Looking Back February 3, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD
The Nusbaum divorce case, which has been roiling Newark, N.J.’s Jewish community for the past two months, has finally come to a conclusion. The case has dragged one of the community’s best-known businessmen, Henry Herzenberg, through the mud. Witnesses said they saw Herzenberg, a Newark Jewish Hospital trustee, in the hospital with Esther Nusbaum sitting on his lap and kissing him. Other witnesses testified that they saw Herzenberg and Mrs. Nusbaum checking into New York City’s Ashland Hotel as “Mr. and Mrs. Otto Fishbein.” After these facts came to light, the judge granted Mr. Nusbaum a divorce.
75 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD
Jewish students were beaten and driven out of the main universities and high schools in Vienna this week following pitched battles between fascist and socialist student organizations. The student brawls occurred just as voting in elections to student organizations was being completed. In spite of a heavy police presence in the vicinity of the University of Vienna, a number of Jewish passersby were lightly wounded by students connected to the fascist movement. The Hitlerist students later congregated in the university and sang antisemitic songs.
This week, not only can you get some good deals at some great stores, but you also can help the masses of unemployed workers. Goldberg’s Drug Store and Greenberg’s Radio Shop, both in the Bronx, will donate 5% of this week’s profits to the Forward’s fund for unemployed laborers. Forward readers who still are employed should remember their responsibility to support their unemployed brothers. They should do so by heading to the Bronx to shop at either Goldberg’s Drug Store or Greenberg’s Radio Shop.
50 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD
After eight years, famed Yiddish literary critic Nakhmen Mayzl finally has decided to break his silence regarding the situation of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union. Mayzl, a longtime communist, said that he kept quiet in order to protect the name of communism. He now admits that he did not publicize his attempts to find out what was happening to Yiddish writers in the USSR, notably his meetings with Russian writers in early 1949, in which he inquired about the status of Yiddish culture and its creators. He initially was told that everything was fine and then later ignored the situation. Perhaps the most telling part of Mayzl’s admission was that he chose to publish it in a Hebrew journal in Tel Aviv and not in his own Yidishe Kultur.
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