Featured
After the Great War, the British Government did keep one of her many wartime promises to her allies.
In a letter dated November 2nd, 1917, towards the end of the Great War, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour assured prominent banker Lord Rothschild that the British Government would do what it could to carve out a homeland for Jewish people in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. The promise was kept, and this is how the Colonial Office List for 1946 summarised the formation of British Mandatory Palestine.
A mild-mannered clerk in the British Embassy’s passport office in Berlin, just before the outbreak of war in 1939, was not all he seemed to be.
By 1938, Germany had stopped forcing Jews to leave the country and was interning them in camps, yet thousands still escaped into British-run Palestine. An angry Arab backlash prompted the Foreign Office in London to dam the flood, but one man had both the will and the means to introduce more than a few leaks.
After a thousand years of uneasy cohabitation, Edward I decided that there was no place for Jews in his Kingdom.
Few countries can claim to have a clean record when it comes to the treatment of Jews, and England is no exception. Confined by law and custom to trade and money-lending, Jews were both indispensable to the economy and the target of suspicion and resentment, leading King Edward I to give an infamous order.
Ten British POWs in German-occupied Poland decide to help a young Jewish woman escape the SS and a death march to the sea.
As the Second World War came to an end in 1945, the Germans began emptying their concentration camps by ‘death marches’, gruelling, roundabout (dodging the Allied advance) journeys on foot to the Baltic shores, where the SS forced their captives into the sea and gunned them down. But one young woman escaped, with the help of ten British prisoners-of-war.
Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens took his wartime protest straight to the top.
In 1941, the Germans invaded Greece, plunging the country into a four-year nightmare of fear, persecution and famine. As elsewhere in Europe, Jews were targeted, but even in the midst of starvation and suspicion the Greeks hid them, found them food, and tried to frustrate the deportations to the camps of Germany and Poland.
The story of the once magnificent Temple in Jerusalem, the city God chose for Israel’s capital.
All that remains of the Temple in Jerusalem is a 187ft section of the western wall, after the rest was destroyed during a rebellion against the Roman Empire in AD 66-74; the heart of the ruined Temple Mount is now occupied by a mosque. The Temple’s history reaches back to the tenth century BC and King Solomon, who first built a House for Israel’s God to dwell among his people.
Wilfrid Israel used his Berlin department store as cover for smuggling thousands of Jewish children to safety in Britain.
Wilfrid Israel (1899-1943) was a wealthy German retailer, who used his business as a cover to bring thousands of Jewish children to Britain in the run-up to the Second World War, saving them from ‘deportation, extermination and annihilation’ - words thought too melodramatic at the time, but only too accurate.