#hazzanut

[cantordebbie]

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The great hazzan Cantor Moshe Schulhof passed away this morning. His life and work had a powerful impact on many of our friends in the cantorate, and the Jewish world at large.

Baruch Dayan Emet.

Moshe Schulhof, an icon of the cantorial world and superstar of the concert stage, was born in New York City and began his singing career there as a child prodigy at the early age of six, when he performed a cantorial piece before an audience of 2,000 in New York. Foreseeing a great cantorial career in his future, at the age of eighteen the famed Cantor David Kusevitsky took him under his personal tutelage. Growing up, Moshe learned to sing in seven different languages and eventually decided to follow in the spiritual path of his father who was a rabbi and his grandfather, who was a cantor in Austria.

Schulhof studied cantorial singing and opera in New York and Montreal conservatories. At the early age of 18, he was appointed to his first pulpit in New York. Subsequently, he has held some of the most important cantorial positions in Montreal, Los Angeles and Miami as well as at the famed Concord Hotel in New York. As an internationally renowned concert artist, Moshe is in constant demand on the concert stage as well as guest cantorial appearances throughout the world thrilling Jewish as well as non-Jewish audiences the world over. Until October 2005 he served for nine years as the cantor of the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center Beth Jacob in North Miami Beach, considered by many as the premier cantorial pulpit in the United States today, where his awesome vocal talent and spiritual guidance inspired thousands of congregants.

During his career, Schulhof has performed in concerts with the Israeli Philharmonic, the Jerusalem Symphony and other great Orchestras throughout the world and has released many very popular albums throughout the years. His most recent being “Moshe Schulhof Sings the Classics.” performed with the Romanian State Philharmonic and shortly he will be releasing a collection of live performances entitled the "Artistry of Moshe Schulhof Live." He has appeared in a concerts with other renowned cantors including his teacher David Kusevitsky, Shmuel Vigoda, Shalom Katz, David Bagley and Moshe Stern as well as with many of his contemporaries such as Benzion Miller, Yakov Motzen, Yitzhak Meir Helfgot and otheres.

In 1988, he was called upon by the American Society for the Advancement of Cantorial Art to be one of the representatives of the American Cantorate in a series of spectacular and historic concerts in the then Soviet Union, Romania and Poland. As a guest of the respective governments, he brought Jewish music and hope to those long forsaken communities. Heads of State, the Diplomatic Corps as well as the public at large gave him standing ovations wherever he sang. His tour of Poland was covered by CBS and was shown in the United States on "Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt". The Society awarded him their gold medal and gave him the designation of "Master Cantor". A recording of this tour is available under the title "Greetings from Russia".Recently, he was called upon to sing in the Rotunda of the Capitol for members of the House and Senate of the United States 

Moshe Schulhof is a prolific composer and also a recognized authority on Nusach Hatfilah as well as a gifted teacher of Hazzanut, having many students who are in themselves professional cantors and has been  on the faculty of the Academy of Jewish Religion in New York as an adjuct proffesor. Moshe Schulhof sings in seven languages being equally at home singing secular as well as religious music to world acclaim.

(Source: MosheSchulhof.com)

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This is a documentary from 2006 on one of our beloved members, Cantor Jacob Mendelson.

Source: A Cantor's Tale

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On Time Capsules (Part 4)

(Click for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3)

Montreal: Centre of Hazzanut

From the 1950s until around 2000, dozens of Montreal synagogues had full-time cantors who performed weekly and on holidays. Montreal was also home to thousands of fans, aficionados and connoisseurs of hazzanut and Jewish religious music. They knew and expected certain melodies at different services during the year. The Selichot service, which took place late at night on the Saturday before Rosh Hashana was a major attraction, mainly to hear the cantor and choir unveil the tunes of the High Holiday season.

(Cantorial concert in 2000s at Shaar Hashomayim, courtesy of cantorsmontreal.com)

Montreal Jews bought their cantors’ albums and attended concerts with full orchestras that would often sell one or two thousand tickets. In fact, cantorial concerts in Montreal were quite popular well into the 1990s and even attract sizable numbers today.

Meanwhile across North America, the market for cantorial music was drying up by the 1960s and 70s. In an attempt to retain their members, synagogues experimented with more popular tunes, often influenced by Broadway or folk music. The Hasidic and folk-inflected tunes of Shlomo Carlebach are ubiquitous in synagogues today. But this rarely occurred in Montreal, where these musical influences weren’t mainstream until recently.

(Shlomo Carlebach)

As Stephanie and I prepared what we thought would be a fairly straightforward walking tour, we realized we had stumbled upon something far more complex. Montreal has been one of the final bulwarks protecting the traditions of hazzanut, its intricate institutional knowledge, its sometimes-arcane and even funny culture and its ability to channel the spirits and emotions of Jews.

What initially made Montreal’s Jewish community appear outdated, is actually what makes it more relevant than ever. It became clear that this part of the time capsule is fast disappearing and that we have been meeting with some of the last preservers of this fragile art form.

It is difficult for someone from my generation, with our penchant for innovation and experimentation, to rally around something that seems so stuck in the past. And yet, I can’t help but feel passionate about making sure others are aware of this complex tradition that has slowly come into being over 2,000 years. Perhaps hazzanut is worth preserving because it has changed so slowly. I am inundated every day with information and knowledge that is piecemeal, trivial and ultimately disposable. Very little of it forms the building blocks required for further expertise. But if there is such a thing as “slow knowledge” (like slow food), hazzanut is a great example of it.

Hazzanut is worth preserving, yet it is hard to see how we will preserve it, at least in Montreal. Outside of a few wealthier synagogues, changing community demographics will make it increasingly difficult to pay for cantors’ salaries. Changing musical tastes are also beginning to shift what synagogue audiences demand. Younger Jews are not as interested in attending synagogue and if they return later in life, few will have the knowledge needed to appreciate the many layers that make hazzanut and synagogue music fascinating and beautiful.

In Montreal, it will ultimately be contingent upon younger Jews and perhaps even non-Jews to take it upon themselves to learn about the many layers of hazzanut, both as a way of preserving a Jewish tradition as well as a way of preserving a Montreal tradition. The forgotten songs of the Plateau and Mile End were once uniquely tied to their neighbourhoods, influencing their development and the daily lives of tens of thousands of their inhabitants. Now it’s time for us to take a peek back into history, connect with it and bring it new life.

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Zev Moses

Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal

Visit IMJM’s new walking tour: Between These Walls: Hidden Sounds of Hazzanut in Montreal

[thirdsolitude]

On Time Capsules (Part 3)

(Click for Part 1 or Part 2)

Inside B'nai Jacob on Fairmount Ave., "Montreal's Carnegie Hall for cantors," ca. 1945. Courtesy of CJCCCNA.

The Accidental Preservers

In 1997, Cantor Subar and the Cantorial Council produced an album of collected recordings of Montreal cantors. It included rare lost tracks from decades earlier. One such track is of Cantor Joshua Dlin, who had presided in the 1940s and 50s at the Beth David on St-Joseph. It is a recording of blessings sung during Subar’s wedding ceremony. The recording of Cantor Joshua Rosenzweig, originally cantor at B’nai Jacob on Fairmount Ave. (and “Montreal’s Carnegie Hall for cantors”), is essentially a bootleg tape made by a young Sidney Dworkin. He would become the cantor of the prestigious Shaar Hashomayim Congregation in the 1990s and 2000s. These recordings and others are featured on our walking tour. 

Dworkin now runs a home for children with special needs and on his spare time also hosts a radio show about hazzanut. Dworkin never meant to have a radio show. He was once asked by Radio Shalom to create an episode on the topic of hazzanut and, at first, he didn’t believe he could speak for an hour about the topic.  The show recently marked its 250th episode. It often focuses on the voices and stories of Montreal hazzanim, but garners an international audience. In fact, Dworkin mentioned that a Hasidic station in Israel is pirating his show! It doesn’t matter to him, as long as more people find out about hazzanut. 

“No One Would Know That We Were Here”

It was the 1997 album that brought us back to visit Cantor Subar this past October. He gave us permission to use it as well as photos from his book for our walking tour. We also sat in his kitchen and recorded him as he entertained us with stories about different Montreal hazzanim in the 60s, 70s and until today. He explained why he decided to publish Hazzanut in Montreal in 1971, “In synagogues, you have pictures of the rabbis, but the cantors – you don’t even see them. So people won’t know…who was hazzan before me. No one would know that we were here.”

The book was published by the Council of Hazzanim of Greater Montreal and is idiosyncratic to say the least. It is bound in white leather and embossed with gold lettering. It can be read from left to right and right to left, with information in English on the left side of the book and other material in Hebrew on the right. The book follows its own order, acting more as a tribute and scrapbook rather than formal history. It includes short biographies, sheet music and long since missing photos of cantors and choirs, as well as some of the only known photographs of the city’s synagogues taken in the 1960s. Perhaps most interestingly, Hazzanut in Montreal also includes some of Cantor Subar’s poetry in Hebrew, written as acrostics, a form most commonly seen in Medieval synagogue liturgy, where the first letter of each line forms a part of a word or person’s name. 

An acrostic poem by Cantor Arie Subar in his 1971 book, Hazzanut in Montreal. The first letter of each word spells out "Moetzet Ha'Hazzanim" (Council of Cantors).

The Choirmaster

Our interviews also brought us into contact with Lou Burko. I have known Lou Burko since I moved to Montreal. He was the towering figure whose silhouette I would see in the loft above the ark in my synagogue, conducting a choir in what seemed to be the dark. Burko is Musical Director Emeritus of the Shaare Zion Congregation, after having served there for over 40 years. 

What is most remarkable about Lou Burko is that his career in synagogue music spans more than 70 years. It began when he was a child in 1939. At that time, Burko lived “Downtown”, in what is now the Plateau. Many synagogues had choirs that featured boys who sang soprano parts. He would sing in the Beth Yehuda, Adath Yeshurun, Beth David and Shaar Hashomayim choirs, before becoming a choir director himself at the age of 17. The Beth Yehuda on Duluth hired him for the high holidays and soon after he took over as full-time choir director at the Adath Yeshurun on St-Urbain.

The Beth Yehuda choir, where Lou Burko began singing at 8 or 9 years old. The synagogue was located at Duluth and Hôtel-de-Ville.

By the early 1950s, Lou Burko had moved on to the Sheveth Achim Congregation on Côte-des-Neiges. His career was growing and branching out beyond the Jewish community to prestigious roles in the CBC radio orchestra. He also had created a business arranging High Holiday and concert choirs for different synagogues that could not afford them year-round. When he finally settled down at the Shaare Zion in 1963 to work with Cantor Solomon Gisser, he had already had a role in the music of nearly every synagogue in the city.

 An interview with Lou Burko is a bit like opening an encyclopedia. His knowledge of the musical history of different synagogues in Montreal is vast. Of the 30 or so synagogues he spoke about, he could name most of the cantors during the past 50-60 years and could also share his views about their voices and abilities as cantors.

What became apparent to us as we spoke to him and others was that during the 2nd half of the 20th century, just when traditional hazzanut was fading in many other parts of the world, it was thriving in Montreal.

(To be continued…)

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Zev Moses

Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal

Visit IMJM’s new walking tour: Between These Walls: Hidden Sounds of Hazzanut in Montreal 

[thirdsolitude]

On Time Capsules (Part 2)

(Click for Part 1)

Hazzan Moses Master and his choir at Adath Yeshurun ca. 1930s. Young members of synagogue choirs learned from older choir members, choir masters and cantors. They in turn transmitted their knowledge to future generations.

The Last Teachers

Almost two years ago I met with Arie Subar, who is the cantor at the Beth Ora Congregation in Ville St-Laurent. He is one of the remaining hazzanim (cantors) from a golden era of hazzanut and synagogue music in Montreal that began in the 1920s and probably came to an end by 2000, although many might say it was fading earlier. Subar arrived here in 1961 from Israel and began his career at the newly amalgamated Shomrim Laboker, Beth Yehuda and Shaare Tfillah on Westbury Avenue in Snowdon. Just a few years earlier the three synagogues had operated independently in different buildings around the Lower Plateau. 

Subar is a preserver of hazzanut (cantorial music). In 1971, he published a book about the hazzanim of Montreal, which included biographies and photos of the many cantors in the city at the time, as well as whatever information he could collect about the city’s former cantors from as early as the 1920s. He became a leader of the Council of Hazzanim of Greater Montreal, and is now perhaps the last teacher for new hazzanim in the city who are searching for extra training. 

Courtesy of Arie Subar (www.cantorariesubar.com)

Subar was born in Israel and comes from a line of cantors. His father, his grandfather and great-grandfather were cantors in British Palestine (and Ottoman Palestine before that). He learned the nusach (modes for different prayer services) from his grandfather who presumably learned it from his father. His current students, among the shrinking number of hazzanim in Montreal, will hopefully pass on to future generations the knowledge that Subar gained from his ancestors and from Montreal’s mid-century greats. 

2,000 Years of Tradition

If that sounds like a long tradition, consider that hazzanut itself has 2,000 years of history, with roots that go back as far as the 2nd Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Though we will never know how prayer services sounded back then, we do know that some of the words and prayers still said today come from that era, and some scholars claim that the nusach derives from the Temple services. 

Think of hazzanut as a series of building blocks that are constantly added to or rearranged as Jews moved from one place to another around the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. New components were added as Jews came into contact with different musical traditions, new prayers were added to the liturgy over the years by different rabbis and poets, and cantors and choirs developed new styles, which reflected the mood of the people in times of peace, success, violence or danger. 

Selections from Hazzan Moses Master's sheet music collection show the variety of influences he brought over from Europe in the 1920s. Courtesy of CJCCCNA.

By the time cantorial music arrived at the banks of the St. Lawrence River around the turn of the 20th century, it was deeply affected by Classical music, formal music education, the reforms and counter-reforms of 19th century Judaism, and increasingly large choirs and complex arrangements. Those cantors arriving from Eastern Europe brought in their song a certain amount of mourning and sadness from centuries of hardship, as well as rich traditions of ornamentation and improvisation. 

Cantors needed to know the words of the service almost by heart, the specific nusach that pertained to the given service of the week (there were dozens), have the ability to read music, understand the text so they could interpret its meaning through improvisation, and know the various melodies that different congregations sang for different songs. 

From Hazzanut to Jazzland to French Canadian Folk Music

For Eastern European Jews, arriving in Montreal between the 1880s and 1920s, this music was what Subar calls “the bread and butter of the people.” Even the many Jewish immigrants who were non-observant or irreligious found comfort in this music or saw it in romantic terms – as a type of Jewish folk music. The editor of the Keneder Adler, Montreal’s Yiddish daily, was also a musicologist. Israel Rabinovitch, a secular Labour Zionist, would devote some of the space of the paper, which did not have a particularly religious outlook, to discussing hazzanut and Jewish music. 

Israel Rabinovitch speaking, ca. 1950s. To his left sit Samuel Bronfman and MP Leon Crestohl. Courtesy of CJCCCNA.

An article in the Keneder Adler by Israel Rabinovitch on different tunes for Shir Hashirim (King Soloman's Song of Songs) with musical notation, April 17, 1935. Courtesy of CJCCCNA.

Rabinovitch also published a book on the same topic in 1940, called Musik by Yidn (translated as On Jewish Music.) The renowned Canadian author A. M. Klein, worked down the hall from Rabinovitch in the Keneder Adler building at 4075 St-Laurent, and translated it in 1952. We learned about the close ties between these two individuals when we interviewed Jack Wolofsky, whose grandfather Hirsch Wolofsky was owner and publisher of the Keneder Adler. Jack Wolofsky worked at the newspaper every evening as a teenager in the 1940s. 

Jack Wolofsky in his office. Above him hangs the eagle from his grandfather's Yiddish daily, the Keneder Adler (Canadian Eagle).

Wolofsky told me a bit about this rare book when I met him at his office in Côte-des-Neiges in October. He mentioned that there was an entire chapter dedicated to Jewish influences on jazz. I found this fascinating but quickly forgot about that detail. 

Musik by Yidn (Israel Rabinovitch)

A few weeks later, my parents were on a trip to New York to help clean out my grandparents’ apartment. My mother let me know that she had brought back a copy of Rabinovitch’s book. (This isn’t entirely accidental. My grandmother lived in Montreal until 1948 and her parents were Labour Zionists who ran in the same circle as Rabinovitch.) I can barely read Yiddish, but just a quick perusing of the book’s table of contents revealed that there in fact was a chapter titled “Unzer Haimische Klezmer in Jazz-Land.” 

The book also includes sections about cantorial nusach and interestingly, a couple of chapters dedicated to the similarities between French Canadian folk music and traditional Jewish music. Rabinovitch wrote during an era of great misunderstanding and tension between Jews and French Canadians that had been punctuated by ­­­­clear moments of antisemitism. But like A. M. Klein would do in The Rocking Chair a few years later­, Rabinovitch looked beyond the borders of his community and sought to find commonalities with Canada’s other minority. 

Chapter in Rabinovitch's Musik by Yidn comparing traditional Jewish music with French Canadian folk music.

A meeting of Le Cercle Juif, a pioneering group that promoted Franco-Catholic and Jewish relations, ca. 1950s. Israel Rabinovitch sits at the far left. Courtesy of CJCCCNA.

(To be continued...)

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Zev Moses

Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal

Visit IMJM's new walking tour: Between These Walls: Hidden Sounds of Hazzanut in Montreal

[thirdsolitude]

On Time Capsules

Upon First View:

Shortly after I first arrived in Montreal from California in 1995, at the age of 11, I went to synagogue with my family at the Shaare Zion, a prominent congregation in the West End, where my father had taken a position as rabbi.

The sanctuary was huge, perhaps the length of a football field, with 30 rows of wooden pews and a balcony above. The services seemed formal and highly scripted, and the atmosphere was austere. The men wore suits and ties under their prayer shawls. Some of those officiating the service wore robes that I had until then associated with church clergy. There was a general hush in the building. 

Perhaps most impressive, yet also foreign to me, was the music. The cantor, in his 70s, was Solomon Gisser, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor, with a deep baritone voice that reverberated with the emotions of a lost world. Fifteen or twenty voices mysteriously accompanied him, singing choruses, or humming as he improvised upon a melody during a segment of the Saturday morning service. You could not see the choir. They stood behind a screen, in a loft twenty feet above the ark. Many of the tunes were unrecognizable to me, written in the 19th century and based on much older modes. The pacing of the service, which featured many solos by the cantor or members of the choir, seemed entirely foreign. It was like a concert.

For a Montreal Jew, this type of service may not sound foreign at all. It’s probably what you grew up with. But I had grown up in California, attending services that were highly participatory, filled with folk tunes (along with some older synagogue compositions), and a more unruly atmosphere where children ran around and often found themselves leading parts of the service! I had entered a time capsule.

On Time Capsules:

It is often said that Montreal’s Jewish community is “30 years behind” its counterparts throughout the rest of North America. It is said to be more traditional, more formal, more conservative, more top-down, more insular and perhaps less innovative than other communities. But it also features higher rates of affiliation, Jewish education and identification, lower rates of intermarriage, and a miraculous ability to preserve certain cultural traditions and the Yiddish language that have all but disappeared in other places. 

I don’t know if this generalization remains as true anymore as it did just five or ten years ago. It seems that trends in the Jewish world that skipped Montreal or came late, have begun to trickle in over the past few years and this community is poised to quickly catch up with the rest of North America, for better and for worse.

That said, visitors to our community have often remarked to me that Montreal is like a time capsule to a Jewish world from decades ago. “There is something in the air here” that feels Jewish to them and, I suppose, to me as well. 

On Preserving the Time Capsule:

This fall, the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal developed a new walking tour feature for our website. The tours feature a curated experience that links numerous exhibits together to tell a story relating to a specific theme. They will soon be available on mobile devices. 

When Stephanie Schwartz, our research director, and I tried to choose a topic for our first walking tour, we had a variety of possibilities. Since April, we had been uploading material on the dozens of former synagogues of the Plateau and Mile End, given to us by Sara Tauben, who recently published Traces of the Past (Véhicule Press, 2011). Her work often includes transcripts from interviews she made with former members of the synagogues, as well as memorabilia and ephemera found in archives that give us a peek into what life was like between the walls of those buildings fifty, sixty or even one hundred years ago. 

But we knew that this exploration could become even more powerful, if we could actually bring the synagogues to life, even for just a few minutes. What would it be like if we could transport ourselves into the aisles and pews of the long-since shuttered, retrofitted or demolished synagogues that were teeming with life until the 1950s and 60s? An unexpected gift to the museum helped us answer this question. 

(To be continued...)

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Zev Moses

Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal

Visit IMJM's new walking tour: "Between These Walls: Hidden Sounds of Hazzanut in Montreal"

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