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Stringed White Dresses - An Installation
Paper, Cotton Strings, Ink and Oil on Paper, Wooden Frames
14" x 20" x 2"
Completed in 2013
Inventory # 4353.401.2013.03.002
© Matthew Felix Sun
Unexpected Successes of "Stringed White Dresses - An Installation"
I have been working on a series of paintings with "white dress(es)" motif for quite a while, and recently I extended my effort to include some installation/mixed-media endeavors. My most complete effort in this new field was a work titled "Stringed White Dresses - An Installation", completed in March 2013.
Using some rather square and unyielding origami white dresses, pasted onto twine, who was in turn attached to a wooden frame, I created a subtle contrast between order and disarray, manifested in the disordered formation of the white dresses. To enhance the contrast and drama, I affixed to the frame an ink drawing - mostly in black, with dashes of muted red. When I started to get excited about this project, I recorded part of the creation process on video. Below are the video clip and the finished piece.
Though I was happy with and proud of the resulting work, I didn't pin much hope on this piece, which was really an experiment. Yet, I was curious enough to see other people's reactions to it, so I submitted it for publication. In April, it was included in Pomona Valley Review, Issue 7, published by Cal Poly Pomona.
I was quite encouraged by this acceptance and entered it for the ArtSlant 4th 2013 Showcase competition, in the mixed-media category. Last week, I was informed, and then saw the result online, that it had won the award.
That made it the fourth win in ArtSlant's Showcase competitions. ArtSlant is the #1 Contemporary Art Network with worldwide arts calendars, artitsts, reviews, and online art sales of originals and prints.
I am quite pleased and more than a bit amused by its success. A new direction? Maybe. The "White Dress" series will continue, for sure.
Pomona Valley Review, Issue 7 Published with My Paintings and Installation
Hot on the heels of Four Paintings of Mine Published by Superstition Review's publication of my four paintings a day ago, Pomona Valley Review, Issue 7 was published by California State Polytechnic University Pomona, which also features two Paintings and an installation of mine. The seventh issue of the magazine - mine works can be seen on pages 10, 63 and 76, and page 150, one may read a short bio of mine.
Stringed White Dresses - The Process of a New Installation
Lately, I was inspired and several exciting ideas propelled me to work diligently to complete one installation last Friday. I documented the last stage of the process - painting background, wiring strings to the frames and final assembling, including the paper origami white dresses folded before. Below are several pictures and an edited, composite video of this final dash, all recorded on Friday, 22 March 2013.
YouTube Video: youtu.be/15RfK8_u3F0
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is presenting an "Unauthorized SFMOMA Show", which allows people to upload images of artworks to SFMOMA website, and "all works are immediately accepted, each submission automatically constituting an Unauthorized SFMOMA Solo Show on view at SFMOMA via the same website ( sfmoma.show ). Each exhibition starts when a work is submitted and ends when a new work is submitted."
The last piece I posted in that May day was Stringed White Dresses — an Installation, the very first piece in my continuing series of installation or assemblage employing paper as main medium.
Using some rather square and unyielding origami white dresses, pasted onto twine, which was in turn attached to a wooden frame, I created a subtle contrast between order and disarray, manifested in the rather random formation of the white dresses. To enhance the contrast and drama, I affixed to the frame an abstract ink drawing - mostly in black, with dashes of muted red.
The location for my viewing was in the lobby, overlooking Alexander Calder's 1963 installation, Untitled, which also featuring a series of similar objects on wire or strings.
Lady Gaga
ARTRAVE "THE ARTPOP BALL"
Boardwalk Hall
Atlantic City, NJ
June 28th, 2014
© 2014 LEROE24FOTOS.COM
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED,
BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
Published in January 1894 by The Historical Publishing Company, author J. W. Buel, this book contains 300 photographs of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and the California Midwinter Fair in 1894.
The Columbian Exposition (also known as the Chicago World's Fair) was a world's fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World in 1492. At the core of the fair was an area that quickly became known as the White City for its buildings with white stucco siding and its streets illuminated by electric lights.
The California Midwinter International Exposition—also known as the Midwinter Fair—was held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park from January 27 to July 4, 1894. Following on the heels of the World’s Columbian Exposition, it showcased selected exhibits from Chicago’s spectacular commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s journey to America as well as an impressive number of new exhibits at its specially constructed fairground, Sunset City.
A set of my photos were just published at www.nerve.com . ... go to the site to check it out!! You'll need an account to see all the pictures, but i do have a couple on my flickr here already....but not all.... ;)
The Postcard
A postcard published by the Photochrom Co. Ltd. of London and Tunbridge Wells. On the back of the card they have printed:
'London, the Royal Exchange. with its broad
steps and Corinthian facade makes one of
the most dignified frontages in London.
The columns seen on the right show the
entrance of the Mansion House - the official
residence of the Lord Mayor'.
The card was posted in Hampstead on Thursday the 9th. October 1924 to a recipient who lived in Cologne.
The Photochrom Co. Ltd.
The Photochrom Co. Ltd. of London and Royal Tunbridge Wells originally produced Christmas cards before becoming a major publisher and printer of tourist albums, guide books, and postcards.
These mainly captured worldwide views as real photos, or were printed in black & white, monochrome, and color.
They also published many advertising, comic, silhouette, novelty, panoramic, and notable artist-signed cards in named series as well. The huge number of titles that Photochrom produced may well exceed 40,000.
In 1896 they took over Fussli’s London office established three years earlier, and began publishing similar photo-chromolithographic postcards after securing the exclusive English licence for the Swiss photochrom process.
This technique was used to produce a great number of view-cards of both England and Europe. While they captured the same fine details as the Swiss prints, their colours were much softer and reduced.
Apart from their better known photochroms, they produced their Celesque series of view-cards printed in tricolor.
One of the largest unnamed series that Photochrom produced was of view-cards printed in brown rotogravure. Many of these cards were simply hand coloured with a dominant red and blue, which gives these cards a distinct appearance. They are similar to cards produced in their Photogravure and Velvet Finish Series.
Photochrom postcard series include:
-- Night Series - Line block halftone over a blue tint depicting London.
-- Carbofoto Series - Black & white real photo cards.
-- Sepiatone Series - Sepia real photo cards.
-- Grano Series - View-cards printed in black & white.
-- Exclusive Photo-Color Series - View-cards printed in colour.
-- Duotype Process Series - View-cards printed in two tones.
Ramsay MacDonald
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, on the 9th. October 1924, Ramsay MacDonald advised King George V to dissolve parliament. The King agreed, and new elections were set for the 29th. October.
Soldier Field
Also on that day, Soldier Field opened in Chicago, as Municipal Grant Park Stadium.
Jake Daubert
The day also marked the death at the age of 40 of the American baseball player Jake Daubert,.
Daubert fell ill during a road trip to New York. Against his doctor's advice, he returned to play in his team's final home game of the season. On the 2nd. October, he had an appendectomy performed by Dr. Harry H. Hines, the Reds' team doctor.
Complications from the operation arose, and a blood transfusion did not improve his health. He died in Cincinnati one week after the operation, with the doctor citing the immediate cause of death as "exhaustion, resulting in indigestion".
It was later discovered that Daubert suffered from a hereditary blood disorder called hemolytic spherocytosis, which contributed to his death.
Jake was laid to rest at the Charles Baber Cemetery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He was survived by his wife Gertrude, his son George, and his daughter Louisa. As of 2019, he remains the oldest ballplayer to die while in the majors.
Justin T. Shockley
@jtsfashion
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The Postcard
A postally unused postcard published by the Valentine & Sons Publishing Co. Ltd. of Montreal and Toronto.
They modestly state on the back of the card that they are 'Famous Throughout the World', and that the card is of British manufacture.
Although the card was not posted, someone has written in ink on the back:
"Dear Hilda,
Just a few lines to tell you
that your P.C. album went
forward on Monday last.
Hoping that you will receive
it safely.
I am looking for a letter
from you every day,
E."
Casa Loma
Casa Loma (Spanish for 'Hill House') is a Gothic Revival style mansion and garden in midtown Toronto, that is now a historic house museum and landmark. It was constructed from 1911 to 1914 as a residence for the financier Sir Henry Pellatt. The architect was E. J. Lennox, who designed several other city landmarks. Casa Loma sits at an elevation of 140 metres (460 ft) above sea level.
Due to its unique architectural character in Toronto, Casa Loma has been a popular filming location for movies and television. It is also a popular venue for wedding ceremonies, and Casa Loma can be rented in the evenings after the museum closes to the public.
History of Casa Loma
In 1903, financier Henry Pellatt purchased 25 lots from developers Kertland and Rolf. Pellatt commissioned architect E. J. Lennox to design Casa Loma, with construction beginning in 1911, starting with the massive stables, potting shed and Hunting Lodge (a.k.a. coach-house) a few hundred feet north of the main building.
The Hunting Lodge is a two-storey 4,380-square-foot (407 m2) house with servants' quarters. As soon as the stable complex was completed, Pellatt sold his summer house in Scarborough to his son and moved to the Hunting Lodge.
The stables were used as a construction site for the castle (and also served as the quarters for the male servants), with some of the machinery still remaining in the rooms under the stables.
The house cost about $3.5 million and took 300 workers three years to build. Due to the start of the Great War, construction was halted.
With 98 rooms covering 64,700 square feet (6,011 m2), it was the largest private residence in Canada. Notable amenities included an elevator, an oven large enough to cook an ox, two vertical passages for pipe organs, a central vacuum, two secret passages in Pellatt's ground-floor office, a pool, and a bowling alley in the basement.
Most of the third floor was left unfinished, and today it serves as the Regimental Museum for The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada. Pellatt joined the Regiment as a Rifleman, and rose through the ranks to become the Commanding Officer. He was knighted for his dedication to the Regiment.
During the depression that followed the war, the City of Toronto increased Casa Loma's property taxes from $600 per year to $1,000 a month, and Pellatt, already experiencing financial difficulties, auctioned off $1.5 million in art and $250,000 in furnishings. Pellatt was able to enjoy life in the castle for less than ten years, leaving in 1923.
The city seized Casa Loma in 1924 because of unpaid taxes, and for years, the building was left vacant.
In the late 1920's, investors operated Casa Loma for a short time as a luxury hotel. During Prohibition, it became a popular nightspot for wealthy Americans.
The Orange Blossoms, later known as Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, played there for eight months in 1927–1928. Shortly thereafter, they went on a tour of North America and became a major swing era dance band.
In the 1930's, CFRB broadcaster Claire Wallace spent a night at Casa Loma to gather material for a story about ghosts and supernatural phenomena, and she later broadcast an appeal to save the old building from demolition.
Her broadcast was heard by the vice-president of a local Kiwanis Club, and subsequently Casa Loma was leased in 1937 to the Kiwanis Club of West Toronto, later the Kiwanis Club of Casa Loma (KCCL), which began operating the castle as a tourist destination until 2011.
During World War II, the stables were used to conceal research and production of sonar, and for construction of sonar devices (known as ASDIC) for U-boat detection. The area was closed, behind an 'Under Repairs' sign. The suggestion that the stables were under renovation allowed workers of the secret facility to come and go without suspicion.
From 1997 until 2012, the castle underwent a 15-year, $33-million exterior restoration largely funded by the city, which also created a new board of trustees in 2008, including seven KCCL members and seven city appointees.
The city's renewed management agreement included a stipulation that KCCL would use the castle's net revenues to help pay for upgrades; however, the organization used the fund to cover operating shortfalls instead, and there was only $335,000 in the account by 2011, rather than the $1.5-million originally projected.
As a result, in 2011, the city temporarily resumed management of Casa Loma and began welcoming bids from the private sector in its search for a new operator.
In January 2014, the city entered a new long-term lease with Liberty Entertainment Group, led by CEO Nick Di Donato, which agreed to spend $7.4 million to continue the castle's upgrades. The company's plans also included a fine dining facility. The restaurant, Blueblood Steakhouse, opened in the summer of 2017.
Make sure to go out and pick up the new issue of AP Magazine in your nearby bookstore now! One of the images that I took for Vampires Everywhere was published in it and I love how it came out!
This is a screen shot from a website so please forgive the quality, also thanks to flickr for always over-sharpening!
Big thanks to my assistant Adrian Rivers for always helping out, and to Marcell for providing the bike!
Info:
AB1600 through med octo camera left
2 AB800's behind and on sides for slight rim
Triggered by Cybersyncs
Powered by Vagabond II
Title: "Map of Manitoba, published by authority of the Provincial Government, March 1893". This very scarce folded map measures approx. 24" x 24" and shows every section (square mile unit) of land in the province. Compared to the Rand McNally map of approximately a decade earlier, the Provincial map shows the province with more or less its modern muncipal organization into Rural Municipalities. Although the main map does not make a point of including the disputed part of Northwestern Ontario, it does contain an inset map (not shown) showing Manitoba's position in the North American continent in which a sizeable region north of the Winnipeg and English Rivers (i.e. not including southerly areas such as Rat Portage/Kenora) and extending several hundred miles into what is now Northwestern Ontario is clearly labelled "Manitoba".
This copy of the map folds and includes a glued-on title page that indicates that it was intended for distribution at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, Illinois.
Please check out some of my images from my trip to Mexico last year that are now published on this great website:
www.sacred-destinations.com/mexico/chichen-itza.htm
You can see all of my images from Mexico here: www.flickr.com/photos/ciaochessa/sets/72157594395460626/
The creator of the website, Holly, is a fellow flickrer. You can check out her stream here:
www.flickr.com/photos/sacred_destinations/
:)
I am now published in a newspaper. Last Friday the Arizona Daily Star, the local paper in Tucson, AZ, published an article in the paper and online about a friend of mine who is receiving an award this weekend from the Tohono O'odham tribe for his work to preserve the traditions and cultures of the Maricopa tribe. The journalist did not feel like driving up from Tucson to Phoenix to get any photos so I took some and sent them to her and three were published.
I am honored to be invited by Richard to attend the awards banquet on Saturday. My wife and I will make a weekend of it.
On-line, only the Spanish version of the article had the photographs (but these are the three). If you are interested in the article about Richard you can go to www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/310793.php. If that does not work, go to www.azstarnet.com/ and then in the upper right corner search on Richard Goodridge and the two articles will come up (Spanish and English).
Woo hoo! Just got a few copies of My Midwest Magazine (Midwest Airlines pubication) created by Ink Publishing out of Brooklyn NY. The photo I took of the Art Museum and posted on flickr last fall was found by them via TAGS. I was very surprised when they contacted me and asked permission and how much I would sell them usage of the photo for. So after a bit of conversation we came upon a fair price for publishing my photo. I have had photos published in the Press a number of times but I found that this magazine has a million circulation.
I feel like Grover on Sesame Street. "I am so excited!"
Anyways, back to the viewfinder.
And use your TAGS!
Strobist lighting info: SB800 as key behind white shoot-through umbrella to camera right at 1/4 power (set to have no glare on photo in background,) SB800 to camera left snooted at 1/64th power for fill and highlight. Both on Smith-Victor RS-8 Raven stands. Fired with ebay triggers and camera fired remotely with Nikon ML-L3 ir.
image DSC_1181
-Dan
My photo of the sausage races in Milwaukee was published by Milwaukee Public Radio station WUWM. The photo is in the middle. The original photo can be seen here:
© All Rights Reserved
Please seek my consent to publish it anywhere.
jahangirnagar university, February 2011
Robert Walpole (1781-1856), a descendant of Sir Robert Walpole, first Earl of Oxford, also considered the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, voyaged to the East around 1803 and returned in 1808. Walpole gathered together in a first precious edition (1817) texts and studies mainly on Greek antiquities. Two enriched re-editions followed in 1818 and 1820.
Most of the texts in Walpole's volume were not published elsewhere or independently. This edition includes in addition to Walpole's articles on various subjects (funerary practices, fishing techniques, ancient Greek vases), the following:
Texts by J.B.S. Moritt on the Mani region and by naturalist Dr John Sibthorp on the Mani, Cyprus, Attica and Central Greece (Cithaeron, Livadeia, Delphi, Hosios Loukas, etc.) as well as on the medicinal flora of the land, olive groves in Zacynthos and various subjects of everyday life (local products, fauna, customs).
An article by Dr P. Hunt on Troy and Assos, and a most interesting text by the same author on Mount Athos and the monastery libraries there.
A letter by J.D. Carlyle and a study by H. Raikes on Lake Copais, the sinkholes, the Euripus Strait, Rhamnus and the Coryceion Cave.
A study by Colonel Squire on the military architecture of the ancient Greeks and on the Plain of Marathon, the Isthmus of Corinth and the antiquities of Boeotia and Phocis.
An article by Mr Davison on the pyramids of Egypt, the catacombs in Alexandria, contemporary customs and practices in Egypt, as well as Captain Light's account of his journey to Nubia.
The Earl of Aberdeen's most interesting text on the mines of Laurion and ancient coinage, and his article on the bas-reliefs from Amyclae.
Studies by J. Hawkins on the topography of Athens, based on information provided by French consul L. Fauvel, and Walpole's own articles on the Vale of Tempe and the Euripus.
The edition also includes a panoramic view of Athens by W. Haygarth, a map of Troy and commentaries on ancient inscriptions. Walpole's pioneering idea of collecting in one volume a number of small chronicles and essays which could not have been published individually, preserved and transmitted information that would otherwise have remained scattered, as family heirlooms or as manuscripts in private collections.
Written by Ioli Vingopoulou
Büyük Britanya'nın ilk başbakanı sayılan Birinci Oxford kontu Sir Robert Walpole'un soyundan gelen Robert Walpole (1781-1856) 1803 yılı civarında başladığı Doğu yolculuğundan 1808 yılında döner. 1817'de yayınladığı ve yunan antik dönem kalıntıları üzerine yazdığı metinleri ve çalışmaları içeren üstün değerli ilk kitabını iki tane daha (1818,1820) zenginleştirilmiş baskı izler. Walpole'un kitabında okuduğumuz yazıların çoğu başka hiçbir yerde, kitap yada müstakil olarak yayınlanmış değil. Bu yayında, Walpole'un ölü gömme gelenekleri, balıkçılık teknikleri, antik yunan seramik sanatı gibi değişik konular etrafında yazdığı makaleler dışında aşağıda belirtilen yazılar da yer almakta:
- J.B.S. Morritt'in Mani (Manya) yöresi hakkında ve doğa bilimci Dr. John Sibthorp'un Mani, Kıbrıs, Attika ve Rumeli'nin Kitheron, Levadya, Delfi, Aziz Luka Manastırı ve başka yerler hakkındaki metinleri, ayrıca ülkenin şifa otları, Zante adası zeytinleri ve günlük yaşama ilişkin, ürünler, hayvanlar, örf ve adetler gibi konuları işleyen metinler.
- Dr. Ph. Hunt'ın Truva ve Assos hakkında ve gine onun Aynaroz manastırları ve kütüphaneleri hakkındaki son derece ilginç metinleri.
- Kopais gölü, su çukurları, Eğriboz, Ramnus ve Parnassos dağındaki Korykion mağarası hakkında J.D. Carlyle'in bir mektubu ve H. Raikes'in araştırması.
- Eski Yunanlıların askeri mimarisi, Maraton ovası, Korint kanalı ve Bœotia ile Fokis yörelerinin antik kalıntıları hakkında Albay Squire'ın çalışması.
- Mr. Davison tarafından kaleme alınmış, Mısır piramitleri, İskenderiye katakombları, çağdaş Mısır halkının örf ve adetleri ve Captain Light'ın Nubiye'ye yolculuğunun vakayinamesini içeren makale.
- Earl of Aberdeen'in Lavrion maden ocakları ve eski nümismatik hakkında ve gine kendisinin yazdığı Amykles (Sparta)'deki mermer kabartmalarla ilgili son derece ilginç makaleler.
- J. Hawkins'in, Fransız konsolosu L. Fauvel'in verdiği bilgilere dayanan Atina topoğrafyasıyla ilgili bir çalışma.
- Walpole'un Tempi ve Eğriboz üzerine makaleleri.
Kitapta ayrıca W. Haygarth'ın elinden Atina'nın panoramik bir görünümü, Truva haritası ve antik yazıtlarla ilgili yorumlar yer alıyor.
Walpole'un, müstakil bir yayın oluşturamayacak nitelikte olan tüm bu küçük vakayiname ve makaleleri tek bir ciltte bir araya getirmek gibi zamanında ilerici olan bu fikri sayesinde, aksi taktirde büyük bir olasılıkla ailevi bırakıtlar olarak yada özel kitaplıklarda el yazması halinde oraya buraya savrulacak olan birçok bilgi korunup sonraki nesillere devredildi.
Yazan: İoli Vingopoulou
This photograph was published in the Illustrated Chronicle on the 6th of September 1915.
During the Great War the Illustrated Chronicle published photographs of soldiers and sailors from Newcastle and the North East of England, which had been in the news. The photographs were sent in by relatives and give us a glimpse into the past.
The physical collection held by Newcastle Libraries comprises bound volumes of the newspaper from 1910 to 1925. We are keen to find out more about the people in the photographs. If you recognise anyone in the images and have any stories and information to add please comment below.
Copies of this photograph may be ordered from us, for more information see: www.newcastle.gov.uk/tlt Please make a note of the image reference number above to help speed up your order.
Published in January 1894 by The Historical Publishing Company, author J. W. Buel, this book contains 300 photographs of every aspect of the fair.
The World's Fair: Columbian Exposition (also known as the Chicago World's Fair) was a world's fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World in 1492. At the core of the fair was an area that quickly became known as the White City for its buildings with white stucco siding and its streets illuminated by electric lights.
On this Thursday, December 26th, 2024, we see Hazzard Range Bulletin Publisher Brittany Romero and Editor/Senior Reporter Omar Grant talking with Hazzard Range County Sheriff’s Office School Resource Sergeant Blake Cooper who is working patrol with the school district on Winter/Christmas break, Blake on his way back to the unit after eating lunch at Law and Order Cafe ask how the move is going. Brittany tells him that “ 120 years of items is more than you think “
The Hazzard Range Bulletin is published once a week and has been owned by Romeros since 1919, but dates back to 1899. The Bulletin has only been going by this name since March of this year, see between 1899 and Feb 2024 it was called The Herald.
One of the few big changes Brittany Romero and her partner Lily did after taking over the paper from Lauretta( Lily's mother ) in the fall of 2023 The first major change was changing the name back to what it was called from 1889 to 1899 when its name was changed by Brittany’s great, great grandfather after he bought Bulletin and Mill newspapers and renamed them the Herald after a city he was from on the East Coast paper. They chose Christmas Week to move from the old location at the corner of Second St and Old Mexico Ave ( NM 308 ) which was its home since 1920. Its new home is in the Back Goat Mining Company Building.
The Back Goat Mining Company Building that they bought in March of this year. It was opened in 1890 as the headquarters for The Back Goat Mining Company. In 1911 the building was sold to Henry Williams who in the winter of 1912 was remodeling it into one of the grandest hotels in the state. Well, the fire and flood of late Feb 1912 dashed his plans, He survived, but most of his family did not.
He sold the building to the county and left the state. The county used it until March 1940, when The Works Progress Administration ( WPA ) finished the new courthouse/county offices, it was then sold and reopened by Oct 1941 only a few short months before the Hazzard Range County and the whole USA entered WW2. The Hotel did great business through the 1940s and 1950s, but with mines closing in the 1950s and Interstate 25 bypassing the county in the mid-1960s the Hotel closed. In the 1970s-1990s Rio Grande Mid Bank leased the first floor and the two other floors were unused. In 2000 the bank was bought up by a chain and a new building was built. It was bought by Billy Tack owner of Tack Properties in 2019, but COVID-19 dashed his hopes to turn it into apartments. ,
After remodeling the first floor Romero’s next step is remodeling the next two floors into apartments so maybe Bill’s plan will come true after all, but 4 apartments will add more issues to the limited downtown parking that has plagued downtown Sparta ever since the arrival of automobiles
One of the other changes Romero’s made was buying KRTK radio buying KRTK radio off of G.D. Enterprise in Jan of this year that move happens in March 2025, but luckily it’s right next door so the move won’t be as far.
G.D. Enterprise is owned by George Dallas “G.D. “ Born in 1941 to the late Thomas and Mary Dallas. He took over as president of Dallas Land Company in 1966 age 25, after his father died in a car crash. In 1967 G.D changed the name of the company to G.D. Enterprises. G.D. Enterprises owns many properties and businesses in the county He was elected to the Hazzard Range County Commission in 1990 and reelected 7 more times before not seeking re-election in 2022, He is married to his wife Lucy of 53 years ( married 1971 ) they have three kids Katy was born in 1972, Charlie 1976 -2000 and Clint was Born in 1988 he is a Deputy sheriff and was promoted to Investigator in Sept 2023.
Katy Dallas is the Manager of KRTK Radio. Charlie lost his battle with drug addiction in 2000
On this Thursday, December 26th, 2024, we see Hazzard Range Bulletin Publisher Brittany Romero and Editor/Senior Reporter Omar Grant talking with Hazzard Range County Sheriff’s Office School Resource Sergeant Blake Cooper who is working patrol with the school district on Winter/Christmas break, Blake on his way back to the unit after eating lunch at Law and Order Cafe ask how the move is going. Brittany tells him that “ 120 years of items is more than you think “ at the old location on the corner of 1st and Old Mexico Ave ( NM 308 ) which was its home since 1920. Its new home is in the Back Goat Mining Company Building.
The scene takes place in Sparta; the county seat. Law and Order Cafe is owned by retired Sheriff’s Lieutenant Joe Young ( 1973 to 2001 ) and his wife retired County Probate Judge Nancy ( 2002 to 2006 )
President Bongo & The Emotional Carpenters
Sonar Reykjavik
February 2016
Reykjavik, Island
© 2016 LEROE24FOTOS.COM
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED,
BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
A postcard published by the Hart Publishing Co. Ltd. of London E.C.
It was posted on Monday the 12th. August 1912 to:
Mrs. N.F. Fawles,
2, Alstone Villas,
Gloucester Road,
Cheltenham
There is a message on the back of the card, but it is not legible.
Scarborough
Scarborough is a town on the North Sea coast of North Yorkshire. The town lies between 10–230 feet (3–70 m) above sea level, rising steeply northward and westward from the harbour on to limestone cliffs. The older part of the town lies around the harbour, and is protected by a rocky headland.
With a population of just over 61,000, Scarborough is the largest holiday resort on the Yorkshire coast. The town has fishing and service industries, including a growing digital and creative economy, as well as being a tourist destination. People who live in the town are known as Scarborians.
The Development of Scarborough as a Resort
In 1626, Mrs Thomasin Farrer discovered a stream of acidic water running from one of the cliffs to the south of the town. This gave birth to Scarborough Spa, and Dr. Robert Wittie's book about the spa waters published in 1660 attracted a flood of visitors to the town.
Scarborough Spa became Britain's first seaside resort, though the first rolling bathing machines were not noted on the sands until 1735. It was a popular getaway destination for the wealthy of London.
The coming of the Scarborough-York railway in 1845 increased the tide of visitors. Scarborough railway station claims to have the world's longest platform seat. From the 1880's until the First World War, Scarborough was one of the regular destinations for The Bass Excursions, when fifteen trains would take between 8,000 and 9,000 employees of Bass's Burton brewery on an annual trip to the seaside.
The Grand Hotel
When the Grand Hotel (shown in the photograph) was completed in 1867, it was one of the largest hotels in the world, and one of the first giant purpose-built hotels in Europe.
Four towers represent the seasons, 12 floors represent the months, 52 chimneys represent the weeks, and originally 365 bedrooms represented the days of the year. A blue plaque outside marks where the novelist Anne Brontë died in 1849. She was buried in the graveyard of St. Mary's Church by the castle.
Maritime Events Associated With Scarborough
During the Great War, the town was bombarded by German warships. Scarborough Pier Lighthouse, built in 1806, was damaged in the attack.
In 1929 the steam drifter Ascendent caught a 560-pound (250 kg) tunny (Atlantic bluefin tuna), and a Scarborough showman awarded the crew 50 shillings so he could exhibit it as a tourist attraction.
Big-game tunny fishing off Scarborough effectively started in 1930 when Lawrie Mitchell-Henry landed a tunny caught on rod and line weighing 560 pounds (250 kg).
A gentlemen's club, the British Tunny Club, was founded in 1933, and set up its headquarters in the town at the place which is now a restaurant with the same name.
Sir Edward Peel landed a world-record tunny of 798 pounds (362 kg), capturing the record by 40 pounds (18.1 kg) from one caught off Nova Scotia by American champion Zane Grey. The British record, which still stands, is for a fish weighing 851 pounds (386 kg) caught off Scarborough in 1933 by Lawrie Mitchell-Henry.
On the 5th. June 1993 Scarborough made headlines around the world when a landslip caused part of the Holbeck Hall Hotel, along with its gardens, to fall into the sea.
Although the slip was shored up with rocks and the land has long since grassed over, evidence of the cliff's collapse remains clearly visible from The Esplanade, near Shuttleworth Gardens.
The Keystone Cops
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, on the 12th. August 1912, Keystone Studios was formed by filmmaker Mack Sennett, producing comedies, most notably those of the Keystone Cops.
SIng Sing Executions
Also on that day, a record seven convicts were put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing, the New York penitentiary at Ossining, New York, in a little more than an hour.
The first man was executed at 5:09 am, and the last at 6:14 am.
Five were Italian-Americans who had burgled a house at Griffin's Corners, New York in November, during which a sixth man, Santo Zanzara, had stabbed an occupant to death. Zanzara had been executed earlier, and the other five were put to death as accessories.
Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Sing Sing Correctional Facility, formerly Ossining Correctional Facility, is a maximum-security prison operated by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in the village of Ossining, New York.
It is about 30 miles (48 km) north of New York City on the east bank of the Hudson River. It holds about 1,700 inmates and housed the execution chamber for the State of New York until the abolition of capital punishment in New York in 1977.
The name "Sing Sing" was derived from the Sintsink Native American tribe from whom the land was purchased in 1685, and was formerly the name of the village. In 1970, the prison's name was changed to the Ossining Correctional Facility, but it reverted to its original name in 1985. There are plans to convert the original 1825 cell block into a museum.
Sing Sing - The Early Years
Sing Sing was the fifth prison constructed by New York state authorities. In 1824, the New York Legislature gave Elam Lynds, warden of Auburn Prison and a former United States Army captain, the task of constructing a new, more modern prison.
Lynds spent months researching possible locations for the prison, considering Staten Island, the Bronx, and Silver Mine Farm, an area in the town of Mount Pleasant on the banks of the Hudson River.
By May 1824, Lynds had decided to build a prison on Mount Pleasant, near (and thus named after) a small village in Westchester County named Sing Sing, whose name came from the Wappinger (Native American) words sinck sinck which translates to 'stone upon stone'.
In March 1825, the legislature appropriated $20,100 to purchase the 130-acre (0.53 km2) site, and the project received the official stamp of approval. Lynds selected 100 inmates from the Auburn prison for transfer and had them transported by barge via the Erie Canal and down the Hudson River to freighters.
On their arrival on the 14th. May 1825, the site was without a place to receive them or a wall to enclose them. Temporary barracks, a cook house, carpenter and blacksmith's shops were rushed to completion.
When Sing Sing was opened in 1826, it was considered a model prison because it turned a profit for the state. By October 1828, Sing Sing was completed. Lynds employed the Auburn system, which imposed absolute silence on the prisoners; the system was enforced by whipping and other punishments.
John Luckey, the prison chaplain around 1843, reported Lynds' actions in running the prison to New York Governor William H. Seward and the president of the Board of Inspectors, John Edmonds, in order to have Lynds removed. Luckey also created a religious library for the prison, with the purpose of teaching correct moral principles.
In 1844, the New York Prison Association was inaugurated in order to monitor state prison administration. The Association was made up of reformers interested in the rehabilitation of prisoners through humane treatment.
Eliza Farnham obtained a position in charge of the women's ward at Sing Sing largely on the recommendation of these reformers. She overturned the strictly silent practice in prison, and introduced social engagement to shift concern more toward the future instead of dwelling on the criminal past.
She included novels by Charles Dickens in Luckey's religious library, novels of which the chaplain did not approve. This was the first documented expansion of the prison library to include moral teachings from secular literature.
Sing Sing in the 20th. Century
Warden T. M. Osborne
Thomas Mott Osborne's tenure as warden of Sing Sing was brief but dramatic. Osborne arrived in 1914 with a reputation as a radical prison reformer. His report of a week-long incognito stay inside New York's Auburn Prison indicted traditional prison administration in merciless detail.
During his time in Sing Sing he wrote his book 'Society and Prisons: Some Suggestions for a New Penology', which influenced the discussion of prison reform and contributed to a change in societal perceptions of incarcerated individuals.
Prisoners who had bribed officers and intimidated other inmates lost their privileges under Osborne's regime. One of them conspired with powerful political allies to destroy Osborne's reputation, even succeeding in getting him indicted for a variety of crimes and maladministration. After Osborne triumphed in court, his return to Sing Sing was a cause for wild celebration by the inmates.
Warden Lewis Lawes
Another notable warden was Lewis Lawes. He was offered the position of warden in 1919, accepted in January 1920, and remained for 21 years as Sing Sing's warden.
While he was warden, Lawes brought about reforms, and turned what was described as an "old hellhole" into a modern prison with sports teams, educational programs, new methods of discipline, and more.
Several new buildings were constructed during the years that Lawes was warden. Lawes retired in 1941, and died six years later.
Sing Sing in WWII And After
In 1943, the old cellblock was closed and the metal bars and doors were donated to the war effort.
In 1989, the institution was accredited for the first time by the American Correctional Association, which established a set of national standards by which it judged every correctional facility.
As of 2019, Sing Sing houses approximately 1,500 inmates, employs about 900 people, and has hosted over 5,000 visitors per month.
The original 1825 cell block is no longer used, and in 2002 plans were announced to turn it into a museum.
In April 2011 there were talks of closing the prison in order to take advantage of its valuable real estate.
Executions at Sing Sing
In total, 614 men and women were executed by electric chair at Sing Sing until the abolition of the death penalty in 1972.
After a series of escapes from death row, a new Death House was built in 1920 and began executions in 1922.
High profile executions in Sing Sing's electric chair, nicknamed "Old Sparky", include Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on the 19th. June 1953, for espionage for the Soviet Union on nuclear weapon research; and Gerhard Puff on the 12th. August 1954, for the murder of an FBI agent.
The last person executed in New York state was Eddie Lee Mays, for murder, on the 15th. August 1963.
In 1972, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty was unconstitutional if its application was inconsistent and arbitrary.
This led to a temporary de facto nationwide moratorium (executions resumed in other states in 1977, and the death penalty was reinstated and abolished in New York in various forms over subsequent years), but the electric chair at Sing Sing remained.
In the early 1970's, the electric chair was moved to Green Haven Correctional Facility in working condition, but was never used again.
The Sing Sing Football Team
In 1931, new prison reforms permitted Sing Sing State Penitentiary prisoners to partake in recreation opportunities. The baseball and football teams, and the vaudeville presentations and concerts, were funded through revenue from paid attendance.
Tim Mara, the owner of the New York Giants, sponsored the Sing Sing Black Sheep, Sing Sing's football team. Mara provided equipment and uniforms and players to tutor them in fundamentals. He helped coach them the first season.
All the Black Sheep games were "home" games, played at Lawes Stadium, named for Warden Lewis E. Lawes. In 1935, the starting quarterback and two other starters escaped the morning before a game.
Alabama Pitts was their starting quarterback and star for the first four seasons, but then finished his sentence. Upon release, Alabama Pitts played for the Philadelphia Eagles in 1935.
In 1932, "graduate" Jumbo Morano was signed by the Giants and played for the Paterson Nighthawks of the Eastern Football League.
In 1934, State Commissioner of Correction, Walter N. Thayer banned the advertising of activities at the prison, including football games. On the 19th. November 1936, a new rule banned ticket sales. No revenues would be derived from show and sports event ticketing.
These funds had been paying for disbursements to prisoners' families, especially the kin of those executed, and for equipment and coaches' salaries. With this new edict, the season ended and prisoners were no longer allowed to play football outside Sing Sing.
Plans for a Museum at Sing Sing
Plans to turn a portion of Sing Sing into a museum date back to 2002, when local officials sought to turn the old powerhouse into the museum, linked by a tunnel to a retired cell block, for $5 million.
In 2007, the village of Ossining applied for $12.5 million in federal money for the project, at the time expected to cost $14 million. The proposed museum would display the Sing Sing story as it unfolded over time.
Sing Sing's Contribution to American English
The expression "up the river" to describe someone in prison or heading to prison derives from the practice of sentencing people convicted in New York City to serve their terms in Sing Sing, which is located up the Hudson River from the city. The slang expression dates from 1891.
Published via my blog (www.travishale.com) @ bit.ly/1FQsHCa, visit my blog for more information and images.
Copyright Horlack eb.aquario.passion. Reproduction et utilisation interdite. Tous droits reserves. 2017-07-19
Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-N Auto 24mm f2.8 (1970)
Film: Rollei P&R 640 @ box speed
Kjemi: Rodinal (1:25 / 13:30 min. @ 20°C)
Sunday 24 March 2024: During the years when I had UN-affiliated assignments in the occupied West Bank (2007-2011), this was a sign that I saw time and time again; spraypainted all over Palestinian shops in Hebron. This is a sign of hate - this is the sign of the US Jewish Defense League and the American-born Kach organization.
So today, I will be presenting some excerpts from ‘The False Prophet’, a book by investigative journalist Robert I. Friedman (1950-2002) published in 1990. In his book, Friedman paints a disturbing portrait of American-born mad 'rabbi' Meir Kahane (1932-1990), his life and deeds, his followers and his religious, racist, fascist ideology - Kahanism.
In today's Israel, Kahane's views and ideology have become mainstream and is represented by several political parties in the Israeli government like Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and the Religious Zionist Party (Tkuma), led by extremist settlers turned politicians like Minister of Security Itamar Ben-Gvir (b. 1976) - the Heinrich Himmler of Israel, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (b. 1980) - the Arthur Seyss-Inquart of Israel; and Minister of Settlements Orit Strook (b. 1960) - truly a real religious nut-job who owes her ministry to her incessant extremism ever since the days of Yamit in in occupied Egypt to her long-time jewish supremacist activities in Hebron / Al-Khalil in the occupied West Bank.
[Addendum: After Orit Strook's daughter Shoshana Strook (d. 2026) made a criminal complaint against her parents for sexually abusing her as a child in 2025, Shoshana was found dead in March 2026.]
PROLOGUE - THE FALSE PROPHET
I first met Rabbi Meir Kahane in December 1979, at his Jerusalem headquarters, a cramped, airless office in an upper-class section of the city. He calls it the Museum of the Potential Holocaust. The “museum” was filled with Nazi flags and anti-Semitic literature that he had clipped from American hate-group publications and pasted on display boards. At the time, Kahane was a political pariah. His followers in Israel consisted of no more than a few dozen teenagers who had belonged to the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in America. “Numbers aren’t important,” Kahane told me. “How many Maccabees fought the Greeks?”
While Kahane admitted that his movement in Israel was small, he said that it was growing—especially in Kiryat Arba, the sprawling, ultranationalist Jewish settlement on the West Bank, where he kept a second home, and in the Sephardic slums of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where he was fast becoming a folk hero to youth who were attracted to his fiercely-held, anti-establishment views, as well as to his uncompromising hatred of the Arabs.
It struck me on that first encounter that Kahane was a man obsessed with sex and violence. He chattered incessantly about Arab men sleeping with Jewish women. He claimed, for instance, that English-speaking Arab men often tried to pass themselves off as Jews to unsuspecting American Jewish women studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He had recently spent an entire day, he told me, plastering the university cafeteria and dormitories with flyers that warned coeds to check their dates’ identity cards before jumping into bed with them.
As far as Kahane was concerned, no Jew in Israel, man, woman, or child, was safe as long as there was a single Arab in the country. Just that morning, he told me, he had read a report in the Hebrew press about a Jew who had been pulled from a taxicab and beaten up by a gang of West Bank Arabs. He confided that he would stage a “reprisal mission” on the guilty Arabs’ village the next day. He invited me to come along.
There were ten of Kahane’s followers on the “mission”—three Israelis of Moroccan origin, two recent Russian immigrants, and five Americans; most were in their late teens or early twenties. “We are going to pay the Arabs back for beating up a Jew here yesterday,” said twenty-eight-year-old, Brooklyn-born Chaim Shimon, as Kahane deftly maneuvered his yellow Ford van through Jerusalem traffic. “Arabs often attack Jews in Israel,” he continued, “but Jews are afraid to fight back. The Israeli superman is a media myth. The country needs us to defend them.”
The van stopped in front of an Israeli police roadblock outside Beit Safafa, a prosperous Arab suburb near East Jerusalem. Apparently, the police had been tipped off to Kahane’s plan.
“Go and do what you have to do,” Kahane ordered the young men in the van as he jumped from the driver’s seat. “I’ll deal with this!”
Kahane strode toward the knot of police in riot gear with a clear look of manifest destiny in his eyes. Dressed in a sun-faded green army parka, gray pants, and combat boots, with a yarmulke pinned to his thinning black hair, he was a vision of a modern-day warrior-priest ready for battle. While Kahane engaged the police in a noisy conversation, his “boys” drove through the suburb to look for Arab prey.
After a short drive, the burly young Moroccan driver spotted a lone Arab. The man was perhaps fifty. His face was gnarled and stained copperbrown from years in the sun. The Jews attacked with their fists so swiftly that his black eyes were quiet and unbelieving as he was pummeled to the ground. The group returned quickly to the van.
“It served the bastard right!” Shimon sneered as we drove away. Bearded and wearing a yarmulke, Shimon recalled that he had been riding his bike through Prospect Park in Brooklyn several years earlier when he was jumped by a gang of young Blacks. He was attacked, he said, solely because he was a Jew. A few days later he joined the JDL.
“I wanted to feel proud and unafraid,” he told me. “I had heard of Rabbi Kahane and had read some of his work. I decided to get involved with the JDL—like 'riding shotgun’ in predominantly Black neighborhoods to protect the remaining old Jews. But anti-Semitism in America got too intense. I came to Israel to be with the rabbi and to fulfill the Torah’s commandments.”
The van lurched as it turned the corner. Although it was winter the sun was warm. The driver wound down the window and called out to a group of middle-aged Arab workers lounging against the peeling, whitewashed wall of a cafe.
‘‘Hey, Mohammed,” he barked in Arabic. “I’m horny! Where are all your Arab whores?”
Laughter flickered through the van.
“Arabs try to sleep with Jewish women whenever they can,” Shimon said. “Like Eldridge Cleaver (1935-1998) said in Soul On Ice, ‘Sleeping with a white woman is the ultimate revolutionary act.’ ”
We drove full circle. Kahane was still at the roadblock arguing with the police. We stopped. The rabbi, who was then forty-seven, and small and thin with a darkly handsome face, stepped into the front seat and sat like a stone icon. As we climbed the highway on our way back to Jerusalem, the only sound in the van was the grinding of gears.
I visited Kahane again the next day, curious to discover if he had read a story in the morning’s newspapers that said the Jew who had been pulled from the cab and beaten up, the one they had staged their assault for, had not been attacked by Arabs, as previously reported, but was actually the victim of a Jewish gangland assault.
Kahane’s eyes twitched. He could barely control what was once a serious childhood stutter.
“I told them to stay in the van and to stay out of trouble,” he muttered. “But some of them are a little crazy. It’s important to have crazies in a mass movement, though. They’ll do anything for you, especially when you’re the first to cross the barricades.”
“But the Arabs were innocent,” I pointed out.
The rabbi was not impressed.
“This time the Arabs didn’t do it,’’ he growled. “But there are hundreds of unreported incidents of Arabs attacking and sexually molesting Jews. And who do you think plants bombs here—the American Boy Scouts? I don’t want to live in a state where I have to worry about being blown up in the back of a bus.’’
“I don’t blame the Arabs for hating us,’’ the rabbi continued, warming to his subject. “This was their land—once! And no matter what the Israeli Left says, you can’t buy Arab love with indoor toilets and good health care. Israeli Arabs and West Bank Arabs identify with the PLO. And they multiply like rabbits. At their rate of growth they will take over the Knesset in twenty-five years. I am not prepared to sacrifice Zionism to democracy. There is only one solution: the Arabs must leave Israel!’’
I squirmed in my seat.
“Of course it’s not nice. Did I say it’s nice? Is it nice when Israel bombs the PLO in Lebanon and kills women and children? We have smart bombs, not nice bombs.”
“How would you implement these ideas if you were the prime minister of Israel?” I asked.
“I’d go to the Arabs and tell them to leave,” he replied. “I’d promise generous compensation. If they refused, I’d forcibly move them out.”
“How could you do that?” I asked. “Midnight deportations in cattle cars?”
“Yes!” he declared.
Thus spoke Meir Kahane—the rabbi who took the concept of the nice Jewish boy and turned it on its head.
[…]
CHAPTER NINE - THE JEWISH IDEA
Meir Kahane had been subject to wild mood swings and crippling bouts of depression since childhood. Now, having been simultaneously rejected by the Israeli electorate and by key JDL members in America, he suffered what some of his closest supporters described as a nervous breakdown. But after briefly disappearing from public view, Kahane reemerged more determined than ever to build a viable political party in Israel.
His manic energy combined with his wounded pride never let him rest. He woke each morning at 4 a.m. to study Torah, prayed and studied again. Then he would go to his office at the Museum of the Potential Holocaust in Jerusalem, returning home around 10 p.m. He was seldom in bed before midnight. “I don’t think he even dreamed at night,” recalled Matt Liebowitz, a young American-born Kach supporter. “Everything he did was geared toward achieving his vision. I think he had such total control over his thoughts that he could even control his subconscious. He believed the Apocalypse was coming, so he was willing to do desperate things.”
Kahane was swept up in a kind of Messianic passion. Jewish destiny, he believed more than ever, was in his hands. Words like apocalypse, redemption, and Messiah took over his political vocabulary. He rationalized his Knesset defeat on the grounds that Jews did not yet understand that he was working from a divine plan. While the JDL in America was supposed to be concerned with helping Jews achieve greater temporal power, in Israel it was rapidly evolving into a fundamentalist cult with Kahane—like some medieval kabbalist—twisting and turning the Torah to explain why expelling the Arabs would usher in the Messiah.
Kahane soon discovered that he did not have a monopoly on fundamentalist fervor. As he turned increasingly to Jewish mysticism for salvation, an earthquake on the Israeli Right shattered the political spectrum. The upheaval was set off by Gush Emunim (the Bloc of Faithful)—a mystical-Messianic movement that would not only radically transform Israeli politics, but would have a profound impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict as well.
[Note: The present-day successor to the Gush Emunim settlement movement goes by the name Nahala and was founded by Daniella Weiss (b. 1945) together with Moshe Levinger (1935-2015) in 2005. You can see Daniella Weiss' presentation of the Nahala settler movement from 2015 on YouTube]
Gush Emunim was based on the teachings of Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982), then the eighty-year-old head of Yeshiva Mercaz Harav in Jerusalem. The son of Rav Avraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), founder of modern Religious Zionism and the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, he had devoted his life to preserving and expounding his father’s teachings—foremost among them that the Jewish return to Israel and the flowering of the land signify the beginning of the Messianic Age. Contending that the Occupied Territories are part of the “holy inheritance” of lands given by God to the Jews as recorded in the Bible, Kook declared that they must be secured and defended at any cost.
Rav Kook and his religious school became the nucleus of Gush Emunim, which was born in 1974 following the Yom Kippur War. It was organized by seven middle-aged students from Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav who sought to Judaize the West Bank.
Jacob Levine, then a forty-one-year-old, soft-spoken, unemployed Talmud student, and one of the movement’s early leaders, believed Zionism had become sterile and self-destructive during the years of Labor Party rule. Gush Emunim, he said, was created as an antidote.
He explained: “There was a lack of clarity in Israel after the ’73 war. The dominant spirit was one of depression. The Labor Party and the country didn’t know what to do about the Arab territories. We stepped into the breach.”
So Gush Emunim began what it regarded as its holy crusade to settle and build up Judea and Samaria, the land of the ancient Hebrews now known as the West Bank. Infused with a selfless dedication and an almost cosmic awareness of self and mission similar to Israel’s early pioneers, Gush Emunim captured the imagination of many war weary Israelis.
Jaded young Sabras who were born long after the pioneering ethos had died and who had never before identified with political Zionism, émigrés from the corrupt and disintegrating Labor Party who were looking for a more meaningful ideology and lifestyle, and Orthodox Jews who decided to keep the promise flocked to Gush Emunim. A handful of new immigrants, mostly Russian and American, also joined the fold. Though Gush Emunim viewed Arabs as intruders in the land of Israel, it had no systematic program to drive them out. Instead, Gush leaders stated that Arabs who were willing to live without political rights in the Jewish state would enjoy a protected minority status similar to the second-class status that Jews historically held in Islamic countries.
Gush Emunim’s West Bank settlement program grew slowly during the years the Labor Party was in power. Labor’s policy was to build settlements in the Jordan Valley for security purposes, while avoiding the occupied areas largely populated by Arabs—these, according to such leaders as Yigal Allon (1918-1980), were to be held as bargaining chips in future peace talks. But as early as 1970, a bitterly divided Labor government allowed a group of ultranationalist Orthodox Jews led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger (1935-2015) to build Kiryat Arba on a hilltop overlooking Hebron, the site of King David’s first throne, and home to 78,000 fiercely nationalist Palestinian Arabs.
Most of the Gush Emunim’s attempts to settle the West Bank during the Labor government era were stopped by the army. Gush members would arrive at a site in a caravan of trailers in the middle of the night without government permission. When the army came to expel the settlers—which it almost invariably did—the right-wing parties would charge the Labor government with betrayal of Israel and compare it to the British Mandate government before Jewish independence. Either way Gush Emunim bested the Labor government.
But when Labor was voted out of office in 1977, and Likud’s Menachem Begin (1913-1992) became prime minister, he organized a right-wing coalition government that was strongly influenced by Gush Emunim. Immediately after his election, Begin journeyed to Elon Moreh, a settlement near Nablus that Gush Emunim had tried and failed seven times to settle extralegally before the Labor government finally gave in. Holding a Torah scroll aloft, Begin vowed that he would establish “many more Elon Morehs.”
Begin, the former commander of the Irgun, which had called for a Jewish state on both banks of the River Jordan, was true to his word. Between 1977 and 1984, successive Likud governments invested more than $1 billion in Jewish West Bank settlements—a huge sum for an economically hard-pressed nation that depends on more than $3 billion in annual aid from America. Today, Gush Emunim is the spearhead of Israel’s West Bank settlement program, which totals more than 150 settlements comprising some 75,000 settlers.
[Note: Number of illegal Israeli settlers in 2024 is more than 800,000!]
Gush Emunim currently boasts important enclaves of support in the right-wing Likud and Tehiya parties, as well as in several of the religious parties. Among its most potent supporters is Ariel Sharon (1928-2014), who through a Gush Emunim real estate front, purchased an apartment in the Muslim quarter of East Jerusalem’s Old Walled City. Sharon moved into the apartment on the first day of Passover in 1988, sparking an Arab riot.
Gush Emunim had everything that Kahane and his movement lacked, observed Professor Ehud Sprinzak, an expert on extremist groups at Hebrew University. It was a cohesive cultural and social entity; it had a skillful, yet modest, collective leadership, as well as an effective membership. A spiritual movement led by the scion of the founder of religious Zionism, Gush Emunim was fully backed by Israel’s leading rabbinical authorities in addition to being very Israeli in character. In contrast to the rather fringe-like nature of Kahane’s mostly American-born followers, Gush Emunim attracted thousands of well-educated, middle-class supporters and settlers, whose outposts in Judea and Samaria soon obliterated the 1949 armistice line that had separated the modern state of Israel from the core areas of the Biblical Hebrew nation.
“In view of the emergence of Gush Emunim and its prestigious and highly publicized activities, Meir Kahane had to reassess his political strategy,’’ said Sprinzak. But in 1974, Kahane was no more capable of joining Gush Emunim than he was Begin’s party or the National Religious Party. So Kahane staked out a position to the right of Gush Emunim. If Gush’s role was to settle and build the land of Israel, then Kahane would concentrate on driving out the Arabs living there. The JDL leader set about subverting Gush Emunim’s declared goal of coexistence with the local Arabs by instigating conflicts between Jewish settlers and the Palestinian Arab population. He purchased an apartment in Kiryat Arba, which became a base for his goon squad’s increasingly violent forays into the Arab West Bank. “They (Gush Emunim) don’t realize what nonsense it is to put a settlement of fifty people in a sea of Arabs,” Kahane told me in 1979. “What do they think they are going to do with those Arabs?”
Since Gush Emunim’s philosophy was firmly rooted in Halacha and the normative Zionist tradition, Kahane countered with his own selective quotes from the Torah and Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940). In a book he published in 1974 called The Jewish Idea, Kahane challenged Gush Emunim’s view that redemption could come with Arabs living in the land of Israel.
According to Kahane’s view, Arabs are more than just a demographic and physical threat. Their presence pollutes the very essence and spirit of Judaism. Therefore, their expulsion is a necessary precondition for redemption. “Zionism, the establishment of the State of Israel, the return of millions of Jews home, the miraculous victories of the few over the many Arabs, the liberation of Judea-Samaria, Gaza and the Golan, the return of Jewish sovereignty over the Holy City and Temple Mount are all parts of the divine pledge and its fulfillment,” wrote Kahane. He argued that Messianic redemption would have taken place if the Israeli government had expelled the Arabs, destroyed the Dome of the Rock Mosque, which was built on top of the ruins of the Second Temple, and annexed Judea and Samaria. “Had we acted without considering the gentile reaction,” Kahane wrote, “without fear of what he may say or do, the Messiah would have come right through the open door and brought us redemption.”
Kahane insists that redemption is guaranteed simply because God picked Jews as his Chosen People. “We are different,” said an article in a JDL publication also called the Jewish Idea. “We are a Chosen One and a Special One; selected for purity and holiness, and to rise above all others and to teach them the truth for purity and holiness that we have been taught. There is no reason or purpose to being a Jew unless there is something intrinsically different about it. No. We are not equal to the Gentiles. We are different. We are higher.”
Gush Emunim also is disdainful of gentiles. Its leaders maintain that Israel will become “a light unto the nations” only after it has attained complete political and spiritual isolation from the rest of mankind. Then, they prophesy, Israel will build its moral and military strength until it is powerful enough to destroy Arab opposition. “We must overcome the goys and dominate the spiritual world,” said Gush activist Jacob Levine as we sat in his apartment with its spectacular eighth-floor view ofJerusalem’s magical countryside.
But even the mystics of Gush Emunim have hard-headed political priorities. Their primary goal has been to confiscate Arab land a dunam at a time—and to build settlements stone by holy stone. They believed that this “divine process” would be far easier to accomplish without deliberately inflaming the local Arabs (not to mention the Zionist Left), who in any case would never be reconciled to their presence in Judea and Samaria.
In response to Gush Emunim’s more pragmatic brand of Messianism, Kahane stepped up his attacks on Arabs, ignoring government pleas that he was undermining Israel’s democratic image.
“The irrational Jew is the rational one,” Kahane once told me. “Democracy and Western humanistic values are foreign implants, which are meaningless to authentic Judaism. The Jewish people didn’t survive for two thousand years by being rational. Had we been rational we would have been done for. We survive because there is a clear promise that the Jewish people will never be destroyed.” So long as Jews fulfill their covenant with God their destiny is assured, said Kahane. Therefore, it makes no difference if America breaks diplomatic relations with Israel for deporting the Arabs. God, not Uncle Sam, will provide, he declared.
If, as a child, Kahane daydreamed about becoming the saviour of his people, he now openly presented himself as a modern day prophet. He claimed to hold the authentic Jewish spark, which had fractured into a million pieces at the Creation. Like his great grandfather who was a kabbalist from Safed, Kahane preached that it is man’s task to recover these sparks and make the world whole again. Kahane claimed that the divine spark was within him and that he could find it in others.
Kahane’s militant Messianism began to affect his relationship with his followers in America. He warned them that American Jews faced the twin perils of assimilation and annihilation if they did not return to Israel. Those who do not melt in America’s melting pot would ultimately melt in America’s ovens, he predicted. He compared the United States to the Weimar Republic, declaring that American Jewry was as blind to its fate as were the German Jews before Hitler took power.
Much of Kahane’s Messianic fury was aimed at America’s 400,000 Orthodox Jews, who, according to Kahane, are worse than blind—they are hypocrites. “The tragedy is that most observant Jews in America are practitioners of Jewish ritual and folklore,” Kahane once told me. “A religious Jew is one who does the really hard mitzvab (commandment), and that’s settling the land. My purpose in life, therefore, is to say the things that no other Jewish leader is saying—that the fate of the Jewish people in the Galut (exile) and in Israel rests upon their being Jewish again. This can only be done in Israel. Only then will God shine his light on Zion.”
He insisted that, just as there cannot be a Jewish state in the Messianic sense unless the Jews return to the land of Israel, a Messianic Jewish state cannot exist with an Arab minority. Jews must be alone in the land to rebuild their moral fiber—which is another reason for this emphasis on Arab deportation, he says.
“I’m not a racist,” he declared. “A racist is a Jew who says Arabs can be equal citizens in a Jewish state.”
[…]
CHAPTER ELEVEN - PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG FANATIC
On a fog-shrouded road between Jerusalem and Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, two young American supporters of Rabbi Meir Kahane put on their prayer shawls to daven (pray), then pulled ski masks over their faces, slipped on black leather gloves, and loaded a U.S.-made M-16 automatic rifle.
Around 5:30 on that chilly March morning in 1984, the men watched an Arab bus wind around a steep curve. As it approached, they jumped from a ditch that ran parallel to the road and opened fire on the driver’s window and the bus’s right side. The volley lasted three to four seconds. While nine Arabs lay wounded inside the blood-spattered vehicle, the Jews ran a quarter of a mile to a prearranged spot, where a friend from New York City waited in a Hertz rental car. When the youths were later arrested by the Israeli police, Kahane told a press conference that his followers were “good Jewish boys” and that the machine-gunning was “sanctified by God.”
Kach supporter Matt Liebowitz, a bearded, disarmingly soft- spoken twenty-four-year-old who served twenty-six months in an Israeli prison for the bus attack, epitomizes the kind of American kids who joined the JDL after Kahane wrested control of the organization from Bonnie Pechter.
Liebowitz’s career in “Jewish activism,” which began in Chicago, where he was raised, and led to New York and later to the West Bank of the River Jordan, is similar to the path taken by many young American Jews who get hooked on Meir Kahane’s sinister vision of ridding Israel of its Arabs. “Violence is a tool,” Liebowitz told me during a 1987 interview at a yeshiva in Far Rockaway, Queens where he sometimes studies. “Kahane says violence is not a nice thing, but that it’s sometimes necessary. For me and for others there was a certain mystical attachment to blood and violence. This was the violence that drew us to the JDL and bonded us together in the struggle. . . . Kahane taught us that what we were doing was true and correct according to the Torah.”
Liebowitz was not always interested in the “Jewish struggle.” He was raised in an assimilated, middle-class Jewish home where Judaism had more ritual than meaning. Like many future JDL members, he was embarrassed by his religion. “I had no connection to Judaism,” Liebowitz told me. “When I was a kid I used to hang out in the inner city and saw old Jews harassed by Black gangs. I had a very bad image ofJews—that they were weak, that they were worms.”
Matt was thirteen when his parents divorced. He moved in with his mother, then later with his father, a family therapist in Chicago. Eventually, he returned to his mother’s house because he did not get along with his stepmother. Matt became, according to his mother, “a street child.” Uninterested in school, he began to hang out with white street gangs, she recalled, until he discovered the JDL and found religion. “He just looked for some authority, someone who would tell him how to live, who would tell him what to do, someone who would decide for him what was good and what was bad,” she told the Israeli publication Koteret Rashit when she was in Jerusalem for her son’s trial.
“He was very restless.”
Matt says that he discovered Kahane and the JDL when he read Kahane’s militant manifesto, Never Again. The book’s title, which became the JDL’s rallying cry, was a warning that Jews will never again be led like sheep to the slaughter. The message was meant as much for passive, liberal-minded Jews as it was for gentiles. “I read Never Again and it hit me right in the heart,” said Matt. “I found what I was looking for.” His first illegal act inspired by Kahane’s philosophy, he said, was to place a home-made bomb under the car of Arthur Butz (b. 1933), an engineering professor at Northwestern University. Butz had written a book in 1978 claiming that the Holocaust was the hoax of the twentieth century. “The bomb never went off,” recalled Liebowitz. “I learned how to make it from a book by Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989).”
Liebowitz was soon studying in a yeshiva and working out with members of the small but violent JDL chapter in Chicago. “I started training with sticks, knives, hand-to-hand combat. We were trained by a guy who was a Navy SEAL. ... It was cool for a fourteen-year-old high-school freshman to see Jews do this stuff. Even though most of the JDL members weren’t religious, they put on kippos (skullcaps) whenever they fought anti-Semites. I hung out in neighborhoods where everyone was fighting, so it took a lot to impress me. The JDL really impressed me!”
But Kahane impressed Liebowitz even more than the street fighting. The Pied Piper of confused Jewish youth, Kahane has a knack for convincing youngsters that violence in the name of Greater Israel or Soviet Jewry is heroic in the tradition of the Bible. “I got to know Kahane when he came to Chicago in 1979. I thought he was it. He had unbelievable charisma. I came to him for advice and guidance, and depending on his answer I would have switched schools or made major changes in my life.”
Shortly after meeting Kahane, Matt moved to Israel to be with the fiery rabbi. At the time, Kahane was a political pariah in Israel with no more than a few dozen young followers from the United States. Like many American Jews who arrived in Israel for the first time, Liebowitz was shocked that Israeli Jews bore so little cultural resemblance to the Jews he had left behind. This fast-paced, chaotic, and intense new world on the Mediterranean was both strange and a little frightening. “I am at an ulpan (an intensive, Hebrew-language training institute),” he wrote to his mother soon after arriving in Israel. “ We sing Chanukah songs. . . . I had to leave the room because the songs reminded me of you and I long for you so much. ... I did not realize it would be so difficult.”
There was little time, however, for reflection when one’s days and nights were devoted to Kahane. There were almost daily vigilante attacks against Arabs, Christian missionaries, Black Hebrews, and U.S. diplomats whose cars were firebombed. Once Matt and a compatriot, laden with satchels of explosives, even scaled a wall that encircled the Dome of the Rock Mosque, intending to “purify” the Temple Mount. But the two scurried away when they heard an approaching Israeli army patrol.
Not surprisingly, Matt gained a reputation inside the JDL as one of Kahane’s most dedicated “crazies.” “Kahane was asked by a reporter why he had so many crazies around him,” Liebowitz recalled. “He replied that he needed crazies because they were the first to cross the barricades. Everybody in the JDL joked that I was the crazy Kahane was talking about.”
In 1980, burned out from the frantic militant activity, Liebowitz borrowed money from his mother and returned to Chicago. He jumped from yeshiva to yeshiva before he moved to New York City, where Kahane had reasserted control of the JDL, after successfully crushing Bonnie Pechter. The JDL, which had claimed as many as ten thousand members in 1970, was now a shell of its former self. Without Kahane’s constant guidance and charismatic presence, it foundered, breaking into small, competing factions. Kahane continued to milk the organization for publicity and money for his affiliated party in Israel. By the time Matt arrived in New York, the JDL had just a few dozen hardcore activists in New York and Los Angeles.
During a brief revival in 1981, however, the JDL began a paramilitary training camp in the Catskills, similar to the one that it had run during its heyday a decade earlier. Matt was one of some fifty youths who spent the summer training with automatic weapons and in martial arts. “Matt was a sweet, good- hearted kid,” recalled Gary Moskowitz, a New York City policeman who was the JDL camp karate instructor. “He loved training. He used to run ten miles a day. But he was easily manipulated and extremely prone to violence.”
Liebowitz rose to become the head of JDL security during a period when the organization was implicated in a number of terrorist attacks, including the bombings of Soviet and Arab diplomatic missions in New York and the firebombing of an Arab-owned restaurant in Brooklyn in which a woman was killed. During the summer of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, armed JDL militants raided the Manhattan offices of the November 29th Coalition, a pro-PLO group. A week later, the JDL training loft at the intersection of West 34th Street and Broadway in Manhattan was bombed. A JDL security guard asleep inside narrowly avoided injury. “It was a crazy summer,” Liebowitz recalled.
“The camp produced fifty good, dedicated JDL people who would prowl the streets of New York at night in search of Arab or Russian victims. That summer there were twelve to fifteen bombings. We had an underground bomb lab in a house in Borough Park crammed with explosives, Tommy guns, Uzis. . . . We knew a grand jury was investigating us and that federal indictments were coming down. Then one of our people was arrested in Israel for shooting a West Bank Arab and was convicted and went to prison. We were very bummed out by that.”
As a federal grand jury weighed indictments against a number of JDL militants, about forty suspects, including Liebowitz, suddenly moved to Israel in the winter of 1983. According to a federal law enforcement agent involved in the JDL probe, that effectively stymied the investigation. Weary of police investigations, Liebowitz tried to keep away from Kahane and his followers in Israel. He moved to a military base in the Negev to work as a volunteer. “It is wonderful to be in my country,” he wrote his mother. “There is some poetic justice in this scene of lighting the Chanukah candles in a military base in the Negev. It is a dramatic scene. The sun shines softly and religious soldiers light a large menorah and say prayers. I am home. I have never felt better in my whole life in any other place.”
A few weeks after Liebowitz wrote to his mother, a bomb planted by the PLO in the back of a bus in Jerusalem exploded, killing several passengers, including two young Jewish girls. “I feel as if I had lost my own sister,” he wrote in another letter home. “I can’t stand this. . . . I am very upset. . . .Jews are dying here only because they want to live here. . . . I must see Rabbi Kahane.”
But Liebowitz got mixed signals from Kahane. On one hand, he says, Kahane told him not to do anything illegal and risk going to jail. However, he said Kahane also constantly preached that vengeance is holy. “The bombing of the Jewish bus was like a sign,” Liebowitz told me. “I knew what road I had to take. I swore I was going to avenge Jewish blood.” He says he met four other Kach Party members from the United States who, like him, itched to strike back at the Arabs. Craig Leitner, whose father is a top official with the New York City Board of Education, was responsible for co-planning the attack. Liebowitz went to Kahane for money to finance the operation without telling him what they were planning. “I said, ‘We need money fast,’ ” Liebowitz recalled. “Kahane took $600 from his pocket and gave it to me without asking any questions.”
[Note: These days Craig Leitner goes by the name Aviel Leitner; he is a lawyer and former terrorist member of the JDL and Kach who served 30 months in jail for firebombing the Palestinian newspaper Al-Fajar and being involved in the shooting at an arab bus in Ramallah in 1984, injuring 6-7 Palestinians. Together with his lawyer wife Nitsana Darshan-Leitner (b. 1973) in the Shurat HaDin lawfare organization he is mostly involved with legal matters defending terrorists like for instance Yigal Amir (b. 1970); the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995), and Jonathan Pollard (b. 1954); an American-Israeli civilian-employed US Military intelligence analyst who in 1986 was sentenced to life in imprisonment for spying on the United States of America for the State of Israel.]
Prior to the attack, Leitner wrote to Randy Medoff, the JDL boss in New York, instructing him that when he received a collect phone call from a “Mr. Gray,” it would be a signal to phone the Israeli media with the news that a Jewish terrorist organization had machine-gunned an Arab bus. The Kach kids were arrested minutes after Leitner placed the call to Medoff. Liebowitz claims that he learned during police interrogation that Shin Bet had them under surveillance for twenty-four hours prior to the shooting.
Craig Leitner, who turned state’s witness, not only documented the close links between terrorism, the Kach Party, and Rabbi Kahane, but also told Shin Bet a chilling tale of Ku Klux Klan-style violence. In a signed confession, he told Israeli officials:
One day, toward the end of July 1984, (we) agreed to take some action against the Arabs. About midnight we saw an Arab in his early twenties walking along the Hebron road. . . . I left the car and gave the Arab a blow with my fist and kicked him. . . . He escaped into the night. . . . We drove to Hebron and decided to set fire to Arab cars. We had two plastic bottles filled with gasoline. (We) took the fuel and poured it under a number of cars. We set them on fire, but we didn’t wait to see what happened. There were many dogs around and I was afraid they might wake up the neighbors, or they might bite us and we would get rabies.
Several days later in Jerusalem, according to his confession, ‘‘We took some empty bottles and rags, then we went to the Kach office because I knew that Rabbi Kahane had left his car there and a fuel tank was in the back of the car. We made Molotov cocktails and drove to an Arab neighborhood. We threw two Molotovs at one of the Arab houses chosen at random.”
Leitner then contacted an American friend from Kach who lived in the West Bank settlement Beit El. “I knew he spoke Hebrew (Leitner could not) and could be relied upon not to inform the police. I asked him to phone the news media and inform them that the attack in East Jerusalem was carried out by TNT (the name for the Kach terrorist underground in Israel).”
Kahane hired an attorney for his young machine gunners and occasionally visited them in prison. He appointed one of the youths imprisoned with Liebowitz, Yehuda Richter, from Beverly Hills, to be his chief deputy in Kach. Leitner, who somehow managed to flee from Israel, was later arrested by U.S. marshals at the White Plains, New York campus of Pace University Law School, where he was studying. He returned to Israel after lengthy legal maneuvering, served a year in prison, and is once again a law student at Touro College in Manhattan.
Liebowitz now says the machine-gun bus attack was a cathartic experience and that he is grateful that confinement in prison gave him the personal discipline he lacked. After spending more than two years in prison, he returned to the United States in 1986 to promote aliya (immigration to Israel) as an emissary of the Eretz Yisrael Movement, which is affiliated with Gush Emunim. He is currently working for a Manhattan-based security firm. He told me he helped install a security system for the Albanian Mission to the United Nations.
Matt says as soon as he saves enough money he will move to Israel permanently. His wife, Judy, a twenty-three-year-old nurse, would like to live in a quiet Jerusalem neighborhood and raise a family. Matt wants to move to the fiercely nationalist Palestinian West Bank city of Hebron, where ultranationalist Jews have carved a foothold in the heart of the city’s squalid, fly-blown Casbah.
A young man who still values violence, Liebowitz says Kahane’s radical philosophy continues to guide him. “I think the Arabs should be moved out of Israel,” he said, echoing Kahane. “My parents can’t believe that the bus attack had anything to do with ideology. They still think it happened because they got a divorce,” he said, laughing softly.