March 9
The Hebrew anniversary of a passing drifts against the civil calendar; these fall on March 9 this year.
- R. Yoel Sirkis (the Bach)d. 1640 CE
Ashkenazi posek; authored the Bayit Chadash (Bach) commentary on the Tur
- R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbachd. 1995 CE
Jerusalem posek; rosh yeshiva of Kol Torah
- 1897 CEIslamic · died
Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a founding voice of Islamic modernism and pan-Islamic thought, died in Istanbul.
- 1898 CEEgyptian · discovered
Victor Loret entered the Valley of the Kings tomb of Amenhotep II (KV35), finding the pharaoh and a cache of royal mummies.
- 1923 CEBuddhist · died
Ananda Metteyya (Allan Bennett), among the first Englishmen ordained as a Theravada monk and an early bearer of Buddhist teaching to Britain, died on this day in 1923.
- 1928 CEMesopotamian · born
William W. Hallo, the Yale Assyriologist who set Mesopotamian texts beside the wider ancient Near East in The Context of Scripture, was born.
- 1936 CEHindu · died
Sri Yukteswar Giri, a Kriya Yoga master, Vedic astronomer, and guru of Yogananda, died at his ashram in Puri, Odisha.
- 1996 CEIslamic · died
Muhammad al-Ghazali, an influential twentieth-century Egyptian scholar who sought to read the Qur'an in a modern idiom, died while attending a symposium in Riyadh.
- 1934 CEScience · born
Yuri Gagarin, who in 1961 became the first person to orbit the Earth aboard Vostok 1, was born in the village of Klushino, in western Russia.