A ditch in a Jewish cemetery, a hotel basement, a house that was anything but a home. All may seem innocuous today to passers-by in Haltern Am See, Germany, but the life of a Jewish family was forever changed in these spots 70 years ago. Holocaust survivor Alexander Lebenstein visited the locations last summer with family and friends, reliving the past in which his life was uprooted during Kristallnacht—the anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria that began Nov. 9, 1938. The “Night of Broken Glass” was a coordinated attack on Jewish people, their property and synagogues.

The Virginia Holocaust Museum last night honored former Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., with its Rule of Law award for his 30 years of service. Warner, 82, did not seek re-election in 2008 and left office Jan. 3 after five terms in the Senate. “The rule of law . . . is the thing that perhaps distinguishes America from the other nations of the world,“ Warner said. “Great Britain, France and most of the major nations of the world carefully adhere to their laws, but the United States is looked upon the world over as the beacon.“

In 1999, Collegiate High School senior Rachel Rosenbaum hit upon the idea of collecting pennies—6 million of them—to try to grasp the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust during World War II. Her grandfather Al Rosenbaum was, with Jay Ipson and Mark Fetter, one of the founders of the Virginia Holocaust Museum, now located in Shockoe Bottom in Richmond. His sculpture of a menorah with six eternal candles stands in the museum and is the center of the museum’s logo. Each candle represents 1 million Jewish dead.

Al Rosenbaum, one of the founders of the Virginia Holocaust Museum, died Saturday at age 82. His funeral is at 11 a.m. Monday at the Bliley Funeral Homes Central Chapel, 3801 Augusta Avenue. Mr. Rosenbaum, who lived in Henrico, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1926. He and wife Sylvia moved to Richmond in 1960, and he retired from the cleaning business in 1989.

Awer Bul was 7 when he fled his war-torn homeland after civil war arrived at his village. His was a nomadic childhood spent dodging bullets, seeing people killed every day.

Seventy years ago—on Nov. 9, 1938—my father was in Berlin, Germany. He was there because he could no longer practice law. He was an international jurist and—because he was a Jew—he could no longer practice his profession, so he became a businessman. The laws that were passed in Nuremberg against German Jews were also accepted by the Lithuanian government against Lithuanian Jews. Therefore, my father became the Lithuanian agent for FN motorcycles (Fabric National) in Belgium. They manufactured weapons and motorcycles. He was on his way there with a stopover in Berlin to visit family.