Dumped items may be from Kristallnacht

By JTA Staff · October 20, 2008

Objects found at a dump outside Berlin may be from Kristallnacht, an Israeli investigative journalist claims.

Yaron Svoray on his search of the site – an area about the size of four soccer fields – said he found numerous items, including a bottle engraved with a Jewish star and part of an ornamented chair back that the journalist suggests could have come from a synagogue.

According to a report in der Spiegel magazine, local residents of a town about an hour’s drive north of Berlin told Svoray that debris had been dumped there after the pogrom on the night of Nov. 9, 1938.

More than 200 synagogues were destroyed throughout Germany and Austria that night, and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked and looted. About 100 Jews were murdered and more than 20,000 arrested and brought to concentration camps.

Svoray received assistance in authenticating the items from the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum in the Galilee. The area he searched – Svoray said he would reveal the exact location Monday at a news conference – had been used from 1935 to 1940. He told reporters that “it is highly likely that this includes debris from Kristallnacht.”

Svoray, 54, the son of German Holocaust survivors in Israel, said he learned of the dump while seeking information about Hermann Goering’s hunting lodge, Karinhall.

In 2005, he worked with archeologists to dig up valuables buried by doomed Jews at the Majdanek death camp in Poland. The 50 items were handed over to the memorial at the site, and Svoray’s partner in the project, American filmmaker Matt Mazer, made a documentary about the search.