The Ransom of the Jews

The Ransom of the Jews PDF

Author: Radu Ioanid

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-06-23

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1538140756

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After 1948, the 370,000 Jews of Romania who survived the Holocaust became one of the main sources of immigration for the new state of Israel as almost all left their homeland to settle in Palestine and Israel. Romania's decision to allow its Jews to leave was baldly practical: Israel paid for them, and Romania wanted influence in the Middle East. For its part, Israel was rescuing a community threatened by economic and cultural extinction and at the same time strengthening itself with a massive infusion of new immigrants. Radu Ioanid traces the secret history of the longest and most expensive ransom arrangement in recent times, a hidden exchange that lasted until the fall of the Communist regime. Including a wealth of recently declassified documents from the archives of the Romanian secret police, this updated edition follows Israel’s long and expensive ransom arrangement with Communist Romania. Ioanid uncovers the elaborate mechanisms that made it successful for decades, the shadowy figures responsible, and the secret channels of communication and payment. As suspenseful as a Cold-War thriller, his book tells the full, startling story of an unprecedented slave trade.

Extraordinary Jews

Extraordinary Jews PDF

Author: Behrman House

Publisher: Behrman House, Inc

Published: 2005-06

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780867050516

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The biographical plays in this book portray eight modern Jewish people, each of whom embodies the idea of Tikkun olam, that we must all be in partership with God to improve the world.

The Jews of Chicago

The Jews of Chicago PDF

Author: Irving Cutler

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780252021855

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Vividly told and richly illustrated with more than 160 photos, this fascinating history of the cultural, religious, fraternal, economic, and everyday life of Chicago's Jews brings to life the people, events, neighborhoods, and institutions that helped shape today's Jewish communities. 15 maps. Graphs & tables.

Extraordinary Jewish Americans

Extraordinary Jewish Americans PDF

Author: Philip Brooks

Publisher: Scholastic Library Publishing

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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Real-life stories of struggle, achievement, victory, and sometimes loss that are an ideal companion for history, social science, language and geography studies. The Extroardinary People series is the perfect starter for students who want to know more about the people who shaped their world, focusing on the unique histories of people from every culture, and every walk of life.

Lincoln and the Jews

Lincoln and the Jews PDF

Author: Jonathan D. Sarna

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2015-03-17

Total Pages: 671

ISBN-13: 1466864613

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One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln's death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. Lincoln and the Jews: A History provides readers both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews, and with the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts and images, many from the Shapell Lincoln Collection, that show Lincoln in a way he has never been seen before. Lincoln's lifetime coincided with the emergence of Jews on the national scene in the United States. When he was born, in 1809, scarcely 3,000 Jews lived in the entire country. By the time of his assassination in 1865, large-scale immigration, principally from central Europe, had brought that number up to more than 150,000. Many Americans, including members of Lincoln's cabinet and many of his top generals during the Civil War, were alarmed by this development and treated Jews as second-class citizens and religious outsiders. Lincoln, this book shows, exhibited precisely the opposite tendency. He also expressed a uniquely deep knowledge of the Old Testament, employing its language and concepts in some of his most important writings. He befriended Jews from a young age, promoted Jewish equality, appointed numerous Jews to public office, had Jewish advisors and supporters starting already from the early 1850s, as well as later during his two presidential campaigns, and in response to Jewish sensitivities, even changed the way he thought and spoke about America. Through his actions and his rhetoric—replacing "Christian nation," for example, with "this nation under God"—he embraced Jews as insiders. In this groundbreaking work, the product of meticulous research, historian Jonathan D. Sarna and collector Benjamin Shapell reveal how Lincoln's remarkable relationship with American Jews impacted both his path to the presidency and his policy decisions as president. The volume uncovers a new and previously unknown feature of Abraham Lincoln's life, one that broadened him, and, as a result, broadened America.

American Shtetl

American Shtetl PDF

Author: Nomi M. Stolzenberg

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-02-20

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 0691259291

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Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history-but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. This book tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows. Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers paint a richly textured portrait of daily life in Kiryas Joel, exploring the community's guiding religious, social, and economic norms. They delve into the roots of Satmar Hasidism and its charismatic founder, Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, following his journey from nineteenth-century Hungary to post-World War II Brooklyn, where he dreamed of founding an ideal Jewish town modeled on the shtetls of eastern Europe. Stolzenberg and Myers chart the rise of Kiryas Joel as an official municipality with its own elected local government. They show how constant legal and political battles defined and even bolstered the community, whose very success has coincided with the rise of political conservatism and multiculturalism in American society over the past forty years.

Prince of the Press

Prince of the Press PDF

Author: Joshua Teplitsky

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0300234902

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David Oppenheim (1664-1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders, and the contacts between Christians and Jews that books facilitated. From contact with the great courts of European nobility to the poor of Jerusalem, his family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended across Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Containing works of law and literature alongside prayer and poetry, his library served rabbinic scholars and communal leaders, introduced old books to new readers, and functioned as a unique source of personal authority that gained him fame throughout Jewish society and beyond. The story of his life and library brings together culture, commerce, and politics, all filtered through this extraordinary collection. Based on the careful reconstruction of an archive that is still visited by scholars today, Joshua Teplitsky's book offers a window into the social life of Jewish books in early modern Europe.--Publisher's website.

The Rise of Modern Jewish Politics

The Rise of Modern Jewish Politics PDF

Author: C. S. Monaco

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0415659833

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Contends that the starting point from which the "new" Jewish politics emerged was the organized joint Jewish-Christian protest against anti-Jewish legislation in Russia which was held in London in 1827. From this event on, the British Jewish community perceived itself as the champion of the rights of Jews everywhere. Traces the development of these politics from 1827-1903, dwelling on the main campaigns and Jewish diplomatic efforts during this period, including the Damascus Affair of 1840, the Mortara Affair in 1858, the diplomatic struggle for the civil rights of Romanian Jews and against the pogroms there in the 1860s-70s, and reactions to the pogroms in Russia in 1881-82 and the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. Gradually, from the mid-19th century on, American Jewry joined in the British Jewish protest campaigns and diplomatic efforts. Relates the activities of some Jewish leaders, e.g. Moses E. Levy from Florida and Moses Montefiore. Not all of the Jewish interventions were successful; however, the significance of the new Jewish politics can be measured not only by the formal successes of its campaigns. From the start, this new politics attracted masses of Jews in Britain and the USA, and developed into broad social movements. The tradition of popular movements for the defense of Jews worldwide continued during the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s, and during the campaign for the rights of Jews in the USSR in the 1970s.

American Judaism

American Judaism PDF

Author: Jonathan D. Sarna

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 0300190395

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Jonathan D. Sarna's award-winning American Judaism is now available in an updated and revised edition that summarizes recent scholarship and takes into account important historical, cultural, and political developments in American Judaism over the past fifteen years. Praise for the first edition: "Sarna . . . has written the first systematic, comprehensive, and coherent history of Judaism in America; one so well executed, it is likely to set the standard for the next fifty years."--Jacob Neusner, Jerusalem Post "A masterful overview."--Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Historical Review "This book is destined to be the new classic of American Jewish history."--Norman H. Finkelstein, Jewish Book World Winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award/Jewish Book of the Year

The Nine Hundred

The Nine Hundred PDF

Author: Heather Dune Macadam

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2020-01-23

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1529329337

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'Books such as this are essential: they remind modern readers of events that should never be forgotten' - Caroline Moorehead On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Filled with a sense of adventure and national pride, they left their parents' homes wearing their best clothes and confidently waving good-bye. Believing they were going to work in a factory for a few months, they were eager to report for government service. Instead, the young women-many of them teenagers-were sent to Auschwitz. Their government paid 500 Reichsmarks (about £160) apiece for the Nazis to take them as slave labour. Of those 999 innocent deportees, only a few would survive. The facts of the first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz are little known, yet profoundly relevant today. These were not resistance fighters or prisoners of war. There were no men among them. Sent to almost certain death, the young women were powerless and insignificant not only because they were Jewish-but also because they were female. Now, acclaimed author Heather Dune Macadam reveals their poignant stories, drawing on extensive interviews with survivors, and consulting with historians, witnesses, and relatives of those first deportees to create an important addition to Holocaust literature and women's history.