Safran again used all his diplomatic skills to have them freed telling the Bucharest police chief
Posted in General on 01. Sep, 2010
Safran again used all his diplomatic skills to have them freed, telling the Bucharest police chief they would be “official hostages” for their community’s good behaviour. Safran lobbied the Orthodox Patriarch Nicodim (whom he remembered as a “grim, ruthless old man of the anti-Semitic priesthood”) in his successful campaign to have the Yellow Star badge abolished soon after its introduction.In December 1941 all Jewish organisations were abolished, and Safran helped set up a Jewish Council which worked underground. As news spread of their disappearance, his and his wife’s deaths were reported on Soviet-controlled Radio Czernowitz. But the relieved couple was reunited two days later.Refusing to emigrate to British-controlled Palestine, Safran was among the senior Jewish leaders arrested in July 1941 after Romania entered the Second World War. Safran needed all his powers of persuasion and pleading to try to mitigate these attacks. During a pogrom in Bucharest in January 1941, the Iron Guard seized and threatened Sarah as they sought to track down her husband. Carrying his daughter Esther in his arms, Safran hunted feverishly for her.
After completing school in the town he went to Vienna University, gaining a doctorate in 1933. But soon after his return his father died, and the young Safran took up the role of Bacau’s rabbi when only just 23.After the death in 1939 of Romania’s chief rabbi, Jacob Nemirower, Safran’s wife Sarah persuaded him to allow himself to be nominated. Safran was certain his election was due to the respect for his late father.When the Fascist Iron Guard seized power in September 1940, latent anti-Semitism soon turned into physical attacks on Jews and Jewish property. Yet, within months, the diminutive and scholarly Safran was having to fight for the community’s very survival.Safran had been born in Bacau in northern Romania to a distinguished rabbi who brought him up to follow in his footsteps. Installed as the country’s chief rabbi, he was just 29, the youngest chief rabbi in the world.
As such he became ex officio a member of the Senate, despite being below the required age of 40, and his inaugural parliamentary speech that month drew prolonged applause – to his abiding surprise. As the great and the good of Romania’s million-strong Jewish community gathered in the choral synagogue in Bucharest one Sunday in March 1940, few could have realised the enormity of the responsibility they were placing on the shoulders of Alexandru Safran. Alexandru Safran (Alexandre Safran), rabbi: born Bacau, Romania 12 September 1910; Chief Rabbi of Romania 1940-47; Chief Rabbi of Geneva 1948-2006; married 1936 Sarah Reinharz (deceased; one son, one daughter); died Geneva 27 July 2006.
Equally at ease playing mellow ballads, boogie-woogie instrumentals or risqu?ongs like “450 Pound Woman” or “Baby Let’s Go Down to the Woods”, Floyd Dixon had an amazing piano technique, sang in a gritty voice and was a pivotal figure in the creation and evolution of early rhythm’n'blues.A gentle and jolly man, he dubbed himself “Mr Magnificent” and even recorded a fitting epitaph, “Don’t Send Me No Flowers in the Graveyard”.Pierre Perrone. In 1984, he was commissioned to write a blues song for the Los Angeles Olympics. While there, he scored some of his biggest successes with “Wine, Wine, Wine”, “Tired, Broke and Busted” and “Too Much Jelly Roll”, one of the first compositions by the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to be recorded. He moved on to Specialty and then Cat, a subsidiary of the Atlantic label, for whom he cut the raucous “Hey Bartender” in 1954, but even if he could hold his own against the likes of Little Richard – as demonstrated on “Oooh Little Girl” issued by Ebb Records in 1957 – the advent of rock’n'roll seemed to have put an end to his career.Dixon recorded for a myriad of regional companies throughout the Sixties and early Seventies but eventually moved back to Texas and led a quiet life there.His 1980 renaissance saw him join his former mentor Charles Brown and the R&B singer Ruth Brown on the European Blues Caravan tour.