German Center Sorry for Talk on Holocaust, Nakba on Kristallnacht Anniversary
A Tel Aviv event that apparently draws a line between the Holocaust and the Nakba was rescheduled with an apology from the organizers after an eruption of widespread outrage over its original date of November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
The Tel Aviv branch of the Goethe Institute, a global German cultural nonprofit association, will now hold the event on Sunday, November 13.
Kristallnacht or “Night of Broken Glass” was the 1938 pogrom that saw Nazi mobs attack synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses across Germany. It is largely seen as the opening salvo in the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Nakba is an Arabic term, meaning “catastrophe,” that refers to the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1949 war that saw the establishment of the State of Israel.
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“The memory of the Shoah and the commemoration of the victims are extremely important to the Goethe Institute, which devotes many projects to this important topic,” the institution said in Hebrew on the website of its Israeli branch, announcing the date change.
“We regret that strong feelings arose due to the selection of the date for the panel discussion. Therefore, after consultation with the lecturers, we have postponed the event to Sunday, November 13, 2022.”
The homepage of the institute’s Israeli website also featured an image from the devastation of Kristallnacht, along with text commemorating the victims of the event. The text refers to Kristallnacht as “a violent transition to the systematic persecution of the Jews in Germany, which culminated in the Shoah, when six million Jews were brutally exterminated.”
The date change and website update come after Israel’s Foreign Ministry decried the event as “blatant cheapening of the Holocaust,” and Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center branded the timing as “an odious provocation.”
