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 000000 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.