Timeline Israel and the Jews thru 1960
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Zionism: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Zionism
Israel is about the same size as New Jersey.
(SSFC, 10/9/05, Par p.27)
What we call ancient Israel was a federation of 12 tribes, 12
different groups that did not even speak the same language. The Jews
did not become ethnic until the time of Nehemiah, when he tried to
force the Jews to divorce their non-Jewish mates.
(MT, Spg. '97, p.12)
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holiest day of the
Jewish year. The steps to atonement are precisely defined: 1) God
directly forgives sins only against God. 2) Only the victim of a sin
may forgive. 3) To obtain forgiveness one must repent. 4) A sinner
must acknowledge that he has sinned. 5) A sin must be acknowledged
precisely. 6) The penitent must resolve not to commit the sin again.
7) The person who wishes to make amends must acknowledge that he
deserves punishment.
(WSJ, 9/25/98, p.W11)
The Bible listed 613 laws given to the Jews.
(SFC, 9/22/03, p.B4)
95Mil BC The 3-foot-long snake,
Pachyrhachis problematicus, lived in a shallow sea over Israel about
this time. It had short, well-developed hind limbs and may have been
related to mosasaurs, giant swimming reptiles.
(SFC, 4/16/97, p.C14)
400000 BC In 2010 a Tel Aviv University team
excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are
about 400,000 years old and resemble those of other remains of
modern man, known scientifically as Homo sapiens, found in Israel.
The earliest Homo sapiens remains found until now are half as old.
The prehistoric Qesem cave was discovered in 2000, and excavations
began in 2004.
(AP, 12/28/10)
5000 BC An international team of researchers in
2019 said they have discovered a 7,000-year-old-seawall along
Israel's Mediterranean coast, providing evidence that coastal
communities protected themselves against rising waters even in
ancient times. The seawall, found about 120 meters (130 yards) off
the coast, is the only structure of its kind found in Israel's
coastal region. The Neolithic era village, called Tel Hreiz, was
abandoned and eventually swallowed by the sea.
(AP, 12/19/19)
4500BC-3500BC The Galgal Refaim, or the "wheel of
ghosts," first noticed by scholars in 1968, was built during this
period. It consists of four circles, the outermost more than 500
feet across, made up of an estimated 42,000 tons of basalt stone,
the remains of massive walls that experts believe once rose as much
as high as 30 feet. The enormous feat of construction was carried
out by a society about which little is known. Scholars tended to
agree that a tomb in the center of the site was added a millennia or
two after the circles were erected in the Chalcolithic period. In
2011 a scholar suggested that Galgal Refaim was an excarnation
facility.
(AP, 11/3/11)
c21000BC Plant remains from this time were found
at the Ohalo II site on the shore of the Sea of Galilee indicating
use of barley and perhaps other grains in the human diet.
(SFC, 6/22/04, p.A3)(SFC, 8/16/04, p.A6)(Econ,
8/7/04, p.65)
13000BC-9500BC The Natufians were hunter-gatherers
who lived in the eastern Mediterranean region during this period,
and began settling down rather than roving from place to place. In
2018 Archaeologists reported finding what they believe is the
world's oldest site for alcohol production in the Raqefet cave south
of Haifa in today's northern Israel. The location also served as a
burial site for the Natufian people. Their beer-like beverage may
have been served in ceremonies around 11,000BC.
(AFP, 9/13/18)
10000BC In 2008 archeologists in northern Israel
found a female skeleton in a grave containing 50 tortoise shells, a
leopard pelvis, a cow tail and part of an eagle wing and believed
they were the remains of a witch doctor from the Natufian culture.
(AP, 11/18/08)
8000BC Tel Sultan, an archaeological dig,
indicated that Jericho was first settled about this time.
(AP, 10/1/10)
7000BC Stone masks, dating to about this time,
were later discovered in the Judean desert and hills near Jerusalem.
In 2014 eleven stone masks were put on exhibit and offered a rare
glimpse at some of civilization's first communal rituals.
(AP, 3/11/14)
6000BC In 2010 Israeli archaeologists uncovered
the remains of an 8,000-year-old prehistoric building as well as
ancient flint tools in the modern city of Tel Aviv.
(AP, 1/11/10)
53000BC In 2008 a human cranium dating to about
this time was found in the Manot Cave in Israel. Anthropologists
later said the cranium was a missing connection between African and
European populations.
(SFC, 1/29/15, p.A7)
3800BC-3700BC In 2010 archeologists in Israel
uncovered two fragments of a clay tablet with writing that resembled
portions of the Code of Hammurabi of the 18th century BC. The
fragments referred to issues of personal injury law relating to
slaves and masters.
(SFC, 7/27/10, p.A2)
c3761BCE The first year of the Jewish calendar,
lunar based, that begins with Rosh Hashana. [Sep 6, 2002 ended year
5762]
(SFC, 10/1/97, p.A16)(WUD, 1994, p.767)
3000BC-2800BC The Burckle Crater, an undersea
crater, formed during this period by a very large scale comet or
meteorite impact event. It is located to the east of Madagascar and
west of Western Australia in the southern Indian ocean and is
estimated to be about 30 km (18 mi) in diameter. In 2006 the
Holocene Impact Working Group believed that it was created when a
comet impacted in the ocean, and that enormous megatsunamis created
the dune formations which later allowed the crater to be
pin-pointed. As not only the Bible, but other ancient writings from
various cultures make reference to a 'great flood', it is
hypothesized that these legends are associated with this event.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burckle_Crater)
2000BC-1600BC In Mesopotamia the Old Babylonian
period began after the collapse of Sumer, probably due to an
increase in the salt content of the soil that made farming
difficult. Weakened by poor crops and lack of surplus goods, the
Sumerians were conquered by the Amorites, situated in Babylon. The
center of civility shifted north. The Amorites preserved much of the
Sumerian culture but introduced their own Semitic language, an early
ancestor to Hebrew, into the region.
(eawc, p.2)
1900BC-1500BC During this period a Semitic group
of nomads migrated from Sumer to Canaan and then on to Egypt. They
were led by a caravan trader, the Patriarch Abraham, who became the
father of the nation of Israel. Ishmael was a son of Abraham had by
Hagar. Isaac was a son of Abraham by Sarah. Hebrews trace their
lineage through Isaac, Arabs through Ishmael.
(eawc, p.3)(NW, 11/02, p.55)
1800BC About this time Abraham buried his wife,
Sarah, in a cave in Hebron. The area later became known to the Jews
as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque.
(SFC, 12/4/08, p.A27)
1800BC In 2016 the Israel Antiquities Authority
unveiled a "unique" 3,800-year-old figurine showing a seated person,
apparently deep in thought. It was discovered recently in
excavations at Yehud, east of Tel Aviv.
(AFP, 11/23/16)
1700BC Canaanites, before the Hebrew conquest,
built a massive wall about this time when Jerusalem was a small,
fortified enclave. Archeologists first discovered the 26-foot-high
wall in 1909 and later believed it to have been part of a protected
passage built from a hilltop fortress to a nearby spring that was
the city's only water source and vulnerable to marauders.
(AP, 9/3/09)
1700BC A Canaanite palace stored wine in large
ceramic jars. In 2013 archeologists exploring the site in northern
Israel, known as Tel Kabri, announced the discovery of a storage
room holding the broken remains of the jars.
(SFC, 11/23/13, p.A5)
1600BC A curved wall in Shekhem city was built by
skilled engineers around this time. The king of Shekhem, Labaya, is
mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of the Pharaonic archive found at
Tel al-Amarna in Egypt, which are dated to the 14th century BC. The
king had rebelled against Egyptian domination, and soldiers were
dispatched north to subdue him, but failed. Romans later abandoned
the original site and built a new city to the west, calling it
Flavius Neapolis. The Greek name Neapolis, or "new city," later
became enshrined in Arabic as Nablus.
(AP, 7/22/11)
c1500BCE Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and
established a calendar with Egyptian features but based on a seven
day week. The later 8-day Sukkot festival commemorates the fall
harvest and the wandering of the Hebrews in the Sinai desert after
the Exodus. In 1998 Jonathan Kirsch authored "Moses: A Life." Miriam
was the sister of Moses and led the celebration following the
crossing of the Red Sea.
(K.I.-365D, p.58)(SFEC,10/19/97, p.A26)(SFEC,
12/13/98, BR p.5)(WSJ, 4/7/00, p.W17)
c1500BCE Linguistic evidence shows that the
Canaanites (now more commonly known as the Phoenicians) were
non-Jewish Semites whose language was almost identical with Hebrew.
(MT, Spg. ‘97, p.12)
1500-1400 The Canaanite "Poem of Aqhat," a work of
seasonal writing, dates to this time.
(SFEC, 1/31/99, BR p.9)
1500-1200BCE The Late Bronze Age. The Amorites in
the time of Moses came from northeast Syria. The languages of
northeast Syria and Palestine appear to have been 1/3 Semitic, 1/3
Indo-European and 1/3 Hurrian.
(MT, Spg. ‘97, p.11)
1490-1436BCE Tuthmosis III, ruled as Pharaoh of
Egypt. In the 15th cent. BCE Thutmose III led his army from Egypt to
Megiddo and outflanked the chariots of the Canaanite forces that had
revolted against him.
(L.C.-W.P.p.87-89)(WSJ, 4/17/97, p.A20)
1470BCE The volcano Thera, or Santorini, erupted
in the Mediterranean. It may correspond to the ninth plague of Egypt
recorded in Exodus as the "darkness over Egypt." [see 1645BCE and
1500BCE for alternate date]
(NOHY, 3/90, p.129)
1400BC-1300BC In 2010 Israeli archaeologists said
a newly discovered clay fragment from the 14th century BC is the
oldest example of writing ever found in antiquity-rich Jerusalem.
Dig director Eilat Mazar of Hebrew University said the
2-centimeter-long fragment bears an ancient form of writing known as
Akkadian wedge script.
(AP, 7/12/10)
c1300-1200BCE Moses: Neither can we be certain
even when Moses lived, except that it was obviously before the Jews
settled in Palestine, when they were still wanderers. The general
opinion seems to be that it was at some time within the period of
Ramesses and his son. The father-in-law of Moses was a Midianite.
Moses reportedly died at Mount Nebo.
(L.C.-W.P.p.123)(MT, Spg. ‘97, p.11)(WSJ,
5/11/00, p.A24)
1290-1279 In Egypt the period of the 19th Dynasty
under Seti I, the father of Ramses II. Seti overran Palestine, made
peace with the Hittites in Syria, opened mines and quarries, and
enlarged the Temple of Amun-Re at Karnak. His tomb was discovered in
1817.
(NG, 9/98, p.17,19)
1250BCE Under the directions of Moses, the
Israelites left Egypt and headed for the "promised land."
(eawc, p.5)
1250-1200BCE The Hebrew people returned to Canaan
from Egypt after wandering for several years in the Sinai desert and
began the conquest of Canaan. The conquest took some hundred years
and after victory they parceled the land of Canaan into tribal
territories under a government known as an amphictyony.
(eawc, p.5)
1200BC The Philistines arrived by sea from the
area of modern-day Greece about this time. They went on to rule
major ports at Ashkelon and Ashdod, now cities in Israel, and at
Gaza, now part of the Palestinian territory known as the Gaza Strip.
In 2014 Eric Cline, an archaeologist from George Washington
University, authored "1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed".
(AP, 7/8/11)(AP, 7/3/19)
1200-1020BCE The Israelites were ruled by the
Judges in a period of relative stability until a Philistine invasion
in 1050.
(eawc, p.5)
1200-1000BCE The archeological evidence later
confirmed that a collection of small settlements appeared in the
eastern parts of the highlands of Palestine later known as the West
Bank.
(AM, 9/01, p.30)
1100BC In 2010 Israeli archeologists found a trove
of gold jewelry in a jug near Megiddo dating to about this time. The
jewelry was said to have belonged to a Canaanite family.
(AP, 5/25/12)
1050BCE The Philistines invaded Israel from the
North. Facing annihilation the Israelites instituted governmental
reform and asked Samuel, the last of the Judges, to select a king.
In 2000 Robert Alter authored "The David Story," a new translation
of the 2 Books of Samuel.
(eawc, p.5)(SFEC, 3/12/00, Par p.8)
1020BCE Samuel selected Saul to be king and
unified the tribes into a nation. Saul faced many losses against the
Philistines and eventually committed suicide. David in his campaigns
against the Philistines proved victorious.
(eawc, p.6)
1020 BC - 980 BC Radiocarbon dating on burnt olive
pits found in the ancient city of Khirbet Qeiyafa, 19 miles (30km)
southwest of Jerusalem, indicate it existed between during this
period, before being violently destroyed. In 2012 archaeologists
reported the discovery of shrines from the fortified city, providing
the earliest evidence of a Biblical cult.
(http://qeiyafa.huji.ac.il/)(http://tinyurl.com/7hxg4qx)
1005BCE King David's conquest of Jerusalem. In
1995 Israel launched a 17 month celebration of the event.
(WSJ, 9/25/95, P. A-1)
1004BC David became the king of Israel. He ruled
from Hebron before moving his capital to Jerusalem. He began to
build a centralized government based in Jerusalem and implemented
forced labor, a census and a mechanism for collecting taxes. In 2000
Jonathan Kirsch authored "King David: The Real Life of the Man Who
ruled Israel." According to the Bible the census under David was
followed by a plague that left some 70,000 Israelites dead.
(SFC, 9/15/00, p.A4)(SFC, 12/31/00, BR p.8)(Econ,
12/22/07, p.97)(SFC, 12/4/08, p.A27)
1004BC-1000BC Absalom, the third son of King
David, led a major rebellion which temporarily dethroned his father
in the late eleventh century BC. Absalom died when his long hair
became entangled in an oak tree and he was slain by David's general,
Joab.
(http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Absalom)
1000BC Israel became a kingdom.
(WH, 1994, p.13)
1000BC A clay tablet, described as an
Akkadian-language letter, dating to about this time was placed on
display in 2011 in Jerusalem. The letter was from the Canaanite King
Abdi-Heba to the king of Egypt. It was found in excavations of a
site from the First Temple period.
(SFC, 6/21/11, p.A6)
c1000BCE A major earthquake struck along the
Carmel-Gilboa fault system about this time. The Hebrew city of Har
Megiddo, located at the strategic Nahal Iron Pass - the only route
where chariots could speed between Egypt and Syria, was destroyed in
the quake. This event is likely one described by John of Patmos in
the Book of Revelations, where a great quake takes place at
Armageddon.
(SFC,12/9/97, p.A8)
c1000BCE The Samaritans broke away from the
mainstream of Judaism about this time. They believed that God chose
Mount Gerizim as the site for the Jews to build their temple.
(SFC, 2/14/98, p.A21)
c1000BCE A Pashtun legend later held that about
this time King Saul’s son, Jeremiah, had a daughter named Afghana
whose descendants made their way to Central Asia.
(SFC, 10/20/01, p.A10)
c1000BCE Three-thousand-year-old archives were
found in Jerusalem on Mar 13, 1935, confirming biblical history.
(HN, 3/13/98)
1000BC-975BC In 2008 Israeli archeologists found a
Hebrew inscription in proto-Canaanite script on a pottery fragment
at a site believed to the biblical city of Sha’arayim (Two Gates).
The city was located on a hill above the Valley of Elah, where the
bible says David slew Goliath.
(SFC, 11/17/08, p.A10)
1000BC-900BC Archeologists in 2005 reported that 2
lines of an alphabet had been found inscribed in a stone in Israel,
offering what some scholars say is the most solid evidence yet that
the ancient Israelites were literate as early as the 10th century
B.C. The stone was found in July, on the final day of a five-week
dig at Tel Zayit, about 30 miles south of Tel Aviv.
(AP, 11/10/05)
970BCE King David of Israel died about this time.
In 2000 Robert Alter authored "The David Story: A Translation with
Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel." In 2005 Robert Pinsky authored “The
Life of David.”
(WUD, 1994, p.369)(SFEC, 4/30/00, BR p.10)(SSFC,
10/23/05, p.M1)
965BCE Solomon, the son of David, became king of
Israel. He was intent on completing the plans of David to make
Jerusalem stand out and to affirm the religious commitment of the
people. He undertook expensive building projects that included the
building of the temple in Jerusalem and raised taxes with increased
forced labor to his ends.
(eawc, p.6)
955-587 The Ark of the Covenant, the sacred chest
built by Moses containing the Ten Commandments, disappeared from
Jerusalem during this period. Legend in Ethiopia holds that the Ark
was stolen by Menelik I, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and
taken to Aksum where Orthodox Christian monks have watched over it
ever since. The 1992 book "The Sign and the Seal" by Graham Hancock
presents evidence that it was taken to Ethiopia some 800 years after
it disappeared.
(SFC, 1/31/98, p.A18)
c950BCE The Queen of Sheba lived about this time.
Local legends name her Makeda and claim that she was from Ethiopia.
Archeologists have found inscriptions from the ancient Sabean
kingdom but no mention of Makeda or Bilqis, the local name for Sheba
in Yemen. The Koran claims she ruled from Yemen.
(WSJ, 5/2/97, p.A1)
c950BCE The Kebra Negast, a 14th cent. Ethiopian
text, claims that the Queen of Sheba came from Ethiopia to see
Solomon and that he tricked her into sleeping with him and bearing
him a son.
(WSJ, 5/2/97, p.A6)
c938BC Israel’s King Solomon died about this time.
The northerners, unwilling to subsidize the financial difficulties
of Jerusalem and the national court, separated from the southern
people. This created Israel to the north with its capital in
Samaria, and Judah to the south with its capital in Jerusalem.
Solomon’s son Rehoboam ruled in the south. Only the tribes of Juda
and Benjamin remaining faithful to Rehoboam. Jeroboam, the son of
Nathan an Ephraimite, ruled 10 tribes in the north.
(eawc, p.6)(www.newadvent.org/cathen/08340a.htm)
930BC Sheshonq I, ruler of Egypt, campaigned in
Palestine about this time laying tribute upon the king of Judah.
(www.crystalinks.com/dynasty21.html)
925BCE The Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak (Shoshenq)
destroyed many Israelite cities, including Rehov, Megiddo and Hazor.
(WSJ, 12/31/97, p.A4)(SFC, 4/11/03, p.A9)
c900-800 Ahab was king of Israel. Pottery, a
4-entry gate at Megiddo, and other structures at Hazor and Gezer are
similar to others in the time of Ahab. This kind of data has
prompted "the Finkelstein correction," which pushes archeological
evidence attributed to David and Solomon more to the time of Ahab
and Jezebel, his wife from Phoenicia. In 2000 Janet Howe Gaines
authored "Music in the Old Bones: Jezebel Through the Ages."
(WSJ, 12/31/97, p.A4)(SFEC, 3/12/00, Par p.8)
c900-800BCE Joash was King of Judah in the 9th
century. Joash and Ashyahu are common variations of the same name.
The temple priest Zechariah was a contemporary to Joash and was put
to death by Joash after a dispute. In 1997 a 13 word pottery
fragment was dated to this time with the words: "Pursuant to the
order to you of Ashyahu the King to give by the hand of Zecharyahu
silver of Tarshish to the House of Yahweh. Three shekels."
(SFC,11/4/97, p.A8)
c900BC-800BC Sebastia, located just outside the
modern city of Nablus, served as the capital of the biblical Kingdom
of Israel under the name of Samaria in the 8th and 9th centuries
B.C.
(AP, 6/2/13)
830BC The Philistine city of Gath was razed. It
appears to have been the work of the Aramean king Hazael, an
incident mentioned in the Book of Kings.
(AP, 7/8/11)
c800BCE The Jewish city of Sepphoris was founded
about this time.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.64)
742BCE The time of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah.
(MofB, A&E TV, 9/7/96)
722BC Hoshea, the king of Israel, sent messengers
to Osorkon in Egypt. He was requesting help against Assyria’s
Shalmaneser V. No help was sent. Samaria was captured and the
Israelites were taken away to Assyria. The Assyrians conquered
Israel and left nothing behind. The Hebrew kingdom of Judah managed
to survive. Descendants of the Israelites not exiled by the
Assyrians were later known as the Samaritans.
(eawc, p.7)(WSJ, 10/13/00,
p.W15)(www.crystalinks.com/dynasty21.html)
721BC About this time as the
northern Israelite kingdom failed, Hebron remained the capital of
the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah.
(SFC, 12/4/08, p.A27)
c720BCE Some Jewish tribes went missing after
being sent into exile by the Assyrians under Tiglath-Pilesar III. In
2002 Hillel Halkin authored "Across the Sabbath River: In Search of
a Lost Tribe of Israel," an account of the search for the lost
tribes that included the Gadites, Reubenites and tribe of Manasseh
(Menashe) and its possible relationship to the Kuki-Chin-Mizo people
of Burma.
(WSJ, 8/8/02, p.D10)(SSFC, 8/11/02, p.M2)
715-642 Judah absorbed refugees from the Assyrian
conquest an achieved the attributes of a state.
(AM, 9/01, p.32)
705-681BCE At the same time the Ekronites had
revolted against the Assyrian. Their king, Padi, had remained a
loyal vassal to his overlord, but his turbulent subjects had put him
in fetters and sent him to Hezekiah, king of Judah, who cast him
into prison. The Ekronites summoned assistance from North Arabia and
Egypt, and met Sennacherib at El-Tekeh. Here they were defeated, and
Sennacherib marched against Ekron, slaying and impaling the chief
officers. Padi was rescued from Jerusalem... Sennacherib then cut of
some of the territory of Judah and divided it among his vassals.
(R.M.-P.H.C.p.64)
701BCE The Assyrian King Sennacherib laid siege to
Jerusalem.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.16)
700BC King Hezekiah, about this time, constructed
a 1,750-foot tunnel to bring water into Jerusalem. Archeologists in
2003 dated plant fragments in the tunnel's plaster to this time +/-
100 years. In 1880 a tablet known as the Siloam inscription was
found in the tunnel. It had been installed to celebrate the moment
the two construction teams met underground. The tablet was taken by
the Holy Land's Ottoman rulers to Istanbul. It was later placed in
the collection of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. In 2007
Jerusalem's mayor asked the Turkish government to return the tablet.
(SFC, 9/11/03, p.A6)(AP, 7/13/07)
700BC – 600BC In 2016 Israeli archaeologists made
public a fragment of an ancient text which they say is the earliest
Hebrew reference to Jerusalem outside the Bible. The piece of
papyrus was dated by the Israel Antiquities Authority to the 7th
century B.C.
(Reuters, 10/26/16)
700-600BCE The search for the 10 lost tribes of
Israel, who were dispersed in the tenth century BCE when the
Assyrians conquered part of the Holy Land, is depicted on a CD
titled The Myth of the 10 Lost Tribes, by Creative Multimedia
Corp.
(New Media, 2/95, p.84)
639BC-609BC King Josiah reigned
in Israel. The biblical account of Israel's origin was possibly
drafted during this time. The leadership reinstituted the exclusive
worship of the god of the Israelites centered on the Temple in
Jerusalem.
(AM, 9/01, p.30,31)
609BC The biblical king Josiah of Judah was slain
on Har (Mt.) Megiddo (root of Armageddon) about this time when he
was betrayed by Pharaoh Necho, whom he had approached to stop from
going to war on the side of the Assyrians against the Babylonians.
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.180)(WSJ, 4/17/97,
p.A20)(www.crystalinks.com/dynasty26.html)
606BCE In Cairo the Ben Ezra Synagogue was
established.
(WSJ, 3/15/00, p.A1)
604BC Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invaded and put
the Philistines' cities to the sword. There is no remnant of them
after that.
(AP, 7/8/11)
587BCE King Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem.
(SFC, 1/31/98, p.A18)
c587BCE Ezra the scribe and Nehemiah, the
Persian-appointed governor of Jerusalem, arrived from Babylon.
(SFC, 9/6/04, p.A4)
586BC Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, ruler of
Mesopotamia, destroyed Jerusalem and recorded his deeds at the Nahr
al Kalb (Dog River) cliff face between Beirut and Byblos. He
destroyed the first Temple, built by Solomon and took the Jewish
people into captivity.
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.157)(SFC, 12/31/96,
p.A11)(Econ, 12/20/03, p.26)
586BC Ezekial, in exile at Babylon, described Tyre
as it was before Nebuchadnezzar's attack in the Bible: (Ezekial
27:1-25). This time is known as the "Babylonian Captivity."
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.162)(eawc, p.8)
c586BC The Menashe tribe was lost following the
Jewish exile in this year. Jews dispersed across Europe and North
Africa. In the 1990s members of Shinglung community from the
province of Mizuru in India claimed to be the children of Menashe
and began returning to Israel.
(SFC, 1/12/00, p.A10)(SFC, 5/10/00, p.A13)
586BC The Jewish Ghriba synagogue in Djerba,
Tunisia, was later said to date to about this time. The first Jews
who arrived were said to have brought a stone from the ancient
temple of Jerusalem that was destroyed by the Babylonians.
(AP, 4/27/13)
539BCE Babylon, under Chaldean rule since 612BCE,
fell to the Persians. Cyrus the Persian captured Babylon after the
New Babylonian leader, Belshazaar, failed to read "the handwriting
on the wall." The Persian Empire under Cyrus lasted to 331BCE, when
it was conquered by Alexander the Great. Cyrus returned some of the
exiled Jews to Palestine, while other Jews preferred to stay and
establish a 2nd Jewish center, the first being in Jerusalem.
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.174)(eawc, p.8,9)
520BC-519BC Darius of Persia authorized the Jews
to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem, in accordance with an earlier
decree of Cyrus. The Hebrew’s began to rebuild Solomon’s Temple
destroyed in the sack of 586BCE. The Second Temple in Jerusalem was
begun. It was remodeled many times and destroyed in 70CE.
(SFC, 5/23/95, p.A-10)(eawc,
p.10)(www.crystalinks.com/dynasty27.html)
515BCE Mar 10, The building of the great Jewish
temple in Jerusalem was completed.
(HN, 3/10/98)
500-400BCE A Byzantine shopping mall was uncovered
in 1998 in Jerusalem at the site of a new mall. One inscription read
"For the victory of the Blues" in Greek. It was a reference to the
competing factions of Blues and Greens at horse races.
(SFC, 7/7/98, p.A8)
500BC-400BC Mordechai, a Jew, became the prime
minister of Persia during this period.
(SFC, 10/21/00, p.C1)
500BC-400BC Haman is described as the son of
Hammedatha the Agagite. In the Biblical story, Haman and his wife
Zeresh instigate a plot to kill all of the Jews of ancient Persia.
Haman attempts to convince Ahasuerus to order the killing of
Mordecai and all the Jews of the lands he ruled. The plot is foiled
by Queen Esther, the king's recent wife, who is herself a Jew. Haman
is hanged from the gallows that had originally been built to hang
Mordecai. Court councilor Haman warned Persia’s King Ahasuerus
(Xerxes I) against strangers whose laws are diverse from all people.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Esther)(SFC, 5/29/15, p.D4)
486BC-465BC Xerxes the Great, king of Persia,
ruled Egypt as the 3rd king of the 27th Dynasty. His rule extended
from India to the lands below the Caspian and Black seas, to the
east coast of the Mediterranean including Egypt and Thrace. Persia’s
great cities Sardis, Ninevah, Babylon, and Susa were joined by the
Royal Road. East of Susa was Persopolis, a vast religious monument.
To the north of Persia were the Scythians.
(V.D.-H.K.p.49)(eawc,
p.11)(www.crystalinks.com/dynasty27a.html)
332BC-63BC The Hellenistic period in Israel.
(AM, 9/01, p.32)
300BC-68BC The Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran, Jordan,
date to this period. The scrolls are usually identified with the
Jewish-monkish cult, the Essenes, know for their pathological
aversion to stool. In 2004 Chicago Prof. Norman Golb authored “Who
Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.” In 2009 Israeli scholar Rachel Elior
theorized that the Essenes, did not exist. She suggested they were
really the renegade sons of Zadok, a priestly caste banished from
the Temple of Jerusalem by intriguing Greek rulers in 2nd century
BC. When they left, they took the source of their wisdom - their
scrolls - with them.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.74)(WSJ, 5/15/98, p.W11)(SFC,
9/6/04, p.A4)(TIME, 3/17/09)
300BC-68BC The Dead Sea Scrolls dating to this
period were discovered by Bedouin at the caves of Qumran in Jordan
in 1947. The scrolls predated the Christian gospels, but contained
many similarities. They also contained some differences from the
traditional (Masoretic) text of the Hebrew Bible. In 1955 Edmund
Wilson published "The Scrolls from the Dead Sea." In 1998 Hershel
Shank published "The Mystery and meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls."
From 1978-1998 over 6,000 books were written about the scrolls. The
discovery date was later contested as were many of the historic
circumstances surrounding the scrolls [see Jordan 1947].
(WSJ, 5/15/98, p.W11)(WSJ, 6/22/98, p.A20)
190BC-180BC The “Wisdom of Sirach” was written
about this time in Hebrew. Its apocalyptic tone reflects the shock
of the Jewish religious establishment at the encounter with Hellenic
culture.
(Econ, 1/20/07,
p.91)(www.updated.org/sirach.shtml)
170BC The rebel Maccabees were able to gain
victory in Jerusalem occupied by Antiochus II. During the
re-dedication of the temple they stretched a days worth of oil out
to 8 days for which the holiday of Hanukkah is celebrated.
(SFC, 11/27/96, zz1 p.F1)
168BC Syria’s Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes
ruled over Israel and tried to outlaw Judaism. He tried to Hellenize
the Jews by erecting idols. The Jews resisted and began the
Maccabean revolt. The Maccabees were successful until internal
dissension tore them apart.
(eawc, p.15)(PC, 1992 ed, p.27)
167BC Antiochus IV, the Hellenistic tyrant of the
what later became called the Middle East, began to increase
religious persecution against the Jews in Palestine and outlawed
observance of the Torah. This included the circumcision of males,
dietary restrictions and observance of the Sabbath. He installed a
cult of Zeus in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jewish priest
Mattathias of Modin defied Antiochus, escaped outside Lydda with his
5 sons and began a revolt.
(WSJ, 12/11/98, p.W15)(PC, 1992 ed, p.27)
165BC Jerusalem and sacred temple of Judah were
recaptured by the Maccabees. They used guerrilla tactics and
elephants as tanks to throw off the tyranny of the Greco-Syrian
oppressors. During the cleanup they found one container of the
sacred oil used to light the temple’s candelabra known as a menorah.
They gathered to light the oil which was expected to last only a
day, but lasted eight nights. The event was memorialized in the
celebration of Hanukkah (rededication), the Feast of Lights. [see
164BCE]
(SFC,12/10/97, Z1 p.4)(SFC,12/23/97, p.A13)(WSJ,
11/27/98, p.W8)
164BC The Temple of Jerusalem was recaptured by
forces under Judah Maccabee, religious traditionalists from the
countryside. [see 165BCE] The restoration of Jewish law was also a
victory over Jewish factions who wanted to turn Jerusalem to a city
modeled after the Greek pagan city-states.
(WSJ, 12/11/98, p.W15)
155BC-213AD Some evidence has
it that the Ark of the Covenant was brought to Ethiopia about this
time. The 1992 book "The Sign and the Seal" by Graham Hancock
presents the evidence.
(SFC, 1/31/98, p.A18)
140BC The first Jews arrived at Salonika, Greece,
from Alexandria.
(SFEC, 3/21/99, BR p.3)
63BC The Romans conquered the
Jews The Jews appealed to Pompey to settle internal dissention. The
Romans intervened and began their occupation of Palestine.
(V.D.-H.K.p.102)(eawc, p.15)
37BC King Herod (d.4BCE)
reigned over Judea. During his reign underground support structures
were built for an expansion of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The
Wall of King Herod’s Second Temple is the famed "Wailing Wall."
(SFC, 7/9/96, p.D1)(SFC, 10/10/96, p.A13)(WSJ,
4/9/97, p.A10)
31BC An earthquake occurred at
the Qumran caves by the Dead Sea when Herod ruled in Jerusalem. This
was the site where fragments of scrolls from the books of Psalms and
Numbers were later found, as well as a human skeleton beneath
boulders from the earthquake.
(SFC,12/9/97, p.A9)
15BC King Herod of Judea built
the coastal settlement of Caesarea. It was razed to the ground in
1265.
(Econ, 4/24/04, p.83)
6BC Apr 17, Jupiter was in a
rare alignment with the constellation Aries and marked an important
date for ancient astrologers. Jesus was believed to have been born
in this year.
(SFC, 4/13/01, p.C1)
~4BC The Second Temple in
Jerusalem was rebuilt a few years before the birth of Jesus.
Jerusalem at this time had a population of about 100,000 people.
(SFC, 8/28/96, p.A10)
4BC King Herod the Great died.
He governed Judea from 37BCE.
(SFC, 6/26/00, p.A12)
4BC-40AD Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great,
tetrarch of Galilee for this period. He examined Jesus at the
request of Pilate. He executed John the Baptist. Pontius Pilate
served as governor of the island of Ponza before he was made
procurator of Judea.
(AHD, 1971, p.618, 706)(SFEC, 11/8/98, p.T12)
2BC The Maccabeans built an
aqueduct in Jerusalem.
(SFC, 9/26/96, p.A10)
1CE Dec 25, The celebrated
birth of Christ in Bethlehem. The birth of Jesus is celebrated on
Dec. 25th because the Romans needed to replace the pagan holiday
called the Feast of the Unconquered Sun. In Ethiopia Jan 7 is the
day that Christmas is celebrated. According to the gospel of Matthew
Joseph soon fled with his family to Egypt following a decree by
Herod that ordered all boys of Bethlehem under age 2 to be put to
death. The gospels of Luke and Matthew are inconsistent on
historical facts. Christ’s birth on this day was officially set by
the Roman Church in 336AD. [see 6-2BCE]
(SFC, 12/4/94, p. S-4)(SFC, 8/2/99, p.A10)(Econ,
1/1/05, p.38)
1CE The three wise men that
reportedly visited the baby Jesus were said to be from Arabia and
Nubia, Godolia and Tarsus.
(Econ, 12/20/14, p.30)
6CE The Romans named Caesarea
as their regional capital.
(SFC, 6/18/02, p.A2)
10CE Hillel the Elder, Jewish
religious leader, died in Jerusalem. He is associated with the
development of the Mishnah and the Talmud. "That which is hateful to
you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is
the explanation; go and learn."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder)
30 Apr 30, Jesus of Nazareth
was crucified [see 33AD]. Christ died on hill of Golgotha,
Jerusalem. His path along the Via Dolorosa was later disputed as to
whether he was tried by Pontius Pilate at the palace of Herod or at
the Roman fortress of Antonia. His death was at an abandoned quarry,
the site of today’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In 1998 Robert
Funk and the Jesus Seminar published "The Acts of Jesus: The Search
for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus." The group had published an
earlier work "The Five Gospels," in which the sayings of Jesus were
examined. In 1999 Thomas Cahill authored "Desire of the Everlasting
Hills," a book about Jesus and his effect on the world. In 2010 Paul
Johnson authored “Jesus: A Biography From a Believer.” Also in 2010
Philip Pullman authored “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel
Christ,” in which he proposes that Jesus and Christ were twin
brothers.
(SFC, 3/27/97, p.C2)(SFEC, 4/12/98, BR p.8)(HN,
4/30/98)(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.W12)(Econ, 4/3/10,
p.85)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Jesus)
33 Apr 3, Christ was crucified
(according to astronomers Humphreys and Waddington). The date is
highly debated. See April 30, 30AD.
(Econ, 4/23/11, p.64)
c37-100 Flavius Josephus, Jewish historian and
general.
(WUD, 1994, p.771)
c62-63 James, the "brother" of
Jesus, was stoned to death for teaching the divinity of Christ. He
had led the church in Jerusalem for the 3 decades following the
death of Jesus. In 2002 a stone ossuary, looted from a Jerusalem
cave, was found with an Aramaic inscription that read "James, son of
Joseph, brother of Jesus." In 1997 Robert Eisenman authored "James,
the Brother of Jesus." In 2003 Hershel Shanks and Ben Witherington
III co-authored "The Brother of Jesus: The Dramatic Story &
Meaning of the First Archeological Link to Jesus & His Family."
In 2003 the stone ossuary was declared a fake.
(SFC, 10/22/02, p.A12)(SSFC, 4/20/03, p.E2)(AP,
6/18/03)
65 Jun 8, Jews revolted against
Rome, capturing the fortress of Antonia in Jerusalem.
(MC, 6/8/02)
66 Jewish Zealots called
sicarii (from the Latin word for dagger) murdered Roman officials
and high-ranking Jews whom they considered as enemies to Israel’s
war of independence.
(NG, 11/04, p.76)(Econ, 10/27/07, p.33)
66-70 The Jews during this period laid in supplies
and prepared to hide during their revolt against the Romans. In 2006
archeologists in northern Israel reported the discovery of chambers,
linked by short tunnels, that would have served as a concealed
subterranean home.
(AP, 3/14/06)
66-73 Roman general Vespasian's army assaulted the
forces of Jewish rebel Joseph ben Matthias at Jotapata in Galilee.
During the Jewish revolt of 66-73 CE, Emperor Nero chose Titus
Flavius Vespasianus (Vespasian) to subdue Judea. Vespasian was
eminently qualified for this martial task. He was fresh from
crushing a German rebellion, and as commander of Legio II, he had
played a significant role in the conquest of Britannia (Britain) by
Nero‘s predecessor. Joseph, meanwhile had assembled his own army
from the rebel bands of Galilee and trained them in the Roman model.
He also fortified many towns, the strongest being Jotapata, a
natural fortress perched on a rock outcrop. It was surrounded on
three sides by steep valleys that made attack virtually impossible.
The only approach to the city was from a hilltop to the north, and
that was blocked by a dry moat fronting a sturdy wall.
(HNQ, 12/4/00)
67 Some 37,000 Jewish prisoners
were held at the Roman stadium in Tiberias after they lost a naval
battle on the Sea of Galilee.
(SFC, 6/18/02, p.A2)
69 Sep 1, Traditional date for
the destruction of Jerusalem. [see Aug 29 70CE]
(MC, 9/1/02)
70 May 31, Rome captured the
1st wall of the city of Jerusalem.
(MC, 5/31/02)
70 Jun 5, Titus & his Roman
legions breached the middle wall of Jerusalem.
(MC, 6/5/02)
70 Jul 1, Roman Emperor Titus
assaulted the walls of Jerusalem with battering rams.
(MC, 7/1/02)
70 Aug 8, Tower of Antonia was
destroyed by the Romans.
(MC, 8/8/02)
70 Aug 29, The Temple of
Jerusalem burned after a nine-month Roman siege. The Second Temple
of Jerusalem was destroyed by Rome’s 10th Legion and the Jews there
were exiled. In the Jewish War the Israelites tried unsuccessfully
to revolt against Roman rule. The destruction buried the shops that
lined the main street. Archeologists in 1996 found numerous
artifacts that included bronze coins called prutot. Carpenters from
Israel’s Antiquities Authority used manuscripts of the Roman master
builder Vitruvius to reconstruct contraptions used in the
construction of the temple. In 2007 Martin Goodman authored “Rome
and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations.”
(SFC, 5/23/95, p.A-10)(SFC, 8/28/96, p.A10)(WSJ,
6/22/98, p.A20)(HN, 8/29/98)(SFEC, 3/28/99, p.T11)(Econ, 1/20/07,
p.90)
70 Sep 7, The Roman army under
Titus occupied and plundered Jerusalem.
(MC, 9/7/01)
70 Sep 27, The walls of upper
city of Jerusalem were battered down by Romans.
(MC, 9/27/01)
70 The Jerusalem mansion of
Queen Helene, who came from a royal clan that ruled Adiabene
(northern Iraq), was destroyed along with the rest of Jerusalem. In
2007 archeologists uncovered remains of the structure. Helene
converted along with her family to Judaism when they came to
Jerusalem in the first half of the first century AD.
(AP, 12/7/07)
70 Josephus recorded that
Vespasian and his son Titus plundered 50 tons of gold and silver
during the Roman conquest of Jerusalem.
(SFC, 10/23/06, p.A15)
71 Vespasian and his son Titus
paraded the treasure plundered from Jerusalem in triumph through the
streets of Rome. They used the 50 tons of gold and silver to help
finance the building of the Colosseum.
(SFC, 10/23/06, p.A15)
73 Jewish zealots on Mount
Masada chose to perish by their own hands rather than surrender to
slavery under the Romans.
(SFEC, 3/28/99, p.T5)
73 When the Jewish rebellion
against Roman rule was crushed, many Jewish refugees fled in all
direction. Those who fled to Europe became known as Ashkenazim.
(Econ, 6/4/05, p.75)
75 The treasure plundered from
Jerusalem in 70AD by the Romans under Vespasian and his son, Titus,
was put on public display in the Temple of Peace in the Roman Forum
and stayed there into the early 5th century.
(SFC, 10/23/06, p.A15)
c100 Raban Gamliel in the first
century is credited with arranging the Amidah, considered by many to
be the most important prayer in the Jewish liturgy. Raban Gamliel
was the most influential Rabbi in the period following the
destruction of the Temple. This was a time when many different
rabbis each had their own individual domains.
(www.kolshalom.com/divrei/dvarilana1.html)
129 Roman Emp. Hadrian visited
Jerusalem. In 2014 archeologists discovered a large stone with Latin
engravings bearing the name of Hadrian and the year of his visit.
(SFC, 10/22/14, p.A3)
132-135 Jewish rebels occupied the mountain ridge
of Hebron during the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans. The
remains of an ancient synagogue and mikveh are visible.
(SFEC, 12/22/96, p.T2)(Econ, 7/19/08, p.94)
135 Roman Emperor Hadrian sent
12 divisions under Julius Severus to quell the Jewish rebellion led
by Simon Bar Kokhba, who was killed at Bethar. An estimated 600,000
Jews were killed. Hadrian ordered Jerusalem plowed under and Aelia
Capitolina was built on the site. He barred Jews from returning and
survivors dispersed across the empire. Judea was renamed Syria
Palestine.
(SFC, 12/26/96, p.C16)(PBS, Nova, 11/23/04)(PC,
1992 ed, p.41)
c200 The Mishna, a section of
the Talmud consisting of a collection of oral laws, was edited by
Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi in the city of Sepphoris.
(WUD, 1994, p.916)(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.64)
211-217 The reign of the Roman emperor Caracalla
(188-217). Coins were minted at the Jewish city of Sepphoris during
the reign of Caracalla.
(WUD, 1994, p.221)(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.64)
325 Emperor Constantine and his
mother Helena reportedly announced the discovery of Christ’s tomb.
The site became the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre.
(Econ, 3/26/05, p.81)
326 The Church of the Nativity
in Bethlehem was begun by the Roman emperor Constantine.
(SFC, 12/26/96, p.B2)
335 Oct 21, Constantinople
emperor (Constantine the Great) enacted rules against Jews.
(MC, 10/21/01)
335 Byzantine Emperor
Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem on
the hill of Golgotha, where his mother claimed to have found the
remains of the True Cross. It was raised by the Persians in 614,
reconstructed and again destroyed by Caliph Hakim of Egypt in 1009.
It was rebuilt by the Crusaders.
(WSJ, 1/27/07, p.W13)
337 Constantine died after
having made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
He had the Chapel of the Burning Bush built in the Sinai Desert at
the site where Moses was believed to have witnessed the Miracle of
the Burning Bush.
(V.D.-H.K.p.92)
c350 The “Codex Sinaiticus,”
the world’s oldest Bible, was created about this time. For most of
its history it resided at St. Catherine’s Monastery built (527-565)
on Mt. Sinai.
(Econ, 3/26/05, p.80)
c400-500 In Ashkalon the bones of some 100 infants
were discovered in 1988 in the debris of a sewer adjacent to a bath
house of this time.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.12)
400-500 The 63-volume, 2,711-page compendium
of Jewish law was compiled in Mesopotamia during this time. In 1923
the custom, known as “Daf Yomi,” Hebrew for “daily page," began,
when Polish Rabbi Meir Shapiro conceived of the idea of reading the
Talmud with the aim of uniting Jews globally in a daily regimen of
Talmud study. It takes seven years and five months to finish at a
rate of a single page per day.
{Israel, Mesopotamia, Jews}
(AP, 1/7/20)
418 Mar 10, Jews were excluded
from public office in the Roman Empire.
(MC, 3/10/02)
500 The second component of the
Talmud, the Gemara, was compiled about this time in Babylon (later
Iraq). It is a discussion of the Mishnah and related Tannaitic
writings that often ventures onto other subjects and expounds
broadly on the Tanakh. The first component, the Mishnah, the first
written compendium of Judaism's Oral Law, dated to around 200.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud)
527-565 Emperor Justinian built the St. Catherine
monastery in the Sinai Desert to house the bones of St. Catherine of
Alexandria, who was tortured to death for converting to
Christianity. The site was thought to be the place where Moses saw
the Miracle of the Burning Bush.
(SFEC, 8/28/98,
p.T6)(http://interoz.com/egypt/Catherines.htm)
549 Jerusalem held to a Jan 6
date for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus until this year.
In the end the West added the Epiphany and the East added the Dec 25
nativity to their liturgical calendars.
(WSJ, 12/18/98, p.W15)
560 Emperor Justinian about
this time returned the treasure of Jerusalem, plundered by the
Romans in 70AD, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
(SFC, 10/23/06, p.A15)
600 A synagogue at Ein Gedi on
the shores of the Dead Sea was destroyed about this time by fire. It
had stood there from about 800BC. In 1970 archeologists digging at
the site discovered a trove of scrolls. Technology in 2016
determined the scrolls to be of Leviticus, one of the first five
books of the Bible, which dated to 200AD-300AD.
(Econ, 9/24/16, p.77)
614 Christian Palestine was
invaded by the Persians. The 5th century monastery of St. Theodosius
east of Beit Sahour near Bethlehem was destroyed by the Persians.
The Jews of Jerusalem allied with the Persians during the invasion
and entered into the cave beneath the tomb of Christ in the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre.
(SFEC, 12/22/96, p.T3)(WSJ, 4/5/02, p.W12)(SFC,
10/23/06, p.A15)
624-628 Several Jewish clans in the Arabian
peninsula joined forces with an Arab tribe, the Quraysh, to make war
on a renegade Qurayshi named Mohammad, who claimed he was a prophet
of God.
(Econ, 8/14/10, p.68)
632-661 The Rashidun Caliphate, also known as the
Rightly Guided Caliphate, comprising the first four caliphs in
Islam's history, was founded after Muhammad's death. At its height,
the Caliphate extended from the Arabian Peninsula, to the Levant,
Caucasus and North Africa in the west, to the Iranian highlands and
Central Asia in the east. It was the one of the largest empires in
history up until that time.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashidun_Caliphate)
633 In Spain the 4th Synod of
Toledo took on the right to confirm elected kings. Jews were obliged
to be baptized. The vernacular language, of Latin origin, prevailed
over that of the Visigoths.
(www.sispain.org/english/history/visigoth.html)
634 Sophronius (74), Christian
monk, was elected patriarch and political ruler of Jerusalem.
(ON, 7/03, p.3)
636 Nov, The Siege of Jerusalem
began as part of a military conflict between the Byzantine Empire
and the Rashidun Caliphate. It began when the Rashidun army, under
the command of Abu Ubaidah, besieged Jerusalem. After six months,
Patriarch Sophronius agreed to surrender, on condition that he
submit only to the Caliph. In April 637, Caliph Umar traveled to
Jerusalem in person to receive the submission of the city. The
Patriarch thus surrendered to him.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(636%E2%80%93637))
636-638 As Muslims conquered the Holy Land St.
Sophronius (560-638), the patriarch of Jerusalem, sent Pope Theodore
I a wooden structure believed to be part of the manger where Jesus
was born.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophronius_of_Jerusalem)(SSFC,
12/1/19, p.A2)
638 cJan, Sophronius met with
Caliph Omar and obtained a set of guarantees and regulations that
came to be known as "the Covenant of Omar."
(ON, 7/03, p.3)
638 Mar 11, Sophronius of
Jerusalem, saint, patriarch of Jerusalem, died.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophronius_of_Jerusalem)
638 Arabs conquered the city of
Hebron. They allowed the Jews to build a synagogue near Abraham’s
burial site.
(SFC, 12/4/08, p.A27)
691 The Dome of the Rock mosque
was built in Jerusalem. It contained inscriptions that later were
held as the 1st evidence of the Koran.
(SFC, 3/2/02, p.A15)
694 Nov 9, Spanish King Egica
accused Jews of aiding Moslems and sentenced them to slavery.
(MC, 11/9/01)
749 An earthquake cause great
damage in the area of the Sea of Galilee.
(SFC, 6/18/02, p.A2)
861 The Khazar kings converted
to Judaism. A Jewish dynasty of kings presided over the Khazar
kingdom until the 960s. In 2008 Dmitry Vasilyev, a Russian professor
at Astrakhan State University, said his nine-year excavation near
the Caspian Sea has finally unearthed the foundations of a
triangular fortress of flamed brick, along with modest yurt-shaped
dwellings, and he believes these are part of what was once Itil, the
Khazar capital.
(TJOK, chap. 6)(AP, 9/20/08)
930 The Aleppo Codex was
written on parchment in the Holy Land town of Tiberias by the scribe
Shlomo Ben Boya'a about this time. Its completion marked the end of
a centuries-long process that created final text of the Hebrew
Bible.
(AP, 9/27/08)
942 May 16, Saadiah Gaon, head
of Talmudic Academy of Sura, died.
(MC, 5/16/02)
1009 Oct 18, Al-Hakim ordered
the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and its
associated buildings, apparently outraged by what he regarded as the
fraud practiced by the monks in the "miraculous" Descent of the Holy
Fire, celebrated annually at the church during the Easter Vigil.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Hakim_bi-Amr_Allah)(WSJ, 5/7/01,
p.A20)(WSJ, 1/27/07, p.W13)
1033 An enormous pilgrimage to
Jerusalem marked the 1000th anniversary of the crucifixion of Jesus
Christ.
(SFC, 1/6/97, p.A3)
1035 In Spain 66 Jews were
killed in Castrojeriz near Burgos. Others were expelled and settled
on a nearby hill that was named Castrillo Motajudios (Jew’s Hill).
Records from 1627 show the name was changed to Castrillo Matajudios,
meaning "Kill Jews." In 2014 the 56 town residents planned a May 25
vote on changing the name back to Castrillo Motajudios.
(AP, 4/22/14)(http://tinyurl.com/pzmhvqh)
1065 Apr 12, Pilgrims under
bishop Gunther of Bamberg reached Jerusalem.
(MC, 4/12/02)
1080 The Knights of St. John
(the Hospitallers) were founded in Jerusalem about this time to care
for the sick.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Hospitaller)
1099 Jun 5, Knights and their
families on the First Crusade witnessed an eclipse of the moon and
interpreted it as a sign from God that they would recapture
Jerusalem.
(HN, 6/5/99)
1099 Jul 8, In Jerusalem 15,000
starving Christian soldiers marched around barefoot while the Muslim
defenders mocked them from the battlements.
(HN, 5/23/99)
1099 Jun 12, Crusade leaders
visited the Mount of Olives where they met a hermit who urged them
to assault Jerusalem.
(HN, 6/12/99)
1099 Jul 13, The Crusaders
launched their final assault on Muslims in Jerusalem.
(HN, 7/13/99)
1099 Jul 15, Jerusalem fell to
the crusaders following a 7 week siege. A massacre of the city's
Muslim and Jewish population followed with the dead numbered at
about 3,000.
(V.D.-H.K.p.109)(HN, 7/15/98)(SSFC, 4/13/03,
p.E3)
1099 Jul 16, Crusaders herded
the Jews of Jerusalem into a synagogue and set it afire.
(MC, 7/16/02)
1099 Aug 12, At the Battle of
Ascalon 1,000 Crusaders, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, routed an
Egyptian relief column heading for Jerusalem. The Norman Godfrey,
elected King of Jerusalem, had assumed the title Defender of the
Holy Sepulcher. Disease starvation by this time reduced the
Crusaders to 60,000, down from an initial 300,000, and most of the
survivors left for home.
(HN, 8/12/99)(PC, 1992, p.88)
1099 The Aleppo Codex, owned by
Jewish community in Jerusalem, was seized by Crusaders who sacked
the city. It was then ransomed and made its way to Cairo, Egypt.
(AP, 9/28/08)
1096 May 18, Crusaders
massacred the Jews of Worms. Before embarking on the First Crusade
to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim Turks, Count Emich von Leiningen
and his army swept through their own German homeland, murdering
thousands of Jews, whom they had declared "murderers of Christ."
When Emich arrived in the town of Worms in May, the town's Roman
Catholic Bishop tried to protect the Jewish population, but the
Crusaders overran his palace and slaughtered some 500 people who had
taken shelter there. Another 300 were killed over the next two days.
The graves of the massacre victims can still be seen at the Jewish
Cemetery at Worms.
(HNPD, 5/12/99)(SC, 5/18/02)
1096 Jun 25, The 1st Crusaders
slaughtered the Jews of Werelinghofen, Germany.
(MC, 6/25/02)
1096 Oct 21, Seljuk Turks at
Chivitot slaughtered thousands of German crusaders.
(HN, 10/21/99)
c1096 The Church of the Holy
Sepulcher was built in Jerusalem on the traditional site of the
burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In 1997 renovation was
completed with a new 115-foot dome, designed by Fresno architect Ara
Normart.
(SFC, 1/3/97, p.A18)
1099 Jun 5, Knights and their
families on the First Crusade witnessed an eclipse of the moon and
interpreted it as a sign from God that they would recapture
Jerusalem.
(HN, 6/5/99)
1099 Jun 12, Crusade leaders
visited the Mount of Olives where they met a hermit who urged them
to assault Jerusalem.
(HN, 6/12/99)
1099 Jul 8, In Jerusalem 15,000
starving Christian soldiers marched around barefoot while the Muslim
defenders mocked them from the battlements.
(HN, 5/23/99)
1099 Jul 13, The Crusaders
launched their final assault on Muslims in Jerusalem.
(HN, 7/13/99)
1099 Jul 15, Jerusalem fell to
the crusaders following a 7 week siege. A massacre of the city's
Muslim and Jewish population followed with the dead numbered at
about 3,000.
(V.D.-H.K.p.109)(HN, 7/15/98)(SSFC, 4/13/03,
p.E3)
1099 Jul 16, Crusaders herded
the Jews of Jerusalem into a synagogue and set it afire.
(MC, 7/16/02)
1099 The Aleppo Codex, owned by
Jewish community in Jerusalem, was seized by Crusaders who sacked
the city. It was then ransomed and made its way to Cairo, Egypt.
(AP, 9/27/08)
c1100-1200 Judah Halevi was a Jewish poet who
lived in Muslim Spain in the 12th century. He wrote "City of the
Great King, for thee my soul is longing."
(WSJ, 12/12/00, p.A24)
1101 Most of the
inhabitants of Caesarea were massacred by the army of Flanders Count
Baldwin I (1100–1118), king of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Baldwin was the first emperor of the Latin Empire of Constantinople
(1204-1205).
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_I,_Latin_Emperor)(AFP,
12/3/18)
1105 Nov 24, Rabbi Nathan ben
Yehiel of Rome completed a Talmudic dictionary.
(MC, 11/24/01)
1113 Feb 13, Pope Paschal II
issued a papal bull recognizing the Knights of Malta as independent
from bishops or secular authorities. The order traces had
establishment an infirmary in Jerusalem that cared for people of all
faiths making pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
(AP, 2/5/13)
1118 The military order of the
Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon was founded in
Jerusalem to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land following the First
Crusade. The Knights Templar were founded to protect pilgrims in the
Holy Land during the second Crusade.
(AHD, 1971, p.724)(AP, 10/12/07)
1119 The French knight Hugues
de Payens approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and Warmund,
Patriarch of Jerusalem, and proposed creating a monastic order for
the protection of the pilgrims. Pope Clement V disbanded the order
in 1312 under pressure from King Philip.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar)
1130 Feb 14, Jewish Cardinal
Pietro Pierleone was elected as anti-pope Anacletus II.
(MC, 2/14/02)
1130 The Knights of St. John
(the Hospitallers) became a military order some 60 years after
having been founded in Jerusalem to care for the sick.
(Arch, 9/02, p.27)
1135 Maimonides (d.1204),
Jewish scholar, philosopher and rabbi was born in Spain. He analyzed
linkages between wealth and charity and created a ladder of giving
with each rung representing a higher degree of virtue. The most
virtuous way to give was to help a stranger by offering him a loan
or job so that he would no longer need help. The lowest rung was to
make a grudging donation.
(WUD, 1994, p.864)(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R14)(WSJ,
10/5/01, p.W17)
1149 In Jerusalem the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre, rebuilt by the Crusaders, was consecrated.
(Arch, 9/02, p.28)
c1171 Benjamin ben Jonah, a
Spanish Jew, returned to his home in Tudela and published an account
of his 6-year journey to Constantinople, Cyprus, Palestine,
Damascus, Persia and Egypt: "The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela."
(WSJ, 8/8/02, p.D10)
1187 Oct 2, Sultan Saladin
captured Jerusalem from Crusaders.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin)
1189 Sep 3, After the death of
Henry II, Richard Lionheart, King Richard I, was crowned king of
England in Westminster.
(AP, 9/3/97)(HN, 9/3/98)
1189 Sep 3, Jacob of Orleans,
Rabbi, was killed in the London anti Jewish riot in which 30
Jews were massacred.
(MC, 9/3/01)
1190 Mar 16, An estimated 150
Jews were massacred in York, England. The Jewish population of York
fled to Clifford’s Tower overlooking the rivers Ouse and Foss during
an anti-Jewish riot. A crazed friar set fire to the tower and rather
than be captured, the inhabitants committed mass suicide.
(http://www.historyofyork.org.uk/themes/norman/the-1190-massacre)(SFEC,
10/26/97, p.T5)(HN, 3/16/99)
1190 Mar 18, The people of Bury
St. Edmonds, England, killed 57 Jews.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_St_Edmunds)
1192 The Order of the Teutonic
Knights of St. Mary's Hospital in Jerusalem formed in Acre about
this time.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teutonic_Knights)
1197 Dec 4, Crusaders wounded
Rabbi Elezar ben Judah.
(MC, 12/4/01)
1199 Sep 30, Rambam
(Maimonides) authorized Samuel Ibn Tibbon to translate "Guide of
Perplexed" from Arabic into Hebrew.
(MC, 9/30/01)
1200-1300 Moses de Leon, a Spanish Jewish mystic,
wrote the "Zohar," in Aramaic. It was a mystical interpretation of
the Torah disguised as a novel. The Zohar consists of mystical
interpretations and commentaries of the Pentateuch, the first 5
books of the Old Testament. It became the major text of Jewish
mysticism that came to be called the Kabbalah, as developed a few
centuries later by Isaac Luria in Palestine. In 2003 a new
translation was made by Daniel C. Matt, as part of a 12-volume new
edition of the Kabbalah.
(WUD, 1994, p.1662)(WSJ, 5/22/98, p.W11)(SFC,
12/16/03, p.D1)
1204 Maimonides (b.1135),
Jewish scholar, died. His books included the “Mishnah Torah,” the
single most important Jewish book after the Bible and Talmud, and
“Guide for the Perplexed.” In 2005 Sherwin B. Nuland authored
“Maimonides.”
(WUD, 1994, p.864)(SSFC, 10/23/05, p.M1)
1205 Jul 15, Pope Innocent III
decreed that the Jews were doomed to perpetual servitude and
subjugation due to crucifixion of Jesus.
(MC, 7/15/02)
1210 Nov 1, King John of
England began imprisoning Jews.
(MC, 11/1/01)
1235 Jan 2, Emperor Joseph II
ordered the Jews of Galicia, Austria, to adopt family names.
(MC, 1/2/02)
1241 May 25, 1st attack on
Jewish community of Frankfort-on-the-Main, Germany.
(SC, 5/25/02)
1242 Jun 6, 24 wagonloads of
Talmudic books were burned in Paris.
(MC, 6/6/02)
1244 Jul 11, The Khwarezmian
Turks attacked Jerusalem. By August 23 they completely razed it and
left it in ruins useless to both Christians and Muslims.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jerusalem_(Middle_Ages))
1244 Aug 23, Khwarezmian Turks
expelled the crusaders under Frederick II from Jerusalem.
Jerusalem’s citadel, the Tower of David, surrendered. The Turks
ruthlessly decimated the population, leaving only 2,000 people,
Christians and Muslims, still living in the city. This attack
triggered the Europeans to respond with the Seventh Crusade.
(HN,
8/23/98)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khwarezmian_Empire)
1250 Apr 15, Pope Innocent III
refused Jews of Cordova, Spain, permission to build a synagogue.
(MC, 4/15/02)
1253 Jul 23, Jews were expelled
from Vienne, France, by order of Pope Innocent III.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1263 Aug 19, King James I of
Aragon censored Hebrew writing.
(MC, 8/19/02)
1264 Aug 5, Anti-Jewish riots
broke out in Arnstadt, Germany.
(MC, 8/5/02)
1265 The coastal settlement of
Caesarea (Palestine) was razed to the ground.
(Econ, 4/24/04, p.83)
1267 Feb 9, Synod of Breslau
ordered Jews of Silesia to wear special caps.
(MC, 2/9/02)
1267 May 10, Vienna's Catholic
church ordered all Jews to wear distinctive garb.
(MC, 5/10/02)
1267 Sep 1, Ramban
(Nachmanides) arrived in Jerusalem to establish a Jewish community.
(SC, 9/1/02)
1269 Jun 19, King Louis IX of
France decreed all Jews must wear a badge of shame.
(MC, 6/19/02)
1275 May 23, King Edward I of
England ordered a cessation to the persecution of French Jews.
(MC, 5/23/02)
1278 May 10, Jews of England
were imprisoned on charges of coining. [see Nov 17]
(MC, 5/10/02)
1278 Nov 17, In England 680
Jews were arrested for counterfeiting coins. 293 were hanged. [see
May 10]
(MC, 11/17/01)
1285 Oct 12, 180 Jews refused
baptism in Munich, Germany, and were set on fire.
(MC, 10/12/01)
1288 Apr 24, Jews of Yroyes
France were accused of ritual murder.
(MC, 4/24/02)
1290 Jul 12, Jews were expelled
from England by order of King Edward I.
(MC, 7/12/02)
1290 Oct 9, Last of 16,000
English Jews, expelled by King Edward I, left. The country was on
the verge of bankruptcy. The debt to Jewish bankers was written off
and all Jews were expelled from England. The Medicis and other
northern Italian bankers were invited as a replacement.
(SFEC, 6/22/97, BR p.3)(MC, 10/9/01)
1291 Mar 5, Sa'ad al'Da'ulah,
Jewish grand vizier of Persia, was assassinated.
(MC, 3/5/02)
1291 May 18, Acre, the last
major stronghold of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, fell to the
hands of Al-Ashraf Khalil and his forces from Egypt and Syria after
a siege of 43 days. It had been in the hands of the Franks for 100
years. Egyptian Mamelukes (Mamluks) occupied Akko (Acre). The
crusaders were driven out of Palestine. Khalil, al-Ashraf Salah
ad-Din, the Mamluk King, conquered Akko and put an end to the
Crusader’s rule in the Holy Land.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Acre_%281291%29)(Arch, 7/02,
p.19)
1294 Jun 30, Jews were expelled
from Bern, Switzerland.
(MC, 6/30/02)
1298 Jun 24, Rindfleish
Persecutions: Jews of Ifhauben, Austria, were massacred.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1298 Jul 23, Jews were
massacred at Wurzburg, Germany.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1306 Jul 22, King Phillip the
Fair ordered the expulsion of Jews from France.
(MC, 7/22/02)
1322 Jun 24, Jews were expelled
from France for a 3rd time.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1348 Sep 21, Jews in Zurich
Switzerland were accused of poisoning wells.
(MC, 9/21/01)
1348 Nov 15, Rudolph of Oron
claimed Jews confessed to poisoning wells.
(MC, 11/15/01)
1349 Jan 9, In Basel,
Switzerland, 700 Jews were burned alive in their houses.
(MC, 1/9/02)
1349 Feb 13, Jews were expelled
from Burgsdorf, Switzerland.
(MC, 2/13/02)
1349 Feb 14, 2,000 Jews were
burned at the stake in Strasbourg, Germany.
(HN, 2/14/98)
1349 Mar 21, Some 3,000 Jews
were killed in Black Death riots in Efurt, Germany.
(MC, 3/21/02)
1349 Apr 30, Jewish community
at Radolszell, Germany, was exterminated.
(MC, 4/30/02)
1349 May 28, 60 Jews were
murdered in Breslau, Silesia.
(MC, 5/28/02)
1349 Aug 24, Some 6,000 Jews,
blamed for the Bubonic Plague, were killed in Mainz.
(MC, 8/24/02)
1349 Aug 24, Jews of Cologne
Germany set themselves on fire to avoid baptism.
(MC, 8/24/02)
1349 Sep 10, The Jews who
survived a massacre in Constance, Germany, were burned to death.
(MC, 9/10/01)
1349 Nov 1, Duke of Brabant
ordered the execution of all Jews in Brussels. He accused them of
poisoning the wells.
(MC, 11/1/01)
1349 Nov 29, Jews of Augsburg,
Germany, were massacred.
(MC, 11/29/01)
1349 Dec 5, 500 Jews of
Nuremberg were massacred during Black Death riots.
(MC, 12/5/01)
1355 May 7, 1,200 Jews of
Toledo, Spain, were killed by Count Henry of Trastamara.
(MC, 5/7/02)
1357 Nov 25, Charles IV issued
a letter of protection of Jews of Strasbourg and Alsace.
(MC, 11/25/01)
1360 Jul 25, Jews were expelled
from Breslau, Silesia.
(SC, 7/25/02)
1366 Oct 12, King Frederick III
of Sicily forbade decorations on synagogues.
(MC, 10/12/01)
1370 May 22, Jews were expelled
(massacred) from Brussels, Belgium.
(MC, 5/22/02)
1391 Mar 15, Jew-hating monk in
Seville, Spain, stirred up a mob to attack Jews.
(MC, 3/15/02)
1391 Jun 4, Mob led by Ferrand
Martinez surrounded and set fire to the Jewish quarter of Seville,
Spain. The surviving Jews were sold into slavery.
(MC, 6/4/02)
1391 Aug 5, Castilian sailors
in Barcelona, Spain set fire to a Jewish ghetto, killing 100 people
and setting off four days of violence against the Jews.
(HN, 8/5/98)
1391 Aug 24, Jews of Palma
Majorca, Spain, were massacred.
(MC, 8/24/02)
1391 There were anti-Jewish
attacks in Girona, Spain, and many Hebrew documents were destroyed.
(SFC, 1/20/02, p.A15)
1391 Ottoman Caliph Bayezid I
sent boats to rescue Jews as they were being expelled from Spain.
(Econ, 12/19/15, p.67)
1394 Sep 17, In France King
Charles VI decreed as an irrevocable law and statute that
thenceforth no Jew should dwell in his domains. The decree was not
immediately enforced, a respite being granted to the Jews in order
that they might sell their property and pay their debts.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_France)
1394 Nov 3, Jews were expelled
from France by Charles VI. The order, signed on Yom Kippur, was
enforced on November 3. Jews continued to live in Lyons and papal
possessions such as Pugnon. [see Sep 17, 1394]
(www.wzo.org.il/doingzionism/resources/view.asp?id=261)
1407 Oct 26, Mobs attacked the
Jewish community of Cracow.
(MC, 10/26/01)
1421 May 11, Jews were expelled
from Styria, Austria.
(MC, 5/11/02)
1421 May 23, Jews of Austria
were imprisoned and expelled.
(MC, 5/23/02)
1424 Dec 6, Don Alfonso V of
Aragon granted Barcelona the right to exclude Jews.
(MC, 12/6/01)
1427 May 10, Jews were expelled
from Berne, Switzerland.
(MC, 5/10/02)
1428 Feb 5, King Alfonso V
ordered Sicily's Jews to convert to Catholicism.
(MC, 2/5/02)
1430 May 5, Jews were expelled
from Speyer, Germany.
(MC, 5/5/02)
1430 Oct 3, Jews were expelled
from Eger, Bohemia.
(MC, 10/3/01)
1450 Oct 5, Jews were expelled
from Lower Bavaria by order of Ludwig IX.
(MC, 10/5/01)
1451 Sep 21, Cardinal Nicholas
of Cusa ordered the Jews of Holland to wear a badge.
(MC, 9/21/01)
1454 Aug 22, Jews were expelled
from Brunn Moravia by order of King Ladislaus Posthumus (1440-1457),
king of Hungary as Ladislaus V, king of Bohemia as Ladislaus I.
(MC, 8/22/02)(Internet)
1455 May 3, Jews fled Spain.
(MC, 5/3/02)
1490 Mar 23, 1st dated edition
of Maimonides "Mishna Torah" was published.
(SS, 3/23/02)
1491 Nov 15, 6 Jews and 5
Conversos (Jews who pretend to be Catholic converts) were accused of
killing Christians in La Guardia, Spain.
(MC, 11/15/01)
1492 Jan 23, "Pentateuch," a
Jewish holy book, was first printed.
(MC, 1/23/02)
1492 Mar 30, King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella signed a decree expelling all Jews from Spain. Jews
numbered about 80,000 and it was estimated that about half chose to
convert. [see Mar 30]
(HN, 3/30/98)(WSJ, 4/16/98, p.A20)
1492 Mar 31, King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella of Spain issued an edict expelling Jews from Spanish
soil, except those willing to convert to Christianity. In 2002
Claudia Roden authored "The Ornament of the World," a collection of
stories of Sephardic Jews in Spain from 750 to 1492. A Jewish text
later known as the Sarajevo Haggadah was carried by a refugee to
Italy and later to Bosnia. [see Mar 30]
(AP, 3/30/97)(WSJ, 4/26/02, p.W12)(SSFC, 12/8/02,
p.F9)
1492 Dec 31, 100,000 Jews were
expelled from Sicily.
(MC, 12/31/01)
1492 Jews began arriving in
Morocco, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world after their expulsion
from Spain.
(SFEC, 7/25/99, p.T11)(SSFC, 6/28/09, p.A8)
1493 Jan 12, This was the last
day for all Jews to leave Sicily.
(MC, 1/12/02)
1496 Mar 9, Jews were expelled
from Carinthia, Austria.
(MC, 3/9/02)
1496 Mar 12, Jews were expelled
from Syria.
(HN, 3/12/98)
1496 Dec 5, Jews were expelled
from Portugal by order of King Manuel I.
(MC, 12/5/01)
1497 Jan 6, Jews were expelled
from Graz, Syria. [see Mar 12, 1496]
(MC, 1/6/02)
1498 Jun 21, Jews were expelled
from Nuremberg, Bavaria, by Emperor Maximillian.
(MC, 6/21/02)
1505 Apr 20, Jews were expelled
from Orange, Burgundy, by Philibert of Luxembourg.
(MC, 4/20/02)
1510 Jan 22, Jews were expelled
from Colmar, Germany.
(MC, 1/22/02)
1510 Jul 19, In Berlin 38
Jews were burned at the stake.
(MC, 7/19/02)
1516 Mar 29, The Jewish Ghetto
of Venice, the first ghetto in Europe, was established by the
government of Venetian Serenissima Republic. The incoming Jews were
forced to pay 30% more to their new landlords as compared to the
outgoing Christian tenants.
(www.elitehotel.it/en/the_ancient_jewish_ghetto_in_venice_13en1341en.htm)(Econ,
6/18/16, p.83)
1521 Nov 20, Arabs attributed a
shortage of water in Jerusalem to Jews making wine.
(MC, 11/20/01)
1525 Jacob Ben-Hayim published
an overhaul of the Hebrew Bible, the Mikraot Gedolot, or Great
Scriptures, in Venice. His version unified the religion's varying
texts and commentaries under a single umbrella and remained the
standard for generations. In 2012 Menachem Cohen completed an
updated 21-volume set, with the final chapter set to be published in
2013.
(AP, 8/8/12)
1526 Nov 9, Jews were expelled
from Pressburg, Hungary, by Maria of Hapsburg.
(MC, 11/9/01)
1529 May 27, 30 Jews of Posing,
Hungary, charged with blood ritual, were burned at stake.
(MC, 5/27/02)
1536 May 23, Pope Paul III
installed the Portuguese Inquisition at the request of John III. Its
most common accusation was maintaining outlawed Jewish practices in
secret. The Inquisition was disbanded in 1821.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Inquisition)(AP, 8/19/15)
1539 Feb 19, Jews of Tyrnau,
Hungary, (then Trnava, Czech), were expelled.
(MC, 2/19/02)
1550 Apr 2, Jews were expelled
from Genoa, Italy. [see Jun 15, 1567]
(MC, 4/2/02)
1551 Persecution of the Jews
became widespread in Bavaria.
(TL-MB, p.18)
1553 Aug 12, Pope Julius III
ordered the confiscation and burning of the Talmud.
(SC, 8/12/02)
1553 Oct 21, Volumes of the
Talmud were burned.
(MC, 10/21/01)
1556 Apr 13, Portuguese
Marranos who reverted back to Judaism were burned alive by order of
Pope.
(MC, 4/13/02)
1558 Aug 4, 1st printing of
Zohar (Jewish Kabala).
(MC, 8/4/02)
1563 Apr 30, Jews were expelled
from France by order of Charles VI.
(HN, 4/30/98)
1567 Jun 15, Genoa expelled the
Jews. [see Apr 2, 1550]
(MC, 6/15/02)
1567 Jun 20, Jews were expelled
from Brazil by order of regent Don Henrique.
(MC, 6/20/02)
1573 Nov 7, Solomon Luria
(Maharshal), Talmudic author (Yam Shel Shelomo), died.
(MC, 11/7/01)
1583 Feb 20, Joseph Sanalbo,
Jewish convert in Rome, was burned at stake on 27 Shebat.
(www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12816-rome)(http://jewishholidaysonline.com/1583)
1587 An early collection of
Jewish songs was published in Zeminoth Israel.
(TL-MB, p.24)
c1590-1600 In late 16th century Prague Rabbi Judah
Bezalel Loew, the Maharal, used clay and the mysticism of the
Kabbalah to fashion the Golem, a human-like creature to help avenge
Jewish persecution.
(WSJ, 4/17/02, p.D7)
1593 The Minhogimbukh, a Jewish
version of the old Farmers’ Alamanac, was written in Yiddish and
published in Venice.
(SFC, 12/6/04, p.B1)
1596 Dec 8, Luis de Carabajal,
1st Jewish author in America, was executed in Mexico. The nephew of
Luis Carvajal, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and governor of the
province of Nuevo Leon, was accused of relapsing into Judaism. He
was tried by Spanish Inquisitors and under torture gave out 116
names of other Judaizers that included his mother and 23 sisters.
They were eventually strangled with iron collars and burned to
death. A 1997 opera by Myron Fink was composed based on his story.
Monterey, Mexico, was founded by conquistador Don Luis de Carvajal.
He fell in love the wrong man’s daughter and was later denounced to
the Mexican Inquisition because of his Jewish heritage.
(SFC, 8/16/96, p.A19)(SFC, 9/18/96, p.A11)(WSJ,
2/25/97, p.A20)(MC, 12/8/01)
1598 Jan 8, Genoa, Italy,
expelled its Jews.
(MC, 1/8/02)
1600-1700 Shabettai Zvi [Sabbatai Zevi], a
Kabbalist from the Ottoman Empire, became the central figure in a
widespread Messianic craze. He declared himself the Messiah and
caused an uproar throughout the Jewish world. He eventually embraced
a form of Islam.
(WSJ, 5/22/98, p.W11)(SFEC, 3/12/00, BR
p.2)(Econ, 10/16/04, p.80)
1614 Aug 22, Trades people
under Vincent Fettmilch chased and plunder Jews out of ghetto in
Frankfurt.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1614 Sep 1, Vincent Fettmich
expelled Jews from Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany.
(SC, 9/1/02)
1625 Sep 13, 16 Rabbis
(including Isiah Horowitz) were imprisoned in Jerusalem.
(MC, 9/13/01)
1632 Apr 20, Nicolas Antione,
converted to Judaism, was burned at the stake. [see Dec 20]
(MC, 4/20/02)
1632 Dec 20, Nicolas Antoine,
French Catholic pastor who converted to Judaism, was executed. [see
Apr 20]
(MC, 12/20/01)
1638 Jan 5, Petition in Recife,
Brazil, led to the closing of its two synagogues.
(MC, 1/5/02)
1645 Apr 7, Michael Cardozo
became the 1st Jewish lawyer in Brazil.
(MC, 4/7/02)
1648 Jun 24, Cossacks
slaughtered 2,000 Jews and 600 Polish Catholics in Ukraine.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1648 Jul 22, Some 10,000 Jews
of Polannoe were murdered in a massacre led by Cossack Bogdan
Chmielnicki (55).
(PC, 1992, p.241)(MC, 7/22/02)
1648 Nov 2, 12,000 Jews were
massacred by Chmielnicki hordes in Narol Podlia (Ukraine). Cossack
Bogdan Chmielnicki led the pogrom in quest of Ukrainian independence
from the Polish nobility, who employed Jews to collect taxes.
(PCh, 1992, p.241)(MC, 11/2/01)
1648-1649 It is estimated that 100,000-200,000
Jews died in the Chmielnicki (Khmelnytskyi) revolt that lasted from
1648-1649. This wave of destruction is considered the first modern
pogrom.
(www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Poland.html)
1654 Apr 26, Jews were expelled
from Brazil.
(MC, 4/26/02)
1654 Aug 22, Jacob Barsimson,
the 1st Jewish immigrant to US, arrived in New Amsterdam.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1655 Apr 26, Dutch West Indies
Co. denied Peter Stuyvesant's desire to exclude Jews from New
Amsterdam.
(MC, 4/26/02)
1655 Aug 28, New Amsterdam
& Peter Stuyvesant barred Jews from military service.
(MC, 8/28/01)
1655 Oct 15, Jews of Lublin,
Poland, were massacred.
(MC, 10/15/01)
1656 Jan 24, Jacob Lumbrozo,
1st Jewish doctor in US, arrived in Maryland.
(MC, 1/24/02)
1656 Feb 22, New Amsterdam was
granted a Jewish burial site.
(MC, 2/22/02)
1656 Mar 13, Jews were denied
the right to build a synagogue in New Amsterdam.
(MC, 3/13/02)
1657 Aug 6, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi
(b.1595/6), founder of the Hetman state (Ukraine), died. In 1648
Ukrainian officer Bogdan Chmielnicki, with the support of the Tatar
Khan of Crimea, roused the local peasants to fight with him and the
Russian Orthodox Cossacks against the Jews.
(http://tinyurl.com/5pe5gf)(www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Poland.html)
1660 Oct 15, Asser Levy was
granted a butcher's license for kosher meat in New Amsterdam.
(MC, 10/15/01)
1665 May 31, Jerusalem's rabbi
Sjabtai Tswi proclaimed himself Messiah.
(MC, 5/31/02)
1667 Feb 20, David ben Samuel
Halevi, rabbi, author (Shulchan Aruch), died.
(MC, 2/20/02)
1668 Oct 23, Jews of Barbados
were forbidden to engage in retail trade.
(MC, 10/23/01)
1670 Feb 14, Roman Catholic
emperor Leopold I chased the Jews out of Vienna.
(MC, 2/14/02)
1670 Feb 27, Jews were expelled
from Austria by order of Leopold I.
(MC, 2/27/02)
1670 Jul 25, Jews were expelled
from Vienna, Austria.
(SC, 7/25/02)
1683 Sep 24, King Louis XIV
expelled all Jews from French possessions in America.
(MC, 9/24/01)
1685 Dec 3, Charles II barred
Jews from settling in Stockholm, Sweden.
(MC, 12/3/01)
1689 Racine wrote a drama based
on the Book of Esther. The Jewish holiday of Purim is based on the
Book of Esther. It tells the biblical story of how Esther, the
Jewish daughter of Mordecai, is persuaded by her father to intervene
on behalf of the Jews to her husband, King Ahaseurus of Persia, who
has been persuaded by his lieutenant, Haman, to have all the Jews
killed
(WSJ, 5/12/98, p.A20)
1691 The Spanish Inquisition
killed 37 Jews from Mallorca for secretly practicing their faith. In
2011 the island’s leading government official issued an official
condemnation for the killing.
(SFC, 5/6/11, p.A2)
1695 Sep 12, NY Jews petitioned
governor Dongan for religious liberties.
(MC, 9/12/01)
1699 Mar 4, Jews were expelled
from Lubeck, Germany.
(SC, 3/4/02)
1700-1800 The Kabbalah of Isaac Luria provided the
inspiration for the revolutionary 18th century Jewish revivalist
movement in Eastern Europe, Hasidism. It included the idea known as
"tikkun olam" whereby the world is repaired by identifying the spark
of God in every living thing.
(WSJ, 5/22/98, p.W11)
1700-1800 The Gaon of Vilna excommunicated the
Hasidic Jews after they cast aside the traditional Jewish prayer
book, replacing it with one composed by Isaac Luria.
(WSJ, 5/22/98, p.W11)
1712 Oct 4, Utrecht banished
poor Jews.
(MC, 10/4/01)
1716 Jul 18, A decree ordered
all Jews expelled from Brussels.
(MC, 7/18/02)
1726 May 14, Moshe Darshan,
Rabbi, author (Torat Ahsam), died.
(MC, 5/14/02)
1727 May 7, Jews were expelled
from Ukraine by Empress Catherine I of Russia.
(MC, 5/7/02)
1727 Nov 15, NY General
assembly permitted Jews to omit phrase "upon the faith of a
Christian" from abjuration oath.
(MC, 11/15/01)
1730 Apr 8, 1st Jewish
congregation in US formed the synagogue, "Sherith Israel, NYC."
(MC, 4/8/02)
1731 May 28, All Hebrew books
in Papal State were confiscated.
(MC, 5/28/02)
1732 Sep 2, Pope Clement XII
renewed the anti-Jewish laws of Rome.
(MC, 9/2/01)
1738 Dec 9, Jews were expelled
from Breslau, Silesia.
(MC, 12/9/01)
1739 Sep 1, 35 Jews were
sentenced to life in prison in Lisbon, Portugal.
(MC, 9/1/02)
1740 Feb 3, Charles de Bourbon,
King of Naples, invited the Jews to return to Sicily.
(MC, 2/3/02)
1742 Dec 1, Empress Elisabeth
ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Russia.
(MC, 12/1/01)
1744 Nov 25, Austrian forces
pillaged and killed Jews of Prague.
(MC, 11/25/01)
1745 Mar 31, Jews were expelled
from Prague.
(MC, 3/31/02)
1745 Schneur Zalman
Boruchovitch of Liadi (d.1813), founder of the Jewish
Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidic Movement, was born. He labored for 20
years to complete the Tanya before it was printed in 1796. In 1814,
the Rav’s Shulchan Aruch fast became regarded by all scholars of
Jewish law as a major source and reference guide in the study and
application of Jewish law. In 2003 Sue Fishkoff authored "The
Rebbe's Army," a study of the sect.
(Internet, 7/18/03)(WSJ, 7/18/03, p.W17c)
1748 Mar 19, English
Naturalization Act was passed granting Jews right to colonize US.
(MC, 3/19/02)
1750 Sep 5, A decree issued in
Paderborn, Prussia, allowed for annual search of all Jewish homes
for stolen or "doubtful" goods.
(MC, 9/5/01)
1750 Acre, a former stronghold
of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, was re-built by the Ottoman
Turks around this time, effectively preserving the earlier town,
which had been destroyed in 1291 and hidden for centuries under
rubble.
(AP,
6/22/11)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Acre_%281291%29)
1751 Sep 12, Amsterdam refused
to establish a Jewish ghetto.
(MC, 9/12/01)
1753 Jul 7, English parliament
granted Jews English citizenship.
(MC, 7/7/02)
1757 The Greek Orthodox clergy
wrested control of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
Ottoman rulers declared a status quo for the holy sties of the city
and control of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was split primarily
among the Latin, Greek and Armenian patriarchates of Jerusalem and
secondarily among the churches of Egypt, Syria and Ethiopia. This
arrangement was formalized in 1852.
(WSJ, 1/27/07, p.W13)
1760 Oct 23, The 1st Jewish
prayer books were printed in US.
(MC, 10/23/01)
1763 Dec 2, Touro Shul, the
oldest existing US synagogue, was dedicated in Newport, RI.
(MC, 12/2/01)
1772 Upon the partition
of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the Kingdom of Galicia and
Lodomeria, or simply Galicia, became the largest, most populous, and
northernmost province of Austria where it remained until the
dissolution of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I. Jews
accounted for 10% of the 2.6 million population of Galicia.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_(Central_Europe))(Econ,
11/15/14, p.87)
1774 Jul 11(Jun 11), Jews of
Algiers escaped an attack of the Spanish Army.
(MC, 7/11/02)
1774 Dec 18, Empress Maria
Theresa expelled Jews from Prague, Bohemia and Moravia.
(MC, 12/18/01)
1775 Jan 11, In South Carolina
Francis Salvador became the 1st Jew elected to office in America.
[see Aug 1]
(AH, 2/05, p.16)
1775 Jan 22, Marshal Oscar von
Lubomirski expelled Jews from Warsaw, Poland.
(MC, 1/22/02)
1775 Feb 22, Jews were expelled
from the outskirts of Warsaw, Poland.
(MC, 2/22/02)
1783 Mar 5, King Stanislaus
Augustus Poniatowski granted rights to Jews of Kovno.
(MC, 3/5/02)
1784 May 25, Jews were expelled
from Warsaw by Marshall Mniszek.
(SC, 5/25/02)
1786 Jan 4, Mozes Mendelssohn
(56), Jewish-German philosopher (Haksalah), died.
(MC, 1/4/02)
1787 Aug 17, Jews were granted
permission in Budapest, Hungary, to pray in groups.
(SC, 8/17/02)
1791 Sep 27, Jews in France
were granted French citizenship.
(HN, 9/27/98)
1794 Jun 23, Empress Catherine
II granted Jews permission to settle in Kiev.
(MC, 6/23/02)
1794 Nov 22, Strasbourg,
Alsace-Lorraine, prohibited circumcision and the wearing of beards.
(MC, 11/22/01)
1797 Oct 9, Elijahu ben Solomon
Zalman (b.1720), the Great Gaon of Vilnius, died. He was one of the
most influential Rabbinic authorities since the Middle Ages.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilna_Gaon)
1798 Nov 27, Rabbi Shneur
Zalman (1745-1812) of Liadi, a Hasidic leader, was released from
prison in St. Petersburg. He had been arrested on charges of
treason, laid by Jews who opposed the nascent movement of Hasidism.
He was the founder and first Rebbe of Chabad, a branch of Hasidic
Judaism.
(Econ, 7/28/12, SR
p.6)(http://tinyurl.com/8sqmk9w)
1799 Mar 7, In Palestine,
Napoleon captured the Turkish citadel at Jaffa and his men massacred
more than 2,000 Albanian prisoners. [see Mar 26] The prisoners were
massacred because Napoleon claimed that he could not feed them.
About this time bubonic plague broke out among his troops.
(HN, 3/7/99)(ON, 12/99, p.2)
1799 Mar 26, Napoleon Bonaparte
captured Jaffa, Palestine. [see Mar 7]
(HN, 3/26/99)
1799 Mar, Napoleon moved on to
the Turkish fortress at Acre. His 2 month siege was unsuccessful. In
1999 N. Schur authored Napoleon in the Holy Land."
(ON, 12/99, p.2,4)
1799 Apr 14, Napoleon called
for establishing Jerusalem for Jews.
(MC, 4/14/02)
1799 May 20, Napoleon Bonaparte
ordered a withdrawal from his siege of St. Jean d'Acre in Egypt.
Plague had run through his besieging French forces, forcing a
retreat. Napoleon, in pursuance of his scheme for raising a Syrian
rebellion against Turkish domination, appeared before Acre, but
after a siege of two months (March–May) was repulsed by the Turks.
(HN,
5/20/00)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre,_Israel)
1800 About this time an Arab
nomadic tribe settled in the southern Israeli desert of Negev. The
Al-Sayyid community that developed there grew with a high incidence
of profound deafness due to a recessive gene. The village developed
a sign language in response that came to be called the Al-Sayyid
Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). In 2007 Margalit Fox authored “Signs
and Wonders,” which told the Al-Sayyid story as part of a history of
linguistics and sign language in American and the world.
(WSJ, 8/23/07, p.D7)
1801 Mar 3, 1st US Jewish
Governor, David Emanuel, took office in Georgia.
(SC, 3/3/02)
1801 Apr 8, Soldiers rioted in
Bucharest and killed 128 Jews.
(MC, 4/8/02)
1804 Nov 18, Palver Purim
(Feast of Lots) was 1st celebrated to commemorate miraculous escape.
The Jewish festival marked the deliverance of the Jews in Persia
from Haman.
(WUD, 1994 p.1167)(MC, 11/18/01)
1808 Mar 31, French created the
Kingdom of Westphalia and ordered Jews to adopt family names.
(MC, 3/31/02)
1808 Jul 20, Napoleon decreed
that all French Jews adopt family names.
(MC, 7/20/02)
1808 Oct 17, The political
rights of Jews was suspended in Duchy of Warsaw.
(MC, 10/17/01)
1809 May 5, Citizenship was
denied to Jews of Canton of Aargau, Switzerland.
(MC, 5/5/02)
1810 Oct 16, Rabbi Nachman
(b.1772) of Bratslav died and was buried in Uman, Ukraine.
Nachman was renowned for his mystical interpretations of
Jewish texts and his belief that higher spirituality could be
achieved through a combination of prayer, meditation and good deeds.
On his deathbed, he is said to have promised to be an advocate for
anyone who would come and pray beside his tomb.
(AP,
9/9/10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachman_of_Breslov)
1812 Mar 11, Citizenship was
granted to Prussian Jews.
(MC, 3/12/02)
1816 Mar 6, Jews were expelled
from Free city of Lubeck, Germany.
(MC, 3/6/02)
1817 Mar 25, Tsar Alexander I
recommended the formation of Society of Israeli Christians.
(MC, 3/25/02)
1818 Nov 21, Russia's Czar
Alexander I petitioned for a Jewish state in Palestine.
(MC, 11/21/01)
1819 Mar 29, Isaac Mayer Wise,
rabbi, founder (American Hebrew Congregations), was born.
(MC, 3/29/02)
1820 Mar 5, Dutch city of
Leeuwarden forbade Jews to go to synagogues on Sundays.
(MC, 3/5/02)
1825 Mordecai Noah attempted to
establish a Jewish state called Grand Island near Buffalo, N.Y. No
one came to the grand opening ceremony. At this time there were
about 1000 Jews living in Manhattan.
(SFC, 5/20/99, p.E1,8)
1826 Jul 26, Riots in Vilnius,
Lithuanian, caused the death of many Jews.
(MC, 7/26/02)
1829 Nov 20, Jews were expelled
from Nikolayev and Sevastopol, Russia.
(MC, 11/20/01)
1834 At the Shrine of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem the ceremony of the Holy Fire led to a
stampede in which many people were killed.
(Econ, 3/26/05, p.82)
1835-1868 Adah Isaacs Menken, a Jewish poet and
actress, was born near New Orleans and learned French, German,
Spanish and Hebrew in school. She shocked American and European
audiences in the 1860s for her bold acting style and became
notorious for her role in the play Mazeppa, where she appeared on
stage barely clothed tied to the back of a running horse. Around
1856 she published her first book of poems and married Alexander
Isaacs Menken, whose name she kept through divorce and subsequent
remarriages and liaisons. Called the most perfectly developed woman
in the world, she moved between Europe and the United States as she
performed. Adah Isaacs Menken died of tuberculosis in Paris and was
buried there in the Montparnasse Cemetery.
(HNPD, 11/16/98)
1836 Sep 1, Reconstruction
began on Synagogue of Rabbi Judah Hasid in Jerusalem.
(MC, 9/1/02)
1839 Jews in Mashad, Iran, were
forcibly converted to Shiite Islam following a pogrom.
(SFC, 10/20/01, p.A10)
1840 Feb 5, In Damascus, Syria,
Father Thomas, originally from Sardinia, and the superior of a
Franciscan convent at Damascus, disappeared with his servant. 13
prominent Jews were falsely accused of the ritual murder of the
Franciscan monk and his servant. The “Damascus Affair” inspired
international protests. In 2004 Ronald Florence authored “Blood
Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840.”
(SSFC, 6/28/09,
p.A8)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_affair)
1847 George Bush, a professor
of Hebrew at New York Univ., authored “The Valley of Vision,” in
which he called on the US government to militarily wrench Palestine
from the Turks and return it to the Jews.
(WSJ, 6/2/07, p.P8)
1848 Apr 6, Jews of Prussia
were granted equality.
(MC, 4/6/02)
1849 The Anglican Church of
Christ was built in Jerusalem by the British.
(SFEC, 5/21/00, p.T7)
1852 Sep 3, Anti Jewish riots
broke out in Stockholm.
(MC, 9/3/01)
1853 Oct 2, Austrian law
forbade Jews from owning land.
(MC, 10/2/01)
1855 Sir Moses Montefiore, an
Italian-born British Jew and financier, became the first European to
be allowed by the Ottomans to visit Jerusalem.
(Econ, 3/19/11,
p.93)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Montefiore)
1856 The Church of St. Anne in
Jerusalem's walled Old City was gifted by the Ottomans to French
Emperor Napoleon III.
(Reuters, 1/22/20)
1856 A Turkish imperial edict
lifted a ban on Christian bell-ringing in Jerusalem, whnich at this
time was part of the Ottoman empire. The British were given the
honor of erecting the city’s first outdoor bell since the crusades.
(Econ, 1/5/13, p.35)
1857 Apr 27, Establishment of
Jewish congregations in Lower Austria prohibited.
(MC, 4/27/02)
1858 Jul 23, Jewish
Disabilities Removal Act was passed by British Parliament.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1858 Jul 26, Baron Lionel de
Rothschild became the 1st Jew elected to British Parliament.
(MC, 7/26/02)
1859 Feb 18, Shalom Aleichem
(Solomon Rabinowitz, d.1916), Russian-Yiddish playwright,
author and humorist, was born in the Ukraine. "To want to be the
cleverest of all is the biggest folly."
(AP,
1/13/01)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholem_Aleichem)
1859 Russia purchased the
Alexander courtyard in Jerusalem.
(AP, 1/22/20)
1860 May 2, Theodor Herzl,
journalist, founder (Zionist movement), was born in Austria.
(MC, 5/2/02)
1862 Jul 1, Czar Alexander II
granted Jews the right to publish books.
(MC, 7/1/02)
1862 Dec 17, Maj. Gen. Ulysses
S. Grant issued General Order No. 11 designed to combat a Civil War
black market in cotton. Grant believed the trade was run primarily
by Jewish traders and th order expelled Jews in his military
district. Pres. Lincoln rescinded the order a few weeks later. In
2012 Jonathan D. Sarna authored “When General Grant Expelled the
Jews.”
(SSFC, 4/22/12, p.F3)
1863 Jul 7, Orders barring Jews
from serving under US Grant were revoked.
(MC, 7/7/02)
1863 Jul 14, Jews of Holstein,
Germany, were granted equality.
(MC, 7/14/02)
1864 Dec 4, Romanian Jews were
forbidden to practice law.
(MC, 12/4/01)
1871 Apr 16, German Empire
ended all anti-Jewish civil restrictions.
(MC, 4/16/02)
1871 A pogrom took place
against the Jews in Odessa and the governor made no effort to
suppress it.
(Econ, 12/18/04, p.88)
1872 C.P. Scott began editing
the Guardian in England and continued for almost 60 years. Scott was
a friend of Zionist Chaim Weizmann. In 2004 Daphna Baram authored
“Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel.”
(Econ, 7/31/04, p.71)
1873 Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer
founded the Rabbinerseminar zu Berlin as German Orthodoxy’s answer
to the Judisch-Theologische Seminar in Breslau. Its outlook was that
although Jewish law, the halacha, was immutable, it had to be
couched in contemporary language. In 1990 Rabbi David Ellenson
authored a biography of Rabbi Hildesheimer.
(Econ, 7/28/12, SR p.10,11)
1878 Feb 8, Martin Buber,
German-Israeli philosopher, theologist (Ich und Du), was born.
(MC, 2/8/02)
1878 Jul 30, German
anti-Semitism began during the Reichstag election.
(MC, 7/30/02)
1880 Abi Hasira (b.1807), a
Jewish kabbalist (aka Abu Hassira, Jacoub Ben Masoud, Yaakov
Abuhatzeira) and the son of the chief rabbi of Morocco, died in
Damanhur, near Alexandria, Egypt, following an attempted trip to the
Holy Land. He is revered by some Jews as a mystic renowned for his
piety and for performing miracles. His gravesite became popular with
pilgrims.
(http://tinyurl.com/7pryucu)(AP, 1/4/10)
1880 Jordan, Lebanon and
Palestine were part of Syria under Ottoman rule.
(Econ, 5/27/06, p.80)
1880 A tablet known as the
Siloam inscription was found in a tunnel hewed to channel water from
a spring outside Jerusalem's walls into the city and taken by the
Holy Land's Ottoman rulers to Istanbul. It was later placed in the
collection of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. The tunnel was
constructed around 700 BC, a project mentioned in the Old
Testament's Book of Chronicles. The tablet was installed to
celebrate the moment the two construction teams of King Hezekiah met
underground. In 2007 Jerusalem's mayor asked the Turkish government
to return the tablet.
(AP, 7/13/07)
1881
Apr 1, Anti-Jewish riots took place in Jerusalem.
(OTD)
1881 Apr 27, Pogroms against
Russian Jews started in Elisabethgrad.
(MC, 4/27/02)
1881 May 5, Anti-Jewish rioting
took place in Kiev, Ukraine.
(MC, 5/5/02)
1881 Oct 13, A revival of the
Hebrew language began as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and friends agreed to
use Hebrew exclusively in their conversations.
(MC, 10/13/01)
1881 A large pogrom took place
against the Jews in Odessa.
(Econ, 12/18/04, p.88)
1882 Apr 13, An anti-Semitic
League formed in Prussia.
(MC, 4/13/02)
1882 May 15, May Laws: Czar
Alexander III banned Jews from living in rural Romania.
(MC, 5/15/02)
1882 Sep 10, The 1st
international conference to promote anti-Semitism met in Dresden,
Germany (Congress for Safeguarding of Non-Jewish Interests).
(MC, 9/10/01)
1883 Jul 11, In Cincinnati the
Reform Jewish Seminary held a dinner for its 1st class of rabbis.
The meal gained notoriety for abrogating every rule of kashrut,
except the prohibition against pork.
(WSJ, 7/6/01, p.W11)
1885 Isaac Mayer Wise united
pockets of Jewish immigrants and assembled 15 rabbis in Pittsburgh
to articulate a platform for the Union of American Hebrew
Congregations, the Hebrew Union College, and the Central Conference
of American Rabbis. The organization of Reform Judaism discussed the
Mitzvot, the 613 commandments in the Torah, and accepted only
the moral laws as binding.
(WSJ, 6/4/99, p.W15)
1886 Oct 16, David Ben-Gurion
(d.1973), Israeli statesman, was born in Plonsk, Poland. He was the
1st PM of Israel and served from 1948-53 and in 1955.
(HN, 10/16/00)(MC, 10/16/01)
1888 Jul 17, S.Y. Agnon,
Israeli writer (The Day Before Yesterday), was born.
(HN, 7/17/01)
1888 In Jerusalem the Mary
Magdalene convent was consecrated. Its decoration was overseen by
Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, consort to Russia’s Grand Duke
Sergei Alexandrovich, the brother of Tsar Alexander III.
(Econ, 12/19/09, p.82)
1890 Mar 21, Austrian Jewish
communities were defined by law.
(MC, 3/21/02)
1890 The Ecole Biblique of
Jerusalem, a research center for Biblical and archeological studies,
was founded.
(WSJ, 8/28/01, p.A12)
1890 In Jerusalem a small tract
known as Sergei's Courtyard, named for Grand Duke Sergei
Alexandrovich, a son of Czar Alexander III, was built. It became
part of the larger Russian Compound, most of which Israel purchased
in 1964, when Israel paid $3.5 million in oranges because it lacked
hard currency. In 2008 Israel approved handing back Sergei's
Courtyard to Russia. The actual transfer took place in 2011.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Compound)(AP, 10/7/08)(AP,
3/21/11)
1891 Apr 11, A Jewish tailor's
daughter (8) disappeared in Greece. A rumor spread that she was a
Christian girl ritually killed by Jews.
(MC, 4/11/02)
1891 Apr 23, Jews were expelled
from Moscow.
(MC, 4/23/02)
1893 Many Russian pilgrims for
the ceremony of the Holy Fire Shrine at the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem died in a snowstorm north of Jerusalem.
(Econ, 12/16/06, p.61)
1894 Dec 22, French army
officer Alfred Dreyfus was fraudulently convicted of treason in a
court-martial that triggered worldwide charges of anti-Semitism.
Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain on the General Staff, was
accused of passing secret French military documents found in to the
German embassy in Paris. Dreyfus was eventually vindicated. [see
1906]
(WSJ, 4/22/96, p.A-20)(AP, 12/22/97)
1896 Feb 14, Theodor Herzl
published "Der Judenstaat," in which he called for a Jewish homeland
in Palestine.
(SFC, 4/30/02, p.A8)(MC, 2/14/02)
1896 Moises Saba Amigo arrived
in Mexico from Aleppo, Syria. He was part of a large migration of
Jews known as "Turcos" from Syria and Palestine whose passports were
issued by Ottoman Turkey. He started peddling dry goods and moved up
to a chain of stores, then textiles. The family savings were put
into real estate. The Saba family were billionaires by 1997.
(WSJ, 8/22/97, p.A10)
1896 In Egypt Solomon
Schechter, a Romanian-born reader in rabinics at England’s Cambridge
Univ., discovered a cache of hundreds of thousands of documents
collected by the Jews of Fustat (Old Cairo). In 2011 Adina Hoffman
and Peter Cole authored “Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of
the Cairo Geniza.”
(SSFC, 5/29/11, p.G4)
1897 Apr 22, NYC Jewish
newspaper "Forward" began publishing.
(MC, 4/22/02)
1897 The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion were 1st printed. They were copied from a novel by
Hermann Goedsche and believed to be concocted by the secret police
of Czar Nicholas II. Goedsche claimed a secret group of rabbis were
plotting to take over the world. His story was based on Maurice
Joly’s "Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu."
(SFC, 10/24/02, p.A9)
1897 The first Zionist Congress
was held in Basel, Switzerland.
(SFEC, 4/26/98, BR p.1)
1897 Apr, The US "Jewish Daily
Forward" began publishing. It was a socialist and secular paper in
Yiddish founded by Russian immigrant Abraham Cahan.
(WSJ, 4/25/97, p.A16)
1898 May 3, Golda Mier
(d.1978), 4th Prime Minister of Israel (1969-1974) and the first
woman PM, was born in Kiev, Ukraine. "Whether women are better than
men, I cannot say -- but I can say they are certainly no worse."
(AP, 5/11/97)(HN, 5/3/02)(MC, 5/3/02)
1898 Oct 1, Jews were expelled
from Kiev, Russia.
(MC, 10/1/01)
1898 Nov 2, Theodor
Herzl, founder (1897) of modern political National Zionism, arrived
in Jerusalem to promote his World Zionist Organization. Zionism
maintains that the Jewish people constitute a nation and are
entitled to a national homeland.
(www.wzo.org.il/home/movement/herzl.htm)
1900-1986 The history of Jerusalem over this
period is covered by Martin Gilbert in his book: "Jerusalem in the
Twentieth Century."
(SFC, 10/18/96, C8)
1901 Feb 2, Jascha Heifetz, US
violin virtuoso (Carnegie Hall), was born in Vilna, Lithuania.
(MC, 2/2/02)
1901 Apr 29, Anti Semitic riot
took place in Budapest.
(MC, 4/29/02)
1901 The Jewish National Fund
was founded to buy and develop land in Palestine (later Israel) for
Jewish settlement.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_National_Fund)
1901 Three German Jewish
businessmen founded a wholesale drug business in Jerusalem. The
operation grew and in 1976 following mergers became Teva
Pharmaceuticals.
(WSJ, 10/28/04, p.A8)
1902 Apr 14, Menachem A.
Schneerson (d.1994), rebee (head of Lubavitcher Jews), was born.
(MC, 4/14/02)
1902 May 10, Joachim Prinz,
author, Rabbi of Berlin (1926-37), was born.
(MC, 5/10/02)
1902 Jul 30, Anti-Jewish
rioters attacked the funeral procession of Rabbi Joseph in NYC.
(MC, 7/30/02)
1902 Sep 17, The US protested
anti-Semitism in Romania.
(MC, 9/17/01)
1903 Apr, Russia instigated a
Jewish pogrom in Kishinev, Bessarabia. 49 people died and some 600
were seriously injured.
(WSJ, 1/2/02, p.A18)
1905 May 26, There was a pogrom
against Jews in Minsk, Belorussia.
(MC, 5/26/02)
1905 May 29, There was a pogrom
against Jewish community in Brisk, Lithuania.
(SC, 5/29/02)
1905 The SF Jewish Congregation
Sherith Israel completed a new Beaux Arts structure, designed by
Albert Pissis (1852-1914) at California and Webster streets. Emile
Pissis (1854-1934) designed many of its stained-glass windows.
Frescoes in the dome were done by Attilion Moretti (1852-1915). The
structure survived the 1906 earthquake.
(SFC, 3/12/05, p.E1)
1905 More anti-Jewish pogroms
swept the province of Bessarabia.
(WSJ, 1/2/02, p.A18)
1905 Another large pogrom took
place against the Jews in Odessa, Ukraine. Many began to leave,
mainly for the USA.
(Econ, 12/18/04, p.88)
1906 Jul 23, Pogroms took place
against Jews in Odessa.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1906 Boris Schatz (d.1932)
founded a visionary art school in Jerusalem and became known for his
trademark white robe and pet peacock. Born in Lithuania and trained
in Paris he was a Jewish artist and occasional boxer who discovered
Zionism and abandoned the European art scene for Jerusalem, then a
Mideastern backwater.
(AP, 5/23/10)
1906 A Jewish Museum was
founded in Prague.
(USAT, 9/24/04, p.3D)
1907 Aug 14, "Ha-Tikva" was
adopted as official Zionist hymn.
(MC, 8/14/02)
1908 Mar 13, Jerusalem's
inhabitants saw their first automobile owned by Charles Glidden of
Boston.
(HN, 3/13/98)
1909 Apr 11, Tel Aviv began as
a suburb of Jaffa. While Palestine was still under Ottoman rule,
sixty-six Jewish families took possession of lots in Karm al-Jabali,
on the northern outskirts of the ancient port city of Jaffa near the
Mediterranean coast amidst dunes, vineyards, and orchards. There
they established a “garden suburb” called Ahuzat Bayit
(“Homestead”), which in 2010 was renamed Tel Aviv, or Hill of
Spring.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Aviv)(http://tinyurl.com/l8ymtod)(Econ,
2/7/15, p.78)
1909 Dec 1, The 1st Israeli
kibbutz, Deganya Alef, a collective agricultural settlement, was
founded in Palestine.
(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R25)(MC, 12/1/01)
1909 In Palestine mostly
Russian socialist idealists of the Zionist movement set up an armed
group, Hashomer, to protect their new farms and villages from Arab
marauders.
(Econ, 1/10/09, p.9)
1910 May 4, Tel Aviv was
founded.
(MC, 5/4/02)
1910 Degania Aleph, Israel’s
first kibbutz, was founded by 12 pioneers, while the area was still
under Ottoman control. In 2007 it joined a growing proportion of
kibbutzim abandoning egalitarian socialism in favor of a self-taxing
regime combined with free-market forces.
(SSFC, 3/4/07, p.A15)
1912 Feb 24, The Jewish
organization Hadassah was founded in New York City.
(HN, 2/24/01)
1913 Aug 16, Menachem Begin,
Israeli statesman (1977-83) and Nobel Peace Prize (1978) recipient,
was born.
(HN, 8/16/98)(MC, 8/16/02)
1913 In 2007 Amy Dockser Marcus
authored “Jerusalem 1913, The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict,”
in which she asserted that choices were made in this year that led
to the current stand.
(SSFC, 5/6/07, p.M1)
1914 Aug 11, Jews were expelled
from Mitchenick, Poland.
(MC, 8/11/02)
1914 Dec 17, Jews were expelled
from Tel Aviv by Turkish authorities.
(MC, 12/17/01)
1914 The Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee, an int’l. relief organization, was formed to
aid Palestinian Jews during WW I.
(SFC, 3/29/00, p.E1)
1914-1928 German and Austrian Jews born in this
period collided with the Third Reich. In 2001 Walter Laqueur
authored "Generation Exodus," a study of what happened to many of
them.
(WSJ, 8/13/01, p.A11)
1915 Feb 2, Abba Eban (d.2002),
Israeli statesman, was born in South Africa. He grew up in England,
attaining honors at Cambridge University, where he honed his oratory
as a leader of the university debating society.
(AP, 11/17/02)
1915 Mar 2, Vladmir Jabotinsky
formed a Jewish military force to fight in Palestine.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1915 May 20, Moshe Dayan,
Israeli general, minister of Defense, was born.
(MC, 5/20/02)
1915 Aug 17, Leo Frank, a
Jewish factory manager, was lynched by a mob of anti-Semites in Cob
County, Georgia. He had been convicted in the killing of Mary
Phagan, a 13-year-old girl who worked at his pencil factory. The
governor believed him innocent and commuted his death sentence in
June. Frank was pardoned in 1986. In 2000 Stephen Goldfarb posted
the names of some 2 dozen men believed to have participated in the
murder.
(WSJ, 6/9/00, p.A1)(AP, 8/17/02)
1916 May 9, The
Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret understanding between the
governments of Britain and France, defined their respective spheres
of post-World War I influence and control in the Middle East. It was
signed on 16 May 1916. Italian claims were added in 1917. Britain
and France carved up the Levant into an assortment of monarchies,
mandates and emirates. The agreement enshrined Anglo-French
imperialist ambitions at the end of WW II. Syria and Lebanon were
put into the French orbit, while Britain claimed Jordan, Iraq, the
Gulf states and the Palestinian Mandate. Sir Mark Sykes (d.1919 at
age 39) and Francois Picot made the deal. As of 2016 the boundaries
of the agreement remained in much of the common border between Syria
and Iraq.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement)(WSJ,
2/27/00, p.A17)(Econ, 5/14/16, SR p.5)
1916 May 13, Sholem Aleichem
(b.1859), Yiddish writer (Fiddler on the Roof), died in NY. He was
born as Solomon Rabinowitz (1859) in Russia. His work included
“Tevye the Dairyman,” a series of stories published from 1894-1914.
(www.britannica.com)(WSJ, 9/22/07, p.W6)
1917 Feb 16, The 1st Madrid
synagogue in 425 years opened.
(MC, 2/16/02)
1917 Mar 28, Jews were expelled
from Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Turkish authorities.
(MC, 3/28/02)
1917 May 20, Turkish government
authorized Jews to return to Tel Aviv and Jaffa.
(MC, 5/20/02)
1917 Oct 31, Australia and New
Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) defeated Ottoman troops to gain control
of a strategic crossroads at Beersheba that helped clear the way to
Jerusalem during World War I.
(http://tinyurl.com/yaqsor8k)(AFP, 10/31/17) fo
1917 Nov 2, British Foreign
Secretary Arthur Balfour, in what became known as the Balfour
Declaration, expressed support for a "national home" for the Jews of
Palestine. It encouraged Jewish immigration to Israel in the decade
after WW I.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C8)(AP, 11/2/97)
1917 Nov 7, British General Sir
Edmond Allenby broke the Turkish defensive line in the Third Battle
of Gaza.
(HN, 11/7/98)
1917 Nov 16, British occupied
Tel Aviv and Jaffa.
(MC, 11/16/01)
1917 Dec 9, British forces
under General Allenby captured Jerusalem. He liberated the city from
Turkish control.
(WSJ, 4/4/96, A-12)(SFC, 10/18/96, C8)(MC,
12/9/01)
1918 Mar 22, Ukrainian mobs
massacred the Jews of Seredino Buda.
(www.ukraine-observer.com/articles/205/612)
1918 Sep 17, Chaim Herzog
(d.1997), president (Israel, 1983-93), was born in Belfast.
(www.pmo.gov.il/PMOEng/Government/Memorial/Presidents/Hertsog.htm)
1918 Sep 22, General Allenby
led the British army against the Turks, taking Haifa and Nazareth,
Palestine.
(HN, 9/22/98)
1918 Nov 21, Polish soldiers
organized a pogrom against Jews of Galicia, Poland.
(MC, 11/21/01)
1918 Nov 22, Polish forces
attacked the Jewish community of Lemberg (Lvov).
(MC, 11/22/01)
1919 Apr 5, Polish Army
executed 35 young Jews.
(MC, 4/5/02)
1919 Aug 10, Ukrainian National
Army massacred 25 Jews in Podolia, Ukraine.
(MC, 8/10/02)
1919 Aug 28, The American
King-Crane Commission presented its report and recommendations to
the allies on the status of Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. The report
recommended that Jewish immigration should be definitely limited,
and that the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish
commonwealth should be given up. It also recommended the creation of
a single Arab state - "Greater Syria"- that included Lebanon and
Palestine and would have been administered under American mandatory
power.
(http://tinyurl.com/z4rnwf4)
1919 This year marked the birth
of Palestinian - Arab nationalism. The events are documented in the
1996 book "Jerusalem in the 20th Century" by Martin Gilbert.
(WSJ, 10/14/96, p.A14)
1919 In central Uganda Semei
Kakungule, chief of the Abayudaya, converted to Judaism after the
British broke a promise to give him a kingdom. By 1961 membership
reached 3,000. In 1972 Idi Amin banned Judaism. Membership in 2004
was about 600.
(Econ, 1/24/04, p.43)
1920 Apr 4, Arabs attacked Jews
in Jerusalem.
(MC, 4/4/02)
1920 Apr 20, Balfour
Declaration was recognized following a conference in San Remo,
Italy. It was agreed that a mandate to Britain should be formally
given by the League of Nations over an area, which in 2010 comprised
Israel, Jordan and the Golan Heights, to be called the "Mandate of
Palestine". The Balfour Declaration was to apply to the whole of the
mandated territory. The doctrine was named after British Foreign
Secretary Arthur James Balfour, who had first articulated it as a
policy on 2 November 1917.
(www.ijs.org.au/The-Balfour-Declaration/default.aspx)
1920 Apr 24, British Mandate
over Palestine went into effect and lasted for 28 years. The British
organized a police force with some 3,000 British, Arab and Jewish
officers.
(MC, 4/24/02)(WSJ, 2/2/04, p.A12)
1920 Aug 10, Turkish government
renounced its claim to Israel and recognized the British mandate.
(MC, 8/10/02)
1920 S. Ansky (b.1863),
Russian-Jewish journalist and playwright, died. In 2003 Joachim
Neugroschel edited and translated "The Enemy at His Pleasure: A
Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I."
(SSFC, 4/20/03, p.M4)
1921 Apr 2, Einstein
(1879-1955) made his first visit to the US on a fundraising tour
with Zionist leader Chaim Weizman. Prof. Albert Einstein lectured in
NYC on his new theory of relativity. In 2007 Jurgen Neffe authored
“Einstein: A Biography;” and Jozsef Illy edited “Albert Meets
America.”
(SSFC, 5/13/07,
p.M6)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein)
1921 May 11, Tel Aviv became
the 1st all Jewish municipality.
(MC, 5/11/02)
1921 Jun 19, Turks and
Christians of Palestine signed a friendship treaty against Jews.
(MC, 6/19/02)
1921 H. Leivick wrote his
Yiddish play "The Golem." It was translated to English in 1966.
(WSJ, 4/17/02, p.D7)
1921 The British contrived the
election of Haj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974) as the Mufti of
Jerusalem. In 2008 David G. Dalin and John F. Rothman authored “Icon
of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam.”
(WSJ, 6/26/08, p.A13)
1921 At the Cairo Conference
Britain and France carved up Arabia and created Jordan under Emir
Abdullah; his brother Faisal became King of Iraq. France was given
influence over Syria and Jewish immigration was allowed into
Palestine.
(HNQ, 6/20/99)(SSFC, 10/14/01, p.D3)
1921 There was an Arab uprising
in Jerusalem.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C8)
1922 Mar 1, Yitzhak Rabin,
premier (Israel, 1992-95, Nobel 1994), was born.
(SC, 3/1/02)
1922 Sep 11, The British
mandate of Palestine began.
(MC, 9/11/01)
1922 Sep 21, Pres Warren G.
Harding signed a joint resolution of approval to establish a Jewish
homeland in Palestine.
(MC, 9/21/01)
1922 The West Bank became an
unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate. The eastern area
became known as Transjordan.
(SFC, 6/24/96, p.A19)(SFC, 4/30/02, p.A8)
1922 Hungary’s Regent Miklos
Horthy passed the first of four anti-Jewish laws, limiting the
number of Jewish students at universities.
(Econ, 11/9/13, p.59)
1922-1948 Palestine and the West Bank comprised
about 1/5th of the area under British rule at his time.
(SFC, 1/22/98, p.B12)
1923 Jul 24, The Treaty of
Lausanne, which settled the boundaries of modern Greece and Turkey,
was concluded in Switzerland. It replaced the Treaty of Sevres and
divided the lands inhabited by the Kurds between Turkey, Iraq and
Syria. Article 39 allowed Turkish nationals to use any language they
wished in commerce, public and private meetings, and publications.
The treaty specifically protected the rights of the Armenian, Greek
and Jewish communities. The former provinces of Baghdad, Basra and
Mosul were lumped together to form Iraq. Both countries agreed to a
massive exchange of religious minorities. Christians were deported
from Turkey to Greece and Muslims from Greece to Turkey. A Muslim
community of at least 100,000 was allowed in northern Greece. In
2006 Bruce Clark authored “Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions
that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey.”
(WSJ, 3/20/97, p.A17)(AP, 7/24/97)(SSFC,
12/22/02, p.A14)(Econ, 3/19/05, Survey p.9)(Econ, 10/14/06,
p.50)(Econ, 12/9/06, p.92)(Econ, 10/16/10, p.72)
1923 Aug 15, Simon Peres,
[Persky], premier of Israel, was born in Belarus.
(MC, 8/15/02)
1923 Vladimir Jabotinsky,
founder of the Zionist movement, wrote that Zionists could never
reach a voluntary agreement with Arabs on sharing land. He said
Arabs would yield to Jews “when there is no longer any hope of
getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron
wall.”
(Econ 5/20/17, SR p.11)
1923 An int'l. border agreement
with Syria was reached.
(SFEC, 9/5/99, p.A12)
1925 May 9, Cornerstone for
Hebrew University in Jerusalem was laid. It was founded in Jerusalem
in part by Aharon and Yocheved Shulov.
(SFC, 6/3/96, p.A19)(MC, 5/9/02)
1925-1939 Joseph Roth, a German Jew, was assigned
to Paris by a Frankfurt newspaper. After one year the job was given
to a Nationalist. He stayed in Paris and wrote for emigre
publications and railed against Germany and racism in his essays and
novels. In 2004 his selected essays appeared in English as "Report
From a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939."
(SSFC, 1/11/04, p.M4)
1926 The Tnuva Central
Cooperative for the Marketing of Agricultural Produce in Israel was
founded as a dairy cooperative. By 2006 it was Israel’s largest food
concern.
(WSJ, 10/4/06, p.A11)
1928 Stalin began his plan for
the resettlement of Jews to Birobidzhan, an area of land the size of
Belgium on the Russian-Chinese border. It was officially declared
the Jewish Autonomous Region and by 1930 some 230,000 people lived
in colonies there. Yiddish language and culture was fostered but
worship was forbidden.
(SFEM, 5/24/98, p.4)
1928 Ariel Sharon (d.2014),
Israeli defense minister 1981-1984, was born as Ariel Scheinermann
in Kfar Mallal, a part of British-ruled Palestine.
(SFC, 10/10/98, p.A8)(Econ, 1/18/14, p.90)
1929 Aug 24, In the Hebron
massacre 65–68 Jews are killed by Arabs and the remaining Jews are
forced to leave Hebron.
(www.zionism-israel.com/Hebron_Massacre1929.htm)
1929 Sir Ronald Stores was
governor of Jerusalem and insisted that all of the buildings of the
city be built or faced with white Jerusalem stone.
(SFC, 6/3/96, p.A19)
1929 There were 67 Jews
massacred in Hebron and the survivors were forced to flee. Arab
riots in Hebron killed dozens of Jews with guns and axes and
destroyed the ancient Jewish quarter.
(SFC, 1/10/96, p.A14)(SFC, 1/25/02, p.AA11)
1930 Oct 20, A British White
Paper restricted Jews from buying Arab land.
(MC, 10/20/01)
1930s Imi Litchtenfeld, a
Jewish Slav, invented Krav Maga (contact combat), which combined
wrestling, boxing and other martial arts to defeat gangs attacking
Jewish neighborhoods before WW II. He later fled to Israel and
joined the Defense Forces where he developed his techniques for the
military.
(SFEC, 10/1/00, p.F6)
1930s Forces of Haj Amin
al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, killed hundreds of Jews and
attempted to get rid of Arabs who tolerated Jewish presence.
(WSJ, 8/14/01, p.A14)
1933 Jan 21, Itzhak Fuks,
Israeli El Al captain, was born. He was captain of the Jumbo Jet
that crashed in Amsterdam on Oct 4, 1992.
(MC, 1/21/02)
1933 Apr 7, The 1st two Nazi
anti-Jewish laws barred Jews from legal and public service.
(MC, 4/7/02)
1933 Apr 26, Jewish students
were barred from school in Germany.
(MC, 4/26/02)
1933 Jul 21, Haifa Harbor in
Palestine opened.
(MC, 7/21/02)
1933 Fritz Hirschberger
(1912-2004), later Holocaust artist, founded the Dresden chapter of
the Zionist underground organization "Betar."
(SFC, 2/6/04, p.A25)
1934 Feb 10, A Jewish immigrant
ship 1st broke the English blockade in Palestine.
(MC, 2/10/02)
1935 Mar 13,
Three-thousand-year-old archives were found in Jerusalem confirming
biblical history.
(HN, 3/13/98)
1935 Aug 11, There was a Nazi
mass demonstration against German Jews.
(MC, 8/11/02)
1935 Sep 15, In Berlin, the
Reich under Adolf Hitler adopted The Nuremberg Laws which deprived
German Jews of their citizenship, made the swastika the official
symbol of Nazi Germany and established gradations of "Jewishness."
"Full Jews," people with four "non-Aryan" grandparents, were
deprived of German citizenship and forbidden to marry members of the
"Aryan race." German Jews, had been barred since 1938 from
government, medical, and legal professions, and shut out from every
area of German public life. After the war Gen'l. Patton gave the
documents to a friend and they were stored in the Huntington Museum
in Cal.
(AP, 9/15/97)(HN, 9/15/99)(SFC, 6/26/99, p.A3)
1935 Nov 14, Nazis stripped
German Jews of their citizenship. [see Sep 15]
(MC, 11/14/01)
1936 Mar 9, The German press
warned that all Jews who voted in the upcoming elections would be
arrested.
(HN, 3/9/98)
1936 Apr 15, A number of cars
on the road between Tulkarm and Nablus were held up by Arab
highwaymen. After the armed robbers had removed valuables from the
occupants of the cars, three Jews were forced to sit together in a
truck where they were shot by the bandits in cold blood. One was
killed outright and another died later from his injuries.
(http://tinyurl.com/j93pg)
1936 Apr 19, Anti-Jewish riots
broke out in Jaffa, Palestine.
(www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_riots_1936-39.php)(http://tinyurl.com/j93pg)
1936 Apr 20, Serious rioting
took place on the borders between Jaffa and Tel-Aviv, in particular
in the Catton, Manshieh and Saknat Abu Kebir quarters.
(http://tinyurl.com/j93pg)
1936 Dec 26, The Palestine
Orchestra was formed. It grew to become the Israeli Philharmonic.
(SFC, 1/8/98, p.E1)(MC, 12/26/01)
1936 Oct 10, The Arab Higher
Committee issued a manifesto to end riots in Palestine. The
committee had been formed in opposition to growing Jewish
immigration into Palestine.
(http://tinyurl.com/j93pg)(HNQ, 2/2/99)
1936 Nov 11, A British Royal
Commission arrived in Palestine to investigate the underlying cause
of the anti-Jewish riots. The Arab Higher Committee called a boycott
of the commission’s inquiry.
(http://tinyurl.com/j93pg)
1936 The Arab Revolt of 1936
was a culmination of actions by Haj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974),
the Mufti of Jerusalem, who recruited and commanded a national
movement of violence aimed at forbidding all compromise with Jews.
(WSJ, 6/26/08, p.A13)
1936 British forces destroyed
the kasbah of Jaffa in Operation Anchor, a security measure to
improve their strategic control of the settlement. Some 100
residents of Tel Aviv were killed and over 1,000 injured from
gunfire emanating from Jaffa.
(Econ., 2/21/15, p.18)
1937 Jan, Arab riots spread
across Palestine and British forces sought to restrict Jewish
immigration. In the Beit Shean Valley 30 young people set up a
defensible tower and stockade that became the Kibbutz Sde Nahum.
(SFEC, 9/28/97, p.A26)
1937 Aug 1, The Buchenwald
concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany, became operational. The
hill on which it stood was called "Ettersberg," a place where Goethe
often wrote and sketched, and that was the initial name for the
camp, which the people of Weimar protested. The name was then
changed to Buchenwald, Beech Forest. By April 11, 1945, an estimated
56,000 people were killed here, including approximately 11,000 Jews.
(HN, 8/1/98)(SFC, 8/3/99, p.A10)(AP, 6/5/09)
1938 Apr 5, Anti-Jewish riots
broke out in Dabrowa, Poland.
(MC, 4/5/02)
1938 Apr 26, Austrian Jews
required to register property above 5,000 Reichsmarks.
(MC, 4/26/02)
1938 May 28, The foundation for
Tel Aviv harbor was laid.
(MC, 5/28/02)
1938 July 6, Delegates from
thirty-two countries met for 9 days at the French resort of Evian to
discuss the problem of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austrian.
The German government was able to state with great pleasure how
"astounding" it was that foreign countries criticized Germany for
their treatment of the Jews, but none of them wanted to open the
doors to them when "the opportunity offer[ed]." The French foreign
ministry, the Quai d’Orsay, sabotaged the Evian conference on
European refugees, the only diplomatic effort to alleviate the fate
of “stateless” German and Austrian Jews.
(http://christianactionforisrael.org/antiholo/evian/evian.html)(WSJ,
11/15/06, p.D14)
1938 Jul 14, Italian Premier
Mussolini published an anti-Jewish and African manifesto prepared by
Italian "scientists."
(http://specialcollections.library.wisc.edu/exhibits/Fascism/Race.html)(Econ,
11/21/09, p.55)
1938 Sep 27, Jewish lawyers
were forbidden to practice in Germany.
(MC, 9/27/01)
1938 Aug 28, Mauthausen
concentration camp began operating in Austria.
(MC, 8/28/01)
1938 Sep 1, Mussolini cancelled
the civil rights of Italian Jews.
(MC, 9/1/02)
1938 Oct 14, Nazis planned
Jewish ghettos for all major cities.
(MC, 10/14/01)
1938 Nov 9, Kristallnacht took
place in Germany. Nazi leaders heard that a Jew had shot Ernst vom
Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, and ordered reprisals. Nazis
killed 35 Jews, arrested thousands and destroyed Jewish synagogues,
homes and stores throughout Germany and Austria in what became known
as Kristallnacht. 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. The
event is depicted by Peter Gay in his 1998 book "My German
Question."
(AP, 11/9/97)(WSJ, 11/3/98, p.A20)(SFC, 11/10/98,
p.A12)(SSFC, 11/10/13, DB p.46)
1938 Nov 10, Fascist Italy
enacted anti-Semitic legislation.
(HN, 11/10/98)
1938 Nov 11, German and
Austrian Jews suffered 1 billion Mark damage in the Nov 9 Nazi
Kristallnacht; Jews forced to wear Star of David.
(MC, 11/11/01)
1938 Nov 12, Hermann Goering
announced he favored Madagascar as a Jewish homeland.
(MC, 11/12/01)
1938 Nov 17, Italy passed its
own version of anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws.
(MC, 11/17/01)
1938 Nov 30, Germany banned
Jews from being lawyers.
(MC, 11/30/01)
1938 Neturei Karta (Aramaic for
"Guardians of the City") was founded in Jerusalem by Jews who
opposed the drive to establish the state of Israel, believing only
the Messiah could do that. The members of Neturei Karta descended
from Hungarian Jews who settled in Jerusalem's Old City in the early
nineteenth century, and from Lithuanian Jews who were students of
the Gaon of Vilna, who had settled earlier.
(http://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/index.cfm)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neturei_Karta)
1938 Dr. Feng Shan Ho (d.1997),
Chinese consul general in Vienna, rescued thousands of Jews by
giving them exit visas after the Nazis annexed the country.
(SFC, 8/15/01, p.A15)
1938-1940 Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat,
and Jan Zvartendijk, a Dutch diplomat, worked together to save 6-8
thousand Polish Jews, who had fled to Lithuania by issuing them
visas for Japan, China and the Dutch colonies in South America. In
1997 Ken Mochizuki published "Passage To Freedom: The Sugihara
Story."
(SFC, 9/7/96, p.A13)(SFEC, 4/27/97, BR p.10)
1939 Jan 4, Hermann Goering
appointed Reinhard Heydrich as head of Jewish Emigration.
(MC, 1/4/02)
1939 Jan 17, The Reich issued
an order forbidding Jews to practice as dentists, veterinarians and
chemists.
(HN, 1/17/99)
1939 Jan 20, Hitler proclaimed
to German parliament his intention to exterminate all European Jews.
(MC, 1/20/02)
1939 May 4, Amos Oz, Israeli
novelist (The Black Box, The Third State), was born.
(HN, 5/4/01)
1939 May 13, The SS St Louis
departed Hamburg with some 937 passengers including over 900 Jewish
refugees. They sought refuge in Cuba, but only 22 were allowed to
disembark there. No country in the Americas would take them. It
returned to Germany where a number of the Jews were later murdered.
[see May 27, June 4 and June 16]
(http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:H.+Con.+Res.+185:)(WSJ,
11/3/98, p.A20)
1939 May 27, The ship St. Louis
sailed into Havana Bay with 937 Jewish passengers fleeing the Nazis.
The ship was turned away and headed for the Florida coast. The 1976
film "Voyage of the Damned" was based on this. [see June 4]
(SFC, 10/4/99, p.D1)
1939 Jun 4, During what became
known as the "Voyage of the Damned," the SS St. Louis, carrying 907
Jewish refugees from Germany, was turned away from the Florida
coast. Also denied permission to dock in Canada and Cuba, the ship
eventually returned to Europe. The passengers were divided among
England, France, Belgium and Holland and a number of the refugees
later died in Nazi concentration camps. By 2003 efforts to track
their fates identified 935 out of the 937 passengers. Some 260 ended
in Nazi killing centers.
(AP, 6/4/99)(SFC, 10/4/99, p.D3)(SSFC, 12/7/03,
Par p.5)(Econ, 6/24/06, p.44)
1939 Jun 16-1939 Jun 20, Jewish
refugees, whose quest for freedom in the Americas was denied, began
to disembark the SS St. Louis back in Europe. Holland took 181,
France received 224, 228 went to Great Britain, and 214 went to
Belgium. [see May 13 and June 4]
(www.iearn.org/hgp/aeti/aeti-1999/ushmm-and-st-louis2.htm)
1939 Jul 6, Nazis closed the
last Jewish enterprises.
(MC, 7/6/02)
1939 Aug 29, Chaim Weizmann
informed England that Palestine Jews would fight in WW II.
(MC, 8/29/01)
1939 Sep 5, In Czestochowa,
Poland, approximately 150 Jews were shot dead by the Germans. The
day was remembered as “Bloody Monday.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cz%C4%99stochowa)
1939 Sep 19, Wehrmacht (German
regular army) murdered 100 Jews in Lukov, Poland.
(MC, 9/19/01)
1939 Sep 21, Reinhard Heydrich
met in Berlin to discuss final solution of Jews.
(MC, 9/21/01)
1939 Oct 24, Nazis required
Jews to wear star of David.
(MC, 10/24/01)
1939 Oct 26, Polish Jews were
forced into obligatory work service.
(MC, 10/26/01)
1939 Nov 12, Jews in Lodz
Poland were ordered to wear yellow star of David.
(MC, 11/12/01)
1939 Nov 15, Nazis began their
mass murder of Warsaw Jews.
(MC, 11/15/01)
1939 Nov 23, Hans Frank, the
Nazi Gov. of Poland, required Jews to wear a blue star.
(MC, 11/23/01)
1939 Nov 28, Nazi Gov-Gen of
Poland, Hans Frank organized Judenrat.
(MC, 11/28/01)
1939 Dec 1, Reichsfuhrer-SS
Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of Polish Jews.
(MC, 12/1/01)
1939 Dec 11, New anti Jewish
measurements in Poland were proclaimed.
(MC, 12/11/01)
1939 Joseph Burg (d.1999 at 90)
came to Palestine and was soon elected to the executive committee of
the Jewish Agency, which served as a pre-state shadow government. He
later helped found the National Religious Party.
(SFC, 10/19/99, p.A23)
1939 Nicholas Winton (b.1909),
English stockbroker, saved 669 Jewish children by organizing train
transport from Prague to London at the outbreak of World War II. In
2007 the Czech Rep. awarded Sir Nicholas Winton (98) the Cross of
Merit of the 1st class for saving the children. In 2001 the
biography, “Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation,” by Muriel
Emmanuel and Vera Gissing was published. The documentary film
“Nicholas J Winton - the Power of Good,” was shown in September 2001
in Prague, where Sir Nicholas met 250 of those he saved.
(AP,
10/9/07)(www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Winton.html)
1939-1945 Of the 330,000 Jews in France at the
start of the war, about 76,000 were deported to Nazi concentration
camps and only 2,500 survived. Prof. Irving Halperin (d.2000) later
authored ""Messengers from the Dead," a book on Holocaust
literature.
(SFC, 4/18/00, p.A8)(SFC, 9/6/00, p.D2)
1940 Jan 25, Nazis established
a Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland.
(MC, 1/25/02)
1940 Jan 26, Nazis forbade
Polish Jews to travel on trains.
(MC, 1/26/02)
1940 Feb 21, The Germans began
construction of a concentration camp at Auschwitz. Hans Munch was an
SS doctor at the camp and later reported his experiences there in
detail for the 1998 TV documentary "People’s Century." [see Mar 27]
(HN, 2/21/98)(WSJ, 6/8/98, p.A21)
1940 Mar 27, Himmler ordered
the building of Auschwitz concentration camp. [see Feb 21]
(MC, 3/27/02)
1940 Apr, The Germans sealed
the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland, with barbed wire. Lodz at this
time had some 231,000 Jews, about one-third of the city’s
population. Some 45,000 Jews from other parts of Nazi-occupied
Europe were forced into the ghetto as well as some 5,000 Gypsies.
Many died under forced labor and horrific conditions. Those
remaining were killed in August, 1944.
(SSFC, 8/30/09, p.A17)
1940 May 1, 140 Palestinian
Jews died as German planes bombed their ship.
(MC, 5/1/02)
1940 Jun, Hitler confided to
Mussolini his plan to ship Jews to Madagascar.
(WSJ, 3/23/04, p.D8)
1940 Jul 1, Australia refused
entry to Dutch Jewish refugees.
(MC, 7/1/02)
1940
Jul, Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch diplomat, and Chiune Sugihara, a
Japanese diplomat, worked together to save some 2,000 thousand
Polish Jews, who had fled to Lithuania by issuing them visas for
Japan, China and the Dutch colonies in South America. Zwartendijk
wrote out the so called Curacao visas, while Sugihara issued the
transit visas weeks after the Red Army entered the Baltic state. The
Sugihara family was later captured by the Russians and placed in a
concentration camp for 1½ years. None of the refugees actually
arrived in Curacao, but many of them reached free countries or ended
up in Shanghai where they survived the war.
(www.remember.org/witness/righteous.html)(SFC,
9/7/96, p.A13)(SFC, 9/9/96, p.A16)(AFP, 6/15/18)
1940 Aug 4, Zeev Jabotinsky
(b.1880), a revisionist Zionist leader, died in NY. He co-founded
the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I and later
established several Jewish organizations, including Beitar, Hatzohar
and the Irgun. He had argued that no concession could appease Arabs.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze%27ev_Jabotinsky)(Econ., 3/14/15,
p.27)
1940 Aug 30, Senpo Chinne
Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, received orders from
Japan to stop issuing visas immediately. He disobeyed the order and
continued issuing visas until the end of the month when the
consulate closed. In all Sugihara issued visas to some 3,500 Jewish
refugees.
(SFC, 9/7/96, p.A13)(SFC, 9/9/96, p.A16)
1940 Sep 17, Nazis deprived
Jews of possessions.
(MC, 9/17/01)
1940 Sep 19, A Nazi decree
forbade gentile woman to work in Jewish homes.
(MC, 9/19/01)
1940 Oct 3, In France the Vichy
government passed a law that placed great restrictions on French
Jews.
(SFC, 10/2/97, p.A9)(MC, 10/3/01)
1940 Nov 25, The ship Patria,
carrying illegal immigrants, sank in port of Haifa, 200 died.
(MC, 11/25/01)
1940 Dec 9, Illegal Jewish
immigrants to Haifa were deported to Mauritius.
(MC, 12/9/01)
1940 In Greece the occupying
Germans started transporting the 50,000 Jews of Thessaloniki to
Auschwitz. Up to 1943 there were 36 synagogues in the city. In 1997
there was one. The Jewish population at Salonika was wiped out.
(WSJ, 4/29/97, p.A20)(SFEC, 3/21/99, BR p.3)
1940 Isaac Babel,
Russian-Jewish author, was killed by a Soviet firing squad. In 2001
Nathalie Babel edited the "Complete Works of Isaac Babel,"
translated by Peter Constantine.
(SSFC, 11/25/01, p.M3)
1941 Jan 9, Some 6,000 Jews
were exterminated in a pogrom in Bucharest, Romania. [see Jan 22]
(MC, 1/9/02)
1941 Jan 22, The 1st mass
killing of Jews took place in Romania. [see Jan 9]
(MC, 1/22/02)
1941 Feb 9, Nazi collaborators
destroyed the pro-Jewish cafe Alcazar Amsterdam. Alcazar had refused
to hang "No Entry for Jews" signs in front.
(MC, 2/9/02)
1941 Feb 20, The 1st transport
of Jews to concentration camps left Plotsk, Poland.
(MC, 2/20/02)
1941 Feb 20, Nazis ordered
Polish Jews barred from using public transportation.
(MC, 2/20/02)
1941 Feb 26, Utrecht and
Zaandam struck against raid on Jews.
(SC, 2/26/02)
1941 Feb 27, Jewish musicians
came together in Berlin and performed Gustav Mahler’s Second
Symphony. In 2001 Martin Goldsmith authored "The Inextinguishable
Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany."
(SSFC, 4/8/01, BR p.5)
1941 Apr 1, Nazi's forbade Jews
access to cafes in Paris.
(MC, 4/1/02)
1941 Apr 9, In Czestochowa,
Poland, a ghetto for Jews was created. By the end of WW II some
45,000 of Czestochowa's Jews were murdered by the Germans, almost
the entire Jewish community living there.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cz%C4%99stochowa)
1941 Apr 11, The Jewish Weekly
newspaper was taken control by Nazis.
(MC, 4/11/02)
1941 Apr 14, The 1st massive
German raid in Paris rounded up 3,600 Jews. [see May 14]
(MC, 4/14/02)
1941 May 14, Some 3,600
Parisian Jews were arrested. [see Apr 14]
(MC, 5/14/02)
1941 May 30, Serbia enacted
anti-Semitic measures.
(MC, 5/30/02)
1941 Jun 3, German occupiers
stamped "J" on Jewish passports.
(MC, 6/3/02)
1941 Jun 4, Republic of Croatia
ordered all Jews to wear a star with the letter Z.
(MC, 6/4/02)
1941 Jun 13, Thousands of
Jewish community leaders in Bessarabia (Moldova) were deported to
Siberia as part of the general purge. The Soviet Union, which had
occupied the former Romanian province a year earlier, loaded 22,600
Moldovans on cargo trains bound for Siberia, where the deportees
were used for forced labor.
(WSJ, 1/2/02, p.A18)(AP, 6/13/06)
1941 Jun 19, Romania ordered
Jews to evacuate Darabani.
(MC, 6/19/02)
1941 Jun 22, Germany attacked
the Soviet Union, its former ally. When the German forces entered
the Polish city of Lviv (Lwov), they and their Ukrainian
collaborators massacred Jews in the city and countryside. While
occupying the area, Germans murdered Jews in the ghetto, the Belzec
death camp and a forced labor camp, Janowska, with the final
annihilation occurring in 1943.
(AP, 9/2/18)
1941 Jun 24, The entire Jewish
male population of Gorzhdy, Lithuania, was exterminated.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1941 Jun 25, Germans invaded
Dubno, Poland, and encouraged the Ukrainians to do whatever they
want to 12,000 Jews living there.
(MC, 6/25/02)
1941 Jun 26, Lithuanian
fascists massacred 2,300 Jews in Kovno.
(MC, 6/26/02)
1941 Jun 28, German and
Romanian soldiers killed 11,000 Jews in Kishinev.
(MC, 6/28/02)
1941 Jun, In the northeastern
city of Iasi, Romania, up to 12,000 people are believed to have died
as Romanian and German soldiers swept from house to house to killing
Jews. Those who did not die were systematically beaten, put in
cattle wagons in stifling heat and taken to a small town, where what
happened to them would be concealed. Of the 120 people on the train,
just 24 survived. In 2010 a mass grave was found containing the
bodies of an estimated 100 Jews killed by Romanian troops in a
forest near the town of Popricani, about 350 km northeast of
Bucharest. It contained the bodies of men, women and children who
were shot in 1941.
(AP, 6/14/03)(AP, 11/5/10)
1941 Jul 7, Nazis executed
5,000 Jews in Kovno, Lithuania.
(MC, 7/7/02)
1941 Jul 8, All Jews living in
Baltic States were obligated to wear Star of David.
(MC, 7/8/02)
1941 Jul 10, In Jedwabne,
Poland, some 300-400 Jews were herded into a barn by the local
villagers and burned to death. In 1949 a communist-era court
convicted 12 Poles in the massacre, saying they assisted German
forces in the killings. In 2001 Jan Tomasz authored "Neighbors: The
Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne." According to
Gross, some 1,600 Jews were killed in Jedwabne.
(SFC, 3/16/01, p.A16)(SFC, 3/31/01, p.A12)(AP,
7/10/11)
1941 Jul 11(Jun 11), The 2nd
great roundup of Jews of Amsterdam took place.
(MC, 7/11/02)
1941 Jul 11(Jun 11),
Vichy-French planes bombed Tel Aviv and killed 20 Jews.
(MC, 7/11/02)
1941 Jul 14, 6,000 Lithuanian
Jews were exterminated at Viszalsyan Camp.
(MC, 7/14/02)
1941 Jul 18, SS troops drowned
40 Jews in Dvina River in Belorussia.
(MC, 7/18/02)
1941 Jul 21, Himmler ordered
the building of the Majdanek concentration camp. The camp was built
in eastern Poland as a principal site to exterminate Jews. It
contained 7 gas chambers.
(SFC, 3/5/98, p.A14)(MC, 7/21/02)
1941 Jul 21, 200 Jewish Torahs
were burned in Ukraine.
(MC, 7/21/02)
1941 Jul 24, Nazis massacred
the entire Jewish population of Grodz, Lithuania.
(MC, 7/24/02)
1941 Jul, Artist Marc Chagall
and his wife Bella Rosenfeld departed France for America. On the
same day that he left Vichy police deported some 1,200 other Jewish
refugees to forced labor in north Africa.
(Econ, 9/20/08, p.102)
1941 Aug 2, Jews were expelled
from Hungarian Ruthenia.
(MC, 8/2/02)
1941 Aug 7, In Romania 551 Jews
were shot in the Kishinev ghetto.
(MC, 8/7/02)
1941 Aug 15, Lithuanian Jews in
Kaunas were herded into the Slobodka ghetto.
(MC, 8/15/02)
1941 Aug 20, Police raided the
11th district of Paris and took over 4,000 Jewish males.
(MC, 8/20/02)
1941 Aug 29, The German
Einsatzkommando in Russia killed 1,469 Jewish children.
(MC, 8/29/01)
1941 Sep 1, Jews living in
Germany were required to wear a yellow Star of David. [see Oct 24,
1939]
(MC, 9/1/02)
1941 Sep 6, Jews over the age
of 6 in German-occupied areas were ordered to wear yellow Stars of
David.
(AP, 9/6/97)(HN, 9/6/98)
1941 Sep 6, Jews of Vilna,
Poland (Lithuania), were confined to their ghetto.
(MC, 9/6/01)
1941 Sep 8, The entire Jewish
community of Meretsch, Lithuania was exterminated.
(MC, 9/8/01)
1941 Sep 15, Nazis killed 800
Jewish women at Shkudvil, Lithuania.
(http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/shkudvil/shkudvil.html)
1941 Sep 19, The Nazi's forced
all German Jews from the age of 6 to wear the Star of David.
(MC, 9/19/01)
1941 Sep 29, In Ukraine some
33,711 Jews of Kiev were killed over 2 days before Yom Kippur in the
ravine at Babi Yar by the Nazis. Henrich Himmler had sent four
strike squads to exterminate Soviet Jewish civilians and other
"undesirables." Over the next 2 years some 100-200 thousand more
people, mostly Jews, were killed at the site.
(SFC, 10/29/96, p.A6)(HN, 9/29/00)(SFC, 6/25/01,
p.A8)(SFC, 6/26/01, p.A8)(AP, 11/16/07)
1941 Sep 30, In Ukraine 33,771
Jews were killed in a two-day Nazi operation at Babi Yar ravine near
Kiev [see Sep 29]. Einsatzgruppe C was responsible for the shooting
of nearly 34,000 at Babi Yar.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar)(AP,
9/28/17)
1941 Oct 2, 6 Paris synagogues
were bombed by Gestapo. [see Oct 3]
(MC, 10/2/01)
1941 Oct 3, Nazi's blew up 6
synagogues in Paris. [see Oct 2]
(MC, 10/3/01)
1941 Oct 3, All elderly Jewish
men of Kerenchug Ukraine, were killed by SS.
(MC, 10/3/01)
1941 Oct 12, Thousands of Jews
were killed in Ivano Frankivsk, Ukraine, by men of the Security
Police (Sicherheitspolizei; SiPo), assisted by members of the German
Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) and the railroad police.
{Jews, Ukraine, Holocaust, Germany}
(Econ, 1/23/10,
p.48)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivano-Frankivsk)
1941 Oct 13, Nazis killed
11,000 Jewish children and old people.
(MC, 10/13/01)
1941 Oct 14, The 1st mass
deportations took place at Kovno, Lodz, Minsk & Riga.
(MC, 10/14/01)
1941 Oct 15, The 1st mass
deportation of German Jews to Eastern Europe.
(MC, 10/15/01)
1941 Oct 22-23, Some 39,000
Jews were killed by Romanian troops over 2 days in Odessa. Many of
them were burned to death in a public square or in warehouses that
were locked shut. Altogether some 90,000 Jews were killed in Odessa.
(SFC, 6/15/98, p.A11)
1941 Oct 25, 16,000 Jews were
massacred in Odessa, Ukraine. [see Oct 22-23]
(MC, 10/25/01)
1941 Oct 27, Nazis directed the
evacuation of the gypsy ghetto in Belgrade.
(MC, 10/27/01)
1941
Nov 6, Einsatz death groups killed some 18 thousand Jews of Rovno,
Ukraine. “Einsatzgruppen” were special soldiers who followed the
fighting forces and “cleaned up” the area.
(www.members.tripod.com/~ebionite/zikkar.htm#nov)
1941 Nov 24, "Life
Certificates" were issued to some Jews of Vilna. The rest were
exterminated.
(MC, 11/24/01)
1941 Nov 25, German Jews in
Netherlands were declared stateless.
(MC, 11/25/01)
1941 Nov 28, In Germany Amin
al-Husseini (1897-1974), the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, met with
Adolf Hitler and asked Hitler to support the elimination of a
national Jewish homeland.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini)(SFC, 10/22/15,
p.A2)
1941 Nov, Some 4,000 who
remained in Gomel, Belarus, were shot by the Nazis. Most of the
40,000 who had lived there had managed to escape before the Nazis
arrived.
(AP, 4/12/08)
1941 Dec 4, Nazi ordinances
placed the Jews of Poland outside protection of courts.
(MC, 12/4/01)
1941 Dec 12, German occupying
army searched house to house in Paris looking for Jews.
(MC, 12/12/01)
1941 Dec, David Ben-Gurion
(1886-1973), Israeli leader, traveled to Washington to speak with
Pres. F.D. Roosevelt regarding a Jewish state. He waited for 10
weeks at the Ambassador Hotel but was refused a meeting.
(http://tinyurl.com/kkvdh)(Econ, 8/5/06, p.28)
1941 Dec, In Romania
authorities ordered the dissolution of all Jewish organizations.
Chief Rabbi Alexander Safran (1910-2006) helped set up the Jewish
Council, an underground organization comprising all sectors of the
Jewish population. The council used its links with Romanian church
officials, the Vatican and the royal family in a bid to prevent the
mass deportation of Romania's Jews to the Nazi extermination camps.
(AP, 7/28/06)
1941 According to later day
Holocaust researchers a force in Ukraine under the command of Roman
Shukhevych took part in pogroms in which 4,000 Jews were killed. In
2007 Shukhevych was posthumously named a Hero of Ukraine.
(AP, 11/16/07)
1941 Nazi documents from this
year showed that the Einsatzgruppe, a Nazi-run Serbian police unit,
executed 11,164 people, mostly Serbian Jewish men, suspected
communists and Gypsies. The unit was allegedly run by Peter Egner,
who emigrated to the US in 1960, and received citizenship in 1966.
In 2009 Serbian authorities sought his extradition. In 2010 Serbia
issued an international warrant for the arrest of Egner (88), who
has denied the accusations.
(AP, 4/14/09)(AP, 4/2/10)
1941-1942 Nearly 80,000 Jews, or 90% of Latvia's
prewar Jewish population, were killed during this period.
(AP, 3/16/11)
1941-1942 At the beginning of the war there were
about 60,000 Jews in Vilnius, Lithuania. A year later, only 18,000
remained. In 1998 Schoschana Rabinovici published her non-fiction
account: "Thanks To My Mother" a description of the murder of Polish
Jews in Vilnius through the eyes of a child.
(SFEC, 4/26/98, BR p.8)
1941-1943 Three Jewish brothers established a
refuge in the forests of Belarus. In 2003 Peter Duffy authored "The
Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis,
Saved 1,200 Jews and Built a Village in the Forest."
(SSFC, 7/13/03, p.M4)
1941-1944 Necdet Kent (d.2002), Turkish diplomat,
was posted to Marseilles, France, and gave Turkish citizenship to
dozens of Turkish Jews living in France who did not have proper
identity papers to save them from deportation to the Nazi gas
chambers.
(AP, 9/20/02)
1941-1944 Avraham Tory (d.2002), a Jewish lawyer
in Kovno (Kaunas), kept a diary on the horrors of Nazi rule during
this period. They were published in Hebrew in 1988 and in English in
1990 as: "Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary."
(SFC, 3/19/02, p.A20)
1941-1945 Some 148,000 Bessarabian Jews were
killed in Rybnitsa and other ghettos and concentration camps on the
East bank of the Dniester during the Nazi occupation.
(WSJ, 1/2/02, p.A18)
1942 Jan 20, Top Nazis met at
Grossen-Wannsee, outside Berlin, and there formulated the infamous
"Final Solution" to the Jewish question. Chaired by SS General
Reinhard Heydrich, the one-day conference was designed to address
the Nazi efforts at removing the Jews. The 15 top-ranking men of the
German Reich agreed upon a blueprint for the extermination of
Europe’s Jews. Their "final solution" called for exterminating
Europe's Jews. Until this time, the plan had been to deport all Jews
to the island of Madagascar off Africa, but by 1942 this plan was
rejected in favor of transporting Jews to the east where the
able-bodied would become slave laborers for the Reich. SS chief
Heinrich Himmler would be in charge. Those unfit to work would be,
the conference minutes noted, "appropriately dealt with." This
phrase was left unexplained, but there was no doubt of its sinister
meaning. After approving genocide as Nazi policy, the conference
attendees adjourned for lunch. The minutes were taken by Adolf
Eichmann. In 2004 Christopher R. Browning authored "The Origins of
the Final Solution."
(AP, 1/20/98)(WSJ, 4/28/97, p.A17)(HNPD,
1/20/99)(MC, 1/20/02)(WSJ, 3/23/04, p.D8)
1942 Jan 23, At Novi Sad,
Serbia, some 1200 people (predominantly Jewish), rounded up over a
period of three days, were shot along the shores of the Danube.
Their bodies were dumped into the frozen waters. Sandor Kepiro
(1914-2011), a Hungarian gendarmerie officer, participated in the
mass murder. In 1944 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his
part in the atrocities, but conviction was later annulled. Kepiro,
who was at the top of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's most-wanted war
criminals list, returned to Hungary in 1996 after living for decades
in Argentina. In 2011 Kepiro (96) was charged with war crimes in the
slaughter, but was cleared by a court on July 18, 2011.
(http://tinyurl.com/o5n5j3)(AP, 9/15/09)(AP,
2/14/11)(AP, 7/18/11)(AP, 9/3/11)
1942 Feb 12, In Palestine
British police killed Avraham Stern (34), founder of the
breakaway militant Zionist group named Lehi. British forces had
begun shooting members of “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”
(Lehi) after the group had ambushed British soldiers and solicited
fascist and Nazi support for their campaign.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avraham_Stern)(Econ, 5/3/14, p.75)
1942 Feb 24, The SS Struma was
sunk in the Black Sea by a Soviet torpedo. The ship with over 750
Jewish passengers fleeing Romania, had docked in Istanbul, but was
denied entry to Palestinian territory by colonial power Britain. On
Feb 23 Turkey towed the vessel to the Black Sea and set it adrift.
Only one person survived.
(AP, 2/24/12)
1942 Feb 27, The 1st transport
of French Jews left to Nazi Germany.
(MC, 2/27/02)
1942 Mar 1, Suriname camp for
NSB people opened to save Jews.
(SC, 3/1/02)
1942 Mar 11, 1st deportation
train left Paris for the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
(MC, 3/12/02)
1942 Mar 17, The Nazis began
deporting Jews to the Belsen camp.
(HN, 3/17/98)
1942 Mar 23, Some 2,500 Jews of
Lublin were massacred or deported.
(SS, 3/23/02)
1942 Mar 25-26, The 1st 700
Jews from Polish Lvov-district reached concentration camp Belzec.
The Germans began sending Jews to Auschwitz in Poland.
(HN, 3/25/98)(MC, 3/25/02)(SS, 3/26/02)
1942 Mar 26, The Germans began
sending Jews to Auschwitz in Poland.
(HN, 3/25/98)
1942 Mar, British and US
intelligence received information on Nazi plans for the Holocaust:
"It has been decided to eradicate all the Jews." This was part of a
dispatch from a Chilean consul in Prague, Gonzalo Montt Rivas, to
Santiago of a German decree that Jews abroad could no longer be
German subjects.
(SFC, 7/3/01, p.A8)
1942 Apr 27, Belgium Jews were
forced to wear stars.
(MC, 4/27/02)
1942 May 7, A Nazi decree
ordered all Jewish pregnant women of Kovno Ghetto executed.
(MC, 5/7/02)
1942 May 12, David Ben-Gurion
left the Jewish state in Palestine.
(MC, 5/12/02)
1942 May 12, 1,500 Jews were
gassed in Auschwitz.
(MC, 5/12/02)
1942 Jun 8, In Paris on the
first day Helene Berr was forced to wear the yellow star to
distinguish Jews: "My God, I didn't know this would be so hard. I
was very brave all day. I held my head high and looked people so
straight in the eyes they turned away. But it's hard ... This
morning, I went out with Mother. Two kids in the street pointed at
us saying 'Hey? You see? Jewish.'"
(AP, 1/9/08)
1942 Jun 20, Adolf Eichmann
proclaimed the deportation of Dutch Jews.
(MC, 6/20/02)
1942 Jun 22, A Jewish Brigade,
attached by British Army, formed.
(MC, 6/22/02)
1942 Jul 10, Himmler ordered
the sterilization of all Jewish woman in Ravensbruck Camp.
(MC, 7/10/02)
1942 Jul 13, 5,000 Jews of
Rovno, Polish Ukraine, were executed by Nazis.
(MC, 7/13/02)
1942 Jul 13, SS shot 1,500 Jews
in Josefov, Poland.
(MC, 7/13/02)
1942 Jul 16, Jews were
transported from Holland to an extermination camp.
(MC, 7/16/02)
1942 Jul 16, The first
large-scale roundups of Jews began under protests by only a
half-dozen Catholic church leaders. French police rounded up some
13,000 Jews over 2 days in Paris, many of whom were first holed up
in harsh conditions at Paris' Vel d'Hiv, or the Winter Velodrome
stadium. The roundup of foreign-born Jews was based on a list
compiled by Paris police. Some 125,000 Jews had been recorded in a
roll based on a census the Nazis demanded in 1941. In 1942 the Vichy
police handed over some 40,000 Jews to the Germans.
(SFEC, 9/28/97, p.A22)(Econ, 7/24/04, p.49)(AP,
7/22/12)(AFP, 9/19/18)
1942 Jul 22, Warsaw Ghetto Jews
(300,000) were sent to death at Treblinka extermination Camp.
(MC, 7/22/02)
1942 Jul 23, Treblinka
Concentration Camp was destroyed.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1942 Jul 26, Roman Catholic
churches protested the Dutch bishops’ stand against the spread of
Judaism.
(MC, 7/26/02)
1942 Jul 28, Nazis liquidated
10,000 Jews in Minsk, Russia.
(SC, 7/28/02)
1942 Jul 30, German SS
einsatzgruppen death battalions killed 25,000 Jews in Minsk,
Belorussia.
(MC, 7/30/02)
1942 Jul 31, The German SS
gassed some 1,000 Jews in Minsk, Belorussia.
(MC, 7/31/02)
1942 Aug 4, The 1st train with
Jews departed Mechelen, Belgium, to Auschwitz.
(MC, 8/4/02)
1942 Aug 7, Transport 16
departed with French Jews to Nazi-Germany.
(MC, 8/7/02)
1942 Aug 7, The Nazi 36th
Police Battalion, made up of ethnic Estonians, massacred some 2,500
Jews at Novogrudok, Belarus (according to the Simon Wiesenthal
Foundation).
(SSFC, 2/15/04, p.A4)
1942 Aug 8, Gerhart Riegner
(d.2001 at 90), World Jewish Congress official in Geneva, cabled the
US vice consul to describe Hitler’s plan to deport an estimated 4
million Jews to Eastern Europe and to annihilate them.
(SFC, 12/4/01, p.A19)
1942 Aug 11, 999 Jews were
taken from Mechelen transit camp in Belgium.
(MC, 8/11/02)
1942 Aug 11-Sep 30, The SS
began exterminating 3,500 Jews in Zelov Lodz, Poland.
(MC, 8/11/02)
1942 Aug 25, German SS
began transporting Jews of Maastricht, Neth.
(chblue.com, 8/25/01)
1942 Aug 26, 7,000 Jews were
rounded up in Vichy, France.
(MC, 8/26/02)
1942 Aug, Irene Nemirovsky,
French-Jewish author, died at Auschwitz. She had recently authored
"Suite Francaise" while waiting in rural France for what she knew
was her imminent arrest and deportation. It is a powerful account of
the effect on ordinary people of the military collapse of June 1940,
the panicked flight from Paris and the arrival of the German army.
In 2004 she Nemirovsky was awarded a top French literary award.
(AFP, 11/8/04)
1942 Oct 5, 5,000 Jews of
Dubno, Russia, were massacred.
(MC, 10/5/01)
1942 Oct 10, 1,300 Austrian
Jews were transported to Theresienstadt.
(MC, 10/10/01)
1942 Oct 27, In Starachowice,
Poland, Nazi soldiers separated out weak Jews from the strong. The
strong were sent to work and the weak were sent to the extermination
camp at Treblinka.
(WSJ, 11/25/03, p.A1)
1942 Oct 29, Nazis murdered
some 16,000 Jews in Pinsk, Soviet Union.
(MC, 10/29/01)
1942 Oct, On Yom Kippur 2,900
Jews were killed in Domachevo, Belarus.
(SFEC, 2/14/99, p.A23)
1942 Nov 5, Nazis raided on
Greek Jews in Paris.
(MC, 11/5/01)
1942 Nov 6, Nazis executed
12,000 Minsk ghetto Jews.
(MC, 11/6/01)
1942 Nov 9, Transport #44
departed with French Jews to Nazi Germany.
(MC, 11/9/01)
1942 Nov 11, 745 French Jews
were deported to Auschwitz.
(MC, 11/11/01)
1942 Nov, German troops arrived
in Tunisia. The nation was home to some 100,000 Jews at the time.
The Germans imposed anti-Semitic policies that included fines,
forcing Jews to wear Star of David badges and confiscating property.
More than 5,000 Jews were sent to forced labor camps, where 46 are
known to have died. About 160 Tunisian Jews in France were sent to
European death camps.
(AP, 1/30/07)
1942 The Biblical Zoo in
Jerusalem was created by Aharon Shulov as a center for children of
all denominations.
(SFC, 6/3/96, p.A19)
1942 American rabbi Judah
Magnes (d.1948) helped found a political party in Palestine called
Ihud (Unity). He argued for a single binational state to be shared
by Arabs and Jews.
(Econ, 3/16/13, p.25)
1942 Andree Geulen-Herscovici
was a teacher in Brussels when she witnessed a Gestapo raid on a
school. That prompted her to join a rescue organization and for more
than two years she took in over 300 Jewish children and hid them in
Christian homes and monasteries under assumed identities. In 2007
Geulen-Herscovici (86) was granted honorary Israeli citizenship.
(AP, 4/18/07)
1942 Nazi documents of
this year showed that the Einsatzgruppe, a Nazi-run Serbian police
unit, killed 6,280 Serbian Jewish women and children who were held
as prisoners. In two months, those women and children allegedly were
taken from a camp and forced into a specially designed van, in which
they were gassed with carbon monoxide. The unit was allegedly run by
Peter Egner, who emigrated to the US in 1960, and received
citizenship in 1966 [see 1941]. In 2010 Serbia issued an
international warrant for the arrest of Egner (88), who has denied
the accusations.
(AP, 4/14/09)(AP, 4/2/10)
1942-1943 Irena Sendler (29), posing as a
nurse, visited the Warsaw Ghetto and persuaded parents that their
children had better chances of survival outside its walls. She and
20 helpers smuggled some 2,500 children out of the ghetto and placed
them with Polish families. In 2003 Sendler was awarded Poland's
highest order. In 2007 Sendler (97) was honored by parliament at a
ceremony during which Poland's president said she deserves the Nobel
Peace Prize.
(AP, 11/11/03)(AP, 3/14/07)
1942-1945 Jose Arturo Castellanos (d.1977 at 86),
Salvadoran diplomat in Geneva, gave citizenship certificates to as
many as 40,000 Jews during the Holocaust. In 2010 Israel named him
posthumously as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations."
(AP, 5/14/10)(http://tinyurl.com/28n2pd7)
1943 Jan 14, Italian occupation
authorities refused to deport any Jews living on their territories
in France.
(HN, 1/14/99)
1943 Jan 18, Jews in Warsaw
Ghetto began an uprising against the Nazis. [see Apr 19, 1943]
(MC, 1/18/02)
1943 Feb 11, Transport # 47
departed with French Jews to Nazi Germany.
(MC, 2/11/02)
1943 Feb 17, Dutch churches
protested to Artur Seyss-Inquart against persecution of Jews.
(MC, 2/17/02)
1943 Mar 1, In Amsterdam a
Jewish old age home for disabled was raided.
(SC, 3/1/02)
1943 Mar 2, 1st transport of
Jews from Westerbork, Netherlands, to Sobibor concentration camp.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1943 Mar 4, Transport Number 50
departed with French Jews to Majdanek and Sobibor.
(SC, 3/4/02)
1943 Mar 15, In Thessaloniki,
Greece, occupying German forces began founding up the first batch of
Jews in Eleftherias (Freedom) Square. By August 1943, 46,091 Jews
had been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of those, 1,950 survived.
(AP, 3/16/13)
1943 Mar 22, SS police chief
Rauter threatened to kill half Jewish children.
(MC, 3/22/02)
1943 Mar, Bulgarians occupying
Macedonia rounded up and deported 7,148 (7,144) Macedonian Jews from
Skopje, and cities of Bitola and Stip to the Treblinka death
camp in German-occupied Poland. Of a pre-war population of
some 8,000 Jews, only 350 remained after the war.
(Econ, 7/16/11, p.88)(AP, 3/12/18)
1943 Apr 19, Nazis entered the
Warsaw ghetto, the eve of the Passover holiday. Three days later
they set the ghetto ablaze, turning it into a fiery death trap.
Jewish fighters kept up their struggle for nearly a month before
they were brutally vanquished. Teenager Simcha Rotem (d.2018), aka
Kazik, served as a liaison between the bunkers and took part in the
fighting.
(AP, 12/23/18)
1943 Apr 19, In Warsaw, Poland,
young Jews under Mordechai Anielewicz directed the 1st urban
uprising against the Nazis. During World War II, tens of thousands
of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto began a valiant but futile
battle against Nazi forces. SS-Gen Jurgen Stroop led the destruction
of the ghetto of Warsaw: "The Warsaw Ghetto is no more!" he wrote
proudly to Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler. Stroop was hanged on
the site of the Warsaw ghetto after the war. Jacek Zlatka (Jack
Eisner, 1925-2003) smuggled arms for the revolt. Eisner made a
fortune in the import-export business after the war and in 1980
authored the autobiography "The Survivor."
(SFEC, 3/2/97, p.T11)(AP, 4/19/97)(HN,
4/19/97)(MC, 4/19/02)(SSFC, 8/31/03, p.A29)
1943 May 1, A German plane sank
a boat loaded with Palestinian Jews bound for Malta.
(MC, 5/1/02)
1943 May 15, Warsaw ghetto
uprising ended in it's destruction by Nazi-SS troops.
(MC, 5/15/02)
1943 May 16, German troops
destroyed the synagogue of Warsaw. Jewish resistance in the Warsaw
ghetto ended after 30 days of fighting.
(MC, 5/16/02)
1943 May 19, Berlin was
declared "Judenrien" (cleansed of Jews).
(MC, 5/19/02)
1943 May 26, Jews rioted
against Germans in Amsterdam.
(MC, 5/26/02)
1943 Jul 23, Meijer de Hond,
[Emanuel Querido], rabbi of Sobibor, died.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1943 Jul 23, Emanuel Querido,
publisher (Sobibor), died.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1943 Aug 2, In Poland at the
Nazi Treblinka concentration camp some 600 prisoners staged an
uprising and fled into the woods. Some 300 inmates managed to
escape. Only 40 survived. Some 900,000 Jews, chiefly from
Poland, were killed from 1941 to 1944 at Treblinka. In 1999 Ian
MacMillan authored "Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the
Treblinka Uprising."
(SFEC, 8/22/99, BR p.5)(AP, 8/2/18)
1943 Aug 18, Final convoy of
Jews from Salonika, Greece, arrived at Auschwitz.
(MC, 8/18/02)
1943 Sep 11, The Jewish ghettos
of Minsk & Lida in Belorussia were liquidated.
(MC, 9/11/01)
1943 Sep 18, Hitler ordered the
deportation of Danish Jews (unsuccessful).
(MC, 9/18/01)
1943 Sep 23, In Lithuania the
remaining residents in the Vilnius Ghetto were executed or sent off
to concentration camps by the occupying forces of Nazi Germany.
(AP, 9/22/18)
1943 Sep - 1943 Oct, About
7,200 Jews, or 95 percent of Denmark's Jewish population, and some
700 of their non-Jewish relatives managed to escape by crossing the
narrow waterway from Gilleleje and other coastal spots to neutral
Sweden in a risky rescue mission. About 500 Jews were arrested in
Nazi raids and deported to concentration camps.
(Econ, 7/10/04, p.46)(AP, 10/11/18)
1943 Oct 1, Germans attacked
Jews in Denmark.
(MC, 10/1/01)
1943 Oct 14, Some 300 of 600
prisoners escaped from the Nazi’s Sobibor death camp in Poland.
Alexander Pechersky, a Russian officer of Jewish origin, roused his
fellow prisoners to rebellion. The event was later documented in the
book "Escape from Sobibor" by Richard Rashke (1982) and the film of
the same name with Alan Arkin. Josef Vallaster, an Austrian guard,
was among 11 SS officers and 11 Ukrainians killed in the escape.
Most of the escaped prisoners were killed as they fled. Only 50
prisoners survived the war. Vallaster had operated the motor that
funneled gas into Sobibor’s shower rooms. After the uprising at
Sobibor, the Nazis shut it down and leveled it to the ground,
replanting over it to cover their tracks.
(SFC, 7/11/03, p.A19)(SSFC, 2/17/08, p.A8)(AP,
8/21/12)(AFP, 10/14/13)
1943 Oct 16, In Italy the Nazi
SS police and Waffen SS began rounding up the Jews of Rome. There
was an anti Jewish riot in Rome as the Jewish quarter was surrounded
by Nazis, and Jews were evacuated to Auschwitz. Pope Pius XII made
no public protest, though he did send some messages of disapproval
through intermediaries. In total, nearly 8,000 Italian Jews died in
concentration camps in World War II.
(WSJ, 10/18/99, p.A46)(AFP, 10/27/18)
1943 Oct 23, The 1st Jewish
transport out of Rome reached Birkenau (Poland) extermination camp.
(MC, 10/23/01)
1943 Oct, Germans demolished
the ghetto buildings of Minsk, known as the Yama, or Pit, in an
effort to find Jews in hiding. 2,000 remaining Jews were rounded up
and killed. More than 100,000 Jews were killed there from August
1941.
(AP, 10/21/08)
1943 Nov 2, Jewish ghetto of
Riga, Latvia, was destroyed.
(MC, 11/2/01)
1943 Nov 3, In Poland Nazi SS
and police units shot at least 6,000 Jewish inmates of the Trawniki
and Dorohucza Labor Camps in one of the largest single
massacres of the Holocaust.
(www.ushmm.org/wlc_ie/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007397)(AFP,
8/21/18)
1943 Nov 3-1943 Nov 4, The
2-day "Operation Harvest" at the Majdanek concentration camp
executed men, women and children. Nazi officer Alfons Goetzfried
later admitted to having personally shot 500 people. Over 42,000
people, mostly Jews, were killed in the operation. In 1999 Alfons
Goetzfrid (79) was convicted for assisting in the murders of 17,000
Jews at the camp. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. During the
so-called "Mission Harvest Festival" massacres tens of thousands of
Jews in the district of Lublin were shot by Nazi officers. Among
them were members of Erich Steidtmann’s Hamburg Polizeibataillon 101
company. In 2010 prosecutors reopened an investigation on
Steidtmann’s role in the massacre.
{Holocaust, Poland, Germany, WWII, Jews}
(SFC, 3/5/98, p.A14)(SFC, 5/21/99, p.D2)(AP,
4/22/10)
1943 Dec 2, 1st RSHA transport
out of Vienna reached Birkenau camp.
(MC, 12/2/01)
1943 Primo Levi (25) was sent
to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. He later authored
"Survival in Auschwitz."
(SFEC, 3/5/00, BR p.8)
1943 Roman Frister (15) was
sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Plaszow. In 1993 Frister
published his biography "The Cap: The Price of Life."
(SFEC, 3/5/00, BR p.8)
1943 In Tunisia Khaled
Abdelwahhab hid a group of Jews on his farm outside Mahdia, saving
them from the Nazi troops occupying the North African nation. In
2007 Abdelwahhab became the first Arab to be nominated for
recognition as "Righteous Among the Nations," an honor bestowed on
non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi persecution.
(AP, 1/30/07)
1944 Jan, In Hungary Sandor
Kepiro (b.1914) was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his part in
the Jan, 1942, atrocities at Novi Sad, Serbia, in which 1,200 Serb
and Jewish civilians were killed by Hungarian forces, who raided
Serbia in the wake of the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. He was
freed by Hungary's fascist regime shortly after his trial and fled
to Argentina after the war. In 1946, the Communist government of
Hungary tried him again and sentenced him to 14 years in absentia.
He returned to Budapest in 1996.
(www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/world/europe/28iht-hungary.2970014.html?_r=1)(AP,
9/15/09)
1944 Mar 7, Emanuel Ringelblum
(b.1900), Jewish historian, died in the Warsaw ghetto. He is known
for his “Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto,” “Notes on the Refugees in
Zbąszyn” chronicling the deportation of Jews from the town of
Zbąszyń, and the so-called Ringelblum's Archives of the Warsaw
Ghetto. In 2009 Samuel D. Kassow authored “Who Will Write our
History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto.
(Econ, 3/14/09,
p.84)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Ringelblum)
1944 Mar 27, Some 2,000 Jews
were murdered in Kaunas, Lithuania.
(HN, 3/27/98)(MC, 3/27/02)
1944 Mar 31, Hungary ordered
all Jews to wear yellow stars.
(MC, 3/31/02)
1944 Apr 13, Transport No. 71
departed with French Jews to Nazi Germany.
(MC, 4/13/02)
1944 Apr 14, 1st Jews
transported from Athens arrived at Auschwitz.
(MC, 4/14/02)
1944 Apr-Jul, Hungarian
authorities facilitated the deportation of some 437,000 Hungarian
Jews to Auschwitz.
(SFC, 6/7/99, p.A9)(Econ, 4/24/04, p.48)
1944 May 16, The 1st of over
180,000 Hungarian Jews reached Auschwitz.
(MC, 5/16/02)
1944 May 19, 240 gypsies were
transported to Auschwitz from Westerbork Neth.
(MC, 5/19/02)
1944 May, Laszlo Csatary was
named chief of an internment camp at a brick factory in Kosice, a
Slovakian city under Hungarian rule, from where 12,000 Jews were
deported to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. In 1948 he was
convicted in absentia for war crimes in Czechoslovakia and sentenced
to death. He arrived in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia the
following year, became a Canadian citizen in 1955 and worked as an
art dealer in Montreal. He left Canada in 1997 and was arrested in
Hungary in 2012. In 2013 Csatary was indicted in Hungary for war
crimes.
(AP, 7/18/12)(AP, 6/18/13)
1944 May-1944 Jun, Some 425,000
Jews from Hungary were brought to the Nazi-run Auschwitz
concentration camp in Poland. At least 300,000 were almost
immediately gassed to death. In 2014 German prosecutors charged
Oskar Groening (93) with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder for
serving as as SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp during this
period.
(SFC, 9/16/14, p.A2)
1944 May-1944 Oct, About 158
trainloads of victims were brought to the Nazi-run Auschwitz
concentration camp in Poland. In 2013 a German arest warrant accused
Johann Breyer (d.2014 at 89), a resident of Pennsylvania, of 158
counts of accessory to murder, one for each trainload of victims
brought to Auschwitz while he served as a guard there.
(SFC, 7/24/14, p.A8)
1944 Jun 20, Nazis began mass
extermination of Jews at Auschwitz.
(MC, 6/20/02)
1944 Jun, The "Kasztner Train,"
with 1,684 Jews on board, departed Budapest for the safety of
neutral Switzerland. Rudolf Kasztner's negotiations also saved
20,000 Hungarian Jews by diverting them to an Austrian labor camp
instead of a planned transfer to extermination camps. Kasztner, a
Zionist leader in Hungary, headed the Relief and Rescue Committee, a
small Jewish group that negotiated with Nazi officials to rescue
Hungarian Jews in exchange for money, goods and military equipment.
(AP, 7/23/07)
1944 Jul 7, Brendan Bracken,
the British Minister of Information, charged that the
Germans are setting up "public slaughterhouses" into which thousands
of Jews are being herded to their deaths.
(SSFC, 7/7/19, DB p.43)
1944 Jul 7, Hungary’s regent
Miklos Horthy issued an order suspending Nazi deportations of
Hungarian Jews.
(ON, 10/20/11, p.1)
1944 Jul 9, Raoul Wallenberg, a
Swedish National Guardsman, arrived in Budapest to head the local
office of the US-sponsored War Refugee Board. He had been recruited
in June by a US Embassy official in Stockholm and sent to
Nazi-controlled Budapest under Swedish diplomatic cover. He used US
funds to bribe Nazi officials and saved over 20,000 Hungarian Jews
from Nazi death camps.
(SFC, 5/5/96, p.A-7)(MT, Spg. ‘99, p.18)(WSJ,
2/28/09, p.A7)
1944 Jul 20, The death march of
1,200 Jews from Lipcani, Moldavia, began.
(MC, 7/20/02)
1944 Jul 23, Bernard M. Cohen,
attorney, was killed at Belsen concentration camp.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1944 Aug 2, Jewish survivors of
Kovno Ghetto, Lithuania, emerged from their bunker.
(MC, 8/2/02)
1944 Aug 4, Nazi police
raided the secret annex of a building in Amsterdam and arrested
eight people, including 15-year-old Anne Frank, whose diary became a
famous account of the Holocaust. She died at the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp in the spring of 1945, just weeks before the camp
was liberated.
(AP, 8/4/02)
1944 Aug 6, All 1,200 Jewish
death marchers from Lipcani, Moldavia, died by this date.
(MC, 8/6/02)
1944 Aug 6, The deportation of
70,000 Jews from Lodz. Poland, to Auschwitz began.
(MC, 8/6/02)
1944 Aug 22, Last transport of
French Jews departed to Nazi Germany.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1944 Oct 2, Nazi troops crushed
the 2-month-old (63 days) Warsaw Uprising, during which a
quarter-million people were killed.
(AP, 10/2/97)
1944 Oct 7, Jews burned down
the crematoria during an uprising at Auschwitz.
(MC, 10/7/01)
1944 Oct 7, There was an
uprising at Birkenau concentration camp.
(MC, 10/7/01)
1944 Oct 16, In Hungary the
Horthy government fell as Adolf Eichmann returned to Budapest and
immediately ordered the resumption of the Jewish deportation
program. Ferenc Szalasi (1897-1946) became the prime minister.
(ON, 10/20/11,
p.2)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferenc_Sz%C3%A1lasi)
1944 Nov 6, British official
Lord Moyne was assassinated in Cairo, Egypt, by members of the
Zionist Stern gang (Lehi).
(AP,
11/6/06)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_%28group%29)
1944 Nov 8, In Hungary Jews
under Nazi custody and the command of Adolf Eichmann began marches
of 120 miles to the Austrian border.
(ON, 10/20/11, p.3)
1944 Nov 8, In Hungary Peter
Balazs (18) was fatally beaten to death for failing to wear a yellow
star marking him as a Jew. In 2009 Australia agreed to extradite
Charles Zentai (87) to face charges regarding the fatal beating of
Balazs. In 2012 Australia said Mr Zentai cannot be surrendered for
extradition because the offence of 'war crime' did not exist under
Hungarian law at the time of his alleged criminal conduct.
(www.shalom-magazine.com/Article.php?id=480310)(AP, 11/12/09)(AFP,
8/15/12)
1944 Dec, Carol Deutsch, Jewish
artist, perished in the Holocaust. Deutsch created illustrations of
the Bible while in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium. He was informed
upon, and died in the Buchenwald camp. After the war, his daughter
Ingrid discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and
valuables but had left behind a single item: a meticulously crafted
wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched
menorah, containing a collection of 99 of the artist's illustrations
of biblical scenes.
(AP, 1/11/08)
1944 Irgun leader Menachem
Begin, an officer with the exiled Polish army, led some 3,500
men to fight Britain’s occupation of Palestine.
(Econ., 3/21/15, p.76)
1944 Some 350,000 Romanian Jews
survived WWII and many soon migrated to Israel.
(WSJ, 10/4/06, p.A11)
1945 Oct 20, Egypt, Syria, Iraq
and Lebanon formed the Arab League to present a unified front
against the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
(HN, 10/20/98)
1944 Nov 5, British official
Lord Moyne was assassinated in Cairo, Egypt, by the Zionist Stern
gang.
(AP, 11/5/01)
1944 Nov 6, Hannah Senesh,
Jewish poet, was executed by Nazis in Budapest.
(MC, 11/6/01)
1944 Nov 8, 25,000 Hungarian
Jews were "loaned" to Nazis for forced labor.
(MC, 11/8/01)
1944 Nov 26, Heinrich Himmler
ordered the destruction of Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoriums.
(MC, 11/26/01)
1944 Hungary’s Admiral Miklos
Horthy passed the 4th of four anti-Jewish laws, outlawing sexual
intercourse between Jews and non-Jews.
(Econ, 11/9/13, p.59)
1945 Jan 26, Soviet forces
liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. [see Jan 27]
(MC, 1/26/02)
1945 Jan 27, The Soviet army
arrived at Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland, and found the Nazi
concentration camp and crematorium where 1.1 - 1.5 million people
were murdered. It is now believed that 1 million Jews were murdered
here, up to 75,000 Polish Christians, 21,000 Gypsies, and 15,000
Soviet prisoners of war.
(SF E&C, 1/15/1995, A-10)(AP, 1/27/98)
1945 Jan 30, Nazi SS guards
shot down an estimated 4,000 Jewish prisoners on the Baltic coast at
Palmnicken, Kaliningrad. The town was later renamed by the Russians
to Yantarny. Some 7,000 prisoners had been marched 25 miles from
Konigsberg to a vacant lock factory at Palmnicken where they were
mowed down with machine guns. The prisoners had been vacated from a
network of 30 camps that made up Poland's Stutthoff concentration
camp. 90% of the Jews were women from Lithuania and Hungary.
(SFC, 1/31/00, p.C1)
1945 Feb 4-12, President
Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet
leader Josef Stalin held a wartime conference at Yalta, in the
southern Ukraine. Roosevelt joked to Stalin that the only concession
he might give to Ibn Saud in Saudi Arabia was "the 6 million Jews in
the US."
(AP, 2/4/97)(WUD, 1994, p.1653)(WSJ, 3/8/99,
p.A16)
1945 Apr 3, Nazi's began
evacuation of camp Buchenwald.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1945 Apr 11, The Americans
liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Some 250,000
prisoners passed through the camp and 50,000 are known to have died
there. From 1945 to 1950, occupying Soviet forces used the camp to
hold political prisoners.
(AP, 4/11/97)(WSJ, 3/26/99, p.B1)(SFC, 8/3/99,
p.A10)(AP, 6/5/09)
1945 Apr 22, Concentration Camp
at Sachsenhausen was liberated.
(MC, 4/22/02)
1945 May, In Austria US Army
officers and troops plundered a “gold train” on its way to Germany
from Hungary that carried gold, jewels, paintings and other
valuables seized by the Nazis from Jewish families. A 2001 suit
filed in Miami said the army falsely classified it as unidentifiable
and enemy property, which avoided having to return the goods to
their rightful owners. The suit alleged that the US made no effort
to return the goods and lied to Hungarian Jews who sought
information about their property after the war. In 2004 the property
was estimated to be worth ten times its original $200 million
valuation. In 2005 the US government reached a $25.5 million
settlement with families of the Hungarian Holocaust victims for
distribution to needy Holocaust survivors.
(AP, 12/20/04)(SFC, 3/12/05, p.A5)
1945 Aug 13, 35 Jews sacrificed
their lives to blow up a Nazi rubber plant in Silesia.
(MC, 8/13/02)
1945 Aug 25, Jewish
immigrants were permitted to leave Mauritius for Palestine.
(chblue.com, 8/25/01)
1945 Sep 8, Bess Myerson of New
York was crowned Miss America, the first Jewish contestant to win
the title.
(AP, 9/8/99)
1945-1948 The 1997 documentary film "The Long Way
Home" was about Holocaust survivors and won a 1998 Oscar. It was
written and directed by Mark Jonathon Harris and covered the years
1945-1948, when the state of Israel was formed.
(SFC, 3/24/98, p.A6)
1945-1950 In 2002 Ruth Gay authored "Safe Among
the Germans," an account of Eastern European Jews in the post-war
refugee camps.
(SFC, 9/19/02, p.D12)
1946 Apr 13, Jewish "Avengers"
carried out a mass poisoning of former SS men at Stalag 13, an
American prisoner-of-war camp at Langwasser. The effort sickened
more than 2,200 Germans but ultimately caused no known deaths.
Authorities in Nuremberg later investigated Joseph Harmatz and
Leipke Distal, who worked undercover in a nearby bakery for months,
after they appeared in a 1999 television documentary and revealed
details of the operation.
(AP, 8/31/16)
1946 May 25, Marcel Petiot
(b.1897), a French doctor, was beheaded for offering Jews an escape
to Argentina, then killing them and getting rid of their bodies,
many by incineration. The remains of 26 people were found in his
home, but he was suspected of killing more than 60 people. In 1980
Thomas Maeder authored “The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot.” In
2011 David King chronicled the hunt for Petiot in "Death in the City
of Light."
(WSJ, 6/9/07,
p.P8)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Petiot)(Reuters, 11/10/11)
1946 July 4, A postwar pogrom
in Kielce, Poland, left 42 Jews people, mostly Jews, dead and 50
wounded. Army and security officers took part in the attack that was
sparked by the false story of Walenty Blaszcyk that his son had been
kidnapped by Jews. The event is considered as Europe’s last pogrom.
In 2001 Jan Tomascz Gross authored “Neighbours,” the story of the
Kielce Jews, who were herded into a barn that was set alight.
(WSJ, 3/20/96, p.A-14)(SFC,10/17/97, p.D3)(Econ,
2/2/08, p.59)
1946 Jul 22, Jewish extremists,
that included Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, blew up a wing of
the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed British
administrative offices. 90-92 people were killed and included
Britons (28), Arabs and Jews. The admitted terrorists were members
of a Zionist organization called Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel),
earlier known as the Stern Gang.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C8)(AP, 7/22/97)(SSFC, 10/28/01,
p.C5)
1946 Aug 13, Britain
transferred illegal immigrants bound for Palestine to Cyprus.
(MC, 8/13/02)
1946 Dec 20, Uri Geller,
psychic and fork bender, was born in Israel.
(MC, 12/20/01)
1946 Zvi Kolitz (d.2002 at 89)
wrote the story "Yosl Rakover Talks to God," for a Jewish newspaper
in Buenos Aires. It became a classic of Holocaust literature.
(SFC, 10/12/02, p.A21)
1946 Egypt’s King Farouk hosted
the 1st Arab summit. The group resolved to thwart the birth of
Israel.
(SFC, 3/26/02, p.A10)
1946 In Palestine Israeli Lehi
assassins dressed up as tennis players killed British detective
Thomas Martin. Lehi was led by Yitzhak Yezernitzky (later PM Yitzhak
Shamir).
(Econ., 3/21/15, p.76)
1947 Jan 12, In Haifa,
Palestine, the Stern Gang drove a truckload of explosives into a
British police station. 4 people were killed and 140 injured.
(SSFC, 4/16/06, p.E4)
1947 Feb 7, Arabs and Jews
rejected a British proposal to split Palestine.
(MC, 2/7/02)
1947 Feb 23, Gen. Eisenhower
opened a drive to raise $170M in aid for European Jews.
(MC, 2/23/02)
1947 Apr 1, The 1st Jewish
immigrants to Israel disembarked at Port of Eilat.
(MC, 4/1/02)
1947 Jul 16, Raoul Wallenberg,
Swedish diplomat jailed by the Soviets who believed that he was an
American spy, reportedly died at the Lubyanka prison in Moscow of an
alleged heart attack. He had saved more than 20,000 Hungarian Jews
from Nazi death camps. A 2001 Swedish report failed to confirm his
death.
(SFC, 5/5/96, p.A-7)(SFC, 12/23/00, p.A12)(SFC,
1/13/01, p.A14)(WSJ, 2/28/09, p.A7)
1947 Jul 18, British seized the
"Exodus 1947" ship of Jewish immigrants to Palestine. The British
Royal Navy intercepted the ship President Warfield, which had been
renamed Exodus by its passengers, forcing the 4,000 Jewish would-be
immigrants aboard back to Displaced Person camps in Germany. Britain
was still the ruling power in Palestine, which was being wracked by
conflict resulting from Jewish national aspirations. The return of
the Jewish immigrants, many of them survivors of Nazi persecution,
heightened anti-British sentiment among Jews in Palestine and
elsewhere. Yossi Harel, commander of the Exodus, died in 2008 at age
90.
(MC, 7/18/02)(HNQ, 12/4/98)(AP, 4/26/08)
1947 Jul 31, The Jewish
underground Irgun Zvai Leumi said it hanged 2 British sergeants in
Palestine.
(G&M, 7/31/97, p.A2)
1947 Sep 8, British government
sailed the "Exodus" with fugitives from Nazis.
(MC, 9/8/01)
1947 Nov 29, The U.N. General
Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partitioning of
Palestine [Jerusalem] between Arabs and Jews. It was to be the heart
of an Arab Palestinian state.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C8)(AP, 11/29/97)(SFC, 1/22/98,
p.B12)
1947 Nov 30, A day after the UN
decree for Israel, Jewish settlements were attacked.
(MC, 11/30/01)
1947 Dec 2, A Syrian mob burned
a synagogue where the Aleppo Codex was hidden. This followed a UN
resolution calling for the creation of Arab and Jewish states in
Palestine Nearly two-thirds of the pages were retrieved by
congregant, Mourad Faham. But 196 pages vanished, including books of
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations,
Esther, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah, as well as pages from other
books.
(AP, 9/27/08)(SSFC, 6/28/09, p.A8)
1947 Dec 29, Ship carrying
Jewish immigrants were forced back from Palestine.
(MC, 12/29/01)
1947 Chief Rabbi Alexander
Safran was dismissed from his post and forced to leave Romania,
making his home in Geneva. He had refused to cooperate with the new
Jewish Democratic Committee, saying it was a Communist body intent
on breaking up traditional Jewish organizations and bringing Jewish
life in Romania to a standstill.
(AP, 7/28/06)
1947 The Dead Sea Scrolls were
discovered by Bedouin at the caves of Qumran in Jordan. The scrolls
predated the Christian gospels, but contained many similarities.
They also contained some differences from the traditional
(Masoretic) text of the Hebrew Bible. In 1955 Edmund Wilson
published "The Scrolls from the Dead Sea." In 1998 Hershel Shank
published "The Mystery and meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls." From
1978-1998 over 6,000 books were written about the scrolls. The
discovery date was later contested as were many of the historic
circumstances surrounding the scrolls. In 2010 Geza Vermes authored
“The Story of the Scrolls: The Miraculous Discovery and the True
significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
(WSJ, 5/15/98, p.W11)(WSJ, 6/22/98, p.A20)(Econ,
2/20/10, p.82)
1948 Feb 1, The Palestine Post
building in Jerusalem was bombed.
(MC, 2/1/02)
1948 Feb 22, An Arab bomb
attack in Jerusalem killed 50 people.
(MC, 2/22/02)
1948 Mar 10, Political and
military men gathered at the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Haganah
and put the final touches to Plan Dalet. In 2006 Prof. Ilan Pappe of
the Univ. of Haifa authored “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” He
held that Plan Dalet was a plan for the ethnic cleansing of some
800,000 Palestinians in order to allow the formation of the Jewish
state.
(Econ, 11/4/06, p.92)
1948 Mar 11, Jewish Agency of
Jerusalem was bombed.
(MC, 3/12/02)
1948 Mar 24, Israel Galili,
chief of the Haganah, sent orders reminding commanders of the policy
to protect the “full rights, needs, and freedoms of the Arabs in the
Hebrew state without discrimination.”
(Econ, 11/4/06, p.93)
1948 Apr 9, Chaim Weizmann,
head of the World Zionist Organization, wrote to Pres. Truman
saying: “The choice for our people, Mr. President, is between
statehood and extermination.”
(Econ, 1/13/07, p.53)
1948 Apr 9, In Deir Yassin
about one-third of 750 Palestinians were killed by Jewish fighters
of the National Military Organization, an underground group better
known as the Irgun, and a splinter group called Lehi. The event is
called Al-Nakbah (catastrophe) by the Palestinians. 30 similar
massacres happened on other Palestinian villages. The death toll was
said to be inflated by Jewish forces to invoke fear and cause
maximum flight.
(SFC, 3/18/98, p.A10)(SFC, 4/25/98, p.A1,11)
1948 Apr 10, Jewish Hagana
repelled an Arab attack on Mishmar HaEmek.
(MC, 4/10/02)
1948 Apr 15, Arabs were
defeated in the first Jewish-Arab battle.
(HN, 4/15/98)
1948 May 11, Haganah took
control of Safed and port of Haifa.
(MC, 5/11/02)
1948 May 14, The British
evacuated Israel. The independent state of Israel was proclaimed in
Tel Aviv under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion as British rule in
Palestine came to an end. Ben-Gurion and 36 fellow members of the
Provisional Council of State signed the Declaration of the
Establishment of the State of Israel. 10 of the member’s signatures
were delayed for 10 days because they were cut off by fighting in
Jerusalem.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C8)(AP, 5/14/97) (SFC, 4/24/98,
p.A17)(HN, 5/14/98)(WSJ, 6/1/00, p.A20)(SFC, 10/12/02, p.A21)
1948 May 14, US granted Israel
de facto recognition.
(MC, 5/14/02)
1948 May 15, A 28 year old
British Mandate over Palestine ended.
(MC, 5/15/02)
1948 May 15, Hours after
declaring its independence, the new state of Israel was attacked by
Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
(AP, 5/15/97)
1948 May 16, Chaim Weizmann was
elected Chairman of the Provisional State Council of Israel.
Weizmann, born in Russia in 1874, taught chemistry in England and as
a leading Zionist influenced Britain’s Balfour Declaration of 1917
favoring a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Weizmann settled in
Palestine in 1934 and served as president of Israel from 1948 until
his death in 1952.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann)
1948 May 16, PM David
Ben-Gurion appointed Israel Amir (d.2002) to head the fledgling air
force of 8 secondhand light aircraft. Amir held the post for 10
weeks and raised the force to 3,000 personnel.
(SFC, 11/2/02, p.A22)
1948 May 17 The Soviet Union
recognized the new state of Israel.
(AP, 5/17/97)
1948 May 18, Arab Legion
captured the fort on Mount Scopus.
(SC, 5/18/02)
1948 May 18, Saudi Arabia
joined the invasion of Israel.
(SC, 5/18/02)
1948 May 20, Israel made the
1st use of its Air Force and claimed its 1st war victory with the
defeat of the Syrian army.
(MC, 5/20/02)
1948 May 24, Ariel Sharon, then
called Arik Scheinerman, was wounded at the battle of Latrun while
securing Jerusalem for Jews in the 1st Arab-Israeli War.
(WSJ, 10/13/00, p.A15)(Econ, 12/16/06,
p.85)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latrun)
1948 May 26, Entire Hagana arm
forces were sworn-in as Israeli soldiers.
(MC, 5/26/02)
1948 May 27, Arabs blew up the
Jewish synagogue Hurvat Rabbi Yehudah he-Hasid.
(MC, 5/27/02)
1948 Jun 1, Israel and the
Arabs agreed to a cease fire.
(DTnet 6/1/97)
1948 Jul 1, Zahava Rozman,
artist, was born in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 1958 she moved to NYC and
in 1976 graduated from Pratt Inst. with a BFA in Fine Arts.
(www.see-art.net/current_work.html)
1948 Jul 14, Israel bombed
Cairo.
(MC, 7/14/02)
1948 Jul 16, Pinchas Zukerman,
violinist and conductor, was born in Tel Aviv Israel.
(HN, 7/16/01)(MC, 7/16/02)
1948 Aug 23, Count Bernadotte
asked for aid for fugitives to Palestine. [see Sep 17]
(MC, 8/23/02)
1948 Sep 17, Count Folke
Bernadotte (b.1895) of Sweden, the UN mediator for Palestine, was
assassinated in Jerusalem by members of the extreme Zionist Stern
Group. Yehoshua Zettler (d.2009 at 91), one of the founding members
of the group, masterminded the assassination.
(AP,
9/17/98)(www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/Bernadotte.html)(AP,
5/25/09)
1948 Sep 18, Ralph J. Bunche
was confirmed as acting UN mediator in Palestine.
(MC, 9/18/01)
1948 Oct 14, Large scale
fighting took place between Israel and Egypt.
(MC, 10/14/01)
1948 Oct 16, Moscow Jews held a
demonstration honoring Israeli ambassador Golda Meir.
(MC, 10/16/01)
1948 Oct 21, The Israeli
offensive, Operation 10 Plagues, liberated Beersheba (Be’er Sheva)
from Egyptian control.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beersheba)
1948 Oct 23, Israel established
its first diplomatic mission as a new nation at the Bristol Hotel in
central Warsaw, Poland.
(AP, 10/23/18)
1948 Oct 28, Flag of Israel was
adopted.
(MC, 10/28/01)
1948 Nov 16, Operation Magic
Carpet began with the 1st plane from Yemen carrying Jews to Israel.
(MC, 11/16/01)
1948 Nov, In Israel hundreds of
residents left Kufr Birim, a Maronite village just south of the
Lebanese border. Israeli troops told Kufr Birim residents they must
leave for security reasons, but would be allowed to return after two
weeks. Their return never materialized.
(AP, 5/28/14)
1948 Dec 8, Jordan annexed
Arabic Palestine. The old city of East Jerusalem came under
Jordanian control until 1968. Transjordan was given to a client Arab
family, the Hashemites (led by King Hussein’s grandfather), and was
run out of Mecca by the Saudis. The country now has an ethnic
Palestinian majority. Elections chose a body evenly divided between
Jordan and the Palestinian territories.
(SFC, 6/24/96, p.A19)(WSJ, 4/9/97, p.A14)(AP,
1/23/13)
1948 Dec 11, United Nations
General Assembly Resolution 194 was passed near the end of the 1948
Arab-Israeli War. The resolution expresses appreciation for the
efforts of UN Envoy Folke Bernadotte after his assassination by
members of the Stern Gang. It was later often quoted in support of
the Palestinian right of return.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_194)(Econ,
9/6/08, p.68)
1948 John Phillips (1915-1996),
photographer for Life Magazine, took pictures of the ill-fated
defense of the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem against
Arab troops.
(SFC, 8/27/96, p.A17)
1948 The Dheisheh Refugee Camp
for Palestinians was founded outside Bethlehem. Some 700,000
Palestinians had become refugees in the war.
(SFC, 3/22/00, p.A10)(SFC, 4/30/02, p.A8)
1948 Israel's PM David
Ben-Gurion allowed 400 ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim) to avoid
compulsory military service to pursue a life of Talmudic study. By
2017 Yeshiva students numbered some 60,000.
(Econ, 9/30/17, p.46)
1948 Chaim Herzog (1918-1997)
founded Israel’s military intelligence service.
(SFC, 4/18/97, p.E2)
1948 Soon after independence
Israel began to evacuate Jews from Yemen and other middle Eastern
countries to Israel.
(SFC, 8/28/97, p.C2)
1948 The military unit of
Yitzhak Rabin, on orders from David Ben-Gurion, forced the Arab
inhabitants from the towns of Lydda (later Lod) and Ramleh.
(SFC, 1/12/01, p.A16)
1948 In the months preceding
the war between Israel and the Arab states some 10,000 Arab homes in
West Jerusalem were looted and seized.
(SSFC, 5/18/03, p.D6)
1948 Jerusalem was split
between Israel and Jordan.
(SFC, 4/30/02, p.A8)
1948 Jewish militia massacred
Palestinians at Deir Yassin.
(SFC, 3/18/98, p.A10)
1948 Attacks on Baghdad’s
synagogues prompted the flight of most of Iraq’s 200,000 Jews.
(Econ, 8/7/04, p.39)
1948 The UN Truce Supervision
Organization (UNTSO) was established to observe the cease-fire
following the war that followed Israel's creation.
(AP, 7/28/06)
1948 Charles Winters, a Miami
businessman, broke US law to supply B-17 bombers to Jews fighting in
Israel’s war of independence. In 1949 he was convicted for violating
the Neutrality Act, for which he was fined $5,000 and sentenced to
18 months in prison. In 2008 Pres. Bush granted Winters a posthumous
pardon.
(SFC, 12/24/08, p.A3)
1948 In Libya more deadly
attacks took place against the Jewish community, prompting most of
those remaining to leave. A few thousand remained until 1967.
(WSJ, 1/10/07, p.A19)
1948-1949 Jordan seized the West Bank and Egypt
occupied the Gaza Strip.
(SFC, 6/24/96, p.A19)(SFC, 1/22/98, p.B12)
1948-1949 Iraqi troops participated in the Arab
League invasion of the new state of Israel. Iraq joined Transjordan
and other Arab states to fight Israel. Most of Iraq’s 120,000 Jews
fled to Israel or the West.
(SFC, 2/24/98, p.A9)(SFC, 9/24/02, p.A10)
1948-1968 The old city of East Jerusalem was under
Jordanian control. Transjordan was given to a client family, the
Hashenites (led by King Hussein’s grandfather), and was run out of
Mecca by the Saudis.
(WSJ, 4/9/97, p.A14)
1948-1998 Micha Bar-Am in 1998 published "Israel,
A Photobiography: The First Fifty Years."
(SFEC, 4/26/98, BR p.6)
1949 Feb 14, 1st session of
Knesset (Jerusalem Israel).
(MC, 2/14/02)
1949 Feb 16, Chaim Weitzman was
elected the 1st president of Israel. The title was invented by PM
David Ben-Gurion to honor and to sideline veteran Zionist leader
Chaim Weitzman.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann)(Econ, 8/29/15, p.40)
1949 Feb 24, Israel and Egypt
signed an armistice agreement.
(MC, 2/24/02)
1949 Feb 27, Chaim Weizmann
became the 1st Israeli president.
(MC, 2/27/02)
1949 Mar 4, Security Council of
UN recommended membership for Israel.
(SC, 3/4/02)
1949 Mar 23, Israel signed a
ceasefire agreement with Lebanon.
(www.wikipedia.org)
1949 Apr 3, Israel signed a
ceasefire agreement with Transjordan.
(www.wikipedia.org)
1949 May 11, Israel was
admitted to the United Nations as the world body's 59th member by a
vote of 37-12. The capital was moved to Tel Aviv.
(TOH, 1982, p.1949)(AP, 5/11/97)(MC, 5/11/02)
1949 Jul 20, Israel's 19 month
war of independence ended with a ceasefire agreement with Syria.
According to Israel's Foreign Ministry, 6,373 people, or nearly 1
percent of the Jewish population, were killed during Israel's War of
Independence.
(www.wikipedia.org)(AP, 12/8/07)
1949 Aug 5, A bomb exploded at
a synagogue in Damascus, Syria, killing 12 people.
(SSFC, 6/28/09, p.A8)(http://tinyurl.com/loxc6n)
1949 Oct 21, Benjamin
Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, was born.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A20)(MC, 10/21/01)
1949 Nov 20, Jewish population
of Israel reached 1,000,000.
(MC, 11/20/01)
1949 Nov 28, Victor Ostrovsky,
Canadian-Israeli, Mossad agent (By Way of Deception), was born.
(MC, 11/28/01)
1949 Dec 9, UN took trusteeship
over Jerusalem.
(HN, 12/9/98)
1949 Dec 13, Knesset voted to
transfer Israel's capital to Jerusalem.
(MC, 12/13/01)
1949 Dec, The UN Relief and
Works Agency (UNRWA) was established to serve Palestinian Arabs
after more than 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during
the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation. By 2018 it was supplying
aid to more than three million of the five million eligible
Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian
territories.
(SSFC, 5/19/02, p.A10)(AFP, 10/2/18)
1949 Yizhar Smilanksy, under
the pen-name S. Yizhar, authored “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novella based
on his experience in clearing a Palestinian village on the Israeli
side of the 1949 ceasefire line.
(Econ, 4/12/08, p.93)
1949-1950 Some 35,000 Yemenite Jews were airlifted
to Israel. Some 14,000 more followed in the early 1950s. Some
children were separated from their parents and passed on to other
parents.
(SFC, 8/28/97, p.C2)
1950 Jan 23, The Israeli
Knesset approved a resolution proclaiming Jerusalem the capital of
Israel.
(SFC,12/11/97, p.C2)(AP, 1/23/98)
1950 Apr 24, Jordan annexed the
West Bank and offered citizenship to all Palestinians wishing to
claim it.
(SFC, 2/8/99, p.A6)
1950 Sep 24, In "Operation
Magic Carpet" all Jews from Yemen moved to Israel.
(MC, 9/24/01)
1950 Israel enacted an Absentee
Property Law which allowed the state to confiscate land within
Israel if its owners spent any time at all away in Arab countries.
(Econ, 2/5/05, p.46)
1950 Some 20,000 Jews remained
in Germany. 8,000 of these were native German Jews and some 12,000
came from eastern Europe, mostly from Poland.
(Econ, 1/5/08, p.41)
1951 Mar 8, The Int’l. Table
Tennis Federation banned Egypt for refusing to play Israel.
(MC, 3/8/02)
1951 Mar 13, Israel demanded DM
6.2 billion ($1.5 billion) in German reparations for the cost of
caring for war refugees.
(HN, 3/13/98)(MC, 3/13/02)
1951 Apr 12, The Israeli
Knesset officially designated the 27th of Nissan, a few days after
the end of Passover, as Holocaust Memorial Day.
(http://tinyurl.com/76zxh)
1951 Jul 20, Jordan's King
Abdullah Ibn Hussein was assassinated in Jerusalem by a Palestinian
extremist. Prince Hussein (15) witnessed the murder. Talal became
king with the assassination of his father, Abdullah ibn-Hussein, who
ruled when Jordan was a British mandate.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_I_of_Jordan)(AP,
7/20/97)(HN, 7/20/98)(SFC, 2/6/99, p.A13)
1951 Sep 1, PM Ben-Gurion
ordered the establishment of Mossad, the Israeli secret service.
(MC, 9/1/02)
1951 Oct 7, David Ben-Gurion
formed Israeli government.
(MC, 10/7/01)
1951 The American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (Aipac) was founded. It was the only US registered
Jewish lobby and was dedicated to nurturing and preserving the
American-Israeli relationship regardless of the government in
Washington or Israel.
(SFEC, 4/26/98, p.A23)
1951 The Conference on Jewish
Material Claims against Germany was founded.
(Econ, 8/23/03, p.44)
1951 The Work and Rest Hours
Act was passed. The law prohibited companies from employing workers
on their religious days of rest.
(WSJ, 6/24/97, p.A1)
1952 Sep 10, Germany and Israel
signed an accord about recovery payments in the Luxembourg
Agreement. West Germany agreed to pay Israel a sum of 3 billion
marks over the next fourteen years. It was signed by West German
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett
and World Jewish Congress President Nahum Goldmann.
(http://tinyurl.com/etznn)(http://tinyurl.com/h6n7m)
1952 Nov 3, Egypt protested
German retribution payments to Israel.
(MC, 11/3/01)
1952
Nov 9, Chaim Weizmann (b.1874), Russian-born bio-chemist and 1st
president of Israel (1949-1952), died.
(www.jafi.org.il/education/100/people/bios/weiz.html)
1952 West Germany signed a
compensation treaty for victims of Nazi crimes.
(SFC, 11/16/12, p.A2)
1953 Feb 12, The Soviets broke
off diplomatic relations with Israel after the bombing of Soviet
legation.
(HN, 2/12/97)
1953 Jul 20, USSR and Israel
recovered diplomatic relations.
(MC, 7/20/02)
1953 Oct 14, Ariel Sharon, who
had formed the elite Israeli commando unit "101" to fight
Palestinian guerrillas, led it in a raid against the Jordanian
village of Qibya killed some 70 civilians.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qibya_massacre)(SFC, 10/10/98,
p.A8)(Econ, 12/16/06, p.85)
1953 Nov 12, David Ben-Gurion,
resigned as premier of Israel.
(MC, 11/12/01)
1953 Nov 16, The US joined in
the condemnation of Israel for its raid on Jordan.
(HN, 11/16/98)
1953 Dec 7, Israel's PM
Ben-Gurion retired.
(MC, 12/7/01)
1953 In Israel Shimon Peres
(b.1923) became the youngest ever Director General of the Ministry
of Defense. He was involved in arms purchases and establishing
strategic alliances that were important for the State of Israel.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres)
1953 Hizb ut-Tahir was founded
in Jerusalem by Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, an Islamic scholar and appeals
court judge from the Palestinian village of Ijzim. It seeks the
return of the caliphate, based on Islamic sharia law, by political
means. By 2012 it had members and sympathizers in more than 50
countries.
(AP,
3/10/12)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hizb_ut-Tahrir)
1953 Israeli forces demolished
Kufr Birim, a Maronite village just south of the Lebanese border,
five years after persuading hundreds of residents to leave with the
promise of a speedy return that never materialized.
(AP, 5/28/14)
1954 Jun 20, Ilan Ramon,
Israeli pilot and astronaut, was born in Tel Aviv. He was among the
7 astronauts killed in the US Columbia space shuttle tragedy Feb 1,
2003.
(SSFC, 2/2/03, p.A8)
1954 Oct 14, An Israeli act of
revenge in Qibiya, Jordan, killed 53.
(MC, 10/14/01)
1954 Zvi Kolitz (d.2002 at 89)
wrote and co-produced "Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer," Israel’s 1st war of
independence movie.
(SFC, 10/12/02, p.A21)
1954 Zohara Shatz (d.1999) was
awarded the Israel Prize, an honor conferred by the president on
distinguished scholars, artists, writers and public figures.
(SFC, 8/6/99, p.D4)
1954 Israel established an
enemy infiltrators law. It allowed the government to hold people
without judicial revue if they were deemed to be security threats.
(SFC, 6/9/06, p.A14)
1954 The Uzi machine gun was
first made by Israel Military Industries. Uzi Gal, the inventor of
Israel's Uzi submachine gun, died in Philadelphia after a long
illness in 2002. The Netherlands was the 1st country outside Israel
to buy Uzis in 1958.
(AP, 9/9/02)(SFC, 9/10/02, p.A16)
1954-1959 The names of 77,297 Czech Jews were put
on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague. The memorial was
closed in 1968. It was renovated after the collapse of the Communist
regime and re-opened in 1996.
(www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/a-ex-pinkas.htm)
1955 Feb 13, Israel acquired 4
of 7 Dead Sea scrolls. Israel already had 3 scrolls, acquired in
1947. The 4 scrolls were purchased from a Christian clergyman, a
Syrian Orthodox archbishop. The price, according to the New York
Times, was an estimated $300,000.
(NYT, 2/14/55, p.21)
1955 Feb 14, A Jewish couple
lost their fight to adopt Catholic twins as the U.S. Supreme Court
refused to rule on state law.
(HN, 2/14/98)
1955 Mar 1, An Israeli
retaliation in Gaza is reported as having killed 37 Egyptians and
wounded 29 others. Palestinians stone the United Nations Gaza
office.
(www.fsmitha.com/time/1955.htm)
1955 Nov 2, David Ben-Gurion
formed an Israeli govt.
(MC, 11/2/01)
1955 Dec 11, Israel launched an
attack on Syrian positions along the Sea of Galilee.
(EWH, 1968, p.1241)(HN, 12/11/98)
1956 Apr 18, An
Israeli-Egyptian cease fire, arranged by UN Gen’l. Sec. Dag
Hammarskjöld, went into effect.
(EWH, 1968, p.1241)
1956 Jun 17, Golda Meir began
her term as Israel's foreign minister.
(MC, 6/17/02)
1956 Jul 25, Jordanians
attacked the UN Palestine truce.
(SC, 7/25/02)
1956 Sep 30, An Israeli
delegation presented France with a fabricated reason for war in
Egypt. The details were agreed on at a secret meeting in Sevres.
Israel proposed to invade Egypt and then let France and Britain come
in as peacekeepers and occupy the Suez Canal.
(Econ, 7/29/06, p.24)
1956 Oct 29, During the Suez
Canal crisis, Israel launched an invasion of Egypt's Sinai
Peninsula. Paratroopers under Ariel Sharon dropped into Sinai to
open the Straits of Tiran. The Sinai Campaign, also known as
Operation Kadesh, lasted eight days to November 5, 1956.
(AP, 10/29/97)(Econ, 7/29/06,
p.24)(www.jafi.org.il/education/100/Concepts/d3.html)
1956 Oct 29, At Kafr Kassem
village 49 Palestinians were massacred by Israeli border guards
enforcing a curfew.
(SFC, 3/28/00,
p.A10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafr_Qasim_massacre)
1956 Nov 2, Gaza was occupied
by the Israeli army and evacuated in March 1957.
(www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0007_0_07101.html)
1956 Nov 2, The UN passed an
American resolution, 64 to 5, for a ceasefire at the Suez Canal in
Egypt. The General Assembly took up a Canadian suggestion for an
emergency force to monitor the ceasefire. The UN Emergency Force
(UNEF) became the first “blue hat” UN peacekeepers.
(Econ, 7/29/06,
p.24)(www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/past/unefi.htm)
1956 Nov 4, Israel captured the
Straits of Tiran and reached the Suez Canal in Egypt.
(MC, 11/4/01)
1956 Nov 5, Israel liberated
Sharm-el-Sheikh, reopening Gulf of Aqaba.
(MC, 11/5/01)
1956 Nov 5, Britain and France
started landing troops in Egypt during fighting between Egyptian and
Israeli forces around the Suez Canal. A cease-fire was declared two
days later.
(AP, 11/5/97)
1956 Nov 6, Pressure from the
US and USSR effected a cease-fire in the Middle-East. The UN created
an emergency force (UNEF) to supervise a cease fire. Britain’s PM
Anthony Eden called French PM Guy Mollet to tell him that Britain
was aborting operations in Egypt. German chancellor Konrad Adenauer,
meeting with Mollet, remarked that Europe must unite to counter the
influence of the United States.
(TOH, 1982, p.1956)(EWH, 1968, p. 1242)(Econ,
7/29/06, p.24)
1956 Nov 7, Britain’s PM
Anthony Eden surrendered to American demands and stopped British
operations in Egypt’s Canal Zone.
(Econ, 7/29/06, p.29)
1956 Dec 18, The Israeli flag
was hoisted on Mount Sinai.
(MC, 12/18/01)
1956 Zorach Warhaftig (d.2002
at 96), a rabbi from Belarus, helped found the National Religious
Party.
(SFC, 10/12/02, p.A21)
1957 Mar 8, Israeli troops left
Egypt. Suez Canal re-opened for minor ships.
(MC, 3/8/02)
1957 Mar 12, In Israel Rudolf
Kasztner, hailed by admirers as a Holocaust hero for saving
thousands of Jews, was assassinated by Jewish extremists. Critics
had reviled him as a collaborator who "sold his soul." Kasztner, a
Zionist leader in Hungary during World War II, headed the Relief and
Rescue Committee, a small Jewish group that negotiated with Nazi
officials to rescue Hungarian Jews in exchange for money, goods and
military equipment.
(AP,
7/23/07)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Kastner)
1957 Oct 29, Hand grenade
exploded in Israel's Knesset (Parliament).
(MC, 10/29/01)
1957 Dec 9, Japan [announced?]
its 1st ambassador to Israel.
(MC, 12/9/01)
1957 The Jewish town of Upper
Nazareth was built on confiscated Palestinian land for the purpose
of domination over Palestinian Nazareth. The 1997 book "Overlooking
Nazareth: The Ethnography of Exclusion in Jalilee" (sic) by Dan
Rabinowitz describes the relations between Arabs and Jews here.
(MT, Fall. ‘97, p.16)
1958 Nov 18, The 1st true
reservoir in Jerusalem opened.
(MC, 11/18/01)
1958 Waltert Eytan (d.2001 at
90), diplomat, authored "The First Ten Years: A Diplomatic History
of Israel."
(SSFC, 5/27/01, p.A27)
1958 Israeli Premier David
Ben-Gurion made a secret visit to Ankara, Turkey.
(SFC, 10/26/99, p.B2)
1958 Mourad Faham smuggled the
Aleppo Codex out of Syria to Turkey and then to Jerusalem, where it
was presented to the president of Israel. In 1982 the first missing
page, from the Book of Chronicles, surfaced in New York and was sent
to join rest of the manuscript. In 2007 another fragment, a piece
from the Exodus story of the 10 plagues, was sent to Jerusalem. Sam
Sabbagh, an Aleppo Jew living in New York, had carried it in wallet
for decades as good luck charm.
(AP, 9/27/08)
1958 Israeli scholars at Hebrew
Univ. began working on the Bible Project. They sought to publish an
authoritative edition of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew
Bible, tracking every single evolution of the text over centuries
and millennia.
(AP, 8/12/11)
1959 Jan 28, Joseph Sprinzak
(73), Speaker of Israel Knesset (1949-59), died.
(MC, 1/28/02)
1959 Jun, Britain shipped 20
tons of heavy water to Israel. The information, made public in 2005,
revealed that the water was vital for the production of plutonium at
Israel's secret Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert. The
documents revealed that heavy water was transported from a British
port in Israeli ships in two shipments, half in June 1959 and half a
year later.
(AP, 8/4/05)(AP, 12/10/05)
1959 Jul 1, Israeli Knesset
agreed to weapon sales to West Germany.
(MC, 7/1/02)
1959 Jul 5, Ben-Gurion's
Israeli government resigned.
(MC, 7/5/02)
1959 Jul 25, Dr. Isaac Halevi
Herzog (71), chief rabbi of Israel (1936-59), died.
(SC, 7/25/02)
1959 Nov 3, Ben-Gurion's
Mapai-party won Israeli parliamentary election.
(MC, 11/3/01)
1960 May 11, Israeli soldiers
captured Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires as he returned home from his
job at the Mercedes factory. Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal, was
nabbed by Peter Malkin. Eichmann was taken to Israel where he was
tried, found guilty and hung in 1962.
(SFEC, 11/3/96, Par. p.13)(WSJ, 4/28/97,
p.A17)(HN, 5/11/98)(MC, 5/11/02)
1960 May 23, Israel announced
Israeli agents had captured former Nazi official SS Lt. Col. Adolf
Eichmann in Argentina. Eichmann was tried in Israel, found guilty of
crimes against humanity, and hanged in 1962. [see May 11]
(WSJ, 4/28/97, p.A17)(AP, 5/23/02)
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