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Flory's Flame: Some highlights from the screening at the Library of Congress this past week!
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January 2015
In the opening remarks of Croatian Ambassador to the US H.E. Josip Paro:
 "This event is supported by two embassies: the Spanish Embassy and the Croatian Embassy. Both nations threatened their Jews with extermination, and almost succeeded in it. And against all odd, there is Flory Jagoda; singing in an antiquated Spanish her "cantikas," and there she is singing Croatian popular song of her youth in Ladino, and the other time there she is singing Bosnian Muslim songs in Bosnian and in Ladino, and there she is, like Chagall's bride, flying above the blue memories of death and extermination, making us all better, in spite, or maybe precisely because the generosity of her music and poetry, making us even more deeply ashamed of our capacity for inflicting misery and death to other beautiful human beings just because they are different.
 

Photo Gallery of Flory's Flame Screening, Sponsored by the American Folklife Center at the

US Library of Congress and the Embassies of Croatia and Spain  

 

 

Entranceway to the event at the Library of Congress
Entrance to screening at the Library of Congress 

  

 

Flory Jagoda at the reception before the screening
Flory Jagoda at the reception prior to the screening 

  

 

Flory engaged in conversation with Croatian Ambassador H.E. Josip Paro (left) and Dino Mihanovic, Political Officer at the Embassy of Croatia
Flory engaged in conversation with Croatian Ambassador H.E. Josip Paro (left) and Political Officer of the Embassy of Croatia Dino Mihanovic  

 

 

Flory and Croatian and Spanish officials
Representatives of Spain Arts & Culture, Embassy of Croatia, and Flory 

  

 

Ellen and Curt's intro
Introduction to the screening by JEMGLO's Ellen Friedland and Curt Fissel

  

 

Q and A, Left to right, Curt, Flory, Ellen and Steve Winick of the American Folklife Center
Q and A with Curt, Flory, Ellen, and American Folklife Center's Stephen Winick 

EXCERPTS FROM THE OPENING REMARKS OF CROATIAN AMBASSADOR H.E. JOSIP PARO:

 

The film you will be watching is about an extraordinary person. Flory Jagoda, born Altarac in a Sephardic family in Sarajevo, spent her youth in Vlasenica in Bosnia and mostly in Zagreb, Croatia, survived the Holocaust, married an American soldier in Italy, ended up as an American. Flory has dedicated her life to keeping alive the miracle of Sephardic music and language...

She is an artist, a worldly outlet of the divine in us humans. She is an uncommonly cheerful lady through whom the very mystery of the human ability to reproduce the divine harmonies and beauty reaches out to us commoners, to us prone to oblivion and, therefore to repetition of not just stupid but very evil blunders too.  


Croatian Ambassdor H.E. Josip Paro's Opening remarks

The history and remembrance her music keeps alive is multilayered and deep. She sings in Ladino, an all but forgotten language spoken by the Spaniards of the 15th century, and preserved in a cultural capsule of the Jewish Sephardic expellee communities of the Turkish Ottoman empire. The Sephardic Jewish culture, their language, poetry and music have survived the pogrom of medieval inquisition, but have almost disappeared under the systematic horrors of the European Holocaust. As you will see, it was faith, music and poetry that helped the Jews survive the exile from Spain. On the more personal experience level, as Flory Jagoda believes, it was her musical talent what helped her to survive the holocaust in Croatia. She literally played and sung her way out of certain death, while fleeing by train from Zagreb where the fascists were rounding up Jews, sending them to death camps in Croatia and Germany.

Flory's culture is Jewish, but it is also Spanish and Croatian, Bosnian and Turkish. Her culture is obviously American too; it's integrative. It is a culture of remembrance: neither forgiving nor forgetting. It generously flies above narrow- minded divisions we are so easily prone to, especially in times of crisis: when we who at least once in our history were all emigrants, loath emigrants, and when we who at one point were all persecuted or ostracized for having different religion, or culture, loath people of different religion or culture.

Flory's art and life story reminds us, it makes us remember that we must not allow ourselves ever again to succumb to the simple minded spirit of the collective We, as opposed to the collective Them. The moment we allow for that simple-minded division, we are just a step from the pogrom, from the Holocaust.


For more information about Flory's Flame, please go to our website.

If you'd like to help plan a screening in your community, please contact us:  

shawna@thebrakefieldcompany.com or  

ellen@jemglo.org 

 

 
Ellen Friedland
President
JEMGLO Productions
JEMGLO Productions | 973-744-0570 | ellen@jemglo.org | www.jemglo.org
117 Watchung Avenue, Floor 2
Montclair, NJ 07042