04/13/2026
"We were singing through people's pain, through people's stories, through history." โ Sam Mayo-Tinoco
Earlier this year, Charlotte musicology professor James A. Grymes published โPartisan Song: A Holocaust Story of Resilience, Resistance, and Revengeโ (Citadel Press / Penguin Random House), telling the story of Moshe Gildenman โ a Jewish Ukrainian engineer and amateur musician who became a partisan leader after his wife and daughter were murdered by the N***s. Somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews escaped N**i ghettos and camps to fight as guerrilla resistance fighters. Gildenman was one of them.
The book's musical heart came from an unlikely discovery: a small songbook that Gildenman had carried in his coat pocket throughout the war, preserved at Yad Vashem in Israel. "Of all the things," Grymes said, "this is what he carried." The songs inside, many in Yiddish, hadn't been heard in decades.
Among the 16 Charlotte students who brought this story to life is Matthew Johnson, a UNC Charlotte Belk College of Businesss grad student and baritone who grew up in Budapest โ a city where Holocaust memorials are prevalent. "The history is apparent there every day," Johnson said. And yet, like many, he knew nothing of the Jewish partisans until he began learning their songs.
Grymes arranged several of those partisan songs for our University Chorale. To get the Yiddish right, the music department brought Binyumen Schaechter, director of the Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus to campus to coach the students. He said the students "now have a better understanding of Yiddish pronunciation than the singers in many Jewish choruses that I've heard."
For student Jylian Taylor, the workshop was a turning point: "That was when it clicked for me. I could really put the words to the meaning."
The program was performed in Feb. at Temple Beth El in Charlotte and in March at the Center for Jewish Historyy in NYC. Johnson served as the soloist, embodying the voice of "Uncle Misha" himself.
The audiences gave standing ovations, and afterward came up to the students with deeply personal stories โ parents who were partisans, fathers who survived ghettos. One woman from Gildenman's own village said her father had known him personally โ and that she understood every word the students sang.
Johnson said he was "dumbstruck" by the response. "It's so personal to them, and yet it's so much bigger than any of us."
Tonight, as we observe Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, we are grateful to everyone who works to ensure that history is never lost ๐ฏ๏ธ
๐ https://brnw.ch/21x1yFK
๐ธ by Amy Hart, Toby Schuetze and Hanna Wondmagegn
