The decision by the community’s chairwoman, Faina Kukliansky, to shut down the Choral Synagogue temporarily “did not lead to greater unity among the Jewish communities,” a statement posted Thursday on the community’s website read. It also said that Lithuania’s prime minister and president have given “assurances” on security following the closure Tuesday.

Along with the synagogue, the community’s headquarters also were announced as being shut down due to threatening phone calls and emails, Kukliansky said Tuesday. She did not say what the threats were. The statement on the synagogue’s reopening did not mention the other building shuttered.

The closures coincided with protests in Lithuania over a decision last month by the mayor of Vilnius to remove a plaque celebrating one alleged Nazi collaborator in the annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry and the renaming of a street for another.

In Lithuania, many view them as heroes for fighting communism.

Simon Gurevicius, chairman of the Jewish Community of Vilnius and leaders of five other communities from Kukliansky’s umbrella group had criticized the closure and questioned her mandate.

Threatening telephone calls or letters are “not a reason to close the synagogue or the community,” Gurevicius told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Jews are safe in Vilnius,” Gurevicius said, noting that anti-Semitic violence is very rare in the country despite a rise in anti-Semitic rhetoric around the collaborators debate.

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Each year, millions flock to admire and photograph its flying buttresses and statuary, yet few take any real notice of two prominent female statues on either side of the main entrance. The one on the left is dressed in fine clothing and bathed in light, while the one on the right is disheveled, with a large snake draped over her eyes like a blindfold.

The disheveled Sinagoga, blindfolded with a snake, is a common motif in medieval art representing the Church’s supercessionism. (Toni L. Kamins)

The statues, known as Ecclesia and Sinagoga, respectively, and generally found in juxtaposition, are a common motif in medieval art and represent the Christian theological concept known as supercessionism, whereby the Church is triumphant and the Synagogue defeated. Sinagoga is depicted here with head bowed, broken staff, the tablets of the law slipping from her hand and a fallen crown at her feet. Ecclesia stands upright with crowned head and carries a chalice and a staff adorned with the cross.

While the issue of what constitutes free speech and what crosses into incitement to violence was brought to the fore by the deadly January attack on the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo, images mocking Jews and Judaism and encouraging anti-Semitic violence have been displayed throughout Europe since the early Middle Ages. In a time when literacy was uncommon, these images were the political cartoons and posters of the age, and the ridicule and carnage they promoted was both routine and government sanctioned. What’s more, most remain visible if you know where to look. Below are some of the most common ones.

Judensau

This carving on the facade of Martin Luther’s church in Wittenberg, Germany, shows Jews suckling at a sow’s teat. (Toni L. Kamins)

Wittenberg, Germany is famous as the place where Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg castle’s church, and where the Protestant Reformation began, but the facade of its otherwise grand Stadtkirche, the church where Luther preached, features another medieval motif known as the Judensau (Jew’s sow). This particular Judensau (1305) shows Jews suckling at the sow’s teat while another feeds at the animal’s anus. Above it appears an inscription in Latin letters, “Rabini Shem hamphoras.”The phrase is gibberish, but refers to the Hebrew words “Shem HaMephorash,” a term for one of the hidden names of God.

Blood libel

The blood libel in Europe, a false allegation that Jews murder Christian children so they can use their blood to make matzah, probably originated in England with the murder of William of Norwich in 1144, followed by accusations in Gloucester (1168), Bury St. Edmonds (1181), Bristol (1183) and Lincoln (1255). It rapidly spread like a cancer to the continent.

This plaque at the Palazzo Salvadori in Trent, Italy, illustrates the supposed martyrdom of Simon of Trent at the hands of Jews. (Wikimedia Commons)

Spain’s Toledo Cathedral has a fresco depicting the alleged ritual murder of Christopher of La Guardia near one of its exits — on one side a malevolent man is dragging away a child, while on the other the child is being crucified. At the 16th-century Palazzo Salvadori in Trento (Trent), Italy, which was built on the foundation of a synagogue, two plaques illustrating the supposed martyrdom of Simonino di Trento (Simon of Trent) at the hands of Jews in 1475 were affixed to the front portal in the 18th century.

Some of the supposed victims of ritual murder — William of Norwich, Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, St. Christopher of La Guardia and Simon of Trent — were canonized, but the Church’s 1965 Second Vatican Council removed them from the canon, forbade worship of them, and absolved Jews of any guilt in such murders. Sadly, some Catholics still believe the libel and continue to celebrate the saints’ days.

There are thousands of Ecclesia/Sinagoga, Judensau and illustrations of blood libel on churches, in paintings, stained glass windows, wood carvings and in medieval manuscripts all over Europe. Meanwhile, the blood libel continues to have currency in places such as Belarus, the Arab world and, of course, on the Internet.

Jesus of Prague

This statue on Prague’s Charles Bridge combines a crucifix with lines from the Kedushah prayer and has a backward aleph. (Toni L. Kamins)

In Prague, the 15th-century Charles Bridge across the Vltava River connects Old Town to Prague Castle. Some 30 statues line its pedestrian-only walkway, but only one is likely to make Jews cringe – Jesus on the cross surrounded by the Hebrew words “kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, Adonai Tzva’ot” (holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts) from the Jewish prayer known as the Kedushah. The statue and inscription, whose origins are disputed, essentially appropriate Jewish liturgy to imply that Jews regard Jesus as God.

Elias Backoffen, a Jewish community leader, was forced to pay for the gold-plated letters as a punishment in 1696 either for an actual or trumped-up blasphemy that may have been at the hands of a rival Jewish businessman. Explanatory plaques in English, Czech and Hebrew were added in 2009 after the city’s mayor was petitioned by a group of North American rabbis.

Take a good look at the aleph in the word Tzva’ot – it’s backward. A secret signal to other Jews? No. The letter was removed by the Nazis during their occupation of Prague, and when the Czechs restored the letters after the war they made a mistake. And the vav in Adonai? It seems to have gone missing.

(Toni L. Kamins is a writer in New York and the author of “The Complete Jewish Guide to France” and “The Complete Jewish Guide to Britain and Ireland.”

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The film, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture on Thursday, has provoked discussion in some Jewish circles, with some having criticized “Selma” for leaving out  mention of Jewish contributions to the civil rights movement and others calling it politically astute and concurring with its focus on African Americans.

Viewers may wish to supplement the film with JTA’s coverage at the time, which, not surprisingly, zoomed in on the Jewish role.

After the “Bloody Sunday” march on March 7, in which many of the 600 protestors were beaten and hit with tear gas, Jews helped ramp up the pressure on President Lyndon Johnson to respond. On March 9, JTA reported that the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (what is now the Jewish Council for Public Affairs) and seven of its affiliate organizations — including the National Council of Jewish Women and the Union of Orthodox Congregations of America — sent Johnson a telegram demanding that he take immediate action on voting rights legislation for African Americans, who JTA, in the style of the time, referred to as “Negroes.” Other Jewish organizations, such as the Association of Reform Rabbis of New York City, joined in over the next couple of days with telegrams of their own.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (second from right), marches at Selma with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Bunche, Rep. John Lewis, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Rev. C.T. Vivian. (Courtesy of Susannah Heschel)

By the last of the three Selma marches, which took place on Sunday March 21 and into the 22^nd and 23^rd, it became clear that numerous rabbis and other Jews were not just supporting, but actually participating in, the marches  — inspiring some African American marchers to don yarmulkes in appreciation. JTA reported on March 22:

Hundreds of Negro freedom marchers today wore yarmulkes (skullcaps), in respectful emulation of rabbis who participated in demonstrations in Alabama as Jewish participation in the march from Selma to Montgomery.

The Alabama Negroes called the yarmulkes “freedom caps.” The demand for yarmulkes was so great that an order has been wired for delivery of 1,000 when the marchers arrive in Montgomery later this week for a great demonstration at the state capitol…

While not assuming the Jewish faith, many Negroes adopted the yarmulke as a symbol of their movement.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who famously walked with Martin Luther King, Jr. at the front of the march to Montgomery, was not the only rabbi on the march. JTA reported that several rabbis were arrested for their participation:

Rabbis jailed by Selma police during the weekend for participating in demonstrations conducted Friday evening services in the Selma Jail, it was learned. Five rabbis recited Hebrew prayers behind prison bars. They have since been released on bond. An estimated 10 to 12 rabbis took part in the march which began yesterday.

Twenty years later, blacks and whites commemorated the events of “Bloody Sunday” by reenacting the momentous protest in Selma (peacefully this time, of course). JTA reported that Rabbi Alvin Sugarman of Atlanta, who had traveled to Alabama that morning on a bus packed to the limit with black and Jewish members of Atlanta’s Black Jewish Coalition, addressed the rally in front of the Brown Chapel church with moving words that symbolized how civil rights intersected with his Jewish life:

[Rabbi Sugarman] related an incident that happened only blocks from the Brown Chapel. “One morning I came in and a buyer phoned in and said he was late. He came in with mud all over his boots and said, ‘I’m sorry son, I was late; I was out in the field beatin’ up a bunch of niggers. ‘And he said that,” Rabbi Sugarman added, “as matter of factly as if he’d had a flat tire. I never walked in that man’s store again, and two years later I left the business world and entered rabbinic school.”

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In February, the Spanish government offered up a bill that, if passed, could grant Spanish citizenship to all Sephardic Jews able to prove their lineage. This is not the first time Spain has offered to aid Sephardic Jews and grant them Spanish citizenship.

In the early 1930s, after the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic, Spain attempted to grow its Jewish population, which had been very small since the Inquisition and Expulsion of the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1931, Indalecio Prieto, the minister of finance, explained why:

The Sephardim have been termed Spaniards without a country. Many of the Jews who live today in Ceuta and Melilla are naturalised Spanish subjects, but there are many more who are anxious to acquire Spanish nationality…

It is a necessary, urgent and patriotic duty to grant the maximum of facilities in this regard.

The Jewish element in Morocco is extremely important to Spain. For one thing, there is the sentimental side, they speak our language and are full of yearning for our country. At the same time, there are their connections with the natives, and their financial importance.

In 1934, the Spanish government looked into granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews.

But two years later, the Spanish Civil War — in which the fascist Francisco Franco rose to power with the help of Nazi Germany — put an end to that. Although Franco allowed some Jews to migrate to Spain to escape Nazi persecution, conditions soon became unsafe for them. In April 1940, JTA called the situation for Jews in Spain “hopeless” and reported that “No special anti-Jewish legislation is expected, but police measures against the Jews have been taken secretly along lines indicated to the police by the Minister of Interior, who is an open advocate of the Nazi racial doctrine.”

Still, Jews continued to flock to Spain in large numbers to escape Nazi-occupied countries. JTA reported in 1943 that the German authorities in occupied France issued an order barring Jews from living in towns on the French-Spanish border.

After the war, the rhetoric of acceptance gradually made its way back into the Spanish government’s policies. On Dec. 16, 1968, Spain officially rescinded the 1492 Alhambra Decree, which had expelled all Jews from the country. And in 1982, the country facilitated the process for Sephardic Jews living in Spain to become citizens.

The connection that some Sephardic Jews have felt to Spain throughout history should not be underestimated. One JTA report from 1931, during the first optimistic surge of support for Jews in Spain, describes one Jewish official’s opinion:

I am myself, Senor Abravenel proceeds, a direct descendant of Don Isaac Abravenel, who was Treasurer, or Minister of Finance in Spain from 1484 till the expulsion in 1492, and thus belong to one of the oldest and most distinguished of Spanish families, tracing its descent back to King David.

Eighteen years ago, in 1913, Senor Abravenel goes on, I entered the service of Spain, as a Secretary to the Spanish Consulate in Salonica, finally becoming Secretary of the Chancellory…

I was happy to be able to serve. Spain in these capacities and in other offices which I held subsequently, because both to myself and to my fellow-Jews of Spanish origin (Sephardim), Spain has always been the mother country, the beautiful land which we all love, Senor Abravenel says. There is not one single Sephardic Jew who does not feel proud to call himself Spanish. With unbounded joy, with burning desire, with overwhelming love, and with all the strength of our soul, all we Sephardic Jews respond to the movement for our return to the country of our origin, to our beloved Spain, the land of our great grandsires.

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Nevertheless, a number of Jewish groups greeted the new policy, which offers protection to some 5 million undocumented immigrants, with excitement. In the United States, Jews have been both the subject of exclusionary immigration policies as well as the leaders to liberalize those laws.

In the 1920s, after decades of relatively loose immigration laws had enabled more than 2 million Eastern European Jews to settle in the U.S., Jews fought an effort to close the gates to the “goldene medina.” The Immigration Act of 1924, a bill advanced by a notoriously racist Republican congressman named Albert Johnson, enacted a quota system that would severely limit Jewish immigration and totally exclude immigrants from Asia.

Jewish leaders staunchly opposed the bill, with JTA reporting “militant action against” it. The United Hebrew Trades, an association of Jewish labor unions in New York, brought together 136 Jewish organizations in order to “wage a nationwide campaign to defeat” the bill.

Jewish efforts concerned Johnson, who responding to an inquiry by a JTA correspondent replied coldly: “If the Jewish people combine to defeat the immigration bill as reported by the [Immigration Committee of the House of Representatives], their children will regret it.”

Nonetheless, the bill passed with ease, and its devastating effects — reducing Jewish immigration from hundreds of thousands annually to less than 15,000 per year — were fully on display in 1939 when refugees, most notably a group of 907 German Jews aboard the S.S. St. Louis, were refused entry.

The law remained largely intact until the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which sought to uphold the previous quota system. The measure was deemed racist and exclusionary.

Jewish groups condemned the bill. JTA reported that “all major Jewish groups” spoke out against the act, warning that it would “abandon our country’s finest traditions by dropping an iron curtain around our shores.” Despite an executive veto from President Harry Truman, the measure passed overwhelmingly in Congress.

In 1965, an immigration bill arrived that Jewish groups could support. The Hart-Cellar Act sought to dismantle the quota system in place since 1924 and finally opened the doors to Asian, African and Middle Eastern populations. Although Jews, with Israel available, no longer needed the open doors, major Jewish groups still rushed to support the bill. In a joint statement, seven national Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Congress and the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue of America, called the bill a “long overdue” change to the quota system that had “defaced our immigration policy and mocked our national protestations of equality.”

Perhaps the most impassioned plea, however, came from a Jewish New York congressman named Leonard Farbstein, who told the House that the act would come too late for the Jews “buried in mass graves at Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen” who were denied U.S. visas.

But, Farbstein said, the new law would allow those murdered Jews to “rest easier in their graves” because America may now provide an easier haven to refugees.

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Sadly, it wasn’t the first time a synagogue was attacked by Palestinians or their sympathizers.

On Aug. 29, 1981, two Palestinian terrorists wearing yarmulkes and posing as Jews attempted to enter a bar mitzvah service at a Vienna synagogue. When an Austrian police officer asked them for identity papers, the two launched a machine gun and grenade attack that killed two and wounded over 15.

Interestingly, the attack was the first time that some Palestinian West Bank leaders felt moved to condemn a Palestinian terror attack, with Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij calling it “an act of brutality which distorted the image of the Palestinian people.”

Just more than a year later, five Palestinian gunmen walked up to the Great Synagogue of Rome’s back entrance at the conclusion of Sabbath services and threw at least three hand grenades at the crowd before spraying the worshipers with submachine gun fire, killing a 2-year old and wounding 37 others.

And on Sept. 6, 1986 two terrorists posing as cameramen made their way into Turkey’s Neve Shalom synagogue. Once inside they barred the heavy gates, opened fire on the congregants with machine guns and hurled grenades. In all, 22 of the approximately 30 worshipers were killed. JTA reported at the time that it was the bloodiest synagogue massacre since the Nazi-era.

Though its name is Hebrew for “oasis of peace,” Neve Shalom suffered two other terror attacks. In 1992, a grenade attack slightly injured a bystander but failed to damage the synagogue or any of its worshipers. Then in November 2003, a car bomb exploded nearby, damaging the synagogue enough that it had to close for almost a year.

Months later, community leaders told JTA they were finding it “very difficult — if not impossible — to return to life as it was before.”

“We are in an ongoing trauma situation,” says Lina Filiba, the Turkish Jewish community’s executive vice president. “The whole community right now is a construction pit — it’s a continuation of the crisis that started Nov. 15.”

“The change of lifestyle, the security consciousness, the restriction on the use of facilities is something that people are still getting used to.”

While synagogue services have been targeted far more frequently in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than have Muslim worship services, it is worth noting that one of the deadliest attacks on a house of worship happened inside a mosque. In 1994, a machine gun-armed Jewish physician — Baruch Goldstein — walked into the mosque inside Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, killing 29 worshipers and wounding another 150.

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In the days after his Nov. 11, 2004 death at age 75 in a Paris hospital, JTA explored the legacy of the infamous terrorist-turned-peacemaker (sort of) whose signature black-and-white kaffiyeh and stubbly beard were iconic images.

JTA’s coverage included a timeline of the Palestine Liberation Organization founder’s life, from his Egyptian birth to his final years in a Ramallah compound.

Of particular focus in the days after his death was Arafat’s metamorphosis among Jews from Public Enemy No. 1 to negotiating partner to enemy to nearly irrelevant, particularly after he rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s Camp David offer in the summer of 2000.

“He will go down as the largest mass murderer of Jews since Hitler,” Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told JTA in an article published the day after Arafat died. “His life was devoted more to killing Jews than to the welfare of his own people.”

That article noted:

In the three years leading up to his death, the aging symbol of the Palestinians’ national hopes found himself quarantined in his Ramallah compound by an Israeli government that viewed him as both “irrelevant” and as the ultimate obstacle to Mideast peace.

In contrast to the frequent White House invitations extended by President Clinton to Arafat, President Bush treated him as a pariah, never once asking him to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Arafat’s sidelining and virtual house arrest capped a raucous progression of more than three decades during which the mainstream Jewish community, both in Israel and the Diaspora, moved from revulsion at the terrorist revolutionary who addressed the United Nations with a pistol on his hip, to cautious optimism about the putative peacemaker who shook the hand of a reluctant Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn, to profound disappointment and resentment at the intransigent old man’s inability to abandon terrorism as a political tool and end his people’s conflict with Israel.

Arafat’s death also was an opportunity to address his questionable financial dealings and the whereabouts of his estate:

When Yasser Arafat is buried, he will take with him one of the enduring secrets of the Palestinian regime — the whereabouts of a missing fortune in ill-gotten public funds. Ranked sixth on Forbes magazine’s 2003 list of “the richest kings, queens and despots” with an estimated private coffer of at least $300 million, Arafat never divulged his finances during decades as a terrorist chieftain and later as Palestinian Authority president.

U.S. accountants commissioned by the Palestinian Authority, where Finance Minister Salem Fayyad has garnered global praise for instituting reform, found that part of Arafat’s personal wealth was in a secret portfolio worth close to $1 billion.

The Israeli government would “shun” the funeral, JTA reported in an article with this quote from Justice Minister Yosef “Tommy” Lapid (father of the current Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid): “I do not usually think we should send a representative to the funeral of somebody who killed thousands of our people.”

Yitzhak Rabin, left, shaking hands with Yasser Arafat, with President Clinton in the center at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony, Sept. 13, 1993. (Vince Musi / The White House)

Concerned about unrest, “Israel imposed a closure on the West Bank ahead of Arafat’s burial” in Ramallah, JTA reported.

Indeed, while some Arab-Israelis held memorial services, the Jewish-Israeli response to Arafat’s passing ranged from satisfaction to ambivalence, JTA noted:

In Yasser Arafat’s death, Palestinians lost a national symbol, and Israelis lost the face of the other side. For so many years, Arafat — often shown grinning under his trademark kaffiyeh while overseeing the struggle against Israel — was the opponent Israelis somehow loved to hate.

Mordy Peretz, a 44-year-old deli owner in Tel Aviv, perhaps summed it up best when he told JTA of his mixed emotions upon seeing the frail Arafat board a helicopter out of Ramallah for what would be his final medical treatment:

“He was everything negative and achieved none of things he could have,” Peretz said. “But when I saw him waving goodbye,” he adds, “I felt a certain sympathy, and I felt badly for the Palestinians. Israelis, though they despise him, will still feel the loss of his image as the symbol of the Palestinian people.”

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On two separate occasions before the curtain rose, thousands gathered outside the Met to protest its staging of the opera, which they argued is too sympathetic to the Palestinian hijackers who murdered the 69-year-old wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985.

It was Klinghoffer’s real death, however, not his staged one, that first drew a crowd in the thousands. On Oct. 22, 1985, more than 1,000 people crowded into Temple Shaaray Tefila, a Reform congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, to attend Leon Klinghoffer’s funeral.

Inside the sanctuary of Shaaray Tefila, Klinghoffer’s story was told quite differently than it would be years later in an opera house less than three miles away.

His daughters Lisa and Ilsa, who in an op-ed last week declared the opera “an injustice to our father’s memory,” both spoke at the funeral, calling their home a “refuge” where they played the piano, sang, and celebrated the Jewish holidays with joy. Ilsa said, “Oh, Daddy, you worked so hard and never complained.”

Shaaray Tefila’s Rabbi Harvey Tattelbaum described Klinghoffer’s murder as a “Holocaust of one.”

Maurice Blond, a childhood friend, recalled to the assembled that Klinghoffer “wouldn’t take guff from anybody”:

He said that when Klinghoffer, who stood 5 feet 8 inches, served in the U.S. Army during the war and a non-Jew of six feet five inches called him a derogatory anti-Semitic name, Klinghoffer took him on. The soldier “broke his jaw and made him deaf in one ear.”

“He struggled with his paralysis,” said Blond. “He refused to lie down and become a cripple.”

Just four months later, in February 1986, Klinghoffer’s wife Marilyn passed away at 58.

Interestingly, while the daughters have repeatedly objected to the operatic dramatization of their father’s murder, Marilyn Klinghoffer “sought to sell the rights of her and Leon’s story of the Achille Lauro hijacking to a production company for a television docu-drama,” JTA reported soon after her death.

A 1990 TV movie starred Burt Lancaster and Eva Marie Saint as Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer. (Wikimedia Commons)

Her New York Times obituary offered more details:

Though Mrs. Klinghoffer at first resisted appeals from magazines and film makers for her husband’s story, she agreed recently to sell it to an independent production company for a film or television docudrama, said Jay Fischer, a family lawyer. He declined to discuss the terms.

Mrs. Klinghoffer made the agreement, [a friend] said, ”because she felt the story was important enough to be told, and to make sure this world recognizes the need to eradicate terrorism.”

It is not clear which TV movie — “The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro” (1989) or “Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair” (1990) — was the result of the agreement. Despite the latter film’s high-profile movie stars, Burt Lancaster and Eva Marie Saint, neither production generated anywhere near the hype of “Death of Klinghoffer.”  

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One of the buildings on the Bronx campus of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. (Wikimedia Commons)

This week Yeshiva University announced that while it will remain the degree-granting institution with a “key role in the educational aspects of the entity,” it is handing over operational control of its Albert Einstein College of Medicine to the Montefiore Health System.

While the renowned physicist died several months before the opening of his namesake school — the first American medical school under Jewish auspices — he was officially notified about the naming two years earlier during a luncheon in Princeton, N.J.,on his 74th birthday.

At the event, attended by 100 community leaders from 20 North American cities, Einstein was presented with a model of the projected medical college building bearing his name and “welcomed the new College as a contribution of real significance to the general welfare,” JTA reported, quoting him as saying:

I am grateful that Yeshiva University has honored me by using my name in connection with the new College of Medicine. There is a shortage of physicians in this country and there are many young people, able and eager to study medicine, who under present circumstances – are deprived of the opportunity to do so.

Einstein’s first graduation ceremony, in 1959, had some distinctively Jewish features, JTA reported:

Highlighting the ceremony was departure from taking by students of the traditional 2,000-year-old Hippocratic Oath. Instead, the students chanted in unison the Declaration of Geneva, a statement of ethics and principle in which genocide is foresworn. They pledged not to use their “medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity” nor to “permit considerations of religion, nationality, race, party politics or social standing to intervene between duty and patient.” The ceremony included the recital of the Prayer of Maimonides.

Einstein, which has a diverse student body of Jews and non-Jews, has been one of the top-ranked U.S. medical schools in recent years, but a financial drain on Y.U., which, a Moody’s Investors Service report warned two months ago is at risk of running out of money by the end of 2015.

Balancing the needs of the Orthodox Jewish-run university with the secular medical school has not always been easy. In 1999, two lesbian couples and an LGBT student group sued Einstein for barring same-sex couples (who could not then legally marry) from living in its subsidized, on-campus married-student housing.

Their original lawsuit was dismissed, but the case was brought again on appeal in 2000. In covering the case, JTA noted:

Although commonly thought of as an Orthodox institution, Yeshiva University has been chartered since 1969 as nonsectarian, enabling it to receive state and federal funding.

That nonsectarian status means it must abide by various anti-discrimination laws, forcing it at times to adopt policies offensive to the religious sensibilities of some of its alumni and donors.

In the mid-1990s, it refused to ban gay student groups at Einstein and its law school, despite demands from some Orthodox students and alumni.

In 2002, the case was still wending its way through the courts, but Einstein changed its policy anyway, allowing same-sex couples to live in the married-student housing nine years before New York State would legalize same-sex marriage.

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A few days later, a woman yelling anti-Semitic slurs assaulted a Jewish mother and her baby at a Paris bus stop. And a recent survey indicated that almost 75 percent of French Jews were considering emigrating.

In July 1934, A. Herenroth, JTA’s Paris correspondent published an essay in three installments detailing the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in France, a problem that the author said had been relatively dormant since the Dreyfus Affair, when a Jewish major was wrongly convicted of treason.

Herenroth wrote that anti-Semitic newspapers were proliferating and that while German Jewish refugees — who began arriving after Hitler’s rise to power — had initially been welcomed, they were starting to spur resentment.  Numerous French leftists  were accusing the new arrivals of trying to drag France into a war with Germany.

At the end of the second installment, Herenroth asked:

Is it possible after the foregoing to speak of “anti-Semitism in France?” It seems to us that this is premature. There undoubtedly is evident a certain growth of moods favorable to the rise of anti-Semitism, but it is still to early to conclude from this that France will be beaten by that stream of hatred of humanity which passed like such a stormy wave over the countries of Eastern and Central Europe.

But by the third installment, Herenroth was already less sanguine, saying that anti-Semitism was rapidly evolving from a “mood” to a “movement,” of “substantial, if not threatening proportions.”

Somewhat prophetically, given that the Nazis would, without too much difficulty, invade France less than six years after the article’s publication, eventually rounding up the country’s Jews for extermination, Herenroth concluded:

French anti-Semitism of the new type is now in the process of birth and its true nature is not yet known to us. The immediate future will reveal this enemy force with which French Jewry will have to contend. 

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Ironically LAOS is also the Greek name for the Popular Orthodox Rally (also translated as Popular Orthodox Alarm), an extreme right-wing party in Greece. The same ADL survey in which Laos came out so well also found that Greece, the home of LAOS, is the most anti-Semitic country outside the Middle East. Not surprisingly, anti-Semitic LAOS has gotten considerably more JTA coverage than the philo-Semitic Laos, most recently last July when former LAOS member Adonis Georgiadis, who had made anti-Semitic statements and published an anti-Semitic book, was appointed health minister of Greece.

LAOS first landed on JTA’s radar in 2007, when it won 10 of the 300 seats in Greece’s parliament, making it the first extreme-right party in parliament since 1974. In its coverage of the 2007 victory, JTA quoted a 2005 U.S. State Department report describing it as a “small, extreme right-wing party (that) supports virulent nationalism, anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia” and whose leader “regularly attributes negative events involving Greece to international Jewish plots.”

Meanwhile, Laos the country has made infrequent, but largely positive, appearances in JTA, dating back to January 1957, as Israel and Laos prepared to establish diplomatic relations.

In August 1968 Laos’ premier, Prince Souvanna Phouma made a brief stopover in Israel while en route home from Europe. The prince “paid tribute to the technical assistance rendered his country by Israel and declared that relations between the two nations have always been ‘excellent,’” JTA reported, making particular mention of an experimental farm set up by Israeli experts near Vientiane, the Laotian capital.

In 1993,  Laos re-established diplomatic ties with Israel (they were severed in the early 1970s, something JTA neglected to cover at the time); 13 years later, Chabad, the outreach-oriented Hasidic group, added Laos to its portfolio of far-flung countries boasting a shaliach. While Laos has virtually no Jewish population, the Chabad outpost aimed to serve Israeli backpackers and other Jewish tourists. Sadly, one such tourist, Israeli airman Avner Bardugo, died there two years later in a kayaking accident.

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Check out the full text of the declaration as it appeared in the May 16, 1948 edition of the JTA Jewish Daily Bulletin (pdf)

Read how Jewish communities around the world celebrated the birth of the modern Jewish state.

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In small ways and large, JTA has covered Israel not just as, say, The New York Times would cover Britain — an important ally with close and intertwined cultural ties — but as a mirror for its Diaspora readers seeking to understand themselves and their place in the world.

Sometimes this take was obvious: The joys attending Israel’s miraculous victories in 1948, 1967 and 1973, the soul-searching following its stumbles in Lebanon in 1982 and throughout the intifadas.

Yet there were subtler and more telling signs as well: Israel’s emergence as a sports and entertainment powerhouse and its beauty contest wins. You can almost hear the Jewish schoolboy chortling beneath the reporting: “Whoa, Jews shoot hoops? And check out these babes — they’re Jewish!!”

The anxious sense of what the relationship will mean bubbles up even in the celebratory statements greeting Israel’s establishment, in this story datelined May 16, 1948, two days after independence was declared: “The test of the ages the world’s doubts and Israel’s loyalty is at hand,” Stephen Wise,  the American Jewish Congress president says at the Madison Square Garden event headlined by Chaim Weizmann.

The prevalent sense, even in those uncertain times, was one of relief. The natural headline for the first Passover post-independence was that “Next year in Jerusalem, which has been for centuries the climax of the Seder service, will assume a new meaning to-morrow evening.”

Anxieties about the shape the revived Jewish polity would take were already a standard of JTA reporting from pre-state Palestine. This October 1947 story datelined less than a month before U.N. recognition made statehood inevitable — lays bare the tensions between the Yishuv establishment and Irgun and Lehi insurgents. Judah Magnes, the Hebrew University president, warns that both sides have embraced “force, violence and totalitarian methods.”

Yet, there was also evident in pre-state reporting the tenderness that still prevails in Israel-Diaspora relations. This brief item notes the reestablishment of cable communications in 1943 between the Yishuv and the Tunisian Jewish community in the wake of the Allied liberation of that country. (It also foretells the critical role electronic communications played in Tunisia’s 21st-century liberation!)

It went both ways, of course, and from the early days of the modern Zionist enterprise. This 1931 story is an appeal for Diaspora assistance in saving the Yishuv’s schools.

The nexus between rescue and redemption has since ancient times been the sweet spot for fund-raising appeals. It was no different in 1950, when the United Jewish Appeal raised an astonishing $6 million — that’s about $54 million in 2010 dollars — in a single evening. UJA’s chairman, Henry Morgenthau Jr., cited the success of Operation Magic Carpet, the rescue of Yemen’s Jewry, in appealing for funds to get Jews out of Iraq.

The same dynamic played out three decades later when Israel thanked the UJA for the $62 million ( $123 million in 2010 dollars) it raised subsequent to the dramatic transport of Ethiopian Jews in Operation Moses.

In moments of triumph  and in moments of profound concern, the relationship always mattered. In September 1974, Jewish leaders met in New York to ponder “the Yom Kippur War and its broad implications for the world Jewish community.” Almost exactly seven years earlier, Yaacov Morris, a Jewish Agency representative, told a group of young American Jews that the Six Day War  had “not only brought Western Jews back to Judaism but also brought many Israelis back to the Jewish people as well.”

There were moments of doubt as well. JTA chronicled the massing of second thoughts following the first Lebanon War in 1982, and its coverage was informed by concerns typical of an American-based news agency: What did the ascendancy of Ariel Sharon mean for basic freedoms? Would broadcasters critical of the war be banned from covering it for the supposedly
independent (and influential) Army Radio? Were displays of military might appropriate in the wake of a war rapidly spinning out of control?

Such concerns played out again 30 years later when Jewish groups warned Israel against targeting human rights groups.

But overwhelmingly, the relationship’s narrative — and its coverage by JTA — has been characterized by mutual concern and affection. Concern, typified by the relentless chronologies of terror, like this one from 2003 covering the Second Intifada.

We see this affection in these stories noting how a country that at times seems to be in a perpetual state of siege celebrates the European basketball cup in 1977; wins at Eurovision in 1978, 1979 and 1998; and then those all important beauty contests, Miss Universe and Miss World.

Ron Kampeas is JTA’s Washington bureau chief.

Other Articles of Interest:

1924 Palestine Must Be Built in Cooperation With Arabs and Christians

1929 Hebrew Language Committee Marks 25th Anniversary

1935 Colorful Rites Mark First Planting of Jubilee Forest

1936 Sees Permanent War in Palestine Between Arabs-Jews

1947 Exodust Refugees at Sea One Month; Steadfast in Refusal to Land as Escort Vessels Refuel

1951 Kibbutz Movement in Israel Splits; Mapai Delegates Walk Out of Mapam Dominated Parlay

1957 Israel Evacuates El-Arish; Hands Over Sinai Capital to UN Forces

1964 First Desalinization Plant in Israel Starts Operation in Eilat

1966 Israel’s Capability to Produce Atom Bomb Raised in TV Discussion

1971 Bones of Jews Killed in Babi-Yar, Riga Reburied in Israel

1975 Rabin: Withdrawal From Oil Fields is Fact of Life, A Reality Israel Will Have to Face

1993 Recent Rash of Traffic Accidents Renews Debate in Israel on Safety

1994 Knesset Tackles Domestic Violence; Vows to Take Steps to Combat Problem

1998 Israel at 50: High-Tech Companies Drive Israel’s Fast-Growing Economy

2004 World Court Says Security Fence is Illegal But Israel Rejects Opinion

2005 Struggling to Make the Grade With its Educational System in Dire Straits; Israel Ranks Near Bottom of Developed World

2008 Two Years After War, Soldiers Still Suffer With the Pain of Trauma

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The role of women in Jewish life was the topic of several rabbinic sermons in New York City in 1934, offering a look at prevailing as well as radical views of the era.

In the United States, Jewish women took to the streets for abortion rights, while in Israel they fought to serve on religious councils.

JTA’s coverage of the first major Jewish conference on domestic violence in 1982debunked the myth that spousal abuse “doesn’t happen” in Jewish families, while a 2008 essay examined the link between the current economic downturn and a national rise in domestic violence.

In 1935, American Jewish women’s groups helped push a law that granted women equal rights to lease JNF land in Palestine, but in the 1990s, Jewish women were still pushing against the glass ceiling at the workplace.

Women in the Israeli military was a hot topic in the early years of the Jewish state. Through the 1950s, Orthodox leaders debated the seemliness of Jewish girls carrying guns and protested the Israeli government’s proposal of compulsory national service for religious women, something many young Orthodox women volunteer for today.In the 1990s, as American women were fighting their way into U.S. combat units, South African immigrant Alice Miller’s struggle to be admitted to the Israeli Defense Forces pilot’s course eventually proved successful.The 20th century also saw women making great advances in Jewish ritual life. In 1927, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun  in New York became the first Conservative synagogue to elect a woman to its board. But in 1982, four years before the ordination of the movement’s first woman rabbi, Conservative women still chafed at restrictions on their ritual involvement.

JTA’s coverage traced the evolution of egalitarianism in liberal Judaism, from 1953, when 21 percent of Reform synagogues called up women to the Torah, to 1972, when the Reform movement ordained Sally Priesand as the country’s first female rabbi. A decade later, there were nearly 100 women rabbis in all the non-Orthodox streams.

JTA charted the growth of the Jewish feminist movement through the 1970s,1980s and 1990s, including the Hillel women who led the feminist revolution in Shabbat worship in 1975, the introduction of gender-neutral language into prayer books and 22 years of Women of the Wall’s struggle to pray with the Torah at Judaism’s holiest site.

In the Orthodox world, JTA chronicled the rise of serious Torah education for women, the rise of the Orthodox feminist movement in the 1990s, and the ongoing battle to end the agony of the agunot, or “chained women,” a problem first reported on by the JTA in 1927, when a Ukrainian rabbi sailed for the United States to track down Jewish husbands who left their wives behind in the old country.

Intermarriage is a growing theme both in American Jewish life and JTA’s coverage. The Reform movement’s 1983 resolution stating that the child of one Jewish parent was “presumed” to be Jewish — mistakenly known as the “patrilineal descent” resolution — was an early recognition of the relationship between gender equality and Jewish continuity. JTA chronicled that ongoing dialogue in stories about outreach to non-Jewish mothers of Jewish children, changing attitudes toward such children and the growing assertiveness of adult children of intermarriage in claiming their place at the Jewish communal table.

From the kitchen to the boardroom, the story of Jewish women is the story of American women, with JTA providing a particular lens on one aspect of this important, fast-changing societal issue.

Sue Fishkoff writes about Jewish identity for the JTA and is the author of “Kosher Nation” (Schocken Books, 2010).

Other Articles of Interest

1927 Bnai Jeshurun Conservative Congregation Elects Women to Board
1929 Jews and Arabs Must Work Together, Miss Szold Tells Hadassah
1933 Activities of the American Jewish Woman
1934 400 Women Groups to Unite on Boycott of German Products
1939 3,000 Women Stage Protest Parade in Jerusalem; Passive Resistance Mapped
1940 Mizrachi Women to Plant 10,000-Tree Forest
1951 Equality Law for Women Passed in Israel Parliament; Revolutionized Life of Arab Women
1957 – Ordination of Women as Rabbis Advocated at Reform Judaism Convention
1971 Jewish Women Power Makes Impact on UAHC, More Women to be Elected to Board
1984 Orthodox Rabbis Urged to Study Religious Needs of Women
1994 Jewish Feminism in the ’90s: New Rituals Created by and for Women Enhance Women’s Connection to Judaism
1998 Tour of Satmar School Provides Rare Glimpse of Girls’ Education
2004 For Women of Different Faiths, a Dilemma: What’s Modest Dress?

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A perusal of the JTA’ archives reveals that early on its reports sometimes contained more than a congratulatory and celebratory tone. They possessed sensitivity to underlying Jewish tensions highlighted and fostered by sports not to be found in American tabloids. See, for example, the April 18, 1926 report on the Mizrachi (Religious Zionist) Organization’s criticism of Hakoah-Vienna, the greatest Jewish sports  team of its time, playing games on the Sabbath as part of its triumphant nation-wide tour of the United States after its soccer club had won the Austrian National Championship. JTA pieces recognized that sports defined the Jews’ status in America and in the world, anticipating the development of a mature present-day Jewish sports history that analyzes more than it idolizes. Thus, six days earlier, JTA reported how representatives from the Austrian athletic club explained  to U.S. President Calvin Coolidge that sports were contributing mightily to the physical development of Jews in Europe. JTA understood that the question of how Jews were treated as athletes, as well as how they comported themselves on the field, track, court — and even at the White House — often reflected on essential communal issues of identification and religious continuity.

JTA continued to report on sports in the 1930s, even introducing a regular column dubbed “Slants on Sports.” And the triumphs of Jewish athletes, like boxing champion Barney Ross, continued to serve as a source of pride. At the same time, JTA captured the Jewish anxiety of that era, with intense coverage of anti-Nazi boycotts and protests surrounding the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

The Olympics would return to Germany in 1972, and once again attract intense attention from JTA — this time with the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich.

In between the 1936 and 1972 Olympics in Germany, JTA’s coverage of sports was sporadic, sometimes completely ignoring important Jewish athletes like basketball great Dolph Schayes. Sandy Koufax garnered a burst of attention in 1963, with the Dodgers reshuffling its pitching rotation to accommodate the hurler’s decision not to pitch on the High Holidays, and his subsequent masterpiece in the opening game of the World Series. But not a word two years later when Koufax sat out Game 1 of the World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.

One exception to this dearth of sports coverage was the Maccabiah Games, which regularly garnered attention.

By the 1970s, JTA’s sports coverage began to broaden again, with reports on the accomplishments of Jewish athletes, as well as the fits and starts of those who have tested the limits of sports accommodation to Jewish religious values. Most notably, the JTA was on the scene when, in the late 1990s, Baltimore high schooler Tamir Goodman attempted to experience the ultimate observant Jewish fantasy of having the sports world bend to his every need in his quixotic attempt to play big-time college basketball while staying true to his Orthodox practices.

Thus the “sports section” of  JTA’s archive is an essential tool for both the amateur Jewish sports historian anxious to recount athletic achievements over the last nine decades and the professional intent on explaining what these sports encounters have meant to Jews and Jewish history.

Jeffrey S. Gurock is the author of “Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports” (Indiana University Press, 2005).

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The Archive includes obituaries of virtually every Jew of note who died in the 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Hank Greenberg, Isaac Bashevis Singer (and dozens more Jewish Nobel prizewinners), Teddy Kollek (and scores of political figures), as well as hundreds who lived remarkable lives but whom you may not know. Have you heard of Demax, a French actor so famous in the 1920s he needed

The oldest obituary in the Archive, from June 5, 1923, is of Simon Wolf, a onetime US ambassador to Egypt, described as “the personal friend of every President, from Lincoln to Harding.” Whether or not that made Wolf a 20th century “court Jew,” other friends to presidents in the Archive, included journalist Gus J. Karger; industrialist Max Fisher; advice columnist Ann Landers, and Leah Brown, a friend of Golda Meir.

Of course, presidents’, premiers’ and prime ministers’ obituaries can be found in the Archive, including those of Leon Blum (France’s first Jewish premier), David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Levi Eshkol and many others.

The Archive contains a panoply of people listed as the first or the oldest, including Levi Feld,  the “oldest Polish Jew,” who died in 1928 at 125, leaving a wife aged only 119; Joseph Joffre, the world’s oldest Jew when he died at 113 in 1988; Meir Dickstein, the oldest Jew in Palestine when he died at 117 in 1938, and Sarah Silverman (no, not that Sarah Silverman), who died at 105 in 1931 in Minneapolis and was described archaically as one of oldest American “Jewesses.”

Among those who were notable for being first at something were Joseph Levi, the “first Jew to settle in Cork, Ireland”; Moses Alexander, the first Jewish immigrant to be elected an American governor (Idaho, of all places), and Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, the first bat mitzvah, who died at 86 in 1996.

The Archive is an international repository of obituaries, more perhaps in the pre-War years than since. Obits of top Jewish leaders from the 1920s include Dr. Paul Nathan of Germany; Maxim Vinaver of Russia, who died in exile in Paris: Luigi Luzzatti, a former Italian prime minister, and Dr. Zevi Perez Chajes, chief rabbi of Vienna.

Pre-state Palestine and later, Israel, have always figured in JTA’s news coverage, and the Archive’s obituaries catalogue deaths there, too. Among early deaths in the Archive are Menashe Meyerowtiz, the last surviving Bilu pioneer, who arrived in Palestine in 1882, and Alexandra Belkind,  the first woman doctor in Palestine, in 1943. In later years, figures of note included Eliahu Elath, Israel’s first ambassador to the United States, and Gen. Yaakov Dori, first Chief of Staff of Israel’s Armed Forces.

A straight line showing the emergence of American Jewry can be drawn from the obituary of MGM studios founder Marcus Loew in 1927, through to that of late 20th century film mogul Lew Wasserman in 2002.

Articles about Americans range from obituaries of pioneering astronaut Judith Resnik to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Jewish cultural influence can be seen in the obituaries of Harpo Marx, George Gershwin, playwright Clifford Odets, and many, many others.

Go through the Archive yourself to discover the hundreds of names of rabbis, scientists, business leaders, politicians, actors, musicians, poets, astronauts, and many others not mentioned here.

(Alan Abbey was the author of The Eulogizer, a JTA daily appreciation column of those who recently passed away.)

Other Obituaries of Interest

Notable

1930 Lord Balfour (author of Balfour Declaration)

1932 Julius Rosenwald  (philanthropist)

1965 Helena Rubinstein (entrepreneur and businesswoman)

1985 Marc Chagall

1988 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell (author of Bakke affirmative action decision)

2001 Mordecai Richler (author)

Noteworthy

1926 Meyer London (Socialist member of U.S. Congress)

1932 Moses Alexander (Governor of Idaho)

1932 Chaia Scheiner (grandmother of 200)

1946 Maurice Falk (steel executive)

1953 Abraham Riesen (Yiddish author and poet)

1959 Gershon Agron (Mayor of Jerusalem)

1960 Benno Elkan (sculptor of the menorah outside the Knesset)

1966 Lady Rebecca Sieff (a founder of Weizmann Institute)

1974 Ervin Kaldor (Bnai Brith leader in New Zealand)

1977 Shabtai Karakushansky (oldest Jewish journalist in Brazil)

1978 Zivia Lubetkin Zuckerman (leader of Warsaw Ghetto uprising)

1985 Moshe Rachmilewitz  (important Israeli medical leader)

1990 Dina Abramowicz (YIVO librarian)

1993 Rabbi Marshall Meyer (rabbi of Buenos Aires and Manhattan)

1994 Abraham Bayer (communal leader and Soviet Jewry pioneer)

1995 Sister Ann Gillen (nun who worked for Soviet Jewry cause)

1996 Maurice (Mickey) Weiss (philanthropist)

1996 Judith Kaplan Eisenstein (first Bat Mitzvah)

2002 David Asseo (Turkish chief rabbi)

2004 Murray Zuckoff (longtime editor of JTA)

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Although some of these Nobel achievements are dissociated with their winners (how many people can name the Nobel laureate who classified the A, B and O blood types?), an overall examination of Nobel laureates reflects the state of the world in which they lived. This was especially true for Jewish laureates. Their overrepresentation on lists of Nobel laureates represents far more than a list of impressive Jewish achievements; it evidences  the currents of social change in the Jewish world.

During particularly strong periods of anti-Semitism, Jews occasionally could overcome social limitations with Nobel Prize-sized over-achievements, but it wasn’t always enough to prevent the restrictions and laws leveled against them in Nazi Germany. The abundance of Jewish Nobel Prizes in America after the 1950s illustrates a geographical shift in the Diaspora, while the first Israeli Nobel Prize marked a dramatic change in Jewish self-identity. Over the years the relationship between Nobel Prizes and their Jewish recipients has varied, but through it all Jews maintained a definite and influential (if also changing) role in Nobel Prize history.

Though united by religion, the 181 Jewish winners differ in almost every other aspect: most visibly, by achievement. JTA reported Nobel discoveries and developments that went on to permanently influence the world:

• The scientist Landsteiner’s discovery of the A, O and B blood types;
• Lederberg’s pioneering work in genetic mapping;
• Bloch and Feynman‘s involvement with the Manhattan Project.
• After Selman Waksman discovered streptomycin — the first effective treatment for tuberculosis — the disease all but disappeared from the United States within a decade and was drastically reduced throughout the world.
• Expectations of an Israel-Egypt peace treaty earned Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin a Nobel Peace Prize, while I.B. Singer introduced the world to the intricacies of the Polish shtetl with his novels and short stories written in Yiddish.

Beyond highlighting remarkable achievements, JTA’s reports of Nobel Prize winners expose fluctuating historical and political forces that shaped the Jewish community. By investigating Nobel laureates’ stances on public issues, reaction to historical events, changing meditations on Jewish or Zionist identity, JTA articles show (both consciously and unconsciously) that Nobel laureates often faced the same sociopolitical issues that all Jews were confronting at the time.

For instance, pre-Holocaust anti-Semitism surfaces in articles like this one, which voices public criticisms of Einstein’s science for “not being German enough.” And as the Holocaust rooted itself into in Europe, Nobel laureates like Landsteiner were forced to flee their countries for Britain or America, despite their internationally lauded accomplishments. This official German decree calls for the resignation of all Jewish professors and scientists, including Nobel laureates — proving that no Jew, no matter how well known, was exempt from the shackles of Hitler’s regime.

The JTA also documented opposition efforts of Nobel laureates during the Holocaust, projecting some resistance to devastated Jewish communities around the world: the 1937 Nobel Peace laureate Viscount Cecil, who was not Jewish, in a 1937 article “urged civilized countries to open their gates to “[Jewish] refugees fleeing from persecution, intolerance and barbarism.” Likewise, the French physics winner Paul Langevin, who had been incarcerated by the Germans and stripped of his professorship at a French college, publicly fought anti-Semitism by becoming the president of the League of the Rights of Man. And Thomas Mann, literature winner and German exile, visited and lectured at the the “University in Exile,” a U.S. haven for Jews banished from Nazi Germany, during the war years, symbolizing the sharp contrast between the growing influence of Jews in America and their disintegrating authority throughout Europe.

Post-Holocaust, America became the epicenter of Jewish Nobel Prize activity — after 1960 for example, American Jews comprised nearly two-thirds of all Jewish physics laureates — and JTA articles began to
feature Brooklyn orNew Jersey-born scientists rather than their European ancestors.

At the same time, both the Jewish community and its Nobel laureates shifted their attention to the fledgling Israel. In this short brief, chemistry laureate Harold Urey proposes irrigation as an agricultural solution for the aridity of Israeli land. Waksman, who discovered streptomycin, helped transfer intellectual culture to Israel by setting up the Weizmann Institute of Science, which later became home to numerous Nobel Prize-winning scientists(both Israeli and otherwise).

The Nobel Prize was no longer a tool used merely to validate Jewish laureates in an anti-Semitic world; winners instead could use their influence to work toward the communal purpose of the Jewish state.

In time, an increasing number of Jews received the Nobel Prize for depicting their own Jewish identities. Israel’s first Nobel Prize in literature went to S.Y. Agnon, whose works had focused on Jewish history and tradition. A tone of surprise is almost audible in this JTA report of Agnon’s acceptance ceremony, in which the novelist recited a Hebrew prayer and referred to himself as “a Jew from Jerusalem.” I.B. Singer, the 1978 literature winner, received his award specifically for “restoring the [Warsaw Jewish] ghetto to life”, the Swedish Academy stated.

And for his efforts as a Holocaust speaker, author and activist, “ceaselessly striking the bells of collective memory, the pain of the murdered Jews,” Elie Wiesel was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.

Peace prizes, also awarded to three Israeli prime ministers, focused on Israeli and Jewish struggles, though they often were mired in controversy. After the Nobel committee awarded the 1978 peace pize to Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, JTA released an article analyzing a phone conversation between the two leaders. The article expresses the excitement stirred up by the award, but also hints at prevailing anxieties — peace with Egypt was still uncertain and some wondered if the Camp David talks had been superficial. In this case, the Nobel committee seemed to award the peace prize based on mere hopes for eventual peace. The JTA tracked the peace process — from Sadat’s controversial decision to send a representative to the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in his place, to a breakdown of the ceremony itself. It wasn’t until the following year that the Egypt-Israel treaty was signed, making Egypt the first Arab country to officially recognize Israel.

From Einstein to Agnon, treaties to atoms, and from Europe to Israel and America, Nobel Prizes have represented historical changes — on small and large levels — in the Jewish psyche and place in the world. Nobel Prizes have served as concrete markers of Jewish achievement. They have validated accomplishments by Jews in periods of anti-Semitism. They have also, as with Begin’s peace prize, provided hope for the future.

But perhaps the relation of Jews to the Nobel Prize is summarized best in between the lines of JTA reporting: a subtle note of anxiety in the article about the Begin-Sadat telephone conversation, a description of Einstein interacting with his wife during an interview, or even S.Y. Agnon’s ironic summary of his feelings about his Nobel Prize in literature: “[Now] the Jews will have to start taking an interest in me.”

Miriam Grossman is a student at Johns Hopkins University. She worked as a JTA intern in the summer of 2011.

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As soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, problems began for the agency. It was, after all, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a country that was determined to deprive all Jews of their rights. The agency faced the Nazi regime’s physical attacks on its operations and rhetorical attacks on its journalistic integrity. “Much of the JTA’s superb reporting from Germany … was labeled Jewish anti-Nazi propaganda,” JTA’s founder and editor, Jacob Landau, explained years later in a report to the JTA board.

The German government was not the agency’s only problem.

“About 1933 …a resistance began to develop in the world press to acceptance of news involving Jews and others from what was considered a partisan (Jewish) source,” Landau wrote.

The New York Times dropped the service in 1937 despite repeated entreaties from JTA editors. The Associated Press followed suit. So many non-Jewish newspapers canceled that the agency felt compelled to form the Overseas News Agency so it could report from Europe under a non-Jewish moniker. Still, JTA maintained its mission of serving as “the eyes and ears of world Jewry.” To the rest of the press, the destruction of Europe’s Jews was a secondary story, buried deep within newspapers. To the JTA, the extermination campaign was the story. As Germany marched into Austria and then into Czechoslovakia and other European countries, JTA correspondents chronicled the ensuing anti-Semitic legislation, property confiscations, sporadic violence, work formations, round-ups, and deportations.

The JTA reported first the mass expulsion of Jews from Vienna and the vicious pogroms in Romania. When World War II began in September 1939, conditions for the Jews and for the JTA grew far worse. The agency had about a dozen correspondents on the continent, most of them were Jewish, and many of them stayed as the German tanks rolled in. Mendel Mozes, the JTA’s Warsaw bureau chief, remained in the city during the German bombardment, focusing on reports that Jewish sites had been targeted. Mozes ultimately made his way to Vilna where he lived under Soviet occupation before escaping to Japan and then to the United States.

The JTA’s Paris editor, Abraham Herenroth, also stayed in Europe during the war’s first two years, reporting  from Vichy on the collaborationist government’s treatment of Jews. (Examples can be found here, here, here and here.) As a stateless Jew, Herenroth lived under constant danger. He left for the United States in 1941.

When the JTA, along with the rest of the Western press, could no longer report from inside occupied Europe, it moved to outposts in neutral countries to take on the increasingly horrific task of tallying European Jewry’s demise. Through contacts with diplomats, underground movements, governments-in-exile and massacre survivors, the JTA managed to produce timely, detailed and accurate accounts on topics from the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto (examples can be found here, here, and here) to Jewish generals fighting with the Russians.

A February 1942 report acknowledged both the importance and difficulty of the JTA’s job: “…the JTA is the principal source of information about the Jewish communities isolated from the rest of the world by the Nazi regime. The JTA remains the only link between these communities and the Jews in the democratic countries.”

The JTA’s most important contribution was in reporting the fate of the Jews in eastern Poland and the Soviet Union after Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet pact and invaded in June 1941. The JTA was one of the only news organizations to report consistently on the massacres of more than a million people. In November 1941, for example, it provided the first report of what has come to be known as the Babi Yar massacre in which 52,000 Kiev Jews were machine-gunned.

The JTA ended its coverage of the war the way it had started it — following behind conquering armies. But this time, it was the Allied armies moving into liberated territories and JTA correspondents finding, not an imperiled community, but a devastated one. When the JTA’s Moscow correspondent reached Lublin in 1944, he discovered just 1,000 survivors out of pre-war Jewish population of 42,000. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency dutifully transmitted the list of the survivors’ names.

Laurel Leff is the author of “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Other Articles of Interest

1933 Jews May Not Bathe in Wannsee – Nazi Order

1934 The Truth About Hitler’s War on the Jews

1937 Concentration Camps Misunderstood, Gestapo Chief Holds

1938 Thousands Hopeless Amid Wreckage

1940 8 Foot Wall Holds 500,000 in Ghetto, U.S. Reporter Finds on Visit to Warsaw

1941 Race Experts to Discuss Means of Combatting Nazi Racial Theory in USA

1941 Nazis Execute 52,000 Jews in Kiev, Smaller Pogroms in Other Cities  (Babi Yar)

1941 The Jews are Merely First to Suffer Under Hitlerism, NY Herald-Tribune Warns

1943 Jews Dying Daily in Concentration Camp in Poland; Jewish Deputies Appeal for Aid

1943 Nazis Start Mass Execution of Warsaw Jews on Passover; Victims Broadcast S.O.S.

1943 Germans Anxious Over Nazi Persecution of Jews; Jew Kills High Nazi Official

1944 Kiev Radio Urges Jews in Occupied Poland to Hid Until Liberation by Russian Army

1944 Hidden Jewish Children Being Reunited With Parents in France; Many Others Orphaned

1945 18,000 Have Died in Belsen Camp Since Liberation; 50 Perish Daily; Jews Worst Off

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Israel reportedly purchased the user name earlier this month from Israel Melendez, who chose it in 2007, when the Twitter micro blogging Internet service was first getting started, The New York Times reported.

Melendez, a Spanish national living in Miami, told the Times that he does not use the name because when he posted, he was flooded with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments from Twitter users who thought the account belonged to the State of Israel.

While the purchase sum was widely reported as being in the five figures, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told The Jerusalem Post that the Israeli government paid $3,000 for the name.

Israel has been working to gain a foothold in social networking. It has opened accounts recently for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Flickr.

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