Everybody wants spirituality. To be a good person means to walk in G-d's ways. How does that translate to reality? The only guidebook to spirituality that has stood the test of time is the Hebrew Bible. The Bible says that the Jews will be a light onto the nations. But if you are not a born Jew, you have to convert, which is not so easy!! If you do convert, it is a lot of work to be a Jew (three times a day prayer, keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath).
This blog will show you how to be Jewish without the work!!
Saturday, May 21, 2022
Part XXIV: December 8, 1942 Meeting With Roosevelt By Alex Grobman PhD. and The Original Grammy Snub and Park Netanya TERROR PAYS: 20 Years After Passover Seder Massacre, Terrorists Rewarded with Millions and a shout out to my Rabbi Grandfather on my Father's side for his 129th birthday
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
A shoutout to my Rabbi Grandfather on my Father's side today which would have been his 129th birthday. My Grandfather taught me the Alef-bet and gave me my first taste of herring in Shul
May 22, 1893 Birthday 11th of shevat dod 01/18/1978 129 years ago
The Three Musketeers at the Kotel
The Three are Rabbi Yehuda Glick, famous temple mount activist, and former Israel Mk, and then Robert Weinger, the world's greatest shofar blower and seller of Shofars, and myself after we had gone to the 12 gates of the Temple Mount in 2020 to blow the shofar to ask G-d to heal the world from the Pandemic. It was a highlight to my experience in living in Israel and I put it on my blog each day to remember.
The articles that I include each day are those that I find interesting, so I feel you will find them interesting as well. I don't always agree with all the points of each article but found them interesting or important to share with you, my readers, and friends. It is cathartic for me to share my thoughts and frustrations with you about life in general and in Israel. As a Rabbi, I try to teach and share the Torah of the G-d of Israel as a modern Orthodox Rabbi. I never intend to offend anyone but sometimes people are offended and I apologize in advance for any mistakes. The most important psychological principle I have learned is that once someone's mind is made up, they don't want to be bothered with the facts, so, like Rabbi Akiva, I drip water (Torah is compared to water) on their made-up minds and hope that some of what I have share sinks in. Love Rabbi Yehuda Lave.
Park Netanya TERROR PAYS: 20 Years After Passover Seder Massacre, Terrorists Rewarded with Millions
Each of the terrorists involved in the Park Hotel massacre has by now been paid over one million shekels by the PA.
We recently marked the twentieth anniversary of the infamous Passover Seder Massacre. As families sat down to participate in the Passover dinner at the Park Hotel in Netanya, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up murdering 30 people and injuring another 160.
Abbas Al-Sayid – Arrested May 2002 – Main planner of the attack – Sentenced to 35 life sentences
Fathi Hatib – Arrested May 2002 – Convicted for transporting the suicide bomber – Sentenced to 29 life sentences
Muhannad Shreim – Arrested May 2002 – Financed the attack – Sentenced to 29 life sentences
Muamar Al-Sheikh – Arrested May 2002 – deputy of Abbas Al-Sayid – Sentenced to 29 life sentences
Each one of the terrorists above has by now been paid over one million shekels by the PA as a reward for their participation in the murder of 30 Israelis.
The PA has also paid hundreds of thousands of shekels to the families of Kais Adwan, one of the main planners of the attack, who was killed on April 5, 2002, and to the family of the suicide bomber, Abd Al-Basset Odeh.
The PA has repeatedly honored the mastermind Abbas Al-Sayid, calling him, among other things a "heroic fighter" and "the lion of the prison cells." [PA TV, Oct 25, 2011]
In 2017, Al-Sayid was among many other terrorist murderers glorified by Fatah – the Palestinian faction headed by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas – in a post on the Fatah Facebook page. The posted text said:
"All blessings to our heroic prisoners carrying out the [hunger] strike of dignity: Karim Younes, Marwan Barghouti, Nael Barghouti, Ahmad Sa'adat, Abbas Al-Sayid, Hassan Salameh, Zaid Bassisi, Bassem Al-Khandaqji, Wajdi Joudeh, Maher Younes, Fuad Al-Shubaki, Wael Al-Jaghoub." [Official Fatah Facebook page, May 3, 2017]
Soccer Tournament Honoring Odeh
At the graduation ceremony held in honor of Shreim on his completing a degree while in prison, Al-Quds Open University President Dr. Younes Amr referred to Shreim as a "prisoner knight." [PA official daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 29, 2018]
The PA has also repeatedly glorified Odeh, the suicide bomber.
While praising the terrorists of the Jenin refugee camp who "wrote a heroic epic in blood" during the 2000 – 2005 PA terror campaign, the official PA daily singled out Odeh:
"Each year in April the blood of the Martyrs sprouts flowers. All the words are silenced, but not the memories of the refugee camp whose residents wrote a heroic epic in blood… The location: The Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. The time: The beginning of April 2002. The heroes of the story are hundreds of resistance members and all the residents of the refugee camp who stand firm…
"They tell the story of the blood that flowed in the alleys of the camp, which wrote an epic of resolve. Despite the siege, it achieved a great victory… After Martyrdom-seeker Abd Al-Basset Odeh (i.e., suicide bomber, murdered 30) from Tulkarem in the northwest of the occupied West Bank carried out a self-sacrificing operation (i.e., suicide bombing) on March 27, 2002, in which 30 Israelis were killed at the Park Hotel in occupied Umm Khaled – which the occupation changed its name to 'Netanya.'" [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 5, 2021]
In January 2003, less than a year after the deadly attack, the PA Ministry of Education even held a football tournament named in honor of suicide bomber Odeh:
"In the football field of Tulkarem's Abd Al-Majid Tayeh School, under the auspices of Jamal Tarif, Director of the Education Department [of the PA Ministry of Education]… the Tulkarem Martyrs' (Shahids') Football Tournament, the Championship of the Martyr Abd Al-Basset Odeh, began with the participation of seven top teams, named after Martyrs who gave their lives to redeem the Homeland… Issam, the brother of the Martyr (suicide bomber Abd Al-Basset Odeh), will distribute the trophies." [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan 21, 2003]
'They Did What We Ordered Them to Do'
It's important to stress that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas has admitted that the PA was responsible for this and all terror from 2000 to 2005. When explaining the PA's demand that Israel release all the Palestinian terrorists, he left no room for misconceptions:
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: "I demand [the release of] prisoners because they are human beings, who did what we, we, ordered them to do. We – the [Palestinian] Authority. They should not be punished while we sit at one table negotiating…
This is war. One (i.e., Israel) ordered a soldier to kill, and I ordered my son, brother, or others, to carry out the duty of resistance (i.e., euphemism for terror). This person killed and the other person killed. So why say this person's hands are stained with blood, and [he] must be kept in prison? He is a fighter just like any other fighter…" [Official PA TV, Feb. 14, 2005]
Other PA leaders have similarly repeated this claim.
The PA's adulation, glorification, and rewarding of terrorists, including mass murderers, is something that every decent human being should ferociously reject. People who praise and reward terrorist murderers, simply because they murdered Jews, are not and will never be partners for peace.
Part XXIV: December 8, 1942 Meeting With Roosevelt
*Editor's Note: This is part XXIV in a series. You can read Part XXIII, here
Arthur Morse, The New York Times, Congress Weekly and the Forward reported that on December 8, 1942 President Roosevelt received a delegation of prominent Jewish leaders, who handed him a 20-page country-by-country analysis of the annihilation entitled "Blue Print for Extermination." Roosevelt expressed his profound shock to learn that two million Jews had already died. The delegation appealed for action to stop the Nazi massacres and urged the US to appoint a commission to investigate the atrocities committed against civilian populations and shared with the conscience of the world. Roosevelt said the Allies were "doing everything possible to ascertain who are personally guilty." As the meeting came to a close, the question Wise asked "what would victory mean to the dead" was never answered.
Morse asked "but beyond the issue of human survival lay other fundamental questions. What would the effect of Allied disinterest be on the captive peoples of Europe who might shelter the oppressed at the risk of their own lives…on Axis troops weighing the commission of atrocities…or on churchmen in Nazi-occupied lands wrestling with consciences…or on German commanders contemplating their own futures?"
Having decided not to oppose Allied policy, the most American Jews could hope for was a joint statement by the Allies condemning the extermination of European Jewry, and other declarations of support and sympathy. The Allied declaration was issued on December 17, 1943. Pope Pius the XII added his own prayer in his Christmas Message on December 24, 1942.
Jan Karski Meeting with President Roosevelt
Roosevelt should not have been surprised. On July 28, 1943, Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground resistance movement, and Jan Ciechanowski, the Polish ambassador in exile, met with Roosevelt to inform him of his firsthand account of the Nazi effort to destroy the Jews of Europe. In Story of a Secret State Karski said he was told Roosevelt "wanted to hear from me personally about the events in Poland and occupied Europe." The president was "amazingly well informed about Poland," Karski said, "and wanted still more information. His questions were minute, detailed and directed squarely at important points. He asked me to verify the stories about the German practices against the Jews."
Karski also provided information gained by visiting the Warsaw Ghetto twice and by posing as a guard at Izbica, a transit camp, where he witnessed masses of Jews being primed to be deported to concentration camps. Walter Laqueur said one of Karski's most significant points he made to Roosevelt concerned the Final Solution: "The unprecedented destruction of the entire Jewish population is not motivated by Germany's military requirement. Hitler and his subordinates aim at the total destruction of the Jews before the war ends and regardless of its outcome. The Allied governments cannot disregard this reality. The Jews in Poland are helpless. They have no country of their own. They have no independent voice in the Allied councils. They cannot rely on the Polish underground or population-at-large. They might save some individuals—they are unable to stop the extermination. Only the powerful Allied governments can help effectively."
This information was shared with many individuals and institutions in the US. This included the State and Justice Departments, writers, newspapermen and women, and Catholic and Jewish leaders including Nachum Goldmann, Stephen Wise, Samuel Margoshes, and many others. Karski also met with US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, accompanied by Frankfurter's friend, Jan Ciechanowski. Walter Laqueur writes that when Karski told Frankfurter of his experience, the judge responded, "I can't believe you." Ciechanowski told Frankfurter Karski represented the Polish Government, and he was telling the truth Frankfurter said: "I did not say this young man is lying, I said I cannot believe him. There is a difference." Either Frankfurter found the thought of Jews being killed in this fashion inconceivable or he knew that if he acknowledged the systematic destruction, he would have to act publicly in their defense.
The delegation appealed for action to stop the Nazi massacres and urged the US to appoint a commission to investigate the atrocities committed against civilian populations and shared with the conscience of the world. Roosevelt said the Allies were "doing everything possible to ascertain who is personally guilty." As the meeting came to a close, the question Wise asked "what would victory mean to the dead" was never answered.
Morse asked "but beyond the issue of human survival lay other fundamental questions. What would the effect of Allied disinterest be on the captive peoples of Europe who might shelter the oppressed at the risk of their own lives…on Axis troops weighing the commission of atrocities…or on churchmen in Nazi-occupied lands wrestling with consciences…or on German commanders contemplating their own futures?"
Having decided not to oppose Allied policy, the most American Jews could hope for was a joint statement by the Allies condemning the extermination of European Jewry and other declarations of support and sympathy. The Allied declaration was issued on December 17, 1943. Pope Pius the XII added his own prayer in his Christmas Message on December 24, 1942.
The Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations against Extermination of Jews December 17, 1942
"The attention of the Governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the United States of America, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Yugoslavia and of the French National Committee "condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination. They declare that such events can only strengthen the resolve of all freedom-loving peoples to overthrow the barbarous Hitlerite tyranny. They re-affirm their solemn resolution to ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution, and to press on with the necessary practical measures to this end."
Pope Pius the XII's Christmas Message on December 24, 1942
In the Pope's Christmas Message on December 24, 1942, he declared, "Mankind owes that vow [of bringing back society to the center of gravity, which is the law of G-d] to the hundreds of thousands of persons, who without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or a slow decline."
US State Department Annoyed by Public Pressure and Protest
In his autobiography Challenging Years, Wise wrote that Riegner continued to send information to the State Department, some of which was forwarded to him. On January 19, 1943, Riegner reported that Jews in Poland were being murdered at the rate of six thousand a day. After being inundated by public pressure and protests, the State Department decided to find a way to stop the harassment. Wise quotes Henry Morgenthau, Jr. secretary of the treasury, who wrote in his diary, how the State Department "tried to shut off the pressure by shutting off the source of the flow of information which nourished it." A few days after Riegner's cable arrived at the State Department on January 21, 1943, (cable 354)Leland Harrison was instructed, according to Morgenthau, "not to send back any more of Riegner's information—any more stories of atrocities which might provoke more mass meetings and more public protest."
The cable was signed by Welles, although it is clear he knew nothing about the request based on his "well-known record on the subject." Furthermore, on April 10, he cabled Leland Harrison for additional information from Riegner. Harrison replied that such critical information should not be subjected to the constraints imposed by cable 354.
Wise noted the "crime of the bureaucrats, however, was far more serious than the attempt to withhold information." In early 1943, Riegner informed them that approximately 70,000 Jews in France and Rumania could be saved, and a number of Polish Jews fled to Hungary, where the Germans had not yet begun a coordinated effort to destroy the Jews if funds could be sent to Switzerland. The money would be deposited in banks under the names of Nazi officials, where it could be withdrawn only after the war. Funds were available Wise said, however, they needed government approval and consent to transfer the money.
An initial approach had been made to meet Roosevelt, but it was not until July 22, that Wise went to the White House. "The President's immediate response astonished me and delighted me," Wise said. "Stephen," Roosevelt said, "Why don't you go ahead and do it?" Roosevelt picked up the phone and told Henry Morgenthau, Jr, "This a very fair proposal which Stephen makes…"
Not until December 18 did the State Department issue instructions that a foreign funds license be issued to Gerhart Riegner-"five full months after the same license had been approvedby the President of the United States, and theSecretary of the Treasury [italics in the original]. "Let history, therefore record for all time," Wise declared, "that were it not for[US] State Department and [British] Foreign Office bureaucratic bungling and callousness, thousands of lives might have been saved and the Jewish catastrophe partially averted."
The Original Grammy Snub
Emile Berliner's inventions shaped the music industry we know today, but his name has been mostly lost to history
A few Sundays ago, the music community will gather at last for the 64th Annual Recording Academy Awards, and the presentation of the iconic Grammy Awards. The trophy, instantly recognizable as a symbol of musical excellence, features a glimmering miniature gramophone—the revolutionary prototypical musical device, hand-cast in Grammium, a zinc alloy created by the Colorado artist who has made the statues in his basement workshop for the past four decades. The decision over which names are ultimately engraved on the placard has been the subject of much controversy, with artists such as The Weeknd and Drake boycotting the awards this year after criticizing the opaque nomination process as out of touch with the listening preferences of the public. But the absence of the German Jewish immigrant who invented the gramophone (creating the music industry in the process) from the public imagination might be the greatest Grammy snub of all. The legacy of this man whose scientific achievements composed the score of musical history has been largely overlooked, even by the ceremony which bears the name of his greatest innovation.
Emile Berliner was born in Hanover, Germany, on May 20, 1851, to Samuel Berliner, a Talmud scholar and merchant, and Sarah Friedman, an amateur musician. The fourth-oldest of 11 siblings, he attended one of the foremost Jewish schools in the German states, the Samson-Schule in Wolfenbüttel, where he received a traditional Jewish education in addition to German and mathematics. Ceasing his formal schooling at the age of 14, Berliner worked as an apprentice in a number of trade shops until his parents had him shipped off to America to work in the dry goods store of a family friend on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War in the spring of 1870.
After a two-week trans-Atlantic voyage on the Hammonia, the young Berliner arrived in Washington, D.C., just a week shy of 19 years. Penniless and without a word of English to his name, he began clerking at Gotthelf, Behrend and Company located on 7th Street between H and I. By day, he wrapped goods in old newspapers, rehearsing his English as he read story after story scrawled over wrinkled print. By night, he took violin and piano classes, prompting a lifelong fascination with acoustics. After a few years, Berliner left for New York, seeking better financial prospects amid the international financial crisis of 1873. There, he took a number of odd jobs throughout his early 20s, selling glue, giving German lessons, and painting backgrounds for tintype portraits.
Briefly, Berliner ventured west, working as a traveling salesman for a Milwaukee haberdashery, though with little success. When he returned to New York, the only employment that he could find was as a low-level bottle washer in a sugar chemist's laboratory, getting paid a meager $6 a week. However, though he could not have known at the outset, this job would prove most auspicious. Not only was the lab located just a few blocks away from the Cooper Institute (Cooper Union today), in which Berliner took advantage of free evening classes and studied obsessively in the library, throwing himself into the fields of physics, electronics, and acoustics, but it also marked his first encounter with ordered research. A real life Will Hunting, Emile Berliner was a genius masquerading as a janitor.
In 1876, he returned to the dry goods store on 7th Street in Washington, D.C., having recently applied to become a citizen of the young nation in whose capital he called home once again. His arrival coincided with the centennial celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the United States. There was much fanfare, including, in Philadelphia that summer, the Centennial Exhibition where a Boston University professor named Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his recently patented telephone. Having studied the underlying physics behind the invention, Berliner took a great interest and began experimenting, venturing to create an improvement for one of the device's most noticeable flaws: namely, its complete and total deficiency. Though Bell is widely considered the father of telephony, the instrument in which Bell had famously first summoned his assistant Thomas Watson was far from an effective communication tool. Speech was not all that discernible due to the weak electrical current that the magneto-electric induction force of Bell's proto-microphone transmitted across conductive wires; over any significant distance, the metal diaphragm in the receiver which reproduced the sound would barely vibrate, turning what was once a joyous shout into a muted murmur.
Reconfiguring his third-floor boarding house apartment into a makeshift electrical laboratory, with wires coming out of his windows and the downstairs neighbors pressed into his experimental service, Berliner worked tirelessly for months to come up with a feasible solution which would render the telephone viable. His breakthrough came inadvertently after a friend, who worked as a telegraph operator, explained that the signal of a message varied with the pressure applied to the contact switch. Using this principle of increased pressure, Berliner eventually created a working prototype for both the loose-contact transmitter (the first working microphone), as well as for a transformer (which prevented electrical signals from fading over long distances). By this point, his English had improved such that he filed for a patent caveat himself on April 4, 1877. When the news reached Bell, he was immediately dismissive and skeptical that an unknown, 26-year-old immigrant had managed to solve an issue whose scientific limitations and complexity he and his partners could not overcome. However, by the end of the year, the Bell Telephone Company had purchased Berliner's caveat for $50,000 ($1.3 million today) and offered Berliner a job as a researcher. Within the decade, the telephone business was booming and the future was ringing with opportunity. Though it was Bell's name on the label, as the Boston Globe would later editorialize in 1891: "It is safe to say that this Berliner patent is of more commercial value than the original Bell Telephone itself."
While Berliner and Bell were ushering in the age of real-time verbal communication, another father of American invention was hard at work producing a different kind of sound. In 1877, Thomas Edison patented the tinfoil cylinder phonograph, the first sound reproduction machine. Yet, for all its promise, Edison's designs did not produce consistent results and he abandoned the project. In 1886, after Berliner had stopped working for the Bell Company, Bell and an associate had produced their own version of the phonograph, the graphophone, which used engraved grooves in a wax cylinder to materialize acoustic waves. However, this also had its share of problems: The recording could only be two minutes in length and the cylinder was quite fragile. Additionally, because the cylinder did not yield itself to easy replication due to its shape, artists had to repeat their performances when recording in order to amass a high quantity of work. This was not only time consuming, but costly. As such, the phonograph, which Edison later revived, borrowing the graphophone's wax cylinder concept, was advertised primarily as a business dictation tool for typists.
Thus, the genesis of sound reproduction as we know it today owes itself to the gramophone which Berliner first demonstrated at the Franklin Institute in May of 1888. The novelty of Berliner's innovation was twofold. First, the audio quality of the gramophone was a dramatic improvement over the phonograph and graphophone. Berliner noticed that the stylus that etched the sound waves into the graphophone's wax cylinder experienced some degree of resistance both due to the hardness of the wax and the gravity of its vertical orientation. So, Berliner changed the orientation from a vertical cylinder to a flat disc to account for the interference of gravity. Additionally, after much experimentation, he created a much softer etching compound by mixing beeswax and alcohol which he applied on top of a zinc disk. These two innovations taken together produced a sound that was much clearer. Second, Berliner created a method for the cheap and efficient reproduction of recordings. He poured acid into the wax etching which ate away at the exposed zinc disk underneath where the grooves had been cut. Then, a positive mold could be taken from this master copy from which an infinite amount of rubber (later shellac) discs could be replicated. The scalable reproduction of sound, and thus the music industry, was born. As an early advertisement cheered: "the Berliner Gramophone is to the voice what photography is to the features—a simple, practical medium for securing accurate and lasting records."
Emile Berliner with a standing gramophone, 1926EMILE BERLINER COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESSOne of the first gramophone models, 1888EMILE BERLINER COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESSEmile Berliner, age 24EMILE BERLINER COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESSHand cranked gramophone EMILE BERLINER COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
As with the telephone, Berliner was able to identify the flaws in existing technology and create an elegant solution that made the product commercially viable. Yet, despite all of the material (and financial) rewards that his invention would soon bring, Berliner was more interested in the transcendent implications of man's synthesis with science and technology. He concluded his speech at the Franklin Institute with the following:
"Future generations will be able to condense into the brief space of twenty minutes the tone pictures of a lifetime—five minutes of childish prattle, five of boyish exultation, five of the man's mature reflections, ending with five moments embalming the last feeble utterances from the death-bed. Will this not seem like holding veritable communion with immortality?"
In his later years, Emile Berliner showed no signs of slowing down. With the fortune he generated from the sale of the telephone and gramophone, he continued to innovate and also committed himself to philanthropic pursuits. At the turn of the 20th century, he became fascinated by the possibility of flight and by 1909 constructed the first working model of a helicopter using a lightweight internal combustion engine that he designed himself. In 1919, after his daughter became deathly ill due to the bacteria she had consumed in a glass of raw milk, he launched a national campaign to educate the public about the dangers of unpasteurized dairy and the increased need for hygiene, authoring a cartoon rhyme book titled Muddy Jim: 12 Illustrated Health Jingles for Children which was distributed free to public schools.
Finally, though he long abandoned the tradition of his youth in the old country, Berliner remained passionate about the status of Jews in America. He adopted an assimilationist attitude, attributing gentile prejudice against Jews to the "mannerisms" and "lack of poise" of the Jews themselves. In an address published in The American Israelite in 1913, he advocated that the Jew should "wipe away that which socially and ethically separates him from the Christian. Judaism is strong enough to stand without danger of falling into decay … the rigid and forbidding fence of ancient ceremonies should be replaced by a hedge of flowers and the gentle spirit of co-ordination with other people." Believing that the security of a nation-state would engender the social and ethical refinement that the Jews so lacked due to their poor conditions in Europe and America, Berliner strongly supported the Balfour Declaration and donated large sums to the newly established Hebrew University.
Originally, when the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (now The Recording Academy) ventured to establish an award to celebrate musical achievement in the 1950s, they called it the "Eddies" after Thomas Edison, the creator of the phonograph. Yet, as we have seen, Edison's phonograph did not create the recording industry; Berliner's gramophone and etched discs did. It was only after launching a nationwide contest asking Americans to come up with a better name for the trophy, that a submission from a New Orleans secretary was decided upon: the Grammys, honoring Berliner's legacy.
It is staggering to consider both the sheer breadth and societal impact of Berliner's accomplishments and their relative obscurity today. Even in his own lifetime, Berliner's achievements had largely already faded from public view. As Frederic Wile exclaimed in his 1926 biography of Berliner, published three years before the inventor's death: "here is a story of a hero unsung and unheralded who some sixty years ago, as a small boy, gazed upon New York harbor from the steerage of an ocean liner, and who was destined to confer countless benefits on all sorts and conditions of mankind."
Perhaps, then, such as with art, the trophies that the historical narrative confer have little to do with deservingness, but, rather, with the story society wishes to tell about which of its subjects are worthy of recognition. Along with Bell and Edison, so, too, must Emile Berliner be enshrined on the Mount Rushmore of great American minds which advanced the frontiers of human possibility. Mayer Lipman said it best in his eulogy for Berliner published in B'Nai B'rith Magazine:
"It was just as well that he was a modest, quiet, unassuming man, and that the world at large did not realize its debt to him. America has lost a great citizen; Judaism has lost an illustrious son; and Humanity has indeed lost a benefactor."
See you tomorrow bli neder
We need Moshiach now!
Hope you had a meaningful Peashuch, we return home to Israel today. If I haven't returned your emails, it was due to our travel
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