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refaes@mail.biu.ac.il
Dr. Shmuel Refael is Head, Department of Literature of the Jewish People ,Bar Ilan University
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Immediately after he saw me for the first time there on the commando he did not believe I was a Jew.
I myself heard him say to his friend “Is dir hayid?” meaning if we were at all Jews?.
And I understood him and answered him in our Spanish, the Spanish of Cervantes: “Si senior, somos J’udios”
And he asked: “What?They bring Sephardis to the ovens too?”
I said to him: “No, we Sephardis came here as volunteers”.
(From the play) .

About the play

“Golgotha” the monodrama revolves around the character of Albert Salavado, a traditional Jew and Holocaust survivor from Thessalonica, who in the winter of 1943, was sent with his wife and two daughters to the Aushwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Albert has been through the worst and most terrible of all experiences: at Auschwitz-Birkenau, when forced to serve as Zondercommando (those assigned to work at the ovens) he had witnessed the cremation of his own adored wife Rozika.

In his simple, one-bedroom Tel Aviv apartment, during his last hours on earth, Albert – a lone and anguished old man, lays bare his past experiences, demonstrating his wisdom, his sharpness and his uniqueness as a descendant of the glorious Sephardi community of Thessalonican Jews that was led to the slaughter.

It is a shuddering voyage into Albert’s past, a man who awakens our recognition and who suddenly, in his old age, is asked to be amongst those who are honored with the lighting of a torch at Yad-Vashem on the Holocaust Memorial day. This is the moment he has waited for all his life, the moment in which he will stand up and tell what happened “back there”, the moment when he will relate the secret stories of the Ladino-speaking Jews in the concentration camps. But, this invitation revives in Albert all those memories he has made an effort to forget in order to be capable of living his life. Now, when all is remembered, he is no longer so sure he wants to light the torch …

Through scenic images that combine video and music, the stories of the Sephardi Jews transported from Thessalonica to Aushwitz-Birkenau are dramatically unveiled. A small number of Ladino-speaking Jews survived that hell, and Albert, the monodrama’s hero, is one of them.

Albert screams out his pain for the plight of the Ladino-speaking Sephardis, which has remained forgotten in Jewish-Israeli remembrance and in the universal narrative of the Holocaust. The hero’s thoughts actually represent those used in the campaign for recognition being conducted by the Ladino-speaking public and Holocaust survivors against the Israeli establishment and its remembrance and commemoration authorities, in Israel and abroad.

How  was “Golgotha” written ?

An invitation by Spain’s Exterior Ministry brought me, in the summer of 2001, to Madrid, to find the research materials needed to write a book on the Holocaust experiences of Ladino-speaking Jews. After I prepared for my assignment and had the required bibliographic items, I suddenly found myself writing a play and not the research project that had originally brought me to Spain. The writing of my research project was replaced by the words of a play that excited and challenged me. My investigative work of the Ladino-speaking Sephardi culture and my commitment as a son of Greek Holocaust survivors, had made me think from time to time, that the particular stories of the Sephardi Jews’ experiences during the Holocaust could somehow be expressed by writing a play. ”Golgotha” was spontaneously born. Days of research work were replaced by the spoken words of characters in a play. In the hub of effervescent Madrid, I reconstructed Thessalonica and the suffering of its Jews since their exile from Spain until their expulsion to the concentration camps in Poland. My thoughts were nurtured by hundreds of audio-taped hours, of conversations I had conducted with numerous Ladino-speaking Holocaust survivors during the writing of the testimonial book “Routes of Hell” (In Hebrew, 1988). The held-in pain, the frugal words, the tormented narrative so characteristic of those testimonial interviews are what guided me to speak for them and to find other ways to express what had not been said in that book. That is how “Golgotha” – a monodrama, was born.

But that was not the end of the story. A draft of “Golgotha” reached some of the best artistic stage people in Israel, but the effort to give life to the written words and to bring it into the limelight, in Hebrew, met with innumerable obstacles. The rejection of the Holocaust subject matter; the search for “light and easy” stage materials; the bureaucratic and budgetary limitations; the fear of producing a monodrama that would not ”fill the theaters” and the fact that I am not part of the artistic “clique”, all these factors almost kept “Golgotha” away from becoming a stage production. Were it not for a chance meeting with the artistic couple of Geula and Victor Attar, the monodrama “Golgotha” would probably today be forgotten in a drawer. They were captivated by the special stories of the Sephardi Jews at the concentration camps, and the special chemistry between us brought about the production of “Golgotha”.

From the moment in which the manuscript reached Geula’s hands, I felt that “finally someone understood what had been born on that spontaneous stroke in Madrid”. Geula became “Golgotha”s artistic "patron", she poured into it all the stage expression that it needed, surrounded herself with a wonderful work team, promoted the project in every possible manner, never giving up, and it is because of her and her husband Victor Attar, a full fledged actor in his own right, that this play is being staged today in Israel. Geula and Victor Attar considered this an almost sacred mission, and this is my chance to thank them and all those who are working to make this project a success, who are serving as the voices of the dead whose cries and stories were suffocated in the smoking chimneys of Aushwitz-Birkenau

Production Team :

By : Dr. Shmuel Refael
Music: Yuval Mesner / Video: Dana Levy / Scenery and Costumes: Gal
Shachak / Lighting: Yacov Seliv / Voices: Yacov Ashkenazy / Children’s voices:
Stav Mesner, Erez and Lior Lev-Ari / Director: Gabriel Guller /
Assistant Director: Snait Ben Gaash / Ladino Diction: Fina Aharonovitz/
Consultation: Dr. Revital Yafet / Photographer: Micha Adar / Graphic Design: Rivka
Kenller / Poster picture: Dana Levy

Sponsored by:

 Mattan Fund || Municipality of Tel Aviv-Yaffo || The Ministry of Education and Culture || “Makom" || "Zehut-Makom", Bar Ilan University || The Dahan Center for Culture, Society and Education in the Heritage of Sephardi Jews at Bar-Ilan University || The Yehoshua Salati Foundation || Contributions for the Commemoration of Thessalonican Jews who Died in the Holocaust || Special thanks to the Tzavta staff

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