‘The Temple Was Burned’ | Remembering a Kristallnacht Bar Mitzvah | Sigi Hart | USC Shoah Foundation

Nov 9, 2022 | "We had about three, four people standing outside watching if they see any police, or SS, or Nazis coming, to warn us so that we can escape from behind in the backyard. [...] In one corner were the burnt Torah scrolls. They were laying on the floor." For more than a year, Sigi Hart prepared for his November 1938 Bar Mitzvah, when he would mark his 13th birthday by reading from the Torah in his family’s synagogue in Berlin. A few days before his family and friends were to gather, his synagogue was burned down during Kristallnacht, also known as the November Pogroms. In this clip, Sigi describes celebrating his Bar Mitzvah amid the destruction.

The Kristallnacht Pogrom was an organized attack by military, police and civilians against Jews in Germany, Austria and parts of former Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland) that occurred on November 9–10, 1938. Orchestrated by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of a German embassy official in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Jewish youth named Herchel Grynzspan, 1,400 synagogues and 7,000 businesses were destroyed, almost 100 Jews were killed, and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. German Jews were subsequently held financially responsible for the destruction wrought upon their property during this pogrom.


For more on Kristallnacht, click here.