Kristallnacht Commemoration Shabbat

Each year, our Shabbat service at Belsize Square Synagogue marks Kristallnacht. This year, 88 years after the November pogrom of 1938, we remember it as the night that ended any illusion of safety for German Jewry, and as the beginning of the story of this congregation, founded by those who were able to escape.

The music carried that memory. We opened with “Halikha LeKeisaria” (“A Walk to Caesarea”), the words of Hannah Szenes, who was murdered in 1944. Hashkiveinu was by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who managed to leave Italy before the war. Their lives were shaped, or ended, by the events we recall.

Ma Tovu by Salomon Sulzer, Lecha Dodi was by Julius Mombach, composers of the Western European tradition as is Louis Lewandowski. These are the composers who give this community its musical identity, the repertoire our founders carried with them and that we still sing today. Their music remains with us, and so does our responsibility to remember