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Jack Cohen

Medical Electronics:

It is now possible to produce hands and feet on a 3d printer that are made of plastic that are tailored for specific individuals.  Connections are then made between the patients nerves and the device and then normal actions can be performed as if the device were really part of the person’s body.   There are so far several drawbacks to this process, namely the person has to learn to control the device, such as not to keep trying to fondle the nurse.   This is known as the Strangelove effect.

One Israeli invention not widely known is the pill-cam, that can traverse the alimentary canal or can be injected into a vein looking for problems in the blood system.  The surgeon simply looks at the TV screen and when he sees a blockage he can take remedial action.  Of course, this can cause problems if his favorite TV series is on at the same time.  I was involved with an Israeli venture to make the physicians view into 3d and color, so that the surgeon could see inside the body as if he were actually there.  This had one drawback that sometimes the surgeon would become car sick.

Another innovation is the electronic brain scanner, you simply put on a head covering that contains many sensitive frequency detectors joined by wires and then plug it in and you can detect local brain waves.  By then doing subtle things, such as digging pins into the patient’s genitals or putting heaters onto certain sensitive skin areas, you could actually detect the pain response.  This is known as the inquisition monitor.  The scanner can also detect negative thinking.  This item is popular among Middle Eastern dictators and Russian Presidents.

The latest invention is the electronically driven suppository.  It has been well known in medical circles for a long time that some patients have difficulty in inserting suppositories where they are supposed to go.  This new invention simplifies the process, and allows the patient to adopt a bent position and then simply press a button on the electronic control.  The electronic suppository is self-propelled and equipped with the latest software derived from cruise missile technology.  Unfortunately there were a few accidents in the testing stages and a few cases resulted in legal action, and in some of them the plaintiff had to be carried into court on a stretcher.   They are the inevitable casualties of progress.  But this should not be taken as an indication that there is any danger in using the latest technology in medical science.

Yom HaShoah Reflections: Jack Cohen

During the week of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, which today commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and is different from the international day of Holocaust commemoration, there were several programs related to the Holocaust.  Here is a brief review of two of those I attended.

An old friend from Netanya, Menno Cohen, talked about his own life in Holland during the Shoah in WWII from when he was 6 to about 10 years old, at Netanya AACI.  It was entitled “I once was Jantje Bosch.”  He told how his father who was a baker had to leave his business and the family had to hide, first with some poor people who had a small house, and then they contacted the resistance and moved again and again, until they moved 22 times in about 3 years.  By moving to the southern countryside near the Belgian border they found an area where they could survive as non-Jews with false papers and his pseudonym was Jantje Bosch.  He even went to school and they lived fairly well, while his father was part of the resistance and cycled for many miles all around the southern part of Holland, delivering false papers and helping people hide, both Jews and non-Jews.

Things got worse when the allied forces started bombing and attacking the Germans from the air.  The Germans built fortifications nearby and ironically after the Germans left they used these concrete bunkers themselves for protection.   They were finally liberated by the Canadian Army.  Most of his immediate family survived, but Holland was notorious for the high proportion of the Jews, ca. 85%, who were murdered, mostly hidden Jews were given away for money. He and his family were exceptionally lucky.

Reuven Geffen spoke at AACI Netanya about the Shoah in Lithuania and particularly in Kovno (also called Kaunas).  He has published a book in English entitled “The Story of an Underground: the resistance of the Jews of Kovno in the Second World War,” which is a translation of a book written 50 years before in Hebrew by two survivors of the Kovno Ghetto underground Dov Levin and Zvi Brown, who had escaped from the Ghetto and fought as partisans in the forest and after the War had moved to Israel.  The former of these authors was also a cousin of Reuven and this was the first detailed academic history of a Jewish resistance movement under the Nazis.  Their narrative is based on oral testimonies of their fellow survivors and fighters and written memoirs of witnesses as well as documentary material.

He described how even before the German Army entered Lithuania in June 24, 1941, the nationalists, who blamed the Jews for the previous Communist occupation by the Soviet Union, openly attacked and murdered Jews in the streets.  Thousands were killed, but this was only a prelude to the German massacres that began immediately with the transport of thousands of Jews from the city to the Seventh Fort, one of the medieval fortresses that encircled the city.  The Jewish population of Kovno had been 40,000 (ca. 25% of the population) but was down to ca. 30,000 when the the Germans established a Ghetto and forced the remaining Jews into it.  The pace of the murders continued to increase week by week, until the last major massacre when 10,000 Jews were murdered in October, 1941.  By then only 17,000 Jews were left in the Ghetto.  Then there was a lull of over two years in the killings.   The remaining Jews were forced to work and a Jewish authority, a Judenrat, was established.  The Head of this Dr. Elhanan Elkes was a respected doctor who was sympathetic to the resistance (not the case elsewhere) and who gave them support.

At first there was no resistance, due to the unpreparedness of the Jewish youth movements for the pace of the killings. During this lull the youth movements became organized, but at first they largely engaged in theoretical discussions, what would be better, to defend the Ghetto or to escape to the partisans that they had heard were fighting in the forests.  However, gradually they gathered weapons and gradually the many youth movements coalesced into a Jewish Fighting Organization (JFO) of ca. 600 under the command of the Communists who had access to weapons smuggled in from Russia (this never happened in the Warsaw Ghetto).   They carried out minor actions against the German occupation, but were then advised by the Communists to move to a forest area near the Byelorussian border.  A  group of 100 and set out to travel the  ca. 100 miles to this area, but most of them were detected and killed by the German forces.

The survivors returned to the Ghetto, and they and the other fighters were rounded up and imprisoned in the Ninth Fort, where the remainder of the Jews were being killed.   The Ghetto was gradually reduced in size as these Aktions continued.  In 1943 the 1,500 children of the orphanage were taken there and massacred, also the Jewish Ghetto police force was wiped out.  Altogether ca. 70,000 people were murdered at the Ninth Fort.

Seeing the end was near the remaining resistance fighters formulated a plan and managed to escape from the Ninth Fort by secretly drilling holes manually in the iron door of their prison.  Most of them escaped, but half were captured and shot and the rest managed to join the partisans in the Rudnicki Forest near Vilna.   Of the ca. 350 Jews who formed the Kovno Battalion of the Partisans, only ca. 100 survived the war.   Although the actual resistance was minor, it served to act as a bridge to the fighting carried out in Eretz Israel.  Altogether ca. 95% of the Jews of Kovno  and of Lithuania were murdered by the Lithuanians and Germans.  Reuven’s book is dedicated to his son Idan who fell while fighting in the IDF.

 

The Beersheva Turkish Train Station Museum:

During our visit to Beersheva we visited the new (6 months) Turkish Train Station Museum.  Both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have renovated their former Turkish train stations as cultural centers, with exhibitions, restaurants and boutiques.  But the one in Beersheva is different.

In 1915, in the middle of WWI, the Turks built an extension of their rail system down to Beersheva, which was planned to be their local capital.  They did this mainly to transfer soldiers and materiel to the war front with the British in Egypt.  Of course, they never thought that they would lose so they expended a lot of money and effort in building this new city (now the Old City of Beersheva) and this train station.  It was their intention to capture British Egypt and the Suez Canal to extend their Empire.

But, the British outflanked them by sending the Australian Light Horse regiment to attack Beersheva in 1917 and the rest is history.  Because Beersheva was captured, the Turks were forced to withdraw from Gaza and they destroyed parts of the railway lines.   British Gen. Allenby captured Jerusalem in 1917 and the Turks were forced out of what the British then called Palestine (although the Philistines were long since gone from the scene).   The British used the railway for some time, but by 1927 during their Mandate they closed it down.

The Israeli State built a new rail line and the first train arrived in Beersheva, capital of the Negev, in 1956 .  It was given the same number as the last train that ran on the Turkish route, 70414.  But, the main train station is elsewhere in the city and the old Turkish train station fell into disrepair.  However, recently it was renovated and opened as a museum, with a train of the old type added.  This was a steam locomotive of British manufacture.  There were only a few of them left in the world, several in Turkey, but they would not sell one to Israel.  So Israel managed to get one from Iran, bought by a third party.  It now sits proudly in the Train Station Museum with the number 70414 painted in large characters on its side.

Just outside the Museum is a memorial to the Turkish soldiers who died fighting the British/Australian/New Zealand troops who captured Beersheva in 1917.   There is also a bust of Gen. Kemal Attaturk, the father of modern Turkey.  Interestingly he is thought to be a descendent of the Donme, Jews who followed the false Messiah Shabbatei Tzvi, who was captured in Turkey and forced to convert to Islam.  His followers did the same thing, but secretly retained many of their formerly Jewish rituals while outwardly remaining Turkish Muslims.  Nearby is also the cemetery of the mainly Australian soldiers who died in the battle for Beersheva in 1917.  Towering over all of this in contrast is a group of very high modern apartment blocks, known locally as “Manhatten.”

  Born in London, UK, lived in suburban Washington DC area for 30 years, moved to Israel in 1996. He has a web site: Jack’s Blog

Jack Cohen