June 20, 2003
100 YEARS AGO
• When Pavolachi Krushevan, editor of the antisemitic newspaper Besarabets, and whose articles are widely believed to have incited the hooligans of Kishinev to attack the Jews, walked out of his office into the street, he was quickly surrounded by a gang of Jewish youths who had recognized the renowned antisemite. A battle ensued and Krushevan was stabbed in the side. The wound he received is not considered serious. One Jewish youth, a former student of the Kiev Polytechnical Institute, was arrested.
75 YEARS AGO
• After a long illness, Jewish social activist Joseph Barondess is dead at the age of 61. Barondess was born in Kamanetsk-Podolsk and came to America in 1888, where he worked in a sweatshop as a cloakmaker. He was one of the earliest activists in the Jewish labor movement and one of the founders of the Cloakmakers’ Union. He became well known during the cloakmaker strike of 1891. Barondess later helped to found the Hebrew Actors’ Union and also served on the New York Board of Education under both the Gaynor and Mitchell administrations.
• A Jewish pharmacist’s love is worth $2,500. Mrs. Minnie Brody accused one Yetta Bloom of stealing her husband’s heart away and filed a suit in a Brooklyn court. As it turned out, the jury agreed and awarded Mrs. Brody, a mother of three, $2,500 for her broken heart. Ms. Bloom was not entirely unhappy with the verdict: She was sure that the pharmacist’s love was worth at least $15,000.
50 YEARS AGO
• Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the first civilians sent to the electric chair for espionage, were executed in Sing-Sing prison this week. The Rosenbergs, who were found guilty of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, were also the first couple to be executed together. After the Supreme Court refused their appeal, the president also refused to commute their sentences. In spite of massive protests and much feverish activity against the execution, their sentences were carried out.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
