Kristallnacht Memorial Service, November 2025

Some 120 AJR members and their families, as well as representatives from the Austrian, German, Hungarian, Israeli and Slovak Embassies, attended this year’s AJR Memorial Service for Kristallnacht at the Belsize Square Synagogue on Wednesday 11 November. With Michael Newman, the AJR’s Chief Executive, having outlined the historical context of the memorial service, a candle-lighting ceremony was held. It was led by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg of the New North London Synagogue, whose grandfather, Dr Georg Salzberger, was the Rabbi of the Westend Synagogue in Frankfurtam- Main, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht. Noting that at the 1938 Evian conference European governments had been ‘found wanting’ in their reaction to Hitler’s anti-Semitism and reluctant to accept the immigration of Jews from Germany, Rabbi Wittenberg asked ‘Who will take today’s refugees?’ Professor Leslie Brent, who was on the first Kindertransport from Berlin on 2 December 1938, gave a brief, deeply emotional, testimony of his recollections of Kristallnacht. Born in Köslin, Germany, on Kristallnacht he had been at the Berlin-Pankow Jewish Orphanage, where his parents had taken him two years earlier. Kristallnacht was an ‘abrupt’ event, Professor Brent said: ‘Many Jews thought their situation would improve despite all the tribulations.’ The Kindertransport had come as ‘a great act of mercy’, he added. Guest speaker Sir Peter Bazalgette, Chair of the United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation launched by the Prime Minister earlier in the year, noted the international reaction to Kristallnacht at the time: many words but little action. He reported on the recent activities of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, recommended that as many people as possible visit the Journey Exhibition, with its Kindertransport element, at the National Holocaust Centre in Laxton, and praised the work of the AJR. Speakers also paid tribute to Sir Nicholas Winton, who had died earlier in the year, and to the Holocaust historian Professor David Cesarani, who had died several weeks earlier at the untimely age of 58. Prayers were recited by Elkan Pressman.