Walter Herzberg and his younger sister, Ursula, in Germany around 1932. After the terror of Kristallnacht, Herzberg, who is now 80, and his sister were then barred from school and his parents from work. The family managed to immigrate to Australia in 1939.

Family photo

It will be among the most unique concerts to come to Providence — a remembrance of the Holocaust, but more so, a celebration of what Hitler failed to destroy: the 1,000-year tradition of European Jewish culture and music. There will be 12 choirs, many of them non-Jewish, singing in Hebrew and even Yiddish. At its center will be actor Leonard Nimoy as narrator, coming from California to this one-night event in part because he grew up nearby in a devout household. His split-fingered Vulcan greeting from Star Trek was based on a gesture of blessing still used by rabbis.

It’s scheduled for a week from tonight at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium, on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the first Nazi pogrom against the Jews. The concert draws its name from that event: “Shining Through Broken Glass.”

To understand its context, it’s best perhaps to start with Kristallnacht itself, and a man who is one reason the concert came to be.

I asked Dr. Walter Herzberg, now 80, if he still remembers the night.

“I don’t think you could ever forget,” he said.

His was one of 20 Jewish families living in the small city of Gütersloh in northwest Germany. His parents owned a household-goods store, and lived above it. On Nov. 9, 1938, at the age of 10, Herzberg was awakened by the sound of breaking glass.

“I looked out,” he said, “and saw people smashing the window panes of my father’s store. I don’t know if you can picture waking up from deep sleep hearing crashing glass continuously. You can’t forget that sound.”

It was part of a planned Nazi attack to drive Jews from Germany and destroy their culture. Over 200 synagogues were burned, 92 people murdered and countless more targeted. Kristallnacht has come to mean “night of broken glass.”

Herzberg remembers shouting at the people below, and his parents pulling him from the window. A brick was thrown inside. Things were chaotic. By now, people were in the house, telling the Herzbergs to get out. They hurried through the downstairs store.

“You can’t believe the sight,” Herzberg recalled. “Broken glass all over, the broken light bulbs still burning. Everything in the store had been smashed. All the debris was on the floor. We had a coal-fired stove. It had been turned over.”

As they were leaving, his father told the invaders the house had recently been sold, which was true, and Herzberg feels it’s the reason it wasn’t burned down, as were other Jewish homes in town, as well as the synagogue.

That night in Germany and Austria, 30,000 Jewish men between 18 and 60 were arrested, including Herzberg’s father. When the Nazi SS came to take him, Herzberg remembers his grandmother saying to them, “I lost two sons in World War I, now you’re going to take the third.”

The family did not know he was put in Buchenwald, soon to become a death camp, but at the time a kind of holding-prison. He was released 11 days later, and the family at first did not recognize him. His head had been shaved, and he had been beaten. He had been starved for most of his time in Buchenwald, and the little food he was given was spoiled and made him sick.

After Kristallnacht, Herzberg and his younger sister Ursula were barred from school and his parents from work. Realizing life for them was over in Germany, the family applied to various countries for permission to immigrate. In March 1939, Australia granted them papers.

In 1962, Herzberg came to America to attend the University of California Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in chemistry. He eventually moved to Fairlawn, N.J. In time, his daughter married Brian Mayer, who for the past 20 years has been the cantor — religious musical director — at Providence’s Temple Emanu-El.

Mayer, inspired in part by his father-in-law’s experience, is one of the two co-creators of next Sunday’s concert. He was inspired as well by his mother-in-law, Miriam Herzberg, another Kristallnacht victim who to this day is unable to talk about it.

In 1998, Mayer was part of a group attempting a similar performance at New York’s Lincoln Center on the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht. It fell apart for lack of funding, and Mayer told a partner in the effort, Cantor Joseph Ness of Temple Beth El in West Hartford, Conn., that someday they should try again.

Two years ago, both cantors were at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass., where they are part-time faculty. They were working with the student choir.

“Do you remember the concert that was supposed to happen on the anniversary of Kristallnacht?” Mayer said.

“Of course,” said Ness.

“Do you remember I promised that we would do it 10 years later?”

Ness remembered.

The two went to work.

They have now assembled a “cast” of well over 300, including 280 singers and 50 instrumentalists. Mayer is one of four cantorial soloists. There will be eight adult choirs, including a Catholic choir from Providence College and the Providence Gay Men’s Chorus, chosen in part, said Mayer, as a reminder that both those groups were also targets of Nazi persecution. The concert includes four youth choirs, from the Moses Brown School, The Wheeler School, Lincoln School, and a youth choir Mayer directs.

There will be 30 selections taken from the 1,000-year legacy of European Jewish music. Those pieces, many still used in American synagogues, have traditionally been performed to organ or a cappella, but Ness, a composer, set them to a 40-piece orchestra for a concert hall performance.

They are sequenced to tell the story of European Jewish culture, with each “window” of the concert revealing telltale moments at various November 9ths over the centuries.

I asked Mayer, now 46, whether there are other reasons, besides his parents-in-law, that have made this subject such a longtime focus for him.

Kristallnacht, he said, has touched his life many times. Growing up, he attended a synagogue in Fairfield County, Conn., and the cantor there, Charles Feld, taught Mayer like an apprentice. Feld had been a victim in Kristallnacht, and many times told of how, at age 14, he was in a Jewish orphanage in Vienna, Austria, which was co-opted by Germany and rife with Nazism. The pogrom of Nov. 9, 1938, reached the whole German realm. A mob, said Mayer, ransacked Feld’s orphanage and over the next weeks, Feld found himself trying to survive on the streets with his 9-year-old brother. As a humanitarian act, England sent trains to rescue 10,000 Jewish children stranded under the Third Reich — they were called kindertransports, and Feld was among the rescued.

It was a shaping image for Mayer, and Feld’s influence stayed with him as he graduated from the University of Connecticut, and then did five years of post-graduate study at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary.

Mayer calls next Sunday’s concert a high-point of his career. He said he’s been especially moved by the way local students of all faiths, some of whom never heard of Kristallnacht, have worked to give life to the very music that was almost snuffed out that night.

“This isn’t your typical Holocaust remembrance,” Mayer said. “It’s to send a message of hope — about the better side of humanity. It’s to highlight that we live in a different world today, where diversity is a prized idea in our culture, where tolerance is a prized idea, where state-sponsored terror is despised — in stark contrast to what was going in Nazi Germany.”

Why Leonard Nimoy, of Mr. Spock fame?

Mayer said Nimoy grew up an observant Jew in Boston and in recent years, has been committed to this kind of historic focus. It’s only a fringe-benefit, Mayer added, that while in the Jewish Seminary, he and his fellow students watched Star Trek reruns five nights a week when they aired at midnight.

Speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles, Nimoy said he was drawn to be part of the performance because he finds personal meaning in works that touch on Judaism and Jewish history.

“One of the highlights of my career was playing Golda Meir’s husband opposite Ingrid Bergman in A Woman Called Golda.” Nimoy also produced a television movie about a death camp survivor who went to court to battle against Holocaust deniers.

A key part of next Sunday’s concert, he said, is a piece called “A Survivor from Warsaw,” by Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg — a spoken and orchestral tribute to Nazi victims. Nimoy said he has been the voice in that piece in other venues and said its impact is powerful.

He feels the entire concert will have that same power.

“It should touch the human spirit,” he said.

The full name of the event is “Shining Through Broken Glass: An Ecumenical Concert of Memory and Hope, 70 Years after Kristallnacht.” It’s sponsored by Temple Emanu-El and the Holocaust Education and Resource Center of Rhode Island.

There are still tickets left, which can be bought by calling Veterans Memorial Auditorium at 421-ARTS, or by logging onto www.vmari.org.

Mayer remembers one more telling moment in his quest — the day he heard, unexpectedly, that Nimoy had agreed to do the narration. He knew Nimoy’s celebrity would take the concert to a higher level of visibility. He rushed to the next room to tell his wife, Suzanne, and found himself thinking how she was the daughter of two Kristallnacht victims — and how, in the end, Hitler had failed.

“Those damned Nazi bastards,” he said to his wife, “I’m going to bring this stuff back to life.”

A week from tonight, Mayer will.

mpatinkin@projo.com