‘Soul to Soul’
Zalmen Mlotek’s Black-Jewish collaboration will honor MLK
Zalmen Mlotek of Teaneck created the cross-cultural “Soul to Soul” concert series more than a decade ago. He’s the artistic director of the lower Manhattan-based National YIddish Theatre Folksbiene, which has produced a new “Soul to Soul” every year since then. Each has been a little different, each a little more ambitious. This year’s performance, at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, will be special in a number of ways.
Mr. Mlotek, a musician, impresario, Yiddishist, and the son of parents whose work in Yiddish and musicology have been vital to Yiddish and to Yiddish music, joined Peter A. Geffen in a joint Zoom call to promote the program, set for Sunday, January 19, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend.
Mr. Geffen had worked with Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference voter registration drives in South Carolina during the summers of 1965 and 1966 and he will speak at the performance.
Coincidentally, it was Mr. Mlotek’s early participation in the civil rights movement that indirectly led to the creation of “Soul to Soul.”
“Having grown up as a kid doing voter registration in Black communities on Long Island and being a child of bundists, I was predisposed to do something like this,” he said.
But the final push came from an unrelated event. About 20 years ago, the actor/singer Elmore James “sought me out looking to learn the Paul Robesons Yiddish repertoire,” Mr. Mlotek said. He’d known the great singer and activist — “he had a beautiful voice” — and he knew which Yiddish songs he sang.
Mr. James is Black, as was Mr. Robeson, so perhaps not surprisingly that conversation “inspired me to conceive a concert that explores the musical commonalities, and of course, the existential commonalities between the Jewish people’s struggles and the African American struggle,” Mr. Mlotek said.
“Soul to Soul” has toured the country — its playlist sometimes adjusted to suit the community — and has played once in Europe too. What makes it especially interesting is that the songs are performed by both Black and Jewish artists. “I’ve taught the African American artists Yiddish and the Jews scat,” Mr. Mlotek said.
The result is a mixture of Yiddish folk, klezmer, spirituals, jazz, and gospel.
As for Mr. Geffen, when we spoke, he was not yet sure of exactly what he would say at “Soul to Soul,” but any of the stories he told me will certainly inspire the audience.
“It started in the summer of 1964,” he began. “I was 18 years old, and on my first trip to Israel. We were working on a kibbutz for a couple of weeks. The work was getting a little intense. Particularly the odor, since we were working in the chicken coops and cow sheds.
“I said to a bunch of my friends, let’s sleep in this morning. We have a shortwave radio. We can listen to the Yankee game — even though I was not a Yankee fan. It’ll be fun.
“As we’re listening to the game, a news broadcast comes through that the bodies of three civil rights workers who have been missing for weeks were found in Philadelphia, Mississippi.”
They were of course, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. Mr. Goodman “was a classmate of mine at Queens College,” and they worked together on several civil rights-related programs, Mr. Geffen said. “So when I came home, I said to my father, ‘Next summer I’m going to take Andy’s place.’ My father, who grew up in Atlanta and knew what the Ku Klux Klan was capable of, said, ‘No, you’re not.’”
They argued back and forth until young Geffen said, “‘But this is what you’ve taught me my whole life.’ My father was a Conservative rabbi” — Rabbi Samuel Geffen led the Jewish Center of Forest Hills West in Queens for 50 years — “and a man of great social conviction.
“And that was the end of the argument.”
Young Peter signed up for a Southern Christian Leadership Conference program called Summer Community Organization and Political Education project, administered at Columbia University. He was assigned to Orangeburg, South Carolina, and charged with trying to get Blacks registered to vote.
Was it dangerous? “In the summer of ’65, I was 19, and at 19 you’re not in any danger,” Mr. Geffen said. But that’s true only until reality intrudes. One evening, a dozen volunteers congregated in the kitchen of a home, “because we were young and always hungry.” A police car pulled up, a cop took out a shotgun, and shattered the picture window in the living room.
“Had we been in the living room, certainly some of us would have been injured,” Mr. Geffen said.
Since then, Mr. Geffen, who lives in Manhattan now, has been active in Jewish life and philanthropy, founding both the Park Avenue Synagogue High School (now the Rabbi Judah Nadich High School) and the Abraham Joshua Heschel School. Among his other accomplishments, he founded and is president of the Kivunim Institute, an international Jewish education program that creates gap year Israel-based international travel programs and special summer programs for teachers.
Mr. Geffen’s involvement influenced the musical casting of this year’s “Soul to Soul.” “I try to reach into the community to see if there’s a way to get community involvement,” Mr. Mlotek said. Because of Mr. Geffen’s relationship to the institution, “I naturally went to the Heschel School and asked if they’d like to have their children’s chorus involved.”
So 25 students from the pre-K to 12th-grade school will join a similarly sized choir from Harlem’s IMPACT Repertory Theatre. They will be joined by Elmore James (who inadvertently started this); Sam McKelton, an operatic tenor and actor; Lisa Fishman, who has starred in many Yiddish Theater productions and is the featured vocalist with Chicago’s Maxwell Street Klezmer Band; and Magda Fishman, a Florida-based cantor and trumpet player who was a vocal soloist and singer with the IDF band. Mr. Mlotek will lead a four-piece klezmer jazz band.
Representative Ritchie Torres, the Democrat who represents most of the South Bronx and has been a strong supporter of Israel, also will speak.
Fittingly, it will all take place in the same building where Dr King delivered his famous 1957 speech known as “The Future of Integration.”
I asked Mr. Mlotek if he had a goal, something he wanted the audience to take home with them after the show. He does, he said. “That we need to be concerned every day about the plight of the people around us. You know, as Jews, that’s our responsibility. To be a light unto the nations.
“So if we can bring some light into people’s consciousness, we will have succeeded.”
What: “Soul to Soul”
When: On Sunday, January 19
Where: Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, at
30 West 68th St. in Manhattan
How much: Tickets are $36 each; $72 for the family.
Tickets and information: www.nytf.org.
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