JUNE 19/SIVAN 13
1269:
King Louis IX of France decreed that all Jews must wear a yellow badge.
1906:
Birthday of Sir Ernest Chain, a chemist who was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his heroic work in finding a method to purify penicillin and to produce it in mass quantities. Penicillin saved the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers during WWII, thereby starting an "antibiotic revolution" that has completely changed the face of modern medicine.
1922:
Birthday of Aage Bohr, Danish nuclear physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection." He and his father Niels were one of the six pairs of fathers and sons who have both won the Nobel Prize and one of the four pairs who have both won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
1933:
Cardinal Pacelli (who later became Pope “Pius” XII) issued the infamous “Hitler Concordant” which was described as "unrestricted acceptance of National Socialism by the Vatican," making it the first state to officially recognize Nazi Germany.
1947:
David Ben Gurion sent a letter to the non-Zionist Orthodox party Agudat Yisrael stipulating a status quo agreement regarding the future Jewish state, in exchange for their recommendation to an UNSCOP fact-finding mission that a Jewish state should be set up. The agreement granted an exemption from military service to a small quota of yeshiva students and to all Orthodox women, made the Sabbath the national weekend, guaranteed kosher food in government institutions and allowed Orthodox Jews to maintain a separate education system.
1953:
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Communists who were convicted by the US of selling atomic weapons secrets to the USSR, were executed by the electric chair at Sing Sing, the only Americans ever executed for treason.