News from SUNY Cortland

For more information contact: Jean Palmer, 607-753-2232

SUNY Cortland To Remember Holocaust On April 29

CORTLAND, NY (04/17/2008; 0900)(readMedia)-- Classical musician and klezmer specialist Robin Seletsky will discuss the style that formed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust and will play examples of folk songs, a lullaby and wedding music on Tuesday, April 29, at SUNY Cortland.

The program is an annual event memorializing the tragedy of the Nazi Holocaust.

Titled “The Spirit of a Lost Culture: Jewish Music in Eastern Europe Before the Holocaust,” the event begins at 7:30 p.m. in Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge. Organized by the Jewish Studies Program, the event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

At the end of the evening, a brief candle-lighting ceremony will take place to remember the lives lost in the Holocaust.

Seletsky, who is the principal clarinetist with the Glimmerglass Opera and the Binghamton Philharmonic, will be accompanied by Jonathen Dinkin, a pianist who has been involved with Jewish music in the Syracuse, N.Y., area for many years. He composes, teaches, performs and is featured annually at the Syracuse Jewish Music Fest.

Through explanation of the Yiddish lyrics and the actual sound and inflections of the melodies, an authentic exploration into Jewish life will be offered. Seletsky will conclude with a discussion and musical examples of what has survived and how it has evolved.

Seletsky is the music director at Temple Beth El in Oneonta, N.Y., and the founder of the Catskill Klezmorim, a group of professional musicians formed in 1995. She is a classically trained performer who has studied at the New England Conservatory and the Julliard School.

Her interest in klezmer music came from her father, Harold Seletsky, the “Prez of Klez” and leader of the acclaimed West End Klezmorim. Seletsky has attended KlezKamp, where she learned from both an older generation of klezmorim and from leaders in the klezmer revival. She has received several grants relating to her work with Jewish folk music, including a project documenting and transcribing music and oral histories of regional Jewish seniors and Holocaust survivors.

The event is sponsored by the Campus Artist and Lecture Series (CALS), the Jewish Studies Committee, Hillel, the Project on Eastern and Central Europe, the Clark Center for International Education, the Center for Intercultural and Gender Studies and Auxiliary Services Corporation. For more information, contact Linda Lavine, associate professor of psychology, at (607) 753-2040 or lavinel@cortland.edu.

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