Attack against Israel organisations was ‘echo of Kristallnacht’, says rabbi at commemoration service

A campaign of vandalism against a Jewish charity and an Israel-focused research centre in London had “echoes of Kristallnacht”, a rabbi leading the Association of Jewish Refugees’ (AJR) annual commemoration service has said.

Rabbi Gabriel Botnick told attendees at Belsize Square Synagogue that during the year following the October 7, the world had witnessed “vitriol from people who want to see Israel wiped from the map”.

Last Shabbat, protest group Palestine Action claimed responsibility after the headquarters of the independent Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom), and JNF UK were sprayed with red paint. They also stole a bust of Chaim Weizmann from Manchester University, which they later “beheaded”.

PA said they had taken action because Britain remained an "active participant in the colonisation, genocide and occupation of Palestine".

The Metropolitan police are treating both attacks as a hate crime.

Speaking at the AJR’s 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Rabbi Botnick said Jews could never be immune from hatred.

Despite that, he said, the Jewish people would always carry on.

Also speaking at the service was Manfred Goldberg, one of the last living witnesses to Kristallnacht.

The November 1938 pogrom saw Jewish homes, schools and businesses ransacked and over 30,000 Jewish men arrested and placed in concentration camps in a campaign of mass violence in the run-up to the Holocaust.

As an eight-year-old, Manfred saw his father’s textile business destroyed as Nazi paramilitary members, supported by German civilians, rampaged throughout his hometown of Kassel.

“It was a nationwide orgy of smashing, breaking and burning of property belonging to Jews,” he said.

"Most of the shops still in Jewish ownership had a brown-shirted SA [Storm Troopers] man posted outside to stop non-Jewish Germans buying from Jewish shops.

"During Kristallnacht, every shop that was known as Jewish was attacked, ransacked, looted, and many of them were set on fire. I remember my heart-sinking and body trembling, witnessing my local synagogue up in smoke – it was just a heap of rubble.”

Manfred’s father avoided being detained himself because a friendly policeman who lived in the same building as the family tipped him off, the 94-year-old Holocaust survivor said.

Manfred was later deported to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia along with his mother, Rosa, and younger brother, Hermann, before he was sent to several concentration camps.

While his younger brother was murdered, he was able to travel to the UK with his mother, where he was reunited with his father.

Former minister Lord Pickles, who serves as the UK’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, said it had been a “tough year” following the October 7 attack, which saw around 1,200 people killed by Hamas and more than 250 taken hostage and rising antisemitism in the diaspora, following the terrorist attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza.

"Hamas spared no one,” he said. “There can be no prospect of a lasting peace without the release of the remaining hostages.”

Claiming that many Jews are scared to enter central London due to pro-Palestine protests, Lord Pickles said he felt a “great sense of shame”.

Holocaust inversion, in which Israel’s actions are compared to those of the Nazis, was increasingly being misused, he said.

"We will defeat the forces that want to destroy, defile and bismirch all that is good,” Lord Pickles said.

AJR CEO Michael Newman told attendees that the “terrifying testimony” from Manfred and Hilary Hodsman and Gillian Field, the daughters of Henry Wuga, who also escaped Germany on the Kinderstransport, underscored how society and humanity could crumble.

He said: “It is vital, on the anniversary of the November pogroms, that we collectively remember all those whose lives were changed forever during that fateful night and educate people about where antisemitism unchallenged can lead.”

Together with Holocaust survivors, the AJR is running “Leave a Light On”, encouraging households across the UK to leave one light on overnight on November 9.

This initiative, which is being supported by Dov Forman, the great-grandson of Holocaust survivor and educator the late Lily Ebert, is “to remember Kristallnacht and those whose lives were ripped apart by antisemitism”, said Newman.