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The huge popularity of cantorial concerts and records during the first half of the 20th century turned the most talented cantors into celebrities. But did they cross the line from prayer to entertainment? // David Olivestone

A century ago, in the a man of meager means, with a family to 1910s and 1920s, waves of support, so as to lend his appeals to Heaven emigration from Europe’s urgency and passion. Empathy with the troubled Jewish communities congregation’s needs was vital as well brought many of the world’s finest (Ta'anit 16a). cantors to American . Thanks In the Middle Ages, there was to this extraordinary array of talent, much discussion as to which of the the first half of the 20th century became aforementioned requirements took known as the golden age of cantorial precedence. Ultimately, if a candidate music. Its stars set the standard by which met at least the basic standards, his vocal cantors are still judged, and the liturgical ability won the day. classics of those years remain Following the Emancipation, as ghetto staples and favorites at cantorial concerts walls came down and Jews were exposed around the world. to Western culture, cantorial music grew Music has been a central feature of more sophisticated. Pioneering cantors, Jewish worship since Temple times. As composers, and choirmasters such as communal prayer in synagogues became Salomon Sulzer (1804–1890, ), the norm following the destruction of Samuel Naumbourg (1817–1880, Paris), ’s Second Temple, liturgical Louis Lewandowsky (1821–1894, Berlin), poems composed by paytanim (poets) – and David Nowakowsky (1848–1921, who also often led the congregation in ) introduced more formal and worship – were added to the basic prayer elaborate choral pieces. While consistent text. Standards had to be established with the character and nusach (musical regarding who could lead the services, but modes) of the various prayer services, it wasn’t always easy to find cantors to fit these compositions also conformed the bill. to the musical standards of the day. Beyond the obvious requirement of Many such works became fixtures in a pleasant voice, the arbiters of Jewish Ashkenazic cathedral synagogues. law determined that the leader should In addition, while aspiring cantors Jewish celebrities of the be scholarly, fully conversant with the had traditionally trained under their cantors’ golden age. Cantor prayers, pious, and known for his modesty predecessors, quite a few now studied Mordechai Hershman and good deeds. He should preferably be with professional music teachers or at

30 September 2020 www.segulamag.com The Jewish Journey through History Tishrei 5781 31 Golden Age of Cantors CANTORS’ HALL OF FAME

Louis Lewandowsky Salomon Sulzer Samuel Naumbourg 1821–1894 1804 –1890 1817–1880 Berlin Vienna Paris

Yossele Rosenblatt First Jew to study David Nowakowsky 1882 –1933 composition at the 1848 –1921 Odessa Pressburg; Berlin Academy Ohab Zedek, Harlem, New York

Gershon Sirota Murdered in the Mordechai Hershman 1874 –1943 ghetto 1888 –1940 Warsaw uprising Vilna; Temple Beth El, New York

Invested in Tel Aviv’s Zavel Kwartin Virtuoso exponent Pinhas Minkowsky Ahva neighborhood 1874 –1952 of folk 1859 –1924 in 1931 Vienna, U.S., music Odessa; Eldridge St. Palestine Synagogue, New York

Selmar Cerini Enjoyed a Composed the classic 1860 –1923 distinguished tune for Shir Ha-maalot, Neue Synagogue, career in opera promoted by some as the Breslau, Germany before becoming anthem of the Zionist a chief cantor movement

Moshe Koussevitzky 1899 –1966 Numerous recordings (and in Vilna, Warsaw, U.S. some cases even videos) of almost all these cantors can be found on YouTube

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conservatories, becoming proficient in CANTORS’ HALL musical notation and vocal techniques. Virtuoso Cantors The golden age was rooted in the closing decades of the 19th century. In major European Jewish centers such as Vilna, Odessa, Warsaw, and Vienna, you would find achorshul , a cathedral- type synagogue with a virtuoso cantor and a large choir of men and boys. But as congregants fled the increasingly oppressive imperial regimes for the New World, most cantors followed them to the Goldene Medina. In New York and other big cities, leading congregations competed fiercely for the star cantors, tempting them with huge salaries and benefits. Popular opinion tends to grant countries like Italy a monopoly on great tenors. Yet talent knows no boundaries, and certain cantors were blessed with voices no less magnificent than the greatest international vocalists. Upon hearing , the famous cantor of Warsaw, opera star reputedly remarked how fortunate he was that Sirota, who’d received many offers to sing opera, preferred the synagogue. Hailed as one of the most powerful and highly trained tenors of his time, Sirota An ornate structure seating thirteen was known for his climactic high notes and outstanding voice control. Born hundred, Temple Beth El still boasts the around 1874 in Imperial Russia's Podolia acoustics of a concert hall region, he landed his first position in Odessa when he was only eighteen. Just three years later, as accounts of his only virtuoso cantor of his era to decline Gershon Sirota of Warsaw’s extraordinary prowess spread, he was a position in America. Great Synagogue, in cantorial appointed cantor of the enormous Vilna Trapped in Warsaw when war broke robes and tallit, on a New Year Synagogue, a prestigious post previously out, Sirota continued to inspire those who card, ca. 1912 Photo: National Library of , filled by some of the biggest names in heard him lead High Holy Day prayers Schwadron Collection cantorial music. in the ghetto. He perished together with In 1905, Sirota became Oberkantor his family during the suppression of the (chief cantor) of Europe’s most renowned uprising in May 1943. house of Jewish prayer, Warsaw’s Great Another superstar of the golden age Synagogue. Seating upwards of two was Zavel (Zevulun) Kwartin. Born in the thousand worshippers, it was attended same region and year as Sirota, Kwartin by the city’s most prosperous Jewish possessed a beautifully expressive and elite. From 1927 on, he focused on powerful lyric baritone. He composed international concert tours and was the as well, and many of his emotionally

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Cathedral synagogues. Built in 1887 on New York’s Lower East Side, the Eldridge Street Synagogue boasted stained-glass rose windows, a dome seventy feet high, and a barrel- vaulted ceiling. But by the 1930s

the congregation could no longer Photo: Rhododendrites, 2018 fill the vast space and moved to the basement. Today the building is a Jewish museum

charged pieces remain popular to this day. Having officiated in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and , Kwartin emigrated to the in 1919. He visited Palestine in 1926, settling there in 1931, but returned to the New York area in 1937, where he remained until his death in 1952. Mordechai Hershman (1888–1940) served as chief cantor in Vilna in 1913 before relocating to New York in 1920.

Photo: G. K. Tramrunner, 2006 A magnificent and versatile tenor, Hershman sang the synagogue liturgy with polished elegance and charmed audiences with his mastery of Yiddish folk songs. He officiated at Temple Beth El in Brooklyn, New York’s equivalent of an Orthodox chorshul, which engaged the greatest cantors of the day. An ornate structure seating thirteen hundred, the synagogue still boasts the acoustics of a concert hall. Perhaps the most famous of Beth El’s luminaries was (1899–1966). In 1920, when Hershman left Vilna for the U.S., Koussevitzky replaced him at that city’s Great Synagogue; in 1927, he succeeded Gershon Sirota as chief cantor of Warsaw. Koussevitzky spent World War II singing opera in the . He emigrated to the U.S. in 1947. A robust but graceful tenor with a phenomenal upper register, Koussevitzky was widely regarded as the greatest cantor of the postwar era.

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When celebrity cantor sang in Jewish Harlem, police often had to control the crowds

The best-known and most beloved of the celebrity cantors was Yossele Rosenblatt (1882–1933). After officiating in various European cities, Rosenblatt was brought to America in 1911 by one of ’s leading shuls, Ohab Zedek. Located in what was then the But Rosenblatt’s life story was filled Warsaw’s Great Synagogue, on fashionable Jewish neighborhood of with highs and lows, from Hollywood Tlomackie Street, was dedicated in Harlem, the synagogue overflowed on and opera companies luring him with 1878. The Nazis’ last symbolic act in Sabbaths and holidays when Rosenblatt lucrative offers (which he consistently crushing the Warsaw ghetto revolt was to blow up the synagogue on led services. Police even had to be on refused) to near poverty after a bad May 16, 1943 hand at times to control the crowds investment. The 1920s found him touring Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Institute, jostling to enter. America in vaudeville just to pay back Warsaw The sweet timbre of Rosenblatt’s his creditors. Yet Rosenblatt’s admirers extraordinary voice was at once resonant stuck with him through it all, and he and poignant. With his huge range and never compromised his strict Jewish trademark “sob,” he inspired congregants observance. He died of a heart attack at and concert audiences alike. Rosenblatt only fifty-one, hard at work on a film in had perfect pitch and could sight-read Jerusalem. even the most difficult score. And much of his repertoire was his own Unseemly Spectacle composition, echoing the tones of his Two innovations enabled these Hasidic background. cantors to win audiences beyond their No other cantor has ever attained own countries: recordings became such popularity and renown among commercially viable, and cantorial audiences both Jewish and non-Jewish concerts widely acceptable. The stage was while retaining his synagogue position. thus set for the golden age to begin.

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Cantors on tour. Gershon Gershon Sirota was among the first to Sirota and choirmaster Leo perform outside the synagogue. Some Leow aboard ship en route congregants were horrified that prayers to a concert tour and psalms would be sung alongside secular music, and in a concert hall This negativism persisted in England, Playbill for a Sirota concert no less. To assert control and separate and Rosenblatt too was greeted with at the Olympia Theatre, in themselves from what they viewed as an disapproval when he arrived for a ’s East End unseemly spectacle, the trustees of his concert tour in 1923. Even in the 1940s, synagogue ruled that his cantorial cap when Moshe Koussevitzky stopped in and robe couldn’t leave the premises. The London after leaving Russia, he found the concert was an overwhelming success, city’s cantorial restrictions too stifling however, freeing Sirota to perform and soon moved on to the United States. wherever he pleased. Word of his prowess None of this antipathy dissuaded the soon spread among local officials and preeminent cantors from embarking on nobles, and his command performance triumphant concert tours, primarily in for the Russian royal family became an the U.S., and all objections gradually annual engagement. faded away. These performances sold out Nonetheless, cantorial concerts largely because their stars’ reputations continued to be frowned upon in some had preceded them, thanks to their quarters. In 1912, when Sirota was recordings. booked for a series of engagements in England, The Jewish Chronicle published A Disgraceful a letter of protest deploring the fact that Shouting Machine “our sacred and beautiful prayers should Though Thomas Edison invented the be sung at such entertainments” (May phonograph in 1877, gramophone 17, 1912, p. 35). Below that letter was records were introduced only in roughly an editorial comment: “We cordially 1889. By the turn of the century, the most endorse our Correspondent’s protest [...]. popular titles were selling millions of We have refused to allow advertisements copies, and the best-known cantors soon of the entertainment to appear in our signed lucrative recording contracts. The columns.” Another editorial two weeks first to record was either Sirota or Polish- later declared that now “the cantor will born synagogue and opera singer be regarded as but a concert singer in Selmar Cerini (1860–1923). clerical costume, and his work [in the Within a few years, cantorial synagogue] as only an exhibition of vocal records were selling in the tens talent” (May 31, 1912, p. 7). of thousands, and such major

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recording companies as Victor, Pathe, To distance themselves from Sirota’s first and Columbia began issuing catalogs of concert, the trustees of his synagogue ruled Jewish music. Jewish households thrilled to the voices of distant cantors they that his cantorial cap and robe couldn’t leave would otherwise never have heard. the premises Zevulun Kwartin, then Oberkantor of the Queen Elizabeth Temple in Vienna, writes in his autobiography that in 1906 As Prof. James Loeffler has pointed out, Festival prayer book tucked he was offered a five-year contract to Minkowsky was “hardly an obscurantist under his arm, Yossele record twenty pieces a year for an annual rabbi plugging his ears to the howling Rosenblatt flees the operatic muse in a cartoon from a fee of three thousand kronen. “This winds of change. He read deeply in Yiddish magazine, 1918 knocked me out of my senses!” he recalls. German philosophy and played a “It was as much as my congregation was leading role in Russian cultural Zionist paying me for the entire year, and here circles” (Loeffler, “The ‘Lust Machine’: all I had to do was sing for about six Recording and Selling the Jewish Nation hours” (Zevulun Kwartin, Mayn Lebn in the Late ,” in Polin: [Philadelphia and New York, 1952], p. 285 Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 32 [Liverpool, [Yiddish]). 2020], p. 257). Moreover, at the urging As with cantorial concerts, not of choirmaster David Nowakowsky, everybody approved of cantorial Minkowsky had agreed to an organ in recordings. his synagogue (at weekday events such Spearheading the fight was the highly as weddings), a radical departure from talented and scholarly cantor and tradition. Still, he felt very strongly composer Pinhas Minkowsky. Born in that recording synagogue music was the Russian Pale of Settlement in 1859, sacrilegious. Minkowsky mastered both Russian and German alongside his traditional religious education and studied music in Vienna and with several distinguished mentors. In 1889, he left his cantorial position in Odessa for the Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York, where he was promised an enormous salary. Minkowsky returned home just three years later, claiming he felt more appreciated in Europe.

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putting them in a machine that knows of no place, of no time, [and] places them before all sorts of people from all kinds of different times and different places?” (Loeffler, p. 268). Calling the gramophone “a disgraceful shouting machine,” he told of hearing cantorial music played in bars, restaurants, and worse. Minkowsky even proposed rules of conduct for cantors. Number 11 reads:

Do not record synagogue compositions on the gramophone. Flee from that terrible invention. Take a holy oath not Pinhas Minkowsky preferred In 1910, this author of many pamphlets to introduce into the liturgy any melody Odessa to New York, leaving and articles on Jewish music published heard from that modern desecration. his lucrative position for the the two-hundred-page Modern Liturgy (quoted in Wayne Allen, The Cantor: Imperial Russian city’s Brody in Our Synagogues in Russia. Writing in From the Mishnah to Modernity [Eugene, Synagogue Ore., 2019], pp. 185–6) Photo: Israel National Library, Yiddish, Minkowsky railed against the Schwadron Collection whole concept: “How can we profane our holy songs,” he demanded, “by The principal targets of Minkowsky’s At ease with the new wrath were Sirota and Kwartin, whose technology. Yossele records were now selling in the hundreds Rosenblatt with a of thousands. The two countered that gramophone and records they’d received enthusiastic compliments and thanks from Jews all over the world, An early gramophone, including long-term Russian conscripts, ca. 1906 for whom these recordings were precious Photo: Norman Bruderhofer reminders of their lost homes and heritage. In 1922, amid increasingly anti-Semitic Soviet policies, Minkowsky left once again for America. His best years behind him, he never regained the status he had enjoyed in Europe. He died in 1924 in relative obscurity, although his colleagues

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Victor Records catalogue featuring cantorial music and Yiddish melodies by Yossele Rosenblatt

Armchair opera. Ad for gramophone store in Jaffa offering easy listening to music from Caruso to Rosenblatt. Note the classic image of the gramophone and the dog, made famous by British record label HMV (His Master’s Voice)

“Ironically, it has often happened that repertoire first heard at concerts somehow made its way into the synagogue, as opposed to the other way round” (Goldstein, “Ashkenazi Liturgical Music still held him in high esteem. Ironically, in Israel,” in Musical Performance [1997], in his last years Minkowsky himself vol. 1, part 2, p. 57). sought a recording contract to generate Zevulun Kwartin reportedly claimed some income. But nothing materialized, that he never sang in synagogue the pieces so no echo remains of his legendary voice. he performed on stage or on record. Given the magnificence of his recorded Prayer or Entertainment? legacy, that’s hard to believe. But shul and Perhaps inevitably, the immense and show are not the same. It’s unfortunate immediate popularity of cantorial that the very success of cantorial music concerts and recordings affected the as entertainment in the 20th century may music of the synagogue itself. In many have led to the decline of its popularity major European synagogues, cantor in the synagogue, its natural home, in and choir had to follow rigid guidelines. the 21st.  Yossele Rosenblatt, for example, was told by the board of his synagogue in Further reading: not to improvise. Frustrated Leo Landman, The Cantor: An Historic Perspective by these constraints, virtuoso cantors (New York, 1972); Samuel Rosenblatt, Yossele may well have used their recordings and Rosenblatt: The Story of His Life as Told by His Son concerts to spread their wings, composing (New York, 1954); Jeffrey Shandler, Jews, God, and and singing more theatrical and elaborate Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New pieces. York, 2009); Mark Slobin, Chosen Voices: The Story In addition, numerous prayers that of the American Cantorate (Urbana, Ill., 1989); weren’t traditionally highlighted were set Samuel Vigoda, Legendary Voices (New York, 1981). to music as cantorial showpieces. Here the line between prayer and entertainment blurred. Many of these compositions, replete with vocal acrobatics, were never David Olivestone intended to be sung during services. To A publishing consultant, Olivestone has authored many articles on cantorial music and other topics of quote Raymond Goldstein, an eminent Jewish cultural interest arranger and teacher of cantorial music,

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