Features
Current turmoil in Egypt spurs memories of 1956 when 75,000-100,000 Jews fled
JERUSALEM — Frolicking with her fiancé in the cool waters of the Suez Canal, Lilian Abada would never have imagined she was about to experience the first of a string of events that would ultimately lead her to flee her native Egypt for Israel with only one suitcase.
When Abada and her future husband, Nisso, emerged from the water that day in 1956, a security agent was waiting for them. The two teenagers were arrested for spying for Israel and interrogated for days. They were released and then rearrested, along with hundreds of Jews. Finally, they fled to Israel.
“We realized the Egyptians wanted us out,” Abada said.
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VIENNA — With more than 250 students living, studying or partying on its campus, quiet moments are rare at the Lauder Business School. But when a lull does occur, it reminds managing director Alex Zirkler of this Jewish university’s opening 10 years ago, when it had only seven students, 15 lecturers and many silent hallways.
“I don’t like to remember those absurd times,” said Zirkler, a Vienna native who has been with the institution ever since the...
THESSALONIKI, Greece — It was spring in northern Greece, 1943. Efthymios Kontopoulos, 13, had come to Thessaloniki for the day when he saw Nazis rounding up the city’s Jews.
“My father brought me into town,” said Kontopoulos, who is not Jewish. “We saw them being taken away. They were with their [yellow] badges.”
On March 15, 1943, the Nazis began deporting the Jews of Thessaloniki. Some 4,000 people were loaded onto cattle cars and shipped off to Auschwitz. Eighteen more convoys f...
NEW YORK — Diane von Furstenberg takes a seat at her long, farm table-inspired desk inside her office on the fifth floor in this city’s Meatpacking District. The studio is so vividly colored, so overly patterned and so decked out in exotic tchotchkes, von Furstenberg is one of the few people who could possibly occupy it.
Seated across from her is Sara Bloomfield, the executive director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the outfits of the two women could not be more different.
Bloomf...
BALTIMORE — It pained Don Jacobson to consider the relatives he’s never met, whose names he didn’t know and the family celebrations they could have been sharing all these years.
And doubtless there are many relatives because Jacobson’s paternal grandfather, Harry, had 12 or 13 siblings. That translates into numerous family events missed and conversations never had.
“I understand that for some reason, someone got mad at someone and no one spoke for years, if not decades. I know you’...