Bringing Back Yiddish Music: JDC-funded Klezmer Ensemble Graces the Stage in Siberia

Last month, in the big hall of the local Arts School in Ussurijsk, Siberia, a JDC- funded Klezmer ensemble performed for an eager and receptive audience. The music group Noar, from the Vladivosiok JCC, gave a concert of Jewish music that many in the community have not actively experienced for decades.

"Elderly people have been kept apart from cultural life due to their poor health and expensive ticket costs," explained Ingrid, an honored teacher in the community. "This time it was like they were coming to a holiday celebration more than a concert!" The anticipation of the concert was so great that entire families came and brought their friends from the greater community as well.

The musicians played many Yiddish tunes, bringing the older generation back in time and introducing the young to a genre of Jewish music that was all but lost years ago. "I knew that I was going to a concert of Jewish music with which I am familiar since childhood," said Ingrid, who grew up in a small village near Minsk. "I used to go visit my mothers’ parents in the city itself, in Komarovka. Before World War II, it was a Jewish place, filled with Jewish music," she explained. "After work people used to gather in the yards to play and listen to songs about Judaism and the holidays."

But the War brought the evacuation of the Urals and other regions of the former Soviet Union. When Ingrid and her family returned in 1944, they could hardly count ten Jewish families in their village, and even those were without men because they had been killed in the War. "There was nobody to make yizkor [prayer for the dead] even," she tells. "At meals we remembered people killed in the ghetto, on the front, and those who starved. The music of the Jewish people left us with memories of our killed friends and relatives."

Ingrid recalls receiving a disc with Jewish music from Moscow from her sister, some years later. "My kids played it so much I thought they were going to burn holes in it!" she says.

For Ingrid and others, the Klezmer concert – featuring Olja on violin and Marik on clarinet – truly resonated with them. "I love clarinet, but it is beyond me to explain what Marik did with his instrument…the clarinet was not just playing, it was speaking to people in the hall that night," says Ingrid, noting that the violin, too, "sang" in Olja's hands, beckoning the audience to sing and dance along.

Through the performance, the audience had a unique opportunity to reconnect with their history and heritage. "The audience was sobbing when the ensemble played A Yiddishe Mamme, and was stomping their feet to the jolly Knejdlicks." Many of the songs were familiar to the younger generation Jews, as well, because they had heard them in Russian. But few had known that the tunes were originally sung with Yiddish lyrics. "Everyone joined in singing together Eveinuh Shalom Aleichem," Ingrid tells. "It was beautiful."

At the close of the two-hour concert, the musicians did not look tired, but rather happy and fulfilled. According to Ingrid, "We were all applauding, standing up, and thanking the young musicians for bringing our Jewish music back to us."