Recently the Jewish Community of Petropavlovsk was invited at the opening performance. Anatoliy Nargelenas supervises a youth theater studio that created and put on stage a performance with his students "There Is a Thunderstorm Somewhere..."

The actor of the Russian Drama Theater, member of our community, Alexander Nargelenas has been working for several months in our Jewish community library to collect materials about the war and Holocaust. He created a play with such a scene at the beginning - the roaring sounds in the background, the cruelest war in history has just started, while people are listening to it and say quietly "there is a thunderstorm somewhere..." The stage was provided by the Regional Russian Drama Theater named after Pogodin. There is beautiful music in the performance and young talented actors took the lead in putting it on stage.

The performance plot - life of Jewish families on the border area on the eve of the war. Unofficial information about upcoming fights started coming in. The play is highly emotionally charged. It shows a difficult time, people’s destinies, and personal pain of each character. The officers were informed of the upcoming fascists’ attack but they were not allowed to share this information even with their families. They tried to save their families. One of the characters, a strong and loving person, had to lie to his family saying that he had a mistress and his wife and children should go to his wife’s parents. There were people who decided to stay despite of everything on the land where their ancestors had been buried. It were the souls of the dead people who were telling about their personal tragedies and their death.

Everybody was deeply moved by the performance. The Holocaust topic is always up-to-date; it is in the heart of each Jew.

We have been friends with Anatoliy Nargelenas for a long time. There is a theater group in Hesed Efraim. Anatoliy Petrovich comes often to give a valuable professional advice. We are glad he was able to put on stage a new performance and convey what we cannot forget, have no right to forget.

Svetlana Makarovskaya