FROM OUR ARCHIVES
65 YEARS AGO
January 21, 1953 A wave of panic was reported to have struck Hungarian Jews. They feared rising antisemitism on the part of Eastern Europeans who would seek to take their revenge upon the Jews for their economic plight. Until just a few days earlier, only Zionists and Orthodox Jews feared for their future. Following the recent wave of Russia’s purge of Jews from government positions and other forms of persecution, the panic spread to communist Jews and especially government officials in senior posts and Jewish doctors, who formed a third of the medical profession in Hungary. Some non-Jews were reported to have offered their Jewish friends the same shelters and hiding places given to them during the Nazi searches in 1944. Activities of the Joint in Hungary were expected to be suspended in the near future. The Commuist Party newspaper in Budapest published a violent attack on the Joint, terming it a spy organization aimed at undermining the governments of all the “Popular Democracies.”
50 YEARS AGO
January 21, 1968 Dozens of disappointed children took things into their own hands at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo [then in the Romema neighborhood] on Saturday when they found out that only visitors who had acquired tickets before Shabbat were being allowed in. The children slipped in past the gate attendant who then had no choice but to let their parents in after them. It was the third Saturday in a row that tickets were not available on the spot, after the zoo had been forced to give in to pressure by the Jerusalem Religious Council. Previously, an Arab resident of Abu Ghosh bought tickets on his own initiative and sold them at a slight profit near the gate on Saturdays. The council threatened to stop supplying the zoo with fruit and vegetables it collected from farmers as tithes. The zoo had been forced to give in, because the loss of the produce would have been even greater than the income received from ticket sales. The Abu Ghosh man had been working for many years and the zoo had seen no reason to object because of the many visitors who came from all over the country and who could not always buy tickets in advance. The Religious Council began applying pressure three months earlier and actually stopped the supply of produce for one day. The arrangement with the council had been functioning for 27 years. Previously, tithes were destroyed, but then the zoo pointed out that, according to the Talmud, the produce could be eaten by beasts belonging to priests. All the animals which ate the produce were then symbolically “sold” to a man named Cohen.
25 YEARS AGO
January 21, 1993 The Bezeq telecommunications company began offering a fax service for those interested in inserting requests in the cracks of the Western Wall. A Bezeq staffer would collect the fax messages and take them to the Kotel and insert them between the cracks. A Bezeq spokesman said that when American telecommunications giants AT&T and MCI heard of the new service, they asked for exclusive rights for transmitting fax messages to the Wall, but Bezeq did not accede to the request.