Jews who made a difference..."The Famous, the Unfamous and the Infamous"....

A lot of Jews new to America became famous and Made a Difference...but were lost in the passage of time.
Some were known for doing or creating Good..... and some Not-So-Good ...along with the rest of the population. But Good or Bad they all Made a Difference.

"The Unfamous".....

Irene Lewisohn (September 5, 1886 - April 4, 1944) and Alice Lewisohn (1883-1972) were the founders of the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Museum of Costume Art in New York City.
They were the daughters of Rosalie Jacobs and Leonard Lewisohn. In 1905 Irene & Alice began classes and club work at the Henry Street Settlement House in New York. They produced performances with both dance and drama. In 1915, they opened the Neighborhood Playhouse on the corner of Grand and Pitt Streets. There they offered training in both dance and drama to children and teenagers. Irene was in charge of the dance training and production, with the assistance of Blanche Talmud. Alice Lewisohn was in charge of the dramatic arts. In 1928 they opened The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre at 16 West Forty-sixth Street.

Alice and Irene Lewisohn — the “Misses Lewisohn,” as they were called well into their dotage.... were left an enormous fortune by their father Leonard Lewisohn. They could easily have slipped into the role of socialite, hobnobbing with the rich and famous rather than donning the mantle of social reformer and consorting with the poor.
At first, working in concert with Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement House and a close friend, the Lewisohn sisters didn’t just “assign” local kids “to nice, innocuous games,” as one eyewitness would have it. Instead, they fashioned them into dramatic groups and “conjured up festivals” whose calendar, as well as content — heavy on “pantomime ballets,” then very much in vogue. Over time, these seasonal, amateur displays gave way to more regularly scheduled and increasingly professional theatrical performances and, in 1915, to the establishment of an independent entity, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and an in-house repertory company, both of which were funded largely through the Lewisohns’ largesse. Sticking out like a sore thumb amid the neighborhood’s utilitarian, dreary tenements, the handsome, Georgian-styled building at 466 Grand Street put on plays during the weekend. On all other nights, and sometimes during the day as well, it showcased the latest exemplar of the dramatic arts: the movies. Only those films that “are up to the minute are shown,” one habitue reported. “The pictures are chosen with the greatest care so that they will be suitable for the mixed but critical audiences that visit the playhouse.”
From Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka” to Ansky’s “The Dybbuk,” its theatrical productions were also selected and mounted with great care and elan, so much so that, little by little, the Neighborhood Playhouse was increasingly touted for the plays it mounted rather than for the films it screened. Early in its history, the intimately scaled theater was known for its “vicarious air of professionalism.” By the 1920s it had become a center of innovative and experimental theater, the doyenne of drama, drawing adventure-seekers and theater buffs from across the city despite its inconvenient location downtown and its hard, “unyielding” seats.
At the conclusion of its acclaimed 1927 season, the Lewisohns decided to close up shop on the Lower East Side. Having kept the Neighborhood Playhouse going for a dozen years and at the cost of well over half a million dollars, they felt it was time to pause, to think through what lay ahead. A victim of its own success, the Neighborhood Playhouse, Irene Lewisohn explained, needed room to grow, inside as well as out. In its new uptown location, the Neighborhood Playhouse went on to enjoy a storied reputation for training a who’s who of actors, among them Robert Duvall, Allison Janney and Gregory Peck.

(from Wiki & The Forward)

"The Famous"....

* Carl Laemmle born Karl Lämmle; January 17, 1867 – September 24, 1939) was a pioneer in American film making and a founder of one of the original major Hollywood movie studios – Universal. Laemmle produced or was otherwise involved in over four hundred films.
Regarded as one of the most important of the early film pioneers, Laemmle was born in Laupheim in the Kingdom of Württemberg, at that time part of the German empire. Born to a Jewish family, Carl was the son of Rebecca and Judas Baruch Lämmle. He emigrated to the United States in 1884, working in Chicago as a bookkeeper or office manager for 20 years. He began buying nickelodeons, eventually expanding into a film distribution service, the Laemmle Film Service.
After moving to New York, Carl Laemmle got involved in producing movies, forming Independent Moving Pictures (IMP); the city was the site of many new movie-related businesses. On April 30, 1912, in New York, Laemmle of IMP, incorporated the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, with Laemmle assuming the role of president. The Company began with studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where many early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1915, the studio moved to 235 acres of land in the San Fernando Valley, California...which became Universal Pictures.
In the early and mid-1930s, Laemmle's son, Carl Laemmle, Jr., produced a series of expensive and commercially unsuccessful films for the studio. His occasional successes included Back Street (1932), 1936's Show Boat (1936), and several horror movies of the 1930s that became considered classics. Carl Laemmle and his son were both forced out of the company in 1936 during the Great Depression. (from Wiki)

A Real Hollywood "Schindler’s List" during WWII

Most everyone knows Oskar Schindler, thanks to the book and the movie, Schindler’s List. The German businessman saved over 1100 Jews from certain death in the Nazi concentration camps.
Fewer people know the Hollywood mogul, Carl Laemmle, who is credited with saving over 300 Jews during World War II. That is remarkable because Laemmle is probably the only Hollywood mogul to even get involved with the German Jews.
Laemmle, was different from his peers (the other Hollywood Movie Moguls), he “was terrified of what Hitler’s ascension would mean for his country, for the village of Laupheim (where he was born), for members of his family — many of whom had remained in Germany — and, perhaps above all, for his fellow Jews.”
That concern prompted him to risk his fortune to save as many Jews from his hometown as he could. He furnished the American consul with hundred of affidavits, which “were pledges of support that were required of every immigrant to ensure that the individual would not become a public charge.”
The story is fascinating, like Schindler’s, with many twists and turns.

(From a New York Times Story called “Laemmle’s List: A Mogul’s Heroism,” by Neal Gabler)

To ensure and facilitate their immigration, Laemmle contacted American authorities, members of the House of Representatives and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He also intervened to try to secure entry for the refugees on board the SS St. Louis, who were ultimately sent back from Havana to Europe in 1939, where many died.

"The Infamous"...

* Arnold Rothstein: (January 17, 1882 – November 6, 1928) nicknamed "the Brain", was an American racketeer, businessman and gambler who became a kingpin of the Jewish mob in New York. Rothstein was widely reputed to have organized corruption in professional athletics, including conspiring to fix the 1919 World Series.
According to crime writer Leo Katcher, Rothstein "transformed organized crime from a thuggish activity by hoodlums into a big business, run like a corporation, with himself at the top. Rothstein was the person who first realized that Prohibition was a business opportunity, a means to enormous wealth, who "understood the truths of early century capitalism (giving people what they want) and came to dominate them His notoriety inspired several fictional characters based on his life, portrayed in contemporary and later short stories, novels, musicals and films.
Rothstein failed to pay a large debt resulting from a fixed poker game and was murdered in 1928. His illegal empire was broken up and distributed among a number of other underworld organizations and led in part to the downfall of Tammany Hall and the rise of reformer Fiorello La Guardia.

"The Unfamous".....

I came across this "Heroine" of sorts who made a Difference...
The Santa Monica home of early 20th-century screenwriter "Salka Viertel", was a haven for World War II émigrés fleeing fascism in Europe.

(http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rifkind-salka-viertel-ho...)

A former actress in Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Salka left Germany for Hollywood in 1928 when her Viennese husband, Berthold Viertel, a director, accepted a contract at Fox. Soon after, their three young sons followed with their nurse, and the family settled down to a comfortable life in the canyon.
Unlike most Americans of the time, Viertel harbored no illusions about the National Socialist epidemic spreading throughout Europe. She quickly turned her house into a haven for hundreds of Jews and anti-Fascists who fled, footsteps ahead of the Nazis, and found themselves, homeless and traumatized, on the shores of the Pacific. An estimated 10,000 refugees from Germany and Austria settled in greater Los Angeles between 1933 and 1941, "the most complete migration of artists and intellectuals in European history," according to historian Kevin Starr.

While anti-Fascist volunteers were spiriting people out of Europe, Viertel in Santa Monica was taking them in. As a co-founder of the European Film Fund, in which studio employees contributed a percentage of their paychecks toward refugee aid, she helped to rescue, among many others, the German Expressionist writer Leonhard Frank, the Dadaist poet Walter Mehring, and Alfred Döblin, author of the acclaimed Weimar novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz."
On Mabery Road, Salka Viertel created a dream of home for those whose homes had been stolen or destroyed.
- Throughout the war, Viertel brokered introductions at the studios for "Nazi scrammers," as Variety dubbed them; she fed them, housed them, reassured them in their native languages — she spoke eight — and absorbed them into her huge circle of Hollywood friends. Perhaps most important, on Mabery Road she created a dream of home for those whose homes had been stolen or destroyed.
Viertel opened her doors on Sunday afternoons — the only day off for Hollywood employees of the time — and welcomed the world. In her book-lined living room, newly arrived emigres were introduced to Thomas Mann and Jean Renoir. Arnold Schoenberg played 12-tone scales on the piano and pingpong on the terrace. Charlie Chaplin was there, and Harpo Marx and Charles Laughton. In her memoirs, Viertel wrote self-effacingly that her house took on the reputation of a literary salon chiefly because of its informality, "and the haphazard intermingling of the famous with the 'not famous' and the 'not yet famous.'"
The Golden Age of Hollywood coincided with the influx of European talent escaping the Nazi's.
The film Casablanca had only 3 American born actors in the entire film...the rest of the cast were immigrants mostly escaping the Nazi's. Dozens of actors with major and minor roles in “Casablanca” had been important movie or theater stars in their native country. The war had them finding their way to America, then Hollywood and finally onto the set of “Casablanca.”
Pauline Kael once said: “If you think of ‘Casablanca’ and of all those small roles being played by Hollywood actors faking the accents, the picture wouldn’t have had anything like the color and tone it had.”
Among those in the film who had fled Germany or other parts of Europe after the Nazi takeover were German stage star Lotte Palfi, who had one line: “But can’t you make it just a little more please?”, Conrad Veidt, (Major Strasser), Peter Lorre (Ugarte) and S.Z. Sakall (Carl the waiter), whose three sisters died in a concentration camp.

"The Famous".............."Hankus Pankus & the Left Hand of G-d"!!!

In Baseball...
One of the Greatest Sluggers of All Time & the Greatest Left Handed Pitcher of All Time were Both Jewish....Both are in the Hall of Fame and Both were famous for what they did off the field on Yom Kippur and what it meant to generations of young Jewish boys learning the American National Pastime.

**************************************************************************************

"HANKUS PANKUS"

Hank Greenberg, born Hyman Greenberg (January 1, 1911 – September 4, 1986), in Greenwich Village, N.Y.C. to Romanian Jewish immigrant parents David and Sarah Greenberg.
As a professional baseball player Hank Greenberg was Nicknamed "Hammerin' Hank," "Hankus Pankus" & "The Hebrew Hammer" due to his power with a bat!!!
As a young pro player he had to concentrate on his game while ducking bottles and chunks of metal thrown at him and the verbal venom of team mates....but at 6' 4" and well over 200 lbs. Hank wasn't afraid to challenge his tormentors!
He played in Major League Baseball primarily for the Detroit Tigers in the 1930s & 1940s. A member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, he was one of the premier power hitters of his generation and is widely considered as one of the greatest sluggers in baseball history. He served over four years in the United States Army and in World War II which took place during his major league career.
He was an American League All-Star for four seasons, AL Most Valuable Player in 1935 & 1940. He had a batting average in nine seasons over .300, and he was a member of four Tigers World Series teams which won two championships. He was the AL home run leader four-times and his 58 home runs in 1938 equaled Jimmie Foxx's 1932 mark for the most in one season by anyone but the 60 hit by the Great Babe Ruth,

Greenberg was the first Jewish superstar in American team sports. He attracted national attention in 1934 when he refused to play on Yom Kippur, the holiest holiday in Judaism, even though he was not particularly observant religiously and the Tigers were in the middle of a pennant race...fighting to get to the World Series.
Late in the 1934 season, he announced that he would not play on September 10, which was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, or on September 19, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Fans grumbled, "Rosh Hashanah comes every year but the Tigers haven't won the pennant since 1909." Greenberg finally relented and agreed to play on Rosh Hashanah, but stuck with his decision not to play on Yom Kippur. Dramatically, Greenberg hit two home runs in a 2–1 Tigers victory over Boston on Rosh Hashanah. The next day's Detroit Free Press ran the Hebrew lettering for "Happy New Year" across its front page. Columnist and poet Edgar A. Guest expressed the general opinion in a poem titled "Speaking of Greenberg," in which he used the Irish (and thus Catholic) names Murphy and Mulroney. The poem ends with the lines "We shall miss him on the infield and shall miss him at the bat / But he's true to his religion—and I honor him for that."
The Detroit press was not so kind regarding the Yom Kippur decision, nor were many fans, but Greenberg in his autobiography recalled that he received a standing ovation from congregants at the Shaarey Zedek synagogue when he arrived.
A prodigious home run hitter, Greenberg narrowly missed breaking Babe Ruth's single-season home run record in 1938, when he hit 58 home runs, leading the league for the second time. That year, he had 11 games with multiple home runs, a new major league record. Greenberg also had a 59th home run washed away in a rainout. It has been long speculated that Greenberg was intentionally walked late in the season to prevent him from breaking Ruth's record, reporter Howard Megdal has calculated that in September 1938, Greenberg was walked in over 20% of his plate appearances, the highest percentage in his career by far. Megdal's article cited this walk percentage statistic as evidence of American League teams not wanting Greenberg to break Babe Ruth's record due to anti-Semitism.

**************************************************************************************

"The Left Hand of G-d"

Sanford "Sandy" Koufax ; (December 30, 1935) , born Sanford Braun in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. His parents, Evelyn (née Lichtenstein) and Jack Braun, divorced when he was three years old. His mother was remarried when he was nine, to Irving Koufax. Before tenth grade, Koufax's family moved back to the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.
As a professional baseball player Sandy Koufax was a left-handed pitcher with many nicknames including "Dandy Sandy" & "The Left Hand of G-d."

He pitched twelve seasons for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers, from 1955 to 1966. Koufax, at age 36 in 1972, became the youngest player ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Koufax's career peaked with a run of six outstanding years from 1961 to 1966, before arthritis in his left elbow ended his career prematurely at age 30. He was an All-Star for six seasons and was the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1963. He won three Cy Young Awards in 1963, 1965, and 1966, by unanimous votes, making him the first three-time Cy Young winner in baseball history and the only one to win three times when one overall award was given for all of major league baseball instead of one award for each league. Koufax also won the NL Triple Crown for pitchers those same three years by leading the NL in wins, strikeouts, and earned run average.
Koufax was the first major league pitcher to pitch four no-hitters and the eighth pitcher to pitch a perfect game in baseball history. Despite his comparatively short career, Koufax's 2,396 career strikeouts ranked 7th in history as of his retirement, trailing only Warren Spahn (2,583) among left-handers.

The 1965 season brought many obstacles for Koufax. On March 31, the morning after pitching a complete spring training game, Koufax awoke to find that his entire left arm was black and blue from hemorrhaging. Koufax returned to Los Angeles to consult with Dr. Robert Kerlan, who advised Koufax that he would be lucky to be able to pitch once a week. Kerlan also told Koufax that he would eventually lose full use of his arm. Koufax agreed not to throw at all between games—a resolution that lasted only one start. To get himself through the games he pitched in, Koufax resorted to Empirin with codeine for the pain, which he took every night and sometimes during the fifth inning. He also took Butazolidin for inflammation, applied capsaicin-based Capsolin ointment (called "atomic balm" by baseball players) before each game, and soaked his arm in a tub of ice afterwards. In April 1966, Kerlan told Koufax it was time to retire and that his arm could not take another season. Koufax kept Kerlan's advice to himself and went out every fourth day to pitch. He ended up pitching 323 innings, a 27–9 record, and a 1.73 ERA. Since then, no left-hander has had more wins, nor a lower ERA, in a season!

Just as Hank Greenberg before him.....Koufax is also remembered as one of the most outstanding Jewish athletes in American sports. His decision not to pitch Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur garnered national attention as an example of conflict between professional pressures and personal beliefs.
"Most people admired Koufax for putting his religion before his job. I'm sure there were others who were furious, saying that he wasn't that religious -- and I don't think he really was -- but that didn't make any difference. It was his decision and everyone respected it. They understood."
Longtime Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully

"There was no hard decision for me," Koufax told ESPN in 2000. "It was just a thing of respect. I wasn't trying to make a statement, and I had no idea that it would impact that many people."

John Thorn, Major League Baseball's official historian, was born to two Holocaust survivors in a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1947. The family immigrated to America in 1949, and Thorn fell in love with baseball. Thorn was in college when Koufax chose not to pitch on Yom Kippur.
"What struck me [about his decision], as an 18-year-old, was that America must be a very great place,'' Thorn says. "That a Jew cannot only profess his faith openly but take a stance for his religion in opposition to the national religion -- and baseball is America's national religion.''

********* "The Famous" *********

Abe Saperstein made a difference...as A Champion of Civil Rights

Abraham M. Saperstein (July 4, 1902 – March 15, 1966) born in London... was an owner and coach of the Savoy Big Five, which later became the Harlem Globetrotters. Saperstein was the commissioner of the American Basketball League and owned the Chicago Majors team in that league.
Abe Saperstein was founder, owner, and coach of the Harlem Globetrotters Basketball Team. He was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1970.

In 1927, following an unspectacular semi-pro baseball and professional basketball career—he stood 5'5"—Saperstein took over an all-Negro basketball team called the Savoy Big Five (named for Chicago's Savoy Ballroom), changed its name to the Harlem Globetrotters, and created a legend that is currently well into its second half-century.

The early Trotters were a serious basketball five, sporting a 101-6 record the first year, 145-13 in 1928, and 151-13 in 1929. Finding difficulty locating willing opponents, Saperstein conceived the idea of fancy, comedic, razzle-dazzle type of play, and soon the team became a must-see attraction on the professional basketball barnstorming circuit. It was not until 1940 that the Trotters started showing a profit, and through those lean years, Saperstein was not only its coach, chauffeur, and trainer, he was also the team's only substitute.

All their clowning notwithstanding, the Globetrotters won the World Basketball Championship in 1940, giving substance to Saperstein's long-ignored claim that given the opportunity, they were among basketball's best. In 1943-44, the Trotters captured basketball'’s International Cup.

Over the years, the Globetrotters developed into an international entertainment attraction, playing in more than 80 countries on five continents, on television, and in motion pictures. They are undoubtedly the most famous sports organization in the world, with Saperstein labeled the "Barnum of Basketball" and his Trotters known as "America's Number One Goodwill Ambassadors."

Saperstein was also a pioneering entrepreneur in America's Negro Baseball League and was a key figure in opening the way for African-Americans into professional sports.

(from Wiki & Jewish Sports Hall of Fame)

******* "The Unknown" *******

....although well known among both Stage and Screen actors Stella Adler is basically unknown among the general public. She was one of the greatest acting teachers in U.S. history... Only Lee Strasberg comes close.

Stella Adler (February 10, 1901 – December 21, 1992) was an American actress and an acclaimed acting teacher, who founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City (1949) Among her students were some of this country's most popular stars, including Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, and Harvey Keitel. The Stella Adler Academy of Acting in Los Angeles (1985) continues to flourish as an acting studio and houses several theaters, alumni of the Stella Adler-Los Angeles school include Mark Ruffalo, Benicio Del Toro, Brion James, Salma Hayek, Clifton Collins Jr., and Sean Astin.

Early life
Born in New York City's Lower East Side, Adler was a member of the Jewish-(Yiddish) American Adler acting dynasty, the youngest daughter of Sara and Jacob P. Adler, the sister of Luther and Jay Adler, and half-sister of Charles Adler; in fact all her five siblings were actors. They were a significant part of a vital Yiddish ethnic theatrical scene that thrived in New York from the late 19th century well into the 1950s. Stella Adler would become the most famous and influential member of her family. She began acting at the age of four as a part of the "Independent Yiddish Art Company" of her parents, and concluded it 55 years later, in 1961. During that time, and for years after, Stella Adler taught acting as well.

Career
She began her acting career at the age of four in the play Broken Hearts at the Grand Street Theatre on the Lower East Side, as a part of her parents' Independent Yiddish Art Company. She grew up acting alongside her parents, often playing roles of boys and girls. Her work schedule allowed little time for schooling, but when possible, she studied at public schools and New York University.
She made her English-language debut on Broadway in 1922, as the Butterfly in the play The World We Live In, and also spent a season in the vaudeville circuit. In 1922-1923, the renowned Russian actor-director Constantin Stanislavski made his only US tour with his Moscow Art Theatre. Adler and many others saw these performances; this had a powerful and lasting impact on her career, as well as the 20th century American theatre.

In 1934, Adler went to Paris with Harold Clurman and studied intensively with Stanislavski for five weeks. During this period, she learned that Stanislavski had revised his theories, emphasizing that the actor should create by imagination rather than memory. Upon her return, she broke away from Strasberg on the fundamental aspects of Method acting.

In January 1937, Adler moved to Hollywood. There she acted in films for six years under the name Stella Ardler, occasionally returning to the Group Theater until it dissolved in 1941. Eventually she returned to New York to act, direct and teach, the latter first at Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, New York City, before founding Stella Adler Studio of Acting in 1949.
In the coming years, she taught Marlon Brando, Judy Garland, Dolores del Río, Robert De Niro, Elaine Stritch, Martin Sheen, Manu Tupou, Harvey Keitel, Melanie Griffith, Peter Bogdanovich and Warren Beatty, among others, the principles of characterization and script analysis. She also taught at the New School, and the Yale School of Drama. For many years, Adler led the undergraduate drama department at New York University, and became one of America's leading acting teachers.

"Stella Adler was much more than a teacher of acting. Through her work she imparts the most valuable kind of information - how to discover the nature of our own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others. She never lent herself to vulgar exploitations, as some other well-known so-called "methods" of acting have done. As a result, her contributions to the theatrical culture have remained largely unknown, unrecognized, and unappreciated."
-Marlon Brando
Adler was Marlon Brando's first professional acting teacher. In 1988, she published 'The Technique of Acting' (Bantam Books), with a foreword by Brando.
Stanislavski and The Method
Adler was the only American actor to study with Constantin Stanislavski. She was a prominent member of the Group Theatre, but differences with Lee Strasberg over the Stanislavski System (later developed by Strasberg into Method acting) made her leave the Group.
In 2006, she was honored with a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in front of the 'Stella Adler Theater' on Hollywood Boulevard.

******* "The Unknown" *******

I just came across Robert Shushan via his obituary..... here's a man who definitely made a difference in his community.

Robert Shushan (1929-2015) Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 23, 1929, Shushan was the youngest of six children of Russian Jewish immigrants. He moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was 10.
Robert opened doors for the developmentally disabled!!!

In 1958, Robert Shushan was a Los Angeles high school teacher with hopes of joining the administrative ranks when his sister disrupted his plans.
She belonged to a grass-roots parents group that wanted to provide an alternative to institutionalization for children like her son, who was born with profound intellectual disabilities. But the group was broke and falling apart. Would Shushan consider taking charge as its first executive director?
He thought he would help out temporarily, but he wound up guiding the Exceptional Children's Foundation to the forefront of its field over the next 40 years.
Under his leadership, the Culver City-based nonprofit pioneered programs to tap the potential of people who society had largely written off. It is now one of the oldest organizations in the country providing training, jobs and other services to children and adults with Down syndrome and other conditions.
"He was there at the frontier ... a very creative and strong spokesperson for individuals with developmental disabilities," said Leslie B. Abell, an attorney and past chair of the foundation.

His efforts to help one young man whose challenges involved his looks as well as his mental limitations inspired "Behind the Mask," a 1999 TV movie starring Donald Sutherland.
Shushan "was a pioneer in addressing the physical appearance of individuals with disabilities to help them overcome social stigma and biases based upon their looks," said David Dubinsky, regional director of SourceAmerica, a national organization that creates job opportunities for disabled workers.

After graduating from Manual Arts High School, Shushan studied music and sociology at UCLA, earning a bachelor's degree in 1951 and a master's in education in 1953.
He was a counselor and department head at Polytechnic High School in the San Fernando Valley when his sister told him about the problems facing the foundation: It was $12,000 in the red and the officers had been thrown out.
He took the job in part because "I was kind of hooked on this particular kid," he said of his nephew, who had been named after him.
One of Shushan's first major initiatives as director was a program that enabled adults with developmental disabilities to "learn and earn" by performing packaging and assembly jobs under contracts with government agencies and community organizations.
"He believed in the value that people with developmental disabilities could contribute to the business community. He was well ahead of everybody in believing in what could be contributed to business from our population," said Scott Bowling, who in 1999 succeeded Shushan as president and chief executive.
Later, Shushan introduced a fine arts training program that allowed them to create, exhibit and sell their work. He also helped establish a center for teaching independent living skills, such as how to prepare a meal, catch a bus and maintain an apartment. Called the S. Mark Taper Center for Exceptional Citizens, it is one of 16 centers operated by the foundation, which now has an annual budget of more than $25 million.
One of Shushan's proudest achievements was a study he conducted in the early 1970s for his doctoral dissertation at UCLA. It was sparked by his young daughter, who asked him if a child she saw in a nearby car was developmentally disabled. The child wasn't behaving unusually, but it took only a quick glance for Shushan to sense that his daughter, then 5, was right.
That experience led him to mount an experiment to determine if there were specific visual cues that people use to identify a person as mentally challenged. He thought it was important to find out if simple cosmetic improvements could erase those cues and thereby increase the social acceptance of such individuals.
He took photographs of 26 young adults, some of whom had normal features and abilities and others who had Down syndrome. He took another set of photos of the latter group after making small adjustments in their appearance, such as adding makeup and stylish glasses.
When he showed the photos to separate groups of volunteers, the results were startling. The volunteers shown the "before" shots quickly identified the subjects who were developmentally disabled. But when another group of volunteers was shown the "after" pictures, he found that they were far less likely to identify the subjects with Down syndrome.
In 1991 Shushan oversaw a dramatic makeover of a young man named James Jones, whose social issues stemmed not only from his low IQ but from his physical features and traits, including missing and grossly misshapen teeth, a menacing walk and a thick, dirty beard. His nickname was "Wolfman."
Shushan arranged for him to undergo months of dental restoration by oral surgeons who donated their services. He counseled Jones on his grooming and other habits, put him in a new set of clothes and had his hair cut and styled. Jones, who had said at the outset that he just wanted "to look regular," was transformed. "All of sudden," Abell recalled, "he had confidence."

******* "The Unknown" *******

Tibor Rubin:
A Holocaust survivor received Medal of Honor for Korean War heroism...
...IN 2005???

Tibor Rubin, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who joined the U.S. Army out of gratitude for his liberation from the Nazis, then earned the Medal of Honor for heroism in the Korean War, died of natural causes Saturday in Garden Grove, CA. He was 86.

Rubin had a Hungarian accent and a Jackie Mason-like sense of humor, said his nephew. Rubin's parents and younger sister were killed by the Nazis, and wounds and starvation had left him disabled. But his comic demeanor betrayed little trace of this history.

After his military service, Rubin worked for years at his brother's Long Beach liquor store and said little of his wartime deeds, which included defending a hill single-handedly for 24 hours and saving the lives of as many as 40 of his fellow POWs in a camp in North Korea, according to his biographer Daniel M. Cohen.

Decades later, supporters successfully argued the Jewish corporal had been denied recognition during the war because of the anti-Semitic leanings of a superior. Rubin was called to the White House in 2005, 55 years after his combat service — to receive the medal from President George W. Bush. An Army spokeswoman said at the time that the government's investigation had found evidence that wartime papers recommending that he receive citations for bravery had been tossed out.

Rubin later showed an L.A. Times writer a photo of Bush giving him the medal. It depicted "the little midget and the nice-looking guy," he joked.

Tibor "Teddy" Rubin was born June 18, 1929, in Paszto, Hungary. His father, Ferenc, and stepmother, Rosa, tried to send him to Switzerland to save him from the Nazis. But the 13-year-old Rubin was caught at the Italian border and sent to the notorious Mauthausen slave labor camp in Austria, Cohen said.

His younger sister Ilonka and stepmother died in Auschwitz; his father died later in Buchenwald, Cohen said.

Rubin endured 14 months in Mauthausen until the concentration camp was liberated by U.S. forces in May 1945. He went to a camp for displaced persons, then to the United States.

By then, Rubin had "promised myself if the Lord helped me go to America, I'd join the Army," he told The Times in 2006. He wanted to repay the country for freeing him. He tried twice to join the Army. He twice flunked entry tests because of his poor English.

He finally succeeded in enlisting in 1948 and was sent to Korea as a rifleman with Company I, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. In interviews, Rubin described difficulties with a sergeant who used anti-Semitic slurs and sent him on dangerous missions.

Wounded that November, Rubin was captured and sent to a Chinese-run prison camp along the Yalu River on the border of North Korea and Manchuria, said Cohen, whose book is "Single-Handed: The Inspiring True Story of Tibor "Teddy" Rubin — Holocaust Survivor, Korean War Hero and Medal of Honor Recipient" (2015).
In July 1950, he was asked to stay behind on a hill to keep open the Taegu-Pusan Road link as his company withdrew, according to his citation. North Korean regulars attacked at dawn. Rubin repelled them alone. "I didn't have too much time to get scared, so I went crazy," he later said.

His citation said he rejected his captors' offers to send him back to Hungary. Remaining prisoner, he slipped out and broke into storehouses to feed his starving fellow POWs. He also acted as their medic. He had learned desperate arts in the Nazi concentration camp, such as how to use maggots to stop the spread of gangrene, Cohen said. Cohen said Rubin told him that the POW camp was "a cakewalk" compared with Mauthausen.

Decades later, when the writer reached one of his camp mates on the phone, "the first words out of his mouth were, 'Rubin saved my life,'" Cohen said.

Rubin was recommended for citations for bravery but left the Army with only two Purple Hearts. He returned to live in Long Beach, marry, raise children and work.

He ran into former war buddies at a POW meeting three decades later. They and others launched the campaign to secure him the medal. He was 76 when he received it.

In the ensuing years, the Garden Grove war hero led parades and supported veterans groups. His nephew, who eventually ran the ROTC program at USC, said Rubin maintained steadfast faith in the military. "He talked me into going into it, even after all he had been through," Huntly said.

(From L.A. Times Obit.)

******* "The Unknown" Today *******

Theodore von Kármán May 11, 1881 – May 6, 1963)
He is regarded as the outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the twentieth century.
Von Karman was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He is responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization.

Von Kármán was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Austria-Hungary as Kármán Tódor. One of his ancestors was Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel.
He studied engineering at the city's Royal Joseph Technical University, known today as Budapest University of Technology and Economics. After graduating in 1902 he moved to Germany and joined Ludwig Prandtl at the University of Göttingen, and received his doctorate in 1908. He taught at Göttingen for four years. In 1912 accepted a position as director of the Aeronautical Institute at RWTH Aachen, one of the country's leading universities. His time at RWTH Aachen was interrupted by service in the Austro-Hungarian Army 1915–1918, where he designed an early helicopter. He is believed to have founded the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in September 1922 by organizing its first conference in Innsbruck.

In 1944 he and others affiliated with GALCIT founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is now a Federally funded research and development center managed and operated by Caltech under a contract from NASA.
In 1946 he became the first chairman of the Scientific Advisory Group which studied aeronautical technologies for the United States Army Air Forces. He also helped found AGARD, the NATO aerodynamics research oversight group (1951), the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (1956), the International Academy of Astronautics (1960), and the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Brussels (1956).

Some Inspiring Jews who died in 2015...They made a Difference....

(NEW YORK (JTA) — As 2015 winds to a close, we’d like to take a moment to honor the memories of some of those who we lost over the past 12 months. ...here are some Jews whose deaths... left their legacy on the year that was.)

********* Theodore Bikel, 91 ********
Bikel, who died on July 21 of natural causes, was best known for playing Tevye in the stage production of “Fiddler on the Roof” more often than any other actor. He was also the first to play Capt. Georg von Trapp in the original Broadway cast of “The Sound of Music.”

Outside the theater, Bikel was a prolific folk singer who recorded 27 albums in Hebrew and Yiddish — languages in which he was fluent.

Bikel championed various causes during his life — including the Soviet Jewry movement and the progressive Zionist movement — and linked his activism to his experience living through the Nazi invasion of his native Austria in the late 1930s. He planned for his tombstone to read “He Was the Singer of His People” in Yiddish.

********* Leonard Nimoy, 83 *********

“Live long and prosper,” Nimoy’s “Star Trek” character Spock used to say. The Jewish actor followed his character’s advice.
Nimoy portrayed the half-Vulcan alien — who became one of the most popular television characters of the second half of the 20th century — for four decades. He also sustained a successful Broadway theater career and directed two of the “Star Trek” films.

Nimoy was born to Yiddish-speaking Orthodox parents in Boston’s West End and rediscovered his Jewish roots in the late stages of his career. He starred in “Never Forget,” a TV movie about a Holocaust survivor who sues a group of Holocaust deniers, and hosted an NPR radio series in which Jewish celebrities read Jewish short stories.

He also employed a Jewish symbol for his entire “Star Trek” career: He based Spock’s iconic split-finger salute on a Kohanic blessing that manually approximates the Hebrew letter “shin.” Nimoy died Feb. 27 from end-stage pulmonary disease.

********** Alberto Nisman, 51 **********

The demise of Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor who at the time of his shooting death was guiding the investigation of the 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing in Buenos Aires, remains a mystery with enough plot twists to fill multiple Hollywood screenplays.
Nisman was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment in the early morning on Jan. 19, the day he was scheduled to reveal the details behind his allegations that then-Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and its Jewish foreign minister, Hector Timerman, had covered up Iran’s role in the AMIA attack. The gun in Nisman’s apartment led police to think his death was a suicide, but subsequent forensic tests appear to have negated the possibility.

His death, which is still being investigated, reignited the media’s interest in the AMIA case and highlighted the rifts opened by the case between Argentina’s government and its Jewish community. The attack killed 85 and injured hundreds of Jews.

******* Oliver Sacks, 82 *******

The British-born Sacks, a neurologist and an author of books such as “The Mind’s Eye” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” was among the best-selling science writers of the past half-century. The New York Times called him the “poet laureate of contemporary medicine,” and his 1973 book “Awakenings” was turned into a 1990 film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.

Sacks was raised in an Orthodox family in London. His homosexuality was not received well by his parents, however, and he moved away from religion. After writing about his terminal cancer in The New York Times in February (a recurrence of a cancer he lived through nine years earlier, in the new form of a metastases in his liver), Sacks revealed a newfound appreciation for Jewish traditions in some of his last essays. He published an ode to gefilte fish in The New Yorker and a meditation on the end of life in The New York Times titled “Sabbath.” Sacks passed away at his home in New York City on Aug. 30.

******* Rochelle Shoretz, 42 ********

Shoretz was the founder of Sharsheret, a nonprofit that provides educational and support services to Jewish women with breast and ovarian cancer. The organization, which Shoretz founded in 2001 while undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, now runs programs nationwide and has an operating budget of over $2 million.

“When I was diagnosed, there were a lot of offers to help with meals and transport my kids, but I really wanted to speak to another young mom who was going to have to explain to her kids that she was going to lose her hair to chemo,” Shoretz told JTA in 2003.

Shoretz, an Orthodox Jewish lawyer who once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died May 31 from complications of her cancer, which resurfaced in 2009. She was remembered by colleagues and friends as being “superhuman” and “compassionate,” and participated in triathlons even after her cancer came back.

******* The Unknown ********

David Daniel "Mickey" Marcus (22 February 1901 – 10 June 1948)
was a United States Army colonel who assisted Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and who became Israel's first modern general "Aluf"!!!
He was killed by friendly fire, when he was mistaken for an enemy infiltrator while returning to Israeli positions at night.

Marcus is the best known Israeli Machal soldier. He was portrayed in the 1966 Hollywood movie Cast a Giant Shadow that starred Kirk Douglas as Marcus.
Marcus's parents, Mordechai Marcus and Leah (née Goldstein), came from Iași, Romania. Born on Hester Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Marcus was bright and athletic. He attended Boys' High School, in Brooklyn, and was then accepted at West Point in 1920 and graduated with the class of 1924. After completing his active duty requirement, he attended Brooklyn Law School. He spent most of the 1930s as an Assistant United States Attorney in New York, prosecuting gangsters such as Lucky Luciano. In 1940, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia named Marcus Commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction for the City of New York.

World War II
After leaving active duty, Marcus had continued his army service in the Organized Reserve Corps. In 1939, he joined the Judge Advocate General's Corps, and became Judge Advocate of his Army National Guard unit, the 27th Infantry Division, which was federalized in 1940. Though as a legal officer, he was not supposed to command troops, he wangled a unit command during the 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers.[3]

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the 27th Division deployed to Hawaii. There, Marcus organized and commanded a "Ranger school", which trained some 8,000 men for special operations during the next year. But instead of a field command, Marcus was sent to Washington in 1943.

After V-E Day in 1945, General Lucius D. Clay asked for Marcus to serve on his staff in the occupation of Germany. Marcus was in charge of providing for the millions of displaced persons in Germany. Clay required all his subordinates to tour the Dachau concentration camp. Marcus was shocked by its horrors; though not previously a Zionist, he began to think differently about a Jewish state.

In 1946, he was named chief of the Army's War Crimes Division in Washington, planning legal and security procedures for the Nuremberg trials and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. He attended the Nuremberg trials, making sure that Nazi crimes were thoroughly documented. After the trials, he was offered promotion to Brigadier General, but instead elected to return to civilian life and his law practice.

Israeli military career

US Col. Mickey Marcus in 1948, the first modern Israeli general (Aluf).
In 1947, David Ben-Gurion asked Marcus to recruit an American officer to serve as military advisor to the nascent Jewish army, the Haganah. He could not recruit anyone suitable, so Marcus volunteered himself. In 1948, the U.S. War Department informally acquiesced to Marcus' undertaking, provided he disguised his name and rank to avoid problems with the British authorities in Mandatory Palestine.

Under the nom de guerre "Michael Stone", he arrived in Palestine in January 1948. Arab armies surrounded the soon-to-be declared State of Israel.

He designed a command and control structure for the Haganah, adapting his U.S. Army experience to its special needs. He identified Israel's weakest points in the Negev south, and the Jerusalem area.

Marcus was appointed Aluf ("general") and given command of the Jerusalem front on May 28, 1948. As no ranks were granted to Israeli high command at that time, he became the first general in the fledgling nation's army (see Israel Defense Forces). (Aluf was then equivalent to Brigadier General. Since 1967, Aluf is equivalent to major general.)

Death

Memorial Plaque for Colonel David Marcus at Union Temple of Brooklyn
A few hours before the cease fire, Marcus returned to his Central Front headquarters. He and his commanders were billeted in the monks' quarters of the abandoned Monastere Notre Dame de la Nouvelle Alliance in Abu Ghosh. Shortly before 4:00 a.m., a sentry, Eliezer Linski, eighteen years old, and a one-year Palmach veteran, challenged Marcus, who he saw as a figure in white. When Marcus failed to respond with the password, Linski fired in the air and the man ran towards the monastery. He fired at the man, as did one or more fighters in a nearby sentry post. Marcus was found dead, wrapped in a white blanket.
Legacy
Marcus' grave is the only one in the West Point Cemetery at the United States Military Academy for an American killed fighting under the flag of another country; he was still eligible for internment there because of his previous service in the US Army. His gravestone at West Point reads: "Colonel David Marcus—a Soldier for All Humanity". A memorial plaque in his honor is located in the lobby of the Union Temple of Brooklyn where his funeral service was conducted. It reads "Killed in action in the hills of Zion while leading Israeli forces as their supreme commander in the struggle for Israel's freedom—Blessed is the match that is consumed in kindling flame/ Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart/ Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake/ Blessed is the match that is consumed in kindling flame—Dedicated by his fellow members of Union Temple of Brooklyn December 9, 1949."

Ben-Gurion wrote to Marcus's wife Emma in Brooklyn, New York:
"Marcus was the best man we had". On May 10, 1951, Ben-Gurion laid a wreath at the Marcus grave, accompanied by Emma Marcus.
Kibbutz Mishmar David and the neighborhood of Neve David in Tel Aviv as well as numerous streets are named after him. Colonel David Marcus Memorial Playground, on the north side of Avenue P between East 4th Street and Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn is also named after him.