Looking Back: June 1, 2012

100 Years Ago in the Forward

Through an advertisement he placed in the Forverts, Berel Cohn found his father, Avrom Yingerman, whom he hasn’t seen in 25 years. Yingerman, who hails from the Polish town Brisk, divorced his wife 25 years ago and left her and their three children in Poland. He went to New York, and from that day on his family didn’t hear a word from him. Two of the children died, but the third, Berel, decided that when he was old enough, he’d go to America like his father. But when he arrived, there was no trace of Avrom Yingerman. Berel Yingerman queried acquaintances from Brisk, and the people in his landsmanshaft, but had no luck. So he decided to put an ad in the paper, an ad that described his father and what he knew about him. Sure enough, a shop mate of Yingerman’s saw the ad and brought the two together.

75 Years Ago in the Forward

According to reports by the Agence D’Orient news corporation, the grand mufti of Jerusalem is willing to accept the division of Palestine into Arab and Jewish sectors if he is made king of the Arab side. The same report noted that the mufti’s representative in London stated that if Palestine is divided, the Arab half should be independent and not part of Jordan. Other sources indicate that the rift between the mufti and King Abdullah of Jordan is worsening significantly, because current plans to divide the territory have the Arab section under the control of Abdullah, a situation the mufti wants to avoid.

50 Years Ago in the Forward

Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews, was executed in Jerusalem after Israel’s president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, rejected all appeals to spare his life. Among the appeals were his own, which stated that he was ashamed by the mass murder of Jews, and one from his wife, who asked the president to have mercy on him. Another appeal, written by a group of professors led by Martin Buber, did not ask for mercy on Eichmann but requested that he not be executed. For his part, Eichmann was said to have preferred death to life imprisonment.

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