From the Auschwitz Orchestra to a German Hip-Hop Group

Born in southwestern Germany in 1924, Esther Loewy was the daughter of a cantor and piano teacher. She was sixteen when she was taken to a slave-labor camp, from which she was sent to Auschwitz, where, despite never having played an accordion previously, she was recruited to play one in the camp’s women’s orchestra. After liberation, she moved to British Palestine, where she married Nissim Bejarano. Esther died on July 15. Richard Sandomir tells her story:

Orchestras were formed in many concentration camps—to entertain the Nazis, but also to serve other purposes. “They were for the benefit of the administration and staff,” said Bret Werb, the musicologist and recorded-sound curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “They believed that quick march music would get the prisoners to march in time, and quickly, to hard labor.”

Mrs. Bejarano, who arrived at Auschwitz in April 1943, performed at the camp for several months until being moved later that year to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. On a death march from the camp near the end of the war, she and several other prisoners escaped.

[After the war], she found it difficult to discuss the Holocaust with anyone until the 1970s, when she watched German police-officers shield right-wing extremists against protesters. The incident turned her into an activist. . . . She began to tell her story in schools, delivered protest speeches and sang with Coincidence, the band that she formed with her children in 1989.

Around 2009, when she was in her eighties, Mrs. Bejarano’s musical career took an unexpected turn. She was asked to join Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop group, with whom she continued to spread her message against fascism and intolerance to young audiences in Germany and abroad, from Istanbul to Vancouver. . . . Hip-hop was not her preferred musical genre. She joked that she persuaded her bandmates to lower their volume and stop jumping around onstage so much. She believed, [however], that hip-hop’s influence on young people could help her counter a rise in intolerance.

Read more at New York Times

More about: Auschwitz, Holocaust, Music

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF