Jews Sing Songs of Hope From Time of Despair : Congregants Observe ‘the Day of Holocaust’ at Newport Temple

More than four decades ago, the songs were sung by victims of the camps as they walked toward the gas chambers; by resisters in the urban ghettos; by partisans hiding in the woods. You imagine they had to be sung quietly at times so the singers would not be detected.

Wednesday night, they were sung again by three cantors at Temple Bat Yahm in Newport Beach and a congregation of about 300. The voices were strong, clear. The people had gathered to observe Yom Ha Shoah (The Day of Holocaust) and remember the millions of Jews--many of them relatives--who died in Nazi-controlled countries during World War II.

The congregation included Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren. Many adults wept discreetly during the program, titled “The Musical Soul of the Holocaust.”

In addition to a candlelighting ceremony and readings--one recounted a ghetto leader’s stirring call for armed resistance--the program included 15 songs, five from the Holocaust period. They ranged from the prayerful “Ani Maamin” ( “I believe with perfect faith in the Messiah’s coming. And even if he be delayed, I will await him.” ) to the graphic, metaphorical “Undzer Shtetl Brent” ( “Brothers, our poor town is burning! Raging winds are fanning the wild flames and furiously tearing, destroying and scattering everything ... “ ).

Polish Poet’s Song

Other songs included “Partizaner Lid,” a combination love song and partisan song written in the 1940s by Hirsh Glik, a Jewish partisan who wrote poems in the Polish woods and sent them back into the Vilna ghetto. “Silence, and a starry night, frost crackling, fine as sand. Remember how I taught you to hold a gun in your hand?”

Familiar with the song, the congregation joined in singing another poem by Glik, “Zog Nit Keinmol,” a gentle march that became the hymn of the United Partisan Organization in 1943. “You must not say that you now walk the final way, because the darkened heavens hide the blue of day.... The time we’ve longed for will at last draw near, and our steps as drums will sound that we are here ....”

The program was sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Orange County, by Shoah (Holocaust survivors of Long Beach and Orange County), by Second Generation of the Holocaust Era (children of survivors) and by the Orange County Board of Rabbis. The songs were chosen to represent strength, resistance and hope more than suffering and tragedy, said Cheri Wilner Kessner, chairman of the Holocaust Committee of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, who came up with the idea for an intensive musical ceremony.

Kessner, also co-chair of Second Generation in Orange County, said she is angered that Jews are sometimes portrayed as having a passive reaction to the Holocaust. “Each survivor’s story is a miracle,” Kessner told the audience, which included her mother, a Holocaust survivor. “It is a testament to their physical and emotional strength and resistance that anyone is left to tell the story. That was their greatest fear. (But) we’re here to remind the world: ‘Never again.’ ”

Keeping Memory Alive

It is also crucial that children learn what happened in order to pass the story on, she said. Music, she said, helps them emotionally understand the facts without listening to a depressing recitation of events.

“The big thing for Jews about the Holocaust is not to forget it,” said Temple Bat Yahm’s cantor, Alan Weiner. “There’s a parallel lesson for all humanity. This was such an outlandish thing in history--calculated, scientific genocide--that’s why we feel we owe it to ourselves and the larger community to express the message of the Holocaust.”

So many people were killed without their families knowing when or where, Yom Ha Shoah was set aside in 1951 as a memorial anniversary for all to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, the traditional Prayer for the Dead, and to light a candle at home in their names. Since then, it has been a Jewish holy day, commemorated in civic as well as religious ceremonies worldwide. The annual date of the observance is the 27th of Nisan on the Jewish calendar, which usually falls in early spring. This year also marks the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the European Jews from the concentration camps.

Orange County Supervisor Thomas Riley, wearing a yarmulke (a skullcap signifying respect), attended Wednesday’s observance and read a proclamation signed by all board members. Riley, a retired Marine brigadier general, said he had served in the Pacific and like other soldiers was unaware of the atrocities being committed in Europe. “All of us, Jews and Gentiles alike, need to realize the deeds of the past so history in this case cannot be repeated,” he told the congregation.

Thursday night, the Catholic Diocese of Orange joined the Jewish community in a Yom Hashoa memorial service at the Catholic Diocese Marywood Center in Orange.

Customs Vary

Since Yom Ha Shoah is relatively new, its rituals are not established but vary from community to community. In Israel, there is a nationwide moment of silence during the day and an official national ceremony at Yad Vashem (“Hand of God”), the memorial center for the Holocaust in Jerusalem. In America, some synagogues stage dramas, set up photo exhibits or read from diaries, histories or poems of the period.

But nearly all services include the lighting of six candles, each candle representing one of the estimated 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. In Wednesday’s ceremony, each candle was lit by three generations in the same family: survivors of the Holocaust, their children and their grandchildren.

Rena Wolfson, 32, of Anaheim Hills lit a candle with her son Adam, 5, and her mother, Ester Fiszgop, 55. For Wolfson, it was an emotional moment. “My mother’s brother was my son’s age when he died. It was symbolic to have all three generations and to know my 5-year-old child is beginning to understand what happened and was remembering another child.”

Fiszgop, a Bellflower pediatrician, had mixed feelings. The only survivor of a large Polish family, she was orphaned at 10 and spent most of the war years on her own, in hiding. Once she spent six months in a cave tunneled under a pigsty. “I’ve seen plenty,” said Fiszgop. “I saw two beautiful kids put on a sled and pushed down a mountain and shot.” The program, she said, was like a “shadow, a scratch. It doesn’t resemble what happened. The horror didn’t come through.”

Others, however, said they broke down for what had happened for friends, relatives and strangers who died, or for what might have happened to them. Martha Posalski of Seal Beach spoke about her life during the war, hiding in France and escaping to Spain with an infant daughter who would have been killed if she cried out. She said she cannot watch World War II movies or read books of the period because she is terrified of nightmares of “what might have happened.”

Shouted Names of Ghettos

The cantors struck a powerful note when they sang the traditional Kaddish with a discordant melody. They punctuated the prayer with the shouted names of the ghetto towns and concentration camps.

Another song had set to music the words spoken by a boy at an improvised Bar Mitzvah ceremony at a camp for displaced persons in Germany following liberation:

“I pray that my father and mother should look down from heaven and see that their son is becoming a Bar Mitzvah today. Let them know that my sister and I have remained good Jews all these years and we will remain so forever.”

Others, written since about the Holocaust included a poem by Robert Frost, “Acquainted With the Night,” and “Come, Angel, Come,” a Broadway show tune that wove a harmonious refrain into a spoken account of a Jewish father captured by Nazis and facing execution with his son.

The songs were sung in Hebrew, English or Yiddish, the everyday language of the European Jews, which is spoken far less today. Cantor Weiner was joined by cantors Patti Linsky from Temple Beth Torah in Ventura and Janece Erman from Temple Beth El in San Pedro. They sang solos, duets and trios.

Kessner said the ceremony provided an outlet for mourning that was denied her family. Both her parents were from Poland and lived in hiding, sometimes paying for protection, throughout the war. Once they came to America, said Kessner, they needed to go on with life and not dwell on the past. “And people did not want to hear about it. As a child, I couldn’t listen to it very often. It was too painful.”

Passed for Catholic

“The reward for turning in a Jew was five pounds of sugar and a bottle of whiskey,” recalled Kessner’s mother, Mitzi Wilner, 65, of San Diego. Wilner’s family was captured in Lwow, a town whose camps were so crowded that captured Jews were shot. Blond and blue-eyed, she lived as a Catholic for two years and was the only member of her family to survive.

The songs of the Holocaust, she said, were “your background and your future.” She recalled they were always heard in the ghetto.

The program ended with the congregation singing “Hatikva,” a Zionist hymn that became the national anthem of Israel.

“So long as still within the inmost heart a Jewish spirit sings, So long as the eye looks eastward, gazing towards Zion, our hope is not lost--that hope of two millennia, to be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

“ ‘Hatikva’ is the song of hope,” said Wilner. “We always lived with hope.”