[yshavurah] Fw: Tuesday: 10 Minutes of Torah - Holocaust and Humanity
- From: "Cheryl Levine" <clevineys@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Havurah Listserv" <yshavurah@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:20:21 -0500
Pretty incredible--thought you might be interested.
-c
Cheryl B. Levine, Psy.D.
Clinical & Consulting Psychologist
Positive Perspectives, Inc.
1130 Vester Avenue, Suite C
Springfield, OH 45503
937.390.3800
OSU-Oakhill Rural Family Practice Residency Program
Behavioral Scientist/Preceptor
4879 US Route 68 South
West Liberty, OH 43357
937.465.0080
----- Original Message -----
From: Union for Reform Judaism
To: TMT@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 11:10 AM
Subject: Tuesday: 10 Minutes of Torah - Holocaust and Humanity
March 28, 2006 Week 123, Day 2 28 Adar 5766
The Music Rises from the Ashes
By Racelle R. Weiman
Inside old suitcases, hidden in attics and under floorboards,
buried in canisters and thrown from moving trains"thousands of drawings, poems,
diaries, musical scores and philosophical essays have been discovered, long
after their Jewish authors perished in the Holocaust.
The sheer quantity of surviving works is staggering,
particularly when we consider that it represents only a fraction of the
creativity spawned during this period, each an act of spiritual resistance
against the Nazi oppressors. Though starved, enslaved and humiliated, Jews
still created inspired art and music. Their rationale"an urgency to document
and report their experiences, the desire to leave a legacy while defying their
enemies. At times, their only currency was their talents"a song for a piece of
bread, a portrait for a potato.
Sadly, many artists and musicians did not survive. Moreover,
the Communist regimes of post--World War II Europe denied scholars access to
archives and materials, effectively silencing the victims' voices a second
time. For almost forty years, until the Communist governments were overthrown,
the world had no idea of the breadth of creative energy that was the true last
gasp of European Jewry.
The short opera Emperor of Atlantis by Viktor Ullmann is a
brilliant gem that exemplifies these parting gifts from the Jews. Discovered
thirty-two years after it was written, the opera finally was performed in
Amsterdam in 1975 to a quite different audience from the first"Ullmann's fellow
inmates of the Terezin ghetto.
Terezin was originally intended to house the Jews of Bohemia
and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). As in many of the larger ghettos, the
Nazis appointed a Judenrat, or Jewish Council, to run the internal
administration, fostering an illusion of authority. Its cruelest assignment was
to compile the continual lists of persons being deported to Auschwitz. Its
greatest achievement was the superior quality of children's education, despite
the Nazi prohibition on teaching, and a thriving cultural life for adults.
Inside Terezin were hundreds of artists, musicians, entertainers and actors.
The ghetto community participated in recitals, lectures, readings, theater and
jazz concerts, using the books, art supplies and musical instruments they
brought into the ghetto as "necessities."
For the Nazis, "music was the most German of the arts," but
to the ghetto composers, music was the most universal language. Yiddish
lullabies, American jazz, Chinese poetry, and cantorial chants were all eagerly
played, helping to drown out hunger, fear and the deprivation of human dignity.
In a perverse reversal, there was more freedom to play music within Terezin,
than outside the barbed wire, where censorship severely restricted what might
be performed. Ullmann wrote: "Theresienstadt [German name of Terezin] helped,
not hindered me in my musical work; we did not sit down by the waters of
Babylon and weep, all our desire for culture was matched by our desire for
life...those who stride in life and art to wrestle form from matter will agree."
During his two years in Terezin, Ullmann composed
twenty-three known works while organizing productions. Emperor of Atlantis was
a one-act opera composed in 1943, but apparently never performed at the request
of the Judenrat. The allegory was too transparent a depiction of the brutality
of genocide. In the opera, an Angel of Death opposes a cruel king-general, the
persecutor of God's people--a satirical parody of Hitler and his henchmen
Goebbels and Goring. The Emperor "Uberall" was a satirical pun on the title of
Germany's national anthem Deutschland uber alles (Germany above all).
Ultimately both Viktor Ullmann, aged 46, and Petr Kien, the librettist, aged
25, perished in Auschwitz.
The tenacity and creativity of these musicians is perhaps
best described by 13-year-old Walter Roth in Vedem, the secret magazine of the
boys of Terezin: "They [The Nazis] have one aim"to destroy us, not only
physically but mentally and morally as well. Will they succeed? Never! Robbed
of the sources of our culture, we shall create new ones!"
Racelle R. Weiman, Ph.D., is the founding director of The
Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education, HUC-JIR, Cincinnati, Ohio.
The Center is dedicated to education, teacher and clergy
training, advocacy, research, and program development. Our core mission is to
guide current and future generations in post-Holocaust challenges facing
individuals and our contemporary society. The Center is uniquely positioned to
teach Holocaust Studies from academic, social, and communal perspectives.
For more information, visit the Center for Holocaust and
Humanity web site or write us by clicking here.
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