Bente Kahan

Bente Kahan (born 23 September 1958) is a Norwegian solo vocalist, actress, musician, director and playwright. She is best known for her renditions and productions of Yiddish folk music and plays. Since 2002, she has lived and worked in Poland.

Biography Kahan was born in Oslo. Her parents are Holocaust survivors: her mother escaped to Sweden during World War II, with most of her family taken to Auschwitz and murdered there in 1942; her father, Herman Kahan (born as Chaim Hersh Kahan), a member of the Satmar hasidic sect, was born in Romania, and he was saved by an American soldier who saw his arm moving under a pile of dead bodies.

Kahan is a graduate in performing arts at Tel Aviv University, and also at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, in New York City.

Kahan started her career acting in 1981 at the Habima theatre in Tel Aviv and at the Nationaltheatret in Norway, performing for the first time as a singer in Oslo, for a play in Yiddish, the cabaret show Over Byen, in 1983. Together with Ellen Foyn Bruun she has written three plays: Bessie (about blues singer Bessie Smith) in 1986; Letter Without a Stamp in 1988; and Stemmer fra Theresienstadt in 1995—translated into German the same year and into English in 1997.

In 1990, after serving in several Norwegian theatrical companies, she founded her own, Teater Dybbuk in Oslo. In 2001, she moved with her husband and two children to Wrocław. She is the current director of the Wrocław Centre for Jewish Culture and Education. This was completed in 2010.

Kahan was honored in 2013 with the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, for her efforts on behalf of intercultural dialogue and for the rescue of the Jewish heritage of Lower Silesia.

Discography 1991: Yiddishkayt 1992: Farewell Cracow 1996: Stemmer fra Theresienstadt (Norwegian) 1996: Stimmen aus Theresienstadt (German) 1997: Voices from Theresienstadt (English) 1998: Di Gojim (klezmer music) 2000: Home (Yiddish, Ladino, and Hebrew) 2005: Sing with us in Yiddish 2016: Only A Human Being Bente Kahan Sings The Poetry Of Tadeusz Różewicz