General News

A foundation seeking to expand the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail will have its headquarters in Omaha.

National Park Service officials on Thursday announced the formation of the Lewis and Clark Trust. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s two-year expedition from Illinois to Washington is documented along what is now the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.

Herbert Karliner, Philip Freud, Hans Fisher and Sol Messinger will present a special lecture at the Durham Museum on Friday morning at 10:30.

The four men are survivors of the tragic 1939 voyage of the SS St. Louis.  After trying to dock in several countries, including the U.S., the ship was forced to return to Europe.  

Many passengers subsequently found themselves under Nazi rule, and many died as a result. The majority of the passengers that were granted refuge in Great Britain survived the ordeal.  Shawna Forsberg is Director of Marketing for the Durham.

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day Thursday, Creighton University in collaboration with the Omaha Jewish Community, will present the original docudrama, “The Trial of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The docudrama is about the 1939 voyage of the SS St. Louis. 900 Jewish men, women and children were adrift at sea for 30 days and were denied entrance into the U.S.  

The passengers were told the United States had reached its immigrant quota, so they were sent back to Germany and other European countries, many of them occupied by Germany.  

Cleanup is underway in southwest Iowa after a tornado left a half-mile-wide damage path in Thurman.

The National Weather Service in Omaha says the tornado touched down two miles north of Percival, Iowa, and continued in to Thurman just after 5:30 PM Saturday.  The tornado left a ten-mile long path of damage before lifting just south of Tabor.