On a Friday night, Temple Israel will gather as it always does — for prayer, for song, for Shabbat.
But this Shabbat will carry a voice that was nearly erased.
Following services on April 17, marking Yom HaShoah, Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut, musicians from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will present “Holocaust Composer Stories: Pavel Haas,” honoring the Czech Jewish composer murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.
The sanctuary will feel familiar. The music will not.
A life interrupted
Haas was born in 1899 in Brno and was composing seriously by his teens. After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, his music was banned. He was deported to Terezin in 1941, where he continued to write. In October 1944, he was sent to Auschwitz and killed shortly after arrival.
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For Helen Turner of the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, hearing Haas’ music live is not just historical reflection.
“There is something profoundly powerful about listening to live music in community,” Turner said. “For me, Haas’s music feels like a declaration of existence. To hear it together, in a synagogue, becomes a sacred act of resistance and an intensely humanizing one.”
She said the score carries Haas’ life inside it.
“You can hear his pride in his country, the anxiety of the approaching Nazis and the tenderness of his love for his young daughter,” Turner said. “It becomes more than music; it is the story of a father, a son, a husband and a composer who was murdered for being a Jew.”
When art becomes witness
For the Symphony, the setting reshapes the experience.
“When we perform Pavel Haas’ music in a sacred Jewish space, we’re doing more than presenting a concert,” said Maureen Byrne, vice president of education and community programs for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. “The space itself invites reverence, and the music becomes not just art, but witness.”
Rabbi Amy Feder remembers the first time she heard Haas’ music — at a Kever Avot service at New Mt. Sinai Cemetery in 2024, when Symphony musicians played during the memorial.
“It was one of the most beautiful, haunting and memorable pieces I’ve ever heard,” she said. “Bringing his music and his story to life is such a tremendous opportunity. And this music, it may not be liturgical, but it feels holy — you just know that it was meant to be played in a sacred space.”
On a night devoted to remembrance, Temple Israel will do something simple and profound: let a silenced Jewish composer be heard again.
Event Details
Symphony Shabbat: Holocaust Composer Stories — Pavel Haas
📅 Friday, April 17
🕕 6 p.m. Pre-Oneg
🕡 6:30 p.m. Shabbat service
🎻 7:30–8:30 p.m. Musical presentation
📍 Temple Israel
RSVP for in-person services at www.ti-stl.org/SymphonyShabbat
Created in partnership with the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum. Holocaust Composer Stories is supported by Michael Staenberg and the Staenberg Family Foundation, Noémi Neidorff, JCA Charitable Foundation and the Rubin and Gloria Feldman Family Educational Institute. Symphony Shabbat is in community partnership with Lest We Forget, a special exhibition by UNESCO Artist for Peace Luigi Toscano. Find out more about this community-wide exhibition here.
