Following the death of his son, Lazarus Joseph initiated the first regular minyan in the State Capitol building in Albany to recite Kaddish
Not far from the original site of the Jacob Joseph School, on the corner of Henry and Rutgers streets in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, stands the iconic Captain Jacob Joseph Playground. Dedicated by leading city officials in 1947, it’s named for a 22-year-old US Marine who was killed in a bloody World War II campaign on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal five years prior.
Following the decisive defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the Guadalcanal campaign in the Solomon Islands, waged between August 1942 and February 1943, was a prolonged battle that ultimately ended in a strategic Allied victory, with the US Navy now able to take the offensive, in contrast to its defensive posture following Pearl Harbor. Allied naval forces under Admiral William Halsey engaged the Japanese under Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, with dozens of ships and thousands of combatants finding their end in the vast sea graveyard known as “Iron Bottom Sound.”
United States Marine and Army detachments battled the Japanese on land for control of the island and its airfields. The enormous loss of life prompted Japan’s Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi to remark, “Guadalcanal is no longer merely a name of an island in Japanese military history. It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese Army.”
Of the approximately 550,000 American Jews who served in the US armed forces during World War II, many lost their lives in the Pacific theater. Among those was Captain Jacob Joseph, who left the Grand Concourse in the Bronx to enlist in the Marine Corps.
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