In the 1980s, Geoffrey Hartman helped establish the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, a Yale-based collection of videotaped Holocaust testimonies he continues to head. The archive preceded Spielberg\’s Shoah Visual History Foundation by more than a decade.
It was not until several years ago that Laura Hillman completed her Holocaust memoir, \”I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree\” (Atheneum, 2005), which reads like a teenager\’s journal of life in eight labor and concentration camps. The lyrical, brutally honest book recreates her youthful musings — echoing the most famous of the Holocaust diarists, Anne Frank.
Almost seven decades after the Nazis murdered and banished many of Europe\’s most renowned composers, a group of German artists will honor the musicians\’ work and lives at two local concerts.\n
Charlotte Salomon perished in Auschwitz at the age of 26, but the astonishing legacy she left behind will be celebrated this month in an exhibition and on stage.\n
Sarah Ogilvie and Scott Miller set a difficult task for themselves. Writing their book was easy. So, too, was researching what happened on the voyage of the St. Louis, the Hamburg-American line ship that traveled from Germany to Cuba in May 1939, carrying 937 passengers who were escaping Nazi Germany. The authors\’ greater challenge was to uncover the fate of the passengers after the ship had been turned away from numerous ports. Their dogged pursuit of all leads yielded some surprising results.
\”Write and record,\” historian Simon Dubnow urged his fellow Jews, as he was taken to his death in Riga. Over the decades since Dubnow\’s murder in 1941, many have taken his words to heart, and scholars, survivors, novelists, poets, members of the second and third generations continue to publish new work on the Holocaust. This season, in time for the commemoration of Yom HaShoah, there are impressive historical works, memoirs of lost childhoods, personal testimonies and artful works of fiction; many written by those who feel an obligation to those whose voices were stilled.
On Monday morning, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center observes Yom HaShoah, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, a place of honor will be reserved for the daughter of the late Khaled Abdelwahab. Abdelwahab is the first Arab to be nominated for official recognition by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations, and his story adds a new dimension to the 6 million stories of horror — and occasionally nobility — rising from the ashes of the Holocaust. His acts also shed light on the little-known fates of Jews in the Arab countries of North Africa during World War II.
Crossroads School in Santa Monica might not be where one would expect to find the archived works of a celebrated composer who survived Dachau and Buchenwald, especially when one considers that the Vienna-born Herbert Zipper worked as an educator at a variety of institutions of higher learning, including USC and the New School for Social Research in New York. But when Zipper died at the age of 93 in 1997, he left his papers to the K-12 school where he taught musical composition and theory in his retirement years. His relationship with the school was such that co-founder and former headmaster Paul Cummins wrote Zipper\’s biography.
Now Long Beach Opera, a company known for its daring repertory and unconventional interpretations, is presenting the West Coast premiere of \”The Diary of Anne Frank,\” with three performances, from April 17 to 21 at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and at Lincoln Park in Long Beach. (Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood will also present a semistaged performance on Yom HaShoah, April 15.)
Members of the Moveable Minyan, a Westside lay-led, egalitarian congregation, freed themselves from enslavement to matzah on Sunday by answering the seder\’s \”fifth\” question: What can you do with matzah aside from eating it? Their idea: Build a matzah pyramid.
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