Light Up The Church

September 2023: Kristallnacht News Update

Thank you again for signing the Kristallnacht declaration. The first week of every month we send a few stories about Kristallnacht and the Holocaust that made the news in the previous month. Towards November 2023 we will share information about Light Up The Church 2023.

 

  • Newly discovered photos of Nazi Kristallnacht prove Third Reich propaganda was lie

    Yad Vashem — The World Holocaust Remembrance Center released the photographs on the 84th anniversary of the November pogrom also known as Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass." Mobs of Germans and Austrians attacked, looted and burned Jewish shops and homes, destroyed 1,400 synagogues, killed 92 Jews and sent another 30,000 to concentration camps.

  • 98-year-old German charged in thousands of Holocaust deaths at Nazi camp

    BERLIN — A 98-year-old man has been charged in Germany with being an accessory to murder as a guard at the Nazis’ Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, prosecutors said Friday. He is charged with more than 3,300 counts of being an accessory to murder between July 1943 and February 1945. The indictment was filed at the state court in Hanau, which will now have to decide whether to send the case to trial. If it does, he will be tried under juvenile law, taking account of his age at the time of the alleged crimes.

  • 'Kristallnacht' and the Anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler: On the Interaction of Malicious Intentions and Unplanned Circumstances

    A commemoration for the victims of the pogrom night and talk with survivor, Doris Edwards at Hybrid In-Person Event and Zoom Webinar Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library, Brandeis University. As early as 1919, Adolf Hitler distinguished between pogrom violence and so-called “rational” anti-Semitism. To achieve a lasting solution to the “Jewish question,” the young Hitler insisted that anti-Jewish laws and state policies had to be adopted. Hitler’s outward commitment to law was in sharp counterpoint to his public speeches and private conversations of the early 1920s, which contemplated extra-legal violence against the Jews.

  • Holocaust survivor Rosa Tyger Lindenberg remembers her saviors

    Rosa Tyge was born in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Germany, in 1924. The family led a comfortable life until the rise of Hitler in 1933. Anti-Semitic persecution forced the speaker out of school and led to their family's displacement. In 1937, the speaker and their mother obtained visas to travel to London and later Paris, seeking refuge, but were unsuccessful. The speaker's father and brother were deported to a dangerous border region and managed to escape, but the father was arrested again, eventually dying in a concentration camp. The brother survived and later moved to America.

  • In apparent first, Croatia restores looted art to grandson of Holocaust victim

    In a historic development in Croatia, three museums have returned stolen art pieces from the Holocaust era to the grandson of Dane Reichsmann, a Jewish businessman who was deported and killed at Auschwitz during World War II. This marks the first such case in the country. The artworks, including pieces by renowned artists like André Derain and Pablo Picasso, were restored to Andy Reichsman, Dane's grandson, after a 70-year struggle by the family. Reichsman expressed astonishment at the return, as he had not expected the museums to willingly give back the looted artworks. While some pieces were returned, 19 others from the same institution are still being pursued by Reichsman's lawyer.

  • Holocaust denier running for school board in Roseville

    A candidate named Vaughn Klingenberg is running for the Roseville, Minn., school board, despite being a Holocaust denier. Klingenberg, one of seven candidates, has written a book denying the Holocaust and refers to it as a "fraud" on his website. The Roseville Area Schools district strongly condemns his stance, emphasizing the importance of truth, human rights, and human dignity. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the Holocaust as the "best documented case of genocide" and states that denial or distortion of historical facts is a form of antisemitism. This situation underscores the need for the public to be aware of the beliefs and values of candidates running for positions governing local schools.

  • Holocaust victims remembered this year at National Holocaust Memorial

    Each year, Kol Israel holds a fall service to remember the six million Jewish men, women and children who perished in the Holocaust. It takes place at the National Holocaust Memorial at Zion Memorial Park in Bedford Heights, Ohio. The memorial became the first freestanding Holocaust National Memorial in the United States in 2022 The service, hosted by the Kol Israel Foundation and the Jewish Foundation of Cleveland, included a ceremony where local survivors lit six candles while attendees listened to stories about their lives during the Holocaust and and later after they immigrated to Northeast Ohio.

  • Holocaust survivor Lucy Weissman Blicker: Cherish your Jewish identity

    Lucy, born in Borysław, Poland in 1922, grew up in a prosperous Jewish family with an oil business. When World War II began, her family faced persecution, and they hid in their home to avoid deportation. Despite their efforts, they were eventually discovered and deported to Auschwitz. Lucy's parents were sent to the gas chambers, but she and her sister survived forced labor and imprisonment. After the war, Lucy moved to Austria, where she met her husband. They later immigrated to Israel in 1949 and eventually settled in the Bronx, New York, in 1959. Lucy worked as a seamstress to support her family after her husband's passing in 1962. She remarried in 1966 and moved to Florida in 1970. Lucy has been actively involved in Jewish organizations and has a large and loving family, including four grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.