FROM OUR ARCHIVES
65 YEARS AGO
December 12, 1952
A federal judge refused to stay the execution of convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were due to die during the week of January 11 at Sing Sing prison.
For the 13,000 Beduin in the Beersheba area, the inauguration of a new eight-kilometer four-inch pipeline from Beersheba to a central point in the area of the five Tehaya tribes with their 5,000 members supposedly marked the end of their nomadic life and heralded their settlement on the land as farmers. In a short speech to the assembled sheikhs and tribesmen, Lt.-Col. Basil Herman pointed out that for generations the Arabs of this area had been nomadic Beduin; this mode of life was impossible in a dynamic country like Israel, and the government was therefore assisting them to change to a settled form of life. [According to a 2007 report of the Israel Lands Authority, 40% of the Beduin population lived in unrecognized villages.]
J.L. Benor, director of the Arab Division of the Education Ministry, reported that school attendance among Israeli Arabs had reached 20% of the total Arab population in the country, a higher percentage than in any Arab country.
50 YEARS AGO
December 12, 1967
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank deprived Jordan of 43% of its income, according to the Jordanian government. A statistics report from the Jordanian Economy Ministry added that Jordan had lost more than 90% of its tourism industry.
Time magazine published what it said were extracts from the last “political will” of Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, Egypt’s former deputy supreme commander and confidant of president Gamal Abdul Nasser, who died in September while under house arrest for allegedly plotting a coup to overthrow Nasser. Amer, who resigned immediately after the Six Day War, was quoted as saying that “we involved ourselves in a war with Israel without wanting it, without taking the initiative and without planning or choosing its date.” Egyptian authorities officially listed Amer’s death as suicide, though according to Time, Amer had written that suicide was “farthest from my mind.” He also added: “I feel sure that a conspiracy is being prepared against me.”
15 YEARS AGO
December 12, 2002
Jewish and Mormon leaders came to an agreement following the church’s apparent violations of an agreement not to posthumously and symbolically baptize Holocaust victims. An agreement was brokered in 1995 that removed the names of some 400,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors from the church’s records. According to independent researcher Helen Radkey, at least 20,000 Jews, some of them Holocaust victims, were still listed in the church’s databases. Radkey said that Anne Frank and her extended family were listed as having been baptized by the church. Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc and Buddha were also posthumously baptized. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called on the Mormon Church to rein in its members regarding these posthumous baptisms. “If these people did not contact the Mormons themselves, the adage should be: Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” Hier said. “With the greatest of respect to them, we do not think they are the exclusive arbitrators of who is saved.”