The Luxembourg reparations agreement between West Germany and Israel was signed on this date in 1952, following lengthy negotiations between Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and very fierce debate in the young state of Israel. Under the Agreement, West Germany paid reparations for its crimes against the Jewish people amounting to more than $800 million in goods over the course of fourteen years (of which $107 million were allocated to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, headed by Nachum Goldmann and representing Jews outside of Israel). Goods bought under this arrangement built up Israel’s infrastructure, including railways and power plants, and helped sustain the households of some half-million Holocaust survivors. An additional $125 million was paid in 1988 to enable survivors around the world to receive monthly payments of $290, and two years later, in the course of unifying with West Germany, East Germany also agreed to pay reparations. In 1999, Germany obtain the dismissal of numerous class action lawsuits, past and future, with a $5 billion payment to a foundation that provided compensation to former slave laborers under the Nazi regime, including 140,000 Jews in 25 countries, until 2006.

“In our name, unspeakable crimes have been committed and they demand restitution, both moral and material, for the persons and properties of the Jews who have been so seriously harmed . . .” —Konrad Adenauer

For a Jewish Currents blog about American reparations for slavery, visit http://jewishcurrents.blogspot.com/2007/04/rreparations-for-slavery-question.html/.

The Palestine Liberation Organization officially recognized the right of Israel to exist “in peace and security” on this date in 1993, and Israel, in turn, recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. In a letter to Prime Minister Yitzkhak Rabin, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat affirmed the Oslo Accords as a “historic event, inaugurating a new epoch of peaceful coexistence,” renounced the use of “terrorism and other acts of violence,” and affirmed that “those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist” were now “inoperative and no longer valid.” Implementation of the Oslo Accords was ultimately derailed by the assassination of Rabin on November 4, 1995, as well as by intensified Palestinian violence, continued Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories, and numerous other obstacles.

“[W]e shall discover ourselves in peace more than we have with war and confrontation, as I am sure that the Israelis in turn shall find themselves in peace more than they have found it in war.” —Yasser Arafat, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 1994

Joshua Lionel Cowen (Cohen), who invented and marketed the most successful model electric trains in the world, died on this date in 1965. He built his first toy train at age 7, with a small steam engine that exploded in his parents’ kitchen. He sold his first electric train at age 24 in 1901, as a store window display; it proved so popular that by the following year, the Lionel Corporation was in business as a toy manufacturer. By the early 1950s, Lionel was the largest toy company in the world. Soon after, Cowen sold it to his great-nephew, Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man. (In 1995, rock musician Neil Young was part of an investment group that took over Lionel; Young has designed innovative soundscapes, landscapes and a wireless control system for electric trains, motivated in part by his desire to share the hobby with kids who are developmentally disabled. Young has two sons with cerebral palsy.) In 2006, the Lionel electric train was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, and in 2007, Cowen was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

“America’s railroads were at the zenith of their importance in the early years of the twentieth century, and Cowen’s miniature locomotives and cars showed a fascination with the machinery that made America work.” —National Inventors Hall of Fame

The captain of the ship that brought the first sizeable group of Jews to North America petitioned for payment of their fare on this date in 1654. These “23 souls, big and little” were passengers in a convoy of sixteen ships carrying Dutch colonists from Recife, Brazil back to Holland in the wake of Portugal’s reconquest of Recife. Captain Jacques de la Motthe of the St. Catrine had rescued them from a pirate attack and conveyed them to New Amsterdam (other accounts state that the Jews were simply forced by bad winds to switch to the St. Catrine in Spanish-held Jamaica). Governor Peter Stuyvesant responded to the captain’s petition by seizing the refugees’ few possessions and selling them at auction, then jailing two as debtors. A notable struggle for sanctuary and equal rights thus began — see Jewdayo for April 20th, http://jewishcurrents.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=1587/.

“We pray that the deceitful race — such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ — be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony.” —Peter Stuyvesant

The author of Bambi: A Life in the Woods, Felix Salten, was born in Budapest on this date in 1869. He grew up in Vienna and became a prolific writer of books, plays, short stories, operetta librettos, and essays, as well as an anonymously published erotic novel, Josephine Mutzenbacher. Salten became the president of Austrian P.E.N. in 1927, four years after the publication of his most famous work. In 1928, Bambi was translated into English and became a bestseller, but in 1933 Salten sold the rights to a film director for $1,000; when the Disney studios produced its famous movie in 1942, Salten saw no royalties. By then he had other problems to contend with: the Nazis had banned his writings in 1936 and taken over Austria in 1938, forcing Salten to move to Switzerland, where he died in 1945.

“Young Bambi: What happened mother? Why did we all run?
Bambi’s Mother: Man was in the forest.” —Bambi (Disney, 1942)

Palestinian guerillas of the Black September Organization (BSO) raided the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany on this date in 1972 and killed or captured Israeli Olympic athletes. The BSO demanded release and safe passage for 234 men jailed in Israel as well as for Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction, who were imprisoned in Germany. By the day’s end, eleven athletes and coaches, five of eight terrorists, and one German police officer would be killed, mostly during an ineffectual airport rescue raid mounted by the West German military. Three captured terrorists would be released a month later when hijackers of a German Lufthansa jet demanded it. One of them would be hunted down and killed by Israel in 1973. Abu Daoud, who claimed to mastermind the Olympics attack, died of natural causes in Syria in July of this year. According to Daoud’s autobiography, Mahmoud Abbas, current head of the Palestinian Authority, was responsible for financing the Black September raid.

“Between 1972 and 1979 more than a dozen Palestinians were assassinated, ensuring the total eradication of Black September.” —Noam Shalev

Percussionist Mickey Hart (Michael Steven Hartman) joined the Grateful Dead as one of the band’s two drummers (the other was Bill Kreutzmann) on this date in 1967. He left the Dead in 1971 and then returned in 1974, remaining with the band until they dissolved in 1995, following guitarist Jerry Garcia’s early death. Hart is an expert in world music and ethnomusicology who has produced several books as well as the Grammy Award-winning album, Planet Drum. This year he debuted “Rhythms of the Universe,” a composition based on astrophysical data. It will be part of a musical history of the universe that reflects such phenomena as the Big Bang, quasars, and supernovae through rhythm and sound. Hart is active with the American Folklife Center and the Library of Congress’ National Recorded Sound Preservation Board.

“Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood, we are a rhythm machine, that’s what we are.”
—Mickey Hart

Edward Filene, the founder of Filene’s department stores and one of the more progressive capitalists in American history, was born on this date in Salem, Massacusetts in 1860. Filene’s innovations included profit-sharing , a 40-hour work week, and paid vacations, as well as a minimum wage for women. He was a major player in the credit union movement, which his philanthropy and leadership developed into a healthy alternative to loan-sharking and under-the-mattress saving for workers. In this endeavor, Filene anticipated community development banking, microlending, and other innovations by more than half a century. Filene was also a major advocate for Workmen’s Compensation (made law in 1911) and for collective bargaining by labor unions. He was an advocate for world peace; among the world leaders he corresponded with were Gandhi, Lenin, Wilson and Clemenceau. (To learn more about Edward Filene, visit http://jewishcurrents.org/2004-sept-stillman.htm.)

Filene “had a great distaste for material things, lived very modestly, never owned an automobile and was scrupulously careful about small expenditures, all because he felt that he was a trustee for the money that he had earned and that trusteeship involved turning his accumulations into the greatest possible disinterested public service.”

—Roy Bergengren, Credit Union North America, 1940

Viktor Frankl, who chronicled the preservation of his mental health as a concentration camp inmate in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), died on this date in Vienna in 1997. Dr. Frankl headed the “suicide pavilion” of the General Hospital in Vienna from 1933 to 1937, where he treated thousands of suicidal women, and hung on under the Nazis as a neurologist and brain surgeon at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna until 1942, when he, his wife Tilly, and his parents were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Working with Rabbi Leo Baeck and Regina Jonas, he saved hundreds of his fellow prisoners from despondency and suicide and gave lectures on mental health. In 1944 he endured life as a slave laborer in Auschwitz and Dachau while losing his wife to the executioners at Bergen-Belsen. Clinging to her memory, he later wrote, he “grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Frankl survived to become an important humanistic psychotherapist who wrote some thirty-two more books.

“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor Frankl

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on this date in 1939, triggering World War II and setting in motion the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Close to two thirds of Poland’s 3.5 million Jews would fall into Nazi hands, while a third came under the rule (and relative protection) of the Soviet Red Army, which invaded Poland from the east on September 17. Hundreds of concentration camps would be built in Poland by the Nazis, and alongside Poland’s three million Jews, close to three million Polish gentiles would be killed in the course of the war. An additional million or more Polish citizens would be deported by the USSR, many to forced labor camps in Siberia.

“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages . . .” —W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”