HeritageandHistory Zurich

Themes from our think tank.

We were ourselves foreigners in the land of Egypt

The text of this parasha puts me in a slightly delicate situation, as it brings laws, rules – mishpatim. Not that I don’t appreciate them and don’t like order and discipline. It’s no surprise that I studied to be a graphic designer, putting texts, colors and images in order. But I am generally bothered by certain applications of laws as commanded in the Torah, either by their rigor dating back centuries or millennia, or by their lack of contemporaneity or context. Therefore, I am a faithful defender of the approach appropriate to our time and moment. But especially this excerpt from the Torah brings something not only very current, but also fundamental for the formation of the ethical conduct of the Jewish people at any time: dealing with others who are in a less privileged situation than you, either because they are so, or because this situation was caused by...

The night of broken hearts and scattered glass

Only from the 19th century onwards did Jews begin to enjoy civil rights in some duchies and counties and principalities that constituted the Union of German Nations. At the beginning of the 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte brought to the territories he conquered in this conglomerate of states a set of equal rights for all, which were maintained with German unification in 1871 and ratified with the Weimar Republic in 1918. To understand the mindset, the mentality of many of the Jews who lived in Germany, and the process that culminated in the Night of Broken Glass (or Night of Shards), Kristallnacht, it is important to elucidate some concepts about the way of life in Germany, and recap events of the ARI community and its members, relating them to historical events. The advantages of belonging to a nation were many for those Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The...

Our Duty towards Remembrance and Our Commitment to Memory

You can gather people around a table on Erev (Eve of) Pessach, you can place a plate with all the symbolic foods in the center of the table, read from the Haggadah (narrative), perform all the ritual, recite the prayers and even have the festive foods for dinner. If there aren’t any Jews sitting at this table, this not a Seder (ritual meal), but a staged act. This is true to most rituals or commemorations within the Israelite nation: it is through the person or the community that these events acquire their fundamental meaning.  The Shoah was, by definition, the systematic annihilation of Jews. There is no other denomination. There are other victims, there are! But there is only one Holocaust. The establishment of the date on which the Holocaust should be remembered in Israel generated heated discussion in the Knesset (Parliament) in 1951. Until then, in 1949 and 1950,...

When horror turns to terror

The Reichspogromnacht, also naively called Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass – marks for German Jews the transformation of horror into terror and the beginning of overt and systematic physical violence. Until then, the persecution of Jews generally took the form of coercion and exclusion through racist and segregationist laws. From then on, the physical integrity of the Jewish population was officially threatened, and both the desire and the need for emigration reached a level of desperation: the race out of Germany became an urgent question of survival. This night symbolizes the end of German Judaism as it was known until then – synagogues are burned, thousands of Jewish men are arrested and taken to concentration camps, their resources for survival are extinguished, their social environment is suppressed. Those who can, due to knowledge or financial possibilities, take refuge in nearby or distant countries, such as Brazil. Those who...