The opera singer who won’t be silenced on Israel

Arriving to meet me, Ilona Domnich glances up at the bright sapphire sky. The sun is out, but the weather is crisp, even a little cold, and Londoners rush around us in summer clothes better suited to last week’s heat than this morning’s chill. “In opera, the weather always reflects the emotions,” she says with a smile, “so maybe our conversation might be more chilling than expected.” It was a warning from an artist whose sunny disposition masks a complex inner conflict of identity, resilience and belonging.

Now an acclaimed soprano, Domnich arrived in the UK from Jerusalem over twenty years ago to study at the Royal College of Music. She was advised that she would be better received as a “Russian soprano”; presenting herself as Israeli, she was told, would not be “helpful” to her career. The advice, delivered with business-like detachment, shaped her early professional image. “They said if you call yourself a Russian soprano, it would sound exotic,” she tells me. Russia, after all, came with cultural gravitas. Israel, not so.

The soprano under bright blue skies in London, but life has not always been sunny for Domnich in wake of October 7[Missing Credit]Photo: Omer Barr[Missing Credit]

And so began a life of shape-shifting, not just as an artist but as a woman negotiating the public gaze through a tangle of overlapping national identities: born in St Petersburg to Jewish parents—one Ukrainian, one Russian, grown in Jerusalem, professionally honed in London. Domnich’s identity has never fitted neatly into any one box.

“In Russia, I was the Jew. In Israel, they called me the Russian. Here in the UK, I’m the Russian and now the Jew,” she told me, unflinchingly. It is, as she observed, a form of exile that doesn’t depend on borders but on perception. And yet, for all its destabilising effect, it has also been a wellspring of strength.

“I am a human, a woman, a musician,” she says. “I contain all these parts, and I’m not embarrassed by any of them.”

Domnich’s story might once have rested there, a patchwork of identities wrapped in music. But the events of 7th October 2023 thrust her, unwillingly, into the political spotlight. In the days following the Palestinian attack on Israel, she began to posted online. Her comments were simple, and deeply personal. She appealed for compassion for hostages. She condemned Hamas. She spoke with nuance.

And then, the cancellations began.

“I didn’t expect that,” she admits. “I lost work, I lost income. I was surprised. I thought I lived in a century where people cared about inclusion, about human rights. But apparently, not for Jews.”

One company she had worked with in Liverpool, she tells me, had centred a production around the Holocaust, and its reverberations in other genocides. But when she asked, as the only Jewish member of the cast, to include a short statement against antisemitism in the wake of  October 7, they refused. “They were happy to talk about the past, to use the Holocaust with their agenda, but not the present. Not if it involved Israel. They basically took my voice away.”

Photo: Omer Barr[Missing Credit]Photo: Omer Barr[Missing Credit]

The irony is brutal. An artist who has spent a lifetime mastering nuance – “music is all the shades between the black and white” – found herself erased by a culture increasingly allergic to subtlety. She quit the production. “I don’t consider myself famous,” she says. “But I believe my voice matters on some level, right? If I believe in something, I have to say it.”

It would be tempting to read this as a story of loss. And in some ways, it is. She has lost professional allies, been warned by friends that her career might be over, watched the offers fall silent. But Domnich has also gained something rarer: clarity.

All of this pushed her to look inwards. This talent, skill, ability she has nurtured and perfected wasn’t simply there to embellish her own ego. “So I asked myself, why am I doing this?” As she recounts her internal dialogue, she seems to be asking herself anew: “Why am I singing? I’m not vain. I don’t care about fame. I realised that God gave me this voice, and I must use it.”

And she has.

Her recording of “Hatikvah”, the Israeli national anthem, is a haunting, layered arrangement. She commissioned the piece with precise instruction: a journey from darkness to light. “I wanted it to contain Jewish pain, and anxiety, and joy, and hope,” she says. The result is an aching tribute to resilience. “This is my voice,” she says. “And I’m not going to stay silent.”

She’s planning similar projects in the future: “The next project I’m thinking about is letters from the Jews of the future. I’m imagining Jews in the future will have a better life. We don’t have to agree on everything as Jewish people, that’s our essence, but we have to have it really strongly engraved into our minds that we have to be united and together.”

 

The soprano under bright blue skies in London, but life has not always been sunny for Domnich in wake of October 7[Missing Credit]

Her journey from pianist to singer was as accidental as it was revelatory. In Jerusalem, during a masterclass by the renowned Hungarian Jewish voice teacher Vera Rózsa, Domnich was still training as a pianist. A student dropped out, and Domnich was invited to sing. Rózsa heard something extraordinary and sent her a note: your technique isn’t there yet, but you have a memorable voice and a solo musician’s heart.

Within three months, she had moved to London to train with her new mentor. It was the beginning of a new life.

Yet even before she found her voice as a singer, Domnich had grown up navigating silence. Her grandmother, a teacher turned museum guide in St Petersburg, would speak at home of the Jewish suffering that Soviet history books ignored. Her great-grandmother taught her Hebrew letters in secret. “She taught me some prayers... she taught me the Hebrew alphabet when I was young, and she told me all the stories about her upbringing in the Jewish environment.” Her father, a Ukrainian Jew, was denied promotion in the Russian Navy due to being Jewish: “He worked in the Russian Navy as a Ukrainian, but he wasn’t able to be promoted because of paragraph five in his Russian passport—nationality.” Section five of Soviet passports recorded “nationality” (often meaning ethnicity), and for Jews this often led to discrimination, including in career progression. She learnt from birth that being Jewish meant always being aware, always hiding something.

Domnich as Tatiana in Eugene Onegin[Missing Credit]With pianist Angela Hewitt[Missing Credit]With the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra[Missing Credit]The Tales of Hoffmann[Missing Credit]At the Royal Albert Hall[Missing Credit]

“I grew up with the message: don’t disclose. Hide your Jewishness,” she says. And as she speaks, the coloured stones in her Magen David necklace pendant glint in the sun. “Now, I am done hiding.”

That act of revelation has permeated her work. During the pandemic, when opera houses closed and the future of live performance was uncertain, she created a lakeside music festival in Barnet, north London. “It’s our fourth year now,” she says with pride. “We bring the community together. People who never heard opera come and say, ‘This touched me.’ A nearby fisherman standing by the lake told me, ‘I listen to heavy metal, but this was just as powerful.’”

Beyond performance, Domnich has turned her own talents and confidence toward helping others find their own voices. As well as teaching other singers, she works as a vocal coach for corporate leaders, CEOs and public speakers. “Confidence comes from awareness,” she explains. “You must be aware of your breath, your posture, your tone. Who do you want to touch with your voice?”

That question has become her mission. Whether on a grand stage in Paris, in the Royal Albert Hall, or an open-air concert by a lake, she seeks to reach people. Her technique is formidable – a mastery of breath and resonance, of drama and stillness. But it is her emotional honesty that resonates most.

“Opera puts human emotion under a magnifying glass. It’s a bit like Greek mythology... So in your personal life, you might refuse to reflect on something, but you see it on stage in front of your eyes, and suddenly, that’s me. Every person can connect to it.” Opera is not famed for its realism; its strength lies in its distilled emotion. “It reveals something in us” she says.

We don’t have to agree on everything as Jewish people, but we have to have it really strongly engraved into our minds that we have to be united

Her voice, critically acclaimed for its “silken beauty” and “luminous edge”, is not merely an instrument. It is a declaration. And now, more than ever, it declares who she is: not Russian, not Israeli, not British, not Ukrainian, but all of these.

“My home is in me,” she says. “Wherever I go, it is with my integrity, with everything that I am.”

It is a statement of artistic philosophy, but also of resistance. At a time when many are silenced by fear, Domnich is standing taller. “I am not switching anything off anymore,” she tells me. “I am just being myself, with everything I have.”

The Jewish ethical tradition tells us ‘words that come from the heart, enter the heart’. Ilona Domnich embodies this principle. Whether on stage, in conversation, or even in her posts online, her voice carries emotional integrity and unflinching sincerity. It is not just beautiful, but deeply felt—and it reaches others because it begins with truth.

“There’s nothing that will stop me from using my voice,” she says, simply. “Singing, speaking, or just the voice of my heart.”

And with that, as the spring sun finally begins to warm the street outside, she smiles. The air is gentler now, but the path ahead remains resolute. She has weathered silence and rejection—not with bitterness, but with poise. Her voice, long trained in beauty and now rooted in conviction, is just beginning to rise.