remembering the future

Hamodia May 21, 20146

F E AT U R E

RememberingA mysterious encounter at the Western Wall;

a Concorde flight to a rebuilt synagogue in atown with no Jews; a gravestone that refuses to

fade.... All are pieces of a message for the futureto the one who knows how to read it.

the FutureBY MORDECHAI SCHILLER

Baden-Baden,G ermany

M alcolm H oenleins great-uncles card.

M alcolm H oenlein view ing the book that took ten years to w rite.

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Fasanenstrasse Synagogue,destroyed Kristallnacht,Berlin, 1938.

A rson in G raz , A ustria,during Kristallnacht, 1938.

The Jew ishcemetery inErmreuth.

The restored Ermreuth Synagogue.

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Solitudestrasse Synagogue, seton fire during the Kristallnachtpogrom, Ludw igsburg,G ermany, N ovember 10, 1938.



Enter, the HeroI knew you would come here.Malcolm Hoenlein turned toward

the speaker. It was Friday night andHoenlein had just come to daven at theKosel. The last thing he expected was tobe accosted by a mysterious strangerwith a cryptic message.

Before he could reply, the man said,I have something for you.... Wait here.Ill be right back. And he walkedaway.

Still startled, Hoenlein turned backto continue davening. But, what did theman mean? And what did he have forhim? Hoenlein recognized the man, butit wasnt someone he was close with ...not yet, anyway.

A few minutes later, Dr. MeirSchwarz returned; he had gone to hishome in the Old City. He handedHoenlein a card the size of a businesscard. It had a hole punched in it, fromwhich dangled a

small piece of ribbon. On the card wasprinted:

Jakob Hnlein und FrauNrnberg

How, what, who...? Hoenlein hadmore questions than he could blurt out ina single mouthful. The cryptic greetingturned out to be more portentous than

Hoenlein could ever have imagined. Itwould be a turning point in his life.

Professor Dr. Meir Schwarz was born inNuremberg in 1926, and escaped toPalestine before 1939. He later becamecaptain of one of the three Exodus shipsbringing illegal immigrants into EretzYisrael. He went on to cofound KibbutzChofetz Chaim and become a pioneer inthe science of hydroponics.

Meirs older brother, Joseph, at thirteen,was a youth leader in Neuendorf, Bavaria.By Josephs bar mitzvah, the Nazis hadalready outlawed all public Jewishcelebrations. So his parents made a small,private seudah at home and invited fivelocal dignitaries. Among them was JacobHoenlein, the most respected kosherbutcher in Nuremberg. Mr. and Mrs.Hoenlein brought a bar mitzvah gift thathad a card attached with a piece ofribbon.

Ludwig Schwarz, Joseph and Meirsfather, was murdered

D r. M eir Schw arz

H oenleins great-uncles card.



by Nazis in 1937. In 1938, as mobsrampaged through the town onKristallnacht, destroying shuls and Jewishshops and homes, their mother lay ill in ahospital. Joseph told the familys malehousekeeper to go around and throwthings out of the windows to make itlook as if the house had already beensacked.

Later, Joseph handed the housekeeper apacket. These are our important familypapers, he said. Please hide them. And ifanything happens to me, find a way to getthem to my brother Meir, in Palestine. Itwas a risky request. If he were caught withthe papers, it would have meant a deathpenalty. But he took them and buriedthem.

The Nazis came and took Joseph,telling him that they were relocating himand his youth group to another city, wherethey could stay together. The city wasAuschwitz.

Four years after the War, Meir Schwarzreceived a package in Israel. In it were thefamily papers.

Forty years later, at the Kosel, ProfessorSchwarz would give his brothers barmitzvah gift card to Jacob Hoenleins

great-nephew Malcolm. As it turned out, the encounter at the

Kosel was only the beginning of the story.

A L ifetim e P rojectMalcolm Hoenlein calls Dr. Meir

Schwarz a true hero of our time. Whenthey met at the Kosel they formed animmediate bond of heart and mind, inaddition to a remarkable familialconnection dating to 1930s Nuremberg.

After Professor Schwarz retired, hebegan his lifes work. He established theBeit Ashkenaz Synagogue MemorialProject and set out to research, withmeticulous, scientific precision, the 2,200synagogues in Germany and Austria from their architecture to the history ofeach community; from profiles of theleaders to photos of shuls burning onKristallnacht. The project has alreadyproduced eight massive volumes inGerman, describing the Jewishcommunities in each of the Lander(regions).

But the work is far more significantthan just another encyclopedia to weighdown library shelves. It is documentaryevidence against the fallacious history

of the Holocaust. It particularly exposesthe lie of what the Nazis cynically calledKristallnacht what led up to it andwhat it led to.

Why cynically? Because, as HorstStuckmann a German Protestantminister and peace activist put it, theterm Kristallnacht is a description thatplays down this event, suggesting that allthat happened were a few shatteredwindows.

Dr. Schwarz writes, The expressionKristallnacht disguises all the atrocitiescommitted to the Jewish populationduring this one night. As AvrahamBarkai, author of From Boycott toAnnihilation: The Economic Struggle ofGerman Jews, 19331943, says in his essay1938, Year of Doom:

Kristallnacht! It flashes, glitters andtwinkles just like a celebration! Itsabout time for this ill-natured belittlingterm to disappear from historiography.

As late as 2013, the sheer inanity of thename led the clueless owners of the KristallSauna Wellnesspark hotel in BadKlosterlausnitz, Thringen, Germany tooffer a special tie-in deal to celebrateKristallnacht weekend.

Local residents view the burning of theSolitudestrasse Synagogue, set on fire duringthe Kristallnacht pogrom, Ludw igsburg,G ermany, N ovember 10, 1938.

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But there is a bigger lie than the cynicalbroken glass Nazi newspeak. Along with theshuls, the Nazis destroyed the evidence. As Dr.Schwarz says, Even more important is to debunkthe lies ... concerning the number of martyrs andof destroyed synagogues. The head of the securityforces, Reinhard Heydrich, mentions onNovember 11, 1938 in a ... report of the plannedpogrom carried out two days ago in all ofGermany, that within the Jewish populationthere were 36 casualties and another 36 that wereseverely injured.

Even though the secret account of the HighCourt of Germany revised this number onFebruary 13th, 1939, and talks about 91casualties, it is this number (36) that wasconsidered the final number of victims inacademic literature to this very day.

Dr. Schwarzs research reveals a vastly differentpicture. The number of victims on the night itselfis 400. Another 400 people were killed in the daysfollowing the pogrom.

But even that figure doesnt tell the full story.To reach an accurate sum, the calculation mustinclude those who were sent to concentrationcamps and those who committed suicide as adirect result of what should more rightly be calledPogromnacht Pogrom Night.

Spreading awareness of the high number ofmartyrs, including the suicide and concentrationcamp victims, Dr. Schwarz says, was the startingpoint of a research undertaking that resulted inthe Synagogue Memorial Project. After detailedwork with documents from the formerconcentration camps, interviews withdescendants of the victims, etc., our research teamconcluded that the overall number of victims ofthe pogrom night lies around 1,3001,500.

Not only the total number of victims wasunderstated. The Nazis also falsified the numberof synagogues that were destroyed. In Heydrichsletter to Gring (November 11, 1938), he gave thenumber of burned synagogues as 191, plusanother 76 damaged.

Schwarz deplores the worlds blind acceptanceof this figure. This number of 267 ruinedsynagogues found its way into practically everywork of historical research related to this topic.There is hardly any researcher who doubted thisnumber or at least tried to prove its correctness.Whether this naive belief in the truthfulness ofone written source is an indication of scientificquality may be up to the reader to decide.

Synagogues all over the Reichw ere torched on Kristallnacht,N ovember 9 10, 1938.



Dr. Schwarz has dedicated his life torighting this wrong and documenting the storyof the destruction of German Jewry.

After years of research, SynagogueMemorial found that the true number of

destroyed or burned synagogues during thepogrom is 1,574 (more than five times asmany as the hitherto-used number). Ouraim is to remember each and every one ofthem.

The event marked the release of thetwo-volume work documenting morethan 1,300 synagogues and prayerhouses destroyed on Pogromnacht,November 9, 1938.

Among the Members of Congress were GraceMeng of Queens, Ted Deutch of Florida, CharlieDent of Pennsylvania, and Tom Marino ofPennsylvania. Other attendees included Min.Reuven Azar, DCM, Israel Embassy, Dr. PhilipAckerman, DCM, German Embassy, NorbertRoettgen, Chairman of the Foreign AffairsCommittee of the GermanBundestag, former GermanAmbassador Wolfgang Ischinger,Exec. Vice Pres. of Allianz SE, PeterLefkin, Vice Pres. of Allianz NorthAmerica, Malcolm Hoenlein, Exec.Vice Chairman, Conference ofPresidents of Major AmericanJewish Organizations, Professor

Richard Stone, Immediate Past Chairman,Conference of Presidents, as well as leaders ofmany Jewish organizations.

This project, which took more than 10 yearsto research, compile, and publish, was led byProfessor Schwarz of Jerusalem, who heads BeitAshkenaz and the Synagogue Memorial Project.His singular dedication, along with hiscommitted associates from Israel and Germany,made this a reality. Malcolm Hoenlein, who wasinvolved from the onset, enlisted a group ofAmerican Jews dedicated to memorializing

these communities and theirsynagogues, along withAmbassador Ischinger and PeterLefkin of Allianz, to provide vitalsupport, helping to bring this tofruition.

Historic Event in Foreign Affairs Committee Marks Release of Work on Pogromnacht, 1938

M alcolm H oenlein, executive vice chairman, Conference of Presidents of M ajorA merican Jew ish O rganiz ations, w ith Congressional event hosts Ed Royce, H ouse

Foreign A ffairs Committee chairman, and Eliot Engel, ranking minority member.

Pogrom Night 1938, documentingmore than 1,500 synagoguesdestroyed on Pogromnacht.

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Man W ith a Mission ... and a Message

Malcolm Hoenlein might be called thesurgeon general of Jewish life. Heconstantly monitors the vital signs ofworld Jewry. One story has it that in the1990s, at a meeting in Yerushalayim withN.Y. Senator Patrick Moynihan andothers, Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamirwas asked whether to risk pushing for avote in the U.N. General Assembly torepeal a resolution equating Zionism withracism. Shamir answered, AskMalcolm.

Political and religious leaders in Israel,the United States and around the worldhave benefited from following that sameadvice.

Malcolms great-grandfather dedicatedand installed the stained-glass windowsin the newly built shul of the tinyBavarian town of Ermreuth. Malcolm'sfather graduated from the famous

Wuerzburg yeshivah seminary. In 1934,he was detained by the Germans, butmanaged to escape to Celerina,Switzerland, where he taught both secularand religious subjects in a Jewish schoolfor refugee children. Until 1937, he wouldstill return to Frankfurt, to daven for theamud for Yamim Nora'im.

Malcolms parents met in Frankfurt in1937. He was undergoing an operation;she was a nurse at the Jewish hospital.The operation was successful.

A year later, the soon-to-be Mrs.Hoenlein was able to escape viaCherbourg, France, and went on to theU.S. She immediately set out to work onpapers to get her chassan out of Europe.He had gone to Switzerland, where he wasteaching Hebrew and secular subjects in aJewish school. Mr. Hoenlein escapedEurope in 1940, on the last boat out ofHolland.

Millions of lives after its destruction,

the Ermreuth shul would be rebuilt as amemorial using blueprints drawn frommemory by Malcolms father, Ephraim.

Malcolm was born in Philadelphiatoward the end of the war. He grew up inthe shadow of the Shoah. The searing painof his parents losses his nations losses branded his soul. He was marked forJewish destiny.

In the 60s he emerged as a leader inthe movement to free Soviet Jewry. In1971 he became founding executivedirector of the Greater New YorkConference on Soviet Jewry and alsoserved as the founding executive directorof the Jewish Community RelationsCouncil of Greater New York, the centralcoordinating agency for Jewishorganizations in the metropolitan NewYork area.

In his work on behalf of Soviet Jewry,Hoenlein developed into a master atdelivering the message. We learned you

L-R M r. Shlomo W erdyger, M alcolm H oenlein, M enachem Lubinsky and President O bama.



have to personalize the message.... AnneFrank means far more [to many people]than the abstract number 6,000,000. AsE.B. White advised authors, Dont writeabout Man; write about a man.

If he had talked about the 3,000,000Soviet Jews, it would have been anotherabstract statistic with no emotionalimpact. Instead, Hoenlein spoke aboutAnatoly Scharansky and about YosefMendelevitch and about Ida Nudel ... eachpersonal story helping to set the stage tofree the imprisoned Jews of Russia.

Today Hoenlein is executive vicechairman/CEO of the Conference ofPresidents of Major American JewishOrganizations, a title whose veryobscurity serves to camouflage his quasi-official role as a key spokesman for worldJewry.

You Mu st C om eOne day in 1994 Hoenleins mother

got an invitation in the mail. It was fora dedication of the rebuilt Ermreuthsynagogue. There are no Jews within 80miles of Ermreuth today, but it wasreopened as a cultural center, with apermanent exhibition on Jewish life inErmreuth. The exhibition includes agenizah of holy artifacts that escaped thefires of Pogromnacht.

Malcolms mother immediatelycalled him to ask about the dedication.He knew nothing about it, but sent afax to the German foreign minister. Theanswer was simple: You must come.Bring whomever you want, but youmust be there.

So Malcolm set out with his mother,his fathers sister, and, yblc, his son, to

spend Shabbos in Frankfurt. On the way,one of the airplane enginesmalfunctioned and they had to turnback. At the airport, they were told thatthey were booked for another flight, at5:30. Fine, thought Malcolm, we can stillmake it. Then they told him it was 5:30in the afternoon.

I cant fly then, its Friday!

The Ermreuth Synagogue after the w ar.(Inset) Part of a prew ar postcarddepicting the Ermreuth Synagogue.



A call to the White House told himthe only other option was to fly on thesupersonic Concorde to England andthen go on to Germany after Shabbos.Hoenlein presented the option toLufthansa officials, who balked at first,but soon the family had four seats onthe Concorde and arrived in GoldersGreen an hour before Shabbos.

Enter, a HeroineOn the way to the dedication, the

driver stopped in Ermreuth to ask awoman for directions. She looked intothe back window of the car and said,Hoenlein? And she told him abouthow she remembered his family.

At the dedication, another womantold Malcolm, Your grandfather wasthe last to leave the synagogue beforethe Nazis set fire to it. She lives nextdoor to the shul and saw him lockingthe door.

Every good story needs a heroine.And this story has a most unusual one.

The Hoenleins were greeted by Dr.Rajaa Nadler, who oversaw thereconstruction of the synagogue. She

also established a museum andpublished several books about thesynagogue, cemetery and history ofErmreuth. Dr. Nadler has devoted herlife to educating young people aboutGermanys Jewish past. All this in theface of what Hoenlein calls oppositionfrom those who did not want toremember or be reminded. Whatmakes her all the more remarkable isthat she is a Catholic convert of Syrian-Arab origin and has been threatened bythe Syrian ambassador. But she persistsin her dedication to commemoratingJewish life from writing books torebuilding, to painstakingly catalogingevery piece of sheimos in the genizah.

The Messenger and the MessageSince childhood, Malcolm Hoenlein

has focused on a message ofremembrance. It is important to knowwhere you are coming from to knowwhere you are going who we are andwho we must be. He expands thismessage of continuity with a quote fromRabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch: Nogeneration is judged in its time, or even

by its children. We are judged by ourgrandchildren. Because it is in the thirdgeneration that you see the results of theactions you took.

In 1988 Hoenlein visited the grave ofhis great-grandfather, the one whodedicated the stained glass windows inthe shul in Ermreuth. The cemetery wasin a clearing, surrounded by forest. Mostlikely it was the seclusion of thecemetery that saved it from beingdesecrated by the Nazis. Still, fromdecades of exposure practically all thegravestone inscriptions were illegible.All but one: Malcolms great-grandfathers.

Hoenlein says, The inscription onhis gravestone was stillremarkably legible and toldof a man of greatintegrity and of

The interior of the restored Ermreuth Synagogue.



his achievements as both a familypatriarch and as an active member ofhis community. I remember wonderingwhy he was described in such detail, ashis children and grandchildren knewhim. Standing there in front of thisuniquely preserved gravestone, Irealized that it was meant for us and forfuture generations; it was preserved forhis great-grandchildren and for ourdescendants to understand where hecame from. So we could know where weare going.

This is a key message that hasbecome a leitmotif in Hoenleins life:

You have to understand how Jewslived, not just how they died. The reasonwe say Yizkor, not a prayer of mourning,is because remembering keeps their

presence alive with us. Zechirah isunlike history, which is static.

Zechirah is a dynamicprocess. It enables us

to interact withthe past to

be able to face the future. We look backto look forward, to spare futuregenerations the trials and tribulations ofthe past.

But you have to have your ears andeyes open.

Chazal say that a voice comes fromHar Sinai every day, bemoaning that theJewish People does not follow the way ofthe Torah. The question is asked, if thevoice comes out every day, why dont wehear it? The Baal Shem Tov answers thatwe do hear it. And every time a Jewthinks about doing teshuvah, it is inresponse to that voice.

Some people hear the message betterthan others. The person open to receivethe message can hear it in the roar of aConcorde engine and see it on agravestone that miraculously remainedlegible and understand it was all tomake sure that the message is givenover to the next generation ... and thenext.

The Jewish horizon is more thanwhere the sky and land seem to meet. Itis where the past and the future actuallymeet.

Meeting of the MindsThe encounter at the Kosel was a

meeting that was waiting to happen.The shared dedication tocommemorate the victims of theHolocaust, Hoenlein and Schwarzbeing landsleit ... led to a partnership ofremembrance. With the support ofpeople like Michael Jesselson, MosesMarx, Murray Halpern, LouBravmann, and The Allianzcorporation, Hoenlein and Schwarz with a small cadre of researchers inJerusalem partnered for more thanten years before it came to fruition.

The effort has culminated in a specialtwo-volume edition in Englishsummarizing Dr. Schwarzs work:Pogrom Night 1938A Memorial to theDestroyed Synagogues of Germany. Thatmessage of remembrance was recentlymarked at a dedication of the new bookPogrom Night 1938 at a special event onCapitol Hill, to an audience of membersof Congress, German and Israeliofficials, diplomats, Jewish leaders andGerman youth.

May the memory be a blessing. I

Left: The restored Ermreuth Synagogue. Below : The Jew ish cemetery in Ermreuth.


remembering the future

Documents

pm page

malcolm hoenlein

rebuilt synagogue

fasanenstrasse synagogue

hoenlein hadmore questions

restored ermreuth synagogue

inyan magaz ine

cryptic message