Anew CD celebrates composers who rebelled against Soviet oppression — Alfred Schnittke, Joseph Achron, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Arvo Part. The album “Sounds of Defiance,” released this week, features star-violinist-to-be Yevgeny Kutic, 26. The piano is played by Timothy Bozarth.

“It is their unyielding faith that provided these composers with a powerful weapon against tyranny — defiance,” Kutik has written.

Kutik’s family fled Soviet-controlled Belarus when he was five after experiencing pressures that impinged on their public, private, and religious lives.

Just as its title promises, “Imagining Heschel,” the current production of the Harold Clurman Laboratory Theater Company (the professional company of the Stella Adler Studio), imagines a series of conversations between Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Cardinal Augustin Bea about the time of the Second Vatican Council, when Pope John XXIII reconsidered the church’s relationship to the Jews.

This change in church teachings, which removed the charge of deicide, would prove to be immensely significant, but that remains in the future at the time of the play. Cardinal Bea has come to meet with Heschel to convince him to travel to Rome to help the council formulate its new approach. Heschel is cautious, probing to see if the church is serious and ready to apologize for millennia of persecution, and willing to give up its determination to convert his co-religionists.

“Apples & Onions” by Ludlow Smethurst

“Power of Squares: Salute to Women in the Arts” with mixed media and paintings is on display at the Waltuch Gallery of the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly this month. A meet-the-artist reception will be on Sunday, Feb. 5, from 1 to 3 p.m. Salute is an affiliate of the Art Center of Northern New Jersey. Admission is free and artwork is available for sale. For information, call Ophrah Listokin, Waltuch Gallery director, at (201) 408-1408 or www.jccotp.org.

Magevet, the premier Jewish, Hebrew, and Israeli a cappella group of Yale University, will be at Congregation Kol HaNeshamah for Shabbat services tomorrow at 9:45 a.m., on the premises of St Paul’s Church in Englewood. A kiddush lunch will follow. (201) 816-1611 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Allan Schiller and Jacqueline Schiller-Audi Courtesy Wayne Y

The Wayne Y continues its “Sundays Backstage at the Y” series with violinist Allan Schiller and pianist Jacqueline Schiller-Audi, performing a tribute concert to wife and mother Eleanor Schiller, who died last year. Concert is on Sunday, Feb. 12 at 1 p.m. (973) 595-0100, ext. 237.

Nobody knew that when Ma’aleh School of Television, Film and the Arts student Pazit Lichtman was working on her 2007 film “Willingly” about a religious couple getting divorced, she herself was struggling to keep her marriage, just a year old, from breaking apart.

The film’s Hebrew title, “Harei aht,” “behold, you are,” begin the sentences a Jewish man says to his wife under the chuppah at the time of their marriage and before the Rabbinical Court when presenting her with a divorce. Both acts must be done out of each party’s own free will; hence, the English title “Willingly.”

LOS ANGELES – Joseph Cedar is on a pretty good run: The Israeli director has made four movies in his 11-year career, and the first three have represented his country at the Academy Awards for best foreign-language film.

Before this week began, one made the cut of five finalists, but a Cedar film has yet to capture a golden statuette. In fact, no Israeli film has ever won an Oscar.

Cedar and many of his countrymen are hoping that will change with his fourth entry, “Footnote,” which was among the five Best Foreign Language Film nominees announced on Tuesday in advance of the 84th Annual Academy Awards.