Front-Line Valor
As a journalist in the Yom Kippur War, I came upon a Patton tank company refueling behind the Israeli lines in Sinai during the last week of fighting.
As a journalist in the Yom Kippur War, I came upon a Patton tank company refueling behind the Israeli lines in Sinai during the last week of fighting.
Gerda Straus Mathan, a well-respected, Berkeley-based photographer of Jewish and other subjects who studied with Ansel Adams and lived for a time in Southern California, died Aug. 10 following a long illness. She was 83.
\”I have a philosophy very compatible with being a banker,\” he told a Seattle Times reporter in 1994. \”I believe that people should pay their debts. My debt to society is so great that if I were to live 100 years I could not completely begin to repay it.\”
Myra Waldo Schwartz, travel writer, food editor and critic died July 25.
Rabbi Alfred Wolf, who pioneered Jewish summer camps and the interfaith movement on the West Coast, died Aug. 1 at the age of 88.\n\nThroughout his life, he strove for his self-described goal \”to serve as a catalyst in bringing people together, despite personal and ideological differences.\”
A native of Los Angeles, born in Boyle Heights, Oct. 1, 1919, bar mitzvah at the Breed Street Shul, Sol Bojarsky was a graduate of Hollywood High School and UCLA.
Rabbi Simon Dolgin, founding rabbi of Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy and rabbi of Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills for 32 years, died in Israel on April 19 at the age of 89.
Abraham Spiegel, a survivor of four concentration camps, who built a new life in America as a successful businessman, philanthropist and ardent supporter of Jewish life in the United States and Israel, died April 10 in his home at the age of 97.\n\nAmong his major legacies are the Children\’s Memorial at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, the Spiegel Family Building at the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv and the Spiegel Family Park, also in Tel Aviv.
Laemmle Theaters: Release of the Academy Award-nominated documentary, "Prisoner of Paradise," about German Jewish actor Kurt Gerron, sent to a concentration camp and forced to write and direct Nazi propaganda. Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills.
Victor M. Carter, who rose from poor immigrant boy to become a creator and shaper of the post-World War II Jewish community in Los Angeles, died March 27, at the age of 94.