'I find that so long as you render service - no matter where and how - all men speak the same tongue, and hearts beat the same." So said Henry Morgenthau Sr. in 1916, his third year as US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
In a brief time as President Woodrow Wilson's envoy, he had indeed rendered service, providing succor and sounding alarms that firmly established his place in Jewish history and made him a hero to Armenians.
Deeply affected by the dire poverty of the Jews in Palestine, Morgenthau in 1914 cabled his friend Jacob Schiff in New York: "Palestinian Jews facing terrible crisis belligerent countries stopping their assistance serious destruction threatens thriving colonies fifty thousand dollars needed."
It was no small amount in those days, but Schiff quickly raised the funds for a relief project that evolved into the Joint Distribution Committee.
The next year, fearful of the fate of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, he cabled Washington, reporting that "from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress." To this day, Henry Morgenthau Sr. is revered by Armenians for alerting the world to the Armenian genocide.
These cables are among the documents, memorabilia, photographs and films in a new exhibit "The Morgenthaus: A Legacy of Service" at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The exhibit, which opened this month in lower Manhattan and runs through 2010, covers the public and communal service of three generations of Morgenthaus: Henry Sr., Henry Jr. and Robert.
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Annual Brussels weekend, November 26-28. A weekend full of fun with plenty of sight seeing, good times, and a HUGE party with UEJB!
Police decoys have helped reduce street crime. The “decoy Jew” has now been added to the police attributes.
Despite volcanic disruptions to European air travel, 150 Europeans traveled to New York for the first transatlantic ECJS event May 6-10.
Ostrove told the Winnipeg Jewish Review that he had the opportunity to talk to a lot of European Jewish students, ages 18-35, about the their concerns, including anti-Semitism.
