GUNS N' ROSES, SALEM Members Prepare To Mark Holocaust Remembrance Day

April 30, 2011

GUNS N' ROSES guitarist Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal will be a special guest at SALEM's May 6, 2011 concert at Reading 3 in Tel Aviv, Israel. The event will commemorate the re-release of SALEM's cult 1994 album "Kaddish" (originally released by Germany's Morbid Records),an LP which represents the band's personal dirge for the victims of the Holocaust during World War II.

"I'm a third-generation Holocaust survivor," SALEM's vocalist and leader Zeev Tannenbaum tells The Jersulam Post. "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."

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post last week, Thal said that he was thrilled to be coming to Israel and to perform the songs on "Kaddish" with SALEM.

"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.

"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."

Thal tells The Jersalem Post that he manages to find projects that inspire him and makes time for them despite his main commitment to GUNS N' ROSES.

"I definitely have more passion than time," he said with a laugh.

"And I have a bad habit of taking on more than I can do and killing myself to get it done. It's a tough juggling act and GUNS N' ROSES is a big ball to juggle. Sometimes, there's not a lot of prior notification of a tour coming together and I'll have to shift around everything else that I'm doing while dealing with the one big ball."

"But everything in life is doable, you figure out a way. If you want to accomplish something worthwhile, it's going to take some pain."

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