A Violinist Finishes His Father’s Concert, Stopped by the Nazis in 1933

In the summer of 1933, the violinist Ernest Drucker, a student at a conservatory in Cologne, was selected to play a Brahms concerto at his graduation ceremony. At the demand of the Nazis, he was forced to halt after the first movement. His son Eugene recently performed the work at a special concert in Israel in honor of Nazi Germany’s Jewish musicians, as Aron Heller writes:

With tears in his eyes, [Eugene] Drucker performed an emotional rendition of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 over the weekend with the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra.

“I think he would feel a sense of completion. I think in some ways many aspects of my career served that purpose for him,” the sixty-three-year-old Drucker said of his father, who passed away in 1993. “There is all this emotional energy and intensity loaded into my associations with this piece.”

Thursday’s concert, and a second performance Sunday night, commemorated the Jüdischer Kulturbund—a federation of Jewish musicians in Nazi Germany who were segregated so as not to “sully” Aryan culture. After the humiliation in Cologne, the elder Drucker became a central player in the Kulturbund, a unique historical phenomenon with a mixed legacy.

On the one hand, it gave Jews the opportunity to carry on with their cultural lives and maintain a sense—some would say the illusion—of normalcy in the midst of growing discrimination against them. On the other, it served a Nazi propaganda machine eager to portray a moderate face to the world.

Read more at Associated Press

More about: Arts & Culture, German Jewry, Holocaust, Music, Nazism

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society