Musical Shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto: A "New Haggada" and the Sanctity of Memory

To commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19, Neil W. Levin—YIVO's Anne E. Leibowitz Visiting Professor-in-Residence in Music—has written a comprehensive article for us, titled: MUSICAL SHADOWS OF THE WARSAW GHETTO—A "New Haggada" and the Sanctity of Memory.

This essay is an extensive analysis of a major but little-known Yiddish choral-orchestral work by Max Helfman, Di naye hagode (The New Haggada), composed in 1945 to a poem by the Soviet Yiddish poet Itsik Fefer, Di shotns fun varshever geto (The Shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto). Professor Levin discusses at length both the dramatic cantata, or quasi-oratorio, and Fefer's moving poem that now demands perpetual annual remembrance and retelling of the events of the Uprising, the heroism of the Ghetto Fighters, and the savage, murderous suppression by the Germans. Hence, the call for a "New Haggada", in which we who remember every year for hundreds upon hundreds of generations will be forever blessed. But those who would choose to forget, proclaimed Fefer, and not maintain eternal wrath against the murderers of the Jewish people shall be forever cursed. This study provides substantial historical, cultural, biographical, and anecdotal context to the genesis of the musical work and the poem. Levin also delves into the timely matter of differentiating between legitimate musical reflections on the Shoah—such as this piece—and what he decries as an epidemic of tasteless, trivializing and self-serving exploitations of the Holocaust.

Read the article here.

Listen to Di naye hagode here.
Purchase a CD featuring Di naye hagode here.