Somewhere Over the Rainbow



I am now back in Israel, waiting for my granddaughter to give us her impressions of her life as a “lone soldier”. Actually, she is serving in the airforce so we are still “up in the air”. Which reminds me of something I heard some time ago which is probably  not well-known.

Perhaps the most emotional song to emerge out of the mass exodus from Europe was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” which was introduced in the popular film The Wizard of Oz. 

The song was voted the 20th century’s No. 1 song by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. The lyrics were written by Yip Harburg, the youngest of four children born, in New York to Russian-Jewish immigrants. The music was written by Harold Arlen son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania.

In writing it, the two men reached deep into their immigrant Jewish consciousness, from the progroms of the past and the Holocaust about to happen. Read the lyrics in their Jewish context and suddenly they are no longer about wizards and Oz but about Jewish survival:

“Somewhere over the rainbow / Way up high / There’s a land that I heard of / Once in a lullaby. Somewhere over the rainbow / Skies are blue / And the dreams that you dare to dream / Really do come true. Someday I’ll wish upon a star / And wake up where the clouds are far behind me. Where troubles melt like lemon drops / Away above the chimney tops / That/s where you/ll find me. Somewhere over the rainbow / Bluebirds fly. Birds fly over the rainbow / Why then, oh why can’t I? If happy little bluebirds fly / Beyond the rainbow / Why, oh why can’t I?”

The Jews of Europe could not fly. They could not escape beyond the rainbows. Harburg was almost prophetic  when he talked about wanting to fly like a bluebird away from the “chimney tops”. In the post-Auschwitz era, chimney tops have taken on a whole different meaning than the one they had at the beginning of 1939. The Nazis had not yet created the crematoriums and gas chambers that they used during the Holocaust.


It is ironic that for 2,000 years, the land that the Jews heard of “once in a lullaby” was not America, but Israel. The remarkable thing would be that less than 10 years after “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was published, the exile was over, and the State of Israel was reborn. Perhaps the “dreams that you dare to dream really do come true”.

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