This year marks the 81st anniversary of Kristallnacht, and Yeshiva University has honored the event by soliciting its faculty for their thoughts and insights and by inviting a Holocaust survivor, Ruth Zimbler, to speak to faculty, staff, students and friends of YU at the annual Kristallnacht lecture sponsored by the Student Holocaust Education Movement, or SHEM.

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Three Authors Speak About the Importance of Keeping the History Alive On the night of November 9, 1938, and crossing over into the next day, Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels used the murder in Paris of an embassy official, Ernst vom Rath, by Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew, as a pretext to launch what came to be known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, a pogrom against Jews in Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over the next two days, hundreds of synagogues and prayer rooms were destroyed, thousands of homes and businesses were ruined, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and tens of thousands of German males were sent to Dachau and Buchenwald, many of them later released when they agreed to sign over all their assets to the government and leave Germany within six months. Irit Felsen, Tova Rosenberg and Richard Weisberg offer three strong essays about why we must all keep the memory fresh of that fateful night 81 years ago, especially in light of the tragedy last year at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and the many other assaults, large and small, that the Jewish community worldwide has suffered. They come to their opinions based on a lifelong engagement with the Holocaust and its effects on modern life. Felsen is an adjunct professor at Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology and a clinical psychologist with a special focus on Holocaust survivors and their families. Rosenberg created Names, Not Numbers, a program in its 14th year where students create documentaries based on interviews with Holocaust survivors. Weisberg is Floersheimer Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and founder of the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights. Read their essays and learn.

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A Holocaust Survivor Makes History Come Alive with Her Story

Ruth Zimbler speaks to YU students about her experience of Kristallnacht

“I want young people who hear my story to be upstanding, not bystanding.” With those words, 91-year-old Ruth Zimbler began her moving account of survival in the face of terrifying odds. On a day with an ordinary start but an extraordinary end, November 10, 1938, she and her family suffered the first wave of destruction targeting Vienna’s Jewish community. She was 10 years old; her brother Walter was six. That her family endured and eventually made their way to New York in 1939, just a year later, is a testament to her parents’ courage and her own resilience. This was the story, filled with both sorrow and pride, that Zimbler recounted to more than 50 students attending her lecture commemorating the 81st anniversary of Kristallnacht at Wilf Campus’ Rubin Shul on the evening of Nov. 13, 2019, organized by SHEM, the Student Holocaust Education Movement. Sometimes referred to as the November pogroms, Kristallnacht is considered by many historians as the “curtain-raiser” to the European Holocaust. The name refers to the anti-Semitic violence that swept across Germany, Austria, and parts of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Kristallnacht was the first time the Nazis carried out mass arrests of Jews, specifically because of their identity. In its aftermath, many anti-Jewish laws and edicts were rapidly enacted. “We couldn’t have known it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end,” Zimbler told the rapt audience of YU students. As that tragic day came to a close, so, too, did her family’s comfortable life. She related how she and her brother were driven from their home while Jewish-owned businesses and shops were vandalized and ransacked. “It wasn’t just us; we saw hundreds of others being thrown onto the streets.” Their synagogue was one of 93 in Vienna that was set aflame. “Walter and I were first puzzled and then shocked that the firemen stood by and did nothing.” By evening, her father Markus was one of 30,000 men and boys rounded up for concentration camps. Sent to Dachau, 300 miles west of Austria, he was put to work processing papers and then released a few days later. In the meantime, Zimbler, her mother and brother found shelter with friends. Within two weeks, they were allowed to return to their apartment which had been looted and nearly stripped bare. Eventually reuniting with their father, the family gathered their wits and resources and took the next step – escape, at least for the children. Zimbler and her brother were put on the first Kindertransport leaving Vienna. However, their destination was not Great Britain but Holland, where they spent many months in a government-donated manor home under the care of Dutch nurses. “We were taken care of, as well as could be, but I desperately missed my parents and desperately wanted to return to Vienna to be with them.” Thanks to her father, who had arranged visas and passage to New York, the siblings’ stay in Holland lasted less than a year. On Oct. 16, 1939, more than a month after World War II began, Zimbler and her brother set sail for America. There, within a few weeks’ time, they would be met by their parents and head to a new home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When asked by an audience member to name her most poignant memory from that period, she recounted how a family member, who had escorted her and brother to the Kindertransport train, told them “to kiss the walls of the station goodbye, because you’re never going to see them again.” She returned to Vienna more than 40 years later with her adult daughter. “It was a painful experience, and I still cannot forgive the people of Vienna who stood by and did nothing. That’s why my message to young people is one of moral responsibility. We all have the obligation to fight injustice. In the face of evil, we must be upstanding, not bystanding.”

Standing: Sophie Gordon and Tania Bohbot, SHEM organizers
Seated: Ruth Zimbler