Today in Jewish History

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Nisan 22 

 

In the Hebrew year 2488 (1272 BCE), Joshua began a seven-day march around Jericho in anticipation of the Jewish conquest. The Jews circled the walls one time each day, for six days, and then on the seventh day marched around Jericho seven times -- until its walls collapsed amidst shofar blasts. The events are recorded in the biblical Book of Joshua, chapter 6.

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Nisan 23 

 

In 1921, Arab mobs attacked Jewish residents of Jaffa and stormed the Zionist Immigration Center, killing 47 Jews. The Arabs used rioting as a political tool: After each outbreak, a British commission of inquiry would pin the cause of the violence on the Arabs' fear of being displaced by Jews. To stop the rioting, the commission would recommend that restrictions be placed on Jewish immigration. In this particular case, the Arabs won the battle -- to scare the Jews out of Jaffa -- but lost the war: The riots spurred Jewish settlement in neighboring Tel Aviv, which left Jaffa nearly devoid of Jewish commercial interests. Again in 1929, rioting caused Jews to leave Jaffa, and before long Tel Aviv had overshadowed Jaffa as Israel's main commercial center.

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Nisan 24 

 

In the Hebrew year 2448 (1312 BCE), after crossing the Red Sea, the Jews came to a place called Mara -- literally "bitter," because the water there was bitter. The people complained and Moses miraculously made the waters turn sweet. It was here that God gave the Jews some of the first mitzvot -- the laws of Shabbat and some civil laws -- in anticipation of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, some six weeks later.

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Nisan 25 

 

In 1933, King Christian X of Denmark attended the 100th anniversary celebration of a synagogue in Copenhagen, to demonstrate his solidarity with the Jews. During the Holocaust, King Christian served as a rare example of refusal to cooperate in the murder of Jews. Almost all of the Jews of Denmark survived the war, while those in almost every other Nazi-occupied nation had their ranks decimated. In September 1943, the Nazis decided to deport all Danish Jews to the death camps -- but overnight a rescue organization was established and Danes from all walks of life helped to ferry some 6,000 Jews to safety in Sweden. Remarkably, less than two percent of the Jewish population of Denmark perished -- and Denmark later apologized for sending 19 Jews to concentration camps. One story (probably apocryphal, and popularized by Leon Uris in his book, Exodus) says that King Christian X bravely promised to wear a yellow star if the Jews would be forced to.

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Nisan 26 

 

Yahrtzeit of the biblical Joshua, Yehoshua Bin Nun, in 1243 BCE. Joshua was born in Egypt, and he led Israel in the first decisive battle against Amalek (Exodus ch. 17). Joshua was Moses' prime disciple, and accompanied him partway up Mount Sinai. Joshua was also one of the 12 spies sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan. Before Moses died, God had him appoint Joshua as his successor. When Joshua led the Jewish people into Israel, the Jordan River miraculously split. Joshua's first conquest was Jericho; after circling the city for seven days and blowing shofars, the city walls collapsed. These and other events are described in the Book of Joshua.

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Nisan 27 

 

Holocaust Remembrance Day. In Israel, for one minute in the morning each year, a siren sounds throughout the Land and daily life stops. Cars halt in the middle of the highway, factories go silent, and students cease to study. People utter prayers or personal thoughts memorializing the 6 million Jews murdered at the hands of the Nazis. On this day, places of entertainment are closed by law, TV stations air Holocaust documentaries, and low-key songs are played on the radio. Flags are flown at half-mast and a memorial ceremony is held at Yad VaShem, the Holocaust Memorial, in the presence of the Israeli Prime Minister, President, survivors and their families.

This date is also the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Avigdor Miller (1908-2001), one of America's leading Torah educators. Rabbi Miller was born in Baltimore, and he studied as a young adult in the famed Slobodka Yeshiva in Europe. In the 1960s, he produced a series of groundbreaking books on Jewish thought, at a time when rabbinic works in English were almost unheard of. He was particularly skillful at connecting secular phenomena to the Divine. For example, before eating an apple he exclaimed, "Almighty God, look at this magnificent apple that You created! The wisdom of its waterproof enclosure, the beauty of its tantalizing red color, and the temptingly delicious aroma with which it is perfumed. How can I even begin to thank You!" Rabbi Miller's greatness is preserved on audiotape, in the form of a 2,000-part lecture series on Jewish ethics and history.

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Nisan 28 

 

In 1912, the RMS Titanic sank after crashing into an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The Titanic was the largest passenger and most luxurious steamship in the world at the time, accommodating over 2,000 passengers. Promoters bragged that it was "the ship that even God couldn't sink." The sinking resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 people, ranking it as one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history, and by far the most famous. Here is a unique Jewish angle: As the ship began to sink, and passengers struggled for one of the few spots in a lifeboat, Leah Aks carried her baby Frank to the deck, trying to get on line to be rescued. In the pandemonium, one man grabbed Leah’s baby and threw him overboard into a lifeboat. Leah was hysterical at having lost her precious baby, but she also managed to get into a lifeboat and was saved. Two days later, she saw a woman holding a child -- her baby Frank! An argument ensued and the other woman refused to give up the baby, claiming it as her own. Leah said, "I can prove this is my child -- he is circumcised." (In Europe at that time only Jewish children were circumcised.) Baby Frank was duly reunited with his mother – and he lived till 1991.

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Nisan 29 

 

In 1945, U.S. soldiers liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. Although not technically an extermination camp (prisoners were used as slave labor in local armament factories), mass killings took place at Buchenwald, and many inmates died in the course of gruesome medical experiments. Elie Wiesel, who went on to write stirring accounts of the Holocaust, for which he earned the Nobel Peace Prize, was an inmate at Buchenwald. Toward the end of the war, the Nazis evacuated inmates from Buchenwald to Flossenberg, where they were liberated.

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Nisan 30 

 

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Chaim Vital (1543-1620), the primary disciple of the famed kabbalist, the Arizal. Rabbi Vital was born in Tzfat, studying under the great Rabbi Moshe Alshech and Rabbi Moshe Cordevero. The Arizal, who died at age 38, taught Rabbi Vital for only two years. But Rabbi Vital diligently transcribed the Arizal's teachings, which have served as the basis for all subsequent study of kabbalah. Rabbi Vital also authored his own kabbalistic work, Aitz Chaim.

Nissan 30 is also the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Yaakov Emden (1698-1776), known by the acronym Yavetz. Born in Germany, Rabbi Emden was the son of a great rabbi known as the Chacham Tzvi. Emden was a controversial figure who relentlessly opposed the Shabbatai Tzvi messianic movement, and accused the great Rabbi Yonason Eibshutz of being a follower of that movement. Shabbatai Tzvi was a dangerous character who had declared himself the Jewish messiah, and predicted that 1666 would be the year of Israel's redemption. When the prediction did not come true, Shabbatai Tzvi converted to Islam, leaving behind a distraught Jewish community. Rabbi Emden's scholarship is preserved in a set of responsa, She'eilat Yavetz.

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Iyar 1 

 

In 372 BCE, the foundation of the Second Holy Temple was laid in Jerusalem, as recorded in the Book of Ezra (3:8). The grandson of a Jewish king, Zerubavel, led the first band of Jews back from the Babylonian exile. He helped clear away the charred heaps of debris which occupied the site of the Second Temple, and the foundation was laid amid public excitement and rejoicing. This Second Temple would become the center of Jewish worship for 420 years, before being destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Today, the Western Wall is a remnant of the Temple complex, the focal point of Jewish prayers for millennia.

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Iyar 2 

 

In 1948, the Jewish soldiers of the Hagganah captured the city of Tzfat and the port of Haifa, just days prior to Israel's declaration of independence. Despite the disadvantages in numbers, organization and weapons, the Jews prevailed in the crucial battles, capturing several major towns and temporarily opening the strategic road to Jerusalem.

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Iyar 3 

 

In 1556, 24 Jews were burned at the stake in Italy, by order of Pope Paul IV. These were Conversos -- Portuguese Jews who had had been forcibly converted to Christianity, yet continued to practice their Judaism in secret. During the Inquisitions designed to discover Conversos, an estimated 32,000 Jews were burned at the stake.

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Iyar 4 

 

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveichik of Brisk (1810-1892), famed talmudic scholar and author of the Beis HaLevi commentary. Legend says that his first wife divorced him after mistakenly thinking he was an ignoramus. In 1854, Rabbi Soloveichik joined the leadership of the famed Voluzhin Yeshiva, the center of Jewish scholarship at that time. He was known for his great piety; it is said that his fear of sin was comparable to an ordinary person's fear when his life is in danger. He became rabbi of Brisk, Lithuania, thus launching the famous Brisker rabbinic dynasty; his son was the famed Rabbi Chaim Soloveichik.

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Iyar 5 

 

In 1948, the State of Israel declared its independence, in a ceremony led by David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv. The first act of the new government was to remove British restrictions on Jewish immigration. The Declaration of Independence granted full civil rights to Arab citizens of Israel, and called for peace and cooperation with neighboring Arab countries. The following day, the armies of five Arab nations attacked Israel. Despite decades of hardship, terror and wars, Israel has become a world leader in research and agriculture -- and most of all, the center of spiritual inspiration for the Jewish world.

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Iyar 6 

 

In 1881, a wave of pogroms swept 166 towns in southern Russia, after Jews were blamed for the assassination of Czar Alexander II. In these pogroms, thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed, and hundreds of Jews were killed and injured. The new czar, Alexander III, blamed the Jews for the riots and issued a series of harsh restrictions against the Jewish community. In the wake of these pogroms, some 2 million Jews fled Russia, many settling in the United States.

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Iyar 7 

 

In 1943, the first Jewish agricultural settlement was established in the Negev, Kibbutz Gevulot. David Ben-Gurion believed that the Negev -- encompassing about half the land mass of Israel -- was the fledging country's great frontier. Though the Negev was virtually uninhabited and thought by many to be uncultivable, Ben-Gurion believed that the desert could be tamed and turned into an asset. Many agricultural innovations, such as the use of hydroponics, have been developed in order to cultivate the Negev. And today, Beersheba -- first known as the biblical watering hole for Abraham's sheep -- is a modern city of 190,000.

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Iyar 8 

 

In 1516, the Jews of Venice were forced to move to an enclosed area, the site of an old metal foundry. The Italian word for foundry is "ghetto," thus giving rise to a byword that would, over the centuries, describe the persecution of Jews. In 1555, for example, Pope Paul IV created the Roman Ghetto, and in the 20th century the Nazis forced Jews into dozens of ghettos -- the Warsaw Ghetto alone held 450,000 people (30% of the entire population of Warsaw), crammed into a tiny area.

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Iyar 9

 

In 1948, the Arab Legion captured the police station on Mount Scopus, isolating it from the rest of Jerusalem. One month earlier, a convoy of 78 Jewish medical personnel en route to Mount Scopus were killed in a merciless Arab ambush. After 1948, Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital both closed their Mount Scopus facilities and relocated to western Jerusalem. When Jerusalem was reunited in 1967, these facilities reopened on Mount Scopus.

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Iyar 10 

 

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Yitzhak Alfasi (1013-1103), popularly know by the acronym, Rif. Alfasi was born in Morocco, and studied in Tunisia under the famed Rabbeinu Chananel. Alfasi ushered in the era of "Rishonim" (lit: the first ones), the important rabbinic period which culminated in the 16th century Code of Jewish Law. Rabbi Alfasi wrote Sefer HaHalachot, the first codification of talmudic law and a precursor to the great codes of Maimonides and Rabbi Yosef Karo. Alfasi served for 40 years as head of the Jewish community of Fez, Morocco. At age 75, two informers denounced him to the government on a spurious charge, and he moved to Spain. The most famous of his many students is Judah HaLevi, author of the Kuzari.

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Iyar 11 

 

This date marks the death of Judah P. Benjamin (1811-1884), an American-Jewish statesman. Benjamin was the second Jew to serve in the U.S. Senate, representing Louisiana. When another senator accused him of being an "Israelite in Egyptian clothing," Benjamin, who had married into a prominent Roman Catholic family, replied: "It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thundering and lightnings of Mount Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain." Two U.S. presidents (Franklin Pierce and Millard Fillmore) offered to nominate Benjamin as the first Jew to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Benjamin declined. During the Civil War, Benjamin served in the cabinet of the Confederacy – variously as Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State. In the aftermath of the war, Benjamin was targeted for his Confederate loyalties; a rumor even surfaced that he had masterminded the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Fearing that he could never receive a fair trial, he burned his personal papers and fled to England under a false name. Benjamin was buried in Paris.

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Iyar 12 

 

In 1967, Egypt blocked the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. On May 17, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded that UN monitoring forces evacuate the Sinai, a request with which UN Secretary-General U Thant cowardly complied. Nasser began the re-militarization of the Sinai, and concentrated tanks and troops on the border with Israel. On May 22, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and blockaded the Israeli port of Eilat in the Gulf of Aqaba. The Egyptian blockade violated international law and Israel demanded that it cease. When Egypt failed to act, Israel launched a pre-emptive attack that destroyed 300 airplanes -- nearly the entire Egyptian Air Force -- in a matter of hours. Within days Israel had captured the entire Sinai Peninsula; this would be the bargaining chip for the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Accords of 1979.

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Iyar 13 

 

In 1427, a decree was issued ordering all Jews expelled from Berne, Switzerland. Jews have wandered and settled in over 100 lands on five continents. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews were subject to frequent expulsions. And amazingly, 90 percent of Jewish families were uprooted in the 20th century -- with mass immigration to America and Israel, and the tragic Holocaust. This is prophesied in Leviticus 26:33: "I will scatter you among the nations..." Yet amidst it all, the Jewish people have miraculously maintained their distinct national identity.

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Iyar 14 

 

In 1960, Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina. Eichmann was in charge of implementing the "final solution" to exterminate Jews in the concentration camps. In one seven-week period alone, Eichmann transported 400,000 Hungarian Jews to the gas chambers. Eichmann was captured through the efforts of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and the Israeli Mossad (Secret Service). Eichmann was later put on trial in Israel, which was broadcast worldwide and featured the wrenching testimony of many Holocaust survivors. Eichmann was convicted and executed by hanging, the only capital punishment ever carried out in Israel. His body was cremated and ashes scattered at sea, so that no nation would serve as Eichmann's final resting place.

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Iyar 15 

 

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Meir Baal HaNeis (second century), a prominent scholar whose opinion is quoted more than any other in Mishnaic literature. Rabbi Meir studied under the great Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael, and was one of five scholars ordained during the persecutions that followed the Bar Kochva revolt. Rabbi Meir's wife was the famous wise woman, Beruriah. When their two sons died, she broke the news gently and comforted him. Rabbi Meir is buried on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee, and today his tomb is a popular place of pilgrimage and prayer. (Some sources list his yahrtzeit as Iyar 14.)

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Iyar 16 

 

In the Hebrew year 2448, Manna fell for the first time in the desert of Sene. This came one month after the Exodus, as the supply of matzah the Israelites took from Egypt had run out. The Manna fell six days a week; a double-portion fell on Friday to include Shabbat. Unlike other miracles that were one-time events, the Manna continued to fall day after day throughout the 40 years of Jewish wandering in the desert.