Piccolo series marks decade of celebrating Jewish culture

For a decade now, Piccolo Spoleto has featured a celebration of Jewish culture and history, and while Ellen Dressler Moryl, the festival's producer, certainly hopes the artistic series entertains and inspires, she said its real goal is to help audiences understand the "bigger issues" that inform art, the context in which art can flourish — or perish.

In 1980, Piccolo Spoleto offered a special performance of Ernst Bloch's "Sacred Service," a musical setting of the Sabbath service, a kind of Jewish oratorio. Moryl said she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce the concert, given on the 100th anniversary of Bloch's birth, and attended by the composer's children.

It set a high standard, Moryl said.

Ten years ago, in honor of Israel's 50th anniversary, Piccolo Spoleto launched its series "A World of Jewish Culture." That year, another special performance was offered: Oliver Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," written while Messiaen was a prisoner of war in a German camp during World War II, and performed 56 years after its premiere at Charleston's St. Matthew's Lutheran Church with the late Francis Kline, abbot of Mepkin Abbey, at the piano.

It was a beautiful way to pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and to acknowledge a Jewish homeland at its half-century mark, Moryl said.

"Piccolo Spoleto reflects the demographics and culture of the community in an effort to make the festival interesting, relevant and inspiring," she said.

"A World of Jewish Culture" is produced each year in conjunction with the College of Charleston's Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program, run by Martin Perlmutter.

The series, which this year features an Israeli film, violin music, Klezmer music and highlights from "Porgy and Bess," is an important way to highlight the Jewish presence in Charleston, Perlmutter said.

"Jews have been welcome in Charleston for over 300 years. Not many cities in the world have that history," he said. "When the series began 10 years ago to celebrate Israel's fiftieth birthday, nobody thought it would be a continuing event. Happily, next year we will celebrate Israel at 60, as our 11th anniversary event."

The series, supported by the Herzman-Fishman Foundation, is a small part of the potpourri of artistic expression in the area, Perlmutter said.

"The arts frame a community and help to define it. That is why Spoleto and Piccolo Spoleto are so important to Charleston. It would be a serious omission not to feature the Jewish story, which is so integrally connected both to the arts and to Charleston," he said.

For events, check out the calendar on 6A