About 300 students from Manhattan’s Ramaz School, each clutching a yahrzeit candle, marched at twilight Wednesday to remember the fate of those they had never known who perished in Germany 50 years ago.
Approaching Park Avenue, where police and media held back the rush-hour traffic for the children, 12-year-old Aaron Bayer recalled “about 20 cousins” he never knew in Mielec, Galicia.
“We lived in an area that was annihilated,” Bayer said, his hands tightly held about the flickering glass.
Judy Sambol said the commemoration meant a lot to her. “My grandparents came from Europe. We shouldn’t forget about it,” the 12-year-old said.
They were led by five members of the Shomrim Society of Jewish police, who were providing a “symbolic presence at almost every synagogue in the city,” said off-duty officer Louis Weiser.
Silently crossing the wide, heavily trafficked street, the children were respectful of a past they had not known but of which they had been told.
The Ramaz School had invited survivors of Kristallnacht to participate in the march and to tell the children what they remembered from that day 50 years ago, when many had been the same age as the Ramaz students.
Hannelore Marx was 6 years old in Stuttgart on Nov. 9, 1938. “I remember the synagogue burning. My father was taken away to a concentration camp. We didn’t know if he was dead or alive.”
Wednesday night, a few thousand people crammed into Congregation Kehillath Jeshurun in Manhattan, the end point of the candlelight march, to listen to survivors of that night and to a Roman Catholic cardinal, whose spoke at many Kristallnacht observances in New York.
Cardinal John O’Connor, who ordered all the churches in his archdiocese to ring in unison at 7 p.m., thanked the synagogue congregation, who rose for him respectfully.
O’Connor said he was “overwhelmed to be here. I cannot thank you adequately.”
He thanked Ronald Lauder, organizer of all the Kristallnacht events, saying, “We owe you a tremendous debt. You have reminded many Jews that they are Jews. Thank you for doing that.
“And thank you for us Catholics — for reminding us of our debt to you Jews.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
