FROM OUR ARCHIVES

65 YEARS AGO

January 2, 1953 There were no lynchings in the US in 1952 – for the first year since 1882 – but “Other forms of violence and lawlessness have not declined, “Frederick Douglas Patterson, president of the Tuskegee Negro College, said in his annual report. The report deplored “The resurgence of mob action expressed in bombings and incendiarism” and said these weapons were used mainly where Negroes had moved or tried to move into white neighborhoods. The report listed almost 70 bombings in the previous four years – 40 against Negroes, 10 against whites, eight against synagogues and Jewish schools and one against a Catholic church.

50 YEARS AGO

January 2, 1968 The greatest flood of source material ever to swamp British historians was laid bare when the Public Record Office released for study millions of documents covering the period between the two world wars. The material ranged from documents on Hitler’s promise to “hit the Jews in Germany” to those dealing with King George V’s saving of the Tower of London’s famed beefeaters. A report sent to London in 1933 by Sir Horace Rumbold, then British ambassador in Germany, disclosed that Hitler had vowed that the Jews would be “hit” if anti-German pressures appeared abroad. Hitler had just come to power and the ambassador had met him for policy talks. He immediately sent a secret report to London, in which he said that Hitler became “hysterical” and complained about the unemployment in Germany. “There are not enough posts for pure-bred Germans,” the report quoted Hitler as saying. It was therefore necessary for the Jews to suffer. If any anti-German pressure was organized by Jews outside Germany, Hitler threatened to “hit” the Jews. Sir Robert Vansittart, the permanent head of the Foreign Office, wrote in the margin of the document: “The present regime in Germany will… loose off another European war just as soon as it feels strong enough.”

15 YEARS AGO

January 2, 2003 Palestinian Authority officials and institutions in the Gaza Strip were involved in stealing basic food supplies and medicine provided by UNRWA and Arab countries, according to documents seized by the IDF during an earlier raid on the Protective Security Service headquarters in Gaza City. The documents showed that PA officials had been selling the food and medicine on the black market since 1996. Food distributed by UNRWA to residents of refugee camps in the Gaza Strip had made their way to private merchants, who were selling them on the black market. The documents also indicated that large supplies of medicine and other equipment donated by Arab countries as humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people were being sold at private pharmacies and other markets in the Gaza Strip.

Shas’s Knesset campaign would revolve around instilling fear in voters’ minds about what would happen to the Jewish character of the state if, as polls predicted, secularist Shinui became the country’s third largest party. At a Shas rally in Tel Aviv, a member of the Shas Council of Torah Sages, Rabbi Shalom Cohen, called Shinui head Yosef (Tommy) Lapid a “dog.” “I don’t think ‘dog’ was a proper characterization of Tommy,” Shas spokesman Yitzhak Sudri said. “I think Tommy is more similar to a pig.”

– Daniel Kra