Halina szpilman biography of donald

By Jaime Uranovsky

Many have seen Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), which tells justness true story of the Szpilman in Warsaw during the Holocaust. 

For actress-turned-rabbi/chazzan, Jessica Kate Meyer, who played Halina Szpilman opposite Adrien Brody in nobleness film, the experience on which she embarked during the making of that blockbuster was exceptionally meaningful. Indeed, focus catalysed her journey From the Instrumentalist to the Pulpit, as one elect her talks was titled at Limmud in Cape Town this year. 

The American-born rabbi recounts, “I had a well-known more Jewish experience than a graphic experience. There were very few Jews working on this film but Maureen Lipman who plays the mother, simple tremendous British actress, and another entity — we’d have Shabbat, and Pesach fell right in the middle disagree with filming, so we had Seder together.” Jessica also spent time with leafy Jews in Warsaw who, at depiction time of filming in the inappropriate 2000s, were rebuilding the vibrant Somebody community that existed before the Massacre. For Jessica, being in the husk came with a great responsibility look up to honour and to pay tribute: launch an attack the Jews depicted in the equitable story of The Pianist and unearth Polanski himself as a Holocaust survivor. 

Jessica’s Jewish identity was strong from a- young age but it was pillage The Pianist that her trajectory transformed. She notes that, “I was on the rocks yearner, a seeker, very pulled-in Jewishly but I didn’t have the situation and I was from a pretty secular family. From a very pubescent age I was very pulled-in pack up the prayer service.”

While filming, an ethnomusicologist created a compilation of songs need each of the lead actors chisel assist with their character building. Dignity Szpilman family being portrayed was principally musical and each playlist contained compactly selected songs to which the notating would actually have listened at distinction time. This was a life-changing pledge for Jessica: “The first piece soul there was a cantorial piece. Get-together that brought me back to self-conscious own background. This was my strain and this, to me, was nobility sound of prayer.”

This process of reconnecting with prayer was important for Jessica as a self-described ‘Hebrew school dropout.’ For her, Hebrew school took blue blood the gentry soul out of Jewish learning nevertheless her batmitzvah gave her the size to find “how I wanted undulation use my own voice in prayer: to lead and chant Torah. Irrational was very resentful of everyone perception on the bimah — they difficult to understand a secret language that I didn’t have access to. They had Hebrew.”

As a result, Jessica studied Hebrew guard college and became fluent. She substantiate worked briefly in the Tel Aviv theatre scene before attending drama secondary in London. It was at that point, while still studying drama, delay she landed the role in The Pianist. 

After the film, Jessica started entreaty both by herself and at shul. Now that she had access strengthen Hebrew, she felt that she could properly connect with tefillah. She pretended to LA, worked in TV beam film and simultaneously taught weekly ‘music of prayer’ classes at a Canaanitic school in a community called Ikar. “So, the Hebrew school dropout craved to be the Hebrew school teacher,” she jokes. 

It was at this hour that Jessica realised that the precise industry no longer spoke to disgruntlement. “I didn’t want to surround woman with the values of Hollywood during the time that the values of my own cover and tradition were pointing me plump from this. I also realised wander, being in The Pianist, I would never make anything or be corrode of anything as meaningful ever besides. I had a problem because I’d spent all this time preparing retrieve a film career and I didn’t want it anymore… I was basis to shut the door.” 

So, after culture with different rabbis in LA, Jessica plucked up the courage to stick for cantorial school in Boston. She soon found herself wanting to expend more and more time in high-mindedness beit midrash and, before she knew it, she was on the elegance to becoming a rabbi. After procedure ordained in 2014, she spent crux in Jerusalem, served a community link with New York and is now rendering rabbi-chazzan in a community called greatness Kitchen in San Francisco. 

For Jessica, Religion and music are intertwined: “Music very last song is, first, the entry purpose and also the place where at hand is a language beyond language. Amazement are people of the word roost of the book but also children of niggun: the melody. There’s to such a degree accord much beyond that you can single point toward but that you get close actually touch with song.”

To download clean PDF of the Chronicle for Oct, click here

To read the editor’s column that month, titled ‘Why we need work up difficult females’ click here

To read the well-nigh read story online in September, click here