Merkel: we must not remain silent

Ha'aretz
10.11.2008
Adi Schwartz, Assaf Uni

"We must not be silent about condemning anti-Semitism," German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared yesterday as Germany and Israel commemorated the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht with concerts, prayers and ceremonies.

The killings and destruction are seen by many as a key step leading to the Nazis' systematic murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Merkel recalled the Nov. 9, 1938 riots in which more than 91 German Jews were killed and more than 1,000 synagogues damaged. She told Germans that the lessons of the nation's past were crucial in confronting a current increase in xenophobia and racism.

"Anti-Semitism and racism are a threat to our basic values - those of democracy and respect for diversity and human rights," Merkel said in Berlin at a ceremony in Germany's newly renovated largest synagogue.

At his weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Kristallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass - was "the turning point toward the inevitable destruction of a greater portion of the Jewish people in Europe between 1939 and 1945." He added that Israel would never forgive or forget the crimes of the Nazi regime.

President Shimon Peres issued a statement calling the Holocaust the "worst disaster" to befall the Jewish people.

Some 30,000 Jewish men and boys were arrested and sent to concentration camps during the pogrom that left the streets of Germany littered with shards of glass from the smashed windows of Jewish homes and shops.

Germany's southern neighbor Austria - where Kristallnacht claimed 30 Jewish lives - also commemorated the day, while German-born Pope Benedict XVI called for prayers for Kristallnacht's victims in profound solidarity with the Jewish world.

The pope is currently being lobbied by Holocaust survivors and their descendants to halt the process of making his wartime predecessor Pius XII a saint. Some Jews accuse Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. The Vatican says he worked behind the scenes to help save many Jews from certain death.

Pope Benedict, born Joseph Ratzinger in Bavaria in 1927, was forced to join the Hitler Youth as a teenager, though both his parents opposed the Nazis. Earlier this year the pontiff spoke in New York about his teenage years being "marred by a sinister regime."

At Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial, survivors, their descendants, academics and the German and Austrian ambassadors to Israel took part in a ceremony that included a rare musical rendition of a work by German-Jewish composer Robert Kahn, whose music was outlawed by the Nazis.

Yad Vashem also presented a new online exhibit, "It Came From Within ... 70 Years Since Kristallnacht," marking the event with images, historical information and pages of testimony about some of the Jews who died during the pogrom.

Charlotte Knobloch, head of Germany's Central Council of Jews, told the gathering in Berlin's Rykestrasse Synagogue that Germans must fight against far-right extremism in all its forms.

"One must be sensitive to the quiet and less-quiet signals of anti-democratic developments in our country," said Knobloch, who lived through Kristallnacht as a girl in Munich.

The synagogue, a red brick temple built in 1904, survived Kristallnacht because of its location, nestled in an inner courtyard of a densely populated neighborhood. It reopened last year after two years of painstaking renovation.

At a memorial concert held later yesterday in Brussels, speakers drew a comparison between the Nazi Germany of the 1930s and today's Islamic Republic of Iran.

"It can happen again," said Brussels Chief Rabbi Albert Guigui. "The Nazi mentality still exists, and we must not ignore reality."

Rabbi Arthur Schneier of Park East Synagogue in New York added: "The Jewish people must not remain quiet in the face of a coming disaster. I thought the world would wake up after 70 years, but that's not what happened. Even today, the head of a UN member state insists on erasing Israel from the map, and nobody is doing anything."

The event in Brussels was organized by the European Jewish Congress. Congress President Moshe Kantor said its goal was to advance cooperation between Jewish organizations and those in the European Union to combat xenophobia and anti-Semitism.

"Seventy years after Kristallnacht, the threat against the Jewish people has not faded. Six thousand European companies participate today with the Iranian regime, despite the promises of Europe's governments. This cooperation is on the scale of $100 billion," he said.

"European states, those which were allies of Hitler and those who fought him, are the ones today supplying Iran with technology to develop a nuclear weapon."

Rabbis and representatives from Jewish communities across Europe participated in the event, as well as Tel Aviv Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Lau was named chairman yesterday of the council of Yad Vashem.

The European Parliament will hold a special session today to launch the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation, to be comprised of former prime ministers and presidents. The council aims to create a legislative and educational framework for encouraging tolerance across the continent.