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Krefeld Jewish community dances and sings at a place of suffering
By: Yaakov Ort
In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht—the horrific pogroms that took place throughout Germany in November 1938—Nazi officials meticulously chronicled the destruction of the Jewish community of Krefeld, a city in northwest Germany:
Sixty-three members of the Jewish community were arrested and taken to Krefeld prison; the apartments of Jewish families were broken into, the furniture smashed, and thrown into the street; the synagogue on Peterstrasse was vandalized and set on fire; the Krefeld Linn synagogue was destroyed, but because the masonry did not burn, it was razed to the ground by firefighters. The Uerdingen synagogue was destroyed and demolished after Torah scrolls, volumes of the Talmud and other Jewish teachings and interior furnishings were burned on a funeral pyre; the Hüls synagogue was set on fire; the Jewish community center on Bleichpfad was destroyed and set on fire; 18 stores owned by Krefeld Jews in the city center were destroyed.
The orders for the destruction and its accounting came from the headquarters of the city’s Nazi Party, an imposing red villa at Bismarckplatz 32.
Almost 85 years later, the red villa is still standing at the center of Krefeld. The swastika flags have long since disappeared, and only a plaque on the facade reminds passersby of the building’s terrible history.
It was precisely in front of this villa that 300 participants joyously danced with a new Torah scroll on Sunday, May 21, corresponding this year to Rosh Chodesh Sivan.
“When we first started planning the event, we immediately knew what route it must take,” said Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Yitzchak Mendel Wagner, rabbi of the Jewish community of Krefeld.
Following a generous donation from the Bayer pharmaceutical company, the Krefeld Jewish community commissioned Rabbi Yosef Dan Khranovsky, a scribe from Antwerp, Belgium, to write the new Torah scroll.
The mantle of the Torah was donated by the Roosen family of Jerusalem. Before the Holocaust, the Roosens were a long-established Jewish family in Krefeld that ran their own small synagogue at Wetwall 20 and suffered terribly under the Nazis.
Together with Hillel Shmuel Naydych, chairman of the Krefeld Jewish community; the Lord Mayor of Krefeld, Frank Meyer; the Krefeld community and its friends; as well as Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries from around Germany and students from Dnipro yeshivah (which was evacuated from Ukraine the nearby city of Düsseldorf last year), hundreds of celebrants danced singing on the square from which so much pain came to the Jewish community.
“Eighty years ago, in 1943, there were no longer any Jews in Krefeld,” said Wagner. “What better gift to our growing community than to have the men, women and children of Krefeld gather for the Ten Commandments read from their own new Sefer Torah this Shavuot?”
