The Big Concert in Warsaw

Tonight we had an amazing concert at Warsaw’s National Opera House – complete with the Orchestra and Chorus of this great institution. A full house was there to hear a concert that featured classical music, cantorial music, and the presentation of the Irena Sendler Award to a local teacher. This imposing theater (built in the 1800s, destroyed by the Nazis and rebuilt in the 1970s(?)) was filled – orchestra and first to third rings – with an audience that stayed for a full 3-hour program – and applauded enthusiastically at the program’s end, which featured all the members of the Cantors Assembly wearing tallitot on stage with the Orchestra and Chorus – a performance of Lewandowski’s Psalm 150. A photo of the one-time choir of the Tlomacki Synagogue was in the program. Tlomacki was the great synagogue of Warsaw as Dohanyi Street is the great synagogue of Budapest. The loss to the cantorial art imposed by the Holocaust is incalculable. Each of us functioning as a Cantor today is the poor heir to a rich tradition. The hazzanim of Warsaw (and all of the Europe that disappeared in the Holocaust) were men who were steeped in the traditions of the synagogue – who knew the liturgy and music in a way I will never be able to, having only really been introduced to it as an adult in suburban America. Many of the pieces performed in the cantorial part of the concert were pieces that these greats would have (and did) sing. They were performed well by my colleagues (male and female) – but even these great cantors of today represent but a shadow of what might have been. And this is true of every aspect of Jewish cultural life. It reminds me of the sense that each of us has the obligation to try to live TWO Jewish lives – our own and one for someone who perished at the hands of the Nazis.