Saturday, October 31, 2026
The Holocaust Memorial Committee of Long Island will hold Long Beach’s annual Kristallnacht commemoration ceremony on the sixth floor of City Hall on Nov. 1 at 1 p.m., continuing a tradition that dates back nearly four decades.
Kristallnacht, known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” was a massive, state-sponsored wave of violent antisemitic attacks across Nazi Germany, annexed Austria, and the Sudetenland on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938. The Holocaust spanned 1933 to 1945, with the systematic mass murder of European Jews carried out from 1941 to 1945.
The afternoon will include a candle-lighting ceremony, Jewish prayers and guest speakers, including this year’s keynote speaker, Alexa Roth — a student at Stony Brook University who has taken a leadership role in Jewish organizations.
At last year’s commemoration, Warren Vegh delivered a speech in memory of his late father, Maurice, a holocaust survivor from a village under the Carpathian Mountains in then-Czechoslovakia.
Maurice, 13, was two weeks removed from his bar-mitzvah — a Jewish coming-of-age ritual. Vegh said his father’s family, and others, were put into cattle cars in the middle of the night, which took them to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“Everybody was pushed in like sardines,” Vegh said of his father’s recollection. “There was no way to sit. [When they got to Auschwitz] and they opened the cattle cars, a lot of people just dropped out dead.”
Those who survived were met by Nazi officers, including physician Josef Mengele, according to Vegh’s account. That was the last time, Vegh said, Maurice, would see his mother, Ruth, and his sister, Esther.
“He was there saying, go to the right, or to the left,” Vegh said. “If you were sent to the left, you went straight to get gassed at the time. His mother and sister went left.”
Maurice would eventually be marched to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Weimar, Germany. The camp was liberated by allied powers in April 1945, but not before Maurice lost his father.
“When the allies came and crashed through the fences, they burst into tears,” Vegh said recalling his father’s memory.
Long Beach held its first commemoration in 1987, with the installation of the Holocaust memorial monument in front of City Hall. When residents attend this year’s ceremony, City Council President Brendan Finn said the afternoon, as always, will be about remembrance and responsibility.
“It was one of history’s darkest times, and it is very important that we commemorate Kristallnacht and honor the victims of the Holocaust,” Finn said. “Our responsibility is to educate future generations, to stand against antisemitism and hatred, and make sure this history is never forgotten, diluted, or repeated.”
