There is something about Germany. For many of us, the mere mention of the country tends to trigger a reflex followed, unavoidably, by disturbing Holocaust-related thoughts and images. That certainly goes for the likes of me, who pertain to the second generation of survivors of that most horrific, despicable, frightening, and devastating chapter in the rocky timeline of the Jewish people.
But Germany is also making constant and ongoing efforts to address its baggage of unthinkable inhumane deeds, not only in the form of relatively prosaic financial support but also through actual street-level initiatives designed to bolster Holocaust education among young Germans. That also helps to ensure that as many Germans as possible are cognizant of and appreciate the central role played by Jewish artists, across a broad swath of disciplinary fields, in the development of the nation’s rich culture through the centuries.
One of the vehicles of that important proactive endeavor is the Internationale Tage Jüdische Musik (International Days of Jewish Music – ITJM) festival, which has been held annually at various spots around the country since 2018. The latest edition took place across the length and breadth of Germany from December 14 to 18, encompassing all manner of genre and style.
Hamburg resident mover and shaker Thomas Hummel conceived the project and got it off the ground in as robust a fashion as he could. As a former professional viola player and son of the respected German composer Bertold Hummel, music was a natural choice as a means of disseminating the good word. He is also a major player on the European music scene in general as the founder and artistic director of the Usedom Music Festival on the eponymous island in northern Germany, and founding executive director of the Baltic Sea Philharmonic orchestra.
But what made him, a German Catholic, invest his precious time and stamina in setting up and continuing to oversee the ITJM, particularly in these troubling post-Oct. 7 times? And that amid ever-dwindling state support for the arts in general in his homeland.
NOW 58, Hummel was born more than two decades after the end of the Holocaust but says he learned of his country’s egregious crimes at an early age. It came as no surprise to hear that it occurred in a musical context.
“I was in a Catholic cathedral choir in Würzburg, and I had a friend there who had been to [visited] Auschwitz,” Hummel recalls. “He was there with his parents, and he showed me all the books [about the concentration camp], and, of course, I was really shocked. We also had this [education] in school, but it was only a singular thing. The Holocaust is a much wider thing.”
Antisemitism goes back hundreds of years
That references the historical backdrop to the emergence of Nazism. “There was antisemitism for the last two, three, four hundred years. It has been increasing more and more. You know, it is a long way to the Holocaust. It did not just start in the 1930s. Without all that happened in the 200 to 300 years before, the ghettos and antisemitic pogroms, it wouldn’t come to the Holocaust. But I didn’t catch this context then. I only caught it later.”
Once caught, Hummel set himself to address what he felt was a pressing matter and to disseminate the significant contribution German Jewish artists have made to their country’s cultural heritage. Luckily, a colleague landed an award in the media domain that came with a hefty financial prize. It went to a good cause.
“He was the director of North German Radio (NDR). The prize was €50,000, and he gave that for the renovation of a synagogue near Schwerin [in northern Germany].” Ever alert to presentational venue opportunities, Hummel was keen to look into the possibility of making the most of the new location as a means for enlightening the local public about some Jewish musical gems. “The synagogue used to be a car garage,” says Hummel. “And I thought maybe there are other synagogues we can use for the festival. We only had a small budget then.”
It was time to raise the bar. “I contacted the authorities and Felix Klein,” Hummel notes. Klein has served as the German state commissioner for combating antisemitism since 2018. “I thought we should start a festival, just a small one,” he says.
Having attended the last three editions of the ITJM, I can attest that the festival has some way to go in its quest to illuminate large sectors of the public. The festival programming primarily features concerts, as well as other events, at locations dotted around Germany.
This year’s was the most geographically diverse to date, as we traveled more than 2,000 km to Berlin, Usedom,
Stavenhagen (a couple of hours’ drive north of Berlin), nearby Röbel, all the way west to Essen near the Dutch border, a long haul back east to Chemnitz close to the border with the Czech Republic, and, finally, another schlep to the northwest to Hamburg for a moving Hanukkah-tailored finale at the liberal synagogue there.
The latter was deftly presided over by Ukrainian-born rabbi-cantor Alina Treiger – the first female rabbi to be ordained in Germany since World War II. Together with musicologist-pianist Prof. Jascha Nemtsov, who earns a crust teaching the history of Jewish music at the Liszt University of Music in Weimar, Treiger led the sizable audience through a program of Hanukkah-related works by a stellar cast of composers, which included feted 20th-century Ukrainian cantor Yossele Rosenblatt and Berlin-born composer Max Janowski.
It was quite an odyssey, but it offered an invaluable opportunity to see just how much progress Hummel and the ITJM were achieving in making inroads into broader German consciousness and illuminating people, particularly the younger folk, about just how much they owe their yesteryear Jewish compatriots for their current cultural riches.
That was most apparent at the patently didactic event that took place at a restored synagogue in Stavenhagen, which now serves as a museum and cultural center thanks to the ongoing sterling efforts of Robert Kreibig.
A non-Jewish engineer, Kreibig has invested great effort in raising the requisite funds and finding skilled workers over the years to bring the Stavenhagen temple and another in Röbel not quite back to their former glory but definitely to a fitting structural and aesthetic condition. The Röbel synagogue premises also house an exhibition of pictures and photographs with explanatory German texts mapping the timeline of the local Jewish community.
THE STAVENHAGEN date featured Berlin-based Israeli cantor and instrumentalist Yoed Sorek, accompanied by non-Jewish German violinist Samuel Seifert. The audience comprised high school students from the vicinity as part of their Jewish education curriculum. The show was classified as a “school workshop” and was titled Arche Musica, which references the eponymous digital library and knowledge platform around which digitized memory culture Project 2025 – Arche Musica revolves.
The project’s declared goal “is to preserve and digitize the almost forgotten compositions and pieces of music from the time of Jewish emancipation and the Holocaust, the years 1890-1945, and to make these manuscripts and pieces of music accessible to the widest possible circle of people.”
That is a commendable and much-needed bottom line that Sorek embraces and applies around his adopted country. “I want to promote empathy [for Jews around the world],” he declares. “I think that Israel challenges the world, to use a nice word,” he smiles wryly.
“That’s why I want to develop empathy [for Jews and Israel]. That’s why I got you to light candles for them on Hanukkah [yours truly did the honors at Stavenhagen, following a similar role in Usedom at the festival curtain raiser], and why I sing Hanukkah and other [Jewish] songs.”
The former Jerusalemite sees that as a way of possibly preempting, or at least mitigating, the global backlash to the political developments he foresees in this part of the world. “There will be news about all sorts of things carried out by the Hilltop Youth [Jewish West Bank settlers] that will be very hard to defend. I am a Zionist,” he states. Shades of the verse in Isaiah, “The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”?
The festival opener at Heringsdorf on Usedom added yet another intriguing and pertinent layer to the multifaceted ITJM venture, as it featured German-based Israeli pianist Daniel Seroussi and British-German vocalist Simon Wallfisch.
Wallfisch is the grandson of cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was a member of the ensemble of Auschwitz led by stellar Jewish Austrian violinist Alma Rosé. Sadly, Rosé did not survive, but Lasker-Wallfisch turned 100 this past summer, with King Charles dropping by her London home to wish her many happy returns in person.
AFTER THE Stavenhagen session, we made the relatively short trip south to Röbel, where the compact audience enjoyed a reprise of the Sorek-Seifert double act. I was delighted to see the progress Kreibig had made with the building restoration since last year’s visit. I was also moved to see a group of Israeli youngsters – one teenager and seven or eight twentysomethings – who survived the Hamas terrorist attack at the Supernova music festival and were invited to Röbel for a breather.
Shelley Sharon Weisberger, aka Soulnoshka, a second-year visual communication student at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, had attended Supernova as a photographer. Since that fateful day, Weisberger has done her utmost to maintain a positive approach to life and has utilized her artistic gifts and skills to portray some of her firsthand memories of Oct. 7, 2023, and other peripheral – some hardly credible – matters.
There were several intriguing and emotive works on show at the Röbel venue that conveyed a broad range of sentiments and responses not only to the barbaric act of terrorism itself but also to darkly humorous real-life addenda. A work called There Is Going to Be a War feeds off an off-the-wall occurrence that took place on October 6, 2023.
“My mother was listening to the news, and I told her it was disgusting, and I asked her to turn it off,” Weisberger recalls. “She said, ‘What will happen if a war breaks out tomorrow?’ Isn’t that amazing?” There’s no arguing with that chillingly risible observation. There’s more. “The driver who took me and some others to Nova said, ‘Guys, get ready.
There’s going to be war.’ He was joking, but look what happened!”
Weisberger says she had a good furlough in Germany and used her time well not only for some downtime from the intensity of Israeli life but also to meet some locals and enjoy fruitful and encouraging exchanges with them.
Naturally, the events of Oct. 7 also came into the discourse picture. “We had a drumming circle session with lovely Germans who live nearby in an ecological community,” Weisberger says. “We did some shopping and went to Christmas markets. That was a nice break,” she laughs.
There was some serious stuff on the agenda, too. “We went to a couple of high schools, and we spoke to the students about life in Israel. That was intense and meaningful.”
I wondered whether there were any confrontational questions raised. “They listened to us and, mostly, were very sensitive. And they showed a lot of interest. On the whole, they had very little idea about life in Israel.” It was a mutually rewarding experience. “We focused on healing and community and learning to ask for help,” Weisberger adds. “For me, that is the most important thing that came out of the experience [in Germany].”
THAT UNDERSCORED the importance of keeping the ITJM show on the road and, at the very least, helping to spread the positive Jewish word in the face of continuing media- and social media-fueled hostility toward Israel. The mood was on the brighter side back in Berlin for the performance of Austrian Jewish crooner Roman Grinberg, backed by the Shvayg Mayn Harts Orchestra, led by German-based American Jewish conductor and musical director Michael Alexander Willens.
In terms of pure entertainment and tight orchestral arrangements and execution, this was the highlight of the five-day program. Grinberg is a polished old hand at this delivery game, evoking the spirit of the heim-shtetl as he ran through a slick program of deliciously kvetch- and smile-inducing numbers that arced the gamut from klezmer to jazz and much besides. Willens’s combo was on the nail throughout and deserved a far bigger audience than the one that made its way through the wintry city streets to the Jewish Community Center.
We got a taste of the seemingly inexhaustible cornucopia of Israeli jazz sounds in Essen, where veteran saxophonist Amit Friedman led a three-quarter Israeli foursome at the spectacularly repurposed Old Synagogue in an improvisational and melodic tour de force.
The interior of the original 19th-century Reform temple was destroyed in Kristallnacht and only got a very different new lease of life as a museum of industrial design in 1961. A fire in 1959 curtailed that culturally and religiously extraneous chapter, and the local city council eventually got its historical act together to help fund the refashioning of the building to something akin to its initial purpose.
Back over near the southeastern corner of the country, the concert in Chemnitz was sparsely attended, with a quartet and a vocalist performing a repertoire of Renaissance and Baroque material that fed off places visited by early 18th-century traveler Avraham Levy as he crisscrossed the then-fragmented Holy Roman Empire stretching from Amsterdam to Prague. The singer for the occasion was Diana Matut, who, incidentally, also runs the Old Synagogue in Essen. The concert was a commensurately varied affair.
IN OUR conversations, Hummel poignantly referenced the murderous terror attack in Sydney, Australia, which took place on the first day of the festival in Germany, as well as growing antisemitism in his own country.
“We want the festival to get bigger, and we hope we find more partners to help us do that. The darker it gets in Germany and other places in the world, the more we have to do. This festival is a small light in the darkness.” The Hanukkah timing of this year’s ITJM seemed entirely appropriate.
In his ITJM program, Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, noted “the explosive rise in antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023,” stressing that the need to “emphasize the diversity and vitality of Jewish life has become all the more important. They make it clear that we belong at the center of society.”
For his part, Klein, the state commissioner for combating antisemitism, talked of the festival as “an integral part of the cultural calendar,” adding that the ITJM is “much more than a musical event.” He cited this year’s festival theme, Hinei ma tov (“Behold, how good it is”) – when brothers dwell together in harmony,” which, he states, “clearly expresses the bond with the Jewish community.”
Hummel’s efforts to spread the word of rich and diverse Jewish culture are not a lone beacon in Germany, with the Bad/Good Jews art exhibition currently on show in Berlin. Curated by Yury Kharchenko and Marat Guelman, the show casts a broad stylistic arc with works by a dozen artists, including feted Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and late Polish-born Holocaust survivor Joseph Bau, who made aliyah in 1950 and became a pioneer in the fields of animation and literature as the young state struggled to its feet.
“The initiative was created in response to the worldwide boycott of Israeli and Jewish artists following Oct. 7,” says the exhibition notes. Hopefully such ventures, including, naturally, the ITJM, will continue to grow and gain public awareness in Germany and beyond.