Jewish life in Russia circa 1920-1930

Betty Klein performs excerpts 3-13--13

Israeli singer Betty Klein performing Jewish folksongs in Ladino, Yiddish, Hebrew, and other Jewish languages at a house concert in Newton, MA, on March 13, 2013.

 Betty Klein.
American-born, Israeli singer, Betty Klein studied with Martha Schlamme at Mannes College, graduated with a BS from Boston University, MS from Columbia University and continued studies at Hunter College and Montclair State College. She performed throughout the New York area until moving to Israel. She participated in the Akko Music Festival, Folk Festival at Horshat Tal and the Llangollen Eisteddfod, Wales in 1990 where she won the 2nd prize in the solo folk singing competition. Ms. Klein has appeared on the BBC, Belgian TV and radio programs, on Israeli TV and radio. Her Ladino, Yiddish and Hebrew concerts have been broadcasted as well as recorded in albums. She has performed extensively in Europe in both Jewish and general venues, including festivals, universities, and the Vatican. She also performs as an accompanist to Shuly Nathan and with the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra. In 2003 she received the prize for music composition with the FestiLadino (International Ladino Song Festival).

ריקוד האש - הלב והמעיין The Fire Song

Classic Jewish Song Played at Weddings and Celebrations

Ellis Island: A brief history of the place where so many Jewish immigrants entered the U.S.

Ellis Island

A brief history of the place where so many Jewish immigrants entered the U.S.

By Elin S. Brockman

But the history of this unimposing bit of land began way before that. Native Americans named it Gull Island after the seabirds that flocked there. The governors of Nieuw Amsterdam bought it in 1630, renamed it Little Oyster Island and proceeded to harvest shellfish. When pirates were executed there it became Gibbet Island.
In 1808, when it was still owned by the Ellises, the defense-conscious federal government bought it for $10,000 and it became a fort. But the Ellis name remained.
After the War of 1812, the island was used for munitions storage until 1890, when the House Committee on Immigration decided that it offered the perfect alternative for the problem-fraught Castle Garden immigration station where prospective new citizens slept on the floor, went hungry, and were routinely cheated by money-changers and other con artists.

Immigration Center Opens

Two years, $500,000, and a lot of landfill later, a splendid Georgia pine arrivals building topped by a quartet of turrets opened its doors. The first immigrant to step inside was 15-year-old Annie Moore from County Cork, Ireland. She was followed by about 700 more newcomers that day alone--450,000 the first year. Then the numbers decreased until 1900 because of tightening immigration laws, a cholera scare, and the economic depression that began in 1893.
In December 1900, a palatial new arrivals building--of fireproof red brick and sculpted limestone, adorned with elegant ironwork and festive towers--was inaugurated. To the steerage passengers (first- and second-class passengers proceeded immediately to the mainland) emerging from weeks trapped in mobbed, dank, filthy, noisy, stinking, disease-ridden quarters, it was truly a vision of hope and promise.

New immigrants waiting to be discharged from Temporary Detention Room,
Discharging Division, Ellis Island, New York City.
Photo: American Jewish Historical Society.

Unfortunately, the ethics of some of the people employed here were not as fine as their surroundings. Currency exchange rates and prices of railroad tickets and food were inflated; bribes were demanded; rudeness and cruelty were rampant. But in 1902, a new commissioner of immigration instituted drastic reforms, heralded by signs everywhere demanding "kindness and consideration."
Still, the average immigrant, exhausted and unable to speak or understand English, quaked at the prospect of getting the door to the New World to open, the "hundred forms and ceremonies, grindings and grumblings of the key," as Henry James decorously put it.
Even the kindest and most considerate person in uniform could appear terrifying. "We were scared of uniforms," a Russian Jewish woman recalled. "It took us back to the Russian uniforms that we were running away from." And there were so many questions--about "character, anarchism, polygamy, insanity, crime, money, relatives, work," as Washington Irving wrote. What seemed like the right answer could be the wrong one. For instance, saying "yes" to "Do you have a job waiting?" could get you detained or deported since contracting for foreign labor was illegal. On top of everything else, unsophisticated refugees were easy marks for swindlers and even white slavers lurking at the docks.

Helping Jewish Immigrants

East European Jews faced a special problem. After a journey that may have outlasted their kosher food supplies, they discovered that Ellis Island had none to offer them. Kosher food wasn't provided until 1911. But the founding of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in 1902 by a group of Russian Jews, recent arrivals themselves, improved conditions considerably.
At Ellis Island and at other ports of entry, HIAS representatives served as mediators and interpreters for the immigrants, found them housing, and fed them until relatives or friends showed up, searched for relatives and friends who didn't show up, and put in all-nighters scouring the late editions of newspapers for jobs.
During Ellis Island's peak years, 1904 to 1909--1907 was the biggest year of all--the HIAS mediator was Alexander Harkavy, better known as the compiler of a famous Yiddish-English dictionary.
World War I brought the influx of newcomers almost to a halt. But the decline in the island's population turned out to be a blessing. When saboteurs blew up munitions-loaded cargo at Black Tom Wharf on the New Jersey shore, none of the 500 immigrants and 125 employees was seriously hurt, although the blasts were heard all the way to Philadelphia.

End of an Era

Immigration picked up after the war, but restrictive laws of 1917, 1921, 1924, and 1929 slowed it to a trickle. During World War II, the island doubled as a detention center for enemy aliens and spies. At the end of 1954, when only 21,000 people came through, the immigration center was closed. The island became a Coast Guard station. In 1965, it was taken over by the National Park Service and made part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument.
In 1982, Lee Iacocca was asked by President Ronald Reagan to head a fund-raising campaign to restore Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The Main Building, brilliantly transformed into the Ellis Island Immigration Museum at the high cost of $170 million (the largest restoration of its kind in American history) welcomed its first visitors on September 10, 1990. Preservation of the other buildings on the island continues.

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Collection of Eugenia Hochberg Lanceter

A group of Jewish women at the entrance to the Brody ghetto in Eastern Galicia, 1942. The sign is written in German, Ukrainian and Polish.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

P

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

Multimedia

Map

Ghettos for Jews in Eastern Europe

Map

SS Concentration Camps

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.

The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions.

The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)

The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was.

The brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites.

When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.

But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.

First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.

Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. “Nobody even knows about these places,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Everything should be documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters The research could have legal implications as well by helping a small number of survivors document their continuing claims over unpaid insurance policies, looted property, seized land and other financial matters.

Multimedia

Map

Ghettos for Jews in Eastern Europe

Map

SS Concentration Camps

“HOW many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a camp that we didn’t even know about?” asked Sam Dubbin, a Florida lawyer who represents a group of survivors who are seeking to bring claims against European insurance companies.

Dr. Megargee, the lead researcher, said the project was changing the understanding among Holocaust scholars of how the camps and ghettos evolved.

As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the researchers have found.

The biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000 people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the smallest camps, the München-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of prisoners were sent there from the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard. They were reportedly whipped and ordered to do manual labor at the home of a fervent Nazi patron known as “Sister Pia,” cleaning her house, tending her garden and even building children’s toys for her.

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

so that they know, and they’ll remember.” 

Honoring 'Our Will To Live': The Lost Music Of The Holocaust

Enlarge image

Italian musicologist Francesco Lotoro is on a decades-long mission to find and resurrect music composed by prisoners at camps before and during World War II. Here, he plays music in his home in Barletta, southern Italy.

Sylvia Poggioli /NPR

For the past two decades, in a small town in southern Italy, a pianist and music teacher has been hunting for and resurrecting the music of the dead.
Francesco Lotoro has found thousands of songs, symphonies and operas written in concentration, labor and POW camps in Germany and elsewhere before and during World War II.
By rescuing compositions written in imprisonment, Lotoro wants to fill the hole left in Europe's musical history and show how even the horrors of the Holocaust could not suppress artistic inspiration.
Lotoro's solitary quest began in 1991, with his first visit to a concentration camp. Since then, he has traveled from his native Italy to more than a dozen countries, searching through old bookshops and archives, and interviewing Holocaust survivors.

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Lotoro displays a copy of music by Rudolf Karel, a Czech composer (in 1945 sketch at left) imprisoned by Nazis for helping the resistance in Prague, in a music shop in Rome, Feb. 22, 2007. Denied access to regular paper, Karel wrote his compositions down on toilet paper. He died of dysentery at the Terezin camp.

Plinio Lepri/AP

He has collected 4,000 pieces — original scores and copies of compositions — some scribbled on scraps of paper and even newsprint. His collection includes works by many non-Jews, Roma and even American soldiers held captive by the Japanese.
'They Wanted To Leave A Testament'
The self-effacing 48-year-old music teacher lives in a modest ground-floor apartment on the outskirts of the small Adriatic town of Barletta. The rooms are filled with bookshelves; musical scores are piled high.
Lotoro believes that whenever a human being is deported and imprisoned, music is born.

Web Resources

Musica Concentrationaria (Music From The Concentration Camps)

Music And The Holocaust

"I think is an almost automatic response to a situation of detention," says Lotoro. "They wanted to leave a testament; they leave to us music."
On his piano, Lotoro plays an excerpt from Nonet, a composition for nine instruments the Czech composer Rudolf Karel wrote in Prague's Pankrac prison.
"[The music] is like a telegraph — 'di-di-ti-ti di-di-ti-ti' — and at a certain moment I imagine this is a Morse code," Lotoro says.
As an anti-Nazi political prisoner, Karel was not allowed access to notepaper. But he suffered from dysentery and was able to use toilet paper to write down his compositions. In 1945, he died at the Terezin camp in Czechoslovakia.
Decades later, Lotoro tracked down pieces of the original score and has reconstructed it for the first time since Karel conceived it.
Some compositions were smuggled out of the camps and preserved by survivors. Others were simply found after the camps were liberated.

Austrian musician Viktor Ullman composed more than 20 operas while imprisoned by the Nazis. In an essay, he wrote: "By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon and our endeavor with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live." He died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1944.

Courtesy of Francesco Lotoro

Lotoro's mission to find the lost music of the Holocaust was one reason he converted to Judaism in 2004; he later learned his great-grandfather was Jewish.
Lotoro has arranged and recorded 400 of the works he discovered. A selection was released last year in a box set of 24 CDs called Encyclopedia of Music Composed in Concentration Camps.
The compositions Lotoro has resurrected were written in conditions of intense suffering.
As he plays an excerpt of a piece by Viktor Ullmann, Lotoro notes the composer's anguish at not having enough time to complete his work, as well as the sense of urgency in the music.
Ullman, who studied with fellow Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, has long been recognized as a prominent composer. Confinement in the Terezin camp made him prolific: In captivity, he composed more than 20 operas.
Lotoro quotes from an essay Ullmann wrote before he was moved to Auschwitz, where he died in the gas chambers in 1944: "By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon and our endeavor with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live."
Artistry Amid Death, Profound Brutality
The Third Reich banned the performance of all Jewish music, from Mendelssohn to cabaret.
But at the camps — with the notable exception of the extermination camps — musicians were allowed a degree of artistic freedom. The Terezin camp was unique. It was an all-in-one ghetto, concentration and transit camp that the Nazis used as a cultural showcase to deceive the Red Cross and for propaganda purposes.

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Frida Misul, a singer from Livorno, Italy, was deported to Fossoli and eventually was at Auschwitz. She survived World War II and died in 1992.

Courtesy of Francesco Lotoro

Terezin became a crossroads of contemporary music, Lotoro says, before its inmates were transferred to the gas chambers. The same day the Nazis killed Ullmann, they gassed a dozen other prominent musicians.
"In a few hours in Auschwitz, an entire generation of musicians, composers, famous piano virtuosos, the fifth column of the Jewish musical elite of Central and Eastern Europe disappeared," Lotoro says.
The compositions rescued by Lotoro cover the entire musical range: classical, folk, swing and some disconcertingly lively tunes.
For instance, a 19-year-old Lithuanian Jew in a camp in Riga, Ljowa Berniker, wrote a syncopated cabaret song, "Reischsbahlied" (Railway Song). Its carefree tone belies lyrics describing the miserable treatment of Jews in the camp.
Berniker died of exhaustion at the Stutthof camp in Poland in April 1945.

"Reichsbahnlied" by Ljowa Berniker

• Playlist

Bret Werb, curator of music at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, says it's not surprising prisoners could write upbeat tunes.
"For them, time had pretty much stopped at the time of their incarceration, and music became a great escape hatch for them," he says. "There are really hundreds, if not thousands of topical songs, original songs, in the style of light music, cabaret music, and so this is what these young people had in their heads."
By no means was all of the music composed in captivity the result of free expression. The Nazis often corralled musician inmates into orchestras at camps like Auschwitz and ordered them to perform while other prisoners were marched out for forced labor.
Or they forced inmates to write compositions.
At the Sobibor camp in Poland, when a cobbler named Shaul Flajszhakier of Lublin refused to beat other prisoners, he was beaten and ordered by the Nazi commandant to compose a song praising the camp's living conditions.

"Fahijad" by Shaul Flajszhakier

• Playlist

The song, "Fahijad," included these lyrics: "Our life is happy there. ... We receive food. ... How happy it is in the green forest, where I stay." According to scholars of Yiddish, the word fahijad in this song could be a disguised expletive to hide its real meaning from the German guards.
Documenting A Lost Chapter In Musical History
In many cases, compositions were never written down, but the melodies and lyrics were passed on from prisoner to prisoner. For example, in Israel, Lotoro tracked down the words of a tune sung by female prisoners at Auschwitz. Esther Refael, a Jew from the Greek island of Corfu, remembered by heart the lyrics written by her fellow Auschwitz inmate Frida Misul.

"Lagerue" by Frida Misul

• Playlist

An Italian Jew from Livorno, Misul penned scathing new lyrics to the tune of what was then a popular polka in her song "Lagerue" — the Italianized form of Lagerruhe, the 8 p.m. curfew at Auschwitz announced with a whistle over the loudspeaker.
The female prisoners in block 31 defied the Nazi ban against "Lagerue" and sang that one day they would take their vengeance on the brutal guards at Auschwitz.
After two decades hunting for the lost music of the Holocaust, Lotoro is now deeply in debt. But he's determined to carry on what he sees as his life's mission — to right a historical wrong and help rewrite the history of 20th-century European music.
He also wants to demonstrate that the creative mind cannot be imprisoned even in conditions of brutality.
"The artist," he says, "is able to separate the external situation from the creativity that belongs to the mind, to the heart."

The birth of the Israeli air force