By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

In 2010, three musicians in Columbus came together to create concert programs they felt passionate about. They named themselves the Anahata Music Project and their first program was a Holocaust remembrance concert.

The trio will perform this concert on Jan. 27 at the University of Dayton Chapel, sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Jewish Federation’s Yom Hashoah Committee, and UD’s Campus Ministry and Arts Series.

“Anahata comes from Hindu tradition,” says the ensemble’s mezzo soprano, Susan Millard-Schwarz. “Anahata refers to the heart, chakra, so we decided we would create programs that pulled from our hearts, that were born out of passion.”

Anahata’s Holocaust remembrance concert focuses on musical works and poetry created by composers and writers who survived or perished in the Holocaust including works by Erich Korngold, Erwin Schulhoff, Hannah Senesh, and Ephraim Fogel.

Millard-Schwarz says she’s dreamed of presenting a Holocaust remembrance concert for a long time.

“What I discovered was that I already knew two musicians who had a strong heart for this type of concert,” she says. “We just started talking and realized we really have to do this.”

The ensemble first presented its Holocaust concert at the Broad Street United Methodist Church in Columbus, where Millard-Schwarz is a member. Her husband and his family are Jewish.

“The pastor at the time shared our passion for getting this off the ground, and so he agreed to host the first one and promoted it to the Jewish neighborhoods on the East Side there,” she says. “That same season we were able to do it at the Grandview Public Library here in Columbus with a grant from the Columbus Jewish Foundation so that I could pay my musicians.”

The Anahata Music Project has also performed the concert at the Bexley Public Library.

Millard-Schwarz says she first learned about the Holocaust when she was 8 or 9; her mother took her to a movie called The Hiding Place, about a Dutch-Christian family that was sent to the camps during World War II for the crime of sheltering Jews.

“It just burned itself into my soul and into my memory,” she says. “And after that, I just tried to learn more.”

Reciting the poems for the Dayton program will be poet Sandra Feen, also of Columbus. “She and I, since we were in third grade, have had a real sensitivity to this. We both learned together.”

“There are a number of Holocaust programs that are out there,” Millard-Schwarz says, “and we are grateful for that. There is a distinction here in that a lot of Holocaust programs use testimony from survivors. This is critical and we need to be able to do that while we still have those people. But this (concert) is meant to complement those programs by using the same type of testimony, in an artistic sense. It allows the artists who did and didn’t survive to speak through their own artistic expression and give voice to those that otherwise wouldn’t have one anymore.”

Millard-Schwarz says the next concert program in the works for Anahata will probably center on the issue of domestic violence.

The Anahata Music Project presents a Holocaust Remembrance Concert, Sunday, Jan. 27, 3 p.m. at the University of Dayton Chapel (Park in Lot P or B). Free and open to the public. For more information, call Beth Adelman at 610-1555.