User:Alonza1/sandbox

Jesse Zel Lurie
Jesse Zel Lurie (born December 4, 1913) is an American journalist, publisher and philanthropist. Since retirement in 1983 he has written a column on Israeli affairs for Jewish newspapers in the US. He has devoted his life to encouraging conflict resolution between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel.

Early Life and Education
He was born in Gloversville, NY, to Jacob and Ida Lurie, the fifth of six brothers. He was named his birth certificate Jesse Zelig. In his professional life he is known as Jesse Zel Lurie. His father, Jacob Lurie, was a partner with his older brother, Morris, in M. Lurie & Co., a chain of women’s fashion and department stores in the Mohawk Valley. When Zel was 2 years old, his father moved the family to Boro Park in Brooklyn, when he became the New York City buyer for M. Lurie & Co.

His father took a leading role in a committee to found a day school in Boro Park. The school, Yeshiva Eitz Hayim, opened its doors in September, 1918. There was no kindergarten but there was a first grade. So at age four, Zel entered first grade. From then on he was always the youngest and smallest boy in his class. His parents were Zionists and his mother was president of the Boro Park Hadassah. In the summer of 1928, he sailed for Palestine from New York on a French tramp steamer which took 28 days to reach Haifa. He entered Beit Sefer Reali, the pre-engineer high school connected to the Technion in Haifa, as a sophomore. In the summer of 1929, His parents and younger brother made aliyah a couple of months before the 1929 crash. His father became a real estate investor. He built the first apartment house at 10 Ahad Haam in Haifa and the family lived in one of the first floor apartments. The apartment house is now an expensive office building but the keystone over the door still reads Beit Yaacov Lurie. He entered Cornell University in 1931 and met his wife, Irene ′Jupie′ Blayzor there. They were married for 50 years. Shortly after their 50th anniversary party she succumbed to cancer in 1988. They have two children and four grandchildren. From 1934 until 1937 Zel was in Palestine, and after returning to the United States he attended Columbia Graduate School of Journalism as a special student. Since he didn’t have a BA, he couldn’t receive a master’s degree but he took all the courses and earned a certificate degree with the Class of ‘39.

Journalism Career - 1937-1983
From 1934 to 1937 Zel worked for the Palestine Post, first as the Jerusalem reporter covering the Arab revolt of 1936 and then as the head of the Tel Aviv bureau. After returning to the United States in 1937, Zel remained a foreign correspondent of the Palestine Post (later the Jerusalem Post) until 1967. In 1937, Zel worked at the New York Jewish News as the editor and at Opinion Magazine as the managing editor, both of which were published by the same people. In the spring of 1941, he was a free-lance writer in Jamaica (when it was a British Colony) for the Miami Herald for about six weeks. The British deported him because he was associating with the “revolutionaries,” the people who later became the leaders of independent Jamaica. In December, 1941, he was hired as the publicity director of the United Palestine Appeal. He had written a release that the director asked him to be sure to have published. But when he called the New York Times, the city desk shouted at him, “The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!” From 1942 to 1945, he worked for the Jewish Welfare Board as the public relations director for the Jewish chaplains. He wrote the story about the Four Chaplains who gave their life jackets to soldiers to help save their lives during the sinking of the Dorchester in February, 1943. The story has since been commemorated in books, film, TV, a postage stamp and even by an act of Congress, who in 1988 proclaimed February 3rd as the Four Chaplains Day.

In the spring of 1945 he was drafted into the army where he was trained as a photographer. He was discharged in November, 1945. In the spring of 1947, after the British announced it was giving up their mandate over Palestine in May, 1948, and the United Nations created United Nations Special Committee On Palestine (“UNSCOP”) to make recommendations on concerning the future of Palestine, Zel covered the United Nations for the Palestine Post, cabling stories every day. He also assisted Isaac “Si” Kenen who was the Information Director of the Jewish Agency in New York.

In June, 1947, Zel was hired by  Abraham Feinberg to open an office for the American Friends of Haganah. The Haganah had been working clandestinely from 1945. Now Abe wanted an ‘open’ public office for the Haganah. Teddy Kolle k was the Haganah emissary in New York in charge of the clandestine operations of buying arms and ships for the illegal immigration of the survivors of the Holocaust. Zel became the first Executive Director of the American Friends of the Haganah. He supervised their the newsletter Haganah Speaks. Hadassah hired him to revamp their newsletter. His first issue appeared in October, 1947 with the headline “UN Declares a Jewish State” after UNSCOP recommended the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. He remained at Hadassah as editor and publisher for 36 years until 1983. He made many trips to Israel where he met and interviewed all the leaders of the day. He nurtured many authors, including Elie Wiesel and Gloria Goldreich, whose stories were first published in Hadassah Magazine.

Always on the lookout for English translations of popular authors on his trips to Israel, Zel obtained an English translation of a short story of A.B. Yehoshua, and he became his first agent in the United States. Zel was in Jerusalem when Anwar Sadat made his historical first visit to Israel in November, 1977. He covered Sadat’s Knesset speech for the New York Post. The front page read “No More War” by Jesse Zel Lurie, Post Correspondent.

Philanthropy/Retirement
After his retirement to Florida, Zel began writing columns for the South Florida Jewish Journal. To this day, he continues to express his opinions on all subjects Israeli and Jewish in a bimonthly column entitled A Reporter’s View. He is now the senior columnist and he may be the oldest American journalist still working. Since retirement, he has devoted his life to building better relationships between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs; Israelis and Palestinians. He spent the 1980's and early 1990's working toward peace in Israel through his work with Peace Now and the Israeli political party Meretz. At a time when anyone who even advocated talking to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians was labelled a traitor in Israel, he supported those who were willing to do so, such as Knesset member Aryeh Eliav. He also wrote numerous letters to the editor of the New York Times, the Nation , New Republic , and Moment and articles for such papers as the The Jerusalem Post and the Palm Beach Post. This work paid off when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords in 1993 and Yasser Arafat returned to Gaza in the spring of 1994. Unfortunately, the Oslo Accords did not bring peace to the region and an independent Palestine State.

Zel is a firm believer in co-existence between Israeli and Palestinians. He was a founder of the American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salam, the only village in Israel where Jews and Arabs choose to live together, and served on its board for many years. In 1993, he helped build a primary school there in Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salam, with a bilingual, binational, and bicultural curriculum. It is the first school in Israel where Israeli Jewish and Arab children learn together in the same classrooms with respect and equality for both peoples. Bilingual, binational, and bicultural education has since been initiated in several schools through out Israel, notably the ones run by Hand and Hand, which Zel also supports. In 1997, he tried to encourage other journalists to write about peace and co-existence by funding the Eliav-Sartawi Pioneers for Peace Journalism Prize. There were three awards for articles reporting on this subject, one in the Israeli Hebrew press, one in the Arab press and one in the American press. From 2000-2010 the prize was overseen by the Search for Common Ground who renamed it the Eliav-Sartawi Awards for Middle Eastern Journalism.

At age 100 (as of 2013), Zel is still active in striving for peace in the Middle East and still writing a monthly column for the South Florida Jewish Journal. He resides in Delray Beach, FL with his partner, Dorothy Cline.