German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warns against rising Jew-hatred on Kristallnacht anniversary

Résumé détaillé

“We see it and hear it on our streets, in our cities, in the cities of our European neighbors and throughout the world, in parliaments, in associations and in schools,” Merz said in German.

Standing inside Munich’s Ohel Jakob Synagogue, which shares its name with a nearby synagogue burned down by the Nazis during Kristallnacht 88 years earlier, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned on Monday that Jew-hatred was once again “omnipresent” in Germany.

“We see it and hear it on our streets, in our cities, in the cities of our European neighbors and throughout the world, in parliaments, in associations and in schools,” Merz said in German.

“Sometimes it is disguised in the language of anti-colonial liberation struggles or criticism of Israel,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, from time to time it is justified through the distortion of history.”

Among those listening was Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, who was 6 years old during the Nazi pogrom of Nov. 9-10, 1938, when synagogues were burned, Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked, and Jews were murdered across Germany and Austria.

Merz quoted the biblical verse “How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel,” from the Book of Numbers, from which the synagogue takes its name.

“I cannot imagine how this psalm must have sounded in the ears of those who, in Munich and other German cities, were awakened on the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938, by armed squads breaking into their businesses, their homes and the centers of Jewish communal life with stones, axes and gasoline canisters,” he said.

“You, dear Mrs. Knobloch, experienced it,” Merz told the 94-year-old, who also serves as vice president of the European Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress. “You experienced what no human being—and what no 6-year-old child, no child at all—should ever have to experience.”

He then invoked the millions of Jews who were arrested and deported to concentration camps in the days and years that followed.

“How must this psalm have sounded in the ears of the millions of men, women and children who, in the days and years that followed, were arrested and…

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