A 1994 Washington Jewish Week article details a D.C.-area singer and cantor’s commitment to keeping the Holocaust memory alive through music, a tradition that remains strong more than three decades later.
Cantor Jerome Barry, a baritone, performed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s first public concert on March 15, 1994. The performance was titled, “Songs of Courage: Music of Jewish Ghettos and Camps in Poland.”
Barry has since performed these “songs of courage” in many countries. The article notes that physical artifacts such as shoes, locks of hair or prison camp uniforms prove that the Holocaust occurred, but items alone can’t illustrate the “depth of loss of Eastern Europe’s once vibrant Jewish culture.”
This Holocaust music remains a mainstay of Jewish communal culture today, especially around International Holocaust Remembrance Day and Yom HaShoah. In January, the Counter Extremism Project presented “Enduring Music: Compositions from the Holocaust” at the Kennedy Center, performing songs composed in ghettos and death camps.
In April, Adas Israel Congregation in D.C. will present “Neshome Lider: Songs of Resilience from the Holocaust” in honor of Yom HaShoah.
Last November, USHMM held an event in Atlanta to hear the musical works that artists risked their lives to create during the Holocaust to showcase life in the Nazi camps and remember the victims.
In Nazi concentration camps, music was both a “weapon of torment and resistance,” according to USHMM. Nazi officers forced Jewish musicians to compete in “humiliating life-or-death performances” and ordered orchestras to play loud enough to cover the screams from gas chambers, USHMM reported.
Some prisoners, including Aleksander Kulisiewicz, took to music to clandestinely record life in the prisons, mock the Nazis and spiritually escape the torment, according to USHMM.
“Each lyric, an act of defiance. Each note, proof that the human spirit could not be silenced,” the event listing read.
