March 14, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward
The wedding of Leo Jacobs and Gussie Goldman, which took place this past Sunday in Brooklyn, had an unusual feature: The couple’s chupah was held up by 12 people, none of them Jewish and all of them Brooklyn policemen. The police-chupah bearers were there on account of Jacobs’s previous fiancee, Celia Davis. Jacobs had planned on marrying Miss Davis, and the couple had gotten as far as renting a hall and buying a dress when Jacobs serendipitously met Goldman and fell for her. He unceremoniously dumped Davis and asked Goldman to marry him. Extremely unhappy, Davis is suing Jacobs in a case that is expected to reach the bench soon. But Davis’s brother wanted to settle the case differently, and he mailed Jacobs a hail of horrible death threats. Jacobs eventually contacted the police, who felt it necessary to protect their charge all the way to the altar. Immediately after the ceremony, the new Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs had to sneak out the back way.
75 Years Ago in the forward
Tens of thousands of Jews have descended upon the town on of Zakapona in Galicia, Poland, for the winter Maccabi Games. Polish Jews are thrilled. They’ve stopped thinking about their usual problems, taxes, bankruptcies and antisemitism and have immersed themselves in skiing, hockey and ice-skating. Some say the games are so popular that people in Warsaw have pawned their furniture and valuables to travel to the Galician mountains and pay big money for tickets to them. And all kinds of Jews are coming: from young men and women in the latest winter fashions to old men and women who look like they’d be more comfortable sitting at home playing cards and eating goose grivenes. But the crowds were enthusiastic: When Vienna’s Hakoach hockey team beat Maccabi Romania 3-1, the crowd was thrilled. And when Poland’s team beat Vienna’s, the people went absolutely nuts.
50 Years Ago in the forward
Reports from the Middle East indicate that Egypt’s president, Gamel Abdel Nasser, is preparing to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state in Gaza on March 14, a year to the day that Israeli forces pulled out of the Egyptian-ruled area. Because Egypt and Syria are now considered one country — the United Arab Republic — it is expected that Palestinian refugees in Syria will declare their loyalty to the new state, which will then become an entity within the United Arab Republic. It is alleged that this plan is also meant to cause unrest among the 500,000 Palestinians ruled by Jordan, which recently became part of a federation with Iraq.
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