In commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the
1947 United Nations Partition Plan
TWorld
Zionist Organization of America
Michigan Region
A Kristallnacht Lesson
presents
New York
Jonathan Schanzer
I
Director of policy for the Jewish Policy Center and former
U.S. Treasury Department counter-terrorism analyst
t was Kristallnacht, the night of
"broken glass:' when hundreds of
Jewish businesses and virtually
every synagogue throughout Germany
and Austria was set ablaze. On that
terrible night in November of 1938
(Nov. 9 10), my father, Sol, ran into
a burning synagogue near his home
in Vienna and rescued a Torah that
would otherwise have been consumed
by the flames.
Together with his brother, Morris
Brafman, they carried that Torah
halfway around the world,
ultimately bringing it to
the United States where it
was later restored and is
currently in a yeshiva in
Far Rockaway (Queens),
New York, in an ark dedi-
cated to the memory of
Sol and his wife of 55
years, my mother, Rose.
My father, my mother
and my father's brother
were among the fortunate
few who reached the
United States. Like
many European
Jewish refugees,
the Brafman broth-
ers built a successful life in their new
country, but never forgot the powerful
and tragic events of that terrible night
that so dramatically reshaped their
lives.
In our home around the Shabbat
dinner table, the conversation fre-
quently included passionate discus-
sions about what the Nazis did to our
people — and even more passionate
discussions about the failure of much
of the international community to do
anything about it. My father and uncle
were also troubled by the lack of an
adequate response from the American
Jewish community to the Holocaust.
-
AMERICAN MIDEAST POLICY:
DANGEROUS TIMES
IN A DANGEROUS
NEIGHBORHOOD
COMME NTARY
Thurs., Nov. 29, 2007
7:00 PM
West Bloomfield Jewish Community Center
6600 W Maple Road / 248-661-1000
Cosponsors: StandWithUs—Michigan, Jewish Institute of
National Security Affairs OINSA), Rayna & Natalio Kogan,
Beverly Baker, Leonard & Ann Baruch, Dave & jenise
Rabens, Janet & Arnold Aronoff, Jewish Community Center
of Metropolitan Detroit, Cheryll & Stuart Israel
Accepting additional cosponsors
For information contact Mark Segel:
248-208-2773— myalesegel@finsvcs.com
:Zfaided /y97
ZIONIST ORGANIZATION
OF AMERICA
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A28
November 15 • 2007
IN
My father and his brother Morris
were determined to put an end to
the silence. Having lived through the
"abandonment of the Jews," words
borrowed from the title of David S.
Wyman's landmark book, they were
concerned about the persecution of
Jews in the Soviet Union. They vowed
to make certain there would be no sec-
ond "abandonment of the Jews."
In the late 1950s and early 1960s,
reports began reaching the West about
the mistreatment of Jews by the Soviet
government. Synagogues were closed
down, the study of the Hebrew lan-
guage was outlawed, Soviet
publications were filled with
anti-Semitism, and even
asking for permission to
emigrate to Israel assured a
one way ticket to a prison or
forced labor camp in Siberia.
These were the years
before American Jewry
mobilized in protest. Before
the huge rallies, before we
wore wristbands with names
of refuseniks, before we set
an empty chair at
our Passover seder to
symbolize the Russian
Jews who were not
permitted to celebrate
the holiday.
The Silence Deafens
In Elie Wiesel's famous book The
Jews of Silence, one of the earliest
writings about the persecution of
Jews in the Soviet Union, Wiesel refers
to them as Jews of silence because
not only were they held prisoner by
the Soviet Union, but were also pre-
vented from even speaking out about
religious matters. Wiesel, in one of
the most haunting statements in his
book, observes that Jews in the Free
World who failed to protest against the
persecution of Soviet Jewry, were also
"Jews of Silence."
The Refusniks
This was 20 years earlier. In a small
Manhattan office, the Brafman broth-
ers established the International
League for the Repatriation of Russian
Jews, recognizing the "legal" right of
any citizen of the world to be per-
mitted to "repatriate" to his or her
homeland. They were not lawyers, but
it was they who put forward, for the
first time, the important legal argu-
ment that since the State of Israel was
the "homeland" of all Jews, the Soviet
Union was violating International Law
by refusing to allow Jews to immigrate
to Israel.
What began as a terrible destructive
blaze on Kristallnacht 69 years ago,
became a blazing lifetime pursuit for
two men who refused to be "Jews of
Silence" and refused to abandon their
Soviet brothers and sisters as so many
of their European brothers and sis-
ters had been abandoned many years
before. LJ
Benjamin Brafman, a criminal defense
attorney, is a board member of the
David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust
Studies.