Kaddish: Holocaust Memorial
Samuel Pisar’s anguished libretto tore through the hearts of the audience - it is “a layman’s Kaddish” that struggles with God for causing suffering, while affirming faith.
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) together with the Australian War Memorial presented a powerful Holocaust memorial concert Kaddish on October 31 at Hamer Hall, attended by over thousand including community leaders and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.
It was curated by the Australian War Memorial’s Christopher Latham and had two parts – it opened with the MSO, conducted by Benjamin Northey, alongside the MSO Chorus and Young Voices of Melbourne, who brilliantly performed Leonard Bernstein’s choral Symphony No.3 Kaddish (1963).
The libretto was written by Samuel Pisar, one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz who passed away in 2015 and was narrated by his daughter Leah Pisar, who chairs Project Aladdin which aims to counter extremism.
Samuel Pisar had a distinguished career in the UN and worked for John F. Kennedy, he also studied law at Melbourne University. His stepson US Secretary of State Antony Blinken opened the memorial with a video address, paying tribute to his stepfather.
Pisar’s anguished libretto tore through the hearts of the audience – it is “a layman’s Kaddish” that struggles with God for causing suffering, while affirming faith. Pisar wrote, “Now I must atone for the ritual Kaddish I could never recite, because I had no dates for their demise. No closure…No burials… no tombs for a stone, a flower, a prayer – a prayer for their redemption. Yt’kadal v’itkakadash sh’me raba.”
The second part of the concert recounted the horror of the Holocaust poignantly, weaving together words, images and music. Australian War Memorial Council Chairman Kim Beazley, addressed the audience via video, and stated in the program, “We are here to remember the dead murdered in the Holocaust, 80 years after the uncovering of the first death camps. Through music, words and images we will tell is terrible history, so it is known and its lasting impacts made visible, so that healing may occur.”
He added, “This project is called the Gift… This Gift is to demonstrate to the communities who suffered that your history is known, that your experiences are interwoven into Australia’s fabric, and your contributions have deeply enriched Australia’s culture.”
It premiered works by renowned contemporary composer Elena Kats-Chernin and William Barton, a leading digeridoo player, which honoured the legacy of Yorta Yorta man William Cooper who protested against the Nazi persecution of Jews after Kristallnacht.
Narrated by renowned Australian Jewish pianist Simon Tedeschi, it told of the round ups of Jews, the killing squads that shot people naked into pits, the ghettos that confined and starved, the concentration and death camps that murdered in gas chambers, the resistance to the Nazis, and after the war – renewal in Australia. It was set to the score of ‘almost lost’ masterworks of those killed in the Shoah including Erwin Schulhoff, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, Gideon Klein Pavel Haas, and Avraham Brudno. It also featured works by survivors Władysław Szpilman, Boaz Bischofswerder, Bela Bartok and George Dreyfus. Especially painful were the images of the artwork of the children killed, and lullaby that Isle Weber taught the children of Terezin, which they sang before they were executed in the gas chamber.
“Beddy-bye, beddy-bye, blying,
The world in stillness lying!
No sounds disturbs your peace and rest,
My baby huddle in your nest.
Beddy-byes, beddybyes, blying,
The world in stillness lying!”
The memorial was most powerful in its humanisation of such mass tragedy. In the orchestra’s brilliant performance of compositions of those murdered, in the children’s beautiful artwork, we mourn not only the needless loss of life though humanity’s cruelty but also the devastating loss of potential stolen from the world. As the program concluded, “May the Dead know our love for them. May their memory be a blessing.”
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