You don’t need to be a media junkie to know these are challenging times for Israel in the global arena, as if we didn’t have enough ongoing existential threats right here at home. There are reports of rising antisemitism all over the show, and Jews around the world are far more wary these days.
All of which makes the advent of the seventh annual International Tage Jüdischer Musik (Days of Jewish Music) Festival, which took place in Germany at the end of November, a more than welcome occurrence and a boost to our flagging spirits, at least in the offshore domain.
Citing the opener of the official festival bumf [printed material] sets the political scene. “These days, it takes some courage to attend a concert series with Jewish music,” it posits. That may be so, and, truth be told, the shows did not attract hordes of culture consumers – it was a similar state of affairs when I attended last year – but there is clearly some pervading interest in the contribution Jews have made over the centuries to German arts and culture.
Germany is keen to keep that ball rolling. Even though it is not yet quite up to full speed, the German government is demonstrably determined to keep its official and – more to the pragmatic point – financial clout firmly behind the invaluable initiative.
The above sobering observation about the challenges presented by merely turning up to hear some Jewish music at a public venue was made by Dr. Felix Klein, the first holder of the office of Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism.
The position was created in May 2018, as the state website puts it, “in response to the intense debate over growing antisemitism in Germany and the question of how the federal level can best counter this phenomenon.”
Pushing the Days of Jewish Music festival forward
THOMAS HUMMEL is fully on board the enterprise. A trained musician in his own right, Hummel’s numerous professional hats include membership on the board of the European Festivals Association, ensuring that the wheels of the Baltic Sea Philharmonic Orchestra are well oiled, and serving as the perennial artistic director of International Tage Jüdischer Musik.
Hummel is keenly aware of the importance of sustaining the Jewish music festival and is convinced the project will eventually bear more plentiful fruit and spawn wider public interest. For now, it is more about gradually establishing the facts on the ground and nudging toward momentum.
“I think every person who shows up [at the concerts] is a reason to do this festival,” he declares.
The federal government venture also, naturally, targets the younger crowd with a view to engendering in them a nondiscriminatory take on life which, hopefully, will inform their attitude toward “the other” as they grow and take their place as full-fledged adult members of society.
“In Stavenhagen we had 80 school students who, maybe for the first time, learned about Jewish life and saw a real cantor,” Hummel notes. The liturgical vocalist in question was Jerusalem-born Yoed Sorek, who relocated to Europe in 2005, working with various choirs in academic institutions and synagogues in Germany in Switzerland.
For Hummel, personal encounters like the Stavenhagen date are integral to the festival credo and what he, Klein, and Dr. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, are aiming to achieve. The November 26 event also echoed the thematic dark subtext. “Yoed asked the students if they saw police there [outside the erstwhile synagogue],” Hummel recalls. “They said they hadn’t.”
He puts that down more to location than a pervading sense of acceptance. “Of course, that was not needed – to have police protection – because the synagogue is not on the main street. Yoed told them they are lucky to be left in peace in this small synagogue.”
Perhaps there was some requisite timely divine intervention, too. “Yoed mentioned the war [in Gaza] and all those bad things, but he said we also must see a future. At this exact moment, the sun came through the synagogue window. It was very touching,” Hummel laughs. Nothing like a sunny vignette to add some good cheer to the proceedings.
The building, which now serves as a Jewish cultural center, was lovingly restored under the aegis of local engineer Robert Kreibig and reopened for new business around a decade ago. Tellingly, the team of young volunteers who helped with the makeover included students from Syria, Israel, and Iraq.
THERE WAS more evidence of positive unison vibes on the first evening of the four-day itinerary, in Berlin, with the Kamocha – Er ist wie Du (He Is Like You) concert.
The lineup for the show – the title of which was shared with the full festival header – a 20-minute drive from my accommodation at the fabulously appointed Kempinski Adlon Hotel, right next to Brandenberg Gate, was intriguing, to say the least.
For starters, there was young Berlin-based Israeli horn player Bar Zemach, who is making a name for himself around the world in a unique slot as a melodic shofar player. That is, in addition to his more conventional vehicle of sonorous expression, the French horn. His opener was followed by Iranian-Israeli troupe Sistanagila performing a program of numbers that ran the gamut from traditional Jewish liturgical material to Persian music from the Sistan region of Iran – hence the band moniker, which also references the timeworn Jewish staple “Hava Nagila” – with the odd, more intimate work thrown in.
The idea of Iranians and Israelis, from any walk of life, joining forces, particularly in this challenging day and age, may seem fanciful if not downright unbelievable to many a media information consumer. But there they were, right in front of me at the Kammermusiksaal des Nachbarschafthauses cultural facility, mixing it up in perfect musical and personal harmony.
There was so much going on there. There were soulful deliveries of staples “Shalom Aleichem” and “Oseh Shalom Bimromav,” with Iranian singer Luna Cavari producing more than credible emotive renditions with ne’er a trace of an extraneous accent in her Hebrew diction.
The three instrumentalists weren’t exactly found wanting, either. Guitarist Hemad Mansouri reeled off blistering riffs aplenty, dipping into flamenco, Ladino, Persian, bluesy, and jazzy climes; and reedman Omri Abramov wended his undulating way through some of the latter, as well as klezmer-leaning fare; while Israeli compatriot bassist Avi Albers Ben Chamo underpinned the whole shebang with some soulful velvety textures, occasionally striking out on a solo limb.
Longtime Berlin-based Soviet-born Jewish pianist and musicologist Prof. Jascha Nemtsov added some rich historical, cultural, and sonic layers to the outing with several stirring slots, including a reading of a score by composer Max Bruch, and one by Polish-born Jewish composer Juliusz Wolfsohn, who was a member of the Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music, founded in Vienna in 1928.
Nemtsov’s largely Jewish repertoire also featured fitting nods to Alexander Veprik, a celebrated member of the “Jewish school” in Soviet music, and Soviet-born composer and conductor Lazare Saminsky, who was also a founder member of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in his homeland in the late 19th century.
Nemtsov is heavily invested in the field, not only as a performer but also as an academic and learned researcher. He felt it was important to enlighten Germans about some of the backdrop to the offerings of Jewish musicians who, over the centuries, were at the core of German culture.
“You cannot do only contemporary music without thinking of the whole history,” he observes. “I think Judaism is actually tradition. Without the tradition, there is no Judaism,” he chuckles.
The concert certainly made for quality entertainment, but International Tage Jüdischer Musik is not just about offering – hopefully growing – members of the German public a good time. Does Nemtsov, who has appeared in the festival several times, feel it is having some kind of impact and spreading the word in Germany about Jewish culture?
Limited clientele notwithstanding, he goes along with the positive intent. “This is not a big festival. There were maybe 50 or 60 people attending [the concert]. There are bigger festivals [in Germany] with bigger audiences, but all together there were different events [in the program]. And it is amazing that Jewish music is so widespread in Germany.”
That goes for academia, too. “We have two professorships and I don’t know how many festivals with Jewish music and Jewish culture.”
The proof of the proliferation pudding, says Nemtsov, is there, among both consumers and artists, including some from outside the fold. “It works very well. Also, it works without Jews. Many protagonists of Jewish music are not Jewish.”
That goes for audiences, too. “Besides you and the other journalist [Eliana Jordan from the London-based Jewish Chronicle], I don’t think there were any Jews there at the concert,” he tells me.
That is an encouraging sign that, despite not yet packing them in, the festival is setting off ripples and advising Germans that – putting it bluntly – their national culture would have been a lot poorer without the gems created by the likes of Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler, and Kurt Weill, to mention but a few.
ONE WONDERS whether the thinking of the average German goes so far as to consider what their homeland’s cultural scene would have looked like if the Holocaust had not happened.
Nemtsov believes that is the case, although not necessarily out of a sense of remorse or regret, or wish to atone for the atrocities their forebears committed. It is, he says, more a matter of pragmatism.
“This is a point which sometimes disturbs me. It took me quite some time to get used to hearing [German] people talking about the Holocaust, and they say ‘It is such a pity that we killed them, because they made such a great contribution to our culture.’
“It’s not like empathy or compassion for the fate of Jewish people. It is that the Jews were so useful, so it was not reasonable to kill them.” If that is really the case, Messrs. Hummel, Klein, and Schuster still have their work cut out for them.
Then again, if the Sistanagila troupe is anything to go by, Middle Eastern affairs – at least in Germany – seem to be faring pretty well. The band, which normally performs as a quintet, was brought together by Babak Safian, another Berlin-based Iranian, who comes from a musical family although not a musician himself.
Safian had developed a great interest in Judaism and reached out to fellow Berlin resident Yuval Halpern, the group’s vocalist and musical director, who gradually overcame his reservations about hooking up with an Iranian, and so Sistanagila eventually came to be.
Ben Chamo is completely behind the togetherness train of thought. “I have a sense of mission, playing in this band,” he declares. “
I am not naive. I know there are people out there who are not happy about Israelis and Iranians playing music and, of course, about Israel at all. But this is a wonderful project.”
The synergy among celebrated Jewish Austrian singer Roman Grinberg, Latvian-born Yiddish vocalist Sasha Lurje, and conductor-musical director Michael Alexander Willens and the Kölner Akademie Big Band was also a boost for the spirit and a joy for the ears.
The concert, at the Jewish community center in Berlin, was a grand affair. The ensemble was a tight-knit unit and exuded the joy and the krechtzen – gripes – to a consummate degree, with a little jazzy flavoring added, while Grinberg, who has performed in Israel, too, in particular doled out a heaping helping of pathos.
International Tage Jüdischer Musik certainly produced quality music. Whether that continues to make the desired inroads into German awareness of Jewish culture remains to be seen.
For now, the efforts of the German government to combat antisemitism are to be applauded.
