Light Up The Church

June 2025: Kristallnacht News Update

Thank you again for signing the Kristallnacht declaration. Every month we send a few stories about Kristallnacht and the Holocaust that made the news in the previous month. Towards November 2025 we will share information about Light Up The Church 2024.

Below is the update from the stories of June 2025.

  • Holocaust survivor David Schaffer shared his harrowing story in a graphic novel

    David Schaffer, a Holocaust survivor expelled from school at age seven under antisemitic Romanian laws, endured years of persecution, hunger, and loss—but lived to 94, eventually building a life filled with family, engineering work, and late-life Holocaust education. His story, captured in But I Live, stands as a testament to resilience, memory, and the urgent importance of defending freedom.

  • Uncovering Nana’s Story: My Journey as a 3rd Generation Holocaust Survivor

    A third-generation Holocaust survivor shares the rediscovered story of her grandmother, Eva Behar, who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and later met her husband—a British RAF officer—after liberation. Through her work at World Jewish Relief, she unearthed archival records that confirmed Eva’s journey and highlighted the vital legacy of organizations that aided survivors, ensuring their stories are preserved and passed on.

  • Holocaust Education Has Never Been More Urgent

    At this year’s Association of Holocaust Organizations conference in Toronto, educators and leaders—facing rising antisemitism and deepened challenges after October 7—gathered to reaffirm their mission of Holocaust education, remembrance, and resilience. Despite uncertainty, they left united in purpose, committed to telling both the historical and present-day Jewish story with integrity, compassion, and vision.

  • Holocaust survivors are fast disappearing. ‘The Last Ones’ project is racing to record their stories

    Journalist Leslie Gelrubin Benitah, granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, founded The Last Ones to preserve the testimonies of aging survivors through short, powerful videos aimed at younger generations. As time runs out, her project honors memory not only to document the past but to equip future generations to recognize and resist injustice.

  • 80 years later, a Holocaust survivor meets an American soldier who helped free him

    Nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, survivor Andrew Roth and U.S. Army veteran Jack Moran reunited—Roth as a liberated prisoner of Buchenwald and Moran as one of its liberators—to share their stories with the USC Shoah Foundation. Their emotional meeting underscores the urgency of preserving firsthand testimonies as the last witnesses to Nazi atrocities pass away, and as Holocaust memory faces rising denial and distortion in today’s world.