École normale supérieure (Paris)
The École normale supérieure is one of the French grandes écoles and a school of PSL University since 2010. It was conceived during the French Revolution and was intended to provide the Republic with a new body of professors, trained in the critical spirit and secular values of the Enlightenment, it has since developed into an institution which has become a platform for a select few of France's students to pursue careers in government and academia. Founded in 1794 and reorganised by Napoleon, ENS has two main sections and a competitive selection process consisting of written and oral examinations. During their studies, ENS students hold the status of paid civil servants; the principal goal of ENS is the training of professors and public administrators. Among its alumni there are 13 Nobel Prize laureates including 8 in Physics, 12 Fields Medalists, more than half the recipients of the CNRS's Gold Medal, several hundred members of the Institut de France, scores of politicians and statesmen; the school has achieved particular recognition in the fields of mathematics and physics as one of France's foremost scientific training grounds, along with notability in the human sciences as the spiritual birthplace of authors such as Julien Gracq, Jean Giraudoux, Assia Djebar, Charles Péguy, philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alain Badiou, social scientists such as Émile Durkheim, Raymond Aron, Pierre Bourdieu, "French theorists" such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
The school's students are referred to as normaliens. The ENS is a grande école and, as such, is not part of the mainstream university system, although it maintains extensive connections with it; the vast majority of the academic staff hosted at ENS belong to external academic institutions such as the CNRS, the EHESS and the University of Paris. This mechanism for constant scientific turnover allows ENS to benefit from a continuous stream of researchers in all fields. ENS full professorships are competitive. Generalistic in its recruitment and organisation, the ENS is the only grande école in France to have departments of research in all the natural and human sciences, its status as one of the foremost centres of French research has led to its model being replicated elsewhere, in France, in Italy, in Romania, in China and in former French colonies such as Morocco, Mali and Cameroon. The current institution finds its roots in the creation of the Ecole normale de l'an III by the post-revolutionary National Convention led by Robespierre in 1794.
The school was created based on a recommendation by Joseph Lakanal and Dominique-Joseph Garat, who were part of the commission on public education. The Ecole normale was intended as the core of a planned centralised national education system; the project was conceived as a way to reestablish trust between the Republic and the country's elites, alienated to some degree by the Reign of Terror. The decree establishing the school, issued on 9 brumaire, states in its first article that "There will be established in Paris an Ecole normale, from all the parts of the Republic, citizens educated in the useful sciences shall be called upon to learn, from the best professors in all the disciplines, the art of teaching." The inaugural course was given on 20 January 1795 and the last on 19 May of the same year at the Museum of Natural History. The goal of these courses was to train a body of teachers for all the secondary schools in the country and thereby to ensure a homogenous education for all; these courses covered all the existing sciences and humanities and were given by scholars such as: scientists Monge, Daubenton and philosophers Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Volney were some of the teachers.
The school was closed as a result of the arrival of the Consulate but this Ecole normale was to serve as a basis when the school was founded for the second time by Napoleon I in 1808. On 17 March 1808, Napoleon created by decree a pensionnat normal within the imperial University of France charged with "training in the art of teaching the sciences and the humanities"; the establishment was opened in its strict code including a mandatory uniform. By a sister establishment had been created by Napoleon in Pisa under the name of Scuola normale superiore, which continues to exist today and still has close ties to the Paris school. Up to 1818, the students are handpicked by the academy inspectors based on their results in the secondary school. However, the "pensionnat" created by Napoleon came to be perceived under the Restoration as a nexus of liberal thought and was suppressed by then-minister of public instruction Denis-Luc Frayssinous in 1824. An École préparatoire was created on 9 March 1826 at the site of collège Louis-le-Grand.
This date can be taken as the definitive date of creation of the current school. After the July Revolution, the school regained its original name of École normale and in 1845 was renamed École normale supérieure. During the 1830s, under the direction of philosopher Victor Cousin, the school enhanced its status as an institution to prepare the agrégation by expanding the duration of study to three years, was divided into its present-day "
Austria
Austria the Republic of Austria, is a country in Central Europe comprising 9 federated states. Its capital, largest city and one of nine states is Vienna. Austria has an area of 83,879 km2, a population of nearly 9 million people and a nominal GDP of $477 billion, it is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north and Slovakia to the east and Italy to the south, Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The terrain is mountainous, lying within the Alps; the majority of the population speaks local Bavarian dialects as their native language, German in its standard form is the country's official language. Other regional languages are Hungarian, Burgenland Croatian, Slovene. Austria played a central role in European History from the late 18th to the early 20th century, it emerged as a margraviate around 976 and developed into a duchy and archduchy. In the 16th century, Austria started serving as the heart of the Habsburg Monarchy and the junior branch of the House of Habsburg – one of the most influential royal houses in history.
As archduchy, it was a major component and administrative centre of the Holy Roman Empire. Following the Holy Roman Empire's dissolution, Austria founded its own empire in the 19th century, which became a great power and the leading force of the German Confederation. Subsequent to the Austro-Prussian War and the establishment of a union with Hungary, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was created. Austria was involved in both world wars. Austria is a parliamentary representative democracy with a President as head of state and a Chancellor as head of government. Major urban areas of Austria include Graz, Linz and Innsbruck. Austria is ranked as one of the richest countries in the world by per capita GDP terms; the country has developed a high standard of living and in 2018 was ranked 20th in the world for its Human Development Index. The republic declared its perpetual neutrality in foreign political affairs in 1955. Austria has been a member of the United Nations since 1955 and joined the European Union in 1995.
It is a founding member of the OECD and Interpol. Austria signed the Schengen Agreement in 1995, adopted the euro currency in 1999; the German name for Austria, Österreich, derives from the Old High German Ostarrîchi, which meant "eastern realm" and which first appeared in the "Ostarrîchi document" of 996. This word is a translation of Medieval Latin Marchia orientalis into a local dialect. Another theory says that this name comes from the local name of the mountain whose original Slovenian name is "Ostravica" - because it is steep on both sides. Austria was a prefecture of Bavaria created in 976; the word "Austria" was first recorded in the 12th century. At the time, the Danube basin of Austria was the easternmost extent of Bavaria; the Central European land, now Austria was settled in pre-Roman times by various Celtic tribes. The Celtic kingdom of Noricum was claimed by the Roman Empire and made a province. Present-day Petronell-Carnuntum in eastern Austria was an important army camp turned capital city in what became known as the Upper Pannonia province.
Carnuntum was home for 50,000 people for nearly 400 years. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the area was invaded by Bavarians and Avars. Charlemagne, King of the Franks, conquered the area in AD 788, encouraged colonization, introduced Christianity; as part of Eastern Francia, the core areas that now encompass Austria were bequeathed to the house of Babenberg. The area was known as the marchia Orientalis and was given to Leopold of Babenberg in 976; the first record showing the name Austria is from 996, where it is written as Ostarrîchi, referring to the territory of the Babenberg March. In 1156, the Privilegium Minus elevated Austria to the status of a duchy. In 1192, the Babenbergs acquired the Duchy of Styria. With the death of Frederick II in 1246, the line of the Babenbergs was extinguished; as a result, Ottokar II of Bohemia assumed control of the duchies of Austria and Carinthia. His reign came to an end with his defeat at Dürnkrut at the hands of Rudolph I of Germany in 1278. Thereafter, until World War I, Austria's history was that of its ruling dynasty, the Habsburgs.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Habsburgs began to accumulate other provinces in the vicinity of the Duchy of Austria. In 1438, Duke Albert V of Austria was chosen as the successor to his father-in-law, Emperor Sigismund. Although Albert himself only reigned for a year, henceforth every emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was a Habsburg, with only one exception; the Habsburgs began to accumulate territory far from the hereditary lands. In 1477, Archduke Maximilian, only son of Emperor Frederick III, married the heiress Maria of Burgundy, thus acquiring most of the Netherlands for the family. In 1496, his son Philip the Fair married Joanna the Mad, the heiress of Castile and Aragon, thus acquiring Spain and its Italian and New World appendages for the Habsburgs. In 1526, following the Battle of Mohács, Bohemia and the part of Hungary not occupied by the Ottomans came under Austrian rule. Ottoman expansion into Hungary led to frequent conflicts between the two empires evident in the Long War of 1593 to 1606.
The Turks made incursions into Styria nearly 20 times, of which some are c
Chanchal Kumar Majumdar
Chanchal Kumar Majumdar was an Indian condensed matter physicist and the founder director of S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences. Known for his research in quantum mechanics, Majumdar was an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies – the Indian National Science Academy, the National Academy of Sciences and the Indian Academy of Sciences – as well a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society. Majumdar was the mentor of Dipan Ghosh with whom he co-developed the Majumdar–Ghosh model, an extension of the Heisenberg model which improved upon the latter, was a protege of Walter Kohn and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, both Nobel laureates; the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to Physical Sciences in 1976. C. K. Majumdar was born on 11 August 1938 in Krishnanagar in Bengal of the British India to Sita and Nirmal Kanti Majumdar, a political science professor, as one of their three sons.
He and his brothers and Mukul, did well in their studies. He did his schooling at C. M. S St. John's High School in Krishnanagar and completed his early college education in Calcutta at Presidency College and the University of Calcutta. After undertaking postgraduate research at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics during 1960–61, he enrolled at the University of California, San Diego and worked at the laboratory of Walter Kohn, who would go on to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. Majumdar's research on the effect of interactions on positron annihilation in solids guided by Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1963, earned him a PhD in 1965, he did his post-doctoral work at Carnegie Mellon University while continuing his work with Kohn for a while. On his return to India in 1966, Majumdar joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research as an associate professor, where he stayed until his move to University of Calcutta in 1975. In between, he had a short stint at the University of Manchester in 1969–70, working alongside Sam Edwards.
At Calcutta University, Majumdar served as the Palit Professor of Physics at the University College of Science, Technology & Agriculture, as the head of the department of magnetism and solid state physics of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, carrying out his research at the Palit Laboratory of IACS and at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre. When the Department of Science and Technology established the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, an autonomous institute for basic research in mathematics, Majumdar was appointed as its first director in 1987. Following a decade of service at SNBNCBS, he retired from official service in 1999. After retirement from regular service, Majumdar served as a senior scientist of the Indian National Science Academy at the Indian Statistical Institute, but his stint there was shortlived, he succumbed to a heart attack on 20 June 2000 in Kolkata, aged 61. He was survived by his wife, Utpala Ghosh, whom he had married soon after his return from the US in 1968, their two children and Rupak.
A major turning point in Majumdar's career came during his doctoral work with Walter Kohn in the early 1960s. The Austrian-born American scientist had been known in the scientific world for his development of the Luttinger–Kohn model, his association with Majumdar resulted in the development of the Kohn-Majumdar theorem, which explained the continuity in a Fermi gas in relation to its bound and unbound states, they described the theorem in an article, Continuity between Bound and Unbound States in a Fermi Gas, published in Physical Review in 1965. During his days at TIFR, Majumdar guided Dipan Ghosh on Magnetic Hamiltonians for the latter's doctoral studies. Together they developed the Majumdar–Ghosh model, an extension of the Heisenberg model, which serves as a stepping stone to a broader understanding of complex spin models; the model is detailed in their article On Next‐Nearest‐Neighbor Interaction in Linear Chain, I, published in the Journal of Mathematical Physics in 1969. A year Majumdar worked on non-Debye stress relaxation of glassy systems along with Samuel Edwards, which resulted in the publication of a notable article.
Subsequently, he developed methods for calculating effective magnetic moment and physical quantities such as specific heat of finite Heisenberg chains. Majumdar used scattering theory techniques to study bound magnon states, his findings have since been experimentally verified, he modified the work of Michael R. Douglas and Sam Edwards on soda-lime glass and proposed a simpler explanation for its time-dependent stress relaxation and a formula to assess long time scales with regard to its order of magnitude; some of his other achievements include the calculation of critical isotherm of Lennard-Jones gas, the Mössbauer effect determination of the Fe and Fe ratio, the determination of critical parameters of gas-liquid phase transition, the Ising model of ferromagnetism, the development of a theoretical method for measuring the Fermi momentum of metals. His studies have been documented by way of a number of articles and the article repository of the Indian Academy of Sciences has listed 45 of them.
Majumdar published two books, Annihilation of Positrons in Metals and S N Bose: The Man and His Wor
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck was an American physicist and mathematician. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977, for his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electrons in magnetic solids. Born in Middletown, the son of mathematician Edward Burr Van Vleck and grandson of astronomer John Monroe Van Vleck, he grew up in Madison and received an A. B. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1920. He went to Harvard for graduate studies and earned a Ph. D degree in 1922, he joined the University of Minnesota as an assistant professor in 1923 moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison before settling at Harvard. He earned Honorary D. Sc. or D. Honoris Causa, degree from Wesleyan University in 1936. J. H. Van Vleck established the fundamentals of the quantum mechanical theory of magnetism and the crystal field theory, he is regarded as the Father of Modern Magnetism. During World War II, J. H. Van Vleck worked on radar at the MIT Radiation Lab, he was half time on the staff at Harvard.
He showed that at about 1.25-centimeter wavelength water molecules in the atmosphere would lead to troublesome absorption and that at 0.5-centimeter wavelength there would be a similar absorption by oxygen molecules. This was to have important consequences not just for military radar systems but for the new science of radioastronomy. J. H. Van Vleck participated in the Manhattan Project. In June 1942, J. Robert Oppenheimer held a summer study for confirming the concept and feasibility of a nuclear weapon at the University of California, Berkeley. Eight theoretical scientists, including J. H. Van Vleck, attended it. From July to September, the theoretical study group examined and developed the principles of atomic bomb design. J. H. Van Vleck's theoretical work led to the establishment of the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, he served on the Los Alamos Review committee in 1943. The committee, established by General Leslie Groves consisted of W. K. Lewis of MIT, Chairman. Tolman, Vice Chairman of NDRC.
The committee's important contribution was a reduction in the size of the firing gun for the Little Boy atomic bomb, a concept that eliminated additional design weight and sped up production of the bomb for its eventual release over Hiroshima. However, it was not employed for the Fat Man bomb at Nagasaki, which relied on implosion of a plutonium shell to reach critical mass. In 1961/62 he was George Eastman Visiting Professor at University of Oxford and held a professorship at Balliol College. In 1950 he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, he was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1966 and the Lorentz Medal in 1974. For his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electrons in magnetic solids, Van Vleck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1977, along with Philip W. Anderson and Sir Nevill Mott. Van Vleck transformations, Van Vleck paramagnetism and Van Vleck formula are named after him. Van Vleck died in Cambridge, aged 81; the Absorption of Radiation by Multiply Periodic Orbits, its Relation to the Correspondence Principle and the Rayleigh–Jeans Law.
Part I. Some Extensions of the Correspondence Principle, Physical Review, vol. 24, Issue 4, pp. 330–346 The Absorption of Radiation by Multiply Periodic Orbits, its Relation to the Correspondence Principle and the Rayleigh–Jeans Law. Part II. Calculation of Absorption by Multiply Periodic Orbits, Physical Review, vol. 24, Issue 4, pp. 347–365 Quantum Principles and Line Spectra, The Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities. Quantum Mechanics, The Key to Understanding Magnetism, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1977 The Correspondence Principle in the Statistical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, vol. 14, pp. 178–188 He was awarded the Irving Langmuir Award in 1965, the National Medal of Science in 1966 and elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1967. He was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal in 1971, the Lorentz Medal in 1974 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977. J. H. Van Vleck and his wife Abigail were important art collectors in the medium of Japanese woodblock prints, known as Van Vleck Collection.
It was inherited from his father Edward Burr Van Vleck. They donated it to the Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin in 1980s; the Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities John Hasbrouck van Vleck NNDB Duncan and Janssen, Michel. "On the verge of Undeutung in Minnesota: Van Vleck and the correspondence principle. Part one," Archive for History of Exact Sciences 2007, 61:6, pages 553–624. Chazen Museum of Art Oral history interview transcript with John Hasbrouck Van Vleck 14 October 1963, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives Oral history interview transcript with John Hasbrouck Van Vleck 28 February 1966, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives Oral history interview transcript with John Hasbrouck Van Vleck 28 January 1977, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives
Vienna
Vienna is the federal capital and largest city of Austria, one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primate city, with a population of about 1.9 million, its cultural and political centre. It is the 7th-largest city by population within city limits in the European Union; until the beginning of the 20th century, it was the largest German-speaking city in the world, before the splitting of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, the city had 2 million inhabitants. Today, it has the second largest number of German speakers after Berlin. Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations and OPEC; the city is located in the eastern part of Austria and is close to the borders of the Czech Republic and Hungary. These regions work together in a European Centrope border region. Along with nearby Bratislava, Vienna forms a metropolitan region with 3 million inhabitants. In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In July 2017 it was moved to the list of World Heritage in Danger.
Apart from being regarded as the City of Music because of its musical legacy, Vienna is said to be "The City of Dreams" because it was home to the world's first psychoanalyst – Sigmund Freud. The city's roots lie in early Celtic and Roman settlements that transformed into a Medieval and Baroque city, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it is well known for having played an essential role as a leading European music centre, from the great age of Viennese Classicism through the early part of the 20th century. The historic centre of Vienna is rich in architectural ensembles, including Baroque castles and gardens, the late-19th-century Ringstraße lined with grand buildings and parks. Vienna is known for its high quality of life. In a 2005 study of 127 world cities, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked the city first for the world's most liveable cities. Between 2011 and 2015, Vienna was ranked second, behind Melbourne. In 2018, it replaced Melbourne as the number one spot. For ten consecutive years, the human-resource-consulting firm Mercer ranked Vienna first in its annual "Quality of Living" survey of hundreds of cities around the world.
Monocle's 2015 "Quality of Life Survey" ranked Vienna second on a list of the top 25 cities in the world "to make a base within."The UN-Habitat classified Vienna as the most prosperous city in the world in 2012/2013. The city was ranked 1st globally for its culture of innovation in 2007 and 2008, sixth globally in the 2014 Innovation Cities Index, which analyzed 162 indicators in covering three areas: culture and markets. Vienna hosts urban planning conferences and is used as a case study by urban planners. Between 2005 and 2010, Vienna was the world's number-one destination for international congresses and conventions, it attracts over 6.8 million tourists a year. The English name Vienna is borrowed from the homonymous Italian version of the city's name or the French Vienne; the etymology of the city's name is still subject to scholarly dispute. Some claim that the name comes from Vedunia, meaning "forest stream", which subsequently produced the Old High German Uuenia, the New High German Wien and its dialectal variant Wean.
Others believe that the name comes from the Roman settlement name of Celtic extraction Vindobona meaning "fair village, white settlement" from Celtic roots, vindo-, meaning "bright" or "fair" – as in the Irish fionn and the Welsh gwyn –, -bona "village, settlement". The Celtic word Vindos may reflect a widespread prehistorical cult of a Celtic God. A variant of this Celtic name could be preserved in the Czech and Polish names of the city and in that of the city's district Wieden; the name of the city in Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian and Ottoman Turkish has a different Slavonic origin, referred to an Avar fort in the area. Slovene-speakers call the city Dunaj, which in other Central European Slavic languages means the Danube River, on which the city stands. Evidence has been found of continuous habitation in the Vienna area since 500 BC, when Celts settled the site on the Danube River. In 15 BC the Romans fortified the frontier city they called Vindobona to guard the empire against Germanic tribes to the north.
Close ties with other Celtic peoples continued through the ages. The Irish monk Saint Colman is buried in Melk Abbey and Saint Fergil served as Bishop of Salzburg for forty years. Irish Benedictines founded twelfth-century monastic settlements. Evidence of these ties persists in the form of Vienna's great Schottenstift monastery, once home to many Irish monks. In 976 Leopold I of Babenberg became count of the Eastern March, a 60-mile district centering on the Danube on the eastern frontier of Bavaria; this initial district grew into the duchy of Austria. Each succeeding Babenberg ruler expanded the march east along the Danube encompassing Vienna and the lands east. In 1145 Duke Henry II Jasomirgott moved the Babenberg family residence from Klosterneuburg in Lower Austria to Vienna. From that time, Vienna remained the center of the Babenberg dynasty. In 1440 Vienna became the resident city of the Habsburg dynasty, it grew to become the de facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire in 1437 and a cultural centre for arts and science and fine cuisine.
Hungary occupied the city between 1485 and 1490. In the 16th and 1
Kindertransport
The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort that took place during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Free City of Danzig; the children were placed in British foster homes, hostels and farms. They were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust. Most the program was supported and encouraged by the British Government, which waived some immigration requirements; the term "kindertransport" is sometimes used for the rescue of Jewish children, but without their parents, from Nazi-occupied Germany and Czechoslovakia to Holland and France. An example is the 1,000 Chateau de La Hille children. However, most the "kindertransport" is used to refer to the organized program to England. World Jewish Relief was established in 1933 to support in whatever way possible the needs of Jews both in Germany and Austria. Records for many of the children who arrived in the UK through the Kindertransports are maintained by World Jewish Relief.
On 15 November 1938, five days after the devastation of "Kristallnacht", the "Night of Broken Glass", in Germany and Austria, a delegation of British and Quaker leaders appealed, in person, to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Neville Chamberlain. Among other measures, they requested that the British government permit the temporary admission of unaccompanied Jewish children, without their parents; the British Cabinet debated the issue the next day and subsequently prepared a Bill to present to the United Kingdom's Parliament. That Bill stated that the Government would waive certain immigration requirements so as to allow the entry into Great Britain of unaccompanied children ranging from infants up to the age of 17, under conditions as outlined in the next paragraph. No limit upon the permitted number of refugees was publicly announced; the Jewish refugee agencies considered 5,000 as a realistic target goal. However, after the British Colonial Office turned down the Jewish agencies' separate request to allow the admission of 10,000 children to British-controlled Palestine, the Jewish agencies increased their planned target number to 15,000 unaccompanied children to enter Great Britain in this way.
On the eve of a major House of Commons debate on refugees on 21 November 1938, Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare met a large delegation representing Jewish, as well as Quaker and other non-Jewish groups, working on behalf of refugees. The groups, though considering all refugees, were allied under a non-denominational organisation called the "Movement for the Care of Children from Germany"; this organisation was considering only the rescue of children, who would need to leave their parents behind in Germany. The agencies promised to find homes for all the children, they promised to fund the operation and to ensure that none of the refugees would become a financial burden on the public. Every child would have a guarantee of £50 sterling to finance his or her eventual re-emigration, as it was expected the children would stay in the country only temporarily. In that Parliamentary debate on refugees of 21 November 1938, Home Secretary Samuel Hoare paid particular attention to the plight of children, as recorded in Hansard.
He reported that enquiries in Germany had determined that, most remarkably, nearly unanimously every parent asked had stated that he would be willing to send his child off unaccompanied to the United Kingdom, but leaving his parents behind. Nearly this was somewhat of an exaggeration, it was traumatic for the parents to send their children away into the "unknown" and for an uncertain time. Yet the actual parting was managed well, as for instance in the video in the main Nicholas Winton article. Returning to the important parliamentary debate, Home Secretary Hoare declared that he would have no objection to expediting and speeding up the immigration process, as for instance that travel documents would be issued on the basis of group lists rather than individual applications. Within a short time, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany known as the Refugee Children's Movement, sent representatives to Germany and Austria to establish the systems for choosing and transporting the children.
The Central British Fund for Germany Jewry were involved in the rescue operation. On 25 November, British citizens heard an appeal for foster homes on the BBC Home Service radio station from Viscount Samuel. Soon there were 500 offers, RCM volunteers started visiting possible foster homes and reporting on conditions, they did not insist. Nor did they probe too into the motives and character of the families: it was sufficient for the houses to look clean and the families to seem respectable. In Germany, a network of organisers was established, these volunteers worked around the clock to make priority lists of those most in peril: teenagers who were in concentration camps or in danger of arrest, Polish children or teenagers threatened with deportation, children in Jewish orphanages, children whose parents were too impoverished to keep them, or children with a parent in a concentration camp. Once the children were identified or grouped by list, their guardians or parents were issued a travel date and departure details.
They could only take a small sealed suitcase with no valuables and only ten marks or less in mon
Jews
Jews or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and a nation, originating from the Israelites and Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah. Jewish ethnicity and religion are interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish people, while its observance varies from strict observance to complete nonobservance. Jews originated as an ethnic and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, in the part of the Levant known as the Land of Israel; the Merneptah Stele appears to confirm the existence of a people of Israel somewhere in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. The Israelites, as an outgrowth of the Canaanite population, consolidated their hold with the emergence of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah; some consider that these Canaanite sedentary Israelites melded with incoming nomadic groups known as'Hebrews'. Though few sources mention the exilic periods in detail, the experience of diaspora life, from the Ancient Egyptian rule over the Levant, to Assyrian captivity and exile, to Babylonian captivity and exile, to Seleucid Imperial rule, to the Roman occupation and exile, the historical relations between Jews and their homeland thereafter, became a major feature of Jewish history and memory.
Prior to World War II, the worldwide Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million, representing around 0.7% of the world population at that time. 6 million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Since the population has risen again, as of 2016 was estimated at 14.4 million by the Berman Jewish DataBank, less than 0.2% of the total world population. The modern State of Israel is the only country, it defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state in the Basic Laws, Human Dignity and Liberty in particular, based on the Declaration of Independence. Israel's Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to Jews who have expressed their desire to settle in Israel. Despite their small percentage of the world's population, Jews have influenced and contributed to human progress in many fields, both and in modern times, including philosophy, literature, business, fine arts and architecture, music and cinema, science and technology, as well as religion. Jews have played a significant role in the development of Western Civilization.
The English word "Jew" continues Iewe. These terms derive from Old French giu, earlier juieu, which through elision had dropped the letter "d" from the Medieval Latin Iudaeus, like the New Testament Greek term Ioudaios, meant both "Jew" and "Judean" / "of Judea"; the Greek term was a loan from Aramaic Y'hūdāi, corresponding to Hebrew יְהוּדִי Yehudi the term for a member of the tribe of Judah or the people of the kingdom of Judah. According to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. Genesis 29:35 and 49:8 connect the name "Judah" with the verb yada, meaning "praise", but scholars agree that the name of both the patriarch and the kingdom instead have a geographic origin—possibly referring to the gorges and ravines of the region; the Hebrew word for "Jew" is יְהוּדִי Yehudi, with the plural יְהוּדִים Yehudim. Endonyms in other Jewish languages include the Yiddish ייִד Yid; the etymological equivalent is in use in other languages, e.g. يَهُودِيّ yahūdī, al-yahūd, in Arabic, "Jude" in German, "judeu" in Portuguese, "Juif" /"Juive" in French, "jøde" in Danish and Norwegian, "judío/a" in Spanish, "jood" in Dutch, "żyd" in Polish etc. but derivations of the word "Hebrew" are in use to describe a Jew, e.g. in Italian, in Persian and Russian.
The German word "Jude" is pronounced, the corresponding adjective "jüdisch" is the origin of the word "Yiddish". According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition, It is recognized that the attributive use of the noun Jew, in phrases such as Jew lawyer or Jew ethics, is both vulgar and offensive. In such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility; some people, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a practice that carries risks of its own. In a sentence such as There are now several Jews on the council, unobjectionable, the substitution of a circumlocution like Jewish people or persons of Jewish background may in itself cause offense for seeming to imply that Jew has a negative connotation when used as a noun. Judaism shares some of the characteristics of a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, a culture, making the definition of, a Jew vary depending on whether a religious or national approach to identity is used.
In modern secular usage Jews include three groups: people who were born to a Jewish family regardless of whether or not they follow the religion, those who have some Jewish ancestral background or lineage, people without any Jewish ancestral background or lineage who have formally converted to Judaism and therefore are followers of the religion. Historical definitions of Jewish identity have traditionally been based on halakhic definitions of matrilineal descent, halakhic conversions; these definitions of, a Jew date back to the codification of the Oral
