The Ra’anana Symphony Orchestra from Israeli opens a tour of Poland  in tribute to Irena Sendler, the Polish woman who saved two and a half thousand Jewish children from the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland.
 
The highlight of the tour of several cities in Western Poland  – Poznan, Gniezno, Konin, Kalisz, Leszno and Pila – is the performance of a piece by Israeli composer Kobi Oshrat  entitled Irena’s Song – a Ray of Light through the Darkness for orchestra, voice and violin.
 
The tour is part of an educational project, which involves two and half thousand Israeli junior high school students. They all wrote letters to Irena Sendler and as a symbolic gesture, the most interesting of them were put in jars, similar to those in which Irena Sendler hid the sheets of paper with the names of the saved children in order to be able to reunite them with their parents after the war ended.  The jars will be presented to leading personalities in Poland and Israel. All the letters were put into specially designed envelopes. The Israeli Philatelic Authority issued two stamps for the occasion, designed by the Polish artist Rafal Olbinski.
Irena Sendler died in May 2008 at the age of 98. Her many distinctions included an honorary citizenship of the State of Israel.

Click on the audio icon to listen to the report by Michał Kubicki.