by Debra Rubin
NJJN Bureau Chief/Middlesex

August 18, 2009

Cantor Jacqueline Shuchat-Marx sometimes feels like the flying women in a Marc Chagall painting.

But it’s work, not fantasy, that has taken Shuchat-Marx to synagogues from Kansas to New Mexico. She has now touched down at Temple Emanu-El in Edison.

“It’s so interesting to see how different congregations have their own minhagim [religious customs], and each is wonderful in its own way,” said Shuchat-Marx. “Now I’ve landed at Emanu-El, which seems to be my new spiritual home.”

A former “wandering minstrel” for eight years who spent time in musical theater and opera in New York along that journey, Shuchat-Marx holds a graduate degree in opera from the Boston Conservatory of Music.

However, being a cantor provides her with an audience connection no theater can provide.

“I was interested in becoming an opera singer, but I felt a sort of void because of the lack of community,” said the Manalapan resident. “But when you’re with a congregation, that invisible barrier is stripped away. Without even knowing it, I was seeking the spiritual.”

Shuchat-Marx was cantor at Temple Rodeph Torah in Marlboro for four years until 2008.

Taking a year off, she taught music four days a week at Temple Shaari Emeth in Manalapan and piloted a junior congregation service that was so successful she was asked to continue and expand it this year.

Shuchat-Marx’s journey began in an unlikely place, her hometown of Morristown, Tenn. Her family regularly commuted 40 miles to Knoxville to attend synagogue.

“There weren’t a lot of Jews around so that probably sparked me,” as did her parents’ “lifelong vested interest” in Jewish education and life, she said.

But it was in 1991 that “out of the clear blue” she found a phone message from a rabbi at a Reform congregation in Wichita, Kan., whose soloist had canceled just before Rosh Hashana.

That temple’s education director turned out to be the daughter of her childhood rabbi, someone “who had made a deep impression on my life as a Jew.”

“He died way too young of a brain tumor,” recalled Shuchat-Marx, who believes “he must have seen something in me” because he requested she chant El Maleh Rahamim at his gravesite.

‘Give and take’

When the Wichita rabbi got on the phone, Shuchat-Marx offered to audition for the High Holy Days gig right there.

“I put down the phone and went to the middle of my living room and sang Kol Nidrei,” she recalled. “He asked me, ‘How soon can you get here?’”

Shuchat-Marx developed an immediate “give-and-take relationship” with that rabbi, Ken Emert, who has moved on to a synagogue in Bergen County and remains one of her best friends.

Shuchat-Marx was invited back the next year, this time for three weeks, when she realized, “I don’t think I want this once a year; I want this all year.”

She was invested at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion School of Sacred Music in New York in 1997 and later earned a master’s degree in sacred music. Her first position was at Congregation Albert in Albuquerque.

Shuchat-Marx’s compositions and arrangements have been performed in several synagogues and at HUC-JIR’s graduation, investiture, and ordination ceremonies.

She made her 92nd Street Y debut in 2003 as a representative of the American Conference of Cantors — where she is on the membership committee — at its 50th anniversary celebration. Shuchat-Marx also sings and serves on the board of the New Jersey Cantors’ Concert Ensemble.

She and husband, Mark Shuchat-Marx, have two adopted children, Harry, seven, from South Korea and Miriam Xiao-Ling, six, from China. She writes extensively about adoption and infertility in the Jewish tradition.

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