June 13, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward
Don’t ask Louie Moscowitz and Rosie Venitsky to try using a matchmaker again. Getting burned once was apparently enough. Venitsky claims that her bank account is $215 lighter because of a matchmaker by the name of Moyshe Kablitsky. And if it hadn’t been for this matchmaker, Moscowitz wouldn’t be sitting on the floor of a dark cell in the Essex Market Police Station. Hired by Venitsky, Seems Kablitsky apparently set up the couple, saying that Moscowitz was a prize catch whom even a princess would marry. Venitsky agreed, and the two got engaged. Shortly thereafter, Moscowitz asked his bride-to-be to loan him $215 so that he could buy her a pair of diamond earrings. After she gave Moscowitz the money, he disappeared, only to reappear a few weeks later — married to some other girl who lived on the same block as Venitsky. Upon discovering this fact, Venitsky went to the police, who promptly locked up the young groom. He is currently awaiting trial.
75 Years Ago in the forward
As a protest against the way Jews there are being treated, Arturo Toscanini, conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and one of the world’s best known, has refused an invitation to conduct at the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany. “The lamentable events which have wounded my feelings both as man and as artist have not, up to this moment, changed, despite my hopes,” wrote the Maestro to the daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, organizer of the Wagner festival.
In other Germany-related matters, more than 20 American athletes have sent a cable to the International Olympic Committee stating that as long as Jewish athletes are excluded from participating in sports in Germany, the forthcoming 1936 Olympic Games should not be held in Berlin.
50 Years Ago in the forward
The streets of Jerusalem were crammed with more than 10,000 protesters singing psalms and blowing shofars in a demonstration against the opening of a new swimming pool that will permit men and women to swim at the same time. Organized by the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael political party, this was not the first demonstration against the pool. Previous demonstrations had ended in violence, something the organizers were hoping to avoid. But when the anti-pool demonstrators were met with a youthful counter demonstration of more than 1,000 people shouting, “We want the pool,” a number of arrests were made.
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