FROM OUR ARCHIVES
65 YEARS AGO
December 25, 1952
The McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, which went into effect on this day, was criticized for having virtually put an end to Jewish immigration while opening the door to former Nazis. The countries from which Jewish migrants would have been expected had essentially mortgaged their quotas for the next 50 to 60 years to account for the admission of the 200,000 displaced persons who came to the US in the previous three years. The law had been described as “America’s first Nuremberg decree” and was condemned by president Harry Truman as “racial.”
While dozens of US citizens serving in the Israeli army reserves had already been released to allow them to retain their nationality under the McCarran Act, US citizens serving in the standing army would not be released. Americans serving in the standing army would therefore be considered having been “conscripted under duress,” and it was presumed that they would not lose their nationality. Some US citizens did not apply for release and were apparently willing to relinquish their American passports and become Israelis.
50 YEARS AGO
December 25, 1967
The Chief Rabbinate proclaimed this day to be a day of fasting and prayer for the Jews of Soviet Russia.
“The hippies – our romantic young – are saying to us parents that our kind of modernity is old-fashioned and unsatisfactory,” San Franciscan Jewish scholar Milton Himmelfarb said. He added that the hippies showed “an unfamiliar thirst for spirituality and religion.” “These young people are telling us that we have foolishly, cleverly and arrogantly abandoned precisely those values that a human being needs for maintaining his humanity in the midst of the bigness and impartiality and machinery. Since many hippies are Jewish, we must conclude that the synagogue, or rather what we, the middle-aged, have made of the synagogue – has failed them.” A recent survey found that 20-25% of the hippie population of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury section, one of the two major concentrations of hippies in the US, was Jewish.
A 60-year-old Christian pilgrim from a small town in the US, asked Lydda Airport officials for the quickest route to the pyramids. She explained that her tour left her with a few extra days and she wanted to see the pyramids since she had already visited Bethlehem. It took a few minutes to brief her on the geopolitical realities of the Middle East.
25 YEARS AGO
December 25, 1992
Sparse crowds braved cold winds and driving rain to mark Christmas Eve in Bethlehem. The weather only served to intensify the gloom cast over the festivities by Bethlehem mayor Elias Freij, who in the end decided not to hang any decorations or organize special festivities for the holiday, as an expression of identification with the 415 Hamas activists who had been deported. In a Christmas message, Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah said, “The first wish of Christmas peace this year goes to God’s children, the deported of Hamas under their tents,” adding that a true Christian “is brother also to the authorities, even when they go astray and oppress, and to the soldier who executes orders.”