The concert program will include Hebrew Rhapsody by Polish-Jewish composer Aleksander Tansman, the second movement of Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto performed by American-Canadian violinist Leila Josefowicz, and Wojciech Kilar’s Exodus, a piece inspired by Jewish folklore.
Cantor Benjamin Muller will perform Samuel Malawsky’s memorial prayer Av Horachamim, while Polish actors Andrzej Seweryn and Milena Lisiecka will read from the memoirs of Łódź Ghetto survivors and excerpts from The Tree of Life by Chava Rosenfarb.
The concert also recalls a piece composed 15 years ago by Krzysztof Penderecki, titled Kaddish – To All Łódź Abrameks Who Desired to Live and to the Poles Who Saved the Jews. Penderecki’s work includes poems by Abram Cytryn, a poet from the ghetto who perished at Auschwitz before turning 18.
The concert is set to be streamed live on Thursday at 6:30 pm.
Established by the Nazis in 1940, the Litzmannstadt Ghetto was the second-largest in Nazi-occupied Poland, after the Warsaw Ghetto. It was transformed into an industrial production center, where tens of thousands of Jews from Poland and other European countries were forced into slave labor.
In August 1944, the Nazis began the ghetto’s liquidation, targeting children and the elderly. Over 20,000 people were killed within days, and the last remaining Jews were deported to Auschwitz on August 29, 1944.
(mk/jh)