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Kristallnacht

This Sunday: “Kristallnacht: Bridge Walk to Remember”

November 3, 2021 by Grace Bennett

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My father references Kristallnacht in the opening to his unpublished memoir when he comes upon a group of destitute deportees from Germany in his hometown in Lodz.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

Filed Under: Cover Stories Tagged With: Bridge Walk to Remember, Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, Holocaust Museum and Center for Tolerance and Education, Kristallnacht, Kristallnacht Commemoration

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

October 27, 2021 by InsidePress

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.

 

 

Filed Under: Happenings Tagged With: Bridge Walk to Remember, Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, Kristallnacht, Kristallnacht Commemoration, Mario Cuomo Bridge, Solidarity Walk

New Castle Holocaust Memorial Dedication: Wednesday, November 6th

November 2, 2019 by Inside Press

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

Filed Under: North Castle Releases Tagged With: Chappaqua, Community Awareness, Daffodil Project, E.N.O.U.G.H, education, genocides, Greeley, Holocaust Memorial, Kristallnacht, New Castle, New Castle Holocaust Memorial, Tolerance

HHREC Speaker on the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht

October 24, 2018 by The Inside Press

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

Filed Under: Happenings Tagged With: FDR, hhrec, Holocaust and Human Rights, Kristallnacht, lecture, Manhattanville College, speaker

Medoff Lecture on “FDR, Immigration and the Jews” to Commemorate 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht

October 19, 2018 by Inside Press

 Manhattanville College Department of World Religions and the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center are proud to present a lecture by Rafael Medoff, entitled “FDR, Immigration Policy and the Jews” on Wednesday, November 7  at 7 p.m., at Manhattanville College. 

This presentation is part of the Distinguished Lecture series and will also commemorate the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) which takes place on November 9th.  This event is FREE and open to the public, but registration is requested.

Dr. Medoff is an Historian and Founding Director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.  The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust studies teaches the history and lessons of America’s response to the Holocaust through scholarly research, public events, publications and educational programs.  Dr. Medoff is also an editor and author of 17 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His forthcoming book “The Jews Should Keep Quiet: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and the Holocaust.” will be published in 2019.

The Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center’s mission is to enhance the teaching and learning of lessons of Holocaust and the right of all people to be treated with dignity and respect. We encourage students to speak up and act against all forms of bigotry and prejudice.   Some of our programs and initiatives include:

  • A Speakers Bureau, comprised of Holocaust Survivors and Liberators, who through first hand story telling reach over 25,000 students per year.
  • Provide curriculum with key lessons from the Holocaust for educators to use in fulfilling the NYS mandate, as well as professional development workshops. Free downloads of a Holocaust curriculum to teachers from across the country. 
  • Train thousands of Middle and High School students in our Human Rights Institutes. These student Upstanders return to their schools with a mission to develop human rights awareness among
    their peers.
  • Community programs include an annual Countywide Yom Hashoah Holocaust Commemoration and Annual Kristallnacht Commemoration
  • Robust programs of Events and Distinguished Lectures


Please click on the EVENTS tab on the HHREC website to register. For more information please contact Executive Director, Millie Jasper mjasper@hhrecny.org and visit our website www.hhrecny.org
or call 914 696-0738.
                                                                                                                      . 

 

Filed Under: Inside Westchester Tagged With: Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, Kristallnacht, Manhattanville College

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