Composed By: Martin Rosenberg (Rosebery D'arguto)

Arranged b: Joshua Jacobson

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Purchase sheet music at Transcontinental

Voicing: SATB

Keyword Holocaust

Language: Yiddish

Difficulty: moderate

Country: Poland, Germany

Solos: none

Instruments: piano

Lyrics: trad. Adapted by Rosenberg

Publisher: Transcontinental

Year Composed/Published: 1942

Timing: 4:30

Tempo: slow

First Line: bom bom, lilai, tsen brider

description: Martin Rosenberg, a conductor and educator in pre-war Poland and Germany, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was brutally tortured. As soon as he recovered, he organized and conducted a clandestine chorus of prisoners. When it became known that the Jewish prisoners of Sachsenhausen were to be transferred to the death camp at Auschwitz, Rosenberg composed this gruesome parody on an old Yiddish folksong called “Tsen Brider.” In Rosenberg’s version, which he called a “Jewish Requiem,” the ten brothers are murdered, one after the other, in the gas chambers. This rearrangement of “Tsen Brider” for mixed chorus conveys the horror and irony of this Holocaust lament in a musical language that is simple and direct.