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Journalist and scholar Aharon Ariel, 97, veteran of Israel’s war of independence and ‘walking encyclopedia’
(JTA) — In May 1948, a decommissioned U.S. Navy ship, the Marine Carp, was carrying passengers from New York to Haifa when, stopping in Beirut, it was met by 400 Lebanese soldiers. Israel had just declared its independence and war was underway — the Lebanese had no intention of allowing Jewish men of fighting age to sail on to the nascent Jewish state.
Among the 69 passengers removed from the ship and trucked to a former French military camp in the city of Baalbek was a Jerusalem-born polymath and former Haganah fighter named Aharon Ariel. Ariel had been studying history at Columbia University and Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary when the war broke out and quickly rushed home.
After the U.S. government brokered the release of the prisoners in late June, Ariel was sent back to the United States and tried again to get home. Eventually, he and a number of the detainees “found creative ways to get back to Israel,” as one history of the incident puts it, and he rejoined the Israeli military.
Still in his 20s, Ariel had already seemed to embody the history of Israel — a pattern he would sustain the rest of his life as a scholar, broadcaster, encyclopedia editor, translator and father of a son who would himself become a prisoner during the Yom Kippur war. He died June 20 in Jerusalem at age 97.
“My grandfather was a true son of Jerusalem,” a granddaughter, Tamar Ariel, wrote in a tribute posted shortly after his death. “Born just outside of Jerusalem in the Palestinian Mandate in 1925, the youngest of 6, and raised on King George St., he was a scholar and lover of Hebrew, history, and Jerusalem. “
Aharon Ariel worked as a journalist whose assignments, according to his granddaughter, included the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. He worked as editor of the “Encyclopedia Hebraica,” a monumental reference work issued between 1949 and 1983. His books include a historical lexicon, written with the historian Joshua Prawer in 1964, and a translation of “Annals of England” (1968) by the British historian George Macaulay Trevelyan.
The son of immigrants to Israel from Hamburg, Germany, he spoke a precise academic Hebrew and delivered a regular Hebrew lesson, “Rega shel Ivrit,” on Kol Yisrael, Israel’s main and then only radio station.
“This was before Israel had a television station, and … when it had just one radio station,” remembered another granddaughter, Yael Ariel-Goldschmidt.”I’ve never met or heard anyone speak better Hebrew. As a child I thought his job was … simply to speak Hebrew.”
In his youth he attended Ma’aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem, where his best friend was Yehuda Amichai, who would come to be regarded as Israel’s greatest poet. At 14, he joined the Haganah, the general defense force of the pre-state Jewish community, eventually becoming a junior commander.
Aharon Ariel rides on the shoulders of his childhood friend, Yehuda Amichai, at left. The two attended the same high school in Jerusalem before Israel became a state. (Courtesy Yael Ariel-Goldschmidt)
He studied mathematics at Hebrew University before, in 1947, he went to New York City for his graduate studies.
When the war interrupted those plans, he joined the fighting that would last until March 1949. His units suffered major casualties, including a number of his close friends.
After the war he worked as a Hebrew teacher whose students included an American immigrant named Batya (Betty) Cohen, who had been raised on New York’s Lower East Side and came to Israel as a member of Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist Zionist youth group. The two married in 1951 in the United States, where Batya had returned for graduate studies, and returned to Israel to live. Batya died in 2021.
They had three sons and nine grandchildren, one of whom predeceased them.
During the Yom Kippur war, one of those sons, Yaakov, was wounded, captured and tortured by Syrian forces. He spent nine months as a POW; because the Syrians refused to release the names of prisoners, his parents knew he was alive only after they saw a photograph of him taken by a Turkish journalist. During his captivity Aharon and Batya lobbied in Israel and the United States for his release.
“My father, with a group of other parents, went to the United States and met with anyone willing to meet them,” recalled Yaakov Ariel, now a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to withholding the names of the captured, Syria refused Red Cross visits or mail. “Many parents didn’t know what was going on.”
Once again the United States brokered a prisoner exchange. Afterwards, the elder Ariel rarely talked about his own captivity in 1948 nor his son’s ordeal, according to Ariel-Goldschmidt.
“My grandparents never spoke to me about this, except for once,” she recalled. “My friend Jordana came over on Shabbat for lunch and brought her little sister, who was just young enough and bold enough to ask questions no one else asked. My grandmother took out photo albums with newspaper clippings from when my father was MIA, from when he was a POW. That is how I learned that my grandfather was elected by the parents of the POWs to fly to the U.S. and campaign on their behalf, to urge the U.S. to exert pressure on Syria and broker a prisoner exchange, which the U.S. (and [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger) eventually did.”
Her grandfather was forthcoming on many other topics.
“He was a connoisseur of whiskey, art, pescatarian food, and coffee,” wrote Tamar Ariel. “He and my grandmother introduced me to Impressionism, taking me to art museums across Israel, the U.S., and Europe from a young age.”
He could also expound on the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and the history of the country whose biography parallelled his own.
“My grandfather was a walking encyclopedia,” wrote Ariel-Goldschmidt.
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The post Journalist and scholar Aharon Ariel, 97, veteran of Israel’s war of independence and ‘walking encyclopedia’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Treasure Trove explores the curious case of a stamp from an imaginary land
This 1 V. postage revenue stamp from West Refaim was postmarked in Virikoso in South Giantsland 100 years ago. Problem is—none of these places ever existed. There is a second […]
The post Treasure Trove explores the curious case of a stamp from an imaginary land appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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