By Julie McCay Turner
Organized by the Bedford Interfaith Clergy Association, the ceremony was led by Rabbi Susan Abramson of Temple Shalom Emeth and Rev. Megan Lynes, a minister at First Parish on the Common in collaboration with others from the community, including the confirmation class from Temple Shalom Emeth.
With music, commentary and prayers, Bedford remembered the horror of Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass; those who lost their lives that night; and those who perished in the Holocaust.
Rep. Ken Gordon spoke about the Jews’ loss of civil rights in the years that led up to Kristallnacht, and the spark that ignited the flame that burned through Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues that fateful night – November 9, 1938.
“Kristallnacht was not the beginning of the Holocaust,” said Rep. Gordon. “It was instead the first night that Jews were murdered en mass or sent into exile. Leading up to that was five years in which the government took away Jewish people’s rights to own businesses, practice their professions, own property, or stay in their homes. Their neighbors and friends remained silent as Jewish people saw their way of life taken from them, one step at a time, until their life itself was taken away.”
Rep. Gordon explained that the spark that lit the fire of Kristallnacht was when a Parisian Jew named Herschel Grynszspan carried a gun into a German embassy and shot a diplomat. That act of violence, done as a cry out against the deportation of 12,000 German Jews, was the excuse used by the Nazi party to commit the atrocities we now call Kristallnacht.
“When we look to the beginning, we have to look further back than the violence to understand its acceptance,” Gordon said.
As it has for more than 25 years, Bedford’s Kristallnacht observance concluded with the Mourners’ Kaddish.
With thanks to the website www.myjewishlearning.com for the transliteration and the translation of the Mourners’ Kaddish.
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