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A moving tribute to Soviet Jewry, with uncomfortable contemporary echoes
The first Yiddish Glory album, the Grammy-nominated Lost Songs of WWII, was, give or take, 70 years in the making.
The idea of preserving Soviet-Jewish culture by way of an anthology of Yiddish folk originally belonged to Moyshe Beregovsky, a Ukrainian-Jewish ethnomusicologist in the Cabinet for Jewish Culture. But Beregovsky was arrested by Stalin’s government on suspicion of so-called Jewish nationalism in 1947. The sizable archive that he and his colleagues had amassed during and immediately after the Shoah — 263 original songs in all, constituting a record of a culture on the brink of oblivion — languished in the basement of a Kyiv library until it was discovered by chance in 1990.
Two or so decades later, a group of archivists, academics and musicians — led by Anna Shternshis, professor of Yiddish studies at the University of Toronto — took up Beregovsky’s task, and out of the jumbled archive they pieced together an album of Yiddish songs. The majority of the archive consisted of just lyrics (that is, without sheet music) so Shternshis teamed up with Russian songwriter Psoy Korolenko to compose new melodies, taking care to match the music to the lyrics’ subject, period and geographic origin. The resulting album, released in 2019, was hailed as a spectacular insight into the experiences of Holocaust-era Soviet Jewry.
Now, seven years later, Shternshis and her collaborators are back with their sophomore effort, The Silenced Songs of WWII. And though it builds upon the achievements of its predecessor, giving poignant expression once more to the sorrow and bravery of Soviet Jewry during the Shoah, it also has another object: confronting the historiographical status quo.
“Every song on this album is there because it challenges the way we understand the history of the Holocaust,” Shternshis told me over a video call.
In “A Priest Murdered in Kalisz,” the singer, Leyb Diament, recounts the 1939 murder of a Catholic priest in a central square in the titular town in Poland, describing how German forces had dragged the priest from his home and forced four Jewish boys to publicly shoot him before burying him in a Jewish cemetery.
Diament then wonders aloud whether the Germans had hoped this final humiliation would provoke a backlash from the local Polish population. No such reprisal ever occurred. “The Poles saw all of this, but no pogrom happened,” he writes in the song. “Afterwards, the Germans captured everyone; they shot some and hanged others.”
“I would say that this is the first Yiddish song of the Holocaust,” Shternshis said. “And how interesting is it that it doesn’t talk about murders of Jews, but about a murder of the Catholic priest, and of Polish solidarity with Jews in the face of Nazi invasion.”
“The Sad Camp,” a plaintive song about Soviet Jewry’s annihilation, was written by Bershad ghetto survivor Isaac Semidubosky, who, after being liberated from the ghetto in late 1944, was drafted into the Red Army and ultimately ended up in Berlin — thought not before he helped liberate Auschwitz. Yet the song also calls into question the scholarly categories that have often governed histories of Soviet Jewry.
“During the war Soviet Jews were either killed or put in a ghetto, served in the Red Army, or were refugees that ended up in Central Asia or Siberia,” Shternshis said. “These three groups are studied separately, but when you look at this song and the story of the person who wrote it, you realize that doesn’t make too much sense.”
Silenced Songs is more than just anguish, though; there’s uplift, too, the same injections of hope, levity and defiance that made the first instalment of Yiddish Glory so memorable.
“I am a Typhus Louse,” written by a teacher at an orphanage in the Mogilev-Podolsky ghetto, in the Transnistria region —which today is Moldova — imagines the war from the perspective of an anti-fascist louse. “Me, I am a Typhus louse; I go from house to house; la-la-la-la-la,” the louse declares, before singing that it, too, is afraid of the German doctors who kill lice.
The anonymously written “Yom Kippur Without Fascists,” meanwhile, looks ahead to a holy day without Hitler. “On Yom Kippur he’ll be our sacrificial rooster,” the lyrics go. “And on Simkhes-Toyrehe he’ll burn like a candle at the pole.”
And while “Transnistrian Lullaby” offers a dark account of refugee life, it still concludes almost wistfully. “A storm doesn’t last forever; the war will end,” writes the again anonymous author. “Again the sun will shine for us.”
The song “In Pechera Camp” is particularly notable for addressing, head-on, the question of Soviet complicity in the Holocaust, long a sore subject for Soviet authorities. (Among the reasons for Beregovsky’s arrest was that the archive revealed instances of Soviet collaboration with the Nazis.) The song describes the brutality of the Russian guards at the Pechera camp, an enclosure designed to kill inmates through starvation in the Vinnytsia region of Ukraine. The Soviet Union never formally acknowledged the camp’s existence.
One guard, Lukyan Smetanski, is singled out in the lyrics as especially merciless: “Smetanski came out with a big rifle, oy, oy, oy; two innocent Jews approached, and he shot them for no reason at all.” Smetanski, according to legend, was killed on the spot by a Jewish officer soon after the Red Army liberated Pechera.
History doesn’t repeat — but it rhymes
Maybe the most important decision Shternshis took as curator, though, was to scrub references to warmongering — both Russian and Jewish — that in view of the ongoing conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Mideast would likely have been poorly received.
For where the first Yiddish Glory album was understood principally as an invaluable window onto a bygone era, the follow-up has acquired rather a lot of contemporary importance. Since 2019, Russia has invaded Ukraine, Israel has destroyed much of Gaza, antisemitism is on the rise and Holocaust literacy has never been lower.
Beregovsky’s archive contains more than a few admiring references to the Red Army, several of which were included in the new album’s initial cut; one even name-checked various cities that the Soviets liberated. Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, however, meant they were omitted.
“A lot of our songs glorify the Red Army and the Soviet Army, they glorify Stalin and they glorify victory,” Shternshis said. “In 2019, we were thinking about this archive as an interesting historical curiosity. Now, it’s like are we really going to glorify the Red Army? It’s a whole different consideration.”
The same rationale drove the decision to exclude songs that gestured at another thorny topic: Jewish militarism. “There are a lot of songs in the archive that praise Jewish soldiers for being violent and cruel towards their enemies,” Shternshis said. “They’re also not on the album.”
Still, Shternshis is optimistic that any parallels between the present turmoil and the album will amplify what she sees as Yiddish Glory’s abiding message. “This album is focused on the most vulnerable victims of the war,” she said. “This is what happens when civilians are caught in that really horrible violence. That message certainly hasn’t lost its significance.”
The post A moving tribute to Soviet Jewry, with uncomfortable contemporary echoes appeared first on The Forward.
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Hezbollah Pays Steep Price in Battle to Reverse Its Fortunes
Workers remove a coffin with a body from temporary graves and prepare for transport for a funeral ceremony of four Hezbollah fighters and two civilians, amid a temporary ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, April 26, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Marko Djurica/File Photo
Hezbollah has paid a heavy price for going to war with Israel on March 2: Israel has occupied a chunk of southern Lebanon, displaced hundreds of thousands of its Shi’ite Muslim constituents and killed as many as several thousand of its fighters, according to previously unreported casualty estimates from within the group.
The move has brought severe political consequences, too. In Beirut, opposition has hardened to its status as an armed group, which domestic rivals see as exposing Lebanon to repeated wars with Israel.
In April, Lebanon’s government held face-to-face talks with Israel for the first time in decades, a decision Hezbollah firmly opposed.
However, more than a dozen Hezbollah officials told Reuters they see a chance to reverse deteriorating fortunes by aligning with Tehran in its war with Israel and the United States. The group, founded by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1982, opened fire two days into the conflict, which began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28.
The group’s calculations are based on the assessment that its participation would force Lebanon onto the agenda of U.S.-Iranian negotiations, and that Iranian pressure can secure a more robust ceasefire than one that took effect in November 2024 following a conflict sparked by the war in Gaza, the officials said.
Hezbollah was mauled in the last war, which killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, along with some 5,000 fighters, and weakened its long-dominant hold over the Lebanese state.
Rearmed with Iranian help, it has used new tactics and drones, surprising many with its capabilities after a fragile 15-month truce during which Hezbollah held fire, even as Israel continued to kill its members.
Hezbollah lawmaker Ibrahim al-Moussawi denied the group was acting on Iran’s behalf when it resumed hostilities, as alleged by opponents. He told Reuters Hezbollah saw a window to “break this vicious cycle … where the Israelis can target, assassinate, bombard, kill, without any revenge.”
He acknowledged losses and damage in southern Lebanon but said “you don’t go into making calculations of how many are going to be killed” when “pride and sovereignty and independence” are at stake.
Hezbollah’s media office said the figure of several thousand fighters killed in the present war was false.
While a US-mediated ceasefire that took effect on April 16 has led to a significant reduction in hostilities, Israel and Hezbollah have continued to trade blows in the south, where Israel maintains troops in a self-declared “buffer zone.”
Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said Hezbollah had “shown more resilience than many thought possible, but that was not a strategic gain in itself.”
“The only thing that will contain Israel is a comprehensive US-Iran deal,” he said. “Without a deal, there’s going to be a lot of pain for everyone. At best, a hurting stalemate.”
GRAVES FRESHLY DUG, AND QUICKLY FILLED
More than 2,600 people have been killed since March 2, around a fifth of them women, children and medics, Lebanon’s health ministry has reported. Its toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Three sources, two of them Hezbollah officials, said the ministry’s figures do not include many of the group’s casualties. They said several thousand Hezbollah fighters have been killed, though the group does not have the full picture yet.
In a statement to Reuters, Hezbollah’s media office denied the figures cited by the sources, and that the numbers published by Lebanon’s health ministry included its members killed in Israeli strikes.
One source, a Hezbollah commander, said scores of fighters had gone to the frontline towns of Bint Jbeil and Khiyam intending to fight to the death. Their bodies have yet to be recovered.
In the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut, more than two dozen freshly dug graves were quickly filled with fighters’ bodies in the days after the ceasefire took hold. Simple marble tombstones identify some as commanders, others as fighters.
In one southern village alone, Yater, the council recorded the deaths of 34 Hezbollah fighters.
Lebanon’s Shi’ite Muslim community has borne the brunt of Israel’s attacks, forced to flee into Christian, Druze and other areas, where many blame Hezbollah for starting the war.
Israel has been entrenching its hold over a security zone stretching as far as 10 km (6 miles) into Lebanon and demolishing villages, saying it aims to shield northern Israel from attacks by Hezbollah militants embedded in civilian areas.
An Israeli government official said Hezbollah had abrogated the November 2024 ceasefire by firing on Israeli citizens on March 2. The threat to northern Israel would be eradicated, the official said, adding thousands of Hezbollah militants had been killed, and Israel was steadily destroying the group’s infrastructure.
The Israeli military says Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel since March 2. Israel has announced 17 soldiers killed in southern Lebanon, along with two civilians in northern Israel.
Citing ongoing Israeli strikes, Hezbollah has called the April ceasefire meaningless and continued to attack.
IRAN ‘WILL NOT SELL’ THEIR FRIENDS
A diplomat who has contact with Hezbollah described its decision to enter the war as a big gamble and a survival strategy, saying it felt it needed to be part of the problem so it could be part of an eventual regional solution.
It has yet to be seen if the gamble will pay off.
Tehran has demanded that Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah be included in any deal on the wider war. But US President Donald Trump said last month that any deal Washington reaches with Tehran “is in no way subject to Lebanon.”
A spokesperson for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, Tahir Andrabi, referred Reuters to an April 16 statement in which he said peace in Lebanon was essential to the talks it is mediating between the U.S. and Iran.
A Western official said they saw a possibility the US and Iran might eventually reach a settlement that does not address the war in Lebanon.
Asked about this, the US State Department, Iran’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva and Lebanon’s government did not immediately comment.
Hezbollah’s Moussawi said a ceasefire in Lebanon continues to be a top priority for Iran, adding Tehran shares Lebanon’s objectives, including that Israel halt attacks and withdraw from Lebanon. Hezbollah has “full trust in Iran – that the Iranians will not sell their own friends”, he said.
The State Department referred Reuters to an April 27 interview Secretary of State Marco Rubio did with Fox News, in which he said Israel had a right to defend itself against Hezbollah’s attacks, and that he didn’t think Israel wanted to maintain its buffer zone in Lebanon indefinitely.
The United States has urged Israel “to make sure their responses are proportional and targeted,” he said.
When the April 16 ceasefire was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hezbollah’s disarmament would be a fundamental demand in peace talks with Lebanon.
Hezbollah has ruled out disarmament, saying the matter of its weapons is a topic for a national dialogue. Any move by Lebanon to disarm the group by force would risk igniting conflict in a country shattered by civil war from 1975 to 1990.
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam have sought Hezbollah’s peaceful disarmament since last year. On March 2, the government banned the group’s military activities.
Hezbollah has demanded the government cancel that decision and end its direct talks with Israel.
Lebanese officials have told Reuters they believe direct talks with Israel under the auspices of the US are the best way to secure a lasting ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops, as only Washington has enough leverage with Israel to achieve those aims.
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US President Trump Tells Israeli Media: ‘I Studied Iran’s New Proposal, It Is Not Acceptable to Me’
US President Donald Trump arrives to award the medal of honor to Master Sgt. Roderick ‘Roddie’ W. Edmonds, Staff Sgt. Michael H. Ollis, and retired Command Sgt. Maj. Terry P. Richardson during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 02 March 2026.
US President Donald Trump said he has reviewed Iran’s latest proposal and described it as “unacceptable” in an interview with Israeli broadcaster Kan News on Sunday. Trump added that ongoing efforts related to the conflict are “progressing very well,” without providing further details. He also renewed his call for clemency for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arguing that Israel needs a leader focused on wartime priorities rather than legal matters.
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Israel Court Extends Detention of Gaza Flotilla Activists
Activist Saif Abu Keshek, a member of the Global Sumud Flotilla detained by Israel, sits at a magistrate’s court for a detention extension hearing in Ashkelon, southern Israel, May 3, 2026. REUTERS/Amir Cohen
An Israeli court has extended by two days the detention of two activists arrested aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla that was intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters near Greece, their lawyer said on Sunday.
Saif Abu Keshek, a Spanish national, and Brazilian Thiago Avila were detained by Israeli authorities late on Wednesday and brought to Israel, while more than 100 other pro-Palestinian activists aboard the boats were taken to the Greek island of Crete.
A court spokesperson confirmed that their remand had been extended until May 5.
The governments of Spain and Brazil issued a joint statement on Friday calling their detention illegal.
The activists were part of a second Global Sumud flotilla, launched in an attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza by delivering humanitarian assistance. The ships had set sail from Barcelona on April 12.
Israeli authorities requested a four-day extension of their arrest on suspicion of offenses that include assisting the enemy during wartime, contact with a foreign agent, membership in and providing services to a terrorist organization, and the transfer of property for a terrorist organization, said rights group Adalah, which is assisting in the activists’ defense.
Hadeel Abu Salih, the men’s attorney, said that the two deny the allegations. Their arrest was unlawful due to a lack of jurisdiction, she told Reuters at the Ashkelon Magistrate’s Court after the hearing, adding that the mission was meant to provide aid to civilians in Gaza, not to any militant group.
Abu Salih said that Abu Keshek and Avila were subjected to violence en route to Israel and kept handcuffed and blindfolded until Thursday morning.
Asked for comment, the Israeli military referred Reuters to the Israeli foreign ministry, which said that staff were compelled to act to stop what it described as violent physical obstruction by Abu Keshek and Avila. All measures taken were lawful, it said.