Joel Ives's Blog – January 2015 Archive (2)

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

MY CONNECTION TO THE REFUGEE SHIP STRUMA 

My quest to identify the guest of honor in a photograph of a family gathering taken in 1924 in Harlem, NY led to an expedition to Istanbul, Turkey seeking the answer to a Holocaust mystery.  On February 24, 1942 a ship with 769 Romanian Jewish refugees was sailing to Palestine on a decrepit former cattle barge and was blown up in Black Sea.  About 70 years later, this largest maritime loss of…

Our thoughts are with those who have lost their lives because of the expression of free thought or due to the fact that they shopped at a Kosher food market.

As fate would have it, my second cousin’s son-in law, with the pseudonym “TIGNOUS,” was one of the four French cartoonists who lost their lives in this horrible event.  In a weird coincidence, on another branch of my family tree, a different French cousin lost his friend in the Kosher market.

Let’s hope that the…