ANSWERS TO TEST YOUR JEWISH IQTM

1. b. Joseph was made viceroy to Pharaoh on the same day he was released from prison. After seven years of plenty and two years of famine, the grain that Joseph had amassed allowed him to gain possession for Pharaoh of virtually all the land and much of the wealth in Egypt, and much of the wealth of neighboring lands. Egypt was a world superpower only while Jews lived there and lost its superpower status two centuries later when the Jews left Egypt following the ten plagues.

2. c. Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, survived several assassination attempts launched against him by Russian President Vladimir Putin and declined offers made to him to escape from Ukraine to the West, in order to stay and lead the military and popular resistance to Russia’s invasion.

3. a. The four quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem – Armenian, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim – represent the different religious and ethnic groups that have lived in the walled-in city for centuries.

4. d. Astronomical observations made during the total solar eclipse of 1919 confirmed Einstein’s predictions in his general theory of relativity of the gravitational deflection of starlight near the Sun and propelled him to international fame.

5. b. Mount Nebo was across the Jordan River from the land of Israel, which Moses could never enter. Moses’s brother Aaron died on Hor the Mountain. Noah’s ark came to rest on the Mountains of Ararat. And the Torah was given to Moses on Mount Sinai.

6. c. “Eat, eat my child” is familiar advice from Yiddishe mamas to their kinder.

7. a. Methuselah’s life was 39 years longer than the life of Adam, who died at the age of 930. Many believe that Adam sacrificed 70 years from his ordained life of 1000 years to enable the life of King David, who lived 70 years.

8. c. King David captured Jerusalem from the Canaanite tribe of Jebusites and moved his capital there about 1004 B.C.E.

9. b. The Shulchan Aruch, literally Set Table, sometimes called in English the “Code of Jewish Law,” was completed by Rabbi Karo in 1563 in the city of Safed, which is in what is now the Upper Galilee region of Israel.

10. a. Natan Sharansky was charged in 1977 with high treason by the KGB, then headed by Yuri Andropov. Sharansky had worked as a translator for Soviet dissident, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Andrei Sakharov, and had once beaten world-chess-champion Garry Kasparov in an exhibition match.