This week in Jewish history: The start of the IDF draft and the Daf Yomi cycle
A highly abridged version of the daily Dust & Stars.
Elul 3, 5695 (1935):
Yahrzeit of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook, Talmudic scholar, philosopher, prolific author, first chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi community in pre-state Israel, and founding father of the Religious Zionist movement. He developed warm relations with the secular pioneers building Israel.
Rav Kook maintained that the modern return to Zion was “the beginning of the redemption and the harbinger of the coming of the Messiah.”
Sept. 7, 1827:
Russian czar Nicholas I issued a decree to draft Jewish boys aged 12, place them in “cantonist,” or garrison, schools until age 18, and then obligate them to 25 years of military service.
Most of the 50,000 cantonists never returned to their families.
Sept. 8, 1949:
The Knesset passed Israel’s draft law, making it mandatory for every Jewish youth in Israel to serve in the military forces.
Sept. 9, 1940:
An Italian air raid on Tel Aviv killed 117 people and wounded 150.
Sept. 10, 1941:
Birthday of Stephen Jay Gould, American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and one of the most influential and widely read popular science authors. As a result of his 300 essays in Natural History magazine and his numerous books, he was named a US Library of Congress Living Legend in April 2000.
Sept. 11, 1923:
The Daf Yomi, a seven-year cycle of studying a page of Talmud each day, was initiated on Rosh Hashanah by Rabbi Meir Shapira of Lublin. Today, tens of thousands of Jews study the “daily page” all over the world.
Sept. 12, 1935:
Birthday of Harvey Alter, American medical researcher, virologist, and physician who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in recognition of his work leading to the 1988 discovery of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) and to the development of blood screening methods that essentially eliminated the risk of transfusion-associated hepatitis.
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