Crystal Night

Crystal Night
Official Medal, Limited Edition

On the night between the 9th and 10th of November 1938 the Nazis took to the streets of Germany and Austria, attacked Jews, broke into synagogues and private houses, murdered, destoyed, and burnt Torah scrolls. The Nazis called the night Crystalnacht – Crystal Night – because of the millions of pieces of glass which remained after the destruction the Nazis themselves wrought. On that one night, 1,300 Jews were killed, thousands injured, arrested and deported to concentration camps, and 1,574 synagogues were burnt or destroyed. German police and firefighters who witnessed the destruction were silent and did not intervene. The world observed from outside and did nothing. The Crystal Night medal honors the memory of the murdered and the injured and symbolizes the loss of German Jewry and the overall destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust.
We acknowlege the role of Ashkenaz House and its Director Professor Meier Schwarz who initiated the issue of this medal and assisted with timely and useful advice.

Obverse: On the face of the medal the “Adas Israel” synagogue in Nuremburg, the city in which the Nazi leaders were later tried, which was burned to the ground on Crystal Night. The flames rising from the synagogue do not harm the Star of David on its roof – symbol of the eternal survival of the Jewish people.

Reverse: On the obverse appears the true numbers of those murdered and of synagogues destroyed, much greater than the numbers which appear in the literature. At the bottom appear the words uttered by the martyrs, “Shema Yisrael” and at the top a Talmudic phrase, “In the future Synagogues of the Diaspora will arise anew in Jerusalem".

Designer: Meir Eshel with assistance from Zvi Steiner and Rabbi Yitzhak Steiner.