Sounds of Music Fill the Valley

 A Rich Culture Remembered

The “Clarinet and Klezmer in the Galilee” international master class under the direction of Maestro Giora Feidman recently performed before an enthralled audience in the Valley of the Communities at Yad Vashem. The musicians, ranging in age from talented Israeli high school students to seasoned professionals from abroad, brought the joyous sounds of Klezmer to the hills of Jerusalem. Encouraged by the charismatic Feidman, the audience of over 500 – mostly Holocaust survivors – sang and clapped along – their voices and the music echoing off the towering walls of the Valley, where  the names of Jewish communities decimated during the Holocaust are etched in the walls.  The music was a living memorial to the Jewish world destroyed during the Shoah, and the celebration of Jewish life that continues.

On August 4, 2010, Yad Vashem’s Synagogue was filled with Holocaust survivors from Greece and their families who gathered together for an annual remembrance day commemorating the Jews of Kos and Rhodes who were murdered in the Holocaust. They sang traditional songs in Ladino, remembering their lost communities and rich culture, listened to testimony of survivors, heard a lecture about the day the Jews of Rhodes arrived at Auschwitz, and took part in a moving ceremony that including lighting the Yad Vashem candelabra. Foundation for the Preservation of the Jewish Heritage of Rhodes Chairman Mario Suriano remarked, "We have met at this holy place, Yad Vashem, in order to remember the event that shouldn't have occurred - the Holocaust. Our purpose is to remember, not to forget. To forget is to murder them once again.”

A new online exhibition on Munkács, the largest and most important Jewish community in Subcarpathian Rus', Czechoslovakia (now the Ukraine), focuses on this once vibrant Jewish community that was decimated in the Holocaust. While researching the community, a unique document was uncovered – a 1934 class picture signed with a promise by its members to meet at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Passover 1944.  Yad Vashem’s Internet staff  was able to track down many of the members of the 1934 graduating class of the Munkács Hebrew Gymnasium and discover what happened to almost all of the students and staff.  The exhibition also  includes rare prewar footage  - a home movie - of the Klein family from Munkács. Survivor Oskar Klein, came especially to Yad Vashem to identify his family members who appear in the film as part of the exhibition.

The conference proceedings from the 7th International Conference on Holocaust Education, “Shoah Education and Remembrance in Hindsight and in Foresight:  Text and Context,” in which more than 200 people representing 40 nations participated is now available on www.yadvashem.org.  Video-taped panel sessions, presentations and other related conference materials are now available here.

Commemorating Janusz Korczak

On August 5, Yad Vashem marked 68 years since the deportation to Treblinka of Janusz Korczak, Stefania Wilczynska, and the children of their orphanage, from the Warsaw Ghetto.   Holocaust survivor Yitzhak Belfer who resided in Korczak’s orphanage in Warsaw and some 70 youth group members participated in  a moving memorial ceremony in  at Yad Vashem. Dr. Janusz Korczak was  the director of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. Despite offers from Polish friends to hide him on the "Aryan" side of the city, Korczak refused to abandon the children under his care.  In August 1942, Korczak, and his assistant Stefania Wilczynska were deported together with 200 children to Treblinka where they were all murdered.