Hundreds Gather for Jewish Choir Festival
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Hundreds of singers from across Europe have convened in Vienna for the first European Jewish Choir Festival.
The festival will culminate on May 12 in a gala concert titled “Shir LaShalom — A Song for Peace” at the Austria Center Vienna, where 400 vocalists from Jewish choirs from 16 European cities will present their repertoires.
The event, is expected to draw some 1,500 spectators over the weekend, is sponsored by the European Jewish Parliament, the Jewish Community of Vienna, the municipality and the Austrian state, among others.
In addition to concerts, the festival’s Jewish and non-Jewish singers are participating in workshops to increase cultural exchange, an element which Roman Grinberg, choirmaster of the Vienna Jewish Choir, described as “extremely important” for organizers.
“The excitement here is enormous, the faces of participants of the initial sessions reminded me of children receiving a new PlayStation,” said Joel Rubinfeld, co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament.
Rubinfeld said singers and musicians from the festival turned an informal dinner on Thursday at Vienna’s Alef Alef kosher restaurant into an impromptu klezmer and song concert.
The event is to become an annual festival. Next year’s gathering is scheduled to take place in Rome and, the following year, in Paris.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
