After its establishment in August 1941, the leadership of the Kovno ghetto sought to hearten those who had survived the horrific aktionen by promoting Jewish educational and cultural life. In 1942, a group of some of the most talented musicians in Lithuania turned to the ghetto leadership with the request to hold concerts of Jewish and classical music. After deliberation over the appropriateness of conducting such events in the shadow of so much suffering and death, the decision was made to ask the Germans for permission. This was granted – on the grounds that it would "raise the spirit" of the slave laborers, and on the proviso that the first performance would be for the German civilian administration.
The former Slobodka yeshiva was chosen to house the orchestra performances, and in order to protect the orchestra musicians from deportation and forced labor, they were formally inducted as police officers. In 1947, the Fun Letstn Khurbn (The Final Destruction) journal described the effect of the orchestra's performances – over 80 in one year – as follows:
"Tears fell from the eyes of the audience members, as well as from the musicians, as the first chords pierced the silence of the hall. However, these were not tears of sadness; rather, they were tears of joy and anguished pride. A people who in its darkest of hours could raise its eyes to culture could never be destroyed."
Although moved to the extreme by the performances, the attendees respected the commonly agreed decision not to applaud, in deference to the thousands in their community who had been murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.
In March 1944, during the horrific "Children's Aktion," members of the Kovno underground buried the ghetto's archives, which were discovered two decades later. While conducting his doctoral research on the Kovno ghetto, Israeli scholar Rami Neuderfer spent a year-and-a-half perusing the archives. Amongst the 40,000 documents, including hundreds of pages about the Kovno ghetto orchestra, Neuderfer discovered a detailed program of the secret Zionist performance lauded by the ghetto leadership as the "crowning glory" of the ghetto's cultural endeavors, and which one of its initiators had entitled "A Concert Where Everything is Blue (Tchelet)."
The concert program brought together the various educational and cultural groups that operated in the ghetto at the time, and presented content that supported Zionism and solidarity. Among the songs played were "Shir Ha'emek" (Song of the Valley), "Shir Hanamal" (Song of the Port), "Shir Ma'apilei Betar" (The Betar Movement Song), and "Nomi Nomi," a children's lullaby. Popular Eastern European Jewish music was also played, as well as a string of tunes perceived as Yemenite melodies. The concert concluded with the singing, in Yiddish, of "Hatikvah" (The Hope), the anthem of the future State of Israel.
Under the direction of Neuderfer, and in cooperation with Israel's Ministry for Social Equality, the authentic revival of the secret concert took place at Yad Vashem's Jewish Fighters and Partisans Monument. The concert was performed by the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra alongside the Ankor Choir – made up of teenage girls studying at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance – and featured several popular Israeli singers, including Karolina, Yonatan Razel and Ofir Ben Shitrit. In between the songs, the story of the secret concert was retold through testimonies, photographs, artifacts and videos from the Yad Vashem Collections.
At the concert, Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev recalled:
"the enormous strength of human spirit of the people who cleaved to and believed in the Zionist endeavor and wished to express it in every manner possible, under the harshest of circumstances… Today we show our appreciation for that strength of spirit, of the ideas developed by the Zionist movement in the hills of Kovno and elsewhere, which in the wake of WWII and the Shoah proved to be the only way to ensure the continuation of the Jewish people: that is, the State of Israel, which came into existence 70 years ago. We will do our best to guard this most valuable of pledges, charged to us all."
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 87.
