Stand up against hate this month with the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle | Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle

Stand up against hate this month with the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle

On the cover of this month’s special section for our print edition, “Stand Up Against Hate,” is a model of a not-yet-realized sculpture. It will be called Shofar Kristallnacht.

This image is a five-foot high model of a planned sculpture.

This would be Milwaukee-based artist Ricard Edelman’s third major shofar sculpture.

His shofar sculptures are functional, amplifying the sounds of any shofar blown into them. One is at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun in River Hills; a second is within the courtyard of the Jewish Community Center of Krakow, Poland, which is sixty miles from the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Shofar Kristallnacht is rife with sharp angles and broken shards of glass, a nod toward the dark history of Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass.”

Kristallnacht in 1938 was a steppingstone to greater evil for the Nazi regime. During the Kristallnacht pogrom, 91 Jews were murdered, more than 1,400 synagogues across Germany and Austria were torched, and Jewish-owned shops and businesses were plundered and destroyed, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel.

“It marked the beginning of the systematic eradication of a people who could trace their ancestry in Germany to Roman times and served as a prelude to the Holocaust that was to follow,” Edelman said.

An installation location for the full-scale Shofar Kristallnacht has not yet been set.