Synagogue to Host Special Holocaust Remembrance Concert
On Wednesday evening, Temple Shaaray Tefila in Bedford will be hosting a very different type of Holocaust Remembrance program.
Former Chappaqua Orchestra conductor and music director Michael Shapiro, a member of the congregation, has been able to gather four Boston Symphony Orchestra string players to perform a concert of music written by four prominent composers at Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp. The music had been buried and later discovered, coming to light in the 1980s into the ‘90s.
The program will be paying tribute to Viktor Ullmann, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and Hans Krasa, prisoners at Terezin but who continued to write music until they were sent to their deaths in late 1944 or early 1945.
Shapiro brought the idea for the program, which will be on the eve of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) to the attention of the synagogue’s Holocaust Remembrance Committee. The composers’ works and those of many others have become important not only for historical purposes but for what their art represented, he said.
“When you think about it, these people were composing in what were concentration camps with Nazi guards and the SS and all the horribleness that went along with that, malnourishment and so forth,” said Shapiro. “It didn’t stop them from producing a performance with an upright piano of the Verdi Requiem. So in any event, the creation of their art was their resistance.”
Accompanying the concert is a multimedia presentation that also includes other art and writings, which had been created by those sent to Terezin. The program will be narrated by former longtime Boston Symphony Orchestra musician Mark Ludwig.
Shapiro said it was no accident that accomplished musicians, composers and artists were sent to Terezin, along with thousands of children. The camp was meant to dupe the Red Cross and representatives from other humanitarian organizations into thinking that Jews who had been rounded up across Europe just before and during the Holocaust were being treated well, he said.
The artists not only performed for each other but put on concerts for the guards and Nazi leaders as well. Most were eventually shipped to one of the Nazis’ death camps.
“They were all killed in one of the last transports of 1944 to Auschwitz before its liberation the next spring by the Russians,” Shapiro said of the four featured composers. “If they had lived a few more months, they would have been liberated.”
There is likely a strong connection among composers today, especially Jewish composers, to Ullmann, Klein, Haas and Krasa, Shapiro said. Their music was a link to pre-war Europe. Within the past 30 years it has been discovered and appreciated.
“Their music was similar to the middle European style of the period,” said Shapiro. “With their deaths and with the migration of their contemporaries to Hollywood, a very vital link was lost.”
There remain Temple Shaaray Tefila members who have close personal connections to the Holocaust, he added. Current Holocaust Remembrance Committee Chair Lori Laub is a child of a Buchenwald concentration camp survivor while another, Arlette Baker, was taken in by her grandmother who was not Jewish and raised a Catholic in Paris through the end of the war.
Important programs are the hallmark of the synagogue.
“Our group is dedicated to presenting these cultural events every year at Temple Shaaray Tefila,” Shapiro said.
The free concert will be performed in the synagogue’s sanctuary tonight at 7 p.m. The public is invited to attend. Temple Shaaray Tefila is located at 89 Baldwin Rd. in Bedford Corners. For more information, visit www.shaaraytefila.org.
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