KRISTALLNACHT REMEMBRANCE FIFTY YEARS LATER: CARDINAL O’CONNOR 1988
I attended a showing of a documentary on November 9,1988 hosted by Ronald Lauder, who announced that Cardinal O’Connor could not attend because he was ill with high fever. Immediately after the screening, a frail and febrile Cardinal O’Connor surprised everyone and walked to the lectern. Holding a Torah to his breast, in a slightly tremulous voice he said a prayer for the souls of the victims ending with the words “never again.” rsk
A week of solemn events commemorating the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht got under way yesterday with John Cardinal O’Connor announcing that all 410 churches in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York would ring their bells Wednesday night to mark the event, the beginning of the Nazi Holocaust.
Speaking at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to 4,000 people, including a delegation of Jewish leaders, the Cardinal also said he would light a memorial candle in the window of his residence on Madison Avenue that night. He urged New Yorkers of all faiths to do the same.
”The horribly destructive flames of Kristallnacht can, by the grace of God, be converted into flames of worship, reverence and prayer for the human spirit,” he said. Hebrew Bible Displayed
Cardinal O’Connor delivered his homily holding a Hebrew Bible, which he called ”the Torah, the law written by the finger of God.” It was this book that the Nazis wanted to destroy, he said, ”so that with diabolical ingenuity, they could replace it with their own laws and thus replace God.”
As he spoke, the Cardinal, his voice breaking with emotion, clutched the Hebrew Bible to his chest and sometimes waved it in the air.
In his homily and in a column this week in Catholic New York, the Cardinal said he ”had no patience” with those who ask, ”Why do the Jews keep remembering the Holocaust?”
”To say to the Jews, ‘Forget the Holocaust,’ ” he wrote in his column, ”is to say to Christians, ‘Forget the Crucifixion.’ There is a sacramentality about the Holocaust for Jews all around the world. It constitutes a mystery, by definition beyond their understanding – and ours.”
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