Kristallnacht And The 3379 UN Resolution

By Tal Bahar

On November 9th this year, I was invited to speak as the keynote speaker at the Emek Sholom Kristallnacht commemoration ceremony.

But almost every word I had spoken suddenly felt insignificant the moment Alex Keisch began, and delivered the most moving speech I’ve heard since arriving in Richmond.

Alex survived the Holocaust and is the last living survivor of his family. Through tears, he spoke about strength, about unity, about pride. At the end of his speech, he cried out the words that burst from every person whose Jewish soul trembles within them:

“Shema Yisrael, HaShem Elokeinu, HaShem Echad!”

Tears streamed down my face. I wanted to join him in calling out to God, but the words disappeared from my throat.

Fifty years ago from the next day, and only twenty-eight years after Kristallnacht, the UN adopted Resolution 3379, declaring that Zionism is racism.

On November 10, 1975, Chaim Herzog, then Israel’s ambassador to the UN, took the stage.

Moments before tearing up the resolution in front of the representatives of the nations and the cameras, he declared:

“For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper, and we shall treat it as such.”

Almost three symbolic decades and a single symbolic day, separate Kristallnacht and Resolution 3379, yet the two are undeniably connected.

What an absurdity. When Jews had no state, they were persecuted: paying for their wandering and lack of homeland with their lives.

And when we finally did have a state, our belonging, our connection to our ancestral homeland, suddenly received a new label: Zionism became “racism.”

Thank you, Emek Shalom, and specifically Irina Manelis and Alex Keisch, for all of the important work you do, In order to preserve the most important trait of our nation: memory. It was a huge honor and a truly meaningful opportunity for me.

And now, for those of you who weren’t able to attend the ceremony, I would love to share my speech:

In schools across Israel, every year on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, students receive memorial candles. On each candle, a name.

One year, when I was no longer a student myself, my younger brother Itay came home with a memorial candle he had received at school. Our whole family stood together around the table and lit the candle of Esther Wiser, of blessed memory.
Only three lines were printed on the designed candle: her name, her year of birth, her year of death. As expected, we scanned the QR code. The page loaded… no photo. Just three lines, for forty years of life.

Suddenly, I was thrown back into a memory from my school trip to Poland, the summer between 11th and 12th grade. I remembered a moment that left me hollow, terrified, and in deep pain, a kind of pain that doesn’t even allow tears to fall. At the end of our visit to Auschwitz, we stood before an enormous book, filled with millions of names. The dissonance between how massive it was, and how small each name appeared on the page, hit me hard. I panicked. I tried flipping through it, placing my eyes on as many names as possible, but I struggled with the realization that every time I read ten names, I already couldn’t remember the ten before them.

It shook me.

How many more names without faces are there? How many more souls without names?
Who was Esther? How many times did she laugh in her lifetime? How often was she sad? Who did she fall in love with? Who hurt her? What did she like to do? To eat? Was she afraid? Did she know what was coming?

And suddenly, when I could find almost no information about Esther, together with the memory of the Book of Names in Auschwitz, I realized that even if every student in Israel lit a candle that evening, we still couldn’t commemorate all six million, because there aren’t enough students, and because not all names are documented.

In my mind echoed the words of Dolek Liebeskind, the leader of the Fighting Pioneer underground in Krakow “We are fighting for three lines in history, for which our youth fought and did not go like sheep to the slaughter. For that we are even willing to die.”

I, asked for a face. To look into Esther’s eyes. To read even a little more about the woman she was. After all, forty years of life do not just disappear. But only those three lines were written, three lines in history. And that broke my heart.

All evening, my thoughts chased me. A burning guilt followed me. Restless, I went to bed. But then, strangely, suddenly a warmth wrapped around me. I felt her, Esther. She hugged me, and I hugged her back.

I promised that night, that for the sake of those three lines in history, their memory would not be lost. We must commit: in the present we will act for those three lines in history; so that there will be many more lines in the future.

Hello,
My name is Tal Bahar, and I’m the Jewish Agency Israeli Shlicha at the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond. It is a great honor for me to stand here and speak before you today.

Every time I try to imagine that terrible night known as Kristallnacht, the night of November 9th, 1938, in Germany, a shiver runs through my body. I think of our brothers and sisters on that night. The paralyzing fear they experienced, the humiliation they felt having their beards and peyos shaved, the brutal violence, the burning of what was most sacred: Torah scrolls and synagogues. The blood and the murder, the sound of shattering glass, the immense destruction. And then, the silence after. A silence that was, of course, only an illusion, because the soul was screaming.

The shards of glass covering the ground were a painful sign of what was to come. Did they realize, in those moments, that the place they had considered home was no longer safe? How shocked the Jews of Germany, and Europe, and the entire world, must have been. Many watched these events unfold and chose to leave. Many watched, and chose to believe that things would be alright. After all, how could the human mind even imagine the horror that was about to unfold?

But it did unfold. The devil took human form, and hell reigned over earth for six years.

Growing up in Israel, we are raised on the bleeding and heroic history of our people. We learn the stories of bravery, and we learn the stories of catastrophe. We learn about the light, and also about the darkness. We live with both. With a childlike innocence, or perhaps simply through logic, I believed that the phrase “Never Again” belonged to the entire world. That the Holocaust was meant to be the sign of Cain, stamped by God onto the forehead of humanity. Proof of what burning, rooted, deliberate hatred creates.

But as I grew older and encountered the world, something inside me broke. How is it possible that children barely learn about the Holocaust in schools? How is it possible that some justify or deny the atrocities? And worst of all, how is it possible that there are people who don’t even know what we are talking about? The world has proven, time and again, how short its memory is.

And perhaps, in truth, it is our memory that is long. And this is why so many Jews in the Diaspora today feel the same fear that Jews felt in the previous century, and likely in every century before. The absurdity is that this fear, based on real insecurity, resurfaced just one day after the most horrific massacre our people have endured since the Holocaust, when around 1,400 Israelis were murdered, raped, burned alive, in a single day, and around 250 were taken hostage.

The haters of Jews found a trick: a mask called “anti-Israel.” These are the people who, on October 8th, took to the streets holding signs calling for an intifada, chanting slogans calling to wipe Jews off their “stolen” land, or to “send them back to Europe,” as if they were not murdered there just eighty years earlier. And of course, they claimed, and still claim, that they don’t hate Jews, only Israel. That they don’t call for violence, only “resistance.” That they don’t justify murder, rape, burning, and slaughter of children, women, and the elderly, only a “struggle for freedom.” And the most shocking part is that many no longer even try to hide their hatred anymore. So the vast majority of our people feel unsafe. Feel in danger.

I’ve heard from many of you that you felt the need to remove mezuzot from your doorframes, tuck your Magen David necklace inside your shirt, or wear a hat over your kippah. Every glance on the street becomes suspicious, every comment a potential red flag.
The testimonies I hear about antisemitism are countless. Social media is filled with people spreading venom, lies, and incitement, as are the streets and schools.

We are witnessing stories and scenes that we never imagined we would see again. Things we never thought could happen, not on that same European soil from which our ancestors’ blood still cries out to us, and not here, in the Western world, on this very soil we stand on today, this land of freedom, whose army in the 1940s came to the aid of our people. Yet today, the statements and actions being taken sometimes feel as though they were sent straight from those same years.

Almost a year ago, in February 2025, the second hostage-release deal began. On that day, we all watched the sickening “Hamas’s Show” with a stomach twisted in disgust and anticipation, with joy mixed with sorrow, with relief mixed with fear. We waited for Or, Ohad, and Eli. Suddenly, they stepped out of the vehicles and climbed onto the stage, three human silhouettes. Pale, gaunt, their bones protruding, their faces changed. Barely able to walk on their own.
We all had the same thought. Onto that stage walked, with great difficulty, three human shadows who resembled the very history that had promised us: Never Again.
But it is happening again. And we, with our long memory, were not surprised when the world remained silent, and still remains silent, in the face of the living testimonies returning from captivity.

And what if, perhaps, this “Never Again” was meant also for us?
To remind us that Never Again will we apologize for existing.
Never Again will we compromise our rights.
Never Again will we allow the world to forget or to speak falsely about us.
Never Again will we live with a sword against our throat.
Never Again will we give up our identity.
Never Again will we forget ourselves; our unity, our courage.

From slavery in Egypt, to the destruction of the First Temple and the Second; from the exiles of Israel and Judea, to the expulsion from Spain; from the blood libels to Kristallnacht and the Holocaust; from the constant attempts to destroy the State of Israel since its establishment, to the horrific massacre of October 7th, 2023; to the feelings of Jews in the Diaspora today; the thread that connects it all is clear to anyone who looks.
But we must not fall into a narrative that our history stands on persecution alone.
Not on persecution - but on justice and truth, on love and compassion, on immense courage and bravery, on wisdom and understanding, on morality and magnificent foundational values, on the sanctity of life.
We are proud. Am Yisrael chai v’kayam. An ancient and strong nation, “Safra Ve-Sayfa” one of both book and sword; a people of Derech Eretz grounded in Torah, of debates for the sake of heaven, and of brotherly love.

I am proud to stand before you today and to be one link in the long chain of generations.
I, am a descendant of the Jews expelled from Spain, on the side of my grandfather Avraham, my father’s father, who was born during the British Mandate in the Land of Israel.
I, am a descendant of generations rooted in Jerusalem, and of a family of converts from Russia on the side of my grandmother Estee, my father’s mother, who was born in the land of Israel just a few months before the establishment of the state.
I am a descendant of Jews who were forced to flee from the hands of the oppressor when the Nazi army invaded Moldova during World War II, and who worked on farms in exchange for shelter. To them were born my grandparents Ben-Zion and Leah Reydeboim, who, in order to preserve their Judaism in the Soviet Union, had to practice it in secret, and who chose to immigrate to Zion with my mother as a baby.