CHELSEA — Sunday, Nov. 9, marked the 87th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the terrifying “Night of Broken Glass” that historians mark as the pogrom that started the Holocaust. On Friday, Nov. 7, two days before the anniversary of that dark night, students at Xavier High School gathered for a prayer service to remember the victims.
The school, which offers a Holocaust Studies course as part of its curriculum, has held a Kristallnacht remembrance each year for the past several years, Xavier President Jack Raslowsky said.
“We, as an institution, [are] trying to send very clear messages,” he explained. “To be very good witnesses to holding sacred memory, the memory of those lost in the Holocaust, the memory of those suffering through Kristallnacht, but other sacred memories that are beyond this.”
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Xavier students recited prayers that included calls for brotherhood. “We pray that with the breaking of this glass, our hearts may be broken in love and reconciliation,” read one prayer.
Kristallnacht (German for “Night of Broken Glass”) took place in cities and towns all over Germany and Austria, involving mobs of rioters who — at the behest of Nazi officials — attacked synagogues and Jewish-owned stores, breaking windows, vandalizing them, and setting them on fire. The mobs also rounded up Jews, beating up, killing others, and arresting many more.
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When the night was over, an estimated 1,000 synagogues had been burned, 7,500 businesses and homes had been destroyed, 91 people were killed, and 30,000 Jewish people had been arrested.
Kristallnacht marked a turning point in Nazi Germany. Before Nov. 9, 1938, antisemitic persecution of Jews mainly had been conducted on economic and political grounds, not with acts of full-scale violence.
The Kristallnacht prayer service is important, said Raslowsky, who added that while Xavier is a Catholic high school, its student body is diverse.
“I think this is a place where we have Catholics and Christian non-Catholics and Jewish students and Jewish families and Muslim families and Hindu families and the different faith traditions form the whole of Xavier, which remains fundamentally and explicitly Catholic,” Raslowsky explained.
“But the best of our Catholicism becomes in our love for one another, regardless of faith tradition,” he added.