Kristallnacht in the Golan 86 years later
I live in Katzrin, Golan. I moved my family to this quiet city eleven years ago because it reminded me of the suburbs of New Jersey, where I grew up. Fanatical Islamists never attacked New Jersey, so I had no reason to expect Katzrin would be attacked. In recent weeks, Color Red Sirens have become more frequent, and the rockets are getting larger and closer.
As Rosh Hashanah began, I stood with my family to say Kiddush, the blessing over wine that began the festive holiday meal. As the words came out of my mouth, rockets began to explode nearby. I hesitated, but Halacha (Jewish law) teaches that once a blessing is begun, it must be completed. So I continued, the cup of wine trembling in my hand. By the end of the blessing, the rocket attack was over. Over the next two days of the holiday and the following Shabbat, sirens sent us for shelter several times daily, usually in mid-afternoon and sunset. Even genocide has a routine.
While the laws of Shabbat require turning off electronic devices on holidays and Shabbat, imminent danger requires an exception. My phone warned me of rocket attacks and beeped updates from the civil authority.
After Shabbat, the mayor, Yehuda Dua, posted a video on WhatsApp. While no rockets had landed in the city, many windows were violently shattered by the powerful reverberations and several residents had been wounded by flying glass. Yehuda stood on a glass-filled floor, holding up a large and vicious shard of glass.
Suddenly, I was scared.
I was raised on stories of the Holocaust. Holocaust education was part of a young Jew’s education, more essential than even Bible study. Every Jew knew about Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
Kristallnacht (the Night of Crystal) was a massive series of pogroms that took place on the night of November 9, 1938. The name Kristallnacht (literally ‘Crystal Night’) comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps and at least 90 Jews were murdered.
However, the worst aspect of the pogrom was when the government looked on without intervening. Firefighters watched as Jewish homes and businesses burned.
Again, we are walking on broken glass in our homes, and, again, the world is silent.
Thank God I live in Israel, the Jewish state. While the same spiritual sickness that drove the Nazis to murder six million Jews is driving Iran and Arabs to fire rockets at Israeli cities, the real danger lies in the “protests” that cheer them on. The solution to the war is absurdly obvious. If the Western powers threatened Hamas and Hezbollah, warning them to return the hostages and immediately stop hostilities, the war would be over immediately.
Far too many in the West make excuses for the new Nazis, claiming “context,” putting limits on Israel’s “right to defend itself” against the evil that has pledged to kill every Jew on the planet.
After 2,000 years of Jew-hatred in the form of forced conversions and pogroms being the norm, October 7 changed everything. We were given a respite after the Holocaust. The non-Jewish world had stepped to the edge of the abyss and stared into the horrors hidden in their collective souls. At the last moment, they stepped back. For 80 years, Jew-hatred was socially unacceptable.
But a renewed wave of Jew-hatred is sweeping over the world. I had read about pogroms and Jew-hating governments. I was, of course, well-versed in the Holocaust, but I never expected to witness anything like it in my lifetime. Jews had learned to fit in, to coexist, and (we thought) how to be accepted by the non-Jews. There were groups like the PLO and the KKK, but they were social aberrations not to be taken seriously.
We convinced ourselves that something like the Holocaust could never happen again. Liberal society championed minorities, and at .03% of the world population and 80 years after the Holocaust, we were a minuscule minority that had seen more than our fair share of oppression. Indeed, most Jews hoped that evil would not notice us.
But along came Israel, committing the worst crime a Jew could ever commit: we survived. To make matters worse, we became a light unto the nations as high-tech wonders flowed from our tiny nation. Even worse, we revived what the world had come to believe was our lost connection with the God of Israel. He had abandoned us for 2,000 years, and the covenant connecting us to this patch of land had lapsed.
But Jews are a stiff-necked people, and we still believe in the covenantal connection to the land. For the first time in human history, a people returned.
The IDF manifested our pledge of ‘Never Again.’ But one image forced me to see how fragile this pledge was.
I am always confused when people express concern for my safety during the war. Though Color Red sirens have become much more common, and I hear the rockets far more often and much closer, life has changed very little since the war began. A few houses have been damaged, and a few people have been wounded. Everyday life is interrupted once every few days, but everything returns to normal.
As the New Year approached, that changed. Iran attacked with hundreds of ballistic missiles and the red tags marking Code Red Alerts blanketed all of Israel. Miraculously, the attack was largely ineffective. But people refused to speak about how the attack had overwhelmed our vaunted air defenses. Cracks were beginning to show in the IDF’s armor of invincibility. Indeed, Oct. 7 had already shown us that our feeling of security was a thin veneer easily swept aside.
Israelis no longer sleep securely.
But even more concerning than the maniacal hatred of our neighbors is the vocal support of elements in the West. We had not noticed that the chorus that supported our chant of ‘Never Again’ was becoming softer as the Holocaust generation disappeared. Universities taught a perverted version of history in which ‘Never Again’ was usurped, referring to any social justice cause. Suddenly, the blue and white Star of David became synonymous with the red and black Swastika. While Jew hatred was still shunned, anti-Zionism opened a channel to express the same hatred of the Chosen People.
I believe in the prophecies written in the Bible. Never again will the Jews be forced out of our land. The anti-Zionist agenda will not succeed, and the God of Israel will judge it.
Those wishing to contribute to Katsrin’s civil defense can do so on the JGive website.
The post Kristallnacht in the Golan 86 years later appeared first on Israel365 News.
Israel in the News
