![]() 575,000 initial reserve forces at the Steppe Front.Soviet defences were as deep as almost 200 miles in places.All other civilians within 25 miles of the front were evacuated.300,000 civilians used to construct eight lines of defences, including 9,000 km of trenches.German advance halted at 10 miles in the north and 30 miles in the south. ![]() Salient was 150 miles across and 100 miles deep into German-held territory.The battle was fought between 5 July to 23 August.The battle took place in July and August 1943, opening with a German offensive and culminating in a momentous Soviet victory. ![]() The Wehrmacht was outnumbered and deficient in weapons in comparison to the Red Army, thus the German attempt to retake the initiative by attacking the vulnerable salient around Kursk represented a real gamble. In a typical act of grandstanding, presumably to reassure the rest of the Axis as defeats began to mount up, Hitler announced on 15 April 1943 that victory in the Battle of Kursk would be “a beacon for the whole world”. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Like many Bay Area Jews, we celebrate Shabbat and observe the laws and customs of our religion in our own traditional ways: we eat homemade challah and enjoy a family dinner every Friday evening we keep a kosher home, and the no-pork-no-shellfish rule applies when we eat out some years we do only one Passover seder, and Lag Ba’omer was a holiday that completely escaped us this year. In our exhaustion and excitement, none of us noticed that we traveled through an entire Shabbat. By the time we arrived in Johannesburg, it was Saturday. It was a Thursday when we left our busy home in California. We journeyed many hours and great distances across continents, oceans and time zones to this tranquil place at the bottom of Africa. For many moments, we are surrounded only by cracking branches, whispering leaves and the setting sun. Her tail swishes behind her, and the grass rustles. She drops the woody limbs with their few leaves into her waiting mouth. Her trunk effortlessly tears entire branches off the tree. One lone elephant grazes in the twilight. Their dark silhouettes are a dramatic contrast to the gently glowing sun and pinky-orange sky. ![]() The trees stretch their bare arms upwards, as if reaching for those last few essential rays of light. Sunset happens early and quickly in winter. The wide African sky is streaked pink and gold as the sun inches toward the horizon. ![]() |
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