This week in Jewish history: Miracle aids and antibiotics

The Exodus, a ship with 4,500 Holocaust survivors on board, tried to get past the British blockade of pre-state Israel. British soldiers boarded the ship, killing three Jews and wounding more than 100 others, and eventually forced the ship to return to Germany. This cruelty enraged the public worldwide and helped force the British out of Israel.

Yahrzeit of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (Ramak) of Safed, Kabbalist, teacher of the Ari, and author of the classic book Pardes Rimonim (Garden of Pomegranates). Written when he was 26, the book presents the primary Kabbalistic topics in an orderly system. 

He also authored the popular Palm Tree of Deborah, an ethical treatise devoted to the idea of emulating God.

Birthday of Tadeus Reichstein, Swiss chemist and endocrinologist who synthesized ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in 1933, using a process that is still in widespread use. He won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research with steroid hormones produced by the adrenal cortex. 

Col. Muammar Qaddafi “nationalized” the property of all Jews in Libya, in essence stealing more than $1 billion in 2004 dollars. By 1972, fewer than 40 Jews remained in Libya.

Birthday of Selman Waksman, a microbiologist who won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for isolating streptomycin, the first and most widely used chemotherapeutic agent of its time. 
He coined the term “antibiotic,” referring to this agent and all the other miracle drugs that he and his successors have since developed that have saved millions of lives.

The day after the Nazis ordered the forced expulsion of the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Adam Czerniaków, the leader of the Jewish council of Warsaw, the Judenrat, committed suicide by writing his own name hundreds of times in response to the German order to provide a list of names for deportation. 

In his suicide note, he wrote: “I am powerless. My heart trembles in sorrow and compassion. I can no longer bear all this.” The Nazi order directly resulted in more than 300,000 Jews being murdered in extermination camps. 

The 51 member countries of the League of Nations unanimously adopted the Articles of the Mandate, granting Britain a mandate to administer Palestine, which had been officially under a British military government since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.

Based on the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the understandings reached at the San Remo Conference, Britain committed itself to overseeing the establishment of the Jewish National Home in all of Mandatory Palestine per the Balfour Declaration of 1917. 

Just a few months later, Britain decided to lop off 77% of the land and use it to establish the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan (today called Jordan). 

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