Ether anesthetic is used for childbirth for the first time by Dr. Crawford Long in Jefferson, Georgia.

Regina Jonas is ordained as the first female rabbi in the history of Judaism.

Regina Jonas was a pioneering figure in Jewish history as the first woman known to have been ordained as a rabbi. She was born on August 27, 1902, in Berlin, Germany, into a traditional Jewish family. Despite facing significant challenges and resistance, Jonas pursued her passion for Jewish studies and eventually became a trailblazer in the field.

In 1924, she began her studies at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Higher Institute for Jewish Studies) in Berlin. Despite societal norms and opposition from many in the Jewish community who believed that women should not serve as rabbis, Jonas completed her studies and wrote a thesis on “Can a Woman Be a Rabbi According to Halachic Sources?” She defended her thesis in 1930 and received semicha (rabbinic ordination) from Rabbi Max Dienemann, a liberal rabbi in Offenbach, Germany.

Following her ordination, Regina Jonas served as a rabbi in various capacities. She worked with youth groups, led religious services, and provided pastoral care. Her work was not widely recognized during her lifetime, and her ordination was not officially recognized by mainstream Jewish authorities.

Tragically, Regina Jonas’s life was cut short by the Holocaust. In 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. She continued to minister to fellow prisoners during her time in the camp. Sadly, she did not survive the Holocaust and was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.

Winter War: Finland holds off a Soviet attack in the Battle of Kelja.

Radio City Music Hall, “Showplace of the Nation”, opens in New York City.

Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin orders the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”.

The International Monetary Fund is created with the signing of an agreement by 29 nations.

[rdp-wiki-embed url=’https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund’]

The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.

Prague, 23 December 2004 — The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is generally thought to have begun on 24 December 1979, when three Soviet divisions took control of airfields in and around the capital, Kabul.

On 26 December, additional Soviet regiments moved south toward the Afghan border.

Finally, on 27 December, 700 Soviet special troops stormed the presidential palace in Kabul, killing President Hafizullah Amin, who had come to power only three months earlier.

In a recent interview with RFE/RL’s Afghan Service, Amin’s widow, Patmana, recalled the events of that day. She said she became separated from her husband, and that the attackers kept her and children on the second floor of the palace during the night.

She said that when she went upstairs in the morning, she saw the bodies of some of those killed in the assault.

“They kept us on the second floor during the night,” Amin said. “In the morning, I went upstairs. There was a big salon full of martyred bodies. I searched for my husband’s body, but I couldn’t find it.”

Afghan radio announced that Amin had been sentenced to death at a revolutionary trial for “crimes against the state” and that he had been executed.

Former Deputy Prime Minister Babrak Karmal, who had been living in exile in Eastern Europe and was seen as more compliant by Moscow, became the new president and secretary-general of the ruling People’s Democratic Party.

Historians believe several reasons were behind the invasion. The Soviet Union, seeking to maintain or expand its influence in Asia, wanted to preserve the Marxist regime that had taken power in Afghanistan in 1978 but which was collapsing due to civil war and anticommunist sentiment in the country.

On 27 December, 700 Soviet special troops stormed the presidential palace in Kabul, killing President Hafizullah Amin.

The Kremlin also wanted to secure its interests in Afghanistan from Iran, which was engulfed in the Islamic Revolution, and also from the West.

The invasion wrecked Soviet relations with the West. In a speech on 4 January 1980, U.S. President Jimmy Carter called the invasion an “extremely serious threat to peace.”

“Massive Soviet military forces have invaded the small, nonaligned sovereign nation of Afghanistan, which had hitherto not been an occupied satellite of the Soviet Union,” Carter said. “Fifty thousand heavily armed Soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country.”

The United States recalled its ambassador from Moscow and together with many other Western countries boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

But that was the least of Moscow’s concerns. A fierce guerrilla war ensued, and Soviet troops found themselves unable to control the countryside or even the smaller cities. Within a few years, the Soviets’ inability to seal Afghanistan’s borders enabled the mujahedin to create a pipeline for weapons and recruits from abroad. The Soviets initially deployed an estimated 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Ultimately, the occupation force was boosted to 100,000 soldiers, but it did not help.

Lieutenant General Aleksandr Mayorov was a senior Soviet military adviser to the Afghan regime in 1980 and 1981 and is the author of the book “The Truth About The Afghan War.” In an interview with RFE/RL, Mayorov said that after the success of the initial invasion, Soviet troops in Afghanistan became desperate.

“Months had passed, the troops had been there, a lot of garrisons, battles were going on, but there was no success,” Mayorov said. “And someone had to take responsibility. And then the Politburo set up a commission of four people. Well, a commission is a commission, but all depended on the success of the war.”

The Afghan resistance was supported for different reasons by the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia, with weapons and fighters channeled through Pakistan. As the war progressed, the rebels improved their organization and tactics and began using imported and captured weapons, including U.S. Stinger antiaircraft missiles.

Mayorov said Soviet troops became increasingly demoralized. Some 22,000 had been killed by the end of the war.

“Every war should have an aim,” Mayorov said. “Both politicians and the military need to be capable of finding a line not allowed to be crossed. Because then [the war] will turn against them. There might be some isolated success stories, but as a whole it leads to failure.”

Kirill Koktysh of the Moscow Institute of International Relations said that, looking from a historical perspective, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the last gasp of the Cold War.

“Essentially, it was the last war and the last event of a bipolar world, when the world was understood as the place where Soviet and American ideologies had to compete,” Koktysh said.

Koktysh said that the war turned out to be destructive for both Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Half of Afghanistan’s agriculture sector was wiped out and 70 percent of its paved roads destroyed. Some 5,000 of the country’s 15,000 villages were destroyed or economically ruined due to damage to roads and wells. Moscow finally withdrew its troops in February 1989, only to see the Soviet Union itself collapse a few years later.

The Soviet withdrawal began a long period of instability in Afghanistan. After Soviet forces left, a number of Afghan factions continued to fight for control of the country. The radical Taliban Islamic militia came to power in 1994. It was ousted by U.S. troops in late 2001 in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks. Those attacks were blamed on the Al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, who was being sheltered in Afghanistan by the Taliban.

The Soviet invasion is also blamed for the rise of Islamic militancy. Foreign fighters who came to fight Soviet troops perceived their eventual withdrawal as their victory. The war created a class of hard-line Islamic fighters, such as bin Laden, ready to fight for what they perceived as the interests of Islam around the world.

The International Monetary Fund is established.

On December 27 1945 the International Monetary Fund was created. The idea of the fund was laid out at the Bretton Woods Conference held in the USA in 1944. The representatives of 45 governments met at the Bretton Woods Conference in the Mount Washington Hotel in the area of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in the United States. There they discussed frameworks for post-World War II international economic co-operation. The participating countries were concerned with the rebuilding of Europe and the global economic system after the war. There were two views on the role the IMF should assume as a global economic institution. British economist John Maynard Keynes imagined that the IMF would be a cooperative fund upon which member states could draw to maintain economic activity and employment through periodic crises. This view suggested an IMF that helped governments and to act as the US government had during the New Deal in response to World War II. American delegate Harry Dexter White foresaw an IMF that functioned more like a bank, making sure that borrowing states could repay their debts on time.

The International Monetary Fund formally came into existence on 27 December 1945, when the first 29 countries ratified its Articles of Agreement. By the end of 1946 the Fund had grown to 39 members. On 1 March 1947, the IMF began its financial operations, and on 8 May France became the first country to borrow from it.

These images shown here are from a series of papers on International Post War settlement, including international agreements and trade negotiations. The papers belong to the Prime Ministers Department. The department’s responsibilities included advise, administrative support and media services to the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Both the External Affairs and External Intelligence Bureau came under its jurisdiction at different times.

Over 30 000 are killed by an earthquake in Erzincan, Turkey.