Harry Houdini didn’t just wriggle out of handcuffs and water tanks—he took on spiritualists, called out frauds, and insisted it was all skill, not sorcery. Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes’s creator went all-in on séances. Here’s how their worlds collided.
Yerachmiel Plezenshtein, a Red Army platoon leader who captured a beachhead at Eltigen, was shot in the head and presumed dead, quietly kept the mitzvot under Soviet rule, and in 1974 surrendered his Hero of the Soviet Union medal to make aliyah—only to have it restored in 1992.
After a long friendship and seeing Judaism up close, he chose to convert. London’s leading rabbi said no—fearing backlash over such a polarizing public figure—so Lord George Gordon kept searching for another path.
Something in his accent gave away a faraway origin... Still, it was hard to imagine that until just a year earlier the speaker's name had been Setsuzo Kotsuji, a University of Tokyo professor of Oriental Studies.
עברית
