Jews take care of other Jews.
Jewish Virtual Library
Operation Ezra & Nehemiah
Operation Ezra & Nehemiah, also known as Operation Ali Baba, was the airlift of more than 120,000 Jews from Iraq to Israel shortly after the founding of the Jewish state. The operation spanned more than a year and saved some 120,000 Iraqi Jews
The Iraqi Jewish community was one of the oldest such communities in the world and its members had served as philosophers, educators, doctors and even as high-ranking government officials. However, in the wake of World War II and the developing conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, conditions in the Jewish community worsened as public violence against Jews increased and government restrictions were levied.
In 1947, the Iraqi government made immigration to Israel illegal and following Israeli independence it officially declared Zionism as a capital offense. Hundreds of Jews were arrested and sentenced to jail for trying to leave the country.
Israel's passing of the Law of Return in 1950, promised immediate citizenship to any Jew who moved to Israel. Subsequently, in 1951, the Iraqi government passed a special bill permitting Jewish emigration. According to Iraqi law, Jews had to sell their property and liquidate their businesses before they could leave. Additionally, each person was allowed to take no more than $140 out of the country and could only carry 66 pounds of luggage; jewerly was also forbidden from being taken out of Iraq
Operation Magic carpet
In May 1949, when the Imam of Yemen agreed to let 45,000 of the 46,000 Jews in his country leave, Israeli transport planes flew them "home" in Operation Magic Carpet. The Yemenite Jews, mostly children, were brought to Israel on some 380 flights. This was one of the most wonderful and complex immigration operations the state has ever known. British and American planes airlifted the Jews from Aden, the capital of Yemen, when they reached the city from all over Yemen after extremely dangerous and risky journeys. The operation was secret and was released to the media only several months after its completion.
Operation Solomon was a covert Israeli military operation in May 24 to 25, 1991, to airlift Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Non-stop flights of 35 Israeli aircraft, including Israeli Air Force C-130s and El Al Boeing 747s, transported 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours. One of the aircraft, an El Al 747, carried at least 1,088 people, including two babies who were born on the flight, and holds the world record for the most passengers on an aircraft. Eight children were born during the airlift process
Refuseniks
In the 1970s, Russian Jews tried to immigrate to Israel, but were refused a visa from the Russian government. Furthermore, many of those Jews were engineers and other professionals who were fired from their government jobs as soon as they applied to leave. They were called Refuseniks. With no income they were in deep financial trouble. Jews from around the world packed suitcases full of western clothes which were very popular in Russia, and flew to Russia to give those suitcases to the Refuseniks so that they could resell the clothes and support themselves.
World Leaders
Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy is a Ukrainian politician, former actor, and comedian, who is the sixth and incumbent president of Ukraine. A real Mensch!
Union Organizers
Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers was a cigar maker even as a child. Later he became the president of the Cigar Makers union. Gompers helped found the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1881 as a coalition of like-minded unions. In 1886 it was reorganized into the American Federation of Labor, with Gompers as its president until 1924.
Clara Lemlich
Lemlich was a seamstress and a firebrand. Rose Schneiderman had worked hard to organize the Shirtwaist wortkers, and assembled them at a rally. However, it was Clara Leimlich who stirred the crowd and demanded a general strike which the audience unanimously approved.
“I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike.
The crowd responded enthusiastically and, after taking a modified version of the ancient Jewish oath of fidelity to Israel — "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise" — voted for a general strike. Approximately 20,000 out of the 32,000 workers in the shirtwaist trade walked out in the next two days; this would become known as the Uprising of the 20,000. Lemlich took a leading role in bringing workers out, speaking at rallies until she lost her voice. The strike lasted until February 10, 1910, producing union contracts at almost every shop, but not at Triangle Shirtwaist.
Triangle Shirtwaist became a synonym for "sweatshop" during the following year. On March 25, 1911, an estimated 146 garment workers died as a result of a fire that consumed the factory. Workers were either burned to death or died jumping to escape the flames.
Maud Nathan
Maud Nathan was an American social worker, labor activist and suffragist for women's right to vote.Founder of the Consumers League of New York.
Ernestine Louise Rose
Ernestine Louise Rose was a suffragist, abolitionist, and freethinker who has been called the “first Jewish feminist. Her career spanned from the 1830s to the 1870s, making her a contemporary to the more famous suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Largely forgotten in contemporary discussions of the American women's rights movement, she was one of its major intellectual forces in nineteenth-century America.
Rose Schneiderman
She returned to New York in 1903 and, with a partner worker, started organizing the women in her factory. When they applied for a charter to the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union, the union told them to come back after they had succeeded in organizing twenty-five women. They did that within days and the union then chartered its first women's local.
Schneiderman obtained wider recognition during a citywide capmakers' strike in 1905. Elected secretary of her local and a delegate to the New York City Central Labor Union, she came into contact with the New York Women's Trade Union League(WTUL), an organization that lent moral and financial support to the organizing efforts of women workers. She quickly became one of the most prominent members and was elected the New York branch's vice president in 1908. She left the factory to work for the league, attending school with a stipend provided by one of the League's wealthy supporters. She was an active participant in the Uprising of the 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York City led by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1909. She also was a key member of the first International Congress of Working Womenof 1919, which aimed to address women's working conditions at the first annual International Labour Organization Convention.
FEMINIST MOVEMENT
Bella Savitzky Abzug nicknamed "Battling Bella", was an American lawyer, U.S. Representative, social activist and a leader in the women's movement. In 1971, Abzug joined other leading feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan to found the National Women's Political Caucus.[1] She was known as a leading figure in what came to be known as eco-feminism.
Elizabeth Cohen
The 1900 Democratic National Convention was the first time a woman served as a delegate to a major party convention. Elizabeth M. Cohen of Salt Lake City, Utah, became a delegate when one of the Utah delegates could not serve, and she seconded the nomination of William Jennings Bryan.
Aletta Jacobs
Aletta Henriëtte Jacobs was a Dutch physician and women's suffrage activist. As the first woman officially to attend a Dutch university, she became one of the first female physicians in the Netherlands. In 1882, she founded the world's first birth control clinic and was a leader in both the Dutch and international women's movements. She led campaigns aimed at deregulating prostitution, improving women's working conditions, promoting peace and calling for women's right to vote.
Born in the mid-nineteenth century, Jacobs yearned to become a doctor like her father. Despite existing barriers, she fought to gain entry to higher education and graduated in 1879 with the first doctorate in medicine earned by a woman in the Netherlands
Margaret Higgins Sanger
Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins; also known as Margaret Sanger Slee, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Rosa Sonnenschein
Rosa Sonnenschein was a moderate liberal who was sympathetic to Zionism and believed in synagogal rights for women. In May 1893, she participated on Press Congress panel at the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago, where she spoke on "Newspaperwomen in Austria"." Here she described the need for a magazine specifically for American Jewish women. Later in the year, she attended the Jewish Women’s Congress at the same Exposition, and won support from prominent middle-class Jewish women interested in literary, philanthropic, and religious questions. This same congress formed the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), to which Sonneschein lent her support. In April 1895, she founded and edited a new magazine called The American Jewess.
Gloria Marie Steinem
Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist journalist and social political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s Her mother was Presbyterian, mostly of German (including Prussian) and some Scottish descent. Her father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Württemberg, Germany, and Radziejów, Poland. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was chairwoman of the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education, as well as a leader in the movement for vocational education Pauline also rescued many members of her family from the Holocaust.
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men"
Shulamith "Shulie" Firestone
Shulamith "Shulie" Firestone was a Canadian-American radical feminist, writer and activist. Authored the Fialectic of Sex. Firestone was a central figure in the early development of radical feminism and second-wave feminism and a founding member of three radical-feminist groups: New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists. Within these radical movements, Firestone became known as "the firebrand" and "the fireball" for the fervor and passion she expressed towards the cause.
Susan Weidman Schneider & Aviva Cantor Zuckoff
Lilith the magazine was founded in 1976 by Susan Weidman Schneider “to foster discussion of Jewish women’s issues and put them on the agenda of the Jewish community, with a view to giving women—who are more than fifty percent of the world’s Jews—greater choice in Jewish life." Amy Stone served as the magazine's first senior editor. Aviva Cantor Zuckoff served as the acquisitions editor. Those consulted as part of the creation of the magazine included Sally Priesand, the first female rabbi in the United States and Letty Cottin Pogrebin of Ms. Magazine.[4] During its early years, Lilith was noted for its work chronicling the fight to have women ordained as rabbis in Conservative Judaism.
Lilith magazine is an independent, Jewish-American, feminist non-profit publication that has been issued quarterly since 1976. The magazine features award-winning[1] investigative reports, first-person accounts (both contemporary and historical), entertainment reviews, fiction and poetry, art and photography.[2] Topics include everything from rabbinic sexual misconduct, to new rituals and celebrations, to deconstructing the JAP (Jewish American Princess) stereotype, to understanding the Jewish stake in abortion rights.
Nicholas S Winton
Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE (born Wertheim) was a British humanitarian who organized the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II in an operation later known as the Czech Kindertransport (German for "children's transport"). Winton found homes for the children and arranged for their safe passage to Britain. The world found out about his work over 50 years later, in 1988. The British press dubbed him the "British Schindler".
An important obstacle was getting official permission to cross into the Netherlands, as the children were to embark on the ferry at Hook of Holland. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Dutch government officially closed its borders to any Jewish refugees. Winton succeeded, thanks to the guarantees he had obtained from Britain. After the first train, the process of crossing the Netherlands went smoothly.
In 2003, Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia".[4] On 28 October 2014, he was awarded the highest honour of the Czech Republic, the Order of the White Lion (1st class), by Czech President Miloš Zeman.
Winton acknowledged the vital roles in Prague of Doreen Warriner, Trevor Chadwick, Nicholas Stopford,[28] Beatrice Wellington (born 15 June 1907), Josephine Pike, and Bill Barazetti (1914–2000 who also worked to evacuate children from Europe. Winton was in Prague for only about three weeks before the Nazis occupied the country. He never set foot in Prague Station. As he later wrote, "Chadwick did the more difficult and dangerous work after the Nazis invaded... he deserves all praise"
Humanitarian World NGO Organizations
UNICEF
When the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), was about to cease its activities, there were some who spoke up during its closing meeting against the catastrophic situation of many children.
The delegate from Poland, Ludwik Rajchman, proposed that the UNRRA’s remaining funds be allocated to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). It is due to this fundamental action that Ludwik Rajchman is now considered to be the founder of UNICEF.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
Peter Benenson was born Peter James Henry Solomon
In a copy of The Observer newspaper he saw a report about the arrest of two students in Portugal during the dictatorial regime of António de Oliveira Salazar. The students’ crime was that they had raised their glasses to toast freedom! They were sentenced to seven years in prison. He decided that one voice in protest would not be effective.
In order to build a network of letter writers and coordinate these campaigns, he founded Amnesty International (AI) with a group of other concerned human rights advocates. Benenson was appointed general secretary. Within a year, a dozen countries had Amnesty International groups, committed to research and action on human rights abuses, especially to end torture, end extra-judicial executions, and to bring freedom for prisoners of conscience. Cases were researched and publicized by AI along with specific steps people could take to support prisoners of conscience.
IPPNW 1985
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War,
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- Dr. Bernard Lown, cardiologist and cofounder with Dr. Evgeni Chazov, of IPPNW
PUGWASH CONFERENCES
Sir Joseph Rotblat believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work. He became one of the most prominent critics of the nuclear arms race, was the youngest signatory of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto in 1955, and chaired the press conference that launched it. After the positive coverage of the manifesto, Cyrus Eaton offered to fund the influential Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an international organisation that brought together scholars and public figures to work toward reducing the danger of armed conflict and to seek solutions to global security threats, particularly those related to nuclear warfare. With Bertrand Russell and others, Rotblat organised the first of these in 1957 and continued to work within their framework until his death.
Doctors without Borders
(Medecins Sans Frontieres)
Bernard Kouchner is a French politician and doctor. He is the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Médecins du Monde
Kouchner worked as a physician for the Red Cross in Biafra in 1968 and that led him to co-found Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in 1971, and then, due to a conflict of opinion with MSF chairman Claude Malhuret, he established Doctors of the World ('Médecins du Monde') in 1980.
Anarchists
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman was an anarchist, political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
Born in Kaunas, Russian Empire (now Lithuania), to a Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885. Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands.
She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906,
Alexander Berkman
Alexander Berkman was a Russian-American anarchist and author. He was a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century, famous for both his political activism and his writing.
Berkman was born in Vilna in the Russian Empire (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) and immigrated to the United States in 1888. He lived in New York City, where he became involved in the anarchist movement. He was the one-time lover and lifelong friend of anarchist Emma Goldman.
In 1892, during the Homestead strike, anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate Frick. On July 23, Berkman, armed with a revolver and a sharpened steel file, entered Frick's office in downtown Pittsburgh.[5]
Frick, realizing what was happening, attempted to rise from his chair while Berkman pulled a revolver and fired at nearly point-blank range. The bullet hit Frick in the left earlobe, penetrated his neck near the base of the skull, and lodged in his back. The impact knocked Frick down, and Berkman fired again, striking Frick for a second time in the neck and causing him to bleed extensively. Carnegie Steel vice president (later, president) John George Alexander Leishman, who was with Frick, was then able to grab Berkman's arm and prevented a third shot, probably saving Frick's life.[citation needed]
Frick was seriously wounded, but rose and (with the assistance of Leishman) tackled his assailant.[18] All three men crashed to the floor, where Berkman managed to stab Frick four times in the leg with the pointed steel file before finally being subdued by other employees and a carpenter, who had rushed into the office. The carpenter also hit Berkman with a hammer during the scuffle.[citation needed]
Frick was back at work in a week; Berkman was charged and found guilty of attempted murder. Berkman's actions in planning the assassination clearly indicated a premeditated intent to kill, and he was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Negative publicity from the attempted assassination resulted in the collapse of the strike. Approximately 2,500 men lost their jobs, and most of the workers who stayed had their wages halved.
Berkman served 14 years in prison for the assassination attempt
SOCIAL ACTIVISTS
Ann Landers: Esther Pauline Friedman - Love Advice
Abigail Van Buren: Pauline Esther Friedman Love Advice
Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner,
2 Civil Rights activists murdered in Mississippi while trying to register black people to vote
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
marched in Selma Alabama with Martin Luther King
Karl Marx
Major publications 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history
Chicago Seven
The Chicago Seven (originally Chicago Eight, also Conspiracy Eight/Conspiracy Seven) were seven defendants—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger(g), Tom Hayden(g), Rennie Davis(g), John Froines(g), and Lee Weiner—charged by the United States federal government with conspiracy, crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, and other charges related to anti-Vietnam War and countercultural protests in Chicago, Illinois during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven after the case against co-defendant Bobby Seale was declared a mistrial
SUPREME COURT JUSTICES
Carl Levin Micihigan’slongest serving senator
Neal Sher Justice Department hunting Nazis who immigrated to America
Solicitors General
· Charles Fried, Solicitor General of the United States (1985–1989)
· Daniel Mortimer Friedman, Acting Solicitor General of the United States (1977)
· Elena Kagan, Solicitor General of the United States (2009–2010)[79]
· Philip Perlman, Solicitor General of the United States (1947–1952)
· Simon Sobeloff, Solicitor General of the United States (1954–1956)
· Barbara Underwood, Acting Solicitor General of the United States (2001)[80]
· Seth P. Waxman, Solicitor General of the United States (1997–2001)[81]
U.S. Attorneys General
· Edward H. Levi, United States Attorney General (1975–1977)[82]
· Michael Mukasey, United States Attorney General (2007–2009)[83]
· Jeffrey A. Rosen, acting United States Attorney General (2020–2021)[84]
· Merrick Garland, United States Attorney General (2021–present)[85]
Confederate Attorneys GeneraL
· Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate States Attorney General (1861)
POLITICIANS
Rudy Boschwitz,Minnesota US Senator
Paul Wellstone Minnesota US Senator
Norm Coleman Minnesota US Senator
Al Franken Minnesota US Senator
Leon Blum Prime Minister of France 1936-37
Andrew Cohen Governor Uganda 1953-56
Benjamin Disraeli Prime Minnister Great Britain 1868, 1874-80
Kurt Eisner Prime Minister Bavarian Socialist Republic 1918-19
Sir Joshua Abraham Hassan Prime Minister Gibralter
Alice Heine Shared the Throne of Monaco with Prince Albert 1880-1902
Sir Isaac Isaacs Governor General Australia 1930-36
Bruno Kreisky Chancellor of Austria 1970-83
Bela Kun Head of Hungary Communist Government 1919
Eugene Levine Prime Minister Bavarian Socialist Republic 1919
Luigi Luzzatti Prime Minister Italy 1910
David Marshall Chief Minister Singapore1955-56
Rene Meyer Prime Minister France 1953
Pierre Mendes-France Prime Minister France 1954-55
Matyas Rakosi Communist Dictator Hungary 1949-56
Lord Reading Viceroy India 1921-26
Sidney Sonnino Prime Minister Italy 1906, 1909=10
Sir Julius Vogel Prime Minister NewZealand 1873-76
Sir Roy Welensky Prime Minister Central African Federation (Rhodesia & Nyasaland) 1956
Zelman Cowen Governor General Australia 1977-82
Malcolm Fraser Prime Minister Australia 1975-83
Mário Alberto Nobre Lopes Soares, Prime Minister of Portugal from 1976-78 and 1983-85 President from 1986-96. Descended from Marranos
American State Governors
Moses Alexander Idaho 1915-19
Simon Bamberger Utah 1917-21
Washington Montgomery Bartlett California 1987
David Emanuel Georgia 1801
Neil Edward Goldschmidt Oregon 1986
Eric Robert Greitens Missouri 2017
Ernest Henry Gruening Alaska 1939-53
Henry Horner Illinois 1930-40
Theodore Ralph Kulongoski Oregon 2003-11
Madeleine May Kunin Vermont 1985-91
Herbert Henry Lehman New York 1933-42
Frank R. Licht Rhode Island 1969-73
Linda Lingle Hawaii 2002-10
Marvin Mandel Maryland 1969-79
Jack Alan Markell Dealware 2009-17
Julius L. Meier Oregon 1931-35
Jared Schutz Polis Colorado 2019
Jay Robert "J. B." Pritzker Illinois 2019
Ed Rendell Pennsylvania 2002-11
Abraham Alexander Ribicoff Connecticut 1955-61
Edward Salomon Wisconsin 1860-64
Edward Selig Salomon Washington 1870-72
Arthur Seligman New Mexico 1930-33
Samuel Harvey Shapiro Illinois 1968-69
Milton Shapp Pennsylvnaia 1971-79
Peter Elliott Shumlin Vermont 2011-17
Eliot Laurence Spitzer New York 2007-8
Bruce George Sundlun Rhode Island 1991-95
Mayors
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· Ed Koch
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· Sophie Masloff (née Friedman) was an American politician. A long-time member of the Democratic Party and civil servant, she was elected to the Pittsburgh City Council and later served as the mayor of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 1994. She was the first woman and the first Jew to hold that office.
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· Ronald Adrian Nirenberg is an American politician who is the mayor of San Antonio, Texas. He was elected following the defeat of the incumbent mayor Ivy Taylor in the runoff for the 2017 mayoral race. Prior to his election, Nirenberg served as a member of the San Antonio City Council for District 8 for two terms. He was sworn into office on June 21, 2017.
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· Sam Pick
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· Sol Star
· Jeff Stone (California politician)
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