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List Of West European Jews
Apart from France, established Jewish populations exist in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. With the original medieval populations wiped out by the Black Death and the pogroms that followed it, the current Dutch and Belgian communities originate in the Jewish expulsion from Spain and Portugal, while a Swiss community was only established after emancipation in 1874. However, the vast majority of the population in the Netherlands and a large proportion of the one in Belgium were murdered in the Holocaust, and much of the modern Jewish population of these countries (as well as of Switzerland) derives from post-Holocaust arrivals from other parts of Europe. Here is a list of some prominent Jews in western Europe, arranged by country of origin. Austria Belgium * Natanel Yatziv, number one athlete in Belgium (Belgian born) * Charles Trau (born 2 August 2002) * Chantal Akerman (6 June 1950 – 5 October 2015), director-screenwriter * Zora Arkus-Duntov, father of the ...
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Black Death
The Black Death (also known as the Pestilence, the Great Mortality or the Plague) was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, causing the deaths of people, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351. Bubonic plague is caused by the bacterium ''Yersinia pestis'' spread by fleas, but it can also take a secondary form where it is spread by person-to-person contact via aerosols causing septicaemic or pneumonic plagues. The Black Death was the beginning of the second plague pandemic. The plague created religious, social and economic upheavals, with profound effects on the course of European history. The origin of the Black Death is disputed. The pandemic originated either in Central Asia or East Asia before spreading to Crimea with the Golden Horde army of Jani Beg as he was besieging the Genoese trading port of Kaffa in Crimea (1347). From Crimea, it was most likely carried ...
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Diane Von Fürstenberg
Diane von Fürstenberg (born Diane Simone Michele Halfin, 31 December 1946) is a Belgian fashion designer best known for her wrap dress. She initially rose to prominence in 1969 when she married into the German princely House of Fürstenberg, as the wife of Prince Egon von Fürstenberg. Following their separation in 1972 and divorce in 1983, she has continued to use his family name. Her fashion company, Diane von Furstenberg (DvF), is available in over 70 countries and 45 free-standing shops worldwide,Jess Cartner-MorleyDiane von Furstenberg: "I danced at Studio 54. Now I work with Google" theguardian.com, 1 July 2014. with the company's headquarters and flagship boutique located in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. She is the past chairwoman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), a position she held from 2006 to 2019; in 2014 was listed as the 68th most powerful woman in the world by ''Forbes''; and in 2015 was included in the ''Time'' 100, as an icon, by ''T ...
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Ernest Mandel
Ernest Ezra Mandel (; also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter (5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995), was a Belgian Marxian economist, Trotskyist activist and theorist, and Holocaust survivor. He fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium. Life Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartacist League. The beginning of Mandel's period at university was interrupted when the German occupying forces closed the university. During World War II, while still a teenager, he joined the Belgian Trotskyist organisation alongside Abraham Leon and Martin Monath. He twice escaped after being arrested in the course of resistance activities, and survived imp ...
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Alfred Loewenstein
Alfred Léonard Loewenstein (11 March 1877 – 4 July 1928) was a Belgian financier. At his peak in the 1920s, Loewenstein was worth around £12 million in the currency of the time (equivalent to £ million in ), making him the third-richest person in the world at the time. His wealth came from investments in electric power and artificial silk businesses when those industries were in their infancy. Loewenstein is remembered today for his mysterious disappearance and death in 1928. Early life and business career Alfred Loewenstein was born to Bernard Loewenstein, a German-Jewish banker in Brussels, Belgium, who converted to Catholicism. Alfred established his own banking concern, and was a wealthy man by 1914. Loewenstein offered his government in exile US$50 million, interest-free, to stabilize the Belgian currency in return for the right to print Belgian francs. The offer was refused. At war's end, he maintained a residence in England where he ran an investment business ...
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Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss (, ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world. Lévi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book ''Tristes Tropiques'' (1955) that established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the sea ...
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George Koltanowski
George Koltanowski (also "Georges"; 17 September 1903 – 5 February 2000) was a Belgian-born American chess player, promoter, and writer. He was informally known as "Kolty". Koltanowski set the world's blindfold record on 20 September 1937, in Edinburgh, by playing 34 chess games simultaneously while blindfolded, making headline news around the world. He also set a record in 1960 for playing 56 consecutive blindfold games at ten seconds per move. Early life Born into a Polish Jewish family in Antwerp, Belgium, Koltanowski learned chess by watching his father and brother play. He took up the game seriously at the age of 14, and became the top Belgian player when Edgard Colle died in 1932. Chess career He got his first big break in chess at age 21, when he visited an international tournament in Meran, planning to play in one of the reserve sections. The organizers were apparently confused or mixed up about his identity and asked him to play in the grandmaster section, to ...
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Julien Klener
Julien Klener is a Belgian linguist born in Ostend, Belgium in 1939. Life During World War II he was a hidden child in Brussels. Since 1945, being back in Ostend, he went to primary and secondary school and later on studied Germanic languages (BA) and Semitic languages (BA, MA and PhD). His main languages being Biblical Hebrew, Akkadian, Biblical Aramaic, Talmudic Aramaic, Ugaritic, Arabic and also a non-Semitic language, Indonesian. Teaching career After a few years teaching on higher secondary level he continued his career at the Dutch-speaking Ghent University where he lectured until 2004. His main teachings concerned: Judaism as a cultural system, Biblical Hebrew (undergraduate and graduate students) Comparative linguistics of the Afro-Asiatic languages (graduate students), Semitic Epigraphy (graduate students) and General Introduction to Semitic Studies (graduate students). He also studied in Amsterdam, Jerusalem and in 1977 received a Fulbright-grant which brought him to ...
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René Kalisky
René Kalisky (; born Kaliski, ; 20 July 1936 – 6 May 1981) was a Belgian writer of Polish-Jewish descent who is best known for the plays he wrote in the last 12 years of his life. Kalisky, whose father, Abraham Kaliski was killed at Auschwitz, was himself hidden from harm during World War II. Personal life Kalisky was born in Etterbeek, one of municipalities located in the Brussels-Capital Region of Belgium, 20 July 1936. His father Abram Kaliski was born in Lodz 10 May 1908. His grandparents, Solomon Yitzhak Kaliski and Hadassah Kaliski had at least 8 children, who all perished during the holocaust except for one son and one daughter. After his wife's death, fleeing the pogroms, Solomon traveled to South Africa before ending up in Mandatory Palestine at the beginning of the century and died in Tel-Aviv in 1948, aged 80. Abram emigrated to Belgium where he became a leather merchant and a dancer. Aged 23, in 1932, he met and married Fradla Wach, born in Warsaw on November 1 ...
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League Of Nations
The League of Nations (french: link=no, Société des Nations ) was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. The main organization ceased operations on 20 April 1946 but many of its components were relocated into the new United Nations. The League's primary goals were stated in its Covenant. They included preventing wars through collective security and disarmament and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration. Its other concerns included labour conditions, just treatment of native inhabitants, human and drug trafficking, the arms trade, global health, prisoners of war, and protection of minorities in Europe. The Covenant of the League of Nations was signed on 28 June 1919 as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles, and it became effective together with the rest of the Treaty on 10 January 1920. T ...
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Paul Hymans
Paul Louis Adrien Henri Hymans (23 March 1865 – 8 March 1941), was a Belgian politician associated with the Liberal Party. He was the second president of the League of Nations and served again as its president in 1932–1933. Life Hymans was the son of the Belgian writer and historian Louis Hymans. He became a lawyer and professor at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. As a politician, he became Belgian Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1918 to 1920 (and again from 1927 to 1935), Minister of Justice from 1926 to 1927 and member of the Council of Ministers from 1935 to 1936. In 1919, together with Charles de Broqueville and Emile Vandervelde he introduced universal suffrage for all men (''one man, one vote'') and compulsory education. As foreign minister during the Great War, Hymans was successful in securing promises from the Allies that amounted to co-belligerency. Britain, France and Russia pledged in the Declaration of Sainte-Adresse in February 1916 that Belgium would be ...
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International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution, headquartered in Washington, D.C., consisting of 190 countries. Its stated mission is "working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world." Formed in 1944, started on 27 December 1945, at the Bretton Woods Conference primarily by the ideas of Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes, it came into formal existence in 1945 with 29 member countries and the goal of reconstructing the international monetary system. It now plays a central role in the management of balance of payments difficulties and international financial crises. Countries contribute funds to a pool through a quota system from which countries experiencing balance of payments problems can borrow money. , the fund had XDR 477 billion (a ...
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Camille Gutt
Camille Gutt (14 November 1884 – 7 June 1971), born Camille Guttenstein, was a Belgian economist, politician, and industrialist who served as the first managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 1946 to 1951. He was the architect of a monetary reform plan that facilitated the recovery of the economy of Belgium after the Second World War. Early life Born in Brussels, he was a son of Max Guttenstein and Marie-Paule Schweitzer. Max Guttenstein had moved to Belgium from Austria-Hungary in 1877 and became a Belgian citizen in 1886. Camille Gutt attended high school at the Royal Athenaeum in Ixelles. Gutt obtained a PhD in legal studies, and a master's degree in political and social sciences at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). During his study, he met Claire Frick, whom he married in 1906. The marriage gave birth to three sons: Jean-Max (1914–1941), François (1916–1944) and Etienne (1922–2011). Career Camille Gutt worked in various industries, s ...
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