Tag Archives: World War II

Jew of the Week: Charles Lazarus

Toys “R” Us!

Charles Lazarus and the original Children’s Supermarket

Charles P. Lazarus (b. 1923) was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up working in his father’s bicycle shop. After returning from combat in World War II, he opened his first business, a baby furniture store called ‘Children’s Bargain Town’. In 1950, Lazarus responded to customer requests and began selling baby toys in his store. He quickly realized that toys are a much better business than furniture, as they break often, get boring quickly, and parents are always looking for new gifts for their kids. Lazarus had a vision of toys becoming an everyday commodity, as opposed to a seasonal item. He decided to try a new store concept, modelling on the self-serve grocery stores that were becoming very popular at the time. Thus, Lazarus opened the first ‘Children’s Supermarket’, which still stands today in Washington. His motto: “Give the customer what they want.” In 1957, as business boomed, Lazarus opened a second store, calling it ‘Toys “R” Us’. The chain has since expanded to over 1,600 locations around the world, employing over 100,000 people, and becoming one of the most recognizable brands globally. Lazarus personally oversaw the bulk of this growth, running his company for 46 years before stepping down as CEO and Chairman in 1994. The company continues to give back to the community with its Children’s Fund donating millions of dollars to countless children’s programs. Recently, Toys “R” Us began to cover the roof of its distribution centre with solar panels, creating a 5.4 megawatt, clean energy generator – the largest such project in North America.

Words of the Week

There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it.
– Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937

Jew of the Week: Frank Lautenberg

Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg

Frank Raleigh Lautenberg (1924-2013) was born in New Jersey to a poor family of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia. His father died young from cancer, leaving his mother to support the family by selling sandwiches. After high school, Lautenberg fought in World War II, serving in the army until 1946. At the time, returning war veterans had their education financed by the government, so Lautenberg got an economics degree from Columbia Business School. He first worked for an insurance company, then as a salesman, eventually rising to the rank of CEO. In 1978 he became New York’s Port Authority, managing the area’s vast transportation infrastructure. That brought him closer to politics, and in 1982 he ran for the Senate as a democrat. One of his first major moves as senator was bringing into effect a minimum drinking age, set at 21 years since 1984. In 1990 his ‘Lautenberg Amendment’ passed into law, making it easier for refugees to immigrate to the US, thus opening the doors to thousands of Jews fleeing the collapsing Soviet Union. Since then, countless refugees from around the world have been able to find asylum in the US due to this law. Lautenberg’s second famous amendment passed in 1996, banning the sale of firearms to those convicted of domestic violence. After winning two more re-elections, Lautenberg decided to retire in 2000. However, he quickly regretted the decision, and came back in 2002, winning re-election again in 2008. Lautenberg wrote legislation that banned smoking on airplanes and in federal buildings. He voted consistently for more stem cell research, gun control, and peaceful foreign policies, making him a hero among liberal democrats. Sadly, he passed away this Monday from viral pneumonia after a previous battle with lymphoma. At 89 years of age, he was the oldest-serving senator, and the last to have fought in World War II.

 

Words of the Week

Are you as careful with what comes out of your mouth as you are with what enters it?
– Chassidic Proverb

Jews of the Week: Nathan Rosen & Brian Podolsky

Podolsky and Rosen

Nathan Rosen (1909-1995) was born in Brooklyn and studied at MIT during the Great Depression. While still young, he published several famous papers, including ‘The Neutron’, which predicted the structure of the nucleus a year before it was discovered. Between 1935 and 1945 he was Albert Einstein’s personal assistant at Princeton. Together, they discovered (mathematically) a “bridge” connecting distant areas of space – now called a wormhole. With Einstein’s encouragement, Rosen moved to the nascent State of Israel and joined Haifa’s Technion in 1953. He later served as President of Ben-Gurion University, founded the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Physical Society of Israel, and the International Society for General Relativity and Gravitation. Aside from all this, he is most famous for coming up with the well-known “EPR Paradox” together with Einstein and a fellow Jewish scientist named Podolsky (hence “EPR”).

Boris Yakovlevich Podolsky (1896-1966) was born in Russia to a poor Jewish family which immigrated to the U.S. in 1913. He served in the US Army and worked as an electrical engineer before returning to school and earning a PhD from Caltech. In 1933 he was given a fellowship at Princeton, which led to his collaboration with Einstein and Rosen on the EPR Paradox. Interestingly, some have suggested that Podolsky was a Soviet spy, codenamed “Quantum”, and helped the Soviets start their nuclear program during World War II. His major legacy, however, is in the great work he did on solving various complex physics problems of the day.

Words of the Week

Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.
– Albert Einstein