{"id":514082,"date":"2026-10-31T11:30:28","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T11:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/514082\/"},"modified":"2026-10-31T11:30:28","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T11:30:28","slug":"long-beach-to-mark-nearly-40-years-of-kristallnacht-remembrance-herald-community-newspapers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/514082\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Beach to mark nearly 40 Years of Kristallnacht remembrance | Herald Community Newspapers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Holocaust Memorial Committee of Long Island will hold Long Beach\u2019s annual Kristallnacht commemoration ceremony on the sixth floor of City Hall on Nov. 1 at 1 p.m., continuing a tradition that dates back nearly four decades.<\/p>\n

Kristallnacht, known as the \u201cNight of Broken Glass,\u201d was a massive, state-sponsored wave of violent antisemitic attacks across Nazi Germany, annexed Austria, and the Sudetenland on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938. The Holocaust spanned 1933 to 1945, with the systematic mass murder of European Jews carried out from 1941 to 1945.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The afternoon will include a candle-lighting ceremony, Jewish prayers and guest speakers, including this year\u2019s keynote speaker, Alexa Roth \u2014 a student at Stony Brook University who has taken a leadership role in Jewish organizations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At last year\u2019s commemoration, Warren Vegh<\/a> delivered a speech in memory of his late father, Maurice, a holocaust survivor from a village under the Carpathian Mountains in then-Czechoslovakia.<\/p>\n

Maurice, 13, was two weeks removed from his bar-mitzvah \u2014 a Jewish coming-of-age ritual. Vegh said his father\u2019s family, and others, were put into cattle cars in the middle of the night, which took them to the Auschwitz concentration camp.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody was pushed in like sardines,\u201d Vegh said of his father\u2019s recollection. \u201cThere was no way to sit. [When they got to Auschwitz] and they opened the cattle cars, a lot of people just dropped out dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who survived were met by Nazi officers, including physician Josef Mengele, according to Vegh\u2019s account. That was the last time, Vegh said, Maurice, would see his mother, Ruth, and his sister, Esther. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was there saying, go to the right, or to the left,\u201d Vegh said. \u201cIf you were sent to the left, you went straight to get gassed at the time. His mother and sister went left.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maurice would eventually be marched to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Weimar, Germany. The camp was liberated by allied powers in April 1945, but not before Maurice lost his father.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the allies came and crashed through the fences, they burst into tears,\u201d Vegh said recalling his father\u2019s memory.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Long Beach held its first commemoration in 1987, with the installation of the Holocaust memorial monument in front of City Hall. When residents attend this year\u2019s ceremony, City Council President Brendan Finn<\/a> said the afternoon, as always, will be about remembrance and responsibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was one of history\u2019s darkest times, and it is very important that we commemorate Kristallnacht and honor the victims of the Holocaust,\u201d Finn said. \u201cOur responsibility is to educate future generations, to stand against antisemitism and hatred, and make sure this history is never forgotten, diluted, or repeated.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Holocaust Memorial Committee of Long Island will hold Long Beach\u2019s annual Kristallnacht commemoration ceremony on the sixth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514083,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[197805,197803,197802,197804,131,133,197801,132],"class_list":["post-514082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-antisemitism-education","tag-brendan-finn","tag-holocaust-memorial-committee-of-long-island","tag-holocaust-remembrance","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-kristallnacht-commemoration","tag-long-beach-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}