“May the wrath burn for hundreds of generations and whoever does not maintain the wrath shall be forever cursed… Let this conscience be ablaze in them for generations,” – from Di Naye Hagode (The New Haggada)

Heroic Jewish resistance to German barbarity during the Holocaust was indelibly manifested in the WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING in 1943. Facing imminent deportation to death camps and preferring, if necessary, to die with dignity in battle, thousands of Jews rose up in armed defiance of their tormentors. Their fierce but doomed struggle-against unimaginable horrors and overwhelming odds-began during Passover, the Festival on which Jews recount the story of the Exodus from Egypt through a canonized narrative, or haggada. After the war, American composer Max Helfman, a legendary champion of Jewish music, immortalized the uprising in his dramatic choral tone poem DI NAYE HAGODE (The New Haggada), based on Itzik Fefer’s epic Yiddish poem The Shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto. For Fefer, who was murdered in Stalin’s postwar terror against Soviet Jewry, both Germany’s genocide and the episodes of armed Jewish response had become the Jewish people’s new, central, and most relevant narrative. Like the Passover haggada, this story must be told and retold, lest a single Jew of the Warsaw Ghetto ever be forgotten. Fefer’s poem conveys modern Jewish determination to resist and to remember, and that resolve – to remember forever – is underscored by Helfman’s powerful music.

DI NAYE HAGODE is presented here in its WORLD PREMIERE RECORDING.