‘From Kristallnacht to Kindertransport’

A deeply moving Kristallnacht commemoration event took place on Sunday evening against the backdrop of a sickening neo-Nazi protest that was allowed to continue outside of NSW Parliament.

‘The Night of Broken Glass’, on November 9-10 in 1938, when Nazi forces destroyed over 200 synagogues, vandalised 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses, arrested 30,000 Jews, and murdered 91 Jews across Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, marked the onset of the Holocaust.

During his speech at the event, which was attended by 900 people, NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip acknowledged the “warning signs” that we are seeing at the moment and what they might pertain for the future.

“As we meet this evening we reflect on the gathering of emboldened neo-Nazis outside NSW parliament, where they proudly and in carefully coded language called for the abolition of the so called ‘Jewish lobby’ – a legally convenient way of making their intentions about the Jewish community as a whole known,” Ossip said.

“They were brazen in a way that would have been unthinkable until very recently.”