This Week in Jewish History

1949: El Al, Israel's national airline, launched its inaugural passenger flight--from Tel Aviv to Paris with a stopover in Rome.

Jul 29, 2024

Highlights and Lowlights This Week in Jewish History

At the beginning of each week, JEWDICIOUS brings you a select set of consequential dates in Jewish history. This feature is a joint venture with our Substack partner, DUST AND STARS, where you can subscribe for access to all landmark dates!

🔯 Monday, July 29/Tammuz 23:

1881: The first shipload of Russian Jewish immigrants following the pogroms of 1881 arrived in New York, beginning their mass immigration to North America. It is estimated that over 2.5 million immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe through 1924, when quotas were established.

🔯 Tuesday, July 30/Tammuz 24:

1992: Yael Arad became the first Israeli to win an Olympic medal, taking the silver in judo in Barcelona.

🔯 Wednesday, July 31/Tammuz 25:

1912: Birthday of Milton Friedman, American winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy." In addition, he founded the (University of) Chicago School of Economics which advocates a very free market, and has served as an advisor to a number of Republican presidents.

🔯 Thursday, August 1/Tammuz 26

1914: August Von Wasserman instituted the Wasserman test, the most advanced diagnostic tool of its day against syphilis. He also developed inoculations against tetanus, typhoid and cholera, antitoxins against diphtheria and a diagnostic test for tuberculosis.

1942: The first reliable report of the Nazi plan for the Final Solution reached the West. The U.S. State Department suppressed the report for several weeks, until after it had been otherwise received by Jews in New York.

🔯 Friday, August 2/Tammuz 27

1923: Birthday of Shimon Peres, the 9th President of the State of Israel and winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize (together with Yitzchak Rabin and Yasser Arafat) for the peace talks that he participated in as Israeli Foreign Minister, producing the Oslo Accords. In a political career spanning over 66 years, Peres served twice as the Prime Minister of Israel, has been a member of 12 cabinets and was one of the fathers of Israel's nuclear program.

🔯 Saturday, August 3/ Tammuz 28

2001: After working on the idea for almost twenty years and successfully creating a prototype in 1998, Gavriel Iddan, an Israeli electro-optical engineer, receivedFDA approval for a disposable pill-sized camera that passes straight through the digestive tract continuously broadcasting to an external receiver. Since then, there have been over 500,000 ingestions.

🔯 Sunday, August 4/Tammuz 29

4865 (1105): Yahrzeit of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi), pre-eminent rabbinic commentator and one of the outstanding intellectual giants produced by medieval Jewry. His commentary on the Five Books of Moses is still studied today by almost every Jewish child and adult, layman and scholar alike. His monumental commentary on the Talmud, which appears in every standard edition, is the basis of nearly all its study.

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