Looking Back: January 18, 2013
100 Years Ago
1913 One of our local, homegrown Jewish gangsters from New York City’s East Side, Joseph Tablinsky, was arrested on the charge of horse thievery. Sam Bernstein, who owns a stable on Cherry Street, where two horses worth about $400 recently went missing, brought the charges. The horses were later found in Berish & Rosen’s Stables, in East Harlem, and had been brought there by another East Harlem horse trader, Sam Mait. When questioned by police, Mait stammered and wasn’t able to come up with a reasonable answer. The police arrested him and were led to Tablinsky, who was already known to them as the leader of a gang of horse poisoners and thieves. Tablinsky, for his part, claimed he wasn’t connected to this job, but the police still put him in the tombs, where he is currently sitting and waiting for someone to pay his $5,000 bail.
75 Years Ago
1938 Yiddish has officially been banned in Bessarabia, Romania. Romanian Premier Octavian Goga, whose anti-Semitic National Christian Party recently stripped Romanian Jews of their citizenship, has made conditions for Jews in the country especially onerous. Acting on orders of Goga, a local party chief ordered all Yiddish newspapers and schools closed and announced that no meetings in which Yiddish is spoken may be held. In addition, at least 600 Jews were expelled from Bessarabia. It is becoming increasingly evident that certain political parties in Eastern Europe are imitating the Nazis not only in the realm of nationalism, but with anti-Semitism, as well.
50 Years Ago
1963 Donald Branch, a 26-year-old municipal employee of the City of Miami, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted of bombing the home of the Miami Herald’s editor, Don Shoemaker. Branch, who police discovered to have had a trove of neo-Nazi paraphernalia and literature in his home, was arrested last year for trying to dynamite Miami’s Anshe Emes synagogue, a plot that was foiled when an undercover agent substituted Branch’s dynamite sticks with duds. The American Nazi Leader George Rockwell, who visited Miami last year, disavowed any connection to Branch or to the other neo-Nazis in his cohort.
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