Song For Joseph is an instrumental version of the original melody composed by Robin Avery and Paul Banman for the universally recited, Lord’s Prayer; Psalm 23. The title of this song pays honor to Robin’s second child, Joseph who continues the spiritual and cultural tradition of her parents and is the hope of the vanished world of her grandparents who perished in world war ll.
As the story goes:
HISTORY:
The author and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, and my father, Moshe Chaim Berkowitz played and grew up together in Sighet, Romania where they established a lifelong friendship. Elie included an incident that involved my father, in his book Night, where he wrote about a little boy named Berkowitz who saw Jews being herded into cattle cars 40 kilometers from the Swiss border and warned the townspeople to flee. They laughed at him in disbelief. My father could have escaped this experience because he had Christian papers. But to honor his father’s request he returned home to Sighet for Passover and to attend his brother's Bar Mitzvah; only to be deported to Auschwitz for the selection.
My grandfather, Avraham Abba Berkowitz, a composer and cantor of the large synagogue in Sighet, was invited to conduct High Holiday services in a synagogue in Philadelphia prior to World War II. Afraid to leave Europe and travel to America, he was unfortunately deported into the concentration camps only to perish together with his wife, Rose, my grandmother and namesake, and 8 of their 10 children.
My father and his older brother, Elias, survived and brought my grandfather’s musical spirit to America. At the heart of their survival lies a story of great courage, loyalty to each other and deep commitment to the practice of their faith and traditions. And in the face of the most profound dehumanizing conditions it is that commitment to the practice of their faith that strengthened and supported their refusal to become that which Hitler would have had them become. I am proud of them and it is an honor to share a few of my father’s most inspiring stories.
Having narrowly escaped the ovens of Auschwitz and Bergen Belzin, the three brothers, my father, Elias, and the youngest of them, Shlomo, thirteen years of age, settled in a work camp in Bart, Germany. In bondage, the brothers exerted their personal freedom to choose what kind of prisoners they would be. Their arduous walks to the worksite were transcended through daily meditations and immersion in the study of the Talmud which Elias had committed to memory. Deemed useless baggage, to fall from fatigue or illness would be an immediate death sentence as the Nazi guards would shoot a fallen prisoner on the spot. When my father begged to collapse from fatigue they pressed on with Elias urging them all the while, “we have to learn one more tract of Gomorra”.
To celebrate his precious and holy Sabbath, in spite of his starving and malnourished state, Elias would set aside crusts from his meager daily portion of bread to have enough bread to represent and partake in each of the three Sabbath meals for himself and his two brothers each week.
The night before the Russians liberated the camp, the Nazi guards lured surviving prisoners into the forest with promises of food and a better place to live. Shlomo was too sick to leave. The brothers chose to stick together and remain behind in the camp. Those who fled to the forest were shot and killed on a death march. The brothers were liberated by the Russians in the morning. Shlomo was hospitalized. My father visited him every day outside his window. Intuiting his death, one morning Shlomo asked my father for a Siddur, a prayer book. The next day he was gone.
After the war, my father and Elias lived in France in an abandoned castle with other teenage survivors. At the age of 20, my father came to America from France as a stowaway, hiding beneath the deck of a ship he snuck onto acting as the baggage boy for a revered rabbi. He evaded security on Ellis Island, finally arriving at the home of relatives in Brooklyn, New York.
He worked 5 jobs at a time, saving money to earn passage to bring Elias to America from France. Elias remained a Chassid, had 10 children of his own and taught in the Satmar School. When Elias lost his hearing at a young age and could no longer teach, my father committed to help support him and later made weddings for each of his children in gratitude for my uncle’s strength and support during the time in the concentration camp.
My father and Elie Wiesel celebrated their personal liberation and redemption together in our home the last 18 consecutive Passover Seders of my father’s life. When Elie was invited to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, he asked for my father‘s support and participation at the presentation in Oslo, Norway . And so my parents had the privilege and honor to attend this propitious moment in Jewish and world history. When Elie was the inspiration for the first United States Holocaust Commission at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. in 1979, my father was invited to attend and light a candle in commemoration of this historic and personal tragedy.
As a child of this survivor I have held onto my father’s learning from this experience, that every day of life is a gift from God and I inherited my grandfather, Avraham Abba’s musical soul. It is a great privilege to bring his musical spirit to America through my song.
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