August 26, 2011
100 Years Ago in The Forward
Sarah Cohen, 18, was walking home from work on Manhattan’s Lower East Side when a thief accosted her, snatching her purse. The thief wasn’t fast enough, and Ms. Cohen managed to grab him. But along came another thief, apparently a friend of the first one, and grabbed the purse as victim and perpetrator tussled. Ms. Cohen was having none of it. She grabbed the first one by the collar and started running after the second, catching him at the end of the block. She then yelled for the police, who arrived and arrested the men. They were local residents Frank Feldman and David Falk. The magistrate in the Essex Market Court commended Ms. Cohen for her bravery.
75 Years Ago in The Forward
If one goes to the old, religious yishuv in Jerusalem — in Meah-Shearim, for example, — it’s easy to find out the reasons for the wave of terrorism in Palestine: It’s because of Jewish women. According to dozens of paskvilim, or the wall placards on which the ultra-Orthodox community gets its news, the responsibility for terrorist attacks in which Jews and Arabs have been killed has less to do with politics and more to do with women’s clothing. “The reason for all the difficulties, troubles and tragedies from which the Jewish people in both the Diaspora and especially in our land are suffering, is due to the profligacy of our Jewish wives and daughters,” one of the placards read. “They wear sleeveless shirts in public. The material of their shirts is so thin that they are practically naked and when one sees the outlines of their body parts, even truly religious men cannot control the evil inclination.”
50 Years Ago in The Forward
It has been 13 years since Yiddish culture was destroyed in the Soviet Union. So when it was announced last spring in Moscow that a new Yiddish journal would begin publication, the news was welcomed. But it’s been more than a year and nothing has appeared. They say, however, that the first issue of a magazine called Sovetish Heymland will appear on newsstands in short order. Edited by poet Aron Vergelis, the publication is looked upon as a step forward in the opening up of Jewish cultural life. In order to combat the claim that Yiddish literary life in the USSR had been destroyed in 1952 with the executions of major Yiddish literary talents, he showed journalists a list of hundreds of names of Yiddish writers and said they were all writing in Yiddish regularly.
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