Thoughts on Kristallnacht in a Post-October 7th World

Eighty-six years ago this week, a series of pogroms took place in Germany. More than 1,000 synagogues were burned, their pews destroyed, sacred Torah scrolls, and holy books set aflame. More than 7,000 Jewish businesses were ransacked and 30,000 men aged 16-60 were arrested and sent off to newly expanded German concentration camps. These pogroms were given a fancy name, Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass), and it is by that name that they are best known. 

Over the past 30 years the Germans have ceased to refer to Kristallnacht as Kristallnacht but as the Reich pogroms of November 1938. Crystal is beautiful, and has a certain sound and delicacy to it, but the “Reich pogroms” tells the much deeper truth of sanctioned violence against the Jews. 

Synagogues were often built in triangulation with the Cathedral and the Protestant Churches to indicate that Germany was a pluralistic, multi-religious community and the synagogues that were built were an expression of the great progress that the Jews had made within Germany. By building buildings of significance, Jews made their presence and their prominence manifest. 

What the Nazis were doing that night was to essentially show the most physical, the most public way imaginable how far they were willing to go, what price they were willing to pay, to tear the Jewish community out of the fabric of Germany.

What the Nazis were doing that night was to essentially show in the most physical, the most public way imaginable how far they were willing to go, what price they were willing to pay, to tear the Jewish community out of the fabric of Germany. 

How did the German synagogue function under Nazism?  On Monday it became a theater because Jewish actors could not perform on the German stage.  On Tuesday it became a symphony hall as Jewish musicians were dismissed from German orchestras. On Wednesday it became an opera house, because opera singers needed a place to earn a living. During the day the synagogue served as a school, for Jewish children expelled from German schools. Their teachers were often professors, writers and artists struggling to survive in a new world. The art teacher might be a world-class artist; the music instructor, a concert pianist. The Jewish school was the safest place for a Jewish child; yet the most dangerous part of the student’s day was walking to and from school. Harassment was routine, bullying was accepted, violence was sanctioned. Teachers turned their back even when they did not overly encourage the violence. 

On Monday morning the synagogue became the place for the distribution of welfare. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, classes were convened in the synagogue teaching Jews mobile professions, because the best way to survive, the best way to leave is if you had a mobile profession so you could earn a living in the country to which you must immigrate. Synagogues were a training center for a generation en route to exile.  

The synagogue was also a place where you taught people who didn’t know what it really was to be Jewish.  The synagogue remained a place where prayers were recited, but prayers took on a new meaning. 

Hour after hour on Kristallnacht the pace of the pogrom intensified, and minute by minute the damage toll increased. No Jewish institution or business or home was safe. The terror directed at the Jews was often not the action of strangers but neighbors. Some brought their children to see the burning synagogues, just as an earlier generation in the American South brought children to lynchings and just as only three years later ordinary men and women in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and in other former Soviet occupied territories brought their children to see the “Holocaust by Bullets,” the execution and burial in mass graves of Jewish neighbors and even friends. 

In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the Jews in Germany were left without their synagogues. Many had lost their businesses and their homes. The concentration camps of Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen were overflowing with new Jewish inmates. Most Jews were without illusions. Jewish life in the Reich was no longer possible. Many committed suicide. The most desperate tried to leave. Unwanted at home, Jews had only a few havens abroad. They could not stay and yet they had nowhere to go. 

The American response to the 1938 pogroms was interesting if not fascinating.  By 1938, America understood and had embodied the value of freedom of religion. No other event garnered such universal condemnation. From the extreme right to the extreme left, leadership in the Catholic, Protestant and every other form of religious denomination condemned Kristallnacht. If you are setting a synagogue up in smoke, you are destroying freedom of religion.  

By attacking the synagogue, the Nazis were attacking not only the heart and soul of the Jewish community, but they were also attacking the institution that had responded to the catastrophe. The Nazis deprived Jews of anything roughly resembling a public life or a communal life.  And they violently ripped them out of the presence of German society.  

In 2024, what are the implications of remembering the November 1938 pogroms in the post-Oct. 7 world? 

• The synagogue remains the most important symbol of the Jewish presence in a society.  

• An attack on a synagogue is an attack on all society. 

• Synagogues must be secured not only by self-protection but by civil society which regards freedom of worship as an essential, indispensable component of a free society. The same is true for Hillel Houses in the center of campuses and for other Jewish buildings. 

In Europe, synagogues have become seemingly armed camps, protected by the police and even the military. We cannot allow that to happen in the United States. 

• Civil society must hold.  In the aftermath of the worst antisemitic killings in American History, the Tree of Life Synagogue murders, civil society took control; political leaders, police officials, religious leaders and communal leaders all came together. The Pittsburgh Steelers and the Pittsburgh Penguins put Jewish Stars on their uniforms, the World Series paused for a Moment of Silence, and the Pittsburgh Gazette printed the Kaddish on its front page. Haters cannot win, if those who do not hate join together to defeat them. 

• Mayors and Governors, police chiefs and district attorneys, moral leaders and community leaders must take the lead, and Jews must call upon their friends to step forward. 

• Religious leaders must also step forward. Freedom of religion must mean freedom for all religions including Jews. 

• If a swastika is painted on a Jewish building, a priest, a minister, an imam and all civil leaders must join hands with the rabbi in cleansing the building and jointly removing the stain.  

• We may not allow our friends to become indifferent, and certainly, not compliant 

• If powerless Jews in 1938 Germany were not passive, powerful Jews today dare not remain passive, or worse yet, be reluctant to exercise their power and call upon their friends. 

• We dare not accept this level of antisemitism as the “new normal.”  

So we remember. 

• We remember with pride the role of the synagogue and the prominence of the synagogue in German society.  

• We remember the cruelty that was inflicted on Jews 86 years ago. 

• We remember the bystanders who watched the synagogues burn and who brought their kids to watch the synagogues burn.   

• We remember the outrage of the world that did not step up to do something serious about the situation.  

• We remember the courage of the Jews who understood they had to get out and that got out, and the despair of the Jews who knew they had to get out and couldn’t find a place to go. 

• We remember sadly that this was only the beginning: the beginning of the end. 

And as a post-Oct. 7 society, we must resolve to make this the end to the explosive antisemitism we are experiencing today.

Dr. Michael Berenbaum is educational consultant to ASHER, the American Society for Holocaust Education and Remembrance.