AJ R Information Volume XLIX No. 9 September 1994 £3 (to non-members) Don't miss . Of fruit, literal antj metaphorical - and repentance Irene's talking library p6 Pensions update Thoughts on the High Holy Days p9 Surnames and curnames pi6 he Yamim Tovim coincide with the advent of showing near-superhuman steadfastness in pursuit of Keats's season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. their peace agenda. —I TFruitfulness, Uterally in the shape of fruit, plays The coniing year will show whether the long- Speaking a key symbolic role during the rituals of the High Holy suffering population of the Jewish State will be with forked Days. allowed to enjoy the fruit of its leaders' gamble in tongues On Rosh Hashana Eve we eat apples dipped in trading land for peace. Diaspora Jewry can only hope honey; the next night we partake of new fruit for the and pray that for the Israelis the apple will be dipped n a gesture rich first time; for the Harvest Festival we decorate the in honey and not gall. in ambiguity, not Sukkah with fruit and foliage. The highest of the High Holy Days is, of course, to say downright I But fruit also has a metaphorical meaning for us; Yom Kippur. Popularly known as the Black Fast, it bad faith, the Vatican — currently nowhere more so than on the threshold of 5755. Israel involves more than physical abstention froiTi food. normalising its has, after four and a half decades of war and rumours "Fasting", runs the Yom Kippur commentary in the relations with the of war, embarked upon a high-risk strategy of Soncino Chumash, "in itself is not the fulfilment of the State of Israel — has hammering out an accord, amid a welter of conflict­ Divine Command and purpose of the Day of Atone­ conferred the order ing and, pace Hebron, bloody pressures, with the ment... Teshuvah (Repentance), Tefillah (prayer) and of Pius IX on Kurt Palestinians and Jordanians. Rabin and Peres are Tsedakah (beneficence) - these can change the whole Waldheim. It is a current of a man's life and destiny...." deeply worrying Repentance can also influence the current of a development. The nation's life. After 1945 most of Europe - first and mercifully near- forgotten quondam foremost Germany — stood in urgent need of repent­ Prisoner in the ance, but maintained a pose of self-justifying silence. Hofburg can now This moral Ice Age took decades to thaw. An early add the honorific turning point was Chancellor Willy Brandt's 1971 Papal Knight to gesture of dropping to his knees at the site of the such earlier titles as Warsaw Ghetto to ask the forgiveness of the dead. But Wehrmacht SS even subsequently, acts of national repentance were liaison officer at few and far between; Chancellor Kohl still spoke of Salonika and most- "the mercy of his belated birth", and President economical-with- Mitterrand had wreaths placed on Petain's grave on the-truth President the anniversary of the latter's death. of Austria. D Finally, during the aftershock of the collapse of the The Committee of Soviet Empire the climate changed significantly. The Management and President of the Ukraine and the Chancellor of Staff of the Austria - two nations indelibly stained by their AJR complicit)' in the Holocaust — spoke openly of their countries' guilt. Earlier this year Premier Gyula Horn wish all departed from his predecessor's glib equation of members a Jewish with Hungarian war-time suffering and France VERY HAPPY instituted 16 July, the anniversary- of the 1942 round NEW YEAR up of Parisian Jews by the French police, as a day of national commemoration. and thank them Slowly, all too slowly, but nonetheless steadily, for their continuing Europe is beginning to confront the monstrous ghosts support of its recent past. May it continue to do so in 5755. First page ofthe Schocken bible, 1300 a.d. L'shanah tovah. D AJR INFORMATION SEPTEMBER 1994 Frantisek Zelenka Profile An exhibition which was recently shown in the National Museum in Prague celebrating the life and work of Frantisek Zelenka Maradonna e mobile (1904 -1944), the avant-garde architect, Thurrock College, he established several artist, creator of interiors, furniture and sales training centres for students on the posters, is coming to London. The exhibi­ Continent. After seven years in full-time tion concentrates on the theatrical design Higher Education he resumed freelance aspects ofhis work from 1926 to 1944 and business activity — a pursuit which he has includes his Terezin productions, including continued, with varying degrees of success, the children's opera Brundibor. Zelenka up to the present day. perished in Auschwitz. It will form part of As to hobbies, he has played Sunday Scenofest! — the first international forum of football for close on half a century and Theatre Design. The exhibition will be in studied singing under Bruce Boyce, the the public Lethaby Gallery at Central Saint eminent Mozart interpreter, for half that Martin's College of Art and Design, South­ time. A founder member of the Philhar­ ampton Row, WCI and will be open to the monia Chorus, he appeared with them at public Mondays to Fridays from 5 to 23 the Edinburgh and Lucerne Festivals - the September 1994, 10 am to 5 pm. latter under Sir Thomas Beecham's baton - A programme of cultural events has been and has recorded under Klemperer, Giulini, organised by the Cultural Department of Karajan and William Walton. the Spiro Institute and Mrs Rena Lewin to Solo recitals include a Wigmore Hall appearance in the 1970s which, he quips, coincide with the exhibition. Fred Rosner. On Thursday 8 September at 6pm a was simultaneously his debut and farewell lecture entitled Bauhaus and the Polymath ne Sunday afternoon in May Fred concert. That is not, strictly speaking, true - Artists will be delivered (The speaker has Rosner (bass) gave a recital before as Day Centre habitues and OSHA Home yet to be announced). Oan audience of fifty at the Day residents will gratefully testify. But just in Tuesday 13 September sees an evening on Centre. The following Sunday evening an case he may one day have to quit the recital the subject of creativity in defiance of audience of possibly five hundred thousand stage, alongside the football pitch, he has tyranny. The evening will include a talk by watched him on Carlton TV News — not as meanwhile been garnering useful "retire­ Professor Zdenko Lesic of Sarajevo Univer­ a singer but as a footballer. The occasion? ment" experience as a reviewer for the sity who, together with his wife, created the The programme makers' discovery that as a Munich-based Opera Magazine! theatre in besieged Bosnia. newly turned 70-year old Fred may well be D R.G. Afterwards, Mrs Alice Sommer (profiled the oldest soccer veteran in the country, in AJR Information, January 1994), a turning out every week, come rain or shine, renowned pianist who gave over 100 on Hackney Marshes. At last: a Heine monument concerts in Terezin while in the camp with Challenged on his puzzling mix of hob­ in Dusseldorf her six-year-old son Raphael (now an bies Fred answers, only half-jokingly, "My internationally acclaimed cellist), will be on maxim is mens sana in corpore sano". This After a 20 year struggle by a ivorld-wide the platform. The evening starts at 7.30pm. occasional recourse to Latin proverbs stems Citizen's Initiative, Diisseldorf University On Thursday 22 September there will be from a love of the classics instilled in him by was at last, in 1989, named Heinrich Heine a concert featuring "Songs of Ashes", still fondly remembered teachers at Vien­ University, Diisseldorf {see AJR Infor­ completed in 1991, which sets the words of na's Sperl Gymnasium. j mation, April 1989). the poet Jerzy Ficowski, from his cycle "A Fred owes an equal debt of gratitude to ' A model of the Heine Monument in reading of Ashes", to music. D his lawyer father and piano teacher mother. Hamburg, which Alfred Kerr inaugurated For details of these events phone the Spiro A kindertransportee in early '39, he pro­ in 1926, and the Nazis destroyed in 1933, Institute on: 071-431 0345. cured a guarantor for them, but since had been brought to England and saved continental legal qualifications weren't from Hitler's vandals. Taken back to Ger­ recognised over here and his father couldn't many after the war, it was acquired by the practise, Fred had to earn a living from spokesman of Diisseldorf's Citizen's Initia­ fifteen onwards. Starting as a packer in the tive, Otto Schonfeldt. On the basis of this HILARY'S AGENCY garment trade, he gradually rose to the model a new Heine statue has now been Specialists in Long and Short-Term position of despatch manager. Eventually erected in the grounds of Heinrich Heine Live-in Care he branched out into marketing as a free­ University, Diisseldorf, the poet's birth­ RESPITE AND EMERGENCY CARE CARE FOR THE ELDERLY lance and switched to the furniture trade. place. Thus the historical campaign for a HOUSEKEEPERS Married in his mid-twenties, he took Heine statue in the city, launched by the RECUPERATION CARE degrees in economics and marketing by MATERNITY NURSES Austrian Empress (and Heine's admirer), NANNIES AND MOTHER'S HELPS correspondence course. Elisabeth, in 1887, and thwarted by Kaiser EMERGENCY MOTHERS At 35 he launched the country's first Wilhelm, Court Chaplain Stoeker, Julius Caring and Experienced Staff Available Streicher and others, has at last been We will be happy to discuss your postgraduate course in International requirements Marketing at High Wycombe College of successfully concluded.