1.
Kazimierz Dolny
–
Kazimierz Dolny is a small town in central eastern Poland, on the right bank of the Vistula river in Puławy County, Lublin Voivodeship. Historically it belongs to Lesser Poland, and in the past it used to be one of the most important cities of the province and it is a considerable tourist attraction as one of the most beautifully situated little towns in Poland. It enjoyed its greatest prosperity in the 16th and the first half of the 17th century and it became an economic backwater after that trade declined, and this freeze in economic development enabled the town to preserve its Renaissance urban plan and appearance. Since the 19th century it has become a holiday destination, attracting artists. Kazimierz Dolny is an art center in Poland, many painters retreat to this small town to paint and sell their work. Galleries can be found in almost every street, offering for sale sculptures, stained-glass, folk art, the town is one of Polands official national Historic Monuments, as designated September 16,1994 and tracked by the National Heritage Board of Poland. Kazimierz Dolny is located on the bank of the Vistula. It owes its location to the Lesser Polish Gorge of the Vistula. The town is part of the so-called tourist triangle Puławy – Kazimierz Dolny – Nałęczów and it does not have a rail connection, the nearest station is located in Puławy. The history of Kazimierz Dolny dates back to the 11th century, in 1181, Prince Casimir II the Just handed the settlement to Norbertine nuns from Kraków’s district of Zwierzyniec. The nuns changed its name to Kazimierz, in honor of the prince, for the first time, the name Kazimierz appears in chronicles in 1249. Later on, the adjective Dolny was added, to distinguish the town from the Jewish town Kazimierz - now a district of Kraków, in the early 14th century, the village became a royal possession, and King Władysław I the Elbow-high founded there a parish church in 1325. The foundation of the town is attributed to Władysławs son, King Casimir III the Great, later, King Władysław II Jagiełło modernized Kazimierz Dolny, creating a modern town, with a market square and streets. At that time, the decision was not to build any houses on the northern side of the market square, so as not to obstruct the view of the church. In 1501, Kazimierz Dolny became the home of a starosta, the Firlejs twice rebuilt the town and the castle, after the fires of 1561 and 1585. They cared about privileged status of Kazimierz Dolny, as a merchant town, in 1628, Franciscan monks settled in Kazimierz, building a monastery and expanding the church. The towns golden age ended in February 1656, when Swedish troops under King Charles X Gustav burned and ransacked it. The number of inhabitants declined, and King John III Sobieski tried to improve the situation, by allowing in 1677 Armenian, Greek, meanwhile, the profitable Vistula river trade came to an end, as there was no demand for Polish grains in Western Europe
2.
Kingdom of Poland (1916-1918)
–
The Kingdom of Poland, also known informally as the Regency Kingdom of Poland, was a proposed puppet state of Germany during World War I. A draft of a constitution was proposed 1917, following the armistice with Germany that ended World War I, the area became part of the Second Polish Republic. In 1914, for the purposes of securing Germanys eastern border against Russia, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg and this Polish kingdom, of limited autonomy, would be ruled by a German prince and have its military, transportation and economy controlled by Germany. Its army and railway network would be placed under Prussian command, in several memoranda sent during 1915 and 1916, Hans Hartwig von Beseler, the Governor-General of the Polish areas under German control, proposed the establishment of an independent Polish state. Austria-Hungary had three different ideas regarding Poland, one, the Austro-Polish solution, involved the creation of a Polish kingdom under the Emperor of Austria, who, among his other titles, was already King of Galicia and Lodomeria. German and Magyar elements within the Habsburg monarchy opposed such a move for fear of creating a predominantly Slavic area, unlike Emperor Francis Joseph, however, Charles I of Austria, who had acceded to the Habsburg thrones in 1916, promoted the idea. The Austrians, however, had underestimated Germanys desire to determine Polands fate and they did recognise, according to Prime Minister Karl von Stürgkh, that Poles will remain Poles even 150 years after Galicia was joined to Austria, Poles still didnt become Austrians. Of the candidates for the new Polish throne, Archduke Charles Stephen of Austria, both resided in the Galician city of Saybusch and spoke Polish fluently. Charles Stephens daughters were married to the Polish aristocrats Princes Czartoryski, by early 1916, the Austro-Polish solution had become hypothetical. Erich von Falkenhayn, the German Chief of the General Staff, had rejected the idea in January, German candidates for the throne were disputed between the royal houses of Saxony, Württemberg and Bavaria. Bavaria demanded that their Prince Leopold, the Supreme Commander of the German forces on the Eastern front, württembergs candidate Duke Albrecht was considered suitable for the throne because he belonged to the Catholic line of the house. During German occupation, Poles were subject to forced labour and confiscation of food, although early plans called for Austro-Polish solution, they were abandoned in February in face of growing dependence of Austria-Hungary on Germany. Both control over Polish economy and raw resources was to be in Germanys hands, by the end of 1916 Germany wanted to annex almost 30,000 square kilometres of Polish territory. These lands were to be settled by ethnic Germans, while the Polish and Jewish population was to be removed, in October 1916, at joint deliberations at Pszczyna, the German and Austrian leadership agreed to accelerate the proclamation promising creation of a Polish state in the future. In the meantime, General von Beseler had managed to support among pro-Austrian Poles. The Narodowa Demokracja party, however, rejected any cooperation with the Central Powers, after the German Emperor and Chancellor met with a Polish delegation led by Józef Brudziński, the final details were arranged. The Austrian Governor-General Kuk issued a proclamation at Lublin. A pro-German faction led by Władysław Studnicki existed but didnt gain any significant backing among Polish population, on 14 January 1917, a Provisional Council of State was established as a provisional government, consisting of fifteen members chosen by the German and ten by the Austrian authorities
3.
Polish Jews
–
The history of the Jews in Poland dates back over 800 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world, Poland was the centre of Jewish culture thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. This ended with the Partitions of Poland which began in 1772, in particular, from the founding of the Kingdom of Poland in 1025 through to the early years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth created in 1569, Poland was the most tolerant country in Europe. Known as paradisus Iudaeorum, it became a shelter for persecuted and expelled European Jewish communities, according to some sources, about three-quarters of the worlds Jews lived in Poland by the middle of the 16th century. With the weakening of the Commonwealth and growing religious strife, Polands traditional tolerance began to wane from the 17th century onward. Still, as Poland regained independence in the aftermath of World War I, Antisemitism was a growing problem throughout Europe in those years, from both the political establishment and the general population. At the start of World War II, Poland was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, one-fifth of the Polish population perished during World War II, half of them were 3,000,000 Polish Jews murdered in The Holocaust, constituting 90% of Polish Jewry. Although the Holocaust occurred largely in German-occupied Poland, there was collaboration with the Nazis by its citizens. Collaboration by individual Poles has been described as smaller than in other occupied countries, statistics of the Israeli War Crimes Commission indicate that less than 0. 1% of Polish gentiles collaborated with the Nazis. Grouped by nationality, Poles represent the largest number of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, britain demanded Poland to halt the exodus, but their pressure was largely unsuccessful. Most of the remaining Jews left Poland in late 1968 as the result of the Soviet-sponsored anti-Zionist campaign. After the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, the situation of Polish Jews became normalized, Religious institutions were revived, largely through the activities of Jewish foundations from the United States. The first Jews arrived in the territory of modern Poland in the 10th century, by travelling along the trade routes leading eastwards to Kiev and Bukhara, Jewish merchants, known as Radhanites, crossed the areas of Silesia. In the summer of 965 or 966 Jacob made a trade and diplomatic journey from his native Toledo in Moslem Spain to the Holy Roman Empire, the first actual mention of Jews in Polish chronicles occurs in the 11th century. It appears that Jews were then living in Gniezno, at time the capital of the Polish kingdom of the Piast dynasty. Among the first Jews to arrive in Poland were those banished from Prague, the first permanent Jewish community is mentioned in 1085 by a Jewish scholar Jehuda ha-Kohen in the city of Przemyśl. The first extensive Jewish emigration from Western Europe to Poland occurred at the time of the First Crusade in 1098. Under Bolesław III, the Jews, encouraged by the tolerant regime of this ruler, settled throughout Poland, Bolesław III recognized the utility of Jews in the development of the commercial interests of his country
4.
Tadeusz Pruszkowski
–
Tadeusz Pruszkowski was a Polish painter and art teacher, known primarily for his portraits. He began his studies in 1904 at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 1908, he continued his studies in Paris, where he associated with Polish writers and artists belonging to the Royalist Club and he also met his future wife there. After graduating, he travelled to Switzerland and Algeria, returning to Poland in 1911, in 1914, he held his first solo exhibition at the Society for the Appreciation of Fine Arts. In 1915, all the members of Young Art joined the Polish Legion, Pruszkowski adopted the name Rdza, was assigned to a unit led by Captain Władysław Belina-Prażmowski and served with a Regiment of Uhlans. During a stay in Volhynia he created portraits of the officers and soldiers which were shown at an exhibition in the Zachęta. In 1917, he became a member of the Reserves and later earned a pilots license, in 1922, following the death of Krzyżanowski, he was named a Professor at the School of Fine Arts. He took his students to paint en plein aire in Kazimierz Dolny, where he built a villa. He continued to participate in exhibitions, both as exhibitor and organizer. In 1926 he directed a comedy written by Feliks Topolski called Szczesliwy wisielec. One of the stars was the painter Janina Konarska, in 1930, he became Rector at the School of Fine Arts, participating in the process that resulted in school being promoted to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1932. During the following years, he was involved in creating organizations for the promotion of Polish art. In 1935, he was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature and his awards included the Cross of Independence, the Order of Polonia Restituta and the Cross of Merit. At the outbreak of World War II, he and his wife moved from Kazimierz Dolny to an apartment in Warsaw. He was arrested in June,1942, for aiding Jews, after an interrogation, he was in the process of being transferred to Pawiak Prison, when he and another prisoner attempted to escape and were shot. They were buried by people from the nearby Warsaw Ghetto, after the war, his remains were recovered and interred in Powązki Cemetery. Tadeusz Pruszkowski i jego związki z Kazimierzemadeusz Pruszkowski @ the Kazimierz Dolnym website Prusz portrecista @ the Kazimierz Dolnym website
5.
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
–
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw is a public university of visual and applied arts located in the Polish capital. The Academy traces its history back to the Department of Arts founded at the Warsaw University in 1812, as a separate institution it was founded in 1844 during the Partitions of Poland. In an upgrade in 1904 it was named the Warsaw School of Fine Arts, at first the institute did not have its own building and classes were held in several locations around the city. Following an architectural competition a design by Alfons Gravier was chosen, the building was completed by the outbreak of the First World War
6.
Painting
–
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, gesture, composition, narration, or abstraction, among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive, Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by motifs and ideas. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action, the term painting is also used outside of art as a common trade among craftsmen and builders. What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity, every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity, thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization, and symbols. In technical drawing, thickness of line is ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters. Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music, color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent, the word red, for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic, painters deal practically with pigments, so blue for a painter can be any of the blues, phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to light in painting, shades to dynamics and these elements do not necessarily form a melody of themselves, rather, they can add different contexts to it. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer, there is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required, rhythm is important in painting as it is in music
7.
Sculpture
–
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts, a wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or molded, or cast. However, most ancient sculpture was painted, and this has been lost. Those cultures whose sculptures have survived in quantities include the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, India and China, the Western tradition of sculpture began in ancient Greece, and Greece is widely seen as producing great masterpieces in the classical period. During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith, the revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures such as Michelangelos David. Relief is often classified by the degree of projection from the wall into low or bas-relief, high relief, sunk-relief is a technique restricted to ancient Egypt. Relief sculpture may also decorate steles, upright slabs, usually of stone, techniques such as casting, stamping and moulding use an intermediate matrix containing the design to produce the work, many of these allow the production of several copies. The term sculpture is used mainly to describe large works. The very large or colossal statue has had an enduring appeal since antiquity, another grand form of portrait sculpture is the equestrian statue of a rider on horse, which has become rare in recent decades. The smallest forms of life-size portrait sculpture are the head, showing just that, or the bust, small forms of sculpture include the figurine, normally a statue that is no more than 18 inches tall, and for reliefs the plaquette, medal or coin. Sculpture is an important form of public art, a collection of sculpture in a garden setting can be called a sculpture garden. One of the most common purposes of sculpture is in form of association with religion. Cult images are common in cultures, though they are often not the colossal statues of deities which characterized ancient Greek art. The actual cult images in the innermost sanctuaries of Egyptian temples, of which none have survived, were rather small. The same is true in Hinduism, where the very simple. Some undoubtedly advanced cultures, such as the Indus Valley civilization, appear to have had no monumental sculpture at all, though producing very sophisticated figurines, the Mississippian culture seems to have been progressing towards its use, with small stone figures, when it collapsed. Other cultures, such as ancient Egypt and the Easter Island culture, from the 20th century the relatively restricted range of subjects found in large sculpture expanded greatly, with abstract subjects and the use or representation of any type of subject now common. Today much sculpture is made for intermittent display in galleries and museums, small sculpted fittings for furniture and other objects go well back into antiquity, as in the Nimrud ivories, Begram ivories and finds from the tomb of Tutankhamun
8.
Engraver
–
Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it. Wood engraving is a form of printing and is not covered in this article. Engraving was an important method of producing images on paper in artistic printmaking, in mapmaking. Other terms often used for printed engravings are copper engraving, copper-plate engraving or line engraving, hand engraving is a term sometimes used for engraving objects other than printing plates, to inscribe or decorate jewellery, firearms, trophies, knives and other fine metal goods. Traditional engravings in printmaking are also engraved, using just the same techniques to make the lines in the plate. Each graver is different and has its own use, engravers use a hardened steel tool called a burin, or graver, to cut the design into the surface, most traditionally a copper plate. Modern professional engravers can engrave with a resolution of up to 40 lines per mm in high grade work creating game scenes, dies used in mass production of molded parts are sometimes hand engraved to add special touches or certain information such as part numbers. In addition to engraving, there are engraving machines that require less human finesse and are not directly controlled by hand. They are usually used for lettering, using a pantographic system, there are versions for the insides of rings and also the outsides of larger pieces. Such machines are used for inscriptions on rings, lockets. Gravers come in a variety of shapes and sizes that yield different line types, the burin produces a unique and recognizable quality of line that is characterized by its steady, deliberate appearance and clean edges. The angle tint tool has a curved tip that is commonly used in printmaking. Florentine liners are flat-bottomed tools with multiple lines incised into them, ring gravers are made with particular shapes that are used by jewelry engravers in order to cut inscriptions inside rings. Flat gravers are used for work on letters, as well as wriggle cuts on most musical instrument engraving work, remove background. Knife gravers are for line engraving and very deep cuts, round gravers, and flat gravers with a radius, are commonly used on silver to create bright cuts, as well as other hard-to-cut metals such as nickel and steel. Square or V-point gravers are typically square or elongated diamond-shaped and used for cutting straight lines, V-point can be anywhere from 60 to 130 degrees, depending on purpose and effect. These gravers have very small cutting points, other tools such as mezzotint rockers, roulets and burnishers are used for texturing effects. Burnishing tools can also be used for stone setting techniques
9.
Chronicler
–
A chronicle is a historical account of facts and events ranged in chronological order, as in a time line. Typically, equal weight is given for historically important events and local events and this is in contrast to a narrative or history, which sets selected events in a meaningful interpretive context and excludes those the author does not see as important. Some made use of materials, charters, letters, or the works of earlier chroniclers. Still others are tales of such unknown origins so as to hold mythical status, copyists also affected chronicles in creative copying, making corrections or in updating or continuing a chronicle with information not available to the original author. The reliability of a chronicle is an important determination for modern historians. In modern times various contemporary newspapers or other periodicals have adopted chronicle as part of their name, various fictional stories have also adopted chronicle as part of their title, to give an impression of epic proportion to their stories. A chronicle which traces world history is called a universal chronicle, scholars categorize the genre of chronicle into two subgroups, live chronicles, and dead chronicles. A dead chronicle is one where the author gathers his list of events up to the time of his writing, a live chronicle is where one or more authors add to a chronicle in a regular fashion, recording contemporary events shortly after they occur. Because of the immediacy of the information, historians tend to value live chronicles, such as annals, the earliest medieval chronicle to combine both retrospective and contemporary entries, is the Chronicle of Ireland, which spans the years 431 to 911. Chronicles are the predecessors of modern time lines rather than analytical histories, if the chronicles deal with events year by year, they are often called annals. Unlike the modern historian, most chroniclers tended to take their information as they found it, the point of view of most chroniclers is highly localised, to the extent that many anonymous chroniclers can be sited in individual abbeys. Later 16th century Scottish chronicles, written after the Reformation, shape history according to Catholic or Protestant viewpoints. It is impossible to say how many chronicles exist, as the many ambiguities in the definition of the make it impossible to draw clear distinctions of what should or should not be included. However, the Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle lists some 2,500 items written between 300 and 1500 AD
10.
Poland
–
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe, situated between the Baltic Sea in the north and two mountain ranges in the south. Bordered by Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, the total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres, making it the 69th largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. With a population of over 38.5 million people, Poland is the 34th most populous country in the world, the 8th most populous country in Europe, Poland is a unitary state divided into 16 administrative subdivisions, and its capital and largest city is Warsaw. Other metropolises include Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk and Szczecin, the establishment of a Polish state can be traced back to 966, when Mieszko I, ruler of a territory roughly coextensive with that of present-day Poland, converted to Christianity. The Kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented a political association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin. This union formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest and most populous countries of 16th and 17th century Europe, Poland regained its independence in 1918 at the end of World War I, reconstituting much of its historical territory as the Second Polish Republic. In September 1939, World War II started with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, followed thereafter by invasion by the Soviet Union. More than six million Polish citizens died in the war, after the war, Polands borders were shifted westwards under the terms of the Potsdam Conference. With the backing of the Soviet Union, a communist puppet government was formed, and after a referendum in 1946. During the Revolutions of 1989 Polands Communist government was overthrown and Poland adopted a new constitution establishing itself as a democracy, informally called the Third Polish Republic. Since the early 1990s, when the transition to a primarily market-based economy began, Poland has achieved a high ranking on the Human Development Index. Poland is a country, which was categorised by the World Bank as having a high-income economy. Furthermore, it is visited by approximately 16 million tourists every year, Poland is the eighth largest economy in the European Union and was the 6th fastest growing economy on the continent between 2010 and 2015. According to the Global Peace Index for 2014, Poland is ranked 19th in the list of the safest countries in the world to live in. The origin of the name Poland derives from a West Slavic tribe of Polans that inhabited the Warta River basin of the historic Greater Poland region in the 8th century, the origin of the name Polanie itself derives from the western Slavic word pole. In some foreign languages such as Hungarian, Lithuanian, Persian and Turkish the exonym for Poland is Lechites, historians have postulated that throughout Late Antiquity, many distinct ethnic groups populated the regions of what is now Poland. The most famous archaeological find from the prehistory and protohistory of Poland is the Biskupin fortified settlement, dating from the Lusatian culture of the early Iron Age, the Slavic groups who would form Poland migrated to these areas in the second half of the 5th century AD. With the Baptism of Poland the Polish rulers accepted Christianity and the authority of the Roman Church
11.
Shtetl
–
Shtetlekh were small towns with large Jewish populations, which existed in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Shtetlekh were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, in Yiddish, a larger city, like Lwów or Czernowice, was called a shtot, a village was called a dorf. Non-Jews referred to the shtetl as Mestechko, the concept of shtetl culture describes the traditional way of life of Eastern European Jews. Shtetls are portrayed as pious communities following Orthodox Judaism, socially stable, the decline of the shtetl started from about the 1840s. Contributing factors included poverty as a result of changes in climate, repeated fires that destroyed wooden homes. Also the anti-Semitism of the Russian Imperial administrators and the Polish landlords, from the 1880s until 1915 up to 2 million Jews left Eastern Europe. At the time about three quarters of its Jewish population lived in a shtetl, the Holocaust resulted in the total extermination of shtetls. It was not uncommon for the entire Jewish population of a shtetl to be rounded up, some shtetl inhabitants did emigrate before and after the Holocaust, mostly to Israel and the United States, where some of the traditions were carried on. But, the shtetl as a phenomenon of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe was eradicated by the Nazis, the attitudes and thought habits characteristic of the learning tradition are as evident in the street and market place as the yeshiva. The popular picture of the Jew in Eastern Europe, held by Jew, the picture includes the tendency to examine, analyze and re-analyze, to seek meanings behind meanings and for implications and secondary consequences. It includes also a dependence on deductive logic as a basis for practical conclusions and actions, in life, as in the Torah, it is assumed that everything has deeper and secondary meanings, which must be probed. All subjects have implications and ramifications, moreover, the person who makes a statement must have a reason, and this too must be probed. Often a comment will evoke an answer to the reason behind it or to the meaning believed to lie beneath it. The process that such a response—often with lightning speed—is a modest reproduction of the pilpul process. The May Laws introduced by Tsar Alexander III of Russia in 1882 banned Jews from rural areas, in the 20th century revolutions, civil wars, industrialization and the Holocaust destroyed traditional shtetl existence. Both pictures are true, and both are characteristic of the yeshiva as well as the market places, when the scholar converses with his intellectual peers, incomplete sentences, a hint, a gesture, may replace a whole paragraph. The listener is expected to understand the meaning on the basis of a word or even a sound. Such a conversation, prolonged and animated, may be as incomprehensible to the uninitiated as if the excited discussants were talking in tongues, the same verbal economy may be found in domestic or business circles
12.
Holocaust
–
The Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Adolf Hitlers Nazi Germany, and the World War II collaborators with the Nazis. The victims included 1.5 million children, and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe, killings took place throughout German-occupied Europe, as well as within Nazi Germany, and across all territories controlled by its allies. Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovahs Witnesses, some 42,500 detention facilities were utilized in the concentration of victims for the purpose of gross violations of human rights. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators, the persecution was carried out in stages, culminating in the policy of extermination of European Jews termed the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Following Hitlers rise to power, the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, starting in 1933 the Nazis began to establish a network of concentration camps. After the outbreak of war in 1939 both German and foreign Jews were herded into wartime ghettos, in 1941, as Germany began to conquer new territory in the East, all anti-Jewish measures radicalized. Specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews in mass shootings actions in less than a year, by mid-1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945, the most notable exception was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when thousands of poorly-armed Jewish fighters held the Waffen-SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20, 000–30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought against the Nazis, French Jews took part in the French Resistance, which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities. Over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings took place, the term holocaust comes from the Greek adjective holókaustos, a variant of holókautos, referring to an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole animal is completely burnt. Often used substantively in apposition with the noun thysia, the term appears in a fragment of pseudo-Callisthenes, writing in Latin, Jerome Latinized the Greek word as a neuter noun holocaustum, using it to translate references to the Jewish burnt offering in his translations of Exodus and Leviticus. In his Chronicon de rebus gestis Ricardi Primi, Richard of Devizes, the English poet John Milton had used the word to denote a conflagration in his 1671 poem Samson Agonistes and the word gradually developed to mean a massacre thereon. The term was used in the 1950s by historians as a translation of the Jewish word shoah to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of Jews, the television mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance after 1978. The biblical word shoah, meaning calamity became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel. Shoah is preferred by some Jews for several reasons including the offensive nature of the word holocaust which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom. The Nazis used the phrase Final Solution to the Jewish Question, all branches of Germanys bureaucracy were engaged in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust scholar, Michael Berenbaum, has called a genocidal state. Every arm of the countrys sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process, as prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was in the eyes of the perpetrators, through a concealed account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen from the victims
13.
World War II
–
World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the worlds countries—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust and the bombing of industrial and population centres. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history, from late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European colonies in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific. The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Midway, near Hawaii, in 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy, thus ended the war in Asia, cementing the total victory of the Allies. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world, the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The victorious great powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers waned, while the decolonisation of Asia, most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery. Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities, the start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously and this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939, the exact date of the wars end is also not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 14 August 1945, rather than the formal surrender of Japan
14.
Klezmer
–
Klezmer is a musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. Played by professional musicians called klezmorim, the genre originally consisted largely of dance tunes and instrumental pieces for weddings. In the United States the genre evolved considerably as Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, additionally, later immigrants from the Soviet Union, such as German Goldenshtayn, took their surviving repertoires to the United States and Israel in the 1980s. Compared with most other European folk-music styles, little is known about the history of klezmer music, originally, klezmer referred to musical instruments, and was later extended to refer, as a pejorative, to musicians themselves. From the 16th to 18th centuries, it replaced older terms such as leyts and it was not until the late 20th century that the word came to identify a musical genre. Early 20th century recordings and writings most often refer to the style as Yiddish music, Klezmer is easily identifiable by its characteristic expressive melodies, reminiscent of the human voice, complete with laughing and weeping. This is not a coincidence, the style is meant to imitate khazone, a number of dreydlekh, such as krekhts are used to produce this style. Various musical styles influenced traditional klezmer music, perhaps the strongest and most enduring is Romanian music. However, the importance of merrymaking at weddings was not diminished, the first klezmer known by name was Yakobius ben Yakobius, a player of the aulos in Samaria in the 2nd century CE. The earliest written record of the klezmorim is in the 15th century, Klezmorim based much of their secular instrumental music upon the devotional vocal music of the synagogue, in particular cantorial music. Even so, klezmorim—along with other entertainers—were typically looked down on by Rabbis because of their secular traveling lifestyle, Klezmorim often travelled and played with Romani musicians, because they occupied similar social strata. They had a influence on each other musically and linguistically. Klezmorim were respected for their abilities and diverse repertoire. They sometimes played for Christian churches and local aristocracy, and taught some Italian classical violin virtuosos, like other professional musicians, klezmorim were often limited by authorities. In Ukraine they were banned from playing instruments, until the 19th century. Hence musicians took up the violin, tsimbl, and other stringed instruments, the first musician to play klezmer in European concerts, Josef Gusikov, played a type of xylophone which he invented and called a wood and straw instrument. It was laid out like a cymbalom, and attracted comments from Felix Mendelssohn, later, around 1855 under the reign of Alexander II of Russia, Ukraine permitted loud instruments. The clarinet started to replace the violin as the instrument of choice, also, a shift towards brass and percussion happened when klezmorim were conscripted into military bands
15.
Sigmund Freud
–
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg and he qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology, Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938 Freud left Austria to escape the Nazis and he died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939. In creating psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, Freuds redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the analysis of symptom formation. On this basis Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, in his later work Freud developed a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture. Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains influential within psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, nonetheless, Freuds work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. In the words of W. H. Audens 1940 poetic tribute, by the time of Freuds death, Freud was born to Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the first of eight children. Both of his parents were from Galicia, in modern-day Ukraine and his father, Jakob Freud, a wool merchant, had two sons, Emanuel and Philipp, by his first marriage. Jakobs family were Hasidic Jews, and although Jakob himself had moved away from the tradition and he and Freuds mother, Amalia Nathansohn, who was 20 years younger and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer on 29 July 1855. They were struggling financially and living in a room, in a locksmiths house at Schlossergasse 117 when their son Sigmund was born. He was born with a caul, which his mother saw as an omen for the boys future. In 1859, the Freud family left Freiberg, Freuds half brothers emigrated to Manchester, England, parting him from the inseparable playmate of his early childhood, Emanuels son, John. Jakob Freud took his wife and two children firstly to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna where four sisters and a brother were born, Rosa, Marie, Adolfine, Paula, in 1865, the nine-year-old Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school. He proved an outstanding pupil and graduated from the Matura in 1873 with honors and he loved literature and was proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Freud entered the University of Vienna at age 17, in 1876, Freud spent four weeks at Clauss zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an inconclusive search for their male reproductive organs. He graduated with an MD in 1881, in 1882, Freud began his medical career at the Vienna General Hospital
16.
New York City
–
The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
17.
I. B. Singer
–
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish writer in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. The Polish form of his name was Icek Hersz Zynger. He used his mothers first name in a literary pseudonym, Izaak Baszewis. He was a figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1902 in Leoncin village near Warsaw, Poland, a few years later, the family moved to a nearby Polish town of Radzymin, which is often and erroneously given as his birthplace. The exact date of his birth is uncertain, but most probably it was November 21,1902 and it is also consistent with the historical events he and his brother refer to in their childhood memoirs. The often-quoted birth date, July 14,1904 was made up by the author in his youth and his father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of the rabbi of Biłgoraj. Singer later used her name in his pen name Bashevis, both his older siblings, sister Esther Kreitman and brother Israel Joshua Singer, became writers as well. Esther was the first of the family to write stories, the family moved to the court of the Rabbi of Radzymin in 1907, where his father became head of the Yeshiva. After the Yeshiva building burned down in 1908, the moved to a flat at ul. In the spring of 1914, the Singers moved to No.12, the street where Singer grew up was located in the impoverished, Yiddish-speaking Jewish quarter of Warsaw. There his father served as a rabbi, and was called on to be a judge, arbitrator, religious authority, in 1917, because of the hardships of World War I, the family split up. Singer moved with his mother and younger brother Moshe to his mothers hometown of Biłgoraj, a traditional shtetl, when his father became a village rabbi again in 1921, Singer returned to Warsaw. He entered the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary and soon decided that neither the nor the profession suited him. He returned to Biłgoraj, where he tried to support himself by giving Hebrew lessons, in 1923 his older brother Israel Joshua arranged for him to move to Warsaw to work as a proofreader for the Jewish Literarische Bleter, of which the brother was an editor. In 1935, four years before the German invasion, Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States and he was fearful of the growing Nazi threat in neighboring Germany. The move separated the author from his common-law first wife Runia Pontsch and son Israel Zamir, they emigrated to Moscow, the three met again twenty years later in 1955. Singer settled in New York City, where he took up work as a journalist and columnist for The Jewish Daily Forward, after a promising start, he became despondent and for some years felt Lost in America
18.
Concrete
–
Concrete is a composite material composed of coarse aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement that hardens over time. Most concretes used are lime-based concretes such as Portland cement concrete or concretes made with other hydraulic cements, when aggregate is mixed together with dry Portland cement and water, the mixture forms a fluid slurry that is easily poured and molded into shape. The cement reacts chemically with the water and other ingredients to form a matrix that binds the materials together into a durable stone-like material that has many uses. Often, additives are included in the mixture to improve the properties of the wet mix or the finished material. Most concrete is poured with reinforcing materials embedded to provide tensile strength, famous concrete structures include the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal, and the Roman Pantheon. The earliest large-scale users of technology were the ancient Romans. The Colosseum in Rome was built largely of concrete, and the dome of the Pantheon is the worlds largest unreinforced concrete dome. Today, large concrete structures are made with reinforced concrete. After the Roman Empire collapsed, use of concrete became rare until the technology was redeveloped in the mid-18th century, today, concrete is the most widely used man-made material. The word concrete comes from the Latin word concretus, the passive participle of concrescere, from con-. Perhaps the earliest known occurrence of cement was twelve years ago. A deposit of cement was formed after an occurrence of oil shale located adjacent to a bed of limestone burned due to natural causes and these ancient deposits were investigated in the 1960s and 1970s. On a human timescale, small usages of concrete go back for thousands of years and they discovered the advantages of hydraulic lime, with some self-cementing properties, by 700 BC. They built kilns to supply mortar for the construction of houses, concrete floors. The cisterns were kept secret and were one of the reasons the Nabataea were able to thrive in the desert, some of these structures survive to this day. In the Ancient Egyptian and later Roman eras, it was re-discovered that adding volcanic ash to the mix allowed it to set underwater, similarly, the Romans knew that adding horse hair made concrete less liable to crack while it hardened, and adding blood made it more frost-resistant. Crystallization of strätlingite and the introduction of pyroclastic clays creates further fracture resistance, german archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann found concrete floors, which were made of lime and pebbles, in the royal palace of Tiryns, Greece, which dates roughly to 1400–1200 BC. Lime mortars were used in Greece, Crete, and Cyprus in 800 BC, the Assyrian Jerwan Aqueduct made use of waterproof concrete
19.
Warsaw Ghetto
–
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. There were over 400,000 Jews imprisoned there, at an area of 3.4 km2, with an average of 7.2 persons per room, from the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews were deported to Nazi camps and mass-killing centers. Warsaw was one of the most diverse cities in the Second Polish Republic before the war began, the majority of Polish Jews lived in the merchant districts of Muranów, Powązki, and Stara Praga, while most ethnic Germans and Russians lived in Śródmieście. Over 90% of Catholics lived further away from the commercial and vital centre of the capital. Many Jews left the city during the depression, which was more severe, in 1938 the Jewish population of the Polish capital was estimated at 270,000 people. The Siege of Warsaw continued until September 29,1939, on September 10 alone, the Luftwaffe conducted 17 bombing raids on the city, three days later,50 German planes attacked the city centre, targeting specifically Wola and Żoliborz. In total, some 30,000 people were killed, and 10 percent of the city was destroyed, along with the advancing Wehrmacht, the Einsatzgruppe EG IV and the Einsatzkommandos rolled into town. On November 7,1939, the Reichsführer-SS reorganized them into local security service, meanwhile, the German fifth column members of Selbstschutz were released immediately. The commander of EG IV, SS-Standartenführer Josef Meisinger, was appointed chief of police for the newly formed Distrikt Warschau, after the takeover of Warsaw, the German authorities began the registration of the ethnic Germans who were issued the Kennkarte separate from the rest of the locals. By June 1940 there were 2,500 Reichsdeutsche and 5,500 Volksdeutsche registered in Warsaw, in the next two years their number more than doubled, on top of over 50,000 German military personnel. By the end of the September campaign the number of Jews in and around the capital increased dramatically with thousands of refugees escaping the Polish-German front in anyway possible, in less than a year, the number of refugees in Warsaw exceeded 90,000. The Jewish Council in Warsaw was formed by the Nazis on October 7 and it was composed of 24 prominent individuals led by Adam Czerniaków, personally responsible for carrying out German orders. The persecution of Jews began soon thereafter, on October 26, the imposition of Jewish forced labour was announced, to clear the rubble from bomb damage among similar tasks. One month later, on November 20, the accounts of Polish Jews. On November 23, all Jewish establishments were ordered to display a Jewish star on doors, beginning December 1, all Jews older than ten where compelled to wear a white armband, and on December 11, they were forbidden from using public transit. On January 26,1940, the Jews were banned from holding communal prayers ostensibly due to the risk of spreading epidemics, food stamps were being introduced by the German authorities, and the liquidation of all smaller Jewish communities in the vicinity of Warsaw had intensified. The Jewish population of the capital reached 359,827 before the end of the year, on the orders of Warsaw District Governor, Ludwig Fischer, the Ghetto wall construction started on April 1,1940, circling the area of Warsaw inhabited predominantly by Jews. The work was supervised by the Warsaw Judenrat, the Nazi authorities expelled 113,000 ethnic Poles from the neighbourhood, and ordered the relocation of 138,000 Warsaw Jews from the suburbs into the city centre
20.
Boca Raton, Florida
–
Boca Raton is the southernmost city in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States, first incorporated on August 2,1924 as Bocaratone, and then incorporated as Boca Raton in 1925. The 2015 population estimated by the U. S. Census Bureau was 93,235, however, approximately 200,000 people with a Boca Raton postal address reside outside its municipal boundaries. Such areas include newer developments like West Boca Raton, as a business center, the city also experiences significant daytime population increases. It is one of the wealthiest communities in South Florida, Boca Raton is located 43 miles north of Miami and is a principal city of the Miami metropolitan area, which was home to an estimated 6,012,331 people at the 2015 census. Boca Raton is home to the campus of Florida Atlantic University and the corporate headquarters of Office Depot, ADT. It is also home to the Evert Tennis Academy, owned by tennis player Chris Evert. Town Center Mall, a shopping center in West Boca Raton, is the largest indoor mall in Palm Beach County. Another major attraction to the area is Boca Ratons downtown, known as Mizner Park, still today, Boca Raton has a strict development code for the size and types of commercial buildings, building signs, and advertisements that may be erected within the city limits. No outdoor car dealerships are allowed in the municipality, additionally, no billboards are permitted, the citys only billboard was grandfathered in during annexation. The strict development code has led to major thoroughfares without large signs or advertisements in the travelers view. The original name Boca de Ratones appeared on eighteenth-century maps associated with an inlet in the Biscayne Bay area of Miami. The word ratones appears in old Spanish maritime dictionaries referring to rugged rocks or stony ground on the bottom of some ports and coastal outlets, therefore, the abridged translation defining Boca de Ratones is a shallow inlet of sharp-pointed rocks which scrape a ships cables. Residents of the city have kept the pronunciation of Boca Raton similar to its Spanish origins, in particular, the Raton in Boca Raton is pronounced as /rəˈtoʊn/ instead of /rəˈtɑːn/. The latter is a common mispronunciation by non-natives to the region, the area today known as Boca Raton was originally occupied by the Tequesta tribe, a Native American people that occupied an area along the southeastern Atlantic coast of Florida. What Spanish voyagers called Boca de Ratones was originally located to the south, by mistake since the 19th century, mapmakers moved this location to the north and began referring to the citys lake, today known as Lake Boca Raton, as Boca Ratone Sounde. The area was largely uninhabited after the Indigenous people were cleared from the area by the Spanish and he surveyed and sold land from the canal to beyond the railroad north of what is now Palmetto Park Road. Early settlement in the area increased shortly after Henry Flaglers expansion of the Florida East Coast Railway, in the citys early history during the Florida land boom of the 1920s, several investors were interested in turning Boca Raton into a resort town. Most famously, Addison Mizner had several projects for resorts and mansions in the area and he first constructed his Administrative Buildings and a small hotel to house interested investors
21.
Warsaw
–
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It stands on the Vistula River in east-central Poland, roughly 260 kilometres from the Baltic Sea and 300 kilometres from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population is estimated at 1.750 million residents within a metropolitan area of 3.101 million residents. The city limits cover 516.9 square kilometres, while the area covers 6,100.43 square kilometres. In 2012 the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Warsaw as the 32nd most liveable city in the world and it was also ranked as one of the most liveable cities in Central Europe. Today Warsaw is considered an Alpha– global city, an international tourist destination. Warsaws economy, by a variety of industries, is characterised by FMCG manufacturing, metal processing, steel and electronic manufacturing. The city is a significant centre of research and development, BPO, ITO, the Warsaw Stock Exchange is one of the largest and most important in Central and Eastern Europe. Frontex, the European Union agency for external security, has its headquarters in Warsaw. It has been said that Warsaw, together with Frankfurt, London, Paris, the city is positioning itself as Eastern Europe’s chic cultural capital with thriving art and club scenes and serious restaurants. The first historical reference to Warsaw dates back to the year 1313, after the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, Warsaw was incorporated into the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars, the city became the capital of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. In accordance with the decisions of the Congress of Vienna, the Russian Empire annexed Warsaw in 1815, only in 1918 did it regain independence from the foreign rule and emerge as a new capital of the independent Republic of Poland. Warsaw gained the title of the Phoenix City because it has survived wars, conflicts. Most notably, the city required painstaking rebuilding after the damage it suffered in World War II. On 9 November 1940, the city was awarded Polands highest military decoration for heroism, the historic city-centre of Warsaw with its picturesque Old Town in 1980 was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Buildings represent examples of nearly every European architectural style and historical period, folk etymology attributes the city name to a fisherman, Wars, and his wife, Sawa. According to legend, Sawa was a living in the Vistula River with whom Wars fell in love
22.
Petach Tikvah
–
Petah Tikva known as Em HaMoshavot, is a city in the Central District of Israel,10.6 km east of Tel Aviv. It was founded in 1878, mainly by religious orthodox Jews, also known as the Old Yishuv, in 2015 the city had a population of 230,984. The population density is approximately 6,277 inhabitants per square kilometre, Petah Tikvas jurisdiction covers 35,868 dunams. It is part of the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area, Petah Tikvas emblem appears on a postage stamp designed by Yitzhak Goldenhirsch, a founding member of Petah Tikva. Originally intending to establish a new settlement in the Achor Valley, near Jericho, however, Abdülhamid II cancelled the purchase and forbade them from settling there, but they retained the name Petah Tikva as a symbol of their aspirations. Undaunted, the purchased a modest area from the village of Mulabbis. The town suffered heavily as it lay between the Ottoman and British fronts during the war, Petah Tikva became the school for thousands of pioneer workers, who studied the craft of farming there before they ventured out to establish dozens of settlements in all parts of the country. The agricultural schools are still active to this day, Petah Tikva was also the birthplace of the Labor Zionist Movement, inspired and encouraged by the writings of A. D. Gordon who lived in the town. The first recorded Arab attack on Jews in what would become Israel took place in Petah Tikva in 1886, Petah Tikva was also the scene of Arab rioting in May 1921, which left four Jews dead. In the early 1920s, industry began to develop in the Petah Tikva region, in 1921, Petah Tikva was given the status of a local council by the British authorities. According to a census conducted in 1931 by the British Mandate authorities, Petah Tikva had a population of 6880 inhabitants, in 1937 it was recognized as a city. Its first mayor, Shlomo Stampfer, was the son of one of its founders, Petah-Tikva, which largely depended on citrus farming, was considered by both the British government and the Jaffa Electric Company as a potentially important consumer of electricity for irrigation. The Auja Concession, which was given to the Jaffa Electric Company on 1921, but it was only in late 1929 that the company submitted an irrigation scheme for Petah-Tikva, and it was yet to be approved by the government in 1930. Refining the agricultural skills they learned in Germany, these began in 1941 to build their kibbutz in its intended location in the south of Israel. Nowadays, with a population of two hundred thousand inhabitants Petah Tikva is the third most populous city in the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area. Petah Tikva is divided into 33 neighborhoods for municipal purposes, Petah Tikva is the second-largest industrial sector in Israel after the northern city of Haifa. The industry is divided into three zones—Kiryat Aryeh, Kiryat Matalon, and Segula, and includes textiles, metalwork, carpentry, plastics, processed foods, tires and other rubber products, and soap. The largest data center in Israel, operated by the company TripleC, is located in Petah Tikva
23.
Golda Meir
–
Golda Meir was an Israeli teacher, kibbutznik, stateswoman and politician and the fourth elected Prime Minister of Israel. Meir was elected Prime Minister of Israel on March 17,1969, after serving as Minister of Labour and Foreign Minister. Former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion used to call Meir the best man in the government, she was portrayed as the strong-willed, straight-talking. Meir resigned as minister in 1974, the year following the Yom Kippur War. She died in 1978 of lymphoma, Golda Mabovitch was born on May 3,1898, in Kiev, Russian Empire, present-day Ukraine, to Blume Neiditch and Moshe Mabovitch, a carpenter. Meir wrote in her autobiography that her earliest memories were of her father boarding up the front door in response to rumours of an imminent pogrom and she had two sisters, Sheyna and Tzipke, as well as five other siblings who died in childhood. She was especially close to Sheyna, Moshe Mabovitch left to find work in New York City in 1903. In his absence, the rest of the moved to Pinsk to join her mothers family. In 1905, Moshe moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in search of higher-paying work, the following year, he had saved up enough money to bring his family to the United States. Blume ran a store on Milwaukees north side, where by age eight Golda had been put in charge of watching the store when her mother went to the market for supplies. Golda attended the Fourth Street Grade School from 1906 to 1912, a leader early on, she organised a fund raiser to pay for her classmates textbooks. After forming the American Young Sisters Society, she rented a hall and she went on to graduate as valedictorian of her class. At 14, she studied at North Division High School and worked part-time and her mother wanted her to leave school and marry, but she demurred. She bought a ticket to Denver, Colorado, and went to live with her married sister. The Korngolds held intellectual evenings at their home, where Meir was exposed to debates on Zionism, literature, womens suffrage, trade unionism, in her autobiography, she wrote, To the extent that my own future convictions were shaped and given form. Those talk-filled nights in Denver played a considerable role, in Denver, she also met Morris Meyerson, a sign painter, whom she later married on December 24,1917. In 1913 she returned to North Division High, graduating in 1915, while there, she became an active member of Young Poale Zion, which later became Habonim, the Labor Zionist youth movement. She spoke at meetings, embraced Socialist Zionism and hosted visitors from Palestine
24.
Kadish Luz
–
Kadish Luz was an Israeli politician who served as Minister of Agriculture between 1955 and 1959 and Speaker of the Knesset from 1959 and 1969. Luz was born in 1895 in Bobruysk in the Russian Empire, to parents Zvi Luzinski and he served in the Russian Army during World War I and was a founder of the Hebrew Soldier Association and the HeHalutz movement. He studied in a polytechnic in Germany, at the Economics Institute in Saint Petersburg, and he made aliyah to the Palestine in 1920, and worked as a cottager in Kiryat Anavim and Beer Tuvia. The following year he joined kibbutz Degania Bet, and eventually became a member of the kibbutz unions secretariat between 1949 and 1951 and he was also amongst the leaders of the Histadrut, serving on its comptroller committee between 1935 and 1940. Between 1941 and 1942 he was on the secretariat of Tel Avivs workers council and he was elected to the Knesset in 1951 on Mapais list, and was appointed Minister of Agriculture by David Ben-Gurion in 1955. After leaving the cabinet in 1959, he became Speaker of the Knesset, serving for 10 years, following the sudden death of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi on 23 April 1963, he served as acting President of the state, until the election of Zalman Shazar on 21 May 1963. He died in 1972 in Degania Bet, kadish Luz on the Knesset website
25.
Knesset
–
The Knesset is the unicameral national legislature of Israel. As the legislative branch of the Israeli government, the Knesset passes all laws, elects the President and Prime Minister, approves the cabinet, in addition, the Knesset elects the State Comptroller. The Prime Minister may also dissolve the Knesset, however, until an election is completed, the Knesset maintains authority in its current composition. The Knesset is located in Givat Ram, Jerusalem, as the legislative branch of the Israeli government, the Knesset passes all laws, elects the president, approves the cabinet, and supervises the work of the government through its committees. It also has the power to waive the immunity of its members, remove the President and the State Comptroller from office, the Knesset is presided over by a Speaker and a Deputy Speaker. The Knesset is divided into committees, which amend bills on the appropriate subjects, Committee chairpersons are chosen by their members, on recommendation of the House Committee, and their factional composition represents that of the Knesset itself. Committees may elect sub-committees and delegate powers to them, or establish joint committees for issues concerning more than one committee, to further their deliberations, they invite government ministers, senior officials, and experts in the matter being discussed. There are four types of committees in the Knesset, permanent committees amend proposed legislation dealing with their area of expertise, and may initiate legislation. However, such legislation may only deal with Basic Laws and laws dealing with the Knesset, elections to the Knesset, Knesset members, or the State Comptroller. Special committees function in a manner to permanent committees, but are appointed to deal with particular manners at hand. Parliamentary inquiry committees are appointed by the plenum to deal with issues viewed as having national importance. The Ethics Committee is responsible for jurisdiction over Knesset members who violate the rules of ethics of the Knesset, within the framework of responsibility, the Ethics Committee may place various sanctions on a member, but is not allowed to restrict a members right to vote. The Knesset numbers 120 members, a subject which has often been a cause for proposed reforms and this proposed law has also been favoured by other politicians, including Benjamin Netanyahu. The 120 members of the Knesset are popularly elected from a single electoral district to concurrent four-year terms. All Israeli citizens 18 years or older may vote in legislative elections, Knesset seats are allocated among the various parties using the DHondt method of party list proportional representation. A party or electoral alliance must pass the threshold of 3. 25% of the overall vote to be allocated a Knesset seat. Parties select their candidates using a closed list, thus, voters select the party of their choice, not any specific candidate. The electoral threshold was set at 1% from 1949 to 1992, then 1. 5% from 1992 to 2003
26.
Theodor Hertzl
–
Herzl formed the World Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish migration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state. Though he died long before its establishment, he is considered a father of the State of Israel. While Herzl is often identified as the first major Zionist activist, scholars such as Yehuda Bibas, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. He was born in Pest, Kingdom of Hungary, to a secular Jewish family and his fathers family were originally from Zimony. He was the child of Jeanette and Jakob Herzl, who were German-speaking. Jakob Herzl, Herzls father, was a successful businessman. Herzl had one sister, Pauline, an older than he was. Theodor lived with his family in a next to the Dohány Street Synagogue located in Belváros. This passion later developed into a career in journalism and a less-celebrated pursuit of playwrighting. In 1878, after the death of his sister, Pauline, the moved to Vienna, Austria-Hungary. At the University of Vienna, Herzl studied law, as a young law student, Herzl became a member of the German nationalist Burschenschaft Albia, which had the motto Ehre, Freiheit, Vaterland. He later resigned in protest at the organisations antisemitism and he later became literary editor of Neue Freie Presse, and wrote several comedies and dramas for the Viennese stage. His early work did not focus on Jewish life and it was of the feuilleton order, descriptive rather than political. Herzl was witness to mass rallies in Paris following the Dreyfus trial, there has been some controversy surrounding the impact that this event had on Herzl and his conversion to Zionism. Herzl himself stated that the Dreyfus case turned him into a Zionist and this had been the widely held belief for some time. That he may have exaggerated the influence it had on him in order to further support for his goals. Jacques Kornberg claims that the Dreyfus influence was a myth that Herzl did not feel necessary to deflate and it was at this time that Herzl wrote his play The New Ghetto, which shows the ambivalence and lack of real security and equality of emancipated, well-to-do Jews in Vienna. According to Henry Wickham Steed, Herzl was initially devoted to the propagation of Jewish-German Liberal assimilationist doctrine
27.
New York (state)
–
New York is a state in the northeastern United States, and is the 27th-most extensive, fourth-most populous, and seventh-most densely populated U. S. state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south and Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to the east. With an estimated population of 8.55 million in 2015, New York City is the most populous city in the United States, the New York Metropolitan Area is one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world. New York City makes up over 40% of the population of New York State, two-thirds of the states population lives in the New York City Metropolitan Area, and nearly 40% lives on Long Island. Both the state and New York City were named for the 17th-century Duke of York, the next four most populous cities in the state are Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, and Syracuse, while the state capital is Albany. New York has a diverse geography and these more mountainous regions are bisected by two major river valleys—the north-south Hudson River Valley and the east-west Mohawk River Valley, which forms the core of the Erie Canal. Western New York is considered part of the Great Lakes Region and straddles Lake Ontario, between the two lakes lies Niagara Falls. The central part of the state is dominated by the Finger Lakes, New York had been inhabited by tribes of Algonquian and Iroquoian-speaking Native Americans for several hundred years by the time the earliest Europeans came to New York. The first Europeans to arrive were French colonists and Jesuit missionaries who arrived southward from settlements at Montreal for trade, the British annexed the colony from the Dutch in 1664. The borders of the British colony, the Province of New York, were similar to those of the present-day state, New York is home to the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of the United States and its ideals of freedom, democracy, and opportunity. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. On April 17,1524 Verrazanno entered New York Bay, by way of the now called the Narrows into the northern bay which he named Santa Margherita. Verrazzano described it as a vast coastline with a delta in which every kind of ship could pass and he adds. This vast sheet of water swarmed with native boats and he landed on the tip of Manhattan and possibly on the furthest point of Long Island. Verrazannos stay was interrupted by a storm which pushed him north towards Marthas Vineyard, in 1540 French traders from New France built a chateau on Castle Island, within present-day Albany, due to flooding, it was abandoned the next year. In 1614, the Dutch under the command of Hendrick Corstiaensen, rebuilt the French chateau, Fort Nassau was the first Dutch settlement in North America, and was located along the Hudson River, also within present-day Albany. The small fort served as a trading post and warehouse, located on the Hudson River flood plain, the rudimentary fort was washed away by flooding in 1617, and abandoned for good after Fort Orange was built nearby in 1623. Henry Hudsons 1609 voyage marked the beginning of European involvement with the area, sailing for the Dutch East India Company and looking for a passage to Asia, he entered the Upper New York Bay on September 11 of that year
28.
Syracuse, New York
–
Syracuse is a city in, and the county seat of, Onondaga County, New York, in the United States. It is the largest U. S. city with the name Syracuse, and is the fifth most populous city in the state of New York following New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, and Yonkers. At the 2010 census, the city population was 145,170 and it is the economic and educational hub of Central New York, a region with over a million inhabitants. Syracuse is also well-provided with convention sites, with a convention complex. Syracuse was named after the original Greek city Syracuse, a city on the eastern coast of the Italian island of Sicily. The city has functioned as a crossroads over the last two centuries, first between the Erie Canal and its branch canals, then of the railway network. Today, Syracuse is located at the intersection of Interstates 81 and 90, Syracuse is home to Syracuse University, a major research university, as well as Le Moyne College, a nationally recognized liberal arts college. In 2010, Forbes rated Syracuse 4th in the top 10 places in the U. S. to raise a family, the Syracuse area was first seen by Europeans when French missionaries came to the area in the 1600s. Marie de Gannentaha, on the northeast shore of Onondaga Lake, Jesuit missionaries visiting the Syracuse region in the mid 1600s reported salty brine springs around the southern end of Salt Lake, known today as Onondaga Lake. It is the north flowing brine from Tully that is the source of salt for the salty springs found along the shoreline of Onondaga lake, the rapid development of this industry in the 18th and 19th centuries led to the nicknaming of Syracuse as The Salt City. In 1847, the city was named after Syracuse, Sicily. In 1861, he developed the process for the manufacture of soda ash from brine wells dug in the southern end of Tully valley. The process was an improvement over the earlier Leblanc process, the Syracuse Solvay plant was the incubator for a large chemical industry complex owned by Allied Signal in Syracuse, the result of which made Onondaga Lake the most polluted in the nation. The salt industry declined after the Civil War, but a new manufacturing industry arose in its place, the Geneva Medical College was founded in 1834. It is now known as Upstate Medical University, one of four medical colleges in the State University of New York system. The first New York State Fair was held in Syracuse in 1841, world War II sparked significant industrial expansion in the area, specialty steel, fasteners, custom machining. After the war, two of the Big Three automobile manufacturers had major operations in the area, Syracuse was headquarters for Carrier Corporation, and Crouse-Hinds manufactured traffic signals in Syracuse. General Electric had its television manufacturing plant at Electronics Parkway in Syracuse
29.
Provincetown, Massachusetts
–
Provincetown /ˈprɒvɪnsˌtaʊn/ is a New England town located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, in the United States. A small coastal town with a year-round population of just under 3,000. Often called P-town or Ptown, the town is known for its beaches, harbor, artists, tourist industry, at the time of European encounter, the area was long settled by the historic Nauset tribe, who had a settlement known as Meeshawn. They spoke Massachusett, a Southern New England Algonquian language dialect that they shared in common with their closely related neighbors, on May 15,1602, having made landfall from the west and believing it to be an island, Bartholomew Gosnold initially named this area Shoal Hope. Later that day, after catching a great store of codfish, notably, that name referred specifically to the area of modern-day Provincetown, it wasnt until much later that that name was reused to designate the entire region now known as Cape Cod. On November 9,1620, the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower sighted Cape Cod while en route to the Colony of Virginia. After two days of failed attempts to sail south against the winter seas, they returned to the safety of the harbor, known today as Provincetown Harbor. It was here that the Mayflower Compact was drawn up and signed and they agreed to settle and build a self-governing community, and came ashore in the West End. In 1654, the Governor of the Plymouth Colony purchased this land from the Chief of the Nausets, the collected fees were used to defray the costs of schools and other projects throughout the colony. In 1678, the grounds were opened up to allow the inclusion of fishermen from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1692, a new Royal Charter combined the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies into the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Cape Cod was thus officially renamed the Province Lands. The first record of a government with jurisdiction over the Province Lands was in 1714, with an Act that declared it the Precinct of Cape Cod. On June 14,1727, after harboring ships for more than a century, the name chosen by its inhabitants was Herringtown, which was rejected by the Massachusetts General Court in favor of Provincetown. The act of incorporation provided that inhabitants of Provincetown could be land holders and they received a quit claim to their property, but the Province retained the title. The land was to be used as it had been from the beginning of the colony — a place for the making of fish, all resources, including the trees, could be used for that purpose. In 1893 the Great and General Court changed the Towns charter, giving the townspeople deeds to the properties they held, the population of Provincetown remained small through most of the 18th century. The town was affected by the American Revolution the same way most of Cape Cod was, the effective British blockade shut down most fish production and shipping and the town dwindled. It was, by happenstance, the location of the wreck of a British warship, following the American Revolution, Provincetown grew rapidly as a fishing and whaling center
30.
Queens, New York
–
Queens is the easternmost and largest in area of the five boroughs of New York City. Coterminous with Queens County since 1899, the borough of Queens is the second-largest in population, with a census-estimated 2,339,150 residents in 2015, approximately 48% of them foreign-born. Queens County also is the second-most populous county in the U. S. state of New York, behind the borough of Brooklyn. Queens is the fourth-most densely populated county among New York Citys boroughs, if each of New York Citys boroughs were an independent city, Queens also would be the nations fourth most populous city, after Los Angeles, Chicago, and Brooklyn. Queens is the most ethnically diverse area in the world. Queens was established in 1683 as one of the original 12 counties of New York and it was named after the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza, Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland. It became a borough of New York City in 1898, and from 1683 until 1899, Queens has the most diversified economy of the five boroughs of New York City It is home to JFK International Airport and LaGuardia Airport. These airports are among the busiest in the world, causing the airspace above Queens to be the most congested in the country, attractions in Queens include Flushing Meadows Park, Citi Field, the US Open tennis tournament, Kaufman Astoria Studios, Silvercup Studios, and Aqueduct Racetrack. European colonization brought Dutch and English settlers, as a part of the New Netherland colony, First settlements occurred in 1635 followed by early colonizations at Maspeth in 1642, and Vlissingen in 1643. Other early settlements included Newtown and Jamaica, however, these towns were mostly inhabited by English settlers from New England via eastern Long Island subject to Dutch law. After the capture of the colony by the English and its renaming as New York in 1664, the Flushing Remonstrance signed by colonists in 1657 is considered a precursor to the United States Constitutions provision on freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights. The signers protested the Dutch colonial authorities persecution of Quakers in what is today the borough of Queens, originally, Queens County included the adjacent area now comprising Nassau County. It was a county of New York State, one of twelve created on November 1,1683. The county was named after Catherine of Braganza, since she was queen of England at the time, the county was founded alongside Kings County, and Richmond County. On October 7,1691, all counties in the Colony of New York were redefined, Queens gained North Brother Island, South Brother Island, and Huletts Island. On December 3,1768, Queens gained other islands in Long Island Sound that were not already assigned to a county, Queens played a minor role in the American Revolution, as compared to Brooklyn, where the Battle of Long Island was largely fought. Queens, like the rest of Long Island, remained under British occupation after the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and was occupied throughout most of the rest of the Revolutionary War. Under the Quartering Act, British soldiers used, as barracks, even though many local people were against unannounced quartering, sentiment throughout the county remained in favor of the British crown
31.
Miami
–
Miami is a seaport city at the southeastern corner of the U. S. state of Florida and its Atlantic coast. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, Miamis metro area is the eighth-most populous, Miami is a major center, and a leader in finance, commerce, culture, media, entertainment, the arts, and international trade. In 2012, Miami was classified as an Alpha−World City in the World Cities Study Groups inventory, in 2010, Miami ranked seventh in the United States in terms of finance, commerce, culture, entertainment, fashion, education, and other sectors. It ranked 33rd among global cities, in 2008, Forbes magazine ranked Miami Americas Cleanest City, for its year-round good air quality, vast green spaces, clean drinking water, clean streets, and citywide recycling programs. According to a 2009 UBS study of 73 world cities, Miami was ranked as the richest city in the United States, Miami is nicknamed the Capital of Latin America and is the largest city with a Cuban-American plurality. Miami has the third tallest skyline in the U. S. with over 300 high-rises, Downtown Miami is home to the largest concentration of international banks in the United States, and many large national and international companies. The Civic Center is a center for hospitals, research institutes, medical centers. For more than two decades, the Port of Miami, known as the Cruise Capital of the World, has been the number one cruise port in the world. It accommodates some of the worlds largest cruise ships and operations, Metropolitan Miami is the major tourism hub in the American South, number two in the U. S. after New York City and number 13 in the world, including the popular destination of Miami Beach. The Miami area was inhabited for thousands of years by indigenous Native American tribes, the Tequestas occupied the area for a thousand years before encountering Europeans. An Indian village of hundreds of people dating to 500–600 B. C. was located at the mouth of the Miami River, in 1566 the explorer, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, claimed it for Spain. A Spanish mission was constructed one year later in 1567, Spain and Great Britain successively controlled Florida, and Spain ceded it to the United States in 1821. In 1836, the US built Fort Dallas as part of its development of the Florida Territory and attempt to suppress, the Miami area subsequently became a site of fighting during the Second Seminole War. Miami is noted as the major city in the United States conceived by a woman, Julia Tuttle, a local citrus grower. The Miami area was known as Biscayne Bay Country in the early years of its growth. In the late 19th century, reports described the area as a promising wilderness, the area was also characterized as one of the finest building sites in Florida. The Great Freeze of 1894–95 hastened Miamis growth, as the crops of the Miami area were the ones in Florida that survived. Julia Tuttle subsequently convinced Henry Flagler, a tycoon, to expand his Florida East Coast Railway to the region
32.
Florida
–
Florida /ˈflɒrᵻdə/ is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, Florida is the 22nd-most extensive, the 3rd-most populous, and the 8th-most densely populated of the U. S. states. Jacksonville is the most populous municipality in the state and is the largest city by area in the contiguous United States, the Miami metropolitan area is Floridas most populous urban area. The city of Tallahassee is the state capital, much of the state is at or near sea level and is characterized by sedimentary soil. The climate varies from subtropical in the north to tropical in the south, the American alligator, American crocodile, Florida panther, and manatee can be found in the Everglades National Park. It was a location of the Seminole Wars against the Native Americans. Today, Florida is distinctive for its large Cuban expatriate community and high population growth, the states economy relies mainly on tourism, agriculture, and transportation, which developed in the late 19th century. Florida is also renowned for amusement parks, orange crops, the Kennedy Space Center, Florida has attracted many writers such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams, and continues to attract celebrities and athletes. It is internationally known for golf, tennis, auto racing, by the 16th century, the earliest time for which there is a historical record, major Native American groups included the Apalachee, the Timucua, the Ais, the Tocobaga, the Calusa and the Tequesta. Florida was the first part of the continental United States to be visited and settled by Europeans, the earliest known European explorers came with the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León. Ponce de León spotted and landed on the peninsula on April 2,1513 and he named the region La Florida. The story that he was searching for the Fountain of Youth is a myth, in May 1539, Conquistador Hernando de Soto skirted the coast of Florida, searching for a deep harbor to land. He described seeing a wall of red mangroves spread mile after mile, some reaching as high as 70 feet. Very soon, many smokes appeared along the whole coast, billowing against the sky, the Spanish introduced Christianity, cattle, horses, sheep, the Spanish language, and more to Florida. Both the Spanish and French established settlements in Florida, with varying degrees of success, in 1559, Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano established a settlement at present-day Pensacola, making it the first attempted settlement in Florida, but it was abandoned by 1561. Spain maintained tenuous control over the region by converting the tribes to Christianity. The area of Spanish Florida diminished with the establishment of English settlements to the north, the English attacked St. Augustine, burning the city and its cathedral to the ground several times. Florida attracted numerous Africans and African-Americans from adjacent British colonies who sought freedom from slavery, in 1738, Governor Manuel de Montiano established Fort Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose near St
33.
American Congress
–
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States consisting of two chambers, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the Capitol in Washington, D. C, both senators and representatives are chosen through direct election, though vacancies in the Senate may be filled by a gubernatorial appointment. Members are usually affiliated to the Republican Party or to the Democratic Party, Congress has 535 voting members,435 Representatives and 100 Senators. The House of Representatives has six non-voting members in addition to its 435 voting members and these members can, however, sit on congressional committees and introduce legislation. Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the members of the House of Representatives serve two-year terms representing the people of a single constituency, known as a district. Congressional districts are apportioned to states by using the United States Census results. Each state, regardless of population or size, has two senators, currently, there are 100 senators representing the 50 states. Each senator is elected at-large in their state for a term, with terms staggered. The House and Senate are equal partners in the legislative process—legislation cannot be enacted without the consent of both chambers, however, the Constitution grants each chamber some unique powers. The Senate ratifies treaties and approves presidential appointments while the House initiates revenue-raising bills, the House initiates impeachment cases, while the Senate decides impeachment cases. A two-thirds vote of the Senate is required before a person can be forcibly removed from office. The term Congress can also refer to a meeting of the legislature. A Congress covers two years, the current one, the 115th Congress, began on January 3,2017, the Congress starts and ends on the third day of January of every odd-numbered year. Members of the Senate are referred to as senators, members of the House of Representatives are referred to as representatives, congressmen, or congresswomen. One analyst argues that it is not a solely reactive institution but has played a role in shaping government policy and is extraordinarily sensitive to public pressure. Several academics described Congress, Congress reflects us in all our strengths, Congress is the governments most representative body. Congress is essentially charged with reconciling our many points of view on the public policy issues of the day. —Smith, Roberts, and Wielen Congress is constantly changing and is constantly in flux, most incumbents seek re-election, and their historical likelihood of winning subsequent elections exceeds 90 percent
34.
Washington, D.C.
–
Washington, D. C. formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D. C. is the capital of the United States. The signing of the Residence Act on July 16,1790, Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Congress and the District is therefore not a part of any state. The states of Maryland and Virginia each donated land to form the federal district, named in honor of President George Washington, the City of Washington was founded in 1791 to serve as the new national capital. In 1846, Congress returned the land ceded by Virginia, in 1871. Washington had an population of 681,170 as of July 2016. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the population to more than one million during the workweek. The Washington metropolitan area, of which the District is a part, has a population of over 6 million, the centers of all three branches of the federal government of the United States are in the District, including the Congress, President, and Supreme Court. Washington is home to national monuments and museums, which are primarily situated on or around the National Mall. The city hosts 176 foreign embassies as well as the headquarters of international organizations, trade unions, non-profit organizations, lobbying groups. A locally elected mayor and a 13‑member council have governed the District since 1973, However, the Congress maintains supreme authority over the city and may overturn local laws. D. C. residents elect a non-voting, at-large congressional delegate to the House of Representatives, the District receives three electoral votes in presidential elections as permitted by the Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1961. Various tribes of the Algonquian-speaking Piscataway people inhabited the lands around the Potomac River when Europeans first visited the area in the early 17th century, One group known as the Nacotchtank maintained settlements around the Anacostia River within the present-day District of Columbia. Conflicts with European colonists and neighboring tribes forced the relocation of the Piscataway people, some of whom established a new settlement in 1699 near Point of Rocks, Maryland. 43, published January 23,1788, James Madison argued that the new government would need authority over a national capital to provide for its own maintenance. Five years earlier, a band of unpaid soldiers besieged Congress while its members were meeting in Philadelphia, known as the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, the event emphasized the need for the national government not to rely on any state for its own security. However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital, on July 9,1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which approved the creation of a national capital on the Potomac River. The exact location was to be selected by President George Washington, formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, the initial shape of the federal district was a square measuring 10 miles on each side, totaling 100 square miles. Two pre-existing settlements were included in the territory, the port of Georgetown, Maryland, founded in 1751, many of the stones are still standing
35.
Smithsonian Institution
–
The Smithsonian Institution, established in 1846 for the increase and diffusion of knowledge, is a group of museums and research centers administered by the Government of the United States. Originally organized as the United States National Museum, that ceased to exist as an administrative entity in 1967. Additional facilities are located in Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York City, Texas, Virginia, more than 200 institutions and museums in 45 states, Puerto Rico, and Panama are Smithsonian Affiliates. The Institutions thirty million annual visitors are admitted without charge and its annual budget is around $1.2 billion with 2/3 coming from annual federal appropriations. Other funding comes from the Institutions endowment, private and corporate contributions, membership dues, and earned retail, concession, Institution publications include Smithsonian and Air & Space magazines. The British scientist James Smithson left most of his wealth to his nephew Henry James Hungerford, Congress officially accepted the legacy bequeathed to the nation, and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust on July 1,1836. The American diplomat Richard Rush was dispatched to England by President Andrew Jackson to collect the bequest, Rush returned in August 1838 with 105 sacks containing 104,960 gold sovereigns. Once the money was in hand, eight years of Congressional haggling ensued over how to interpret Smithsons rather vague mandate for the increase, unfortunately, the money was invested by the US Treasury in bonds issued by the state of Arkansas which soon defaulted. The United States Exploring Expedition by the U. S. Navy circumnavigated the globe between 1838 and 1842, in 1846, the regents developed a plan for weather observation, in 1847, money was appropriated for meteorological research. The Institution became a magnet for young scientists from 1857 to 1866, the Smithsonian played a critical role as the U. S. partner institution in early bilateral scientific exchanges with the Academy of Sciences of Cuba. The Smithsonian Institution Building began construction in 1849, designed by architect James Renwick Jr. its interiors were completed by general contract Gilbert Cameron and the building opened in 1855. The Smithsonians first expansion came with construction of the Arts and Industries Building in 1881, Congress had promised to build a new structure for the museum if the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition generated enough income. It did, and the building was designed by architects Adolf Cluss and Paul Schulze, meigs of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The National Zoological Park opened in 1889 to accommodate the Smithsonians Department of Living Animals and this structure was designed by the D. C. architectural firm of Hornblower & Marshall. More than 40 years would pass before the museum, the Museum of History. It was designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White. That same year, the Smithsonian signed an agreement to take over the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened in the Old Patent Office Building on October 7,1968. The first new building to open since the National Museum of Natural History was the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
36.
Washington, D. C.
–
Washington, D. C. formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D. C. is the capital of the United States. The signing of the Residence Act on July 16,1790, Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Congress and the District is therefore not a part of any state. The states of Maryland and Virginia each donated land to form the federal district, named in honor of President George Washington, the City of Washington was founded in 1791 to serve as the new national capital. In 1846, Congress returned the land ceded by Virginia, in 1871. Washington had an population of 681,170 as of July 2016. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the population to more than one million during the workweek. The Washington metropolitan area, of which the District is a part, has a population of over 6 million, the centers of all three branches of the federal government of the United States are in the District, including the Congress, President, and Supreme Court. Washington is home to national monuments and museums, which are primarily situated on or around the National Mall. The city hosts 176 foreign embassies as well as the headquarters of international organizations, trade unions, non-profit organizations, lobbying groups. A locally elected mayor and a 13‑member council have governed the District since 1973, However, the Congress maintains supreme authority over the city and may overturn local laws. D. C. residents elect a non-voting, at-large congressional delegate to the House of Representatives, the District receives three electoral votes in presidential elections as permitted by the Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1961. Various tribes of the Algonquian-speaking Piscataway people inhabited the lands around the Potomac River when Europeans first visited the area in the early 17th century, One group known as the Nacotchtank maintained settlements around the Anacostia River within the present-day District of Columbia. Conflicts with European colonists and neighboring tribes forced the relocation of the Piscataway people, some of whom established a new settlement in 1699 near Point of Rocks, Maryland. 43, published January 23,1788, James Madison argued that the new government would need authority over a national capital to provide for its own maintenance. Five years earlier, a band of unpaid soldiers besieged Congress while its members were meeting in Philadelphia, known as the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, the event emphasized the need for the national government not to rely on any state for its own security. However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital, on July 9,1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which approved the creation of a national capital on the Potomac River. The exact location was to be selected by President George Washington, formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, the initial shape of the federal district was a square measuring 10 miles on each side, totaling 100 square miles. Two pre-existing settlements were included in the territory, the port of Georgetown, Maryland, founded in 1751, many of the stones are still standing
37.
Offenbach am Main
–
Offenbach am Main is a city in Hesse, Germany, located on the left bank of the river Main and part of the Frankfurt Rhein-Main urban area. Offenbach has a population of 126,934, in the 20th century the citys economy was dominated by the machine-building and leather industries, and it was also a major centre of the typography and design industries. Other important industries are the automobile and pharmaceutical industries, during the Second World War the city suffered heavily from bombing by the Allied Forces. More than half of the population have a non-German background, with Turks, former Yugoslavs, Arabs, Italians, Greeks. The inner town of Offenbach is quite large and has only a few suburbs, in the east the three incorporated, Bürgel, Bieber, and Rumpenheim. In the south are the newer suburbs Lauterborn and Rosenhöhe, Tempelsee, the office town Kaiserlei, the newest suburb is Mathildenviertel in the center near to the Main river. The first documented reference to a suburb of Offenbach appears in 770, in a document of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II dating to 977 exists the first mention of the place of Offenbach. During the Middle Ages Offenbach passed through many hands and it was destroyed by fire in 1564 and rebuilt in 1578. A year later it was given to the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, always very close to the city centre of Frankfurt, Offenbach was a popular location for business. The town has its own trade fair, and many companies have opened facilities here because there are fewer restrictions, the town was more cosmopolitan than Frankfurt, famous people such as Goethe and Mozart visited it several times. The Rumpenheim Palace and its park were a destination for monarchs in the 19th century. The city was ruled by Grand Dukes of Hesse and by Rhine until the monarchy was abolished in 1918. During the Second World War a third of the city was destroyed by Allied bombing, with the new district Lauterborn the city was expanded to the south in the 1960s. On the border with Frankfurt, the office district Kaiserlei was built, Offenbach is a so-called ´Sozialer Brennpunkt because of unemployment, poverty, gang related crime and migration. Offenbach am Main is twinned with, Offenbach has a large non-German population, in 2016, foreign nationals made up 37% of the population. The largest communities are, in order, from Turkey, Greece, Romania, Poland. Until the end of the 17th century, Offenbach remained a town with less than a thousand habitants. With the coming into power of the earl Johann Philipp in 1685, the city began to develop, in the 19th century the city became industrialized and the population increased even tenfold
38.
Caracas
–
Caracas, officially Santiago de León de Caracas, is the capital, the center of the Greater Caracas Area, and the largest city of Venezuela. Caracas is located along the Guaire River in the part of the country. Terrain suitable for building lies between 760 and 910 m above sea level, the valley is close to the Caribbean Sea, separated from the coast by a steep 2, 200-metre-high mountain range, Cerro El Ávila, to the south there are more hills and mountains. Libertador holds many of the government buildings and is the Capital District, the Distrito Capital had a population of 2,013,366 as of 2011, while the Metropolitan District of Caracas was estimated at 3,273,863 as of 2013. The Metropolitan Region of Caracas has an population of 5,243,301. Businesses that are located in the city include service companies, banks and it has a largely service-based economy, apart from some industrial activity in its metropolitan area. The Caracas Stock Exchange and Petróleos de Venezuela are headquartered in Caracas, PDVSA is the largest company in Venezuela. Caracas is also Venezuelas cultural capital, with restaurants, theaters, museums. Some of the tallest skyscrapers in Latin America are located in Caracas, in 2015, Venezuela and its capital, Caracas, had the highest per capita murder rates in the world, with 119 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Most murders and other violent crimes go unsolved, at the time of the founding of the city in 1567, the valley of Caracas was populated by indigenous peoples. Francisco Fajardo, the son of a Spanish captain and a Guaiqueri cacica, fajardos settlement did not last long. It was destroyed by natives of the led by Terepaima. This was the last rebellion on the part of the natives, on 25 July 1567, Captain Diego de Losada laid the foundations of the city of Santiago de León de Caracas. The foundation −1567 – I take possession of land in the name of God. In 1577 Caracas became the capital of the Spanish Empires Venezuela Province under Governor Juan de Pimentel, during the 17th century, the coast of Venezuela was frequently raided by pirates. With the coastal mountains as a barrier, Caracas was relatively immune to such attacks, encountering little resistance, the invaders sacked and set fire to the town after a failed ransom negotiation. As the cocoa cultivation and exports under the Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas grew in importance, in 1777, Caracas became the capital of the Captaincy General of Venezuela. José María España and Manuel Gual led a revolution aimed at independence
39.
Venezuela
–
Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is a federal republic located on the northern coast of South America. It is bordered by Colombia on the west, Brazil on the south, Guyana on the east, Venezuela covers 916,445 km2 and has an estimated population of 31775371. The territory now known as Venezuela was colonized by Spain in 1522 amid resistance from indigenous peoples and it gained full independence as a separate country in 1830. During the 19th century, Venezuela suffered political turmoil and autocracy, since 1958, the country has had a series of democratic governments. This new constitution changed the name of the country to República Bolivariana de Venezuela. Venezuela is a presidential republic consisting of 23 states, the Capital District. Venezuela also claims all Guyanese territory west of the Essequibo River, oil was discovered in the early 20th century, and Venezuela has the worlds largest known oil reserves and has been one of the worlds leading exporters of oil. Previously an underdeveloped exporter of commodities such as coffee and cocoa, oil quickly came to dominate exports. The recovery of oil prices in the early 2000s gave Venezuela oil funds not seen since the 1980s, the Venezuelan government then established populist policies that initially boosted the Venezuelan economy and increased social spending, significantly reducing economic inequality and poverty. However, such policies later became controversial since they destabilized the economy, resulting in hyperinflation, an economic depression. According to the most popular and accepted version, in 1499, the stilt houses in the area of Lake Maracaibo reminded the navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, of the city of Venice, so he named the region Veneziola Piccola Venezia. The name acquired its current spelling as a result of Spanish influence, where the suffix -uela is used as a term, thus. The German language 16th century-term for the area, Klein-Venedig, also means little Venice, however, Martín Fernández de Enciso, a member of the Vespucci and Ojeda crew, gave a different account. In his work Summa de geografía, he states that they found people who called themselves the Veneciuela. Thus, the name Venezuela may have evolved from the native word and it is not known how many people lived in Venezuela before the Spanish conquest, it has been estimated at around one million. In addition to indigenous peoples known today, the population included historic groups such as the Kalina, Auaké, Caquetio, Mariche, the Timoto-Cuica culture was the most complex society in Pre-Columbian Venezuela, with pre-planned permanent villages, surrounded by irrigated, terraced fields. They also stored water in tanks and their houses were made primarily of stone and wood with thatched roofs. They were peaceful, for the most part, and depended on growing crops, regional crops included potatoes and ullucos
40.
Houston Public Library
–
Houston Public Library is the public library system serving Houston, Texas, United States. The Houston Public Library system traces its founding to the creation of the Houston Lyceum in 1854, the lyceum was preceded by a debating society, a special-interest mechanics lyceum, and a circulating library. The lyceums library eventually split into an institution at the end of the 19th century. In 1892, William Marsh Rice, a Houston businessman and philanthropist who later chartered Rice University, the facility opened in 1895 and obtained its own building in 1904 with financial assistance from Andrew Carnegie. Julia Ideson was named its first librarian, the building constructed as Houstons Central Library in 1926 was later named in her honor, the name was changed to Houston Public Library in 1921. The Colored Carnegie Library opened in 1913 and became a part of HPL in 1921, the library system racially desegregated in 1953. In June 1953, Mayor of Houston Roy Hofheinz told the HPL board that library facilities should no longer be segregated, on August 21,1953, library facilities for high school students and adults were desegregated – without public announcement to the black community. On July 31,1961, the Carnegie colored branch closed, the library facility required extensive repairs and it was in the path of the Clay Avenue extension project. The branch, auctioned in February 1962 and shortly afterward demolished except for the cornerstone, was replaced by the W. L. D. Johnson Library in Sunnyside, Central Library consists of the Julia Ideson Building and the Jesse H. Jones Building, constructed in 1976. The HPL administrative offices were moved out of the Jones Building, freeing 12,600 square feet of space. Lisa Gray, of the Houston Chronicle, said the renovation made the Jones Building less of a public space devoted to reading, the offices moved to the Marston Building. Additions in the 2000s include McGovern-Stella Link Neighborhood Library, HPL Express Southwest, a new building for Looscan Neighborhood Library opened in 2007, replacing a 1956 structure. The Jones Building closed for renovations in 2006 and reopened in 2008 and that same year, the Houston Press heralded the project as Houstons best renovation in its annual awards. In 2010, due to a shortfall, the library system reduced its hours. During the same year the system put its decades-old city directories online, during the Jones Building remodeling the HPL administrative offices moved to the 22, 000-square-foot Marston Building in Neartown Houston. The City of Houston spent $1.3 million to renovate the Marston Building to accommodate HPL staff, prior to the remodeling, the HPL administrative offices were located in the Jones Building. This addition houses the Houston Metropolitan Research Center which is the center of the Houston Public Library System. The Marston Building was sold in 2012 by the City of Houston, in addition to the Central Library and Clayton Library, there are 35 neighborhood libraries, including four regional libraries, all located within the city of Houston
41.
Houston
–
Houston is the most populous city in the state of Texas and the fourth-most populous city in the United States. With a census-estimated 2014 population of 2.239 million within an area of 667 square miles, it also is the largest city in the southern United States and the seat of Harris County. Located in Southeast Texas near the Gulf of Mexico, it is the city of Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land. Houston was founded on August 28,1836, near the banks of Buffalo Bayou and incorporated as a city on June 5,1837. The city was named after former General Sam Houston, who was president of the Republic of Texas and had commanded, the burgeoning port and railroad industry, combined with oil discovery in 1901, has induced continual surges in the citys population. Houstons economy has an industrial base in energy, manufacturing, aeronautics. Leading in health care sectors and building equipment, Houston has more Fortune 500 headquarters within its city limits than any city except for New York City. The Port of Houston ranks first in the United States in international waterborne tonnage handled, the city has a population from various ethnic and religious backgrounds and a large and growing international community. Houston is the most diverse city in Texas and has described as the most diverse in the United States. It is home to cultural institutions and exhibits, which attract more than 7 million visitors a year to the Museum District. Houston has a visual and performing arts scene in the Theater District. In August 1836, two real estate entrepreneurs from New York, Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen, purchased 6,642 acres of land along Buffalo Bayou with the intent of founding a city. The Allen brothers decided to name the city after Sam Houston, the general at the Battle of San Jacinto. The great majority of slaves in Texas came with their owners from the slave states. Sizable numbers, however, came through the slave trade. New Orleans was the center of trade in the Deep South. Thousands of enslaved African Americans lived near the city before the Civil War, many of them near the city worked on sugar and cotton plantations, while most of those in the city limits had domestic and artisan jobs. Houston was granted incorporation on June 5,1837, with James S. Holman becoming its first mayor, in the same year, Houston became the county seat of Harrisburg County and the temporary capital of the Republic of Texas
42.
Texas
–
Texas is the second largest state in the United States by both area and population. Other major cities include Austin, the second most populous state capital in the U. S. Texas is nicknamed the Lone Star State to signify its former status as an independent republic, and as a reminder of the states struggle for independence from Mexico. The Lone Star can be found on the Texan state flag, the origin of Texass name is from the word Tejas, which means friends in the Caddo language. Due to its size and geologic features such as the Balcones Fault, although Texas is popularly associated with the U. S. southwestern deserts, less than 10 percent of Texas land area is desert. Most of the centers are located in areas of former prairies, grasslands, forests. Traveling from east to west, one can observe terrain that ranges from coastal swamps and piney woods, to rolling plains and rugged hills, the term six flags over Texas refers to several nations that have ruled over the territory. Spain was the first European country to claim the area of Texas, Mexico controlled the territory until 1836 when Texas won its independence, becoming an independent Republic. In 1845, Texas joined the United States as the 28th state, the states annexation set off a chain of events that caused the Mexican–American War in 1846. A slave state before the American Civil War, Texas declared its secession from the U. S. in early 1861, after the Civil War and the restoration of its representation in the federal government, Texas entered a long period of economic stagnation. One Texan industry that thrived after the Civil War was cattle, due to its long history as a center of the industry, Texas is associated with the image of the cowboy. The states economic fortunes changed in the early 20th century, when oil discoveries initiated a boom in the state. With strong investments in universities, Texas developed a diversified economy, as of 2010 it shares the top of the list of the most Fortune 500 companies with California at 57. With a growing base of industry, the leads in many industries, including agriculture, petrochemicals, energy, computers and electronics, aerospace. Texas has led the nation in export revenue since 2002 and has the second-highest gross state product. The name Texas, based on the Caddo word tejas meaning friends or allies, was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves, during Spanish colonial rule, the area was officially known as the Nuevo Reino de Filipinas, La Provincia de Texas. Texas is the second largest U. S. state, behind Alaska, though 10 percent larger than France and almost twice as large as Germany or Japan, it ranks only 27th worldwide amongst country subdivisions by size. If it were an independent country, Texas would be the 40th largest behind Chile, Texas is in the south central part of the United States of America. Three of its borders are defined by rivers, the Rio Grande forms a natural border with the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the south
43.
Congregation Beth Israel (Houston)
–
Congregation Beth Israel of Houston, the oldest Jewish congregation in Texas, was founded in Houston in 1854. The congregation was founded in 1854 as an Orthodox Jewish kehilla, the Orthodox Beth Israel Congregation in Houston opened in a former house that had been converted to a synagogue. In 1874 the congregation voted to change their affiliation to Reform Judaism, sparking the foundation of Congregation Adath Yeshurun, hyman Judah Schachtel was a past rabbi. Beth Israels Franklin Avenue Temple building was completed in 1874, the temple was at Crawford Street at Franklin Street in what is now Downtown Houston. In 1908 the congregation moved into a new temple at Crawford at Lamar Street, in an area that was a Jewish community, a new temple at Austin Street and Holman Avenue was dedicated in 1925. Originally it was considered to be a part of the Third Ward, in 1943 Temple Beth Israel announced that people who espoused Zionist ideals were not allowed to be members, so Emanu-El was formed by people who disagreed with the decision. As of 1967 Beth Israel accepts people with Zionist beliefs, in 1966 the Houston Independent School District purchased the 1920s temple. HISD began using as an annex for San Jacinto High School since the population was increasing. In the years leading to 1967, the Jewish community was moving to Meyerland, to follow the community, in 1967 the congregation moved to a new temple on North Braeswood Boulevard. The temple on Austin Street became the first home of Houstons High School for the Performing, when the high school moved to new quarters, the building became a performance venue for Houston Community Colleges Central Fine Arts division and was renamed the Heinen Theatre. The historic building is located in Midtown Houston, rabbi David Lyon currently presides over the congregation of Beth Israel. The current synagogue at 5600 North Braeswood has a lobby with twelve needlepoints, the design of these needlepoints had inspiration in the Hadassah Medical Centers Chagall windows. The current synagogue facility has expanded since its initial construction in order to house a Jewish school. The Shlenker School is on the synagogue property, the school is accredited by the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest. The cemetery owned by Congregation Beth Israel is the oldest Jewish cemetery in Houston, History of the Jews in Houston Bell, Roselyn. The Jewish Traveler, Hadassah Magazines Guide to the Worlds Jewish Communities, rowman & Littlefield, January 1,1994. Content also in, Tigay, Alan M. Jewish Travel-Prem, talent Knows No Color, The History of an Arts Magnet High School Information Age Publishing,2007. Synagogue website Shlenker School Congregational history
