Deja View : An updated look at some of the people, places and programs featured in Valley View during the year : HOLOCAUST : Jews, Germans Meet Formally to Discuss Holocaust

Last month in Berlin, Jewish scholars and clergymen from around the world formally met for the first time with German citizens to discuss the Holocaust, and conference participants are labeling it a huge success.

“We met so many good people there,” said Phil Blazer, publisher of the Studio City-based International Jewish News, who organized the conference and headed the 25-member San Fernando Valley delegation. “I found myself almost in tears, seeing the interaction survivors had with the Germans.”

About 200 attended the three-day gathering, including scholars, Holocaust survivors, and Germans from the business and professional communities. Participants included Beate Klarsfeld, the Nazi hunter who apprehended war criminal Klaus Barbie; professor Franklin Littell, president of the Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, and Dennis Prager, publisher of Ultimate Issues, a Los Angeles-based quarterly about religious values in modern society.

Discussion centered on the historic roots of anti-Semitism and how society might discover ways to halt the cycle of hatred against Jews.

“It was extremely useful,” Prager said. “It will help Jews like me get audiences among Germans so they can hear what Jews have to say.”

Blazer said conference members agreed to meet each November in Berlin to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nov. 9, 1938, night of rioting that transformed Hitler’s war against Jews from legal decrees into destruction and death.

Zev Garber, professor of Jewish history at Valley College in Van Nuys, said the timing of the annual gatherings is essential.

“We can not lose sight of this day,” said Garber, who attended the conference. “People have a tendency of universalizing Kristallnacht as an attack against minorities. But I think this conference will have the message of remembering the Jewish tragedy.”