The Jewish calendar is full of anniversaries, but so is the regular calendar.
Every week marks the anniversary of events that helped shape Jewish history, whether that’s a Nobel Prize-winning discovery, a pivotal Supreme Court decision, the birth of an iconic artist, the founding of a community, or a moment that changed the course of the Jewish people.
Welcome to Unpacked’s latest series, “This Week in Jewish History.” Each week, we’ll take a look back at the stories worth remembering and why they still matter today.
Check out previous editions here.
Fascist Italy bombs Tel Aviv (September 9, 1940)
Monday, September 9, 1940. Italian warplanes appeared over Tel Aviv and dropped bombs on densely populated residential and commercial neighborhoods, striking an area that stretched south from Bograshov Street. The city had no effective air-raid warning system, radar station or anti-aircraft defenses.
The casualties were immediate and devastating: 137 people were killed. Most were Jews, although Arabs and an Australian soldier were also among the dead.
Wait…what?
We don’t often think of Mandatory Palestine as a front in World War II. But Fascist Italy had been bombing the territory since July 1940 as part of its campaign against Britain and its empire. Most of those attacks targeted strategically important sites, particularly Haifa’s port, oil terminal and refineries.
Tel Aviv was different. The bombs fell primarily on civilian neighborhoods rather than military or industrial infrastructure, making the September 9 raid the deadliest aerial attack on Mandatory Palestine during the war.
Why the residential area was hit remains somewhat unclear. Some accounts maintain that the Italian aircraft had initially been headed for Haifa but were forced to turn back, then dropped their bombs near Tel Aviv while attempting to evade British planes. Italian officials, meanwhile, claimed that their aircraft had struck port facilities and warehouses in Jaffa.
Whatever the intended target, the bombs landed in the heart of civilian Tel Aviv.
The attack demonstrated just how close the Yishuv was to the war consuming Europe and North Africa. The danger only grew as Axis forces advanced across the region. German aircraft also attacked British strategic targets in Haifa during the war, while the advance of German forces toward Egypt in 1942 raised fears that the Nazis could eventually reach Palestine itself.
And there’s more.
In October 1944, Nazi Germany dispatched three German operatives and two Palestinian Arab collaborators to Mandatory Palestine in a covert mission known as Operation Atlas. The team parachuted near Jericho carrying weapons, radio equipment, explosives, forged documents and money.
The mission’s primary goals were to establish an intelligence network, recruit and arm local anti-British forces and foment unrest in the territory. It was connected to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former grand mufti of Jerusalem and a prominent Palestinian Arab nationalist who had spent the war collaborating with Nazi Germany and broadcasting Axis propaganda.
Operation Atlas failed almost immediately. British-led forces captured three members of the team within days, while the other two escaped. The operatives never established the intelligence and resistance network Nazi officials had envisioned.
Some later accounts claimed that the mission had an even more sinister purpose: poisoning Tel Aviv’s water supply with arsenic. The surviving British records confirm that the operatives carried a small quantity of poison, but they do not establish that the team possessed enough to kill tens of thousands of people or that poisoning Tel Aviv was part of the mission. Historians therefore dispute that version of the story.
As for the September 1940 bombing, the Yishuv responded with grief and outrage. Tel Aviv Mayor Israel Rokach appealed to governments abroad for international condemnation. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, although the United States had not yet entered the war, denounced the targeting of civilian populations.
The attack is little remembered today, but it was a stark reminder that Mandatory Palestine was not insulated from World War II. For the Jews of the Yishuv, the war did not exist only in distant European cities. On September 9, 1940, it arrived in the streets of Tel Aviv.
Jewish history is a story of both tragedy and triumph. This week is no exception.
Israel signs reparation agreement with West Germany (September 10, 1952)
Was the reparations agreement between Israel and West Germany a triumph? In 1952, it depended on whom you asked.
The story goes like this: In its first three and a half years, Israel absorbed nearly 700,000 Jewish immigrants and refugees from postwar Europe and countries across the Middle East and North Africa, roughly doubling the young country’s Jewish population. Many arrived with few possessions, and Israel — still recovering from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War — struggled to house, feed and employ them.
Hundreds of thousands of newcomers were initially placed in ma’abarot, or transit camps. Although the camps housed Jews from both Europe and the Muslim world, their residents were disproportionately Mizrahi. Families lived in tents, tin huts and other temporary structures, often amid overcrowding, unemployment, inadequate sanitation and poor access to basic services.
The economic situation across Israel was so dire, and resources so scarce, that the government instituted a policy known as tzena, or austerity. Staple foods, clothing, shoes, furniture and other necessities were strictly rationed.
Israel was running dangerously low on foreign currency, and its leaders feared that the economic crisis could threaten the new state’s survival.
Enter David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and consummate pragmatist.
Ben-Gurion argued that Germany should not be permitted to retain the property it had stolen from murdered Jews. As he put it, the Jewish people could not allow “the murderers to become the heirs.” Israel also maintained that it deserved compensation for the enormous cost of resettling approximately 500,000 Holocaust survivors.
But opponents, led on the right by Menachem Begin — himself a survivor of Soviet imprisonment who had lost most of his family in the Holocaust — argued that accepting money from Germany would amount to taking “blood money.” No payment, they insisted, could compensate for the murder of six million Jews, and negotiating with Germany risked granting the country moral absolution far too soon after the Holocaust.
Opposition also came from parts of the Israeli left, making the debate one of the fiercest and most emotionally charged in the country’s history.
On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset debated whether to authorize negotiations, thousands of protesters gathered outside the building in Jerusalem. Begin delivered a fiery speech, and the demonstration descended into violence as protesters threw stones at the Knesset and police responded with tear gas and water cannons. Hundreds of protesters and police officers were injured, windows were shattered and the parliamentary debate was temporarily interrupted.
Two days later, the Knesset voted 61–50 to authorize the government to pursue negotiations with West Germany.
Meanwhile, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was seeking to distinguish the new Federal Republic from the Nazi regime and restore his country’s standing in the international community. In September 1951, he acknowledged before the West German parliament that “unspeakable crimes” had been committed in the name of the German people and declared his government willing to pursue material compensation. He nevertheless faced substantial political resistance at home.
Formal negotiations began in March 1952 and lasted six months. Israel sought compensation for the cost of absorbing Holocaust survivors, while the newly established Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany — better known as the Claims Conference — represented Jewish organizations and pursued compensation for individual survivors and heirs outside Israel.
On September 10, 1952, representatives of Israel, West Germany and the Claims Conference signed the Luxembourg Agreements. West Germany agreed to provide Israel with goods worth 3 billion Deutsche marks ($10.2 billion USD today) over roughly 12 years. An additional 450 million marks ($1.54 billion USD today) would go to the Claims Conference to support relief, rehabilitation and compensation programs for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.
Much of Israel’s share came not as cash but as fuel, raw materials and German-made goods, including ships, railway equipment and industrial machinery. These imports helped expand Israel’s electrical grid, merchant fleet, railways, water system and manufacturing sector, fundamentally reshaping the country’s economy.
The agreement did not make the controversy disappear. Many survivors and other Israelis continued to reject German money, and relations between the two countries remained fraught; Israel and West Germany would not establish formal diplomatic relations until 1965.
Economically, however, the agreement proved enormously consequential. It supplied Israel with resources the cash-strapped country urgently needed and helped build the infrastructure of the young state. Whether that made the agreement a triumph, a painful necessity, or an unforgivable compromise remained a far more complicated question.
Originally Published Sep 8, 2026 02:40PM EDT
