Despite growing antisemitism, unity and dialogue headline emotional German-Jewish music festival

On a rainy November night in northern Berlin, I found myself seated in the front row of a musical performance in the Kammermusiksalon Prinzenallee, a repurposed hat factory formerly run by a Jewish family, now a small housing project-cum-concert venue. There are only fifty seats arranged in the high-ceilinged room but each one is taken, the occupants hushed and reverent. Before us, an Iranian woman is singing the classic Hebrew song Oseh Shalom, accompanied on the double bass and saxophone by, of all people, two Israeli musicians.

It is the first night of the International Days of Jewish Music Festival, a yearly celebration of German-Jewish culture through its distinctive sound, set in various synagogues and venues around a country that once fought ruthlessly to be rid of us.

Now in its seventh year, the festival has been bringing together an assortment of Jewish and non-Jewish musicians each year to showcase the classical, jazz, klezmer, Yiddish, and religious songs our people have donated to the world.

Founded by musical director Thomas Hummel as an offshoot of the acclaimed Usedom Music Festival, a classical music event held on the Baltic Sea island every autumn, the International Days of Jewish Music Festival takes place across the length of Germany, from Berlin in the centre, Usedom on the Baltic to Görlitz, on the border with Poland.

The theme of this year’s festival – ‘kamocha: he is like you’ – denoted a call for interfaith dialogue and solidarity during a time of violent discord within and around the Jewish community, in Israel and abroad. The spirit of that theme was unmistakably alive in the first night’s performance by Berlin-based band Sistanagila, made up of Israeli and Iranian musicians who perform side by side as if the governments of their home countries are not hell-bent on one another’s destruction.

Iranian singer Luna Cavari sang a stunning, Middle Eastern-influenced rendition of Oseh Shalom, imbued with jazzy tones thanks to the rhythm meted out by Israeli double bass player Avi Albers Ben Chamo and enriched by the melodic stylings of Hemad Mansouri on acoustic guitar and Omri Abramov on the saxophone.

Israeli horn and shofar player Bar Zemach also gave a heartfelt perfomance on the evening, as did pianist Jascha Nemtsov. The first known musician to play the shofar chromatically as a musical instrument, Zemach produced a distinct sound which, despite its unfamiliarity, rang as uniquely Jewish.

“Thinking about the situation in Germany since October 7, we should take this message of ‘kamocha’ more, not less, to heart,” said Dr Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of German Jews and patron of the festival, which is supported through public funds. “Music can also help with this. It unites where division divides, it reconciles where hatred destroys.”

It’s an apt time to talk about unity. Just a week before, Berlin’s police chief Barbara Slowik referenced Arab neighbourhoods in the city when she told a local newspaper: “There are areas, and we must be honest at this stage, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly homosexual or lesbians to be more attentive.”

With antisemitism on the rise and Jewish-Arab tensions reaching fever-pitch across Europe as well as the Middle East, Sistanagila is all the more exceptional for its effort to facilitate dialogue and friendship across sociopolitical divides, manmade or otherwise.

The festival continued the following morning with a performance by Cantor Yoed Sorek and accordion player Ira Shiran, both Israeli-born, at the rebuilt Synagogue Stavenhagen in the northern municipality of the same name. There, I was joined by a group of German secondary school students, who followed along with the traditional Yiddish songs on sheet music distributed by the cantor, blue sky winking through a high window engraved with the Star of David. I felt like I was back in Sunday school.

But the synagogue, first constructed in 1788 with its own mikveh, is nothing like the one I grew up attending. Miraculously it was not set aflame during Kristallnacht in 1938, when rioters put torches to Jewish-owned businesses and institutions, likely because of the building’s proximity to nearby houses. Even so, the synagogue went into disuse shortly after as the last remaining Jews of Stavenhagen were deported to Auschwitz, and with the local Jewish community still nonexistent, the synagogue and adjoining community centre are now run almost exclusively for educational purposes – like many of the historic Jewish buildings in Germany.

The following day’s concert took me to Heringsdorf, a resort town on the coast of the Baltic Sea. At the Seetelhotel I was treated to a performance by the Klezmer Trio, headed by larger-than-life Jewish singer, pianist and composer Roman Grinberg who flew in from Vienna, where he is also director of the European Jewish Choirs Festival and the Yiddish Culture Festival.

With a bellowing voice, Grinberg sang a collage of both new and old klezmer melodies from behind the keyboard, accompanied by Sasha Danilov on the clarinet and Alexander Shevchenko on the button accordion.

Grinberg also managed to deliver a series of presumably hilarious Jewish jokes, dispensed entirely in German to a delighted local audience and one uncomprehending JC writer.

A pivotal figure in the movement to revive traditional Jewish music, Grinberg pays homage to his ancestors by performing and teaching the oft-forgot songs he heard throughout his childhood in Moldova. It’s the effort of every contemporary Yiddish or Jewish musician to sustain the music of their forebears in this post-shtetl era when such tunes seem to live on only as relics of a period our people toiled to overcome.

But for Grinberg, carrying on musical traditions is the only way to truly remember our roots, and it’s not enough to simply learn the chord progression of this or that Yiddish song.

“Folk music—whether Jewish or from any other culture—carries a rich heritage that goes far beyond the notes on a page,” he told the JC. “It has survived and thrived through generations because it was sung, shared, and passed down from one person to the next.”

Grinberg continued: “Simply playing or singing from a songbook, while valuable as a starting point, only scratches the surface. The heart and soul of these songs lie in the nuances, the stories, and the emotions that can only be captured through direct connection and experience. Many young musicians today play with remarkable skill and mastery, but the essence of folk music is something deeper.”

Peering around at the audience, I wondered how many of those who came to hear the Klezmer Trio had a clue what they were listening to. Maybe it didn’t matter; the performers knew what they were playing, knew the traditions and the pain and the stories from which their songs sprung, and they played them honestly.

I returned to Berlin for the third night of the festival, which took place at the Fasanenstraße Synagogue. The building, which was set on fire during Kristallnacht and further destroyed by air raids in 1943, was reconstructed as a Jewish community center to symbolise a turning point for Berlin's diminished Jewish population after World War II.

Grinberg performed again, this time joined by leading Yiddish singer Sasha Lurje and renowned American composer and conductor Michael Alexander Willen, who reanimated the Yiddish songs his musician grandfather Alexander Olshanetsky brought to the New York Yiddish theatre scene in the 1920s.

The final night of the festival was set in the border town of Görlitz. It looked like the set of a 1920s noir, all the pre-war buildings perfectly preserved but hauntingly dark when I arrived after dusk under a gentle rain. The last concert was at the New Synagogue, an imposing domed building built in 1911 in the modernist style which somehow survived Kristallnacht and was refurbished after reunification. After more than 30 years, the building was reopened in 2021 as the “Kulturforum Görlitzer Synagoge”, serving as a cultural monument with a permanent exhibition on Jewish life in Görlitz and as a venue for events.

To a small audience scattered among the rows of seats, pianist Andrea Linsbauer, violinist Ekaterina Frolova and vocalist Celina Hubmann performed a collection of music from the turn of the 20th century, focusing on composers of Jewish descent, many of whom were forced into exile during the Nazis rise to power. The impressively performed mélange included music by the famous violin virtuoso and composer Fritz Kreisler as well as Vienna-born composers Walter Jurmann and Erich W. Korngold, whose works contributed to the development of film scores and soundtracks in the US entertainment industry after their emigration to the states.

I left the concert in that dreamlike state classical music can put one in. I wondered how many of the performers I’d watched over the week had been Jewish themselves, then decided it wasn’t important. Do you really need to be Jewish to play the music of Jewish composers or the Yiddish music of the shtetls? To appreciate such music? To feel it in your soul?

I thought of Sistanagila, hearing an Iranian woman sing Oseh Shalom more beautifully than I’d known it could sound. And I felt hopeful then, in the soft rain outside a synagogue no longer populated by a congregation, knowing the torch of our musical culture is being carried on in a place where incredible violence determined to extinguish it.