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Note: A European gathering commemorated 70 years since the 1938 pogrom that marked the start of Hitler's organized attack on European Jewry. Some see troubling parallels to current events.
Standing next to the ark of the Great Synagogue of Europe, in the center of Brussels, Arthur Schneier, 78, recalled the sounds of breaking glass and the smell of the raging fires as the fire brigade stood by, doing nothing, in his native Vienna.
Schneier, now rabbi of the Park East Synagogue in New York, was an 8-year-old boy in Austria, which had recently been annexed to Nazi Germany, when he witnessed Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom that marked the beginning of the organized Nazi attack on European Jewry.
On November 9 this year, he joined with other rabbis and dignitaries to mark the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht at one of several commemorative events, organized by Dr. Viatcheslav Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress (EJC) and Aleksander Kwasniewski, former president of Poland and president of the recently formed European Council of Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR) (see "Organized Tolerance" in our Nov. 10 issue).
"Kristallnacht must be remembered again and again," declared Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterne at the closing event, summing up two days of commemoration proceedings in Brussels, which began with the service at the central synagogue of Brussels, a venerable and sober 130 year-old building that was dedicated as the Great Synagogue of Europe five months ago, and culminated in a ceremony in the European Parliament. The week-long series of European gatherings for "tolerance and reconciliation," organized by the ECTR, went on from Brussels to the Czech Republic and then to Russia.
Survivors recounted the pogrom night of November 9-10, 1938, in Germany and German-controlled lands, during which over 90 Jews were murdered, tens of thousands deported to concentration camps and the shattered windowpanes of hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned shops set aflame carpeted German streets, giving the night its name of Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass). The Jews were then punished still further by the Nazi government, which ordered them to pay millions of marks to repair the damage.
Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp as an 8-...