Opera singer Raya Gonen, left, who performed “Singing for Survival: From Holocaust to Hope” on Nov. 19 at Monmouth University, embraces composer Andrea Clearfield, who wrote the music for a song cycle of poems included in the program.
Photo by Jill Huber
December 2, 2008
When lyric soprano Raya Gonen performs “Singing for Survival: From Holocaust to Hope,” her one-woman program featuring compositions by victims and survivors, the notes she hits are personal: She is the daughter of survivors who were saved by Christians in Lithuania.
“My parents’ stories are the reason for the creation of “Singing for Survival” and why I reach out to audiences, especially young people,” said Gonen, interviewed after a performance Nov. 19 at Monmouth University in West Long Branch. “Music, song, and the human spirit can triumph during the most terrible times. The strength of the human soul is uplifting. That’s why I chose to tell their stories through music.”
Gonen, an adjunct professor in Monmouth’s department of music and theater arts, began developing “Singing for Survival” in 1995 and completed the project several years later. The melodies of some of the program’s 17 songs are based on traditional Russian and Lithuanian tunes, but most of the music and lyrics — in Hebrew, English, German, and Yiddish — are compositions written by victims and survivors who lived in the ghettoes and concentration camps.
The event at Monmouth included the world premiere of “Farlorn Alemen” (“Losing Everyone”) — three poems written by Sima Yashonsky-Feitelson, an inmate of Lithuania’s Kovno ghetto, and set to music several months ago by composer Andrea Clearfield of Philadelphia.
The performance was sponsored by the university and the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Center of Brookdale Community College in Lincroft.
Yashonsky-Feitelson survived the Kovno ghetto and documented the atrocities she witnessed in a book of poems. When she immigrated to Israel, she reunited with friends from Kovno, including Gonen’s parents. Yashonsky-Feitelson gave them a copy of her poems, and when Gonen eventually read them, she decided to include several in her Holocaust song program.
Last summer, she commissioned Clearfield to write the music for the three poems that comprise the “Farlorn Alemen” cycle.
The idea of the program, said Gonen, “was to provide insight and understanding about the Holocaust through the medium of music. It shows how the human soul can survive and even triumph over evil forces.”
‘Living the dream’
The stories about her parents’ survival reveal the very best and worst aspects of human nature, Gonen said. Her father, Yerachmiel Siniuk, was born in 1920 in Kovno. He was forced into the Kovno ghetto after the Germans invaded Lithuania. While working with a slave labor detail at a nearby ammunitions storage site in 1943, he lost his left arm in an explosion.
Andreas Urbonas, who lived on a nearby farm with his wife Maria, son Jouzas, and daughter Ona, agreed to hide Siniuk in a barn on their property. The family also agreed to hide seven other Jews, who escaped from the ghetto with Siniuk’s help.
In 1999, Siniuk sent testimony to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, which, in 2000, designated the four members of the Urbonas family as Righteous Gentiles.
“All the attention of this noble family was directed toward us, and they tried in every way to make our lives easier,” Siniuk wrote.
Meanwhile, Gonen’s mother, Yocheved, lived in Vilna, then part of Poland, until the Germans came. She escaped to Kovno and was taken in by the Krulickas, a devoutly Catholic family, who helped her masquerade as a Christian maid. While she lived with the family, three SS officers were billeted in the same house.
Yocheved had an especially grisly task to perform. While in her maid’s garb, she had to clean blood from the boots of the three SS men, who would return to the Krulickas’ home after taking part in massacres of Jews.
After the war, she met and married Siniuk. Raya Gonen and her sister were born in Lithuania, and the family immigrated to Israel in 1958. (Gonen’s father died six years ago; her mother still resides near Tel Aviv.) In 1992, Gonen and her husband and two daughters came to the United States and now live in Cherry Hill.
Gonen still finds it emotionally challenging to perform the Holocaust songs.
“I’ve learned to distance myself a little bit, but it’s always hard,” she said. “I’m often on the verge of tears when I sing them.”
But the homage to her parents and other survivors and victims will continue, she said.
“My parents had beautiful singing voices and my father wanted to be an orchestra conductor, but the war took that choice away,” said Gonen, who has performed opera extensively throughout Israel and Europe. “I feel I’m living the dream that he could not achieve.”
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