History events
1846 — (26th of Av, 5606) The Jewish Oath, originally established by Charlemagne, was abolished in Austria. Until then, a Jew who took oath in a Christian court against a Christian was forced to stand on the skin of a dead animal or be surrounded by thorns and call down the curses of Korach or Naaman if he were not telling the truth.
1921 — (14th of Av, 5681) In London, The Times published ….. the third in a series of articles by it “Constantinople Correspondent” that “incontrovertibly demonstrated that ‘The Protocols’ consist in the main of ‘clumsy plagiarisms’ from a French political pamphlet directed against Napoleon III and published in Brussels in 1865 by a French Lawyer named Maurice Joly and entitled ‘Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.’”
1936 — (30th of Av, 5696) Fifty thousand Jewish residents of Tel Aviv attended the funeral today of two nurses killed by Arab snipers yesterday.
1943 — (17th of Av, 5703) The process of destroying the evidence of mass murder that took place at Babi Yar, ….. a suburb of Kiev in the Soviet Ukraine, began. Jewish and Soviet prisoners were set to work, unearthing thousands of bodies and burning them in huge pyres. The Jewish prisoners attended to the horrible task knowing that they too would be shot and burned at the end they tried an escape. During attempt to hide the evidence of genocide, 311 out of 325 Jewish and Soviet prisoners would be killed in their break-out attempt
1948 — (13th of Av, 5708) Yiftah, a kibbutz in northern Israel located near the Lebanese border was established today by demobilized Palmach soldiers who were members of the Yiftach Brigade, after which the kibbutz is named
1952 — (27th of Av, 5712) The US granted Israel over $73 million for the relief and resettlement of immigrants and for technical cooperation
2005 — (13th of Av, 5765) Shirat HaYam was evacuated today as part of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza, Kfar Darom was evacuated as part of Israel’s unilateral disengagement plan
2011 — (18th of Av, 5771) The IDF attacked terror targets in Rafah in the Gaza Strip today, in response to a three-stage terrorist attack which killed seven Israelis and wounded dozens in the South earlier in the day
People
1856 — (17th of Av, 5616) Birthdate of Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg who gained fame using the Hebrew pan name Ahad Ha’am. ….. A pre-eminent essayist he was the founder of Cultural Zionism with a vision of a Jewish «spiritual center» in Palestine. Ha’am strived for «a Jewish state and not merely a state of Jews.» In what would appear to have been a detour from his intellectual pursuits Ahad Ha’am managed the Anglo-Asiatic tea company established by Kaloniumus Wolf Wissotzky, the founder of the Wissotzky Tea Company which prior to the Bolshevik Revolution was the largest tea company in the world
1886 — (17th of Av, 5646) Birthdate of Sholom Schwartzbard a Bessarabian-born Jewish anarchist known primarily for the assassination of the Ukrainian politician Symon Petliura. Schwartzbard held Petliura responsible for the death of his parents who had been murdered in a pogrom in 1919
1921 — (14th of Av, 5681) Birthdate of Lydia Litvyak a Soviet fighter pilot during WW II who flew 66 missions before being shot down in 1943
1929 — (12th of Av, 5689) Arabs, following their attack Friday on the Wailing Wall and on groups of Jews yesterday, today stoned Rabbi Nical of the College of Torah Chaim; A young Sephardic Jew named Abraham Mizrachi who was stabbed at the Maccabi grounds near Mea Shearim, in the Bukharan Quarter on Shabbat by Arab rioters died of his wounds today
1930 — (24th of Av, 5690) In Ploiesti, Romania, Isidor and Mina Librscu gave birth to Holocaust survivor and Israeli professor Liviu Librescu, who was murdered while trying to protect his students during the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007
2011 — (18th of Av, 5771) Forty-nine year old “Paskal Avrahami, a member of the YAMAM Counter-terrorism Unit was killed this evening during a firefight with terrorists north of Eilat on the border with Egypt. He was married and had three children.”