GUNS N' ROSES, SALEM Members Marking Holocaust Remembrance Day Loudly
April 30, 2011, 13 years ago
As previously reported, GUNS N' ROSES guitarist Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal will be a special guest of Israeli death/doom metallers SALEM, at the band's May 6th show at Reading 3 in Tel Aviv. The special event is for the re-release of the cult 1994 album, Kaddish (originally released by Germanu's Morbid Records), an album which represents the band's personal dirge for the Holocaust victims in WWII.
"I’m a third generation Holocaust survivor,” Salem’s vocalist and leader Zeev Tannenbaum told The Jerusalem Post earlier this week, explaining how a doom metal band came to write and record the relentlessly aggressive album Kaddish, which after selling more than 100,000 copies worldwide in the years after its release, has just been reissued by the band.
“My father lost his whole family in the Shoah and escaped from Poland to Russia to Israel. I heard his stories all my childhood about what had occurred to his father and Kaddish was our desperate cry in memory of the horrors that happened to our families. By doing this album, we sent two important messages: We will never forget, and we are here to survive.”“My family is originally from Lithuania and Poland and my grandparents got out in the late 1920s, but many of their relatives were killed. We have no record at all what happened to them,” said Thal, who joined Guns N' Roses, one of the world’s top musical acts, in 2006.
“Even though none of my immediate family was killed in the Holocaust, it’s something that speaks to every Jew. If it’s not the Holocaust, it’s the trauma of the Six Day War, and if it’s not that, it’s the fucking Inquisition. We all feel the sense on a holiday when a family gets together that the gathering would have included seven times as many people if certain events hadn’t happened. I think only Jews would understand that – only we get it.”
Read the entire report here.
