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A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

Jewish History

Until Jan. 1, 2025, public access to the Central Archives of the Special Administration of Justice (CABR) was limited. (Wikimedia)

Netherlands not shy about exposing suspected Nazi collaborators

JTA StaffPublished January 2, 2025

A massive trove of documents about suspected Nazi collaborators in the Netherlands is now open to the public for the first time. For the past seven decades, only researchers and relatives of those accused of collaborating with the Nazis could access...

Dick Cavett Alan King Johnny Carson Friars Club Carson roast 1968

Should Jews mourn the loss of the Friars Club?

By Benjamin Ivry, The ForwardPublished December 12, 2024

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward's free email newsletters delivered to your inbox. The news that the Manhattan townhouse occupied by the Friars Club was auctioned on Dec. 10 at a foreclosure sale raises...

A view of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia

Biden signs law that could lead to US Jewish history museum joining the Smithsonian

Ron Kampeas, JTAPublished December 11, 2024

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that could bring the country’s premiere Jewish history museum under the Smithsonian umbrella,  a measure that may help ensure the survival of an institution that faced bankruptcy just a few...

Polish and German police officers inspect the papers of a Jewish pedestrian, Warsaw, 1941.

Polish police murdered Jews during the Holocaust with gusto and even without Nazi orders, new book claims

Zev Stub, JTAPublished December 10, 2024

Writing a comprehensive history of Polish citizens during the Holocaust is challenging, especially under Poland’s controversial 2018 law criminalizing references to Polish complicity in Nazi crimes. Despite this, acclaimed Holocaust historian Jan Grabowski...

Dr. Fran Levine brings women’s forgotten stories on the Santa Fe Trail come to life

Dr. Fran Levine brings women’s forgotten stories on the Santa Fe Trail come to life

Jordan Palmer, Special To The Jewish LightPublished December 9, 2024

Dr. Fran Levine is someone who knows a thing or two about history. As the former president and CEO of the Missouri Historical Society and Missouri History Museum, and the interim executive director of the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum in 2022,...

Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar staple “Alice’s Restaurant” was inspired by a Thanksgiving Day visit to Alice Brock’s diner in western Massachusetts. (Larry Bessel, Los Angeles Times, via Wikipedia)

Jewish woman who inspired Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” dies at 83

Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTAPublished December 4, 2024

“Running a restaurant isn’t really satisfying,” wrote Alice Brock. “In fact, next to running a hospital emergency ward, I think this is the worst thing you can do.” But her time running a restaurant gave Brock a measure of pop immortality:...

Shalom Nagar

The guard who hanged Adolf Eichmann, passes away at 88

By Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTAPublished December 4, 2024

Israel has carried out the death penalty just once, when Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was sentenced in 1962 to death by hanging. “We placed the rope on his head. I pressed [a handle] and he fell downward,” Shalom Nagar, the guard who carried...

Can ‘September 5,’ a film about Israeli hostages in a time of Israeli hostages, survive the news cycle?

Can ‘September 5,’ a film about Israeli hostages in a time of Israeli hostages, survive the news cycle?

By PJ Grisar, The ForwardPublished December 1, 2024

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward's free email newsletters delivered to your inbox. September 5, director Tim Fehlbaum’s gripping control room thriller about the 1972 massacre at the Munich Olympics...

Security and rescue forces work on the remains of the bus destroyed by a suicide bomber in Haifa on Dec. 2, 2001. By Moshe Milner, Israeli Government Press Office, CC BY-SA 3.0

This week in Israeli history: Nov. 28-Dec. 4

Center for Israel EducationPublished November 26, 2024

Nov. 28, 1961 — Operation Yachin Begins for Moroccan Jews After a two-year ban on Jewish emigration from Morocco, Israel launches Operation Yachin to help Moroccan Jews make aliyah via France or Italy. By the operation’s end in 1964, more than 97,000...

"Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down)," by painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. (Public domain)

There aren’t Jewish fighters in Ridley Scott’s ‘Gladiator II.’ But what about in ancient Rome?

Luke Tress, JTAPublished November 23, 2024

In 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius erupted in southern Italy, burying the nearby Roman city of Pompeii in scalding stone and ash. The catastrophe famously entombed, and preserved, the city’s villas, workshops, and a gladiator barracks known as the Caserma dei...

Holocaust survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan holding a yellow star identification badge that Jewish people were forced to wear by the Nazis

Holocaust survivor shares her story and a message of hope with St. Louis audience

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished November 11, 2024

Trapped in Nazi Germany, Marion Blumenthal Lazan and her family sought refuge in Holland, only to be captured and sent to the Westerbork transit camp and later the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her 1996 memoir, “Four Perfect Pebbles,”...

The Bornplatz Synagogue in Hamburg, Germany, once held 1,200 congregants before it was destroyed in the  Kristallnacht pogroms, Nov. 9-10, 1938. (Wikimedia Commons)

When the Nazis attacked synagogues on Kristallnacht, they were targeting Judaism’s heart and soul

Michael Berenbaum, JTAPublished November 7, 2024

(JTA) — Eighty-six years ago this week, a series of pogroms took place in Germany and Austria. More than 1,000 synagogues were burned, their pews destroyed; sacred Torah scrolls and holy books were set aflame. More than 7,000 Jewish businesses were...

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