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The evening of January 23, 1963 marked the start of a public trial held by the Jewish Agency against the Algerian Jewish community. Over 100 men and women crowded into the auditorium of the Jerusalem Artists’ House, where the key charge leveled against Algerian Jewry was their alleged flawed Zionist sentiment. The person behind the trial and its architect was the then Chairman of the Jewish Agency and former Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett. He was maddened by the fact that out of 140,000 Algerian Jews, only 15,000 had emigrated to Israel, while the others preferred to emigrate to France. “That[…]

“One of the greatest disadvantages of the human soul, and at the same time one of its deepest subtleties, is its inability to be revealed unless through the body,” wrote the Argentinian author, Ernesto Sábato, in his celebrated novel, On Heroes and Tombs. Sábato, who lived and worked in South America in the second half of the 20th century, said more than once that Franz Kafka was his most admired author. It is not hard to understand why. If ever there was a master of analyzing the human soul by means of the body, it was no doubt the gifted[…]

Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, was first jolted by his Jewish origins when he was six years old. It was a Shabbat in the afternoon when his father, Jacob, went out for a walk on the streets of Vienna, wearing a new fur hat. A Christian boy suddenly approached him and yelled, “Jew, get off the sidewalk” – and knocked his hat into the mud. When Jacob returned home, he told his family about the incident. “And what did you do?’ young Sigmund asked him. “I got off the sidewalk and picked up my hat,” his father answered.[…]

Rabbi Chanoch Heinich HaCohen, once told a story about a fool who didn’t want to go to sleep because he was afraid to take his clothes for fear of not finding them the next morning. So, what did he do? He took a pencil and paper and wrote down where he had placed each and every item of his clothing: the streimel is on the right side, the trousers are on the left side, the shoes are over there, and so on. When he woke up in the morning and wanted to find his clothes, he read what he had[…]

The “Demon of the Archipelago” is how the historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, described Naftaly Frenkel, the man who started out as a common prisoner in the gulag and became the big boss of the Soviet forced labor camps.  He also conceived the idea of the “nourishment scale” – the barbaric labor system that was in place in the gulags. Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Laureate in Literature who was exiled from the Soviet Union, knew all too well what he was talking about. He played a pivotal role in exposing what was going on in the Soviet labor camps (gulags) to the Western world.[…]

On the fifth day of Iyar – 15 May 1948 – The State of Israel is established After two thousand years of exile, the Jewish people have an independent State 1949 Israel is one year old. The War of Independence ends. Approximately 6,000 men and women are killed in the war – almost 1% of the country’s population of 650,000. 1 of every 6 Jews lives in Jerusalem. Today 1 of every 16. During the next 12 years approximately 1,000,000 immigrants arrive in the country: 439,000 from Europe, 237,000 from Africa, 275,000 from Asia. Most of the immigrants arrive at[…]

According to people who lived under the Nazi occupation of Paris, Béatrice de Camondo would often ride her well-groomed horse in the Bois de Boulogne park, accompanied by a German officer. One can only assume that while meandering among the chestnut and sycamore trees, Béatrice probably entertained the thought that a day would come when her privileged last name would no longer impress the Germans and they would stop providing her with a regular escort. However, even if she let her imagination run wild, it is highly unlikely that she envisioned her life ending soon in the gas chambers of[…]

While riding in a taxi for many long hours, en route from Russia to his city of birth, Benjamin Zar dropped the bombshell: “When we get to Mashhad,” he told Sarah, the woman he recently got engaged to, “my mother will give you a pendant that you have to wear. Otherwise, our lives will be in danger.” That episode took place in the 1920’s. A few months earlier, Benjamin’s father, a fur trader from Mashhad, Iran whose name was Yaakov Zar, was hosted by the Jewish community in the Russian city of Mur (which can no longer be found on[…]