December 31, 2010

100 Years Ago in the Forward

Two teenage boys, Louis Goldstein and Max Bernstein, are being held on $2,000 bail after being arrested for seducing two teenage girls from Brooklyn and holding them against their will. Goldstein and Bernstein allegedly approached the girls, Anna Fastor and Eva Blistein, in a movie theater on Graham Avenue, saying that they worked for the theater. They asked the girls if they would like jobs as actresses and took them to a store, where the girls were told they would be fitted for outfits. It is thought that the two lotharios had planned on forcing the girls into a life of licentiousness, but police foiled their plans.

75 Years Ago in the Forward

Zulmati Shlomo, a Jewish lieutenant in Haile Selassie’s Abyssinian army, was wounded in battle and taken prisoner by Italian troops. He was shipped to Trieste, Italy, where he was hospitalized for treatment of his wounds. Subsequent to his hospitalization, Shlomo was to be placed in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp, but just prior to his release, he escaped from the hospital and managed to sneak out of Italy. At the time of this reporting, Shlomo had made it to Athens, where he spoke to Jewish journalists. He reported that times are currently quite difficult for Abyssinia’s 60,000 Jews, whose towns are situated in the main battlefields.

50 Years Ago in the Forward

The recent announcement that the nuclear reactor currently being constructed in Israel’s Negev desert will be used only for peaceful purposes did not mollify Arab reaction to the fact that Israel will soon have the capability to produce plutonium, the material necessary to create atomic bombs. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser stated that if Israel builds an atomic bomb, he would pay “any price” so that he can also have the bomb. Speaking about the Israeli reactor at a meeting in Port Said, Egypt, Nasser declared NATO to be Egypt’s No. 1 enemy.

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