On a Cantors Assembly trip to Poland, Cantor Murray Simon, front row, left, and members of The Jewish Center of Princeton gather with other trip participants outside the site of Auschwitz.
Photos courtesy Cantor Murray Simon
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August 4, 2009
For 60 men and women accustomed to performing at their synagogues, the stage of the Polish National Opera House and the former concentration camp at Auschwitz are hardly traditional venues.
But to the members of the Cantors Assembly who visited Poland and Israel last month along with 120 of their congregants and Holocaust survivors, the trip was extraordinary.
“It has been two years in the making,” said Murray Simon, cantor at The Jewish Center of Princeton, who took part in the organization of the trip.
Held June 30-July 5, the event involved careful coordination among the governments of the United States, Poland, and Israel.
“The idea was to build bridges through culture,” said Simon, a member of the assembly’s national executive council. “The Polish government wanted to rebuild bridges with the Jewish community, and they felt the best way to do it was through culture.”
Although cantors played chiefly to non-Jewish audiences, the music they performed had many variations on Jewish themes.
At the opera house in Warsaw, a number they presented was cantorial — but with an ecumenical twist. It was a prayer that had been recited by Pope Paul II at the Kotel in Jerusalem during his 2000 visit, but set to a musical composition by Charles Fox, an American composer who wrote the scores of such television shows as Happy Days, Love Boat, and Fantasy Island.
“We sang in Polish, English, and Hebrew,” Simon said. “It was very significant.”
A day later the cantors performed “Musical Gems of Yiddish Theater” at the Ida Kaminska State Theater, then traveled to Auschwitz for the most solemn moments of the trip.
Holocaust survivor Steven Felton, center, a member of The Jewish Center of Princeton, is surrounded by an unfurled Torah scroll at Auschwitz.
“At Auschwitz we did something that was remarkable,” the cantor said. “We invited about a dozen people on the trip who were survivors. We unwrapped a Torah scroll and wrapped it around them as a symbolic gesture.”
Two days later, the Cantors Assembly ensemble appeared at the closing night of the Cracow Jewish Culture Festival.
On July 5, at an Independence Day commemoration at the United States consulate in Cracow, they sang works by Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and George and Ira Gershwin. “The composers were all of Jewish origin,” Simon noted.
To him and many of his fellow travelers, the trip to Poland represented both an optimistic new era and a reminder of a peaceful past overlooked by many American Jews.
“I’m not saying the country of Poland is now devoid of anti-Semitism. I’m saying there is a new mood there,” said the cantor. “It is a totally different place than what may be the perception that it is totally anti-Semitic.”
Simon said his colleagues are already talking about traveling to India or China for their next concert tour “because there are Jewish communities in both countries.”
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