My personal adventure
with Mordechaj  Gebirtig

In the year 1978  I was listening to an old record by Peter Rohland, a German collector and singer who in the middle of the sixties started his first attempt with Yiddish songs in Germany At that time nobody was very interested in Yiddish culture, it was "flotsam of history'. Nobody wanted to have or keep it To my surprise lots of Jewish people had said "what do you want with this old stuff, leave it, let it be, you could bring back the life of the shtetl, also the culture" Only a handful of the after-the-war-generation in Germany thought it. could be then that the Nazis had reached their goal to destroy not only the Jews but also their culture.

So it took a long time to build up a small audience for this treasure of experiences written down in songs. There was this one title on said LP by Peter Rohland that l was so extremely touched by that l could never forget it again "Undzer shtetl brent" (our town is burning). l was so fascinated by this powerful resistance song that l could imagine that there were of course, ghetto-fighters willing to fight against these misanthropes This was not a lamentation that you hear very often belonging to Jewish culture. Here was a very powerful appearance to fight against the nazi enemies for freedom and justice. I understood from the first instance, here someone told stories about the real life which will no longer exist in this form as they did before world-war II.  and the Shoah. So I started to collect everything that l could get my hands on about the Cracow carpenter Mordechaj Gebirtig. I visited time-witnesses in Cracow, the home town of Gebirtig, England, Israel and also the United States of America to find out what was left of his wonderful poetry

Exactly on the 50th anniversary of his death I edited, with the help of my wife Angelika and her girl friend Dagmar Gutmann, the whole poetry of this unforgettable Jewish bard of Cracow, including 50 Gebirtig-songs on three CD's, two of which received the prestigious German record-award "Vierteljahrespreis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik". We did not expect an exorbitant success with this expensive investment because those who are interested insuch literature or music are very few. Much to our surprise we edited the third Gebirtig-edition in 1999.

In 1990 I was invited by our friend Dagmar Gutmann, to perform a concert whith songs by Gebirtig at her former school, an international grammar school with pupils from over 50 nations. The topic of the concert was tolerance with regard to other cultures and was to be understood as contradiction to the sprouting right-wing extremists. I had gained some experience already before regarding such school-concerts and had my doubts concerning the understanding of the still very young audience. With about 400 pupils the concert was rather well visited but I had the impression however, that the audience more or less consumed the concert without any great interest. It would have been the same effect if one bad played to the audience Country and Western music or Irish folklore. They could not recognize the depths of the Gebirtig-songs. So I had the idea to turn around the whole plan, i.e. to involve the pupils into the concert, let them sing the songs themselves, accompanied by my musicians who partly originated from synphonic-orchestras, real professionals.
In this way the whole matter had a solid background and separated itself notably from ordinary school-concerts since it was announced as an open concert with audience. The acceptance changed immediately because the participants of my first Yiddish-Workshop had to take a critical look at the songs because not as an audience, but as performers, not only linguistically but also as regards content.

The topic Holocaust education was not a major issue in this work, it brought itself into the project because of the contents of Gebirtig's songs. During this Workshop the Gebirtig-songs set up true links between today and yesterday, especially in view of the grievous history of the European nations and the nearly total distruction of  the Jewism  in Eastern Europe.