Yosef’s Facts of the Day, Sept. 27-Oct. 3, 2025
The following places are — or have been — named after the British Empire’s Secretary of State for War and the Colonies between 1812 and 1827, Henry Bathurst (1762–1834)…
1. Bathurst Street in Toronto — where most of the Jews of Canada’s largest city are found
2. Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada — the largest city in the northeastern part of that province (however modest)
3. Bathurst Island, Nunavut, Canada — one of those islands in the Canadian High Arctic
4. Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia — Australia’s first inland city (however modest)
5. Bathurst Island, Northern Territory, Australia — just off Darwin, the territorial capital
6. Bathurst, Eastern Cape, South Africa — just inland from Port Alfred, and between Port Elizabeth and East London
7. Banjul, Gambia (named Bathurst until 1973) — the capital and largest city of that West African country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Bathurst,_3rd_Earl_Bathurst#Legacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathurst#Places_and_jurisdictions
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The following early/mid-18th-century composers, philosophers, and rabbis were pretty much contemporaries of one another….
1. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
2. George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) — personally my favourite composer
3. Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741)
4. Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767)
1. Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet; 1694–1778)
2. Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat; 1689–1755)
1. Ba’al Shem Tov (Israel ben Eliezer; ca. 1700-ca. 1760) — progenitor of Hasidic Judaism
2. Ramhal (Moses Hayyim Luzzatto; 1707–1746)
3. Or ha-Hayyim (Hayyim Ibn Attar; 1696–1743) — perhaps the most prominent Moroccan rabbi
4. Jonathan Eybeschutz (1690–1764)
5. Jacob Emden (1697–1776)
(Consult their respective Wikipedia pages if you wish; for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Eybeschutz)
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My full given name, Yosef Dov (Joseph Bear, word for word in English), is shared most prominently with illustrious members of the legendary Lithuanian rabbinical dynasty carrying the family name of Soloveitchik and — in Europe — most famously associated with the city of Brisk (Brest-Litovsk, present-day Belarus).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soloveitchik
These Soloveitchik family members include:
1. Rabbi Yosef Dov — or Yosef Dov Ber — Soloveitchik (also known as “the Beit ha-Levi” [House of Levi], the name of his magnum opus; 1820–1892) — lived in various places in present-day Belarus (at the time part of historical Jewish Lithuania)
https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Yosef_Dov_Soloveitchik_(Beis...
2. Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik (also known as “the Rav”; 1903–1993) — great grand-son of Rabbi Yosef Dov, born in western present-day Belarus, lived in various places in Eastern and Central Europe, and ultimately moved to Boston and New York (splitting his time between the two) and was a towering figure in Modern Orthodox Judaism in the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_B._Soloveitchik
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3. Rabbi Berel Soloveichik* (1915–1981), a first cousin of Rabbi Joseph Ber and also a great grand-son of Rabbi Yosef Dov, born in western present-day Belarus and ultimately moved to Israel
*notice the different spelling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berel_Soloveitchik
There are a couple of other and much less famous Soloveitchik family members who bear the Yosef Dov given name.
That given name is also shared by Yosef Dov Babad (whose lifespan I haven’t been able to get so far), the dayan (judge) of the Belz Hasidic community in London, England, as well as — I believe — one of his ancestors in the late 19th century.
Another famous, though far more secular, bearer of the Yosef Dov name is José Ber Gelbard (1917–1977). Born in Poland, he came with his family to Argentina in 1930 and eventually became a labour activist and a politician (especially as Minister of Economy). He and his family fled to Washington DC after the 1976 coup, and he died there the following year; his son and family returned to Argentina after the restoration of democracy there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ber_Gelbard
Moreover, Dov Yosef — the reverse of my given name — was carried most famously by the Montreal-born Dov Yosef (originally Bernard Joseph; 1899–1980), albeit on a first name-last name basis. Having moved to Israel in 1918, he went on to be an attorney and especially a prominent statesman in early Israeli politics. He, like Gelbard but unlike the other above figures, was quite secular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dov_Yosef
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Couscous is a steamed North African pasta dish made up of very finely rolled granules of semolina (coarse durum wheat flour). A major staple dish of countries like Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, it is often served with some sort of stew on top, whether with meat or with dried apricots, prunes, raisins, etc. (or something else). It has been popular across all ethnicities there, be it the Arabs, Berbers, or Jews (the last one of which used to be quite numerous until the 1950s-1960s).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couscous
So-called “Israeli couscous” is the rolled wheat variety of rice substitutes first developed in the early 1950s, during Israel’s immediate post-independence economic austerity period — which included rice shortages — when that country received loads of Jewish immigrants. That “couscous” has nothing inherently to do with the original Maghrebi couscous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_couscous
Cuscus is the name of numerous arborial marsupial species native to the general region that includes eastern Indonesia, New Guinea, and northeastern Australia. These species are of the possum family, which is not to be confused with American opossums, which are also marsupials. The cuscus species play similar ecological roles to the lemurs of Madagascar, despite the latter being primates (albeit much more primitive than humans or apes or even monkeys).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuscus
Finally (something I had absolutely no idea about), there is a town and archaeological site in Chile — somewhat north of the capital Santiago — called Cuzcuz. (In many dialects of Spanish, it’s pronounced more like “cuscus”, much as “z” in general is pronounced as “s”, this being part of the seseo phenomenon.) Besides being an archaeological site for various pre-Columbian cultures, a claim to fame there is that it is where the treaty to end a brief Chilean civil war in 1829–30 was signed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuz_Cuz
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Rutgers University, my college alma mater and located in New Jersey, is unique among American universities in having been one of only eight colonial colleges in the United States (i.e. first established before 1776), a land-grant college starting a century later (in the 1860s), and ultimately a state university (starting in 1945). In other words, it’s unique among all American universities in having been all three of those at one time or another.
(I’m talking about just the flagship New Brunswick campus that I attended, not the Newark [“NEW-urk”] or Camden campuses as well. And Rutgers — officially known as Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey — retains some private rights/protections with regard to its essential character and mission because of its one-time status as a private university.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutgers_University
However, one other American university geographically pretty close by almost has that distinction as well. The University of Delaware, in Newark,* wasn’t a colonial college but was an academy in the colonial era, it became a land-grant college in the 1860s, and it is a “privately governed, state-assisted” (or statutory) university.
*”NEW-ark” — notice the difference from Newark, New Jersey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Delaware
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Along or near Interstate 90, there are at least three place names which occur both in the western portion of Upstate New York (on the first map) and further west in the United States (from Indiana to Wyoming; on the second map). (On a personal note, I have fond memories of passing through western New York, including those place names, on my way to and from Ohio.) These are:
Rochester, both in New York and Minnesota (indicated in red on the maps)
Buffalo, both in New York and Wyoming (indicated in blue)
Angola, both in New York and Indiana (indicated in yellow) — the service area near Angola, New York, is the westernmost one of New York’s portion of Interstate 90 and is in a wide median of the highway with pedestrian bridges to parking lots on either side of the highway
(Ignore the white dot in northeast Wyoming on the second map; that is an error of mine.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_90
