Remembering The Future

Hamodi a May 21, 2014 6
FEATURE
Remembering
A mysterious encounter at the Western Wall;
a Concorde flight to a rebuilt synagogue in a
town with no Jews; a gravestone that refuses to
fade.... All are pieces of a message for the future
to the one who knows how to read it.
the Future
BY MORDECHAI SCHILLER
Baden-Baden,
Germany
Malcolm Hoenleins great-uncles card.
Malcolm Hoenlein viewing the book that took ten years to write.
Feature052114p6-15Kristalnacht e.qxd 5/15/2014 5:15 PM Page 6
I nyan Magazi ne 21 I yar 5774 7
Fasanenstrasse Synagogue,
destroyed Kristallnacht,
Berlin, 1938.
Arson in Graz, Austria,
during Kristallnacht, 1938.
The Jewish
cemetery in
Ermreuth.
The restored Ermreuth Synagogue.
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Solitudestrasse Synagogue, set
on fire during the Kristallnacht
pogrom, Ludwigsburg,
Germany, November 10, 1938.
Enter, the Hero
I knew you would come here.
Malcolm Hoenlein turned toward
the speaker. It was Friday night and
Hoenlein had just come to daven at the
Kosel. The last thing he expected was to
be accosted by a mysterious stranger
with a cryptic message.
Before he could reply, the man said,
I have something for you.... Wait here.
Ill be right back. And he walked
away.
Still startled, Hoenlein turned back
to continue davening. But, what did the
man mean? And what did he have for
him? Hoenlein recognized the man, but
it wasnt someone he was close with ...
not yet, anyway.
A few minutes later, Dr. Meir
Schwarz returned; he had gone to his
home in the Old City. He handed
Hoenlein a card the size of a business
card. It had a hole punched in it, from
which dangled a
small piece of ribbon. On the card was
printed:
Jakob Hnlein und Frau
Nrnberg
How, what, who...? Hoenlein had
more questions than he could blurt out in
a single mouthful. The cryptic greeting
turned out to be more portentous than
Hoenlein could ever have imagined. It
would be a turning point in his life.
Professor Dr. Meir Schwarz was born in
Nuremberg in 1926, and escaped to
Palestine before 1939. He later became
captain of one of the three Exodus ships
bringing illegal immigrants into Eretz
Yisrael. He went on to cofound Kibbutz
Chofetz Chaim and become a pioneer in
the science of hydroponics.
Meirs older brother, Joseph, at thirteen,
was a youth leader in Neuendorf, Bavaria.
By Josephs bar mitzvah, the Nazis had
already outlawed all public Jewish
celebrations. So his parents made a small,
private seudah at home and invited five
local dignitaries. Among them was Jacob
Hoenlein, the most respected kosher
butcher in Nuremberg. Mr. and Mrs.
Hoenlein brought a bar mitzvah gift that
had a card attached with a piece of
ribbon.
Ludwig Schwarz, Joseph and Meirs
father, was murdered
Dr. Meir Schwarz
Hoenleins great-uncles card.
by Nazis in 1937. In 1938, as mobs
rampaged through the town on
Kristallnacht, destroying shuls and Jewish
shops and homes, their mother lay ill in a
hospital. Joseph told the familys male
housekeeper to go around and throw
things out of the windows to make it
look as if the house had already been
sacked.
Later, Joseph handed the housekeeper a
packet. These are our important family
papers, he said. Please hide them. And if
anything happens to me, find a way to get
them to my brother Meir, in Palestine. It
was a risky request. If he were caught with
the papers, it would have meant a death
penalty. But he took them and buried
them.
The Nazis came and took Joseph,
telling him that they were relocating him
and his youth group to another city, where
they could stay together. The city was
Auschwitz.
Four years after the War, Meir Schwarz
received a package in Israel. In it were the
family papers.
Forty years later, at the Kosel, Professor
Schwarz would give his brothers bar
mitzvah 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 Lifetime Project
Malcolm Hoenlein calls Dr. Meir
Schwarz a true hero of our time. When
they met at the Kosel they formed an
immediate bond of heart and mind, in
addition to a remarkable familial
connection dating to 1930s Nuremberg.
After Professor Schwarz retired, he
began his lifes work. He established the
Beit Ashkenaz Synagogue Memorial
Project and set out to research, with
meticulous, scientific precision, the 2,200
synagogues in Germany and Austria
from their architecture to the history of
each community; from profiles of the
leaders to photos of shuls burning on
Kristallnacht. The project has already
produced eight massive volumes in
German, describing the Jewish
communities in each of the Lander
(regions).
But the work is far more significant
than just another encyclopedia to weigh
down library shelves. It is documentary
evidence against the fallacious history
of the Holocaust. It particularly exposes
the lie of what the Nazis cynically called
Kristallnacht what led up to it and
what it led to.
Why cynically? Because, as Horst
Stuckmann a German Protestant
minister and peace activist put it, the
term Kristallnacht is a description that
plays down this event, suggesting that all
that happened were a few shattered
windows.
Dr. Schwarz writes, The expression
Kristallnacht disguises all the atrocities
committed to the Jewish population
during this one night. As Avraham
Barkai, author of From Boycott to
Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of
German Jews, 19331943, says in his essay
1938, Year of Doom:
Kristallnacht! It flashes, glitters and
twinkles just like a celebration! Its
about time for this ill-natured belittling
term to disappear from historiography.
As late as 2013, the sheer inanity of the
name led the clueless owners of the Kristall
Sauna Wellnesspark hotel in Bad
Klosterlausnitz, Thringen, Germany to
offer a special tie-in deal to celebrate
Kristallnacht weekend.
Local residents view the burning of the
Solitudestrasse Synagogue, set on fire during
the Kristallnacht pogrom, Ludwigsburg,
Germany, November 10, 1938.
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But there is a bigger lie than the cynical
broken glass Nazi newspeak. Along with the
shuls, the Nazis destroyed the evidence. As Dr.
Schwarz says, Even more important is to debunk
the lies ... concerning the number of martyrs and
of destroyed synagogues. The head of the security
forces, Reinhard Heydrich, mentions on
November 11, 1938 in a ... report of the planned
pogrom carried out two days ago in all of
Germany, that within the Jewish population
there were 36 casualties and another 36 that were
severely injured.
Even though the secret account of the High
Court of Germany revised this number on
February 13th, 1939, and talks about 91
casualties, it is this number (36) that was
considered the final number of victims in
academic literature to this very day.
Dr. Schwarzs research reveals a vastly different
picture. The number of victims on the night itself
is 400. Another 400 people were killed in the days
following the pogrom.
But even that figure doesnt tell the full story.
To reach an accurate sum, the calculation must
include those who were sent to concentration
camps and those who committed suicide as a
direct result of what should more rightly be called
Pogromnacht Pogrom Night.
Spreading awareness of the high number of
martyrs, including the suicide and concentration
camp victims, Dr. Schwarz says, was the starting
point of a research undertaking that resulted in
the Synagogue Memorial Project. After detailed
work with documents from the former
concentration camps, interviews with
descendants of the victims, etc., our research team
concluded that the overall number of victims of
the pogrom night lies around 1,3001,500.
Not only the total number of victims was
understated. The Nazis also falsified the number
of synagogues that were destroyed. In Heydrichs
letter to Gring (November 11, 1938), he gave the
number of burned synagogues as 191, plus
another 76 damaged.
Schwarz deplores the worlds blind acceptance
of this figure. This number of 267 ruined
synagogues found its way into practically every
work of historical research related to this topic.
There is hardly any researcher who doubted this
number or at least tried to prove its correctness.
Whether this naive belief in the truthfulness of
one written source is an indication of scientific
quality may be up to the reader to decide.
Synagogues all over the Reich
were torched on Kristallnacht,
November 910, 1938.
Dr. Schwarz has dedicated his life to
righting this wrong and documenting the story
of the destruction of German Jewry.
After years of research, Synagogue
Memorial found that the true number of
destroyed or burned synagogues during the
pogrom is 1,574 (more than five times as
many as the hitherto-used number). Our
aim is to remember each and every one of
them.
T
he event marked the release of the
two-volume work documenting more
than 1,300 synagogues and prayer
houses destroyed on Pogromnacht,
November 9, 1938.
Among the Members of Congress were Grace
Meng of Queens, Ted Deutch of Florida, Charlie
Dent of Pennsylvania, and Tom Marino of
Pennsylvania. Other attendees included Min.
Reuven Azar, DCM, Israel Embassy, Dr. Philip
Ackerman, DCM, German Embassy, Norbert
Roettgen, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs
Committee of the German
Bundestag, former German
Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger,
Exec. Vice Pres. of Allianz SE, Peter
Lefkin, Vice Pres. of Allianz North
America, Malcolm Hoenlein, Exec.
Vice Chairman, Conference of
Presidents of Major American
Jewish Organizations, Professor
Richard Stone, Immediate Past Chairman,
Conference of Presidents, as well as leaders of
many Jewish organizations.
This project, which took more than 10 years
to research, compile, and publish, was led by
Professor Schwarz of Jerusalem, who heads Beit
Ashkenaz and the Synagogue Memorial Project.
His singular dedication, along with his
committed associates from Israel and Germany,
made this a reality. Malcolm Hoenlein, who was
involved from the onset, enlisted a group of
American Jews dedicated to memorializing
these communities and their
synagogues, along with
Ambassador Ischinger and Peter
Lefkin of Allianz, to provide vital
support, helping to bring this to
fruition.
Historic Event in Foreign Affairs Committee
Marks Release of Work on Pogromnacht, 1938
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman, Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations, with Congressional event hosts Ed Royce, House
Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, and Eliot Engel, ranking minority member.
Pogrom Night 1938, documenting
more than 1,500 synagogues
destroyed on Pogromnacht.
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Man With a Mission ...
and a Message
Malcolm Hoenlein might be called the
surgeon general of Jewish life. He
constantly monitors the vital signs of
world Jewry. One story has it that in the
1990s, at a meeting in Yerushalayim with
N.Y. Senator Patrick Moynihan and
others, Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir
was asked whether to risk pushing for a
vote in the U.N. General Assembly to
repeal a resolution equating Zionism with
racism. Shamir answered, Ask
Malcolm.
Political and religious leaders in Israel,
the United States and around the world
have benefited from following that same
advice.
Malcolms great-grandfather dedicated
and installed the stained-glass windows
in the newly built shul of the tiny
Bavarian town of Ermreuth. Malcolm's
father graduated from the famous
Wuerzburg yeshivah seminary. In 1934,
he was detained by the Germans, but
managed to escape to Celerina,
Switzerland, where he taught both secular
and religious subjects in a Jewish school
for refugee children. Until 1937, he would
still return to Frankfurt, to daven for the
amud for Yamim Nora'im.
Malcolms parents met in Frankfurt in
1937. 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 via
Cherbourg, France, and went on to the
U.S. She immediately set out to work on
papers to get her chassan out of Europe.
He had gone to Switzerland, where he was
teaching Hebrew and secular subjects in a
Jewish school. Mr. Hoenlein escaped
Europe in 1940, on the last boat out of
Holland.
Millions of lives after its destruction,
the Ermreuth shul would be rebuilt as a
memorial using blueprints drawn from
memory by Malcolms father, Ephraim.
Malcolm was born in Philadelphia
toward the end of the war. He grew up in
the shadow of the Shoah. The searing pain
of his parents losses his nations losses
branded his soul. He was marked for
Jewish destiny.
In the 60s he emerged as a leader in
the movement to free Soviet Jewry. In
1971 he became founding executive
director of the Greater New York
Conference on Soviet Jewry and also
served as the founding executive director
of the Jewish Community Relations
Council of Greater New York, the central
coordinating agency for Jewish
organizations in the metropolitan New
York area.
In his work on behalf of Soviet Jewry,
Hoenlein developed into a master at
delivering the message. We learned you
L-R Mr. Shlomo Werdyger, Malcolm Hoenlein, Menachem Lubinsky and President Obama.
have to personalize the message.... Anne
Frank means far more [to many people]
than the abstract number 6,000,000. As
E.B. White advised authors, Dont write
about Man; write about a man.
If he had talked about the 3,000,000
Soviet Jews, it would have been another
abstract statistic with no emotional
impact. Instead, Hoenlein spoke about
Anatoly Scharansky and about Yosef
Mendelevitch and about Ida Nudel ... each
personal story helping to set the stage to
free the imprisoned Jews of Russia.
Today Hoenlein is executive vice
chairman/CEO of the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations, a title whose very
obscurity serves to camouflage his quasi-
official role as a key spokesman for world
Jewry.
You Must Come
One day in 1994 Hoenleins mother
got an invitation in the mail. It was for
a dedication of the rebuilt Ermreuth
synagogue. There are no Jews within 80
miles of Ermreuth today, but it was
reopened as a cultural center, with a
permanent exhibition on Jewish life in
Ermreuth. The exhibition includes a
genizah of holy artifacts that escaped the
fires of Pogromnacht.
Malcolms mother immediately
called him to ask about the dedication.
He knew nothing about it, but sent a
fax to the German foreign minister. The
answer was simple: You must come.
Bring whomever you want, but you
must 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 engines
malfunctioned and they had to turn
back. At the airport, they were told that
they were booked for another flight, at
5:30. Fine, thought Malcolm, we can still
make it. Then they told him it was 5:30
in the afternoon.
I cant fly then, its Friday!
The Ermreuth Synagogue after the war.
(Inset) Part of a prewar postcard
depicting the Ermreuth Synagogue.
A call to the White House told him
the only other option was to fly on the
supersonic Concorde to England and
then go on to Germany after Shabbos.
Hoenlein presented the option to
Lufthansa officials, who balked at first,
but soon the family had four seats on
the Concorde and arrived in Golders
Green an hour before Shabbos.
Enter, a Heroine
On the way to the dedication, the
driver stopped in Ermreuth to ask a
woman for directions. She looked into
the back window of the car and said,
Hoenlein? And she told him about
how she remembered his family.
At the dedication, another woman
told Malcolm, Your grandfather was
the last to leave the synagogue before
the Nazis set fire to it. She lives next
door to the shul and saw him locking
the 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 the
reconstruction of the synagogue. She
also established a museum and
published several books about the
synagogue, cemetery and history of
Ermreuth. Dr. Nadler has devoted her
life to educating young people about
Germanys Jewish past. All this in the
face of what Hoenlein calls opposition
from those who did not want to
remember or be reminded. What
makes her all the more remarkable is
that she is a Catholic convert of Syrian-
Arab origin and has been threatened by
the Syrian ambassador. But she persists
in her dedication to commemorating
Jewish life from writing books to
rebuilding, to painstakingly cataloging
every piece of sheimos in the genizah.
The Messenger and the Message
Since childhood, Malcolm Hoenlein
has focused on a message of
remembrance. It is important to know
where you are coming from to know
where you are going who we are and
who we must be. He expands this
message of continuity with a quote from
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch: No
generation is judged in its time, or even
by its children. We are judged by our
grandchildren. Because it is in the third
generation that you see the results of the
actions you took.
In 1988 Hoenlein visited the grave of
his great-grandfather, the one who
dedicated the stained glass windows in
the shul in Ermreuth. The cemetery was
in a clearing, surrounded by forest. Most
likely it was the seclusion of the
cemetery that saved it from being
desecrated by the Nazis. Still, from
decades of exposure practically all the
gravestone inscriptions were illegible.
All but one: Malcolms great-
grandfathers.
Hoenlein says, The inscription on
his gravestone was still
remarkably legible and told
of a man of great
integrity and of
The interior of the restored Ermreuth Synagogue.
his achievements as both a family
patriarch and as an active member of
his community. I remember wondering
why he was described in such detail, as
his children and grandchildren knew
him. Standing there in front of this
uniquely preserved gravestone, I
realized that it was meant for us and for
future generations; it was preserved for
his great-grandchildren and for our
descendants to understand where he
came from. So we could know where we
are going.
This is a key message that has
become a leitmotif in Hoenleins life:
You have to understand how Jews
lived, not just how they died. The reason
we say Yizkor, not a prayer of mourning,
is because remembering keeps their
presence alive with us. Zechirah is
unlike history, which is static.
Zechirah is a dynamic
process. It enables us
to interact with
the past to
be able to face the future. We look back
to look forward, to spare future
generations the trials and tribulations of
the past.
But you have to have your ears and
eyes open.
Chazal say that a voice comes from
Har Sinai every day, bemoaning that the
Jewish People does not follow the way of
the Torah. The question is asked, if the
voice comes out every day, why dont we
hear it? The Baal Shem Tov answers that
we do hear it. And every time a Jew
thinks about doing teshuvah, it is in
response to that voice.
Some people hear the message better
than others. The person open to receive
the message can hear it in the roar of a
Concorde engine and see it on a
gravestone that miraculously remained
legible and understand it was all to
make sure that the message is given
over to the next generation ... and the
next.
The Jewish horizon is more than
where the sky and land seem to meet. It
is where the past and the future actually
meet.
Meeting of the Minds
The encounter at the Kosel was a
meeting that was waiting to happen.
The shared dedication to
commemorate the victims of the
Holocaust, Hoenlein and Schwarz
being landsleit ... led to a partnership of
remembrance. With the support of
people like Michael Jesselson, Moses
Marx, Murray Halpern, Lou
Bravmann, and The Allianz
corporation, Hoenlein and Schwarz
with a small cadre of researchers in
Jerusalem partnered for more than
ten years before it came to fruition.
The effort has culminated in a special
two-volume edition in English
summarizing Dr. Schwarzs work:
Pogrom Night 1938A Memorial to the
Destroyed Synagogues of Germany. That
message of remembrance was recently
marked at a dedication of the new book
Pogrom Night 1938 at a special event on
Capitol Hill, to an audience of members
of Congress, German and Israeli
officials, diplomats, Jewish leaders and
German youth.
May the memory be a blessing. I
Left: The restored Ermreuth Synagogue. Below: The Jewish cemetery in Ermreuth.

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Hamodi a May 21, 2014 6

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