Ben Sayevich and his nephew, Aviad Sajevitch, want younger generations of Lithuanian Jews to learn the history of their ancestors through music and visual arts.
Sayevich is a native of Lithuania, a world-renowned violinist and a professor of music/violin at Park University’s International Center for Music. Sajevitch is a lifelong Israeli resident, a painter and a musician.
Both will perform along with additional family members and others at an event called “The Music, Art & Culture of Lithuania” at 6 p.m. Wednesday, May 23, at the 1900 Building in Mission Woods.
Artwork by Sajevitch will be on display during the event and later at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City (The J), from May 25 through May 30. The May 23 concert also will feature Sayevich’s brother, Schmuel Sajevitch, on jazz piano; Jeff Harshbarger on bass; John Kizilarmut on drums; and Sayevich’s wife, Lolita Lisovskaya-Sayevich on piano. She also teaches music at the International Center for Music.
Ben Sayevich has never performed at an event that combines music and artwork that celebrate Lithuanian Jewish heritage, he said. The May 23 event was his idea.
“The event is to commemorate this great culture that doesn’t really exist anymore in the same form,” he said. “There was a period when Yiddish was spoken by 97 percent of people in the Russian empire, a few generations ago.”
Sayevich is 58 and lives in North Kansas City. He moved from Lithuania to Israel at age 12. At 21, one day after completing his Israeli army service, he came to the United States, first to New York. He later moved to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory of Music. He also had studied at the Churlonis School of Performing Arts and the Tel Ma-Yelin School of Arts.
He moved to Lawrence in 1987 to take a professorship at the University of Kansas. He joined the staff at Park University in 2006. He also plays occasionally with a piano trio in London.
Yiddish was his first language, which he speaks fluently along with English, Hebrew and Russian, and he also speaks Lithuanian and German.
All of his grandparents, aunts and uncles and two older siblings died in the Holocaust, he said. This played a large part in his desire to preserve and celebrate his Lithuanian Jewish heritage.
“Also, I feel that many people who live in the U.S. and throughout the world who are second-, third- or fourth-generation Lithuanian Jews know almost nothing about the history,” he said. “And maybe some people have a certain interest in it, where they come from. Whenever you put together a program, maybe you try to make it interesting intellectually to the public.”
Aviad Sajevitch shares his uncle’s passion for their Lithuanian Jewish culture, and it is the driving force behind his passion for his painting and music.
“First of all, Lithuanian Jewish heritage is my heritage, and I’m very interested in the history of my family and culture,” Sajevitch said. “It’s the same with the music. The paintings were inspired from some of the music. It’s all connected. It’s like there’s something in you that you want to take out and share it with the world. The history of my family is so important to me that I want to share it.”
He wants people who come to the concert to see how music and art “can explain a lot, can tell a story — maybe not just for the individual, but for a nation, a group of people, a family.”
“All my paintings tell stories,” he said. “I like to tell stories through my paintings and my music, and maybe some of (those who hear and see them) will connect their roots with my stories.”
Sajevitch is 29. He started painting at age 2. He started playing music at age 16 and set his painting aside for a time.
“Music was my life,” he said.
At 18, he was the lead singer in the Israeli navy ensemble and performed for Jewish communities in Argentina, Panama and the United states. At 24, he decided to study visual communications. Now he paints and makes music.
“I can’t do just one thing,” he said. “It’s all combined, and now I know I can combine them both.”
He graduated from Senkar College of Engineering.
Among the painters who have influenced him most are Leonardo da Vinci, Roberto Ferii and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, he said. His genre of painting is hyperrealism.
“Through painting you can tell something that a camera cannot do,” he said. “It catches tiny moments, maybe a scene within a scene. It can capture something surreal.”
Steven Karbank, chairman of Karbank Real Estate Co. and owner of the 1900 Building, also is of Lithuanian ancestry. He helped Sayevich organize the May 23 event.
“Ben did the work, but I provided the encouragement,” Karbank said. “He’s the one with the talent.”
Karbank and Sayevich are old friends and were introduced to each other by a mutual friend who also was of Lithuanian heritage. Karbank thinks the concert and exhibition are important because of the Lithuanian Jewish community’s long and storied history.
“It was a center, and at times the center, for Jewish learning in Europe, so we’re proud of the heritage,” he said. “We’re excited to have the Sayeviches performing at the building and hopeful that the heritage will be appreciated by Kansas City.”
The most important thing about the event, Sayevich said, is to reach a wider group of people.
“Mostly people of Jewish extraction would be interested in this, but not exclusively Jews,” he said. “I also am doing it for my nephew, and he is doing it as something to show his respect to his forefathers he never knew. Also, I have an 8-year-old daughter and I want her to understand something of her culture.”
