Nechama Lifshitz
Her seemingly innocent concerts were the heart and soul of Lipshitz's contribution to keeping Jewish culture and identity alive in the Communist bloc.
Early in her career Lifshitz sang as a soloist in the Kaunas Opera, performing Barber of Sevilla, Rigoletto and other productions.
This was mainly limited to Yiddish concerts, which helped propel singers such as Lifschitz, and others like Sidi Tal and Mikhail Epelbaum, to officially-sanctioned popularity.
However, they had little access to Yiddish music in the Lithuanian SSR, and so Lifshitz went to Moscow to meet the composers Shaul Senderei and Lev Pulver.
[9] Pulver had been director of the Moscow Yiddish State Theater for years, and gave her material by Avram Goldfaden, Sholem Aleichem and others.
[9] In his memoirs, Braudo listed the repertoire in those first concerts: Pulver and Senderei's compositions, as well as the work of L. Kahan and L. Yampolsky, set to music with texts by poets Shmuel Halkin, Yosef Kotlyar, Zalman Shneur, and S.
[10] They also read poems by Shmuel Halkin and Yosef Kotlyar and Hirsch Osherovich and some short stories by Eliezer Steinberg and Sholem Aleichem.
According to Braudo, her success in that contest caught the attention of the press in Moscow, which rarely gave any coverage to Jewish artists.
Many of the surviving members of the prewar Yiddish cultural world came to the concert, including Shmuel Halkin (whose poems she had performed), and the widows of Der Nister, Itzik Fefer, Perets Markish, and others.
At around this time, one of the most well known Soviet Yiddish singers Mikhail Alexandrovich convinced her that she was talented enough to give solo concerts and that she did not need to travel with the Lithuanian troupe.
[13] The new material she added for the centenary concerts and a show of Sholem Aleichem "Wandering Stars" (Yiddish - Blonjedike Shtern) composed by Abraham Rubinstein, with montages by Leonid Lurie, director of the Russian Theatre in Vilnius, artist Rafael Chwoles and with music by Lev Pulver.
[17] In the late 1950s and early 1960s she continued to give regular concerts in the Soviet Union, although it became difficult for her to get permission to perform in cities with a large Jewish population.
[19] Apparently this came as a surprise to many people, and may have been a result of Leonid Brezhnev trying to interfere with the Jewish cultural revival by getting rid of some of its major figures.
[2] After a sold-out concert in April 1969 which was attended by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (who also sponsored the event), and most of her government as well as artists, writers, editors, and thousands more, she greatly reduced her performance schedule once in Israel—she later said that she "felt like a partisan when the war was over.
[11] Seeing an opportunity to continue that work with a younger generation and to pass her heritage, she launched her own workshop in Israel for Yiddish vocalists which she ran almost till her death.
