Features On The Jewish World

A series of documents I acquired recently tells one such situation, where a woman who survived the war, but whose husband did not, spent several years dealing with the halachic ramifications that resulted.

Over a century before the Holocaust, Rav Alkalai predicted that 1940 would be a year of great hardship with an outpouring of wrath that will lead to the gathering of our dispersed in Eretz Yisrael and urged Jews to make aliyah voluntarily before this catastrophic event forced them to settle in Eretz Yisrael.

The Ottoman Empire, which gained prominence and world power in the 14th and 15th centuries and on, had a significant effect on the Jews of the era, and for many centuries served as a relative safe haven for its Jews.

The focus of the miscarriage of justice against Dreyfus has always been upon the fraudulently-obtained Dreyfus handwriting sample, but it may have been du Paty de Clam’s bogus telegram that was outcome determinative in Dreyfus’s conviction by the tribunal.

The recipient of the letter was Rabbi Aharon Mendel HaCohen (1866-1927), a native of Tiberias who served as Chief Rabbi of the Ashkenazic community in Cairo for decades. He is best remembered for his ambitious attempt of renewing the Sanhedrin and reinstating the semicha.

When WWI broke out in 1914, he was arrested as an enemy alien and was later released in a prisoner exchange; in his memoir, he notes the irony of his freedom being secured through the intervention of the Pope’s Nuncio on behalf of a Jewish boy he had never seen.

Some of his many achievements include his promotion of Shabbat observance in Germany, and his role as editor of a monthly journal titled Der Sabbath from 1910 until 1914 – when WWI ceased publication.

Leading the antisemitic discrimination against the Jews in New Amsterdam was Stuyvesant, who was strongly committed to the supremacy of the Dutch Reformed Church, determined to promote morality and social cohesion through the enforcement of Calvinist orthodoxy, and unwavering in his desire to deport Jews from the colony.

Soviet Russia's complex pact, and later disbandment, with the Nazis left a troubling legacy in Soviet Russia, and mention of the Holocaust and the murder of Jews was forbidden.

Some authorities suggest that he adopted his views on Jews because he understood Judaism only through the lens of Christianity and that he reduced Judaism to a religion without considering its nationalistic character and, as such, he excluded Zionism from the Jewish identity.

One particularly memorable item was a photocard of himself and his crew standing in front of the Sphinx on which he has written In Mitzraim just at the right time of year; expect to be in Palestine for Pesach.

This collection, originally gathered by Solomon Schloss (1815-1911), had one of the most remarkable provenances a collector or institution could hope for – namely, that all the items had a highly detailed, provable pre-war provenance.

The oldest surviving Yale seal may be found on the 1749 master’s diploma of Reverend Ezra Stiles, who went on to serve as Yale’s president (1778-1795).

In Ma'aseh Tuviah, Kohn discusses Copernicus's system but finds it incompatible with Jewish teachings.

What was published, though, was nearly all after his passing, and much of it is obscured in the murkiness of what was authentic, what less so, what was expounded from his teachings and what was a commentary by his disciples.

my favorite tale of a Jewish horse thief is Sholem Aleichem’s generally unknown Moshkeleh Ganev (Moshe the Thief), which he serialized in twenty episodes in a Warsaw Yiddish daily before it was published in book form in Warsaw (1913) and, after Aleichem’s death in 1914, in Kiev (1927).

While there are sporadic quotes in the era of the Rishonim to the Jerusalem Talmud on the Seder Kodshim portion, no portion of it survives today.

Noah’s plan for a temporary Jewish homeland in the United States – the restoration of the Jews to Eretz Yisrael and the reestablishment of Jerusalem as the eternal Jewish capital was always the ultimate goal – may have had its genesis in his removal from a high government position because he was Jewish.

Noting that the local paper mill in Vilna burned down and no paper was available locally, he apologizes for the delay in getting the process started as they were awaiting a batch of paper from Warsaw. Dismissing an option to print on low quality paper, the printer writes that in their vicinity such paper is not used.

The 1934 Fair represented the largest and most prestigious concentration of buildings executed in the International Style up to the time; it made a crucial contribution to a local evolution of modern form and details, and it formed the basis for the definition of the content of situated modernism and its promotion in Eretz Yisrael.

It is dated 1866, and written by the famed Rabbi Haim Palachi (1787-1868), the rabbi of Izmir, and author of over 80 published works and many others lost to the infamous recurring fires in Izmir.

When Samuel arrived in Jerusalem to commence his term as High Commissioner, he was deeply moved by his greeting, as the Yishuv welcomed him enthusiastically, calling him “the First of Judea” and greeting him with a seventeen-gun salute and endless words of welcome.

This letter was written in the month of Sivan, 1881, coinciding with the heat of chaos and turmoil that enveloped the Iraqi Jewish Community.

Interestingly, a proposed Knesset bill in 2012 proposed to simplify the structure of the celebration so that Yom Ha’Atzmaut would always fall on a Thursday, but the proposal failed because many legislators and citizens were unhappy about a summary dismissal of the significance of the fifth of Iyar, the date on which Israel had declared independence in 1948.

Although some 4,000 volunteers – again, most of them Yishuv youth – went house-to-house collecting money from the public, the Tax for Our Defense failed to meet the goal of raising 2.5 million pounds within a month.

One of the first to foresee the impending Holocaust, Rav Herzog wrote countless letters to European Jewish leaders warning about the coming cataclysm and urging them to leave but, sadly, his entreaties went largely unheeded.

For this column, I thought I would share two Pesach Seder plates hailing from Germany that are in my personal collection.

Leeser is best remembered for his extensive English translations and prolific writing for the American Jewish community, having authored numerous books and translations, edited a newspaper and full translations of the siddur and Tanach in an era where books written by Jews in English were nearly non-existent.

There is an ongoing debate amongst scholars as to whether the earliest text of Dayenu was created before or after the destruction of the Second Temple.

The map is rather rudimentary, with just a border and a few place names, but its appearance in print was a major achievement, anything other than text was very labor-intensive to include in the printing blocks of the day and thus costly.