Jews History

After much procrastination and hopes that The Times would expand on an article that was buried in the back of the first section, I feel that I must comment on what I contend to be an extremely troubling situation. An awkwardly worded sentence in the May 5 article states, "A federal jury decided Friday that a businessman was not lying when he said Reagan-Bush campaign officials asked Iranians not to free American hostages until after the 1980 presidential election."

On the movie screen, a troop of clean-cut teen-agers filed silently into Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, idling past a sign in bold Hebrew advertising for sale "The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust." The sign elicited a titter of recognition from some of the film's viewers who evidently had grown weary of Holocaust history presented as a consumer item; the encyclopedia is also hawked on radio by rock deejays.

From his window in the Yemin Moshe neighborhood, the eminent Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai contemplated the rough walls of the Old City, glowing golden in the sun, and recalled the pain of the two decades when he and other Israelis were denied access to what they regard as the "eternal capital" of their nation and the seat of their faith. "For me, as a Jew, life without Jerusalem is not possible, and Jerusalem without the Old City is not Jerusalem," Amichai said.

The Jews of Istanbul, who have lived for centuries along the shores of the Golden Horn, never tire of one particular sea story: In 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from the tiny port of Palos . . . because the harbors at Cadiz and Seville were jammed with boatloads of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain by his royal sponsors. Columbus went west to uncertainty. Around 60,000 Jews exiled that year by Ferdinand and Isabella came east to official welcome in lands of the Ottoman Empire.

Music, song and storytelling celebrated the opening Sunday of the new Jewish Heritage Center on Los Angeles' Museum Row, bringing together the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the Jewish Community Library and Jewish Historical Society of Southern California.

For nearly three years Isidore Myers has been obsessed with researching, writing and publishing a book he has no intention of selling. "Remember: A Book to Honor the Family I Never Knew" is a self-published labor of love designed to preserve Myers' family history and, in so doing, keep alive the memories of 115 Polish relatives verified to have been murdered in Nazi extermination camps during World War II.

Masha Loen was 14 when she exited a box car to be taken to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. A Nazi soldier, known as "Max the Sadist," struck Loen's head against the side of a barrack, splitting her head open. At 17, Alfred Benjamin shot a picture of Adolf Hitler in Hamburg, Germany, as the dictator addressed a crowd of onlookers. Benjamin was one of only a few Jewish youngsters who saw the man responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews.

In Luisa Leschin's new radio play, the Carvajal family has a secret, closely guarded by the grandparents. Although they live in Santa Fe in the 1860s, the Carvajals are not Catholics, like most of their neighbors. They are Conversos, secret Jews forced to convert or flee Spain when all Jews were expelled in 1492.

Although the first Jews reached Poland from the east, it was emigres from Bohemia and Germany in the Middle Ages who had the greatest impact on the way of life for Polish Jewry. During the same 13th- to- 15th-Century period when Jews were being expelled from virtually all of Western Europe, Poland's rulers, seeking to develop their urban economy, welcomed Jewish and other townspeople, particularly from Germany, and granted them various privileges.

Fifty years ago, on the evening of Nov. 9, Nazi thugs attacked Jews and their institutions throughout Germany--a vicious, violent assault that foreshadowed the Holocaust. That dreadful evening in 1938 has gone down in history as Kristallnacht --"crystal night," which is sometimes called the "night of the broken glass," a phrase coined by the Nazis.