'Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango' marks Holocaust Remembrance Day at Rodef Shalom

The award-winning music program “Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango,” based on the poetry and writings of women who survived the Holocaust, will come to Pittsburgh this Sunday.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Rodef Shalom Congregation will present the concert, which has toured in Europe and North America over the past year. The album “Silent Tears” was released in early 2023 and reached number one on World Music Charts Europe in March of that year.

Several of the songs are based on the poetry of survivors who were part of a group started by Dr. Paula David at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto in the 1990s. David was a social worker at the center and was trying to find ways to better serve the survivors living there.

“My instincts were that we were not necessarily rising to the challenge properly … and we started learning,” she said.

For example, many of the Holocaust survivors living at the center had a tendency to hide and hoard food in their rooms, an instinct they learned when they experienced starvation conditions during the Holocaust. But many of the patients would forget that they had hidden the food, and it would spoil or get thrown away by staff at Baycrest, which was retraumatizing for them.

“So she instructed the staff at these care homes to secretly replace the bread whenever these patients were out doing something else,” said Daniel Rosenberg, a journalist and music producer who produced “Silent Tears.”

David started a non-therapy group for children of Holocaust survivors and a regular group meeting for older adults who were survivors themselves.

“They were facing aging differently,” she said. This was the first wave of survivors who were getting older, so there weren’t established best practices to give them the help and care they needed.

“We just started, and it blossomed and bloomed,” she said. “They learned, I learned. It was an incredible learning curve, though.” For the first year, the group of survivors was appreciative but didn’t talk much.

“I learned about trauma and PTSD in my coursework in school … none of what we talked about ever covered their level of trauma,” David said.

Later, however, she found that poetry was a useful outlet for the survivors to tell their stories.

“One of the things I did was tape what they were saying,” she said.

The survivors mostly spoke English as a second or third language and only spoke in English in the group because it was what David could understand.

“The way they framed their stories and their sentences, I knew, was totally unique. So I taped it because that was part of the magnificence of their expression,” David said.

She took the tapes home and grouped their words together by theme, calling it a “collective poem.” When she took the results back to the survivors, it struck a deep chord.

“I would read something on a theme, and they would say ‘That’s beautiful, that’s exactly how I feel, who wrote that?’ and I had to explain, ‘well, you did,’” she said.

They started working on poems according to themes, taking a theme home each week to consider it for the next time. Each session would birth a new poem. Eventually, they published a book.

“I learned a lot about resilience and changing what a lot of us had assumed about victimhood and surviving, and I had this book of poems. It was quite remarkable,” she said.

She met Daniel Rosenberg about five years ago. He was moved by the work that she had done with the group at Baycres and asked if he could put the words to music.

“By this time, not one of the women was still alive, and I thought, what a lovely tribute posthumously that it will become something else to another generation,” she said.

When David heard what Rosenberg had done with the group’s poetry — and that he had translated the originally English words into Yiddish — she was deeply moved.

“I had no idea … I just started bawling because it should have always been in Yiddish, that was their language,” she said.

She was also surprised and fascinated by the decision to set the poetry to tango music.

“It seemed only natural to have their stories sung in their native tongue … sadly, most of the Yiddish speakers were killed in the Holocaust,” Rosenberg said. There are translations projected on a screen during the program’s live concerts.

“The poems are so moving because they not only talk about what happened but also the trauma people are still dealing with decades and decades later,” Rosenberg said. “She did this amazing work of helping people dealing with severe trauma. They had often kept these stories private for decades.”

He believes that the poems — and now the songs — are important because they shine a light on what happens during war and genocide, but also because they illustrate how the effects of those traumas reverberate for years to come.

In addition to the poems from Dr. David’s group, “Silent Tears” also contains music based on the story of Molly Applebaum, a writer whose memoir is titled “Buried Words: The Diary of Molly Applebaum.”

As a child, Applebaum spent two years in hiding after Germany invaded Poland. She and an older cousin were buried in a wooden box under the barn of a farmer in Dabrowa.

“The punishment for hiding Jews was death, so the farmer couldn’t just have them in the spare bedroom,” Rosenberg said. “He would sneak over at night and bring them food and water. They had to deal with the cold and the insects and darkness and isolation.”

Applebaum kept a diary of the ordeal. After the war, she emigrated to Canada and later published it and her memoir. She kept her diary in Polish, so some of the songs in the program include Polish language.

Both David and Rosenberg feel that — while heartbreaking — the stories of “Silent Tears” also bring hope and inspiration.

“It’s so important to learn these consequences of racism and bigotry and antisemitism and xenophobia,” Rosenberg said, “but when we learn about history, it’s often told from politicians and historians, and not from the firsthand accounts of children and young women. To hear their voices is extremely important.”

He also wants the audience to be inspired by David’s work to help survivors.

“This seems to reach viscerally into anyone who’s feeling any kind of trauma or insecurity and it gives it an alternate expression,” David said.

She also touted the program for its music as well as its stories.

“I know that people who appreciate really good music are blown away by this ensemble,” she added.

“Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango” is a collaboration by Payadora Tango, composer Rebekah Wolkstein and executive producer Rosenberg, along with other musicians and singers.

Bringing this concert to Pittsburgh has special significance for Rosenberg, who grew up in Squirrel Hill and attended Taylor Allderdice High School.

Sunday’s performance of “Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango” will be held at 2 p.m. at Rodef Shalom Congregation, 4905 Fifth Ave., Shadyside. Admission is free for Rodef Shalom and Temple Sinai members and $18 for the general public. To find out more and register for the event, visit rodefshalom.org.