First part of the Torah scroll once in the Synagogue of Heidelberg. It was removed on September 11, 1938 and taken to Sweden. “Hedelberg” is a German spelling variant and a potential misspelling of Heidelberg

From the evening of 9 November to the following morning of 10 November 1938, Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”) was a “pogrom”, a coordinated series of violent attacks by Nazis against the Jewish people and their property in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. Pogromnacht (or Reichspogromnacht) is a truer description; the “prettier sounding” Kristallnacht hides the brutality of “the night of (broken) crystal” referring to broken shattered glass from windows to synagogues, homes, and stores owned by Jews. Aside from a few who intervened, most stood aside and watched people and property burn.

In the university town of Heidelberg, the earliest recorded presence of Jews dates back to the 13th-century. Jews gathered in what is now the Old Town and converted the building they were using into a synagogue in the early 18th-century; the community built a new synagogue at the same site in 1878.

The synagogue was torched and burned to the ground on Pogromnacht, and the Jewish community was forced to pay for demolition of the building. Alter Synagogenplatz or Old Synagogue Square is all that remains today. With reconstruction and dedication in 2001, there are: memorial plaques with the names of people arrested, deported, and murdered; the outline of the synagogue’s walls in white marble; the entrance and windows marked in grey granite; twelve sandstone cubes representing pews and the twelve tribes of Israel; and a marble stone platform for the location of the Torah ark.

In the square is a memorial commemorating the Jewish community who once thrived in Heidelberg’s Old Town.