c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the National Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ Two of my parents’ dearest friends, Eric and Erna Frankel, fled Berlin, Germany just before World War II and found safe haven in Alexandria, Va.

A strikingly handsome couple, the Frankels were the epitome of urbane European sophistication. He was a brilliant patent attorney and she, a beautiful woman who reminded me of the film star, Ingrid Bergman. Eric died many years ago, but Erna, now quite frail in her nineties, still exudes extraordinary charm and elegance.

During my childhood years, I frequently heard the usually refined and gracious Frankels speak with bitter anger about the bloody state-sponsored pogroms (riots) that took place in Germany and Austria on the night of November 9-10, 1938.

They described how their beloved synagogue in Berlin was destroyed by arson, the sacred Torah scrolls and other ritual objects desecrated, and Jewish shops and businesses looted.

I vividly remember the harsh-sounding German name the Frankels used to describe the anti-Jewish riots of 60 years ago: Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. During that single night of terror 91 Jews were killed, 30,000 were deported to concentration camps, 191 synagogues were burned, and 7,000 Jewish stores were destroyed. For the Frankels and thousands of other German and Austrian Jews, Kristallnacht marked a radical transformation in the Nazi policy of anti-Semitism.

When Adolf Hitler became Germany’s dictator in 1933, he began a systematic legal, economic and social attack upon German Jews. At first they were stripped of citizenship, then were excluded from most schools, professions, athletic organizations, and were officially forbidden to attend theaters, restaurants, and concert halls.

But Kristallnacht marked the end of such legal persecution and the start of what the Germans later called”the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”The Jews, of course, had a far different name for the same historical event.

They called it”the Holocaust.” Immediately after Kristallnacht, a fine of 1 billion marks was imposed not upon the criminals who carried out the pogroms, but upon the victims, the Jewish community of Germany and Austria. The criminals were not only the street thugs who set the fires and murdered nearly 100 Jews, but they were also the leaders of the German government, especially Reinhard Heydrich, the sinister Security Office chief who directed the Gestapo.

Heydrich ordered that”The demonstrations (read pogroms) of November 9-10 are not to be prevented by the police.” After Kristallnacht, the entire world was put on notice that Nazi policy had shifted to an overt campaign to destroy Jews and Judaism. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled the American Ambassador from Berlin stating that he”could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization.” But they did occur and worse _ much worse _ was to come in the seven years following Kristallnacht.

American Christian leaders strongly condemned the pogroms and expressed their”sense of horror and shame that leaders of a modern government should openly instigate and condone such terrible actions.”However, the condemnations from political and religious officials failed to change restrictive American immigration policies, and the Frankels were among the very few able to escape Nazi Germany and enter the United States.

The Western democracies’ failure to respond with stringent economic sanctions against Germany and a generous immigration policy meant there was no escape possible. Six million Jews of Germany, Austria, and later, of Nazi-occupied Europe were doomed to mass murder.

In 1995, Germany’s Roman Catholic bishops remembered Kristallnacht with guilt:”Today the fact is weighing heavily on our mind that … even the pogroms of November 1938 were not followed by public protests. … (We have) the heavy burden of history.” The Rev. Jay Rock of the National Council of Churches has publicly asked:”Why were most Christians not moved by their faith to protest the Night of the Broken Glass? Is it possible that our Christian faith was unable to give them the strength to say `No’ to such an evil?” For the Frankels and others like them, Kristallnacht was more than the failure of the Christian community to respond; more than the impotent response of the Western nations; more than a shattering of windows and hopes. It marked the beginning of the physical destruction of European Jewry.

Kristallnacht remains a perpetual memorial to a vibrant Jewish civilization that is no more, and it is a tragic reminder of what happens when radical evil is met with indifference and inaction.

DEA END RUDIN