Jewish History

Books, Internet tell of plagues through history

The plague has interested me for over 60 years. On my shelves I have Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year 1665; William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976); John Aberth, the author of The Black Death, The Great Mortality of 1348-1350 (2005), the first of his several studies on mass mortality; Teofilo F. Ruiz, The Terror of History, on the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization (2011); and Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink (2017). I knew people who suffered through the 1918 Influenza epidemic. And I know three of the above mentioned authors. One of the first books I received as a gift was Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. [Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, International, Jewish History, Oliver Pollak, USA

Torah laws foresaw need for good hygiene

With the coronavirus threatening people’s health in the first major pandemic we have seen in over a hundred years, Jewish tradition has much to say about the importance of handwashing. As a “priestly people,” (Exodus 19:6), priests in the Torah were always instructed to wash their hands whenever they enter into the Tent of Meeting or upon entering the Temple.
Just how serious is this precept? [Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel]

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Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Michael Leo Samuel-Rabbi, Science, Medicine, & Education

‘Fate of Our Fathers’ tells horror of Stalin’s purges

Stalin ruled from the mid-1920s to 1953. Vladimir Berger was born in 1931. In 1937, at the age of 6, his father, Iosif Shmulevich Berger, was arrested by the secret police. Vladimir, his mother and sister never saw him again. The family went from being reasonably well off to selling what they had to make ends meet. [Book review by Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, International, Jewish History, Oliver Pollak

ADL’s anti-Semitism primer heading to candidates

Beginning this week, ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) will share a new comprehensive guide to contemporary antisemitism with candidates running for national office in 2020, as well as every member of Congress. Antisemitism Uncovered: A Guide to Old Myths in a New Era identifies some of the most stubborn tropes about Jews, explains why they are dangerous, provides the backstory behind the myths and shows how they have evolved into the present day. [Press Release from Anti-Defamation League]

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Jewish History, USA

‘The Super Achievers’ probes Jewish Nobelists

The Super Achievers by Ronald Gerstl reveals the remarkable disproportionate Jewish contributions to world knowledge of science and heath, and the surprisingly high number of Jewish Nobel Prize Winners in these fields. Although Jews are only 0.2% of the world’s population, Jews were awarded 24% of the Nobel Prizes in science and medicine. Similarly, while Jews account for only 2% of the American population, they received 37% of the US Nobel Prize awards in these fields. [Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, International, Israel Drazin-Rabbi Dr., Jewish History, USA

A history of Gold Country Jews in pictures

Gold was discovered in January 1848 at Sutter Creek near Coloma, in what became El Dorado County in 1850. Five chapters focus on thirteen Northern California counties. Patterns emerge. Jews were attracted by the opportunities posed by the discovery of gold, but they did not go into staking claims and mining, they went into commerce, shifting from itinerant peddling into storefronts. Enterprising immigrants provided much needed supplies including dry goods at mercantile stores. Miner settlements went from canvas tents to wooden structures and ended with a degree of permanence and optimism, brick and stone buildings. Some boomtowns became ghost towns and were transformed into State Parks and Historic places. The magic word, according to Fred Rosenbaum, historian of Jewish California is “retail.” [Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Jewish History, Oliver Pollak, USA

Haman, Purim, and Holocaust

During the Holocaust years, Purim celebrations were forbidden to the Jews. Christians and Jews could not even own the book of Esther. Such decrees did not stop the Nazis from poking fun at the Jews on this Jewish holiday. With diabolical glee, the Nazis frequently orchestrated special killings with the Jewish festivals. On Purim in 1942, the Nazis hanged ten Jews in Zdunka Wola to avenge the hanging of Haman’s sons. Similar incidents occurred in the Piotrkow ghetto and in Czestochowa and Radom. [Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel]

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International, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Michael Leo Samuel-Rabbi

Works of Holocaust poets performed at LFJCC

“That was the last butterfly. Butterflies don’t live in the Ghetto” wrote Pavel Friedmann in Terezin, before he was deported to Auschwitz, where he perished in 1944. Myla Wingard opened the March 3 program in the Astor Judaic Library, Poets of the Holocaust, with an inspiring musical rendition of that iconic poem. “Never say that you are going your last way.” Those words, penned by Hirsh Glik, became the anthem of the Jewish Partisans. The Ohr Shalom Choir was joined by the audience in singing that song of defiance and hope to conclude the program in which fifteen poets were represented. [Eileen Wingard]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Eileen Wingard, International, Jewish History, San Diego County

A Czech woman’s journey through the Holocaust

Published  posthumously with the help of her author daughter Helen Epstein, Franci’s War by Franci Rabinek Epstein is a well-written step-by-step recounting of Franci’s experiences during the Holocaust. A dress designer of  good reputation in Prague, Franci was transported with her parents to Terezin, the Nazis’ “model ghetto” nearby.  She was able to secretly rendezvous with her first husband, Pepik “Joe” Solar, who had been arrested and sent away earlier than she was.  Soon, however, her parents were taken on another transport to their deaths, and with Joe leaving the ghetto daily to work as slave labor on a railroad spur, Franci often was left to her own devices [Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, International, Jewish History

Purim differs from the biblical requirement

The current practice is that Purim is celebrated as a one-day holiday. Cities that were walled at the time of Joshua’s conquest of Israel – most notably Jerusalem – celebrate Purim on Adar 15, as a commemoration of the end of hostilities in the walled city of Shushan, where the battles occurred on Adar 13 and 14. Elsewhere, the holiday is observed on the one day of Adar 14, to recall the cessation of the battle after the war on the thirteenth in all other places of Ahasuerus’s kingdom. [Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin]

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Israel Drazin-Rabbi Dr., Jewish History, Jewish Religion

Historians, biographers probe Jewish Cleveland

Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community contains a pair of biographical essays, which I read with considerable interest, and more than a majority of essays of the historical type, dealing with such phenomena as the growth of Jewish Orthodoxy in Cleveland; the impact of Jewish philanthropy on that city; the growth of Jewish schools; The development of feminist ideals among Jewish women’s organizations;  Black-Jewish relations in Cleveland; suburbanization of Cleveland’s Jewish community; Reform Judaism in the Cleveland suburbs; and programs to assimilate into Jewish society refugees from the Soviet Union. [Book review by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Jewish History, USA