Subject: 60th Anniversary of Kristallnacht
From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 19:38:10 EST

Remembering Kristallnacht
by Michael Petrelis, November 9, 1998

On November 9, 1938, all across Germany, Jewish businesses, homes, schools and
synagogues were systematically looted, attacked, burned or defaced with paint.
Also on this night, tens of thousands of Jews were rounded up, interrogated
and either deported or quickly executed.  Laws had long since been enacted by
the Reichstag stripping Jews of their German citizenship and a full scale
propaganda campaign was being waged portraying Jews as less than human.  The
Nazis were retaliating for the assassination of a German diplomat by a Polish
Jew.  The political climate was primed for this nasty night and more ghastly
crimes against humanity to come, with little opposition.

History now recalls November 9, 1938, as "Kristallnacht" in German, which
translates as "night of broken glass," due to shards of glass from the smashed
windows of Jewish institutions.

The anti-Semitism of the Nazis intersected with long-standing persecution of
homosexuals under the penal code, specifically Paragraph 175, which prohibited
sodomy between men and was on the books since the last decades of the 1800's.
Nazi hatred recognized few boundaries as Communists, prostitutes, gypsies,
Jehovah's Witnesses, the handicapped, and other undesirables were also
targeted for incarceration, "scientific" experimentation and extermination.
Sad to say, the Holocaust is a prime example of how hatred against one can so
easily run amok and transform into hatred against many.

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of Kristallnacht and I find it is
reason to pause, light candles in our home not only against the Nazism of so
long ago, but also to think about prejudices today.  Kristallnacht is a unique
stain of inaction on the world's conscience because so little was done to
protect Jews in the face of such hostility.  We must continually renew our
collective memory about the night of shame and the entire Holocaust, in small
and large ways.

I occasionally ask friends and political allies to make a phone call, or write
a letter, or attend rallies to protest in a public way an injustice against
gays or people with AIDS.  However, on this sad sixtieth anniversary I instead
plead with you to privately remember all victims of Nazism and to light a
candle in your home in memory of all who perished in the concentration camps.
You can also contact a Jewish community group or Holocaust center in your area
and participate in a formal ceremony this week to honor the dead and those
lucky few who survived the Holocaust.

In addition to lighting several candles, I have also again read "Fragments:
Memories of a Wartime Childhood," written by Binjamin Wilkomirski.  He was
sent to a concentration camp as a child and miraculously survived.  His
terrifying account moved me more than many documentary films have, in part,
because his story is told in an unfiltered bewildered child's voice, lacking
any political context.  Imagine a younger Anne Frank writing about living
through a concentration camp and you have some idea of how powerful
Wilkomirski's book is.  "Fragments" is available in paperback and hardcover
from the Schocken division of Random House.  If you do read it, I strongly
suggest you avoid doing so in the evening, otherwise you will be up all night
due to the terrors recounted.

For this occasion I call special attention to a remarkable Jewish woman I
learned about when I visited the re-built synagogue of Berlin in August.  Her
name was Regina Jonas, the world's first female rabbi.  The best way to
introduce he is through the words of  James Raphael Baaden, a rabbinical
student in Israel.  Baaden writes on the Internet Regina Jonas "was born in
Berlin in 1902 . . . she was privately ordained . . . on December 27, 1935.
She never held a pulpit as such, though it is known that she exercised various
functions in the Jewish community in Berlin (it's worth bearing in mind as
well, of course, that the Nazi era had begun in 1933): she gave a number of
public lectures occasionally appeared as a guest preacher in various
synagogues, and increasingly filled in for other rabbis (many of whom were
emigrating, whilst others were detained in concentration camps.)  It also
seems she had important pastoral and rabbinic  functions in one the main 
Jewish old people's homes in Berlin.  She was deported to Theresienstadt in
1942 - where she also gave lectures and had pastoral responsibilities for the
care of newly arrived prisoners - and two years later she was deported to
Auschwitz, where she is believed to have died in October 1944." 

Please find the time this week to mark, in whatever way you deem appropriate,
the sixtieth anniversary of Kristallnacht.  To paraphrase the cry of anguish
after concentration camps were liberated, "Never again, never forget."  Light
a candle.  Remember the Holocaust.