The Jewish Voice is pleased to announce the winners of its Israel Trivia Contest! Mazal Tov – we know how tough it was!
First Prize (two tickets to the Jerusalem Symphony): Gail Lichtman
Second Prize (copy of Moshe Arens Speaks Out): Joel Glazier
Consolation Prizes (copies of the book Facts About Israel): Alan Horowitz and Rebecca Bank
The Jewish Voice would like to thank Bob Akell for creating this contest in honor of Israel’s 40th Anniversary.
Answers to contest: Easy:
1. The Knesset has 120 members
2. The Shekel
3. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt
4. May 14, 1948, at 4 p.m.
5. El Al Airlines
6. Jewish, Moslem, Christian and Armenian
7. David Ben-Gurion
8. The Maccabiah Games
9. Yad Vashem
10. Jersualem
11. The Jordan River
12. Golda Meir
13. Asia Media:
14. A seven -branched menorah surrounded by two olive branches linked by the word “Israel” written in Hebrew
15. In 1897 by Theodore Herzl
16. 1286 feet below sea level
17. Mt. Hermon -9220 feet
18. Saul
19. Jaffa, Zion, Dung, Lions (or St. Stephens), Herod’s, Damascus and New, Golden
20. May 11, 1949
21. On March 26, 1979, with the signors: Prime Minister Menachem Begin for Israel and President Anwar Sadat for Egypt; President Jimmy Carter was witness
22. Metulla
23. Caesarea
24. Arabic
25. Judea and Samaria
26. Palestine Hard:
27. Tat-Aluf
28. Israel has 10,840 square miles. Nine states in the U.S. are smaller: Connecticut (5009 sq.mi.), Delaware (2057 sq.mi), Hawaii (6424 sq.mi.), Maryland (10,577 sq.mi.), Massachusetts (8257 sq.mi.), New Hampshire (9,304 sq.mi.), New Jersey (7,836 sq.mi.), Rhode Island (1,214 sq.mi.) and Vermont (9,609 sq.mi.).
29. 82.9 percent Jews, 13.5 percent Moslems, 2.3 percent Christians, and 1.3 percent Druze and others.
30. Tel Aviv University with 16,900 students and Hebrew University of
Jerusalem with 16,000 students
31. War of Independence: May 1948-July 1949; Sinai Campaign: October 1956;
Six-Day War: June 1967; Yom Kippur War: October 1973; and Operation Peace
for Gallilee: June 1982.
32. The Histadrut
33. The Mount of Olives
34. Ho Chi Minh offered land in Vietnam
35. Degania
36. Herodion
37. November 29, 1947
38. Nelson Glueck
39. Safed at 960 meters or 3150 feet
40. Tiberias is 210 meters or 689 feet below sea level.
In 1973, the thirtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising inspired Rabbi David Geffen, then the Rabbi of Congregation Beth Shalom, to write this article for the Jewish Voice. Now, forty-five years later and seventy-five years after the events in the spring of 1943, we should again remember their heroic resistance.
BY RABBI DAVID B. GEFFEN, President, Rabbinical Assembly of Delaware
A hush falls upon the Seder table richly laden with the symbols of an ancient quest for freedom. The head of the household begins anew the story of the heroic and tragic fight for freedom in our time.
“On this night of the Seder we remember with reverence and love the six millions of our people of the European exile who perished at the hands of a tyrant more wicked than the Pharoah who enslaved our fathers in Egypt.
Come, said he to his minions, let us cut them off from being a people that the name of Israel may be remembered no more. And they slew the blameless and pure, men and women and little ones, with vapors of poison and with fire. But we abstain from dwelling on the deeds of the evil ones lest we defame the image of God in which man was created.
Now the remnants of our people who were left in the ghettos and camps of annihilation rose up against the wicked ones for the sanctification of the Name. On the first day of Passover the remnants in the Ghetto of Warsaw rose up against the adversary, even as in the days of Judah the Maccabee. They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided, and they brought redemption to the name of Israel through all the world.
And from the depths of their affliction the martyrs lifted their voices in a song of faith in the coming of the Messiah, when justice and brotherhood will reign among men.”
***
WARSAW WAS HOME for 330,000 Jews in 1939. They studied, worked and lived peacefully until October of the following year when the great madness, Hitler’s “New Order,” began in Poland. Jews were herded into a ghetto separated from the Christians with walls and barbed wire. This was a harbinger of the human holocaust which followed.
Until July of 1942, slow starvation and the denial of medical help were the means employed by the Germans to exterminate the Jews. These methods, however, were apparently too slow, for the Germans now began mass deportations to concentration camps and gas chambers under the guise of using Jews in labor camps.
Jews from various parts of Europe were collected and sent to the Warsaw Ghetto. From this central location they were transported to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdenek, and the like. At the end of October, 1942 only 50,000 Jews were left in Warsaw.
Up to this point it was difficult for most people to believe that the Germans were using Jews for any purpose other than for forced labor. Gradually rumors of atrocities committed and gas chambers began to fly through the ghetto. The news became a clarion call to the young Jews to organize for survival. Young Jewish leaders arose and formed the Organization of Jewish Fighters. Young leaders they were, indeed, for the Germans had already slaughtered the top leadership of the Jewish Communal Council, thinking by doing this, that the Jews would easily be crushed.
***
THEY HAD NOT reckoned however, with the caliber of people like Mordechai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Michał Klepfisz, Aron Liebeskind, Yitzhak Goldstein, Tosia Altman, Eliezer Geller, Shlomo Alterman, Rubin Rosenberg, Rifkah Glanz, Lejb Rotblat, and others who led the active heroic resistance in many places.
Following the mass deportations of October, 1942 during which Michał Klepfisz, an engineer, had managed to escape from a train bound for the gas chamber in Treblinka, a period of relative quiet ensued lasting three months. In January, 1943 when the Germans again began to deport and exterminate, they were met with organized armed resistance under the leadership of Mordechai Anielewicz.
Mordechai Anielewicz
Mordechai Anielewicz, born in Warsaw of a poor family of workers was then only 24 years old. By 1943 he had already undertaken various missions in behalf of Jewish youth and the Jewish Underground Movement.
During this January revolt the Jews suffered very heavy losses, but they were now determined that if they were to die they would die in dignity, fighting, believing that the great madness let loose’ in the world, could not triumph.
Another period of foreboding quiet followed. It was broken in the middle of the first Seder night, April 19, 1943. SS Troops, Ukrainians, Polish Blue Police, Lithuanian uniformed auxiliaries invaded the ghetto in order to perform complete murder, a ritual of extermination.
***
UNDER MORDECHAI’S leadership the Jews were prepared with limited weapons for the barbarians. They fought with a fierceness and perseverance which made even Germans and Poles wonder. The losses to the Jews, however, were tremendous.
On the second day of the uprising Michał Klepfisz, the engineer, 30 years old, son of a Hassidic rabbi, having escaped certain death in Treblinka, fell in action as commander of a sector, one of the bravest fighters in the Warsaw revolt.
Yitzchak Goldstein, 27 years old, who had acquired his military training in the Polish army now used it skillfully for Jewish resistance. He too was killed in action defending a bunker in the ghetto.
Tosia Altman, then 25 years of age, had been born into a wealthy family of Wloclawek. During the uprising she was one of 14, who after being wounded in a severe fight, were carried through underground tunnels and sewers to the Aryan part of Warsaw. Polish police turned her over to the German Gestapo. In the hospital she was denied any help, even water, and died of exhaustion due to her wounds.
Rubin Rosenberg, 22, was born in Suchwole, near Bialystok of a very rich Hassidic family. Editor of a bulletin which circulated among the entire Jewish Underground Movement in Poland during the war, he fell armed with two revolvers during an attack -upon the Germans while trying to break through the ghetto wall.
Mordechai Anielewicz courageously together with four of his comrades among them the girl, Mira Fuchrer, fell in action in May, 1943, defending the office of general staff. The Germans had blocked all the exits from the bunker and started throwing hand grenades into the headquarters. Eighty fighters died with them, some committing suicide in order not to fall into the hands of the enemy.
***
Lejb Rotblat
THE ONLY SON of an assimilationist family, Lejb Rotblat, 24, born in Warsaw, had attended a Christian school, but later joined the Zionist group Akiba. During the uprising he had brought his mother, whom he adored, to the bunker he was defending. When it was seized by the Germans after a hard fight, he shot his mother to prevent her torture by the Germans and then shot himself.
Some heroes survived the uprising only to be subsequently killed performing dangerous missions resisting the German butchery.
Eliezer Geller
Eliezer Geller, born in Opoczno in 1919 was one of the dreamers of Zion. In January, 1943 he wrote in one of his letters: “I am continuing my love-game with death and I think I shall marry it.” He undertook extremely dangerous missions under the Aryan name of Eugenjusz Kowalski. His last was a special mission to Bergen Belsen, the death factory from which he never returned.
Aharon Liebeskind
Aharon Liebeskind, born in Cracow in 1912, was a master saboteur. He executed nearly 30 sabotage actions against the Germans including a daring attack upon German officers in the center of Cracow.
Shlomo Alterman
Shlomo Alterman fought courageously during the whole revolt and managed to escape through the sewers to the Aryan part of Warsaw. He died during the summer fighting together with a partisan group in the woods near the city of Lozma.
Rifkah Glanz was preparing:” herself for Navy service in Eretz Yisrael when she was seized by the Germans in the Polish port of Gdynia. She escaped afterwards to Lodz and let the armed Jewish Underground resistance in Czestochowa. At the end of the Warsaw revolt, Rifkah courageously smuggled herself into the ruins of the Ghetto in order to get arms for resistance in to her places. On June 26, 1943, 28 year old Rifkah and the 40 fighters whom she led were killed trying to force their way out of the Warsaw ghetto through the German blockade.
The pharoah in our time destroyed six million lives, but the spirit with which they clung to life cannot die. Indeed in our own community there should be a public memorial to them which would testify eternally to what they did against the greatest tyrant in history. Let their actions and the song they sang be an inspiration to us on Passover 5733.
“Tell me not the light of hope has passed you by
Tell me not the sun has vanished from the sky
I can hear the footsteps beating like a drum.
And the day we all are striving for will come.
When the enemy has been destroyed at last,
Then tomorrow’s sun will light our bitter past;
Though this day of blood may seem to us so long;
Future years will hear the echo of our song.”
Chag sameach vepesach Kasher – May each of you be blessed with a meaningful Passover. ”
About the Author:
Rabbi David Geffen served as the rabbi of the Beth Shalom Congregation in Wilmington Delaware from 1970 to 1977, during which time he also established the Jewish Historical Society of Delaware in 1974 and authored six books under its auspices.
Geffen emigrated to Israel in 1977 with his family. He writes for The Jerusalem Post, having published more than 350 articles and book reviews and another 75 in the World Zionist Press Service.
He also authored the American Heritage Haggadah in 1992 which in the context of the Passover Seder service described the history of Jews in the United States of America.
Geffen returned to the US in 1993 to serve as rabbi of the Temple Israel congregation in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a position he held until 2003.
For more information, please visit these resources:
Ronen, Avihu. “Poland: Women Leaders in the Jewish Underground During the Holocaust.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive. (Viewed on February 26, 2018) .
Webb, Chris “Mordechai Anielewicz” Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team. 2008 HolocaustResearchProject.org (Viewed on February 26, 2018).
Kutzik, Jordan. “Remembering Archivist and Warsaw Ghetto Survivor Rose Klepfisz.” April 15, 2016 Yivo Institute for Jewish Research Yiddish Forverts (Viewed on February 26, 2018).
Bill Frank, journalist.Jack Jurden cartoon of Bill Frank
The article, “AKSE Cornerstone Dedication Kicks off Centennial Celebration”, highlighted in the February 2018 issue of the Jewish Voice is over the byline of Zev Amiti. Who was Zev Amiti? None other than, “Bill Frank, legendary journalist,” as he was described by John Sweeney of the News Journal in an April 2012 article in Delaware Today.
William P. Frank was Delaware’s best-known journalist of the 20th century. His career spanned 65 years, during which he became the state’s foremost newspaper columnist and radio commentator. He was a Delaware historian, a Judaic scholar, a Shakespearean actor, and a social activist. Although he was listened to by powerful people, he made the concerns of ordinary people his concerns. Mr. Frank was born in New York City in 1905, but he grew up in Wilmington. He died in Wilmington on August 21, 1989. Most people knew him as simply “Bill Frank” or as Zev Amiti, his Hebrew name.
Bill Frank’s Delaware: Six Decades Through the Eyes of a Working Newspaperman, by Bill Frank. Published to commemorate the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution in cooperation with The News-Journal Co., (Middle Atlantic Press, Wilmington, Delaware, 1987).
Reporter is honored
Dick Codor’s cartoon of Bill Frank included in Zev Amiti Author Laureate of the Jewish Federation of Delaware, a commemorative scrapbook containing tributes to and articles by William Penn Frank.
William P. Frank, a Morning News reporter and columnist, received a special award at the annual meeting of the Jewish Federation of Delaware last night [June 17, 1979] at the Jewish Community Center. Frank has been a regular contributor to the federation’s newspaper, The Jewish Voice, under his Hebrew name, Zev Amiti, for the past five years. Simon Steinberg, chairman of the Voice newspaper committee, presented the award for Frank’s “significant contribution to the successful cultural growth of The Jewish Voice.” “Zev Amiti’s input has inspired The Voices‘ dynamic and varied coverage of local and national Jewish events,” Steinberg said. The award included a bound volume of Frank’s columns and stories that have appeared in the Voice during the last five years. There was also a compilation of letters of congratulations from friends and colleagues.
The Morning News, June 18, 1979, Wilmington, Delaware, page 10
Jewish Historical Society
to Honor Bill Frank
On May 22, [1986] at 7:30 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, the Jewish Historical Society of Delaware will honor someone who is not only well recognized by the State of Delaware but well known by the Jewish community as a leader in the need to preserve the history of the Jewish community.
Bill Frank is now in his 80th year, and has spent 62 of those years working as a reporter for the local newspapers. He still carries on a radio program as a commentator on Station WILM.
During all those years he has championed many issues, but the one issue that he never gives up is how to make the Delaware Jewish community become more aware of its history and its contributions both in manpower and actual deeds to the Jews and the general citizenry of Delaware.
The existence of the Jewish Historical Society of Delaware is due in great part to Frank’s efforts to preserve that history for generations to come. He is a charter member and past president of the Society.
The Jewish Voice, May 16, 1986, Wilmington, Delaware, page 1
Jewish Historical Society of Delaware – A Treasure Trove Of Memorabilia
By GEORGE SHTOFMAN
(from The Jewish Voice, November 4, 1983)
What do you know about the status of Jews in Delaware during the Colonial days? Who was the first Jewish office holder in the State of Delaware? What prominent member of the Jewish community was responsible for Wilmington’s slogan, “The First City of the First State?”
Do you know when the Moses Montefiore Society was founded and when the first synagogue was formed here? Do you remember when Second Street was the center of Jewish marketing, especially on Saturday nights? Do you recall the old Y.M.H.A. when it was located at Third and King Streets and also the Avoda Club?
Memorabilia of these events are well documented and preserved through the patience and efforts of the Jewish Historical Society of Delaware, representing the achievement of a goal of Rabbi David Geffen, then of Temple Beth Shalom, upon its formation nine years ago.
For two years prior to its organization, Rabbi Geffen worked for the formation of Jewish Historical Society, dedicated to research and Jewish history in the State of Delaware dating back some 320 years.
Rabbi Geffen’s dream of a Jewish Historical Society in Delaware was realized late in 1974 when Judge Charles K. Keil of the Family Court became its first president and Rabbi Geffen a vice-president.
Since Judge Keil’s presidency, others who have headed the organization are: William P. Frank, Lillian Robertson, Dr. Ralph Tomases, Helen Goldberg and Jacquelin Rofel, the present presiding officer.
The Jewish Historical Society of Delaware, a constituent agency of the Jewish Federation of Delaware, occupies space in the quarters of the Historical Society of Delaware at 505 Market Street. There are two tables, shelves and over 100 boxes of manuscripts, books, pictures, documents, clothing, tools, old family records, synagogue and organization papers, letters, etc.
All of this material is very carefully documented and handled by Myrtle E. Kurland, archivist of the Jewish Historical Society of Delaware.
An idea of some of the materials which Mrs. Kurland has on hand for the Jewish Historical Society of Delaware are two hand made carpenter planes made by Max Paikin in London and brought to Wilmington in 1910; the famous “Dear Mollye” letters, representing correspondence by Mollye Sklut with Jewish servicemen from this area during World War II; Temple Beth Shalom records dating back to 1922; Jewish Welfare Society records dating back to 1934; a large ledger type book containing a history in Yiddish of Machzikey Hadas, and many, many others of extreme interest.
Those desiring to inspect and view any of the Jewish material at the Historical Society of Delaware between Mondays and Fridays can arrange for a definite time by contacting Myrtle Kurland at her home number.
Over the years since its organization, officials of the Jewish Historical Society of Delaware have cooperated in the direction of gathering together any and all material that can be of value as far as the history of the Delaware Jewish community is concerned.
Yetta Chaiken has been interviewing many of the older residents regarding their recollections of the Jewish community and has quite a large number of cassettes revealing interesting and delightful insights as to incidents and experiences of bygone years.
Several members of the community have contributed to the history of Jewish background of the State, in-eluding Emile V. Topkis, a thorough researcher who has turned over all his notes to the Society; the late Harry Bluestone, formerly director of the Jewish Community Center who wrote several important historical booklets about various Jewish organizations; Rabbi Elihu Schagrin, formerly of Wilmington, who authored a three-volume Delaware history published in 1947, and others. Some “Old Timers” may not have even heard of some Jewish groups, such as: Ohabe Shalom Synagogue, Ahavath Schim Synagogue, Hebrew Library Association, Kallah, and William Topkis Benevolent Society.
From a personal point of view, an interesting experience was to see a picture postcard of the Centennial of Delaware Jewry showing three Market Street stores, including that of Sample Clothing Co. at 726 Market Street, which was owned by the writer’s father, the late Morris Shtofman, who opened it in 1914, and the adjoining tobacco store of the late Charles K. Breuer, who was the father of Mrs. Samuel Shames.
Undoubtedly, large numbers of historical material are stored away in the attics of many Jewish homes here. It would really be a mitzvah to collect these items and make them available to the Jewish Historical Society of Delaware.
The purpose and work of the Jewish Historical Society of Delaware can be furthered only through the cooperation of those in the community who can furnish more historical material to this enterprising organization.
Originally published in The Jewish Voice, November 4, 1983, p. 12
Jewish Historical Society