JUNE 24/SIVAN 18
In loving memory of my father, Yitzchak ben David Meir, whose yahrzeit is today.
3880 (120 CE):
Yahrzeit of Rabban Gamliel II, successor to Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakai as the President of the Sanhedrin and the leader of the Jewish community in Israel after the war against Rome. He helped establish a new spiritual and cultural leadership, designing the foundation for Jewish survival in the Diaspora after the destruction of the Temple and the loss of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.
1322:
After having been allowed back into France in the year 1315 (after the expulsion in 1306 by Philip IV), the Jews were once again expelled from France, this time by Charles IV who broke the pledge made by his predecessors in 1315 that the Jews would be able to stay in France for at least 12 years.
1858:
Edgardo Mortara, a six year old Jewish boy, was abducted from his parents by order of the bishop of Bologna. A servant girl of the family had testified to Edgardo’s emergency baptism during a serious infant illness, thereby classifying him as Catholic, and "prohibiting" his non-Catholic parents from raising him. Many attempts were made by Edgardo’s parents and European leaders to free the boy—but to no avail. By the time he was 18, Edgardo had decided to remain Catholic, and became a monk of the Augustinian order.
1914:
Birthday of Jan Karski, Polish resistance fighter and activist who was recognized by Yad Vashem as a "Righteous Among the Nations" for reporting Nazi atrocities and the extermination of European Jewry to the Western Allies.
"He who does not condemn, acquiesces."
1922:
Walter Rathenau, the Jewish German Foreign Minister, was assassinated by anti-Semitic nationalists.
1927:
Birthday of Martin Perl, American chemical engineer and physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 "for the discovery of the tau lepton and for pioneering experimental contributions to lepton physics."
1944:
Birthday of Avi Weiss, American rabbi, educator, author and activist; co-founder of the International Rabbinical Fellowship, and the "Open Orthodox" organization founded as a liberal alternative to mainstream Orthodoxy. He is best known for his activism in the struggle to liberate Soviet Jewry and for his efforts to ordain women rabbis within an Orthodox framework.