Synagogues Plan Remembrances of Nazis’ Murderous 1938 Kristallnacht

In 1938, when Eve Wechsberg was 16 and living in Leipzig, storm troopers came looking for her father, a prominent Jewish doctor. When Wechsberg told them he had emigrated to America, they demanded proof and ransacked the house.

Fifty years later, Wechsberg wants to make sure no one forgets Kristallnacht, sometimes called “night of the broken glass,” a Nazi rampage in which many Jews were killed and synagogues destroyed all over the Third Reich. It foreshadowed the Holocaust.

Wechsberg, a Rancho Palos Verdes resident and the wife of Temple Ner Tamid’s Rabbi Emeritus Bernard Wechsberg, is one of several survivors of Kristallnacht who will be addressing South Bay congregations Friday night to commemorate the event.

At the Temple Menorah in Redondo Beach at 8:15 p.m., four congregation members who were born and raised in Germany will also talk about their experiences in a program called “Kristallnacht Remembered.”

“It’s not just a historical event, it’s a personal event,” said Temple Menorah Rabbi Steven L. Silver. “In a way it trivializes the entire event by referring to it as Kristallnacht. The Nazis really coined the term and by doing so they took away from the murderous nature of it and focused instead on the destruction of property.”

At Temple Beth El in San Pedro, special services starting at 8 p.m. will include prayers, music and recollections of witnesses to the attacks that took place on Nov. 9, 1938.

Eli Hecht, rabbi of the Chabad of South Bay in Lomita, said a special service Saturday will approach the remembrance in a different way. The Sabbath services and Friday’s religious classes at Chabad’s day-care center will focus on altruism.

“The consciousness of society looked the other way at the time. The thing to do now is to remember to care about others,” Hecht said.

And Michael Nutkiewicz, director of the Jewish Federation Council’s Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust, stressed that the lesson of Kristallnacht is not limited to Germany.

“We have forgotten our own immigrant status in our attitudes toward other foreigners, the rejection of the other amongst us,” he said.

In an observance Wednesday of Kristallnacht, South Bay churches, including Seaside Community Church in Torrance, Rolling Hills Estates Seventh-day Adventist Church, and Riviera United Methodist Church, First United Methodist Church, St. Lawrence Church and St. Katherine Greek Orthodox Church, all in Redondo Beach, kept their lights burning.