May 16

German forces ended the month-long Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, blowing up the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street to mark the ghetto's destruction.

Two days after independence, Israel's Provisional State Council elected Chaim Weizmann its president, a step toward his becoming the state's first president.

Muktananda, founder of Siddha Yoga and a teacher of Kundalini and Kashmir Shaivism, was born near Mangalore in south India.

The groundbreaking ceremony for Fo Guang Shan, the Humanistic Buddhist monastery founded by Hsing Yun near Kaohsiung, Taiwan, was held on this day in 1967.

Theodore Maiman fired a small pink ruby rod at Hughes Research Laboratories in California, producing the first working laser beam, a pulse of deep-red coherent light at 694 nanometers.