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 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.
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