FROM OUR ARCHIVES

65 YEARS AGO

Dr. Nahum Goldmann, chairman of the Jewish Agency, was set to be presented by chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany with a concrete offer for capital goods and machinery valued at over a billion dollars to be delivered to Israel within five years. Heading the list were two new ships, one passenger and one freighter. No foreign currency was offered, due to Germany’s significant war-related debts, so if the proposal were to be accepted, Israel would have to reimburse German Jews outside Israel who were also being represented by Goldmann in the reparations talks.

The milkmen’s strike in Tel Aviv would continue, after a heated meeting of the Milkmen’s Union could not reach any conclusions about the food controller’s new proposals for daily milk distribution. Some of the emotional milkmen said that if they were to distribute milk daily, they would have to work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. They said that Tnuva was incapable of supplying them daily, and even if they could, it wouldn’t come at prearranged hours. This would mean time wasted waiting for the milk to arrive and then a rush to the customers to prevent the milk from turning sour.

50 YEARS AGO

A cease-fire agreement between Israel and Syria was announced in Tel Aviv and in New York at the UN Security Council. The call was made by the Syrian UN delegation as the situation for the Syrians was rapidly deteriorating, with Syrian defense lines cracked open by the IDF to deal with Syrian artillery positions which had been bombarding settlements in the border valleys almost incessantly for the previous five days. The Syrians were reported to have shown stiff resistance. They gave up only after an intensive artillery and air force bombardment of positions east and southeast of Lake Kinneret. Thousands of Egyptian soldiers continued to struggle back on foot to Egypt, with the IDF making no attempt to stop them, merely taking away their weapons. Israel had taken possession of 70 of King Hussein of Jordan’s 200 tanks. Of the remaining 130, quite a number had been put out of action.

25 YEARS AGO

A Jewish contractor’s son was mistakenly shot in the chest by police and nine people were detained during rioting in the Jerusalem haredi neighborhood of Mekor Baruch, sparked by unfounded reports of an Arab terror attack. Boaz Dahan, 19, was using a large metal rod to fend off the angry crowd attacking his Arab co-workers when he was shot. The confrontation started when a construction worker accidentally started a fire while using a soldering iron. Before Dahan and the other workers could put out the blaze, dozens of haredim converged on the site, sparked by rumors that the Arab workers had purposely set the fire that nearly reached a home next to the construction site. One haredi man fired several shots in the air as Dahan, along with his father and his brother, tried to fight off the angry crowd. A plainclothes policeman was one of the first to arrive and opened fire on Dahan, apparently believing he was a terrorist. Dahan was taken to Hadassah-University Medical Center in moderate but stable condition.

— Daniel Kra