Bringing Darkness to Light: Singing Hanukkah Songs Through the Holocaust

In the summer of 1948, Ben Stonehill, a Jewish man of Polish descent and a lover of everything Yiddish with a keen historical awareness, made his way uptown on the New York City subway system carrying a bag filled with recording equipment. Word had reached him that Jewish refugees had been brought to a hotel on the Upper West Side, and he wanted to get there as quickly as possible.

When he arrived at the hotel, Stonehill found the lobby overrun; the place looked more like a crowded European train station filled with luggage and lost people rather than a modern American hotel. Every man, woman, and child in that lobby was a Holocaust survivor.

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Stonehill set up his equipment and asked the refugees to sing all the songs they knew from before the war. He recorded over 40 hours of music and most likely saved more than 1000 songs from being lost forever.

Men and women, young and old, sang in Hebrew, Russian, and Polish – but most of them sang in their mother-tongue – Yiddish. Children clamored around the music recorder, begging for a chance at the microphone. They wanted to hear their own voices, recorded by Stonehill. The technology delighted them and they were excited to sing the songs they heard at their parents’ knees, songs from their Hebrew school, from their youth movement, from the ghetto, from the camp, and even from where they remained hidden during the destruction. Those pieces of their culture, their voices, would now be alive forever, for future generations.

As we listen, other voices can be heard in the background, other survivors crying, laughing, and singing along.

Ben Stonehill (center) with his children, New York, 1948

Among the children that sang for Stonehill was a little boy named Meir, a 9-year-old who survived the war and had just set foot in New York. The song, Simu Shemen (“Put Oil On It”), is sung in Jewish households around the world to this day.

Hanukkah was celebrated and observed throughout the war, in the ghettos and even in the camps, as the survivors hoped beyond hope that the suffering would end and believed that they would be free once again. These were small glimmers of light in the endless darkness and Hanukkah was of specific symbolic importance during the Holocaust.

Hanukkah in Fuerstenfeldbruck DP Camp, Germany, 1945. Yad Vashem Archive 1486/582

These rare recordings that Ben Stonehill taped reveal a nearly lost world, barely kept alive as an entire generation and culture were almost completely wiped out.

“Antiochus”

Thankfully we are able to listen to those days long gone.

This article was written with the help of Dr. Gila Flam, head of the National Library’s Music Department.

The Ben Stonehill Collection of Jewish Folksongs in the Sound Archive was cataloged by Amy Simon, you can listen to more recordings from the collection, here.

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These treatments were not only administered in the fledgling State of Israel with the arrival of the immigrants. Various Jewish organizations traveled to North Africa, especially to Morocco, in order to administer treatment against ringworm and other diseases even before the children and their families left for Israel.

One of these organizations—acting out of the purest Zionist intentions, and perhaps herein is the tragedy of the matter—was the international Jewish organization OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants). Founded in St. Petersburg in 1912 as OZE (“Obschtestvo zdravookhraneniia evreev,” devoted to the promotion of health, hygiene and childcare among the Jews), its mission was to provide healthcare for Jews in places with inferior sanitary conditions. After WWII the organization headquarters moved to Paris and focused on offering healthcare to Holocaust survivors and mainly the children among them. The organization also later worked in North Africa, Iran, and the young State of Israel.

One of the organization’s activities was to establish well-baby clinics in Morocco. A photograph album documenting part of its activities in Morocco was preserved in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (which was eventually incorporated into the NLI archive). Thus, photos of the organization’s volunteers have come to light showing them helping to provide milk to children, instructing parents, conducting various medical examinations, and treating ringworm and trachoma using those drastic measures, which, in retrospect, was the real tragedy.

The photographs were used by the organization for purposes of public relations and fundraising.