Event information
Chayela Rosenthal - known as the “Wunderkind of the Vilna Ghetto Theatre” - was one of many Lithuanian survivors of the holocaust who relocated to South Africa.
Having survived the Vilna Ghetto, the Kaiserwald Labour camp, the Stutthof concentration camp and a death march to the Baltic Sea, Rosenthal married fellow survivor Xavier Piatke, and went on to have a remarkable international career in Yiddish theatre with many stars of stage and screen.
She and her husband established a home in Cape Town where they raised their two daughters, Naava and Zola, who continue their parents’ legacy.
Against the backdrop of Vilna, ”the Jerusalem of Lithuania”, the exhibition explores Rosenthal’s pre-war life and her extraordinary tale of survival and resistance through her music, and that of her brother, the composer Leyb Rosenthal, who was murdered in the Klooga camp.
The exhibition also explores the connections to YIVO (an organisation that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life) and Rosenthal’s post war career and enormous contribution to Yiddish theatre internationally.
