Israeli choir sings at Nazi Dachau death camp

The chamber choir of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (JAMD) was booked to give a joint concert with a German ensemble in a Lutheran chapel at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial, on the outskirts of Munich. The New York-born music director of the choir, Stanley Sperber, 69, said no Israeli choir had ever risked a concentration-camp concert before. Though expected to trouble some Holocaust survivors, the move was a gesture of reconciliation to Germany.

The various Nazi camp memorials in Germany are sombre places, kept neat and landscaped to honour the dead. Jewish visitors lay pebbles on top of the monuments in an ancient, silent mourning custom. Most visitors are left numb when told of the relentless Nazi atrocities at each site. The Lutheran chapel at Dachau was built to give visitors a place to mourn and pray. At Dachau, tens of thousands of Jewish and other prisoners died of starvation, disease or execution. Even after the camp was liberated in 1945, many were too weak to recover.

 

Sperber's concert programme with the Vokal Ensemble of Munich will comprise works in both Hebrew and German. 'It's an impressive sign that relations between Germans and Jews are healing,' Sperber told to press. 'My father's generation is probably not interested any more in a reconciliation. That's hopeless. But this is a new generation and the time to heal has arrived. It's not good to let hatred keep eating away at you,' he said.

 

Music could overcome enmities, Sperber said, adding that he also hoped to form a joint choir of Israelis and Palestinians back home to reconcile those two groups. 'It won't be easy, but you have to try,' he said. The whole 30-member choir agreed to take part in 'this very emotional' concert, including a female singer whose grandfather was detained in Dachau.

'The Holocaust is a very important part of our history and consciousness,' he explained.

 

Singing Israeli folk songs in Dachau 'symbolizes that our people live on,' said Sperber. 'We know that concentration camps are a part of our very, very sad history, but we are living in the present.' The concert programme includes choral works by Orlando di Lasso, Felix Mendelsohn Bartholdy, Johannes Brahms and Josef Rheinberger. JAMD is one of Israel's premier university-level music academies.