> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Hundreds attend Kristallnacht anniversary event - URL: https://www.smdp.com/hundreds-attend-kristallnacht-anniversary-event/ - Published: 2005-11-17T16:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T08:11:56.000Z - Author: Guest Author - Tags: Events, Santa Monica, #archive-import *Design and conquer at SMC* *By Daily Press staff* More than 400 people attended the 67th anniversary event remembering the Kristallnacht, the “Nights of Broken Glass,” which is widely viewed as the beginning of the Holocaust. The event, held Nov. 12, featured rare Torah scrolls rescued from formerly Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. The Czech Ambassador to the United Nations, His Excellency Hynek Kmonicek, welcomed those who gathered to celebrate the determination of the Jewish people. More than two dozen temples participated in a moving procession of rescued Torah scrolls, which was followed by a rare public screening of “The Power of Good,” an Emmy-award winning HBO documentary about Sir Nicholas Winton, whose Kindertransport saved nearly 700 Jewish children by taking them from Czechoslovakia to England. Congregation Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC) served as the organizer for the event, having located through the Shoah Visual History Foundation a Holocaust survivor, Mrs. Olga Grilli, from the same hometown as the scroll that has been in BCC’s care since 1973\. Mrs. Grilli, who was rescued from her home in Chotebor, Czechoslovakia at age 11 on a Kindertransport, now lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, and attended the event with her family. Santa Monica College’s library expansion and modernization project and its science complex have both won statewide awards from the Community College Facility Coalition. Both projects were designed by CO Architects of Los Angeles, formerly Anshen + Allen. The library project won the Award of Honor in the Modernization Project category and the Science Complex won the Award of Honor in the Growth Project category. The coalition is made up of representatives of California community colleges, architects, engineers and contractors. The 2005 awards were presented for the best in design for California community college projects. The $23.6-million library — which was completed in August 2003 — nearly doubled the size of the facility to 96,500-square feet and provided widespread Internet access. In addition, the project included seismic retrofitting and a redesign of the exterior, with landscaping, benches, lighting and more. With three stories divided into five levels, the library features skylights and atriums. The centerpiece is an elliptical wood-paneled “building-within-a-building,” flanked at the north end by a three-story glass elevator tower. The $30 million science complex — which opened in August 1999 — is a 98,000-square-foot facility made up of two buildings separated by a courtyard but connected at the second floor. The gray-green-white building has many environmentally-sensitive features, as well as modern labs and classrooms, officials said. The complex includes two 100-seat lecture halls, including built-ins such as infrared assisted-listening devices and computerized control modules for the professor to display DVDs, CDs, and other media. There are also labs ranging from plant propagation to instrument labs and a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer, one of only two at a community college. *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 17, 2005.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/111705.pdf?ref=smdp.com)