Adolph Schwimmer, 94, the founder of Israel’s aerospace industry who smuggled planes out of the U.S. to help in the war surrounding Israel’s 1948 creation, died Friday.
The New York native was tasked with building a homegrown aerospace industry for the new state of Israel. His efforts grew into the state-run Israel Aerospace Industries.
Schwimmer’s wife, Rina, said Saturday that her husband’s contributions to Israeli society were “heroic.” She said he died Friday of complications from pneumonia.
Schwimmer was convicted in the U.S. in 1950 of violating the Neutrality Act by exporting aircraft to Israel during its independence war. He never served time in prison and was pardoned by former President Bill Clinton in 2000.
Clara Luper, 88, a black civil rights activist in Oklahoma whose early leadership of lunch counter sit-ins helped break down racial barriers at restaurants and diners nearly two years before the Greensboro, N.C., sit-ins captured national attention in 1960, died of natural causes Wednesday at her home in Oklahoma City, her family said.
Luper was a history teacher at Dunjee High School in 1957 when she agreed to become adviser to the Oklahoma City NAACP’s youth council. The youngsters asked what they could do to help the civil rights movement.
On Aug. 19, 1958, Luper led three other adult chaperons and 14 members of the youth council into the Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City, where they took seats at the counter and asked for Coca-Colas. Denied service, they refused to leave until closing time. They returned on Saturday mornings for several weeks.
The sit-ins received local press coverage. Eventually, the Katz chain agreed to integrate lunch counters at its 38 stores in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas and Iowa. Over the next six years, the local NAACP chapter held sit-ins that led to the desegregation of almost every eating establishment in Oklahoma City.
Jorge Semprun, 87, a writer and politician who chronicled his own experiences in the Nazis’ Buchenwald death camp, struggled against dictatorship in his native Spain and later became that country’s culture minister, has died, the French and Spanish governments said.
Semprun died Tuesday in Paris, where he spent most of his life, the French capital’s mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, said in a statement.
A prolific author who helped develop the genre of the autobiographical novel, Semprun was widely considered one of the foremost chroniclers of the Holocaust. Equal parts memoir and essay, his “Literature or Life” (1994) elegantly describes his experience in Buchenwald, even as it ponders larger philosophical questions.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed the book, which was written in French, as “a testimony that’s as mind-blowing as it is lucid,” and he called Semprun “one of the last great protagonists of an epic.”
Denver Post wire services
