Eighty-five years ago today, in the night of 9 to 10 November 1938, antisemitic pogroms were carried out. In Germany and Austria, citizens looted shops and residential buildings marked as Jewish, set synagogues and prayer houses on fire and stormed and desecrated Jewish cemeteries. Jewish women and men were driven through German and Austrian streets, imprisoned and raped. The antisemitic outbreak of violence was orchestrated by the SA and the SS, but it was also German and Austrian citizens who all too willingly robbed, humiliated and dehumanised their Jewish neighbours, acquaintances and friends; driven by a mania for conforming to the antisemitic mass of the “Volksgemeinschaft”, they gave free rein to their aggression. More than a thousand Jewish women and men were murdered on that day and at least 300 took their own lives. More than 1,300 synagogues, residential buildings, shops and Jewish cemeteries were destroyed in the November pogroms. The November pogroms represented the transition from the National Socialists’ policy of discrimination to their policy of systematic extermination. On 10 November 1938 the first Reich-wide deportations began.
Today, 85 years later, in a difficult and gloomy time, we remember the darkest hours of German history, for German and European streets once again represent an unsafe place for Jewish women and men today. The safe haven for Jewish women and men worldwide, the Jewish state, became the victim of an indescribable massacre by the antisemitic terrorist organisation Hamas on 7 October. This massacre activated antisemites worldwide to pursue their antisemitic hatred and their agitation against Israel and against Jewish women and men. While the Jewish community was not even given time and space to mourn those murdered and the hostages abducted to Gaza, Israel has been under constant fire since 7 October, not only from Hamas but from several surrounding Arab states and terrorist organisations.
On today’s anniversary of the November pogroms, the imperative must be that ALL of us not only keep alive the memory of the Shoah, but also express and show our indivisible solidarity with Israel and with Jewish women and men worldwide again and again and as loudly as possible.
