Ancient music and refreshed memory
The liturgy’s spirituality reunites me with my family through joys and sorrows
It was mid-September 1991, and I was 31. After years on the West Coast, I moved back to New Jersey and found myself living at home with my parents.
As always, my family was observing the High Holidays, a time of thoughtful reflection about the year that had passed and the hope of a sweet year to come. This meaningful tradition would be followed, just a week or two later, by an acknowledgment and subsequent repentance for sins committed against ourselves and others.
I sat between my parents in the synagogue of my youth as they prayed and meditated — sometimes seated, sometimes standing in reverence — reciting and chanting prayers they knew by heart, after so many years. Both silently and in communion with other members of their congregation, one or the other began to weep, perhaps in remembrance of someone they’d lost or maybe because of a deep spiritual connection that each of them had nurtured and developed.
I recall feeling awed and envious.
My late mother had a beautiful singing voice; her range was exquisite, her harmonies, pitch perfect. Self-taught on piano and fluent in Yiddish, she performed for her parents, who’d immigrated from Russia, and her three older sisters in their small apartment in Lynn, Massachusetts, for the first nine years of her life — until music in the home was forbidden.
In November 1942, an older cousin who was home on leave from military service invited my mother’s two oldest sisters, Hilda and Leah, to join him as his guests at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston. The evening ended in a devastating fire, a tragedy that killed 492 people, including my mother’s oldest sister, Leah. Miraculously, Hilda was in the ladies room when the fire began and was pushed out of a window to safety.
The Cocoanut Grove fire is considered the deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history, likely caused by the nightclub’s flammable decorations, overcrowding, and safety violations.
When Leah died, a part of my mother’s mother, my Baba, died with her. She never allowed music or dancing in her home again.
When my mother and father married, they moved first to Attleboro, Massachusetts, where my brother and I were born, and then to Fair Lawn, where we joined the Fair Lawn Jewish Center. My parents bought a cherrywood Everett upright piano that brought music into her life and into our home. She made herself available to accompany PTA productions, our school plays, and productions of the Yiddish Vinkl. She played Jewish music for residents at the Daughters of Miriam and clients at the Fair Lawn Opportunity Center and other nursing homes. She was known for writing the cleverest parodies for the Fair Lawn Hadassah’s Woman of the Year celebrations and all her family and friends’ special occasions.
While my piano-playing days were soon over, I loved sitting on the bench next to my mother, harmonizing to songs by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and the Barry Sisters; Yiddish love songs and lullabies; and popular hits from the 1940s, along with a host of Broadway show tunes.
Both my mother and my father were members of the Fair Lawn Jewish Center’s choir for many years. There, in what I always believed was a secret compartment in the rafters of the sanctuary, my parents’ voices joined other sopranos’, altos’, tenors’ and basses’ voices that emanated, a cappella, from unseen speakers. It seemed to me like they were coming from heaven.
Sitting in between them in the fall of 1991, so close that I could smell my father’s aftershave and follow the veins in my mother’s hands, hearing their strong voices as well as the davening of other worshippers, brought back memories of being 9 or 10. I remembered how we’d run up the stairs to the main sanctuary to join our parents after Junior Congregation ended. The ushers, who we’d usually find terrifying, would chastise us for making a ruckus, but we couldn’t wait to be a part of the adult service, if only for the concluding announcements, the festive singing of Adon Olam and the prayer I wasn’t yet allowed to say, the Mourner’s Kaddish.
I recall being certain, when I entered that vast room, with rows and rows of folding chairs added for just those special days, that I could distinguish my mother’s voice, her harmony, above the other unseen sopranos in the choir. It always warmed and welcomed me into the room, urging me to sit quietly and listen deeply.
While the adult Shabbat and High Holiday services were predominantly in Hebrew, my brother and I were able to hold our own during the obligatory weekly Junior Congregation services. Frustrated that we had to miss Saturday sports activities, including a weekly bowling league that my non-Jewish friends loved, still, once we were involved in the service, we found that we liked it, particularly when my brother was asked to co-lead with the Hebrew School principal’s son. While we weren’t necessarily able to translate the songs to English, we knew the words without reading the sheets they gave us, and we were pleased to bring the tunes we learned at services and Hebrew school home to our family holiday celebrations at Chanukah and Passover.
At the seder, my mother would talk to my grandmother at the table in Yiddish, most likely commenting on our enthusiastic singing voices, our ability to follow along with the Haggadah, and our seeming command of the Hebrew language. But while I could read, write, and sing, I didn’t know what I was saying.
Years later, when my husband and I became associate members at Barnert Temple, the Reform synagogue in Franklin Lakes where we’d enrolled our three sons in preschool, I invited my mother and father to join us at a Tot Shabbat service. I recall my mother expressing shock at the organ on the bimah. “An organ? Like in a church?” I told my mother to give it a chance. “The pianist is as good as you, Mom,” I told her. “She’s a professional.”
I remember the way my mother’s body relaxed as the cantor, accompanied by the talented Janet Montroy, Barnert Temple’s music director, chanted the songs we both knew to different, but still melodious, tunes. There were songs in Hebrew, prayers in Hebrew (with transliteration), and songs in English. When it was time for the Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing, we followed the rabbi’s voice and the written song sheet, catching on quickly to the Debbie Friedman tune; Hebrew and English words interspersed. It was beautiful. With respect to my middle son, who was born with a rare vascular anomaly, my mother sang along, amidst tears.
Music is the language of the heart.
Years later, I invited my parents to join me for Kol Nidre. I knew they’d want to attend Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at their shul, but I also knew that the haunting music of Kol Nidre would mean as much to them as it did to me. For as long as I’d been a member, Barnert Temple had the honor and privilege of sharing the bimah with temple member Lanny Paykin, a classically trained and accomplished cellist who performed Kol Nidre, All Vows.
The first time I heard him perform, I’d been so moved by his poise, his grace, his vigor, and his generosity of spirit that I replayed the solo over and over in my head for the weeks following Yom Kippur, each time re-experiencing the intensity of emotion I had that evening.
Since the Kol Nidre service was later in the evening, my husband stayed home with the kids while once again I sat in a Jewish sanctuary with my parents. Sitting between them years later, when so many things in our lives as a family had changed, when people who had been important to us were gone, when the health conditions of those we loved had worsened, when the state of our world was uncertain, we listened to Kol Nidre, each deep in thought, each yearning for what once was, each hoping for what might be.
In later years, following my mother’s unexpected death in August 2013, my husband urged me to think twice about attending Kol Nidre services. He knew that when Mr. Paykin’s bow touched the strings of the cello, I wouldn’t make it through to the end of his haunting spiritual declaration. He was right. The pain of grief engulfed me with each note.
This experience of tying music to memories occurred again for me during the High Holy Days last fall, when our cantorial soloist, Marina Voronina, chanted the melody made famous by Max Janowski to Avinu Malkeinu during both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. The heart-wrenching petition to God, pleading to be inscribed in the Book of Life, to bless us, keep us, and sustain us, was so powerful for me that I felt raw and vulnerable, yet at one with God.
Avinu Malkeinu — let me continue to carry forth the traditions instilled in me by my beloved parents and grandparents.
Avinu Makleinu — take care of my husband, my children, my future daughter-in-law, and all who are important to me.
Avinu Makleinu — may I always appreciate the blessings you have bestowed upon me.
Avinu Malkeinu — have compassion on us, protect our people.
It is 2025. and admittedly my attendance at services is somewhat limited to the High Holidays, special musical events, and the observance of yahrzeit — for my late parents, for my late in-laws, for my late sister-in-law. Whenever I leave the sanctuary after what is always a meaningful experience, I turn to my husband and say, “Why don’t we come more often?”
At the first Shabbat service in April, Rabbi Rachel Steiner announced that our worship will be elevated by the Ben Wisch Trio, made up of Ben Wisch, a seasoned pianist and two-time Grammy award-winning record producer, Marc Shulman, an exceptional guitarist and musical director, and Joe Bonadio, a renowned percussionist. We are serenaded by the Barnert Tempos, a group of third- through sixth-graders led by Marina Voronina. As we share the Sabbath in community and song, there is hand clapping and foot tapping and a vibrancy that helps us forget the troubles of the week that passed and reminds us of all there is to celebrate.
And as I stand for the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer I’m now old enough and entitled to say, I rejoice in the sacred space that envelops me; a place to remember and appreciate the rituals, traditions, and customs of my youth instilled in me by my mother, my grandmother, and generations before her.
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