A Sabbath Kristallnacht in the Temple Beth El Library

[First published on November 10, 2007, as On Libraries: The Library of Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester]

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I write this on Saturday, November 10, less than a week before I am to give a talk this coming Friday on the use of open technologies such as open-source to a group of librarians of the City University of New York.

Though I had originally planned to combine some material from my presentation to a group of k12 educations last May in Litchfield, CT, I have decided to prepare new content for this in the form of several posts about libraries and the custodians of our heritage, our librarians.

I recently wrote a post on my home away from home for most of my childhood , On Libraries: The Ernie Pyle Memorial Home/Library. I have also published a post on authority, authoritative opinions, and librarians, An Authoritative Opinion on Libraries and Authoritative Opinions.

I spent several hours this past Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art viewing some of the greatest works of art ever produced: three of the ten panels from the immortal Gates of Paradise. The panels on display are Adam and Eve, Jacob and Esau, and David and Goliath, respectively the top, middle, and bottom panels on the left door.

This my second visit to view the bronze relief sculptures within a week, yet I did not spend my entire time viewing the panels, for I had noticed on my first visit that the panels were on display in a room with the title, Watson Research Library. I thus spent an hour or so learning more about the role of the Watson Family — the founders of my employer, IBM — including a visit to two of the libraries in the Met and two conversations with some of the Met’s librarians. I hope to publish a post about that shortly.

I spent last night in the library of my synagogue, Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester. Indeed, I spent the whole night there. For several years Temple Beth El (TBE) has participated as one of a group of churches and synagogues in my area who provide an ad hoc homeless shelter by taking turns providing food and a night’s lodging for some of our fellow citizens who happen to be homeless. The sponsoring organization commits to providing both dinner and a breakfast, and also some hosts to stay the night, not to guard the premises, but to represent the hosting congregation. My wife and I had done this once before, and volunteered to do it this year, and last night was our turn for this wintry season.

The evening was special in many ways, including a live concert by four musicians who played music by composers who either died in the Holocaust, or by the chance of fate, survived their time in the death camps, and lived on to write more music.

Last night was cold and wintry, with a chilling rain. I noted some flakes on snow of my car, the first snow I have seen this year. My wife, Karin, and I slept in the library, and when I went out from time to the central Sanctuary, I could hear the soft sound of rain failling our our Temple’s roof. But almost seventy years ago there was a much different sound of falling during much of Germany and Austria — the sound of shattered glass.

It was the anniversary of that “night of shattered glass,” Kristallnacht, that set this Sabbath apart from any other Sabbath this past year, as Kristallnacht was the the opening battle in the most one-sided war in history, The War Against The Jews.

Moreover, this night was not only the anniversary of the start of the war in November, 1938 — it happened to occur on a Friday.

Thus, Friday, November 9, 2007, was the tenth — or perhaps eleventh — Sabbath Kristallnacht.

I started writing about my night in a syngogue’s library on a Kristallnacht Sabbath shortly after midnight while sitting in the library. That writing can be found at the site of one of my other projects, the Rabbi Chaim Stern project.

The Loss of Innocence

[I published this, in slightly different form and with a a different title, as presentation to be given to some librarians of the City University of New York on November 16, 2007, On the Authority of Librarians. The writing is also appropriate to this project.]

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Our librarians are among the key custodians of our culture, for they are the people whom we charge to decide what books and writings are to be found in our libraries, and of course also what books and writing are not to be found in our libraries.

Their authority goes both ways, especially in their constant struggle against those who seek to make them our censors. See for example The Internet Public Library: Censorship.

For the most part they go about their job day by day, making judgment calls as best they can.

Some of those calls can change a life in an instant, as once happened to me.

I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I spent much of my first few years there reading books that could be found in my neighborhood library, as I have described in On Libraries: The Ernie Pyle Memorial Home/Library.

I exhausted that library by the time I was twelve. I next worked through the main branch of the Albuquerque Public Library.

I’m going to take a little detour here. I just looked up the web address of the ABQ library system and found it here. I soon noticed the link Albuquerque Historical Postcards.
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Thank you, Albuquerque Librarians, Thank You!

I found a postcard of the Ernie Pyle library via eBay a few days back, and I have been waiting for it to arrive so I could take a picture of it and put it up in my post on my favorite childhood library. However, I see there is a section on Schools and Libraries.

Here, courtesy of the Albuquerque Libraries, are some of the buildings of my youth:

Albuquerque Public Library Main Branch: “This unusual building in Pueblo architecture is the Albuquerque City Library, one mark of the culture and progressiveness of this fastest-growing city in the Southwest.”

I spent a lot of time in this library, most of it in the green steel sections that contained the non-fiction works.

I spent a lot of time reading magazine, including every issue of Reader’s Digest, from its start to about 1957 or so. My favorite story was the one about the Great Molasses Flood in Boston that occurred around 1918. I also went through most of the issues of Life Magazine

Kimo Theater: “Kimo, America’s Foremost Indian Theatre, Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Kimo Theatre Building expresses architecturally, in its composite design, the traditions of New Mexico and the old Southwest. One of the few typically American Indian architectural expressions, with a suggestion of the Spanish in its contours, this unusual edifice, both inside and out, provides an atmosphere of historical romance unequalled elsewhere in America.”

I saw many a movie in the Kimo, at no cost, since my mother worked for the local theater chain.

Luminarios: “Luminarios are one of the loveliest of the old customs still followed today in the southwest. They are small brown paper sacks, half filled with sand and a candle placed in the sand. On Christmas Eve these are lit, it will help in guiding the Christ child to this home.”

How I miss them. They are a unique part of celebrating the Holidays in the SouthWest. We once spent a Christmas in Sante Fe, and attended Christmas Mass in the Cathedral. A tradition then, and I expect now as well, was to have posole, a hot chili stew, after attending the service.

Downtown, 1952. The Kimo can be seen on the left. The large brown building on the right is the Sunshine Building, home of the Sunshine Theater and also the place where my mother worked.

And here is an image of the library I want to write about, that of the University of New Mexico:

The University of New Mexico Library, 1938: “The University Library – contains more than 125,000 volumes with a total capacity of over 300,000. Of Pueblo-style architecture, this beautiful building was opened April 1, 1938. The carvings are in the symbolic Indian motif and the furniture and other ornamentations are entirely authentic of the Southwest. The Great Chandelier – in the reference room is said to be the largest of its type ever made by hand. It follows the design of the lamps used by the early Spanish conquistadors. ‘From the Land of Enchantment’”

I can remember the chandelier in the main reading room. It was a wonderful place to read.

You can see the library has several stories in a central tower. As I recall, there were nine stories above ground level, and each story had books arranged using the Dewey Decimal System: 900’s on the top, 800’s on the floor below, and so on down. I just loved that arrangement, for I would wander about the library by first deciding a starting floor, and then I would move downward, shelf by shelf, floor by floor, taking books off the shelf to see if they were worth reading.

The moment I am writing about came on the fifth floor, when I paused to pick up a book of photos with a title that contained the words “Nuremberg Trial.”

When I opened that book, I saw for the first time photographs of the Nazi Death Camps.

My life changed forever and irretrievably, in that single moment.

For that was the moment I realized that True Evil could be found on the face of the earth, and at the hands of man.

My world hasn’t been the same since. I do wish I could have retained more of my childhood innocence, though I know — as do we all — that this is one of the prices we have to pay as we grow up:

The Loss of Innocence

On Searching for the Meaning of “Sabbath Kristallnacht”

I (Dave Shields) write this on the second night after I spent a night in my Syngagogue’s Library and then wrote a blog post, On Libraries: The Library of Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester noting that Friday, November 9, 2007, was unusual in that is both the anniversary of “Kristallnacht” and also a Friday, the Holiest Day in the Jewish Calender, and thus a “Sabbath Kristallnacht.”

I just searched for the phrase “Sabbath Kristallnacht” on Google and found my post is now the first hit!

That inspired the following post: On Libraries: On Searching for the Meaning of “Sabbath Kristallnacht”.

I’ve also just noticed that I’m now experiencing the same effect by working on this project that occurred once I started writing about SSgt. Kyu Hyuk Chay … I think of him often.

Shabbat Kristallnacht in the Library of Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester

This post continues a post on my primary blog, On Libraries: The Library of Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester.

I copied out the following excerpt from one of most authoritative histories of the Holocaust, The War Against The Jews, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, shortly after midnight of November 9 — November 10, 2007, a Shabbat Kristallnacht:

From The War Against the Jews, Kristallnacht, pp 100-104.

But an unexpected opportunity for dealing with the Jews opened up with the assassination on November 7, 1938, of Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary in the German embassy in Paris, by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jewish student, Hershl Grynszpan. … Grynszpan’s parents had been among the first rounded up, and the son had become unsettled by their fate.

Hitler himself never uttered a word publicly on vom Rath’s assassination or on the events of the Kristallnacht (night of glass). Yet those events could not have occurred without his approval. The incitement against the Jews began on November 8 with the first news report that vom Rath had been seriously wounded (he died two days later).

Now, the party members and SA men took Goebbels’ hints as he intended them to be taken: Jewish blood was to flow for the death of vom Rath…That night fires were ignited all over Germany, and the shattered pl

[I stopped here to go to bed, resuming at 6:50AM Saturday morning)]

ate glass that was to give the pogrom its name littered the streets of German towns and cities. (It was later estimated that the amount of plate glass destroyed equaled half the annual production of the plate-glass industry of Belgium, from which it had been imported. Over seven thousand Jewish businesses were destroyed. Nearly one hundred Jews were killed, and thousands more subjected to wanton violence and sadistic torments.

About thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen.

If the death of vom Rath had triggered Gorbbels’ pogrom, the pogrom itself provided the National Socialist Government with the opportunity , short of actual war, to proceed with the total expropriation of the Jews and the complete removal of their freedom.

Everything relating to the Jewish question, it seemed, had been disposed of, except the Jews themselves. On January 24, 1939, Goring gave Heydrich the power to take all measures for a stepped-up forced emigration of the German Jews, along the lines that Eichmann had pioneered in Vienna after the Anschluss.

[I had not known before reading this passage that Eichmann was directly involved in the planning for the War Against the Jews in Austria.]

P. 80. The SD Main Office in Munich wsa enlarged to three departments. Within the department known as SD-Inland (domestic affairs), a separate desk for Jewish affairs (coded II-112) was set up with the SS-Untersturmfuhrer Leopold von Mildenstein in charge. Mildenstein hired Adolf Eichmann at the end of 1934 as his export on Zionism, that niche in the bureaucracy coded II-1123.

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The Subject: Definitions and Contours

The annihilation of six million Jews, carried out by the German state under Adolf Hitler during World War II, has resisted understanding. The question persists: how could it have happened? That question embraces several questions, each charged with passion and moral judgment. They are:

1. How was it possible for a modern state to carry out the systematic murder of a whole pople for no reason other than that they were Jews?

2. How was it possible for a whole people to allow itself to be destroyed?

3. How was it possible for the world to stand by without halting this destruction?

Part I of this book, “The Final Solution,” attempt to answer the first question.

I write this on a Saturday afternoon. The Jewish Sabbath lasts from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, and one is not supposed to work on a Sabbath.

However, this is an exception, since the preservation of life takes priority over any religious ritual requirement. Though I am writing on a Sabbath, I am not working, but I am laboring, in a labor of love.

Though Rabbi Chaim Stern of Blessed Memory is no longer with us, as is also the case with most of the few Jews who emerged from the Nazi death camps, we need to preserve their memory, and the memory of the times in which they lived, lest history repeat itself.

This goal of this project is to help preserve those memories.