The Gray Zone:  Annual Community Yom HaShoah Commemoration

Tickets are REQUIRED.* Seating is limited with registration on a first come, first served basis. 

Please register HERE.

Join us for a community commemoration of Yom HaShoah-Holocaust Remembrance Day performance featuring Mark Ludwig and members of the Terezin Music Foundation Ensemble: Greg Vitale on violin, Jesse Holstein on viola and Jing Li on cello. 

A memorial candle lighting, prayers and a moment of silence in memory of those murdered in the Holocaust will follow the program which will focus on the "gray zone" as described by Primo Levi through both the historical example of Terezin and the lived experiences of Jews today.

Co-sponsored by Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and Tanglewood Learning Institut

*If you are unable to attend, please let us know so that we can make the seat available to other community members.

More on the program:

The great writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi developed and explored the concept of the “gray zone” in one of his final essays. Reflecting on relationships between the Nazis and his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz, Levi observed that “the network of human relationships inside the lagers [concentration camps] was not simple; it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors.” In Levi’s gray zone, oppressors compel their victims to become unwilling accomplices.

Drawing from his book Our Will to Live, Terezín Music Foundation Director Mark Ludwig will share stories of how the music of Jewish composers—along with other artistic expression in the Terezín concentration camp—was co-opted for Nazi propaganda. This gray zone was exploited through a propaganda film and a staged Red Cross inspection, turning creativity and culture into instruments of deception.