Touro Law to Commemorate Kristallnacht

Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center will host a commemorative program remembering Kristallnacht on Wednesday, November 14 at 12:30 pm. The program is being presented by Touro Law’s Jewish Programs Committee and co-sponsored by the Colloquium Committee. The special guest speaker is Ira Fuchs, author of the Off-Broadway play Vilna.

Ira Fuchs, is a lifelong resident of New York City. He graduated with a BA in English from Queens College of CUNY in 1974. While in college he started writing plays that were staged at the original Playwrights Horizons, founded by Bob Moss in a YWCA on Eighth Avenue.

After graduating he spent 45 years as an entrepreneur working with computer technology from mainframes to microcomputers. He has consulted for and with companies such for AT&T and Microsoft. He is the author and publisher of two books on Microsoft’s SharePoint platform.

In 2016 he returned to writing plays and enrolled in a six week play writing workshop at Hollins University where Bob Moss is a faculty member. One assignment was to write a full length play, in three days, based on a news article published that day. In the New York Times was a story about the discovery of an escape tunnel in the Ponar death pits outside of Vilnius. 

Vilna tells the story of Motke Zeidel and Yudi Farber, from the ages of 11 through 28, as they grow up in Vilna during its degradation in the Interwar years and its complete destruction by the Nazis during World War 2. Their encounters with historical people and situations chronicles the heroic perseverance of the Jewish community under extraordinary circumstances.

Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom against Jews throughout Germany and parts of Austria on November 9 and 10, 1938. Jewish homes were ransacked in numerous German cities along with 8,000 Jewish shops, towns and villages, as civilians and storm troopers destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in smashed glass. Jews were beaten to death; 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps; and 1,668 synagogues ransacked with 267 set on fire. To many, this planned “spontaneous” event marked the beginning of what would later be called the Holocaust, and thus it is remembered each year for what it meant in Jewish history, and in the history of all civilized people.

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Patti Desrochers

Director of Communications

pattid@tourolaw.edu

(631) 761-7062