Jews using their wits and moral courage during the Holocaust was the focus of the Kristallnacht remembrance at Congregation Machane Chodosh on Thursday, November 7.
The 2024 movie Bardejov tells the true story of the Jewish community in that town in Slovakia during March of 1942. It is not the Nazis but the Slovakian Fascist Hlinka Guard rounding up Jews. President Jozef Tiso of Slovakia offers Nazi Germany money to take each of the 90,000 Jews out of an overall population of 2.6 million.
Should the Jewish leaders register the Jewish inhabitants in the town to work with the Fascists? Should they comply with the roundup of Jews to be sent to “work camps”? What could they do to fight back, based on the bits and pieces of information they know?
The Jewish protagonist in the movie is Rafuel Lowy, the long-time president of the Bardejov Jewish community, Orthodox, and owner of a liquor business. One of his proposals is to blow up the whole town, Jewish and non-Jewish, with the gunpowder and gasoline in his possession. The rabbi of the town votes it down at their Jewish council meeting as not what Hashem wants.
There are many moral dilemmas and difficult decisions for both Jews and non-Jews in the movie. The crescendo comes when the Fascists want to send their first transport (300 young, unmarried Jewish women) to work at a shoe factory in Brezovac, a town in eastern Slovakia. Only they learn there isn’t a shoe factory in Brezovac. They are to be taken to Auschwitz. The rabbi asks for all of the town to fast and pray on Taanis Esther for succor. The transport date for the young women is set for March 25, 1942.
Jacob Fiskus is an 89-year-old survivor of the Holocaust from Bardejov and the narrator of the one-hour and 24-minute movie. Fiskus starts the movie by taking the family back to the town.
The Jewish market was next to the non-Jewish market, he said. “There was friendship between the two, a mutual respect.” Some 450 families – nearly 3,000 Jews – lived in Bardejov: 60% were chasidic Jews and the rest were Conservative or not religious. The town had a mikvah, a beis midrash at the synagogue, and a Jewish school.
Jacob Fiskus met Emil Fish when Fiskus sat in front of Fish during a plane trip. Fish is a Hollywood producer and a member of Congregation Machane Chodosh. Fiskus already had a script and Fish made the movie.
A live Zoom meeting for questions and answers was held after the movie for the approximately 45 attendees. Fiskus and Fish were together in Los Angeles.
Fiskus said the last words most Jews said before being killed in the Holocaust was not “Never again” but “Don’t forget us.”
Fiskus’ mission is to restore the Jewish heritage in the town of Bardejov: “so they should know the history.” He rebuilt the shul, built a memorial (80% of the Jewish inhabitants were murdered), educated the town, and had students research and write about the town. He is also building a museum.
The reactions from the current inhabitants, said Fiskus, “are very, very positive.” “I’ve absolutely had no negative reaction to what we do there. On the contrary, the City Council and the people are very supportive. I don’t want everyone to think they are not anti-Semitic; I think they are basically anti-Semitic. But the young generation, luckily, doesn’t know the history of the anti-Semitism. They don’t know what it means. They don’t know because they don’t have any Jews there.”
“There are so many stories of resistance. It’s important to see that,” said Emil Fish, the producer of the movie. “Even though they didn’t understand what was going to happen to them. Nonetheless, they fought back as much as they could and stayed together as a community… They didn’t go like sheep to the slaughter.”
Rabbi Yossi Mendelson of Machane Chodosh appreciated the movie showing “real Yiddishkeit. Their emunah, their faith in Hashem, and their resilience, and their hope, and their courage.”
Kristallnacht (“Night of Glass” in German) is considered the beginning of the physical persecution of the Jews.
Herschel Greenspan shot a German embassy delegate in Paris on November 7, 1938, to get the world’s attention, after his family and other Polish Jews were kicked out of Germany and into Poland. The German diplomat died on November 9, 1938.
Nazis then destroyed 267 synagogues, shattered 7,500 Jewish businesses, took 30,000 Jews to concentration camps, and killed 91 Jews in Austria, Germany, and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia on November 9-10, 1938.
After a tepid reaction from the world, the Nazis intensified their anti-Jewish policies. The ultimate goal was the systematic extermination of the Jewish people, culminating in the Holocaust.
Each year, Congregation Machane Chodosh, originally started by German Jewish refugees in 1939, remembers Kristallnacht.
By David Schneier
