You’re in for a delightful evening if you attend the Shir Joy concert at Congregation Beth Shalom on Sunday, March 10. Hazzan Tahl Ben-Yehuda, director of congregational learning at Beth Shalom, is hosting the concert and will be joined by three other cantors.
Hazzan Asa Fradkin of Beth El Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, a friend of Hazzan Ben-Yehuda, is one of them.
“I was a guest at a concert for my friend Asa and at the end of his concert he said ‘you should invite me to a concert with you,’ and I said I had never done a concert before,” Hazzan Ben-Yehuda said. “So we sat down together and he basically said OK here’s how you make a concert and he talked me into it.”
When she returned to Kansas City, she learned Beth Shalom has a tradition of cantorial concerts every couple of years, with funding from the Polsky Family Supporting Foundation.
The other cantors joining her are Hazzan Elizabeth Shammash of Tiferet Israel Congregation in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, and Hazzan Steven Stoehr of Congregation Beth Shalom in Northbrook, Illinois. All four cantors are graduates of the H.L. Miller Cantorial School of The Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Hazzan Ben-Yehuda brings her passion for Jewish story-telling, music and education to Beth Shalom. She studied biology and epidemiology at Cornell University until she felt the call to serve the Jewish community. She left her studies of science and began her journey at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Rabbinical School. She later combined her love of davening, singing and music to pursue studies as a cantor. Her great-grandfather was Hebrew lexicographer and newspaper editor Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.
Hazzan Fradkin is a bass baritone and a sought-after performer and lecturer on the subject of teen choirs, as well as an interpreter of opera arias. He has been a featured performer with Gateway Classical Music Society under the direction of Ida Angland. Recently he was a featured soloist with the Colorado Hebrew Chorale.
Hazzan Shammash is the daughter of a mother with roots in Latvian Jewry and a Baghdad-born father of Babylonian Jewish tradition. She enjoys sharing her passion and calling with congregants of all ages, in music of diverse genres, connecting them to the rich Jewish liturgical and cultural tradition.
Hazzan Stoehr was responsible for the programming and actualizing of the Day at Auschwitz/Birkenau, which was featured in the celebrated documentary “100 Voices: A Journey Home” for the Cantors Assembly. He has released three music CDs and has been featured on the USCJ/CA Spirit of Jewish Music Series.
Nearly every piece the cantors will sing was written by Jewish composers, Hazzan Ben-Yehuda said. You’ll hear songs in English, Hebrew and Yiddish from Broadway, American cinema, Yiddish theater, the Israeli playbook, songs from the bimah and even music inspired by the Jews of Uganda. There will be solos, a couple of duets and some group pieces.
Hazzan Fradkin will perform a song from “Camelot,” that the character Lancelot sings in the musical. As Hazzan Ben-Yehuda said, it has no Jewish character and no Jewish theme. However the lyrics and music of “Camelot” were written by two Jews, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.
This begs the question, “What exactly is Jewish music?”
“There are so many different aspects of music,” she said. “Does the composer have to be Jewish, does the language have to be in Hebrew or Yiddish, does it have to be from prayers or biblical sources or does it have to be about some Jewish topic somehow?”
Hazzan Ben-Yehuda said she took a class in cantorial school that asked the same questions and they struggled with them.
“The people who are listening to the music ultimately are the ones who are going to decide whether it is Jewish or not Jewish,” she said. “Which means it’s just utterly subjective.”
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz” will also be performed. Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, both Jewish, wrote the music and lyrics to the musical. “We can assign a Jewish valence to it, but is it Jewish?” she asked.
“It’s like the $64,000 question, very difficult to answer. I think that everything we perform is going to be easily appreciated by a Jewish crowd, and some would argue that’s all you need,” Hazzan Ben-Yehuda said.
Two songs from the Israeli playbook will be performed, one by the poet Leah Goldberg and the other by Rachel Bluwstein. Both are from the era between the 1920s and 1950s, “folksong stuff that every American who has a certain level of American culture recognizes,” she said.
“It’s really early Israeli ballad music, like love songs to Israel or working the lands from which the early pioneers came — songs that were very well known in Israel in the ’50s and ’60s,” said Hazzan Ben-Yehuda.
The concert begins at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 for adults and $8 for students and may be purchased online at bethshalomkc.org. Tickets at the door will be $15. Seats are limited. For questions other than ticket sales, contact Becca Levine, 913-647-7282 or .
Hors d’oeuvres will be served at 6:30 p.m. and a dessert reception will follow the concert.
The event is being co-chaired by Erwin Abrams and Harold Kaseff. Hazzan Ben-Yehuda said Bernie Fried, executive director of Beth Shalom, has also been critical in helping bring the concert to fruition.
“There’s going to be a wonderful spread of food before the concert and dessert after,” she said. “It’s really going to be enjoyable.”
