100 Years Ago In the Forward

When a taxi cab pulled up outside Max Shneier’s Suffolk Street Saloon, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at midnight, a few men got out and walked into the saloon with revolvers in hand and started shooting. The customers dove onto the floor and into corners, trying to avoid the bullets that were whizzing by; the bullets ended up in the walls and in beer and whiskey barrels. When the gunmen had emptied their revolvers, they simply walked out, got back into the taxi and left. A short while thereafter, the police found the bodies of Ludlow Street peddler Samuel Klein and East Broadway resident Michael Kuliski; both men had bullets in their heads. The bodies of the apparently innocent bystanders were discovered outside the saloon. It is thought that the shooting was perpetrated by the Kid Twist gang.

75 Years Ago In the Forward

Two men lay dead as a result of the ongoing war in the kosher chicken industry, which is well known to be riddled with corruption. The two men, Abraham Cohen and Max Livingstone, both chicken-flickers from Brooklyn, were lured to an apartment on Stanton Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and murdered. In a related incident, Irving Bernstein, a Bronx poultry dealer, was shot and badly wounded. He is not expected to survive. The police say that these murders are related to the 1914 murder of poultry dealer Barnet Baff and are only a prelude to a larger and bloodier war in the kosher chicken trade, something that has waxed and waned over the past 20 years. Joseph Cohen, a poultry dealer who was convicted of Baff’s murder and released on bail, was shot to death in his home two years ago. The pair murdered on Stanton Street yesterday were widely believed to have murdered Cohen.

50 Years Ago In the Forward

Eighty million Arabs, from Casablanca to the Persian Gulf, will declare war on Israel if the current United Nations Assembly does not do something to solve the problem of the Palestinian refugees. So said Ahmad Shukeiri, the Saudi Arabian delegate to the U.N., in a bitter, two-hour-long speech in which he described the terrible conditions the refugees endure. He laid the entire blame on the State of Israel. Shukeiri, formerly Syria’s U.N. delegate, also demanded that Israel be removed from the U.N. entirely, due to the U.N.’s refusal to deal with the refugee issue.

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