The Sinking of the Titanic
On the night of 14–15 April 1912 the largest liner in the world goes down; among the fifteen hundred dead are Jewish emigrants of third class, and Isidor and Ida Straus.
The Titanic sails from Southampton for New York—the very route by which millions of emigrants travel in the years of the Great Immigration. In third class are dozens of Jewish families from the Russian empire; the ship carries a kosher kitchen, by then customary on transatlantic liners competing for passengers from the Pale of Settlement. On the night of 14–15 April the liner strikes an iceberg and sinks in two hours and forty minutes; about fifteen hundred people die. Among them are Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy's, a former congressman and a noted figure of Jewish philanthropy, and his wife Ida, who refused a lifeboat without her husband: "Where you go, I go." Straus Park in Manhattan keeps their memory. The disaster changes maritime law: it brings the first international convention for the safety of life at sea (SOLAS, 1914)—lifeboats, from then on, for every soul aboard.
Sources
Documents of the period
- British Wreck Commissioner's inquiry (Mersey report), 1912 — the circumstances of the disaster and the death toll
Scholarship
- Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Straus, Isidor” — Isidor and Ida Straus; Jewish passengers and the kosher kitchen
Basis: documents and evidence.