Soccer Dad

Saving liturgy

The New York Times recently ran an obituary for Rev. Abraham Lopes Cardozo, who was

the longtime cantor of a historic Manhattan synagogue and a major force in recovering and preserving the liturgical music of Spanish and Portuguese Jews.

The Rev. Cardozo - the honorific, the Times points out, used to be common for Jewish clergy - was born

in Amsterdam in 1914 to a rabbinical family that traced its origins to the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, when the Jews were expelled. His great-grandfather was the Sephardic chief rabbi of Amsterdam and his father was the leader of the boys choir of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam.

Though his family had survived the expulsion from Spain, he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust having left the Netherlands for what was then Dutch Guiana in 1939.

There is a lot of information on Reverend Cardozo. Unfortunately a lot of it appears to be at a website The Jewish Music Web Center where some of the pages are terribly formatted (or at least they were in my browser) so the information cannot be easily read.

MentalBlog remembers Reverend Cardozo and links to an item about his family history.

In Baltimore there's an effort to keep another aspect of Jewish liturgical music alive. Jewish Blogmeister notes from an article in the Baltimore Sun

In efforts to restore tradition in their synagogue the Baltimore's Beth Jacob Congregation has a choir rehearsing pieces of Jewish liturgical music.

The choir is conducted by

Sholom Kalib, a 76-year-old retired college professor who did his first stint as choirmaster at age 14 at the Romanian Synagogue in Chicago.
...

The Dallas-born Kalib comes from a strong cantorial line. His uncle and grandfather were cantors; his father taught him music so effectively that Kalib was singing in an orthodox choir at 11 and serving as cantor soon after.

When his family moved to Chicago, Kalib became immersed in a rich legacy of Eastern European Jewish music being carried on by cantors there. He enjoyed his own career as a cantor in various cities, and also spent three decades as a professor of music theory at Eastern Michigan University.

Since his retirement in 1999, Kalib, now living in Baltimore, has been focusing anew on a longtime goal of documenting Eastern European synagogue music in print and on recording. In the past few years, he has published two volumes of history and analysis of this music, with three more to come.

I have to admit that liturgical music is usually not to my liking. When I'm davening (praying), I like efficiency. I'm not very patient listening to a chazzan (cantor) extend davening sounding nice. But this past Shabbos (Sabbath) the father of the Bar Mitzvah boy arranged a choir to sing while the Torah was taken out and again when it was returned to the ark. I have to say that the singing of the choir was beautiful and I really enjoyed it. I'm even more surprised that my 12 year old also enjoyed it.

And when I told one of the members of the choir how much I enjoyed it, he admitted that he usually doesn't have much patience for lots of singing and wondered how he'd have felt if he was in the audience. I hope I eased his mind.

Technorati tags: Abraham Lopes Cardozo, Jewish liturgy.