Our research on the daily newspaper Haaretz

An article by the well-known Israeli journalist 𝐌𝐈𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐄𝐋 𝐊𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐍 published yesterday 28.4.2024 on the well-known Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The last part talks about the research work of the ILMC Foundation (translated from Hebrew - see photo below):

Today, many of Ilse Weber's manuscripts are preserved in the Holocaust Museum in Berlin and at Yad Vashem. Because the children in the [Theresienstadt] camp asked Ilse to sing her songs over and over again, the survivors eventually memorized some of the melodies, adapting them or performing them at various musical events. A particularly impressive event took place in 2018. The Italian Jewish musicologist and pianist Francesco Lotoro, who has dedicated his life to researching music written during the Holocaust, met a woman named Aviva Bar-On, who 70 years earlier had been one of the children entrusted to Ilse Herlinger Weber's care at the Theresienstadt children's clinic [Block C41]. Little by little, Aviva remembered the melody of one of the songs that Willy [Vilem Weber, Ilse's husband] saved from the grave, and during an evening organized by the Jewish National Fund to mark the 70th anniversary of the State of Israel, the 86-year-old Aviva performed the piece accompanied by an orchestra conducted by Lotoro. Ilse and her young son died during the Holocaust, but her music and poems, written as a rebellion against death and a way of clinging to life, survived her.

( Michael Keren )