Fiddler on the Roof, the musical being performed by Becker High School next weekend, centers around a Jewish family in 1905 Russia attempting to maintain their religious and cultural traditions.
After the recent shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, Director Joseph Rand felt he should bring someone in to speak to the students as the content of the play is closely related to what happened there.
“After the shooting, I knew I didn’t have the capacity to teach them the historical context,” said Rand. “I wanted to bring someone in to talk about that as well as help the students with what they’re doing on stage and show them the meaning behind it.”
He contacted the Jewish Community Relations Council in Minneapolis, and last Monday representative Heidi Schneider came to the school to talk to the students performing in the musical about Jewish tradition and its relation to Fiddler on the Roof.
Schneider began by talking about her own Jewish background and beliefs, and told students the Nazis perpetuated many of the myths about Judaism.
“Judaism is the oldest of the monotheistic (belief in one God) religions,” she said. “It’s not a race. Jews are found all over the world and look like all the people of the world, although they have different cultural and ethnic groups depending on where they come from.”
She explained the guiding story of the Jews comes from Exodus, and is the story of the Jewish people escaping Egypt, their longing for freedom and their lifelong search for a land of their own.
She then asked students how they thought the guiding story is found within the play, and talked about the characters being strangers in a strange place being taken advantage of and then forced to leave and go into exile.
“It’s the idea of being persecuted because you’re a minority and having divine intervention to be brought to the promised land,” she said.
Schneider brought along a number of her family’s own personal religious items to share with students as she talked about them, including her Torah, family prayer book, prayer shawls, yarmulke and tzedakah box, which is used to collect money for the poor.
She taught the students a prayer in Hebrew, assuring them every character in Fiddler on the Roof learned that particular one as their first prayer. She also invited students up so she could bless them like the main character in the play blesses his daughters.
After talking about Jewish holidays and a number of other customs and rituals, Schneider spoke about anti-Semitism, another central theme in the play.
“Jews have always been a minority others have been suspicious of,” she said. “In the middle ages Jews were hated for their religion. In Nazi Germany, they were hated for their race and made to wear a star in public. Only 10% of the European Jews survived the Holocaust.”
Anti-Semitism has also occurred over the years because Christians were taught that Jews killed Jesus, because there was a belief that Jews killed Christian children to use in their blood rituals, and because of scapegoating – the belief that Jews caused all the problems in the world.
“They were different and people who are different cause fear even today,” she said. “Crimes against Jews are rising rapidly.”
Schneider asked the students to be thinking of questions she spoke about in her presentation as they get into their characters during rehearsals, and ended by showing individuals how to perform the rituals in the play correctly and how to make them more realistic.
Schneider will be holding another panel discussion on Judaism, anti-Semitism and how they relate to Fiddler on the Roof Dec. 1 at 5 p.m. between performances.
Show times are 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 30, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 1 and 2 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 2. Tickets, which are available at the door or on the Becker Schools’ website, are $12 for adults and $10 for students, seniors and military
