introduced essays that drew a connection between literature and current events, whereupon circulation of the magazine increased 50 percent. Unafraid to criticize, Cousins was outspoken and his articles sometimes bitter. At times he criticized the U.S. government, but he felt strongly that a unique potential for greatness existed in America; he wrote The Good Inheritance: The Democratic Chance (1942) to explore this idea. Cousins felt modern problems stemmed from the absence of a collective voice and from Americans’ inability to see their social and political dilemmas clearly… In 1980 he was named “editor emeritus.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/140951/Norman–Cousins (accessed March 2, 2009)
1942 CE: SINKING OF THE STRÜMA, TURKEY
The Struma was a ship charterd by the Revisionist Zionist organization in Romania (especially Betar) to bring Jewish refugees from Axis–controlled Romania to Allied-controlled Palestine.
It was, so-to-speak, in British eyes an “illegal” immigrant ship. The Stürma was a former coal barge–turned–rescue ship, and although not seaworthy, loaded 769 passengers at Constanza, Romania on December 12, 1941 and headed towards Palestine.
The ship reached Istanbul, Turkey, but the passengers were not permitted to land until the British would issue assurances that they would be allowed to proceed to Palestine. The British refused to allow them to land under the White Paper agreement of 1939.
After two months of pressure, the British relented and agreed to allow children to leave the ship. Although they promised to notify the Turks, they delayed for 10 days. Giving up, the Turks had the boat, still loaded with its 769 Jewish passengers, towed out to the Black Sea. It was torpedoed by Soviet submarine Sch 213 acting under orders to sink all neutral or Axis shipping entering te Black Sea – in order to deny potential supplies to Germany. 768 of the 769 Jewish passenger-refugees perished.
1942 CE: VATICAN
March 14: The Vatican sent a letter to a Slovak official protesting the deportation of Slovakian Jews. The reply by Foreign Minister Vojtech Tuka assured the Vatican that the Jews were being settled in labor camps and that their conditions were “humane.”
Eichmann and his lieutenant, Dieter Wisliceny, organized “letters” from those deported, to be sent upon their arrival to Auschwitz. They also organized an “inspection” by Fritz Fiala, a pro-Nazi Slovak editor whose report and pictures (censored directly by Himmler) were published in the Slovak and Romanian press.
1942 CE: MIDWAY
June 4–7: “Battle of Midway”
Pacific Ocean, off Midway Island atoll
[Four now–legendary protagonists: (Overall) American Fleet Admiral Nimitz’s carrier strike force (with Rear Admiral Fletcher in operational command of the American strike force itself from aboard the American Flagship Yorktown) “breaks–the–back” of (over–all) Japanese Fleet Admiral Yamamoto’s carrier strike force (Vice Admiral Nagumo in operational command of the Japanese strike force itself from the Japanese Flagship).
With both major battle fleets starting with roughly equal firepower due to Nimitz’s adroit marshalling of U.S. naval resources, basically, Fletcher then out–foxes Nagumo and checkmates him. Coming just 6 months after Pearl Harbor, the battle broke the temporary, but quite threatening, naval superiority which the Japanese navy had achieved with the Pearl Harbor attack. The Japanese lost 4 of the 6 carriers in its strike force as against one lost by the Americans…
The battle exposed the relative hollowness of the importance of the Japanese destruction of battleships at Pearl Harbor, inasmuch as aircraft carriers, not battleships, now projected power and defined dominance. With rough naval parity now achieved – and the American economic giant awakened – and with its related industrial military complex now ramping–up with a vengeance – the die was cast.
It would be three years and three months until V–J Day (Victory–over–Japan Day) September 2, 1945, but the Rising Sun was now irrevocably doomed… to set.
In–the–interim, Japan would cut a swath of destruction, abuse and death spanning thousands of miles across Manchuria and Asia.
1942 CE: YELLOW BADGE
June 7: Jews were ordered to wear a yellow badge in the occupied section of France. Many Jews marched down the streets of Paris wearing their war medals together with the star and were applauded by the crowds. Xavier Vallat, Commissariat of Jewish Affairs, told the Germans that he would not enforce the regulation and was replaced by Darquier de Pellepoix. A month later, Jews were banned from public places and only allowed one hour a day for shopping.
– Eli Birnbaum
1942 CE: OSS
June 13: President Franklin Roosevelt establishes the Office of Strategic Services, with swashbuckling General William J. Donovan at–the–helm.
At the height of its influence during WWII, the OSS employed over 23,000 people. Included on its rosters were Julia Child (later, world–famous cooking celeb), Arthur Goldberg (later, US Ambassador to the UN), Mo Berg (later, a Major League Baseball catcher, then coach), and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (later, the renowned historian).
Among other activities, the OSS helped arm, train and supply sundry resistance movements, including Mao Zedong’s Red Army and the Viet Minh in French Indochina (later, Vietnam). Both these movements later emerged as foes of the US.
The OSS was spawned by WWII, and its institutional life ultimately did not supersede the end of the war. Disbanded in September 1945, a month after VJ Day (August 15), the OSS is reincarnated two years later in 1947 in the form of the CIA.
1942 CE Collaboration: VICHY COLLABORATION
July: Vichy France government rounds–up 12,884 Parisian Jews.
–Including 4,051 children which the Gestapo had not asked for—and sends them to the Drancy internment camp on the outskirts of Paris—en route to their subsequent mass–killings at Auschwitz...[‘so much’ for ‘FRATERNITE’ – author]
1942 CE: BATTLE OF STALINGRAD
The German Wehrmacht (ground army) and Luftwaffe (air force) attackers v. Stalin’s Russian defenders.
July 17: German bombardment of Stalingrad commences... eventually over 90 percent of the city turned into rubble... the Russians “hang on by their fingernails” as the Germans capture over 95 percent of the city, with the defenders relegated to two tiny pockets.
It is at this tender historical moment, with the Germans within a hairsbreadth of the conquest of Stalingrad, the ultimate psychological and symbolic prize, only to be held at bay by a ragtag tiny group of surviving defenders, that one must pause to wonder “what if?”
What if the Nazis had, instead of diverting many thousands of crucial SS Troops to the “Final Solution,” including deploying crucial manpower and material to building and maintaining the massive infrastructure of murder across Europe, had instead deployed those assets towards the siege of Stalingrad? Might that parlay not have “tipped the slender balance?”
Quite possibly. Might not recorded history have taken a very different turn? Quite possibly. Might the capture of Stalingrad under that scenario have led to an eventual total Soviet collapse? Very possibly. And, in turn, German conquest of Russia? Quite possibly. And with Russia then turned into a vassal slave–state of the Nazis, might not Britain and the Near East as well as the (oil–rich) Middle East not have fallen next? Probably.
With the remaining Free World, including its Jewish denizens, then–to–face possibly the greatest evil empire of all–time?
The actual six and a half month battle, one of the bloodiest in human history, will leave over 1.5 million dead.
On November 19, Soviet General Zhukov’s counter–offensive “Operation Uranus” against the Germans commences. Zhukov traps the primary German army, the 6th Army, in “pincer envelopment,” cutting–off its supply lines...and trapping 230,000 German and Romanian (allies of Germany) soldiers inside the “envelopment.”
As the German 6th Army withers, the German pressure on the remaining isolated ‘pockets’ of Russian defenders of Stalingrad, weakens.
The Battle of Stalingrad will last through February 2, 1943, when the German 6th Army collapses completely, and its leadership surrenders, ending, of course, their siege of Stalingrad, as well.
A very, very, very close–call.
1942 CE: GRUSS & COMPANY, INVESTMENT BANKERS, FOUNDED IN NY
The name is pronounced “Groos.”
A financier and philanthropist, Joseph S. Gruss, heavily supported Jewish education and other Jewish causes. After fleeing Poland to the USA to escape the Nazis, he made a fortune in the oil and gas business, as well as on Wall Street. His total Jewish philanthropic donations, both during his life, and ongoing to this day through his foundations, have been massive.
1942 CE: DUTCH BISHOPS STAND UP TO THE NAZIS
July 20: Dutch Bishops Conference has a public statement read in all the churches of the country condemning Nazi racism.
July 26: In a retaliatory response, the Nazi occupiers order the arrest of all Jewish converts, including Edith Stein, Carmelite nun, who was arrested shortly thereafter, and murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz August 9, 1942.
1942 CE: “PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM”
Casablanca was a 1942 film starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid and featuring Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. It is set in the Vichy–controlled Moroccan city of Casablanca during World War II.
The film has grown in popularity, and by 1977, Casablanca was the most frequently broadcast film on American television. In 2006, the Writers Guild of America voted the screenplay of Casablanca the best of all time.
“Sam” was the pianist at “Rick’s Café American” the club in Casablanca. [“Rick” was played by Bogart.]
1943 CE: JEWISH RESISTANCE
[See exhibit]
1943 CE: THE FOUR CHAPLAINS
Feb 3: The USAT Dorchester troop transport is torpedoed by a German U–Boat. As the naval vessel sank, the four chaplains on–board calmed the frightened sailors and soldiers, aided the boat’s evacuation, and helped guide the wounded to relative safety. All four also gave up their life jackets.
By a survivor –
“As I swam away from the ship, I looked back.
The flares had lighted everything. The bow came up high and she slid under. The last thing I saw, the Four Chaplains were up there praying for the safety of the men. They had done everything they could. I did not see them again. They themselves did not have a chance without their life jackets.”
– Grady Clark, survivor
The four chaplains, all of whom held the rank of lieutenant, were–
Reverend George L. Fox, Methodist
Rabbi Alexander D. Goode
Rev. John P. Washington, Roman Catholic
Rev, Clark V. Poling, Reformed Church in America
Only 230 of the original 904 men aboard the ship survived, many killed by hypothermia in the water (the water temperature being approximately 32 degrees F., and the air temperature being about 36 degrees F.)
On Dec 19, 1944 all four chaplains were posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross. Many other posthumous awards and tributes followed.
1943 CE: WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING
Warsaw, Poland, Spring: Nazi–imposed Jewish Ghetto.
Final insurgency: First Day of Passover, Spring 1943.
Duration: 27 days: April 19–May 16, 1943.
In the cataclysmic Jewish rebellion, uprising leader Mordecai Anielewicz, age 23, and 750 other organized Jewish fighters – as well as thirteen thousand Jews of Warsaw – are either killed in the Nazi fire bombings or murdered execution–style by the SS...
[See back cover photo memorial]
Warsaw was one of 100 recorded Jewish revolts against the Nazis.
The phoenix of Anielewicz’s fighters incinerated in the ashes of Warsaw’s firestorm will arise—5 years almost to the day—incarnate in the Haganah (whose recruits are acutely versed in his insurgency)…May 14, 1948.
1943 CE: FOUNTAINHEAD!
New York: Ayn Rand publishes The Fountainhead.
Iconoclast philosopher/writer Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinov’ yevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, 38 years earlier, publishes The Fountainhead, one of literature’s all–time great classics… after 12 major publishers reject the manuscript…. Rand lived on east 34th Street in Manhattan (near current–day Stern College of Yeshiva University).
The Fountainhead was to be followed 14 years later by her second mega–classic, Atlas Shrugged (1957).
In reference to her philosophy of “Objectivism,” which she crafted, Rand articulated: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of Man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
(Appendix to Atlas Shrugged)
(Author’s note: By Rand’s philosophy, only actions which did not infringe upon other’s rights and property, were acceptable, of course…)
Ayn Rand was a full–fledged enthusiast of Jeffersonian Democracy and called America, in an address to the West Point graduating class of cadets, “…the greatest and noblest…country in the history of the world.” This definitive viewpoint would be shared by many of her European and Russian émigré Jewish–American compatriots – and their descendants.
(b. 1905; d. 1982).
1943 CE: OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN
Born July 12, 1895; died Aug. 23, 1960
Britannica –
“[Jewish] U.S. lyricist, musical comedy author, and theatrical producer influential in the development of musical comedy and known especially for his immensely successful collaboration with the composer Richard Rodgers.
The grandson of the opera impresario Oscar Hammerstein, he studied law at Columbia University before beginning his career in the theatre. Between 1920 and 1959 he wrote all or part of about 45 musical dramas for stage, film, or television. Until he became exclusively Rodgers’ librettist in 1943 Hammerstein wrote lyrics for several other composers, among them Vincent Youmans, Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg…
…he teamed with Richard Rodgers in creating Oklahoma! (1943; winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 1944), Carousel (1945), and South Pacific (1949; Pulitzer Prize in 1950).
Rodgers and Hammerstein formed a music publishing firm, Williamson Music, Inc., and from 1949 were theatrical producers for their own works as well as for those of many others.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/253651/Oscar–Hammerstein–II (accessed March 4, 2009)
1943 CE: JOHN F. KENNEDY’S PT BOAT IS CUT IN HALF
It was “cut” by a Japanese destroyer in the South Pacific (Aug 3): Ferguson Passage, Blackett Straits:
Despite the trauma and his own (back) injuries, (Lieutenant, Junior Grade) Kennedy, 26, managed to save the lives of most of his crew (of the eventually to be legendary motorized patrol boat PT #109).
1943 CE: FRENCH IMPRESSIONIST SOUTINE
…dies on–the–run from the Nazis.
Britannica –
“Russian–born French painter whose highly individualistic style, characterized by the use of thick impasto, agitated brushwork, convulsive compositional rhythms, and the presence of disturbing psychological content, is closely related to early 20th century Expressionism.
Soutine was born the 10th child of a poor Jewish tailor in Belorussia. At age 16 he went to Vilna (now Vilnius) in Lithuania, where a friendly doctor helped him attend the school of fine arts for three years. In 1913 he emigrated to Paris, where he met Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jacques Lipchitz, and attended the École des Beaux–Arts. Modigliani introduced Soutine to the art dealer Leopold Zborowski, who enabled him to spend three years (1919–22) painting at Céret in the south of France. The feverish, visionary landscapes Soutine painted there marked the emergence of his mature style. Soutine spent most of the remainder of his life in Paris. He exhibited little during his lifetime and relentlessly reworked or destroyed old canvases, but his paintings nevertheless found their way into French and American private collections and museums...”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/557027/Chaim–Soutine (accessed March 5, 2009)
August 9: French Jewish Impressionist master Chaim Soutine dies after emergency surgery.
1943 CE: NJ: LAKEWOOD YESHIVA FOUNDED
Beth Medrash Govoha founded by Rav Aharon Kotler. BMG is a leading and highly–regarded right–wing Orthodox institution.
1943 CE: RAV MOSHE
Oct 6: Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (of NY) participates in “Rabbis’ March on Washington”—asking Roosevelt to do more to save the Jews…
(Peter Bergson, a nephew of Rav Kook, was one of the prime organizers of the march of 500 Orthodox rabbis).
Rav Moshe, a Lithuanian–born (1895) Orthodox rabbi and religious scholar–extraordinaire Moshe Feinstein, was known endearingly as Rav Moshe. He chaired the Agudah rabbinical committee, and was regarded by many as the supreme arbiter of Jewish Law for decades until his death in 1986.
1944 CE: MORGENTHAU
January: Washington, DC: “War Refugee Board” created.
…(years into the Holocaust) by Franklin Roosevelt – at the behest of [Jewish American] Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau II and allies in the Roosevelt hierarchy – to aid civilian victims of the Nazi and Axis powers.
[His father, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during WWI.]
[Henry Morgenthau II’s son, Robert Morgenthau, has been the Manhattan D.A. (District Attorney) since 1975].
1944 CE: VON NEUMANN
He releases Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (along with Oskar Morgenstern).
Born Dec. 28, 1903; died Feb. 8, 1957
Britannica –
“[Jewish] Hungarian–born American mathematician. As an adult, he appended von to his surname; the hereditary title had been granted his father in 1913. Von Neumann grew from child prodigy to one of the world’s foremost mathematicians by his mid–twenties.
Important work in set theory inaugurated a career that touched nearly every major branch of mathematics. Von Neumann’s gift for applied mathematics took his work in directions that influenced quantum theory, automata theory, economics, and defense planning. Von Neumann pioneered game theory and, along with Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, was one of the conceptual inventors of the stored–program digital computer.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/632750/John–von–Neumann (accessed March 7, 2009)
1944 CE: OPERATION OVERLORD
Normandy Beach, France
June 6: Normandy Invasion!
Operation OVERLORD, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, lands troops on “Omaha Beach,” Normandy, France June 6, 1944… commences long–awaited historic Allied sea and land (and air) assault on Nazi occupied Europe… largest sea invasion in history, employing over 155,000 Allied troops crossing the English Channel from Dover, England to Normandy, France…and commences multi–front military drive north–eastwards onwards through France and Belgium into Germany and then onward heading towards Berlin; five plus months after Normandy, on December 26, 1944, “force of nature” Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army closes–in on the counter–sieging German lines at Bastogne (Belgium), forcing their hand and essentially sealing the fate of the Third Reich, which will go through its death–throes over the subsequent four months…caught in a mortal vise between the onslaughts of the American, British and Red invasion forces.
1944 CE: TEREZÍN CONCENTRATION CAMP
Britannica –
“The Nazis intended the camp to house elderly, privileged, and famous Jews from Germany, Austria, the Czech lands, and Western Europe. As the home—and the place of death—of some of the most prominent Czech, Austrian, and German artists, writers, scientists, jurists, diplomats, musicians, and scholars, Terezín had a rich cultural life.
Some 15,000 children passed through Terezín, and the community ensured that their education continued with a rigorous daily routine of classes, athletic activities, and art. They painted pictures and wrote poetry. By war’s end, however, no more than 1,100 (according to some estimates, no more than 150) of these children survived.
Conditions were harsh. At times, over 50,000 Jews lived in the space once inhabited by 7,000 Czechs. Food was scarce. In 1942, 15,891 people died, more than half the average daily population of Terezín at the time.
In 1943 the Nazis sent to Terezín some 500 Danish Jews who had not escaped to Sweden. While Europeans elsewhere often quickly lost interest in their deported Jewish fellow citizens, the Danes persisted in demanding that the Germans account for these Danish citizens and allow the Red Cross to visit the ghetto.
To dispel rumors about the extermination camps, the Nazis permitted the visit, but they arranged an elaborate hoax. They deported many camp residents to Auschwitz to minimize the appearance of overcrowding and erected fake stores and cafés to give the appearance of a life of comfort and ease. The Red Cross visited the Danish Jews—no more than two or three in a room—in freshly painted quarters. A children’s opera, Brundibar, was performed for the guests. The hoax succeeded so well that the Nazis made a propaganda film at Terezín showing how well the Jews were living under the benevolent protection of the Third Reich. When the filming was finished, the Nazis deported most of the cast, including nearly all of the children, to Auschwitz.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/591290/Theresienstadt (accessed March 9, 2009)
1944 CE: BRETTON WOODS CONFERENCE
July: Bretton Woods, New Hampshire: 730 delegates from 44
Allied nations fashioned the financial institutions of the anticipated beginning of the postwar era. The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world’s industrial states.
The establishment of both the IBRD – The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (part of the World Bank Group), and the IMF – The International Monetary Fund, was approved by the delegates. Both institutions became operational in 1945 after formal ratification by the respective countries involved.
One of the chief components of the Bretton Woods Agreements was the establishment of fixed bands of exchange rates between various currencies – and gold. The particular exchange rate system lasted twenty–seven years until 1971, when the United States suspended the convertibility from dollars to gold.
1944 CE: AUSCHWITZ REBELLION
Oct 7: Poland: Auschwitz Death Camp rebellion by Jewish prisoners…
451 of the rebels were torture–murdered… This was the third major Concentration Camp rebellion…after Treblinka (August 2, 1943) and Sobibor (Oct 14, 1943)… the Nazi “deterrent” to rebellions was brutal and very public torture–murder of any participants captured.
1944 CE: LECHI
November 6: Egypt: Lechi (the right–wing Jewish militant group) assassinates (in Cairo) Lord Moyne, British Minister of State for the Middle East…
1944 CE: EXECUTION / SZENES
November 7: Hannah Szenes, executed at age 23 – by Axis allies in Hungary.
Born in Hungary, 1921, she makes aliyah (moves to Israel) 1939–1943; Palmach/Haganah member Senesh parachutes into Nazi–occupied Europe (Yugoslavia–Hungary border area) as part of British SOE—Special Operations Units—rescue commando units—hoping to interfere with Nazi deportations of Jews to concentration camps; but captured by Hungarian Axis allies...and tortured by same vainly trying to extract code to her British radio transmitter; executed by firing squad about half–a–year after her capture.
Her remains transferred to Israel National Military Cemetery on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem in 1950—along with six other Jewish/Palestine parachutists executed by the Nazis in Slovakia, Hungary and Italy....
Szenes became emblematic of the parachutist group (32 originally parachuted + 5 infiltrated into Nazi–occupied Europe)—and a genuine consummate national heroine of Israel.
Her actual (Hebrew–inscribed) tombstone brought from Hungary to Israel (just recently) in November 2007 and placed in Sdot Yam kibbutz near Haifa.
Szenes was also a poet; two of her poems later turned into enduring–to–this–day Hebrew songs—“Ey–ly, she–lo yi–ga–mer me’olam” and “Ashrei Ha–Gafrur.”
1944 CE: TORAH UMESORAH
NY: National Society of Hebrew Day Schools founded...now a loosely–affiliated network of 700 independent private Jewish day schools...200,000+ students enrolled.
1944 CE: RAPHAEL LEMKIN PUBLISHES AXIS RULE IN OCCUPIED EUROPE
–and coins the word Genocide.
It combines the Greek word genos (race), with the Latin word cide (killing).
Born into a Jewish family in 1900 in Bezwodne in Imperial Russia (now Belarus), by age 14 Lemkin had mastered nine languages. Entering law, from 1929–1934 he was the Public Prosecutor for the district court of Warsaw (Poland).
Lemkin moved to the United States during the war, and taught at Duke University (which had facilitated his wartime visa), and then at the University of Virginia, leading into the writing of his post–war preeminent work noted above.
He lost (all) 49 relatives in the Holocaust.
1944 CE: RAOUL WALLENBERG
Swedish diplomat
Born August 4, 1912, Stockholm, Sweden; died July 17, 1947, Moscow, U.S.S.R. [now Russia]
Britannica –
“Swedish businessman and diplomat who became legendary through his efforts to rescue Hungarian Jews during World War II and through his disappearance while a prisoner in the Soviet Union.
A descendant of a wealthy and prestigious family of bankers, industrialists, and diplomats, Wallenberg studied architecture in the United States and in 1936 became the foreign representative for a central European trading company, whose president was a Hungarian Jew. After the Germans sent troops and SS (Nazi paramilitary corps) units into Hungary in March 1944 to round up “subversives” and Jews, Wallenberg, with the help of Jewish and refugee organizations from Sweden and the United States, persuaded the Swedish Foreign Ministry to send him to Budapest on July 9 with a diplomatic passport.
There, several thousand Jews (estimates vary from 4,000 to 35,000) were enlisted and sheltered by Wallenberg in “protected houses” flying the flags of Sweden and other neutral countries. By this time, some 438,000 Hungarian Jews had already been deported to the Nazi extermination camps—Wallenberg arrived just after the deportations came to a halt.
He also dogged the Germans at deportation trains and on “death marches,” distributing food and clothing to the Jewish prisoners and trying to rescue some of them with papers and money for their passage out of the country. In the process, he was threatened more than once by Adolf Eichmann.
Soon after Soviet troops reached Budapest, Wallenberg reported to the occupying authority on January 17, 1945, but was immediately arrested for espionage—his money, radio, and dubious diplomatic status making him suspect.
According to Swedish authorities, the Soviets later privately admitted that his arrest had been a mistake, during a confused period at war’s end, but that their only information was that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in a Moscow prison cell in 1947.
There were unconfirmed reports from freed Soviet prisoners, however, that he had been seen alive in prison, notably in 1951, 1959, and 1975. On September 22, 1981, the U.S. Congress, under the leadership of Representative Tom Lantos—who had himself been rescued by Wallenberg—granted honorary citizenship to the missing Wallenberg. Such honorary citizenship had been granted only once before, to Sir Winston Churchill.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/634844/Raoul–Wallenberg (accessed June 25, 2009)
1945 CE: GOSPEL OF THOMAS
The Gospel of Thomas, is a well preserved early Christian, non-canonical sayings-gospel discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in December 1945.
1945 CE: AUSCHWITZ LIBERATED
Jan 27: Poland: Red Army (322nd Infantry unit) rolls into and liberates Auschwitz (Death Camp) Oswiecim, (southern) Poland.
Between 1.1–1.6 million individuals (90 percent Jewish) were murdered here by the SS – between May 1940 through the above–noted liberation in January 1945. A total of approximately 6 million Jews are persecuted, then murdered by the Nazi state terror–machine overall.
Auschwitz, as the other camps, was a house–of–horrors…sadism, torture, and murder on a daily basis…
The human mind was simply not created to grasp the enormity of the horror–crimes, let alone to endure them…
***
Pope Pius XII – charged by many with being (for the most part deafeningly) “silent” on the ongoing genocide for the 6 year duration of mass murders… contentious issue, particularly as the Vatican—for the past decade—apparently eager to press for this sainthood… On October 16, 1943, over 2,000 Rome Jews deported to Auschwitz from Rome’s Jewish center a mile away from Pope Pius XII’s Vatican by the Nazis…On October 29–30, 14 days later, the Vatican’s semi–official daily L’Osservatoro published a front–page article stating that “the German troops have respected the Roman Curia as well as Vatican City.” The pope who controlled the newspaper? Pius XII.
Author – One very clear definitive and very public admonition from Pius XII to the Nazis to cease their mass atrocities against the Jews, undoubtedly would have had profound resonance around the world with manifold positive ramifications for the embattled Jews trapped in Christian Europe…It is asserted – and not challenged – that Pius XII never once uttered the word “Jew” publicly, during his papacy.
The Pope is supposed to be primarily a moral force, not primarily, as asserted by his defenders, a subtle, nuanced diplomat—as millions are being torture–murdered all across Christians Europe. Respectfully, those proposing sainthood for the ‘silent pope,’ merely become complicitous themselves; notwithstanding their intellectual acrobatics.
One should be clear that the Nazis, while non–Christian, and, indeed opposed to the Vatican, nevertheless tapped directly into the wellspring of hatred and anti–Semitism implanted—pervasively and deeply—into Europe quite knowingly by the Catholic Church over the 17+ centuries leading right into the Holocaust.
*
Contemporary debate may focus on what Pope Pius XII (formerly Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli) did or did not do. But the seeds of Auschwitz’s crematoria were not planted by Pius XII, nor even by the Vatican over–the–centuries; rather, the original seeds of hatred are sown in the Canon Gospels themselves, in the Gospel of Matthew in particular. The hate–mongering of Matthew is acute – and rabid. A “hate crime” of ignominious magnitude. It is intended to elicit hatred. And indeed, it does. Its hand of death, will span the centuries. In turn, the Passion Saga performances globally which fed the masses of Christianity hatred as entertainment for centuries, poisoned Europe against the Jews.
*
Until the Church as a whole, confronts its unacceptable roots of hatred, as did the contemporary Lutheran Church, the boil of anti–Semitism will never truly be lanced. Perpetually, the Right Wing of the Church will find ways to disseminate or tolerate the flow of hatred, while the Left Wing of the Church espouses themes of ecumenicism and reconciliation.
*
Until such time, however quixotic, that the Church elects to diligently teach of valorous Jewish icons in its schools, to teach, among other things that Jesus was Jewish and not anti–Jewish, to counter the diabolical Jewish stereotypes embedded in the Canon Gospels and in its already–embedded lore, then, what the left hand of the Church giveth, the right hand of the Church perpetually taketh away.
Ultimately, both individuals and entities define themselves by their actions, not by their transient power or by their public spin. And ultimately only the Church will define who it truly is. By action and deed.
*
“In October 1941, Harold Titman, a US Delegate to the Vatican asked the pope to condemn the atrocities against the Jews, Pius XII replied that the Vatican wished to remain ‘neutral,’ reiterating the ‘neutrality policy’ that the Vatican had invoked since early as September, 1940.” [Perl, William, The Holocaust Conspiracy, see pp. 176, 206 in particular.]
“Neutrality” between the state–sponsored Gestapo terror–murder machine and the defenseless and ongoing hounded, tormented and mass–murdered civilian Jewish population of Europe?
Moral equivalence?
Perhaps Pius XII forgot the quote from fellow Italian, Dante…[see 1314 CE above]
“The hottest places…..”
In the annals of history, Pius XII’s stated as well as de facto policy of “neutrality” vis–à–vis the ongoing Nazi terror–murders of the Jews (against the backdrop of the Church’s historic instigation of the same “toxic brew” of Jew–hatred), must certainly rank as the epitome of callousness. But, then again, his behavior merely paralleled Church policy, and that of its bishops noted previously above, towards the Jews for many, many hundreds of years. There were exceptions, for sure, but the norm was callous posturing, but no substantive action.
Hence, the Vatican rush to canonize (the “silent pope”) Pius XII, and the absence of any significant move to canonize his proactive and bona fide valiant predecessor, Pope Pius XI.
For, “the silent pope,” Pius XII, symbolizes the Church’s own “neutrality” at best—over the millennia—with murder and terror ongoing against the Jews around it, (again, against the sordid backdrop of the Church’s historic instigation of the same European Jew–hatred) whereas valiant Pope Pius XI, of course, epitomizes what the Church might have been.
*
The Vatican will be hell–bent to canonize the legitimizer of its own dubious modus operandi. That will be an easier move on the chessboard for the Church than actually confronting itself, than actually being true to the ideals of its central icon, Jesus of Nazareth.
*
Primo Levi, 26 years old, formerly a young Italian Jewish chemist pre–War, barely survives a year in Auschwitz. He will write: Survival in Auschwitz (‘Se questo è un Uomo’ – original Italian title); The Reawakening (‘La Tregua’ – original Italian title); The Periodic Table; Moments of Reprieve; The Drowned and the Saved; The Monkey’s Wrench; If Not Now, When? (‘Se non Ora, Quando?’ – original Italian title); The Reawakening (The Truce)…his masterful works, likely to endure as immortal literature of any genre – author.
*
Respectfully, as regards Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (who became Pius XII March 2, 1939), he can probably best be encapsulated as paradigmatic of the executive who rises to the presidency of his company by having two secretaries, and having them respectively notarize opposing positions to be attributed to him—on major issues facing the company, as contentious issues emerge.
Depending on the eventual outcome of each issue, the particular secretary produces the notarized position paper, and vouches publicly for him that her boss had clearly been “right all along” on this issue.
Pre–war and during the war, successively as Cardinal and then as Pope, Eugenio Pacelli never even finds the will to say the “Jew” publicly. Nor to even halt the deportation of Rome’s own Jewish targets, a mile away, to the death camp Auschwitz in Poland. Post–war, and six million Jewish corpses later, when anti–Semitism is declasse at least for the time being, advocates for his sainthood, magically find his “ghost–writing” (emphasis on “ghost”) of various papers challenging the persecution of the Jews. His hands are “always clean.” He can posture both ways. Sort of.
On net balance, Eugenio Pacelli was, indeed, “the silent pope’. And, nowhere in the 5,000 year annals of human history, has the self–serving deafening silence of one extremely powerful clergyman, so very directly allowed the suffering and deaths of so many.
The Vatican’s obsessive touching–up of Pacelli’s record, in turn, is part of a much broader, concerted and ongoing Vatican effort to re–touch history, both in its texts and on the web, to attempt to sanitize its 1,900 year historical role and moral culpability vis–à–vis the debasement and murder of the many millions of Jews of Europe a.k.a. “the Holocaust.”
1945 CE: THE YALTA CONFERENCE
February: The “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) meet at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea (i.e. on Russian ‘turf, at Stalin’s insistence).
Each of the three came to the conference with prime agendas in different spheres. Churchill wanted free elections in Poland; Roosevelt wanted Soviet support for the US anticipated invasion of Japan; Stalin demanded a Soviet sphere–of–influence in Eastern Europe.
Conceptually, Churchill and Roosevelt had tactical agendas, while Stalin had a strategic objective (the domination of Eastern Europe). Strategic victories tend to transcend tactical victories, and Yalta was no exception. For decades after Yalta, when no one even remembered whether or not Polish elections took place, and decades after no invasion of Japan ever took place (both having been Western tactical objectives), Russia continued its new–found “strangulation hold” on Eastern Europe.
1945 CE: THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK
March: Anne Frank, Dutch, now age 16, succumbs to typhus in Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp, Germany…
…along with 17,000 other desperate Jewish prisoners…suffering terrible typhus deaths... She will not make it to Hollywood (her dream), but through her diary, will transcend the multi–year sadism and eventual murder visited upon her and upon her fellow Jewish Danes and Germans—and give voice to the sufferings and deaths of a million+ Jewish youngster–victims, in particular.
Jews, numbed by documentaries and books and memorial services, may not be fully aware of the singular trajectory of Ann Frank’s Diary to youngsters of many varied cultures and religions across the far reaches of the planet.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, has been translated into over 50 languages, with 25+ million copies in distribution.
1945 CE: DIETRICH BONHOEFFER IS EXECUTED BY THE NAZIS
1945 CE: BUCHENWALD LIBERATED
Apr 11: Patton’s THIRD ARMY liberates Buchenwald concentration camp, Weimer, Germany.
April 12: United States Military Chaplain, “20–something” Rabbi Herschel Schechter rolls into Buchenwald with tanks of Ace Corps headquarters, 3rd Army… He announces with bullhorn to the survivors “YOU ARE FREE”… Emaciated and starving survivors try to kiss his boots… Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, arrive to view the debacle inside Buchenwald…
Apr 12–14: Famous American photographer Margaret Burke–White, accompanying the Third Army, photographs the unfolding death–camp liberation saga for the world finally to see; Patton orders the 1750 denizens of surrounding town of Weimer marched–through to witness the “handiwork” of their compatriots… Eisenhower orders the entire contiguous liberator US 4th Armored Division to march through Buchenwald: “Now you will all know clearly what this war has been about…”
Seventeen–year–old emaciated and starving imprisoned Elie Wiesel emerges from the NIGHT of Buchenwald only barely clinging to life… DOWN. But not quite OUT.
1945 CE: MAUTHAUSEN LIBERATED
May 6: Liberation of Mauthausen Concentration/Death Camp (Austria).
US Third Army rolls into Mauthausen.
Mauthausen, Austrian Alps. Sgt. “Dick” Pomante of Detroit, Michigan and Sgt. Bob Persinger of Rockford, Illinois, respectively captaining the two lead tanks of U.S. THIRD Army, 3rd Cavalry Group, XX Corps roll through the main gates of Ebensee sub–camp, Mauthausen Death Camp, Austrian Alps… and declare “We are Americans!”… half–dead inmates fling themselves onto the tanks, trying to stay “glued” to them… Sgt. Pomante (according to two totally independent accounts to me directly) is packing two long pistols and giving out small chocolate bars and encouragement to the shriveled and near–death teenage (male) inmates.
As the US tanks enter the main entrance, prisoners, several of whom have been collecting guns, and who have been awaiting the “cover of liberation,” execute the “rear guard” of their previous tormentors throughout the outreaches of the camp… until the Americans have a chance, over the next four hour duration, to secure the vast Death Camp.
…The next morning at 9:00 A.M., US light tanks and military vehicles – with mounted machine guns at–ready – take up protective positions (guns facing outwards) around the main “formation grounds,” as the 400 assembled Jewish survivors are then given the all–clear sign by the Jewish U.S. officer placed in–charge of the particular unique outdoor assembly, to sing ensemble… “Hatikvah”… “Our hope has not faltered….” the Jewish (and embryonic State of Israel) anthem.
After the Jews, the same morning in December 1945, the French inmates are assembled in the same square, the La Marseillaise is sung…
The American and British divisions had trumped the Third Reich’s Atlantic front...
1945 CE: RED ARMY
Thunders (south–westward), early 1945 CE
Marshal Zhukov’s Soviet Army artillery divisions inexorably blast their way through Nazi lines westward across Russia, then through Poland and into Germany… ROLLING THUNDER… they blast their way westward across Germany, then into Berlin itself – and plant the Red flag on the roof of the infamous Reichstag, May 2, 1945… trumpeted “Thousand Year Reich” fails to meet “forecasts”… falls short by 988 years… Russia loses about twenty million dead during WWII to the Nazis (aside from about another 20 million Russian dead directly or indirectly at the hands of their own “leader” Stalin 1925–1945)… Within the onslaught of Zhukov’s campaign towards Berlin, all German town mayors and SS troops rounded–up are summarily executed…
1945 CE: TRINITY TEST
July 16: “TRINITY” test; Alamogordo, New Mexico…culmination of the “Manhattan Project”… 20 kiloton test… begins the “Atomic Age.”
Nuclear physicists Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Robert Serber, Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller—all seven Jewish—played the key historic political and scientific roles in advancing the development of the ominous weapon against the Axis powers... for a decade, a desperate race against time by this very focused group of Jewish–American nuclear physicists. The small group of hi–level nuclear physicists would change the contours of the world. The first two of the group, Einstein (of Germany) and Szilard (of Hungary) were European expatriates who had viewed the Nazi monster up–close, and had no illusions. Amalek (historic emblematic gratuitous enemy of the Jews) was on–the–march.
The physicist group and the Empire of the rising sun both outlasted the Third Reich. The bomb designed to neutralize the genocidal Nazi Third Reich, was now headed towards another destination.
Hitler had incited the pacifist Einstein to move along a warlike axis; Japan would now face the consequences of Hitler’s virulent anti–Semitism.
Oppenheimer after the “Trinity” test: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
President Truman gives orders to proceed with the double–bombing of Japanese cities Hiroshima (08.06.45); Nagasaki (08.09.45)… Mega–catastrophic human toll.
1945 CE: NUREMBERG TRIALS
Nov 14: Nuremberg, Germany: Commencement of the Trials of Major War Criminals.
The Nuremberg Trials were a series of trials held by the Allies of the German leadership 1945–1949. The city of Nuremberg was of course the namesake of the Nazi racial laws of 10 years prior.
The first trial that of the most important (notorious) leaders was held from Nov 14, 1945 – Oct 1, 1946. Death sentences were handed–out to the following:
| Martin Bormann | Death in Absentia; his remains are found 1972 |
| Hans Frank | Hanged |
| Wilhelm Frick | Hanged |
| Hermann Göring | Death sentence...suicide, night before scheduled execution |
| Alfred Jodl | Hanged |
| Ernst Kaltenbrunner | Hanged |
| Wilhelm Keitel | Hanged |
| J. von Ribbentrop | Hanged |
| Alfred Rosenberg | Hanged |
| Fritz Sauckel | Hanged |
| A. Seyss–Inquart | Hanged |
| Julius Streicher | Hanged |
1945 CE: “SONNEBORN INSTITUTE”
Organized by Manhattan industrialist Rudolf Sonneborn, scion of a German–Jewish family.
Massive successful nationwide endeavor to prepare war material for the inevitable Jewish War of Liberation in Palestine/Israel.
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI winks at the operation.
1945 CE: THE NAG HAMMADI LIBRARY IS DISCOVERED
1946 CE: KIELCE POGROM
Kielce, Poland: July 4: The blood libel pogrom resulted in 37 Polish Jews being killed out of 200 Holocaust survivors who had returned home after World War II. Two more Jews in trains passing through Kielce also lost their lives. Two or three Gentile Poles were killed by the Jews defending themselves, while nine Poles were later sentenced to death.
The attack against the Holocaust refugees that took place more than a year after the end of World War II.
1946 CE: HESCHEL
He joins faculty of JTS (Jewish Theological Seminary) in NY.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jewish thinker–extraordinaire and Civil Rights advocate.
His works include: The Prophets; The Sabbath; Man is not Alone; God in Search of Man; Torah min HaShamayim (Heavenly Torah).
1946 CE: KING DAVID HOTEL / SOUTH WING
July 22: King David Hotel (Jerusalem) bombed from within! Jerusalem: Jewish militant bombing of south wing of the hotel used as British Military Headquarters…
…the bombing was spearheaded by Jewish militant groups Irgun and Lechi… 90 dead, in spite of warning call 2 hours prior to the bombing…the dead overwhelmingly from the British military establishment.
The bombing was denounced by Haganah, although the Irgun asserts they were conceptually on–board with the plan.
1946–7 CE: DEAD SEA SCROLLS
First “Dead Sea Scrolls” discovery
a.k.a. “The Qumran Scrolls”…in “Qumran Cave” (just off the western shore of the Dead Sea in Israel)…roughly 850–900 documents discovered (in 15,000 pieces unfortunately) between 1946–1956…including texts from Tanach (the Hebrew Bible)…
80% on parchment; 20% on papyrus
In 11 proximate caves… the Qumran site covers 78,000 square feet…
The scrolls are from 2000 years ago...approximately the year 0 CE...
Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (which date back to the second century BCE), the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were Masoretic texts dating to the ninth century CE, and the oldest extant manuscripts of the so–called Old Testament were in Greek manuscripts such as Codex Vaticanus (c. 325–350 CE) and Codex Sinacticus (c. 300–360 CE).
Over a twenty year period (since 1946), the “scrolls” finally wind–their–way into The Shrine of the Book, a sui generis architectural gem custom–designed to house them at the Israel Museum (on the outskirts of Jerusalem)...
The painstaking assembly work of the 15,000 pieces spans 40 years…you do remember the “40 year” figure, do you not?
It might have taken 400 years, but digital technology turbo–charged the process.
Note: the Qumran Caves, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, are not all that far from Masada (Fortress Masada of 73 CE Zealot lore)... perhaps a 15–20–minute ride eastward from Masada...(by car, that is) with some documents contemporaneous with that very same
(Fall of Masada) era.
1947 CE: CHRISTIAN DIOR CREATES THE NEW LOOK
1947 CE: EVANGELISTIC ASSOCIATION
Oral Roberts founded Evangelistic Association.
1947 CE: JACKIE ROBINSON, 28, DEBUTS WITH THE BROOKLYN DODGERS
April 15: Before a crowd of 26,233 spectators at Dodger Stadium in Brooklyn, NY.
Branch Rickey, Dodger’s Club President, made–it–happen. Manager Leo Durocher and National League President Ford Frick had to backstop Rickey, respectively, with the team and the league. The 60–year old Major League baseball “color line” was crossed—and shattered forever.
1947 CE: DENNIS GABOR INVENTS HOLOGRAPHY
Rugby, Warwickshire, England: Having fled Nazi Germany in 1933, [Jewish] Gabor was invited to join the British technological firm British Thomson–Houston, where he eventually makes his breakthrough in holography.
Dennis Gabor also lays claim to the invention of granular synthesis.
Gabor: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
1947 CE: THOR HEYERDAHL, 33, SETS SAIL ON THE SUPER–RAFT KON–TIKI
…to prove that Polynesia could have been settled by South Americans.
The serendipitous book will follow in 1950, and the Academy Award–winning movie in 1951.
1947 CE: HARVARD’s DANA–FARBER INSTITUTE FOUNDED
Boston, MA: The Farber in the name is Dr. Sidney Farber, the “father” of modern pediatric pathology, among other sub–disciplines, which he “fathered.” The original name of the comprehensive cancer center was Children’s Cancer Research Foundation, founded by Farber (Jewish).
1947 CE: “MACH 1”
October 14: “Sound Barrier” officially broken by American test pilot Chuck Yaeger.
At age 24, piloting a Bell X–1, in CA.
Speed of sound is: 744 miles/hour... a.k.a. “Mach 1”...
The next major hurdle, Mach 2 was achieved 6 years later in Nov 1953 by test pilot Scott Crossfield piloting a D–558 II Skyrocket (when in doubt, these feats occur in California).
1947 CE: KAPLAN / AMERICAN–JEWISH UNIVERSITY
“The American Jewish University” founded 1947 in Los Angeles.
…current locale is Bel–Air, Los Angeles.
…incorporates the “University of Judaism” and the “Brandeis–Bardin Institute.”
Spiritual founder: Dr. Mordecai Kaplan, (1881–1983) dynamic founder and prime mover of the Reconstructionist Movement…Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (1968)…
Kaplan had significant, if not pivotal, tenures with the Young Israel synagogue movement (Orthodox), then with the Conservative JTS (Jewish Theological Seminary) and, as well, with the Conservative–Reconstructionist Society for the Advancement of Judaism.
Works include “Judaism as a Civilization”…“The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Thought”…“The New Haggadah.” While Kaplan’s thrust asserting Judaism primarily as a religious civilization found resonance, then and now, his particular (evolving) grappling with core theological concepts led to stormy ruptures with many of his early affiliations… Notwithstanding, he leaves enduring worldwide legacy…spanning the entire Jewish “nation civilization religion cultural entity ethnic group tribe”…the RRC (Reconstructionist Rabbinical College), Wyncote, PA, graduated its 300th rabbi in 2007…presidents of RRC: I. Eisenstein, A. Green, D. Teutsch, D. Ehrenkrantz.
1947 CE: SCHWIMMER
Wartime US Pilot Adolf Schwimmer organizes “Schwimmer Air Freight Company” out of Burbank, CA…buys and overhauls mothballed US military transport planes…newly–destined to form the embryonic Israeli Air Command–transports, trainers, fighters and light bombers.
Hank Greenspun of L.A. organized staging–areas for the planes in Nicaragua, Panama and the Dominican Republic awaiting the imminent end of the British Mandate in Palestine.
Both Schwimmer and Greenspun supported and nurtured by a grapevine stretching across the Americas.
1947 CE: WAR OF INDEPENDENCE / RAMP–UP
Nov 9: Pre–Independence Palestine: fighting breaks out between Jewish settlers and Arab forces in various sectors of Palestine, including the Jerusalem area, as British Mandate nears its end.
1948 CE: BRANDEIS U.
Brandeis University founded outside of Boston…
The largest non–sectarian university under Jewish auspices in the United States…illustrious legacy…“unique” in the world; named after the first Jewish U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis (of Louisville, Kentucky and Boston, MA)
1948 CE: BEGINNING OF 3–YEAR BRITISH BOYCOTT OF BEN HECHT
Born Feb. 28, 1894; died Apr. 18, 1964
Britannica –
“American novelist, playwright, and film writer who, as a newspaperman in the 1920s, perfected a type of human interest sketch that was widely emulated. His play The Front Page (1928), written with Charles MacArthur, influenced the public’s idea of the newspaper world and the newspaperman’s idea of himself.
Hecht was the son of Russian–Jewish immigrants, and after attending high school in Racine, Wis., he moved to Chicago, then in the midst of an artistic and literary renascence. He worked as a reporter for the Chicago Journal (1910–14) and then the Chicago Daily News, which sent him to Berlin during the revolutionary upheaval following World War I. From this experience came some of the material for his first novel, Erik Dorn (1921). For the Daily News he developed a column that formed the basis of his collection of sketches A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (1922).
He was dismissed by the Daily News after his novel Fantazius Mallare (1922) was seized by the government on obscenity charges. He was associated in Chicago with the bohemian novelist and poet Maxwell Bodenheim. Hecht later divided his time between New York City and Hollywood. He collaborated with MacArthur on another successful stage comedy, Twentieth Century (1923). In Hollywood he wrote scripts, often with MacArthur, for a number of successful motion pictures, among them The Front Page (film version 1931), The Scoundrel (1935), Nothing Sacred (1937), Gunga Din (1938), Wuthering Heights (1939), Spellbound (1945), and Notorious (1946). Hecht also wrote the script for the film Spectre of the Rose (1946).
Hecht’s last Broadway success was Ladies and Gentlemen (1939; also with MacArthur). Columns written for the New York newspaper PM appeared as 1001 Afternoons in New York (1941). Among his other works are A Guide for the Bedevilled (1944), an analysis of anti–Semitism; Collected Stories (1945); and Perfidy (1961), which concerns the struggle to establish Israel.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/259157/Ben–Hecht (accessed March 11, 2009)
1948 CE: MAARIV NEWSPAPER FOUNDED
Tel Aviv: A popular Hebrew language Israeli daily newspaper, Considered “middle of the road,” it is controlled by the Nimrodi family. Founded initially by a breakaway group of a large number of journalists and staffers from Yediot Ahronot that year. The breakaway group was led by Azriel Carlebach, who had just resigned as Editor of Yediot.
[Not to be confused with the Jewish religious evening service, Ma’ariv, of the same name, (a.k.a. Arvit) and preceding the newspaper historically by 2000–3300 years, depending on different strains of religious historical tradition.]
1948 CE: DIR YASSIN
April 9: Arab village of Dir Yassin (contiguous to Jerusalem, currently the Har Nof area): Irgun and Lechi kill (Arabs say “massacre”) over 100 Arabs…roundly condemned/deplored/lamented by the Jewish establishment worldwide and by Haganah, but the negative repercussions have lasted decades.
Exaggerated reports of the already quite–severe matter possibly fueled the panic that became a significant factor in the 1948 Palestinian exodus – “the wound that does not heal.”
Lechi and Irgun maintain that the 100+ Arabs killed were para–military. Whatever precisely transpired at forsaken Dir Yassin, Lechi and the Irgun never fully politically recovered from the “collateral damage.”
Down–the–road, the future IDF (Israel Defense Forces) would adopt a strict code of Taharat Neshek (“purity of arms”) to distance Israeli troops further from potentially morally ambiguous situations and actions.
***
Note that the Arab narrative regarding the 1948 Arab refugees differs radically from the Jewish/Israeli narrative. Thus the two respective groups base their convictions on radically diverging narratives. This is part of the reason that resolution of the conflict has proven so elusive.
It should be noted clearly, however, that the “Western” part of this equation operates within a milieu of a free press and unfettered debate, including a not–inconsiderable perpetually self–critical Jewish Left Wing, stretching back the entire duration.
1948 CE: HADASSAH MEDICAL CONVOY MASSACRE
April 13: An Israeli civilian medical convoy, marked.
Appropriately, bringing medical supplies and personnel to Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus (Jerusalem) was ambushed by Arab forces outside Jerusalem. Seventy–one Jewish personnel, including doctors and nurses, were killed in the grave attack.
1948 CE: NACHSHON!
Jerusalem, April 20: Operation Nachshon by 1500 fighters of Haganah/Palmach breaks the primary Arab siege of Jerusalem…
…Arab commander of the blockade, Al–Hassayani, killed in battle…food and water supplies now start flowing steadily to the hitherto besieged and severely–rationed residents of Jerusalem.
1948 CE: KFAR ETZION
West Bank: May 13–14: Massacre (of Jewish settlers) at Kfar Etzion kibbutz, part of the 4–kibbutz Etzion Bloc.
Kfar Etzion is located in the Judean Hills between Jerusalem and Hebron.
The Arab Legion, backed by irregulars, attacks and takes Kfar Etzion …127 of the 131 Jewish fighter–defenders killed in the brutal battle…all Jewish survivors of Kfar Etzion of all ages massacred.
1948 CE: ISRAEL RE–BORN / WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
Phoenix nation. Latest reincarnation in its 3000+ year legacy.
Arises from the 1940s ashes of Auschwitz and the 1890s vision of Herzl:
“Im tirtzu ein zo agadah”
“If you will–it–to–happen,
the dream will not just be a fable”
May 14: Establishment of The Third Jewish Commonwealth, STATE of ISRAEL
Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion presiding…
As head of liberator Jewish Establishment… Chaim Weizmann, Founding Father… Menachem Begin, to be head of Heirut Party…
National Anthem, Hatikvah, (Our Hope) sung…
Flag, blue on white Star–of–David, raised...
British exit; UN votes to partition Palestine; Arab nations reject UN Partition Plan; Six Arab armies immediately attack the fledgling state; Haganah and former Irgun forces are ready—and counter–attack…the rest is history.
Finally, after much blood, much sweat, much sacrifice, much yearning, much prayer, much bravery, much boldness, much martyrdom, and many, many tears, a Jewish Homeland after 2000 year Diasporah.
Armistice achieved March, 1949 Signed on the (Greek) Island of Rhodes.
1948 CE: DR. ALFRED KINSEY
…takes the first of eighteen thousand sexual histories.
1948 CE: “BURMA ROAD”
Myanmar, June 10: A makeshift bypass road/track built by Israeli forces during the early phases of the War of Liberation (1948) by (American volunteer) General Mickey Marcus, during the Siege of Jerusalem. The road name was inspired by the WWII allied route into China.
The main road from Latrun into Jerusalem (now Israel Highway 1) had been under repeated ambush/blockade by local Arab village sympathizers (of the Bab el Wad Valley) and by Jordanian forces. Food and water supplies had been intermittently cut off as well. The makeshift “Burma Road” broke the second component of the siege of Jerusalem.
1948 CE: COL. MICKEY MARCUS
As noted in Encyclopaedia Judaica on Mickey Marcus {1997} [CD–ROM]
“Marcus, David Daniel (1902–1948), U.S. soldier, commander of the Jerusalem front in the Israel War of Independence. Marcus was born on New York’s Lower East Side. In 1920 he entered the West Point Military Academy, graduating in 1924. He also studied law, and, when he left the army in 1927, was employed in the U.S. Attorney General’s Office. In 1934 Mayor Fiorello La Guardia invited him to join the New York City Department of Correction, and in 1940 he was sworn in as a commissioner of correction. After the outbreak of World War II in Europe he rejoined the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel as divisional judge advocate and divisional headquarters’ commander. In 1943 he was called to the Civil Affairs Division of the War Department and attended the meetings of the “Big Five.” On D–Day he volunteered to participate in the airborne assault, parachuting into Normandy despite his lack of previous training. In 1945 he was on the staff of Feneral Lucius D. Clay’s military government in Germany. Recalled to Washington, he was appointed head of the War Crimes Branch. In 1947 he retired from the army with the rank of colonel and returned to legal practice, after being awarded a number of major U.S. and British decorations.
At the request of the Jewish Agency and the Haganah, he went to Palestine at the end of January 1948, serving as David Ben–Guirion’s military adviser under the nom de guerre of Mickey Stone. He immediately perceived the special spirit and conditions of the new Israel army which was emerging from the underground. After a brief visit to the United States, he returned to Israel in May 1948 and on May 28, 1948, was appointed commander of the Jerusalem front. Marcus was the first officer to receive the new rank of alluf (brigadier general). Before dawn on June 11, he went outside the perimeter fence of his headquarters in Abu Ghosh and was accidentally killed by a sentry. His body was transferred with military honors to the United States and buried at West Point. A village in Judea, Mishmar David, is named after him.”
1948–9 CE: ALIYAH!
Almost 250,000 Holocaust survivors make their way to Israel... from the DEPTHS to DREAM–in–FORMATION.
1949 CE: MOSSAD FOUNDED
May 13: “The Mossad” (Israel’s intelligence agency) founded in Israel
–parallel mandate as that of America’s CIA or Britain’s M16…
“The Central Institute for Coordination,” it will attract the best and the brightest of Israel into its talented ranks.
Outnumbered 200:1 by surrounding hostile and intermittently attacking Arabs, the Jews of Israel will have a very, very narrow margin for survival…
At almost perpetual war, it can WIN or it can DRAW in each major engagement, but, realistically, it can never ever LOSE.
1949 CE: EVANGELIST BILLY GRAHAM
–preaches his first Los Angeles crusade
1949 CE: OPERATION MAGIC CARPET
June: Start of “Operation Magic Carpet” (Yemen to Israel) – to bring 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel over 15–month–period…on 380 Israeli, British and American flights from British Colony of Aden (a port in Yemen) in a secret operation…a.k.a. “Operation On Wings of Eagles” (al Kanfei Nesharim).
[Not to be confused with the immediately post–WWII “45–46” major US Navy transport operation of the same name (Magic Carpet) bringing the US troops back to the USA from Europe and the Pacific.]
1949 CE: OXFORD’S J. R. TOLKIEN FINISHES EPIC HIGH FANTASY LORD OF THE RINGS
Tolkien’s attic: Oxford, England: Typing with two fingers, Tolkien completes his 3–volume epic after seventeen years.
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
The Return of the King
1949 CE: PHILIP JOHNSON, 43, DESIGNS HIS FAMOUS GLASS HOUSE
–for his master’s thesis, which he builds on a property he just happens to own in Connecticut.
[Architecture was Johnson’s second career]
1949 CE: GEORGE ORWELL
Author of several extraordinary and quite–unique works, including–
| year | book | subject |
| 1945 | Animal Farm | Communism/Stalinism |
| 1949 | Nineteen Eighty–Four | Totalitarianism |
Writer, author, journalist… (b. 1903, India; d. 1950, England).
1950 CE: H.G. ADLER WRITES THE JOURNEY (IN GERMAN)
Born in Prague in 1910, Jewish, interned in Theresienstadt (concentration camp), then incarcerated in Auschwitz. After losing his parents and wife plus 15 other family members to the Nazis, after the war he will re–marry and father a son. Then he will write 26 books. Dies: 1988
“The Journey,” noted above, the first of his six novels, would be translated into English in 2008, and reviewed by the NY Times Sunday Book Review January 11, 2009, years after his death.
1950 CE: NOAM CHOMSKY COMMENCES REVOLUTIONIZING LINGUISTICS
Born Dec. 7, 1928
Britannica –
“[Jewish] American linguist and political activist who founded transformational–generative grammar, an original and highly influential system of linguistic analysis.
Chomsky was introduced to the study of linguistics by his father, a Hebrew scholar who worked within the framework of historical linguistics. He studied under the linguist Zellig S. Harris at the University of Pennsylvania and earned bachelor’s (1949) and master’s (1951) degrees there. The early stages of Chomsky’s theories of language appear in his University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. dissertation, “Transformational Analysis” (1955). After receiving his degree, he began teaching modern languages and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955. He became a full professor there in 1961 and was appointed Ferrari P. Ward professor of foreign languages and linguistics in 1966.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/114218/Noam–Chomsky (accessed March 12, 2009)
1950 CE: WALTER CRONKITE, 34, JOINS CBS
1951 CE: J.D. SALINGER RELEASES THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
Britannica –
“U.S. writer whose novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) won critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post–World War II generation of college students. His entire corpus of published works consists of that one novel and 13 short stories, all originally written in the period 1948–59.
Salinger was the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, and, like Holden Caulfield, the hero of The Catcher in the Rye, he grew up in New York City, attending public schools and a military academy. After brief periods at New York and Columbia universities, he devoted himself entirely to writing, and his stories began to appear in periodicals in 1940. After his return from service in the U.S. Army (1942–46), Salinger’s name and writing style became increasingly associated with The New Yorker magazine, which published almost all of his later stories…
Major critical and popular recognition came with the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, whose central character, a sensitive, rebellious adolescent, relates in authentic teenage idiom his flight from the “phony” adult world, his search for innocence and truth, and his final collapse on a psychiatrist’s couch. The humor and colorful language of The Catcher in the Rye place it in the tradition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the stories of Ring Lardner, but its hero, like most of Salinger’s child characters, views his life with an added dimension of precocious self–consciousness. Nine Stories (1953), a selection of Salinger’s best work, added to his reputation.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/519270/J–D–Salinger (accessed March 15, 2008)
1951 CE: CAMPUS CRUSADE FOR CHRIST
–founded at UCLA
Promotes evangelism and related in “more than 190 countries”; apparently employs over 25,000 full-time missionaries and relates that it has trained over 225,000 volunteers.
1951 CE Foundation! I, GENIUS
ISAAC ASIMOV....immortal Science Fiction writer Isaac Asimov publishes first book of classic trilogy—“Foundation Series”…
A year after masterwork “I, Robot”…
Born into an Orthodox Jewish household and shtetl (tiny Jewish village) in Smolensk, Russia, Asimov grew up in Brooklyn, NY, speaking Yiddish and English.
(b. Jan 1920; d. Apr 1992)… Asimov was initially a professor of biochemistry at Boston College.
And, now a quick–quiz question for all you astute readers out there:
What are the “Three Laws of Robotics”?
(No peeking on Google until you answer—or surrender)
1951 CE: HERMAN WOUK RELEASES THE CAINE MUTINY
Also a co–founder of the Great Neck Synagogue, along with Solomon Goldwyn, et al.
Britannica –
“U.S. novelist best known for his epic war novels.
During World War II Wouk served in the Pacific aboard the destroyer–minesweeper “Zane.” One of his best known novels, The Caine Mutiny (1951), grew out of these years. This drama of naval tradition presented the unforgettable character Captain Queeg and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1952.
Wouk’s novels are all meticulously researched, and they provide an accurate and in–depth portrait of a particular slice of the world. They are built on a belief in the goodness of man or, in the case of Marjorie Morningstar (1955), the purity of women, and revolve around moral dilemmas. Wouk wrote with little technical innovation, but his novels have been tremendously popular. Most have been made into screenplays. Popular television mini–series were based on his expansive two–volume historical novel set in World War II: The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978).”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/649271/Herman–Wouk (accessed March 16, 2009)
1951 CE: BISHOP FULTON SHEEN
–debuts his television program Life is Worth Living on the DuMont Network. His half hour lecture program on Roman Catholic theology remained the number one show on U.S. television for its time slot, winning several Emmys until Sheen ended the program in 1957.
As of 2002, he is a candidate for “sainthood” in Rome.
[b. May, 1895 El Pas, Illinois; d. December 1979 New York, NY]
1952 CE: GEN. MARK WAYNE CLARK
He takes helm of UN forces in Korea.
Born May 1, 1896; died Apr. 17, 1984.
Britannica –
“[Jewish] U.S. Army officer during World War II, who commanded Allied forces (1943–44) during the successful Italian campaign against the Axis powers.
A graduate (1917) of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., Clark served overseas in World War I. Early in 1942 he became chief of staff of army ground forces. Later that year, as deputy commander in chief to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, he executed delicate and demanding assignments in connection with the Allied invasion of North Africa, including a dramatic submarine trip to Algeria for a secret meeting with French officers.
Clark’s responsibilities were considerably enlarged when he was appointed commander of the American 5th Army, which effected a major landing at Salerno (September 1943) aimed at wresting the Italian peninsula from Axis control.
Clark received the surrender of the Italian fleet and the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio the same month; his march into Rome (June 4, 1944) marked the fall of the first enemy capital. In December he was appointed commander of the 15th Army Group and finally received the surrender of the stubborn German forces in the north of Italy on May 2, 1945.
After hostilities ended in Europe, Clark assumed command of U.S. troops in Austria before returning home to command the 6th Army and later the army field forces. In May 1952, during the Korean War, he was given command of all United Nations troops in Korea, holding that post until after an armistice was signed (July 1953); he retired from the army the same year. Clark served as president of The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, S.C., from 1954 to 1966. He wrote Calculated Risk (1950), an account of his experience of World War II, and From the Danube to the Yalu (1954), his perspective on the Korean War.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/119962/Mark–Clark (accessed March 16, 2009)
1952 CE: ARCHITECT MORRIS LAPIDUS RE–SHAPES MIAMI
Britannica –
“Russian–born [Jewish] American architect (n. Nov. 25, 1902, Odessa, Russia [now Ukraine]—d. Jan. 18, 2001, Miami Beach, Fla.), designed some 1,200 buildings, including 250 hotels; his flamboyant style was long scorned by critics but gained a measure of respect late in his career. Lapidus, who graduated from Columbia University, New York City, with a degree in architecture in 1927, designed retail spaces for 20 years before turning his attention to buildings… His designs were always popular with the general public, but it was not until the 1980s and ‘90s that critics began to appreciate his work. In 2000 Lapidus received a National Design Award from the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum. His autobiography, Too Much Is Never Enough, appeared in 1996.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/761427/Morris–Lapidus (accessed March 16, 2009)
1952 CE: ERNEST HEMINGWAY
–publishes The Old Man and the Sea
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream....”
1952 CE: DR. SCHWEITZER
Albert Schweitzer wins Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of “reverence for life,” expressed in–action by his founding and sustaining (over the decades) the Lambaréné Hospital in Gabon, west central Africa... Schweitzer and his wife had moved to (French) Gabon and founded Lambaréné in 1913 after Schweitzer had finished his medical studies.
In his mid–years back in Europe, Schweitzer developed noted careers in theology, music, philosophy, and, of course, his initial specialty, medicine.
Initially from Alsace–Lorraine (German–occupied at the time of Schweitzer’s birth, but returned to France after WWI), Schweitzer would spend his final years at Lambaréné (b. 1875; d. 1965).
1952 CE: LINUS PAULING WINS FIRST OF TWO NOBEL PRIZES
Born Feb. 28, 1901; died Aug. 19, 1994
Britannica –
“American theoretical physical chemist who became the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes. His first prize (1954) was awarded for research into the nature of the chemical bond and its use in elucidating molecular structure; the second (1962) recognized his efforts to ban the testing of nuclear weapons.”
After graduating from Oregon State University (then Oregon Agricultural College), he attended the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where Roscoe G. Dickinson showed him how to determine the structures of crystals using X rays. He received his Ph.D. in 1925 for a dissertation derived from his crystal–structure papers.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/447161/Linus–Pauling (accessed April 2, 2009)
1952 CE: NIGHT OF THE MURDERED POETS
Aug 12: On the orders of Joseph Stalin, thirteen of the most prominent Russian Jewish writers (Yiddish), poets, actors and other intellectuals were taken away and secretly executed.
Among them were: Peretz Markish, Leib Kvitko, David Hofstein, Itzik Feffer and David Bergelson.
1952 CE: AGATHA CHRISTIE’S NEW PLAY THE MOUSETRAP
The play opens in London.
Ambassador’s Theatre: It will outlive its author, and play to more than 20,000 audiences through 2004.
1952 CE: EINSTEIN AND ISRAEL
When Chaim Weizman, Israel’s first president died, Albert Einstein (of the USA) was offered the Presidency of Israel (a ceremonial but influential post); however, Einstein declined due to “scientific research commitments.” Einstein served on the Board of Governors of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and bequeathed the literary rights to his writings to same, where many of his original documents are held in the Albert Einstein Archives. In 1968, the Israeli 5 Lira Bank Note was issued in his honor.
1952 CE: SAMUEL BECKETT
–finishes his play, Waiting for Godot.
1953 CE: PLAYWRIGHT ARTHUR MILLER’S “THE CRUCIBLE” OPENS ON BROADWAY
As noted in Encyclopaedia Judaica on Arthur Miller {1997} [CD–ROM]:
“Arthur Miller… U.S. playwright. He was born in New York City. Miller worked in a Michigan automobile factory to finance his studies, became a newspaper editor, and first began writing in the late 1930s. He acquired an international reputation after World War II, following the publication of two plays and of Focus (1945), a novel about anti–Semitism. The play All My songs (1947) revealed his ability to portray characters involved in emotional conflicts, but his reputation was really established with Death of a Salesman (1949), which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The play, later made into a motion picture, owed its success to the delineation of Willy Loman, the unsuccessful traveling salesman, and was regarded as an indictment of the false sense of values of American life.
In 1950, engaged by the problem of freedom of speech, Miller wrote an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and in 1953, his own play The Crucible, he turned to the Salem witch trials of 1692, and spoke for freedom of conscience during the period of Senator McCarthy’s anti–Communist campaign. This play was screened as the Witches of Salem. A View from the Bridge (1957) again won a Pulitzer Prize. It showed Miller still striving for significant realistic drama and imaginative dramatic form. The film script, The Misfits (1961), written after his marriage to the screen star Marilyn Monroe, and acted in by her and Clark Gable, was an unusually sensitive, though commercially unsuccessful, study of loneliness and divorce. Miller returned to the theater with an autobiographical drama, After the Fall (1964), based largely on his life with Marilyn Monroe, whom he had divorced in 1962, and relating his own conflicts in love and friendship to the state of the world. Incident at Vichy (1966) dealt with the arrest of a number of Frenchmen, including some Jews, during the Nazi occupation. The Price (1968), depicting a dramatic conflict between two brothers, had as a central character an old Jew who acted as a wise commentator.
Miller stated his intention as a dramatist as being to “bring to the stage the thickness, awareness, and complexity of the novel.” He endeavored to give postwar American drama depth of purpose and content, and a sense of tragic conflict in terms of contemporary American life. Widely regarded in the 1950s as America’s leading dramatist, his reputation faded somewhat in the 1960s as realistic drama itself passed out of critical fashion. The 1980s, however, saw a return to appreciation of Miller’s contribution to Twentieth Century Theater. Other plays include The American Clock, The Archbishop’s Ceiling, Danger: Memory, Two–Way Mirror, The Ride Down Mount Morgan, The Last Yankee, and Broken Glass. For the collected edition of his plays published in 1958, he wrote a 50–page introduction, which clarified his purpose and explained his methods of work. Translated into many languages, the plays were internationally popular. Miller was elected president of the International P.E.N. Club in 1965, in which position he strove vigorously to organize protests against literary censorship and repression all over the world.”
1953 CE: “BOND, JAMES BOND”...
Great Britain: 007, fictional British Agent, created by (British) writer Ian Fleming.
Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever, From Russia with Love, Dr. No, Goldfinger, For Your Eyes Only, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965)...
1953 CE: “THE DOCTOR’S PLOT”
January 13: Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper organ in the Soviet Union, publishes an article “Vicious Spies and Killers under the Mask of Academic Physicians.”
This was the infamous fabricated “Doctor’s Plot,” which accused leading Jewish doctors of involvement in a massive “plot” to poison the Soviet leadership. Hundreds of Jewish physicians and academics were arrested, with many sent to the GULAG (the Siberian prison world) or executed. Stalin’s (fortuitous) death March 5, less than two months into the grisly saga, ended the sordid matter. The arrested that were still alive were acquitted and released by Beria et al. (of the incoming Soviet leadership cadre).
1953 CE: LUXEMBURGER ABKOMMEN
March 27: Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany entered in force.
West Germany commences multi–decade multi–faceted backing for Israel with various modalities and combinations of financial, military and political support; some public, some not; ongoing to this day.
1953 CE: DNA
In the April 25, 1953 issue of Nature, Francis Crick and James Watson (age 25) write “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid.”
They have discovered the double–helix structure of the DNA molecule that defines life.
1953 CE: ALBERT EINSTEIN CHALLENGES McCARTHY
…as Senator Joe McCarthy ramped–up his investigation of the US Army.
In an open letter, Einstein endorses civil rights and criticizes McCarthy. Senator McCarthy then calls Einstein “an enemy of America.”
1953 CE: (NEW ZEALANDER) EDMUND HILLARY, AND (NEPALESE) TENZING NORGAY
Age 33 and 39 respectively – together reach the summit of Mt. Everest.
a.k.a. Sagarmatha (Nepali meaning Head of the Sky)
11:30 A.M., May 29: Nepal–Tibet border: World’s highest mountain at 29,029 feet.
To date, Everest has claimed the lives of over 210 climbers.
(The conquest of Everest coincided with the coronation of Elizabeth II a couple of days later, June 2. By the time Hilary got back to the jump–off base at Katmandu a few days later, to his great surprise, he had already been knighted by Elizabeth, whose advisors apparently proactively fostered an association with the Everest milestone achievement.)
1953 CE: HESDER YESHIVOT
Movement established with Yeshiva Kerem B’Yavneh. [Yavneh, (central/coastal) Israel].
It’s yeshivas combines advanced Yeshiva study with military service in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces).
The movement was awarded the iconic Israel Prize in 1991.
1953 CE: WOODY ALLEN
–majoring in communication and film, flunks out NYU
He had received a D in film production.
City College New York’ subsequently “picks up his option.”
(Note: Allen had been born Allen Stewart Konigsberg).
1953 CE: PERSIAN JEWS FLOURISH UNDER THE SHAH
The beginning of Jewish history in Iran date back to late biblical times. The biblical books of Isaiah, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, and Esther contain references to the Jews of Persia.
Persian Jews have lived in the territories of today’s Iran for over 2,700 years, since the first Jewish diaspora when Shalmaneser V conquered the (Northern) Kingdom of Israel (722 BCE) and sent the Israelites into captivity at Khorasan. In 586 BCE, the Babylonians expelled large populations of Jews from Judea to the Babylonian captivity.
Jews who migrated to ancient Persia mostly lived in their own communities. The Persian Jewish communities include the ancient communities not only of Iran, but of parts of [present day] what is now Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, northwestern India, Kirgizstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. During the peak of the Persian Empire, Jews are thought to have comprised as much as 20 percent of the population.
Parthian period [247 BCE – 224 CE]
The Parthian Empire was an enduring empire that was based on a loosely configured system of vassal kings. The Parthians were protective of the [Jewish] minority. An old Jewish saying goes: “When you see a Parthian charger tied [stallion] up to a tomb–stone in the Land of Israel, the hour of the Messiah will be near.”
In the continuous struggles between the Parthians and the Romans [200 BCE – 200 CE], the Jews had every reason to side against the Romans, ultimately the destroyers of the Jerusalem Temple, and to side with the Parthians, their protectors. Possibly it was recognition of their loyalty (rendered by the Jews of Babylonia) that induced the Parthian kings to elevate the [ex–Judean] leaders of the Exile, who till then had been little more than mere collectors of revenue, to the dignity of almost–princes, called Resh Galuta [the Head of the Exiles]. When the numerous Jewish subjects were provided with a central authority, this assured a relatively undisturbed development of their own internal affairs.
*
Nineteenth Century
In the nineteenth century there were many instances of forced conversions and massacres, usually inspired by the Shi’a wing of Islam. A representative of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Jewish humanitarian and educational organization, wrote from Tehran in 1894: “…every time that a priest wishes to emerge from obscurity and win a reputation for piety, he preaches was against the Jews.”… Driven by persecutions, thousands of Persian Jews emigrated to Palestine in the late 19th – early 20th century.
Pahlavi dynasty (1925 CE – 1979 CE)
The Pahlavi dynasty implemented modernizing reforms, which greatly improved the life of Jews.The influence of the Shi’a clergy was weakened, and the restrictions on Jews and other religious minorities were eliminated. Reza Shah prohibited mass conversion of Jews and eliminated the Shi’ite concept of uncleanness of non–Muslims. Modern Hebrew was incorporated into the curriculum of Jewish schools and Jewish newspaper were published. Jews were also allowed to hold government jobs. However, Jewish schools were closed in 1920s. In addition, Reza Shah sympathized with Nazy Germany, making the Jewish community fearful of possible persecutions, and the public sentiment in Iran at the time was anti–Jewish.
Anti–Jewish sentiment ratcheted–up after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and continued until 1953 due to weakening of the central government and strengthening of the Iranian clergy in the course of the ensuing political struggles between the shah and prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
The reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after the deposition of Mossadegh in 1953, was the most prosperous era for the Jews of Iran. In 1970s, only 10 percent of Iranian Jews were classified as impoverished; 80 percent were middle class and 10 percent wealthy. In 1979 two of the 18 members of the Iranian Academy of Sciences were from the small Iranian Jewish community.
Prior to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there were 80,000 Jews in Iran, concentrated in Tehran (60,000), Shiraz (8,000), Kermanshah (4,000), Ishafan (3,000), the cities of Khuzistan, as well as Kashan, Tabriz, and Hamedan…
Estimates of the Jewish population in Iran vary. In mid– and late 1980s, it was estimated at 20,000–30,000, rising to around 35,000 in mid– 1990s, and estimated at less than 30,000 nowadays, possibly much less.
The Islamic government appoints the officials who run Jewish schools, most of these being Muslims and the government requires that those schools must open on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath. Criticism of this policy was the downfall of the last remaining newspaper of the Iranian Jewish community which was closed in 1991 after it criticized government on this score.
1955 CE Posthumous: DE CHARDIN DIES
–and his works can then get published.
De Chardin’s death will liberate his works, as his obedience to Church fiat had kept his books unpublished during his lifetime.
Works of the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin published posthumously primarily over 1955–2002 CE span; [b. 1881; d. 1955].
His works had been banned by the Vatican “Holy Office” during his lifetime (with the Holy See ban reaffirmed in 1981)…
His works deal with, among other themes, “consciousness” as well as “directed evolution”…noosphere....Omega Point.
Note that his important posthumously published works include:
"The Phenomenon of Man
(in French: 1955, in English: 1959)
The Future of Man
(in French: 1959, in English: 1964) and
The Human Phenomenon (1999)
Note that the works of the extraordinary de Chardin are extremely complex and difficult to read, by any standard.
1954 CE: BANNISTER BREAKS THE 4–MINUTE MILE
May 6: Oxford, England. Iffley Road Track: Oxford medical student Roger Bannister runs the mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. At an official meet between British AA and Oxford University, before a crowd of 3,000 spectators.
The race was broadcast live by the BBC, as the historic 4–minute barrier was known to be under assault by Bannister.
Bannister (born in Harrow, England in 1929) went on to become Sir Roger Bannister (1995), a distinguished neurologist and medical innovator, and a Master of Pembroke College, Oxford.
Bannister – “I found longer racing boring; [so] the mile was just perfect.”
1954 CE: HO CHI MINH’S GUERILLA’S DEFEAT THE FRENCH AT DIEN BIEN PHU
The French are finished at this point. The Americans mistakenly follow in their footsteps, and will reap horrendous consequences.
1954 CE: USS NAUTILUS
The world’s first nuclear submarine launched...
Admiral Hyman Rickover presiding.
1954 CE: NATIONAL TESTING OF THE SALK VACCINE
The son of Russian–Jewish immigrants, Jonas Salk
Britannica –
“American physician and medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective vaccine for polio.
Salk received his M.D. in 1939 from New York University College of Medicine, where he worked with Thomas Francis, Jr., who was conducting killed–virus immunology studies. Salk joined Francis in 1942 at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and became part of a group that was working to develop an immunization against influenza.
In 1954 Francis conducted a mass field trial, and the vaccine, injected by needle, was found to safely reduce the incidence of polio. On April 12, 1955, the vaccine was released for use in the United States. Salk’s polio vaccine was superseded in 1960 by the live–virus oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin.” [See 1957 CE: SABIN]
On Edward R. Murrow program See It Now in 1955, Salk was asked “Who owns the patent on this vaccine?” Surprised by the questioner’s assumption that patents and profit were factors, Salk responded: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/519425/Jonas–Edward–Salk (accessed April 5, 2009)
1954 CE: 12 YEAR–OLD CASSIUS CLAY’S BICYCLE IS STOLEN
He then starts taking boxing lessons at a neighborhood gym in Louisville, Kentucky.
He will learn to “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” and in due course defeat Sonny Liston in two sequential championship fights, first in February 1964, and then in May 1965. He will emerge as the undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World.
In between the two Liston fights, on March 6, 1964, Cassius Clay rattled America when he assumed the Nation of Islam name Muhammad Ali.
In 1999, Sports Illustrated and the BBC will crown him “Sportsman of the Century.”
1955 CE: ABRAHAM RIBICOFF ELECTED GOVERNOR OF CONNECTICUT
–serving until Jan 21, 1961
US Senator from Connecticut Jan 3, 1963 – Jan 3, 1981 Secretary of HEW (Department of Health, Education and Welfare) Jan 21, 1961 – Jul 13, 1962
Born in New Britain, CT. The son of Polish–Jewish immigrants. Died in 1998 at age 87 at Hebrew Home in Riverdale, NY.
1955 CE: BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY FOUNDED
–Near Tel Aviv, Israel…ideologically parallel somewhat to Yeshiva University in NY, but more multi–cultural and without the seminary component. Over 25,000 students in 2007.
1955 CE: I.M. PEI
Formerly of Harvard School of Architecture faculty, founds I.M. Pei Associates, Architects.
Born 1917, to prominent ancestral Chinese family in Guandong, China... influenced by Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Bauhaus schools...
Among the many noted I.M. Pei works around the world:
National Center for Atmospheric Research,
Boulder, CO (1961–1967)
Luce Memorial Chapel, Taiwan (1963)
Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong (1982–1990)
Pyramids of the Louvre, Paris (1989) with Peter Rice
Miho Museum, Shiga, Japan, (1996)
note: post–1990, Pei was officially “retired” from the firm
Rock and Roll “Hall of Fame,” Cleveland, OH (1995)
Museum of Islamic Arts, Doha, Qatar (2004–2007)
1955 CE: “HEAVY HITTERS”
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations founded, Washington, DC, at the suggestion of President Dwight Eisenhower.
Now compromising 51 national Jewish organizations March ‘08. Yehuda Hellman led the organization for thirty years through 1986; subsequently, Malcolm Hoenlein has.
All members of the Conference sit on AIPAC’s Executive Committee, with AIPAC being a dynamic pro–Israel advocacy/lobbying group in Washington, DC (founded two years prior in 1953).
1955 CE: ROSA PARKS
–is arrested by Montgomery, Alabama police (December 1) for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man.
***
*
end of
Jews, Church & Civilization
Volume VI
*
continued
in Volume VII