Fostering Dialogue Among Neighbors



Council Member Jumaane D. Williams (left-center) visits the Museum of Jewish Heritage with high school students and teachers from Brooklyn College Academy and the Yeshivah of Flatbush as part of a cross-cultural event commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Month, organized by Council Member David G. Greenfield and him. 
Photo Credit: Keith Dawson/NYC Council

Museum Educator Loren Silber shares her perspective on a unique student visit.

Meeting Hate with Humanity is the Museum’s most popular tour for school groups. In fact, educators at MJH conduct this tour for most of the 50,000 students who visit annually.  But last month, this tour took on new depth and meaning for both our staff and a special group of students from City Council District 45 in Brooklyn.

It all started with Councilman Jumaane D. Williams’s idea to create an educational gathering that would foster better understanding among the younger residents of his district.  He recruited 9th graders from Brooklyn College Academy (BC) - a school with predominantly African American and Hispanic students, and 10^th graders from the Yeshiva of Flatbush (YF), along with their teachers, to participate in a day-long program of cultural exchange and communication, starting at MJH before continuing over lunch at City Hall, and concluding with a trip to the African Burial Ground National Monument.

In preparation MJH education staff met to strategize about how to work with this unique group.  The challenge was to find a way for students who had never met before, and who had very different backgrounds, to be able to talk and share their experiences. To achieve this, we decided to expand our usual group question and answer format to allow students to engage in one-on-one discussions in response to our prompt questions. We would organize the students into small groups to have equal representation from BC and YF in each one.

We approached the first artifact, the Schacter Family Tree, and soon the high-schoolers chatted away in answer to my first questions. “What do you know about your name?” “What does your name tell you about your heritage?” I asked. Working in pairs (one student from BC, one from YF) each shared the story of her name, an important aspect of personal and family identity, with her partner. One of the sweetest exchanges I overheard was between two girls who found a common bond, both having been named after their grandmothers.

With each artifact my group became more articulate and willing to share.  By the time we reached the Rat Catcher, a blatantly anti-Semitic illustration from late 19^th century Germany, my group, all girls, couldn’t stop talking to each other.  This was a rare opportunity for the students to voice freely their frustration at being misunderstood, isolated from neighbors of a different race or heritage.  I hated to interrupt as they swapped stories of the discrimination and stereotyping they have already experienced in their youth, but more artifacts awaited them.

When the tour concluded, two girls told me how much they appreciated and enjoyed their visit. Although I couldn’t accompany them to their other destinations, I felt certain that as the day progressed, these two groups would continue to talk and bond in ways that would resonate for each of them personally and perhaps even radiate out to their communities.

Q&A with Gary Fagin about Jewish Refugee Composers

On Sunday, May 19, at 2:30 p.m., the Museum of Jewish Heritage welcomes the Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra  for a powerful musical event — Banished Genius: Émigré Composers in America, inspired by the Museum’s new exhibit Against the Odds: American Jews and the Rescue of Europe’s Refugees, 1933-1941, which opens to the public on May 21.

The concert will present the work of Kurt Weill; Erich Korngold; Arnold Schoenberg; Darius Milhaud; and Erich Zeisl, five of the many acclaimed Jewish composers who were forced into exile by National Socialism and who found their way to America.

In advance of the concert, we caught up with the KCO’s very talented music director and conductor Gary Fagin.

MJH: How did you go about curating the concert? There is clearly a lot of material from which to choose.

GF: The list of émigré composers is long, and the number of excellent works by émigré composers is rich. I chose composers whose journeys from the Old World to the New World connect with the Museum's Against the Odds exhibit, and I selected works of theirs that would best reflect each composer's aesthetic and, that together, would make a moving and entertaining program.

MJH: How did the composers’ experiences as refugees shape their music?

GF: Some composers slipped on the clothes and cultural persona of their new country with ease. For example, Kurt Weill, in America, insisted on having his last name pronounced beginning with a W rather than, as in German, with a V. And his music took on a more popular, less continental/academic quality. Other composers, like Schoenberg, retained strong consistency with their pre-immigration musical sensibility.

MJH: How did American jazz work its way into Darius Milhaud’s compositions?

GF: Milhaud had been in America in the early 1920s, visited Harlem jazz clubs frequently, and enthusiastically infused his music thereafter with the new American style just then being called jazz. His music exhibits, as well as any composer, a wonderful mix of jazzy vibrancy and continental tradition.

MJH: How did the composers, in turn, help change the existing musical landscape here in the States?

GF: The émigré composers' influence on the American musical landscape cannot be overstated. Composers like Schoenberg, Zeisl, and Milhaud taught the next generation of great American composers; composers like Kurt Weill became Broadway stalwarts; and the film scores of composers like Erich Korngold defined that genre.

MJH: Why do you think Kurt Weill’s distinctly European style was so important in the development of  American musical theater?

GF: In short, his melodic gift. Kurt Weill famously said, "I have learned to make my music speak directly to the audience, to find the most immediate, the most direct way to say what I want to say, and to say it as simply as possible. That’s why I think that, in the theater at least, melody is such an important element, because it speaks directly to the heart––and what good is music if it cannot move people?"

MJH: Why did so many exiled composers, like Erich Zeisl work as film composers?

GF: That's where the money was. In America, there was not, as in Europe, a tradition of supporting and honoring composers in the concert hall that would enable a composer to make a living strictly composing concert music. Thus, most composers had to teach and/or compose for film or theater.

MJH: Are there any distinctly Jewish musical themes worth noting?

GF: There is a beautiful example of what I would call Jewish sensibility in Erich Zeisl's Andante from his String Quartet No. 2. His daughter, Barbara Schoenberg Zeisl, wrote me that her father thought of this piece as: "a conversation (but a sad, almost gently reproaching conversation) between man and God."

MJH: What would you like audience members to take away from the concert?

GF: I’d like audience members to walk away with an appreciation of the journey and artistry of these composers whose lives were upended by circumstances beyond their control, but who survived and thrived with the help of their American experience.

Photo: The Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra. Photo by Robert Simko.

Remembering One of My Favorite Children's Books

Photo of Metropolitan Museum of Art - Michelangelo Buonarroti portrait by Wally G

Last week I had the pleasure of taking a 90-minute trip to Philadelphia by train. Among my reading material was my original copy of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I was saddened to read of the death of the author E. L. Konigsburg earlier in the week, and like so many readers of the book, I have terribly fond memories of reading it.

As a small child growing up in the midwest, I missed a lot of school due to illness. My bed was always strewn with piles of books courtesy of my mother and the Scholastic Book Club. What a pleasure it was for me to read about Claudia, her stingy little brother, and their adventures in New York City, and not just in New York City, but in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I always appreciated how Claudia didn’t just want to run from something, she wanted to run to something. Long before I cared about museums or knew about MetroNorth tickets, I could think of nothing more exciting than being a kid on the loose in this city.

Of course, in New York City circa 2013, immediate notification via Amber alerts, social media, and Pat Kiernan and Roger Clark would have announced that Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, of Greenwich, CT, were last seen on their school bus on their way to school. And that’s the way it should be. But for 90 wonderful minutes last week I had the benefit of running away with them, discovering the beautiful little statue, and more importantly, meeting the mysterious and possibly glamorous Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, as she traded one secret in exchange for another.

Photo of Metropolitan Museum of Art - Michelangelo Buonarroti portrait by Wally G

A Shabbat in Oświęcim

This blog is by Shelby Weltz, a 2012 Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellow, who is currently pursuing her M.A. in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa. Next fall, Shelby will begin a doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University, where she hopes to integrate her Holocaust Studies background into her future work as a clinician.

I stood in the Auschwitz Jewish Center’s small synagogue, staring at the two Shabbat candles set before me. I was hesitant to proceed. Sure, I knew the blessings and ritual, but the idea of praying in a place like Oświęcim felt more than unnatural; it felt wrong.

The mitzvah of hadlakat nerot, or the commandment to light the Shabbat candles, occupies an important place in my life, not only because it’s a mitzvah reserved for women, but because watching my Grandma light the Shabbat candles is still one of my most poignant childhood memories. Standing by her side, I recall scanning her face as it glowed in the candlelight just before she covered it with her hands while reciting the prayer.  Growing up, I noticed that she would do more than pray beneath her hands; she would cry. Eventually, I learned that my Grandmother survived Auschwitz II-Birkenau and spent the rest of her life crying over those family members who did not.

The wave of hesitation I felt prior to candle lighting was representative of a broader discomfort I felt spending Shabbat in Oświęcim, a place that I regarded not merely as a physical space, but as the personification of evil and the embodiment of dehumanization. To me, Oświęcim was responsible for the murder of my ancestry and was, subsequently, an “entity” that I would forever put on trial. Thus, it still surprises me until this day that our Shabbat, which began with such caution and aversion ultimately ended in transformation and acceptance.

The hesitancy I felt prior to reciting the Kiddush that Friday night contrasted greatly with the qualms that preceded my candle lighting. Whereas the latter emerged from an unwillingness to engage spiritually with my surroundings, the former was the result of a speechlessness incited by an overwhelmingly spiritual experience. After returning from lighting my Shabbat candles, I found my peers – a cohort comprising graduate students of various backgrounds – sitting around a beautifully set table, waiting for me to return to help lead them in welcoming in the Shabbat. A group who had been strangers only three weeks prior was interested, eager, and appreciative enough of my ritual observance to insist on celebrating Shabbat in Oświęcim. This group who watched my struggle with religious commitment for those three weeks assumed that same commitment for themselves. I was stunned. Taking my place at the head of the table, I looked around at a group who made me realize that location has nothing to do with one’s spiritual lifeline; faith in humanity does.

With grapes in hand as an improvised substitute for Kiddush wine, I choked over the words of the Kiddush prayer, holding back the tears of gratitude that had formed in my throat. Ironically, I had experienced my most meaningful Shabbat in a place where I was certain Judaism or spirituality could not exist. Suddenly, it was possible for Oświęcim to embody beauty and more importantly, to embody nothing at all. In my eyes, Oświęcim became merely a place, slowly ceasing to personify the perpetrator it had always been.

Photo: Shelby and her peers in Poland. Courtesy of Shelby Weltz.

Meeting the Person Behind the Photo

This blog comes from our communications assistant, Emily.

Last week, I stepped away from my desk for just a moment and returned to find a message on my phone from a woman named Lily Glass. I recognized the name immediately and hurried to call her back. Anyone who has ever given a tour here at MJH would understand my excitement at having received a message from her.          

On the second floor of the Core Exhibition, there is a photograph of a nun standing with a group of young girls in front of the Maison du Saint Coeur de Marie convent in Belgium. Mrs. Glass was one of the girls. She was hidden by the nuns of this convent during the Holocaust, and was fortunate to have been reunited with her family after the war.
                 

This photograph is featured on the tours of the museum and in classroom presentations as well.  As a former Lipper Intern, I have used this photograph to discuss the experiences of hidden children during the Holocaust countless times. It was wonderful to be able to actually speak with Mrs. Glass on the phone.

She was delighted to hear that her photograph and her experiences have reached thousands of school children throughout the Tri-state area through tours and classroom visits.

At the beginning of a tour, we often ask students what they think it means for our museum to be a Living Memorial to the Holocaust. For me, this phone call embodies that aspect of our Museum perfectly. Our artifacts illustrate how the Holocaust was experienced by individuals, many of whom are still very much a part of our community. We are grateful to those, like Mrs. Glass, who share their stories and entrust us with their photos and their artifacts. 

Photo courtesy of Lily Glass