sleep, my brother Abel? (1979–1980); A Psalm of unity, commissioned in 1980 for the choir of St Margaret's Episcopal Church, Washington DC; Ein Musikalischer Spass: theme and variations from Mozart's Dorfmusikanten-Sextett, K. 522 (1983); Adagietto for flute and organ, and a Sonata for violin and piano: Le violon de Chagall, both in 1985. Major works of this period included two commissions, Shevirath ha-kelim (The Breaking of the Vessels) commissioned by the Library of Congress for the fiftieth anniversary of Reichskristallnacht in 1988, and in the same year the Hanukah oratorio, The Trumpets of Freedom, which he wrote for performance by his Chir Chadash Chorale and other forces in the Kennedy Centre. After the premiere of The Trumpets of Freedom, critic Joan Reinthaler wrote in The Washington Post: With his new Hanukah oratorio ... Herman Berlinski has affirmed his conviction that it is as important to celebrate victories as it is to remember tragedies. In 1990 Berlinski wrote Maskir Neshamoth (In Remembrance of the Souls) which was commissioned by Ann and Donald Brown in memory of businessman Jules C. Winkelman, and its premiere was of excerpts only which were performed in 1998 at the Library of Congress for the sixtieth anniversary of Kristallnacht. He wrote a Cello Concerto between 1992 and 1994, a work which has yet to be performed. In 1993 the Union Theological Seminary (UTS) asked him to write Das Gebet Bonhoeffers (The Prayer of Bonhoeffer), part of a longer work, Bonhoeffer-Triptychon, a tribute to a man who had been executed by the Nazis during the Second World War, for which other sections were co-commissioned from German composers Heinz Werner Zimmermann, a Protestant, and Robert Helmschrott, a Catholic. The work was premiered that same year at UTS, and has now been performed in many countries including Germany, the United Kingdom, Israel and South Africa. Also in 1993, when he was commissioned to write a work for the groundbreaking ceremony for the synagogue about to be rebuilt in Dresden, called the New Synagogue, he reworked in German his oratorio, Job (under the title, Hiob). In 1995 he revised his unfinished 1983 cantata, The Beadle of Prague, incorporating it into the oratorio Etz Chayim (The Tree of Life). A work of particular interest is called Celan, for narrator and piano, written in 2001 in memory of the Romanian-born poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. Celan's prolific output included many works about