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Klezmer in Germany and Eastern Europe
Klezmer is a musical Jewish genre that consists of mainly instrumental songs. In Germany, Klezmer expanded significantly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the mid-1980s. As Klezmer was expanding, so was the Yiddish folk movement, and the two genres became intertwined to a certain extent. In the 1980s while Klezmer was seeing tremendous growth, many Jews in Eastern Europe turned to Klezmer as a means of understanding their communist backgrounds and showing their remembrance to those who experienced the Holocaust. Once Klezmer groups started to tour outside of Europe in the 1980s, Americans gained immediate interest in the music genre. Henry Sapoznik created the first American Klezmer band, known as Kapelye, which toured all around Europe. The spread of Americans playing Klezmer brought a new tone to the genre which captured large audiences. Most American groups who played Klezmer added a hint of American rock into their performances, which was different than the traditional sound of Klezmer in Eastern Europe. It was uncomfortable at first for many of the American Klezmer bands to play in Germany because of the trauma that had occurred there. Despite Germany's background, the American Klezmer groups knew Germany was a place they had to play because of Klezmer's popularity there. Over time, the feelings of awkwardness faded away when Klezmer's audience expanded in Germany.

A man under the name of Giora Feidman is arguably one of the most influential Klezmer musicians. Giora Feidman created a new perspective for Klezmer, and shared a new ideology for how the music genre could be viewed and appreciated. Feidman gained a large amount of popularity from his work on the musical play, Ghetto, which associated him and his style with the Holocaust. He brought a new theme to Klezmer music which focused on the remembrance of the Holocaust, and a way of "healing" the trauma caused by the Holocaust. Feidman turned Klezmer into a form of personal expression, in which he tried to unite all people (especially the Jews and Germans) and all things through Klezmer. He completely shifted the ideology of Klezmer and explained how Klezmer is in everything, it is even a way to get in touch with religion and communicate with God. However, some people believe Feidman took his ideology too far and turned Klezmer into something that it never intended to become.

During the 1980s Klezmer underwent significant transformation, and by the middle-late 1990s Klezmer experienced a new wave of change. Klezmer became a name for many different trends far from where it originated. Klezmer was known as a political statement, a method of healing, amateur musicians getting together and playing music, a way to reconnect with lost traditions, and so on. Klezmer's roots were still in music, but it had become something so much more than just a music genre. Klezmer was open to anyone's interpretation of what it is, and not subject to one group of people(s).