Dr. Gideon Joffe | Chairman of the Jewish Community of Berlin

The motto of this year’s 13th Louis Lewandowski Festival is “75 years of Israel”. A beautiful and worthy motto. I was really looking forward to the festival when I heard about festival director Nils Busch-Petersen’s plans. And I actually wanted to tell you about the diversity of Israel’s contemporary music culture, which draws on a wide variety of oriental and European currents.

Instead, I must take this opportunity to express my anger and sadness at the criminal and insidious terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7 of this year. A cowardly attack in the 75th year of the founding of the State of Israel and the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. Hamas murder gangs killed over 1200 people and abducted 240 victims.

At the same time, I would like to thank you for the solidarity shown to Israel and the Jewish community in Germany, which is also expressed through this festival. Four choirs and ensembles are coming from Israel, the USA and Berlin. Two ensembles from Israel cannot come because of the terrible events, also because they do not want to leave their families alone in the current, extremely critical situation, or because musicians are fighting as soldiers against the Hamas barbarians.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the participants, who have once again succeeded in putting together an extremely interesting and artistically high-quality program.
I wish the organizers, the artists and the hopefully very numerous guests every success, great success and I very much hope that peace will soon be restored in Israel.

Dr. Gideon Joffe, Vorsitzender der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin