[Jewish True Tales] 11/21/2010 06:40:00 PM

[Lawrence J. Epstein]

Welcome to Jewish True Tales. It’s appropriate to begin this project today, the first day of Hanukkah. Each week there will be a new story about a significant Jewish person or event. For this first post, I have included three anecdotes. Please feel free to provide comments or suggestions for other stories. And if you like these true tales, please do tell others about the site.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955). Albert Einstein may have been the smartest person of the 20^th century, but no one would have been able to guess that when he was young. He didn’t speak until he was three years old. In high school, his Greek teacher told him, “Nothing will ever become of you.” Some years later he failed his college entrance examinations the first time he took it. He finally did go to college—to become a science teacher so the German army wouldn’t draft him. He then became a patent clerk before turning his attention to writing scientific papers. His first paper was not quite about how the universe worked. It was about the physics of drinking straws. 

In 1952, when Einstein was 73, David Ben Gurion, the Prime Minister of Israel, offered Einstein the chance to be the President of the new Jewish nation. Einstein turned down the offer. After spending a lifetime with scientific studies, he didn’t think he knew how to deal with people well enough.

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887).  The Statue of Liberty is one of the great symbols of freedom. The original statue lacked a pedestal, and so a woman named Constance Harrison began collecting money to build one. She had the idea that if she could collect original manuscripts from famous writers, she could auction these manuscripts and collect a lot of money. She therefore approached such writers as Bret Harte, Walt Whitman, and John Greenleaf Whittier. In the fall of 1883, Harrison finally approached her friend Emma Lazarus to ask for a new poem. But the poet was dismissive. Lazarus explained that she just couldn’t write a poem because someone asked her to do so. Harrison persisted. She told Lazarus to think about that torch raised high welcoming the Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. Lazarus was deeply concerned about these poor newcomers to the Golden Land.

             

A few days later, Lazarus gave Harrison the text of a new poem. That poem, “The New Colossus,” was eventually engraved on a memorial plaque and placed on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal in 1903. The poem includes these stirring lines:

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breath free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Leslie Howard (1893-1943) Pimpernel Smith is the most morally influential motion picture ever made. The 1941 adventure film focused on the rescue of innocent people from the Nazis. The film was made by Leslie Howard, the son of a Hungarian Jewish father and British Jewish mother. Howard used money he had earned from co-starring in Gone With the Wind.  Pimpernel Smith directly influenced extraordinary acts of heroism. For example, in 1942 the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg attended a private screening of the film with his half-sister Nina. She later noted, “On the way home, he told me this was the kind of thing he would like to do.” Working in Budapest during the War, Wallenberg issued passports and housed Jews. He saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazis. He was later arrested by the Russians and disappeared in the Gulag prison system.

Leslie Howard sought to transfer the heroism he portrayed on the screen to his own life. He made other anti-Nazi films and appeared on radio broadcasts. His work was so effective that Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, called him, “the most dangerous propagandist in the British service.” When Pimpernel Smith was released, the worried Nazis pressured neutral countries not to screen it in public. That’s why Raoul Wallenberg had to see the film within the confines of the British embassy.

Eventually, the Nazis were so fearful of Howard’s work that on June 1, 1943, they shot down a civilian airliner over neutral airspace because they knew he was on board. According to a recent, credible study by the Spanish journalist Jose Rey-Ximena, Howard had been personally sent by Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a successful mission to keep Spain out of the war and was returning on that flight.

Beyond these two extraordinary cases, Pimpernel Smith stirred the patriotic feelings, provided emotional strength, and offered inspiration to untold millions of British citizens and alerted people around the world of the dangers of Nazism.

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Posted By Lawrence J. Epstein to Jewish True Tales at 11/21/2010 06:40:00 PM