Charles Abelsohn – Letter from Israel: Hatikvah, The Hope
Hi again from Israel,
The Haggadah which Jewish families read on Passover commences and ends This year [we are] here; next year in the land of Israel. This year [we are] slaves; next year [we will be] free people.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Pesach Haggada (p. 24) explains:
“What is distinctive about Jewish time is that we experience the present not as an isolated moment, but as a link in a chain connecting past and future. The very fact that they had been liberated in the days of Moses gave our ancestors confidence that they would be liberated again. The Jewish people would return to the land of Israel. Here we see one of the most profound instincts of the Jewish mind: memory is the guardian of hope. Those who forget the past become prisoners of the present. Those who remember the past have faith in the future. We can face it without fear because we have been there before.”
In a sense, Passover is the festival of Hope.
It is no coincidence that the name of Israel`s national anthem is Hatikva – the Hope. In this Passover Letter from Israel, we look at the history of Hatikva, the Hope, and show several instances when it was sung, some with the original recording, and on at least one occasion, it was sung when Hope was totally absent.
Like everything else about the Jews, probably there is not a people in the world who have a national anthem that has gone through so many countries and so many versions of its origins. The melody, Jewish in origin, had been wandering around Europe for centuries, until finally coming home to the Land of Israel at the end of the 19th century. There, in the community of Rishon LeZion, the early pioneers read the poem, the poem met the melody and Hatikvah, the Hope, was born.
The information in this Letter has been taken from the internet, is public knowledge and accordingly is presented without attribution
As usual, you are welcome to distribute all or part of this letter to your friends and family.
As always, shalom from Israel together with my warm wishes for a Chag Pesach kasher ve`sameach, a festive and kosher Passover and a happy Easter.
Charles
Charles M. Abelsohn
Truth be Told
The History of Hatikvah
An ardent Zionist and poet, Naphtali Herz Imber (born 1856, Zloczow, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, now Ukraine—died Oct. 8, 1909, New York, N.Y., U.S.) hoped for and dreamed of someday leaving Zloczow and making aliyah (immigrating to the Land of Israel). By age 10, Imber was a Talmudist and fluent in Hebrew. For most of his life, Imber only wrote his poems in Hebrew. In 1878, Imber penned some words about his dream, a poem he titled “Tikvatenu” (“Our Hope”). These words became “Hatikvah.”
In 1882 Imber realized his dreams and moved to the Land of Israel joining other olim (immigrants) on farming communities.
In 1886, he published his first book of poems in Jerusalem, “Barkai” (The Shining Morning Star) which included “Tikvateinu” (our Hope). His passionate poem strongly expresses the ancient hope of the Jewish people to return and reclaim their ancient homeland. Other early olim (immigrants) during this wave of immigration now called “The First Aliyah” soon embraced Imber’s poem.
Imber’s handwritten text of the poem “Tikvateinu”
In 1887, reading his poem to fellow olim (immigrants), Imber’s words caught the ear of a Jewish teenager named Samuel Cohen (1870-1940) who lived in the community of Rishon LeZion (its name meaning “First to Zion”). Cohen, originally from Romania, saw how the poem’s words brought out the emotions in the other Jewish farmers who had followed their own hopes and dreams to the Land of Israel.
Shmuel Cohen, then still young (17 or 18 years old) with a musical background, after witnessing the emotional responses of the Jewish farmers who had heard the poem, decided to sing the poem by using a folk song melody he knew from Romania and making it into a song. Cohen was not aware of the Jewish roots of the Romanian folk song. Cohen’s musical adaptation served as a catalyst and facilitated the poem’s rapid spread throughout the Zionist communities of Palestine.
Shmuel Cohen Naphtali Imber
With both words and music in place, “Hatikvah” as we know it was born. The words of “Hatikvah” (which literally means “The Hope”) are hopeful and inspiring. And these words (which you can read in English in full below) have been inspiring Jewish people for nearly a century and a half. Please note how the future (to be a free nation in our land) is linked through the present (an eye gazes now) to the past (the two-thousand-year hope), exactly as Rabbi Sacks described the Haggadah, connecting the past through the present to the future.
It was adopted as the anthem of the “Lovers of Zion”, and later of the Zionist Movement at the First Zionist Congress in 1897.
In its current version, Hatikvah incorporates only the first stanza from the original poem. The remaining eight stanzas focus on the establishment of a sovereign Israeli nation, a hope fulfilled with the founding of the State of Israel.
I mentioned earlier that the Romanian folk song had Jewish roots.
“Wherever you look at Hatikvah, there is a story. Peel off the layers and you will see that, not only is there an endless history, there is also a yearning for an eternal future.” That is what concert pianist and musicologist Dr. Astrith (Esterita) Baltsan wrote in her book, “Hatikvah – Past, Present, Future.”
In her multimedia presentation, Dr. Balstan divides Hatikvah into three parts: melody, lyrics, and orchestration. Each element of the song, she said, proved the strength and unity of the Jewish people. She also detailed the histories of those involved in creating the song and shared her amazing discoveries.
Most people attribute the music of Hatikvah to the familiar Smetana poem “My Country” which included Die Moldau. This is incorrect. Actually, it was picked up by 12-year-old Amadeus Mozart who heard the folk tune in Italy and incorporated it into one of his compositions. He took the music to Prague where Smetana adopted it and it became part of his Czech nationally inspired symphony poem.
As already mentioned, the original roots of the melody are actually Jewish.
Dr. Baltsan discovered in her revolutionary research, that the melody of Hatikvah is based on a Jewish Sephardic version of “Birkat Tal”, the prayer for dew, composed by Rabbi Yitzchak Bar Sheshet in Toledo, Spain, in 1400. [On the first day of the spring festival of Passover, Jews still today change one line in their daily prayers: instead of asking God for rain, they ask God for dew].
After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the Jews who fled Spain found temporary refuge in Italy, Holland, the Balkans, etc. That explains how the tune of the prayer for dew meandered around Europe and emerged in several different versions, including a 16th-century classical piece, “La Mantovana,” by the Italian composer Cenci; a 17th-century Baroque fugue; a Mozart piano variation; a Slovenian folk tune; the Flemish Ik zag Cecilia komen, the Ukrainian Kateryna Kucheryava, even the Scottish song “My mistress is prettie,” a Swedish symphony; the famed French composer Camille Saint-Saens used the melody in his piece “Rhapsodie Britonne” and, probably most importantly, a Romanian farmer’s folk song.
When Cohen set Imber’s lyrics to the tune of a Romanian folk song he knew, the poem which began with the musical Jewish prayer for dew sung in synagogue on the first day of Passover, had come full circle.
As has been shown in this Letter, Hatikvah is a song of hope, sung in both joyful times, as well as tragic.
Like everything else about the Jews, probably there is not a people in the world who have a national anthem with a melody that has gone through so many countries and so many versions of its origins. It’s been wandering around for centuries until finally coming to rest in the Land of Israel at the end of the 19th century.
Well before the modern State of Israel was established, and more than a hundred years before the song was officially recognized as the Jewish state’s anthem, “Hatikvah” held special meaning for the Jewish people. It was popular with the early Zionists and the attendees at multiple Zionist Congresses sang “Hatikvah” at their meetings. Sessions at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901 and the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel in 1903 concluded with the singing of the poem.
Although the poem was sung at subsequent congresses, it was only at the Eighteenth Zionist Congress in Prague in 1933 that a motion passed formally adopting “Hatikvah” as the anthem of the Zionist movement.
As the 20th century and its many conflicts and unrests dawned, the Jewish people continued looking toward Zion and continued finding hope in this song. After WWI and the British Mandate, which gave England control over the Land of Israel (Palestine), the British even banned “Hatikvah” for a short period, for fear of it inspiring Jewish uprisings. Since, as early as 1919, the Jewish radio station was forbidden to play Hatikvah, the radio instead played Smetana’s Die Moldau. The British could not blacklist a work of classical music!
World War One: A Jewish Fighting Force sings Hatikvah.
In March 1915 the Zion Mule Corps became the first regular Jewish fighting force – with a distinctively Jewish emblem and flag – to take an active part in a war since the defeat of the Bar Kochba Revolt 2000 years ago. The Zion Mule Corps was a military unit comprising of about 650 Russian Jewish émigrés from Palestine and Jews from Egypt. Some of its men later formed the core of what was to become the modern Israeli army. General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief of the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force in the Dardenelles, later wrote in his diary, ‘I have here, fighting under my orders, a purely Jewish unit – the Zion Mule Corps. As far as I know, this is the first time in the Christian era such a thing has happened. They have shown great courage taking supplies up to the line under heavy fire’ and proved ‘invaluable to us.’
The commander of the Zion Mule Corps, Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, DSO, an elegant Boer War veteran of southern Irish Protestant origin, had been born in Dublin in 1867. Patterson was knowledgeable about Jewish history and sympathetic to the Zionist cause, and as a young man had read all he could of Jewish military and religious history. Captain Trumpeldor was second-in-command.
The Dardanelles campaign of the First World War, which took place between April 1915 and January 1916 and included the battles of Gallipoli, was designed to spearhead an Allied invasion through southern Turkey to Istanbul, to defeat Turkey and in this way release Allied men and resources from the Middle East to fight in Europe, thereby shortening the War and saving lives and money.
The campaign is of Jewish interest not only because of the number of individual Jewish servicemen who fought and died there but the presence of the famous Zion Mule Corps.
Intense training went on for only three weeks as they were under orders to sail soon for Gallipoli to supply front-line troops with food, water, and ammunition. The newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force to Gallipolli, General Sir Ian Hamilton, carried out a spot inspection and was delighted with the workman-like appearance of the Corps after so little training. At Passover, which began on 30 March 1915, Patterson, known to his men as the ‘Collon-el’, fought unfriendly attitudes in high places to procure his men Kosher food and Matzah for the celebrations in which he participated. At the end of their training, the Corps paraded and marched 3 miles to the Great Synagogue in Alexandria where they were blessed by the Grand Rabbi and cheered by the local population. The Corps then sailed on 17 April 1915 in two ships, HMT Hymettus (which took the two ‘Palestinian’ troops and the HQ company) and HMT Anglo-Egyptian carrying thirty days of forage for the mules and rations for the men. As they left Alexandria harbour, the band of the USS Tennessee played a farewell march. But the men of the Zion Mule Corps on the Hymettus could be heard singing the Hatikvah, the Zionist anthem.
The voyage to Lemnos – springboard for the attack on Gallipoli – was uneventful save for an unsuccessful submarine attack on the French transport ship Manitou, just in front of those of the Mule Corps. The volunteers did learn, however, that the Jewish officers were not permitted to eat in the British officers’ mess, at which Trumpeldor protested strongly to Patterson, but in vain.
As for the fighting, the Jewish unit exceeded expectations. A Distinguished Conduct Medal was awarded to Private M. Groushkowsky, who, near Krithia on 5 May 1915, prevented his mules from stampeding under heavy bombardment and despite being wounded in both arms, delivered the ammunition. Trumpeldor was shot through the shoulder but refused to leave the battlefield. Patterson later wrote: “Many of the Zionists whom I thought somewhat lacking in courage showed themselves fearless to a degree when under heavy fire, while Captain Trumpeldor actually revelled in it, and the hotter it became the more he liked it …” Gallipoli was the first known occasion that Hatikvah was sung in a military setting.
1st September 1939: The Tiger Hill
World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. The conflict left Europe in ruins, cost millions of lives, and proved a most crushing blow to the Jews of Europe, unspeakable and unfathomable in scope.
The saga of Tiger Hill, while at first glance a footnote in the larger scope of Jewish history, epitomizes the painful predicament of the Jews in the Second World War. While the British were fighting those whom the Germans marked for mass murder, at the same time the fading Empire was obstructing the Zionist settlement of the Land of Israel. The 1939 MacDonald White Paper, known to the Jews of the yishuv (settlement in the Land of Israel) as “the Black Paper,” prohibited more than 75,000 Jews from escaping Europe over a period of five years and settling in Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel – thereby assuring an Arab majority.
SS Tiger Hill was a 42-year-old cargo ship that was one of the major vessels involved in the Aliyah (immigration) movement.
The Tiger Hill, a 1,481-ton ship, was built in 1887 by Archibald McMillan & Son Ltd., Dumbarton, Scotland. The cargo vessel originally sailed as the SS Thrace in the period 1887-1910. It then went through various names and owners until it was renamed as the SS Tiger Hill and was owned by the General Steamship Company of Panama and sailed under a Panamanian flag. However, the crew was Greek.
The ship sailed from Constanţa, Romania to Palestine on August 3, 1939, laden with between 750-800 Jewish refugees. The refugees were overwhelmingly of Czech, Austrian and German origin (being the three territories the Nazis then controlled) plus some from the Free City of Danzig. Hundreds of bunk beds had been assembled within the holds of the cargo ship. Passengers were allowed a maximum of 25 kgs of luggage.
The voyage was a very long one. Towards the end of the voyage, the Tiger Hill rendezvoused with another Panamanian vessel, the S.S. Frossoula off the coast of Lebanon, on August 29, 1939, and several hundred more Jewish refugees were transshipped to the “Tiger Hill”. Many of the refugees were malnourished and dysentery broke out amongst the passengers. The Frossoula (another Panamanian-flagged Greek ship) had set sail even earlier (from Sulina in Romania on 29 May 1939) with its voyage having been organized by a few Slovakian Jews from Bratislava with the agreement of the Nazi government.
The ship did not have approval to land, therefore the passengers were technically illegal immigrants in the eyes of the British, who then controlled the Mandate.
Hours after the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, far away from battle, but on the same September 1, 1939, the SS Tiger Hill with its now 1,400 illegal Jewish refugees was intercepted and fired on by Royal Navy gunboats off Tel Aviv and ran ashore on Frishman Beach. Two passengers [Dr. Robert Schneider and Zvi Binder] were killed when the vessel was strafed by British planes.
As the British Mandate authorities trained their searchlights on the ship, the Jews on board sang Hatikvah in defiance. Crowds gathered on the beach and cheered as the refugees descended from the stranded ship.
The two Jews shot by the British died, so the first Jews to die in the second world war were killed by the British, not the Nazis.
The Tiger Hill Memorial
Below is a picture of Tiger Hill, stranded off Tel Aviv`s Frishman beach. For those who know Tel Aviv, it is in the vicinity of where the Dan Hotel now stands.
Hatikvah is a song of hope, sung in joyful times, as well as tragic. The SS could not stop them: In 1944, Czech Jews spontaneously sang Hatikvah at the entry to the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chamber
“Hatikvah” has served as a source of hope and inspiration for Jews who have found themselves in the most dire circumstances. During the darkest hours of the Holocaust, when hope was lost, Jews defied their tormentors by singing the song’s powerful lyrics.
Filip Muller was a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz—a Jewish slave laborer who was kept alive because he helped take corpses from the gas chambers to the crematoria. One of the very few Sonderkommandos to survive the Holocaust, Muller later described the remarkable behavior of one group of Czech Jews who were being marched toward the gas chambers and were told what was about to happen:
“Their voices grew subdued and tense, their movements forced, their eyes stared as though they had been hypnotized… Suddenly a voice began to sing. Others joined in, and the sound swelled into a mighty choir. They sang first the Czechoslovak national anthem and then the Hebrew song “Hatikvah”.
Enraged SS men tried to halt the singing by beating the Jews into submission, Muller wrote. “It was as if they regarded the singing as a last kind of protest which they were determined to stifle if they could.” But the SS was unable to stop them. “To be allowed to die together was the only comfort left to these people… And when they sang Hatikvah, now the national anthem of the state of Israel, they were glancing into the future, but it was a future that they would not be allowed to see. To me, the bearing of my countrymen seemed an exemplary gesture of national honor and national pride which stirred my soul.”
Overwhelmed by feelings of remorse, Muller tried to join the group as they entered the gas chamber, but they pushed him back out. A woman implored him, “Your death won’t give us back our lives. That’s no way. You must get out alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us.” Muller survived. As a result, today we know about the singing of Hatikvah at the very door of the gas chambers.
A diversion from Hatikvah – A Jewish Religious Service
While Hatikvah is the beautiful expression of hope, a Jewish religious service in Germany may have been the concrete expression that the Hope is one step closer to being fulfilled. Following the entry of the Allied forces into western Germany in mid-September 1944, Aachen was the first German city captured by the Allied forces in World War 2 after a horrific three-week battle, on 21 October 1944. Shortly thereafter, a Shabbat service was held for United States Jewish servicemen.
Here is the recording, broadcast from Germany, of the first Jewish religious service held in Germany one week later, on Shabbat, 29 October 1944 in Aachen. The service took place in an open field near the site of a demolished synagogue while shooting continued in the area of the service. There is no evidence that Hatikvah was sung.
Like many veterans, Max Fuchs did not talk much about what he did in the war. His children knew he landed at Omaha Beach. Sometimes, they were allowed to feel the shrapnel still lodged in his chest.
And once, he had told them, he sang as the cantor in a Jewish prayer service on the battlefield.
On Oct. 29, 1944, at the edge of a fierce fight for control of the city of Aachen, Germany, a correspondent for NBC radio introduced the modest Sabbath service like this:
“We bring you now a special broadcast of historic significance: The first Jewish religious service broadcast from Germany since the advent of Hitler.”
Mr. Fuchs, (1922-2018), 87 when he gave this interview in 2009 and living in New York, on the Upper West Side, was 22 that day at Aachen.
“I was just as much scared as anyone else,” he said in an interview in his Manhattan apartment. “But since I was the only one who could do it, I tried my best.”
Well-known in its time, the battlefield service became lost in obscurity, where it might have remained except for an archivist’s chance find and then, fast forward, released on YouTube (see below) where the 1944 service has drawn hundreds of thousands of hits.
His performance on that 1944 broadcast, alongside Army chaplain Rabbi Sidney Lefkowitz, for some 50 Jewish-American soldiers, was heard throughout the United States. A special poignancy was brought to the 10-minute open-air service, partly because of his well-trained, stately voice, partly because a few seconds before he began the traditional “Yigdal” hymn, and for the three minutes it took to finish it, the crack of artillery shells exploding nearby could be heard clearly in the background.
“The emotion was tremendous,” Fuchs said of the service in an interview for the American Jewish Committee in 2009. “The soldiers had heard of all the atrocities. Most of them had families that perished in the Holocaust. We had so many of my family.”
A private first class in the First Infantry Division, Mr. Fuchs volunteered to sing that day because there was no cantor available. In fact, Mr. Fuchs had been studying to become a cantor, when the war broke out. But he had left his studies and was drafted, and never considered the chaplaincy.
After the war he studied cantorial music and served as the cantor of the Bayside Jewish Center in Queens, and also worked as a diamond cutter in Manhattan. His parents had emigrated from Poland in 1934, when he was 12. Some of his aunts, uncles and cousins who remained were killed after the German invasion in 1939, he said in the interview. He wanted to fight the Nazis.
Max Fuchs, second from left, helped lead the first battlefield prayer service for Jewish soldiers in Germany in 1944 that was broadcast in the United States. Hatikvah may not have been sung but there was certainly Tikvah, hope, that the end was in sight.
The service, broadcast throughout Germany, immediately captured the attention of all Americans; the response was so profound that it was later re-aired.
The soldiers who attended the service at Aachen had survived Omaha Beach, one of the bloodiest sites of the Normandy invasion. These were men who belonged to a group of people that had been deemed by the Nazis to be so cowardly that they should be exterminated. These Jewish soldiers were now standing on German soil, singing ancient Jewish prayers, equal members of the Allied advancing forces. It was a symbol that the war was coming to an end, Jews were involved in the defeat of Germany and that Judaism and the Jewish people would survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZihm6VlYjo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dj-Y86Hoc0
Hatikvah in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
On April 15, 1945, the 11th Armoured Division of the British Army liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. Sixty-thousand prisoners were living in the camp when the troops arrived, most of them seriously ill. Thousands more lay dead and unburied on the camp grounds. BBC reporter Patrick Gordon Walker was among the press corps that entered Bergen-Belsen with the British troops that day. Over the next few weeks, he documented what he saw, recording the first Sabbath service attended by Bergen-Belson survivors conducted just five days following the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, interviewing survivors and speaking to British soldiers about what they had witnessed at liberation. One of the people who heard Walker’s radio dispatches was folk-music producer Moe Asch. An engineer at the time at New York radio station WEVD, Asch recorded the shortwave broadcast onto an acetate disc. Decades later, this remarkable recording was re-discovered at the Smithsonian Institution by historian Henry Sapoznik.
The service was led by Rev Leslie H Hardman, Senior Jewish Chaplain to the British 2nd Army, and former camp inmates, Rabbi H Helfgott of Yugoslovia and Rabbi B Goldfinger of Poland. The BBC’s veteran broadcaster, Richard Dimbleby, sounded on the verge of tears as he witnessed the survivors singing Hatikvah. “Around us are corpses that there has not been time to clear,” said Dimbleby.
The surviving 60,000 prisoners had seen and suffered unbelievable horrors. But they still had hope. It was the first time many of them had taken part in a Jewish service in six years. With what little energy they had left, they sang Hatikvah. LISTEN:
https://ps-af.facebook.com/WorldJewishCong/videos/hatikvah-in-bergen-belsen/10155204080229805/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWOkML4A8sU
Here is a photo of the service:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205214665
Purim and Passover in Goebbels’ Castle
The Purim Jewish Service at Schloss Reydt
As pointed out by Rabbi Sacks, Passover and Hope (Tikvah) are one. Schloss Rheydt, the Renaissance-era palace in Mönchengladbach, had been given as a vacation home to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels was a native of the area and the palace had been given to him as a vacation home. Though Schloss Reydt was centuries old and associated with various noble families, to the Americans it was “Goebbels’ Castle.”
By early March, the Americans had already seized the palace and immediately recognized it as a useful place for both practical and symbolic reasons. G.I.s had been sleeping and eating meals there. In news reports, soldiers described a beautiful building with each room decorated with the Goebbels family seal. Men who’d grown used to the hardship of wartime service reveled in the luxury of the castle. But it was the fact that they were showing up the Nazis that was the best. There was no better way to do this than holding Jewish religious services.
The first Jewish service at Schloss Rheydt was for Purim. The service was conducted on March 8th, a week after the holiday. The service was attended by front-line troops who were too busy fighting the previous week to pause for the traditional observances. The irony of observing Jewish holidays commemorating the liberation of the Jewish people (both Purim and Passover) in a palace decorated with nazi symbols and given as a tribute to a nazi leader, Goebbels, was lost on no one.
Chaplain Manuel Poliakoff and his men draped a Jewish Welfare Board flag with the star of David over a table. The Jewish chaplain’s symbol was hung in the window. Below the windows, the G.I.s left the German flag with the large swastika in the center–visible for all to see. The Ark and Torah were placed on top of the swastika. The symbolism was clear. What had once been home to the Nazis was now home to Jewish celebration and triumph over those who sought the destruction of the Jews.
Chaplain Poliakoff assisted by Pfc. Armolda [Arnold] Reich and Cpl. Martin Willen “raised their voices in an ancient Hebrew hymn of jubilation sung at Purim to celebrate the deliverance of the Jews from an earlier Hitler – Haman of Persia, who long held the Hebrew in captivity in Biblical Times.”
A non-Jewish soldier, Captain Frederic E. Pamp, jr. attended the service and described the pleasure he derived: “It was a satisfying experience, as I have ever had in my life, to hear the Hebrew service sung in the Great Hall of Goebbels’ own chateau. Whatever else this war may have been fought for, you men of Jewish ancestry in our army can know that you are the symbols of American power on the side of justice, mercy, and equality.”
Passover came three weeks later. Again, it was time to turn Goebbels’ castle into a house of Jewish worship. Being at Schloss Reydt with 300 Jewish soldiers in 1945 was a cause for celebration that perfectly complemented the message of Passover. As Hitler had become the modern Haman at Purim, a few weeks later he was the modern Pharaoh.
Sidney Talmud was placed in charge of the food. He recalled the experience in an essay written decades later:
“In the middle of March, 1945, I was approached by Lt. Shubow, our Jewish chaplain. He planned to conduct Passover services, and since I was the only Jewish cook in the battalion, would I supervise the food arrangements. The next two weeks were hectic. I solicited all canned goods from our Jewish soldiers and they responded generously.
Sidney Talmud
I soon had a truckload of food. Erev Pesach came and our chaplain directed our convoy several miles to an imposing building called “Schloss Reydt.” This was Goebbels’ castle. Directly off the veranda, where I set up two gasoline camp-stoves, was a gigantic banquet room that would easily accommodate the 300 GIs I would feed. On one wall was a picture of Hitler and one of my buddies had scrawled “Kaput” across it. For the next two or three hours I was too busy to deal with emotions. They came later. While I was frying latkes a fellow came by and inquired what I was doing. I offered him some pancakes while I explained our presence. He asked me lots of questions and that night his Associated Press story flew across the Atlantic cable and were published in many newspapers. My parents were interviewed by Time and other papers, they planted trees for me in Israel, and my mother, rest her soul, discovered that I had lied to her. I wasn’t having a great time in Paris after all. However, as mothers will, she forgave me. When all the latkes were fried and eaten, I joined my comrades in the Passover songs. We had seen the atrocities and now we were savoring some small measure of vengeance and victory.
The Associated Press story quoted Chaplain Joseph Shubow: “This is indeed retribution. When Goebbels decreed the burning of the synagogues seven years ago, he little imagined that we would one day eat potato pancakes on Passover in his own home.”
Talmud summed up his feelings this way: “…there wasn’t a seder when I didn’t for a moment envision Hitler’s portrait with ‘Kaput’ scrawled across it and a tray of sizzling latkes just removed from the hot oil. And when the youngest completes his Four Questions and the company responds ‘Avadim Hayenu,’ (We were slaves) I still get the sense of having been there.” (There do not appear to be any photos of the seder. The photo of the service shown above is from Purim, conducted by Rabbi Poliakoff. The Passover service and seder was conducted by Rabbi Shubow).
Ship Full of Holocaust Survivors Sing Hatikva
It’s 1945 and a ship called the “Unafraid,” full of Holocaust survivors from Buchenwald, have just been informed that they are going to be arrested by the British for the crime of trying to get into Israel. The passengers come out of hiding, raise the Israeli flag, and sing Hatikva, the future national anthem of the Jewish state.
Holocaust Survivors Sing Hativka on the Exodus Refugee ship while being Boarded by British Troops.
Despite being surrounded by the British Navy, rammed by British ships and threatened physically, the 4,515, including 655 children, Holocaust survivors on the Exodus refused to listen to the British orders or let them board the ship.
Even though they would see Palestine for just a short time, when the Jews in Haifa began singing Hatikva and then were joined by the passengers on the ship, it was a tearful, emotional and uplifting entrance into Palestine.
The British tried to send the passengers back to France, but they refused to get off the boats for three weeks. When the British sent these Jews back to the “Death Land”, Germany, it became a PR disaster for the British. Thus, these defenseless survivors were able to defeat the will of the British navy and sway world opinion in favor of the Jews for the first time. The events turned the tide of public opinion in favor of the creation of a Jewish state. Exodus became known as “the ship that launched a nation.”
Hatikva, the Song of Hope, which in 2004 became the national anthem of the Jewish State, is sung here by Holocaust refugees fleeing Europe on their way to freedom in Israel. Hatikvah is sung by Jewish refugees from the Nazis, as British troops board the Exodus Refugee ship in 1947 to enforce a blockade on Jews seeking refuge in Israel. Below: Refugees on the Exodus.
Please note: Only the first 1.11 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CVLPOY9nc0
Germany, six weeks before the Proclamation of the State of Israel
In Germany, shortly before the proclamation of the Jewish State, two thousand years since the destruction of the previous Jewish State by the Romans in 70CE. On 2 April 1948, delegates on the dais sing Hatikva (the Jewish National Anthem) at the closing session of the Third Congress of the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in the US Zone in Bad Reichenhall, near Munich.
Orchestration of Hatikvah, 1948.
Dr. Balstan divided Hatikvah into three parts: melody, lyrics, and orchestration. We have discussed the history of the lyrics and the melody. Let`s look at the orchestration.
Longtime Israel Philharmonic conductor and musical director Zubin Mehta has said that the orchestration of Hatikvah by Bernardino Molinari, the version now used almost exclusively by orchestras, “was the most beautiful national anthem of them all”. Molinari was an Italian orchestra conductor. In October 1948, he arrived in Palestine on a British plane, claiming the Virgin Mary had appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to help the Jews. Molinari spent three years with the Palestine Orchestra, and one of his first endeavors was to orchestrate Hatikvah. It was Molinari who conducted the performance of Hatikvah (not yet the official national anthem) when David Ben Gurion declared independence in Tel Aviv in May 1948. Then, as Israel began to hunt down Nazi collaborators, Molinari disappeared. It emerged that he was put on trial in Italy as a Fascist sympathizer who had corresponded with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. As head of an orchestra, he had betrayed Jews to the Fascists. His flight to Palestine was a failed attempt to evade punishment, or perhaps to pay penance. He was found guilty and died, isolated, in a monastery.
1978 Golda and Barbra: Perhaps the finest version of Hatikvah
- A United States nationally televised Hollywood spectacular salute to Israel to mark its 30th year of independence.
The Stars Salute Israel at 30, filmed live, features every Hollywood star you can think of, including names that still resonate today, from Elizabeth Taylor to Paul Newman, a two-hour-long festival of songs, sketches, and dance, including, among others, Barry Manilow, Henry Fonda, Henry Winkler (aka The Fonz, dressed as a sabra), Gene Kelly, Sammy Davis Jr, and even tennis player, Billie Jean King.
The evening of The Stars Salute Israel at 30 was topped off by Barbra Streisand interviewing Israel’s former prime minister Golda Meir, which was followed by, perhaps, the definitive version of Hatikvah, Barbra Streisand singing Hatikvah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uPHaioopKM
Official, at long last!
Yes, for more than half a century, “Hatikvah” unofficially served as the national anthem of Israel. But decades later, in November 2004, the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) at last officially proclaimed “Hatikvah” to be Israel’s national anthem. Actually, Hatikvah had long since been adopted first by the Jewish residents of the Land of Israel and subsequently by Israelis after the establishment of the State of Israel as the Jewish/Israeli anthem.
Unbelievably, for more than 50 years, the song sung by the early pioneers, by Jewish soldiers in World War 1, at Zionist conferences, by illegal immigrants, even by Jews being led to the gas ovens as well as by Jews who had survived the concentration camps, had no official recognition. But history had already determined otherwise. It was obvious that all those Jews who sung Hatikvah had long ago decided that this song (“Our hope has not yet been lost/The two thousand-year-old hope,/To be a free people in our own land”) would be the national anthem of the Jewish people. Until November 10, 2004, it was sung by everyone but officially chosen by no one.
When the State of Israel was established in 1948, “Hatikvah” was unofficially regarded as the national anthem. It was sung on all official occasions. It took the government 56 years to “decide” and only in 2004 officially select Hatikvah as Israel`s national anthem. The casting vote in favour of Hatikvah as the official national anthem was cast by a Druze, Ayoub Kara, who hails from Daliat al-Carmel, where Imber had at one time been secretary, and Kara`s grandfather had been an assistant, to Sir Laurance Olifant.
Hatikvah, The Hope for a free and sovereign Jewish State, had come full circle from the day when the penniless and alcoholic Imber had read his poem aloud in Rishon LeZion in 1887, when a teenager, Shmuel Cohen, then set Naphtali Imber`s poem, unknowingly, to Jewish liturgical music composed by Rabbi Yitzchak Bar Sheshet in 1400 and eventually, when in 1948, Hatikvah was orchestrated by Bernardino Molinari, a wartime Italian fascist.
At the Passover seder, when we read the Haggadah (narrative), the participants, us, declare that we came out of Egypt 4000 years ago with hope for the future. As stated in the Haggadah and emphasized by Rabbi Sacks, it is Hatikvah, Hope, which links the memory of the past with the hope and inspiration for the future. It is no wonder that the early pioneers, who lived on hope and little else, dreaming to establish a home in the Jewish ancestral home, immediately recognized the powerful message of Hatikvah.
