BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY

 
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On the ‘Tikvah’ film set (from left to right), Jose Cardenas, Stephen Hildreth, Allison Toman, Max Eberle, Dustin Brandt and Justin Russell prepare the shot as John Jurko looks through the camera.

Audiences around the country have been moved by performances of “Tikvah,” a powerful oratorio on the Holocaust by Dr. Burton Beerman. The internationally recognized, award-winning professor of music composition at BGSU was inspired to write the piece when he met Toledoan Philip Markowicz, a concentration camp survivor and Talmudic scholar who was writing his memoirs. They collaborated to create a piece that unites music, dance and the spoken word to convey both the sorrow and the hope felt by survivors everywhere.

Now, with the donation of 30 rolls of film by the Eastman Kodak Co., BGSU film students are making a documentary about “Tikvah” so the “concert of hope, enlightenment and remembrance” can be shared more widely with schools, synagogues, museums, theaters and other universities, and even as a theatrical release with an interactive DVD. The film is being shot in part at America’s first Holocaust memorial center, in Detroit, which opened its doors to a film crew for the first time for this project.

“There’s a lot of excitement with the students,” said Jose Cardenas, School of Communication Studies, who is overseeing the project. “It’s rare for students to get to do something of this magnitude.”
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