The UJA coordinated a sold-out concert at Lincoln Center, Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín, to benefit its Community Initiative for Holocaust Survivors.

Approximately half a million survivors of the Holocaust are alive today:  The largest community of survivors in the United States is in the Greater New York area – close to 73,000.   The majority of these survivors are between the ages of 73 and 85, and half of them are living in poverty.

In 2013, Jewish Communal Fund’s Special Gift Fund granted $100,000 to the Community Initiative for Holocaust Survivors, an initiative of UJA-Federation of New York to meet the needs of this vulnerable population.

On April 29, UJA-Federation of New York, along with the Defiant Requiem Foundation and Selfhelp Community Services, coordinated a sold-out concert at Lincoln Center, Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín, which raised $2.3 million for the Community Initiative for Holocaust Survivors. All concert proceeds will be dedicated to the UJA-Federation of New York Community Initiative for Holocaust Survivors thanks to generous gifts from The Pershing Square Foundation, Shelley and Steven Einhorn, Patti Askwith Kenner, Leo Model Foundation, and Ilse Honigsberg Melamid. Two hundred Holocaust survivors were given free tickets and transportation to attend the concert.

The concert paid tribute to the courage of Jewish prisoners in Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration camp who performed Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass 16 times between 1943 and 1944. The last performance, sung by a chorus of 150 Jewish prisoners, occurred before high-ranking Nazi officials and a delegation from the International Red Cross.

Edgar Krasa, a survivor of Terezín and member of the chorus, said the conductor, Rafael Schächter, who organized the chorus in Terezín, “uplifted the spirits of thousands of prisoners” who sang or listened to the music in the midst of starvation and brutality.

“The Requiem, in several places, expressed the coming days of wrath and sitting in judgment that no one escapes,” Krasa said. “We sang in Latin what we could not say to the Nazis.”

The concert at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, created and conducted by Murry Sidlin and performed by the City Choir of Washington and the Orchestra of Terezín Remembrance, was interspersed with videotaped testimony from survivors in the original chorus, segments of Nazi propaganda film, and the actors John Rubinstein and Bebe Neuwirth giving voice to the words of Schächter and others.

“It is still emotional for me,” said Krasa, and added that his two sons and a grandson were singing in the concert.