December 17, 2004

100 Years Ago

• Ms. Ada Ginsberg came into the office of the Forward and announced that she would like to sell her five-week-old baby. Ms. Ginsberg informed us that since her husband disappeared three months ago, she has been living in Brooklyn with her uncle. Unfortunately, her uncle is in dire financial straits and is unable to support Ms. Ginsberg and her new baby. She said that she has nowhere to turn, and that if she does not find a place to live soon, both she and her baby will die of hunger in the street.

75 Years Ago

• Shmuel Yitzhok Shereshevki was born in a Lithuanian shtetl and went to cheder there. His parents hoped he would become a rabbi, but fate intervened and his parents died. Shereshevski wandered throughout the Pale, staying at a variety of yeshivas. He was a strange type and was once rumored to have sneaked the New Testament into a yeshiva in Zhitomir. Shereshevski also spent time in a few different German universities. Eventually he wound up in America, where he converted to Episcopalianism. He did well among the Episcopalians and became a bishop. The seminary at which he studied sent him to China as a missionary. However, the Chinese were not very interested in Christianity. This left Bishop Shmuel Yitzhok Shereshevski time to learn Chinese, into which he eventually translated the entire Bible.

• Philadelphia Rabbi Max D. Klein announced in a speech at the YMHA that the Zionists are at fault for the recent conflagrations in Palestine. “Jews and Muslims have lived in peace and friendship for hundreds of years. There is no reason that the two nations should hate each other….That the Zionists have requested of the British the right to pray at the Western Wall is enough for the Arabs to claim that they are being religiously oppressed.… The Zionists created this situation in which the Arabs have attacked the Jews.”

50 Years Ago

• A prosecutor in Egypt has requested that 13 Jews who were arrested for espionage and sabotage in the interests in the State of Israel be sentenced to death. The Jews have denied the charges, which include being part of a secret organization, financed and armed by Israel, the intention of which was to ruin Egypt’s relations with a variety of different countries, including the United States. The prosecutor charged that the group received visits from Israeli officers and that they planned on planting bombs in American cultural centers in Cairo and Alexandria.

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