Notes of Hope

My uncle took my son and me to an extremely moving and inspiring event commemorating both last week's Holocaust Memorial Day and this week's upcoming 70th Israel Independence Day.

The evening at Jerusalem's International Convention Centre (Binyanei Hauma) presented but a fraction of the thousands works written by Jewish composers, songwriters and poets during the Holocaust and lovingly collated by Italian-Jewish Professor Francesco Lotoro, who has made it his life's work to track down ever last piece of music or song written during the Holocaust, be it in a long lost hidden archive, remembered by a survivor or uncovered in a European attic. Prof Lotoro has dedicated himself to their preservation as a musical testimony to the creativity of those Jews who in their darkest hour still found a way to make life more beautiful, strove to live to the fullest even as death closed in all around.

JNF-UK and Israeli JNF introduced Prof Lotoro to a conservatory (a JNF-UK project) in the southern Israeli town of Yeruham. Prof Lotoro came to Yeruham to teach them a selection of works he had rescued, rehearsing with them, absorbing the stories behind the pieces and teaching them about the lives of the composers and songwriters. The programme combined educating the next generation about the Holocaust, testimonies from survivors and those who perished, wonderful music and Zionism, giving these long forgotten pieces born of horrific tragedy new life in the Israeli desert.

Tonight these youngsters performed what Prof Lotoro had taught them, accompanying the adult musicians of the Ashdod Symphony Orchestra on stage conducted by Francesco Lotoro.

During the Holocaust there was controversy among Jews in Nazi occupied Europe about whether art and music had a place in their living hell on earth. Some quoted Psalms 137 vivid description of the ancient Jewish exiles in Babylon hanging up their harps on the willows growing by Babylon's mighty rivers, refusing to play music for their Babylonian oppressors who tauntingly asked them to
sing "Songs of Zion".

Yet for many of the myriad Jewish intellectuals, artists and musicians suffering under the Nazi jackboot music, songs and poems were an act of resistance, of life and creativity in the face of a regime dedicated to death and destruction of the Jewish people. These compositions kept hope alive.

The most intense moment of the evening was when 86 year-old Aviva Bar-On sang in her still strong, clear voice a song that she had learnt in Terezin from Ilse Weber, a Jewish poet who worked as a nurse in the children's division in the Terezin ghetto. Weber and her son Tommy, along with most of the children she cared for were gassed to death in Auschwitz. Bar-On said that to the best of her knowledge she had been the last person in the world who knew these songs until she met with Prof Lotoro and he recorded and transcribed them and taught them to a new generation, ensuring that this works would survive even if their creator had perished.

Aside from one piece of hazzanut the songs performed were decidedly secular, mostly in German, Czech or Yiddish (one translated in to Yiddish from Polish), most in the cabaret style which was so popular during that period in Europe, a musical style which European Jews had helped to create and in which they were very prominent, to the extent that the Nazi regime had banned much of this music and closed many the clubs in which it was performed - many of the composers, singers, musicians and club owners were Jews, and so it was deemed "deviant", and yet the style was so popular that it could not be stamped out. It is a reflection of how much these Jews were part of the fabric of the European countries in which they lived. How much they seemed to have assimilated, how much they saw themselves as Europeans.

As my young son put it "Jews helped to create European culture, they even created a great deal of the European culture of that time and in the languages of European nations. When the Nazis and their collaborators murdered the Jews living amongst them they also murdered their very own (European) culture, the beauty of a culture that they themselves enjoyed. They hurt themselves."