They Hid Grenades Under Their Skirts. Now They Get a Rock Band.

Most Americans learned a version of the Holocaust in school: the trains, the camps, the diary in the attic. That version is true, and it is incomplete. Somewhere between the textbook and the museum gift shop, a whole category of people went missing. They were young Jewish women who walked through Nazi checkpoints with bread in their bags, messages braided into their hair and, on more than one occasion, grenades under their skirts.

They were called the kashariyot. The word translates, roughly, to "couriers," which makes them sound like they worked for an early version of UPS. What they actually delivered was the resistance. With forged papers and the nerve to pass as non-Jewish, they moved food, money, intelligence and weapons between sealed ghettos, forests and underground cells across occupied Europe. Many were teenagers. Many did not survive.

On Sunday, Nov. 8, their story arrives at The Florida Holocaust Museum in a form you might not expect: loud. RiSE: The Rock Musical, written and composed by Joshua Daniel Hershfield, sets the couriers' war to electric guitar. The show's own pitch puts it plainly: "Instead of Fiddler on the Roof, this is Rock Band on the Roof."

Hershfield studied at Berklee College of Music and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He came to the couriers later, while earning a master's in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, where a professor mentioned them almost in passing. He went digging. One of the women he found was Gusta Davidson Draenger, a member of the Krakow underground. After the Gestapo arrested her, she wrote her account of the resistance on smuggled scraps of toilet paper. Hershfield has called her his greatest inspiration.

He has also said he wrote the show in response to rising antisemitism and Holocaust denial. He worries about how easily people assume democracy will simply keep itself running. Germany, he points out, was a progressive republic before it wasn't.

RiSE has had an unusual road. It was workshopped by the Alliance for Jewish Theatre in 2021, then opened as a full development production in Rochester, New York, in 2022, where it sold out a three-week run. After Oct. 7, 2023, it was staged in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem under missile fire, in a venue that doubled as a bomb shelter, to a sold-out crowd. Since then it has sold out the Holocaust Museum Los Angeles, the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Michigan and JW3 in London, and it has played Lviv, Ukraine. It won the Bela Zarhi Prize from Israel's Ghetto Fighters' House and was a finalist for the Eugene O'Neill National Music Theatre Conference.

If you've ever wondered what it takes to get a new musical produced in America, the answer is apparently this. Write a score people sing on the way out. Sell it out on three continents. Perform it in a bomb shelter. Then discover that many mainstream backers still won't touch it. The production now runs as its own nonprofit and largely produces itself, which is a polite way of saying the couriers are, once again, doing the carrying.

Set your expectations correctly. Nov. 8 is not a fully staged production with sets and a full cast. It's an intimate salon performance of selected songs and scenes, the kind of format that lets a museum audience hear the music up close. After the performance, Hershfield sits down for a conversation, followed by a dessert reception. The afternoon is ASL-interpreted and funded in part by Creative Pinellas.

That format might be the best way to meet this show. The songs carry the argument here. They make the case that these women weren't only victims or footnotes. They were fighters, and the music sounds like it knows that.

The couriers' job was to get what was needed to where it was needed, under impossible conditions. RiSE does the same work with amplifiers, and on a Sunday afternoon in St. Pete the conditions are a lot easier. Go.

RiSE: The Rock Musical, salon performance, conversation with Joshua Hershfield and dessert reception
Sunday, Nov. 8, 2-4 p.m.
The Florida Holocaust Museum, 55 Fifth St. S, St. Petersburg
Passport members: 2 credits at tbartspassport.com/events
Everyone else: $15 through the museum, free for FHM members, at thefhm.org
ASL interpreted. The museum has a clear-bag policy, so leave backpacks and large bags at home.