Merkel to address Kristallnacht ceremony at Berlin synagogue World news
Event will commemorate 80th anniversary of Nazi terror that led thousands of Jews to flee
Event will commemorate 80th anniversary of Nazi terror that led thousands of Jews to flee
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, will address a ceremony at a Berlin synagogue to mark the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of Nazi terror across Germany and Austria that led thousands of Jewish families to flee.
Merkel will be joined by the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, for the commemoration on Friday at the Rykestrasse synagogue, organised by the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
The Jewish Community of Berlin has also organised a number of events, including a ceremony at the state parliament during which the names of all 55,696 Jews from the city who were murdered during the Holocaust will be read out at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
The anniversary will also be marked by Jewish communities across the world. In the UK – the destination of almost 10,000 children put on Kindertransport trains following Kristallnacht – a multi-faith service of remembrance will take place at Westminster Abbey on Thursday evening, and synagogues will leave lights on over Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath.
More than 1,400 synagogues and other Jewish premises were looted and destroyed across Germany and Austria in a series of pogroms unleashed by Nazis on the night of 9-10 November 1938.
The windows of Jewish shops, businesses and homes were smashed as police stood by during the antisemitic rampage, giving it the name of (night of broken glass).
Scores of synagogues burned down as firefighters watched; their orders were only to intervene if the flames threatened to spread to other buildings.
At least 91 Jewish people were killed in the violence, and up to 30,000 men were rounded up and taken to concentration camps.
In the weeks that followed, the German government passed dozens of laws and decrees targeting Jews and their property. Many families fled the country or sent their children to safety.
Martin Winstone from the UK-based Holocaust Educational Trust said: "Everything that happened on Kristallnacht had already happened, but until then it was localised and not orchestrated. Kristallnacht was a new level of radicalism and systematic, nationwide violence against Jews.
"Many Jews had already left Germany and Austria, but for the rest, Kristallnacht "represented a moment of reluctant realisation that there was no future for them there."
The commemoration this year is "probably the last landmark anniversary where there are still living witnesses to what happened. And it is given an extra dimension because of the resurgence of antisemitism in Europe, and the issue of how we deal with people displaced from their homes is again very much on the agenda," he added.
Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said: "The images of the burning synagogues and destroyed Jewish shops have become part of our collective memory.
"The memory of the November pogroms is important because it shows us the horrible consequences of social exclusion of a group. And it shows that civil society did not resist or protest against the violence against Jews. Resist the beginnings – that is the message of that date."
After the Holocaust, "it was not taken for granted that Jewish life would develop again in Germany", Schuster added. But the country's Jewish population more than trebled between 1990 and 2002, with many Jews relocating from the former Soviet Union.
The number of Jews living in Germany has fallen from 106,435 in 2008 to 97,791 last year, according to federal interior ministry data. Between 2015 and 2017, the number of antisemitic crimes recorded rose from 1,366 to 1,504, although figures are lower than a decade ago, when they climbed to about 1,600.
Some politicians have blamed incoming migrants for the recent rise, but the data showed that in 2017, almost 95% of incidents had a rightwing motive.
However, many antisemitic incidents are not reported to authorities, according to some monitoring groups. RIAS, which tracks antisemitic incidents in Berlin, recorded 947 incidents in the German capital alone, almost double that of 2016, when the figure was 590.
Anecdotally, some Jews talk of no-go areas in Berlin and other German cities. All major Jewish sites, including synagogues, are guarded by police.
Ilan Kiesling, a spokesperson for the Jewish Community of Berlin, said: "Our community members have become used to that over the decades – community life virtually taking place behind protective fences and under surveillance cameras."
The rise in antisemitism in Germany and across Europe has made events such as the commemoration of Kristallnacht even more important, he said.
Hella Pick, who arrived in the UK from Vienna in 1939 at the age of eight, said Austria had not confronted its past to the same extent as Germany.
"Germany has really tried to understand what happened. Every schoolchild has to learn about the country's history. That's a great contrast with Austria," she said. All children should be taught Jewish history, "not just the Holocaust, but the contribution Jews have made to literature and the arts and so on".
Pick, who spent 35 years working for the Guardian, said she had very little memory of her childhood in Vienna in the 1930s. "I've somehow blotted it out of my mind," she said.
The interior of Rykestrasse synagogue was destroyed during Kristallnacht, although the building's structure survived the bombing of Berlin during the second world war almost undamaged.
In 1940, it was confiscated by the Wehrmacht and used as a stables and for storage. Its restoration was completed in 2007, and it is now the second-biggest synagogue in Europe with a capacity of 2,000.
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