Department of Global Communications, Foreign Minister of Germany Launch Virtual ‘Seven Places’ Exhibit Marking 1938 Pogrom, Antisemitic Terror Campaign
To commemorate the November Pogrom of 1938, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming will join Heiko Maas, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany, to open the online exhibition “Seven Places in Germany”.
The event will take place on Monday, 9 November, beginning at 11 a.m. EST and will be streamed on the website www.7Places.org.
The November Pogrom of 1938 was a Nazi State-sponsored antisemitic terror campaign that took place from 9-10 November across Germany and Nazi-occupied territory. Ninety-one Jewish civilians were killed, over 1,400 synagogues were desecrated and destroyed and Jewish-owned shops were plundered. The pogrom triggered a massive refugee crisis, as Jewish civilians realized that there would be no safety under Nazi rule.
The launch of this multilingual online exhibition marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the Holocaust and the Second World War, and the founding of the United Nations. Focusing on seven synagogues in Germany, the exhibition uses historical photographs, art from the synagogues, documents and testimonies to examine the history and its commemoration today. The exhibition is built around a timeline that illustrates the diversity, differences and similarities of experiences at each place. It offers an in-depth history of the seven synagogues featured, explaining how they came into being, how they changed and how they were destroyed during the 1938 pogrom, as well as how they were later revived and reconstituted.
Under-Secretary-General Fleming and Foreign Minister Maas will deliver opening remarks and the event will be hosted by the artist Tatiana Feldman. In a virtual format, it will bring together all seven places featured in the exhibition: The New Synagogue in Berlin, the Old Synagogue in Essen, the Memorial to the Rural Jews on the River Sieg, a memorial site in Halle an der Saale (represented by the Leopold Zunz Zentrum memorial institution), the former synagogue on the North Sea island of Norderney, the site of the former synagogue in Solingen, and the MiQua. LVR-Jewish Museum in the Archaeological Quarter Cologne.
The exhibition was produced by curator Birte Fritsch and director Jürgen Kaumkötter at the Museum Center for Persecuted Arts, with the assistance of the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, as a multimedia educational resource in remembrance of, and to educate about, the 1938 November Pogrom. International partners include Radio Berlin-Brandenburg RBB, the trimedial ARD project “Auschwitz and I”, ARD and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, MOCAK.
Established in 2015, the Center for Persecuted Arts is the only museum of its kind in the world. It focuses solely on artists whose opportunities for development were blocked, impeded or destroyed by terror and violence.
The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme was established by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 in 2005 to further education about and remembrance of the Holocaust through mobilization of civil society in order to help prevent future acts of genocide.
Media contacts: Museum Center for Persecuted Arts, 7places@verfolgte-kuenste.de; Tracey Petersen, United Nations Education Outreach Section, petersen3@un.org.