by Lawrence Bush on May 20, 2012
Among the small citizens group that launched the American Red Cross with Clara Barton on this date in 1881 was Adolphus Simeon Solomons, a Sephardic Jewish businessman who hosted many of the group’s meetings in Washington, DC and became vice-president of the new organization for its first eleven years. In 1884, Barton and Solomons were appointed by President Chester A. Arthur to represent the U.S. at the International Congress of the Red Cross (IRC), in Geneva, where delegates from thirty-seven nations elected him a vice president. Solomons also helped found the American Jewish Historical Society and created the first training school for nurses in Washington. Ironically, the Red Cross — which was chartered by the U.S. government as a quasi-governmental agency in 1905 — developed a history of cooperating with Jim Crow laws, including the racial segregation of blood supplies and the mistreatment of black disaster victims. The organization also minimized the brutality of conditions in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and refused for fifty years to accept as an IRC member Israel’s Mogen David Adom (Red Star of David).
“Everybody’s business is nobody’s business, and nobody’s business is my business.” —Clara Barton
by Lawrence Bush on May 19, 2012
Helen Brooke Taussig, who led the development of pediatric cardiology as a medical specialty, died in an auto accident at the age of 88 on this date in 1986. Despite her lifelong dyslexia, Taussig graduated as a physician from the Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1927 and maintained an association with the school for six decades. She pioneered in the use of X-rays and fluoroscopy to identify heart defects in newborns, and worked with surgeon Alfred Blalock to develop, in 1944, a surgical intervention for “blue baby syndrome” that saved the lives of thousands of newborns. Her 1947 book, Congenital Malformations of the Heart, was a comprehensive work about heart defects, diagnostic tools, and medical interventions. (She herself was unable to use a stethoscope, however, as she was hard of hearing as a result of childhood whooping cough.) Taussig was also key in the early 1960s in identifying the terrible birth defects caused by the sedative thalidamide and getting the drug removed from the market.
“Neither her scientific and clinical acumen, nor her enormously demanding schedule, ever prevented Taussig from being a warm, compassionate physician to her many patients and their families. She followed her patients for years, even after her own retirement. She never found it necessary to distance herself from the critically-ill children that she treated, or from their parents. Her warmth and ability to see and treat people as individuals has been recalled by many who knew her.” —Gale Encyclopedia of Biography
by Lawrence Bush on May 18, 2012
The Jews of Spain had their revenge on the Inquisition and the Spanish monarch on this date in 1588 when the Spanish Armada arrived in Lisbon in preparation for an attack on England, and Hector Nuñez, a crypto-Jew who had fled the Portuguese Inquisition to settle in England in 1546, was able to provide the British spymaster Francis Walsingham with foreknowledge of the Armada’s position and intentions. The Spanish Armada set sail on May 28th with 151 ships, 8,000 sailors and 18,000 soldiers, and with 30,000 more soldiers waiting to join the invasion in Netherlands. Nuñez was a successful merchant and physician who had relatives in Flanders and Spain and received letters in cipher concealed in cargoes of wine, raisins, figs and other goods. In the course of several sea battles, the Armada was shattered by the British navy and returned to Spain with only 67 ships and 10,000 men, many of them wounded or deathly ill. The wife of Hector Nuñez, Leonara Freire, contributed to the upkeep of a secret synagogue in Antwerp.
“The wily Nuñes even corresponded directly with Phillip the Catholic. He had an extensive network of informants . . . [and] was so important to the government that the Privy Council even protected him from creditors. He was appointed as a special commissioner in insurance cases. He was treated unlike any other Portuguese merchant of the period.” — Manuel Azevedo
by Lawrence Bush on May 17, 2012
On this date in 1942, a mostly Jewish anti-Nazi group headed by Herbert and Marianne Baum set fire to “The Soviet Paradise,” an anti-Communist, anti-Semitic display established by Joseph Goebbels in Berlin. Within days, hundreds of Jewish Berliners were rounded up and executed by the Gestapo, including the Baums. Herbert and Marianne had met as kids in the Young Communist League in 1931. By 1938 they had organized a network of nearly 100 young Germans, most of them Jewish, to oppose the Nazis. Months before their deaths, the Baums were forced into slave labor in the electro-motors works of the Siemens corporation, and led a group of intimates into the Berlin underground to avoid deportation to concentration camps. The average age of the twenty-odd members of the inner circle of the Baum group was 22; Charlotte Päch, age 32, was nicknamed “Grandma.” For individual portraits of women of the Baum Group, click here. Monuments were erected by the East German government in Berlin’s Weissensee Jewish Cemetery and the Lustgarten, where the 1942 arson took place.
“This was the time when Jewish youth movements were outlawed, though they still managed to get most of their members out of Germany. Under these conditions, the organization became a kind of ‘city of refuge’ for members of Jewish youth movements and organizations who for one reason or another had not left Germany.” —Avraham Atzili
Among the small citizens group that launched the American Red Cross with Clara Barton on this date in 1881 was Adolphus Simeon Solomons, a Sephardic Jewish businessman who hosted many of the group’s meetings in Washington, DC and became vice-president of the new organization for its first eleven years. In 1884, Barton and Solomons were appointed by President Chester A. Arthur to represent the U.S. at the International Congress of the Red Cross (IRC), in Geneva, where delegates from thirty-seven nations elected him a vice president. Solomons also helped found the American Jewish Historical Society and created the first training school for nurses in Washington. Ironically, the Red Cross — which was chartered by the U.S. government as a quasi-governmental agency in 1905 — developed a history of cooperating with Jim Crow laws, including the racial segregation of blood supplies and the mistreatment of black disaster victims. The organization also minimized the brutality of conditions in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and refused for fifty years to accept as an IRC member Israel’s Mogen David Adom (Red Star of David).
