Orchestra Started by Shoah Refugees
LA PAZ, Bolivia — Erich Eisner founded the Bolivian National Symphony Orchestra in 1945, six years after being released from the Dachau concentration camp and landing in the South American country.
Bolivia was one of the few countries still willing to take Jews as World War II erupted in 1939.
Eisner, a pianist born in Prague in 1897, had apprenticed under Bruno Walter, one of the 20th century’s major conductors. In the 1930s, he worked at theaters in southern Germany and in Austria.
Eisner was arrested after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.
He won his release from Dachau and went to Bolivia via Great Britain.
Under Eisner, the orchestra operated under Spartan conditions in La Paz. But he found a willing ensemble. Almost all the musicians were Jewish refugees from Austria, Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Eisner headed the orchestra until his death in 1956.
A piece he composed in 1941, “Cantata Bolivia,” was performed in Israel in 2003 and then by the Bolivian National Symphony Orchestra.
The Jewish Museum Berlin hosted a small exhibit on Eisner in 2003, and also on painter Kurt Bialostotzky, who also escaped to Bolivia in 1939.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
