Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County Features Music of Composers from the Holocaust

The Deborah & Larry D. Silver Center for Jewish Engagement, a program of the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County, will host a concert, called "Echoes of Hope," featuring the music of composers who survived/endured the Holocaust.

The concert will be held at 6 p.m., April 18, 2023, in Zinman Hall on the Jewish Federation campus, 9901 Donna Klein Blvd., Boca Raton, FL 33428. It will feature acclaimed violinist, David Lisker, a Juilliard graduate and former student of legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman.

Tickets are $18 per person and can be purchased at https://jewishboca.org/events/echoes-of-hope. Tickets are required to gain entry to the campus.

The program will celebrate the lives and music of nine Jewish composers directly affected by the Holocaust, eight of whom perished in the concentration camps. Lisker, along with six world-renowned musicians, will perform a wide array of works by these inspiring individuals.

"Echoes of Hope" a way for patrons to commemorate Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah, the remembrance day of the Holocaust and heroism, which is the Jewish Memorial Day for the Shoah. It is marked on the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nisan, a week before Yom Hazikaron, or Israel's Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism. This year, Yom HaShoah begins the evening of April 17 and ends the evening of April 18.

The "Echoes of Hope" concert will feature violinists Lisker and Regi Papa, violist Katarzyna Bryla, cellist Michael Katz, soprano Leila Bowie, and pianist Renana Gutman; a piano trio by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, selections from string quartets by Erwin Schulhoff; songs by Ilse Weber, Pavel Haas, and Carlo Taube; movements from string trios by Hans Krasa and Gideon Klein; the first movement of Piano Sonata no. 7 by Viktor Ullmann, the only surviving composition by Robert Dauber; as well as beloved works by Joseph Achron and Ernest Bloch.

"If these composers had been allowed to realize their potential, they would have had the capacity to alter the history of music in the 20th century," said Rabbi Josh Broide, director of the Center for Jewish Engagement.

The program, which took nearly a year to develop, included researching the composers, discovering their individual bodies of work, and determining how many compositions survived the war.

Some of the featured composers, such as Mieczyslaw Weinberg, Viktor Ullmann, and Erwin Schulhoff, left behind a tremendous amount of music, including operas, symphonies, chamber music and songs. In more unfortunate cases, only single works remained, such as Robert Dauber's Serenade for violin and piano, and Carlo Taube's Ein Judisches Kind, a song for soprano and piano.

For more information and to purchase tickets, visit https://jewishboca.org/events/echoes-of-hope/

To post a comment, you must register and login.