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At a recording studio in Tel Aviv, Israeli
musician Lee Biran performed a song he composed from words
penned by Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor Abraham Sutzkever.
"Literature is stronger than death," Sutzkever’s grand-daughter,
Hadas Kalderon Sutzkever, said as she listened in the studio to
poetry he had written in 1942 while confined to the Vilna Ghetto
in Lithuania.
"I long to say a prayer, to whom I do not know," sang the
29-year-old Biran, one of 10 Israeli artists who volunteered to
compose the songs.
Rabbi Avraham Krieger, director of the Israeli Shem Olam
institute sponsoring the project, said collecting the poems of
Holocaust victims and turning them into contemporary music was a
way to reach out to today’s youth and generations to come.
Kalderon Sutzkever, 43, said she would sit for hours listening
to her grandfather recount his experiences, which included the
murder of his mother and infant son by the Nazis.
The poet, who was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for
literature in 1985, died in 2010 at the age of 96.
"When you sing this song, it gives it new life after so many
years," Kalderon Sutzkever told Biran.
Israel's annual Holocaust Remembrance Day begins at nightfall on
Wednesday. A siren on Thursday morning brings the country to a
halt for two minutes to commemorate the six million Jews who
perished.
(Reporting by Elana Ringler, Writing by Jeffrey Heller, Editing
by William Maclean)
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