Calling All Cantors : Jewish Group Holds Job Fair to Find Singers to Lead Prayers

High school senior David Stotland was one of only half a dozen young people who attended a job fair this week staged by the Cantors Assembly, a nationwide group whose members are worried that their profession is running out of recruits.

More than 70 people had been invited. The sparse attendance reflects the problem of the vanishing cantor. Last year, organizers said, 60 synagogues sought new singers to lead their prayers, and the assembly could only provide 15 candidates.

The job can be a good one--paying from $45,000 to $100,000 for prestigious pulpits.

But the unusual demands of the job--in addition to being steeped in Jewish law and tradition, a cantor has to sing, after all--have combined with the virtual demise of anti-Semitic discrimination in other professions to reduce the number of cantorial hopefuls.

“I enjoy music and I enjoy Judaism, and this is a way to combine the two. And I’ve seen several cantors who were happy with their jobs,” said Stotland, a student at Grant High School in Van Nuys.

If he perseveres with his ambitions, Stotland may find himself in an enviable position, according to leaders of the 550-member assembly, which is holding its first West Coast convention in Los Angeles.

The assembly is largely made up of cantors from Conservative synagogues, but cantors from the Orthodox and Reform strands of Judaism said they face similar problems.

David Silverstein, cantor of Adat Ariel, a Conservative synagogue in North Hollywood and a member of the assembly’s Board of Directors, pointed to the sparse turnout at the job fair as a disappointing omen.

According to the assembly’s newly installed president, Nathan Lam of the Stephen S. Wise Temple in Bel-Air, the profession is more than 2,000 years old, dating back to the days before rabbis, when priests offered animal sacrifices and hereditary singers chanted Psalms in the ancient temple.

Today, cantors lead prayers, train choirs, prepare young people for their bar and bat mitzvahs and preside at weddings, funerals and other events. Some of them also provide psychological counseling.

“Years ago, before the advent of television and talking movies and recordings, the people needed a means of entertaining themselves, especially the Eastern European (immigrant) Jew,” said Cantor Bernard Beer, director of the Belz School of Jewish Music at Yeshiva University, an Orthodox institution in New York.

“He went to the synagogue and this was his identification with being religious and also his way of being entertained. Today, a person who comes to the synagogue doesn’t need this as a means for entertainment, so we are preparing a different kind of cantor, who can be not merely an entertainer, but a religious figure along with the rabbi.”

Having a good cantor can make a difference, says Rabbi Mel Gottlieb of Kehillat Ma’arav, a congregation in Santa Monica.

As a result of the fierce competition, his Santa Monica synagogue lost its cantor to a bigger congregation, but recently managed to bring in a replacement from Arizona.

“To have a knowledgeable, pious cantor as well as one who has a sweet voice is rare today,” Gottlieb said. “The importance is that the cantor encourages the congregation to sing and reach spiritual heights through the music.”

“You need a commitment to yiddishkeit (Jewishness),” Silverstein said. “Any knowledgeable Jew can conduct a service, but that’s only 10% of what I do.”

Lam stressed that it takes talent as well, quoting from the Shulkhan Arukh, a compendium of religious laws, to the effect that the cantor must have “a pleasing voice and a pleasing personality.”

What kind of talent depends on who is doing the hiring. Some congregations look for singers in the operatic style. Indeed, Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker were famous for excelling in both fields.

But others are happier with an approach that is closer to folk music.

“I believe the cantorial sound is a push-button to emotional response in a Jew,” Lam said. “The sound has pathos, it evokes memories of former times of persecution or joy.”

At the same time, he said, synagogue music is hardly static. About 1,000 years ago it may have had echoes of the Gregorian chant, while some of today’s singing may reveal the influence of Broadway or pop music.

“The art of the cantor has been to take the music that surrounds the Jewish community and incorporate it into the service to inspire the people,” he said, quoting from Psalms, the cantor’s theme song: “Sing unto the Lord a new song; the whole Earth is his glory.”

At the assembly convention, which concludes Thursday, the cantors will discuss ways to deal with the problem, including scholarships and internships, Lam said.

A singathon at the Shrine Auditorium, featuring choirs, an orchestra and 300 massed cantors, is scheduled for 7:45 tonight.

The lack of recruits is not the only factor in the problem, he noted. In Los Angeles alone, the Jewish population has increased from 100,000 in 1950 to more than 600,000, with a corresponding increase in the number of synagogues seeking cantors, he said.

At the same time, the European immigrants who filled many of those jobs are nearing retirement or have already left the pulpit.

Despite the problem in attracting new cantors, some young people, such as Richard Schwartz of Temple Menorah in Redondo Beach, still want to enter the profession.

Schwartz, 30, grew up in a traditional Jewish home in New York but went to Europe, where he sang on street corners, and then to Los Angeles to pursue a songwriting career.

However, he said, he always kept his hand in religion by leading services during the Jewish New Year season, and he is now about to take a full-time job at the Reform congregation in the beach community.

Having bypassed the option of four years of formal post-graduate training, he auditioned for membership in the Cantors Assembly this week.

“It’s hard to accept myself as a cantor,” he said. “There’s a nebbish quality that’s not so comfortable, but as you get into it, it becomes more comfortable. It’s music, it’s singing, it’s a pretty fair income, it’s spiritual and creative, and I like to work with kids, so it’s satisfying in a number of ways.”