Today in Israeli History

A massive earthquake and subsequent landslide devastate Jewish and Arab communities in Safed (Tz’fat). The mountain town, which had been the long-time home to a thriving Jewish population, suffers thousands of deaths.

January 1, 1995 The full, 1,500-page Agranat Report, the Israeli government’s official assessment of the Israel Defense Forces’ performance during the October 1973 Middle East war, is released to the public, with the exception of...

Israeli commandos overtake a weapons ship, the Karine-A, and seize fifty tons of Iranian weapons, including a number of long-range rockets.

January 2, 1927 Ahad Ha’am, the leader of the movement for cultural Zionism, dies in Mandatory Palestine. He was born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg on Aug. 18, 1856, in a village near Kyiv, Ukraine, and...

Emir Faisal, son of Sharif Husayn of Mecca, and Chaim Weizmann, Zionist diplomat and leader, sign the Faisal-Weizmann agreement. It is an agreement of mutual respect and cooperation between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.

January 3, 2004 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon orders the Israel Defense Forces to remove two illegal Jewish outposts, Tal Binyamin and Havat Maon, from the West Bank. The announcement is unpopular on the right —...

The Mosul-Haifa pipeline, which spans 590 miles, connects the Mosul oil fields and the Mediterranean Sea. It begins in Kirkuk, Iraq and ends in Haifa.

January 4, 2006 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon undergoes a series of life-saving operations at Hadassah Hospital at Ein Kerem to stop bleeding in his brain after experiencing a massive stroke. Sharon, 77, suffered a minor...

David Ben-Gurion of Ahdut Ha’avodah and Joseph Sprinzak of Hapoel Hatzair recognize that their parties have more in common with each other than they have differences and begin moving towards a merger. The Mapai party is the result.

January 5, 1996 Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayyash is killed in Gaza City when his cellphone explodes during his weekly phone call to his father in the West Bank. It is a targeted assassination by...

Jacob Toledano returns to the Land of Israel in early 1942 to take up his new post as Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Tel-Aviv and Jaffa.

January 6, 1909 Moshe Sneh, known for his left-wing politics and resistance to British rule in Palestine, is born Moshe Klaynboym in Radyzn, Poland. Sneh serves as the chairman of the Yardinia Zionist student group...

University of Haifa Professor Gershon Galil announces that he has deciphered an inscription from the time of King David’s reign in the 10th century BCE.

January 7, 1858 Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, considered the father of the modern Hebrew language, is born Eliezer Yitzchak Perelman in the Lithuanian village of Luzhky. Expected to become a rabbi, Ben-Yehuda becomes interested in the secular...

Rose Luria Halprin, who served twice as the national president of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, passes away at the age of 83 in New York.

January 8, 2008 Moshe Levi, the first Mizrahi chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, dies at age 72 of a brain aneurysm at HaEmek Medical Center in Afula a week after suffering his...

Chaim Nahman Bialik, famed Zionist poet, is born in the village of Radi, near Zhitomir in Volhynia (Northwest Ukraine).

January 9, 1952 The Knesset ends three days of debate by voting 61-50 to accept more than $800 million in Holocaust reparations from the Western German government over 14 years. The decision sparks protests and...

Seven days of peace talks between Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara in Shepherdstown, West Virginia close without any resolution.

January 10, 1996 Jordan’s King Hussein makes his much-anticipated first public visit to Israel, almost 15 months after the two countries signed a peace treaty. The king co-pilots a Jordanian army helicopter to the Sde...

The Egoz, a ship making its 12th mission to bring Moroccan Jews to Israel, sinks, drowning 44 immigrants, half of whom are children.

January 11, 1929 Rafael Eitan, the 11th chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, is born in Tel Adashim to a mother whose family immigrated to Palestine during the First Aliyah and a father...

Maccabi Tel-Aviv defeats the CSKA Red Army team 97-92 in a basketball game in Moscow.

Nahum Sokolow, serving as President of the Executive Committee of the World Zionist Congress, meets with President Warren Harding in Washington, D.C.

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, one of modern Judaism’s most influential composers and spiritual leaders, is born in Berlin.

January 14, 2018 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in India’s capital, New Delhi, reciprocating a state visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Israel in 2017, the first by an Indian prime minister. It...

Dr. Israel (Rudolf) Kastner, who had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis in the annihilation of Hungarian Jewry, is cleared of any wrongdoing by Israel’s Supreme Court.

January 15, 2014 Israel is admitted as the 21st member state of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by the French acronym CERN. Israel is the first new member since 1999 and is the...

The Columbia space shuttle takes off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10:39 AM. The shuttle explodes while reentering the earth’s atmosphere two weeks later, killing all on board. Among the seven-member crew is Ilan Ramon, an Israeli Air Force pilot and the country’s first astronaut.

January 16, 1948 A convoy of 35 Haganah men carrying supplies on foot to the blockaded settlements of Gush Etzion is spotted by Arab civilians around daybreak after departing from Hartuv at 11 the night...

January 17, 1986 Israel establishes diplomatic relations with Spain, the last Western European nation to open formal ties with Israel. It’s also the first time that Spain officially recognizes the state of Israel. The establishment...

Arthur Goldberg, former United States Supreme Court Justice, Secretary of Labor, and American Ambassador to the United Nations, passes away at the age of 81 at his home in Washington, DC. Goldberg was an important drafter of UN Resolution 242 following the June 1967 War.

Nazis draw up a plan for the “Final Solution” of European Jewry in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.

January 20, 2014 Defense Ministers Moshe Ya’alon of Israel and Adilbek Dzhaksbekov of Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic that has a Sunni Muslim majority, sign a security cooperation accord in Tel Aviv that formalizes the...

The groundwork for the First Aliyah is laid with the formation of the BILU group at a meeting in the home of Israel Belkind in Kharkov, Ukraine.

January 21, 1968 Three parties in the Knesset — Mapai, Ahdut Ha’avoda and Rafi — join with the Histadrut to form the Labor Party. The secretary general of Mapai, Golda Meir, agrees to chair the...

Early elections are held following the October 2012 dissolution of the Knesset due to an impasse over the state budget.

January 22, 1979 Ali Hassan Salameh, the mastermind behind the Palestinian terrorist attack on the Israeli team at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, dies at a hospital about 30 minutes after a Mossad car...

By a vote of 60-2, with members of Mapam and Herut abstaining, the Knesset adopts a proclamation declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

Syrian police raid the home of Damascus businessman Kamel Amin Tha’abet, who is in fact a Mossad Spy named Eli Cohen, and arrest him on charges of espionage.

January 24, 1941 Dan Shechtman, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, is born in Tel Aviv. He earns his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering in 1966, master’s in materials engineering in 1958 and doctorate in materials science in...

During a two-week trip to Italy, Theodor Herzl meets with Pope Pius X in an effort to gain his support for the Zionist cause.

January 25, 1956 Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, and John Foster Dulles, the U.S. secretary of state, discuss a proposal for the United States to sell Israel $50 million worth of weapons...

Chaim Weizmann warns that unless world Jewry secures a place of their own they will be faced by a terrible catastrophe.

January 26, 2006 Hamas, the militant Palestinian opposition group, wins 76 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian Authority’s legislature, a groundbreaking power shift. Because Hamas rejects Israel’s existence, the election results present a new...

A week of discussions between Israeli and Palestinian leaders concludes in the Egyptian resort town of Taba. The talks at Taba take place during the height of the second “Intifada.”

Sephardi Jews living in France are granted equal rights and given French citizenship by the National Assembly.

January 28, 1996 About 10,000 Ethiopian Jews from across Israel demonstrate in Jerusalem against the government’s decision to dispose of blood donated by Ethiopian Israelis. The demonstration outside the office of Prime Minister Shimon Peres...

Israeli writer, playwright, and film writer/director Ephraim Kishon passes away at the age of 80 in Switzerland.

The same day that Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul Von Hindenburg, Recha Freier establishes the Committee for the Assistance of Jewish Youth.

January 30, 1958 At a meeting in Ankara, Turkey, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles tells Baghdad Pact states that the United States is committed to assisting their defense programs. This statement is seen...

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion resigns as a result of the controversial, covert operation in Egypt, setting the stage for new elections in the summer of 1961.

January 31, 1922 The Hebrew version of “The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds” begins its successful stage run at the Habimah Theater in Moscow. Dybbuk is a Yiddish world for a malicious spirit that attaches itself to a...

After 15 years in exile, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Iran, two weeks after the Shah of Iran flees the country.

Israeli politician, diplomat, historian, and writer Abba Eban is born in Cape Town, South Africa.

February 2, 1965 The Knesset revises the Absentees’ Property Law to allow the Custodian for Absentees’ Property, a state office, to maintain, rent or sell property in Israel held in a waqf, an endowment created...

A delegation of the Zionist Organization, led by Chaim Weizmann, presents the case for a Jewish homeland in Palestine to the Paris Peace Conference following World War I.

February 3, 1980 Acclaimed actress Hanna Rovina dies in Ra’anana at age 91. Her body lies in state the next day at the Habima Theatre, and she is eulogized by Shimon Finkel as “the high...

February 4, 1997 Two CH-53 Yasur military transport helicopters collide in midair in the middle of the night while carrying troops and munitions to the Israeli-occupied zone in southern Lebanon. In the worst air disaster...

The custom of planting trees in Israel on Tu B’Shvat begins when Ze’ev Yavetz, an educator in Zichron Ya’akov, takes his students to plant trees on the holiday.

February 5, 1879 Engineer and activist Pinhas Rutenberg, who is credited with bringing electricity to Palestine during the British Mandate, is born in the small town of Romny in present-day Ukraine. While working in a...

In the only instance in Israel’s history, a direct election is held for Prime Minister without a simultaneous election for the Knesset.

Jordan’s King Hussein, who in 1994 became the second leader of an Arab state to make peace with Israel, dies of complications related to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Renowned philosopher Martin Buber is born in Vienna. Following his parents’ divorce when he was three years old, Buber spends much of his childhood in Lemberg, Ukraine, raised by his grandparents in their religious home. Buber emigrates to Jerusalem in 1933.

Five months after the signing of the Declaration of Principles (DOP) on the White House lawn, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat sign an agreement in Cairo.

Charles Winters, an American who helps Israel acquire fighter planes in 1948, is born in Brookline, Massachusetts. 

The Board of Governors of the American Jewish Committee adopts a new Policy Statement on Israel-Diaspora Relations.

The first of eleven Basic Laws is issued by the Israeli parliament. Basic Laws are originally intended to form the basis of an Israeli Constitution, but the constitution remains unwritten.

February 12, 1994 Figure skater Michael “Misha” Shmerkin becomes the first Israeli to participate in the Winter Olympics when he marches in the opening ceremonies in Lillehammer, Norway, after three days of travel: two by...

The White Paper contained distinct threats to the geography of the Jewish National Home. The subsequent nine years saw unprecedented growth of Jewish demographic and physical presence in Palestine.

“Der Judenstaat” (The Jewish State), subtitled, “An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question,” by Theodor Herzl is first published in Vienna. 500 copies are originally printed and distributed.

February 14, 1978 President Jimmy Carter announces a plan to sell advanced fighter jets to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Coming three months after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel, the proposal draws swift...

Former Egyptian Olympic fencer and leader of the Cairo Jewish community, Salvator Cicurel passes away.

February 15, 2017 During his first month in office, President Donald Trump welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House. It is Netanyahu’s first visit to Washington since his speech against the Iran...

Aharon Appelfeld, an Israeli author, professor, and Holocaust survivor is born near Czernowitz, Ukraine (then part of Bukovina, Romania).

The US State Department prepares a memorandum for Secretary of State George Marshall and President Truman seeking non-implementation of the UN partition resolution (181) on Palestine.

February 17, 2013 Shmulik Kraus dies from swine flu in Tel Aviv at age 77 after a long career as one of Israel’s most influential musicians. Kraus was born in Jerusalem on July 1, 1935,...

February 18, 1947 British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin announces that after a quarter-century of holding the mandate for Palestine, the British government will ask the United Nations to address the question of what to do about...

Zionist leaders debate how to confront proposed British restrictions on Jewish land purchase in Palestine.

February 19, 2009 Ten of the fewer than 300 Jews living in Yemen arrive in Israel after being secretly airlifted through arrangements by the Jewish Agency amid threats from Al-Qaeda and other terrorists. The arrivals...

In a nationally televised address to the American people, President Dwight Eisenhower discusses the tense situation in the Middle East in the aftermath of the October 1956 Suez War.

February 20, 2009 Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud finished second in the Feb. 10 election, receives the mandate to form a government from President Shimon Peres and surprisingly offers to bring leading rivals Kadima and Labor...

Pope Pius IX writes to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II, to protest the Grand Duke’s decision to grant levels of emancipation to Jews in the Grand Duchy.

February 21, 1955 Former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ends his 14-month semiretirement from politics to replace Pinhas Lavon as the defense minister in Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s Cabinet. Ben-Gurion has remained a member of the...

An important moment in Israel’s nation-building comes when the Kuratorium (board of trustees) of the Technion University, then under construction in Haifa, reverses its decision of October 1913 and decides that Hebrew, not German, will be the language of instruction at the new school.

February 23, 1966 Saleh Jadid launches a coup of young army officers against a Syrian government of old-guard members of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party who themselves seized power in a coup in 1963. The...

After being mistaken as an enemy ship, the SS Struma, carrying nearly 800 Jewish refugees hoping to immigrate into Palestine, including 70 children, is sunk by a Russian submarine in the Black Sea.

Baruch Goldstein, an American immigrant and member of the radical Kach party, opens fire on Muslim worshippers in Hebron, killing thirty and wounding 125 before being beaten to death by survivors.

Hafez Ismail and Henry Kissinger conduct secret meetings. Egyptian President Sadat had decided to appoint veteran diplomat Ismail to a newly created position, Egyptian National Security Adviser, in 1972.

Ariel Sharon, Israel’s 11th Prime Minister, is born in K’far Malal (near Hod Hasharon). Born Ariel Scheinerman to political, socialist parents who had come to Eretz Yisrael during the Second Aliyah, Sharon joined the Haganah in 1945, serving in the War of Independence.

February 27, 1974 U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger arrives in Tel Aviv from Damascus with a list of 65 Israeli prisoners held by Syria since the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, along with...

Two Israeli paratrooper platoons made up of approximately fifty IDF soldiers storm an Egyptian army camp in Gaza. The raid is a reprisal for continued fedayeen (Palestinian militants) attacks against Israeli civilians.

February 28, 1942 Dorit Beinisch, the ninth president of Israel’s Supreme Court, is born Dorit Werba in Tel Aviv to a father who works as a civil servant after arriving from Poland in the 1930s...

February 29, 1948 Jewish militants from the Lehi underground group mine train cars carrying British troops on the Cairo-Haifa line north of Rehovot. The attack uses one or more bombs placed on the tracks and...

Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s 5th Prime Minister, is born in Jerusalem to parents who came to Israel during the Third Aliyah. He is the first Israeli Prime Minister to be born in Eretz Yisrael.

The first forty students, all women, enroll in the newly established Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem.

The Mufti has enormous power in his hands, yet he chooses non-engagement with the British, who controlled Palestine.

March 3, 1950 The Iraqi government retracts a policy banning emigration to move to Israel, on the condition that Jews give up their Iraqi citizenship when they leave the country. In addition, those who previously...

Jonathan Pollard, accused of spying for Israel, is sentenced to life in prison for espionage. He is later released in 2015.

William E. Blackstone, a Methodist lay leader and real estate investor, petitions President Benjamin Harrison on behalf of creating “a home for these wandering millions of Israel.” The Blackstone Memorial was the name of the signed petition.

March 5, 1934 Israeli-American behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman is born in Tel Aviv while his mother is visiting relatives. He spends his early childhood in Paris and is there when the Nazis defeat France in...

Clark Clifford did not want the US to waiver from the partition resolution passed at the UN in November 1947, which called for the division of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.

The Carter Administration had already established that negotiating a comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict is a foreign policy priority for its administration.

Egyptian forces launch a major offensive at Israeli positions on the eastern banks of the Suez Canal, starting the War of Attrition that lasts until August 1970.

Arthur Ruppin, head of the Palestine Office of the World Zionist Organization, purchases the estate of Sir John Gray Hill on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem for the purpose of building a university.

Israel’s Law of Return, which was originally passed in 1950, was amended to further define citizen eligibility in Israel.

March 10, 1960 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower meet for more than two hours at the White House. “This was the first opportunity I have had of seeing President Eisenhower...

A group of eleven Palestinian terrorists, who had departed from Lebanon by boat, land on a beachhead north of Tel Aviv and embark on one of the worst terrorist attacks in Israel’s history.

In a speech delivered to a joint session of Congress, President Harry Truman outlines a new, decidedly anti-Soviet direction for American foreign policy.

Czar Alexander II, the leader of Russia, is assassinated in St. Petersburg when a bomb is thrown into his carriage.

March 13, 1948 The Davidka, a mortar designed and manufactured at the Mikveh Israel agricultural school for use in Israel’s fight for independence, is used in combat for the first time in an attack on...

A riot breaks out against the conversos or marranos–Jews who had publicly converted to Christianity but continued to practice Judaism behind closed doors.

March 14, 1972 Israel’s Black Panthers, a social justice group that seeks equality for Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, steal crates of milk meant for wealthy Jerusalem neighborhoods and hand them out across poor neighborhoods to...

In a radio address delivered to the Jordanian people on Amman Radio, Jordan’s King Hussein proposes a federal solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

March 15, 1939 Kol Tzion HaLokhemet (“Voice of the Fighting Zion”), the underground radio network operated by the Irgun, sends out its first broadcasts across Palestine as Esther Raziel-Naor hits the airwaves. The network broadcasts...

The Knesset reaches a compromise to draft a series of Basic Laws that would eventually form a final constitution.

The US undertakes a “reassessment” of the Washington-Israel relationship, creating enormous tension between the US executive branch and the Israeli government.

March 18, 1974 The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, led by Arab oil producers, lifts the oil embargo it had placed on the United States for resupplying Israel during the Yom Kippur War. OPEC also...

The Knesset adopts the “Photoshop Law” to prevent adult fashion and commercial models from losing weight to the detriment of their health, or appearing unhealthily underweight in ads, negatively effecting body image issues amongst Israelis.

March 19, 1999 Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin’s final play, “Requiem,” makes its debut at the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv. The play is based on three short stories by Anton Chekhov. Levin dies of bone...

At the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the idea of a central fund to support the development of a Jewish home in Palestine had been raised by Max Bodenheimer.

President Obama’s address is delivered in Jerusalem and broadcast on radio and television across the world.

The Arab League Constitution is signed in a ceremony marked by speeches from representatives of each of the six signatory states.

Rabbi Raphael della Pergola, the Grand Rabbi of Alexandria, Egypt, administers the oath of allegiance to approximately 500 volunteers for the Zion Mule Corps, known officially as the Assyrian Refugee Mule Corps.

March 23, 2016 Aharon Megged, who won almost every literary prize in Israel, including the S.Y. Agnon Prize, Prime Minister’s Prize, President’s Prize and 2003 Israel Prize, dies in Tel Aviv at age 95. He...

Ezer Weizman is elected President by the Knesset on the second ballot in a narrow vote of 66 to 53.

March 24, 1966 An instructional program in math, geared toward seventh- and ninth-graders in 32 schools in the middle of the country, becomes Israel’s first television broadcast.  The Israeli government has viewed television as a...

Shaikh Yusuf Yassin, Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, states that “Arab states would never agree to any working relationship with Israel.”

Sixteen months after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem and Knesset address, the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty is signed at the White House in Washington.

March 26, 2017 Two months after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Vice President Mike Pence lays out the administration’s goals for the U.S.-Israel relationship during a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual Policy...

The tensions between the local Shiite population and Jews erupt in the northeast Iranian city of Mashhad.

March 27, 1949 Elisheva Bikhovsky, one of the “four mothers” of modern Hebrew poetry, dies of cancer at age 60 in Tiberias and is buried at Kvutzat Kinneret, a kibbutz. A native of Russia with...

The first Maccabiah Games, an international Jewish Olympics, open in Tel Aviv.

March 28, 2002 At the Arab League Summit in Beirut, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia lays out a plan to end the Arab-Israeli conflict that has become known as the Arab Peace Initiative. Among...

In September 2000, following the breakdown of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians at Camp David, the Palestinians launch the Second Intifada. Operation Defensive Shield is an Israeli military operation devised to curtail violence associated with the Second Intifada.

March 29, 1967 Russian-born writer Yitzhak Dov Berkowitz, who won the Bialik Prize, Israel Prize and Tchernichovsky Prize for Translation, dies after a short illness at age 82. Born in 1885 near Minsk, Berkowitz read...

Moses Ben Maimon, known as Maimonides or Rambam, is born in Cordoba, Spain, into a distinguished family (some sources give the year of his birth as 1138).

March 30, 1976 Protests against the recently announced expropriation of Arab land in the Galilee turn into riots that result in the deaths of six Israeli Arabs and injuries to hundreds of Arab civilians and...

The 1979 Eurovision Song Contest, an annual competition between member countries of the European Broadcasting Union, is held in Jerusalem.

April 1, 1948 Nine Jews are killed and 17 others are wounded in an unsuccessful attempt to move a 60-truck convoy of food and other supplies to Jerusalem through Wadi Sarrar, even though Haganah patrols...

The Hebrew University officially opens in Jerusalem on Mount Scopus with Zionist and British leaders joined by representatives from universities across the world.

In a move designed to “make the polluter pay,” according to Environment Minister Raphael Eitan, the Knesset passes the Environmental Enforcement Law.

As a follow up to the 1978 Camp David Accords, Begin becomes the first Israeli Prime Minister to visit an Arab capital.

Yoel Margalith was born in February 1933 in Cantavir, Yugoslavia. After surviving the Holocaust, Margalith immigrated to Israel with his mother and sister in 1948.

April 3, 1970 Hebrew poet and novelist Avigdor Hameiri, Israel’s first poet laureate, dies at age 79. Born into a farm family in a small Hungarian village, Hameiri had a typical Jewish education and was...

Israel’s War of Independence ends with the signing of individual armistice agreements between the newly established Jewish state and Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon in 1949.

Major General Aharon Remez, who led Israel’s Air force in its early years and served as Ambassador to Great Britain died on April 3, 1994 in Jerusalem at the age of seventy-four from illness

A Muslim pilgrimage festival erupts into violence against Jews in Jerusalem, leaving nine dead and hundreds wounded.

The United States was deeply worried that supporting the establishment of a Jewish state would jeopardize Arab oil supplies and force the US to send troops, risking a confrontation with the USSR.

April 5, 1999 Kfar Saba-based M-Systems files a U.S. patent application for the USB flash drive, which has a storage capacity of 8 megabytes, five times the memory of most floppy disks at the time....

Richard Crossman, who supported Zionist efforts while serving on the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry, passes away at his home in England from liver cancer.

Professional tennis player Jonathan Erlich, known as Yoni, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 5, 1977.

April 6, 1999 An Israel Defense Forces medical mission flies to Macedonia (now North Macedonia) to care for refugees from sectarian violence in Kosovo. The 70-person mission includes 12 physicians of various specialties, most of...

Retired Israeli Supreme Court Justice Shoshana Netanyahu, the second woman to serve on Israel’s highest court, is born in the free city of Danzig (Gdnask, Poland).

Ben-Gurion feared that there were too many decision-making centers in the Yishuv and that urgency and immediacy demanded one single voice.

April 7, 1973 Israel’s first-ever entry in the annual Eurovision Song Contest, Ilanit with the song “Ey-sham,” finishes fourth out of 17 nations, while host country Luxembourg wins for the second consecutive year. The music...

After unarmored Israeli tractors were fired upon in the demilitarized zone, Israeli forces began to return fire. The event soon escalated.

April 8, 1960 U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold for the first time publicly criticizes Egypt’s confiscation of Israeli cargo on ships going through the Suez Canal. The Egyptian closure of the Straits of Tiran and the...

More than 3,000 spectators attend the Ten-Dance European Cup, the first international dance sports competition to be held in Israel.

The 1929 Palestine and Near East Exhibition was the last of four smaller exhibitions which would eventually become (in 1932) the Levant Fair or Orient Fair (Yerid Hamizrach).

April 9, 1973 Israeli commandos conduct a seaborne night raid on Beirut to kill three leaders in the Palestine Liberation Organization and its Black September wing, the terrorist group responsible for the Munich Olympics massacre...

Yitzhak Navon, Israel’s fifth President, is born in Jerusalem.

After Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s diplomatic opening with Israel, almost all Arab states publicly criticized his engagement with Jerusalem.

April 10, 2002 Eight passengers on a commuter bus are killed and 14 others are wounded in a suicide bombing outside Haifa during the morning rush hour, the second in a string of Palestinian suicide...

Forty-nine participants from eleven countries gather in Haifa for a five-day NATO conference on mass-casualty medical preparedness. The conference is NATO’s first ever event held in Israel.

Following a week of intense public debate and finger pointing, Prime Minister Golda Meir announced that she was resign as leader of the country at a Labor Party meeting.

April 11, 2002 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell calls for an immediate West Bank cease-fire during a press conference in Madrid before he flies to Jordan to meet with King Abdullah II the day...

The trial of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Nazi Final Solution, begins in front of a special panel of three judges at the Beit Ha’am community center in Jerusalem.

Sixty-six families gathered on the sand dunes outside of Jaffa and selected lots for property in a new neighborhood called Ahuzat Bayit (“Homestead”) that became the first modern Jewish city, Tel Aviv.

April 12, 1971 Singer Eyal Golan is born Eyal Biton in Rehovot, Israel, to a family of Yemenite and Moroccan Jewish ancestry. He lives in Rehovot until 2010, when he moves to Tel Aviv. Known...

Egged bus 300 traveling from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon is attacked by four Palestinian terrorists. They take the forty passengers hostage.

A resolution was passed by the Knesset, establishing the 27th day of Nisan as Yom Hashoah (“Holocaust Memorial Day”), a memorial day for the Jews who were victims to the Nazis.

Arab forces ambush a medical convoy en route to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, Jerusalem. Seventy-nine people, mostly doctors and nurses are killed in the attack.

Emerging in the early seventies, to protest against the social injustices felt by the Mizrahi Jews in Israel, the Black Panthers staged a number of demonstrations in the country and began to generate widespread support.

April 14, 1961 Illana Shoshan, who wins the 1980 Miss Israel title after finishing second in the 1978 teen pageant, is born in Kfar Saba, Israel. In a public vote held in 2010 to celebrate...

Jews in all of Germany were finally given emancipation when the North German Confederation Constitution was extended to Bavaria.

April 15, 1945 The British 11th Armored Division liberates the Nazis’ Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, discovering 60,000 starving prisoners, most of them seriously ill, and 13,000 unburied corpses. They are the remnants of...

Weightlifter Yossef Romano, one of the eleven Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics, is born in Benghazi, Libya.

April 16, 1983 Watches, clocks and paintings worth tens of millions of dollars are stolen overnight from the L.A. Mayer Institute for Islamic Art, now the Museum for Islamic Art, in Jerusalem. The break-in at...

PLO leader Khalil al-Wazir, the architect of a number notorious terrorist attacks against Israelis, is killed by Israeli Special Forces in his home in Tunis.

Organized by Israeli author Aharon Applefeld and politician Natan Sharansky, the Kisufim Conference opened in Jerusalem.

Two days after being established and placed under the command of twenty-four-year-old Yitzhak Rabin, the Harel Brigade organized a convoy of supplies to be brought to Jerusalem under fire from Arab irregulars.

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a leading scholar and Jewish communal and religious leader, passes away from heart failure at the age of 84.

April 18, 1996 Israeli artillery fire strikes a U.N. compound where at least 800 Lebanese civilians are sheltering in the village of Qana in southern Lebanon. At least 13 shells hit the compound, killing 106...

The Jerusalem YMCA, still operational today, is opened by General Edmund Allenby in front of an overflow crowd.

World famous scientist and Zionist supporter Albert Einstein passes away at Princeton Hospital.

April 19, 1956 Writer and academic Gadi Taub, a leading commentator on the meaning of modern Zionism, is born in Jerusalem. Taub’s grandparents were Zionist pioneers who arrived in Palestine in the 1920s during the...

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a stalwart of American Zionism and the Reform movement, passes away at the age of 75.

Five major points regarding Israel were made at the White House Middle East Policy review meeting on April 19, 1977.

April 20, 1965 The Shrine of the Book, built to house seven Dead Sea Scrolls found in the Qumran caves in 1947, opens as part of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Moshe Sharett announced the...

The Israel Prize, an annual award presented in a variety of cultural and scientific categories and considered as the highest honor in the country, is awarded for the first time to nine individuals in seven fields.

April 21, 1947 Two Jewish underground fighters, Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein, blow themselves up in a British prison in Jerusalem at night to avoid being hanged the next morning. Barazani, a Kurdish Jew born...

Romanian born artist Marcel Janco, one of the founders of the Dada art movement who made Aliyah in 1941, passes away at the age of 89.

As fears about a nuclear Iran intensify, the United States agrees to provide Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with $10 billion in military aid.

A month after US President Barack Obama brokers a reconciliation of Turkish-Israeli relations, a high level three-member Israeli delegation commences talks with Turkey in Ankara under the auspices of US Secretary of State John Kerry.

After Egyptian President Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, the United States seeks to move negotiations closer to an agreement between Israel and Egypt.

April 23, 2014 Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization announce a unity pact after a seven-year rift in which Hamas has led the Gaza Strip and the PLO has led the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank....

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second President and celebrated historian, passes away at the age of 78.

In his final communication, ZOB commander Mordechai Anielewicz outlines the success of the revolt even in the face of almost certain defeat.

April 24, 1924 Hapoel Haifa is established during Passover in a meeting led by Yehoshua Sherpstein and Yair Aharony at a house in Haifa’s Hadar neighborhood. The organization creates several branches related to sports and...

Jordan formally annexes the West Bank and East Jerusalem, allowing the Palestinian inhabitants therein to obtain Jordanian citizenship.

British Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain and Theodor Herzl meet to discuss Jewish settlement. At this meeting, Chamberlain proposes that the Jewish state be created in Uganda.

April 25, 1975 Singer-songwriter-musician Ehud “Udi” Davidi is born. He grows up in Kedumim, a settlement established in the northern West Bank by the Gush Emunim movement, and is active in the Bnei Akiva youth...

As stipulated in the 1979 peace agreement between the two countries, Israel completes its evacuation of Sinai and returns the peninsula to Egypt.

April 26, 1972 Avi Nimni, considered one of the greatest players ever for the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer club, is born in the Holon section of Tel Aviv. Nimni joins Maccabi Tel Aviv’s youth program...

Yossi Harel, commander of the Aliyah Bet ship Exodus, passes away at the age of ninety.

Following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in March 1881, a wave of pogroms (violent attacks) against Jewish communities sweeps through southwestern Russia.

April 27, 1955 The Israeli public receives its first look at the Uzi submachine gun in the hands of Israel Defense Forces troops during a Yom HaAtzmaut (Independence Day) parade. The weapon had its first...

In a speech in Ramallah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dismisses a demand from Benjamin Netanyahu to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

After a two-year investigation, the Shin Bet (The Israeli Security Force) arrests fifteen members of the Jewish Underground.

April 28, 2008 The MBT Space Division of Israel Aerospace Industries successfully launches the Amos-3 satellite from Kazakhstan five days after the originally scheduled launch date, a delay caused by a mechanical problem with the...

Renowned Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai jointly wins the 1982 Israel Prize for poetry with Amir Gilboa.

Although its support of the Balfour Declaration was tepid, the AJC did recognize that a Jewish homeland could provide safety for Jews still suffering oppression in other lands.

April 29, 1976 Politician Tamar Zandberg of the left-wing Meretz party is born in Ramat Gan. She is first elected to the 19th Knesset in 2013, then wins a place in the 20th, 21st, 22nd...

Killed in an ambush along the Gaza border, Ro’i Rothberg is eulogized by Moshe Dayan. Rothberg becomes a symbol for the inability to achieve peace in Israel's early years.

At Ben-Gurion Airport, five recently released Soviet Jewish prisoners are welcomed by Prime Minister Menachem Begin and cheering crowds. The five had been convicted in a 1970 hijacking plot, attempting to escape the anti-Semitic policies of the Soviet Union at the time.

April 30, 2012 Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, dies at home in Jerusalem at the age of 102. He was born Benzion Mileikowsky on March 25, 1910, in Warsaw. His...

Conceived by President George W. Bush during the second Intifada, the Roadmap serves as the centerpiece of failed peace negotiations at the beginning of 21st century.

Delivering a Labor Day speech in Cairo that is broadcast on Egyptian radio, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak discusses issues relating to the peace process.

May 1, 1956 Finance Minister Levi Eshkol authorizes the establishment of the city of Ashdod along the Mediterranean coast between Ashkelon and Tel Aviv on land rich in history, including the Arab-Israeli conflict. The name...

Shahar Pe’er, the highest ranked professional tennis player in Israel’s history, is born in Jerusalem.

A joint communiqué is issued, and it is clear that no widespread action to rescue Jews will be forthcoming. This bolsters the Zionist argument for a Jewish homeland.

Yosef Haim Brenner, a pioneer of Modern Hebrew Literature, is murdered by an Arab gang during the 1921 Jaffa Riots.

Theodor Herzl is born in Pest, Hungary. In addition to creating the World Zionist Organization, Herzl will help found the Jewish Colonial Trust in 1899 and the Jewish National Fund in 1901.

May 3, 1906 Stage actor Meir Margalit, a winner of the Israel Prize in 1964, is born in Ostroleka, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. Margalit begins acting in local plays at age 13....

The May Laws, which restrict Jewish land-tenure and residency rights, are passed amidst widespread pogroms in Russia.

Born Golda Mabovitch in Kiev, Russia, Meir’s family immigrated to the United States in 1906, settling in Milwaukee.

May 4, 1947 The Irgun sets off explosives at 4:22 p.m. to blast open a hole in the wall of the Acre (Akko) fortress, used as a prison by the British Mandatory authorities, in an...

The Agreement on the Gaza Strip and Jericho Area, the first of its kind to grant Palestinians a measure of autonomy, is signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in a ceremony in Cairo.

Israeli author, journalist and intellectual Amos Oz is born as “Amos Klausner” in Jerusalem during the British Mandate.

May 5, 1959 Some 2,500 people, including Israeli Interior Minister Israel Bar-Yehuda and Polish Ambassador Antoni Bida, gather at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot in the western Galilee for a commemoration of the first Yom HaShoah (Holocaust...

The President, seeking reconciliation with Europe, angers Jewish leaders in the US and Israel with his planned visit to a Nazi military cemetery.

Karl Marx, whose theories of modern socialism will form the framework of the Communist Revolution in Russia, is born in Trier, a town in West Prussia (present day Germany).

May 6, 1947 Alexander Rubowitz, 16, is abducted in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem while on a mission for Lohamei HaHerut b’Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), known by the acronym Lehi or as...

Ben-Gurion’s trip, the first visit by an Israeli Prime Minister to the US, includes a tour of hydroelectric and water projects in Tennessee and Alabama.

Israel and the United States sign a secret agreement for Israeli participation in Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) research.

May 7, 2002 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon flies home to Israel, cutting short a visit to the United States, after a suicide bomber kills 15 Israelis and wounds 55 others in a pool hall in...

Palestinian militant factions unsuccessfully challenge Arafat’s control during the First Lebanon War.

Created in 1920 to serve as a neutral, independent trade union representing all Jewish workers in Palestine, the Histadrut had grown to 503,000 members by 1953, representing approximately 75% of the country’s workers.

May 8, 2007 A public announcement reveals that the tomb of King Herod the Great has been found at Herodium in the Judean Desert of the West Bank in an excavation led by archaeologist Ehud...

Exiled because of Italy’s incursion into Ethiopia, Selassie spends a few weeks in Jerusalem contemplating how best to gain global support for his country.

May 9, 1998 Dana International wins the Eurovision Song Contest, becoming the third Israeli and the first since 1979 to do so, with her performance of the techno-pop song “Diva” in Birmingham, England. Her victory...

Following a show trial lasting only twenty minutes, Habib Elghanian was executed by firing squad.

May 10, 2010 The 31 member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development unanimously vote to invite Israel to join the organization, reflecting Israel’s economic strength and importance in the world economy. Israel,...

The second secret meeting between the two is a last-ditch effort to persuade Transjordan to stay out of an impending war with the soon-to-be declared State of Israel.

In a closed-door address at a Johannesburg mosque, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat delivers a brief speech in which he calls for a jihad to liberate Jerusalem.

May 11, 1953 U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles arrives in Cairo at the start of a 2½-week fact-finding trip to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, India, Pakistan, Turkey and Libya. Dulles emphasizes...

The UN General Assembly votes 37 to 12, with 9 abstentions, to admit Israel as its 59th member.

The concept of a national museum originated in the early years of Zionist settlement in the Yishuv. Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, opened the Bezalel Museum in 1912.

May 12, 1992 Doron Erel, the 33-year-old son of Holocaust survivors who made aliyah on the Exodus 1947, becomes the first Israeli to reach the summit of Mount Everest in an expedition with 13 other...

Just two decades after the tragedy of the Holocaust, Israel and West Germany begin a fruitful and mutually beneficial diplomatic and economic relationship.

May 13, 1934 Archaeologist Ehud Netzer is born in Jerusalem to teachers Joseph and Pua Menczel. After graduating from the Technion with a degree in architecture in 1958, Netzer earns a doctorate in archaeology from...

A wide-ranging agreement on expanded economic cooperation provides short term relief to Israel’s struggling economy.

In 1984, there were approximately 20,000 Jews in Morocco. Both Israelis and Arabs were suspicious of the May 13-14 Conference on the Jewish Communities of Morocco which was held in Rabat.

May 14, 2018 On the 70th anniversary of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, President Donald Trump fulfills a campaign promise and moves the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Although Israel has made Jerusalem its...

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko proposes a unitary state for Palestine, but vows to support partition if it is deemed the only workable solution.

On Friday afternoon in the Tel Aviv Museum, David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Provisional State Council, declares Israel’s independence. The United States is the first country to recognize the new and already besieged state of Israel.

May 15, 1947 The United Nations establishes its Special Committee on Palestine, known as UNSCOP, to study and propose options for the future of British Mandatory Palestine. The committee’s formation comes in response to a...

The Palmach, an elite strike force of the Haganah, goes on to play a significant role in the 1948-1949 War.

The Voice of Israel Song Festival was created in 1960 as part of Israel’s Independence Day celebration and as an opportunity to showcase Israel’s emerging culture.

A secret treaty is negotiated to divide the former Ottoman territories between Britain and France.

May 16, 1967 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser requests that the United Nations withdraw its peacekeeping troops from the Sinai, clearing an obstacle to war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The Six-Day War begins...

Bolstered by the support of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, Likud’s victory ends the Labor movement’s hegemony over Israeli politics.

The 1939 White Paper signaled Britain’s readiness to relegate the Jews in Palestine to minority status in a future majority-Arab state.

May 18, 1965 Eli Cohen is hanged in Marjeh Square in Damascus after being convicted of spying for Israel and being sentenced to death March 31, 1965. Cohen was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1924...

Avraham Shlonsky, renowned Israeli poet, editor, and translator, passes away in Tel Aviv at the age of 73.

Shortly after assuming the Presidency of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Selig Brodetsky suffered a major heart attack.

May 19, 1966 The Johnson administration announces that it will sell A-4 Skyhawk light bombers to Israel, marking the first sale of U.S. warplanes to Israel and a shift from France to the United States...

Following the passage of March 1950 law allowing Jews to leave Iraq, the Ministry of Aliyah in Israel develops a plan to facilitate their immigration to Israel.

Handler moves to Israel in 1948, taking a leadership role in Hapoel Ha-Mizrahi. In 2006, at the age of ninety, he makes Aliyah to Israel for a second time.

May 20, 1948 Count Folke Bernadotte is appointed by the U.N. Security Council as the mediator for Middle East peace efforts five days into the Israeli War of Independence. Bernadotte was born in Sweden in...

Shazar, a drafter of Israeli’s declaration of Independence who had helped Jews make Aliyah from Russia in the 1920s, becomes Israel’s third President.

After a breakdown in diplomatic talks between Gerald Ford and PM Yitzhak Rabin, seventy-six Senators sign a letter to the President stressing the importance of both military and economic assistance to Israel.

May 22, 1970 Palestinian terrorists ambush an Egged school bus on the road from Moshav Avivim, near the Lebanese border, to Dovev and kill eight children and four adults. The ambush takes place at a...

Austrian Archduke Albert V ordered that all his Jewish subjects were to be imprisoned and their possessions confiscated following libelous accusations against an influential member of Viennese Jewish community.

May 23, 1969 Pioneering Knesset member Hanin Zoabi is born into a Muslim family in Nazareth. Zoabi earns a bachelor’s in philosophy and psychology from the University of Haifa and a master’s from the Hebrew...

Going against the advice of some of his top military advisors, PM Ben-Gurion orders an assault on the fortress of Latrun, considered a key component of liberating Jerusalem.

Acclaimed jazz artist John Zorn hosts the first annual Israeli Jazz Festival at “The Stone,” his New York City venue.

May 25, 1991 Operation Solomon flies more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours using 34 airplanes, including a Boeing 747 that sets a record with 1,087 passengers. The operation brings almost twice...

Unable to immigrate to the US, many European Jews immigrate to the land of Israel. Between 1924 and 1929, the period known as the Fourth Aliyah, 82,000 Jews arrive in Palestine.

May 26, 1958 Four Israeli police officers and the chairman of the United Nations’ Israel-Jordan Mixed Armistice Commission are fatally shot by Jordanian fire in the demilitarized zone on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Both Israel...

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is established during a Palestinian National Council meeting of nearly 400 delegates convened by King Hussein of Jordan.

May 28, 1999 The Israeli submarine Dakar, which disappeared in January 1968, is discovered between Crete and Cyprus almost 9,800 feet (nearly two miles) beneath the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. The diesel-electric Dakar, originally...

In a Knesset address, Minister of Foreign Affairs Moshe Dayan recounts the events that transpired between Israel, the US, and Egypt in the past two years, including the Camp David Accords.

May 29, 1911 Poet Leah Goldberg is born in Königsberg, Prussia, now Kaliningrad, Russia. Raised mostly in Kovno, Lithuania, Goldberg begins writing poetry in Hebrew and Russian around age 12. She studies at the Universities...

Ephraim Katzir immigrated to Palestine with his family at the age of 9. He goes on to serve as Chief Scientist of the Israel Defense Forces and later as President of Israel.

May 30, 1972 Three Japanese Red Army terrorists working for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-External Operations attack Israel’s international airport at Lod, now Ben Gurion Airport, with machine guns and hand grenades....

June 1, 1948 A convoy passes along the new Burma Road from Kibbutz Hulda to bring supplies to Jerusalem for the first time. Under the direction of Gen. Mickey Marcus, an American Army veteran, the...

As tensions with Egypt escalate, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol appoints Moshe Dayan as Defense Minister, leading to Israel’s first national unity government.

After World War I, Iraq was under the British Mandate, in accordance with the plan put forth by the League of Nations. In April 1941, a pro-Nazi government seized power and it took the British three months to regain control of the government.

June 2, 1980 HaMakhteret HaYehudit (the Jewish Underground), a terrorist group formed by members of the Orthodox Gush Emunim movement, launches its first round of car-bomb attacks on West Bank Palestinian officials. Bassam Shakaa, the...

The biennial Tel-Aviv International Student Film Festival film festival includes a future Oscar winner among its student films.

Shortly after Israel declared its independence from the British, on May 14, 1948, the US sent a memorandum to the UN that indicated its acceptance of the new state and the direction of its future policy in the Middle East.

June 3, 1974 Having defeated Shimon Peres in an election for Labor Party leader, Yitzhak Rabin formally succeeds Golda Meir as prime minister when he presents his coalition government to the Knesset for approval. He...

David Ben-Gurion delivers a report to the Provisional Government on the status of the 1948 War with neighboring Arab states, discussions with the United Nations, and the domestic needs of a young country at war.

Zgibniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser, wrote a memorandum redefining the Carter administration’s position on resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, and advocating for a Palestinian homeland.

At the beginning of his first term, President Obama addresses the Muslim world in a speech focusing on mutual interests and respect between Muslims and the West.

Known internationally for her beauty and business savvy, Bar Refaeli has lead modeling campaigns for major brands such as Gap and Samsung, and has one of the most recognizable faces in the fashion industry.

Egypt was on alert, expecting an Israeli attack to come at dawn. However, the Israelis delay and do not strike until 8:15 AM, when most Egyptian pilots are at breakfast and Egyptian commanders caught in traffic.

June 5, 1952 Having been forced to evacuate its campus on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus after the massacre of 78 medical people April 13, 1948, Hadassah breaks ground on the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center at...

Some 156,000 Allied troops land at Normandy and begin their fight to liberate France and ultimately all of Europe from the Nazis. D-Day is the largest seaborne invasion in history.

June 6, 1956 The Tel Aviv School of Law and Economics merges with the Municipal Institute of Natural Sciences and Humanities to form Tel Aviv University, which soon also incorporates the Academic Institute of Jewish...

The idea of an emergency medical society such as Magen David Adom is revived in response to the 1929 Arab riots against Jewish settlements in Palestine.

June 8, 1963 Chaim Boger, a founder of the first Hebrew high school in the Yishuv, the area of Jewish settlement in pre-state Palestine, dies at age 86. Boger, born with the last name Bograshov...

After several days of training and an official dedication by Prime Minister Golda Meir, the first El Al flight, using a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet, departs from Lod Airport for London and New York.

The Orthodox movement created the Orthodox Union, and adopted a constitution and by-laws at their meeting at Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York.

June 9, 1959 Benjamin “Benny” Gantz, who rises to chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and a top candidate for prime minister, is born in Kfar Ahim. His father is a native of...

Israeli forces, under the command of Major General David Elazar, launch an offensive into the Syrian-controlled Golan Heights.

Aharon David Gordon, one of the founders of Hapoel Hatzair, the Jewish Labor movement, was born into a religious family in Troyanov near Zhytomyr, which was then part of the Russian empire.

June 10, 1964 Israel’s National Water Carrier begins pumping water out of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) for drinking and agriculture in the center and south of the state.  Initially called the Jordan Valley Unified...

June 11, 2013 Google reportedly outbids fellow tech giants Apple and Facebook and buys Israel-based social-mapping service Waze for roughly $1 billion, adding the user-generated data of the app to the market-leading Google Maps software....

Emma Gottheil, one of the first and most important women in Zionist leaders, passes away at her New York home at the age of 85.

Eliyahu Golomb, prominent leader of the Jewish defense effort in Palestine, passed away at the age of 52.

June 12, 2014 Three Israelis ages 16 to 19 are abducted while hitchhiking near the Alon Shvut settlement in the West Bank. The young men realize they are in trouble after they accept a ride...

After more than a year of continued debate on the issue, the First Knesset adopts the "Harari Resolution," which stipulated that the “constitution” of Israel would be composed of a series of Basic Laws approved by the Knesset.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a thirty-minute foreign policy speech at Bar-Ilan University, offering details for a completely demilitarized Palestinian State.

June 14, 1985 Two Lebanese Shiite terrorists armed with grenades and handguns hijack TWA Flight 847, a 727 traveling from Cairo to San Diego with scheduled stops in Athens, Rome, Boston and Los Angeles, shortly...

In an address to the Knesset, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett reconfirms Israel’s willingness to negotiate agreeable and sustainable terms of peace with its neighbors.

June 15, 1970 A dozen Soviet dissidents are arrested at Leningrad’s Smolnoye Airport just before boarding a 12-seat Antonov AN-2 aircraft for an attempt to fly to freedom. Also arrested are four conspirators in the...

The SS St. Louis, a ship carrying Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany, returns to Europe after being refused entry into both Cuba and the United States.

June 17, 2010 Thirty-five Haredi fathers of girls attending the Beis Yaakov Chasidi School in Emanuel refuse a Supreme Court order to send their daughters to the regular Beis Yaakov School and instead accept two-week...

June 18, 1992 Mordecai Ardon, one of Israel’s best-known painters, dies at age 95 in Jerusalem. Born Max Bronstein in Galicia in 1896, he ran away from his religiously observant family at 13 and wandered...

Speaking to a group of 800 educators at the State Department, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivers an important foreign policy address, which includes five principles for peace in the Middle East.

June 19, 1983 Simha Erlich, the deputy prime minister in Israel’s first two Likud-led governments, dies. Born in 1915 in what is now southeastern Poland, where he was involved in a Zionist youth group, Erlich...

The Altalena arrives off the coast of Kfar Vitkin from France carrying 900 immigrants and a large stockpile of weapons.

June 20, 1950 Israel’s first Festival of Jewish Music begins in Jerusalem and runs until July 1. It is arranged by the Music Department of the Israeli government’s Ministry of Education and Culture and the...

Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky (known simply as “Zelda”), one of the most widely acclaimed and beloved Israeli poets, is born in Russia.

June 21, 1882 Israeli filmmaker and photographer Ya’acov Ben-Dov is born in Yekatermoslav, Ukraine. He joins the movement for the revival of the Hebrew language in his teens, and he studies photography at the Kiev...

After a distinguished career in the service of Zionism and Israel, Eliahu Eilat passes away in Jerusalem at the age of 86.

Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Ada Yonath is born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine.

June 22, 1989 Basketball player Omri Casspi, the first Israeli to play in the National Basketball Association, is born in Holon to parents of Moroccan heritage. He grows up in Yavne and plays for Israeli...

Brigadier General Orna Barbivai is promoted to the rank of major general, becoming the highest-ranking female officer in the history of the IDF.

June 24, 1987 Arabs across Israel hold an Equality Day strike, organized by the National Committee of Local Arab Council Heads, to demand an end to all discrimination against Israel’s 700,000 Arabs, who at the...

June 25, 2009 Jerusalem holds a $500,000 extravaganza to inaugurate the Chords Bridge, also known as the Bridge of Strings, at the main entrance to the city. Its designer, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, has built...

IDF soldier Gilad Shalit is captured by a group of Palestinian militants and is held hostage for over five years before being exchanged for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.

June 26, 2004 Israel Prize-winning musician Naomi Shemer, best known for writing “Jerusalem of Gold,” dies at age 73 at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv after a long battle with cancer. Born in 1930 at...

At the 1944 Republican Party National Convention, New York Senator Thomas Dewey’s strong support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine captures the attention of Zionists in Palestine and, more notably, American Jewry.

Following Israel’s victory and subsequent acquisition of Jordan’s territory along the West Bank of the Jordan River in the war, the Israeli government annexes roughly 70 square kilometers of land next to West Jerusalem.

June 28, 1967 Israel publishes the Jerusalem Declaration, announcing the reunification of the ancient holy city under Israeli sovereignty after the Six-Day War, which ended June 10. The announcement comes 23 days after Jordan chose...

During the Paris Peace Conference, one of the major initiatives undertaken by the Allies is recognition of minority rights in European states. While addressing the rights of minorities in general, the Polish Treaty specifically mentions Jewish cultural and civil liberties.

June 29, 1946 The British military launches Operation Agatha, a two-week series of raids and arrests of Jewish resistance fighters, on a day that comes to be known as Black Sabbath. Involving some 17,000 soldiers,...

Originally working as laborers in surrounding agricultural communities, the founding members of Givat Brenner establish agricultural and industrial infrastructure for the kibbutz, quickly making it financially stable and self-sustaining.

June 30, 1937 Kibbutz Tirat Zvi is established in the Beit She’an Valley as one of the first religious kibbutzim. The kibbutz is just west of the Jordan River and just north of what becomes...

Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s seventh Prime Minister and staunch advocate for settlements in the West Bank, passes away in Tel Aviv at the age of 96.

July 1, 1973 Col. Yosef “Joe” Alon, a military attache at the Israeli Embassy to the United States, is shot five times in his driveway in Chevy Chase, Maryland, after attending a farewell party for...

In 1244, the Duke issues a charter extending rights to Jews. His goal is to build the region’s economy. The charter encourages Jewish money-lending and Jewish migration to an outlying area. It also guarantees Jewish safety.

Chelsea Football Club, one of Europe’s most prized teams, offers Yossi Benayoun, one of Israel’s top soccer players, a three-year, multimillion-dollar deal.

July 3, 1904 Theodor Herzl, the “father of modern Zionism,” dies of cardiac sclerosis at age 44 in the village of Edlach, Austria. His will calls for no speeches, flowers or pomp at his funeral,...

The First International Conference and Festival of Jewish Theater opens in Tel Aviv. The festival coincides with the beginning of the first war in Lebanon and is almost canceled because many Israeli participants were called up for reserve duty.

July 4, 1975 Fourteen people are killed and 62 others are wounded when a bomb hidden inside a refrigerator explodes in Jerusalem’s Zion Square at 10 a.m. The bomb inside the Amcor-10 refrigerator was built...

Elite Israeli military forces launch a successful rescue attempt of Israeli hostages on board a hijacked Air France flight at Entebbe Airport, Uganda. PM Netanyahu’s brother, Yoni Netanyahu is killed in operation.

July 5, 1979 Israel National Opera Company founder Edis De Philippe dies at age 67 after brain surgery. A New York native, De Philippe studied music, ballet and half a dozen languages before committing to...

Introduced as part of a festive legislative session marking the anniversary of Theodor Herzl’s death, the Law of Return creates an open-door immigration policy for Jews throughout the world.

July 6, 1973 Otto Klemperer, a legendary German Jewish conductor and composer, dies at 88 at home in Zurich. Born in 1885 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), Klemperer began playing music at age 4....

When Bus 405 passed a ravine near Jerusalem, a Palestinian terrorist seizes control of the wheel and runs the bus over the cliff, killing 16 passengers and injuring 17 others.

Serving in various financial positions, Eliezer Siegfried Hoofien provided the Yishuv and then Israel with nearly fifty years of banking and financial expertise.

July 7, 1969 U.N. Secretary-General U Thant warns the Security Council that he is considering withdrawing the 96 U.N. observers from the Suez Canal zone because a state of “open warfare” exists there. He reports...

July 8, 1989 Israeli judo champion Yarden Gerbi is born in Kfar Saba. Her success in national and international competitions includes a bronze medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. At age...

Tzipi Livni is born in Tel Aviv to two prominent figures of the Irgun. A graduate of Bar-Ilan University’s school of law, she later serves in the Israeli Army, Mossad, and works as an attorney before entering politics.

July 9, 1959 Riots break out in the impoverished Haifa neighborhood of Wadi Salib after police officers shoot resident Yaakov Elkarif during an attempt to arrest him for being drunk and disorderly. Witnesses dispute whether...

A packed audience fills the amphitheater on Mount Scopus to celebrate the end of the June 1967 War and to mark the cultural unification of Jerusalem.

July 10, 1957 Yiddish novelist and playwright Sholem Asch dies at age 76 in London. Asch was born in Kutno in Russian-controlled Poland in 1880 as the youngest of 10 children in a Hasidic family....

Nahum Goldmann is born in Visznevo, Lithuania. He is later a founder of the World Jewish Congress and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, as well as President of the World Zionist Organization.

WIZO is founded in London by Rebecca Sieff, Vera Weizmann, and Edith Eder. Women from Palestine, England, Germany, Poland, The Netherlands, Russia, and South Africa are present at the inaugural conference.

July 11, 1927 A major earthquake strikes Jericho just after 3 p.m., killing between 300 and 500 people and injuring at least 700 others. Measured at a magnitude of 6.3, the quake lasts about five...

July 12, 2006 The Second Lebanon War begins when Hezbollah launches Katyusha rockets and mortars at Israeli border towns and Israel Defense Forces positions, a diversion for a raid across the border to ambush an...

As part of the Zionist strategy to engage the British government in political negotiations, Chaim Weizmann airs his grievances against the British government for reversing their pro-Zionist policy.

July 13, 1941 Singer, songwriter and media personality Ehud Manor is born to Russian immigrant parents in Binyamina. A graduate of the University of Cambridge, Manor composes about 1,200 songs and translates 600 others into...

Six months after his historic visit to Jerusalem, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat invites Israel’s Foreign Minister Ezer Weizmann to meet with him in Salzburg, Austria.

Pope Paul IV issues the papal decree Cum Nimis Absurdum, which subjects Jews under his dominion to a myriad of restrictions and humiliations, most notably forcing them to live in ghettos.

July 14, 1958 Iraqi army officers stage a coup and overthrow and kill King Faisal. Also killed is Iraq’s crown prince, whose body is left hanging outside the Defense Ministry. Iraqis celebrate, but Western powers...

July 15, 1965 In a speech to a graduating class of Israel Defense Forces officers, IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin addresses ongoing Arab efforts to divert the sources of the Jordan River. Syria hasn’t...

Max Fisher is born in Pittsburgh to Russian Jewish immigrants. He dedicates much of his life to the Jewish State, raising hundreds of millions of dollars through his career as a leader in nearly every Jewish organization in North America.

July 16, 1948 Classical musician and conductor Pinchas Zukerman is born in Tel Aviv. At 4, he begins playing the recorder, then the clarinet, and by 8 he is playing the violin and studying at...

Born in Kippenheim, Germany in 1926, Stef Wertheimer immigrates to Mandatory Palestine in 1937. A philanthropist and ardent peace activist, Wertheimer has dedicated more than $100 million of his own money to build industrial parks in the Galilee.

Born in 1888 in Buczacz, Galicia (later part of Ukraine), Shmuel Agnon is the first Israeli to win a Nobel Prize and remains the only Hebrew writer to receive this award in literature.

July 17, 1906 Yitzchak Ben-Aharon, a pioneer of the kibbutz movement, is born Yitzhak Nussboim in Bukovina, Romania, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He joins several Zionist organizations as a teenager, then walks and rides a...

Following decades of exploitation and persecution that included heavy taxation and attempts at forced conversion, King Edward I of England issues an expulsion order for the Jews of England.

July 18, 1999 Singer-songwriter Meir Ariel, 57, known as the “Man of Words” for his poetic Hebrew lyrics, dies of Mediterranean spotted fever transmitted by a tick. He is buried at Kibbutz Mishmarot, where he...

A close associate of Theodore Herzl, Max Bodenheimer is the first president of the Zionist Federation of Germany and is a leader in the establishment of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). He dies in Jerusalem.

July 19, 1999 Stella Levy, who commanded the Women’s Corps of the Israel Defense Forces in the 1960s and briefly served in the Knesset, dies. She was born in French Mandatory Syria in 1924 and...

Israel’s War of Independence ends in 1949 with the signing of armistice agreements between the newly established Jewish state and four Arab states. Separate agreements are signed with each state.

July 20, 1951 Abdullah I, the founding king of Jordan, is assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist at the Al Aqsa Mosque entrance in Jerusalem. The king’s bodyguards immediately shoot the assassin dead. Abdullah’s grandson, Hussein,...

The US rejects a UN request that US Marines be temporarily stationed in Jerusalem to support an Israeli-Arab military truce agreement. The US continues its policy of supporting diplomacy in the region, while maintaining politically-strategic, military distance.

July 21, 1973 A Mossad team targeting the terrorists behind the Munich Olympics massacre fatally shoots Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki while he walks home from a movie with his wife in Lillehammer, Norway. The mistaken...

Members of the Irgun, a Jewish military organization that is absorbed into the IDF during the 1948 War, bomb the British administrative headquarters in Palestine, based in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Twenty-eight British, forty-one Arabs, and seventeen Jews are killed.

When neither party receives a majority of the votes in the eleventh Israeli Knesset elections, the Labor and Likud parties form a coalition government.

July 23, 2002 The Knesset votes 51-41 to approve the Tal Law, an effort to address the growing problem of Haredi Jews receiving exemptions from military service. The law, which expires after five years, allows...

Bella Abzug is born in the Bronx, New York to an Orthodox Jewish immigrant family from Russia. Elected in 1970, she serves three terms in Congress and is the first Jewish woman to be elected to the House of Representatives.

Competitive swimmer Keren Leibovitch is born in Hod Ha’sharon, near Tel-Aviv. Considered Israel’s greatest Paralympian, Leibovitch wins four gold medals, two silver medals, and a bronze medal in Paralympic swimming competitions in 2000 and 2004.

July 25, 1992 Aris San, who popularized Greek music in Israel, mysteriously dies at age 52 while living in Budapest. His quick cremation and past connections to organized crime at his nightclubs contribute to conspiracy...

Penned by Yigal Allon, the Plan is a strategic proposal for Israel’s retention of the Jordan Valley in the West Bank. It includes a series of Jewish settlements and military installations to act as buffers against potential Arab attacks from the east.

July 26, 1928 Netiva Ben Yehuda, a Palmach member, early Israeli feminist, acclaimed writer and media personality, is born in Tel Aviv to a father from Lithuania and a mother from Ukraine. She has two...

Baruch Spinoza’s ideas about Judaism are rejected by the Amsterdam Jewish community, eventually leading to his excommunication. He goes on to become one of the most important philosophers of the Jewish Enlightenment, which seeks to reconcile the world of Jewish faith with secular, empirical reality.

July 27, 1955 Bulgarian fighter jets shoot down El Al Flight 402 en route from London’s Heathrow Airport to Israel. The weekly flight is scheduled for two stops before reaching Lod Airport: Vienna, Austria, and...

July 28, 1923 Mordechai Golinkin’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata” marks the beginning of opera in Mandatory Palestine. Because Palestine has no opera house, the performance is in a movie theater. Golinkin, who wrote...

Thirty-one rabbis meet in Frankfurt am Main for a two-week assembly. The assembly ultimately decides that while Jewish law allows prayer in any language, it is necessary to recite certain prayers – including the Barechu and Shema – in Hebrew.

Max Nordau is born Simon Maximilian Sudfeld in Pest, Hungary to an Orthodox Jewish family. Nordau’s most notable contribution to early Zionism is The Basel Plan – the first official blueprint for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine.

July 29, 1891 Bernhard Zondek, the obstetrician-gynecologist who creates one of the first reliable pregnancy tests, is born in Wronke, Germany, now in Poland. Zondek moves to Berlin for his medical studies and earns his...

In 1950, the Knesset passes a law that states, “Whereas with establishment of the state of Israel, Jerusalem once more becomes the capital.” In 1980, the Knesset elevates the law to a Basic Law, giving the political status of Jerusalem increased legislative weight.

July 30, 1992 Yael Arad at age 25 becomes the first Israeli to win an Olympic medal, taking the silver in judo in the half-middleweight (61-kilogram) class at the Summer Olympics in Barcelona. She dedicates...

King Hussein of Jordan announces his intention to politically disengage from the West Bank, leaving the PLO to fill the political vacuum.

In the south of Israel, the development town of Dimona is populated entirely by Mizrahim (Jewish immigrants from Arab lands). It receives municipal status in 1969.

August 1, 2016 Andre Hajdu, a prolific composer and ethnomusicologist, dies at age 84 in Jerusalem. Hajdu was born in Hungary on March 5, 1932. After displaying an early aptitude for music and the arts,...

The only politician in Israeli history to hold the positions of both President and Prime Minister, Shimon Peres is born in Belorussia to Yitzchak and Sara Perski.

August 2, 1968 Oil reaches the Mediterranean Sea port of Haifa from the Red Sea port of Eilat by land for the first time through a pipeline that provides an alternative to the Suez Canal....

August 3, 1981 Excavations in Jerusalem’s Area G, on the eastern side of the City of David, are suspended because of attacks on archaeologists at the site by Haredi Jews, most of them part of...

The Harrison Report, an inquiry into the conditions of displaced persons camps in occupied Germany, reveals that many of the rumors of poor treatment of Jews are indeed true and that “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.”

Rabbi Mordechai M. Kaplan, publishes “A Program for the Reconstruction of Judaism” in the Menorah Journal. His ideology eventually leads to the creation of a fourth American Jewish denomination, the Reconstructionist movement.

August 4, 1888 Yitzhaq Shami, one of the earliest writers of modern Hebrew literature, is born as Yitzhaq Sarwi to an Arabic-speaking father and a Ladino-speaking mother in Hebron. He takes the name Shami, first...

Famed Israeli Composer Menachem Avidom, whose compositions help lay the groundwork for future Mizrahi and Sephardic (Middle Eastern Jewish) music in Israel, passes away in Tel Aviv.

August 5, 1953 Unit 101, an independent special forces section of the Israel Defense Forces, is formed under the command of Ariel Sharon, hand-picked by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Facing the constant threat of terrorist...

Convened in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, the Thirteenth Zionist Congress discusses details of the Palestine Mandate and particularly the prerogatives of the Palestine Zionist Executive (PZE) that guide Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine.

August 6, 2015 Stage and screen actress Orna Porat dies at age 91 in Tel Aviv. She was born Irene Klein, a German Christian, near Cologne in 1924. She turned toward atheism and socialism in...

August 7, 2002 The Palestinian Authority Cabinet agrees to a truce deal proposed by Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer to withdraw the Israel Defense Forces from Palestinian-controlled parts of the Gaza Strip and from the...

Israel, Jordan and Egypt finally signed a ceasefire, ending the 1967-1970 War of Attrition.

Ralph Bunche is born in Detroit, Michigan. He is appointed to the UN Special Committee on Palestine in 1947, which is charged with devising a partition plan.

A pioneer in Israeli film, Lia Van Leer is born Lia Greenberg in Beltsy, Romania (today Moldova).

August 8, 1984 Hebrew linguist and lexicographer Avraham Even-Shoshan dies at age 77 in Tel Aviv and is buried in Jerusalem. Born Avraham Rosenstein in 1906 in Minsk, Belarus, he attended a Jewish school run...

Chez Jo Goldberg, a Jewish deli in Paris, is attacked by two terrorists wielding grenades and machine guns. Six people are killed and twenty-two injured. The attack is believed to have been planned and carried out by the Abu Nidal Organization, an international Palestinian terrorist group.

August 9, 2006 Israel’s Security Cabinet approves an expansion of the military offensive in southern Lebanon nearly a month after the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War. Also known as the Israel-Hezbollah War, the conflict...

Following the San Remo conference in April 1920, a treaty is signed between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire in the town of Sevres, France, officially breaking up the Ottoman Empire.

August 10, 1979 Economist David Horowitz, the founder of the Bank of Israel, dies at age 80. Horowitz was born in 1899 in Galicia, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in western Ukraine. He...

The Jewish Agency holds its first meeting on August 12, the day after the conclusion of the Congress. With so many Jews having immigrated to the US over the previous four decades, American presence in the Jewish Agency had become financially and politically significant for Zionism’s key growth in the United States.

August 11, 2017 Holocaust survivor Yisrael Kristal, recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s oldest living man and one of the 10 longest-lived men ever, dies in Haifa one month before his...

Berl Katznelson, a leader in the Labor Zionist movement, dies suddenly at the age of 57 in Jerusalem. His advocacy for the creation of a labor-based society in Israel would eventually form the basis of the Mapai party, which was created in 1930 and would dominate Israeli politics until the late 1970′s.

August 12, 1991 Yeruham Cohen, an Israeli intelligence officer known for his friendship with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, dies at age 75. Cohen was born into a Yemeni family in Tel Aviv in 1916 and...

During his term as President, Barak is instrumental in expanding the court’s power, especially in the area of protecting civil liberties and personal freedoms, often from government rulings or military actions.

August 13, 1942 Nurit Hirsch, a musician and composer, is born in Tel Aviv. From a young age, she plays piano at a theater, a ballet studio and a quartet club. She plays in a...

In a letter written to Leon Kubowitzki, head of the Rescue Department of the World Jewish Congress, US Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy states that the War Department would not order the bombing of Nazi Death Camps because they did not see it as a priority for US military resources.

Soldiers and policemen begin enforcing the Disengagement Implementation Law, entering Gaza settlements and handing out evacuation orders to settlers.

August 15, 1096 The armies of the First Crusade officially embark from Western Europe on their quest to capture the Holy Land, especially the holy city of Jerusalem, from Muslims. Jerusalem has been controlled for...

Known as Operation Diamond, the plan to recover a functional, Russian-made MIG-21 fighter jet succeeds after the Mossad cuts a deal with disillusioned Iraqi-Christian fighter pilot Munir Redfa. As part of the deal, Redfa receives $1 million, Israeli citizenship for himself and his family, and guaranteed full-time employment.

August 16, 2015 Physicist Jacob Bekenstein, whose work on black holes advanced efforts to create a theory of quantum gravity, dies of a heart attack at age 68 in Helsinki, Finland, where he is scheduled...

Held a few weeks before the Second Zionist Congress was set to convene in Basle, Switzerland, 160 Russian Zionists from ninety-three cities and towns in Russia meet secretly in Warsaw, Poland.

August 17, 1949 Theodor Herzl, who was buried in Vienna after his death July 20, 1904, is reburied along with his wife and parents on the Jerusalem hill that is renamed Mount Herzl in his...

Archaeologist Claire Epstein, who performed many archaeological surveys and excavations in Israel, including discovering the culture of the Chalcolithic period (4500-3300 B.C.E.) in the Golan, passes away in Kibbutz Ginossar.

August 18, 1994 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a controversial Jewish thinker and Israeli public intellectual, dies in his sleep at age 91 in Jerusalem. Leibowitz was born to a religious Zionist family in Riga, Latvia, in 1903....

Scholar and writer Michah Joseph Berdichevski is best known for his Hebrew writings, which included his lengthy debate with Ahad Ha’am about the nature of Hebrew literature, as well as his extensive recording of Jewish folklore.

August 19, 2003 A suicide bomber kills 23 people and injures more than 130 others by detonating an 11-pound explosive packed with ball bearings on a bus in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Shmuel Hanavi in...

The first Hebrew language medical journal in Palestine, “HaRufuah,” is published quarterly by the Jewish Medical Association of Palestine. The journal is still published monthly by the Israel Medical Association and distributed to all its members free of charge.

August 20, 1967 Etgar Keret, one of Israel’s most popular writers, is born in Ramat Gan. Keret’s quirky work, mainly short stories and graphic novels featuring odd twists and the unexpected, wins critical acclaim as...

American, French, and Italian troops supervise the evacuation of around 15,000 PLO forces from Lebanon's capital. Terrorists and Syrian forces leaving Beirut are one of Israel's principal goals during the 1982 Lebanon War.

August 21, 1969 A new immigrant to Israel, Denis Michael Rohan, sets fire to Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Born and raised in Australia, Rohan moved to Israel only a few months before the attack. He...

“The Development Corporation of Israel” (known today as “Israel Bonds”) offers American Jews the opportunity to invest in Israel by purchasing bonds.

August 22, 1891 Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, whose final work, “The Tree of Life,” stands outside Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, is born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz in Lithuania. Though his father wants him to...

The Sixth Zionist Congress, the last to be presided over by Theodor Herzl, convenes in Basel, Switzerland. It is the largest Zionist Congress held to date, with approximately 600 delegates in attendance.

August 23, 1969 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who has adopted devout Muslim observance since losing the June 1967 war to Israel, responds to the arson attack on Al-Aqsa mosque two days earlier by calling...

The Knesset passes the Bank of Israel Law by a vote of fifty-five to zero with fourteen abstentions. The new law, which goes into effect on December 1, 1954, establishes the Bank of Israel as the central financial authority for the country.

August 24, 1926 Playwright and translator Nissim Aloni is born Nissim Levi to poor Bulgarian Jewish parents in Florentin, a low-income neighborhood in the south of Tel Aviv that becomes an inspiration for his work....

August 25, 2004 Windsurfer Gal Fridman wins Israel’s first and, through 2020, only Olympic gold medal at the Summer Games in Athens. Born and raised in Pardes Hana-Karkur in northern Israel, Fridman began windsurfing under...

Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts to Ukrainian-Jewish parents, Leonard Bernstein is one of the most prolific composers and conductors in American history.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most widely distributed anti-Semitic publication in history, is first published in Znamya, a Russian newspaper.

August 26, 1955 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles delivers a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations that points to the Eisenhower administration’s new plan to launch covert discussions between Israeli Prime Minister David...

The first passenger train arrives in Jerusalem from Jaffa as part of the first railroad project in the Ottoman-controlled Levant, the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway line.

August 27, 2001 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Secretary-General Abu Ali Mustafa is killed in his mid-60s when two or more helicopter-fired missiles strike his office in Ramallah. Israel confirms its responsibility for...

The Second Zionist Congress convenes in Basel, Switzerland. 400 delegates, including Theodore Herzl’s father, participate in the Second Congress, which is nearly double the size of the First Congress held the previous year.

August 28, 1965 Physicist Giulio Racah, a winner of the Israel Prize, dies at age 56 during a visit to Florence, Italy. The cause of death is believed to be asphyxiation by a faulty gas...

The Fourth Arab League Summit convenes in Khartoum, Sudan. Participants agree that all measures should be taken to regain lands controlled by Israel after the War, and that the oil-rich countries would finance an increased Arab military presence in the region.

August 29, 1897 Spearheaded by Theodor Herzl, the First Zionist Congress opens in Basel, Switzerland, for three days of meetings with roughly 200 attendees. Herzl invites allies in the Zionist cause — Jews and non-Jews...

Rattled by numerous attempts on his life, and fearing for the safety of his family, MacMichael steps down in August 1944.

August 30, 1987 On a 12-11 vote, the Israeli Cabinet decides to end production of the Lavi fighter jet, under development since 1980 by Israel Aerospace Industries and first flown as a prototype in December...

The United Nations had set up UNSCOP in April 1947. Its purpose, like previous commissions that visited Palestine, is to investigate underlying causes for communal unrest and to make political recommendations about curtailing violence.

August 31, 2004 Bombs explode on a pair of buses 100 yards apart along Beersheba’s main street, Ranger Boulevard, shortly after leaving the central bus station. Sixteen Israelis, one as young as 3 years old,...

September 1, 1967 The Arab League summit in Khartoum, Sudan, ends with the signing of the Khartoum Resolutions, best known for the conclusions that become known as the “Three Nos”: no recognition of Israel, no...

Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel, then working as a chemist in Manchester, England, is appointed to the British Admiralty as an Honorary Technical Adviser on acetone supplies.

September 1, 1891 Yosef Zaritsky, one of Israel’s most renowned painters, is born near Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Zaritsky studies at the Academy of Art in Kyiv and lives in Moscow before making aliyah...

80,000 mourners, approximately a quarter of the Jewish population in Palestine, line the streets of Jerusalem for the funeral of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook. He passed away the day before from cancer.

September 2, 1953 Israel starts work on a project to divert some of the water of the Jordan River at the B’not Yaakov (Daughters of Jacob) Bridge in the north of the state for use...

Demonstrating against the rising costs of living and economic inequalities in Israel, more than 450,000 protestors fill the streets throughout the country. It is the largest demonstration in Israel’s history.

September 3, 1905 Scholar, teacher and biblical commentator Nechama Leibowitz is born in Riga, Latvia, where she grows up competing with her brother, future Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, in their father’s Bible quizzes. The family...

In Geneva, Switzerland, Israel and Egypt sign their Second Disengagement Agreement (Sinai II) following the October 1973 War.

September 4, 1985 The new Israeli shekel is introduced as the currency of the state. The original shekel, named for a biblical currency, came into use in 1980 as a replacement for the Israeli pound,...

During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team are killed after being taken hostage by Black September, a Palestinian terrorist organization affiliated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the left-wing terrorist group The Red Army.

September 5, 1978 The Camp David Summit begins at the Catoctin Mountain presidential retreat in Hauvers, Maryland. Conducted within the framework of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, enacted in 1967 after the Six-Day War, the...

In Operation Orchard, Israel's air force secretly destroys a reactor at Al Kibar, a Syrian military facility thought to be a nuclear site constructed with the help of North Korea.

September 6, 1840 The nine surviving Damascus Jews accused of killing a Franciscan Capuchin friar and his servant to harvest the blood are freed by order of Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman pasha who controls an...

David Gruen, who in 1910 would change his name to David Ben-Gurion, and his girlfriend Rachel Nelkin arrive in Jaffa with a group of other young adults from Plonsk, Poland.

September 7, 1865 The first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, known for promoting religious Zionism and for writing “Orot” and other religious books, is born in Griva, Latvia. In 1884,...

Major General Israel Tal passes away at the age of 85. Tal is best known for heading the 1970 committee that designed and developed the Israeli-made Merkava tank.

September 8, 1908 Orthodox theologian and ardent Zionist Eliezer Berkovits is born in Nagyvarad, Transylvania. Berkovits studies the Talmud at yeshivot, and in 1934 he is ordained as a rabbi at the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary,...

After nine months of secret contacts mediated by Norwegian diplomats, the PLO and Israel recognize each other's existence.

September 9, 1948 Alon Garbuz, the director of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque for four decades, is born in Givatayim, the youngest of three brothers. The oldest, Aharon, becomes a leader in the Histadrut labor federation...

Eilat Mazar, a third generation Israeli archaeologist, is most well-known for her work at the City of David site in Jerusalem. She is a professor of archaeology at Hebrew University.

September 10, 1923 Journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery is born Helmut Ostermann in Beckum, Germany. After Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, Uri’s father, an upper-class Zionist, moves the family to Haifa, then...

Nahalal, the first moshav ha’ovdim (workers settlement), is founded in the northwest Jezreel Valley, about halfway between Haifa and Afula.

September 11, 1881 Yosef Haim Brenner, the leading Israeli literary figure of the early 20th century, is born in Novi Mlini, Ukraine. He grows up receiving a Jewish education and joins the Bund, a Jewish...

For the first time since the award was introduced in 1949, an Israeli film, Lebanon, wins the Golden Lion Award at the 66th annual Venice International Film Festival.

September 12, 1977 Singer, composer and producer Idan Raichel is born in Kfar Saba, Israel. His music incorporates Israeli, Middle Eastern, Ethiopian and other international sounds. Lacking family musical roots, he takes up the accordion...

Shimon Peres becomes Israel’s eighth Prime Minister. He moves swiftly to form a coalition government.

September 13, 1993 U.S. President Bill Clinton holds a White House signing ceremony for the Oslo Accords, a set of agreements between the Israelis and Palestinians, at the conclusion of which Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak...

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion summons dozens of Palmach commanders for a conference. There he announces a plan to dismantle the elite, underground fighting unit and integrate it into the newly established Israel Defense Forces.

September 14, 2014 Abdel Rahman Zuabi, a secular Muslim and proud Israeli who was the first Arab to sit on Israel’s Supreme Court, dies at age 82. Born in the village of Sulam in 1932,...

Judge Richard Goldstone, a South African Jew who had previously served as the chief UN prosecutor in both Yugoslavia and Rwanda, presents his UN-sponsored Report, “Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.”

September 15, 1891 Austrian-Israeli writer Moshe Yaacov Ben-Gavriel is born Eugen Hoeflich in Vienna, Austria. He begins writing at a young age in German, particularly in the expressionist style. He serves as an officer in...

Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan conducts secret talks with Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister Hassan Tuhami in Morocco.

September 16, 1949 Israel becomes a member of UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Based in Paris, UNESCO has the purpose of creating peace and security by encouraging international collaboration in education, natural...

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign the Camp David Accords under the mediation of President Jimmy Carter.

September 17, 1948 Count Folke Bernadotte, a diplomat sent by the United Nations to mediate between Israel and the Arabs during the War of Independence, is assassinated in Jerusalem by members of Lehi (the Stern...

September 18, 1918 Champion swimmer Judith Deutsch is born in Vienna, Austria. Most Austrian athletic clubs ban her because she is Jewish, so she begins swimming with a Jewish club, Hakoah Vienna. Between 1933 and...

Israel launches its first space satellite, Ofek 1, from an undisclosed location near the Mediterranean Sea.

September 19, 2014 Actor, screenwriter, director and producer Avraham Heffner dies at age 79 in Tel Aviv. He was born in Haifa in 1935 and served in the Nahal army band during his time in...

September 20, 1931 Actress Haya Harareet, best known as Judah Ben-Hur’s love interest Esther in the 1959 remake of “Ben-Hur,” is born Haya Neuberg in Haifa to Polish immigrants who arrived in Mandatory Palestine when...

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resigns amid charges of corruption and financial improprieties.

September 21, 2010 Legal expert and diplomat Shabtai Rosenne, a law professor at Bar-Ilan University, dies of a heart attack at age 92. He is considered one of the most important international lawyers of the...

Yehuda Amichai, the Poet Laureate of Jerusalem, passes away from lymphoma at the age of 76.

September 22, 1943 Singer-songwriter Ariel Zilber is born in Tel Aviv to Bracha Zefira, a singer, and Ben Ami Zilber, a violinist with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. He attends a nonreligious boarding school on Kibbutz...

Simcha Dinitz, a longtime Israeli diplomat who served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States from 1973-1978, passes away at the age of 74.

September 23, 1920 Ovadia Yosef, a Sephardi rabbi, politician and community leader, is born in Baghdad. He moves from Iraq to Jerusalem at age 4 with his family. While studying at Porat Yosef Yeshiva, he...

Between June 1949 and September 24, 1950, Operation Magic Carpet secretly brings nearly 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel.

September 24, 1996 A northern exit from the Western Wall Tunnel to the Via Dolorosa opens to the public, leading to three days of Palestinian riots. The excavation of the tunnel began after Israel’s capture...

Amir Gilboa, born Berl Feldmann in the Ukraine, is one of Israel’s leading poets. He is known for drawing upon his military experiences and biblical issues of morality to write contemplative poems.

September 25, 1982 An estimated 400,000 protesters in Tel Aviv demonstrate anger at the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon and demand an investigation into Israel’s role and responsibility. Organized by...

Rabbi Zerach Warhaftig, a founder of Israel’s National Religious Party and signatory of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, passes away in Jerusalem at the age of 96.

September 26, 1955 Oil is discovered in Heletz, a moshav in southern Israel that becomes the site of the state’s first successful oil well. The Heletz field, containing an estimated 94.4 million barrels of oil,...

September 27, 1955 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser uses a speech at a military exhibition to announce that Czechoslovakia will supply heavy Soviet weaponry to his nation. The deal is said to be worth more...

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat sign the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, sometimes referred to as Oslo II, in a ceremony at the White House.

September 28, 1970 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser dies of a heart attack at age 52 after experiencing symptoms while returning from ceremonies marking the end of an Arab summit, in which he brokered a...

In border designations for states drafted primarily by Britain and France after WWI, the new state of Syria gains control of the Golan Heights.

September 29, 1947 The Arab Higher Committee for Palestine formally rejects the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine’s partition plan, which advocates for the division of the land into a separate Jewish and Arab states and...

Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician who leaked details of Israel’s nuclear program to the British press, is extradited to Israel, one day after an undercover female Mossad agent posing as an American lured him to Italy from London.

September 30, 1957 French Prime Minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury backdates to today his signature on a letter granting Israel’s request for France’s cooperation in building a heavy-water nuclear reactor and reprocessing facility. He actually signs the...

President Ronald Reagan announces a plan to sell military aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Aaron Ciechanover is born in Haifa to parents who emigrated from Poland before World War II.

Following a siege that began on September 20, Jerusalem falls to Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt.

David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency since 1935, formally accepts the partition plan proposed by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP).

Sarah Levy-Tanai, one of Israel’s foremost choreographers and contributors to Israeli cultural life, dies in her mid-90s.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrives in Jerusalem for the first time in more than four years to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid growing U.S.-Europe tensions over Iran.

El Al flight 1862, a 747 cargo plane flight bound from New York to Tel Aviv, crashes into an apartment complex in Bijlmermeer, an Amsterdam suburb.

A suicide bombing kills 17 Jews and four Arabs and injures some 60 others at Maxim restaurant in Haifa.

Louis Brandeis, retired United States Supreme Court Justice and celebrated American Zionist, passes away in Washington DC at the age of 84.

Painter Nachum Gutman is born in a part of Russia that is now Moldova.

Responding to a plea from Henry Morgenthau, United States Ambassador to Turkey and American Jewish leaders, led by Louis Marshall and Jacob Schiff, quickly raise $50,000 in aid for the Jewish community in the Palestine.

Egyptian troops cross the Suez Canal to push the Israelis out of the Sinai at the same time that Syria attacks in the Golan Heights.

Ada Yonath was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem, then under the British Mandate. Yonath’s family was poor and lived in a four-room apartment that they shared with two other families.

Members of the Palestinian Liberation Front hijack the cruise ship Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt. The ship had departed from Genoa, Italy on October 3rd with 748 passengers on board for an 11-day cruise with planned stops in Naples, Alexandria, Port Said, and Ashdod, Israel.

Singer Hagit Yaso, a winner of Israel’s version of “American Idol,” is born in Sderot to parents who escaped poor conditions in an Ethiopian village by walking four months through the desert to reach Sudan and fly to Israel.

Ottoman Sultan Murad III issues a firman (a royal decree) ordering that 1,000 Jews from Safed be registered and sent to live in Famagusta, Cyprus.

Hamas terrorists abduct Israeli soldier Nachshon Wachsman from the Bnai Atarot junction in central Israel by offering him a ride while wearing kippot, playing Hasidic music and carrying a prayer book.

Sarah Aaronsohn, a Nili intelligence operative, dies four days after shooting herself in an effort to avoid further torture and interrogation from Turkish authorities.

Yitzhak Shamir becomes the seventh Prime Minister of Israel after Menachem Begin resigns due to health and personal issues.

Moshe Hess, a 19th century Zionist, is reburied in the Kibbutz Kinneret cemetery beside other fathers of socialist Zionism.

Filmmaker Amos Gitai, known for documentaries and features on the Middle East, the Israeli-Arab conflict and Holocaust memory in Europe, is born to architect Munio Weinraub and teacher Efratia Margalit in Haifa.

At the conclusion of a four-day conference in Cairo, Egypt, Arab leaders adopt the Resolutions of the Inter-Parliamentary Congress. The conference and resolutions are a response to the British Peel Commission Report of 1937.

Israel refuses to let 26 Irish and Romanian tourists enter the country at the port of Haifa for being members of an extreme Christian cult.

Israeli composer Daniel Barenboim is named musical director of the prestigious La Scala Opera House in Milan, Italy.

Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, a former IDF general, reveals in remarks to the Foreign Press Association of Israel his plan for “home rule” for Arabs living in the West Bank.

Israeli intellectual and former Knesset member Dov Sadan dies at the age of 87.

Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the time, Rabin is Prime Minister of Israel and Peres is Foreign Minister.

Yaakov Farkash, known by the pen name Ze’ev and considered the father of Israeli political cartoons, dies at age 79 near Tel Aviv.

Moshe Sharett is born as Moshe Shertok in Kherson, Ukraine. Sharett’s parents were early Zionists, having been involved in the BILU movement in the early 1880’s.

Moshe Dayan, Israel’s iconic military and political leader, passes away from a heart attack in a Tel Aviv hospital at the age of 66.

Ron Arad, the 28-year-old navigator of an Israeli F-4 Phantom II, is captured by the Shia terrorist group Amal after parachuting out of his burning aircraft over Lebanon.

Oil ministers from Arab states cut exports by 5% and recommend an embargo of Israel’s allies in response to the U.S. airlift of military supplies to Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky is born in Odessa, Ukraine. He is mostly known for his revisionist attitudes towards Zionism, which serve as the ideological foundation of Israel’s Likud political party.

Relations between Israel and the USSR began to improve under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1987, the two countries established consular ties which coincided with the Soviet Union’s easing of restrictions on Jewish life and eventually opening the gates of immigration to Israel.

The Israeli Supreme Court upholds the Central Election Committee’s ban on the extremist right-wing political party Kach from the election for the 12th Knesset.

Nir Barkat is born in Jerusalem. He serves as the city’s mayor from 2008 to 2018, then joins the Likud party to run for the Knesset.

During the fourth day of Operation Yoav, the fledgling Israeli Navy engages in its first major battle off the coast of Ashkelon, Israel.

Dalia Itzik is born in Jerusalem to a family of Iraqi immigrants. In the Seventeenth Knesset (2006), she becomes the first woman to serve as Speaker of the Knesset.

Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men hurl rocks at and slash the tires of buses bearing ads on their sides promoting female worship at the Western Wall.

The Israeli destroyer INS Eilat is sunk in the Mediterranean in international waters off Port Said by Soviet-made missiles launched by Egyptian missile boats.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the ninth and current Prime Minister of Israel, is born in Tel Aviv. Although he spends a good portion of his childhood in Philadelphia, Netanyahu returns to Israel in 1967 to fulfill his service in the IDF.

The Israeli Supreme Court rules on an appeal by Arab landowners that the Gush Emunim settlement of Elon Moreh must be dismantled because of a lack of evidence that it was established for security reasons.

Eliahu Elath presents his credentials to Queen Elizabeth II and becomes Israel’s first Ambassador to the United Kingdom (officially called the Ambassador to the Court of St. James).

An early Zionist supporter in England, Alfred Mond (who would later become the first Lord Melchett) is born in England. Despite the fact that his parents were Jewish, Mond was not raised as a Jew and in fact was married in the Anglican church and raised his children as Christians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and U.S. President Bill Clinton sign a memorandum recommitting to the Oslo II agreement of September 1995 after nine days of negotiations at the Wye River Plantation in eastern Maryland.

Yossi Sarid, a politician on the left known as “Israel’s moral compass,” is born in Rehovot.

The Husayn-McMahon correspondence commences between the Arab leader Husayn bin-Ali and the British government official Sir Henry McMahon.

Israel’s third prime minister, Levi Eshkol, is born Levi Shkolnik into a Hasidic family near Kyiv, Ukraine.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the president of the International Chess Federation, Max Euwe, open the 22nd men’s and seventh women’s Chess Olympiad in Haifa despite opposition from many FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Échecs) member nations and a boycott led by the favored Soviet Union.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordanian King Hussein sign a peace treaty at the Wadi Arava Border Crossing between Eilat, Israel and Aqaba, Jordan.

Ron Ben-Yishai, a famous war correspondent and recipient of the 2018 Israel Prize, is born in Jerusalem.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin are jointly awarded the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to bring about peace between Israel and Egypt.

In response to an overnight barrage of roughly 30 rockets from the Gaza Strip toward Sderot and other Israeli towns near the border, the IDF strikes 80 Gaza targets by air.

Degania Alef is established as the first Kibbutz in Israel. The idea for a communally operated agricultural settlement in the land of Israel did not, however, originate with the founders of Degania Alef.

The iconic flag with two blue stripes and a blue Star of David at its center becomes the official Israeli flag more than five months after the establishment of the state.

IDF troops kill 48 Israeli Arabs returning from their fields at dusk.

At the end of the October 1973 War, after several miscommunications, the first Egyptian-Israeli Military Talks between Generals commenced. These talks take place at 1am in Israeli-controlled territory, 101 kilometers from Cairo.

The Soviet Union and the United States convene the Madrid Middle East Peace Conference, based on a two-track approach for bi-lateral as well as multi-lateral talks.

Shlomo Mintz, violinist and conductor, is born in Moscow.

As part of the British campaign during World War I, the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade overtake the Turkish defenders and capture Beersheba.

Yehuda Amital, the founder of Yeshivat Har Etzion, is born as Yehuda Klein in Oradea, Romania, where he receives a religious education.

November 1, 1945 The newly formed Jewish Resistance Movement sets off explosions at more than 150 sites along the railway system of British Mandatory Palestine and blows up three British gunboats in the Jaffa and...

The 1965 election preparations begin in June 1963 when David Ben-Gurion resigns as Prime Minister for the second time.

November 2, 1955 Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, assumes the premiership again, replacing Moshe Sharett, who had succeeded him. Ben-Gurion had retired from Israeli politics in 1953 and went to live on a Negev...

In seeking official government endorsement for the Zionist cause from a great power, the leadership of the Zionist Organization successfully obtains support from the British government in 1917 by way of the Balfour Declaration.

Petah Tikvah (Gateway of Hope), today Israel’s fifth largest city, is established by a group of religious Jews wishing to leave Jerusalem and establish an agricultural moshav.

November 3, 1840 A coalition of Austrian, British and Ottoman forces commanded by Austrian Archduke Friedrich bombards the port city of Acre and drives out the Egyptian garrison. More than 1,100 Egyptians are killed in...

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a prominent actor in virtually all of Israel’s modern history, is assassinated by Yigal Amir at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.

November 4, 1966 Egypt and Syria sign a mutual defense treaty and create a joint military command. The move comes amid constant low-level violence on the Israeli-Syrian border, characterized by Syrian guerrilla raids and shelling...

November 5, 1990 Israeli politician Rabbi Meir Kahane, 58, is fatally shot by Egyptian-American El Sayyid Nosair in a Manhattan hotel where Kahane is addressing a crowd of mostly Orthodox Jews. Kahane was elected to...

In a speech marking the opening of the 1933-34 academic year, Judah Magnes, the President of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, outlines an expansion plan for the university.

Delegates convene in Katowice (presently southern Poland) for the first gathering of the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement.

Hannah Senesh (Szenes), the poet and Haganah fighter who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to rescue Jews, is executed by Hungarian firing squad in a Budapest prison courtyard.

November 7, 1878 Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, who becomes one of the 20th century’s leading Talmud scholars, is born in Kosava, Russia, now part of Belarus, to the head of the local rabbinical court, Rabbi Shmaryahu...

November 8, 1923 Rabbi Yisrael Meir Friedman Ben-Shalom, a sixth-generation descendant of Rebbe Yisrael of Rizin, is born in Bohush, Romania, to a Hasidic and Zionist family. Friedman Ben-Shalom joins Hashomer Hatzair, the secular Zionist...

November 9, 1924 Avraham Tamir, a military strategic mastermind who rises to the rank of major general, is born. He is one of the first Israeli officials to meet with the PLO’s Yasser Arafat and...

Chaim Weizmann, a leader of the Zionist movement and the first President of the State of Israel, passes away at his home in Rehovot after a year-long illness.

The United Nations passes UN Resolution 3379, which defines Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. It passes with a vote of 72 in favor, 35 against, and 32 abstentions.

November 10, 2004 More than half a century after the founding of the state of Israel, the Knesset officially adopts “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”) as the national anthem. The song became the anthem of the Zionist...

The Kilometer 101 Six-Point Agreement focuses on the maintenance of a cease-fire between Israeli and Egyptian forces, the movement of non-military supplies, the use of U.N. supervision, and exchange plans for prisoners of war.

November 11, 1902 Yisrael Amir, the first commander in chief of the Israeli Air Force, is born in Vilna in the Russian Empire as Yisrael Zabludovsky. He makes aliyah in 1923 and that year joins...

November 12, 2009 Former Knesset member Eliyahu Speiser dies at age 79. Born in Haifa on March 23, 1930, Speiser was educated at the Hebrew Reali School and Hebrew University, where he earned a degree...

Leah Rabin, peace advocate and widow of slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, passes away at the Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikvah after battling cancer.

Reuven Rubin (born Rubin Zelicovici), one of Israel’s most acclaimed painters, is born in Galatz, Romania. Rubin’s family was both very poor and religious.

November 13, 1949 Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, known by the acronym Shagar, is born in Jerusalem to Reb Shalom Zelig and Sasi Rosenberg, both Holocaust survivors. Shagar is recognized as a rabbi, a philosopher of...

November 14, 2012 Ahmed Jabari, the Hamas military chief, is killed in an Israel Defense Forces airstrike on Gaza that marks the start of Operation Pillar of Defense. The strike comes in response to an...

The Knesset debates Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s announcement that Israeli troops would withdraw from Sinai following the 1956 Suez War.

El Al, Israel’s national airline is officially founded and legally incorporated.  On September 29, 1948, Chaim Weizmann was abroad in Geneva, where he had undergone an eye operation. Due to an embargo placed on Israel and other combatants in the 1948 War, Israel was not able to use a military plane to retrieve Weizmann and bring them to Israel.  An Israeli Air Force DC-4 plane was painted and rebranded as “El-Al Ltd. - Israel National Aviation Company.”  The plane was sent to Geneva to pick up Weizmann and his wife, where they brought them to Israel so that Weizmann could be sworn as Israel’s first President.

November 15, 1942 Conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim is born in Buenos Aires to Russian-Jewish immigrants. At age 5, he begins taking piano lessons from his father, who remains his teacher. He moves to Israel...

The Aliyah-Bet (illegal immigration) ship Kadima (sometimes called the Kedma) arrives in Haifa under British escort. All of its passengers are arrested and moved to detention camps in Cyprus.

November 16, 1924 Haim Bar-Lev, an Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, is born in Vienna, Austria. His family moves to Yugoslavia before settling in Palestine in 1939. He studies at the Mikveh Israel agricultural...

November 17, 2008 Organized-crime leader Yaakov Alperon, 53, a suspected murderer who has survived as many as three assassination attempts, is driving home from a court hearing for two of his sons in Tel Aviv...

Israeli businesswoman and fashion pioneer Leah Gottlieb passes away in her Tel-Aviv home at the age of 94.

November 18, 1951 Yoni Rechter, considered one of Israel’s greatest musicians, is born in Tel Aviv. He is the son of architect Ya’akov Rechter and stepson of actress Hanna Meron. He pursues music as a...

The 2½-year year project culminates with the opening of a water reservoir for Jerusalem at Bayit Vegan.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s plane lands at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport at the start of his historic 36-hour visit to Israel.

November 19, 1957 Singer Ofra Haza, the youngest of nine children, is born in Tel Aviv to a family who had emigrated from Yemen. Haza grows up in the impoverished Hatikvah Quarter, where she is...

November 20, 1944 Haviva Reik and two other paratroopers from British Mandatory Palestine are among about 40 Jewish fighters executed by the Nazis after the suppression of an uprising in Slovakia. Reik, who was born...

One day after arriving from Egypt for his historic visit to Jerusalem, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat addresses a specially arranged sitting of the Knesset.

November 21, 1984 Israel launches Operation Moses, the first of several covert missions to bring Ethiopian Jews to Israel. The collaboration among the Mossad, the CIA and Sudanese State Security uses more than 30 aircraft...

Known for dying while defending the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai in 1920, Joseph Trumpeldor, a Zionist political activist and military hero, is born in Pyatigorsk, Russia.

In the wake of the June 1967 Six Day War, the United Nations Security Council adopts Resolution 242, a document which has served as a framework for all major Arab/Israel negotiations since.

November 22, 1923 Hannele Meierzak, who as Hanna Maron becomes known as “the first lady of Israeli theater,” is born in Berlin. As a child, she appears in many plays and films, including an uncredited...

Sultan Murad III orders an investigation into the number of synagogues in Safed in the Land of Israel, then under Ottoman Control.

In the midst of the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt, a debate over British policy in Mandatory Palestine is held in the House of Commons.

November 24, 2006 Benny Sela, convicted in 2000 of being the “Tel Aviv serial rapist,” escapes while being transported to a court hearing in Tel Aviv. While handcuffed, he eludes two police guards and scales...

November 25, 1940 A Haganah bomb does more damage than intended to the SS Patria, which sinks within 16 minutes of the explosion in Haifa’s harbor, killing 267 people, including members of the British crew,...

Kibbutz Kfar (Village) Ruppin is established under the framework of the “Tower and Stockade” movement in Zionism, which takes place primarily between 1936-1939.

November 26, 2013 Arik Einstein, one of Israel’s most beloved singers and songwriters, dies of an aortic aneurysm in Tel Aviv at age 74. The national outpouring of grief includes a gathering of thousands of...

Israeli folk rock singer-songwriter and composer Shlomo Artzi is born on Moshav Alonei Abba, southeast of Haifa.

November 27, 2007 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and U.S. President George W. Bush release a joint statement of the framework of their approach and goals at the conclusion of...

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is founded with the merger of the Central Relief Committee and the American Jewish Relief Committee.

November 28, 1961 Israel launches Operation Yachin to enable members of the 2,000-year-old Moroccan Jewish community to make aliyah. By the time the operation ends in 1964, more than 97,000 Jews emigrate from Morocco via...

The Land Transfer Committee Report reveals that Arabs in Palestine willingly continued to sell land to Zionists in the early 1940s despite the British legal prohibition on doing so.

November 29, 1928 Shulamit Aloni, the lawyer and politician who founds the Meretz party, is born in Tel Aviv. From a young age, Aloni is involved with politics and is relentless in working to bring...

The United Nations General Assembly passes Resolution 181 by a vote of 33-13 with 10 abstentions. The Resolution recommended the creation of separate Arab and Jewish states in Palestine, linked by an economic union.

Following the United Nations vote for the Partition of Palestine on the previous day, violence ensues between Jews and Arabs in the British Mandate of Palestine. The first phase of Israel’s War of Independence begins.

November 30, 2010 The Carmel Tunnels open, giving vehicles the chance to drive across Haifa in eight minutes, compared with the 30 minutes required in even good traffic conditions. The tunnels — one set running...

David Ben-Gurion, (born David Gruen) Israel’s first Prime Minister passes away at the Tel Hashomer-Sheba Medical Center in Tel-Aviv at the age of 87.

December 1, 1932 The Palestinian Post, the precursor of The Jerusalem Post, prints and distributes 1,200 copies of its first, eight-page edition. Founded by Gershon Agron, a Ukrainian-born immigrant from the United States, The Palestine...

December 2, 2001 Maher Habashi, a 21-year-old Palestinian plumber from Nablus, boards a No. 16 Egged bus driving from Neve Sha’anan to the Giborim bridge in Haifa just after noon and, moments after paying for...

The deadliest forest fire in Israel’s history broke out on the Carmel Mountain Range near the city of Haifa.

Matti Shmulevitz, a member of the underground Lehi and an advisor to Menachem Begin, passes away at the age of 75 one day after collapsing during a chess game in Tel Aviv.

Led by Israeli television personality Tommy Lapid, Shinui (change), wins fifteen seats in the 2003 Israeli election.

Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem, preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, is born in Berlin, Germany. Scholem emigrates to the Land of Israel in 1923.

Raised in a traditional Jewish household, early Zionist activist Leo Motzkin is born in present-day Brovary, Ukraine.

December 7, 1953 Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who declared Israel’s independence as the head of a provisional government May 14, 1948, announces his resignation and his plan to retire to Kibbutz Sde Boker...

Joseph Sprinzak, who would serve as the first Speaker of the Knesset and twice as Interim President, is born in Moscow, Russia.

Shmuel Katz, a leader of Revisionist Zionism and a founder of the Herut Party in Israel, is born in Johannesburg, South Africa.

December 9, 1987 Riots erupt in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in what comes to be recognized as the start of the First Intifada, an Arabic word meaning “awakening.” The immediate cause of...

At the end of the traditional thirty-day mourning period for Israel’s first President Chaim Weizmann, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi is inaugurated as Israel’s second President in a Knesset ceremony.

December 10, 2000 Prime Minister Ehud Barak submits his surprise resignation to President Moshe Katsav amid domestic and international political chaos and calls for a special election for prime minister within 60 days rather than...

A two-day debate on the future of Britain’s presence in Palestine begins in the British House of Commons. Eventually it is decided to terminate the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.

The General Federation of Hebrew and later Israeli Labor, the Histadrut, is founded in Haifa to serve as a neutral, independent trade union to represent all Jewish workers in Palestine.

Israel’s Attorney General Gideon Hausner addresses the three presiding judges and demands the death penalty for Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Nazi’s Final Solution.

December 13, 1949 Prime Minster David Ben-Gurion appoints Reuven Shiloah, a former Jewish Agency official and a Foreign Ministry special operations adviser, to establish and lead the Institute for Collating and Coordinating Intelligence Operations, the...

December 14, 1858 The Ottoman Empire enacts the Tapu Law, which introduces title deed registration in the empire’s Arab provinces. An effort to apply the principles of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, the land...

Aqua International Partners, a San Francisco-based venture fund, purchases a 25% stake in Israeli bottled water company Mayanot Eden (Eden Springs).

December 15, 2016 President-elect Donald Trump announces that he will nominate New York bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Friedman, an adviser to Trump for more than 15 years...

December 16, 1984 Israeli humanitarian and peace activist Abie Nathan arrives in famine-struck Ethiopia with a plane full of relief supplies donated by Jews worldwide. The $300,000 shipment includes equipment to build a refugee camp...

In a Paris meeting, United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger tells Foreign Minister Hammadi that the United States would not negotiate Israel’s existence but could “reduce its size to historical proportions.”

December 17, 1993 Shlomo Goren, the first head of the Military Rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces and Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi from 1973 to 1983, publishes a statement in the newspaper HaTzofeh calling on...

At the urging of Berl Katznelson, a proposal is passed among Zionist leadership creating the Kupat Holim Clalit (General Sick Fund), a still present healthcare organization in Israel.

While attending a Hanukkah Ball arranged by Mevasseret Zion, a Paris Zionist Society, Max Nordau is the victim of an assassination attempt. Nordau, who together with Theodor Herzl had co-founded the World Zionist Organization, escapes unharmed.

December 19, 1936 Avraham B. Yehoshua, one of Israel’s most acclaimed writers, is born in Jerusalem into a Mizrahi/Sephardi family going back at least five generations in the city. His father, Ya’akov, is a historian...

Arturo Toscanini, considered to be one of the finest virtuoso conductors of the 20th century, arrives at Lod airport after being asked to conduct the opening performance of the Palestine Philharmonic.

December 20, 1976 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin fires two National Religious Party members, Religious Affairs Minister Yitzhak Rafael and Welfare Minister Zevulun Hammer, from the Cabinet and sees a third, Interior Minister Yosef Burg, resign,...

Convened under the co-chairmanship of the United States and Soviet Union, the Geneva Middle East Conference is “aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.”

December 21, 1968 Assaf Gavron, a writer and musician, is born in Arad to English immigrants. Gavron spends his childhood in Motza Illit, near Jerusalem. He studies media and communication at Goldsmiths’ College in London...

In a cable to the State Department, US Chargé d’affaires Julius Holmes recounts British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s concerns that “within five years, Israel may be a Communist state.”

December 22, 1938 The Rambam Health Care Campus opens as the British Government Hospital of Haifa and is hailed by the British high commissioner for Palestine, Harold MacMichael, as the “finest medical institution in the...

Following the French Revolution and the August 26, 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, the issue of Jewish rights is debated in the French National Assembly for three days with no conclusion.

December 23, 1907 Avraham Stern, who becomes one of the leading fighters against British rule in Palestine, is born into a Zionist family in Suwalki, Poland. He immigrates to the Land of Israel in 1925...

Israeli teams are sent to France to work in local shipyards. The Mossad established a “front” shipping company to buy the remaining boats and then return them to Israel.

December 24, 1920 The World Zionist Congress in London launches Keren Hayesod (Hebrew for the Foundation Fund, now known in English as the United Israel Appeal) to raise money for the Zionist movement and fulfill...

Born into a family of thirteen children in Mit Abu al-Kum, Egypt, Sadat is a member of the Free Officers movement that overthrew Egypt’s monarchy in 1952. As Egypt’s President, he signs a historic peace agreement with Israel in 1979.

December 25, 1925 Politician and activist Geulah Cohen, the founder of the Tehiya party, is born in Tel Aviv. Cohen becomes involved with political movements in Mandatory Palestine when she is young, and she joins...

One of the most distinguished land purchasers of the Yishuv, Yehoshua Hankin was born in Ukraine in 1864.

December 26, 1968 El Al Flight 253 from Tel Aviv to New York is about to take off after a layover in Athens when two men posing as passengers approach the Boeing 707. One draws...

Nearly 12,000 rockets are fired from the Gaza Strip into Israeli civilian areas over eight years. On December 27, 2008, Israel responds with Operation Cast Lead.

December 27, 1925 Moshe Arens, an Israeli defense minister and foreign minister, is born in Kovno, Lithuania. After moving to Riga, Latvia, when he is a toddler, his family immigrates to New York in 1939....

British General Edmund Allenby appoints Ronald Storrs as Military Governor of Jerusalem.

December 28, 1907 Linguistic scholar Ze’ev Ben-Chaim is born in Mosciska, Galicia, in present-day Ukraine. Ben-Chaim is regarded as one of the greatest scholars of Hebrew and Aramaic. His research revolves around the Samaritans’ language,...

At the Fifth Zionist Congress, after the delegates again vote to table the idea of a national fund, Theodor Herzl delivers an impassioned address to the delegates, urging them to act immediately. The motion passes by a vote of 105 to 82.

December 29, 1946 The underground militant movement Irgun carries out the Night of the Beatings, an effort across Palestine to flog British soldiers in retribution for the lashing of captured Irgun members. Irgun members abduct...

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir dismisses Science Minister Ezer Weizman as a consequence of his contact with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization).

Israel holds the election for the eighth Knesset after a delay caused by the October 1973 war.

December 31, 1898 Eliyahu Dobkin, a signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the founder of the Israel Museum, is born in Bobruysk, Belarus. Dobkin is raised in a religious Zionist family. His father,...