The composer Leonard Bernstein asked Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar to write the text for his monumental Symphony No. 3 Kaddish in 1990. And now, Leah Pisar-Haas is narrating her father’s powerful text in a performance of the piece at the Ludwig van Beethoven Easter Festival in Poland, the country where her grandmother was murdered 80 years ago.
“It’s important the world hears it, because it’s a stunningly contemporary message of vigilance and warning,” says Pisar-Haas, who will narrate it during the final concert of festival at Warsaw Opera House, which runs from April 6 to 18. “The most important thing that we can take from Holocaust survivors is: ‘beware, because this could happen to you the way it happened to us.’ We have to be vigilant. Don’t let it happen again.”
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Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony, 01/29/2025Fadi Kheir
The West Side Story composer had written his own text to accompany the 45-minute symphony he composed in 1963 and premiered with the Israel Philharmonic. However, Bernstein felt that it did not express everything he wanted to say, and suspected the text was the reason for the piece being so seldom performed. Towards the end of his life, he turned to Pisar, a talented writer friend to humanise the suffering of Holocaust victims in lyrics. In Kaddish: A Dialogue with God, Pisar recounted his survival in three concentration camps – Auschwitz, Dachau and Majdanek.
In 2003, 13 years after Bernstein’s death, he narrated his poignant words for the first time, with the Chicago Symphony. Since Pisar’s final performance in 2014, Leah and her mother Judith have taken over the narration.
“I channel my father on this and it’s very emotional every time. Watching a documentary about Auschwitz is dark, it’s nauseating and you just want to turn away. This is a much gentler way of communicating, so people listen and take it in differently. It’s very meaningful because it’s not just doing a concert, it’s a very special way of delivering a message.”
Leah has performed the Kaddish around the world, including at New York’s Carnegie Hall, which she describes as a “religious experience”.
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Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony, 01/29/2025Fadi Kheir
“During one of the non-speaking passages, I thought, as my grandmother was being led into that gas chamber, would she have imagined her son’s words and that her descendant would one day stand on the stage of Carnegie Hall and do this? It finally felt like Kaddish had been said.”
However, she has never performed it in Poland. Doing the show at the 80th anniversary of the end of the war and of the liberation of Auschwitz in Poland, where her father was born, feels particularly poignant.
“I don’t know what to expect emotionally,” she says. “Doing it in Warsaw is meaningful to me as a Jew. The fact that 80 years later, it can be performed at the Warsaw Opera House, which is not next door to Auschwitz, but in the same country where my father was born and his entire family was murdered, it’s a very personal pilgrimage.”
Samuel took two years to write the Kaddish and tweaked it until his final performance. Leah recalls her father having a strong sense of humour and being open about his traumatic experiences. His autobiography, Of Blood and Hope, was published in 1980.
“It’s upsetting, horrible stuff, but there was always hope and optimism. He had a very strong conviction that survival couldn’t just be physical surviving. I think he decided that he owed it to his mother to be as happy as possible and to live.
“He talked about it a tremendous amount, and the reason he talked about it is he felt a duty to warn and he saw everything that’s happening today. Every time I perform it, I look at it to see if anything’s obsolete. Nothing is. He saw the whole thing coming. It’s uncanny. There are sentences that could be written today. We’re in such a strange time right now.”
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She says the other message in her father’s writing feeds into her own work as President of Project Aladdin, a non-profit dedicated to countering antisemitism, hatred and extremism by teaching the universal lessons of the Holocaust and fostering dialogue among Jews, Christians and Muslims. “What is so important is this idea that there’s no such thing as hereditary enemies. He really wanted to raise us not to hate and not to judge other people by where we think they come from.”
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Her father and Bernstein collaborated at a concert in that same Warsaw concert hall back in 1989. While Bernstein conducted works by Beethoven, Mahler, Schoenberg and Penderecki, Pisar talked about the Second World War on screen between the pieces of music.
Pisar-Haas believes Bernstein felt guilty that he could not serve in the US Army due to his asthma. Bernstein had an Auschwitz uniform to remind him of the Shoah and when it disintegrated after going to the dry cleaner, he was distraught.
In 1948, Bernstein toured Israel to conduct concerts with the Israel Philharmonic.“He felt that he didn’t do his part, so he did his part in different ways,” says Pisar-Haas.
