The Inside Press

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Kristallnacht

Michael Shapiro’s VOICES Premieres, a Requiem Honoring Victims of the Holocaust

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More than 20 years ago, longtime Chappaqua resident Michael Shapiro found himself thumbing through a poetry compilation about the Holocaust written from the perspective of Jews in countries such as Greece, Italy and France at at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The compilation, And The World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust, chronicles the life of nearly 160,000 Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain in 1492 and who ultimately perished in the Holocaust.

At the time, Shapiro’s work focused primarily on curating concerts featuring music of Jews who had fled the Holocaust and emigrated to Hollywood such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold who scored several films most notably The Adventures of Robin Hood. Shapiro also organized concerts featuring music from composers who had lived in Teresienstadt, a ghetto in Czechoslovakia–a hotbed of musical creativity with composers such as Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas, Hans Krása and Viktor Ullmann residing there.

Shapiro lost about 75 members of his own family among the six million Eastern European Jews massacred during the Holocaust. He yearned for the chance to immerse himself in how the Holocaust impacted Jews in the countries included in the poetry compilation and to share his own family history. Shapiro was immediately moved by the literature. “The poetry hit me completely. It was so powerful,” recalls Shapiro. A few years ago, conductor Deborah Simpkin King of Ember Choral Arts, inspired him to write the 60-minute plus work and is conducting Shapiro’s piece, which took him just seven months to write. “It flew out of me,” explains Shapiro. Shapiro was intentional in having the piece be a requiem. “Nothing gets to people like the sound of a chorus with an orchestra,” he noted.

Shapiro has written more than 100 works for orchestral, theatrical, film, chamber, choral and vocal forces throughout his career. His works have been performed by many of the greatest orchestras and performers in North America and Europe and for years he served as the conductor of the Chappaqua Orchestra. His music has been played on BBC, National Public Radio, SiriusXM and is available on major platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.

Shapiro has always been interested in exploring themes such as prejudice and racial divisiveness in his music. In fact, one of Shapiro’s most well-known pieces is the score from Frankenstein which has been performed more than 50 times internationally. “I think I was attracted to Frankenstein because I was interested in the way the monster was depicted and treated as the other.”

Shapiro hopes his “Voices of the Holocaust” concerts “give a voice to people who no longer have a voice.” While the Nazis murdered six million Jews, they also targeted other groups such as Roma (gypsies), homosexuals and people with disabilities. This same hatred is happening today, Shapiro is quick to point out. He felt he had to write the piece now, especially with the number of Holocaust survivors dwindling each year to 300,000-350,000 survivors in 2022 according to the nonprofit Holocaust group, Claims Conference.

The premiere of the piece took place at Temple Shaaray Tefila on November 9th and at Manhattan’s famed Central Synagogue on November 10th. The timing was purposely chosen to coincide with the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht, ‘The Night of Broken Glass’, when Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues and homes were destroyed by the Nazis in Germany and in Nazi occupied territories in Austria and Czechoslovakia. In the two-day spree of massive violence against the Jews, 30,000 Jewish males were arrested and sent to prisons or concentration camps.

The premiere at Central Synagogue also included a Q & A session with Paul Shaffer, the former musical director and band leader of Late Night with David Letterman. It also featured tenor soloist Daniel Mutlu, the Senior Cantor of Central Synagogue and the American Modern Ensemble. “Mutlu has a phenomenal voice. He really is one of the greatest cantors in the country,” exclaims Shapiro.

On the Horizon

The concert will also debut at the Reagan Library in California performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and conducted by Grant Gershon. The LA performance will coincide with the Auschwitz exhibition at the library for ten months starting this spring. The moving exhibition originally was showcased at the Museum of Jewish Heritage–A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in downtown New York City. Visit MichaelShapiro.com.

This Sunday: “Kristallnacht: Bridge Walk to Remember”

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Collaborative Effort to Never Forget “Night of Broken Glass”

Two sister organizations devoted to Holocaust education–whose programming promoting tolerance typically take place from opposite sides of the Hudson River–are collaborating to present Kristallnacht: Bridge Walk to Remember, a solidarity walk on the Gov. Mario M Cuomo Bridge to commemorate the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht.

The walk this Sunday, November 7, starting at 9 a.m. is co-sponsored by the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center (HHREC) and the Holocaust Museum & Center for Tolerance and Education.  It is to remember and honor the victims, survivors and rescuers of the Kristallnacht pogroms and the Holocaust.*

“Just as we will be taking in the beauty of the Hudson River, we can also remember back to 1938 when synagogues and storefronts of Jews were broken into and burned down,” said Millie Jasper, executive director of the HHREC in White Plains. The Holocaust Museum recently opened at Rockland Community College. The HHREC is presenting additional Kristallnacht commemorative events; see below.

“Participants may walk some or all of the Gov. Mario Cuomo bridge, however far they wish,” said Jasper, in remembrance of the terrible events which transpired between November 9 and 10 in 1938 on Kristallnacht, oft referred to as ‘Night of Broken Glass’.

As a child of survivors, I plan to walk, too.  My dad, Jacob Breitstein (who passed away at 97 in 2019) survived Auschwitz and the Holocaust but his mother and four siblings were killed.

My father references Kristallnacht in the opening to his unpublished memoir when he comes upon a group of destitute deportees from Germany in his hometown in Lodz.

… “Last week I was a wealthy man in Germany, and this line I’m standing in is a soup kitchen! The Germans came into my store, told me to go outside, put me on a train, and here I am.” I couldn’t comprehend what happened. It must have been Kristallnacht.”

Kristallnacht is notorious for the solidifying of a nation’s descent into total madness and for the continuing downward spiral toward the massive destruction of the Holocaust. But it’s erroneous to think of Kristallnacht as some sole trigger of the Holocaust, explained Steve Goldberg and Julie Scallero, HHREC’s co-directors of education during a discussion about Kristallnacht.

“From Kristallnacht, yes, the Nazi agenda begins to accelerate, and less than a year later, we have World War II,” said Goldberg. “But November 9 was not an arbitrarily selected date, either. The Kaiser abdicates on November 9, 1918, as Germany loses World War I. On November 9, 1923, Hitler’s smaller Nazi party fails to overthrow the government in Munich and Hitler is sent to prison where he writes Mein Kampf, the rantings of a madman, and he is eventually released.”

  “Kristallnacht was thus very calculated,” said Goldberg–revenge against Germany’s losses and Nazi failure. The breaking, burning, beating and murdering took place all over Germany and in Nazi-occupied territories in Austria and Czechoslovakia too.

The deportations in October 1938 “were a foreshadowing, with so many Jews being put on trains, and dropped callously at the Polish border, told to get out,” said Scallero.

One such victim of the deportations sent word to her son in Paris of their family’s urgent plight. Infuriated, Herschel Grynszpan, made his way to the Embassy in Paris, where he shot a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, who soon died. Soon after, Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Nazi regime, greenlighted the pogrom carried out by the Sturmanteilung (SA) aka the ‘Brown Shirts.’

To learn more about Kristallnacht, I also visited the HHREC’s well stocked library of Holocaust related literature and borrowed historian Martin Gilbert’s Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (Harper), a compilation of devastating testimonies from dozens of survivors. From the book jacket summary: “In the early hours of November 10, 1938, Nazi storm troopers and Hitler Youth rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods across Germany, leaving behind them a horrifying trail of terror and destruction. More than a thousand synagogues and many thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed. Kristallnacht–the Night of Broken Glass–was a decisive stage in the systematic eradication of a people who traced their origins in Germany to Roman times and was a sinister forewarning of the Holocaust.” 

From Gilbert’s intro, “In 24 hours of violence, 91 Jews were killed. Within those 24 hours, more than 30,000 Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60–a quarter of all Jewish men in Germany–were arrested and sent to concentration camps. There they were tortured and tormented for several months. More than a 1000 died in these camps.”

And so, we remember.

To mark Kristallnacht, Armonk’s Congregation B’nai Yisrael community and 7th graders who are studying the Holocaust are having a conversation on Wednesday, November 10 via Zoom with Hannah Deutch, member of the HHREC Speakers Bureau. Hannah experienced Kristallnacht as a young child in Germany.

On November 14, the HHREC will present “Holocaust Memory and Racial Healing” via Zoom featuring Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum and author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. Free and open to the public. To register and receive a link, write to sgoldberg@hhrecny.org

*For more information about Kristallnacht: Bridge Walk to Remember, please contact the HHREC, 914.696.0738 mjasper@hhrecny.org www.hhrecny.org, or the Holocaust Museum & Center for Tolerance and Education at 845.574.4099 www.holocauststudies.org. Registration to this walk, which begins on the Westchester side, is limited to 75 participants.

 

This story was first published this week in the EXAMINER NEWS. Special thanks to publisher Adam Stone and editor Martin Wilbur for including it.

Kristallnacht Commemoration Solidarity Walk of Remembrance Planned Across Mario M. Cuomo Bridge

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On Sunday, November 7th 2021 starting at 9 a.m., the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center of Westchester will join with the Holocaust Museum & Center for Tolerance and Education of Rockland to commemorate the 83rd Anniversary of Kristallnacht with a solidarity walk across the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge to remember and honor the victims, survivors and rescuers of the Kristallnacht pogroms and the Holocaust. For more information, please contact the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center  914.696.0738 mjasper@hhrecny.org www.hhrecny.org or the Holocaust Museum & Center for Tolerance and Education at 845.574.4099 www.holocauststudies.org. Please call soon for meeting place and for availability: registration to this walk is capped at 75.

Kristallnacht, also called the “Night of the Broken Glass” was a horrific, violent assault launched by the German Nazi government against the Jews on November 9, 1938. Over the course of the two day pogrom, over 30,000 Jews were arrested, 91 Jews were brutally murdered and hundreds more were injured. Kristallnacht foreshadowed the terror and destruction of the Holocaust.

 

 

New Castle Holocaust Memorial Dedication: Wednesday, November 6th

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Planting daffodils: Alexandra Rosenberg (left) and Stacey Saiontz, co-chairs of the recently established New Castle Holocaust & Human Rights Committee.

Residents of the New Castle community will gather on Wednesday, November 6, at 6pm, to dedicate the New Castle Holocaust Memorial located by the Gazebo in the town of Chappaqua near 200 South Greeley Avenue. The opening of the Memorial will coincide with and commemorate Kristallnacht. The project is the fruit of the efforts initiated by New Castle residents Alexandra Rosenberg & Stacey Saiontz, the recently appointed chairs of the New Castle Holocaust & Human Rights Committee.

The New Castle Holocaust Memorial will serve as a place where individuals and families can come together to learn, to remember and to reflect on lessons from the Holocaust.

Last week 750 daffodil bulbs were planted at the memorial as part of the Daffodil Project, a worldwide project to commemorate the lives of the children lost during the Holocaust. The goal is to plant 1.5 million flowers across the world – one daffodil for every child killed. https://www.daffodilproject.net. As the daffodils begin to blossom in the spring the community will hold an annual event that coincides with Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day commemorating the six million Jews and other victims who lost their lives during the Holocaust.

The dedication of the New Castle Holocaust Memorial follows the creation of the New Castle Holocaust & Human Rights Committee and the Horace Greeley High School Club E.N.O.U.G.H. – Educate Now On Understanding Genocide and Hate.  The New Castle Holocaust & Human Rights Committee will work to educate our children and create community awareness about the Holocaust, other genocides and human rights violations.  The mission of E.N.O.U.G.H. is to empower students to stand up to hate and to develop a community of tolerance through education and the understanding of people’s differences.

Alexandra Rosenberg commented, “I proposed the idea for the New Castle Holocaust Memorial, the New Castle Holocaust & Human Rights Committee and the student run organization E.N.O.U.G.H. as a way to combat the significant rise in hate that is permeating our world, our children’s world and more specifically our schools.  The New Castle Holocaust Memorial will serve as a tangible reminder of the impact that each human being can have in creating positive change. Together, the residents of New Castle and the students of Horace Greeley will work to make sure that the horrors of the past never happen again.”

Stacey Saiontz commented “As Elie Wiesel stated, ‘the opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.’ I am so happy that New Castle is taking action. The creation of the Memorial, the Committee and E.N.O.U.G.H. will serve as a platform to educate the community and future generations about the lessons of the Holocaust. The Holocaust did not start with the gas chambers and killing, it started with indifference to hate. We need to teach people to stand up to hate wherever it may fester. Never Again.”

New Castle Town Supervisor Rob Greenstein stated “This is one of the most meaningful projects that I’ve worked on over the last six years. It’s crucial that we remember the lessons of history and provide future generations with the tools to combat hate and bigotry. The idea for these projects started in the heart of New Castle resident, Alexandra Rosenberg, who along with fellow resident, Stacey Saiontz, have led these incredibly important initiatives. I want to thank them for their efforts.”

The materials for the memorial as well as the landscaping, were generously donated by Manzer Landscape Design & Development.

 

News Courtesy of the Town of New Castle

HHREC Speaker on the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht

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Dr. Rafael Medoff will speak at the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht at Manhattanville College.  Dr. Medoff’s topic will be FDR, Immigration Policy, and the Jews. Dr. Medoff is an American historian and the founding director of The David Wyman Institute, which is based in Washington, D.C. The Institute focuses on issues related to America’s response to the Holocaust.

Sponsored by the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center on November 7 at 7 p.m., Manhattanville College, 2900 Purchase Street, Purchase, NY 10577. For more information, please contact Millie Jasper 914 696-0738 or mjasper@hhrecny.org