Barletta, a coastal city in Puglia, Italy, is an unexpected place for a massive archive of concentration camp music. Yet one of its citizens, Francesco Lotoro, has spent decades amassing one of the world’s largest collections of this kind.

On Jan. 27, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Maestro Lotoro led a concert of this music in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Lotoro’s collection includes not only music from the Nazi camps and ghettoes, but also the camps of the USSR and Hirohito’s Japan, and other sites of mass internment.

Amid a linguistically, tonally and thematically diverse array of works performed, six were Yiddish songs, one of which had its American premiere.

On entering the Kennedy Center, I immediately encountered a rather menacing photo of the current president, along with those of his vice president and their wives. I rushed to the ticket window, got my ticket, passed through security, and approached the Eisenhower Theater.

President Eisenhower’s bust gazes down upon visitors as they enter. It occurred to me that this was a fitting mekabl ponim (welcome) for a concert of music written by martyrs and survivors of the Holocaust, given then-General Eisenhower’s prescient campaign to film, document and expose the Nazi camps.

I was torn away from this musing by the ten-minute warning chime — a descending arpeggiated major chord (do-sol-mi-do) — and made my way inside.

Five minutes before the advertised start-time (7:30 PM), the house was still sparsely seated. Given the political fallout from the president’s takeover of the Kennedy Center — I wondered if this concert would be a casualty of the ongoing audience boycott. (Since the concert, the president has announced a two-year closure of the Kennedy Center for renovations.)

At showtime, the house lights were still up, and audience members were still filing in. But when the lights finally dimmed around 7:45, the house was mostly full.

The curtain rose on Lotoro seated at the piano. He performed a wordless lullaby by Polish composer Adam Kopyciński, and without waiting for applause, rose and exited stage right. The co-organizer of the concert, Counter Extremism Project CEO and current UN Ambassador Mark Wallace, then walked on to give introductory remarks.

The Counter Extremism Project (CEP)’s webpage described the concert as “an external rental […] not produced by the Kennedy Center.” Technically true, but CEP is headed by Trump’s UN ambassador, and some of the remarks between pieces, as well as some of the speakers, indicated a partisan agenda. More on that later.

The first song of the night was the tragic Yiddish love song “Friling” (Spring), composed in the Vilna Ghetto by Avrom Brudno with lyrics by Shmerke Kaczerginski. Written after the death of Kaczerginski’s wife Barbara, “Friling” has been recorded by many artists, including the great Chava Alberstein. Lotoro’s rich but never overpowering orchestration, together with baritone Angelo De Leonardis’s expressive interpretation, were a potent combination.

Like Lotoro’s collection, the concert also featured songs written in other camp systems, in other languages, by other peoples. Lotoro has coined the term “concentrationary music” to encompass music composed in any site of mass internment. Friling was followed by several Polish works, a stunning Roma song, and one English-language serenade by an American POW.

The next Yiddish selection was Iber Fremde Vegn (Across Foreign Roads) composed around 1942 by Leibu Levin, who was imprisoned in a Soviet camp for 15 years. After an archival recording of Levin singing the song, with Yiddish lyrics projected above the stage, singer Paolo Candido rendered the lyrics in a crystal-clear Yiddish, accompanied by an appropriately restrained orchestration for a more contemplative song of exile.

Candido’s robust voice, together with expert use of gesture, masterfully conveyed the song’s themes and imagery, though no translations were provided for any of the evening’s songs. It was clear to me, at any rate, that the singers understood what they were singing, despite not being Yiddish speakers. (I later confirmed this with Lotoro.)

Then came Dort In Dem Lager (There In the Camp). I knew two nearly identical versions of this song from 1946 and 1948, but Lotoro worked with a quite different version, recalled half a century later, in 1996.

In my opinion, the 1946 version is the most melodically and lyrically complete, while the one recalled in 1996 collapsed the three verses of the “original” into one. Its rhyme scheme works, but the story it tells has internal inconsistencies. After the concert, I expressed my opinion to Lotoro. “I didn’t use that version at all,” he said of my favored 1946 version. “I completely disregarded it.”

But, as he explained, “I’m not a philologist. I’m a musicologist.” As he put it, the version he chose to arrange and perform “doesn’t cancel the original, philological version.”

Admittedly, the arrangement sung that night by soprano Anna Maria Pansini, accompanied by Lotoro on the piano, is musically the most interesting and complex, because the survivor who recalled it mixed in two lines of a second, unknown song. Lotoro’s spare, intimate arrangement— just piano and voice— counterbalanced the particularly heart-wrenching text and melody. “Sometimes, you have to feel whether a song needs piano or full orchestral accompaniment,” Lotoro told me later in the green room. “It’s important never to exaggerate.”

The song’s most powerful line is its last: Hot shoyn rakhmones, gotenyu. (Have mercy already, dear God.) Presumably, few attendees understood the Yiddish, but the anguish expressed in the song was still palpable.

Next came a US premiere: a song from Birkenau entitled In Oyshvitser Flamen (In The Flames of Auschwitz), also sung by Pansini.

The accompaniment was instrumentally richer, but still appropriately understated. One particularly devastating verse translates to:

On holy Motzei Shabbos at night / When we bless the Creator of fire’s lights / Pieces of flesh / Fall from me / Oh, when I / when I recall / How Jews burned / In the flames of Auschwitz.

Closing out the evening was a nearly-lost Yiddish song sung by actor and director Jack Garfein, Tsi Iz Mayn Harts Keyn Harts Fun Keyn Mentshn? (Is My Heart the Heart of a Human?) Archival footage of Garfein singing the song for Lotoro —  the only source for the song, because the boy who composed it was killed shortly after Garfein heard him sing it— was shown prior to De Leonardis’ performance. The first two lines translate to:

Is my heart the heart of a human being? / Do I have the right to live, or not?

Garfein’s voice is faint, but the melody is clearly in a minor key, and deeply melancholy. In Lotoro’s interpretation, however, the melody was in a major key, and his orchestration made the song into an expression of hope rather than a lament of its anonymous composer’s dehumanization by the Nazis. The music was beautiful and uplifting, but emotionally dissonant with the words. There are uplifting Yiddish songs from the WWII period, but Tsi Iz Mayn Harts isn’t among them.

For an encore, all three singers performed a rousing rendition of Der Shtrasdenhofer Hymn, a Yiddish march song from the Strasdenhof forced labor camp. The rather ironic lyrics, however, bitterly complain about the camp, where “one must march and sing.” The singers clapped to the beat, and the audience clapped along too, apparently unaware of how inappropriate it was to do so.

When I asked Lotoro, a Jew by choice, how he works with Yiddish lyrics, he said he’d never had much difficulty with Yiddish due to its similarity to German, but that he’d also had significant help with the Yiddish from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s music curator Bret Werb, and from others. He also shared that the three singers, with whom he’s worked for many years, did philological research of their own, spending significant time working with the Yiddish, Polish, and Roma texts before rehearsals. “They don’t get the score two days before, or something like that,” he told me. “I send it to them months in advance.”

Many of the introductory remarks between songs focused on voices being recovered, unsilenced, given new life. But neither lyrics nor song titles were made comprehensible to the largely anglophone American audience. What good is being heard without being understood?

Music may be the universal language, but its vocabulary is small.

Many of the evening’s remarks by non-survivor presenters focused on extremism in the abstract without any mention of far-right nationalism, or of other genocides. An Iranian dissident spoke movingly of the Iranian government’s brutal repression of her people and its sponsorship of anti-Jewish terrorism. A Cuban-American former Republican congresswoman spoke of fleeing a communist dictatorship as a child. Yet not one word was said about China’s ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs of East Turkestan. At an event organized by Trump’s UN Ambassador, this omission could not be an oversight.

It almost seemed as if there were two programs occupying the same stage that evening: one about human dignity in the face of unimaginable brutalization and mass-murder, and another about the particular extremist political ideologies that this administration has made its enemies.

For his part, Maestro Lotoro — a rather self-effacing man — didn’t say a word during the concert. He allowed the music to speak for itself, though much was lost in non-translation.

Lotoro is far from the only collector or interpreter of Holocaust music, and he has been working with “concentrationary” music longer than I have been alive. Besides, much of this precious heritage is widely accessible online. So, if I believe an interpretation misses the mark here or there, someone else can put forth another one more “faithful” to the original material.

“The real goal,” Lotoro told me, “is for all this music to go into circulation around the world.” Thanks to Lotoro’s prolific and artistically top-notch recordings— including a 24-volume album— that seems likely.

The post A moving but problematic concert for Holocaust Remembrance Day appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Since the end of World War II, Vienna has functioned as an Ellis Island for Jewish refugees from Europe and the Middle East, a place where survivors, dissidents and religious minorities arrived with little more than documents and hope, and departed toward new lives.

That role has come to an end: HIAS is shutting down its Vienna operations and laying off dozens of employees who worked there, following the Trump administration’s decision to halt the U.S. refugee program and terminate the federal grant that funded the Resettlement Support Center in Austria, which HIAS had operated for more than 25 years.

HIAS said the move has left more than 14,000 Iranian religious minorities — including hundreds of Jews and thousands of Baha’i, Christians, Zoroastrians and Sabean Mandaeans — stranded in Iran after having already been vetted and approved for resettlement in the United States. Several hundred Eritrean and other asylum seekers in Israel have also lost their pathway to resettlement following the closure.

“This decision leaves thousands of families in danger, with no pathway to safety,” Beth Oppenheim, HIAS’ chief executive officer, said in a statement.

The Trump administration has said the suspension of the refugee program is necessary because local communities lack the capacity to absorb additional arrivals, citing concerns about assimilation. In an executive order, the White House said refugee admissions should resume only if they align with U.S. national interests and do not compromise public safety, national security or taxpayer resources.

Oppenheim said HIAS continues to advocate for the restoration of refugee admissions and the reopening of lawful pathways for people fleeing religious persecution, and continues to provide services to thousands of refugees and asylum seekers around the world.

“For generations, the United States has stood as a beacon for those fleeing religious oppression, and we will fight to preserve that legacy,” Oppenheim said.

The closure of the Vienna office marks the end of an institution whose history closely mirrors the modern history of Jewish displacement.

Known then as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS began operating in Vienna in the aftermath of World War II, when Austria became a central transit country for Jewish survivors leaving displaced persons camps across Europe. During that period, the organization helped resettle roughly 150,000 Holocaust survivors to communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, South America and later Israel.

Vienna again emerged as a refugee crossroads after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, when thousands of Jews fled Soviet-backed repression and passed through Austria on their way to new homes overseas. In later decades, the city became a key waypoint for Jews leaving the Soviet Union, particularly from the late 1970s through the late 1980s.

During that period, Vienna served as the first stop in what became known as the “Vienna-Rome pipeline,” the migration route used by more than 400,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union as they resettled in the United States and other countries. For U.S.-bound refugees, the Vienna office coordinated case preparation, documentation and interviews with American authorities.

Singer-songwriter Regina Spektor and Google co-founder Sergey Brin are among the many prominent Jews who passed through Austria on their journey from the Soviet Union to the United States.

“If your family arrived in the postwar period, or through the Soviet Jewry movement, HIAS’ office in Vienna may have been their gateway to the United States,” Oppenheim said.

In its modern form, HIAS’ operations in Austria became a U.S.-funded Resettlement Support Center in 2000, operating under contract with the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. One of nine such centers worldwide, the Vienna-based operation focused primarily on Iranian religious minorities and vulnerable asylum seekers in Israel.

Between 2001 and 2025, HIAS said it resettled more than 33,000 people from Iranian religious minority communities to the United States through the Austria center and its suboffices. The work was conducted under the Lautenberg Amendment, a U.S. law first enacted in 1990 to facilitate the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union and later expanded to include persecuted religious minorities from Iran.

Since Trump paused refugee resettlement on his first day in office, no one has entered the United States through the Lautenberg program.

The post HIAS shuts Vienna office that aided generations of refugees after Trump pulls funding appeared first on The Forward.

Right-wing political commentator Candace Owens speaks during an event held by national conservative political movement ‘Turning Point’, in Detroit, Michigan, US, June 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Rebecca Cook

Candace Owens’ recent viral post conflating Israel, ISIS, the Star of David, paganism, and the abuse of children is not merely wrong or provocative. It is something more revealing — and more dangerous.

Owens claims that “despite Israel’s best efforts to destroy the ancient world in the Middle East — relics still remain and reveal the truth.” She asserts that “the Kiddush cup is the symbol of Judaism,” that the Star of David has “ALWAYS been associated with Canaanite cults and Baal worship,” and that Aleister Crowley and his “occult friends who abuse children utilize this symbol in their ceremonial magic.” She pairs these claims with an image she falsely identifies as a “2nd-century temple in Baalbek, Lebanon,” adds that ISIS “has a knack for destroying ancient Canaanite temples,” and ends with the insinuation: “Who do you think controls ISIS?”

This is not argument. It is an indictment assembled from fragments — misidentified images, decontextualized symbols, and recycled antisemitic tropes — designed to contaminate. The method is deliberate: connect enough charged elements and let the audience complete the accusation without ever having to state it openly.

Owens urges her audience to “wake up” to what she presents as a hidden truth: that Jewish symbols are not Jewish at all; that Judaism is secretly pagan or occult; that Jewish ritual objects are implicated in sinister practices; that Jews or Israel are responsible for the destruction of ancient history; and that shadowy forces tied to Jewish symbolism abuse children. The implications are unmistakable.

What is most striking is the absence of evidence. No archaeology. No primary sources. No theology. No peer-reviewed history. Just insinuation stacked on insinuation, sealed with the conspiratorial refrain to “wake up.”

This is not political criticism. It is ideological collapse.

In modern terms, this is the QAnonization of antisemitism.

There is a reason that Owens’ post contains no factual evidence: it doesn’t exist. 

In its place appears the oldest components of conspiratorial antisemitism: secret knowledge reserved for the initiated; symbols stripped of historical context and recast as sinister codes; insinuations of ritual corruption; and the projection of vast, hidden power onto Jews.

This is not “thinking outside the box.” It is backwards thinking. Owens’ move is not modern. It is medieval.

The most revealing element of Owens’ post is not its historical illiteracy, but its moral destination: the insinuation of child abuse.

This is not incidental. It is the endpoint of the narrative. From medieval blood libels to modern conspiracy movements, antisemitism reliably converges on the same accusation. Jews are charged with violating what society holds most sacred because the charge is designed not to persuade, but to obliterate moral resistance.

Once Jews are framed as abusers of children, no counterargument matters. No evidence is sufficient. Debate becomes impossible.

Owens did not stumble into this trope. She arrived precisely where antisemitic narratives always arrive when they run unchecked.

Ancient Israel outlawed child sacrifice when it was widespread across the Near East. It denied divinity to kings, subordinated rulers to law, and insisted that power itself was morally accountable. Human beings were no longer fuel for the gods; every individual life was sacred. To accuse Jews of Baal worship is not confusion. It is inversion — the projection of pagan cruelty onto the civilization that dismantled it.

Furthermore, Owens’ claims about Jewish symbols collapse under even minimal scrutiny.

The Star of David is not an occult emblem. It appears as a Jewish symbol in late antiquity, with archaeological evidence from the synagogue at Capernaum dating to the second century CE, and it recurs throughout late antique and medieval Jewish life. Its adoption reflects Jewish continuity, not pagan borrowing. 

The Kiddush cup is a sanctification vessel used to bless wine — on Shabbat and holidays — but it was never the “symbol of Judaism” as Owens’ claims. Its purpose is to mark sacred time, family gatherings, and restraint. There is no historical, textual, or anthropological evidence tying it to anything resembling Owens’ claims or insinuations. 

The image Owens presents as a “2nd-century Canaanite temple” at Baalbek is fictitious. Baalbek’s monumental remains — the Temples of Jupiter, Bacchus, and Venus — are Roman imperial constructions from the first to third centuries CE. Baalbek was a Roman city, not a Canaanite cult center.

Owens’ follow-on post fares no better. She points to the historical appearance of a six-pointed star — often called the “Seal of Solomon” — in Moroccan iconography and on some flags and coins in the 19th and early 20th centuries as supposed proof that the symbol is not Jewish.

This is a classic example of conspiracy reasoning masquerading as historical insight. 

Yes, the hexagram appeared in Moroccan art and occasionally on flags prior to 1915, when Sultan Yusef formally replaced it with a five-pointed star to distinguish the national flag and emphasize Islamic symbolism. But the hexagram’s presence there proves precisely nothing about Judaism. Geometric symbols migrate across cultures. Their use in Islamic or Christian contexts does not erase their meaning within Jewish civilization — just as the crescent’s appearance outside Islam does not make it non-Islamic.

Owens takes a very limited historical fact, strips it of context, and weaponizes it to imply occult continuity and Jewish corruption.That is not history. It is symbol scavenging in service of a predetermined conclusion.

Archaeology, linguistics, epigraphy, and historical memory all point in the same direction: Jewish civilization emerged in the land of Israel, maintained continuity there for millennia, preserved its language, law, and rituals through exile, and launched a moral revolution that shaped the ethical foundations of the Western and Islamic worlds alike.

When that evidence proves stubborn, opponents do not refine their claims. They abandon the field. Israel is no longer wrong — it is demonic. Jews are no longer mistaken — they are occult.

Antisemitism does not begin with expulsions, pogroms or gas chambers. It begins when lies are repackaged as insight, when conspiracy theories replace scholarship, and when hatred is disguised as revelation.

Candace Owens’ post is not mere controversy. Its popularity — over 1.4 million views as of this writing — is the symptom and proof of how far this intellectual rot has already spread.

And history is unforgiving to societies that mistake intellectual decay for courage — until the consequences arrive in forms no one can plausibly claim to have misunderstood.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.