Countering darkness with light

Jewish community centres and synagogues around the world, including here in Winnipeg, have traditionally commemorated Kristallnacht with memorial services, film screenings, speakers, museum exhibits or panel discussions. This weekend many of them will be adding a new form of observance to their agendas. They will be keeping their lights on overnight!

Kristallnacht, also referred to as “Crystal Night” or “Night of the Broken Glass,” was a Nazi-led and instigated pogrom, or riot, targeting Jewish community members and institutions in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9-10, 1938. In the course of two days of rioting 91 Jewish people were murdered, more than a thousand synagogues were destroyed and 30,000 Jewish men were shipped off to concentration camps.

Survivor testimonies preserved at the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, better known as Yad Vashem, testify to the shock, fear and despair of those ominous days.

“They ransacked the apartment,” recalls Arnold Goldschmidt, who was 16 when the Gestapo raided his family’s home in Fulda, Germany. “They threw everything out of the window, and downstairs on the street were the Gentile women standing with their big aprons and catching the gold and the silver. (These were) people that we were friendly with, people that we knew for 20, 30 years.”

In his testimony, Walter Bacharach, who was a teenager in Berlin that November, recalls standing on the street across from the synagogue where he had become a Bar Mitzvah and watching the Nazis drag out all of the Torahs, pile them up and light them on fire.

“They smashed everything possible,” he remembers. “You could hear glass breaking throughout the city, in every quarter.”

While the Nazis claimed that the attacks were a spontaneous response to the attempted assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young Jewish refugee named Herschel Grynszpan, they were, as archival documents verify, planned in advance by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda .

Kristallnacht was not an isolated event. It was a clear harbinger of the darkness that was about to fall on the Jews of Europe.

Eighty-seven years later, a new initiative launched by Yad Vashem is encouraging Jewish community members and institutions to remember and counter that darkness with light.

Yad Vashem’s Spread the Light Campaign is simple and symbolic. All that it does is ask that on Nov. 9 and 10, participants keep the lights on overnight in their communal buildings, schools, synagogues, sanctuaries and private homes. By doing so, they will be relaying a message to the world about Jewish solidarity, survival, resiliency and continuity. They will be demonstrating that Jewish faith, Jewish culture and the Jewish spirit continue to thrive in spite of pogroms, the Holocaust and the recent alarming rise in antisemitism across the globe, including here in Canada.

In Winnipeg, at least three synagogues will be keeping their lights on during the Kristallnacht weekend. One of them is the Reform congregation, Temple Shalom.

“As part of the Spread the Light initiative of Yad Vashem, Temple Shalom will be leaving its sanctuary lights on through the night of Nov. 9 in commemoration of Kristallnacht and in solidarity with other Jewish organizations around the world,” says congregation president, Judith Huebner.

“This is a beautiful way of marking this tragic event,” she continues. “A number of our members noted that they have been leaving a light or candle on in their homes for some years and like the idea of extending this beyond their homes to a Jewish institution.”

The Winnipeg Jewish community’s formal commemoration of Kristallnacht will takes place that same evening with a screening at the Berney Theatre of the film, The Last Twins. The documentary recounts the story of the Hungarian Jew, Erno Zvi Spiegel, one of the Holocaust’s unsung heroes. Presumably the lights will be turned off in the theatre for the screening, but turned on, and left on, the rest of the night.

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