Bourne Street Synagogue Tile Piece
Synagogue Fragment
Zoom This! World War II is a dark time in world history. With Hitler’s rise to power, many Jews knew that they were going to be facing the hardest trial they have ever gone through. The Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, is the first pogrom against the Jews that the Nazis carried out. Up until then, the Nazis only passed laws that prevented Jews from being equal members of society. With the first synagogue to be destroyed, the genocide of the Jews had officially begun. Despite the years of genocide and fighting that erupted all over Europe and East Asia, many people came home after the war and tried to rebuild. One such family is the Wachhaus family. After leaving Germany before the genocide officially occurred, they returned to their community in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and found that their most prized and loved building, the Bourne Street Synagogue, had been one of the first synagogues to be destroyed in the Kristallnacht. Their neighborhood had been turned into a Jewish ghetto, or Judengasse, and the synagogue that had been the center of the community had only a single wall left. Almost every store had been destroyed, and everyone that had been left behind had either been deported and spread across Europe, or executed in concentration camps. To remember their community and the lives lost in the Kristallnacht and the rest of the war, the Wachhaus family took a piece of tile of the synagogue. This piece of tile was used on the main sanctuary of the ceiling and was designed to catch the light from the windows and reflect it around the sanctuary by turning the light into a golden sheen. Every anniversary of the Kristallnacht, the Wachhaus family takes this piece of tile from the padded box they keep it in, and remember the community and lifestyle that was destroyed during the Night of Broken Glass.
Tags: 1900s, Artifacts, Religion, World War II