Temple Sholom Commemorates the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht

Temple Sholom of Scotch Plains announces its 2018 Kristallnacht program to be held on Sunday November 4 at 7pm. Dr. Magdelena Wrobel, Project Manager for the Leo Baeck Institute of New York and Berlin, will present “Posts from the Past: Personal Stories on the 80th Anniversary of Kristallnacht and the Events of 1938.” These personal stories are reports from Jews from 1938. The Leo Baeck Institute is the premier repository for archival materials from German and German speaking countries in Europe.

Eighty years ago, on November 9-10, 1938, the Nazi party escalated its anti-Semitic campaign against the Jews through a pogrom in Germany, Austria and part of Czechoslovakia. Prior to that, in March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria (the Anschluss); at the end of September 1938, England, France, Italy and Germany signed the infamous Munich Agreement which allowed Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia and eventually led to the dismemberment of that country. And on December 2, 1938, the Kindertransport began, eventually sending 10,000 children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to safety in England and elsewhere, most of whom never saw their parents again. Dr. Wrobel earned her Ph.D. from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich in 2013 and has served as a visiting scholar at the University of Haifa, University College London and Columbia University. Before coming to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, she worked at the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous in their Rescuer Support Program and served as Assistant to the Ambassador at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Poland to the United Nations.

The program is free and open to the public. Temple Sholom is located at 1925 Lake Avenue in Scotch Plains, NJ. For additional information call the Temple office at 908-889-4900.