Jewish History

[Sixties Fan]

Roman Abramovich’s tangled Portuguese roots

Documents filed in his citizenship case show the validity of his claims and reveal the complexity of Sephardic heritage

blogs.timesofisrael.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

In May 1933, some American newspapers published a letter, ostensibly from a patriotic German citizen upset at how the media was covering Germany's oppression of Jews:


(full article online)

An interesting example of Nazi propaganda in the US in 1933

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Today is Monday, Tammuz 14, 5783 · July 3, 2023​ Today in Jewish History​ • Jews of Schaffhausen (Switzerland) Burned at the Stake (1401) After the postilion (coach driver) of the governor killed the four-year-old son of a councilor, charges were lodged against a Jew named Michael Vinelmann, a former resident of Basel, alleging that he had promised the murderer three gulden for the blood of the child. The murderer was broken on the wheel, and the Jew burned alive without trial. Shortly before, a similar accusation had been brought against the Jews of Schaffhausen and been successfully refuted. When news of Michael Vinelmann's fate was brought to Schaffhausen, several of the Jews of the city fled and were soon captured. They were taken back to Schaffhausen, where they were thrown into a dungeon and terribly tortured. Unable to endure the pain, they "confessed" to the crime of which they had been accused, whereupon all the Jews living in Schaffhausen were condemned to death. Thirty Jews were burned alive. Four weeks later, eighteen men and women died at the stake in Winterthur in a similar context.​

 

[Sixties Fan]

Jewish Immigration to America: Three Waves | My Jewish Learning

Jewish Emigration to America. 19th Century Jewish Emigration. Jewish History from 1650 - 1914. Modern Jewish History. Jewish History and Community.

www.myjewishlearning.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

South African politician calls for Cape Town Jewish school to be shut do

Member of the Provincial Legislature Aishah Cassiem made the controversial statement about Herzlia High, a Cape Town Jewish school, on June 15 in the Western Cape Provincial Parliament.

www.jpost.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Oscar-winning actor Alan Wolf Arkin, who died June 29 at age 89, spent decades trying to replace lost Yiddishkeit with personal spirituality and professional ethnicities.

Born in Brooklyn to lefties of Ukrainian, Russian and German Jewish origin, Arkin informed the authors of American Jewish Filmmakers that his Jewish background was “scant” and lack of religious training meant that Judaism played “little part in [his] conscious life.”

Perhaps unconsciously, formative studies on the West Coast with Benjamin Zemach, a Polish dancer and choreographer who specialized in Jewish themes, may have replaced an absence of domestic ritual. Zemach, who had also coached the actors Lee J. Cobb and Sam Jaffe, guided Arkin to psychologically adept approaches to acting.


So Arkin was prepared when cast as David Kolowitz, an aspiring actor in 1963’s Enter Laughing, a play by Joseph Stein, based on a novel by Carl Reiner.

(full article online)

After a serpentine life of spiritual seeking, Alan Arkin discovered his soul in Jewish characters

The Oscar-winning star of 'Catch-22,' 'Little Miss Sunshine' and 'Glengarry Glen Ross' has died at the age of 89.

forward.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

This letter, written by George Washington in 1790, is a response to Moses Seixas, warden of the Touro Synagogue in Newport. In it, Washington addresses the tolerance and freedom of religion in the newly established nation:

Gentlemen.

While I receive, with much satisfaction, your Address replete with expressions of affection and esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you, that I shall always retain a grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced in my visit to Newport, from all classes of Citizens.

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet, from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security. If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and a happy people.

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess a like liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

G. Washington

George Washington and the Jews | My Jewish Learning

Washington's famous letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport.

www.myjewishlearning.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Revolutionary War and the Jews | My Jewish Learning

While some Jews fought, others suffered at the hands of the British.

www.myjewishlearning.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

A few months ago, Rabbi Elhanan Miller posted a video online of his interview with an elderly Jewish man who had fled Syria in the 1980s. The video, in which Mordechai Ezra shared his terrifying experience undergoing interrogation by Syrian intelligence officers before escaping to Israel, went viral.

Among the hundreds of thousands who viewed it on Miller’s YouTube channel and Facebook page was a Syrian refugee living in Germany. When Miller notified his followers on social media recently that he was heading to Berlin for a short trip and would be happy to meet up for coffee, this young man accepted the invitation.

It is not every day that Miller gets to hold face-to-face meetings with his Arabic-speaking social media followers and subscribers, most of whom are based in countries where Israelis cannot step foot. He therefore jumped at the opportunity.

“Like Mordechai Ezra, this young man – who was Kurdish – came from the city of Qamishli in northeastern Syria,” recounts Miller. “The story of this Jewish refugee resonated strongly with him, as it has with many Syrian refugees. But what was especially moving for me in this particular encounter was that it offered me an opportunity to communicate with someone from the Middle East outside the virtual world.”

In the video interview, Ezra also nostalgically recalled his childhood home and spoke about the marketplace in Qamishli that had been named after his grandfather. Not only did it receive many comments, says Miller, but it also generated direct email requests for Ezra’s contact information. After obtaining his interviewee’s permission, Miller was happy to oblige.

It would not be the first time he found himself in this unusual intermediary role.

A few years ago, he also interviewed Dr. Haim Daya, a family physician from Aleppo who had moved to Israel in the late 1980s – among the last batch of Syrian Jews to flee the country. Daya spoke at length about the wonderful relations he enjoyed with his neighbors and patients in Syria.

“I thought he must be exaggerating,” recalls Miller. “But as soon as the video went up, I got dozens of comments from Syrians living inside and outside Syria saying that Haim had been their doctor and that they missed him. There was this unbelievable outpouring of emotion and nostalgia.

Then, too, Miller found himself forwarding on contact information.

He considers it a sign of success of his latest project that it has enabled Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin to reconnect with their former compatriots, fostering friendly exchanges between citizens of countries officially at war.

“It’s above and beyond anything I expected,” says the 41-year-old rabbi.

“Jews of the Middle East,” as this oral history project is known, was launched five years ago as a way of preserving the stories of Jews from communities in the Arab world on the verge of extinction. Thus far, Miller has posted some 70 interviews on his dedicated website – as well as on his YouTube channel and Facebook page – with Mizrahi Jews old enough to have memories to share. It follows that most of them are in their seventies and older.

The majority were born in two countries that had especially thriving Jewish communities, Syria and Iraq, and ended up in Israel. But not only those. Miller recently interviewed a Jewish woman in her nineties, currently residing in London, who came from Port Sudan. “Who even knew there was a Jewish community there?” he asks.


(full article online)

The Arabic-speaking rabbi connecting Mizrahim with their former homes • Point of No Return

Rabbi Elhanan Miller’s enterprise interviewing Jews who lived in Arab countries is not the only oral history project – but it is one of the few being conducted in Arabic. This has allowed Miller to build up an audience in the Arab world and make some surprising connections. The project explodes...

www.jewishrefugees.org.uk

 

[Sixties Fan]

David Beckham: “I am proud to be part of the Jewish community”

The football legend talks about his grandma's chicken soup, wearing a kippah and his childhood in East London

www.jewishnews.co.uk

 

[Sixties Fan]

A Jewish Leader at Just the Right Time

Long forgotten but deeply deserving of remembrance, J. George Fredman was part of the national leadership in the American Jewish community only briefly—but at exactly the right moment, when the community needed him most.

jewishjournal.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

How the Jewish People Invented Hope | My Jewish Learning

One of the most formative moments in the history of Judaism came in the encounter between Moses and God in ...

www.myjewishlearning.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The day after the proclamation of Ukrainian nationalist leader Yaroslav Stetsko’s state of Ukraine, on July 1, 1941, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) pasted posters around Lviv with Mykola Mikhnovsky’s slogan, “Ukraine for Ukrainians,” printed in white letters against a red background. On the same day in Lviv and in many other localities of Galicia and Volhynia, another poster appeared, authored by Ivan Klymiv sometime earlier; it instructed Ukrainians: “People! Know! Moscow, Poland, the Hungarians, the Jews are your enemies! Destroy them!” These posters issued a clear signal as to what non-Ukrainians in Lviv could expect. And under the conditions of Nazi occupation, the only non-Ukrainians who could be targeted with impunity were Jews.

But much more incendiary than any posters of the new nationalist state was the discovery of the hundreds of prisoners murdered in Lviv by the NKVD in the last days of Soviet rule. Emotions ran high—rage, outrage, grief. Some people went inside the prisons to look for missing relatives. Famously, Roman Shukhevych discovered his brother Yurii’s body in a mass grave in the NKVD prison on Lontsky Street. When the corpses were exhumed and laid out in courtyards so that the public could search for relatives among the victims, a strong stench of rotting flesh permeated areas near the prisons. Photographs from the time show people with kerchiefs over their mouths and noses to blunt the stomach-churning smell. Isolated incidents of anti-Jewish violence escalated into the Lviv pogrom of July 1, 1941.

The word “pogrom” has a number of meanings. The term originated with the incidents of anti-Jewish violence that erupted in cities on Ukrainian territories within the Russian Empire in the early 1880s. These pogroms included much looting of Jewish businesses, beatings and rapes of Jews, and some murders. The pogroms of 1903-06 on the same territories were similar. But the pogroms in Ukraine of the civil war period, largely perpetrated by soldiers, were marked by great numbers of murders. Pogroms initiated by the Nazis, as when they seized Vienna in March 1938 and throughout the Reich in November 1938 (the November pogrom, often called Kristallnacht), primarily involved the destruction of Jewish property, the humiliation of Jews, and assaults, although there were also some murders.


(full article online)

A Slaughter of Jews in Ukraine

Who perpetrated the Lviv pogrom of July 1941?

www.tabletmag.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

During the first b’nai mitzvah at Tbilisi’s Peace Synagogue, Nina Mgeladze, center, was one of the first women to read Torah in Georgia’s 2,600 years of Jewish history. Rabbi Golan Ben-Chorin of Haifa, to her left, ls the nascent congregation’s spiritual leader. At right are Misha Grishashvili, the synagogue’s founding president, and his wife, Keti Chikviladze, director of Georgia’s Hillel, both of whom also became b’nai mitzvah. Photo by Eli Deush Krogmann

'Make for me a sanctuary': Amid Orthodox ire, Tbilisi women read Torah for the first time

Tbilisi's Peace Synagogue hosted a b'nai mitzvah in which Georgian women read Torah for the first time. Jodi Rudoren was there to see it.

forward.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Unveiling Heroines: Women who Shaped Israel’s Defense Forces through Courage and Leadership | United with Israel

Throughout the Jewish state's history, there have been female soldiers who have demonstrated bravery and courage.

unitedwithisrael.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Today in Jewish History​

• Jews of Jerusalem are set aflame (1099)

When the crusaders captured Jerusalem during the First Crusade, the Jews of Jerusalem fled into a synagogue. The crusaders then set flame to the synagogue, burning alive all the Jewish men, women, and children who had taken refuge there. All Jews were barred from living in the city of Jerusalem for the following 88 years.

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Jewish Value of Hospitality | My Jewish Learning

Jewish Hospitality. Jewish Acts of Kindness. Doing Good.

www.myjewishlearning.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Conventions of Biblical Poetry | My Jewish Learning

Biblical Poetry. Ketuvim, Biblical Writings. Jewish Bible. The Tanakh. Jewish Texts.

www.myjewishlearning.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Today in Jewish History​

• Third expulsion from France (1322)
After having been allowed back into France in the year 1315 (after the expulsion in 1306 by Philip IV), the Jews were once again expelled from France by Charles IV, who thus broke the pledge made by his predecessors in 1315 that the Jews would be able to stay in France for at least 12 years.